Locating the Historical Roots of Slavery in New Hampshire

Essay by Tim Hastings, UMASS Amherst, 2024

Using particular terminology is important when discussing topics like enslavement and racism, the consequences of which we’re still living with today. We should be mindful of people’s lived experiences and that, for different people, the past may not be so past.

The most transformative moment for me as a master’s student in the History and Archives program at Keene State College was when, at the New Hampshire Historical Society, I came across a broadside printed in Haverhill, NH, that purported to contain a Black man’s last words prior to his execution. My encounter with Thomas Powers, who was hanged on July 28, 1796, stuck with me. The racial violence, which reminded me of stories from the antebellum or Jim Crow South, took me aback because I hadn’t expected to find it among eighteenth-century records in New Hampshire. But my surprise cannot be attributed to ignorance alone.

By the eve of the Civil War, enslavement—and the history of enslavement—had been recast as a Southern issue. The history of the North, on the other hand, told the story of a white republic in which free labor triumphed over enslavement—a narrative that overlooked and obscured the history and presence of Black individuals, both free and enslaved, in regions like New England. Enslavement, however, was not a nineteenth-century Southern phenomenon but had been practiced—and experienced— in the Americas for nearly four centuries by the time Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. In fact, New Hampshire’s experience with African enslavement stretches back to 1645—only a couple decades after the Mayflower landed in Plymouth.

The work of the Recovering Black History in the Monadnock Region (RBH) project has begun to shed light on the presence and historical experiences of African-descended people in Cheshire County [NH]. The staff and their team of citizen archivists have spent hours combing historical records and have found several hundred people of African descent that were in Cheshire County between 1730 and 1940—and this number continues to grow. Recovering the names and stories of these individuals sheds light not only on their lived experiences—both negative and positive—but also on the key roles they played in the region’s development. But to understand the historical experiences of African-descended people in New Hampshire, we need to step back and look at the longer history of enslavement in what historians call the Atlantic World. Then we can see how New Hampshire and Cheshire Country fit into this broader context.

Enslavement in the Atlantic World

The Atlantic World was the trans-Atlantic area made up of North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and West Africa between the 1400s and the 1800s. It was a place where the movement and coming together of goods, cultures, and people—European, Indigenous, and African—created new cultures, new opportunities, and new constraints on the lives of everyday people. Thinking about New Hampshire within this context does two things: it challenges us to reconsider what we think of as “early or colonial American history”—usually told as the history of the thin sliver of coast stretching from Maine to Georgia—and it also makes New Hampshire seem less isolated from the rest of world history.

Enslavement was an important characteristic of the Atlantic World. The Portuguese and Spanish initiated it in the 1400s when they began to colonize the Americas. Indigenous peoples in the Americas made up the bulk of the first enslaved people, with as many as one million being enslaved in the first fifty years between Columbus’ voyage and the mid-1500s. Around 100,000 Africans were also enslaved in that same period. Widespread sugar cultivation in the 1600s changed the demographics of the Atlantic World dramatically, when sugar plantations in Brazil and on islands in the Caribbean, like Barbados and Jamaica, imported millions of enslaved Africans to grow, harvest, and process sugar cane. In fact, between 1650 and 1860, as many as 15 million Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas.

Life for enslaved people on sugar plantations was dangerous. Sugar production required that many enslaved laborers have specialized knowledge and skills, but it also taxed their bodies, which, along with malnutrition and disease, contributed to high mortality rates. Besides being brutalized, Africans began to be associated with slavery and slavery therefore became synonymous with Africanness or Blackness. That is, slavery became racialized. Atlantic enslavement was also heritable— when an enslaved African woman gave birth, her child was enslaved. We, in the United States, likely recognize these characteristics—brutal, racialized, and heritable—because it’s the same system that the more familiar nineteenth-century Southern system of slavery emerged from.

Atlantic slavery didn’t develop exclusively in the Caribbean and Brazil. It developed simultaneous throughout the interconnected regions of the Atlantic World, including New England. New Hampshire was a colony in the British Empire and had ties to other British colonies—ties which helped prop up and sustain slavery in unexpected ways. During the mid-1600s, for example, New Hampshire merchants sold food to places like Barbados to help feed the growing enslaved population in exchange for molasses, rum, and enslaved people. White pine trees from New Hampshire became the masts of ships in the Royal Navy. These ships not only protected Britain’s shipping and commercial interests in the Caribbean but also helped control the enslaved population in places like Jamaica.

Surprisingly, however, Massachusetts—not Jamaica or Barbados—was the first British colony to codify slavery. In 1641, when the government of Massachusetts Bay Colony still controlled New Hampshire, the Massachusetts government laid out the conditions under which individuals could be enslaved. The Body of Liberties, as these laws were known, said that it was legal to enslave prisoners of war who were captured in a so-called “just war”—that is, in a war deemed legal by colonial authorities, which, in practice, were against Indigenous people—and people who “sold themselves willingly” to another person could also be enslaved.

These laws were ambiguous and opened the door to abuse and kidnapping. In 1645, a trading ship out of Massachusetts called The Rainbowe kidnapped several men off the coast of West Africa, one of whom they sold to the lieutenant governor of New Hampshire, Francis Williams. A Massachusetts court ordered that the man be returned to Africa because his capture was a violation of the Body of Liberties, although historical sources don’t document what ultimately happened to him. Nevertheless, the first enslaved African person in New Hampshire arrived only two decades after the establishment of the first European settlement in New Hampshire. Many others would follow in the next century and a half.

Enslavement thus extends far back into New Hampshire’s history. What the Spanish and Portuguese initiated in the 15th century, took hold and expanded in the Americas, where it became racialized—that is, associated with blackness—heritable, and commodified. Later essays will examine how enslavement developed specifically in New Hampshire, including the laws that regulated it, population numbers, and stories of enslaved people.