Massachusetts

By: Paul Finkelman, David Quigley

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Massachusetts

Slavery existed in Massachusetts from the founding generation of Puritans up to and beyond the era of the American Revolution. Puritan writers debated the legitimacy of the institution, yet colonial leaders maintained the slave system for well over a century. The history of slavery in Massachusetts reveals the particularities of the system in New England.

There is evidence that enslaved Africans were living in coastal settlements even before the establishment of Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. By midcentury slaves could be found in a number of Massachusetts communities, with the black population concentrated in Boston and a few other port towns. Although the slave workforce never reached the size of those in colonies in the South or even in neighboring New York, slave labor nevertheless played a significant role in the colony's economic development. Some Massachusetts merchants were leading players in the triangular trade linking the New World with West Africa and Great Britain. Substantial fortunes were made by Boston traders who operated in the Atlantic. Enslaved men and women played important roles in the economy of the colony's port towns; in particular, the largely male black population worked extensively at the docks. Slaveholding was not common in the colony, which was a relatively homogeneous place, populated by English Puritans. However, in coastal cities black slaves could be found working on ships and serving the middle and upper class as domestic servants. In the early 1740s, 42 percent of all male slaves in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, were owned by sailors, shipwrights, or masters who also owned some sort of ocean going vessel.

Massachusetts was the most important slave colony in New England. Throughout the colonial period typically half of the region's slaves lived in Massachusetts, though the slave population of Massachusetts was still relatively small. Only a few wealthy whites owned slaves, and these masters were disproportionately located in Boston and surrounding towns. At the turn of the seventeenth century the colony's enslaved population was fewer than five hundred.

Massachusetts Bay Colony was a pioneer first in legally defining the status of enslaved Africans and later in unraveling the legal system that permitted the institution to survive. In 1641 the colony's Body of Liberties—which defined one hundred essential liberties and would later serve as a foundation for Massachusetts' General Laws—officially recognized the institution of slavery, taking the lead among Britain's North American colonies. By the late seventeenth century courts had ruled that the legal status of mixed-race children would be determined by the race of the mother. In the first years of the eighteenth century, Massachusetts banned marriage between whites and blacks.

Massachusetts Puritans engaged in sustained debate over the morality of slavery from the late seventeenth century forward. The Boston judge Samuel Sewall authored The Selling of Joseph in 1700, arguing that his Calvinist faith led him to recognize the moral wrong of slavery. Sewall called upon his fellow Puritans to turn against slavery as the new century began; few immediately heeded the judge's call, however. More typical was the position of Cotton Mather, one of the most important Puritan intellectuals. From his pulpit at Old North Church and in his numerous writings, Mather demanded that Puritans “Christianiz[e] the Negro” and, by extension, Puritanize slavery. Yet, while Mather did not oppose slavery, he also advocated the baptism of slaves; he further argued for basic literacy and religious education for local blacks. In 1717 he opened a school for blacks (including those who were slaves) to insure they gained a proper education and could read the Bible. The ambivalence of people like Mather—who supported slavery but also wanted to baptize and educate blacks—illustrates the ambivalence toward slavery found in the colony. By the middle of the eighteenth century support for slavery in Massachusetts began to crumble as other men in Massachusetts followed Sewall's example. Thus in 1735 Elihu Colman published Testimony Against the Antichristian Practice of Making Slaves of Men. As early as the 1730s blacks used the legal system to assert their freedom. In 1737 a slave named James petitioned and won an order for his freedom based on his deceased master's will.

