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The Selling of Joseph
Bostonians, Antislavery, and the Protestant International, 1689–1733

MARK A. PETERSON


ON JUNE 24, 1700, Samuel Sewall published The Selling of Joseph, the first pamphlet condemning African slavery and the slave trade in North America. The successful merchant and judge offered a simple and direct argument: "Liberty is in real value next unto Life: None ought to part with it themselves, or deprive others of it, but upon the most mature Consideration." His brief tract refuted all the era's typical justifications for slavery and placed his main proposition firmly on biblical grounds, citing chapter and verse to decry "Man Stealing" as an atrocious crime. In the end, he warned, such criminality only introduced among the English a people who would remain restive and forever alien. "There is such a disparity in their Conditions, Colour, Hair, that they can never embody with us, and grow up into orderly Families, to the Peopling of the Land." Nevertheless, Sewall concluded his argument with a plea to honor the common humanity of all people under a universal deity: "These Ethiopians, as black as they are; seeing they are the Sons and Daughters of the First Adam, the Brethren and Sisters of the Last ADAM, and the Offspring of God; They ought to be treated with a Respect agreeable."1 1

 
Figure 1
    Samuel Sewall. Nathaniel Emmons, oil on canvas, 1728. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
 
 
      Historians have viewed The Selling of Joseph as an aberration. Rather than reflective of a larger movement, the text seemed more the product of Sewall's sensitive Puritan conscience, spurred by his unusual reading habits, by an upsurge in Boston's slave population, and by a petition that came before him "for the freeing of a Negro and his wife, who were unjustly held in Bondage."2 In other words, forced to think about a problem that most of his contemporaries took for granted, Sewall produced The Selling of Joseph out of his peculiar habits of mind. A year after its publication, a fellow judge on the Massachusetts Superior Court, John Saffin, attacked Sewall in print. By most accounts, Saffin got the better of the argument. According to social and legal standards of the day, Saffin refuted each of Sewall's objections to slavery, and The Selling of Joseph subsequently fell into obscurity.3 Only a single copy of the original edition survives; it was reprinted only once in the eighteenth century and not again until 1863. Sewall's efforts failed to spark a viable antislavery movement in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, and no direct line of influence can be drawn from Sewall to Garrison and Boston's other nineteenth-century abolitionists. Received wisdom appears to confirm that The Selling of Joseph was an anomaly.4 2
      If we expand our horizons, however, to consider more broadly the contexts, both local and global, in which Sewall wrote The Selling of Joseph, a different picture emerges. In the closing decade of the seventeenth century and the first third of the eighteenth, rapidly changing circumstances within Boston and in the larger Atlantic community brought slavery and related issues to the forefront of public concern. If Sewall's pamphlet did not initiate an antislavery movement, it nevertheless occupied a prominent place in a circuitous conversation that spread far beyond Boston. The full meaning and impact of The Selling of Joseph can only be understood if we follow this dialogue out into the complex and conflicted world of the larger Atlantic community. The full dimensions of this conversation remain to be charted, but in its echoes and reverberations we may begin to find new ways to understand the emergence of antislavery thought in the Atlantic world, as well as the place of Massachusetts in that process. 3
      We know the immediate circumstances that prompted Sewall to write his pamphlet. In his own words, "The Numerousness of Slaves at this day in the Province, and the Uneasiness of them under their Slavery, hath put many upon thinking whether the Foundation of it be firmly and well laid."5 Here, Sewall stood on solid ground. According to available estimates from the time, the number of slaves in Massachusetts more than doubled between 1676 and 1708, from roughly 200 to about 550, and 75 percent of these 550 slaves lived in the city of Boston.6 From the perspective of white Bostonians in 1700, Africans had become far more numerous than in the 1670s, when Sewall (b. 1652) came of age. In more general terms, Sewall's pamphlet appeared after a decade of extraordinary unease in Boston. In the 1690s, the traffic in human bodies and souls of many sorts reached unprecedented levels, and concerns about coerced labor and the forced migration of unwilling populations gained particularly urgency. Africans, of course, constituted a substantial part of this traffic. In 1696, when Parliament suspended the Royal Africa Company's monopoly, more Boston merchants than ever before entered the "Guinea trade," which partly accounts for the increased number of slaves in town.7 But African slaves were not the only human commodities routinely bought and sold in Sewall's Boston. 4
