Connecticut

By: Paul Finkelman, David Quigley

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Connecticut

Slavery appeared early in the history of colonial Connecticut. Records indicate that in 1639 an enslaved African was killed by his Dutch owner in Hartford. Unlike Massachusetts and Rhode Island, however, Connecticut conducted its colonial slave trade with merchants and sailors playing only minor roles.

Connecticut's African American population clustered in a few port towns. Almost one-half of all blacks in the colony in 1774 lived in the coastal counties of New London and Fairfield. In that year 49 percent of Connecticut blacks were under the age of twenty, a substantially lower percentage than that of the colony's white community. Across New England, colonial African Americans had low birth rates.

Connecticut stood apart from the rest of the New England colonies in the intensity of its restrictions on the free black community. In 1718 the colonial assembly passed a law denying blacks the right to buy land and enacted legislation prohibiting free blacks from living in the colony's towns. Local jurisdictions were directed to enforce the laws but seemingly never did so. Nevertheless, the laws remained on Connecticut's books throughout the colonial period.

The complexity of free black life in late-eighteenthcentury Connecticut is illuminated in the life of Venture Smith. Born in West Africa in 1729, Smith had been brought in slavery to southern New England. He finally gained his freedom in the 1760s and eventually earned enough money to purchase the freedom of his wife and children, to establish several businesses, and to amass more than a hundred acres of property. Settling in East Haddam, Connecticut, Smith took advantage of the freedoms of life on the state's coast but eloquently wrote about the discriminations he and his family faced. His 1798 memoir was published in New Haven and was read by nineteenth-century New Englanders as a classic autobiography of a self-made man.

Before the Revolution blacks commonly served in Connecticut's militia, with at least twenty-five companies that fought in the French and Indian War containing African Americans. Similarly blacks served in Connecticut units when the Revolution began, although not as extensively as in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In 1777 the legislature allowed men to provide substitutes—including slaves—to fulfill their military service requirement. The slaves would then become free. To further encourage both manumission and enlistments, the legislature provided that masters would not be responsible for the future maintenance of any slaves they manumitted for military service. By the end of the war almost every sizable town in the state had provided black soldiers.

In the wake of the American Revolution, African American demands for freedom intensified, and white Connecticut citizens debated the state's commitment to a system of slavery. Connecticut joined neighboring Rhode Island in adopting a gradual emancipation statute in 1784. All children born after 1 March of that year were not slaves for life but were required to work for twenty-five years for their mothers' owners. This provision meant that slaves can be found in Connecticut census records well into the nineteenth century. At the same time, the gradual abolition act spurred private manumissions. In 1790 about half of the state's 5,572 blacks were slaves, but by 1800 only about 900 of the 6,281 blacks in the state were slaves. The 1810 census found only 310 slaves in the state. In 1840 there were just 17 enslaved blacks in the state, and they would all become free through a statute in 1848.

Even as the rest of New England committed to multiracial citizenship in the early nineteenth century, Connecticut pursued a different route and moved toward establishing second-class citizenship. In 1818 the state was one of the first to rewrite its original eighteenth-century constitution. Republicans pushed hard for a more democratic suffrage clause. Local Federalists had managed to maintain strict property qualifications since the American Revolution. These elitists lost ground in the second decade of the nineteenth century because of their opposition to the War of 1812 and because poor veterans were clamoring for political rights. In addition, some reformers suggested that expanded voting rights would convince some of the state's young men not to migrate westward. The 1818 Connecticut Constitutional Convention voted to remove existing property qualifications and at the same time to insert the word white in the new elections clause. As a result, every white male citizen could vote but even blacks with property were barred from voting. In the next two decades most other northern states followed Connecticut's lead, linking the empowerment of poor whites with some form of African American disfranchisement.

At the beginning of the Jacksonian era Connecticut showed little sympathy for the 8,000 or so blacks in the state. In 1832 Prudence Crandall, a Quaker opponent of slavery, allowed the daughter of a prosperous black farmer to enroll in her school in Canterbury. Whites immediately boycotted the school, and Crandall responded by turning her enterprise into a boarding school for African American females. Residents of Canterbury not only boycotted her efforts, but vandalized the school and put manure in Crandall's well, while merchants refused to sell her food and other goods. Meanwhile in May 1833 the Connecticut legislature, at the request of Andrew Judson, a local attorney, passed a law making it a crime to run a boarding school for blacks who came from other states. Crandall defiantly ignored the law and Judson, who was now the county attorney, successfully prosecuted her. In 1834 the state Supreme Court dismissed the charge on a technicality.

