Slavery in the United States

From Wikipedia, 1/16/2022

This article is about slavery from the founding of the United States

Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, that existed in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during early colonial days, it was practiced in Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies which formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property and could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until 1865. As an economic system, slavery was largely replaced by sharecropping and convict leasing.

By the time of the American Revolution (1775–1783), the status of enslaved people had been institutionalized as a racial caste associated with African ancestry.[1] During and immediately following the Revolution, abolitionist laws were passed in most Northern states and a movement developed to abolish slavery. The role of slavery under the United States Constitution (1789) was the most contentious issue during its drafting. Although the creators of the Constitution never used the word "slavery", the final document, through the three-fifths clause, gave slave-owners disproportionate political power by augmenting the congressional representation of slaveholding states.[2] All Northern states had abolished slavery in some way by 1805; sometimes, abolition was a gradual process, and hundreds of people were still enslaved in the Northern states as late as the 1840 Census. Some slaveowners, primarily in the Upper South, freed their slaves, and philanthropists and charitable groups bought and freed others. The Atlantic slave trade was outlawed by individual states beginning during the American Revolution. The import-trade was banned by Congress in 1808, although smuggling was common thereafter.[3][4]: 7 It has been estimated that about 30% of congressmen who were born before 1840 were, at some time in their lives, owners of slaves. This is argued to have affected the progress of legislation against slavery.[5]

The rapid expansion of the cotton industry in the Deep South after the invention of the cotton gin greatly increased demand for slave labor, and the Southern states continued as slave societies. The United States became ever more polarized over the issue of slavery, thus splitting into slave and free states. Driven by labor demands from new cotton plantations in the Deep South, the Upper South sold more than a million slaves who were taken to the Deep South. The total slave population in the South eventually reached four million.[6][7] As the United States expanded, the Southern states attempted to extend slavery into the new western territories to allow proslavery forces to maintain their power in the country. The new territories acquired by the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession were the subject of major political crises and compromises. By 1850, the newly rich, cotton-growing South was threatening to secede from the Union, and tensions continued to rise. Slavery was defended in the South as a "positive good", and the largest religious denominations split over the slavery issue into regional organizations of the North and South.

When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election on a platform of halting the expansion of slavery, seven slave states broke away to form the Confederacy. Shortly afterward, the Civil War began when Confederate forces attacked the U.S. Army's Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Four additional slave states then joined the confederacy after Lincoln requested arms from them to make a retaliatory strike. Due to Union measures such as the Confiscation Acts and the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the war effectively ended chattel slavery in most places. Following the Union victory in May 1865, upon ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865, chattel slavery was effectively abolished in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

Origins

Main article: Slavery in the colonial history of the United States

First enslavements

Main article: Slavery among Native Americans in the United States

In 1508, Ponce de León established the Spanish settlement in Puerto Rico, which used the native Taínos for labor. The Taínos were largely exterminated by war, overwork and diseases brought by the Spanish. In 1513, to supplement the dwindling Taíno population, the first enslaved African people were imported to Puerto Rico. The abolition of Indian slavery in 1542 with the New Laws increased the demand for African slaves.[8]

A century and a half later, the British conducted enslaving raids in what is now Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and possibly Alabama.[9] The Charles Town slave trade, which included both trading and direct raids by colonists,[10] was the largest among the British colonies in North America.[11] Between 1670 and 1715, between 24,000 and 51,000 captive Native Americans were exported from South Carolina—more than the number of Africans imported to the colonies of the future United States during the same period.[12][13] Additional enslaved Native Americans were exported from South Carolina to Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.[12] The historian Alan Gallay says, "the trade in Indian slaves was at the center of the English empire's development in the American South. The trade in Indian slaves was the most important factor affecting the South in the period 1670 to 1715"; intertribal wars to capture slaves destabilized English colonies, Spanish Florida, and French Louisiana.[12]

First continental African enslaved people

Slavery in the colonial history of the United States – see below

The first Africans enslaved within continental North America arrived via Santo Domingo to the San Miguel de Gualdape colony (most likely located in the Winyah Bay area of present-day South Carolina), founded by Spanish explorer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón in 1526.[14] The ill-fated colony was almost immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership, during which the enslaved people revolted and fled the colony to seek refuge among local Native Americans. De Ayllón and many of the colonists died shortly afterward of an epidemic and the colony was abandoned. The settlers and the enslaved people who had not escaped returned to Santo Domingo.[14]

On August 28, 1565, St. Augustine, Florida was founded by the Spanish conquistador Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles and he brought three enslaved Africans with him. During the 16th and 17th centuries, St. Augustine was the hub of the trade in enslaved people in Spanish colonial Florida and the first permanent settlement in what would become the continental United States to include enslaved Africans.[15] The first birth of an enslaved African in what is now the United States was Agustin, who was born there in 1606.[16]

Slavery in the Colonial History of the United States

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about slavery in the Colonial era. For slavery after the United States were formed, see Slavery in the United States.

Slavery in the colonial history of the United States, from 1526 to 1776, developed from complex factors, and researchers have proposed several theories to explain the development of the institution of slavery and of the slave trade. Slavery strongly correlated with the European colonies' demand for labor, especially for the labor-intensive plantation economies of the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and South America, operated by Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and the Dutch Republic.

Slave-ships of the Atlantic slave trade transported captives for slavery from Africa to the Americas. Indigenous people were also enslaved in the North American colonies, but on a smaller scale, and Indian slavery largely ended in the late eighteenth century. Enslavement of Indigenous people did continue to occur in the Southern states until the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Slavery was also used as a punishment for crimes committed by free people.[2][3] In the colonies, slave status for Africans became hereditary with the adoption and application of civil law into colonial law, which defined the status of children born in the colonies as determined by the mother - known as partus sequitur ventrem. Children born to enslaved women were born enslaved, regardless of paternity. Children born to free women were free, regardless of ethnicity.[4][a] By the time of the American Revolution, the European colonial powers had embedded chattel slavery for Africans and their descendants throughout the Americas, including the future United States.[5]

Native Americans

Main articles: Slavery among Native Americans in the United States and Native American slave ownership

Native Americans enslaved members of their own and other tribes, usually as a result of taking captives in raids and warfare, both before and after Europeans arrived. This practice continued into the 1800s. In some cases, especially for young women or children, Native American families adopted captives to replace members they had lost. Enslavement was not necessarily hereditary. [6][7] Slaves included captives from wars and slave raids; captives bartered from other tribes, sometimes at great distances; children sold by their parents during famines; and men and women who staked themselves in gambling when they had nothing else, which put them into servitude in some cases for life.[6]

In three expeditions between 1514 and 1525, Spanish explorers visited the Carolinas and enslaved Native Americans, who they took to their base on Santo Domingo.[8][9][10] The Spanish crown's charter for its 1526 colony in the Carolinas and Georgia was more restrictive. It required that Native Americans be treated well, paid, and converted to Christianity, but it also allowed already enslaved Native Americans to be bought and exported to the Caribbean if they had been enslaved by other Native Americans.[10] This colony did not survive, so it is not clear if it exported any slaves. Native Americans were enslaved by the Spanish in Florida under the encomienda system.[11][12] New England and the Carolinas captured Native Americans in wars and distributed them as slaves.[13]

Native Americans captured and enslaved some early European explorers and colonists.[6]

Larger societies structured as chiefdoms kept slaves as unpaid field laborers. In band societies, owning enslaved captives attested to the captor's military prowess.[14] Some war captives were subjected to ritualized torture and execution.[15] Alan Gallay and other historians emphasize differences between Native American enslavement of war captives and the European slave trading system, into which numerous native peoples were integrated.[16] Richard White, in The Middle Ground, elucidates the complex social relationships between Native American groups and the early empires, including 'slave' culture and scalping.[17] Robbie Ethridge states,

"Let there be no doubt…that the commercial trade in Indian slaves was not a continuation and adaptation of pre-existing captivity patterns. It was a new kind of slave, requiring a new kind of occupational specialty … organized militaristic slavers."[18]

One example of militaristic slaving can be seen in Nathaniel Bacon's actions in Virginia during the late 1670s. In June 1676, the Virginia assembly granted Bacon and his men what equated to a slave-hunting license by providing that any enemy Native Americans caught were to be slaves for life. They also provided soldiers who had captured Native Americans with the right to "retain and keep all such Native American slaves or other Native American goods as they either have taken or hereafter shall take."[19] By this order, the assembly had made a public decision to enslave Native Americans. In the years to follow, other laws resulted in Native Americans being grouped with other non-Christian servants who had imported to the colonies (Negro slaves) as slaves for life.

Puritan New England, Virginia, Spanish Florida, and the Carolina colonies engaged in large-scale enslavement of Native Americans, often through the use of Indian proxies to wage war and acquire the slaves. In New England, slave raiding accompanied the Pequot War and King Philip's War but declined after the latter war ended in 1676. Enslaved Native Americans were in Jamestown from the early years of the settlement, but large-scale cooperation between English slavers and the West and Occaneechi peoples, whom they armed with guns, did not begin until the 1640s. These groups conducted enslaving raids in what is now Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and possibly Alabama.[20] The Carolina slave trade, which included both trading and direct raids by colonists,[21] was the largest among the British colonies in North America,[22] estimated at 24,000 to 51,000 Native Americans by Gallay.[23]

Historian Ulrich Phillips argues that Africans were inculcated as slaves and the best answer to the labor shortage in the New World because Native American slaves were more familiar with the environment, and would often successfully escape into the frontier territory they knew. Africans had more difficulty surviving in unknown territory. Also, early colonial America depended heavily on the sugar trade. Its cultivation and disease-carrying mosquitoes caused malaria, a disease the Africans were far less susceptible to than Native American slaves.[24]

Slavery among Native Americans in the United States

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Native American slavery" and "American Indian slaves" redirect here. For slavery among other indigenous people of the Americas, see Slavery among the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Slavery among Native Americans in the United States includes slavery by and slavery of Native Americans roughly within what is currently the United States of America.

Tribal territories and the slave trade ranged over present-day borders. Some Native American tribes held war captives as slaves prior to and during European colonization. Some Native Americans were captured and sold by others into slavery to Europeans, while others were captured and sold by Europeans themselves. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, a small number of tribes adopted the practice of holding slaves as chattel property, holding increasing numbers of African-American slaves.[1]

European influence greatly changed slavery used by Native Americans, as pre-contact forms of slavery were generally distinct from the form of chattel slavery developed by Europeans in North America during the colonial period.[2][3] As they raided other tribes to capture slaves for sales to Europeans, they fell into destructive wars among themselves, and against Europeans.[2][3][4]

Traditions of slavery by Native Americans

Many Native-American tribes practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America.[2][3]

Difference in pre- and post-contact slavery

There were differences between slavery as practiced in the pre-colonial era among Native Americans[specify] and slavery as practiced by Europeans after colonization. Whereas many Europeans eventually came to look upon slaves of African descent as being racially inferior, Native Americans[specify] took slaves from other Native American groups, and therefore viewed them as ethnically inferior.[2][3]

Another difference was that Native Americans[specify] did not buy and sell captives in the pre-colonial era (but see below), although they sometimes exchanged enslaved individuals with other tribes in exchange for redeeming their own members.[4][5] In some cases, Native American slaves were allowed to live on the fringes of Native American society until they were slowly integrated into the tribe.[3] The word "slave" may not accurately apply to such captive people.[2][3]

When the Europeans made contact with the Native Americans, they began to participate in the slave trade.[6] Native Americans[specify], in their initial encounters with the Europeans, attempted to use their captives from enemy tribes as a "method of playing one tribe against another" in an unsuccessful game of divide and conquer.[6]

Treatment and function of slaves

Native American groups[specify] often enslaved war captives, whom they primarily used for small-scale labor.[2][3] Others, however, would stake themselves in gambling situations when they had nothing else, which would put them into servitude for a short time, or in some cases for life; captives were also sometimes tortured as part of religious rites, which sometimes involved ritual cannibalism.[2][7] During times of famine, some Native Americans would also temporarily sell their children to obtain food.[2]

The ways in which captives were treated differed widely among Native American groups. Captives could be enslaved for life, killed, or adopted. In some cases, captives were only adopted after a period of slavery. For example, the Iroquoian peoples (not just the Iroquois tribes) often adopted captives, but for religious reasons there was a process, procedures, and many seasons when such adoptions were delayed until the proper spiritual times.

In many cases, new tribes adopted captives to replace warriors killed during a raid.[2][3] Warrior captives were sometimes made to undergo ritual mutilation or torture that could end in death, as part of a spiritual grief ritual for relatives slain in battle.[2][3] Adoptees were expected to fill the economic, military, and familial roles of the departed loved ones, to fit into the societal shoes of the dead relative, and maintain the spirit power of the tribe.

Captured individuals were sometimes allowed to assimilate into the tribe, and would later produce a family within the tribe.[2][3] The Creek, who engaged in this practice and had a matrilineal system, treated children born of slaves and Creek women as full members of their mothers' clans and of the tribe, as property and hereditary leadership passed through the maternal line. In the cultural practices of the Iroquoian peoples, also rooted in a matrilineal system with men and women having equal value, any child would have the status determined by the woman's clan. More typically, tribes took women and children captives for adoption, as they tended to adapt more easily into new ways.

Several tribes held captives as hostages for payment.[2][3] Various tribes also practiced debt slavery or imposed slavery on tribal members who had committed crimes; full tribal status would be restored as the enslaved worked off their obligations to the tribal society.[2][3] Obtaining prisoners was also a strong interest for Native American warriors as for the qualification of being considered brave this was especially an interest of male warriors in various tribes.[2] Other slave-owning tribes of North America included the Comanche of Texas; the Creek of Georgia; the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, who lived in Northern California; the Pawnee; and the Klamath.[8] When St. Augustine, Florida, was founded in 1565, the site already had enslaved Native Americans, whose ancestors had migrated from Cuba.[2]

The Haida and Tlingit, who lived along Alaska's southeast coast, were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave-traders, raiding as far as California.[9][10] In their society, slavery was hereditary after slaves were taken as prisoners of war[9][10]—children of slaves were fated to be slaves themselves.[11] Among a few Pacific Northwest tribes, as many as one-fourth of the population were slaves.[9][10] They were typically captured by raids on enemy tribes, or purchased on inter-tribal slave markets. Slaves would sometimes be killed in potlatches, to signify the owners' contempt for property.

European enslavement of Native Americans

When Europeans arrived as colonists in North America, Native Americans changed their practice of slavery dramatically.[4] Native Americans began selling war captives to Europeans rather than integrating them into their own societies as some had done before.

Native Americans were enslaved by the Spanish in Florida and the Southwest under various legal tools.[12] One tool was the encomienda system;[13][14][15] new encomiendas were outlawed in the New Laws of 1542, but old ones continued, and the 1542 restriction was revoked in 1545.[16][17]

As the demand for labor in the West Indies grew with the cultivation of sugarcane, Europeans exported enslaved Native Americans to the "sugar islands." Historian Alan Gallay estimates that between 1670 and 1715, 24,000 to 51,000 captive Native Americans were exported through Carolina ports, of which more than half, 15,000-30,000, were brought from then-Spanish Florida.[18] These numbers were more than the number of Africans imported to the Carolinas during the same period.[18]

Gallay also says that "the trade in Indian slaves was at the center of the English empire's development in the American South. The trade in Indian slaves was the most important factor affecting the South in the period 1670 to 1715;" intertribal wars to capture slaves destabilized English colonies, Florida and Louisiana.[18] Additional enslaved Native Americans were exported from South Carolina to Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.[18]

Starting in 1698, Parliament allowed competition among importers of enslaved Africans, raising purchase prices for slaves in Africa, so they cost more than enslaved Native Americans.[18]

The British settlers, especially those in the southern colonies, purchased or captured Native Americans to use as forced labor in cultivating tobacco, rice, and indigo. Accurate records of the numbers enslaved do not exist. Slaves became a caste of people who were foreign to the English (Native Americans, Africans and their descendants) and non-Christians. The Virginia General Assembly defined some terms of slavery in 1705:[19]

All servants imported and brought into the Country ... who were not Christians in their native Country ... shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion ... shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resists his master ... correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction ... the master shall be free of all punishment ... as if such accident never happened.

