Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLIX:2 (Autumn, 2018), 305–313.

Elizabeth Pleck

Slavery in Puritan New England

New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. By
Wendy Warren (New York, Liveright Publishing, 2016) 268 pag.
$29.95 cloth $18.95 paper
The footnotes in Warren’s monograph, which won the Merle
Curti Prize in U.S. Social History and was a ﬁnalist for the Pulitzer
Prize, are equally as worthwhile reading as the text. In one of them,
Warren tells the story of Lorenzo Johnston Greene, the renowned
African-American scholar of slavery in colonial New England. As a
graduate student at Columbia, he was assigned a paper about the
abolition of slavery in the region from 1775 A 1800. Greene re-
called thinking at the time that “slavery never existed in New
England.” Intrigued by the subject, he conducted prodigious re-
search, producing The Negro in Colonial New England (New York,
1942), which became the deﬁnitive account for his time.

Greene was not alone in his original belief. There have been
many explanations for the denial of slavery in New England.
Among the most compelling are that the region is associated with
abolitionism and that the story of slavery usually concerns the
period immediately prior to the Civil War, after slavery in New
England had been eliminated. Historians continue to follow
Greene’s path-breaking research, trying to pierce the public’s am-
nesia about slavery in New England. In 1991, the discovery of an
African burial ground at a Manhattan construction site led to
dawning recognition of the presence of slavery in the North.

By 1998, scholars had caught up: Three important mono-
graphs about slavery in New England were published that year.1
Leadership passed to public historians, journalists from the Hartford

Elizabeth Pleck is Professor of History, emerita, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. She is
the author of Not Just Roommates: Cohabitation after the Sexual Revolution (Chicago, 2012); Love of
Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (New York, 2010).

© 2018 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, Inc., https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01270

1
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Comunità, E
Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York, 1998); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery:
Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, 1998); Robert K. Fitts,

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| E L I Z A B E T H PL E C K

306
Courant, the Providence Journal, academics at Brown University’s
Slavery and Justice Project, and local museum staff. More recently,
historians, literary scholars, and journalists have written about this
subject for a scholarly audience and for the general public. One
signiﬁcant new development is the attention to Indian slavery,
showing both its extent and the ways in which Indian and African
slavery were intertwined. Because of “the fragmented archive”—
tiny bits of information about individual slaves buried in several
archives—most historians have been drawn to the eighteenth cen-
tury, when slaves were more numerous, and more information is
available.

This deeply researched monograph depends on investigation
of handwritten texts rather than the several new databases about
slavery and the slave trade. Warren has tracked down references
in the extant literature and added research in unpublished court
cases, wills, probate inventories, and private papers in New England
as well as in London. With her ability to convert a line or two in a
court deposition or a will into an argument about the nature of
New England slavery, Warren successfully circumvents the illegi-
bility of the archive.

The subtitle Slavery and Colonization in Early America reveals
the connections that Warren seeks to highlight. The most impor-
tant population center in the British colonies of New England was
Massachusetts Bay, founded by Puritans, who are best known for
their religious ideals. Many historians have tried to ﬁnd a middle
ground that characterizes Puritans as motivated by proﬁts and piety;
Warren comes down heavily on the side of proﬁt. She seeks to
show how slavery was embedded in, and central to, the economic
growth of the largely white, settler-based colonies of New England
during the seventeenth century. The racial demography of the
region is not conducive to such an inquiry, since only 2 percent of
New England’s population was black in 1700. Accordingly, Warren
widens her vision to link two regions, New England and the
Caribbean, especially Barbados, the ﬁrst English settlement in that
area almost entirely dependent on slave labor.

New England merchants shipped “refuse” ﬁsh, horses, other
livestock, and lumber there, allowing Caribbean planters to put

Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise: Master/Slave Relations in Eighteenth-Century Narragansett,
Rhode Island (New York, 1998).

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S L A V E R Y I N NE W EN G L A N D | 307
slave labor to work in growing cash crops—ﬁrst tobacco, then cot-
ton or indigo, and ﬁnally sugar, the most desirable of products.
Warren submits that Boston merchants and Salem sea captains
were key players in the forging of modern capitalism based on this
trade. She further portrays the West Indies as a dumping ground
for Indians captured from wars with settlers, thereby opening
Indian land to white colonists. She describes a simple process:
“Indians and Africans had replaced each other in a way orchestrated
by settler colonists, for the purposes of proﬁt and expansion” (97).
An economic historian would certainly agree that maritime
commerce contributed to New England’s growth in the seventeenth
century; Boston and Salem no doubt proﬁted from trade with the
West Indies. But there is insufﬁcient evidence to evaluate the con-
tribution of West Indian trade to New England’s commercial
growth, in comparison with, Dire, whaling, the fur trade, ﬁsh sold
to mainland colonies, intercoastal shipping, or trade with southern
Europe and the Canary Islands. Sketchy ﬁgures do not support a
simple replacement of Indians with Africans. Estimates of Indians
enslaved after New England’s major Indian wars show that hundreds
of Indians were shipped to the West Indies and more were inden-
tured and enslaved locally. In sum, New England replaced and added
Indian servants and slaves, rather than simply substituting Africans
for Indians.2

