This commentary is by James Haaf, a resident of Windsor who has been researching Dinah Mason and her life for the past 16 years.
The installation of a historic site marker in Windsor honoring a Negro woman slave has been long overdue, and accolades are owed to those who moved the project to completion.
But while a 2-by-3-foot bronze plaque is inadequate to memorialize any life, the state of Vermont and the marker’s sponsor deliberately omit a known fact about the woman, and with this, they rob her of that which would’ve been afforded a person of European heritage — identity.
The identity of those enslaved in America is often shrouded; family names were rarely recorded and given names were used repeatedly. For descendants, family history can be confused, scant, even nonexistent with slavery’s grip of anonymity, its erasure of self and banishment of kin.
And it’s in this manner that Windsor’s once-enslaved woman is identified on this marker, with only a single name, most often written in records of her time as it was then spoken, Dinar.
The name Dinah was common among enslaved women, so common that white Union soldiers used it as a generic title for any black female. In Vermont’s Bennington County, one woman with the name has been confused with Windsor’s resident, such that their records in state archives have been mistakenly interwoven.
And throughout New England, archival vaults hold accountings of innumerable women and girls named Dinah, all indistinguishable one from another except for a date of birth, baptism, death, or a chance reference to a father, a sibling, an owner.
Yet for this historian, such records offer theories linking Windsor’s Dinah to a young girl, once property of a man now buried in Old Pine Tree Cemetery of Lebanon, New Hampshire. But distanced by more than decades, theories require proof before casting names in bronze.
In recent years, Windsor’s Dinah has been labeled with a compound but false family name that has no support of historical evidence — while in fact, her true family name appears in documents presented to Dinah herself when she was living free and paying her own bills.
Seemingly given of her own accord, a family name would’ve contributed to Dinah’s sovereignty, and it’s known today, recorded during her lifetime as “Dinar (a negro) Mason.”
The reason for Dinah’s use of the name Mason is unknown, and while there is no proven history of her life before Vermont, her association with the name is not theory. Still, for her marker, the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation and Historic Windsor Inc. intentionally blot out her family name in fear of paying homage to a slaveholder named Mason.
But such a slaveholder isn’t known to have existed within Dinah’s life, and while any link between Dinah and the man buried in Lebanon remains a hypothetical theory, his lichen-covered headstone isn’t carved with the name of Mason.
Contrary to popular belief, few slaves adopted names that were reflective of slaveholders. For Sally Hemings of Monticello, Virginia, family lore recounts that Sally and her mother were christened with the name Hemings in recognition of Sally’s grandfather, a white man who never owned Sally, her mother or grandmother.
In Windsor, a runaway Negro fellow once sheltered on the property of a well-known judge didn’t use the name of his owner and would-be captor.
And the Windsor resident who cared for Dinah Mason before her death was first known as London, Negro, a typical name and tagging for a black man at the time. He later called himself Leonard Freeman.
Names carry more than identity. In West Rutland, a state historic marker honors a minister with a family name taken from the man who once held the minister as an indentured servant. Recently, Vermont’s Legislature deemed that indentured servitude to be contrary to life and liberty, and that its original reference within the state’s Constitution should be expunged.
Yet if this minister’s unchosen past were reason enough to expunge his chosen name, living Vermonters would be deprived of a forefather, and of his merit.
First names may be sufficient for embroidered bath towels, but identifying Windsor’s survivor of America’s great atrocity as merely Dinah, a woman of color, falls short. It cordons her back into a shadowed existence, ambiguous as a number on a census page or as a tally mark on an ink-stained tax record.
With this marker, the state of Vermont deprives the woman of individuality, of her sought-after sovereignty, and isolates her from those who continue to live with her legacy.
Here is the text on the Windsor historic marker:
Dinah c. 1753 – 1809
Dinah was taken to Windsor in 1783, identified only as a Negro woman slave about thirty years of age, valued at £40. An ensuing court case would later make her the best known of those to have been enslaved in Vermont despite its 1777 Constitution — the first to prohibit adult slavery.
In defiance of the law, lawyer Stephen Jacob purchased Dinah, obtaining a bill-of-sale from a future Vermont legislator that was witnessed by a town leader. Dinah served the Jacob family in the adjacent 18th-century house. When no longer in his service, she fell into need and requested town support, which was denied by a vote of the Windsor residents who urged their selectmen to charge Jacob legally for her care instead.
(Continued on other side)
SIDE TWO
The lawsuit, Selectmen of Windsor v, Stephen Jacob, was heard before the Vermont Supreme Court in 1802 when then-Justice Stephen Jacob recused himself. Remaining justices disavowed Dinah’s slave status, ruling no inhabitant of the state can hold a slave, thus absolving Jacob of her care while affirming Vermont’s prohibition of slavery. In total, Dinah continued to live in Windsor for nearly three decades, enslaved or free without manumission. Labeled as Jacob’s wench or African Dinah, she was summoned by selectmen to leave town, assaulted by a
deacon’s son, and suffered repeated illnesses. Although Dinah died in poverty, she was identified in a published obituary as a woman of color. The location of her grave is unknown.
Vermont Division for Historic Preservation — 2022
