Slavery, Education and Race: Northeast Region
Northeast Region
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Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey,
New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont
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The Census Bureau’s Northeast Region of the United States is extraordinarily diverse, with mountains and tidal estuaries; cornfields and factories; great cities and isolated villages; ethnic enclaves maintaining eighteenth century ways of life and world-class universities; areas where nearly all the residents are descendants of Europeans and neighborhoods where dozens of languages are spoken. There is, however, one nearly uniform factor: throughout the region the descendants of enslaved Africans are subjected to racist discrimination.
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The conditions of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the northern and southern areas of what became the United States increasingly diverged during the eighteenth century.??In the south, those conditions worsened, if anything, so that to be sent south was a fate looked upon with terror by enslaved people.??In the north, under the influence of religion—chiefly that of the Quakers and Congregationalists—and legalism, conditions gradually improved for enslaved Africans and their descendants until settling into mere racism. “Attacks on slavery as a legal institution began during the first year of the Revolution.??
In 1775 Pennsylvania’s Provincial Congress called upon the colonies to prohibit the importation of slaves, and the Chester County Committee of Correspondence endorsed the principle of gradual emancipation.? Two years later the newly organized State of Vermont outlawed slavery under a constitution declaring that no one “ought to be holden by law to serve any person as a servant, slave, or apprentice after he arrives at the age of twenty-one years.” A vigorous campaign against slavery at New York’s Constitutional Convention culminated in a resolution endorsing the proposition that “every human being who breathes the air of the state” should enjoy the privileges of freedom.? In 1779 Rhode Island prohibited the export of Negroes held in slavery “until some favorable occasion may offer for its total abolition.”[i]
What appeared to be a great victory for abolition was not quite what it seemed.? The process was slow and not at all straight-forward; chattel slavery and bondage as “apprenticeships” continuing for decades in the north.
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The northern New England states of Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire are thinly inhabited with few major cities and few racial or ethnic minorities.? Slavery was for the most part not economically viable in these states and little practiced outside the port of Manchester, New Hampshire. Vermont having abolished slavery in 1777, followed that with (male) enfranchisement of formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants. Slavery was abolished in Maine in 1783[1] and seems to have simply died out in New Hampshire before national emancipation, and had ended legally there in 1857.
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The situation was quite different in the other areas in the Northeastern Region.?
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From the years of the founding of the first theocratic English colonies—Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut—residents lived in a tight web of laws and customs, both secular and religious.??The laws applied to all inhabitants of the area, both as a matter of limits on behavior and as sets of rights.??The restrictions were applied more harshly to enslaved people and their rights were more limited, but enslaved people did have access to the courts to enforce those rights against arbitrary acts by their “owners”. This in contrast to enslaved people in the southern states, who were without rights, who had little or no recourse in law against the savagery of those who held them in slavery or trafficked them to others. “Although much brutality obviously occurred, Northern slavery exhibited none of the systematic barbarism practiced in the plantation colonies . . . relatively few Northern slaves were physically disfigured; by contrast, those from the plantation colonies were often scarred, branded, and cruelly mutilated.”[ii]? “Barbarism,” marking the characters of the slavers, and the societies of the slave states, as well as the bodies of enslaved people themselves.
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Massachusetts
Massachusetts was the earliest of the northern British North American colonies: a theocracy that slowly became secularized.? It was the most radical of those colonies; the place where the American Revolution began.? Although there were enslaved people in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, by the end of the eighteenth century slavery had been abolished in the state. Part of the reason for this was that the labor of enslaved people in a rapidly industrializing economy based on trade, mills, fisheries and small farms was not substantially cheaper than that of the labor of newly arrived European immigrants. In addition, many prominent religious and academic figures in Massachusetts were morally opposed to slavery. However, it was the action of state courts, interpreting the wording of the new national and state constitutions, that brought an abrupt end to legal slavery in Massachusetts. The state Constitution of 1780 “contained a declaration that “all men are born free and equal, and have . . . the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties.”?A series of law suits by or on behalf of enslaved residents of the state in the early 1780s culminated in 1783 when “Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice William Cushing announced that slavery was incompatible with the new Massachusetts Constitution:
. . . all men are born free and equal; and that every subject is entitled to liberty . . . slavery is in my judgment as effectively abolished as it can be by the granting of rights and privileges wholly incompatible and repugnant to its existence.? The court are therefore fully of the opinion that perpetual servitude can no longer be tolerated in our government.[iii]
As a consequence of this decision there were no enslaved persons in Massachusetts recorded by the 1790 census—seventy-five years before national Emancipation.
