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CHAPTER EIGHT

Oxford and Temperance

After 1694 not only magistrates but also clergy had the legal right to perform marriages in colonial Connecticut. The only known marriage conducted by Lyme’s first minister united a “negro man” and a “molato girl.”

Oxford negro man & Temprance molato girl the two servants of Richard Lord of Lyme were married together by ye Revd Moses Noyes the 21 day of January 1725/26.

Formalizing the bond of an enslaved couple was likely unprecedented in Lyme when Moses Noyes, age eighty-two, married two servants of Lieutenant Richard Lord, age seventy-five. The union of Oxford and Temperance 1725/6 appears in the land records alongside a deed detailing Temperance’s purchase. When Lord died a year later, the married couple passed to his son Richard Lord Jr. (1690–1776), described in a later family history as a “genial man” with a “large household and many slaves.”

The couple’s passage through Lyme left faint traces. Oxford, born in 1706, may have been a son of Moses Noyes’s servant Arabella, with whom he was later baptized and admitted to the church, or a grandson of Moses, Richard Ely’s servant, or he may have been purchased elsewhere, in Boston or New London. Temperance was the daughter of a “Negro” man and a Narragansett woman named Jane who had been captured at age two in King Philip’s War. Until a week before her marriage, Temperance served Joseph Peck Jr. (1680–1757), son of the first deacon in Lyme’s church.

An account book kept by Deacon Peck’s son recorded varied financial transactions. In 1715 he sold large quantities of sugar by the pound and rum by the pint and quart, along with wheat, oats, and beef. He delivered wood by the sled load, provided hay storage in his barn, and hired out his plow, harrow, and ox team. He also hired out a slave. In 1718 he entered charges of one shilling for a “black boy one day” and three shillings for a “black boy one day [with] harrow.” The black boy may have been “Jack man servant of Joseph Peck.” Twenty years later church records noted the death of Peck’s servant.

When Joseph Peck Jr. sold the “molato” girl Temperance a week before her marriage, she “freely” consented to her purchase by Richard Lord.

When and where Peck acquired his enslaved servants is not known, but in January 1725/6 he sold “a certain molato Negro girl named Temperance, after the manner of a negro slave,” to serve Lieutenant Richard Lord “during the term of her natural life.” The deed stated a purchase price of “sixty pounds in bills of public credit of the colony of Connecticut” and included the young woman’s consent. “I Temperance the above said molato negro girl do freely consent to the above said sale & further being come to [my] years of discretion do freely so far as I have power put and bind myself and my heirs to the said Lord and his heirs for the term of our natural life.” Below Joseph Peck’s signature, “Temperance negro molato,” age twenty, marked an X.

Whether Temperance gave birth to a daughter, perhaps fathered by the manservant Jack, before her sale to Richard Lord cannot be established. But in May 1729, three years after her marriage to Oxford, Joseph Peck Jr., “in consideration of the sum of twenty five pounds,” sold to Benjamin Reed of Lyme “one certain molato girl of about three years old called Jane, to have and to hold, possess & enjoy as his own proper estate free and clear to him and his heirs … during her natural life.” The coincidence of names suggests that Temperance at age seventeen may have 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.