Moll and the Indian Slave Trade in Colonial America

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Moll walked through the narrow streets of Boston’s North End with her head held high. She had to look confident, she thought, as if she had every right in the world to be going on about her business here. As far as Moll was concerned, she did; her owner, John Jenkins, would disagree on the strongest possible terms, and reward her pertinence with a blow from the back of his hand. Never again, Moll told herself. She was leaving, and Jenkins would never find her.

Moll limped as she walked, her going burdened by a thick bundle of clothing slung over her shoulder. Her hip always hurt, and one of her feet dragged along the ground. That shoe always wore out before the other one, another thing Jenkins and his harridan wife abused her for. Memory after memory brutalized her in quick succession: the master’s fist cuffing Moll upside the back of her head, the mistress’s screeching about finding a stick to beat Moll for neglecting the firewood. It was all enough to make Moll sag and slow her pace.

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But then she straightened and sped up. Jenkins and the mistress couldn’t tell her what to do, not anymore. She had money, hard silver coin and some paper, and spare clothing to replace the stuffed plaid jacket she usually wore. She could feel the sweat gathering underneath her thick coat. The Boston summer was warm, though not as warm as the swampy humidity of the south where she was born. Not that Moll wanted to go back to the Carolinas, not now: Her family was all gone, killed or taken captive like her, and she had been so young when the Yamasee warriors came to her village. Even if she wanted to go back home, she couldn’t remember where home was.

Moll pushed through the knots of sailors crowding the streets. They stank of sea salt and tar, just like Jenkins did whenever he returned from one of his long voyages to Barbados or Charles Town. The sense memory made her shudder. The only way she would ever get on a ship again was if she decided where it was going. Never again would someone else - not Jenkins, not anyone - make that decision for her. For now, though, Moll was just walking: walking away from Jenkins and the North End, walking toward a new life. She had emancipated herself, and even if Jenkins did find Moll, he could never take that away from her.

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When we think of slavery in the Americas, the horrors of the Middle Passage and the enslavement of more than 12 million Africans is, understandably and rightfully, the first thing to come to mind. Huge ships trafficking hundreds of captives at a time, a racial caste system of unparalleled power and durability, plantations worked by enslaved labor producing for the global market: these are all hallmarks of the system that was chattel slavery, which dominated the Caribbean and the American South for centuries. Our impressions of that system aren’t wrong. African enslavement in the Americas is one of the most brutal, degrading, and horrific forms of the practice we have in the historical record. Its legacy is a living one, and it lives alongside us every day.

But African enslavement wasn’t the only form of slavery in the Americas. The Middle Passage wasn’t the only route by which formerly free people were made into property. In North America alone - leaving aside Spanish practices throughout their vast New World empire - tens of thousands of indigenous people were abducted and sold into slavery. As many or more were forced into less intense but still exploitative and degrading forms of unfreedom, such as indentured servitude. Once taken, these people were commodified and injected into the same farflung networks of trade and forced migration that trafficked enslaved Africans everywhere from New England to Barbados.

The Indian slave trade - I’m following the general terms preferred within the discipline here - is much better understood today than it was even a few decades ago. Its tributaries reached deep into the North American interior, tying villages along the Ohio River to plantations in the Caribbean and London tea houses where drinkers sweetened their beverages with sugar. The demand for slaves among European colonists decimated indigenous communities, creating an environment of war and predation that shattered old tribal confederacies. New slaving societies emerged on the fringes of the colonies, exchanging deer skins and human beings for valued trade goods, especially firearms; the precarious settlements clinging to the eastern seaboard were more often dependent on these powerful indigenous groups than vice versa.

This was the world in which a young indigenous child was captured somewhere in the Carolinas, transported north to Boston, and enslaved for years before emancipating herself and escaping in 1711. Her name - at least the name her owner had given her - was Moll. We know that Moll existed because her owner, a man named John Jenkins, placed a fugitive slave ad in the Boston News-Letter, the first continuously running newspaper in the colonies. Jenkins’ description of Moll and her actions is all we have to go on, but it’s more than enough to place her amid the currents of her time and place. We can see the threads of much larger systems and events attached to her: the fragmentation of indigenous societies in the American southeast, the emergence of worldwide trade networks that relied on the enslavement of people to make a profit, and the global imperial competitions that defined the 18th century. Moll will be our guide to all of that.

