Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to enslavement, violence, and sexual violence.

“Put plainly, it is this: the tragedy of chattel slavery—inheritable, permanent, and commodified bondage—the problem that dominates the narrative of so many other early English attempts at colonization in North America and the Caribbean, hardly appears in the story of New England. The following pages demonstrates why it should.”

In this quotation the author introduces one of the main points of her work: Chattel slavery was a key part of the founding of New England and played a role in its financial success. This passage clearly states what the author aims to prove in her book and asks about the parallels between the founding of New England and the myriad other instances of English colonization.

“The first documented shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in 1638, eighteen years after the Mayflower's journey. The arrival of those Africans merited a brief mention by Governor John Winthrop, who noted in his journal that the Salem-based ship Desire took captive Indians to the West Indies for sale as slaves […] thus describing the first known slaving voyage to and from New England. It came to seem, to the English at least, a convenient swap.”

Warren describes the early beginnings of enslavement in New England, which the colonists began soon after settling in the region. This passage reveals how the colonists enslaved both Indigenous and African people, but for different purposes.

“The skewing of the study of slavery in North America toward a relatively short period of time in the continent’s long history has created a false impression that slavery and the antebellum South were synonymous, and that American slavery was only the enslavement of people of African origins.”

Warren discusses how historians’ focus on slavery in the South has left a void of knowledge about slavery in other regions and time periods in American history. According to Warren, this has left most people ignorant to the fact that Indigenous Americans were also enslaved by colonists and that there was slavery in the northern states as well as the South.