Bonds of Family, Bonds of Chattel

by �WENDY�HUBBARD� Site Manager, Lincoln, Massachusetts, and DOROTHY�A��CLARK��Editor

Bonds of Family, Bonds of Chattel

The Codman Estate’s legacy of “the peculiar institution”

The two-story Georgian mansion and expansive

farm that Charles Chambers built between 1730 and 1741 in what then was part of Concord, Massachusetts, was situated high on a man-made hill where its size and placement were meant to impress, serving as a daily reminder of the owner’s mastery over land and people. That mastery included his ownership of people of African heritage.

The slave trade was an important system of wealth accumulation for many prominent New England families, enabling the amassing of fortunes that would be passed down to their descendants for centuries. One of these families was the Chambers-Russell-Codman clan, whose interfamilial and multigenerational ties of mutual interests, money, and inherited property—the Codman Estate in Lincoln, Massachusetts—grew upon a foundation that included slavery.

In stark contrast to the continuity of this family’s history, the enslaved did not have lucrative or illustrious legacies to pass down. Considered commodities, they were separated and scattered by their owners’ bequests, purchase or sale, payment of debts, and other transfers or exchanges. The names of some are listed as property in family account books, wills, probate records, and inventories, or in public notices, pamphlets, and publications, much of which is

in Historic New England’s Library and Archives. Their personal possessions and spaces were not preserved. Nothing associated with them was passed down for posterity. Still, the geographies where and in which their lives were spent remain.

The subjugation of people of color underpinned colonial commerce and systems of wealth acquisition. Indeed, New England’s prosperity was funded directly and indirectly by the slave trade with investments in shipping, shipbuilding, rum distilling, exports, raw materials, and finished goods through trade with Caribbean plantations. As prominent landowners of European descent, the Chambers, Russell, and Codman men helped to uphold these systems, occupying positions of authority in government and the courts to better secure their vested interests.

Charles Chambers (1660-1743), a British immigrant, was the progenitor of the Chambers-Russell-Codman clan. The multiple intersections among the Chamberses, Russells, and Codmans over four generations began in 1708 when Chambers was appointed guardian of orphaned John Codman I (1698-1755) of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A sea captain in Antigua, Chambers maintained investments in more than sixteen vessels, some of which worked out of Barbados. No longer active at sea by 1708, the Charlestown resident purchased 275 acres in Concord [now a part of Lincoln, which became a separate town in 1754]. Over time

HistoricNewEngland.org 23

he purchased another 400 acres. He had long held Black people as slaves. Among them were Lincoln, Caesar, Jack, and Chloris.

Little is known about Lincoln, Caesar, Jack, and Chloris. Jack and Chloris married in 1697. Jack purchased the couple’s freedom in 1706, Chambers having set a price of sixty pounds; Jack paid him in twentypound installments. The purchase agreement indemnified Chambers from any bond or support of the couple.

Upon Chambers’s death, his grandson Chambers Russell (1713- 1767) inherited the estate, which included the enslaved man Lincoln. Lincoln married a woman named Zilpah, whom the Russells owned. Their five children were born into slavery on what had become the Chambers-Russell family property—

the vast farm with the Georgian mansion. Russell was appointed a judge in Middlesex County in 1745. A decade later, the judge—a slave owner—presided over the trial of the poisoning death of John Codman I, who as mentioned above, had been the ward of Russell’s grandfather. Three enslaved Black people—Mark, Phoebe, and Phyllis—were convicted. Russell ordered the grisly executions of Mark and Phyllis and banished Phoebe to the West Indies, where to be enslaved was so brutal it was a death sentence.

In 1754, Massachusetts Governor William Shirley ordered all towns to conduct a census of enslaved people over the age of sixteen. The town of Lincoln documented sixteen males and seven females. At this time, slavery in New England, apart from work required on the docks, was largely a household economy. The enslaved performed the tasks of running colonial households and farms. Some were highly skilled and worked as carpenters, shipwrights, sail makers, shoemakers, blacksmiths, weavers, bakers, coopers, and tailors. If their owners loaned them out, some enslaved people earned wages—a portion of which their owners felt they were entitled to—with which they could meagerly augment their existence.

The violence of family separation was an ever-present threat to the vulnerable and powerless enslaved population. Lincoln and Zilpah’s five children were Bilhah, Peter, Ishmael, Zilpah, and Brister. Born about 1744, Brister may have either been sold or given to a Lincoln selectman and housewright; the Massachusetts Vital Records Project lists the child as “Negro boy of Mr. Timothy Wesson”

and having been baptized on January 14, 1753. Brister would become the property of Wesson’s daughter Abigail and her husband, John Cumings, a wealthy doctor and land speculator, who wed about three weeks after the child’s baptism. The Cumingses owned at least one other slave, Jem.

In 1777, Cumings, a militia colonel, enlisted his slave to serve with him in the Revolutionary War. Cumings would eventually give up his claim of ownership of Brister and Jem. (Cumings, who died in 1788 at the age of sixty, made a provision in his will for the establishment of a small fund, managed by the selectmen, to care for Brister and Jem so that if they required assistance, it would not have to be paid from the town coffers.) By 1779, Brister had taken Freeman as his surname.

Brister Freeman returned to Concord and married a woman named Fenda. After more than three decades a slave, he became the second former slave to own land in Concord, which he co-purchased with another onetime slave near Walden Woods. Brister worked as a day laborer and Fenda was reportedly a fortuneteller. The couple had three children. Fenda died in 1811 and Brister in 1822. Henry David Thoreau wrote about the Freemans as well as other once-enslaved Black people in Walden (1854). Among them was Brister Freeman’s sister Zilpah White.

