FeaT ures Tufts’ connection to slavery, Part 2: The royall slave Quarters and the Tufts family

by Guillem Colom Assistant Features Editor

Located less than a halfmile from the Joyce Cummings Center, the Royall House and Slave Quarters was an integral part of the Ten Hills Farm that functioned as a slave plantation and encompassed current land now a part of the Tufts campus. The Slave Quarters serve as a painful reminder of the impacts of slavery on systemic social and economic conditions that disproportionately harm communities of color.

The Slave Quarters also function as an example of Tufts’ relationship with slavery. The family of Charles Tufts, the founder of the university, accumulated wealth that was maintained over generations due to his family’s involvement in the Medford slave economy. The Slave Quarters was the locus of this involvement.

The central figure of this involvement was Isaac Royall Jr. After his slave-trading father Isaac Royall Sr. purchased the Slave Quarters in 1732 and died in 1739, Royall Jr. inherited the property at the age of 20. Royall’s ownership of enslaved Africans enabled him to become one of the wealthiest men in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during his time.

The Royall House and Slave Quarters now serves as a museum in Medford, Mass. Kyera

Singleton, the executive director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters, understands how the legacy of Royall Jr.’s enslavement of Africans continues to reverberate through local communities of color and impacts broader struggles for racial equality.

Singleton outlined how the Royall family became embedded in slavery.

“Isaac Royall Sr. was originally from Massachusetts. He [and] his family [were] in Dorchester,” Singleton said.

“He actually leaves, like many white colonists do at the time, to try to make their wealth in the transatlantic slave trade. So, he ends up in Antigua, running and owning one of the largest sugarcane plantations in Antigua, … and then they moved back to Massachusetts in 1737.”

Alexandra Chan, an archaeologist and former visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Vassar College, further explained the Royall family dynamics and some of Royall Jr.’s motivations in maintaining the Slave Quarters.

“Isaac [Royall] Sr. made [the Royall House and Slave Quarters] a country estate … but Isaac [Royall] Jr. wanted to display his riches and made himself the center of elegant hospitality, and threw soirees and parties all the time,” Chan said. “[Isaac Royall Jr.] made all these big improvements on the house. … He tried to make it look more like a Roman villa. … There was some grandiosity about him that his father didn’t seem to have.”

In Chan’s 2007 book, “Slavery in the Age of Reason: Archaeology at a New England Farm,” she details the type of labor that Royall Jr. forced enslaved people to perform. Such labor had significant implications for the broader nature of Northern and Southern slavery. Chan outlined the characteristics of enslaved labor in the North.

“The overwhelming majority of [enslaved people in New England] … were generalist farmhands [who performed] basic domestic work … because the economy did not support gigantic plantation-style farms,” Chan said.

Exploiting enslaved people for capital, Royall Jr. used such wealth to ingratiate himself with the Medford and Massachusetts social and political elite. From 1743–52, he served as a deputy to the Massachusetts Bay Colony General Court and became a noteworthy figure through other avenues. Such avenues included a 22-year commitment as a member of the Governor’s Council from 1752–74.

Singleton spoke to how well-connected Royall Jr. was to elite leaders.

“The [Royall] family was extremely well-connected, [and they were] extremely wealthy,” Singleton said. “Isaac Royall Jr. [became] a very prominent businessman. Not only does he own property [through the Slave Quarters], but he [owned] another plantation in Bristol, R.I. He owned other property in western Massachusetts.”

Royall Jr. knew many people, and one of those people was Simon Tufts, an ancestor of Charles Tufts. A prominent Medford physician and member of the General Court, Simon Tufts was embedded in similar social and political circles as Royall Jr. The two developed a working relationship that endured through the American Revolutionary War. Because his family were loyalist supporters of the British empire and built their wealth from slavery based on ties to the empire, Royall Jr. became a target and left his Quarters to go to Nova Scotia three days before the Battle of Lexington in 1775.

Singleton described what Tufts then did to help Royall Jr.

“Simon Tufts was the administrator of Isaac Royall Jr.’s estate once he fled for Nova Scotia and then England at the start of the Revolutionary War,”

NICHOLAS PFOSI / TUFTS DAILY ARCHIVE

Singleton said. “Tufts was … the person that Isaac [was] writing to instruct [Tufts] to try to sell some of his enslaved people when he is struggling financially [and] once he is no longer in the country.”

The evidence for Royall Jr. and Tufts’s partnership is clear. A receipt dating back to Aug. 6, 1777, provided by the University of New Hampshire’s Milne Special Collections and Archives, was given to Royall Jr. by Tufts for turning in eight pounds of counterfeit New Hampshire bills.

Royall Jr. and Tufts developed a friendship and deep admiration for each other that is further evidenced by the correspondence between them, along with communication between Tufts and close confidants. In a letter dated from March 28, 1780, which was provided by the Charlotte and William Bloomberg Medford Public Library Archives, Royall Jr. writes to a confidant about Tufts’ attempts to defend Royall Jr. amid legal challenges.

“Some time past I received a letter from my attorney, Dr. Simon Tufts at Medford … wherein he says that the committee of Medford for the last year voted my estate out of his hands, as they said I was an absentee, and forbade him having anything further to do with it,” Royall