Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom [1 ed.] 9781613760482, 9781558497405

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Copyright © 2010. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom, University of

Copyright © 2010. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2010. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

VENTURE SMITH and the Business of Slavery and Freedom

Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2010. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

VEN T U R E SMI TH and the Business of Slavery and Freedom

edited by

James Br ewer St ewa rt

Copyright © 2010. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.

Foreword by James O. Horton

University of Massachusetts Press amherst and boston

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Copyright © 2010 by University of Massachusetts Press all rights reserved Printed in the United States of America lc 2010003401 isbn 978-1-55849-740-5 Designed by Steve Dyer Set in Sabon Next with Caslon display type by Westchester Book Group Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Venture Smith and the business of slavery and freedom / edited by James Brewer Stewart ; foreword by James O. Horton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55849-740-5 (paper : alk. paper) 1. Smith, Venture, 1729?–1805. 2. Smith, Venture, 1729?–1805—Influence. 3. Smith, Venture, 1729?–1805. Narrative of the life and adventures of Venture, a native of Africa. 4. Slaves—Connecticut—Biography. 5. Free African Americans—Connecticut—Biography. 6. Africans— Connecticut—Biography. 7. Slavery—Connecticut—History—18th century. 8. Connecticut—Race relations—History—18th century. 9. Slavery—United States— History—18th century. 10. United States—Race relations—History—18th century. I. Stewart, James Brewer. E444.S625V46 2010 306.3'62092—dc22 [B] 2010003401

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available. “How I Came By My Name” and “The Freedom Business” copyright © 2008 by Marilyn Nelson, from The Freedom Business, published by Wordsong, an imprint of Boyds Mills Press. A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture and Documenting Venture Smith Project Time Line copyright © 2010 Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation & Beecher House Center for the Study of Equal Rights Foreword by James O. Horton appeared in Making Freedom: The Extraordinary Life of Venture Smith by Chandler B. Saint & George A. Krimsky, copyright © 2009, Wesleyan University Press. Publication of this book was aided by grants from Bio-Rad Laboratories; University of Connecticut College of Arts and Sciences; University of Connecticut College of Arts and Sciences Center for Applied Genetics and Technology; and Macalester College, Office of the Provost.

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Contents

Foreword James O. Horton

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Editor’s Preface James Brewer Stewart

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“How I Came By My Name” Marilyn Nelson

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A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of venture, . . . Venture Smith

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Pa rt I: His t ory 1. The African Background of Venture Smith Paul E. Lovejoy

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2. Trust and Violence in Atlantic History: The Economic Worlds of Venture Smith Robert P. Forbes, David Richardson, and Chandler B. Saint 3. Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery John Wood Sweet 4. “Owned by Negro Venture”: Land and Liberty in the Life of Venture Smith Cameron Blevins

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Pa rt II: Memory 5. Venture Smith, One of a Kind Vincent Carretta

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6. Keeping His Word: Money, Love, and Privacy in the Narrative of Venture Smith Anna Mae Duane ·

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Contents

Pa rt III: Leg ac y

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7. The Genomics Perspective on Venture Smith: Genetics, Ancestry, and the Meaning of Family Linda Strausbaugh, Joshua Suhl, Craig O’Connor, and Heather Nelson

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8. Venture Smith and Philosophical Theories of Human Rights Anne L. Hiskes

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9. Venture Smith’s Gravestone: Its Maker and His Message Kevin Tulimieri

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“The Freedom Business” Marilyn Nelson

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Documenting Venture Smith Project Time Line

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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It’s important his story be told and spread throughout all the United States, because it’s such a positive African American story. David P. Warmsley, eighth-generation descendant of Venture Smith

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Foreword

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T

HE STORY of Venture Smith is an important part of American history. In many ways, it is an American story of the struggle for freedom. Yet Venture struggled against a powerful American institution, the institution of slavery. The capture and enslavement of this one African in eighteenthcentury America before the North American British colonies began their own freedom struggle, which led ultimately to national independence, illustrate the young nation’s most fundamental contradiction. American patriots explained their revolution against the British monarchy as a natural result of their dedication to human rights and human liberty. But by holding tens of thousands of Africans as slaves, the new United States of America diminished much of its moral authority in the eyes of the world. In its Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia slaveholder with 150 bound people in his possession when he penned the words, the nation asserted its commitment to the basic, God-given human rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The irony of slaveholders publicly declaring their commitment to human freedom did not go unnoticed at home or abroad. As founding father John Adams worked to establish American liberty, his wife, Abigail, pointed forcefully to the contradiction. In a letter to her husband in 1774 she reflected on the state of freedom in America. “It always appeard a most iniquitous scheme to me,” she wrote, “to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.” 1 The British writer Samuel Johnson directly challenged the American argument for its independence. In his 1775 pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny, Johnson defended the right of the king to rule over his American subjects, and then posed a stinging question: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of [N]egroes?” 2

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Foreword Venture and the other African slaves held in this emerging free nation could not have agreed more. In 1773 and 1774 Massachusetts slaves confronted colonial authorities with the question of their freedom. In a petition to the state legislature they declared, “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow men to enslave them.” They demanded that they be allowed one day a week to labor for their own benefit so they might accumulate funds to purchase their freedom. This petition was refused, but others followed, each carefully worded to highlight the parallels between the slaves’ cause and the colonists’ desire for a “free and Christian country.” 3 Yet as America struggled for its national independence, slavery remained a vital institution, not only in the southern and middle Atlantic regions of the young nation, but also in much of New England. In Vermont, where slaveholdings were never large, slavery was abolished altogether in its constitution of 1777. In Massachusetts, with a much larger and more economically significant slave presence, the supreme court of the commonwealth ruled, in 1783, that slavery was illegal under the constitution of 1780. Still, in Connecticut, where Venture Smith spent more than half his life, slavery was a powerful institution in the eighteenth century. By 1774, New London County had become the greatest slaveholding section of New England, with almost twice as many slaves as the most populous slave county in Massachusetts. As the Revolution approached, Connecticut had more than six thousand slaves, the largest number of any colony in New England.4 Venture was sold from master to master until 1760, when he was able to strike a deal that allowed him to buy his freedom on a time payment plan. Five years later he had worked his way out of slavery, taking on a variety of jobs and seizing what little opportunity was available to black people in revolutionary America. On the eve of the revolution that would bring liberty to white Americans, Venture Smith was able to purchase the freedom of his wife and three children, bringing his entire family out of bondage. As the American colonies waged their freedom struggle against British power, Venture purchased a farm in the small Connecticut village of Haddam, on the Connecticut River. There he would live the rest of his life as a prominent landowner and businessman. As the nation matured through its revolutionary years, slavery was gradually ended in most of the northern states, and Venture and his family settled into a more secure freedom in New England. But in the South, slaveholders gained increased economic and political power; during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, as the cotton curtain descended on the South, ex·

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Foreword panding into the rich black-belt regions of the Louisiana territory, a slave’s achievement of freedom for himself and his family became all but impossible there. Thus Venture Smith’s accomplishment was attributable in part to opportunities available to the enslaved at a specific time and place. Antislavery voices in New England benefited from the fact that slavery was never as strong there as it was, and would continue to be, in the South. The call to reconcile America’s commitment to freedom with its tolerance of slave labor was strong in revolutionary-era New England. In the South, however, slavery remained a stubbornly solid institution from which there was but small chance of escape. Venture Smith’s story, then, is an important reminder of the power of slavery and race in the formation of the American story in all parts of the nation and of the regional separation on the issue that led to America’s most costly war. It also remains an uncomfortable story for those who would rather not face the hypocrisy of this part of the nation’s history. Smith’s story is also the iconic story of a self-made man who struggled against the greatest of odds to become a successful entrepreneur. This volume tells that story through the extraordinary life of a man one cannot help but admire. It sets the stage for his own moving account of his life. Venture’s autobiography reveals him to be a man of talent and determination, as committed to American values as any of the founders, and more committed to seeing the nation fulfill its grand goal of universal human freedom and opportunity. Venture did not live to see an end to American slavery, but by the time of his death in 1805 he had personally brought freedom to several former slaves and set an example of what they might accomplish if given the opportunity. His autobiography, published only seven years before his death, still stands as irrefutable evidence of the great American contradiction that was there from before the nation’s existence and of the irrepressible spirit and the strong will necessary to overcome the power of socially sanctioned oppression.

Venture Smith’s victory over injustice and degradation bears a vital message for societies of the twenty-first century. This story, lost to all but a very few Americans for more than two centuries, was brought to public life at a grand event organized by the Beecher House Center for the Study of Equal Rights in Torrington, Connecticut; the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) in Hull, England; and the University of Connecticut. The two-day conference (September 29–30, 2006) was held on the Storrs campus of the university, at the Congregational Church in East Haddam, ·

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Foreword where Venture Smith is buried, and at his Haddam Neck farm. The event brought the public together with some of the nation’s most distinguished historians, archaeologists, geneticists, anthropologists, genealogists, poets, actors, and educators to explore Smith’s extraordinary life. Prominent among the contributors to this revolutionary project were more than a dozen of Venture Smith’s descendants, who spoke to the conference participants, telling the story of their ancestor from the family’s perspective. This volume, then, is a gift to all those who seek to understand the complex racial beginnings of America. It helps to connect the broad American story with the stories of many Americans whose lives illustrate the national struggle to live out the national ideals. The life of Venture Smith is the American story; African American history is American history, made by Americans in America. James O. Horton Washington, D.C.

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Notes 1. Abigail Adams to John Adams, September 22, 1774, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 1, ed. Lyman H. Butterfield (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 162, 12–14. 2. “Taxation No Tyranny” (1775), The Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 10: Political Writings, ed. Donald J. Green (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 454. 3. Sidney Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770–1800 (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 11–13. 4. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 272.

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Editor’s Preface

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T

HE IN SPIRATION for this book took form in the summer of 2006, in the burial ground of the First Church of Christ, Congregational, of East Haddam, Connecticut, when a team of forensic scientists began excavating the graves of two emancipated slaves, Venture Smith (d. 1805) and his wife, Marget (d. 1809), known as Meg. Those requesting this remarkable disinterment were Smith’s direct descendants, members of the seventh and eighth generation, who were determined to honor the bicentennial of their founding ancestor’s death by discovering everything possible about his life. Opening burial plots in the hope of recovering DNA for genealogical tracing proved a compelling first step. But what began as a scientific inquiry into African origins rapidly evolved into an unparalleled interdisciplinary collaboration among historians, literary analysts, geographers, genealogists, anthropologists, political philosophers, genomic biologists, and, perhaps most revealingly, a poet, Marilyn Nelson, whose evocative meditations on two pivotal moments in Venture Smith’s life open and conclude this volume. The common goal of all this interdisciplinary effort has been to reconstruct the life of a truly extraordinary African American and to assay its profound implications for the sprawling, troubled eighteenth-century world of racial exploitation over which he triumphed so magnificently. As James O. Horton emphasizes in his foreword that this volume “is a gift to all who seek to understand the complex racial beginnings of America. It helps to connect the broad American story with the stories of many Americans whose lives illustrate the national struggle to live out the national ideals.” Horton’s observation defines the fundamental purposes of this book. Venture Smith is a familiar figure to scholars because of the account of his life he dictated in 1798, published as A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But resident above sixty years in the United States of America. His narrative is widely regarded as a canonical text in early African ·

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Editor’s Preface American literature, and it is the only extant account by an African American that links West African memories to a life completed within the United States. Most historians consider it a source sufficient in and of itself to explain who Venture Smith was, where he came from, what circumstances he faced, what he believed in, and how he translated his beliefs into designs for living. On first appearance, the Narrative does seem to give a straightforward account in which a shrewd and immensely energetic slave transported from Africa transformed himself, through unstinting labor, into a respectable citizen of Connecticut who amassed impressive landholdings and commercial connections. It is a story that has led some to consider Smith as a variant of Benjamin Franklin, wholly devoted to the hard-fisted values of possessive individualism and capitalist accumulation and uninterested in the controversies over slavery that characterized his era. What this volume demonstrates, if nothing else, is what an enormous amount is missed if Venture Smith’s life is approached in this manner. The very act of opening the family gravesites raised so extraordinary a range of questions bearing on Smith’s origins, life, and legacies that no single scholar representing a single discipline or specialty could possibly address them all. Scholarly collaboration across disciplinary boundaries can, however. The essays presented here offer a convincing example of how interdisciplinary scholarship can provide substantial answers to a challenging range of questions surrounding the life of Venture Smith, and surrounding the nature of Atlantic-world slavery and the struggle for freedom. Organized into three parts, it presents the life of Venture Smith and its significance from the perspectives of history, memory, and legacy. The opening section, History, contains three essays by historians and a fourth by a historical geographer, each examining a significant aspect of Venture Smith’s experiences as his odyssey took him from West Africa to coastal Connecticut. The first of these, Paul E. Lovejoy’s “The African Background of Venture Smith,” explores such questions as: Where in West African did Venture Smith actually come from? What ethnic group might he have belonged to? What evidence explains the circumstances of his capture and transport? How accurate and substantial are Smith’s recollections of the infamous Middle Passage—the slave-ship voyage from Africa to the Americas—as recounted in his narrative? The second, “Trust and Violence in Atlantic History: The Economic Worlds of Venture Smith,” by Robert P. Forbes, Chandler B. Saint, and David Richardson, examines who Smith’s owners were and what their ownership of his body reveals about the political economies

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Editor’s Preface of slavery in West Africa, the greater Caribbean basin, southern New England, and coastal New York. The authors also explore the personal values and social connections that guided Smith as he negotiated his transformation from slavery to citizenship, from social isolation to the headship of his own free family, and from dependency to affluence. John Wood Sweet’s essay, “Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery,” analyzes Smith’s highly varied, often tempestuous personal relationships with his owners in order to understand how he accomplished his transit from enslavement to emancipation. How, Sweet asks, can his encounters with acts of violence, his experiences of being bought and sold, his attempts to run away, and the negotiation of his own emancipation be better understood by comparing and contrasting these experiences to those of other New England slaves? The fourth essay, “ ‘Owned by Negro Venture’: Land and Liberty in the Life of Venture Smith,” by historical geographer Cameron Blevins, employs global positioning technology and a detailed examination of documents bearing on land transactions to help us reconstitute Venture Smith the real-estate and commercial entrepreneur. Blevins addresses these questions: What can Smith’s business dealings tell us about what success might have meant to him and how he went about achieving it? What were his long-term goals, his short-term tactics? Who else became involved in his climb upward? Who else benefited? Who lost out? What did Smith’s material accomplishments do to challenge the prevailing racial order? Next in this cascade of questions come those arising from Venture Smith’s Narrative itself. These are addressed in the section titled Memory, in two essays by literary scholars, the first by Vincent Carretta, “Venture Smith, One of a Kind,” and the second by Anna Mae Duane, “Keeping His Word: Money, Love, and Privacy in the Narrative of Venture Smith.” To what extent does the Narrative, dictated by an illiterate African American to a white amanuensis and covering recollections of a sixty-odd-year lifetime in a mere thirty pages, actually convey Venture Smith’s voice? To the degree that this voice is present, how might one reliably recover it? Once recovered, what elements can be teased from it that suggest its author’s abiding judgments on the life that he sensed was nearing its end? What enduring values was he expressing by making these judgments and what is revealed by his explanations of how he remembered himself applying them? How might the substance of these values be independently validated by connecting them to other significant knowledge bearing on his life and times? How much, if at all, did memories of a West African boyhood influence a middle-aged man’s choices and shape an old man’s recollections of those choices? How does his Narrative compare

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Editor’s Preface with others published by emancipated slaves during this time? What might variances between the structure of Venture Smith’s life story and others recounted through this genre reveal about the author himself? Two essays and a research note comprise the third section of the volume, Legacies. In “The Genomics Perspective on Venture Smith,” Linda Strausbaugh and her associates examine the many ways in which the myriad of Smith’s direct descendents challenge our prevailing assumptions about the functions of “race.” Today’s Smith family members embody a stunningly complex genealogical map, one that unites them through kin connections that reach beyond “race” just as much as they are bonded by a common African American heritage. To what extent is theirs a specifically African American family story, and to what extent has it come to incorporate important elements which many non–African Americans also share? In empirical terms, what does genomic research such as that completed on the Smith family reveal about the capacity of DNA techniques to challenge the existence of substantial racial differences? Finally, as political philosopher Anne L. Hiskes emphasizes in an essay that reflects on the volume as a whole, we must grapple with profound ethical questions that bear on us as Venture Smith’s twenty-first-century custodians. In “Venture Smith and Philosophical Theories of Human Rights,” Hiskes questions the sufficiency of commonly held assumptions about human rights, given that Smith’s enslavement and the enslavement of so many millions of others took place precisely when “all men” were first being declared “equal.” Recognizing this, can we continue to rely on eighteenth-century ideals that define equality on the basis of individual autonomy, rational choice, and minimal governmental intervention to provide a secure basis for upholding Smith’s enduring human rights? And since these Enlightenment theories did not extend equal rights to women and children, how tenable are they in protecting either the claims of someone such as Smith, who labored much of his life to liberate and gather his enslaved family, or the collective claims of his descendents? Might Venture Smith’s humanity and that of his descendents be more fully protected by postmodern or perhaps African systems of ethics that emphasize collective rights and mutual responsibilities? In what ways might DNA mappings of Venture Smith’s genealogy give liberating confirmation of the universality of his, and our, claims to human rights? Historian Kevin Tulimieri closes the volume with an illuminating research note that explains how Venture Smith’s legacy has been projected into our time by the compelling artistry of the man who carved his gravestone.

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Editor’s Preface Tulimieri’s findings make it all the more fitting that an image of this most impressive monument serves as the book’s front cover.

Scholars seeking to illuminate the problems of slavery, emancipation, and their legacies face many challenges. Yet, as these essays demonstrate, when broad interdisciplinary collaboration is brought intensively to bear on a single, clearly defined subject, opportunities for understanding multiply abundantly. When we concentrate on understanding slavery solely as a system of human commerce and global capitalism, we risk subsuming in statistics and generalizations the very individuals that this system affected so traumatically. We also risk overlooking the system’s most enduring consequences even as they reverberate into our own time. Our greatest debt to Venture Smith, then, is the opportunity his extraordinary life provides us to step past these pitfalls, to see more clearly and deeply, and to discover so much more.

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James Brewer Stewart

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How I Came By My Name

Four casks of rum and a bolt of calico. (A quarter of the list price. A terrific deal, a steal for the ship’s steward who bought a boy onboard as two-legged cargo was being loaded and stowed.) Four casks of rum and a piece of cloth. (For breath, dreams, heartbeat.) The boy who was Broteer disappeared. A business venture took his place. Same face, same eyes, but inside utterly transformed, harmed past healing by the cheapening of human life. Breath, dreams, pulse, traded for cloth and alcohol, were capital. There was profit in the pain, the chains. Venture. There were whole worlds to gain

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M a r ily n Nel s on

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VENTURE SMITH and the Business of Slavery and Freedom

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This facsimile is a reproduction of the 1798 1st edition of A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But resident above sixty years in the United States of America. It is identical to the original in size and spacing, but for the sake of contemporary readability, the 18th-century “long s” (which resembles our “f”) has been replaced by a modern “s.” It is set in ITC Founder’s Caslon Thirty and Founder’s Caslon Forty-Two typeface designed by Justin Howes (the closest modern typeface to the Caslon used in the 1st edition. Readers will note a word at the right-hand bottom of each page. This was common in texts of the period as an aide to introduce the next word on the subsequent page when reading aloud.

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HISTORY

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1 The African Background of Venture Smith Paul E. Lovejoy

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A

NARR ATIVE of the Life and Adventures of Venture . . . chronicles the story of a remarkable man, born in the interior of West Africa around 1727 and buried in the cemetery of the Congregational Church in East Haddam, Connecticut, in 1805. Like many others, he was sent as a slave across the Atlantic, leaving Anomabu on the Gold Coast in 1739, taken to Rhode Island, and spending his period of slavery on Long Island and in Connecticut. His account of transatlantic migration is one of the few that has survived for enslaved Africans in the eighteenth century,1 and like his contemporary Gustavus Vassa (often referred to by his literary name, Olaudah Equiano), Venture Smith recounts that he was first taken to Barbados and then to North America, Smith arriving in New England and Vassa/ Equiano in Virginia.2 While Smith played out his life story on Long Island Sound, Vassa journeyed widely in the Caribbean, the North Atlantic, and the Mediterranean, and spent much of his adult life in London. Despite these differences, the two accounts are worth exploring further, examining both men’s memories of childhood and the experiences of enslavement and transshipment to the Americas, because of the methodological issues that arise in determining precisely where Venture Smith may have come from. The problems of chronology and verification of remembered events, places, and people are similar in the two cases. In my estimation, the details of when Smith left Africa are reasonably clear and can be verified, while the information he provides about his experiences in Africa is confusing and difficult to ·

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h i s t o ry interpret. Vassa’s account of the interior of the Bight of Biafra has the ring of truth, and Vassa clearly reflected on his childhood before writing his narrative in 1788, adding information and interpretation arising from his efforts to understand what he remembered about Igbo culture and society and thereby adopting his birth name Olaudah Equiano as his literary signature.3 An examination of the details of the early lives of both men for what may or may not be revealed about their homelands and experiences in Africa confirms that both were born in Africa and adds new information about African culture and society in the middle of the eighteenth century.4 The identification of Smith’s ethnicity is more problematic than that of Vassa, who was clearly Igbo, although here it is possible that the evidence indicates a Fulani background, in which case he might have come from north of Dahomey or some region in the middle Volta River basin, inland from the Gold Coast, although he also might have come from areas where there were no Fulani livestock herders, such as Bono (Brong) country to the north of Akyem and east of Asante. On the basis of his references to cattle and other livestock, it seems highly probable that he came from somewhere in the savanna, not the forested region close to the coast. It can be assumed that Venture Smith reflected on his early life and attempted to make sense out of his memories, and there is no apparent political motivation for Smith to have altered what he remembered, as there was with Vassa, other than perhaps claiming that his father was a “king,” a title that would have been translated from an African language in any case, if his claim was true. Both Smith and Vassa may have embellished their accounts of childhood, but it is assumed here that there are kernels of truth in their accounts, subject to the distortions of memory and their later attempts to interpret what they remembered. In Smith’s case, moreover, we possess other contemporary accounts of individuals from the Gold Coast. Jacobus Capitein, also enslaved on the Gold Coast as a boy in 1728, was taken to the Netherlands, where he was educated and ordained, before returning to Elmina in 1742; Capitein wrote a treatise on slavery.5 Around 1749 a fictional account titled The Royal African; or, Memoirs of the Young Prince of Annamaboe (discussed further below) was published in London; according to the title page it contains A Distinct Account of His Country and Family; His Elder Brother’s Voyage to France, and Reception There; the Manner in Which Himself Was Confided by His Father to the Captain Who Sold Him; His Condition While a Slave in Barbadoes; the True Cause of His Being Redeemed;

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The African Background of Venture Smith His Voyage from Thence; and Reception Here in England. Interspers’d throughout with Several Historical Remarks on the Commerce of the European Nations, whose Subjects Frequent the Coast of Guinea. To which Is Prefixed a Letter from the Author to a Person of Distinction, in Reference to Some Natural Curiosities in Africa; As Well As Explaining the Motives which Induced Him to Compose These Memoirs.6

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This narrative was presumably based on the true story of a boy enslaved on the Gold Coast and taken to Britain, where he was educated. Thus there were precedents and context for Smith’s life story, documented well before his own publication in 1798. There seems to be no reason to doubt that Venture Smith was born in Africa, although there is some disagreement over his views of his homeland. According to Mechal Sobel, “Venture Smith’s narrative reveals his deep longing for his lost African home and for the people and culture he remembered,” 7 but a careful study of the Narrative reveals attitudes that are ambivalent at best. He recounts memories of his youth but gives no indication that he ever wanted to return there. According to his testimony, he was “born at Dukandarra, in Guinea,” his childhood name being “Broteer,” and he was the eldest son of “Saungm Furro, Prince of the tribe of Dukandarra”; he had two brothers by the same mother, “Cundazo” and “Soozaduka.” Although Smith provides information about his birthplace, his family, and the circumstances of his enslavement and movement to the coast, it is not until he reaches the Gold Coast that any part of his story of Africa can be verified; the details of his departure establish that he left in 1739. The account of his departure is unusual in that he provides the name of the captain of the slave ship that he was on, in addition to the fact that he was at Anomabu: On a certain time I and other prisoners were put on board a canoe, under our master, and rowed away to a vessel belonging to Rhode-Island, commanded by capt. Collingwood, and the mate Thomas Mumford. While we were going to the vessel, our master told us all to appear to the best possible advantage for sale. I was bought on board by one Robertson Mumford, steward of said vessel, for four gallons of rum, and a piece of calico, and called venture, on account of his having purchased me with his own private venture. Thus I came by my name. (13)

On the basis of this information, it is possible to identify his ship as the Charming Susanna, which left Newport, Rhode Island, on October 6, 1738, under the command of Captain James Collingwood, and probably reached ·

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h i s t o ry the Gold Coast in the first half of 1739. The ship is listed in the voyage database compiled by David Eltis and his associates; it arrived in Barbados on August 23, 1739, although previously it was not known where the ship had gone in Africa. Venture Smith remembers that 260 slaves were purchased and taken to Barbados, but the surviving records for the Charming Susanna indicate that ninety-one slaves were actually purchased, of whom seventy-four were disembarked at Barbados.8 As Smith notes, Robinson Mumford, the steward, whose first name is given in the text as Robertson, bought him.9 Robinson Mumford was related to the ship’s first mate, Thomas Mumford, who is probably the same Thomas Mumford who was captain of Rhode Island slave ships in 1735 and 1737. The family was familiar with the West African coast and specifically Anomabu. After Robinson Mumford’s death, apparently at sea around 1740–42, his father, George (d. 1756), became Venture’s owner. Since Smith’s account of leaving Africa is confirmed by shipping records, the coastal point of his embarkation is crucial to identifying Smith’s ethnic background. There are methodological problems in establishing the people and places that are mentioned in the interior of the Gold Coast, besides the difficulties deciphering Smith’s geography. The names Smith dictated were transcribed phonetically by his amanuensis and thus the spellings are not easily matched with the historical record. Smith claims to have remembered a considerable amount of detail about the interior of the Gold Coast, specifically about incidents relating to the enslavement of the inhabitants of his hometown, but it is difficult to know where that was located. On the assumption that Smith was retelling memories of his childhood as accurately as he could remember, I think he reveals knowledge of geography and details of places and people of a boy about twelve, not six and a half, as he calculated. As his achievements later in life demonstrated, Smith had a good sense of direction and was clearly very intelligent. Hence we can assume that his memories give a reasonably good indication of where he came from, with the names of people and places permitting an identification of his specific place of origin. If he were as young as he says he was, in my opinion, Smith’s account would most likely have to be seen as a fabrication; it is hard to imagine a child of six remembering the details recounted in the narrative, although he might remember the names of a few places and people. As we will see, Smith’s evidence does conform to the geography of the interior of the Gold Coast, but again the identification of names and places has proven to be difficult. The reconstruction presented here is speculative, based on possible correlations with the political history of the interior and the correspondence with the geographical details as Smith recalled them. ·

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The African Background of Venture Smith There are other problems with the published account, since Smith was illiterate and dictated his story, apparently to Elisha Niles, a local schoolteacher who is credited with writing the text, according to traditions that were published in 1897.10 Niles provides no clues about his involvement in his surviving diary from the 1790s, unfortunately, but it can be assumed that he tried to capture phonetically what Smith told him. As the introduction to the Narrative, presumably written by Niles, notes, that the “account is published in compliance with the earnest desire of the subject of it, and likewise a number of respectable persons who are acquainted with him.” Stylistically, Niles’s diary and the Narrative are very different, suggesting that Niles served as a scribe and not as an author or even much of an editor of the text, and hence the account appears to be Smith’s voice. We must ask, however, whether errors were introduced in the recording of African names, just as the names of Smith’s first owner is recorded as Robertson Mumford when it was actually Robinson Mumford. Indeed, the copy of the Narrative at Yale University has “corrections” written on the front cover that suggest alternate ways of deciphering the names in the published text. While it is not clear who inserted these alternate forms, it is possible that Smith was given the chance to amend the published work. The glosses on the Yale copy, as best they can be deciphered, suggest alternates to the names of his two brothers and the place from which he came. Instead of Cundazo and Soozaduka, the glosses appear to read “Condozo” and “Suzaduka,” both of which are admittedly minor variations but nonetheless variations, and “Duncandarra” is written instead of “Dukandarra,” which also may or may not be significant. It may be that the Yale copy of the Narrative belonged to Venture Smith or one of the individuals who testified in 1798 to the authenticity of the Narrative. Thus we must allow for the possibility that the published text altered Smith’s pronunciation of names and places, however slightly. While the authenticity of Smith’s birth in Africa seems certain, the date of his birth has to be questioned. Smith’s Narrative states that he was born “about the year 1729,” which suggests he would have been about ten when he was sold to Robinson Mumford in 1739. The testimony at the end of the volume, signed by Nathaniel Minor, Elijah Palmer, Captain Amos Palmer, Acors Sheffield, and Edward Smith, confirms that the Narrative was authentic and that Venture was “a native of Africa, . . . a free negro man, aged about 69 years.” His tombstone, however, which he commissioned and thus also must be considered to represent his voice, is inscribed “Sacred to the Memory of Venture Smith an African tho the Son of a King he was kidnapped & Sold as a Slave but by his industry he acquired Money to purchase his Freedom ·

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h i s t o ry who Died Sept 19th 1805 in ye 77th Year of his Age,” which suggests that he was born in 1727 or 1728, making him closer to twelve when he boarded the Charming Susanna off Anomabu. Some personal details in the Narrative are useful in helping to establish his age, since he noted that his parents separated over a dispute when his father took another wife, although his parents subsequently were reconciled, which suggests that he had to have been old enough to understand that his parents had had a serious disagreement or at least to have thought that they had. Comprehension of this type of situation seems more likely for a boy of twelve or so, not one of six and a half. Similarly, on the march to the coast, Smith remembered that he had had “very hard tasks imposed on me, which I must perform on pain of punishment. I was obliged to carry on my head a large flat stone used for grinding our corn, weighing as I should suppose, as much as 25 pounds; besides victuals, mat and cooking utensils. Though I was pretty large and stout of my age, yet these burthens were very grievous to me, being only about six years and an half old” (11). Smith was very likely a strong boy—he grew to be six feet, two inches in height and weighed 300 pounds11— but to have carried the heavy load he describes, he was probably not six but several years older. The problem of identifying Venture’s home in the interior of the Gold Coast can be approached in three ways: by working backward from the approximate date of Smith’s departure from Anomabu in late May or early June 1739; by attempting to link various details in his account with known political and military activities in the interior of the Gold Coast in the period from about 1735 to 1739; and by examining various terms and descriptions that might provide evidence of a cultural nature. In my opinion, there are three possibilities that can explain his passage to the coast: first, the activities of Akyem inland from the Fante coast and Accra; second, Asante aggression in Brong territory or other areas to the east and north of Kumase, the Asante capital; and third, the activities of Dahomey and its attempt to quell its former ally, Little Popo, to the east of the Gold Coast. Of these possibilities, the most likely relates to the activities of Akyem. According to what Smith remembered, the predatory army that had seized him in the interior marched him to the coast, reaching a “district which was contiguous to the sea, called in Africa, Anamaboo” This “district” might refer to either the actual town of Anomabu or to the Fante confederation, of which Anomabu was the largest town.12 In 1739 Eno Baisie Kurentsi, known to Europeans as John Currantee, was the most important merchant at Anomabu. Kurentsi was variously described as ohene (titled official, symbolized by ·

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1.1 West Africa

a stool), principal caboceer (merchant or official), captain, chief magistrate, and general of the Fante coast, and he remained a leading merchant until his death in 1764.13 It is possible that Smith passed through the hands of Kurentsi, perhaps seized from him and taken elsewhere on the Gold Coast, most likely to the Dutch or Danish settlements further east. Anomabu was reasonably well known in the late 1730s and 1740s. The Royal African; or, Memoirs of the Young Prince of Annamaboe, published around 1749, described the experiences of the adopted son of Kurentsi, William Ansah, who had been sent to England for an education in the 1740s. Ansah initially had been tricked and sold into slavery, but he was subsequently redeemed by the British government, and according to his biographer, Margaret Priestley, came under the personal charge of Lord Halifax, Commissioner of Trade and Plantations, and was even introduced to King George II.14 Two poems published in Gentlemen’s Magazine in London in 1749 also referred to the same incident and confirm that the approximate location and importance of Anomabu was reasonably well known in England at the time.15 Moreover, the Gold Coast was a common destination for Rhode Island ships, as Anomabu was for the Charming Susanna on its 1738–39 voyage.16 ·

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h i s t o ry There was no castle at Anomabu in 1739, however. The castle, Fort Charles, had been abandoned in the early eighteenth century and was in ruins; Fort William was not built until 1753.17 At the time Venture Smith was there, the trade at Anomabu was handled through a ship, the Argyle, which was anchored off the coast from 1737 until early 1743 and served as a “floating factory” for a syndicate operating out of London that sold slaves to passing ships. Thus Smith’s report of being held in a castle could not have referred to a castle at Anomabu, but might refer to any one of a number of establishments to the east of Anomabu as far as Accra, which forwarded slaves by canoe to Anomabu or elsewhere that ships were waiting. The Danish fort, Christiansborg, for example, was reselling slaves to ships at Anomabu via the Argyle in this period.18 It is not clear which castle Smith was in, but in any event, the identification of Anomabu as the point of reference suggests a possible link with Akyem, which controlled the immediate interior of the Fante coast and Accra after it defeated the Fante and Agona in 1738.19 Smith’s description of his arrival at Anomabu is curious, because his captors were attacked and he was seized, along with everything the captors had in their possession. According to Smith’s account “The inhabitants [of Anomabu] knowing what conduct they [Smith’s captors] had pursued, and what were their present intentions, improved the favorable opportunity, attacked them, and took enemy, prisoners, flocks and all their effects” (13). Apparently, Smith was subject to the practice of “panyarring,” which was common on the Gold Coast in this period. Panyarring involved the seizure of goods that were considered to be legitimate compensation for a debt.20 Such seizures were acceptable in situations in which communities were held collectively responsible for debts or wrongdoing. Numerous examples of panyarring are reported in Danish, Dutch, and English sources for this period.21 Hence what at first might appear to have been random violence in fact conformed to known practices on the Gold Coast and is fully understandable in the context of Gold Coast politics and economy in the 1730s. It may well have been that Smith’s captors, whom he later thought had been “instigated by some white nation who equipped and sent them to subdue and possess the country” (8), were in debt to Fante merchants at Anomabu, such as Kurentsi, or one of the other caboceers on the Fante coast or at nearby Agona, and this could account for the apparently arbitrary seizure of slaves and property. It appears that Smith’s captors were known on the coast, which suggests that this may have been an Akyem detachment. Anomabu later became the terminus of one of the most important roads between the coast and the Asante capital at Kumase, but in the late 1730s the road to Elmina seems to have ·

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The African Background of Venture Smith been more important to Asante while the Fante towns were under the sway of Akyem.22 In 1738 Anomabu and the other Fante towns attacked Elmina, to the west, and while this attack was repulsed, trade was disrupted and presumably the road was closed to the interior.23 At first glance “Dukandarra,” or “Duncandarra” as is written on the Yale copy, seems close to Denkyira, the Akan state defeated by Asante in the early eighteenth century and incorporated into its emerging empire, but the timing is off. Moreover, the names that Smith recounts are decidedly not Akan, so it is unlikely that he came from the forested region near the coast, where Denkyira was located. Whether or not he was caught up in the events surrounding the Fante attack on Elmina is uncertain, but the possibility of Asante involvement in his enslavement is undermined by other details of his account, especially his references to livestock and to the enslavement of people who had defensive positions built into the side of a hill. As far as is known, this would not have involved an Asante army, since there are no substantial hills that would allow for such defensive works inland from Anomabu or Elmina toward Asante. The most likely scenario for Smith’s movement to the coast can be derived from the history of Akyem and the relationship of Akyem to the Fante, Agona, and Accra in the late 1730s.24 In 1730 an Akyem alliance (including the Abuakwa and Kotoku factions) defeated Akwamu, which hitherto had dominated the Fante coast and Accra. The victory was possible because Asante remained neutral, thereby betraying its erstwhile ally, Akwamu. The remnant Akwamu state fled east of the Volta River, with Akyem Abuakwa securing control of the coastal region but threatened from Asante and in danger that Akwamu might reestablish itself with assistance from Asante or Dahomey. According to J. K. Fynn, “Akyem lived in fear of an Asante invasion of their country.” The alliance between the Abuakwa and Kotoku factions of Akyem was fragile, with Akyem Abuakwa attempting to occupy the territory evacuated by Akwamu government.25 From Smith’s account, he seems to have been embroiled in the affairs of Akyem and its consolidation of the Fante coast, Agona, and Accra between 1737 and 1739. His enslavement and his movement to the coast at Anomabu but incarceration in a castle elsewhere on the coast, most likely to the east of Anomabu, is consistent with what is known of the history of the Fante, where Anomabu was located, and Akyem, which controlled the coast, including Anomabu. Akyem was involved in war on the coast in 1737 and 1738, which continued until early 1739, and this is clearly the period when Smith was there. ·

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h i s t o ry The conflict on the coast stemmed in part from Dutch–Danish rivalry at Accra and divisions between the Kotoku and Abuakwa factions in Akyem that spilled over onto the coast. According to Kofi Affrifah, the Dutch and Danes became involved in a succession dispute over the inheritance of the political stool at Dutch Accra, with the Dutch supporting the Ga candidate, Darko, and the Danes supporting Okaidja. The situation became tense when the Dutch panyarred some of Okaidja’s relatives and slaves; Okaidja then fled to Osu, where the Danes welcomed him. Okaidja, with Danish connivance, convinced Akyem of Dutch intrigue, and this prompted an invasion of Accra to suppress an alleged alliance between the Dutch and Asante. On June 4, 1737, J. Baron des Bordes, the Dutch director-general, arrived in Accra and sent a delegation “to the Great Man of the Akim Nation such as Frempong [Frimpon Manso], Baquentyn [Baa Kwante] and Oers [Owusu Akyem] . . . to enquire from them why they have decided to attack the Dutch Company with whom they have been accustomed to trade always.” 26 Several weeks later, on July 20, the delegation returned and relations were normalized. Owusu Akyem joined the Danes and Okaidja against the Dutch, however, even though Baa Kwante and other Abuakwa leaders initially sided with the Dutch. From Akuapem, Owusu Akyem sent a large army, reportedly numbering eight thousand, to assist Okaidja. Owusu Akyem followed in November 1737 and arrived near Accra in December, allegedly with an additional eight thousand troops. The presence of the Akyem army caused thousands to flee, many seeking sanctuary at Fort Creveoceur. Owusu suddenly withdrew to Akuapem, however, and he left for Akyem Abuakwa. The Danes attributed the withdrawal to a shortage of water in the Ga region, but according to Affrifah the ultimate effectiveness of Dutch diplomacy in Akyem was probably another and a much better reason: in December 1737 the Dutch were confident enough to say that “Oers [Owusu Akyem] is not assisted with proper force by his brother [Baa Kwante] to begin formal war; his advance is entirely contrary to the views of his brother.” Kotokuhene Frimpon Manso may also have disapproved the conduct of Owusu Akyem. The Dutch were in touch with the courts at Banso and Oda, and their protests against Owusu Akyem may have compelled the two other Akyem rulers to order Owusu Akyem to stop his Accra venture. The withdrawal of Owusu’s forces had no immediate effect on the Okaidja–Dutch conflict. Okaidja continued to block some of the routes leading to Dutch Accra and eluded Dutch attempts to apprehend him. Akyem was not in a position to do anything to suppress Okaidja because Akyem was preoccupied with problems in other parts of the empire, particularly the old Akwamu heartland inland from Accra. Okaidja rightly ·

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The African Background of Venture Smith calculated that the Akyem authorities were initially not in a good position to deal with him, but in the second half of 1738 Akyem became less distracted by problems elsewhere and Okaidja seems to have disappeared. He must have scaled down his hostile activities against the Dutch when information reached Tema in July 1738 that the Akyem were about to dispatch a punitive force against him. Moreover, by then the Danes and Dutch had reached an accord, although their commercial bickering continued. It is likely that Venture Smith experienced Akyem vengeance on the heartland of old Akwamu. Even though the area was subjugated to Akyem Abuakwa in 1730–31, the trade route to the coast was blockaded in 1732, and continued economic sanctions were “a great source of irritation.” Friction with the Akwamu who had remained in “Old Akwamu” became an excuse for other punitive expeditions; in 1734, Akyem Abuakwa announced an expedition against Old Akwamu but attacked the lower Volta basin instead. In October 1738, Akyem invaded the province to confirm their authority there. Although the Akwamu ruling lineage and a section of the population had moved across the Volta after the Akyem victory in 1731, Akyem scarcely left them in peace. In 1731, Akyem forces under Owusu Akyem invaded the lower Volta in what amounted to “glorified slave raiding ventures targeted primarily against the Krepi,” according to Affrifah.27 In 1737 Akyem invaded the new stronghold of Akwamu across the Volta, and many people were killed or captured. Many of those who escaped fled to an island in the Volta, and from there they appealed to the Dutch at Keta to intervene. King Agaja of Dahomey invaded Keta about this time. The Dahomey assault on Keta gave rise to a strong speculation among the Dutch that the Akwamu had sent messengers to invite Agaja to come to their aid and that the attack on Keta might be the first phase of a grand Akwamu– Dahomey secret plan. The Dutch therefore began to put their defenses in the Ga–Adangbe area on good footing in anticipation of the expected assault. But the perceived attack never materialized to worry the Akyem as overlords of the Ga and Adangbe provinces, and in 1738 Akyem also finally defeated Agona and the Fante. Hence in late 1738 or early 1739, when Venture Smith arrived at the coast, there is evidence of turmoil and marauding armies of Akyem along the Fante coast and inland from Accra. It seems probable, based on the fragmentary evidence contained in Smith’s memoirs, that this portion of the Narrative refers to these events. Danish sources note in October 1738 that “the Akanists [i.e., Akyem] have for the last month been at war with the Fantes and have defeated them, just as they have destroyed the market place that ·

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h i s t o ry was in Agona, where the Akanists mostly went to trade because they bought the goods there at half the value they then had to and still must pay at the forts. This, we may hope, will contribute to the trade here at Accra.” 28 It is possible that this was when Smith was seized at Anomabu. In December 1738, Governor Enevold Nielson Boris informed the directors of the Danish West India Company that Captain Hamilton, “our Correspondenct at Annamaboa[,] recently supplied 50 silk brawls and 50 whole allejars @ 12 rdl., which when the opportunity arises will be paid back in tusks.” 29 There were few slaves because of the conflict in the interior, but Smith was apparently panyarred at the coast. Writing on December 15, Boris complained that

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for a month’s time we have not heard much of the Akenists [i.e., Akyem], neither Ban’s [Baa Kwante] nor Frempung’s [Frimpon Manso] people, but we live in hope that they will soon come down again, since they now have nowhere else to go than here at Accra. As for the Coast in general, it is very quiet up the Coast, but the whole Lower Coast is in a state of uproar and war. The Dutch have almost all their lodges on the Lower Coast, such as Fida [Ouidah], Jaquin, Apa, Benin and Quitta [Keta]. Their Commandant on the Lower Coast, Hertug by name, has been killed by his own slaves, and everything, both the Company’s and his own property, has been panyarred and taken away. On the Upper Coast they [the Dutch] are also harassed by the Fantes, so that not one of their vessels can pass Annemaboa without being in fear of being panyarred.30

Venture Smith appears to have been caught up in these events, and the reference to hill people would probably have been to the Akuapem ridge, where remnants of Akwamu still resisted Akyem victory. According to Smith’s recollections, the invasion in which he was seized was intended to enslave people. Both Dukandarra and the place where he had apparently served his apprenticeship were “invaded by a numerous army, from a nation not far distant, furnished with musical instruments, and all kinds of arms then in use” (8). The use of musical instruments in combat seems to have been common. According to a description of the Dahomey army in the 1720s, attacks were announced with overpowering noise, including shouting, drumming, the beating of gongs, and gunfire.31 The armies of the Akan states, including Asante and Akyem, were also armed with guns, however, and probably used battle techniques similar to those described by Smith. Hence the invading army that carried guns and used musical instruments could have come from Dahomey, Akyem, Asante, or one of the other ·

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Akan states. An examination of the political history of the region in the late 1730s allows a consideration of the various possibilities. Because of the quest for slaves, people had to “necessarily evacuate their lands to the fierce enemy, and fly to the protection of some chief; and that if he would permit them they should come under his rule and protection when they had to retreat from their own possessions” (8–9). Smith’s father offered temporary sanctuary to the refugees from the town where Smith had been apprenticed because, as he thought, his father “was a kind and merciful prince,” although it is more likely that his father “consented to these proposals” (10) for refuge because of clan links. That slave raiding was the paramount intention of the invasion is confirmed by betrayal; after the demands of tribute were paid, the town was still attacked: “The army of the enemy was large, I should suppose consisting of about six thousand men. Their leader was called Baukurre. After destroying the old prince [i.e., Venture’s father, Saungm Furro], they decamped and immediately marched towards the sea, lying to the west, taking with them myself and the women prisoners” (11). If the events described by Smith related to Akyem, then Baukurre might possibly be identified with Baa Kwante, the leader of Akyem Abuakwa.32 Smith’s description of people who lived in hills or mountains and built defensive sanctuaries into the hills might be identified with many places as far as the Atakora Mountains in the north, but possibly also to any of the hilly country southward from the Atakora ridge, including Akuapem and Kwahu, immediately north of Accra, whose escarpment might have been the location of such fortifications. There were various peoples who lived in hills who might fit Smith’s account: We were then come to a place called Malagasco.—When we entered the place we could not see the least appearance of either houses or inhabitants, but upon stricter search found, that instead of houses above ground they had dens in the sides of hillocks, contiguous to ponds and streams of water. In these we perceived they had all hid themselves, as I suppose they usually did upon such occasions. In order to compel them to surrender, the enemy contrived to smoke them out with faggots. These they put to the entrance of the caves and set them on fire. While they were engaged in this business, to their great surprise some of them were desperately wounded with arrows which fell from above on them. This mystery they soon found out. They perceived that the enemy discharged these arrows through holes on the top of the dens directly into the air.—Their weight brought them back, point downwards on their

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enemies heads, whilst they were smoking the inhabitants out. The points of their arrows were poisoned, but their enemy had an antidote for it, which they instantly applied to the wounded part. The smoke at last obliged the people to give themselves up. They came out of their caves, first spatting the palms of their hands together, and immediately after extended their arms, crossed at their wrists, ready to be bound and pinioned. I should judge that the dens above mentioned were extended about eight feet horizontally into the earth, six feet in height and as many wide. They were arched over head and lined with earth, which was of the clay kind, and made the surface of their walls firm and smooth. (11–12)

The location of Malagasco is uncertain, but it could possibly be Malfakassa, a Tem town in the Atakora Mountains.33 But it is also possible that the town was located in the Akuapem region inland from Accra or Kwahu, near Akyem Abuakwa. According to Smith, “The invaders then pinioned the prisoners of all ages and sexes indiscriminately, took their flocks and all their effects, and moved on their way toward the sea. On the march the prisoners were treated with clemency, on account of their being submissive and humble. Having come to the next tribe, the enemy laid siege and immediately took men, women, children, flocks, and all their valuable effects” (11–12). This description suggests that the area in question might well have been immediately inland from the Fante coast, which would correspond to the Akuapem hills. References to horses, cattle, and “desert,” as well as other evidence, suggest that Smith’s birthplace, Dukandarra or Duncandarra, was not in the forest but rather in the savanna, and this region might well have been to the north of Akyem. Smith’s account suggests that he came from some distance in the interior (“400 miles”), and while Vincent Carretta has suggested that Dukandarra was “perhaps a reference to Tenkodogo, capital of one of the Mossi States,” 34 he gives no explanation for this suggestion. In fact there is no placename in Tenkodogo or any of the other Mossi states as outlined on maps or in Michel Izard’s reconstruction of the political history of the Mossi states that resembles “Dukandarra” or “Duncandarra.” 35 Moreover, I have been unable to identify any place name in Mamprussi, Dagomba, Gonja, Wa, Bobo Dioulasso, Kong, or Gurma country, all in the interior of the Gold Coast, that sounds similar to Dukandarra. In the area of Atakora, to the east of the middle Volta region, there is a place called Doukoudérou, northeast of Djougou, in what is today Republique du Bénin, but its site seems too far in the ·

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interior to be identified with Dukandarra. It may be that Smith came from an area north of Akyem, perhaps the area between Kete-Krachi and Asante, in Brong territory, which was conquered by Asante a few years later. If so, the names have not yet been identified, and the linguistic evidence—the names and people mentioned in Smith’s account—suggests a people and place that no longer exist. Smith recounts that as a young child he traveled east with his mother after she left Dukandarra, apparently following a dispute with his father: “Thus we went on our journey until the second day after our departure from Dukandarra, when we came to the entrance of a great desert. . . . After five days travel we came to the end of this desert, and immediately entered into a beautiful and extensive interval country . . . [estimated to be] not less than one hundred and forty miles from my native place.” Smith’s figures suggest that he and his mother traveled about twenty miles per day, although this again is based on later reflection and can only suggest a considerable distance for a woman alone with small children. Of this country, where his mother placed Venture in the care of a prominent man who became his guardian, Smith recalls: A large river runs through this country in a westerly course. The land for a great way on each side is flat and level, hedged in by a considerable rise of the country at a great distance from it. It scarce ever rains there, yet the land is fertile; great dews fall in the night which refresh the soil. About the latter end of June or first of July, the river begins to rise, and gradually increases until it has inundated the country for a great distance, to the height of seven or eight feet. This brings on a slime which enriches the land surprisingly. When the river has subsided, the natives begin to sow and plant, and the vegetation is exceeding rapid. Near this rich river my guardian’s land lay. He possessed, I cannot exactly tell how much, yet this I am certain of respecting it, that he owned an immense tract. (7)

There are no rivers flowing west in the interior of the Gold Coast, however, and such western-flowing rivers are tributaries of the Niger, far to the northeast. Moreover, this river is the only one that Smith refers to, which suggests that he did not cross the Volta in his travels, nor does it seem that he passed along the lagoons that are east of the mouth of the Volta. The reference to a large river with floodplains could be the Volta, even though the Volta does not flow in a westerly course, but rather to the south and at times to the east. There is extensive bush country in the interior of the Gold Coast, ·

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h i s t o ry and this might be what Smith means by “desert,” although his use of the term could equally apply to any uninhabited region. Smith thought he was at this place near the large river for “about one year” when he was “about six years old,” but it is more likely that he was older to have remembered it in such detail. He was taken home when his father “sent a man and horse after me” (8). The various references to cattle, sheep, and goats, and indeed the horse, suggest that his family came from the savanna region north of the tsetse fly– infested forests. It is tempting to think that his people may have been Fulani, who were specifically associated with livestock herding, and especially cattle. How long Fulani herders had ranged in the regions north of Dahomey and in parts of the Volta River basin is not known, nor is it known how far south they had moved and when they set up permanent settlements similar to what Smith describes for Dukandarra. Whether or not the place where his mother took him in the east was the location of a Fulani clan related to that of his father is equally speculative. As Smith recounted, the man he calls his guardian not only had extensive lands but “possessed likewise a great many cattle and goats”; he also notes that the “principal occupations of the inhabitants there, were the cultivation of the soil and the care of their flocks” (7). By the nineteenth century, Fulani settlements, including enslaved inhabitants, were scattered throughout the region in the interior, but little research has been done on their location during the first third of the eighteenth century.36 Nonetheless, Smith, along with another boy, was assigned the task of tending a herd of sheep: “The flock which I kept with the assistance of a boy, consisted of about forty. We drove them every morning between two and three miles to pasture, into the wide and delightful plains” (6–7). It seems that Smith had been placed in some form of apprenticeship in which he learned to tend sheep in a manner that could well have been compatible with Fulani cultural practices. His father, too, appears to have owned considerable numbers of livestock, including the horse that he sent for his son, but also cattle, sheep, and goats. When Dukandarra was invaded, his father had to pay “a large sum of money, three hundred fat cattle, and a great number of goats, sheep, asses, &c.” (9), which suggests the possibility that this was a Fulani settlement. Another clue can be found in the fugitive slave advertisement for Smith in the New York Gazette on April 1, 1754, in which Venture was described as “a very tall Fellow, 6 Feet 2 Inches high, thick Square Shoulders, Large bon’d, mark’d in the Face, or Scar’d with a Knife in his own Country.” Unfortunately, the description of scarification is not sufficient to allow identification ·

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with known practices. It should be noted that many people in the interior of the Gold Coast and adjacent Bight of Benin used facial markings, and therefore the fact that Smith had markings does not establish any particular ethnic identification. As with much of the other detail in Smith’s account, there are tantalizing bits of information but no clear identification with his place of origin. None of the places, names, or terms that Smith used has been identified, and while failure to establish a link is not proof, it is likely that Smith was not from an Akan area or any language group or place that is recognizable in the Togo–Ghana region. Certainly, because of war and slavery, places and social groups disappeared, and documenting such occurrences is difficult. Nonetheless, it has to be stated that these crucial details of Smith’s memory have not yet been recognized.

Clearly there are difficulties with the speculative reconstructions of biography. The interpretation presented here is consciously aimed at providing a “logical” explanation for the few and confusing details that often confront us as researchers. DNA technology and collaborative research, as is being conducted in the case of Venture Smith, must follow every clue available. Each biographical account must be examined as carefully as possible, with full recognition that many, if not most. details in such accounts cannot be verified. Admittedly, the interpretation presented here is speculative. It is based on the proposition that events, people. and places correspond to the historical record. The aim has been to establish a trajectory for Smith’s experiences that is possible, and while specific details cannot be confirmed, until a better explanation can be found, the events described here might elucidate Smith’s African origins. Vassa’s account of the interior of the Bight of Biafra confirms his identity as Igbo, but Smith does not establish his ethnic identity, perhaps in part because he apparently never came in contact with anyone from his homeland or anywhere nearby. If his experiences are authentic and can be associated with the events described here, then he provides new information on the political history of the interior of the Gold Coast in the 1730s.

Notes I thank Elisée Soumonni, Obaré Bagodo, Mariza Soares, David Conrad, Sylviane Diouf, Akosua Perbi, Kwabena Akurang-Parry, James Sweet, Robin Law, Ivor Wilks, N. Gayibor, and Olatunji Ojo for assistance in identifying, or failing to identify, the names and places in Smith’s account. Chandler B. Saint inspired this study, providing

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me with considerable information and insights and responding to each effort at reconstruction with enthusiasm, for which I am greatly indebted. 1. Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But resident above sixty years in the United States of America (New London, Conn.: C. Holt, 1798), 13. Subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Gustavus Vassa, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (London: By the author, 1789). 3. See Paul E. Lovejoy, “Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African,” Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 3 (2006): 317–47. 4. On doubts of Vassa’s African birth, see Vincent Carretta, “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-century Question of Identity,” Slavery and Abolition 20, no. 3 (1999): 96–105; “More New Light on the Identity of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 226–35; and Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 1–16. 5. David Nii Anum Kpobi, Saga of a Slave: Jacobus Capitein of Holland and Elmina (Legon: Cootek, 2001). 6. The Royal African; or, Memoirs of the Young Prince of Annamaboe, 2nd ed. (London: W. Reeve, ca. 1750). 7. Mechal Sobel, “Migration and Collective Identities among the Enslaved and Free Populations of North America,” in Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, ed. David Eltis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 189. 8. See David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). In the voyage database, the ship is listed as no. 36067. The information is based on Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island the African Slave Trade, 1700–1807 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 242–43, and CO 28/25 in the National Archives, London. 9. Robinson Mumford was named after his mother, née Mary Robinson. Niles apparently misunderstood Venture in transcribing his account (personal communication, Chandler B. Saint). For the genealogy of the Mumfords, see Sherri Styx, The Mumford Families in America, 1600–1992 (Springfield, Ore.: privately printed, 1992) and Jessica Files, Newport Historical Society, Newport, R.I.. 10. “Elisha Niles his Diary,” Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford. I thank Chandler B. Saint for allowing me to consult the diary. 11. H. M. Selden, ed., Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture A Native of Africa, But Resident Above Sixty Years in the United States of America. (Middletown, Conn.: J. S. Stewart, Printer and Bookbinder, 1897), which includes additional material, in the form of memories and traditions, compiled by Selden. This edition is reprinted in Arna Bontemps, ed., Five Black Lives: The Autobiographies of Venture Smith, James Mars, William Grimes, The Rev. G. W. Offley,

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12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

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18.

19.

20.

James L. Smith (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971). On his height and size, see the description in the fugitive slave advertisement, New York Gazette, April 1, 1754, and the traditions in Seldon’s edition of the Narrative, 26–34. For a study of Fante history, see Rebecca Shumway, “Between the Castle and the Golden Stool: Transformations in Fante Society in the Eighteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2004). See also James Sanders, “The Expansion of the Fante and the Emergence of Asante in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of African History 20 (1979): 349–64; Sanders, “The Political Development of the Fante in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Study of a West African Merchant Society” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1980); and J. K. Fynn, Asante and Its Neighbours, 1700–1807 (London: Longman, 1971). Margaret Priestley, West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 13. The Royal African; or, Memoirs of the Young Prince of Annamaboe; and Priestley, West African Trade and Coast Society, 20–21. Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (New York: Octagon Books, 1969), citing William Dodd, “The African prince, now in England, to Zara at his father’s court,” and William Dodd, “The Epistle of Zara at the Court of Anamaboe, to the African Prince now in England,” Gentleman’s Magazine, July and August 1749. See also Wylie Sypher, “The African Prince in London,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2, no. 2 (1941): 237–47. Coughtry, Notorious Triangle, 105. I thank John Sweet for drawing my attention to the fact that the castle at Anomabu was in ruins in the 1730s and not rebuilt until 1753. See A. W. Lawrence, Trade Castles & Forts of West Africa (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963), 349; and Margaret Priestley, “A Note on Fort William, Anomabu,” Transactions of the Gold Coast and Togoland Historical Society 2 (1956): 46–48. In a letter dated September 30, 1737, Governor E. N. Boris, Christiansborg, referred to an English captain, George Hamilton, “who lies off Annamaboe”; Hamilton was the captain of the Argyle. Ole Justesen, ed., Danish Sources for the History of Ghana, 1657–1754, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005), 2:533; see also Conrad Gill, Merchants and Mariners of the Eighteenth Century (London: E. Arnold, 1961), 91–97. For Akyem influence on the coast in this period, see M. A. Kwamena-Poh, Government and Politics in the Akuapem State, 1730–1850 (Evanston. Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 35–50; Kofi Affrifah, The Akyem Factor in Ghana’s History, 1700–1875 (Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 2000), 46–74; and Ludewig Ferdinand Rømer, A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea (1760) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). On the practice of panyarring, see Robin Law, “On Pawning and Enslavement for Debt in the Precolonial Slave Coast,” in Pawnship, Slavery and Colonialism in Africa, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy and Toyin Falola (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press,

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21.

22.

23.

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24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

2003), 62–64; and Raymond Kea, “ ‘I Am Here to Plunder on the General Road’: Bandits and Banditry in the Pre–Nineteenth Century Gold Coast,” in Banditry, Rebellion, and Social Protest in Africa, ed. Donald Crummey (London: James Currey, 1986), 109–32. Albert Van Dantzig, The Dutch and the Guinea Coast, 1674–1742 (Accra: Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1978); Van Dantzig, Les Hollandais sur le Cote de Guinee a l’Epoque de l’Essor de l’Ashanti et du Dahomey, 1680–1740 (Paris: Société française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 1980); Ole Justesen, “Aspects of EighteenthCentury Ghanaian History as Revealed by Danish Sources,” Ghana Notes and Queries 12 (June 1972): 9–12; Affrifah, Akyem Factor, 63; and Justesen, Danish Sources for the History of Ghana, 2:551, 553, 558. Ivor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 8; Affrifah, Akyem Factor, 66. Harvey M. Feinberg, Africans and Europeans in West Africa: Elminans and Dutchmen on the Gold Coast during the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989); and Harvey M. Feinberg, “An Incident in Elmina– Dutch Relations, the Gold Coast (Ghana),” African Historical Studies 3, no. 2 (1970): 359–72. Affrifah, Akyem Factor, 60–65. See Fynn, Asante and Its Neighbours, 72; Robert Addo-Fenning, “The Akim or Achim in 17th Century and 18th Century Historical Contexts: Who Were They?” Institute of African Studies Research Review 4, no. 2 (1988): 1–15; Ronald R. Atkinson, “Old Akyem and the Origins of Akyems Abuakwa and Kotoku,” in West African Culture Dynamics: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives, ed. R. K. Swartz Jr. and Raymond Dumett (The Hague: Mouton, 1980): 351–69; J. K. Fynn, “Asante and Akyem Relations,” Institute of African Studies Research Review 9, no. 1 (1973): 58–81; Affrifah, Akyem Factor, 60–67; and Kwamena-Poh, Government and Politics in the Akuapem State. Affrifah, Akyem Factor, 60–62, quote on 62, citing J. Baron des Bordes, Journal de Voyage au Accra. Affrifah, Akyem Factor, 64–65, quote on 64. Justesen, Danish Sources for the History of Ghana, 2:549 (Governor Boris to Directors of The West India and Guinea Company, October 6, 1738). Justesen, Danish Sources for the History of Ghana, 2:551 (Boris to Directors, December 15, 1738). Ibid. See the account of Chevalier des Marchais, published in R. Père Labat, Voyage du Chevalier des Marchais en Guiné isles voisines, et à Cayenne (Paris, 1730), vol. 2, 96– 97, and discussed in Edna Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 141. According to Ronald R. Atkinson, the three Akyem leaders who formed the coalition that defeated Akwamu in 1730 were Frempong Manso, Owusu, and

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33.

34.

35.

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36.

