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Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North
The untold story of how colonial New England was built on the Atlantic slave trade
Ten Hills Farm tells the powerful saga of five generations of slave owners in colonial New England. Settled in 1630 by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Ten Hills Farm, a six-hundred-acre estate just north of Boston, passed from the Winthrops to the Ushers, to the Royalls―all prominent dynasties tied to the Native American and Atlantic slave trades. In this mesmerizing narrative, C. S. Manegold exposes how the fortunes of these families―and the fate of Ten Hills Farm―were bound to America’s most tragic and tainted legacy.
Manegold follows the compelling tale from the early seventeenth to the early twenty-first century, from New England, through the South, to the sprawling slave plantations of the Caribbean. John Winthrop, famous for envisioning his "city on the hill" and lauded as a paragon of justice, owned slaves on that ground and passed the first law in North America condoning slavery. Each successive owner of Ten Hills Farm―from John Usher, who was born into money, to Isaac Royall, who began as a humble carpenter’s son and made his fortune in Antigua―would depend upon slavery’s profits until the 1780s, when Massachusetts abolished the practice. In time, the land became a city, its questionable past discreetly buried, until now.
Challenging received ideas about America and the Atlantic world, Ten Hills Farm digs deep to bring the story of slavery in the North full circle―from concealment to recovery.
Ten Hills Farm tells the powerful saga of five generations of slave owners in colonial New England. Settled in 1630 by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Ten Hills Farm, a six-hundred-acre estate just north of Boston, passed from the Winthrops to the Ushers, to the Royalls―all prominent dynasties tied to the Native American and Atlantic slave trades. In this mesmerizing narrative, C. S. Manegold exposes how the fortunes of these families―and the fate of Ten Hills Farm―were bound to America’s most tragic and tainted legacy.
Manegold follows the compelling tale from the early seventeenth to the early twenty-first century, from New England, through the South, to the sprawling slave plantations of the Caribbean. John Winthrop, famous for envisioning his "city on the hill" and lauded as a paragon of justice, owned slaves on that ground and passed the first law in North America condoning slavery. Each successive owner of Ten Hills Farm―from John Usher, who was born into money, to Isaac Royall, who began as a humble carpenter’s son and made his fortune in Antigua―would depend upon slavery’s profits until the 1780s, when Massachusetts abolished the practice. In time, the land became a city, its questionable past discreetly buried, until now.
Challenging received ideas about America and the Atlantic world, Ten Hills Farm digs deep to bring the story of slavery in the North full circle―from concealment to recovery.
344 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
June 16, 2015
I liked the basic narrative of this book, learning about Ten Hills Farm and the various families that intersected with the property through the centuries. There's no question the author did a great deal of research and has pulled it together nicely. The main thing that bugged me, though, was the constant tone of "Wow! Can you believe that Northerners owned slaves, too?" throughout the book. Maybe I'm the wrong audience for the book, because I DID know this fact. In any case, if one did NOT realize it before, this would be a good book to start with, particularly if one is interested in New England history.
November 26, 2019
Read for a museum book group. I learned a great deal about Native American and African slavery in the New England colonies, but the writing style was so stilted, melodramatic, and difficult to plow through that I would not recommend the book to anyone who did not have a very specific interest in the Royall family.
June 11, 2018
I wanted to love this one. I really enjoy good non-fiction that spans generations, as this property was owned through five generations of three different families. But, that slavery existed in the north wasn't shocking to me, as I did know this beforehand. This would be an excellent starting point for someone who has little knowledge of northern slavery.
April 10, 2010
Ten Hills Farm is lyrical and revelatory. It tells a "history of amnesia," disclosing a sordid history of slavery in Massachusetts that is contrary to the puffed-up self-image of the "city on a hill."
Want to read
January 26, 20101/26/10
June 12, 2015
enjoyed this reading...
December 30, 2023
In 1630, Massachusetts' first governor, John Winthrop, was granted 600 acres of land by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He took the land and proceeded to build an estate like no other. Over the next 143 years, the farm saw five generations of slave owners, owners who were foundational to colonial America and helped to shape the infant colonies up until the Revolutionary War when British support and current owner Isaac Royall Jr. was forced to flee to England when the house and the entire farm was taken over by the British as a military base. The book follows the changing of the land and its inhabitants from the early Puritans and their complicated relationship with the natives to the Revolutionary Era troubles where both white and black men were demanding their freedom at the cost of many, many lives.