Antislavery sentiment permeated pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts. A series of personal liberty cases had been contested over the course of twenty years in Massachusetts courts, with blacks arguing for, and often winning, their freedom. The British Somerset case of 1772—widely interpreted as ending slavery in England—had only intensified such litigation. Massachusetts was also the seedbed of the American Revolution in the 1770s, as both the city of Boston and its surrounding hinterland were central sites of mob violence, military mobilization, and armed conflict. The upheavals of that decade had a profound and ultimately fatal impact upon the institution of slavery. In Massachusetts blacks participated in the protests against the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, and other British policies. They also trained as members of their local militias. One of the first to die in the Revolutionary struggles was a former slave, Crispus Attucks, who was killed in the Boston Massacre in 1770. The patriot silversmith Paul Revere quickly produced an engraving of the massacre that became iconic in the Revolutionary period. In the engraving Attucks is clearly visible—and clearly African American. While blacks like Attucks joined in the colony-wide opposition to the British, other blacks in Massachusetts began petitioning the colonial legislature for emancipation as early as 1773; the outbreak of war only intensified black antislavery activism. In 1777 Prince Hall and seven other blacks petitioned the Massachusetts government to end slavery. They appealed to both Jeffersonian concepts that slavery was a “violation of Laws of Nature and of Nations” and that slavery also violated the “Religion of Jesus.” All the while, white Massachusetts leaders and citizens struggled to reconcile their revolutionary fervor with the existing institution of slavery.

The people of the new state would ultimately weigh-in against slavery and demand that their new constitution reflect this hostility to human bondage. The courts of the new Commonwealth of Massachusetts would strike the final blow against a slave system seriously undermined by the Revolution and by the ideological underpinnings of the struggle with Britain. In 1778 the Massachusetts legislature sent a proposed constitution to the people for ratification. The town meetings in Massachusetts rejected the proposed constitution, often citing the failure to end slavery and the failure to give black men the right to vote. In 1780 Massachusetts adopted a new constitution that allowed all adult men to vote and also declared in the first line of Article I that “All men are born free and equal.” The Massachusetts courts applied this clause in the Quock Walker cases (1780–1783), which centered on the legal status of one Massachusetts African American. Ultimately the state found that Walker was free and in Commonwealth v. Jennison (1783) upheld the conviction of his former master (Jennison) for battery and false imprisonment. Both the clause in the constitution and the court decision reflected the social reality of slavery in Revolutionary-era Massachusetts, and the case signaled the end of slavery in Massachusetts. In 1795 the Virginia jurist and legal scholar St. George Tucker asked Dr. Jeremy Belknap the “mode by which slavery hath been abolished” in Massachusetts. Belknap noted antislavery sentiment before the Revolution, the 1780 Constitution and the Quock Walker cases, but he stressed that the most important element ending slavery in Massachusetts was cultural and social: “The general answer is, that slavery hath been abolished here by publick opinion; which began to be established about thirty years ago.” He noted that at beginning of the struggle with Britain a number of people “did then take occasion publickly to remonstrate against the inconsistency of contending for our liberty, and at the same time depriving other people of theirs.”

Black participation in the Revolution also helped lead to the speedy end to slavery in Massachusetts. Blacks had fought in all of the colonial wars, but the Revolution attracted significant participation. Peter Salem distinguished himself at Lexington and Concord. He had been a slave in Framingham just before the Revolution, but his owner emancipated him so he could enlist in the militia. Other blacks fighting at Lexington and Concord included “Pompy” from Braintree, “Joshua Boylston's Prince,” who appears to have been a slave or had just been emancipated, and Cato Stedman and Cato Bordman from Cambridge. One of the fifty-one Americans to die there was Prince Estabrook, from West Lexington. Peter Salem also fought at Bunker Hill, but one of the heroes of that battle was Salem Poor. After the battle fourteen white officers commended him for his bravery. By the end of the war hundreds of black men from Massachusetts had served in the American Army. They returned to a state where slavery was socially dead and legally about to end. The first U.S. Census, in 1790, found about 5,500 blacks in the state—all of them free.

Freedom did not bring immediate or complete equality. In 1786 the state prohibited interracial marriage. State legislators worried about fugitive slaves from other states, and in 1788 required that migrating blacks prove their freedom. The law was designed to regulate “vagabonds” and was concerned with the support of indigents, suggesting that these white legislators held racist assumptions about blacks. However, the law did not prohibit black immigration and there is no indication it was ever implemented. In the 1830s the statutes would disappear from the state's revised statutes. While free and allowed to vote, blacks were not given access to schools throughout the state although in small towns and rural areas they probably attended school with whites. While trying to prevent fugitive slaves and impoverished blacks from becoming a burden, the Bay State was however also ready to protect its own black citizens from kidnapping. Another law passed in 1788 guaranteed that any person held against his will was entitled to the old common law writ of homine replegiando or personal replevin, which allowed the case to go before a jury. This law also prohibited any citizen of Massachusetts from participating in the African slave trade

