Dear Trinity Church,
In the fall of 1782, James Perkins sailed to the French colony Saint-Domingue (modern day Haiti) to establish a mercantile business. With younger brothers Thomas Handasyd Perkins and Samuel Gardner Perkins, and business partner Walter Burling, they bought and sold enslaved people as well as traded cash crops like coffee, sugar, cotton, and rum. It was a profitable endeavor for the brothers who maintained residences in Boston. Though slavery had been abolished in their home state of Massachusetts in 1783, the French would not definitively abolish slavery until the 1840s.
Cap-Français was the primary port city and principal slave market in Saint-Domingue. According to family lore, one day in 1785, Thomas Handasyd Perkins was wandering through the market and chanced upon a young African man who was deathly ill. He had survived the Middle Passage voyage but just barely. Perkins negotiated with the market overseer and purchased the youth for half a doubloon (that equates somewhere between $2 to $8 in today’s dollars). After hospitalization, the young man recovered, lived in the Perkins household, and worked in the brothers’ trading house. They called him Mousse.
While there are family stories about how he came to be called Mousse, his actual name was Moussa, the Arabic version of Moses. Dehaya was his patronymic name. Later in life, Moussa shared memories of tending the flocks with his father and of being captured and walking thirty days to the coast before being herded onto the ship that brought him to Saint-Domingue.
At this time, Saint-Domingue was on the cusp of a great transformation. It was France’s most profitable sugar and coffee colony; wealth derived by the exploitation of enslaved labor. The enslaved population vastly outnum
bered the white residents, and discord existed between wealthy white planters, poor white artisans, and wealthy free people of color. The concepts of liberty and equality gleaned from the successful American and French Revolutions inspired unrest across all sectors of society. The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man and brilliant military strategist.
In 1792, Moussa traveled with the Perkins family to a neighbor’s plantation where they intended to dine for the night. Upon learning from other enslaved servants of the insurrection where plantations were being set ablaze and “masters” killed, Moussa warned the Perkins. Everyone was able to escape before the rebel forces descended. They made their way to the coast where white residents were leaving the island. Family lore is that Moussa jumped into the water swimming toward the ship, and that Samuel Perkins pulled him aboard. They all arrived in Boston in 1793.
Moussa would become a fixture in the home of James Perkins. At the Boston Athenaeum where the Perkins Family Papers are housed, there is a silhouette of Moussa. Written on the silhouette is the word “Daddy.” The Perkins children, whom he helped raise, called him Daddy Mousse.
James Perkins died in 1822. Moussa remained in the Perkins household until his death nine years later on August 15, 1831. Trinity Church burial records note that he was seventy years old. In those records, for that year, people of color were identified by “(colored)” written next to their names. Two men, James Brown and John Williams, were listed this way just above Moussa. Moussa was different. Following his name are the words, “African servant of Mr. James Perkins.”
An obituary for Moussa in the local newspaper highlights that
“during the latter years of his sojourning here [in Boston], his ability to labor had ceased; he never, however, was without the kind attentions which are merited by ‘a good and faithful servant,’ from all the branches of the family, who had witnessed his devotion to them all. His remains were on Monday deposited in the family vault, under St. Paul’s Church, by the side of those of his late master, who was fondly attached to him.”
The bodies entombed at St. Paul’s were reinterred in 1914 at Mount Hope Cemetery in Mattapan. Although the deceased were afforded their own graves, there were no headstones. A towering stone Celtic cross marks the lot.
Moussa’s relationship with James Perkins and the Perkins family is thought-provoking and highlights the complexity of the relationship that could develop between the enslaved and their enslavers. Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts in 1783, but until the Haitian Revolution began in 1791, the Perkins brothers were actively engaged in the slave trade. Even once back in Massachusetts, the brothers, especially Thomas Handasyd Perkins, continued to engage in the trade by outfitting slave ships that were sent to Africa to collect men, women, and children. Just like a young Moussa. What did they explain to Moussa when he arrived in Massachusetts in 1793? What did Moussa, who was clearly intelligent, understand about his fate and his choices? We can only speculate.
Until next time,
Cynthia
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Sources and Further Reading
Archival Materials
Trinity Church Burial Records 1820-1869
Newspapers
Mortuary Notice. Boston Patriot and Mercantile Advertiser. Wednesday August 17, 1831.
Online Reading
James Perkins: Slave Traders, Enslaver and Opium Smuggler
https://www.jphs.org/colonial-era/2022/perkinsslavetraders#gsc.tab=0
Mattapan grave tells story of slavery, Haitian revolution
https://baystatebanner.com/2022/05/05/mattapan-grave-tells-story-of-slavery-haitian-revolution/
Updated: https://elevennames.substack.com/p/november-21-2022
Perkins Family Papers
https://cdm.bostonathenaeum.org/digital/collection/p16057coll43
Reminiscences of the Insurrection in St. Domingo by Samuel G. Perkins
https://archive.org/details/reminiscencesofi00perk_0
About the Haitian Revolution
Haitian Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution
Haiti’s Revolution and the United States
https://today.duke.edu/showcase/haitideclaration/haitiusa.html
Images
Portrait of James Perkins (1822) by Gilbert Stuart, located at the Boston Athenaeum.
San Domingue 1785, López De Vargas Machuca, Tomás. Plano de la plaza y ciudad de Santo Domingo, capital de la isla Española. Madrid, 1785. Map. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/74691152/>.
Toussaint Louverture, Alexandre-François-Louis, comte de Girardin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons