Study Guide Social Hierarchies
Table of Contents
Resident Non-Members, Slaves, and Servants
Although many people think of slavery as part of the American South, slavery was legal in Massachusetts from the beginning of the colony until after the Revolutionary War (see Melish for more on this subject). Slavery was also a part of pre-contact Wampanoag society, though scholars have argued that the nature of this slavery was different from that in white culture. Servants and slaves comprised a low status group in both white and Wampanoag society. Thus, one of the lowest classes of people on the island both before and after colonization were strangers, slaves and servants. In Wampanoag society, resident non-members such as prisoners of war and their descendents did not have the same social status as full-fledged members of the community. These “non-members” of Algonquian communities also include servants and slaves (Bragdon 1996: 143). Social inferiors were expected to behavior in a deferential manner since etiquette was an important way of reinforcing the relative power of individuals without to having to resort to violence or threats (Bragdon "ES" 103-05, 108).
In white colonial society, servants and slaves were also accorded the lowest rung, just below women and children. Although not the majority, a substantial number of early immigrants to New England arrived as servants who had sold their labor for a set number of years in exchange for their passage to America and room and board (Archer 126). For whites, being an indentured servant was not only a way to escape debt or a bad lot, it was a possible way to learn a craft through an apprenticeship (Archer 107). Indenturement was seen as a positive and necessary way of taming unruly young men (Archer 106-07). Either way, the rights of servants were not much better than slaves, although they had the benefit of an end to their term. The majority of slaves in New England were of African descent; though Native Americans were also enslaved. During the seventeenth-century Native Americans comprised less than 1% of the slave population (Archer 126-28). Most New England Indians who were captured and enslaved were sold elsewhere, such as to the Caribbean. During the eighteenth century, however, many New England Algonquians served long terms as indentured servants. Moreover their racial assignment began to shift. For example, a 1772 Newport Mercury advertisement for Nathaniel Johnson, an "Indian boy" uses the same graphic employed by the Mercury in previous years to represent fugitive slaves (Newport Mercury, November 23, 1772; Issue: 742, p. 4). Indian and black intermarriage was on the rise in New England in the 1770s, and increasingly white New Englanders began to image "Indians" and "blacks" in a combined category of "colored" people (Silverman 232-33).
One of the many negative consequences of colonization on the island was that the status of the Wampanoag community was seemingly inverted: the colonists who at first were low-status foreigners, had established themselves as rulers; in contrast, members of the Wampanoag community came under financial strain and were forced to sell themselves and their offspring as indentured servants, often with the result that the children were dislocated into foreign communities as resident aliens. This servitude, along with their racial assignment in white communities, made Algonquians some of the least powerful members of white society.Items Related to Resident Non-Members, Slaves, and Servants in the Archive
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