Introduction

Liberty is our motto, Liberty is our motto,
Equal liberty is our motto, in the “Old Granite State.”
We despise oppression, We despise oppression,
We despise oppression, And we cannot be enslaved.

—“The Old Granite State,” The Hutchinson Family Singers

 

Like the glimmering spark from the meteor’s fire,
Like the gay humming insects who fall and expire,
We’re fading away. Fading away.

—“Fading Away,” by “Hattie,” Amherst (N.H.) Farmer’s Cabinet, December 6, 1851

 

 

If Hattie E. Wilson, a “clairvoyant physician,” diagnosed her own illness, she prescribed the right cure.¹ Once known as “our Nig” to the New Hampshire family to whom she was informally indentured as a child, Boston’s “colored medium” outlived every person in whose service her health was broken. Rather than “fading away,” as Hattie laments in a poem by that title published in the town paper where she grew up, she survived to see the twentieth century.² Hattie E. Wilson, as Harriet E. Wilson was called for much of her life, was ultimately overcome by the exhaustion that characterized her years in service; but she didn’t succumb to this “inanition,” the listed cause of her death, until she was seventy-five years old. Her friends placed announcements in Boston and Quincy papers advertising the time, location, and even the runs from South Terminal station that would bring welcome relatives and friends to celebrate her life and passing.³ Wilson died on June 28, 1900; she is buried in Mount Wollaston Cemetery in Quincy, Massachusetts.⁴

More than forty years earlier, on September 5, 1859, Harriet E. Wilson published Our Nig. It tells Wilson’s own story through a renamed character, a spirited six-year-old girl named Frado who is abandoned by her white mother after her “kindly African” father succumbs to consumption. As an indentured servant in the New England household of a “she-devil” “mistress” “Mrs. B,” and her family, the Bellmonts, Frado is tortured and overworked for years.

When Our Nig appeared, Wilson became the first African American woman to publish a novel, a story told in the third person using conventional novelistic literary strategies. Freed from her indenture but plagued by broken health, she found herself deserted again, this time by her new husband Thomas Wilson, a supposed fugitive slave, who courted—and then left—her precipitously. Faced with the confession that her husband’s antislavery lectures were “a humbug for hungry abolitionists,” and confronted with his inability to find legitimate local work to support them and their young son, Wilson herself turned from physical to intellectual labor. Soon after Thomas went to sea and died there, she was forced to “some experiment,” as she calls Our Nig in its preface, “which will aid me in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life.” Wilson’s “experiment” is a sophisticated hybrid of autobiography and prose fiction.

Recent research has confirmed the autobiographical claims made in Our Nig’s preface and appendices, and has documented much of the story told within its pages. Indeed, the text so closely corresponds to the historical record that Our Nig lays claim to being the only extant narrative written by a black indentured servant in the antebellum North. Besides being one of the rare sketches that tells what it was like to be a poor northern-born freewoman, Our Nig is one of the very few narratives written by a free northern-born black at all.

Despite Wilson’s signal contributions, however, her written work was ignored by her contemporaries and lost to American letters for more than 120 years. The antislavery establishment best situated to publicize Our Nig ignored Wilson’s work. Its leaders were more interested in southern slavery than the harsh treatment blacks faced in the North; and they were no doubt offended by Wilson’s critical treatment of abolitionists and spooked by her sympathetic treatment of an interracial marriage. Despite the plea of her preface to “colored brethren” for their support, they, too, overlooked Wilson’s writing, perhaps because her depiction of a fake fugitive, her first husband, could do blacks of whatever status no good. Because of the assumption that this obscure writer was probably white, even the twentieth-century cultural movements that resurrected a host of forgotten black novels, narratives, and treatises failed to take notice of Our Nig.⁵

When Henry Louis Gates, Jr. rediscovered and republished Wilson’s work in 1983, however, it enjoyed a powerful and formative twentieth-century debut. It followed hard on the heels of breakthrough bestsellers that first landed Toni Morrison on the cover of Newsweek and won Alice Walker a Pulitzer Prize and an American Book Award. Once almost entirely disregarded, in the midst of a black women’s literary revival, Our Nig received a warm welcome. As contemporary African American women’s fiction increasingly appeared on the New York Times’s bestseller lists, Gates’s rediscovery of Our Nig pushed back the inaugural of black women’s novel writing from the early 1890s—with its host of firsts by writers such as Frances E. W. Harper, Emma Dunham Kelley Hawkins, and Amelia E. Johnson—to 1859.⁶

Our Nig has become an important text in American, women’s, and African American letters. It complicates, as well as integrates, what Nathaniel Hawthorne dubbed the “damned mob of scribbling women,” writers in the 1850s whose books sold more than a million copies and were translated into scores of languages. Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe were just two women who penned bestsellers while the writings of Her-man Melville, for example, languished. Our Nig enriches its readers’ understanding of gender and of antebellum African American literary forms and messages. By the 1840s and ’50s, the abolitionist movement had forged an audience for black writers who were once enslaved. As best illustrated by Frederick Douglass’s 1845 publication of his life story, slave narratives—now considered a cornerstone of American literary expression—sold well. African Americans such as Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany also began writing fiction in the 1850s, though their more overtly creative acts were less welcome by readers than African American testimony, a seemingly simple relation of the “facts.” Until Our Nig, however, no African American novels were written by a woman; and only Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857) addressed the thorny issue of race and class in the North. This edition of Our Nig helps to illuminate Wilson’s contribution to multiple American literary traditions and to readers’ understanding of how her book engages issues of gender, geography, labor, and race.

Despite Our Nig’s growing popularity, until now, virtually everything beyond what Wilson’s narrative chronicles has remained an unsolved mystery. This edition introduces information about Wilson’s parentage, and, in doing so, raises some questions even as it answers others. By mining city directories, census records, marriage licenses, and nineteenth-century newspapers, it also offers the first full glimpse into Wilson’s later life, the intriguing four decades after Our Nig’s 1859 publication, her son’s death in 1860, and the years she spent as a “county pauper” in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire .⁷ Called “Hattie,” as well as “Harriet,” by the mid-1860s Wilson began to use that name in public documents. Indeed, “Hattie E. Wilson” is the name used in newspaper reports of her travels as a Spiritualist lecturer; it is the name on her death certificate and gravestone.

