Brethren by Nature - by Margaret Ellen Newell

About the Book

In Brethren by Nature, Margaret Ellen Newell reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians.

Book Synopsis

In Brethren by Nature, Margaret Ellen Newell reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legalize slavery in 1641, and the colonists' desire for slaves shaped the major New England Indian wars, including the Pequot War of 1637, King Philip's War of 1675-76, and the northeastern Wabanaki conflicts of 1676-1749. When the wartime conquest of Indians ceased, New Englanders turned to the courts to get control of their labor, or imported Indians from Florida and the Carolinas, or simply claimed free Indians as slaves.Drawing on letters, diaries, newspapers, and court records, Newell recovers the slaves' own stories and shows how they influenced New England society in crucial ways. Indians lived in English homes, raised English children, and manned colonial armies, farms, and fleets, exposing their captors to Native religion, foods, and technology. Some achieved freedom and power in this new colonial culture, but others experienced violence, surveillance, and family separations. Newell also explains how slavery linked the fate of Africans and Indians. The trade in Indian captives connected New England to Caribbean and Atlantic slave economies. Indians labored on sugar plantations in Jamaica, tended fields in the Azores, and rowed English naval galleys in Tangier. Indian slaves outnumbered Africans within New England before 1700, but the balance soon shifted. Fearful of the growing African population, local governments stripped Indian and African servants and slaves of legal rights and personal freedoms. Nevertheless, because Indians remained a significant part of the slave population, the New England colonies did not adopt all of the rigid racial laws typical of slave societies in Virginia and Barbados. Newell finds that second- and third-generation Indian slaves fought their enslavement and claimed citizenship in cases that had implications for all enslaved peoples in eighteenth-century America.

Review Quotes

Last fall, National Geographic and PBS touted their respective TV series about the first Thanksgiving as new and historically accurate interpretations of the European colonization of New England. But neither 'Saints and Strangers' nor 'American Experience: The Pilgrims' dared to go where Margaret Ellen Newell has gone in her most recent book, Brethren by Nature, a meticulously researched account of American Indian slavery during the Colonial period in New England.

Newell has done an excellent job of combing through court recordscorrespondenceand other materials to reconstruct details large and small and to uncover the stories of enslaved people and their enslavers... [A] testament to her careful scholarship and indeed a central part of the story of Indian slavery in New England.

Newell recovers the stories of individual Indian people caught up in a system of unfree labor that contributed to New England's prosperity, linked the region to slave economies in the Atlantic and Caribbean, and played an important role in the racialization of society. Brethren by Nature is an important book about Indians in New England; it is also an important book about New England.

Newell's achievement represents some of the best new research within the historiographies of Native America, slavery, and colonial New England. Never losing sight of the enslaved themselves, Brethren by Nature places the travails of indigenous nations and individuals at the heart of colonial slavery. With this outstanding work, Newell shakes the 'city on the hill' to its very core.

About the Author

Margaret Ellen Newell is Professor of History at The Ohio State University. She is the author of From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England, also from Cornell.