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

1717-1771

1717  Shipwreck sheds light on piracy-slavery links 

During the ship’s maiden voyage in 1716, the captain had purchased more than 500 captive Africans as well as gold, jewelry, and ivory at ports along the West African coast. He had then sailed to the Caribbean islands and traded the cargo – including the African prisoners – for precious metals, sugar, indigo, rum, logwood, and spices which had been transported back to England.    

In late February 1717, the Whydah has just left Jamaica when it is attacked by pirates. Following a three-day chase, the Whydah’s captain surrenders his vessel near the Bahamas islands. The pirate chief, “Black Sam” Bellamy, decides to make the Whydah his new flagship, and several of her crew remain with the ship and join the pirate gang.  

Together with three other ships in Bellamy’s fleet, the Whydah sails on to the Carolinas and heads north along the eastern coastline of Britain’s American colonies, en route to what is now the central Maine coast. Along the way, the crews loot or capture additional vessels. 

On the night of April 17, a violent storm drives the Whydah aground at Wellfleet, Massachusetts where it capsizes and is smashed to pieces. More than four tons of silver and gold – treasure reputedly taken from 53 other vessels – as well as some 60 cannons, and 144 bodies of crew members (including that of Bellamy himself) end up on the ocean floor. Local fortune-hunters flock to the beach and plunder the wreck.  

In 1984, a team of underwater explorers discovers the wreck. Since then, more than 200,000 artifacts from the ship, including coins, cannons, handmade weapons, and the ship’s bell, have been recovered. In 2016, the Whydah Pirate Museum – which claims to house the largest collection of pirate artifacts from a single shipwreck anywhere in the world – opens in West Yarmouth some 30 miles from the site of the Whydah wreck.  

Submerged beneath the museum’s romanticized narrative of swashbuckling adventure is another story of the Whydah Gally: that of a slave ship that carried hundreds of shackled human beings to bondage, suffering, and an early death on Caribbean sugar plantations. 

Also downplayed or omitted in museum exhibits and popular media narratives about pirates is the complicated relationship between piracy and slavery. During the “golden age” of piracy (1650s-1730s) – which coincides with the rise of the slave trade – an estimated one third of the 10,000 pirates of the period are formerly enslaved Black and Indigenous people. Some have fled plantations to gain their freedom; others join pirate crews when the slave ships in which they are being transported are seized by pirates. “It was often an easy choice between perpetual slavery and freedom through lawlessness,” writes Encyclopedia Britannica editor Melissa Petruzzelo.  

Attitudes to slavery among pirate chiefs vary; some free enslaved people they capture, while others become slave traders themselves. On board ship, some pirate captains mistreat their recruits of color and assign them the most menial tasks. Others establish a culture of equality among their men, regardless of race: Food, living conditions, and booty are equitably shared, and crew members are treated with respect; this is in deliberate contrast to the often oppressive conditions that exist on the merchant ships on which many of the pirates had previously served. 

On some pirate ships, captains are elected by popular vote and required to follow strict rules; councils composed of all crew members make operational decisions and act as a court to resolve disputes and punish crimes. Back on the mainland, however, justice discriminates. Captured White pirates are usually hanged, whereas their Black and Indigenous counterparts are often returned to their “owners” or resold into slavery. 

European colonial powers use pirates who operate in the Atlantic and the Caribbean for their own ends, officially sanctioning them as “privateers.” As government agents, these pirates engage in legal piracy – seizing ships and their cargoes, including enslaved people – with the shared profits enriching them and swelling the coffers of the governments that had hired them. Piracy against merchant and slave vessels becomes a major issue. By the 1720s, as many as 10 warships from different colonizing countries patrol the Caribbean to catch pirate ships and arrest the pirates on board.

1723  Arson: Weapon of retaliation, resistance  

In her doctoral dissertation, Fires of Discontent: Arson as a Weapon of Slave Resistance in Colonial New England, 1650-1775, historian Kerima Lewis notes that devastating conflagrations had afflicted Boston “since the days of wooden houses and thatched roofs,” and residents are always on constant alert for any signs of fire. An arson law is adopted as early as 1652 because some of the earliest fires are believed to be the work of arsonists. “Slave owning families must have been particularly afraid of fires since they shared their homes with their bondservants. New England was not like the southern colonies where enslaved persons lived in remote slave quarters some distance from the master’s house.” Enslavers in New England lived in fear of rebellious African and Native American servants “torching the very house they occupied.” 

Documentary evidence shows that enslaved individuals as well as groups employed arson as a form of retaliation and resistance. In 1681, two Africans enslaved in Massachusetts, Jack and Mariah, are hanged for separate alleged acts of arson; their corpses are burned together as a warning and deterrent to other enslaved people. Jack had claimed that he was looking for food with a lighted lantern when he accidentally set fire to the house of a local landowner and military officer in Northampton. Mariah, an enslaved woman in Roxbury, and two male accomplices had burned down the home of her enslaver, a merchant, and also that of his brother-in-law, a doctor. 

Native Americans – who have suffered catastrophic losses from disease, war with settlers, and land theft – also resist by attacking and burning colonists’ houses, ships, and other property. In 1738, a Indigenous group hatches a plan to incinerate the town of Nantucket, on the Massachusetts island of the same name, before killing as many White people as possible. But they are betrayed and the plot is foiled. In some instances, Native Americans join forces with enslaved Africans to protest their dehumanization and exclusion by setting fires. One such collaborative arson attack in 1657 destroys several houses in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1712, Hittee, an enslaved Native American servant girl, is hanged for burning down her enslaver’s house. 

