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Stephen Higginson Tells Fish Stories To Parliament In 1771 and Gets Arrested For It

In 1771, the British government desperately needed to know how American colonists felt about fishing policies. Stephen Higginson filled them in, and almost got jailed as a traitor because of it.

Stephen Higginson served in many capacities during the American Revolution and the formative years of the country – military leader, representative to Congress and political intriguer.

Higginson was born in Salem, Mass., in 1743 into a family of politicians and clergymen. Well-connected, his single act of rebellion against his place in society seems to be his decision to marry Susannah Cleveland, his second cousin from Connecticut. As their families opposed the marriage (probably because of their youth), the couple ran away to New Hampshire to marry in 1764.

After returning to Salem, Higginson took up his position as a merchant trader, same as his father. He set up a home near East India Square in Salem across from the Lafayette Coffee House. Armed with introductions from his well-connected father, he sailed to England in 1771.

Stephen Higginson in London

Stephen Higginson

In England, Higginson had his first critical brush with politics. Higginson, on his travels in England to introduce himself to his trading partners, found himself summoned before Parliament to answer to an investigation about New England’s fisheries.

Higginson’s testimony gave a picture of how large and vital cod fishing was to the New England economy.

Seven hundred fishing vessels, most between 40 and 70 tons, worked the waters off New England fishing for cod. It took more than 4,000 people to man those vessels, Higginson estimated. Another 2,000 worked on shore, curing and preparing the catch for sale. And another 350 vessels, employing another 3,000 people, transported the fish to market.

Between 1768 and 1772, fish accounted for 35 percent of all New England exports by value. But the interests of the English and their American colonies often diverged when it came to codfish.

Fishing schooners

American fish fed slaves in the West Indies and Catholics in Europe. This resulted in New England fishermen trading with the French, importing French sugar, rum and molasses, as well as trading directly with the French in Newfoundland. Britain implemented a series of tariffs to limit New England fishermen’s ability to trade with the French, preferring to keep such trade for Englishmen.

By 1771, the arguing over the New England fishery had gone on for 40 years, and Britain’s Navy actively seized American fishing vessels caught trading with the French. Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament who sympathized with the colonists and their position, summoned Higginson to testify.

Stephen Higginson Testifies

The British, as usual, were concerned that New England was trading too much with Spain and France, rather than England.

Higginson explained that Britain remained New England’s primary trading partner. He suggested that restricting New England trade would result in the region being unable to pay its debts to English companies.

In particular, the Parliament questioned what New England fishermen would do if the government closed the fishery entirely.

A partial transcript of his testimony:

Under Questioning

Q. What would these people do if the Fishery was stopped?

A. I can’t readily resolve that question. I suppose they would remain where they are as long as they could subsist in hopes of being engaged in their old employment.

Q. But when that hope failed and they could no longer subsist?

A. Then they will probably go elsewhere?

Q. Whether they would settle at Halifax?

A. In general I think not … the Fishermen in Salem and other Towns are a very quiet and steady set of men They esteem the people of Halifax to be dissolute and of a quite contrary turn. I think therefore they would not sit down among a people so different in their manners. Another reason is that they think the Government of Halifax is arbitrary and have a terrible notion of it. Another, those who have been there have disliked the country very much as being inhospitable.

Q. Would they go to Miguelon and St Pierre and fish for France?

A. Don t think they would generally. From Marblehead some perhaps would.

Q. Why would they from thence?

A. Because the people there are of various nations Spaniards, Portuguese and Dutch, but the others are born in the towns where they live, have tenements and freeholds there and would not leave their place of abode, I conceive.

Return of the Traitor

News of Higginson’s appearance before Parliament spread, and upon his return to Marblehead, the colonial authorities arrested him on suspicion of traitorous conduct. Higginson had walked a fine line in Parliament, both continuing to state the American case for greater freedom in operating the fishery while defending the loyalty of the colonists.

Fortunately for his sake, Higginson had brought a detailed account of his testimony home with him. When he presented what he had said, the colonial authorities reversed themselves and praised him for his poise and presentation.

Into the History Books

During the American Revolution, Higginson ran his ships as privateers, and in 1783 Massachusetts elected him to the Continental Congress. Following the war, he participated in the military force that put down Shay’s Rebellion in 1786 and 1787.

Higginson’s most well-known legacy involves his opposition to John Hancock, during Hancock’s term as governor of Massachusetts. Higginson was a firm Federalist, along with John Adams and many others. The Federalists wanted a strong central government, and they were opposed by the Anti-Federalists who wanted the states to retain more power in the new country that they were forming.

John Hancock, meanwhile, had become something of a political chameleon. He managed to win support from enough Federalists and Anti-Federalists to serve as governor.

