(vibrant music) I am Nicole Carpenter, the programs and collections director at the Westport Museum for History and Culture and the host of today's episode where we will be exploring the true nature of the underground railroad and the abolitionist movement in Fairfield County and the state of Connecticut.

I am joined by Nicholas Foster, the associate curator at the Wilton Historical Society in Wilton, Connecticut.

For the historical society, he has curated exhibitions on a wide range of topics including semi-pro baseball teams locally, historical fashion, early colonial life, women's suffrage and Wilton's involvement in war.

He also oversees the society's archive, the Wilton History Room, which documents Wilton's history from pre-European contact through modern times.

Ramin Ganeshram is both an award-winning journalist and food historian who is currently the executive director of the Westport Museum for History and Culture, formerly the Westport Historical Society in Westport, Connecticut.

Ramin's area of study is colonial era African-American history particularly focused on the food ways of enslaved African-Americans and mixed race people.

We're also joined by Joel Lang who during his nearly 40 year career at the Hartford Courant, frequently wrote stories with a historical perspective including a history on the courant itself.

In 2002, he was the lead writer on a project called Complicity that examined Connecticut's ties to slavery.

And in 2005, he co-authored the book sequel, Complicity: Exploring the North's Role in Perpetuating and Profiting From Slavery.

So welcome everyone, thank you so much for joining me.

To begin, I'd like to briefly give our audience some context about the slave trade and the realities versus the myths in Connecticut.

I wonder, Nick and Ramin, if you would each give us an idea of the number of people enslaved in the state as well as the reality of ownership of human beings in Connecticut.

- So let me preface this by saying that exact numbers are very difficult to provide for a number of reasons.

The first being that census taking then, as now, can be an imperfect science and depends very much on who is providing the information.

And the second thing is that the way taxation of human property happened in Connecticut and elsewhere in this country, enslaved people who were under a certain age often were not counted because they were not being taxed in public records.

Having said that, Connecticut had the most enslaved people of any New England state and by the time of the revolutionary war, the census that had been taken just before the revolutionary war, there were 6,500 counted enslaved people in the state of Connecticut, most of whom resided in Fairfield County.

- And we find that bears out in Wilton too, trying to find even local records sometimes.

Our earliest census is 1790.

So finding traces of enslaved people before then, you have to rely on a few different sources and they're not always complete.

Frequently we find, as Ramin alluded to, tax records, probate records of when someone would pass away and essentially bequest an enslaved person and a few other areas simply, writings and other documents that might mention an enslaved person is really how we have been able to find the enslaved people in Wilton and the surrounding area.

And even then, we're constantly doing more research to find more people.

So to Ramin's point, it's difficult to find the exact number but we do know that slavery was extremely prevalent in the colony and the state throughout the 18th and into the 19th century.

- You had asked about the nature of slavery, sorry to interrupt you.

I just wanted to answer that question a little bit.

And that is, it was different from slavery in the south but it wasn't any less cruel or any less difficult for the enslaved.

So in the south, you had a plantation system for the most part.

That system meant that fewer families owned many many more people to do for the most part, agricultural labor.

Here in Connecticut and New England, what we're talking about is actually more individual families owning fewer people.

A great example here in Westport is the majority of founding families in Westport owned at some point during the colonial and early federal period, anywhere from one to two to in some cases, 12 other human beings of African descent and indigenous descent.

So this is one of the ways that it was different in Connecticut.

And in Connecticut, enslaved people lived in the homestead generally with their enslavers, whereas in the south, again, a plantation system that often had barracks or rudimentary housing for enslaved people.

Only those who worked in the house may have, at times, remained in the house with their enslavers in the south.

So this is a little bit of just the tip of the iceberg on how it was different but no less cruel.

- And I know that both in Wilton and in Westport, there's been research that's been ongoing about the enslaved and also free Black populations.

Is there any indication of individuals or the known people that are recorded?

I know in Westport, there is a record book within the church and I'm wondering if there are individuals that are known in Wilton as well.

- We have a few.

Generally, the records as I mentioned, are during the census and we do occasionally get names, sometimes we don't.

