Lucy Terry Prince must have wondered if this was all a big waste of time. She had traveled the 70 miles from her home in Guilford to Norwich to plead her case before a gathering of Vermont’s governor and his council.
She had every reason to expect to be snubbed.
For one thing, she was a woman and the year was 1785. Women held hardly any political power. They wouldn’t get the vote for 13 decades. Lucy was also Black, and a Black woman seeking redress from Vermont’s government was simply unprecedented. And yet she persevered.
The bravery it took to make her case for relief from the incessant harassment and physical attacks by racist neighbors was just one of countless such courageous moments in the extraordinary, and yet ordinary, lives of Lucy and her husband, Abijah.
Today Lucy is celebrated as the first African-American poet ever to be published, though she didn’t live to see her words in print.
The story of the Princes has been told and retold over the years, with fact and fiction coalescing in the narrative. Biographer Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, with the research assistance of her husband, Anthony, set out to discover the true story. The resulting book, “Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved out of Slavery and into Legend,” was published in 2008 and nominated for a Pulitzer.
It is a triumph of investigation and storytelling. By scouring libraries, archives and courthouses, the Gerzinas were able to unearth and piece together the story of two formerly enslaved people and their children.
Lucy’s widespread fame as a poet didn’t come until 33 years after her death, when her poem “Bars Fight” was published on the front page of the Springfield Daily Republican in 1854. The poem details an attack in 1746 on two white families in a section of Deerfield, Massachusetts, known as the Bars, by a group of Native Americans. Lucy, who was living in Deerfield at the time, probably produced the poem the same year. The structure of the poem makes it easy to memorize and helps explain how it could survive for a century before it was printed.
People who had known Lucy told a 19th-century Deerfield historian that she had been a charming woman of uncommon eloquence and an engaging storyteller. They remembered children flocking to hear her tell one of her gripping stories about life in town or from the Bible, or recite one of her poems. (“Bars Fight” is her only poem known to survive.)
Slaveholders in the North
Lucy had been born in Africa, kidnapped as a young girl and sold into slavery. Given the name Lucy Terry by one of her enslavers, she was raised by a childless Deerfield couple for whom she was forced to keep house. Years later, in Deerfield, she met Abijah Prince, who was two decades her senior.
Abijah had held positions of responsibility throughout his life. As an enslaved person, he had a variety of jobs, including working at a store in Enfield, Massachusetts, running errands, and delivering goods and cash. In 1747, Abijah was one of nine Deerfield men to enlist in a local regiment to defend the community during the French and Indian Wars and prepare to join a possible attack on Canada. He was well paid for his service.
“Deerfield presented a picture of slavery that went against so much of what we think we know about American slavery,” writes Gerzina, who is a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of numerous books, mostly biographies. She is currently writing a memoir about growing up in a mixed-race family in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Rather than being abolitionists, as we might imagine them, many northerners in the early and mid-1700s were slaveholders. At the same time, Gerzina explains, enslaved people in the North had more freedoms than those in the South. They could learn to read and could attend church. They could travel between towns, marry and even sue someone in court.
Most surprisingly, perhaps, they had access to firearms for use in hunting or defending their communities from attack. Beneath these freedoms, however, lay the cold fact that they could be bought and sold, and often lived lives of such despondence and isolation that it drove many to suicide.
Gerzina calls the situation “moral schizophrenia.”
Abijah’s military service might have been part of his plan to win his freedom. Gerzina believes that Abijah struck a deal with a man named Aaron Burt to buy him shortly before he enlisted, and then to free him, perhaps in exchange for his military pay, after his military service was complete.
When Abijah and Lucy married in 1756, their marriage certificate indicated that she was still enslaved. But a year later, when her enslaver wrote out his will, she was not listed among his assets. What had happened? Gerzina has a theory: When the French and Indian Wars flared up again in the mid-1750s, Abijah served another stint in the local militia; perhaps he earned enough to purchase her freedom.
A chance to own land
Abijah wasn’t one to let an opportunity pass him by. Several years after marrying Lucy, he got the chance to own land in what is today Vermont. He staked his family’s future on it.