As a book, it is well-researched and well-presented, but the writing doesn't always flow smoothly, and there is a fair amount of melodrama and emotional manipulation. If you can ignore the last bit, it's a decent book, but not one I would recommend except to seasoned researchers. To those more inclined to be emotional, they might get lost in all the "How terrible!!" bits of the book instead of paying attention to the actual facts. Probably the part I liked best, though, was when the writer pointed out how little was actually recorded and preserved about much of the slaves' daily lives, leaving gaping voids in what is known about that time. This can also be applied to other social classes where not much is recorded, giving us a whole different look on history and how much is left unknown, because what farmer is going to be spending his time journaling every moment of every day? Or a street beggar? Or many lower or middle-class workers, particularly women? There's a lot we don't know for all our professions of knowledge.
Ten Hills Farm lives on today as Ten Hills, Somerville, Massachusetts neighborhood, a wedge-shaped, 50 acre area bounded by the Mystic River and McGrath Highway.
As a book, it is well-researched and well-presented, but the writing doesn't always flow smoothly, and there is a fair amount of melodrama and emotional manipulation. If you can ignore the last bit, it's a decent book, but not one I would recommend except to seasoned researchers. To those more inclined to be emotional, they might get lost in all the "How terrible!!" bits of the book instead of paying attention to the actual facts. Probably the part I liked best, though, was when the writer pointed out how little was actually recorded and preserved about much of the slaves' daily lives, leaving gaping voids in what is known about that time. This can also be applied to other social classes where not much is recorded, giving us a whole different look on history and how much is left unknown, because what farmer is going to be spending his time journaling every moment of every day? Or a street beggar? Or many lower or middle-class workers, particularly women? There's a lot we don't know for all our professions of knowledge.
Ten Hills Farm lives on today as Ten Hills, Somerville, Massachusetts neighborhood, a wedge-shaped, 50 acre area bounded by the Mystic River and McGrath Highway.
August 7, 2017
Excellent overview of Ten Hills Farm and northern slavery.
February 8, 2018
Great read about slavery owners in the north from early settlement for several generations. Something you never heard about in history class.
November 8, 2019
good scholarship. a reminder to New England not to get sanctimonious about slavery in the South.
February 1, 2020
Slavery was everywhere :(
Excellent history, particularly interesting to Cambridge locals.
Excellent history, particularly interesting to Cambridge locals.
May 13, 2022
Not that much about slavery.
February 17, 2025
How much we were not taught in school...
May 27, 2010
"Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North," by Catherine S. Manegold, is a novel of such great scope and depth cataloging the history of the Winthrop family and its descendants' occupation of the northern territory known as Ten Hills Farm, that it truly boggles the mind. Not only do we see, as clear as the skies of 17th and 18th century New England and beyond, the disgust and deceitful behavior of the northerners who had always professed to be against slavery, but by others who by changing the letter of the law, supported it. The detail she expounds upon is nothing short of exponential; literally so much so that I felt the weight of history on me like a great boulder, and I was ashamed that I was born in a place I thought was a beacon of freedom.
The Winthrop family and their assorted kin sailed through life with barely a mention of the people who were the backbone of their successes, and watched as myriad lands were snatched from the rightful Indian owners illegally and without remorse. Such horror stories were reserved for the south, and the light Ms. Manegold has wrought upon this northern history should, as all accurate historical periods should, keep us aware just how unjust a people can be treated and how easily liberties can be taken. We should embrace this ideal.This is a work to be reckoned with.
The Winthrop family and their assorted kin sailed through life with barely a mention of the people who were the backbone of their successes, and watched as myriad lands were snatched from the rightful Indian owners illegally and without remorse. Such horror stories were reserved for the south, and the light Ms. Manegold has wrought upon this northern history should, as all accurate historical periods should, keep us aware just how unjust a people can be treated and how easily liberties can be taken. We should embrace this ideal.This is a work to be reckoned with.