The slave trade of Native Americans lasted until around 1730. It gave rise to a series of devastating wars among the tribes, including the Yamasee War. The Indian Wars of the early 18th century, combined with the increasing importation of African slaves, effectively ended the Native American slave trade by 1750. Colonists found that Native American slaves could easily escape, as they knew the country. The wars cost the lives of numerous colonial slave traders and disrupted their early societies. The remaining Native American groups banded together to face the Europeans from a position of strength. Many surviving Native American peoples of the southeast strengthened their loose coalitions of language groups and joined confederacies such as the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Catawba for protection.

Native American women were at risk for rape whether they were enslaved or not; during the early colonial years, settlers were disproportionately male. They turned to Native women for sexual relationships.[20] Both Native American and African enslaved women suffered rape and sexual harassment by male slaveholders and other white men.

The exact number of Native Americans who were enslaved is unknown because vital statistics and census reports were at best infrequent.[21] Andrés Reséndez estimates that between 147,000 and 340,000 Native Americans were enslaved in North America, excluding Mexico.[22] Linford Fisher's estimates 2.5 million to 5.5 million Natives enslaved in the entire Americas.[23] Even though records became more reliable in the later colonial period, Native American slaves received little to no mention, or they were classed with African slaves with no distinction.[21] For example, in the case of "Sarah Chauqum of Rhode Island", her master listed her as mulatto in the bill of sale to Edward Robinson, but she won her freedom by asserting her Narragansett identity.[24]

Little is known about Native Americans that were forced into labor.[24] Two myths have complicated the history of Native American slavery: that Native Americans were undesirable as servants, and that Native Americans were exterminated or pushed out after King Philip's War.[24] The precise legal status for some Native Americans is at times difficult to establish, as involuntary servitude and slavery were poorly defined in 17th-century British America.[24] Some masters asserted ownership over the children of Native American servants, seeking to turn them into slaves.[24] The historical uniqueness of slavery in America is that European settlers drew a rigid line between insiders, "people like themselves who could never be enslaved", and nonwhite outsiders, "mostly Africans and Native Americans who could be enslaved".[24] A unique feature between natives and colonists was that colonists gradually asserted sovereignty over the native inhabitants during the seventeenth century, ironically transforming them into subjects with collective rights and privileges that Africans could not enjoy.[24] The West Indies developed as plantation societies prior to the Chesapeake Bay region and had a demand for labor.

In the Spanish colonies, the church assigned Spanish surnames to Native Americans and recorded them as servants rather than slaves.[25] Many members of Native American tribes in the Western United States were taken for life as slaves.[25] In some cases, courts served as conduits for enslavement of Indians, as evidenced by the enslavement of the Hopi man Juan Suñi in 1659 by a court in Santa Fe for theft of food and trinkets from the governor's mansion.[26] In the East, Native Americans were recorded as slaves.[27]

Slaves in Indian Territory across the United States were used for many purposes, from work in the plantations of the East, to guides across the wilderness, to work in deserts of the West, or as soldiers in wars. Native American slaves suffered from European diseases and inhumane treatment, and many died while in captivity.[27]

The Indian slave trade

European colonists caused a change in Native American slavery, as they created a new demand market for captives of raids.[3][21] Especially in the southern colonies, initially developed for resource exploitation rather than settlement, colonists purchased or captured Native Americans to be used as forced labor in cultivating tobacco, and, by the eighteenth century, rice, and indigo.[3] To acquire trade goods, Native Americans began selling war captives to whites rather than integrating them into their own societies.[29] Traded goods, such as axes, bronze kettles, Caribbean rum, European jewelry, needles, and scissors, varied among the tribes, but the most prized were rifles.[29] The English copied the Spanish and Portuguese: they saw the enslavement of Africans and Native Americans as a moral, legal, and socially acceptable institution; a rationale for enslavement was "just war" taking captives and using slavery as an alternative to a death sentence.[30] The escape of Native American slaves was frequent, because they had a better understanding of the land, which African slaves did not. Consequently, the Natives who were captured and sold into slavery were often sent to the West Indies, or far away from their home.[3]

The first African slave on record was located in Jamestown. Before the 1630s, indentured servitude was dominant form of bondage in the colonies, but by 1636 only Caucasians could lawfully receive contracts as indentured servants.[31] The oldest known record of a permanent Native American slave was a native man from Massachusetts in 1636.[31] By 1661 slavery had become legal in all of the existing colonies.[31] Virginia would later declare that "Indians, Mulattos, and Negros to be real estate," and in 1682, New York forbade African or Native American slaves from leaving their master's home or plantation without permission.[31]

Europeans also viewed the enslavement of Native Americans differently than the enslavement of Africans in some cases; a belief that Africans were "brutish people" was dominant. While both Native Americans and Africans were considered savages, Native Americans were romanticized as noble people that could be elevated into Christian civilization.[30]

New England

The Pequot War of 1636 led to the enslavement of war captives and other members of the Pequot by Europeans, almost immediately after the founding of Connecticut as a colony. The Pequot thus became an important part of New England's culture of slavery.[21][24] The Pequot War was devastating: the Niantic, Narragansett, and Mohegan tribes were persuaded into helping the Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth colonists massacre the Pequot, with at least 700 of the Pequot killed. Most enslaved Pequot were noncombatant women and children, with court records indicating that most served as chattel slaves for life. Some court records show bounties on runaway native slaves more than 10 years after the War.[24] What further aided the Indian slave trade throughout New England and the South was that different tribes didn't recognize themselves as members of the same race, dividing the tribes among each other.[29] The Chickasaw and Westos, for example, sold captives of other tribes indiscriminately so as to augment their political and economic power.[29]

Furthermore, Rhode Island also participated in the enslavement of Native Americans, but records are incomplete or non-existent, making the exact number of slaves unknown.[21] The New England governments would promise plunder as part of their payment, and commanders like Israel Stoughton viewed the right to claim Native American women and children as part of their due.[24] Because of lack of records it can only be speculated if the soldiers demanded these captives as sexual slaves or solely as servants.[24] Few colonial leaders questioned the policies of the colonies' treatment of slaves, but Roger Williams, who tried to maintain positive connections with the Narragansett, was conflicted. As a Christian he felt that identifiable Indian murderers "deserved death", but he condemned the murder of Native American women and children, though most of his criticisms were kept private.[24] Massachusetts originally kept peace with the Native American tribes in the region, but that changed, and the enslavement of Native Americans became inevitable. Boston newspapers mention escaped slaves as late as 1750.[21] In 1790, the United States census report indicated that the number of slaves in the state was 6,001, with an unknown proportion of Native Americans, but at least 200 were cited as half-breed Indians (meaning half African).[21] Since Massachusetts took the advance in the fighting of the King Philip's War and the Pequot War; it is most likely the Massachusetts colony greatly exceeded that of either Connecticut or Rhode Island in the number of Native American slaves owned.[21] New Hampshire was unique: it had very few slaves, and maintained a somewhat peaceful stance with various tribes during the Pequot War and King Philip's War.[21] Colonists in the South began to capture and enslave Native Americans for sale and export to the "sugar islands" such as Jamaica, as well as to northern colonies.[3][21][29] The resulting Native American slave trade devastated the southeastern Native American populations and transformed tribal relations throughout the Southeast.[2] In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English at Charles Town (in modern South Carolina), the Spanish in Florida, and the French in Louisiana sought trading partners and allies among the Native Americans by offering goods such as metal knives, axes, firearms and ammunition, liquor, beads, cloth, and hats in exchange for furs (deerskins) and Native American slaves.[3][29]

