LongRoad

Long Road to Freedom

African-Americans in the Old Colony

A June of 2006 exhibition at Pilgrim Hall Museum sponsored by
the Massachusetts Society of the Order of the Cincinnati and
Vickie Quinn, Bank of America Mortgage Representative

The first record of an African American in Plymouth Colony occurs in 1643.

In that year, the Colony Records record the presence of an unnamed “blackamore” among “the males that are able to bear arms from 16 years old to 60 years.”

Ten years later, an African-American maidservant, also unnamed, testified in court against a white man whom she accused of receiving stolen items.

There is no reason to believe these two African-Americans, the "blackamore" and the maidservant, were not free.

In 1684, African-American Robert Trayes, probably also a free man, was indicted for having shattered a man’s leg with a gun blast; the man died as a result of his wounds. Robert Trayes was found guilty of negligence (but not of murder). He was reproved and fined.

By the time of Trayes’ trial, slavery had been established in Plymouth Colony for over ten years. The estate of Thomas Willett of Scituate, who died in 1674, listed eight slaves.

Slavery was practiced intermittently in the Plymouth area after the 1670s. Slave owners were generally wealthy merchants and ship owners who had ties to larger communities, such as Boston and Newport, that were active in the slave trade.