Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England by Jared Hardesty

Abstract

Reviewed by: Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England by Jared Hardesty Christy Clark-Pujara (bio) Keywords Slavery, New England, Emancipation, Native Americans, Race Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England. By Jared Hardesty. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. Pp. 175. Paper, $22.95.) Jared Hardesty's sweeping and well-researched history of the institution of slavery in New England is a wonderfully engaging and critical followup to Lorenzo Greene's groundbreaking study The Negro in Colonial New England (New York, 1942). Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds, however, is much more than an update. Hardesty's thorough synopsis of the most recent scholarship on New England slavery is seamlessly paired with his own historical analysis of the varied and complex experiences of the enslaved and enslavers. Using an array of sources, from business records to diaries and journals, to newspapers, church records, and government documents, Hardesty properly places New England within the global plantation economy that was reliant on colonization and slave labor. He clearly connects the emergence of American industrial capitalism to the wider world of colonization and slavery in the Americas. New England colonists engaged in land theft, slave-trading, slaveholding, and the commodities trade that sustained plantation economies in the West Indies and the American South. Hardesty does all this while centering the experiences of the enslaved. Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds is a critical reminder that the institution of slavery was central to the social, political, and economic development of New England. Through a broad but detailed evaluation of the religious, social–political, and economic society that New Englanders came from, Hardesty convincingly demonstrates that white New Englanders embraced colonization [End Page 146] and race-based slavery from the very beginning. He contends that early New England was not that different from early southern British colonies—a small number of enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples supplemented the labor of white workers, many of whom were bound laborers or dependents of some sort. Hardesty is careful to remind readers that the archive privileged and preserved the experiences of the enslaver class; however, careful examination of the records of enslavers alongside sources left by enslaved people allow for reasonable re-construction of the lives of the enslaved. He details how enslaved people strove to build lives for themselves despite the confines of slavery and resisted their bondage through family formation, community-building, and pursuing freedom. Enslaved New Englanders lived and worked with their enslavers; they were usually one or two bound people in a household where they performed a wide range of labor and were present in every facet of the economy from agricultural production to the merchant and building trades. These intimate living and working conditions had benefits and disadvantages. Enslaved people in New England had a right to life, could own property, and had more access to literacy than their counterparts in other parts of the Americas. However, they were also trapped in small homes with their captors and under near-constant white surveillance. Moreover, the patterns of slaveholding made family formation and community-building very difficult. Particularly impressive is Hardesty's commitment to diversity of enslaved experiences, from kidnapped "Queens" to sickly children bought cheap in the West Indies to those who were treated with relative dignity while others were horribly abused. The legal ambiguity of slaveholding in New England meant enslavers had wide discretion to be relatively benevolent or exceedingly cruel. Hardesty also carefully untangles white colonists' and citizens' economic dependence on slave labor within and outside of New England. The slave-labor force in New England was "flexible, skilled and most importantly, effective" (70). Slaveholders were free to pursue a cadre of entrepreneurial ventures, most of which were connected to the plantation economy, particularly the transatlantic slave trade and West Indian commodities trades (local foodstuffs, livestock, and wood in exchange for sugar and molasses) and later southern cotton (textile mills and farming implements). Moreover, widespread slaveholding among middling households meant that the majority of enslavers were artisans and farmers, not wealthy merchants. Enslaved people not only labored in the [End Page 147] economy but they also were consumers...