By the time of the Civil War, the New England states were known to be home to abolitionists and to many free Black intellectuals and activists. Yet, New England history is not unstained by slavery. In fact, Colonial New England was one of the earliest places in British North America where the practice of enslaving Africans and codifying their dependent status occured. This slim but informative volume offers an outline of slavery in New England.

While the number of slaves in New England was small relative to the Southern colonies, there were greater concentrations in larger cities such as Boston, Newport, and Bristol where the Black population approached 10%, and even more rural communities such as Deerfield. As a result of enslaved people being held in more urban areas, they were less likely to work in agriculture but in a great variety of skilled and unskilled labor such as building trades, shipbuilding, distilling, and as sailors. Enslavers could hire out their enslaved people for extra income, and Hardesty even details the practice of self-hiring when enslaved people would take on jobs of their interest (sharing a percentage of their income with their masters). Some Black people earned money to buy their freedom in this way.

Blacks were not the only people held as slaves, as New England colonists captured Native people and traded them to Caribbean colonies. In at least one instant, Carolina Indians were held as slaves in New England. Apart from direct slave ownership, New Englanders were deeply invested in the trade and trafficking of slaves in Africa and the West Indies, particularly in the port cities of Rhode Island. Even the common people profited by this trade by investing into shares of the slave ships.

The most illuminating part of this book is that it tells the personal stories of several enslaved and free Black people in New England. Their is Belinda Sutton who successfully petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for reparations for her captivity by the Royall family of Medford. Venture Smith had three different masters, learned a variety of trades, and eventually saved up to purchase his freedom. Onesimus, held by Cotton Mather, steadfastly refused to convert to Christianity. Briton Hammon wrote a narrative of his life as a sailor. And Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker established the precedent for judicial emancipation in Massachusetts by filing suits under the commonwealth's new constitution of 1780.

This is an excellent and important work of popular history that should be read by anyone studying the history of New England, slavery, and Black Americans.

Favorite Passages:

“Most Africans who ended up in the region came from two places in Africa: the Gold Coast and Senegambia in the northern part of sub-Saharan Africa.” – p. 46

“Unlike our modern world, New England before the American Revolution was not a place of universal freedom. Rather multiple forms of dependence characterized society. Slavery, although an extreme and uniquely violent form of subjugation, existed alongside more traditional forms of bondage such as indentured servitude, apprenticeship, and marriage. Almost everyone living in New England would have been in a state of dependence at some point in their lives, and at no given time was less than 60 percent of the total population legally bound in some way.” – p. 52

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