SubscribeAmerican slavery began to change from the Indian to the "blackamoor" African in the years between 1650 and 1750. Though the issue is complex, the unsuitability of Native Americans for the labor intensive agricultural practices, their susceptibility to European diseases, the proximity of avenues of escape for Native Americans, and the lucrative nature of the African slave trade led to a transition to an African based institution of slavery.
In the 18th century, British colonies in the Southern US encouraged the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks and Seminoles to own black slaves. Some of these nations, notably the Seminoles, also took in escaped slaves and refused to give them up when whites came demanding the return of fugitive slaves. In 1750, slavehunters were sent to retrieve a slave living in the Creek Nation. A Creek chief stood between them and the black man, cut their rope and threw it in the fire. The posse returned empty-handed. In 1770, a white observer reported that the Creeks allow slaves their freedom when they marry, which "is permitted and encouraged" and their children were considered free. Contemporary Euro-American records revealed a European fear for black/Indian mixing, for there were instances of Africans and Indians joining together in armed resistance against Europeans. A British officer had warned, "Their mixing is to be prevented as much as possible." In 1751, South Carolina law stated: "The carrying of Negroes among the Indians has all along been thought detrimental, as an intimacy ought to be avoided. A 16th century French colonial dispatch also stated "Between the races we cannot dig too deep a gulf". In the 19th century, a number of high ranking Seminoles married black wives - Chief Osceola was one of them. It was said that 52 of his 55 body guards were black. Seminole King Philip too had a black son John Philip, half brother to Chief Wild Cat. King Philip, Chief Osceola and Wild Cat were key figures in the 2nd Seminole war between the US and the Seminole Nation.10 The US General Sidney Jesup apparently saw the mixing of blacks and Indians in the Seminole Nation as a threat: .. the 2 races ... are identified in interests and feelings...Should the Indians remain in this territory, the negroes among them will form a rallying point for runaway negreos from adjacent states. When Native Americans in the United States were driven off their land by Europeans, some sought refuge in black communities, passing as 'colored' (of mixed Afro-European ancestry).
"More disheartening are the images of slave ships sailing away from the New World. As early as 1637, a group of American Indians was sold into captivity to a Puritan settlement on an island off the coast of Central America. Philbrick doesn't make apologies, but, again, he scrupulously adds context: 'From the perspective of the Plymouth magistrates, there was nothing unusual about enslaving a rebellious Native population. The English had been doing this in Ireland for decades.'Also --
Still, in tallying the casualties from King Philip's War (1675-76), he notes that 1,000 men and women were 'shipped out of the country as slaves' — shameful for any generation."
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"The British North American colonists’ practice of enslaving Indians for labor or direct sale to the West Indies preceded the appearance of the first chained Africans at the dock in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. The Jamestown colonists’ human transaction with the Dutch vessel was an unscheduled occurrence. However, once the African slave trade became commercially established, the fates of Indians and Africans in the colonies became inextricably entwined. New England, born of up-close-and-personal, burn-them-in-the-fires-of-hell genocide, led the political and commercial development of the English colonies. The region also led the nascent nation’s descent into a slavery-based society and economy.
Ironically, an apologist for Virginian slavery made one of the best, early cases for the indictment of New England as the engine of the American slave trade. Unreconstructed secessionist Lewis Dabney’s 1867 book 'A Defense of Virginia' traced the slave trade’s origins all the way back to Plymouth Rock:'The planting of the commercial States of North America began with the colony of Puritan Independents at Plymouth, in 1620, which was subsequently enlarged into the State of Massachusetts. The other trading colonies, Rhode Island and Connecticut, as well as New Hampshire (which never had an extensive shipping interest), were offshoots of Massachusetts. They partook of the same characteristics and pursuits; and hence, the example of the parent colony is taken here as a fair representation of them.[source]
The first ship from America, which embarked in the African slave trade, was the Desire, Captain Pierce, of Salem; and this was among the first vessels ever built in the colony. The promptitude with which the "Puritan Fathers" embarked in this business may be comprehended, when it is stated that the Desire sailed upon her voyage in June, 1637....The first feeble and dubious foothold was gained by the white man at Plymouth less than seventeen years before; and as is well known, many years were expended by the struggle of the handful of settlers for existence. So that it may be correctly said, that the commerce of New England was born of the slave trade; as its subsequent prosperity was largely founded upon it. The Desire, proceeding to the Bahamas, with a cargo of "dry fish and strong liquors, the only commodities for those parts," obtained the negroes from two British men-of-war, which had captured them from a Spanish slaver.
