Collect Day #14, PRIMUS FOWLE
God of all mysteries, we thank you for those who through creativity, ingenuity, and determination, made surprising stands for freedom, dignity and justice. Some, like Brother Fowle, showed courage that upended the expected norm. Then and now, these children of Yours create sparks that lead to justice. May we all know greater justice, greater dignity and our full freedom on this earth; we ask this in the name of Jesus, who sets all people free. Amen.
DAY #14, March 1, 2018
Portsmouth
PRIMUS FOWLE
(1700-1787)
Steve Fowle
According to the laws and customs of his place and time, Primus was, in a very literal sense, a man of no account. As a black African in 18th century New England, he was considered to be mere property in the eyes of the law. Thousands of others who suffered that intolerable condition lived and died in utter obscurity. Not Primus.
For 30 years or more he was made to pull the lever of a wooden common press, forcing blank paper to accept black-inked type, in the process printers call making an impression. That work made an impression on him — it bent his back so, that he could not stand upright. But, though he was dealt a life of drudgery, and though he died centuries ago, still, something of Primus lives on today. The world did its best to crush him, but he left his impression on the world.
Primus first appears in 1730, his purchase noted in the account book of Hugh Hall. Before, and for two decades after, his life is a mystery. When Hall’s daughter Lydia married the printer Daniel Fowle, Primus was, apparently, Lydia’s dowry. A few years after the marriage, Daniel and the Massachusetts legislature fell into acrimonious disagreement over “The Monster of Monsters,” a scurrilous satirical pamphlet. Under interrogation, Daniel admitted that Primus—”my Negro”—may have been involved in the printing of “the Monster.”
We know this story because Daniel published a pamphlet about being locked up in Boston’s “stone gaol.” Its tone was indignant rather than jocular, but there’s irony in its title: a slave-owning man complaining about “A Total Eclipse of Liberty.” Daniel, Lydia and Primus soon moved to Portsmouth, where Daniel established the province’s first print shop. Lydia died at 36, in 1761. It was at her funeral that we begin to see Primus as more than a cipher.
According to Portsmouth printer Charles Brewster’s Rambles About Portsmouth, Primus “mourned the loss of his mistress, and called her “an old fool” for dying. Tobias Ham Miller, yet another printer, gives a fuller account: Primus “inadvertently got on the right hand [of the funeral procession], which in this case, was evidently the wrong side.” Through nods and gestures, Daniel tried to get Primus to exchange places.
“‘At least,’ [Daniel] whispered, ‘Go to the other side,’ expecting to be promptly obeyed in so slight and reasonable a request; but, to his surprise and that of the bystanders, Primus screamed out, ‘Go tudder side ye’se’f, ye mean jade.’ The master of course complied, and the procession moved off.”
Primus didn’t even own his own body, but he knew who he was—and so did those around him. On his death in 1791, he achieved a unique distinction for an enslaved black man: he was eulogized in the very paper over whose pages he had once labored.
He may even have left undiscovered surprises, waiting for us yet. In 2015, a Dartmouth librarian, inspecting a broadsheet printed in Daniel’s shop, discovered, written in a faded but elegant hand, the words, “Prime [sic] Fowle a man of handsome color 1760.”