We also have surviving things such as bills of sale where we know at least two different enslaved people, we have a history of their transaction through a document that has survived, they have a name that we're able to track.

There was another man actually who went by the name of Caesar who we actually have pretty good records on because he was actually able to read and write.

He wrote his own will and was actually the first and as far as I can tell, only enslaved member of the Wilton Congregational Church.

So he shows up in church records and actually has a few written documents, he actually wrote notes in several books that he owned that sort of tells about his life.

So we are able to track and sort of tell a fuller story about some of these people.

But again, sometimes it's passing references to just African boy, Negro man.

Because of the nature of slavery where it is very transactional and treated as a property, the name doesn't always come to the forefront.

So when we are able to find a name, we're very fortunate to be able to see more into this person's life.

- And Ramin, are those individuals in Westport as well?

- Very much so.

As you mentioned, Greens Farms Congregational Church, the church record book from the mid 18th century into almost the mid 19th century is a very useful record for us.

It allows us because of the way that record book was constructed, the owner of enslaved people were referenced and those references, for example, enslaved people would be listed as births, marriages, baptisms and deaths.

And often even when, as Nick said, there may not be a name, the owner's name would be recorded.

So that allows us to, in some cases, follow and trace the tract of an enslaved individual's life.

Here in Westport, we were extremely fortunate to have very good records about a couple who were separately owned by two families.

Ultimately, one of the individuals, the wife, was purchased by the husband's family to live in that house and were eventually emancipated in 1799.

We were very lucky to find their five times great-grandson who, once they left Westport, went to upstate New York and have an interaction with him and he filled in the gaps of their life.

And so sometimes we get lucky that way.

As Nick said, it's not always and it's unfortunately not as much as we would like.

- Genealogical research can be difficult for anyone.

It sounds like the realities of researching Black history, especially family history can be especially difficult because of the limited resources that are available in this period of time.

Now Joel, I want to switch over to you.

Of course you co-authored the book Complicity where you specifically focused on the economic incentives and impacts related to the northern state's participation in the slave trade.

Could you expand on the ways in which Connecticut and the rest of the north benefited from the institution of slavery?

- I have quotes that I want to read to you here but there's sort of two eras, first, the colonial era where much of Connecticut's agricultural produce and all of New England was sent south, not necessarily to southern plantations but to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.

It was a major source of early wealth for New Englanders, including Connecticut with no exceptions.

And then the second phase would have been the dependence on manufacturing of cotton from the south.

And when I used to give talks about the book and it maybe out of place, but I want to acknowledge my two co-authors, Jennifer Frank and Ann Farrow.

What I thought was a stunning figure, this switches suddenly to the beginning of the civil war to recognize how important slavery was to the economy that according, I'm taking my glasses off, according to the 1860 census, the value of slaves in the United States was $3 billion.

That is more than all the farm equipment, all the manufacturing and all the railroads and livestock put together.

So you can just extrapolate from that the extent of the entire U.S economy profited from slavery and think of all the textile mills that were built in Connecticut in the whatever, start at 1820s, 1830s, all the mill valleys in Connecticut were working with cotton which mostly came from the south.

That's a brief summary.

- Thank you, Joel.

Just thinking about Connecticut history, we have a very very rich history of textile manufacturing as you mentioned and that's a huge impact especially if you think about the coasts and all of the products that are be imported and exported.

Westport especially has this bustling trade along the Saugatuck river and then later on with Wilton and some of the products that they're making and then throughout the rest of Connecticut.

- Let me just add some things.

I prepared several short lectures for this program but Ramin, I know is familiar with the exports from Westport which of course is on the sound.

But the other source I like to quote and this is very vivid from Bernard Baylan who I don't know if he's still alive or not but he was considered the dean of colonial historians who's at Harvard.

This adds or undercuts so many conceptions about how New England itself became profitable.

And I guess in school, we learned about, New England didn't have enough money to send back to the mother country.

So Baylan writes this, "How was it that this unpromising, barely fertile region, incapable of producing a staple crop for the European market became an economic success by the eve of the American revolution?

The most important underlying fact in this whole story, the key dynamic, unlikely as it may seem, was slavery.

New England was not a slave society.