In 1762, the most disastrous fire in Rhode Island history is initiated by Fortune, an enslaved African who is temporarily “hired out” by his enslaver to a merchant, Thomas Hazard, to help unload a ship in Newport. Instead of compensating Fortune and his fellow enslaved workers after the job is done, Hazard whips them – knowing that he can do so with impunity and without legal repercussions. 

Vowing revenge, an angry Fortune returns that night with live coals and torches Hazard’s warehouse. The fire – which spreads through Long Wharf and the surrounding area – is as destructive as the Great Fire in Boston two years earlier, when scores of houses, tenements, warehouses and shops, and tons of merchandise had been reduced to ashes. Fortune explains the reasons for his actions in a confession he dictates a few days before his execution. 

According to Kerima Lewis, desperate enslaved women in New England “set far more destructive fires than enslaved men. Life for female bondswomen meant having to complete inordinate chores while often living in isolation as the lone domestic in a slave-owning household. This is in comparison to enslaved men who worked in an array of occupations that provided them more freedom during the day. This freedom of mobility allowed enslaved men to meet up socially and to jointly plan and set modest fires. These low-scale fires appeared to be in retaliation [for] the harsh treatment they received at the hands of dominating whites. 

“Enslaved women, on the other hand, were closely monitored and were expected to be working in the master’s residence at all hours of the day and on call at night, if need be. When this is taken into consideration, it is not surprising that some enslaved women reached a boiling point.”

As an example, Lewis cites an unidentified African woman in Middletown, Connecticut who ignites three ruinous fires over the course of several days in 1760. Like most African women held in slavery in New England towns, she works as a domestic servant. Her enslaver is Philip Mortimer, a wealthy rope-maker, who lives with his family in a downtown mansion in Middletown. The woman first sets fire to a manufacturing facility owned by Mortimer, then a barn full of hay, and then a second barn. After being taken into custody, the woman reveals that she had also planned to torch the Mortimer mansion. She “appears to have grown so despondent over her life in bondage under Philip Mortimer,” writes Lewis, “that she sought to hurt both her master as well as his family.” 

Desperation drives a number of enslaved women to deadly actions beyond arson. Some choose suicide as the only sure way to escape bondage and put an end to the misery that engulfs them. Some enslaved mothers respond to the overwhelming stress and anxiety of their lives by resorting to infanticide; those convicted are either hanged or punished with severe whippings. 

Lewis notes that during this period women of all racial backgrounds commit infanticide, particularly when a child is conceived out of wedlock. “However, it was a slave woman who would not have wanted to bring her offspring into their world of bondage. It was not enough that slave children could learn to read and write, enjoy some legal rights and might have a chance to be manumitted, the child would still be in bondage. These women knew all too well that most masters forced slave couples to live separate and apart. More devastating, however, was New England’s custom of giving away slave children like they were puppies. Masters simply did not want the burden of supporting children who could not contribute economically to their household. Instead of having their newborn babies adopted or sold away to strangers, some black women did the unthinkable.”  

After Massachusetts effectively abolishes slavery in 1781, reports of suspected arson by Black residents appear “to have declined precipitously across New England,” according to Lewis. However, in states where slavery still exists, Black and Indigenous people continue to use arson as an effective tool of resistance to oppression. 

For example, recurring fires – many of which are believed to have been set by Black people – plague Charleston, South Carolina throughout most of the 18th century. More than a third of all captive Africans transported to North America are trafficked through Charleston. And the busy seaport has a large enslaved and free Black population that outnumbers Whites in seven out of eight decades between 1790 and 1860. According to historian Stacy Groening in her dissertation thesis, the threat of fire produces “pervasive fear” among White people in Charleston. “Slaves and free black people held invisible power because of the destruction and chaos they had the capacity to cause.” 

In his book, American Negro Slave Revolts, historian Herbert Aptheker documents some 250 revolts and conspiracies by enslaved people in colonial and independent America involving at least 10 rebels each. He estimates that arson was used in about half of those uprisings.

1734  Sarah Chauqum: Native American woman wins reparations 

“Indians who challenged illegal enslavement publicly in court represented a small subset of a much larger group whose status came under attack but who had insufficient money, support, and knowledge to fight against illegal enslavement.” Successful lawsuits “required immense social and cultural capital. Plaintiffs needed familiarity with the legal system, English language skills, and patrons who could provide financial resources and legal advice.” 

Moreover, in bringing her legal suit, Sarah faces justices and juries in three counties with very high rates of slave “ownership” and large numbers of enslaved people. “Many of these men had a personal stake in slavery,” writes Newell. “They and their friends and families had used the courts and extra-judicial means to enslave Indians or trap them into servitude, and turned a blind eye to neighbors’ illegal enslavement of Indigenous people.”

Nonetheless, Sarah prevails. Although the details of her legal argument remain unknown, her “evidences” of freedom prove persuasive. Two courts – one with a jury and one without – rule in her favor. Edward Robinson appeals in vain and Sarah is declared a free woman. 

She does not stop there. She sues Robinson in the South Kingstown Court of Common Pleas for unpaid wages for the “Labor and Service” she had provided to him during the three years and eight months she lived in his home “as a Slave.” Surprisingly, she wins her case and is awarded $40 in damages. In response, Robinson petitions the Rhode Island General Assembly, which not only increases the award to $55 but orders him to pay court costs. 

Why did Sarah Chauqum beat the odds? Margaret Ellen Newell offers a variety of reasons: The blatant trafficking of Sarah to Connecticut might have bothered the Rhode Island justices following passage of a 1730 law specifically designed to prevent illegal enslavement of Native Americans; public opinion about enslaving Indians was changing; and lawyers committed to justice for people of color and for claims of Native American ancestry were increasing in number. (Sarah herself had secured the help of such lawyers.) Her mother’s social networks and connections may also have played an important role in Sarah’s victory because some colonists were uncomfortable enslaving people they knew or were familiar with. 

Surviving written records do not show whether Sarah actually receives her reparation payment. They are also devoid of information about her later life. A possible archival reference cited by Newell suggests that Sarah remains quite poor even if she retains her independence. As is often the case for people of color, systemic racism denies her opportunities to build a better life.

But Sarah’s impact endures. Her stunning legal victories – especially in her reparations case – had “political implications, then and now,” according to Newell.

“Sarah Chauqum held her enslavers culpable and asked for economic damages, while present-day advocates of reparations want recompense for crimes that seem many generations in the past. But a closer look reveals the parallels between Sarah’s legal action and present-day arguments. Reparations claims tear the veil from sanitized histories of American prosperity. By putting a cash value on the labor Edward Robinson stole from her, Sarah exposed a small part of the massive involuntary transfer of wealth from Indians and Africans to Euro-American colonists, and challenged the very fabric of slave society. 

“Today, the most persuasive arguments for reparations recognize that dispossession and exploitation are not merely artifacts of the past but rather ongoing, modern outrages with catastrophic price tags for Native Americans and African Americans.”

Newell concludes: “The struggle for freedom has a long history, but one constant is the persistence of communities of color dedicated to preserving their rights and heritage. Sarah Chauqum created a pathway to freedom not only for herself, but for others who followed her.”

1737  Benjamin Lay: Radical Quaker voice for abolition

Increasing numbers of Quaker abolitionists urge boycotts of goods made through the exploitation of the enslaved, beginning what later becomes the “free produce” movement. Lay himself sets a strong example: he makes his own clothes, eschewing anything made from the loss of animal life – he is also a vegetarian – or provided by slave labor. Lay’s legacy continues to inspire the abolitionist movement. Throughout the early and mid-19th century, it is common for abolitionist Quakers to keep pictures of Lay in their homes. 

1738  First free Black town in North America founded

Those who succeed in reaching Florida safely include Francisco Menéndez, who had fled a South Carolina plantation with nine other escapees in 1724. Two years later, Florida’s governor creates a Black militia to help the White Spanish regiments defend St. Augustine, the colonial capital, against British attacks. He appoints Menéndez to lead it.

Captain Menéndez establishes the officially sanctioned and fortified village of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé for Black citizens of St. Augustine. By 1738, more than 100 free Africans – many of them skilled workers such as blacksmiths, carpenters, cattlemen, boatmen, and farmers – and their families are living in Fort Mosé, as the settlement is unofficially known; it ultimately attracts others who have escaped slavery. 

When war between England and Spain breaks out in 1740, the people of St. Augustine and nearby Fort Mosé find themselves involved in a conflict that stretches across three continents. The British send thousands of soldiers and dozens of ships to destroy St. Augustine and bring back any fugitives from slavery. They set up a blockade and bombard the town for 27 consecutive days. Fort Mosé  – two miles outside of St. Augustine and the town’s first line of defense – is briefly overrun, but the men of the Fort Mose Militia under Menéndez eventually recapture it, and help repel the British forces. Florida stays in Spanish hands, and for the next 80 years it remains a haven for those escaping slavery from the British colonies of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and later when these territories achieve statehood and become part of the United States.

Centuries-old documents recovered in the colonial archives of Spain, Florida, Cuba, and South Carolina paint a picture of what life was like in Fort Mose in 1759: the village – by this time rebuilt at another site – consists of 22 palm thatch huts which house 37 men, 15 women, seven boys and eight girls. They attend Mass in a wooden church where their priest also lives. The people of Mose farm the land and the men stand guard at the fort or patrol the frontier. Most of the Carolina fugitives marry fellow escapees; some marry Native Americans or enslaved people living in St. Augustine. 

The second Fort Mose, also led by Captain Menéndez, lasts until 1763 when Spain is forced to give Florida to Britain in exchange for the return of its colonies, Cuba and the Philippines, that the British had captured during the French and Indian War (Seven Years War).

1739  Indigo: African expertise is key to major cash crop

Exports increase dramatically, from 5,000 pounds in 1745-46 to 130,000 pounds by 1748; indigo becomes second only to rice as South Carolina's commodity cash crop, boosting the wealth of local White planters. Indeed, before the Revolutionary War, indigo accounts for more than one-third of the value of exports from Britain's American colonies. 

By all accounts, production and processing of indigo dye is grueling and nauseating work. After planting, weeding, and harvesting the indigo shrubs, enslaved workers pound them to pulp, submerge and rot them in giant vats of water, and beat the resultant foul-smelling sludge with wooden paddles to feed it with air. Dried and sold in cakes, the dye is ground to a powder and mixed with urine and water for use. When a piece of cloth is dipped in this solution and then exposed to air, atmospheric oxygen reacts to produce the familiar blue color. 

A poor quality but durable indigo-dyed cloth, known as “Negro Cloth” or “Slave Cloth,” is one of the fabrics commonly used by enslavers to clothe the enslaved. It is the forerunner of the material used to make modern-day blue jeans before the invention of a synthetic alternative to indigo.

