"The cause of her grief": The rape of a slave in early New England

Journal of American History

Volumn 93, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 1031-1049

  Warren, Wendy Anne ^a,b  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Yale's Writing History Working Group   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547770906     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/25094595     Document Type: Article

References (100)

1. Paul J. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler: A Critical Edition of Two Voyages to New England (Hanover, 1988), 24.
2. See, for example, Lorenzo Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York, 1942), 17-18;
3. George F. Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving (Salem, 1927), 268;
4. and Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), 66-68.
5. John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649, ed. Richard Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 246.
6. Ann Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca, 2000), 119. On African Americans in the colonial North,
7. see William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst, 1988);
8. and George Henry Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts (New York, 1866). This article joins a surge of interest in slavery in the North. Examples include John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore, 2003);
9. Thelma Wills Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in New York City (New York, 2004);
10. and Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York, 2005).
11. For helpful articles, see Robert C. Twombley and Robert H. Moore, "Black Puritan; The Negro in SeventeenthCentury Massachusetts," William and Mary Quarterly, 24 (April 1967), 224-42;
12. Albert J, Von Frank, "John Saffin; Slavery and Racism in Colonial Massachusetts," Early American Literature, 29 (Dec. 1994), 254-72;
13. and Melinde Lutz Sanborn, "Angola and Elizabeth: An African Family in the Massachusetts Bay Colony," New England Quarterly 72 (March 1999), 119-29.
14. See also the recent collection formed from the 2003 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife: Peter Benes and Jane Montague Benes, eds., Slavery/Antislavery in New England (Boston, 2005).
15. The 1942 book is Greene, Negro in Colonial New England.
16. Saidya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1997), 11.
17. See also Emma Perez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington, 1999), xii-xvii.
18. Rhode Island merchants dominated the African slave trade to North America for most of the eighteenth century. Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700-1807 (Philadelphia, 1981), 25.
19. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler, xiv-xv.
20. Miller Christy, "Attempts toward Colonization: The Council for New England and the Merchant Venturers of Bristol, 1621-1623," American Historical Review, 4 (July 1899), 683-85;
21. Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 5-9;
22. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler, xviii.
23. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler, 12.
24. Ibid., 5, 3, 129-30.
25. Ibid., 5-7.
26. Ibid.,7-8.
27. Ibid, 23.
28. William Sumner, A History of East Boston: With Biographical Sketches of its Early Proprietors (Boston, 1858), 69-75;
29. Samuel Maverick, A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Tournes Therein together with the Present Government Thereof '(1660; Boston, 1885), 13.
30. Mellen Chamberlain, A Documentary History of Chelsea, Including the Boston Precincts of Winnisimmett, Rumney Marsh, and Pullen Point, 1624-1824, vol. I (Boston, 1908), 16;
31. Sumner, History of East Boston, 9;
32. Winthrop, Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, 36,
33. Elizabeth French, "Genealogical Research in England: Maverick," New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 69 (1915), 157-59;
34. "Mrs. Amias Maverick to Trelawny," in Documentary History of the State of 'Maine, vol. Ill: The Trelawny Papers, ed. James P. Baxter (Portland, 1884), 76-78.
35. Thomas Prince, A Chronological History of New England in the Form of Annals (Boston, 1826), 321;
36. Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 124-25;
37. Maverick, Briefe Description of New England, 17.
38. Chamberlain, Documentary History of Chelsea, 21;
39. Prince, Chronological History of New England, 323;
40. Maverick, Brief: Description of New England, 26. Samuel Maverick's brother Moses helped his sister-in-law; he is listed in colonial records as having paid taxes on Noddle's Island to the General Court in 1636. See French, "Genealogical Research in England."
41. Winthrop, Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, 182. The identity of Captain Powell remains elusive. He may have been John or Henry Powell, ship captains who worked for an influential Barbadian merchant. See Richard S, Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972), 49-50, 58.
42. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975),
43. A. B. Forbes, ed., Winthrop Papers, 1498-1628 (5 vols., Boston, 1929-1947), I, 356-57, 361-62, and esp. II, 66-67;
44. French, "Genealogical Research in England," 158-59.
45. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 71.
46. Madge Dresser, Slavery Obscured: The Social History of the Slave Trade in an English Provincial Port (New York, 2001), 10-20;
47. Virginia Bernhard, "Beyond the Chesapeake: The Contrasting Status of Blacks in Bermuda, 16161663," Journal of Southern History, 54 (Nov. 1988), 546-49.
48. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 71.
49. Johannes M. Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815 (New York, 1990), 13-19;
50. Pieter Emmer, The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580-1880 (Brookfield, 1998), 17-20;
51. "Body of Liberties, 1641," in Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, vol. Ill, ed. Elizabeth Donnan (New York, 1969), 4.
52. David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York, 2000), 246-50.
53. Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 130;
54. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (New York, 2000), 62-64.
55. See Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston, 1976), 42-43;
56. Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1673), 46.
