Making Freedom: Resisting and Abolishing Slavery in New England and beyond

1492-1705

The peaceful and unarmed Arawak people who inhabit Guanahani are the first to experience the greed and cruelty of Columbus and his associates that will eventually result in the death or enslavement of many of them. Over the next 400 years, countless thousands of Arawak and other Indigenous peoples will perish at the hands of European invaders.

Indeed, an entry in Columbus’ journal just two days after his arrival foreshadows the massive genocidal tragedy to come that will include the eventual extermination of the Arawak. Addressing his royal sponsors, Columbus writes in his journal that “when your Highnesses so command,” the Arawaks on Guanahani “could all be carried off to Castile (in Spain) or be held captive in the island itself because with 50 men they could all be subjugated and compelled to do anything one wishes.”

Columbus wastes no time. Less than one month later, he begins enslaving local people. He orders five young male Arawak, who have come trustingly aboard his flagship, to be seized and “taken to the Sovereigns to learn our language so that it might be disclosed what is in the land.” He subsequently has five women and three children kidnapped to accompany the men because the latter “would comport themselves better in Spain having women from their land than without them.” He uses the phrase cabezas de mugeres, meaning “heads of women,” just as he would say “head of cattle.”

Columbus then visits the islands now known as Cuba and Hispaniola, and establishes  a colony in the part of Hispaniola that some 300 years later will become

 Haiti. In 1493, in the second of his four exploratory voyages, Columbus leads a fleet of 17 ships that sails to the Caribbean. Again, the official goal is to expand Christendom by acquiring territories and converting Native peoples to the faith, but the quest for gold – an obsession of Columbus and others – invariably takes priority. In Hispaniola, he and the colonists enslave more Indigenous people, including children, and torture, beat, and rape them to extract information about where gold can be found. Thousands resist by committing suicide.   

In 1494, Columbus transports to Spain about 500 captured members of the Taino tribe – a sub-group of the Arawak – of whom he had written “they show as much love as if they were giving their hearts.” The 300 who survive the passage are sold on the auction block in Seville. In February the following year, Columbus rounds up about 1,500 Arawak, some of whom have rebelled, and selects 500 deemed the strongest for transportation to Spain; about 200 of them die en route. 

The slave trade between the Old World and the New World is now well underway. 

1526  First Africans likely brought as slaves to North America revolt

What is known is that the Spanish abandon the settlement one year later. Historians cite this event as but one example of the presence and agency of Africans in the Atlantic world, and in what became the United States, prior to 1619. That year – when “20 and odd” captive Africans arrive in Jamestown, Virginia aboard an English ship – has long been referenced as the starting point of the story of Africans and slavery in the U.S. But some modern scholars say this is both inaccurate and overstates the significance of the 1619 event in a global context.   

Beginning in the early 1500s, the Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and others fight to control the resources of the emerging transatlantic world, killing and displacing countless Indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas, and seizing their lands. And slavery increasingly becomes an integral part of European colonial ventures.

“The worst aspect of overemphasizing 1619,” writes historian Michael Guasco, “may be the way it has shaped the black experience of living in America since that time.… How we choose to characterize the past has important consequences for how we think about today and what we can imagine for tomorrow.”

According to Guasco, author of Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World, “raising the curtain” with 1619 “casually normalizes white Christian Europeans as historical constants and makes African actors little more than dependent variables in the effort to understand what it means to be American.”

Selective memory, he says, “has conditioned us to employ terms like settlers and colonists when we would be better served by thinking of the English as invaders or occupiers. In 1619, Virginia was still Tsenacommacah, Europeans were the non-native species, and the English were the illegal aliens. Uncertainty was still very much the order of the day.

“When we make the mistake of fixing this place in time as inherently or inevitably English, we prepare the ground for the assumption that the United States already existed in embryonic fashion. When we allow that idea to go unchallenged, we silently condone the notion that this place is, and always has been, white, Christian, and European.”

Guasco states that “remembering 1619 may be a way of accessing the memory and dignifying the early presence of black people in the place that would become the United States, but it also imprints in our minds, our national narratives, and our history books that blacks are not from these parts. When we elevate the events of 1619, we establish the conditions for people of African descent to remain, forever, strangers in a strange land.”

1579  Africans win freedom in first mass uprising

have long believed that the first successful sustained mass uprising in the Americas took place in Haiti when armies of the enslaved led by Toussaint Louverture -- himself formerly enslaved -- defeated French colonial forces and created an independent republic in 1804 after 13 years of warfare. 

Schwaller upends the conventional wisdom by discovering new details about the Panama uprising at the General Archive of the Indies, a repository in Seville, Spain, devoted to the Spanish Empire in the Americas and Asia, of which Panama was a part for over 300 years. The papers, including letters, royal edicts and court documents, shed new light on several groups of enslaved Africans in and around what is now the Panamanian province of Colón.

Schwaller details his research in a book, African Maroons in Sixteenth-Century Panama: A History in Documents. He writes: “The success of Panama’s maroons established a precedent for securing freedom and autonomy that other African maroons would repeat in the centuries to come in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Jamaica.” 

