For Adam's Sake: A Family Saga in Colonial New England - Hardcover

Di Bonaventura s achievement is to make the familiar seem strange, turning a topic we thought we knew so much about into something that feels new Slavery may have mattered to prerevolutionary New England in ways that her book does not account for, but she illustrates how it was a noxious institution no matter its regional variation. It corroded the lives of the enslaved, their owners, and the society that supported them. --Eric Herschthal"

In the tradition of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich s classic, A Midwife s Tale, comes this groundbreaking narrative by one of America s most promising colonial historians. Joshua Hempstead was a well-respected farmer and tradesman in New London, Connecticut. As his remarkable diary kept from 1711 until 1758 reveals, he was also a slave owner who owned Adam Jackson for over thirty years. In this engrossing narrative of family life and the slave experience in the colonial North, Allegra di Bonaventura describes the complexity of this master/slave relationship and traces the intertwining stories of two families until the eve of the Revolution. Slavery is often left out of our collective memory of New England s history, but it was hugely impactful on the central unit of colonial life: the family. In every corner, the lines between slavery and freedom were blurred as families across the social spectrum fought to survive. In this enlightening study, a new portrait of an era emerges."