By Erasmus Baxter
When most people envision American slavery they imagine Southern plantations. Few think of New England as being a hot spot for slavery. However, in the middle decades of the 1700s, as the colonies moved towards independence, around 15 percent of Boston’s population consisted of enslaved peoples.
Jared Hardesty, an assistant professor of history at Western, is providing one of the first looks at that world in his book “Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston.”
“There’s a fairly rich literature of slavery in New England, but no one’s looked at Boston, which was kind of exceptional,” Hardesty said. “Boston’s the largest city in New England. It was the largest city in the American Colonies before the revolution. And it has, by the numbers, the largest slave population in New England.”
Hardesty based his research on a collection of court records located in Boston, where he attended graduate school. To access these records, called the Suffolk Papers, he had to go to the Massachusetts Archives, a 100,000 square foot, bunker-like building that he compared to a time machine because of its lack of Wi-Fi or cell service and dependence on hand-cranked microphones and card catalogs. Much of the micro-film he used had to be re-spooled since it hadn’t been used with newer micro-film machines.
“I really felt like I was uncovering something that nobody has looked at before,” Hardesty said.
The records were extensive, with over 150,000 cases spanning from 1628 to 1799. Hardesty estimated that the collection of was over 1 million pages long.
“If you want to take kind of a stereotypical view of the New England puritans, stodgy and all that, they’re also incredibly litigious and self-reflective,” he said. “There’s a massive collection of legal records that historians had never used to really do anything with, let alone study slavery and enslaved people.”
Hardesty was able to make sense of the collection using an index that was added at a later date.
“Whoever did it was incredibly racist, because they made sure whenever the case involved an indigenous person or an African American they would note ‘Negro” or ‘Indian,’” he said. “It was very helpful for me, because it made this collection navigable in a way that it otherwise wouldn’t haven’t been.”
He says this indexation reflects how differently race was conceived in 18th century Boston.
“For a lot of enslaved people, in, say Boston, a lot of the oppression they experienced was more class-based oppression,” Hardesty said. “They were very much envisioned as part of a social hierarchy. Their race does matter; their race puts them at the bottom of that hierarchy, but that’s very different from being defined as biologically inferior. Which is what’s going to happen by the end of the 18th century.”
Capturing this different mindset was one of the goals of the book.
“It’s a world where people don’t believe in universal human equality,” Hardesty said. “It’s a world where they accept the norm that a large portion of the population is going to be legally bound or dependent in some way.”
Hardesty thinks that historians in the past often overlooked or ignored that acceptance that some enslaved people had of the existing social structure.
“[Historians missed] this idea of a world structured by dependence and bondage and deference to social superiors,” he said. “How that influences the lives of enslaved peoples. And essentially I argue, they embraced this unfree world they live in. And why wouldn’t they? Everyone else does.”
This inspired the name of the book: “Unfreedom.”
“It’s a categorization of a grouping of all these forms of dependence that might have existed,” Hardesty said. “When you look at what Boston’s social landscape would look like in the 18th century, a solid 75 to 80 percent of people were bound in some way.”
He points to indentured servitude, and the dependent position of most women as examples of this bondage.
“What I found is [that enslaved people] behave a lot more like other early modern peoples,” Hardesty said. “The types of protests and things they have are very similar to other peoples’ protests in the sense that it’s about addressing grievances, it’s about restoring rights they believe have been taken away from them. It’s not about abstract notions of freedom, it’s about finding autonomy.”
By focusing on court documents Hardesty is able to bring out the voices of the enslaved people through testimonies and depositions. He hopes that their voices and stories can be used to help better stand the history of slavery in New England.
“It is a story of recovery,” he said. “That’s how I really envision both the book, but also everything that’s going on right now in New England, this kind of public reckoning. It’s about finally recovering the lives of these enslaved people and those who owned them and the institutions that supported it. Both legally, the institution of slavery, but churches and merchant houses and how they supported slavery as well.”
Hardesty has been able to deliver several talks on his book in New England, including one at the Old North Church that famously signaled Paul Revere, and a seminar at the Royal House enslaved quarters in Bedford, Massachusetts, the only freestanding slave quarters north of the Mason-Dixon line. He says that New England is moving to understand its legacy of slavery, and he hopes the stories in his book will be part of the conversation.
“Institutions that operate on shoestring budgets, and are driven by tourism dollars and small donations, slavery could turn those visitors off,” he said.
Hardesty said that specific anecdotes are important in conjunction with statistics and general statements.
“[Individual stories are] a tool to use,” he said. “You can make a personal connection. You have to tie these individual stories to the numbers.”
Jared Hardesty will be speaking about his book and signing copies on October 26 at 7 p.m. at Village Books in Fairhaven. His book is currently $40 new, but there as an eBook available and a paperback edition coming out next year.
