‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner.
The upcoming Independence Day is, of course, the sesquicentennial of our country. For history lovers this Fourth of July will also be remembered as the 200th anniversary of the deaths of both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in 1826 (in that order, despite Adams’ plaintive last words, “Jefferson lives”), in what surely is the most extraordinary coincidence in American history.
But the year 1826 is also the bicentennial of the birth of Thomas Peterson, who spent much of his early life in New Canaan living in what is now the historic 1764 Hanford-Silliman House, a featured attraction on the five-acre campus of the New Canaan Museum & Historical Society. And it is also possible that Tom Peterson, who died in 1901 in Milford, was the last former slave to live in Connecticut. ***
The history of the beginnings of slavery in Connecticut is scant. There is a 1638 account where several Native American prisoners taken during the Pequot War (1636-1638) were exchanged in the West Indies for enslaved Africans; historians believe this is probably how the first enslaved Africans ended up in the colony. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t be the last.
By 1790, most prosperous merchants in Connecticut owned at least one slave, as did half of all ministers. Unquestionably, the state’s economic links to slavery were entwined with the colony’s religious, political, and educational institutions, making the sordid institution a part of the social contract in Connecticut. According to U.S. census data there were 2,764 slaves in Connecticut as of 1790. This declined during the early part of the 19th century, with the census indicating number reported as slaves in the state of 951 in 1800, 97 in 1820, and 25 by 1830.
Perhaps the most enlightening account of 18th century slavery in Connecticut is the narrative autobiography of Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself. The story highlights an individual who has been heralded as one of the country’s first black entrepreneurs. What’s particularly poignant about the narrative is how his enslaved experience could become seemingly run-of-the-mill, even where life was focused not on the active “pursuit of happiness,” as Thomas Jefferson posited, but daily survival, where human beings and their families were bought, sold and traded like a cow, a piece of furniture, or a collection of farm utensils. Born Broteer Furro in West Africa, he was kidnapped as a six-year-old and taken to the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) to be sold.
