Slavery in New England

Abstract

In popular imagination, the history of chattel slavery in North America is largely linked to the southeastern quarter of the continent, and focused on the 19th century. But the slave trade and institution of chattel slavery functioned in other regions and at other times. One region that has drawn much scholarly attention is New England; the first records of enslaved Africans in that region (in the Massachusetts Bay Colony) appear in 1638, and the region’s enslaved African population grew steadily throughout that century and well into the 18th. Numbering less than two thousand in 1700, there were more than fifteen thousand people of African descent, both free and enslaved, in the region by 1770. Neither the slave trade to New England nor the institution of slavery itself, consisted only of Africans and people of African descent; historians have increasingly paid attention to the ways that commodified enslavement ensnared Native Americans, who worked as unfree labor in the region and were also exported to the West Indies and elsewhere as chattel slaves in the Atlantic slave trade. Indeed, studies of slavery in New England, by focusing on a region seemingly relatively marginal to the greater Atlantic economy and one mostly lacking (save a few areas of Rhode Island) a stereotypical plantation economy, have usefully emphasized the various ways that chattel slavery could be experienced, and have also emphasized the broad reach of Atlantic racial hierarchies and labor systems. Slavery in New England was not the monocrop plantation slavery typical of the 19th-century US South; enslaved people in New England worked in a more varied labor system. The small holdings of New England also meant the slave market worked differently than the antebellum South. Enslaved women in New England were valued differently than in other regions; for example, their reproductive capacities meant less than they would in societies with large-scale holdings of enslaved people. Enslaved children could be a liability rather than an investment. Emancipation in the region was truly gradual: though laws were passed in the late 18th century that sought to outlaw slavery, enslaved people were still legally held in New England as late as the 1840s.