Historical Context

Plan of Brookes Slave Ship’s Lower Deck Stowage of 292 African Captives (1788)
Slave ship launched in 1781 from Liverpool England
Source: www.alamy.com

“There shall never be any bond slaverie, villinage or Captivitie amongst us unles it be lawfull Captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us. … This exempts none from servitude who shall be judged thereto by authority.”

The 91st Article of the "Body of Liberties"

The Human Context

According to the Slave Voyages website (Slavevoyages.org), beginning in the fifteenth century, the trade of captive and enslaved Africans, known as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, with the Americas including the American colonies, resulted in the kidnapping and forced relocations of more than 12 million African people. They were chained and crowded into ships designed for their transport and carried across the Atlantic Ocean to ports in the Caribbean, South America, and West indies. This was called the Middle Passage, during which thousands of the captive men, women and children, died of disease, overcrowding, malnutrition, brutality, rebellions, and suicide. Hundreds of thousands of the captives were then trafficked up and down the coast of the North America, including and especially, among the American colonies.

Beyond that horrific loss of human life in the slave trade, the lives of those who survived the capture, forced marches, and the Middle passage across the Atlantic, the life of the those enslaved men, women, and children became a life consisting daily, and over many years, of the loss of individual freedom, forced labor, forced separation of families, punishment, subjugation, the humiliation of being sold as chattel and property, torture, demonization, assault, rape, and murder. The toll is impossible to imagine: the enslavement of millions of human beings for over 400 years.

What is not impossible to imagine, though, is the continuing effects of racism, wealth and social inequality, marginalization, segregation, incarceration, brutality, and disenfranchisement of the millions of descendants and their families of those enslaved individuals, who are living today.

Slavery had been practiced as part of the American experience from the time of its settlement by Europeans, as well as before that by native indigenous people. (Source: Little, Ann.Native American Captivity and Slavery in North America, 1492–1848. Oxford University Press. 2022)

Slavery, the capture and holding of persons without their consent and against their will had been, before European settlement and colonization, as a result of taking prisoners of war or punishment for the commission of a crime. However, as practiced by European settlers, it was to hold people in permanent bondage for the purpose of making them work without pay as chattel slaves. (Source: African American Registry.org)

Chattel slavery is the term used for holding individuals for life as the personal property of another person and being forced to work and live under conditions determined by their owner. Chattel slaves were deprived of their freedom and human rights, and their children were subject to enslavement as well. A chattel slave had monetary value to its owner and could be bought and sold, used as collateral, and rented out to others for labor. Owners of chattel slaves were taxed for them as property and often listed in owner’s wills along with other belongings and property. By 1850 in the United States, the overwhelming majority of the 2.5 million Africans living in America were living as chattel slaves. (Source: African American Registry.org)

The terms used in referring to slavery have evolved over time. In this website we use and respect the terms which were used in writings, records, testimonies, documents, and opinions of the time in which they were written. However, in current usage some terms are favored over the historical terms. For example, an enslaved person is favored over “a slave.” Enslavement is favored over “slavery;” and, in current usage, enslaver is favored in some contexts over “master” and “slave owner.” And in certain contexts, slavers might be used in referring to captains of slave ships. There is no absolute rule and no right or wrong terminology. The rationale for the evolving terminology is sensitivity to the integrity of personhood, much the same as “a person with diabetes” is favored over “a diabetic.”

A Brief History of Slavery and Anti-slavery in Cape Ann, Massachusetts, and New England

Cape Ann is an area in northeastern Massachusetts and includes the City of Gloucester and the towns of Essex, Manchester-by-the-Sea, and Rockport. Prior to the colonization of Cape Ann by European settlers and traders, it was the home for many thousands of years of native Algonquian peoples. These were the first people who were captured and enslaved by the Europeans.

From the time of the colonization of the land by Europeans, enslaved men women and children lived throughout New England, including Massachusetts, and Cape Ann. Some of Cape Ann’s settler families owned, traded, and enslaved both native people and Africans who had been brought to Cape Ann from Africa and other European colonies in the West Indies and other parts of the world.

Dutch merchants introduced African slaves to the Virginia Colony as early as 1619, but not until 1638, according to the earliest records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, were the first enslaved Africans brought to New England. The report of the first enslaved Africans brought to New England was by Capt. William Pierce on the ship Desire to the Puritan settlement at Salem, north of Boston. The “cargo” as it was called consisted of women and children.

Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts describing the slave ship Desire, wrote in his personal journal, in 1645, “One of our ships, which went to the Canaries, with pipe-staves in the beginning of November, returned now and brought wine, and sugar, and salt, and some tobacco, which she had at Barbadoes, in exchange for Africoes, which she carried from the Isle of Maio.” (Pg 34.) The Isle of Maio is the island called now called Cape Verde, off the coast of West Africa.

Diagram of the slave ship Desire

Source: Kevin Westerberg, The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the USA

These Africans were from slave plantations in the Caribbean and had been acquired in exchange for Native American prisoners of war (POWs)—Pequot Indians defeated by English colonists in the Pequot War of 1637-1638. The Mass. Bay Colony sent 15 Pequot boys and two Pequot women to Bermuda as slaves. In addition, 38 captive Pequot women and children were sent to Boston to be divided up among the towns according to each town’s contribution to the war effort. Native Americans were swapped for Africans because African slaves were regarded as better workers than Native people, who were both defiant and more susceptible to European diseases. Warriors often fought to the death rather than be enslaved, and many who escaped with their lives joined resistance movements against the English.

Native people of the Northeast had a tradition of slavery as a form of restitution for a wrong or payment for a loss. They also enslaved some of their captured enemies, especially youths who might at some point be suitable for adoption into the band or tribe. The status of a slave was always temporary and nontransferable and therefore more like the European concept of indenture.

Nevertheless, they did not accept the European concept of slavery. Also, in the traditional division of labor among Native people of New England, agricultural activities—growing and harvesting crops and processing plants—were women’s work. As colonists early discovered, captive warriors did not adapt well to plantation life or conditions of slavery. After being traded to plantations in exchange for African slaves, Native men refusing to work risked execution.

The Legality of Colonial Slavery in Massachusetts

The first law or statute recognizing and establishing slavery in the American colonies was the Code of Fundamentals, also known as the Body of Liberties of the Massachusetts Colony in New England. This set of laws was adopted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1641.

This was the first legal code established by European colonists in New England and was composed of a list of liberties, rather than restrictions, and intended for use as guidance for the General Court of the time.

The text of the Body of Liberties reads, “91. There shall never be any bond slaverie villinage or captivitie amongst us unless it be lawfull captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us.”⁹The Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641): www.mass.gov; On line transcription section 91: www.history.hanover.edu (Pg 32.)

Since that time and until the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts by a Massachusetts Superior court decision in 1783, enslaved men, women and their children who, generation after generation, were born into slavery who had little or no chance of freedom. They were the property of their masters and could be “sold and transferred like other chattles, and as assets.” (Pg. 38)

The legal justification of slavery was to create and support free labor for the colonies and their economy. The economy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was based upon the labor of enslaved people. From the first importation of African slaves and the very growth of the economy of the colony, was dependent upon the slave trade.

The Ownership of Enslaved Persons in Massachusetts and Essex County

The ownership of slaves by families became established in Massachusetts by the early 1700s, although estimates of the number of slaves vary widely. In 1680, forty years after slavery was recognized in Massachusetts, the Colony reported only 170 enslaved men, less than one percent of the nation’s total.

Unfortunately this number is not broken down by town, so how many of those 170 were on Cape Ann is not known. The Massachusetts 1754 Slave Enumeration reported 2,270 slaves in Massachusetts (which until 1820 included Maine), and 442 slaves in Essex County, where Cape Ann is located.¹⁵Massachusetts State Archives, 1754 Slave Enumeration.
The enumeration was incomplete, however, with some towns, as well as some slaveowners, not responding to the census.

1754 Slave Enumeration for Essex County

TOWN	MALES	FEMALES	TOTAL
Salem	47	36	83
Ipswich	-	-	62
Gloucester	-	-	61
Newburyport	34	16	50
Andover	28	14	42
Beverly	12	16	28
Danvers	9	12	21
Haverhill	8	8	16
Wenham	-	-	16
Middleton	9	3	12
Rowley	10	2	12
Boxford	4	4	8
Georgetown	-	-	7
Bradford	3	3	6
Manchester	1	5	6
Topsfield	4	1	5
TOTALS	169	120	435

Other towns in Essex County were either part of other towns at that time or did not respond to the survey.

Gloucester (which until 1840 included Rockport) claimed 61 slaves aged 16 and older in 1754 and was the fourth largest slave owning town behind Boston with 939, Salem with 83, and Ipswich with 62.¹⁶U.S Census Office, 1909, A Century of Population Growth from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790-1900, Vol. 900, p. 156, Table 80: Male and Female Negro Slave Population of Massachusetts, by Counties and Towns: Census of 1754.
The period from 1740 to 1750 had the largest number of slaves in New England, including an estimated 1,300 Native Americans. In his 1892 History of the Town and City of Gloucester, James Pringle reports there were “around 300 Negroe slaves” on Cape Ann at the time of the Revolutionary War, with descendants of only two “ex-slave families” still living in Gloucester as permanent residents after the Civil War.¹⁷Pringle, James R., 1892, History of the Town and City of Gloucester, Cape Ann, Massachusetts, p. 86. According to raw data in the 1790 census, Massachusetts including Maine had 6,001 slaves “including about 200 half-breed Indians.”¹⁸American Statistical Association Collections, i. pp. 208-214; Mass. Historical Society Collections Series I, iv. p. 199. However, because the Massachusetts Constitution outlawed slavery in 1780, the 1790 U.S. Census officially reported “none” for the number of slaves in Massachusetts and Maine.¹⁹1790 Slave Census: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/us-census-1790/ By 1880 an estimated 5.5 million Native Americans had been enslaved in the Americas in addition to 12.5 million Africans.²⁰Fisher, 2017, p. 91.