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Connecticut
There were enslaved Africans in Connecticut from the mid-1600s, shortly after it was colonized by Europeans. In the late eighteenth century Connecticut had more enslaved Africans than any other state in New England. Since the state’s economy was based on trade in manufactured goods, products of nascent industrialization, fishing and small farms, slavery in Connecticut tended to be, as it were, domestic: most wealthy merchants owned at least one slave, as did half of the state’s Congregationalist ministers.[iv]? Many of the founders of Yale University, for example, held enslaved people and the University itself benefitted from the labor of enslaved people and other donations from slavers.[v]
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The slave trade conflicted with the strong religiosity of some White Connecticut residents.? The Society of Friends, the Quakers, took a strong (but not unanimous) stand against it, as did some members of the dominant Congregationalist churches. An influential Congregationalist minister and theologian, Samuel Hopkins, who moved about between Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, wrote: “Are not the African slaves among us the poor, the strangers, the fatherless, who are oppressed and vexed, and sold for silver?
And will not God visit and punish such oppression? Are you willing to be the instruments of bringing judgments and ruin on this land, and on yourselves and families, rather than let the oppressed go out free?[vi]
“People of African descent, he admonished, were the colonists’ brothers and sisters whom God valued as much as whites.”
Although whites might perceive slaves as being ignorant and degraded, he said, it was only because enslavement had made them so.[2] (Emphasis added.)
According to Hopkins and his associates, because colonists had exploited the enslaved, they now had a Christian obligation to free, “uplift,” and enlighten those held in bondage.[vii]
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In addition to the religious Abolitionist influence, it appears that in rapidly industrializing Connecticut, with its fisheries and small farms, White laborers themselves also objected to competition from enslaved African-Americans. Under the influence of Hopkins and others, White disquiet with slavery in Connecticut led to the 1784 act of “Gradual Abolition,” which stated that children born into slavery after March 1, 1784, would be freed when they turned 25. When legal slavery itself was finally brought to an end in Connecticut in1848, there were only a couple dozen enslaved African-Americans in the state.[viii] On the other hand, Black residents were not allowed to vote until 1876.
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Rhode Island
Buying and selling people was economically important in the small state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (as officially designated), so much so that in Rhode Island the axiom attributed to Balzac—"Behind every great fortune there is a great crime”—was simply a truism in that refuge from the Puritan religious oppression. Colonial Rhode Island’s wealthy human traffickers sent their ships to West Africa, trading rum and manufactured goods for kidnapped people, whom they transported either to the West Indies, where they were sold to work in the deadly sugar cane plantations, back to the slave markets in Rhode Island itself or on to those in Charleston, South Carolina. White residents of Rhode Island effectively controlled the intra-colonial trade in enslaved people from Africa to the southern states, some growing wealthy from it.[ix] In Rhode Island, as a result of these activities, the Black population approached 12% of the total in 1755, Rhode Island itself developing its eponymous plantations.
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Rhode Island’s trade in kidnapped Africans was not isolated within the state’s economy; it was integral to it. Slavers needed ships; the ships had to be built, supplied, manned and insured, with profits at each stage of the process. In addition to sending enslaved people south, Rhode Island sent manufactured goods after them, including large quantities
of a rough cloth specifically intended for slaves.[x] Rhode Island’s trade in human beings, like the much larger British slave trade, was, almost literally, an exercise in cannibalistic capitalism, feeding on the bodies of Africans as the capital for early industrial development. [xi]
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Resistance to abolition was much stronger in Rhode Island than in other New England states.? Although a similar law to the Connecticut “Gradual Abolition” law was passed in Rhode Island the same year as in Connecticut, but it was largely ignored. The Rhode Island oligarchy continued sending their ships to West Africa to purchase kidnapped people, even after the trade in people had been made illegal by both American and British authorities. The accompanying moral issues led to divisions in some of the slave trading families.? For example, while Moses Brown led the state’s Abolitionists, other members of his prominent—nearly dominant—family clung to the human trafficking source of their wealth.?
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Slavery in Rhode Island, as elsewhere, brought racism in its train. Even after Emancipation, African-Americans were often harassed and forced out of the state. The heritage of slavery and racism continues to influence the practices of Rhode Island’s financial and educational institutions.[3]
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Mid-Atlantic States
The trade in human beings was also important in the colonies that would become the Mid-Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where enslaved people created profits for those holding them when employed in manufacturing, as agricultural workers, as laborers in the ports, and as domestic servants. The practice of trading in human beings and using enslaved people in the fields, harbors and factories in the Mid-Atlantic states dated from the days of the Dutch colonies along the Delaware and Hudson rivers, especially in the ports of Philadelphia and New York, both of which were centers for that trade and centers of its ?supporting infrastructural and financial institutions.
