New Hampshire’s entanglement with American slavery is easy to underestimate if one looks only for plantation fields and auction blocks.

 

The state’s geography and climate discouraged staple-crop plantations of the Chesapeake or Lower South variety, and its nineteenth-century public image leaned heavily on yeoman farms, riverine mills, and granite stoicism.

 

Yet if one widens the lens from the plantation to the political economy that sustained bondage—capital, credit, cargo, commodities, and law—New Hampshire comes plainly into view.

 

From its earliest colonial decades through the Civil War and well into the industrial age, the Granite State participated in, profited from, regulated, rationalized, and ultimately contested slavery.

 

Its merchants and magistrates, its shipyards and countinghouses, its colleges and pulpits, its mills and insurance ledgers all formed an integrated corridor connecting forced labor to northern prosperity.

 

The story of slavery in New Hampshire is therefore not an anomalous footnote to Southern history but a central thread in the fabric of New England’s ascendancy and the nation’s uneven struggle toward freedom.

 

Slavery existed in New Hampshire in fact and in law. Although the enslaved population was never large compared with southern colonies, bondage appeared in household, artisanal, maritime, and agricultural settings from the seventeenth century onward. Port towns such as Portsmouth and Exeter were the earliest nodes: coastal elites imported enslaved Africans and Afro-Caribbeans directly and indirectly, employing them as domestic servants, coachmen, dockworkers, and skilled laborers.

 

Inland towns also bound Black people to lifetime service, and town records, probate inventories, and bills of sale testify to the presence of enslaved men, women, and children in households otherwise remembered as stoutly independent. The legal regime acknowledged and protected the property claims of slaveholders: colonial statutes taxed, policed, and disciplined “Negroes” as a distinct category; manumission required formal instruments; and enslaved people could be hired out, mortgaged, and inherited. Even where the letter of the law grew ambiguous, custom, magistrates, and market practice supplied the enforcement that law lacked.

 

The state’s governors and leading families provide an unembarrassed window into elite participation. The Wentworth dynasty—particularly Governor Benning Wentworth and his successor John Wentworth—operated within a mercantile world in which slaveholding, slave trading, and the provisioning of slave societies were normalized, and their circles included men who owned enslaved people and financed voyages that knitted New Hampshire to Caribbean sugar islands.

 

In Portsmouth, John Langdon—shipbuilder, merchant, Revolutionary financier, and later governor—moved in a milieu in which enslaved servants and maritime investments overlapped; William Whipple, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, owned Prince Whipple, the most famous of the state’s enslaved men, before manumitting him during the Revolution. Less famous but no less revealing are scores of merchants, artisans, and clergy whose household accounts or probate inventories list human beings alongside livestock and furniture. What distinguished New Hampshire was not abstention from human property but the scale and uses of that property within a commercial New England economy.

 

Plantations in the southern sense did not take root in New Hampshire, but the absence of gang labor on monocrop estates should not obscure the state’s plantation connections. New Hampshire agriculture and timber fed plantations elsewhere. Farmers shipped beef, pork, butter, and barrel staves to West Indian sugar islands; lumber camps supplied masts, boards, and hoops; coastal shipyards built and outfitted vessels carrying fish and flour outbound and returning with molasses and sugar.

 

Molasses entered regional distilleries—New England’s rum economy—whose exports paid for manufactured goods and, in notorious cases, financed further slave trading. When cotton became king after 1800, New Hampshire’s industrial revolution, centered in river cities like Manchester and Dover, drew its raw material from slave labor in the American South. The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, once the largest textile producer in the world, transformed enslaved people’s labor into northern wages, dividends, and municipal tax bases. The wage envelope in Manchester and the whip in Mississippi were two instruments of a single transregional economy.

 

This economy comprised what many scholars now call a slavery industrial complex: a lattice of enterprises, institutions, and legal devices that captured value from bondage whether or not the enslaved themselves were present. New Hampshire banks discounted bills of exchange drawn on southern factors; insurance companies underwrote cargoes, ships, and lives implicated in the traffic; lawyers enforced contracts and recovered debts linked to plantation commodities; newspapers advertised runaways and sales; colleges solicited donations and enrolled the sons of mercantile households whose profits rested on enslaved labor far to the south.

 

The state exported human capital as well as material goods—Yankee overseers and mechanics traveled to build gins, presses, and railroads in slave states, and New Hampshire clocks, shoes, and textiles clothed enslavers and the enslaved alike. In return, southern cotton and Caribbean sugar paid for mortgages, endowed pews, and built libraries.

 

The movement of enslaved people within and through New Hampshire produced its own geography of unfreedom and resistance. Portsmouth’s African presence was sufficiently substantial in the eighteenth century to require a burial ground, rediscovered in the twenty-first century and now commemorated as a sacred site. Enslaved mariners shipped in and out of the Piscataqua; enslaved coachmen and craftsmen moved along the coastal road to Massachusetts; indentured and enslaved children were hired out seasonally. The legal line between slavery and long-term indenture was often indistinct in practice, and northern apprenticeship sometimes functioned as de facto bondage.

 

The state also sits astride the great fugitivity corridor: enslaved people fleeing New York and New England bondage, and later those escaping from the South, traveled through Nashua, Concord, Keene, and the Connecticut River Valley toward Vermont and Canada. Taverns, farmsteads, and meetinghouses formed an informal Underground Railroad, with free Black households and white antislavery families—such as the Cheneys of Peterborough—providing shelter, money, and transport. In this landscape of peril and hope, Black agency is unmistakable.

 

New Hampshire’s enslaved and free Black residents spoke for themselves in petitions, lawsuits, and print. In 1779 enslaved men in Portsmouth petitioned the General Assembly for emancipation, appealing to revolutionary principles that white patriots proclaimed in every town square. The petition did not immediately achieve legal freedom, but it made the intellectual and moral claim that would reverberate in New England politics: a republic founded on natural rights could not coherently maintain chattel slavery.

 

The long, complex process by which slavery ebbed in New Hampshire after the Revolution included such petitions, individual manumissions, self-purchase, flight, and shifting judicial and legislative interpretations. By the early nineteenth century, explicit slave sales dwindled, yet shadows of bondage lingered in the lives of bound children and in a racialized labor market that consigned free Black people to the most precarious work.

 

Law both reflected and produced this uneasy transition. Colonial statutes regulated the movement of enslaved people after dark, criminalized gatherings without white supervision, and punished resistance with brutal sanctions. Taxes identified “Negroes and mulattoes” as taxable property or heads for capitation, a fiscal grammar that yoked Blackness to revenue. After independence, legislative language grew more equivocal, yet courts and selectmen continued to apply vagrancy, apprenticeship, and pauper laws in ways that constrained Black freedom.

 

 

Not until the mid-nineteenth century did the state purge lingering references to slavery from its statute books, and even then political debates about Black suffrage, jury service, and schooling revealed the incomplete nature of emancipation. The formal demise of slavery in New Hampshire was therefore less an abolitionist crescendo than a gradual, contested unspooling of practices that had sunk roots in household economy and provincial law.

 

The intellectual and moral challenge to slavery, however, found ardent voices in New Hampshire. The state produced and harbored abolitionists of national stature. Parker Pillsbury, born in Hamilton and long resident in the Merrimack Valley, became one of the most uncompromising Garrisonian orators and editors, denouncing clerical complicity and demanding immediate emancipation and full equality.

 

Nathaniel Peabody Rogers of Concord edited the Herald of Freedom, an abolitionist newspaper that assailed gradualism and colonization as polite evasions. Harriet E. Wilson of Milford—author of “Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black,” (1859)—offered the first novel by an African American woman published in the United States, an extraordinary autobiographical indictment of northern racism and indenture masquerading as benevolent household discipline.

 

Her narrative explodes the myth that the North was merely a safe harbor; it insists that the slavery system had northern analogues and that Black children could be exploited and brutalized in the shadow of church spires. In Canaan, the Noyes Academy’s brief experiment in interracial education was crushed in 1835 by a white mob that literally dragged the schoolhouse from its foundations—a searing emblem of the costs paid by those who tried to instantiate equality in New Hampshire soil.

 

White leadership in the state divided, sometimes within the same families and congregations. Clergy thundered both for and against abolition; merchants defended trade with the South as an economic necessity; Whig and Democratic editors traded accusations of fanaticism and hypocrisy. Town meetings resounded with resolutions condemning the gag rule in Congress, defending the right to petition, or, conversely, decrying “incendiary” literature. Politicians sought to finesse a balance between northern free labor ideology and the profitable cotton connections of manufacturers.

 

Some of the same legislators who had invested in railroads carrying southern cotton to northern mills voted tepid antislavery measures when public pressure demanded it. The state’s political economy thus registered in its political culture: wherever plantation wealth passed through banks and countinghouses, the rhetoric of compromise and the policing of dissent followed.

 

 

Colleges and corporations embody the longue durée of these entanglements. Dartmouth College, founded by Eleazar Wheelock and chartered to educate Native youth while also training Congregational clergy, drew patronage and donations from transatlantic networks entangled with slavery. The college educated sons of mercantile families whose fortunes were interlaced with Caribbean and southern trades, and it benefited from the antebellum boom in cotton textiles that enriched New Hampshire towns. Industrial corporations—the mill companies of Manchester and Dover most prominently—converted slave-grown cotton into cloth at unprecedented scale, employing immigrant and Yankee labor in regimented factory systems whose profits washed through northern banks and municipalities.