Within a few years there was a sea change in Connecticut's treatment of blacks. In 1838 the legislature repealed the anti-Crandall law. In 1837 the state Supreme Court held in Jackson v. Bulloch that slaves brought into Connecticut by their masters became immediately free. A year later, in addition to repealing the law used to prosecute Prudence Crandall, the legislature passed a strong personal liberty law, guaranteeing the right of a jury trial for anyone seized as a fugitive slave. In a mere five years Connecticut had gone from opposing blacks coming into the state merely for an education, to protecting the liberty of any black brought into the state, as well as anyone claimed as a fugitive.

A year later one of the most dramatic slavery-related cases arose in the Nutmeg State. In August 1839 the United States Coast Guard brought the ship Amistad to New Haven, Connecticut. On board were thirty-nine Africans who had been illegally imported into Cuba and purchased by Montez and Ruiz, who were also on the ship. Montez and Ruiz were taking their newly purchased slaves by ship to another part of Cuba when they revolted and eventually the ship ended up in Long Island Sound. Once in New Haven Connecticut abolitionists rallied to the cause of the “Amistads,” as the Africans were called. Their main attorney was Roger S. Baldwin, who came from a distinguished Connecticut family and would later serve as governor and U.S. senator. Yale professors worked with the Africans to discover what language they spoke (Mende) and to find someone who could help communicate with them. Meanwhile, Ruiz and Montez claimed them as slaves and the Spanish government wanted them returned to be tried for killing the ship captain and others during their revolt. The status of the Amistads was first determined by Andrew T. Judson, who had prosecuted Prudence Crandall earlier in the decade and had since become a U.S. district judge. To the surprise of President Van Buren, and the delight of the antislavery community, Judson ruled the Amistads were illegally taken from Africa and should be returned to Africa. The case would eventually go to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Baldwin would be joined by former president John Quincy Adams in successfully arguing for the freedom of the Africans. They would remain in Connecticut until 1842, when they were finally returned to Africa. This case helped transform Connecticut into strong antislavery state. In 1844 the legislature passed a new personal liberty law, which essentially withdrew all state support for the return of fugitive slaves. And in 1854 passed another law that further distanced the state from the support (in any form) of slavery. During this period a number of black abolitionists lived and worked in the state, including Reverend James W. C. Pennington. In the 1850s Republicans in the state attempted to give blacks the vote, but could only get their legislation through one house of the legislature.

The black population of Connecticut remained stable throughout the first half of the century, growing from 5,600 in 1790 to 7,700 in 1850. At the beginning of the Civil War there were approximately 8,600 blacks in the state; from this population, plus some volunteers from other states, Connecticut organized two black regiments who served in the War, the Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth Connecticut Infantry. Both regiments saw action in Virginia in the last year and a half of the war. The Twenty-ninth Connecticut was the first U.S. Army unit to enter Richmond when the Confederates evacuated the city. After the war, in 1868, blacks successfully agitated for an end to all segregated education in the state. The leader of this movement was James Ralston, who was the Grand Master of the Prince Hall Masons. Blacks remained active in Republican Party politics for the rest of the century as their population grew to 12,000 in 1890 and 15,000 by 1900. In the late nineteenth century B. Rollin Bowser was appointed U.S. Consul General to Sierra Leone, as reward for helping to turn out the black vote for Republicans in Connecticut. Another significant African American in the state was the Hartford painter Charles Porter, who had the patronage of the city's most famous resident, Mark Twain.

With only 1.7 percent of the state's population, blacks had relatively little influence in politics or public life, though the state had no formal laws that segregated blacks or discriminated against them, and some African Americans worked for large white companies, especially in the insurance industry. Generally, however, blacks in late nineteenth century Connecticut were economically and politically on the periphery of the state. In the 1880s blacks in Connecticut had their own national guard units, but, reflecting the growing segregation in the nation, in 1896 the last black company was disbanded. There was no formal introduction of segregation in the Connecticut national guard, but the guard remained entirely white until well into the next century.

See also American Revolution; Amistad; Autobiography; Civil Rights; Discrimination; Free African Americans to 1828; Gradual Emancipation; Laws and Legislation; Massachusetts; Rhode Island; Slavery: Northeast; Smith, Venture; Voting Rights;and War of 1812.

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