Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

for despotism, warned the slaves and servants in a sermon that "there is a
Fondness for Freedom in many of you." Mather advised the slaves that they
were living better materially than they would be under freedom; furthermore,
slavery had been appointed for them by God. Singing—for others—the siren
song of supposedly contented and blissful security, Mather purred: "Your
servitude is gentle . . . you are treated, with more than mere humanity, and
fed and clothed and lodged as well as you can wish for, and you have no cares
upon you, but only to come when you are called, and to do what you are
bidden." All the subjects must do, in short, was to surrender their naturalborn
gift of freedom and independence, to subject themselves completely to
the whims and commands of others, who could then be blindly trusted to
"take care" of them permanently. How justify such unreasoning trust? Mather's
role, of course, was not to engage in disinterested inquiry into the wellbeing
of the slaves.*
Despite the myths of ideology and the threats of the whip, servants and
slaves found many ways of protest and rebellion. Masters were continually
denouncing servants for being disobedient, sullen, and lazy—little wonder,
since they scarcely had reason to be cheerful or energetic. They did not live
up to the ideal set for them by the obliging Cotton Mather in his A Good
Master Well-served (1696) : "Servants, you are the animate, separate active
instruments of other men. Servants, your fingers, your hands, your feet are
your masters' and they should move according to the will of your masters."
One servant declared that he would much rather be in hell than serve his
master; another, upon murdering his master, confessed that he had often told
himself such words of reason as these: "I am flesh and blood, as well as my
master, and therefore I know no reason why my master should not obey me,
as well as I obey him."
The Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth, in The Well-ordered Family (1712,
1719), set forth the problem of the slaves' and servants' fondness for liberty
and hence their rebelliousness, quite clearly: "Some servants are very high,
proud. . . . They'll scarce be commanded or restrained; they are much for liberty.
They must have liberty for their tongues to speak almost what and when
they please; liberty to give or receive visits of their own accord, and when
they will; . . . liberty to ... go and come almost when they will, without telling
why or wherefore; such liberty they contend for; they won't be ruled,
governed, restrained. ..." Such servants, Wadsworth thundered, are very
wicked "in their plain disobedience to God, . . . they trample God's law, his
authority under their feet." Thus, God was adroitly linked to the rule of the
masters.
Runaway servants and slaves were a problem from the beginning in Massa-
*For further discussion of the servant problem in Massachusetts, see Lawrence W.
Towner, "A Fondness for Freedom: Serant Protest in Puritan Society," William and
Mary Quarterly (April 1962): 201-19.
19