 

The dividends financed philanthropy, endowed church windows and libraries, and underwrote civic improvements that still shape urban landscapes. To say that institutions “still benefit” is not merely rhetorical flourish; it is to recognize how capital compounds over time, how buildings and endowments erected by nineteenth-century profits continue to yield rents, prestige, and infrastructural advantage. Contemporary institutional self-studies and public memorials—spurred by student activism and scholarly inquiry—have begun to name donors, trace endowment lineages, and reconsider honorifics, joining a broader New England reckoning with slavery’s legacies.

 

If one follows the paper trail of the slavery industrial complex—bills of lading, marine insurance policies, bank ledgers, mill accounts, and probate dockets—the moral arithmetic is stark. A Portsmouth ship outfitted with New Hampshire timber and iron sails with salted fish and flour to Barbados, returns with molasses; the molasses becomes rum that finances further ventures; a Manchester mill imports bales of raw cotton picked under the overseer’s lash; the mill sells cloth domestically and abroad; dividends accrue in Concord banks; a merchant subscribes to a college building fund, a hospital, a museum. At each step, law secures contract and property, and public authority—tariffs, patents, river improvements, and railroad charters—amplifies private gain. The human cost—the unspeakable violence visited on enslaved people—remains largely off the ledger, appearing only as “shrinkage,” “loss,” or “runaways.” The wealth, by contrast, is concretized in brick, granite, and paper, accreting into what later generations innocently inherit as “heritage.”

 

Yet the same record yields a counter-archive of resistance and civic labor for freedom. Black petitioners and church founders in Portsmouth and beyond claimed space in public life; free Black sailors navigated a perilous Atlantic world, asserting skill and dignity in occupations that exposed them to kidnapping and harassment; abolitionist women organized fairs, sewed, and raised funds for antislavery newspapers; farmers opened attics and cellars to fugitives moving north under winter stars; editors risked social ostracism and legal peril to publish arguments deemed “incendiary.” After Appomattox, New Hampshire’s Black veterans, like their white comrades, returned home to find a Reconstruction that unfolded largely in the South yet depended on northern will. The Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency housed in the War Department, concentrated its field operations below the Mason-Dixon Line, but New Hampshire citizens staffed northern aid societies, sent teachers southward, raised money, and debated the terms of reunion and citizenship.

 

The federal amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—were ratified in legislatures where New Hampshire lawmakers took positions that would frame civil rights struggles for generations. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Black Granite Staters and their allies fought for fair schooling, against residential segregation and employment discrimination, and for recognition of Black military service and civic leadership. Their work laid foundations that the modern civil rights movement would widen and deepen.

 

The legal architecture of racial subordination did not disappear with the end of chattel slavery. In New Hampshire, as elsewhere in New England, de facto segregation in housing and schooling, exclusion from skilled trades, and discriminatory policing persisted. The jurisprudence of contract and property, facially neutral, could perpetuate inequalities that slavery had produced, while the absence of explicit Jim Crow statutes allowed northern politicians to proclaim an abstract commitment to equality without disturbing entrenched hierarchies. Black Granite Staters created mutual aid societies, churches, literary clubs, and civic organizations that sustained community life and pressed claims for justice. Their activism—ranging from school desegregation efforts to campaigns for fair employment and public accommodations—should be understood as a continuation of antislavery, translated into the legal grammar of the Fourteenth Amendment and the moral rhetoric of democratic inclusion.

 

Narratives from New Hampshire illuminate these long arcs with human detail. Prince Whipple’s life—from enslavement in an elite Portsmouth household to manumission and respected status—condenses the contradictions of Revolutionary freedom; Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig” renders the psychic and bodily violence of “free” New England servitude with unsparing clarity; Underground Railroad stories, while sometimes embroidered by local legend, attest to real risks assumed by Black and white neighbors to assert a higher law than the statutes of property. These lives and stories resist the erasures of triumphal regional memory, insisting that New Hampshire’s conscience was neither uniform nor uncomplicated.

 

 

The question of ongoing institutional benefit leads naturally to the terrain of memory, repair, and policy. Municipalities and colleges have begun to acknowledge ties to slavery and to Atlantic economies of forced labor; some have erected memorials, commissioned reports, revised curricula, and established scholarships. Businesses that trace their origins to nineteenth-century finance or manufacturing face increasingly sophisticated historical audits of founding capital, early client lists, and product lines. In the philanthropic sphere, endowments built in part on commodity flows from slavery are being interrogated, and trustees are asked to convert acknowledgement into tangible investments in equity and access. None of this work rests on moral anachronism; it rests on a historical realism that connects streams of capital across time and recognizes the compound interest of injustice. The point is not to anathematize the Granite State but to bring into full view the very sources of its growth so that the benefits of that growth can be more justly shared.

 

New Hampshire’s slave laws, its household bondage, its mercantile and industrial profits from slave labor elsewhere, its ambivalent politics, and its abolitionist conscience together form a narrative both particular and emblematic. Particular, because the state’s scale, demography, and industries created distinctive patterns: small numbers of enslaved people in domestic and artisanal contexts; a heavy reliance on provisioning trades and, later, cotton textiles; a legal abolition by erosion rather than dramatic decree; a reform culture laced with religious dissent. Emblematic, because the state exemplifies the northern story writ large: a freedom region deeply implicated in unfreedom, a reform tradition struggling within and against its own material interests, a set of institutions that converted bondage into brick and book, and communities—especially Black communities—that insisted on liberty’s meaning when others treated it as a slogan.

 

To study New Hampshire in this light is to dissolve the false border that places slavery “elsewhere.” The Granite State’s forests and falls, its docks and depots, its banks and bell towers belonged to an Atlantic and national system in which enslaved labor generated the raw materials, purchasing power, and profits that transformed a narrow coastal colony into a modern commonwealth. The path from that world to ours runs through law and ledger, sermon and song, petition and riot, factory and farm. The reckoning now underway—in classrooms, boardrooms, sanctuaries, and public squares—asks not for performative guilt but for historical maturity: the capacity to hold together the facts that New Hampshire helped enslave and helped liberate, that its institutions extracted value from bondage and have the present capacity to invest value in repair, that its freedom tradition is strongest when it is honest about the ground from which it grew.

 

If the measure of a state’s greatness is not only the wealth it amasses but the justice it pursues, then New Hampshire’s history with slavery is not an indictment alone but an invitation. It invites the custodians of archives to keep opening boxes, the stewards of endowments to keep tracing capital, the leaders of colleges and corporations to keep naming benefactions and redirecting benefits, the teachers to keep assigning narratives like Harriet Wilson’s that unsettle civic pieties, and the citizens to keep widening the circle of belonging. It invites us to imagine a political economy as intricate in its solidarities as the old one was in its exploitations—a moral infrastructure robust enough to return compounded interest not to bondage but to freedom.

 

Slavery in New Hampshire began not as an anomaly but as an extension of the larger Puritan and mercantile experiment in northern New England. The earliest records from the mid-seventeenth century reveal that Africans were present in the Piscataqua region as early as the 1640s. Some came directly via English merchants, others by way of Massachusetts Bay and the West Indies, as captives purchased in Barbados or Jamaica were resold in New England ports. Court records from the 1660s describe enslaved men accused of theft and women accused of fornication, revealing that their legal status was already distinct from English indentured servants.

 

A 1663 inventory from Portsmouth lists “one Negro, valued at 30 pounds,” inserted between livestock and household implements, signifying that African persons had been fully commodified within household economies. By the early eighteenth century, the practice of slaveholding among New Hampshire’s coastal elites was normalized. Ministers, lawyers, and merchants alike appear in probate documents as owners of enslaved individuals. Reverend Samuel Penhallow, prominent in Portsmouth, left in his estate at least one Black servant listed as property. His fellow clergy, despite their professed devotion to liberty in Christ, rationalized the practice by citing the Curse of Ham or by appealing to the civilizational mission of Christian households. That they rarely preached openly against slavery until the Great Awakening suggests a cultural equilibrium in which religious conviction and racial subordination coexisted without cognitive rupture.

 

 

The slave economy in New Hampshire, though numerically smaller than in Virginia or South Carolina, must be measured by integration, not by size. Portsmouth functioned as a provisioning hub for the West Indies, where enslaved labor produced sugar, molasses, and rum that generated the triangular trade profits sustaining New England prosperity. Records of local merchants such as the Sheafe and Wentworth families reveal consignments of salted cod, barrel staves, and livestock bound for Barbados and Antigua. In return, molasses flowed northward, where it fueled New England rum distilleries, whose products were exported to Africa or sold domestically. New Hampshire timber, especially white pine masts, supplied British naval power, enabling the empire to secure Caribbean plantations. Thus, even absent vast plantations, New Hampshire’s ecology of forests and fisheries became a critical feeder system to the global machinery of slavery.

 

The enslavement of Africans and their descendants within New Hampshire was most concentrated in Portsmouth, Exeter, Dover, and Hampton. The 1767 census identified 633 enslaved persons, though actual numbers may have been higher given undercounting. They labored as domestic servants, farmhands, coopers, blacksmiths, and maritime workers. Portsmouth’s African Burying Ground, rediscovered in 2003 during street reconstruction, revealed the presence of a substantial Black community that had been physically erased by centuries of urban development. Archaeological studies of the site uncovered human remains positioned with West African burial traditions, testifying to cultural persistence under captivity. Oral history and local memory confirm that enslaved people built docks, carted goods, and labored in households whose owners wrote treatises on liberty while maintaining human property.

