by Christopher B. Gordon
Three names from New Hampshire stand at the head of the right-hand column of the Declaration of Independence. Josiah Bartlett first, then, just beneath him, in a merchant’s steady hand, the signature of a man who had spent the best years of his life at sea.
Before William Whipple ever put his name to a page that called liberty the birthright of all men, he had carried men, women, and children across the Atlantic in the hold of a ship and sold them at the end of the voyage. That is not the part of the story carved on any monument. It is the part that makes the rest of it matter, and an honest history begins there or it begins nowhere.
His name was William Whipple, and most Americans have never heard of him.
The boy who went to sea
Whipple was born in Kittery, in what was then the northern reach of Massachusetts and is now Maine, on the fourteenth of January, 1730. His father was a sea captain and maltster. His mother, Mary Cutt, came of a Portsmouth family with money in it. The boy had the ordinary common-school learning of the coast and then went where a Piscataqua boy with salt in him went, which was to sea, in one of his father’s vessels, while he was still in his teens.
The sea made him early. By the age of twenty-one he was master of his own ship. By his late twenties he had grown wealthy, and the trade that made him wealthy was the trade that built much of maritime New England, the long triangle that ran rum and goods east across the Atlantic, carried human beings west out of Africa, and turned the profits of the West Indies back into the counting houses of Portsmouth and Boston and Newport.
The Africa trade
The records that survive do not hand us a single ship’s manifest with William Whipple’s name at the top and a tally of human cargo beneath it. What they give us instead is the plain shape of his career and the plain testimony of the institutions that keep his memory.
The National Constitution Center, in its account of the signer, states without flinching that Whipple grew rich through the triangular trade, trading in rum, in wood, and in enslaved people. Modern scholarship on the household he later kept describes him as a man who had captained ships in that trade, plying the Africa run, carrying rum eastward and human beings west, before he came ashore for good around the age of twenty-nine. How many voyages he made, how many people he carried, no surviving document I have seen will say. That precise reckoning is lost. What is not lost, and what cannot be honestly set aside, is that the fortune William Whipple brought home to Portsmouth was in part the price of other people’s stolen lives.
Around 1759 he quit the sea and went into business on the land, a mercantile house in Portsmouth run with two of his brothers. In 1767 he married his first cousin, Catharine Moffatt, and in time the couple lived in her father’s fine house on Market Street, the place known now as the Moffatt-Ladd House, still standing, still open to anyone who wants to walk its rooms. They had children. None of them lived to grow up.
The merchant and the Glorious Cause
When the quarrel with Britain came, it came to a man with a great deal to lose, and Whipple did not hang back.
After the royal government in New Hampshire fell apart, the province built its own, and in 1775 Portsmouth sent Whipple to the new Provincial Congress and onto its Committee of Correspondence. The colony named him one of its three delegates to the Continental Congress, alongside Josiah Bartlett and Matthew Thornton, and he took his seat in Philadelphia for the session that would make the country.
In January of 1776, writing to Bartlett about the year ahead, Whipple set down the stakes as he saw them. The letter survives. “This year, my Friend is big with mighty events. Nothing less that the fate of America depends upon the virtue of her sons, and if they do not have virtue enough to support the most Glorious Cause ever human beings were engaged in, they don’t deserve the blessings of freedom.”
Whipple wrote those words about virtue and freedom in a household where enslaved people cooked his meals and banked his fires. Both of those facts are true, and they were true at the same hour, under the same roof. That summer he voted for independence, and on the second of August, 1776, signed the engrossed Declaration with the rest.
The general at Saratoga
Whipple did not sign and go home. In 1777 New Hampshire made him a brigadier general of its militia, and he marched.
His brigade went to the Saratoga campaign in New York, the fight that broke General John Burgoyne’s invasion from Canada and turned the war. After the British surrender, General Horatio Gates chose Whipple as one of the two American officers to sit down with Burgoyne’s representatives and settle the terms, and Whipple’s name stands on the Convention of Saratoga, the instrument of that surrender, signed the seventeenth of October, 1777. Afterward he helped escort the captured army on its long march east toward Boston. Whipple served Congress on its Marine Committee as well, and at least once carried the orders that sent the captain John Paul Jones to the deck of the Ranger.
