The Black Man They Elected for Fifty Years, Then Forgot

The meetinghouse is cold, and the men stamp their boots against the plank floor. A hand rises, then another, until the count is plain. The vote carries.

It is 1768.

His grandfather, a man named Richard who had once been enslaved, bought twenty acres of New Hampshire ground in 1717 and became among the first Black men in the colony to own land. His father, Hopestill, a free man and a skilled builder of houses, married a white woman and raised his son in Newmarket.

The son they had just elected was twenty-two years old. Sent away to an academy in Byfield, Massachusetts, he had come home lettered and careful, and he taught the town’s children in the schoolhouse. In 1768 the same town chose him constable, and that choice began something that lasted.

Year after year the voters returned him to office. Selectman, assessor, auditor, scrivener, and, in 1805, justice of the peace. Nearly every year until his death, one duty or another rested in his hands, and the town trusted him to keep its accounts and its peace.

When the alarm came, he rode. Serving as town messenger for the Committee of Safety, in December of 1774 he carried word to Exeter while the countryside stirred over the king’s powder at Fort William and Mary. Later he signed the Association Test, and he rode again as a private in a company of light horse bound toward Saratoga.

Some historians call him the first Black man elected to public office in America. Others set an earlier name before his. What no one disputes is that a New England town, in 1768, wrote a Black schoolmaster’s name onto its rolls and left it there for half a century.

For fifty years the town knew exactly who he was. Then the country let him slip out of its memory, and the record lay quiet in the ground with him until other hands opened it again.

His name is Wentworth Cheswell.
Now we know em.
Pass it on.

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