Delete comment from: Boston 1775
In the context of Barnstable in 1760, “James Otis, Esqr” was the colonel because his son the lawyer was settled in Boston. The suffix “Sr.” was conditional in the eighteenth century, applied only when people saw potential for confusion. That’s why I included the two Barnstable references in one sentence that related to the colonel.
(It’s conceivable that a note on “London, servant to James Otis Esqr,” taken out of context might have been the source of John Waters’s statement that Otis the lawyer owned a “colored ‘boy.’” However, in his book Waters referred to London as the colonel’s slave, so there would have had to be further confusion.)
Starting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, genealogical societies published the vital records of many Massachusetts towns. Those volumes weren’t exact transcriptions of the records in chronological order; instead, they sorted the names into alphabetical order with “Negroes” in a separate and unequal section. I linked to the VItal Records of Massachusetts website, which is based on such a publication, because it’s the easiest to access. Different transcribers can sometimes read the same handwriting in different ways, so Bathsheba Towardy appears in some transcriptions as Bathsheba Lowardy. (Incidentally, there was an intention of marriage between her and another enslaved man, Micah, about two years before the intention for London.)
The term “servant” in the mid-1700s was used exclusively for an enslaved person. If London had not been enslaved, he would have been noted in the record as “Negro” or “free Negro” instead of “servant of James Otis.” New England town records note many marriages involving enslaved people because that was significant for the deeply Christian community.
Yes, the one slave owned by Samuel Adams and his wife was Surry, a black woman who was reportedly a gift to Adams’s wife and remained with the family even after slavery became unenforceable in the state. There were no laws in colonial Massachusetts against freeing slaves or requiring an owner to post bond as were later enacted in other states.
Jun 13, 2017, 5:22:14 AM
Posted to James Otis, Jr., and Slavery Revisited