If the age “75 years, 3 months, 13 days” given on that death certificate is correct, she was born on March 15, 1825, in Milford, New Hampshire, the daughter of Joshua and Margaret Green.⁸ “My father,” Wilson writes in Our Nig’s opening pages, worked as a “hooper of barrels” in a cooperage or barrel-making shop. Timothy Blanchard, one of the few black men in Milford, ran such a business. “Jim,” as Joshua Green is called in Our Nig, probably met his wife, Mag, a fallen white woman, as Wilson describes her, while distributing the wood not fine enough for barrel staves but perfect to fuel the fires that kept local residents’ food cooked and houses warm. According to Our Nig, the death of the child’s father marked the waning of the family’s economic health as well. Like other nineteenth-century mothers with few resources, Mag relieved herself of a child she could not support, leaving her daughter at the home of a local family whom she knew was always in need of a servant girl, though the “she-devil” lady of the house couldn’t keep one “over a week” because of her “ugly” disposition (12).

The poignancy of “our Nig” ’s situation stems not only from her abandonment, but also from the service to which she was consigned after her mother left her. When a newspaper printed the suggestion that women should take up the “light work and kind appreciation” found in domestic service, New Hampshire abolitionist Parker Pillsbury offered a much-needed corrective: “the work is never ‘comparatively light’ in genteel households,” he retorted. “Never.”⁹ Sleeping in alternately stifling and freezing quarters, being overworked to the point of exhaustion, and enduring depressing isolation were the norms in service.¹⁰ As a young black child indentured to a white family in a town that only a handful of blacks called home, Wilson experienced a fate even worse than the typical northern indenture. For much of her childhood at the home of Nehemiah Hayward, Jr. and his wife, Rebecca (Hutchinson) Hayward, she was probably the only female “free colored person” in all of Milford.¹¹ Moreover, girls who were “bound out” were seldom as young, and, though isolated, they were rarely cut off completely from their families, which provided a source of both solace and protection. ¹² Wilson’s assertion that slavery casts shadows even in the North sets up an apt comparison between the experiences she describes and the life of an enslaved youngster separated from kin and community.

The personal claim made in the opening chapter title, “Mag Smith, My Mother,” could be more literal even than readers once thought.¹³ Indeed, if “Margaret Ann Smith,” a twenty-seven-year-old New Hampshire woman who died in Boston, corresponds to the “lonely Mag Smith” whose story Our Nig first recounts, then soon after she left Milford, Harriet’s mother died in much the same way that she had lived. After her husband’s death, Mag (as nineteenth-century Margarets were often called), descends into a “darkness,” casually taking on one of her husband’s partners as a lover, and engaging in tense domestic scenes that became “familiar and trying” (11). Before the couple decides to relieve themselves of her child and leave town to find work, Mag is “morose and revengeful” (6), and subject to “fits of desperation” and “bursts of anger” (11). Margaret Ann Smith, and the black man with whom she resided, seemed to have lived in much the same way.

The March 27, 1830, Farmer’s Cabinet—the paper that covered the area in which Wilson grew up—reports Smith’s death in detail:

 

Margaret Ann Smith, black, late of Portsmouth N.H. about 27 years was found dead in the room of a black man with whom she lived in Southack [sic] Street, Boston, last week. The verdict of the Coroner’s jury was that she came to her death from habitual intoxication. It appears that she and the man had quarreled, both being intoxicated, and he had beaten her severely, but that the immediate cause of her death was drinking half a pint of raw rum.—Patriot.

 

Boston newspapers confirm the death but add no information; the Boston Patriot lists one death that week from intemperance, and the New Hampshire Patriot, presumably the other possible Cabinet source, makes no note of Margaret Smith’s passing.¹⁴ Indeed the Cabinet’s notice is so much more detailed than the coverage in Boston that it leaves one wondering why a small New Hampshire paper would announce the death of a woman from Portsmouth who died in Boston unless she had recent local connections. The Cabinet article corresponds to the story Our Nig tells. Mag was not born in “Singleton,” as Milford is called; she relocated there and had just left shortly before her death.

The newspaper account raises intriguing questions.¹⁵ If Harriet Wilson’s father’s name, as we now know, was most certainly Green, and her mother’s maiden name may have been Smith, it seems odd that Harriet would use the surname Adams from at least 1850 until the time of her marriage the following year. As baffling is the racial assignation in this account. Is it simply a mistake? Was Margaret (Mag) Smith listed as black because of her socially and sexually compromised status, her intimate connections with black men? And how does this link to Wilson’s challenging play with her readers’ racialized expectations in Our Nig, choosing not to reveal Mag’s racial designation—she could very well be a light-skinned black woman—until the very last paragraph of the first chapter that tells her story?

In the first chapter title, the author claims “Mag Smith” as “My Mother” in a text otherwise told almost entirely in the third person. Likewise, Wilson claims this story, Our Nig by “our Nig,” as her own.¹⁶ And although neither the importance nor the authenticity of the text depends on its claim to truth—as shifting, situated, and ultimately unrecoverable as any narrative truth claims are—new evidence both broadens and bolsters literary historian Barbara A. White’s point that the “lives of the Haywards,” into whose family the young Harriet was indentured, “correspond so closely to the narrative . . . as to remind us that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. [the book’s first editor], not Harriet Wilson, classifies Our Nig as fiction.”¹⁷

From the beginning to the end and with very few exceptions, Wilson’s narrative corresponds to the historical record. If “Mag Smith” is “Margaret Ann Smith,” she moved south from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Milford, leaving “the few friends she possessed,” to “seek an asylum among strangers” (5). In Our Nig, “Jim” “boards cheap” with the cooper who employs him, and the 1820 and 1830 censuses show that Timothy Blanchard (“Pete Greene”), the cooperage owner, and one of Milford’s two black heads of households, boarded other “free men of color,” one of whom was almost certainly Wilson’s father Joshua Green.¹⁸ Indeed, one of Timothy Blanchard’s nieces could easily have been the other “little colored girl,” the “favorite playmate,” who went missing with Frado after she overheard she was to be given away, (12-13).¹⁹ Moreover, as White has established, the portrayal of the “County Home” found in Our Nig corresponds almost exactly to descriptions and town records for the support of the poor.²⁰

Our Nig’s story overlaps with the closing testimonials that function to authenticate its claims and, again, new evidence confirms the details both Our Nig and its appended documents recount. Indeed, while the future black beauty magnate Madame C. J. Walker was little Sadie Breedlove playing in the mud of the Mississippi Delta, Wilson started a fruitful business selling hair products.²¹ Freed from her indenture and faced with poverty and poor health, as Our Nig reports, a friend provided Frado with “a valuable recipe” that restored “gray hair to its former color.” Availing “herself of this great help [she] has been quite successful,” “Allida” reports in an appended document, “but her health is again failing, and she has felt herself obliged to resort to another method of procuring her bread—that of writing an Autobiography.”²² We now know that sometime between 1856 and 1860, “Mrs. H. E. Wilson” sold “hair regenerator” and “hair dressing” in a business that almost certainly began in Manchester, New Hampshire.²³ The bottles still exist; hundreds were probably sold.

