Hagar was enslaved by Eleazar Wheelock and three other men in Connecticut
Hagar was a woman enslaved by Eleazar Wheelock and three other men, who all jointly owned a property in Judea (now Washington), in the Colony of Connecticut. Hagar was, for reasons unknown, incapacitated and in need of constant care. (In keeping with the common practice of naming enslaved persons after biblical figures, Hagar was named for an Egyptian slave in the Book of Genesis.) Her caretaker was another enslaved person named Nando. At one point, Wheelock refers to Hagar as Nando’s wife, but the relationship between the two is actually unclear, and Nando consistently demanded and received compensation for her care.
The first known reference to Hagar, in a letter from December of 1767, presents her in terms only of the logistics and cost of her upkeep. Over the course of a written record that spans 1767 to 1775—and describes the various scenarios, refused by Nando, to relieve Hagar’s enslavers of the cost of caring for her—these terms remain the only framework within which Hagar’s life is recorded.
Whether Hagar was an unloved burden to Nando and their enslavers, a bargaining chip used by Nando to gain money and agency, or whether Nando exercised what control he could to keep Hagar and himself together and cared for, is unknown. What’s clear is that Hagar herself had little-to-no say over her own destiny, and her ultimate fate remains unknown.