New England Bound

“The first documented shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in 1638, eighteen years after the Mayflower's journey. The arrival of those Africans merited a brief mention by Governor John Winthrop, who noted in his journal that the Salem-based ship Desire took captive Indians to the West Indies for sale as slaves […] thus describing the first known slaving voyage to and from New England. It came to seem, to the English at least, a convenient swap.”

Warren describes the early beginnings of enslavement in New England, which the colonists began soon after settling in the region. This passage reveals how the colonists enslaved both Indigenous and African people, but for different purposes.

“The skewing of the study of slavery in North America toward a relatively short period of time in the continent’s long history has created a false impression that slavery and the antebellum South were synonymous, and that American slavery was only the enslavement of people of African origins.”

Warren discusses how historians’ focus on slavery in the South has left a void of knowledge about slavery in other regions and time periods in American history. According to Warren, this has left most people ignorant to the fact that Indigenous Americans were also enslaved by colonists and that there was slavery in the northern states as well as the South.

“As sugar production increased in the African islands and Portuguese colonies in South America (Brazil) so did agricultural slavery. Indeed, at the very moment that Europe was generally limiting slave labor within its own borders, the system was flourishing in European colonies elsewhere, thanks almost entirely to Spanish and Portuguese trade; those Iberian countries were, one scholar has noted, ‘the transitional link between slavery as it had existed throughout history and slavery as it developed in America.’”

The author places English colonists’ enslavement of Africans in its broader historical context. During the previous two centuries, the Portuguese and Spanish had established trading relationships with existing African slave trading networks, paying for shipments of enslaved people who were forced to work as domestic servants in Portugal and South America. Warren implies that as Europeans gained more rights within their own countries during the Renaissance period, they had more reason to seek out cheap labor elsewhere by enslaving foreigners.

“So the question remains: Did the New England colonists disapprove of slavery? The answer is a resounding no. Puritan theology had no existential distaste for slavery, no more than did Anglicanism, the religion of Samuel Maverick and John Josselyn, among others.”

In this passage Warren addresses the religious beliefs New England colonists used to justify their enslavement of African and Indigenous people. None of the Protestant denominations represented in New England took issue with slavery, and some leaders pointed to biblical passages which justify the enslavement of non-Christians. This quotation indicates that most colonists considered enslavement a normal and justifiable act that was not at odds with their religious beliefs.

“The Connecticut Code of Laws of 1646, published in 1650, made reference to Indian and African slavery as a legitimate form of punishment for wrongdoing. Upon order from magistrates, a ‘convenient strength of English’ could go to an Indian town and ‘seize and bring away any of that plantation of Indians that shall interteine, protect, or rescue the offendor, onely women and children to be sparingly seized, unless known to bee some way guilty.’”

Warren explains that slavery became a legally protected practice in many early colonies in New England. By legalizing slavery as a valid form of punishment, colonist leaders found a way to further profit from the capture of Indigenous people, thus clearing the land of its original inhabitants and earning money at the same time. Warren notes that these laws helped solidify New England as a slavery regime that actively participated in the Atlantic slave trade as sellers and buyers.

“Slavery bridged the ocean between New England and the West Indies […]. Tracing economic connections instead of colonial boundaries offers a new understanding of New England’s relationship to slavery […]. The vast majority of seventeenth century New England lived in port towns on the Atlantic coast or on major rivers and even farmers who lived inland were often close to major ports and sold their surplus harvests there.”

In this passage the author emphasizes how New England’s economic success was dependent on trade with English colonies in the West Indies. By referring to slavery as a “bridge” the author highlights the interdependence these settlements created and reveals the mutual complicity in their role in continuing and expanding the slave trade.

“They were savvy exporters, for it turned out that some of the fish they sold to the West Indies was not considered worth eating in Boston. They shipped to the islands the cod rejected by both the local, and the European, markets. The exported cod did not improve any from its shipping time to the West Indies, but it went to a captive market—slaves could not easily regulate or reject foodstuffs.”

Warren explains how New England colonists profited from their trade with plantation-owning enslavers in the West Indies, in part by selling them poor goods intended for enslaved people. She posits that these colonist merchants’ “savvy” strategies further entrenched their economic relationship with the West Indies, and by extension their role in perpetuating enslavement.

“Such stories of misfortune must have been common, and yet, throughout the century, young men went to the Caribbean to make their fortune, with the understanding that they were to send their gains back home […]. Colonists (mainly, but not only, merchants) in New England counted, and counted on, the profits of West Indian estates.”

In this passage Warren reveals that the West Indies became a fairly popular work destination for young men from New England, with varying success. This quotation reveals yet another facet of the connection between cash crop plantations in the West Indies and the early colonies of New England.

“Even though the English hoped to do better than the Spanish, even though the initial colonial rhetoric of the English suggested that Indians held a special status, even though Indian salvation was, after all, one ostensible reason for colonization, there always remained a tension between words and deeds. On the one hand colonizers described Indians as potential recipients of God’s word; on the other, they arrived with swords and guns and garrisoned their towns.”

