'Slavery in Boston' exhibit opens

[wnylib]

2. When we think about America's history of slavery,

we usually think of the South. But Boston was a major slave trading port in colonial times. So was New London, CT.

Something that I discovered during genealogy research is that colonists in New England captured Native Americans in wars with them over territory and shipped them to the Caribbean sugar plantations to trade them for "seasoned" enslaved Africans. Some colonists wrote in their journals that they longed for another skirmish with Indians in order to import more enslaved Africans to New England. Connecticut was a center for that type of slave trade.

The Boston slave trade was based on newly captured Africans shipped into the Boston port where they were auctioned off. Nearly every New England village, no matter how small, had enslaved people. Clergy and magistrates had them in their households. Prosperous farmers had enslaved people to do field work.

Initially they tried enslaving Native people, but they knew the land and could escape, or had relatives nearby to free them, so the colonists in New England switched to importing Africans who did not have a nearby African village, nation or culture to help them escape.