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

1788-1800

1788  Massachusetts bans slave trade, expels "outsiders"

Massachusetts also enacts a law in 1788 that bans “any African or negro” from living in the state for longer than two months; violators are to be whipped and ordered to depart within 10 days. The aim is to exclude those who have not established legal residency in a particular town from receiving monetary aid. 

With the passage of the Massachusetts Poor Relief Act in 1794, the state finally ends the “warning out” system and assumes overall financial responsibility for transient people. Struggling families are often placed in almshouses or broken apart and their members indentured – contracted for unpaid labor for a specified period of time. 

1789  Enslavers are majority in first U.S. Congress 

As Northern states outlaw slavery, the proportion of congressmen who are enslavers declines. But some New England congressmen continue to enslave people until at least 1820, says the Post, and some representatives of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and other northern states do likewise for at least a decade longer.

When 11 Southern states secede from the Union in 1860 and 1861, their representatives leave Congress, lowering the number of members who are enslavers. But even with their departure, the Post study shows that more than 20 percent of those who remain in Congress during the Civil War – a war over slavery – are themselves current or former enslavers.

Enslavers come from all parts of the political spectrum. The Post’s database includes lawmakers who are members of more than 60 political parties. The most common political affiliation among enslavers is the Democratic Party with more than 600 members in Congress. But enslavers are also Federalists, Whigs, Unionists, Populists, Progressives and others. While the early Republican Party is associated with abolition, the Post finds that more than 480 enslavers identify as Republicans at some point during their careers in elected public office.

In the decades before the Civil War, abolitionists regularly decry the “Slave Power” or “Slavocracy” – the notion that wealthy Southern enslavers have seized political control of their own states and are trying to take over the federal government by any means necessary in order to protect and expand slavery. Among the abolitionist leaders who make that argument is Frederick Douglass. He brings a uniquely personal perspective to the issue – as one of more than 460 people enslaved on the plantations of Edward Lloyd V, the U.S. senator for Maryland and later governor of the state. 

It is not until 1870 – five years after the end of the Civil War – that the first Black person takes their seat in Congress. Hiram Rhodes Revels, who had been born free and served as a chaplain to Black regiments during the war, is elected as the Republican senator for Mississippi, despite efforts by racist Democrats to block him. They claim he is ineligible to serve because he had not been a citizen for the required nine years prior to his election. 

Over the next few years, 15 more Black men take their seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate; most of them had previously been enslaved. But after 1877, a White backlash against growing Black political power in the South leads to Jim Crow racial segregation laws, poll taxes, and racial terror attacks on African Americans designed to permanently exclude virtually all Black voters from participating in elections. 

The last Black congressman from the South in the postwar Reconstruction era is North Carolina Republican George White. After White leaves office in 1901, there is a gap of 72 years before another African American is elected to Congress from the original 11 Confederate states. In 1973, Andrew Young, Jr., of Georgia and Barbara Jordan of Texas, both Democrats, are sworn in and take their seats.

1790  Opium king bankrolls hospitals, museums  

The Perkins’ seven ships – and others in which they are investors – sail from Massachusetts to Türkiye to buy opium; from Türkiye to China where their agents sell the drug; and from China to Boston with cargoes of tea, porcelain and silk purchased with the proceeds from opium sales. Taxes on the goods arriving in Boston help fund Massachusetts police and fire departments, roads, bridges, courthouses, and schools.

The Perkins’ sophisticated and elaborate smuggling operation in China would not disgrace a modern drug lord: their agents store chests filled with cantaloupe-size balls of opium in company ships anchored offshore (in order to exert some control over supply and price); they develop fruitful relationships with other smugglers and corrupt top government officials; and they use boats crewed by dozens of rowers to speed past inspectors, sneak up the coast, and deliver opium to secret landing sites.

By the 1820s, opium is the single largest Western import into China, and the culture of addiction fueled by its European and American peddlers is ravaging communities across the country. When Chinese authorities again target opium smuggling in the 1830s, the British respond with all-out war. China suffers humiliating defeats in the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60. British warships blast Chinese coastal towns to ruins and British troops slaughter thousands of civilians. 

In an article for the Boston Review, historian Max Mishler writes: “Imperial violence against China complemented the torture of enslaved blacks on cotton plantations in the West, forming a global regime of racial capitalism.”

“Abolitionists, meanwhile, drew explicit connections between the suffering of enslaved blacks and Chinese opium addicts, both of whom were vulnerable racialized populations subjected to the depredations of Anglo-American capitalism.”

An immediate consequence of the Opium Wars for China is a devastating loss of control over the emigration of its people. The abolition of the African slave trade in Britain, and in other European countries and the U.S., creates a labor shortage on plantations and in other labor-intensive enterprises in the New World whose owners had previously relied on enslaved workers, mostly Africans and African Americans. South China becomes the West's favored destination for filling the void. 

Between the 1840s and 1870s, slave traders transport more than 250,000 Chinese and 500,000 Indians to the Caribbean and South America, ostensibly as indentured servants, under a new system of slavery in which Asians replace workers of African and Indigenous descent.

During and after the Civil War, the U.S. experiences an opiate epidemic of its own. The Union Army alone issues nearly 10 million opium pills to its soldiers, plus 2.8 million ounces of opium powders and tinctures. An unknown number of soldiers return home addicted, or suffering the pain of war wounds that opium relieves. 

As with contemporary drug profiteers, such as the Sackler family with Oxycontin, the Perkins brothers’ public benevolence distracts from the grisly sources of their fortune. Ironically, their profits from the opium trade and the slave trade – both destructive of so many lives – help found a major Boston institution dedicated to health and healing: the Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1832, Thomas Perkins donates his Boston mansion to the financially troubled Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind, which is renamed The Perkins School for the Blind in his honor. He and James are also major funders of other Boston-area institutions and initiatives, including the Boston Athenaeum, the Museum of Fine Arts, McLean Hospital, and the Bunker Hill Monument that memorializes one of the first major battles between British and Patriot forces in the American Revolutionary War.

1790  U.S. Congress: "You must be White to be a citizen"

1791  Prominent slave trader evades murder charges 

James DeWolf is a member of a prominent slave-trading family in Rhode Island, and his powerful friends and connections ensure that he evades prosecution. After he is discovered in the West Indies, he is twice charged with murder, and despite eyewitness testimony from Polly crew members, the prosecution declines to pursue the case. Meanwhile, his family is working to get the charges in Rhode Island dropped, and after four years, they succeed. 

After his return home, James DeWolf continues his slave trading ventures, usually with his family. His father had started importing enslaved Africans in 1769 and his nephew, George, continues the family tradition until 1820. The DeWolf family is estimated to have brought 11,000 enslaved people to the United States. 

James DeWolf – who with his family starts the Bank of Bristol and a company to insure slave ships – also owns sugar and coffee plantations in Havana, Cuba as well as a rum distillery and a mill. He serves as a Rhode Island state senator for 17 years, and is elected to the U.S. Senate in 1821. When he dies in 1837 in New York City, he is believed to be the second wealthiest man in the United States.

1791  Largest private emancipation in U.S. history

Carter orders each enslaved person to come to court with both a first and last name with which to start a new life. He also tries to ease their transition to freedom by renting them land and experimenting with sharecropping. 

Carter takes these actions amid a growing debate, especially within evangelical churches, over the contradiction of slavery in a new American republic espousing liberty and justice for all. And they shock and unnerve other enslavers in Virginia and beyond. One compares Carter’s manumission project to a man burning down his own house, heedless of the danger to his neighbors. 

Fear of the growing free Black population among planters and the ruling elite is heightened by a short-lived and abortive insurrection by enslaved people near Richmond, Virginia in 1800. This eventually leads to passage of an 1806 Virginia law requiring all enslaved people freed after May 1 of that year to leave the state. Some of the people newly emancipated by Carter may have joined settlers migrating westward to Ohio and beyond.

Precisely when Robert Carter begins nursing serious doubts about slavery is unclear. But by 1776, he has rejected the Anglican Church and become a Deist. Two years later, he stuns plantation society by joining the Baptist Church, whose members include opponents of slavery. By the time of his death in Baltimore at the age of 76, he has left the Baptists and embraced the views of Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. 

Robert Carter III has a large family – his wife, Frances Ann Tasker, reputedly intellectually gifted and a stabilizing force in his life – gives birth to 17 children. At least two of his sons, whom he sends to school in Rhode Island to free them from the “destructive” influences of slavery, do not share their father’s anti-slavery views. John Tasker Carter vows to do everything in his power to “overturn and frustrate” his father’s manumission deed, including selling whatever enslaved people he can before their scheduled freedom dates. Another son, George Carter, buys enslaved people from dealers even as he is freeing others to settle his father’s estate.   

Local historians believe that many of those enslaved and later freed by Robert Carter formed what became a large free Black community in Frederick County, Virginia. While efforts to trace their descendants have met with little success, the names on Carter’s manumission paper provided a useful starting point. They include: Allen, Arnold, Banks, Brooke, Brutus, Burke, Burton, Cary, Colson, Conway, Cooper, Craft, Daley, Daniel, Dial, Dicher, Dickerson, Gaskins, Glascock, Greggs, Gumby, Hackney, Harris, Harrison, Henry, Hollady, Hubbard, Johnson, Johnston, Jones, Kenardy, Mitchell, Newgent, Newman, Peterson, Puss, Reid, Richards, Richardson, Robinson, Single, Smith, Spence, Taylor, Thomas, Thompson, Thornton, Tosspot, Tuckson, Walker, Weldon, Wells, Wilson, Wormley, and Wyatt.

On August 1, 1991, over 1,000 people – local residents, church leaders, historians, and others – gather at the site of Nomini Hall, the plantation house in Westmoreland County, Virginia, where the Carter family had lived, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Robert Carter III’s signing of his manumission document. A twilight ceremony, featuring African drumming and a Black choir, honors a little-known man who freed the 500 people he had held as slaves 72 years before President Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

1793  New law requires return of fugitives from slavery   

The Fugitive Slave Act gives a more detailed description of how this constitutional measure is to be practically enforced. More importantly, it decrees that “owners” of enslaved people and their agents have the right to search for escapees within the borders of free states. Any suspected fugitive from slavery can be returned to her or his “owner” simply on the basis of a sworn affidavit before a judge by an enslaver that the person is his property. The law also imposes a penalty of $500 (about $14,294 today) on any person who helps harbor or conceal escapees.

Abolitionists and others protest the new law, arguing that it turns the free states into a stalking ground for bounty hunters, and is tantamount to legalized kidnapping. Many northern states enact legislation to protect free Black Americans – who can otherwise be abducted, brought before court without the ability to produce a defense, and then lawfully enslaved – as well as enslaved people who have escaped bondage. These laws come to be known as “personal liberty laws”; they require enslavers and fugitive hunters to produce concrete evidence that those they have detained are truly people who had been enslaved and had absconded.  

Historian Carol Wilson, author of Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780–1865,  has documented 300 cases of people who were legally free and never previously enslaved being seized and brought south to be sold into slavery. She estimates there were likely thousands of others. One of the best-known cases is that of Solomon Northup. Born free in Essex County in New York State, Northup is tricked in 1841 into traveling to Washington, D.C. where slavery is legal at the time. He is drugged, kidnapped, sold into slavery, and held as a slave in Louisiana for 12 years. After finally escaping, he unsuccessfully sues the slave traders involved. His memoir, Twelve Years A Slave, is the basis for a popular 2013 feature film of the same name. 

The 1793 law is strengthened by a second Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 – part of the Compromise of 1850 passed by Congress. The more stringent law, which becomes a major flashpoint between the North and South over slavery, for the first time requires local law enforcement officials to arrest anyone allegedly escaping slavery or pay a fine of $1,000 ($30,732 in present-day value); and anyone aiding a suspected escapee faces a similar fine and six months in jail. 

The new law challenges all citizens in the North in a direct and personal way: it makes them and their institutions legally responsible for enforcing and sustaining slavery. 

1793  Cotton gin boosts, prolongs plantation slavery system

By 1850, of the 3.2 million enslaved people in the country's 15 slave states, 1.8 million (56%) are producing cotton; by 1860, enslaved labor accounts for two billion pounds of cotton per year. American cotton soon comprises two-thirds of the global supply.    

But not all Southern cotton goes overseas. Thousands of pounds are transported north each year to feed the textile mills of New England. The U.S. textile industry is born in 1797 with the construction of the country’s first cotton mill in Beverly, Massachusetts. Established by the Beverly Cotton Manufactory, a company founded by a group of New England merchants and investors, the horse-powered mill is the first in which machines are used to make cotton cloth. In part because of its huge start-up costs, the project encounters economic problems, and a state bailout and legislation to protect it from local competition keep the mill alive during its early years. 

President George Washington visits Beverly during his 1789 New England tour, and notes in his diary that "the whole (mill) seemed perfect, and the cotton stuffs which they turn out, excellent of their kind.” Overtaken by new technological innovations – including the use of water power – the Beverly mill ceases operations by 1813.  

1793  Province limits slave trade, moves to end slavery 

The 1793 Act to Limit Slavery, along with the 1833 Act for the Abolition of Slavery passed by the British parliament that gradually abolishes slavery in most of the British Empire, sets the stage for Canada to become a haven for freedom-seekers from the South via the Underground Railroad. It is believed that as many as 30,000 refugees from U.S. enslavement find freedom and security in Canada, either by way of the Underground Railroad or on their own.

Canada’s famed role as a sanctuary for people escaping bondage has tended to obscure the country’s own history with slavery. As Charmaine Nelson, a professor of art history and founding director of the Slavery North Initiative, notes in an article for The Walrus: “In my fifteen years as a university professor, I have yet to come across one student who has entered my classroom already knowing that slavery existed here (in Canada). What they have all been schooled in, without fail, is that white Canadians were valiant abolitionists….”  

She is echoed by historian Natasha L. Henry in her book Emancipation Day: Celebrating Freedom in Canada: “Very few Canadians are aware that at one time their nation’s economy was firmly linked to African slavery through the building and sale of slave ships, the sale and purchase of slaves to and from the Caribbean, and the exchange of timber, cod, and other food items from the Maritimes for West-Indian slave-produced goods.”

1794  U.S. abolition groups connect and convene

1794  Black churches become hubs of activism   

1794  Slave trade law fails to curb trafficking  

The first person prosecuted under the 1794 law is John Brown, a merchant in Providence, Rhode Island and a member of New England’s preeminent slave trading clan. In 1796, Brown’s ship Hope travels to Cuba with 229 enslaved Africans on board. He is found guilty in federal court of violating the law and is forced to forfeit his ship. 

The Browns and others cannily work the so-called Triangular Trade. In this three-legged trade route, ships carry sugar and molasses produced by enslaved Africans from the plantation colonies of the Caribbean to New England where colonists turn much of it into rum. Merchants then ship some of this rum and other manufactured goods to Africa where they are exchanged for captive Africans, who are carried back to the Caribbean as slaves to produce more sugar.

Rhode Island comes to dominate the regional slave trade. By the middle of the 18th century, more than 20 Rhode Island ships, mostly from Newport, sail to Africa every year. Two-thirds of the tiny colony’s fleet is engaged in the slave trade. Over the next century, more than six out of every 10 North American ships involved in the African slave trade are based in Rhode Island. In all, perhaps as many as 100,000 captive Africans are carried to the New World in Rhode Island vessels. 

The slave trade becomes a crucial economic engine in the state, enriching some merchants and investors and creating jobs for thousands of others. In addition to sailors crewing the slave ships, many people work in industries dependent on the slave trade, from rope making to iron forging, from candle manufacturing to carpentry. Rum-making is also a big employer. By the 1760s, Newport alone boasts nearly two dozen rum distilleries. 

1796  African American mutual aid group founded 

1798  Ivory and slavery: The deadly cost of a pianoforte  

In 1843, a young buyer working in East Africa for John Bertram, a sea captain and trader from Salem, Massachusetts, witnesses scores of enslaved porters with ivory arriving from the interior. He describes them as “thin almost as Skeletons. They had an iron ring around the neck & a chain went through it, thus connecting 40 or 50 in a line.” By one contemporary estimate, only one in four porters survive the trek. Those who do are invariably sold into forced labor on East African clove plantations or sugar plantations in Brazil, or into agricultural slavery in Arabia and North Africa.  

Residents of villages ravaged and burned to the ground by the ivory/slave traders suffer traumatizing loss. But many also starve because their fellow-villagers who are taken away in chains to serve as porters in the ivory caravans are also subsistence farmers. And their disappearance often means the loss of critical food production in the community.

Elephant communities, too, are decimated. As Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank note in their book, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery, African elephants live in matriarchal herds, and the older females, generally those carrying the most valuable tusks, are also the source of community knowledge about where to find food and water. Their slaughter – 25,000 to 100,000 die each year at the hands of ivory hunters – have a fatal effect on the survival of young, vulnerable members of the herd. 

Such is the price of a pianoforte in the parlor. 

The mass deaths of African humans and elephants only increase with the accelerating demand for pianos as a middle-class symbol of cultural refinement and social respectability –  “a badge of gentility,” according to one Boston, Massachusetts social commentator. 

It is a demand that Jonas Chickering is happy to meet. By the mid-1830s, Chickering has become the country’s foremost piano-maker. He and his team of 20 craftsmen are turning out about 350 pianos a year at his Boston factory. They use ivory as the best covering for the piano keys. (One adult African elephant tusk of 75 pounds, properly milled, can yield the wafer-thin ivory veneers to cover the keys of 45 pianos.) Business booms. In 1852, one in nine of the estimated 9,000 pianos manufactured nationwide is a Chickering product. 

It seems a bizarre irony that both Phineas Pratt and George Read – and later Pratt’s youngest son, Julius, who joins the family business – are staunch abolitionists. Read is a founder and a deacon of the local Baptist church, and his home is a safe house for fugitives from slavery in the South heading north to greater freedom and security in Canada.

But if they “thought about it all – and there is no evidence that they did – they probably would have regarded ivory’s human victims as necessary components in their complex business,” write Farrow, Lang, and Frank.

The authors point out that the reality of involuntary labor, especially of Black people, was familiar to Pratt and Read. Theirs was the “bifurcated mind” of 19th century commerce. “Human rights were all well and good, but successful businesses always rested on somebody’s back.… An inferior people, living in untamed wilds on the other side of the globe, were part of ivory’s African supply system, but that was not the problem. The problem was maintaining the flow of high-quality ivory.”

1798  George Moses Horton: Poet free after 68 years 

He continues to buy his own time for more than 30 years while appealing – repeatedly and unsuccessfully – for his freedom. He publishes a second collection of poetry, The Poetical Works, in 1845. Twenty years later he finally becomes free when Union troops and the Emancipation Proclamation reach North Carolina. 

Following the Civil War, Horton travels with the 9th Michigan Cavalry Volunteers throughout North Carolina. During his travels, he composes the poems that make up his third collection, Naked Genius, published in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1865. After being enslaved for 68 years, Horton settles in Philadelphia for at least 17 years of freedom before his death.

The legacy of George Moses Horton is celebrated in North Carolina. In 1996, he is inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, and the George Moses Horton Society for the Study of African American Poetry is founded in Chapel Hill. In 1997, Horton is declared the Historic Poet Laureate of Chatham County, North Carolina.

1800  Failed uprising inspired by revolutions overseas  

Gabriel Prosser is inspired and driven by the prevailing themes of liberty and freedom espoused in the revolutions in the U.S. (1776), France (1789), and Haiti (1791-1804).

With the help of other enslaved workers, many of them highly skilled artisans like himself, Gabriel Prosser and his fellow leaders recruit hundreds of supporters and organize them into military units. He and his brothers, as well as other blacksmiths, create weapons for the insurgents. They turn scythe blades into dozens of swords, and manufacture spears and musket balls for use in the muskets they intend to steal. 

The rebels' plan to march into Richmond, gain control of the Virginia State Armory and the Virginia State Capitol, and take Governor James Monroe hostage. Negotiations about ending slavery would then begin. 

But the insurrectionists are betrayed. Two enslaved men warn their “owner” of the planned revolt, and the state militia arrests more than 70 of the alleged conspirators, including Gabriel. At his trial, one of the accused testifies that Gabriel intended to write the words “Death or Liberty” on a silk flag, in reference to the 1775 speech by Patrick Henry, a Founding Father and former Governor of Virginia, who said: “Give me liberty, or give me death!” 

Gabriel, aged 25, his two brothers, and 23 other rebels are hanged. One of the accused commits suicide before his arraignment. Eight enslaved men are moved or sold outside of Virginia. Thirteen are found guilty and pardoned by the governor, 25 are acquitted, and two men receive their freedom for informing their enslaver of the plot.

Some Virginia enslavers had already become increasingly nervous about the sharp increase in the number of Black people in the state. French colonial planters had fled Saint Domingue – soon to become Haiti – as armies of the enslaved under Toussaint Louverture began their ultimately successful fight for independence from France. Many of these wealthy White refugees had resettled in Virginia and brought their Black bondsmen with them. By 1795, as many as 12,000 enslaved workers from Saint Domingue are living in the U.S. Historian Douglas Egerton notes in his book, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802, that most states regard these workers as “infected with the malady of insurrection” and bar them from entry. Virginia does not. 

After a second conspiracy is discovered in 1802 among enslaved boatmen along the Appomattox and Roanoke Rivers, the Virginia authorities crack down. New laws are enacted to restrict free and enslaved African Americans. The Virginia Assembly makes it illegal for any Black person to obtain a pilot’s license (being found at the helm of a boat will be punished with 39 lashes); forbids enslaved people from meetings in groups after work and on Sundays, as had been customary; bans “masters” from hiring out of their enslaved workers; and requires African Americans who are freed to leave the state within 12 months or face re-enslavement.  

In 2002, the City of Richmond passes a resolution honoring Gabriel Prosser on the 202nd anniversary of the rebellion. In 2007, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine gives Prosser and his followers an informal pardon, in recognition that his cause, "the end of slavery and the furtherance of equality for all people” has prevailed “in the light of history.”