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African-American history

The Canaan Mob Destroys the Noyes Academy, Foreshadowing the Civil War

In 1834 a group of New Hampshire abolitionists decided to establish a school for black students. At first, Noyes Academy seemed relatively uncontroversial. But that would soon change.

Henry Highland Garnet portrait in the National Portrait Gallery

Scheduled to open in March 1835, some 14 black students – boys and girls, mostly teenagers – made their way north to the small town of Canaan.

Noyes Academy Students Arrive

Henry Highland Garnet, 19, arrived at the school exhausted from travel and with an injured leg. Black passengers had to sit on the outside of carriages, making for a cold and miserable journey. He was warmly welcomed by Charles Kimball, a lawyer and supporter of Noyes Academy. Kimball would host most of the black students at the academy, and Garnet rested while he anticipated starting his studies. Garnet and his family had escaped from slavery in Maryland. He was raised in New York.

The trip to New Hampshire soon turned terrifying. As news of the interracial school spread, anti-abolitionists in Canaan and neighboring Hanover, Dorchester and Enfield began agitating. They posted road signs directing travelers to “Nigger Town.”

Proslavery newspapers piled on. The New Hampshire Patriot in June of 1835 carried an attack on the school:

Post Card View of Canaan, N.H.

“Since the establishment of the school, it has been no uncommon spectacle to witness colored gentlemen walking arm in arm with what ought to be respectable white females. And that respectable people opposed to the school, as well as others, have been invited to parties where the colored portion of the school were also invited guests.

“It is said that one of the principal agitators of the slave question in this state, George Kimball, Esq., and his family, sit at table with a half dozen colored people, while a white girl attends upon them as servant.”

Lawbreaking

By July 4th, ominous rumors began to circulate that a riot was planned and the school would be attacked. On the night of the fourth, a large group of anti-abolitionists marched to the door of the school.

Dr. Timothy Tilton, a town magistrate, had taken up a position inside the building. Tilton opened the window and shouted that the crowd was breaking the law. He then began calling out the names of the agitators he recognized. Faced with the threat of prosecution, the crowd dispersed and the school survived.

The anti-abolition forces, led by Ben Porter and Jacob Trussell, next turned to Town Meeting for help. They drafted a resolution declaring the academy a “nuisance” and directing a committee to remove it at town expense to a location to be chosen by selectmen.

The Abolition Debate

Tiny Canaan, N.H., had become the temporary focal point for the nation’s abolition debate. Trussell was a Mason and drew political support from his network in the secret society both in Canaan and elsewhere. George Kimball, meanwhile, was a lawyer and postmaster and an Anti-Mason. He brought in financial support for Noyes Academy from abolitionists throughout New England.

The resolution declaring Noyes Academy a nuisance passed at Town Meeting, and work moving the school was to commence on August 10.

The day the work was to start began sunny and pleasant, but soon a gang of men again marched toward the school. Some townspeople took to the street to shout at the drunken mob, but retreated, fearing the destruction of their own houses.

Dr. Tilton again tried to intervene, but Porter and Trussell pushed him aside, citing the legal authority granted them by the Town Meeting. The town’s lawyer later issued an opinion that the mob acted illegally. However, prosecution was unlikely because of the controversial nature of the abolitionist cause.

Pushing past Tilton, the mob began smashing the fence in front of the school. The men assembled a team of some 90 oxen to literally pull the school from its foundation. It would take several days, uncounted quantities of rum and lots of broken chains, but eventually the group pulled the school to the town common to await the selectmen’s decision on where to put it. The mob also delivered an ominous threat to the students at the school. They had one month to leave town.

By now, the number of black students had dwindled. There remained only five boys and one girl.

The Mob Again

On September 10, the mob reassembled. It hauled the school to its final resting place and led a parade through town, firing a cannon in front of the houses of abolitionists, shattering some windows and rattling others.

