Published February 12, 2021
By JAMES BENNETT
Melrose Historical Commission
Peter. Nan. John. Dinah. Cato. Samson. Zachary. Pidge. Pomp. Israel.
We know precious few of their names. They were not etched into the register of births and deaths kept by the town clerk of Malden. They were not carved onto the headstones at Bell Rock Cemetery. They instead come down to us most commonly in wills, inventoried alongside cattle, horses, and other prized possessions. These were the names of some of the enslaved people of the North End of Malden, the place that would one day become the city of Melrose. Their stolen lives and labor laid a foundation for this community and enriched many of its most prominent white families. Despite living under conditions of constant maltreatment and surveillance, the threat of violence omnipresent, without much hope for the future, they found ways to survive. They were Melrose’s first Black community, and at this late date it is time for our city to recognize their legacy in all of its immiserating complexity.
Since the 19th century, slavery in New England has been dismissed as a fringe phenomenon that was much gentler than what was found on Southern plantations. It was neither of these things, although it was different. In the South, the soil supported cash crops such as tobacco, rice, and cotton, meaning that plantation owners could exploit anywhere from a few to several hundred enslaved people at one time. These conditions gave us the popular image of American slavery, of a world of sadistic overseers and brutal slave patrols, of organized white supremacy enforcing the slave system through terror. Such conditions of mass enslavement also allowed for the survival of African culture, religion, music, and language, and for the creation of communities that could invent ways to resist white oppression.
The life of a Melrose slave was comparatively lonely and hopeless. The soil here did not support cash crops, so white families exploited at most one or two enslaved people at a time. The enslaved spent their days under the constant watch of the white people who dominated them, rarely able to confide their fears or concerns to anyone undergoing the same daily horror. Unlike in the South, opportunities to cultivate community, maintain African culture, and devise resistance were few. While there were no organized slave patrols, the comparative rarity of Black people in small New England towns such as Melrose made them more conspicuous, and members of the wider white community were ready to aid in their capture. For decades after the execution of Mark Codman in 1755 for the crime of trying to poison his master, any enslaved person from Melrose traveling over Charlestown Neck, what is today Sullivan Square, would have passed by his rotting body, as it was left there as a reminder to other enslaved people of the consequences of resisting white supremacy. Slavery in Melrose was thus by several measures different from what went on in the South, but it was by no means less oppressive.
Slavery was also quite profitable for the white people who practiced it. In a census of 1765, just under five percent of the people in the town of Malden were categorized as “negroes,” and the vast majority of them were enslaved; by way of comparison, the federal census estimates that Melrose in 2020 is about three percent Black. With about one in twenty laborers in town working for free, slave-owning farmers were able to divert the money that they would have spent on wages into investments in land, infrastructure, and farming equipment. As a result, most of the prosperous families in Melrose, among them the Lyndes, the Spragues, the Greens, and the Barretts, were also Melrose’s most prolific slave owners.
In the mid-eighteenth century, there was perhaps no more prosperous farmer in Melrose than Joseph Lynde, who lived at the house that is today 409 Lebanon Street. Just across from the house stands a little park, which contains a plaque honoring Joseph’s great-grandfather, Thomas Lynde, who was Melrose’s first recorded slave owner, willing two enslaved people named Peter and Nan to his wife Rebecca in 1671. Exactly one century later, a tax census of 1771 shows all three of Joseph’s sons, Joseph, Jabez, and Nathan, to be slave owners, making slavery an unbroken Lynde family tradition for five generations. Despite all of those long years, almost no documentary evidence survives to tell us about the lives of the enslaved—excepting two newspaper advertisements published in 1757 and 1758 on account of the brave and desperate actions of a man enslaved by the Lyndes named John.
In 1757, John was about 35 years old. We know that he had been living at the Lynde house for at least eight years, because he had been married in 1749 to an enslaved woman named Violet. Violet was enslaved to Thomas Hills, a farmer who lived over a mile away in Malden. Joseph and Violet may have met at the Malden meeting house on Sundays, where all people in the community were expected to attend religious services. Their marriage had been solemnized by the Rev. Joseph Emerson, Malden’s minister, so we know it received their masters’ approval. Yet it was cruelly restricted, for their union did not end their servitude. They continued to live apart, working on their respective masters’ properties, and they knew that any children that resulted from their brief time together would never be free.
On June 22nd, 1757, John decided he had had enough. He stepped out of the Lynde house and onto the road to Boston that was just outside the door. We know the details of his plan because Joseph Lynde published two escaped slave advertisements in a bid to get him back. In a clever ruse, John had taken some of his master’s best clothing, and according to Lynde “pretends to be a great Doctor and Surgeon, is a great Talker, ‘tho speaks but broken English.” The seeming contradiction between John being “a great talker” who “speaks but broken English” finds explanation from Lynde’s describing him as having “had the Small-Pox, and shows it by small Pits in his Nose.” In the eighteenth century, the most valuable enslaved people sold at the Boston auctions were men in the prime of life, brought from Africa, and “seasoned” on Caribbean sugar plantations for a few years both to break them of their will and expose them to Small-Pox, to which they would develop lifetime immunity. If that was John’s life history, it would explain his “broken English,” for English was not his first language.
