“Out of the Land of Bondage”: The English Revolution and the Atlantic Origins of Abolition

FIGURE 1: In 1637, the antinomian wine cooper Thomas Venner migrated to New England, where he served in the Bay Colony militia. Inspired by the prospect of thoroughgoing reformation in revolutionary England, he returned to London in 1651 and entered the radical republican underground. By 1654, he had joined the millenarian Fifth Monarchist movement, which opposed the Protectorate regime of Oliver Cromwell as another form of kingly government. In January 1661, Venner led his London Fifth Monarchist cell in a four-day rebellion to overthrow the newly restored king, Charles II. In the course of the fighting, Venner’s forces attacked the Comptor Prison in Wood Street and attempted to free the prisoners to rescue them from potential transportation to the colonies to work as “bond slaves.” In tracts written before the rising, the rebels condemned the trade “in the slaves and souls of men” and prophesied the doom of those who engaged in this traffic. Shortly after their capture on the fourth day of battle, Venner and ten of his followers were hanged, drawn, and quartered. Prints such as this quickly followed, depicting Venner as a traitorous fanatic. He would not be the last abolitionist to be vilified in such terms. Engraving by unknown artist, 1861. From Charles Knowles Bolton, The Founders: Portraits of Persons Born Abroad Who Came to the Colonies in North America before the Year 1701, 3 vols. (Boston, 1919), 3: 827. “Out of the Land of Bondage”: The English Revolution and the Atlantic Origins of Abolition JOHN DONOGHUE IN 1646 THE TEENAGER Charles Bayly wandered through the Thames-side town of Gravesend on his way to London, joining thousands of other people streaming into the capital after being uprooted by the chaos of the English Revolution.1 As he wrote years later, in Gravesend he met with one Bradstreet, who was commonly called a spirit, for he was one of those who did entice children and people away for Virginia; he fell into discourse with me, and I being in tender years, he did cunningly get me on board a ship, which was then there riding ready for to go to those parts, and I being once on board, could never get on shore, until I came to America, where I was sold as a bond-slave for 7 years. Reflecting on his subsequent life in the Chesapeake, Bayly described his plight: [I endured] hunger, cold, nakedness, beatings, whippings, and the like . . . for many times was I stripped naked, and tied up by the hand, and whipped, and made to go barefoot and barelegged in cold and frosty weather, and hardly clothes to cover my nakedness, besides the sore and grievous labor which I was continually kept at during which time my poor soul would be The author thanks the anonymous readers for the American Historical Review for their insightful commentaries and articles editor Jane Lyle for her skill and diligence. He also thanks the following for their comments on earlier drafts of this article: David Armitage, Bernard Bailyn, Denver Brunsman, Robert Bucholz, Bernard Capp, Seymour Drescher, Betsy Erikkla, Timothy Gilfoyle, Michael Goode, Jeffrey Hegleson, Peter Kotowski, Eric Slauter, Albert Vogt, Betty Wood, and Alfred Young. The author also expresses gratitude to the people who have encouraged this project throughout its many stages: Desa Amos, Kevin Bales, Charlotte Carrington, Todd DePastino, Laura Donoghue, William Fusfield, Alison Games, Elliot Gorn, Janelle Greenberg, Richard Huzzey, Evelyn Jennings, Eric Kimball, Wim Klooster, Peter Linebaugh, John McManamon, S.J., Simon Middleton, Ty Reese, Seth Rockman, Jonathan Scott, Billy G. Smith, and the Spring 2009 students of History 300: Slavery and Abolition—Then and Now. Most of all, the author wishes to thank Marcus Rediker for his close readings of the article’s successive drafts, for many illuminating conversations about their content and historiographic implications, and for the new courses he has charted for studying history from below. 1 Early modern historians disagree on what to call the political and social upheavals that swept across Britain and Ireland during the mid-seventeenth century. Some doubt that a “revolution” in England even took place. For the purposes of this article, the phrase “English Revolution” describes the political and social events from 1640 to 1660 that led to the abolition of the monarchy and episcopacy and the establishment of an English “commonwealth” or “republic” that embraced a relatively wide degree of religious toleration and attempted to transform England’s Atlantic colonies into a well-ordered empire. For a recent overview of the concept of an English Revolution, see Nicholas Tyacke, “Introduction: Locating the ‘English Revolution,’ ” in Tyacke, ed., The English Revolution, c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester, 2007). 943 944 John Donoghue often bemoaning itself concerning my sore captivity and misery . . . I had hard labor, and my daily exercise was beyond the common manner of slaves, for mine was often night and day.2 Although his master tried to break his spirit through such brutal treatment, Bayly remained strong, resisted, and briefly managed to escape. Upon his subsequent capture, a colonial court punished him by doubling his seven-year term of service, notwithstanding the fact that this sentence contradicted both English statute and common law regarding servants.3 While in Gravesend, Bayly had fallen victim to an illegal form of enslavement called “spiriting”; but once transported to the Chesapeake, he legally became the temporary, chattel property of his owner, although this too violated English labor law. Within one context, the imperial, Bayly’s chattel status remained ambiguous, but within another context, his own lived experience, he conveyed his position on the plantation with precision: he called himself a “bond slave.” Referring to those who labored beside him in what he described as “Maryland in Virginia,” he wrote movingly, “the poor creatures had better have been hanged, than to suffer the death and misery they did.”4 Bayly underwent this traumatic experience during the 1640s and early 1650s, when laborers from Britain and Ireland dominated the Chesapeake’s plantation workforce. On Barbados, during the same time that Bayly languished in Maryland, the seaman Henry Whistler described the plight of the permanently enslaved who were just then beginning to equal and perhaps outnumber “Christian” servants on the island.5 “The gentry here . . . have most of them 100 or 2 or 3 slaves a piece whom they command as they please . . . with ingones [indians] and miserable negors . . . borne to perpetual slavery they and their seed . . . they sell them one to the other as we sell sheep.”6 Writing on the treatment that “Christian” workers endured on Barbados during the same period, Richard Ligon noted, “I have seen such cruelty there done to servants, as I did not think one Christian could have done to another”; “servants” with the worst masters, (...truncated)