Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and ...

“in good merchantable Mahogany.”² When no buyer emerged, Card departed. Newport, at last, enjoyed de facto freedom with his wife.

This case of an individual slave deployed from Rhode Island to the far reaches of the Atlantic region exemplifies how New England merchants and ship captains reshaped peoples’ lives as they redistributed labor through their carrying trade. As their vessels plied the waters from New England to the West Indies alongside the ships of many nations, the merchants put in motion a vast array of cargo, including goods, commodities, and enslaved people—often just a few people at a time. For most New England traders, the occasional buying, selling, and transporting of small groups of slaves was an incidental part of their overall business. Cumulatively, these transactions resulted in the constant, unrelenting, low-level forced migration of enslaved Africans. Often dispatched before ships ever reached their final destination, the slaves’ presence is elusive but nevertheless revealed in the accounts of New Englanders who exchanged people for “good merchantable Mahogany” and other plantation produce.

Drawing on my research into New Englanders’ involvement in supplying labor to the mahogany industry, this chapter analyzes how this type of slaving fit into their more generalized West Indies trade. Though it addresses only a narrow slice of a huge topic, the study offers some insights into the logistics of one facet of this often-overlooked trade in human beings. For although New Englanders’ participation in the transatlantic slave trade is now relatively well documented, their itinerant, opportunistic role in the intercolonial slave trade, especially within the circum-Caribbean, remains understudied.³ Indeed, as David Brion Davis has pointed out, historians have tended to focus on the movements of people through “the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, a subject worthy of attention, but then to portray [slavery as] a relatively static institution in which movement was peripheral at best.”⁴ On the contrary, in many slave societies, an unremitting undercurrent of movement was the norm; small numbers of slaves were constantly in transition as they were transferred among work sites, leased, or sold. Most scholarship on the intercolonial slave trade within the Caribbean has