Race, Redemption, and the Dorchester First Church

To Secure her Freedom: “Dorcas ye blackmore,” Race, Redemption, and the Dorchester First Church

deborah colleen mcnally

N December 1653, seventeen “brethren” from Dorchester’s I First Congregational Church in Massachusetts gathered to attend a meeting at which the fate of one of its members, a young enslaved African woman identified in church records as “Dorcas ye blackmore,” would be decided. The task before the men assembled this day was to vote on “whether they were all willing that Dorcas was to be Redeemed.” At issue was whether securing the temporal freedom of the only enslaved member of their congregation was worth their time, attention, and financial resources. A simple vote would decide her future.1 As part of their deliberations, the men worked out a plan whereby Hopestill Foster and the church’s two deacons— laymen of high status within the congregation—would travel from Dorchester to Boston and “inquire first what the magest[rate] could doe by power” to free Dorcas. If necessary, the men planned to approach one Lt. Cooke or “any other,” for that matter, who might help. In formulating this plan, the men were acting without established precedent to guide them. The earliest mention of manumitted enslaved Africans in New

I would like to thank the anonymous reader for the NEQ as well as Richard R. Johnson and the members of the Paciﬁc Northwest Early Americanists for their valuable insights and suggestions regarding this article. 1Records of the First Church at Dorchester in New England, 1636-1734 (Boston, Mass.: George H. Ellis, 1891), pp. 5, 7. The “brethren” present at the meeting included Dorchester’s minister, Richard Mather and its elder, Henry Withington.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 534 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY England dates to 1646, just seven years before the Dorchester meeting, when Theophilus Eaton, governor of the New Haven Colony, resettled his slaves, John Wham and his wife, on a farm in New Haven. But Eaton was alive and well at the time that he freed his slaves, and by 1653, Dorcas’s owner was deceased, thus the Dorchester men were attempting to free an enslaved individual whose owner was no longer living.2 Anticipating success and assuming that some kind of payment might be required, they left an ox and a cow for safe-keeping with one of their brethren, Robert Howard. In addition to the value of the livestock, if a cash payment should also be required, the men “promised” that they would “laye down for the present” whatever “sume” was required until it could be raised “from the whole church by Contribution or otherwayes.” So sure were the brethren of Dorcas’s high standing within the church and of the congregation’s willingness to dip into their own pockets to purchase her freedom and wait for reim- bursement later. One can only imagine how Dorcas felt when word reached her that the vote in support of her redemption was “afﬁrmative.” If the men were successful, the “promise” they made would be kept and would be “free,” at no charge to Dorcas, their “sister” in Christ.3 This brief but remarkable account, recorded for posterity in the Dorchester First Church records, raises a host of questions not only about this particular enslaved woman but also about the extent to which religion helped shape conversations and attitudes about race, gender, identity, and freedom during the seventeenth century in puritan New England. Who was Dor- cas and why were the clergy and lay members of Dorchester First Church so willing to pledge their time and resources to secure her freedom? What does the attempt to redeem her tell us about how white puritans viewed the status of their enslaved African sister? Did their attempt to free her mean that

2Records of the First Church at Dorchester, pp. 5, 7; On Theophilus Eaton and the Whams, see: Lorenzo Johnson Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), p. 290. 3Records of the First Church at Dorchester, pp. 5, 7; Robert D. Pierce, ed., The Records of the First Church in Boston, 1630-1868 (Boston: The Society, 1961), 1:323.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 “DORCAS YE BLACKMORE” 535 church membership ameliorated race? What did full church membership mean for this enslaved woman of African origin?4 Dorcas’s story bears telling for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that at a time when only a handful of blacks could be found in all of New England, Dorcas was one of the first enslaved Africans brought to the newly settled Massachusetts Bay Colony. She was the first black to join the Dorchester First Church, the first to join the Boston First Church, and the attempt to free her represents one of the first efforts to manumit an enslaved individual in colonial New England, the brethren’s efforts coming just twelve years after Massachusetts became the first colony in British North America to legalize the ownership of Africans and Indians in the Body of Liberties. Above all else, the story of Dorcas is the story of a life that, like other enslaved African lives in seventeenth- century New England, is badly “in need of reconstruction,” as historian Wendy Anne Warren points out.5 For too long historians have overlooked the study of slavery in seventeenth-century New England. Until recently, most scholarship has focused on the eighteenth, rather than the seventeenth century, in large part because of the difficulty of finding extant sources that speak to the lived experiences of New England’s first blacks. Until the publication of War- ren’s New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America, the most current full-length work to include substan- tive research on Africans in seventeenth-century colonial New England was more than seventy years old: Lorenzo Johnson Greene’s, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776.6

4In not capitalizing the word puritan I follow the convention of historians such as Francis J. Bremer who argues that “to understand the diversity that was puritanism is to avoid capitalizing the word (and its various forms), which implies a more concrete and definable essence than is warranted.” Francis J. Bremer, “‘To Tell What God Hath Done for Thy Soul’: Puritan Spiritual Testimonies as Admission Tests and Means of Edification,” New England Quarterly 85,no.4 (2014), pp. 625-65. 5Wendy Anne Warren, “The Cause of Her Grief”: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England,” Journal of American History 93,no.4 (2007): 1031-49. The female subject of Warren’s evocative, prize-winning article was likely brought to New England at the same time as Dorcas. 6Wendy Anne Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2015). Warren briefly mentions Dorcas