On the eve of the revolution, blacks constituted less than 4% of the population in Massachusetts and Connecticut and many of them were were free.

But it was slavery nonetheless that made the commercial economy of 18th century New England possible."

And then he says, "The greatest profits from this were the West Indies trade," the planters which included all large stock wood staves, flour, any kind of natural resource or agricultural product you could think of.

So, that's from Bernard Bayland and I'd like to pair that, which is, that's about a hundred year span from the revolutionary period to the civil war where one economy or the other was tied directly to slavery.

- Right, right.

Ramin, I wonder if you would speak to some of the specific ways that Westport and Fairfield County benefited from this economy built on slave labor.

- As Joel and you have pointed out, the main way was in sending farm goods, specifically food at first to the Caribbean.

And Westport and of course, a fair amount of Fairfield County being on the Long Island sound, Westport very specifically having a river that led from the sound right into the heart of the town, really created an ideal circumstance to trade with and ship material to the West Indies initially.

So what would happen to here, for example, grains, cracked corn, wheat.

We have ships' manifests that talk about eggs, right?

A lot of people don't realize that eggs can actually remain viable for three to four weeks unrefrigerated.

In fact, America is the only country that refrigerates eggs to this day.

And because of that, we would send eggs in barrels down to the West Indies, a trip that roughly took three to four weeks, salted meats.

And most of this was to feed enslaved people working in sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

So sugar was the most important crop to the British empire for a very long period of time.

So supplying food and resources for those who were tasked with growing, harvesting and then cooking down the sugar cane into molasses, providing the food stuffs for them, providing the clothing, the cloth to be made into clothing for them was an ongoing and continuous need that areas like Westport were able and Fairfield County farm areas were able to fulfill and quickly get down to the West Indies basically using ships, sloops that would come up the river here in Westport and then go down to New York City to go on much bigger ships to go down to the West Indies.

- Now, Nicholas, is this the case in Wilton as well, knowing that this is a community that is a bit more landlocked?

How was that community benefiting from this economy that we've discussed?

- Well, Wilton was from its very early days an agricultural center and actually, wheat was one of the bigger products that Wilton grew.

If you've ever been to Wilton, it's hard to believe but the Norwalk river runs and the Norwalk river valley runs right through the heart of Wilton.

And there are many areas, there's actually one area of Wilton referred to as Egypt because the wheat grew so strong and so tall there that it was a great grain producer.

We haven't been able to track those direct payments of wheat leaving Wilton and heading down to the West Indies or being turned into other foodstuffs but given what we know about how the Fairfield County economy operated, I wouldn't doubt that there was food being produced in Wilton that ended up in Norwalk Harbor, in Fairfield, in New Haven, in various other areas that did get shipped to the Caribbean.

It would be hard to believe that some food stuffs in Wilton grew here and then sold to traders going to the West Indies, I'd find it hard to believe.

And of course, a lot of the agricultural work that was being done in Wilton was being done by enslaved people.

As Ramin mentioned earlier, supplemental labor, free labor through enslaved people and some of these larger farms that we find in Wilton have three or four adult males who are working in the fields.

So it's sort of this vicious circle of slaves producing food here that is then sent down to the West Indies to feed more enslaved people.

- Now, understanding that the northern part of the United States is just as complicit in the slave trade as the southern states, what were the differences between the two halves of the country and the ways that enslaved people were living in these regions?

We did discuss this briefly a bit earlier.

I wonder if Ramin, maybe you could expand on what these living conditions were like in the north?

- So as I said, here in the North with the exception of a few and there are some houses, plantations that did have separate quarters for the enslaved, you can see this at the Royall House in Boston has an extant standing quarters of the enslaved.

unusual.

For the most part, we didn't have vast plantation systems.

There were a couple in Connecticut and New London but it wasn't the norm.

So what I often tell people is that as you drive around Connecticut and you drive around Fairfield County and you see some still standing beautiful homes from the 18th century or the early to mid 19th century, if that was a family that had a big enough farm to require enslaved people, the enslaved people lived right in that house with those who enslaved them.

They did not have their own rooms.

You have to understand in this period of time in the 18th century, privacy as we knew it, as we know it today, was not a concept for anybody, white, black or otherwise and certainly not for servants of any kind, whether free or enslaved.

