Slave-for-sale advertisements and slavery in Massachusetts, 1704-1781

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 59, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 623-664

  Desrochers Jr , Robert E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33645751093     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3491467     Document Type: Review

References (85)

1. On the relative volume of advertising in the Boston Gazette, see Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740 (New York, 1994), 112, 168
2. and Mary Ann Yodelis, Who Paid the Piper? Publishing Economics in Boston, 1763-1775, Journalism Monographs, 38 (Lexington, Ky., 1975), 34-35
3. According to Lawrence William Towner, A Good Master Well Served: Masters and Servants in Colonial Massachusetts, 1620-1750 (New York, 1998), 118 n 33
4. who collected at random ads from a number of Massachusetts newspapers. Edgar J. McManus, Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse, 1973), 18-48, made fuller use of slave-for-sale notices, though he tended again to favor description and also to favor New York and Pennsylvania over New England and Massachusetts
5. Other studies include Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago, 1967), 35-40
6. and Patricia Bradley, Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution (Jackson, Miss., 1998), 25-32
7. and George H. Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts (New York, 1866), 69-70, 178, 207-09
8. Despite the emergence in recent years of what might be termed the new history of northern slavery, the most thorough studies of the domestic slave market pertain to the antebellum South. For recent works see especially Steven Deyle, "The Domestic Slave Trade in America" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1995)
9. Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison, 1989)
10. and Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)
11. Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade, 3:48n
12. Towner, "A Good Master Well Served: A Social History of Servitude in Massachusetts, 1620-1750" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1954), app. M
13. and Towner, A Good Master Well Served, 103-23
14. Greene, Negro in Colonial New England, 84
15. William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst, Mass., 1988), 15
16. Clark, Public Prints, 199, 201
17. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743-1776 (1955; New York, 1971), 88
18. On slaves' willingness to flee rather than be sold and on masters' recognition of and responses to that threat, see T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington, Ky., 1997), 61-63
19. On printers' intermediary position as slave peddlers, see Steven Deyle, "'By farr the most profitable trade': Slave Trading in British Colonial North America," Slavery and Abolition, 10 (1989), 116-17
20. cited in A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (New York, 1978), 378
21. Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810 (Athens, Ga., 1991), 106-07
22. Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 4:479
23. On runaway advertisements as a print genre and print and slavery more generally, see White, Somewhat More Independent, 116-20
24. and David Waldstreicher, "Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 56 (1999), 243-72
25. For a sophisticated reading of the coded language masters used to turn people into slaves in print, see Alex Bontemps, The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South (Ithaca, 2001)
26. On economic conditions see Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 54-65, 82-88
27. Moore, History of Slavery in Massachusetts, 10
28. Sewall, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial, ibid, 83-85
29. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, A Topographical and Historical Description of Boston (Boston, 1872), 48
30. Joshua Coffin, A Sketch of the History of Newbury, Newburyport, and West Newbury, from 1635 to 1845 (Boston, 1845), 153-54
31. Sewall, Selling of Joseph, 86
32. See also John Saffin, A Brief and Candid Answer to a Late Printed Sheet, Entituled, The Selling of Joseph (Boston, 1701)
33. and Towner, "The Sewall-Saffin Dialogue on Slavery," WMQ, 3d Ser., 21 (1964), 40-52
34. Massachusetts Acts and Resolves 1692-1714 (Boston, 1869), 325, 520, 535, 578-79
35. Nash, Urban Crucible, 107. Colonial population estimates are just that, though for a variety of reasons the records are consistently more complete and accurate for blacks than whites
36. William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1620-1789, 2 vols. (Boston, 1890), 2:456, 570
37. Coffin, An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, and Others, Which Have Occurred, or Been Attempted, in the United States and Elsewhere, During the Last Two Centuries (New York, 1860), 12-13
38. On white emigration, see also Richard S. Dunn, "Servants and Slaves: The Recruitment and Employment of Labor," in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984), 183-84
39. R. J. Dickson, Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718-1775 (London, 1966)
40. and David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: an Economic Analysis (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 124-25, 156-57. It does not appear to have been the case that the resumption of white immigration after the Peace of Utrecht ushered in the permanent "decline in the significance of slavery" in New England or that the institution had passed its peak in Massachusetts by 1715