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 536 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Works that consider the intersection of race and religion during the seventeenth century are equally scarce, although the titles of several suggest they might do so. Richard A. Bailey’s Race and Redemption in Puritan New England, argues that all New Englanders created race, in part, by offering “spiritual freedoms,” such as salvation, to enslaved Africans and Native Americans while they simultaneously “ordered” these members of society as culturally, intellectually, and spiritually inferior. However, Bailey builds his case on examples and illus- trations drawn from the eighteenth rather than from the seventeenth century. Marcus W. Jernegan’s “Slavery and Conversion in the American Colonies” is useful primarily as it relates to slavery and religious conversion in the middle and southern colonies. As with Bailey, however, Jernegan’s New England is the New England of the eighteenth, not the seventeenth, century. Robert C. Twombley and Robert H. Moore’s essay, “Black Puritan: The Negro in Seventeenth-Century New England,” examines legal and economic opportunities available to enslaved Africans in the puritan commonwealth but omits any discussion of religion. Even Greene tailors his analysis of slavery and religious conversion in chapter ten toward the eighteenth century.7

and cites her as an example that there were “free people of African descent in New England,” even though Dorcas’s status as a free black cannot be definitively established (p. 139); Lorenzo Johnson Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776 (New York: Atheneum, 1969). 7Richard A. Bailey, Race and Redemption in Puritan New England (New York: Ox- ford University Press, 2011), p. 7; Marcus W. Jernegan, “Slavery and Conversion in the American Colonies,” American Historical Review, 21,no.2 (1916): 504-27;RobertC. Twombly and Robert H. Moore, “Black Puritan: The Negro in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly 24,no.2 (1967): 224-42; Greene points to Dorcas as the first black baptized in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but in the remainder of chapter ten, documentary evidence is drawn primarily from late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources. In referencing Dorcas as the first baptized black, Greene misquotes his source, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649 (ed. Richard Dunn et al. [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996]) and identifies Dorcas as belonging to the “Rev. Stoughton of Dorchester” rather than “Mr. [Israel] Stoughton,” as he is identified in Winthrop’s journal (p. 257). Green also misquotes Winthrop and refers to Dorcas as a “Negro woman” rather than as a “negro maid,” as Winthrop identifies her (p. 257). See also, Albert J. Von Frank, “John Saffin: Slavery and Racism in Colonial Massachusetts,” Early American Literature, 29,no.3 (1994): 254-72. Von Frank successfully argues that racism increased at the end of the seventeenth century concurrent with a rise in mercantilism.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 “DORCAS YE BLACKMORE” 537 This case study of Dorcas the blackmore adds to the limited scholarship on race and religion in the seventeenth century by arguing for the flexibility of racial construction during the first decades of settlement in puritan New England. Rather than ordering all Africans as culturally, intellectually, and spiritually inferior, some puritan New Englanders acted in ways that rendered race less binding. In Dorcas, they recognized their spiritual—perhaps even their intellectual and cultural—equal and instead of allowing her to remain in slavery as she moved into adulthood, the congregation of Dorchester First argued for her bodily freedom. The color of her skin—her racial difference—was noted by seventeenth-century record keepers, but skin color need not preclude legal freedom in the minds of the Dorchester First Church congregation. Puritan belief in the equality of all souls did not trump the legal status of slavery, but it did undergird and sustain the argument made by those advocating for Dorcas’s freedom. The story of Dorcas and of her Dorchester brethren may be the exception, rather than the rule, but it points to the value of visible sainthood in overriding race, determining social identity, and providing a community supportive of legal freedom, at least for a time. In all probability, Dorcas arrived in Boston on 26 February 1638, aboard the Salem-owned ship the Desire as part of its cargo of “cotton, and tobacco, and negroes.” No extant man- ifest exists to confirm definitively her presence onboard the vessel, but John Winthrop—the colony’s governor—recorded the arrival of the Desire and her cargo in his journal, providing the earliest evidence of enslaved Africans in New England. Winthrop notes the return of the ship from its seven month long voyage to the West Indies where its cargo of “negroes” was acquired on Providence Island, probably in exchange for the seventeen captive Pequot Indians held in the ship’s hold. Hav- ing captured the Pequots in a recent war, the New Englanders discovered that the Indians made poor slaves, thus the decision was made to transport a number of them to the Caribbean, where, presumably, the colony could make an advantageous trade. Dorcas and the other slaves that William Pierce, the De- sire’s captain, acquired upon arriving at Providence had come

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 538 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY to the island first via Portuguese and then Spanish traders, thus Dorcas—who was probably in her mid to late teens at the time of her acquisition by Pierce—would have passed through mul- tiple hands before arriving at her final destination in Dorch- ester. The Desire’s 1638 voyage would be the first of many profitable voyages by New England slave-trading vessels, both to the West Indies and to the African coast, so that by 1700, historians estimate that there were some 1,680 Africans in all of New England, representing just two percent of the total population: almost half, 800, residing in Massachusetts, a four-fold increase over the 200 Negroes in Massachusetts just twenty years earlier in 1680.8 Just three years after arriving in the colony, and twelve years before the Dorchester brethren met to decide her fate, Dorcas was living and working in the home of wealthy General Court representative Israel Stoughton, when she became the first slave to join the Dorchester church. On 16 April 1641, Dorcas was received into membership of the Dorchester First Church along with two men and seven other women. A hand-written list of names in the Dorchester Church records—ubiquitous in seventeenth-century church record books—recorded the event: Andrew Pitcher, Mary Brecke, the Widow Jones, Henry Brid- gram, Dorcas ye blackmore, Goody Munninges, Goody Lippen- cot, Elizabeth Craine, Mrs. Frances Burre, and Jane Wickes agreed to join “as members of the same body, by profession of faith and Repentence and taking hold of the Covenant before the Congregation.” For the first time since arriving in New England, Dorcas’s name became part of the colony’s recorded history. No longer simply part of a cargo of unnamed “negroes,” her decision to become a member of the church meant that her name would be recorded for posterity, her designation as a “blackmore” simultaneously noted.9