1607  Colonists "christianize the natives" with war, land theft  

A fragile peace between the Powhatan and the colonists is eventually established, and an emphasis on cooperation is strengthened by the efforts of the Powhatan paramount chief, Wahunsenacah, and his daughter, Matoaka (nicknamed Pocahontas, which is variously interpreted as “playful one" or “ill-behaved child”). 

But the new leaders of the revived colony are military men who consider the Powhatan to be essentially a "military problem.” Taking to heart the urging of the Virginia Company to “Christianize the natives” and absorb them into the colony, they embark on a strategy of outright conquest. Wahunsenacawh suspects as much. He tells colonial officials: “Your coming is not for trade, but to invade my people and possess my country.” 

In 1610, 70 armed colonists attack the Paspahegh tribal capital. They kill between 65 and 75 villagers, burn houses, and cut down cornfields. The assault marks the start of the first of three Anglo-Powhatan Wars that will span the next 36 years. 

In 1612, colonial forces capture Pocahontas and hold her for ransom, triggering an immediate ceasefire. Encouraged – and likely pressured – to convert to Christianity, she is baptized under the name Rebecca. Peace negotiations stall over the return of captured hostages and arms. Finally, after almost two years, a deal is sealed by the marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe, a colonial official and tobacco planter. Their union ushers in an eight-year period of better relations between the Native Americans and the colonists – known as the “Peace of Pocahontas” – and Pocahontas serves as a translator and ambassador for her people. 

In 1616, the Virginia Company arranges for the Rolfes to travel to London, England to promote further investment in the colony. Pocahontas is presented to English society as an example of the "civilized savage." The following year, the Rolfes board a ship to return to Virginia but Pocahontas falls ill. She is taken ashore, where she dies of unknown causes, possibly pneumonia or tuberculosis.

Ironically, it is John Rolfe who is the first Virginia settler to successfully grow and harvest tobacco – soon to become the economic mainstay of the colony and the source of more than three decades of intermittent armed conflict between the Powhatan and the English settlers. Rolfe had brought untested tobacco seeds from Bermuda where his supply ship, destined for the Virginia colony, had been deliberately run ashore during a fierce storm in 1609 to save the lives of those on board. Tobacco was growing wild on the Caribbean island after being planted there by shipwrecked Spaniards years before. 

1619  First enslaved Africans brought to Virginia  

Historians estimate that, from 1492 to 1880, between two million and five and a half million Indigenous people and 12.5 million Africans are enslaved in the Americas. The arrival of Europeans on the continent spells disaster for local inhabitants: By the beginning of the 1600s, according to some academics, as many as 56 million people – 90% of the population of the Americas – die in the wake of the European invasions.

Historian Edward L. Bell estimates that 90% of New England’s Native population is decimated by the 1620s, leaving about 10,000 survivors. Meanwhile, the English occupiers of the region grow tenfold, from about 3,000 in 1630 to 33,000 in 1660. 

The superiority of their weapons is a major factor in Europeans’ conquests and domination in the New World. But the genocides of Indigenous peoples are spurred by a lethal invisible weapon: smallpox. 

Indigenous peoples have no history of prior exposure to – and therefore no developed immunity to – smallpox, measles, or flu, and no experience of how to combat them. 

These European viruses are the product of thousands of years of livestock farming, during which time animal infections cross species and new strains evolve that become deadly to humans. These viruses tear through the Americas at a devastating and overwhelming rate.  

1622  Powhatan kill settlers to stop theft of tribal lands

1638  Enslaved Africans traded for Native prisoners

During the 17th and 18th centuries, most captive Africans do not arrive in New England directly from Africa. Rather, they are the “residue” or leftover human cargo of slave ships that sail from Africa to the Caribbean. Planters on the islands purchase the more physically robust West Africans for their sugar plantations. Those not selected – children, the elderly, the sick, or those known to be rebellious – are often sold to interested buyers in New England and transported there, mainly from the English colonies of Barbados, Jamaica, Antigua, and Nevis. Indeed, an estimated one-third of the enslaved people imported to Massachusetts in the 1700s come directly from Barbados.  

According to the National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, D.C., about 27,000 enslaved Africans – around seven percent of the total brought to North America – are transported to the Mid-Atlantic and New England region. Researchers have found that most come from West Africa’s Gold Coast, in the modern nation of Ghana. Fifty-five of the 80 documented slave ship voyages from Africa to New England begin at the port of Anomabu in modern-day Ghana; for a time in the mid-18th century it is the most active port in the West African slave trade. 

According to historian David Hackett Fischer in his book, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, traders from Rhode Island and Massachusetts establish close relations with an integrated elite of African and English merchants in Anomabu to purchase captives; some of those captives arrive by sea in coastal commerce, but most come from a vast hinterland stretching hundreds of miles into the interior of West Africa, and are force-marched southward to Anomabu to be sold. New England captains know that their customers prefer slaves sold there – called Coromantees – believing them to be the tallest and strongest people in West Africa and better able to survive the rigors of New England winters.  

1638  Enslaver orders rape to "breed slave stock"

Seven years later he expands his land holdings after receiving grants of 600 acres in Boston and 400 acres in nearby Braintree. Operating with several ships, he trades furs with Native Americans, and is credited with originating New England’s trade in fish, lumber, and provisions. He sells whale oil to a slave trader and merchant in Bristol, England, and lumber to a merchant in Malaga, Spain in exchange for cash and fruit. It is not clear if this trade also includes enslaved Africans.

