“Slavery flourished in colonial New England,” writes Margaret Ellen Newell in Brethren by Nature, and “Native Americans formed a significant part of New England’s slave population” (3). Indian servants augmented the colonial workforce “in important ways.” They were the “dominant form of non-white labor” (5). Bound Indian laborers, who “likely numbered in the thousands” (14), performed a variety of tasks associated with “ironworks, fisheries, livestock raising, extensive agriculture, provincial armies, and other enterprises that required unusually large workforces” (5). Most, however, worked and lived in English households, where they “interacted with the English in daily, intimate ways” (6–7), producing over time an “increasingly hybrid society” (14).
In telling this important story, Newell includes a number of powerful stories of individuals ensnared in the region’s trade in human flesh. She recasts the Pequot War and King Philip’s war as racial conflicts motivated in part by a desire to enslave New...
