Michael Baick: Remembering Peter, who escaped from slavery in CT 250 years ago

As the oldest continuously published newspaper in America, the Hartford Courant is an unbroken record of our ongoing history: from 13 colonies to 50 states, telegrams to iPhones, and smallpox to COVID-19. Every issue is a window into the past.

Let us open the Courant from 250 years ago: August 24, 1773. You would see complaints about British taxes in Boston, farms for sale in Berlin, and lost horses in Hartford. You would also find this advertisement for Peter, a Black man who had just run away from slavery in Somers. He was “betwixt 30 and 40,” and had escaped with a change of clothes and a fiddle. To motivate Courant readers to hunt Peter down, his enslaver, John Williams, offered a cash bounty for his recapture.

In the 1700s, fugitive slave advertisements appeared in this newspaper and others almost every week. The Courant apologized for its complicity in slavery in 2000, and its reporters have spent years uncovering the truth within its pages: before Connecticut was a “free state” and a refuge for Southern runaways on the Underground Railroad, it relied on thousands of enslaved Black people.

As Peter’s story reminds us, these enslaved people fought back against their captivity. It illuminates a forgotten chapter of Connecticut’s past, when enslaved Black people risked everything to gain their freedom. For my college senior thesis, I worked with the Longmeadow Historical Society to piece together the details. Now, 250 years later, Peter’s escape is as newsworthy as ever.

How does Peter’s story begin? We can only guess where he was born—probably in Africa or the Caribbean—or when he was torn away from his family and sold into slavery. But one fact about Peter shines through the fog of history: his defiance. At around 13 years old he landed in prison, probably for trying to escape. His owner, the Rev. Stephen Williams, visited Peter’s cell and asked him to swear he would not try again. But Peter, rebellious, refused to comply.

“He won’t… promise not to run away [if] I take him out of prison,” Stephen wrote in his diary. His audacity got under Stephen’s skin; the minister wrote a quick prayer “to keep my spirit calm.” A few days later, Stephen took Peter out of jail and sent him to work on a Williams family farm in Somers, but the conflict between the two of them was just beginning.

As a child, Peter would not make promises he could not keep. When he grew up, he would not be kept.

Enslaved Black people made up only 3% of the population of colonial Connecticut, but they were vital to stabilizing the workforce amid constant labor shortages from hunger, disease, and war. Stephen enslaved at least 10 people in his lifetime. They worked on his farms and raised his children, but never accepted his control. Nicholas faked illness to avoid work. James went out at late at night. Phillis had a baby out of wedlock, then spent nine years convincing Stephen to let her get married. Peter slipped away with a white neighbor, likely to do odd jobs and pocket the cash for himself. The Williamses sued. These subtle, insurgent tactics—which historians call “weapons of the weak”—allowed Black people to gain greater autonomy within the confines of slavery.

Even as Peter clashed with the Williamses, he was essential to them. He became a valuable laborer, learning to read, write, play the fiddle, and work on a farm. Stephen remained paranoid about new “mischief” and escape attempts, but the reverend still trusted Peter to drive a team of oxen between Springfield and Somers—an hours-long, unsupervised journey—to transport their agricultural produce.

As the years passed, Peter seemingly dropped the defiance of his youth, perhaps hoping to convince Stephen to set him free. In the 1760s, after an economic depression made slavery less profitable, a growing number of enslavers changed their wills to free their slaves when they died. The free Black population grew rapidly, and Peter probably hoped to join them.

In 1773, Stephen wrote that he had been “considering setting [Peter] at liberty,” but doubted “whether it could be done without injury to me, or the public.” But on August 11, the aging reverend revised his will without freeing Peter. Peter might have heard the bad news, because the very next day—August 12, 1773—he ran away for good.

“Peter Negro is run away ungratefully,” Stephen complained in his diary, “[and] left my Son… who has been Kind to him.” Stephen was not only outraged that Peter was gone; he resented the runaway for not appreciating 23 years of slavery. Now, the hunt was on.

Escapes were common in colonial New England, but getting away was hard. A century before the Underground Railroad, there was no “free state” or friendly Native tribe to reach. Two of Peter’s enslaved peers in Somers, Jenny and Saunders, ran away repeatedly but were recaptured or returned within a few days. Two others, Tom and Cato, drowned themselves rather than remain in bondage.

Peter knew that the path to freedom was narrow, but he had a plan. The advertisement in the Courant tells us he left with “a considerable amount of clothing,” probably because one outfit would have been easy to recognize. He took a fiddle, which meant he could sing for his supper in taverns and city streets. And finally, he “may have [had] a forged pass,” which would confirm his right to travel alone as a Black man. Stephen would not give Peter his freedom, so Peter wrote his own ticket.

This was a cunning escape, but Peter did not come up with it alone. Many New England runaways used forged passes, changes of clothes, and fiddles; Peter had probably spent years learning from their stories. He may have also found allies, Black and white, to help him on the road. In 23 years, he had transformed himself from a defiant youth to a knowledgeable, well-connected, formidable fugitive.

As Peter fled through the forests of Connecticut, the Williamses used the Courant to hunt him down. This paper printed the notice every week for five weeks, mobilizing readers across the colony to pursue him.

But in September, the advertisement vanished. The Williamses had given up.

Where did Peter go? Perhaps he boarded a whaling ship in New London and started a new, anonymous life at sea. Maybe he went to Boston, entering a new city just in time to watch the outbreak of the Revolution. Many enslaved people used the chaos of the war to run away or convince their enslavers to free them; the historian Gloria Whiting calls this period a “bottom-up revolution.” By the end of the century, slavery in New England was no more.

Today, we can retell Peter’s extraordinary life to recover the importance of slavery in our collective imagination. Last June, Melissa Cybulski, Beth Hoff, Betsy McKee, and Al McKee of the Longmeadow Historical Society presented their research about Peter and other enslaved people in Longmeadow’s First Church of Christ—the church founded by Stephen Williams himself.

What does Peter’s story tell us? Not only that slavery happened here, but that enslaved resistance happened here, too. We rightfully celebrate runaways like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass who fled from the South and advocated for abolition while living in the “free states” of the North. But the North was only free because of people like Peter. By resisting their own bondage, they helped weaken slavery overall.

Thus, 250 years later, the advertisement has acquired a new meaning. Once, it was a tool of slavery; today, is a testament to liberty.

Michael Baick is a writer from Longmeadow, Massachusetts. His 2022 senior thesis at Harvard College discussed Black and Indigenous history in New England.