Colonial New England’s Timber and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (1690-1776)

Gabriel Masello Pequeno

The aim of this chapter is to present one possible approach to analyze the colonial history of New England, in light of one of the great concerns of the historical discipline. Over the years, an academic ideal has been established that North American society, especially the English colonies known as New England, were not associated with slavery, nor with its brutal relations with Atlantic history. Imbued with a narrative that reflects a democratic essence and a detachment from slavery, the so-called “myth of American exceptionalism” has been challenged by new contributions from historiography. Drawing on efforts related to World-Systems Theory, this chapter seeks to explore the history of Colonial New England and specifically its trade networks throughout the early modern period, as a way of deconstructing these usages of the past of the United States.

One of the starting points of this perspective lies on the other side of the Atlantic, in France. Beginning with the works of Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, still in the 19th century, various explanatory frameworks for the legitimization of empires were developed, especially in De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes, published in 1882.

Deeply disseminated in Brazil through the explanatory frameworks of “settler colony” and “exploitation colony,” the myth of American exceptionalism is presented to us as a formulation capable of guiding diagnoses of the struggles faced by developing countries (Junqueira, 2007). In this sense, a series of manuals and even textbooks produced by the Brazilian publishing sector helped expand this proposition. The settlement-exploitation dichotomy was also highly influential in Brazilian academia in the 1940s and 1950s.

In Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo, Caio Prado Júnior relies on a form of climatic determinism (Junqueira, 2007), to categorize the colonies of the southern and northern United States, a hallmark of later works attributed to developmentalists and dependency theorists. In the same vein, Formação Econômica do Brasil by Celso Furtado stands out for determining that the distinction between colonization processes in the Americas was radical, in an equation that considers the outcome of the so-called settler colonies as the developed countries.

The fact is that the explanatory frameworks of Prado Jr. and Furtado stemmed from Beaulieu’s contribution, in a movement that used the colonial past to explain the problems of the present. A thorough investigation of the colonial past of regions central to these studies seems to be a fruitful path for relativizing the myth of American exceptionalism, and New England, one of the most caricatured regions in terms of stereotype production and explanatory frameworks like those mentioned earlier, lends itself well to this investigation.

Conceived not only in the American imagination as the locus of the country’s democratic and political formation but also penetrated in their culture—perhaps explaining the choice of the name for its football franchise, located in Foxborough, Massachusetts, the New England Patriots—New England has traditionally been treated by American historiography as a region with a peculiar historical trajectory.

Looking at the United States itself, a lot of classic literature over the history of New England portrays the trajectory of the region as a determining factor in shaping the American character—promoting values such as individualism, democracy, and innovation. New England can be seen as the birthplace of these ideals in a way.

Criticisms have flowed from various fronts, mostly due to the ambiguity of the region’s role in this narrative of highlighting the American spirit. It is impossible to highlight the importance of the discussion without introducing the works of W. E. B. DuBois. Making a significant contribution to the main thesis of this chapter, DuBois was able, as early as the 1890’s, to suggest that in order to find slavery in New England, one should look not to the presence of black enslaved people at the colonies, but to their merchants who certainly had a lot to do with the slave trade. DuBois insights will be fundamental for the discussions ahead.

Returning to the dilemma around colonization, Jack Greene, in The Ambiguity of the American Revolution (1968), addressing the scientific inadequacy of using a colonization model as a key to explaining development, made it possible to reach one of the major questions guiding this work: how can slavery be integrated into discussions that so differentiate the models of the South and North of the country?

Kenneth Stampp’s classic The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (1989) daringly deconstructed some paradigms mobilized by the historiography of exceptionalism, particularly the idea that slavery in the United States was characterized by bonds of affection that mitigated its harshness—a movement similar to that of Gilberto Freyre in Brazil. Drawing on Stampp’s work, we can refocus on the specific economic dynamics of New England.

Jay Coughtry’s famous analysis, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and The African Slave Trade (1981), as influential as it is problematic within historiography, highlighted a central aspect of New England: its connections with Atlantic slavery. Although not as direct as the relationships in places like Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Charleston, or even Lisbon, Coughtry’s contribution to understanding New England brings with it a concern that can be repurposed beyond the author’s original focus on the controversial triangular trade thesis. By examining the complex web of trade networks that made up Colonial New England, we can find Atlantic slavery present in various forms and from different perspectives. One can even say—such as historian Ronald Bailey did—that Coughtry’s analysis were able to reveal as much about the relations between New Englanders and the transatlantic slave trade as other historic researches did back then. One of his great contributions to the discussion was the capacity of confrontating a persistent narrative that identified the British as the only responsibles for transporting slaves to the Continent. Coughtry’s exhaustive studies over Rhode Island merchants revealed a new way of addressing the issue.

Lorenzo Greene (1942) was also capable of noting the relations between New Englanders and the transatlantic slave trade. Focusing on the trajectory of specific families who became wealthy through the institution of slavery, the author was able to affirm that black enslaved work was a fundamental part of the development of New England, and that this institution was associated with all things related to wealth in the colonies—sugar, molasses, rum, shipbuilding, setillaries, fishing, agriculture, shipping.

Based on both Jay Coughtry and Lorenzo Greene’s frameworks is Ronald Bailey’s (1990) main thesis. Utilizing the data proposed by both authors, Bailey suggests that the wealth related to the institution of what he calls the “slave(ry) trade” shaped the industrial development of New England, and by consequence, of the United States. Bailey’s capability of association with W. E. B. DuBois famous thesis mentioned before, makes his approach one of the most complete narratives about the relations between New England and slavery in terms of the transatlantic slave trade. Bailey was capable of associating the entirety of New England’s identity in the world economy with slavery, building a great step forward from his predecessors. In his analysis, New England’s shipbuilding industry is identified as a key element to compose the narrative. But what raw material was necessary to this process?

This concern is the focus of my current master’s dissertation in progress, which aims to incorporate aspects of Immanuel Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins’ (1986) World-Systems Theory to examine the influence of one of the most important commodities of the early modern period: timber. Through the extensive timber trade network from its colonial forests, New England was able to supply the Caribbean sugar islands and their numerous sugar mills, with the raw materials that were necessary to sustain one of the most lucrative businesses associated with Atlantic slavery, as indicated by authors such as John J. McCusker, Russell Menard, James Shepherd, Robert Albion, Bernard Bailyn, Sean Kelley, Eric Kimball, Stroher Roberts, William Weeden, Shawn Miller, Keith Pluymers, and a series of other scholars engaged in this significant topic in American historiography.

However, this same timber was also involved in a process that Immanuel Wallerstein termed “the production of means of circulation” (Wallerstein, 1980) of the early modern period, and which Leonardo Marques later reconfigured as “the circulation of means of production” (Marques, 2021) of that same era: the shipbuilding industry. New England was responsible for providing a wide range of vessels for the British Royal Navy, as well as circulating various commercial ships to different locations within the Thirteen Colonies.

Adding up the factors of this vast equation, we arrive at a final product still unexplored by historiography: the shipbuilding industry of the Atlantic slave trade in New England. A quick search in the Slave Voyages database reveals that the region was responsible for producing slaving ships that together made over 500 voyages throughout the colonial period, representing more than 12,000 tons of timber used in their construction processes. Revealing the facets of this trade network, which had significant human impacts—associated with slavery but also with the exploitation of various forms of labor in timber extraction—and non-human impacts—associated with the environmental effects of timber exploitation—is an effort that proves fundamental for the ongoing process of dismantling the myth of American exceptionalism, as well as for constructing a longue durée history of accumulation, and so, of capitalism, in the terms of Fernand Braudel.

Using the filter “place of ship construction” combined with the regions of Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, reveals several factors in the database. Among these regions, the following cities/ports/sub-regions are included:

1. For Maine: Bath, Berwick, Biddeford, Calais, Camden, Troy, Freeport, Portland, Prospect, Richmond, Robbinston, Rockland, Sheepscut River, Wiscasset, Kittery Point, Orrington, Penobscot, Thomaston, Gardiner, Bangor, St. George, Falmouth, Nesterbury, Hampden, Hallowell, Nobleborough, Brewer, unidentified ports in Maine.
2. For New Hampshire: Piscataqua, Portsmouth, North Hampton, unspecified ports in New Hampshire.
3. For Massachusetts: Massachusetts Bay, Amesbury, Arundel, Boston, Chatham, Cohasset, Dighton, Duxbury, Freetown, Georgetown, Hingham, Kingston, Marblehead, Marshfield, New Bedford, Newbury, Salem, Salisbury, Salfatudas, Scituate, Swansea, Weymouth, Charleston, Newburyport, Nantucket, Plymouth, Dartmouth, Somerset, Sandwich, Braintree, Medford, Rochester, Taunton, Cambridge, Dedham, unspecified ports in Massachusetts.
4. For Connecticut: Bridgeport, Guildford, Haddam, New Haven, New London, Middletown, Hartford, Fairfield, Killingworth, Wethersfield, Seabrook, Mystic, Glastonbury, unspecified ports in Connecticut.
5. For Rhode Island: Bristol, Little Compton, Newport, North Kingston, Providence, Tiverton, Warren, Warwick, Westerly, Barrington, Chopmist, Narragansett, Smithfield, Cranston, unspecified ports in Rhode Island.

Combined with the applied filter for the place of ship construction is the temporal limit of this research, which covers ship records from 1690 to 1776. Thus, the data can be presented as follows:

Table 1. Involvement of ships built in New England (1690-1776) in Europe in terms of the number of enslaved individuals onboard

Decades	England and Wales	Scotland
1711-1720	661	0
1721-1730	6.436	0
1731-1740	8.670	0
1741-1750	22.840	0
1751-1760	24.683	236
1761-1770	28.273	457
1771-1780	21.542	0
1781-1790	2.333	0
1791-1800	1.099	0
1801-1810	1.147	0
Totals	117.684	693

Source: Slave Voyages Database; Retrieved 08 september 2024 from https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/NouZkPBA.

Table 2. Involvement of ships built in North America (1690-1776) in Colonial America in terms of the number of enslaved individuals onboard

Decades	Rhode Island	Massachusetts	Connecticut	New York	South Carolina
1711-1720	0	0	0	0	0
1721-1730	0	166	0	0	0
1731-1740	0	82	0	0	116
1741-1750	338	0	0	0	0
1751-1760	1.749	0	109	55	0
1761-1770	1.520	0	0	0	352
1771-1780	1.981	716	0	23	0
1781-1790	0	0	0	0	0
1791-1800	0	0	0	0	0
1801-1810	0	0	0	0	0
Totais	5.588	964	109	78	468

Source: Slave Voyages Database; Retrieved 08 september 2024 from https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/NouZkPBA.

Table 3. Involvement of ships built in New England (1690-1776) in the Caribbean in terms of the number of enslaved individuals onboard

Decades	St. Kitts	Dominica	Barbados	Other British Caribbean Locations
1711-1720	0	0	714	0
1721-1730	0	0	452	0
1731-1740	0	0	113	0
1741-1750	0	0	0	0
1751-1760	0	0	233	0
1761-1770	0	0	0	0
1771-1780	169	230	0	359
1781-1790	0	0	0	0
1791-1800	0	0	0	0
1801-1810	0	0	0	0
Totais	169	230	1.512	359

Source: Slave Voyages Database; Retrieved 08 september 2024 from https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/NouZkPBA.

Table 4. Involvement of ships built in New England (1690-1776)
in Africa in terms of the number of enslaved individuals onboard

Decades	Gold Coast
1711-1720	0
1721-1730	0
1731-1740	0
1741-1750	230
1751-1760	0
1761-1770	0
1771-1780	0
1781-1790	0
1791-1800	0
1801-1810	0
Totais	230

Source: Slave Voyages Database; Retrieved 08 september 2024 from https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/NouZkPBA.

Image 1. Dispersion Graphic: Year of Arrival at the Port of Disembark × Total Number of Enslaved Individuals Disembarked from Ships Built
in New England (1690-1776)

Source: Slave Voyages Database; Retrieved 08 september 2024 from https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/NouZkPBA.