So that meant if you were an enslaved person and you were owned by a family here in Connecticut and you lived in the house as you would, where did you sleep?

Well, it kind of in many ways depended on your job so to speak.

If you worked in the kitchen, you slept in the kitchen by the hearth because you had to keep the fire, the embers going so that early in the morning when they had to be stoked again, you had a spark to work with.

If there weren't many enslaved people in the house, everybody might sleep in that kitchen because it was warmer in the winter.

If you functioned as a personal servant to somebody who owns you, you slept in the hallway outside of their room or possibly on the floor right beside their bed should they have a need that they wanted you to fulfill, bring me water, empty my chamber pot, so on during the night.

If you worked as a nurse maid and you took care of children, you would sleep on the floor in that child's room.

Other enslaved people who would perhaps more likely to have had possibly their own quarters separately would be people with highly skilled traits such as a blacksmith, might and often would live above the blacksmith shop.

A groomsman or someone who worked with the horses might sleep above the coach house or in the loft of the barn.

An apothecary, someone who worked essentially as a pharmacist, if the family was wealthy enough that they had a separate room or a separate building to store herbs and so most often it was a room like a larder in the house, they might remain there although cooks often usually functioned as apothecaries.

So it really was a case by case basis, based upon the work you were doing and the need that you fulfilled for the family that enslaved you.

- Understanding the realities that you all have discussed with us that existed for enslaved people in Connecticut and in the North, where did this myth that the state of Connecticut was an abolitionist state, where did this kind of romanticized image of the state come from?

If Ramin, you'd like to start.

- So I think about this a lot.

I have a couple of theories, I certainly would love to know what Joel thinks about it as well.

But to my mind, one of the main things that created this myth was Uncle Tom's Cabin because Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in Connecticut.

She was a great abolitionist from an abolitionist family, her father was Henry Ward Beecher in New York.

And she really - Uncle Tom's Cabin was that first major national, international work that shed light on, exposed the horrors of slavery.

So I feel that on some level, the fact that she was from Connecticut, she was a contemporary on some level and admired by people like Walt Whitman and so on, that created an illusion in the mind of many people that Connecticut was a pro abolition state.

In later years, I really think that the civil war had a lot to do with furthering this myth, not just about Connecticut but about the entire north in the mind of Americans at large where it became very easy to paint the south as the complete aggressors in this situation, the war was very clearly fought over slavery as is human nature to create a villain and a hero because slavery and it's ill effects were so obvious in the south, it was easy for the north to kind of slip under the radar, if you will.

That's my thought on it, I would love to know what Joel's opinion is.

- Well, thank you.

I think you pretty much covered it.

I had forgotten about, wasn't thinking of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

What I was thinking of was the civil war and an essay I read at the time of doing this research by Robert Penn Warren.

And it was written on the 100th anniversary of the civil war but he wrote about the great alibi which he applied to the south's rewriting of what the civil war is about.

And the attorney applied to the north was treasury of virtue.

So I certainly think the two things that Ramin mentioned contributed to that treasury of virtue and I'm not adding much but if you back up just a second, the extent anybody learns about the civil war anymore it is that the north fought the war to end slavery.

So it's this blanket apology, excuse, get out of jail free pass for the north profiting from slavery.

It may seem unfair, I want to go back.

Nicole used the term slave trade which is easily mixed up with a slave economy and I would like Ramin to help me out on this.

So often, even now when people talk about slavery, horrors that were inflicted, they think of it as a moral issue, they think of it as how slaves were treated and how cruel slavery was to those people.

A term that's more often used now and recognized by scholars is the Atlantic economy.

The point about this whole history is the economic benefits that the north realized from slavery so that whether or not it was more or less an abolitionist state, you've got to remember to think of slavery as an economic force that affected the whole Atlantic world and not as a question of human morality and evil which it certainly was.

I think that's part of the civil war; you get stuck on the treatment of the slaves and the cruelty of slavery and forget about the economic consequences.

So I'm going back to one more thing, part of the civil myths about the American myths is it was the industrial north and the agricultural south and after the civil war, the south was impoverished.