The children and teacher scattered to schools elsewhere. Jacob Trussell read a victory speech. “The abolitionist monster that ascended out of the bottomless pit, is sent headlong to perdition, and the mourners go about the streets. To you, gentlemen, who have assisted in attaining the glorious victory, I present you hearty and sincere thanks.”

The town paid $135.39 to the committee that oversaw the moving of the school. While efforts were made to revive the school as a white-only institution, it stayed largely vacant. In 1838 the town voted funds to restore it, but in December of that year a “midnight mob” ransacked the building, stealing new windows recently installed. It burned in 1839. No one tried to extinguish the fire.

Looking back on the episode some years after the Civil War, some had repented their part in the rabble, while some remained unmoved.

Unrepentent

Deputy Sheriff Samuel Cobb, despised in the community, had served on the committee that moved the school. The sheriff himself had stayed well clear on the day of the moving, receiving reports from men on the scene.

“Cobb never repented the part he took in producing the chaos in those days. It is said that for a long time after those events he was in the habit of hissing and spitting at clergymen whom he knew to be abolitionists,” according to The History of Canaan, New Hampshire.

Likewise, Jacob Trussell never repented. He sought and received a vote from Town Meeting assuring him that the town would defend him against any legal claims arising against him for his role in the destruction of the school.

His church, the Congregational Church, gave him less support. The church excommunicated him in 1839 for what he had done and distributed its findings that he was not in good standing with the church.

Henry Highland Garnet

Among the students at the school were a number who went on to become active abolitionists. Most famously, they included Henry Highland Garnet, who would continue his education and become a minister and abolitionist leader.

Garnet’s views – that armed conflict was the best way for slaves to win freedom – put him out of favor among mainstream pre-Civil War abolitionists. Garnet actively recruited and ministered to black soldiers who fought in the Civil War. In 1865 he delivered a sermon to Congress – the first black minister to do so – on the ending of slavery. Long after the Civil War, Garnet sought and won the appointment as ambassador to Liberia. He wanted to visit Africa, if only to die there. He did die there in 1882.

The records show that Garnet once returned to Canaan and preached at the Congregational Church. After he finished speaking, he was approached by Ben Porter, one of the men who led the charge in destroying Noyes Academy.

Porter then apologized for his part in destroying the school. He only lacked a little moral courage to make him go up at the close of the speech and make public confession to the whole audience, he told Garnet.

Thanks to The history of Canaan, New Hampshire, by William Allen Wallace. This story last updated in 2022.

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The Sumner League, Connecticut’s Forgotten Civil Rights Society

Daily Morning Journal-Courier, August 23, 1894

The story was long forgotten: A New Haven bootblack became a leader in the fight against Jim Crow as president of a statewide civil rights group, the Sumner League. Forgotten, that is, until the Connecticut Digital Newspaper Project researched African-Americans’ struggle for civil rights in Gilded Age Connecticut.

Librarians digitizing the New Haven Daily Morning Journal and Courier (1880-1907) discovered more than 30 news stories about the State Sumner League of Connecticut. Joseph P. Peaker, its president, was one of New Haven’s many bootblacks operating on New Haven Green or in bootblack parlo rs.

On August 22, 1894, Peaker and about 200 Connecticut African-American leaders met at J.W. Stewart’s cafe (also described as a ‘casino’ and ‘pavilion’) at Savin Rock. The seaside resort in West Haven once rivaled Coney Island. There the men formed a new organization for the “betterment of the conditions of Afro-Americans.”

The Sumner League played a prominent role in post-Reconstruction campaigns against lynching and disenfranchisement in the South. It also fought discrimination in public accommodations in the North. Peaker was involved in national civil rights actions alongside W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.

Sumner League

The State Sumner League of Connecticut was considered a club of the Republican Party – the party of Lincoln. Its purpose was ‘the improvement and advancement of the colored citizens of Connecticut to the end of healthy and material progress—politically, socially, intellectually, and morally’ (Daily Morning Journal and Courier, Aug. 23, 1894).