Thus, the trade of which the good ship Desire, of Salem, was the harbinger, grew into grand proportions; and for nearly two centuries poured a flood of wealth into New England, as well as no inconsiderable number of slaves. Meanwhile, the other maritime colonies of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and Connecticut, followed the example of their elder sister emulously; and their commercial history is but a repetition of that of Massachusetts. The towns of Providence, Newport, and New Haven became famous slave trading ports. The magnificent harbor of the second, especially, was the favorite starting-place of the slave ships; and its commerce rivaled, or even exceeded, that of the present commercial metropolis, New York. All the four original States, of course, became slaveholding.'"
"Most Native American tribal groups practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America; but none exploited slave labor on a large scale. Indian groups frequently enslaved war captives whom they used for small-scale labor and in ritual sacrifice. Most of these so-called Indian slaves tended to live, however, on the fringes of Indian society.
...Once Europeans arrived as colonialists in North America, the nature of Indian slavery changed abruptly and dramatically. Indians found that British settlers, especially those in the southern colonies, eagerly purchased or captured Indians to use as forced labor in cultivating tobacco, rice, and indigo. More and more, Indians began selling war captives to whites rather than integrating them into their own societies. And as the demand for labor in the West Indies became insatiable, whites began to actively enslave Indians for export to the so-called "sugar islands."
The resulting Indian slave trade devastated the southeastern Indian populations and transformed Native American tribal relations throughout the region. The English at Charles Town, the Spanish in Florida, and the French in Louisiana sought trading partners and allies among the Indians, offering trading goods such as metal knives and axes, firearms and ammunition, intoxicants and beads, and cloth and hats in exchange for furs (deerskins) and Indian slaves captured from other tribes. Unscrupulous traders, frontier settlers, and government officials encouraged Indians to make war on other tribes to reap the profits from the slaves captured in such raids or to weaken the warring tribes.
It is not known how many Indians were enslaved by the Europeans, but they certainly numbered in the tens of thousands. It is estimated that Carolina merchants operating out of Charles Town shipped an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 Indian captives between 1670 and 1715 in a profitable slave trade with the Caribbean, Spanish Hispaniola, and northern colonies. Because of the higher transportation costs of bringing blacks from Africa, whites in the northern colonies sometimes preferred Indian slaves, especially Indian women and children, to blacks. Carolina actually exported as many or even more Indian slaves than it imported enslaved Africans prior to 1720. The usual exchange rate of captive Indians for enslaved Africans was two or three Indians to one African.
Until late in the 18th century, Indian slaves worked on English plantations along side African slaves and even, occasionally, white indentured servants. Women and children frequently were used as menial laborers or domestic servants. By 1720, most whites in the southeastern British colonies preferred enslaved Africans to Indians for obvious reasons. Indians could, for one thing, more easily run away into the wilderness. Also, Europeans always feared the possibility of a coalition of enslaved Africans and enslaved Indians, aided by free Indians on the frontier. What’s more, English settlers played the Indians off against one another in the various Indian wars or wars of empire fought between European colonial powers, using them as allies or as paid mercenaries. Additionally, Europeans commonly believed that Native American men, culturally conditioned to be hunters, considered fieldwork to be women’s work, and that Indian warriors would not adapt easily to agricultural labor in comparison to enslaved Africans. Most importantly, the demand for enslaved labor in the tobacco and rice plantations came to far exceed the potential supply of Indian captives, especially once European diseases began to decimate Indian populations and once the Indians began to more effectively resist European powers.
The Indian slave trade lasted only until around 1730, and it was characterized by a series of devastating wars among the tribes. Those Indians nearer the European settlements raided tribes farther in the interior in the quest for slaves to be sold, especially to the British. Before 1700, the Westos in Carolina dominated much of the Indian slave trade until the English, allied with the Savannah, who resented Westo control of the trade, wiped them out. The Westo tribal group was completely eliminated; its survivors were scattered or else sold into slavery in Antigua.