Bakwante, who continued to govern Akyem until defeated by Asante in 1742; see Atkinson, “Old Akyem and the Origins of Akyems Abuakwa and Kotoku,” 363. For the chronology of the Akyem rulers, see Affrifah, Akyem Factor, 245. N. L. Gayibor, Histoire des Togolais, vol. 1 (Lomé: Presses de l’Université de Bénin, 1997), 120. On the Atakora region, see also Edward G. Norris, “Atakora Mountain Refugees,” Anthropos 81 (1986): 109–36. Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 385. Michel Izard, Introduction a l’histoire des Royaumes Mossi, 2 vols. (Paris: CNRS, 1970). Jacques Lombard, Structures de type “feudal” en Afrique Noire. Étude des dynamisms internes et des relations sociales chez les bariba du Dahomey (Paris: Mouton, 1965), 33–37; 120–24.

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2 Trust and Violence in Atlantic History The Economic Worlds of Venture Smith Robert P. Forbes, David Richardson, and Chandler B. Saint

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V

ENTURE SMITH has been celebrated as an individual whose life provides a human face for the millions of enslaved Africans caught in the vortex of the Atlantic slave trade.1 Venture’s life was hardly representative, but examined closely through his own narrative it may be seen as representative of many aspects of the relationship between transatlantic slavery and Atlantic history from slavery’s heyday to the beginnings of its final stages in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine another figure whose experiences both as an enslaved person and as a free American incorporated so many of the historical elements encompassed by transatlantic slavery and the environments that intersected with it. Venture Smith’s life as a slave and as a free man came to be the embodiment of what Edmund Morgan called the American paradox.2 By transcending the status of enslaved African and achieving freedom, he came to see himself at the end of his life as an American, although whether he qualified as what some historians call an Atlantic Creole—that is, someone with an identity too cosmopolitan to be defined in strictly national terms—is open to doubt.3 Venture’s life straddled a variety of worlds, and his story enables us to see not only how those worlds were connected—indeed, how they were integrated commercially—but also how their interrelationships shifted through time. Conceptually, his life sheds light on the interrelationship between vio·

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Trust and Violence in Atlantic History lence, on the one hand, and trust and social networking, on the other, as the twin pillars shaping cross-cultural trade and other forms of commercial exchange around the Atlantic Basin. These are themes that have recently dominated literature on the Atlantic economy, but rarely have they been explored through the life of an enslaved African who became a successful landowner and arguably a socially respectable member of a community in the new American republic.4 Geographically, his life encompassed Africa, the Caribbean, and most of the coastal regions of the eastern Long Island Sound, crossing a range of political and legal jurisdictions that together helped to shape Atlantic history. Temporally, his life encompassed first privilege and then enslavement in Africa, the colonial mercantile order of the British state of the mid-eighteenth century, and the “new order of the ages,” the revolutionary era premised on the universal claims of the Declaration of Independence and of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, and on the accompanying radical principle of self-government. The trajectory of Venture’s life thus closely parallels the transformation of American society from a deferential, elite-driven culture based on British rule and on the transplanting of Old World systems of coerced labor to the New World, to the beginnings of a democratic republic. We now know, of course, that during the later stages of Venture’s life and afterward, most of the doors of opportunity opened to blacks during the Revolution were to be firmly closed once again and to remain so for generations to come. But the reality of what Venture Smith accomplished—and the meaning of his life for our understanding of Atlantic history—should not be obscured on that account. Throughout his seventy-seven years—whether in Africa, during his Atlantic journey, or in his sixty-six years in America5—Venture was enmeshed in market-based activity and the processes of accumulation that it facilitated. Moreover, as he relates his life and describes his journey from Africa to America, he provides insights into how markets interacted and, even in a world of mercantilism, became more globally interconnected, their effects filtering down to smaller players and ordinary people as well as the more celebrated ones. Behind Venture’s story, of course, lay the much bigger—and often violent—story of European colonization of the Americas, in which the British were relative latecomers but seized territories in the Caribbean and mainland North America. The mineral and land resources of newly acquired American colonies were quickly exploited for commercial purposes by their new owners, and exploitation of resources became identified with coerced labor in Brazil, Spanish America, the Caribbean, and even mainland North America.6 ·

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h i s t o ry Some of that labor was, and—especially in mainland North America— remained, of European birth, engaged under various forms of time-limited contracts.7 Increasingly, however, coerced labor, even in mainland North America, became identified with enslaved Africans, ensuring that Africa was in time drawn more fully into the orbit of transatlantic commerce. Dominated by Spain and Portugal in its first century, the traffic in enslaved Africans claimed at least two thousand to four thousand victims a year before 1640. But a “sugar revolution” in Barbados from 1640 to 1660 and the subsequent spread of sugar cultivation throughout the Caribbean ensured that the numbers of enslaved Africans employed in the Americas, as well as British and British colonial participation in their mobilization, would grow dramatically during the following century. By the time that Venture Smith—or Broteer Furro, as he was then known—was born in the late 1720s in Dukandarra in Guinea, some fifty to sixty thousand captives a year were leaving Africa for the Americas, the Gold Coast had already made the transition from being the primary source of gold to a major supplier of slaves to the Atlantic world, Britain had emerged as the leading carrier of slaves across the Atlantic, and Rhode Island was in the midst of establishing itself as an important colonial outpost of slave-trading activity with Africa.8 In short, though Venture’s own enslavement was neither inevitable nor, given his background and apparent remoteness from the ocean, even predictable, by the 1730s the mechanisms and economic processes were in place that would violently entrap him in the economic worlds of transatlantic commerce and slavery. Although Venture does not articulate the fact directly, his Narrative reveals that he was born into an African world in which market activity and accumulation were not uncommon. In this respect, his account of his early life bears witness to the emphasis that modern historians place on production for exchange as well as both long-distance and local trade in shaping economic behavior in pre-colonial Africa.9 In Venture’s case, he seems to have been raised in pastoral-farming communities of some prosperity. When his mother chose to exile herself and her children from the family home following a dispute with her husband, Venture tells us that he was placed in the care of “a very rich farmer,” who put him “into the business of tending sheep” (6).10 He relates driving some forty animals each day two or three miles to pasture in “the wide and delightful plains,” and that, after the floodwaters of the local river subsided, “the natives begin to sow and plant.” Near “this rich river,” he reports, lay the farm of his guardian, who treated him well and, he claims, “owned an immense tract” and possessed, in addition to sheep, “a great many cattle and goats” (7). Venture does not reveal what became of the farm’s pro·

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Trust and Violence in Atlantic History duce, but while some was doubtless consumed on the farm, it is difficult not to believe that some must have been sold locally. And when he returned home following the reconciliation of his parents, he evidently went back to a similar pastoral-farming community. Reporting the invasion of Dukandarra about 1738 by those who eventually enslaved him, he noted that the invaders demanded “a large sum of money, three hundred fat cattle, and a great number of goats, sheep, asses, etc.” (9) in return for not attacking the community. Venture’s father evidently agreed to pay the tribute requested, but soon realized that the enemy was about to renege on the agreement. He was captured and tortured to death, refusing to give any “account” of the “money which they knew he must have” (10). Venture’s enslavement, as his narrative shows, began in Africa and involved seizure through violence by an outside group. This was a common method of enslavement of American-bound captives in Africa, though the form of capture might range from warfare to slave-raiding.11 Some historians make a distinction between the enslavement and the transport and marketing processes involved in the generation of slaves for export from Africa, the former being associated with overt violence and open warfare, the latter with less openly violent and more stable, market-orientated patterns of behavior.12 Venture’s narrative provides one of the most detailed firsthand accounts of the processes of enslavement in Africa. It offers a vivid illustration of the devastation and societal costs—the collateral damage—associated with the enslavement process, which encompassed more than the loss to Africa of those taken captive.13 The narrative also shows, however, that in terms of levels of violence the distinction between initial enslavement and the transport and marketing processes in slave trafficking within Africa could be blurred. In this process, the brutality and bloodshed inherent in slavery was not yet domesticated to the conventions of commerce. As experienced by the young Broteer Furro, the system of enslavement looked less like Locke’s “state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive” and more like Hobbes’s “war of every man against every man.” 14 According to Venture, the journey from his homeland to the African coast was at least four hundred miles. It was arduous—“all the march I had very hard tasks imposed on me,” he reports, including carrying a twenty-fivepound grindstone on his head—and involved further violence and devastation wrought by the army of some six thousand men that were his captors. The army lived off the land, “destroying the country wherever they went” (11), and during its march to the coast laid waste to a community of peaceable agriculturalists before seizing the “men, women, children, flocks, and all ·

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h i s t o ry [the] . . . valuable effects” of the “next tribe” that it encountered (12). Ironically, the remnants of the army and their chattels, according to Venture, were then attacked, defeated, and enslaved by the inhabitants of the coastal trading community of Anomabu, who, he contended, knew “what conduct they had pursued” and what “their present intentions were.” Entering Anomabu, Venture was not only “taken a second time” but was also incarcerated with his former captors (13). Venture’s harrowing experience of enslavement imparted profound lessons about trust and violence and the connection of commerce, loyalty, and character. They were lessons that shaped the rest of his life. His captors violated their word in agreeing to accept tribute from his father rather than invade his country “and deprive his people of their liberties and rights” (9).The “shocking scene” of his father’s death by torture remained “fresh in [his] mind,” and he was “often . . . overcome while thinking on it” (11).15 Thus enslavement would be forever linked in Venture’s mind with duplicity, violence, and retribution (a perception quickly reinforced by the enslavement of his captors); and his father’s defiant refusal to surrender his concealed treasure would be associated with courage, endurance, and honor. It is reasonable to surmise that these experiences instilled in Venture a hatred of dishonesty coupled with an appreciation of lawful commerce and a strong sense of the value—one might almost say the nobility—of money. Venture says little about Anomabu and the Gold Coast beyond the fact that he and the other captives were “put into the castle” there “and kept for market.” He then goes on to note that “on a certain time I and the other prisoners were put on board a canoe, under our master, and rowed away to a vessel belonging to Rhode-Island.” All the captives, he notes, were advised “to appear to the best possible advantage for sale” (13). With such cryptic comments, Venture describes the process by which he, as a slave, changed hands for a third time. On this occasion, he tells us, he was bought, rather than seized, for the price of four gallons of rum and a piece of calico. His new owner was Robinson Mumford, an officer and relative of the first mate of the ship. By means of this simple transaction, Venture moved silently, like millions of other fellow Africans before and after him, from the economic world of Africa to that of Europe and its colonial outposts.16 Venture could hardly have known, then or later, that Anomabu (or Adja or Agga, as it was sometimes known), with its fort overlooking rock-strewn passages to oceangoing vessels moored offshore, was among the leading eighteenth-century slave ports along the littoral of Atlantic Africa. A town of about one to two thousand people engaged in fishing, maritime activities, ·

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Trust and Violence in Atlantic History and above all slave trading, Anomabu accounted for four out of ten of all captives embarking ship at the Gold Coast between 1730 and 1759. It was the place from which ultimately as many as 466,000 African captives departed their homeland for the Americas. Nearly a quarter were, like Venture, classified by their captors as children.17 When Venture boarded the ship, therefore, he was doing so at one of the key points of integration of the African, European, and American commercial worlds, not just on the Gold Coast but throughout Atlantic Africa. It was, moreover, on a stretch of the African seaboard—the Gold Coast—that drew Rhode Island slave ships in unusually high proportions.18 At Anomabu, Rhode Islanders mingled with resident British agents and local Fante traders, who in turn had connections with inland slave suppliers. Commercial negotiations between shipmasters and local agents centered on determining the quantities and prices—usually in trade ounces, the local currency—of European, Indian, and North American manufactures for slaves, corn, and water.19 The last two were essential for sustaining the “human cargo” in the Atlantic crossing. Among the goods exchanged for slaves at Anomabu were textiles, firearms, beads, and rum.20 Textiles, firearms, and beads usually came from Europe, but rum was commonly produced in New England from Caribbean molasses and carried to Africa by Rhode Island vessels such as the Charming Susanna, commanded by Captain Collingwood, on which Venture Smith would make his Atlantic crossing. As he made the short but fateful journey from shoreline to ship, Venture Smith thus became yet one more victim of the brutal commercial processes that through places such as Anomabu linked Africa with the wider European, Caribbean, and New England commercial worlds. Venture’s reticence in describing his time at Anomabu is matched by his terse description of his Atlantic crossing. “After an ordinary passage,” he informs us, “except great mortality by the small pox, which broke out on board” (13), on August 23, 1739, the Charming Susanna reached Barbados, where all but four of the surviving slaves were sold to local planters. Losses of slaves in the crossing totaled some 60 (or 23 percent) of the 260 embarked at Anomabu (13)—if Venture recalled accurately the number of captives embarked or lost on the Charming Susanna, which is open to question.21 Most Rhode Island slaving vessels were comparatively small and typically carried fewer than two hundred slaves, with a high proportion carrying less than a hundred.22 But even if the loading and mortality levels of slaves recorded by Venture were accurate, a loss in transit of 23 percent of those embarked was high by Rhode Island or British slave-trading standards in the eighteenth century, and even by the standards of those leaving Anomabu.23 In this sense, ·

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h i s t o ry the Charming Susanna’s passage to America was not an “ordinary” one. The fact that smallpox broke out on board ship was doubtless an important factor in the reportedly high loss of captives. Epidemics were among the most common causes of exceptional mortality levels on slave ships. It is possible, however, that some of those embarking on the Charming Susanna were the invaders of Venture’s homeland, and this was perhaps a potential contributory factor in the high mortality on the vessel. Recent work has shown that adult males on ships that left the Gold Coast in the mid-eighteenth century experienced exceptionally high rates of mortality in the Middle Passage, the journey from Africa to the Americas.24 Whatever the cause of mortality, a loss of sixty slaves, if the figure is accurate, would almost certainly have reduced significantly the potential profitability of the Charming Susanna’s voyage. This, in turn, may help explain why the vessel and its master made only one known voyage to Africa for slaves. For slave traders, survival and loss of slaves in the Middle Passage was fundamentally an economic issue. Stephanie Smallwood has interpreted the Middle Passage as one element within a process that, beginning in Africa and continuing through to the sale of captives in the Americas, was intended to convert “saltwater” slaves (or newly imported Africans) into dehumanized labor units. She argues, indeed, that the survivors of the Middle Passage were left to try to recreate “kinship and community out of the disaggregated units remaining after the market’s dispersal of its human wares.” Her argument is a grim reminder of the human costs of transatlantic slavery and a powerful commentary on the market forces that nurtured it. For Smallwood, saltwater slaves, as dehumanized victims of a stream of one-way departures from Africa, were left with little possibility of “narrative closure.” 25 At one level, Venture Smith’s narrative would seem to provide endorsement of this view. The terseness of his description of the Middle Passage and of his onward journey from Barbados to Rhode Island may reflect an eagerness to put out of his mind an experience he preferred to forget. Had he known more about the survival chances of African slaves who arrived at Barbados, where close to half a million are estimated to have disembarked and many died prematurely, he might well have considered himself fortunate not to have been sold there.26 But Barbados was pivotal to the flow of commercial information in the English-speaking Atlantic world. It helped to nurture settlement in the Carolinas from the 1670s onward.27 And it was an important market for export products of mainland North America, such as fish, grain, and barrel staves.28 In the last respect, it was to play a significant part in Venture’s life after he achieved his freedom. But Barbados, with its relent·

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Trust and Violence in Atlantic History less commitment to plantation-based sugar cultivation for export, was, like almost every other Caribbean colony with the same dependence, a graveyard for newly imported enslaved Africans. Some died in the “seasoning period” immediately after arrival, and a sizable proportion died within a few years after disembarking from Africa.29 The fact that Venture Smith survived some sixty-six years in the Americas, first as a slave and then as a freeman, owed much to his own physical and mental strength. But it doubtless owed something, too, to his good fortune in being, as a child, the “venture” of the son of a notable Rhode Island and Connecticut family, Robinson Mumford, who, having bought the young Broteer Furro at Anomabu, elected to bring him home to New England, with a view, almost certainly, of training him. There he would join a community of enslaved Africans with much higher rates of survival than those of the sugar colonies. This chance occurrence was to allow Venture Smith to achieve some sort of “narrative closure” during his life, a possibility denied to so many of his fellow enslaved Africans who died prematurely. As he traveled from Barbados to New England, Venture became one of a small proportion of African captives—perhaps two percent but sometimes more—who were more or less immediately transported from the British Caribbean to the mainland colonies. Most went to the colonies from the Chesapeake south: Maryland, Virginia, and, above all, South Carolina, which before 1730 had close links with Barbados.30 Another group went to the middle Atlantic colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, while a third group—and probably the smallest—went to New England.31 Some of those reshipped from the islands to the mainland are thought to have been troublemakers, but others were slaves who, like Venture, were owned as personal property by the crew of slave ships. Seen as “likely Negroes” by their owners, they were intended for domestic or other ser vice nearer home.32 For those taken to New England, Rhode Island was one of the most important destinations. In this respect, Venture’s onward journey from Barbados to Rhode Island as the property of Robinson Mumford was not unusual. It was an extension of the Middle Passage experienced by a sizeable proportion of African captives who entered the intra-American slave trade Venture’s journey to New England physically removed him from the epicenter of British American slavery in the West Indies. But it did not distance him from slavery itself or from the commercial world, with its mixture of credit, trust, networking, and even violence, which Caribbean slave plantation agriculture and its southern mainland offshoots were instrumental in sustaining. On landing in Rhode Island, Venture came into contact with one ·

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h i s t o ry of the oldest and most established communities of Africans in the North. Enslaved Africans first arrived in Newport no later than the 1680s, and by the time of Venture’s arrival blacks—some of them free—made up almost a third of the city’s residents.33 African youths, trainable as apprentices in various trades and as specialized servants, were almost certainly in high demand there in the mid-eighteenth century. They were to play an important part in urban construction and other aspects of the local economy. As much as anywhere in the North, Africans in Newport also preserved memories and traditions from their homeland. Thus while Venture became acculturated to America, and arguably came to see himself as a citizen of the new republic after 1783, his ties to Africa were not erased, as so often occurred to traumatized young survivors of the Middle Passage.34 Venture’s arrival in New England also coincided with a substantial growth in the region’s links with Caribbean slavery. We now know that Newport was the fourth most important port, after Liverpool, London, and Bristol, for fitting out slave ships for Africa in the First British Empire. As the principal base for outfitting slaving voyages in North America, Newport and other places in Rhode Island dispatched close to nine hundred voyages to Africa for slaves between the seventeenth century and January 1, 1808, when federal law barred the importation of slaves from Africa.35 Many took slaves from the Gold Coast. Most, like the Charming Susanna in 1739, landed the great majority of their slaves in the Caribbean. Significantly, too, Newport’s participation in the slave trade was erratic and modest up to the 1720s but then solidified and expanded from the 1730s onward. In this sense, Venture’s arrival in Rhode Island occurred at the moment when the colony’s integration with the world of Caribbean slavery was moving to a new level. It continued to deepen, along with that of the rest of coastal New England, to and beyond 1776. That integration, however, did not end with supplying African captives to the West Indies. Seen in a wider context, the particular corner of the New World in which Venture found himself was a coastal outpost of New England that faced south. The center of this world was the Long Island–Rhode Island Sound—a busy thoroughfare knitting together southern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, the Connecticut coastline, and the North Shore of Long Island into a single integrated maritime region that could aptly be described as a Yankee Mediterranean. It was a region or subregion as closely integrated into Atlantic trading systems as Barbados and Anomabu, places with which Newport and other ports in New England were forging ties.36 Its prosperity and wealth were tied to the ebbs and flows of the Caribbean sugar economy

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Trust and Violence in Atlantic History and thus to Caribbean slavery. This was recognized at the time, of course, and it has been understood by economic historians since the early twentieth century.37 The cohesiveness of this Sound-centered coastal world cut across land-based political jurisdictions and created an interconnected network of powerful families with interests in all four colonies and far beyond. Among them were the Mumfords, the Stantons, and the Smiths, who at different times came to own Venture Smith.38 The timing of Venture’s arrival in New England and the close social world in which he found himself were to have a profound influence on his life, creating opportunities for an enterprising and hard-working slave perhaps barely conceivable in the more anonymous or depersonalized world of slave plantation agriculture that dominated the West Indies and South Carolina. After arriving in New England, Venture lived first with a sister of his owner, Robinson Mumford—probably his oldest sister, Mercy, who lived in Newport. For several months Venture was groomed to become a servant, was taught English and schooled in the obligations of a New England slave. During this time, he probably came into contact with fellow African slaves as well as perhaps some of the free blacks of Newport.39 Early, too, as his narrative reminds us, he demonstrated the lessons he had learned in Africa about trust and honor. After Venture passed some time in training in the capital, his young master relocated him to his own home on Fisher’s Island and returned to sea for a time. Entrusting Venture with the keys to his ship’s trunks, he enjoined him not to surrender them to anyone. Robinson’s father put Venture’s loyalty to the test, demanding the keys and threatening him with punishment if he did not surrender them; but like his father in the face of the slavers, Venture refused to relent. In a passage with overtones of the Biblical story of Joseph, Venture described the scene that followed: When [my master] returned he asked where venture was. As I was then within hearing, I came, and said, here sir, at your ser vice. He asked me for his keys, and I immediately took them off my neck and reached them out to him. He took them, stroked my hair, and commended me, saying in presence of his father that his young venture was so faithful that he never would have been able to have taken the keys from him but by violence; that he should not fear to trust him with his whole fortune, for that he had been in his native place so habituated to keeping his word, that he would sacrifice even his life to maintain it. (14–15)

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h i s t o ry With its endorsement of the value of trust, this episode arguably stands as a pivotal moment in Venture’s early life in slavery as well as an illustration of how trust was seen to underpin the economic world in which he then found himself. His decision to defend his master’s possessions at all costs, even in the face of possible violence, allowed him to accomplish a set of vital, seemingly conflicting outcomes. He established clear lines of authority, declaring his unwavering obedience to one master—an essential component of an endurable servitude (as the absence of it would soon prove). He won the respect, too, of his master, and at least the grudging respect of his master’s kin. He demonstrated his readiness to resist and even to defy powerful authority figures—in a way that nonetheless conformed to his status as a servant and even enhanced his reputation for obedience. He exemplified the unwavering integrity of his upbringing in a way that reflected honor on his despised homeland, and compelled his master to acknowledge an aspect of nobility in the African character. Finally, and perhaps most important, he chose to construct a foundation for his self-identity on the temperament and sacrifice of his father. Faced with a life of abuse and exploitation, Venture thus transmuted the greatest trauma of his life—the death of his father—into a wellspring of strength and endurance, and a sense of the value of money that almost equated it with life itself.40 Robinson Mumford died at sea shortly after his return home with Venture, and his father, George, assumed ownership of the boy. Unfortunately, the clear line of authority he had achieved with his first master was no more, since Robinson’s brother James vied with his father for Venture’s labor and obedience. “To serve two masters” (15)—an ironically literal use of Jesus’ injunction against serving God and mammon (Matthew 6:24)—caused him “difficulty and oppression . . . greater than any I had ever experienced since I came into this country.” The family into whose possession Venture had come enjoyed a close association with mammon, at any rate. Wealthy in their own right, the Mumfords were also most noted at the time as tenants and overseers for more powerful families. In the two decades before the American War of Independence, John Mumford served as overseer on William Browne’s ten-thousandacre plantation in Salem, Connecticut. From the early 1730s to the 1750s, the Mumford family leased Fisher’s Island, a seven-mile-long manorial estate off the coast of New London, from the powerful Winthrop family for the substantial sum of £1,100 a year—enough to buy nearly a hundred acres of productive land outright. This indicates the commercial value of the island,

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Trust and Violence in Atlantic History which the Mumfords chiefly employed in raising sheep, mainly for export to the West Indies and other Atlantic ports.41 Venture’s description of his labors on Fisher’s Island—which ironically involved activities similar to those which had occupied him in Africa—provides a glimpse into both the production of an offshore New England provisioning plantation and Venture’s own education into the ways of slavery as well as colonial commerce: “The first of the time of living at my master’s own place, I was pretty much employed in the house at carding wool and other houshold [sic] business. In this situation I continued for some years, after which my master put me to work out of doors. . . . I then began to have hard tasks imposed on me. Some of these were to pound four bushels of ears of corn every night in a barrel for the poultry, or be rigorously punished. At other seasons of the year I had to card wool until a very late hour” (15). Other sources indicate that wool-carding at Fisher’s Island rested on locally produced raw materials. The Fisher’s Island plantation supported a flock of more than thirteen hundred sheep a few years before Venture arrived there,42 suggesting that he became part of a sizeable workforce probably composed of enslaved and indentured laborers. In addition to the production of wool on Fisher’s Island, Venture’s narrative points to beef production (“a gallows made for the purpose of hanging cattle on”), the manufacture of salt (mentioned in John Winthrop Jr.’s original charter from Connecticut), and substantial orchards of peaches (16). The island supported a brickworks, producing bricks for export to the West Indies. There were also deer. As befitted the proprietors of a manorial estate, the Winthrops stocked their island with game animals in the fashion of the English aristocracy.43 Venture’s next master was Thomas Stanton, scion of another founding family of southern New England.44 Thomas’s great-grandfather, also Thomas, was a quintessential agent of empire—a founder of the town of Stonington, a translator to the Mohegans and a friend of the sachem Uncas. Stanton was a pioneer in establishing trading ties with the West Indies, and his son Daniel moved to Barbados to coordinate the family’s interests in the Caribbean. Both the Mumfords and the Stantons cemented their standing in New England society with alliances of marriage and business with most of the leading families in the region, creating a close-knit “interlocking directorate” of powerful clans. In close proximity to such central actors in colonial affairs, Venture watched, learned, and—through his intellect, strength, and reputation for integrity—constructed his own network of dependable patrons, as is

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h i s t o ry illustrated by his later business dealings and the roster of respected signatories to the “certificate” that accompanied the Narrative and vouched for its veracity.45 In seeking to understand life in southeastern New England in the halfcentury after Venture’s arrival there, it is important not to allow our perceptions to be shaped by categories and distinctions that belong to a later time. The geopolitical lines between “North” and “South,” and even between mainland colonies and the Caribbean, barely existed in the mid-eighteenth century, and in a place like southwestern Rhode Island cannot really be said to have existed at all. Writing in 1835, a descendent of several of these prominent Narragansett families described the region in the later eighteenth century as “the seat of hospitality and refinement,” whose “large-landed proprietors lived in ease and luxury, visited by the elite from all parts of the then British American Colonies and distinguished strangers of Europe. Every gentleman in the state had his circle of connections, friends, and acquaintances. They were each invited from one plantation to another,” enjoying a way of life that “did not differ materially from what was known in the southern slave states.” The family historian of the Mumfords commented in 1900 that “house parties and junketings in those days were as common to these good people as they were to their Virginia cousins.” He observed that “the extent of their properties and the employment of slaves made life often easy and idle,” adding ironically, in the heyday of Gilded Era excess, “very different from anything that recent generations have known in the same regions.” 46 In reality, the ties of commerce and kinship between southeastern New England and the plantation colonies of the South and the West Indies were old and enduring—as place names such as Anguilla, Bridgetown, Carolina, Charlestown, Richmond, and Kingston, and the prominence of families with important southern and West Indian branches, attest.47 Venture’s narrative refers often to agricultural products he harvested, carried, or marketed that were key commodities in the West India trade. On Fisher’s Island, he hoisted a tierce of salt weighing upwards of 450 pounds (19);48 on Long Island during one six-month period, he recalls, “I cut and corded four hundred cords of wood, besides threshing out seventy-five bushels of grain” (24). While any of these products could have been destined for the local market, they would also typically have been shipped to the Caribbean, where they would have commanded a better price. 49 The forests of the coastal islands of the Long Island Sound contained large stands of white oak, prized (then and now) for its suitability for barrel staves—the single most essential ancillary to the sugar industry. ·

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Trust and Violence in Atlantic History Even more than the barrel staves that contained it, molasses itself was the key commodity that linked New England and the Caribbean. The dark, pungent syrup seeped into the very identity of the region: in Boston baked beans, baked goods such as gingersnaps and sweet brown bread, and the ubiquitous “Indian” pudding—the name derived most likely from a combined reference to the cornmeal of the Indians and the molasses of the West Indies. To be sure, molasses was most valuable ounce-for-ounce when distilled into rum, a product of huge importance both as a domestic libation (in a staggering multiplicity of concoctions) and as a trade good (including the New England slave trade), but molasses was ubiquitous as well in its original form.50 Visitors found New Englanders’ insatiable appetite for molasses bizarre; they classified it as one of the region’s defining characteristics. And so it was. It is not surprising, then, that the iconic molasses barrel makes two dramatic appearances in Venture’s narrative. Thomas Stanton once “sent me two miles after a barrel of molasses, and ordered me to carry it on my shoulders. I made out to carry it all the way to my master’s house” (18). Much later, one “Capt. Elisha Hart, of Saybrook,” forced Venture to pay for a hogshead of molasses that had fallen overboard from a boat on which he had been a passenger, unconnected to the shipment—targeted for his “deep pockets” in place of the boat’s impecunious Native American owner (30). Both of these encounters with molasses, a basic by-product of slave labor, seem emblematic of coercion and bad faith. Indeed, since nearly all of the molasses that entered New England arrived through smuggling, bribery, or the intimidation of colonial excise collectors, the whole New England molasses trade can be said to have been founded in deceit, as well as in violence. In this respect it was a fitting by-product of the slavery system on which molasses production depended. With this understanding of Venture’s environment and his location in what might be termed the northwest corner of the Greater West Indies, we can obtain new perspectives on the changes wrought by the American Revolution. To begin with, New England’s iconic substance, molasses, appropriately takes center stage. The first serious American agitation for resistance to the mother country came in response to the passage of the Sugar Act of 1764—which discriminated against non-British molasses and in practice sought to impose a tax on the colonists that had been universally evaded until this time. Contemporaries regarded the newly enforced tax as the death knell for New England. The subsequent notorious Stamp Act, the infamous tax on tea, and the Intolerable Acts imposed by Parliament had powerful symbolic and political consequences and affected a much broader swath ·

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h i s t o ry of the American population. But the Sugar Act struck at New England’s lifeblood. In terms of chronology, Venture’s effort to free himself and his family paralleled the emergent nation’s struggle for independence, although his course was far more deliberate and disciplined than America’s. He had taken the measure of his captors early in his captivity, and had realized, perhaps more clearly than they, that loyalty and trust mattered but that in the Atlantic world, too, everything was for sale and everything had its price—including freedom. His decades-long effort to secure his liberty makes harrowing reading, as time after time he is cheated of his hard-earned funds, either by the dishonesty of his owners or by the caprice of fire. The narrative also makes for confusion, because of the incomprehensible variety and complexity of currency systems Venture had to deal with. A list of these in itself—new tenor, old tenor, johanneses, coppers, Spanish money, lawful money—offers a window not only onto the complexity of colonial economics, but onto the dizzying range of overlapping customs, cultures, and imperial systems in which Venture’s Long Island Sound world was embedded.51 When Venture speaks of being “cheated . . . by people whom I traded with taking advantage of my ignorance of numbers” (29), the statement must be placed in this context, in which “ignorance” is at best a relative term, and trust is again a value to be prized. After a succession of owners and would-be owners, Venture ultimately became the property of Col. Oliver Smith of Stonington, in large part through Venture’s own choice. He chose well. He recognized that Smith was a man after his own type: a businessman and a man he could trust. Smith agreed to permit Venture to purchase his freedom, at a price that reflected Venture’s high value as a slave. While neither cheated the other, each drove hard bargains; and although Venture adopted the surname “Smith,” this did not inhibit him in later years from taking his former master and now business associate to court when he felt it necessary.52 In addition, nearly concealed in the narrative is strong evidence of Venture’s extended condition of obligation to Smith. Describing the “various other methods” to which he resorted to obtain the funds necessary to redeem his family, Venture mentions fishing at night “with set-nets and pots for eels and lobsters” and then discloses, in the same sentence, that “shortly after,” he “went on a whaling voyage in the ser vice of Col. Smith” (27). Through a remarkable verbal sleight-of-hand, Venture conflated setting out traps for eels and lobsters with seven harrowing months at sea in pursuit of mighty spermaceti. Although he tells us that the ship returned with four ·

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Trust and Violence in Atlantic History hundred barrels of oil—a wildly successful voyage—this odd verbal concealment, combined with Venture’s distress after he learned that his son Solomon had signed on for a whaling voyage of his own, suggests an experience that Venture neither enjoyed nor wished to recall. Given the hardships it inflicted and the seemingly wide opportunities available ashore, how did the whaling industry find sufficient labor to sustain it? While the limited opportunities available to blacks and Native Americans obviously resulted in their becoming an attractive and relatively inexpensive labor supply, it is nonetheless the case that the majority of laborers in the whaling industry were whites who faced social and economic pressures that placed them in much the same condition as their non-white fellow crewmen. These hard-pressed, marginalized Yankees composed a substantial fraction of the population of colonial New England. Although the deck was stacked against blacks and Native Americans, the lion’s share of victims were white. Their struggles provide a deeper understanding of the true measure of Venture’s success. The historian Daniel Vickers has described the difficulty faced by the New England whaling industry in securing sufficient labor in an article that seeks to describe the precise arrangement entered into by Venture. Vickers illustrates the exploitation endured even by African Americans who were free— a group that may have comprised up to 10 percent of the American merchant marine.53 The extremely harsh working conditions and lack of personal freedom on board whaling ships assured that the majority of their crews comprised men who had few other options—African Americans and Native Americans, and white Yankees who were saddled with debt. These individuals were recruited by a network of farmers, businessmen, and merchants, who delivered them to labor brokers, who in turn assigned them to ship owners. In 1770, Vickers reports, Oliver Smith delivered a group of twenty blacks and Native Americans to the Nantucket whaling baron William B. Rotch. “After boarding them in Nantucket and outfitting them at his warehouse, Rotch shipped them all on voyages that spring and credited Oliver Smith with the product of their toil.” Vickers notes that “fully one-half of the ordinary Yankee hands and 93 percent of their black and Indian counterparts hired by Rotch . . . were conveyed to the island in that manner and received their pay indirectly through middlemen such as Oliver Smith.” 54 The life of the whaler was hard, but it could also be highly profitable. The most valuable crewmen—the officers, mates, and steersmen—were recruited with the promise of higher pay through shares (“lays”) of the profits, and even in some cases through shares in the ship itself. A ship’s captain received ·

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h i s t o ry a “full share” of one-sixteenth of the oil; mates garnered one-twentieth; regular whalemen were capped at a “half-share,” around a thirty-second part of the voyage’s yield. As Vickers notes, “Masters could also if, if they wished, invest in their own voyages. Some actually purchased, probably on credit, eights or even quarters of the vessels that they directed, whereas others ‘ventured shares,’ agreeing to assume along with the vessel’s owners a proportion of the risk.” 55 While whaling provided steady work throughout the late colonial period, a spike in the demand for oil in the late 1760s and early 1770s—when Venture sailed—caused a dramatic rise in whalers’ wages. “For voyages averaging four and one-half months, the typical whaleman brought home about £15 sterling, or slightly over £3 per month,” Vickers reports. “On a few highly successful voyages, the lays could amount to incredible sums. Prince Boston, a young black freedman who came from the port whose name he bore to settle in Nantucket in 1769, once earned for a three-and-one-half-month cruise in the sloop Friendship, a steersman’s lay of £28 sterling—as much on a monthly basis as the captain of the largest British slaver on the Atlantic!” 56 Despite the tremendous potential return, it is easy to see why many aspects of whaling would have been deeply unpleasant to Venture. The problem was not the labor, for he was used to that, nor the danger, since he was familiar with the sea. Rather he would have been troubled by the indignity of associating, and being associated, with men not deserving of trust, men who were there precisely because they lacked his sobriety and prudence. Nonetheless, Venture knew the drill: he had long since become adept at subduing his pride, and he knew that he could trust Oliver Smith not to cheat him, just as Oliver Smith could trust Venture to look out for Oliver’s interests in the voyage, even as he exploited him. Although “whaling was not an easy life,” as Vickers acknowledges, “it furnished a generous income and a fine way of providing for the future.” 57 By 1770, Venture surely must have heard many stories of men who had risked going on a whaling voyage and returned with a large sum. For Venture, the chance to gain capital that could then be invested in purchasing his sons’ freedom and buying land was worth the risk. We do not know the terms of the agreement between Oliver and Venture, but it is not surprising that Venture does not appear on the lists of regular boatmen. With his great size and strength, Venture would have been very valuable on a whaling boat, and Oliver knew that he could trust him to protect his interests; thus it is highly likely that he signed on above the status of an ordinary seaman. For several years Oliver Smith partnered in outfitting—

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Trust and Violence in Atlantic History and sailing—whaling vessels and coastal traders to the West Indies with Roche and several other merchants as a one-third owner.58 Even a 10 percent share of Oliver’s profits on four hundred barrels of oil could have netted Venture over £100—a sum that would have taken him many years to earn on land. This episode also illuminates the process by which Venture’s son Solomon was induced to sign up for his own fatal whaling voyage. Venture bound out Solomon for a year to one Charles Church, a shoemaker, “on consideration of his giving him twelve pounds and an opportunity of acquiring some learning” (26). Church seized the opportunity to entice Solomon to emulate his father and sign on to a whaling voyage, offering “a pair of silver buckles” (26), equivalent to a whaleman’s average lay share, as an inducement. In Venture’s eyes, perhaps, the son for whose freedom he had expended close to a year of his labor showed himself as capricious and pliable as the spendthrifts and inebriates with whom Venture had crewed a few years earlier. Solomon’s death by scurvy typified the all too frequent consequences of these voyages. It undoubtedly afflicted Venture with remorse to have bound out his son out to the dishonest Church, and perhaps too for having provided Solomon with the example that killed him. Venture had sustained himself through life by honoring the lessons of his father’s death; Solomon had followed in his father’s path and it cost him his life. More broadly, Venture’s and Solomon’s experiences in the whale fishery demonstrate another important aspect of the Atlantic slave system: the availability for continued exploitation of vulnerable free blacks, even after their manumission. The harsh realities of Venture’s life after emancipation suggest that he would have been unlikely to have put much stock in the chances for change after America’s Revolutionary War and may help to explain why he made no mention of it in his narrative. There is no reason to think, for example, that he viewed his son Cuff ’s enlistment in the Continental Army as any different from Solomon’s enrollment in a whaling crew. Undoubtedly, however, the Revolution had a significant and disruptive impact on Venture’s Atlantic world. The lifeblood of Connecticut and Long Island commerce—trade with the West Indies—was greatly disrupted by the war, although not cut off completely.59 But fortunately the vast demands for provisions generated by the Continental Army opened up to fill the void, and for six years Connecticut became the breadbasket of the Revolution.60 The region was subject to constant military and naval activity throughout the war—raiding, reconnoitering, privateering—creating conditions of anxiety, constant alertness, and

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h i s t o ry opportunity. For Venture, however, the war itself did not greatly change his family life—his son Cuff returned safely from the war as a veteran, but in 1783 his eldest child, Hannah, died, leaving behind a widower whom Venture considered a ne’er-do-well. Nor in retrospect did it appear to do him financial harm. Just before war broke out, Venture prudently disposed of his lands on Long Island, which would be a Tory-occupied redoubt for the entire war, and, like other patriots, relocated to the mainland. During the war years, he purchased land on Haddam Neck, a promontory of steep and rocky but productive land that formed a V between the Connecticut and Salmon rivers. His farm on the Neck, in a protected cove away from the coast, offered a safe and convenient distribution point for the coasting and West India trade, and it was a strategic location during wartime. According to the historian James Henretta, “In the Connecticut Valley . . . merchants, peddlers and itinerant traders appeared in growing numbers during the 1780s,” buying “cheese, potatoes, and salted meat from farmers, as well as substantial quantities of household manufactures.”61 It was to be here that Venture made his final home. Ironically, however, there was similarity in the consequences of Venture’s freedom and the new nation’s independence. Like Venture, the veterans of the Revolution struggled for a precious ideal; like him, they endured hardships and privations, and experienced many ignoble as well as uplifting episodes; and like him, they often felt that the younger generation, for whose sake they fought, neither understood their sacrifice nor appreciated its results. Certainly in each case there was truth to the complaints. For who could properly appreciate the true nature of the struggle who had not undergone it himself? It is the fate of all those who achieve something so difficult and so precious to lament the ingratitude of those who profit from their labors, just as it is the curse of those who follow them to be measured by their standard and found wanting.

The life of Venture Smith can hardly be described as representative. Nor can it be seen as a Horatio Alger story: Venture did not depend for his success, as did Alger’s “likely boys,” on pluck and luck and the recognition of a powerful patron. Luck often turned against him, and he met his “patrons” eye to eye, as equals. From the outside, Venture appears as the essence of a truly selfmade man, relying for his success on the sweat of his brow and the strength of his intellect and character. Undergirding all, however, was the example of his father’s strength and sacrifice, a model of endurance that made his worst hardships bearable by comparison. ·

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Trust and Violence in Atlantic History If Venture cannot be said to represent the experience of his fellow enslaved Africans in the sense of typifying their general experience, there is no doubt that a careful study of his life illuminates the entire landscape and the intertwined Atlantic world in which Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans lived and worked. Sharing a common physical landscape, they also unexpectedly shared a common economic landscape. An essential aspect of Venture’s vision is his unreserved participation in capitalism and the marketplace and his understanding of how, in his lifetime at, least, violence as well as the values of trust and family had combined to underpin the development of capitalism and the marketplace. As David Kazanjian notes in a perceptive passage: “Equating the value of his family with the value of his labors by incessantly calculating the cost of both, [Venture] Smith does not just coldly calculate the cost of death in these passages. He also implicitly gives his calculable labors the incalculable value of life.” 62 The promise of capitalism, Kazanjian reminds us, is that the differences between commodities will be suspended and they will all be temporarily rendered equal through the system of market exchange. Venture’s engagement with the Atlantic economy began with his conversion from a person—a prince—into a marketable commodity. James Fenimore Cooper described Connecticut and the portion of northern Long Island under its cultural sway as a society notorious for its reluctance “to part with anything without a quid pro quo.” 63 Plunged into such a society, Venture confronted his neighbors on their own terms, and appropriated their values and tactics as a means to achieve his own freedom and that of his family.64 Seen in these terms, Venture’s life illustrates, from a perhaps unexpected quarter, how trust, networking, and social capital underpinned commercial expansion and wealth creation in the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. But Venture’s narrative also illustrates that his own, apparently relentless, pursuit of economic gain aimed at something more than personal freedom and respect, and at something still more unobtainable: a sense of redemption and closure from the trauma of witnessing his father’s violent death in defense of his buried wealth. This he could achieve only by passing on to his surviving sons the legacy and values his father bequeathed to him. But this, as his comments about his children at the end of the earliest edition of the Narrative suggest, proved impossible—even though Venture had been able to protect them as his father could not protect him. They did not share his almost filial devotion to money. Nor did they share his nearly supernatural endurance in its pursuit. On the last page of the Narrative, Venture sums up his life: “Notwithstanding all the losses I have suffered by fire, by the injustice of knaves, by the ·

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h i s t o ry cruelty and oppression of false hearted friends, and the perfidy of my own countrymen whom I have assisted and redeemed from bondage, I am now possessed of more than one hundred acres of land, and three habitable dwelling houses. It gives me joy to think that I have and that I deserve so good a character, especially for truth and integrity.” He goes on: “I am now looking to the grave as my home” (31). Venture spoke more than metaphorically: he had a specific grave in mind, in the plot he had purchased in the churchyard of East Haddam’s First Congregational Church. A visitor to that grave will find the final measure of Venture’s lifelong struggle. In death, Venture achieved admission as a ranking member of the Yankee establishment, solemnized by his interment, along with his wife, Meg, his son Solomon, and his granddaughter Eliza, in a prime plot close to the meetinghouse, marked with expensive and expertly carved headstones. Archaeological investigation of their graves has shown that their mortal remains have returned to dust, in accord with the Biblical injunction; but it also has revealed that Venture spared no expense on an elaborate hardwood coffin with a hinged lid-section to reveal his face. At the end of his life, then, Venture engaged in one final realestate transaction—the smallest and most permanent of his land purchases and the ultimate signifier of the accomplishments of an African-born American whose understanding and respect for his own father’s values helped him to transcend the violence that brought him to America and to rebuild a new life in his adopted land.

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Notes 1. Robert J. Desrochers Jr., “ ‘Not Fade Away’: The Narrative of Venture Smith, an African American in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 84, no. 1 ( June 1997): 40–66; David Waldstreicher, “The Vexed Story of Human Commodification Told by Benjamin Franklin and Venture Smith,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 268–78; Philip Gould, “Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist: Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic,” American Literary History 12, no. 4 (2000): 671–77. 2. See Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 1975), 3–4, where Morgan argues that a central paradox of American history is “how a people could have developed the dedication to human liberty and dignity . . . and at the same time have developed and maintained a system of labor that denied human liberty and dignity every hour of the day.” 3. For the term “Atlantic Creole,” used largely to describe people of mixed-race parentage in various parts of the Atlantic world, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone:

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4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

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11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1998), 17–26. David Richardson, “Agency, Ideology, and Violence in the History of Transatlantic Slavery,” Historical Journal 50, no. 4 (December 2007): 971–89. There is disagreement among scholars as to the exact date of Venture’s birth. See the Time Line in this volume for the best estimate of the date of his birth based on external sources. For a review of the story of European colonization of the Americas, see Joel Quirk and David Richardson, “Anti-Slavery, European Identity and International Society, 1500–1914: A Macro-Historical Perspective,” Journal of Modern European History 7, no. 1 (March 2009): 68–92 David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For the general background to trends in the slave trade, see David Eltis and David Richardson, “A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1–60. The data on which these trends are based are available on www.slavevoyages.com. For the “sugar revolution,” see B. W. Higman, “The Sugar Revolution,” Economic History Review, n.s., 53, no. 2 (May 2000): 213–36. Among many studies see Anthony G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London: Longmans, 1973); Philip D. Curtin, Cross- cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Ralph A. Austen, African Economic History (London: Heinemann, 1987). Although Venture describes this event as occurring when he was “five or six,” external evidence indicates that he was much older; see the Time Line and Paul E. Lovejoy’s essay in this volume. See, for example, P. E. H. Hair, “The Enslavement of Koelle’s Informants,” Journal of African History 6, no. 2 (July 1965): 193–203. This distinction between the enslavement and the transport and marketing processes is perhaps most explicitly made in Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 68. The impact of the Atlantic slave trade on African development remains one of the oldest and most contested issues in the historiography of transatlantic slavery. Studies that paint a gloomy picture include Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: London: Bogle L’Ouverture, 1972) and Nathan Nunn, “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 123, no. 1 (February 2008): 139–76. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690), chap. 4, section 24; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 13, section 13. For a deeply insightful reading of this episode, see Anna Mae Duane’s essay in this volume.

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h i s t o ry 16. The price that Venture reports Mumford paying for him may be seen as low but probably reflects the fact that he was not at that time a mature juvenile. In this respect, it may be confirmation of Venture’s own claim that he left Africa when he was young. As far as Mumford was concerned, Venture was a speculation. Whether he actually paid for Venture’s passage across the Atlantic is not known, but it is possible that if he was shipped freight-free to Mumford, this may have been part of Mumford’s “privilege,” an allowance sometimes given to senior officers to deter them from engaging in “private’ ” trade in competition with the owners of the ship on which they sailed. 17. For data on departures from Anomabu see www.slavevoyages.com and David Eltis and David Richardson, An Atlas of Transatlantic Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming), table IV. It is important to distinguish between actual reports of ships trading at Anomabu, which yield the number of reported departures, and estimated departures of captives from projections based on voyage data. The numbers in the text here are estimated departures. 18. Between 1730 and 1759, over six in ten of all ships leaving British mainland North America for Africa took their African captives from the Gold Coast (www.slave voyages.com). The second most important destination was Senegambia, which accounted for one in four. 19. Trevor R. Getz, “Mechanisms of Slave Acquisition and Exchange in Late Eighteenth-Century Anomabu: Reconsidering a Cross-Section of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” African Economic History 31 (2003): 75–89. On the trade ounce, see Marion Johnson, “The Ounce in Eighteenth-Century West African Trade,” Journal of African History 7, no. 2 (July 1966): 197–214. 20. For evidence on trade goods shipped to the Gold Coast, see David Richardson, “West African Consumption Patterns and Their Influence on the EighteenthCentury English Slave Trade,” in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. H. A. Gemery and J. S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 312–13; Darold D. Wax, “Thomas Rogers and the Rhode Island Slave Trade,” American Neptune 35, no. 4 (October 1975): 289–301. 21. So far we have only Venture’s word that the Charming Susanna carried 260 captives from Africa and after losing 60 in the crossing reached Barbados with some 200. Treasury papers of Barbados indicate that the vessel paid duty on only 74 captives at the island (www.slavevoyages.com). According to Venture, four others including Venture himself remained on board when the vessel departed Barbados for Rhode Island. We cannot, as yet, explain this variance. 22. According to www.slavevoyages.com and notes from David Eltis and Paul Lachance, there are records of 72 voyages from British mainland North America for which we have slave embarkation in Africa between 1730 and 1759. The mean number of captives embarked was 94, with a standard deviation of 44.6. For the same period, we have records of arrivals in the Americas with captives for 38 British mainland North American vessels. The mean number of arrivals is 92, with a standard deviation of 46.7. .

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Trust and Violence in Atlantic History 23. Data available on www.slavevoyages.com suggests that on 34 British mainland North American vessels leaving Africa in the period between 1730 and 1759 for which we have mortality data, the mean loss in transit was 12.3 per cent (standard deviation 8.2). Mean passage time, based on 18 voyages, was just over 60 days (standard deviation 25.6). 24. Simon Hogerzeil and David Richardson, “Slave Purchasing Strategies and Shipboard Mortality: Day-to-Day Evidence from the Dutch African Trade, 1751–1797,” Journal of Economic History 67, no. 1 (March 2007): 160–90. 25. Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 183, 206. 26. For arrivals in Barbados, see www.slavevoyages.com and Eltis and Richardson, Atlas, map 128. The figure cited here is for estimated arrivals. Documented arrivals total 375,000. Roughly one in three captives disembarking at Barbados came from the Gold Coast. 27. Converse D. Clowse, Economic Beginnings in Colonial South Carolina, 1670–1730 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971). 28. Richard Pares, Yankees and Creoles (London: Longmans Green, 1956). 29. Barry W. Higman, “Economic and Social Development of the British West Indies, from Settlement to ca. 1850,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, vol. 1, The Colonial Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 306; David Eltis and Paul Lachance, “The Demographic Decline of Caribbean Slave Populations: New Evidence from the Transatlantic and Intra-American Slave Trades,” in Eltis and Richardson, Extending the Frontiers, 335–63. 30. Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 121–40; W. R. Higgins, “The Geographical Origins of Negro Slaves in Colonial South Carolina,” South Atlantic Quarterly 70, no. 1 (Winter 1971): 34–47. 31. For some comparative data on arrivals of enslaved Africans (including Africans reshipped from the West Indies) in the mainland North American colonies from 1768 to 1772, see James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 141–44. 32. The term “likely Negroes” was commonly used among those involved in shipping African captives in intercolonial trade. 33. Jim Potter estimates that blacks made up 10 per cent of Rhode Island’s population in 1730, with most being concentrated in Newport. Jim Potter, “Demographic Development and Family Structure,” in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. J. P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 138. 34. William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth- Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 107; Robert C. Youngken, African Americans in Newport, 1700–1945

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h i s t o ry

35. 36.

37.

38.

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39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

(Newport, R.I.: Newport Historical Society, 1995), 5–10; see also www.colonialcemetery.com, a Web site run by Keith Stokes and Theresa Guzman Stokes. See www.slavevoyages.com; see also Jay Coughty, Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700–1807 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). See, for example, Simon D. Smith, “Gedney Clarke of Salem and Barbados: Transatlantic Super-Merchant,” New England Quarterly 76, no. 4 (December 2003): 499–549. See, for example, Herbert C. Bell, “The West India Trade before the American Revolution,” American Historical Review 22, no. 2 ( January 1917): 272–87; David Richardson, “Slavery, Trade and Economic Growth in Eighteenth-Century New England,” in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, ed. B. L. Solow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 237–64. The point is underlined by work on the coasting trade of New England and the middle Atlantic colonies that straddled the Long Island sound. According to data for the years 1768–1772 compiled by James Shepherd and Samuel Williamson, products derived from West Indian sugar— molasses, brown sugar, New England rum, and West Indian rum—figured prominently in exports shipped coastwise to other parts of mainland North America from both regions; New England’s reliance on West Indian goods to fuel its coasting trade was particularly great, prompting Shepherd and Williamson to claim that “New England clearly was in the business of importing large quantities of West Indian goods and re-exporting a substantial portion of them . . . in the coastal trade to the other regions.” James F. Shepherd and Samuel H. Williamson, “The Coastal Trade of the British North American Colonies, 1768–1772,” Journal of Economic History 32, no. 4 (December 1972): 783–810 (quotation 796–97). Chandler B. Saint and George A. Krimsky, Making Freedom: The Extraordinary Life of Venture Smith (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 148–49. Piersen, Black Yankees, 15, 21, 59; Youngken, African Americans in Newport, 5–10; Stokes and Stokes, www.colonialcemetery.com. See David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 60–69; and Anna Mae Duane’s essay in this volume. Joshua Hempstead, The Diary of Joshua Hempstead of New London (New London, Conn.: The New London County Historical Society, 1999), 232, 451; Mary E. Perkins, Chronicles of a Connecticut Farm, 1769–1905 (Boston: privately printed, 1905), passim. Ibid., 233. Indeed, the Lords of the Admiralty commanded Governor Saltonstall to transport three “moose deer”—a stag, doe, and fawn—from Fisher’s Island for the personal use of Queen Anne. Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1871–1873 (Boston, 1873), 253–54. On the Stanton family and the founding of Stonington, see Frances Manwaring Caulkins, History of New London, Connecticut, from the First Survey of the Coast in

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45.

46. 47. 48.

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49.

50.

51.

1612 to 1860 (New London, Conn.: H. D. Utley, 1895), 28, 55, 99–106; Victoria Freeman, Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2000), 99–226. The five certifiers—Nathaniel Minor, Elijah Palmer, Amos Palmer, Acors Sheffield, and Edward Smith—were prominent leaders of Stonington and individuals with whom both Venture and his son Solomon had extensive business ties. Two were officers in the American Revolution, two were state representatives, including Edward Smith, the son of Oliver, who served both as a state representative and a selectman of Stonington. In 1798, for example, Venture borrowed money from Edward using his Haddam Neck farm as collateral; Venture’s son Solomon repaid the loan to regain title. Significantly, Solomon named his second son George Oliver Washington Smith. James Gregory Mumford, Mumford Memoirs, Being the Story of the New England Mumfords from the Year 1655 to the Present Time (n.p., 1900), 98. Mumford, Mumford Memoirs, 56–60. The weight of the tierce, which held seven bushels of salt, is derived from a range of state regulations classifying salt as containing between fifty and seventy pounds per bushel. The potential for local sales of produce as well as interregional trade is underlined by David Klingaman’s study of food surplus and deficits in the American colonies before 1776, which highlights Rhode Island’s and Massachusetts’ status as deficit colonies and New York’s and Connecticut’s as surplus ones in the late colonial period; see David Klingaman, “Food Surpluses and Deficits in the American Colonies, 1768–1772,” Journal of Economic History 31, no 3 (September 1971): 562. Interestingly, Klingaman includes Connecticut in the middle Atlantic colonies rather than New England for purposes of analysis. He also notes that much of the New England deficit in foods was met by coastwise imports from places south of New York (564). This still allows the possibility of some movement of foods overland or by intracolony routes to and from Long Island Sound. For the wider flows of goods from New England (including Connecticut) as well as New York to the West Indies in the late colonial period, see Shepherd and Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and Economic Development, who present evidence to show that exports to the West Indies comprised about 26 per cent of all commodity exports from Britain’s mainland North American colonies in the years 1768–1772; the New England colonies (which in their definition include Connecticut) accounted for some 39 per cent of the trade to the islands, with the middle Atlantic colonies providing the largest share of the rest (94–96). See, for example, Gilman M. Ostrander, “The Colonial Molasses Trade,” Agricultural History 30, no. 2 (April 1956): 77–84; John J. McCusker, Rum and the American Revolution: The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1989). Venture does not mention yet another currency difficulty of early America: counterfeiting, one of the themes of Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Ormond (1799).

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h i s t o ry 52. Venture’s adoption of his former owner’s name anticipated a pattern found in the United States after the Civil War (see Henry Louis Gates Jr., Finding Oprah’s Roots: Finding Your Own (New York: Random House, 2007). 53. Daniel Vickers, “Nantucket Whalemen in the Deep-Sea Fishery: The Changing Anatomy of an Early American Labor Force,” Journal of American History 72, no. 2 (September 1985): 277–96. For estimates of the contribution of Africans and African Americans to mariner communities of the Atlantic seaboard, see W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7–43, 235–39. 54. Vickers, “Nantucket Whalemen,” 291. 55. Ibid., 284. 56. Ibid., 285. 57. Ibid. 58. Roche diaries, Journal B, vol. 2, New Bedford Historical Society, New Bedford, Mass. 59. Gordon C. Bjork, “The Weaning of the American Economy: Independence, Market Change and Economic Development,” Journal of Economic History 24, no. 4 (December 1964): 541–60. 60. Albert Van Deusen, “The Trade of Revolutionary Connecticut,” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1948, 145–57, 165–304. 61. James A. Henretta, “The War for Independence and American Economic Development,” in The Economy of Early America: The Revolutionary Period, 1763–1790, ed. Ronald Hoffman, John J. McCusker, Russell R. Menard, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988), 78. According to Henretta, what went on in the Connecticut valley was part of a wider regional process during the Revolutionary era that involved “an expanded domestic industrial base” and participation in “more active systems of local exchange and commercial markets” (81). 62. Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick, 62. 63. James Fenimore Cooper, The Sea Lions; or, The Lost Sealers (New York, 1849), 18. 64. Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick, 62.

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3 Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery John Wood Sweet

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W

HEN, as an aging man, Venture Smith recalled his life as a slave in colonial New York and Connecticut, he still bore the scars— both physical and emotional—of an incident that unfolded around 1759, when he was about thirty years old and had been in America some twenty years. His account of the incident is a vivid example of what is so powerful and unusual about the autobiographical Narrative he published in 1798: it offers a rare, eyewitness view into the experience of enslavement and the personal struggles at its heart. Smith’s account also raises broader questions about how other people enslaved in the region sought to shape their own lives—and how their owners sought to control them. Were the challenges Venture navigated and the strategies he pursued particular to his circumstances? Or were they characteristic of a regional landscape of slavery? And if others faced similar obstacles and pursued similar strategies, what accounts for Venture’s extraordinary success in negotiating with a series of owners, securing his freedom, and providing for his family? Venture had been working out in his owner’s barn when he was alarmed by a commotion in the kitchen. He ran to the house and found his mistress, Sarah Stanton, “in a violent passion” with his wife, Meg. With the household head, Thomas Stanton, away on a hunting trip to Long Island, Venture intervened, urging his wife to apologize even though her offense had been a “mere trifle.” He succeeded only in shifting the object of Mrs. Stanton’s ire: she took down her horsewhip and began using it to “glut her fury” against ·

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h i s t o ry Venture. He reached out, intercepted the blows, and threw the whip into the fire. And there, uneasily, matters stood for a time—even after Thomas Stanton returned home. Then, one morning, as Venture was putting a log in the fireplace, he was struck by powerful blow to the crown of his head—from his master, wielding a club two feet long and as thick as a chairpost. Although “badly wounded” by the blow, Venture deflected the next, snatched the club, and dragged his master outdoors. At this point, Stanton sent for his brother, who lived on the old family homestead just to the south. And Venture, raising the stakes still further, took the club and marched off to lodge a complaint with a neighboring justice of the peace.1 The justice listened to his story with some sympathy, but was evidently reluctant to pursue charges in such a case. Venture was advised to return home to Stanton’s and “live contented with him till he abused me again, and then complain.” Venture acquiesced. But just as he was getting ready to leave, Stanton and his brother arrived. The justice took the opportunity to reprove Stanton: “He asked him for what he treated his slave so harshly and unjustly, and told him what the consequence would be if he continued the same treatment.” Being forced to eat crow did not improve Stanton’s temper. The Stantons set off for home on horseback with Venture, on foot, between them. And as soon as they were out of the justice’s sight, they dismounted and attacked Venture. “I became enraged at this and immediately turned them both under me, laid one of them across the other, and stamped both with my feet what I would” (20). Now Venture had pushed his relationship with Stanton to a dangerous impasse. The law was reluctant to pursue charges against a master who claimed to be correcting a servant, and it was swift to help a master regain control of a violent slave. Venture soon found himself collared by a local constable and two other men who took him to a blacksmith’s shop and had him handcuffed. He arrived home to find Mrs. Stanton delighted to hear that he had been bound, so he made a point of sardonically thanking her for his new “gold rings.” At this, Thomas Stanton ordered another slave to secure Venture’s legs with oxchains and a large padlock. Venture remained bound like that for several days, but eventually Stanton realized that he, too, had reached an impasse. He had proved that he could physically overpower his slave. But a slave bound hand and foot is not of much use around a farm. In order to get Venture back to work, Stanton was going to have to procure his consent. Yet Venture rebuffed all overtures. Even when Stanton threatened to sell him to the West Indies—a terrible threat, given that slaves arriving in the brutal

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery sugar plantations were unlikely to live more than a few years—Venture replied laconically, “I crossed the waters to come here, and I am willing to cross them to return” (20). Sale offered both men an increasingly attractive way out of their ruptured relationships. As gossip about the conflict circulated around town, some local slaves may well have sympathized with Venture and Meg, and some local slaveholders may well have sympathized with the Stantons. But others were less interested in taking sides than in taking advantage of the conflict. One Stonington farmer, Hempsted Miner, offered Venture a deal. If Venture would continue to act unruly, Miner would be able to purchase him from Stanton at a reduced price. In exchange, Miner would give Venture a good chance to obtain his freedom (20). This extended struggle illustrates the features that are most extraordinary about Venture Smith and his experience: he was able, even in the most difficult and disempowering circumstances, to marshal his personal resources and successfully shape the course of his life. Even while enslaved, he was able to use his enormous physical strength, determination, and entrepreneurial savvy to accumulate enough money to purchase his own freedom. And as a free man he succeeded—despite setbacks caused by personal betrayals and racial discrimination—in developing property and business enterprises that allowed him to free and support his family. This is the story he tells with evident pride in his Narrative. It is also the story inscribed on his handsome gravestone, dedicated to the memory of “Venture Smith, an African tho the son of a King he was kidnapped & sold as a slave but by his industry he acquired Money to purchase his Freedom.” 2 Remarkable as Smith’s successes may have been, his experience illuminates some of the basic dynamics that shaped the relations between slaves and their owners throughout the region. Throughout the English-speaking world, slavery was understood as a form of household governance, in which slaves were under the purview of their owners in the same way that wives were subordinate to husbands, children to parents, and apprentices or indentured servants to masters. What went on within a household was understood to be largely at the discretion of the household head and not normally a matter of public inquiry. Masters embraced this ideology of household governance because it greatly enhanced their power, and they did their best to erect a series of binary oppositions between the domestic and the public, excluding slaves from the privileges, honors, and protections of civil society. To be enslaved was therefore to experience a form of “social death.” 3 Yet as

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h i s t o ry Venture Smith’s account illustrates, this ideology of household governance and the social death from enslavement was challenged in two specific ways by the particular circumstances of slavery in New England. First, slaveholdings in New England and coastal New York were very small compared to the pattern in the plantation regions of the southern and Caribbean colonies; as a result, master-slave relationships in New England and coastal New York were very intimate. For that region, the farms Venture Smith lived on were relatively large. At his death in 1755, George Mumford left more than a dozen slaves.4 And Venture refers to Thomas Stanton owning himself, his wife, and at least one other man (20). In New London County, which along with adjacent parts of Rhode Island enjoyed some of the most productive farmland in the northern colonies, slavery was much more profitable than in most of New York and New England, and consequently the local slave populations were unusually high. During the time Venture lived there, from the 1750s into the 1770s, more than one in twenty people in the county were black; and in the town of Stonington the ratio was much higher—more than one in ten. But even in the parts of the northeastern colonies where slaveholdings were most concentrated, the households of George Mumford and Thomas Stanton were unusually large. Most slaveholdings were only one or two.5 This intimacy produced specific kinds of conflicts and required specific kinds of compromises. For instance, while slavery everywhere disrupted the family lives of slaves, the intimate household dynamics of slavery in New England could make the overlapping relationships between slaves, their masters’ families, and their own families particularly tense. The ideology of household governance was also strained because, in New England, the exclusion of slaves from civil society was not as complete as it was in the southern colonies. As Venture Smith’s narrative reminds us, masterslave relations in the northern colonies did not exist in isolation. When his conflict with the Stantons turned violent, gossip circulated around the town. And he himself brought the matter to the attention of a local magistrate. At the same time, his master always had the option of taking advantage of the public institution of the market to cash out of his relationship with Venture. All of these interactions were both between Venture and his owner and between both of them and the broader public. In the end, what masters could do as well as the extent to which slaves could maneuver were shaped by the actions or inactions of a wide range of outsiders, including relatives, neighbors, and government officials.

