Slavery and the Black Experience

Although there is a rather extensive list of articles about slavery in Connecticut, the subject has not been well studied or competently discussed in print. The time of Northern disillusionment with the Reconstruction effort in the South from about 1877 to the end of World War II is known historiographically as the period of “National Consensus.” That is, white Northerners and Southerners agreed to leave black Americans to the mercies of “local custom.” Thus readers should be very careful about ac­cepting as factual the data and generalizations in works during that period. Local histories written during the era of their greatest outpour­ing—the late nineteenth century—are full of patronizing and pejorative comments about Negroes. Henry C. Fowler’s much-quoted work, cited below, is an excellent example.

General Works

For a long time Lorenzo Johnston Green’s The Negro in Colonial New England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942) was a standard work, and it is still a good place to start a study of Connecticut blacks. Refer also, however, to Bruce Stark’s very careful analysis of Green’s figures for the number of slaves in Connecticut in the late colonial period. Stark shows Green to have included Indians among the Negroes and thus to have “misinterpreted the nature of Connecticut slavery.” (Connecticut Review 9 November, 1975:75) For Connecticut the standard work is still Bernard Steiner, History of Slavery in Connecticut (1893; reprinted by the Negro University Press as “Slavery in Connecticut” in Slavery in the States, New York, 1969). There is a brief treatment in Tercentenary pamphlet XXXVII (1935), Slavery in Connecticut, by Ralph Foster Weld. Students should also be aware of United States House of Representatives Executive Document no. 90, 26th Congress, 2nd Series, vol. 3, 1845, “Statement of Slaves in Connecticut, Abstract of Census,” which is the last official tabulation before the abolition of slavery in Connecticut in 1848; United States Census Bureau, Department of Commerce, The Negro Population of the United States, 1790-1915 (1918); and two works published by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History by Carter G. Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration (Washington, 1918) and Free Negro Heads of Families in 1830 (Washington, 1925). John Codman Hurd, The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, 1862)I:267-72 and II:41-48, summarizes and elaborates briefly in notes on the Connecticut colony and state legislation regarding slavery. Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1925-36) 4 vols., lists and discusses fifty cases regarding slaves or slavery that were decided in the Connec­ticut Supreme Court of Errors, 1702 to 1873.

Another genre of writings of primary importance in researching the black experience is the biographical accounts of nineteenth-century Con­necticut blacks. These were often printed as pamphlets in the ante- and immediate post-bellum periods, and five of them have been republished by Wesleyan University Press in 5 Black Lives, edited by Arna Bontemps (Middletown, 1971). This work should not be missed.

There is one biography of an early Connecticut Negro. A sixty-nine-page booklet by E. Merrill Beach, a Trumbull local historian. From Valley Forge to Freedom: A Story of A Black Patriot (Trumbull, Conn.: Trumbull Bicentennial Commission, 1975), tells the story of Nero Hawley (1758-1817), a Revolutionary War veteran and local brickmaker and timber merchant. An extraordinary pair of books by Barbara Brown and James M. Rose (Brown is white and Rose is black) constitute a genre of their own. One is Black Roots in Southeastern Connecticut (Detroit: Gale Genealogical and Local History Series, vol. 8, 1980). This is a reference work designed both to permit Negro families to compile their own genealogies and to document the strong black presence in Connecticut throughout much of its history. James M. Rose and Barbara W. Brown, Tapestry: A Living His­tory of the Black Family in Southeastern Connecticut (New London, Conn.: New London County Historical Society, 1979) uses genealogical materials to reconstitute black life, mostly in the nineteenth century, with some spe­cial attention to Rose’s own family history. The book goes a long way toward filling a huge void in an unexplored aspect of Connecticut history.

The best work on the black experience in Connecticut is Robert Austin Warner’s New Haven Negroes: A Social History (1940; reprinted by Arno in 1969). Warner is an academic anthropologist whose dissertation on Connecticut Indians is cited elsewhere in this bibliography. Though the book focuses on New Haven, there is much material dealing with Con­necticut Negroes generally, and Warner presents the best published pic­ture of nineteenth-century black life in the state. He wrote, of course, before the great Civil Rights movement had fully awakened white America to the black presence, but as a trained scholar Warner was less bound by unconscious biases than any other writer on the subject until very recently. Indeed, Charles S. Johnson, a president of Fiske University and an influential black writer and sociologist long associated with the Urban League, wrote that Warner’s book “... is as much a study of New England as it is of the Negro population. This fortunate fact gives a convincing perspective to the role of the Negro and at the same time adds to this dark and faltering current fresh glimpses of those social forces that helped to shape not only New England, but America .... [As] a study of population it has a rare human flavor, a sympathetic insight and meticulousness about historical data that give it the stamp of authen­ticity and realism.” (New England Quarterly 14December, 1941:749-50)