History of slavery in Massachusetts

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Slavery was practiced in Massachusetts bay by Native Americans before European settlement,^[1] and continued until its abolition in the 1700s.^[2] Although slavery in the United States is typically associated with the Caribbean and the Antebellum American South, enslaved people existed to a lesser extent in New England: historians estimate that between 1755 and 1764, the Massachusetts enslaved population was approximately 2.2 percent of the total population; the slave population was generally concentrated in the industrial and coastal towns.^[3] Unlike in the American South, enslaved people in Massachusetts had legal rights, including the ability to file legal suits in court.

The practice of slavery in Massachusetts was ended gradually through case law. As an institution, it died out in the late 18th century through judicial actions litigated on behalf of slaves seeking manumission. Unlike some other jurisdictions, enslaved people in Massachusetts occupied a dual legal status of being both property and persons before the law, which entitled them to file legal suits in court. Prominent Massachusetts lawyer Benjamin Kent represented slaves in court against their masters as early as 1752. He won the first freedom suit in the British American colonies in 1766.^{[4][5][6][7][8]} The post-revolutionary court cases, starting in 1781, heard arguments contending that slavery was a violation of Christian principles and also a violation of the constitution of the Commonwealth. During the years 1781 to 1783, in three related cases known today as "the Quock Walker case," the Supreme Judicial Court applied the principle of judicial review to effectively abolish slavery in 1783 by declaring it incompatible with the state Constitution that had just been adopted in 1780.^[3] This did not have the effect of immediately freeing all slaves, however. Rather, it signaled to slaveowners that their right to own slaves would no longer be legally protected, and without that surety, it was no longer profitable to keep slaves in the first place. Those who owned the slaves then generally chose to replace the enslavement with some other arrangement, either indentured servitude for a fixed term or conventional, paid employment.

As a result of this, Massachusetts was the only state to have zero slaves enumerated on the 1790 federal census. (By 1790, the Vermont Republic had also officially ended slavery, but it was not admitted as a state until 1791.) Maine, in the 1790 Census, also lists no enslaved people among its population but did not become a state until 1820.

A large threat to former slaves and freemen living in Massachusetts, however, was that posed by slave catchers, whose profession was to look for runaway slaves who had successfully fled from the South and sheltered in the North. Under American law at the time, these individuals were subject to detention and return to slavery in any jurisdiction that had not yet ended slavery. Many abuses were also committed in which even blacks who were freeborn in the North could be falsely accused of being runaway slaves and spirited away to a life of slavery, as in the infamous case of Solomon Northup, who was freeborn in New York and kidnapped into slavery in Louisiana.

This ongoing uncertainty impelled the abolition movement in the North because it meant that even blacks living in free states could never truly be free until slavery was definitively ended all across the United States. Massachusetts became a leading center for abolitionism in early 19th-century America, with individual activists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass as well as organizations like the Boston Vigilance Committee dedicated to advancing the cause.

The political tensions caused by the collision between abolitionism and pro-slavery forces in the United States led directly to the American Civil War in 1861. After the war's end in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified by the states, including Massachusetts, which legally abolished slavery in the United States and ended the threat of enslavement or re-enslavement once and for all. This was the final date when slavery was formally outlawed in Massachusetts, although it had been a moribund institution for decades prior to that time.

After the end of legal slavery, however, racial segregation continued in Massachusetts as a de jure legal requirement in various contexts until the mid-20th century.