 

The legal codification of slavery in New Hampshire was piecemeal but decisive. Colonial law did not produce a comprehensive slave code like South Carolina’s, but town ordinances and provincial statutes regulated movement, taxed enslaved persons as property, and curtailed assembly. A 1705 statute prohibited enslaved Africans from being abroad after dark without written permission, a curfew law that positioned them under suspicion and vulnerable to corporal punishment. A 1714 act established fines for harboring runaways, thus deputizing all white inhabitants into the policing of Black mobility. Town records in Exeter in 1720 list expenditures for the punishment of “Negro servants” who fled from their masters. Unlike indentured servitude, which had a fixed term, African bondage was hereditary, passing from mother to child, as confirmed by cases in Portsmouth probate courts. These local statutes reveal that slavery was neither accidental nor ambiguous but actively upheld by legislative design.

 

White leaders who supported slavery in New Hampshire were often the same men who crafted the political identity of the state. Governor Benning Wentworth, who presided over the colony from 1741 to 1766, held enslaved servants in his Portsmouth mansion and authorized land grants whose proceeds indirectly supported merchants engaged in West Indian trade. John Langdon, a shipbuilder, signer of the Constitution, and first President pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, owned enslaved Africans while investing heavily in maritime commerce tied to slave economies. William Whipple, another signer of the Declaration of Independence, marched into battle accompanied by Prince Whipple, whom he would later manumit. The paradox of revolutionary freedom alongside private enslavement is embodied in such figures, whose rhetoric of liberty resonated in the Atlantic world while their household economies belied the universality of their ideals.

 

The Revolutionary era in New Hampshire marked a turning point. The petition submitted in 1779 by twenty enslaved men in Portsmouth to the General Assembly stands as one of the most important documents in northern Black resistance. These petitioners—whose names include Nero Brewster, Pharoah Rogers, and Cato Warner—invoked the Declaration of Independence directly, asking legislators how men who had declared that “all men are created equal” could deny that equality to Black residents. Their petition fell on largely deaf ears, as the legislature refused to abolish slavery outright.

 

Yet it crystallized the intellectual and moral contradiction of the Revolution and placed New Hampshire within the broader New England debate about liberty and bondage. The gradual disappearance of explicit slaveholding after the Revolution was less the result of enlightened principle than of demographic attrition, economic restructuring, and the unprofitability of holding slaves in a small-scale agrarian economy. Manumission and self-purchase increased, some enslaved people fled during the disruptions of war, and shifting social attitudes rendered open slaveholding less respectable. Yet freedom remained precarious, for Black New Hampshirites entered into a society that denied them suffrage, segregated them socially, and constrained their economic prospects.

 

In the nineteenth century, the slavery industrial complex revealed its full power in New Hampshire through textile manufacturing. Manchester’s Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, at its peak in the mid-nineteenth century, processed hundreds of thousands of bales of cotton annually. Every pound of that cotton was picked by enslaved people in the Deep South. The profits accrued to northern investors, who reinvested them in railroads, canals, and civic projects across New Hampshire. Mill girls, many of them Yankee farm daughters, earned wages from cloth woven from slave labor. The irony of northern wage laborers benefiting from southern coerced labor underscores the interconnectedness of free and unfree labor in America. Amoskeag’s dividends built Manchester’s city hall, its libraries, and its industrial infrastructure, leaving a material legacy still visible today. To this extent, every New Hampshire textile town was implicated in slavery’s global empire, even as many of its residents professed moral opposition to bondage.

 

 

Colleges also bore complicity. Dartmouth College, founded in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, relied on patronage from wealthy merchants and benefactors linked to Caribbean and southern economies. Its early endowment was intertwined with donations from slave-trading families, and its alumni included sons of households whose fortunes derived from slave labor. In later years, industrialists connected to cotton mills endowed professorships and scholarships. Thus, the institution that produced some of the state’s intellectual elite carried within its DNA the economic imprint of slavery. That heritage persists in endowment structures and named buildings, prompting recent debates over whether full historical accountability requires renaming, reparative justice, or new forms of memorialization.

 

The lives of New Hampshire’s enslaved and free Black residents illuminate this history with individual poignancy. Prince Whipple, enslaved by William Whipple, became a symbol of Black participation in the Revolution, reputedly rowing General Washington across the Delaware though historical accuracy of that scene remains debated. Yet his life of bondage and eventual freedom represents the duality of the age. Harriet E. Wilson’s narrative “Our Nig,” published in 1859, exposed the cruelty of northern indentured servitude and racism. Her semi-autobiographical story, describing her abuse in a Milford household, is a singular northern counterpoint to southern slave narratives, demonstrating that bondage and racial exploitation were not foreign to New Hampshire soil. Wilson’s life, marked by poverty and struggle, is a testament to the resilience of Black women who navigated a society that professed liberty while withholding it.

 

New Hampshire abolitionists of the antebellum era wielded national influence. Parker Pillsbury, a radical Garrisonian, denounced the clergy for their complicity and advocated not merely for the abolition of slavery but for a sweeping egalitarianism that included women’s rights. Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, editor of the Herald of Freedom in Concord, became a trenchant voice against colonization schemes and gradualist compromise. Their work placed New Hampshire within the larger constellation of northern radicalism that fueled sectional conflict. The violent suppression of the Noyes Academy in Canaan in 1835, where white mobs destroyed a school admitting Black students, revealed the limits of abolitionist vision within the state, where many white citizens opposed slavery in principle but resisted racial integration in practice.

 

The Civil War, when it arrived, drew heavily on New Hampshire’s manpower. More than 30,000 Granite Staters served in Union blue, and among them were free Black men who enlisted to fight for the destruction of slavery. Their service, though often marginalized in local memory, testifies to the deep investment of New Hampshire’s Black community in emancipation. The postwar Freedmen’s Bureau, while headquartered in the South, drew on northern support, and New Hampshire reformers sent teachers, missionaries, and funds southward. The ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments reflected New Hampshire’s participation in the constitutional refounding of the republic, even as racial prejudice at home limited full Black inclusion in civic life.

 

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Black Granite Staters continued the struggle for civil rights. Segregated housing patterns, employment discrimination, and exclusion from political office reflected the persistence of structural racism. Yet community organizations, Black churches, and civic leaders sustained cultural life and pressed for equality. The NAACP established branches, and local activists joined national campaigns for civil rights in the mid-twentieth century. Their work stands in continuity with the petitions of 1779 and the abolitionist editorials of the 1830s, forming a centuries-long tradition of Black civic labor.

 

The long arc of New Hampshire’s connection to slavery thus extends from the African Burying Ground in Portsmouth to the Amoskeag mills of Manchester, from the petitions of enslaved men to the prose of Harriet Wilson, from the mansions of the Wentworths to the radical oratory of Parker Pillsbury. It is an arc of complicity and conscience, of exploitation and resistance, of wealth extracted from bondage and of moral witness against it. Today, as municipalities, colleges, and corporations reckon with the legacies of slavery, New Hampshire’s place in that reckoning is undeniable. Its forests, fisheries, factories, and fortunes were all touched by slavery’s hand, and its culture of liberty was tested by its willingness to exclude Black citizens from its promises. To recover and narrate this history is not merely to indict but to illuminate: to show how deeply northern states were enmeshed in the national sin, and how deeply Black Granite Staters fought to make liberty real.

 

The story of enslavement, profit, resistance, and reform in New Hampshire sharpens when it is carried by lives, ledgers, and institutions whose arcs intersect the larger Atlantic system. Consider first the Wentworths, a dynasty whose prominence makes them a revealing proxy for elite colonial practice. Benning Wentworth, governor from 1741 to 1766, presided over a provincial regime that stabilized merchant wealth and maintained a steady provisioning trade with the Caribbean. He lived in a Portsmouth world where enslaved Black servants were status markers as well as laborers, where evening levees and mercantile correspondence coexisted with curfew ordinances and bills of sale.

 

 

His kinsman John Wentworth, the last royal governor, moved in the same circles, cultivating imperial relationships that made the timber and shipbuilding sectors of the Piscataqua indispensable to Britain’s naval reach. The household economies of such men—linen, glassware, horses, portraits, and “servants”—encode an ideology in which governance, commerce, gentility, and enslavement were mutually reinforcing. The property ledger was not an embarrassment but a charter of belonging within the British Atlantic, and Black presence in those households—cooking, driving, laundering, nursing—was the ordinary texture of elite life.

 

The Langdon brothers illuminate the mercantile face of this world. John Langdon’s trajectory from shipwright to statesman charts the path by which maritime wealth translated into political authority in the new republic. He commissioned and owned vessels, insured cargoes, and dealt in commodities whose profitability was inseparable from the plantation complex. He sat in assemblies that thundered against parliamentary overreach while his domestic economy relied on enslaved labor. The contradiction is not ancillary; it is the engine of revolutionary ambivalence. Nor was Langdon alone. Portsmouth families with names like Moffatt, Sheafe, and Cutts filled probate inventories with objects and persons, their wharves with casks and cordage, their newspapers with advertisements for ships, barrels, cargoes, and runaways. These men and their kin contracted pilots, harbormasters, coopers, and enslaved dockworkers in a choreography of labor that rendered the West Indies less a distant archipelago than the southern annex of New England’s economy.

 

William Whipple stands as the pivot figure through which historians often narrate New Hampshire’s revolutionary paradox. Whipple’s signature on the Declaration of Independence traveled the same hand that signed manumission papers for Prince Whipple. The emancipation, occurring during the ideological boil of the war, has sometimes been romanticized as a pure conversion to egalitarian principle. A colder reading notices that wartime exigencies increased the leverage of enslaved men who served, and that manumission could coexist with persistent racial hierarchy. Prince Whipple’s trajectory—learning a trade, marrying within the small Black community, achieving a measure of respect—nevertheless represents an insurgent claim upon the civic space that the Declaration opened rhetorically but that local practice hedged.