A quick note on sources here: I’m relying on Antonio T. Bly, Escaping Slavery: A Documentary History of Native Ameri Runaways in British North America; Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade; and the relevant chapters in the edited volume Indian Slavery in Colonial America.

Let’s start by trying to make sense of the American southeast, the region in which Moll was born. The newspaper advertisement refers to Moll as a “ Indian,” a broad categorization applied to indigenous people taken captive somewhere in the triangle between North Carolina, Florida, and the Mississippi River. By the early 18th century, when Moll was enslaved and transported, this region looked nothing like it did 200 years earlier when Europeans first reported their impressions of the area. The Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto traveled through the region with a large armed force between 1539 and 1543, and several of his companions wrote accounts of what they saw. These are our only firsthand descriptions of a series of indigenous societies that scholars call “Mississippian,” a long-lasting and widespread cultural grouping spanning much of the southeastern and midwestern United States. Mississippian societies were linguistically and ethnically diverse, but otherwise shared many similarities. All were based on maize agriculture, which had been introduced to the southeast around 1000 AD. Populations rose as productivity increased; maize, unlike previous staples, could be grown in much greater quantities and stored for longer. Before long, chiefdoms and even small-scale states covered the entire region. The largest and best-known of these today is Cahokia, located in southern Illinois, with its enormous, extraordinarily labor-intensive earthen mounds.

Mound-building is a form of monumental construction, and while there are cases in the historical and archaeological record of egalitarian societies creating these kinds of structures, the Mississippian groups weren’t among them. These were hierarchical societies with chiefs of varying ranks leading different groups. Some chiefs controlled a single village; others, like those leading Cahokia, controlled entire networks of villages by virtue of their religious prestige and authority. The largest settlements could have thousands of inhabitants, specialized craft production, and active trade links spanning hundreds of miles. The huge mounds constructed at the chiefs’ direction were centers of ritual power and practice, and the chiefs presided over the ceremonies that regularly took place : These were fundamentally unequal societies, with some above and many others below; archaeological evidence speaks to inherited inequalities across generations, visible in everything from nutrition to the kinds of grave goods with which people were buried. The Mississippian world was intensely competitive, and these elites - and the small-scale polities they ruled - were constantly rising and falling over decades; no single polity, not even Cahokia, was ever able to consolidate control for long.

When de Soto arrived in the region in 1539, the Mississippian world was already in deep decline: Many of its major population centers, like Cahokia, had been abandoned for a century or more. The accounts we read of sophisticated, hierarchical, densely populated chiefdoms centered on towns describe a series of societies that wouldn’t exist even a century later. Whatever led to this decline was already happening before de Soto, much less English colonists, ever set foot in the region, but it was the downstream effects of European colonization that destroyed it for good.

By the time Moll was born around 1690, that same world looked much different than it had even when de Soto’s expedition rampaged through the southeast. Only a couple of those deeply rooted chiefdoms remained, such as the Natchez along the lower Mississippi. The Spanish had been established in Florida for more than a century, and took a slow approach to missionizing and controlling the indigenous peoples of the peninsula; the English and French were much more recent arrivals, but it was those twenty-some years prior to Moll’s birth that had been most disruptive. The last remnants of the Mississippian world were splintering, the pressure of integration shattering them into a new series of global trade and political networks, and new peoples and practices were emerging in the rubble of the old. The course of Moll’s life, her journey from Carolina to Boston, was the direct result of these enormous, overarching changes in what scholars refer to as the “Mississippian Shatter Zone.”

