New England and Caribbean Slavery
Harvard’s financial ties to slavery are multifaceted, and the economic links between colonial New England and the Caribbean provide critical context to understand such entanglements. Trade between New England and the West Indies proved so essential to both regions that one 17th-century observer declared Boston “the mart town of the West Indies.”Go to footnote 154 detail As early as 1667 the governor of the English colony of Barbados acknowledged that “these colonies cannot in peace prosper, or in war subsist, without a correspondence with” the New England colonies.Go to footnote 155 detail
While large-scale plantation slavery never took root in New England, for more than a century, Boston merchants played an essential role in sustaining the sugar plantation economy of the Caribbean; many of those same merchants were important players in Harvard’s early history. New England ships carried enslaved people and critical supplies to the Caribbean islands. They brought back slave-produced commodities like sugar and molasses, most of which was then re-exported throughout the British empire.Go to footnote 744 detail As early as the 1630s there were already more than 20 ships plying trade between New England and the British Caribbean.Go to footnote 156 detail As Edmund Burke observed in 1757, New Englanders became “carriers for all the colonies of North America and the West-Indies, and even for some parts of Europe. They may be considered in this respect as the Dutch of America.”Go to footnote 157 detail
Here, too, we begin with Governor John Winthrop. As the historian Wendy Warren has observed, “To understand New England not only by the labor done within its colonies but even more by the commodities that came and went is to understand New England as John Winthrop did, by its place in the world.”Go to footnote 158 detail Winthrop saw the region’s profitable trade with the West Indies, in particular, as a gift of God for the benefit both of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s economy and its reputation:
[I]t pleased the Lord to open to us a trade with Barbados and other Islands in the West Indies, which as it proved gainful, so the commodities we had in exchange there for our cattle and provisions, as sugar, cotton, tobacco, and indigo, were a good help to discharge our engagements in England. And this summer there was great a drouth [drought], as their potatoes and corn, etc., were burnt up; and divers London ships which rode there were so short of provisions as, if our vessels had not supplied them, they could not have returned home; which was an observable providence, that whereas many of the London seamen were wont to despise New England as a poor, barren country, should now be relieved by our plenty.Go to footnote 159 detail
Timber was of particular importance to New England merchants engaged in the triangle trade. Because ships could be built and rigged in New England using only the produce of the region’s forests, shipbuilding became a significant facet of its economy.Go to footnote 160 detail And with so much Atlantic trade focused on slave-grown commodities, Boston merchants soon became central to that industry as well. In 1700, Governor Richard Coote wrote that “more good vessels belong to Boston than to all Scotland and Ireland.”Go to footnote 161 detail Timber from New England was also used to build and rebuild the Caribbean’s sugar plantations, whose infrastructure required constant replacement: more than 75 hurricanes struck the region between 1700 and 1775.Go to footnote 162 detail
Trading connections grew stronger throughout the 18th century, as Caribbean planters relied on New Englanders to provide the vital supplies required to maintain the plantation complex. New England’s fishing industries fed the West Indies sugar plantations, sending “refuse fish”—“salt burnt, spotted, rotten, and carelessly ordered”— to “the Charib-Islands, Barbadoes, Jamaica, &c. who feed their Negroes with it.”Go to footnote 163 detail Dried cod from New England was “the meat of all the Slaves in all the West Indies.”Go to footnote 164 detail
Importantly, these provisions imported from New England allowed West Indian planters to allocate far more land to sugar than would otherwise have been possible, enabling the system to grow. In Barbados, for example, after an unsuccessful attempt in the first decades of the 1600s to produce tobacco, planters turned to sugar as their primary crop; by the 1670s, Barbados produced 65 percent of the sugar sold in England.Go to footnote 165 detail Initially, sugar was a scarce commodity and commanded very high prices in European markets. In 1647, at which time about half of Barbados’s arable land was used for sugar, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop received a letter stating that planters in the island were “so intent upon planting sugar that they had rather buy foode at very deare rates than produce it by labour, soe infinite is the profitt of sugar workes once accomplished.”Go to footnote 166 detail As other colonies followed Barbados into the market, however, supply increased and prices fell sharply.Go to footnote 167 detail To remain profitable, planters were forced to devote an ever-greater percentage of land to the crop. By 1767, the share of Barbadian land producing sugar “had risen to 80 percent, which meant that virtually all land useful for agriculture of any kind was devoted to this one crop.”Go to footnote 168 detail
As the amount of land dedicated to sugar production increased, so too did the number of enslaved laborers needed to work it. According to one estimate, the population in the mid-18th century across the Caribbean encompassed approximately 725,000 enslaved people and just over 250,000 whites. In the English colonies to which New England was most closely tied the divide was even more extreme.Go to footnote 169 detail
In short, New England merchants provided Caribbean sugar plantations with vital supplies, which enabled planters to remain profitable and expand the brutal business of slavery far beyond anything they could have otherwise sustained. In return, New Englanders acquired capital and slave-produced goods that were essential to their trade throughout in the Atlantic world. This cycle was New England’s economic bedrock. In 1783, John Adams (AB 1755) wrote: “The Commerce of the West India Islands, is a Part of the American System of Commerce. They can neither do without Us nor We without them.”Go to footnote 170 detail