New Hampshire is better, and braver, than HB 544
by Dan Weeks In 1645—decades before the colony of New Hampshire was independently established—historical records show that the purchase and sale of human beings began in the “Live Free” state. In that year, an African man was kidnapped in Guinea and brought to Portsmouth for a life of servitude. His European enslaver would later be punished by the local Puritan authorities—not for owning another human being but for working his human chattel on the Sabbath. On the eve of the Revolutionary War in 1773, official statistics showed that 674 persons of African descent were enslaved in New Hampshire. One of them, Prince Whipple, fought for …