For Adam's Sake
A Family Saga in Colonial New England
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the New England Historical Association’s James P. Hanlan Book Award
Winner the Association for the Study of Connecticut History’s Homer D. Babbidge Jr. Award
“Incomparably vivid . . . as enthralling a portrait of family life [in colonial New England] as we are likely to have.”—Wall Street Journal
In the tradition of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s classic, A Midwife’s Tale, comes this groundbreaking narrative by one of America’s most promising colonial historians. Joshua Hempstead was a well-respected farmer and tradesman in New London, Connecticut. As his remarkable diary—kept from 1711 until 1758—reveals, he was also a slave owner who owned Adam Jackson for over thirty years. In this engrossing narrative of family life and the slave experience in the colonial North, Allegra di Bonaventura describes the complexity of this master/slave relationship and traces the intertwining stories of two families until the eve of the Revolution. Slavery is often left out of our collective memory of New England’s history, but it was hugely impactful on the central unit of colonial life: the family. In every corner, the lines between slavery and freedom were blurred as families across the social spectrum fought to survive. In this enlightening study, a new portrait of an era emerges.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When the subject of slavery arises, colonial New England rarely comes to mind, but di Bonaventura, the assistant dean at the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, shows in this gripping dual biography that the institution has a rich history in the region. Di Bonaventura details New London, Conn., shipwright Joshua Hempstead's (1678 1758) apprenticeship and marriage, and the early years of his career as he set up shop and put down roots. The account draws from the shipwright's near-daily diary entries. Meanwhile nearby, Adam Jackson grows up a slave under the Foxes, where in addition to working on the family farm six days a week, he is exposed to religious teachings and sobering reminders of the discrepancy between slaves and free men. After Hempstead's wife dies, the patriarch is forced to work tirelessly to raise his children and maintain his household. But a break comes when his role as executor of the Fox estate allows him to purchase Jackson. Hempstead, whom townsfolk regard as a "fair and honest" man, portrays his new servant as hardworking and constant, and their relationship as rendered in writing by the master's own hand sheds light on both men, their town, and their moment in history. But despite Hempstead's respect for Jackson, di Bonaventura insists that the former's diary is still primarily "a chronicle of Adam's objectification." 20 illus.