Stephen Higginson led probably the harshest attack on Hancock, though there were many. He published the “Laco Papers” in a newspaper, castigating Hancock for a weak military record during the Revolution. He called into question Hancock’s fitness to serve, as well as the alliances he had struck with his opponents, including Samuel Adams. In addition to printing the letters in a newspaper, under the pseudonym Laco, he also had them bound and distributed.

The Laco Papers had a remarkable effect, though not the one Higginson intended. Historians agree that the publication most likely generated sympathy for Hancock and helped extend his political reign.

Thanks to: Life and Times of Stephen Higginson, Member of the Continental Congress (1783)

Images: Stephen Higginson, Delegate to Continental Congress, New York Public Library, Max Rosenthal(Etcher)

Postcard of fishing vessels at the Portland Dock, Maine, c. 1908.

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Samuel Maverick Writes A Guide to the Wonders of New England – in 1660

Samuel Maverick, as his name suggests, didn’t like to go along with the crowd. The Puritan crowd, that is.

He came to Boston sometime in the 1620s, before the Puritans arrived, and lived on Noddles Island in Boston Harbor. Noddles Island is now East Boston, which has a Maverick Square and a Maverick T stop.

Samuel Maverick, a firm Anglican and staunch royalist, saw amazing changes in New England during the first 30-some years of his residence. When he arrived, several hundred Europeans were scattered over 150 square miles of wilderness. By 1660, Maverick saw 86 towns that fielded militia, vast herds of livestock, an abundance of English fruit, and harbors bustling with many dozens of ships, some as large as 300 tons.

Other changes he didn’t like so much. He chafed under the Puritans’ rigid laws and suffered from their religious intolerance. Another Samuel Maverick – who may have been a descendant – shared his independent spirit in 19^th century Texas. The Maverick name would brand movies and cars and sports teams into the 21^st century.

East Boston, 1841. The large building in the center is the Maverick Hotel.

Samuel Maverick

He was born in England around 1602, the son of the Rev. John Maverick, who later followed him to the New World.

Samuel arrived in Massachusetts when in his twenties. With another colonist named David Thompson he built a house on Noddles Island and fortified it with guns. Thompson died, and Maverick married Thompson’s widow, Amias. They had three children in addition to her son by David Thompson.

When Maverick started out in Massachusetts, fewer than 300 Europeans lived within a radius of 150 miles. Then in 1630, John Winthrop and his band of Puritans arrived and started running the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Things would change dramatically in a few decades.

Maverick Guide to New England

In 1660, Samuel Maverick returned to England with a guide he wrote about New England. He intended to present it to King Charles II, along with his complaints about how the Puritans treated him.

He called the guide A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together with the Present Government Thereof. In it, he described 86 towns from Damariscotta, Maine, to Greenwich, Conn. Maverick described how New England had once had only a sparse population of scattered colonists. By 1660, however, almost all of those towns could field a militia (“a full Company of Foote and some Horse”).

Changes in the Boston shoreline from 1630-1675

When he first arrived in New England, he wrote, he found nothing but shacks save for three or four decent houses in Plymouth. Boston, which wasn’t even Boston then, was “a swamp and pound.” It grew into a “great Towne” with “two churches, a Gallant Statehouse & more to make it compleate, then can be expected in a place so late a wilderness.”

“Now to behold the handsome Houses & Churches in so many Townes as I have named is a wonder,” wrote Maverick.

Wonders

Farming and husbandry had flourished in every town he mentioned.

In 1626 New England had not a single head of cattle, nor horse, nor sheep, and very few goats or hogs. But less than 40 years later, New Englanders exported livestock to the Caribbean, consumed much of it themselves and provisioned the ships that called at New England ports.

Along with the livestock, “the great abundance of English Fruite, as Apples, Pears, Apricots, Plumbs, Cherries Musk-Mellons, Water-Mellons &c. is not to be beleeved but by those that have seene it,” wrote Maverick.

Massachusetts also had harbors filled with “great Shipps of Burthen” and “many Vessels…of all sorts and seizes,” he wrote. “And I am confident there hath not in any place out of so small a number of People been raised so many able Seamen and Commanders as there hath been.”

In southern New England, he wrote, “it is incredible what hath been done.”

The Puritan by August Saint-Gaudens. Samuel Maverick chafed under their intolerance

Majority Rule

As colonists carved towns out of the wilderness, the Puritans gained power at the expense of the minority Anglicans. They took over Maine, then largely Anglican, and they persecuted Thomas Morton, a free-thinking Anglican in Braintree. They cast out nonconformists, who often ended up in free-thinking Rhode Island.

The Puritans also created and enforced a set of laws that reserved privileges for members of the Puritan church, or freemen. Samuel Maverick was not one of them. As such, he couldn’t hold government office, but he had to pay taxes. He also couldn’t take communion and he couldn’t have his children baptized.

Nevertheless, Samuel Maverick prospered and contributed to the community’s defense. Contemporaries described him as a “whole-souled, generous, hospitable man, of warm impulses and courteous behavior.” He was “a royalist and Episcopalian, living in a strongly fortified residence on Noddle’s Island,” according to A History of East Boston: With Biographical Sketches of Its Early Proprietors, and an Appendix, by William Hylsop Sumner.

Intolerance

Ironically, Maverick owned three slaves. His treatment of them is another story. Suffice it to say he felt he was the one denied civil and religious liberties.

By 1647, Maverick and others began to resent the colony’s rigid laws. He joined several others in a petition to end taxation without representation and to gain basic civil and religious rights.

They complained the colony did not base its laws on the fundamental laws of England. The government also denied them the same civic and religious privileges as the church members, or freemen. They protested they were entitled to those privileges as “freeborn Englishmen of sober lives and conversation.”

Maverick and the other petitioners threatened to take their complaints to England if the Puritans didn’t cave in to their demands.

And so the Puritans sent him to jail for conspiracy and perjury and slapped him with a steep fine. After 12 days he paid the fine and went free.

Successful Complaint, Failed Commission

Maverick wasn’t going to get any satisfaction in England while the English Civil War raged. Nor would he while Oliver Cromwell ruled the country. But when Charles II restored the Crown in 1660, Samuel Maverick headed straight for England to air his complaints about the Puritans to the King.

He brought with him the little book he’d written, outlining the lay of the land. A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Townes Therein, Together with the Present Government Thereof received the King’s attention. For centuries it rested in private hands, its existence unknown to but a few. Then in 1875 its owner put the book up for auction and the British Museum bought it.

King Charles II

His little book convinced the king he needed to rein in his independent colonies. Maverick returned to New England in a position of authority as one of four commissioners. The King charged the commissioners with enforcing liberty of conscience and oaths of allegiance as well as forcing local militias to follow the King’s orders.

The commissioners couldn’t exercise their power, though, and Samuel Maverick moved to New York. He is believed to have died sometime around 1670.

Maverick’s Brief Description

Here are excerpts from his descriptions of 20 towns from Maine to Connecticut. (To see all 86, click here.)

Note his disapproval with how the Massachusetts Puritans took over Maine towns, originally settled by Anglicans like himself. And he makes clear his disdain for the poor, weak and Dutch-friendly Plymouth Colony.

Map of New England, 1677

Maine

Pem˜a—Westward from Penobscott (which is the Southermost Fort in Nova Scotia) … is Pem˜aquid…many Families are now settled there… by vertue of [a patent granted by King James I] they hold the Islands of Monahegan and Damerells Coue, and other small ones adjacent Commodious for fishing.
Casco Bay.— In this Casco Bay are many scattering Families settled…[Col.] Alexander Rigby…[held the patent] and under this Goverment the People lived some yeares, till of late the Government of the Massachusits hath made bold to stretch its Jurisdiction to the midle of this Bay, and as lyeing in their way have taken in a dozen of Goverments more.

New Hampshire

Strawberry Bank. The Great House & Isle of Shooles.—Within 2 Myles of the Mouth is Strawberry Banke where are many Families, and a Minister & a Meeting House …This Strawberry Banke is part of 6000 acres granted by Patent about y^eyeare 1620 or 1621, to M^r David Thompson, who with… assistance … went over with a Considerable Company of Servants and built a Strong and Large House, enclosed it with a large and high Palizado and mounted Gunns, and being stored extraordinarly with shot and Ammunition was a Terror to the Indians, who at that time were insulting over the poor weake and unfurnished Planters of Plymouth… all is at this day in the power and at the disposall of the Massachusitts. Two Leagues of lyes the Isle of Shooles one of the best places for ffishing in the land, they have built a Church here and maintaine a Minister.

Massachusetts

Newbury—… the Houses stand at a good distance each from other a feild and Garden between each house, and so on both sides the street for 4 Miles…
Salem—… very commodious for fishing, and many Vessells have been built there and (excep^tBoston) it hath as much Trade as any place in New England.
Marblehead or Foy.—… the greatest Towne for ffishing in New England.
Lynne—… within the bounds of it are the greatest Iron works…
Cambridge—[In] Cambridge … is a Colledge a Master and some Number of Students belonging to it…
The Old State House in Boston
Boston—the Metrapolis of New England lying pleasantly on a plaine and the ascending of a High Mount which lyes about the midle of y^eplaine, …It hath two handsome Churches in it, a handsome market place, and in the midest of it a Statehouse. In the Towne are fouer full companys of ffoote and a Troope of horse…The Towne is full of good shopps well furnished with all kind of Merchandize
Braintree—once called Mount Wolaston, … It subsists by raiseing provisions, and furnishing Boston with wood.
New Plymouth.—… This place was seated about y^eyeare 1620 or 1621 by a company of Brownists, …[They] found this place and there settled liveing extream hardy for some yeares and in great danger of the Indians, and could not Long have subsisted, had not Plymouth Merchants …at Monhegon and Pascattaway … supplyed them…It is a poor small Towne now, The People being removed into Farmes in the Country.
Sandwich—a good Towne … which affords good store of Provisions, and some yeares a quantity of Whalebone made of Whales which drive up dead in that Bay.