Zilpah and another brother, Peter, were free, having been abandoned when Charles Russell, a Loyalist who in 1767 inherited the Lincoln estate (property that included their siblings Bilhah and Ishmael), fled to his inlaws’ plantation on Antigua with his family during the Revolution. Another significant intersection of Chambers- Russell-Codman owners and their slaves occurred in 1768 when Charles

24 Historic New England Winter 2021

PAGE 24 Portrait of John Codman III (c. 1800 by John Singleton Copley), a successful merchant in the late eighteenth century who sold enslaved Africans. LEFT Sarah and Ogden Codman Sr. purchased the Codman Estate in 1862 after it had been out of the family’s ownership for six decades.

Russell married Elizabeth Vassall of Cambridge (1742- 1802). The couple inherited two slaves, Robin and Luck, from Elizabeth’s mother, Penelope Royall Vassall (1724- 1800). Penelope’s father was Isaac Royall (1672-1739), who had traded in sugar, rum, and enslaved people, which made him extremely rich.

Zilpah White, like her mother, worked as a spinner in the Chambers-Russell household. After Charles Russell and his family fled the country, she settled in a squatters’ community at Walden Woods. She lived in a one-room house on the common land that bordered Walden Road and made her living spinning flax into linen fibers. Thoreau wrote that her living conditions were “somewhat inhumane.” Yet her ability to provide for herself at a time when few, if any, Concord women lived alone was a phenomenal accomplishment.

In 1781, John Codman III (1755-1803), grandson of John Codman I, married Margaret Russell (1757-1789), the niece of Judge Chambers Russell and the sister of Dr. Charles Russell. She had inherited the Lincoln property along with family wealth acquired in shipping and trade.

Codman III was born in Charlestown. A conservative

Boston aristocrat, he was a successful merchant. His business, Codman and Smith, owned a number of ships and traded with European countries and in the Caribbean. A 1785 business document titled “Prices Current” lists values of Jamaican and American produce, liquors, and “New negroes as in quality $50-68 per head.”

The couple’s son, Charles Russell Codman (1784-1852), was five years old when his mother died; he inherited the estate and his father served as steward. In 1799, Codman III undertook the largest expansion of the property. Many features of Grandfather Codman’s mansion and landscape are visible today.

In 1807, Charles Russell Codman took control of the Codman Estate. He sold the house and its several hundred acres incrementally to finance his extensive European travel. It would remain outside the family for fifty-five years, until Ogden Codman Sr.—Charles’s son—and his wife, Sarah Fletcher Bradlee, embarked on their “Lincoln plan” to reclaim it. Codman Sr., orphaned at age 12, saw the estate as a symbol of family continuity and ancestral heritage. Marriage into the Bradlee family, whose wealth came largely from the Old China Trade, created the first big infusion of cash since Grandfather Codman’s time. The couple purchased the estate in 1862, christened it The Grange to evoke the image of a gentleman’s country estate, and set about preserving the property as Grandfather Codman had envisioned it.

The last Codmans to live on the estate were Ogden Jr. (an architect and notable interior designer), Alice, Tom, Hugh, and Dorothy. In 1968 Dorothy, the surviving sibling, bequeathed the Codman house, collections, family papers, and a parcel of land surrounding the perimeter of the mansion to Historic New England.

Many historic sites have sidestepped presenting interpretations of the indivisible ties between slavery, white supremacy, and racism. Historic New England is working to recast its interpretations, including that of the Codman Estate. The life stories of Lincoln, Zilpah White, Mark, Brister Freeman, Robin, Bilhah, Peter, Ishmael, Phyllis, Phoebe, Scipio, Luck, Zilpah, Jack, Chloris, Caesar—and no doubt nameless others—will never be fully known. But their footfalls continue to echo through the Codman Estate’s halls and barns and leave impressions in its fields, forests, and across time.

HistoricNewEngland.org 25

Addendum

In addition to Historic New England’s archives and collections database, the resources listed below were consulted in the writing of “Bonds of Family, Bonds of Chattel: The Codman Estate’s legacy of ‘the peculiar institution’.”

Balgooy, Max van, and Lonnie G. Bunch. Interpreting African American History and Culture at Museums and Historic Sites. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Blancke, Shirley Imogen Booth, Dena Ferran Dincauze, and Barbara Robinson. From Musketaquid to Concord: the Native and European Experience. Concord, Mass.: Concord Antiquarian Museum, 1985.

Brooks, Paul. Trial by Fire: Lincoln, Massachusetts, and the War of Independence. Lincoln, Mass.: Lincoln 1975 Bicentennial Commission, 1975.

Chapin, R. Curtis. “The Early History and Federalization of the Codman House.” Old-Time New England71, no. 258 (1981): 24–46.

Doyle, David D. “‘A Very Proper Bostonian’: Rediscovering Ogden Codman and His Late-Nineteenth- Century Queer World.” Journal of the History of Sexuality13, no. 4 (2004): 446–476.

Ferentinos, Susan. Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2015.

Gallas, Kris, and James DeWolf Perry. Interpreting Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Gates, Henry Louis. Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008. New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

Lemire, Elise. Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

MacLean, John C. A Rich Harvest: the History, Buildings, and People of Lincoln, Massachusetts. Lincoln Center, Mass.: Lincoln Historical Society, 1987.

Martin, Margaret Mutchler. The Chambers-Russell-Codman House and Family in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Lincoln, MA: Lincoln Historical Society, 1996.

Piersen, William D. From Africa to America: African American History from the Colonial Era to the Early Republic, 1526-1790. New York, N.Y.: Twayne Publishers, 1997.

Shinto, Jeanne. “Family Pictures: The Codman Collection.” Fine Arts Connoisseur, 2016.

Slaughter, John. Vital Records of Lincoln, MA - 1754 to 1850. https://mavitalrecords.org/MA/Middlesex/Lincoln/.