Traders, frontier settlers, and government officials encouraged Native Americans to make war on each other, to reap the profits of the slaves captured in such raids or to weaken the warring tribes.[2] Starting in 1610, the Dutch traders had developed a lucrative trade with the Iroquois.[29] The Iroquois gave the Dutch beaver pelts; in exchange the Dutch gave them clothing, tools, and firearms, which gave them more power than neighboring tribes had.[29] The trade allowed the Iroquois to have war campaigns against other tribes, like the Eries, Huron, Petun, Shawnee, and the Susquehannocks.[29] The Iroquois also began to take war captives and sell them.[29] The increased power of the Iroquois, combined with the diseases the Europeans unknowingly brought, devastated many eastern tribes.[29]

American Southeast

Main article: Indian slave trade in the American Southeast

Carolina, which originally included today's North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, was unique among the North American English colonies because the colonists thought of slavery as essential to their success.[30][32] In 1680, proprietors ordered the Carolina government to ensure that enslaved Native Americans had equal justice[further explanation needed] and to treat them better than African slaves; these regulations were widely publicized, so no one could claim ignorance of them.[30] The change in policy in Carolina was rooted in fear that escaped slaves would inform their tribes, resulting in even more devastating attacks on plantations.[30] The new policy proved almost impossible to enforce, as both colonists and local officials viewed Native Americans and Africans as the same, and the exploitation of both as the easiest way to wealth, though the proprietors continued to attempt to enforce the changes for profit reasons.][30]

In the other colonies slavery developed into a predominant form of labor over time.[32] It is estimated that Carolina traders operating out of Charles Town exported an estimated 30,000 to 51,000 Native American captives between 1670 and 1715 in a profitable slave trade with the Caribbean, Spanish Hispaniola, and Northern colonies.[33] It was more profitable to have Native American slaves because African slaves had to be shipped and purchased, while native slaves could be captured and immediately taken to plantations; whites in the Northern colonies sometimes preferred Native American slaves, especially Native women and children, to Africans because Native American women were agriculturalist and children could be trained more easily.[25] However, Carolinians had more of a preference for African slaves but also capitalized on the Indian slave trade combining both.[32] In December 1675, Carolina's grand council created a written justification of the enslavement and sale of Native Americans, claiming that those who were enemies of tribes the English had befriended were targets, stating those enslaved were not "innocent Indians".[30] The council also claimed it was within the wishes of their "Indian allies" to take their prisoners and that the prisoners were willing to work in the country or be transported elsewhere.[30] The council used this to please the proprietors, and to fulfill the practice of enslaving no one against their wishes or be transported without his own consent out of Carolina, though this is what the colonists did.[30]

In John Norris' "Profitable Advice for Rich and Poor" (1712), he recommends buying 18 native women, 15 African men, and 3 African women.[32] Slave traders preferred captive Native Americans who were under 18 years old, as they were believed to be more easily trained to new work.[25] In the Illinois Country, French colonists baptized the Native American slaves whom they bought for labor.[25] They believed it essential to convert Native Americans to Catholicism.[25] Church baptismal records have thousands of entries for Indian slaves.[25] In the eastern colonies it became common practice to enslave Native American women and African men with a parallel growth of enslavement for both Africans and Native Americans.[32] This practice also lead to large number of unions between Africans and Native Americans.[34] This practice of combining African slave men and Native American women was especially common in South Carolina.[32] Native American women were cheaper to buy than Native American men or Africans. Moreover, it was more efficient to have native women because they were skilled laborers, the primary agriculturalists in their communities.[32] During this era it wasn't uncommon for reward notices in colonial newspapers to mention runaway slaves speaking of Africans, Native Americans, and those of a partial mix between them.[31]

Many early laborers, including Africans, entered the colonies as indentured servants and could be free after paying off their passage. Slavery was associated with people who were non-Christian and non-European. In a Virginia General Assembly declaration of 1705, some terms were defined:[35][non-primary source needed]

And also be in [sic.] enacted, by the authority aforesaid, and it is hereby enacted, That all servants imported and brought into the Country... who were not christians in their native country, (except... Turks and Moors in amity with her majesty, and others that can make due proof of their being free in England, or any other christian country, before they were shipped...) shall be accounted and be slaves, and such be here bought and sold notwithstanding a conversion to christianity afterward. [Section IV.] And if any slave resists his master, or owner, or other person, by his or her order, correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction, it shall not be accounted felony; but the master, owner, and every such other person so giving correction, shall be free and acquit of all punishment and accusation for the same, as if such incident had never happened... [Section XXXIV.][35][36]

In the mid-18th century, South Carolina colonial governor James Glen began to promote an official policy that aimed to create in Native Americans an "aversion" to African Americans in an attempt to thwart possible alliances between them.[37][38] In 1758, James Glen wrote: "It has always been the policy of this government to create an aversion in them Indians to Negroes."[39]

The dominance of the Native American slave trade lasted until around 1730, when it led to a series of devastating wars among the tribes.[3] The slave trade created tensions that were not present among different tribes and even large scale abandonment of original homelands to escape the wars and slave trade.[32] The majority of the Indian wars occurred in the south.[40] The Westos originally lived near Lake Erie in the 1640s but relocated to escape the Indian slave trade and Iroquois mourning wars designed to repopulate the Iroquois Confederacy due to European enslavement and large number of deaths due to wars and disease.[32] The Westos eventually moved to Virginia and then South Carolina to take advantage of trading routes.[which?][32] The Westos strongly contributed to the rising involvement of southeastern Native American communities in the Indian slave trade especially with Westos expansion.[32] The increased rise of the gun-slave trade forced the other tribes to participate or their refusal to engage in enslaving meant they would become targets of slavers.[32] Before 1700, the Westos in Carolina dominated much of the Native American slave trade, enslaving natives of southern tribes indiscriminately.[29] The Westos gained power rapidly but the British and plantation owners began to fear them as they were well-armed with a lot of rifle power through trading; unremorsefully from 1680 to 1682 the English, allied with the Savannah who resented Westo control of the trade wiped them out killing most of the men and selling most of the women and children that could be captured.[29] As a result, the Westo tribal group was completely eliminated culturally; its survivors were scattered or else sold into slavery in Antigua.[3] Those Native Americans nearer the European settlements raided tribes farther into the interior in the quest for slaves to be sold, especially to the British.[32]

In response, the southeastern tribes intensified their warring and hunting, which increasingly challenged their traditional reasons for hunting or warring.[29][32] The traditional reasoning for war was revenge not for profit.[32] The Chickasaw war parties had pushed the Houmas tribe further south where the tribe struggled to find stability.[29] In 1704, the Chickasaw alliance with the French had weakened and the British used the opportunity to make an alliance with the Chickasaw bringing them 12 Taensa slaves.[29] In Mississippi and Tennessee the Chickasaw played both the French and British against each other, and preyed on the Choctaw, who were traditional allies of the French, as well as the Arkansas, the Tunica, and the Taensa, establishing slave depots throughout their territories.[18] In 1705, the Chickasaw activated their war parties again targeting the unexpected Choctaw since a friendship had been established between the two tribes; several Choctaw families were taken into captivity rekindling a war between the two tribes and ending their allegiance.[29] A single Chickasaw raid in 1706 on the Choctaw yielded 300 Native American captives for the English.[18] The warring between them continued through the early 18th century with the worse incident for the Choctaw occurring in 1711 as the British also attacked the Choctaw simultaneously fearing them more because they were allies to the French.[29] It is estimated that this warring mixed with enslavement and epidemics devastated the Chickasaw, it is estimated that in 1685 their population was 7,000 plus but by 1715 it was as low as 4,000.[29] As the southern tribes continued their involvement in slave trade they became more involved economically and began to amass significant debts.[32] The Yamasee amassed a great debt in 1711 for rum, but the General Assembly had voted to forgive their debts, but the tribe replied by stating they were preparing for war to pay their debts.[32] The Indian slave trade began to negatively affect the social organization in many of the southern tribes particularly in gender roles in their communities.[32] As male warriors began to interact more with colonial men and societies which were heavily patriarchal they began to increasingly sought out control over captives to trade with European men.[32] Among the Cherokee the undermining of women's power began to create tensions among their communities e.g. warriors started to undermine women's power to determine when to wage war.[32] In the Cherokee and other tribes' societies "war women" and "beloved women" were those who had proven themselves in battle, and were respected with vested privileges to decide what to do with captives.[32][41] The incidents led warring women to dress as traders in effort to get captives before warriors.[32] A similar pattern of friendly and then hostile relations among the English and Native Americans followed in the southeastern colonies.[3]