      Since the late 1680s, New England's war with New France and its Indian allies had created a lively market in captives on both sides. The exchange of prisoners of war and even the enslavement of prisoners were not new phenomena in Boston. During the Pequot War of 1637 and King Philip's War of 1675–1676, the Massachusetts government sold captive Indians into slavery in the West Indies, and Indian warriors held English captives for ransom or exchange.8 But King William's War against Louis XIV brought a new dimension to these colonial conflicts. From that point onward, New England's wars increasingly involved the strategy of deliberately raiding enemy settlements to seize captives for exchanges.9 Sewall's diary for September 10, 1688, records a typical example: "There is a press in Boston, of 32 Men, four out of a Company, to goe to the Eastward [to the district of Maine], by reason of the fears and dispersions people there are under. It seems 10. or 11 English persons are taken away as hostages till those Indians sent into Boston, be return'd."10 5
      The famous raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1704, in which French and Indian raiders seized the Rev. John Williams and his family and brought them to New France, is merely the most notorious example of this approach to warfare. Nonetheless, many Bostonians felt that the new war measures entailed appalling consequences. French and Indian captors separated English children from their parents in order to destroy their personal and religious allegiances—in much the way that English plantation owners treated African slave families.11 It is perhaps, then, no coincidence that the separation of families became one aspect of slavery that disturbed Sewall enough to merit special mention in his pamphlet: "It is likewise most lamentable to think, how in taking Negroes out of Africa, and Selling of them here, That which GOD ha's joyned together men do boldly rend asunder; Men from their Country, Husbands from their Wives, Parents from their Children."12 6
      Throughout the 1690s and well into the eighteenth century, Indian and French captors held English prisoners while French and Indian prisoners languished in Boston jails. The warring sides negotiated the price on a captive's head based on the prisoner's personal qualities, professed allegiances, and value as a bargaining chip. Was a French Indian held in Boston who had "publicly abjured the popish religion" worth trading for a Boston merchant, captive in Quebec, who had French sympathies and a lapsed Anglican religious sensibility?13 Such questions loomed large in Boston's moral economy. In the 1670s, few New Englanders doubted that Indian prisoners in King Philip's War should be sold into slavery. By the 1690s, however, Bostonians had to ponder the morality of selling captured French soldiers from the Port Royal garrison into servitude in Barbados.14 7
      The turn of the eighteenth century also marked the high point of piracy in the English Atlantic, and this too raised ambiguous ethical issues. A year before the publication of The Selling of Joseph, the infamous Capt. William Kidd had been seized and imprisoned in Boston. The privateer-turned-pirate's treasure, "the Iron chest of Gold, Pearls, &c," went to Sewall and four other members of the colonial council for safekeeping. Although Sewall felt enormously relieved when the colony shipped off Kidd and his booty to London in February 1700, the city could not export all of its problems with pirates so easily. 8
      The threat of piracy heightened Bostonians' awareness of the trade in human souls and the use of force to make one person do another's will. The Selling of Joseph challenged the notion that African slaves were "lawful captives taken in Wars." By this analogy, Sewall reasoned, "if some Gentlemen should go down to the Brewsters to take the Air, and Fish: And a stronger party from Hull should Surprise them, and Sell them for Slaves to a Ship outward bound: they would think themselves unjustly dealt with."15 His example was not hypothetical—New England's sailors and fishermen commonly faced the threat of captivity and those on transatlantic voyages frequently became captives, forced into slavery by Barbary Coast pirates. In the years before he published The Selling of Joseph, Sewall had put time and money into redeeming friends from "Algerian captivity," and in 1698 his prolific friend Cotton Mather published A Pastoral Letter to the English Captives in Africa in response to this disturbing problem.16 9
      Not all pirates were foreigners and infidels. New England's homegrown buccaneers sometimes dragooned coastal fishermen and sailors into a criminal form of enslavement.17 This practice raised a puzzling question: if illegally captured servants or slaves became unwilling participants in voyages that turned from privateering to piracy, could they be held responsible for their crimes? In a case that Sewall adjudicated in 1704, Capt. John Quelch commanded a ship that had been commissioned as a privateer against the French off Acadia. Quelch ignored this directive and instead sailed to Brazil to prey on Portuguese shipping. Whether he knew it or not, Quelch had committed piracy as defined by the treaty of amity signed by England and Portugal the year before. When Quelch and his crew returned to New England, Massachusetts authorities tried and hanged Quelch and the free white sailors but set free the African slaves found on his vessel. This was a rare instance in which it proved advantageous for a person to be defined as property rather than as an independent moral agent.18 10