Warren notes the discrepancy between colonists’ initial hopes that Indigenous people would convert to Christianity and their violent relationship with them. The author uses this quotation to introduce her discussion on colonist perspectives on Indigenous people. Like their colonial predecessors the Spanish, the English debate around Indigenous people also revolved around whether to “save” or enslave them. While some colonists like John Eliot were dedicated to converting people, in practice most English colonists saw the Indigenous as inferior, dangerous competitors who had to be driven away, killed, or enslaved—often far from their homeland.

“English colonial ideology may have ranked Indians, as a group, somewhere above Africans, but that did not deter colonists from selling Indians into Caribbean slavery. In fact, in New England’s colonial racial hierarchy, the gap that mattered was not that between Indians and Africans, but rather that which existed between those groups and the English.”

In this passage Warren explains how the colonists’ racism informed their brutal treatment of Indigenous people and Black Africans. Even though colonists did not regard Indigenous people as racially inferior to the same degree as Africans, these distinctions did not protect them from being enslaved by colonists both in New England and in the West Indies. This passage encourages consideration about how colonists' notions of race informed their position on slavery and how Indigenous and African people experienced the consequences of colonists’ beliefs.

“While the land was still fiercely contested, and while the outcome of the colonial project was uncertain, there was little time to establish and enforce racial distinctions in labor and few reasons to do so. And in New England, where no cash crop ever developed, a racialized labor system took even longer to emerge […] Seventeenth-century New England offers one window to how slavery functioned in a time and place where laborers were differentiated by race, even while their labor was not.”

The author explains that the everyday experiences of enslaved people differed greatly depending on their region. Unlike the cash crop plantations of the West Indies, enslaved people in New England performed similar tasks to the colonists: farming, fishing, and household work. This quotation helps to illustrate how systems of slavery differed depending on the ecology and economy of the places where people were enslaved.

“And so it was that common people owned slaves and that the settling of their estates and the assessing of their property worked slavery into the legal regimes of the New England colonies more thoroughly than did any deliberative discussion of the institution. Rather, instance by instance, regulations regarding slavery emerged.”

Warren explains that colonists developed laws around slavery in a gradual, patchwork process. Rather than creating a clear and comprehensive legal system before New Englanders purchased enslaved people, colonial authorities neglected to have a “deliberative discussion” about the practice. As a result, slavery regulations were informed by how enslavers assessed their own property and the instructions they laid out in their wills regarding the inheriting, loaning, or manumitting of enslaved people. This passage suggests that everyday colonists were as complicit in the normalization of enslavement as colonial authorities, that slavery was an accepted practice throughout colonial New England’s social tiers, and that New England’s authorities developed their laws in a somewhat haphazard, reactive manner.

“One sign of the cultural knowledge gained from immersion is the use by enslaved people in New England of individual legal agreements to earn their manumission through additional labor.”

This passage reveals how some enslaved people were able to learn the language and cultural knowledge necessary to try to negotiate their freedom. Some enslavers were willing to manumit the enslaved people they owned in exchange for certain tasks being done in the future, for example, an annual crop harvest, or a certain quota being met. This discussion adds to Warren’s theme on the individuals’ experiences of enslavement in New England and emphasizes their strategy and agency.

“For New England’s wealthiest colonists, many of whom were merchants rather than farmers, the ownership of enslaved people who were not needed for physical labor could be a sign of prosperity and prominence perhaps particularly so in a town like Boston, where the close proximity of neighbors meant that the display of slave ownership could carry extra weight.”

This passage reveals that some enslavers valued enslaved people as status symbols rather than as practical help in the household or farm. This quotation shows that colonists had different purposes for enslaving people, and affirms that some colonists found a sense of authority and importance in owning other people.

“Like enslaved people throughout the Atlantic world, enslaved people in New England, both men and women, Indian and African, knew that their fates and those of their loved ones were almost wholly controlled by their owners […] their presence in a colonial home happened only because at some point they had been removed from their own communities and families elsewhere.” 

Warren depicts enslaved people as family members who were cruelly separated from their kin. This reminder encourages consideration about the relationships and communities that were broken by the transatlantic slave trade and the effect this had on enslaved individuals. Warren argues that, although some enslaved people worked in intimate settings, they were not a part of English families and were, in fact, missing their own families from which they had been separated.

“Such a scattering of families, through capture, kidnapping, or sale, was central to the early modern Atlantic market, with its emphasis on slaves as individual commodities. West Indian trade, even with New England, was made on the backs of broken families.”

In this passage Warren develops her theme on how enslavement separated families and undermined enslaved people’s efforts to establish relationships and kinship. This adds depth to the author’s discussion of African and Indigenous perspectives on slavery.