For example, the Creek, a loose confederacy of many different groups who had banded together to defend themselves against slave-raiding, allied with the English and moved on the Apalachee in Spanish Florida, destroying them as a group of people in the quest for slaves.[3] These raids also destroyed several other Florida tribes, including the Timucua.[18][40] In 1685, the Yamasee were persuaded by Scottish slave traders to attack the Timucuans, the attack was devastating.[29] Most of the colonial-era Native Americans of Florida were killed, enslaved, or scattered.[18] It is estimated that English-Creek raids on Florida yielded 4,000 Native American slaves between 1700 and 1705.[18] A few years later, the Shawnee raided the Cherokee in similar fashion.[18] In North Carolina, the Tuscarora, fearing among other things that the English planned to enslave them as well as take their land, attacked the English in a war that lasted from 1711 to 1713.[18] In this war, Carolina whites, aided by the Yamasee, completely vanquished the Tuscarora, taking thousands of captives as slaves.[18][40] Within a few years, a similar fate befell the Yuchis and the Yamasee, who had fallen out of favor with the British.[18] The French armed the Natchez tribe, who lived on the banks of the Mississippi, and the Illinois against the Chickasaw.[18] By 1729, the Natchez, along with a number of enslaved and runaway Africans who lived among them, rose up against the French. An army composed of French soldiers, Choctaw warriors, and enslaved Africans defeated them.[18] Trade behavior of several tribes also began to change returning to more traditional ways of adopting war captives instead of immediately selling them to white slave traders or holding them for three days before deciding to sell them or not.[29] This was due to the heavy losses many of the tribes were obtaining in the numerous wars that continued throughout the 18th century.[29]

The lethal combination of slavery, disease, and warfare dramatically decreased the free southern Native American populations; it is estimated that the southern tribes numbered around 199,400 in 1685 but decreased to 90,100 in 1715.[29][32] The Indian wars of the early 18th century, combined with the growing availability of African slaves, essentially ended the Native American slave trade by 1750.[3][18] Numerous colonial slave traders had been killed in the fighting, and the remaining Native American groups banded together, more determined to face the Europeans from a position of strength rather than be enslaved.[32][18] During this time records also show that many Native American women bought African men but, unknown to the European sellers, the women freed and married the men into their tribe.[42] Though the Indian slave trade ended the practice of enslaving Native Americans continued, records from June 28, 1771 show Native American children were kept as slaves in Long Island, New York.[21] Native Americans had also married while enslaved creating families both native and some of partial African descent.[31] Occasional mentioning of Native American slaves running away, being bought, or sold along with Africans in newspapers is found throughout the later colonial period.[21][32] Many of the Native American remnant tribes joined confederacies such as the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Catawba for protection, making them less easy victims of European slavers.[32] There are also many accounts of former slaves mentioning having a parent or grandparent who was Native American or of partial descent.[34]

Records and slave narratives obtained by the WPA (Works Progress Administration) clearly indicate that the enslavement of Native Americans continued in the 1800s, mostly through kidnappings.[34] One example is a documented WPA interview from a former slave, Dennis Grant, whose mother was full-blooded Native American.[34] She was kidnapped as a child near Beaumont, Texas, in the 1850s, and made a slave, later becoming the forced wife of another enslaved person.[34] The abductions showed that even in the 1800s little distinction was still made between African Americans and Native Americans.[34] Both Native American and African-American enslaved people were at risk of sexual abuse by slaveholders and other white men of power.[43][44] The pressures of slavery also gave way to the creation of colonies of runaway slaves and Native Americans living in Florida, called Maroons.[45]

Slavery in the Southwest

See also: Unfree labor in California, History of slavery in New Mexico, and History of slavery in Utah

Local colonial authorities in colonial and Mexican California organized slavery systems for Native Americans through Franciscan missions, theoretically entitled to ten years of Native labor, but in practice maintaining their slaves in perpetual servitude until the Mexican government secularized the missions in 1833.[citation needed] Spanish colonists and Native Americans sold or traded slaves at many of the trade fairs along the Rio Grande.[citation needed] Following the 1847–1848 invasion by U.S. troops, indigenous peoples in California were enslaved in the new state from statehood in 1850 to 1867.[46] Indian slavery required the posting of a bond by the slave holder.[47] Enslavement occurred through raids[citation needed] and through a four-month servitude imposed in 1846 as a punishment for Indian "vagrancy".[48]

Native-American enslavement of Africans

Main article: Native American slave ownership

The earliest record of African and Native American contact occurred in April 1502, when Spanish explorers brought an African slave with them and encountered a Native American band.[50] Thereafter, in the early colonial days, Native Americans interacted with enslaved Africans and African Americans in every way possible; Native Americans were enslaved along with Africans, and both often worked with European indentured laborers.[31][21][51] "They worked together, lived together in communal quarters, produced collective recipes for food, shared herbal remedies, myths and legends, and in the end they intermarried."[31][52]

Because both races were non-Christian, and because of their differing skin color and physical features, Europeans considered them other and inferior to Europeans. The Europeans thus worked to make enemies of the two groups. In some areas, Native Americans began to slowly absorb white culture, and in time some Native American tribes came to own African slaves.[3][4]

Native-American slavery in the Southeast

The Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole made the largest efforts of all the Native American peoples to assimilate into white society by implementing some of the practices which they saw as beneficial; adoption of slavery was one of them.[53][54][55] They were the most receptive to whites' pressures to adopt European cultures. The pressures from European Americans to assimilate, the economic shift of furs and deerskins, and the government's continued attempts to “civilize” native tribes in the south led to them adopting an economy based on agriculture.[56]

Slavery itself was not a new concept to indigenous American peoples as in inter-Native American conflict tribes often kept prisoners of war, but these captures often replaced slain tribe members.[4][57] Native American "versions" of slavery prior to European contact came nowhere close to fitting the European definition of slavery as Native Americans did not originally distinguish between groups of people based on color, but rather traditions.[58] There are conflicting theories as to what caused the shift between traditional Native American servitude to the enslavement the Five Civilized Tribes adopted. One theory is the ”civilized” tribes adopted slavery as means to defend themselves from federal pressure believing that it would help them maintain their southern lands.[55] Another narrative postulates that Native Americans began to feed into the European belief that Africans were inferior to whites and themselves.[59] Some indigenous nations such as the Chickasaws and the Choctaws began to embrace the concept that African bodies were property, and equated blackness to hereditary inferiority.[60] In either case, "The system of racial classification and hierarchy took shape as Europeans and Euro-Americans sought to subordinate and exploit Native Americans' and Africans' land, bodies, and labor.[58] Whether strategically or racially motivated the slave trade promoted African slaves owned by Native Americans which led to new power relations among Native societies, elevating groups such as the Five Civilized Tribes to power and serving, ironically, to preserve native order.[61][1]

Slavery in the Indian Territory

See also: Cherokee freedmen controversy

In the 1830s, all of the Five Civilized Tribes were relocated, many of them forcibly to the Indian Territory (later, the state of Oklahoma). The incident is known as the Trail of Tears, and the institution of owning enslaved Africans came with them. Of the estimated 4,500 to 5,000 blacks who formed the slave class in the Indian Territory by 1839, the great majority were in the possession of the mixed bloods.[55]

