Bibliography
Brown University (2017). Colonial enslavement of Native Americans included those who surrendered, too. Brown.edu
https://www.brown.edu/news/2017-02-15/enslavement
De Costa, J., and Hall, Charles. “A plan of the town and harbour of Boston.” Map. 1775. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center
https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:z603vj169
Dudley, Dean (1886). The History of the Dudley Family. Wakefield, Mass .pdf Library of Congress
http://rs5.loc.gov/service/gdc/scd0001/2008/20080818002hi/20080818002hi.pdf
Dudley, Joseph (1675). Letter from Joseph Dudley to John Leverett. Native Northeast Portal
https://nativenortheastportal.com/node/18192
Fiorentino, Wesley (2021). Pirates in Boston: The Trial and Execution of John Quelch. The Beehive (Massachusetts Historical Society).
Hardesty, Jared. (2017). Creating an Unfree Hinterland: Merchant Capital, Bound Labor, and Market Production in Eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Early American Studies, 15(1), 37-63.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/90000335
Headlam, C. (1916). Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 23-1706-1708.
https://books.google.com/books?id=nIMwAQAAMAAJ&lpg=PA262&pg=PA262#v=onepage&q&f=false
Hanscom, E. Deering. (1917). The heart of the Puritan: selections from letters and journals. New York: The Macmillan company.
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015008312012
Lincoln, Rose (2011). Hidden Spaces: The tiny cemetery. The Harvard Gazette
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/08/hidden-spaces-the-tiny-cemetery/
Massachusetts Historical Society (1892). Collections. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society.
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/miun.aag3648.0005.006
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/miun.aag3648.0005.007
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.31175024078589 https://www.google.com/books/edition/Letter_book_1712_1729/IVhHAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
McNally, Deborah (2011). Dorcas The Blackmore (ca. 1620-?). BlackPast.com
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/dorcas-blackmore-ca-1620/
Miller, Yawu (2017). Re-writing Boston’s history of slavery: Efforts underway to change historic names. The Bay State Banner
https://www.baystatebanner.com/2017/09/13/re-writing-bostons-history-of-slavery/
Nodjimbadem, Katie (2017). Newly Uncovered Documents Address the Mystery of One Slave’s Life. SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
Poetry Foundation. Anne Bradstreet 1612-1672 Poetryfoundation.org
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-bradstreet
Sheppard, Stephen M. (2000). Paul Dudley: Heritage, Observation, and Conscience. St. Mary’s University School of Law
Suffolk County, MA: Probate File Papers. Online database. AmericanAncestors.org. New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2017-2019. (From records supplied by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Archives. Digitized images provided by FamilySearch.org) *subscription/library access required
https://www.americanancestors.org/DB2735/rd/48705/7943-co1/1416817417
Thwing, W. Eliot. (1908). History of the First Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts, 1630-1904. Boston: W. A. Butterfield.
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044024595175
Vital Records of Roxbury, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849. (1925). United States: Essex institute.
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89064881170
Whiting, G. (2020). Race, Slavery, and the Problem of Numbers in Early New England: A View from Probate Court. The William and Mary Quarterly, 77 (3), 405-440.
www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.77.3.0405
Additional Media and Resources
NB: I repeat some items from the bibliography for the sake of organization.
Re-writing Boston’s history of slavery: Efforts underway to change historic names (2017) by Yawu Miller for The Bay State Banner. This is a concise overview of the controversy surrounding the renaming of old Dudley Square written before the name changed to Nubian Square.
Introductory talks about New England slavery
Roxbury, Past and Present
About Roxbury Roxbury Historical Society
Drake, F. S. (Francis Samuel). (1878). The town of Roxbury: its memorable persons and places, its history and antiquities, with numerous illustrations of its old landmarks and noted personages. Roxbury.
Glimpses of Early Roxbury: General Society of the Daughters of the Revolution. Massachusetts. Mary Warren Chapter, Roxbury (1905).Boston
Thwing, W. Eliot. (1908). History of the First Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts, 1630-1904. Boston: W. A. Butterfield.
Vital Records of Roxbury, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849. (1925). United States: Essex institute.
