Browsing Tag: slave trade

Hello, and welcome to African Elements. In this episode, Slavery in Black and White: The Development of Race Based Slavery in the British North American Colonies. As we’ve seen, slavery is nothing new in human history, and generally went hand in hand with conquest. What is relatively new, however, is the phenomenon of race based slavery – a radical transformation from slavery as it had been practiced up to the point of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Given that the British colonizers conquered many different peoples, and had a general distain for the Irish, Native Americans, Africans, and each of their conquered subjects, how then did it come to be that Africans got tagged with slave status – so much so that even free blacks experienced slave like status? In this episode, we will see how and why this transformation takes place. All that coming up next. As we saw in Episode 3, Africa in historical Context, slavery has been practiced in one form or another by many civilizations throughout history. We also learned, however, that Atlantic slave trade represents a radical departure from the historical practice of slavery. Historically, the practice of slavery typically involved the expansion of one group as they conquer and enslaved their neighbors, but in this context, race was more or less incidental. The Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, and even Native Americans each enslaved a variety of different people, but no one particular group was specifically targeted or singled out for slave status. The advent of the Atlantic slave trade brought about a radical transformation in which race becomes the defining factor in determining who is slave and who is free. Additionally, in the era of the Atlantic slave trade, slavery no longer functioned as a means to assimilate a population, but to specifically single out a population. Slave status was now to be passed down to one’s children and one’s children’s children, and so on. In 1619, a Dutch ship entered Jamestown with a cargo that included 19 Africans. The 19 African arrivals had long been believed to be the first Africans to reach the British North American colonies, but we now know that by 1619 there were already 32 people of African descent living in the English colony at Jamestown. There’s been much debate over the status of those 19 Africans. Did they arrive as slaves or indentured servants? Their status was not clear. The main reason the lack of clarity here is that in the early 1600s “slavery” that had no clearly defined legal definition. It was an ambiguous term for an institution that was not yet fully developed conceptually. As such, there was very little distinction between slaves and indentured servants. Consistent with a system of slavery and servitude throughout human history, white servants on the old world typically consisted of poor and conquered people. In fact, the term white” is a tricky one when applied to early colonial American history. Prior to the early to mid 1600s, racial terms such as “white” and “black” had very little social meaning. In fact, we saw that in Episode 1, the concept of race is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history – emerging (for reasons that we will see in this episode) only within the past four or so hundred years. Speaker, and activist Tim Wise explains: Because if you know the history of the whole concept of whiteness; If you know the history of the whole concept of white face – where it came from and for what reason, you know that it was a trick and it’s worked brilliantly. You see, prior to the mid to late 1600s in the colonies of what would become the United States, there was no such thing as the “white race.” Those of us of European descent did not refer to ourselves by that term, really ever before then. In fact, in the old countries of Europe, we had spent most of our time killing and each other. We didn’t love each other. We weren’t one big happy family. The side of my family that comes from Scotland, hell, they didn’t worry about fighting people outside of Scotland. The highlanders and low-landers just fought the hell out of each other. So, Europe has had a turbulent history of war, conquest, and enslavement, going all the way back to Roman times. That is, before slavery became racially based, Europeans essentially enslaved other Europeans. The relationship between the various warring groups has remained turbulent up until the fairly recent past. In fact, England’s first conquest over a people occurred not in Africa, nor the Americas, but in Ireland. As England ventured out into its colonial age began with Ireland. It was there that England developed the idea of what a plantation colony would be and extended it throughout an empire that would later include Africa, Australia, India and other parts of Asia, and, of course, the Americas. The English conquest the Irish – brought with it centuries of hostility between England and Ireland. England’s harsh colonial treatment of its Irish subjects brought with it an ideology of supremacy that would later be applied to other groups as a justification for English domination over its colonial subjects. Edmund S. Morgan, author of American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia writes, that in the eyes of the English,”the Irish … clearly the wrong kind of people. In the English view they were barbarous, only nominally Christian, and generally intractable.” The English view of superiority over their subjects accompanied colonial policies guided by the economic principle of mercantilism. Mercantilism is the underlying principle that colonies exist solely for the benefit of the mother country. What the English needed from its colonial subjects in Ireland was wool for clothing, and it was England’s needs for wool, that brought about a colonial policy known