So from the same 1860 census, the states with the highest white per capita income in the U.S were South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia.

The south was, by population, not counting the enslaved people, was the richest area of the country and it's sort of a modern Connecticut now, it used to be known for having the highest per capita income In 1860, Connecticut was the first New England state ranked after those southern states in terms of wealth.

That's another way of demonstrating the economic impact of slavery.

I know we talked about this, maybe she would like to say something about the Atlantic economy and how that thinking goes now.

- Joel is completely right, the scholars who study slavery here on this side of the world and we're talking about North America and the Caribbean, we talked about the Atlantic economy.

So there's a couple of things that Joel brought up that I really think are important and that we need to think about when we talk about this.

The first is there slavery, the condition of being enslaved which can be and often was multi-generational.

And so this is an enslaved person who has children, who has grandchildren all born into slavery.

The trade could refer to a number of things.

First, the beginning of enslaving people in Africa and selling them as relates to Connecticut most likely into the West Indies.

Most enslaved people in Connecticut and in the north came via the West Indies, they did not come directly from Africa.

There are some cases when that happened usually in New London, in Newport because you're talking about ports that were frankly big enough to accommodate slave ships.

But down here in Fairfield County, you're talking for the most part about people who originally came from the West Indies, from the Caribbean.

Other types of trading or the economy of slavery were sales between and among people already here in the state.

So a family selling an enslaved person or as Nick said, giving as a request an enslaved person to another family member or just outrightly selling an enslaved person to another individual.

And then there's the larger economy that we've been talking about and that Joel has been discussing.

I want to make a point here about the wealth of the south as Joel has said and because of the economic engine of slavery to have vast amounts of free or over time, more ties and therefore very cheap labor for these vast plantations.

If we remember our revolutionary era history, the south was needed to fund the revolutionary war, therefore the south had to be on board with the war.

Even as early as the revolution, concessions were made to continue the institution of slavery, the economic engine of slavery, that Atlantic economy that the South benefited from to get their support for the war.

So when we think about it as an Atlantic economy, to my mind, this is the correct way to think about it because you're talking about an economy, an engine that essentially created the western hemisphere as we know it.

- To Ramin's point about that, that was the south's gamble during the civil war as well.

They were so important to the Atlantic economy that the British were going to join on their side.

And even though the British had abolished slavery in the generation earlier, the south basically said, "The British isles are so reliant on us for cotton and other materials through our slave economy.

There's no way they're gonna get involved and they might actually become allies with us."

I mean, that tells you how important the south somewhat realized how important they were and to the economy as Ramin and Joel said, the Atlantic economy, the entire almost Western economy was based around southern slavery to some extent.

- These goods are so intertwined with the economy throughout the world and that clearly just shows how important and how vital the economy built around slavery was, both during the 18th and later on into the mid 19th century, not only for the United States and Connecticut but also globally for that economy.

Getting back to abolition and Connecticut and this myth of kind of being this free state even into the north, very often we hear of spaces in homes in Fairfield County and throughout Connecticut having these hidden spaces or hidden spots within their homes that homeowners very often claim to be stops on the underground railroad.

This is the case very much in Westport and I wonder, Ramin, if you could elaborate a little bit on the situation in the county and Connecticut and what these structures might actually be.

- First of all, Connecticut, because of its complicity with the Atlantic economy and it's dependent upon it for it's wealth, very vigorously and actively supported the fugitive slave laws, the federal fugitive slave laws that had been enacted in the 18th century, the first one being signed into law by George Washington.

These laws said that in a, we call it self-emancipated, people will often say escaped, but a self-emancipated enslaved person who go to a free state or obligated by the federal law to be apprehended by agents in that state and returned to their owner.

Some states didn't comply.

New Hampshire is a great example of a state that basically didn't comply.

George Washington's wife, Martha, lost her maid, Ona Judge, who escaped, self-emancipated from the president's house in Philadelphia, made her way to New Hampshire where federal agents there or local agents, state agents refused to comply with the federal agents and turn her over.

Connecticut on the other hand absolutely fully complied with these laws.

So that meant that enslaved people generally tried to avoid the state of Connecticut, particularly towns on the water.