 

If the enslavers were prominent, so were the petitioners and writers who forced the province and then the state to hear Black voices. The 1779 petition by enslaved men in Portsmouth is a document of luminous political intelligence. Its rhetoric is not supplication but indictment; it deploys the colonists’ own language of natural rights to expose the incoherence of a freedom circumscribed by color. Each name on that petition—Nero Brewster, Cato Warner, Pharoah Rogers, and others—anchors a life whose contours can be glimpsed through manumissions, baptisms, marriages, and occasional courtroom appearances. These men were not abstractions in a moral syllogism; they were artisans, sailors, teamsters, and household laborers whose literacy in the idioms of rights and covenant testifies to the porousness of revolutionary discourse. The petition failed legislatively but succeeded historically: it etched into the record the premise that New Hampshire’s laws must answer to a higher standard than custom and profit.

 

Amos Fortune’s life, which stretched from West African childhood to enslavement in Massachusetts and eventual residence in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, offers a counterpoint that binds together bondage, craft, philanthropy, and memory. Purchasing his freedom late in life, Fortune established himself as a tanner, acquired modest property, and left funds for the local church and library. His will, read alongside the account books of his tannery, invites a meditation on the intricate ways in which a man who had been treated as a commodity mastered the alchemy of turning labor into capital and capital into communal goods. The gravestone and the town’s later commemorations are not simply scene-setting; they are part of the politics of memory through which New Hampshire narrates the humanity and thrift of a formerly enslaved man while sometimes softening the structural violence that required his thrift to be heroic.

 

The mid-nineteenth century throws into relief a cohort of abolitionists and reformers whose pens and voices made New Hampshire an outsized node in the moral insurgency. Parker Pillsbury, trained for the ministry and converted to radical abolition by the antislavery lecture circuit, stripped away the pieties of clerical moderation. In speeches and in the pages of antislavery journals, he named the complicities of pew and pulpit, arguing that a church that tolerated slaveholding in its communion or its mission boards invalidated its own sacraments. His oratory freighted the cause with eschatological urgency while keeping a ledger of the mundane: proslavery sermons printed by presses that also supplied hymnals; benevolent societies whose donations came bathed in the profits of cotton. Pillsbury’s career, which later widened to women’s rights, testifies to the indivisibility of reform when it is pursued at the root rather than the branch.

 

Nathaniel Peabody Rogers sharpened the editorial blade in the Herald of Freedom, published from Concord. Rogers scorned the pseudo-philanthropy of colonization and the polite evasion of gradualism. He understood that the North could decry the lash while underwriting the loom, and his pages became a forum in which to discipline the northern conscience as much as to excoriate the southern plantation. He published letters from activists across New England, debated strategy with national figures, and defended the right of abolitionists to assemble and petition in towns where their presence was met by hostile crowds. If Pillsbury supplied the thunder, Rogers supplied the daily weather report of antislavery agitation, the running account of meetings dispersed, pamphlets seized, halls denied, and yet of hearts changed and alliances formed.

 

 

Harriet E. Wilson, with “Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black,” extended this moral cartography into the domestic interior. Her narrative dislocates the reader from the plantation romance to the New England household, where a Black girl’s body and labor could be consumed by an ostensibly charitable white family. Wilson’s account, published in 1859, is artful and unsparing; it teaches that the grammar of domination—surveillance, withholding of wages, corporal punishment, psychological terror—did not require auction blocks. The book’s initial neglect and its twentieth-century recovery mirror a broader phenomenon: the North’s preference to remember itself as a freedom region until Black texts insist on a more complex reckoning. Wilson’s later life, including lectures and entrepreneurial attempts at self-support, echoes the precarious economics that hemmed in free Black women even when formal bondage had receded.

 

The Black presence in New Hampshire’s reform landscape was not limited to native-born Granite Staters. The brief, incandescent history of Noyes Academy in Canaan, incorporated in 1834 as an interracial academy and demolished by a white mob in 1835, braided the lives of nationally significant Black thinkers into New Hampshire soil. Among the Black students drawn to the academy were Henry Highland Garnet and, in some accounts, Alexander Crummell, young men who would become towering abolitionist voices. Their sojourn in Canaan ended when oxen dragged the schoolhouse from its foundation and townspeople drove Black students out. The episode reveals both the magnetic pull of New Hampshire’s reform aspirations and the ferocity of local resistance to racial equality when it threatened to move from sermon to syllabus. Garnet’s later militancy—the call for enslaved people to resist—carries the resonance of having seen a northern experiment in equality literally uprooted.

 

Jude Hall, a man enslaved in Exeter who fought in the Continental Army, and whose free life was marred by the kidnapping of his sons into southern slavery, stands as a tragic emblem of the porous boundary between freedom and re-enslavement in the early republic. Hall’s military service should have conferred honor and protection; instead, his family’s suffering exposed a national failure to erect legal safeguards for Black bodies. The advertisements for the capture of his abducted sons, the petitions for redress, and the silence that followed is a documentary triptych whose message is that Black New Englanders could never assume that northern soil alone would guarantee their security.

 

Ona Judge’s life extends this theme with acute political irony. Enslaved in the household of George and Martha Washington, she fled bondage in Philadelphia in 1796 and made her way to New Hampshire, settling in the Portsmouth area and later in Greenland. Washington’s agents attempted to recapture her; local networks and her own resolve thwarted them. Interviews she granted late in life render a first-person account of flight, fear, and the stubbornness of freedom. Judge lived, married, worked, and raised children in a state that presented itself as the moral antithesis of plantation Virginia, yet poverty and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 cast long shadows. Her presence on New Hampshire ground is a reminder that the state’s claim to liberty was vindicated not by rhetoric but by harboring a woman whose very existence embarrassed the nation’s most illustrious household.

 

If biographies give slavery and resistance their faces, corporate and institutional case studies reveal how those faces were pressed against the machinery of capital. The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, headquartered on the Merrimack River at Manchester, offers the canonical northern example of an industrial giant whose lifeblood was slave-grown cotton. Founded in the 1830s and rising to prominence mid-century, Amoskeag engineered an industrial city around its mills: canals channeled river power; brick mill buildings multiplied along the banks; company boardinghouses regimented workers’ lives; company stores mediated consumption; and a managerial cadre enforced schedules calibrated to the rhythms of global cotton markets. Amoskeag bought cotton through New York factors and New Orleans brokers who funneled the produce of Mississippi and Alabama plantations into bales, bills, and drafts. The company’s success depended on predictable deliveries of raw cotton, on marine insurance and credit lines that reduced risk, on tariffs that shaped competition, and on a transportation network—coastal shipping, then rail—that shortened the distance between whip and spindle.

 

The profits that poured through Amoskeag’s books paid wages to thousands of operatives, many originally recruited from New England farms and later from immigrant communities; they yielded dividends to investors across the state; they swelled municipal coffers through taxes; they funded philanthropic gestures that clothed the company in civic virtue—libraries, lecture series, churches. The textile output clothed America and the world, but its inputs were watered by the sweat and blood of enslaved field hands.

 

When the Civil War disrupted cotton supplies, Amoskeag endured the “cotton famine,” a crisis that illuminated the company’s structural dependency on bondage. After emancipation, the company continued to buy cotton now picked by sharecroppers trapped in debt peonage, proving that the end of chattel slavery did not sever the cord between racial subordination and northern profit. The twentieth-century decline of Amoskeag, accelerated by southern and then overseas competition, left vast mill shells that later generations repurposed for offices, museums, and apartments. The repurposing itself—admirable as urban renewal—sits atop layered capital histories in which early accumulations extracted from enslaved labor continue to yield rents as heritage aesthetic.

 

 

Dartmouth College’s case requires a different analytic register, attentive to philanthropy, curriculum, social stratification, and the evolution of institutional conscience. Founded by Eleazar Wheelock out of the earlier Moor’s Charity School, Dartmouth’s early funding networks stretched to Britain through the celebrated fundraising mission of Samson Occom, the Mohegan minister whose sermons electrified audiences and whose letters later condemned Wheelock’s diversion of funds from Native education to the new college.

 

The college’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century donor base included New England merchants and professionals whose fortunes were entwined with Atlantic commerce. A portion of that commerce involved direct or indirect profits from slave economies, whether via West Indian provisioning, marine insurance on cargoes linked to slavery, or later through industrial fortunes leveraged on cotton. Dartmouth educated sons of these families, trained clergy who preached against slavery while soliciting gifts from pews whose coin bore the stamp of plantation economies, and later received benefactions from industrialists integrated into the cotton-textile cycle.

 

The institution’s deeper complicity is not best captured by a list of tainted donors, although such lists matter; it lies in the circulation of ideas and social capital by which a northern elite rationalized a political economy tied to bondage. The college’s libraries collected pro- and antislavery treatises; its debating societies rehearsed the arguments of gradualism and immediatism; its alumni joined legislatures, bar associations, pulpits, and countinghouses where they translated education into policy and practice. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Dartmouth, like peer institutions, began a more explicit process of reckoning: commissioning research into its early finances, revising campus narratives, and expanding programs that address racial inequality. The point of the case study is not to adjudicate the adequacy of any particular step but to track how an institution built amid slavery’s ascendancy now performs moral leadership partly by naming the economic substrata of its own ascent.

