Read History with Jack 48 - The Development of Slavery in New England, 1637 to 1700

Introduction

In 1614, Thomas Hunt embarked on a voyage that would change the course of history for the Native inhabitants of North America. Hunt, an English explorer and trader, set sail to the shores of present-day Massachusetts, New England, with the intent of establishing trade relations with the Indigenous tribes. However, his true intentions proved to be far from honorable. Taking advantage of the trust and hospitality shown by the Wampanoag, Hunt betrayed their goodwill and captured over twenty individuals, including Tisquantum, a key figure in the future colonization of Plymouth, and sold them into slavery in Spain.[1] This act of treachery would have devastating consequences for the Wampanoag, as it not only disrupted their way of life but also set the stage for future conflicts between the Indigenous people and European colonizers. Hunt's story serves as a stark reminder of the exploitation and violence faced by Native American communities during the early encounters with English settlers and colonists in New England.

Although the English began their colonial endeavors much later than the Spanish or the Dutch did, they were quick to ramp up their efforts. Prominent English trading companies, such as the Muscovy Company and the English East India Company, were already established by 1600.[2] By the early 1610s, with the opening of the Americas to England, these companies could start to look West, tapping into the wealth of the Americas. Starting in 1620, Englishmen known as the Pilgrims and Puritans, who desired a more thorough reformation of the English Church, began to arrive in New England. They established colonies in Massachusetts (1630), Connecticut (1636), Rhode Island (1636), and New Haven (1638). New England quickly became a prospering region colonized by the English.[3]

In the view of many contemporary Americans, New England was a poetic land with bountiful crops, honest workers, and fervent religiosity. The term “Puritans” itself, which historians use to describe New England colonists, refers to a group of Protestants aiming to reform a Church of England that they claimed was plagued by the vestiges of Roman Catholicism.[4] But history tells a more complicated story, one that illustrates how the pious devotion of these Puritans went hand-in-hand with their real desires for wealth and how religious devotion coexisted with economic profits. The narrative of slavery in the United States must expand beyond Virginia to include how English colonists interacted with Natives and Africans in the New England colonies during the seventeenth century. This region and period witnessed humanitarian atrocities and set the tone for the tragedy that would occur throughout America in the next two centuries.

From the start, English colonists had a double-edged relationship with the Natives in the region. On the one hand, the English traded with the Native communities peacefully and initially refrained from forcefully invading into their territory. On the other hand, as the colonies grew, it was increasingly difficult for the English to coexist with the Natives.[5] Indeed, within a decade of the founding of Boston (1630), colonists waged a war against one tribe, the Pequots, and enslaved hundreds of them.

This essay will examine the relationship between the English colonists and the other peoples in New England during the seventeenth century, with special attention to the rise of slavery. Specifically, as conflicts ultimately broke out in the 1630s and the Puritans chose to enslave the local population following these conflicts, copying their European rivals, the most pertinent question is: “In what manner did slavery grow in New England after the 1630s?” This question considers not only the enslavement of Native peoples but also that of Africans, another significant aspect of New England slavery in the seventeenth century.[6]

Multiple contemporary scholars have done outstanding research in this field. Wendy Warren, a historian at Princeton University, wrote a book titled New England Bound that details the development of chattel slavery and colonization in New England.[7] Other scholars, such as Margaret Newell, Alan Gallay, and Linford Fisher, have focused on specific cross-sections of this period: the Pequot War and King Philip’s War being two notable examples.[8] This essay will particularly investigate the development of slavery in New England from the late 1630s to 1700 and argue for the role that slavery played in shaping the relationship between the Puritans, Native communities, and Africans.

From the end of the Pequot War, the first war launched by the Puritans against Natives in 1637, to 1700, the development of slavery in New England colonies was complex. Following the end of the Pequot War, Native enslavement became widespread, causing the Puritans to respond with a series of laws over time. These laws provided legitimacy for slavery. Beginning in the 1638, New England colonists started to participate in African slavery, which initially stemmed from a trading of Natives and Africans. Gradually, colonists employed more Africans in the tobacco and sugar economies in the West Indies. Following King Philip’s War in 1676, New England witnessed another sharp rise of Native slavery, but it was soon outmatched by the rapid expansion of African slavery, as Africans, in the long-term, proved to be cheaper and more competent laborers. Taken together, this history demonstrates that although the laws in New England were often uneven and unclear, slavery was present throughout in various forms and continued to grow throughout the century, thereby playing a formative role in the development of American slavery.

A Background of Early Modern Slavery

       To understand the development of slavery in New England colonies, one must be aware of a wider narrative of slavery during the colonial period in North America and the Caribbean. Such a narrative begins with the earliest encounters between Europeans and local Indigenous populations. In 1492, as the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus successfully landed on American shores, a new era marked by widespread exploration and colonization of North America commenced.[9] Upon the first landing on the continent, Columbus noted the existence of Native peoples. During his voyages across different Caribbean islands and along the American coasts, Columbus frequently encountered locals he called “Indians.”[10] Even during his first voyage, Columbus and his crew thought about subjugating the local population. For example, in his diary, he recorded an encounter with the Lucayan, a group of Natives living in the modern-day Bahamas, writing, “With [fifty] men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them.”[11] His crew subsequently captured dozens of Native inhabitants on various islands, bringing them back to Spain to the courts of King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I.[12] Columbus’s voyages to the American shores paved the way for Spain to launch the first European effort to conquer and colonize vast swathes of North American soil and the surrounding Caribbean islands.

The Spanish quickly followed up on Columbus’s trips by sending organized armies to the Americas. In 1517, Hernán Cortés notoriously led an army of one hundred conquistadores to capture Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Native Aztec Empire.[13] An ensuing wave of Spanish troops with various Native allies completely decimated the Aztecs. Cortés enslaved many of the Aztecs, including even young Mayan women that his men acquired as gifts from an Aztec chief.[14] Similar scenes also occurred in the Caribbean, as the Spanish established colonies in modern-day Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba, and sent many of the Natives to labor in the silver mines in South America. The conquering of the Aztec Empire and a range of Caribbean islands by around 1520 set the scene for future, more massive European invasions into the Americas and Caribbean.

The Spanish became the first Europeans to enslave Native populations in North America. One would expect that the Spanish would pass laws that would promote the growth of Native slavery.[15] That was, however, not the case. Laws such as the Laws of Burgos of 1512 and the New Laws of 1542 forbade the enslavement of Native Americans because Queen Isabella viewed the Natives as rightful subjects of the Spanish monarchy.[16] Nevertheless, the Spanish empire did simultaneously start to enslave people of African origin, laying the cornerstones for the trans-Atlantic slave trade connecting Africa with the Caribbean and American colonies. In 1501, Spanish colonists on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola imported enslaved Africans from the Iberian Peninsula to the colony.[17] By approximately 1525, African slavery had gradually spread through the Caribbean. In 1526, the first case of African slavery on the North American mainland occurred after the Spanish explorer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón built the San Miguel de Gualdape colony on the current coast of Georgia to possess a firmer grip on North America.[18] The colony’s construction involved a large number of African slaves. A greater group of enslaved Africans landed in Spanish Florida in 1539 with the Spaniard Hernando de Soto, and in 1565, when Spanish forces founded the central colony of St. Augustine in present-day Florida.[19] In the early-to-mid sixteenth century, Spain was the most prominent European empire that initiated and developed a tradition of slavery in North America and the Caribbean.[20]

Although Spain’s actions heralded the coming of an era marked by continuous slavery, it was not the only European nation to build oversea empires. The English Empire, a rising power in Europe during the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, established colonies in North America and the Caribbean, enslaving local populations along the process.[21] The seventeenth century witnessed a sometimes direct competition between the English and Spanish over colonial resources in the Americas.[22] Following the establishment of their own North American colonies, starting with Jamestown in Virginia in 1607, English forces actively engaged in both Native and African slavery. For example, in 1614, Captain Thomas Hunt captured at least twenty Native Wampanoags from Patuxet and sold them as slaves to Spain.[23] In 1619, just five years after this first incident of English enslavement of Natives, approximately twenty African male and female captives arrived at the colony of Jamestown, Virginia from the kingdom of Ndongo in modern-day Angola. The English colonists made them work the tobacco fields in Jamestown.[24]

The 1610s to the early 1630s should be viewed as a formative period when the Puritans were still focused on exploring the North American continent, though it was clear that they set themselves on a course of continuous territorial expansion. As more ships arrived from England, some form of conflict between the Puritans and Natives was inevitable, as the former group must take up more residential land to accommodate the rising population.[25] To effectively control Native land and resources, New England colonists, being a pioneering force for the English, quickly adapted to slavery as part of their economy and society, although they were almost a century later to this enterprise than the Spanish or Dutch colonists. Although it might be surprising to see the Puritans so quickly embrace slavery, the English were already deeply invested in slavery by the 1630s. As Wendy Warren points out, “One historian has estimated that at times in the first decades of the seventeenth century as much as one-third of the members of England’s House of Commons were somehow implicated in colonial endeavors. English traders and merchants, along with the crown, showed intense interest in the use of slaves to further their respective goals.”[26] As many Englishmen were already intent on finding opportunities to conduct slavery and probably familiar with enslavement practices, with the onset of New England colonization in the 1620s, they could fully endeavor to construct a society in which slavery played a major part. As a result, in the New England colonies of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Plymouth, and New Hampshire, in the late 1630s, there were escalated conflicts against the Natives. Such events and the often-following acts of enslavement heralded an era of brutal colonialism and slavery.[27]

The Pequot War and the Beginning of Systematic Slavery in New England

Beginning in mid-1630s, New England Puritan colonists developed an increasingly belligerent attitude towards some local Native groups.[28] In particular, the Pequot people seemed to be a bothersome force for the English, as they had an aggressive stance on trade. They subjugated neighboring tribes to control the flow of wampum and fur, which were commodities of decent value in the region.[29] In 1634, the murder of an English trader, John Stone, by the Pequots on the Connecticut River made the Puritans realize that they could not afford to let any English deaths at the hands of a Native go unpunished. As a result, the English became more aggressive in diplomatic conversations with the Pequots, and demanded the tribe to hand over the killers of Stone. In July 1636, the body of another trader, John Oldham, was discovered on a ship off Block Island (belonging to modern-day Rhode Island). This event triggered the Pequot War.[30]

