6 minute read
Caesar's Stories
Above: Cattle in front of Sarah Orne Jewett House, South Berwick, Maine.
by SCOT MCFARLANE
Scot McFarlane is a researcher for the American Historical Association’s Mapping the Landscape of Secondary Education project and founder of the Oxbow History Company. He is a former Historic New England Recovering New England’s Voices research scholar.
In the late 1700s, an enslaved man named Caesar labored and lived at what is now called Sarah Orne Jewett House in South Berwick, Maine. Built in 1774, the house is named after the author who called it home for most of her life from 1849 to 1909. But for Caesar, who predated Jewett by more than half a century, it was a site of labor rather than a home. Like many people who were enslaved, what little we know about him comes from just a few documents. In Tilly Haggens’s 1777 will, he left his son John, the original owner of Jewett House, some tracts of land, a mill and mill privileges, and “also that negro Boy he now has with him, Caesar by name.” There also is evidence that Caesar may have stayed in the house long after the Revolution, maybe into the nineteenth century. Two documents point to this possibility: the 1790 and 1800 censuses, in which the Haggens household lists one person under the “all other persons” category used to categorize non-white, free people.
During the year I worked as a Historic New England Recovering New England’s Voices scholar, I focused in large part on the stories of enslaved people like Caesar. A network of researchers has learned so much about the history of slavery in Maine, including a number of people enslaved in Berwick where Jewett House is located (the area became South Berwick in 1814). Recovering the stories of enslaved people is very challenging; details of their lives were rarely recorded or saved. In my own research I have seen how evidence related to the history of slavery has been purposefully destroyed, making it even more difficult and requiring us to consider different approaches that move beyond archives to recover more of Caesar’s story.
In contrast with Caesar, Sarah Orne Jewett’s life is well documented. Sarah’s grandfather Captain Theodore F. Jewett, a merchant and ship owner, moved his family from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to the Haggens house in the 1820s. It appears that the Jewett family rented the house for a number of years, finally purchasing it in 1839. In 1848, Captain Jewett’s son, Dr. Theodore Herman Jewett, his wife Caroline, and their baby daughter Mary moved into the house. Sarah was born in 1849 and the young family continued to live with Captain Jewett until 1854, when a Greek Revival house was built next door for their use.
Sarah’s life in the house and Caesar’s life there were separated by only one generation. Sarah wrote fiction, but first she listened to other people’s stories. It is likely that she heard Caesar’s story and shared a part of his history with her readers.
Sarah built her stories from her lived experience and her awareness of local history. When she described her novels Deephaven and The Tory Lover, she said they “hold all my knowledge, real knowledge, and all my dreams about my dear Berwick.” In particular, The Tory Lover relies on real historical characters set in the time of the Revolution. Several historically accurate names of local Berwick characters are included — Tilly Haggens, the father of the first owner of Jewett House, is named in the book, and so is Caesar. This suggests Sarah must have at least known his name, but it begs the question of what else did she know?
In The Tory Lover she places Caesar in the nearby Hamilton House rather than her own home. Yet one other detail suggests that Sarah may have carried over more than his name in this novel. Near the beginning of the book she writes: “Caesar, who had been born a Guinea prince, drank in silence, stepped back to his place behind his master, and stood there like a king.”
Members of West African royalty did become ensnared in the slave trade in this period. For example, Randy J. Sparks’s The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey describes the true story of how the Robin John brothers, themselves slave traders, became enslaved in North America. Thanks to the research of Patricia Wall, who studied slavery in Berwick and Kittery, Maine, in her book Lives of Consequence, we also know a more specific fact related to Sarah’s description of Caesar. The year before Tilly Haggens willed Caesar to his son John, he placed a runaway advertisement for one of his enslaved men named Newport. The ad included this description: “is scar’d in his temples which was done in Guinea.”
This detail about the Haggens family’s ownership of at least one enslaved man born in Guinea suggests that Sarah’s specific presentation of Caesar as a real historical figure went beyond his name.
Sarah Orne Jewett did not tell her readers when her fiction derived from history and thus far none of her letters tell us what she did know about the history of slavery in Berwick. These mysteries also serve as a reminder of the limitations of history. We cannot rely on primary sources alone to understand the history of slavery in New England.
Literature can help to fill in some of the gaps of records right up to our present moment. Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved addresses these omissions directly. She wrote the novel in part because she “was keenly aware of erasures and absences and silences in the written history available to me — silences that I took for censure… To me the enforced or chosen silence, the way history was written, controlled and shaped the national discourse.” As Morrison wrote, in order to learn from the past, sometimes it must be imagined. To be clear, Sarah Orne Jewett’s descriptions of Caesar lack the depth and agency that Morrison used to correct both the historical record and a literature of either flatness or caricature.
Scholarly historical monographs cannot fill in the holes with the imaginary, and historians such as Harvard University professor Tiya Miles also publish works of historical fiction. Their deep knowledge of historical context allows them to create an accurate world in which they can explore how their characters might have felt and acted. We know Caesar labored as an enslaved man at Jewett House in the 1770s. He might have been born in Guinea before surviving the Middle Passage, and after he obtained, or perhaps regained, his freedom he may have continued to work at Jewett House into the early 1800s. The recorded history of slavery in New England often preserved only the first names of enslaved people such as Ceasar, and historically-informed literary treatments offer another way to consider the stories we cannot recover through archival research alone.
