There is Something Special About Sleepovers

Ben Franklin, William Penn, and Quakers enslaved people.  That statement is shocking to some, especially northerners, because, in their shocked and misinformed minds, chattel slavery was strictly a southern thing.  Yes, it did take a Civil War and the thirteenth amendment to end the slavery that existed in southern states.  After the American Revolution, many northern states that enslaved people began to abolish that institution within their boundaries legislatively.  After abolishing slavery, the complicity of northerners revealed itself in the owning of the insurance companies, banks, ships, and the factories adding value to the cotton that was picked by enslaved people.  One did not have to touch or even be around enslaved people to enable the continued existence of their bondage or benefit from their stolen labor. One must wonder if the northern enslavers freed their enslaved people when the law required them to do so or did they sell them down south to recoup their investments? 

Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1780.  Pennsylvania also had a law that stated that if people were enslaved in the state for six months, they had to be set free.  Some Pennsylvanians skirted this law by enslaving people less than six months, sending them back south, and bringing in a new batch of enslaved people to start the cycle over again.  President George Washington, one of twelve slave-owning presidents, engaged in the practice of enslaving people when he resided in Philadelphia, which was at this period in history, our nation’s capital.

Nine years ago, I started spending nights in slave dwellings to honor the enslaved Ancestors.  I, like some northerners, thought that slavery was strictly a southern thing.  I blame this misconception on my education in the subject of slavery or lack thereof.  This misconception made me believe that slavery was relegated to plantations in the south, and the north was responsible for slavery’s eradication.  This was a time in history when Confederate flags and monuments met little to no. I was misinformed, bamboozled, hood winked, shortchanged.  As a South Carolinian in my formative years, I was fed a revisionist history.  This history came from hand me down history books that were used in previous years by children from the White schools.  Yes, the students integrated, but the curriculum did not.

In relegating slavery to plantations, we miss many components of that peculiar institution. Urban slavery thrived in cities like Charleston, South Carolina.  By 1777, Charleston was the fourth largest city in this nation behind New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, which brings me to the purpose of this blog.

Stenton

Slavery could have ended in this nation at the Constitutional Convention, which was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1787. Still, our Founding Fathers allowed it to persist. One of the players was James Logan, a Scots-Irish colonial American statesman and scholar who served as the fourteenth mayor of Philadelphia and held several other public offices. He served as colonial secretary to William Penn. He was a founding trustee of the College of Philadelphia, the predecessor of the University of Pennsylvania. James Logan lived at Stenton, and yes, this Quaker, enslaved people.  The conversation and sleepover minus the campfire would occur at Stenton.

Stenton is located in a neighborhood which made my UBER driver question my desire to be dropped there.  The house is made of bricks, but I found only a few bricks that may contain fingerprints and my confidence was low. The motherload of finger and handprints were in the bricks that compose the walkway. My host informed me that the bricks were placed in the walkway at a period in history long after slavery ended in Pennsylvania, so more investigation is necessary.

Investigating Mid-Atlantic Plantations

Libbie Hawes is preservation director at Cliveden in Philadelphia. , My first and second sleepover in a slave dwelling in Philadelphia, was at Cliveden. Libbie was on the planning team for the Investigating Mid-Atlantic Plantation Conference. The conference was scholars presenting papers about mid-Atlantic plantations.  The format didn’t excite me. Libbie’s idea about adding a sleepover at Stenton at the backend of the conference was excellent.  This sleepover would be an addition to the conference and the last activity to occur.  Registrants to the conference had the opportunity to participate.   

My relationship with Stenton did not get off to a good start.  When I  learned through social media that Stenton was honoring Dinah, an enslaved woman who kept the house from being burned by the British, my attempt to thank and encourage more research came off as rude and obnoxious. An apology from me, and we were set for planning and implementing a sleepover.  In the process of planning, we became a little concerned about getting the thirty people we sought for the conversation and sleepover.

The conference that was, in my mind, a boring format turned out to be great.  I sat in on some sessions that impressed me immensely.  I learned some things about slavery in the mid-Atlantic and northern states that I had no clue happened historically.  It did solidify my thought that chattel slavery was terrible no matter where it was practiced in these United States.

The Conversation:

The conversation and sleepover occurred in the big house, no campfire, but it was not necessary. Our concern about getting an adequate number of people for the discussion was erased when the desired amount showed up for the event.  To achieve this, we collectively decided to extend the invitation to people who were not registered for the conference. This resulted in the most diverse group ever assembled. Ireland, Netherlands, and France and a member of the Jewish faith were all represented. The Mid-Atlantic Plantations conference attracted this diverse group of people. It made it possible to assemble them at Stenton to discuss slavery and the legacy it left on this nation. 

