Slavery in Boston and Boston’s Role in the Slave Trade

We discuss slavery in Boston and Boston’s role in the slave trade with Jared Hardesty, Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University, and the author of the important books Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston and Black Lives, Native Lands, and White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England.

Readings:

Jared Hardesty, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 12-42, 71-135.

Mug battle question (courtesy of Jared Hardesty): Which Boston cemetery contains nearly 1000 mostly-unmarked graves of enslaved and freed Blacks from the colonial and revolutionary eras?

Answer: Copp’s Hilly Burying Ground. Congratulations to Hunter Rodriguez for winning it in a showdown!

Further reading: For those interested, I highly recommend reading all of Hardesty’s Unfreedom and his very recent synthetic history of slavery in New England, Black Lives, Native Lands, and White Worlds. Two other fairly recent studies are Margaret Ellen Newell’s Brethren by Nature: New England Indian, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell, 2015) and Wendy Warren’s New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (W. W. Norton/Liveright, 2016). It’s also worth reading the New York Times’ 1619 Project and attending controversies, summarized nicely in this Washington Post article by Sarah Ellison, “How the 1619 Project took over 2020.”