NH role in slavery needs closer look

Famously lauded by abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier in his poem “New Hampshire” and home to just a handful of slaves between 1645 and 1840, our state seems almost to stand outside the dark shadow of slavery – especially here in the capital, where it’s rare to find even a mention of a slave.

But Rep. David Watters’ bill to create a monument commemorating New Hampshire’s slaves gives us reason to look more closely at the history of slavery here – and what we find may surprise us.

Slavery in New Hampshire was concentrated mainly on the Seacoast in the 1600 and 1700s and never reached the proportions of other New England states.

But as historian Douglas Harper points out on his Slavery in the North Web site (slavenorth.com), New Hampshire quietly made a tidy profit from slavery: Because it was one of the few colonies that didn’t impose a tariff on slaves, it became a hub for slave importation.

And the culpability didn’t end there. Major slaving ships were built in Portsmouth, and New Hampshire textile factories built profits on cheap, slave-picked cotton. Perhaps most shameful, though, is the way the Live Free Or Die state turned a deaf ear to the plight of slaves in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

As Watters pointed out last week, the New Hampshire Legislature ignored a petition by Prince Whipple and a small group of other New Hampshire slaves asking for their freedom in 1779 – three years after the Declaration of Independence stated that all men are created equal. The New Hampshire Gazette published the petition, but only for its readers’ “amusement,” read a disclaimer at the top.

When Whittier published “New Hampshire,” in 1846, the state was still 11 years away from banning slavery. His enthusiasm for John P. Hale, a U.S. senator from Dover who openly opposed slavery, may have been well placed, but as historian J. Dennis Robinson explains in an article for seacoastnh.com, New Hampshire itself was probably ill deserving of his lavish praise. The state’s abolitionist society was crippled by infighting, and it was the only eastern state not to send a candidate to a Buffalo abolitionist convention in 1843.

Racial relations were nothing to be proud of here either. In 1835, when a group of abolitionists started a private, integrated school in Canaan, the townspeople responded by hitching up their oxen and dragging the school off its foundation and into the town common, where it couldn’t be used. A few years later, a suspicious fire burned it to the ground.

In her book, “Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New England, 1780-1860,”University of Kentucky professor Joanne Pope Melish argues that New England, with its free, white ideology, made important contributions to the racial tension that plagued the country for decades and is still with us today. New England abolitionists hoped not just to rid the country of slavery, she suggests, but of slaves.

Today, there are a handful of reminders of those shameful years for those who care to look for them. Historian Valerie Cunningham has pieced together a Black History Trail, showing the places on the Seacoast where Africans and their descendants lived, worked and worshipped. And writers such as Melish have invited us to take a new look at slavery in the north.

But a monument such as Watters proposes, erected in the state capital where the rights of slaves were unceremoniously dismissed some 200 years ago, would not just memorialize New Hampshire’s slaves, but force us to take responsibility for a wrong long ignored.

– Concord Monitor