“In fact, for those who had lived lives of servitude away from family, old age could be truly fearsome. Because slavery was, at its core, an institution of labor, its effects on those past prime laboring age were most pernicious. Scholars have discussed how slavery changed over the course of American history, but it of course also changed over the life of an individual enslaved person.”

Warren develops her theme on individual experiences of slavery by discussing how people experienced enslavement in different stages of their life. This passage provides a window into the slave experience by showing how aging without caregivers was a painful, and common, problem among enslaved people in New England. This passage reinforces how enslavers exploited people’s labor in their prime and then neglected them when they were no longer exploitable due to old age.

“‘If he should be sick, no body would comfort him’—the pain and loneliness conveyed in the simple statement is devastating. Whan’s was such a human desire, and one so heartbreakingly akin to the grief felt by many other uprooted people who found themselves marooned in strange environments, surrounded by strange people.”

Warren quotes a court witness who explained that John Whan, a recently freed Black man from New Amsterdam, wanted to sell his plot in New Haven to return to his original community. He revealed that Whan felt frightened about the prospect of getting sick and dying alone and wished to be among other African people in his old age. This passage adds moving detail to Warren’s discussions on enslaved people’s broken families, loneliness, and the emotional and physical perils of aging.

“Selling an unruly slave out of the colony also had multiple advantages: it made her or him someone else’s problem, served as a lesson to those left behind, and profited the owner, provided the owner could find a buyer quickly enough to keep the costs of maintaining the slave in jail from increasing […] Thus a local crime had an imperial solution, making use of a transcolonial trade in its local punishments and codes.”

The author explains how many enslavers would send enslaved people abroad if they were found guilty of crimes. The colonial authorities made enslavers responsible for paying for the imprisonment of the enslaved people they owned, and this discussion shows how this law incentivized enslavers to simply sell away the enslaved people they owned. This passage demonstrates how enslaved people were vulnerable to further displacement if they were convicted of offenses and emphasizes the close connections of the colonial slave trading world.

“Fear of slave conspiracy was real even in the first century of English settlement in New England […] Such alarms notwithstanding, the most likely threat from a ‘negro’ with a gun was that he or she might wield it to avenge an individual grievance.”

Warren discusses how colonists feared enslaved people, who were seen as a constant threat within the community. This fear fueled laws which banned enslaved people from owning weapons, such as guns, and from training in local militias. Warren’s discussion underscores the constant tension between enslaved people and colonists and helps illustrate the attempts that colonists made to control enslaved people, and the way that some of those enslaved people resisted such control.

“Wandering about was dangerous. But since enslaved people in New England often had no family with them to draw close, they might have had a further sense of the night as a time when owners would not be about and they would not be called to labor […] Indeed, by 1690, Connecticut had passed a curfew, a law forbidding ‘negroes’ from being away from ‘the place to which they doe belong’ without a written pass from their owner. The law authorized ‘any’ English inhabitant to apprehend such ‘negroes,’ effectively deputizing the free citizenry while reinforcing racial hierarchies.”

Warren’s discussion on curfew laws illuminates how New England authorities continually added to their legal code to specifically restrict Black people’s mobility and freedom. This passage encourages consideration about how an enslaved person may have viewed the landscape and nighttime differently from colonists, and how “nightwalking” may have appealed to them. This quotation also reinforces Warren’s argument that over the course of the 17th century New England formally became a “slave regime,” by creating laws such as this one.

“The recurrence of food as the target of slaves’ theft prompts questions about the treatment of slaves, and of servants too, in New England […] Indeed, Tony and James’ acts of petty theft in the face of such severe punishments may speak forcefully to their need for food, food unavailable to them not because of any famine but only because they were slaves.”

Warren provides her own interpretation of New England’s court records, which reveal that theft was fairly common among enslaved people in New England, with food being a popular target. In this passage Warren makes the logical conclusion that enslaved people stole food to relieve their own hunger, and she ponders how many New England enslavers likely deprived enslaved people of adequate nutrition in spite of there being an abundance of food in their communities during this time. This discussion gives another window into the slave experience and how enslaved people fell victim to New England’s strict laws.

“Whereas Tryon and Godwyn had emphasized the ill treatment of slave hands by their masters, Sewall held out for special opprobrium not instances of torture but the moment of commodification. It was evidence both of a New England mind at work, and of Sewall’s awareness of New England’s role in the Atlantic slave trade. Perceiving New England sliding backwards into a moral abyss, Sewall found no better proof of his fellow colonists’ sinful embrace of commerce than in their part in facilitating the slave market.”

In this quotation the author compares different anti-slavery arguments from 17th-century New England writers. She notes that Thomas Tryon and Morgan Godwyn’s articles condemned the cruel treatment of enslaved people, while Samuel Sewall focused on the moral illegitimacy of commodifying other human beings. This passage provides examples of how anti-slavery views began to take root in New England and raises the question of which arguments were most persuasive to the region's Protestant English colonists, many of whom were enslavers themselves.