57. It is difficult to estimate slaves' shipboard mortality in the early seventeenth century, since the slave trade was not professionalized until the later decades of the century. For a one-in-three estimate for 1663-1713, see EItis, Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, 185.
58. Other scholars suggest that earlier trips were less deadly, as market needs did not yet force maximum efficiency from each trip. A 5 to 10% mortality rate was more typical for early seventeenth-century slaving trips across the Atlantic Ocean, when the Dutch still controlled the trade, according to Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624-1690 (New York, 1972), 245.
59. A 20% mortality rate for the early seventeenth century is posited by Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 136-37.
60. Kenneth F. Kiple and Brian T. Higgins, "Mortality Caused by Dehydration during the Middle Passage" in The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, ed. Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman (Durham, 1992), 321-25.
61. Daniel Mannix, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518-1865 (New York, 1962), 128-29.
62. Eltis, Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, 111 ;
63. Ligon, True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 46;
64. Winthrop, Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, 246.
65. Karen O, Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630-1641: The Other Puritan Colony (New York, 1993), 26, 32535. Kupperman notes that Providence Island colonists overcame Puritan unease over slavery through hubristic reasoning: an "inward turned logic allowed the company dedicated to Providence to assume that God had provided perfectly acclimated heathens to work in tropical fields. If God had not intended their use, why did he make Europeans ill-suited to such labor conditions, while Africans worked so well under the hot sun?"
66. Ibid., 178.
67. Karen O. Kupperman, "Errand to the Indies: Puritan Colonization from Providence Island through the Western Design," William and Mary Quarterly, 45 (jan. 1988), 75-81;
68. Kupperman, Providence Island, 170-72.
69. For the quotation from Gov. Nathaniel Butler of Providence Island, see ibid., 172.
70. Winthrop, Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, 352-57. Pierce's slave, a woman, apparently attempted to burn down his house while he was away on a trip.
71. See James Duncan Phillips, Salem in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1933), 96-97.
72. Nancy Seasholes, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 355;
73. Chamberlain, Documentary History of Chelsea, 16;
74. grant of Noddle's Island to Samuel Maverick, in records of a court held at Boston, April 1, 1633, oversize box 1, David S. Greenough Papers, 1631-1859 (Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston);
75. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler, 18.
76. Jordan, White over Black, 6-15.
77. Winthrop, Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Dunn, Savage, and Yeandle, 227;
78. Michael L. Fickes, '"They Could Not Endure That Yoke': The Captivity of Pequot Women and Children after the War of 1637," New England Quarterly 73 (March 2000), 58-61.
79. See Margaret Ellen Newell, "The Changing Nature of Indian Slavery in New England, 1670-1720," in Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, ed. Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury (Boston, 2003), 106-36.
80. Fickes, '"They Could Not Endure That Yoke,'" 67-70.
81. Daniel Mandell, "Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriage in Southern New England, 1760-1880," Journal of American History 85 (Sept. 1998), 468.
82. George Henry Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts (New York, 1866), 7.
83. Samuel Maverick, "Letters to John Winthrop," Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 7 (1865), 307.
84. I am reminded of Else Barkley Brown's admonition to recognize that differences in class and race mean "that all women do not have the same gender." Elsa Barkley Brown, '"What Has Happened Here': The Politics of Difference in Women's History," Feminist Studies, 18 (Summer 1992), 300.
85. A long-standing and well-developed European discourse on non-European sexuality was employed constantly in encounters with other peoples. See Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, 2004), esp. 12-49.
86. On African men's reactions to their feminization in the New World, see Edward Pearson, "'A Countryside Full of Flames': A Reconsideration of the Stono Rebellion and Slave Rebelliousness in the Early Eighteenth-Century South Carolina Lowcountry," Slavery and Abolition, 17 (Aug. 1996), 22-50.
87. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 3-4;
88. Edward Rowe Snow, The Islands of Boston Harbor: Their History and Romance, 1626-1935 (Andover, 1935), 237.
89. "Indenture Between Samuell Mavericke and John Burch," in Suffolk Deeds, liber II (Boston, 1883), 325-27.
90. On contraceptive and abortive techniques that may have been used by slave women, including herbs and "pointed sticks," see Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Bloomington, 1990), 142.
91. See also Morgan, Laboring Women, 114-15.
92. The Lawes Resolution of Women's Rights; or the Lawes Provision for Woemen: A Methodicall Collection of Such Statutes and Customes, with the Cases, Opinions, Arguments and Points of Learning in the Law, as doe properly concerne Women (London, 1632), 392-93.
93. John Josselyn, New-Englands Rarities Discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, and Plants of that Country (London, 1672), 101-2, 99.
94. French, "Genealogical Research in England," 157; "Bond between Samuel Maverick and John Parris," in Suffolk Deeds, liber I (Boston, 1880), 262.
95. "Notice of Sale from Maverick to Briggs," oversize box 1, Greenough Papers; "Petition of Samuel Shrimpton, 1682," Massachusetts Archives (microfilm), vol. 16, p. 309 (Massachusetts State Archives, Boston);
96. Snow, Islands of Boston Harbor, 239-40;
97. Andrew Oliver, Ann Millspaugh Huff, and Edward W. Hanson, Portraits in the Massachusetts Historical Society: An Illustrated Catalog with Descriptive Matter (Boston, 1988), 93.
98. Eltis, Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, 97.
99. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 5;
100. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), 20.