slavery-was-woven-into-connecticuts-fabric
Ten years ago, Hartford Courant reporter Anne Farrow, acting on a tip from a friend, sat down at the Connecticut State Library and began reading three logbooks from ships that sailed out of New London in the mid-1700s.
The first ship was called the Africa. It was aptly named.
The crew was bound for West Africa to buy slaves and then sell them on England’s colonial islands in the Caribbean. Some of the “human cargo” probably stayed on board to be brought to Connecticut, where they were sold and owned by residents here.
Farrow was astonished and sickened by the matter-of-fact notations in the logbook: “This 24 hours died three small slaves with the Flux.” (“The Flux” was dysentery; “small slaves” were children.) Farrow later determined the logbook was written by Dudley Saltonstall, the 18-year-old son of the ship’s owner, Gurdon, deputy (mayor) of New London.
What Farrow had discovered, long hidden away in the library’s archives, was documented evidence of Connecticut’s deep ties to the profitable slave trade.
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