Joseph Dickinson was (1686-1755) born in Hatfield, Massachusetts, to Samuel and Martha (Bridgeman) Dickinson. Joseph moved to Sunderland, Massachusetts in 1720. He had no wife or children. (John Montague Smith, History of the Town of Sunderland (Greenfield, MA: E.A. Hall), p. 161.) Joseph Dickinson died in Sunderland in 1755.
Joseph Dickinson enslaved a man called Napthalo (c1710-1800), (Naptha, Napthali), later referred to as "Napthalo Freeman" in John Smith's town history of Sunderland published in 1899. Smith's history excerpted Phinehas Field's 1879 essay, "Slavery in Massachusetts" in the P.V.M.A. Proceedings to share information relating to Napthalo. According to Field, Napthalo was listed as a member of the Sunderland church in 1744. (Phinehas Field, "Slavery in New England," published in History and Proceedings of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Vol. 1, p. 484.)
In 1783, 28 years after Joseph Dickinson's death, the town of Sunderland denied responsibility for supporting the now-elderly Naptho, arguing that the financial burden of his care should fall to his enslaver's heirs, who resided in Northfield, Massachusetts. Later that same year, Napthalo initiated a suit against the town to provide poor relief as a settled resident of the town as required under Massachusetts laws. Ten years later, Sunderland residents voted to pay two residents to transport Napthalo to Northfield where he spent the remainder of his life in the home of Joseph Dickinson's nephew Moses Field until his death in 1800, aged about 90. It was Moses Field's grandson, Phinehas, who would write "Slavery in New England" in 1879.
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