8Winthrop’s Journal, pp. 246, 227; On population statistics for Africans in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, see Twombly and Moore, “Black Puritan,” pp. 224-25, who estimate that in 1680, there were between 100 and 200 blacks in Mas- sachusetts; and William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro- American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 166-69. 9Records of the First Church at Dorchester, pp. 5, 2.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 “DORCAS YE BLACKMORE” 539 For the Massachusetts Bay puritans there was nothing unusual about the events of 16 April when the ten new names were added to the congregation’s membership rolls. The colony was settled, after all, for the express purpose of being a “city upon a hill,” a Bible commonwealth that would be an example to the rest of the world, but especially to England, of how to live pure Godly lives in community with other believers. For the average lay man or woman, the highest attainable status within this community was that of a full church member, and by the time that Dorcas joined the congregation in 1641,at least 176 other souls—74 men and 122 women—had preceded her into membership, similarly asserting that they were “called of God” to covenant themselves in fellowship. In this sense, the events of 16 April were common-place, familiar enough except for the fact that Dorcas was the first enslaved person known to have joined any New England congregational church.10 In joining the Dorchester congregation, Dorcas would have participated in a rigorous and lengthy process designed to en- sure that only the discernably godly, only those deemed “visible saints,” would become full church members. It was a process designed specifically to separate the wheat from the chaff, the righteous from the unrighteous. Although the particulars varied slightly from congregation to congregation, the process of joining a church, of covenanting with other believers, followed a pattern typified by the First Church at Dedham, Mas- sachusetts where, for example, a potential member was first asked to give a conversion narrative: to “declare the workings of god in his hart” and “the true workings of faith and re- pentance in his soule.” This narrative—typically lasting about fifteen minutes or so—was usually given first before a “private assembly” consisting of elders and a select group of full church members, both men and women. Following the applicant’s meeting with the private assembly, one of the ruling

10John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in Winthrop Papers, 1623-1630 (Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society, 1931), 2:282-95; Records of the First Church at Dorchester, p. 1; The next African to enter into covenant at Dorchester First was “Nullaines a Negroe,” on 10 March 1700.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 540 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY elders would next notify the entire congregation—both members and non-members alike—that the individual desired to “enter into Church-fellowship with them.” If any within the church had doubts about the moral or spiritual fitness of the potential candidate for membership, the process was halted until all such concerns had been satisfied. The potential member would next appear before the entire congregation where the elder “propounded,” or put forth, the applicant’s name to the congregation. If there were no objections, the party was asked once again to relate their conversion narrative, but this time to the entire congregation, to “make knowne . . . the work of grace upon his soule.” The conversion narrative was typically followed by a “profession of faith,” or confession, in which the applicant demonstrated their understanding of Christian doctrine. Following the narrative and profession of faith, testimony was offered on behalf of the potential member, and even at this late stage of the process an applicant could still be rejected for just cause. On the day that Dorcas gave her narrative and profession of faith, so many individuals testified about her “blame- lesse and godly Conversation, that she was admitted a member by the joynt consent of the church, with great joy to all their hearts.”11 In keeping with reformed Protestantism’s views on the equality of all souls, Dorcas joined the church as a spiritual equal, irrespective of race or gender. And despite her designation in the church records as a “blackmore,” it was understood that her eternal soul had the same value in the eyes of God as that of any other member. The eminent minister Samuel Willard expressed the puritan point of view on this subject when he

11Edmund Morgan in Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963) popularized the term “visible saint” to refer to those men and women who were accepted into membership in the Congregational church, but the term was contemporary to seventeenth-century puritan ministers such as Thomas Hooker in A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline (London: John Bellamy, 1648), pp. 16, 30; Dedham, Mass., The Early Records of the Town, ed. Don Gleason Hill (Dedham, Mass.: Printed at the Ofﬁce of the Dedham Transcript, 1886-99), 2:313-14, 6-7; Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing or News from New England . . . (London: W. E. and I. G. for Nath. Butter, 1642), pp. 5-9; New England’s First Fruits (London: Printed by R.O. and G.D. for Henry Overton, 1643), p. 10.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 “DORCAS YE BLACKMORE” 541 wrote “the Soul of a Slave is, in its nature, of as much worth, as the Soul of his Master.” As with other full church members, Dorcas’s designation as a visible saint entitled her to several beneﬁts not available to non-church members: participation in the sacraments of the Lord’s Supper, or communion, and baptism. Enhancing the sense of exclusivity shared by full church members, communion was typically offered one Sabbath morn- ing a month, but only after all non-church members had been dismissed. Only then would full members partake of the bread and wine in remembrance of Christ’s saving death on the cross. Likewise, until the adoption of the Halfway Covenant later in the century—a controversial loosening of restrictions on who could and could not be baptized—only full church members were entitled to baptism and to have their children baptized, a privilege of which Dorcas would take advantage later. As understood by the New England puritans, both sacraments were reminders of the Covenant of Grace between the believer and God. In their view, to allow non-members to participate would be blasphemous. More generally, with church attendance being required of all Bay Colony inhabitants beginning in 1646, Dorcas’s status as a full church member and her ability to take part in both sacraments placed her in an elite society within the Dorchester congregation as well as within the larger puritan society.12

