The Influence of the West Indies on the Origins of New England Slavery

IN considering New England Negro slavery, it might well be asked not why it was weakly rooted there, but why it existed at all. Service for life, together with the inheritance of a like obligation by any offspring, had no basis in English law, and New England never developed a staple crop that demanded large amounts of raw labor for its cultivation. It has been suggested that slavery became established in the Puritan colonies because there was indeed some economic need for unskilled labor, even though not so much as in the South.' By this reasoning, as New England's needs were considerably less than the South's, so her slavery was less well established. Yet a logic of direct proportion does not convincingly explain why Negro slavery existed in New England; if there had been economic need in a degree sufficient to require formation of an utterly new institution of chattel slavery, then there would have been economic demand for many more Negroes than were actually brought into the area. The actual number was small, not more than 3 per cent of the population in the eighteenth century. Massachusetts had only about one hundred Negroes in i680.2 Surely no economic exigency required the establishment of a distinct status for such a small proportion of the labor force. True, without some need for labor there certainly would not have

Ancient history · Ethnology · Geography · New england · Political science · West indies · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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