New England Bound

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to enslavement, violence and sexual violence, suicide, and racial slurs.

How could America’s first European settlers, renowned for their strict views on religion and morality, become a community of enslavers? In New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America Warren provides an answer, explaining that most of the Pilgrims and Puritans who first settled New England firmly believed that God had given them the right to enslave non-Christian foreigners. Some even believed that enslaved people would benefit from the arrangement by converting to Christianity.

Theology and enslavement, then, were not at odds. Indeed, Warren argues that for these early colonists, “piety and profit worked hand in hand,” and most colonists were at ease with reaping the rewards of enslaved people’s exploitation (12). Warren quotes historian Perry Miller on the relationship between the colonists’ faith and their enslavement of outsiders: “Piety…made sharp the edge of Puritan cruelty” and agrees that “enslaved people lived on that knife’s edge” (120).

Warren emphasizes the ubiquity of Christian theology and scriptures in colonists’ views on slavery—whether they were for or against it. Pro-slavery thinkers such as John Saffin and Cotton Mather referred to religious analogies and biblical passages to support their argument that slavery was not only tolerable but a beneficial feature of society. For example, Saffin argued that abolishing slavery would “invert the Order that God hath set in the world” in which some people were born to be “Monarchs, Kings, Princes, and Governours” while others were fated to be their enslaved people (274). He also referenced Bible passages that permitted the enslavement of foreigners.

Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister, also argued that slavery was a Christian practice, especially if enslavers converted their enslaved people to Christianity. What bothered Mather about slavery was not enslavement itself but allowing enslaved people to live as heathens rather than as Christians. However, even if an enslaved person converted, Mather believed that their enslavement should continue. To him, Christianity was the path to saving their soul—not to securing actual freedom. He wrote, “What law is it that sets the baptised slave at liberty?...Not the law of Christianity…which allows of slavery” (168).

Mather and Saffin’s intellectual opponents also based their logic in Christian tradition, with of course a different interpretation of the holy text and the Christian purpose as a whole. Missionary John Eliot “had grave doubt about the righteousness of sales into slavery,” arguing that colonists should focus on preaching to Indigenous people, as he did, in an effort to expand “God’s Kingdom” (120). Samuel Sewall, meanwhile, articulated a more confident argument against slavery in his 1700 pamphlet “The Selling of Joseph.” Like the other thinkers of his time, Sewall based his reasoning in Christian thought, even stating in his work that he believed he had been “call’d of God to write this apology” (262). Sewall called the act of stealing and selling people “the most atrocious of capital crimes,” pointing his readers to a passage in the Bible that called for slave traders to be put to death. To Sewall, slavery was not a natural feature of social hierarchy, but a sinful invention. He wrote, “Originally and naturally…there is no such thing as slavery” (264). By analyzing colonial perspectives on slavery and the religious opinions on which they were founded, Warren explains the typical worldview of English colonists in this time period—and how a radical few rejected it.