Lucy Terry Prince,
(1733–1821)
Lucy Terry’s poem, “Bars Fight”, composed in 1746 and published in 1855, is considered the oldest known work of literature by an African American.
She was an American settler and poet. Kidnapped in Africa and enslaved, she was taken to Rhode Island, America. Her future husband purchased her freedom before their marriage in 1756. She composed a ballad poem, “Bars Fight”, about a 1746 incident. It was preserved orally until it was published in 1855. It is considered the oldest known work of literature by an African American.
Terry was born in 1733 in Africa. She was abducted from there and sold into slavery in Rhode Island as an infant in about 1733. She spent time in Rhode Island until the age of five when she was sold to Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield, Massachusetts, who allowed the five-year-old Terry to be baptized into the Christian faith during the Great Awakening.
A successful free Black man named Abijah Prince from Curaçao purchased her freedom and married her in 1756. They were married by Justice of the Peace Elijah Williams. In 1764, the Princes settled in Guilford, Vermont, where all six of their children were born. Their names were Tatnai, Cesar, Drucilla, Durexa, Abijah Jr., and Festus. Cesar fought in the Revolutionary War.
Lucy was well known for her speaking ability — according to her 1821 obituary, “the fluency of her speech captivated all around her” — and she used her skills a number of times in defense of her family’s rights and property. In 1785, when a neighboring white family threatened the Princes, Lucy and Abijah appealed to the governor and his Council for protection. The Council ordered Guilford’s selectmen to defend them. Lucy argued unsuccessfully before the trustees of Williams College for the admission of one of her sons, skillfully citing scripture and law “in an earnest and eloquent speech of three hours.”
Seekers of Justice to Protect Land Rights
The Princes valued the importance of land ownership and used the law to protect their rights. Upon settling in Guilford, they faced ongoing harassment that resulted in damaged property and crops. In 1785, Lucy brought the case before the Governor and Council, winning her protection request against Colonel Eli Bronson who attempted to steal land owned by the Princes.
In 1803, Lucy’s sons brought a land rights case against Eli Brownson, which went as far as the Vermont Supreme Court. Lucy argued against two of the leading lawyers in the state, one of whom later became chief justice of Vermont — and she won. Samuel Chase, the presiding justice of the Court, said that her argument was better than he’d heard from any Vermont lawyer.She was awarded $200 but not the land in Sunderland. As the widow of an original proprietor, she continued to claim her rights to the land. By 1806, the Princes were able to settle on lots the Sunderland Selectmen purchased from Brownson to truly settle this debt.
Poetry
Terry’s work “Bars Fight”, composed in 1746, is a ballad about an attack upon two white families by Native Americans on August 25, 1746. This poem is part of the American captivity narrative genre. The attack occurred in an area of Deerfield called “The Bars”, which was a colonial term for a meadow. The poem was preserved orally until it was finally published in 1855 in Josiah Gilbert Holland’s History of Western Massachusetts. This poem is the only surviving work by Terry, although she was famous in her own time for her “rhymes and stories”.
Terry’s work is considered the oldest known work of literature by an African American, though Phillis Wheatley’s, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, printed in 1773, was the first published work by an African American.
Prince’s husband died in 1794. By 1803, Prince had moved to nearby Sunderland. She rode on horseback annually to visit her husband’s grave until she died in 1821at the age of 97.
The Lucy poems are a series of five poems composed by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) between 1798 and 1801.
The following obituary was published for Prince on Tuesday, August 21, 1821, in the Greenfield, Massachusetts, paper The Franklin Herald:
At Sunderland, Vt., on July 11th, Mrs. Lucy Prince, a woman of color. From the church and town records where she formerly resided, we learn that she was brought from Bristol, Rhode Island, to Deerfield, Mass. when she was four years old, by Mr. Ebenezer Wells: that she was 97 years of age—that she was early devoted to God in Baptism: that she united with the church in Deerfield in 1744—Was married to Abijah Prince, May 17th, 1756, by Elijah Williams, Esq. and that she had been the mother of six children. In this remarkable woman, there was an assemblage of qualities rarely to be found among her sex. Her volubility was exceeded by none, and in general, the fluency of her speech was not destitute of instruction and education. She was much respected among her acquaintances, who treated her with a degree of deference
The Prince family was remembered in the Guilford community for many decades after their death. John Noyes’ daughter was once startled off a horse by the sight of their ghosts, and ghost sightings on their farm have been reported even into the 21st century.: 166
Historical record
Only a single letter in Abijah’s hand and none in Lucy’s has survived. Because the shopkeeper’s records show that the household sometimes purchased paper, it is suspected that Lucy wrote other literary works which were eventually lost in the course of the attacks on her household and declining fortune.