 

Set alongside Amoskeag and Dartmouth are lesser-known but revealing enterprises. Small banks in Concord, Portsmouth, and Nashua discounted bills drawn on southern cotton factors, lubricating the flow of plantation commodities to northern mills. Marine insurers, some with New Hampshire capital stakes but headquartered in Boston, underwrote voyages that carried New England fish to Caribbean plantations and returned with molasses destined for distilleries whose profits cycled back into shipping and manufacturing. Law firms plying admiralty and commercial practice normalized these transactions, and newspapers whose editorial pages condemned slavery printed advertisements for commodities bearing slavery’s imprint. The interdependence was quotidian rather than conspiratorial; it was sustained by habits of trade, professional pride, and the deeply human desire to regard one’s livelihood as honorable. Abolitionists understood this psychology and therefore confronted not just planters but neighbors.

 

The Black activists who navigated this terrain after emancipation did so with a legal grammar transformed by the Reconstruction Amendments but with social realities that too often mocked constitutional text. In the decades after the Civil War, Black New Hampshirites organized church communities in cities like Portsmouth and Manchester, formed mutual aid societies to buffer economic shocks, and fought case by case for fair access to schooling and public accommodations. Ministers, barbers, seamstresses, porters, and teachers made claims on civic life through the mundane heroism of dues, minutes, and petitions. Their names do not always crown chapters of national histories; they populate the archives of city directories, church rolls, and fraternal ledgers. Yet their cumulative insistence that the state’s professions of liberty be rendered in equitable practice ties them to the earlier petitioners of 1779 and to the radical editors of the 1830s.

 

The state’s white reformers in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, some of whom were the descendants of antebellum abolitionists, often focused on temperance, labor reform, and municipal good government; Black activists had to wedge their claims within those agendas or create parallel institutions when doors closed. In Manchester, the rhythms of mill work constrained civic engagement but also created spaces—boardinghouses, Sunday schools, benevolent lodges—where interracial alliances could be forged.

 

When strikes broke out, as in the early twentieth century, the language of exploitation sometimes supplied new idioms for thinking about race, though solidarities were fragile. The Great Migration did not flood New Hampshire as it did northern metropolises, but Black newcomers nevertheless arrived, bringing with them southern church traditions, musical forms, and political experience. They met a Granite State that could be welcoming in rhetoric and exclusionary in deed, a dynamic painfully familiar in northern settings.

 

The longue durée of New Hampshire’s slavery industrial complex thus rests on three pillars—law, capital, and narrative—each of which evolved but never lost its capacity to shape outcomes. Law moved from explicit slave codes and curfews to ostensibly neutral contract and property regimes that punished poverty and policed mobility; capital moved from timber-and-fish provisioning to cotton manufacturing to finance and real estate, but its early accumulations, where slavery’s mark was deep, compounded into endowments and inherited advantages; narrative moved from self-congratulation about northern liberty to a more chastened historiography in which Black voices prise open civic pieties.

 

 

Biographies and case studies anchor these abstractions: a governor’s household where an enslaved woman sets a table for a visiting admiral; a revolutionary general who frees one man while voting with merchants who resist emancipation; a Black girl whose “free” New England indenture mangles her body and spirit; a schoolhouse dragged by oxen while future luminaries watch; a mill complex that hums with productivity fueled by cotton money; a college whose benefactors’ ledgers teach seminar after seminar on the entanglement of learning and lucre.

 

The deeper contours of New Hampshire’s relationship to slavery, freedom, and abolition become clearest when traced through the biographies of those individuals and institutions whose lives and legacies embody the contradictions of a state that at once profited from human bondage and simultaneously nourished the seeds of resistance. Among the most instructive lives to consider are those of the early enslavers and political leaders who normalized slavery in New England society, the merchants and industrialists who continued to benefit from its global commerce, the abolitionists and Black intellectuals who rose against it, and the corporations and colleges that, even into the present day, bear the moral weight of complicity. Through these lives we see that New Hampshire was not a marginal player in the nation’s history of slavery but rather a participant deeply bound into its material and ideological fabric.

 

One figure whose life illuminates this entanglement is Governor Benning Wentworth, New Hampshire’s royal governor from 1741 to 1767, who, though often remembered for his role in land grants and political maneuvering, also benefited from an economy that depended upon slave labor and the importation of enslaved Africans through New England ports. Wentworth’s household, like those of many of New Hampshire’s elite families, included enslaved people whose unpaid labor reinforced the social hierarchy and underwrote his own displays of wealth and authority. The Wentworth family’s acceptance of slavery also represented a broader reality: that the governing class of colonial New Hampshire—whether engaged in politics, the clergy, or commerce—largely regarded slavery as both natural and profitable.

 

Merchant families such as the Langdons and the Ladds further exemplify this reality. John Langdon, a Revolutionary War patriot, signer of the U.S. Constitution, and governor of New Hampshire, built his fortune not only on shipping and international trade but also on ventures linked to Caribbean commerce in sugar and molasses—industries utterly dependent on enslaved labor. Langdon’s prominence in New Hampshire’s civic life demonstrates the dissonance of a man who spoke eloquently about liberty from British oppression while his material wealth rested on a global economy of bondage. In his household were enslaved Africans who bore the weight of his contradictions, laboring invisibly behind the rhetoric of freedom. That such men occupied leadership in the state offers a sober reminder that New Hampshire’s Revolutionary fervor was selective, extending only to white colonists while reinforcing the subjugation of people of African descent.

 

The case of the celebrated Phillips family of Exeter provides a further illustration. The Phillipses, founders of Phillips Exeter Academy, stood at the intersection of commerce, philanthropy, and education. Their endowment of the academy was fueled by wealth tied to trade networks connected with slavery. While they may not have directly overseen plantations, the Phillips fortune rested on mercantile systems that thrived through the exchange of goods produced by enslaved people, particularly in the Caribbean and American South. Institutions such as Phillips Exeter thus carried within them the paradox of Enlightenment ideals—education, improvement, civic virtue—underwritten by the material foundation of coerced Black labor elsewhere.

 

To this complex story of complicity we must add the industrial dimension represented most powerfully by the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, headquartered in Manchester, New Hampshire. In the nineteenth century, Amoskeag became one of the largest textile producers in the world, transforming Manchester into an industrial powerhouse. The raw cotton that fed its mills was cultivated by enslaved people in the American South, harvested through unspeakable toil and violence, and then transported north to be spun and woven into cloth by mill workers in New Hampshire. Amoskeag thus embodied the so-called “New England slavery industrial complex,” wherein the North’s prosperity and industrial modernity were inseparable from the Southern slave economy. While New Hampshire prided itself on its abolitionist sentiments in the mid-nineteenth century, the fact remains that its leading corporations, its investors, and its workers were enriched by the blood-stained fibers of cotton. Amoskeag’s prominence is a stark case study in how slavery’s tentacles reached even into communities that claimed to stand against it, embedding themselves in architecture, public works, and philanthropic projects that endure to this day.

 

Dartmouth College offers another instructive case. Founded in 1769 with the professed mission of educating Native Americans, Dartmouth soon became a training ground for New England elites. Its benefactors and trustees, like those of other Ivy League institutions, were often merchants or political leaders whose wealth was derived from slavery or slavery-linked commerce. Even as Dartmouth styled itself as a bastion of enlightenment, its very survival as an institution depended on financial contributions stained with slavery’s legacy. Some of its students hailed from families directly enriched by plantation ownership or the slave trade, and the college’s intellectual culture reflected the racial hierarchies of its time. More recent scholarship and institutional reckonings have begun to excavate this history, but it remains clear that Dartmouth—like Brown, Harvard, Yale, and others—cannot disentangle its development from the profits of human bondage.

 

 

Against this backdrop of complicity, however, New Hampshire was also home to individuals whose courage and activism charted a very different course. Among these were African Americans such as Prince Whipple, an enslaved man who fought in the Revolutionary War after being brought to Portsmouth by William Whipple, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Prince Whipple’s life illustrates the cruel paradox of Revolutionary America: enslaved men were asked to fight for liberty they themselves could not enjoy. His subsequent petitions for freedom, along with those of other enslaved people in New Hampshire, were among the earliest legal challenges to the institution of slavery in the state. These petitions forced white legislators to confront, however reluctantly, the contradiction between their public ideals and private practices.

 

Harriet Wilson, born in Milford, New Hampshire, in 1825, offers another remarkable biography. Abandoned by her white mother and forced into indentured servitude by the age of six, Wilson endured years of exploitation that left an indelible mark on her life. In 1859 she published “Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black,” the first novel published by an African American woman in the United States. The novel drew directly on her own experiences in New Hampshire, exposing the cruelties of Northern racism and the hypocrisies of so-called “free” states. Long neglected in literary history, Wilson’s work has since been recognized as a vital testament to the realities of Black life in New England. Her voice resounds as a counternarrative to the sanitized image of New Hampshire as a bastion of abolitionism, insisting that racism and exploitation were not confined to the South.

 

Equally critical were the white abolitionists and reformers who arose within New Hampshire’s civic and religious life. Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, editor of the “Herald of Freedom” in Concord, used his pen to advocate for the immediate abolition of slavery and to critique the racial prejudice permeating Northern society. Rogers, like William Lloyd Garrison, insisted upon a radical egalitarianism that challenged not only slavery but the broader structures of white supremacy. His life demonstrates how New Hampshire’s public sphere was animated by voices willing to speak against the prevailing order, even at the risk of ostracism and financial ruin.