Self-emancipation by water was preferred, it was faster, remember, the waterways were the highways well into the 19th century.

It was safer, you could stay hidden and you didn't have to go into the interior of the state that complied with fugitive slave laws.

So, what are these rooms in people's houses that they say, "I have a hidden room, I have a back staircase.

I believe my house was on the underground railroad."

So we need to kind of look at the period holistically to understand what these spaces are.

When you're talking about a house that was built in the 18th century, particularly around or just after the revolutionary war, these rooms are likely safe houses, safe rooms and here's the reason why.

During the revolutionary war, it was chaos.

It wasn't the myth that is told that all Americans were patriotic and they wanted freedom from England and everyone participated equally.

In actual fact, it was chaos.

In actual fact, only 30% of the country supported revolution, 30% were loyal and the other 30% didn't care.

Or a third rather, 33%.

Mixed in there were soldiers of fortune, people who switched sides as needed in order to pillage and maraud and burn property and steal and worse.

So it was a very chaotic time, it was a very frightening time and people building houses both during the day time and soon thereafter, often built these rooms in which they could hide themselves and their family should another upheaval of this kind happen.

Prior to that, rooms were often built to hide goods.

You have to understand that in the colonial period, every single piece of property you owned down to a teaspoon was taxed by the British crown and one way to lower your tax burden was to hide your goods.

So a lot of these little rooms and safe rooms were for that purpose.

That's not to say there aren't underground railroad houses in Connecticut, there certainly are.

I've been looking a lot at the town of Colchester which had quite an abolitionist spirit and I would not be surprised if there were underground railroad houses in Colchester, Nick can speak about one in Wilton.

They did exist, but not in any stretch to the extent that people believe and primarily because Connecticut felt very strongly that it was in its best interest to help its Southern neighbors to return self-emancipated, enslaved people back to their owners.

- Given that Connecticut was compliant with the fugitive slave laws, excuse me, the Fugitive Slave Act, it was not a friendly place for self-emancipating people.

Nick, I do wonder if you would discuss a little bit about Wilton's abolitionist movement and one particular individual with William Wakeman and the known underground railroad stop in Wilton.

- Yeah.

So in Wilton, an area in Wilton called Georgetown which actually sits on the Wilton, Redding, Ridgefield border, there was a baptist church community that became a very vocal community for abolition.

They had several reverends who spoke out against slavery, they did sort of see it as the humanitarian issue that it was and began to take steps to advocate for abolition.

Some more drastically than others.

One of the members of this community was, Nicole, as you mentioned, William Wakeman, he was a farmer lived on Sealy Road here in Wilton.

His father was an abolitionist, he was an abolitionist and he actually built a tunnel underneath his house to try to help self-emancipating enslaved people or formerly enslaved people now with this self-emancipation hide out from these authorities, these state agencies, federal agents who were looking for what they saw as fugitives.

So essentially what this tunnel was was a stone and brick tunnel underneath the house that went out to a brushy, woodsy area where if some where to come knocking at the door looking for what they called a fugitive slave, that person could basically hide out in the woods until trouble had passed, until William Wakeman could lead the authorities astray.

So this tunnel still exists and we do have photographic evidence that it did exist.

So we know of at least one house that was on the underground railroad.

And it was very dangerous for these people to do it 'cause as Ramin pointed out, this was against the law, this was a very serious crime if you were caught harboring self-emancipated people.

And there's actually one house that we've recently rediscovered to be a stop on the underground railroad and not too far from the Wakeman's house, owned by the Chichester family who actually had their house bombed by pro-slavery rioters, essentially while one of these abolitionists committees was meeting at the house of Aaron and David Chichester, the gunpowder bomb actually went off and blew out several windows in the home.

It was actually not the first bombing that took place against one of these abolitionist groups.

So there has been some writing to suggest that their house was also on the underground railroad and we're not sure if it's a house that's still standing or if one that's since been demolished but we're doing a little bit more research into that.

So we do know of at least two, at least one spot and possibly a second that was on the underground railroad in Wilton but again, this was not the norm, it was a rarity because it was a rather dangerous thing to undertake.

- I do want to say that there are other towns in Connecticut.

I'd mentioned Colchester for example.