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New York
In the seventeenth century immigrants from French Canada and the Dutch settled in the lower Hudson River Valley, where New Amsterdam became the Dutch colonial capital. There were household slaves, enslaved Africans and their descendants in New York City from the time it was settled by Europeans.[xii] The Dutch colonies were taken by England in the mid-seventeenth century (New Amsterdam renamed New York), which continued the patterns of settlement, trade and large plantations along the Hudson River. The plantations were feudal, with a small group of families—first Dutch, then mingled Dutch and English—controlling workers by means of a variety of forms of status: free, bonded laborers, enslaved Africans and their descendants.? African slavery ended in New York state in 1827, but the feudal system—which included White debt-peonage—continued until 1846. Although much of New York’s merchant class was Abolitionist, or, at least, personally opposed to slavery, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, many had grown rich on the cotton trade that was funneled through it, as on the slave trade before then, and—therefore—supported the Confederacy until it became impolitic to do so.
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In the nineteenth century, before and after Emancipation, the recently arrived Irish and German immigrants often had a socio-economic status barely different from that of African-Americans, a difference, an advantage, such as it was, based on the color of their skin.[xiii] Competition for work between these groups, especially between Irish immigrants and formerly enslaved African-Americans, periodically erupted in attacks by the former on the latter. In the twentieth century, that hostility and broader pariah racism found expression in patterns of institutionalized discrimination in employment, housing and education
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New Jersey
Kidnapped Africans were enslaved in New Jersey in the seventeenth century under the Dutch and Swedes, then by the English.? There were at first different types of unfree people in New Jersey, not all Black. “In addition to African and Indian slaves, there was the class known as ‘redemptioners,’ or term slaves, consisting of indented servants, who bound themselves to their master before leaving the mother country, and ‘free willers,’ who allowed themselves to be sold after reaching American, in order to reimburse the ship captain for the cost of their passage.”[xiv]? Slavery in New Jersey became more fully identified with trafficked Africans when “Planters from Barbados, along with their slaves, came . . . to East Jersey and New York in the 1660s and 1670s . . .
By 1700 Barbadian immigrants owned the largest concentration of slaves, whom they forced to labor on large estates granted by the colony proprietors . . . the colony passed, in 1704, a slave code that used previous East Jersey statutes as a model and included provisions influenced by the Barbadians.? The 1704 law imposed severe restrictions on black people, including prohibiting slaves and free blacks from owning property.[xv]
Slavery in New Jersey was not dissimilar to that further south. Enslaved people were worked as laborers in the state’s ports as well as on plantations and farms. Enslaved women also served as domestic workers there and as breeders of new generations of enslaved people, as in the southern slave states.
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Emancipation in New Jersey was a slow process, beginning in 1804, when a law came into effect mandated that? “all children born of slaves after July 4, 1804, were to be freed after serving as apprentices to their mothers’ masters—females after twenty-one years, males after twenty-five. . . . Among the laws associated with [that law] were one prohibiting slave abuse, one liberalizing manumission requirements, and one requiring slaveholders to teach their slaves under twenty-one to read.”[xvi] After much debate, “In 1846 an act was passed designating slaves as apprentices bound to serve until discharged by their “owners”, and providing that children of such apprentices should be free at birth, but were to be supported by the master of their parents for six years.” ?Although, by the time of the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, there was little left of the slavery system in New Jersey[xvii] yet, “In 1865, New Jersey became the only state in the North to vote against the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery.”[xviii] New Jersey also voted against the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. Black adult males were not enfranchised in New Jersey until 1875.[xix]
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The Great Migration from the south brought large numbers of formerly enslaved African-Americans to New Jersey, as to elsewhere in the north, many to work in factories. “By 1930 there were over two hundred thousands blacks in [New Jersey], a huge gain over the roughly eighty-eight thousand in 1910.”[xx] During the New Deal and World War II, the Black population of New Jersey continued to increase, as did residential segregation.? Although laws requiring racial segregation in the schools were abolished in 1947, schools were in fact racially segregated in New Jersey until the 1960s, as were “many movie theaters, restaurants, swimming pools, and other public accommodations.”[xxi] The concentration of the Black population of New Jersey in such cities as Newark and Camden was accompanied by a concentration of Black poverty in those cities and of the White population and prosperity in their suburbs. Inter-racial relations in New Jersey are now, by at least one measure, much worse than those in neighboring states. There were 726 racial bias hate crimes recorded in 2022 for the state by the U.S. Department of Justice, three times that of neighboring states.[xxii]
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Pennsylvania
Enslaved people were brought to Pennsylvania by its first Proprietor, William Penn. However, they formed a relatively small part of the population of the colony and the institution itself was opposed by Penn’s fellow members of the Society of Friends, who also worked to mitigate the condition of enslaved residents.? An “Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” was passed in 1780. And yet, “No one was set free at first. A registry of all slaves in the state was compiled.
