Atlantic Black Box
“The Meeting House,” an ink on paper work by Daniel Minter, shows the Abyssinian Meeting House much as it appears in 2021, undergoing an extensive renovation to preserve the original character and intention of the building. Collections of Maine Historical Society (mainehistory.org)
A crowd-sourced history project uncovers New England’s connections with the trans-Atlantic slave trade
By Amy Paradysz
VANA CARMONA, AN AVID GENEALOGIST and historical researcher from Portland, was walking through a cemetery in Gorham when she noticed one of her family names—McLellan—on a stone with a first name that wasn’t familiar.
“It didn’t take me more than a day to discover that he had been enslaved by my ancestors,” she says. “Then I vaguely remembered my mother saying something about my grandmother looking for the stone of a Black man who had helped the family when we needed him. She had neglected to mention that he was purchased in Antigua.”
His name was Prince McLellan, and Carmona’s interest grew into what she calls “The Prince Project.”
“I started researching people who were enslaved by our family,” she says. “I consider it my job now to make sure they are not forgotten. The McLellans in Gorham owned at least seven enslaved people, and they were closely tied to the Portland McLellans, who were shipping merchants.”
For seven years, Carmona has been examining census and church records, bills of sale and gravestones. She has created a list of approximately 1,800 people of color who lived in Maine before 1800—an end date she chose arbitrarily to give herself some parameters. The majority of those 1,800 names represent people, like Prince, who were enslaved.
Carmona is one of a dozen crew members of the Atlantic Black Box, a crowd-sourced history project that is researching and reckoning with New England’s role in the global economy of enslavement. The captains of this ship, so to speak, are Dr. Meadow Dibble, a Visiting Scholar at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, and Dr. Kate McMahon, a Maine native who works for the National Museum of African American History and Culture and leads research efforts at the Center for the Study of Global Slavery.
Though she now lives in Portland, Dibble grew up on Cape Cod in Brewster, Mass., which has branded itself as “The Sea Captains’ Town.” In 2016 she—like Carmona—discovered a surprising truth in a cemetery.
A chance encounter at this Gorham headstone engraved with the name “Prince McLellan” set Vana Carmona on a mission to honor a man who had been enslaved by her ancestors. Photo courtesy: Vana Carmona
“I was walking with my young daughters through this cemetery near our home in Brewster,” Dibble says, “when my eyes landed on the engraving in the white marble of a moss-covered headstone that read… ‘Benjamin Crosby, died in Africa, 1795, age 27.’”
She stared at the stone for a good three minutes, wondering what a New England sea captain would have been doing in Africa—and then wondering why she had never looked too closely at the narrative of those intrepid New England sea captains making fortunes in whaling and fishing.
No town historian could tell her what Benjamin Crosby had been doing in Africa in 1795. But when she went back to the cemetery, she found the answer was there, carved in stone. More men from Brewster died in the Caribbean— Havana, Cuba, in particular, where enslaved Africans were growing sugar—than anywhere else in the world but Brewster itself for the early half of the 19th century.
“Why has nobody seen these signs and thought to ask questions about what they were doing there?” Dibble asks. “There is something redemptive about picking up the metaphorical shovel and learning to dig right where we are at the micro-local level, saying, ‘It is my responsibility to know who built this place, with what capital and from where. Whose labor was at the source of the wealth?’”
Dibble dubbed her research the Cape Cod Black Box, a reference to the modern-day recording device that captures details of dangerous trans-Atlantic voyages. It wasn’t long before she met McMahon, whose career has focused on exploring complexities of the shipbuilding economies of northern New England and their connection to the Atlantic slave trade.
“Maine vessels transported at least 18,000 people from Africa to Cuba between 1850 and 1862,” says McMahon, who finds evidence in congressional, parliamentary and naval records and old newspapers. “That’s a significant number of people. At least 1,000 people died on the passage. And I only have numbers of people for about half of the voyages, so the actual figure is much higher. What they were doing was illegal, so they didn’t keep records. The figures that I have are from finding vessels that were caught.”
Encouraged by volunteer researchers like Carmona, Dibble and McMahon modeled the Atlantic Black Box after community-based research platforms more common in the science fields. By 2020, a small coalition of volunteers was gathering names, statistics and other details that show New Englanders were complicit in the slave trade economy of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Maritime historian Seth Goldstein, an instructor at Maine College of Art, breaks it down like this. “Portland and Maine were plugged into the Atlantic world economy through the West Indies trade. Cod salted on the Portland waterfront and shipped to Cuba and the West Indies fed the enslaved Africans, because places like Cuba were just growing sugar. All that sugar and molasses was coming up to Portland to be processed, and some of that molasses was turned into rum on the Portland waterfront, where there were seven rum distilleries. Some of the rum got shipped to the west coast of Africa, where it was used to buy more enslaved Africans.”
The brig Kentucky was built in Searsport by J. Carver in 1833 and commanded by Benjamin Carver until 1840. On the back of this watercolor painting from that same time period is a note that says, “Built for Captain Benjamin Carver, 1833, sailed by him for 10 to 12 years, then went into slave business from Africa to Rio de Janeiro.” Image courtesy Penobscot Maritime Museum, catalog number 1952.31
The interior of Maine—which may not seem obviously connected to this West Indies trade—supplied the lumber that went to build the ships. “All over the state, people benefitted from the global economy of slavery,” McMahon says. “You can’t take slavery out of the merchant economy—yet for generations, maritime history has been written without slavery.”
