The Blogs: Black Women Enslaved by Ministers and Founders

When we look back at the colonial and revolutionary period of American history, we often imagine its leaders as men of exceptional moral clarity — ministers who shepherded their congregations, and the signers of the Declaration of Independence who proclaimed that “all men are created equal.” Yet when we examine the records they left behind — diaries, letters, church registers, and estate inventories — a troubling truth emerges. Both the “enlightened” signers of the Declaration and the religious leaders of the age routinely enslaved Black women, and almost none of them recorded those women’s full names. Their humanity was reduced to a line in an account book, a baptismal entry, or a will, often listed simply as “Negro woman,” “wench,” or by a single given name. The very people who claimed to be guided by natural rights or by the highest religious morality did not see Black women as full persons. They saw them as property.

The Signers of the Declaration

Of the fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, historians estimate that roughly forty owned enslaved people at some point in their lives (Wiencek 2012, 23). Many of them enslaved women. Yet when we turn to their journals, letters, or plantation records, those women’s names are almost never preserved. Southern signers such as Charles Carroll of Maryland, Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia left behind detailed estate papers that tallied crops, livestock, and human beings in the same lists — with enslaved women identified only by age, approximate value, or a first name (Finkelman 2001, 51–54). These records make clear that the revolutionary generation, despite their soaring rhetoric about liberty, viewed enslaved Black women through the lens of ownership and utility, not individuality.

There is one exception: Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s plantation records at Monticello are unusual in their detail. In his Farm Book, Jefferson recorded the names of the enslaved people he owned, including Black women such as Betty Hemings, Sally Hemings, Mary Hemings Bell, Ursula Granger, and Edith Fossett (Jefferson, Farm Book, 1774–1824, Monticello Manuscript Division). To be sure, Jefferson’s decision to write down their names did not mean he saw them as equals — he enslaved more than six hundred people over his lifetime, and even Sally Hemings, with whom he fathered children, remained legally his property. Yet the fact that Jefferson named enslaved women where other signers did not means that today we can at least recover fragments of their lives. The majority of Black women enslaved by the Founders remain nameless, their identities lost because those who controlled them did not think it worth writing down.

Ministers and Morality

The silence is even more striking when we turn to the clergy. Ministers were regarded as the moral compass of their communities, entrusted with teaching virtue and guiding souls. Yet many enslaved people themselves — and women in particular.

In Boston, Rev. Cotton Mather enslaved several people. He baptized a woman he called Phillis, recording her in his church book without surname or family ties (Mather, Diary, entry for 1706; see also Brekus 2003, 177). Another enslaved man, Onesimus, gave Mather the knowledge of smallpox inoculation that would later save countless lives, but he too was never recorded with a full name.

Rev. Jonathan Edwards, the famed theologian of Northampton, Massachusetts, and later president of Princeton, enslaved several individuals. In 1741, Edwards purchased a “Negro girl” for his household (Edwards, Account Book, 1741). Estate records after his death list enslaved women named Venus and Leah, again without surnames (Marsden 2003, 220–22).

Rev. Ezra Stiles, minister in Newport and later president of Yale College, also owned enslaved people. In his diary, he mentions an enslaved woman named Abigail, but does not record her family name (Stiles, Itineraries and Diaries, 1765–1795). He freed her after some years, and she remained in Newport as a free woman — one of the rare cases where a partial story survives.

Across New England and the South, Anglican, Congregational, and Baptist ministers alike appear in church records and probate files as owners of enslaved women, yet they did not preserve their full names. Even in baptismal registers, enslaved women were often listed as “a Negro woman belonging to Rev. So-and-so,” their spiritual identity filtered through property ownership.

The Meaning of Silence

This silence is not accidental. It reflects how both ministers and Founders — the supposed guardians of morality and liberty — truly viewed Black women in their care. To them, these women were not historical actors, not neighbors, not fellow children of God or citizens-in-waiting. They were resources. Enslaved women cooked, cleaned, raised children, and in many cases endured sexual exploitation. But their names — the very markers of their humanity — were rarely preserved because their enslavers did not believe they merited remembrance.

Jefferson stands out here, but his exception is complicated. His detailed records of enslaved people’s names reflected his managerial obsession with Monticello as a plantation. Naming them was part of keeping track of his “property,” just as he meticulously recorded crop yields and expenses. To modern historians, this obsession is ironically invaluable — without Jefferson’s records, the stories of Sally Hemings and her family might have been lost entirely. Yet we must not mistake Jefferson’s naming for recognition of equality. He named, but he also enslaved.

Enlightenment and Hypocrisy

The erasure of Black women’s names by ministers and statesmen tells us something profound about the moral limits of the Enlightenment and of American religion in the colonial era. Enlightenment thinkers spoke of liberty, natural rights, and reason. Ministers spoke of salvation, souls, and virtue. But both groups operated within a society that depended on slavery. Their ideas of freedom and morality had racial boundaries. Liberty was for white men; salvation was preached from pulpits that owned Black women.

The absence of names is more than a quirk of record-keeping. It is an indictment. It shows that the most “enlightened” men of the time, and the most “godly,” shared the same blind spot: they did not recognize Black women as individuals worth remembering. Their humanity was acknowledged only when it served a purpose — as when Jefferson, for his own reasons, wrote down their names. Otherwise, their identities disappeared into ledgers and probate files.

Conclusion

The Founders and the ministers of colonial America proclaimed lofty ideals — liberty, natural rights, Christian morality. But their treatment of Black women in slavery tells another story. The majority did not even bother to record their names. They erased them from history as surely as they erased their freedom. Jefferson, unusual in naming some of the women he enslaved, left us a partial record — but even his practice was bound up in the logic of ownership.

Today, the absence of full names in journals, diaries, and church records is a silence we cannot ignore. It reminds us that the women who cooked meals, bore children, labored in fields, cleaned households, and sustained communities under slavery were seen by their enslavers as nothing more than property. Ministers who claimed moral authority and Founders who claimed enlightenment failed to recognize their full humanity. Their silence speaks volumes, and our responsibility is to name that truth.

References

Brekus, Catherine A. Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America. Yale University Press, 2013.
Edwards, Jonathan. Account Book, 1741. Jonathan Edwards Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
Jefferson, Thomas. Farm Book, 1774–1824. Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.
Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Yale University Press, 2003.
Mather, Cotton. Diary of Cotton Mather, 1706. Massachusetts Historical Society.
Stiles, Ezra. Itineraries and Diaries, 1765–1795. Yale University Library.
Wiencek, Henry. Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
Finkelman, Paul. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson. M.E. Sharpe, 2001.