Written records suggest that Maverick lives a life of notable contradictions. A staunch Anglican, he is reportedly hospitable and kind to newly arrived colonists, providing them with lodging and food; and he and his wife and servants aid local Native American families during a smallpox epidemic in 1633, burying those that die and taking in some surviving children. By contrast, he enslaves at least three Africans and boasts about breeding "blooded stock, both slaves and cattle."  

Samuel Maverick is an ancestor of two other men of the same name: a 17-year-old apprentice who is one of four people killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre at the start of the Revolutionary War; and a Texas rancher, land baron, and signer of the 1836 Texas Declaration of Independence from whom the term “maverick,” meaning unorthodox or independent-minded, is derived.

Maverick Square, in present-day East Boston, and Maverick station on the city’s Blue Line subway, are named after Samuel Maverick. 

1641  Massachusetts gives legal green light to slavery

With the expansion of the slave trade, the importation of enslaved people to New England is reflected in their growing numbers: From 1,700 in 1700 to more than 15,000 70 years later. The 1754 census lists nearly 4,500 enslaved people in Massachusetts; Boston alone is home to more than 1,500. 

Vital to local economies, and viewed by their enslavers as essential labor as well as valuable investments, enslaved people work in every kind of trade, workplace, and home environment. They are house servants, dairy workers, cooks, lumberjacks, nurses, sailors, blacksmiths, rope makers, coopers, tailors, physician’s apprentices, distillery workers, and more. And it is not just wealthy Whites who benefit from their free labor: By the 1740s, nearly one in four Boston households “owns” at least one enslaved person. 

In western Massachusetts, the town of Northampton “fit the New England pattern of having a small population of enslaved persons in each household,” according to Historic Northampton’s Slavery Research Project. “Other Massachusetts towns recorded larger enslaved populations per site on farms, but in Northampton it was more common to see enslavers making use of the labor of the people they enslaved in their homes, on their farms, and in their places of business.”

The situation is quite different in the extensive dairy and cattle-raising farms of eastern Connecticut and southern Rhode Island. These farms grow to a size comparable to small plantations in the southern colonies. Through their connections to the Atlantic slave trade, the Narragansett planters buy enslaved Africans from the Caribbean sugar colonies, and eventually directly from Africa, to work on their farms and increase production of goods for export. They collaborate with merchants in Providence and Newport – a major slave trading center – to ship much of the cheese, beef, pork, wheat, corn, candles, molasses, rum, and wool produced on their farms to southern colonial ports and the West Indies. The food products are used to feed enslaved plantation workers, allowing Caribbean and southern planters to maximize their profits by devoting as much land as possible to growing cash crops like sugarcane and cotton.   

At the height of this plantation system in the mid-18th century, Washington County – known as “Narragansett Country” – contains between 25 and 30 large and very lucrative plantations, each with as many as 40 enslaved workers. Robert Hazard, one of the richest enslavers in New England, owns 12,000 acres of land in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, including a large dairy farm. Twenty-four enslaved women work in the creamery alone. It is estimated that, at this time, enslaved people in Washington County make up as much as a quarter of the population. 

Only a few Narragansett planters “own” large numbers of enslaved people. But according to historian Christy Clark-Pujara, author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island, ultimately “thousands of enslaved men, women, and children” in the area produce foodstuffs and raise livestock for trade.

Journalist C.S. Manegold, author of Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North, writes: “Though slavery never took hold in New England on the same epic scale as in rural Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and elsewhere, the practice was just as firmly planted in the minds of northern settlers accustomed to white rule, and just as ravaging for those who suffered the consequences.” 

1644-1645  First slaving venture helps legitimize bondage in Massachusetts 

The court, however, does not convict them on these charges, but does rule that the two Africans, including one who has served as an interpreter, had been enslaved and brought to New England illegally. The court orders their return to Africa with a letter expressing its “indignation” at the mariners’ conduct.  

Several scholars have suggested that the court’s action, far from indicating a principled opposition to slavery as an institution, actually helps to legitimize bondage within the Massachusetts Bay Colony. While its Body of Liberties bars “bond slaverie, villinage or Captivitie,” it makes exceptions for war captives and “such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us.” By voiding the enslavement of the two men from the Rainbow and returning them to Africa with a written apology, the court implies that slavery is tolerable as an institution in Massachusetts as long as it stays within the rules.

As a business venture, notes historian Sean M. Kelley, the Rainbow’s voyage is a very public failure, demonstrating that early New England slavers are both inexperienced and underfunded – compared to their European counterparts. It will be close to another century before the transatlantic slave trade becomes an established sector of New England’s economy. 

Until about 1730, most Africans arrive in Massachusetts through trading between European colonies in the Caribbean. White New Englanders look especially to English-occupied islands in the West Indies to purchase enslaved Africans. “Seasoned” by life in the New World and having built immunity to diseases common in the islands (including those introduced by European colonizers), the majority of these African captives are first shipped to Caribbean islands from their homelands by English, French, and Spanish slavers to work on sugar plantations. Many have valuable skills, such as blacksmithing and rice cultivation, and have learned some English.

