given birth to a child she called Jane after her own mother, and that the child remained the property of Joseph Peck Jr.
During the nine years that Richard Lord Jr., a justice of the peace for New London County, owned Temperance and her family, Rev. Jonathan Parsons baptized Oxford and three of the couple’s five children, including infant Joel, in February 1734/5. Six months later Judge Lord sold the two adults, both age twenty-nine, together with Joel, age seven months, “all sound and in good health to the best of my knowledge,” for £180. The deed of sale to John Bulkley (1705–1753), the son of Colchester’s minister and also a justice of the peace, confirmed Richard Lord’s “good right, full power, and lawful authority to sell said man, woman and child, as servants, during the term of their natural lives.” It also obligated him and his heirs forever to defend Oxford, Temperance, and Joel as Judge Bulkley’s “slaves against all … endeavors of said slaves to free themselves.” The couple’s four older children, born into hereditary slavery, remained the property of Judge Richard Lord in Lyme.
The three-year-old “molato” child named Jane sold by Joseph Peck Jr. for £25 may have been the daughter of his enslaved servant Temperance.
The map that appeared in Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados in 1657 included illustrative vignettes showing English planters hunting wild boars and chasing runaway slaves.
Enslaved people served other “consequential families” in town. A week before Parsons’s ordination in 1731, Renold Marvin (1698–1761), later a church deacon, purchased from New London merchant John Bradick (1675–1733), then living in Lyme, a “Negro boy” named Caesar, about fifteen years of age, to be held as a “servant slave” for the term of his natural life. The deed of sale, witnessed by Joseph Peck Jr., was entered in the land records. Marvin’s “Negro woman servant” Chloe died in 1748.
After Rev. Parsons’s enslaved child servant Cato, age ten, died in 1734, the minister baptized his maidservant Phillis six years later. He also baptized Lucy, servant of David Deming (1681–1745/6), a retired minister living in Lyme who had assisted “in preaching in times past.” Parsons may have acquired Cato and Phillis from his father-in-law Judge John Griswold (1690–1761), a son of Matthew Griswold Jr., and described as a man of “great wealth.” Judge Griswold’s estate inventory after his death in 1761 listed among other property a “Negro girl” named Phillis. The deeds to two “Negro” men “sold and delivered to him during his life” were found among his papers. A family history states that in all probability those were “only a representation of his household-slaves.”
Rev. George Griswold (1692–1761), also a son of Matthew Griswold Jr. and the founding minister in Lyme’s second parish, purchased a servant in New London in 1730. The bill of sale noted that he paid £80 “current money of New England” to New London merchant and ship captain Joseph Coit (1698–1787), who sold “unto the said Mr. George Griswold, in plain and open market in New London … a Negro woman called or known by the name of Cornelia … for and during her natural life.”
Bristo, the servant of Rev. George Beckwith (1703–1794), the founding minister in Lyme’s third parish, became involved in May 1756 in an extended court case following an accusation that he sexually assaulted a white woman “in a bye and secret place.” The Superior Court in New London sentenced Bristo “to suffer the pains of death,” but “soon after said condemnation” the alleged victim, Hannah Beebe, “openly and freely declared said Bristo to be innocent of said crime and that her said complaint was wholly false and groundless.” The court overturned the conviction in November and released Bristo from the county jail. Two decades later, in 1777, Beckwith advertised in the Connecticut Gazette for the return of London, “a runaway Negro man, age about 25.”
Unlike Lyme’s ministers, Rev. James Noyes in Stonington acquired native captives as servants. In October 1676 he wrote to colonial official John Allyn (1631–1696) detailing his “considerable expense, in powder & lead & provisions & tobacco,” while serving the previous year as a chaplain in King Philip’s War. He noted that “the worshipful John Mason” (1600–1672) knew something of his “constant pains and charge” and had already sent him “a young girl of 14 years of age,” along with “her child of 5 years of age” and the girl’s mother, “an old woman that [was] sick.” James Noyes had also received a forty-year-old man whose limbs had been lame for two years and “would do [him] no good.” He requested instead “a young man & woman.”
Seeking assurances that the captives already sent, if they “proved a pest to us,” could be sold “to [the] English,” or some other way be found “to rid our hands of them,” Stonington’s minister asked for “a good young lad of about 16 years of age.” His letter advised that he “knew of some that could do [him] service.” Among the young males who moved at night from wigwam to wigwam to avoid being sold in Barbados, a suitable servant could be found.
CHAPTER NINE
A Dark House
After Rev. Moses Noyes died in November 1729, Saybrook’s minister delivered a eulogy in Lyme’s meetinghouse. He offered not only praise for a learned teacher and valued friend but also warnings that ongoing controversy in the parish could erupt into open strife.
I must now offer a word to this Church & Society, you have lost an excellent and eminent pastor, What shall I say?… His doctrine once distilled as the dew and the rain, but now you will see him and hear him no more. This bereaved flock surely mourns, his study mourns, his very books mourn, as it were, leaving none so able to look into them; his family mourns, his pulpit mourns, this is a dark house and desk now. You must allow me to share with you in tears.
When Rev. Azariah Mather delivered a sermon “occasioned by the decease of the Reverend Mr. Moses Noyes,” he offered words of consolation from the pulpit to the “bereaved flock” in Lyme’s meetinghouse. The “eminent pastor” who had served the town for sixty-three years would be heard no more. “This is a dark house and desk now,” Saybrook’s minister, age forty-three, lamented. He had viewed Moses Noyes as both a mentor and a father, he wrote in his Discourse Concerning the Death of the Righteous, and his remarks reflected his personal experience.
The printed version of the funeral sermon in 1731 opened with Mather’s note of condolence to Moses Noyes Jr.: “Sir, At the instance of many & your solicitation in particular, I have adventured to let come forth to the light some things, delivered upon the death of your deceased & excellent parent.” While the Discourse offered lofty praise for the elder Noyes’s character, learning, and godliness, it also warned that “sparks of contention” in the parish were “ready to break out into a flame.”
To preserve Rev. Moses Noyes’s gravestone, church members removed it from Duck River Cemetery in 2007 and substituted a replica. Today a glass case in the church fellowship hall protects the original monument.
The choice of a successor loomed over the “dark house” when Mather brought the sparks of contention into the light. Concerned with discord among church members, he made no reference