We don’t know where exactly within this vast space Moll came from, but the underlying dynamics were similar whether she was enslaved in northern Florida, the upper reaches of the Savannah River, or the environs of the Mississippi itself. As European traders and colonists arrived in the closing decades of the 17th century, they found themselves in a complex relationship with their indigenous neighbors. Whether English, French, or Spanish, they were always outnumbered, their foothold precarious; successful colonies had to play a Byzantine game of politics with a bewildering variety of indigenous groups just to survive. A concerted effort by any of the new emerging indigenous groups, such as the Westo and Creek, could have wiped the nascent English colony of South Carolina, or French Louisiana, off the map without much effort. The fact that indigenous groups didn’t do this was a matter of choice, not capability: They wanted the Europeans nearby, albeit at arm’s length and at a manageable level of power, because they were such a valuable source of trade goods.

The indigenous powers rising in the south at this time were fundamentally new, featuring entirely new ethnic groups, which were far more warlike and trade-oriented than their predecessors. Scholars call these “coalescent” societies, in that we can quite literally see in our sources the process of group formation happening as a result of identifiable trends. Groups like the Chickasaws and Creeks to the west emerged as slaving societies at precisely this time. The two commodities European colonists valued most were deer hides and people, and people were far more valuable than hides. Firearms were by far the most valued commodity indigenous people received in return, providing the direct means of acquiring still more captives and thus wealth, fueling further warfare and captive-taking.

This is a fundamental point that is too often overlooked in textbook accounts of colonial America: Both individually and collectively, indigenous people weren’t passive recipients of European colonialism. Many were active agents, often the most important ones, in creating the new world. Indian slavery is the perfect example of this. Unfreedom of varying kinds and degrees probably existed among Mississippian societies long before the first European set foot in Florida. There were certainly people we would call enslaved living in the places de Soto’s expedition visited, which hardly makes Mississippian groups unique in the Americas. Captives taken in the raids and low-intensity warfare that defined Mississippian life might be tortured and killed, adopted into a kin-group to replace a deceased member, or put to work, much like enslaved people elsewhere in the world; what changed with the arrival of the English and the French was the commodification of those captives and their being folded into trade networks that spanned the eastern seaboard and the Caribbean. A person abducted and enslaved by a group de Soto encountered in 1540 couldn’t end up in Massachusetts; Moll could, and did.

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The only source that tells us Moll existed is an advertisement, otherwise known as a fugitive slave ad, that her owner placed in the Boston News-Letter on August 13th, 1711, after she emancipated herself. It’s worth reading it in its entirety: “Ran away from her Master, John Jenkins of Boston Mariner, the 8th of thus Instant August, a Carolina Indian Maid-Servant, Named Moll, Aged about 20 years, Speaks good English, a short thick fat Wench, having short Hair, is Lame in one of her Hips & goes Wadling; she has carried away Considerable Money, & a bundle of Cloaths. viz. A Pladd Stuff Jacket, broad Check’d a Peticoat small Check’d; an old dark Home-spun Jacket, a dark colour’d Kersey Peticoat, & a strip’d Home-spun Peticoat Cotton & Wool; several Cotton & Linnen Shifts, with some others, several pair of Stockings, & several Lace Caps; blue Gloves, and Shoes about half wore out. Whoever shall take up the said Run-away, & her safely Convey to her above said Master, or give any true lntelligence of her, so as her Master may have her again who Lives at the North End of the Town in Shipstreet, shall be sufficiently rewarded besides all necessary Charges Paid.” This first advertisement evidently didn’t result in Moll’s capture and return, because Jenkins ran the same copy again on August 27th, 1711. That’s the last we hear of Moll, and we’re left to wonder what fate befell her.

This sole advertisement doesn’t seem like much, but it actually gives us a tremendous amount of information about Moll, her personal history, and her circumstances. Let’s break it down piece by piece.

In the advertisement, Jenkins describes Moll as a “Carolina Indian.” This was a generic term for indigenous people from the American southeast, who were generally funneled through the port of Charles Town - now Charleston - on their way to destinations further afield. We’re told that she’s around 20 years old and speaks English fluently, which tells us that she had been in servitude long enough to learn the language of her enslavers; the reasonable assumption is that she was abducted as a child and grew to adulthood while enslaved. Moll had a noticeable limp, we learn, due to an injury to one of her hips, and we’re left to wonder whether that injury was inflicted in the violence that accompanied her initial enslavement. The advertisement provides a detailed physical account: short hair, short stature, a “thick fat Wench,” in Jenkins’ own uncharitable words. We can infer that Moll’s self-emancipation wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment act, because Jenkins tells us that Moll took both money and a substantial amount of clothing with her, enough that she could vary her appearance while evading capture. Jenkins describes himself as a mariner, meaning that he was a skilled seaman, perhaps a navigator or a mate; he wasn’t captain of a ship, however, because other advertisers made it clear when they held that status. His stated location in Boston’s North End was full of other people who made their living from the sea. Jenkins must have been relatively prosperous, considering his investment in a slave and the money Moll took with her when she escaped. Finally, we learn that wherever Moll went on August 8th - the day Jenkins says she ran away - she managed to remain free for nearly three weeks: Jenkins ran the advertisement a second time on August 27th. We can hope that Jenkins’ promise of compensation to whomever helped return Moll to him was never fulfilled, but we simply don’t know.

All this allows us to piece together an outline of Moll’s life and experiences. It’s deeply unfortunate that we can’t pinpoint her origins more precisely: She might have been enslaved any time between the early 1690s and the early 1700s - enough time for her to learn English fluently - when slavers ranged so widely that she might have come from half a dozen different groups. One strong candidate, however, is the southern part of Georgia and Alabama, which experienced a wave of violence during Moll’s teenage years. The enormous conflagration known in Europe as the War of the Spanish Succession also leaked into the Americas, where colonists with loyalties to European empires fought their own smaller but no less nasty conflict. The southeast was particularly active during this time, as English colonists in the Carolinas attacked Spanish missions to their south and the burgeoning French presence to their west, near the Mississippi. Hundreds, even thousands of people were made captive and enslaved in these clashes, and many more were killed.

But viewing these ongoing cycles of raiding and killing as adjuncts to a European war badly warps our understanding of them. These cycles were primarily conflicts among the indigenous groups residing in the southeast; the Europeans provided firearms and lucrative markets for captives, but the men joining warbands and enslaving captives were doing it for their own reasons, not to serve the interests of faraway kings. These activities continued when there were no European conflicts, the same way they had for generations before European demand for slaves and trade goods to pay for them entered the system.

There’s no doubt, however, that European demand - rather than European political goals - incentivized indigenous groups to create more warbands and go on more raids: more raids meant more captives, which meant more firearms, gunpowder and shot, as well as other valued trade goods, but also logically meant that the raiders had fewer nearby enemies. The raided groups retaliated, finding trading partners among other Europeans with whom they could exchange captives for guns and ammunition. It was a vicious cycle that played out all across the southeast. (The other major export from the region, deer hides, were much more labor-intensive to hunt and process and far less valuable than people.) The dynamic was not unlike what we see in West Africa at this time, the interaction between the agency of aggressive indigenous groups and European demand for the enslaved people they could provide.

For their part, European colonists saw nothing wrong with Indian slavery, just as they saw nothing wrong with African slavery. Thousands upon thousands of people were abducted and trafficked throughout North America, transported through ports like Charleston, and sold into new, often miserable lives far from home, with little hope of return. This both empowered some groups and destroyed others, contributing in myriad, devastating ways to the shattering of indigenous societies across the continent. Moll’s life was a product of that world, the nexus between far-flung trade networks feeding European empires and indigenous politics and war.

Whenever and wherever she was taken, Moll’s enslavement was a direct result of these larger processes. After her initial capture, Moll was probably taken to her captors’ village along with anyone else taken during the raid. There, she would have witnessed the torture and execution of male captives; some of her companions may have been adopted into the group to replace slain members, with a couple of others kept in servitude to tend crops and process deer hides. Once enough captives had been collected, the remainder would be taken - probably by boat - down the rivers snaking through the southeast interior toward the coast. We can’t know for sure where exactly Moll was taken, but the most likely destination is Charles Town.

Since its inception, South Carolina’s viability as a colony depended on its relationships with indigenous groups, who provided valuable trade goods for export and military protection. Early colonists in the region grew crops maize and let their cattle roam freely; eventually, rice fields- planted by enslaved Africans - began to appear along the coast and the major navigable rivers. Rice proliferated as a crop because of South Carolina’s deep trade connection to the sugar-planting islands of the Caribbean, which needed food enough to sustain their many thousands of enslaved workers working under the worst possible conditions. Even so, in South Carolina, enslaved indigenous people were still considered more lucrative than rice.