In late August 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Colony dispatched a group of ninety soldiers led by Colonel John Endecott to Pequot territory near Block Island to avenge the traders’ demise. As the English sailed along the Thames River, they burned numerous villages and cornfields, prompting the Pequots to lay siege to the fort at Saybrook as retaliation.[31] The siege destroyed English provisions and dragged the war into 1637. The turning point of the conflict came on May 1, 1637, when the Connecticut colony declared war on the Pequots. Captain John Mason was sent to implement offensive war plans against Pequot forces.[32] The most significant battle was the Battle of Mystic Fort, during which seventy-seven Connecticut soldiers and more than 200 Native allies launched a surprise attack, burning down the fortified Pequot village at Mystic at dawn. As many as 400 Pequots were killed within an hour, as most were asleep and burned to death.[33] The Battle of Mystic Fort severely broke up Pequot fighting forces, declaring the war a total English victory. As the Pequot tribe became scattered across a vast region, in late 1637, the Puritans of Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay launched campaigns to hunt down fleeing Pequot communities.[34] The collective efforts of the Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut colonists, along with their Mohegan and Narragansett allies, killed approximately 700 Pequots, or nearly one in four, decimating the entire tribe.[35]

The fate of the Pequots captured during and after the critical phases of the Pequot War was defined by slavery, following a tradition of the Spanish and other European nations.[36] In her essay “Indian Slavery in Colonial New England,” historian Margaret Newell argues that the enslavement of Natives in New England entered a new phase after the Pequot War in 1637. The victors enslaved and shared Pequot captives among themselves.[37] However, some slaves were sent to other places across the colonies. Victorious generals, such as Israel Stoughton and Samuel Davenport, took about 250 Native captives to Connecticut and Massachusetts authorities in July 1637 to “be disposed aboute in the townes” as household servants.[38] This action allowed Native slavery to spread across an English colony. The war caused slavery to proliferate almost without restraint through the 1640s and 1650s.[39]

Neither legal nor moral considerations hindered the colonists’ decision to enslave Pequot captives. Even officials who were “closely concerned with evangelization of Native Americans seldom went on the record against Indian slavery in the seventeenth century.”[40] Many individuals in the Christian church owned Indigenous, mostly Pequot, slaves themselves following the Pequot War. The Reverend Hugh Peter wrote in a letter to John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, “Mr. Endecot and my selfe have heard of a dividence of women and children in the bay and would bee glad of a share viz. a yong woman or girle and a boy.”[41] This quote suggests that enslaved Natives quickly became commodities of high demand in many English colonies.[42] Hugh Peter devised a plan for delivering additional “boyes” to Bermuda and other islands in the West Indies, one that Puritan colonists would later carry out.[43]

Not only did New England Puritans distribute Pequot slaves among the population of their New England colonies, but they also took an opportunity to expand their slave trade networks with the West Indies and Africa by sending Pequot slaves elsewhere after the war.[44] During the 1600s, Indian slaves were often exported and traded for imported African slaves from the West Indies. As historian Herbert Klein argues in his book African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbeans, the West Indies should be considered a trade nexus that connected Africa and New England colonies.[45] By the time of the Pequot War, many West Indies islands, notably Barbados, already had established a flourishing sugar economy. The growth of the sugar economy meant that the demand for slave labor was on the rise, hence piecing together a vast slave trade web that spanned two continents.[46]

John Winthrop, who as governor of Massachusetts had significant control over Pequot captives, tried to fulfill the requests from Bermuda for Pequot captives, and hence implemented a plan to send several such captives to the West Indies. As he recorded in his journal, “Here our men gat some booty of kettles, trays, wampom, etc., and the women and children were divided, and sent some to Connecticut, and some to the Massachusetts…We sent fifteen of the boys and two women to Bermuda, by Mr. Peirce; but he, missing it, carried them to Providence Isle.”[47] Winthrop allocated Pequots within New England colonies and then planned a trip to deliver seventeen Pequots to Bermuda. These Pequots would likely work as slaves on sugar or tobacco plantations on that island, given the flourishing state of the plantation economy at that time. The captain of the ship, “Mr. Peirce,” missed Bermuda and instead sailed to “Providence Isle,” a small island off the coast of present-day Nicaragua, deep in Spanish territory, where they traded Pequot captives for enslaved Africans. New England Puritans successfully utilized the victory of the Pequot War as a chance to initiate the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s trade with the Caribbean islands, which became closely tied to the prosperity of the colony’s economy.[48]

One might wonder at the lack of regulations or laws that would aim to confine the acts of slavery after the Pequot War. At the time, laws regarding the treatment of captured soldiers and civilians were ambiguous, leaving much room for the colonists to manipulate and interpret the laws in a way that would justify their actions. During the 1600s, the Puritans discovered legal loopholes that would make it permissible to assault Indigenous communities and seize captives. Newell explains, “The Christian tradition of the just, defensive war, which the Puritans invoked in their conflict with the Pequots, allowed the enslavement of non-Christian captives.”[49] This means that the Puritans tried to justify their treatment of Pequot captives from a religious perspective. Indeed, throughout the era of colonization, the English often employed Christianity as a source to demonstrate the righteousness or appropriateness of their actions. From a more legal perspective, Hugo Grotius’s “The Law of War and Peace,” a set of international codes written in 1625, claimed that enslavement was a merciful alternative to execution.[50] The Puritans drew on Grotius’s work to show that for Pequots, enslavement was a lighter punishment, and hence, they were standing on the humanitarian side.[51]

The attempt by John Winthrop to send seventeen Pequot captives to the West Indies ultimately proved instrumental in facilitating the growth of the trans-Atlantic African slave trade. More ships regularly voyaged across the Atlantic between Africa, the West Indies, and the New England coastline. In 1638, Winthrop must have been enthralled to hear the news of the ship Desire. He recorded the arrival of enslaved Africans in his journal on February 26, 1638, that this ship returned from the West Indies to the Massachusetts colony with “some cotton, and tobacco, and negroes.”[52] This journal entry can demonstrate two pieces of crucial information. First, Massachusetts and Rhode Island were turning into active slave trading colonies in New England. Second, though Natives constituted most slaves captured following the Pequot War, this early experimentation in Indigenous slavery also led to the importation of Africans by 1638.

