stocky, Saltonstall, though still a teenager, was aloof and proud. He was sailing aboard a ship owned by his father Gurdon, the deputy (a kind of mayor) of New London, a merchant of considerable means and the son of one of colonial Connecticut’s early governors. The family was related to the Saltonstalls, Dudleys, and Winthrops, ruling families of the Massachusetts colony since its founding. Both Dudley’s surname and Christian name were those of governors.
John Easton of Middletown was master of the vessel, and at thirty-nine he had already served as commander on slaving ships for a decade. Dudley was aboard the Africa as Easton’s right hand, and to serve as supercargo, a position in which he would watch over the ship’s supplies and the labor of the seamen, and protect his father’s interests on the voyage.
The two men, both descendants of New England’s early settlers, were sailing their fast, two-masted ship on a voyage to Africa, guiding the 110-ton vessel in a long loop across the Atlantic Ocean and down more than 3,000 miles of the lush West African coast. They were sailing to windward, and following the prevailing winds to what was often called the Windward Coast. These winds blew in a clockwise direction, and it was the most natural way to go. Though not an easy voyage—a reliable way to measure longitude was still decades away, and it was hard for mariners to know exactly where they were on the Earth’s ocean surface—it was familiar to Easton, and a learning voyage for Saltonstall. (Inside the front cover of his logbook, Saltonstall wrote the rules for figuring course and distance using a trigonometric formula that was standard for the time. He also wrote what appears to be a practice equation.)
Saltonstall and his commander were sailing to West Africa to buy slaves and then to sell them on England’s colonial islands in the Caribbean. A small number of their human cargo probably returned with them to New England. Easton and Saltonstall were part of what today we call the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century. Easton was already what the teenaged Saltonstall would become: a full participant in the system of trade that made New England rich and powerful, and made the Caribbean black.
This trade system made America not only dependent on the wealth that derived from slavery, but also a society that held slaves. The two Connecticut men were part of a history that transformed the Western Hemisphere, even as it solidified their own wealth and prosperity. The dark and terrible core of that history, one that has not been integrated into the shared stories of early New England, is told in the logbooks that Dudley Saltonstall began to keep on that January afternoon and continued to keep for three voyages made in the twenty months that followed.
Like the insect that no longer exists anywhere on Earth but is frozen in a fragment of amber, the eighty handwritten pages of Saltonstall’s logbooks offer a perfectly detailed glimpse of a now-distant past. They are an emissary from the past, proof of a past that really happened, that had material substance. The logbooks are not just an idea but a powerful form of evidence. They are a history that was lived and then lost, and is our very own.
SHADOWS ON THE WALL
We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember.
ERIC KANDEL
More than twenty years ago, scholar Arna Alexander Bontemps, son of Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps, began to explore an intriguing and troubling aspect of documents surviving from the first two centuries of Southern slavery. He found that in the early personal records of Southern slaveholders, slaves generally appear only in terms of purchases, or as laborers, as in “Mulatto Jack arrived from Fredk With 4 Beeves,” or “Colo. Bassetts Abram arrivd with Letters from his Master.”
As human beings with varied personalities, as participants in the household, as people with diverse skills, captives were rarely part of the record. Bontemps found many examples, including that of a plantation owner whose account of a fierce lightning storm that struck his mansion emphasized the fear it aroused and its awesome power, rather than the three enslaved men who were struck by the lightning and nearly killed. Slaves appeared in the record as a reflection of wealth, or as workers. Otherwise, they were a shadowy presence, “seldom unseen,” Bontemps writes, “but judged by the way in which they were most often portrayed, they were virtually invisible as subjects.” As captives, their real selves could not be lived openly.
This reality pervaded a culture where enslaved labor was already essential. Essential, and yet not seen. When I began to study New England slavery in the spring of 2002, I was baffled. Despite a wealth of books documenting the extent, character, importance, and influence of slavery in America, as well as a vast archive of original documents substantiating its nature, slavery is rarely taught in schools, and our understanding of its scope is barely rudimentary. The mainstream of American thought still does not contain a shared body of information on slavery even though the facts about American enslavement are widely available. Several years after that first spring, when I began to speak publicly about the book that had come forward from a newspaper project on slavery in the North (Complicity), I was asked the same question over and over, by audiences around the country: “Why don’t we know about this?”
I thought that something else had to be at work for this narrative failure, something that touched on shame and reluctance but was larger than those, something that was also involuntary. Decisions get made about what gets remembered, but they are not all conscious ones. Scholars cautioned me to “contextualize” slavery, but I couldn’t see what its context was. The truth I was trying to get at had a frayed, eroded quality, as if its damage had begun a long time ago.
The problem is not one of material but of memory, and not only of the history we have, but of how that history was made. What is missing from our history of slavery is the context for integrating, in a broad way, what we were thinking and how we were thinking when we made ourselves not just a nation that held slaves, but the largest slaveholding nation that had ever existed. And the questions that are right behind “Why don’t we know about this?” are as important: “Why does it matter for today, and what would such knowledge change?”
The incomplete narrative of American slavery cannot be made whole without a reframing of our early history. The black “invisibility” that Bontemps found in Southern records permeates Northern documents as well; there too, black men and women appear mainly as possessions and as workers. Essential yet held in the shadows.
Adam mowed the Little pasture before the Door & Stacked the oats.
Adm Carted 3 hhd [hogs head barrels] for a west India man from Colln Saltonstalls to Ms. Shackmaples.
The year before I began to explore the story of slavery in New England, my mother was diagnosed with dementia, an illness that causes the brain to forget what it holds, and that makes even the deeply familiar unrecognizable. As I looked for ways to help my mother, we stumbled together over the terrible terrain of her last years. There was a moment when I realized, with the force of a blow, that she would never recover, never get her memory back, never return to me and be my mother. But the story of those Connecticut slave ships and their captains, that story, I could recover.
CREATING A RECORD
In the pages of his atlas-shaped logbook, Dudley Saltonstall carefully ruled off spaces for the information he was to record every two hours. In a flowing and legible hand, he wrote the name of his ship, his commander, their home port, and their destination across the top of every set of facing pages. He noted the day, the hour, the speed at which the ship was traveling and its course, as well as the direction of the wind and the nautical miles traveled. Under “Transactions,” Saltonstall described the weather and made a few notes on what happened aboard the ship each day.
Later commissioned one of the first captains in the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War, the young ship’s officer kept track of how much food and