Harriet Wilson refers to Our Nig as “sketches” or “narrations,” while the author of one of the closing testimonials, as we’ve seen, urges others to buy the “interesting work” she calls an “autobiography” (76). Yet this narrative, as Priscilla Wald points out, “is not finally just an autobiography”; it is a sociopolitical allegory and a “narrative about autobiography.”²⁴ Even as we recover the direct correspondences between Wilson’s text and her life, we might do well to heed Guilia Fabi’s caution that the appreciation of the literariness of early African American and women’s writing is often overshadowed by the emphasis on the sociohistorical context.²⁵ The census records, newspaper citings, city directory listings, and marriage and death certificates that confirm the “facts” described in Our Nig and that legitimize the book’s autobiographical claims are not meant to bind the narrative to the historical record, to become yet another authenticating apparatus. Literary forms and generic lines are fluid. Our Nig is prototypical of black antebellum writing in its tendency to blend and challenge the narrative forms it incorporates, weaving together factual and fictional conventions. Indeed, Our Nig functions as an autobiography characterized by its complex novelistic maneuvers just as surely as it is a brilliant novel that makes autobiographical claims.

While critics often emphasize the ways in which Our Nig weaves together the conventions of sentimental fiction and slave narratives, it also includes strong references to a variety of popular genres, including the seduction novel and the captivity narrative. Gates has outlined how vividly the text aligns itself with (and revises) the generic strategies of the sentimental novel.²⁶ Yet Our Nig also emphatically rejects many aspects of domestic ideology: the redeeming power of motherhood and the ability of marriage to bring either happiness or stability to women or children, for example. As Amy Lang contends, in domestic fiction as the protagonist “exchanges rage for patience, the terms of her identity shift from poor to female, and she is awarded a home. Once gender is established as the source of social mobility and the guarantor of social harmony, the narrative focus shifts from social justice to individual reform, from deprivation to self-control.”²⁷ The racism documented in Our Nig makes it impossible for Frado to join or claim a family or fulfill the maternal and material expectations of womanhood valued by sentimental ideology. Our Nig challenges domestic ideals that privilege bourgeois home maintenance without providing a point of entry for those who have been excluded, at least as mistresses of their own homes. In that way, Our Nig can be characterized as anti-sentimental; it offers perhaps the strongest and most subversive challenge to sentimental ideology and literary conventions articulated in an antebellum woman’s novel.

Our Nig’s opening incorporates the language and conventions of the seduction novel, an eighteenth-century form that includes runaway bestsellers like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Susannah Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), books that remained enormously popular throughout the next century. Our Nig ingeniously merges Mag’s tale of sexual seduction with Frado’s story of service by recalling Pamela, the British novel named for a servant girl pursued by her employer, the wealthy “Mr B.,” who attempts to forcibly seduce the eponymous heroine he holds captive at his estate before recognizing her virtue and marrying her. Our Nig’s Mrs. Bellmont “Mrs. B.” recalls Pamela’s antagonist. The British Mr. B.’s attempt to “ruin” and “undo” his servant girl informs the American Mrs. B.’s attempt to ruin her own. In Our Nig, however, sex and marriage are not ultimately items of exchange that hold transformative power. Our Nig instead highlights the connection between control of one’s own labor and one’s own body; it underscores the harm done by the quotidian physical violence meted out—and tolerated—by white women and men, and by extension, by the North, when the abused party is black and economically vulnerable.

Our Nig’s tone, if not its language, is pitched in economically deterministic registers. Economic desire, the wish to “ascend to [her seducer] and become an equal” (5), motivates Mag to surrender a “gem,” her virtue, then to marry a black man (“want” is a “powerful philosopher and preacher” [9]), and subsequently to abandon her child. Financial hardship likewise is the reason for Wilson’s separation from her own young son, who, until his death six months after Our Nig’s publication, alternately resided with his mother when she could afford it, in the Hillsborough County Poor Farm in Goffstown in which he was born, and was boarded out at others’ homes. When Frado first arrives at the Bellmonts’, the youngest daughter, the devilish Mary, says, “Send her to the County House,” “in reply to the query what should be done with her” (15). Mary’s words—or Wilson’s rendition of them—prove prophetic. Wilson’s child ends up in the home of others, as Frado was, separated from his mother. Thus, while much has been made of Our Nig’s sentimentality, with its rhetorical arc, dark narrative resolution, and depiction of mothers incapable of transcending their poverty, Wilson’s writing anticipates the grim determinism of twentieth-century novels by Richard Wright and Ann Petry as much as it echoes the sentiments expressed in the writings of Wilson’s contemporaries Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, and Maria Cummins.

By stressing the permanence, scope, and violence of her servitude—“slavery’s shadows”—Wilson implies that the racially neutral category of northern indenture is inadequate in explaining the circumstances and experiences she describes. The physical torture that Frado endures while no one is held accountable either in private or public spheres, the recurring runaway plot, and the possessive qualities in black chattel labor implied by the family’s moniker “our Nig”—all of these themes tie the text to another popular form, the life stories published by and about former slaves. The continuous references to Mrs. B.’s racialized sense of the totality and permanence of her ownership rights to “her” servant’s body and soul, signal that indenture is not an appropriate model through which to understand Frado’s experience. Instead, through the subliterary rendition of her story, Wilson levels a devastating critique of northern race relations.

But, importantly, neither Wilson nor Frado is enslaved. And so we might consider how Our Nig draws on another popular early American form, the captivity narrative. This genre, which had enormous currency in the eighteenth century, was generally associated with innocent captives, often women, held by so-called savage American Indians. Although critics conventionally refer to the life stories penned by Solomon Northup, Harriet Jacobs, and Lucy A. Delaney as slave narratives, they relate how the authors, their mothers, or their grandmothers, were illegally robbed of the freedom to which they were entitled. Our Nig can be usefully grouped with these narratives; all claim not only that blacks are unjustly enslaved as a class under existing laws, but also that they are free individuals who have been unjustly held captive by the illegal subversion of those laws. Originating in New England, where Mary Rowlandson—whose book is often cited as the first and most influential of the genre—was abducted, many of these narratives share Our Nig’s geographical terrain. Wilson remaps the genre’s racial assumptions about victimization and virtue; in Our Nig white women are savage villains, while a racial outsider, here a young black girl, is held captive in New England.

