http://www.boston.com/dailynews/161/region/History_of_free_North_being_re:.shtml

History of ''free'' North being rewritten

By Associated Press, 6/10/2001 15:01

SALEM, Conn. (AP) Archaeologists are studying what is believed to be the traces of a large 18th Century slave plantation in southeastern Connecticut, debunking the belief that slavery was uncommon in the North.

''We're rewriting history,'' said archaeologist Gerald Sawyer of the City University of New York. ''Most people know little of slavery in the North. It was once huge here, and this plantation was bigger than many in the South. When this comes out, it will shake up a lot of people.''

Sawyer and Warren Perry of Central Connecticut State University are leading the project. Perry is the co-director for the African Burial Ground, a project that discovered an 18th century black cemetery under the streets of New York City.

Their current work in Salem focuses on a 2.5-acre wooded site that may have been the slave graveyard for a 13,000-acre plantation.

Sawyer said more than 1 million Africans were kidnapped during the 18th Century and enslaved in the Caribbean, New York City, Connecticut and Rhode Island. In 1774, 2,000 Africans were listed in the census of New London County.

The Salem plantation, which measured five by six miles, was run by Col. Samuel Browne and his family over three generations. Browne, a shipping merchant with connections to the West Indies, ran a slave market in Salem, Mass. He started buying the Connecticut land in 1718, calling it New Salem Plantation.

Browne hired Samuel Gilbert as his first overseer and brought in 60 families of Africans as many as 120 people to clear the land, according to The Day of New London.

Sawyer said the 13,000 acres were excellent bottomland, and that old records show Browne was growing wheat, cutting lumber, making barrel staves and butchering, drying, and preserving meat for shipment out of New London, Providence and Newport to the Caribbean.

The archaeologists learned of the site from Abraham Abdul Haqq, of Colchester. Haqq, a local historian, has done extensive research into Colchester cemetery records to find out where blacks were buried. Sawyer also plans to conduct digs on some of the other sites related to the former plantation.

''What you're involved in is the rewriting of the history of this country and of the world,'' Sawyer recently told a class of archaeology students at the site. ''We'll change this view of a free white New England, and you're a part of that. Just stand here and feel the history. . . It gives you the chills sometimes.''

-- Anonymous, June 10, 2001

Answers

debunking the belief that slavery was uncommon in the North.

Uncommon is not the same as non-existent. I think it means less so than in the south.

I don't recall learning that slavery didn't exist in the north. There were areas that had free blacks, and the underground railroad was linked to these areas, was it not?

-- Anonymous, June 11, 2001

Slavery was common throughout Colonial America, either through outright ownership or articles of indenture. The northern states abolished slavery at various times, all (I think) before 1800. The 1790 census of Maine shows one slave servant despite the fact that Massachusetts -- of which Maine was a province until 1820 -- had abolished slavery many years before. Presumably the slave was either a holdover from pre-abolition, an indentured servant, or the slave of a visitor from the South.

-- Anonymous, June 11, 2001