670 the NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Boston, but Class And

670 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Boston, but class and status mattered more” and “race determined place in [the] social order” (p. 4). While it is certainly true, as the author demonstrates, that poor whites and persons of color on the margins of society labored together, socialized, and even married— and that the authorities tended to regulate all persons of color as one—perpetual chattel slavery was a unique institution and largely limited to blacks. Perhaps the greatest difficulty is that the book’s ambitions outrun its limited, albeit compelling, sources. Even though relatively short, the book is strikingly repetitive. At that, the author has to reach be- yond Boston in order to fill in the story, a difficulty since one of the book’s theses is that slavery in Boston was different from slavery elsewhere in New England. More significantly, for a book ostensibly framed around eighteenth-century Boston, the book fails to treat in any detail the changes in slave culture that resulted from the spread of revolutionary ideology with its broad message of equality and human rights. Indeed, the book provides only a superficial account—roughly eighteen pages—of the slaves’ transition from meliorative resistance to demands for emancipation in the last quarter of the century and the role of Boston’s black freed people in aiding that change. Nev- ertheless, the book represents a real achievement in adding to our understanding of slavery and the life of slaves in Boston in the first half of the eighteenth century. Marc Arkin is a professor of law at Fordham University. Her most recent publication is a study of a protest by the Massachusetts General Colored Association at Boston’s Park Street Church in 1830. The Case of the Piglet’s Paternity: Trials from the New Haven Colony, 1639-1663. By Jon C. Blue. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2015. Pp. 308.$22.95 cloth; $17.99 e-book.) Judge Jon Blue’s The Case of the Piglet’s Paternity introduces its readers to the inner workings of New Haven Colony’s court system and the trials and tribulations experienced by a wide range of New Haven colonists. Similar to nearby Plymouth Colony and the Province of Maine, Pemaquid, and Lygonia colonies, New Haven Colony was a short-lived political experiment that ended after its merger with the larger Connecticut Colony in 1665;inthe1690s, Plymouth, the Province of Maine, Pemaquid, and Lygonia colonies merged with Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00569 by guest on 26 September 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 671 Massachusetts Bay. Regardless of size and political longevity, all En- glish colonies established in North America developed their own legal systems, and Judge Blue’s book is an important contribution to a growing discussion on the legal and political workings of the smaller English colonies. The first efforts to transcribe and publish colonial court records for the benefit of scholars and curious readers alike began in the nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries. As Judge Blue documents, Con- necticut’s transcription and publication of the colonial New Haven court records in the 1850s were typical of these efforts. While the transcribers made the decision to retain the contractions and ab- breviations used in the original manuscript, they also omitted four court trials involving various forms of sexual misconduct from the published volumes, and because the print run was limited to 250 copies, it made the published records little more accessible than the original court records. By retelling and documenting the events of thirty-three New Haven trials, including the missing sexual misconduct trials, Judge Blue’s intention was to bring these episodes from colonial New Haven’s history to a twenty-first-century audience, and this book more than fulfills that goal. The Case of the Piglet’s Paternity opens with an introductory chapter providing background information on New Haven Colony and its laws and court system, which included both a general court and the more commonly used Court of Magistrates. Similar to neighboring Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Rhode Island colonies, New Haven worked to establish a legal code in the 1650s, though Judge Blue suggests that New Haven justices rarely used these laws when issuing their rulings, preferring instead to refer to the Bible for guid- ance. New Haven courtrooms also rarely used attorneys and omitted juries altogether, a decision which would benefit from further discussion from Judge Blue as it placed New Haven in direct opposition to legal practice in England, the neighboring colonies of Rhode Is- land where both attorneys and juries played active roles in the court room, and Massachusetts which allowed for jury trials (though not attorneys). Following the introduction, each of the thirty-three trials receives its own retelling and commentary. These accounts introduce readers to trials on charges still found in courtrooms such as disputed wills, defamation, theft, and arson, though Judge Blue notes that the rulings on most of these charges may appear overly harsh to modern audi- ences. Other chapters are constructed to remind readers even further about the differences between seventeenth-century society and our Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00569 by guest on 26 September 2021 672 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY own. Chapter 9, “The Faulty Shoes,” takes trial participants through pre-Industrial Revolution efforts to determine whether threads used for sewing the shoes, the leather, or the shoemaker were at fault for an order of shoes which fell apart after a few days of wear. Likewise, a witchcraft trial in chapter 14 and the titular “Case of the Piglet’s Paternity,” in which colonist George Spencer was convicted on bes- tiality charges with a sow and summarily executed by hanging, serve much the same purpose. Judge Blue’s efforts to reconstruct these trials are, on the whole, successful. The book would, however, benefit from providing further historical context and discussion of the transitions taking place in the Anglo-American legal world during the colonial period. While the legal and cultural gap between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries is enormous, the threads connecting them were already be- ing established. For example, “The Milford Paternity Case,” covers a 1658 trial focused on Bethia Hawes’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Judge Blue’s remarks closing the chapter observe that “the standards of justice employed by the Court of Magistrates were vastly different from those recognized in modern times ...whilethecourt was undoubtedly interested in the factual question of biological paternity, its focus centered on the morality of Baldwin and Hawes” (pp. 193-94). Ten years later in 1668, Massachusetts Bay Colony would pass a law mandating that men accused of fathering children out of wedlock be tried on paternity charges and, if convicted, be re- quired to pay child support. The transition from the moral challenges posed by sexual contact outside marriage to economic functional- ism was already underway in mid-seventeenth-century New England, rather than in some far modern future. Acknowledging such transitions would greatly help readers curious not only about the past but also about how our world came to evolve from it. Abby Chandler is an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is currently conducting research for a book on political unrest in British North America during the 1760s. Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act. Edited by Zachary McLeod Hutchins. (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2016. Pp. xxii, 242.$40.00 paper; $34.99 e-book.) Edited collections are typically criticized for a lack of topical coher- ence and the mixed bag quality of the essays. This volume strives to Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00569 by guest on 26 September 2021.

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