Slavery, Family, and Intimacy on New England Smallholdings

This paper places the relationships that bound people forged on smallholdings at the center of slave family life. In doing so, it supplies an instructive methodological intervention into the southern-centered historiography on the slave family, which has written the history of slave family life primarily by examining large plantations. After all, most slaves in the southern mainland colonies, nearly all slaves in the northern mainland colonies, and a surprising proportion of slaves throughout the Atlantic lived, labored, and raised their children on significantly smaller holdings than those that have been explored in the bulk of literature on black family life. This paper’s New England focus is strategic; New England may be the richest setting for the study of slave life on smallholdings in the early Atlantic, as the great majority of the region’s slaveholders owned very few Africans, and New Englanders created a vast array of records that shed light on black family life. Mining this rich historical record provides a striking new vantage on slavery and family. Afro-New Englanders lived in Euro-American homes with few, if any, other Africans, and the families they built differed starkly from those of slaves who lived on large plantations. While families in plantation settings often cohabited, were patrifocal in form, created sprawling networks of extended kin, and enjoyed a semblance of privacy in outbuildings set apart from their masters’ homes, the families of enslaved Africans in early New England were nearly always fractured, matrifocal, and unceremoniously lodged in garrets, cellars, or the corners of kitchens in Euro-American households. Clearly, when it came to building stable kin structures and maintaining intimacy, Afro-New Englanders faced significant challenges. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that the region’s bound Africans invested deeply in efforts to embed themselves in kin communities – and some managed to create surprisingly resilient family ties