To Plead Our Own Cause

African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement

Christopher Cameron

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781612778341
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The antislavery movement entered an important new phase when William Lloyd Garrison began publishing the Liberator in 1831—a phase marked by massive petition campaigns, the extraordinary mobilization of female activists, and the creation of organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society. While the period from 1831 to 1865 is known as the heyday of radical abolitionism, the work of Garrison's predecessors in Massachusetts was critical in laying the foundation for antebellum abolitionism. To Plead Our Own Cause explores the significant contributions of African Americans in the Bay State to both local and nationwide antislavery activity before 1831 and demonstrates that their efforts represent nothing less than the beginning of organized abolitionist activity in America.

Fleshing out the important links between Reformed theology, the institution of slavery, and the rise of the antislavery movement, author Christopher Cameron argues that African Americans in Massachusetts initiated organized abolitionism in America and that their antislavery ideology had its origins in Puritan thought and the particular system of slavery that this religious ideology shaped in Massachusetts. The political activity of black abolitionists was central in effecting the abolition of slavery and the slave trade within the Bay State, and it was likewise key in building a national antislavery movement in the years of the early republic. Even while abolitionist strategies were evolving, much of the rhetoric and tactics that well-known abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass employed in the mid-nineteenth century had their origins among blacks in Massachusetts during the eighteenth century.

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Puritans and Slavery

Masters, give unto your Servants, that which is Just & Equal, Knowing that ye also have a Master in Heaven.

—Colossians 4:1

Well then, poor Ethiopians, do you now stretch out your Hands unto the Lord; even those poor Black Hands of yours, the Lord calleth for them.

—Cotton Mather

The history of Puritanism and African American life are two fields of inquiry that are not often tied together. Doing so, however, greatly enriches our understanding of African American religion and politics, including the origins of black abolitionist thought as well as the transatlantic influence of the Puritan movement. To understand the ideology of Puritanism and its effect on African American life in Massachusetts, it is useful to briefly explore the background of the Puritan migration to the colony.

Under the rule of James I and Charles I in the early seventeenth century, English Puritans experienced increasing persecution for continuing the work of the Protestant Reformation to purify the Church of England of the remnants of Catholicism. King James and King Charles saw the Puritan movement as an assault on their authority, which they believed should be absolute in both civil and ecclesiastical matters. Both monarchs forbade preaching by ministers, instead insisting on preapproved readings from a common prayer book. Charles I also rejected the idea of a priesthood of all believers, seeking instead, as the head of the Church, to dictate religious belief and practices to the populace. By the 1610s and 1620s, authorities were imprisoning and executing Puritans at an alarming rate, prompting many to flee England.¹

Many Puritans at first fled to the Netherlands. But finding that country’s culture and manners strange, they decided to found the Plymouth colony in 1620. Their primary goal was to practice their religion freely in a place where they could raise their children in a language and culture familiar to them. The Puritans who left England aboard the Arbella and six other ships in the spring of 1630 to settle the Massachusetts Bay colony similarly wanted to practice their religion freely, but they did not want to separate themselves completely from their English brethren, as the earlier Puritans who landed at Plymouth wanted to do.² Instead, they aspired to establish a godly community that would serve as a shining light for their brethren back in England. In his famous sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” probably delivered before the voyage to Massachusetts, John Winthrop told his listeners: “We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”³ If they succeeded in establishing a godly community in New England, the Puritans believed they could bring old England back to the ways of God.

Among the key beliefs of these early Puritans was the absolute sovereignty of God. For them, this was his chief attribute, even above benevolence. They believed that all men deserved damnation but that God’s benevolence had led him to choose some people as his Elect, those who would find themselves in heaven after death. While one could certainly look for signs of election, a good Puritan could never be sure if he had been chosen, a mind-set that often led to great anxiety over one’s spiritual fate. Although the belief in predestination and its mysteries produced apprehension among many, it also made for a more egalitarian view toward conversion and evangelism, as ministers could argue that all people, including blacks and Native Americans, might be among God’s Elect.⁴