While the Haywards (the “Bellmonts”), the family that held young Harriet, no doubt justified the hard labor, poor diet, harsh domestic conditions, and physical treatment she endured in terms of her indenture, to this date there have been no documents found that confirm that they registered or formalized her service. Our Nig’s publication closely followed an 1857 act of the New Hampshire state legislature that provided “that no person should be deprived of the right of citizenship in the state on account of color, or because that person had been a slave.” Any person “found guilty of this felony was to be confined to hard labor not less than one, nor more than five, years.”²⁸ In this context, Our Nig’s literary indictment may have carried the weight of legal conviction as well as moral indignation, even though the principals in Our Nig had almost all died by that time. Critics generally agree that one motivation for Wilson’s using fictional names might be her fear of reprisal from the living Hayward relatives. This, too, underscores Our Nig’s indictment of slavery’s appurtenances North, as she puts it in her preface. Several writers who were once enslaved—most notably Harriet Jacobs, who called herself Linda Brent—renamed the principals in their narratives for fear that their testimony would provoke a backlash.

While New Hampshire was a state proud of its patriotic commitment to freedom, it had not always been as welcoming to citizens or visitors of color as the passage of the 1857 act implies. In 1835, in the U.S. Congress, New Hampshire Senator Isaac Hill justified mob violence against black students, their white counterparts, and the abolitionists who had invited them all to Canaan, New Hampshire, to study at the multiracial Noyes Academy. Hill explained that local residents stood against abolitionist schemes to mingle the races. Using rhetoric that could characterize the twentieth as well as the nineteenth century, the town’s reaction to an integrated school, he suggested, reflected their fears that an influx of blacks would overrun Canaan, inviting poor people who would tax the town’s resources and subject its citizens to public nuisances.

The actions Canaan residents took to avoid such nuisances culminated in New Hampshire’s ugliest historical episode concerning black education. Occurring when Wilson was about ten, this episode in Canaan eerily frames Our Nig’s description of Frado’s first days in school: being teased by her classmates and spurned by the young Mary Bellmont, who enjoyed tormenting Frado in private and shunned the thought of “walking with a nigger” in public (18). Henry Highland Garnet and Alexander Crummell, who would become intellectual giants of the nineteenth-century antislavery and black rights movements, and Anglo American Richard Rust, who would later found the Freedmen’s Aid Society and Rust College, faced far worse. They were young men when they joined twelve blacks and twenty-seven young whites of both sexes at the newly founded academy. Though abolitionists were sanguine about the town’s reception, opposing residents made their patriotic wishes known on July 4, when the ensuing mob had to be dispersed by a local magistrate.

In a town meeting, a committee organized to do away with the school in “the interest of the town, the honor of the State, and the good of the whole community.”²⁹ On August 10, Canaan whites rallied neighbors and, with nearly a hundred yoke of oxen, pulled the school from its foundation, dragging it into a swamp half a mile away. Young people like Julia Ward Williams and her future husband, Garnet, who had traveled four hundred miles to study there, were not to have “the opportunity to show that they are capable, equally with the whites, of improving themselves in every scientific attainment, every social virtue, and every Christian ornament,” as the young people and the Noyes founders had hoped.³⁰ Instead, Garnet and eleven other black students had to face down a violent assault on their boardinghouse with shotguns and then, with Garnet sick and no doubt terrified, they had to flee the town while the mob fired a cannon as their wagon retreated.³¹ In 1835, ninety miles north of Milford, Noyes’s students were confronted with public expressions of racial violence. By that same year, Frado’s experience in public school—one of the few places where “she had rest from Mrs. Bellmont’s tyranny”—had ended. Mrs. Bellmont felt that Frado’s “time and person belonged solely to her” (24). Using the language of ownership to claim Frado as her private property, Mrs. Bellmont reined the young girl back into “her place,” a black girl’s proper place, that is, in the domestic and racial order.

A host of staunch New Hampshire abolitionists and reformers condemned public violence against blacks and their supporters, and even more residents of the Granite State, as they called New Hampshire, opposed slavery, however ambivalent they were in their feelings toward free blacks like Wilson. They thought themselves worthy of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier’s paean to “New Hampshire” in his poem by the same name. Inspired by Senator John P. Hale, who broke the infamous gag rule by openly condemning slavery on the floor of the U.S. Congress, Whittier imagined the Granite State’s antislavery credentials to be rock solid. Ending with the lines “Courage, then, Northern hearts! Be firm, be true; / What one brave State hath done, can ye not also do?” the poem joined the Hutchinson Family Singers’ “The Old Granite State” (which they sang for President Tyler at the White House in 1844) as one of the most famous anthems to celebrate antebellum New Hampshire.

Although Frederick Douglass would praise the Milford-based Hutchinson Family Singers for having “sung the yokes from the necks and the fetters from the limbs of my race,” Harriet Wilson was not impressed.³² The ties between the well-loved and renowned Hutchinson family and the Haywards must have been particularly hard for the young Wilson to stomach or understand. Betsey, one of the “Bellmont” children “already settled in homes of their own” (14), married the eldest Hutchinson son, David, in 1829. The couple stayed close by, and their families’ lives were intertwined in multiple ways. Frado’s favorite, “Jack Bellmont,” or Charles Hayward, did indeed go West, as Our Nig outlines. He was accompanied by his brother-in-law Zephaniah Hutchinson, who had once been the manager for his siblings, the famous singers.³³ When the Hutchinson Singers visited Baltimore, as Barbara White has established, they stayed with Jonas Hayward (Lewis Bellmont), who made their arrangements and took them to visit the grave of his sister, Rebecca, Frado’s nemesis “Mary.”³⁴

The Hutchinson Singers were known as not just “performers,” as the most famous antislavery newspaper put it, “but abolitionists.”³⁵ And they brought the news of their travels home. In 1842, for example, when George Latimer was captured and imprisoned in Boston, Jesse and John Hutchinson—both members of the famous singing group—joined a group of some fifty men who “were resolved to make an effort towards rescuing” the fugitive. Soon they were “at the head of the delegation,” marching to the famous Marlboro Chapel, singing, “Oh, liberate the bondsman.” In a letter in which John reports their success, he closes by saying “after the Latimer incident Sister Abby and I returned to Milford.” Linked to the antislavery front line in this way and others, the town was no isolated outpost in the struggle for abolition. If it is “distinguished for anything,” said a speaker at Milford’s Centennial Celebration, “it is for the unselfish and sublime work of these splendid men and women in the grandest movement of the century, for human rights.”³⁶

Little good it did Wilson that New Hampshire was the home of several prominent abolitionists. The radical Stephen S. Foster had helped to organize the New Hampshire Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society just a year after Noyes Academy was demolished—and he stayed active and uncompromising for decades—but this did nothing to alleviate Wilson’s condition in a “two-story white house, North” as she put it in Our Nig’s subtitle.³⁷ Milford’s Leonard Chase was one of the three New Hampshire subscription agents for the widely circulated paper the Liberator, and the vice president of the state’s antislavery society.³⁸ His home at 15 High Street, Milford, was a stop on the underground railroad. And Horace Greeley, the nationally prominent editor of the New York Tribune, hailed from nearby Amherst, New Hampshire. Indeed, the Reverend Humphrey Moore had married Nehemiah and Rebecca Hayward, the “Bellmonts,” before he was elected to the state legislature in 1840 and 1841, where he “gave stirring orations against slavery.”³⁹

Local Reformers’ brave and active roles in civil disobedience in New Hampshire, Boston, and elsewhere raises questions about the town residents’ passivity toward the practically enslaved girl growing up in their midst. Placing Our Nig in the antislavery context of its time personalizes a central human contradiction and a particularly American paradox: how can people who stand firmly against injustice ignore it—or enact it—in their own front yards?

