They Are Men, and Not Beasts

This dissertation investigates the relationship between religion, slavery, and evolving notions of humanity in eighteenth-century colonial New England. During the seventeenth-century, New Englanders largely conceived of slavery in terms of their communal notion of society, which was characterized by a high degree of collective solidarity, and within this context the humanity of slaves went largely unquestioned. This communalist view of New England was gradually displaced by a more commercial ethos, expedited and then reinforced by commerce, the law, and travel narratives, in which slaves became dehumanized. Religion played a key role in this process as it mediated the shift toward a more individualistic view of Christianity, in which moral virtue and the treatment of slaves became something more associated with the lives of individual Christians rather than the larger society. This project discusses how many eighteenth-century New Englanders came to think about the humanity of African slaves in order to understand the influence that this thought had on their embrace of the institution of slavery. In order to do this, this dissertation investigates how New Englanders' original religious understanding of Africans as human beings who should be converted and integrating into the society, albeit at a much lower status, conflicted with social traditions that described them as animal-like, a legal system that came to define the majority of blacks in the region as property, and an economic system that encouraged thinking about African slaves as just another form of chattel. Rather than assuming that Christianity and slavery were inherently incompatible, this dissertation looks at how the religious convictions of many colonists changed to allow for the dehumanization of slaves, while others came to reject the institution of slavery instead. The first chapter of this project aims to situate its contribution by discussing works on slavery in the colonial period, religion in the colonial Northeast, and studies that focus on the evolution of slavery in the early Republic. Chapter two begins a discussion of eighteenth-century change by investigating how debates about slavery in colonial New England evolved. Both published supporters and opponents of slavery during the colonial period largely agreed that slaves were fully human, but by the time of the American Revolution, claims of their natural inferiority had gained support as people began to print tracts that explicitly questioned Africans' humanity. Chapter three begins a three-part discussion of how colonial culture functioned to distinguish blacks from whites and how this gradually led many colonists to accept the view that Africans were innately different than Europeans. The third chapter focuses on how Africans were portrayed as animal-like in many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel narratives, and chapter four goes on to discuss Massachusetts' legal codes and explains how the law there changed the status of slaves in New England over time, dehumanizing them by categorized them primarily as property. Chapter five adds to this discussion by explaining the relationship between the changing religious and economic cultures in New England and how these changes led colonists to embrace the dehumanization of slaves and the slave trade. The final chapter investigates how the above-mentioned changes influenced arguments about the validity of slavery in the early Republic. By the time of the Revolution, debates about the right to own slaves focused much more on whether Africans were best understood as humans or as lesser beings.