12Samuel Willard, Compleat Body of Divinity, (Boston: Green and Kneeland, 1726), p. 616; On the Halfway Covenant, see Robert G. Pope, The Halfway Covenant Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969). The Halfway Covenant was a controversial innovation in church practice that permitted non-church members to have their children baptized, as long as the non- member had been baptized as a child. Although the innovation was introduced for adoption by the Cambridge Synod in 1662, it was up to individual congregations to decide if they wanted to adopt it or not. At Dorchester the congregation had not adopted the Covenant as late as 1668; on the schism in Boston First Church over the adoption of the Halfway Covenant, see Deborah Colleen McNally, “Within Patriarchy: Gender and Power in Massachusetts’s Congregational Churches 1630-1730”(PhD diss., University of Washington, 2013), chap. 4. On the Lord’s Supper and baptism, see Morgan, Visible Saints, p. 121. For the text of the 1646, law requiring attendance at public meetings, including the Lord’s days and fast and thanksgiving days, see Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of The Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1642-1649 (Boston: From the Press of William White, Printer to the Commonwealth, 1854), 2:177-78.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 542 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Even before joining the church, Dorcas’s reputation as a godly young woman preceded her. When she joined the church in 1641, Governor Winthrop commented in his journal on the ease with which she was accepted into membership as based on her knowledge of scripture and her godly character. As Winthrop notes, “A negro maid, servant to Mr. Stoughton of Dorchester, being well approved by divers years’ experience, for sound knowledge and true godliness, was received into the church and baptized.” Recording the baptism of community members in his journal was not something that Winthrop com- monly did. With the exception of noting the baptism of one of his own children and that of the Reverend John Cotton’s child, Dorcas’s baptism was the only other baptism recorded by Winthrop, signifying the signiﬁcance of the occasion.13 As Winthrop notes, she was “well approved” for her “sound knowledge and true godliness.” Clearly, at some point between her arrival in Dorchester and her acceptance into church membership, Dorcas had not only internalized church doctrine, but she had made a decision to embrace the puritan Christian- ity professed by others in her community, including her owner, Israel Stoughton. Indicative of their high status within the community, both Stoughton and his wife, Elizabeth, were founding members of the Dorchester church when it gathered in 1636. Living and working in close proximity to her owners meant that Dorcas was probably catechized along with Stoughton’s own children and included in regular family religious devo- tions consisting of prayer, scripture reading, and psalm singing. As a godly householder, Stoughton would have considered it part of his duty to lead his family—including his servants and slaves—to the meeting house for worship services, not once, but twice on the Sabbath. During these services, Dorcas would have gained knowledge of the scriptures through listening to the sermons of the minister, Richard Mather. Seated with the other women she would have participated in worshipful psalm- singing and corporate prayer and would have been present for the instructive question and answer sessions that came at the

13Winthrop’s Journal, p. 347.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 “DORCAS YE BLACKMORE” 543 end of the service. As she listened to other new members relate their own conversion narratives, she might have found comfort and ediﬁcation in the things that they said.14 Perhaps Dorcas even became convinced of her own salvation as a result of hearing someone else give their conversion narrative. As the Reverend Increase Mather noted, it sometimes happened that “...some [have] been Converted by hearing others give an Account of their Conversion!”15 As a young woman with a reputation for godliness, Dorcas may have been part of one of the informal women’s groups that gathered regularly to “pray and edify one another.” Describing a meeting of one of these groups, a young maidservant named Katherine, for example, spoke of how she turned for counsel to “an aunt” who possessed the “means of light.” This aunt prayed with the group and led them in a study of the scriptures. And even in the midst of the Antinomian Controversy, where the brilliant but outspoken Anne Hutchinson was tried and ban- ished from the colony in 1638, in part, for her involvement in leading similar mixed-sex fellowship groups, church elders, and colony leaders, such as John Winthrop, agreed that these women’s groups were permissible, provided they avoid controversial discussions about church doctrine, something best left to the clergy. In short, religious inﬂuences and instruction would have permeated Dorcas’s life, and it is not surprising that she would eventually consider the question of salvation for herself.16