The slave trade blossoms into a thriving enterprise for New Englanders and West Indian planters alike. By 1750, the harbors of New England are filled with schooners, sloops, and brigantines going to and from the Caribbean or to and from Europe and West Africa. The trade offers New England mariners the opportunity to make more money from human cargo than they can from rice, sugar, cotton, molasses, and other agricultural commodities. Ships out of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts, Portsmouth in New Hampshire, and Providence and Newport, Rhode Island, start carrying enslaved people from the English-occupied sugar islands of Barbados and Jamaica to England’s Atlantic coast colonies and, despite international tensions, to Spanish, Dutch, French, Swedish, and Danish colonial ports around the Caribbean.

The realities of the trade defy obvious assumptions. Most North American slave ships do not deliver African captives to American ports. In his book, American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, Sean Kelley writes that over two centuries nearly seven out of 10 captive Africans arrive on American shores aboard British vessels. Conversely, some 56% of all captives on American slave ships end up on Caribbean sugar plantations. 

According to Kelley, this reflects two different – and often separate – currents in the American transatlantic slave trade: what he calls “ships coming in” and “ships going out.” The former is the process by which some 389,000 Africans are transported into North American captivity from the 17th to the 19th century by vessels of all nations, particularly Britain. The “ships going out” trade, by contrast, involves North American-based merchants and mariners carrying Africans into captivity in the Caribbean and throughout the hemisphere. In that same time period, they transport some 305,000 enslaved people in nearly 2,300 slaving voyages.

Researchers have documented that the American slave trade is most active in the 18th century when 87 percent of all American slaving voyages take place. 

1652  Rhode Island slavery ban is not enforced

1662  Racist laws reward rape of enslaved

Historians are uncertain about how often White enslavers raped enslaved women and girls. But the historical record provides some indication. The 1619 Project refers to an analysis by historian Thelma Jennings of 514 personal narratives of formerly enslaved people. Jennings found that 12 percent of the female authors referred to experiences of coerced sex by White men. Of those women, 35 percent had fathers who were White men or had given birth to children fathered by White men. (Jennings notes that the numbers were likely far larger, given the reluctance of recently freed Black women to discuss such private matters with their White interviewers.)

Recent DNA research has also proved illuminating. A 2020 study that sampled the DNA of 50,000 people – 30,000 of them with African ancestry – shows that the genetic contribution of European men to the ancestry of African Americans is three times that of European women. This suggests, according to researchers, that enslaved men were more likely to die before they could father children and that enslaved women were often raped by White men and forced to bear their children.

1669  Virginia makes killing enslaved people legal

• Non-white, free African Americans and Native Americans cannot purchase a White, Christian indentured servant. (1670).

• Enslaved people need a pass to leave their “master’s” property, and are not allowed to carry weapons of any kind (1680).

• An enslaved person visiting another plantation is not allowed to remain for longer than four hours without permission from his or her owner (1682).

• A White man or woman who marries an African American or Native American person can be banished from the state of Virginia (1691).

These regulations are incorporated in the Virginia Slave Code of 1705 – formally entitled An act concerning Servants and Slaves – that consolidates and expands slavery laws in Virginia.

1670  First African American to own land in Boston

The pioneering Potter Atkins buys her timber-frame house and land from a baker and his wife using an inheritance from her father and money likely earned from domestic work. She owns her property as a single woman, and manages to maintain control of it throughout her marriage to a man named Atkins. Puritan minister Cotton Mather reportedly officiates at the wedding ceremony in 1693. After her death, Potter Atkins is laid to rest in Copp's Hill Burying Ground in Boston’s North End neighborhood. 

The documentation of Potter Atkins’ property records are discovered in 2009 by Dr. Vivian Johnson, a retired professor of education at Boston University, after years of research. In an article she wrote for Historic New England, Dr. Johnson comments on the significance of Zipporah Potter Atkins’ accomplishment.

“In the rigid structure of Puritan society, in which women were seen as inferior to men and people of color were consigned to the lowest ranks, being a woman of African descent meant that Atkins’s place would always be in the bottom stratum. In that context, her achievement of the American Dream was not just in acquiring property but in making a home where she could exercise her independence and affirm her connection to family and heritage.” 

In 2014, then-Governor Deval Patrick unveils a memorial to Zipporah Potter Atkins on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway in Boston. The granite monument is etched with the initials she used to sign the 1699 deed for the sale of her property.

1671  Race scientists peddle theories of White superiority

He coins the latter term – which becomes a label for White people – to describe the inhabitants of the southern slopes of Mount Caucasus along Europe’s eastern border who he claims constitute  the “original,” and therefore most beautiful, human type. His inspiration for this idea is the skull of a young Georgian woman who had been a sex slave in Moscow, and had died there of venereal disease. If hers is the most beautiful skull, he reasons, then its place of origin –  the Caucasus Mountains – must be the birthplace of the White race; hence, the term Caucasians.

Blumenbach’s belief is shared by many prominent cultural and political leaders in the U.S., including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. 