November 10, 2012
tenhillsfarm.com
This book is focused on a single Massachusetts farm but its reach is broad, stretching from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the Caribbean and beyond. Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Stephen Hahn (A Nation Under Our Feet) said this: "I found the encounter both riveting and wrenching. Bookended by Antigua and moving from the early seventeenth century to the early twenty-first, Ten Hills Farm is quite simply one of the best works of history I’ve read in a long time. Indeed, I think of it as a much shorter version of a book that focuses on tracts of land in coastal Georgia, Erskine Clarke’s, Dwelling Place, which I regard (as I mentioned in a New Republic review) as one of the finest studies of American slavery ever written: and I think this because, like Clarke, Manegold insists that the story of Ten Hills Farm is a parallel and interconnected one of descendants of Britain and Africa."
... "It is the sort of book that will be of interest to professional historians as well as to a general public," he wrote, "because (except for specialists) it is an unexpected story of very well-known people that shows how the brush strokes of a micro-history can in fact paint a very large interpretive canvass."
This book is focused on a single Massachusetts farm but its reach is broad, stretching from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the Caribbean and beyond. Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Stephen Hahn (A Nation Under Our Feet) said this: "I found the encounter both riveting and wrenching. Bookended by Antigua and moving from the early seventeenth century to the early twenty-first, Ten Hills Farm is quite simply one of the best works of history I’ve read in a long time. Indeed, I think of it as a much shorter version of a book that focuses on tracts of land in coastal Georgia, Erskine Clarke’s, Dwelling Place, which I regard (as I mentioned in a New Republic review) as one of the finest studies of American slavery ever written: and I think this because, like Clarke, Manegold insists that the story of Ten Hills Farm is a parallel and interconnected one of descendants of Britain and Africa."
... "It is the sort of book that will be of interest to professional historians as well as to a general public," he wrote, "because (except for specialists) it is an unexpected story of very well-known people that shows how the brush strokes of a micro-history can in fact paint a very large interpretive canvass."
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 13, 2010
This is a fascinating and well-written history about slavery in the North, focused on one parcel of land, the 600-acre Ten Hills Farm, in Medford, MA. The history extends from the 1630s to the present, though it focuses on the three families that inhabited the land from the 1630s to just after the American Revolution. The first owner was John Withrop, Sr., first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, who kept Native Americans as slaves. The third family was the Royalls, who made their money from buying and selling enslaved Africans and also using the free labor of the enslaved in their sugar cane fields in Antigua. This is a story that has definitely been kept out of history books until now. It's good that it is finally being brought to light.
December 6, 2014
I love micro-histories of a place, and this one is riveting. The Winthrops and the Royalls got to be rich and influential in great measure through the exploitation of slave labor, and confiscation of Indian lands by virtue of a Christian imperative. It seems like hypocrisy now, but to the first American Puritans it was the natural order of things.
Really enjoyed the way the author connected Medford, Boston, Antigua, and London. I could hear the snap of sail and smell salt air in the opening section -- nicely written.
Good read!
Really enjoyed the way the author connected Medford, Boston, Antigua, and London. I could hear the snap of sail and smell salt air in the opening section -- nicely written.
Good read!
October 28, 2011
A real eye opener. A riveting read which moved me on an emotional level. Words like hypocrisy, barbarian, the worst kind of people when i think of the characters exposed in this book. This book made me angry again at what black people endured as they built this country. These are truly an enduring people and we should be proud of them. This book should be required reading in high schools across America but especially here in Massachusetts.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 19, 2012
This was our city's community read this year and I gave it a valiant effort, several actually. I kept picking the book up, wanting to like it, because the subject is interesting and much of it is set right where I live. However, I found the writing to be redundant and unclear. I gave up about halfway through.
September 5, 2015
The history is interesting. The writing is overwrought and thesaurus-enhanced, requiring rereading of passages to get at the sense under the elaboration. There is much well-known history (of the dominant white landowners) padding the slim account of what is known about slavery in early Massachusetts. I would love to find a better-written and more carefully researched history of this subject.
April 27, 2010
I really enjoyed this book, perhaps because I live in the footprint of the old farm. Good local history, written in a very readable style. Nothing revelatory to me, but I was raised in the South, where the history books covered slavery pretty intensely.
April 3, 2010
I appreciate the subject matter; however, the writing bordered on the ludicrous at times. Florid musings about The Master led to a lot of eye rolling on my part.
February 16, 2011
loved the history of the Pilgrims, history of the caribbean, how families grew with wealth.
February 28, 2015
Just was looking thru books.. and saw this.. caught my since I love history.. actually a good read too..
Read
April 24, 2015Interesting book. There were slaves in Medford MA. Important read if you think the North was better than the South on slavery and race relations.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews