New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America by Wendy Warren (review)

Colonial New England birthed many of America's most familiar tropes: the witch hunt, the errand into the wilderness, the city upon a hill. New England was the promised land for the puritan and the slave alike, so the popular understanding goes. Wendy Warren upends such notions and writes to the heart of New England's origin story, portraying New England's founders as eager enslavers who viewed bondage as a crucial element of colonization.

In recent years, a growing body of scholarship has tackled the thorny questions of Northern involvement in slavery and the slave trade, a trail first blazed by nearly a half-century of history that was largely relegated to the sidelines within academia. Warren offers nuanced and heartbreaking accounts of the violence at the heart of that striving by highlighting the men and women, young and old, whose lives were sacrificed on the altar of profit and nation building. What results is both sweeping and profound, a narrative that places the enslaved as central actors in New England's origin story.

With evocative prose and an accessible style, Warren makes such a feat of excavation look easy, a testament to the achievement of her work. Tackling an archival record whose very existence was designed to support the violence committed against the enslaved and render their humanity invisible, Warren offers rigorous close readings paired with probing questions that challenge the reader to consider the tragedy of bondage. She wonders whether "the inhumanity demanded by a system such as chattel slavery" gave "individual colonists pause, even in a world like the early modern world, built on hierarchies of power and violence" (41). Even if, as she offers "such an optimistic view of humanity is naïve and modern," such questions challenge (42). In a chapter entitled "Visible Slaves" she writes to the particular difficulty for the historian in excavating the stories of New England's enslaved population: "The role of enslaved labor in New England in creating that wealth is, however largely invisible, because enslaved people there did not do different work than their English counterparts; their slave labor was not distinguished from free labor" (118). If such disambiguation proves challenging for the scholar, it was as easy as breathing for the seventeenth-century New England denizen, for slavery was, according to Warren an "institution" far "more visible than the unseen covenant that Winthrop hoped and trusted his government held with his Lord" (142). New England Bound is not a work that heavily explores the statistics of slavery; Warren spends little time counting and comparing numbers of human cargos and tallying up economic slave profit margin for seventeenth-century New England, but rather, explores bondage in the everyday experience of New Englanders.

The early modern world Warren explores—probably the most familiar seventeenth-century terrain to North American readers—emerges as both undiscovered and wholly contingent. There was nothing preordained about slavery in New England: instead, New Englanders made active and premeditated choices to fuel their society with the grist of human lives. Centering her analysis around an array of New England sources paired alongside a thoughtful exploration of the evidence for enslaved people, Warren presents a gripping account of the reach of slavery in seventeenth- century New England.

Divided into three parts—"A World that Does Wrong," "Likely That of New England," and "Backing into Modernity"—New England Bound is organized chronologically. Indeed, chronology is central to Warren's scholarly argument: the seventeenth century, not the eighteenth century which forms the basis of most scholarly explorations of New England slaver accounts, is the crucial moment for New England investment in slavery. Warren emphasizes New England's position as first in the invention of much of the edifice of North American slavery: from an early investment in slave breeding, formulating the first slave code, to fielding the first pro/antislavery debate. In chapters one through three she recounts the enthusiastic commitment to slavery made at...