It would also explain the high reward of twenty Spanish dollars that Lynde offered for John’s capture; by comparison, a few years later Lynde offered a reward of only three Spanish dollars for a lost horse. Aside from the land itself, there was no more valuable commodity than human life in colonial Melrose. Lynde nearly succeeded in recapturing John, as the second advertisement tells us that white people across Massachusetts had been on the look out for someone matching his description, and that he had been “seen at Brookfield…. travelling Southward.” It seems he escaped. As for his wife Violet, she would remarry in 1765, this time to another enslaved man named Jupiter. Violet would outlive slavery, dying a free woman on her own land in Malden in 1804; John’s final fate is unknown.
Violet was not the first free Black woman to live in the neighborhood. In the 1710s, Ann and Jack Welcome, a free Black couple, had made a home and raised a family of at least three children at the far eastern side of the town of Malden, close to the border of what is today Revere, near the edge of Rumney Marsh. After Jack died in 1744, the area became so associated with Ann Welcome that it would be known as “Black Ann’s Corner” up until the early 20th century. In 1755, a child of mixed race was left on Ann’s doorstep, whom she breastfed and cared for as her own for two months. In the 18th century, town governments were responsible for all provisioning of poor relief, so when the child was discovered, its future welfare fell to the Malden town meeting.
The meeting voted to send the child to what would become the east side of Melrose with a farmer named Joseph Barrett. Barrett’s house was located on what is today Lincoln Street, about half-way down the block between Porter and Upham. Barrett agreed to free the town of Malden from any financial responsibility for the child on the condition that it become his slave. As he pledged to the town meeting “I the said Joseph Barrett do promis for me and my heirs to indemnify and clear the said town from any charge that may arise upon the account of said child so long as it may be made a slave to me my heirs or to them that I or my heirs shall assign said child too.” Although left to be raised by a free Black family, the mixed-race heritage of the child defined it as a potential slave in the eyes of the town meeting, and as a valuable investment in the financial portfolio of Joseph Barrett. The town meeting voted to give Ann Welcome ten pounds old tenor for his trouble. The child never again appeared in the record.
Such written records describing Melrose slavery are taciturn; oral traditions, abundant in some other New England communities, are almost non-existent. Only one oral tradition of any substance has come down to us, through the chance survival of a letter from the 19th century antiquarian Artemas Barrett. The anecdote is both baffling and repellent, as it was framed in a vulgarly racist way that I have edited for publication here. It concerns an enslaved man’s encounter with Phineas Sprague. Sprague was the father of the Phineas Sprague who built the house at 301 West Foster Street, next to the Beebe School. The elder Sprague had occupied a house on the same spot, and then lived with his son in the new house until his death in 1805. The story relates how Sprague would write numbers in a mood of intense concentration on a chalkboard, in an attempt to make enslaved people “believe that he could find out by arithmetic any mischief they had been up to.”
Barrett related the story in a way that made the enslaved people look like “credulous” fools. In 1988, in his book Black Yankees, the scholar William D. Pierson placed this incident in the context of West African numerology. In many West African cultures, numbers have mystical meaning and they can be used to divine secrets. In this story of Phineas Sprague, what sounds like an eccentric performance was in fact something akin to what today might be called cultural appropriation. Sprague appropriated the belief systems of his enslaved people to exercise greater control over them, making them believe that he could wield magic to surveil them even when he was not present. What was passed down in oral history as a farcical racist folktale was in fact a real memory of psychological warfare waged by a master upon the enslaved.
In the early morning of April 19th, 1775, Phineas Sprague and his son would join a number of other Melrose slave owners at the great elm tree across from his house to start the long march to Concord. A plaque now marks the spot in Gooch Park where the elm once stood, which commemorates “the first battle for freedom.” For the enslaved people that the Melrose minutemen left behind on that night, freedom would have to wait. In 1781, as the War for Independence drew to a close, two successful lawsuits brought by enslaved people under the newly ratified Massachusetts Constitution led to the legal demise of slavery in Massachusetts. By the time of the first federal census in 1790, Massachusetts would be the only state to list no enslaved people.
Yet that 1790 census also witnessed the dispersion of Melrose’s first Black community. Only twenty Black people remained in the town of Malden by that year, and there were only three independent households: Violet and Jupiter and their three children, William Welcome (Ann Welcome’s bachelor son), and Cato Lynde (formerly enslaved to Nathan Lynde) and his wife Marere. The other dozen people were now servants. The demise of slavery left the formerly enslaved without money or resources, and their former masters had no desire to see them stay in the neighborhood and potentially call on public poor relief. Some of the formerly enslaved, particularly the elderly, stayed on in a state of virtual continued slavery because they had no other options. The young and able followed the road to Boston to seek better opportunities. By the time of the census of 1810 there were no black people left in the entire town of Malden, and the same would be true in 1820. The first epoch in Melrose’s Black history had drawn to a close.
But it would not be the last, as we shall see next in the next installment of this series.
The author invites readers to visit the social media pages of the Melrose Historical Commission, including Facebook and Instagram, where they can find supplementary images and text related to this story.