 
Figure 2
    The Arraignment, Tryal, and Condemnation of Capt. John Quelch (London, 1705). Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
 
 
In these various ways, the face of Boston's public life was transformed by an unprecedented rise in the number of people whose status and condition raised difficult moral and legal questions. Even refugees—survivors from the ravaged Maine frontier or Huguenots fleeing persecution following Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes—contributed to the sense of change. Bostonians had to raise money, provide homes and food, and find occupations for these forced migrants and victims of unjust wars. In 1686, Sewall himself served as one of two colonial council members assigned to distribute relief supplies to Huguenot refugees from the West Indian islands of St. Christopher and Eleuthera. Unless refugees had particular skills or resources, they soon found themselves placed as servants in private homes and set to work alongside African or Indian slaves. The most famous instance of this practice occurred in the early 1690s, when refugee girls from devastated Maine settlements became servants of families in Salem Village. There they encountered other servants, including the Afro-Indian slaves Indian John and Tituba, and together they subsequently became principal figures in the witchcraft crisis of 1692, an episode that would cause Sewall years of moral anguish over his part as a judge in the trials.19 11
      The uneasiness that Sewall and others felt over the "numerousness" of slaves in the province was thus part of a larger sense of rapid dislocation in Boston. Until the 1680s, the town had been a small, relatively homogeneous English community with strong isolationist instincts that resisted extensive involvement in England's larger imperial ambitions. But with the revocation of the original Massachusetts charter, the restructuring of provincial government, and the rapid expansion of commercial contacts around the Atlantic rim, Boston saw an influx of new and unfamiliar kinds of people, whose arrival coincided with an increase in poverty, crime, and religious heterodoxy. The status, condition, and sheer numbers of these new settlers forced Bostonians to consider the moral and social costs of involuntary migration, coerced labor, and the commodification of human beings.20 12
      Behind these local changes lay major transformations in the Atlantic world, of which Boston was a small but integral part. The "Protestant Wind" of 1688, which allowed William of Orange's massive invasion fleet to land uncontested in Britain, breathed fresh air into the sails of a resurgent Protestant International. In addition to restructuring England's overseas empire and making way for the creation of a Great Britain, William's "Glorious Revolution" inaugurated more than a century of warfare steeped in religious and ideological conflict.21 Britain and France may have been the principal combatants, but William and his successors linked the Protestant powers of northern Europe in a more stable set of alliances than the seventeenth century previously had seen.22 13
      All of the transformations Boston experienced, beginning in the 1690s, can be attributed to this major restructuring of the British Empire and the coming of global warfare. The Royal Africa Company lost its monopoly, in part, because of its association with the hated Stuart monarchs, and the consequent growth of the slave trade among Bostonians received an additional boost from the commercial reordering of the empire through the revised and expanded Navigation Acts of the 1690s.23 New England's war with New France and its allies, "King William's War," as the colonists called it, was the North American manifestation of the War of the League of Augsburg, the Protestant alliance William led into combat against the ambitions of Louis XIV. Not surprisingly, Louis XIV loomed large in Bostonians' fears, and rumors of the Sun King's demise frequently swept through the town.24 Even the piracy that plagued Boston's shipping during this period resulted from a military strategy that used privateering as an extension of naval warfare. The most complex moral issues surrounding piracy in Boston stemmed from cases where privateers, such as Kidd and Quelch, had crossed the line into piracy by attacking neutral or allied ships.25 The settlement of refugees, another by-product of heightened Catholic-Protestant conflict, began in the 1690s with the Huguenots and continued into the eighteenth century when Bostonians helped to relocate the "poor Palatines," the Salzburg exiles, and other victims of Catholic repression.26 14
      Sewall's decision to publish The Selling of Joseph emerged from these contexts. The tract represented the strongest and most original voice in Boston's conversation about how to respond to this new set of internationally inspired problems. Sewall denounced the trade in slaves on moral grounds, contesting all the typical religious defenses of slavery. He rejected the notion that Africans suffered under the "curse of Cham," the idea that "Ethiopians" bore the mark of the cursed son of Noah. Even if they did, he asserted, Europeans possessed no right to play the part of "Executioner of the Vindictive Wrath of God." He dismissed the notion that the slave trade could be justified because it brought pagans to the knowledge of the Gospel: "Evil must not be done, that good may come of it." He cast doubt on the idea that African captives were taken in "just wars": "Every War is upon one side Unjust. An Unlawful War can't make lawful Captives." And even if Abraham had owned slaves, Sewall reminded his readers that "Israelites were strictly forbidden the buying, or selling one another for Slaves," and that "Christians should carry it to all the World, as the Israelites were to carry it one towards another."27 In Sewall's eyes, slavery was wrong because "all Men, as they are the Sons of Adam, are Coheirs; and have equal Right unto Liberty, and all other outward Comforts of Life." 15

 
Figure 3
    "The Town of Boston in New England by Capt. John Bonner," 1722, facsimile engraving. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
 
 
      At the same time that Sewall made these assertions, he linked his moral objections to slavery to a racist belief that, whether slave or free, Africans "can never embody with us, and grow up into orderly Families, to the Peopling of the Land: but still remain in our Body Politick as a kind of extravasat Blood." With respect to the labor force, Sewall argued that "it would conduce more to the Welfare of the Province, to have White Servants for a Term of Years, than to have Slaves for Life." Regarding military affairs, Sewall believed that "as many Negro men as there are among us, so many empty places there are in our Train Bands." He even feared for the colony's reproductive potential (never much of a problem in early New England, with its phenomenal birth rates), claiming that imported African workers take the places of "Men that might make Husbands for our Daughters. And the Sons and Daughters of New England would become more like Jacob, and Rachel, if this Slavery were thrust quite out of doors."28 16
      All of Boston's participants in the debate over slavery in this era shared Sewall's equivocations. For that reason, Boston's response to the problem of slavery moved in several directions at once. Sewall and a small number of allies tried to discourage the slave trade as much as possible. In 1702, Boston's representatives urged the Massachusetts General Court to promote the importation of white indentured servants and "put a period to Negroes being slaves," but nothing came of this initial measure.29 Meanwhile, local and provincial legislation responded to the perception of social disorder by attempting, among other things, to control the status and actions of servants and slaves more definitively. Between 1690 and 1720, Massachusetts enacted legislation that linked slavery to the maintenance of a racial color line—statutes of the kind that had developed several decades earlier in the Chesapeake. Town meetings and provincial legislatures passed laws prohibiting miscegenation, limiting the access of blacks to firearms and participation in militia training, imposing curfews, and defining slaves as personal property (rather than polls) for taxation purposes.30 17

 
Figure 4
    Title page from Sewall's tract, first printed in Boston in 1700. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
 
