Enslavers, civic leaders, and ministers attempted to dictate most aspects of enslaved people’s lives. Massachusetts laws included curfews for enslaved people and regulated their consumption of alcohol. The Reverend Jonathan Ashley was typical of 18^th-century New England ministers who linked Christian virtue to obedience when he told Deerfield’s enslaved people, “You must be faithful in the places God puts you…in vain think to be Xts [Christ’s] freemen and be slothful Servants.” In his book The Well-Ordered Family, published in 1712, the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth of Boston declared, “When your master or Mistress bids you do this or that, Christ bids you do it, because he [Christ] bids you obey them.” Despite these coercive efforts, enslaved people found a variety of ways to exercise some personal control over their lives and culture. Carrying out errands for enslavers, for example, provided opportunities to interact with others beyond the household. Such day-to-day human interactions among people living in bondage were essential to retaining a sense of self and building community.

In 1749, Prince escaped from Joseph Barnard, taking with him extra clothing, a gun, and a violin that he could use or barter for his survival on the road. Prince’s freedom was short-lived; he died in Deerfield in 1752. Jinny, abducted from her Africa as a young girl, continued throughout her life to collect small objects in preparation for her spirit’s return to her homeland, maintaining her African beliefs throughout decades of servitude in a New England minister’s household. Other forms of resistance included theft and holding clandestine gatherings. As late as the 1840s, Deerfield residents still remembered that sometime in the 1760s, a man called Titus and several other enslaved residents “belonging to some of the most respectable people” stole food and rum and gathered for a frolic at a “place of resort.” The risk inherent in such activities was dramatically demonstrated when Titus and the other participants were detected and flogged.