Making Slavery Visible (Again): The Nineteenth-Century Roots of a Revisionist Recovery in New England

In recent years, scholars, teachers, curators, and amateur historians have diligently uncovered New England's slave past, making the stories of enslaved and formerly enslaved New Englanders visible in museums, at historical sites, in schoolbooks, and on the web. What is not often acknowledged in these presentations of the local history of slavery is how heavily they rely on narratives and sources produced and preserved in the nineteenth century, a generation or two after emancipation in the region. Many of the most widely circulated stories and images associated with enslaved New Englanders first made their way into print as a result of the efforts of nineteenth-century writers and illustrators, many of whom were involved in the contemporary movement against slavery in the American South. When present-day accounts of New England slavery rely on these sources, they often turn out to be as much about nineteenth-century conceptions of national freedom and historical agency as they are about the experience of enslaved people in the colonial period. This paper does not aim to critique existing presentations of the history of slavery in New England, but it does advocate for a more layered approach to representing that history, one that acknowledges that the desire to make enslaved people visible in history is not so new as we sometimes think. This paper argues that in addition to recovering the history of slavery, scholars, curators, and educators should aim to make visible the history and politics of that recovery. Juxtaposing New England with larger-scale slave societies, this paper also explores the distinctive challenges and opportunities associated with making slavery visible in a society in which demographics (the small size of the enslaved population) and chronology (the comparatively early date of abolition) made the institution relatively possible to overlook.