41. For a different view, see Duncan J. Macleod, "Toward Caste," in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, 1983), 220-21
42. Winthrop D. Jordan, "The Influence of the West Indies on the Origins of New England Slavery," WMQ, 3d Ser., 18 (1961), 243-50, deals primarily with the role of inherited ideas about race, not with the actual exchange of slaves
43. See Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 3-34
44. and Galenson, "The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Barbados Market, 1673-1723," Journal of Economic History, 42 (1982), 491-511
45. On African transmigration and African cultures in North America more generally, see Robert Farris Thompson, "Kongo Influences on African-American Artistic Culture," in Joseph E. Holloway, ed., Africanisms in American Culture (Bloomington, 1990), esp. 148-57
46. Thompson and Joseph Cornet, The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds (Washington, D. C., 1981)
47. Sylvia R. Frey, Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991)
48. Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and British Caribbean, 1736-1831 (Urbana, 1992)
49. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1992)
50. and Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998)
51. Piersen, "White Cannibals, Black Martyrs: Fear, Depression, and Religious Faith as Causes of Suicide among New Slaves," Journal of Negro History, 62 (1977), 153
52. Piersen, Black Yankees, 78, 7
53. and Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, 1982), 105-14, 335
54. The Virginian, an Eastern Shore planter named Thomas Cable, is cited in Darold D. Wax, "Preferences for Slaves in Colonial America," J. Negro Hist., 58 (1973), 396
55. On smallpox in early Boston, see John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America (Baton Rouge, 1953), 43-68
56. The classic statement of the relationship between slave importing and disease is Philip D. Curtin, "Epidemiology and the Slave Trade," Political Science Quarterly, 83 (1968), 190-216
57. Wood, "More Like a Negro Country': Demographic Patterns in Colonial South Carolina, 1700-1740," in Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, 1975), 144
58. Drake, The History and Antiquities of Boston . . . (Boston, 1856), 574
59. On New England's historical amnesia regarding its slave past, see Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, 1998)
60. On the sugar economy and slave availability, see Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623-1775 (Kingston, Jam., 1994; orig. pub. 1974), 389-446
61. Nash, "Slaves and Slaveowners in Colonial Philadelphia," WMQ, 3d Ser., 30 (1973), 227
62. On Philadelphia and New York, see also McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse, 1966)
63. For a graphic representation of heightened American involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, see Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969), 138
64. Herman Belz, "Paper Money in Colonial Massachusetts," Essex Institute Historical Collections, 101 (1965), 149-63
65. and John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600-1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, 1978), 125-37
66. While historians generally agree that Boston weathered its share of economic storms in the middle of the 18th century, Bridenbaugh's social histories and Nash's Urban Crucible make the boldest claims for long-term economic decline. Economic historians tend to stress adaptation and slow growth. For a range of views, see David Richardson, "Slavery, Trade, and Economic Growth in Eighteenth-Century New England," in Barbara L. Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge, 1991), 237-64
67. Jacob M. Price, "Economic Function and the Growth of American Port Towns in the Eighteenth Century," Perspectives in American History, 8 (1974), 140-49
68. Allan Kulikoff, "The Progress of Inequality in Revolutionary Boston," WMQ, 3d Ser., 28 (1971), 375-412
69. Warden, "Inequality and Instability in Eighteenth-Century Boston: A Reappraisal," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1976), 49-84
70. Terry L. Anderson, "Economic Growth in Colonial New England: 'Statistical Renaissance,"' J. Econ. Hist., 39 (1979), 243-57
71. Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1988), esp. 55-80
72. and Gloria T. Main and Jackson T. Main, "The Red Queen in New England?" WMQ, 3d Ser., 56 (1999), 121-47
73. On the rise and annual voyages of Rhode Island slavers, see Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700-1807 (Philadelphia, 1981)
74. Deutsch, "The Elusive Guineamen: Newport Slavers, 1735-1774," New England Quarterly, 55 (1982), 243-44
75. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 93-194
76. Nash, "Slaves and Slaveowners in Colonial Philadelphia," 229-30
77. Wax, "Africans on the Delaware: The Pennsylvania Slave Trade, 1759-1765," Pa. Hist., 50 (1983), 40
78. Lydon, "New York and the Slave Trade," 381
79. and Coughtry, Notorious Triangle, 27, 30, 34-35
80. Fred Anderson, A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War (Chapel Hill, 1984), 230-31
81. Josiah H. Benton, Jr., Early Census Making in Massachusetts, 1643-1765 (Boston, 1905)
82. Bailyn with Barbara DeWolfe, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1986), 205, 209
83. T. H. Breen "Making History: The Force of Public Opinion and the Last Years of Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts," in Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1997), 67-95
84. See David Eltis, Stephen Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999)
85. and "New Perspectives on the Slave Trade" (special issue), WMQ, 3d Ser., 58 (2001), 3-251