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery Despite his appeal to the justice of the peace, Venture’s conflict with the Stantons did not make it into the public record. But a variety of other legal disputes involving slavery can be found in the records of the New London County courts, the jurisdiction under which Venture spent much of his life as a slave (even Fisher’s Island, although technically part of New York, was closely interconnected social, economically, and legally with the port of New London). While Smith’s remarkable Narrative offers a fascinating and unique look at the dynamics of slavery in the northern colonies, it is not of much help in illuminating the experiences of others enslaved in the region—or in attempting to elucidate the underlying social and cultural patterns that shaped their options and expectations. Yet these questions can be explored in the files of civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions, which frequently include testimony about master-slave relations—sometimes from people held in slavery themselves—and provide intimate glimpses of personal experiences. And, taken together, the cases brought forward and the decisions made by judges and juries suggest broader patterns in the evolving relationships among masters, slaves, and the larger public. The legal records confirm the impression one gets from Smith’s Narrative: that he was extraordinarily deft as a negotiator and unusually bold in pushing the barriers between public and private. But these records also reveal that the most crucial challenges Venture faced were shared by many others enslaved in the region, and many of the most important opportunities he embraced were similar to the strategies they, too, pursued. Both in Smith’s Narrative and in the court records, four themes stand out as central to the struggles between masters, slaves, and the public. First is the role of the public in regulating violence. How much violence masters could use on slaves and what happened to slaves who used violence against masters were determined both by the laws on the books and by how public officials and the courts enforced them. The second theme is market values: the white public also determined what constraints and protections masters and slaves enjoyed in the marketplace. Who could be bought or sold, what recourse people had when they were sold illegally, and the extent to which enslaved people could influence transactions were all shaped by both legal and informal regulations. Third is the theme of running away: the white population largely determined whether or not slaves who tried running away would succeed. And the fourth theme is conditional manumission: whether or not slaves were able to secure their freedom, as Venture did, by striking bargains with their masters was determined in large part by the extent to which they

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h i s t o ry could get such agreements enforced—both before the law and in the realm of white public opinion.6 In all of these ways, the actions of the white public and the institutions of civil society determined the balance of power between masters and slaves. Never are these dynamics more apparent than in records than reveal that during the 1770s public opinion began to shift decisively enough to disrupt the prevailing balance of power between masters and slaves.

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Domestic Violence As Venture Smith emphasized in his stories of slavery, at the heart of relationship between master and slave was always the menace of violence. There is abundant evidence that masters routinely whipped and beat slaves. But in all the files of the eighteenth-century New London county courts, there is only one case that resembles Smith’s effort to seek legal protection from a physically abusive master. On September 9, 1753, a ten-year-old boy named Sharper came to the home of justice of the peace Pardon Tabor of New London in desperation. Both of his ears were badly torn, and he reported that his master had tortured him with shocking cruelty. One ear had been nailed to a wall in his master’s house, the other to a block of wood attached to the wall. His hands and feet had been bound. A corncob had been jammed into his mouth with enough force to distend his jaws into an “unnatural position.” Then he was left in that position for some twelve hours. The justice was evidently sympathetic to the boy’s plight but advised him to return to his master. The boy refused. Eventually the justice gave in, agreed to shelter the boy, and filled out the paperwork necessary to call his master, James Rogers, to account before the local magistrates.7 It is quite possible that Venture heard about Sharper’s ordeal. During the summer of 1753, when this incident happened, he was living on Fisher’s Island, just off the New London coast, and in the winter of 1755, when the case finally came to trial, he had moved to nearby Stonington. It may well have been Sharper’s example that gave Venture the audacious idea, a few years later, of appealing to the authority of a local justice of the peace when his conflict with the Stantons turned dangerously violent. Both incidents serve as reminders that the role of violence in shaping relationships between masters and slaves was determined in large part by the ways in which the law, and the broader civil society, drew lines between violence that was legitimate and violence that was not. ·

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery The basic pattern suggested by the legal records as a whole is quite clear, and it confirms the pattern evident in Smith’s Narrative. When violence from slaves threatened the authority or well-being of masters, the law was quick to intervene. Such insubordination was considered an assault on the entire social order. In contrast, violence directed by masters toward slaves was generally considered private, an exercise of the legitimate power that maintained proper social relations. Observers might sometimes sympathize with the plight of a slave subjected to violence that seemed cruel, unreasonable, or even deadly, but in the mid-eighteenth century they almost always respected a master’s right to govern his household without outside intrusion. More interesting than this broad pattern is the evidence these cases offer about how New Englanders balanced the tensions between their sympathy for victims of violence and their revulsion against cruelty with their respect for the right of household heads to both discretion and privacy. Probably nobody in the region was more keenly aware of the vulnerability of slaveholders to violence from slaves—or the forcefulness with which the law would respond to such crises in the social order—than Venture’s longtime owner, George Mumford. When he was eighteen year old, a slave whom his mother was whipping turned against her and killed her. The murderer then threw himself into the sea and drowned. The Rhode Island General Court was somewhat flummoxed: they were determined to enact justice, but the perpetrator was dead. So they enacted the ritual of execution upon the dead slave’s body: “It is ordained . . . that his head, legs, and arms be cut from his body and hung up in some public place, near the town, to public view; and his body be burned to ashes, that it may, if [it] please God, be something of a terror to others from perpetrating of the like barbarity for the future.” 8 Across early New England, for a servant to kill a master was considered worse than murder: it was a form of treason, because it threatened the chain of authority that theoretically extended from the head of a household to various levels of government, to the monarch, and ultimately to God. In a dramatic trial in 1755, two Massachusetts slaves who had poisoned their master were convicted of petit treason, and as was common in legal documents of this time, these two enslaved people, Mark and Phillis, were referred to only by their first names. Mark was hanged, and then his body was suspended in a metal gibbet at the roadside to serve as public terror (where what was left of it remained when Paul Revere passed it on his midnight ride twenty years later). Phillis became the second person in the history of Massachusetts to be burned at the stake. The first to suffer that fate was ·

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h i s t o ry another enslaved woman accused of killing her master.9 By the mid-eighteenth century, the social hierarchies marked and protected through such double standards were not simply about servitude and slavery, but were also more broadly racial. Early in the century, the Connecticut general assembly passed and then revised a statute making it a special crime “if any Negro or mulatto servant or slave disturb the peace, or shall offer to strike any white person.” 10 In contrast, public officials were reluctant to intrude into the private realm of a master’s domain, even when there was evidence of extreme violence. This is clear from one of the only cases in eighteenth-century New London County in which a master was prosecuted for violence against a slave. In February 1711 George Chatfield of Killingworth was indicted for murdering a slave woman who had died in his house one night. He had raised suspicion by secreting her body off to the graveyard along back roads and burying her before authorities could view the body. In court, Chatfield acknowledged that he should have invited the neighbors to see the body, but pleaded that he had been unaware that the legal obligation to report sudden deaths applied in the case of “an neager.” Questioning focused on the fact that he had indeed spoken to various neighbors about burying her—and even borrowed a neighbor’s male slave to help out. Chatfield admitted that he had considered the dead woman a “contemptable creature” and that a few hours before she died he had “corrected” her for her “turbulent” behavior. But the court seemed to accept his assertion that his beating had done her no damage and that it was probably exposure to the cold that killed her. The interrogation ended without exploring any of these issues, and Chatfield was acquitted. Apparently, having satisfied itself about the burial and reporting procedures, the court had exhausted its willingness to pry into his household affairs. Violence directed by a master toward a slave was almost by definition considered legitimate—or at least beyond the purview of the law. In this case, the court was not sufficiently concerned about the dead women to bother recording her name.11 Some forty years later, this was the kind of outcome James Rogers had in mind when he appeared before a local justice’s court to answer Sharper’s charges. A member of a long established and well connected New London family, Rogers made no attempt to explain or justify his behavior. Instead he denied the authority of the court to pursue the matter. Rogers argued that Shaper was his “absolute property” and, as such, had no standing to bring forward any such legal complaint. In any case, Rogers continued, there was no law limiting his right to correct his slaves. ·

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery Yet the justices declined to dismiss the case. Instead, they demanded that additional evidence be gathered—namely testimony from two other slaves in the Rogers household whom, it was alleged, he had also used “very cruelly.” At the hearing two days later, the justices showed no diffidence. They bound Rogers to trial at the county court, required him to post a large bond for his “Good Behavior,” and placed the three slaves in question in other households to protect them from retaliation. For good measure, the justices registered this assessment: “Upon the whole it appears to this Court that the Said Rogers hath Used Very Great Cruelty and Barbarity towards the sd. Sharper.” 12 If this decision was partly a result of the court’s pique at Rogers’s defiant attitude, it also reflected the fact that he had significantly overstated his case. Civil authorities in the northern colonies did not relinquish oversight over household governance as completely as did their counterparts in planterdominated societies to the south. For instance, none of the New England colonies followed the lead of a Virginia statute that granted masters carte blanche in punishing slaves—declaring that even if such correction provided fatal it could not constitute murder, since no one could reasonably be imagined to intentionally destroy his own property.13 There are scattered indications in the documentary record that when New Englanders of the mid-eighteenth century saw their neighbors treating servants in ways that seemed excessive or cruel they sometimes expressed their disapproval in private. In South Kingstown, Rhode Island, the Anglican minister James MacSparran—who in the 1730s had been engaged in a prolonged legal conflict with Venture’s master George Mumford—recorded in his diary regular whippings of his slaves for offenses such as stealing sugar or slipping out at night to have sex—and at times his disagreement with his wife over the severity of such punishments. On one occasion, he whipped a young man named Hannibal—for his disobedience and “malpert” behavior to his mistress—who then impetuously ran off. A neighbor captured Hannibal and sent him back to MacSparran—but with a note asking that he be spared further punishment.14 In the 1760s, a Newport settler violently beat his pregnant servant Jenny to the point of crippling her so badly that she couldn’t walk but could only drag herself across the floor. There is no evidence that local worthies raised the issue with the master and certainly they did not bring him to court, but they did sympathize with her suffering. Subsequently, when she was charged with infanticide, a long list of local gentlemen signed a plea for clemency, noting that if she did in fact conceal her pregnancy and murder the baby, it was only because her master had threatened that if she had a child he would “cruelly punish” her.15 ·

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h i s t o ry As slaves such Venture, Jenny, Peter, and Sharper knew all too well, it was one thing to elicit sympathy from well-meaning white residents and quite another thing to receive effective legal protection. In Smith’s account, what limited the violence exercised by his masters was neither the law nor local opinion—and certainly not a public standard of compassion or benevolence— but rather Venture’s own ability to establish a balance of power. In large part, Venture’s leverage derived from his combination of extraordinary physical stature and mental toughness. As a mature man Venture stood 6 feet 2 inches—which made him unusually tall. Even though eighteenthcentury New Englanders were about as tall as modern Americans, the average native-born white man stood, at 5 feet 8 inches, fully six inches shorter than Venture. He probably stood out even more as a tall black men—since black men in the colonies seem to have averaged about an inch or two shorter than their white counterparts.16 Venture was not simply tall, he was also broad-shouldered, stoutly built, exceptionally strong—and willing to endure considerable hardships in order to accomplish his goals.17 As Smith’s Narrative recounts with evident pride, in one six-month period during the 1760s he not only cut four hundred cords of wood and threshed seventy-five bushels of grain, but also kept his expenses to a minimum by wearing the same pair of shoes the entire time and sleeping on the floor in front of the hearth, with only one coverlet over him and another under him. This display of physical and emotional fortitude was only one of his many “singular and wonderful labors” (25). These extraordinary physical and emotional qualities undoubtedly gave Venture an unusual ability to resist the violence and threats of his masters. In the case of his struggle with the Stantons, his master was able to call upon the resources of the law and the local blacksmith and even other slaves in the household; he was thus able to establish physical dominance over Venture, as long as he was restrained. But if Venture was restrained, he could not do any work. And even on a farm as large as Stanton’s—with at least two other slaves and perhaps additional workers—it made no economic sense to continue restraining him for very long. If Stanton had been overseeing a large sugar plantation in the West Indies with a hundred or more workers, he might have had reason to make some kind of example of Venture. But as it was, there were not enough other workers to learn such a lesson, and too much of his capital was invested in Venture to make a prolonged stalemate seem reasonable. When James Rogers III appeared before the bar a second time, about a year after the original incident, he presented the court with a very different

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery account of himself and his actions. No longer full of patriarchal bluster about a master’s unlimited authority over his chattels, Rogers adopted the persona of a benevolent paternalist. At least that was the image presented in the written statement submitted by his attorneys. In this account, Rogers argued that his treatment of Sharper had been neither immoderate nor cruel, as alleged, but rather reasonable, restrained, even kind. Long before the incident with the nailed ears, Rogers had been struggling to curb Sharper’s bad behavior. Several times the boy had had stolen goods belonging to Rogers and conveyed them to “those Who Were avowd. Enemies to God [and the] King”—referring, apparently, to French ships in Fisher’s Island Sound. Rogers administered “Milde & Moderate Correction,” but to no avail. Soon thereafter, Sharper ran away. After considerable difficulty and expense, Rogers recovered Sharper and again administered “Due & Moderate Correction” with a “Small Rod.” Rogers warned him he should not expect such easy treatment in the future. If Sharper were to run away again, “his Punishment for ye first offense Should to have one of his Ears Naild to ye Door post & their be Confined for Such a Length of Time as he Should be absent, and for ye second offense he Should have both his Ears Nailed to ye Door post & there stand as aforesd.” For a time, this threat worked. “The Terror of this Resolution held said Sharper in aw[e], So that he Continued a Good Servant and Caused his Master to Depend Much on his fidellity.” But in mid-July 1753 Sharper again ran away—only to be pursued and retaken. Rogers was about to punish him by nailing his ear to the doorpost, but Shaper promised never to run away again and made such entreaties that Rogers forbore. He was, after all, “a [K]ind Tender & Pittiful Master.” Despite this act of mercy, Sharper ran off once again two days later, still planning to aid the French king. After being on the lam two days, he was captured and returned to Rogers. It was at this point, on July 19, that Rogers carried out his previous threat. Here the narrative is striking for its emphasis on his supposed emotional sensitivity: “in a Mild Calm & Tender Manner Even as a Tender father Would Correct his only Son,” Rogers “Put a Nail thro Each of sd Negro’s Ears, one of Which he Tackt to ye Wall in ye sd House & ye. other he put a Small Light peice of Wood of about one ounce Weight There being fore this holes in Sd. Negro’s Ears Where ye. Nailes Were.” Sharper’s feet and hands were bound “so as to Gentelly hold him, that he Might not free himself by pulling out ye. Nail,” and he was kept secured for twelve hours. During this time, Sharper was kept under the care of his mother, Jan,

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h i s t o ry “a Good Christian” who “had a Tender Parentinel affection” for him, whom Rogers supplied with “all things necessary” for the boy’s comfort while he was thus “confined.” 18 This narrative of Rogers as a frustrated paternalist suggests something about the ability of slaveholders to turn a story of brutal violence into a story in which their kindness and mercy leads them to be victimized by recalcitrant slaves. For one thing, it was apparently enough to sway the jury when the case finally came to trial in early 1755. Rogers was found not guilty and ended up paying only the court costs.19 In the aftermath of the trial, he did not exactly turn the other cheek. Instead he retaliated against the justice of the peace to whom Sharper had first turned, suing the man for damages. This charge raised a new set of issues about who was liable for prosecution, and whether a private man could be sued for his actions as a public official; it was ultimately dismissed.20 Should we imagine that the jurymen were such poor judges of character that they were taken in by this revised image of Rogers as kindly, patient, and forgiving? Or should we assume that the accuracy of this representation was not their primary concern? Perhaps they were satisfied simply that Rogers acknowledged the dignity of the court and acquiesced to the ideology of paternalism. That was one of the most powerful aspects of patriarchal theory: the assertion it could make so persuasively that a man’s house was his castle and not the proper object of other men’s meddling. Of course, Venture Smith’s Narrative was also shaped and partial. In the behavior he recounts, and in the act of making such stories public, he challenged both the accuracy and the logic of paternalistic ideology. His masters did not always act out the role of a kind, moderate, father. Often, they were brutal and vindictive. At the same time, Smith’s account also focused attention on his role as father figure, specifically on the contradiction between his role as a slave and his role as the head of his own family. As his Narrative tells it, Venture’s fight with the Stantons began when he tried to protect his wife, Meg, from an unwarranted attack. Here he reminds us of a basic problem with the ideology of patriarchy in the case of slavery: slaves were not temporary dependents, like children or bound servants who might leave their masters when they came of age and potentially get married and have their own households. At the same time, the legal narratives also shed light on Smith’s experience and the story he tells in his Narrative. By the time Smith’s account was published in 1798, the family-values critique of slavery had become a staple of Anglo-American ideology. But the case of Sharper and James Rogers reveals ·

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery that this language and these values were not necessarily invoked in hindsight. Sharper’s case demonstrates that the discourse of paternalism obtained in the 1750s—when Rogers submitted to the indignity of defending his behavior as consistent with an idealized image of a kindly father. And the image of this boy nailed to the wall while his mother was forced to stand watch reminds us that this paternalism was ideology, not reality: less a description of how things actually were than a way of justifying structures of power.

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Market Values As a slave, Venture developed a keen awareness of his market value. The act of sale was the most obvious representation of a slave’s status as a person with a price. An owner frustrated by a relationship with a slave could use sale as a threat or as a negotiating tactic; and when negotiations broke down a slaveowner owner could always just cash out.21 Even so, those faced with sale were not entirely powerless. After being sold away from his family by George Mumford, Venture was able to convince his new owner, Thomas Stanton, to purchase his wife as well. Even when Venture pushed things with the Stantons too far and was confronted with the threat of sale to the West Indies, he was able to arrange for a seemingly more advantageous sale to Hempsted Miner. And there are suggestions in the documentary record that other slaves across the region were sometimes able to seek out new buyers in much the same way that other servants and wage laborers might seek out new employers.22 The ability of slaves to influence such transactions stemmed in large part from the fact that they could to some extent manipulate their financial value. Buyers considering a purchase and slaves faced with sale had to do their best to read each other for signs of where their interests lay. Buyers gleaned what information they could by reading a slave’s body, reputation, and comportment for signs of future potential. Meanwhile, the person offered for sale engaged in a similar process of discernment. Before a slave could determine what face to present to a current or prospective owner, he had to do his best to read signs of where his best interests might lie. In such assessments, the stakes were high. Although sales could offer opportunities, they also posed serious risks. Venture and Hempsted Miner both learned the hard way that although they succeeded in manipulating Thomas Stanton, they failed to correctly read each other. Venture had expected Miner to keep him close to his family and was explicitly promised a chance to earn his freedom. Instead, Miner immediately took him to Hartford, more than fifty miles away, and put him up ·

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h i s t o ry for sale. For his part, Miner either overestimated Venture’s compliance or underestimated his capacity to resist. Venture quickly proved both willing and able to thwart his own sale. One potential buyer asked Venture whether he was willing to relocate to German Flats in New York. “No,” Venture answered. Yes, you will, the man replied: “If you will go by no other measures, I will tie you down in my sleigh.” Venture retorted that “if he carried me in that manner, no person would purchase me” for it would be thought that the man “had a murderer for sale.” This worked. The man declared that he would not take Venture “as a gift.” Soon, Miner, too, gave up. He left Venture with the prominent Hartford attorney and colonial official Daniel Edwards, who warily accepted him only as a temporary pawn. Over time, Venture managed to earn Edwards’s respect and gained permission to rejoin his family in Stonington and try his luck finding a new buyer there (20–21). The risks of slave sales were great because the law did so little to regulate such sales and the broader public could not always be relied upon to enforce basic standards of fairness. Most disputes over slave sales that were documented in the county court were cases in which buyers discovered after the fact that their powers of discernment had failed them. Slaves themselves rarely figured as agents in these suits, for there was no provision in the colonial period to protect the interests of slaves—no restriction on where they could be sold, for example. Thus, in most lawsuits the agency of the slaves themselves was irrelevant because the law focused narrowly on the property rights of sellers and buyers. The records of disputed sales reveal that buyers frequently sought to protect themselves by ensuring that the transaction took place before witnesses, yet those witnesses were not always reliable. At least until the 1770s, it appears from the legal record that witnesses, neighbors, and legal officials did little to protect buyers and even less to protect the interests of those offered for sale. Buyers were particularly vulnerable when making deals away from their home towns. A large portion of the disputed slave sales that came to court involved slaves who had been represented as healthy but turned out to be sick. When Oliver Buckley of Colchester wanted to sell a twenty-two-year-old man named Caesar in January 1740, he could not cover up the fact that the man was unhealthy; Caesar showed the symptoms of a chronic, debilitating illness. So Buckley invented a cover story: he told a potential buyer that Caesar was a “new” negro (that is, recently arrived from the West Indies or tropical Africa) and simply suffering temporary symptoms from the sudden shift to wintry weather. The buyer, who lived some twenty miles away in Lyme, had no way of knowing the truth: that Caesar was a longtime resident of the ·

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery region. During the sale at Buckley’s house, a pair of witnesses privately murmured to each other that Caesar was “good for nothing”—but they did nothing to warn the buyer. Eventually, Buckley was dragged into court and forced to pay damages.23 But what Buckley learned from this episode was evidently not that he should be more honest, but rather that he should put more distance between himself and the buyer. Twenty years later, in the early 1760s—around the time Venture was asked about being taken to German Flats —Buckley attempted to get an agent to help him sell a thirteen-year-old boy named Nero in Albany. Apparently Nero was seriously sick, and he died before Buckley could unload him.24 In such instances, witnesses apparently calculated that the disadvantages of displeasing a relatively prosperous neighbor (poor neighbors didn’t own slaves) outweighed the benefits of gaining the gratitude of someone from out of town. In one 1744 incident, a buyer considering the purchase of a woman named Janey suspected that there was something wrong with her. So he pressed the seller and several local men and woman who were present. “She is a healthy well strong Negro,” was the reply. Still not reassured, the buyer insisted on a formal warrantee. Reluctantly, the seller laid his hand on Janey’s forehead and declared, “I Deliver to you this Negro as my proper Estate Sound mind and Limb.” This was not true, as everyone present, except the buyer, knew. For a long time, Janey had been seriously ill: she suffered from severe fits and seizures, during which she had to be restrained from harming herself or others. On one occasion she writhed on the floor with her feet in the fire, burning them badly; on another she had to be restrained to prevent her from “killing the children.” One witness went so far as to discreetly admonish the seller that failing to disclose “how bad she was” would be a “great Cheat.” But he was unwilling to take the matter further and heeded the seller’s response: “dont say anything I am like to make a good bargain.” 25 Sellers could derive similar advantages by taking problematic slaves out of town for sale. Doing so made it easier to divorce that person’s actual past and local reputation from the image the seller wanted to project. For instance, in early 1748 Charles Hull of South Kingstown, Rhode Island, bought a thirty-year-old woman and at least one of her children, apparently on speculation. He got a good price for her because, as he knew, she had recently cut her own throat and attempted to kill her children. And several months later, presumably after the woman’s scars had healed and she could be more easily passed off as healthy, he resold her to a man in Connecticut at a 10 percent profit.26 ·

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h i s t o ry The pattern suggested by these cases may help explain Hempsted Miner’s attempt to take Venture out of Stonington for sale. Although the Narrative consistently represents Venture as always proud of his personal reputation for strength, industry, and integrity, it seems likely that during his violent struggles with the Stantons his reputation had substantially undercut his local market value. Gossip about his willingness to use force to resist—even to fight—his master and mistress and about the extent of his defiance may very well have made Stonington slave-buyers see his unusual physical stature, strength, and endurance in a new and dangerous light. Presumably, avoiding these associations was the reason it seemed profitable to sell him far from his home. Putting physical distance between an individual and his or her past was also crucial to the other most common kind of legal dispute over fraud: those in which sellers didn’t actually own the people they were offering for sale. In some cases it turned out that a slave was effectively stolen goods. A few days after July 4, 1776, Thomas Allen of New London sold a twenty-year-old woman named Juno to a man from Killingworth; in fact, however, she was owned by another man from New London, who eight years later managed to track her down and reclaim her. The records of this case give no indication of how Juno may have understood these transactions. Was she simply misled into believing that the sale was legitimate? Did she want to get away from her master in New London and thus collude with the sale? Was she the one who, after an eight-year interval, ultimately alerted her true owner to her whereabouts? 27 These questions were not aired during the trial because they were legally irrelevant—the dispute was simply between the owner and the seller. Of course, the emphasis colonial law placed on the property rights of settlers made selling someone else’s slave a risky undertaking. Such transactions always left behind an aggrieved owner anxious to recover his or her property. It was less hazardous, and hence more common. to sell someone who was legally free to be sold. Despite Venture’s ability to influence his own sales, the records of disputed sales make it clear that he and other people of color across the region faced grave risks. The terrible alchemy by which a free person could be converted into a slave reminds us that most often a person offered for sale had no control over the transaction at all. It appears that those most vulnerable to this kind of illegal enslavement were people of color already entangled in some form of servitude and, often as a consequence, separated from family members.

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery Consider two cases that involved Samuel Richards of New London, in the first as a seller and in the second as a buyer. In July 1728 Richards purchased a nineteen-year-old woman named Sarah Chauqum from a man in Rhode Island, where Sarah’s mother, a Narragansett Indian, worked as a domestic servant. It appears that Sarah Chauqum was not entirely free, but rather bound to servitude until she came of age. But when Richards resold her to another local man, which he did a short time later, it was not a temporary servant but rather as a slave. This succession of sales both complicated her origins and allowed both men to cash out of their respective investments in her before it became clear that the transaction was fraudulent. It also may have kept Sarah herself from suspecting what was going on.28 She worked for Robinson for about four and a half years as a maid, spinning and doing other kinds of housewifery. But when she was twenty-four, it became clear to her that she was not going to be paid wages: Robinson had purchased her as a permanent slave. So she ran away, heading back to her mother in Rhode Island and managing to secure the assistance of a prominent local attorney who took up her case and vindicated her freedom.29 This kind of family separation was not uncommon for slaves and servants, as Venture knew from personal experience. First Venture, and then Meg and their young daughter were sold to the Stantons, but the Mumfords regained possession of their daughter, Hannah. She ended up being owned by a relative referred to in Smith’s Narrative as “Ray Mumford”—probably Simon Ray Mumford of South Kingstown, Rhode Island.30 Only around 1774, when Hannah was about twenty, did Venture manage to buy her freedom, and even then she continued to reside with her former owner (27). In a region where few households could accommodate more than one or two servants or slaves, the children of slaves, servants, and even free people who fell on hard times were frequently separated from their parents and bound to long terms of servitude.31 Venture must have felt quite confident about the good intentions of Ray Mumford, for any such arrangement that blurred the distinction between slavery and freedom put a young person of color, such as Hannah, at risk. White settlers seeking to claim free people as slaves also frequently sought to blur the racial status of those over whom they sought domination. For instance, those attempting to enslave Sarah Chauqum and Caesar consistently described them as “Negro” or “Mulatto.” In fact, both of their mothers were Native Americans. Sarah’s mother, Jane Chauqum, was Narragansett, and Caesar’s mother, Betty, was Pequot. The issue of African or Native American descent was crucial because Native people, while frequently bound by settlers

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h i s t o ry into various forms of servitude, often for long periods, could not generally be legally enslaved.32 Just how ruthless some white settlers could be and how limited was the legal recourse available to those illegally enslaved are suggested by Samuel Richards’s behavior after being called to account for his illegal sale of Sarah Chauqum. A month after being served a writ by Edward Robinson (who wanted back the money he had paid for Chauqum), Richards entered into another shady transaction. This time he purchased a twenty-seven-year-old man named Caesar from a man who had recently bought him from someone else. Like Sarah Chauqum, Caesar worked for his new master for several years on the understanding that he would be paid wages. After about five years he became suspicious. When he demanded to see Richards’s accounts of his wages, Richards refused. So, like Sarah Chauqum, Caesar forced the issue by running away. What is most striking about the ensuing litigations is that while both Sarah Chauqum and Caesar Freeman were ultimately determined to be free, freedom from such enslavement came only after long legal ordeal that required the assistance of legal patrons. And the cases tended to focus quite narrowly on the interests of buyers and sellers but generally to ignore the damages suffered by those whose liberty and labor had been unjustly expropriated. In the case of Sarah Chauqum, Edward Robinson succeeded in suing Samuel Richards for the cost of the investment he lost when she was found to be free: hence the receiver of stolen property was not punished and instead got his money back.33 In the case of Caesar Freeman, when his freedom was established, Richards turned around sued the man who had sold Caesar to him. He, too, got his money back.34 In contrast, the people who didn’t get reparations were those whose forced servitude was the center of these disputes. In this respect, Sarah Chauqum’s case is an instructive exception to the dominant pattern. After vindicating her freedom, Chauqum sued Robinson in the Rhode Island courts for three years and eight months of unpaid wages— and she won.35 Caesar Freeman also attempted to recover lost wages—for seven years of unpaid labor—from Richards, but the outcome of the case was more typical: his demand was dismissed.36 The vulnerability of people of African ancestry who found themselves bound to some kind of legal servitude, and the limits of the legal recourse available to them, must have been on Venture Smith’s mind around 1773, when he put his son Solomon in just such as position. Shortly after Smith purchased his son’s freedom, he hired seventeen-year-old Solomon out to a man named Charles Church, who lived some distance from Stonington. In ·

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery exchange for wages and “an opportunity of acquiring some learning,” Solomon was required to live with and serve his master like any other apprentice or indentured servant until he turned eighteen (26). In this case, he went to live with Church—who, apparently, lived more than fifty miles away, near New Bedford, Massachusetts. Why did he feel confident enough to do this? One clue may be found in business records from this period linking Church with Smith’s trusted former master, Oliver Smith of Stonington. Among other things, Church may have helped Smith recruit black and Native American crewmen for whaling voyages, perhaps including the seven-month voyage that Venture mentions participating in around this time.37 In any case, although there was no suggestion that Solomon faced illegal reenslavement, Smith did lose control of his son, with terrible consequences. Church enticed Solomon to sign onto a whaling voyage. “As soon as I head of his going to sea, I immediately set out to go and prevent it if possible.—But on my arrival at Church’s, to my great grief, I could only see the vessel my son was in almost out of sight going to sea. My son died of scurvy in his voyage, and Church has never yet paid me the least of his wages” (26). By this time, there are signs that the public regulation of slave sales began to shift significantly across New England. During the colonial period, the market in slaves was not specifically regulated: legal disputes centered on the property interests of buyers and sellers, but the interests of enslaved people were defined as irrelevant. For instance, if Thomas Stanton had actually wanted to sell Venture to the West Indies, he could have done so—even though it was well known that this would likely be an agonizing death sentence. Indeed, some of those sold from New England into slavery in the South or the West Indies were legally free. This was a useful tactic, because it was so difficult for those sold to achieve any effective legal recourse; and as a result such cases typically came to trial only as a result of tangentially related disputes. For instance, in 1784 a Rhode Island woman sued a Stonington man on the grounds that he had taken a seventeen-year-old indentured servant named Corydon (who was bound to her) and sold him as a slave in the Carolinas. She won financial damages; but there was no talk about attempting to retrieve Corydon and restore his freedom.38 By the 1770s this issue had become a key ground of battle, as antislavery activists and others sought to restrict and regulate the sale of slaves. In that decade New England legislators were persuaded to enact new restrictions on the sales of slaves, moving first to prohibit the importation of slaves into the region and, by the 1780s, to bar the sale of slaves out of state.39 This was an increasingly important issue. As emancipation laws went gradually into ·

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h i s t o ry effect in the 1780s, the postwar economic decline further reduced the value of slaves in New England. Masters were increasingly tempted to cash out on their remaining slaves—as well as indentured servants and sometimes people who were entirely free—by exporting them to the Carolinas or West Indies. In 1788, responding to a new Connecticut law curbing participation in the transatlantic slave trade, antislavery activist Jonathan Edwards complained that it did nothing to prevent the exportation of slaves—or of their children who, although legally free if born after May 1, 1784, were still bound to long indentures. “I expect yt now the poor creatures will be carried out in shiploads. I have heard since the passing of this law, of one man employed in purchasing Negroes for exportation.” 40 Antislavery activists seized on such cases with special zeal, for they came to represent the worst features of slavery—families torn about by sale, and the violence and lack of civil protections associated with the plantation regions.41 In Connecticut, the best known case was that of Caesar Peters and his family—who were living in a house in Hebron in September 1787 when they were attacked by a gang of eight men, including David Prior of South Carolina, armed with pistols and swords. The men wrestled Peters into a pair of iron handcuffs and, with a drawn sword, “pricked, menaced & threatened” him, his wife, and their eight children into a horse-drawn wagon and then raced across the countryside to Norwich, where a vessel lay waiting to secret the unfortunate family off for sale “in some of the southern States as slaves.” But news of the kidnapping spread quickly, and a number of local antislavery activists set off in pursuit. What happened next was recounted by Connecticut governor Samuel Huntington in legal papers stemming from this case. The Peters family, bruised, wounded, and bounced through the night, were in despair when “to their great delight” they “were overtaken by a number of Good Citizens of this State, who being religiously moved by a spirit of benevolence & philanthropy & strongly impressed with a pious & laudable zeal for the support of the rights of mankind . . . nobly rescued” Peters and his “unhappy family, & once more gave them to taste the sweets of Liberty.” After the attempted kidnapping, Peters successfully petitioned the state legislature to declare him and his family free, and in the coming years he launched a series of lawsuits attempting to recover damages from several of the men who had attacked his family.42 This dramatic intervention on his behalf— and the language of the governor’s statement, effusive and sentimental— suggests a realignment of sympathies: away from the point of view of masters and toward the point of view of people enduring slavery.

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery Venture Smith’s account reminds us that even at the moment of sale many slaves retained agency, sought to exert control over their lives, and refused to accept the situations they found themselves in. Yet despite the bravado with which Smith described his negotiating power in his Narrative, the images of slave sales we can glean from the legal records are anything but heroic. Venture’s extraordinary physical capacity, toughness, and savvy gave him a remarkable ability to influence the course of events in his life. Yet his own efforts often had consequences that he could neither predict nor control. In the years after Smith became free, he purchased several men with the intent of allowing them to earn their own freedom, but none of these arrangements worked out as he had hoped. One man ran away, and another he quickly “parted with” for unexplained reasons; a third changed his mind and decided he wanted to “return to his old master” and Smith let him go (26–27). The mobilization of public opinion against the sale of slaves to the southern states and the West Indies in the 1780s reminds us of the crucial role played by white citizens in establishing the balance of power between masters and slaves. During the colonial period, slaves such as Venture enjoyed no such public protection, and as a consequence their ability to negotiate with masters was much more limited. Even later, as public sentiment and hence the negotiating power of slaves began to shift, slaves still had limited options. As cases of people being sold into slavery illegally make horrifyingly clear, being a person with a potential market value was not inherently empowering. Often it was quite the reverse.

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Running Away As Venture learned the hard way, a slave’s ability to escape was limited by the extent to which masters could rely upon the sympathies of the public and the institutions of civil society. On March 27, 1754, shortly after his marriage to Meg, Venture joined a white servant named Joseph Heday and two other slaves, Fortune and Isaac, in a plan to escape from their master and begin new, free lives. They stole food—including two sixty-four-pound wheels of cheese, a firkin of butter, and a batch of bread—and a wide variety of clothing, loaded it onto George Mumford’s large two-masted boat and sailed off, rather dreamily, for Mississippi. They made it only as far as the eastern end of Long Island. After landing there, Fortune and Isaac set about cooking some food, Venture went off to search for fresh water—and Joseph Heday went back to the boat, stole all of their clothes, and ran off (16–17).43

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h i s t o ry Venture the hunted became Venture the hunter. He “advertised” Heday as a runaway, alerting local settlers to his description and asking for their help apprehending him. Presumably he posed as if he and his comrades had come to the area as a search party. The ploy worked. Locals returned Heday to the boat and entrusted him to Venture’s custody. But Venture’s dreams of escape were over. Hoping at least to mitigate his master’s anger, Venture took Heday, his two companions, the boat, and himself back to Fisher’s Island. Mumford immediately sent Heday off to the public jail in New London and soon set about selling Venture (17–18). This remarkable turn of events is evidence of some of Venture’s most extraordinary qualities: the physical prowess that allowed him to force three other men to return to their master, the quick wits, boldness, and determination that characterized his response to Heday’s desertion, and his notable ability to convince white settlers, even under shady circumstances, to trust and even rely on him. More broadly, this incident draws attention to one of basic ways in which members of the white public shaped the relations of masters and slaves: their role in helping masters identify, apprehend, and return escaped servants. If the relations between masters and slaves were generally deemed “private” and thus shielded from the view of the law, there were circumstances when master-slave relations ruptured or were reconfigured and thrust into public view: when masters put slaves up for sale, or when slaves ran away. Would members of the public help masters in identifying and securing suspected runaways? During the colonial period, the answer was almost always yes. Community surveillance increased the power of masters by making it more difficult for servants to escape. People of color passing through unfamiliar towns were often regarded with suspicion. Sometimes local officials picked up a black stranger whom they suspected of being a runaway, confined him in jail, and advertised his description so that his (presumed) owner could claim him.44 This kind of surveillance greatly enhanced the power of masters by making it difficult for slaves to escape. Its importance was made clearer when, in the late eighteenth century, it began to change. By the 1780s, members of the white public could not always be relied on to collaborate with masters in this way, and this shift quickly began to alter the balance of power between masters and the men and women they were trying to keep enslaved. The back pages of colonial newspapers frequently featured advertisements for runaway slaves. George Mumford posted one in the New York Gazette four days after Venture and his companions made their escape. He offered a £20 reward for the men and offered to pay any reasonable charges incurred ·

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery in capturing and securing them. Such advertisements greatly amplified the power of masters, allowing them to canvass wide distances and enlist an invisible army of reward-seekers in their efforts to detect and capture escapees. As was common in such notices, Mumford gave detailed physical descriptions of the men he was trying to recapture, including the most precise description we have of Venture himself. We know from Venture’s Narrative that he was unusually tall and strong—and from the archaeological remains of his coffin that he wasn’t exaggerating.45 But Mumford’s advertisement is much more detailed: “a very tall Fellows, 6 Feet 2 Inches high, thick square Shoulders, large bon’d, mark’d in the face, or scar’d with a Knife in his own Country.” Mumford didn’t comment on Venture’s speech or visage, perhaps because his height and size seemed sufficiently distinctive: as we have seen, the average white man in the colonies was a good six inches shorter than he, and black men, on average, another inch or two shorter than that. The less physically imposing runaways received much more detailed descriptions in Mumford’s advertisement: Isaac was short and “seemingly clumsy” with a stiff gait and a “sower Coutenance”; Isaac was “tall,” “slim,” “comely,” and “well spoken.” Joseph Heday was a “white man,” short, well-set, and ruddycomplexioned, who “says he is a Native of Newark, in the Jerseys.” If Heday had a hometown he could return to for shelter or help securing employment, running away would be much easier for him than it was for slaves such as Venture who had no such safe havens. Taken together, these advertisements for runaway slaves reveal some general patterns. Venture was typical in being a young man—he was probably about twenty-five years old at the time. More than half of all runaways were in their twenties, and six out of seven were between sixteen and thirty-five. Also, like Venture, a large majority of runaways—again, six out of seven—were men. But Venture was very unusual in running away as part of a group— about nine in ten runaways made their escape attempts alone.46 Moreover, Venture and his comrades chose an unpopular time of year for their attempt— early spring, when the weather was still predictably cool and damp. In general, runaways favored the warmer weather from late spring into fall.47 But what such advertisements can tell us is limited. For one thing, not all escape attempts produced advertisements. When Venture “advertised” for James Heday on Long Island, he may have done so by canvassing locals personally or by arranging to have handwritten notices or printed handbills posted, but there was no corresponding newspaper advertisement. Similarly, the legal testimony of James Rogers III is the only indication we have of ten-year-old Sharper’s series of ill-fated escapes. Moreover, not all printed ·

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h i s t o ry advertisements appeared in newspapers—sometimes they were simply small handbills that were likely circulated and posted in public places.48 More significantly, such advertisements rarely tell us either how successful escapees were or what motivated them to make the attempt in the first place. Legal records illuminate some of the ways in which this system of surveillance worked. One of the few cases in which we know how locals responded to a printed advertisement involved Hempsted Miner around the time that he bought Venture around 1759–60. Miner was one of a group of four Stonington men who noticed the “print advertisement” posted on August 31, 1763, at Stonington, by David Frink, offering a £20 reward for the return of a “negro” man owned by Joseph Miner. The man had been imprisoned while awaiting trial for on a murder charge, but broke out of jail after only a few days. About a week later, Minor or one of his comrades got wind of the man’s whereabouts—he was still hiding out in town—and the group set off in pursuit, captured him, and took him to the more secure jail in New London. Their interest and their exertions were directly sparked by the reward, and when it was not forthcoming, they sued.49 A rather different perspective on the dynamics of a case came into public view about twenty years earlier—around the time Venture arrived on Fisher’s Island. On the night of October 3, 1743, an “Indian” woman named Ann, who had worked for some thirty years in the household of Stephen Gardiner in Norwich, ran away. Gardener had her arrested as a runaway slave. In the ensuing legal battle a long parade of family members and neighbors testified that she had been purchased off of a Carolina ship at Newport by William Gardner around 1715, that she was a slave, and that she was either a Spanish Indian or a “Carolina” Indian—memories differed somewhat, but always within the boundaries of the two categories of Indians that could be lawfully enslaved in Rhode Island at that time. Actually, Ann was a Mohawk—and therefore entitled to her freedom. But simply pointing this out didn’t do much good—and how could she prove it legally? Evidently she couldn’t, until a pair of witnesses came forward, Martin and Rebecca Kellog, who had spent over twenty years among the Mohawk. After carefully testing her mastery of the language and way of speaking, they declared that she was indeed a Mohawk. The jury promptly declared Ann and her children free.50 This result raises the question of why the long parade of witnesses had testified otherwise. Were they consciously lying? Had they allowed themselves to be misled several decades earlier? Had they harbored suspicions, but allowed their memories to harden in retrospect? And why did she make this claim more than two decades after she was first enslaved by the Gardiners? ·

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery An extraordinary glimpse into such issues is provided by another case that at first seems quite open and shut. Readers of the New-London Gazette for May 28, 1773, would have noticed, on the back page, an advertisement regarding a runaway that was immediately recognizable by the iconic image at its head: a woodcut, about a inch square, of a black figure running, legs outstretched, walking-stick flying, head turned to face the viewer, and wearing a headdress, a grass skirt, and little else. Capt. Thomas Truman of Norwich reported that two nights earlier “a Negro Woman named lettice” had run away from him and offered a $2 reward for her return.51 The advertisement worked: he soon recaptured her. But in what became a prolonged legal battle, she disputed his central claim. Lettice Jeffries insisted that when she had come to work for Truman in 1763, she had done so not as a slave, but rather as a free woman working for pay. And although Jeffries lost her case at the county court, her account was subsequently proved to be true. Only with the assistance of an attorney, Jeremiah Halzey of Preston, was Jeffries able to produce testimony that showed that both she and her sister Pegg had been born free. Their mother had been a free woman of Irish descent who worked for a branch of the Truman family on Long Island. As a result, the Jeffries girls were bound to serve the Trumans until they were twenty-three, which left them vulnerable to exploitation. In 1763, when Lettice Jeffries went to work for a Truman relative in Norwich, she and her sister were at pains to clarify her free status. Pegg succeeded in getting Long Island neighbors to warn the Trumans that they “had no Right to sell her as a slave” and that doing so would be “Very Wrong.” 52 A few years later, when Lettice came of age, she managed to bring the matter to the attention of her master’s neighbors. Truman was forced to present himself before the local magistrate, “Squire” Fosdick, to attest that he made no claim to Lettice Jefferies as a slave, but only to a term of her time.53 This avowal convinced locals to drop the matter. But Truman refused to pay Jeffries the wages she was earning. Only by running away, years later, was she able to get her status into the purview of the law. And finally, at the Superior Court in March 1774, she was vindicated and declared free.54 As Venture’s quick change from runaway to runaway-catcher suggests and as Lettice Jeffries’s long struggle illustrates so vividly, running away was, at root, part of an ongoing battle over identity: a master sought to represent a servant one way, and the servant sought to project another image of himself or herself. It was up to others—neighbors, bounty-hunters, attorneys, judges, and as jurymen—to determine which representation of the person’s self would be validated. In most cases, presumably, runaways sought to hide and escape ·

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h i s t o ry detection by dropping their former identity. But in a number of cases, like that of Lettice Jeffries, running away allowed her to get her case into public view. And, crucially, this shift in context made witnesses who had previously decided not to make matters public willing to say what they knew. Sometimes such efforts were successful. Once in the public eye, people who had been regarded as slaves for long periods had a chance to vindicate their right to freedom. The practice of running away thus presented settlers with a choice: whether to accept a person’s claim to freedom or support the claim of his or her master. In the late eighteenth century, the sympathies of ordinary New Englanders began to shift. From Smith’s account, it appears that as early as the 1770s it was becoming easier for slaves to run away. While living on Long Island around 1770, he reports, “I purchased a negro man, for no other reason than to oblige him, and gave for him sixty pounds. But in a short time after he run away from me, and I thereby lost all that I gave for him, except twenty pounds which he paid me previous to his absconding” (26). Either Smith didn’t have the stomach to run the man down or he felt that such efforts were less likely than before to be successful; in any case, no advertisement for the man appeared in the region’s newspapers. However difficult it is to precisely measure this kind of thing, it is clear that during this period it was becoming increasingly easy for those held in slavery to escape: masters could rely less and less upon the active assistance and support of the public. During the 1770s and 1780s, the expectation that the public would support the interests of masters collapsed. Runaway advertisements in newspapers suggest the broad contours of this transition. During the early years of the Revolutionary War, the number of runaway advertisements in Connecticut newspapers spiked—presumably as slaves took advantage of the disruption of the war, British raids, and the British presence in Newport and New York to escape. But by 1780 the number had dropped again—and by the 1790s the advertisements were both lessening in frequency and changing substantially in tone.55 As the Gradual Emancipation Act and restrictions on slave trading were going into effect in the 1780s, there are indications that local populations began to shift their allegiances away from masters. Instead of helping to identify and return escaped slaves, many in New England in the late eighteenth century were either becoming indifferent or actively assisting people to elude their putative owners. One indication of this shift is the bitter tone of a number of advertisements in which masters offered token rewards. An early example of such sardonic notices was issued in ·

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery 1783 by James Haughton of New London. He offered a six-cent reward for the return of his slave Philby and warned that he would not reimburse any expenses.56 Such insultingly small rewards began to appear frequently in the 1790s: six cents was a common figure, though sometimes two cents or even one was offered.57 Some writers to New England newspapers went further and explicitly attacked abolitionists for encouraging slaves to run away and harboring them.58 One important challenge to the system of surveillance designed to prevent runaways came in 1788 in a series of legal cases brought by Jack Randall, a black man living in Norwich. He had been violently attacked by two men who argued that under state law “whatsoever Negro is found wandering out of the town or place to which he belongs, without a ticket or pass, in writing, under the hand of his master or owner . . . shall be deemed a runaway; and any person finding or meeting him, may seize and secure him to be examined before the next authority.” Randall denied that he was either “wandering” or a slave; instead he charged that the two men who had assaulted and seized him were in fact attempting to kidnap him in order to sell him into slavery. Both the Mayor’s Court and the Superior Court sided with Randall and awarded him damages. In a sign of how far legal norms were shifting, the Superior Court judges refused to dismiss one of the jurors who was alleged to have stated “that no negro, by the laws of this state, could be holden a slave.” 59 By the time of the 1793 federal Fugitive Slave Act, the antecedents of the antebellum Underground Railroad had begun to develop—moving slaves not from the South to the North but rather from slavery to freedom within the northern states. In one case that came to court as early as 1774, a Harwington man was accused of aiding and abetting the escape of an enslaved Stonington man named Harry.60 Several cases from Litchfield County in the following decades confirm that ordinary white settlers, as well as free blacks, were increasingly collaborating with fugitives—helping them escape, hiding them, and guiding them to places where they could secure employment.61 The fact that such actions were illegal suggests the depth of the change in public sympathies. By this time, of course, Venture Smith had been free for about a decade. When he had made his attempt to run away, it would have been very difficult for him to elude detection and reinvent himself as free. From the legal records it appears that those who were most successful in running away during the colonial period were people who were deliberately trying to attract public attention—to pierce the veil of privacy that enabled masters to keep them ·

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h i s t o ry illegally enslaved. But Venture was legally enslaved and could only have succeeded as a runaway by obscuring his old identity. This would have been particularly difficult for him, both because his unusual height and size made him stand out and because of the unusual skills and abilities that gave him such pride and power in his life. And yet, over the course of the next several decades, shifts in public opinion made it increasingly easy for people held in slavery—whether legally or not—to run away and remain free. The complex, informal apparatus that had supported the power position of masters in this regard dissolved. This was part of a broader transition that dramatically shifted the balance of power between masters and slaves.

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Conditional Manumission Perhaps the best evidence of this shift in power is the fact that, increasingly, those held in slavery were able to secure their freedom—legally. As Venture Smith describes with some pride on his Narrative, the way he ultimately obtained his freedom was by paying for it. And his pride was justified: the process had not been easy. By the time Venture and Meg got married, around 1754, they had been accumulating savings for some time. He had earned some £16 in New York currency by “cleaning gentlemen’s shoes and drawing boots, by catching muskrats and minks, raising potatoes and carrots, &c., and by fishing in the night, and at odd spells.” And she had saved another £5. When Venture moved to Stonington several months later, he took this money with him and loaned it out at interest to his master’s brother, Robert Stanton (18). But after their fight, his master broke open his chest, took the note and destroyed it— leaving Venture unable to collect the debt. All he could do at that point was to protect the additional money he had earned since making the loan by burying it secretly, and attempt to negotiate a good deal with a new buyer (21). This was the context in which Venture struck a bargain with Hempsted Miner to buy his freedom—only to be betrayed and cheated again. Finally, in Oliver Smith, Venture found a master willing to go through with an self-purchase agreement. Even then, the price was steep. Hempsted Miner had paid only £56 for him (20), but Oliver Smith was able to demand £85—though, in the end, after receiving just over £71, he let Venture go free (24). Venture then set about earning the money to free Meg and their children. Venture Smith is often regarded as extraordinary for his ability to purchase his own freedom, but in fact this is the way most enslaved northerners ·

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery ultimately became free. In their accounts of how slavery ended in the North, historians have tended to overemphasize the role of laws passed by state legislatures.62 The Connecticut Emancipation Act was fairly typical of such laws; it both favored the property rights of slaveowners and was designed to take effect only very gradually. Only children born after May 1, 1784, were freed, and even they were bound to long terms of service—until they reached twenty-five years of age (in 1797, the age was reduced to twenty-one).63 Thus the law did not affect the status of anyone already alive in 1784, and it would not really begin to free anyone until 1804. We know from federal census records, however, that by 1790 most blacks in the state had already become free. By 1800, nine in ten had. The same pattern developed in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island around the same time, and in New York and New Jersey somewhat later.64 The vast majority of enslaved northerners got free not by depending on the acts of well-intentioned politicians, but rather—as Venture did—by taking matters into their own hands and driving the best bargains they could. What was most unusual about Venture Smith was that he managed to secure his freedom in the 1760s, a generation before most other slaves in the region were able to do so. His account provides rare insight into the process by which the balance of power between slaves and owners began to shift so momentously. Statutes such as the Gradual Emancipation Act were publicly debated and carefully documented. But very few of the thousands of private agreements that enslaved residents of Connecticut made in the late eighteenth century are well documented. Still, a number of disputes over such manumission agreements did come to court. The records of these cases confirm what Smith’s account suggests about why it had been difficult for slaves to secure their freedom for most of the eighteenth century: the informal and formal ways the market was regulated put slaves at a huge disadvantage. It was difficult for slaves to earn or accumulate their own money, for they had limited access to capital, were prone to being cheated, and had limited rights to enforce contracts. And even when slaves did enter formal manumission agreements with their owners, it was often impossible to get the courts to recognize such arrangements as legally binding. Venture learned all this through bitter experience. And he was justifiably proud not only of his capacity for productive labor, but also of his legal acumen. During his time with Oliver Smith, Venture earned his £85 purchase price in various ways. He fished for eels, chopped huge quantities of firewood, and, increasingly paid his master a set fee for his time and worked independently. For instance, at one point Venture hired himself out to work ·

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h i s t o ry once again on Fisher’s Island, earning a total of £20, of which his master claimed more than two-thirds, leaving him with a profit of slightly less than £7 (24). Smith’s unusual strength and stamina allowed him to earn more money through such work than many others could have. And his labors were not only physical. As he had done before, he also invested capital as he accumulated it. Given his past experience, Venture was concerned about his tenuous legal position: “I was the property of my master, and therefore could not safely take his obligation.” So when Venture advanced money to Oliver Smith, he arranged for a local free black friend to serve as a middleman. He also reinvested the interest on this note, as well as money he had earned fishing, in a piece of property “adjoining my old master Stantons.” Cultivating this land “with the greatest diligence and economy,” he was able to net another £10—while also spending time near his family (23). Records of a lawsuit may shed light on this last transaction: around 1765, a free black man from Stonington named Primas Sike was sued over his tenancy of a small parcel of land adjoining Stanton’s property. Sike may well have been the man who helped secure Venture’s interests during this period. In any case, in the early 1770s, Venture Smith had acquired a twenty-six acre parcel bordering the farm of his former master—which he ultimately sold to his former master at a healthy profit.65 As scattered legal records reveal, other enslaved men during this period were earning money in similar ways and trying to overcome their legal disabilities. One case involved men that Venture very likely knew personally. Around the end of May 1762, two Stonington slaves, Peter and Brister, sought credit at the local store. Extending credit to slaves was illegal unless authorized in writing by their masters—and both masters involved had forbidden the shopkeeper to extend the men credit. But Peter and Brister promised they were good for money, saying that “they Expected to Raise potatoes in ye. fall to pay with.” 66 In the end, the storekeeper ended up allowing them to buy “shop goods” on credit, including snuff for Peter and yellowish “thickset” cloth for Brister. But he lost out on the deal: Peter and Brister failed to pay the debt, their masters refused to do so, and the courts would not compel payment.67 Venture might well have disapproved of Peter and Brister’s decision to fritter away their earnings on luxuries. But he would likely have sympathized both with their entrepreneurial intentions and with the ways in which their slave status compromised their ability to conduct business. Slavery also exposed those pursuing entrepreneurial ventures to special risks. Consider a suit brought by a Preston landowner over a small plot of ·

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery land he rented to a local slave named Caesar. Caesar had rented the land to raise a crop of flax, but his crop turned out very poorly. He did his best to make the most of it, but another local slave didn’t think it was worth the trouble of harvesting. Caesar eventually learned that his crop did poorly because flax had been grown there recently, depleting the soil. Several locals, knowing this, had declined to rent the land; but no one had tipped off Caesar until it was too late. When the landlord attempted to collect his rent, Caesar declared that “he did not Intend to pay him Nothing Towards the flax Ground Because the flax was good for nothing, & he ought not to Pay him anything for the Use of it.” The landowner ultimately accepted a pair of sleeve-buttons from Caesar in full payment for the debt. But he then turned around and sued Caesar’s master for the full amount of the rent. He might have prevailed had not another man, Picol, witnessed their negotiations and supported Caesar’s account in court—and had the legal dispute not escalated into a conflict between the property rights of two white settlers.68 Despite the risks and difficulties they faced, some local slaves were able to accumulate money and negotiate successful manumission agreements. One such arrangement has striking parallels to the complex deal Venture worked out with Oliver Smith. In 1761 a New London slave named Fortune made an elaborate agreement with his master, Benjamin Alvord. Fortune would be free when he paid £40 to a third man, Patrick Robinson; the money had to be paid within five years, and during that time first claim to his labor was to go to a fourth man, Joseph Chew. As in Venture’s case, Fortune and Alvord agreed on a specific purchase price; and, as in Venture’s case, the enslaved man earned the money by working outside of the master’s household. Like Venture, as he worked toward his freedom Fortune invested the profits he accumulated in land, which he presumably used both to live independently and to generate income. Finally, like Venture, after he obtained his freedom Fortune began helping others do the same. Several years after officially securing his freedom in 1768, Fortune mortgaged his land in order to purchase another slave named Caesar and help him become free.69 How many other slaves in these years were able to obtain their freedom? Unfortunately, the records are both equivocal and, at least in some cases, misleading. In New London County, for instance, several dozen manumission agreements appear in town records. And dozens more wills, preserved in probate records, promised slaves freedom.70 But it appears that most such agreements—like the agreement between Venture and Oliver Smith—were never written down or officially registered in the public record. This in itself is a sign of the power struggle involved. Masters attempting to extract labor ·

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h i s t o ry from hard-bargaining slaves would have had little incentive to make an official record of an agreement that they might, later on, not wish to honor. Even when agreements were written down, they were not always easy to enforce. Venture very likely heard of the long struggle of the slave Joan, who had been promised freedom under the will of James Rogers Sr., who died in 1688. Instead of honoring the will, the Rogers heirs claimed Joan, her children, and subsequently her grandchildren as slaves. In a remarkably lengthy legal battle that ran for several decades, Joan and one of her children managed to secure their freedom in a Massachusetts court, but most of the family was held in slavery by the Rogers family for decades. Those who subsequently became free did so only by negotiating their own manumission agreements.71 A similar case was even closer to home. When the Stonington widow Elizabeth Hill wrote her will in 1757, she included a provision granting “unto my Negro Maid Phillis her Freedom to go out Free for herself immediately after my Decease.” Twelve years later, when her mistress died, Phillis was not freed. Instead, the executors of the estate sold her. And when Phillis sued for her freedom in 1773, the county court judges dismissed her case. For Phillis, securing the freedom she had been promised involved a long, hard struggle.72 If slaves in the colonial period found it so difficult to enforce manumission agreements, how do we explain the fact that by the 1780s they were enjoying much greater success? As Venture Smith knew from personal experience, one factor was the huge need for manpower created by the Revolutionary War, which opened new opportunities to enslaved New Englanders fighting their own personal battles for freedom. Although politicians and military leaders disagreed about whether to allow men of color to enlist as soldiers, and policies shifted over time, black men had fought alongside New England militiamen from the very first alarm in April 1775. Smith’s son Cuff was in his early twenties when he enlisted in the Continental Army on December 4, 1780; he served under Captain Caleb Baldwin in the Second Connecticut Regiment until furloughed in June 1783.73 Meanwhile, from the start of the military conflict enslaved men had been entering military ser vice as substitutes for settlers: those who could send a slave to war instead of a son often preferred to do so, and draft companies and individuals with sufficient resources frequently paid for slaves to serve in their stead and help complete their quotas. Generally, it was assumed that slaves serving long military terms would be rewarded not only with bounties and wages but also with their freedom, and across New England hundreds of enslaved men obtained their freedom by serving in the Continental Army.74 ·

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery One of those who pursued this path was Cudjo, the slave of Oliver Holmes of Stonington. His experience illustrates both the continuing difficulties and the new opportunities that enslaved people encountered in these years.75 During the war, Cudjo saw military ser vice as his best chance for freedom, and he pressed his master for permission to enlist. Holmes agreed but imposed several stipulations: Cudjo would be free only if he fulfilled his entire term of enlistment, “acted prudent” during that period, and saved his wages.76 Cudjo enlisted into the army in March 1781—intent on earning his freedom.77 Yet he left the army, late in the summer of 1783, without waiting for his official discharge. Most of the army had been demobilized by the time Cudjo arrived back in Stonington; only a handful of units, including the Second Connecticut Regiment (in which Cuff Smith served) were kept in ser vice after August 15, 1783. But as far as Holmes was concerned, Cudjo’s abrupt departure from the army had cost him his claim to freedom.78 Cudjo returned to work for Holmes. Clearly he felt aggrieved: in January 1784 Holmes’s children reported that they had heard Cudjo threaten to kill their father and burn their house down. Holmes called neighbors to help him bind and secure Cudjo and then demanded to know what was the “Reason of his Giving out such awful Wicket & Dreadful threats.” 79 Around the end of April, Cudjo ran off to Preston to secure the legal assistance of Jeremiah Halzey, antislavery activist and justice of the peace. In May 1784, they filed suit to establish Cudjo’s freedom. But the jury accepted Holmes’s view that Cudjo had violated a condition essential to securing his freedom, and Halzey’s attempt to appeal to the superior court that fall failed. The following winter he was still being held in slavery.80 Cudjo’s story reminds us that many masters fought tooth and nail to keep people enslaved. It also illustrates the importance of a new set of allies those struggling for freedom acquired: well-placed and resourceful advocates to whom enslaved people could turn when their owners reneged on agreements. Back in the 1760s, it appears that Venture had found something like this sort of a patron in Daniel Edwards. But by the 1770s a new breed of antislavery activists had emerged—exemplified by Jeremey Belknap in New Hampshire, Moses Brown in Rhode Island, and Elias Boudinout in New Jersey.81 Typical of these men was Jonathan Edwards Jr., who in 1790 reported that he and other New Haven activists had already “effected the liberation of a number of Negroe & Mulattoes holden in slavery, who here legally free.” 82 Legal records in New London County make it clear that the most important of these advocates there was Jeremiah Halzey—and they shed some light on ·

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h i s t o ry the development of his antislavery activism. As early as 1774 he helped Lettice Jeffries to secure her freedom. It appears that it was the special injustice of Lettice’s case that moved him to action, rather that the fact of slavery— for at the time he owned a slave himself, a man named Thomas. But by 1779, around the time Thomas married, Halzey freed him—perhaps a sign of his evolving values.83 Certainly by the 1780s Halzey had become a dedicated advocate for numerous men, women, and children struggling for their freedom. At the same time, Venture Smith’s account highlights the emergence of another set of crucial allies for those struggling for freedom in this period: friends and family members who had already become free. As Smith’s Narrative recounts, once he secured his own manumission, he set about earning the money necessary to purchase first his sons Solomon and Cuff, then of his wife, Meg, and finally their oldest child, Hannah. He also purchased a number of other men, in order to help them gain their freedom (26–27). Smith’s Narrative describes these transactions only in passing, but legal records illuminate important parts of his story. In 1778, only a few years after Smith had moved his family to East Haddam and bought his first property there, he agreed to help a local slave named Sawney Anderson redeem his freedom. Approximately forty years old, Anderson had been married for about fifteen years to a free black woman named Susan Freeman and had several children, the oldest being in their early teens. He had moved away from New London, where his owner lived, and become a landowner in Glastonbury. Evidently he had negotiated an arrangement with his master similar to the one Venture and Oliver Smith had entered into ten years earlier. But this arrangement was disrupted the same year it was entered into, when Anderson’s owner died and Anderson faced the prospect of sale as part of his late owner’s estate. Venture Smith agreed to help Anderson purchase his freedom, and he did so through a carefully thought out series of transactions. First, on December 7, 1778, Smith bought Anderson from the executors of the estate, giving them a note promising to deliver to them ten bushels of corn and ten bushels of rye the following November. Next, Smith formally freed Anderson—and carefully recorded the unconditional deed of manumission in the local town records.84 This procedure was evidently designed to protect Anderson’s freedom in the event that something went wrong with the agreement. Indeed, we know about it because something did go wrong: seven years later, the remaining executor of the estate sued Venture Smith, claiming that he had never delivered the twenty bushels of grain as promised.85 Apparently, ·

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Anderson had been expected to pay the loan back directly to the executors of the estate on Smith’s behalf, but hadn’t done so. Smith was forced to pay the executors and then attempted to recover the money from Anderson. But because of the way Smith set up the arrangement, Anderson’s freedom was not at risk. Yet freedom could be precarious for free blacks struggling to help each other and reunite their families. Smith’s loan to Sawney Anderson, it turns out, was part of a chain of loans, and when it unraveled the consequences were heartbreaking. Just as Smith had advanced the money that allowed Anderson to secure his freedom, so Anderson had evidently loaned money to a New Londoner named Cuff Chesebrough, who used the money to purchase a twenty-two-year-old slave named Rose—presumably his wife. Around the same time that Smith was taken to court for the money he had guaranteed on behalf Anderson, Anderson sued Chesebrough to recover £60 he had loaned to him. But Chesebrough did not have the resources to make good on the loan. When Anderson sued him in late 1781, Chesebrough ended up losing both Rose and his home, which was dismantled and sold for lumber. He had not officially secured her manumission, so technically she was property liable to seizure. Consequently, on March 4, 1782, she was sold at a public auction—back into slavery.86

At the time Venture Smith managed to secure his freedom, such successes were very rare. Yet over the course of the next two decades he was a key participant in a momentous transformation. Along with others who were enslaved, he faced major challenges in his negotiations with a series of masters because of the way colonial society drew the line between public and private—who was a member of civil society, with a right to legal recourse from violent assault or a broken contract, and who was not. What seems most unusual about Venture’s experience during the mid-eighteenth century was the extent to which he succeeded in shaping the course of his life and those of his family members and, ultimately, in securing their freedom. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, it became easier to emulate Smith’s course of action. That was because changes in public sentiment, as well as in the law, shifted the balance of power. New efforts to regulate the sale of slaves in the 1770s and 1780s were signs of changing political values and priorities, and significantly limited the options of slave owners. Similarly, the increasing reluctance of ordinary New Englanders to collaborate with masters by returning runaway servants reflected broad cultural and ideological ·

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h i s t o ry shifts. This change in turn affected the ability of slaves to negotiate with masters: the easier it was for a slave to attain freedom by simply running away, the more incentive a master had to enter negotiations. And when slaves did strike bargains with their owners for their freedom they found such agreements much easier to enforce. Across New England in the 1770s and 1780s, people held illegally in slavery were finding it easier to get into court—and they were finding juries increasingly sympathetic.87 In short, the boundaries of civil society were redrawn in ways that disrupted the power of masters and enhanced the bargaining position of slaves. As Venture Smith’s Narrative reminds us, however, this transition was neither easy nor complete. At the end of the century, those still held in slavery had to struggle for their freedom, and those who had earned their freedom faced not only new opportunities but also new risks. Smith emphasizes that even long after he became free he was still repeatedly cheated and abused by racist whites—and he still did not always receive equal justice at law. These facts may help explain the tone of Smith’s narrative: proud of his accomplishments, yet at the same time outraged at the inequality of justice under the law. Perhaps, given his experiences, what is remarkable is not so much his frustration at the realities of exploitation and abuse, but rather his enduring belief in the attainability of justice.