For the Puritans, conversion to Christianity was both an experience and a process. The initial justification, or realization that one was among the Elect, represented the experiential aspect of conversion. The individual might hear a particularly relevant sermon and become convinced of their sinful nature. This was often followed by a period of spiritual anguish, in which people were sure they were going to hell, followed by a feeling of relief, perhaps coming after a vision or dream about Jesus. By the end of the first decade of settlement, it was common for churches to require an oral account of the justification process as an admission for membership. But conversion did not end there. Sanctification followed justification and was a process whereby individuals strove to live the rest of their lives according to God’s precepts. If they thrived economically and appeared to be upright and Godly, this was evidence that they were among the Elect, but their adherence to Calvinism meant that they could never be sure.⁵

While salvation was uncertain for even the most Godly in Puritan society, damnation was almost assured for those who rejected God and followed Satan. This damnation affected the individual but could also have an impact on the larger society. In a follow-up to his passage arguing that Massachusetts residents must be “a city upon a hill,” John Winthrop claimed that if they were not, “wee shall shame the faces of many of gods worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Cursses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whether wee are goeing.”⁶ Winthrop articulated his belief that New Englanders had a covenant with God to follow his biblical commands. If they broke the covenant, it would affect those around the world who the Puritans were trying to influence and bring back to the ways of God. But it would also mean that “the Lord will surely breake out in wrathe against us be revenged of such a periured people and make us know the price of the breache of such a Covenant.”⁷ This wrath could include natural disasters, famine, or attacks by Indians.

Ideas concerning God’s sovereignty, man’s covenant with him, and original sin gained strength from the cultural domination of a group of powerful ministerial intellectuals during the earliest years of settlement. This cultural domination had four major elements: authority conferred on these ministers, consensus among the intelligentsia, attention and deference of the laity in public, and the suppression of religious heresies. Thomas Hooker and John Cotton were two of the most prominent ministers. Both had immigrated to Massachusetts Bay in 1633, and it was Cotton who insisted on the test of saving grace that came to be practiced in most Congregational churches. One reason ministers wielded such great power in the colony was Puritan biblicism, the idea that they were the only figures capable of interpreting the Bible, which they did using ancient languages and hermeneutical techniques. Over time, divisions between the magistrates and ministers resulted in the loss of cultural domination by the ministerial class, yet they continued to wield an important influence over social and intellectual life in Massachusetts well into the eighteenth century.⁸

Puritans’ religious thought played an important role in their approach toward the institution of slavery. Massachusetts’ first law regarding slavery demonstrates a sort of ambivalence toward holding people in bondage. In 1641 the colony officially authorized slavery in its legal code the Body of Liberties. “There shall never be any bond slaverie, villinage or captivitie amongst us,” it reads in part, unless it be lawfull captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israell concerning such persons doth morally require.⁹ The statute expressly authorized slavery when the captives were the result of just wars, such as the 1637 Pequot War, or were outsiders sold to them, such as Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. By guaranteeing slaves “the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israell,” Puritan magistrates demonstrated the influence of the Old Testament on their ideas about slavery and their recognition that the slaves among them were not merely property but human beings before the law. These liberties included freedom by slaves from arbitrary punishment, especially leading to death. In 1672 colonial leaders amended the law to make slavery a heritable condition by dropping the phrase “such strangers,” making it possible for blacks born in Massachusetts to be slaves for life.¹⁰

From the early years of settlement in Massachusetts, masters used African slaves for a variety of purposes. Initially, slaves helped develop the economic infrastructure of the colony by clearing land, building barns, breaking up soil, building docks, and making roads. They generally worked twelve hours a day, yet the stamina of the owner determined the pace of work, because he usually labored alongside his servants and slaves. Until the Revolution, most residents of Massachusetts earned their living by farming, and masters used many slaves in agricultural work. Whites also used black slaves as domestic workers, and in the coastal regions a number of blacks worked in the shipping industry, either aboard ships or as ship joiners, carpenters, and rope makers. Other slaves worked as blacksmiths, caulkers, bakers, shoemakers, and tailors.¹¹ Extant records indicate the importance of slavery to the colonial economy. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Governor John Winthrop, Emmanuel Downing expressed his wish for another Indian war, writing, “If upon a Just warre the lord should deliver them into our hands, wee might easily have men woemen and Children enough to exchange for Moores.” Downing wrote to Winthrop that he did not believe the new colony could thrive without a sufficient stock of slaves and claimed that slavery was a much more profitable system of labor than indentured servitude. “I suppose you know verie well how wee shall maynteyne 20 Moores cheaper then one English servant,” he told Winthrop.¹²