14On the duty of a godly householder to his family, see Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). Until 1665, both men and women at Dorchester gave public confessions. After 1665, the church began allowing both men and women to give their relation in private after which it was read publicly before the church. 15Cotton Mather, Ecclesiastes: The Life of the Reverend & Excellent Jonathan Mitchell, a Pastor of the Church, and a Glory of the College in Cambridge, New England (Massachusetts: Printed by B. Green and J. Allen . . . , 1697), pp. 6, 8, 16-17. 16Thomas Shepard, Thomas Shepard’s Confessions, ed. George Selement and Bruce C. Woolley (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1981), p. 99; On the sanc- tioning of these women’s groups during the Antinomian controversy, see Winthrop, Journal, p. 234; On women counseling each other, see Deborah Colleen McNally, “Within Patriarchy,” pp. 51-56; On Anne Hutchinson, see Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America, 1600-1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Tra- ditions (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 38-45.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 544 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY And yet, it is important to note that while Dorcas would have been influenced by the religious culture that surrounded her and well acquainted with the religious faith of her owner, the decision to join the church as a full member would have been entirely her own. Church membership could not be required or coerced in the same way that a householder might compel church attendance or catechism from his dependents. Indeed, the decision to join a church rested with the potential member alone and was the culmination of a process that by its very nature recognized an individual’s personal power—that is the ability to make decisions based on one’s own spiritual beliefs, knowledge, and desires. Arriving at a place where one was assured of their salvation was never a given, and in a society in which nothing was more important than the visible sainthood conferred upon full church members, Dorcas attained a status not shared by all. Ironically, Dorcas joined the Dorchester congregation the same year that Massachusetts became the first colony in British North America to legalize the ownership of Africans and Indi- ans in its first legal code, the 1641 Body of Liberties. Composed of one hundred different “Liberties,” including laws pertaining to the “Liberties of Women” and “of Children,” the Body was in actuality more a bill of rights than a law code, as one scholar has noted. Not untypical of the era, laws that gave license to some resulted in a loss of liberty for others. Liberty 91,for example, part of the section pertaining to the liberties of “For- reiners and Strangers,” prohibited puritans from enslaving each other but allowed for the enslavement of three other groups of people: of captives—such as the Pequot Indians—taken in wars, of “strangers”—or non-puritans—who sold themselves, and of “strangers,” such as Dorcas, who were sold into slavery. As the Body of Liberties states, “There shall never be any bond slaverie, villinage or Captivitie amongst us unles it be lawful Captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us.”17

17For a copy of the Bay Colony’s Body of Liberties, see Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 3rd ser. (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1843),

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 “DORCAS YE BLACKMORE” 545 As befits a colony founded as a Bible commonwealth, Liberty 91 of the Body also made it clear that enslaved individuals were not prohibited from seeking salvation, being baptized, or joining a church: “these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of god established in Israell concern- ing such persons doeth morally require.” Indeed, as a people who believed that all man-made laws should be based on the laws of God as revealed in the Bible, the colony’s Body of Liberties judged it a moral requirement that all enslaved individuals should have the same “liberties and Christian usages” as those established by God for the Old Testament children of Israel and by proxy, for the Massachusetts Bay colonists. Thus Dorcas, and anyone else—such as captive Natives—who found themselves in a similar state of unfreedom, would still be at liberty to pursue church membership.18 At the same time that Liberty 91 of the Body permitted enslaved individuals the same “liberties and Christian usages” as other colonists, it also specified that conversion did not free the bound individual from legal servitude. Baptism and church membership did not change the status of the enslaved. Fearful that newly converted slaves would claim freedom on the basis of their baptism and church membership, and that owners would incur attendant financial losses, the committee of Bay Colony magistrates, ministers, and freemen who drafted the Body of Liberties employed language to prevent this from oc- curring. As Liberty 91 goes on to state, “This exempts none from servitude who shall be Judged thereto by Authortie.” Her admission to full church membership aside, Dorcas’s secular legal status remained unchanged. Her earthly body was still held in bondage, the legal property of Israel Stoughton, the man who had purchased her.19

8:216-37; On the history of the Body of Liberties, see Edgar J. McManus, Law and Liberty in Early New England: Criminal Justice and Due Process, 1620-1692 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), pp. 7-10. 18Mass. Laws and Liberties, pp. 216-37. 19On the process of the drafting the Body of Liberties, see McManus, Law and Liberty in Early New England, pp. 7-10.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 546 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Although Massachusetts was one of the ﬁrst colonies to pro- hibit converted slaves from claiming freedom on the basis of their Christianity, elsewhere the passage of similar laws was being discussed. In England, there had been a great deal of talk about whether conversion entitled a slave to freedom; some believed that Christians should not hold each other as property. In British North American between 1664 and 1706, at least six other colonies passed laws preventing slaves from claiming freedom on the grounds of conversion. In Virginia for example, a 1667 act decreed that slaves from birth must serve for life. Baptism alone could not change this status. In New England, despite the legal assurance that slaves could not claim freedom on the basis of their conversion, slave owners made surprisingly little effort to convert their bondsmen and women. Not until the end of the century would the numbers of enslaved Africans joining the church begin to increase. In Dorcas’s own Dorch- ester church, almost sixty years would pass before another enslaved person, “Nullanies a Negroe,” joined as a full church member.20 The passage of the Body of Liberties, coming as it did just months after Dorcas joined the Dorchester church, only conﬁrmed her legal status as an enslaved “stranger,” and yet for the brethren of Dorchester First Church, clearly, she was something more. Her status under the law notwithstanding, by 1653 Dorcas had become known both in New England and across the At- lantic. In a document published in London and designed to showcase early puritan efforts at converting the Indians, Dorcas is praised for witnessing to the Natives. Described as having “with teares exhorted some other of the Indians . . . to embrace Jesus Christ,” Dorcas assured them that they might be received, even as Christ had “received her.” More importantly for her future, Dorcas had become well-known to the Dorch- ester congregation, and the actions of the brethren and their intervention on her behalf can be understood in the context of several key events to occur in her life. The relative anonymity

