Who was Agrippa Hull?

Answer 1

Agrippa Hull (1759-1848), was born a free African American in Northampton, Massachusetts, of unknown parentage. He was taken to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, at the age of six by Joab, an African-American former servant to Jonathan Edwards. When Hull was eighteen years old, in May 1777, he enlisted to fight in the revolutionary war as a private in General John Paterson's brigade of the First Massachusetts Regiment of the Continental army. Free blacks had been allowed by the Continental Congress to enlist in the army since January 1776, but each unit commander determined whether or not he would accept African-American recruits. Hull served as General Paterson's personal orderly for two years. He then attended General Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the Polish volunteer in the American cause, as an orderly for four years and two months. As an orderly, Hull performed a variety of personal and military duties for the generals, including serving as a surgeon's assistant in South Carolina in 1781. Hull was with Kosciuszko during battles from Saratoga, New York, through the campaign in the South and served with the general until the end of the war. When the Continental army was disbanded at West Point in the summer of 1783, Hull received a discharge signed personally by George Washington, the commander in chief, a document he prized for the rest of his life. After the war, Hull returned to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he eventually owned a small plot of land. As was the case for many free African Americans in New England after the Revolution, Hull was on the economic margins of society, and he eked out a living from a variety of sources. He farmed his land, performed odd jobs around Stockbridge, and occasionally served as a butler and a major-domo to the local gentry. However marginal his economic position, Hull was very much a part of town life in Stockbridge. The prominent Stockbridge resident and novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick, whose family was friendly to Hull, called him "a sort of Sancho Panza in the village." He acquired a reputation for understanding the supernatural and was considered something of the town "seer." Hull married twice and adopted at least one child. His first wife (whom he married sometime before 1790) was Jane Darby, a fugitive slave from Lenox, Massachusetts, whose master, Mr. Ingersoll, tried to seize her after she had married Hull. After Jane Darby died, Hull married Margaret Timbroke. Sometime after the revolutionary war, Hull adopted the daughter of Mary Gunn, a runaway slave from New York. Like most revolutionary war veterans, Hull was proud of his military service. When General Kosciuszko returned to the United States in 1797 after fighting for Polish independence, Hull traveled to New York to meet with him, and during this trip Kosciuszko directed the Ohio land granted to him by Congress to be sold to pay for a school for African Americans. One of only several dozen African Americans who applied for revolutionary war pensions, Hull received a veteran's pension from Congress, which he sought to have mailed to his home in 1828. Hull enlisted the help of Charles Sedgwick, who wrote to Acting Secretary of State Richard Rush for assistance with Hull's claim. Hull enclosed his discharge paper as proof of his service but worried that it might not be returned. Slavery was outlawed by 1790 under the Massachusetts state constitution, but racial divisions in society persisted. Within a restrictive system of racial hierarchy, Hull used his good standing in the community of Stockbridge and his good humor to question the limitations of race. The town historian, Electa F. Jones, who knew Hull, recorded several anecdotes that reveal Hull's racial attitudes. For example, on one occasion he proclaimed: "It is not the cover of the book, but what the book contains. . . . Many a good book has dark covers." That Hull was a respected member of Stockbridge society by the end of his life in the 1840s is evidenced by two main facts. The historian Francis Parkman recorded his impressions of Hull after a visit to Stockbridge in 1844, declaring that Hull "looked on himself as father to all Stockbridge." Hull's respectability was also portrayed visually in 1844 in a daguerreotype photograph by Anson Clark, which was copied as an oil painting in 1848. The photograph and painting present an image of Hull as a distinguished, formally dressed old man staring out resolutely and grasping a cane firmly in his left hand. The oil painting of Hull, one of the few formal portraits of an African-American revolutionary war veteran, hangs in the Stockbridge Public Library. Hull died in Stockbridge. His position in the Continental army was more distinguished than that of most African Americans who were allowed to serve, and as the orderly to generals, he witnessed some of the most important fighting of the war. Hull carried with him for the rest of his life the legacy of his important service to the revolutionary cause, which enhanced his pride as a free African-American man. He stands as an extraordinary example of early African-American military service and as a typical example of the free African Americans who carved a place for themselves in New England society between the revolutionary war and the Civil War.

Answer 2

Agrippa Hull died in 1848.