The discontinuity between Milford’s public face and young Harriet’s private life helps to explain the sardonic tone that seethes just beneath the narrative’s surface. She must have experienced the swell of antislavery activity in Milford as she reached her majority, or was about to turn eighteen, as if antislavery reformers were dancing on top of her living grave. Abolitionist meetings and challenges to Northern churches led up to, and followed, the huge abolitionist rally the town hosted in 1843. Reformers braved snow and wind to hear the eloquent George Johnson and George Latimer, whose case prompted the largest acts of civil disobedience in the nineteenth century, speak about their captivity. They also heard from Pillsbury, Foster, and Nathaniel Rogers, the editor of New Hampshire’s Herald for Freedom. At least one historian claims that William Lloyd Garrison, the movement’s greatest editor; Frederick Douglass, its most powerful writer and witness; Wendell Phillips, its most eminent orator; and the most important national and state reformers swelled the town’s numbers on a “granite winter” day when Wilson was in her teens.⁴⁰ During that decade Garrison visited again. And Douglass reported in his paper, the North Star, that he met a “good anti-slavery friend” and gave four “real old-fashioned meetings, full of life and spirit” there in 1848.⁴¹ In Wilson’s experience, however, white abolitionists not only in her area, but throughout New England, “didn’t want slaves at the South, nor niggers in their own houses, North. Faugh! to lodge one; to eat with one; to admit one through the front door; to sit next to one; awful!”(71).

Our Nig’s last lines, “Frado had passed from their memories as Joseph from the butler’s, but she will never cease to track them till beyond mortal vision” (72), offer conventional narrative resolution appropriate to the genres from which Wilson draws. Quoted from the Bible, they are comforting and gender appropriate. Wilson reports that many of Frado’s would-be supporters have found their way to heaven. Her words are also empowering. Frado has outlived Mrs. B. and recounted her agonizing death. She has bested her foes and has wrested from them the control she lacked as a child. She tracks them. They cannot escape her, even though they are dead and gone. Prophetically, her writing determines how they are to be remembered.

The reference to Joseph, an enslaved seer and interpreter of dreams who was abandoned, indeed sold, by his family, and forgotten by those whom he once had helped, also anticipates Wilson’s growing connection to Spiritualism, which was sweeping the country in the 1840s and 1850s. It was a major, nearly ubiquitous, nineteenth-century movement that appropriated space for women’s expression and leadership in religious, political, social, and medical reform. The movement was an heir of mid-century religious awakenings that would spawn Christian Science, Seventh Day Adventism, Mormonism, Mesmerism, and the Oneida, New Harmony, and Northampton communities, among others. Like those who believed in phrenology and biometrics, Spiritualism’s adherents, who held that spirits’ messages were conducted through electricity, linked it to scientific progress and the surge of discoveries that were then changing the way society understood both natural phenomena and itself.

In their lecture halls, conventions, and camp meetings, Spiritualists discussed the larger concerns of women, labor, and racial oppression. Before the Civil War, the movement was popular with many leading abolitionists. After 1865, they took up the cause of the eight-hour workday, women’s rights in marriage and childbearing, and Indian removal. Clairvoyant physicians challenged draconian practices—the overprescribing of toxic doses of purgatives, stimulants, and narcotics such as opium and mercury—and rejected the medical establishment’s restrictions on women because of their supposed inclination toward “hysteria.” Instead, they relied on homeopathic remedies. ⁴² Though in the present day, nineteenth-century Spiritualism is commonly associated with séances, spirit communication, the “planchette” and Ouija board, and often dismissed as mere quackery, it was one of the most important, and radical, movements of its time. Its adherents included the familiar names of journalist Horace Greeley, historian George Bancroft, abolitionists and women’s rights activists Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and William Lloyd Garrison, among others. To that pantheon, we can now add Hattie E. Wilson.

After daring to write a book that is both the first black woman’s novel and an important autobiography of an indentured servant, Wilson continued to challenge convention and to exceed the expectations of those who thought little of her capabilities. By 1867, she had left Milford and was living in East Cambridge, Massacusetts, appearing on platforms with Spiritualist leaders such as Andrew Jackson Davis, one of the most important authors, speakers, and philosophers of the movement, and Pascal Beverly Randolph, one of the few black mediums of national renown. Known as “the earnest colored trance medium,” Wilson gave fervent addresses in Boston on labor reform and children’s education.⁴³ At a camp meeting in Melrose, Massachusetts, where three thousand people gathered, Wilson’s speech “excited thrilling interest and was at once an eloquent plea for the recognition of her race [and] the sentiment and philosophy of universal brotherhood.”⁴⁴ By 1868, she was advertising her services as a lecturer and trance physician and was doing well enough to make generous financial contributions to Spiritualist conventions.⁴⁵

In Boston, she joined forces with a young apothecary, John Gallatin Robinson. Soon after, though he was white and eighteen years her junior, she married him. Their marriage certificate shows that Harriet E. Wilson, born in Milford, New Hampshire, but residing in Boston, daughter of Margaret and Joshua Green, was entering into her second marriage. She is listed, erroneously, and perhaps euphemistically, as thirty-seven years old (if she was born in 1825, she would have actually been forty-five). She is also listed in public records of that time as white, though she was widely known as Boston’s “colored medium.”⁴⁶ In the oft-noted feminist spirit of the movement, she again bucked custom, alternately calling herself both by her married name, Hattie E. Robinson, and by the name by which we continue to know her, Hattie E. Wilson.

Like Achsah Sprague, who recovered from a debilitating illness to become one of the mid-nineteenth century’s most famous mediums and lecturers, when Hattie E. Wilson became a Spiritualist, she found it a life-changing as well as life-saving experience. As she described it to her peers on a fall morning in 1870, one day “she had been brought into acquaintance with her father in spirit-life.” At first she was opposed to becoming a medium, she reports, but was finally convinced by “seeing an old schoolmate who had been dead several years standing by her bedside, who conversed with her as naturally as ever. Then her father came and gave all the facts of his life and acquaintance with her mother, manifesting the tenderest interest in her.”⁴⁷ Wilson’s experience follows the path to spiritualism taken by countless men and women attracted to the growing movement when faced with the loss of loved ones. Abolitionist reformers Amy and Isaac Post, New York Supreme Court judge John W. Edmonds, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley and his wife, and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, for example, all became associated with spiritualism after the death of a child.

