For all the talk of using colonies as vents for proletarian discontent, the first group of English to arrive in Virginia in 1607 included a disproportionate number of aristocrats and gentlemen, and their personal attendants, for whom productive labor was as unthinkable as it was for any Spanish hidalgo bound for New Spain.1 Like Cortés, they were prepared to find ready access to gold and silver rather than to start cultivation of the soil.2 By 1622,3 however, the Virginia Company investors, realizing that Virginia was to be no El Dorado, rationalized their abandonment of dreams of emulating the treasure hunts of the Spanish in Mexico and Peru. “[T]o thinke that Gold and Silver mynes in a Country [Virginia] (otherwise most rich and fruitful) the greatest wealth of a Plantation is but popular error,” wrote Edward Waterhouse in a long letter of advice to fellow members of the Virginia Company. He now saw the Spanish case in a different light. The law of diminishing returns had set in for silver and gold mining in Spanish America, he said, and Spain had turned to agricultural products, such as sugar, cotton, indigo, and brazil wood, to offset the decline of mining output.4 He left no doubt that, in his opinion, the future prosperity of the Virginia plantation likewise lay in exploiting the country’s natural potential for commodity production.
Why, he thought, could not the English do as the Spanish had done and recruit a labor force from the native population for that purpose? True, the colony was intended as a vent for the “troublesome poor” of England, but why should they not serve in the English plantation as an intermediate stratum, as overseers and tradesmen, such as had been formed by a certain portion of Spanish immigrants and Spanish creoles in Mexico and Peru?5 Why should not the Virginia Indians be
compelled to servitude and drudgery, and supply the roome of men that labour, whereby even the meanest [Englishmen] of the Plantation may imploy themselves more entirely in their Arts and Occupations, which are more generous, whilest Savages performe their inferior workes of digging in mynes and the like, of whom also some may be sent for the service of the Sommer Hands [Bermuda Islands].6
Old planter John Martin likewise suggested that the Indians be “brought into subjection,” they being “apter for worke then yet our English are … and fitt to rowe in Gallies & friggetts and many other pregnant uses.”7 Captain John Smith (1580–1631), the most famous leader of the early Jamestown settlers, retrospectively regretted that the English had not from the beginning done as the Spanish had done, namely “forced the … [Indians] to do all manner of drudgery worke and slavery for them, themselves [the Spanish] living like Souldiers upon the fruit of their [the Indians’] labours.”8 The Spanish option was not to be dismissed out of hand. Indeed Captain John Smith reasoned that, vis-à-vis the respective native populations, the English in Virginia and New England were better situated than the Spanish had been in the West Indies. The Spanish, outnumbered by the West Indies Indians by fifty or more to one, had “no other remedy” but mass extermination of the natives. “Ours,” said Smith, referring possessively to Virginia and New England Indians, were “such a few, and so dispersed, it were nothing in a short time to bring them to labour and obedience.”9
If the English had subdued and forced “their” Indians into “drudgery and slavery,” they would have had to confront, as the Iberians had had to do, the problem of establishing a system of social control over the native population that would be, as the phrase is nowadays, “cost-effective.”