1739  Stono Rebellion fuels rise in militias

Historian Carol Anderson says that the ongoing epidemic of gun violence in the U.S. has historic roots in the need of White people for guns to suppress Stono and other rebellions and to control the enslaved. Gun rights advocates today claim that their right to bear arms is constitutionally protected. They often refer to the “well-regulated militia” mentioned in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, with the misleading inference that such militias were needed for American patriots to win and defend their independence from Britain. In fact, the amendment had more to do with protecting slavery and preventing revolts by those in bondage.

Anderson, author of White Rage and The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, refers to a debate in the constitutional ratification convention in Virginia in 1788. At issue is whether the federal government should control state militias. Virginians Patrick Henry and George Mason argue that states should control their own militias. They raise the specter of a massive revolt by enslaved people that would be left unchecked because Congress could not be trusted to summon the forces to protect the plantation owners. Mason warns that if and when Virginia’s enslaved people rise up (as they have before), Whites will be left “defenseless.” Patrick Henry explains that White plantation owners will be abandoned because “the north detests slavery.” 

In short, says Carol Anderson, “Black people have to be subjugated and contained and state control of the militia was the way to do that.

“This function of the militias was so important during the war of independence that governments like that of  South Carolina devoted the lion’s share of their white manpower to the containment of the enslaved. As a result, the colony did not have enough white men to join the Continental Army and repel the British. The calculus was simple: it was more important to the plantation owners in the colonial government to maintain slavery and control Black people than to fight for American independence.”

1739-1740  Native Americans use courts to win freedom

“What did these distinctions mean in eighteenth-century New England?” writes Bell. “Being categorized in a legal document as mulatto or mustee rather than Indian could make the difference between slavery and freedom.” While Rhode Island has outlawed the enslavement of local Indigenous people, the legality of Indian slavery in other colonies remains unsettled. 

In his suit, Caesar recounts a very specific personal history to justify his claim to freedom. His mother, Betty, had been one of many Native Americans captured during the 1675-76 King Philip’s War – a multi-tribal uprising against New England colonists to stop colonial expansion – and later forced into servitude. 

Under a new 1676 Connecticut law, many captives had been sentenced to slavery for life; others whom colonial authorities determined had not personally committed violent acts during the conflict had been considered servants, not slaves, to be freed after 10 years. Betty had been placed in the latter category. But her “owners” had not freed her after she had completed her assigned term of servitude. Instead, they had held her as a slave for life and subsequently asserted ownership of her son, Caesar. He had passed through the hands of three other “owners” before eventually becoming the “property” of blacksmith Samuel Richards.

Caesar argues in court that, under the 1676 law, his mother should have been “Manumitted & sett at Libertie” after 10 years of faithful service as a servant. Legally, she had been a free woman before she gave birth to him, which makes him free as well.

The presiding judge, Joshua Hempstead, like many of his friends and fellow justices, is himself an enslaver. He buys and sells Native American and African servants and enslaved people and employs them on his farm alongside his children. As Bell notes, “Enterprising residents, including modest farmers such as Hempstead, made periodic voyages to the Caribbean to buy slaves and then returned to sell them to their neighbors or to nearby New York.” In his court rulings, Hempstead condemns Native Americans to servitude and sells them at public auction to pay fees, fines, or restitution. 

Given his own involvement in the African and Indian slave trade, it seems surprising that Hempstead allows Caesar’s freedom suit to proceed – leading to Caesar’s ultimate victory at trial after various unsuccessful appeals by Richards. But Bell notes that Connecticut magistrates hesitate to rule on such freedom suits “because they feared that freeing Indian slaves would upend the whole system of chattel slavery – both Indian and African – that underpinned the economies of towns such as New London.”

Bell writes, “One particularly persistent historical myth about New England is that the colonists preferred to rely on wage laborers, European indentured servants, and their own large families for workers…. In fact, the colonists sought Indian workers from the beginning of settlement…. The most important religious and political figures in early New England eagerly sought Pequot [war] captives and incorporated them into their households in large numbers as a solution to the severe regional labor shortage that coincided with the [1636-1638] Pequot War.”

1740-1742  Slave trader's hall hosts abolitionist rallies

In 1890, Julius Caesar Chappelle, one of Boston’s first Black Republican legislators, delivers a speech at Faneuil Hall, entitled "At the Cradle of Liberty," in support of a federal elections bill that would help give Black people the right to vote. In 1915, women’s rights activists hold a conference at the hall on amending the U.S. constitution to include universal suffrage. 

Because of its storied history and symbolism, prominent politicians continue to use Faneuil Hall for major policy pronouncements and political events. In 2013, President Barack Obama gives a speech there in defense of the Affordable Care Act – six years after Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney had chosen the same venue to sign Massachusetts' new healthcare bill into law. 

In 2018, local activists call for a boycott of Faneuil Hall – now owned by the city of Boston – because it had been constructed with funds derived from selling enslaved people. They also urge the mayor and petition the city council to re-name the building in honor of Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Native American (Nipmuc) descent, who had escaped slavery and had been killed during the 1770 Boston Massacre. Attucks is generally considered the first martyr of the American Revolution. His body had been carried to Faneuil Hall and had lain in state there for three days to allow people to pay their respects. No action has yet been taken by city officials to rename the hall. 

1741  New York "slave plot" brutally suppressed

At the height of the hysteria, half of the city's enslaved men over the age of 16 – New York is then home to 1,700 Black people and 7,000 Whites – are implicated in the plot and jailed. The round-up reaches such proportions that officials are forced to suspend circuit courts because all the jails are full. They ban enslaved people from meeting on street corners and reduce other rights of assembly and movement. 

Fueling White anxiety is the memory of the 1712 New York revolt by enslaved Africans that resulted in the deaths of nine Whites and the execution of 21 rebels. That event is part of a pattern: Between 1687 and 1741, a slave plot is "discovered" in New York every two and a half years on average.

Colonial authorities focus on Black people and working-class Whites as the prime culprits in this latest so-called conspiracy. Their star witness is Mary Burton, a 16-year-old Irish indentured servant under arrest for theft, who later receives a $100 reward from the city for her cooperation, which she uses to buy her freedom from indenture. The prosecutors also keep changing their grounds for accusation, even linking the insurrection to a "Popish" plot by Spaniards and other Catholics – at a time when Britain is at war with Spain. (Historians disagree about whether a plot of any kind actually existed and, if there was one, its scale.) 

By the end of the trials, 161 Black people have been tried for conspiracy to burn down New York City and murder its White inhabitants. Seventeen are convicted and hanged, 13 are burned at the stake, and 70 are exiled to various destinations, including Newfoundland, Portuguese-occupied Madeira off the northwest coast of Africa, and the Caribbean islands of Saint-Domingue (later independent Haiti) and Curaçao. Four of the 20 Whites who face similar charges are convicted and hanged, and seven are deported.  

The executions take place near the Poor House at the north end of the city, south of the African Burial Ground, which is rediscovered in 1991 during survey work for the construction of a new building in lower Manhattan. In consultation with the African-American community, the remains of 400 people, including children, are removed and studied before being reburied in a formal ceremony. The African Burial Ground is thought to be the site of as many as 20,000 burials of people of African descent during the colonial period. It is designated a National Historic Landmark.

1743  Mutiny, chocolate, and the rise of racial capitalism

The mutineers also severely injure boatswain John Shaw, but are persuaded by first mate William Blake to spare him and Shaw so they can pilot the ship. Their captors plan to sail to Orinoco, a Spanish colony to the west of Suriname that is a haven for escapees from slavery and military deserters, and to sell the ship and its cargo. In addition to the young Africans, the cargo includes valuable cacao, sugar, coffee, various types of cloth, and a trove of gold and silver coins. 

But Blake and Shaw trick the mutineers and steer the ship along the coast and up the Courantyne River to a Dutch outpost where Dutch soldiers, assisted by Indigenous Amerindians, take control of the Rising Sun and arrest two of the three mutineers. The two are later tried, tortured, and executed. The third escapes into the forest and attempts suicide before being killed by an Amerindian search party. 

Three months later, the young enslaved Africans who had survived their ordeal aboard the Rising Sun, are transported back to Barbados. Their fate is unknown but it is likely that they are re-sold. The disposal of the ship and the rest of its illegal cargo becomes the subject of years of legal wrangling.

The saga of the Rising Sun – and its links to smuggling and slave-trading – is chronicled by historian Jared Ross Hardesty in his book, Mutiny on the Rising Sun, a Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate.

According to Hardesty, smuggling underpins the economy of colonial America. By conservative estimates, half of all commerce in the Atlantic world during the 18th century is illegal; people of all social classes, races, and ethnicities engage in buying and selling contraband.  

The two men killed by the Rising Sun mutineers, George Ledian and Newark Jackson, had been part of a lucrative international cacao smuggling enterprise linking New England, the Caribbean island of Barbados, London, and Suriname. The ringleaders are Ledian and two other prominent merchants, Edward Tothill and Gedney Clark. Together, they hire ship captains like Jackson to illicitly transport dried fish, timber, foodstuffs, and other New England produce to Suriname for sale, along with captive Africans originally enslaved in Barbados. With the proceeds, the captains purchase molasses (used to distill rum), sugar, coffee, and cacao (for making chocolate). At the time of his death, Jackson himself owns a shop in Boston’s North End neighborhood that sells chocolate made by his three enslaved workers.

Britons and British Americans have a strong and growing appetite for chocolate – at that time largely consumed as a hot drink – but cacao, which is indigenous to Central and South America, is in short supply within the British empire. Shipping it illegally from Suriname, a Dutch colony where it is produced by enslaved labor on numerous plantations, proves to be a profitable solution for those involved in the trade. By contrast, the cost in human lives is gruesome: Because of disease, brutal treatment, and overwork, the average survival rate among the thousands of enslaved workers in Suriname is five to seven years. 

The informal organizing space for the cacao smuggling ring is the historic Christ Church in Boston’s North End – otherwise known as Old North Church – which attracts “ambitious merchants and ship captains like Newark Jackson and George Ledain,” writes Hardesty. Both men own pews there. Tothill and Clark are also congregants and support the church financially. All of them individually “own” and trade in enslaved people.

In 2013, the Old North Foundation, which interprets the church’s history for the public, opens a new attraction on Boston’s famed Freedom Trail called Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate Shop. It is part of a program exploring the history of chocolate in the context of the colonial period. Subsequently, extensive research by Hardesty and other historians in the Netherlands, Barbados, the U.K., and Suriname reveals that Jackson was not a “quaint chocolatier” but a human trafficker. In 2019, the Old North Foundation removes his name from the church pew he once owned and from the chocolate shop. The shop now centers the history of slavery and smuggling associated with Jackson. 

