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The Massachusetts Body of Liberties was the first legal code established in New England, compiled by Puritan minister Nathaniel Ward. The laws were established by the Massachusetts General Court in 1641. The Body of Liberties begins by establishing the exclusive right of the General Court to legislate and dictate the "Countenance of Authority".
Prior to 1641, no statutes guided this emerging trade in indigenous slaves. Instead, as historian Margaret Newell has argued, the colonists acted in self-interest and justified their practice after the fact, by referring to existing European notions of a just war (a theory later codified in the Body of Liberties). [16]
English colonist William Vassall (1592–1656) is remembered both for promoting religious freedom in New England and commencing his family's ownership of slave plantations in the Caribbean. A patentee of the Massachusetts Bay Company, Vassall was among the merchants who petitioned Puritan courts for greater civil liberties and religious tolerance.
In 1641, the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the first colony to authorize slavery through enacted law. [67] Massachusetts passed the Body of Liberties, which prohibited slavery in many instances but allowed people to be enslaved if they were captives of war, if they sold themselves into slavery or were purchased elsewhere, or if they were ...
During the American colonial period a freeman was a person who was not a slave. The term originated in 12th-century Europe. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a man had to be a member of the Church to be a freeman; in neighboring Plymouth Colony a man did not need to be a member of the Church, but he had to be elected to this privilege by the General Court.
The history of a Massachusetts beach named after an enslaved African American is the focus of new efforts to recognize the role of slavery in the state. Enslaved man who inspired beach name and ...
In 1850, Brown founded his first militant, anti-slavery organization – The League of the Gileadites – in Springfield, to protect escaped slaves from 1850s Fugitive Slave Act. Massachusetts was a hotbed of abolitionism – particularly the progressive cities of Boston and Springfield – and contributed to subsequent actions of the state ...
A Massachusetts teacher has been placed on leave after the district’s superintendent learned of them holding a mock-slave auction in a 5th-grade classroom and using the N-word, according to a ...