We sometimes think of slavery in the pre-emancipation U.S. republic as not only the "peculiar institution" of the southern states, but something foreign to the northern part of the Union. Not so, according to Western Washington professor Jared Ross Hardesty's Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England. This slim book provides a solid, workmanlike survey of slavery's features, development, and eventual dispatch among my Massachusetts ancestors.
Puritan colonists were escaping what they experienced as an inadequately godly home country. They sought purity. Their peculiar form of slavery began in that context. For the English men and -women who settled New England, slavery was something both foreign and familiar. While they would not have encountered many enslaved Africans in England before sojourning across the Atlantic, they would have been aware of various forms of captivity and bondage from around the globe. As such, the first generation of New Englanders had a relatively ambivalent relationship with slavery. On the one hand, slavery was always on the table and a tool of colonization. There was, however, a deep-seated fear about the presence of so many enslaved "strangers" present in their colonial experiment in the North American wilderness. ...
There were never huge numbers of enslaved persons in New England. This was a land of small farms and bustling towns where artisans thrived. But the port cities -- especially those of Newport and Providence, Rhode Island -- were central to the slave trade in English-speaking America. New Englanders conquered the Native people of their area and shipped the captives to the West Indies. The West Indies traded Africans who had been stolen from West Africa and enslaved on Caribbean plantations. Some enslaved people who ended up in New England were born in Jamaica and on other islands.
New Englanders valued slaves for their labor.
Whether African or Indian, perceived to be part of the community or not, enslaved men and women were in New England to work. By 1700, slaves could be found working in nearly every sector of the New England economy. They provided labor on farms across the region, helping to clear forests, build fences, and plant crops. In that sense, they were both tools of imperialism and victims of it. Likewise, as the port cities of New England established commercial connections across the Atlantic world, and their economies became ever more complex, bondsmen and -women found themselves at work providing supplemental and skilled labor. As the seventeenth century progressed, an observer would have found increasing numbers of slaves working in shipyards, brick kilns, and artisanal workshops of places like Boston, Salem, New London, Hartford, Newport, and Providence. Meanwhile, as the region's wealth increased through commerce, many leading families purchased enslaved women to work in their kitchens, provide household labor such as sewing and weaving, and help raise children.In the usually legalistic environment of the colonies, the status of these bound foreigners long remained not fully articulated. Colonial laws "both permitted and prohibited slavery." Hardesty concludes that, without completely defining the practice even among the colonizers themselves, New England slavery can be characterized as "equivocal, racialized, and legal."
This was a newly founded society that believed absolutely in god-given hierarchies whose preservation determined the good life. Even though these colonists had rather bravely ventured across a daunting ocean into an unknown land, they thought their settlements only thrived when their inhabitants obeyed the dictates of properly constituted authority. People were born into roles and were to stay in their places. So when they took up slavery, they folded the enslaved people into their accustomed pattern, much like dependent children and other servants.
In this world structured by ties of dependency, slavery made sense. Laws and institutions supporting bondage were already in place and able to accommodate another form of oppression. The men and women trafficked to the region would have encountered colonies and peoples inculcated in this culture. New England colonists integrated slaves into their patriarchal families. As legal dependents in New England households, enslaved men and women were subject to the same authority and disciplinary regimen as other bound laborers. Like families, authorities envisioned slaves as part of the social hierarchy, although their blackness confined them to the bottom of the "great chain."
For enslaved men and women, patriarchal slavery was double-edged sword. On the one hand, they were are the bottom of the social hierarchy, yet the bottom was still a place in society. As such, they access to many of New England's institutions such as the region's many churches and the legal system. Likewise, they could use the language of dependence to leverage concessions from both masters and society at large.
... Unlike plantation colonies in the American South and Caribbean, the New England colonies did not create special slave courts or bar people of color from testifying in court. ... Legal personhood... came with two additional benefits for enslaved New Englanders, which further differentiated the region from other parts of the Americas. ... [M]asters did not have the right to the lives of their slaves, so masters could not kill their slaves. If an enslaver murdered his or her bondsman or -woman, the enslaver faced criminal charges in the way one did for murdering a free person. Likewise, enslaved people could buy, sell, and own property. ...
How did slavery end in New England? In Hardesty's telling, essentially with the growth of ideas of equality among the owner population. In the time of the American revolution, slavery became untenable. The relative legal personhood of slaves, the fact that by the 1740s there was an ever more sizable group of literate Africans, often freed from bondage through their own skilled labor, made continuation of human slavery impossible.
After the United States secured its independence in 1783, the new nation had to face the question of slavery. How could a nation dedicated to liberty and equality condone slavery? New Englanders had to confront this question with even greater concern. The region was the epicenter of revolutionary activity, and the hypocrisy of owning slaves was even more glaring. Disproportionately, enslaved men from New England served in the military. By the 1770s, the region was a hotbed of anti-slavery activity and New Englanders of color vociferously demanded their rights. It should come as no surprise, then, that in the two decades following the Declaration of Independence, New Englanders, black and white alike, systematically destroyed slavery.
The impulse for abolition came from above from revolutionary governments and below from the enslaved themselves.
The founding of a new nation -- however equivocally conceived in liberty -- changed possibilities for both whites and Blacks, both for both free men and enslaved people. Change does happen.
Afterthoughts: The post will likely conclude my personal 1620 project -- explorations in the history of my ancestors who arrived in Massachusetts 400 years ago. The little work I've done on this has been a good reminder to me that people in other times and places were very different from me and my contemporaries. And that I'll never really "get it." I find my puritan ancestors pretty repulsive. I'm not sure what that means -- perhaps nothing at all. Humans do our best; times and seasons come and go. Other 1620 posts:
2 comments:
Doubtless people in different times and places are different. But they had many of the same feelings as people now, and people yet to be.
This looks interesting. The scholarship on Puritanism continues.
Brandon: you are right -- that book looks interesting. Maybe if I go back to reading in this arena ...
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