Between Slavery and Freedom

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Book: Read Between Slavery and Freedom for Free Online
Authors: Julie Winch
about fifty free black families in Philadelphia by the 1770s, and perhaps the same number scattered throughout the counties adjoining the city—some 500–600 individuals in all. They took whatever employment they could, struggled to keep their heads above water financially, and tried not to fall foul of the law. It was a tough existence, made tougher by the knowledge that they and their children could be bound out to labor if the authorities judged them to be vagrants or paupers.
    Just as slavery flourished in the Mid-Atlantic colonies, so it took root in New England. The tendency of masters throughout the region to refer to both hired hands and slaves as “servants” makes it difficult to determineprecisely how many slaves there were in any neighborhood at any point in time. It also hides the presence of black people who were free, who earned wages, and were indeed “servants.”
    The Puritans of Massachusetts gave legal sanction to slavery early in the colony’s history. The 1641 Body of Liberties ruled that it was lawful to hold as property “Captives taken in just warres,” those who voluntarily sold themselves into bondage, and those who were sold into slavery by others. 7 Obviously that covered every category of individuals the Puritans might lay claim to. Within fifty years black slaves were “fixtures” not only in port towns like Boston but in rural areas. Some came directly from West Africa and others from the British colonies in the West Indies. Massachusetts never had the large gangs of slaves one would see in the South or even in the Mid-Atlantic colonies, and there were plenty of white householders who could simply not justify the purchase of a single slave. Nevertheless, black slavery emerged as part of the fabric of social and economic life in colonial Massachusetts. Black freedom, however, did not.
    Rhode Islanders were even more eager than their Massachusetts neighbors to acquire slaves. There was a fleeting attempt in the 1650s to limit the period of servitude to ten years, but it went nowhere. The pressure for cheap labor on farms, in private homes, and in the bustling town of Newport was simply too great, and the town’s merchants soon enmeshed themselves in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. By 1770, Rhode Island, the smallest of the New England colonies, had the highest percentage of slaves. Its free black population, by contrast, numbered just a few hundred individuals, and the colony’s laws, combined with prevailing white assumptions about people of color, left them struggling to maintain their freedom.
    Slavery also flourished in Connecticut. Thriving coastal communities were hungry for labor, and slaves supplied it. Slaves accounted for a significant percentage of farmhands, especially in the eastern part of the colony. They did other kinds of work as well. Depending on age and gender, they were blacksmiths and wheelwrights, dairymaids and household drudges. They planted and wormed tobacco, and enslaved black men built, maintained, loaded and helped crew every kind of vessel that sailed out of Connecticut’s ports, from small coasting skiffs, to brigs and schooners in the West Indian trade, and much larger square-riggers plying the trans-Atlantic routes. Although by the end of the colonial period Rhode Island had the highest ratio of slaves to whites, Connecticut had the largest number slaves in New England—nearly 6,500. Its free black population was very small in comparison to the number of enslaved blacks—perhaps 300 people in all.
    Further north, New Hampshire law recognized and protected slavery. Once Portsmouth began to grow as a port, merchants shipped in slaves. Black men provided much-needed labor, skilled and semi-skilled, while the white families that prospered through trade bought black women as household “help.” Other coastal communities sprang up, and the more affluent whites in those communities purchased slaves.

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