Justene Hill Edwards

And so this became part and parcel of life in the Lowcountry, and it evolved around rice production.

If we go north to Virginia, the enslaved worked by what was called gang labor.

They would work

In groups, side by side, often guided by an overseer.

And that was the kind of day in, day out experience of slave life in places like Virginia.

Yeah, I mean, it kind of gets back to this idea that slavery evolved in a variety of ways based on time and place.

And so slavery in Charleston in, let's say, 1720 was not the same as the experience of an enslaved person in Massachusetts, for example, in the same period of time.

There weren't really plantations in New England.

There were kind of smaller slave holdings.

And so the entire slave population was actually a bit smaller.

And the enslaved were kind of clustered in cities.

And so we have slaves in Boston, in Newport, as opposed to kind of outside of those specific regions.

Well, understanding the laws of slavery is really fundamental to understanding how slavery evolves and expands here.

And so if we think about kind of the popular narrative of American slavery, I think is focused on the South in places like South Carolina and Georgia.

But if we're to understand the kind of legal foundations of slavery, especially in colonial America, we actually have to go first to Massachusetts.

And Massachusetts was actually the first colony to legally recognize slavery.

And that happened in 1641, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties.

And it is a law that essentially says, and I'll get the actual language wrong, but slavery is essentially legal if slaves are sold to colonists in just wars.

And so what it kind of means is that this idea that colonists were recognizing the presence of enslaved Africans, even enslaved Native Americans, but they were kind of taking a backseat to being active participants in the slave trade.

Like slavery is fine if we're fighting wars or if