Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord Massachuetts
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
…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
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
...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
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
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
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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