The League had chapters throughout the state with ladies’ auxiliaries. It held annual meetings, during which a baseball game was held for the state’s ‘colored championship.’ (Daily Morning Journal and Courier, Aug. 27, 1898).

The Sumner League was responding to deepening discrimination in the North and to the frightening advance of segregation, disenfranchisement and criminal violence in the South. The founders of the Sumner League asserted the right of all citizens to ‘every civil right without distinction or account of birth, race or previous social status.’

Within a few years of its founding, the Sumner League was mentioned in several of the most important African-American newspapers in the country.

President Joseph P. Peaker (1852-1937) generated the most news about the League. In 1896, he was reported to be serving as president of an 1896 ‘colored convention’ in Boston. In other years he was listed as a member of the executive committee of the major civil rights organization of the time, the National Afro-American Council (1898-1907).

Mitchell Tour

When the legendary newspaper editor John J. Mitchell, Jr., toured Connecticut in 1897, Peaker played a key role. The outspoken Mitchell was a living legend who at great personal peril used his newspaper, the Richmond Planet, to crusade against lynching. Thus, his appearance in Connecticut was widely covered. On March 26, he spoke in New Haven to a crowd of about 300 on “Outrages in the South and the Lunenburg Case.”

John Mitchell, Jr., St. Paul and Minneapolis Appeal, August 19, 1899

Mitchell spoke for an hour about the many cases of unjustified imprisonment and lynching of African-Americans in Virginia, according to the account of his talk in the Planet. Black Connecticut leaders congratulated him for his efforts to free three innocent women— Pokey Barnes, Mary Barnes, and Mary Abernathy. They were unfairly accused of murder in Lunenburg County, Virginia, and sentenced to death.

Mitchell left a fascinating and detailed first-hand account of his Connecticut tour. He discussed the people he met and places of interest he visited (Richmond Planet, April 3, 1897, p. 1, cols. 7-9). In it, he described Joseph Peaker as ‘an original character, a race man through and through, a polished speaker, using chaste English,’ and ‘in his glory’ at the podium.

Black Lives Mattered

Joseph Peaker took his fight against Jim Crow beyond Connecticut after African-Americans were murdered in the Carolinas. He was involved in national civil rights actions central to the period, speaking at a historic meeting in New York City, rubbing shoulders with the great African-American figures of his time and serving as a leader of the group that arguably was the predecessor to the NAACP.

A year after the Mitchell tour, in 1898, Peaker appears in a national wire service story about a historic mass meeting at Cooper Union in New York City (Daily Morning Journal and Courier, Nov. 18, 1898, p. 1, col. 4)). He is said to have made brief remarks, sharing the stage with such prominent African-Americans as New York Age editor Thomas T. Fortune and Ebeneezer J. Barrett, the former U.S. minister to Haiti.

The Cooper Union meeting was called in response to the Wilmington, N.C., race riot. A former Confederate officer and white supremacist led an armed band of 500 townspeople in forcing the ouster of the Republican town government and burning the offices of the Daily Record. Many African-Americans fled to safety, but 14 black residents were killed.

The destruction of the Daily Record building by Waddell’s Army during the Wilmington Riot of 1898.

The Cooper Union meeting not only condemned this violence, but resolved to protest the constitutional changes that allowed Mississippi, South Carolina and Louisiana to disenfranchise more than half their populations. It also called upon the federal government to pass a constitutional amendment that would allow the president to use federal troops to protect African-American lives in the southern states.

The Sumner League and the NAAC

Many of the people speaking out at the Cooper Union went on to found an important organization, the National Afro-American Council.

By 1899, Peaker, again identified as president of the Sumner League of Connecticut, is listed as part of the executive committee of the new group. He was in the company of some of the most important black leaders in the country: Fortune, Mitchell, Bishop Alexander Walters, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington.