 
      While whites more sharply defined the idea of race and increased the legal debilities of slaves, a concomitant effort tended to ameliorate the condition and treatment of blacks. The General Court, for instance, passed manumission restrictions in 1701. On the face of it, they seemed to entrench slavery more deeply, yet the legislature intended to prevent masters from abandoning elderly slaves whom they saw as unproductive and burdensome. Sewall, who loathed the 1705 law prohibiting miscegenation, managed to soften its worst effects. As originally written, the "Act for the Better Preventing of a Spurious and Mixt Issue" barred any sexual relations between whites and Indians or Africans. Blacks who broke the law would be sold out of the colony. Sewall removed Indians from the bill and managed to insert a clause that recognized the legitimacy of marriage between slaves, a protection that southern colonies never achieved. Even so, Sewall feared that if passed the bill "will promote Murders and other Abominations," presumably by providing mixed race couples an incentive to abort or kill their offspring to avoid prosecution.31 In the end, however, the 1705 miscegenation law also included a provision requiring shipmasters to pay a £4 impost on each imported slave. This provision encouraged the preference for white over African servants and partially fulfilled the purpose of Boston's 1702 proposal to discourage slavery in the province.32 18
      The efforts by Boston's religious community to take more seriously its responsibilities to the souls of those in bondage developed in equally ambiguous ways. Cotton Mather led the way in 1693 by organizing neighborhood prayer societies for slaves and free blacks, and later offering to hold meetings for them in his own home. In 1706, he published The Negro Christianized to encourage similar efforts throughout the province, at the very same time that his North End congregation presented him with the gift of a slave to assist him with his household chores. Following his own principles, Mather worked to educate his slave, whom he named Onesimus after the runaway slave who became St. Paul's servant. Mather also allowed him to earn an independent income outside the household, a practice not uncommon in colonial Boston. Even as Mather reminded his neighbors that slaves are "Men, and not Beasts," The Negro Christianized reinforced the notions that no inconsistency existed between slaveholding and Christianity and that neither baptism nor Christian instruction compelled masters to free their bondservants.33 19
      None of these contradictory developments concerning the problem of slavery in Boston occurred in isolation. Opposition to the slave trade and attempts to define slavery and control slaves represented parts of a general movement within Boston to counter the recent rise in social disorder and dislocation. The conversation about African slavery emerged out of a multifaceted reform program that included the war on piracy; attempts to curtail the Indian slave trade; the renewal of missionary work among New England's Indians; the formation of religious societies for young people, sailors, and servants; the creation of social institutions to heal the sick, combat poverty, and support widows, orphans, and refugees; and the reform of commerce and regulation of public markets in Boston.34 From 1690 onward, Bostonians vigorously addressed all these issues in a variety of interconnected forms, ranging from province-wide legislation to the actions of local churches and informal societies, all of which can be traced in an extensive paper trail of legal records, pamphlets, newspaper controversies, and diary entries. 20
      The ubiquitous Cotton Mather powerfully summarized this activity in a sermon preached before the General Court in November 1709 and published (with a dedication to Samuel Sewall) the following year as Theopolis Americana.35 Here, amid an exhaustive list of social reforms, Mather proposed a compromise position on slavery, much like the one he had offered in The Negro Christianized. Taking his cue from Richard Baxter, the famous English dissenting divine, Mather denounced slave traders who "go as Pirates, and Catch up poor Negroes ... to make them Slaves, and Sell them" as "the common Enemies of Mankind." Quoting Baxter's Christian Directory, Mather further declared that slave owners who "use them as Beasts, for their meer Commodity, and betray, or destroy, or neglect their Souls, are fitter to be called, Incarnate Devils, than Christians." Yet at the same time, Mather argued, "when we have Slaves in our Houses, we are to treat them with Humanity; we are so to treat them that their Slavery may really be their Happiness." Through the judicious application of the "Golden Rule of Charity" with respect to slavery (and every other activity in the marketplace), Mather imagined that Boston might become the Holy City of Revelations 21.21, its streets paved with pure gold.36 21

 
Figure 5
    Cotton Mather. Mezzotint after 1727 Peter Pelham portrait. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
 
