The Problem of Numbers in Researching Early Black History in the Monadnock Region

Essay by Tim Hastings, UMASS Amherst, 2024

Using particular terminology is important when discussing topics like enslavement and racism, the consequences of which we’re still living with today. We should be mindful of people’s lived experiences and that, for different people, the past may not be so past.

The Recovering Black History in the Monadnock Region (RBH) project and its team of citizen archivists have begun the formidable task of combing through historical records to find people of African descent who lived in Cheshire County from the early 1700s to the early-20th century. This task is particularly challenging for the years prior to 1800, largely because archival documents generally don’t prioritize marginalized people like they do more notable individuals and families. There’s another challenge that is not unique to regions in northern New England but is felt more acutely in Cheshire County than even along New Hampshire’s seacoast, and that is what I’m calling the problem of numbers*: the difficulty of determining accurate population size and the tendency to associate small numbers with historical insignificance.

This essay will examine the problem of numbers in documenting the lives of African-descended people in Cheshire County prior to 1800 and will explain how the RBH project is attempting to address it through its biographical sketches of particular individuals and families. It’ll conclude with a brief note reflecting on the ethical challenges of conducting research on Black History in a region that, in popular historical memory, is almost exclusively White.

The Problem of Numbers: Quantification and Historical Significance in Historical Records

Numbers are problematic for documenting the lives and experiences of enslaved, free, and formerly enslaved people of African descent in early New Hampshire—a region that has historically contained a population that was and is predominantly of European descent, a fact which is reflected in historical records. Simply determining the population of African-descended people is difficult. The name of an enslaved person might appear in one record—a will or estate inventory, for example—but then that person may never appear again in any record. Or a census may indicate that in a particular New Hampshire town, there were four enslaved men, yet there are no names given. Or perhaps an enslaved person has become a free person. Would this person be counted among the free inhabitants of a town, or omitted? Tracing African-descended individuals—whose status as free or enslaved was often changing and ambiguous—through historical records is thus deeply challenging and often produces inaccurate population numbers. 

A more insidious problem, however, is the tendency to associate small numbers with historical insignificance—an issue that is particularly salient in Cheshire County. This problem likely stems from the broader tendency in the United States to associate enslavement with largescale Southern plantation slavery, which has obscured how widespread enslavement was in places like northern New England until the late 18th century. In the 1790 census, for example, all counties except for Hillsborough recorded enslaved people—although in the 1786 census, at least 9 enslaved people were recorded in Hillsborough County.

If we examine the 1790 census more thoroughly, we can see how the two aspects of the problem of numbers—the difficulty of accurately enumerating African-descended people and the tendency to associate small numbers with historical insignificance—function together to constrain our knowledge of Black history and the historical experiences of African-descended people. 

According to the 1790 census, the population of free “Blacks” in New Hampshire was, at most, 630 in 1790, and the enslaved population was 158, the combined total of which represented about 0.55% of the population of the state. In Cheshire County, there were 16 enslaved people out of a population of 28,772. While this only includes enslaved people, the number of free or formerly enslaved African-descended people is likely not significantly higher. For example, the largest population of African-descended people in eighteenth-century New Hampshire was in Portsmouth, where, according to New Hampshire historian Valerie Cunningham, in 1790 there were perhaps as many as 76 free and 26 enslaved African-descended individuals out of a 4,720-person population. The census numbers, however, illustrate both the difficulty in determining the African-descended population—enslaved and free—and the relatively small population. Yet this population had a profound influence on the history of the Seacoast, as work from historians and groups such as the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire have demonstrated.

Portsmouth, of course, had a longer historical relationship with the Atlantic slave enslavement than western parts of New Hampshire like Cheshire County, as the vast majority of enslaved and free people of African descent in the 1600 and 1700s lived in and around Portsmouth. Because of this long history, there are relatively more historical records, and there has therefore been more historical scholarship related to enslavement and Black History, which has helped this area of New Hampshire grapple with the problem of numbers more effectively.

Cheshire County, on the other hand, doesn’t yet have scholarship written about it that discusses the history of enslavement, nor has its historical institutions grappled with the presence of African-descended people in the region. But the work that RBH has begun promises to chip away at the problem of numbers by foregrounding the historical and cultural contributions of the small number of African-descended people who resided in early Cheshire County.

Reconciling a Quantitative Approach with the Importance of Storytelling

 RBH’s methodology is largely quantitative. The bulk of the work that researchers have done has focused on populating the project’s dataset of African descended people that resided in Cheshire County between the early 1700s through 1930. To date, they’ve located over 500 named individuals and around 200 unnamed individuals from before 1800. Yet, how do we reconcile this project’s quantitative methodology with the broader tendency to associate small numbers with historical insignificance? The answer is we tell stories wherever possible.

Stories make us feel connected to the past. They cut through the fog of history and allow us to understand people, places, and events in ways that dates and data do not. In our own lives, we might, for example, hear stories about family members we’ve never met before, yet we feel as if we know them. Stories about historical figures serve the same function. These individuals become familiar to us, and they help us make sense of history, whether our own past or a broader, collective past.