This document serves as a receipt for the sale of Phebey, an enslaved child, by Josiah Richardson of Sudbury to Elizabeth Balch, a Framingham widow. It is the most complete document relating to the sale of an enslaved person in our collection.
Phebey was not an anomaly in Framingham. A 1760 tax accounting identifies seven “slaves for life” in town, but there had once been far more. Most prominent households in town counted at least one enslaved person within their number.
Phebey, who was just two years old at the time of sale, was sold to the Widow Balch for 1 pound, 6 shillings, and 8 pence, the modern equivalent of roughly $370. This document forces us to face the ways in which the white people of Framingham owed their success to the subjugation and dehumanization of people of African descent, and to consider the echoes of this practice that still exist today. Continued records of Phebey’s life are lost, but if she lived to see slavery outlawed in the state in 1783, she would have been 21 years old.
Framingham’s Pick
A bill of sale for a two-year-old child is horrifying and disgusting. I look forward to the day we acknowledge and repent our racist past and present, from slavery in Framingham to unequal discipline in schools. Racism and hatred are ugly and disturbing, and justice is essential. No justice, no peace.