The harder truth
A profile of William Whipple could stop at the general and the judge and call him a patriot, and it would be a clean story, and it would be a lie of omission, and TurningPoint Press does not trade in those.
In the house on Market Street there was a man named Prince Whipple.
Prince was born in Africa around 1750. As a boy of about ten he was taken, carried across the same ocean William Whipple had sailed, sold, and brought into the Whipple household, where he became the general’s personal servant and bore, as the enslaved were made to bear, his owner’s name. So when William Whipple wrote to Bartlett about the most Glorious Cause that human beings were ever engaged in, a stolen African child was somewhere in his house, listening, or not listening, and owning none of it.
Prince did not wait quietly to be freed. On the twelfth of November, 1779, he and nineteen other enslaved men in New Hampshire put their names to a petition to the state legislature, asking for their freedom in the plain language of the Revolution turned back upon the men who had made it. The God of Nature, they wrote, gave them life and freedom. They asked that the name of slave might no more be heard in a land gloriously contending for the sweets of freedom. The legislature did nothing. The men stayed enslaved.
Prince Whipple was freed in the years that followed, by the accounts that survive sometime around 1784 or before William Whipple’s death in 1785. The exact deed and date are not in front of us, and so the manner of it should be told plainly and no more. New Hampshire itself would not formally end slavery until 1857, two full generations on.
Two stories about Prince have grown up over the centuries, and both should be named for what they are. The first is that Prince once confronted his master directly, asking how a man could fight for his own liberty while holding another in bondage, and that the question changed Whipple’s heart. It is a powerful scene, and it appears nowhere in the documents of the seventeen-seventies. It is a tradition, told and retold long after both men were dead. The second is that Prince is the Black oarsman in Emanuel Leutze’s painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. Leutze painted that canvas in Germany in 1851, three-quarters of a century after the night it shows, and no contemporary record places Prince at the river. The figure is a symbol, and a worthy one, but it is not a portrait, and it is not proof.
What is true without embellishment is heavy enough. A man who had trafficked in human beings, and who held a man as property while writing in praise of freedom, came at the last to free him. The freedom was real. So was the bondage that went before it. A reader is allowed to weigh the one against the other and to find that the scale does not come easily to rest.
What he left
Whipple came home from the war to serve his state. New Hampshire put him in its legislature and then on the bench of its Superior Court, a merchant sea captain made a judge, riding the court circuit from town to town on horseback to hear the cases of farmers and creditors and thieves.
His heart was failing him by then. In the autumn of 1785, riding that circuit, he fainted and fell from his horse, and he was carried to his room and did not leave it. Whipple died on the twenty-eighth of November, 1785, at fifty-five years of age. No living child survived him to carry the name. The house on Market Street still stands, and the people who keep it now tell both halves of its story, the family that owned it and the people that family owned.
A boy who went to sea, he grew rich on a trade that ought to shame the country still, signed his name for liberty, fought for it at Saratoga, and freed at the end the one man whose bondage had stood closest to his own hand. Whipple is owed, as every figure this paper takes up is owed, the whole truth and not the flattering half of it.
His name was William Whipple.
Now we know him.
— Christopher B. Gordon
TurningPoint Press · Where History Comes to Life
A note on the record. Whipple’s January 1776 letter to Josiah Bartlett is preserved in collections of Founders’ correspondence and is quoted here as written, including its period spelling. His participation in the Atlantic slave trade is attested by the National Constitution Center and by modern scholarship on the Moffatt-Ladd household, though no individual ship manifest bearing his name is cited in the accessible record, and the number of his voyages is not documented. The 1779 freedom petition signed by Prince Whipple and nineteen others survives and is transcribed in the public record. The date of Prince Whipple’s manumission is given variously as about 1784 or before Whipple’s death in 1785 and is not tied here to a surviving deed. The story that Prince confronted Whipple over the contradiction of liberty and slavery, and the identification of Prince as the Black figure in Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, are traditions repeated long after the fact and are not supported by contemporary documentation. Whipple’s role at Saratoga, his signing of the Convention of Saratoga, his judgeship, and the date and manner of his death are drawn from the National Constitution Center and the records of the Daughters of the American Revolution.