By the early nineteenth century Massachusetts occupied central ground in a new era of struggle over slavery. Black Bostonians—particularly on the north slope of Beacon Hill—formed an exceptionally vibrant urban community, establishing religious and educational institutions. In 1798 blacks established their own private school in Boston, and in 1820 the city began to fund a public school for blacks. At this point the state's 6,700 blacks represented about 1.3 per cent of the entire population. In the rest of the state blacks had equal access to schools. In coastal cities blacks were heavily involved in the whaling and maritime industries and in places like New Bedford there was substantial integration. But for the 25 percent of the state's blacks who lived in Boston, racial equality was not a reality. Until the eve of the Civil War blacks in Boston would struggle, often successfully, to integrate schools and public accommodations. From this community, David Walker—who had migrated to Boston from the South and contributed to Freedom's Journal, founded in 1827 as America's first black newspaper—issued his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in 1829; the pamphlet was a foundational text for the rise of militant abolitionism in the next decade, even as it sparked widespread hysteria among white southerners. Walker would be followed by a rising chorus of antislavery voices, white and black, in antebellum Boston. The early national period also witnessed the growth of new forms of antiblack politics and culture in Massachusetts. Racist popular publications and race riots in the 1820s suggested the complicated legacies of slavery in the Bay State.

The complications continued into the next decade. In 1830 William Lloyd Garrison, a native of Newberryport, moved back to Massachusetts and in 1831 began to publish theLiberator in Boston. In his first editorial he declared that when speaking about slavery he would be as “harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice.” He proclaimed to the world, “I will not retreat an inch and I will be heard.” In the next few years he would establish the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833) and the New England Anti-Slavery Society (1832), which would later become the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison's radical abolitionist views led to an attack by a mob in 1835. The mob dragged him through the streets of Boston by a rope, but in the end nothing else happened to him. Garrison would never be popular in Boston until the Civil War made him seem like a prophet. However, he helped turn Massachusetts into a center of the antislavery movement. In the process the state became one of the most progressive in the nation.

In 1836 the Supreme Judicial Court ruled, in Commonwealth v. Aves that slaves brought into the state by their masters would become immediately free. The courts continued to recognize the federal right of a master to recover fugitive slaves, but in 1843 the legislature passed a new personal liberty law prohibiting state officials from helping to recover fugitive slaves. That year the state also repealed the ban on interracial marriage. However, in 1850 the Supreme Judicial Court ruled in Roberts v. Boston that under the state constitution local governments were free to maintain segregated schools. The case was brought by a group of blacks, led by the activist William C. Nell, who was also an early historian of African Americans and the typesetter for Garrison's paper. The case was argued by Charles Sumner, who would soon become one of the most radical antislavery men in the U.S. Senate, and Robert Morris, Jr., one of the first black attorneys in the United States. When the state court upheld segregation, blacks boycotted the public schools while they lobbied with their white allies for legislative relief. In 1855 the state legislature banned segregated education in Massachusetts.

In the 1840s and 1850s Boston was the scene of four major fugitive slave cases: George Latimer (1842), Shadrach (1851), Thomas Sims (1851), and Anthony Burns (1854). Latimer's master was forced to “sell” him to abolitionists when the sheriff refused to hold him in jail; Shadrach was rescued from a courthouse while Sims and Burns were returned to their owners. Still, hundreds of fugitives came to Boston or passed through the city and the state. Population figures for the state probably vastly undercounted the black population because fugitive slaves naturally avoided the census takers. Thus, in 1860 the census found 9,600 blacks in the state, but in 1870 almost 14,000 were counted, suggesting that many blacks who had been there all along were now free to be visible.

Early in the Civil War Massachusetts General Benjamin F. Butler began to free slaves who came to his camp, arguing they were “contrabands of war” and thus would not be returned to Confederate owners. Butler's shrewdly legalistic approach to runaway slaves solved a huge problem for the Lincoln administration. It allowed the administration to free any slaves who came under the control of the army without officially declaring emancipation to be a goal of the war. After January 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Butler's de facto policy became the official policy of the government.