New Haven was a known stop on the underground railroad.

A family of reverends by the name of Beeman, Amos Beeman, a very well known conductor on the railroad.

We know this from his writings.

But to Nick's point about trying to reconstruct these things it was a secret and lives were at stake so it's very hard to reconstruct the evidence.

Reverend Beeman left enough writings that we know that his church, an AME church in New Haven was a stop on the underground railroad.

- Both you, Ramin and Nick have have cited the difficulty in researching these stops.

How is it known that some of these underground railroad stops even exist in Connecticut given the unfriendly nature of the state?

Are there specific sources or specific documents that are looked at to try to determine the status of a stop?

- As I said, one of the reasons we know that the house in Wilton had a stop is because the tunnel still exists, there's physical evidence.

But that is relatively rare.

It would have been a lot of effort to build that tunnel.

So it's not like, when you say the underground railroad, it being literally underground is not actually the case.

This is a rare instance of physical evidence existing.

As far as other research goes, usually in writings that people might've kept, you don't want to record yourself committing a crime whether or not you believe it's an important humanitarian effort or otherwise.

So it's not like we're going to have people writing in their diary, "Today I helped six self-emancipating people up to the north, to Canada or somewhere else."

So it really comes down to rare occasional writings.

We know about the Chichester house in Wilton through another baptist reverend's journal but he's writing in 1881, well after the underground railroad was no longer needed.

So it's a difficult thing to research.

- Ramin, what kind of sources have you found for the sites that you have discussed?

- The sources that are generally looked at, I want to make a point here first that the underground railroad predates the underground railroad, right?

The term underground railroad of course is relating to the period of time when there were railways being built, this is in the 1840s.

But prior to the existence of a railroad, there were abolitionists societies that helped people self-emancipate from the south, usually by water.

And they provide often, sometimes the best record that we have because a great example is the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.

They kept minutes.

They talked about their efforts moving people north from the south.

They pursued redress under the law whenever they could.

So legal cases that might relate to whether somebody should continue in a state of bondage, do they have legal redress to be self-emancipated?

And sometimes in the s in the background, in the writing of these cases, we can glean little bits of information about people who were involved in the abolition movement and moving people from safe house to safe house.

Sometimes it is in writing as Nick said, after the fact.

Here in Westport, we can assume and a lot of it can be sort of, it's interpretation on assumption.

We have a park here in Westport called Winslow Park.

It's named after the man who owned the property in the 1840s and fifties, Richard Henry Winslow who was both a Connecticut state senator and also a congressional representative for the state of Connecticut.

While we don't have a lot of material talking about Winslow as an abolitionist, what we do have is the guest book from his house called Compo House, it was a fabulous mansion that once stood in the park for the 4th of July festivities and one of the guests was a man called Elihu or Elihu Burut, also known as the learned blacksmith, very active abolitionist not just in Connecticut but throughout New England.

The fact that we can place Burut in this house in Westport, the home of a state senator later congressional representative, it becomes a clue to us that Winslow was supportive at least in some part in abolition.

It's these tiny threads that make us look at people twice.

Could Winslow have been a conductor on the railroad?

I'm not saying he was but it's that kind of logical flow that allows us to look at it and think about it in great detail.

Nick talked about the Wakeman family in Wilton being abolitionists and conductors on the railroad.

The Wakeman family in Westport for the most part enslaved other people, not every Wakeman, but many of them.

So again, we use logic and say what is the logic that any of those people who had enslaved people in their own home would be participating on the underground railroad?

And it's highly unlikely.

- I wonder if each of you would share your belief and your understanding of the history of the Atlantic slave economy, abolition and enslavement in Connecticut and how it can help the United States move forward.

What can we take from this history in our state and in the north and in the United States even understanding this trade globally?

How can we use this to move forward as a society?

- Well, I think it's extremely important to realize that it's not like the civil war ended slavery and then we just went and moved on from there.

I think it's extremely important to realize that for the vast majority of African-American people in this country whose ancestors were enslaved, you essentially start life in this country after emancipation with nothing in many cases and so many of these older families in Connecticut and across the United States, a lot of the economy was built off the backs of these enslaved people and all of this wealth is established and then people are emancipated without access to the wealth that they created.