 
      Just as Boston's problems resulted from changes occurring throughout the Atlantic world, so too did the town's responses. Renewed religious zeal and the developing program of reform found inspiration in the newly resurgent Protestant International. With the accession of William III in 1689 and the passage of royal succession to the electoral house of Hanover in 1704, British interests merged with those of Dutch and German Protestants. On the margins of these political connections, evangelical Protestants, dissenters, and pietists throughout northern Europe strengthened their international ties. Reforming societies emerged among dissenters in Britain in the 1690s and, together with the newly founded Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), worked to reform the manners and morals of every social class, within and without the Church of England. These activist societies in Britain then reached out to forge strong connections with like-minded Dutch, German, and Danish reformers. The beehive of pietist activism at Halle, in Saxony, the most notable of these efforts, saw the remarkable August Hermann Francke presiding over a bewildering array of charitable, educational, and missionary endeavors.37 22
      Besides sharing similar theological positions and reforming ambitions, these far-flung organizations united around the idea that the global proportions of Catholic-Protestant warfare linked the military contest for Europe to the scramble for worldwide colonial domination. As their ambitions expanded, evangelicals throughout Protestant northern Europe saw it as their mission to compete with the Catholic powers for cultural hegemony. The SPCK sent its missionaries and pious publications throughout the Americas, and the Halle pietists did likewise in India, believing they needed to keep pace with the Jesuits.38 23
      Evangelicals found motivation in the desire to substantiate their claims that Protestantism represented a religion of freedom and that Catholicism was just another form of slavery. They sought to manifest these presumed differences in their treatment of pagans and heathens throughout the world, as well as their care and education of the poor and the persecuted at home. In their efforts to found orphanages and religious academies, publish and distribute cheap Bibles and devotional tracts in dozens of languages, support missions, and rescue Huguenot, Palatine, or Salzburg refugees from Catholic persecution, Francke and the Halle pietists pursued a common theme. They aimed to heal divisions within the Protestant world, expand Protestant Christianity's appeal, and counter the Roman Catholic threat.39 24
      For Bostonians like Samuel Sewall, the dream of a unified and truly Protestant church militant had always been appealing. Sewall, like many of his fellow Bostonians, had an eschatological cast of mind. He was fond of reading the Heidelberg theologian David Pareus, who wrote millennial speculations during that brief utopian moment in the early seventeenth century when the marriage of Frederick, the Elector Palatine, and Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England, raised hopes that a unified Protestant Christian power would emerge at the Heidelberg court.40 That dream was crushed when Frederick, lacking support from his father-in-law, failed in his bid for the Bohemian throne in 1618, plunging Europe into thirty years of religious war. So long as James and his Stuart successors—reluctant Protestants at best, open Catholic sympathizers at worst—remained on England's throne, New England's vision of a unified international Protestant alliance remained remote. But with the Stuarts gone the dream reemerged. Locally, this transformation prompted a sudden upsurge in millennial speculation—Sewall published his own tract, Phaenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica, in 1697.41 25
      Other Boston merchants and politicians, aided by a restless clergy, reached out to the newly resurgent and sympathetic Protestant International. European editions of Increase and Cotton Mather's descriptions of New England's Indian missions found eager audiences, particularly among Halle pietists who used them to shape their own missionary plans.42 Soon a correspondence network formed. The Mathers, Sewall, and other Bostonians forged ties, by way of Henry Newman, a Boston native who moved to London and became the secretary of the SPCK, to Anton Wilhelm Boehm, Francke's protégé and court preacher at St. James's, and then through Boehm to Francke himself.43 By the time Cotton Mather published Theopolis Americana in 1710, his vision of Christian social reform in Boston already showed the profound influence of Francke and the Halle pietists.44 Soon Mather corresponded directly with Halle's missionaries in India, and in 1721 he published this correspondence as India Christiana, a how-to guide for Protestant world missions. 26
      From Theopolis Americana to India Christiana, Mather had constructed a consistent argument characterizing the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery as an impediment to the expansion of true Christianity and therefore an obstacle in the ongoing war against popery and the anti-Christ. Antislavery ideas were thus bound up in the package of evangelical reform that Bostonians shipped out to their correspondents throughout the Atlantic world.45 Never one to miss an opportunity, Sewall included spare copies of The Selling of Joseph in his overseas correspondence, as he dreamed of "bombing" the Spanish New World colonies with vulgate Bibles, godly tracts, and antislavery ideas.46 27
      The Selling of Joseph, then, was not the first salvo in a concerted antislavery movement but an early statement in a complex conversation in which slavery took its place among a host of social and ideological issues animating the Protestant world. The experiences of Jonathan Belcher, a prominent Boston merchant and politician, can help us better see how slavery fit into this constellation of ideas. Belcher will never be mistaken for an antislavery hero. He and other members of the Belcher family occasionally trafficked in slaves, and liveried slaves catered to their domestic needs.47 But Belcher did not lack all sensitivity for the problem of slavery. In 1704, as a young man expanding his horizons through travel, he encountered a spectacle of a sort rarely seen in his native Boston. A slave had escaped bondage, not for the first time, and his indignant master tried to negotiate his return from hiding. Belcher described it this way:
[the] young boy ... had run away ..., which was the 4th time he had done so. The 3d he was taken, he was kept 15 days in prison and fed on bread and water, and now [the master] sent him word if he would promise to run away no more, he'd only cut off 2 of his fingers. His answ: was he wd run away a thousand times, if he did not hang him.48
 Such scenes may seem typical of the brutal plantation economies of Jamaica or Barbados, places Boston merchants commonly visited. The runaway slave in this case, however, was not a sugar cane worker but an accomplished oboe player. He had fled from the royal court of Hanover, where Belcher was staying while on an extended tour of northern Europe.49 The brutal master was none other than the Hanoverian Elector, who in a decade would ascend to the throne of Great Britain as George I. According to the horrified Belcher, "the hautboyes are all slaves, the Elector buyes 'em from one at Cassel, who breeds them up and sells 'em afterwards."50		 28
      The cruelty of the future king was not the only example of brutality toward bound labor that Belcher witnessed on his European tour. When he visited the famous silver mines in the Hartz mountains, source of the Elector's fabulous wealth, Belcher commented at length on the harsh treatment of the miners who served under terms that a later age would call wage-slavery.51 At the palace of the King of Prussia, outside Berlin, Belcher met the famous philosopher G. W. Leibniz. In all earnestness, he informed Belcher about a local apothecary's apprentice who had discovered the secret of turning lead into gold. The unfortunate alchemist had fled the grasp of the King of Prussia only to be captured by the King of Poland and imprisoned at Dresden, "where he now continues" making gold for the king, "but not enough for him.52 Even (or especially) at the heart of European courtly refinement, Belcher could not escape the presence of slavery. 29
      When the Princess Sophia, George I's mother, asked Belcher, the exotic American, to send her some of the indigenous wonders of the New World, Belcher happily obliged. On a return visit to Hanover, he presented the princess with the gift of a native American slave, a boy he named "Io." The Princess was overjoyed, for now she had her own heathen servant to match the "Turkish" captives (African Muslims) her son had won in battle: "she took a great liking to the boy, she kept him at Court in his own habit, and [he] always stood with a plate behind her chair at table."53 Sophia "immediately put him to school to learn to speak and write high Dutch and French and told me would have him instructed in the Christian religion." Belcher's comment on the Indian's fate is telling: "If he behaves himself well, his fortune is made for this world."54 30
      This story, set alongside the narrative of the unfortunate oboe player, offers insight into Belcher's views on servitude, power, and despotism. The Elector might be a tyrant and brute, but not all forms of servitude were necessarily based on brutality. What redeemed the otherwise slavish relationship between the Indian servant and the princess, or, for that matter, what redeemed Belcher's own servile relationship with the princess, was the quality of Christian charity that infused it—the belief, as Cotton Mather was soon to express it, that "their Slavery might really be their Happiness." Belcher's attitude, then, approximated that of Cotton Mather and virtually all of Boston's worthies, save Samuel Sewall, who took an interest in the problem of slavery. The brutalities and injustices of the institution could be horrifying, but slavery in the service of Christian advancement raised few objections. Indeed, a hint of envy appears in the aspiring Belcher's description of Io's secure future—what higher aspirations could a commoner have than to be a servant to royalty? 31

 
Figure 6
    Jonathan Belcher. By Franz Lippoldt, 1729, oil on canvas. Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
 
