RECORDINGS NOW AVAILABLE
The Museum of Old Newbury (MOON) invited writers and historians to explore the lives and work of Black New Englanders and abolitionists through a fresh examination of the historical record and recent research.
The assembled leaders brought various views and expertise to a scrutiny of New England's deep involvement in slavery. Topics include a detailed look at Black civic life in Essex County, new scholarship on the abolitionist movement and detailed investigation of the lives of free Blacks, as well as the enslaved and enslavers in the region.
Recordings of the presentations are available below. We ask viewers donate what they can to help us defray existing fees, as well as allow us to continue to provide worthwhile content to our members, supporters and friends
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The day’s full agenda and a synopsis of each presenter can be found below. Please note, the opening remarks by John Demos and Manisha Sinha’s morning keynote address are coupled together, as is the panel discussion with moderator Edward Carson and John Demos’ closing remarks.
FULL AGENDA - Race & Slavery in New England (1700-1876)
Introductory Remarks
Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director, Museum of Old Newbury; John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University; and the day’s moderator, Edward Carson, Dean of Multicultural Education, The Governor’s Academy.
Morning Keynote Address
Manisha Sinha
“The Abolitionist International”
Sinha explores how Garrisonian abolitionists built transnational networks of protest by aligning antislavery with pacifism, women's rights, and utopian socialism. Abolition overlapped with contemporary radical social movements, including the struggle for the rights of labor. The talk will address both the convergences as well as conflicts between these movements.
Presentation
Kabria Baumgartner
“Good Old ‘Lection: Election Week and Black Civic Culture in Essex County, Massachusetts (1741-1831)”
Negro Election Day was a prominent Black cultural festival that took place in late May during election week in towns throughout Essex County, from Salem to Marblehead. This talk uncovers the history and legacy of Negro Election Day, focusing on Black women and children who, through storytelling, memory making, and joy, created an early Black civic culture.
Presentation
James DeWolf Perry
“Tracing the Trade: What a Family Learned Wrestling with the Memory of New England’s Role in Slavery and the Slave Trade”
James shares his family’s efforts to recover the memory of New England’s role in slavery and the slave trade, through their PBS documentary, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, as well as books, dialogues, workshops, works of art and political activism. He also discusses the reasons this history became largely erased from our public memory and why remembering has proven so difficult. Why are even the simple facts involved so controversial to acknowledge? What are the roots of our resistance to remembering, and how can this nation begin to move forward honestly and in a spirit of healing?
Presentation
Allegra di Bonaventura
“For Adam’s Sake: A Family Saga in Early New England”
For Adam’s Sake is the story of two third-generation New Englanders and their interwoven families: Joshua Hempstead, a well-regarded shipwright, farmer and magistrate in New London, Connecticut, and Adam Jackson, an enslaved husbandman whom Joshua owned for more than thirty years. Hempstead’s remarkable diary—kept from 1711 until 1758—forms the basis of this intimate narrative of domestic life and enslavement in the colonial North.
Presentation
“David Walker’s Neighbors: Maria Stewart, Hosea Easton and the Black Reconstruction of Enlightenment in New England”
Starting from the premise that early plantation life in the U.S. South retained the spirit of medieval feudalism, Roy shows how early black writers living in New England sought to bring slavery’s Dark Age ideology to light. In so doing, Roy examines the relatively understudied work of Maria Stewart and Hosea Easton, two Black orators of the 1830s who—like their more well-known Boston area neighbor, David Walker—appropriated and transformed a plurality of American Enlightenment ideas. Their revision of Enlightenment philosophy combines faith in an active and just God with modern commitments to reason, humanism and progress. Through this synthesis, they began to redefine the concept of “human” in the age of positivism, liberalism and nascent secularism by promoting the sacred dignity of individuals while trumpeting the ongoing influence of a divine Creator who would intervene on behalf of the oppressed.
Afternoon Keynote Address
“Abolitionism and the Power of Race”
Stauffer examines how New England abolitionists — notably Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, John Brown, Gerrit Smith, Charles Sumner, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Cooper Nell, David Walker, Harriet Jacobs and Lydia Maria Child — fought and grappled with American racism. While focusing on the Northeast, particularly New England, he contrasts racial conceptions in the Midwest, the South and in the British Isles.
Discussion with Questions from Moderator & Audience & Closing Remarks with John Demos
Demos is the Samuel Knight Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University. He was awarded the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his book Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford U. Press, 1982). He was awarded the Francis Parkman Prize for his book The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story From Early America (Knopf, 1994).
Presented with the support of:
