Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston by Jared Ross Hardesty (review)

In eighteenth-century Boston, a man who was born into slavery could sue a white man for assault and win a cash settlement. The story of "Fortunate, 'a Negro'" (147), who convinced a justice of the peace in 1758 to fine a white man forty shillings, is just one of the many fascinating vignettes in Unfreedom that Jared Ross Hardesty has dug out of Massachusetts's rich records. Fortunate's eponymous good fortune is paradigmatic of the story of enslaved Bostonians that Hardesty has reconstructed: a world in which white men sometimes had to pay for violating black bodies might make readers rethink their understanding of colonial slavery.

Studies of African slavery in Massachusetts are enjoying a well-deserved resurgence in the past decade. Thanks to Elise Lemire's Black Walden and Margot Minardi's Making Slavery History, as well as new work emerging from Chernoh M. Sesay Jr. and Gloria McCahon Whiting, our knowledge of enslaved New Englanders now reaches far beyond Phillis Wheatley and Crispus Attucks. Hardesty now joins this vibrant field with a highly readable examination of slavery in eighteenth-century Boston. He positions his book as a "new conceptual framework" (2) that rejects the dichotomy of freedom and slavery. Because freedom was "amorphous, abstract, fickle, and ever changing" (42), he argues, enslaved Bostonians did not view it as either the opposite of slavery or even their primary goal. Instead, they bent their energies toward living the best lives they could within the "continuum of unfreedom" (2) that structured the world of both black and white Bostonians.¹

Hardesty's argument implicitly rests on the supposedly anomalous nature of most New England slavery. Unlike enslaved men and women in other English colonies—but similar to the practices of French and Iberian slave regimes—enslaved New Englanders in Connecticut and Massachusetts could enjoy due process, give evidence against whites, and even sue those who held them in bondage for poor treatment. At the same time, Massachusetts did create in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a steady stream of race-based police laws that applied to African-descended Bostonians, including curfews, limitations on drinking, and roadblocks to manumission. Although Massachusetts was the first of England's mainland colonies to codify slavery (in its 1641 law code, known as the Body of Liberties), slavery remained a surprisingly vague category in practice. Hardesty shows that legal status itself was not determinative. Just as married white women were not invariably held hostage to the legal structures of coverture, Boston's slaves, especially men, did not live their lives focused on a legal status that was only sometimes meaningful. Throughout the book, Hardesty argues that enslaved Bostonians were far more interested in ameliorating their daily conditions than they were in demanding freedom.

Hardesty opens by arguing that the diverse origins of Boston's enslaved population provided them with a wealth of ideas about how to understand slavery and how to make the most of their situation. Massachusetts's law code offered a vague baseline of restricting slavery to people captured in "just wars" (usually applied to Native Americans) or "strangers" (15) (assumed to be Africans), but beyond these general categories Massachusetts legislators were unwilling to spell out the place of slavery any more clearly in law. Unlike their counterparts in nearby Rhode Island and New York (comparisons Hardesty does not draw), legislators not only never created a separate slave court but never even explicitly defined the heritable status of children born to enslaved mothers. For the most part, Hardesty concludes, slavery was defined less by law than by practice.

The result was a world with some flexibility for the enslaved. Throughout the eighteenth century, white Bostonians brought more and more enslaved people to live and work in Boston: an eightfold increase from 1700 to 1750. Those African-descended people brought with them experiences of life in the Caribbean (including violent protests against...