 
      After twenty-five years of behaving himself well, Belcher's own fortune was made through his Hanoverian contacts. George II did Belcher the honor of making him a "servant" by appointing him royal governor of Massachusetts. In that capacity, Belcher entertained a visitor from Hanover, a young nobleman whose travels in the American colonies mirrored Belcher's youthful tour of Germany. Baron Philip von Reck, the nephew of George I's ambassador to Vienna, served as the commissioner in charge of a group of Protestant refugees expelled from Salzburg in 1731 by the Catholic archbishop. After helping the Salzburgers settle in the newly founded colony of Georgia, the Baron set out on a tour of Britain's American colonies, hoping to raise money for his charges. His travels eventually brought him to Boston. The town's piety, its charitable institutions, and its commercial life, which aspired to the highest European standards, impressed Reck. But what most struck him was the contrast he saw between Boston and those American places, such as Jamaica, South Carolina, or even New York City, that "swarm with Negroes" and where masters cruelly mistreated slaves and deprived them of Christian education. Somehow, perhaps through his education among German pietists, this young Hanoverian nobleman had imbibed antislavery notions, and these notions caused him to appreciate the significant difference between Boston and other Atlantic cities where the slave trade had proceeded unrestrained.55 32
      The transatlantic current that links Samuel Sewall and Jonathan Belcher to Baron von Reck is one of many such currents through which the conversation on slavery among evangelical Protestants flowed in the early years of the eighteenth century. In this context, antislavery thought did not constitute a movement or a cause; no direct line of influence or single idea connects it to an antecedent or a consequence. Rather, the discussion of slavery was one element that bubbled along and occasionally rose to the surface within an amorphous stream of common interests and overlapping purposes generated by the specific circumstances of a historical moment. By locating The Selling of Joseph in this context, we gain a better sense of how antislavery thought arose in conjunction with a historically peculiar set of circumstances and concerns that simultaneously gave it voice and limited its coherent development. By charting its meandering course, we gain a richer understanding of how the stream of antislavery thought would one day break free from its original channels, merge with others, and become a powerful and effective force around the Atlantic world. 33


MARK A. PETERSON, associate professor of history, University of Iowa, is the author of The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (1997) and is currently at work on a book about Boston in the Atlantic World, 1630–1860.


NOTES

1. Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (Boston, 1700), reprinted in The Diary of Samuel Sewall, ed. M. Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. (New York, 1973), 2:1117–1121. Cited hereafter as Sewall Diary.

2.Sewall Diary, 1:432–433.

3. Lawrence Towner, "The Sewall-Saffin Dialogue on Slavery," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., vol. 21 (1964): 40–52.

4. Indeed, a history of slavery in Massachusetts published just after the final abolition of slavery in the United States reprinted Sewall's pamphlet in full, "probably for the first time in the [19th] century," arguing for its "rarity and peculiar interest" and claiming that it had been "unknown to our historians" and that there had been "no quotation from it later than 1738, when it was reprinted in Pennsylvania." George H. Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts (New York, 1866), 82–87. In addition, the Massachusetts Historical Society reprinted The Selling of Joseph in 1863 when Robert C. Winthrop presented the Society with a copy of Sewall's rare tract. Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 7 (1863): 161–165. See Towner, "The Sewall-Saffin Dialogue on Slavery," and David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York, 1966), 341–348, for further discussions of the limited influence of The Selling of Joseph.

5.Sewall Diary, 2:1117.

6. Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery, 48–50; Lorenzo Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York, 1968), 79–95. Both Moore and Greene cite the same sources, rough estimates made by colonial officials of the city's and province's slave populations.

7. Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 20–26. On the Royal African Company, see Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London, 1997), 254–255, 266–267; and Kenneth Davies, The Royal African Company (New York, 1970), 129–152.

8. Mary Rowlandson was the most famous of the many captives exchanged during the two-year war between English colonists and an Indian coalition led by Metacom. See Russell Bourne, The Red King's Rebellion: Racial Politics in New England, 1675–78 (New York, 1990); and Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origin of American Identity (New York, 1998). On the Pequot War, see Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst, Mass., 1996).

9. Cotton Mather, Decennium Luctuosum (1699; New York, 1978), provides a detailed and thoroughly biased account of the war from Puritan New England's perspective. For a modern account, see Philip S. Haffenden, New England in the English Nation, 1689–1713 (Oxford, Eng., 1974).

10.Sewall Diary, 1:176.

11. See John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York, 1994); Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, "Revisiting the Redeemed Captive: New Perspectives on the 1704 Attack on Deerfield," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., vol. 52 (1995): 3–46.

12.Sewall Diary, 2:1118.

13. "Cotton Mather's Letter Justifying His Part in Nelson's Capture and Release," in Richard R. Johnson, John Nelson, Merchant Adventurer: A Life between Empires (New York, 1991), 142–145.

14. On the controversy over the Port Royal garrison, see Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid, The New England Knight: Sir William Phips, 1651–1695 (Toronto, 1998), 86–109, 156–160.

15.Sewall Diary, 2:1120.

16.Sewall Diary, 1:156; Letter-Book of Samuel Sewall, vols. 1 and 2, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 6th ser. (Boston, 1886) 1:28, 34, 38, 45, 49, 76–77, 112, 234–235 (hereafter, Sewall Letterbook). See also Cotton Mather, A Pastoral Letter to the English Captives in Africa (Boston, 1698).

17. For a vivid example, see John Barnard, Ashton's Memorial: An History of the Strange Adventures and Signal Deliverances of Mr. Philip Ashton (Boston, 1725), along with numerous other examples reprinted in George Francis Dow and John Henry Edmonds, The Pirates of the New England Coast, 1630–1730 (New York, 1996).

