Freedom and Conflicts Over Class, Gender, and Identity: The Evolving Relationship Between Indians and Blacks in Southern New England, 1750-1870

Daniel Mandell

Assistant Professor of History

Truman State University

March 16, 2004

When African slaves began arriving in large numbers in New England after 1700, they often found Indians already living as unfree laborers in the same town; some even ended up in the same household. Members of both groups served as slaves, servants, and unskilled free laborers in rural villages and port towns. Their status and demographics as well as some aspects of their native cultures were quite compatible: many developed close friendships or married, and by the outbreak of the Revolution the two peoples seemed well on the way to forming a common “people of color.” But after 1790, subtle but noticeable distinctions emerged between Indian and African American cultures; these differences would generate conflicts within Indian tribes even as intermarriage and other connections continued to develop. The distinctions grew out of the efforts of many African American leaders earn a better place for their people in the new Republic, which included the embrace of values and practices that clashed with Native needs and traditions, particularly women’s leadership, community management of resources, and maintenance of the tribe rather than assimilation. By 1850, tribes that had struggled to maintain their communities felt threatened by the embrace by blacks of liberal values including individualism, privacy, competition, and civil equality.

During the eighteenth century, many individuals of African and Native ancestry in southern New England forged social and family relationships across ethnic lines. While one cannot generalize about African cultures from this period, nor indeed even more than guess about the customs of those who came to New England, West African and Eastern Woodland peoples may have shared similar traditions of animism, chiefdoms, and clan or village-based landholding.[1] Among the unwilling immigrants, such traditions may have grown in importance by the mid-eighteenth century as more slaves were brought directly from Africa. By the 1740s, Africans, Indians, and some whites were participating together in the annual "Negro election festivals” that took place in many port towns and rural areas.[2] African Americans who fled slavery for a short spell of relief or final freedom find refuge in Indian communities.[3] And a growing number of Indians and African Americans found enough commonality to readily form couples and create families.

These exogamous marriages were shaped by complementary demographic imbalances, as censuses of Indians in southern New England between 1765 and 1774 show about 60 percent more women than men, and those of slaves or blacks show the reverse.[4] Many New England villages held only a few blacks and Indians, and even in the region’s emerging cities many mixed couples formed. For example, in Providence in 1728, Aaron, a slave of African ancestry who belonged to Joseph Whipple, married Sarah Muckamugg, a Nipmuc from Hassanamisco who was a domestic (possibly indentured) in the household of Whipple’s son John.[5] Later accounts by white observers indicate that intermarriage between Indians and Africans became common after 1750.[6] By 1792, Natick minister Stephen Badger found it "almost impossible to come to any determination" of the number of Indians remaining in his congregation, for they "are intermarried with blacks, and some with whites; and the various shades between these, and those that are descended from them."[7]

Indians and blacks were also brought together by their shared legal and social status, created and reinforced by Anglo-American racial prejudices. For example, in 1703, the Rhode Island Assembly required "any negroes, or Indians, either freemen, servants, or slaves" walking the streets after nine at night to carry "a certificate from their masters" or to be accompanied by "some English person of said family." Similar measures existed in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and other colonies.[8] In 1706, Massachusetts banned marriages between whites and blacks, and in 1786 added Indians after slavery officially ended in the state; Rhode Island passed a similar measure as slavery ended.[9] And of course both Indians and Africans—creoles and natives—were treated in nearly identical ways in servitude. While African Americans may have been more deeply ensnared in permanent slavery, a very percentage of Indians in the region—perhaps a majority—were forced into servitude for many years. Many Indian children were held for up to two decades as indentured servants, and like blacks (and very poor whites) could be forcibly taken from poor parents and given to white families by town authorities.[10] Not surprising, by the Revolution most white New Englanders perceived Indians and Africans within the region in analogous ways. Such perceptions became more significant with the rising tide of Indian-African American intermarriage.[11]

Within Anglo-American New England lay another micro-world of small Indian communities, ranging in size from 100 to 4,000 acres, with anywhere from a few families to about 350 people. Indians in the region operated their reservations in ways that reflected colonial innovations and aboriginal traditions. Individuals, including women, could lay claim to and enclose land for crops and pass it to their children, although the lands of those who lacked heirs reverted to the community. Pastures and woodlands were managed in common and assigned to households on a yearly basis, and any resident could, at any time, cut needed firewood and building timber from the commons, hunt game, fish in the reserve's rivers and ponds, and take clams along its seashore.[12] The reserve represented community, culture, and a sacred past.[13] These traditions were, ironically, upheld by laws that barred the sale of Indian lands to outsiders and by guardians appointed by the legislatures.

African Americans who married into these communities benefited from access to their spouses’ kinship networks, the tribe’s land and resources, and freedom for their children; some even had their freedom purchased by their wives.[14] Initially, Indians lacked the racial prejudice of Anglo-Americans, and viewed marriage with outsiders regardless of skin color as a way to gain new knowledge and power. But that began to change in the last quarter of the century, as some began to try and check the rising rate of exogamous marriage.[15] These efforts may have been driven by existing tribal conflicts over power and land, as among the Mohegans who were divided by a century-old lawsuit that tried to reclaim land and challenged their traditional ruling family, the Uncases. In May 1773, the anti-Uncas faction led by Samson Occum agreed that the children of those who married "Negroes" would have no tribal rights; their opponents denounced this agreement and tried to discredit Occum and the others as foreigners and blacks.[16] This and other battles were also clearly shaped by the long rise of African slavery and Anglo-American racism, as the leaders struggled to distinguish themselves and their people by employing (without any sense of irony) the language of race. When Occum and his allies established the pan-tribal Brothertown, in Oneida territory, they barred “Negroes” and banned marriages with "persons of negro blood."[17]

