The Puritans and New England’s Slave Trade
The New England Puritans warred upon and sold into West Indian slavery the local inhabitants they didn’t kill in the process. The native inhabitant’s land was forfeited and divided among the victors, whose later prosperity was largely the result of a profitable triangular slave trade with Africans shipped to the West Indies sugar plantations. New England slave ship construction was highly profitable and lured many Liverpool shipwrights away from home, and during one period the little village of Newport, Rhode Island was the haven for 150 slave-trade vessels. From Delaware to Georgia, each State was indebted to New England for its slave labor.
In the 1820s the Puritan descendants discovered a “Higher Law” and denounced the 1789 compact they then agreed to as “a covenant with Death and an agreement with Hell.” This was heard despite the millions in profits made by New England textile mills fed by the cotton picked by slaves they had sold to Southern planters – a process made more efficient and profitable by a 1790’s invention of Massachusetts inventor Eli Whitney.
(The Puritans. Thomas Manson Norwood, 1875. Virginia Heritage Foundation, pp. 63-65)