Other Native Americans responses to African slavery

Tensions varied between African Americans and Native Americans in the south, as each nation dealt with the ideology behind enslavement of Africans differently.[56] In the late 1700s and 1800s, some Native American nations gave sanctuary to runaway slaves while others were more likely to capture them, and return them to their white masters or even re-enslave them.[59] Still others incorporated runaway slaves into their societies, sometimes resulting in intermarriage between the Africans and Native Americans, which was a common place among tribes like the Creek and Seminole.[62][58] Although, some Native Americans may have had a strong dislike of slavery, because they too were seen as a people of a subordinate race than white men of European descent, they lacked the political power to influence the racialistic culture that pervaded the Non-Indian South.[58] It is unclear if some Native American slaveholders sympathized with African-American slaves along racial lines.[55] Missionary work was an efficient method the United States used to persuade Native Americans to accept European methods of living. Missionaries vociferously denounced Indian removal as cruel, oppressive, and feared such actions would push Native Americans away from converting.[63] These same missionaries reported that Native American slave owners were brutal masters, even though accounts of Indian freedmen gave different accounts of being treated relatively well without tyrannical treatment.[62]

American Civil War

Traditionalist groups, such as Pin Indians and the intertribal Four Mothers Society, were outspoken opponents of slavery during the Civil War.[64]

Notes

1. Smith, Ryan P. 6 March 2018. "How Native American Slaveholders Complicate the Trail of Tears Narrative." Smithsonian Magazine.

2. Lauber 1913, pp. 25–47.

3. Gallay, Alan, ed. (2009). "Introduction: Indian Slavery in Historical Context". Indian Slavery in Colonial America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 1–32. ISBN 978-0803222007.

4. Perdue, Theda (1979). Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866. University of Tennessee Press. pp. 207 pages.

5. Driver, Harold E. (November 30, 2011). Indians of North America Chapter 19: Rank and Social Classes. University of Chicago Press. pp. 330–344. Retrieved March 1, 2019.

6. Bailey, Lynn R. (1966). Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest. New York: Tower Publications.

7. "Picnic with cannibals: Wisconsin's Aztalan State Park was home to mysterious, ancient city whose residents ate their enemies". Charlotte Observer.

8. "Slavery in America". Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Black History.

9. Mintz, S. (2007) [2003]. "African American Voices: Slavery in Historical Perspective". Digital History.

10. MacDonald, George F. (2017) [1996]. "Warfare". Haida: Children of the Eagle. Gatineau, QC, CAN: Government of Canada, Canadian Museum of History. Retrieved March 8, 2017 – via historymuseum.ca. Based on MacDonald, George F. (1996). Haida Art. Vancouver, BC, CAN: Douglas & McIntyre.

11. "Haida – Haida Villages – Haida Warfarre". Canadian Museum of Civilization.

12. Trever, David (May 13, 2016). "The new book 'The Other Slavery' will make you rethink American history". Los Angeles Times.

13. Lauber 1913, pp. 48–62.

14. Guitar, Lynne, No More Negotiation: Slavery and the Destabilization of Colonial Hispaniola's Encomienda System, by Lynne Guitar, retrieved December 6, 2019

15. Indian Slavery in the Americas- AP US History Study Guide from The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, March 22, 2012,

16. "Laws of the Indies: Spain and the Native Peoples of the New World". Bill of Rights in Action. 1999 15:4. Fall 1999 – via Constitutional Rights Fdn.

17. King Charles I of Spain (August 16, 1545). "Letter to the president and oidores of the Council of the Indies". Library of Congress.

18. Gallay 2008, pp. 7, 299–320.

19. "The Terrible Transformation:From Indentured Servitude to Racial Slavery". PBS. 2009.

20. Gloria J. Browne-Marshall (2009). ""The Realities of Enslaved Female Africans in America", excerpted from Failing Our Black Children: Statutory Rape Laws, Moral Reform and the Hypocrisy of Denial". University of Daytona.

21. Lauber 1913, pp. 105–117.

22. Reséndez 2016, p. 324.

23. "Colonial enslavement of Native Americans included those who surrendered, too" (Press release). Brown University. February 15, 2017. Retrieved September 12, 2017.

24. Newell, Margaret Ellen (2009). "Indian Slavery in Colonial New England". In Gallay, Alan (ed.). Indian Slavery in Colonial America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 33–66.

25. Ekberg, Carl J. (2007). Stealing Indian Women: Native Slavery in the Illinois Country. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

26. Daughters, Anton. "'Grave Offenses Worthy of Great Punishment': The Enslavement of Juan Suñi, 1659." Journal of the Southwest 54:3 pp.437–452 (Autumn 2012)

27. Schneider, Dorothy; Schneider, Carl J. (2007). "Enslavement of American Indians by Whites". Slavery in America, American Experience. New York: Facts On File.

28. "Sacajawea." Shoshone Indians. (retrieved November 1, 2011)

29. Snyder 2010, pp. 46–79.

30. Gallay 2009a, pp. 109–146.

31. Katz, William Loren (1996). "Their Mixing is to be Prevented". Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage. Atheneum Books For Young Readers. pp. 109–125.

32. Bossy, Denise I. (2009). "Indian Slavery in Southeastern Indian and British Societies, 1670–1730". In Gallay, Alan (ed.). Indian Slavery in Colonial America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 207–250.

33. Krauthamer 2013, pp. 17–45.

34. Yarbrough, Fay A. (2008). "Indian Slavery and Memory: Interracial sex from the slaves' perspective". Race and the Cherokee Nation. University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 112–123.

35. Virginia General Assembly (2012) [1705]. "An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves (1705) [Sections IV. and XXXIV., Transcription From Original]". In Gibson, Matthew (ed.). Encyclopedia Virginia. Charlottesville, VA: Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Retrieved March 8, 2017. Cited is a digital version of William Waller Hening, Ed. (1823). The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619. Vol. 3. Philadelphia, PA: R. & W. & G. Bartow. pp. 447–463, esp. 447f, 459. Primary source.

36. For a popular work that uses this quoted section, but that misquotes this primary source, and includes further untraceable material, see Crotty, Patty; Woods, Meredith; Gaffney, Dennis (2017) [1999]. Sicker, Ted (Prod.) (ed.). "Part 1, 1450–1750: Narrative, From Indentured Servitude to Racial Slavery". Africans in America. Boston, MA: WGBH and PBS. Retrieved March 8, 2017 – via PBS.org/WGBH/AIA. Full production credits are available for the series and accompanying materials.

37. Patrick Minges (2003), Slavery in the Cherokee Nation: the Keetoowah Society and the defining of a people, 1855–1867, Psychology Press, p. 27.

38. Kimberley Tolley (2007), Transformations in Schooling: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Macmillan, p. 228,

39. Tiya Miles (2008). Ties That Bind: The story of an Afro-Cherokee family in slavery and freedom. University of California Press.

40. Lauber 1913, pp. 118–153.

41. Perdue, Theda (1998). "Defining Community". Cherokee Women. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln & London. pp. 41–59.

42. Dorothy A. Mays (2004). Women in Early America: Struggle, Survival, and Freedom in a New World. ABC-CLIO. p. 214.

43. Browne-Marshall, Gloria J. (2011) [2002]. "The Realities of Enslaved Female Africans in America". Race, Racism and the Law: Speaking Truth to Power!!. Dayton, OH: University of Dayton, School of Law.

44. Linwood Custalow & Angela L. Daniel (2009). The true story of Pocahontas. Fulcrum Publishing.

45. William Loren Katz (1996). Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage Chap. 4 The Finest Looking People I Have Ever Seen. Atheneum Books For Young Readers. pp. 53–68. ISBN 9781442446373. Retrieved April 2, 2017.

46. Castillo, E.D. 1998. "Short Overview of California Indian History" Archived December 14, 2006, at the Wayback Machine, California Native American Heritage Commission, 1998. Retrieved October 24, 2007.

