Slave-for-Sale Advertisements in Boston's Newspapers, 1704–1781

A slave-for-sale advertisement in the Boston News-Letter, June 5, 1704.

In 1704 The Boston News-Letter became the first successful newspaper in the American colonies. Barely a month after the weekly first appeared, on June 5, it carried an advertisement from a local merchant, John Colman, offering "Two Negro Men" together with a "Negro Woman and Child" for sale. It was the first of 77 years of advertisements in Boston's newspapers placed by local merchants selling enslaved people.

What the advertisements show

The Boston Gazette, first published in 1719, soon overtook the News-Letter. Between 1719 and 1781 it printed 1,103 separate "slaves for sale" advertisements, which led to the sale of more than 2,500 people.

The notices also show where the trade happened. Boston had no single slave market. People were sold on board ships or at businesses near Long Wharf. An advertisement in the Gazette of September 30, 1728, offered, at No. 24 on the Long-Wharf, "Good Barbados Sugar: also two likely Negro's Male and Female, by Jonathan Sewall…" — a human sale listed beside a cargo of sugar.

An advertisement for an enslaved person in Boston, from a supplement to the Boston-Gazette, March 16, 1767.

Who enslaved people in Boston

Slavery in Massachusetts was far smaller in scale than in the Southern colonies, but Boston's enslaved population climbed steeply during the 1700s. Historian Jared Hardesty counts 400 enslaved people living in Boston in 1704 and 1,541 in 1752, a rise he puts at more than 350 percent. The advertisements of the period track that growth and show how the town used enslaved labor.

Among Boston's elite, owning enslaved people was a display of wealth, and rich merchants such as Peter Faneuil and John Hancock enslaved several people on their estates. A News-Letter advertisement of December 28, 1732, pitched its offer at exactly that market:

Several likely young Negros of both Sexes, lately imported from the West Indies, fit for either Town or Country Service, among whom is a choice Negro Man, suitable for a Gentleman's Family: To be Sold..

Below the elite, artisans and laborers also enslaved people, usually one or two, to work in their shops, homes or farms.

Skills and silence

Unlike the large-scale chattel slavery of the South, slavery in Boston put enslaved people to many different kinds of work, and the advertisements reflect it. Historian Robert Desrochers Jr., studying Boston's slave-for-sale notices, found references to cooking, gardening, caulking, barrel making, tailoring and blacksmithing. In his reading, the quality Massachusetts enslavers wanted most was versatility: the ability to do a wide range of work indoors and out, as the 1732 advertisement's "Town or Country Service" suggests.

Sellers increasingly preferred not to be named. Desrochers found that 70% of advertisements in the 1720s named the seller, but only 20% did by the 1740s. As public opinion began to turn against the slave trade, sellers kept their names out of print.

A slave-for-sale advertisement in the Boston Gazette, December 10, 1781, the last to appear in that paper.

Decline

Boston's slave trade peaked in the 1720s and 1730s and declined over the following decades. The economy, war and growing moral doubts about slavery brought the institution down in Massachusetts. The last slave advertisement in The Boston Gazette ran on December 10, 1781. Though Boston's trade never approached the scale of the South's, those 77 years of advertisements are an important record of slavery in the town and of the central place slavery held in the global economy.

Sources

• National Park Service, Boston African American National Historic Site, "Slave Advertisements." https://www.nps.gov/articles/slave-advertisements.htm
• Robert E. Desrochers Jr., "Slave-for-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts, 1704–1781," The William and Mary Quarterly 55, no. 3; Jared Hardesty, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston (New York University Press, 2016); Boston Gazette, September 30, 1728; Boston News-Letter, December 28, 1732.
• Hardesty's and Desrochers's findings are paraphrased here. The advertisements are quoted from the eighteenth-century newspapers.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.