 

The intersecting lives of enslavers, traders, abolitionists, and Black activists together underscore the layered history of slavery and resistance in New Hampshire. They show that the state’s economic, cultural, and intellectual development was inseparable from slavery, even as it gave rise to some of the nation’s earliest challenges to that system. The Amoskeag mills and Dartmouth College remind us that institutions still revered today were nourished by the profits of bondage. The lives of Prince Whipple and Harriet Wilson remind us that Black New Hampshirites endured both enslavement and its long shadow, yet also created enduring legacies of resistance. Figures like John Langdon and the Phillips family testify to the ways New Hampshire’s white elite profited from slavery while championing liberty for themselves.

 

This biographical lens also complicates the simplistic division of North and South, abolitionist and enslaver, by demonstrating how deeply interwoven these identities could be. The state’s history is thus neither peripheral nor incidental but rather constitutive of the nation’s story of slavery. Through these narratives, one perceives a moral geography in which New Hampshire was simultaneously complicit and resistant, enriched and haunted, culpable and redemptive. That geography remains embedded in its public memory, its institutions, and its economic legacies, demanding ongoing engagement and acknowledgment.

 

The legal architecture that sustained and then slowly unstitched slavery in New Hampshire emerged not as a single statute or dramatic decree but as a layered, accretive fabric of town by-laws, provincial enactments, judicial glosses, petitions, and constitutional text—each thread binding Black life to white authority and then, over time, fraying under the friction of revolutionary ideals, Black petitioning, and changing political economy. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, local ordinances and provincial practices treated Africans as both laboring persons and taxable property.

 

Night-walking restrictions, passes for travel, fines for harboring runaways, and the routine listing of enslaved people in probate inventories signaled a status distinct from indenture and presumptively hereditary through the mother. What is most striking about the early record is not the existence of a comprehensive slave code—New Hampshire never produced a sweeping Carolina-style code—but the matter-of-fact municipalization of racial control: towns paid constables for whipping or returning those who fled; selectmen budgeted for jail fees; courts enforced bills of sale as they would livestock transfers. The law of slavery in New Hampshire began as the law of daily management, a jurisprudence of errands and punishments that made bondage local, ordinary, and enforceable by any white neighbor who claimed the authority to stop a Black person on the road after dark.

 

The American Revolution disrupted this equilibrium less by immediately changing statutes than by altering the interpretive weather within which statutes were read. The decisive intervention was made by Black New Hampshirites themselves. In 1779, nineteen or twenty men in Portsmouth—styled in the document as “Natives of Africa,” among them Nero Brewster, Cato Warner, Pharoah Rogers, and others—petitioned the General Assembly with a precise indictment of the province’s moral incoherence. They insisted that “the God of Nature gave them life and freedom, upon terms of the most perfect equality with other men,” and asked how a people invoking natural rights against parliamentary tyranny could retain the power to “dispose of [our] Lives, Freedom and Property.” The petition did not yield an abolition act in that legislative session; the assembly received it and declined its revolutionary remedy.

 

 

But its legal significance was profound: it forced the state’s lawmakers to hear the Declaration’s language echoed back by those whom New Hampshire’s practice excluded from its promises, and it created a documentary fulcrum upon which later constitutional argument could pry. The petition has since been preserved and interpreted by public historians; its rhetorical economy—rights articulated as theological anthropology, liberty framed as inherent rather than granted—anticipated the idiom of later litigants who would test the meaning of New Hampshire’s constitutions.

 

When New Hampshire adopted its post-Revolution constitution in 1783 (reorganized in 1792), it did not explicitly abolish slavery. This omission made the Granite State different from Massachusetts, where in 1783 jury instructions in the Quock Walker litigation read in combination with the 1780 constitution were taken to render slavery incompatible with the declaration that “all men are born free and equal.” New Hampshire’s fundamental law proclaimed individual rights and equality before the law, but legislators never passed a categorical emancipation statute in the eighteenth century. Consequently, enslaved people continued to be counted in the 1790 federal census—158 people appear under the category “slaves”—and vestigial bondage endured for decades, even as the practice shrank through manumissions, self-purchase, demographic attrition, and a slow reorientation of elite respectability. The critical legal work here was interpretive rather than legislative: judges and lawyers increasingly treated the constitution’s egalitarian language as a presumption against enslavement, while town officials and juries evinced less appetite for coercing a system that no longer paid. The ambient jurisprudence resembled Massachusetts in spirit but lacked a single decisive case; the result was a crawling demise rather than a surgical abolition.

 

That crawling demise should not be mistaken for legal safety. Federal law intervened powerfully in 1793 with the first Fugitive Slave Act, authorizing summary seizure and return of alleged fugitives across state lines and criminalizing assistance to them. For free Black New Hampshirites and those who had informally gained their liberty, the statute made mobility perilous and every border porous. New Hampshire’s courts, like others in the North, were forced to entertain claims made under federal authority even as many citizens opposed the idea that their sheriffs and justices should serve as plantation auxiliaries.

 

After the Supreme Court’s decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) struck down key features of state “personal liberty” protections, northern legislatures sought new ways to deploy state processes—habeas corpus, jury trials, limits on state officers’ assistance—to shield residents from kidnapping and to ensure a modicum of due process before any removal south. New Hampshire joined its New England neighbors in this evolving legal resistance, and by the 1850s, in the shadow of an even harsher federal Fugitive Slave Act, the state enacted protective legislation that both declared a public policy of freedom and wrestled procedural control back from federal summary process.

 

The statute most often taken as the capstone of New Hampshire’s legal disengagement from slavery came in 1857. Styled as an “Act to secure freedom and the rights of citizenship to persons in this State,” it belonged to the family of personal liberty laws that proliferated across the North in the 1850s. As with analogues in Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Vermont, the New Hampshire act sought to ensure that anyone within the state’s jurisdiction enjoyed a presumption of freedom, access to habeas corpus, and procedural protections that made summary rendition more difficult. It aligned state officials against participation in the federal machinery of capture, and in doing so announced, with the force of positive law, that New Hampshire’s public policy was freedom. Historians often cite 1857 as the date when slavery “formally” ended in the state—not because a large enslaved population was liberated by its passage (there is scant evidence of sizable chattel slavery by then), but because the last legal ambiguities were converted into a statutory architecture that refused cooperation and affirmed liberty as a status. The act thus closed the constitutional circle begun by the 1779 petitioners’ insistence that natural rights were not selectively racial.

 

Yet the legal story between petition and personal liberty law is more intricate than a straight line from right to remedy. The 1790 and 1800 censuses confirm the persistence of slavery in diminished form, and local records occasionally capture lawsuits over self-purchase agreements gone awry, disputes about the status of children born to enslaved mothers after 1783, and prosecutions of whites who aided fugitives. In the early republic, New Hampshire, like other northern states, experimented with gradualist measures in practice if not in text—masters informally agreed to manumit at an age of majority; churches baptized and married Black congregants but did not always defend them against sale; courts heard freedom suits in which plaintiffs invoked the spirit of the constitution.

 

All of this created a jurisprudence of attrition: each manumission reduced the social legitimacy of slavery; each jury that balked at enforcing a harsh covenant curbed the appetite for litigation; each town that refused to fund a slave catcher signaled that slavery had become a legal outsider. But attrition did not equal equality. Free Black New Hampshirites often faced exclusion from the franchise, segregated schooling or outright denial of educational opportunity, and private-law discrimination for which courts offered little redress. The law was shedding one form of status subordination even as it tolerated others under the rubrics of property and contract.

 

 

The litigation that most directly pressed the question of Black status in the North during these years—cases over fugitives—was structurally tilted against liberty. Federal commissioners could order rendition on skeletal proofs; alleged fugitives were denied the jury trial that northern legislatures attempted to supply; and in Prigg the Supreme Court declared that state procedural additions to the federal scheme were unconstitutional. New Hampshire’s legislative response in 1857 harmonized with the post-Prigg strategy: it did not purport to nullify federal law but withdrew state cooperation and built a state-law due process canopy for anyone seized within its borders.

 

Even this canopy was precarious: Dred Scott v. Sandford, also in 1857, declared that Black people, free or enslaved, could not be citizens of the United States and thus could not sue in federal court, a decision whose logic menaced Black life everywhere in the republic. New Hampshire’s assertion of state citizenship and freedom in its personal liberty act therefore did more than protect against kidnapping; it articulated a counter-citizenship that repudiated Dred Scott within the state’s legal imagination.

 

Against the formal institutions of law stood the continuing insurgency of petition and protest. The 1779 petition has rightly received pride of place in the state’s memory and in modern public history installations, but it was neither the first nor the last instance of Black Granite Staters using paper to move power. Town meeting petitions for manumission, collective appeals for redress following kidnappings, and printed narratives that exposed northern cruelty formed a parallel docket on which New Hampshire’s legal conscience was tried. In 2013, the State of New Hampshire symbolically acknowledged the justice of the 1779 petition by posthumously emancipating fourteen of its signers who had died in bondage, a commemorative act that both honored their legal reasoning and confessed the polity’s long deafness to it. The granite “petition line” at the Portsmouth African Burying Ground, inscribing phrases from the 1779 text into civic space, literalizes the long walk from grievance to law.

 

The end of chattel slavery within New Hampshire’s borders did not end the state’s legal entanglement with slavery as a national system. Throughout the antebellum period, banks discounted bills drawn on southern factors, merchants insured cargoes bound to and from slave ports, and courts enforced commercial instruments whose value depended on slave-grown cotton. The law of contracts, of negotiable instruments, and of marine insurance all functioned as conduits for profits that originated in coerced labor. The very judges who, in their criminal and habeas jurisdictions, might hesitate to facilitate a rendition could, in their commercial terms, rule in favor of a northern creditor whose debtor’s solvency rested upon the sale of plantation staples.