The council’s general mission was to dismantle segregationist Jim Crow legislation. But the immediate impetus for its formation was the mob assault and murder of the African-American postmaster, Frazier Baker, and his daughter in Lake City, S.C.

Their work on the behalf of Baker, and many others, consciously bridged the range of strategies found in the movement at the time. Perhaps uniquely, they urged both protest and self-help, and were admired because they were granted annual meetings with President William McKinley.

The NAAC’s effectiveness has been debated. Contemporary scholar Shawn Leigh Alexander, though, argues in his book An Army of Lions that it played a critical role and laid the foundation for the founding of the NAACP in 1909.

National Afro-American Council meeting, St. Paul MN, 1902

The New Haven Daily Morning Journal and Courier run (1880-1907) that carries the stories about the Sumner League has been digitized by the Connecticut Digital Newspaper Project. It is searchable in the Library of Congress database of historic newspapers known as Chronicling America.

Stories about African-American Gilded Age Connecticut in state newspapers like the Journal and Courier will be easily contextualized when compared with related articles from the dozens of key African-American newspapers already in the database. For the Gilded Age, these include the Richmond Planet, the Washington Bee and the Saint Paul and Minneapolis Appeal.

The author of this story is Christine Gauvreau, Project Coordinator, CT Digital Newspaper Project, an initiative of the CT State Library.

For Further Research

Alexander, Shawn Leigh. An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle before the NAACP. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Opsahl, Alexander J. “Afro-American Council (1898-1907)” at BlackPast.org. Accessed on July 15, 2016 at http://www.blackpast.org/aah/afro-american-council-1898-1907.

Warner, Robert Austin. New Haven Negroes: A Social History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940, pp. 178-181. State Library Catalog Record at http://www.consuls.org:80/record=b1760232~S1.

This story updated in 2022.

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The Secret History of New England’s Sundown Towns

“Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark” reads the faded road sign, an artifact on display at the Tubman African American Museum in Georgia. The sign was found outside one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

Sundown towns were municipalities that prevented African-Americans or other minorities from lingering after dark.

A sundown town sign found in Connecticut

James Loewen, a sociologist who taught at the University of Vermont, discovered thousands of sundown towns throughout the United States, including New England.

Beginning in the 1890s, New England’s small towns and rural communities drove African-Americans into urban ghettoes, Loewen contends.

Small towns kept out not just black people, but Jews, Catholics, Greeks, Italians, Indians, even trade unionists and gays. They used violence and intimidation and restrictive covenants and mortgage practices

Great Migration

Some New England counties drove out their entire African-American populations. From 1890 to 1940, many African Americans who lived in rural areas of New England had to move to cities.

From 1890 to 1930, the U.S. black population increased 60 percent. Between 1915 and 1930, more than a million African-Americans moved from the South and the Caribbean to the North. And yet entire counties in New England became whiter.

In Maine, for example, only two of the state’s 16 counties had fewer than 10 blacks in 1890. By 1930, Maine had five.

Writes Loewen, in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, 14 Maine counties had at least 18 African Americans. By 1930, only nine did. Five black people lived in Lincoln County in 1930, where 26 had lived in 1890. Hancock County had 30,000 people in 1930, but only three were black. Forty years earlier, there had been 56.

Vermont had no all-white counties until 1930. New Hampshire had no all-white counties in 1890, but two in 1930.

Rise of the Klan

Keeping out African-Americans happened well before the 19th and 20^th century. In 1717, Town Meeting in New London, Conn., voted against free blacks living in the town or owning land anywhere in the colony.

But in the 1890s, racism deepened in the North as memories of the Civil War faded. Waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Canada and southern Europe moved into Yankee mill towns. The influx of immigrants sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan — and created sundown towns.

In the early 1920s, the Klan began to hold regular meetings and cross-burnings in small towns in eastern and central Massachusetts. A Klan rally near Montpelier, Vt., in 1925 drew 10,000.

