Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston by Jared Ross Hardesty

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston by Jared Ross Hardesty Antonio T. Bly Jared Ross Hardesty. Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston. New York: New York UP, 2016. 272 pp. $40.00. May 25, 1743, Captain John Bulkey of Boston paid Samuel Kneeland “twelve pence to five shillings” to print in the Boston Gazette an advertisement for the return of his fugitive slave. Over one week would pass before he would turn to the printer for help. The absconded “Negro Girl named Billah,” however, would wait no longer. Freedom beckoned. Judging from her name that reflected the presence of Islam in West Africa, it is likely that Billah might have been a captive African forcibly transported to the Americas. In Arabic, Billah means “with or by Allah’s permission.” In Islamic traditions, the name given to girls signified good things. In the New World, her refusal to answer to another signified agency. Either way, in Unfreedom, Jared Ross Hardesty explores how New England slaves like Billah realized autonomy. Hardesty’s excursion through wills, probate, court records, newspapers, etc., is a provocative study of slavery and dependence in eighteenth-century Boston. Rather than examine black life in early America from the point of view of slavery or freedom, Hardesty advances an alternative paradigm, one that suggests that a better way to understand the institution would perhaps be to examine it as part of the larger Atlantic world where other systems of labor (i.e., Amerindian slavery, indentured servitude, and pauper apprenticeship) existed alongside racial slavery in a continuum of unfreedom or dependency (43–103). Within this broader context, he challenges traditional dichotomies about slave resistance and agency. As opposed to freedom, enslaved Bostonians focused on ways to ameliorate their situation without necessarily threatening the authority of their owners. In a world where black freedom seemed hopeless, Hardesty argues that slaves’ pragmatism created an autonomy that trumped freedom (6–8, 105–08, 155–56). Through this rationale, Billah’s flight would represent a concerted effort to actively renegotiate the terms of her enslavement—somewhat like a disgruntled worker in a factory. While freedom was not her intent, agency had been her ultimate goal. However, in its view of slavery and servitude as essentially the same, Unfreedom overreaches. While thought-provoking, it appears to dismiss the persistent matter of race, which mattered despite the fact that New Englanders used the terms servants and slaves interchangeably (51). Aside from Hardesty’s awareness of the complexities of race and slavery in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Boston, his larger argument about unfreedom and dependence blurs the divides between Native and African American slaves, indentured servants, and apprentices in a way appears to strip race of its significance. This seems ironic, given that race is the motivating force behind most, if not all, of the instances of slave agency and autonomy he recounts (104–35). His argument also dismisses slaves’ endeavors to own themselves as “at best far-off dreams and, more likely, mere abstractions that would not have made sense in slaves’ unfree, hierarchical world.” Consequently, not until the advent [End Page 61] of the American Revolution do these pragmatic African Americans dare venture to believe that their freedom is truly obtainable (135, 164–65, and 170). Boston’s poet laureate, Phillis Wheatley, would undoubtedly disagree with Hardesty’s assessment. People are not always rational. Despite being more privileged than most slaves in her day, she too protested slavery. She artfully expressed the idea that autonomy meant little without freedom. In an epistle to Samson Occom, a Mohegan minister who preached to Native Americans in Connecticut, she addressed the subject explicitly. “God,” Wheatley wrote in 1774, “has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us. . . . I desire not for [vengeance],” she continued, “but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the Exercise of oppressive Power over others agree.” Billah would...