as the “enclosure movement.” Thus, while the Irish existed for countless generations prior to English colonization through hunting and subsistence farming, the old Irish manors were enclosed to forward the herding of sheep. Remember here that the concept of mercantilism dictates that colonies exist solely for the benefit of the mother country, so the enclosure movement was never intended to be for the benefit of the Irish. The process of enclosure, accompanied by force, resistance, and bloodshed, pushed the Irish off their ancestral home lands, who then flooded the streets of London jobless and homeless and were arrested wholesale and imprisoned as vagrants. From their prisons cells their debts to society were purchased in exchange for seven years of 72 service in the Americas. Some historians, such as Professor Ron Takaki, author of A Different Mirror: A Multicultural History of the United States, have argued that the export of these Irish immigrants was coercive at best, but Dr. Takaki goes as far as to refer to their immigration as wholesale kidnapping. After they were purchased for seven years of service they were crammed onto ships headed for the Americas on a voyage in which they were subjected to dysentery pregnant women were suffering miscarriages and many of these immigrants died horrible deaths en route. If the experience of the poor white and Irish indentured servants sounds familiar, it should, and the similarity between their experience and that of African captives of the Atlantic slave trade was not lost on the Irish. They recognized early on that while they didn’t arrive on the same boat as the Africans they arrived on a boat that looked like, felt like, and smelled much like the boat that the Africans arrived on. Court records of the period are rife with instances of collaboration between blacks, poor white and Irish indentured servants. It was not uncommon for blacks and whites to run away and conspire in rebellions together. Even those who came willingly in this discontented class of poor whites – often referred to as the “giddy multitude” – were beginning to feel as though they had been duped into coming to the Americas. It’s from this climate in which we have increasingly unruly groups of poor whites and blacks whose labor was being exploited by the colonial elite and in which the status of servitude between blacks and poor whites was virtually identical that a real threat to the elite status began to take shape. Those who survived their term of indenture, were typically given land way out on the colonial frontier where they dealt with hostile Native Americans who did not take kindly to their intrusion on native land. To the colonial elite, those undesirables were simply out of sight and out of mind. They were not concerned with the harsh and hostile climate into which the poor had been cast out, and they expended little thought or effort in offering the frontier folk any sort of protection as colonial subjects. When Nathaniel Bacon approached the British appointed Governor of Virginia, Lord William Berkeley for an army commission so that he and the frontiersman could deal with the Native American problem themselves, Lord Berkeley was understandably reticent about arming a group of unruly whites and blacks on the Virginia frontier. When his army commission was refused, Bacon’s Rebellion was on. Instead of sending help, Lord Berkeley resolved to fortify a chain of forts protecting the colonial elite in Jamestown – a solution that provided no comfort to those out on the frontier, so the frontiersmen (black and white) rallied behind Bacon to deal with the Native Americans themselves. The problem was that Bacon attacked friendly and hostile Native Americans without distinction. Wary that Bacon may touch of a new war with the Native Americans, Berkeley declared Bacon a rebel. Bacon then marched on Jamestown, captured it, and pillaged the estates of the pro-Berkeley elite and burned Jamestown to the ground. By the time an English force arrived to crush the revolt, Bacon himself had died dysentery, and his army of indentured servants, runaway slaves, and former servants was already falling apart. Bacon’s rebellion led to tighter British control of the colony. It may also have hastened the movement toward a labor system based on black slavery. Some historians argue that Virginia planters, fearing other insurrection by former white servants, began to turn to Africa for laborers. The strategy 115 was to divide blacks and whites by creating an artificial color line. This is the moment when race and racism radically alters the system of forced labor that had been practiced by human civilizations for thousands of year by injecting race into the equation. Again Tim Wise explains: So, there was no white race, but in the colonies of what would become the United States, what did we see in the 1660s, 1670s? We began to see that Africans of indentured servant status (many of them not enslaved yet, they were not necessarily permanently enslaved- some were, others were indentured like many poor Europeans for periods of 7 to 11 years, they could work off their indenture and then they would be free labor, technically) realized, as did the white indentured servants (the Europeans, who hadn’t been called white yet) that they had a lot of things in common, like the fact that they were all getting their clock cleaned by elites. So they would get together more than our history books taught us and foment rebellion against the elite to try to get a better deal for themselves on the basis of economic necessity and economic justice. And what did the elite do? When that you were outnumbered by black and white folks who are penniless landless peasants you have to do one of two things. You either have to kill them all – but you can’t do that because who’s going to work? Rich folks weren’t going to. They