Klan members march on Washington in 1926

The Klan spread rapidly in Maine, with 15,000 showing up at the state convention in 1923. The KKK held its first daylight parade in the United States in Milo, Maine, in 1923, and others soon followed.

In 1925, The Washington Post estimated New England had more than a half-million Klansmen, with 150,141 in Maine and more than 370,000 across the other New England states.

Though Klan membership fell almost as quickly as it grew in New England, the KKK left a legacy of sundown towns. Their history is rarely told.

Tales of Sundown Towns

Loewen collected anecdotes about places where minorities were afraid to spend the night.

Italian stonecutters who quarried in Portland, Conn., were told to be on the other side of the Connecticut River by sundown. The bridge would then stay open at night so no one could pass over it.
One resident of the Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Mass., remembers an incident from the mid-1950s: “My father, a jazz musician, had some of his musician friends over one night for some jamming. Most of the musicians involved were black. The next day, a delegation of neighbors…came by to register their disapproval that my father had blacks in their neighborhood after dark.”
A similar story was told about Burlington, Conn. An African-American family friend from Waterbury came over to play cards. “He always made a habit of leaving before sunset and if he could not, he would spend the night on the couch. … [In] earlier years, whenever he would drive in or out of town, the police would stop and harass him, detain him for questioning, or pull him over and run his license and plates. Comments were made to the effect that being a black man in Burlington after dark, he couldn’t be up to any good…”

Starting in the 1930s, the Negro Motorist Green Book guided African-American travelers away from sundown towns. Black travelers typically carried blankets, food and cans of gasoline in their cars to avoid embarrassment, or worse.

Restrictive Covenants

In 1905, restrictive covenants began appearing in property deeds. They typically stated, “No portion of these premises shall ever be sold to or occupied by anyone other than members of the white or Caucasian race.” Then they often added, “Nothing in the foregoing shall preclude live-in servants.”

The exception rather than the rule: Jackie Robinson at home in Stamford with his wife Rachel, sons David, Jackie Jr.. and Sharon.

A 1940 deed for a development called High Ledge Homes in West Hartford, Conn., said, “No person of any race except the white race shall use or occupy any building on any lot.” The deed allowed one exception for people of a different race: the owner’s employees.

Similarly, Manchester-By-The-Sea in Massachusetts only allowed blacks and Jews to live within its borders if they were servants.

Government-Supported Sundown Towns

The federal government encouraged sundown towns through discriminatory mortgage practices. Between 1934 and 1968, 98 percent of loans approved by the federal government in Connecticut went to white, non-Hispanic borrowers.

In 1954, baseball great Jackie Robinson bought a house in Stamford, Conn., but only with help from prominent white people. He proved the exception in suburban New England.

In Nahant, Mass., a property deed written in the 1920s contained language forbidding the owner to sell the house to Greeks or Jews. (Nahant, ironically, now has the densest population of Greek descendants in New England.)

Anti-Semitism

A film that exposed Darien as one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

In 1922, the Sharon, Conn., chamber of commerce distributed a leaflet asking homeowners not to sell to Jews. Another realtor in Greenwich, Conn., sent a similar memo. It said, “From this date on, when anyone telephones us in answer to an ad in any newspaper and their name is, or appears to be Jewish, do not meet them anywhere.”

Darien, Conn., did not let Jews spend the night within its borders. The 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement , co-starring Paul Revere’s descendant Anne Revere. exposed the practice. Gregory Peck played a reporter pretending to be Jewish to write a story on anti-Semitism.

The Civil Rights movement then started to change all that with laws against racist policies. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, family status or national origin.

But attitudes didn’t necessarily change.

In 1973, all-white Ashby, Mass., voted at Town Meeting 148 to 79 against inviting people of color into town.

Photos: Darien, Conn., via Wikimedia. This story about sundown towns was updated in 2023. With thanks to Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James Loewen.