The Legal Justification of Slavery After the Pequot War

Following the Pequot War, New England Puritan colonists began to establish a greater trade web of enslaved Natives, such as the Pequots, with the West Indies and Africa, hence gradually building up their slave empire. However, when Puritan colonists considered the long-term economic development of the colonies, they realized that they needed to create laws and legislations to justify slavery, firmly strengthening its status as an integral element of New England’s colonial society.[53] These laws were uneven and ambiguous. Different colonies enacted their own legislations at different times, and some colonies’ laws placed a greater importance on slavery than those of other colonies. Furthermore, the content of some laws were not aligned with that of more prevalent colonial laws regarding slavery at the time, and many laws experienced significant changes within a short period, blurring the clarity and purpose of them.

Massachusetts

A few years after slave trade routes from the bay colonies to the West Indies opened in approximately 1638, governors like John Winthrop led discussions on enacting long-term legal codes. One of the most essential codes during the early 1640s was the Body of Liberties. This colonial code was the first official one that mentioned the matter of slavery in New England colonies, and it effectively propelled the development of slavery in them.[54]

In the Body of Liberties, Passage 91 explains when it would be appropriate to enslave an individual: “There shall never be any bond slaverie, villinage or Captivitie amongst us unles it be lawfull Captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of god established in Israell concerning such persons doeth morally require. This exempts none from servitude who shall be Judged thereto by Authoritie.”[55] It lays out two circumstances under which “bond slavery” is allowed: When captives are taken in “just war[s]” or who “willingly sell[] themselves or are sold to us.” This passage justifies the enslavement of both Native Americans and Africans. Like the Pequots, Natives may be considered as individuals taken in war, and the Puritans tended to label their warfare against the Natives as “just.”[56] African people in the trans-Atlantic slave trade could be sold to the New England colonists, further justifying the act of slavery. Colonists additionally resorted to Christian texts when attempting to defend slavery in the Body of Liberties.[57] In Leviticus, 25:44-45, God provides a series of instructions to Moses regarding enslaved people: “Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.”[58] Leviticus added that these captives or slaves would serve forever, and their descendants would inherit the same status. Passage 91 in the Body of Liberties states: “And these [captives] shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of god established in Israell concerning such persons…”[59] This sentence from the passage references the rules established by Moses in The Bible, thus offering a biblical justification for enslaving those in a foreign nation, such as Native Americans or Africans. So long as the captives belonged to a different “nation,” they were legitimately enslaved.

The impacts of the Body of Liberties were long-lasting. Most importantly, it perpetuated race-based slavery in New England. Through the justification of the enslavement of those perceived to belong to a different “nation,” it positions non-white individuals as being a foreign “other.”[60] By following the “law of god,” Passage 91 allows for the enslaved people’s children to automatically be enslaved as well, effectively perpetuating the enslavement of non-whites.[61] In an effort to fully compel the Natives to succumb to their Puritan colonists in New England colonies, a 1647 revision of the Body of Liberties included a passage that mentioned a movement to persuade Natives of the righteousness of English laws and religion. An excerpt reads: “Considering that one end in planting these parts was to propagate the true Religion unto the Indians: and that divers of them are become subjects to the English and have ingaged themselves to be willing and ready to understand the Law of God…”[62] This quote suggests that a crucial and urgent goal for the Puritan colonists was to “propagate the true Religion,” Christianity, and The Bible, to the Natives. By doing so, they can become “subjects to the English” and hence understand the reasonings behind the Body of Liberties. The 1647 revision added: “That such necessary and wholsom Laws, which are in force, and may be made from time to time, to reduce them to civilitie of life shall be once in the year (if the times be safe) made known to them…”[63] This quote points to the fact that Puritan government officials aimed to ingrain these laws that justified Native slavery into the minds of the Indigenous population and force them to conform to English legislation.