In the mid-1800s, Samuel George Morton, an American anthropologist, theorizes that intelligence is linked to brain size. After measuring a vast number of skulls from around the world, he concludes that Whites have larger skulls than other races and are therefore “superior.”

Black abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass comments on why race scientists’ views become popular and fashionable among White Americans. “The whole argument in defense of slavery becomes utterly worthless the moment the African is proved to be equally a man with the Anglo-Saxon. The temptation, therefore, to read the Negro out of the human family is exceeding strong.”

Nell Irvin Painter explains that unitary Whiteness holds up until the late 20th century, when immigrants from Latin America and Asia complicate the classification of American races. “We now live in an age where race (Black, white, etc.) coexists with ethnicity (Hispanic, non-Hispanic). Who knows what classifications the future will bring?”

“Whiteness isn’t done with us yet,” she writes, “but it need not be the same whiteness as two or three generations ago, as a generation ago, despite the heroic efforts of white nationalists to shore it up with guns. This is a good thing. Since the George Floyd protests, fewer and fewer white Americans are now able thoughtlessly to think of themselves as unraced individuals with no role to play in undoing white supremacy. May their embrace of human rights, especially Black rights, change yet again the meanings of American whiteness.”

1676  Rebellion spurs imports of enslaved Africans

The revolt, and others that soon follow, are ultimately defeated, but the planter elite in the eastern Tidewater region is deeply alarmed by the multiracial alliance of indentured White servants and enslaved Africans. It abandons its heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of importing more enslaved Africans whom they believe will be easier to control. 

Virginia’s lawmakers begin to make legal distinctions between “white” and “black” inhabitants. By permanently enslaving people of African descent and giving poor White indentured servants and farmers some new rights and status, they hope to separate the two groups and make it less likely that they will unite again in revolt.

As part of its effort to preserve control over the colony’s government, economy and society, the planter elite pushes Indigenous people off their lands and enslaves those who resist. According to historian James D. Rice, author of Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America, between 1670 and 1725 colonists enslave between 30,000 and 50,000 Native Americans. Entire tribes disappear from the area and White farmers move onto their lands. 

1676  Executions portend broad assault on Indigenous peoples

Violence erupts after colonists accuse three Wampanoag of murdering John Sassamon, a Native cultural mediator and translator who is also a “praying Indian” (the colonists’ term for Native people who have converted to Christianity and who live in one of the dozen or more so-called “Praying Towns” established by John Eliot and other Puritan ministers). The Harvard-educated Sassamon had served as an advisor to Pumetacom, but the latter accuses him of spying for the colonists. 

In June 1675, a colonial jury finds the three Wampanoag men guilty of murdering Sassamon; two are hanged and the third is shot.  

The arrest, trial and execution of the men – viewed by Pumetacom and his supporters as a hostile violation of Wampanoag sovereignty – ignites long-simmering tensions between Native people and colonists into a full-scale conflict that engulfs parts of modern-day Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and coastal Maine. The Wampanoag, Narragansett, Pocumtuck, and Nipmuc battle the English and tribes allied with them, including the Pequot and Mohegan. 

The fighting begins to subside in August 1676, after Pumetacom is shot dead in what is now Bristol, Rhode Island by a Native American man allied with the English. Colonists mutilate Pumetacom’s body, and distribute and publicly display its parts in gruesome celebration. His head is exhibited on a tall pole outside the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts and left to rot there for 20 years after his death in an effort to intimidate other Native Americans, and to warn them of the consequences of resisting the colonists.  

By the fall, the colonists and their Native allies have eradicated much of the Native American opposition in southern New England. The conflict claims the lives of an estimated 3,000 Native people from wounds and disease. Six hundred English soldiers die, and 17 White settlements are destroyed.

But the loss of Native lives in the war “only begins to capture the extent of the hurt,” according to historian David J. Silverman, in his book, This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and The Troubled History of Thanksgiving. “For months after the fighting slowed to a trickle, terrified Native people straggled into English settlements pleading for mercy, some of them mere children on their own. Men who surrendered joined other Indian prisoners in jail or holding pens until authorities could determine whether they had committed hostilities during the war. Basic standards of evidence had no bearing on these rulings. The slightest suspicion was enough for English judges to sentence Indians to die on the gallows before hostile crowds. The same macabre scene played out over and over again in the public squares of Plymouth, Boston, and Newport (Rhode Island) throughout the summer and fall of 1676.”

Some 2,000 Indian captives who are spared execution – most of them women and children – are sentenced to slavery. Many are initially imprisoned in Fort Washington, a military fortress on Boston’s Castle Island. Males over the age of 14 are transported to the brutal sugar plantations of the West Indies (see next timeline entry.) The majority of the others, and their offspring, are forced to work as servants in New England households for the rest of their lives. “As late as the American Revolution,” writes Silverman, “descendants of Indians taken by the English during King Philip’s War could still be found as slaves in every corner of New England and many other British dominions.”

Victims of the conflict also include some 500 Native residents of the Praying Towns. At the beginning of the war, colonial officials, fearful that Praying Indians would join the fight on Pumetacom’s side, order their relocation to Deer Island, a barren strip of land in Boston Harbor. Some 500 Native people are force-marched to Boston and then taken by boat to the island. More than half die of starvation and exposure in what is essentially a concentration camp.  

Historian Margaret Ellen Newell, author of Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery, estimates that state-sanctioned enslavement of Indians during King Philip’s War enmeshed nearly 40 percent of the Native population of southern New England in slavery and involuntary servitude. 

The war – and the executions and enslavements that follow it – represent one of the opening salvos in a centuries-long violent assault on Indigenous people by White colonists and, later, by “Americans.”

1676  Colonists trade Native captives for enslaved Africans

Native Americans are forced into slavery and servitude as early as 1636. But it is not until Metacomet’s War that Native people are enslaved in large numbers, according to a study by Brown University historian Linford D. Fisher, entitled ‘Why shall wee have peace to bee made slaves’: Indian Surrenderers during and after King Philip’s War. His research indicates that the colonists enslave those who take no part in the fighting – and who surrender to avoid enslavement – at nearly the same rate as captured combatants. Some Native Americans offer their services to the English for self-protection. For example, Awashonks, the female chief of a confederation of Sakonnet Indians, pledges support on the condition that Sakonnet men, women, and children will not be killed or sent out of the country as slaves.

Fisher writes: “Even contemporary official histories of the war all point to the same thing: Indians were enslaved en masse and either distributed locally or sent overseas to a variety of destinations.” 

During Metacomet’s War, New England colonial authorities routinely ship captive Native Americans to enslavement in Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, the Azores islands, Spain, and the Moroccan port of Tangier in North Africa. While kidnapped and enslaved Africans do not know where they will be taken, Native Americans understand that they can be sent to Caribbean plantations and face extremely harsh treatment far from their homes and communities. Fear of this fate spurs some Native Americans to pledge to fight to the death, while others surrender hoping to avoid being shipped overseas. Especially near the end of the war, Native Americans surrender in larger numbers in direct response to promises of leniency or because they hope that doing so will be understood as a statement of neutrality.  

Enslavement drastically reduces the Native population and feeds the colonists’ appetite for land. But it also has an ideological and racist component: a presumption that Indigenous people are innately inferior. Fisher says he is increasingly convinced that, for colonists, “slavery was a normal part of their mental framework.”

1688  Anti-slavery petition divides Quakers

For example, they assert that, according to the Golden Rule, enslaved people have the right to revolt. (Increasingly frequent rebellions, plots, and mutinies by enslaved people in England’s Caribbean sugar colonies have made Germantowners concerned for their safety.) Also, they reason, it would be difficult to recruit other prospective settlers from Europe to join the community if they saw the contradiction inherent in slavery.

The petition is highly controversial. Quakers will later be synonymous with abolition – as well as with peace, equality, and pacifism – and Philadelphia will become a hub of anti-slavery activism. But at this time slavery is widespread in the colonies. Many early European settlers in Philadelphia and surrounding towns, including Quakers, purchase enslaved Africans at local slave markets to work on their farms. 

According to historian Katharine Gerbner, author of Origins of Abolitionism in America: The Germantown Petition Against Slavery, the slave trade was “a source of pride and a symbol of prosperity for many English Quakers who considered slaves to be necessary for economic development.” She notes that William Penn, the Quaker founder of the Province of Pennsylvania, once proudly declared that during the course of one year 10 slave ships with their human cargo had arrived in Philadelphia from the West Indies.

No action is taken on the Germantown petition. It is forwarded up the hierarchical chain of the Quakers’ administrative structure—monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings—without being approved or rejected. 

Anti-slavery sentiment and activism take a firmer hold among Quakers in the north during the late 18th and early 19th century. For example, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, founded in 1775, consists primarily of Quakers. And individual Quakers play an important role in the Underground Railroad, providing shelter and other support to escapees from slavery heading to freedom in the northern states and Canada. 

But the situation in England’s southern colonies is different. Many early Quaker settlers are enslavers, and local Quaker meetings wrestle with whether and how to emancipate those they hold in bondage. In North Carolina and Virginia, some Quaker meetings set deadlines for members to free their enslaved workers and cease purchasing or importing enslaved Africans and Indigenous people or face being “disowned” by their community. 

In North Carolina, as in most Southern states, emancipating slaves is illegal. After unsuccessfully petitioning the colony’s assembly for the right of enslavers to free their enslaved workers, Quakers devise a legally defensible emancipation scheme. Ironically, it arguably results in a different form of bondage for those they seek to free. In his 1896 book, Southern Quakers and Slavery, historian Stephen B. Weeks describes how North Carolina Quakers accept “donations” of enslaved workers whose “masters” want to be rid of them. The Quakers then transport these workers to free states like Ohio and Indiana, as well as to Liberia, the controversial new American colony established in Africa. 

Beginning in 1808, and over a 40-year period, hundreds of previously enslaved African Americans receive resettlement assistance “under the care” of Quaker agents who effectively control them, including hiring them out and receiving their wages. In this effort, the Quakers collaborate with the federally funded American Colonization Society, the organization behind the scheme to relocate freeborn and emancipated Black Americans to Liberia. In the opinion of Quakers and others, the program provides participants with opportunities to start a new life; for the Southern enslavers who support it, the ACS is a vehicle for reducing the threat of slave rebellions and protecting the institution of slavery from the threat posed by free Black Americans. Colonization is overwhelmingly opposed by the African-American community and the abolitionist movement.