20On attitudes toward slavery and conversion in the American colonies, see Jerne- gan, “Slavery and Conversion in the American Colonies,” pp. 504-27.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 “DORCAS YE BLACKMORE” 547 of African slaves in the extant documents makes it challeng- ing to reconstruct her life between 1641, when she joined the church, and 1653, when the men sought her freedom, but what was certain was the death of her owner, Israel Stoughton, in 1644. Stoughton was away in England at the time of his death, and his unexpected passing left the young Dorcas in legal limbo. Who owned Dorcas with Stoughton’s death and the absence of any direction regarding her status in his will? Did her ownership pass to his wife or his eldest son? Although Stoughton had taken care in drafting his will, specifying which portions of his estate were bequeathed to his children and “worthily honored wife,” Elizabeth, including “all my land upon Dorchester neck,” the “house in Dorchester towne, with the garden, orchard & yard roome,” “my wearing ring, all my plate, best downe bed, & her tapestry, coverlet, with all the best furniture,” he made no speciﬁc mention of Dorcas, or of any other slaves or servants. Following her owner’s death, the young Dorcas continued to live and work as a slave under the watchful eye of his widow, Elizabeth Stoughton. With seven children remaining in the Stoughton home, the youngest just an infant, Dorcas’s unpaid labor was still very much in demand. Dorcas could continue to attend her Dorchester church, and life would go on as before, at least for a time.21 In the eight years that passed after Israel Stoughton’s death, however, the young Dorcas eventually came of age, and by 1652, her status had changed from that of a “negro maid” to that of a mother. Again, the details are sparse, but sometime in 1652 Dorcas—who would have been around age thirty—gave birth to a son whom she named Mathew, probably after the child’s father. As a full church member, she was entitled to have her child baptized, making it more likely that Mathew would one day become a full church member. Curiously, the child’s baptism took place at the Dorchester church, but was not recorded in the Dorchester record books but in Boston First Church’s. Failing to record the baptism of a child in this

21New England’s First Fruits, p. 11; An abstract of Israel Stoughton’s will is available in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register 4 (1847-1852): 51-52.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 548 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY way was unusual and suggests several things. First, it suggests that the baptism was strictly procedural. In part, baptism of a child acted to bring that child symbolically under the watch and care of the congregation in the hope that as the young person grew to maturity, they would experience conversion and likewise become a full church member. That Mathew’s baptism was entered into the records of Boston rather than those of the Dorchester church, implies that it was the Boston congregation, rather than Dorchester, that was responsible for the spiritual nurturing of the child. Second, recording the baptism in the Boston First record books suggests that Dorcas was living in Boston at the time of her son’s birth, was known to that congregation, and was attending the Boston church on a regular basis, perhaps with the boy’s father. As stated in the Boston First Church records, “Mathew a Negro sonne to Dorcas a Negro a sister of the Church of Dorchester was baptized into the fellowship of that Church on the 12th dayofthe7th month 1652.”22 Because women came to outnumber men as full church members in the majority of New England’s seventeenth- century congregational churches, church records are full of entries recording baptisms in which the child was presented for baptism on the strength of the mother’s church membership alone. In this sense, recording Mathew’s baptism under his mother’s name would not have been unusual at all. Had Mathew’s father been a full church member of Boston First Church, the baptism would have been recorded under his name and would have taken place at Boston First, as was customary. But in 1652, non-church members were not permitted to have their children baptized; the Halfway Covenant—which would later make such baptisms possible—had not yet been proposed or enacted. The birth of another child—this time a daughter—in Boston approximately two years after Mathew’s birth lends added weight to the argument that Dorcas was indeed living in Boston

22Pierce, ed., The Records of the First Church of Boston, 1:323.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 “DORCAS YE BLACKMORE” 549 at the time that her son was born. Dorchester was, after all, just six miles south of Boston, and with no parent in full membership at Boston First, Dorcas easily could have made the return trip to Dorchester to have her son baptized at the same church that had originally welcomed her into fellowship. Un- fortunately, Dorcas’s daughter did not survive infancy, passing away before her baptism could be recorded or even conducted, suggesting that the infant died shortly after birth. Again, according to the Boston town records, “Martha a neger daughter of Matthew & Dorcas died 26th ...6th month” of 1654.Given Dorcas’s circumstances in December of 1653 when the Dorch- ester brethren met to decide her fate, she may very well have been a slave in name only. With her original owner long dead, she was living in Boston, had partnered with a man who was almost certainly of African origin, and, with whom, she had produced a child. The following year she would give birth to a second child, her daughter Martha.23 Very little can be known about Matthew, the man with whom Dorcas partnered and conceived children. If the cou- ple had been married—and it is likely that they were, given that childbirth outside of marriage constituted the sin of forni- cation for puritans—their marriage would constitute one of the ﬁrst marriages of enslaved Africans in Boston, the ﬁrst recorded marriage having taken place in 1654 between Angola and Eliza- beth, slaves of Captain Robert Keayne. Who originally brought Matthew to Boston? Was he part of the original cargo of Ne- groes who were acquired, along with Dorcas, on Providence Island in 1638? Was he one of the “two or three Negros,” ev- ery “now and then,” according to Governor Bradstreet in 1680, who were brought from Barbados and other English planta- tions after 1638 and sold for “about Twenty pounds apiece”? Regardless of how Matthew arrived in the colony, his absence in the church records indicates that he was likely one of Dor- cas’s “friends and Kindred still in their sinnes,” fellow enslaved