After the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed the Body of Liberties in 1641, the ramifications of this decision almost appeared instantaneously. Between 1640 and 1644, as the economies of New England colonies developed, an increasing number of immigrants arrived in New England.[64] As the Body of Liberties provided pathways for colonists to integrate slavery into their society, a greater interest was invested in trading slaves. Starting in 1644, Boston merchants began importing enslaved people from Africa to the West Indies and Massachusetts – slavery grew to be a more prevalent phenomenon.[65]

To illustrate, in 1640, the estimated enslaved population of Massachusetts totaled 150, but it almost doubled to 295 by 1650, only nine years after the enactment of the Body of Liberties.[66] Included in this expanded slave population was the addition of various Indian groups. John Winthrop, in 1645, for example, began to consider the possibility of enslaving the Narragansett people, thereby widening the extent of Native slavery almost justifiably by referencing the Body of Liberties.[67] The Winthrop Papers documented this consideration: In August 1645, Emmanuel Downing, brother-in-law of Governor Winthrop, suggested a solution to the Massachusetts labor shortage. He encouraged Winthrop to wage war against the Narragansett Indians (a “Just Warre”) in order to gain indigenous captives to exchange for enslaved Africans.[68] Downing and Winthrop referred to the Body of Liberties in this text by trying to utilize a just war against the Narragansetts as a legal means to obtain indigenous slaves and exchange for enslaved Africans. Their parallel consideration of Indian and African slaves further suggested that following the enaction of the Body of Liberties, the Native people were not the only group affected. African slavery increased in scale as well.

Connecticut

The Body of Liberties accelerated the development of slavery in Massachusetts during the 1640s and early 1650s. At roughly the same time that Massachusetts governors attempted to enact laws to justify slavery, officials in the Connecticut colony were replicating similar actions, showing the expansion of slavery in the post-Pequot-War era. In 1646, a mere five years after the Body of Liberties came into effect, the Connecticut colonial government created a set of laws that included a section concerning the slavery of Natives and Africans, albeit expressed in a less explicit manner.[69] The 1646 Code of Laws made it possible for slavery to be a legitimate form of punishment for wrongdoings. In cases when Natives were perceived as offending Puritan interests, the magistrates could “send some convenient strength of English.” This force could “seize and bring away any of that plantation of Indians that shall interteine, protect, or rescue the offendor, onely women and children to be sparingly seized, unless known to bee some way guilty.”[70]

Being well aware that Indian captives who escaped incarceration could “prove more insolent and dangerous after,” the Connecticut government set strict requirements on how long these Natives could stay in captivity. The code laid out that if following a trial and guilty verdict, “satisfaction” for the crime was not provided promptly by the accused’s community, the colony could choose to “deliuer vp the Indian seized to the party or partyes endammaged, either to serue or to bee shipped out and exchanged for neagers, as the case will justly beare.”[71] This quote proves that, by 1650, enslaving Natives and trading them for “neagers,” presumably African slaves, were becoming widely accepted practices in New England colonies. Such practices would directly be backed by colonial laws and the government, subsequently promoting the proliferation of slavery across the colony.

Whether the 1646 Connecticut Code of Laws was strongly correlated to the 1641 Body of Liberties cannot be ascertained due to the lack of primary historical records that juxtapose both texts. However, since the colonies were geographically close and possessed various means of communication at that time, it seems convincing enough to argue that the aftereffects of the Pequot War were felt in both colonies, and Massachusetts’ institution of the Body of Liberties influenced the enacting of Connecticut’s code. In fact, the commission “to severall persons, to govern the people at Connecticutt for the space of a year [then] next coming,” was drafted and granted by the General Court of Massachusetts, after consultation with John Winthrop.[72] This relationship between the Connecticut and Massachusetts governments shows the intrinsic links between the colonies’ form of government and legislation. Thus, since the practice of slavery following the Pequot War strongly affected Massachusetts’ laws, it seems logical to deduce that Connecticut laws were indirectly impacted, too.

While the Body of Liberties only stated the conditions under which the Puritans were allowed to enslave Natives or Africans, the Code of Laws specifically laid out the possible outcomes for the enslaved. Comparing the two legislations, the Connecticut code seemed to emphasize the role of slavery in their economy and society more than the Massachusetts one, as the former contained more directions about the dealing of slaves than the latter. This comparison highlights the unevenness of legislative work surrounding slavery in New England during the 1640s. There was no uniform standard concerning the enacting of slavery codes – each colony possessed their own ideas and circumstances under which they created these laws.

Rhode Island

In 1652, the colony of Rhode Island published a law that explicitly explained the case of slavery directly. Intriguingly, one section of the code pointed out that it would actually be inappropriate to keep African slaves for life. The section reads: “There is a common course practised amongst English men to buy negers, to that end they may have them for service or slaves forever; for the preventinge of such practices among us, let it be ordered, that no blacke mankind or white being forced by covenant bond, or otherwise, to serve any man or his assighnes longer than ten years…”[73] Although the Rhode Island government still allowed African individuals to be enslaved by the Puritans, as other New England colonies did, it limited the time of service to “ten years.” The phrase that it was “common course” for English colonists to “buy negers” illustrates that by 1650, the trading of slaves was commonplace and continuously proliferating.

The 1652 law did not mention the treatment of Natives, which did not meet the Rhode Island government’s intention of justifying slavery. Thus, in 1659, to pronounce the legitimacy of slavery explicitly, another law was passed. This new law claimed that if a Native who was convicted of “any offence aforesayd” and “not able to procure and pay and discharge all the damages…” could be sent as a slave to “any forraigne country of the English subjects.”[74] From the Body of Liberties of 1641 to the Connecticut Code of 1646 to the Rhode Island 1652 and 1659 laws, the justification of slavery was being done in increasingly lucid and systematic ways. Nevertheless, legislative work in New England was still quite uneven as there was no uniformity in the enacting of laws and many colonies, such as Rhode Island, experienced several trials before their slavery legislation was firmly in place.

