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1 Land and Labor
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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chapter one Land and Labor At the beginning of the nineteenth century, William Tudor of Boston reported that Indians in the region “are a harmless set of beings, and lead a life of hardship, though not of labor.” Within their few remaining reserves, “they cannot alienate their lands . . . Each individual has a right to cultivate what piece of land he pleases, and this, as well as the hut he occupies, are his, from a kind of right of occupancy , which is not clearly defined.” Many men worked as whalers, sailing out of Nantucket or New Bedford. In addition, “some of the females go into the neighboring towns, as servants, returning home occasionally.” Small groups “perambulate the country, offering medicinal herbs, baskets or brooms for sale, almost the only articles they manufacture.” Like other Anglo-American observers, the prominent merchant, politician, and founder of the North American Review perceived such subsistence, transient workways as “slothful,” combining the worst of aboriginal customs and the habits of the early republic’s lower sort.1 Tudor’s description of Native workways, although colored by prejudice, was accurate . In the wake of the American Revolution, the keys to Native identity, persistence , and indeed their presence in southern New England were their land and labor. Tribes with substantial reservations were distinguished by informal landholding , subsistence agriculture, and reliance on fishing and hunting. Traditional crafts also played an important role, as Native women found a growing market among whites for baskets, mats, brooms, and medicine. At the same time, Indians away from their reservations and the survivors of smaller Native groups became part of the region’s emerging proletariat. Men went to ports to sign onto whaling vessels; men and women worked in cities and villages as transient laborers and do- mestics; and children were bound out to work for the “better sort” of white families . But even as Indians developed closer connections to New England’s society and economy, political and market forces reshaped both. As a result, the remaining Indian reservations became reservoirs of antimarket traditions that drew poor whites and blacks threatened by an increasingly uncertain, impersonal economy. Thus Indians and their communities shed new light on socioeconomic changes in southern New England during the early republic. In the century between King Philip’s War and the Revolution, Indians in Connecticut , Massachusetts, and Rhode Island were set apart from other peoples in those colonies by law and custom. Their lands were reserved as the result of treaties and provincial laws, so that parts or the whole were not supposed to be sold or alienated without the approval of the provincial assembly—although such laws were occasionally repealed and often flouted. While tribes had varying degrees of autonomy, most had guardians assigned by the provincial legislatures to manage their resources, arrange labor contracts, and prevent illegal acts, liquor consumption , and immorality (see chapter 3). In part to avoid the need to sell land, Indians could not be sued for debts, although adults could be forced into an indenture to fulfill their debts. Natives were not considered citizens and were treated as minors and charity cases by the law; obviously they could not vote. In all three states, these laws survived the Revolution, leaving Indians separate and distinct.2 By the outbreak of the Revolution, Indians in southern New England lived in four distinct situations (Table 1). First, tribes with large, legally protected reserves, such as Gay Head and Mashpee, held a high degree of autonomy and had visible political organizations, and some retained substantial resources. Second, smaller groups took the form of either a very small reserve where a small number of families farmed or a neighborhood where a cluster of Indian families lived; in both the core lay within an Anglo-American town that had once been the Native village , and more tribal members lived dispersed in nearby towns. By 1760, many Indian villages had become so small and the land so poor that few members managed to farm there; many members moved to larger tribes or to the cities or remained near the reserve in ancestral territory. Some of these communities (such as the Eastern Pequot or Hassanamisco) often seemed nearly extinct, yet families and individuals frequently and mysteriously reappeared. Third, a few communities existed largely as loose networks of families living near their former reserves. Finally, a growing number of Indians moved to the larger towns, mostly ports, where they were more likely to develop connections to the growing African...