(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[W]hen Windsor voters gathered for town meeting in 1800, they debated one of the stranger articles ever placed on a Vermont warning. After dispensing with the usual election of a moderator, a town clerk, selectmen and other town officers, they launched into the controversial subject.
Article No. 3 asked them to decide “what measures the Town will take respecting a certain Negro woman by the name of Dinah…” In case there was any ambiguity who Dinah was, the article explained that she had been “purchased and brought into this State about Seventeen years past by Stephen Jacob, Esq.”
Dinah was a slave, or at least she had been. That was the nub of the question. Whose responsibility was she? Dinah was now sick and poor, and someone had to pay for her care. In those days, towns were responsible for caring for the indigent who had no other place to turn.
But Dinah did have a place to go, the selectmen argued. Jacob, as a prominent member of the community and Dinah’s keeper, had a legal and moral responsibility to her, they figured. Besides, he could afford it.
Jacob, a trained lawyer, saw the case differently. He had no intention of footing the bill alone. He believed Dinah was the town’s responsibility. As a Windsor taxpayer, he owed only his fair share of the burden.
Nothing got resolved that late winter day in 1800. The dispute would continue another 2½ years before reaching the Vermont Supreme Court.
When the court gathered in August 1802, only two justices agreed to hear the case of Selectmen of Windsor against Stephen Jacob, Esquire. The third judge recused himself, citing conflict of interest. If ever there was a case for recusal, this was it. Stephen Jacob was not only the defendant but also a justice on the Supreme Court. In fact, until the previous year he had been the chief justice.
Despite Jacob’s high position, and the judges’ familiarity with him, the lawyer for Windsor refused to soften his view of Jacob’s actions. Jacob had purchased Dinah in 1783 and brought her to Windsor. “(S)he continued to live with and serve him as a slave until some time in the year 1800,” the lawyer said, “when she became infirm, sick, and blind, and in this condition was discarded by the defendant, and became a public charge.”
To bolster the town’s case, Windsor’s lawyer presented a bill of sale to the court to prove that Jacob had indeed purchased Dinah. The action brought a quick objection from one of Jacob’s lawyers – perhaps fearing the admonition that lawyers representing themselves have “a fool for a client,” Jacob had hired two.
The lawyer, Charles Marsh, made what was the main argument in Jacob’s defense. Dinah was not Jacob’s responsibility because he did not own her. How could he have? Marsh asked. Hadn’t the state banned slavery in its constitution in 1777?
“The bill of sale is void by our constitution,” Marsh said. He contended that Dinah had been a free woman since she had moved to Vermont in 1783.
Jonathan Hatch Hubbard, one of Windsor’s lawyers, responded that even if Dinah could not have legally been Jacob’s slave, she had been so in everything but name. In her years working for him, “(s)he may be presumed to have earned for the master sufficient to maintain her in the decrepitude of old age,” Hubbard said. Furthermore, “there is a moral obligation upon the master to support her when incapable of labor.”
Hubbard then attacked the argument that Dinah had been made free simply by moving to Vermont. He asked: Weren’t escaping slaves who reached Vermont still subject to the national runaway slave laws?
Marsh then switched from arguing principles to arguing facts. It is true, he said, that Dinah had worked for several years for the Jacob family. “(T)here can be but little doubt, from the excellent character and disposition of her master,” said Marsh, “(that) she would have so continued until this time in sickness and in health.”
That is, had it not been for some other Windsor residents. “(D)iscovering that she was an excellent servant, and wishing to profit themselves of her labours,” Marsh said, “(they) inveigled her from her master’s family and service by the siren songs of liberty and equality.”
Now Marsh deflected the criticism of Jacob and said it was these unnamed Windsor residents, and by extension the selectmen, who were acting callously. “She spent the vigour of her life with these people, and wasted her strength in their service; and now (that) she is blind, paralytic, and incapable of labour, they aim by this suit to compel the defendant solely to maintain her.”
Jacob, “as an inhabitant of the State, in obedience to the constitution,” renounced any right to own her as a slave. Now that he had been “deprived of her labours,” Marsh asked, was it fair to ask Jacob to pay for Dinah’s care?
Evidently, it was not. In writing for the court, Assistant Judge Royall Tyler – from whom we get the details of the case – sided with Jacob.
Tyler wrote that the federal fugitive slave laws, upon which much of Windsor’s argument was based, were irrelevant to the case. The Vermont Constitution’s ban on slavery was the relevant issue here, because Jacob had become a resident of the state. The moment her master had moved to Vermont, Dinah had become free (though in reality some slaves lived in the state during its early years). And since Dinah was no longer enslaved, Jacob was no more liable to support her than was any other resident of Windsor, the court ruled.
Even after the case was resolved, however, Windsor’s selectmen still bristled at the need to pay for Dinah’s care. Records show that at least in 1806 and 1807, the selectmen tried to warn her out of town, a legal procedure at the time for informing poor people that the town would not pay for their care.
As hard-hearted to Dinah’s plight as the town may have seemed, Windsor continued to pay the bills. Records show the town paid $4 to one resident for briefly boarding her and $20 to another for a longer stay. The documents note her decline. One entry reads: “Paid Nahum Trask for attending Judge Jacob’s Dinah in her last sickness – $14.00.”
The final notation states: “Paid Barnard Norton – making coffin and tolling bell for Judge Jacob’s Dinah – $3.00. Pd. Josiah Hawley, digging grave, $1.50.”
The court might have ruled otherwise, but in Windsor at least, the former slave remained “Judge Jacob’s Dinah.”