Breaking down the data presented here is a complex effort that requires a range of tools not fully available in a short chapter. However, let us break down a few possible debates. If we take a look at table number 1, we have a growth pattern starting from the 1740’s going all the way to the 1770’s in terms of ships being active with British flags. In a way, those numbers can be associated with a few metrics from New England’s key shipbuilding regions. The Connecticut Valley was vital for places such as Ireland during the first years of the 1740s in terms of flaxseed exportations—sending around 80% of the shipments of the commodity to the region (Roberts, 2019, p. 91). It is possible to observe that the thesis many historians have presented throughout classic agendas is compatible with the evidence shown here: New England was a key region to the British Empire in terms of accumulation if we consider slave(ry) trade—in terms similar to those proposed by Ronald Bailey—as one of the main sources around the matter.

The data presented by table 2 would be of high value to the classic works of DuBois, Lorenzo Greene and Jay Coughtry. Not only does it utilize their historical investigation with sources to fulfill the real impact of the slave trade in New England, but it also can be utilized to confirm their thesis about the participation of New England merchants in the lucrative human trade. Sources such as the Slave Voyages database can help trace down owners and captains of those ships operating in the Atlantic, where one can be able to find the families listed by Greene’s research as the “Slavery Families” from New England. The importance of regions such as Rhode Island—the aim of Coughtry’s comprehensive data gathering—is also highlighted as the most relevant colony of the New England region in terms of slave ships operations till the end of the regular trade.

Tables number 3, 4 and 5 can represent some insights for further investigation as new agendas for the historiographical scenario: New England’s presence in the Caribbean and Africa in terms of slave ships. There is an emerging debate over the participation of New England merchants involving Mahogany on the Caribbean which can be seen at Jennifer Anderson’s more recent Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America, which can be added to the discussion, but the data shown here reveals an interesting aspect of the relation between these regions. If the relations between New England and the Caribbean sugar islands are being investigated through the lens of timber sold to the plantations, it can now be studied as timber-built vessels fit for the slave trade. It also reveals the main regions in Africa were enslaved people were captured, helping to trace down racial insights over the participation of New England-built vessels.

We believe that presenting the data itself is a fundamental step for historical investigation on the topic. Additionally, a quick review of the data highlights several issues for researchers to consider: the considerable number of enslaved individuals transported by New England ships (see Image 1) also provides a perspective on the colony’s involvement in the history of the English slave trade; the presence of ships in the Caribbean might suggest that the timber used for sugar plantations on the islands was also being employed in shipbuilding; the participation of New England ships in Africa, in terms of disembarkation levels, is significantly lower compared to other locations, even considering British settlements on the Coast; and the relationship between variations in the number of enslaved individuals onboard and the regulations imposed by the British Crown through the White Pine Acts, which reserved specific types of timber for the Royal Navy in New England. All these questions contribute to a multifaceted understanding of the history of the slave trade in New England.

The objective outlined by the investigation described here aligns with what Fernand Braudel described for the Mediterranean in his most significant work. For Braudel, following the “trail of successive highly illuminating documents” from that region (Philip II’s Spain), would be of little use if it did not ultimately lead to an awareness of “that multifaceted and bustling life” (Braudel, 1983, p. 25). The author concludes by positioning himself as a new chapter in historiography:

Subject to such stimuli, could I remain deaf to the appeal of a revolutionary economic and social history […] The attempt to address the history of the Mediterranean in its complex globality required […] a new form of history, rethought and elaborated by us, yet capable of transcending our own borders; a history aware of its tasks and responsibilities, and also eager, because compelled to do so, to put an end to old forms, even if not always with complete justice! (Braudel, 1983, p. 25, adapted)

This is the case with my dissertation in progress. While historiography has partially succeeded in subverting the logic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which produced a myth of American exceptionalism that separated New England from the history of slavery, it is now time to combine the new techniques, methods, and perspectives of our time to incorporate new paths into historical scholarship. While taking the North Atlantic as a space of connection, as many of the authors listed here have done, it is necessary to also consider the slave trade as a constitutive element of this dynamic, which made New England as crucial to the slave trade as it was to the consolidation of the American Republic.

To achieve this, the ongoing work summarized in this chapter relies not only on the bibliographic survey presented and the records from Slave Voyages, but also on documents involving colonial New England merchants held in The National Archives Kew, in the United Kingdom, and the National Archives in Washington, D.C., in the United States. Based on these references, the research aims to construct a comprehensive picture of the colonial timber trade and its intrinsic relationship with the naval industry of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

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