Rhode Island

Rhode Island.— It is full of people haveing been a receptacle for people of severall Sorts and Opinions.
Warwick Providence.— I think they still keepe a seeming forme of Goverment but to litle purpose, none submitting to Supream Authority but as they please.

Connecticut

(Pequot Plantation, now Mystic and Stonington—Haveing gone through New Plymouth Goverment we come next to Connecticot Goverment. The first that was under this Goverment was Pequate
Hartford—From Withersfield to Hartford the Metropolis of the Goverment, it is about 3 Miles, it is a gallant Towne, and many rich men in it.
Springfield— This is the Massachusetts bounds. And above Springfeild 8 Miles is another Towne at first Intended but for a tradeing house with the Indians, but the gallant Land about it hath invited men to make it a Toune. This Connecticott River is a great River before y^eTowne[which] is also in the Massachusetts bounds and under its Goverment although 8 Miles from it.
Woodcut of New Haven, 1786
Newhaven—This Towne is the Metropolis of that Goverment, and the Goverment tooke its Name from this Towne; … was the first built in those parts, many stately and costly houses were erected the Streete layd out in a Gallant forme, a very stately Church; but y^eHarbour proveing not Comodious, the land very barren, the Merchants either dead or come away, the rest gotten to their Farmes, The Towne is not so glorious as once it was.
Milford—From Newhaven to Milford it is about 10 Miles, This Towne is gotten into some way of Tradeing to Newfoundland, Barbados, Virginia, So also hath some other Townes in this Goverment.
Greenwich—From Stamford to Greenwich…these two last Townes are under Newhaven Goverment, and there was another place begun and much done in it, but the Dutch came and tooke it by force, and since the people of this Towne call it New Chester…

The Rest of the Story

New England had no shortage of Mavericks, and it’s hard to tell who was the ancestor of the famous Maverick who moved to Texas as a baby. That Maverick, also Samuel, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, served as mayor of San Antonio, owned huge tracts of land and practiced law. He also had a few cows. He didn’t brand his cattle, and, according to lore, those who strayed into another rancher’s herd were called mavericks.

His grandson Maury Maverick coined the term ‘gobbledygook.’

This story was updated in 2022. Image of map of New England: By http://maps.bpl.org – A map of New England, being the first that ever was here cut … places, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27807459.

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Seven Fascinating Facts About Frederick Douglass

He rose from slavery in the South to international prominence as a writer, orator and anti-slavery activist. Frederick Douglass didn’t spend a day in school and only learned to read by a stroke of luck. That’s just one of the amazing facts about Frederick Douglass.

He was born in 1818 to a white father he never identified and to a black mother he barely knew.

Douglass escaped from slavery as a 20-year-old with the help of a free African-American, Anna Murray, whom he married as soon as he escaped.

After only a few years of freedom, abolitionists discovered the articulate young fugitive slave. But Frederick Douglass was far more than an abolitionist exhibit of a survivor of slavery. As an orator, he enraptured his audiences; as a polemicist, he caught the attention of presidents; and as a public intellectual, he influenced the debate about slavery, war, equality and opportunity.

Here then are seven fascinating facts about Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass

1. Why New Bedford

Frederick Douglass moved to New Bedford in 1838 to get a job as a caulker, a trade he had learned as a slave in Baltimore.

When he escaped slavery and arrived in New York City, his rescuer, David Ruggles, advised him to go to New Bedford because he could get a job on the waterfront there. He could also fit into the large African-American community, which included both free blacks and fugitive slaves. He arrived penniless and with a new wife. Eventually he began to speak out against slavery at local abolitionist meetings.

William Lloyd Garrison, leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society, heard him speak and decided to put him on the broader abolitionist circuit.

By the time Frederick Douglass left New Bedford, he was a rising star on the abolitionist lecture circuit, traveling as far as Michigan to speak against slavery.

He never did get a job as a caulker, though. White workers on the waterfront refused to work with him, so he had to earn a meager living doing common labor like hauling barrels of whale oil.

Nathan and Mary Johnson houses, where Frederick and Anna Douglass first stayed in New Bedford.

2. Columbian Orator

Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln learned how to give speeches from the same book.

Published in 1797, the Columbian Orator sold 200,000 copies and went through 23 printings until 1860. The author, Caleb Bingham, was a radical egalitarian who believed the young United States needed educated citizens. He published the book to promote a dignified, classical style of speaking without any aristocratic pretensions.

Abraham Lincoln studied it as a young politician during a cold winter in Illinois. The Columbian Orator also influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Frederick Douglass bought the book as a 13-year-old slave living and working in Fells Point, Baltimore.

