IN THE COURSE OF MY RESEARCH, I came to learn that Concord, Massachusetts, of all places, was a slave town. From its founding in 1635 until after the Revolution, enslaved men and women helped to build what would become New England’s most storied town. To be sure, there was never the same percentage of slaves here as in the South. While I discovered more than twice the number of slaves in Concord than scholars have previously noted (thirty-two on the brink of the Revolution as opposed to the thirteen counted in the often cited 1771 tax valuation list), their numbers never exceeded 2 to 3 percent of the local population. But Concord was a slave town nonetheless. Every inhabitant who was not enslaved, whether a slaveholder or not, agreed to uphold the institution, watching slaves as they went about their masters’ business and questioning them if there was any reason to suspect they were intent on running away. On the one known occasion when a Concord slave attempted to run, virtually everyone joined in the chase to hunt him down. It never struck even the most ardent Concord Patriots that their efforts against British authorities were in direct contradiction to their actions as either slaveholders or the co-conspirators of slaveholders. When slavery finally came to a gradual end, by a process that has long confounded historians, it was not because Massachusetts slaveholders somehow became more egalitarian-minded than their southern brethren on account of their early role in fomenting a revolution in the name of liberty. Nor was it because slaveholders “gave” their slave men their liberty in “exchange” for their service in the Continental Army (a common formulation in the history books that credits only the slaveholders with ending slavery). Rather, after the British began to occupy Boston, slaves in Concord and across Massachusetts took stock of the mounting political tensions and threatened to expose their masters to whichever side their respective masters considered the enemy. Many slaveholders decided to abandon their slaves to their freedom rather than suffer the political consequences. But even as these slaves effected a revolution of their own, slavery did not completely end in Massachusetts with the war. Not all slaves were relinquished. Nor did all those who had the option to strike out on their own choose to do so. Some slaves continued to serve their masters in exchange for room and board rather than risk abject poverty. There were men and women still enslaved in the Commonwealth as many as twenty years after the Revolution.

    The slaves who managed to take their freedom faced numerous challenges. To begin with, they were forced to stay in the towns where they had been enslaved because of what was known as the warning-out system. Anyone who tried to move to a new town without a means of support was warned or kicked out of that town by its officials and sent back to their hometown in order to ensure that each jurisdiction accepted financial responsibility for all its inhabitants. Unable in most cases to purchase land, the abandoned slaves were permitted by their former owners to squat locally, but only on the most out-of-the-way, infertile places. Walden Woods was one of those sites. The first European settlers had given up attempts to till what Henry David Thoreau calls Walden’s “sterile” soil, leaving the area forested as a source of fuel and timber. The swampy edge of the town’s Great Field, no longer the centerpiece of the town’s agricultural system, was another similarly infertile place. Those who had been enslaved at what is now called the Codman estate chose to settle in Walden Woods on account of its proximity to their former home and the community they had cultivated there, while those who had been enslaved on estates on the other side of town settled by the Great Field.