Hallowed Ground

An investigation of old grave sites in New England is unearthing hard truths about yankees and slavery

Even though the midday sun is high in the sky, my companions and I can hardly see the headstones lying half-hidden in this dense Connecticut forest. Warren Perry (left) is an anthropologist at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain. Gerald Sawyer (right) is working on a doctorate in archaeology from the City University of New York (CUNY), where he is also a graduate instructor. For the better part of three years now, they have been studying scores of humble grave sites scattered across my family’s ancestral lands here in the rolling countryside near New London. These are the resting places of slaves who died more than two centuries ago.

As we walk from site to site, Sawyer, a tall man wearing jeans and sporting a ponytail, keeps up a running commentary. "Those cairns," he says, pointing toward mounds of rocks piled high in an oval shape, "are more like burial markers found in Guinea, West Africa, than anything in this country." He speculates that the mounds might represent traditional African burials, whereas the rounded headstones we just examined may designate the grave sites of slaves who became Christians. When I ask how people from Africa were able to survive our harsh Connecticut winters, Perry answers, "A lot of them didn’t."

As the recent furor over Yale University’s close ties with slaveholders in the 1700s and 1800s made clear, many Americans are just beginning to understand that for a long time slavery was as ubiquitous in the North as in the South. The first African captives arrived in Massachusetts in the middle part of the 1600s. A century later, there were more slaves in New York City than anywhere else in the colonies except Charleston, South Carolina. Despite the fact that Quakers condemned slavery in Philadelphia as early as 1693, there were at least 3,000 slaves in Pennsylvania by the mid-1700s, and Connecticut had more than 5,000. Although it’s uncertain how many there were overall in New England, slaves at one time may have made up as much as 5 percent of the total population in Connecticut and 10 percent in Rhode Island.