The conversation was as diverse as the people represented. Forgiveness, social justice, historical trauma permeated the dialogue throughout.  The conversation was not about the homeowner, James Logan, but about the people whose labor was stolen to make his lavish life possible.

Slave Dwelling Project at Stenton Hall  

Andrea Mosterman                                      

As a historian of slavery, I research, write, and teach this history every single day. But even though I am very familiar with these histories, I have learned that visiting the spaces that enslaved people inhabited adds a deeper understanding of their lives. Spending time in the spaces where they lived and worked, walking where they walked, and sleeping where they slept gives a more intimate yet complex insight into their lives.

In my research, I write about the spaces enslaved women, men, and children in Early New York inhabited and frequented. Thus, I have been very interested in the Slave Dwelling Project for years. When I found out about this overnight stay at Stenton, I knew I had to participate. After a nice dinner, we spent the evening in the garret space where enslaved people at Stenton most likely lived. Laura Keim of Stenton and Joseph (Joe) McGill of the Slave Dwellings Project were amazing hosts. They taught the group about the history of some of the home’s enslaved people, but the conversation also covered more contemporary issues concerning the legacy of slavery in the United States. I was especially impressed with the ways in which Joe led these discussions of sensitive and sometimes contentious subjects.

After these conversations, we all grabbed our sleeping gear for the night. Indeed, trying to sleep on the hard, cold floor, and waking up from the various sounds within the home gave me a new understanding of what life might have been like within these spaces. For instance, I had never realized how easy it would have been to listen in on people’s conversations, and that it would have been very difficult to navigate these homes without enslavers hearing these movements.

In short, I am grateful I had a chance to participate. Not only did I learn new things about slavery and the lives of enslaved people in the United States, I also had a chance to spend time with an amazing group of people who all were there to gain a new understanding of this history. If I ever have the chance to do another sleepover, I certainly will. It was an unforgettable experience.

VJ Kopacki

I recently attended my second overnight program with Joe McGill and the Slave Dwelling Project at Stenton in Philadelphia. This group was a little livelier, a little more outspoken and very willing to dive into the hard parts of history. The four or five hours we all talked flew by in a flash and in that time we managed to talk about race relations in America, the 1619 Project, Confederate monuments, Black Lives Matter, white male privilege, white female privilege, gun control, and the continued legacy of systemic racism, among many other topics. Joe is a consummate professional, guiding us to new insight, sometimes gently, sometimes with biting questions that cut right to the quick. There was a tension, too, of course, but I find that feelings of discomfort made the conversations stronger: sometimes we stumbled over words or lacked the eloquent answers we sought, but those difficulties forced us to work through answers and ideas while embracing the tension together.

One of the other participants asked me early on in the night: “why are you doing this again? What brought you back?” I could have said any number of things: tactile living history experiences help me feel connected to the past, I was there to absorb ideas for my own professional work, I will take any opportunity to visit historic sites I’ve not seen before, etc. Those answers would only be half-truths. The real reason I will join the Slave Dwelling Project at every opportunity is because understanding the trajectory of enslavement and white supremacy throughout American history is vital to understanding systems of inequality, exploitation, and violence which still plague this country. This conversation did not begin in 1619 and it does not end when the sleeping bags roll out.

Joe McGill asks us to step outside the confines and comforts of our everyday lives and consider the bigger picture and our place within it. The work of the Slave Dwelling Project requires us all to interrogate our privilege and our institutional biases in places where we cannot ignore the echoes of history and at a time when we cannot afford to remain silent.

Jessa J. Krick

Associate Director of Collections Historic Hudson Valley

After our simple dinner, battery-powered candles lit our way up the staircase to a garret space at Stenton, recently cleared of spinning wheels and furniture, where the group gathered for our discussion. Around the walls, slips of paper traced the story of Dinah, a woman enslaved at Stenton who saved the house from fire and how that story has evolved over the centuries, the subject of ongoing research by site staff.

I found remarkable the range of reasons people mentioned for their participation in the event: people who had keen interest in the Slave Dwelling Project, people who had stayed at sites before with Joe through the SDP, people with keen interest in historic sites, people with keen interest in what is happening at Stenton, people who knew Stenton in other contexts, people who teach or address “hard history” including Holocaust studies, neighbors, scholars with an interest in slavery in the Atlantic world. We represented a range of ages and backgrounds. It was an international group.

Joe deliberately raised provocative questions and prompts. The group duly considered each opinion and comment, even the most tangential. I appreciated how other members of the group provided a check when needed, offering an alternate perspective or bringing the topic back into focus.