The Ambiguity of Slavery Legislation

While slavery was being justified in clearer manners, the processes of reaching such justifications were not straightforward. New England colonists sometimes disputed among themselves, holding different opinions on the strictness of slavery laws. For example, in 1656, the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law that forbade “negroes or Indians, although servants to the English,” from any “physical training.”[75] Colonists set this law in place to forestall slave rebellions against their English masters. However, prior to the publishing of this law, it received widespread discussion in the Massachusetts government. Only a few years prior, the colony still legally allowed Native and African servants to train their bodies.[76] Thus, this 1656 revision almost wholly overturned the content of the previous version. This example shows that the laws regarding slaves in New England colonies should not be considered fixed. Within a decade, there were a series of changes and back-and-forth discussions of a particular code.

The often ambiguous and unstraightforward process of New England legislative work had another aspect: New England colonies often did not adopt similar laws compared to other colonies. For instance, in 1670, the Massachusetts colony did not enact a law stating that enslaved women’s children would inherit their mother’s status. This event is surprising since other English colonies, such as Virginia and Barbados, created such a law before 1670.[77] For Massachusetts, on October 12, 1670, the General Court of the Massachusetts colony omitted a discussion or an announcement of a verdict on this matter. This omission hints that, unlike other English colonies that were resolute on establishing slavery as a long-term root of society, such as Virginia, New England governments were more hesitant at times and even made contradictory decisions about the role of slavery in their society.[78]

The Gradual Increase of the Trading of African Slaves from 1640 Onwards by New England Colonists

As New England colonists were enacting laws to justify the idea of slavery, they simultaneously increased the trade volume of African slaves after 1640. As a result, while Native slavery was still prominent in New England, the market of African slaves experienced a sustained rise in both demand and supply.[79] Historian Gary B. Nash states, “Through extraordinary repression, [Puritan colonists molded Africans] into a slave labor force.”[80] By 1645, Barbados, for example, had over 5,500 enslaved Africans toiling away in its tobacco farms. These 5,500 individuals composed almost forty percent of the entire population on the island. Trade and communication were far-reaching between the West Indies and the mainland colonists, allowing the latter to have clear knowledge about the prospect of slave labor.[81]

As Indian slavery persisted after the end of the Pequot War, New England colonists were starting to realize the economic value of African slaves. Hence, a slave trade where Natives were exported and Africans were imported existed in the late 1630s, but by the early 1640s, this slave trade almost began to focus solely on importing Africans. This trend occurred for two main reasons. First, the ineffectiveness of employing indentured servants and Native Americans for labor was increasingly evident for New England colonists. Indentured servants did not come in large numbers and could not satisfy the ever-growing desire for labor in the West Indies. It was additionally quite challenging to convince them to work in the often-dangerous conditions in the Americas.[82] In the case of Native Americans, most tribes were dispersed across a vast terrain and knew the land quite well, making them far from ideal as a labor force.

Second, on the other side of the argument, Africans brought from the Caribbean gradually proved to be a better, more cost-effective substitute for indentured workers or Natives. They were usually well-accustomed to the environments in the sugar and tobacco fields on islands in the West Indies; they were also more resilient against infectious diseases, positively impacting the stability of their bodies; they could be captured easily in immense numbers, as many groups were arranged in sedentary kingdoms or empires; finally, they were relatively ignorant of the terrain of the West Indies, it would be difficult for them to organize effective slave rebellions.[83]

Given these advantages of African slaves, New England colonists were eager to expand their trading of them. For a notable example, in 1644, three New England Puritans, Robert Shopton, Miles Casson, and James Smith, agreed to lead three ships bound for Cape Verde and proceed along the West African coast. They hoped to successfully search for “whatsoever negars, or goods, gold, or silver, or other quality or vallew [that] shallbe equally divided tunn for tunn, and man for man, in each severall ship…”[84] After leaving Africa, the men planned to sail to Barbados to sell their African slaves and goods and presumably divide the profit. Ultimately, at least one of the three ships returned to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as noted by Winthrop in April 1645: “One of our Shipps which went to the Canaryes with Pipestaves in the beginninge of November last, returned now, and brought wine and Sugar and salt, and some tobacco, which she had at Barbados in exchange for Africoes, which she carried from the Ile of maio.”[85] The Ile of maio is the modern-day country of Cape Verde, about 640 kilometers off the West African coast.[86] As Warren points out, the intriguing characteristic of Winthrop’s documentation is that it does not demonstrate a particular interest in the ships or the chattel slaves aboard, implying that he must have been accustomed to vessels returning to Massachusetts across the Atlantic with various goods for sale.

Shopton, Casson, and Smith’s trip was only one of many during the 1640s. Not only did this period witness a sudden rise in the number of African slaves being taken from Africa, but it also witnessed a diversification of potential trading routes and destinations. For instance, while Massachusetts was the New England nexus of slavery before 1645, after that year, most colonies in that region completely began importing Africans. As a further example, in 1648, the ship Beginning departed Rhode Island on a voyage first for Barbados, then to Africa, back to Barbados, then to Antigua, and finally arriving at Boston.[87] The ship’s route alone suggests that the crew intended slave trading to be a major part of the voyage, as Barbados and Africa were popular destinations for shipping slaves. The route additionally shows that Rhode Island, like Massachusetts, was actively engaging in Africans’ enslavement in 1648.