From the beginning of the war blacks in Massachusetts clamored to fight against secession and slavery. Governor John Andrew, a committed abolitionist, offered to recruit black troops for the U.S. Army. In late 1862 Massachusetts became the first northern state to enlist blacks. The Massachusetts 54th Infantry Regiment became the most famous black unit in the war. Known as the “Glory Brigade” for its heroic yet futile assault on Battery Wagner, in South Carolina, the 54th proved to whites throughout the United States that blacks could be disciplined and brave soldiers. While organized in Massachusetts, the men of the 54th came from all over the North. Two of the earliest recruits were Charles and Lewis Douglass, who were living in Rochester, New York, with their father Frederick Douglass. Lewis ultimately became the regiment's first sergeant major. Frederick Douglass gave speeches throughout the North to recruit for the 54th. Reflecting the state's long abolitionist tradition, as well as Governor Andrew's enthusiastic support for black troops, Douglass declared in one speech: “We can get at the throat of treason and slavery through the State of Massachusetts.” In May 1863, with the 54th equipped and organized and on its way to South Carolina, Massachusetts organized a second black regiment, the 55th. The 54th would fight almost continuously from July 1863 until the end of the war. Five of its officers, including its commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, died in battle, along with 104 enlisted men. One other officer and 160 enlisted men died of disease. The 55th was sent to New Berne, North Carolina, but fought mostly in South Carolina and Florida. The regiment lost three officers and sixty-four enlisted men in battle and two officers and 128 men to disease. In May 1864 Massachusetts organized yet a third regiment, the 5th Regiment, Massachusetts Cavalry. This unit saw combat in Virginia in 1864 and 1865, participating in the siege at Petersburg in June 1864. When the war ended the regiment was sent to the southwest to help pacify Texas during the first year of Reconstruction. The regiment lost only seven enlisted men in combat.

After the war blacks in Massachusetts were active in politics. Even before the Civil War blacks held a few minor political offices in the state. In 1866 Edward Walker became the first black elected to a state legislature while other blacks held local offices. When General Butler became governor of the state, in the mid-1880s he appointed a black judge in Charlestown. Harvard admitted its first black student in 1866 and in 1869 George L. Ruffin became the first African American to graduate from Harvard Law School. The state's black population grew substantially, going from 14,000 in 1870 to 22,000 by 1890 and 32,000 by 1900.

In 1865 Massachusetts passed a comprehensive civil rights act, the first in the nation, giving blacks equal access to all licensed businesses. The legislature expanded this law in 1874 and again in 1895. African Americans still faced discrimination at hotels and restaurants, and in employment and housing, but compared to the rest of the nation, they had a great deal of legal protection and substantial equality in the public sphere. Boston continued to serve as a center for black intellectuals, where Harvard provided an education to such men as the Great Barrington native W. E. B. Du Bois.

Throughout the century Massachusetts politicians fought for civil rights. Senator Charles Sumner was a stalwart supporter of black equality and the author of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875. In 1890 Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge guided a new federal elections bill through the House, but it died in the Senate. While the South was moving toward segregation, in the 1890s, Massachusetts continued to pass civil rights legislation and in other ways promote racial harmony. In 1893 Boston put up a large monument by Augustus Saint-Gaudens to commemorate the heroic charge of the 54th Massachusetts at Battery Wagner. Two years later the state expanded its thirty-year-old civil rights act to provide equal accommodations for blacks at all businesses in the state. That year W. E. B. Du Bois received his PhD from Harvard with a groundbreaking dissertation on the suppression of the African slave trade. Three years later Massachusetts sent black militia units to fight in the Spanish American War. In the face of southern protests, other northern states kept their black soldiers home and so the African Americans from the Bay State were the only militia soldiers of their race who fought for the United States in that war. As it had before the Civil War, Massachusetts, while hardly perfect, remained in the vanguard in the struggle for racial equality.

See also American Anti-Slavery Society, American Revolution; Civil War; Congregationalism and African Americans; Boston; David Walker's Appeal; Freedom's Journal; Garrison, William Lloyd; Laws and Legislation; Literacy in the Colonial Period; Mather, Cotton, and African Americans; Religion; Slavery; and Walker, David.

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