When John Robinson wed Hattie Wilson, he married an increasingly well-known lecturer in the Spiritualist community. Wilson found enthusiastic audiences throughout the North-east, not only in Massachusetts, but in Connecticut, Maine, and New Hampshire as well. Reports of her successful addresses were sometimes printed in the Spiritualist press.⁴⁸ In 1873, she reportedly shared the platform with Victoria Woodhull, who had run for president on the Equal Rights Party ticket in the previous year, and had just recently emerged from one of the most scandalous libel trials of the century. They spoke in front of crowds that numbered sixteen thousand.⁴⁹ Wilson traveled as far as Chicago as a delegate to the American Association of Spiritualists. At the Universal Association of Spiritualists, reported as “a mass meeting of Radicals and Reformers,” by one paper and a “mongrel convention” by another, she delivered an oration of “great vigor” on the “conduct of Spiritualists to each other, founded on personal experience” and also challenged “the doctrine of turning children over to the state.”⁵⁰ She joined a community that worked to establish children’s lyceums, Spiritualist Sunday schools, and sang in quartets at meetings.

Even the social gatherings Wilson organized were covered in the Banner of Light, a Spiritualist paper that claimed subscribers in every state and territory.⁵¹ When, on February 13, 1874, the anniversary of her son George’s death, she gave “an anniversary in honor of her spirit father,” it was “attended by a goodly number of friends” who gathered at her home on 46 Carver Street before adjourning to a hall where prominent Boston Spiritualists made appropriate remarks. Dancing went on until midnight. And on March 15, 1876, when Wilson organized a gathering at her house, “a large gathering of her friends” came out to celebrate “the attainment by their hostess of another birthday.”⁵²

Almost a decade earlier, in 1867, at least some of the former stalwarts of the New England abolitionist community had taken note of Hattie Wilson. William Cooper Nell corresponded regularly with Amy Post, a Rochester, New York, abolitionist, reformer, and Spiritualist who was the close friend of Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Nell, a black activist and historian who spearheaded successful efforts to integrate Boston’s public schools, wrote to Post about their shared interests and social circles. An avowed Spiritualist, he reported that he “found but little opportunity to attend the New England Convention or the Spiritualists Meeting—and knew nothing of the Colored Medium Mrs. Wilson. It may be some one of my acquaintances.”⁵³ Early in her career, then, Wilson drew the attention of at least one important black Boston reformer whose connections included a wide range of former abolitionists and black activists who were still laboring on the political and social issues of their day. One wonders about the relationship that Wilson and Nell may have established, as they were two of the few black Spiritualists in Boston, and Nell’s wife, Frances, whom he would marry in 1869, was from Nashua, New Hampshire, some ten miles from Milford.⁵⁴

Still active as a lecturer and trance reader, by 1879 Wilson was settled as the housekeeper of a two-family home at 15 Village Street in Boston’s South End. She was to stay there for eighteen years. In 1889, when Moses Hull, the famous Spiritualist and reformer who once nominated Frederick Douglass to the Equal Rights Party ticket as vice-president, appeared in Boston after a nearly ten-year hiatus, the newspaper Banner of Light announced the notable Spiritualists who were in the audience. Andrew Jackson Davis and “Dr. Hattie Wilson” were among them. By this time, Hattie and John Gallatin Robinson had probably gone their separate ways. Spiritualists believed that marriage was an institution that too often oppressed women and that the bonds of spiritual love rather than the dicta of the state should guide couples’ decisions. By 1900, Robinson was living with Izah Moore, his twenty-five-year-old wife, according to the census. He would marry her in 1902, two years after Wilson—his legal wife—had died.

In 1900, Wilson left her beloved Boston and went to live with, and perhaps work for, the family of Silas and Catherine Cobb in nearby Quincy. Perhaps she was employed as a nurse—the occupation listed on her death certificate—or perhaps the Cobbs were friends. Whatever the case, Silas Cobb passed away in April. Wilson fell ill later that month, and after a sickness of two months died in Quincy Hospital of “inanition” or exhaustion. Unlike the Haywards, the Cobb family clearly valued its relationship with Hattie E. Wilson. She is buried in their family plot; her name is engraved on a massive and impressive Quincy granite headstone alongside theirs.

As a child, Wilson had been scoffed at for her attempts to find spiritual comfort and reproached by her mistress for turning into a “pious nigger” who might expect to “preach to white folks” (49). As a mature and emancipated woman, she did just that. Wilson spent the last thirty-five years of her life as a “lecturer,” “trance reader,” and “clairvoyant physician.” She joined the luminaries of a movement that took issues of labor reform, women’s rights, and spirituality—and took Hattie Wilson herself—seriously. The record shows that, as in Our Nig, Wilson continued to speak about her condition and experiences, offering sometimes trenchant and often humorous commentary that “excited thrilling interest” and was “an eloquent plea for the recognition of her race.”

 

Thanks to Denise Burgher, Rhondda Thomas, Suzanne Schneider, and Andrea Williams for their companionship and research assistance. Thanks also to Alan Lewis, Bill Nell, Julie Winch, Charlotte Edwards, and Priscilla Wald for their intellectual generosity.

NOTES

1 The 1870 Federal Census and the Boston city directories of the period list her as “Dr. Hattie E. Wilson.” It was not unusual for nineteenth-century citizens to call themselves medical practitioners on the basis of their readings on the subject, says critic John Ernest. William Wells Brown, whose novel Clotel (1853), published in London, launched the black novelistic tradition, started adding M.D. to his name in 1864 or 1865, calling himself a “dermapathic and practical physician.” John Ernest, Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press), 215 n. 1.

2 Farmer’s Cabinet, December 6, 1851.

3 Boston Herald, obituary announcements, June 29 and 30, 1900. Boston Globe, obituaries, June 29, 1900. The service was held at 8:00 P.M. on June 30.

4 Death certificate for Hattie E. Wilson, giving her age as “75 years, 3 months, 13 days,” dated June 29, 1900, number 192, for the City of Quincy, found in Massachusetts Deaths 506:95, Massachusetts Archives, Columbia Point, Boston, Massachusetts. Hattie E. Wilson was born in Milford, New Hampshire to Joshua Green. The “maiden name and birthplace of mother” line is left blank.

5 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, civil rights movements impacted publishing and curricular changes. Arno Press and the Negro University Presses, for example, reissued hosts of important black books that had been out of print. Women’s novels by authors such as Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ann Petry were again in circulation. Many of these novels were out of print again by the late 1970s, only to be resurrected ten years later.

