Slavery's true history

New England has long prided itself as an abolitionist bulwark against slavery. It was in Boston that William Lloyd Garrison fulminated against the Constitution, which considered each slave to be three-fifths of a human being, as "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." Yet while the number of slaves in New England was minuscule compared with the plantation culture of the South, the institution of slavery permeated life in New England for 200 years.

"Slavery came early to New England and insinuated itself into all aspects of daily life," says Ira Berlin, a luminary in this field of history from the University of Maryland. "Its death was slow and painful."

The first records of the enslavement of Africans in New England appeared in the 1620s, according to James Horton of George Washington University, another expert. The numbers remained small for a long time. By 1708, he says, there were 400 slaves in Boston. By 1750, there were 4,000 in Massachusetts and 3,300 in Rhode Island -- about 10 percent of its population.

Berlin and Horton were in town last week to participate in an extraordinary conference sponsored chiefly by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts on slavery in New England. The goal of the two-day affair, says Berlin, is "the remaking of American history."

For starters, we should erase the very concept of "North" and "South" when discussing slavery. "It was a continental institution," he says. "There was a different kind of slavery to the south."

Also, the enslavement of Native Americans in Massachusetts and Rhode Island was far greater than commonly thought. Pequods and Narragansetts, for example, were often enslaved, and many later married African slaves. Hundreds of Native Americans captured in King Philip's War (1775-76) were sent as slaves to the plantations on the sugar islands of Barbados and Jamaica.

Yankees were less slave owners than slave traders. They owned ships that carried men and women from Africa to the killing fields of the sugar islands and beyond. Boston names like Boylston and Faneuil and Rhode Island clans like the Browns, founding benefactors of what is now Brown University, all grew rich from the trafficking of human beings. Most of the leading families of Boston, Providence, and Newport, R.I., had house slaves, and prosperous farmers often had one or two to work their fields.

"Slavery was not a minor, weak institution in New England," says Berlin. "It was a substantial institution that lasted for a long time."

"The slave trade was very important here because it jump-started the New England economy," he continues. "The sugar islands were the Saudi Arabia of the 18th century. Slavery created connections all over the Atlantic. In New England, it involved shipbuilding, insurance, and many other ancillary trades supporting the institution."

Many Yankees participated passively, buying shares of a slave voyage much as we buy mutual funds today. (There were about 35,000 trips in the transatlantic trade to the Americas from 1527 to 1867, according to David Eltis of Emory University.)

Rhode Island was the hub of the New England slave trade. (Its full name remains the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.) A small, slave-holding aristocracy existed in the southern coastal part of the state as a miniature plantation society, says Horton. In one area, he notes, the ratio of slave to white was 1 in 3. Berlin adds that wealthy sugar planters from Barbados operated large estates in the southern area, using slaves to tend livestock and produce goods necessary to maintain their lucrative island plantations.

While conditions for slaves in New England were less harsh than in the South, it was, says John Tyler of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, "a lonely slavery." A house slave was often alone with the master's family. There was no slave community, as in the South, and far less opportunity to meet other slaves and have families.

With the emancipation of slaves here came an immediate amnesia among whites about their immediate past. "There was a denial of the existence of slavery, of its importance, a denial of responsibility," says Berlin. As New England gained abolitionist fervor, it displayed, in his words, "total hypocrisy." The irony between the ideals of the Revolution and the black reality in New England was "delicious."

"If slavery was `un-American,' " says Horton, "how doubly `un-New England' it was."

And slavery died slowly in these parts. While Massachusetts abolished it in toto in 1783, Rhode Island and Connecticut followed a year later with a cruelly gradual approach whereby only the children of slaves would be free upon reaching their majority. Thus, there were slaves alive in those states well into the early decades of the 19th century. The last slave recorded alive in Rhode Island was in 1859.

(The Massachusetts ban, by the way, was issued by the same Supreme Judicial Court now accused of being too activist regarding gay marriage.)

Brown University has created a commission to investigate the actions of the slave-trading Brown family to better understand its own history and consider what remedial actions, if any, the university might take. The rest of New England should open up its own can of worms, too.

Sam Allis's e-mail address is allis@globe.com