His mistress taught him to read, which was unusual (and forbidden). The boy made friends with a gang of white boys in Baltimore, and they showed him their schoolbook, the Columbian Orator. The book captivated him, and he spent 50 cents to buy it with money he earned polishing boots. “Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book,” he said.

The full name of the book: Columbian Orator, Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces, Together with Rules, Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence.

3. A Little-Known Fact About Frederick Douglass

One of the little-known facts about Frederick Douglass was that he took his name from a Scottish hero in a Sir Walter Scott poem.

Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, he changed his name to Stanley, then Johnson, to evade capture when he fled Maryland.

But when he arrived in New Bedford, he and his wife Anna stayed with Nathan and Mary Johnson, black abolitionists. Nathan Johnson told him there were already too many Johnsons in New Bedford. He gave his houseguest the name ‘Douglass’ after the hero of Sir Walter Scott’s poem, The Lady of the Lake.

Frederick Douglass described what happened in one of his three autobiographies:

…unwilling to have another of his own name added to the community in this unauthorised way, after I spent a night and a day at his house, gave me my present name. He had been reading Lady of the Lake, and was pleased to regard me as a suitable person to wear this, one of Scotland’s many famous names.

In the poem, James Douglas feuded with King James V of Scotland, whom he had formerly mentored, and was himself a fugitive. He came from a line of aristocrats known as the black Douglases because of an ancestor’s dark complexion and ferocity on the battlefield.

Douglass later went on the abolitionist lecture circuit in Scotland, a country he loved. While there, he met a surviving relative of Sir Walter Scott.

4. Frederick Douglass Says No to John Brown

Three-and-a-half weeks before John Brown made his famous raid on Harper’s Ferry, Frederick Douglass met with him in a stone quarry across the Virginia line in Pennsylvania. Brown, disguised as a fisherman, urged Douglass to join him in the attack.

Up until then Frederick Douglass encouraged and supported Brown, but he couldn’t go along with his plan to seize the federal armory. He tried to talk him out of the suicide mission.

After the attack failed disastrously, word got out that Douglass met with Brown just before the raid. The governor of Virginia ordered Frederick Douglass arrested, but he fled to Canada and then to Britain.

5. A Career Highlight With Abraham Lincoln

After the Civil War, Frederick Douglass criticized President Abraham Lincoln for his weak Reconstruction plan and failure to give black people the vote. Lincoln invited Douglass to visit him at the White House.

During their meeting – their second – the two men had a long and frank discussion while Connecticut Gov. William Buckingham waited at the door. Lincoln’s secretary interrupted Lincoln twice to tell him the governor waited for him, and Lincoln waved him off. He said, “I want to have a long talk with my friend Frederick Douglass.”

Douglass often retold that story.

6. Jim Crow in Lynn

He moved to Lynn, Mass., in 1841, after his involvement in one of the most famous Jim Crow incidents in history. Still living in New Bedford, he had taken the train from Boston for a speaking engagement in Newburyport, Mass. He boarded the train in Lynn and sat with three white abolitionists.

Then the conductor grabbed him by the collar and demanded he move to the Jim Crow car. Douglass said he would if the conductor gave him a reason. Other passengers began to chant, “Give him a reason.”

The conductor finally replied, “Because you are black.” The passengers surrounded the conductor, but soon a half dozen company thugs arrived and began to beat Frederick Douglass. He clung to his seat, but they pulled it up by the bolts and threw him and the seat out of the railcar and onto the ground. They threw his luggage after him as well.

The outrage shown by the people of Lynn helped persuaded him to move to the city, which had a large abolitionist community. He and his growing family lived in a small frame house on Union Street.

His wife helped support them by working as a shoebinder, a common occupation then in Lynn. He wrote his first autobiography (he wrote three) in Lynn, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

Anna Murray Douglass

7. White Women

His friendships with white abolitionist women provoked severe criticism. In 1847, he caused a scandal when he traveled by steamboat down the Hudson River to an abolitionist meeting. Newspapers discovered he slept in a stateroom next to Lydia or Lucretia Mott (it isn’t clear which). He finally had to explain that he had two choices: to sleep on the deck in the cold because black men couldn’t buy cabins, or to have Miss Mott book an adjoining room.

Later, he developed close relationships – possibly romantic – with British abolitionist Julia Griffiths and German radical Ottilie Assing. Both women spent time living in the Douglass household, inspiring speculation and rumor.

But it was his marriage to white abolitionist Helen Pitts that caused a real firestorm of criticism. A descendant of John and Priscilla Alden, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1859. In her 40s when they met, Douglass hired her as a clerk and married her two years after Anna died.

Fast and furious came the denunciations. “The Venerable Colored Orator Takes a White Wife” screamed one headline. A Washington, D.C., newspaper called it a ‘national calamity.’ Many in the black community called him a traitor to his race.

