Not pity but respect: Thomas Nelson Baker

Presented to the Club on Monday Evening, January 14, 2013 by Robert G. Anderson

We are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln’s Presidential declaration that all slaves were no longer property but free. Lincoln shifted the justification for the civil war from preserving the union to liberating those enslaved. The proclamation began to undo the entanglement of the 1850’s when it was federal law to seize and return escaped slaves to their owners while abolitionists were extending the underground railroad and taking up arms to promote civil freedom in new territories. The contentious adoption of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution by Congress in the final months of the Civil War and the subsequent confirmation by the States, rendered the intent of the emancipation proclamation federal law.

I want to tell you about a person whose life as a 2 year old was dramatically altered by Lincoln’s proclamation, enacted January 1, 1863. His name was Thomas Nelson Baker, born a slave on August 11, 1860. His significance for us is that, at age 71, Baker was voted into membership of the Monday Evening Club, the first African American. The 1863 proclamation declared that he and his family were free. Since we each likely have tracked genealogy back to 1860, whether in the US or abroad, we might consider what impact the proclamation had on our ancestors, whether soldiers, slaveholders, merchants in the cotton trade, conductors in the underground railroad, victims of collateral war damage, or even those entrapped in oppressive countries where freedom from bondage was a dream.

"Nothing intelligent to say...": Servants and slaves in southern New England; the initial years for natives and settlers

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, January 23, 2011 by Robert G. Anderson

Last fall I began to search for material about slavery in 17th century southern New England with the hope that I would have something intelligent to say for my first endeavor as “reader.” No surprise, there is a richness, complexity and darkness to the history of natives and settlers, as differing peoples began to mix it up in this territory. I will describe some key events from 1620 to 1640, an incomplete narrative, after taking a look at the respective cultures that clashed once English settlers began to arrive on native land. My enigmatic title is part of a quote from the novelist Kurt Vonnegut which I will explain later.

I hope to explore how English settlers got here, how servitude evolved and slavery took hold as a significant economic, social and security development. The sources I found are almost exclusively based upon accounts of colonist history by colonists and accounts of native activity by colonists. Archeology has provided limited data regarding the lives of natives in the early 1600s. What we mostly have is one side of the story.

I. Backdrop of the Clash of Peoples

As far back as 7,000 years ago peoples inhabited our four season region of woodland, mountains and coastland. The migrating Algonquin people arrived 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, divided into nations, living a life of hunting, fishing, gathering and seasonal crop farming, with clustered villages along the coast in the warm months and inland by other waters during the coldest, following game. They lived in circular thatched dwellings easily moved with the seasons or in more permanent longhouses.