A ghostly outline of a bookcase that held books from James Logan’s collection still appears on the wall in the room where we gathered (and some participants slept). Similarly, the vestiges of enslavement are still with us. Even if the institution is gone, the marks are indelible in American society. One does not need to look far, as we discussed on Saturday night, to find inequalities in the legal system, in medical care, in housing and in our experiences with the police. 

For  those of us who work at historic sites, we must be able to answer the question “Why is this site and its history relevant?” The best answer is always quite specific to the site and should change over time. Curator Laura Keim and other Stenton staff, through a process of discussion, study, exhibition, and collaboration, fueled by events like this, are creating a new layer of history for the site, adding to and extending the story of the site to include all the residents, including Dinah, Jack and Hannibal and Menah. I feel this event (and other recent activities) provide a balance, a counterweight to the long-standing interpretation at the site. All of these are steps toward drawing a fuller picture of the American experience, in the past, and even more so, in the present. We all posed with “This Place Matters” banners on Sunday morning and I think each of us who participated in the sleepover can answer the of question “why?” a bit differently as a result of this experience.

Stenton Sleepover with the Slave Dwelling Project

October 19, 2019 Reflection – Laura Keim

I have worked at Stenton for twenty years and have even overseen the re-creation of a flying tester bedstead in Stenton’s Yellow Lodging Room, but I had never entertained the possibility of sleeping in the museum until we started planning the Mid-Atlantic Plantations Conference.  My Cliveden colleague, Libbie Hawes, and I wanted to be sure to incorporate some site-based programming into the conference to prompt our academic historian colleagues to engage in some material history.

I had attended Joe McGill’s presentation at Cliveden in 2011 after he had spent the night in Cliveden’s Kitchen Dependency.  I took in the presentation as he showed slide-after-slide of place-after-place – “I slept here; I slept there.”  I came away underwhelmed.  Who was this off-beat re-enactor guy from the south sleeping in places where enslaved people live and telling about it?  While I took away that his goal was raising awareness of slavery in America, I was just not getting it….  Ok, Libbie, I admire and trust your professional judgement, so we will have the Slave Dwelling Project as part of the conference.  And the sleepover will be at Stenton! 

There is something special about sleepovers.  Just bedding down with people to sleep is a kind of bonding experience.  We put on comfortable clothes.  We open ourselves up to the possibility of being vulnerable — and that is the magic of the Slave Dwelling Project’s sleepover programs.  Because Joe McGill no longer just sleeps in places where enslaved people slept by himself, he has built a following of self-selecting people who join him for late-night conversations about slavery in America – then and now.  We also discussed historic architecture and slavery, contemporary events, the state of American society, gun control, healing and forgiveness, and love.  Joe creates a safe situation where the power of the place where the discussion is convened, a place where humans who were held against their wills in bondage lived and worked, sets the stage for a powerful discussion.   

Seated in a circle in the Stenton Middle Garret Room, with our “Piecing Dinah Together” exhibit and timeline on the walls around us, with the ghost of James Logan’s Library Bookcase, on which second generation enslaved people laid their things and clothes, we each shared something of our selves – our interest in attending, out thoughts, sorrows, fears, hopes, dreams – ultimately something of our souls.  I came away from the conference and the sleepover (this time) OVERWHELMED with the ubiquity of slavery in early American culture.  I grew up feeling that because I was from Pennsylvania, which was a birthplace of Quaker abolitionism, that somehow slavery was less a part of my American heritage.  I did not want to fully confront the reality of historical slavery that was right in front of me, nor the systemic racism that still divides us.  Sleeping on the floor at Stenton, I was keenly aware that people should have more than just a straw-filled tick between their bodies and the floor.  Certainly, the Logan family could have afforded a bedstead for every person in their household, and yet that was not provided.  A servant bed consisted of a mattress directly on the floor. 

One of the other thoughts I came away with was that until spring 2019, when Stenton staff installed the Dinah exhibit in the Middle Garret Room, that room was filled with a large loom, myriad spinning wheels, and textile processing equipment – the remnants of a very non-place-specific Colonial Revival interpretation of early America.  We removed the Colonial Revival equipment to literally make space for a deeper telling of Dinah’s story.  In the garret, we present a room that speaks for itself in its authentic emptiness, its unpainted wood, its lack of storage and a fireplace for heat.  We are allowing the room to communicate something of the lives of the indentured and enslaved laborers, who lived in bondage in Stenton’s garret spaces.  That is the magic of the Slave Dwelling Project – realizing that slavery was everywhere in early America, and that furthermore, we can open our hearts in the present to heal its wounds and the brokenness of our Society.  In the garret, engaged in discussion, we could ponder the inhumanity of the way the enslaved lived and toiled and open ourselves to the common humanity in each of us, a path to love that can heal the wounds of the past if we recognize the legacy of slavery all around us.