Ten Hills Farm
The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North
-
- $41.99
-
- $41.99
Publisher Description
The untold story of how colonial New England was built on the Atlantic slave trade
Ten Hills Farm tells the powerful saga of five generations of slave owners in colonial New England. Settled in 1630 by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Ten Hills Farm, a six-hundred-acre estate just north of Boston, passed from the Winthrops to the Ushers, to the Royalls—all prominent dynasties tied to the Native American and Atlantic slave trades. In this mesmerizing narrative, C. S. Manegold exposes how the fortunes of these families—and the fate of Ten Hills Farm—were bound to America’s most tragic and tainted legacy.
Manegold follows the compelling tale from the early seventeenth to the early twenty-first century, from New England, through the South, to the sprawling slave plantations of the Caribbean. John Winthrop, famous for envisioning his "city on the hill" and lauded as a paragon of justice, owned slaves on that ground and passed the first law in North America condoning slavery. Each successive owner of Ten Hills Farm—from John Usher, who was born into money, to Isaac Royall, who began as a humble carpenter’s son and made his fortune in Antigua—would depend upon slavery’s profits until the 1780s, when Massachusetts abolished the practice. In time, the land became a city, its questionable past discreetly buried, until now.
Challenging received ideas about America and the Atlantic world, Ten Hills Farm digs deep to bring the story of slavery in the North full circle—from concealment to recovery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Manegold (In Glory's Shadow) centers her study of slavery in the North on Ten Hills Farm, a 600-acre estate north of Boston, passed down through five generations of powerful slave-owning dynasties. Famous figures defend and transform Ten Hills, beginning with Manegold's epitomic "Puritan," John Winthrop, founder of the farm and governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his son, John Jr. The Puritan is followed by William Ryall, "the Immigrant," whose heirs Isaac Royall and Isaac Jr. morph into "Master" and "Benefactor" of Harvard, respectively. Their domestic lives and commercial dealings form the scaffold of Manegold's "forgotten history" of the tangled bond, "stitched with the skins of slavery and blown by the winds of greed," between American slavery and American wealth. Tightly focused on the Ten Hills Farm connection, Manegold conveys a lively depiction of New England social, cultural and political history peppered with jolting reminders that what may have been forgotten, nevertheless remains. Manegold's thoughtfully researched and eminently readable biography of this piece of land will allow no one to "remain unaware of the North's extensive links to slavery and the slave trade."
