Abstract
“King’s Men and Continentals: War & Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts” argues that freedom’s course in Massachusetts was intimately linked to two elements of the eighteenth-century world: the creation of a distinctive slave system that historians have traditionally called “family slavery” and the province’s experiences during the great wars for empire that convulsed the British Atlantic world between 1713 and 1775. Although Massachusetts merchants began importing enslaved Africans into the province in the 1630s, they never trafficked in the same quantities as their colonial counterparts in the Chesapeake or the Caribbean. Because Massachusetts never became a slave society in Ira Berlin’s classic definition of the term, the system of slavery that developed in Massachusetts was different from that of the other British slave owning colonies. The provincial legislature never enacted a comprehensive slave code like those adopted in South Carolina or Barbados, for example, and the end result was an ambiguous set of laws and customs governing the enslaved which, among other things, allowed Black men to serve in provincial military forces to an extent that was virtually unique among other British colonies. As they served in provincial armies sent to conquer in the name of empire, enslaved blacks in Massachusetts were absorbed into the imperial culture of their white masters in a way that has never been fully realized. In the years leading to the Revolution, this meant that enslaved and free Blacks in Massachusetts were unique among their enslaved counterparts in the British Empire, fighting in the empire’s wars and participating in provincial politics in way that – although limited - was unheard of elsewhere in the English-speaking Atlantic World. That they could do so was due to the relationship between war and slavery in eighteenth-century Massachusetts.