23Boston Births, Baptisms, Marriages, and Deaths, 1630-1699 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, City Printers, 1883), p. 47.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 550 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Africans who had not joined the church and to whom Dorcas was favorably compared.24 Did Dorcas entertain thoughts of freedom and of how it might be obtained in the years following Stoughton’s death? Did she initiate the conversation with her Dorchester brethren in 1653? Did she press the brethren to act on her behalf? Did some of her church sisters approach the men? Who owned Dorcas? Did Elizabeth Stoughton own her? If so, why not approach Stoughton about freeing her slave? Elizabeth Stoughton was still alive in 1653, and by all accounts she could have used the money. Her late husband died owing a debt to the colony, and in 1645, the General Court had ordered her to “answer the country for what her late husband stands indebted . . . to the satisfaction of the auditor.” If the men approached Stoughton or her representatives about freeing Dorcas, the record is silent. The fact that the brethren traveled to Boston—where Dorcas was living—in search of a magistrate or “any other” who might help, suggests that the power to change Dorcas’s status did not lie with Elizabeth Stoughton.25 How then was Dorcas to gain her freedom? In 1646,just seven years before the brethren met to decide her fate, Gov- ernor Theophilus Eaton of the New Haven Colony freed two of his slaves. Unlike Eaton, Israel Stoughton could not manumit Dorcas from the grave. In the earliest decades of New England’s history, a handful of other enslaved Africans were purchased speciﬁcally as indentured servants, that is, as bound laborers who would be granted their freedom after a spe- ciﬁc term of service was completed, typically six years. Had Stoughton purchased Dorcas as an indentured servant in 1638, rather than as a chattel slave, her term of service would most certainly have been completed long before 1653 when the

24On Angola and Elizabeth, see Melinde Lutz Sanborn, “Angola and Elizabeth: An African Family in the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” NEQ, 72,no.1 (1999): 119-29; James Savage, “Gleanings for New England History,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 3rd ser., (1843), 8:337; New England’s First Fruits, p.10. 25Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New En- gland, 1620-1633, 3 vols. (Boston: New England Historic and Genealogical Society, 1996), 3:1773-1775. Elizabeth Stoughton died in 1681.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 “DORCAS YE BLACKMORE” 551 brethren had found it necessary to meet. If Dorcas had lived in Rhode Island, she could have argued for her freedom on the basisofa1652 law that limited slavery to a term of ten years. But Dorcas lived in Massachusetts.26 Prevented by Massachusetts law—in Liberty 91 of the Body of Liberties—from claiming freedom on the basis of her conversion, Dorcas needed someone to advocate on her behalf. The law prevented Dorcas from claiming legal freedom on the basis of her conversion to Christianity, but nothing precluded someone else from purchasing Dorcas and then setting her free. Her identity as a full church member, as a “sister” in Christ, gave the Dorchester brethren the authority to act for her, to purchase her freedom and set her at liberty. As fellow church members, Dorcas and the brethren were “joyned . . . as members of the same body” of believers. They had a covenantal duty to care for and watch over each other, a duty that was empha- sized, in fact, in the Dorchester church covenant that obligated all who joined the church to seek the “spirituall good of each other” through “mutuall Instruction, reprehension, exhortacon, consolacon, and spiritual watchfulness.” Often disciplinary in nature, the watch and care provided to Dorcas took on a new dimension in light of her enslavement.27 Had Dorcas not been a full member of the Dorchester congregation, had she been merely an attendee, it is unlikely that the brethren would have gone to the lengths that they did to try and secure her freedom. It is also unlikely that the brethren acted out of concern over the legal status of her children, over the possibility that her children would be born enslaved. Prior to 1670, any child born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to an enslaved mother would have had grounds to claim freedom. Only after 1670, when the 1641 Body of Liberties was revised, was slavery made hereditary, following the status of the mother. Perhaps the congregation of Dorchester Church was motivated to free Dorcas by a desire to see the status of the new mother

26On the emergence of a free Negro population in New England, see Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, chap. 11. 27Records of the First Church at Dorchester, p. 1.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 552 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY match the status of her infant son. In 1653 the men of Dorch- ester Church had decided that the time was right to act on their sister’s behalf to help her secure something that she was unable to acquire on her own: her legal status as a free black woman.28 If the brethren were successful in this regard, if they were able to help Dorcas secure her freedom, their victory was never recorded by the church, and it is impossible to know with any certainty the outcome of their efforts. The sources are silent on Dorcas’s life between 1654, when Martha died, and 1676,when her name next appears in the Dorchester church records. After 1654, there were no more births, baptisms, or deaths of “neger” children recorded for Dorcas and Matthew, and Dorcas’s son, Mathew, fades from the historical record. If Dorcas remained in Boston after 1654—which seems probable given that she later joined the Boston First Church—if she continued to attend church in Boston, she did so as a non-member until 1677. By the time that Dorcas was formally “dismissed” from Dorch- ester in August of 1676, the church had long since ceased to consider her an active part of its congregation, referring to her as “being formerly a member of this Church.” Other members of the Dorchester church—white members—transferred their membership from Dorchester to Boston First between 1653 and 1676, but Dorcas’s name was not listed among them.29 Perhaps some in the Boston church had scruples about ad- mitting a “nigro,” whether enslaved or not, into membership. When “Dorcas a nigro”—now approaching middle age—was ﬁnally admitted as a member of the Boston First Church on 29 July 1677, by “Letters of Dismission” from Dorchester, she was the ﬁrst person of African ancestry to covenant with the