47. Beasley, Delilah L. (1918). "Slavery in California". Journal of Negro History. 3 (1): 33–44. doi:10.2307/2713792. JSTOR 2713792. S2CID 149542384. The subject of slavery in California was officially called to the attention of the inhabitants through the issuance of a proclamation by the Commander in Chief of the District in regard to the unlawful enslaving of the Indians. He was endeavoring to protect them, but they were enslaved in spite of his efforts. The legislature undertook to perpetuate this system by enacting a law permitting the enslavement of Indians, the only condition upon the master being a bond of a small sum, that he would not abuse or cruelly treat the slaves.

48. Compare: Beasley, Delilah L. (1918). "Slavery in California". Journal of Negro History. 3 (1): 33–44. doi:10.2307/2713792. JSTOR 2713792. S2CID 149542384. The subject of slavery in California was officially called to the attention of the inhabitants through the issuance of a proclamation by the Commander in Chief of the District in regard to the unlawful enslaving of the Indians. He was endeavoring to protect them, but they were enslaved in spite of his efforts. The legislature undertook to perpetuate this system by enacting a law permitting the enslavement of Indians, the only condition upon the master being a bond of a small sum, that he would not abuse or cruelly treat the slaves. Under the provision of the same law, Indians could be arrested as vagrants and sold to the highest bidder within twenty-four hours after the arrest, and the buyer had the privilege of the labor for a period not exceeding four months.

49. "Czarina Conlan Collection: Photographs". Oklahoma Historical Society Star Archives. Archived from the original on February 28, 2009. Retrieved August 23, 2010.

50. Dirks, Jerald F. (2006). Muslims in American History: A Forgotten Legacy. Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications. p. 204. ISBN 1590080440. Retrieved March 8, 2017.

51. Dorothy A. Mays (2008). Women in early America. ABC-CLIO.

52. Brown, Audrey; Knapp, Anthony; et al. (2008). "Work, Marriage, Christianity". African American Heritage and Ethnography. Archived from the original on January 21, 2008. Retrieved March 8, 2017 – via nps.gov. Content production credits are available for these materials.

53. Goins, Charles Robert, Danney Goble, and James H. Anderson. 2006. Historical Atlas of Oklahoma. University of Oklahoma Press. p. 52: "The concept of the 'Five Civilized Tribes' has been an important interpretive tool for students of the history of Indian Territory and Oklahoma. But it is an ethnocentric idea that is no longer meaningful."

54. Ray, Michael. [2017] 2019. "Five Civilized Tribes." Encyclopædia Britannica: "Five Civilized Tribes, term that has been used officially and unofficially since at least 1866 to designate the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians in Oklahoma (former Indian Territory).... [B]ut there has never been any unification or overall organization of these tribes under that name."

55. Doran, Michael (1978). "Negro Slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 68 (3): 335–350.

56. Strong, Pauline Turner. 2002. "Transforming Outsiders: Captivity, Adoption, and Slavery Reconsidered." Pp. 339–56 in A Companion to American Indian History, edited by P. J. Deloria and N. Salisbury.ch20.

57. Katz, William Loren (January 3, 2012). Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage. Simon and Schuster. p. 254.

58. Miles, Tiya, and Barbara Krauthamer. 2004. "Africans and Native Americans." Pp. 121–39 Companion to African American History, edited by A. Hornsby Jr.

59. Krauthamer 2013, Ch. 4.

60. Krauthamer 2013, pp. 17–19.

61. Bragdon, Kathleen (2010). "Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (review)". Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Harvard University Press. 42: 301–302. doi:10.1162/jinh_r_00232. S2CID 141954638.

62. Michael (1978). "Negro Slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 68 (3): 342.

63. Krauthamer 2013, pp. 46–76.

64. Slagle, Allogan. 1993. "Burning Phoenix." Original Keetoowah Society.

References

· Gallay, Alan (2008) [2002]. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.

· Gallay, Alan (2009). Indian Slavery in Colonial America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

· Krauthamer, Barbara (2013). Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

· Lauber, Almon Wheeler (1913). Indian Slavery in Colonial Times Within the Present Limits of the United States. Studies in History, Economics and Public Law. vol. 54, no. 3, issue 134. New York: Columbia University.

· Reséndez, Andrés (2016). The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

· Snyder, Christina (2010). Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Slavery in the Colonial History of the United States

From Wikipedia

This article is about slavery in the Colonial era. For slavery after the United States were formed, see Slavery in the United States.

Native Americans

Main articles: Slavery among Native Americans in the United States and Native American slave ownership

Native Americans captured and enslaved some early European explorers and colonists.[6]

Puritan New England, Virginia, Spanish Florida, and the Carolina colonies engaged in large-scale[citation needed] enslavement of Native Americans, often through the use of Indian proxies to wage war and acquire the slaves. In New England, slave raiding accompanied the Pequot War and King Philip's War but declined after the latter war ended in 1676. Enslaved Native Americans were in Jamestown from the early years of the settlement,[citation needed] but large-scale cooperation between English slavers and the West and Occaneechi peoples, whom they armed with guns, did not begin until the 1640s. These groups conducted enslaving raids in what is now Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and possibly Alabama.[20] The Carolina slave trade, which included both trading and direct raids by colonists,[21] was the largest among the British colonies in North America,[22] estimated at 24,000 to 51,000 Native Americans by Gallay.[23]

The first enslaved Africans

Further information: Slavery at common law and Atlantic slave trade

Carolinas

Further information: Colonial period of South Carolina

The first African slaves in what would become the present-day United States of America arrived August 9, 1526 in Winyah Bay with a Spanish expedition. Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón brought 600 colonists to start a colony. Records say the colonists included enslaved Africans, without saying how many. After a month Ayllón moved the colony to what is now Georgia.[9][10]

Until the early 18th century, enslaved Africans were difficult to acquire in the British mainland colonies. Most were sold from Africa to the West Indies for the labor-intensive sugar trade. The large plantations and high mortality rates required continued importation of slaves. One of the first major centers of African slavery in the English North American colonies occurred with the founding of Charles Town and the Province of Carolina in 1670. The colony was founded mainly by sugar planters from Barbados, who brought relatively large numbers of African slaves from that island to develop new plantations in the Carolinas.[25]

To meet agricultural labor needs, colonists also practiced Indian slavery for some time. The Carolinians transformed the Indian slave trade during the late 17th and early 18th centuries by treating such slaves as a trade commodity to be exported, mainly to the West Indies. Historian Alan Gallay estimates that between 1670 and 1715, an estimated 24,000 to 51,000 captive Native Americans were exported from South Carolina to the Caribbean. This was a much higher number than the number of Africans imported to the English mainland colonies during the same period.[26]

African Slaves

Many of the rich planters came from Barbados and other islands in the Caribbean, and brought seasoned African slaves from there. The planters duplicated elements of the Caribbean economies, developing plantations for the cultivation of export crops, such as Sea Island cotton, indigo, and particularly rice. The slaves came from many diverse cultures in West Africa, where they had developed an immunity to endemic malaria, which helped them survive in the Low Country of South Carolina, where it frequently occurred. Peter Wood documents that "Negro slaves played a significant and often determinative part in the evolution of the colony."[37] They were integral to the expansion of the rice culture, and were also important in timber harvesting, as coopers, and in the production of naval stores. They were also active in the fur trade, and as boatmen, fishermen and cattle herders.[37]

By 1708, expansion of plantation agriculture had required continuing importation of slaves from Africa and they comprised a majority of the population in the colony, a status maintained after the colonial era.[38] On the large rice and cotton plantations, where slaves were held in large numbers with few white overseers, they gradually developed what has become known as the Gullah culture, which preserved numerous African customs and practices within adaptations to the local environment, and they developed a creole language based on West African languages and English.

