ABSTRACT
Boston merchant and jurist John Saffin’s A Brief and Candid Answer was a direct response to the famous The Selling of Joseph, A Memorial by Samuel Sewell. In The Selling of Joseph Sewell built a religious and moral case against enslavement, arguing that there was no biblical justification for enslaving Africans and specifically denying the link between Noah’s curse of his son Ham and slavery. The agreement suggests that Adam retained a significant degree of agency in his dealings with his master: perhaps he had caused trouble for Saffin before, and this was the only way that Saffin thought he would get any work out of him. Saffin clearly conceived of Adam as a source of income, since he was sent to work on hire first on a farm and later on Castle Island.