Since most exogamous marriages involved Indian women and “foreign” men, gender became intermingled with race and power in these emerging conflicts. Brothertown’s founders limited the rights of women as well as blacks. The thirty-one Mashpees who complained in 1788 of "Negroes & English, who, unhappily, have planted themselves here, hath managed us, and it is to be feared . . . will get away our Lands & all our Privileges in a short time," were all men. About this time, Narragansett men developed a "very bitter feeling" against blacks when a noticeable number of the tribe’s women married African American men.[18] This was probably one reason why Rhode Island in 1792 limited Narragansett “citizenship,” including the right to vote in tribal council elections, to men with a Narragansett mother or father—but not those with “Negro” mothers.[19] And while such marriages were rare on Martha’s Vineyard before 1790, by the turn of the century men from Chappequiddick and Christiantown were very concerned about “their Females Marying Negroes whom they did not wish to have any right to their lands,” and some from Christiantown filed lawsuits between 1805 and 1813 to stop such marriages.[20]

After 1800, the rising tide of freedom created a gap between Indian and African American cultures and gave rise to two distinct though connected communities. While many people of color continued in servitude, particularly indentured children, and limited emancipation laws kept many African descendants in slavery, the emergence of a free black community was undeniable. The slave population in southern New England declined from about 10,000 in 1775 to about 3,500 in 1790.[21] Perhaps the most noteworthy characteristic of this emerging free black community was its urbanity. Most African Americans in the region already lived in port towns, particularly Boston, Newport, New Haven, and Providence, but with emancipation many who had lived in rural villages with white households joined them. In 1795, Jeremy Belknap told a Virginian correspondent that former slaves in Massachusetts "have generally, though not wholly, left the country, and resorted to the maritime towns. Between 1790 and 1800 the black population of Boston rose 53 percent; between 1790 and 1820, it increased 125 percent.[22] But freedom and new opportunities did not mean social and economic independence; in Providence, for example, it was not until 1810 that a majority lived in black-headed households.[23]

These urban communities soon established charitable organizations and churches that stressed their African roots.[24] In the early 1780s, blacks in Newport formed the Free African Union Society as a self-help fraternity to “improve” themselves and their community; when they invited those in Providence to form a chapter, they addressed their letter "To All the Africans in Providence." In 1787, Prince Hall in Boston formed the African Masonic Lodge to provide firewood and food for needy blacks; members paid weekly "sick dues" to create a fund for those unable to work. In 1796, members of Boston's Africa Society swore to "watch over each other in their Spiritual concerns . . . and to live soberly, righteously and Godly, in this present world."[25] Ten years later, the Society could meet in the new African Meeting House, which they shared with the year-old African Baptist Church. And in 1820, when the Providence African Union Meeting House became the first black church in the city, its dedication drew some of the most prominent whites in Rhode Island.[26] These organizations required their members to conduct themselves in ways that mirrored the emerging Anglo-American virtues of sobriety, punctuality, and industry, and they labored to inculcate those values in the black community. Many also sought to leave America and return to Africa.[27] This meant that the children of mixed marriages who were active members of the black community also had to commit themselves, publicly and privately, to "African" organizations.

During the 1820s, community leaders increasingly stressed their people’s intimate connection to American culture and history, including entrepreneurship and gender roles.[28] By 1830, New England blacks celebrated Emancipation Day or Haitian Independence (and tried to participate in Fourth of July parades) instead of Negro Election Day, and rejected returning to Africa.[29] Churches and schools became more important, and chose names that stressed their American nature; in 1837, the Boston African Baptist Church became the First Independent Baptist Church of People of Color of Boston "'for the very good reason that the name African is ill applied to a church composed of American citizens."[30] Beginning in 1830, annual meetings of the American Society of Free Persons of Color brought together delegates from African American communities in eleven states, forging a national network and identity that emphasized “the virtues of prudence, frugality, and purity.”[31] Ministers, businessmen, and writers urged their compatriots to work hard, establish their personal and community independence, and support and protect their women.[32] They urged women to stay at home and become guardians of the family, even though economic and social discrimination forced black wives to work. African Americans were not simply trying to emulate Anglo-American virtues, for blacks could not assume that they would soon be accepted as equal members of New England society. Instead, the evolution of these standards should be seen as part of the process of forming a free but separate community which would be as inclusive as possible, move closer to the dominant culture, and help black leaders forge beneficial relations with Anglo-American elites.[33]

These urbane, patriarchal, market-oriented values marked a deepening divide between African American and Indian communities. After the Revolution, Native groups remained closely connected to their rural ancestral lands, even as many men and women left for long periods to work in cities or on whaling ships. The mixed subsistence economy on tribal reserves, featuring hunting and cattle raising, farming and fishing, communal landholding and family allotments, and most notably the power of women to claim land, farm, and vote, formed the greatest surviving marker of Indian culture at the turn of the century. Native craft traditions become more significant as Indians found a growing market in the region for their baskets, mats, and other goods. These communities generally defended themselves and their reservations by reinforcing social and cultural boundaries in ways that emphasized birth, residence, and behavior. Full members with rights to communal resources included the descendants of those already recognized as Indians, those raised in any Indian enclave, and individuals who demonstrated their support for the community. Strong barriers barred the sale of land and resources to outsiders, and traditions of witchcraft and hostility to selfishness remained strong, discouraging changes such as intensive farming. Surviving stories underscore how community standards continued to condemn acquisition and the values of capitalism.[34]