To the criticism, Frederick Douglass replied, “This proves I am impartial. My first wife was the color of my mother and the second, the color of my father.”

One of the most surprising facts about Frederick Douglass is that he married a white woman. Here he is with his wife Helen Pitts (seated); her sister, Eva Pitts, is standing.

End Notes to Fact About Frederick Douglass

Seven Fascinating Facts About Frederick Douglass owes much to Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight. This story was updated in 2023.

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James Somerset, the Boston Runaway Who Ended Slavery in England

In 1771, James Somerset languished in an English prison ship that would soon set sail for Jamaica. From there, he would be sold to a sugar plantation owner who would probably work him to death well before he reached old age.

But he had friends in England, and they went to court asking for a writ of habeas corpus. And so the prison ship captain dutifully took James Somerset to the Court of King’s Bench, where a judge would decide whether he had been legally imprisoned.

He hadn’t. And the judge’s decision in Stewart v. Somerset would end slavery in England, at least in the public’s mind. It sent American Southerners into the patriot camp, fearing that England would take away their slaves. And it inspired enslaved men and women to sue for their freedom in the northern colonies.

Granville Sharp

James Somerset

A Boston customs collector named Charles Stewart bought James Somerset from a Virginia plantation owner. He brought him to England in 1769, but James Somerset escaped. Stewart caught up with him, however, and had him incarcerated on the prison ship Ann and Mary.

But James Somerset had been baptized a Christian in England, and his three godparents went to court to set him free. England’s leading abolitionist, Granville Sharp, assembled a team of five lawyers to defend James Somerset. Frederick Douglass would later quote one of those lawyers, an Irishman named John Philpot Stewart.

The lawyers argued that no law authorized slavery in England.

Stewart’s lawyers argued that property rights took precedence over human rights. Plus, they pointed to the danger of freeing all 15,000 enslaved black people in England.

Lord Mansfield, who ruled in favor of James Somerset

Air Too Pure

In 1772, Lord Mansfield, the chief justice, ruled on the case. He decided that slavery had no basis in natural law or in English law. He found slavery so odious, he wrote, that it required Parliament to pass a law to legitimize it.

The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law [statute]… Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged

Lord Mansfield’s decision did not include a quotation often attributed to him: “This air is too pure for a slave to breathe in.”

Shock Waves

Slavery did persist in England, however, for another six decades after the ruling. James Somerset, though, had set in motion a series of actions that would ultimately end slavery in England. And his legal victory persuaded the English public at large that no man was a slave on English soil.

In the American colonies, of course, it would take a Civil War to end slavery.

During the run-up to the American Revolution, the colonial newspapers reported extensively on Stewart v. Somerset. The case created a sensation, especially in the South. Plantation owners realized that Parliament could not only tax them without representing them, it could free their slaves.

The Massachusetts General Court in 1771 had actually drafted a bill to emancipate the slaves, but the patriot leaders killed it. James Warren explained it “would have a bad effect on the union of the colonies.”

James Warren by John Singleton Copley

Selfish Colonials

Historian Alan Taylor argues that James Somerset’s victory persuaded many African Americans to take the Loyalist side in the looming revolution.

“Many enslaved men and women began to look to the king as a potential liberator,” Taylor wrote. African-American preachers preached the king ‘was about to alter the World and set the Negroes Free.’ The selfish colonials had blocked his wishes.

Elizabeth Freeman played an important role in ending the slave trade.

Some colonies did take the battle for liberty to include more than just white men. Vermont abolished slavery in 1777, and Pennsylvania followed in 1780, Massachusetts in 1783 and Connecticut in 1784.

In Massachusetts, two enslaved servants followed James Somerset’s example and filed freedom suits. Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker both won their cases, effectively ending slavery in Massachusetts.

James Somerset presumably died in England – a free man.

With thanks to American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 by Alan Taylor. This story was updated in 2023.

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The West Indies Send Sugar, Slaves and Red Sox Stars to New England

For four centuries, the West Indies have made an outsized impact on New England. In 2018, West Indian stars and a West Indian manager brought the Boston Red Sox to a World Series championship.

West Indians have come to New England as doctors, teachers, ministers, slaves, farm workers and servants, depending on when they came.

Beginning in the 17^th century, merchants like Connecticut horse jockeys, Rhode Island slavers and Boston banana importers have traded with the West Indies. Well into the 19^th century, retail shops called West India Goods Stores sold items from the Caribbean and all over the world.

And West Indians came to New England in waves – from the British and Spanish West Indies, the French Antilles and the Dutch Caribbean. Some were Afro-Caribbean, like W.E.B. Du Bois’s father, some were Euro-Caribbean, like Oscar de la Renta, Jackie Kennedy’s favorite designer.

Kevin Youkilis, Alex Cora and Dustin Pedroia.

And some came as key players for the Boston Red Sox. Rafael Devers came from the Dominican Republic. Xander Bogaerts came from Aruba. Christian Vazquez and manager Alex Cora came from Puerto Rico.