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Notes For their assistance and support, I am grateful to a number of colleagues. In recent years, the Connecticut State Library, and particularly archivist Bruce Stark, has undertaken an ambitious effort to reprocess the state’s early court records and in the process has made extraordinary efforts to identify cases involving people of African or Native descent; my research was greatly facilitated by the thorough and detailed finding aids they compiled for the New London County Court African Americans Collection, the New London County Court Native Americans Collection, and the Litchfield County Court Minorities Collection. Karl Stofko has been as generous with his discoveries as he has been indefatigable in his research. Nancy Steenburg and Elizabeth Kading also graciously shared materials they have uncovered in the course of their own research. In addition, I would like to thank Sheryl Kroen, Lisa Lindsay, Ann Little, James Brewer Stewart, and the anonymous reviewers for the press for their insights, suggestions, and support. 1. Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But resident above sixty years in the United States of America (New London, Conn.: C. Holt, 1798), 18–19. Subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery 2. For more on Venture’s gravestone in the First Church Cemetery in East Haddam, see Kevin Tulimieri’s essay in this volume. 3. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 38–45. 4. Inventory of the estate of Capt. George Mumford, late of New London, September 1, 1756, New London Probate Records, file 3779, microfilm, Connecticut State Library, Hartford, Conn. (hereafter cited as CSL). 5. For a recent survey of northern slavery, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 47–63, 228–55. On the demography of northern slavery, see Louis P. Masur, “Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island: Evidence from the Census of 1774,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Comparative Studies 6, no. 2 (1985): 139–50. 6. For more on these issues, see John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), chapters 3 and 6. 7. This prosecution entered the county court in November 1753. In order to distinguish him from other family members and locals of the same name, Rogers was identified, in early records, as James Rogers 3d; in later records he was referred to as James Rogers of Great Neck. Rogers’s reply was recorded the following summer; County Court of New London County (hereafter cited as NLC CC) Trials 22, June 1754, no. 181. The case finally came to trial in early 1755, as two separate charges: one for assault, which went to the jury, and a second for “cruelty,” which Rogers petitioned to have quashed: Rex v. James Rogers of the Great Neck (late James Rogers the 3rd), NLC CC Trials 22, Feb. 1755, nos. 50 (assault) and 51 (cruelty); quotes are from Files 101/8, no. 50. 8. James Gregory Mumford, Mumford Memoirs: Being the Story of the New England Mumfords from the Year 1655 to the Present Time (Boston: Merrymount Press, 1900), 54–55. Quote: John Russell Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, vol. 4 (Providence: K. Knowles, Anthony and Company, State Printers, 1859), 27. 9. For both these cases, see Abner Cheney Goodell Jr., “The Trial and Execution, for Petit Treason, of Mark and Phillis, Slaves of Capt. John Codman, Who Murdered Their Master at Charlestown, Mass., in 1755 . . . ,” in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 20 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1882), 122–49. 10. 1708 statute (quoted), Charles J. Hoadley, ed., Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 15 vols. (Hartford, 1850–1980), 5:52; 1730 statute, Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 8:246. See also Guocun Yang, “From Slavery to Emancipation: The African Americans of Connecticut, 1650s–1820s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1999), 43–54. By the time Venture arrived in the region around 1740, the pattern of jury verdicts in response to prosecutions for sexual assault in Connecticut made it clear that while the all-white juries could not find it within themselves to convict local white men, they had no such hesitancy when the alleged perpetrator

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was black; see Cornelia Dayton, Women before the Bar: Gender, Law and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1798 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 243–49. More broadly, see Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Coercion in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 142–52. Rex v. George Chatfield, NLC CC, June 1711, Files 5/10. I am grateful to Ann Little for bringing to my attention one of the few similar cases that came to trial in colonial New England: a slave woman named Rachel was killed by her owner, Nathaniel Keene, in Kittery, Maine, in 1694. Keene was charged with “Murdering a Negro Woman,” but the jury found him guilty only of “Cruelty to his Negro woman by Cruell Beating and hard usage.” In the end he was levied a fine (which the court suspended) and costs of court. Charles T. Libby, Robert E. Moody, and Neal W. Allen Jr., eds., Province and Court Records of Maine, 6 vols. (Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1928–75), 4:34–35. Rex v. James Rogers of the Great Neck (late James Rogers the 3rd), NLC CC, February 1755, Files 101/8, no. 50. A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), describes statues in Virginia (36, 39, 55–57), Georgia (240, 254, 263), and South Carolina (171, 187, 195, 197) and compares them to Pennsylvania, which unlike “its southern neighbors” refused “to sanction physical attacks on slaves by masters or third parties” (306). James MacSparran, A Letter Book and Abstract of Out Services Written during the Years 1743–1751, ed. Daniel Goodwin (Boston: Merrymount Press, 1899), 50–51 (September 8–10, 1751). The published edition is somewhat bowdlerized, but the original manuscript makes the sexual nature of Peter’s offense clear: Records of the Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island, ser. 1, box 9, folder 98 oversize, Special Collections, University of Rhode Island Library, Kingston. R.I.. Rex v. Jenny, alias Jenny Chapman, Superior Court (hereafter SC), Newport County, March 1767, Record E:325, Rhode Island Supreme Court Judicial Record Center, Pawtucket (hereafter RISJRC). Governor of Rhode Island to the Earl of Hillsborough, Newport, November 14, 1768, Letters to the Governor, 2:15, Rhode Island State Archives, Providence, R.I. One recent effort to determine the heights of black men in the eighteenth century is Philip Morgan’s analysis of data from Charlestown, South Carolina, in Slave Counterpoint (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 93n83; in this sample the average height of black men between the ages of sixteen and fifty was 67 inches for native-born men and 66 inches for creoles and those born in Africa. At the time of the Revolutionary War, native-born white men in British North America between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-five measured an average of 68.1 inches; R. W. Fogel et al., “Secular Changes in American and British Stature and Nutrition,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 14, no. 2 (Autumn 1985): 462–63.

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery 17. On Venture’s physique: George Mumford, advertisement for Joseph Heday, Fortune, Venture, and Isaac, New York Gazette and Weekly Post Boy, April 1, 1754. 18. Reply of James Rogers 3rd, June 1754, in Rex v. James Rogers of Great Neck, late James Rogers 3rd, NLC CC, February 1755, Files 101/8, no. 50. 19. Rev. v. James Rogers of Great Neck, late James Rogers 3rd, NLC CC, February 1755, Trials 22, no. 50 (see also Trials 22, June 1754, no. 181). 20. James Rogers 3rd v. Pardon Tabor, NLC CC, June 1756, Files 105/4, no. 64. 21. For a discussion of these issues, see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 135–88. 22. In one arson case, it was argued that a Native American woman, far from feeling hostility to the man whose barn had burned down, had been eyeing him as potential new master; Rex v. Hannah Green (Indian woman, Preston), NLC CC, Feb. 1769, NLC CC African Americans Collection (hereafter AAC) 3/3 (no. 174). For other examples of slaves seeking out new owners, including Abigail’s efforts to avoid being sent south with John Rice in 1779, see Sweet, Bodies Politic, 247–48. 23. John Beckwith 3d v. Oliver Buckley, NLC CC, February 1740, Files 2/2, no. 69. 24. On Nero, see Barbara W. Brown and James M. Rose, Black Roots in Southeastern Connecticut, 1650–1900 (Detroit: Gale, 1980), 593, citing Slavery Documents, Connecticut Historical Society and Colchester First Church Records, December 24, 1761. Other cases disputing sales of slaves who turned out to be suffering from either serious physical or mental illnesses in New London County include William Wedge v. Ephraim Smith, NLC CC, November 1746, Files 82/14, no. 107; Benjamin Lee v. Reuben Ely, NLC CC, June 1758, Files 109/4, no. 27; Benjamin Green v. Matthew Steward, NLC CC, November 1748, Files 85/19, no. 32. 25. Zechariah Williams v. Thomas Spaulding, NLC CC, November 1745, Files 81/4, no. 55. 26. Deposition of Charles Hull, January 6, 1750, in Jonathan Huntington v. Prosper Whetmore, NLC CC, February 1750, Files 88/5, no. 17; this case actually focused on ownership of the (unnamed) woman’s six-year-old daughter, Jenny, and was fought between creditors of the buyer. As it turned out, he was deep in debt and soon after the sale fled the region without paying for the woman and her daughter. See also petitions to the General Assembly relating to this trial: Connecticut Archives, Miscellaneous, Series I, 1:50–60 and 2:55–63, CLS. 27. Theophilus Morgan, Esq. v. Thomas Allen, NLC CC, February 1785, Files 190/20. See also Thomas Wilson, Mortgage of chattels including Juno to Thomas Wilson, Jr., New London Land Records 24:190, cited in Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 523. 28. On indentures and apprentices, see Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). On the bound labor of Native Americans, see Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau, “The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People

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36. 37.

and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era,” Ethnohistory 44, no. 3 (1997): 433–62. In a number of other cases involving women claimed as slaves, they appear not to have realized they were being claimed as slaves until they came of age; see Sweet, Bodies Politic, 228–39. As is often the case with Algonquian names written in English in the colonial period, the name “Chauqum” was spelled in a variety of phonetically similar ways, including “Charquin,” “Chaugum,” and “Chagum.” Sarah Charquin v. Edward Robinson, King’s County, Court of Common Pleas, January 1733, Record A:121; a rehearing, by special order of the General Assembly, confirmed the former judgment: Sarah, daughter of Jane Chagun v. Edward Robinson, Newport County Superior Court, Record B:481, RISJRC. A “Ray Mumford” is listed as an able South Kingstown man between sixteen and fifty years old in the Rhode Island Military Census of 1777, Rhode Island State Archives, 10. The most recent genealogy of the Mumford family is Sherrie A. Styx, The Mumford Families in America, 1600–1992 (Eugene, Ore.: Styx Enterprises, 1992). For a discussion of family separation and servitude, see Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau, “Colonizing the Children: Indian Youngsters in Servitude in Early Rhode Island,” in Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, ed. Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003), 137–73. On the enslavement of Native Americans in the seventeenth century, see Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). Margaret Newell’s study of Native American labor in early New England finds much exploitation but little lawful enslavement; “The Changing Nature of Indian Slavery in New England,” in Calloway and Salisbury, Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, 106–36. Edward Robinson v. Samuel Richards, NLC CC, November 1734, Files 41/6, no. 236. Samuel Richards v. Caesar, NLC CC, June 1739, Files 58/8, no. 393; appealed to NLC SC, September 1741. Samuel Richards v. Jabez Hamlin, NLC CC, June 1743, Files 75/3, no. 175. Sarah Charquin v. Edward Robinson, King’s County, Court of Common Pleas, January 1733, Record A:121, RISJRC. A rehearing, by special order of the General Assembly, confirmed the former judgment: Sarah, daughter of Jane Chagun v. Edward Robinson, Newport County Superior Court, Record B:481, RISJRC. Ceasar Freeman v. Samuel Richards, NLC CC, November 1742, Files 73/19, no. 161/162. On the identification of Charles Church, see the essay by Robert P. Forbes, David Richardson, and Chandler B. Saint in this volume. Smith refers to a “Charles Church, of Rhode-Island” (26), and a Charles Church was listed on the 1774 Rhode Island census as a household head in Charlestown, just across the border from Stonington; John Russell Bartlett, ed., Census of the Inhabitants of the Colony

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of Rhode Island . . . 1774 (Providence: Knowles, Anthony and Company, State Printers, 1858), 149. But links between Oliver Smith and a Charles Church living near New Bedford, Massachusetts—and the fact that both were involved in producing whaling crews in this period—suggests that this may be the man to whom Solomon was hired out. Sarah Clark v. Isaac Wheeler 2nd, NLC CC, November 1785, Files 199/14; the defendant appealed to the SC. Sweet, Bodies Politic, 246–48. Jonathan Edwards Jr., New Haven, to Moses Brown, October 20, 1788, Moses Brown Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society. Several cases in Connecticut and Rhode Island involved the North Carolina man John Rice, who traveled through New England in 1779 buying slaves for resale in the South. Hannah Clinton, with the help of attorney Jeremiah Halsey (sometimes spelled Halzey in the records), successfully prosecuted Rice, proved her freedom, and was awarded damages: Hannah Clinton v. John Rice, NLC SC, March 1780, Files 21/34 and Records 22:201–2; Hannah Clinton v. Stephen Gifford, NLC SC, Records 22:270–71. Clinton ended up in a dispute with her attorney over payment of her damages: Ovid Scipio and his wife Hannah v. Jeremiah Halsey, NLC CC, Feb. 1785, Files 190/20, no. 113. On Rice in Rhode Island and the broader trend, see Sweet, Bodies Politic, 246–48. On the ideology of sentimental antislavery, see Sweet, Bodies Politic, 240–46. In case of Caesar Peters, it was not at all clear that he or his children were legally free. He had been born into slavery during the early 1750s and had been purchased by Mrs. Mary Peters of Hebron when he was about eight years old. Although she at one point promised to free him when he grew up, he displeased her by marrying a woman named Lois without her permission—so instead of freeing him she sold him to her son, the Reverend Samuel Peters of Hebron. Samuel Peters also spoke of freeing the family, but during the war he was a Loyalist and ultimately fled the region, leaving Caesar’s family behind. In debt after the war, Peters sold Caesar’s family to a South Carolinian named David Prior, who, in 1787, began attempting to claim his slaves. Of course, by then the Peters family had been living as free people for some ten years. And in any case, by this point Connecticut officials had little sympathy with Prior’s claims, whatever the letter of the law. In 1789 Peters petitioned the Connecticut General Assembly for his freedom and that of his family, which was granted; Connecticut Archives, Rev. Ser. 1, XXXVII, 258–62, CSL. Caesar Peters v. David Prior, NLC CC, November 1790, Files 221/10, no. 236 (this case was apparently withdrawn by Peters); a parallel action brought by Peters in the name of his son James, went forward: NLC CC, November 1790, Files 221/10, no. 237. Samuel Huntington, writ dated November 11, 1789, Caesar Peters v. John Mann and Nathaniel Mann, NLC CC, December 1793, Files 216/17, no. 246. George Mumford, advertisement for Joseph Heday, Fortune, Venture and Isaac, New York Gazette and Weekly Post Boy, April 1, 1754. In Venture’s Narrative, published

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50. 51. 52.

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some fifty years after this incident, Joseph Heday is identified as “a certain Irishman, named Heddy” (16). For example, the New London gaoler advertised in 1793 that he had picked up a man he determined to be a runaway slave named Tite, so that his Long Island master could claim him; New London Gazette, September 26, 1793. On the coffin uncovered during excavations of Venture Smith’s grave, see the comments of Nicholas F. Ballantoni, Connecticut State Archaeologist, in Matt Apuzzo, “Clues to ‘Black Paul Bunyan’ found,” USA Today, August 1, 2006. Guocon Yang tabulates advertisements in Connecticut newspapers from 1763 to 1820 in Appendix 5B of “From Slavery to Emancipation,” 319–20. According to this tabulation, a total of 620 advertisements referred to 649 individuals; thus a very high portion of runaways did so alone. In age calculations, I refer to the 572 cases in which advertisements noted the ages of individuals, not the 649 total cases. A collection of 662 fugitive slave advertisements from New York and New Jersey between 1716 and 1783 describes some 753 individuals; Graham Russell Hodges and Alan Edward Brown, “Pretends to Be Free”: Runaway Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey (New York: Garland, 1994). Distribution of age and sex in this sample is consistent with Yang’s findings for Connecticut in “From Slavery to Freedom,” Appendix 5B: 86.3% of runaways were men (Table 1); 49.51% were between 16 and 25 years old, and another 27.40% were between 26 and 35 (Table 2); Runaways were most likely to run away in the summer and fall (rising from 9.98% in May, peaking at 12.77% in August, and falling to 8.18% in November) and least likely to run away in the winter and early spring (4.99% in January and February; 5.59% in March; 6.19% in April) (Table 5). One of the few such handbills to have survived from New England appears in the files of a lawsuit. See Nathaniel Backus Jr. v. Jedediah Frink, NLC CC, November 1757, AAC 2/24; Trials 22, no. 38. Amos Chesebrough et al. v. David Frink, NLC CC, November 1764, AAC 2/135, no. 3. The man at the center of this manhunt was subsequently found guilty of manslaughter: Rex v. Isaac, NLC SC, September 1763. Stephen Gardiner v. Caesar, Ann, Ann, and Phillis, NLC CC, November 1743, Files 76/7, no. 110. New-London Gazette, May 28, 1773. On Eleazar Truman’s “low circumstances” and Pegg’s good reputation, see depositions of Jonathan Terry and Amon Taber, and on confrontations with Eleazar Truman, depositions of Robert Sheffield, Elizabeth King, all in Jeffries v. Truman, NLC SC, March 1774, Files 20, no. 49. Deposition of Elizabeth Dyar, Jeffries v. Truman, NLC SC, March 1774, Files 20, no. 49. Jeffries v. Truman, NLC SC, March 1774, Files 20, no. 49. Norwich Town Meetings, December 26, 1774. Preston and Norwich censuses for 1800 include women named Lettice, one of whom may well have been Lettice Jeffries; see Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 525.

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Venture Smith and the Law of Slavery 55. For a tabulation of Connecticut runaway advertisements, see Yang, “From Slavery to Freedom,” Appendix 5B. For New York and New Jersey advertisements, see Hodges and Brown, “Pretends to Be Free.” For Rhode Island, see Taylor and Sweet, Runaways, Deserters and Notorious Villains. 56. New-London Gazette, March 28, 1783. 57. Examples from the New-London Gazette in late 1792 and early 1793, arranged chronologically, include: 6 cents (September 27, 1792); 2 cents (November 22, 1792); 4 cents (December 20, 1792); 6 cents (January 24, 1793); 1 cent (February 7, 1793); 6 cents (March 21, 1793); though rewards of $5 (New-London Gazette, May 9, 1793), $6 (New-London Gazette, April 11, 1793), and $10 (Connecticut Courant, May 20, 1793) remained common, and one advertisement in 1793 offered $40 (Connecticut Journal, July 3, 1793). 58. On attacks on abolitionists, see Sweet, Bodies Politic, 254. For a compilation of all eighteenth-century Rhode Island advertisements for runaway slaves, as well for servants, deserters, etc., see Maureen A. Taylor and John Wood Sweet, eds., Runaways, Deserters, and Notorious Villains from Rhode Island Newspapers, 2 vols. (Camden, Me.: Picton Press, 1998–2001). 59. Quotes: Ephraim Kirby, “Pettis and Others against Jack Warren,” in Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Superior Court of the State of Connecticut: From the Year 1785 to May 1788 (Litchfield, 1789), 426–28. See also Jack Randall (also identified in the records as Jack Warren) v. James Cambell and Stanton Cambell, NLC SC, March 1788, Files box 26, no. 45; and Jack Randall v. James Cambell and Stanton Cambell NLC CC, February 1789, Files box 212/19, no. 71. 60. Phelps v. Browning, Litchfield County CC, March 1774, Files 1/8. 61. “Negro Pomp” was accused of persuading Bud and Abigail to run away from their owner in Woodbury; Hinman v. Negro Pomp, Litchfield County CC, March 1780, 1/11. See also two variant advertisements for Bud and Abigail: Connecticut Journal, June 2, 1779, and Connecticut Courant, June 8, 1779. On September 28, 1790, Stephen Welton of Litchfield and a group of others seized a fourteenyear-old girl, Violet, who was owned by two Harwington men, and took her to Vermont, some two hundred miles away—which may have been an early example of an “underground railroad” in which Connecticut residents were breaking the law in order to help individuals secure their freedom. Welton was found guilty and posted bond for appeal; David King and Samuel W. Baldwin v. Stephen Welton, Litchfield County CC, March 1791, no. 142. (A fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girl named Vilet was described as running away from William Barnard of Harford in November 1791—this could have been the same girl; Connecticut Courant, December 5, 1791.) More clear is a second case, in 1813, in which Jonathan Princtle was accused of encouraging twenty-year-old Jack Actolphuse, who was bound for five more years under the 1780 gradual emancipation law, to run away from his master and advising him (successfully, as it turned out) how to escape and avoid detection; David Buckingham v. Jonathan Princtle, Litchfield County CC, December 1813, Files 205/12 (this case was appealed to the Superior Court).

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h i s t o ry 62. See, for example, Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 63. Charles J. Hoadley et al., eds., Public Records of the State of Connecticut, 11 vols. (Hartford, 1894–1967), 6:472–73 (1784 act); 9:38–39 (1797 revision). 64. For summaries of census data, see Edgar J. McManus, Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1973), 199–214. 65. Andrew Stanton v. Prymus Sike, “a free Negrow man” of Stonington, NLC CC, June 1767, Files 145/6, no. 536. Stonington land records show Venture Smith purchasing a twenty-six-acre parcel in that vicinity from members of the Denison family in 1770 and selling the parcel to his former master, Thomas Stanton II, several years later: Register of Deeds 9/110 (January 12, 1771, “for £60 lawful money”), 9:421–22 (March 22, 1774, “for £100 lawful money”), Stonington Town Hall. Thanks to Nancy Steenburg and Elizabeth Kading for sharing her work on these deeds with me. See also Nancy Steenburg and Elizabeth Kading, “The Venture Adventure,” Wrack Lines 6, no. 1 (2006): 7–10. 66. Deposition of Joseph Vincent, in Phineas Minor v. Walter Palmer, NLC CC, June 1763, Files 127/2, no. 375. 67. Deposition of Sylvanus Maxson, Phineas Miner v. Walter Palmer Jr., NLC CC, June 1763, Files 128/3, no. 376; Trials 23, June 1763, nos. 375 and 376. 68. On the land and Picol’s agreement: Depositions of Lydia Gile, Preston, June 8, 1772; John Starkweather, Preston, April 20 1772; Samuel Starkweather, Preston, April 20, 1772. The sleeve-button conversation: Deposition of Picol, Preston, April 20, 1772, and deposition of Elisha Boardman, Preston, April 27, 1772, in Abel Gile v. Thomas Branch, Jr., NLC CC, June 1772, AAC 3/9, no. 326. 69. New London Land Records, 18:236 (1768); 19:152 (1765); 18:236 (1771). As late as 1775, Fortune appeared on local tax rolls: Tax Lists, New London Town Clerk; as cited in Brown and Rose Black Roots, 5. 70. The largest compilation of manumissions in Connecticut town and probate records is in Brown and Rose, Black Roots. 71. For a summary of these cases, see Dominic DeBrincat, “Discolored Justice: Blacks in New London County Courts, 1710–1750,” Connecticut History, 44, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 190–92. 72. In the end, though, it appears that Phillis did prevail. She seems to have established her freedom by 1778, when she married York Quamine in Preston’s First Church. Phillis Hill v. John Meech, NLC SC, March 1775, Files 20, no. 11; appeal of NLC CC, November 1773, AAC 3/14, no. 178. Preston First Church records, June 18, 1778, cited in Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 185. 73. Cuff Smith, Pension Application for ser vice in the Connecticut Line during the Revolutionary War, April 2, 1818, S36321, National Archives, Washington, D.C. State Pension Schedule for Cuffee Smith, June 20, 1820, NLC CC, African Americans Use File, box 13 (Pensions), folder 10, CLS. Henry P. Johnson, comp., Record

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85.

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of Service of Connecticut Men in the I. War of the Revolution; II. War of 1812; III. Mexican War (Hartford, 1889): 97, 326, 368, 369, 363. See David O. Wilson, Connecticut’s Black Soldiers, 1775–1783 (Chester, Conn.: Pequot Press, 1973). On the substitution and manumission, see Sweet, Bodies Politic, chapter 5. Andrew Champlin deposition, Holmes v. Brand, Stonington Court Records, evidence in the case Holmes v. Holmes, NLC SC, September 1784. Depositions of Thomas Brand and Samuel Brown, Stonington Court Records, evidence in the case Holmes v. Holmes, NLC SC, September 1784. NLC SC, November 1784, Papers by Subject, 46/20, no. 83. Deposition of Andrew Champlin, Stonington Court Records, evidence in the case Holmes v. Holmes, NLC SC, September 1784. Depositions of Thomas Brand and Samuel Brown, Stonington Court Records, evidence in the case Holmes v. Holmes, NLC SC, September 1784. Stonington Court Records contain a copy of a note from James Holmes and Jared Holmes promising to pay Thomas Brand (for value received) £8.7.6 lawful silver money within two months with interest; SCR, June 1785. Cudjo Holmes v. Oliver Holmes, NLC CC, June 1784, Files 190/9, no. 308. In December he was arrested for assaulting one Elihu Thompson in Stonington—with sticks and fists—and was sentenced by a justice’s court a few days later to be whipped six stripes and fined three shillings; Elihu Thompson v. Cudjo (slave of Oliver and John Holmes), NLC CC, June 1785, Files 193/16, no. 570. On the role of such activists see Sweet, Bodies Politic, chapter 6. Jonathan Edwards Jr. to Moses Brown, New Haven, March 4, 1793, Moses Brown Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society. Petition of Thomas Halsey to the General Court, New London (representing that he was a slave manumitted in 1779 by Jeremiah Halsey), NLC CC, March 1808, 4/11. For more on Thomas Halsey, see Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 170. Bill of sale for “a certain Negro Man, Named Sawney” by Guy Richards and Richard Deshon, executors of the estate of the late Capt. Peter Harris to Venture Smith, December 7, 1778, with endorsement from Venture Smith releasing his claim to Anderson, dated October 26, 1778, Glastonbury Town Records, copy at Connecticut Historical Society, pp. 205–7. Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 7–8, summarize evidence of Sawney Andersons’s 1763 marriage (Glastonbury vital records, November 2, 1763), the 1778 manumission agreement, and his purchase of land in Glastonbury during the Revolutionary War (Glastonbury Land Records, 8:363). Richard Deshon v. Venter Smith, NLC CC June 1785, Files 193/11, no. 277; the case was continued to NLC CC, November 1785, Files 194/10, no. 229, at which point Venture Smith defaulted. Sonny Anderson v. Cuff Chesborough (variant spellings include “Cheseboro” and “Cheseborough”), NLC CC, November 1781, Files 171/2, no. 12. See also New London Land Records, 23:19 (1781) and 23:32 (March 4, 1782).

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87. On these broader trends see Sweet, Bodies Politic. On New York, see Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991). On Pennsylvania, see Gary B. Nash, and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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4 “Owned by Negro Venture” Land and Liberty in the Life of Venture Smith Cameron B. Blevins

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I

N 1798 an ailing Venture Smith reflected as an elderly man on his life’s achievements: “My freedom is a privilege which nothing else can equal. . . . I am now possessed of more than one hundred acres of land, and three habitable dwelling houses.” 1 Smith’s careful listing of his property alongside the “privilege” of his freedom conveyed the immense value he placed on his hard-earned land. The former slave had spent the previous three decades buying, selling, mortgaging, and leasing various tracts of real estate in the Connecticut town of Haddam in order to navigate a world fraught with instability. Now nearing the end of his life, Smith could proudly declare himself a free and prosperous man—an identity that rested on the interlocking foundations of his property and his freedom. These entwined elements of land and liberty provide a lens through which to examine the life of Venture Smith. As a textual starting point, Smith’s Narrative vividly illustrates his continual reliance on property and real estate in the decades following his emancipation. Unfortunately, the factual validity of an autobiography can become clouded by personal bias, a faulty memory, or in the case of Smith, a white amanuensis and editor. In this volume, Vincent Carretta discusses the significant challenges of analyzing Smith’s Narrative as a historical text, challenges that arise in large part from issues of authorship. Carretta describes the overwhelming tension between the “white ·

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h i s t o ry envelope” of Smith’s amanuensis and the “black message” of Smith’s story, and he turns to a broader slave narrative tradition in order to analyze and engage this tension. Scholars wishing to explore Smith’s day-to-day actions, decisions, and motivations must similarly turn to other sources beyond his Narrative. Fortunately, Smith’s prolific exchange of real estate on Haddam Neck left an extensive paper trail in the form of town land deeds. Recorded deeds act much like cinematic previews—they concisely display the characters, setting, and essential plot of a bigger picture. The twenty-nine deeds directly mentioning Venture Smith outline a basic skeletal structure of his transactions, but, just like previews, they often provide as many tantalizing questions as concrete answers: Where exactly was the property? What kind of land was it? What did the boundaries actually look like? To answer these questions requires the kind of detailed geographical analysis that begs for a visual component, and Geographic Information System (GIS) computer software offers an ideal solution. As a powerful mapping program, GIS presents a formidable array of visual and analytical tools for historical research. In the case of Venture Smith’s real-estate transactions, GIS allows for an indepth investigation of his land, and this essay presents the results of my application of GIS technology to information gathered from the various deeds involved. After I had compiled the deeds, I placed each transaction geographically, using a combination of unchanged landmarks mentioned in the deeds (such as rivers, hills, or swamps) and property descriptions gathered from older or neighboring deeds. From there, I could digitally plot the boundaries of the tracts and overlay them onto existing maps. Once these basic layers were compiled, the GIS software was used to examine various characteristics of the property, such as topology, soil quality and hydrology, thus comprehensively evaluating the land’s location, value, and probable use under Smith.2 This digital toolkit, coupled with on-site exploration, allowed for a far greater depth of analysis than studying the historical records alone. In addition to conveying distinctive geographical information about Smith’s land holdings and real-estate transactions, an examination of his property also illuminates Smith as a businessman, neighbor, and family member. A greater understanding of Smith’s real-estate records gives voice to their own fascinating narrative, one that largely avoids the problematic issues of authorship and authenticity surrounding his written narrative. This essay follows this trail of deeds through the hills and meadows of Haddam Neck in order to examine the crucial link between land and liberty during Venture Smith’s life as a free man. ·

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“Owned by Negro Venture”

Ascension (1775–1784)

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In 1775 Venture Smith embarked on a new phase of his life. As the American colonies rolled inexorably into war, the middle-aged Smith moved his family from Eastern Long Island to Haddam Neck, Connecticut. The peninsular Haddam Neck marks the eastern boundary of the town of Haddam and its neighbor, East Haddam. The Connecticut River runs along its west edge, and the tributary Salmon River flows along its eastern border (see figure 4.1). Haddam Neck provided Smith with an ideal location to settle down with his family. Moving inland from the vulnerable Connecticut coastline offered an important measure of security, as hostile British naval forces maintained an active presence along the Connecticut coast for much of the war. The Salmon and Connecticut rivers supplied abundant fishing, along with access to transport and trade—either upriver to the bustling cities of Hartford and Middletown, or downriver to the state’s coastal ports and Long Island Sound.3

4.1 Middlesex County, Connecticut. GIS data provided by Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (CDEP), available at www.ct.gov/dep/ site/default.asp. All maps created by Cameron Blevins using ArcGIS software. ·

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Venture Smith completed his first real-estate purchase on Haddam Neck on March 3, 1775, when Abel Bingham (a local man who had previously employed Smith) sold “Venture a free negro resident in Haddam” a narrow, tenacre strip of land for £204 (figure 4.2). Beyond the land itself, the deed also awarded Smith important material concessions. In particular, it contained a clause granting him the “liberty to courd up his wood on the [River] Banks” of Bingham’s property, which facilitated one of Smith’s most renowned economic endeavors: cutting wood.5 Smith’s prowess as a logger would become the stuff of legends, and he himself touted this ability in his Narrative, repeatedly describing the “singular and wonderful labors I performed in cutting wood” (25).

4.2 Abel Bingham’s sale to Venture Smith, March 3, 1775. GPS readings allowed for placement of the dry dock, and the cart path is an approximation based on GPS readings, topographic features, and on-site exploration. Unless otherwise noted, all GIS data for maps provided by CDEP and the Center for Land Use Education and Recreation (CLEAR) at the University of Connecticut. Mark Hoover, Jason Miller, and Nick McNamara at CLEAR provided an invaluable digital elevation model, available at clear.uconn.edu/data/ct_dem/ct_dem.htm. ·

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“Owned by Negro Venture” In addition to granting him the right to store timber on Bingham’s property, the deed allowed the enterprising Smith to use “a cart path to the water” on his neighbor’s land. An old path that fits this description currently runs along the edge of the Salmon River. It is especially prominent near what archaeologists believe to be the remnants of a dry dock on Bingham’s former property, implying the likely location for Smith to “courd up his wood” (see figure 4.2). The archaeological evidence, in conjunction with the deed’s two concessions, conveys the significance of Venture Smith’s first real-estate transaction on Haddam Neck. The purchase granted him not only the means to transport his material, but also a place to store it at his neighbor’s dock. A short trip downriver would bring his lumber to the East Haddam Landing, a commercial and shipbuilding center on the Connecticut River, while a lengthier trip to the state’s familiar coastal ports opened up critical avenues into the lucrative Atlantic trading system.6 The timber clause was an important concession for Smith; without it the tract was far from valuable real estate. If Smith were to walk the length of his property from west to east, he would have begun near Dibble’s Creek, a small marshy stream. To the east, the land sloped steadily upward, with several dips and peaks, until plummeting the final hundred yards down a steep embankment to the Salmon River (see figure 4.3). This thin strip of property was a mere 165 feet wide, roughly the width of a soccer field. Nevertheless, purchasing it endowed Smith with both economic concessions and the symbolic currency of property ownership. This allowed him to get a figurative foot in the door of the Haddam Neck community by reassuring its residents of his status not as an itinerant former slave but a hard-working, independent landowner. For the next two years, Smith patiently worked on his small strip of land, waiting to build a permanent home until he had acquired more property and established critical lines of trust and credit. As Connecticut absorbed the rippling effects of the war, local communities became even more important. The historian Bruce Daniels writes that “at the center of the circles of the Revolutionary world would be the individual, followed by the society or neighborhood, the town, and so on until the final circle would inscribe the nation.” 7 This effect carried over into the marketplace as well. In The Roots of Rural Capitalism, Christopher Clark describes the importance of communal bonds in the countryside: “Relatively few families in the late eighteenth century owned all the necessary means of earning a livelihood. Reciprocal exchanges enabled them to borrow what they did not own . . . [which] created networks of obligation alongside those already created by kinship or neighborhood.” 8 ·

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4.3. Three-dimensional elevation model of Venture Smith’s property in 1775.

Such a personalized microeconomy compounded the significance of Venture Smith’s land ownership. In the words of the legal historian Bruce Mann, “It was the questions of debt, contract, and property that underlay everyday social interactions.” 9 Specifically, rural areas had never utilized official currency on a widespread basis, instead relying on an informal system of bartering and credit. A farmer would most likely buy two sheep from his neighbor not by using a two-pound note, but by exchanging it for six bushels of wheat, or for lending the neighbor a hand in erecting a new barn. The prevalence of this system of exchange meant that a land deed’s listed price could signify anything from actual money to material goods to expectations of future labor, all represented by a symbolic number given in pounds (or, later, dollars). Participants in the system could complete intricate, and expensive, transactions without a single note of currency exchanging hands. Smith’s situation in Haddam Neck exemplified this fluid system of communal exchange. In the East Haddam account book of Ezra Brainerd, there are multiple entries for Solomon Smith, Venture’s youngest son. These entries reveal, by extension, a glimpse of Venture’s activities as well. Solomon purchased cider, leather, beef, and candles from Brainerd and “paid” for his purchases with goods and labor. On varying occasions, he supplied Brainerd with oak and boat timber, “21⁄2 lb. cod fish,” or several days of mowing and haying for the merchant.10 The system prevailed even on the municipal level; the town of Haddam’s official tax system set price equivalents to allow its ·

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“Owned by Negro Venture” citizens to pay in wheat, rye, Indian corn, flax, or beef.11 As Venture worked in Haddam Neck between 1775 and 1777, he established critical lines of credit in order to operate within the community—a strategy that became increasingly important in the wake of significant wartime disruptions to the economy of the eastern seaboard. By March 14, 1777, Smith had saved enough money to purchase an adjacent seventy-acre plot from Abel Bingham for £140.12 Beyond extending his holdings to a total of eighty acres, the deed included another critical concession clause. This time, Smith was granted valuable fishing rights on the sand banks of Salmon Cove, which opened yet another door for the enterprising businessman. Fishing rights on the Salmon River were both lucrative and hotly contested—only four years previously, a legal dispute over similar fishing rights on the river rose all the way to the Connecticut Colonial Assembly.13 Fortunately, Smith was well prepared to take advantage of the adjacent river’s substantial bounty, as he had spent part of his life fishing for eels and lobsters in Long Island Sound and had even manned a whaling voyage (27, 29). Smith’s second real-estate purchase on Haddam Neck provided this experienced fisherman with a phenomenal opportunity for profit. In order to complete this major purchase, Venture Smith did what most people would do in such a situation: he took out a mortgage. To do so, he turned to a former employer named Timothy Chapman, mortgaging half the newly acquired property to him for £55.14 The Chapmans were one of the original founders of Haddam, and members of the clan proliferated across the region. Timothy Chapman was a leading figure in the town and would later serve as its representative in Connecticut’s General Assembly.15 Given his far-reaching familial connections, Chapman had likely discovered the hard-working Smith in the interconnected social and economic circles of southeastern Connecticut. Because of his personal relationship with Smith, Chapman trusted his former employee to repay the £55 loan. The mortgage, while financially significant to Smith, also embodied the remarkable level of trust he had gained within the community in a relatively short period of time. In terms of property value, Smith’s purchase significantly upgraded his former ten-acre plot. He could now expand by building a permanent home and establishing tracts for agriculture and livestock. More important, it gave him the financial means to permanently settle on Haddam Neck. His original ten-acre tract had allowed him a degree of flexibility—if the location turned out to be problematic, he could cut his losses and move his family. One can imagine the gravity with which Smith completed his major purchase in 1777. For the third time since his childhood, he had a permanent home to ·

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call his own. Now, as the legal owner of eighty acres of property (and with a mortgage, moreover), he had fully invested himself in the Haddam Neck community. Venture Smith was there to stay. Five months later, the enterprising Smith again extended his property holdings when he and a man named Stephen Knowlton jointly purchased Francis Chapman’s forty-eight-acre tract for £250.16 Seven months later, on March 8, 1778, Smith bought the property outright from Knowlton for the same sum. The fleeting nature of Knowlton’s role suggests that he acted as an intermediary (sometimes referred to as a “straw-man” in land deeds). Perhaps Smith needed the legitimization that came with a white business partner, or perhaps he helped Knowlton cut lumber in compensation (Knowlton shortly thereafter advertised the sale of several hundred cords of wood on the banks of Salmon Cove). Regardless of the motive, once the two men had secured the property Knowlton relinquished his legal ownership, leaving the middleaged Smith with sole possession of a sprawling 128 acres17 (see figure 4.4). In order to appreciate Venture Smith’s achievements in the real-estate market, one needs to understand the substantial dimensions of 128 acres of land.

4.4. Venture Smith’s property, March 1778. ·

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“Owned by Negro Venture” As a matter of spatial perspective, it is almost half the total area of New York City’s Central Park. Jackson Main’s social and economic study of Connecticut provides a basis for comparing Smith to his contemporaries. By examining probate records, Main delineates categories of property ownership and finds that Connecticut’s “average mature farmer” (men like Smith, with teenage or young adult children) owned between 80 and 120 acres. Smith’s 128 acres placed him just above this “average” level and well above the “adequate” level of less than 80 acres. By Main’s standards, Smith had achieved a substantial level of material comfort.18 Smith’s achievement becomes even more impressive when we consider the context of his situation. The vast majority of his peers enjoyed an array of benefits that were denied to Smith. Most white farmers relied on a support system of extended family members, while Smith had not seen his parents since he was kidnapped over forty years before. Many of his white peers enjoyed some form of inheritance, which often proved instrumental in raising families of their own. In contrast, Smith had bought his freedom at the age of about thirty-six, and had worked himself ragged in order to emancipate his family. Despite these handicaps, Smith equaled and surpassed the property acquisitions of many white landowners. In 1778, while an escalating war engulfed the fledgling American nation, Venture Smith resided on Haddam Neck with his wife, Meg, and their sons, Cuff and Solomon. He invested a fair portion of his time and energy in a variety of economic projects, including fishing and trade. He could draw only on his and Meg’s labor, as Solomon, who was about five, was too young to work, and his other son, Cuff, would soon join the American ranks in the Revolutionary War. Given these factors, Smith faced a two-pronged problem: even with his ingenuity and legendary work ethic, he had far more land than he had hands (or time) to work it. On July 1, Smith adroitly solved this problem when he sold twelve acres to two free black men named Whacket and Peter for £6619 (see figure 4.5). The historical record from this period largely denies black participants an identity, and consequently those documents listing African Americans rarely include a surname. Although this unfortunate pattern holds true for Whacket and Peter, local record-keeping contributes to a rudimentary portrait of the two men and their interaction with Venture Smith. The previous year, Whacket had gained his freedom after the death of his master, Daniel Brainerd.20 In the spring of 1778, he and Peter married two free black women named Base and Peg, respectively, in a double ceremony at the East Haddam First Congregational Church.21 Less than two months later, Whacket and ·

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4. 5. Venture Smith’s sale to Whacket and Peter, July 1, 1778.

Peter again acted in tandem and brought their new brides to Haddam Neck, where they jointly purchased the twelve-acre tract of land from Venture Smith. While the transaction offered the four newlyweds the opportunity to live and own property together, Smith’s sale presumably brought him tangible benefits as well: four additional laborers for his extensive land. The real-estate sale to Whacket and Peter illustrated Venture Smith’s ongoing interaction with other African Americans. Smith describes in his Narrative buying the freedom of several slaves and employing them in various business projects (27, 29). Historical documentation supports his recollection. Mere months after selling land to Peter and Whacket, Smith purchased a slave named Sawney from the estate of Captain Peter Harris for £40 and twenty bushels of grain. Following the transaction, Sawney likely joined Whacket, Base, Peter, and Peg in working on Smith’s land. In October 1778, after Sawney had sufficiently paid off his debt to Smith, he was presented with his certificate of freedom.22 In buying Sawney, Smith may have drawn on the West African practice of pawnship, whereby individuals served as a form of collateral for debts. ·

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“Owned by Negro Venture” Although it is disconcerting to think of Smith, a former slave, using fellow African Americans as indentured servants, pawnship was distinct from slavery in that the employers “recognized they were engaging in a time-limited contract.” 23 The practice was especially prevalent among African merchants along the Gold Coast. From the time of Smith’s capture by African slave traders in 1738–39 to the time of his sale to Robinson Mumford on the coast, the young child may have witnessed this practice of pawnship. Years later, Smith incorporated his memory of an African business practice into his navigation of the New England economy, a process that reinforces Robert Desrochers’s portrait of Smith as a bicultural man who constructed a uniquely African American identity.24 Venture Smith vividly remembered his communal life as a child in Africa, and used financial transactions to partially recreate this social network. The towns of Haddam and East Haddam contained a miniscule black population. Records from 1774 reveal only thirteen blacks living in the town of Haddam (0.75 percent of the town’s total population), and sixty-five residing in neighboring East Haddam (2.3 percent of the total). The densest black communities in the state were concentrated in coastal towns such as Stratford, New London, Fairfield, and New Haven. In total, Connecticut’s free blacks comprised less than 1 percent of Connecticut’s total population. Surrounded by an overwhelmingly white population, Smith utilized a real-estate transaction (through his sale to Whacket and Peter), along with a traditional African practice of pawnship (through his transaction with Sawney), as a way to forge his own small black community on Haddam Neck and reclaim a fragment of his former life.25 In 1780, Whacket sold his portion of the land (a little under six acres) to an East Haddam man named Amos White.26 White’s acquisition marked the commencement of a series of joint real-estate purchases by himself and Captain James Green. A highly esteemed member (and future selectman) of the East Haddam community, Green owned a blacksmith shop at the East Haddam landing where he manufactured muskets. His shop, likely aided by his military background, did a booming business supplying the Continental Army, and Green may have invested his wartime profits in real-estate speculation.27 Much like Green, White was a prolific entrepreneur and worked varyingly as a merchant and self-described “gold-smith and jeweler.”28 White was an equally prolific member of the community, and he filled various public posts over the years. He played a surprisingly active role in the local black community as well. Beyond his land purchase from Whacket, White served as the administrator for the estate of a black man named Cuff from East Haddam, and he was listed alongside Whacket and Peter as one of the deceased’s creditors.29 ·

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4.6. Venture Smith’s sales to James Green and Amos White, February, 1781. White and Green subsequently purchased two pieces of land from Venture Smith on February 1 and 27, 1781 (see figure 4.6). The two tracts were located on the southern and western edges of Smith’s property and sold for £144 and £20, respectively.30 Significantly, Venture Smith’s sale marked the first time a deed documented him with the surname Smith. The social stature of White and Green and the use of Smith’s surname carried a deep symbolic importance and reveals the remarkable ease with which Smith moved within and between the region’s social and economic realms. Green and White were both men of prominence—as active businessman who served various political posts in East Haddam, they were respected leaders in the community. Smith’s business relationship with these two men suggests that he entered into the real-estate contract on a level footing, as a shrewd and cautious landowner. Despite decades of bondage and a lifetime of injustice, Venture Smith emerged to put his mark on a land deed that finally established him, at least for that wintry Thursday in 1781, as a man among equals. In December of the following year Peter sold back to Venture Smith his six-acre portion of land for £20.31 For several years Smith maintained this level of real estate, and his name does not appear in the Haddam Town Land ·

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Records again until 1785. During this same period, rampant inflation and fiscal instability accompanied the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. Connecticut faced financial disaster: state currency depreciated at an even faster rate than Continental currency, and by 1780 “the state’s fiscal mechanism collapsed.” 32 In Smith’s hometown of Haddam, meeting records illustrate a microcosm of the state’s downward spiral. First, the town selectmen increased taxes to provision troops. When required by the state legislature to fill its soldier quota, the town government was repeatedly forced to raise financial incentives in order to entice enlistees. These failed, and the town ultimately petitioned the state legislature for a pardon, because it was simply unable to supply men and provisions. Any real-estate transactions in this economic climate carried an inherent risk, and like a poker player riding out a streak of bad hands, Smith carefully stayed put.33 Smith led his own personal revolution during the war for American independence. His was not a military struggle against Great Britain, a battle against tyranny and oppression, or an ideological rebellion against the hypocrisy of the founding fathers. Instead, it was a monumental effort against an economic and social system that placed seemingly insurmountable obstacles in his path. His struggle was to obtain crucial financial security that would provide for his family’s well-being. Acre by acre, he achieved a degree of prosperity and social status almost impossible to imagine for a former slave. Less than two decades removed from bondage, Smith could walk out of a house he had built, with a family he had freed, onto an expansive estate he had purchased. By the end of the war, Smith had built the material foundation of success that would distinguish his story for the next two centuries.

Perseverance (1785–1790) In 1784 the Connecticut State Legislature passed groundbreaking legislation to address the issue of slavery: “All persons who now are or hereafter shall be possessed of any Children born after the first Day of March 1784 . . . by Law shall be freed at the Age of twenty five Years.” 34 The emancipative legislation, while hopelessly timid in the view of antislavery advocates, symbolized a shift for the state’s future. The bill fit into a broader pattern during the postRevolutionary years, as northern states began taking steps toward gradual manumission. Although Venture Smith and his family already enjoyed their legal freedom, the legislative landmark symbolized a monumental turning point in their world and coincided with a crossroads in their own lives. ·

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h i s t o ry In 1785 Smith officially reentered the real-estate market when he finally paid off his eight-year-old, £55 mortgage to Timothy Chapman.35 On January 25, 1786, he repurchased the two parcels of land he had previously sold to James Green and Amos White, increasing his property holdings by nearly twenty-nine acres for the price of £60.36 The same day, he obtained a loan from Green by mortgaging half the newly purchased property to him for £40. The deed specified that Smith would have one year to repay the mortgage.37 In effect, Smith was taking a chance in the real-estate market by betting that the additional land would provide enough extra income to offset both its price and the mortgage needed to buy it. A decade-long veteran of the regional economy, he felt that now was the time to expand his land holdings. Smith refused to slip into the complacency of middle age, and instead took aggressive command of his financial future. Even as Venture Smith deftly maneuvered through the real-estate market, his former owner found himself in the midst of a financial tailspin. In 1786 Colonel Oliver Smith petitioned the Connecticut Assembly for an Act of Insolvency to save him from debtor’s prison. Oliver had entered into the lucrative West India trade and, through a combination of storm-wrecked ships, wartime naval disruption, and depreciating Continental currency, managed to lose upwards of £1,000. Now “rendered wholly unable to pay his just & honest debts . . . without hope and nothing before him but the dreary prospects of a prison life,” he pleaded with the Assembly for a ten-year moratorium on his payments.38 For Venture, who still harbored resentment toward Oliver for charging him “such an unreasonable price” for his freedom (24), the situation reeked of irony. A white man with a colonel’s rank had plummeted into financial ruin, while his former slave had shrewdly utilized both land and ocean to become a prosperous businessman. Meanwhile, Venture Smith continued his prolific land dealings through the end of the decade. On August 19, 1787, he granted a twenty-year lease to William Ackley of East Haddam. The deed referred to an island off Beaver Point in the Salmon River, along with river flats to the east, where Smith and Ackley agreed to construct a fishing seine. The two men divided the entire enterprise equally, each responsible for half the labor and half the material. This included lead, hair for ropes, twine for nets, a boat, and general repairs. Subsequently, the seine would “furnish fishers equally & to lease each one half the fish that may be caught.” In short, Smith and Ackley shouldered identical loads of risk and reward.39 The deed is noteworthy on several levels. Materially, the real-estate transaction opened up an additional avenue for profit. Such an undertaking under·

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“Owned by Negro Venture” scored the remarkable energy and initiative that Smith (at this point approximately sixty years old) employed as an entrepreneur. William Ackley was a member of one of the oldest families in the region and a remarkably wellread and educated man; the fact that he would legally bind himself to such an enterprise further illuminates Smith’s rising social standing.40 The contract’s careful insistence on Ackley’s legal responsibility also reveals Smith’s alert business instincts. By utilizing the written power of a land deed, in the form of a “covenant of lease,” the ever-careful Smith obtained a means of insurance. On the brink of a significant economic undertaking, he turned to the familiar legal process of a real-estate transaction in order to safeguard against financial loss or duplicity. In the spring of 1788 Smith embarked on a series of complex land dealings with Amos White. On March 17, he purchased a roughly five-acre strip of land from White for £30.41 Two weeks later, he mortgaged a separate twentytwo-acre piece to White for £60.42 The mortgage deed set a two-year deadline to repay White, with interest. Smith managed to beat the deadline by a scant eleven days; he paid off the mortgage, along with £7 4s. interest, on March 20, 1790.43 At this point, the transactions with White appear relatively straightforward—Smith needed capital, so he mortgaged part of his property and eventually paid it off. The very same day he paid off the mortgage, however, he officially sold the same property to White outright for £67 6s., the identical price of his mortgage payment plus the interest 44 (see figure 4.7). The series of deeds is a tangle of sales, purchases, mortgages, and deadlines. In addition, a tiny clause in Smith’s final sale to White further complicated matters by granting “one fourth part of all the English grain growing thereon” to White. This stipulation likely guaranteed Smith’s claim to three-quarters of the year’s future wheat harvest, into which he had already invested a large portion of time and energy. Unfortunately for Smith and other farmers in the region, disaster struck in a matter of months when a massive hailstorm swept across the state. Elisha Niles, a local schoolteacher, recorded the event in his diary: “A most violent Storm of Hail destroyed the greatest part of the wheat rye corn oats & flax & in short almost the whole of every vegetable that fell in its way . . . the hail was of different shape & size some were as large as quails eggs, & was attended with a strong wind almost blowing as hurricane which broke & tore up great numbers of trees.” 45 An episode such as the 1790 hailstorm highlighted the critical, and tenuous, nature of agriculture to Venture Smith. Although he was a skilled businessman who engaged in fishing, trade, and woodcutting, a wide body of ·

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4.7. Venture Smith’s transactions with Amos White, 1788–1790. evidence illustrates his agrarian reliance on his land—a reflection of the widespread practice of economic diversification in rural New England. Beyond supplying his family with sustenance or profit, crops were also used in lieu of a dependable currency. For example, Smith himself had signed a contract in December 1778 to pay “Ten Bushels of Good and Merchantable Rye and Ten Bushels of Good and Merchantable Indian Corn” to the estate of Captain Peter Harris. Seven years later, the administrators of Harris’s estate brought Smith to court to force him to deliver the grain.46 Archival documentation gives us some indication of what Smith was growing on his land, and a physical examination of his property augments an understanding of his farming activities as well. While much of the land on the banks of the Salmon River slopes steeply downward, other areas of his estate contained fertile soil for raising crops. The northwestern edge of Smith’s property runs through a wide, flat meadow whose soil quality suggests an ideal location for farming (see figure 4.8). Archaeologists Lucianne Lavin and Marc Banks supplied further evidence for the field’s agricultural use when they excavated the foundation of what they believe to be a barn on the eastern edge of the meadow. In addition to this first-rate farmland, Smith ·

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4.8. Soil quality of Venture Smith’s land. Soil data from United States Geological Survey (USGS). tended an orchard—the nineteenth-century historian Henry M. Selden describes Smith’s orchard, as does one land deed that mentions “buildings fences & fruit trees” on Smith’s land.47 Today a small grove of apple trees grows on land that Smith owned, and may be the final remnants of his welldocumented orchard.48 Beyond crops and produce, Venture Smith’s land supplied him with other opportunities. Like most rural New Englanders, Smith possessed a wide array of livestock. In 1790 he became involved in a legal dispute with a local man named Jonathan Kilborn, and in enforcement of the court’s orders, Deputy Sheriff Zacharias Chapman confiscated from Smith “one Yoak of Oxen two 2 year old (past) Steers, one Cow & ten Sheep & five Shoats.” 49 Although a substantial loss, these animals presumably constituted only part of Smith’s total livestock holdings. They would have grazed on hardier forage crops, such as grass and clover, likely planted by Smith on the hillier sections of his land that were less suitable for growing rye, wheat, or maize. In contrast to farming, raising livestock was a relatively low-maintenance affair. While cash crops necessitated a substantial investment of time and land, ·

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h i s t o ry grazing animals required less labor and could prosper on lower-quality soil. For these reasons livestock played a vital role within the rural economy. In fact, Bruce C. Daniels estimates that by 1779 “there were over seventeen domestic animals per adult in the colony. The average farmer possessed ten cattle, sixteen sheep, six pigs, two horses, and a team of oxen.” Jackson Turner Main calculated that in Connecticut “farmers derived most of their income from livestock, which made up one-third of their personal wealth.” And, as we have seen, beef was one of the commodities that the town of Haddam accepted in payment for taxes. Smith used his land to raise a variety of animals, which he relied on for sustenance and profit; they were also a critical component of the region’s dominant economic system.50 By the winter of 1790, Venture Smith was a rapidly aging man who likely felt the advancing effects of a lifetime of strenuous labor. Over the past fifteen years, he had achieved the unimaginable by building up a veritable estate on Haddam Neck. He lived with a loving wife and their family, continued to pursue an array of entrepreneurial endeavors, and enjoyed the satisfaction that came with hard-earned prosperity. Beyond the bushels of grain, cords of wood, and barrels of produce, Smith managed to effectively negotiate the broader economic and social world of post-Revolutionary Connecticut. In part through the security of his property and his prolific real-estate transactions, the onetime slave had become a respected, successful, and independent businessman.

