Slavery: Northeast

By: David Quigley

Source:

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

Slavery: Northeast

Slavery existed in New England from the mid-seventeenth century into the nineteenth century. The Northeast's slave system differed substantially from other American slave societies in terms of demographics, work patterns, and the nature of the religious debate over enslavement. The region's early achievement of gradual emancipation in the years after the American Revolution stands as the most significant point of regional particularity.

The first slaves arrived in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island in the first decades of English settlement. Colonial records reveal scattered slaveholdings along the coast as early as the 1620s and 1630s. Greater numbers began to arrive after midcentury, as New England merchants grew to prominence in the Atlantic slave trade. While never central to the colonial New England economy, slavery was nevertheless an accepted part of colonial development for generations. In the Northeast enslaved blacks constituted a far smaller percentage of the population than in the American South and the Caribbean. The region's slave population was even significantly smaller than in the Middle Colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. While some coastal southern New England counties had substantial slave minorities, far less than 10 percent of the region's population was enslaved. New England's enslaved community hovered between 2 and 3 percent of the region's entire population throughout the eighteenth century. In the second half of the eighteenth century growing numbers of slaves imported to New England were imported directly from Africa; in the decades before the American Revolution over three-quarters of the region's slave population was African by birth. Most of the slaves came to the Northeast after initial New World experiences in the South and the West Indies.

Slaves in the Northeast were concentrated in coastal towns. Newport, Rhode Island; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and Boston, Massachusetts, were centers of black life in the eighteenth century. From the mid-seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century such cities were characterized by significant and visible communities of people of color. Ownership of slaves was more widespread in the ports but was still confined to a small minority of the white population. Members of the coastal merchant elite who became powerful by the early eighteenth century were important participants in the Atlantic slave trade. Massachusetts and Rhode Island, in particular, were home to merchant elites whose fortunes rested on the trade in slaves.

Many slaves labored on the docks of port towns like Boston, Newport, and New Haven, Connecticut. Blacks found employment as stevedores, longshoremen, and teamsters. Male slaves were often hired out in these ports, and some were able to save enough money to purchase their own freedom. Away from the waterfront, slaves typically worked as part of the domestic labor system or were hired out to local employers as skilled craftsmen and day laborers. Elite city residents commonly owned slaves, as did many urban artisans and middle-class residents.

Religious leaders often reflected upon the existence of slavery in the region. Having been founded as a result of a mix of religious and economic impulses in the seventeenth century, colonial New England unsurprisingly featured recurring debates over the legitimacy and morality of the slave system. Cotton Mather, a leading Puritan minister in Boston in the early eighteenth century, argued for the baptism of enslaved blacks and for the Christianization of the slave system. Some Puritan leaders went so far as to condemn slavery and call for gradual emancipation; such critics were often marginalized and met with angry responses from supporters of slavery. Quakers in Rhode Island were early advocates of emancipation of New England's slaves. By the 1770s they were joined by other Protestant sects in the Northeast.

New England's legal system helped shape the region's distinctive patterns of slave life; slaves were defined simultaneously as property and as persons before the law. As property, enslaved blacks were assessed like other goods, yet slaves often enjoyed legal rights similar to those of the region's free population. The enslaved could testify in court and bring lawsuits to colonial courts. Courts in the Northeast helped pioneer a range of legal approaches to slavery. Massachusetts defined the status of interracial children according to the race of the mother and in the early eighteenth century outlawed interracial marriage. In the 1760s and 1770s the region's courts handled a growing number of personal liberty cases, as enslaved men and women petitioned for their freedom. The 1772 Somerset case, which many viewed as having ended slavery in Great Britain, was invoked by blacks seeking their freedom and by their white allies. Such cases helped launch the eventual drive toward gradual emancipation in the early 1780s.

African American culture in the Northeast was shaped by the unusual demographics of the region. Small in numbers and concentrated on the coast, New England blacks turned popular colonywide events like election day and training day into moments of collective identification and celebration. Participation by African Americans in these events allowed them to assert their status as members of a larger public, even as they presented a nuanced critique of society. Negro Election Day in particular allowed slaves in the Northeast to subvert conventional racial ideas, critiquing notions of African American powerlessness and presenting the possibility of black power.

Residents of rural areas of the region, especially in northern New England, were early, enthusiastic supporters of emancipation, although these areas had few if any enslaved blacks. The onset of the Revolutionary War, which was centered in New England, accelerated a long-developing movement against slavery in the region. Local blacks intensified their activism; eight African Americans from Boston petitioned the general court for an end to slavery in 1777, invoking the rhetoric and ideas of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. Court decisions often found for black plaintiffs. Vermont's legislature abolished slavery, and by 1784 courts in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut cleared the way for regionwide gradual emancipation.

While small numbers remained enslaved in the Northeast well into the nineteenth century, the first emancipation in New England set the region in deepening opposition to southern slave states. In the antebellum era only five northern states, all in New England, would allow African American men to continue to vote on the same terms as white men: Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Yet the attainment of gradual emancipation and black citizenship by no means put an end to long-standing patterns of discrimination and racism. The early nineteenth century witnessed the publication of numerous antiblack popular publications, the emergence of a more racist politics in some communities, and a particularly damaging series of race riots in the 1820s. Even as some New Englanders were sowing the seeds of a more militant antislavery movement in the antebellum period, other whites in the region maintained a belief in racial hierarchy and struggled to limit the dimensions and possibilities of African American freedom.

See also Baptism; Connecticut; Declaration of Independence; Demographics; Emancipation, Gradual; Free African Americans to 1828; Laws and Legislation; Maine; Massachusetts; Mather, Cotton, and African Americans; Negro Election Day; Negro Training Day; New Hampshire; Occupations; Petitions; Religion; Rhode Island; Slave Trade; Slavery: Mid-Atlantic; Society of Friends (Quakers) and African Americans; and Vermont.

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