This year marks 400 years since the first enslaved Africans were brought to the Colony of Virginia. And while much history written about slavery in the U.S. focuses on the South, slavery was also prominent in the North.
A new book about slavery in New England by Jared Ross Hardesty, "Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery In New England," highlights how embedded slavery was in the economy of the colonial towns in the area.
But to tell that history, Hardesty said he needed to push past some myths that have emerged.
Jared Ross Hardesty, author: Those myths are things like slavery was not important to the economy of New England, that slavery did not take deep root; only the wealthiest in society own enslaved people, and it was easy to abolish because New Englanders, seeing the errors of their way during the Revolution, struck it down, and the problems of slavery in a new republic dedicated to liberty and equality.
And so those sorts of myths attached to it. Then those myths lead to kind of a historical interpretation that it wasn't important.
A lot of when you write about the history of slavery in New England, it's not so much acknowledging that it existed. It's fighting back against those myths.
Carrie Healy, NEPR: Did you find that the structure of communities in New England impacted the way slavery took hold here?
Absolutely. You know, slavery is different in some ways in New England, partially because of small-scale slave-holding. Most enslaved people lived in households in New England. And there'd be one, maybe two — I think the number is like 1.75 — enslaved persons per household in New England. So enslaved people are embedded right in that kind of family structure.
The ways in which both Puritans, and then their descendants in the 18th century, envisioned slavery had to do with their vision of family. They envisioned family in very broad terms. It's everyone who lives in the household under the guise of the patriarch. That includes the wife and the children, but also any other dependents in the household.
So maybe, you know, an orphan nephew, maybe an unmarried sister, an elderly parent, or a servant — an indentured servant, or an enslaved person. Very much, enslaved people are incorporated into that kind of family structure.
From there, they're there in the communal structure, through their owners. Enslaved people have a kind of connection to the community. They're recognized as belonging to that person in that town. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing could depend on the circumstances. But it does give them kind of a claim to the community, or they're kind of embedded in the community.
As a history professor, you're fluent in the history of the time. Did you learn anything new in writing this book?
Yeah, a lot of new things. When I embarked on writing this book, I saw it as kind of a need. I didn't want to write The Boston history of slavery, New England. I wanted to write a history of slavery in New England that looked across the region broadly, including Maine and New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The urban areas, rural areas, things like that.
I learned a whole lot especially about slave-holding in rural areas. For example, there's enslavement in Maine, on the Maine frontier, and the way in which slavery is largely shaped by the geopolitics of that frontier. They're nearly in a constant state of war. And so slave-holding in some ways resembles that in rural New England, small-scale. But also there are sort of opportunities for enslaved people to, say, escape in the chaos of war, or to slip away into the frontier. That's very much part of it. That was one of the neat things I learned.
But also the stuff about Deerfield. I did not know 50 enslaved people were living in the town of Deerfield, Massachusetts. It kind of came as a surprise, because in some ways, I still do think of slavery as an urban institution. And yet here are these rural towns with sizable numbers of enslaved people.
