In this week’s episode, we present our first full-length phone interview with returning guest Dr. Tara Bynum, a Mellon research scholar in African American history at the Library Company of Philadelphia, and Assistant Professor at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Tara takes us back in time to an era before the Revolutionary War in Newport, Rhode Island, where we are introduced to an enslaved man named Cesar Lyndon, whose remarkable story offers us a glimpse into colonial enslavement and pre-Revolution commerce.
Cesar Lyndon’s diary accounting what he provided for the pig roast. Housed at the Rhode Island Historical Society.
We begin by discussing the biography of Lyndon, a shopkeeper, trader, and accountant who, while enslaved to a clerk of the Rhode Island General Assembly, bartered goods with some of Rhode Island’s most prominent figures, selling them everything from pigs, to silver buckles, to copywriting services. While it remains unclear exactly where his journey to this position begins, he is literate, numerate, and an extensive keeper of records. In the lines of his thirty-seven page account book, now housed at the Rhode Island Historical Society, a chronicle emerges of the impact left on the colonial economy by British-imposed taxes and tariffs. Tara notes that while historians often discuss the effects of the Stamp Act and Sugar Act on wealthy white colonists, rarely do we discuss the impact also felt by black individuals -- Lyndon’s case is not exceptional, and in fact many enslaved men and women held positions that required skilled labor in a variety of industries. And yet the conversation of the Revolutionary War, and the many economic frustrations that led up to it, often excludes black individuals.
We also delve into what slavery in Rhode Island looked like at this time, as well as the narratives often propelled by post-colonial U.S. regarding the enslavement economy. Tara explains Newport’s role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, pointing out that before the start of the Revolution, it was in fact the seat of the slave trade in the Anlophone world, and that like Charleston, it should be implicated (along with the rest of the nation) in the 18th century economy of human enslavement. She notes that Cesar Lyndon, while a victim of enslavement, is also a participant in this economy, along with many others like him. Though he may not have been pro-slavery, he is deeply involved in a socioeconomic system that involves this practice. As Tara offers, “It’s a complex system that, in our desire to understand the economics of it, we have not necessarily put black people into the mix of that action as people who are also buying and selling things, not just being bought and sold.”
Newport, Rhode Island in the 1730s. Image housed at the New York Public Library via Wikimedia Commons.
Additionally, the human element of enslavement is often neglected from critical conversation, particularly where numbers are concerned. But in the margins of this account book, Tara explains, are short notes about Cesar Lyndon’s life -- that he chose to paint the bedchamber of his girlfriend blue and white, that he eventually married her, that they took a trip together to enjoy a celebratory pig roast with a group of their friends -- and it is in these margins that a brief but clear picture emerges of an enslaved man’s life in colonial North America, in a port city that in this era did not yet know freedom, and that in this space he was connected to a constellation of figures that would shape the history of the state, the nation, and the world.
We would like to thank the Rhode Island Historical Society, The Library Company of Philadelphia, The Hodson Trust at Washington College, the John Carter Brown Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Rutgers University, and the American Antiquarian Society. We encourage you to visit and/or support these institutions.