An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, and Others, Which Have Occurred, or Been Attempted, in the United States and Elsewhere, During the Last Two Centuries.
By Joshua Coffin
The number of slaves in the Middle and Southern Colonies at this period is not easily ascertained, as few books and no newspapers were published in North America before 1704. In that year, the Weekly News Letter was commenced. In the same year, the “Society for the propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts opened a catechizing school for the slaves at New York, in which city there was then computed to be about 1500 negro and Indian slaves,” a sufficient number to furnish materials for the “irrepressible conflict,” which had long before begun.
The catechist, whom the Society employed, was “Mr Elias Neau, by nation a Frenchman, who, having made a confession of the Protestant religion in France, for which he had been confined several years in prison, and seven years in the gallies.” Mr Neau entered upon his office “with great diligence, and his labours were very successful, but the negroes were much discouraged from embracing the Christian religion upon account.
Genre: History | African-American Studies
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Joshua Coffin
Coffin was born to Joseph and Judith Coffin in Newbury, Massachusetts, on October 12, 1792, in the Coffin House.
Biography
He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1817 and taught school for many years, numbering among his pupils the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who addressed to him a poem entitled “To My Old School-Master”. Coffin was ardent in the cause of emancipation and was one of the co-founders of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832, being its first recording secretary. From 1834 to 1837, Coffin was the manager of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
He published The History of Ancient Newbury (Boston, 1845), genealogies of the Woodman, Little, and Toppan families, and magazine articles. As an adult, Coffin lived in the downstairs southwest room of the Coffin House, his ancestral home; in a tiny study housed within an ell of the house, Joshua wrote his History of Ancient Newbury.
Joshua Coffin