The International Slave Trade and the Cape Ann Economy

Boston merchants began importing slaves directly from Africa in 1644 to be sold to plantations in the West Indies in exchange for sugar and molasses to make rum, initiating New England’s triangular trade. The trade routes typically had three components. Ships left New England ports for ports in West Africa with hogsheads (barrels) of rum, iron ingots (African currency) and manufactured goods. In West African ports they then picked up enslaved people, palm oil, ivory, animal hides and gold dust, and sailed back via the West Indies. There they sold the enslaved people to plantations, picked up sugar and molasses, and sailed home. Some triangular trade included stops in Brazil or Cuba for coffee and in the Carolinas for cotton and indigo.

Cotton, tobacco, sugar, molasses, coffee, and the laborers themselves were the commodities that drove the domestic and international slave trade. Northerners were consumers of these commodities and local industries began to support their economy, for example, by converting raw cotton to cotton cloth, ships sails, and finished clothing as well as using molasses to distill rum. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Massachusetts had 63 distilleries, which annually produced about 700,000 gallons of rum. Additionally, support for the local economy based on the triangular trade was provided by other businesses and industries, such as ship building, shipping, financial management, fishing, banking, accounting, land transport, insurance, lumber production, and home and commercial building.

Atlantic_Triangular_Trade_1500-1800s-350x237-3784508516

Triangular Trade Route
Source: Pressbooks.cuny.edu

Luxury commodities such as sugar, salt, pepper, coffee and cocoa, not to mention cotton, tobacco, indigo, and tea, had come to be seen as indispensable to European and colonial quality of life. Because of this, slavery was everywhere deeply woven into everyone’s everyday life. As a consequence, both active and passive participation in the slave trade grew, and slave ownership ranged in scope from one or two domestic servants per family household, or one or two helpers per family farm in the North, to hundreds of agricultural workers in forced labor on southern and foreign plantations.

Wealth was accumulated by the Massachusetts settlers, including those on Cape Ann. They included landowners, businesspeople, cotton, sugar, and tobacco plantation owners in the Caribbean islands, ship builders, ship captains, investors, banks, fishing companies, lumber mills, cotton mills, rum distilleries, molasses factories, tobacconists, and more. The accumulated wealth and property on Cape Ann remains today in the prosperity of much of each of the towns, and though it is no longer based any more on the slave economy, life of Cape Ann is a part of its legacy.

The Expansion of Slavery, Abolition, and the Legacy of the Slave Economy

As cotton became a major international commodity of the colonies, based upon slave labor, the need for more and more land dictated the expansion of the country in search of arable land in states in which slavery was legal.

The growth of slavery in the colonies, and then in the United States, in the mid-seventeen hundreds, became both a moral, legal, and economic dilemma. Opposition to slavery, led in large part by the enslaved men and women themselves, with the support of anti-slavery and abolitionist advocates, grew as the colonies moved toward declaring their right to freedom and justice for all and their independence from British rule.

The anti-slavery and abolition movements in the American colonies began with enslaved Black activists seeking liberty for themselves and for other enslaved people. It began with the voices of the enslaved persons themselves. The movement was not “about “or “for” enslaved Black African Americans, it was “by” Black African Americans.

Massachusetts was a major center of anti-slavery activity, and Essex County, which includes each of the towns on Cape Ann was a center for legal challenges by enslaved Black residents against their owners. They fought not only to end slavery but to define the meanings and conditions of freedom in the earliest days of the founding of the country.²⁵Sinha, Manisha. The Slaves Cause: A History of Abolition. Yale University Press. 2016. pg 67.

The emancipation of slaves in Massachusetts in 1783 came as the result of decades of slave resistance, organization, protests, and legal challenges in court suits brought by enslaved persons to argue and define the meaning of liberty and freedom. The benefits of their work went far beyond the chance of freedom from bondage for themselves. It extended, through the United States Constitution, amendments to the constitution, legislation, and Supreme Court decisions, the benefits of freedom for all Americans at that time and into the present.

Despite the constitutional emancipation of slaves in Massachusetts in 1783, emancipation of slaves was gradual. and the formerly enslaved individuals faced discrimination, economic hardship, and indentured servitude. In 1865, the thirteenth amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. Nevertheless, the legacy of slavery in its social, economic, and personal effects remains with us.
The Cape Ann Slavery and Abolition website is dedicated to continuing to expand and put into context the history of slavery and abolition on Cape Ann how the legacy of the past has shaped the Cape Ann of today.