18. Dow and Edmonds, Pirates of the New England Coast, 99–115.

19. On Sewall's role in organizing Huguenot refugee relief efforts in Boston, see Sewall Diary, 1:406n; C. C. Smith, "The French Protestants in Boston," in The Memorial History of Boston, ed. Justin Winsor, 4 vols. (Boston, 1886), 2:249ff.; Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). On the difficulties in resettling Maine refugees during King William's War, and the involvement of the refugees in the witchcraft crisis, see Cotton Mather, Decennium Luctuosum, and John McWilliams, "Indian John and the Northern Tawnies," The New England Quarterly 69 (1996): 580–604. Sewall believed that his grievous errors as a judge in the witch trials had led directly to God's punishment of himself and his family, including the death of his infant daughter. In a public confession at his church in 1697, he expressed his desire "to take the Blame and Shame of it, Asking pardon of Men." Sewall Diary, 1:366–367.

20. Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of American Revolution, abridged ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 33–39, is attuned to the social problems Boston faced during the wars of the 1690s but does not attend to the traffic in human beings as part of the problem. See also G. B. Warden, Boston, 1689–1776 (Boston, 1970).

21. Jonathan I. Israel and Geoffrey Parker, "Of Providence and Protestant Winds: The Spanish Armada of 1588 and the Dutch Armada of 1688," in The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact, ed. Jonathan I. Israel (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 335–364; Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), 24–63, 122–147.

22. Stewart P. Oakley, William III and the Northern Crowns during the Nine Years War, 1689–1697 (New York, 1987).

23. Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, 266; John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985), 162–163; Richard Pares, Yankees and Creoles: The Trade between North America and the West Indies before the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1956).

24. Sewall himself even handed out copies of Louis's revocation of the Edict of Nantes and recorded the rumors of Louis's death in his diary. Sewall Diary, 1:92, 176, 330–331, 365, 393, 492, 530, 801. See also Cotton Mather, A Letter Concerning the Terrible Suffering of our Protestant Brethren, on board the French King's Galleys (Boston, 1701).

25. For another example of the porous boundary between privateering and piracy, consider the strange case of Thomas Pound. A former naval officer condemned for piracy in Boston and sent as a prisoner to England in 1690, Pound redeemed himself when his transport ship was attacked by a French privateer and he fought valiantly in its defense. Shortly after his arrival in England, Pound was rewarded with the command of a Royal Navy frigate. See Dow and Edmonds, Pirates of the New England Coast, 54–72.

26. Philip Otterness, "The Unattained Canaan: The 1709 Palatine Migration and the Formation of German Society in Colonial America" (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1996); Mack Walker, The Salzburg Transaction: Expulsion and Redemption in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca, 1992).

27.Sewall Diary, 2:1119–1120.

28.Sewall Diary, 2:1117–1118.

29. Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery, 52.

30. Lorenzo Greene described this body of legislation as "The Machinery of Control." The Negro in Colonial New England, 124–143. See also Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery, 52–58; Robert C. Twombly and Robert H. Moore, "Black Puritan: The Negro in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., vol. 24 (1967): 224–242.

31.Sewall Diary, 1:532.

32. See James J. Allegro, "'Increasing and Strengthening the Country': Law, Politics, and the Antislavery Movement in Early Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts Bay," The New England Quarterly 75 (2002): 5–23, for a discussion of legislative efforts to limit slavery and promote the importation of white servants in this era.

33. Cotton Mather, Rules for the Society of Negroes (Boston, 1693); Cotton Mather, The Negro Christianized (Boston, 1706). See also Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York, 1984), 263–265.

34. For example, Cotton Mather's organization of religious education for slaves began as a continuation of work that John Eliot had begun at the end of his life, work that Eliot saw as an extension of his missionary work with Indians. See Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 237–238, 263–267.

35. For an overview of these reform movements, see Warden, Boston, 101–126; Mark A. Peterson, The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 163–190. Cotton Mather's Bonifacius: An Essay Upon the Good (Boston, 1710), was a compendium of two decades of effort along these lines. The extensive publication of reforming pamphlets was itself part of the effort—the realization that the press could be used to promote social change led to the publication of dozens of polemical and exhortatory pamphlets, much of it by the clergy. See George Selement, "Publication and the Puritan Minister," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. ser., vol. 37 (1980): 219–241.

36. Cotton Mather, Theopolis Americana: An Essay on the Golden Street of the Holy City (Boston, 1710), 15, 21–22; Sewall Diary, 2:628–629.

37. On English reforming societies and the SPCK, see W. K. Lowther, Eighteenth-Century Piety (London, 1944); and W. O. B. Allen and Edmund McClure, Two Hundred Years: The History of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1698–1898 (New York, 1970). On Francke and the Halle Institute, see F. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism during the Eighteenth Century (Leiden, 1973), 1–88; and Gary R. Sattler, God's Glory, Neighbor's Good: A Brief Introduction to the Life and Writings of August Hermann Francke (Chicago, 1982). For the connections forged between the two groups, especially by way of A. W. Boehm, Francke's protégé and court preacher to Queen Anne's consort, Prince George of Denmark, see W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 302–307; and Arno Sames, Anton Wilhelm Böhme: Studien zum ökumenischen Denken und Handeln eines halleschen Pietisten (Göttingen, 1990).