Colonists tried to regulate the numerous slaves, including establishing dress rules to maintain differences between the classes. Relations between colonists and slaves were a result of continuing negotiation, with increasing tensions as slaves sought freedoms. In 1739, a group of slaves rose up in the Stono rebellion. Some of the leaders were from the Catholic kingdom of Kongo and appeared to be seasoned warriors; they introduced ritual practices from there and appeared to use military tactics they had learned in the Kongo.[39] The site of the Stono Rebellion was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1974, in recognition of the slaves' bid for freedom.

The comprehensive Negro Act of 1740 was passed in South Carolina, during Governor William Bull's time in office, in response to the Stono Rebellion in 1739.[40] The act made it illegal for enslaved Africans to move abroad, assemble in groups, raise food, earn money, and learn to write (though reading was not proscribed). Additionally, owners were permitted to kill rebellious slaves if necessary.[41] The Act remained in effect until 1865.

The evangelicals worked hard to convert the slaves to Christianity and were especially successful among black women, who had played the role of religious specialists in Africa and again in America. Slave women exercised wide-ranging spiritual leadership among Africans in America in healing and medicine, church discipline, and revival enthusiasm.

Georgia

Further information: History of slavery in Georgia (U.S. state) and Georgia Experiment

The first African slaves in what is now Georgia arrived in mid-September 1526 with Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón's establishment of San Miguel de Gualdape on the current Georgia coast.[9][10][27][28][29] They rebelled and lived with indigenous people, destroying the colony in less than 2 months.[27][30]

Two centuries later, Georgia was the last of the Thirteen Colonies to be established and the furthest south (Florida was not one of the Thirteen Colonies). Founded in the 1730s, Georgia's powerful backers did not object to slavery as an institution, but their business model was to rely on labor from Britain (primarily England's poor) and they were also concerned with security, given the closeness of then Spanish Florida, and Spain's regular offers to enemy-slaves to revolt or escape. Despite agitation for slavery, it was not until a defeat of the Spanish by Georgia colonials in the 1740s that arguments for opening the colony to slavery intensified. To staff the rice plantations and settlements, Georgia's proprietors relented in 1751, and African slavery grew quickly. After becoming a royal colony, in the 1760s Georgia began importing slaves directly from Africa.[31]

Slavery in Georgia is known to have been practiced by European colonists. During the colonial era, the practice of slavery in Georgia soon became surpassed by industrial-scale plantation slavery.

The colony of the Province of Georgia under James Oglethorpe banned slavery in 1735, the only one of the thirteen colonies to have done so. However, it was legalized by royal decree in 1751,[1] in part due to George Whitefield's support for the institution of slavery.

Pre-Colonial Period

Native Americans did not commonly enslave members of their own and other tribes before Europeans arrived but this practice became common after European intrusion, continuing into the 1800s; slaves might or might not be adopted eventually, especially if enslaved as children; and the enslavement was rarely if ever hereditary.[2][3] Native American slaves were most often captives from wars; captives bartered from other tribes, sometimes at great distances; or children sold by their parents during famines.[2] However, there were differences between the types of captivity. European slavery was specifically focused on economic profitability, racism, and the concept of racial inferiority, something that had not been present in Native American societies prior to contact.[3][4]

Colonial America (1526–1765)

The life of a slave in Colonial America differed greatly depending on the colony, nature of work, the size of the enslaved workforce, temperament, and the power of the enslaver.[3] Additionally there had been a variety of psychological experiences of those that experienced slavery from birth, versus those born free, and differences across the different ethnicities.[3]

The first enslaved Africans in Georgia arrived in 1526 with Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón's establishment of San Miguel de Gualdape on the current Georgia coast, after failing to establish the colony on the Carolina coast.[5][6][7] They rebeled and lived with indigenous people, destroying the colony in less than 2 months.[5][8]

Federalist Era (1788–1801)

Birthplace of the cotton gin (1793)

Georgia figures significantly in the history of American slavery because of Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793. The gin was first demonstrated to an audience on Revolutionary War hero General Nathanael Greene's plantation, near Savannah. The cotton gin's invention led to both the burgeoning of cotton as a cash crop and to the revitalization of the agricultural slave labor system in the southern states. The Southern economy soon became dependent upon cotton production and the sale of cotton to northern and English textile manufacturers.

Civil War Era (1850–1865)

Georgia voted to secede from the Union and join the Confederate States of America on January 19, 1861. Years later, in 1865, during his March to the Sea, General William Tecumseh Sherman signed his Special Field Orders, No. 15, distributing some 400,000 acres (1,600 km²) of confiscated land along the Atlantic coast from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. Johns River in Florida to the slaves freed by the Union Army. Most of the settlers and their descendants are today known as the Gullah.

Slavery was officially abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, which took effect on December 18, 1865. Slavery had been theoretically abolished by President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which proclaimed that only slaves located in territories that were in rebellion from the United States were free. Since the U.S. government was not in effective control of many of these territories until later in the war, many of these slaves proclaimed to be free by the Emancipation Proclamation were still held in servitude until those areas came back under Union control.

References

1. Marsh, Ben (2007). "Planting families: Intent and outcome in the development of colonial Georgia". History of the Family. 12 (104–115): 104–115.

2. Lauber, Almon Wheeler (1913). "Enslavement by the Indians Themselves, Chapter 1 in Indian Slavery in Colonial Times Within the Present Limits of the United States". 53 (3). Columbia University: 25–48.

3. Gallay, Alan (2009). "Introduction: Indian Slavery in Historical Context". In Gallay, Alan (ed.). Indian Slavery in Colonial America. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 1–32.

4. Thompson, Alvin O. (1976). "Race and Colour Prejudices and the Origin of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade". Caribbean Studies. 16 (3/4): 29–59.

5. Cameron, Guy, and Stephen Vermette; Vermette, Stephen (2012). "The Role of Extreme Cold in the Failure of the San Miguel de Gualdape Colony". The Georgia Historical Quarterly. 96 (3): 291–307.

6. Parker, Susan (August 24, 2019). "'1619 Project' ignores fact that slaves were present in Florida decades before". St. Augustine Record.

7. Francis, J. Michael, Gary Mormino and Rachel Sanderson (August 29, 2019). "Slavery took hold in Florida under the Spanish in the 'forgotten century' of 1492-1619". Tampa Bay Times.

8. Torres-Spelliscy, Ciara; Law, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of; Br, the author of "Political; s." (August 23, 2019). "Perspective - Everyone is talking about 1619. But that's not actually when slavery in America started". Washington Post. Retrieved

9. Wood, Betty; et al. "Slavery in Colonial Georgia". New Georgia Encyclopedia.

10. Grinspan, Lautaro (December 3, 2021). "'This has been happening for a long time': Modern-day slavery uncovered in South Georgia". The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

11. Ockerman, Emma (November 24, 2021). "Workers Held at Gunpoint in Modern-Day Slavery Operation in Georgia, Feds Allege". Vice.

12. Alderman, Derek H. (January 2010). "Surrogation and the politics of remembering slavery in Savannah, Georgia (USA)". Journal of Historical Geography. 36 (1): 90–101.

13. "Savannah Divided Over Monument". Los Angeles Times. February 10, 2001.

14. "Black History: River Street". WTOC. Gray Media Group, Inc. February 18, 2009. Retrieved May 18, 2021. Africans play a role in the laying out the cobblestones

15. Fears, Darryl (June 20, 2005). "Seeking More Than Apologies for Slavery". The Washington Post.

Slavery in the United States

Origins

First enslavements

First continental African enslaved people

Slavery in the Colonial History of the United States

Native Americans

Slavery among Native Americans in the United States

Traditions of slavery by Native Americans

Difference in pre- and post-contact slavery

Treatment and function of slaves

European enslavement of Native Americans

The Indian slave trade

New England

American Southeast

Slavery in the Southwest

Native-American enslavement of Africans

Native-American slavery in the Southeast

Slavery in the Indian Territory

Other Native Americans responses to African slavery

American Civil War

Notes

References

Further reading

Slavery in the Colonial History of the United States

Native Americans

The first enslaved Africans

Carolinas

Georgia

Birthplace of the cotton gin (1793)

References

Further reading