 

This bifurcation did not reflect hypocrisy so much as the segmentation of legal consciousness: liberty was the subject of one docket, capital of another, and the traffic between them was not yet morally taxed. The 1857 act, by declaring a statewide commitment to freedom, began to integrate these compartments—less by disrupting commercial law than by forcing every actor in the system to acknowledge that New Hampshire would not, as a matter of public policy, lend its officers to the coercion of a human being.

 

Reading New Hampshire’s long arc of anti-slavery law alongside that of neighboring states makes clear how regional jurisprudence develops by analogy and emulation. Pennsylvania’s 1780 gradual emancipation act offered a statutory model that Connecticut and Rhode Island adapted; Massachusetts offered a judicial model in which constitutional equality nullified slavery without a statute; New Hampshire advanced along the Massachusetts path of constitutional attrition but lagged in achieving a declaratory finish, reaching for it in the 1857 personal liberty act rather than in a classic emancipation act.

 

The upshot is that scholarship has had to use compound verbs—“eroded,” “withered,” “unraveled,” “ceased”—to describe slavery’s end in New Hampshire, reserving “abolished” for the 1857 date as a matter of public policy and for the Thirteenth Amendment as a matter of national constitutional text. The historical record supports this asymmetry: numbers of enslaved persons plummet after the Revolution; the 1790 census still records bondage; the docket of fugitive cases and kidnapping scares remained active; and only with midcentury personal liberty legislation do we see the state claim a general jurisdictional hostility to enslavement itself.

 

At the level of legal culture, New Hampshire’s bench and bar developed a habit of reading freedom charitably and slavery strictly—a hermeneutic that mattered enormously in close cases. If a will’s manumission clause were ambiguous, freedom would be favored; if a master asserted a lifetime term for a person informally treated as indentured, the claim would be viewed skeptically; if a child’s status was disputed in light of the mother’s shifting status in the 1780s and 1790s, the burden on the enslaver’s heirs was heavy.

 

This was not the radicalism of immediate abolition but the practical jurisprudence of a community that had ceased to regard human property as respectable and therefore declined to rescue it with creative doctrines. By the 1830s, when abolitionists publicly agitated and southerners demanded stricter compliance with fugitive law, this habit had hardened into a political position: New Hampshire could not be compelled to conscript its officers into slavery’s police. From that premise, the logic of the 1857 act followed with the inevitability of a syllogism.

 

 

The post-emancipation aftermath illuminates how legal dismantling and social equality diverged. The Freedmen’s Bureau operated in the South, not in New Hampshire, but New Hampshire’s legislators ratified the Reconstruction Amendments, and its courts and civic associations had to interpret what those amendments meant for their own institutions. In schooling, public accommodations, employment, and jury service, informal barriers fell more slowly than formal ones.

 

The very tools that had been used to curtail slavery’s reach—local discretion, municipal administration, private-law autonomy—could be redeployed to maintain racial hierarchy without naming it. Thus the same state that, in 1857, announced that all persons within its jurisdiction were presumptively free would, for decades, tolerate practices that blunted the practical enjoyment of equality. The legal history of slavery’s end in New Hampshire therefore properly includes the history of how equality’s beginning was delayed by law’s deference to custom.

 

The state’s present-day reckoning with this legal past has taken juridical as well as commemorative form. Research initiatives and public histories have republished the 1779 petition, mapped the African Burying Ground, and drawn attention to the statutory language of 1857. In law schools and bar associations, the state’s role in developing “personal liberty” doctrines is taught as an early chapter in the long American argument over federalism and rights. Perhaps most poignantly, the state has used law to correct the record of law: in 2013, New Hampshire passed a bill posthumously recognizing the freedom claims of the 1779 petitioners and, in public ceremony, acknowledged the justice they were denied. That act does not rewrite the eighteenth-century docket; it writes a twenty-first–century footnote that binds the contemporary polity to the petitioners’ jurisprudence of natural right.

 

Taken together, New Hampshire’s slave laws, court practices, and emancipation petitions demonstrate how a legal system can at once facilitate domination and also contain within itself the instruments of deliverance. Early municipal ordinances and provincial practices created a net of surveillance and discipline whose threads were small but strong; Black petitioners and revolutionary constitutional text began to cut those threads; federal fugitive law tried to knot them again; personal liberty statutes reasserted the state’s right to protect those within its borders; and, finally, the Thirteenth Amendment drew the national line that New Hampshire’s law had already limned.

 

The state’s role in this story is neither that of a reluctant follower nor that of a heroic vanguard; it is the role of a community whose legal conscience was repeatedly instructed—sometimes by its judges, often by its Black residents, always by the contradiction between its ideals and its practice—and that, over the course of three generations, learned to read its own constitution as if its promises included everyone.

 

The narrative deepens as one traces the consequences of emancipation through Reconstruction, the long nineteenth century, and into the modern era, and as one attends to the quotidian legalisms and lived practices that shaped whether formal freedom yielded meaningful equality. Emancipation, when it arrived as constitutional text in 1865, altered the legal horizon but did not automatically reorder social relations in New Hampshire any more than it did elsewhere in the republic. Granite Staters who had campaigned for the Union—some from motives of national cohesion, others from commitments to abolition—confronted the fact that the end of chattel bondage made conceivable a new set of civic obligations they had hitherto evaded. New Hampshire’s wartime and immediate postwar politics reveal a complex web: legislators voted for the Reconstruction Amendments with varying degrees of enthusiasm; charitable societies dispatched teachers and aid to the South; veterans’ organizations commemorated Black and white service unevenly; and local courts were pressed to apply the new constitutional provisions to matters of contract, local governance, and policing.

 

 

The Freedmen’s Bureau did not have a stationary presence in New Hampshire, for its mandate and field offices were concentrated where formerly enslaved populations were largest. Yet the Bureau’s pedagogy—land settlement, educational uplift, labor contracts—was animated by volunteers and reformers who passed through New Hampshire’s towns and meetinghouses. Missionary teachers trained in northern seminaries and aided by congregational and philanthropic funds left New Hampshire classrooms for Southern ones; the moral culture that sustained that humanitarian mobilization drew on decades of antislavery organizing inside the state.

 

New Hampshire’s contributions to Reconstruction were thus diffuse but sincere: ministers and women’s societies raised funds for freedpeople’s schools; university-educated northerners joined Freedmen’s Aid societies; and the state’s newspapers printed both pleas for justice and reports of Southern violence, keeping the public attentive if not always active.

 

Veterans returning from the Union armies included Black men who had mustered in through neighboring states or arrived as free men who enlisted locally. Their service complicated conventional narratives of regional loyalty; it supplied moral leverage for political claims that Black men could not entirely convert into political power because of entrenched racial prejudice. Still, their presence in civic life—church leadership, trades, and fraternal organizations—provided institutional nodes around which Black communities organized for mutual aid and civil rights. These communities, though small in numerical terms compared with urban centers like Boston or New York, sustained cultural creativity, produced local leadership, and litigated for equal treatment in municipal matters such as street rail access, employment in municipal services, and educational resources.

 

The legal battles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often turned not on the formal existence of freedom but on its implementation: access to unemcumbered land, fair wages, jury service, and integrated schooling. Where state law had declared a presumption of freedom in 1857, local custom still permitted discriminations codified in hiring practices, union rules, and business licensing. The practice of occupational exclusion—Black workers being restricted to service trades or laboring posts—was sustained through guild-like arrangements, employer preferences, and prejudiced hiring managers.

 

Political enfranchisement, though not barred by state law, was impeded by social ostracism and the practical obstacles of campaign politics in small towns where a cohesive white voting bloc could determine local offices. Black Granite Staters therefore often relied on extralegal institutions—churches, benevolent societies, and fraternal orders—to build capital, to educate children, and to contest discrimination through local pressure and occasional litigation.

 

Education became a recurrent terrain of struggle. School committee minutes reveal debates over whether Black children should be admitted to common schools or relegated to separate facilities, and court records from the late nineteenth century show that activists litigated to assert access to public instruction. Even when courts ruled in favor of integration, school boards sometimes complied only grudgingly, erecting administrative hurdles that diluted the effect of judicial pronouncements. The lived consequence was that equality in law required constant civic advocacy to convert into equality in practice. Throughout the Progressive Era, Black New Hampshirites sought to use the rhetoric of reform to their advantage—pointing to public health, child welfare, and vocational training as entry points for broader inclusion—yet they continued to meet resistance shaped by racialized conceptions of civic hierarchy.

 

The twentieth century brought both continuity and change. The Great Migration delivered more substantial Black populations to northern cities than New Hampshire typically absorbed, but those who did arrive contributed significantly to urban economies, religious life, and artistic culture. World Wars I and II galvanized new patterns of labor mobility and civic rhetoric: service in the armed forces and wartime industrial employment expanded Black claims for civic membership. After World War II, returning Black veterans and their families leveraged the rhetoric of the war—the fight for freedom abroad—to demand civil rights at home. Local civil rights campaigns focused on public accommodations, employment equality in municipal services, and fair housing; they connected political education with direct-action tactics that ranged from letter campaigns to coordinated complaints to city officials.

