Goree (May 1774)

This advertisement appeared in the Boston Post-Boy. The Boston Evening Post and the Essex Gazette also published a copy of the bulletin.[1] Reflecting perhaps the intensity of the moment, reprints appeared in subsequent editions of both newspapers. The story they reveal is a complex one. Whether in the pages of the Boston Post Boy or the Boston Evening Post or the Essex Gazette, the story, partly in black and white, partly in shades of gray, explores the reality of natural rights during an era of American Revolution.

Sometime in May, Daniel Vose paid between “Twelve Pence to Five Shillings” to have the notice printed in the newspapers concerning his disloyal subject. Born in Milton, Massachusetts in 1741, the son of Captain Thomas Vose would grow up to become a prominent leader in town. As extant records would document, he owned a wholesale and retail store and a tavern in town that would also serve as an inn. Through his father-in-law, Jeremiah Smith, he owned perhaps one of the earliest paper mills in New England. He also owned several tracts of land and warehouses in the burgeoning township.[2]

Later, during the escalating conflict between Great Britain and her North American subjects, the Massachusetts businessman would side with the rebels. Like many of his neighbors, he imagined himself not the subject of his King, but his slave. Like many of his fellow New Englanders, he frowned at the crown’s efforts to bully his overseas children. As the crisis grew intense, he volunteered his house as the location where the Suffolk Resolves would be drafted.

But unbeknownst to the tavern keeper, another rebel resided within his house. A recently imported, sixteen-year-old “Negro Boy” from Africa, Goree seized upon the emerging conflict to declare himself free of the tyranny of the king of ales. Approximately four months before his owner met with others privately in a concerted effort to denounce “voluntary slavery,” the African took matters into his own hands. He protested with his feet. When “he went away,” the newspaper advertisements explained, the “5 Feet, 3 Inches” tall young man took with him all of the clothes he wore. To his enslaver’s surprise, he declared his independence.[3]

His clothes, ironically, speak to the peculiar politics of the day. For most were probably made in Great Britain. Although some enslavers “used locally-woven cloth” to clothe enslaved people, Linda Baumgarten observed that “especially around the time of the Revolution, most of the materials for slave clothing in the eighteenth century were imported from England.” Despite the call to produce home spun clothing, many well-to-dos continued to import their wares. Either way, possibly mindful of New England’s cold climes, Goree took an additional coat. Judging from the advertisement Vose had printed in the Evening Post and in the Essex Gazette, Goree had managed to remain at large for well over three weeks. For the return of the fugitive, the tavern owner offered a “handsome” reward of “six dollars.” In this manner, the hunt for the “Negro boy” was afoot; chronicling, ironically, one founding father’s disapproval with his bondservant’s own resolve to be free.[4]

The vignette of the young man’s flight reveals a multi-layered story. Part biography and part autobiography, Goree’s story is one in which he had emancipated himself, fought against the odds, and forged a new life in a New World. Like other fugitives, for example, his name captured aspects of his unique experience in the Atlantic world. A recent arrival, the African-born man was given an impersonal place or pejorative name. While some enslaved Africans had been named Boston, London, or for some other port within the Trans-Atlantic economy, Vose likely named his servant after Goree Island, the door of no return for many African captives, the port island from which New England’s slave traders acquired many enslaved people.[5]

Interestingly, like Venture Smith, whose name can also be traced back to his Trans-Atlantic experience, Goree’s name reflected his painful journey of being brought from Africa to America. Similarly, whilst he was free, Goree might have had a moment to entertain the social and political implications of what Phillis Wheatley, who had been named for the slave vessel that carried her to America, had considered in her best-known verse, “On Being Brought from AFRICA to AMERICA,” wherein she pondered the meaning of her own crossing, a crossing he too would know of all too well:

‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.[6]

What he made of it all, that is his life in revolutionary New England, we may never know. We can nonetheless ascertain one thing for sure. When he left, Goree “took away with him” something more than just an ambiguous name. As a matter of fact, the bondservant might have even chosen the name for himself, as a reminder of what he had lost, as a type of symbolic keepsake of what he had endured. In either case, Goree’s flight documented more than letters in black and white. Set in print, his name captures his Middle Passage, a voyage into Orlando Patterson’s “social death,” the transition of a human being made into a commodity or thing, a redemption story in which one founding father is noticeably disturbed by the actions of another founding father and his bid to claim his own natural rights.[7]