Enemies to Their Country*

As dusk fell on October 28, 1769, Misses Ame and Betsy Cuming hurried to lock their modest house against the gathering darkness, hoping that doors and shutters would keep them safe until morning. Alone in their flimsy fortress, the sisters huddled together, “trimbling lick Co[wa]rds,” straining to hear beyond the ordinary sounds of night. They did not wait long. The click of hobnails on cobblestones, the rattle of a cart, and groans of agony announced the arrival of unwelcome visitors. Peering through a darkened window, Betsy beheld a ghastly tableau: a sea of twinkling candles illuminated a moaning man who lay on her doorstep “in a Gore of Blood,” surrounded by a thousand men and boys. As Betsy watched, the crowd “aranged themselves befor [her] door” and positioned the broken body under her window, where they doused it with steaming tar and a flurry of feathers. Betsy did not recognize the sufferer, but feared for her friends and their families. As the armed men melted back into the night, they called “to all the inhabitance to put Candles in their Windows” to show their support for the mob. Betsy watched, helpless, as her neighbors’ windows flashed with blazing assent.

"Tho' He Lived in a Land of Liberty, He Lived a Slave"

I was in Concord on Monday and visited the famous John Jack stone on Old Burial Hill. This is one of the most visited, most quoted African-American gravestones in New England (it is a replica of the original stone).

According to Joanne Braxton and Maria Diedrich in Monuments of the Black Atlantic, John Jack was once owned by Benjamin Barron of Concord. He bought his freedom and a small farm in 1761. Jack's wonderful epitaph was written by Daniel Bliss, a noted Tory and abolitionist who was forced to flee Massachusetts during the Revolution. John Jack's epitaph reads:

God wills us free, man wills us slaves.

I will as God wills Gods will be done.

Here lies the body of

JOHN JACK,

A native of Africa who died

March 1773. aged about 60 years

Tho' born in a land of slavery,

He was born free.

Tho' he lived in a land of liberty,

He lived a slave,

Till by his honest, tho' stolen labors,

He acquired the source of slavery,

Which gave him his freedom;

Tho' not long before

Death the grand tyrant,

Gave him his final emancipation,

And set him on a footing with kings.

Tho' a slave to vice,

He practised those virtues

Without which kings are but slaves.