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4 / “Extravasat Blood” Adam Saffin’s actions challenged varying levels of puritan notions of bodily order. Laying the descriptions of Adam’s behavior that had landed him in court against a consideration of his motives and perspective suggests the unstable place of an African man who insisted on personal dignity backed by physical force in Boston at the opening of the eighteenth century. In 1701, Adam thought he was free. He had served out his time, and so when his former master John Saffin demanded that he leave Boston for Bristol and then work for someone in Swansea, Adam refused. Instead, he got dressed in clothes that he had probably been able to acquire using the £3 of income gained from tending his own patch of tobacco, left Saffin’s household, and went about his own business in Boston. He secured a lawyer and worked through the legal system to contest John Saffin’s continuing efforts to have his “enfranchizement,” his manumission, declared void on the basis that he had not fulfilled the terms of the agreement. In the meantime, when the court ordered him back under Saffin’s direction he complied and worked on building the fortifications at Castle Island. Adam did object when, after he had ignored the militia officer’s direction to dig earth in a different way, that officer called him a “Rascal.” The captain’s insult was not only a statement that Adam belonged to the lowest social order, but it also accused him of dishonesty. Adam retorted that he was “no rascal, no rogue, no thief,” whereupon the captain hit his pipe out of his mouth and pushed him, violence Adam returned. His physical defense of his reputation earned him another stint in jail.1 108 / performing A second account of the incident at Castle Island omitted the verbal taunting and contained no hint that Adam might have been justified in defending his reputation and honor. Instead, he was “in great Fury & rage,” out of control, and “so furous & outragious and putt forth so great Strength that it was as much as Six or Seven” men “could do to hold and restrain him.” His “pertinacy”—that is, his refusal to act as a subordinate then and at other times—provoked repeated descriptions of him as “very Surley” and “sawcy.” Not only did the immediate participants in the Castle Island incident reject the idea that Adam’s assertion of his independence was justified, colonial laws altered his relationship to the body politic even once the court recognized his freedom. “Free negro’s molattos &c.” were required to work between two and eight days annually repairing town highways “as an equivalent to Trainings Watchings &c.”2 In 1652, the Massachusetts legislature had decreed that “Scotsmen, Negers, and Indians inhabitants . . . are hereby enjoyned to attend traynings ,” but in 1656 it dropped Africans and Indians from the militia, as did Connecticut in 1660. The Massachusetts 1656 law also limited the militia franchise to freemen, householders, and persons who had already taken the oath of fidelity.3 Not all English colonies took this approach: enslaved people of color in Bermuda were expected to train with arms in order to repel a feared foreign attack on the island.4 Adam’s presence in Massachusetts courts and on the streets of Boston came at a time when English officials and colonists were sharpening their attention to the place of enslaved Africans and indentured Indians in New England. This heightened interest occurred long after such questions had become central in other English colonies, colonies with a longer and more extensive history of the importation of Africans. While there were already more than one thousand Africans in southern New England at the opening of the eighteenth century—enough that even English colonists outside of port cities would have come into contact with Africans on a weekly basis—the opening of the eighteenth century saw mainland Natives becoming more deeply enmeshed in multigenerational debt to English colonists.5 In addition, Africans and Algonquians were not the only ones held in unwilling bondage in the decades following King William’s War (1689–97). That and subsequent conflicts created a local market for English, French, and Haudenosaunee captives whose release prices were negotiated by English leaders on one side and French and Haudenosaunee leaders on the other.6 These colonial transactions were part of, and yet distinct from, larger shifts in the English empire and Atlantic world. In Virginia, elite and [3.145.206.169] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...

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