Boston, Massachusetts: CHAPTER 9: The Changing South

The first Africans arrived in Boston in February of 1638, eight years after the city was founded. They were brought as slaves, purchased in Providence Isle, a Puritan colony off the coast of Central America. By 1676 Boston ships had pioneered a slave trade to Madagascar, and were selling black slaves to Virginians in 1678. There were over 400 slaves in Boston by 1705, and the beginning of a free black community in the North End. Boston was about 10 percent black in 1752.

The American Revolution was a turning point in the status of Africans in Massachusetts. At the end of the conflict, there were more free black people than slaves. When the first federal census was enumerated in 1790, Massachusetts was the only state in the Union to record no slaves.

Maria Weston Chapman, active in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery
Society, constant colleague and confidant to Garrison (photo of a portrait, courtesy, Rare Books, Boston Public Library)

The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (1833-1840) was an abolitionist, interracial organization in Boston, Massachusetts, in the mid-19th century. It made three national women's conventions, organized a multistate petition campaign, sued southerners who brought slaves into Boston, and sponsored profitable fundraisers.

BOSTON-BASED ABOLITIONIST NEWSPAPER PUBLISHED BY WILLIAM LLYOD GARRISON, 1831-1865

Garrison spoke out articulately and passionately against slavery and for the rights of America's black inhabitants for more than three decades, from the first issue of his weekly paper in 1831, until after the end of the Civil War in 1865 when the last issue was published.