Westport in Brief!
EverythingWestport.com
Sunday, February 7, 2016
photos/EverythingWestport.com except as
noted
Exploring the evidence of slavery in
Westport and Little Compton presented by Marjory O’Toole.
WAHTF
announces qualified applicant for HOPP grant.
|
Exploring
the evidence of slavery in Westport and Little Compton presented by Marjory
O’Toole. Westport Historical Society's Winter
History Forum continues with an informal historical discussion exploring the
evidence of slavery in Westport and Little Compton with Marjory O’Toole.
“Westport
boy was arrested soon after Mr. Benjamin Howard’s robbery and murder, and
confessed to helping a white boy dispose of the body after the other had done
the crime. Later admitting to committing the murder himself, he was speedily
convicted of the crime in a New Bedford courthouse. But was he really guilty! EverythingWestport.com Thursday, February 4, 2016
By Robert Barboza Special correspondent to EverythingWestport.com One
line in an old will has led Little Compton Historical Society executive
director, Marjory O’Toole on a multi-year search for the truth about race
relations and the impact of slavery on her town and surrounding communities
in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Many
of her findings on the real stories left out of “sanitized” local histories
detailing the treatment of blacks, Native Americans and indentured servants
in area towns were aired on February 4th at a lecture presented by the
neighboring Westport Historical Society at the historic Paquachuck
Inn at Westport Point.
Inset: Lecturer and author Marjory
O’Toole is a lifelong resident of Little Compton who fondly remembers trips
to Adamsville with her grandmother to buy candy at Simmons’ Store. Today she
lives a few miles away from the village with her husband and three children.
O’Toole is Managing Director of the Little Compton Historical Society.
Submitted photo. The
local history of slave ownership and the common practice of buying indentured
servants dates back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s earliest days, and is a
story we know only “bits and pieces” about, O’Toole noted, thanks to the
white men who kept early records and wrote histories that largely ignored
people of color, slaves, and “bound” servants of all races. The
story of O’Toole’s research began when she found a reference in prominent
early Little Compton resident Thomas Church’s will to the family’s options
for his slave Jane – “If Jane Should Want to be Sold” after his death. “He
gave her the choice of whether she wanted to be sold to another white family,
or not,” O’Toole said; the curious consideration made the historian
determined to find out more. O’Toole
found that Jane chose to stay with the family,
married another slave named Prince Bailey, and ended up living in Dighton.
She also discovered that researching other old wills, town records, and other
primary documents from the colonial era to the Civil War gave a clearer
picture of slavery and indentured servitude than those “sanitized” local
histories and genealogies. The
shifting boundaries of Little Compton, Tiverton, Westport, and Dartmouth
through the years makes many of the stories about buying and selling slaves
and indentured servants intertwine, the lecturer noted. The Acoaxet section
of Westport was once part of Little Compton, and Little Compton was
originally part of Old Dartmouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony before
becoming part of Rhode Island, according to the historian. No
matter what side of what boundary you lived on, everyday life for black
slaves, Native Americans, and indentured servants of any color in early New
England was difficult and demeaning, O’Toole explained. Many Indian men were
sold into slavery in other countries after King Philip’s War (1675-76), and
the colony sold many Native American women and children into indentured
service after the conflict. Importation
of slaves into New England and other colonies soon followed, with Rhode
Island being one of the most active partners in the growing international
slave trade. Nearby Newport was the region’s busiest slave port, and the
slave trade played an important part in the local economy, O’Toole said. The
local economy was based on the “triangle trade” that brought slaves from
Africa to West Indies sugar plantations, producing the molasses regularly
shipped to New England’s many rum distilleries. Local fishermen and farmers
sent salted fish and meats to the West Indies to feed slaves, O’Toole
explained, and shipped the rum distilled in New England to Africa to trade
for new slaves to keep the plantation system going. Local
histories often downplayed early family involvement in the slave trade, and
seldom mentioned slave ownership, O’Toole said. For that reason, she turned
to letters, probate records of local men, and other primary sources to find
out the true facts about slavery and indentures in this corner of New
England. Early
accounts from Little Compton, for example, suggest about 45 black and Indian
slaves or bound servants were living in Little Compton from colonial times to
the mid-19th century. With a thorough examination of town clerk’s
records, census data, and other documents, however, she found evidence that
actually about 250 enslaved and forcibly indentured people were in the town
at some time before the Civil War ended all slave ownership in America, she
said. Real
People, Real History Here
are some of the real people O’Toole has researched and written about during
her many years of looking into local records on slave owners and those buying
indentured servants for cheap labor:. Fred Burley is mentioned in some local
histories as a runaway slave who joined a nearby Indian tribe and became the
band’s chief. Not true, said O’Toole, who found that Burley was a slave in
North Carolina plantation run by some Little Compton men, and was brought here
to serve the Richmond family. While he did run away from his owners at one
point, he ended up working locally as a farm laborer, she reported. Primus Collins, listed in town history as
the first free black man to vote in Little Compton, was freed from youthful
slavery in Newport and came here as an indentured servant, O’Toole said. He
was later able to buy a farm and live as a free man, becoming successful
enough to become the first “Black Governor of Rhode Island, an honorary
title,” she reported.