In the introduction to his book, Jared Ross Hardesty comments that placing the events of the Rising Sun in the wider world of Atlantic slavery “demonstrates that it was a small piece in the larger history of the rise of racial capitalism.”

“Smuggling may have undermined empires, but, like most other early modern commercial practices, it still relied on the exploitation of bound African and Indigenous bodies. That immiseration, in turn, generated the wealth that laid the foundation for a modern industrial, capitalist economy."

1746  Lucy Terry Prince: Resilient poet, storyteller

Lucy Terry Prince continues to be a strong advocate for her children. She is said to have delivered a three-hour address to the board of trustees of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts in a vain effort to gain admittance for her son, Festus. He is reportedly denied entry because of his skin color. According to an oral history compiled by a local resident, Lucy Terry Prince remains popular in her hometown until her old age, and young boys often come to her home to hear her talk. 

Lucy Terry Prince dies in 1821. At her funeral, Rev. Lemuel Haynes, a Congregational minister and leading anti-slavery activist in Vermont, preaches a sermon in which he predicts that despots and racists, “tyrants and oppressors,” will “sink beneath” Terry’s “feet,” a witty reference to her poetry.

1755  Cash for scalps = license to kill Indians

According to researchers Dawn Neptune Adams, Maulian Dana, and Adam Mazo, there were at least 69 government-issued scalp edicts across the Dawnland – the name Wabanaki people called the area that colonists named “New England” – from 1675 to 1760, and at least 50 other scalp edicts were issued elsewhere in the United States before 1885. In New England alone, the government paid out 94 claims for 375 human scalps. 

In an article in The Guardian newspaper, Adams, Dana, and Mazo – part of a team behind the documentary film Bounty – note that scalping proclamations targeted specific tribes by name, and occasionally marked tribes "safe" because they were “allies” of the authorities. “But neither scalpers nor authorities had much way of knowing the tribal affiliations of the people whose scalps they took, so for centuries bounties were a license to kill all Indigenous people.”

In some instances, bounty hunters are given the land of the people they scalp. Petersham, Massachusetts is created by a land grant from the colonial legislature, with 72 volunteer bounty hunters each rewarded with 50 to 100 acres of Nipmuc land for scalping 10 Abenaki people. In several locations, bounty hunters and soldiers who participate in capturing and killing Native people name the towns they subsequently establish after themselves. These include Westbrook, Maine; Shirley, Massachusetts; and Spencer, Massachusetts. 

Scalping – cutting or tearing a part of the human scalp, with hair attached, from the head – and its use as an instrument of terror, war, and genocidal extermination extends beyond the New England colonies. For example, in his 1756 Declaration of War against the Lenni Lenape tribe, Pennsylvania Governor Robert Hunter Morris announces payment of 130 pieces of eight (Spanish silver coins used as hard currency) “for the scalp of every male Indian enemy above the age of 12 years, produced as evidence of their being killed” and 50 pieces of eight for the scalp of every Indian woman.

As part of a divide-and-conquer strategy, colonial authorities also reimburse some tribal allies for scalping members of other tribes; for example, Connecticut pays Mohegans for slaying and scalping the Pequot in 1637 during the Pequot War.  

Scalp-hunting produces its own White folk heroes. In 1697, on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony, Puritan settler Hannah Duston, a mother of nine, is taken captive by Abenaki people during a raid in which 27 colonists – and allegedly her newborn baby – are killed. During a nighttime escape, Duston and two other captives kill and scalp 10 members of the Abenaki family who had been holding them. She later presents their scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly, which rewards her with bounties for six children, two men, and two women.

Duston is memorialized with a granite statue in Boscawen, New Hampshire. Erected in 1874, the statue depicts her holding a tomahawk in one hand, and a fistful of human scalps in the other. (Over the last few years, an advisory committee comprised of local Indigenous leaders, descendants of Hannah Duston, and state officials have been working to devise a plan to revise and expand the history surrounding Hannah Duston’s story, and to at least commemorate those who were killed by Duston. Rather than removing the statue, leaders of the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook-Abenaki People want the state to provide more context and nuance to the historical site.)  

The most infamous and celebrated ranger (scalper) of the 18th century in New England is the inaptly named John Lovewell, a private militia captain from Nashua, New Hampshire. In the 1720s, he leads three scalp-hunting expeditions against the Abenakis who are fighting to defend their lands in what is now Maine from incursions by colonists. In March 1725, Lovewell's troops parade through the streets of Boston with 100 Indian scalps. Lovewell himself wears a wig made of scalps.  

One hundred years later, Lovewell and his military exploits are lauded in print by such literary luminaries as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Lovewell Mountain in Washington, New Hampshire, which Lovewell climbed to do surveillance, is named for him; so is Lovewell Pond in Fryeburg, Maine. The town of Lovell, Maine, derives its name from John Lovewell. 

The historical records show that scalping – as part of the broader cultural practice of taking and displaying human body parts as trophies – developed independently in various cultures in Europe, Asia/Pacific, Africa, and the Americas, over thousands of years. Scalps were probably removed as alternatives to human heads because they were easier to take, transport, and preserve.

In White American popular culture, Whites have been typically portrayed as victims of scalping by “barbarous” Indians, while “civilized” Whites rarely if ever scalped Indians. Dr. Dean Chavers, a member of the Lumbee tribe and consultant in Indian education, is author of the 2021 book Indian Massacres in the U.S.  In a 2017 article for Indian Country Today, Chavers writes that Indians and Whites scalped each other “but whites got paid for it. Whites also did it to help the colonial legislature achieve their goal to exterminate all Indians and control their land in the budding United States.”

