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the Caribbean black.

      This trade system made America not only dependent on the wealth that derived from slavery, but also a society that held slaves. The two Connecticut men were part of a history that transformed the Western Hemisphere, even as it solidified their own wealth and prosperity. The dark and terrible core of that history, one that has not been integrated into the shared stories of early New England, is told in the logbooks that Dudley Saltonstall began to keep on that January afternoon and continued to keep for three voyages made in the twenty months that followed.

      Like the insect that no longer exists anywhere on Earth but is frozen in a fragment of amber, the eighty handwritten pages of Saltonstall’s logbooks offer a perfectly detailed glimpse of a now-distant past. They are an emissary from the past, proof of a past that really happened, that had material substance. The logbooks are not just an idea but a powerful form of evidence. They are a history that was lived and then lost, and is our very own.

SHADOWS ON THE WALL

       We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember.

       ERIC KANDEL

      More than twenty years ago, scholar Arna Alexander Bontemps, son of Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps, began to explore an intriguing and troubling aspect of documents surviving from the first two centuries of Southern slavery. He found that in the early personal records of Southern slaveholders, slaves generally appear only in terms of purchases, or as laborers, as in “Mulatto Jack arrived from Fredk With 4 Beeves,” or “Colo. Bassetts Abram arrivd with Letters from his Master.”

      As human beings with varied personalities, as participants in the household, as people with diverse skills, captives were rarely part of the record. Bontemps found many examples, including that of a plantation owner whose account of a fierce lightning storm that struck his mansion emphasized the fear it aroused and its awesome power, rather than the three enslaved men who were struck by the lightning and nearly killed. Slaves appeared in the record as a reflection of wealth, or as workers. Otherwise, they were a shadowy presence, “seldom unseen,” Bontemps writes, “but judged by the way in which they were most often portrayed, they were virtually invisible as subjects.” As captives, their real selves could not be lived openly.

      This reality pervaded a culture where enslaved labor was already essential. Essential, and yet not seen. When I began to study New England slavery in the spring of 2002, I was baffled. Despite a wealth of books documenting the extent, character, importance, and influence of slavery in America, as well as a vast archive of original documents substantiating its nature, slavery is rarely taught in schools, and our understanding of its scope is barely rudimentary. The mainstream of American thought still does not contain a shared body of information on slavery even though the facts about American enslavement are widely available. Several years after that first spring, when I began to speak publicly about the book that had come forward from a newspaper project on slavery in the North (Complicity), I was asked the same question over and over, by audiences around the country: “Why don’t we know about this?”

      I thought that something else had to be at work for this narrative failure, something that touched on shame and reluctance but was larger than those, something that was also involuntary. Decisions get made about what gets remembered, but they are not all conscious ones. Scholars cautioned me to “contextualize” slavery, but I couldn’t see what its context was. The truth I was trying to get at had a frayed, eroded quality, as if its damage had begun a long time ago.

      The problem is not one of material but of memory, and not only of the history we have, but of how that history was made. What is missing from our history of slavery is the context for integrating, in a broad way, what we were thinking and how we were thinking when we made ourselves not just a nation that held slaves, but the largest slaveholding nation that had ever existed. And the questions that are right behind “Why don’t we know about this?” are as important: “Why does it matter for today, and what would such knowledge change?”

      The incomplete narrative of American slavery cannot be made whole without a reframing of our early history. The black “invisibility” that Bontemps found in Southern records permeates Northern documents as well; there too, black men and women appear mainly as possessions and as workers. Essential yet held in the shadows.

      Adam mowed the Little pasture before the Door & Stacked the oats.

      Adm Carted 3 hhd [hogs head barrels] for a west India man from Colln Saltonstalls to Ms. Shackmaples.

      The year before I began to explore the story of slavery in New England, my mother was diagnosed with dementia, an illness that causes the brain to forget what it holds, and that makes even the deeply familiar unrecognizable. As I looked for ways to help my mother, we stumbled together over the terrible terrain of her last years. There was a moment when I realized, with the force of a blow, that she would never recover, never get her memory back, never return to me and be my mother. But the story of those Connecticut slave ships and their captains, that story, I could recover.

CREATING A RECORD

      In the pages of his atlas-shaped logbook, Dudley Saltonstall carefully ruled off spaces for the information he was to record every two hours. In a flowing and legible hand, he wrote the name of his ship, his commander, their home port, and their destination across the top of every set of facing pages. He noted the day, the hour, the speed at which the ship was traveling and its course, as well as the direction of the wind and the nautical miles traveled. Under “Transactions,” Saltonstall described the weather and made a few notes on what happened aboard the ship each day.

      Later commissioned one of the first captains in the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War, the young ship’s officer kept track of how much food and water was brought aboard the ship and when the barrels of food and water were “broacht.” The men ate beef, pork, mackerel, and mutton, all salted, as well as a hard cracker called “ship’s bread,” and potatoes.

      The crew would have been small, probably not more than eight men. Saltonstall noted in his log the tasks at which the men were employed throughout the day. Subject to the worst hardships of ship-board life as well as the dangers of the slave trade, these seamen were from the lowest ranks of colonial life, and they were driven hard. A neighbor of mine who was an expert on maritime history read the logbooks and said, “You wouldn’t have wanted to give these men too much time to think.” On the coast of Africa, a seaman named Denis Bryan would try to desert but was captured on shore and brought back to the ship in chains.

      English commander John Newton, who served as master on three slaving voyages to the same stretch of African coastline and during the same decade as Easton and Saltonstall, wrote that the world of the slave ship was one governed by harsh practice, and that “a savageness of spirit, not easily conceived, infuses itself into those who exercise power on board an African slave-ship.” A slave ship was, in every sense and for nearly all on board, an oceangoing prison.

      Logbooks, Courtesy of the Connecticut State Library

      The ocean crossing could have been narrated by Captain Jack Aubrey, the hero of Patrick O’Brian’s maritime novels. The Africa weathered wild seas, blizzards, and gale winds. The heavy longboat, to be used for trading ashore, tipped over in its chocks and had to be righted; that same January day, a seaman named Waterman got his hand caught in the mainsail’s block and tackle, and his fingernails were torn off.

      But by the second week of March, Saltonstall was recording visits to slaving outposts on islands near the African coast. He sent ashore 187 feet of New England white oak and eight casks of rum to the governor of St. Jago, the largest of the Cape Verde Islands and a major center for the slave trade. This gift was a gesture of generosity, one designed to open the way for trading. Like enslavement itself, the slave trade rested on a system of extreme violence, but it had its social conventions,

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