The second section of the book relates the life and labor of
New England slaves to the theme of slavery and colonization.
Without cash crops to cultivate, New England’s masters enlisted
slave labor to do exactly the same kind of work as servants and
family members. Warren summarizes a chapter about slave labor by
writing that “slave conscripts [were] in the front line of colonization—
lumbering woods, clearing land for planting, fencing enclosures”
(130). She frames a chapter about sexual relations and kinship around
the theme that chattel slavery separated families and “made personal
relations fraught with sorrow” (159). A chapter about the legal sys-
tem examines multiple forms of slave resistance and crimes com-
mitted by slaves.

Linford D. Fisher, “‘Why shall wee have peace to bee made slaves?’ Indian Surrenderers
2
during and after King Philip’s War,” Ethnohistory, LXIV (2017), 91–114; Margaret Ellen Newell,
Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca, 2015),
76–77, 118–122.

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| E L I Z A B E T H PL E C K

In the third section of the book, Warren re-tells a familiar story,
that of the dispute between two Puritan ministers about the abolition
of the slave trade in New England at the beginning of the eighteenth
century. Samuel Sewall, a former Salem witchcraft trial judge,
penned an antislavery pamphlet, The Selling of Joseph in 1700. John
Safﬁn, a slave owner and a fellow judge with Sewall on the
Massachusetts Superior Court, sought to refute Sewall in A Brief
and Candid Answer. Warren adheres to the standard interpretation
of Sewall’s pamphlet as an anomaly with little impact at the time.
She cites an article by Mark Peterson about The Selling of Joseph in
a footnote. Peterson agrees that Sewall’s pamphlet did not lead to
any major abolitionist fervor, but he insists that it contributed to
general evangelical reform in Boston and throughout northern
Europe.3

Warren uses the Sewall/Safﬁn debate as an opportunity to
dissect Puritan racism among abolitionists and anti-abolitionists
alike. An examination of racist beliefs suggests that racism, non
simply proﬁt, motivated the enslavement of Africans. But the en-
slavement of Indians reinforces Warren’s view that land hunger,
not simply racism, propelled enslavement. She writes, “English
colonial ideology may have ranked Indians, as a group, somewhere
above Africans, but that did not deter colonists from selling Indians
into Caribbean slavery” (106).

Every book about New England slavery adopts the position
that it was either milder than or, as Warren concludes, similar to
slavery elsewhere in North America. Warren ﬁnds “almost nothing
about early New England’s practice of slavery [Quello] was unique to
the region” (12). She insists that New England, like other English
colonies, had “chattel slavery,” which she deﬁnes as a master’s
ability to sell slaves, as the permanence of slave status, and as the
inheritability of slave status from mother to child. These indica-
tors suggest, Tuttavia, that New England was indeed unique.
New England had no statutes, or only vague and ambiguous ones,
about many conditions of servitude that were clearly spelled out
in many other colonies.

In 1641, Massachusetts enacted a Body of Liberties, specifying
that slavery was permissible only for those captured in “just wars” or

3 Mark A. Peterson, “The Selling of Joseph: Bostonians, Antislavery, and the Protestant Inter-
national,” Massachusetts Historical Review, IV (2002), 1–22.

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those who willingly sold themselves into it. The Body of Liberties,
possibly the ﬁrst explicit statute about slavery in the English New
World colonies, was also imprecise. For Warren, its “ill deﬁned”
interdiction of slavery gave a green light to the development of
slavery.4 The real test of what the Body of Liberties meant came
four years later in a criminal prosecution of a Massachusetts ship
captain and his mate for killing 100 Africans and absconding with
a number of others (as well as breaking the Sabbath) when they
torched a Guinean village on a slave-trading voyage. The authorities
in Massachusetts ordered the release of the Africans that these sailors
brought back with them, and the Puritans wrote a public apology to
be sent to the surviving Africans near the decimated town. Warren
sees the case as more of an anomaly than a fundamental debate about
the morality of the slave trade. Nonetheless, she explicates it with
more subtlety than previous scholars. She writes, “What was Puritan
about the trial was the insistence on rigorous adherence to the law,
what was English about the trial was the series of events that led to
Esso, and what was human about it, just maybe, was that it left some
people disturbed” (42).

