In the early period of European colonization of the western hemisphere, involuntary perpetual servitude—slavery—was generally accepted as a biblically ordained practice if the individuals enslaved were war captives or criminals. Although chattel slave-owning in seventeenth-century New England was not common, some Puritan founders of New Haven, such as Theophilus Eaton (c. 1590-1658), did own enslaved persons, and the Reverend John Davenport (1597-1670) purchased a “servant boy.” Davenport had envisioned establishing a college in the town, but that dream was not realized until the early part of the eighteenth century. When the institution that would become Yale College was founded in 1701 and officially moved to New Haven in 1718, the number of enslaved persons in New England was beginning to increase significantly. During the 1700s, for example, the number in Connecticut grew tenfold, as elite colonists sought sources of inexpensive labor and markers of social status. In the process, Yale College became inextricably linked to an economy that benefited incalculably from the importation and labor of enslaved persons.
While captive or indebted Natives formed a portion of the labor pool, Africans and people of African descent constituted the great majority of the slave population. Scholars estimate that over the course of the eighteenth century more than two million Africans and people of African descent, mostly from the west-central coastal region, were illegally and forcibly taken from their homes and families and shipped to the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean. As the number of Africans suffering in bondage in the Americas grew, blackness became associated in white minds with enslavement, and enslavement was justified by false views that Africans were either inferior or were not human at all. Others approved of the forced kidnapping of people from Africa as a missionary effort, arguing that they would thereby be exposed to Christianity, and so their souls would be saved even if their bodies were not.
The Beginnings of Antislavery Thought in New England
But there were those in this society with slaves who raised questions. Enslaved persons themselves, often in untold ways, engaged in antislavery acts of resistance from the beginning of their forced servitude. On rare occasions, enslaved individuals publicly denounced the institution of colonial slavery, as was the case with Greenwich (d. 1765) of Canterbury, Connecticut, who in 1754 declared before an almost entirely white congregation that he had “been instructed by the Lord” to say that “justice must take place” and that it was against God’s will for one nation to “impose upon another.” As time went on, there were also white colonizers who pointed out the hypocrisy of the missionary argument, saying that enslaved persons were regularly brutalized and that very few masters actually taught Christianity to their slaves, and if they did, the only version enslaved persons heard was the gospel of submission and obedience. Some, such as Boston judge Samuel Sewall, denounced the “slave trade,” the ongoing importation of people to be sold into slavery. Even so, he was typical of his fellow colonists in his fear of miscegenation, the intermixing of races. Such spokespersons were precious few initially, but over time their voices—Black, White, and Native—grew, as did the extent of their condemnation to include not only the slave trade but the institution of slavery itself and the segregation of American society.
Kenneth P. Minkema, Director
The Jonathan Edwards Center & Online Archive at Yale University
Image citations:
Limner, Davenport. Reverend John Davenport, ca. 1670 (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven)
https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/4
Smibert John. Samuel Sewall 1729 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)