So when the Red Sox clinched the world championship in Los Angeles, Cora acknowledged a historic relationship when he said, “I can’t imagine what’s going on in Boston, I can’t imagine what’s going on on my island.”

West Indies Trade

Tragically, the first documented West Indians in New England were slaves from Barbados. European slavers bought captured Africans and took them to Barbados in the British West Indies to work on ever-larger sugar plantations.

Because the West Indian planters grew few crops other than sugar cane, New England traders seized the opportunity to sell them farm produce, livestock, salted fish and wood products. They brought back sugar, molasses and some of their slaves on the two- to five-week voyage.

Enslaved Afro-Caribbeans first came to Massachusetts in 1638 and to Connecticut in 1639. At the end of the Pequot War in 1669, the Puritans tried to force captured Indians into slavery. The Indians, though, ‘would not endure the yoke,’ so the Puritans sent them to the West Indies in exchange for captive African laborers.

On the eve of the American Revolution, Massachusetts and Connecticut each had about 5,000 black people living within their borders. Most had lived in or were born in the Caribbean.

As late as 1860, one in five black Bostonians had a Caribbean birthplace. Many West Indians were free, and some quite successful. Prince Hall from Barbados founded the Negro Masonic Order in Boston in 1775. John Brown Russwurm from Jamaica founded the first African-American newspaper after graduating from Bowdoin College in 1826.

W.E.B. Du Bois, born free to a Haitian father in Great Barrington, Mass., in 1868, rose to international prominence as a historian, sociologist and civil rights leader.

An 1855 map of the West Indies

2nd Wave from the West Indies

From 1900 to 1930, a second wave of immigrants from the West Indies arrived, mostly from the English-speaking islands. They were typically literate and skilled, and a significant number had worked as professionals and in offices. Others were dockworkers, porters, laborers and domestic servants.

They came because they suffered tremendous economic hardship due to the decline of the Caribbean sugar plantation during the late 19^th century. And they came to New England for a very specific reason: cheap steamer fares.

During the late 19^th century, a group of Boston merchants called Boston Fruit ran a steamship service between the West Indies and Boston. They imported bananas, coconuts, oranges and lemons, eventually becoming Chiquita Brands International.

Boston Fruit’s steamer also carried passengers, including West Indians coming to Boston, the first port of call. They also settled in New Haven, Cambridge, Mass., and New York. Florida, though, had the highest concentration of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in 1900, just under 22 percent..

In 1924, immigration from the West Indies all but stopped with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. The law sharply limited immigration from countries outside of Western Europe.

Then the Great Depression came, and many immigrants returned to the West Indies, forced home by economic hardship and even more restrictive immigration policies.

World War II

Puerto Rican men immigrating to the United States. Photo from the film ‘Puerto Rican Passages.”

In 1900 Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens, and for the next 45 years about 90,000 Puerto Ricans moved to the continental United States. Some came to work in defense plants during World War II. But it wasn’t until 1945 that the Great Migration of Puerto Ricans started, lasting until 1964.

Half a million people from the islands, 21,000 a year, came to the mainland, many as farm workers. Some stayed in Springfield, Mass., and Hartford, Conn. They were joined by Jamaican contract farm workers picking apples, tobacco, melons and blueberries.

Life was harsh for Puerto Ricans in New England’s declining industrial cities. Young Puerto Ricans rioted from Worcester to Waterbury during the late 1960s through the 1970s. Many returned to the island.

Jamaicans

The flow of West Indian immigrants slowed in 1952, when Congress enacted an immigration law, the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. It aimed to keep out black immigrants, and it worked.

But like a pendulum, immigration laws loosened up in 1968. They let in close to half a million Caribbean immigrants, mostly Cubans, to Florida. The number of Jamaicans rose eightfold, to about 75,000 in the ’60s. Then it almost doubled in the ’70s to 140,000 and rose again in the 1980s to 208,000 in the 1990s.

In New England, Jamaicans concentrated in the Hartford and Bridgeport areas of Connecticut, which has the fifth highest population of Jamaicans in the country. The Blue Hills neighborhood of Hartford, in fact, has the densest concentration of Jamaicans in the United States. Jamaicans have also settled in the Boston area and throughout New England. Jamaican musicians perform at reggae festivals all over the region. Even Brattleboro, Vt., has a Jerk Festival.

Dominicans

Big Papi, David Ortiz

Today, three New England states – Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut – have some of the densest populations of people with West Indies heritage in the country. Only Florida and New York have more.

The arrival of Dominican immigrants from the West Indies contribute heavily to the West Indian presence in New England. Beginning with the assassination of President Trujillo in 1961, a series of political and economic crises drove waves of Dominicans to the United States.