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Decline (1791–1805) From 1791 until his death in 1805, Venture Smith purchased no more land, but embarked on a series of property sales to reduce his holdings. As an elderly man with a rapidly degenerating body, Smith sold pieces of land he could no longer work in order to obtain much-needed capital to support himself and his family. He began this process on June 17, 1793, when he paid off his £40 mortgage to James Green, six years overdue.51 The two men had presumably come to an agreement on an extension of the payment deadline, and a separate land sale from Smith to Green on the same day ( June 17) was likely part of this arrangement. For the price of £26 15s., Green purchased two pieces of land totaling seventeen acres from Smith.52 Four years later, Smith sold another two tracts of land, this time to a wealthy man named Silvester Dudley.53 As the eighteenth century drew to a close, Smith began the process of transferring an inheritance to his son Solomon. On October 20, 1798, Venture sold ·

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“Owned by Negro Venture” him a modest three-and-half-acre parcel of land for £17 16s. 10d.54 This transfer reflects the decline of Smith’s physical abilities, as he began entrusting more and more responsibility to Solomon in managing the family’s estate. Through a real-estate transaction, Smith provided a means of inheritance and established Solomon as an independent property-holder. Sales such as these were extremely common in eighteenth-century New England, where rural families utilized real estate as the primary form of inheritance. In particular, elderly African Americans often sold their land (most often to a family member) while retaining the legal right to reside on the property until their death.55 Thus this transaction reflects a broader pattern of familial property inheritance; in a more immediate sense, the sale also laid the preliminary groundwork for one of the most important real-estate transactions of Smith’s life. In the late fall of 1798, an ailing Smith entered into a property contract that would propel elements of his past, present, and future into a towering collision. On November 24 he mortgaged all of his property, “containing above one hundred acres” to Edward Smith, the son of his former owner, for £200.56 Edward then immediately transferred the mortgage to the town of Haddam, in exchange for a contractual obligation to pay all of Venture and Meg’s outstanding debts and provide them with “sufficient meat drink & Clouthing bedding Phisik houseroom & firewood” to meet their needs for the remainder of their lives.57 In order to understand the significance of the mortgage, it is necessary to understand the legal context surrounding it. In 1702 the Connecticut Legislature passed a law addressing freed slaves who had “become a charge and burthen to the towns where they have served.” 58 The act stipulated that former owners must provide financially for their freed slaves; if the town ended up supporting the freed slave, it could recover from the former owner “all the charge and cost they were at for such relief.” 59 It is unclear whether by 1798 Venture Smith had become such a “charge and burthen” on the town of Haddam, but he certainly did suffer from a variety of ailments. In his Narrative he describes himself as “bowed down with age and hardship. . . . My eye-sight has gradually failed, till I am almost blind . . . for many years I have been much pained and troubled with an ulcer on one of my legs” (31). Such infirmities might well have resulted in substantial doctor’s fees and other costs, and the town had the legal right to hold Edward Smith liable for these expenses. On the other hand, Venture Smith was a successful entrepreneur, the legal owner of a substantial estate, and a well respected and long-standing figure in the Haddam community—perhaps the antithesis of an impoverished, socially isolated former slave sapping a town’s resources. ·

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h i s t o ry The deeds’ complexities and significance requires us to peer through the eyes of each participant at the conclusion of the transactions. Edward went to sleep on the night of November 24, 1798, seemingly no poorer than when he had woken up that morning, as he had both paid £200 to Venture and immediately received an identical sum from Haddam’s selectmen. Nevertheless, the thirty-eight-year-old found himself saddled with more than a hundred acres of mortgaged property and a legally binding contractual requirement to support an aging couple until their deaths. Like Edward, Haddam’s selectmen likely went to their homes that night with mixed emotions. The town selectmen had given up £200, but had also obtained a minutely detailed commitment from Edward Smith to provide financial and material support for one of their community’s long-standing families. Finally, Venture Smith returned to his home on Haddam Neck £200 richer than when he left, and with the legal assurance that the son of his former owner would subsidize all of his family’s living expenses. The transactions on that November day highlighted a number of complex relationships in Venture Smith’s life. After living in Haddam for over thirty years, Smith had undoubtedly formed strong connections with his neighbors. Real-estate transactions with men such as Timothy Chapman, Stephen Knowlton, James Green, Amos White, and Silvester Dudley point to a substantial degree of involvement in the community. These men saw fit to deal with Smith as both a buyer and a seller of land, to extend him mortgages, and to raise their crops and their families alongside him. Particularly in rural towns, personal relationships such as these created the foundation for a strikingly interwoven and tight-knit social environment. The 1798 deeds also shed light on Venture Smith’s complex relationship with the family of his former owner. Given Oliver’s ongoing financial troubles, 1798 proved a critical year in his family’s relationship with Venture Smith. Three weeks before Venture’s mortgage, Edward Smith had signed a certificate on Venture’s behalf confirming the authenticity of his soon-to-be published narrative. Nevertheless, the late November deeds proved disastrous for a man already straining under his father’s mass of debt. Now specifically required by the mortgage to pay Venture and Meg’s existing debts and future expenses, Edward collapsed under the financial burden. In September 1801 Edward’s frustrated creditors issued a commission of bankruptcy in the Connecticut Gazette that gave him eleven days to surrender himself. 60 Saddled with obligations to Venture and Meg, the forty-oneyear-old Edward was forced into a humiliating and glaringly public state of bankruptcy. ·

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“Owned by Negro Venture” It is tempting to interpret Venture’s transactions with Edward as the former slave returning, like a specter from the past, to exact one final dose of revenge from the family that had held him in bondage more than forty years before. Given the detail with which Venture chronicled in his Narrative a vast array of often decades-old slights and affronts, it is conceivable he took a degree of satisfaction from his role in Edward’s bankruptcy. Nevertheless, Venture was a man who considered the well-being of his family his first priority. Their fortunes were now tied tightly to Edward’s, and his bankruptcy effectively dried up their stream of financial support. Instead of moral retribution, the struggles of Oliver and Edward Smith highlight Venture’s complicated relationship with his former owner. Venture engaged the Smith family in a nuanced dance, a push and pull of how much he could extract from the interaction. Like most of their interactions, the result was neither a wholesale victory nor an unequivocal defeat for either side. During the winter of 1801, Venture Smith lived a day-to-day existence with Solomon and Meg on Solomon’s small plot of land, waiting for the outcome of Edward Smith’s bankruptcy saga. At this point, the sale of three and a half acres to Solomon three years before became particularly significant. Venture was in a vulnerable position, as a black man who had lost the security blanket of property ownership. By selling his son a parcel of land, he had prudently created an escape hatch for himself and Meg. Meanwhile, William Lord and Stephen Brown (the assignees of Edward’s estate) had seized Venture Smith’s former property. On April 3, 1802, Edward managed to reacquire the property, still mortgaged to the town of Haddam, for $2.50. Nine days later, Edward finally extricated himself from all obligations in Haddam, when Solomon paid off his father’s mortgage at the drastically reduced price of £51, or about one-quarter of the original mortgage. The deed intended to “exonerate & leave harmless sd. Edward Smith from all the debts there may now be due from sd. negro Venture.” 61 But Edward’s ultimate exoneration had come with the steep price of bankruptcy. The conclusion of Venture Smith’s series of land deeds with Edward Smith marked a phenomenally important achievement. The financial windfall and guarantee of future assistance that accompanied the mortgage undoubtedly helped his family’s immediate survival. In the longer term, his transactions with Edward Smith enabled Venture to provide an inheritance to his son. Solomon, not Venture, paid off the mortgage, in effect anointing himself the sole owner of the Smith estate. The transaction allowed for a symbolic transfer of familial responsibility along with a material form of inheritance for Solomon—a luxury Smith himself never enjoyed. Smith did not leave a recorded ·

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h i s t o ry will, but seems rather to have turned to real-estate transactions in order to pass on the backbone of his life’s achievements: his land. Although significant for his family’s survival, this period marked a low point for the immensely proud and hard-working man. Once a towering figure of propertied achievement, Venture Smith was now the landless dependant of his youngest son, and still owed several debts to local merchants.62 His frustration over the loss of status and property ultimately affected his interactions with his son, as Venture testily criticized Solomon at the end of his Narrative, writing that he wished the young man and his brother, Cuff, “had walked in the way of their father” (31). By 1804 their relationship had deteriorated to the point where a furious Venture fled Solomon’s care, forcing his equally furious son to take out a notice in the local newspaper: “Whereas Venture Smith, my father, has departed from my house, and refuses to return and receive a comfortable support, which I am willing to provide for him. All persons are forbidden to harbour or trust him on my account, as I shall not pay any expence or contract of his making.” 63 Venture’s dispute with his son paints a heartrending portrait of a stubbornly proud man in the twilight of his life. Yet despite their antagonistic relationship, land deeds from this period illustrate Solomon’s ongoing support of his parents. In 1806 Haddam’s town selectmen granted Solomon ten acres of land in recognition of “fifty pounds received of Solomon Smith in the support of Venter Smith his father.” 64 While Solomon may not have lived up to his father’s lofty expectations, he provided important material aid for his aging parents, and as a form of repayment the town of Haddam allotted him a modest tract of property. The deed illuminates the fragile dynamics within a family struggling to maintain its weakening grasp on financial security in the face of economic downturn. On a rainy spring day in May 1804, Venture Smith completed his final official real-estate transaction, when he sold his half of the fishing seine to William Ackley for one dollar. The nominal price indicates that the deed constituted a dying gift to his long-time business partner, who kept the property until his own death nearly thirty years later. At this point, the elderly Smith continued to reside in the care of his family. The following year, in September 1805, Venture Smith died at the age of about seventy-seven. Pallbearers carried his body across the Salmon River and buried him in a plot at the East Haddam First Congregational Church. Four years later, Meg died at the age of seventy-nine and was buried next to him. Several of their descendants eventually joined him in the East Haddam church’s cemetery. Their presence bears silent witness to Smith’s most enduring property transaction. By pro·

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curing a burial plot in the quiet cemetery, Venture Smith staked out an enduring claim to his family’s independence that survives to this day.65

The inscription on Smith’s headstone, now worn and weathered by time, reads “Sacred to the Memory of Venture Smith an African tho the son of a King he was kidnapped & sold as a slave but by his industry he acquired Money to purchase his Freedom.” It tells succinctly of the enslavement and manumission of a remarkable man, but that is only part of Smith’s story. There is no mention of his forty years as a free man. The first half of Smith’s life embodied the wrenching hardship of slavery and the uplifting triumph of emancipation, but it was the second half of his life that led to the lasting fame he attained with the publication of his Narrative. During this time, he achieved the economic and social success that enabled his story to be published. An intertwined relationship between the abstract notion of liberty and the tangible reality of property allowed Smith to navigate the turbulent currents of a precarious and racially divided world. An understanding of the contextual framework in which Smith operated is crucial to an appreciation of the scope and significance of his achievements as a property owner. Smith’s move to Haddam Neck in 1775 coincided with the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and it is possible that Smith drew some inspiration from the heady rhetoric of the generation that expounded on ideals of freedom and natural rights. The historian Gary Nash notes that “[many] blacks imbibed the ideology of natural and inalienable rights and fit the ringing phrases of the day to their own situation.” 66 The editorial preface to Smith’s Narrative embraced this Revolutionary rhetoric by referring to Smith as “a Franklin and a Washington” (iv). Yet Smith likely felt the frustrations of so many African Americans over the yawning chasm between principle and action when it came to extending the nation’s ideals of freedom to its black inhabitants. During this time, America’s black populace waited in vain for the nation’s actions to catch up to the lofty height of its ideals. In fact, Vincent Carretta points out that Smith pointedly ignores, to the point of actively erasing, any mention of the war and its political aftermath in his Narrative. The nation’s infancy was a period of tremendous upheaval, as demographic shifts accompanied a restructuring of traditional socioeconomic orders. States across New England enacted gradual emancipative acts during the 1780s and 1790s, exemplified by the Connecticut legislature’s 1784 manumission law that effectively spelled out a death sentence for chattel slavery in the ·

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h i s t o ry state. In this volume, John Sweet describes the shift in public sympathies away from the rights of slaveholders and toward the rights of the enslaved during this period. In Sweet’s opinion, what made Venture Smith’s own emancipative experience unusual was not the self-reliant nature of his manumission, but its timing. Decades later, a broad transformation in attitudes toward the institution of slavery helped thousands of slaves follow in Smith’s footsteps to obtain their freedom. Paradoxically, the ideological shift away from slavery concurrently served to harden strains of prejudice against free black women and men. White citizens, many already anxious about the social disruption taking place, viewed any assertion of black independence as a direct threat to their hegemony and responded accordingly. As Sweet has written elsewhere: “The colonial legacy of white preeminence did not, in the early years of the Republic, simply survive. It took on new life. As northern blacks became increasingly independent, prosperous, and respectable . . . whites responded by drawing ever more rigid lines of color.” 67 In fact, Joanne Pope Melish argues that gradual emancipation acts served to build a new conception of race, in a process that required ever more rigid systems of subjugation and control over New England’s black communities.68 Although many New Englanders no longer supported the institution of slavery, they remained deeply suspicious of independent blacks such as Venture Smith. By the end of the eighteenth century, a new national ideology had emerged, one predicated on an evolving notion of race. Venture Smith faced a world that no longer tolerated his success, one that increasingly saw him as the threatening vanguard of a growing free black population. For a man such as Smith, who had worked so hard as a black man in a white world to become a successful property owner, the nation’s growing tide of racial prejudice was deeply embittering. He specifically recounted an episode during this period when a wealthy white merchant unfairly cheated him, lamenting, “But Captain Hart was a white gentleman, and I a poor African, therefore it was all right, and good enough for the black dog” (30). Against this backdrop of growing prejudice, land and property allowed Venture Smith to stake a claim to liberty for himself and his family. The symbolic significance of property ownership cannot be overstated, as the idealized image of an individualistic property owner harnessing the power of the land remains inextricably woven into the fabric of the American tradition. Particularly in rural eighteenth-century Connecticut, perhaps no other marker of accomplishment was more important. A property holder not only became distinguished as productive and hard-working, but also enjoyed a ·

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“Owned by Negro Venture” perceived degree of moral superiority as well.69 In many ways, Venture Smith embodied the popularized characteristics of a traditional Yankee. He was a frugal and industrious landowner, trusting in his legendary work ethic and resourcefulness as a jack-of-all-trades to provide for himself, his wife, and his children. Yet he also fundamentally refuted the standard vision of a white family carving out a living within a small town or village. Instead, Smith’s status as a black man and former slave revealed the fissures and contradictions within the conventional image of a whitewashed New England occupied by free laborers. Given the events of Venture Smith’s life, ideals of property ownership took on even greater personal significance. To be owned by a fellow human being is to endure a humiliating subjugation, the effects of which reverberate for generations. Once emancipated, Smith initiated a critical healing process through his purchase and ownership of property. Real estate supplied him with an effective means of self-empowerment, a way to shed the lasting marginalization of his former enslavement. In his essay in this volume, John Sweet describes the “social death” imposed on slaves by owners who restricted their participation in the sphere of civil society. By living on land he freely and legally possessed, Smith began to reclaim a critical sense of ownership over himself and escape the social death of enslavement. Smith’s race and background hampered his ability to navigate a rural society where communal relations provided the building blocks of not just social but also economic advancement. Real-estate transactions and land ownership became a critical component of his survival. Christopher Clark describes the “complex tangle of unsettled debts that crisscrossed the [New England] countryside,” necessitating strong local relationships built on trust.70 Within this convoluted system, intensely personal transactions based on kinship and familial bonds kept the rural machine running smoothly. In an environment where handshakes often took the place of signatures, participants such as Smith were vulnerable to exploitation. Smith bought, sold, and owned substantial tracts of land, and through these transactions he carefully built up an important reservoir of trust, which in turn opened up an array of otherwise unavailable opportunities. Elsewhere in this volume, Anna Mae Duane describes the complex role that money played in Smith’s life as a placeholder for familial love and loss. Throughout his Narrative, Smith equates events, especially traumatic events, in starkly monetary terms. Given the fluid interchangeability of real estate with money in rural America, it is tempting to argue that land occupied a similarly problematic position within Smith’s worldview. Duane notes, however, that ·

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h i s t o ry money ultimately failed Smith, as it could not prevent (and in some cases, helped cause) the deaths of his father, son, and daughter. Money was a capricious friend, to be lost, stolen, and devalued throughout the course of Smith’s life. In comparison, land was a faithful companion, one that provided Smith a home, an income, a reputation, and an inheritance. Land gave his family the security that his money repeatedly failed to deliver. Land laid the material foundation for Venture Smith’s remarkable success and helped him survive decades of financial blows, personal loss, and eventual physical infirmity. Smith utilized his estate to the fullest possible extent. Its trees provided him with not only an orchard, but the opportunity to exploit his legendary talents as a woodcutter. The nearby Salmon River allowed him to set up a fishing seine and simultaneously granted him access to the trading and transportation arteries of the Connecticut River, Long Island Sound, and the wider Atlantic seaboard. The soil itself produced a variety of crops for sustenance and sale while supporting Smith’s array of livestock. He also utilized his land as a form of currency by selling, buying, mortgaging, and leasing pieces of property to fit his changing financial needs. Perhaps most importantly, Smith could stand on his land and breathe in the scent of the trees, the river, and the soil, and exhale a single word: home. Venture Smith’s real-estate transactions anchored him within the swirling tempests of early America and played a fundamental role in the continuation of his life’s story. Examining this narrative of land and property contributes to an understanding of the actions and motivations underlying his struggle to lay claim to the ideals of ownership and liberty. Without these transactions, he might have never achieved such a remarkable degree of stability and prosperity in a world marked by inequity and uncertainty. His success eventually contributed to the publication of his Narrative, and instead of becoming one of millions of lost African American voices, he and his story have endured.

Notes The essay’s title is from the Haddam Town Land Records, Town Hall, Haddam, Conn. (hereafter cited as HTLR), 13:252. My essay would not have been possible without a host of contributors. Pomona College and the Hart Institute for American History supplied the incredible initial opportunity for me to research Venture Smith as an second-year undergraduate. Helena Wall and Rita Roberts graciously served as phenomenal senior thesis readers, and Samuel Yamashita provided four years of mentoring. On the technical side, Warren Roberts and Beverly Chomiak kindly tutored me in utilizing GIS.

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I am in John Sweet’s debt for extending a helping hand to a wide-eyed nineteen-yearold, while Chandler Saint has been an inspiration to anyone interested in Venture Smith. Jim Stewart has worn the dual hats of editor and academic advisor with equal parts generosity, enthusiasm, and thoughtfulness. None of my work would have been possible without the love, support, and guidance of my wonderful family. 1. Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But resident above sixty years in the United States of America (New London, Conn.: C. Holt, 1798), 31. Subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2. GIS is rapidly emerging as a valuable tool for a variety of academic disciplines, ranging from archaeology to history to sociology. From a historical standpoint, GIS can be used to visually portray everything from military battles to census data to migratory patterns. See Anne Kelly Knowles, ed., Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History (Redlands, Calif.: ESRI Press, 2002). 3. For regional history and geography, see Levi H. Clarke, Connecticut Towns: Haddam in 1808 (New Haven: The Acorn Club of Connecticut, 1949), 4–5; David B. Field, A Statistical Account of the County of Middlesex in Connecticut (Middletown, Conn.: Clark and Lyman, 1819), 75; Henry M. Selden, “Haddam Neck,” in History of Middlesex County, Connecticut, with Biographical Sketches of its Prominent Men (New York: J. H. Beers, 1884), 393–95. 4. HTLR, 10:107. 5. Unfortunately, many people continue to disproportionately link Venture Smith’s legacy to his physicality and labor. The issue becomes problematic when examined in the context of Smith’s status as a black man and former slave. Despite his extraordinary accomplishments as a businessman, landowner, and black pioneer, most scholars cannot resist the tall-tale allure of his physicality. This insidious approach at best devalues his other (far more significant) achievements and at worst dehumanizes Smith. 6. For a discussion of Smith’s involvement in the Atlantic world, see the essay by Robert P. Forbes, David Richardson, and Chandler B. Saint in this volume. 7. Bruce Colin Daniels, The Connecticut Town: Growth and Development, 1635–1790 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 177. 8. Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780– 1860 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 30. 9. Bruce H. Mann, Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 6. 10. Ezra Brainerd’s Account Book, 1786–1808, 97–98, and Anonymous Account Book, East Haddam, 1803–1806, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford. 11. Haddam Town Records, Town Hall, Haddam, Conn., 2:126. 12. HTLR, 10:148. 13. J. Hammond Trumbull and Charles J. Hoadly, eds. The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 15 vols. (Hartford: Press of Case, Lockwood, and Brainard, 1850–90), 13:626 and 14:233–34.

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h i s t o ry 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

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25.

26. 27.

28.

HTLR, 10:257. Connecticut Journal, September 26, 1814, 3. HTLR, 10:191. For Knowlton’s advertisement, see The New-London Gazette, May 1, 1778, 3; for Knowlton’s sale to Smith, see HTLR, 9:254. Jackson Turner Main, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 30, 217. HTLR, 10:201. See the probate record for Daniel Brainerd, Colchester Probate Court Records, no. 334, July 1, 1777, Town Hall, Colchester, Conn. East Haddam First Congregational Church and Ecclesiastical Society Records, 1702– 1927, 6 vols. (Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1932), 1:167. Glastonbury Town Meeting Minutes, 205–7, Connecticut Historical Society. Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, “The Business of Slaving: Pawnship in Western Africa, c. 1600–1810,” Journal of African History 42, no. 1 (March 2001): 67–89. See Robert J. Desrochers Jr., “ ‘Not Fade Away’: The Narrative of Venture Smith, an African American in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (June 1997): 64–66; David Waldstreicher, “The Vexed Story of Human Commodification Told by Benjamin Franklin and Venture Smith,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (Summer 2004), 268–78; Philip Gould, “Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist: Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic,” American Literary History 12, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 671–77. I thank Jim Stewart and Robert Forbes for their suggestions on the concept of pawnship. See also Anna Mae Duane’s essay in this volume for an in-depth discussion of the place of pawnship in Venture’s worldview and identity. Trumbull and Hoadly, Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 14:485–91. The first census of the United States occurred in 1790, and it lists people according to gender, race, and status (free or slave). While Peter and Whacket were both listed in the 1790 census, Venture Smith and his family were not. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, United States Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790, Connecticut (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1908), 9. HTLR, 9:285. See John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections, Containing a General Collection of Interesting Facts, Traditions, Biographical Sketches, Anecdotes, Etc., . . . (New Haven: Durrie & Peck and J. W. Barber, 1846), 525; and Emory Johnson and Hosford B. Niles, “Town of East Haddam,” in History of Middlesex County, 300. For Green’s finances, see Colchester Probate Records, no. 1512 (microfilm, Connecticut State Library). An increase in Green’s real estate purchases corresponded to the period of the Revolutionary War; see East Haddam Town Land Records, 9:162, 9:344, 9:481, 9:511, 10:68, and 10:115, Town Hall, East Haddam, Conn. For White’s business ventures, see Amos White to David Trumbell, July 28, 1800 in David Trumbull Papers (1773–1823), box II, folder 9, Connecticut Historical

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29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Society; Connecticut Gazette (New London), June 11, 1784, 3; and New-London Gazette, November 12, 1773, 4. Green and White as neighbors: East Haddam Town Land Records, 10:115; for White’s posts in East Haddam, see East Haddam Town Records, 3:125; for the estate of Cuff, see Colchester Probate Records, 5:156, and Connecticut Gazette (New London), June 7, 1782, 4. HTLR, 10:297, 334. HTLR, 10: 480. Richard Buel, Dear Liberty: Connecticut’s Mobilization for the Revolutionary War (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980), 245. Haddam Town Records, 2:110–20. See Jonathan Grossman, “Wage and Price Controls during the American Revolution,” Monthly Labor Review 96, no. 9 (1973): 3–10; and Buel, Dear Liberty. Charles J. Hoadly et al., eds., Public Records of the State of Connecticut, 19 vols. (Hartford: Press of the Case, Lockwood, and Brainard Company, and Connecticut State Library, 1894–2007), 6:473. HTLR, 10:484. HTLR, 9:409. HTLR, 9:390. Insolvent Debtors–2nd Series, vol. 11, microfilm reel 80, pp. 89a, 89b, Connecticut Archives, Connecticut State Library. HTLR, 14:269. The land deed is intriguing; it lacks the signature of a Justice of the Peace and was not recorded until May 5, 1804—seventeen years after it was signed. The corresponding land deed ending the lease, signed in May 1804, included the signature of the East Haddam Justice of the Peace (Abner Hall), despite being recorded in the Haddam Town Land Records. The 1804 deed also includes the fact that Stephen Knowlton, the same man who jointly purchased land with Venture in 1777, helped clear the fishing place. See HTLR, 14:213. Ackley’s probate record shows an insolvent estate, with the large majority of his personal effects consisting of encyclopedias, pamphlets, and books on arithmetic, law, and grammar. See Colchester Probate Court Records, 10:180, 199, 241, 246, 264. HTLR, 9:445. HTLR, 11:177. HTLR, 9:497. HTLR, 11:301. Elisha Niles’ Diary, 1:19–20, Connecticut Historical Society. Richard Deshon v. Venter Smith, New London County Court Files—African Americans, box 3, folders 30 and 31, Connecticut State Library. HTLR, 13:48, and Henry M. Selden, “Traditions of Venture! Known as Venture Smith” (1896), reprinted in Five Black Lives: The Autobiographies of Venture Smith, James Mars, William Grimes, The Rev. G. W. Offley, and James L. Smith, ed. Arna Bontemps (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 32.

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h i s t o ry 48. For archaeological findings, see Lucianne Lavin, “More Exciting Discoveries at the Venture Smith Archaeology Site: A Window into the Life of an 18th-Century African Prince, Ex-captive, and Free African American Merchant-Farmer,” www .cttrust.org/9777?highlight =malloy. 49. Jona[than]. Kilborn v. Vintner Smith, Middlesex County, County Court, Docket 2 (April 1790–November 1790, 14, Connecticut State Library. A shoat is a recently weaned piglet. Many thanks to John Wood Sweet for providing the case and its transcription. 50. Bruce C. Daniels, “Economic Development in Colonial and Revolutionary Connecticut: An Overview,” William and Mary Quarterly 37, no. 3 (July 1980): 433; Jackson Turner Main, Connecticut Society in the Era of the American Revolution (Hartford: The American Revolution Bicentennial Commission of Connecticut, 1977), 29; Haddam Town Records, 2:125. 51. HTLR, 12:50. 52. HTLR, 11:487. The deed refers to one of the two pieces (containing six acres) as “Baldhill Lot,” which Smith claimed he had purchased from Joseph Wells. No record exists of this transaction, and the parcel’s exact location and shape is unknown, but it was likely located north of Smith’s property, in an area of Haddam Neck where Green owned land. 53. HTLR, 13:4. 54. HTLR, 13:39. 55. For details on Connecticut patterns of inheritance see Main, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut, 217; see also Clark, Roots of Rural Capitalism, 91, 129–32. For specific inheritance trends among black families, see 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), 27. 56. HTLR, 13:48. 57. HTLR, 12:142. 58. Trumbull and Hoadly, Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 4:375. 59. Trumbull and Hoadly, Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, 5:233. A 1777 amendment to the act protected former masters and their heirs (such as Edward) from the responsibility, provided they present the freed slave with a certificate of freedom. See Hoadly et al., Public Records of the State of Connecticut, 1:415–16. Unfortunately for Edward Smith, his father granted Venture Smith’s freedom twelve years before the passage of the act, leaving Edward financially responsible. 60. “Notice, a Bankruptcy,” Connecticut Gazette (New London), September 23, 1801, 4. 61. HTLR, 13:246. 62. See Anonymous Account Book of East Haddam (1803–1806), 132, Connecticut Historical Society. 63. See Narrative, 31, and Middlesex [Conn.] Gazette, June 29, 1804, 1. 64. HTLR, 12:230. 65. HTLR, 14:213. For the weather, see Elisha Niles’ Diary, 3:27. For William Ackley’s death and estate, see Colchester Probate Records, vol. 10:180, 199, 241, 246, 264.

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“Owned by Negro Venture”

66. 67. 68.

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69. 70.

For Venture Smith’s death, see East Haddam First Congregational Church and Ecclesiastical Society Records, 1:443–44, and Selden, “Traditions of Venture,” 30. Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, Wisc.: Madison House, 1990), 58. John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730– 1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 315. See Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press: 1998), 162. Main, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut, 34. Clark, Roots of Rural Capitalism, 35.

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ii

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MEMORY

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5 Venture Smith, One of a Kind Vincent Carretta

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T

HE PUBLICATION of a collection of archeological, critical, and historical essays on Venture Smith’s Narrative acknowledges the place that the story of Smith’s life holds in the African American literary canon. Few would now dispute its current canonized status as a work considered worthy of study on its own literary merits.1 But far more difficult to answer is the question of the historical place and role of Smith’s Narrative in the evolving tradition of the genre of the African American slave narrative, in which authors or their editors, or both, were aware of the form, content, and significance of the works of their predecessors, and influenced their successors in that tradition. By author, I mean the subject of the narrative, who recounted his or her own life, either directly to his or her audience or through the intervention of a white amanuensis, who in turn recorded the narrative, which he or she then edited before publication in print. Hence, the author may or may not also be the writer, who commits the autobiographical narrative to paper. Smith’s Narrative seems clearly indebted to the slave narrative tradition established before 1798, from which, however, its author appears to intentionally deviate. For example, it was not an abolitionist text in either the pre-1808 or post-1808 sense of abolitionist. It apparently was not designed to participate in the international campaign whose primary goal was the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, accomplished in both Britain and the United States in 1808. Nor does it seem to have anticipated later texts aimed at the abolition ·

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m e m o ry of the institution of slavery. On the other hand, Venture’s willingness to resist slavery physically, his refusal to wait for emancipation in the afterlife, and his skepticism about “white” Christianity did anticipate significant aspects of nineteenth-century slave narratives, exemplified by Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845). But Smith’s Narrative apparently did so without influencing the later narratives, at least in part because in 1798 it was published only in Connecticut, and reprinted only there in 1835 and 1897. It was not included in nineteenth-century abolitionist anthologies, perhaps in part because, as I will argue, it is ideologically so different from other works by authors of African descent. Even more complex than locating Smith’s Narrative in the canon or tradition of the African-British and African-American slave narrative is the challenge of identifying in Smith’s Narrative the “black message in a white envelope,” to use John Sekora’s inspired metaphor describing so-called as-told-to slave narratives.2 Venture Smith’s amanuensis and the author of the preface to his Narrative may have been Elisha Niles, a Connecticut schoolteacher and post rider between Middletown and New London. The style and content of Smith’s Narrative, however, differ greatly from Niles’s other writings, which are pervasively religious.3 Moreover, some contend that Niles may have been a slaveowner, although census records from his home town of Colchester dispute this.4 To what extent does the message we receive in the text of the Narrative proper conflict with the voices we hear in the paratext—the preface and the testimony titled “Certificate”—that frame the text? To what extent may those paratextual voices attempt to “contain” Smith’s message, and thus control the reader’s response to it? Can we distinguish Venture Smith’s voice from that of his editor, and if so, how? The Narrative comprises three chapters: the first covers Venture’s life in Africa, the second his life as a slave in America, and the third his life as a freeman. The story of Smith’s life can be summarized in a few paragraphs. According to the Narrative, Venture was born around 1729, the eldest son of the first of the three wives of “Saungm Furro, Prince of the Tribe of Dukandarra” in Guinea, Africa. His father named him Broteer, and he was “descended from a very large, tall and stout race of beings, much larger than the generality of people in other parts of the globe, being commonly considerable above six feet in height, and every way well proportioned” (5). When he was about six years old he was kidnapped by an army of slave catchers “instigated by some white nation” (8) and eventually brought to the English slavetrading factory at Anomabu, on the coast of present-day Ghana. External evidence indicates that there he was sold in 1739 to Robinson Mumford, the ·

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Venture Smith, One of a Kind steward of the Charming Susanna, a slave ship registered in Rhode Island.5 Mumford renamed him Venture, perhaps indicating that he had bought the young boy as a speculative investment. According to the Narrative, Venture was one of 260 enslaved Africans taken on board, 60 of whom died from smallpox during the Middle Passage before reaching Barbados in August 1739.6 Mumford did not sell Venture in Barbados. Perhaps Venture was so young that he was a “refuse” slave no one wanted to buy; according to the Narrative, he was barely eight years old. Or perhaps Mumford intended all along to keep Venture for himself, a more likely explanation if the boy was actually closer to twelve years old, as Paul E. Lovejoy plausibly speculates.7 Mumford took his new slave to Newport, Rhode Island. Venture soon proved himself a loyal and trustworthy slave. As he got older, Venture increasingly experienced the tyranny of slavery, and he demonstrated his willingness and ability to physically resist oppression by brutal and unreliable whites. When he was in his mid-twenties he married Meg, a fellow slave his age. He was soon separated from his wife and infant daughter when they were sold to another owner. Repeatedly betrayed and cheated by whites who promised to allow him to buy his freedom, or to whom he lent money, Venture was not able to purchase his freedom until he was about thirty-seven years old. He took the surname of his last owner, Oliver Smith, because Smith had honored his agreement to allow Venture to buy, or redeem, himself. Venture Smith moved to Long Island, where he lived a hard-working, spartan life to save enough money to buy the freedom of his wife and children. He eventually earned enough money to gain the grudging respect of his white neighbors. When he was about forty-seven years old, he sold all his property on Long Island and moved his family to Haddam, Connecticut, where he continued to prosper, though he was often cheated by whites, disappointed by slaves whose freedom he had bought, and saddened by the death of his daughter.8 Smith died on September 19, 1805, and quickly became a legendary figure as the “Black Paul Bunyan.” The challenge of trying to distinguish Smith’s “black message” from the “white envelope” that contains it was evident as early as December 26, 1798, when the first advertisement for the Narrative appeared in The Bee, published in New London, Connecticut.9 Charles Holt published both The Narrative itself and the four-page newspaper that advertised it; each sold for one shilling. Holt may have been the amanuensis of the Narrative, and he may also have been the author of the advertisement, which continued to run every week in The Bee through January 1799: ·

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m e m o ry Just published, and for sale at this office, Price 1s. A NARRATIVE of the LIFE AND ADVENTURES of VENTURE, A native of Africa, but above sixty years an inhabitant of the United States of America. Related by himself, and attested by respectable witnesses.

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[Venture is a negro remarkable for size, strength, industry, fidelity, and frugality, and well known in the state of Rhode Island, on Long Island, and in Stonington, East Haddam, and several other parts of this state. Descended from a royal race, Benevolent and brave; On Afric’s savage plains a prince, In this free land a slave.]

But can we distinguish Smith’s “voice” from the words of his amanuensis, who apparently controls the account of Smith’s life? The answer may lie in the fact that the differences between his Narrative and its antecedents are at least as significant as their similarities. Many of these differences anticipate the form and content of nineteenth-century African American slave narratives. Anticipation, however, is not always equivalent to influence. Smith’s tale had relatively few antecedents associated with people of African descent. Certainly it had been preceded by fictional and nonfictional accounts of enslaved African princes or nobles. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most Britons and Anglo-Americans did not believe that being of African descent necessarily meant that one was suited for slavery. Numerous fictional and historical accounts reminded readers that not all blacks were slaves or even servants, that not all slaves were black, that some blacks were socially superior to many whites, and that slavery was considered an inappropriate condition for at least some blacks. Social status could supersede race as a defining category, as it does in Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave (London, ca. 1678) and in Thomas Southerne’s 1696 play based on Behn’s novel, or in the historical cases of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo or Prince William Ansah Sessarakoo, which found their way into

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Venture Smith, One of a Kind print in the 1730s and 1740s. Throughout the eighteenth century, British subjects on both sides of the Atlantic recognized slavery as an inappropriate status for at least some Africans. Even after the American Revolution, AngloAmericans tended to acknowledge the significance of social status. And on both sides of the Atlantic, before the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, claims of noble or royal birth by wrongly enslaved Africans were at least plausible, no matter how improbable. But those fortunate Africans were a precious few, outside of fictional accounts. Prior to 1760, the fictional and historical subjects of such accounts tended to be non-Christian enslaved Africans who either were repatriated to Africa or died in the New World resisting their enslavement. Following the midcentury transatlantic Great Awakening of evangelical religious revivalism, stories of people of African descent who converted to Christianity began to be published. The few published narratives purportedly related or written directly by people of African descent before Venture Smith’s Narrative appeared were spiritual autobiographies. In his fourteen-page Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man (Boston, 1760), Hammon (fl. 1760) presents the story of his life, structured as a tale of separation and restoration, as proof of God’s Providence. On Christmas Day, 1747, with the permission of his “master,” Major-General John Winslow, Hammon sailed from Plymouth, Massachusetts, to Jamaica and Central America to harvest logwood for making dye.10 Because “master” could mean either employer or owner, we do not know with certainty whether Hammon was a free man or a slave. The vessel ran aground on a reef off the Florida coast. Native Americans killed every one of the stranded crew except Hammon, who survived long enough to be rescued by a Spanish captain. Hammon was taken to Cuba, where he lived with the governor until he was imprisoned for more than four years for refusing to be impressed into the Spanish navy. At the request of an American captain, Hammon was released from prison and returned to the governor’s household. After living with the governor for about a year, Hammon finally escaped from Cuba on his third attempt, gaining passage on an English ship. Once in England, he joined several Royal Naval vessels as a cook. After being discharged, in London he engaged to join a slaver sailing to Guinea, but before he was to depart he overheard the conversation of a captain bound for Boston. He quickly changed his plans and joined the voyage to Massachusetts as a cook. He learned that one of the passengers was his former “master,” John Winslow, with whom he was soon reunited.

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m e m o ry Hammon’s Narrative was one of several captivity narratives about people of African descent that preceded Venture Smith’s Narrative. Such captivity stories were frequently also conversion narratives, conveyed in the form of as-told-to tales, whose veracity was attested to by white witnesses, and whose publication was made possible by white patrons. Among the earliest of these as-told-to tales was James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself (London, 1772). Gronniosaw’s Narrative was subsequently reprinted in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1774; in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1781; and in the American Moral and Sentimental Magazine (New York, July 3–September 25, 1797). The Narrative is framed by a preface by Walter Shirley, a Methodist clergyman, who tells us that it was first “committed to paper by the elegant Pen of a young lady.” Shirley assures us that “this little History contains Matter well worthy the Notice and Attention of every Christian Reader.” 11 The Narrative of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (ca. 1710–1775) says that he was born sometime between 1710 and 1714 into the royal family of Bournou (Bornu), a kingdom located in what is now northeastern Nigeria. Gronniosaw alienated himself from his friends and relatives by challenging their animist faith. When he was an adolescent, he accepted the invitation of an African merchant to accompany him to the Gold Coast, more than a thousand miles away. There, the merchant soon sold him to European slave traders, who brought him to Barbados. From Barbados he was taken to New York City, where Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen bought him. A wealthy Reformed Dutch clergyman in New Jersey, Frelinghuysen was also a friend of the English Methodist evangelist George Whitefield. Frelinghuysen converted Gronniosaw, whose slave name was James Albert, to Christianity. Gronniosaw soon learned to read. After attempting suicide because he believed that his sins were too great to be forgiven, he experienced his spiritual rebirth around 1747, after reading John Bunyan and Richard Baxter. Gronniosaw gained his freedom at his master’s death. In 1762, at the close of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), during which he voluntarily served in the British army in the West Indies, he decided to go to England, the homeland of his spiritual guides Bunyan and Baxter. Gronniosaw’s lack of interest in money caused him to be repeatedly cheated throughout his life. He was very disappointed to discover that the English were no more pious than Anglo-Americans. Whitefield helped him find housing in London, where he fell in love with Betty, a widowed English weaver. Three weeks ·

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Venture Smith, One of a Kind after meeting her, Gronniosaw moved to Holland, returning a year later to be baptized and marry Betty. His English friends opposed the marriage, not because of the interracial relationship but because of her poverty. Because of the economic depression, especially among weavers, that followed the Seven Years’ War, Gronniosaw and his growing family led a somewhat nomadic life in England, depending on a series of Quaker contacts for employment and charity. His extreme poverty notwithstanding, Gronniosaw’s tale ends with his Christian faith unshaken. John Marrant (1755–1791) was born to free black parents in New York on June 15, 1755. When his father died four years later, his mother moved with him to St. Augustine, then in Spanish Florida, where he began his schooling. After Spain joined France against Britain at the beginning of 1761 in the Seven Years’ War, Marrant’s mother fled with him to the British colony of Georgia. They moved to Charleston, South Carolina, when he was eleven years old. There he was apprenticed to a carpenter, and he learned to play the French horn and violin. At the age of thirteen Marrant experienced spiritual rebirth after hearing Whitefield preach in Charleston, probably in early December 1768, at the beginning of what would be the last of Whitefield’s seven North American preaching tours. Because of his family’s opposition to his conversion, Marrant sought solace in the wilderness, trusting God to sustain him. He was sentenced to a horrible death when a Native American hunter brought him to a Cherokee town. The miraculous conversion of the executioner, however, gained him a reprieve. Marrant lived with the Cherokee for two years before returning to his family, who at first did not recognize him. He taught religion to slaves, despite the objections of their owners, one of whom became the prototype of the excessively cruel white female slave owner, a figure that also appears in Venture Smith’s Narrative. Naval records support neither Marrant’s claim that he was pressed into the British Royal Navy as a musician during the American Revolution, nor that he was at both the siege of Charleston in 1780 and the 1781 naval battle with Dutch forces off the Dogger Bank in the North Sea. At the end of the war he went to London, where he worked for a clothing merchant. On May 15, 1785, he was ordained, in Bath, England, as a minister in the Huntingdonian Connexion, a Calvinistic branch of Methodism founded by Whitefield’s patron, the Countess of Huntingdon. Later that year his as-told-to A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black . . . was published in London. Its “black message” was delivered in the “white envelope” formed by the preface of Marrant’s amanuensis/editor, the Reverend William Aldridge, and, at least in the fourth edition, a concluding affidavit from Marrant’s landlord ·

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m e m o ry attesting to his character and Christianity. With Huntingdon’s backing, Marrant left England a few months after the appearance of his Narrative to preach in Nova Scotia to the native Micmac and doctrinally more moderate black and white Wesleyan Methodists. He alienated several white ministers when his preaching lured their parishioners to his all-black chapels. Despite his success in Canada as a preacher, he never received the financial aid promised by the countess, forcing him to move to Boston in 1787. There he served as chaplain to the first lodge of African Masons, founded by Prince Hall three years earlier. Marrant married Elizabeth Herries, a black Loyalist, on August 15, 1788. He published A Sermon in Boston in 1789, before returning to London in 1790, where he continued his ministry. His last publication was A Journal . . . To Which Are Added Two Sermons (London, 1791). Marrant died in Islington, then a London suburb, on April 15, 1791. By 1798, Marrant’s Narrative had been reprinted nearly twenty times in England and Ireland. The works of both Gronniosaw and Marrant were known to Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (ca. 1757–1791?), the most radical eighteenth-century African opponent of slavery. Cugoano directly tells us that he was born about 1757 in the Fante village of Agimaque or Ajumako, on the coast of present-day Ghana. Around 1770, fellow Africans kidnapped Cugoano and sold him to Europeans, who transported him to the island of Grenada in the West Indies, where he was bought by Alexander Campbell. Campbell brought him to England at the end of 1772. On August 20, 1773, Cugoano was baptized “John Stuart—a Black, aged 16 Years” at St James’s church, Piccadilly. By 1784 the fashionable painters Richard and Maria Cosway were employing Cugoano in Schomberg House, Pall Mall, London. Through the Cosways he encountered prominent politicians, artists, and writers, including William Blake. Cugoano soon became one of the first African Britons to write against slavery. In 1786 he helped save a black man named Harry Demane from being forced into West Indian slavery. With Olaudah Equiano and other selfdescribed “Sons of Africa,” Cugoano continued the struggle against slavery with public letters to London newspapers. In 1787, perhaps with Equiano’s help, Cugoano published Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. In this polemical jeremiad Cugoano refutes religious and secular pro-slavery arguments, demands the immediate abolition of the slave trade, calls for emancipation of all slaves, and urges fitting punishments for slave owners, including enslavement by their former slaves. In 1791, in a shorter version of Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery that was “Addressed to the Sons of Africa, by a Native,” Cugoano announced his intention to open a ·

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Venture Smith, One of a Kind school for African Britons. Around 1791, he also asked the abolitionist Granville Sharp to send him to Nova Scotia to recruit settlers for a second attempt to settle free African-Britons in Sierra Leone. No record has been found of Cugoano’s having either opened a school or participated in settling Sierra Leone. The cause, date, and place of Cugoano’s death and the place of his burial are unknown. Cugoano occasionally collaborated with Olaudah Equiano (1745?–1797) in writing letters to newspapers against slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. In The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in London in March 1789, Equiano claims that he was born in 1745, in what is now southeastern Nigeria. He says that he was kidnapped into slavery around the age of eleven and taken to the West Indies for a few days before being brought to Virginia and sold to a local planter. Michael Henry Pascal, an officer in the British Royal Navy, soon bought him from the planter, renamed him Gustavus Vassa, and brought him to London in 1757, according to Equiano’s account. Equiano actually first reached England in December 1754, and he may have been born in South Carolina rather than Africa.12 Equiano served under Pascal in the Seven Years’ War, but as the war came to a close Pascal refused to grant Equiano his freedom, instead selling him into West Indian slavery at the end of 1762. Equiano purchased his own freedom in 1766. He remained in the employ of his former West Indian master, the Quaker Robert King, for a year, making several trading trips to Georgia and Pennsylvania. Based in London between 1767 and 1773, Equiano worked on commercial vessels sailing to the Mediterranean and the West Indies, and commented on all the versions of slavery, white and black, he observed. After joining an expedition to the Arctic seeking a Northeast Passage in 1773, he returned to London, where he embraced Methodism. Soon again growing restless, in 1775 and 1776 he helped his friend and former employer, Dr. Charles Irving, in a short-lived attempt to establish a plantation in Central America, with Equiano acting as buyer and driver (overseer) of the black slaves. He returned to London in 1777, and ten years later he published hostile newspaper reviews of pro-slavery books and argued for racial intermarriage. (Equiano married an Englishwoman, Susanna Cullen, in 1792.) He became increasingly involved with Cugoano, Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, James Ramsay, and others in efforts to help his fellow blacks, both with the project to resettle the black poor in Sierra Leone and with the drive to abolish the African slave trade. During Equiano’s lifetime unauthorized editions and translations of his Interesting Narrative appeared in Holland (1790), New York (1791), Germany ·

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m e m o ry (1792), and Russia (1794). Equiano’s will indicates that when he died on March 31, 1797, he may have been the wealthiest person of African descent in the English-speaking world, having achieved the economic and social status he sought throughout his life. Autobiographical authors of African descent less familiar today than Gronniosaw, Marrant, Cugoano, and Equiano also preceded Venture Smith. George Liele (ca. 1751–1825), known by his friends as Brother Liele, was “called also George Sharp because his owner’s name was [Henry] Sharp.” 13 Liele was born in Virginia, the son of slaves Liele and Nancy. The family was soon moved to the colony of Georgia, where both blacks and whites considered his father to be “the only black person who knew the Lord in a spiritual way in that country.” 14 George “had a natural fear of God from [his] youth,” 15 but a sermon by the Baptist minister Matthew Moore on the necessity of grace disabused him of his belief that good works alone could earn one salvation. After a few months of despair, George felt the call of divine grace, was baptized by Moore, and became a member of Moore’s Buckhead Creek Baptist Church. George’s owner was a deacon in the same church. George became the first person of African descent licensed and ordained to serve as a Baptist preacher-missionary in North America. He was soon preaching to both black and white audiences near Savannah, Georgia, where he remained until the British evacuated the city in June 1782. Sometime before that, George had been freed by his owner, Sharp, an officer in the British army who was killed during the American Revolution. Some unidentified people, refusing to acknowledge his manumission, had him thrown in jail, but with the help of a friend, Colonel Kirkland, and the proper papers, he was released. The British evacuated Liele, his wife, and their four children to Jamaica in 1783. To pay off his debts, Liele indentured himself to Kirkland as a servant. With Kirkland’s recommendation, Liele spent two years in the employ of the governor of Jamaica, enabling him to settle his debts and regain his freedom. Liele established the first Baptist church in Jamaica when he began preaching in Kingston around September 1784. He initially had a congregation of four. He quickly gained a following among the poor, especially the slaves, though he admitted slaves only with the written permission of their owners. Persecuted at meetings and baptisms, Liele applied for and received legal sanction for his itinerant ministry, which soon numbered 350 congregants throughout Jamaica. Although he received nothing for his services, he also established a school for both white and black children. In 1794 Liele was jailed, tried, and acquitted on a charge of sedition. He was able to support his ministry with the help of the charity of British Baptists, though at least once financial problems ·

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Venture Smith, One of a Kind caused him to be imprisoned for debt from 1797 to 1801. Liele’s as-told-to tale was published in London in 1793 in The Baptist Annual Register, for 1790, 1791, 1792, and Part of 1793, and it was distributed by Baptist ministers in several cities throughout the United States, including New York City and Boston. David George (1743?–1810) was born to native-African slaves, John and Judith, in Sussex County, Virginia. George escaped from his abusive owner in 1762, when he was about nineteen years old. Relentlessly pursued by his owner’s son, George fled farther and farther south, seeking sanctuary with various Native American peoples. The Natchez eventually sold him to a white trader, George Gaulphin, in Silver Bluff, South Carolina. David George married Phillis, another slave, around 1770. A fellow black introduced him to Christianity, and George began attending Baptist ser vices conducted by his longtime friend George Liele, as well as by Wait Palmer, a white itinerant Baptist evangelist from Connecticut. Sometime in the early 1770s George became a founder of the Silver Bluff Baptist Church, probably the first exclusively African American church. Having been taught to read by white children, George became an occasional preacher in the church. When his rebel owner fled in 1778 in the face of advancing British troops, leaving his slaves behind, George took advantage of Britain’s offer of freedom to any rebelowned slave who could reach their lines. George helped the British fortify Savannah when rebel forces unsuccessfully besieged it in 1779. Working as a butcher, he preached to fellow blacks behind the British lines. In 1783 George and his family were among the former slaves evacuated by the British from Charleston, South Carolina, and resettled in Nova Scotia, Canada. Despite resistance from black and white Anglican and Methodist denominations, George preached the Baptist word throughout Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to audiences of both races. He helped John Clarkson recruit black loyalists and their families for the Sierra Leone Company’s project to establish a colony of free blacks in Africa at Freetown, Sierra Leone. George, his wife, and their four children were among the twelve hundred settlers in 1792. There, George established the first Baptist church in Africa. As one of the settlement’s three superintendents, he went to England in 1792 with Clarkson to meet fellow Baptists and to raise money for his African mission. He returned to Africa in 1793, where he died in 1810. Like the story of Liele’s life, George’s as-told-to narrative appeared in The Baptist Annual Register, for 1790, 1791, 1792, and Part of 1793. The Methodist preacher and autobiographer Boston King (1760?–1802) was born a slave around 1760, on a plantation owned by Richard Waring near Charleston, South Carolina. King’s African-born father, a slave-driver and ·

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m e m o ry later mill-cutter, and his mother, a seamstress and practitioner of folk medicine, were both favored by their owner. King’s father was also a lay preacher to his fellow slaves. When Boston King was sixteen years old, his owner apprenticed him to a brutal carpenter, who severely punished King for the misdeeds of other workers. To escape further punishment, he sought refuge and freedom with the British forces that had occupied Charleston since 1780. He soon contracted smallpox and was quarantined and left behind with the militia when the British regular forces withdrew from their position. Recovered, King rejoined the regular forces as the servant to the commander and as a carrier of dispatches through enemy lines. He soon sailed from Charleston to New York City, also under British control. There he married a former slave named Violet, twelve years his senior. While at sea, he was captured by an American whaler and taken to New Jersey, but he soon escaped and returned to New York City. At the end of the war in 1783, the Kings were among the three thousand former slaves evacuated from New York by the British and resettled in Birchtown, Nova Scotia. There, first Violet and then Boston King had their Christian conversion experiences, and King began preaching in 1785. Faced with general famine and the resentment of competing white workers, they found life extremely difficult until King obtained regular employment as a carpenter. Conditions improved even further in 1791, when he was appointed the Wesleyan Methodist preacher to the black settlement at Preston, near Halifax. Despite his comfortable situation, King felt the call to participate in the Sierra Leone Company’s project to establish a colony of free blacks in Africa at Freetown. He, Violet, and twelve hundred other free blacks sailed to Sierra Leone in 1792. Like many of the new settlers, Violet soon died of fever; King had remarried by 1793. King’s very limited success as a schoolteacher and missionary to the native Africans prompted the Company to send him to England in 1794 for several years of education at the Methodist KingswoodSchool, near Bristol. His reception in England and his experience there as a preacher enabled him to overcome his acknowledged prejudice against whites. King returned to Freetown in 1796 and became a somewhat more successful teacher, but he soon left that position to continue his ministry one hundred miles south of Freetown, among the Sherbro people, where he died in 1802. According to the 1802 census, he was survived by a daughter and two sons. King’s narrative, “Written by Himself,” was first published in the Methodist Magazine in London in March 1798, nine months before the publication of Venture’s as-told-to tale. ·

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Venture Smith, One of a Kind But was either Venture Smith or his amanuensis aware of any of the earlier works in the tradition in which I am placing him? We cannot be certain, because the text of Smith’s Narrative alludes directly to none of them. But even if none of the earlier narratives had been originally published or later reprinted in North America, the transatlantic book trade would very probably have made all of them available orally to Smith, or in writing to the editor, as well as the readers, of Smith’s Narrative, which bears significant similarities to several of its predecessors, particularly to Gronniosaw’s Narrative. Like Gronniosaw’s Narrative, as well as those of Marrant, George, and Liele, Venture Smith’s as-told-to account is prefaced by the voice of a white amanuensis and editor. And like those of Gronniosaw, Marrant, George, and Liele, as well as later editions of Equiano’s autobiography, Venture Smith’s Narrative is framed by terminal testimonies from whites attesting to the subject’s character and veracity. The prefatory statement by Smith’s editor that “the reader is here presented with an account, not of a renowned politician or warrior, but of an untutored African” (iii) is reminiscent of Equiano’s having described himself as “an unlettered African,” and his own Narrative as “the history of neither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant.” 16 Like Gronniosaw, Cugoano, and Equiano, Smith’s narrative reports that he comes from a noble or royal line in Africa, having been enslaved there and forcibly introduced, like them, to the Christian New World as a “stranger.” The motif of the stranger, even in the land of his own birth, recurs in virtually every eighteenth-century narrative by or about a person of African descent. Despite all these similarities, however, the differences between Venture Smith’s Narrative and its predecessors are even more significant. The tension between Smith’s editor, who apparently seeks to contain Venture’s voice within a “white envelope,” and the “black message” we may hear in the narrative itself strikes me as far greater than the gap between envelope and message found in any preceding as-told-to tale. The editor’s patronizing (and possibly ironic) attitude toward Venture is challenged by Venture’s assertive behavior within the narrative: “The subject of the following pages, had he received only a common education, might have been a man of high respectability and usefulness; and had his education been suited to his genius, he might have been an ornament and an honor to human nature. . . . This narrative exhibits a pattern of honesty, prudence and industry, to people of his own colour; and perhaps some white people would not find themselves degraded by imitating such an example” (iii–iv). Whoever served as Venture Smith’s amanuensis, whether Niles, Holt, or someone else, in the preface he or she offers Benjamin Franklin and George ·

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m e m o ry Washington as models by which to measure Smith, or more precisely by which to measure what he might have become had he had their opportunities: “The reader may here see a Franklin and a Washington, in a state of nature, or rather in a state of slavery” (iii). By 1798 Franklin and Washington were both firmly established in the pantheon of national heroes. The Narrative itself, however, reveals Venture Smith to be someone who, unlike Franklin, did not epitomize the self-made man whose life emphatically validates the optimism of the new nation.17 Nor does the account of his life endorse the military and political values represented by Washington, the father of his country. On the contrary, the American Revolution and Venture Smith’s son’s participation in it against the British are both completely erased in the Narrative itself, an erasure more likely made by Smith than by an editor who celebrates Washington. Readers of the accounts of Venture Smith’s predecessors Hammon, Gronniosaw, Marrant, George, Liele, King, and Equiano are pointedly told that they each served in the British military forces before and during the American Revolution. Venture Smith is not represented as a patriot of the country in which he consciously remains a “stranger.” As striking as the absence in the Narrative of any mention of the American Revolution is the erasure of Venture’s experience on the Middle Passage aboard the slave ship that brought him from Africa to the Americas, an absence particularly telling in a decade when opposition to the horrific conditions of the transatlantic slave trade received tremendous attention in the press on both sides of the Atlantic. Less than ten years after the reception of Equiano’s Narrative demonstrated the market for and the rhetorical power of a firsthand victim’s account of the Middle Passage, Venture recalled his transatlantic voyage as simply “an ordinary passage, except great mortality by the small pox” (13). The author of Venture Smith’s Narrative apparently intentionally avoided engaging in the international debate over the transatlantic slave trade. Nor is Smith represented as objecting to slavery as an institution. Unlike the other authors in the 1790s—Cugoano, George, Liele, King, and Equiano— Smith appears to see slavery as bad for individuals, especially himself and members of his family, without attacking the system of slavery directly. Although he does buy slaves seemingly to enable them to eventually redeem themselves by self-purchase, as he had done, he is ultimately a businessman rather than an emancipationist: “I purchased a negro man for four hundred dollars. But he having an inclination to return to his old master, I therefore let him go. Shortly after I purchased another negro man for twenty-five pounds, whom I parted with shortly after” (27).

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Venture Smith, One of a Kind Smith’s position in the Narrative on the issue of slavery appears to be relatively close to that of his editor/amanuensis in his preface, whose commendation of the slave-owning Washington undermines, perhaps unintentionally, any emancipationist implications of his praise for Smith as an individual. Readers of Smith’s Narrative can feel self-satisfaction in their emotional responses to his tale without needing to take any action against slavery: “And if [the reader] shall derive no other advantage from perusing this narrative, he may experience those sensations of shame and indignation, that will prove him to be not wholly destitute of every noble and generous feeling” (iii). Neither the preface nor the Narrative itself encourages us to see Smith as representative of people of African descent in America. Nor, with the exception of Smith and his wife, are people in America of African descent depicted very positively in the Narrative. They tend to be as untrustworthy as most of the whites he encounters. Smith’s industriousness renders him virtually one of a kind. The greatest estrangement between Venture Smith and the cultural values of the United States and Britain, reflected in the most glaring discrepancy between his narrative and those of his predecessors, as well as between the “envelope” and “message” of his Narrative, involves religion and the significance of Africa. A third of Smith’s account is devoted to Africa, which retains its cultural and ethical value throughout his life. As Venture notes twice, memories of Africa remain “to this day fresh in [his] mind” (11). Unlike the descriptions in earlier narratives, however, Venture Smith’s life in Africa and America is remarkably religion-free. His only reference to his African religion is to an implicitly monotheistic “Almighty protector” (6), but unlike other contemporaneous authors of African descent he draws neither parallels nor contrasts between his original African faith and Christianity. Venture’s explicit references to religion in America undermine his editor’s prefatory characterization of the United States as “this Christian country” (iii). For Gronniosaw, alienated from his family and society in his African homeland by his intimations of monotheism, once he reaches America European religious values quickly supersede those of benighted Africa. For Equiano, who devotes nearly one-sixth of his Narrative to an account of life in Africa, many African cultural, political, and religious values prefigure the superior ones he finds in the European-American world. For Smith, however, African ethical values retain their superiority to American. Even his extraordinary preoccupation with money, which many critics attribute to his imbibing the commercial values of the new United States, can be traced back to Africa, where

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m e m o ry he associated money with heroism and familial trauma.18 He tells us that despite being tortured by fellow Africans, his father “died without informing his enemies of the place where his money lay. I saw him while he was thus tortured to death. The shocking scene is to this day fresh in my mind, and I have often been overcome while thinking on it” (11). Christianity gave all of Venture Smith’s predecessors access to a universal community whose membership transcended ethnic, national, and social identities. However much they may have felt themselves strangers in a strange land in this world, Christianity offered them full equality and communal integration in the afterlife. With its emphases on direct exposure to the Word through the Bible and the need to bear witness to one’s faith, evangelical Protestant Christianity encouraged all believers to gain access to reading and publication. Even if communicated through the pen of another, spiritual narratives by and about people of African descent demonstrated the universality of Christianity, as well as the power and appeal of evangelism. Whether one was pro- or antislavery, enslavement was perceived to be paradoxically a fortunate fall for the enslaved because it introduced the pagan slave to Christianity: enslavement of the body paved the way for freedom for the soul. By his actions and words, Venture Smith rejects this ideology. Whereas Gronniosaw and Equiano contrast true Christianity with the hypocritical versions that most whites embrace, Smith apparently discovers all professed Christians to be hypocrites. The vision of “a christian land” in his Narrative repudiates the “Christian country” cited in his amanuensis’s preface: “Such a proceeding as this, committed on a defenceless stranger, almost worn out in the hard ser vice of the world, without any foundation in reason or justice, whatever it may be called in a christian land, would in my native country have been branded as a crime equal to highway robbery. But Captain Hart was a white gentleman, and I a poor African, therefore it was all right, and good enough for the black dog” (30). Such “christian” behavior contrasted with the treatment he received as a young stranger in Africa: “During my stay with [my guardian] I was kindly used, and with as much tenderness, for what I saw, as his only son, although I was an entire stranger to him, remote from friends and relations” (7). Unlike the accounts of Gronniosaw, Marrant, Liele, George, and King, or those by Cugoano and Equiano, Smith’s is pointedly not a providential conversion narrative. The only time conversion is mentioned is in a completely materialistic context: “When I had been with [Daniel Edwards] some time, he asked me why my master wished to part with such an honest negro, and

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Venture Smith, One of a Kind why he did not keep me himself. I replied that I could not give him the reason, unless it was to convert me into cash, and speculate with me as with other commodities” (21–22). Biblical and religious allusions pervade the works of Venture Smith’s predecessors, but, with one exception, words and phrases in his Narrative that in other contexts would have spiritual import seem to refer only to worldly matters. Most eighteenth-century readers of Smith’s Narrative, especially those familiar with any of the works of his predecessors, would have been struck by the apparently intentional way he appears to frustrate any urge to read the phrase and words “serve two masters” (15), “convert me into cash” (11), “redeem,” “redeeming,” “redeemed,” and “redemption” (22, 24, 27, 28, 31), and “stranger” (7, 30) to mean anything more than, respectively, working for two owners at once, being sold, buying one’s freedom, and alien. But surely no reader of the Narrative in 1798 or since who is familiar with the Bible would fail to recall the spiritual dimension of such words and phrases. The one time that Smith directly invokes the Bible underscores the lack of religious justification for his life. Placing this unique invocation at the conclusion of his story emphasizes the ultimate failure of materialism on spiritual and physical levels. Sounding as if Venture is trying desperately to convince himself of the value of his life, his Narrative ends on a very pessimistic note. Only the grave, not heaven, awaits him: “It gives me joy to think that I have and that I deserve so good a character, especially for truth and integrity. While I am now looking to the grave as my home, my joy for this world would be full—if my children, Cuff for whom I paid two hundred dollars when a boy, and Solomon who was born soon after I purchased his mother—If Cuff and Solomon—O! that they had walked in the way of their father. But a father’s lips are closed in silence and in grief!—Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” (31). His sons failed to embrace their father’s African ethical values. Reading the words that open Ecclesiastes, how many of Venture’s first readers would not have recalled the complete quotation and the next verse: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?” The Narrative concludes by implicitly rejecting the fundamental rationale for slavery as an institution that introduced the enslaved to the means to everlasting life. The voice from Ecclesiastes undermines the optimistic assumptions about the new republic found in the words of the preface. Moreover, read in light of the pessimistic conclusion to Venture Smith’s tale, the earlier reference in the Narrative to serving two masters delivers to readers familiar

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with the New Testament the message that Smith ultimately rejects both choices Jesus offers in his parable: “No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Luke 16:13). The back of the Narrative’s “white envelope” consists of a “Certificate” signed by five local Connecticut worthies, two of whom are relatives of Venture Smith’s former owners. In light of the tale of struggle, repeated betrayals, frustration, and ultimate despair that precedes it, the Certificate anticlimactically, if not ironically, completely fails in its attempt to domesticate Smith as “a faithful servant” whom his masters paternalistically “indulged” by allowing him to earn the money to buy his freedom (32). The treatment of Christianity throughout the Narrative denies the validity of trying to associate Venture Smith, characterized in the Certificate as having been “a faithful servant,” with the exemplary Christian “good and faithful servant” in Matthew 25. The Venture Smith we hear in the Narrative successfully resists the attempt to reappropriate his identity in the Certificate. For Venture Smith at least, neither the myth of the self-made man promoted in the Narrative’s preface nor the claim that the new United States is a “Christian country” ultimately offers him any satisfactory reward in either this world or the hereafter. Although formally similar in many ways to earlier narratives by and about people of African descent, Smith’s Narrative is unprecedented both in its rejection of the Christian and nationalist ideologies that underlie them and in how strongly his “black message” resists the “white envelope” that tries to contain it. In effect, Venture Smith’s Narrative subverts the tradition to which it is indebted.

