Non-Indian Residents of Stockbridge, Massachusetts: African Population, Part 1

[caption id="attachment_6953" align="aligncenter" width="784"] Go to Wikipedia's "Slavery in the United States" page for a series of maps like this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States[/caption]

Electa Jones, the author of Stockbridge, Past and Present (alternate title: The Records of an Old Mission Station), compiled and wrote her history in the early 1850's. On the issue of slavery, she - like us today - knew it was immoral, and she also believed that even worse than simply owning slaves was the use of "bondage" to keep them in one's possession. On page 238, Jones tells us that there is no question that slaves were kept in Stockbridge, [present-day Massachusetts], and there was even reason to suspect (but no written proof) "that Africans were held in bondage." (Unless otherwise noted, my source for this entire post is page 238 of Jones' Stockbridge, Past and Present).

A person who was supposed to be setting a good example of Christian living to the Indians - the missionary, Reverend Jonathan Edwards - is the first slaveholder of the town of Stockbridge known to history. In an interview for a church history magazine several years ago, Edwards' award-winning biographer, George Marsden, referred to Edwards' keeping of slaves as a moral "blind spot."

Although I'm tempted to say that owning slaves is too nasty an offense to be written off as a "blind spot," I know that we 21st century Americans have our own blind spots. Most of us aren't thinking about the wars we're voluntarily waging, the mercury in the batteries that we toss out, the thousands of acres of rainforests cleared, etc. etc. (And even if we say we disapprove, are we doing anything to stop these atrocities?) Feel free to comment about Edwards, slavery, ethics, the environment, etc.

Let's get back to "what happens next."

As you may know, Rev. Jonathan Edwards, before coming to Stockbridge, was pastor of the church at Northampton. The Edwards family owned a slave named Rose, who was said to have been stolen from Africa as a child, when she was "getting water at a spring." Rose was married to Joab, also a slave. Joab's master was a "Mr. Hunt" of Northampton.

Edwards was something of a celebrity, but - like a lot of celebrities - he was also controversial. This resulted in his being thrown out of his congregation. As you might imagine, it isn't always easy to throw a celebrity preacher out of a congregation. I'm not quite familiar with the process of throwing Edwards out, but one of the inducements to Edwards was that Mr. Hunt "released" his slave Joab to the minister so Edwards couldn't use the breaking up of a slave marriage as an excuse to try to keep his job as the church's pastor.