"Increasing and Strengthening the Country": Law, Politics, and the Antislavery Movement in Early-Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts Bay

Abstract

A LMOST seven decades before the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts Bay, the author of an obscure essay devoted to currency policy arrived at a somewhat surprising conclusion about the relationship between bondage and economics. Entitled Some CONSIDERATIONS Upon the Several Sorts of BANKS, the anonymous 1716 tract proclaimed that twenty Years hence there should be no Slave in the Country. Responding to a recent economic downturn in the colony marked by inflation, rising taxes, and expanding debt, the writer urged his fellow colonists to reconsider African slavery's impact on local prosperity and stability. The current fiscal woes, he argued, would not abate until Bay colonists replaced all of their slaves with good Farmers and indentured servants. However unrealistic the suggestion may have been at the time, it reflects an attitudinal shift during the first few decades of the 1700s. Slavery, a number of settlers began to suspect, was not necessarily the greatest Means of Increasing and Strengthening the Country.' Between 1705 and 1739, growing concerns for economic welfare in Massachusetts Bay were embodied in a series of laws