Taxes were placed on them. No new slaves could be imported. Children born to slaves in Pennsylvania were “indentured,” not enslaved, and were to be set free when they reached the age of 28. An amendment to the Act passed in 1788, making it illegal for slave “owners” to transport pregnant women out of the state to give birth, thus circumventing the law, and prohibited the separation of slave families. It also prohibited the “rotation” of slaves in and out of the state to subvert the law.[xxiii]
By 1860 there were no enslaved people in Pennsylvania. But the end of slavery did not bring with it an end to racism, for which the state became notorious. More racist “incidents” now occur in Pennsylvania than in any other state.[xxiv]
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The pariah racism concerning the freed Black slaves, other Black residents, and their descendants, was strong throughout the Northeast Region in the nineteenth century, leading to efforts to expel freed Black people from those states and to prevent others from immigrating into the area.? The extension of the suffrage after the Civil War was slow, riots by White workers fearing competition from their Black peers common, and segregation in housing and schooling wide-spread for the next century and later. Racism remains prevalent in administrative forms and everyday life in the Region. For example, in most of the states, and particularly egregiously in Connecticut, the practice of surrounding large urban school districts, serving concentrations of Black and other lower income students, with small, suburban districts, overwhelmingly White, continues to result, as intended, in de facto segregation, both racial and economic.
Michael Holzman
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[1] ?Maine was then part of Massachusetts.
[2] This has some relevance to today’s discussions of racial gaps in educational achievement: plus ?a change, plus c'est la même chose.
[3] “Since [Washington Trust] was founded in 1800 in Rhode Island, the bank has never offered its home loan services at a branch location in a majority-Black or Latino neighborhood . . . The practice perpetuated the scourge of red-lining, the longstanding racist policy of banks blocking people of color from getting mortgages.” “Rhode Island bank agrees to pay $9m over discriminatory lending allegations.” Rios, Edwin. The Guardian, September 27, 2023.
[i]McManus, Edgar J. Black Bondage in the North. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973, p. 160.
[ii] McManus, Edgar J. Black Bondage in the North. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973, p. 91.
[iii] “Slavery in Colonial and Revolutionary Massachusetts,” Massachusetts Constitution and the Abolition of Slavery. https://www.mass.gov/guides/massachusetts-constitution-and-the-abolition-of-slavery#:~:text=It%20is%20generally%20agreed%20that,participated%20in%20the%20slave%20trade.
[iv] Farrow, Anne; Lang, Joel; Frank, Jenifer (2005).?Complicity: How the North promoted, prolonged, and profited from slavery. New York:?Ballantine Books.
[v] Blight, David W., et al. “Yales’s Ties to Slavery: Confronting a Painful History, Building a Stronger Community. https://yaleandslavery.yale.edu/See Also: Blight, David W. Yale and Slavery: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024.
[vi] Hopkins, Samuel. An Address to the “Owners” of Negro Slaves, in the American Colonies. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=evans;c=evans;idno=N15010.0001.001;view=text;rgn=div1;node=N15010.0001.001:5
[viii] “Connecticut Abolitionists,” National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/connecticut-abolitionists.htm#:~:text=Slavery%20in%20Connecticut%20dated%20back,the%20time%20they%20turned%2025.
[ix] Haper, Douglas. “Slavery in the North,” https://slavenorth.com/rhodeisland.htm
[x] Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.?Brown University’s Slavery and Justice Report with Commentary on Context and Impact. Providence: Brown University, 2021.
[xi] See: Berg, Maxine and Pat Hudson. Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Polity Press: Cambridge, UK, 2023.
[xii] Mosterman, Andrea C.? Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
[xiii] See, inter alia, the remarks of Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States with Remarks on their Economy, passim.
[xiv] “New Jersey,” The Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 19. The The Encyclopaedia Britannica Company, New York, 1911, p. 511.
[xv] Fuentes, Marisa J. and Deborah Gray White, eds. Scarlet and Black, Volume I: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016, p. 44.
[xvi] Wright, Giles R. Afro-Americans in New Jersey, A Short History. Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, Department of State. https://nj.gov/state/historical/assets/pdf/topical/afro-americans-in-nj-short-history.pdf
[xvii] New Jersey,” The Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 19. The The Encyclopaedia Britannica Company, New York, 1911, p. 512.
[xix] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_New_Jersey.? This is a particularly careful article.
[xx] Wright, Giles R. Afro-Americans in New Jersey, A Short History. Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, Department of State. https://nj.gov/state/historical/assets/pdf/topical/afro-americans-in-nj-short-history.pdf
[xxi] Wright, Giles R. Afro-Americans in New Jersey, A Short History. Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, Department of State. https://nj.gov/state/historical/assets/pdf/topical/afro-americans-in-nj-short-history.pdf
[xxiii] Schick, Jack H. “Slavery in Pennsylvania,” Friends Journal, September 1, 2012. https://www.friendsjournal.org/slavery-in-pennsylvania/
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