28On the 1670 revision to the Body of Liberties, see: George H. Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1866), p. 17. 29Included in the list of former Dorchester Church members who transferred their membership to Boston First ahead of Dorcas were Robert Howard and his wife, in 1668; Deacon John Wiswall, in 1670; Henery Mason and his wife in 1670;andAnn Leger, in 1672. Records of the First Church at Dorchester, pp. 10, 11. Both Howard and Wiswall were present at the meeting of the brethren in 1653 when the men decided whether to try and redeem Dorcas. At the same time that Wiswall was admitted into membership at the Boston First Church, he was also chosen by a unanimous vote of the church as a ruling elder.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 “DORCAS YE BLACKMORE” 553 Boston congregation. Three more years would pass before another black followed Dorcas into membership, coincidentally another woman named Dorcas: “Dorcas a black. Now Warnex,” was admitted to the church in 1680. “Jane, a Negro” joined next in 1690 followed by “Mary Browne and Sarah Negroes” who were dismissed from Sudbury in 1695. The following year, 1696, “Elanor Pallow, negro” would become the sixth black woman to covenant with Boston First since Dorcas.30 As it turned out, the 1677 entry noting Dorcas’s admittance into the Boston congregation was her last appearance in the colonial records. Her death, unfortunately, was never recorded, either in the Boston town records or in the Dorchester or Boston First Church records, as was sometimes done. It may have been that she continued to live the remainder of her life as if she were free, a de facto freedom, answering to no one for her daily comings and goings around town, continuing to witness to local Indians as she had done earlier. If she lived into the eighteenth century, it is easy to imagine that her reputation for “sound knowledge and true godliness” only increased after decades spent navigating life as a black woman in colonial Boston. If Dorcas survived, she would have witnessed a slow but steady growth in the number of enslaved Africans joining Bay area churches in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. And as the number of enslaved Africans grew more numerous in the colony after 1680, and the number of blacks joining Massachusetts’ congregational churches increased, ministers once again found it necessary to reassure anxious slave owners that slaves could not sue for a “Release from just servitude” on the grounds of their baptism.31

30Pierce, ed., The Records of the First Church of Boston, 1:74, 90, 91, 94, 95, 113.It may seem strange that another Dorcas would covenant with the Boston First Church just three years after “Dorcas ye blackmore” joined. Were it not for the different dates pertaining to both entries, one could assume the second entry for Dorcas was a duplicate. Dorcas, however, was a common enough name in the seventeenth century. At least ﬁve infant girls named Dorcas were baptized at the Dorchester church between 1689 and 1726, for example, and Boston First Church records mention three other women named Dorcas in the seventeenth century. 31At Dorchester First Church, ﬁve blacks joined between 1700 and 1726.Boston Third Church added seven between 1696 and 1728, and Cambridge First admitted six between 1698 and 1730;perThe Acts and Resolves Public and Private of the Province

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 554 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Based on the records of Dorchester and Boston First, full church membership did not make race invisible—either for Dorcas or for those who followed her into visible sainthood— despite the puritan belief in the equality of all souls. As it did on the day that she joined the church, the color of her skin identified and set Dorcas apart for the remainder of her life, both at Dorchester and later at Boston First. Referred to as both “Dorcas a Negro” and “Dorcas ye blackmore,” it was the unsettling reality of her enslaved condition that precipitated the events of December 1653. The importance of her status within the church, however, as a “sister” in Christ justified one early attempt to render race less binding. Significantly, the only time that Dorcas is mentioned anywhere in the colonial records without an accompanying racial descriptor is in the church entry recording the meeting at which the brethren voted on “whether they were all willing that Dorcas was to be Redeemed,” not “Dorcas ye neger,” or Dorcas the blackmore, just Dorcas. On the day that the brethren voted to redeem her, they saw Dorcas as simply, Dorcas, their sister in Christ.32 By any stretch of the imagination, Dorcas was an extraordi- nary individual. Just two years after joining the church—still only in her late teens or early twenties—she was already being touted in England for her “competent measure of knowledge in the mysteries of God.” And while the congregation of Dorchester First Church was not opposed to slaveholding, as evidenced by their willingness to welcome this enslaved “stranger” into visible sainthood in 1641, as time went on, there was something deeply troubling about Dorcas’s ongoing state of legal unfreedom, about the conflation of Christianity and slavery that she represented. Based on their vote in support of Dorcas’s redemption, the brethren of Dorchester did not share the same sentiments as their Anglican slaveholding neighbors

of the Massachusetts Bay (Boston: Wright and Potter Printing Company, 1892), 2:537, in 1694 a group of ministers meeting in Boston presented the General Court with a petition requesting the passage of a bill that speciﬁcally denied slaves the right to sue for freedom on the basis of their conversion, but there is no evidence to indicate that the bill was ever passed into law. 32Records of the First Church at Dorchester, pp. 7, 12, author’s emphasis.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021 “DORCAS YE BLACKMORE” 555 in Virginia who, according to historian Rebecca Anne Goetz, “believed that enslaved Africans were doomed to [permanent] slavery and heathenism.” For the congregation of Dorchester First Church, Dorcas was indeed their spiritual, perhaps even their intellectual and cultural, equal. She was worth their in- vestment of time and money. She was their sister in Christ. For Dorcas, the decision to become a visible saint and to align herself with this particular community of faith proved to be a valuable asset in trying to obtain something that she was unable to obtain on her own, her legal freedom, something that she may not have even dreamed possible when she arrived in Boston in 1638 as part of a cargo of “cotton, and tobacco, and [unnamed] negroes.”33

33New England’s First Fruits, p. 10; Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), p. 3;Winthrop,The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649, pp. 246, 227.

Deborah McNally received her PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle where she is a lecturer in history. She is currently working on a book which examines the relationship between puritan New England’s religious culture and attitudes about gender, race, identity, and freedom during the seventeenth century.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00563 by guest on 30 September 2021