Photo credit: Gore Place Society
Who was Robert Roberts?
Author, Social Activist, and Domestic Servant
Robert Roberts is best known as a highly accomplished manservant and the author of The House Servant’s Directory, published in 1827, while he worked as a domestic servant for Christopher and Rebecca Gore. The book’s publication made Roberts one of the first Black authors to be commercially published in America.
Born about 1780 in Charleston, South Carolina, Roberts made Boston his home from 1805 until his death in 1860. A leader in Boston’s free Black community, centered in the city’s West End, Roberts was active in its civic and religious life. Inspired by American principles of freedom and equality, and by his deeply held religious beliefs, Roberts worked for the end of slavery and for full citizenship and equal rights for free Black people. He was active in the anti-colonization movement, the National Free Colored People’s Convention movement, and in the cause of abolition, including as a longtime member of the American Anti-slavery Society.
A businessman with an entrepreneurial spirit, Roberts worked as a domestic servant, a trader, and a stevedore. He invested in real estate, owning several properties in Boston’s West End, including his home and rental properties.
His story is one of self-making, of perseverance, and optimism in the face of obstacles. He took action to improve his life and his community. His model of activism flowed from deeply held values and personal choices about how to make a difference. His personal history engages us in themes of citizenship, civic action, self-determination, and ongoing efforts to achieve the American ideals of freedom and equality.
Doing Good with the House Servant’s Directory—Roberts’ Vision
Roberts wrote that he hoped his Directory “would do the good that I intended.” What was this good? The Directory is a how-to manual for young men working as manservants in elite households. In Roberts’ time, many young men had few job opportunities other than undesirable low-paid servant positions. Young men in the free Black community, where prejudice limited opportunity, often went into service. Roberts put his mastery of the profession to work, writing a manual to prepare these untrained young men for a high-level servant position, a “good position,” he wrote, with “comforts, privileges, and pleasures.”
Title page from 1827 first edition of Roberts’ Directory, on exhibit and
owned by Gore Place.
Roberts hoped to do even more with his book. He sought to elevate the servant and the servant job in the eyes of society by showing the skills, intelligence, and even artistry, the work required. Doing so might undermine the discrimination against servants, especially young men of color, and build servant confidence and self-respect. Seeking to do good, Roberts made powerful choices about using his personal strengths to act on his beliefs and make a difference for others. His model can offer inspiration for our own personal civil participation today.
The Head Manservant’s Chamber at Gore Place. Photo credit: Gore Place Society
Gore Place and Robert Roberts
Gore Place has undertaken a multiple-year project to research and reinterpret Roberts’ life and work. We are drawing on a rare opportunity: to have available for a domestic servant and Black activist—as Gore Place does with Roberts— the spaces where he lived and worked, objects with which he worked, and the text in which he wrote about it all. With new research and scholarship, our Roberts project also moves beyond servitude and servant spaces to understand Roberts’ life, work, and activism in the context of Boston’s free Black community struggling to claim full citizenship in the face of increasing prejudice and discrimination.
With the generous support of a Mass Humanities Project Grant, Gore Place developed a new program, which premiered in 2020, entitled “To Do the Good I Expected: Robert Roberts — Domestic Servant, Author, Abolitionist.” Through additional new programs, talks and published articles, and a planned republication of the Directory with a new Foreword, we continue to uncover and share his remarkable story.
On display at Gore Place, a reproduction manservant’s suit like that described by Robert Roberts. Photo credit: Gore Place Society
For more on the Robert Roberts Project, see:
“Robert Roberts’ Quiet Activism,” The Agrarian, Newsletter of Gore Place, Spring 2020
“Finding Robert Roberts,” The Agrarian, Newsletter of the Gore Place, Fall 2019
“A New Portrait of Robert Roberts, “ The Agrarian, The Newsletter of Gore Place, Spring 2019
To learn more about the history of Gore Place, click the links below:
GORE PLACE TIMELINE
LEARN ABOUT OUR BUILDINGS
WHO WERE THE GORES?
LEARN ABOUT THE FARM
