ABSTRACT
The English Puritans and Pilgrims, who successfully built seventeenth-century Zions on the shores of the present state of Massachusetts, built them in part on a system of unfree labor. In the years intervening between its establishment, and 1750, many changes occurred: for example, in the sources and types of bound labor, and in the use of the system as a method of social control. The land system, for example, tended to limit the demand for servile labor. Most Massachusetts and Plymouth farms were small and required the diversified and intensive application of few hands rather than the extensive and repetitious labor of many. Indian servitude, though obviously exploitation of another culture would, if continued, perhaps have resulted in amalgamation and a happier solution than the reservation system begun in seventeenth-century Plymouth and Massachusetts. Negro slavery, even in the relatively mild form prevalent in the province of Massachusetts Bay, had no excuse.
