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Near the as-yet unmarked grave of the British soldiers [in Lincoln's old cemetery], Henry Thoreau read the epitaph of the Negro slave Sippio Brister that inspired the familiar passage in Walden: “He is styled ... ‘a man of color’ as if he were discolored.” Paul Brooks, The View from Lincoln Hill (1976), p. 177.
Some years ago, a member of the Company stopped at the old Lincoln cemetery and found there Margaret and Warren Flint, placing flowers at the graves of remembered ancestors. Conversation turned to Sippio Brister, the slave and soldier of the Revolution who is buried in the cemetery. Margaret Flint began a story. A woman of Lincoln, the wife of John Hoar, was traveling to Boston by carriage to do her shopping. Near the city, she encountered a black woman beside the road who offered to give away her infant son, to be raised by the Lincoln woman. The Lincoln woman replied that if the mother were still at the side of the road at the end of the day when she had completed her shopping, she would take the infant. And she did. The boy was given the name Brister Hoar and was held as a slave — he named himself Sippio Brister only after he gained his freedom.
Told in a country cemetery filled with the sun and cheer of Spring, this seemed a cruel tale of an inhuman bargain between two women. But not long after, our member of the Company found this in Carol Berkin’s book about women in colonial America:
Urban slave women [in the North] had little hope of creating a family that could remain intact. Slaveholdings [by urban whites] were too small for a woman to choose a husband from within the household, and few urban colonists were willing to shoulder the costs of raising a slave child in their midst. Rural slaveholders could set a slave’s child to work in the garden or field, but in the cities, youngsters were simply a drain on resources and living space. At least one master preferred to sell his pregnant slave rather than suffer having her child underfoot. Other masters solved the problem of an extra mouth to feed by selling infants — or, in one case, giving his slave’s baby away. ... In Boston, a pregnant slave woman and her husband chose to commit suicide rather than endure the dissolution of their family. Urban slave women who were allowed to keep their children often lost them quickly. Communicable diseases and cramped quarters combined in deadly fashion in every household in 18th century colonial cities, but black infant mortality rates were two to three times higher than white. [First Generations: Women in Colonial America, p. 125]
The Massachusetts Court ended slavery in 1783 by ruling that it was incompatible with the state’s constitution.
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