Like many Americans, I have struggled to come to any kind of understanding of the violence and destruction taken to Washington just over a week ago. But one thing is clear to me as a late-coming student of slavery in the Colonial and early Republic North: Mob violence is no aberration in our history.
“Never has anything like this happened in this country,” or ideas like that, have had a common thread since a pro-Trump insurrection raged inside and outside the Capitol. “Not since 1814!” they say, and in that case blame the British.
But anger and the use of force have been a constant throughout our history. The same contorted faces were in Charlottesville in 2017 as American fascists and self-styled neo-Nazi fanatics chanted “You will not replace us,” as obvious an example of racist and/or anti-Semitic hate as could be. And they have been there anytime violence is perpetrated on others because of the color of their skin, religious differences, or any of a multitude of hollow justifications.
Brutality has deep roots in the United States. Native people were killed or burned out of their homes almost from the time European colonists arrived. I think of the 1636-37 massacre brought down on the Pequot people in Connecticut, after which the few able-bodied survivors were forced into slavery. Here, the forebears of East Hampton’s oldest white families (mine included) passed laws to constrain the native people, limit their freedom of movement, and many years later drive them from their land — after more than two full centuries of exclusionary repression.
Black and mixed-race slavery lasted nearly as long here, too. The celebrated Lion Gardiner was an enslaver, as were nearly all of the major landholders in the early townships. His widow, Mary, left two enslaved people, Boose and Japhet, to her son David in her will. Fortunes were made off the labor of enslaved people; Capt. William Rysam, who set up an education fund that the town trustees to this day manage, was an enslaver. In East Hampton, if any family had a street named after it, its members had held people in slavery.
In December 1675 a colonial militia surrounded a Narragansett fort during King Philip’s War and killed hundreds of men, women, and children. Survivors were shipped off to the West Indies as enslaved laborers and closer to home as well. About a year later, a Samuel Rogers of New London sold “one Indian Captive girle about Thirteene or foorteene yeeres of age Comonlie Called or knowne by ye name of Beck” to James Loper of East Hampton to “have hould posses and enjoy” as long as she lived.
Enslavement of African people became the status quo in the North well into the 19th century, in East Hampton for a span of about 180 years. King Cotton, the era mistakenly thought of as the beginning and end of slavery in America, by contrast, lasted about two generations — from the adoption of the cotton gin after 1793 to the Civil War.
The chain is hardly weathered by time that links the rage of the early nation masters to Southern secessionists of the 1850s to the anti-Reconstruction horrors of the 1870s to lynch mobs and Jim Crow laws that lasted until the late 20th century to current efforts to restrict voting — a chain that reaches all the way to the attack on the Capitol. But it goes yet further back, more than a century more, with roots that first grew right here under our feet. It is a legacy that, as Americans, we all share and one that we can no longer tolerate.