Atlantic Black Box volunteers were already filling gaps left by centuries of being “incurious,” as Dibble so politely puts it. And then current events all too painfully demonstrated that complicity isn’t just a thing of the past.
“George Floyd’s murder was a catalyst and has ramped up this conversation so fast,” says Dustin Ward, an Atlantic Black Box crew member from New Gloucester whose consulting business, It Is Time, helps organizations establish equitable practices.
“I’ve experienced racism my whole life,” says Ward, a Black man who was adopted into a white family in Aroostook County. “The work that Atlantic Black Box is doing is giving a truer narrative than the one I was given—the narrative that Maine had nothing to do with slavery. That narrative seeps into how we see ourselves and creates the sense that there’s no way we could be racist. But it’s not true. We believed things that are only part of the story. Atlantic Black Box encourages us to get the full history, including the things we never heard in school. And when you dig it up and learn about it, you begin to find a sense of belonging.”
The Atlantic Black Box project is interested in facts and figures— including the slave vessel statistics that McMahon has been collecting for a decade. But it’s also about stories— people and places.
Sunset over Cardenas, Cuba as seen from the Schooner C Mathews in 1859. The vessel loaded up with sugar grown on slave plantations of Cardenas and returned home to Portland. Image courtesy Penobscot Maritime Museum, MS 516
In Portland, for example, there were enough Africans here in 1826 to build the Abyssinian Meeting House, which would become the center of religious and community life and a northern hub for the Underground Railroad.
Lesser known is the story of Peterborough, which McMahon has stitched together based on oral histories with descendants with census data, deeds and other historical records filling in the gaps.
Amos Peters, born in Plymouth, Mass., likely of mixed Wampanoag and African heritage, enlisted and fought in the Revolutionary War. For reasons lost to history, high-ranking military officer Henry Knox gave Peters 150 acres in what is today Warren, Maine. Peters married a woman named Sarah who had negotiated her own freedom based on the argument that slavery was contradictory to the ideals of liberty upon which the United States had so recently been founded. Amos and Sarah Peters had four sons who lived to adulthood, and each of those sons married and had a large family.
“By the 1820s there were dozens of people,” McMahon says, “and by 1850 there were approximately 80 people living in their part of Warren.”
By 1845, the community had its own schoolhouse that doubled as a meeting house and place of worship. Several Peters men became ministers. During the Civil War, at least six men from Peterborough enlisted—and two died in battle in Petersburg, Va.
The number of people living in Peterborough was in decline from 1860 to 1870—the census period that coincides with the Emancipation Proclamation. By 1911, the number of children at Peterborough had dropped too low to continue running the school. Little of Peterborough as a place remains today, just some cellar holes, grave markers and a memorial about a mile off Route 1, on the other side of the train tracks and down a little path through the woods in Warren.
Ten children— four boys and six girls—at the Warren School District No. 16 in the once-thriving Black community of Peterborough before it closed in 1911 due to low enrollment. Earlier, enrollment averaged about 30 students. Warren Historical Society. Image courtesy Penobscot Maritime Museum, catalog number R2017.20.275
Of course, the people of Peterborough live on in untold numbers of descendants—which is one of the reasons volunteer researchers slog through ship manifests, census data and dusty local histories to recover as much of the history as can be reclaimed.
“We will never know the full extent of this history,” Dibble admits. “But the effort of trying to know—that matters.”
The historical recovery effort is informing discussions happening now—about expanding history curriculum, about renaming places that currently honor former enslavers, and about understanding today’s complicity in light of what Dibble has called the “willful amnesia” that set over New England for centuries.
“What we are proposing is a paradigm shift,” she says. “This is not history for history buffs. This is history as civic duty.”
Want to dig deeper?
Atlantic Black Box: Walking tours of Portland
Historian Seth Goldstein, Atlantic Black Box Education Coordinator, leads guided walking tours that connect today’s landscape with stories of the Freedom Trail, Underground Railroad and Abolition Movement. Tours include: Portland’s African Heritage, A People’s History of Portland, and Portland & Atlantic World Slavery. Ages 6+
atlanticblackbox.com/tours-of-portland
Maine Historical Society: “Begin Again: A reckoning with intolerance in Maine.”
489 CONGRESS ST., PORTLAND
Past event. Explore our historical role in the national dialogue on race and equity through a series of virtual programs, an on-site exhibition in Portland and an online exhibition on Maine Memory Network (mainememory.net). The exhibit opened summer 2021 and featured two 2020 pieces by artist Daniel Minter (an Atlantic Black Box board member) inspired by the Abyssinian Meeting House.
Abyssinian Meeting House
75 NEWBURY ST., PORTLAND
Built in 1826, The Abyssinian is the third oldest African American meeting house in the United States. It was a religious, educational and cultural center and a northern hub of the Underground Railroad. For more information or to donate to ongoing renovations:
More maritime history
If you just can’t get enough of Maine’s maritime past, take your explorations to
Bath
Maine Maritime Museum, 243 Washington St.
mainemaritimemuseum.org
Searsport
Penobscot Maritime Museum, 2 Church St.
penobscotmarinemuseum.org
York
Old York Historical Society, 3 Lindsay Rd.
oldyork.org