In 1844, the Germantown petition is rediscovered in the Philadelphia archives of the Religious Society of Friends and published in its newsletter, The Friend, to support abolitionist efforts.

Katharine Gerbner writes that the petition – which preceded by 92 years the official Quaker commitment to abolish slavery – has over the past three centuries “reached iconic status in abolitionist and Quaker narratives…. Indeed, the petition has served to strengthen the modern Quaker abolitionist identity and provide deep roots for the anti-slavery movement in American history.”  

1698  Colonial merchants gain right to trade Africans

The Puritan leader, Rev. Cotton Mather, takes a different position. Opposed to the slave trade but an enslaver himself, Mather berates those who fail to educate their enslaved servants in Christianity, and have them baptized. He argues that this will make them more obedient and compliant. 

Mather rejects the notion that baptism would mean freedom and “masters” losing their slaves. “What law is it,” he asks, “that sets the baptized slave at liberty? Not the law of Christianity.” Christianity, he says, recognizes both bondmen and freemen; and neither under canon law (Christian religious law) nor under the English constitution could the baptism of an enslaved person result in emancipation.

Some other Massachusetts ministers who support Mather’s contention petition the state legislature for a law stating that baptism does not alter the status of the enslaved. They are successful. In his book, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776, historian Lorenzo J. Greene writes that this was “the first concerted effort of the Congregational ministry to effect a compromise similar to that adopted by the Anglican Church in the southern and middle [English] colonies, whereby the soul of the slave might be saved and the slaveholder left in possession of his property.”

Cotton Mather had long supported converting the enslaved, in large measure to mold them into exemplary servants. In 1693, he had organized a “Society of Negroes” for that purpose. Enslaved workers who could obtain permission from their enslavers were invited to meet at Mather’s home every Sunday evening for two hours to pray, sing, and listen to a sermon. For their guidance, he published a set of rules – "RULES For the Society of NEGROES.” 

Historian and anti-racist activist Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, comments that two of Mather’s rules are instructive: members were to be counseled by someone “wise and of English” descent, and they were not to “afford” any “Shelter” to anyone who had “Run away from their Masters.” Kendi writes that “some members of the society probably delighted in hearing Mather cast their souls as White. Some probably rejected these racist ideas and used the society to mobilize against enslavement.”

The debate about Christianity and enslavement continues. By 1760, numerous essays and sermons have been written addressing the questions: Is slavery Christian? What about slavery is unChristian?

1700  Isaac Royall: A dynasty built on slavery

Isaac Royall amasses enormous wealth in Antigua and related businesses in New England. His income from selling enslaved people totals more than his sales of sugar and molasses combined; it also exceeds the cost of his purchase of Ten Hills Farm, a 500-acre estate in Medford, Massachusetts that was once owned by John Winthrop, one of the Puritan founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its governor for 18 years. 

In 1732, while still living in Antigua, Royall buys Ten Hills Farm and expands the existing colonial farmhouse into a grand and ostentatious three-story Georgian mansion. The remodeling project is overseen by his younger brother, Jacob. Five years later – after drought, a hurricane, and a severe economic depression in Antigua that prompts planters to cut costs, including food and housing for their enslaved workers – Isaac Royall leaves the island for good. 

He departs soon after the discovery of an alleged plot by a group of enslaved people to massacre all the 3,800 White residents, beginning with gunpowder bombs at a British ceremonial event where many White planters and officials would be present. One of the masterminds of the rebellion, Kwaku Takyi, an enslaved West African also known variously as Prince Klaas or King Tackey or King Court, would then be installed as the leader of a new Black kingdom on the island. (He is now honored as a National Hero of Antigua and Barbuda.) 

While some historians believe that the size and threat of the conspiracy has been exaggerated, its brutal suppression is fully documented. Of the 132 enslaved persons convicted of participating, 88 are executed: five, including Prince Klaas, by being broken on the wheel (a form of crucifixion in which the prisoner is strapped, spreadeagled, on a rotating, bone-crushing cartwheel;) six by gibbeting (being hung in irons until death from hunger and thirst;) and 77 by being burned at the stake. Among the latter is Hector, an overseer of Isaac Royall’s. Royall receives $70 compensation for the loss of his “property.” Quaco, another rebel who had been enslaved by Royall, is reprieved and banished to Hispaniola, the Caribbean island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

When Isaac Royall returns to Massachusetts, he brings with him 27 of his enslaved servants. These are housed in a two-story slave quarters at Ten Hills Farm constructed for the purpose. At least 13 other people enslaved by Royall family members work on farms owned by the Royalls in Walpole, Massachusetts and Bristol, Rhode Island, according to journalist C.S. Manegold in her book Ten Hills Farm, The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North. Manegold notes that Jacob, Isaac’s brother and business partner, is also a wealthy man. He is described by historian Robert E. Desrochers, Jr. as “Boston’s most active slave trader”.

