African Americans at Copp’s Hill

Africans first appear in Boston’s written record in Governor John Winthrop’s diary entry of February 26, 1638, when the Salem ship Desire returned from the West Indies carrying “cotton, and tobacco, and negroes.” For the next 145 years, most Africans and African Americans who came to Boston were brought in bondage through a lucrative slave trade, as Boston became one of New England’s premier slave ports and by the 1700s imported hundreds of slaves each year for New England and the southern colonies. A free African American community began about 1650, when a small number of Africans secured their freedom, and freed people such as Sebastian Ken, Angola, and Zipporah Potter settled in Boston, while many former slaves are said to have lived in the North End area called New Guinea near the wharfs and shipyards around Copp’s Hill. In the 1760s, under the leadership of Prince Hall, the free African American community petitioned to end slavery in Massachusetts, while enslaved people across the colony sued in court for their freedom, and by the 1780s slavery had ended in Massachusetts. Many slaves, free African Americans, slave owners, and slave traders are buried in Copp’s Hill, where more than 1,000 African Americans may be buried, especially in Section A along Snow Hill Street, an area with fewer surviving gravestones because stones may have been removed or lost or memorials may have been made of wood that decayed. Among those connected to Copp’s Hill are Thomas Paul, minister of the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill from 1809 until his death in 1831, whose death record says he was buried there though no marker survives; Abel Barbados, a prominent member of Paul’s congregation, who has a grave marker; Prince Hall, freed from slavery in 1769, who became a leading figure in Boston’s African American community during the American Revolution by drafting petitions for the abolition of slavery, against the slave trade, against the kidnapping of free Black men from Boston, and against the exclusion of African American children from schools, and who in 1775 founded the African Lodge of the Honorable Society of Free and Accepted Masons of Boston, the first lodge of black Freemasonry; and Mary Augustus, listed with Ceasor Augustus as a “free negro” at their 1757 marriage, whose 1759 epitaph identifies her as the wife of Ceasor Augustus and servant of Mr. Robert Ball, the mariner, pilot, and keeper of Boston Light who is also buried at Copp’s Hill with his first wife, Martha.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States