Slaves, Servants, Soldiers, Captives, and Wage-Earners: The Complex World of Indian Labor in Colonial New England

Despite the publication of several fine works recent works on labor in colonial America, we still know little about the role of Indian workers in English North America.  Native Americans contributed to the wealth of the regional economy and to the prosperity of individual English households not only through the transfer of assets in land and trade but also directly through their labor.  In fact, the most important religious, commercial and political figures in early New England eagerly sought Indian workers and incorporated them into their households.  Some of this labor was “voluntary,” but some was not: the English in New England waged two wars in the seventeenth century in which capturing Indians for use or for sale became a central goal.  Simultaneously, New England governments built a legal and jurisdictional system that effectively channeled a portion of the region’s Indians into labor for English households, a system whose reach widened in the 1700s.  New England elites participated in an Atlantic world of commerce, culture and law, and one of the salient new institutions in that world was slavery.  As human commodities, captive Indians helped the English in New England forge connections to the Atlantic world of slavery, and New England lawmakers incorporated insights drawn from these experiences in constructing the first legal definitions of slavery in English North America.  An even larger number of New England Indians, while nominally free, served as a pool of laborers.  Increasingly, Indians also represented a coveted target of military recruiters for provincial armies in the imperial wars in the northeast between 1676 and 1749.  My paper will sketch the processes by which some Indians lost control of their own labor and others leveraged their labor in order to preserve a degree of autonomy as they became part of a larger Atlantic economy.