Lesson Six
African-American Presence in Deerfield, Massachusetts

In New England, black slaves and free blacks left few historical materials for scholars to study. No diaries have been discovered; few inventories exist; correspondence is lacking; only scattered records in merchants' account books and baptismal records validate their presence. Our knowledge of black life and customs in the early days of settlement often derives from white observers who may have been unfamiliar with and even uninterested in the African heritage and the personal lives of the region's African-American population. New England masters assumed that in training their servants they would simply replace African patterns of behavior and belief with Yankee ones. Where, precisely they came from was not as important to buyers as their availability for purchase; most new slaves were advertised simply as "just arrived."

It is probable that more than three-quarters of New England's black immigrants were African by birth, according to William D. Pierson (Black Yankees). The majority entered bondage as displaced people - captives from the losing side of a battle or a war. Others were kidnapped by raiding parties of local slave dealers.

Although Deerfield never had a substantial black population - blacks comprised no more than 2% of the total population - there have been black people there from the time of the second permanent settlement in the 1680s. Slavery was an institution that was considered a legitimate part of life in New England and the residents must have been accustomed to interacting with black people on a regular basis, on the street, at the meeting house, and in the stores of local merchants and craftsmen. In eighteenth-century Deerfield the most prominent families in the civic and religious life of the community owned slaves. It has been calculated that the population of Deerfield included forty "servants for life" from the seventeenth century to 1783, when slavery was outlawed in Massachusetts. The Reverend John Williams (1664-1729) owned five slaves, John Sheldon (1658-c.1733) owned seven, the Reverend Jonathan Ashley (1712-1780) owned three, and yeoman farmer Ebenezer Wells (1691-1758) owned two. Ashley claimed in a sermon that slaves were servants by divine dispensation and that any attempt to escape or any dissatisfaction with one's lot in life was to the "damage of their masters but would also be to the dishonor of religion and the reproach of Christianity." The Deerfield parson's attitude was shared by many.

In New England, it was common for white masters and black servants to work side by side during the day - the male slaves involved in farm work and the females in domestic activities - and it was also common for them to retire to the same house at night. There is no evidence of the existence of separate slave quarters in the North as there were in the South. Many of the slaves in New England were purchased as youths whereas young slaves were often avoided in southern plantation areas. Plantation masters wanted slaves of at least middle teenage years who could be put to work immediately in the fields under the direction of experienced hands. New England masters, conversely, expected to personally train their servants for specialized tasks or family roles and were, therefore, willing to buy juvenile slaves who might not be immediately productive but who could be more effectively assimilated into the family. As William Pierson has observed, the bondage was no less frustrating for those who were forced to serve, but the brutality of the system [in the North] was lessened.

These young slaves, newly arrived in America, had often spent long months far from their villages or homelands and were probably ready to assimilate themselves to the extent that they could be comfortable in their new lives. Some were clearly ready to master what they considered valuable in the new culture. For example, this quote from one slave, "I had long wished to be able to read and write, and for this purpose I took every opportunity to gain instruction." In the more intimate family servitude of New England, slaves picked up a functional grasp of their masters' language faster than anywhere else in the world. The new slaves did not necessarily reject their African heritage, but they soon learned that if they were to function comfortably in New England, they would often have to be willing to change.

Family-based slavery speeded acculturation in New England and family slavery often fostered close and relatively humane relationships that sometimes may have approached a fictional kinship between white masters and black "servants." But it should not be forgotten that even the kindest of treatment could not resolve the basic contradictions inherent in treating humans as property.

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