New England Bound

Captain John Smith, an English soldier, explored North America in the early 17th century and helped to establish the colony of Jamestown in Virginia. In his writings he advised prospective immigrants to the New World to expect to work very hard and not anticipate easy profits. His experience at Jamestown gave him some insight into the challenges of establishing colonies in America; the settlement there failed when the English colonists, gentlemen who were unfamiliar with how to farm, fish, and hunt, could not survive in the unfamiliar territory.

Early settlers to New England were hopeful and optimistic that their new community would provide religious sanctuary as well as material riches. The Pilgrims and Puritans who moved to New England were often from farming families. Their religious leaders instructed them to consider their emigration a divinely ordained act, preaching that God approved of their desire to build a new community that was separate from England, whose church and monarchy they disagreed with. Puritan leaders such as John Cotton preached that they were also allowed to seek riches and that making profits was not sinful. As such, Warren argues, early colonies were driven by two main aims, establishing a religiously pure community and thriving financially: “Profits and piety could and needed to go hand in hand” (37).

Purchasing and owning enslaved African people soon became the norm in New England. In 1630, writer William Wood related an anecdote about Indigenous people being frightened by an African fugitive from slavery, as they were startled by his appearance and thought he must be a “devil.” English colonists were amused by their fearful reaction and recaptured the enslaved man to return him to his enslaver. According to Warren, Wood’s story shows that English readers would have been familiar with the sight of enslaved African people, both in London and in New England.

The Portuguese and Spanish were the first European nations to substantially engage in the transatlantic slave trade, utilizing existing slave-trading networks, such as the trans-Saharan slave trade, which had existed for centuries. Beginning in the 1500s, a few English merchants inserted themselves into this trade, venturing to West Africa to either capture and enslave people or collaborate with local African leaders to enslave their enemies. These merchants transported enslaved people to the West Indies, where they sold them to plantation-owning enslavers who grew cash crops such as sugar. Soon the English government established the “Royal African Company,” which claimed a monopoly on the slave trade, though some merchants continued to illegally exploit the trade.

The various Protestant denominations in New England did not disapprove of slavery on moral or religious grounds; they considered hierarchy amongst people legal, legitimate, and a reflection of God’s will. They grounded their beliefs in the Bible; there is a passage in Leviticus which instructs people to enslave others who are outside of their belief system. By the 1630s and 1640s some New England colonies were enshrining the English colonists’ right to enslave Africans and Indigenous people into their laws. This legal framework treated Africans and Indigenous people as equals who could be legitimately owned and sold within the colonies and to other locations such as the West Indies.

There were some small, but ineffective, voices of dissent: Rhode Island tried to limit enslavement to 10 years or until a person’s 24th birthday, but this law was not reliably enforced. When a group of marauding English colonist merchants raided a West African village, killing 100 villagers with a cannon and enslaving two men, they were tried in court in New England for their offenses. New Englanders were offended that the events had happened on a Sunday and that the enslaved people had been kidnapped rather than purchased. Such illegal merchant voyages were not uncommon; in the 17th century there were 19 documented journeys from New England to West Africa and the West Indies, and likely even more undocumented ones. Meanwhile, the Royal African Company tried to make their legal monopoly on the slave trade a reality. Governor Bradstreet of Massachusetts and Governor Cranston of Rhode Island sought to downplay the amount of enslaved people in their colonies to the authorities in London, perhaps because many of the African enslaved people in those communities likely came to New England by way of illegal merchant behavior, or because these governors did not want their communities to engage in more slave trading.

Prominent New England colonist John Winthrop lamented his community’s financial difficulties in 1648. The New Englanders were struggling because the English government forbade them from trading guns to the Indigenous population in exchange for beaver pelts, out of fear that the Indigenous people would become better armed and therefore more of a threat to the colonists. The Indigenous people then shifted to trading more with the French and Dutch, leaving English colonists outcompeted and undersupplied. Another reason for their financial troubles was the sudden decrease in immigrants from England; due to political changes in their home country, fewer Puritans sought refuge in New England by the late 1640s. As such, the colonies did not enjoy the same influx of wealth they had in previous decades.

To deal with this problem, New England’s colonies developed more trade with their English peers in the West Indies, in particular Barbados. New England’s farmers and fishermen traded their goods to the plantation-owning enslavers in the Caribbean. These colonists focused on growing the valuable cash crops sugar and tobacco and therefore did not produce food crops to feed themselves or the people they enslaved. In exchange for New England’s crops, fish and meat, the West Indies colonists offered them tobacco and sugar, which the New England merchants then sold to England.

The sugar plantations in the West Indies were particularly brutal for enslaved people, many of whom died within the first few years of laboring there. This was a “slave society,” or a society which depended on slave labor to function economically. While New England was, in contrast, a “society with slaves,” in which enslaved people played a more marginal economic role, these two regions were “part of one economic system,” since they both required trade with the other to survive (68). New England’s colonists greatly profited from this trade. In addition to gaining a valuable source of goods to sell to England, they were also able to commodify poor quality products that they couldn’t have sold locally anyways, such as rotting fish. The colonists in the West Indies had few providers to choose from and would purchase low quality food to feed to enslaved people.