Notes I am very grateful for a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London, which enabled me to finish researching and revising this essay. My research is greatly indebted to the staffs and collections of the British Library, the Houghton and Widener Libraries at Harvard University, the Library of Congress, and McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland. I am particularly thankful for the support of Henry Louis Gates Jr. An earlier version of this essay was presented to the research seminar at Queen Mary, University of London. I am grateful to my fellow participants and members of the audiences at that gathering and at the Documenting Venture Smith conference for their comments, suggestions, and encouragement. I also thank Christopher M. Brown, Robert P. Forbes, Scott Heersman, and the members of the Washington Area Early American Seminar for their comments on an earlier written version of this essay.

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Venture Smith, One of a Kind 1. Recent perceptive critical commentaries on Smith’s Narrative include William Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Rafia Zafar, “Capturing the Captivity: African Americans among the Puritans,” MELUS 17, no. 2 (Summer 1991–92): 19–35; Robert S. Desrochers Jr., “ ‘Not Fade Away’: The Narrative of Venture Smith, An African American in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (June 1997): 40–66; Philip Gould, “Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist: Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic,” American Literary History 12, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 659–84; Philip Gould, “ ‘Remarkable Liberty’: Language and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Black Autobiography,” in Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 116–29; David Kazanjian, “Mercantile Exchanges, Mercantilist Enclosures: Racial Capitalism in the Black Mariner Narratives of Venture Smith and John Jea,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 147–78; David Waldstreicher, “The Vexed Story of Human Commodification Told by Benjamin Franklin and Venture Smith,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (2004): 268–78; Yolanda Pierce, “Redeeming Bondage: The Captivity Narrative and the Spiritual Autobiography in the African American Slave Narrative Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey Fisch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 83–98; Robert S. Levine, “The Slave Narrative and the Revolutionary Tradition of American Autobiography,” in Fisch, Cambridge Companion, 99–114 2. John Sekora, “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 10, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 482–515. 3. Compare the Diary of Elisha Niles in the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Conn. I thank Chandler B. Saint for sending me a photocopy of the typescript of Niles’s diary. Further complicating identification of the editor of Venture’s Narrative is the existence of at least two men named Elisha Niles living in Connecticut during Venture’s lifetime. The Elisha Niles who advertised his becoming “Post-Rider on the route from Hartford to New-London” in the American Mercury (Hartford) on April 2, 1807, and his retirement from that position in the Connecticut Courant (Hartford) on November 11, 1807, did so from Chatham. He was probably the Elisha Niles whose death was announced in The Constitution (Middletown), on July 2, 1845: “In Chatham (Middle Haddam Society) on the 13th ult. Mr. Elisha Niles, a revolutionary pensioner, aged 81.” The Connecticut Gazette and the Commercial Intelligencer (New London) on February 19, 1812, announced the death of a different Elisha Niles: “At Groton, Mr. Elisha Niles, aged 63, of the palsy; and Mr. Nathaniel Niles, aged 72, of the apoplexy; they were brothers, and died within a few hours of each other.” The announcement was repeated in the Connecticut Mirror (Hartford) on February 24, 1812, the American Mercury (Hartford) and the Connecticut Courant on February 26, and the Courier (Norwich) on March 10. On October 1 of the same year the

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

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9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

Columbian (New York) advertised letters unclaimed in the New York City Post Office, including at least one belonging to Elisha Niles. The Elisha Niles who advertised in the Connecticut Gazette (New London) in December 1795 for a runaway “negro woman servant,” did so from Groton (see next note). On December 17, 1795, Elisha Niles placed an advertisement in the Connecticut Gazette for a runaway indentured servant or slave: “Went away from the subscriber November 29th, a negro woman servant, named Chloe, about 37 years of age, of middling stature. Any person who will take up and return said negro to the subscriber, shall have three pence reward and no charges paid. Groton, Dec. 7, 1795. elisha niles. n.b. All persons are hereby forbid harboring, trading with, or employing said negro on penalty of the law. e.n.” See David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), no. 36067. According to the Transatlantic Slave Trade database, however, of approximately ninety enslaved Africans who began the voyage, only seventy-four disembarked from the Charming Susanna at Barbados. See the essay in this collection by Paul E. Lovejoy. Interestingly, Lovejoy is far more willing to accept the possibility that some of the details in the account of Venture Smith are erroneous or fictitious than he is to accept the much stronger evidence that Olaudah Equiano may have altered the story of his own life, evidence that Lovejoy rather dismissively acknowledges in a note. For an account of Venture’s success as a businessman, see Cameron Blevins’s essay in this volume. The 1798 advertisement for the Narrative was not the first time that an account of part of Venture’s life was published. After Venture and three other men ran away from their master on Long Island in a futile attempt to reach the Gulf of Mexico, he was described in a runaway advertisement that ran in the New York Gazette, on April 1, 1754: “a very tall fellow, 6 feet 2 inches high, thick square shoulders, large bon’d, mark’d in the face, or scar’d with a knife in his own country.” Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996; 2nd ed., 2004). All quotations from this text are taken from the 2004 edition. Smith’s Narrative is also reprinted in Unchained Voices. James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, in Carretta, Unchained Voices, 32. The documents that say that Equiano was born in South Carolina are reproduced and discussed in Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005; rpt., Penguin, 2007). George Liele, “An Account of several Baptist Churches, consisting chiefly of Negro Slaves: particularly of one at Kingston, in Jamaica, and another at Savannah, in Georgia,” in Carretta, Unchained Voices, 325. Ibid., 326.

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15. Ibid. 16. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 2003), 7, 31. 17. Rosalie Murphy Baum, “Early-American Literature: Reassessing the Black Contribution,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 27, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 536, notes that Venture’s Narrative “with its portrayal of a black self-made man brilliantly interrogates the Franklinian model of honesty, prudence, industry and frugality.” 18. On the significance of money in Venture’s Narrative, in addition to Gould, “Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist” and “Remarkable Liberty,” Kazanjian, “Mercantile Exchanges,” and Waldstreicher, “The Vexed Story of Human Commodification,” see Anna Mae Duane’s essay in this volume.

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6 Keeping His Word Money, Love, and Privacy in the Narrative of Venture Smith Anna Mae Duane

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As soon as I heard of his [my son’s] going to sea, I immediately set out to go and prevent it if possible. But on my arrival at Church’s, to my great grief, I could only see the vessel my son was on almost out of sight going to sea. My son died of the scurvy on this voyage, and Church has never yet paid me the least of his wages. In my son, besides the loss of his life, I lost equal to seventy-five pounds. Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture . . . (1798)

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N 1844 Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote that he was shocked at how little he felt at the loss of his young son Waldo: “In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar.” 1 Emerson’s meditation on personal loss and the passage from Venture Smith’s Narrative quoted at the head of this essay ·

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Keeping His Word juxtapose money, love, and grief in shocking ways. For Emerson’s nineteenthcentury audience, schooled in the fantasy of separate public and private spheres, equating the loss of a child with the loss of an “estate” conflicted with the cherished cultural belief that real love existed outside commercial interests. For Emerson himself, the comparison represents a failure. Grief is supposed to function in an entirely different realm than the vagaries of the market, and his inability to get “nearer” to his son’s death than he can to the loss of a profitable estate marks his inability to participate in an affective realm where feeling is all-penetrating, and where grief transcends the pettiness of any financial enterprise.2 Venture Smith, an eighteenth-century African-born slave who worked his way to freedom and remarkable prosperity in the United States, acknowledges no such failure. The paradox of Smith’s 1798 narrative—brought about by the desire of its subject, arguably, for recognition as a person rather than as property—is that the narrator speaks of private loss in startlingly proprietary ways. The equation of familial and financial loss found in his account of his son’s death is repeated at several junctures in the Narrative without reflection or, it would appear, remorse. At very few points does Smith reveal an aspect of his life that would somehow thwart the economic logic that has defined him—the triumphs and tragedies of his remarkable life are rendered through a narrative ledger of monetary gains and losses. Smith’s laconic accounting is particularly striking when he describes the loss of his daughter, Hannah, who falls ill and dies despite his having “procured her all the aid mortals could afford.” After recounting Hannah’s long and painful illness, Venture makes sure to let the reader know that “the physician’s bills for attending her during her illness amounted to forty pounds.” 3 An episode where Smith is cheated by a white merchant receives more narrative weight, and more discernible grief, than the loss of either of his children (30).4 Even when Smith describes intact familial bonds, money is never far behind. At the end of the text, Smith thinks on his consolations, among them Meg, “the wife of my youth, whom I married for love, and bought with my money” (31). For many critics, Venture’s tendency to view his family members through a financial rather than an affective lens renders his narrative tragically compromised. David Waldstreicher notes Smith’s “weird play . . . with the relationships between people and capital,” arguing that “there is something disturbing about Smith’s absorption of the cash nexus in his society.” 5 Philip Gould goes still further, suggesting that when Smith tells us of his son’s death by relating how much money he lost on the deal, “he commits the sin of slavery.” 6 ·

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m e m o ry If read through the prism of Paul Gilroy’s magisterial work on the Black Atlantic, Smith’s text fares little better. Gilroy reads early black writing as functioning either within the compromised realm of the “politics of fulfillment—a stance that works wholly within the established heuristic,” or within the more revolutionary “politics of transfiguration”—a mode patterned after the sublime, where writers try to “repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable.” 7 Smith, in this text, and particularly in his portrayals of loss, seems to reside within Gilroy’s “politics of fulfillment.” He tells his story in the terminology and logic of a marketplace that has dehumanized him. As Gould writes, “Smith’s ‘grief’ would seem to arise from a material rather than a sentimental economy.” 8 Venture’s reliance on an amanuensis (tradition has it that it was Elisha Niles, a schoolteacher and literary entrepreneur) furthers the notion that the narrative is almost wholly a white script that occludes any semblance of an authentic eighteenth-century black voice. These critical objections, have, unfortunately, prevented Venture Smith’s Narrative from getting the attention it deserves. The Narrative provides one of the few (admittedly laconic) accounts of the Middle Passage written by a North American slave, and it makes a substantial contribution to the emerging republican mythology of the self-made man.9 As Robert E. Desrochers Jr. points out, because of his frugality and industry “Smith embodied republican virtue as many whites had not.” 10 First published in 1798, Smith’s Narrative was republished in 1835 and again as late as 1897 along with an addendum called “Traditions of Venture” that contains folkloric accounts of Smith’s strength and work ethic. Although the story of a black man who somehow combined the virtues of both Benjamin Franklin and Paul Bunyan made the text popular among nineteenth-century readers, the Narrative has not enjoyed much popularity among modern critics. Before this volume’s publication, the Narrative received fine literary analysis from Philip Gould, Robert E. Desrochers Jr., and David Kazanjian, but it still remains relatively neglected, considering its significance.11 Many of the essays in this volume draw from Venture’s Narrative as a way of anchoring him within various eighteenth-century historical contexts— Paul E. Lovejoy illuminates his African background; John Wood Sweet draws on the Narrative to better understand slaves’ working lives in the eighteenth century Northeast; Robert P. Forbes, David Richardson, and Chandler B. Saint cull details from the text to demonstrate the commercial integration of the Atlantic world. My contribution to this study of Venture Smith focuses primarily on the Narrative as a work of literature—as an act of storytelling. Smith, with the help of an amanuensis, chose to highlight certain aspects of ·

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Keeping His Word his life to create a particular story that he felt would best represent his life and struggle. By paying particular attention to how Smith interprets these events, we gain another means of understanding his remarkable life. Rather than replacing love with money, Smith’s Narrative recalibrates money’s meaning at a historical moment when commerce, sentiment, and personhood were being defined in complex and mutually constitutive ways.12 More precisely, I argue that Smith’s account of his African father’s defiant death— and how money figures in that death—inflects his adoption of the Atlantic system of commerce with an African identity. As Robert Desrochers has argued, it is both reductive and inaccurate to assume that hard work and wealth were the sole domain of Western culture, and thus would be alien concepts to an African prince. Indeed, Smith’s depiction of his heroic work ethic and relentless pursuit of wealth draws explicitly on the memories of Africa he takes pains to describe.13 On one level, Smith’s intense attachment to money reflects the psychological power money accumulated when he witnessed his African father die for refusing to hand it over. On another level, much of Smith’s engagement with money echoes with West African traditions, including the system of pawnship (a form of indentured servitude) and the spiritual belief system that invests certain objects with the potential to tap into the powers of lost ancestors.14 Instead of evaluating early black writing by its ability to differ from Western ideals, I will argue that it would be more useful to acknowledge the influence African traditions and beliefs had on the conceptual marketplace that helped to form those ideals in the first place. As Joanna Brooks and John Saillant have demonstrated, black authors of the late eighteenth century often “cast Africa as a spiritual environment into which blacks anywhere could enter if they attained the proper consciousness.” 15 Smith’s text, though decidedly unspiritual, returns again and again to a scene of African memory that reshapes the meanings of labor, exchange, and loss that emerge throughout the narrative. The African reading of money and loss offered early in the text allows Smith to engage the terms of the Western game, but from a decidedly different starting point.16 That starting point, I suggest, is inspired both by Smith’s personal memories of his African father and by an African traditions such as minkisi (charmed objects; the singular is nkisi) that link people and objects in powerful ways. I am not arguing that Smith literally saw money as a nkisi. Indeed, as Paul E. Lovejoy and others in this volume note, even if we consider Smith’s memories sacrosanct (an assumption both science and literary studies have shown to be a dangerous one), determining his precise point of origin is exceedingly difficult. Add to that uncertainty the difficulty of determining the precise historical conditions ·

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m e m o ry and practices of inland sections of Africa in the eighteenth century, and tying Smith to any particular set of beliefs becomes risky indeed. I draw on the concept of minkisi because the careful study it has inspired has explanatory power for understanding a more wide-ranging set of African traditions that allot to certain objects personal and ancestral power. Placing Smith’s narrative within this set of beliefs allows for a new way of reading his struggle to gain command over money and its fantastic ability to determine the lives of those he loved. It seems entirely likely that eighteenth-century readers were as frustrated by the Narrative’s seeming lack of private subjectivity as modern readers are. Smith’s text violates an emerging antislavery formula through which writers emerged into the public sphere of literature by writing harrowing scenes of deeply intimate and emotional loss. Indeed, the striking divergence between the sentimental promises in the preface and the narrative’s unemotional prose suggests that Smith actually had considerable editorial control over the finished product. In the preface, the amanuensis offers two ways of reading the narrative. One casts Venture as a self-made man, in the mold of Benjamin Franklin, offering him as an example to the black race, and more timidly, as an example that “some white people would not find themselves degraded by imitating” (iv). The preface’s second framework speaks to sentiment, a value that is almost wholly absent from the narrative. In syntax that slips from the “subject” of the narrative to the ostensible object of it, the amanuensis writes: “The reader is here presented with an account, not of a renowned politician or warrior, but of an untutored African slave, brought into this Christian country at eight years of age, wholly destitute of all education but what he received in common with other domesticated animals, enjoying no advantages that could lead him to suppose himself superior to the beasts, his fellow servants. And if he shall enjoy no other advantage from perusing this narrative, he may experience those sensations of shame and indignation, that will prove him to be not wholly destitute of every noble and generous feeling” (iii). In a grammatical move that anticipates the slippage of identity that should come with true sympathetic connection, the writer here fails to distinguish between the slave-narrator’s “he” (that is equated with beasts) and the readerly “he” that “shall enjoy no other advantage” but the experience of “shame and indignation” when reading of Venture’s travails. Here, in what would become formulaic practice in circum-Atlantic slave narratives, the writer of the preface suggests that Smith’s entry into the public sphere will gain legitimacy by first eliciting particular interior responses and then confirming for the reader that these responses are correct and in line with the ·

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Keeping His Word private sensibilities of a citizen of “noble and generous feeling.” In other words, Venture becomes a publicly acknowledged “person” when white readers can acknowledge, through their own “noble” feelings of sympathy, that he possesses a recognizably emotional interior life. As Houston A. Baker has noted, because blacks were figured as private property of the bourgeoisie, they were almost wholly excluded from participation in the public sphere of commerce, literature, and government.17 Correspondingly, one of the most popular strategies for reestablishing slaves as people was to appeal to increasingly private realms of familial relationships. According to Habermas’s description of the public sphere in the eighteenth century, a citizen worthy of participating in the public arena had to emerge from, and return to, a private, intimate realm of family.18 For Habermas, owning property offered the promise of independence: “commodity owners could view themselves as autonomous . . . subject only to the anonymous laws functioning with an economic rationality.” Importantly, however, the freedom manifested in the public realm of commerce could be truly validated only by the private freedom found in the family. It was only through the intimate bonds of home—and the sense that such a home creates unique individuals— that one could feel one wielded “private autonomy exercised in competition.” 19 Many black writers strove to validate their claims to public speaking by insisting on the power and validity of their family bonds. In alliance with theories of sentiment, black writers who portrayed familial loss and grief sought to create a sympathetic response from whites, who would then recognize the narrator’s pain as their own. According to sentimental theory, once white readers followed the preface’s formula to become aware of their own noble and generous responses to heartrending tales of a violated intimate sphere, they were implicitly granting that blacks had a valid claim to occupy that sphere in security. To appreciate how starkly Smith’s tale deviates from what was emerging as the usual sentiment-laden framing of a slave’s subjectivity, it is helpful to consider Smith’s formulations of loss and grief against the account of another contemporary slave author, Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa), whose 1789 narrative caused a transatlantic sensation. Early in his narrative, Equiano describes his separation from his sister as a catastrophe that would permanently damage his ability to feel happiness and to enjoy the fruits of his labor: “Yes, thou dear partner of all my childish sports! thou sharer of my joys and sorrows! happy should I have ever esteemed myself to encounter every misery for you, and to procure your freedom by the sacrifice of my own. Though you were early forced from my arms, your image has been always ·

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m e m o ry riveted in my heart, from which neither time nor fortune have been able to remove it; so that, while the thoughts of your sufferings have damped my prosperity, they have mingled with adversity and increased its bitterness.” 20 The loss of the sister is explicitly figured as irretrievable, a scar that cannot be healed by economic gain or personal freedom. The world of commerce, although it eventually allows Equiano freedom and prosperity, is formulated here as an entirely different order—and one infinitely inadequate to recompense the loss of love.21 Strategies of sentiment were not without cost, however. As scholars of sentimentalism have argued, writers who created sympathy through scenes of subjection and pain depended on a perpetual victim to make their case, and thus constructed an individual so helpless that s/he could only function as private.22 As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon points out, the autonomous citizen created through the work of print, government, and commerce only became possible by projecting a lack of autonomy onto the supposedly encumbered and dependent bodies of people of color, women, and children.23 Thus the work of generating sympathy was a double-edged sword. By speaking of trauma and separation, early black writers did undeniably move white readers to tears. They also inevitably shaped representations of blackness as a site of dependence and suffering. Like the children to whom they would be compared, blacks were considered incapable of the rational autonomous stance that would allow them to participate in public life. Smith’s narrative offers a startling revision of both the standing definition of blacks as hollow public commodities, devoid of “private” life, and of the definition of blacks as encumbered, victimized subjects, whose intensely private pain disqualifies them from active participation in the public sphere. Smith’s body is not only unencumbered by trauma, it also contains a nearly superhuman capacity for labor. His ability to work, and to save the money earned from this labor, allows him to shift from being an object of the commercial marketplace to being an agent within that marketplace. As Cameron Blevins demonstrates elsewhere in this volume, Smith’s canny dealings in real estate established him firmly as one who owns property, rather than one who might be owned by another. As a property owner, Smith describes very few losses that defy the logical accents of economics. On the contrary, the familial separations that often occupy the affective center of the slave narrative are, in Smith’s text, portrayed calmly, in the language of capitalism. The redemption and death of his son Solomon—cited in the epigraph—appears in a long paragraph in which his son’s loss is related as an item in a ledger detailing assets and deficits. ·

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Keeping His Word Felicity Nussbaum, in her recent reading of the narratives of Equiano and Ignatius Sancho, deftly acknowledges how the restraints of gender ideology— which of course were implicated in the negotiation of private and public realms—also restricted the expression of black writers. “How might a black man in England,” she asks, “shape a masculinity when male sociability rested on imperialism, commerce and trade, the very trade to which he was subject, and which made of him a commodity?” 24 For Smith, his claim to both masculinity and commercial prowess would seem to have come through excising all traces of a private, or as Dillon might argue, an encumbered, even feminized, self that had suffered under slavery. His self-portrait contains little that could not be captured on a ledger. By casting his lot so fully with commerce, Smith does seem to map a gendered divide between public and private spheres that would reach its imaginative peak in the nineteenth century. Yet once we include Smith’s insistence on African memory, money does not fall so easily into either an affective or a commercial realm. For in Smith’s Narrative, the economic does not function in opposition to a private realm of feeling, as it does for Equiano in the quoted passage. Rather, money acts as an alternate form of privacy—one that overlays the Atlantic system of commerce with an African male perspective. In other words, within the aesthetics of the text, money functions as a physical manifestation of a hidden psychological realm, of a part of the self that can be secreted away and preserved from the predations of the slave market. Money becomes invested with particular, private meaning in the portion of the Narrative that unfolds in Africa, in a striking passage wherein the young Smith watches his father, Saungm Furro, die. This scene of childhood separation and trauma takes a sharp turn away from the expected sentimental formula. The scene of his father’s death emerges primarily as a failed exchange—a theme that will echo throughout Smith’s own catalog of loss. Smith relates that his father had agreed to pay an enemy a tribute of “large sum of money, three hundred fat cattle, and a great number of goats, sheep, asses, &c.” Yet, Smith tells us, after the deal has been negotiated and the exchange completed, “their pledges of faith and honor proved no better than those of other unprincipled hostile nations,” and the enemy decides to attack anyway (9). The passage in which Smith’s father is captured and killed is one of the few moments in which Smith allows for emotion at all: My father was closely interrogated respecting his money which they knew he must have. But as he gave them no account of it, he was instantly cut

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m e m o ry

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and pounded on his body with great inhumanity, that he might be induced by the torture he suffered to make the discovery. All this availed not the least to make him give up his money, but he despised all the tortures which they inflicted, until the continued exercise and increase of torment, obliged him to sink and expire. He thus died without informing his enemies of the place where his money lay. I saw him while he was thus tortured to death. The shocking scene is to this day fresh in my mind, and I have often been overcome while thinking on it. (10–11)

Here, Smith admits, there is a lasting scar. Cast as a scene so powerfully traumatic that it is still “fresh” enough to “overcome” Smith “often,” this passage welds irreparable loss to an act of resistance expressed as silence. At the hands of an enemy who can capture and kill his family, who can, and does, possess and abuse his body, Smith’s father dies for keeping a secret—for remaining silent about a treasure that the enemy cannot reach. Particularly for modern readers, Furro’s choice seems painfully confused—instead of fighting for his family, or working to remain with them, he instead sacrifices his body to keep money hidden. His money, however, is the only aspect of his life that Smith’s father has the capacity to save at the moment. Like the generations of slaves that would follow him, the father is rendered devoid of the claim to his own body (and the labor it might produce) and any claim to the sacrosanct realm of familial relations. All claims to what the eighteenth century coded as private property—and the personhood that accompanied it—were denied him. In the face of such negation, Furro’s choice to resist establishes him as a man of great integrity, who staunchly claims the only property he can still possess. As Desrochers has suggested, Furro “can be taken to represent Smith’s more perfect—and African—version of [the preface’s] ideal American forefathers.” 25 Within this framework, the father’s choice to meet his attackers’ queries about his treasure with silence gives money a particular power. Simply by choosing to withhold it at the expense of his life, the father’s resistance in this scene transfigures the monetary into a private realm, unreachable by the “unprincipled hostile” enemy. In Smith’s shocked retelling of this scene and the scenes of loss that follow it, money functions as what psychoanalytic theorists would call the lost object. Its connection to his father’s death is both undeniable and unfathomable. To fully understand the talismanic power money has in this text, it is important to recognize that, for much of West Africa, money itself was explicitly acknowledged as a signifier of human relationships. The money that ·

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Keeping His Word Saungm Furro hides was likely cowry shells, or perhaps gold—both of which had significant transatlantic value by this point.26 But Furro’s need to protect his money was likely more complex than a desire to hoard valuable items. As Jane I. Guyer and others have pointed out, wealth in Africa was a complex affair that encompassed both things and people. Many African languages had two sets of terms for describing wealth—ones that referred to objects, and others that referred to people, often in terms of kinship relations, but also including slaves. Yet, as Guyer notes, there are multiple points of acknowledged overlap between the two classes of terminology. For much of eighteenthcentury Equatorial Africa, then, there was little insistence on separate spheres— love and money were often, if not always, in explicit engagement with one another. As Guyer writes, in Equatorial Africa there were “assorted items” that comprised wealth “and the intricacy, variability and changeability of the human, often kinship relations that were at its heart.” 27 African scholars have coined the term “wealth-in-people” to account for such a model. As Guyer and Samuel M. Eno Belinga explain, “wealth-inpeople” or “rights-in-people” is “invoked in a general way as a shorthand for many syndromes of interpersonal dependency and social network-building that clearly involved strategizing, investing and otherwise cultivating interpersonal ties at the expense of personal wealth in material things.” 28 While the economic ramifications of such an expansive conception of wealth provide a compelling background for Venture’s willingness to fuse the material with the emotional in his narrative, I want to focus on another possible aspect of money’s meaning in the death scene of Venture’s father. For Saungm Furro— and his son—the choice to withhold money from enemies who held his family captive took place amidst a cultural tradition in which things of value could conceivably stand in for people of value. The African practice of pawnship, in which a family member—quite often a child—is traded in an economic exchange further helps to clarify Saungm Furro’s choice. In this tradition, if the head of a household fell into debt, he might pawn family members as collateral. Contemporary observers noted that the labor required of a pawn was not “slavish” at all, and the pawn was often protected from slavery by the kinship and social relationships in which the system of pawnship was embedded.29 As Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson point out, many West African languages have different terms for pawn and slave.30 Most important for our purposes, pawnship allowed for a more fluid version of captivity, one in which a third party could redeem the pawned family members if the head of the household proved too indebted or was otherwise incapacitated. So, viewed from a West African perspective, ·

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m e m o ry Furro’s choice to die in order to hide his money from his attackers was, in fact, a possible means of saving his wife and children. He could not save himself, but he died to save the money that, to his mind, might well have redeemed his family. For Saungm Furro, and for Venture Smith as well, then, money and love do not constitute an either/or proposition. Smith’s engagement with both commerce and family enacts an Africaninspired process of self-composition, through which he both manifests his own powers and actualizes those powers through fetishizing and privatizing money itself. Guyer and Belinga, when speaking of ethnographic studies of southern Cameroon, explain the reciprocal relationship between an individual’s own destiny and the nkisi he chooses for himself: “Each individual person’s power is itself a composition, put together through various means, but means in which the verb ‘bi’ figures prominently. Bi can be most simply translated as ‘to take’; but in various places in the literature it is given the meaning of ‘to seize or capture,’ a variety of connective and disjointive acts, and the critically important gloss of “to conserve or retain.” In this latter meaning it forms the root concept of bian, literally then ‘a thing to conserve’ but usually translated as ‘charm’ or ‘medicine.’ Personal abilities exist first, then they can be augmented, conserved or actualized within the person.” 31 Certainly Smith’s self-composition was deeply entangled with money—his ability to save it, earn, it, and invest it. When we examine that process of selfcomposition through the lens of African beliefs about the power of things over people, Smith’s insistent blurring of love and money is no longer the failure that some critics have seen; instead it is a means of accessing his own power and of connecting to the power of his ancestors. Discussing the Bakongo people (who populated an area south of where Venture likely lived) Wyatt MacGaffey tells us that “to a considerable extent, minkisi (fetishized items) as personalized objects were functionally interchangeable with human beings, who in turn were in certain aspects objectified.” 32 In the crushingly devaluative process of slavery, I suggest, Smith uses money much in this way—as a stand-in for the people and relationships whose fate he could not immediately affect and whose well-being he could not guarantee. To return to Gilroy’s formulation, I suggest that Smith’s text can lay claim to both the politics of fulfillment and the politics of transfiguration. Smith’s narrative functions within Gilroy’s politics of fulfillment—as it does certainly play the abstract game of Western capitalism, seemingly surveying every aspect of life through a solely commercial lens. Yet as the very symbol of commercial exchange, cash itself becomes imbued with African memories of betrayal, silence, and resistance. The narrative also remakes the ·

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Keeping His Word coin of the realm into a placeholder for what Gilroy calls the “unspeakable” and “unpresentable.” 33 After a rather perfunctory description of the harrowing passage (more than one out of every five people died en route) to North America, the narrator pauses to lavish authorial attention on another act of withholding—an act that gains meaning by its juxtaposition with the scene of Venture’s father’s own act of resistance. One of Venture’s first acts as a slave is to withhold something—the key to his master’s trunks. Like the mind of Smith’s father in Africa, the key here represents the only path to whatever treasure lay in the trunks:

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When I arrived with my master’s articles at his house, my master’s father asked me for his son’s keys, as he wanted to see what his trunks contained. I told him that my master intrusted me with the care of them until he should return, and that I had given him my word to be faithful to the trust, and could not therefore give him or any other person the keys without my master’s directions. He insisted that I should deliver him the keys, threatening to punish me if I did not. But I let him know that he should not have them say what he would. He then laid aside trying to get them. But notwithstanding he appeared to give up trying to obtain them from me, yet I mistrusted that he would take some time when I was off my guard, either in the day time or at night to get them, therefore I slung them around my neck, and in the day concealed them in my bosom, and at night I always lay with them under me, that no person might take them from me without being apprized of it. (14)

Like his father, Venture renders his body the shield for the key he refuses to relinquish. Immersed in a system in which his body represents a commodity owned by another, Smith alters the terms of the equation—displacing the value onto a third space—one protected by his will, and the body he deploys in response to that will. Tellingly, Smith pauses to tell us of his success through an interaction between father and son. Telling us proudly that “I kept the keys from every body until my master came home,” Smith goes on to relate the praise his young master heaps on him: “He took them [the keys], stroked my hair, and commended me, saying in presence of his father that his young venture was so faithful that he would never have been able to have taken the keys from him but by violence; that he should not fear to trust him with his whole fortune, for that he had been in his native place so habituated to keeping his word, that he would sacrifice even his life to maintain ·

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m e m o ry it” (14–15). “Keeping his word” takes on multiple meanings in this passage, and in the narrative itself as well. Certainly Venture’s choice to keep his word makes him a good servant—his word functions as a guarantee of faithful service. And Venture keeps his word(s) throughout this tale—creating, at first glance, the awkward blend of silence and complicity that many readers have found so difficult. As the narrative unfolds however, Smith’s insistence on both keeping his word and withholding treasure becomes more explicitly resistant. Even in this scene, however, Smith’s dogged withholding dominates the exchange between the father and son, who both give him credit for having the temerity to tell a white man no. At a later point in the text, Smith, like his father, seems willing to sacrifice his own body in order to deprive his enemy of monetary gain. In one of the many scenes initiated by a broken promise, Smith’s new owner breaks his word to him and denies him the “good chance” to regain his freedom he had originally offered (20–21). Instead, he tries to sell Smith immediately to another man, William Hooker, who wants to carry Smith away to a further locale. When Smith tells Hooker that he does not want to go to the German Flats with him, Hooker grows angry and tells him that he would have his way, “if not by fair means . . . by foul. If you will go by no other measures, I will tie you down in my sleigh” (21). Smith transforms the restraint his prospective master threatens into a bargaining chip. Rather than decrying the injustice of the master’s threats or lamenting his sorry condition, Smith merely points out to his prospective purchaser that if he carried out his threats to use “foul” means to tie him down and drag him along in a sleigh, “no person would purchase me, for it would be thought that he had a murderer for sale” (21).34 For Smith, the meanings of wealth move between African memories of money as a talisman of both grief and power, and American sentimentalism’s investment in separating the value accorded to things and to people. When placed amidst Anglo-American sentimental expectations—expectations made fairly explicit in a preface of which we must assume Venture was aware— Venture’s emphasis on the monetary aspects of loss, paired with his comparative silence on private feelings, can be read as another means of “keeping his word” from the prying eyes of whites. When read against the expectations of the emerging sentimentalist genre, Smith’s focus on money instead of love emerges as a different form of resistance. In other words, Smith’s doggedly unemotional prose refuses to tell us where the real treasure lies. In this way, Smith reformulates privacy as something that, while marked by the brutalities of the public sphere of commerce, can nonetheless remain intact as a space inviolate by predation or exchange. ·

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Keeping His Word First emerging as a placemarker for the lost person, money also functions as a surrogate for Smith’s feelings about the family member and his/her loss. At a particularly painful moment in the narrative, Smith describes being sold away from his wife and child. Once again, instead of the affect-laden lament one might expect, the text immediately follows grief with money: “At the close of that year I was sold to a Thomas Stanton, and had to be separated from my wife and one daughter, who was about one month old. He resided at Stonington-point. To this place I brought with me from my last master’s, two johannes, three old Spanish dollars, and two thousand of coppers, besides five pounds of my wife’s money” (18). Unable to retain the trappings of private subjectivity—a home life with his wife and infant child—Smith displaces that privacy onto the money he can grasp and keep. He may not be able to keep Meg with him, but he can hold her money close. Indeed, Venture’s stance toward Meg’s money anticipates the nineteenth-century keepsake tradition, in which objects stand in for the presence of a lost loved one. Instead of publicizing his private psychic wounds, Smith eventually invests money with the power to stanch those wounds: if money first acts as a manifestation of the loss itself, it eventually emerges as a means of regenerating what has been lost. Or, to be more precise, money should have the power, both within Smith’s daunting tale of wealth-building and within the larger commercial system that promises such social mobility, to regenerate itself. A moment in the Narrative when Smith buries his money in the ground has the ring of regeneration, even of salvation, to it—as it resonates through both African and Western traditions. Unlike a lost family member, a buried treasure always carries the hope of rising again. Within the frame of the narrative, which fuses his father’s memory with the memory of hidden money, the act evokes a connection with his lost father. And within the minkisi tradition, the act of burying something in the ground and then retrieving it promises the possibility of connection to one’s dead ancestors. As MacGaffey, Guyer, and Belinga all suggest, tapping the ground with a staff was a meaning-laden gesture that, in many African traditions, activated the power of the fetishized object, and more importantly, the power of the ancestors who were a vital part of the object’s mystique. “Consonant with the ancestral inspiration and relics of the dead that were key components of all minkisi, the [user’s] privileged contact with the dead was the focal point of his powers. He aroused them by driving the point of his staff—duly strengthened by ‘tokens’—into the ground.” 35 According to Smith’s narrative, the act of burying money in the earth was potent indeed. After much negotiating, and several turns of luck, Smith winds up with a ·

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m e m o ry master who does indeed allow him to buy back his freedom. His first installment toward that freedom is the very money he buries, and then retrieves, from the ground. Once he has a surplus of money, Smith gives us a detailed account of how he chooses to spend it. After he buys his wife, he “purchase[d] a negro man” for sixty pounds. He seems genuinely surprised and disappointed when, “in a short time after, he run away from me, and I thereby lost all that I gave for him, except twenty pounds” (26). After his heroic travails to free himself from the clutches of slavery, Smith’s decision to purchase a slave—and his surprise and hurt when the man runs away to gain his freedom—offers one of the more problematic moments in the text. Once again, Smith’s African childhood provides insight into why he finds this loss so painful. Early in the narrative, before Smith tells us of his father’s death, he relates another scene of separation. His mother leaves the young Venture with a “rich farmer” after a falling out with Venture’s father, and has left the homeland without “the least sustenance along with her, to support either herself or children” (6). Venture, at five years of age, was the oldest of these children.36 Clearly, Venture’s mother needed access to financial resources. Thus when she leaves Venture with a “rich farmer” the scenario falls well within the boundaries of the pawnship tradition, in which a person stands in as collateral. Because Smith’s mother had no food and three small children to support, pawning Venture would have allowed her to find a secure place for him and to gain access to the resources that would allow her to support her two youngest children. Smith recounts a year living apart from both of his parents in his usual laconic style. He does not tell us of his youthful pining for a father’s voice or a mother’s hand. Perhaps he was comforted by the knowledge that he was protected by his father’s status, and by the social and kinship networks that worked as a safety net for pawns. As Lovejoy and Richardson tell us, “as a credit system, the pawning of individuals relied on social relationships, often kinship, to protect those being held in pawn, wherein membership in a kin group implied some insurance in situations of indebtedness.” 37 And indeed, a year later an emissary from Venture’s father arrives, and “after settling with my guardian for keeping” the young boy, he brings Venture home (8). While young Venture had little choice in the matter, it was not uncommon in West Africa for adults to pawn themselves in the absence of other resources. As Lovejoy and Richardson point out, pawnship could be seen as a safety net, keeping community members from falling into irreversible poverty. One contemporary observer remarks that in African communities that practiced pawn-

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Keeping His Word ship, “no matter how little they possess, they never beg.”38 In many ways, the householder who agreed to take in a pawn could be seen as providing a service, by supporting an individual until he or his parents could get back on their feet. Smith may well have seen himself as providing precisely such a service when he “purchased a negro man, for no other reason than to oblige him” (26). Perhaps he saw himself as re-creating the circumstances of his own childhood redemption. Like the “rich farmer,” and like his father, Smith had the money that allowed him to move someone from a position of penniless dependence to a transitional state where he could—within the protections of social and kinship networks—work his way to financial independence. Smith’s other purchases suggest that he sees the transactions within a framework analogous to voluntary pawnship. He buys one “negro man for four hundred dollars,” he tells us. “But he [had] an inclination to go to his old master,” so Venture “therefore let him go.” He purchases another man for twenty five pounds, “whom [he] parted with shortly after” (27). Perhaps Smith was trying to live up to his father’s powerful example of redemption, rather than the white man’s example of enslavement. If so, Smith’s bewilderment and hurt at his bondsman’s breaking of a contract—that for him was both voluntary and inflected with the power of kinship ties—becomes a poignant loss indeed. Indeed, by the end of the narrative money has failed at many of the tasks Venture sets for it. Its talismanic power has largely dissipated. Venture’s story, as it comes to a close, contains a critique of the very rubric he creates. Money’s power to both stand in for and recover loss grows less and less effective as he accumulates more and more wealth. Just as Smith’s story evokes the notion of a “Franklin or a Washington” most powerfully, the losses he incurs emerge as a threat to the ideal of the public self-made, self-reliant man that such founding fathers would increasingly come to represent.39 The scenes of paternal grief that, at first glance, seem devastatingly materialistic in their expression pose a very different set of problems once we have acknowledged Smith’s psychologically complex, African-inflected engagement with money. The loss of Smith’s children, when considered in the dual framework of money’s psychic work in this text and its supposed power to grant power to the classically liberal individual, actually deals a devastating blow. The deaths of Smith’s children, despite the considerable amount he spends to prevent them, illustrate that wealth fails to guarantee a space free from loss in either symbolic or material terms. In other words, Smith’s adoption of the capitalist system— layered, as I have suggested, with African-inspired resistance within that system—renders the rags-to-riches story that the narrative’s preface suggests

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m e m o ry “some white people would not find themselves degraded by imitating” (iv) a devastatingly hollow success. In order to consider money’s place in Smith’s powerful narrative within a larger circum-Atlantic tradition, I’d like to return to the Emerson quote that opened this essay. In doing so, I am not hoping to establish Smith as a fledgling Emerson. As Vincent Carretta notes in his essay in this volume, Venture Smith’s narrative does not fit easily into literary history’s clear narrative connecting ancestors to successors. Rather, I wish to emphasize the still underrecognized extent to which slave writing anticipated questions that eventually would be considered quintessentially American concerns. When Emerson speaks of his son, he feels cheated because he finds he can only grieve in financial, but not affective, terms. The signification of money in Smith’s text both anticipates and critiques Emerson’s nineteenth-century assertion that somehow commerce and affect should be separate. Smith’s text is at its most heartbreaking when it illustrates how intertwined money and love are—both for Smith as an African man trying to find his place in a system designed to negate him and for the American liberal subject increasingly invested in the idea that private and public were distinct. Money, which represents at first resistance and then redemption for Smith, ultimately becomes a shockingly inadequate form of protection and validation. When Smith reveals that he paid forty pounds to secure the best medical care available for his suffering daughter, it is money’s inability to contain and ameliorate Smith’s loss that renders it doubly devastating. Money served Smith faithfully as he secured it to gain his family’s freedom, but at this moment it loses its regenerative power—power that for Smith was intimately connected to his homeland. The loss attached to his daughter’s care and eventual downfall is permanent, impervious to the prowess or strength of the spender to transform the means of exchange. The Narrative, even as it speaks the language of commerce throughout, ultimately reveals the insufficiency of money. Ultimately, it critiques the emerging belief that somehow the public sphere of commerce allowed a classically liberal male subject to protect the private space of the family. Smith’s final lament, that a “father’s lips are closed in silence and grief” (31) acts as a powerful counterweight to his father’s own resistant silence. The closing words of Smith’s text are taken from the book of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of Vanity, all is Vanity” (31). Smith’s portion of the text ends there, leaving a silence that for readers familiar with the Bible would resonate with the question that immediately follows Smith’s citation. In the King James Bible, the lament over vanity is followed by the question, “What profit hath a man of all his labour ·

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Keeping His Word which he taketh under the sun?” The answer the Narrative supplies offers a keen correction to the capitalist structure Smith worked so hard to inhabit. Smith, like Benjamin Franklin to whom he is compared, does create profit through his own hard work and ingenuity. It is his very success, or more precisely, the failure of that success to protect the private realm, that illustrates the vanity of imagining an autonomous liberal subject whose prosperity and prowess can somehow free him from the encumbrances of private dependence and loss. Smith chose to end his narrative with a biblical quotation; I would like to close my reading of his narrative with a final return to the minkisi tradition, and in particular a description of the minkisi power that amplifies Venture’s question about what constitutes the profit of his lifetime. One of the most widely quoted descriptions of the dual power of African sacred objects— both to compose individuals, and to hold them to the rules of the composition, comes from Kavuna Simon, a turn-of-the century evangelist in the Lower Congo who wrote of Minkisi in his native KiKongo” “[Minkisi] receive these powers by composition, conjuring and consecration. They are composed of earths, ashes, herbs and leaves, and of the relics of the dead. They are composed in order to relieve and benefit people, and to make a profit. . . . To look after their owners, and to visit retribution on them. The way of every nkisi is this: when you have composed it, observe its rules lest it be annoyed and punish you. It knows no mercy.” 40 In African terms, perhaps, and certainly in American ones, Venture is punished by the rules of the market that were so essential to his selfcomposition. By drawing his primary sense of wealth and power from money’s undeniably potent presence in his life, Venture finds himself bound by money’s relentless demands and betrayed by its failure to protect the loved ones it had come to represent.

Notes I am greatly indebted to Paul Lovejoy, Robert Forbes, Vincent Carretta, and James Brewer Stewart for their help and encouragement as I worked on this chapter. I also thank Kristina Dougal, who asked the good questions that led to this essay’s creation. 1. “Experience,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 473. 2. For an excellent assessment of Emerson’s commodification of grief, see Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth- Century Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 120–31.

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m e m o ry 3. Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But resident above sixty years in the United States of America (New London, Conn.: C. Holt, 1798), 28. Subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 4. As David Waldstreicher notes, this passage is also infused with African memory, as Smith declares that in his “native country” cheating an innocent man would be “equal to highway robbery,” but that in America’s “Christian land” such blatant misconduct was unpunished. Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 244. 5. Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 243. 6. Philip Gould, “Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist: Reading the Lives of the Early Black Atlantic,” American Literary History 12, no. 4 (2000): 677. 7. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double- Consciousness (1993; repr., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 38. Other critics who argue that Smith’s narrative is little more than a white script imposed upon an exemplar of assimilation include William L. Andrews, “The First Fifty Years of the Slave Narrative,” in Original Essays in Criticism and Theory, ed. John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner (Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1982), 6–24; Blyden Jackson, A History of Afro-American Literature, vol. 1: The Long Beginning, 1746–1895 (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1989). 8. Gould, “Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist,” 677. 9. In recent years Vincent Carretta has unearthed biographical data that suggest that Olaudah Equiano may have been born in North America rather than Africa. As Carretta writes, the burden of proof now lies with the historian who seeks to argue that Equiano’s narrative is undoubtedly a firsthand account of the Middle Passage. See Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). 10. Robert E. Desrochers Jr., “Not Fade Away: The Narrative of Venture Smith, an African American in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (June 1997): 50. 11. Gould, “Free Carpenter, Venture Capitalist”; Desrochers, “Not Fade Away”; David Kazanjian, “Mercantile Exchanges, Mercantilist Enclosures: Racial Capitalism in the Black Mariner Narratives of Venture Smith and John Jea,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 147–78. 12. I am indebted to John Wood Sweet for a conversation that helped me to further think through Venture’s tentative relationship to sentiment. 13. Desrochers, “Not Fade Away,” 51. 14. Much of my speculation about the role the minkisi tradition may have played in Venture Smith’s attitude toward money comes from Wyatt MacGaffey’s groundbreaking work on the Bakongo people. As Paul Lovejoy’s research has suggested, Smith most likely was born in what is now modern-day Benin, or perhaps Togo. Jane I. Guyer and S. M. Eno Belinga and others have argued, however, that many

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Keeping His Word

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

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21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

of the notions invested in minkisi, notions about the interrelations between things and people, were widely known in varied formats among many peoples across Western Africa. Joanna Brooks and John Saillant, “Introduction,” in “Face Zion Forward”: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785–1798 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), 4 Henry Louis Gates, The Signifyin(g) Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 47. The Black Public Sphere Collective, ed., The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 13. The linear progression of private to public in Habermas’s account of the public sphere has been critiqued by feminist critics such as Carole Pateman. Recent criticism by Elizabeth Dillon, however, suggests a more reciprocal account of the relationship between public and private in Habermas’s writing. Elizabeth Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Mass: MIT Press, 1989): 46. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself, in Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Vincent Carretta (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1996), 200. In this respect, I differ from Houston Baker’s excellent analysis of Equiano’s narrative in Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Baker feels that Equiano moves through sentiment and religiosity to ultimately locate his freedom in his “canny mercantilism” (33). Although I agree that Equiano takes pride in his commercial success, he also takes pains, at least in this passage, to render that success wholly inadequate to heal the pain of familial loss. Perhaps the most famous critique of sentimentalism’s emphasis on victimhood is James Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 13–22. See also Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth- Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Dillon, Gender of Freedom, 15. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, eds., Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 57. Desrochers, “Not Fade Away,” 56. I am indebted to Paul Lovejoy for this information, and for his generous advice on the subject of African money. See Jane I. Guyer, “Introduction,” Journal of African History 36, no. 1 (March 1995): 86.

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m e m o ry 28. Jane I. Guyer and Samuel M. Eno Belinga, “Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa,” Journal of African History 36, no. 1 (March 1995): 106. 29. William Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (1705), quoted in Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, “The Business of Slaving: Pawnship in Western Africa, c. 1600–1810,” Journal of African History 42, no. 1 (March 2001): 71. 30. Lovejoy and Richardson, “The Business of Slaving,” 71. 31. Guyer and Belinga, “Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge,” 102. 32. Wyatt MacGaffey, “The Eyes of Understanding,” in Wyatt MacGaffey and Michael D. Harris, Astonishment and Power: The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi / The Art of Renée Stout (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of African Art, 1993), 80. 33. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 73, 38. 34. I am indebted to Sophie Bell for this reading. 35. Guyer and Belinga, “Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge,” 114. 36. Both Paul Lovejoy’s essay and the timeline in this volume posit that Smith was closer to twelve than five when this event occurred. Because I am focusing on the literary and aesthetic choices Smith makes in the telling of his life story, I am not weighing in on the historical accuracy of this detail. Rather, my interest lies in the fact that Smith remembers—or at least chooses to recount—this story as an event in the life of a very young child. 37. Lovejoy and Richardson, “The Business of Slaving,” 72 38. William Bosman, 176, quoted in Lovejoy and Richardson, 71. 39. I am in full agreement with Rosalie Murphy Baum, who argues that Smith’s narrative “brilliantly interrogates the Franklinian model of honesty, prudence, industry and frugality.” Baum, “Early-American Literature: Reassessing the Black Contribution,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 27 (1994): 4, 536. 40. Kavuna Simon (1915), quoted in Wyatt MacGaffey, “The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi, in National Museum of African Art,” in Astonishment and Power, 21. This is a translation by MacGaffey of a manuscript by Simon written in his native Kikongo. This passage was prepared for an art exhibiton at the National Musuem of African Art in 1993. MacGaffey acknowledges that the translation is approximate at best, revealing that “nkisi has no verbal, conceptual, or practical equivalent in English.” MacGaffey, “Structural Impediments to Translation in Art,” in Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology, ed. Paula G. Rubel and Abraham Rosman (Oxford: Berg, 2003) 260–61.

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LEGACY

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7 The Genomics Perspective on Venture Smith Genetics, Ancestry, and the Meaning of Family Linda Strausbaugh, Joshua Suhl, Craig O’Connor, and Heather Nelson

From my deepest heart and my family, I want to thank my grandmother, great-aunt, and aunts for preserving this [family history]. We are proud of who we are . . .

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Mandred T. Henry, eighth-generation descendent of Venture and Meg Smith, 2006

I

T SEEMS that hardly a week passes without some reminder that genomic analysis can reveal, often in dramatic fashion, otherwise unknown aspects of human history. Whether through television, radio, newspapers, magazines, or the Internet, we are constantly learning about the potential applications of genetic studies. The determination of ancestry based on information derived from an individual’s DNA has become a highprofile cause, especially for the descendents of enslaved Africans, where there is often little in the way of records about the specific lands and peoples of their origins. In this environment, it was natural to ask if a genetics perspective could contribute to the Documenting Venture Smith Project. Carl Schaeffer, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut and secretary of the Beecher House Society, and Chandler B. Saint, president of the Beecher House Society, first approached us in 2005 to ask if ·

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l e g a c y it would be possible to learn more about the African origins of Venture Smith by studying the DNA of his descendents. Like the vast majority of Americans, we knew nothing about Smith, but over the next several months we would come to know his story well. Not only did we become committed to documenting the genetic legacy of Venture and his wife, Marget (known as Meg), but we also became equally committed to using the opportunity presented by our studies of Venture’s family to prompt a public discussion about what DNA analysis can and cannot tell us about who we are and where we come from. We share the view that the current interest in genetic genealogy can foster a more broadly based interest in the interface between science and society, as well as promote public literacy concerning genetics and the African origin of our species. The transatlantic slave trade was one part of a bridge between the Old and New Worlds,1 transporting millions of people across the globe and permanently altering the world’s genetic landscape through its survivors. Unfortunately, relatively few living descendents can accurately trace their families’ lineage back to their founding enslaved ancestors. As geneticists, we found the most compelling factor in undertaking a study of the genetic legacy of Meg and Venture to be the availability of a family tree; as one writer has noted, genomic analysis is “especially illuminating when DNA evidence can be combined with historical evidence.” 2 Just as Venture’s Narrative would guide historians in their scholarship,3 so the family tree would guide us in our research. Thanks to the efforts of the many generations of descendents who kept Venture’s story alive in their own oral histories and the tireless work and dedication of Karl P. Stofko of the First Church Cemetery Association of East Haddam, Connecticut, a family tree that documented ten generations of descendants from Venture and Meg Smith had been created.4 This information was invaluable from a genetics perspective, since we knew that it should be possible to “look backward” from living descendents to learn something about previous generations; if we were very lucky, we might be able to work back to Venture and Meg. Of greater interest to us, we knew for certain that we could “look forward” to paint the genetic landscape left by Meg and Venture by determining the different lineages that have become part of the legacy that is Venture’s family tree. In the early part of 2006, a second avenue of genetic research presented itself. Members of the DNA team attended the annual Uncle Tom’s Cabin Dinner sponsored by the Beecher House Center, and had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Coralynne Henry Jackson, a seventh-generation descendent of Meg and Venture Smith, and her niece Susan Henry Ryan. The astute Mrs. Jackson ·

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The Genomics Perspective on Venture Smith asked why we were not attempting to directly extract and test DNA from the bones of her ancestors. This question initiated a series of conversations between Chandler Saint and Mrs. Jackson that ultimately resulted in the archaeological excavation late in the summer of 2006. The kinds of DNA typing that we were proposing to undertake are sophisticated and relatively costly. Fortunately, the University of Connecticut’s Center for Applied Genetics and Technology (CAGT) was already fully equipped with all of the required advanced instrumentation for human genotyping. Its students and staff members (who volunteered to participate in the project) were already well versed in the theory and practice of human identity typing through ongoing forensic DNA typing research. All that remained was to secure funding for the activities that were specifically associated with the Venture Smith project. One of the CAGT’s ongoing partners, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc., headquartered in Hercules, California, stepped forward with a donation that enabled us to proceed.5

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A Primer in Genetics The genetic testing strategy we used was essentially the same as that for any sample, whether remains from excavated burial sites or cheek swabs from living persons. The hereditary material, or DNA, was extracted by appropriate methods, and molecular photocopies of pieces of that DNA were made and its sequence obtained. We then compared the results to databases in order to learn as much as possible about the likely geographical origin of that particular genetic lineage. One of our goals was to provide scientific support for Venture Smith’s personal narrative and to compile biological data that might be relevant to ongoing studies into the boundaries of his African origins.6 Nothing at all was known about Meg, so any geogenetic information would be new knowledge. Our other goal was to use the DNA of Smith’s living descendants to fill in the genetic landscape of the many lineages that had become part of the Smith family tree. The term used to describe the total hereditary information in any living organism is genome; the Human Genome Project is an international project to study the entire genetic blueprint of humans.7 Among the most exciting applications of the information from the Human Genome Project are identifying the earliest history of our species, documenting the migration of our ancestors across the globe, and linking living persons to ancestral lineages. To understand how all of this has been accomplished, a little background is needed. ·

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l e g a c y Each of the cells in a human body contains two distinct kinds of DNA: chromosomal DNA, which is located in the nucleus of the cell—its genetic headquarters—and mitochondrial DNA, which is located in the cytoplasm, or the rest of the cell body. Nuclear DNA is packaged into forty-six chromosomes, which can be thought of as suitcases that both carry and enable control of the expression of our hereditary material. The chromosomes are essentially long thin threads of DNA, and they contain the tens of thousands of genes that control traits. Each of the cells in the body contains twentythree paired sets of chromosomes; each individual inherits one of the two sets from the mother and the other set from the father. The genetic information in these two sets is copied and included in every cell; specialized reproductive cells (the egg in females and the sperm in males) have only one set and will create offspring when combined at fertilization. The unique genetic blueprint of each human arises from two sources. First, each egg produced by a woman and each sperm produced by a man has an essentially random shuffling of the chromosomes. For this reason alone, the odds that any two gametes (reproductive cells, egg or sperm) produced by a single individual will carry identical blueprints are amazingly slim— one in more than eight million. Second, there is further mixing of the genetic material in the biological process that produces gametes, since the chromosomes in each pair (one set from each parent) can actually exchange parts with each other, a process called recombination. Third, each fertilization event is a further unique combination of one sperm cell and one egg cell. In men, the nuclear chromosome set includes the Y chromosome that is passed from fathers to sons; the Y chromosome essentially does not recombine. Therefore, Y chromosome sequences provide us with a way to track male lineages through time. A well-known example of genetic analysis of the Y chromosome that contributed valuable information in support of oral history was the study that showed that a Jefferson Y chromosome was present in the descendants of one of the children of his slave Sally Hemings.8 Although it was initially suggested that the chromosome came from Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, the resulting controversy serves to remind us that DNA analysis is best interpreted in the context of other historical information, and that Y chromosomes analysis alone cannot reveal which of several candidates is in fact the specific contributor.9 Unlike nuclear genes that occur in two copies per cell, or the Y genes that occur in a single copy in males only, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences occur in hundreds to thousands of copies in each cell of both males and females. Also unlike nuclear DNA, the mtDNA is a very small circle ·

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with only a handful of genes, making it very easy to isolate and study. From a genetic perspective, however, the most important difference between mtDNA and nuclear DNA is that mtDNA does not recombine and is passed from a mother to all of her children, providing a continuous link from mothers to daughters throughout time. MtDNA traces maternal lineages in a manner analogous to the Y-based tracing of paternal lineages. MtDNA also has very high stability; under the right environmental conditions it can last tens of thousands of years, making it the hereditary molecule of choice for “ancient” genetic studies, including the remains of extinct Neanderthal “cavemen,” wooly mammoths, saber toothed-tigers, and ancient birds, horses, and bears. More contemporary historical studies have used mtDNA gathered from remains to confirm the identity of the members of Russia’s royal family, the Romanovs, who were murdered in 1918.10 There is an important characteristic of both mtDNA and Y chromosome typing that has enormous impact on the understanding of their use for ancestry determinations: each of them traces one and only one line of ancestry. This can be easily illustrated using mtDNA as an example (see figure 7.1).

7.1. Mitochondrial DNA analysis traces only one of many ancestral lineages. Starting with a living female descendant (shaded human figure), her one maternal line of ancestry (checkered female figures) is traced (inferred) by mitochondrial DNA typing. The lineages of all other ancestors (unshaded human figures) who have contributed genetically to the living descendant are ignored. ·

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l e g a c y Each person has two parents; mtDNA provides genetic information about the mother, but not the father. Although each person has four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and sixteen great-great-grandparents, mtDNA traces the same single lineage out of the sixteen possible ones. The eighth generation, corresponding to a passage of time of about two hundred years, has a total of 256 ancestors of which only a single one is traced by mtDNA typing. The reality of using mtDNA or Y chromosome DNA to establish ancestry is that each traces only a small sliver of one’s total ancestry, and this small thread may or may not accurately reflect the majority of one’s ancestral genetic input. As the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins notes, “A single chunk of DNA, such as from a mitochondrion or Y chromosome, gives as impoverished a view of the past as a single sentence from a history book.” 11

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The Fact and Fiction of Using DNA to Infer Ancestry DNA-based studies of ancestry have two aims: to find a geographical place of origin and to discover modern persons who share ancestors. As we have seen, Y chromosomes (paternal or male lineages) and mtDNA (maternal or female lineages) provide a continuous link through time to male or female ancestors, while the rest of the chromosomes (called autosomes) are mixed each generation. This means that for most of our (autosomal) genes, those we inherit from any given ancestor will be diluted over time. If we consider Venture as our first generation founding ancestor, his children will inherit exactly 50 percent of their DNA from him. From this point onward, the representation of Venture’s DNA in the descendants will no longer be exact, but an average value; for his grandchildren, 25 percent; for his greatgrandchildren, 12.5 percent, and so on. By the time of the tenth generation, on average, Venture’s ancestral genome will be represented by only 0.2 percent of the DNA of any one of Venture’s lineal descendents. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to use autosomal genes to trace the origin of Venture and Meg through their descendants, because we simply do not know which of a descendant’s DNA sequences are inherited from one of these two as opposed to the many other ancestors he or she has had over nearly two centuries. And even if we were able to know which DNA sequences represented a direct line from the founding couple, the databases as they exist today are not likely to allow us to infer ancestral homes or peoples. Although 0.2 percent in a tenth-generation descendant is a small percentage, it still represents a measurable portion, since the genome is so large. It may be possible in the future, given improved technology and a comprehensive family tree with ·

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The Genomics Perspective on Venture Smith many different branches that arise from a founding couple, to make some progress in this area. All of the human genome is subject to changes that accumulate gradually over long periods of time. These naturally occurring changes, or mutations, occur in an essentially random fashion, and thus different human lineages will be characterized by their own set of new mutations that combine with older ones in a distinct pattern. Therefore they can be used to infer the geographical pathway of a particular DNA sequence throughout human history by tracing the accumulated changes that occur along a particular path of migration. Mutation rates can be used as a kind of “molecular clock” to estimate the length of time that has passed between two different DNA lineages. One of the most significant findings to arise from our knowledge of the human genome and its diversity across the globe is that our planet was populated by the descendents of a relatively small number of people who lived in Africa around 80,000 to 100,000 years ago.12 The descendents of this group slowly but surely spread to all regions of the globe (see figure 7.2). This investigation of the human journey, supported by studies in archaeology, linguistics, history and geography, provides what is called “deep” human ancestry, and it reflects events in human history that occurred very long ago (thousands to hundreds of thousands of years ago). On the maternal side, mtDNA has mapped our origins back to a “mitochondrial Eve” population that came out of Africa. Genetic studies on Y chromosome sequences similarly coalesce back to a “Y chromosome Adam” that also points to an African origin for all modern peoples. The National Geographic’s Genographic Project has been creating a worldwide database of genetic signatures.13 While it is true that the mtDNA and Y-chromosomal DNA each contain information about geogenetic history, it is not necessarily a simple matter to correctly interpret its meaning. Before investigating the complications in inferring ancestry, it is necessary to introduce some genetic terminology. For both mtDNA and Y DNA, specific unique sequences are called haplotypes. Haplotypes represent each of the unique sequences that can occur worldwide; to illustrate, the children of one mother will inherit her exact mitochondria DNA sequence, and thus they will share her specific mitochondrial haplotype. Haplotypes that are highly similar in their DNA sequences are collected into classes that are known to be derived from each other but may have small changes; these categories are called haplogroups. The major haplogroups are designated by a letter of the alphabet and correspond to the major lineages that came out of Africa to populate the planet (figure 7.2). ·

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7.2 Postulated patterns of migration in early human history. Numbers represent estimates of the number of years ago that modern humans arrived at particular places on the globe. These routes of migration are based on a wide variety of disciplines, including history, geology, archaeology, linguistics, and genetics. Letters represent mitochondrial haplogroups that are associated with specific routes of migration. Figure adapted and updated by Joshua Suhl and Igor Ovchinnikov from Tom Strachan and Andrew Reed, Human Molecular Genetics, 3rd ed. (New York: Garland Science, 2004) and from GeneTree, described in Mark D. Shriver and Rick A. Kittles, “Genetic Ancestry and the Search for Personalized Genetic Histories,” Nature Reviews Genetics 5, no. 8 (August 2004): 611–18.

