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Celebrating Portsmouth’s Black History
Celebrating Portsmouth’s Black History
by JERRIANNE BOGGIS and BARBARA M. WARD
JerriAnne Boggis is executive director and Barbara M. Ward is senior grantwriter and program developer at the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire.
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the surface, is a typical picturesque New England seaport bustling with tourists. Eighteenth-century wood frame houses huddle together in the South End and nineteenth-century brick waterfront warehouses now converted into restaurants and shops line the waterfront.
The history told at most places in the city is the history of merchants and mansions.
But there is much more to learn about the city’s past. As you stroll along the waterfront, you begin to see the bronze markers of the Black Heritage Trail. From the story of the first documented enslaved African in the region – a man sold to “Mr. Williams of Piscataquak” in 1645 – to the story of the desegregation of the former Rockingham Hotel in 1964, these markers share history that is too often forgotten.
As Portsmouth takes note of its 400th year as a colonial town, we acknowledge that the town was established on a site previously occupied by Indigenous peoples and fishermen from the Atlantic diaspora. And we take stock of what life here has been like for the descendants of African peoples who were unwillingly transported from their homeland and enslaved here, as well as for peoples of African descent who continue to come here from all over the world.
The best place to begin this introduction to Portsmouth’s Black history is the African Burying Ground memorial site on Chestnut Street between State and Court streets. In 2003 during routine road repairs thirteen coffins were unearthed in the area recorded by early Portsmouth historians as the site of the “Negro Burying Ground.” In use from 1705 until about 1810, the precise location was obscured, paved over, and forgotten by the early twentieth century.
The Burying Ground was one of the first sites identified by Valerie Cunningham when she founded the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail in 1994. The trail soon stretched throughout the city. Cunningham’s initial pamphlet expanded into a book, Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African American Heritage, written by Cunningham with the assistance of Mark Sammons.
Even as the plaques began to be a familiar site in Portsmouth, it was not until the unearthing of coffins at the corner of Court and Chestnut streets that the whole city became involved in honoring this history. What had been theoretical became real as the shovels hit the coffins and residents realized what lay beneath a quiet street. Ground-penetrating radar was used to map the location of additional coffins. Archaeologists estimate that at least 200 grave sites exist and are now protected beneath the street.
Designed by sculptor Jerome Meadows, the African Burying Ground Memorial visibly tells the story of New Hampshire's involvement with enslavement. One element of the memorial, the Entry Piece on State Street, consists of two figures with a wall of granite separating them, their hands reaching out and nearly touching. The woman represents Mother Africa while the man represents the first enslaved man brought to Portsmouth in 1645. They reach out to one another but remain forever separated.
At the base of the park, at the point where the remains were found in 2003, is the Burial Vault surrounded by eight Community Figures representing the people who honor those buried here. The railing behind them is decorated with tiles incorporating African symbols, created by Portsmouth Middle School students under Meadows’s direction.
Connecting these is the Petition Line of pink granite, inscribed with words from the 1779 Petition of Freedom. To date, this is the only known eighteenthcentury document that directly records the voices of Portsmouth’s enslaved people. In November 1779, twenty men who described themselves as “Natives of Africa now forcibly detained in Slavery in the State of New Hampshire” signed this petition calling for the restoration of their freedom. Most are identified by the first names given to them by the merchants, craftsmen, and gentlemen who enslaved them, and all are identified with the surnames of leading families of the colony, Loyalists and Patriots alike. Most of these enslaved men performed multiple functions within their households, acting simultaneously as body servants, butlers, footmen, artisans, and laborers. Only ten were living as free men at the time of their deaths. Four were enslaved in houses that are now open to the public as museums – Winsor Moffatt and Prince Whipple in the Moffatt-Ladd House, and Peter and Cato Warner in the Warner House.
The elected head of the Black Community of Portsmouth, known as the King of the Negro Court, Nero Brewster, appears first in the list, followed by his fellow officers. One signer, Prince Whipple, although only nineteen or twenty years old in 1779, had broad experience with the Revolution and Revolutionary rhetoric. Prince Whipple traveled to Philadelphia with William Whipple when William was one of the New Hampshire delegates to the Continental Congress from 1775 to 1779 and served alongside him in the New Hampshire militia at the Battle of Saratoga and during the Rhode Island campaign. Prince Whipple heard the signers’ debates and informal discussions. His familiarity with Enlightenment ideas suggests that he may have been the principal author of the Petition of Freedom. But he and his fellow petitioners may also have drawn upon African tradition when they asserted that “the equal Dignity of human Nature” made them free in the eyes of God. They also pledged – at a time when new recruits for the Patriot forces were greatly needed – to, if freed, “exert” themselves in the Revolutionary cause. It is through the Petition, and its arguments against all the common apologies for slavery that circulated at that time, that we learn about the experiences of these enslaved men and feel the courage of their passion for freedom.
Prince Whipple and Winsor Moffatt were enslaved in the household of William Whipple and his wife, Katharine Moffatt Whipple, and Katharine’s elderly father, John Moffatt. Both William Whipple and John Moffatt had engaged in the slave trade in the 1750s and early 1760s. Prince and Winsor may have been kidnapped from their homes and forcibly transported to New Hampshire aboard one of the ships owned by the Moffats or Whipples. They may have been assigned to the men who owned the ships or sold at public auction.
The sites related to this story are many – the Moffatt-Ladd House where two of the petitioners, Prince Whipple and Winsor Moffatt, lived, and the Warner House, where Peter and Cato Warner lived, the North Church where these men sat in the gallery and listened to church services every week. The wharves where slave ships docked and the taverns where captains, such as Nathaniel Tuckerman, and shipowners like John Moffatt and William Whipple auctioned their human cargo, are also part of the Black Heritage Trail.
Other Black Heritage Trail markers honor those who persevered in the fight for freedom by helping others to find refuge here, including free Black residents Pomp and Candace Spring. It was probably the Springs who housed Ona Marie Judge when she first arrived in Portsmouth having escaped from her enslavement in the household of George and Martha Washington. John and Phillis Jacks (Phillis was also enslaved in what is now the Warner House) gave Ona Judge a home in Greenland, New Hampshire, after Siras Bruce (also known as Cyrus or Sirus Bruce), a free Black servant in the home of Governor John Langdon, warned her that the president’s nephew was planning to capture her and take her to Mount Vernon.
The trail’s walking tours (guided, self-guided, and recorded, and available at www.blackheritagetrailnh.org) also include other sites such as the location of the African Ladies’ Charitable School on High Street, where Dinah and Rebecca Whipple taught from about 1790 to 1820, and Historic New England’s Langdon House on Pleasant Street. More modern sites are included as well – places where segregation gave way to integration in the 1960s, the Pearl Street Church where the Reverend Martin Luther King preached as a young student, the South Meetinghouse where Emancipation Day celebrations were held for many years, and the beauty shop owned by Rosary Broxay Cooper who opened her business to serve the city’s Black community in the late 1940s.
Portsmouth is where the story begins, but it does not end on the Seacoast. In 2016, the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail expanded statewide, becoming the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire. Many more sites are coming to light through the work of researchers from throughout the state. The Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire now includes sites
in Andover, Derry, Dover, Hancock, Jaffrey, Milford, Nashua, Warner, and Windham, New Hampshire, and Kittery, Maine, with six additional markers already planned for 2024 and 2025. Our work is not only an opportunity to tell this history, but also an opportunity to celebrate Black life and culture through public programs.
