In May of 1637 the Puritan militia attacked a Pequot community near today’s Mystic, Connecticut, killing many and pursuing the remaining men, women, and children across southern New England. The Pequot men captured were killed, with women and children enslaved as spoils of war. Others were shipped to the Caribbean islands and worked to death on sugar cane fields.
New England History
“To the modern reader who has accepted the sectional misrepresentations of the last half-century as historical verities a comparison of the Northerner with the Southerner will be unsatisfactory unless it locates the responsibility for African slavery in the United States, since that has been regarded as the Pandora’s box which was opened when the thirteen States entered into a federal compact.
Hence, omitting references to the South’s well-known responsibilities in the premises, I present here the evidence on which a fair decision can be based:
- In 1638 the Salem slave ship, the Desire, brought into Massachusetts a number of Negroes, and found ready sale for them. This “was not a private individual speculation,” says Moore (Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts); “it was the enterprise of the authorities on the colony.”
- In 1639 an African queen had been brought across the waters and sold to “Mr. Maverick,” as we are informed in Joselyn’s Account of Two Voyages to New England; and Mr. Maverick undertook to compel her to raise him an improved breed of slaves. “This she took in high disdain beyond her slavery.”
- In 1643 the Colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven formed a Confederation, agreeing among other stipulations to mutually surrender fugitive slaves.
- In 1641, say Hildreth, “Massachusetts adopted her Body of Liberties, which “recognized and authorized the slavery of such strangers as are sold to us.”
- 1676 was the year when Wappanoag Sachem Massasoit’s nine-year-old grandson was shipped to Bermuda and sold as a slave.
- In 1796 John Dorsey advertised two runaway slaves in Young and Mims Boston Mercury, stating that the reward offered for their capture and return to him should include “what the law allows.” This was sixteen years after the “powerful civilization” of Massachusetts, as was arrogantly asserted by Senator Sumner in his debate with Senator Butler of South Carolina, in June, 1854, had “exterminated every vestige of slavery within her borders.”
But African slaves proved to be unprofitable in the Northern States . . . and the boasted superior humanity of that section is disproved by the fact that much of the shipping of the Northern States was employed in the slave trade from 1638 to 1862. In 1861 the ship Nightingale, of Boston, commanded by Francis Bowen, was captured on the African coast with 951 Negroes on board and “expecting more.”
(The South’s Burden: The Curse of Sectionalism in the United States. Benjamin Franklin Grady. Nash Brothers, 1906, pp. 19-20)