ABSTRACT
Why slavery? How did it get started? Does anyone get to ask that question, or do students just learn about the slave colonies? ey learn that the New England colonists came for religious freedom and had trouble farming so they became traders, while the middle colonies consisted of free farmers (although there were large farms run by slaves in New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania) and that the Southern colonists established plantation slavery. is “naturalizes” slavery, telling students that it was always part of the landscape, just like the Chesapeake Bay. A mystery approach treats slavery as a problem and asks just how it came to be established. Aer all, England did not allow slaveholding
in 1600 when the settlement in North America began. David Eltis asks at the beginning of his volume on The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (2000), “why would Europeans revive slavery at the time of the Columbian contact, when the institution had disappeared from large parts of Europe? (p. 2)” He refers to this as the “slave-free paradox” (p. 2). If we start with this question, and then investigate colonial society in the Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland and Virginia, we will not nd a simple story we can tell our students. Choosing this region unfortunately reinforces the notion that colonial American slavery existed only in the South. All English colonies included slaves among their early populations, including New England (Warren, 2007). Even the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam held slaves on the farms of Long Island and in Manhattan, where their jobs ranged from household servants to skilled artisans, and slavery continued into the British period (Lepore, 2005). e advantage of setting a mystery in the early Chesapeake is that the origins of slavery there have been intensively studied and debated by historians, the relatively nite number of early sources are widely available, and the status and treatment of all servants in the period of initial English settlement are contradictory and ambiguous-a medium or a major mystery.
