Reflections from researcher and guest blogger Tim Hastings, PhD Candidate in History at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst

 

Because of a generous fellowship from Historic Deerfield (HD), I was able to spend several weeks poring over the collections in the Memorial Libraries (a library jointly administered with the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association [PVMA]) to support research for my dissertation, “New Hampshire’s Atlantic World: Slavery, Freedom, and Community, 1645 – 1783.” While in Deerfield, I was particularly interested in trying to understand the broader connections within the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts and what would become New Hampshire — the majority of present-day southwestern New Hampshire was part of Massachusetts until the second half of the 1700s — and how slavery developed across this region. I was also interested in examining how Euro-Americans, particularly enslavers, thought about slavery and enslaved people. That’s where the Burke’s extensive collection of sermons came in useful.

 

The PVMA houses hundreds of sermons from Deerfield-based ministers, but, as I learned, the one most obviously relevant to my research was at the Burke. Many of the ministers in Deerfield had slaves, as Historic Deerfield’s Witness Stones Project can attest. Reverend Jonathan Ashley (1712 – 1780) — who had enslaved people — is unusual, however, because we have evidence that he delivered a sermon specifically to Deerfield’s enslaved community in January 1749/50. I had read a transcription of the sermon in Robert Romer’s Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, which he had from an 1867 edition of The Historical Magazine and Notes and Queries concerning the Antiquities, History and Biography of America, the authors of which, apparently, had access to Ashley’s sermon. George Sheldon also may have had access to this sermon, as he discussed it in his History of Deerfield.[1] But I wanted to consult the original for myself. This proved more difficult than I’d anticipated. It was not in the PVMA’s Ashley Family Papers with Reverend Ashley’s other sermons, nor was it at the American Antiquarian Society, which also houses a handful of his sermons. A footnote in Romer’s book, however, indicated that the original may be at the Union Theological Seminary — now the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary. And so it is, among the Jonathan Ashley sermon collection.

 

The Burke’s Caro Bratnober helpfully sent me scans of the original, which did not differ much from the transcriptions. The most significant may be just below the date in which the transcription reads, “Preached on an evening Lecture to the Negroes” and the original reads, “preached on an evening Lecture to the Negros.” The latter spelling ‘Negros’ is more consistent with mid-eighteenth-century convention.

 

The most striking aspect of the sermon is that Ashley argues that “Spiritual liberty is not inconsistent with a State of Servitude — men may serve their masters, and yet be free from the law of sin and death, and be free to serve X [Christ].” Slaves, then, can be Christ’s “freemen,” and among the ways to do so is to “be contented with your State & Condition in the world and not murmur and complain of what God orders for you.” While justifying enslavement by preaching eternal freedom may seem contradictory, the most contradictory aspect for me is not religious or philosophical but is how the enslavers of Deerfield reconcile their captivity of Africans with their and their community’s experience with captivity at the hands of Indigenous people. The people of Deerfield had extensive experience with being captivated by Native Americans, particularly the 1704 raid in which hundreds were taken to Canada, the memory of which suffuses so much of their history.

 

Reverend Jonathan Ashley’s sermon will be a vital piece of evidence as I continue researching slavery in the Connecticut River Valley of New Hampshire and Massachusetts because it has raised several questions. Were Ashley’s ideas shared with others, both minsters and non-ministers? What is the relationship — or difference — between Native American captivity, freedom, slavery, and religion? -TH

 

[1] Robert H. Romer, Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts (Florence, MA: Levellers Press, 2009), 240-44; The Historical Magazine and Notes and Queries concerning the Antiquities, History and Biography of America, 2nd ser., 1 (1867): 142–43; George Sheldon, A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts, vol. 2 (1895–96), 901-3.