While the number of African slaves throughout New England always remained relatively small compared to the southern colonies, the numbers do not begin to tell the story of how important slavery was to the region. Most enslaved Africans were clustered along the seacoast in major towns, which meant that slave populations were heaviest where those of the region’s political and cultural leaders, the mercantile elite, lived and worked. Even though slavery was not absolutely central to the New England economy, it did help to diversify it, partly by freeing masters to work outside the home, and was an important factor in the transition to capitalism.¹³

In Massachusetts specifically, and New England more broadly, slaveholders often regarded themselves as benevolent patriarchs and better masters than those elsewhere in the Atlantic world. They prided themselves on giving slaves what they felt was adequate clothing and proper medical attention. Yet the image of the good master in colonial New England is largely a myth. The long hours demanded of slaves could be very taxing. And unlike their southern counterparts, female slaves in New England who reproduced were actually more of a liability to their master than a boon. In what would become an early harbinger for the tragedies associated with the internal slave trade, newspapers in colonial Massachusetts sometimes advertised masters’ offers to give away the children of their female slaves.¹⁴

Despite what could be the harsh nature of slavery in Massachusetts, Puritan-influenced law granted slaves some of the liberties and rights of Christians in accordance with biblical precepts. A revision to the Massachusetts legal code and a case of magistrates returning enslaved Africans to their homeland further highlights the influence Puritan thought wielded on ideas about slavery in the colony. The 1646 Body of Liberties provided that “every man whether Inhabitant or foreigner, free or not free shall have libertie to come to any publique Court … and either by speech or writeing to move any lawfull, seasonable, and materiall question, or to present any necessary motion, complaint, petition.”¹⁵ By giving both free and unfree individuals the right to bring cases in court and petition for redress of grievances, Puritan authorities recognized in part the humanity and rights of slaves that colonies such as South Carolina summarily denied, a recognition based on the scriptural basis of their views on slavery.

Events regarding kidnapped slaves in 1645 similarly point to the religious influence on ideas about slavery. During that year, two merchants, Mr. Smith and Mr. Keser of Boston, traveled to the coast of Africa where they attacked a village, killed 100 people, and kidnapped two men to sell as slaves. Smith and Keser brought the Africans back to Boston, and Richard Saltonsall immediately petitioned the General Court to prosecute Smith and Keser because “it is apparent that Mr. Keser upon a sabboth day gave chace to certaine Negers; and upon the same day took divers of them; and at another time killed others.” Saltonsall accused the two of murder, “manstealing,” and breaking the Sabbath, all of which were “expressly capitall by the law of God.”¹⁶ In October 1645, the House of Deputies granted Saltonsall’s petition and ordered “that Capt Smith and Mr Keisar be laid hold on and committed to give answer in convenient time thereabouts.”¹⁷ According to John Winthrop, colonial magistrates freed the slaves because Smith had kidnapped them, an unacceptable method of attaining slaves under the 1641 statute.¹⁸

Puritan ministers supported the magistrates’ recognition of slave rights in the colony with their own injunctions for masters to treat their bondmen properly. Samuel Willard, minister at Boston’s Old South Church from 1678 to 1707, wrote that no master “hath an Arbitrary Power over his servant, as to life and death.” This drew from the book of Exodus, which mandates punishment for those who take the life of a slave. Slaves were to practice patience and submission at all times, but if a servant “be injuriously treated, he may make his Orderly application to the Civil Magistrate, whose Duty it is impartially to afford him a redress, upon a clear Proof of it.”¹⁹ Cotton Mather similarly enjoined slaves to obey their masters in all things, except when their masters told them to do something sinful.²⁰ Although both Willard and Mather supported the system of slavery, as did the magistrates who drew up the laws regarding bondage, their concessions to slaves’ humanity paved the way for freedom suits and organized black abolitionism.

One of the most well-known freedom suits in Massachusetts history came from an enslaved man named Adam Saffin in 1701. In 1694 John Saffin, a wealthy landowner and magistrate of the Massachusetts Bay colony, drew up a document placing his slave Adam under t...