By Nancy K. Crevier

New Englanders tend to think of slavery as having been a southern institution, but the truth lies a bit north of those ideas, according to Newtown Town Historian Dan Cruson.

Slavery in the north is a subject that he has explored over a number of years. In 1994 he published Newtown Slaves, a booklet that was what Mr Cruson recently called "a rural snapshot of slavery in Newtown." His newest book, The Slaves of Central Fairfield County: The Journey From Slave to Freeman in Nineteenth Century Connecticut, published this month by History Press of Charleston, S.C., is a broader picture of northern slavery in central Connecticut, he said, including a look at the social and economic status of the slaves owned in Fairfield County. "It's a remarkable part of local history that happened right in our own back yards," said Mr Cruson.

"Today, we can never fully understand the mentality of why slaves were owned in the 18th and 19th Centuries," said Mr Cruson. "It's important that we come to understand that people 200 years ago thought differently than we did."

That is one reason that Mr Cruson, who is also president of the Archeological Society of Connecticut and a retired history and anthropology teacher, feels that the information included in his newest book will provide fascinating insight into local history.

It is also important for people to understand that the slavery issue was not just a southern issue, he said. In Newtown, Easton, Weston, and Redding, the towns focused upon in his book, prosperous families did own slaves, although in comparison to the southern plantations that relied on slave labor for economic reasons, the one or two slaves for domestic help presented a difference in degree, if not ideology. A few farmers in Connecticut owned perhaps five or six slaves, said Mr Cruson.

"We northerners can be rather smug about slavery being a southern problem, but it was a part of the mentality all over the country at one time. I think, though, that the difference was that the northerners handled [the slavery issue] better. New Englanders always had moral qualms about owning another person." When the inherent immorality of slavery could no longer denied, they sought to soothe their conscience with the emancipation process, he explained.

A series of legislation in 1791 and 1792 led to a process for the emancipation of slaves in Connecticut, he explained, and if certain conditions were met — age, health, desire — owners could formally free slaves.

Researching the 124-page book enabled him to delve more deeply into the abolitionist and Underground Railroad movements in the region, and in doing so Mr Cruson found some surprises.

Because of Connecticut's approach to emancipation of slaves many years prior to the start of the Civil War, slavery was somewhat a nonissue by the time abolitionist movements began to take hold in cities across the Northeast. "Surprisingly," Mr Cruson said, "Fairfield County was one of the weakest areas for the abolitionist movement. The antislavery meetings in the county were very poorly attended. Abolitionists were looked upon as troublemakers more than anything and not because the area was proslavery. By the time abolitionists were trying to gear up because of slavery in the south, there really were no slaves in the north."

A Hard Life In Freedom

For many slaves and their descendents, though, freedom was not a glorious salvation. From what Mr Cruson was able to determine, the socioeconomic situation of blacks in central Fairfield County was well below that of an average white family. Even the more "prosperous" black landowners did not fall into the same earning category of their white counterparts.

The conditions of black people in the post-Colonial days of Newtown and its neighboring towns are personalized by case studies of freed slaves and an appendix listing the names and families of slaves in The Slaves of Central Fairfield County. Photographs of historical homes and artifacts left behind define the stories and beliefs of northern slaves and freed blacks.

The book also looks to dispel folklore about the black people who populated western Connecticut, including one of Newtown's most popular tales, that of James Purdy and the Underground Railroad. Mr Purdy, a black man, was said to have smuggled runaway slaves in coffins at the height of a small pox epidemic in Newtown. "The story has built up over time," said Mr Cruson, "and what keeps it an endearing part of folklore is that it deals with a black man as a humanitarian and also as a participant of the Underground Railroad. So it became Newtown's contribution to black history."

But under the scrutiny of research the story unravels, said the historian. The so-called small pox epidemic consisted of four cases in Sandy Hook, across town from Mr Purdy's land off of Hattertown Road. Further research supports that Newtown was never a stop on the Underground Railroad at any time. "It's a romantic notion that every time you find a trap door in a Victorian-era house, you think it was a secret hiding place on the Underground Railroad," Mr Cruson said. In reality, Newtown would have been a very inconvenient place for smugglers to have stopped as they headed north to Canada.

The wealth of information in The Slaves of Central Fairfield County was a long time coming. The material for the book was collected over a period of ten years, and involved in-depth research of old church records, town records, census records, and the state archives. Old newspapers, documents at Yale University and libraries, and private document collections from all over Connecticut provided Mr Cruson with bits and pieces of slave history to round out previously collected information and offer an ever-changing view of slavery in the north. As with much research, Mr Cruson said, one thing frequently led to another, and he found himself at times involved in "far flung telephone calls" to track down records that had strayed from central Connecticut. In the end, though, he feels he has put together a fair and accurate account of slavery in the north, one that is more comprehensive than any other to date.

The Newtown Historical Society will make available for purchase copies of The Slaves of Central Fairfield County by the end of March at the C.H. Booth Library. Mr Cruson's book can also be found at several local businesses and bookstores.

The public is invited to the Mark Twain Library in Redding, Thursday, March 29, at 7:30 pm, when Mr Cruson will present a talk on The Slaves of Central Fairfield County. Seats may be reserved by calling the library at 938-2545, as space is limited. Admission is free.

Further opportunity to learn more about northern slavery is offered by The Stratford Historical Society, 967 Academy Hill, Stratford, which will host Mr Cruson on March 31. For more information call 378-0630.

"The story of slavery is always ongoing," said Mr Cruson. "It's never-ending research."