Chavers concludes: “Altogether, the record shows that there were more Indians who scalped white people than there were white people who scalped Indians. But the abomination lies on both sides. There is still a question in my mind about who originated it in the U.S., but I believe it was Europeans who brought it with them.”

While scalping begins in the northeast in the 1630s, the horrific practice occurs all over what is now the United States and continues into the 1880s. In her doctoral thesis, “Grim Commerce: Scalps, Bounties, and the Transformation of Trophy-Taking in the Early American Northeast, 1450-1770,” historian Margaret Bell writes that colonial scalp bounties fused the “logic of elimination” with targeted violence. 

“The rewards simultaneously produced racialized enemies and constructed whiteness as the unifying principle for people of the British (and later American) empire.”

1755  Poison is tool of resistance and revenge

The trio – among the most trusted of Codman’s enslaved servants – had apparently decided to kill Codman rather than continue to endure his violent and cruel treatment. Six years earlier, Mark and several other enslaved workers had burned down Codman’s blacksmith shop and workhouse in the hope that the resulting financial loss to Codman would force him to sell them to a more humane enslaver. It did not work. 

They then devise a plan to poison him. Mark obtains poisons – arsenic and black lead – through enslaved workers of other “masters,” one of whom runs a Boston apothecary store. And Phillis and Phebe, whose responsibilities as house servants include preparing food, have ample opportunities to dose Codman with the deadly substances. It appears that one of Codman’s daughters also at times innocently poisons her father’s food.   

Historian Jared Ross Hardesty, author of “Negro at the Gate”: Enslaved Labor in Eighteenth Century Boston, writes that “the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their labor was more important to these individuals than were abstract notions of freedom or emancipation.” They took the risk to kill Codman “for the chance to possibly live easier lives working for ‘good masters.’”

Poisoning as an act of resistance and revenge by enslaved women – especially in response to sexual violence from their enslavers – has been widely documented. 

According to The Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, a digital public history project, women working in Southern plantation houses as cooks, especially senior mammy figures, had the means and the opportunity to poison White families through the food they cooked for them.  

“To carry out these acts, women relied on knowledge within their communities about dangerous roots and plants." Sometimes enslavers hung women they accused of poisoning. But in many cases it was impossible to determine whether a fatal poisoning was deliberate or accidental.  

1761  Phillis Wheatley Peters: Genius poet arrives on slave ship

Wheatley Peters’ remarkable poetry brings her fame both in England and its American colonies. And her work provides a shining example of the intellectual capabilities of enslaved Africans whom Whites typically regard as inferior or even sub-human. Indeed, in response to doubts that Wheatley Peters is the author of the first collection of poems in her name, a group of 17 prominent Bostonians – including Governor Thomas Hutchinson, Lieutenant Governor Andrew Oliver, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, and seven ministers – is asked to attest to their authenticity. After an investigation, the group declares that Wheatley Peters had indeed written the poems in question.

Some modern literary scholars claim that Wheatley Peters’ poems, written in a neoclassical “White” style, lack a sense of the author’s identity as a Black enslaved person, and fail to reflect the Black experience. Other scholars say that Wheatley's use of classical imagery and ideas was designed to deliver "subversive" messages to her educated, majority White audience, that supported freedom for Wheatley herself and other enslaved people.

In addition to being a creative genius, Wheatley also proves to be a savvy businesswoman with definite ideas about how her poems should be presented in print. She markets her own work, and even autographs copies to avoid the loss of profits to pirated editions.

During or shortly after a trip to England, where her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773 is published with the financial support of a British patron, Wheatley Peters is granted her freedom. In his recent biography of the poet, Genius in Bondage, scholar Vincent Carretta suggests that she likely returns to Boston only after gaining a commitment from the Wheatleys that she would be freed. Her subsequent poems become increasingly and explicitly critical of slavery.

In 1778, she marries John Peters, a free Black man, small-scale farmer, and grocer. She tries unsuccessfully to secure a publisher for her second volume of poems and letters. (Several of her lost poems are rediscovered in the 1970s and 1980s.) After her death in 1784, at the age of 30 or 31, Phillis Wheatley Peters continues to be celebrated and honored. Her work is widely circulated, and appears in newspapers in the U.S. and the U.K.

1761  Jupiter Hammon: First published Black male poet

During the Revolutionary War, Hammon writes a poem dedicated to his fellow poet, Phillis Wheatley Peters. The first published African American female poet, Wheatley Peters had arrived in Boston at age seven or eight aboard a slave ship and has achieved national and international renown. While the two never meet, Hammon is reportedly a great admirer of Wheatley. 

In 1786, Hammon pens what are regarded as his two most significant works: "An Address to the Negroes in the State of New-York" and the unpublished "An Essay on Slavery." It is believed that the Lloyds prevent him from publishing the latter because of its direct critique of the institution of slavery.  

Hammon dedicates his “Address” to the members of The African Society, an early Black political activist organization in New York City, and delivers it in a speech to a Society meeting in 1787. "If we should ever get to Heaven,” he says, “We shall find nobody to reproach us for being black, or for being slaves.” Expressing hope for the young and empathy for his fellow elders, who, like himself, have spent their entire lives in bondage, Hammon states: “Though for my own part I do not wish to be free, yet I should be glad if others, especially the young negroes were to be free, for many of us, who are grown up slaves … should hardly know how to take care of ourselves….” New York Quakers publish Hammon's speech, and it is reprinted by several abolitionist groups, including the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.