Indeed, New England’s trade was so successful that authorities in London were somewhat alarmed and were concerned that, as the colonies grew wealthier, they would also seek more independence from England. However, they continued to allow trade from New England. As England’s colonial ambitions grew, the country continued “offensive wars” against Indigenous people and “imperial wars” against competing European powers. Oliver Cromwell wanted to capture Jamaica, which the Spanish had laid claim to, and encouraged English people to settle there. Young men from New England often ventured to Barbados, working on merchant ships, building connections with plantation-owning enslavers there, and sending their wages home to family in New England.

Several families became prominent in New England, such as the Winthrops, Hutchinsons, and Shrimptons, among others, acting as political leaders and merchants. These wealthy families owned the most enslaved people and had the deepest economic and familial ties to the colonies in the West Indies. These families intermarried, creating one “extensive family” that effectively ruled New England.

Warren explains that enslaved people endured painful, disorienting, and often fatal voyages from their homelands to colonists’ homes and plantations. On the coast of Africa about one in five enslaved people would die in captivity before even reaching the slave ships, and 20-30% of enslaved people died during the ships’ sea voyages to Brazil or the West Indies. Slavers strategically selected people from different linguistic groups so they could not communicate with each other while on board. Enslaved people suffered numerous physical and emotional indignities during and after these journeys, including being inspected and sold naked. Warren reflects on the fear and confusion people must have experienced upon reaching Barbados, a very small, isolated island. Some of these people would then face yet another sea voyage to New England, where slavers sold them to English colonists.

Merchants and colonists shipped enslaved people to New England through major ports such as Boston, Charleston, and Salem. Over the course of the 17th century, slavery became more widespread geographically and socially throughout New England; wealthy people continued to own, on average, a handful of enslaved people, while poorer colonists often owned one or two. Legal documents from this period continue to treat enslaved people as property that could be inherited through a will or offered as a payment for debt. Enslaved people were considered very valuable, and so it was somewhat common for thieves to steal enslaved people and resell them in a different colony.

Before the arrival of English colonists and European traders, there were about 126,000-144,000 Indigenous people in the region later named New England.

These groups included hundreds of different communities which made up five different language groups. The English simplified and categorized these communities as such: the Pequots, Narragansetts, Pawkannawkuts, Massachusetts, and Pawtuckets. The colonists were concerned that these groups would become hostile, and so many members of their community were armed with muskets and swords. Some communities, such as the Plymouth Plantation, were surrounded by a tall wooden wall and watchtower.

Warren explains two types of colonization. The first is “extractive colonization,” in which a small group of settlers oversees the slave labor of natives or others who extract value from the land to profit the colonizers. The second is “settler colonization,” in which a large population of settlers permanently moves into a region, killing or displacing its native inhabitants. Warren labels New England a type of “settler colonization”: English colonists considered the presence of Indigenous inhabitants a problem that needed to be solved.

The displacement of Indigenous people was central to the goals of the English colonists, and this prompted differing views. Philosopher Francis Bacon maintained that it was morally better to cooperate with locals rather than remove them from the land. Captain John Smith agreed, urging English colonists to befriend the Indigenous inhabitants, arguing that it would be easier for their communities to have local friends rather than enemies. However, most colonists did not hold such cooperative views, and it became common to kill, displace, or enslave Indigenous people.

Indeed, Europeans had been enslaving Indigenous people of the Americas since their first contact with them. When Spain began colonizing South America in the 1500s, Spanish philosophers and theologians debated the legitimacy of forcing Indigenous people into slavery. Some argued that it was natural and reflected the will of God, while others maintained that Europeans should convert the natives to Christianity rather than enslave them. Some English colonists, such as John Eliot, agreed with this religious approach. Eliot missionized to local Indigenous people and organized “praying towns” for the converts to live in together. These communities were separate from the other Indigenous people, but also separate from the English colonists, who were often uncomfortable with the presence of Indigenous people residing close to colonist communities, even if they had converted.

One way that the colonists enslaved people was by taking prisoners of war. When the English colonists allied with the Narragansetts and warred against the Pequots, they captured Pequot women, men, and children. The colonists gave the women and children to the Narragansetts, but kept the men captive, executing some of them and selling others into slavery in Barbados. Another method of enslaving Indigenous people was taking people accused of crimes and making enslavement their punishment. This allowed the New England colonial authorities to remove the Indigenous person from the community and make a profit at the same time.

In 1675 colonists engaged in a war against numerous tribes and enslaved the men who surrendered to them. They sent a boat full of enslaved Indigenous men across the Atlantic to Tangiers, where they were rejected by slave traders. Colonists maximized their profits from the slave trade by selling younger, healthy men into slavery in Barbados, while older Indigenous people and children were sold to local colonists. As such, within New England, Indigenous women and children were more likely to be kept in servitude. New England had a vague legal process around slavery and emancipation, as evidenced by confusing court cases of people who were “accidentally” enslaved and never released.

Indigenous people feared being captured by the English and preferred to be captives of other Indigenous tribes, who would not displace them to the West Indies or treat them so severely. For instance, the Iroquois Confederacy enslaved their prisoners of war. Unlike English slavery, however, this state was not permanent, as captives were forcibly assimilated into their new culture and their children were not born into bondage. Warren concludes that the transatlantic slave trade thrived because of the various people, from African leaders to warring Indigenous factions and English colonists and merchants, who chose to engage in enslavement.