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l e g a c y

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The Genomics Perspective on Venture Smith Haplogroups are further subdivided by a combination of numerals and letters. Once one’s haplogroup is known, it is possible to use information (available from the Genographic Project, for example) to infer the place of one’s ancestors in the early migration patterns of humankind. The use of haplogroups to assign deep ancestry is based on well-accepted scholarship that involved a synthesis of concordant information from history, archaeology, linguistics, and genetics. It is important to recognize that a limitation of both mtDNA haplotype and haplogroup assignments is that they are largely based on a small sampling of one highly variable region of the total mt genome (typically, around 600 positions out of a total of more than 16,500). We don’t know how much additional valuable information may be excluded by this current approach, but it may be considerable. If the scholarship behind the genetic signatures of the human migration map is solid, why is it problematic to interpret? There are two basic problems. First, the rules of assigning a sequence to a haplogroup are not clearly articulated, and many assignments have a subjective quality. While the several forprofit DNA ancestry companies may have computational models for assigning haplogroups, they are neither transparent nor available to the larger scientific and public communities. Second, when a mtDNA sequence does not exactly match one of the previously published haplogroups, the uncertainty may result in the creation of new subdivisions to accommodate novel sequences. A different strategy for inferring geogenetic origins has been featured in a number of high-profile ancestry determinations. In this method, a subject’s mtDNA sequence is used to query a database to identify living persons who share the exact same haplotype; this approach links an African American query lineage to present-day African populations, and the subject is confident that his or her ancestral origins have been found. But in fact this may be termed a “shallow” determination, since it reflects events resulting from relatively recent human history. This strategy also has a number of problems. First, success in identification of exact matches is highly sensitive to the databases that are available for searching. The likelihood that an exact match will be discovered is dependent on both the absolute number of individuals present in the database and the spatial distribution of its members. Second, even when an exact match is discovered, further questions arise: What is the likelihood that it occurs in only that one group? How will the results change if more persons from a wider geographical distribution are included in the database? Several studies that deal with the distribution of mitochondrial sequences in modern-day Africa have revealed that many haplotypes are widely spread ·

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l e g a c y across the continent, although they may vary in frequency.14 Most such studies issue a cautionary warning about claims of tracing shallow ancestry to a finite region in Africa. The popular Web site of the National Geographic Society’s Genographic Project cautions that “for an AfricanAmerican who is L2—the likely result of West Africans being brought to America during the Atlantic slave trade—it is difficult to say with certainty exactly where in Africa that lineage arose.” 15 It is unlikely that any particular mtDNA haplotype occurs in only one population or region, so the ancestral association is actually a probability rather than an absolute conclusion. To give a simplified example: a particular mitochondrial type occurs in about 50 percent of the people surveyed in present-day North African populations and in about 5 percent of those surveyed in both West and Central African populations. Based on frequency alone, one might be tempted to conclude that an African American with that type would find his ancestral home in North Africa. If his ancestors originally came from a Central African population, however, the higher statistical frequency is not relevant to his history and will lead to the incorrect conclusion that his ancestral land was in the coastal regions bordering the Atlantic or Mediterranean, when it was actually nearer to the Equatorial Forests. Although this example does not take into account more finely tuned typing or geographical sampling, it illustrates the basic factors that come into play in determining ancestral homes or peoples. A final complicating factor in localizing the original homelands of living persons through genetics is the fact that the only thing we can accurately measure, the present-day distribution of markers, may have little relationship to those that existed several hundred years ago. As the site of the origin of modern humans and their longest occupied home, Africa has the greatest genetic diversity of any continent. It is also a large and dynamic continent with a long record of population movements. Some of these, such as the Bantu dispersals, have had widespread impact on the genetic landscape of the continent.16 Moreover, there are cases in which the behavior of individuals or small groups can also have profound impact on the distribution of genetic markers, such as the high prevalence of a Y chromosomal lineage across a large region of Asia that is thought to originate from the clan of Genghis Khan.17 To the extent that some genetic markers reflect, but do not define, ethnicities, the current-day distribution is often a function of recent human activities. We can appreciate this complication by considering the very different ethnic profiles of, say, New York City in 1709 and 2009. Most regions of the world, especially in modern times, experience ongoing ·

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The Genomics Perspective on Venture Smith changes in the makeup of their populations through migration and genetic assimilation. The same scientific limitations outlined in the preceding paragraphs have also been discussed elsewhere.18 Given the present-day limitations of inferring ancestry by DNA matches, we should not be surprised that a single genetic sample from one person could result in a different ancestry conclusion from each of four commercial typing laboratories.19 Inferring ancestry from DNA information has become big business. Estimates of half a million people purchasing ancestry tests in the span of just a few years are common, and demand will likely continue to be strong. More than a dozen companies offer a variety of tests that cost from just under $100 to just under $1000, depending on their complexity. Most companies base ancestry assignment on the results of less expensive testing of some portion of the mitochondrial (maternal only) and/or Y (paternal only) chromosomal DNA. A smaller number also provide the much more expensive testing of portions of other chromosomal DNA that is inherited from both maternal and paternal lineages and is mixed each generation. Results from such autosomal genetic markers are frequently provided as probable percentages of ancestry that is African, East Asian, European/Indian, and Native American. Although these more comprehensive tests may seem at first glance to be superior just by the sheer amount of information that can be gathered, they suffer from many of the same database and statistical limitations as the simpler tests. Moreover, genetic contributions from any single distant ancestor become, on average, more diluted with subsequent generations. Some companies have added public documentation and family history information to their ser vices; as we argue in the following section, this is an advantage, although the same limitations we present are also at work. Companies vary considerably in the claims they make, the education provided to the public about the meaning of results, and the specific genetic information they provide to the consumer. The consumer who conducts a little research will discover that perceptions of ancestry companies range from being valuable public ser vices to fraudulent. The best advice is “Caveat emptor” or “Let the buyer beware.” In the first of a Pulitzer Prize–winning series of articles in the New York Times on the DNA age, reporter Amy Harmon recounts one view of directto-consumer ancestry testing, which holds that these are “recreational genomics,” harmless and entertaining activities.20 While this may certainly be true for many if not most cases, there are elements that may not be so innocuous. Ancestry determined by DNA may conflict with the individual’s ·

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l e g a c y self-identification, causing confusion and even anger. Results of DNA tests can provide facts about paternity, maternity, and adoption that were otherwise unknown and may not be welcome information. There is an additional privacy and ethical dilemma in that results of genetic tests by definition affect not only the tested individual, but every member of his or her family. An article by anthropologist Deborah Bolnick and a number of multidisciplinary colleagues also touches on several other unintended consequences to society at large.21 As these authors note, there is no simple and direct link between DNA and race or ethnicity, and it is potentially damaging to disconnect issues of race from its historical, sociological, and economic origins. They provide three specific examples of complications arising in these contexts. First, membership in some Native American tribes, which could conceivably be pursued through genetic identity, can involve lucrative financial benefits. Another important consideration for some Native American tribes is the contradiction between the human migratory origins inferred from DNA data and the traditional beliefs of their origins. Second, there will be a potentially harmful tendency to link DNA-determined ethnic identity to statistically defined medical risks. This carries the danger of melding a very generic (and possibly inaccurate) DNA-based assignment, one that tends to be continental, with a very specific estimate of medical risk that is narrowly based on discrete populations. How should the medical community respond to requests to interpret disease risk, treatments, and remediation in the context of ancestry testing? A third possible byproduct of ancestry testing is a change in self-identification that could affect the national census, which in turn affects governmental policy. In a similar way, our own research indicates that self-identification in forensic contexts can affect criminal justice. Harmon’s New York Times article provides an instructive example of the unintended and complicated consequences that can arise from DNAdetermined ancestry. The father of adopted twin boys who were considered “white” thought it would be interesting to learn something of his sons’ ancestry. When results indicated a probability of 11 percent North African and 9 percent Native American ancestry, the family of the now college-aged boys speculated on whether this might help them secure financial aid. Harmon further reports that “on its Web site, a leader in this cottage industry, DNA Print Genomics, once urged people to use it ‘whether your goal is to validate your eligibility for race-based college admissions or government entitlements.’ ” She presents additional anecdotal information related to African, Asian, or Native American ancestries; it is a must-read for those who would like to gain some insight into the slippery slope of a quantitative definition of ·

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ancestry that can too easily be interpreted in the context of race or ethnicity.

Even with all of the scientific caveats and the potential for negatively affecting individuals or communities described in the preceding sections, DNA testing for inferring ancestry remains quite powerful. It has the capacity to provide new information—physical evidence, as it were—that reflects at least a portion of an individual’s genetic history. It can be an exhilarating addition to the family history, as long as one understands its limitations and realizes exactly what is and is not accurately known from any one genetic test. Considering all of these factors, the DNA team decided to concentrate its initial efforts in the genomics studies of Venture Smith’s family on using mtDNA to unravel at least a few threads of an otherwise unknown tapestry of deep ancestry. If, as Anna Mae Duane persuasively argues elsewhere in this volume, several aspects of Venture’s narrative can be viewed through the lens of the Western African tradition of minkisi, with its undertones of ancestral respect and power, then it becomes even more appropriate to include genetic studies of ancestry in our documentation of Venture Smith. Although we intend future studies to include Y chromosomal typing, at the time that we began this project mtDNA offered us several advantages. First, mtDNA provides information from both males and females (as opposed to the Y, which can only be studied in males), so we could extract more information from all members of the family tree. Second, there was a well established international consensus about what portions of the mtDNA should be collected for both ancestry and forensic applications, and as a result, comprehensive worldwide databases were available that would provide greater resolving power than with the Y chromosome, for which there were many different sets of markers in use. Third, a large number of studies of indigenous peoples had been examined for mitochondrial types, creating a framework for the early global migrations of humans and for ancestry inference. Finally, if we were fortunate enough to recover any remains from the archaeological investigation, mtDNA would be the marker of choice there as well.

The Genealogical Record As is the case with many applications, DNA identification is much more valuable if there is additional information to support it. Historical information on enslaved persons may be very hard to find; the U.S. National Archives ·

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l e g a c y and Research Administration reports that “slave records are difficult to locate and found rarely” in the nation’s archives.22 In the case of Venture Smith’s family, the existence of a genealogy provided an essential framework for the genetic studies, both for inferring the genetic signatures of members of prior generations and for documenting the many lineages that have become part of the family tree that arose from Meg and Venture. Even when we have a genealogical record, however, there are many good reasons why it will be unlikely to provide all the answers we would like to have. First, genealogical research often hits “dead ends” when there is no documentation of some family members. For many of Venture’s descendents, we have a record of the names but no knowledge of what became of them or whether their lineages continue into the present. It is likely that there are entire branches of the family tree that will never be recovered. Second, records may be incomplete or inaccurate since historical events that disrupt families (such as epidemics, wars, and economic stressors) can result in the placement of children with relatives other than their biological parents, and sometimes with nonrelatives. In the more than two hundred years that the Smith family has been in existence, it is certain that in times of distress family members have both taken in unrelated children and placed their own with other families. Third, family trees that have been kept alive by oral histories and the research efforts of branches of descendents show a natural bias toward their own branches of the family, resulting in incomplete family trees. In the case of Venture Smith, as for any famous founder, the emphasis is on the direct line of descent from him, and we often know very little about the genealogy of those who have married or mated into the family, although they, too, are now incorporated into Venture and Meg’s legacy. As we have already seen, this omits a great deal of information from a purely genetics perspective. The genealogical chart developed for the family of Meg and Venture Smith provided us with some immediately useful information. First, there was no maternal lineage from Meg; she had no daughters who had children. Second, all of the known living family members are descended from Meg and Venture’s son Cuff Smith (1758–1822). There may be one or two living male descendents who have Y chromosomes that are copies of the one Cuff inherited from Venture, but we have not succeeded, yet, in locating and contacting these key descendents. Third, the branch of the family tree that can trace lineages back to Venture and Meg further pass through the same fifthgeneration couple, Charles F. Smith (1848–1928, a direct lineal descendant) and his wife, Asenath Hurd (1852–1897). Fourth, the genealogical studies have identified more than fifty living members of the family tree; their mitochon·

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The Genomics Perspective on Venture Smith drial DNA signatures represent both lineal descendants and introduced genetic lines. Expanding the family tree to include additional lineages is an ongoing project that will continue to strengthen the genetic studies of the future.

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A Partnership with the Family Proposals to excavate and sample the remains of historical figures require good practices on two levels. First, does the proposed testing meet the ethical standards and scholarship merit of the broader scientific community? If it does not, the project should come to a halt. Second, have the family members been adequately informed of the pitfalls as well as the promises of the proposed study, and do they agree to it? Since the archaeology project took place in the summer of 2006, we have received several requests for information about how we made the decision to proceed with an attempt at DNA recovery. For those who contemplate similar projects or are just curious about how such genetic studies are planned, a detailed recounting of our decision-making process follows. The scientific aspects of our decision were initially directed by a set of four questions addressed by a DNA Advisory Panel convened in 1991 and charged with making a recommendation on the proposed testing of the remains of Abraham Lincoln. An excellent nontechnical description of this project has been presented by Philip Reilly.23 Although this commission was considering genetic testing of museum samples, we felt that the spirit of determining factors should be similar in our case. The group was asked to address four questions, restated here in more generic language: (1) Is the proposal consistent with the best traditions of scholarship and research? (2) Does the proposal violate the subject’s privacy or views on disclosure of personal information? (3) Is it acceptable to destroy specimens of historic value if compelling public interest is served by doing so? (4) Is there consistency with prevailing standards of professional ethics in the disciplines of science and history? The three questions requiring information that resides largely in the realms of science, archaeology, and history were most easily answered. The use of mitochondrial DNA as a genetic marker of choice in studies of historical samples had been well established in several recent high-profile studies. Our proposal to recover and analyze mitochondrial DNA from interred remains was analogous to DNA studies of the remains of the Romanov family. Our plans to make inferences from the living descendents used strategies similar to those in studies of the living descendents of Thomas Jefferson. ·

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l e g a c y Once the criteria for scientific merit were met, the next priority became the establishment of a working relationship with the descendents of Venture and Meg. We planned a “Descendant’s DNA Day” in June 2006 at the Center for Applied Genetics and Technology at the University of Connecticut. The event would include a light supper, informal presentations about what we hoped to do and learn, time for questions and dialog with the participating scientists and scholars, and the opportunity to tour the genotyping facilities. Invitations were mailed to the list of descendents provided by Karl Stofko and Chandler Saint. The scholars present at the event were a diverse and eclectic group: the CAGT’s DNA and genealogy team, the archaeology team, DNA analysts from the Connecticut State Forensic Sciences Laboratory, and representatives from the Beecher House Center and from the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE), at the University of Hull in England.24 Scholars made brief presentations about what was proposed and what might be accomplished. Nine family members were able to attend the event. Other invited descendents, including Mandred Henry’s family (the first to respond to the invitation, although he was too ill to attend) communicated support by phone or email. In attendance were the oldest known living male descendent, Frank Warmsley (seventh generation), and the oldest living known female descendent, Coralynne Henry Jackson (eighth generation), as well as Florence Warmsley (eighth generation), ninth-generation descendants Carla Moody Francis, Erica Buttram, Tonia Warmsley Morring, and Paula Moody Foster (along with her husband, Daniel Foster), and tenth-generation descendent Raquel Moody.25 Four significant things happened at the meeting with the family. First and foremost, a simultaneously personal and professional working relationship was established, and the family obtained a clear idea of what the research team proposed to do. Historians David Richardson and James Brewer Stewart were especially valuable in providing a more global perspective for both research and education projects built around Venture’s story. Archaeologists Nick Bellantoni and Warren Perry described in detail how the archaeological project would proceed and the measures that would be taken to respect the burial sites as well as the privacy of the descendants. They also described the battery of tests that could be performed on biological remains and what might be learned from each. Both emphasized that it was possible that no biological remains would be found, and that the family should weigh the risks versus benefits of the excavation. The second significant decision reached by the family occurred when Jim Stewart asked directly if the family would support the research projects, fully ·

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The Genomics Perspective on Venture Smith knowing that nothing might be discovered. The family discussed this at length and decided that it was worth the risk to undertake an excavation. Third, the family members also decided that they should select representatives who could make time-sensitive decisions as the dig proceeded. They authorized Coralynne Henry Jackson and Florence Warmsley to act in their behalf. Members of the CAGT team described the steps in DNA recovery and what could be learned from studying DNA from biological remains or samples from living persons. We also emphasized that recovery of DNA remains was possible, but not guaranteed, depending on the state of the biological samples. Finally, in the ensuing discussions the family accomplished a fourth milestone by addressing the last remaining question of the four we began this section with: what would have been Venture’s view of this project? Their consensus was best stated by Paula Moody Foster and Carla Moody Francis, who both noted that Venture was ahead of his time in so many ways, and had such an entrepreneurial spirit, that they believed he would fully support attempts to use the newest approaches and technologies to further his life’s story. In this process of engaging the family, we had, albeit without the elegant philosophical framework, reached the same conclusions as Anne L. Hiskes that the family should speak for Venture Smith.26 Even our best attempt to secure family participation and consensus is not without its own set of limitations, however. All of the same biases that come into play with the creation of a family tree are also at work in this effort, since family members are almost exclusively derived from self-identified branches of the family. Moreover, not all contacted family members had an interest in participating in the project.

Meg’s Gift The archaeology team and family had decided to excavate four closely adjacent graves: those of Venture and Meg and those of their son Solomon and granddaughter Eliza Late. In the archaeological excavation, which was codirected by Nick Bellantoni and Warren Perry, two badly degraded pieces of arm bones from Meg’s grave site were recovered. These were all that was left of the skeletal elements in all four graves; unfortunately, the acid soil and water at the East Haddam cemetery had long ago dissolved everything else, including the wooden coffins. Best practices were used at the site in collecting these samples, including the use of gloves and masks, and sterile handling ·

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l e g a c y and storage. We had also previously collected samples from all persons likely to be present in the tent at the time of discovery and removal of the biological samples so we could recognize any contamination that occurred in spite of our safeguards against it. Carefully excavated by Nick Bellantoni, the fragments were lifted on a bed of soil and stored frozen at Central Connecticut State University’s Archaeology Laboratory for African and African Diaspora Studies (ALAADS). The samples were so fragile that they disintegrated on even the lightest touch, so freezing allowed us to use scalpels to excise and clean the small slices that would be used in DNA recovery attempts. In this type of historic DNA recovery, samples should be processed at several sites to increase the likelihood of success and to validate any findings. Samples would be processed at the CAGT, at Mitotyping Technologies in State College, Pennsylvania (a leading company in the isolation and analysis of mtDNA from challenging samples),27 and at the Connecticut Forensic Science Laboratory in Meriden, Connecticut (a public crime lab with extensive experience in the isolation of DNA from difficult samples). Despite the best efforts of scientists from all three institutions, no DNA was recovered from any of the samples. Although the most likely interpretation of the collective results is that no genetic information remains in these badly degraded samples, they remain in frozen storage in the event that methods developed in the future might improve the outcome. Although the archaeological excavation failed to produce the hoped-for biological remains, it contributed to the project by providing other types of important evidence and information, described in several reports.28 Using the position of iron coffin screws, researchers were able to create a threedimensional outline of Venture’s coffin, which had a length of close to seven feet, placing it among the largest historic coffin structures excavated by the Office of State Archaeology. This finding provides physical evidence in support of the assertions that Venture was an uncommonly large man, over six feet tall. Other artifacts from the graves support portrayals of a relatively wealthy family. The coffins of Venture, Meg, and their son Solomon used screws (rather than nails) and were hinged at the top to allow viewing, two features of well-constructed coffins of the time. The grave of Venture and Meg’s granddaughter Eliza Smith Roy yielded beautiful coffin handles and personal artifacts such as expensive false teeth, earrings, and a gold wedding ring. The archaeological project also provided new dimensions for the family history. At the site, archaeological researchers noted that Meg’s coffin was quite small in comparison to those of both Venture and Solomon, suggesting ·

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The Genomics Perspective on Venture Smith that she may have been a woman of small physical stature. Since nothing is known of Meg beyond what little is contained in the Narrative, each bit of information about her is prized. The ALAADS team has raised an intriguing question about Eliza, who is connected to her spouse through her wedding ring, but is buried beside her father with the inscription “Daughter of Solomon Smith” instead of beside her husband with an inscription such as “Wife of . . . ,” more typical at this time for a married woman.

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The Global Genetic Signatures of the Legacy of Meg and Venture Smith To understand the scope of the genetic legacy of Meg and Venture Smith, it was necessary to reflect on the nature of “family” and the meaning of being descended from them. Would the genotyping project include only those who were linear descendants? This approach, as we have learned, would exclude a significant genetic contribution from the lineages of the people who entered the family tree through marriage or mating. Would the genotyping project exclude those who had been adopted into the family? This would exclude people raised by “blood-line” descendants for whom the story and lessons of the life of Venture Smith were a strong part of their own identity. Whether added by marriage/mating or adoption, many of these persons have fully embraced their membership in the Smith clan and are as active as lineal descendants in keeping the tradition and story of Venture Smith alive. The team decided that the legacy of Venture and Meg Smith should cover the fully extended family, and we would extend invitations to participate in the DNA study to any of the persons identified on the current (and future) family tree. Participation was voluntary, and required the completion of a short survey and collection of cheek swabs. All samples were recorded by secure code numbers and the results tabulated and reported in anonymous form. All of the procedures for genetic studies on living persons were developed in consultation with staff in the University of Connecticut’s Office of Research Compliance and approved by its Institutional Review Board, a group charged with assuring that such research complies fully with the regulations and best practices for human subject protection. We are permitted to return haplotype results to any individual who desires to know them. The methods for extraction, amplification, and automated sequencing of mtDNA hypervariable regions were straightforward. As we have seen, if there is no exact haplotype match to an existing haplogroup sequence, the ·

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l e g a c y

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assignment becomes somewhat subjective. The DNA team had previously confronted this ambiguity as part of a forensic DNA research project and had collaborated with Dr. Craig Nelson of the University of Connecticut to develop a computer program to assign a most probable haplogroup to any mtDNA sequence. What have we learned to date about the genetic lineages in the Smith family tree? First, a relatively small sample of direct descendents from different maternal lines of the genealogy has revealed six different mitochondrial haplotypes. Second, of the three lines typed for persons who have married into Venture and Meg’s family, three new mitochondrial haplotypes are introduced. This rough draft of the genetic landscape arising from a formerly enslaved couple includes lineages that are widely distributed (see table 7.1). Some argue, in this volume as well as elsewhere, that the story of Venture Smith is not only of local and national relevance, but also an important and relevant portal into international and American history.29 The DNA analysis supports the biological extension of Venture’s family to include worldwide genetic signatures originating and presently found in Africa, Europe, and the Near East, and further globalizes the legacy of Meg and Venture Smith.

Genetic studies on the descendants of Meg and Venture Smith have only just begun. Success in locating and securing participation from male descendants who carry the same type of Y chromosome as Venture Smith would allow a direct indication of more specific African origins, at least at the level of deep ancestry, and perhaps shallow as well, depending on the results and databases available. Future efforts will expand the family tree to include more branches, and identify and locate new descendants. This endeavor may well permit ancestral inferences for earlier generations and will certainly expand the documentation of lineages in the Smith family tree. It is important to state from the onset that inferring ancestry by DNA is, like every other scientific venture, an evolving process. The science will change as new genotyping technologies are developed, as numbers and distributions of individuals sampled become more comprehensive, and as better databases and computational tools to analyze them become available. A conclusion reached today is likely to be more refined, if not different, than one reached five years ago for the same DNA sequence. By extension, the conclusion reached five years from now will certainly be more refined, if not different, from the one we make today. ·

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59,000–78,000 years ago

L2a

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80,000 years ago

15,000–30,000 years ago

50,000 years ago

L3

H

K1

59,000–78,000 years ago

150,000–175,000 years ago

L1c2

L2b

First Appearance

Haplogroup

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Moved out of the Near East to explore surrounding areas in northern Europe

Migrated out of the Near East to populate Europe and Asia

First modern humans to have left Africa and populated the rest of the world

Originated in East Africa and migrated into West and Central Africa

Originated in East Africa and migrated into West and Central Africa

Originated in East Africa and migrated through the sub-Saharan desert

Original Migration Pattern

Europe, northern Africa, India, Arabia, northern Caucasus Mountains, Near East

Widely distributed in modern peoples; dominates modern European landscape (40–60% of the gene pool of most European populations); also found in Asia

High frequency across North Africa

Confined to West and Western Central Africa

Most widespread haplogroup in Africa: sub-Saharan Africa, Central Africa, as far south as South Africa; signature for the Bantu people

Central Africa (pygmies), southern Africa (Khoisan), West and North Africa (probably later expansion)

Present- day Distribution

Table 7.1. Descriptions of the mtDNA types found in the family tree of Venture Smith. Information summarized from National Geographic’s Genographic Project.

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The Genomics Perspective on Venture Smith

l e g a c y An inescapable conclusion from many of the studies undertaken as part of the larger Venture Smith project is that Smith was a man of great integrity and intelligence who would make his presence on earth known and remembered. One can’t help but suspect that he would be pleased that he and his descendants will be permanently recorded in both genealogical and genetic history.

Notes

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An earlier version of this essay was also presented at the conference “Slavery: Unfinished Business,” University of Hull, May 16–19, 2007. 1. See the essay by Robert P. Forbes, David Richardson, and Chandler B. Saint in this volume. 2. Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin, 2006), 237. 3. Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But resident above sixty years in the United States of America (New London, Conn.: C. Holt, 1798). 4. A version of the family tree, which is too large to reproduce here, was presented by Karl Stofko at the conference “Documenting Venture Smith,” University of Connecticut, Sept. 29–30, 2006. 5. We thank Bio-Rad Laboratories for their forward-looking support of this innovative interdisciplinary project. 6. For more on Smith’s African background, see the essay by Paul E. Lovejoy in this volume. 7. For more on the Human Genome Project, see www.genome.gov/. 8. Eugene A. Foster et al., “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child,” Nature 396, no. 6706 (November 5, 1998): 27–28. 9. See Eliot Marshall, “Which Jefferson Was the Father?” Science 283, no. 5399 (January 8, 1999): 153–54. 10. Peter Gill et al., “Identification of the Remains of the Romanov Family by DNA Analysis,” Nature Genetics 6, no. 2 (February 1994): 130–35. 11. Richard Dawkins with Yan Wong, “Eve’s Tale,” in The Ancestor’s Tale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 52. 12. An excellent nontechnical account of the origins and migrations of modern humans is James Shreeve, “The Greatest Journey” and “Reading Secrets of the Blood,” National Geographic, March 2006, 60–73. 13. See www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic. 14. Among the many articles on this topic are Antonio Salas et al., “The Making of the African mtDNA Landscape,” American Journal of Human Genetics 71 (2002): 1082–1111; Antonio Salas et al., “The African Diaspora: Mitochondrial DNA and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” American Journal of Human Genetics 74 (2004): 454– 65;

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15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

and Bert Ely, Jamie Lee Wilson, Fatimah Jackson, and Bruce A. Jackson, “African-American Mitochondrial DNAs Often Match mtDNAs Found in Multiple African Ethnic Groups,” BMC Biology 4 (2006): 34, www.biomedcentral.com/ 1741-7007/4/34 . Description of haplogroup L2 from the National Geographic Genographic Project, https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/atlas.html. The Bantu dispersals are discussed in Salas et al., “The Making of the African mtDNA Landscape.” Tatiana Zerjal et al., “The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols,” American Journal of Human Genetics 72 (2003): 717–21. Deborah A. Bolnick et al., “The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing,” Science 318 (October 19, 2007): 399—400. A summary of this article is also available from the University of California–Berkeley’s ScienceDaily: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071018145955.htm. “Roots,” a segment on 60 Minutes, December 2007, www.cbsnews.com Amy Harmon, “Seeking Ancestry in DNA Ties Uncovered by Tests,” New York Times, April 12, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/04/12/us/12genes.html. See Bolnick et al., “The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing.” U.S. National Archives and Research Administration, www.archives.gov/genealogy/heritage/african-american/. Phillip R. Reilly, “Abraham Lincoln: Did He Have Marfan Syndrome?” in Abraham Lincoln’s DNA and Other Adventures in Genetics (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2000), 2–13. The CAGT and genealogy team comprised graduate students Craig O’Connor and Joshua Suhl, staff members Igor Ovchinnikov and Heather Nelson, and director Linda Strausbaugh, along with Karl Stofko of the First Church Cemetery Association of East Haddam. The archaeologists included Connecticut’s State Archaeologist, Nicholas Bellantoni; the director of Central Connecticut State University’s Archaeology Laboratory for African and African Diaspora Studies (ALAADS), Warren Perry; and staff members Janet Woodward and Gerry Sawyer. Connecticut’s State Forensic Sciences Laboratory was represented by Carl Ladd and Michael Bourke. James Brewer Stewart (Macalaster College), historian and president of the Beecher House advisory board, and treasurer Dorothea Dicecco represented Beecher House; Chandler Saint was ill and could not attend. The Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation was represented by its director, David Richardson. The generational designations I’ve used to describe relationships to Meg and Venture Smith are the same ones used by descendents to describe themselves and were developed through the research of Karl Stofko. See Hiskes’s essay in this volume. See www.mitotyping.com/mitotyping/site/default.asp. Janet Woodruff, Gerald F. Sawyer, and Warren R. Perry, “How Archaeology Exposes the Nature of African Captivity and Freedom in Eighteenth- and

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l e g a c y

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Nineteenth-Century Connecticut,” Connecticut History 46, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 155– 83; “Archaeology Laboratory for African and African Diaspora Studies (ALAADS): Broteer Venture Smith Project,” The Sojourner Truth Newsletter 1, no. 3 (2007); “Uncovering a Life,” News from the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History & Connecticut Archaeology Center, Fall 2006, 1–3. 29. See the foreword to this volume by James O. Horton.

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8 Venture Smith and Philosophical Theories of Human Rights Anne L. Hiskes

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W

HO, if anyone, has the moral right to speak for Venture Smith in giving consent to exhume his grave for DNA? Does this right reside with the family group whose cultural and biological identities merge with Venture’s, or is this exhumation an affront in some way to Venture’s human dignity by turning him into a mere means to someone else’s ends? Furthermore, why is Venture’s story important for us today? Answers to these questions can only be obtained by examining Venture’s story for clues to the nature of his human identity and his core values. The story of Broteer Furro, or Venture Smith, as he was called in America, begins with his birth in eighteenth-century West Africa, includes his kidnapping and sale into slavery at the tender age of twelve, and extends into the twenty-first century with the exhumation of his grave in Connecticut at the request of over a dozen of his living descendents. This most recent chapter of Venture’s story is recounted elsewhere in this volume in the essay by Linda Strausbaugh and her colleagues. Motivated by a desire to identify the geographical origins of their famous and inspiring ancestor, Venture’s descendents hoped to use DNA recovered from his remains and a chemical analysis of any bone remnants to identify the location of his origins on the coast of West Africa. They also hoped to gain knowledge of their ethnic identity by connecting their own genetic markers with those of known living African populations. Thus Venture’s descendents, like many other people today, are turning to the science of genetics to supplement their sense of identity with ·

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l e g a c y knowledge of a physical identity that extends back in time and beyond their individual selves. Answering the question of who has the moral right to give permission regarding the exhumation of any body, including Venture Smith’s, is complicated precisely because human identity is so closely connected to a human body that is linked by DNA both to an individual and to a group of kin. Much of Venture Smith’s story is told through his autobiographical narrative, which was dictated to and recorded by a white amanuensis.1 Unpacking the narrative to appreciate the complexity of Venture’s humanity as a unique individual and as representative of our species is an interdisciplinary enterprise requiring the skills of historians, literary analysts, anthropologists, geneticists, and economists.2 Using these perspectives, we see him as a biological, embodied being who shares with all living creatures the basic needs for food and shelter, as a social being who values his family and participates in the social and economic life of his community, and as a creature of culture carrying in his inner being the vestiges of his princely African heritage. Most of all, we see Venture as a rational being who is an astute businessman and a man of strong personal integrity and self-discipline. In all of these aspects Venture Smith expresses his human capacities. Perhaps the most pressing question posed by Venture’s story for our times is the active participation and institutional support of the enslavement of black Africans by civilizations with Enlightenment beliefs in the natural, inalienable rights of all men. It is puzzling particularly in light of the obvious humanity of Africans such as Venture. My intent in this essay is to examine Venture’s story through the lens of philosophical theories of human rights in an effort to make sense of this paradox, and to argue for the necessity of a guiding image of our shared humanity in which multiple facets of human needs and capacities are inexorably woven together as equal parts of a complete human person. The twenty-first century, like the eighteenth, is a time of vast economic and educational inequalities, a time of racial and ethnic conflict, and a time when children are kidnapped and enslaved. As Robert P. Forbes, David Richardson, and Chandler B. Saint note, probably every commercial activity occurring around the Atlantic basin in the eighteenth century profited from and supported the slave trade either directly or indirectly, including Venture Smith’s own farming and logging.3 If the profits of slavery were hidden and entrenched within a transnational economy in the eighteenth century, they are even more so in today’s global, mega-corporate economy. ·

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Venture Smith and Philosophical Theories of Human Rights The postcolonial world of the twenty-first century is significantly different from Venture’s world in several other respects, however. With the advent of electronic information technologies, our awareness of multiculturalism is facilitated by technologies that send visual images and textual information across continents in seconds. Twenty-first-century biological theories of human origins and heredity also differ from those of the eighteenth century. In light of these considerations we might suspect that an eighteenth-century Enlightenment conception of human identity and human possibilities would be an inadequate basis for a twenty-first-century theory of human rights, and that a different view of human nature informed by contemporary science, history, and multicultural awareness would better serve as a foundation for contemporary human-rights causes. Venture’s story is a testimony to the need for a conception of the human person that does justice to the complexities of human identity in all of its biological, social, and cultural dimensions. This is one reason why Venture’s story is important today, and why answering the question of who has the right to speak for him is not simple. My discussion is organized into three sections. I begin by examining the dominant political conception of human identity that informed the Western world in Venture’s era and through the twentieth century. Next I discuss two alternative views of human identity, one associated with African peoples and the second developed in recent work by Martha Nussbaum. These alternatives provide support for a more inclusive theory of human rights than one based on a framework of liberal individualism inherited from the eighteenth century—more inclusive not only in the populations whose rights are protected, but also in the inclusion of social and economic rights in addition to standard political rights of liberty and self-determination. In the third section I argue that theoretical developments in the life sciences support a conception of human identity that resonates with those developed by Nussbaum and incorporated in African cultures. The life sciences can therefore be used as an important ally in providing a foundation for a theory of human rights that recognizes the social, biological, and psychological needs of human beings as well as the liberties advocated by an Enlightenment view of human identity. Finally, I present a tentative answer to the question “Who has the right to speak for Venture Smith?”

Human Identity and Rights in the Enlightenment Tradition Perhaps the most important question posed by the story of Venture Smith is why the enslavement of black Africans was tolerated and institutionalized in ·

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l e g a c y a nation whose government was founded on the philosophical moral and political theories of the Enlightment.4 The language of the American Declaration of Independence summarizes the Enlightenment commitment to a specific conception of rights and human dignity: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson and others who signed the Declaration of Independence, men who were contemporaries of Venture Smith, not only tolerated slavery but obtained their wealth through the labor of their African slaves. It is also puzzling why more of those who knew Venture or read his narrative were not moved to recognize and respect a shared humanity by witnessing his intelligence, resourcefulness, and commitment to his wife and children in working for their redemption. While an explanation of the existence of slavery in America would be complex and ultimately a matter of the convergence of economic and political factors, a rationalization of slavery could draw on an image of human identity and human dignity inherent in several Enlightenment moral and political theories. These theories in turn provide a framework for understanding eighteenth-century concepts of citizenship and rights and the context in which Venture Smith lived and worked. Human dignity is often identified with those traits or capacities that allegedly distinguish humans from animals. In Enlightenment thinking, natural traits provide a basis for what are regarded as “natural” rights that individual humans have simply in virtue of being human. These rights are entitlements to act and live as befitting a human being through the exercise or manifestation of distinctively human traits. Rights correspond to absolute duties of justice, and the primary duty of the State is to protect rights through the legal system.5 An Enlightenment conception of what it means to be human that can be construed as tolerant of slavery draws on three complementary threads of thought: the rationality-based conception of human dignity in the moral theory of Immanuel Kant, the social contract tradition of political theory associated with Locke and Hobbes, and the essentialist conception of natural kinds and biological species within Aristotelian philosophy. Together these threads provide a philosophical framework for Enlightenment theories of rights and to some extent more recent Western views of rights.6 Within the Kantian moral framework, the defining trait of humanity, which distinguishes humans from animals and objects, is the free exercise of reason— the capacity for autonomous, rational decision-making. Unlike animals, whose ·

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Venture Smith and Philosophical Theories of Human Rights behavior is dictated by instinct, and unlike inanimate objects, which obey impersonal laws of nature, the human individual is self-determining and chooses for himself which rules of conduct to follow. The moral individual is a person who out of duty binds himself to the dictates of reason, which demand that a person act on the basis of universal rules that he can rationally will all people to follow without simultaneously undermining the practice justified by a given rule. A Kantian shows respect for his own humanity by respecting the humanity of all other human persons. An illustration of the Kantian framework given by Kant himself is that of promise-keeping, that is, of keeping one’s word.7 Adopting the rule that one has a duty to keep promises only when it is expedient undermines the practice of promise-keeping and is inconsistent with it. A rational, moral person therefore adopts the rule of unconditional promise-keeping in governing his own behavior. Ironically, as Anna Mae Duane shows in her analysis of Venture’s Narrative, Venture deliberately constructs his own identity as a person who keeps his word even under extreme duress.8 The irony is that Venture, who is described by the author of the Narrative’s preface as “a great mind wholly uncultivated, enfeebled and depressed by slavery” (iii), often exemplifies Kantian rational, moral ideals to a greater extent than more educated white citizens portrayed in the Narrative. The political social contract tradition of the Enlightenment also characterizes human nature in terms of rationality, but it is a rationality that is selfserving. Humans, as rational beings, have the capacity to freely choose those courses of action which best serve their self-interests. Rather than using reason to ground a moral theory, as Kant does, the social contract theorists use reason and the associated human capacity to give voluntary consent as grounds for political authority and the political obligations of states and citizens. A distinctive feature of social contract theories is the idea of the “state of nature,” a possibly fictitious time before the existence of the State or cooperative social communities. In the state of nature humans have complete liberty to pursue their own interests. But as Hobbes and later liberals note, humans in the state of nature do not have the opportunities to develop their higher creative capacities because they must constantly attend to basic survival and security.9 Therefore, out of self-interest men would voluntarily leave the state of nature and enter into cooperative political and social agreements, agreeing to refrain from infringing on the liberties of others in return for the same degree of respect. The role of the State is to protect the exercise of individual autonomy—specifically, to protect the standard political and civil human ·

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l e g a c y rights of life, liberty, and property, along with other freedoms such as the rights of assembly, worship, and free speech. Human rights in this framework appear to be primarily the right to noninterference and protection of property, and rationality takes on the character of an economic rationality of selfinterest. It is paradoxical that Venture Smith excelled in economic rationality and resourcefulness, as is evidenced by his commercial successes while enslaved, yet was denied the attendant rights of a participant in the social contract. One explanatory clue for the failure of Enlightenment principles to protect the human rights of Smith and other African slaves derives from the conditions under which entering into a social contract with others is rational. The conditions under which individuals will rationally and voluntarily leave the state of nature, give up their absolute liberty, and enter into cooperative social agreements are those in which all parties regard the agreement as mutually beneficial. As Locke and Hobbes assume, there can be mutual benefit and thus voluntary consent only between individuals who are equal in power, freedom, and resources. Otherwise the powerful can simply force the weak into enslavement without giving up any of their own freedom. Within the Enlightenment tradition the rights and obligations of citizens, and therefore the responsibilities of the State, are based on the concept of reciprocity—tit for tat. The social contract does not include those who—like Venture and his fellow slaves—are regarded as inferior or who have no power. As Martha Nussbaum and others have argued, by its very presuppositions the social contract tradition of the Enlightenment does not extend equal rights to women, children, or animals, nor to any men thought to be closer to the animals in rationality because they lack education. People or creatures outside of the social contract are not fully recognized in the public sphere of legal protections, but are relegated to the private sphere where law and the State do not intrude. Nussbaum’s diagnosis of the implications of the social contract tradition is reinforced by James Wood Sweet’s analysis of the role of law in relation to slavery in colonial and post-revolutionary New England.10 As Sweet notes, the political and social context that supported the master-slave relationship similarly supported the subordination of wives to husbands and children to parents. All three types of relationships belonged in the private sphere of the household, where the master was boss and the law should not interfere. Indeed, historians describe enslavement as “social death.” Even though slaves could bring legal suit against masters for unjust and excessive cruelty, courts

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Venture Smith and Philosophical Theories of Human Rights rarely found in favor of the slave and against the master, particularly when the master defended his actions by analogy to a parent punishing a wayward child. Venture himself brought a complaint against his master Thomas Stanton to a justice of the peace, only to be told to go home and wait until he was abused again. From the perspective of the court justices, it was too risky to defend the interests of the powerless against those of the more powerful. A second explanatory clue for the failure of Enlightenment principles of liberty and equality to protect Venture Smith and other African slaves can be found in the exclusive focus on rationality as the defining feature of human nature coupled with the then-dominant essentialist Aristotelian conception of natural kinds and biological species. Within the essentialist Aristotelian framework, natural objects and living beings fall into natural groups or species determined by their inner nature or essence. The essence of a biological species is to be defined by one or more properties possessed by all members of the species and only by members of the species. These essential properties also define norms—the way members should be. The essential properties define the end points of natural development—the full actualization of the inner essence. Deviation from species norms or failure to achieve full potential are signs of inherent inferiority or some other problem.11 As we have seen, human nature or human identity in the liberal Enlightenment tradition is characterized by a single property—economic rationality. This one-dimensional view of human nature coupled with an Aristotelian essentialistic framework implies that failure to exhibit the right kind of rationality could be regarded as evidence of inherent inferiority and the basis for lack of respect. Behaviors of enslaved Africans that might be symptomatic of lack of European-style education and acculturation could be open to interpretation as manifestations of subhuman status rather than effects of contingent circumstances. Both Venture’s amanuensis, in the preface to the Narrative, and Venture himself indicate that lack of education may be a basis for low esteem by others. According to the preface, if Venture had received even a common education he would have been a man of high respectability and usefulness. In the Narrative itself, Venture rues his ignorance of numbers as the reason why he had been cheated out of considerable money by people with whom he had traded. The Enlightenment focus on rationality as the basis of human dignity and rights has further implications for the human status of enslaved Africans. In the eighteenth century, love, emotions, and the need for community were seen not only as opposites of rationality, but even as incompatible with it.

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l e g a c y Individuals who exhibited a passionate or sensuous nature might be regarded as more animal than human. Thomas Jefferson is on record as expressing precisely this point of view. In reference to black Africans he says that their consciousness, like that of animals, “participate[s] more of sensation than reflection.” 12 Here Jefferson is simply echoing the philosophical and scientific tradition inherited from Aristotle, with its association between the human/ animal dichotomy and the rational/passional dichotomy.13 Material and psychological needs that naturally attend physical embodiment are shared by humans and animals, and therefore are inferior to the rational capacities of humans. In the eighteenth century these Aristotelian dichotomies also provided a naturalized basis for the parallel social and political dichotomy of the public domain of law and rights versus the private domain of home and paternalistic relationships of masters to subordinates. The worldview of the Enlightenment was not conducive to accepting a plurality of expressions of human nature as equally indicative of full human status. A distinctive feature of Venture’s narrative in contrast to other slave narratives is the absence of expressions of sentiment and private pain normally used to evoke sympathy and stoke abolitionist fervor. This is true even when Venture is describing brutal injustices and the loss of a child. Personal losses are calculated in terms of pounds and dollars—the loss of his son Solomon amounted to a loss of seventy-five pounds and the illness of his daughter, Hannah, cost forty pounds in doctor’s bills. Furthermore, Venture’s responses to injustice and betrayal come across as calculated, controlled, and dignified. One interpretation of the tone and content of the Narrative is that Venture was playing to the dominant social and political ideologies that I described earlier. He was asserting his human worth with evidence of his resourcefulness, rationality, and agency. As Anna Mae Duane notes in her essay in this volume, expressions of pain, dependency, and trauma might reinforce the view of Africans as childlike at best and animal-like at worst. By using the language of the political and cultural ideology of eighteenthcentury New England, Venture was asserting his status as a full human being with the right to enter the public domain ruled by law and leave the private domain of a master’s whims. Given the eighteenth-century scientific understanding of biology and limited experience with cultural diversity, the prevailing view of a homogenous population of “true humans” could exist relatively unchallenged. It must be noted that the philosophical framework I discuss here is simply one possible resource for supporting what has been the strategy for rationalizing slavery

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Venture Smith and Philosophical Theories of Human Rights and other forms of dehumanizing behavior throughout the millennia of human history, namely to deny the genuine human status of the victim. Slaves have always been regarded as similar to domestic animals in their natural capacities and moral status.14 Venture notes this attitude when describing his attempt to obtain justice when he was sued by Captain Hart for the loss of a hogshead of molasses that had fallen off a boat on which Venture had passage. “But Captain Hart was a white gentleman, and I a poor African, therefore it was all right, and good enough for the black dog” (30). In the case of black African slaves, differences in physical appearance, language, and cultural practices, combined with Enlightenment thought and what David Brion Davis calls “pseudo-scientific racism,” reduced the African to a “link or even a separate species between man and the ape.” 15 The combination of a narrow view of the human person and a view of political obligation based on reciprocity, together with eighteenth-century biological theories, provided a framework that colonial Americans could use to rationalize the acceptability of slavery.16

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The Social and Embodied Human as a Framework for Human Rights The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the United Nations in 1948, has been criticized primarily on two grounds: it represents a Western, individualistic view of human identity at odds with a communityoriented view of some non-Western and indigenous cultures; and it goes too far beyond basic civil and political liberties by including a list of economic, social, and cultural entitlements. The UDHR is therefore faulted both for sticking too closely to the individualistic view of Enlightenment rights conceived as individual liberties of noninterference and for going too far beyond the Enlightenment view of rights conceived as basic liberties. In this section I sketch a concept of human identity that uses the resources of African cultures and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to justice as a basis for evaluating both criticisms. In the next section I will discuss the role of the life sciences in promoting a transition from the liberal Enlightenment concept of human identity discussed earlier to the concept of human identity discussed in this section. An African conception of human identity different from the Enlightenment view is expressed in the African (Banjul) Charter on Human and People’s Rights, adopted in 1981 by the Organization of African Unity.17 This

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l e g a c y charter reflects the historical experience of Africans as individuals and as members of tribes with roots in ancient civilizations. Its stated goals are the eradication of all forms of colonialism and the achievement of a better life for the peoples of Africa. It asserts individual rights similar to those of the UDHR, but goes beyond the UDHR in including analogous rights of “peoples.” For example, Article 19 asserts that all peoples shall be equal, and Article 20 asserts that all peoples have the right to existence and self-determination. Also unlike the UDHR, the Banjul Charter speaks of duties of the individual to family, parents, and various communities, as well as a duty to preserve and strengthen positive African cultural values and promote African unity. The existence of a people’s or group’s rights independently of and sometimes in contradiction with the rights of the individual is currently a contentious issue. A “people” may be identified as a group with a cultural, ethnic identity that cannot be defined in terms of national borders of citizenship. A people is often defined in terms of a shared biological ancestry and kinship, but the boundaries are not sharp. There may be peoples within peoples; for example, the Ashanti are a subgroup of the Akan of Ghana in West Africa. Yet the culture of the Akan and that of other African groups are similar enough so that one may speak of an African culture in general.18 An individual’s sense of self is often defined in terms of being a part of a people, and this identification may be the strongest when a group is marginalized within a larger society. In this case the bonds of community are strengthened through a shared history and culture and the need to survive through solidarity. Whether free or enslaved, black Africans certainly felt marginalized in the New World. As Vincent Carretta’s essay in this volume indicates, a common theme in slave narratives is that of being a displaced stranger in an alien land. Venture Smith’s narrative expresses this theme more strongly than others through his extensive and recurring nostalgic reflections on his African heritage, which holds people to a higher standard of conduct than does New England culture. When Venture is unjustly sued by Captain Hart, he says that “such a proceeding as this, committed on a defenceless stranger, . . . without any foundation in reason or justice, . . . would in my native country have been branded as a crime equal to highway robbery” (30). Even though Smith was an exceptionally frugal and astute businessman, it was probably his sense of being the “other” in white society that led him to engage in a number of relatively risky financial transactions with blacks. Cameron Blevins’s essay shows Smith using a real-estate transaction “as a way to forge his own small black community on Haddam Neck and reclaim a fragment of his former life” in Africa. ·

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Venture Smith and Philosophical Theories of Human Rights What is striking in the Banjul Charter and other explications of an African view of human identity is the affirmation of the inherently social nature of the human being. Human identity at both an individual level and the broadest species level is inseparable from sociality. Humans naturally live in groups ranging in size from families to entire peoples. Similarly, Nussbaum endorses Aristotle’s conception of the dual nature of humans as rational, social beings, and uses this as an antidote to a narrow rationalitybased Enlightenment perspective.19 The affirmation of the human being as naturally both rational and social is in stark contrast to the social contract theory’s story of humans leaving the state of nature in order to become social. Since the social behavior of human beings is a direct manifestation of their intrinsic humanity, there is no need in either the African or Nussbaum capabilities approaches to resort to a rational justification for the political realm in terms of mutual self-interest or reciprocity, as is the case with liberal social contract theories. As a consequence, entry into the public domain of rights protected by law is not restricted to those with power sufficient to make a social contract attractive. The grounds for distinguishing between a private domain of family and human relationships based on beneficence and a public domain of politics, justice, and rights based on mutual self-interest and reciprocity disappears. In fact, a case can be made that the nature of family relationships serves as a model for the political in Nussbaum’s theory. In the social, communitarian view, humans have the capability to love, grieve, feel justified anger, and act out of concern for others. They are not completely independent or autonomous, but need to belong to communities based on shared values, interests, histories, and experiences. Relationships can be empowering and liberating, and community membership both molds and expresses individual identity. Living a life of human dignity, a life befitting a human being, therefore requires the protection and promotion of opportunities to develop and exercise human social capabilities. Former archbishop Desmond Tutu affirms this view using the African concept of human identity known as ubuntu. Ubuntu gets at the very essence of being human, and is described by Tutu as the human traits of generosity, care, and compassion. It is high praise to say of someone that he or she has ubuntu. Tutu writes: “We say ‘A person is a person through other persons.’ It is not ‘I think, therefore I am.’ ” 20 Ubuntu implies that a life of human dignity is realized only in relationships with other people, and never as an isolated individual. ·

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l e g a c y Anna Mae Duane’s essay in this volume enables us to see how Venture Smith drew on his more communitarian African heritage as a source of identity and strength. As Duane explains, tribes of West Africa had a tradition of charmed objects—minkisi—that linked the possessor of the objects to ancestors and other people of importance by standing in for them. By choosing the objects that make up his minkisi, an individual engages in a process of interior selfcomposition, augmenting his own powers with those of the minkisi. Duane suggests that money serves as Venture’s minkisi, connecting him first with his father, then with the family members whom he redeemed, and eventually with a community of fellow Africans with whom he engaged in business transactions. Venture’s private identity was constituted by a network of relationships in which money and love were inextricably mixed. He thus adopts the Western ideals of a rational, autonomous, and public man as a means of protecting and expressing his private and more relational African self. In both Nussbaum’s conception and the communitarian African conception of human identity, sociality and beneficence are viewed as natural. Thus the logical need to justify public and political relationships on the basis of mutual self-interest and reciprocity disappears, as does the assumption that public and political relationships can hold only between people of equal power and resources. Indeed, as Nussbaum argues, a view of human identity in which sociality and beneficence are seen as natural provides a basis for respecting and promoting the rights of all humans regardless of wealth, ability, or nationality. I believe that using the family as a metaphor is appropriate here. Just as individuals born into a family unconditionally inherit certain entitlements to parental care without the need to negotiate a mutual benefit, so too individuals born into the human family unconditionally inherit human rights regardless of their abilities to provide a payoff. Both the African and the Nussbaum concepts of human identity differ from the Enlightenment concept I described earlier not only with respect to the inherently social nature of humans, but also with respect to the significance of humans as essentially embodied, physical beings in kinship with nonhuman animals. Some minimal level of satisfaction of material needs of food, shelter, and health are prerequisites for the existence of human rational and social capabilities and their free exercise. Some minimal level of capabilities for sensation and physical movement are prerequisites for the existence and exercise of political and civil liberties. Thus, living a life of human dignity requires some basic level of material and economic well-being. Through this line of argumentation the claim of the Banjul Charter that the standard

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Venture Smith and Philosophical Theories of Human Rights civil and political liberties cannot be dissociated from economic rights and right to development is given a theoretical basis.21 The idea that human identity and human dignity are inherently linked with the human body also opposes the Enlightenment view of an idealized homogenous humanity. Indeed, throughout the Narrative Venture proudly mentions his unusual height and superior physical strength as important distinguishing features of his self-composed interior identity and his public identity. Human bodies vary across a range of heights, weights, shapes, and colorations, just as physical and mental ability vary across the life stages of an individual. Nussbaum’s concept of human dignity and human identity as characterized by a list of bodily, social, and cognitive capacities incorporates human diversity as a fundamental assumption. Because of differing physical and cognitive capabilities, human beings differ in their needs for resources and their abilities to use resources in improving their quality of life. Pregnant women, for example, have different nutritional needs than women who are not pregnant, and autistic children may require more resources to reach a specific level of human functioning than non-autistic children. When human identity and human dignity are characterized in terms of a broad set of capabilities, then people have value not because of what they have actually achieved, but because of who they might become as individuals and as members of a community. When human identity and human dignity are characterized in terms of a set of bodily, social, and cognitive capabilities, each of which is necessary to live a life of human dignity, then each human individual who lives below a minimal acceptable economic, social, or cognitive level makes a claim for assistance in developing his or her capabilities on those who have a level of power or resources significantly above that level. Furthermore, support in developing capabilities is a social and collective responsibility. The author of the Narrative’s preface acknowledges Venture’s capability for genius and laments the missed opportunities for its development through education. Venture’s Narrative may be symptomatic of the evolving acceptance by New Englanders of their public and collective responsibility for the degradations of slavery.22 But even if white New Englanders still had doubts about the full human status and potential of Venture Smith, Venture’s own sense of his value and worth as a human being were sustained by successfully merging his private, relational African identity with his public, rational, economic Western identity.

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Human Rights Theory and the Life Sciences The most recent chapter of Venture’s story is the exhumation of his remains and those of his wife, Meg, at the request of several direct descendents, who hoped that recovering DNA samples would provide clues to the location of the family’s ancestral origins in Africa. With their ancestor’s Narrative already perhaps metaphorically part of the family minkisi, ancestral DNA could further strengthen a sense of both family and individual identity. Using DNA analysis to locate ancestral geographic origins is only one possible application of science in informing us of who we are as individuals, as populations, and as a species. If a theory of human rights is informed by conceptions of human identity and human flourishing, it is important to consider potential contributions of the life sciences to these conceptions. Using the life sciences to support social and political agendas has a checkered history and should be attempted only with extreme caution, and then only tentatively. Facts about nature never speak for themselves but are understood and perhaps even created in a social and political context. In the late nineteenth century, for example, Herbert Spencer abstracted the phrase “survival of the fittest” from Darwin’s theory of biological evolution and used it as an argument against governmental assistance for the poor in the name of improving the human species. But the phrase “survival of the fittest” does not occur in Darwin’s writings, and it oversimplifies the theory. Its social application falsely assumed that the socially disadvantaged were necessarily genetically disadvantaged. Incorrect views of inherent genetic differences between ethnic groups were used in the 1930s as a basis for U.S. immigration policies limiting the influx of targeted ethnic groups. But even if the genetic claims had been correct, it would not follow that the social policy was ethically justified or even the only acceptable policy from a practical perspective.23 As the essay by Linda Strausbaugh and her colleagues in this volume cautions, similar caveats apply against an overly simplistic application of genetic analysis in establishing direct “blood” relations and a genetic basis for race. Studies of the relation between science on the one hand and social, political values on the other hand seem to show an interaction of mutual influence between the two. The division between science and ideology is in constant flux as both science and culture change. As a result of her studies of the human genome diversity project, the sociologist Jenny Reardon concludes that “scientific knowledge and political order come into being together” and that “scientific knowledge and ethical and political decisions about human diver·

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Venture Smith and Philosophical Theories of Human Rights sity can only be made together.” 24 Scientists study what seem to them to be interesting and significant phenomena. Social and political values shape the significance of these phenomena and their meaning. Conversely, as history shows, the life sciences can effectively challenge social and political values that limit human possibilities and opportunities and indicate a direction for a more emancipatory framework. If science is indeed a source of knowledge, however flawed, then science is potentially liberating. All this is to say that the life sciences may be a source of insights and support for understanding the “human” that is the focus of human rights theory. With these cautionary remarks in mind, I want to claim that theories in the life sciences provide an important source of support for theories of human rights by illuminating the nature of human identity in a potentially liberating manner. In the previous sections I have argued that a concept of human identity and human dignity are important foundational elements of a theory of rights. Here I will argue that science has a legitimate role to play in enhancing our understanding of human identity and human dignity, and that theoretical developments in the life sciences, specifically evolutionary biology and genetics, over the past 150 years support a shift from Enlightenment-based concepts of the human to those I outlined in the previous section. In using these sciences to supplement a concept of human identity, I am advocating for the interaction among biological, cultural, historical, and ethical perspectives in our construction of human identity. The development and acceptance of Darwinian evolutionary biology in the later part of the nineteenth century provided a scientific framework for understanding the biological origins of species, and particularly the origins of the human species. The acceptance of a Darwinian framework replaced the previous Aristotelian essentialist view of species as unchanging and fixed and as characterized by a limited and specifiable set of essential properties manifest by all and only members of the species. An Aristotelian view of human possibility and excellence appears rather narrow in comparison to the capabilities approach of Nussbaum, with its focus on human diversity and a plurality of conceptions of a good human life. The Nussbaum conception of human identity and human dignity gains support from the Darwinian perspective in five areas. First, variation of traits within a species is expected and normal. The very process of natural selection requires variation in traits in order for there to be a pool of possibilities for selection. Thus variation in human capabilities is normal. Second, what is normal for a population is a matter of statistical averages and contingent environmental conditions in the past. Averages are not norms in the sense of what ·

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l e g a c y is good or desirable.. Thus the typical level of capabilities exhibited within a group of humans is not a scale for evaluating human value or worth. The third relevant feature of the Darwinian perspective is that it places humanity squarely within the natural domain. We are biological beings with a strong kinship to other species. Our physical embodiment is not in opposition to our human essence, but gives us our humanity. Thus the fact that humans experience physical pain and pleasure just as animals do is not a reason for dismissing their relevance in defining human dignity. Fourth, as studies in the evolution of social behavior of both humanoid and nonhumanoid primates show, sociality is an important adaptation and part of the human “state of nature.” Thus from this perspective Nussbaum is justified in accepting Aristotle’s view of humans as inherently social as well as rational. A final supportive feature of the evolutionary framework is that the advantages and disadvantages of a trait are relative to a particular environment. As the story of Venture Smith illustrates, humans are ingenious and resourceful in changing their environment or themselves to better suit their ends. We find Venture moving from master to master in search of opportunities to use his extraordinary physical strength in raising money to redeem his family. To gain some control over who would be his master, we see him altering his behavior and demeanor in order to make himself attractive or unattractive to a prospective buyer. Thus rather than adopting a fatalism concerning the biological, economic, or political conditions inherited at birth, humans often have the option of changing themselves or their environment to allow the full development and exercise of their human capabilities. One of the motivations behind the capabilities approach is to provide a philosophical foundation for including developmental opportunities for the disabled and the impoverished of all nations within a human rights framework. The new science of genetics also provides potentially liberating insights into the nature of our identity as members of a species, as members of a people, and as individuals. Slavery in America and around the globe has been nourished and sustained by racism, the belief that human differences in appearance or behavior are signs of inferior value or worth. In the past, attempts have been made to use science in legitimating racism by providing a biological basis for racial distinctions.25 Some of the potentially liberating results of science come from studies of human genetic diversity. For example, a wellknown study by Richard Lewontin in 1972 showed that genetic differences within any given human population are statistically greater than between-

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Venture Smith and Philosophical Theories of Human Rights group differences.26 Furthermore, individuals of a given ethnic background often share more alleles with members of other ethnic groups than with their own. Indeed, for all we know genomic analysis could have shown more similarity between Venture’s DNA and that of his master Thomas Stanton than between Stanton’s DNA and that of a randomly selected white New Englander. These facts are used to argue that race is not in our genes, but is a social construction used to reinforce power differentials. What are we to make of efforts to identify the ancestral geographical origins of living individuals by comparing their genetic markers with the frequency distribution of genetic markers of living populations in Africa, as Venture’s descendents hoped to do? The essay by Strausbaugh and her colleagues addresses the risks and uncertainties in this method. As these authors stress, the use of DNA analysis is most effective when combined with family genealogies and historical and archeological scholarship, as was the case with Venture’s family. This reinforces the claim that although biology has a role to play in understanding who we are, it is only part of the story and by itself is potentially misleading. Individual and group identities are cultural as well as biological, partly inherited and partly created. Darwinian evolutionary theory gives credence to the claim of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that we are one human family, because we all have the same ancestral origins in Africa.27 The science of genetics reveals that there are varying degrees of biological relatedness in the human family. Each individual (except perhaps for identical twins) is uniquely distinguished by personal nuclear DNA. Family groups and peoples share genes in varying degrees of relatedness. At the most general and abstract level, all humans share the same genome. A message emerges that human biological identity is multifaceted, as is human identity from a psychological and cultural perspective. Each of us is unique in the convergence of lineages that constitute our bodies and minds. As the essays in this volume show, the man Broteer Furro/Venture Smith was as psychologically unique in the mixing of his African and New England experiences as he was biologically unique in the mixing of his parent’s genes. Yet in spite of individual uniqueness there is also a shared human need and capacity for community and culture. A liberating message is that human experience and potential are not defined or determined by biology alone. We have the capabilities of creating our identity, of choosing our families, communities, and cultural values. As the story of Venture Smith and his descendents show, we have the capabilities of forming families and communities

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l e g a c y that span races and ethnicities, continents and nations, rich and poor, weak and strong.