Isaac Royall dies in 1739 at the age of 67, and his son, Isaac Jr., also a merchant mariner, inherits Ten Hills Farm, the enslaved people who work there, and other property. Isaac Jr.’s advantageous marriage confirms his place in the colonial elite. His wife, Elizabeth McIntosh, will also inherit from her grandfather's half of a 1,400-acre sugar plantation in the Dutch colony of Surinam in South America, and its enslaved workforce, as well as land in Rhode Island. Together, the Royalls own six homes in New England and as many as 70 enslaved workers toil in their buildings and fields. 

After Elizabeth’s death in 1770, the Revolutionary War upends the lives of the remaining Royalls and the people they hold in bondage. Isaac Jr., who is loyal to Britain, abandons Ten Hills Farm – which is later confiscated by the new American government – and heads north to Salem, Massachusetts where he tries, desperately and unsuccessfully, to find a sea captain who will take him to Antigua. Instead, he boards a ship to Halifax, Nova Scotia and eventually sails to England and exile. One of his daughters and her family find refuge in Boston when it is still under British control; the other flees to the Surinam plantation. Meanwhile, Ten Hills Farm becomes a military camp where General George Washington meets periodically with his senior officers during the 11-month siege of Boston by Patriot forces.

Isaac Royall Jr. dies of smallpox in England in 1781. In his will, he orders the sale of his Antigua lands and enslaved workers to pay his debts and “distributes” those people he holds in bondage in New England to other family members. He makes an exception in the case of Belinda, an elderly woman at Ten Hills Farm. He gives her the option of choosing her freedom “provided she get security that she shall not be a charge to the town of Medford.” 

In 1783, Belinda Sutton petitions the state legislature for compensation for her 50 years of unpaid service to her former “master”. In what some scholars call the first instance of reparations for slavery in independent America, Belinda Sutton is awarded an annual pension of fifteen pounds and twelve shillings, to be paid from Royall’s estate. However, just one payment is made, and Sutton is compelled to renew her claim no less than five times over 10 years to secure missed payments.

An enslaved man named George, who had also worked for years at Ten Hills, commits suicide after learning that Royall plans to sell him off the farm. 

Isaac Royall Jr.’s will includes a bequest to Harvard College of six tracts of land in Massachusetts. In 1815, the college sells three of these plots and uses the proceeds to endow the Royall Professorship of Law. Two years later, Harvard Law School is established. Royall’s bequest was “a generous gift”, writes Manegold. “But it might as well have been a blade of grass in a great lawn. The land represented just a fraction of Isaac Royall Jr.’s holdings at the time he died.” 

In 2015, students at Harvard Law School (HLS) organize successful protests and sit-ins demanding that the school change its official seal, which had been modeled on Isaac Royall's family crest. 

In 2022, the HLS announces that, in commemoration of Belinda Sutton and other enslaved people who labored on Royall’s Medford estate, a courtyard on campus will be renamed the Belinda Sutton Quadrangle and will become home to an art installation that “will highlight her voice and moral clarity.” The school will also sponsor a lecture and a conference in her name every two years. The latter will “feature speakers and topics that advance our understanding of the legacy of slavery and expropriation and the ongoing pursuit of racial justice.”

HLS also announces that it has retired the endowed chair funded by Royall’s original bequest.

The Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts is now a museum. The Slave Quarters is believed to be the only remaining such structure in the northern United States.

1705  Slave Codes deny rights, legalize barbarity

The code establishes new property rights for enslavers; allows for enslaved people to be freely traded; prohibits Africans, free or enslaved, from owning arms or traveling without written permission; sanctions the apprehension of suspected runaways; and prohibits Black people from employing Whites. The code also determines that anyone who cannot prove they were Christian in their home country is a slave in the colony, even if they converted to Christianity in Virginia. This means that anyone from Africa is automatically a slave. And since the code establishes that children follow the status of their mother, racial slavery is now officially hereditary.

Enslaved people are subject to harsh physical punishment for violating provisions of the code, ranging from hanging for rape or murder to being whipped, branded, or maimed – for example, having ears cut off – for lesser offenses.  

With the new laws, the colonial elite aims to establish greater control over the growing population of enslaved Africans in Virginia and to segregate them from White workers. This, it is hoped, will reinforce efforts to prevent uprisings like Bacon’s Rebellion, 29 years earlier, in which enslaved Africans and White and Black indentured servants had formed a multiracial alliance and made common cause. 

The pattern of division between Black and White soon begins to seem “natural and proper, even God-given,” writes historian Heather Cox Richardson in her book, How The South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. “White men began to believe that they were inherently superior to black men. They argued that the guidance of superior white men was all that kept black men from a savagery similar to that of animals. It was a burden for white men, to be sure, they thought, but it was their duty.”

Cox Richardson continues: “It was this mindset that southern leaders like Thomas Jefferson brought to their declaration that ‘all men are created equal.’ Since most white men could not conceive of a world in which men of color had rights equal to theirs – and they certainly didn’t think women did – they believed that the fact white men had equal rights meant that the nation was dedicated to the ideal of human equality.”

The Virginia code serves as a model for the slave codes of England’s other tobacco colonies – Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina. 

In her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson describes American slavery's all-encompassing dehumanization.

"The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owner desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner's debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate. They were regularly whipped, raped and branded, subject to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them. Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil.

"Before there was a United States of America, there was enslavement. Theirs was a living death passed down for twelve generations."