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Subject: [CRF] Digs unearth slave plantations in North
Date: Sun, 2 Mar 2003 21:14:34 EST

[ The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 3/2/03 ]

Digs unearth slave plantations in North
By <A HREF="mailto:">MIKE TONER </A>
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Slaveholding plantations, usually thought of as uniquely Southern
institutions, were deeply rooted in the fabric of "free" states of the North
as well, new archaeological studies are showing.

The hidden history of Northern plantations and their slaves is emerging --
one shovelful of soil at a time -- from excavations in and around historic
manor houses in Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. From bits of china,
kitchen utensils, tools, buttons and personal items, archaeologists are
getting glimpses of a chapter of America's past that written histories have
either ignored or forgotten.

Most Northern states abolished slavery before the Civil War. But recent
excavations show that during the late 1700s and early 1800s, many of what
later came to be called manors and landed estates were full-fledged
plantations that held African-American slaves under conditions similar to
those in the South.

"Historians are stunned by some of the evidence," said Cheryl LaRoche, a
historical archaeologist at the University of Maryland.

"The popular notion is that slavery in the North consisted of two or three
household servants, but there is growing evidence that there were
slaveholding plantations," she said. "It's hard to believe that such a
significant and pervasive part of the past could be so completely erased from
our history.

"Near Salem, Mass., archaeologists have excavated the ruins of a 13,000-acre
plantation that produced grain, horses, barrel staves and dried meat. The
owner, Samuel Browne, traded those goods for molasses and rum from the
Caribbean. The graveyard shows at least 100 African-Americans were enslaved
there from 1718 to 1780.

At Shelter Island on New York's Long Island, archaeologists have spent
several years peeling open the grounds of present-day Sylvester Manor to
reveal the traces of an 8,000-acre plantation that provisioned two sugar
plantations in Barbados and made heavy use of African slave labor. During the
late 1600s, at least 20 slaves there served as carpenters, blacksmiths,
domestics and field hands.

"America was a slaveholding country -- North and South," said LaRoche. "Over
the years, that reality has been lost, stolen or just strayed from the
history books.

"Fleshing out history

The United States banned the importation of new slaves in 1808, but that did
not free the millions already in the country, or their descendants. Some
states did take action, enacting bans one by one, so that by 1863 the
practice was illegal in most of the North.

Because the written record of slavery from the slaves' point of view is so
meager, archaeology -- with its emphasis on the physical landscape and
material aspects of culture -- is emerging as an important means of filling
in omissions and distortions.

"Artifacts can tell us how people washed their clothes, fed themselves,
churned their butter and hitched their horses," said Orloff Miller of the
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. "That's why
archaeology can tell what it was like to live as a slave.

"Some of the new evidence of Northern slaveholding plantations comes from
excavations on the well-manicured grounds of historic estate homes, like the
elegant Van Cortlandt Manor on the banks of New York's Croton River, where
slaves worked in the fields and orchards.

Other discoveries are turning up in more humble, more endangered locations.
In Morris County, N.J., plans for a park-and-ride transit station for New
York commuters recently prompted the state to order archaeological
investigations of the site, thought to have been home to the 18th century
Beverwyck estate.

Before archaeologists finished, they had found the remains of more than 20
plantation buildings, including a dairy, blacksmith shop, distillery and
quarters for at least 20 slaves that were part of a 2,000-acre provisioning
operation for the owners' properties in the Caribbean.

Beneath the floor of the slave quarters, archaeologists found a set of iron
shackles; small caches of pins, needles and beads; and ritualistic
arrangements of cooking utensils that reflect the occupants' African origins.

"For a time, Beverwyck was one of the region's finest plantations, but it
could only have reached that high state of cultivation through the forced
labor of enslaved workers," said archaeologist Wade Catts of John Milner
Associates, a New Jersey archaeology firm engaged in the project.

"For most of history, Beverwyck has been known primarily as one of the places
that George Washington slept," he said. "Now the tangible evidence we've
uncovered allows us to see it in a whole new light.

"Catts said there was little doubt that other plantations in New Jersey also
had significant slave populations.

As a science, archaeology is more than a century old. But only in the last
few decades have researchers devoted much attention to the African-American
component of sites, both in the North and the South.

"For a long time, archaeologists who studied plantations were mostly
interested in the people who lived in the big house," said Syracuse
University anthropologist Theresa Singleton, author of "The Archaeology of
Slavery and Plantation Life."

"That didn't tell us much more about slaves than we learned from the
histories by the people who enslaved them. Archaeology allows us to see
history through a different lens.

"Digging up a past that many would rather forget has had interesting results
on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.'

Amnesia' recovery

Slave quarters have been reconstructed at Bulloch Hall, the Greek Revival
mansion just off the town square in Roswell. Until archaeological excavations
in the late 1990s helped identify the location of the structure, the only
hint of the slaves who helped build the mansion in 1839 had been a simple
sign pointing in the general direction of "the quarters."

In rural Mason County, Ky., archaeologists recently identified an old wooden
barn as the country's only extant slave pen, one of the prisonlike compounds
where slaves were kept overnight during transport from the East to the cotton
fields of Mississippi and Louisiana in the mid-1800s.

The busloads of curiosity seekers who descended on the farm for a closer look
prompted an ultimatum from the owner. Archaeologists could either remove the
structure or he would tear it down. The building, disassembled one timber at
a time, will soon be reconstructed at Cincinnati's Underground Railroad
center.

In Philadelphia, when the new $9 million Liberty Bell Center opens this year,
the grounds of the most famous icon of American independence -- and later the
symbol of the abolitionist movement -- will now acknowledge an aspect of
African-American history that almost got left out.

During excavations for the new center, archaeologists recovered thousands of
artifacts from the red brick mansion where Washington stayed in Philadelphia.
But it took public protests for the National Park Service to decide that the
story of Washington's slaves deserved space in the pavilion, too.

"Most Philadelphians would be shocked to know that Washington had slaves with
him in the city," said University of California, Los Angeles, history
professor Gary Nash, who helped spur the Park Service decision.

The slave quarters, and any artifacts they hold, lie just outside the
entrance to the new center. They were undisturbed by construction, and the
Park Service plans to leave them in place, to be studied and interpreted at
some future date.

"Written history is always subject to a kind of cultural amnesia. Some of it
is deliberately forgotten and some of it is inadvertently lost," said Nash.
"That's why artifacts and their context are so important. They can speak to
us for the people who left no written record."

"Friends are angels who lift us to our feet when our wings have trouble
remembering how to fly."

Don't Drive faster that Your Guardian Angel can fly!

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