Unfreedom by Jared Ross Hardesty

Author:Jared Ross Hardesty [Hardesty, Jared Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: IDENTIFIER: Hardesty
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2016-01-14T05:00:00+00:00

While it is easy to demonstrate the workplace autonomy experienced by Boston’s slaves, it had a deeper meaning, one that allowed slaves to shape the terms of their enslavement to their own ends. The vibrant working world of a cosmopolitan seaport like Boston meant that slaves were employed in a variety of different professions, each with its own set of restrictions and freedoms. Slaves manipulated these limitations to capitalize on the autonomy offered by an urban work environment. Important to understanding how this happened is the concept of boundaries—both those of enslavement and the labor regimen and those constructed by slaves in their own working lives. We need to analyze not only how slaves behaved in the workplace but also their relationships with coworkers and, in some cases, coconspirators, bosses, and other enslaved people they encountered. Examining how enslaved Bostonians protested working conditions, contested wrongful claims to their labor and interruptions to their working lives, and, most importantly, created a sense of self and personality built out of their workplace experiences allows us to understand these trends. Interpreting the meaning of labor independence illustrates how slaves challenged boundaries forced on them, while upholding boundaries they created and ameliorating their condition in the absence of a call for emancipation.

Complaints concerning working conditions were quite common among enslaved people, leading many to protest against them. Whether slaves worked in a distillery or in their owner’s home, they had plenty to complain about. Hours were long, the work was demanding and unrewarding, and masters and bosses were never completely satisfied. This led to a number of different types of protests that ranged from relatively benign to wildly destructive. Some were simple and straightforward, such as the enslaved boy who burned down his master’s barn, killing ten horses and a “Yoke of fat Oxen,” because the boy was “tired of tending the Creatures.”88

Compared to the simple protest in the preceding example, some slaves concocted more elaborate conspiracies to challenge their working conditions. Two examples help to illustrate this subterfuge. The first involved three slaves named Yaw, Caesar, and Betty, Yaw’s spouse. They belonged to Humphrey Scarlett and his wife, Mary. Scarlett owned a tavern, where his slaves worked. Although Yaw and Caesar often went on errands and purchased supplies for the tavern, they spent a considerable amount of time at the tavern itself. Mary Scarlett must have also been at the tavern often because both slaves later testified that she “plagued them everyday.” While the two men offered conflicting evidence, in spring 1731, they conspired to poison Mary, hoping to silence her annoying demands. Caesar acquired arsenic from another slave, as Yaw claimed he did not have the money to purchase it. Meanwhile, Caesar claimed that Yaw pestered him about the poison for a few months until mid-August, when he finally stole some of the poison from Caesar. Yaw mixed it into water, which was then used to make Mary’s drinking chocolate. This is where their plan went awry. Mary was the only person

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