THE MYTH OF THE SLAVELESS SOCIETY: BLACK POLITICS AND THE AMBIGUITIES OF ANTISLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS, 1641-1783
Degree type
Graduate group
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American Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Political Science
Subject
American Revolution
Antislavery
Black Politics
Massachusetts
Slavery
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Abstract
The “Myth of the Slaveless Society” explores antislavery sentiment in Massachusetts from the founding of the colony to the legal abolition of slavery in the newfound state in 1783. It argues that white colonists there told a story of themselves, to themselves, that denied the reality of chattel bondage in the Bay Colony while simultaneously permitting the expansion of Indigenous and Black enslavement across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This narrative was, even at its creation, fatuous, illogical, and palpably erroneous. Nevertheless, it had a tangible impact on the shape of bondage and freedom in Massachusetts. Black free and enslaved persons, and their white allies, were able to hijack this myth to challenge the legitimacy of perpetual, hereditary, slavery throughout the colonial era. By the dawn of the imperial crisis with Great Britain, enslaved activists seized on the mechanisms of Massachusetts’ high politics to lead the first interracial, organized, successful abolition movement in American history. As petitioners, plaintiffs, soldiers, and citizens, Black men, like James Somerset and Felix Holbrook, and Black women, like Jenny Slew and Phillis Wheatley, capitalized on their native fluency in the language to liberty to push their white contemporaries across the vast gap that separates moral perception of a problem from taking concrete action against it. In the process, they gave birth to America’s first formal Black political tradition.Studying the myth of the slaveless society in Massachusetts has several benefits. It helps us see that antislavery sentiment in the early Anglo-Atlantic was more powerful and widespread, yet even more contradictory and multifaceted than historians have previously appreciated. This fable was not believed in by all actors at all times, but it provided a pool of popularly accessible resources upon which colonists Black, white, and Indigenous drew upon to contest the reduction of human beings to absolute chattel goods. This study also offers historians the chance to expand our scope of exploration beyond Pennsylvania and its Quaker activists when scrutinizing the origins of the Anglo-American abolitionist movement, and it invites us to reconsider the place of antislavery agitation in the American Revolution. Finally, it compels us to appreciate the many ways Black men and women helped constitute and create the new American nation.