New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America
New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America

Author: Wendy Warren

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2016-06-07

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 1631492152

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History A New York Times Notable Book A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection A Providence Journal Best Book of the Year Winner of the Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Award for Social History Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize Finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize "This book is an original achievement, the kind of history that chastens our historical memory as it makes us wiser." —David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Widely hailed as a “powerfully written” history about America’s beginnings (Annette Gordon-Reed), New England Bound fundamentally changes the story of America’s seventeenth-century origins. Building on the works of giants like Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan, Wendy Warren has not only “mastered that scholarship” but has now rendered it in “an original way, and deepened the story” (New York Times Book Review). While earlier histories of slavery largely confine themselves to the South, Warren’s “panoptical exploration” (Christian Science Monitor) links the growth of the northern colonies to the slave trade and examines the complicity of New England’s leading families, demonstrating how the region’s economy derived its vitality from the slave trading ships coursing through its ports. And even while New England Bound explains the way in which the Atlantic slave trade drove the colonization of New England, it also brings to light, in many cases for the first time ever, the lives of the thousands of reluctant Indian and African slaves who found themselves forced into the project of building that city on a hill. We encounter enslaved Africans working side jobs as con artists, enslaved Indians who protested their banishment to sugar islands, enslaved Africans who set fire to their owners’ homes and goods, and enslaved Africans who saved their owners’ lives. In Warren’s meticulous, compelling, and hard-won recovery of such forgotten lives, the true variety of chattel slavery in the Americas comes to light, and New England Bound becomes the new standard for understanding colonial America.

Disowning Slavery
Disowning Slavery

Author: Joanne Pope Melish

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2016-01-21

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1501702920

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Following the abolition of slavery in New England, white citizens seemed to forget that it had ever existed there. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources—from slaveowners' diaries to children's daybooks to racist broadsides—Joanne Pope Melish reveals not only how northern society changed but how its perceptions changed as well. Melish explores the origins of racial thinking and practices to show how ill-prepared the region was to accept a population of free people of color in its midst. Because emancipation was gradual, whites transferred prejudices shaped by slavery to their relations with free people of color, and their attitudes were buttressed by abolitionist rhetoric which seemed to promise riddance of slaves as much as slavery. She tells how whites came to blame the impoverished condition of people of color on their innate inferiority, how racialization became an important component of New England ante-bellum nationalism, and how former slaves actively participated in this discourse by emphasizing their African identity. Placing race at the center of New England history, Melish contends that slavery was important not only as a labor system but also as an institutionalized set of relations. The collective amnesia about local slavery's existence became a significant component of New England regional identity.

Brethren by Nature
Brethren by Nature

Author: Margaret Ellen Newell

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2015-11-25

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0801456479

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Brethren by Nature, Margaret Ellen Newell reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legalize slavery in 1641, and the colonists' desire for slaves shaped the major New England Indian wars, including the Pequot War of 1637, King Philip's War of 1675–76, and the northeastern Wabanaki conflicts of 1676–1749. When the wartime conquest of Indians ceased, New Englanders turned to the courts to get control of their labor, or imported Indians from Florida and the Carolinas, or simply claimed free Indians as slaves.Drawing on letters, diaries, newspapers, and court records, Newell recovers the slaves' own stories and shows how they influenced New England society in crucial ways. Indians lived in English homes, raised English children, and manned colonial armies, farms, and fleets, exposing their captors to Native religion, foods, and technology. Some achieved freedom and power in this new colonial culture, but others experienced violence, surveillance, and family separations. Newell also explains how slavery linked the fate of Africans and Indians. The trade in Indian captives connected New England to Caribbean and Atlantic slave economies. Indians labored on sugar plantations in Jamaica, tended fields in the Azores, and rowed English naval galleys in Tangier. Indian slaves outnumbered Africans within New England before 1700, but the balance soon shifted. Fearful of the growing African population, local governments stripped Indian and African servants and slaves of legal rights and personal freedoms. Nevertheless, because Indians remained a significant part of the slave population, the New England colonies did not adopt all of the rigid racial laws typical of slave societies in Virginia and Barbados. Newell finds that second- and third-generation Indian slaves fought their enslavement and claimed citizenship in cases that had implications for all enslaved peoples in eighteenth-century America.

Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass

Author: David W. Blight

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 912

ISBN-13: 1416590323

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

* Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times * Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History * “Extraordinary…a great American biography” (The New Yorker) of the most important African American of the 19th century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era. As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery. Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, using his own story to condemn slavery. By the Civil War, Douglass had become the most famed and widely travelled orator in the nation. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the United States as well as a radical patriot. After the war he sometimes argued politically with younger African Americans, but he never forsook either the Republican party or the cause of black civil and political rights. In this “cinematic and deeply engaging” (The New York Times Book Review) biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. “Absorbing and even moving…a brilliant book that speaks to our own time as well as Douglass’s” (The Wall Street Journal), Blight’s biography tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. “David Blight has written the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass…a powerful portrait of one of the most important American voices of the nineteenth century” (The Boston Globe). In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Frederick Douglass won the Bancroft, Parkman, Los Angeles Times (biography), Lincoln, Plutarch, and Christopher awards and was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Time.

Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds
Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds

Author: Jared Hardesty

Publisher: Bright Leaf

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781625344564

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Shortly after the first Europeans arrived in seventeenth-century New England, they began to import Africans and capture the area's indigenous peoples as slaves. By the eve of the American Revolution, enslaved people comprised only about 4 percent of the population, but slavery had become instrumental to the region's economy and had shaped its cultural traditions. This story of slavery in New England has been little told. In this concise yet comprehensive history, Jared Ross Hardesty focuses on the individual stories of enslaved people, bringing their experiences to life. He also explores larger issues such as the importance of slavery to the colonization of the region and to agriculture and industry, New England's deep connections to Caribbean plantation societies, and the significance of emancipation movements in the era of the American Revolution. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of New England.

Dark Work
Dark Work

Author: Christy Clark-Pujara

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2018-03-06

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1479855634

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Tells the story of one state in particular whose role in the slave trade was outsized: Rhode Island Historians have written expansively about the slave economy and its vital role in early American economic life. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders bought and sold slaves and supplies that sustained plantations throughout the Americas; however, nowhere else was this business so important. During the colonial period trade with West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses, the key ingredient for their number one export: rum. More than 60 percent of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode Island. During the antebellum period Rhode Islanders were the leading producers of “negro cloth,” a coarse wool-cotton material made especially for enslaved blacks in the American South. Clark-Pujara draws on the documents of the state, the business, organizational, and personal records of their enslavers, and the few first-hand accounts left by enslaved and free black Rhode Islanders to reconstruct their lived experiences. The business of slavery encouraged slaveholding, slowed emancipation and led to circumscribed black freedom. Enslaved and free black people pushed back against their bondage and the restrictions placed on their freedom. It is convenient, especially for northerners, to think of slavery as southern institution. The erasure or marginalization of the northern black experience and the centrality of the business of slavery to the northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction—that North has no history of racism to overcome. But we cannot afford such a delusion if we are to truly reconcile with our past.

Slavery in the North
Slavery in the North

Author: Marc Howard Ross

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-08-01

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 0812295285

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 2002, we learned that President George Washington had eight (and, later, nine) enslaved Africans in his house while he lived in Philadelphia from 1790 to 1797. The house was only one block from Independence Hall and, though torn down in 1832, it housed the enslaved men and women Washington brought to the city as well as serving as the country's first executive office building. Intense controversy erupted over what this newly resurfaced evidence of enslaved people in Philadelphia meant for the site that was next door to the new home for the Liberty Bell. How could slavery best be remembered and memorialized in the birthplace of American freedom? For Marc Howard Ross, this conflict raised a related and troubling question: why and how did slavery in the North fade from public consciousness to such a degree that most Americans have perceived it entirely as a "Southern problem"? Although slavery was institutionalized throughout the Northern as well as the Southern colonies and early states, the existence of slavery in the North and its significance for the region's economic development has rarely received public recognition. In Slavery in the North, Ross not only asks why enslavement disappeared from the North's collective memories but also how the dramatic recovery of these memories in recent decades should be understood. Ross undertakes an exploration of the history of Northern slavery, visiting sites such as the African Burial Ground in New York, Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, the ports of Rhode Island, old mansions in Massachusetts, prestigious universities, and rediscovered burying grounds. Inviting the reader to accompany him on his own journey of discovery, Ross recounts the processes by which Northerners had collectively forgotten 250 years of human bondage and the recent—and continuing—struggles over recovering, and commemorating, what it entailed.

Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World
Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World

Author: Edward B. Rugemer

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-11-12

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0674982991

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner of the Jerry H. Bentley Book Prize, World History Association The success of the English colony of Barbados in the seventeenth century, with its lucrative sugar plantations and enslaved African labor, spawned the slave societies of Jamaica in the western Caribbean and South Carolina on the American mainland. These became the most prosperous slave economies in the Anglo-American Atlantic, despite the rise of enlightened ideas of liberty and human dignity. Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World reveals the political dynamic between slave resistance and slaveholders’ power that marked the evolution of these societies. Edward Rugemer shows how this struggle led to the abolition of slavery through a law of British Parliament in one case and through violent civil war in the other. In both Jamaica and South Carolina, a draconian system of laws and enforcement allowed slave masters to maintain control over the people they enslaved, despite resistance and recurrent slave revolts. Brutal punishments, patrols, imprisonment, and state-sponsored slave catchers formed an almost impenetrable net of power. Yet slave resistance persisted, aided and abetted by rising abolitionist sentiment and activity in the Anglo-American world. In South Carolina, slaveholders exploited newly formed levers of federal power to deflect calls for abolition and to expand slavery in the young republic. In Jamaica, by contrast, whites fought a losing political battle against Caribbean rebels and British abolitionists who acted through Parliament. Rugemer’s comparative history spanning two hundred years of slave law and political resistance illuminates the evolution and ultimate collapse of slave societies in the Atlantic World.