Robert E. Desrochers, Jr.

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Robert E. Desrochers, Jr. | Slave-For-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts, 1704–1781 | The William and Mary Quarterly, 59.3 | The History Cooperative

Slave-For-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts, 1704–1781

SLAVERY and the newspaper grew up together in Massachusetts, in a close and synergetic relationship that made slave-for-sale advertisements a regular feature of the local press for most of the eighteenth century. Indeed, New England's long history of trading slaves in print dated practically to the birth of the newspaper in colonial British America. The Boston News-Letter, the first successful weekly published anywhere in the colonies, had been in business barely a month when, on June 5, 1704, local merchant John Colman initiated the practice by offering up "two Negro men" along with a "Negro Woman & Child." Unencumbered by competition for roughly the next sixteen years, the News-Letter averaged one new slave-for-sale notice in every second issue and brokered the exchange of more than 500 slaves through 1720. A die had been cast.

As the newspaper press in Massachusetts expanded so did the newspaper slave trade. The Boston Gazette, established in December 1719 , quickly overtook the rival News-Letter and all future comers as the town's most advertising-friendly weekly. ¹ By 1781 , when slave trading in the Gazette ended for good, masters had placed 1,103 different slave-for-sale advertisements in its pages; counting repetitions, three-fourths of the roughly 3,200 editions of the Gazette printed from 1719 through 1781 included at least one such announcement (see Figure I). In all, approximately 2,000 people of African descent, newly arrived slaves and seasoned hands alike, appeared for sale in the Gazette alone. Meanwhile, masters sold untold other slaves in organs other than the Gazette, which despite its status as eighteenth-century Boston's longest-lived newspaper remained one of three to five weeklies published in the town at any given time down to the American Revolution. ²

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