New Haven’s Final Slave Auction Remembered

On March 8, 1825, Lucy and Lois Tritton were paraded through the streets of New Haven, led by a drummer shouting ​“slaves for sale.”

The mother and daughter were then marched, likely with potential buyers following, the few blocks to the Green. There, by the old sign post near Chapel and Church streets, they were auctioned off for $10 — marking the last slave sale recorded in New Haven, and in the state of Connecticut.

That doleful and spirit-crushing 200th anniversary was marked Sunday afternoon at Trinity Church on the Green by a somber ​“service of lamentation and healing.”

The event drew nearly a hundred people to sing, pray, hear the Trittons’ tale of servitude and perseverance, and engage in a memorial candle-lighting for the victims of the slave trade as well as other rituals of remembrance, spiritual healing, and reconciliation.

“I feel like I’m channeling them,” said Jill Snyder, the retired insurance executive and self-taught family historical researcher and storyteller, who was the lead organizer of Sunday’s event. She first came across the Trittons when she was writing a history of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in the 1990s.

That church, with a large congregation of Afro-Caribbean origin, was established 20 years after the Trittons were purchased by an abolitionist, Anthony Sanford. He summarily freed them although, according to the sources, they appeared to have had to work in an indentured capacity for years to repay the debt occasioned by their purchase.

Still, Trinity on the Green — abolition or not — remained segregated for worship, so in 1844, a group of its ​“colored” congregants had had it, and broke away to build their own church, St. Luke’s Episcopal, now on Whalley Avenue, with a grandfather of W.E.B. Du Bois being one of the original founders.

Sunday’s moving service was filled with a different kind of drumming: Music, rhythms, and rituals of African religion, which would have been part of Lucy and Lois’s heritage, and was intended as a reminder of New England’s complicity in slavery, said the organizers.

It was also, said the main speaker, Dr. Rev. Leon Bailey, to serve as an attempt at reconciliation and healing — not only between these two churches, but over the larger legacies of slavery, including levels of deep if often unacknowledged trauma, for white people as well as Black, that have percolated down through the generations.

The Trittons’ saga took this family from the shores of Africa to the Danish-owned island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean, and then to London, England, to Nova Scotia in Canada, to the auction block on the Green and, finally, to where Lois is buried at the Blake Street Cemetery. That story was limned in outline by young readers between musical offerings provided by the Salt and Pepper Gospel Singers.

It illuminates the whole Atlantic world of the 18th and 19th centuries, said Snyder, and the economic system that was linked by the slave trade and the evolution of that deadly ​“institution.”

One example: Lucy and Lois’s initial purchaser, a ​“General” Tritton, who turned out to be an odd general as he was a sea captain, died when his ship was lost in a storm at sea. When his estate was being settled, the will, said Snyder, included reference to a Black girl who was given dollar value. 

“That dollar value illuminates the meaning of ​‘chattel,’ as in chattel slavery, because chattel was the technical and comparatively new term for movable property,” she said.

“Lucy was listed in the estate with furniture and tea cups. This is very different from ancient slavery, in part because modern accounting practices were developing at the same time as the slave trade,” Snyder added.

Tritton’s widow, Sara, needed money after her husband’s death and took out a loan using Lucy and Lois as collateral. When Sara Tritton couldn’t repay the loan, the sheriff stepped in and it was he who arranged the auction on the Green to generate funds to repay the debt.

The sad irony apparently is that Lois Tritton (her mother Lucy seems to have disappeared from the findable record) continued to work for years for the man who bought her, Sanford, even though he ceremonially issued ​“certificates of freedom.” 

In her long life Lois Tritton gave a number of interviews, in part because she was among the last living former slaves and a kind of historical celebrity.

She said, according to Snyder’s research, that after the apparent moment of freedom, she had to work additionally hard to accumulate $600, which Sanford still required of her to formally buy her freedom.

All this even though there was the Gradual Abolition Law and others on the books by 1784 that female slaves attaining the age of 21 had to be freed outright, and Lois was older than that at the time of her auction.

Snyder observed in her formal remarks to the congregation that she broke into tears researching her own family’s history, which she traced back to a run-away slave named Henry Jones. His escape as a young child, she related, has motivated her research and storytelling since.

“My hope is,” she concluded her remarks to the congregation, ​“that we’ll all take part in the healing.” 

At the midway point in the service, organizers inserted a 15-minute interval when you could, for example, write a thought of something left undone on a piece of paper or, if the spirit so moved, a confession; and then place it in a bowl of water at the back of the church. Attendees could also light a candle in Trinity’s columbarium.

The columbarium is the small rear section of the church where today the ashes of cremated congregants lie. However, at the time of the Trittons, that was the small segregated area where, long after the abolition of the slave trade, Black members of the church were required to sit, before leaving to found St. Luke’s in 1844.

On Sunday, before the concluding readings and psalms resumed, a long queue of people lined up to enter the columbarium.

“In the 1960s,” Snyder said, ​“New Haven was a ​‘model city.’ Today my hope is we can make New Haven a model city for healing and racial reconciliation.”

Both churches have had a reconciliation project team that has been meeting for the last five years, said the Rev. Heidi Thorsen, the assistant rector of Trinity on the Green. They celebrate Juneteenth and other important occasions together. 

On Saturday, preceding Sunday’s service, the churches, with other groups, organized a walking tour of the Blake Street Cemetery that focused on the grave of Lois Tritton, who was buried there at age 95 in 1894. 

A next step in the process, Thorsen said, is for the churches’ reconciliation group and the community to come together to lead a campaign to raise funds for a headstone for Lois Tritton’s grave.

The committee members from both churches continue to meet monthly, said Thorsen, ​“but we can’t do our healing, our coming to awareness around the wounds, as a group; it’s only in relation, one-on-one, with each other.”

See below for other recent articles about the Green.

• View From The Hub: Concerns & Satisfaction
• The Once & Future Green: A Timeline
• Green Conservancy Debuts
• Town Green: Make That Doughnut A Danish
• Green Proprietor: ​“We Are Not The Committee Of ​‘No’ ”
• City Historian: The Green’s Constant Is Change, & ​“Public Good”
• Prof/Filmmaker: The Green’s Not Just About Fun
• Green Remakers Face Grave Question
• Big Changes Eyed For The Green