...The Indian wars of the early 18th century combined with the growing availability of African slaves essentially ended the Indian slave trade by 1750. Numerous colonial slave traders had been killed in the fighting, and the remaining Indian groups banned together more determined than ever to face the Europeans from a position of strength rather than be enslaved. Many of those Indians who remained joined confederacies like the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Catawba for protection, making them less easy victims of European slavers.
From 1750 to the American Civil War in 1861, Native Americans, especially those in the Southeast, interacted with enslaved blacks in every way possible, although there is no evidence that blacks ever owned Indian slaves."
"But the greatest discouragement, in the management of the Indian Affairs, is by the Indians being constantly cheated by them with what they deal. This is a mischief which has been long complained of, and unless some Law were passed for the preventing of it, I know not how it can be remedied; for as the Law now stands, an Indian before he can obtain redress must fee a Lawyer, must take out a writ, fill a declaration, and at last wait twelve months for Justice, at two or three hundred miles distance, sometimes five hundred from his habitation,, and without one farthing to support him, or to defray the charges of the suit, and then, his evidence is not admitted in any of our Courts, nor the evidence of any other Indian."He goes on at length about how this is an intolerable situation, etc. The very numerous records of conferences between white colonial authorities and the representatives of the Five (later Six) Indian Nations (ie, the Iroquois Confederacy) are less "Fetch me that there horse, boy" and more "Please please please help us fight the French, here, take these gifts." The Iroquois drove a hard bargain, and a good amount of colonial political correspondence is about how to stay on their good side--the idea that they should be enslaved or slaughtered would have been rejected as immoral, nonsensical, and impracticable.
Victoria, a Tongva woman who grew up in Mission San Gabriel, testified that mission life was filled with misery, humiliation, and terror. She reported that the missionaries punished an Indian woman who had a miscarriage by having her head shaved, by being flogged every day for fifteen days, and by wearing iron shackles on her feet for three months, and by "having to appear every Sunday in church, on the steps leading up to the altar, with a hideous painted wooden child in her arms."
Lorenzo Asisaro, a neophyte at Mission Santa Cruz, testified that the mission Indians were subject to strict discipline: "The Indians at the missions were very severely treated by the padres, often punished by fifty lashes on the bare back. They were governed somewhat in the military style, having sergeants, corporals, and overseers, who were Indians, and they reported to the padres any disobedience or infraction of the rules, and then came the lash without mercy, the women the same as the men. The lash was made of rawhide."
"Ramona Peters gave a brief history lesson, beginning with the colonization of the Wampanoag, Narragansett and Pequot territories. She told of the end of the Pequot War, the massacre, in 1637, of the Pequot village in Mystic, Conn., where Colonial forces surrounded the fort and burned alive as many as 600 people, mostly women, children and elderly.
'That kind of savagery was unheard of,' she said.
'It was the beginning of the effort to dismantle the power of our people,' Tall Oak said.
To prevent further resistance, the Colonists passed a law that Indian men over the age of 14 be sold into slavery, with Bermuda specified as a destination, perhaps as an effort to repay the colony for helping fund the Mayflower pilgrimage from Holland in 1620.
Native American slaves arrived in Bermuda as cargo, listed simply as 'Indian man' or 'Indian woman.' They were originally called Mohawks as a generic term, though it is highly unlikely any Mohawks were enslaved on the islands at all Tall Oak said."
Faced with incontrovertible evidence of this excessive exploitation, Ferdinand issued the Laws of Burgos in 1512, the first systematic attempt to regulate the Spaniards' treatment of the Indians. Better work conditions, adequate food and living standards, and restrictions on punishment were among its many, though unenforced, provisions.
[...]
Initially the mainland encomienda supported elements of indigenous culture and economy. Except where precious metals were found, the encomenderos' demands were similar to those of the preconquest indigenous elites. [...] In comparison to the Caribbean experience, the encomienda in Mexico and Peru had a settled character.
...The Crown listened to colonists excluded from grants of encomienda and to a small, articulate group of clerics who condemned the encomienda as a major source of the ills suffered by the natives. The most effective lobbyist was the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas, whose efforts led to the New Laws of 1542.
The New Laws authorized a viceroy for Peru and audiencias in Lima and Guatemala as part of their provisions to create a more effective administration and to imporve the judicial system. But they are best known for prohibiting Indian slavery, attacking the encomenderos in general, and ordering in particular that individuals responsible for the civil war in Peru be stripped of their encomiendas.
posted by CodeBaloo at 6:36 PM on August 4, 2006