Scholars believe Hammon supported the gradual abolition of slavery because he considered immediate emancipation of all enslaved people too difficult to achieve. He is 88 years old when New York State passes its first gradual emancipation law in March 1799. 

In 1806, Jupiter Hammon dies at the age of 95. It is believed that he is buried separately from the Lloyds on the Lloyd estate in an unmarked grave.

In 2013 and 2015 respectively, researchers discover two previously unknown poems by Hammon. One is found in the Yale University library; the other surfaces during an investigation of a Long Island family’s history as enslavers. 

1762  Jenny Slew: Among first to win a freedom suit   

1764  Tax law protest tied to growing rum industry  

Related industries such as shipbuilding, coopering, lumber, and metalwork prosper along with the rum trade. Shipbuilding in particular sees a major boom, with Boston and nearby towns building 70 ships a year by 1700 – the most in number and tonnage in the Western Hemisphere. All these industries benefit from the unpaid labor of many highly skilled enslaved workers; by 1750, 26% of Newport, Rhode Island residents are enslaved. 

Rum is a cornerstone of the “Triangular Trade”: Northern colonies send food, livestock, and wood (especially for barrels) to the West Indies, where enslaved Africans grow and harvest plantation sugarcane. Refined in mills, sugar and molasses are are then shipped back North where distilleries turn the molasses into rum. Most of the rum produced in New England is consumed within the colonies, but a portion goes back to West Africa. There, together with other manufactured goods including cloth and weapons, it is bartered for captive Africans who are transported into slavery on Caribbean plantations, thus completing the “triangle.” In 1769, some 92,066 gallons of rum are exported from Massachusetts as part of this interconnected trade.  

Boston merchants are less directly involved in the Triangular Trade than their counterparts elsewhere in New England. About half the slave ships that sail from Boston to Africa return directly to Boston with their human cargo. 

1764  Colleges reckon with blood money, history  

In 2021, Brown University releases a second edition of the 2006 report that had led to the creation of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and, as the Boston Globe reports, “sparked introspection at more than 100 other colleges and universities across the country, untangling – and in some cases, apologizing for – the damages their founders and institutions had caused as related to slavery.” 

Paxson says that the second edition – which offers new commentary on the context and impact of the original and is required reading for all incoming freshmen – is important because it “highlights the fact that addressing the legacy of slavery at our institutions is not something that you do once and forget about it. Right? It’s something that requires sustained attention over time.”

In April 2022, Harvard publishes a report that acknowledges the university’s complicity in race science – the 19th century idea that humankind is divided into separate and unequal races, justifying racism and White supremacy – and 20th century racial discrimination that limits admissions to Harvard for Black and Native American students, and excludes those who are accepted from housing and other features of campus life. 

The university announces the establishment of a $100 million fund to address the legacies of slavery, with a focus on funding educational opportunities for communities descended from enslaved people. This would include an exchange program with historically Black colleges and universities that would enable students from those schools to “study abroad” at each other’s universities. The report also calls for the creation on campus of an “imposing physical memorial” dedicated to people enslaved by men with Harvard ties. 

More than 70 people are known to have been enslaved by Harvard presidents, faculty and staff, laboring in homes and on campus. Harvard profited from slavery through loans to Caribbean sugar planters who used enslaved labor, and it made lucrative investments in U.S. textile mills where workers turned cotton produced by enslaved people in the South into yarn, cloth, fabrics and more. These investments helped build the institutional wealth of the university. In June 30, 2024 , Harvard’s endowment stood at $53.2 billion.

1770  Crispus Attucks: First martyr of the Revolution 

1771  Quaker abolitionist educates, inspires others 

An immigrant from France, Benezet teaches at a day school for Quaker children, and at night he tutors Black students, enslaved and free, in the same subjects. Unlike the vast majority of other White men of his era, he does not subscribe to the theory of Black inferiority, nor to the idea that Africa is barbaric, citing a variety of sources to document the rich cultures the continent has produced. 

With friend and fellow Quaker John Woolman, Benezet convinces the Philadelphia [Quaker] Yearly Meeting to take an official position against the practice of buying and selling enslaved people, and eventually to disown Quakers who do not comply. He assists Black Philadelphians in their petitions to defeat an amendment to the 1780 gradual emancipation act that would return unregistered Black people to slavery. 

Benezet is known for his humility and tireless devotion to the education and uplift of the Black community. When he dies in 1784 at the age of 71, 400 Black residents of Philadelphia turn out to mourn his passing.

1771  Governor rebuffs proposed ban on slave imports 

Finally, in 1774, both houses of the state legislature pass a bill to prohibit the importation of enslaved people. But Governor Hutchinson again balks. He lumps the bill with others as inconsistent with the “authority of the King and Parliament” and refuses to sign it – as does his successor as governor, General Thomas Gage, who argues that he lacks the legal authority from London to do so. 

For its part, the British government has no interest in limiting or ending Britain’s lucrative slave trade. It is British and Dutch traders who have supplied the bulk of enslaved workers to Massachusetts and Britain’s other North American colonies. Massachusetts’ engagement in the trade is small by comparison: In the early 1770s, Boston and other Massachusetts merchants send an average of just six slaving vessels per year to the African coast. Their captives are delivered for sale at ports in the Caribbean and the South.