The magnitude of African slavery continued to increase during the 1650s and 1660s. By 1670, it had reached such a magnitude that the English government decided to create new regulations to control the fervent action. In 1672, the government granted the Royal African Company, an English company that specialized mainly in the enslavement and shipment of Africans, a monopoly status.[88] The idea behind this regulation was to offer the Royal African Company a notable competitive advantage over free traders or other groups, discouraging these groups from trading enslaved Africans at a considerable volume. Following the creation of this monopoly, the volume of ships traveling to and from Africa increased. According to an estimate by Nash, “in the 1680s the Royal African Company had transported about 5,000 to 6,000 slaves annually.”[89] The sheer magnitude of slavery conducted by the Royal African Company suggests that while the number of slave trading groups might have decreased due to the Company’s monopoly status, overall, slave trading became more concentrated, organized, and systematic.

The ports of New England colonies, such as at Boston, were bustling with slave trading ships of the Royal African Company in the 1670s. Warren claims that, by 1673, a great list of ships freighted by the Company included some from New England. Some of these ships left Boston and purchased slaves in mainland Africa or as far as Madagascar, dropping these slaves in Jamaica, Barbados, or another island in the West Indies.[90] From Massachusetts to Connecticut to Rhode Island, slavery appeared in almost every aspect of daily life by this period. Most Puritans were well aware of enslaved Africans or Natives. One European traveler to the region recorded, “There is not a house in Boston, however small may be its means, that has not one or two [African slaves].”[91]

King Philip’s War of 1675 and a Sudden Spike of Native Slavery in New England

King Philip’s War pitted Native Americans, namely the Narragansetts and Wampanoags, against New England Puritan settlers from 1675 to 1676. The war was named after King Philip, the sachem, or chief, of the Wampanoags. This war was one of the bloodiest conflicts in American history and left profound marks on New England’s colonial society, as the Puritans eventually emerged victorious.[92] Arguably, the most prolonged impact of this war was a sudden spike in Native slavery that occurred afterward, further propelling the expansion of slavery in the region. The victory of the war allowed the New England colonists to better control Native land, people, and ideologies. Almost all facets of this war, from the causes to the process and aftermaths, were tied to the enslavement of Natives.[93]

After this war, Native slavery grew to be, once again, an equally significant element in the broader narrative of New England slavery. Aspects of this war were tied closely to the idea of slavery, and one can understand this point from the perspective of the causes of King Philip’s War. In a similar way to the Pequot War, a rapid rise in tension between the Natives and the English triggered the outbreak of the war. Many Natives feared enslavement, and thus they were highly vigilant of any clear signs of English belligerence.[94] As Newell writes, “forced expropriation of labor loomed large for the Wampanoags.” Robert Mason, a New England colonial army captain, convincingly wrote that such a relentless “expropriation of labor” was “the chief if not only cause of the Indians making war upon the English.”[95] His words were convincing as he was one of the heavily-involved personnel in King Philip’s War. Captain Wyborg, a Wampanoag man under Metacom, had witnessed hundreds of Indigenous men enslaved at the Boston fort, where they were subjected to frequent whipping and abuse by their English overlords. Metacom and his tribe were well aware of the potential danger brought by New England forces. Thus, when the colonists intended to take more land in 1675, breaching the Pilgrim-Wampanoag Peace Treaty of 1621, Native forces were highly vigilant. If no action was taken, New England Puritans would have encroached upon further territory and easily enslaved Natives en masse.[96]

The war consequently broke out in 1675. Unfortunately, the Natives were simply outmatched by the Puritan forces. Throughout the war, in an attempt to drain Metacom’s soldiers, English officials encouraged the decision to surrender and promised mercy for the surrenderers.[97] However, the definition of “mercy” in this context was nebulous. Most magistrates sided with Josiah Winslow and the Plymouth War Council, who decreed that all Natives conspired to initiate the war and therefore committed treason. The rationale then claimed that since the Natives, as subjects, broke their covenant with Puritan colonists, slavery was a justifiable treatment for all Natives.[98]

Enslavement ultimately proved to affect the surrenderers, who should have been spared in theory. In a trial of Indian war captives in October 1675, several men were sentenced to be sold as slaves. Another jury determined that several other men were guilty, too, and ordered ship captains Lancelott Talbott and Joseph Smith to sell these men as slaves out of the continent.[99] Many comparable examples happened during and after King Philip’s War, as Puritan forces captured Native people in considerable numbers. The Native enslavement related to King Philip’s War even extended to Indian children. In an instance when Governor John Leverett of the Massachusetts Bay Colony ordered Captain Thomas Harris of the Seaflower to deport seventy captives to be sold as slaves, Leverett specifically stressed the importance of women and children aboard this ship, accusing them of being supporters of Metacom.[100] This instance shows that King Philip’s War took Native slavery to an unprecedentedly relentless level, at which slavery seemed to become the norm for noncombatants and refugees as well.

One of the most immediate ramifications of King Philip’s War was the expansion of Native slavery in New England. According to an estimate done by Warren, “By the end of the century, when the English population was somewhere around ninety thousand people, there were probably fifteen hundred enslaved Africans in the region, and a roughly equivalent number of Indians in some form of captivity, while hundreds (at a minimum) more Indians had been exported as slaves to English colonies in the West Indies and elsewhere.”[101] This toll was convincing enough to reveal the shocking increase in Native slavery after 1675. Within two decades, Native slavery temporarily caught up with the rise of African slavery, which took more than three decades to take root in New England colonies fully.

