Black Walden
Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord Massachuetts
 
             
  Black Walden was named a MassBook of the year and short listed for the 2010 Massachusetts Book Award. The judges describe it as "A carefully-researched book, mustering available sources to create a historically-grounded account of the (very small) slave community in Concord before, during, and following the Revolutionary War; a captivating narrative of real people and their times."  
             
     
Book Reviews
     
             
             
  From Slavery & Abolition (June 2010)

This is a striking addition to the literature about New England slavery and race, to be read alongside the growing body of studies by Joanne Pope Melish, John Wood Sweet, the scholars exploring the life of Venture Smith, and others. Elise Lemire has written a fine microhistory whose specific stories illuminate broader themes. Her starting points are the town of Concord’s reputation as a birthplace of American freedom, and Henry David Thoreau’s interest in the people who had lived in Walden Woods a generation or two before he took up his solitary residence there in 1845. In the chapter ‘Former Inhabitants’ of his classic, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), Thoreau penned brief sketches of the people, including ex-slaves, whose former homes were now long abandoned and in ruins. In Black Walden, Lemire draws on public records, private correspondence, and literary sources to reconstruct the lives of these individuals in slavery and afterwards. Her findings enrich our understanding of slavery in Massachusetts and complicate the conventional picture of Concord as a cradle of liberty…. - Christopher Clark, University of Connecticut

 
             
  From New England Quarterly (June 2010)

…As Elise Lemire no doubt intended, both her title and subtitle may well strike many readers as startling, or even paradoxical, since the history of Concord is so closely associated with that of the struggle for liberty. That tradition is the overriding theme of historical works such as Ruth R. Wheeler’s Concord: Climate for Freedom (1967), in which the first mention of slavery comes in a discussion of the emergence of anti-slavery sentiments during the period 1840–60. And despite the spate of recent scholarship on slavery in New England, scholars have for the most part continued to display a greater interest in the town’s contribution to abolitionism—the subject of Sandra Herbert Petrulionis’s fine study To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord (2006). Thoreau, however, having collected materials for a very different history of his native town, recorded “a plethora of information about area slaves and former slaves gleaned from town and county archives, area graveyards, and local memory, more, it turns out, than anyone before him or since” (p. 9). Lemire has masterfully finished what Thoreau started, filling in an unwritten and largely forgotten chapter in the town’s history - from the 1750s to the late nineteenth century, when the last descendants of local slaves either died or left Concord.
   Both in its broad outlines and in the details of its individual stories, that repressed history proves to be deeply painful. The number of slaves in the town, although never large, was higher than previously noted; on the brink of the Revolution, Lemire puts the number at thirty-two—roughly 2 to 3 percent of the local population. Through assiduous research, she has tracked the lives of many of those slaves and their almost equally forgotten masters. The arc of her graceful narrative is shaped by the “intertwined lives” of the wealthy landowner John Cuming (Thoreau’s “Squire Cummings”) and Brister Freeman, his slave for twenty-five years (p. 13)….
Lemire has genuinely enriched our understanding not only of the history of Concord but also of the country for which that fabled town still so often stands. - Linck Johnson, Colgate University

 
             
  From American Nineteenth Century History (March 2010)

This interesting book seeks to explore and explain the web-like impact of slavery in the history of Concord, Massachusetts, and it does so with great skill. The author succeeds in bringing to life a small but, as she explains, significant population of African Americans in a community deeply connected to the origins of the American Revolution and the intellectual life of antebellum America. Navigating between local history and national trends, Lemire provides a depth of understanding about slavery's relationship to economic and social mobility. Her perceptive comments about architecture, furniture, and other arts provides for a most perceptive unearthing of a place and its people, including its African Americans residents who have been greatly unknown. In particular, Lemire seeks to demonstrate 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” (p. 9). Concord patriots and their heirs kept slavery in place, but Lemire explains how African Americans survived and, indeed, challenged slavery itself…. Lemire's reconstruction of the life of Brister Freedman is an especially fascinating part of her book and a significant contribution to African American historiography. Black Walden is a book that deserves a wide readership. It makes local history come alive and demonstrates a relentless effort to unravel the past, and interpret that past through the lives of people too long neglected. - Richard Klayman, Bunker Hill Community College

 
             
  From Wild Apples: A Journal of Nature, Art, and Inquiry (Fall/Winter 2010)

...Black Walden is an eye-opening revelation, an exemplary labor in investigative history. Elise Lemire is offering a corrective vision to the image of Concord established during the abolitionist era, a vision that extolled Concord as the birthplace of American liberty while suppressing its past as a town that supported slavery until the Revolution, and then miserably mistreated the former slaves who struggled to survive on the fringe. - Dillon Bustin

 
             
  From Library Journal (5/1/2009)

Walden Pond in Concord, MA, is most famous as the place where Henry David Thoreau went to "live deliberately" and subsist on the land. Thoreau chose Walden in part because its shores, Walden Woods, were at one time home to freed Concord slaves and several generations of their children. Lemire (literature, SUNY at Purchase; Miscegenation: Making Race in America), a native of Concord, sets about to resurrect the memory of not only the freedmen and -women who dwelled there but also the history of slavery in Concord. The first half of the book focuses on the Concord slave holders, in particular prominent slave owner John Cuming. The second half focuses on their 32 slaves, particularly Brister Freeman, who was Cuming's slave and was then freed. Lemire's literature background helps her to bring alive these long-dead historical characters, and she deftly weaves excerpts from Thoreau's Walden throughout the narrative. Ultimately, Lemire conveys the idea that before Walden Pond was a "green space," it was, in fact, a "black space." Recommended for students of early American history and slavery studies, as well as New England readers interested in local history.—Jason Martin, Univ. of Central Florida Lib., Orlando

 
             
  From Choice (March 2010)

Slavery has haunted America since its settlement. For most, it is an evil practice that existed in the South until the Civil War struck it dead. This is not a historically accurate understanding. Slavery existed throughout America from the beginning. This small but important study shines light on Africans in Massachusetts as both slaves and freedmen. Using Concord as a case study, Lemire (Purchase College) first focuses on the slave owners, paying particular attention to John Cuming. The author makes clear that the owners were not benevolent slave masters. Like all slave owners, they saw their slaves as a productive piece of property and an always-present threat to the well-being of their families. Lemire next turns her attention to the life of the slaves after they had gained their independence. As with the slave owners, she focuses on a particular individual, Brister Freeman, a slave who became free. The life of Concord's Africans in and out of slavery was one of prejudice, submission, abandonment, poverty, and absence of earthly rewards. This well-written and researched work must be included in all academic collections and most public libraries. Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic libraries.- J. J. Fox Jr., emeritus, Salem State College

 
             
  From The History Teacher 43.2 (February 2010)

Rendered forever famous by its most celebrated author, the woods around Walden Pond had shielded other sorts of refugees long before Henry David Thoreau built his cabin there in 1845. In discussing the open green spaces then admired by Concord's residents, Thoreau devoted a chapter of his book to the former slaves who had been driven to the village's margins and cultivated small patches by the pond. Elise Lemire aptly notes that these "green spaces began as black spaces" (p. 12). The small community of enslaved men and women—together with the equally small number of wealthy whites who owned them on the eve of the American Revolution—is the subject of this slim but passionate and elegantly written study…..- Douglas R. Egerton, Le Moyne College

 
             
             
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