In this illuminating and engaging lecture, renowned historian Jared Hardesty launched our six-part fall series, Enslavement & Resistance: New England 1620-1760, exploring the importance of slavery in the colonization of New England, with the experiences of enslaved African and Indigenous people at its center.
Although slavery existed everywhere in early America, colonists in New England created a flexible and resilient slave labor system that mixed a variety of other dependent laboring arrangements - indentured servitude, apprenticeship, poor laws, and convict servitude - to address labor shortages. In turn, these enslaved people became ingrained in the colony’s social fabric, giving them access to public goods and, so they claimed, a place in society beyond their role as laborers.
This presentation offers an overview of the origins and significance of slavery in early New England. Often overlooked in histories of American and Atlantic slavery, New England was nevertheless an important space for the creation, perpetuation, and refinement of slavery as an institution.
Puritan settlers arrived in the region having studied Spanish, Portuguese, and earlier English colonial endeavors, all of which involved slavery. For them, slavery was a routine - and essential - part of colonizing the Americas and one they looked to adopt in their own settlements. Thus, enslaved Africans were present in the region from the earliest days of colonization and, within the first decades of English settlement, Puritans enslaved local Indigenous people. Enslaved people were a key source of labor, especially in port towns like Boston, while capturing Native people helped alienate them from their traditional homelands and accelerate colonization.
Most significantly, by the middle decades of the 17th century, the New England colonies became a key source of provisions for the burgeoning Caribbean plantation system. Providing these plantations and the large numbers of enslaved Africans who lived there salt cod, timber, and livestock, white New Englanders gained first-hand experience of slavery and how to maintain large enslaved labor forces. As they enjoyed the profits wrought from the immiseration of enslaved people in the Caribbean, New England colonists freely appropriated what they found most useful for their own version of slavery back home. This led to the rapid growth of the enslaved population in the region, which numbered around 1000 by 1700.
In tracing the history of New England enslavement, Jared Hardesty mines the rich documentary record of early New England to better understand the lives and experiences of the enslaved people victimized by New England’s peculiar institution. Unique among early modern English-language sources, the records kept by Puritan settlers - court records, probate records, and private letters and diaries - provide unparalleled, if often troubling, access for understanding enslaved people. Such documentation allows the lives of the enslaved to be centered in any account of early slavery.
Jared Ross Hardesty is professor of history at Western Washington University and a scholar of colonial America, the Atlantic world, and the histories of labor and slavery. He is the author of three books, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston (New York: NYU Press, 2016), Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England (Amherst & Boston: Bright Leaf, 2019) and Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Smuggling, Slavery, and Chocolate (New York: NYU Press, 2021). His articles and book reviews have appeared in Early American Studies, Slavery & Abolition, New England Quarterly, and William & Mary Quarterly. Almost all of his peer-reviewed publications have examined the economy, social structure, and global entanglements of 18th century New England.
We are grateful to Mass Humanities for its support of this lecture series.