Entangled Lives, Black and White: The Black Community, Enslaved and Free, in Eighteenth Century Lincoln, Massachusetts
 
(2024) Lincoln Historical Society, Lincoln, MA
Paperback. New. 
 
In the eighteenth century, the town of Lincoln was a small community lying between Lexington and Concord in rural Massachusetts. Lincoln was the site of one of the most ferocious battles on April 19, 1775, the first day of the War for Independence. 

Lincoln had a significant community of Black residents, both enslaved and free, who helped the town thrive in the years before the Revolution. They plowed the fields, harvested the food, did the cooking, washed the laundry, cared for the children, and tended the sick and elderly. But as was so common in eighteenth‑century Massachusetts, little effort was made by the town of Lincoln to record even the most basic facts about its Black residents, whether free or enslaved, nor to acknowledge how their lives were intertwined with the white community around them. From town records, one would hardly know they existed. Yet the labor of this Black community yielded food, clothing, shelter, and warmth of hearth for white households in Lincoln. For some, ownership of enslaved servants also enhanced the family’s status among their white neighbors. Lincoln’s Black population was not large, yet more than a hundred white residents lived under the same roof with an enslaved Black person, and vastly more mingled with their Black neighbors in church, in the market, and in the fields and workshops.

They lived entangled lives, Black and white, enslaved and free. Here are their stories.