Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery

Abstract

“Slavery flourished in colonial New England,” writes Margaret Ellen Newell in Brethren by Nature, and “Native Americans formed a significant part of New England’s slave population” (3). Indian servants augmented the colonial workforce “in important ways.” They were the “dominant form of non-white labor” (5). Bound Indian laborers, who “likely numbered in the thousands” (14), performed a variety of tasks associated with “ironworks, fisheries, livestock raising, extensive agriculture, provincial armies, and other enterprises that required unusually large workforces” (5). Most, however, worked and lived in English households, where they “interacted with the English in daily, intimate ways” (6–7), producing over time an “increasingly hybrid society” (14).In telling this important story, Newell includes a number of powerful stories of individuals ensnared in the region’s trade in human flesh. She recasts the Pequot War and King Philip’s war as racial conflicts motivated in part by a desire to enslave New England Algonquians, 350 alone in the “Great Swamp Fight” that took place in Rhode Island late in 1675 and perhaps 2,000 in all during this important Indian rising against the English.Despite its considerable virtues, there are still some problems with Newell’s book. The number of Indians involved in slavery in New England, either held within the colonies or shipped out to the West Indies, is a bit hazy, a problem that scholars who preceded Newell in this field have confronted as well. Newell’s determination to find Indian servants leads on occasion to some selective and problematic use of evidence. She identifies 319 Pequot captives in New England in 1640, for instance, a few short years after the Pequot War but offers no evidence to contradict Michael Fickes’s assertion that many of these Indians ran away (57, 270n46). On another occasion Newell referred to “one of the only surviving documents that mentions Pequots” as captives, a warning from the Massachusetts Bay Company to the governor of Providence Island that “we would have the Cannibal Negroes from New England inquired after, whose they are and special care taken of them” (49). But this document does not refer to Pequots, and Newell offers no evidence to contradict John Thornton and Linda M. Heywood’s claim that this document referred not to Pequots at all but to Angolan slaves (269n23).Newell’s concept of hybridity is a bit murky as well. Certainly, New England Algonquians played an important role in shaping New England society. A spate of books over the last decade or so has suggested that New England Algonquian leaders—like Uncas, Ninigret, or Metacom—might justly be placed on the list of New England’s founding fathers. But what about Indian servants, their movements tightly controlled, their interactions almost exclusively with the English, subject to proselytization and discipline, many of them children or others perhaps traumatized by the viciousness of the Puritans’ way of war? The evidence suggesting that “Indian actors and goals sometimes determined outcomes” in English households is difficult to firmly establish with the evidence Newell presents (86).Newell appropriately demonstrates the involvement of New England’s founders in the slave trade. Her work demands that historians reconsider their analyses of the colonists’ conflicts with the region’s native communities. New Englanders sought out Indian labor and at the local level constructed the institutional bases to bind native peoples to ever longer terms of servitude. She shows how New Englanders developed many of their ideas about race, freedom, and slavery as they constructed the institutional framework for Indian servitude. Readers will learn much from her work about how New Englanders conceived of Indian labor, but perhaps not as much as they might like about the Indians ensnared in the colonies’ systems of bound labor.