New England Bound

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

How could America’s first European settlers, renowned for their strict views on religion and morality, become a community of enslavers? In New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America Warren provides an answer, explaining that most of the Pilgrims and Puritans who first settled New England firmly believed that God had given them the right to enslave non-Christian foreigners. Some even believed that enslaved people would benefit from the arrangement by converting to Christianity.

Theology and enslavement, then, were not at odds. Indeed, Warren argues that for these early colonists, “piety and profit worked hand in hand,” and most colonists were at ease with reaping the rewards of enslaved people’s exploitation (12). Warren quotes historian Perry Miller on the relationship between the colonists’ faith and their enslavement of outsiders: “Piety…made sharp the edge of Puritan cruelty” and agrees that “enslaved people lived on that knife’s edge” (120).

Warren emphasizes the ubiquity of Christian theology and scriptures in colonists’ views on slavery—whether they were for or against it. Pro-slavery thinkers such as John Saffin and