Inset: Little Compton’s Lucy Collins
appears to have been cheated out of her inheritance, and finished out her life as a servant. Submitted photo By
contrast was the early opposition of slavery by area Quakers, who often
helped runaway slaves from Rhode Island escape to Massachusetts, where a 1783
court decision had made slavery illegal. O’Toole found no records of Little
Compton Quakers owning slaves, she said, but the practice was common in
Westport and other parts of Old Dartmouth. O’Toole
cited the case of Dartmouth slaveholder Abigail Allen, temporarily
cast out of her Quaker congregation in 1711 for allowing her slave Jeremiah
to be beaten so badly that he died soon after. She was not charged with a
crime, and was allowed back in the congregation after an apology for the
brutal act that did not seem very sincere, the historian said. Within
the next generation or two, New Bedford Quakers would become famous for
harboring runaway slaves from the slave-hunters seeking to recapture them for
their owners. “Massachusetts became a haven for people trying to escape
slavery,” O’Toole noted. Many
Quakers were very tolerant of free blacks, allowing their slaves to learn
trades and buy their freedom, or worship in their meetinghouses… like Paul
Cuffe of Westport, the son of a freed black Inset: Paul Cuffe
of Westport. Picture courtesy Westport
Historical Society. In her
research into the records of Nathaniel Briggs, “one of the most notorious”
slave traders in Rhode Island, she found 1776 entries listing Cuffe and local Wampanoag David Lake being paid to load
ships in Tiverton with food bound for the slave plantations in the West
Indies. So much of the maritime economy of these parts was tied to the slave
trade, it was hard to avoid the contact, she suggested. Another
example was Little Compton’s Joseph Grinnell, a white former
indentured servant, who as a youth helped three runaway slaves from Rhode
Island get to New Bedford to escape Newport’s sheriff, who was in hot
pursuit. As an adult, though, Grinnell would later proudly sail on a number
of slave-trading ships without a second thought of the injustices of the
business, the historian noted. A
Westport Murder One of
the more interesting characters mentioned in O’Toole’s lecture happened to be
another Cuffe from Westport – Charles Horatio Cuffe, also known as Charles H. Hall – no
relation to the famous ship captain, but equally well known in these parts
for his role in a shocking crime in this town in the late 1800s.
Picture courtesy Westport Historical Society. His is
a tale that exemplifies the fact that “people of color faced extreme
prejudice in their daily lives,” O’Toole suggested; a fact of life that lingered
long after the Emancipation Proclamation had freed all slaves in America. Charles
Cuffe/Hall, a young black man who, when he was 14,
made newspaper headlines as “The Youthful Murderer of Mr. Benjamin Howard of
Westport, Mass.” in 1870. O’Toole said the Westport boy
was arrested soon after Howard’s robbery and murder, and confessed to helping a white
boy dispose of the body after the other had
done the crime. Police said Cuffe later admitted to
committing the murder himself, and he was speedily convicted of the crime in
a New Bedford courthouse at a
trial deemed as much “a spectacle” as the famed Lizzy Borden case. Jailed
in Boston, Cuffe was dead by age 18, a victim of
typhoid or mistreatment in prison, the historian said. A modern-day
re-examination of the case showed the black boy was undoubtedly railroaded
for the crime. He was held for days without legal counsel, and probably
forced into confessing by authorities withholding food and water; the alleged
white accomplice, with a past record of robbery and violence, was never
charged with the crime. O’Toole
said she is looking for more information about the boy’s family and early
life, and what role he may have played in the murder, and appealed to the
audience for help. A few details came quickly from some people present, and
more information promises to come out before she completes her investigation
of the case. The
incident may have happened some 130 years ago, but the curiosity of a modern
historian has breathed new life into the old story. WAHTF announces qualified applicant for HOPP grant. EverythingWestport.com Sunday,
February 7, 2016 WESTPORT
– The Westport Affordable Housing Trust Fund has announced the qualification
of an applicant for a second round of first-time homebuyer grants through its
Housing Opportunity Purchase Program (HOPP). The program makes grants of up
to $125,000 available to income and asset qualified households for the
purpose of “buying down” the selling price of existing market rate housing in
Westport. The
Trust received two applications for the grant program by the Dec. 22, 2015
deadline for this round of grant funding. Citizens for Citizens, acting as
lottery agent for the Trust, and the state Department of Housing and
Community Development (DHCD) found only one of the two applicants met the
qualification criteria. For that reason, there was no need to hold a lottery
to pick a successful applicant, said Westport Housing Specialist Leonardi Aray. The
grant award will be the lesser of the maximum grant applicable, or the amount
between the maximum affordable sale price and the actual sale price. In
addition, the grant will reimburse the buyer up to $1,000 toward initial home
inspections and any additional inspections required under this program, he
explained. If the
qualified applicant finds a home in Westport that meets program guidelines,
the Trust will award that applicant the amount The
home will be eligible for inclusion in the town’s Subsidized Housing
Inventory (SHI), helping Westport meet state guidelines for the creation and
preservation of affordable housing in Westport for the benefit of low and
moderate income households. “We're
excited to be able to offer another first-time homebuyer, a single mom, the
opportunity to purchase a home in Westport. We wish her good luck with the
home search process,” Aray said. The
Trust hopes to offer another grant opportunity this summer, if funding is
available, under the following eligibility requirements, the housing
specialist added. To
qualify, households must be eligible under the Department of Housing and
Community Development Local Initiative Program Guidelines as summarized below.
To be eligible, the combined gross annual income for all household members,
from all sources in the household must be at or below 80% of the
Providence-Fall River Metro Area Median Income (AMI) as defined by the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): Current
Maximum Income Limits 1-Person 2-Person 3-Person
4-Person 6-Person $41,650 $47,600 $53,550 $59,500 $67,000 For
more information on the HOPP first-time homebuyer program, residents can
contact the Westport Housing Assistance Office at 617.270.3912, by email to WestportHousing@outlook.com,
or pick up eligibility requirements from the information rack on the second
floor of Westport Town Hall. © 2016 Community Events of Westport. All
rights reserved. EverythingWestport.com |