Dominicans comprise the largest Hispanic group in Rhode Island – 35,008 in 2010. They also dominate the Hispanic population in eastern Massachusetts. The Connecticut cities of Danbury, Waterbury and Bridgeport have large Dominican populations.

Only New York City has more Dominicans than Lawrence, Mass., with 30,243 as of 2010. And when Marcos Devers was appointed as Acting Mayor of Lawrence, he became the first Dominican-American mayor of a U.S. city.

Massachusetts, in fact, has the fourth largest Dominican population (103,292 in 2010) in the United States. The Bay State can also claim David Ortiz, the Red Sox legend, now an American citizen living in suburban Boston.

End Notes

Images: David Ortiz By Arturo Pardavila III from Hoboken, NJ, USA – CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52501471; Alex Cora By Eric Kilby – Three Amigos, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63535958.

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Jehu Grant, Black Revolutionary, Makes an Eloquent Plea for Fairness

Jehu Grant, inspired by talk of freedom, escaped slavery in Rhode Island to enlist as a Continental Army soldier in 1777.

Time and again he would be disappointed by promises the patriots didn’t keep. For Jehu Grant, the struggle for independence, let alone fairness, never ended.

Jehu Grant

He was born around 1752, and enslaved in Narragansett, R.I., by a man named Elihu Champlen.

Narragansett had a large slave population because Rhode Island engaged in the transatlantic slave trade.

When war broke out, Jehu Grant was a young man in his early 20s. He later wrote that he ‘heard much about the cruel and arbitrary things done by the British.’ Their ships lay a few miles off his master’s house, and he suspected his Champlen of Loyalist leanings. His master, he wrote, traded with the enemy, and sold the British sheep, cattle and cheese.

Jehu Grant feared his master would sell him to the British Navy, where he could expect harsh treatment. He also knew entire companies of black soldiers enlisted in Rhode Island, which added to his fears that his master would sell him to the British.

And so he ran away to join the cause of freedom.

The Continental Army

Jehu Grant arrived in Danbury, Conn., in August 1777, after the British had burned the town. Rhode Island had yet to form its black regiment, comprised of free African-Americans, Indians and slaves. The latter would obtain their freedom on their discharge.

Historians count 9,000 black Patriot soldiers, including the Army and Navy, state militias, privateers, wagoneers, servants and spies.

African-Americans comprised about a fifth of the Continental Army. By the Siege of Yorktown, an officer in a French regiment estimated that one-quarter of the northern army was African American.

When the British offered slaves their freedom in exchange for enlisting, African-Americans joined the British cause as well.

Jehu Grant joined Capt. Giles Galer’s regiment for 18 months as a soldier. He was put to work as a teamster, loading, unloading and driving a wagon of army provisions. After about four months he worked as a waiter to John Skidmore, wagon master general. In June 1778, Elihu Chaplen found Jehu Grant serving in the army just north of New York City. Though he had eight more months of his enlistment, the Continental Army returned him to his master.

The Pension

In 1832, Charles Carroll of Maryland died, the last of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. By then, the young nation felt nostalgic about the passing of the Revolutionary generation. And so the U.S. Congress enacted the first comprehensive Pension Act, which granted an annual stipend to any veteran of war who could prove his service. By then, the youngest Revolutionary War veterans would have reached their late sixties, the oldest their 90s.

Several thousand veterans applied for the pension, including several dozen African-American soldiers — and Jehu Grant.

Few soldiers had any documented evidence of their service. All they had was their own memory. So ex-soldiers had to tell their stories to a local court reporter, who sent the records on to Washington for a decision.

Freedom – Just Another Word?

A few years after the Revolutionary War ended, Joshua Swann of Stonington, Conn., bought Jehu Grant. He promised him his freedom if he served him faithfully. Swann was as good as his word, and Jehu Grant married, had six children and moved to Milton, N.Y.

In 1832, Jehu Grant asked for his pension, helped by a neighbor to write the letter. The Commissioner of Pensions denied him in 1834 because he was a fugitive slave during his service.

Two years later Jehu Grant appealed the decision in an eloquent, if bitter, plea.

All around him he had heard patriotic rhetoric about the inalienable right to freedom. When he spied liberty poles, ‘and the people all engaged for the support of freedom, I could not but like and be pleased with such thing (God forgive me if I sinned in so feeling.)’

He wouldn’t have run away, he wrote, ‘Had I been taught to read or understand the precepts of the Gospel, “Servants obey your masters,” I might have done otherwise, notwithstanding the songs of liberty that saluted my ear, thrilled through my heart.’

He had compensated his master, he wrote, and other who had served as long as he had received a pension.

“I must be upward of eighty years of my age and have been blind for many years,” he concluded. “And, notwithstanding the aid I received from the honest industry of my children, we are still very needy and in part are supported from the benevolence of our friends.”

This time, he was denied his pension because he was only a teamster and a waiter.

Jehu Grant died on Dec. 28, 1840.

This story was updated in 2022.

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