Slavery was a dominant feature of southern pre-war times, but it was also ubiquitous in the pre-civil war north – the New England states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts , Connecticut and Rhode Island all have a history of slavery. At the start of the colonial period, Europeans invaded these lands and enslaved the natives who lived there.
As the New England settlers drove the Aboriginal nations out of their homes, they replaced these Aboriginal slaves with African slaves and invested heavily in the slave trade to fuel their economy.
Rhode Island brought up its history of slavery on June 22, 2020 when Governor Gina Raimondo announced that the state’s official name – “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” – would no longer appear on state documents. Instead, the state will simply identify itself as “Rhode Island”.
Slavery was “integrated” into the construction of cities in the Northeast
“Most of the general public in the United States does not understand the very long history of slavery in the northern colonies and the northern states,” says Christy Clark-Pujara, professor of African American history and studies. at the University of Wisconsin. Madison and author of Dark Work: The Slavery Business in Rhode Island.
“They don’t feel that slavery was an integral part of building New York and places like Newport and Providence, that many of these cities had more than 20% of their population enslaved … and that slavery lasted well in the North in the 1840s, “she says. “Some states, like New Jersey, never abolished slavery, so slavery ended there legally in 1865.”
Colonel Roger Williams coined the longer name for Rhode Island in the 17th century, when the word “plantation” referred to a new colony. The word evolved during the 19th century, becoming synonymous with black enslavement on large farms. This is the meaning it has today, and the main reason why activists have previously asked Rhode Island to remove “plantation” from its name.
Yet even in the 17th century sense, the word “plantation” meant European colonization, a violent practice intertwined with slavery, says Margaret Ellen Newell, professor of history at Ohio State University and author of Brothers by nature: New England Indians, settlers and the origins of American slavery.
“Slavery was a global market, it was a global phenomenon and it was linked to colonization,” she says.
PHOTOS: Slavery in America
How slavery evolved in New England
In the 17th century, the majority of slaves in colonial New England were Native Americans. According to Clark-Pujara and Newell, the New England settlers had access to the international slave markets of Africa and sought to purge the natives of their lands violently. These enslaved people worked on small farms and in some large plantations, as well as in houses, shipyards and mines. New England white settlers also invested heavily in the slave trade, buying shares in slave ships and boosting their economies with the benefits of human trafficking.
The earliest laws limiting slavery in New England were local, weak, and largely overlooked, says Clark-Pujara. In 1652 and 1676, the colonial cities of Providence and Warwick passed laws limiting the slavery of Africans and Aboriginals, respectively. The settlers of these cities probably adopted these statutes to differentiate themselves from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which legalized slavery in 1641, and from which the settlers of Providence and Warwick had separated.
However, officials did not apply the statutes, and from 1703 the Rhode Island Colony and Providence Plantations supplanted them with new laws codifying the slavery of Africans and Indigenous peoples. In 1750, the colony of Rhode had the highest percentage of enslaved people in New England and was a dominant player in the world slave trade.
“The North was in many ways the engine of the expansion of slavery in the South,” says Clark-Pujara.
The flourishing textile factories of New England used cotton gathered by slaves from the South who received no compensation for their work. Rhode Island has fueled its rum trade by trafficking people in Africa and the Caribbean. The enslaved carried out many types of free work throughout New England, and Clark-Pujara says that this enslavement in the north was as brutal as in the south.
Fewer large farms in the North mean less slavery
“There is a strong fiction that slavery was sweet in the North,” she says. “There is absolutely no historical evidence to support this. Slavery was slavery … People were beaten and tortured in the North, just as they were beaten and tortured in the South, and it was just bad in different ways. “
New England could not support as many large plantation-style farms as the South, so most white slavers in the North held one or two slaves. “The very rare historical documents that we have left of people enslaved tell us about the horror of the solitude of slavery in the North, of the horror of having to live in the same house and sleep at the door of the person who stole your freedom every hour of every day, ”says Clark-Pujara.
Some northern states outlawed slavery in the late 18th century, but many whites continued to illegally enslave blacks in those states. In states like Rhode Island, which outlawed slavery in 1843, slavery continued until just before the Civil War. Others such as New Hampshire and New Jersey have never prohibited slavery. There, slavery only became illegal with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865.