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Wentworth Cheswell, the Black Man Who Rode With Revere

In the middle of December 1774, messengers on horseback carried news to the people of New Hampshire’s seacoast. Two British warships were headed to New Castle to reinforce Fort William and Mary. The messengers, or dispatch riders, helped organize the resistance. One messenger was Paul Revere. And one was Wentworth Cheswell.

Revere made quite a few rides before war broke out, and so did dozens of dispatch riders before and during the American Revolution. As part of the secret patriot network, the riders shared intelligence about the enemy and communications between the colonial provisional governments.

Wentworth Cheswell took a number of rides like Revere. He volunteered to serve in the military and fought at Saratoga. He is also considered New Hampshire’s first archaeologist — and the first African-American elected to public office in the United States.

Wentworth Cheswell

He was born on April 11, 1746, to a biracial father, Hopestill Cheswell (sometimes spelled Cheswill), and Katherine Keniston, who was white. Hopestill was the son of a white woman and an enslaved black man, Richard Cheswell. Under the laws of the day, Hopestill’s status followed his mother, making him free.

Eventually Hopestill’s father bought his freedom. and in 1717 purchased 20 acres of land in Newmarket, N.H. Richard’s land purchase is considered the first by an African-American in New Hampshire.

John Paul Jones House

Hopestill, a housewright and carpenter, built the John Paul Jones House in Portsmouth, N.H., as well as the Samuel Langdon House (now in Sturbridge Village). He also built the Bell Tavern (since burned in the Portsmouth fire of 1867).

Hopestill earned enough money to send Wentworth to Governor Dummer Academy in Byfield, Mass. Wentworth took advantage of his unusual educational privilege and worked as a schoolmaster in Newmarket. By the time he reached 21 he owned more than 30 acres and a pew in the meetinghouse.

At 21 he married 17-year-old Mary Davis of Durham, N.H. They then had 13 children. Their descendants identified as white, and the census listed Cheswell as white. Records of comments by his contemporaries suggest they viewed him as biracial.

Public Office

In 1768, 22-year-old Wentworth Cheswell won election as town constable. George Mason University determined that made him the first African-American elected to public office. Cheswell beat out Vermont’s Alexander Twilight for the honor. For all but one year of his life, Cheswell held public office including town selectman, assessor, scrivener, justice of the peace and auditor.

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Grant Wood

His civic involvement included founding the Newmarket Social Library with several other men and bequeathing his books to it.

He also won election as town messenger for the Committee of Safety, which meant he had to carry news to and from the patriot Committee of Correspondence in Exeter.

Riding With Revere

For several years, New England colonists had risen up in sporadic violence to protest Parliament’s taxation and restrictions. Boston had its Tea Party, Providence its Gaspee Affair and New Hampshire its Pine Tree Riot — to name a few. In the fall of 1774, the British government grew concerned about the rebellion then developing. And so it secretly banned the export of munitions to the American colonies. Redcoats also seized gunpowder in Charlestown, Mass., in September.

Boston’s patriot leadership knew that only a few soldiers guarded Fort William and Mary. They believed British troops and ships would sail to New Hampshire to secure the fort. And they thought the gunpowder and weapons at the fort would serve a more useful purpose in patriot hands.

On Dec. 13, 1774, Paul Revere rode the 66 miles to Portsmouth with a letter from Boston’s Committee of Correspondence to its counterparts in Portsmouth and Exeter. The letter advised them to seize the weapons and gunpowder at the fort before the British warships arrived.

Portsmouth mustered volunteers for an assault the next day on the British soldiers who guarded the fort. The men of Newmarket, a strongly patriotic town, wanted to take part in the attack as well. But where and how?

Wentworth Cheswell then rode to Exeter to find out from the Committee of Correspondence where the Newmarket volunteers should go. The next day, 400 New Hampshire men marched on the fort and forced it to surrender. They took 100 barrels of gunpowder, light cannon and small arms.