And we see it down through the ages of people still trying to get a foothold in this country after their ancestors were brought here involuntarily.

And we need to understand the context for a lot of the issues that we look at today with relationships between different races in this country and how policing is done in this country and where wealth is accumulated in this country dates back to the Atlantic economy that was built throughout the 17th, 18th and into the 19th century.

And it really sets the context for a lot of the things, a lot of the institutions in this country that we might not immediately link to slavery, but is.

And understanding how those institutions operate, you need to understand how the Atlantic economy worked and it's not until you understand that economy that you can then understand why some of these institutions and laws and relationships between people takes place.

And we can kind of question whether or not those institutions need to exist in the format that they do.

- Ramin, maybe if you'd like to expand on this idea of how we can move forward, understanding this history.

- There's a couple of things I always tell people when we talk about this.

The first is that, for many people, very rightfully so, this is an extremely painful or difficult, embarrassing for some, discussion, people feel uncomfortable feeling that maybe their ancestors were complicit in the system.

Guilt, shame can often be part of the discussion.

So what I say to people is the first thing we need to do to move forward is we need to look at things in terms of the numbers, numbers don't lie.

And as Joel has said and as Nick has said, the wealth created, the money that was moved, the generational and foundational leg up of a strong economy was based on vast numbers of enslaved people being brought to the Western hemisphere as the fuel for an economic engine throughout the Atlantic region.

And these are numbers, these are facts.

So let's look at it from there first so that we can then say as Nick has said and what has that meant to generations of people on both sides, the enslaved and the enslaver?

When we understand the disparity, then we can start to think about how to rectify the disparity.

I would also say to move forward, it's incredibly important for us in states like Connecticut and throughout the New England to really understand the truth.

Connecticut was not an abolitionist state, it was not a shining star in the north, it did not fight on the side of right even in the civil war.

I just want to give you this number.

During the civil war, 80% of eligible African-American men who could enlist to fight in the civil war on behalf of the union army did so.

By contrast, white Connecticut men did not want to enlist to the extent that towns were given authority by the statehe state to issue bonds or rewards for signing up.

And so many men here in Connecticut, Benjamin Tokay, a name well-known in Westport, sorry, availed himself of this bond in order to sign up to fight for the union, he was not going to do so otherwise.

We need to face this fact, we need to understand it because as long as we wrap ourselves in this cloak of disbelief about the moral right of the state of Connecticut in this issue, we can never really examine the complicity and address the multi-generational impacts of it.

- Joel, if you'd like to round out our discussion today.

- People...I'm talking to very much in general, people will say, "Well, slavery always existed.

It goes back centuries, many societies had slavery."

And then they will say, "Well, the United States atoned for slavery by fighting the civil war at great loss of life."

Even today, so far as I know, there has never been a formal apology, nevermind reparations, an apology for slavery.

When I looked it up, I think that the senate, it's in notes here someplace, at one point passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and the house separately passed the resolution but there's never been a national apology for slavery, a national acknowledgement that slavery existed and was bad.

So the quote that I would end with, in deference to James Baldwin, which I just happened to have from pages and pages of research.

And this is from an essay, "American Dream and the American Negro" and it relates to what Nick said and Ramin.

"The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors through 400 years and at least three wars.

Why is my freedom, my citizenship in question now?"

And this is the sentence coming.

"What one begs the American people to do for all our sakes is simply to accept our history," in which the United States has not done.

It is still impossible to accept that history, acknowledge that history of slavery.

It still hasn't happened.

That's my conclusion.

- I want to thank all of you for sharing your thoughts on this very difficult topic.

We do of course want to thank all of our panelists this evening.

Nick, Ramin and Joel, thank you so much for sharing your research and your insight into this very difficult topic and this important history.

- Thank you so much for having us.

- Yes, thank you.

- Yes, thank you.

- This has been a production of CPTV's Cutline in the Community with the Wilton Historical Society and the Westport Museum for History and Culture.

To learn more about this topic and other regional history, we encourage you to visit virtualhistorywestport.org or wiltonhistorical.org.

And we want to thank you all for joining us.