6 Frances E. W. Harper’s “Two Offers,” serialized in the first editions of the Anglo-African, is known as the first short story by a black woman. Maria F. dos Reis published a novel called Ursula in Brazil in 1859.

7 Barbara White, John Ernest, R. J. Ellis, and Eric Bardner have built considerably on Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s groundbreaking research. White established the historical identities of the family members in whose service Wilson spent her childhood. R. J. Ellis’s cultural biography of Our Nig, which came out as this edition was in progress, does path-clearing work on New Hampshire and Milford abolition. Eric Gardner’s primary research traces the publishing and circulation history of Our Nig’s first edition. Ellis notes that “after 1856 we know nothing for sure about Harriet Wilson except that Our Nig is entered in her name in Boston in 1859 and that her son died in 1860.” E. J. Ellis, Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig”: A Cultural Biography of a “Two-Story” African American Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 29. In his 2002 reprint edition, Gates states that “researchers, including Barbara A. White, have found no trace of Wilson after 1863.” Gates, ed., Our Nig, lxxxiv.

8 See both her death certificate and her second marriage certificate (Massachusetts Marriages 228:129), which lists both her parents’ names (Joshua and Margaret Green) and her Milford birthplace. In the most thorough historical work done to that date, Barbara White pointed out that spring 1825 would be a likely time for Wilson’s birth “because all of the age markers in Our Nig are given in the Spring.” See “ ‘Our Nig and the She-Devil’: New Information about Harriet Wilson and the ‘Bellmont’ Family,” American Literature 65, no. 1 (1993): 41.

9 See Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 195.

10 Dudden, Serving Women, 196-97, 225.

11 According to the 1840 census, when Harriet would have been about fifteen, there were no other female “free colored persons” in Milford.

12 “Orphaned children were commonly bound out at about age ten or twelve to serve until they were eighteen.” Dudden, Serving Women, 20. R. J. Ellis, citing Joan M. Jensen, With These Hands: Women Working the Land (New York: Talman, 1980), disagrees, suggesting that seven was a typical age for mid-Atlantic farm women (Ellis, Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig,” 105). For comparisons and commentary on indenture by enslaved blacks, see Douglass, Narrative of the Life, in which he compares his servitude to the indenture of his shipyard friends. Also see Moses Roper, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery, in North Carolina Slave Narratives, ed. William Andrews et al. (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2003), 28.

13 This recalls Harriet Jacobs’s use of Amy and Isaac Post’s real names in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a narrative in which all other principals are renamed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s findings definitively establish that Wilson went by Harriet Adams before her marriage to Thomas Wilson in 1851. Harriet Adams appears on the document recording her first marriage and on the 1850 census records that establish she was living with the family of Samuel Boyles that year. R. J. Ellis speculates that Adams might not be Harriet’s mother’s married name, “but instead her maiden name (or even a name invented for Harriet).” See Ellis, Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig,” 35. Wilson’s second marriage and death certificates confirm his suspicion. They both list Wilson’s birthplace as Milford, New Hampshire, and her father’s name as Joshua Green. Again, both parents, as Margaret and Joshua Green, appear on the marriage license. The death certificate leaves blank the line that identifies her mother. Why she would use the name Adams if her maiden name was Green and her parents were, as we assume, married, is still an open question.

14 The Amherst Farmer’s Cabinet (later the Milford Cabinet), March 27, 1830, 1. Under “interments of the city of Boston,” the Boston Courier lists a Margaret Ann Smith, twenty-six (March 22, 1830). The Boston Patriot only lists “death in city,” “intemperance 1,” on March 23, 1830. Boston’s Columbian Centinel for Tuesday, March 17, 1830 lists “Mrs. Margaret Ann Smith, 27, of Boston [March 14, 1830]”; however the New Hampshire Patriot has no listing.

15 Frado would have just turned five if both her death certificate and this account are correct. Our Nig states that she is abandoned when she is six. Wilson’s birth year, even taking into account the exactness of the death certificate, still begs for verification. Census records and her own creative accounting, on her second marriage certificate, for example, complicate any definitive answer to that question. The 1830 notice of Margaret Smith’s death closely correlates to Wilson’s childhood recollections.

16 See Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s introduction to the 1983 edition for a reading of the inverted commas Wilson uses “to underscore [her] use as an ironic one, one intended to reverse the power relation implicit in renaming-rituals.” She renames herself not our Nig but “our Nig,” as Gates points out (introduction, li).

17 White, “New Information about Our Nig,” 23, 29, and 44. There are at least three self-consciously substantial ways in which Our Nig diverges from the historical record. “Aunt Abby” or Sally Hayward Blanchard, who in the narrative appears as a “maiden aunt,” was widowed, a fact that Wilson more than likely knew. And Our Nig excises, or merges into another brother, a rendering of Nehemiah Peabody Hayward, probably, as critics have suggested, for the sake of narrative flow that would be disrupted with an ungainly number of principal characters. Caroline Frances, the daughter of George and Nancy Hayward (“James and Susan Bellmont”), also appears as a boy, Charlie Bellmont, in Our Nig.

18 The 1820 census shows that in addition to Blanchard, two other free colored males lived at his residence. The 1830 census indicates that one black man, between ten and twenty-four, was housed there. Blanchard had brothers, but they were all older than he. He was thirty-nine in 1830, the year, presumably, in which Joshua Green succumbed to consumption.

19 Sara Malysa, the eldest daughter of Timothy and Dorcas Hood, his (white) wife, was born in Milford on July 16, 1830, and so is probably too young to be Frado’s favorite playmate. Her sister Elizabeth was born on September 6, 1834. They had Salem cousins (Cecilia and Sarah Coleman, born in 1823 and 1827), and their mother and Timothy’s other sisters remained closely connected to the Milford family. When Timothy died in 1839, his sister Sarah, and her husband, William Coleman, would take the Blanchard girls to Salem, where they and other relatives shared in the girls’ care and were active in the African American community. Sara and Elizabeth would grow up to marry African Americans from Salem. Their older brothers, George Walter (1824-96) and Tim Blanchard, Jr. (1828-?), were both enumerated in the 1850 census for Milford as living with their maternal grandfather, Joseph Hood; George would be listed as white in public records until his death in 1896. The youngest two, James and Henry, who was barely a toddler, however, ended up in the Milford poorhouse. Henry was eventually apprenticed to a black barber, William Henry Montague, of Springfield, Massachusetts, where he would stay until 1864. And James worked on farms in nearby Amherst, where he is listed in both the 1850 and 1860 censuses, until he joined the (white) 10th New Hampshire Infantry. Dorcas Hood remarried Luther Elliot, a white property owner. When James, whom she evidently abandoned to the poorhouse, died during the Civil War, she would collect his pension. See Pension Records for Mrs. Dorcas H. Elliot, mother of Private James Blanchard, Company H, 10th New Hampshire Infantry Regiment, National Archives; Death Certificate for Mrs. Sara M. (Blanchard) Washington, dated July 9, 1910, Massachusetts State Archives, Columbia Point, Boston, Massachusetts. See William P. Colburn, “Register,” in George A. Ramsdell, The History of Milford, with Family Registers (Concord, N.H.: 1901), 593; and White, “New Information about Our Nig,” 48 n. 12, for information on the Blanchard boys’ time in the poorhouse.