The ships never arrived, but the patriots used the gunpowder and weapons in the Siege of Boston.

Wentworth Cheswell, Town Father

Some people claim Cheswell rode north from Boston on April 18, 1775, alerting the countryside to the British attack even as Revere did the same riding west. Local historian Rich Alperin, however, said there’s no evidence Cheswell ever made that ride.

Cheswell did enlist in Col. John Langdon’s Company of Light Horse Volunteers and fought at the Battle of Saratoga. When he finished his military service he returned to Newmarket, where he ran a store next to his schoolhouse. As a prosperous, well-educated citizen, he continued his leadership of the town.

When he realized that Newmarket’s town records might disappear, he copied them all by hand in a journal. The Newmarket Historical Society now holds them.

The Massachusetts Historical Society holds another document written by Cheswell — a letter sent to the Rev. Jeremy Belknap. The letter contains descriptions of artifacts left by indigenous people that Cheswell recovered around Newmarket. Belknap included the information in his history of New Hampshire, and Cheswell earned the distinction as New Hampshire’s first archaeologist.

Wentworth Cheswell died at age 70 of typhus on March 8, 1817. He and his descendants were buried on his farm.

Missouri Compromise

Three years later, Wentworth Cheswell’s name surfaced on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Sen. David Morril of New Hampshire rose to speak against the Missouri Compromise, which forbade biracial people from obtaining citizenship in Missouri.

“In New Hampshire there was a man by the name of Cheswell, who, with his family, were respectable in point of abilities, property and character,” Morril said. “He held some of the first offices in the town in which he resided, was appointed justice of the peace for the county, and was perfectly competent to perform with ability all the duties of his various offices in the most prompt, accurate and acceptable manner. But this family are forbidden to enter and live in Missouri.”

This story about Wentworth Cheswell was updated in 2023.

Image: Historic marker By Slulek – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68100118. To read more about Paul Revere’s ride to New Hampshire, click here.

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Mashpee Teen James Mye Ends Slavery for Indian Children

James Mye, a poor Indian boy, was apprenticed to a Nantucket couple whose children treated him like a slave.

James Mye, Jr.

The commonwealth never passed a law making slavery illegal until it ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. Slavery instead was slowly abolished by the courts, starting with the 1781 court case that freed Elizabeth Freeman from bondage.

Since the Pequot War, people in Massachusetts sent captured Indians to the West Indies in exchange for African slaves. Some people simply treated Indian children as slaves, believing they could buy and sell their labor.

Mashpee Indians

Before English settlers arrived, the Mashpee Indians numbered in the thousands and lived throughout southern New England and eastern Long Island. They were a branch of the Wampanoag Indian people, converted to Christianity by the Puritans. Disease wiped out all but about 60 families in Barnstable Country on Cape Cod. They survived largely through intermarriage with free or escaped Africans.

They made their living selling wild fruit, clams and brooms, but many fell into debt bondage. Their creditors pushed them further into debt by plying them with liquor.

In 1789, Massachusetts passed a law giving a board of overseers control of the Mashpee Wampanoag Indians.

Guardians, who reported to the board of overseers, could bind out poor Mashpee minors as apprentices.

The Mashpee Indians on Thanksgiving, 1929. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

James Mye

James Mye was born in 1783 to an African-American father named Newport or Levi Mye. His mother was Sarah Soncansin, a Wampanoag.

On June 21, 1793, the guardians of the Mashpee Indians in Barnstable County bound the 10-year-old boy as an apprentice to Joshua Hall for 10 years until his 21st birthday. Hall died, leaving Mye to his two sons, Stephen and Joshua.

In 1801, Stephen and Joshua agreed to send James Mye as a cabin boy on a sealing voyage aboard the Trial for 1/100th of the ship’s profits. The ship captain was Thomas Coffin, father of abolitionist Lucretia Mott. Coffin and his partners told the Hall brothers they would kill seals in the Pacific Ocean, sell their skins in Canton, then return to Nantucket.

