New England Colonies - Slavery of Native Americans in New England

Slavery of Native Americans in New England

In the view of the Plymouth court, the enslavement of natives that were rebelling against English authority was quite lawful. This was a policy that had been going on for decades in Ireland, particularly at least since the time of Elizabeth I, and during the mid-17th century Cromwell wars in Britain and Ireland where large numbers of Irish, Welsh and Scots prisoners were sent as slaves to plantations in the West Indies, especially to Barbados and Jamaica.

The income provided by selling native American captives as slaves was helpful financially in covering war costs and in removing natives from the colony who were considered potentially dangerous - and in effect made more native lands available to English settlers.

One person among the colony hierarchy who did speak out at that time against enslavement of native Americans was military leader Benjamin Church, whose militia company ironically was responsible in August 1676 for the killing of King Philip. He said, in the summer of 1675 regarding the slavery of native Americans, “an action so hateful…that (I) opposed it to the loss of the good will and respect of some that before were (my) good friends.” This said, Church, like many Englishmen in the colony, would be an owner of African slaves himself.

Ships carrying native peoples as slaves began to leave New England ports for places far away late in 1675, and by the next summer the shipping out of slaves had turned into a regular process that removed what was considered dangerous native males by stating that “no male captive above the age of fourteen years should reside in the colony.” That fall, they had King Philip’s nine-year-old son in their hands and not known what to do with him - some wanted to execute the boy - but in the end he, as his mother had been, was shipped off as a slave.

It is estimated that during King Philip's War at least a thousand native Americans of New England were sold as slaves, with over half of those coming from Plymouth. By the end of the war, villages that were once crowded native American population centers were empty of inhabitants.