The ill-deﬁned nature of New England’s slavery can be seen in
a more positive light. In the early days, a few New England settlers
had African indentured servants—men who became free after the
contract for their service ended.5 Moreover, Warren mentions two
enslaved men—Angola (also called Angelo) in Boston and Roco in
Springﬁeld—who entered into contracts with their owners to buy
their freedom, and other evidence shows that a couple of other
owners made the same deal, largely as a means of freeing themselves
from a rebellious male slave.6 The inheritance of slavery through
the mother’s line was also ambiguous. Custom may have validated
Esso, but no clear statute explicitly stated this principle. Occasionally,

In an unpublished paper—“‘Man Stealing, Bond Slaverie & Villinage’: Reconsidering
4
Slavery & Slave Law in Early Massachusetts and England’s Empire” (2018)—Holly Brewer
regards this case as a major debate about the legality and morality of slavery. Inoltre, she
argues that in comparison with other colonies, the law permitting slavery for captives in “just
wars” was a much more limited rationale for slavery than those found in the statutes of other
colonies.
5 George Henry Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts (New York, 1866), 9.
For Peter Swinck, see Henry M. Burt, The First Century of the History of Springﬁeld (Springﬁeld,
Massa., 1898), 302.
6 Warren, New England Bound, 121–124, 137–139, 172–175, 235–236, 239–241. Michelle Morris,
Under Household Government: Sex and Family in Puritan Massachusetts (New York, 2013), 20.

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| E L I Z A B E T H PL E C K

Indians and Africans signed contracts with their owners, consenting
to their enslavement, precisely because the inheritability of slavery
was not a settled legal matter.7 Moreover, after the General Assembly
of Connecticut in 1704 overruled a decision afﬁrming a biracial
man’s claim not to be a slave because his father was English, IL
man’s fellow townsmen in Hartford refused to turn him into the
authorities, allowing him to remain free.8 Manumission was similarly
ill-deﬁned because, as Warren points out, it might be conditional, O
result in a former slave becoming an indentured servant as a more
stable economic arrangement than being a free laborer.

Angola and Roco, the two slaves mentioned above who won
freedom for themselves, had names related to the current nation of
Angola, a gigantic swatch of central west Africa that the Portuguese
had colonized. Warren emphasizes New England’s slave trade with
Guinea and the Gold Coast, but some of the slaves in New England
were originally from Angola and were bounty stolen from another
empire’s slave trade with Africa. The union of the Spanish and
Portuguese crowns facilitated a surge in the transatlantic slave trade
from Angola, mostly to Brazil. English privateers raided the human
cargo of Portuguese ships in the Caribbean and brought the slaves
into the ports of colonial North America to sell. Inoltre, IL
Dutch brieﬂy established a foothold in a small slice of Brazil, Dove
African slaves cultivated sugar. When the Dutch power in these
areas deteriorated, Dutch slave traders sold slaves brought to Brazil
from Angola to the English in the Caribbean.9

As a result of these trade routes, a small group of Africans from
Angola in New England shared work, intermarried, and supported
each other in winning freedom. Warren notes the existence of
such a social network from Angola in New Amsterdam; other
scholars located ones in colonial Virginia and the eastern coast of
Maryland.10 One clue to such a network is the presence of Spanish-
Luso names among Africans in New England. Warren notes that

Ibid., 248.

7 Newell, Brethren by Nature, 173.
8
9 April Lee Hatﬁeld, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Phila-
delphia, 2004), 165–166.
10 Douglas Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia: Indians, Englishmen, and Africans on the
Eastern Shore during the Seventh Century (New York, 1993), 374–379; Timothy H. Breen,
“Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (New York, 1980),
7–18. For the early presence of Angolans in the Spanish Caribbean, see David Wheat, Atlantic
Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1650 (Chapel Hill, 2016), 68–103.

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S L A V E R Y I N NE W EN G L A N D | 311

slaves from west-central Africa often took Portuguese names even
before the Atlantic slave trade. She writes, “Manual’s name suggests
non-English origins: was he linguistically skilled? Was he trained in
some special way?" (296). She also refers to the Spanish-sounding
name of Wonn (121).

Warren tells the story of Sebastian Kane, a free black man in
Boston, who bought Angola’s remaining servant time without dis-
closing their friendship as fellow countrymen from Angola. Later
in life, as a free man, Angola worked alongside Meneno, another
man with a Portuguese name.11 Angola also had a son-in-law,
Philip Sabatta, with a Portuguese-sounding name. In addition to
those names, sixteen other Portuguese-sounding names appear in
the text and footnotes of New England Bound, including three men
named Mingo (short for Domingo).

Portuguese-sounding names are a clue about background and
identity, suggesting something about the survival and adaptation of
African cultural practices in New England. Who were John and
Gallio Nota? The willingness of Dudley Bradstreet, their owner,
to allow them a surname other than his own implies that the Notas
were able to maintain a modicum of control and personal identity.
The very fact that slaves did not universally receive ﬁrst names
from their owners and occasionally retained surnames, sometimes
taking their father’s ﬁrst name as a surname, shows that all traces of
their prior identity did not disappear.

