Higher Education and Slavery in Western Massachusetts

• Published in: The Journal of blacks in higher education no. 46; p. 98
• Main Author: Romer, Robert H
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York BruCon Publishing Company 01.01.2005
• Subjects: African Americans; Agricultural Occupations; Black culture; Black people; Children; Colleges & universities; Culture; Education; Family (Sociological Unit); Higher education; Historical text analysis; History; International; Memory disorders; Minority & ethnic groups; Municipalities; North America; Persuasion; Presidents; Slavery; United States > US
• ISSN: 1077-3711

Was slavery in the North fundamentally different from slavery in the South? Was it a "gentler" kind of slavery? Sometimes slaves do appear on property lists as "servants," sometimes as "servants for life," but often as "Negroes" and sometimes simply as "slaves." But they were not "just members of the family." They did not choose to come here. For them, there was no light of freedom at the end of the tunnel. They were listed as property along with the furniture and the cows and horses. They could be and were sold apart from their children, and their children automatically became slaves like their parents. The Amherst students seem, not surprisingly, to have had some difficulty deciding precisely where they stood on these issues. Though in its earlier incarnation the college Anti-Slavery Society had described itself as an auxiliary of Garfison's Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, this time it allied itself with the American Anti-Slavery Society and explicitly decided not to subscribe to [William Lloyd Garrison]'s newspaper, The Liberator. By this time, Gainson was vigorously criticizing New England churches, and this undoubtedly helped to persuade the Amherst students to keep their distance. The students' views remained relatively radical, however, as they adopted the affirmative in answer to questions such as, "Is slave holding always a sin?" and, "Is it the duty of Christian churches to exclude slave holders from their communion and slaveholding ministers from their pulpits?" while choosing the negative in response to the question, "Can an abolitionist consistently belong to a Colonization Society?" On the question, "Does the Constitution of the United States, properly interpreted, sanction slavery?" the group was evenly divided. Surely anti-slavery activity and debate must have continued at Amherst, especially after passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, but unfortunately the records from the years after 1841 have not survived. A striking example I have discovered of New Englanders' deliberate amnesia on the subject of slavery is to be found in the comparison of a passage in Carpenter and Morehouse's 1896 History of Amherst with the original document on which it is supposedly based. Carpenter and Morehouse print what purports to be a portion of a 1759 Amherst tax valuation list. It shows columns for "Polls [i.e., adult white males], Horses, Oxen, Cows, Hogs, Sheep, Personal Estate, Houses and Lands, and Real Estate." Because of what I had seen of other tax lists from the 1700s, it seemed to me that there was something missing from the Carpenter and Morehouse version. Sure enough, when I finally discovered the original document, it was just what had been reproduced in the 1896 book except that the original contained one additional column, between "Sheep" and "Personal Estate": "Negro." The omission of that one column cannot possibly have been an accident! There are many histories of towns from this area that were published in the late 1800s. In most cases, little or no mention is made of the existence of slavery in colonial times. (George Sheldon's 1895 History of Deerfield is an honorable exception, with an 18-page section on "Negro Slavery.") But the Amherst history is the only one I have found that contains an apparently deliberate falsification of an historical document.