Further Background on Boston Colonial Slavery
The Shirley-Eustis Place: Working Report On Slavery At The Shirley-Eustis House (2021) by Aabid Allibhai, JD. PhD Candidate, African & African American Studies Harvard University (Jump to .pdf pg 63)
Lifelong residents of Shirley Street (the overwhelming majority of Shirley Street residents) and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) know the structure at 42-44 Shirley Street to be a former slave quarters in addition to a barn. They learned this from the folks at the Shirley-Eustis House in the 1980s. In fact, this information is part of the tours given by DSNI. This would make 42-44 Shirley Street one of only two still-standing slave quarters in the northern United States (the other being the slave quarters at the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, MA). Shirley had white indentured servants and presumably live-in secretaries while governor of Massachusetts, perhaps forcing his slaves to live at 42-44 Shirley Street due to lack of living space in the main house. Eliakim Hutchinson, one of the richest men in Boston, owned many slaves, perhaps forcing some of them to live at 42-44 Shirley Street for the same reason.
– Aabid Allibhai
The Royall House and Slave Quarters of Medford, Massachusetts
In the eighteenth century, the Royall House and Slave Quarters was home to the largest slaveholding family in Massachusetts and the enslaved Africans who made their lavish way of life possible. Today, the Royall House and Slave Quarters is a museum whose architecture, household items, archaeological artifacts, and programs bear witness to intertwined stories of wealth and bondage, set against the backdrop of America’s quest for independence.
royallhouse.org
Boston Middle Passage Project – In October 2020, the Middle Passage and Port Marker Boston Partnership installed a permanent marker on Long Wharf. It acknowledges Boston as a port of entry for enslaved Africans.
Nodjimbadem, Katie (2017). Newly Uncovered Documents Address the Mystery of One Slave’s Life. SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
Books with Complimentary Podcasts
New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (2016) by Wendy Warren
While earlier histories of slavery largely confine themselves to the South, Warren’s “panoptical exploration” (Christian Science Monitor) links the growth of the northern colonies to the slave trade and examines the complicity of New England’s leading families, demonstrating how the region’s economy derived its vitality from the slave trading ships coursing through its ports.
Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (2015) by Margaret Ellen Newell
In Brethren by Nature, Margaret Ellen Newell reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legalize slavery in 1641, and the colonists’ desire for slaves shaped the major New England Indian wars…
The Digital Archive of John Wompas. Jenny Hale Pulsipher, scholar and author of Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England (Yale University Press, 2018) describes the archive below. Pulsipher’s notes on captives of King Philips War is where I first saw a “Mr Dudly” as enslaving an Indian girl; this was my first hint that any Dudleys had enslaved people.
I gathered a great deal of information on such subjects as Indian slavery, Native land sales, the Atlantic maritime trade, and Native education in Massachusetts. This information contributed to the book by providing historical context for Wompas’s life, but most nitty-gritty details were tangential to the book’s purpose so do not appear in it. Because those details could help other scholars working on more narrowly focused books or articles, I have placed them here where they can be accessible to anyone who has the URL.
Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston and Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England by Jared Ross Hardesty. (See embeded WGBH video above.)
[Hardesty] shares the individual stories of enslaved people, bringing their experiences to life. He also explores the importance of slavery to the colonization of the region and to agriculture and industry, New England’s deep connections to Caribbean plantation societies, and the significance of emancipation movements in the era of the American Revolution.
-WGBH
HUB History Podcast: He Takes Faces at the Lowest Rates (episode 229) (2021) Host: Jake @HUBHistory
In 1773, an ad appeared in the Boston Gazette for a Black artist who was described as possessing an “extraordinary genius” for painting portraits. From this brief mention, we will explore the life of a gifted visual artist who was enslaved in Boston, his friendship with Phillis Wheatley, the enslaved poet, and the mental gymnastics that were required on the part of white enslavers to justify owning people like property. Through the life of a second gifted painter, we’ll find out how the coming of the American Revolution changed life for some enslaved African Americans in Boston. And through the unanswered questions about the lives of both these men, we’ll examine the limits of what historical sources can tell us about any given enslaved individual.
– HUB History
Dynamic Digital Research Tools
Atlascope Boston, Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library
Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests.
https://www.hathitrust.org/about
Supplementary tweets from the Eleven Names Twitter account.
Copyright Wayne Tucker 2021. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
