Briefly Noted

New England Bound, by Wendy Warren (Liveright). Whereas most studies of slavery in the United States concern the antebellum South, this one stakes out less visited territory—the laws and decisions made by the colonists in New England two centuries earlier. In 1638, eight years after John Winthrop’s famed “City Upon a Hill” sermon, the first documented shipment of enslaved Africans arrived. That same year, the colonist Samuel Maverick, “desirous to have a breed of Negroes,” attempted to create slaves through rape. African slaves started working on West Indian plantations and at New England ports. Not all of this was legal, but, as Warren points out, it was hardly at odds with Puritan piety. Many colonists used Scripture to justify it.