Slavery and Freedom in Northampton

and in the Colonial North Lecture Series

Venus and Leah, enslaved to Jonathan Edwards

Living and Laboring in the Business of

Slavery in Rhode Island & New England

Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Thursday, April 10, 2025

at 7 pm on Zoom

On June 7, 1731, in Newport, Rhode Island, a 14-year-old girl named Venus was sold to Northampton's minister Jonathan Edwards. In the eighteenth century, Rhode Island merchants dominated the American trade in enslaved people. Many individuals enslaved in Northampton were forcibly brought to the American colonies through Rhode Island ports.

Dr. Clark-Pujara's book, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016), examines how the Business of slavery—economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, food, and goods—shaped the experience of slavery, the process of emancipation, and the realities of Black freedom in Rhode Island from the colonial period through the American Civil War. Dr. Clark-Pujara is professor of history in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Moderated by Olivia Haynes

Olivia Haynes is a Ph.D. candidate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses on the history of slavery in the American North with an emphasis on the visual and material culture of slavery, social reproduction theory, and Black motherhood and reproduction under enslavement and nominal freedom.

In partnership with the

Northampton Reparations Study Commission

Image Credits



Graphic Silhouette of Venus and Leah (Design Division, 2025).

Venus was born in West Africa and separated from her family. She was sold in Newport, Rhode Island, by a ship captain and slave trader to Northampton’s minister Jonathan Edwards. He purchased "a Negro Girle named Venus” who was “age Fourteen years or thereabout.”

Leah was also enslaved by Jonathan Edwards. Some historians think that Edwards renamed Venus to Leah when she was baptized. It is also possible that Venus died and Leah was a different person who replaced her.

Learn more about the

Northampton Slavery Research Project

HISTORIC NORTHAMPTON

46 Bridge Street Northampton, MA 01060

info@historicnorthampton.org | 413-584-6011

www.historicnorthampton.org