Brethren by Nature by Margaret Ellen Newell
Part of an Ongoing Book Review Series
Margaret Ellen Newell’s Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, 2015) fills a significant gap in the history of American slavery scholarship. The book covers the history of capture and enslavement of Native Americans by English colonizers in North America from the moment of first contact to roughly the middle of the eighteenth century. By devoting the entire work to the history of the enslavement of Indians, and their numerous struggles to be free—whether through physical escape or legal challenges—Newell re-centers the history of North American slavery away from African slavery scholarship and toward those who were the first to be held in bondage by European (particularly English/British) colonizers in the Americas. By revealing the history of the enslaved Indians and tracing the development of Indian/Euro-American relations that transpired as a result, a broader but also deeper analysis of the story of slavery in North America is demonstrated. Moreover, by centering the historical lens upon New England, Newell debunks some long-held myths about the region during the colonial period. First, slavery flourished in New England during this era. Second, Native Americans made up a significant portion of the slave population. By asserting these points, and utilizing a wealth of primary sources throughout her work, Newell capably puts to rest the long-held assumptions that slavery was not popular in the New England colonies and that Native American slavery in particular was rare.
One of the first aspects of Brethren by Nature that sets it apart from most other modern works of academic history is its utter lack of a historiography. Most works of this kind devote an introduction, sometimes an early chapter, to the anthology of scholarship related to the topic at hand, offering a glimpse into how the author’s work is both similar and dissimilar to prior scholarship (either in its thesis or with its approach). At first glance, Newell’s lack of a historiography might give one pause for its seeming disinterest in being part of the historical discourse. Newell addresses this issue, however, when she notes that—for some reason—scholarship covering the enslavement of Native Americans in New England disappeared sometime soon after World War One. Newell, thus, does not have a world of historical scholarship from the past century to compare and contrast her work with. Such work is missing, and Brethren by Nature begins the filling of that vacuum, largely through its trove of primary sources, which include personal journals, court documents, and more.
Newell’s book is well organized, largely following events chronologically. More than the timeline utilized, however, points in the timeline when something of great significance—which impacts Indian-English relations or which mean further ramifications for Native American life—are highlighted. Early on, for example, Newell observes that the capturing of American Indians actually pre-dates the permanent English settlements of the early seventeenth century. English explorers prior to that time were kidnapping Native Americans and putting them into forced labor or selling them off in some of the global slave markets of the sixteenth century. Newell provides further emphasis on the impacts of (first) the Pequot war and (later) King Phillip’s War as moments of transition for Native Americans and the state of their freedom. The aftermath of King Phillip’s War (1675-1676), in particular, was a breaking point for Native American sovereignty, status, and power. As Newell observes, in the wake of that war, two thousand Indians—captured during the war—found themselves held in slavery. About twenty-five percent of them were sent to slave markets in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and even the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. “The rest remained to work in New England households, distributed through auctions” (159).
Though Brethren by Nature impressively demonstrates the ubiquity of Indian enslavement in colonial New England right up and through the American Revolution, it takes care not to treat those held in bondage or displaced by English settlement as passive participants of their own history. Conversely, Newell also does not overplay an argument for agency the way some works in recent decades have sought to do (an understandable motivation not to treat the enslaved as the objects they were treated as in their own time, but a tendency that can—at times--go too far in the other direction and actually undercut the reality of their experience). It is, in fact, the court cases, in which second and third-generation Indians challenge the legality of their enslavement in the eighteenth century that are some of the most uplifting and fascinating moments captured in this history. Newell makes sure to note that these cases became numerous and that many did not win on such grounds, yet there was a growing trend of these challenges and a growing feeling of support.
It is here where a mild critique can be offered to Brethren by Nature. The author asserts that the eighteenth-century New England court cases where figures like a defendant named Caesar won his freedom, was part of the earliest seeds of what would become a burgeoning abolitionist movement in what becomes the United States. It is not that Newell claims that from this era, abolition was inevitable. Quite the contrary, she observes that “the process of abolition in the North proved tortuous” (253). Her assertions that this can nevertheless be seen as the beginning of that slow abolition process is a viewpoint of the author and is not necessarily borne out of the primary texts.
Brethren by Nature provides something new by changing the focus of the history of North American slavery, especially its origins and particularly in New England, away from the history of the African Atlantic slave trade and back to its roots: that of Native American enslavement. The work accomplishes this without making light or diminishing the important work related to African slavery, but by demonstrating the vast primary sources available to ascertain the very real history of Indian enslavement in Colonial New England. The book works best when avoiding making connections to the later abolitionist movement and allows the history to more or less speak for itself. The work successfully argues that American Indians were the first in North America to be captured and enslaved by Europeans, including the English, and that Native American slavery in New England was not a footnote of history but a pervasive institution that transformed the lives of Indigenous Americans and British Americans alike. It is a work that is long overdue and is sure to inspire further scholarship going forward.
[James M. Masnov is a Columbian Distinguished Fellow at George Washington University, founder of History is Human, and author of Rights Reign Supreme: An Intellectual History of Judicial Review and the Supreme Court, published by McFarland Books and available here.]