20 See White, “New Information about Our Nig,” 24.

21 Sarah Breedlove McWilliams Walker (1867-1919), born in Delta, Louisiana, on the banks of the Mississippi River, was known professionally as Madame C. J. Walker. She worked as a laundress and dressmaker who developed a conditioning treatment to straighten hair, which she first sold door-to-door. By advertising her products and teaching others to treat hair, she became the first African American female millionaire. See A’Lelia Perry Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madame C. J. Walker (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001).

22 Letter by “Allida,” appendix to Our Nig, 76.

23 Wilson writes of the “valuable recipe” from which she found a “useful article for her maintenance” (72); and “Allida” gives more details (76). The bottles were produced by Henry Wilson & Co. and Tewksbury & Wilson of Manchester. In 1856, Henry Wilson was a clerk at 22 Elm Street, Manchester. The same year, Monroe G. J. Tewksbury was a physician at 37 Elm Street. By 1858, the two were together as Tewksbury & Wilson, Apothecaries, 45 Elm Street, and were again listed together in 1860. From 1861 on, Tewksbury was listed as a physician at 233 Elm. Wilson probably returned to selling hair products in the 1860s and 1870s. One of her bottles, for example, is listed in the “Annual Price Current and Illustrated Catalogue,” in Drugs, Chemicals and Medicines (Chicago: Van Schaack, Stevenson & Reid Druggists, 1871). See Donald V. Fadley, “Mrs. Wilson’s Hair Preparations,” 164. Also see Manchester City Directory (Boston: Sampson & Murdock, 1871).

24 Priscilla Wald, Constituting Amerias: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham, N.C.,: Duke University Press, 1995), 169.

25 M. Guilia Fabi, Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 1.

26 See Gates, introduction to Our Nig (New York: Vintage, 2002), xli-liv. See also Ellis, Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig,” chapter 3.

27 Amy Lang, “Class and the Strategies of Sympathy,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 130.

28 J. W. Hammonds, “Slavery in New Hampshire,” Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries 21 (January-June, 1889): 65.

29 Douglas Harper, “Slavery in New Hampshire,” www.slavenorth.com/newhampshire.htm .

30 Harper, “Slavery in New Hampshire.”

31 Sterling Stuckey, “A Last Stern Struggle: Henry Highland Garnet and Liberation Theory,” in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Leon Litwack and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 132. Garnet and Crummell later attended Oneida Institute in New York.

32 Douglass also wrote the introduction to Jonas Hutchinson’s Story of the Hutchinsons. See White, “New Information on Our Nig,” 51 n. 35. Carol Brink, Harps in the Wind: The Story of the Singing Hutchinsons (New York: MacMillan, 1947), 286.

33 See notes to text, p. 91, for more information. Also see White, “New Information on Our Nig,” 35.

34 White, “New Information on Our Nig,” 37.

35 Liberator, January 20, 1843, 2.

36 Ramsdell, History of Milford, 522.

37 Joshua Hutchinson writes that in 1874 he was living “on Amherst Street, Milford, N.H., the former residence of Parker Pillsbury.” A Brief Narrative of the Hutchinson Family (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1874), 66.

38 Chase represented the area in the state legislature in 1850 and 1851. Ramsdell, History of Milford, 433.

39 White, “New Information on Our Nig,” 27.

40 Nathaniel Rogers writes of his travels with Parker Pillsbury to the Milford meeting in the Herald of Freedom, January 13, 1843. He writes that the “weather tried even [Pillsbury’s] hardihood of endurance” and that “anti-slavery service has touched his manly shoulders and they can’t bear granite winters as they used to.” The convention is also covered in the Liberator, January 20, 1843, 2. See Brink, Harps in the Wind, 55, for the most impressive account; while it may be true that all of these luminaries attended, neither the Liberator nor the Herald of Freedom mention Douglass, Garrison, Remond, or Phillips. Though Brink quotes their resolutions in detail, she provides no sources. She or her own sources may have confused the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society meeting advertised in the Liberator on January 27, 1843, 3, with the Milford meeting. Foster chaired the Milford meeting. Jesse Hutchinson, the brother who lived in Lynn, Massachusetts, and the other siblings were there, and made a definite impression on those who wrote the Liberator notice.

41 North Star, June 9, 1848, 2.

42 See Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 142-61.

43 Banner of Light, June 15, 1967, 3. See also July 6, 1867, 8.

44 Banner of Light, September 14, 1867, 5.

45 Banner of Light, June 27, 1868, 3; July 18, 1868, 8.

46 “Hattie E. Wilson” is listed as white in the 1870 census and on her second marriage certificate. She is, nonetheless, the same “Hattie E. Wilson, colored,” who appears in Banner of Light monthly listings for years. Indeed the addresses on the census record match the Banner’s listings. The 1880 census lists her as white (W) which is then crossed out and “Mu” for mulatto is scribbled over it. Wilson’s death certificate lists her color as “African,” and, as we have seen, confirms that she was born in Milford, and that her father’s name is Joshua Green.

47 Banner of Light, November 12, 1870, 2.

48 Banner of Light, October 19, 1867, 5; November 28, 1867, 8; January 4 and December 5, 1868, for example. 49. Banner of Light, August 23, 1873. The listing of Hattie C. Robinson is almost surely a typographical error. She is listed throughout the year as Hattie E. Robinson and Hattie E. Wilson; no other Hattie Robinson, or Hattie C. Robinson, appears.

50 Banner of Light, September 26, 1874, 8. See also the Religio-Philosophical Journal, Vol. 17-18, October 10, 1874, 6.

51 Braude, Radical Spirits, 29.

52 Banner of Light, February 28, 1874, 4; Banner of Light, March 25, 1876, 4.

53 Letter from Nell to Post, Boston, June 23, 1867, in William Cooper Nell: Selected Writings, 1832-1874, ed. Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac (Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 2002), 670. Nell would die in 1874.

54 Frances A. Ames’s mother was Lucy Drake Ames; her father was Phillip O. Ames, a black barber, whom, considering Wilson’s hairdressing business, Wilson very well may have known. Frances would return to Nashua with her two young sons but would return by 1880 to Boston. Porter, ed., William Cooper Nell, 48.