Puzzling as it may seem, the same Puritans who sought to
dictate the terms of a favored slave’s manumission did not insist on
naming their human property. Berlin dubbed slaves with this degree
of autonomy “Atlantic Creoles.” Their familiarity with Christianity
and European languages and customs enabled them to establish
friendly relationships with masters and former owners. Angola
owned a dwelling house, land, and a cow in Boston; Roco had a
house and 60 acres of land in Springﬁeld. Not every Angolan, how-
ever, gained freedom and became a landowner. Basto, a slave
in Boston, was convicted of having raped his master’s daughter.12
Nonetheless, the undeniable success stories of some of New England’s

11 Melinde Lutz Sanborn, “Angola and Elizabeth: An African Family in the Massachusetts
Bay Colony,” New England Quarterly, LXXII (1999), 119–129.
12
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (New York,
1998), 17–28; Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, “‘Canniball’ Negroes, Atlantic Creoles,
and the Identity of New England’s Charter Generation,” African Diaspora, IV (2011), 76–94.

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| E L I Z A B E T H PL E C K

slaves provides some balance with the equally valid stories of hunger,
slave suicide, alienation, and isolation that Warren tells.13

New England was unique in having no laws that prohibited
marriages among slaves. In 1654, a wealthy Boston merchant, who
was also an assistant to the General Court of the colony, performed
the marriage ceremony of Angola and Elizabeth, the ﬁrst slave
couple to be married in New England. The Puritans believed that
legal marriage was a better option for slaves than sinful sex outside
marriage, although it did not prevent the sale of married slaves’
family members. Gloria McCahon Whiting’s “Power, Patriarchy,
and Provision,” published after New England Bound appeared,
highlights the importance of common-law and legal marriages
among slaves in New England. Whiting characterizes New England
slave marriages as matrifocal in structure (mothers and children often
living separately from the husband), but patriarchal in practice.
Warren’s chapter about intimate relationships between Africans
states that slave marriages were rare. Her text and footnotes refer
to ﬁve slave marriages in seventeenth-century New England;
additional research suggests nineteen more.14

“How could a servant be a patriarch?” writes Warren. Whiting
itemized several ways. Owners allowed enslaved men hired out as
laborers to keep their earnings, which slaves could use to buy their
libertà. Warren reports that masters could release slaves for several
days a week to plant crops to feed themselves and their families
(179). Inoltre, Massachusetts courts also required enslaved
men who were not legally married to earn wages to pay child
support—a recognition that they were providers for their chil-
dren, even while they remained the property of an owner.

Warren’s writing style—bracing, humorous, and occasionally
cynical—is as noteworthy as her interpretations. She does not pull
any punches: “There was as much cruelty to the slave trade as
cupidity” (38). She belongs to the school of “artful historians”

13
For assimilation to English norms through the Anglicization of Portuguese names, Vedere
Gloria McCahon Whiting, “Power, Patriarchy, and Provision: African Families Negotiate
Gender and Slavery in New England,” Journal of American History, CIII (2016), 599, N. 30.
14 A Report of the Record Commissioners Containing Boston Births, Baptisms, Marriages, and Deaths,
1630–1699 (Boston, 1883); William H. Whitmore and William S. Appleton, Records of the Boston
Selectmen, 1701–1715 (Boston, 1884); Vital Records of Salem (Salem, 1918); Vital Records of New
porto, 1649–1850 (Hartford, 1917).

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who challenge the norm of writing in an objective, neutral voice,
often blurring the line between history and ﬁction. The book club
member who expects the kind of thinking and feeling characters
who populate a novel will not be disappointed. In the service of pro-
viding a full portrait of one African woman’s sadness about being
torn from her family, Warren writes, “We might consider what
Hagar felt” (154).

Artful historians are not social historians. They prefer the
techniques of the novelist, including a heavy dose of speculation,
served a la carte or with dollops of context supplied from the
scholarly literature. Artful historians do not use databases to piece
together modal life stories or to discern general patterns based on
counting up cases.15 Warren sometimes claims a phenomenon to
be rare or common, but the strength of this book lies in scene set-
ting and storytelling, not in empirical representativeness. In definitiva,
the theme of this highly accessible study is how the immoral con-
junction of cultivating staple crops for export and racialized slavery
reshaped the entire Atlantic world, beginning with a fateful
exchange of goods and people between the Caribbean and New
England.

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15 The methodological contribution of Marissa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives (Philadelphia,
2016), is to write about an enslaved woman’s perspective even without referring to any spe-
ciﬁc enslaved woman in a historical document. She does so by imagining how the presence of
slaves inﬂuenced the lives of the white people described in court cases. This method involves
an even higher level of speculation than does work that refers to a genuinely documented
enslaved subject.

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