There was another long-term ramification regarding slavery. As the colonists of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Plymouth shipped a significant proportion of Native slaves to foreign locations dotted along the Atlantic, the trans-Atlantic trade routes connecting New England with the West Indies and even Africa expanded rapidly. To illustrate this expansion of shipping and trans-Atlantic slave trading, according to a set of data collected by SlaveVoyages, in 1675, there were approximately 10,000 ships that completed trans-Atlantic slave voyages. This number skyrocketed to 24,000 in 1681 and stabilized at around 19,000 ships in 1685.[102] Many of such ships left or arrived at New England ports, stopping at an island in the West Indies as a transfer point. The exponential increase of these ships points to the notion that as the selling of slaves flourished after King Philip’s War, the trans-Atlantic trade routes benefitted simultaneously as well.

The gradual stabilization of the trans-Atlantic slave trade routes additionally meant that African slavery could exponentially grow, as the increase in the number of trading posts in Africa in particular created new opportunities for slave traders. In the long run, with many Natives exported as slaves and exiled from their New England homelands, African enslavement could fill the shortages of labor and the role of Native slavery in society, a cruel example of Archimedean displacement.[103] In other words, the rapid expansion of trans-Atlantic slave trading and the marginalization of Native slaves in New England colonial society encouraged colonists to import African slaves in even greater volumes.

A Final Complete Turn to African Slavery in New England

While African slavery consistently grew from the 1640s to the 1670s, its popularity only began to surge after the end of King Philip’s War and the following short-term spike of Indian slavery, as the trans-Atlantic slave trade network between Africa, the West Indies, and New England became fully established.

By the late 1680s, although Native slavery exploded shortly after 1675, the pace of this intensification began to be outmatched by that of African slavery. As the New England colonist named Samuel Sewall noted, as the seventeenth century drew to a close, the number of African slaves was increasing so rapidly that the sheer number of slaves prompted him to argue for the abolishment of African slavery.[104] Sewall’s claim about the rapid rise of slaves can be corroborated by referencing the trend that more merchants realized the value of trading African slaves by 1685. For example, John Pynchon was a prosperous merchant with close relations with the Connecticut colony. Between 1680 and 1700, he owned at least five African slaves, and linked his trade with traders along the New England coast and in the Caribbean.[105]

As the eighteenth century dawned, the British Parliament similarly recognized the potential economic boom from the concentrated trading of Africans. In 1696, the government of the British Empire revoked the Royal African Company’s monopoly on English trade with Africa.[106] This decision was momentous. It allowed the New England colonists to participate in the African slave trade legitimately and almost made slave trading a competitive economic market. Previously, besides men working for the Company, colonists could rely only on New England traders who smuggled Africans into the colony, a much longer and more costly process.[107]

A final signal to herald the beginning of a new era of slavery – one whose narratives solely concerned Africans – was the voyage of a ship named Friendship in 1699 and early 1700. The English merchant Thomas Windsor was the owner of the ship, and the sole purpose of its voyage was to deliver slaves. The ship left Boston in 1699 and headed straight towards Africa. There, picking up twenty-five African slaves, it returned to Boston. The ship’s route only involved Boston and an unspecified port along the coast of Africa. There was no stop in the West Indies, where trans-Atlantic voyages used to drop slaves frequently.[108] From this voyage onwards, increasingly more ships would adopt this direct route from New England to Africa or vice versa. Doing so significantly improved the efficiency of the African slave trade, signaling its rise into a shocking and inhumane state during the eighteenth century.

Conclusion

From 1637 to 1700, the development of slavery in New England colonies involved a combination of legislation, economic interest, and the relationship between the Puritans, the Natives, and the Africans. Following the Pequot War, the Puritans responded to a rise in slavery by enacting various legal codes, creating a coexistence of Native and African slavery. The enslavement of Africans grew at a steady rate from the 1640s to 1680. However, in 1676, with the end of King Philip’s War, a short-run spike of Indian slavery was followed by a dramatic surge of African slavery, which continued as the seventeenth century ended.

Slavery in the United States is usually associated first with the atrocities committed by the southern colonies, such as Virginia and the Carolinas. Indeed, millions of African workers suffered extreme abuse and even violent death in their agricultural economies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[109] The southern colonies undoubtedly were the center of slaveholding beyond the seventeenth century. However, this essay has shown that although the northern colonies, such as those in New England, are commonly associated with an early adoption of freedom and liberty, they still have a dark and often unbeknownst past. An investigation into the slavery of New England reveals the bond shared between colonization and slavery, “two of history’s most violent enterprises,” as Warren puts it.[110] From the very start of European colonization, in the days of Columbus, slavery accompanied almost every exploration into unknown territories and every military campaign to conquer the land of the Native populations. Without colonies to grow agricultural economies, there would be no demand for slaves; however, without slaves, there would be no labor to develop these economies on the colonies. The legacies of both enterprises – colonization and slavery – continue to impact and afflict the world today. Natives are still trying to protect their culture and revive cultural traditions lost during the colonial era; Africans are continuously striving to shield their rights, which they lost tragically to European colonists centuries before. The coexistence of colonization and slavery was a truly deadly one.

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Endnotes