Lucy Terry Prince collection

1967-1973

Lucy Terry Prince, a Black pioneer woman, was born in Africa in 1730. At the age of five she was brought to Newport, Rhode Island, by the Malbone brothers, slave traders and rummakers, and sold to Ebenezer Wells for sixty pounds. For the next twenty years, she lived with the Wells family in Deerfield, Massachusetts, working as a domestic servant.

In 1756, Lucy Terry married Abijah Prince, a Black soldier and formerly enslaved person. Although the couple had met in 1746, it took ten years for Prince, freed upon his master's death in 1748, to earn the money to buy Lucy's freedom from Ebenezer Wells. For the next fourteen years, Lucy and Abijah Prince continued to live in Deerfield and raise their six children.

Upon the death of his master, Abijah Prince inherited his land in Northfield, Massachusetts. Over a period of time, he acquired additional land in Guilford and Sunderland, Vermont (Sunderland was then in New Hampshire territory), making Prince one of the original founders of Sunderland. In 1770, the Prince family moved to Guilford where they lived until 1803, when they lost the Guilford land and moved to their Sunderland property. Abijah Prince died in 1794.

Throughout her life, Lucy Terry Prince distinguished herself as a woman of intelligence and determination. In 1746, at the age of sixteen, she wrote a poetic ballad commemorating the Indian attack on a Deerfield haying party. As a result of this poem, Lucy Terry Prince is considered the earliest Black American poet, a sample of whose work still exists.

On two occasions, she fought and won legal battles over land disputes. In 1785, she went before the Governor of New Hampshire's Council to protest harassment of her property and family by the wealthy Noyes family. In the 1790s, Colonel Eli Brownson, the Prince's neighbor in Sunderland, claimed part of the Prince land. The case was tried before Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase on circuit in Vermont. Although she had a lawyer, Isaac Tichenor, Lucy Prince presented her own argument before the judge and won the case. In the early 1770s, Lucy Prince also attempted, without success, to have her son admitted to Williams College. Lucy Terry Prince died in 1821 at the age of ninety-one.

The details in this biography were taken largely from the Katz book, Black Woman: A Fictionalized Biography of Lucy Terry Prince. Bernard Katz, born in New York City in 1901, had a longstanding interest in the history of Black oppression and resistance. He also had an interest in jazz and published a work on music entitled The Social Implication of Early Negro Music in the United States(Arno Press, 1969). Katz had done the research and finished part of the manuscript for the Prince biography when he died in 1970. His son, Jonathan Katz, revised and completed the manuscript, which was published by Pantheon in 1973.

Jonathan Katz was born in New York City in 1938. He attended Antioch College and the City College of New York, and currently works as a writer in New York City. He inherited his father's avid interest in Black studies and also specializes in American women's history. Katz is also the author of Resistance at Christiana: The Fugitive Slave Rebellion, Christiana, Pennsylvania, September 11, 1851; a Documentary Account(Crowell, 1974); Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.(Crowell, 1976); Coming Out! A Documentary Play about Gay Life and Liberation in the U.S.A(Arno, 1975) ed.; and Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History and Literature (Arno Press reprint series).