 

The mid-twentieth–century civil rights movement found in New Hampshire its own local actors and causes. NAACP branches and informal networks mounted legal challenges and public campaigns to dismantle exclusionary practices. Teachers, ministers, and lawyers worked in coalition to press for school integration and anti-discrimination ordinances. Yet the demographic scale of the state made mass mobilization of the sort seen in the South less likely; change was often incremental, achieved through litigation, municipal policy shifts, and cultural persuasion. The gains were real but partial: systemic disadvantages in wealth accumulation, educational attainment, and political representation persisted across decades, the structural legacies of an earlier era’s legal toleration and economic entanglement with slavery.

 

 

Institutional memory and contemporary reckoning constitute the final arc of this legal and social history. Beginning late in the twentieth century and accelerating in the early twenty-first, civic institutions—museums, colleges, municipal governments—began to commission archives, to convene panels, and to fund historical research tracing links between their endowments and the money flows tied to slavery. Public archaeology projects, notably the rediscovery and memorialization of the Portsmouth African Burying Ground, articulated a new form of public history attentive to those who had been erased from street maps and guidebooks. Colleges such as Dartmouth launched committees to audit historical ties; they published reports that cataloged donors with connections to slave economies, recommended curricular adjustments, and proposed programs of community engagement and reparative scholarship. Corporations that occupy mill complexes and underwriting lists have faced shareholder and civic scrutiny concerning the provenance of their early capital and the ethical implications of historic naming rights and benefactor recognition.

 

These acts of institutional self-examination are neither merely ceremonial nor merely private; they recalibrate the politics of memory in ways that carry civic consequence. When a town council decides to erect a plaque naming a burial ground, when a college adopts scholarship programs targeted at descendants of enslaved laborers, when a museum curates an exhibit that narrates the slavery industrial complex rather than eliding it, a new distribution of honor and visibility begins to take shape. Public policy—through state-supported research grants, through legislative recognition of historical injustices, and through educational mandates—can amplify these local initiatives and link them to broader reparative strategies. Yet the politics of remediation are contested: some argue for symbolic acknowledgment, others for material redress, and still others for structural reforms that address contemporary inequality (education funding, housing policy, access to legal counsel) as the appropriate site of reparative justice.

 

From a methodological perspective, reconstructing New Hampshire’s long involvement with slavery demands patience and archival plurality. Probate inventories disclose enslaved persons as line items but rarely provide their voices; parish registers confirm baptisms yet often conceal the coercive relations that shadowed religious life; insurance policies and bank ledgers speak the language of capital but require ethical interpretation to place human cost beside monetary figure. Oral histories, when recoverable, provide liminal narratives that resist the neat causal pathways of ledger histories. Interdisciplinary work—combining economic history, legal analysis, archaeology, and Black literary studies—yields a fuller accounting of how slavery’s legacies became embedded in place. Collaborative projects that bring together municipal archivists, local historians, descendant communities, and academic researchers produce both richer archives and more democratic histories. Such projects also insist that historical knowledge should inform present policy choices, rather than remain an esoteric exercise confined to libraries.

 

The moral and civic lesson of New Hampshire’s history with slavery is not simply an exhortation to feel moral regret; it is an impetus to translate historical knowledge into institutional practices that expand opportunity and recognition. If the mills built with cotton capital now host incubators and apartments, if college endowments grown in part from slave-linked commerce now support scholarships, then historical awareness can shape decisions about who benefits from those contemporary resources. If municipal commemorations render visible the African Burying Ground or the 1779 petition, they do more than honor the past: they recalibrate civic memory in ways that shape collective identity and future policy. The continuing task, then, is to ensure that history’s illumination be joined by political imagination and institutional courage, so that the state’s inherited advantages serve not merely to embellish local prestige but to expand democratic possibility for those whose ancestors were excluded from the original bargains of liberty.

 

The examination of New Hampshire’s historical connections to slavery and its legacies is incomplete without a sustained engagement with the material residue of human bondage as recorded in probate inventories, ship manifests, and the meticulous ledgers of insurance companies and maritime financiers. These archival traces, often terse in language yet devastating in implication, serve as some of the most concrete indicators of the interpenetration between abstract sums and the intimate, lived realities of enslaved persons.

 

For example, probate inventories of Portsmouth merchants in the eighteenth century routinely list “Negro man,” “Negro wench,” or “mulatto child” alongside livestock, silver, and household furnishings, revealing that the enslaved were not only human beings but also fungible property assessed for liquidable value in estate settlements. These documents, when read with critical attention, show not merely ownership but also the cruel reduction of lives to commodities, with monetary figures affixed to individuals whose agency was systematically denied. They also map the circulation of wealth within families and across generations, demonstrating how the enslavement of even a handful of persons could underwrite the consolidation of mercantile dynasties that later passed as respectable pillars of the Granite State’s economy and politics.

 

 

Ship manifests deepen this understanding by situating New Hampshire within broader Atlantic networks of commerce. Portsmouth’s wharves were not peripheral to the slave trade but were sites where molasses, sugar, rum, and timber converged with human trafficking, each reinforcing the other. Vessels outfitted in Portsmouth or nearby coastal towns carried the rum distilled in New England to Africa, where it was exchanged for captives; those captives, in turn, were transported to the Caribbean, where they labored on plantations whose output returned to New England markets. Although the manifests frequently suppress the names of the enslaved in favor of aggregate counts, occasional annotations and irregularities testify to the embodied presence of men, women, and children whose dislocation was part of a ruthless arithmetic of profit.

 

Maritime insurance records, moreover, reflect the commodification of risk: enslaved Africans were insured as cargo, their lives reduced to actuarial calculations where mortality, rebellion, and shipwreck were anticipated contingencies to be indemnified rather than humanitarian crises to be averted. In pairing such quantitative documents with qualitative narratives—letters, court petitions, manumission records, and the rare but invaluable testimonies of the enslaved themselves—one can reconstruct not only the scale of New Hampshire’s entanglement in slavery but also the profound human costs encoded in numbers.

 

The economic flows revealed in these materials point to an enduring paradox: the very institutions and fortunes that came to symbolize New Hampshire’s industriousness and civic culture were often seeded by the proceeds of enslavement. Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, whose textile mills in Manchester became synonymous with industrial progress in the nineteenth century, depended fundamentally on the cheap raw cotton harvested by enslaved laborers in the American South. The profits of New Hampshire banks, insurers, and maritime traders alike were entangled with the traffic in human lives, whether directly through ownership or indirectly through ancillary industries.

 

Dartmouth College, meanwhile, whose intellectual prestige lent the state an aura of enlightenment, drew benefactions and institutional stability from donors whose wealth was generated through slaveholding, Caribbean plantations, or the wider slavery industrial complex. The presence of enslaved men like Prince Whipple in the households of Portsmouth’s elite and the long struggles for gradual emancipation waged in the courts and legislature underscore that this history was not abstract but immediate, woven into the texture of daily life in the Granite State.

 

It is within the archives of New Hampshire that these threads can be most vividly traced and reconstructed. The New Hampshire State Archives in Concord preserves legislative acts, judicial proceedings, and gubernatorial papers that chart the legal arc from toleration of slavery to its gradual dismantling. Town clerk offices in Portsmouth, Exeter, and other early settlements hold deeds, wills, and municipal records that register both the presence of enslaved individuals and the economic structures that sustained their bondage.

 

The Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth houses correspondence, account books, and donor records that reveal the institutional complicity of higher education in the profits of slavery, while the Portsmouth Athenaeum and the Strawbery Banke Museum steward collections that link material culture with African American community histories. The Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire, through oral histories, curated archives, and public history projects, adds crucial interpretive layers that connect past to present, ensuring that the archival silences are supplemented by reconstructed voices of resistance and resilience. Together, these repositories offer scholars, community researchers, and descendants a mosaic of sources through which the contours of slavery’s impact can be examined, challenged, and remembered.

 

The act of pairing quantitative economic documents with qualitative human accounts is thus more than an academic exercise; it is a reclamation of humanity against the tide of abstraction. Probate inventories that coldly list “one Negro girl, valued at 40 pounds” gain deeper resonance when set against freedom petitions drafted by enslaved men demanding recognition of their rights, or against church records noting baptisms and marriages that signal the persistence of familial bonds under conditions of subjugation.

 

Ship manifests that tabulate “seventy-five souls” on board a vessel acquire haunting specificity when juxtaposed with runaway advertisements that describe a scar on a man’s cheek, the skill of a woman in weaving, or the courage of a youth who dared to abscond toward liberty. Insurance policies that calculate the risk of “cargo mortality” stand in stark contrast to the personal letters of enslavers’ children who refer to their household “servants” in casual familiarity, unknowing that those same individuals bore the full weight of systemic oppression. In weaving these disparate records together, one apprehends not only the architecture of New Hampshire’s slavery economy but also the indivisible humanity of those who endured, resisted, and ultimately redefined freedom on their own terms.

 

 

Thus the story of slavery in New Hampshire is neither a footnote to national history nor an isolated anomaly. It is a chapter deeply inscribed in the evolution of American capitalism, jurisprudence, and racial ideology. By recovering the names, values, and trajectories recorded in the ledgers of merchants and the testimonies of the enslaved, scholars reveal how the wealth of a small northern state was built in part upon the foundation of bondage, how its intellectual institutions and civic culture were indebted to human exploitation, and how its Black residents—enslaved and free—struggled ceaselessly to claim dignity, justice, and recognition.

 

The task that remains for contemporary researchers and community members is not only to interpret the archival evidence but also to reckon with its implications for present inequities. For the memory of slavery in New Hampshire is not a relic of the past; it is an ongoing demand for acknowledgement, repair, and a fuller embrace of historical truth.