had to get poor people to work. What will point was to be a person of leisure back in those days. That was the goal – was not to work. So, you couldn’t kill them all. You didn’t want to kill them all. You have to do the work yourself. You have to build your own levee, build your own house … NO! Pick your own tobacco … NO! Harvest your own cotton…NO! We are not going to do any of that. So, you can’t kill them, but you can co-opt them, and so, the elite in Virginia, for example, the colony begins to give certain carrots to people of European descent saying things like, “Were going to let you own a little and… not much, but just a little. We’re going to get rid of indentured servitude, now you’re free labor. And, by the way, once your free labor, you get 50 acres of land just because you’re free labor… See? So we’re going to cut you in on this deal. We’re going to let you enter into contracts. We’re going to let you testify in court. And here’s the best of all. We’re going to put you on the slave patrol to keep those people in line. The idea was, you’re still going to get your clock cleaned. We still don’t like you. We still aren’t going to really empower you or change your economic subordination, but we’re going to make you honorary members of this team and you’re going to help us keep those other people down. So, they got a little taste of power, and it did affect if we divide and conquer those coalitions. Those rebellions began to stop almost instantly. Did Bacon’s Rebellion hasten the establishment of a labor system based on black slave labor? Let’s review the evidence. It’s clear that the colonial elite were deeply concerned about the potential for blacks and poor whites to join forces. Notice that about the same time as Bacon’s rebellion we start to see in the Colonies laws that transform slave status from relatively ambiguous to institution associated exclusively with blacks. Many have argued that this was a strategy to create a color line between blacks and poor whites by elevating the status of poor whites just enough to keep the giddy multitude at bay and to create an artificial incentive for poor whites to protect status which was only slightly better that of black slaves. Any African-American caught in the commission of a crime was committed to slavery for life while white indentured servants simply had years added to their term. Slave status would now be based on the status of the mother – this is an odd development in a patrilineal society but it also marks the beginning of perpetual slavery in which slavery is passed down from generation to generation. By 1691 there were also laws against “abominable mixture” or miscegenation. Where it was common previously for black men to marry white women, now it was illegal. At the same time, as slave status is based on the status of the mother there is actually an economic incentive for white slave owners to rape black slave women – a dirty little secret about slavery that was a common experience for black women. Even before the Great Awakening, a religious movement in which figures like George Whitfield preached in a highly emotionally charged style to blacks and whites alike and many blacks began to convert to Christianity, it became necessary to further codify slave status as it relates to religion. A 1705 Virginia law provided that all servants imported and brought into the country by sea or land who were not Christians in their native country shall be slaves and as such be bought here and sold not withstanding their conversion to Christianity afterwards. In other words, while the enslavement of Africans was justified as a rescue from barbarism, even black Christians could now be enslaved. Step by step the words in English, Christian, white, and free became nearly synonymous in the minds of white colonizers. It also became synonymous in the minds of poor whites even in the face of their own oppression. As poor whites cast their lot with the colonial elite, let us not forget that in many places until the 1830s poor whites were not allowed to vote as property qualifications effectively barred them from citizenship. On the eve of the Civil War the strategy of conquering poor people by dividing them by race is most vividly on display. By 1860, only about a quarter of southern families owned slaves, yet during the Civil war – a war being waged to protect and extend the institution of slavery – the Confederacy instituted a policy that exempted anyone who owned 20 or more slaves from service in the military. So who’s left to do the fighting? Mostly the poor, non-slaveholding class. How do you get a bunch of poor whites who don’t even own slaves to go off to war, fight and die to preserve and protect the elite status of the slaveholding class? The sheer stupidity is mind boggling. Yet the irony of racism is that those who most ardently defended white supremacy – organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan for sample which was primarily composed of poor whites – were the very people who didn’t own slaves, had no stake in the institution of slavery, and benefited least from white supremacy. The legacy of Bacon’s rebellion was to create a system of institutionalized racism that created a barrier for poor whites in their ability to join forces with the population with which they had the most common – black slaves. I argue here that racism proved ineffective way not only to oppress blacks but to dupe poor whites into becoming active and willing agents in their own oppression. From here, the colonies, and later the United States will go down a path of increased dependence on Black slave labor. That’s it for this episode. You can see everything you’ve seen here as well as the entire archive of episodes at my website www.africanelements.org. You can also join the discussion on our Facebook Group African Elements. Thank you for watching.