By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 January 2025

There had been indentured servants in the Massachusetts Bay Colony since its foundation and the 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties, the first de facto constitution of the Colony, legalised slavery—specifically “lawful captives taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us”.

The Body of Liberties was passed in the wake of the first major war Massachusetts fought with the Native Americans, the Pequot War (1636-38), where the colonists took hundreds of slaves, many of them sold to the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and others sold to the anti-Pequot Natives who had fought alongside them, but some remained in the Colony. (Massachusetts was led in this war by Sir Henry Vane, shortly before he returned to England to take up a seat in Parliament and play such a pivotal role in pushing the country into the Civil Wars.) In the colossal Metacom War or King Philip’s War (1675-76) that followed, and the Nine Years’ War (1688-97) that overlapped with the Salem witch panic, the same pattern of enslaving defeated Natives repeated.

However, the majority of slaves in Massachusetts were always African, and that majority got larger through the eighteenth century as the slave trade became racialised with the massive expansion of the Triangular Trade. Massachusetts acquired African slaves from the West Indies sugar islands, but it also traded directly—often in goods like rum—with the African Empires that did the slave-hunting for the Europeans.

That said, the number of slaves in Massachusetts was never very large, even relatively, because the economy was based on small farms, fishing, and urban artisanry. In format, slavery in Massachusetts was domestic and sparse (rarely more than two slaves to a household), categorically different in scale and type to the massive slave plantations in the southern colonies, especially Virginia, the Carolinas, and Maryland, and to a lesser extent Georgia.

Massachusetts finally abolished slavery in 1783, at the end of the rebellion that gained America independence. As Puritanism infused into society, becoming more a category than a particularist identity, it differentiated into several elements, some of which—like Congregationalists—moved towards abolitionism, and the elimination of official Puritanism in Massachusetts in the 1690s allowed an influx of Quakers, who had always been abolitionists. There was, therefore, a grassroots movement already when Massachusetts ignited the 1775 insurrection, but it was that war that tipped the balance.

“All men are created equal”, the rebels had said in explaining their actions, and this kind of rhetoric—drawing as it did on Christian precepts—threw into sharp relief the question of slavery for some colonists. And even those colonists who did not struggle internally with the hypocrisy were forced to reckon with the embarrassment of it because the British kept bringing it up. Dr. Samuel Johnson famously sneered, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Massachusetts had an easier time than most in settling its conscience without sacrificing much materially or in terms of societal structure because by 1775-76 there were “only” 3,500 slaves (1.3%) in a Colony of 268,500 people. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780—drafted by John Adams—said, “all men are born free and equal”, and legal challenges based on this wording were to be the mechanism for bringing an end to slavery in Massachusetts.

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SOURCES:

William O. Blake (1857), The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade: Ancient and Modern; the Forms of Slavery that Prevailed in Ancient Nations, Particularly in Greece and Rome, the African Slave Trade and the Political History of Slavery in the United States. Compiled from Authentic Materials, p. 388.

James A. Rawley and Stephen D. Behrendt (2005), The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History, pp. 294-98.

Wendy Warren (2016), New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America, p. 106.

Alin Fumurescu (2019), Compromise and the American Founding, pp. 129-30.