Who was Paul Long
Who was Paul Long?
I was doing a bit of research as a follow up to General Lafayette’s stop in North Hampton during his farewell tour of the United States in 1824. Thanks to Noah Robie’s research and initiative, North Hampton has a Lafayette Trail marker on the Town Common.
The town history The Way it Was in North Hampton describes the townspeople’s response to the War for Independence. It includes these lines:
“To encourage long term enlistments in the Continental forces, the town, in 1777, offered to pay each man one hundred pounds over and above what the Continental Congress and New Hampshire paid in bounties. At least 14 North Hampton men joined the Continental services that year, two of whom went in as officers…Interestingly, Paul Long, a black man, volunteered as one of the privates.”
I had not heard of Long and, of course, wanted to learn more.
Fortunately in 2016, Deborah B. Knowlton, minister at the First Congregational Church, Hampton researched and wrote Color Me Included: The African-Americans of Hampton’s First Church and Its Descendant Parishes, 1670-1826. North Hampton was one of those descendant parishes, from 1738 until becoming its own town in 1742.
A copy of Knowlton’s book is in the Library. The first few chapters offer a summary of the slave trade and slavery in New Hampshire in the late 17th through 18th centuries. There were slaves in the state as early as 1645. And because NH was one of the few colonies that did not impose a tariff on the importation of slaves, many arrived in Portsmouth and then were smuggled to other colonies.
Knowlton notes that generally people think only wealthy merchants in Portsmouth and Exeter were likely to have slaves. She proves slaveholders were more widespread and included those who had professions where they were away from home and had little time for the care of their landholdings -- ministers, doctors, and public officials among them .
I immediately thought of Josiah Bartlett, a doctor in Kingston who also was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the first Governor of the State of New Hampshire -- and a slaveholder.
So was Paul Long a slave? He likely was until the American Revolution which brought about major changes in the North, including New Hampshire. The number of slaves in the state fell from 674 to 46 between the years of 1773 and 1786. Many ran away to the British in Boston, others by serving in the Continental Army.
Desperate to fill its regiments, NH offered bounties to slaveholders who freed the black recruits. A law in the Fall 1777 allowed owners to enlist their slaves as substitutes for themselves or their relatives or in return for their enlistment bounty.
Do we know for whom Long was a slave? Not for sure. Knowlton goes into more detail but it may have been Merryfield Berry of Rye. Were there slaves in North Hampton after the war? Again, not definitely known. The Reverend Jonathan French wrote in 1823 that three blacks lived near the mills owned by the Seavey, Jenness, and Wallis families. Their names? William Scott, Caesar Jenness, and Paul Long.
Back to the American Revolution, Long, according to Knowlton, enlisted as early as July 1776 with Captain Samuel Nay’s company in Colonel Joshua Wingate’s regiment. He also served in Colonel David Gilman’s regiment at Fort Ticonderoga which later saw action at Trenton and Princeton. And in April 1777 while in Colonel Alexander Scammel’s regiment, Captain Richard Weare’s company, fought at Saratoga.
Discharged in 1781, Long returned to North Hampton, married, was baptized in the North Hampton church, and raised a family. He died in 1826 at the age of seventy-four. The only item I could find in the Town’s Ancient Town Papers was an 1818 receipt signed by Daniel Gookin for taking Long’s Declaration for services in the Revolutionary Army. Gookin, the son of North Hampton’s first minister, also named Daniel, had served as a Lieutenant in the war. Long did receive pension benefits which appear in National Archives records.
Paul Long, slave, veteran, citizen of North Hampton, NH, USA.