In 1761, he was invited to join a petition for a land grant to form the town of Sunderland. Five acres were assigned to him and he had the right to 100 acres more in the future when the town divided more land. (It wouldn’t be until after Abijah’s death and a long series of legal actions — which culminated in Lucy successfully arguing the family’s case before the Vermont Supreme Court — that two of his sons would be able to secure that land.)
Separately, Abijah agreed to clear land for an acquaintance, and perhaps friend, Elijah Williams, who owned 10 lots totaling 1,000 acres in the newly granted town of Guilford. In exchange for clearing 5 acres on each of those lots, which was required for Elijah to take ownership of the land, Abijah would receive one of those 100-acre lots himself.
In 1765, the British government enacted the Stamp Act, which levied a heavy tax on legal documents. Nonetheless, Abijah and Lucy decided to officially register the births of their five children (they would eventually have a sixth). It cost them 10 shillings, about a week’s wages for Abijah.
Gerzina explains that the couple were investing in their children’s futures, securing proof they had been born free.
After a decade of dividing their time between Massachusetts and clearing land in Vermont, the family moved permanently to Guilford in 1775. The house they built was probably a story-and-a-half cape, with a central chimney, fireplaces in both downstairs rooms, a sleeping loft and a root cellar. They also built a barn, outbuildings, and stonewall enclosures for animals. The property offered fertile fields and a fine view.
Yet there was something terrible about the location: the man building a fancy home just down the road.
A nasty neighbor
John Noyes seems to have developed an instant antipathy toward the Princes. Perhaps, Gerzina suggests, he was uncomfortable living beside a free Black family, something his upbringing in Connecticut hadn’t prepared him for.
A campaign of insults and outright attacks soon began, with Noyes the common denominator. A close relative of Noyes attacked and beat the two youngest Prince boys, ages 10 and 14. Noyes broke through the Princes’ gate and set his cows and pigs to graze on their crops. For good measure, he cut down a dozen of the Princes’ trees.
In retaliation, Abijah and his eldest son let their livestock loose on Noyes’ crops. When another neighbor failed to pay for using the Princes’ horses for a 50-mile journey and 12 days of labor by one of their sons, the Princes took him to court. Noyes represented the neighbor in court. The Princes won the case.
When the neighbor still refused to pay, the judge ordered the neighbor arrested and his property seized. Then it was Noyes’ brother Amos’ turn to break down the Princes’ fence and feed his livestock on their crops.
This is when Lucy turned to Gov. Thomas Chittenden and his council for help. (At the time, Vermont’s chief executive was comprised of the governor and his council, the state’s founders not trusting all that authority to one person.)
Lucy was in Norwich on Thursday, June 2, 1785, and watched the procession of the governor, lieutenant governor and others arriving in Norwich, where they were met by members of the state militia, who escorted them to the home of a local lawyer.
The council failed to have a quorum of members that day, or on Friday or Saturday. The governor and council finally met on Monday, but still didn’t address Lucy’s appeal.
Finally on Tuesday, Lucy was able to make her case. Whatever she said persuaded the governor and council that the Princes had been “greatly oppressed” and “much injured.” The council directed the governor to write to Guilford’s selectmen, telling them that they must protect the Princes.
Later that summer, John Noyes defended his brother Amos against the latest trespassing charges. The Noyeses lost, and the judge ordered Amos to pay damages to Abijah, as well as court costs. The ruling didn’t sit well with the Noyeses.
Two months later, John Noyes paid a mob of poor local men to attack the Princes’ farm. They broke down the front door and beat the Princes’ hired man so badly his “life was Greatly dispaired of.” As the mob fled, they set fire to the farm’s supply of hay.
The papers of State’s Attorney Stephen Row Bradley show that the state went after the mob. The state was able to bring two of the attackers to trial. John Noyes defended one of the men, and paid his bail. Both men were convicted based on testimony by Lucy, Abijah, their eldest son, the hired man and a half-dozen other witnesses who saw the mob drinking in a tavern before the attack.
“The Princes were generally accepted in the community and church,” Gerzina writes, “and there was for the most part a live-and-let-live attitude in this part of early Vermont. (But) Noyes was able to call upon the disaffected, poor men with few opportunities to attack black people who had more than they did.”
As Gerzina notes, Noyes’ mob “complicated the picture of a state that wrote antislavery into its first constitution.”
