The opening: From 1676 to 1708, the enslaved population in Massachusetts more than doubled, from about 200 to approximately 550 enslaved people. An estimated two-thirds of them lived in Boston. Some of this demographic change can be attributed to the British Parliament’s revocation of the Royal African Company’s monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade, enabling merchants in Massachusetts to engage more freely in the lucrative trade in enslaved Africans.
“There is such”: Sewall, Selling of Joseph, 2.
“sons of Adam”: Ibid., 1–2.
“for the freeing”: Diary of Samuel Sewall, 16.
“FOR AS MUCH”: Sewall, Selling of Joseph, 1.
“To persist in holding”: Ibid., 3.
“SEVERAL IRISH MAID SERVANTS”: Boston News Letter, September 13, 1714, in Lorenzo Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 41.
“Cowardly and cruel”: Lawrence W. Towner, “The Sewall-Saffin Dialogue on Slavery,” William and Mary Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1964): 48.
He had made peace: By 1715, the enslaved population of Boston had grown to approximately two thousand. The enslaved Africans and African Americans of eighteenth-century Massachusetts would face even stricter regulations than had preceding generations, including restrictions on buying provisions at market, keeping livestock, carrying canes, and being in public areas at night.
his uncle’s protest: The Selling of Joseph was reprinted only once in the eighteenth century, by the Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay in 1737. It then fell into obscurity and was not reprinted again until 1863.
1709–1714: The Revolt in New York
“gathered in an orchard”: Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham—The History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 148.
“had resolved to revenge themselves”: Ibid.
enslaved to British owners: James E. Allen, The Negro in New York (Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1964), 15.
20,613 enslaved Blacks in New York: Neil Smith and Don Mitchell, eds., Revolting New York: How 400 Years of Riot, Rebellion, Uprising, and Revolution Shaped a City (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 29.
“Koramantines and Pawpaws”: Ibid., 148.
“themselves to secrecy”: Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1943), 172. Aptheker cites an article found in the Boston Weekly News-Letter, April 7–14, 1712.
“Several did”: Ibid., 148.
“Hunted down”: Ibid., 149.
“The real legacy”: Ibid., 149.
1714–1719: The Slave Market
“socially relevant feature”: Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 35.
“grow likely”: Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 21.
“possibilities of their wombs”: Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in the Making of New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 3.
chattel principle: Walter Johnson, The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 1.
One enslaved woman: Richard Shannon Moss, Slavery on Long Island: A Study in Local Institutional and Early African-American Communal Life (New York: Garland, 1993), 51.
between 1715 and 1718: Jeanne Chase, “New York Slave Trade 1698–1741: The Geographic Origins of a Displaced People,” Historie & Measure 18, no. 2 (2003): 95–112, 98.
“undesired testimony”: Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 159–61.
Between 1715 and 1763: Moss, Slavery on Long Island, 35.
plainly visible in their tears: Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 38–39.
1719–1724: Maroons and Marronage
“two good ones”: Le Page du Pratz, The History of Louisiana or of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina (London: T. Becket, 1774), 22, 27.
policy of divide and conquer: E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1855), 5:674.
“lest [Africans] prove as troublesome”: “Documents,” American Historical Review 1 (October 1895–July 1896): 89.
“refuge to the runaway negroes”: Lt. Governor Bull to Board of Trade, May 8, 1760, in Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians Through the Revolutionary Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 74.
“many Times Slaves run away”: Walter Clark, ed., The State Records of North Carolina, 1715–1776 (Goldsboro, NC: Nash Brothers, 1904), 23:201.
“safer among the alligators”: Liverpool Albion, February 20, 1858.
Cornelia Carney: Charles L. Perdue, Jr., and Thomas E. Barden, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976), 66.
Some maroons did not: Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 1, 218, 301.
“I taste how it is”: John George Clinkscales, On the Old Plantation: Reminiscences of His Childhood (Spartanburg, SC: Band & White, 1916), 20.
1724–1729: The Spirituals
“the syncretic Afro-Brazilian”: Jonathon Grasse, “Calundu’s ‘Winds of Divination’: Music and Back Religiosity in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil,” Yale Journal of Music and Religion 3, no. 2 (2017): 43.
“The music is everywhere!”: Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3rd ed. (1971; New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), xxi.
“Song texts generally”: Ibid., 16.
“A most striking”: Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., “Cosmopolitan or Provincial?: Ideology in Early Black Music Historiography, 1867–1940,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996): 14.
“Afro-American music”: Dena J. Epstein, “Black Spirituals: Their Emergence into Public Knowledge,” Black Music Research Journal 10, no. 1 (1990): 59.