The ship set sail in April 1801 and sold sealskins in the China trade as planned. But instead of returning to Nantucket, the Trial sailed to South America with goods banned by the Spanish king. The ship landed in Valparaiso on July 1802 and was seized by the Spanish. Eventually the crew returned to the United States, but without any bounty from the voyage.

Stephen and Joshua Hall sued Coffin and his partners for $200 for taking James Mye under false pretenses. They won their case in Common Pleas court. They said they were deprived of the profit from 1/100th part of the skins and lost ‘time, labor and service’ of James Mye.

The Court Case

The court of Common Pleas ruled against the ship’s partners, who appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

The three-man Supreme Judicial Court ruled in October 1804 the Halls couldn’t inherit an indenture as if it were personal property.

Justice Simeon Strong wrote that even if Mye were the Halls’ apprentice, they had no ‘right to send him to the south-pole, to the end of the globe, in their service.’ The judges said the guardians might have had the right to send him on the voyage if navigation instruction was part of the agreement.

The case was important because the judges objected to the idea that a person’s labor could be owned by another. It was an early precedent in court rulings that moved the United States away from apprenticeships and indentures.

James Mye’s children worked as mariners and carpenters on Cape Cod and bought property. By 1844, Mye’s son James could show his prosperity by buying a daguerrotype of himself wearing a top hat, frock coat and tie.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Ted Williams, The First Latin American Superstar

Few people knew Red Sox great Ted Williams had Mexican ancestry. That’s because he didn’t tell them.

Ted Williams

Teddy Samuel Williams was born Aug. 30, 1918, named after his father, Samuel Stuart Williams, and Teddy Roosevelt. His mother, May Venzor, was a Mexican-American from El Paso, Texas.

His ambition from childhood was to be the greatest hitter in baseball. During his 19 seasons with the Boston Red Sox, he did it.

He was the John Wayne of sports, the last player to bat .400, a 17 time All-Star, two-time Most Valuable Player, two-time Triple Crown winner. Ted Williams did all that despite two interruptions to his career: World War II and the Korean War. During those conflicts he flew fighter jets in the Marines.

He also warred with sportswriters and fans, swore profusely, made it into the Fishing Hall of Fame, raised millions for the Jimmy Fund, helped young players with their hitting, went through three wives and routinely hit the cover off the ball.

His fielding — not so good.

Ted Williams, The Kid

Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Perhaps his burning ambition to be the greatest stemmed from his resentment of his mother. She was fanatically devoted to the Salvation Army and neglected her sons. They hated it when she took them to street corner revivals.

He was called up to the majors in 1939, eight years before Jackie Robinson. Nicknamed The Kid, he was advised to keep his Mexican heritage secret because it might hurt his career. After his outstanding rookie year, Williams took the train home to San Diego. He looked out the window and was horrified to see a crowd of his Mexican relatives waiting to welcome him. He sneaked off the train through a different car.

Ted Williams never learned to speak Spanish. He didn’t disclose his Mexican ancestry until 1970, when he briefly mentioned it in his autobiography.

Well after his baseball career was over, he said, “If I had my mother’s name, there is no doubt I would have run into problems in those days, the prejudices people had in Southern California.”

Ahead on Civil Rights

Ted Williams was far ahead of the baseball establishment on matters of race.

He wrote Jackie Robinson a letter to congratulate him when he broke the Major League color barrier. He befriended Larry Doby, the first black player in the American League. And he went out of his way to make friends with Pumpsie Green, the Red Sox first African-American player.

Williams was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. He shocked his audience with his speech on July 25, 1966, calling for the Hall of Fame to include Negro League greats.

“I’ve been a very lucky guy to have worn a baseball uniform,” he said, “and I hope some day the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given a chance.”

If you enjoyed this story about Ted Williams, you might also want to read about Babe Ruth here. This story was updated in 2023.

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