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Who Speaks for Venture Smith, and for Whom Is Venture Speaking? So who does have the moral right to speak for Venture Smith in providing consent to exhume his body? From the Enlightenment perspective, an individual’s autonomy and right to self-determination trump all other considerations. To deny a human adult the right to speak for himself in fact places him within the category of an animal or a mentally incompetent person. Even in the case of a deceased person, we show our respect for her humanity by honoring her last will and testament. In this tradition only Venture really has the moral right to speak for himself, either directly or indirectly. To say otherwise is to deny his human dignity. We can let Venture Smith speak for himself through his Narrative, which reveals his values and character. We see a man who was proud to be an African, who identified strongly with his family, and whose greatest desire was to see his children walk in his footsteps. Venture’s descendents want to retrace his footsteps and connect with their own African heritage by means of any remaining DNA of Venture or Meg. Given the circumstances, it is appropriate to adopt the perspective of the Banjul Charter and allow that in this context Venture’s descendents function as a people united by a shared history and set of values. A people generally has a designated leader who has the authority to speak for the group. Who speaks for Venture? The descendents who serve as the designated spokespersons for the others. This is the way to show respect for the man Broteer Furro, whose human identity was intimately intertwined with the identity of his people. Linda Strausbaugh and her colleagues report that two of Venture’s descendents, Paula Moody Foster and Carl Moody Francis, concluded that, given that Venture was a man ahead of his time of extraordinary entrepreneurial spirit, he would support the newest technologies in further telling his story.28 Reflecting on the story of Venture Smith enables us all to hear Venture speak for himself. But we also hear him speaking on behalf of all those whose humanity has been denied and whose economic conditions do not enable them to live a life befitting a human being. Richard Rorty speaks against the efficacy of philosophical theories in motivating people to care about others and provide assistance, and against the use of science in revealing the truth

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Venture Smith and Philosophical Theories of Human Rights about human nature. Both roles are better accomplished by listening to sad and sentimental stories, he says.29 Rorty is probably correct, but the stakes are too high to refrain from using the best that science, philosophy, history, and literary analysis have to offer in promoting the cause of human rights and the end of human enslavement.

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Notes 1. Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But resident above sixty years in the United States of America (New London, Conn.: C. Holt, 1798). Subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2. See Vincent Carretta’s essay in this volume. 3. See the essay by Forbes, Richardson, and Saint in this volume. 4. David Brion Davis, In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 132–33, 307–22. See also Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in The Politics of Human Rights, ed. The Belgrade Circle (London: Verso, 1999), 67–83. 5. A theory of human rights should be distinguished from a theory of ethics. Rights are entitlements that may be claimed against others or the State, perhaps on moral grounds, whereas a theory of ethics provides resources for evaluating a broader range of human actions and concerns. 6. Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, and Species Membership (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 23–24. John Rawl’s political theories and theories of justice, often recognized for their importance in providing a philosophical foundation for contemporary theories of human rights, are examples of theories that draw on the Enlightenment resources of Kant and the social contract theories. 7. Immanuel Kant, “Selections from the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Classics of Political and Moral Philosophy, ed. Steven M. Cahn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 753. 8. See Duane’s essay in this volume. 9. The author of the Narrative’s preface describes Venture as a Franklin or a Washington in a state of nature, thus showing his familiarity at least with the terminology of social contract theory and revealing a conception of Africans as primitives living in a pre-political state of nature. 10. See Sweet’s essay in this volume. 11. Essential Aristotelian properties establish a norm in the sense of providing standard of excellence, not in the sense of a statistical average. 12. Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” 67. Rorty is quoting Jefferson’s “Notes on Virginia,” from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew

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13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

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21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

A. Lipcomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904), 194. Davis, In the Image of God, 129, where he quotes a passage from Aristotle’s Politics. It is also relevant to note that Aristotelian concepts still dominated the eighteenthcentury scientific understanding of species and biological differences. Ibid., 127. Davis’s chapter 10, “At the Heart of Slavery,” documents the “bestialization” of slaves throughout human history. Ibid., 134. See also Davis’s chapter 23, “Constructing Race: A Reflection,” for further discussion of the use of pseudo-science in constructing race in the cases of black Africans and Native Americans. It should be recognized that the political leaders and citizens of Enlightenment Europe eradicated slavery significantly before their American relatives. African (Banjul) Charter on Human and People’s Rights, www.africa-union.org/ union .org/.org/official _documents/ Treaties _ %20Conventions _ %20Protocols/ Banjul%20Chartern.pdf Kwasi Wiredu, “An Aikan Perspective on Human Rights,” in Human Rights in Africa: Cross- Cultural Perspectives, ed. Abdullahi An-Na’im and Francis M. Deng, (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1990), 243–44. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 85–86. Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 31. Tutu’s reference to the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes’ most famous statement is a way of distinguishing African communitarianism from Western individualism. For arguments concerning the relation between economic rights and human freedom see Michael Goodheart, “None So Poor That He Is Compelled to Sell Himself: Democracy, Subsistence, and Basic Income,” in Economic Rights: Conceptual, Measurement, and Policy Issues, ed. Shareen Hertel and Lanse Minkler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 94–114; Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). In his essay here, Sweet notes a transition toward increased public support in New England for laws protecting slaves and free Negros by 1770. Troy Duster discusses social Darwinianism and immigration policy in Backdoor to Eugenics, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 132–140. Reardon discusses the collision between an idealized Enlightenment view of science and rationality and political reality in Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 6–9. On the interactions between science and racism see Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 149–56; Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 186–203; Barbara Katz Rothman, The Book of Life: A Personal and Ethical Guide to Race, Normality, and the Implications of the Human Genome Project (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 45–107. Reardon, Race to the Finish, 35, and Richard Lewontin, “The Apportionment of Human Diversity,” Evolutionary Biology 6 (1972): 391–98.

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27. The phrase “one human family” in the UDHR was selected with evolutionary theory in mind, for the explicit purpose of combating the racism that gave rise to the Holocaust. See Haraway, Primate Visions, 197–203. 28. The practice of allowing family members to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves is also endorsed by contemporary medical ethics. See Allen E. Buchanan and Daniel W. Brock, Deciding for Others: The Ethics of Surrogate Decision Making (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 112–51. 29. Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” 81.

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9 Venture Smith’s Gravestone Its Maker and His Message Kevin J. Tulimieri

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V

ENTURE SMITH died in 1805, at some time in his mid-seventies, and was honored with a large funeral at the East Haddam First Congregational Church. He was buried in the First Church Cemetery and his grave marked with a richly carved gravestone (fig. 9.1). At a glance, the large brownstone marker appears to be typical of many made in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for East Haddam’s prominent citizens. But a closer inspection reveals that the details of Venture Smith’s gravestone are as unique as was Venture himself. In a remarkable act of artistic license rarely seen on early nineteenthcentury tombstones, the maker of Venture’s gravestone created an extraordinarily personal portrait of the man it commemorates. Instead of the standard abstract representation of faces almost invariably found on gravestones of this period, this carver adorned Venture’s gravestone with the image of a distinct individual, one with an African face. Subtle but enormously evocative, this rare and important portrait in stone is a remarkable expression of the maker’s and the community’s respect and admiration for Venture. Venture Smith’s gravestone was made by John Isham Jr. (1757–1834) of East Haddam.1 A prolific and talented stone carver, Isham had begun his career by 1781—a career that spanned at least thirty-nine years. Testifying to his productivity are more than four hundred gravestones decorated by Isham that survive today. This large group stretches through nine Connecticut towns, from the coastal port of Stonington to the interior village of Marlborough. ·

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Venture Smith’s Gravestone

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9.1. Venture Smith Gravestone, 1805. First Church Cemetery, East Haddam, Connecticut. All photographs by Kevin Tulimieri. Unlike the majority of gravestone carvers, Isham did not work as a mason or own a stone quarry. He had a small farm, but his main occupation was carving the decoration and lettering on gravestones. Judging by the number of gravestones that survive today, Isham carved at least ten stones per year on average. The total is certainly much higher, however, as many of the delicate brownstone monuments have been lost over time. There are 281 gravestones by Isham that survive in East Haddam alone; there are also 133 in other towns, and at least one can be found outside the United States, in Scotland.2 Isham died in Farmington in 1834 at the age of seventy-seven. Ironically for a carver who marked so many graves, the location of his own grave is unknown, and it appears to be unmarked. It has been suggested that Isham and his wife, Lois, may be buried next to his son, Alfred, and his daughter, Laure, in the East Haddam First Church Cemetery. The children’s graves are marked with finely crafted gravestones carved by Isham in 1792 and 1793.3 Probably locally trained, Isham worked within the traditional vocabulary of gravestone decoration established in the early eighteenth century. At the same time, he created a distinctly personal design that must have been highly successful, since he repeated elements of it systematically throughout ·

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his career. Isham’s central motif was a delicate and refined oval face supported on upward-swept wings. The characteristic features of these carved faces include a precisely shaped outline, almond-shaped eyes, and a slender straight nose carved in relief. Below the projecting nose is a simple concave horizontal line to indicate the mouth. Isham’s gravestones exhibit a consistent design, executed by the hand of a dedicated craftsman (figs. 9.2–9.4). They include a variety of decorative elements on the borders, as well as fine lettering. Among the border decoration he used are scrolls, rosettes, twists, tassels, vines, and flowers. But it is the carved faces and upswept wings that immediately identify a gravestone as carved by Isham. Almost never during his long and highly productive career did he ever choose to vary from this generic template, except in the case of Venture Smith. His most singular and most truly creative departure from his standard face carving is found in the gravestone he made for Venture in 1805. In a bold act of artistic license, Isham subtly but dramatically changed his standard design and endowed the face on Venture’s stone with the very distinct features of an individual of African descent. Isham changed the thin nose of his typical grave-

9.2. Elisha Cone Gravestone, 1781. Salmon Cove Burial Yard, East Haddam, Connecticut. This is one of the earliest gravestones carved by John Isham and shows the early elements he would refine over his career. ·

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Venture Smith’s Gravestone

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9.3. Lois Emmons Gravestone, 1801. First Church Cemetery, East Haddam, Connecticut. This finely carved gravestone is located only yards from Venture Smith’s gravestone and shows the standard cherub and border design used by John Isham.

9.4. Sally Williams Gravestone, 1808. Waterhole Road Cemetery, East Hampton, Connecticut. This tender gravestone was carved by John Isham and features his standard design slightly altered to show a sleeping child. ·

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l e g a c y stone face for a broad one, a subtle but easily verifiable effort to manipulate his standard design and create a unique image. An analysis of measurements from twenty-one of Isham’s gravestones makes this clear: Venture’s nose measures more than twice as wide as those found on Isham’s other stone. The tip of Venture’s nose is 2 cm wide; the next largest of those measured is .9 cm, and the average width is .73 cm. Isham also added subtle elements to the mouth. The standard mouth carved by Isham most often is a single horizontal line. A seldom-used variation is a concave pyramid with a horizontal top line. The single exception is, again, found on the gravestone he created for Venture Smith. To his standard design Isham added a few extra lines to accentuate the mouth, again emphasizing the face’s African characteristics. The result of these two singular exceptions is a gravestone carved in Venture Smith’s image, and in his honor. Surely this local artist knew Venture personally and, in a rare creative moment, expressed his respect for him by departing from time-honored approaches to stone-cutting. Instead he created an early, rare portrait of a free African man. And, simultaneously, he represented Venture Smith’s soul as an African soul. In these path-breaking ways, the gravestone John Isham created for Venture Smith crosses the boundary from a fine gravestone carving to a uniquely important work of art. It is a remarkable artifact that verifies the far-reaching impact Venture had on the people around him and that he still exercises today.

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Notes 1. James A. Slater, “The Colonial Burying Grounds of Eastern Connecticut and the Men Who Made Them,” in Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts & Sciences, vol. 21 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1987), 69. 2. Slater, “Colonial Burying Grounds of Eastern Connecticut,” 70. 3. Karl Stofko, “John Isham, Stone Carver, of East Haddam, Connecticut” (unpublished manuscript, 2006), 1.

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The Freedom Business (ca. 1790)

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Freeing people is good business in principle. You’d think they’d thank you for sixty percent of their earnings while they repay your capital investment: business and benevolence, for once, going hand in hand. But people think your freeing them means they are free to leave or lollygag. And your money, carefully banked, then paid to The Man out of brotherly love, might as well be tossed down the privy hole. The first person I freed cost sixty pounds, and had repaid twenty when the fellow stole away by night. The second turned around and went back to his master, so I lost four hundred dollars for nothing. And the third and I simply decided it was best to part company. Frankly, the reward for freeing people is a broken heart. My son Solomon (seventy five pounds) sent on a whaler, his young life cut short by scurvy. My daughter (forty-four pounds) marrying a fool and contracting a fatal disease. I paid for a physician (forty pounds), but Hannah died. God has mysterious ways. And freedom is definitely not a matter of funds. Freedom’s a matter of making history, of venturing forth toward a time when freedom is free. M a r ily n Nel s on ·

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Copyright © 2010. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Documenting Venture Smith Project

time line The Life of Venture Smith (dates): dates being researched, documented, and refined. Bold: dates on which there is general agreement. •

Bold italic: dates confirmed by documented records

Venture’s own estimates of dates, recounted when he was about seventy years old and in failing health, are sometimes in conflict with historical records. The date that he gives for his birth in the Narrative is “about the year 1729.” The age and date on his tombstone, and the title page of the Narrative, crossreferenced to records of the slave voyage and the runaway notice, indicate that he was born between 1727 and 1729.

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1727–1729 “Broteer Furro,” the first son of a prince of “Dukandarra,” is born. (1737) His mother leaves with her three children after a dispute with her husband, returning to her own family. She leaves Venture with a prominent farmer, probably for some form of apprenticeship. 1738 Broteer returns home, probably in the summer or fall. •

1738 October 6 Charming Susanna departs from Rhode Island for Africa

(1738, fall, or early 1739) Broteer’s father is killed by a raiding army, and the boy is captured.

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Time Line 1739 (early in the year) Broteer is taken to Anomabu District on the Gold Coast of West Africa (now Ghana). It is unclear which slave castle he was kept in or how long he was held there. 1739 (late May– early June) Broteer and other slaves are purchased by American slavers operating the Charming Susanna. 1739 (approximately early June) Charming Susanna sails from the Gold Coast. •

1739 August 23 Charming Susanna arrives in Bridgetown Harbor, Barbados, and sells all but four of the captives.

1739 (late August or early September) Charming Susanna sails from Barbados. 1739 (September) Ship arrives in Rhode Island. Robinson Mumford temporarily places the boy with one of his sisters (probably Mercy, his oldest, who lived in Newport) to learn some English and colonial customs. (1740) Venture is taken from Rhode Island to the Mumford homestead on Fisher’s Island.

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(1742 or earlier) Robinson Mumford dies at sea and his father, Capt. George Mumford, inherits Venture. 1754 (probably January or February) Venture marries Meg (Marget). •

1754 March 27 Venture runs away with two other slaves and an indentured servant and returns voluntarily sometime in April.

1754 Approximately in November, Meg gives birth to their first child, Hannah. •

1754 end of year Venture is sold to Thomas Stanton of Stonington and separated from his family. ·

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Time Line 1756 Meg and Hannah are sold to Thomas Stanton. Venture and Meg’s first son, Solomon, is born. 1758 Their second son, Cuff, is born. (1759) Hempstead Miner of Stonington contracts to buy Venture from Thomas Stanton and then hires him out to Daniel Edwards of Hartford. (1760) Venture is sold for the last time to Oliver Smith Jr., who has moved to Stonington from Groton. Smith agrees to let Venture purchase himself for £85, to be paid in installments. (1762) Venture begins farming a plot of land near Thomas and Robert Stanton’s Stonington farms. 1765 (March or April) After nearly five years of making payments to Smith, largely with money earned from side jobs, Venture finally buys his freedom. (1767) Venture sells his house and land in Stonington and moves to Long Island. (To date no records of Venture’s Long Island locations have been found.)

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1769 Venture purchases his two sons, Solomon and Cuff, while on Ram Island. (1770, late 1760s or early 1770s) Venture buys land on Long Island. •

1770 December 3 Venture buys 26 acres in Stonington.

1773 His eldest son, Solomon, dies at sea at the age of seventeen. (1773–1774) Venture purchases Meg’s freedom and his oldest child, Hannah. 1774 A third son is born and named Solomon. 1774 March Venture sells his land in Stonington. ·

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Time Line 1774–1775 December–January Venture leaves Long Island for Haddam, Connecticut. •

1775 March 3 Venture buys 10 acres on Haddam Neck.

(1776–1777) Venture buys 6 more acres on Haddam Neck. •

1777 March 14 Venture buys 70 additional acres from Abel Bingham and builds his home.

•

1777 August 18 Venture and Stephen Knowlton buy 48 acres of adjoining land.

•

1778 March 8 Venture buys Knowlton’s share.

•

1781–1783 Cuff serves in the Continental Army.

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(1781–1782) Daughter Hannah dies of illness. •

1798 Venture dictates his life story to Elisha Niles, and the Narrative is published by The Bee of New London in December.

•

1805 September 19 Venture Smith dies in his seventy-seventh year at Haddam Neck.

•

1809 December 17 Marget Smith dies in her seventy-ninth year at Haddam Neck. For updated Documenting Venture Smith Project Time Line see the Beecher House Center for the Study of Equal Rights and Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation’s Documenting Venture Smith Project at www.DocumentingVentureSmith.org

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Notes on Contributors

C a m e ron Bl ev i ns graduated from Pomona College in 2008 and is pursuing a Ph.D. in American history at Stanford University. With support from the Hart Institute for American History, he completed his undergraduate research on Venture Smith by investigating slavery in early New England and the exploring the application of digital methodology within historical scholarship.

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Vi nce n t C a r r et ta , a professor of English at the University of Maryland, specializes in eighteenth-century transatlantic historical and literary studies. Author of more than a hundred articles and reviews, he has also written and edited ten books, most recently the award-winning Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. A n na M a e D ua n e is an assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the director of UConn’s American Studies program. She is the author of Suffering Childhood in Early America: Colonial Violence and the Making of the Child-Victim (2010). Her other publications include Hope is the First Great Blessing: Leaves from the African Free School Presentation Book, 1812– 1826, and forthcoming essays in the Cambridge History of the American Novel and the Norton edition of Susanna Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple. Robe rt P. For be s is an assistant professor of History and American Studies at the University of Connecticut, Torrington. His research focuses on the impact of slavery on American institutions. He is the author of The Missouri Compromise and its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America. A n n e L . Hisk e s is an associate professor of philosophy and director of the Program on Science and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut. Her scholarly papers and publications focus on interactions between science and human values and on the ethics of stem cell research. Ja m e s O. Hort on is the Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and Histtory at George Washington University and Historian Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. ·

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Notes on Contributors Pau l E . L ov ejoy, Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of History, York University, holds the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples at York University. He has published more than thirty books and one hundred papers and articles. H e at h e r Ne l s on is a graduate of the University of Connecticut’s Professional Science Master’s program in applied genomics, where she worked on several forensic DNA typing projects. She is currently a scientist in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City. Poet M a r ily n Ne l s on is the author or translator of twelve books and three chapbooks, and the former (2001–2006) Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut. She is a professor emerita at the University of Connecticut and the founder and director of the writers’ colony Soul Mountain Retreat.

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Cr a ig O’Con nor holds a Ph.D. in Genetics and Genomics from the University of Connecticut, where he conducted research into autosomal and Y chromosomal identity typing for forensic applications. He is currently a forensic scientist in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City. Dav id R ich a r d s on is a professor of economic history and director of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) at the University of Hull, U.K. In 2004 he was Visiting Research Fellow at Yale University’s Gilder-Lehrman Center for the study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, where he met Chandler Saint and began work with him and Robert Forbes on the life of Venture Smith. His primary research interest is transatlantic slavery, on which he has published and edited various books and numerous articles. Ch a n dl e r B . Sa i n t, a historian and preservationist, is president of the Beecher House Center for the Study of Equal Rights and co-director of the Documenting Venture Smith Project. In 1997 led the effort the to save from the wrecking ball the birthplace of Harriet Beecher Stowe and her brother Henry Ward Beecher in Litchfield, Connecticut, and to establish their homestead as the core of the Beecher House Center. He is the coauthor of Making Freedom: The Extraordinary Life of Venture Smith. Ja m e s Br e w e r St e wa rt is James Wallace Professor of History, Emeritus, at Macalester College and president of the National Board of the Beecher House Society. He has published ten books and over a hundred articles and ·

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Notes on Contributors reviews, all focused on the problem of slavery and abolitionist movements in the United States. Li n da St r ausb augh is a professor of genetics and genomics at the University of Connecticut. She directs the College of Liberal Arts and Science’s interdisciplinary Center for Applied Genetics and Technology and conducts research in molecular evolution and forensic genetics. Jo sh ua Su h l earned a Ph.D. in Genetics and Genomics from the University of Connecticut, where he conducted research into mining the full information content from mitochondria DNA. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Human Genetics at Emory University in Atlanta. Joh n Wo od Sw e et is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His previous books and articles have explored the dynamics of colonialism in early North America. He is currently at work on a biography of Venture Smith.

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K ev i n Tu l im ie r i is a research assistant and antiques dealer with Nathan Liverant and Son Antiques in Colchester, Connecticut. He first published his art historical observations of Venture Smith’s gravestone in 1997 as the editor of the Hometown Journal in East Haddam, Connecticut. He has published articles on American antiques in The Magazine Antiques, the Catalogue of Antiques and Fine Art and the New England Antiques Journal.

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Index

abolitionism, 109, 115–16, 163, 170; and fight to restrict slave sales, 101; and Sierra Leone resettlement efforts, 171, 173, 174; and slave runaways, 109; Venture Smith’s narrative and, 163–64, 176–77 Abuakwa, 43. See also Akyem Abuakwa Accra, 43, 44, 46 Ackley, William, 142–43, 150, 157n40 Adams, Abigail, vii–viii Adams, John, vii Affrifah, Kofi, 44, 45 Africa: communal traditions in, 139, 240, 241–42, 250n20; genetic diversity in, 215–16; human origins in, 213, 214, 247; human rights in, 239–40; livestock raising in, 6, 7, 43, 50, 58–59; money and market activity in, 58–59, 187, 192– 93, 196, 202n4, 242; panyarring tradition in, 13, 42, 44, 46, 53–54n20; pawning tradition in, 138–39, 187, 193– 94, 198– 99; slave resettlement movement in, 171, 173, 174; as spiritual environment for blacks everywhere, 187. See also Gold Coast; Gold Coast war; Smith, Venture—Africa Agaja, King, 45 Agona, 42, 43, 45–46 Akan states, 43, 46–47, 51, 240 Akwamu, 43, 44, 45, 46, 54–55n32

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Akyem, 53n19; in Gold Coast war, 42–47, 54–55n32; as likely attackers of Dukandarra, 40, 42–43; map, 41 Akyem Abuakwa, 43, 44, 45, 47 Aldridge, William, 169 Allen, Thomas, 98 Alvorod, Benjamin, 113 American colonies: British measures against, 69–70; coerced labor in, 58; commercial exploitation of, 57; currency systems in, 29, 70, 81n51; interregional trade in, 81n49; slavery and, 63, 68, 80n37, 86, 91. See also Revolution, American Anderson, Sawney, 116–17 animals: in African tradition, 242; and humanity, 234–35, 246; slaves compared to, 3, 188, 238–39. See also livestock Ann (runaway slave), 106 Anomabu: castle in, 13, 42, 53n17; defeats invaders, 13, 60; and slave trade, 41, 60–61, 65, 78n17; Venture Smith in, 12–13, 35, 37–38, 40, 41–43, 164 Ansah, William, 41 Argyle, 42 Aristotle, 249n11; contrast of to capabilities approach, 245; on dual nature of humans, 241, 246; influence on Enlightenment ideas, 238, 250n13; on natural kinds and biological species, 234, 237

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Index

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Asante, 40, 43, 49; and Gold Coast war, 43, 46–47 Atlantic Creole, 56, 76–77n3 Baa Kwante (Bakwante), 44, 47, 54–55n32 Baker, Houston A., 189 Bakongo, 194 Baldwin, Caleb, 114 Banjul Charter (African Charter on Human and People’s Rights), 239–40, 241, 242–43, 248, 250n17 Banks, Marc, 144 Baptist Annual Register, for 1790, 1791, 1792, and Part of 1793, 173 Barbados: economic role of, 62; slave mortality rate in, 62–63; in slave trade, 64, 79n26; and sugar, 58, 62–63; Venture Smith in, 13, 35, 61, 165, 260. See also West Indies bartering and credit, 134–35 Baukurre, 11, 47 Baxter, Richard, 168 Bee, 165–66, 262 Beecher House Center for the Study of Equal Rights, x, 207, 208, 222, 229n24 Behn, Aphra, 166 Belinga, Samuel M. Eno, 193, 194, 197 Belknap, Jeremey, 115 Bellantoni, Nick, 222, 223, 224, 229n24 bian, 194 Bible, 65, 66, 179–80, 200–201 Bingham, Abel, 28, 132, 135, 262 blacks, free: in Continental Army, 73, 74, 114–15; expulsion act against, 27; racial discrimination against, 30, 152, 178, 239. See also manumission Blake, William, 170 Blevins, Cameron, xiii, 129–54, 190, 240, 263 Bolnick, Deborah, 218 Bordes, J. Baron des, 44 Boris, Enevold Nielson, 46, 53n18

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Boston, Prince, 72 Boudinout, Elias, 115 Bourke, Michael, 229n24 Brainerd, Daniel, 137 Brainerd, Ezra, 134 Brister (slave), 112 Britain, 174; American colonization by, 57; American resistance to, 69–70; and slave trade, 58, 64 Brooks, Joanna, 187 Brown, Moses, 115 Brown, Stephen, 149 Browne, William, 66 Buckley, Oliver, 96–97 Bunyan, John, 168 Bunyan, Paul, 165, 186 Butram, Erica, 222 Caesar (slave), 96–97, 99 Campbell, Alexander, 170 capabilities approach, 239, 241, 242–43, 245–46 capitalism, 75, 133, 190, 194, 199–200 Capitein, Jacobus, 36–37 Carretta, Vincent, xiii–xiv, 48, 129–30, 151, 163–80, 200, 240, 263 Center for Applied Genetics and Technology (CAGT), 209, 229n24 Chapman, Timothy, 28, 135, 142 Chapman, Zacharias, 145 Charming Susanna, 41, 164–65, 182n6, 259, 260; Caribbean destination of, 64, 182n6; facts about trip of, 37–38, 52n8; mortality aboard, 13, 61–62, 78n21 Chatfield, George, 90 Chauqum, Sarah, 99 Chesebrough, Cuff, 117 Chew, Joseph, 113 Christianity: black preachers of, 169–70, 172, 173, 174; slave conversions to, 167, 168, 174; in Venture Smith’s narrative, 22, 164, 177, 178, 180

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Index

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Christiansborg, 42, 53n18 Church, Charles, 26, 73, 100–101, 122–23n37 Clark, Christopher, 133, 153 Clarkson, John, 173 Clarkson, Thomas, 171 Collingwood, James, 13, 37, 61 Cone, Elisha, 254 Connecticut: black population in, 139; capitalist mentality in, 75; economy, 73, 74, 81n49, 82n61; emancipation legislation in, 111, 141, 147; farm sizes in, 136–37; manumission law in, 151–52, 158n59; Revolution’s effects on, 73, 82n61, 108, 133, 141; slavery in, viii, 90, 102, 108, 119–20n10. See also Haddam/Haddam Neck/East Haddam, Conn. Cooper, James Fenimore, 75 Cosway, Richard and Maria, 170 cotton, ix counterfeiting, 81n51 Cuba, 167 Cudjo (slave), 115, 127n80 Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah, 170–71 currency: in American colonies, 29, 70, 81n51; and bartering system, 134–35, 144; depreciation of, 141 Dahomey, 36, 40, 43, 45, 46, 50 Daniels, Bruce C., 133, 146 Darwinism, 244, 245–46, 247 Davis, David Brion, 239 Dawkins, Richard, 212 Declaration of Independence, vii, 57, 234 Demane, Harry, 170 Denmark, 44, 45, 46 Descartes, René, 250n20 descendants of Venture Smith: establishing relationship with, 222–23; and excavation project, xi, 225–26, 231–32; seek to keep his memory alive, 208; studying DNA of, xiv, 208, 212, 220

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Desrochers, Robert E., Jr., 139, 186, 187, 192 Diallo, Ayuba Suleiman, 166–67 Dicecco, Dorothea, 229n24 Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock, 190, 191 DNA, chromosomal and mitochondrial, 210–13 DNA Project: descendents’ participation in genotyping, 225–26, 231–32; establishes working relationship with family, 222–23; establishing who speaks for Venture Smith, 231, 232, 248–49, 251n28; excavation of graves, xi, 209, 221, 223–25, 244; excavation results, 224; mitochondrial types in family tree, 219, 227; and understanding slavery, 208 DNA technology, 212–19; as big business, 217; genetic signatures, 213, 215, 219, 220–21, 225–26; need for supplementary information to corroborate, 210, 219–20, 247; and privacy issues, 218, 221; and race and ethnicity, 218; unintended uses of, 218–19; what it can tell us, 208 Douglass, Frederick, 164 Duane, Anna Mae, xiii–xiv, 153–54, 184–201, 219, 235, 238, 242, 263 Dudley, Silvester, 146 Dukandarra: geographic location of, 43, 48–49; military attack on, 8–12, 40, 46, 59; as Venture Smith’s birthplace, 5–6, 37, 39 duplicity: false promises on manumission, 20, 22, 95–96, 196; by West African captors, 9, 60, 191; by whites, 17, 21, 29–30, 31, 70, 75–76, 110, 118, 165. See also trust and trustworthiness Ecclesiastes, 179, 200 Edwards, Daniel, 21–22, 96, 115, 178, 261

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Index

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Edwards, Jonathan, Jr., 102, 115 Eltis, David, 38 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 184, 185, 200 Emmons, Lois, 255 England. See Britain Enlightenment principles, xiv, 235, 242, 243, 248; and slavery, 232, 233–34, 236, 237–38, 239 Equiano, Olaudah (Gustavus Vassa): on Africa, 36, 177; biographical information, 35, 170–71; doubts about his birth, 52n4, 182n7, 182n12, 202n9; narrative compared to Venture Smith, 36, 51, 175, 176, 178, 189, 191; sentimentalism of, 189–90, 203n21; and struggle against slavery, 170, 171 Fairfield, Conn., 139 family: separation under slavery, 18, 99, 165, 189–90, 191, 197; in slave narratives, 189– 90. See also Smith, Venture – family Fante, 40, 53n12; and Gold Coast wars, 42, 43, 45, 46 Fisher’s Island: about, 66–67, 87; Venture Smith living on, 14, 17, 65, 88, 104, 260; Venture Smith’s work on, 24, 67, 68, 111–12 fishing, 18, 23–24, 27, 70–71, 111–12, 154; in Haddam Neck, 29, 135, 142 Forbes, Robert P., xii–xiii, 56–76, 186, 232, 263 Fortune (slave), 13 Foster, Daniel, 222 Foster, Paula Moody, 222, 248 Francis, Carla Moody, 222, 248 Frank, David, 106 Franklin, Benjamin, xii, 4, 151, 175–76, 186, 188, 199, 249n9; values of, 183n17, 204n39 Freeman, Caesar, 100 Freeman, Susan, 116 Frelinghuysen, Theodorus Jacobus, 168

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Frimpon Manso, Kotokuhene (Frempong Manso), 44, 54–55n32 Fugitive Slave Act, 109 Fulani, 36, 50 Furro, Cundazo (brother), 5, 37, 39 Furro, Saungm (father): and military attack, 8–10; offered sanctuary, 8–9, 10, 47; owns livestock, 9, 50, 58–59; as representative of courage and honor, 60, 187, 192, 193–94; as royalty, 5, 8, 36, 37, 164; torture and death, 10–11, 60, 75, 178, 187, 191–94, 259; wives of, 5 Furro, Soozaduka (brother), 5, 37, 39 Fynn, J. K., 43 Gardiner, Stephen, 106 Gardner, William, 106 gender ideology, 191 genetics. See DNA Project; DNA technology Genghis Khan, 216 Genographic Project, 215, 216 genome, 209, 212–13, 247; and Venture Smith ancestry, 212 Gentlemen’s Magazine, 41 Geographic Information System (GIS), 130 George, David, 173 George II (King), 41 Gilroy, Paul, 186, 194–95 Gold Coast: geographic features, 49–50; identifying locations in, 38, 40–43, 49–50, 51; Jacobus Capitein on, 36–37; and panyarring, 42; pawnship in, 138–39, 187, 193–94, 198–99; and slave trade, 37–38, 41, 42, 58, 60–61, 64, 78nn17–18 Gold Coast war, 42–47, 54–55n32; European powers and, 8, 42, 44; hill people in, 12–13, 46, 47–48; predatory army in, 13, 40, 59–60; as slaveraiding venture, 45; Venture Smith’s account of, 8–12, 40, 46–47

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Gould, Philip, 185, 186 Green, James, 139–40, 142, 146 Gronniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw, 168–69, 177, 178 Guyer, Jane I., 193, 194, 197 Habermas, Jürgen, 189 Haddam/Haddam Neck/East Haddam, Conn.: geographic features, 131; graves of Venture Smith family in, x, 76, 223–25, 253; taxes in, 134–35, 141, 146; tiny black population in, 139; Venture Smith agriculture and livestock in, 135, 144–46; Venture Smith as respected figure in, 135, 147, 148, 153; Venture Smith builds home at, 31, 32, 135; Venture Smith land dealings in, viii, 28, 31, 74, 129, 132–33, 135–37, 138–40, 142–44, 146–51, 154, 261; Venture Smith move to, 28, 32, 165, 261. See also Connecticut Halifax, Lord, 41 Halzey, Jeremiah, 107, 115–16, 123n40 Hamilton, George, 53n18 Hammon, Briton, 167–68 haplotypes, 213, 215–16, 226 Harmon, Amy, 217, 218 Harris, Peter, 144 Harry (slave), 109 Hart, Elisha, 30 Haughton, James, 109 Heddy (Joseph Heday), 16–18, 103, 105 Hemings, Sally, 21 Henretta, James, 74, 82n61 Henry, Mandred T., 207, 222 Hertug, Commandant, 46 Hill, Elizabeth, 114 Hiskes, Anne L., xiv, 231–49, 263 Hobbes, Thomas, 59, 234, 235, 236 Holmes, Oliver, 115 Holt, Charles: as possible Venture Smith amanuensis, 165, 175; as publisher of Venture Smith’s Narrative, 165

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Hooker, William, 21, 196 Horton, James O., vii–x, xi, 263 Human Genome Project, 209 human identity: biology insufficient for establishing, 233, 247–48; diversity of, 213, 216, 238, 243, 244–45, 246–47; and human nature, 175, 233, 237–38, 248–49; and human origins, 233, 245; as opposed to animals, 234–35, 246; social character of, 240, 241, 242, 246 human migration, 213, 214, 215, 216 human rights, 233, 240, 248, 249n5; African conception of, 239–40; Enlightenment conception of, vii, 234, 236; and human dignity, 234, 237, 241, 242–43, 245, 248; and life sciences, 244, 245, 249 Huntingdon, Countess, 169, 170 Huntingdonian Connexion, 169 Huntington, Samuel, 102 Hurd, Asenath, 220 information technologies, 233 inheritances, 137; to Solomon, 146–47, 149 Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, The (Equiano), 171–72 interracial marriage, 168–69, 171 Intolerable Acts, 69 Irving, Charles, 171 Isaac (husband of daughter Hannah), 28, 74 Isham, John, Jr., 252–56 Izard, Michel, 48 Jacklin, William, 28–29 Jackson, Coralynne Henry, 208–9, 222, 223 Janey (slave), 97 Jefferson, Thomas, vii, 210, 221, 234, 238 Jeffries, Lettice, 107–8, 116 Joan (slave), 114

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Index Johnson, Samuel, viii Journal . . . To Which Are Added Two Sermons, A (Marrant), 170 Juno (slave), 98

Lewontin, Richard, 246–47 Liele, George (George Sharp), 172–73 livestock: in Africa, 6, 7, 43, 50, 58–59; Connecticut farmers and, 146; at Haddam Neck estate, 135, 144–46 Locke, John, 59, 234, 236 Long Island: economy of, 64, 73; expulsion of blacks, 27; Venture Smith in, 25, 27, 28, 35, 68, 74, 165, 261 Long Island Sound, 57, 64–65, 68, 70, 154 Lord, William, 149 Louisiana territory, ix Lovejoy, Paul E., xii, 35–51, 165, 187, 193, 198, 264

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Kant, Immanuel, 233–34, 249n6 Kazanjian, David, 75 Kellog, Martin and Rebecca, 106 Kilborn, Jonathan, 145 King, Boston, 173–74 King, Robert, 171 King, Violet, 174 Kirkland, Colonel, 172 Knowlton, Stephen, 136, 157n39, 262 Kotoku, 43, 44 Krepi, 45 Kurentsi, Eno Baisie (John Currantee), 40–41, 42 labor, bonded, 99–101 Ladd, Carl, 229n24 land: agrarian reliance on, 143–44; dealings in Haddon Neck, viii, 28, 31, 74, 129, 132–33, 135–37, 138–40, 142–44, 146–51, 154, 261; as freedom, 31, 129; as independence, 189, 199; purchases in Long Island, 27, 135, 144–46; purchases in New London County, 112, 126n65; purchases on Long Island, 74, 261; as security, 141, 146, 149, 153–54; as self-empowerment, 153 Late, Eliza, 76, 223, 224–25 Lavin, Lucianne, 144 legal system: bonded laborers and, 100, 101; on extending credit to slaves, 112; slavery and, 85–86, 88, 90–91, 92–94, 106, 236–37; slaves earning money under, 112–13; Venture Smith seeks debt repayment through, 28–29; Venture Smith seeks redress for slaveowners’ attack, 19, 83–84, 87, 237; Venture Smith sued by Captain Hart, 30, 239

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MacGaffey, Wyatt, 194, 197 MacSparran, James, 91 Main, Jackson Turner, 146 Malagasco, 11–12, 47–48; possible location of, 48 Mann, Bruce, 134 manumission, 73, 110–17; conditions regulating, 87–88; Connecticut law on, 151–52, 158n59; court cases around, 111; by Venture Smith, viii, 24, 32, 110–11, 152, 165, 261; verbal nature of agreements, 113–14 market: in Africa, 58–59, 187; as central to Venture Smith vision, 57, 75, 185, 186, 190, 200, 201; and communal bonds in countryside, 133; real-estate, 136–37, 142; and slave sales, 86, 87, 95–98, 101, 111; slave trade and, 59, 60, 62–63 Marrant, John, 169–70 Maryland, 63 Massachusetts, 81n49; slavery in, viii, 89–90, 114 Melish, Joanne Pope, 152 mercantilism, 57 Methodist Magazine, 174

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Index Miner, Hempsted, 20–21, 22, 85, 95–96, 106, 261 Miner, Joseph, 106 Mingo (purchased slave), 28–29 minkisi: African tradition of, 201, 204n40; as fetishized item, 194; money as, 187–88, 194, 202–3n14, 242; as way of linking up with ancestors, 197, 219, 242, 244 Minor, Nathaniel, 32, 39, 81n45 molasses: as emblematic of coercion and bad faith, 69; and New England economy, 69; Venture Smith charged for loss of, 18, 30, 69, 239 money: and African tradition, 177–78, 192–93, 194, 196, 197, 201, 204n40, 242; burying of, 21, 22, 197, 198; earned as slave, 18, 23–24, 25–26, 70–71, 111–13, 197; and father’s death, 10–11, 60, 75, 178, 187, 191–94, 197; fetishizing of, 194, 197; as form of privacy, 191, 196, 197; and love, 153, 184, 185, 187, 194, 196, 200, 201, 242; as minkisi, 187–88, 194, 202–3n14, 242; as placeholder for family loss, 26, 28, 75, 153–54, 184–86, 190, 196, 197, 199, 238; and social network building, 193; ultimate failure of, 153–54, 199, 201; Venture Smith cheated and robbed of, 21, 26, 28, 29–30, 70, 110 Moody, Raquel, 222 Moore, Matthew, 172 Morgan, Edmund, 56, 76n2 Morring, Tonia Warmsley, 222 Mossi states, 48 multiculturalism, 233 Mumford, George, 14–15, 86, 91, 95, 195–96; becomes Venture’s owner, 38, 66, 78n16, 260; mother killed by slave, 89; Venture’s attempted runaway from, 16–18, 103–4, 104–5 Mumford, James, 15–16, 32, 66 Mumford, John, 66

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Mumford, Mercy, 65, 260 Mumford, Ray, 27, 99, 122n30 Mumford, Robinson (Robertson), 52m9; becomes Venture’s owner, 13, 37, 38, 39, 60, 63, 164–65, 260; death of, 38, 66, 260; and incident with key, 14–15, 65, 195–96 Mumford, Thomas, 13, 37, 38 Mumford family, 14–15, 65, 66–67, 68 mutation, genetic, 213 Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa, A (Smith), 1–31; absence of religion in, 177; account of Middle Passage, 13–14, 35, 61, 165, 176, 186; ambivalence about Africa within, 37; American Revolution absent in, 176; antecedents for, 166–67; Biblical allusions in, 179–80, 200–201; canonized status of, xi–xii, 163; certificate of authenticity, 32, 39, 68, 81n45, 164, 180; contradictions in on his age, 38, 39–40, 77n5, 204n36, 259; corrections marked to, 39; depicts whites as untrustworthy, 177; as detailed account of slavery, 35, 59, 83, 186; first publication of, ix, 164, 165– 66, 182n9, 262; lack of sentimentalism in, 188, 189, 191, 196, 238; literary critics on, 163, 181n1, 186; not an abolitionist text, 163–64, 176–77; portrayal of Christianity in, 22, 164, 177, 178, 180; preface, 3–4, 39, 151, 177, 178, 188–89, 237, 243, 249n9; presents blacks as agents, not victims, 190; republications of, 164, 186; and self-made man mythology, 180, 186, 188; spelling of names in, 39; white amanuensis for, 3, 39, 129–30, 164, 175–76, 180, 186, 232 Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black . . . , A (Marrant), 169–70

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Index Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself (Grooniosaw), 168–69 Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man (Hammon), 167–68 Nash, Gary, 151 Native Americans, 167, 218; sold as slaves, 99–100, 106, 122n32 Nelson, Craig, 226 Nelson, Heather, 207–28, 229n24, 264 Nelson, Marilyn, xi, xvii, 257, 264 Netherlands, 44, 45, 46 networking, 56–57, 67–68, 75, 139 New England: economy of, 64, 69–70, 80n37, 81n49; emancipation legislation in, ix, 101–2, 108, 111, 141, 147, 152; molasses and, 69; public opinion realigning against, 102–3, 108–9, 117–18, 152, 243, 250n22; slavery in, viii, 63, 86. See also Connecticut; Rhode Island New Haven, Conn., 115; black population in, 139 New Jersey, 63, 111 New London, Conn., 86, 139; slavery in, viii New-London Gazette, 107 Newport, RI: black population in, 79n33; as slave port, 64–65; Venture in, 65, 165, 260 New York, 81n49; slavery in, 63, 86, 111 New York Gazette, 104 New York Times, 217, 218 Niles, Elisha, 143; biographical information, 181–82n3; as Venture Smith’s amanuensis, 39, 164, 175, 186, 262 nkisi. See minkisi Nova Scotia, 173, 174 Nussbaum, Felicity, 191

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Nussbaum, Martha: capabilities approach of, 239, 241, 245; on human identity, 233, 241, 242, 243, 245, 246; on social contract tradition, 236 O’Connor, Craig, 207–28, 229n24, 264 Okaidja, 44–45 Organization of African Unity, 239 Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave (Behn), 166 Ovchinnikov, Igor, 229n24 Owusu Akyem, 44–45, 54–55n32 Paine, Thomas, 57 Palmer, Amos, 32, 39, 81n45 Palmer, Elijah, 32, 39, 81n45 Palmer, Wait, 173 panyarring, 13, 42, 44, 46, 53–54n20 Pascal, Michael Henry, 171 pawnship: in African tradition, 138–39, 187, 193–94, 198–99; of Venture Smith, 21, 96, 198 Pennsylvania, 63, 111, 120n13 Perry, Warren, 223, 229n24 Peter (freed slave), 137–38, 156n25 Peter (slave), 112, 120n14 Peters, Caesar, 102, 123n42 Philby (slave), 109 Phillis (slave), 114, 126n72 polygamy, 5 Portugal, 58 Priestley, Margaret, 41 Prior, David, 102, 123n42 privacy: and DNA technology, 218, 221; money as form of, 191, 196, 197; slave abuse as matter of, 89, 109–10 property. See land; money racism, 30, 152, 178, 239; genetic justification for, 244; as justification for slavery, 239, 246; rise of with slave emancipation, 152 Ramsay, James, 171

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Index Randall (Warren), Jack, 109 rationality, 234, 235, 236, 237–38, 241 Rawl, John, 249n6 Reardon, Jenny, 244–45, 250n24 reciprocity, concept of, 236, 239, 241, 242 Reilly, Philip, 221 religion: absence of in Venture Smith narrative, 177. See also Christianity Revere, Paul, 89 Revolution, American, 70, 74; absent in Venture Smith narrative, 176; blacks and rhetoric of, 151; blacks helping British in, 172, 173, 174, 176; blacks in Continental Army, 73, 74, 114–15; doors opened to blacks during, viii, 57; economic impact of, 69, 73–74, 102, 141; labor shortage during, 114; real-estate speculation during, 139; rising taxes during, 141; slave escapes during, 108 Rhode Island, 81n49; black population in, 79n33, 86; slave emancipation, 111; slavery in, 58, 61, 63, 64–65, 68, 86, 89–90; Venture Smith in, 14, 35, 63–64 Rice, John, 123n40 Richards, Samuel, 99, 100 Richardson, David D., xii–xiii, 56–76, 186, 193, 198, 222, 229n24, 232, 264 Rights of Man (Paine), 57 Robinson, Edward, 100 Robinson, Patrick, 113 Rogers, James, III, 88, 90–91, 92–94, 105, 119n7 Rogers, James, Sr., 114 Romanavs, 211, 221 Roots of Rural Capitalism, The (Clark), 133 Rorty, Richard, 248–49 Rotch, William B., 71 Roy, Eliza Smith, 224

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Royal African; or, Memoirs of the Young Prince of Annamaboe, The, 36–37, 41 rum, 13, 61, 69, 80n37 Ryan, Susan Henry, 208 Saillant, John, 187 Saint, Chandler B., xii–xiii, 56–76, 186, 232, 264; and DNA project, 207–8, 222, 229n24 Sancho, Ignatius, 191 Sawyer, Gerry, 229n24 Schaeffer, Carl, 207–8 Selden, Henry M., 145 self-government, 57 sentimentalism: as dehumanizing of blacks, 238–39; and emphasizing victimhood, 190, 203n22; lack of in Venture Smith narrative, 188, 189, 191, 196, 238; in slave narratives, 188, 189–90 Sermon, A (Marrant), 170 Sessarakoo, WIlliam, 166–67 Seven Years’ War, 168, 169, 171 Sharp, Granville, 171 Sharper (slave), 88, 93–94, 105 Sheffield, Acors, 32, 39, 81n45 Sierra Leone, 171, 173, 174 Sike, Primas, 112 Simon, Kavuna, 201 slave narratives: and abolitionism, 163, 170; displaced stranger theme in, 175, 176, 178, 179, 240; as genre, 163; sentimentalism in, 188, 189–90; Venture Smith’s as different from other, 164, 166; white amanuenses in, 163, 164, 169; written: by Ansah, 36–37, 41; by Behn, 166; by Capitein, 36–37; by Cugoano, 170–71; by Diallo, 166–67; by Douglass, 164; by Equiano, 35, 51, 171–72; by George, 173; by Gronniosaw, 168–69; by Hammon, 167–68; by King, 174; by Liele, 172–73; by Marrant, 169–70; by

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Index slave narratives (cont.) Sessarakoo, 166–67; by Southerne, 166. See also Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa, A (Smith) slave runaways, 103–10; advertisements for, 50–51, 104–6, 107, 108, 124nn46–47; community surveillance and, 104, 106; and legal system, 106, 107–8; rewards offered for, 104–5, 106, 109, 125n57; and Underground Railroad, 109; white public opinion and, 87, 108–9, 117–18 slavery: as America’s paradox, vii–viii, ix, 56, 76n2, 151, 232, 233–34; changing public opinion about, 102–3, 108–9, 117–18, 152, 243; emancipation legislation around, 101–2, 108, 111, 141, 152; Enlightenment principles and, 232, 233–34, 236, 237–38, 239, 250; entrepreneurial ventures by slaves, 112–13; and family separation, 18, 99, 165, 189–90, 191, 197; family-values critiques of, 94–95; household governance ideology in, 85–86, 91, 236–37; and labor by free blacks, 73; and law, 85–86, 88, 90–91, 92–94, 106, 112, 236–37; master-slave relations, 86, 87, 88, 104, 111, 118, 236; myth of paternalism in, 93–94, 95; in New England, viii, 58, 61, 63, 64– 65, 68, 86, 89–90, 102, 108, 114, 119– 20n10; racism as justification for, 239, 246; rationalizations for, 234, 238–39; role of white public opinion in, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 103, 108–9, 117–18; seeking legal recourse under, viii, 19, 88, 90–91, 106, 236–37; as “social death,” 85–86, 153, 236; in South, ix, 63, 68, 91, 120n13; Venture Smith gives human face to, 56, 59, 60; and violence, 59, 60, 75, 88–95, 120n11; in West Indies, 62– 64, 79n26.

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See also manumission; Smith, Venture—slave slave sales: antislavery activists and, 101–2; dishonesty in, 96– 97, 98; going out of town for, 21, 97–98; of nonslaves, 98–100, 122n28; public regulation of, 96, 101; slaves’ market values, 87, 95–103 slave trade, African: altered world’s genetic landscape, 208; American colonies and, 58, 63, 78n22, 232; Barbados as epicenter of, 64, 79n26; Britain and, 58, 64; distinction between enslavement and transportmarketing, 59; and Gold Coast, 37–38, 41, 42, 58, 60–61, 64, 78nn17– 18; impact on Africa of, 77n13; kidnapping of Africans, 8, 10, 11–13, 42, 47, 59, 164, 232; Middle Passage, xii, 38, 61–62, 63, 176, 186; mortality rate of, 13, 61–62, 78n21, 79n23, 165, 176. See also Charming Susanna Smallwood, Stephanie, 62 Smith, Charles F., 220 Smith, Cuff (son), 27, 31, 220, 260; freedom purchased for, 26, 116, 261; serves in Continental Army, 73, 74, 114, 137, 262 Smith, Edward, 147–50; signs certificate of authenticity, 32, 39, 81n45, 148 Smith, Hannah (daughter), 260; death of, 28, 74, 185, 238, 262; freedom purchased, 27, 99, 116, 261 Smith, Meg (wife): burial and grave, 7, 150–51; death of, 150, 262; DNA Project on, 208, 223, 225; freedom purchased, 27, 31, 32, 110, 116, 261; Venture keeps money of, 18, 197; marriage to Venture, 16, 31, 165, 260; as slave for Stantons, 18–19, 22, 83 Smith, Oliver, 22–23, 24, 32, 70; financial ruin of, 142, 148; lets

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Index Venture purchase freedom, 70, 110, 165, 197–98, 261; and whaling, 27, 71, 72–73, 101, 123n37 Smith, Solomon (first son), 260; death in whaling voyage, 26, 73, 100–101, 238, 261; freedom purchased, 26, 116, 261 Smith, Solomon (third son), 76, 81n45, 134, 262; father’s difficult relations with, 31, 150; inheritance from father, 146–47, 149; material support to father, 150 Smith, Venture: adopts surname Smith, 70; as bicultural man, 139; as Black Paul Bunyan, 165; cheated and robbed by whites, 17, 21, 29–30, 31, 70, 75–76, 110, 118, 165; compared to Franklin and Washington, xii, 4, 151, 175–76, 186, 188, 199, 204n39, 249n9; creates social network, 56–57, 67–68, 75, 139; genetic legacy of, 208; grows old, 30–31, 146, 147; lack of formal education, 3, 4, 188, 237; name of “Venture,” 13, 32, 37; on oppression and cruelty, 31, 75–76, 118; personal revolution achieved, 117, 141; on racial discrimination, 27, 30, 152, 178, 239; remains displaced “stranger,” 176, 240; as self-made man, ix, 180, 186, 188; time line, 259–62. See also Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa, A (Smith) Smith, Venture—Africa, 5–13; in Anomabu, 12–13, 35, 37–38, 40, 41–43, 164; birth, 5, 35, 164, 259; birthplace location, 40–41, 51, 202n14; birth year questioned, 38, 39–40, 77n5, 204n36, 259; departure from Africa, 13, 37, 38, 164; description of countryside, 7, 49–50; ethnic background, 3, 36, 38, 50–51, 164; guardian of, 6, 7, 50; influence of African traditions on, 139, 187, 242; kidnapping of, 8, 10, 42, 164; march to coast as prisoner, 11–13,

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40, 48, 59–60, 259; originally named Broteer Furro, 5, 37, 164; proud to be African, 248; tended livestock, 6–7, 58; verifying narrative’s details about, 35–38; witnesses father’s torture and death, 10–11, 60, 178, 259 Smith, Venture—death and burial: death, ix, 150, 165, 262; funeral and burial, 35, 150–51, 252; gravestone, 39–40, 76, 85, 151, 252–56, 253 Smith, Venture—family: family tree, 208, 220–21; father, 5, 7, 10–11, 60, 164, 178, 259; as father figure, 94; marriage, 16, 165, 260; mother, 5–6, 259; parents’ separation and reconciliation, 5, 8, 40; pride in, 248; prioritized family’s well-being, 149, 248; purchases freedom for wife and children, 26, 27, 32, 110, 116, 117; relations with sons, 31, 150, 179; separated from wife and daughter, 18, 99, 165, 260; siblings, 5; wife and daughter purchased by Stantons, 18, 95. See also Furro, Saungm (father); Smith, Cuff; Smith, Hannah (daughter); Smith, Meg; Smith, Solomon (third son); Smith (wife), Solomon (first son) Smith, Venture—independent proprietor: and black community, 138–39, 240; crops and livestock, 135, 144–46, 154; entrepreneurial skills and spirit, 85, 142–43, 147, 155n5, 223, 232, 236, 248; establishes lines of credit, 133, 135; land dealings in Haddon Neck, viii, 28, 31, 74, 129, 132–33, 135–37, 138–40, 142–44, 146–51, 154, 261; land purchases in Long Island, 27, 135, 144–46; land purchases in New London County, 112, 126n65; on Long Island, 25, 27, 28, 74, 165, 261; moves to Haddon Neck, 28, 32, 165, 261; purchases and hires slaves, 26,

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Index Smith, Venture—independent proprietor (cont.) 28–30, 31, 76, 103, 138, 176, 198; purchases freedom for slaves, 27, 113, 116–17; social standing, viii, 142–43, 148, 153. See also land Smith, Venture— qualities and values: boldness and determination, ix, 92, 104; height, 5, 30–31, 40, 50, 92, 105, 120n16, 224, 243; honesty and trust, 14–15, 31, 32, 60, 65– 66, 70, 75, 76, 135, 179, 195– 96, 232, 235; ingenuity and self-discipline, 201, 232, 246; physical strength, 18, 40, 85, 92, 104, 112, 155n5, 243; prowess as logger, 24, 25, 26, 132; work ethic, 85, 142–43, 153, 201. See also money; trust and trust worthiness Smith, Venture—slave: bought by Hempsted Miner, 20–21, 85, 95, 261; bought by Oliver Smith, 22, 70, 110, 261; bought by Thomas Mumford, 13, 37, 60, 78n16, 164– 65, 260; bought by Thomas Stanton, 18, 67, 85, 260; buries money, 21, 217–18; cheated out of money by Stantons, 21, 110; earns money, 18, 23–24, 25–26, 70–71, 111–12; false promises on manumission, 20, 22, 95– 96, 196; as loyal and trustworthy slave, 14–15, 65, 165, 195– 96; on Middle Passage, 13–14, 35, 61, 165, 176, 186; negotiating ability of, 21–22, 87, 92, 95– 96, 103, 117; pawning of, 21–22, 96, 198; pays high manumission price, 24, 110, 142; physical attacks on, 15–16, 18–19, 83–84; punishments received, 16, 20, 84–85, 92; purchases freedom, viii, 22–23, 24, 32, 110–11, 152, 165, 261; purchases freedom earlier than most, 111, 152;

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runaway and return, 16–18, 50–51, 103–5, 109–10; seeks legal redress, 19, 84, 87, 88, 237; work tasks, 15, 18, 21, 23–24, 67, 111–12 Sobel, Mechal, 37 social contract, 235, 236, 241, 249n6, 249n9 South: similarities of New England slavery to, 68; slaveholders’ power in, ix, 63, 91, 120n13 South Carolina, 63, 120n13 Southerne, Thomas, 166 Spain, 58 Spencer, Herbert, 244 Stamp Act, 69 Stanton, Elizabeth, 18–19, 83–84 Stanton, Robert, 21, 110 Stanton, Thomas, 18, 20, 32, 69, 83, 95, 197, 260; from aristocratic family, 67, 86; threatens to send Venture to West Indies, 20, 84–85, 95, 101; Venture’s struggle against violent abuse by, 18–19, 83–85, 86, 88, 92, 94, 95, 98, 237 Stanton family, 18–20, 21, 67, 84 Stewart, James Brewer, xi–xv, 222–23, 229n24, 264–65 Stofko, Karl P., 208, 222, 229nn24–25 Stratford, Conn., 139 Strausbaugh, Linda, xiv, 207–28, 229n24, 231, 244, 247, 248, 265 sugar, 58, 62–63, 64–65, 68, 80n37 Sugar Act, 69, 70 Suhl, Joshua, 207–28, 229n24, 265 “survival of the fittest,” 244 Sweet, John Wood, xiii, 83–118, 152, 153, 186, 236, 265 Tabor, Pardon, 88 Taxation No Tyranny ( Johnson), viii taxes: by British colonial authorities, 69; in Haddam, 134–35, 141, 146

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Index 178, 259; Venture Smith’s resistance to, 15–16, 19, 92 Virginia, 63, 91, 120n13

Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (Cugoano), 170–71 Throop, Justice, 28–29 Truman, Thomas, 107 trust and trustworthiness: as characteristic of Venture Smith, 31, 32, 65, 70, 75, 76, 165, 179, 232, 235; and incident of Mumford’s key, 14–15, 65–66, 195–96; for Oliver Smith, 70, 110, 165, 197–98, 261; and social networking, 56–57. See also duplicity Tulimieri, Kevin, xiv–xv, 252–56, 265 Tutu, Desmond, 241, 250n20

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ubuntu, 241 Underground Railroad, 109, 125n61 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 239, 240, 247, 251n27 Vassa, Gustavus. See Equiano, Olaudah Venture Smith project: Conference on Documenting Venture Smith (2006), x; funding for, 209; as interdisciplinary effort, xi, xii, xv, 232. See also DNA Project Vermont, viii, 125n61 Vickers, Daniel, 71 violence: by slaveowners against slaves, 15–16, 19, 87, 88, 90–92, 93–94, 120n11; by slaves against slaveowners, 89–90; and slave trade, 59; Venture Smith’s experiences in Africa, 10–11, 60, 75,

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Waldstricher, David, 185 Warmsley, David, vii Warmsley, Florence, 222, 223 Warmsley, Frank, 222 Warren, Perry, 222 Washington, George: as slaveowner, 177; Venture Smith compared to, xii, 4, 151, 175–76, 199, 249n9 Webb, James, 29 West Indies: plantation system in, 65, 68, 92; sending slaves from New England to, 102, 103; as slavery epicenter, 63–64; trade with, 66–67, 73, 81n49; Venture threatened with being sent to, 20, 84–85, 95, 101. See also Barbados Whacket (freed slave), 137–38, 156n25 whaling: industry of, 71–72; Solomon death in, 26, 71, 73, 100–101; Venture Smith and, 27, 29–30, 70–71, 72–73, 101 White, Amos, 139–40, 142, 143 Whitefield, George, 168, 169 Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE), x, 222, 229n24 Williams, Sally, 255 Winslow, John, 167 Woodward, Janet, 229n24 “Written by Himself” (King), 174

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Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom, University of

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Copyright © 2010. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,