38. A crucial text in promoting the SPCK's worldwide missionary efforts was the revised edition of Patrick Gordon, Geography Anatomiz'd; or The Compleat Geographical Grammar (London, 1699), which offered a lengthy appendix summarizing the holdings of European powers in "Asia, Africk, and America" and offered "some Reasonable Proposals for the Propagation of the Blessed Gospel in all Pagan Countries" (391–402). on the influence of Gordon's Geography, see Clarke, Eighteenth-Century Piety, 91–95. Cotton Mather summarized Halle's missionary efforts, emphasizing the contest between Protestant and Jesuit missionaries and the advantages held by the latter, first in Nuncia Bona e Terra Longinqua: A Brief Account of Some Good & Great Things a Doing for the Kingdom of God in the Midst of Europe (Boston, 1715); and again in India Christiana (Boston, 1721).

39. August Hermann Francke, Pietas Hallensis: or, an Abstract of the Marvellous Footsteps of the Divine Providence, trans. A. W. Boehme (London, 1707); Cotton Mather, India Christiana, 64.

40. See Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London, 1972). David Pareus's writings were a direct influence on Sewall's argument in The Selling of Joseph. See Sewall Diary, 2:1119.

41. Increase and Cotton Mather's many apocalyptic writings were also products of this era; in particular, Cotton Mather's fervent belief in 1715 that the millennium was imminent was linked to the death of Louis XIV that year. The Diary of Cotton Mather, vols. 7 and 8, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 7th ser. (Boston, 1912), 8:333; Cotton Mather, Shaking Dispensations: ... with some Useful Remarks on the Death of the French King (Boston, 1715).

42. Cotton Mather, Triumphs of the Reformed Religion in America: The Life of the Renowned John Eliot (London, 1691); Increase Mather, Ein Brieff von dem glucklichen Fortgang des Evangelii bey den West-Indianern in Neu=Engeland an den beruhmten Herrn Johann Leusden (Halle, 1696).

43. Kuno Francke, "The Beginning of Cotton Mather's Correspondence with August Hermann Francke," Philological Quarterly 5 (1926): 193–195; Leonard W. Cowrie, Henry Newman: An American in London, 1708–1743 (London, 1956); Richard Lovelace, The American Pietism of Cotton Mather (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1979).

44. In the same year, Mather published the even more elaborate Bonifacius: An Essay upon the Good, which also shows the influence of Halle pietism. For some traces, see David Levin's edition (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), esp. 138–142.

45. In 1731, when Paul Dudley, a Boston merchant and avid reader of international Protestant literature, penned a rabid attack on Roman Catholic practices, he resorted constantly to the language and form of antislavery discourse, even though his argument had almost nothing to do with chattel slavery. Dudley was too thoroughly grounded in this ongoing conversation not to be steeped in its vocabulary and style of thinking. See Paul Dudley, An Essay on the Merchandize of Slaves and Souls of Men, with an Application thereof to the Church of Rome (Boston, 1731). In 1700, Dudley, then in London, was among the first of Sewall's overseas correspondents to receive a copy of The Selling of Joseph—Sewall "entreated his Censure of it." Sewall Letterbook, 1:245.

46. For examples, see Samuel Sewall to Henry Newman, Joseph Lord, and John Higginson, in Sewall Letterbook, 1:297–299, 324–326. Cotton Mather was equally willing to send great sheaves of his reforming publications to his worldwide correspondents: his diary for February 1709/10 reads, "I send Numbers of Books, to serve the Designs of Religion, in the other Plantations. Yea in England, in Scotland, in Ireland, in Saxony," and his first letter to Francke at Halle included examples of publications that Mather called "the true American Pietism." Diary of Cotton Mather, 8:25–27.

47. Michael C. Batinski, Jonathan Belcher, Colonial Governor (Lexington, Ky., 1996).

48. Jonathan Belcher, A Journal of My Intended Voyage and Journey to Holland, Hannover, &c, July 8, 1704 to October 5, 1704, p. 45, Massachusetts Historical Society.

49. This was the same royal court that G. F. Handel had only just left to pursue his musical career in England. On courtly life at Hanover during the era of George I, see Maria Kroll, Sophie, Elecress of Hanover (London, 1973); and Joyce Marlow, The Life and Times of George I (London, 1973).

50. Belcher, Journal, 45.

51. Belcher, Journal, 63–68. For a contemporary description of the Hartz mines, see Georg Henning Behrens, The Natural History of the Hartz Forest (London, 1730).

52. Belcher, Journal, 76–78. On Leibniz's interest in and experience with alchemy, see Roger Ariew, "G. W. Leibniz, Life and Works," in The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, ed. Nicholas Jolley (Cambridge, Eng., 1995).

53. For a portrait of the Hanoverian Royal family attended by their Turkish servants, Mahomet and Mustapha, see Marlow, Life and Times of George I, 71.

54. Jonathan Belcher to "Dear Brother," Nov. 16, 1708, Belcher Miscellany, Princeton University Library. Little else is known of the fate of this Indian servant, though the story raises intriguing possibilities. The name "Io" may be derived from classical mythology, where Io was the name of a servant girl taken by Zeus as a lover, transformed into a heifer because of Hera's jealousy, then eventually restored to human form and elevated to the status of the gods (Hercules was her descendant). Perhaps Belcher bestowed this name on the Indian slave, who may have been a wartime captive, expecting him to be similarly transformed through contact with royalty.

55. This is not to say that von Reck's observations were accurate, only that they reveal his attitudes about slavery. See "Travel Diary of Commissioner Von Reck," in Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in America ... Edited by Samuel Urslperger, ed. George Fenwick Jones (Athens, Ga., 1968–1972), 1:116–134. By this time, Jonathan Belcher, while still a slave owner and occasional slave trader, had developed what he considered an enlightened attitude on the subject—he disapproved of transactions that threatened slave families. See Jonathan Belcher to Cuthbert Campbell, The Belcher Papers, vol. 7, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 6th ser. (Boston, 1894), 7:410.

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