Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x5gtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-02T05:03:24.063Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Sarah Chauqum, Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island and Connecticut (US)

from Part II - Experiencing Freedom during Slavery’s Expansion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2020

Erica L. Ball
Affiliation:
Occidental College, Los Angeles
Tatiana Seijas
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Terri L. Snyder
Affiliation:
California State University, Fullerton
Get access

Summary

In 1732, a twenty-three-year-old enslaved woman named Sarah Chauqum ran away from New London, Connecticut and headed for South Kingstown, Rhode Island. In two successful pathbreaking legal actions, Sarah and her lawyers not only exposed the seamy regional system of human trafficking that turned free people of color into slaves in New England, but also laid the groundwork for freedom suits that would follow. In the first, Sarah established her legal freedom.  In the second, Sarah filed what is possibly the first reparations case in New England—and won. In the process, Sarah also reclaimed her Indigeneity from her owners’ intentional efforts to erase it by categorizing her as a person of African ancestry. Sarah's post-escape success in claiming freedom created the legal files that contain what we know of her history, which is not much. The story of her enslavement helps us understand the larger phenomenon of Indian slavery in the colonial period.  It also points to the ways in which Indian slavery and the slave system more broadly in New England changed as the number of enslaved Africans imported to the region grew over the course of the eighteenth century.

Type
Chapter
Information
As If She Were Free
A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas
, pp. 151 - 170
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×