Ironically, there were nowhere as many enslaved indigenous people in South Carolina as the scale of the trade might suggest. The reason for this was straightforward: Because the colony depended so strongly on indigenous groups for protection from both other Europeans and their hostile native neighbors, it was politically unwise to keep large numbers of them enslaved so close at hand. Many of the same people were involved in importing African slaves and exporting indigenous captives. Many of those indigenous captives were sent to the brutal Caribbean sugarcane plantation islands, packed tightly into cargo holds alongside parcels of rice and deerskins. Others, like Moll, were transported north to Boston, one of the rising maritime cities of North America and a center of Atlantic trade.

It’s possible that John Jenkins, Moll’s owner, bought her in Charles Town. He was a mariner, a skilled seaman, and Charleston was a common stopover point for Boston vessels traveling to and from the more lucrative British Caribbean markets like Barbados and Jamaica. Alternatively, one of those Boston vessels could just as easily have dropped off a holdful of rum in Charles Town and picked up a cargo of deerskins and a few enslaved captives to cover the costs of the voyage home. Either way, Moll found herself on a ship cutting through the choppy Atlantic, what was likely a new and terrifying experience for her. She was a child at this point, and she may well have been alone. She may also have been injured: The process of enslavement was violent, and the marked limp Moll had later in life could easily have been the result of an incident during her capture. It could even have been intentionally inflicted to make it harder for her to escape.

Once she arrived in Boston, Moll would have seen many other indigenous faces among the descendants of English Puritans. Many of them, like Moll, were enslaved. Some were from the northern colonies or their fringes, places like Rhode Island or Martha’s Vineyard. Others were, like Moll, called “Carolina Indians.” How much kinship Moll would have felt toward these people, with their many linguistic and ethnic differences, is hard to say; the distinction the newspaper advertisements drew between “Spanish” and “Carolina” Indians probably didn’t map well onto the self-understanding of the people Europeans so designated.

Perhaps John Jenkins was Moll’s initial buyer; perhaps he wasn’t. There were many John Jenkins in Massachusetts at this time, and pinpointing which one owned Moll is far beyond my knowledge of and access to those archives. While enslaved, Moll would have been forced to work, carrying out all the tasks an urban household required under the presumed direction of Jenkins’ wife. She had to draw water, wash, clean clothes, cook, haul firewood, weave homespun cloth, and make clothing, contributing in these and other myriad ways to the household economy. By legal definition, Moll was Jenkins’ property; the patchwork laws of the colonies placed few restrictions on the practice, regardless of the enslaved person’s origin. Moll suffered under these conditions for years, long enough for her to learn English and develop an escape plan. She knew where Jenkins and the mistress of the house kept their petty cash; she prepared a bundle of clothing and probably other, less noteworthy items; and she knew where to go to stay off Jenkins’ radar for at least 19 days. Where that was, Jenkins didn’t know, and neither do we.

I hope Moll got away for good, and made a better life for herself, far away from a master who called her mean, cruel things in print and subjected her to even meaner treatment in person, enough to compel her to emancipate herself. There were many others like her, indigenous and African alike, who took her same steps in Boston. The advertisements in the Boston News-Letter are full of calls for the return of escaped indigenous slaves: Will, “a slim tall fellow;” Hector, who escaped from a Royal Navy vessel docked in the harbor; a pair of Carolina Indian men, one branded on the cheeks with a W and a B. Every one of these ads is proof that, whether for a day, a week, or forever, people who had once been enslaved made themselves free.

Next time on Past Lives, we reach the apex of slavery, the most infamous manifestation of the system with which we’re all familiar: the Transatlantic African slave trade. In the next episode, we’ll meet a man named Olaudah Equiano, whose life’s journey took him from Africa to the Caribbean to the most distant reaches of the Atlantic. We’re incredibly fortunate to have Equiano’s own account of his remarkable life, and we’ll explore it together.

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Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

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