Another Project: Rhetoric of New England Slavery

 I have, however, deliberately avoided where possible (though it was not always possible) the hundreds of antiquarian histories of New England towns, cities, and counties, most written in the 188os and 18gos. Although they offer a rich variety of anecdotal information about the institution of slavery in New England and also about individual slaves and free persons of color, I am deeply suspicious of their rather uniformly "fond" reconstruction of relations between slaves and slaveowners. I see these products of the New England revival movement as building blocks of a kind of post-bellum revision of New England mythology, reintroducing slavery into New England history with at least one rather ahistorical purpose: to suggest to a generation of white New Englanders facing a new immigration of southern people of color and "alien"-seeming southern and eastern Europeans that an even more "alien" population in their midst had been successfully managed once before. 18 Nonetheless, where I was unable to find detailed information on an important event or practice elsewhere, I resorted to these histories or depended on other historians' use of them. (Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery, 9) --also see footnote citing Robert Fitts work