Episode 360: Kyera Singleton, Slavery & Freedom in Massachusetts

Juneteenth is a holiday that celebrates and commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. We choose to reflect on the end of slavery in the United States on June 19 because, on June 19, 1865, United States General Gordon Granger issued his General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, informing Texans that all slaves were free.

Juneteenth may feel like it is a mid-19th-century moment, but the end of slavery didn’t just occur on one day or at one time. And it didn’t just occur in the mid-19th century. The fight to end slavery was a long process that started during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.‌

Kyera Singleton, the Executive Director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts, has spent years researching the lives of the enslaved people who lived and worked on the Royall Plantation and the significant contributions they made to ending slavery in Massachusetts. Kyera joins us to investigate the story of slavery and freedom within the first state in the United States to legally abolish slavery.‌

About the Show

Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about early American history.

It is a show for people who love history and for those who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world.

Ben Franklin’s World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.

Episode Summary

Kyera Singleton is the Executive Director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts. She’s also a historian who is finishing her doctoral degree in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Kyera and her colleagues have spent years researching the lives of the enslaved people who lived and worked on the Royall Plantation, and the significant contributions they made to ending slavery in Massachusetts, which was the first state in the United States to legally abolish slavery in 1783.

During our investigation, Kyera reveals the story of the Royall House and Slave Quarters and why this is a unique historic site; Details about the Royall Plantation and how it operated; And, what we know about the enslaved people who lived and worked on the Royall Plantation and the important roles they played in creating and seeking freedom in Revolutionary Massachusetts.

What You’ll Discover

‌The Royall House and Slave Quarters
The ability of the Royall House and Slave Quarters to tell an international story of slavery
Story of the Royall Family and its fortune
How the Royall House came to have free standing slave quarters
The Royall Family and its Medford, Massachusetts Plantation
Function of the Royall Plantation
The work enslaved people did to sustain the Royall Plantation
Details about Plato
Information about siblings Abba and Cuba
Historical records and evidence that tells us what we know about the enslaved people who lived and worked the Royall Plantation
Information about Fortune
Life and relationships on the Royall Plantation
The American Revolution and the Royalls’ Loyalist politics
What happens to the enslaved people after the Royall Family leaves Massachusetts
Belinda Sutton and her petitions to the Massachusetts General Court
Freedom Suits
Abolitionist and anti-slavery in the late eighteenth century
The abolishment of slavery in Massachusetts
Opportunities in freedom for the formerly enslaved

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Time Warp Question

In your opinion, how might our understanding of slavery and enslavement in the Northern colonies be different if there were more historic sites that had external slave quarters that had survived?

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