Social Control: Haiti (Hispaniola), Cuba and Puerto Rico
When European colonization of the so-called New World began in Hispaniola in 1492, the population density of that island was about the same as that of Portugal (around 33 and 38 inhabitants per square mile, respectively), but the society of the island was not highly stratified.10 Speaking of the Indians of the West Indies, Las Casas said, “They are very poor folk, which possess little … they are accustomed to have no more store than they ordinarily have need of and that such as they get with little travail [labor].” He elaborated with notations of the people’s diet, apparel, and shelter.11 There was no distinct native social stratum that could act as a buffer between the laboring people and the Spanish conquerors in the administration of a normal, orderly, colony. Hence the encomienda system, whereby the King of Spain “commended” the natives to “the care” of individual Spanish colonists as laborers,12 was conducted “in an irregular, uncontrolled, and highly exploitative form.… Spaniards raided Indian communities, took captives, and, in order to prevent escape or to ensure the full measure of work, practiced large-scale enslavement.”13
The native population did not willingly submit to such brutal administration. In Hispaniola the Maguana people rose in revolt after the treacherous Spanish killing of the captive Maguana chief Canaobo.14 In 1511 in Puerto Rico, the Borinqueños under the leadership of a cacique named Guaybana mounted a major rebellion against the imposition of the Spanish system of forced labor. A second Borinquen uprising was led by another cacique, Humacao, four years later.15 Other Borinqueños, possibly one-third of the population, sought refuge in remote mountainous areas, or fled by boat to other islands.16 But in Haiti (Hispaniola/Santo Domingo) and Cuba, the Spanish advantage of overwhelming military strength exerted without restraint, in the context of the even more devastating toll of epidemic European diseases, resulted in almost complete extermination of the native population. There it was a mathematical certainty that without an intermediate social stratum, “social control” by mere unbridled military force would be self-defeating because it exceeded the limits that had to be observed to preserve an exploitable labor force.
Social Control: Mexico and Peru
At the time of the Spanish invasion in 1519, the population of central Mexico,17 an area of about 200,000 square miles, was an estimated 13.9 million,18 representing a density of almost 70 people per square mile. Of this population, 2.5 million, concentrated more than 350 per square mile, lived in the 8,000-square-mile area in and near the Basin of Mexico.19 Tenochitlan (Mexico City), in the heart of this area, had a population of 300,000.
The invaders found already in place “an elaborate system of levy providing products of all kinds, slaves, and services for the three capitals of the so-called Aztec Empire,” and a similar system in other large states outside the Aztec territory. In each case it was organized to support its central government ruling group.20 Originally a three-layered stratum,21 the ruling group came to be designated by the Spanish under the general name of caciques.22
The Spanish were able to adapt this pre-existing form of social organization to extort labor and tribute from the Indians, even in the most rapacious manner,23 using “Indian office-holders … at the subordinate levels of the hierarchy for the enforcement of Spanish rules.”24 In the opinion of the well-known historian of colonial Mexico Charles Gibson, it was “[t]he power and prestige of the pre-Spanish states, and their continuing traditions of popular subservience, [that] made it possible for the Spaniards to exact labor and tribute with little opposition.” Summarizing, Gibson writes that in both Mexico and Peru, “Spaniards took charge of an established society, substituting themselves for the rulers they had deposed or killed.”25
But such a displacement at the top would not have been effective in gaining the Spaniards’ purposes without the preservation of a buffer social control function for the socially demoted caciques.
The ease with which the first Spaniards manipulated huge numbers of native peoples, even the ease with which the first missionaries induced huge numbers of conversions, depended upon the intermediate position of the caciques.… Caciques were in the vanguard in the adoption of Spanish dress, foods, language, and styles of house construction. They were excused from tribute and labor exactions and given special privileges, such as permission to ride horses and carry arms.… Indian caciques and Spanish corregidores [Spanish officers in charge of local districts] joined forces to extract from the mass of the Indian population whatever wealth it possessed over and above the subsistence level of its economy.26
Considered in terms of social control and resistance, the story of the Spanish defeat of and rule over the Inca civilization of Peru in the sixteenth century closely corresponds to the pattern set in Mexico. The Inca word for chiefs, kurakas, was by Spanish decree in 1572 changed to cacique,27 appropriately enough it would seem, since the buffer social control function of that office in Peru was identical with its function in Mexico. The hereditary Peruvian caciques were exempt from paying tribute or labor service. They were the collectors of tribute to be paid to the Spanish by Indians between the ages of eighteen and fifty. They were responsible also for furnishing the mita laborers for service to Spanish masters in industries, in farming and, worst of all, in the silver and mercury mines of Potosi and Huancavelica.28
In Peru, the caciques “exercised considerable power over Indians, even within the borders of Spanish towns.”29 In 1558, supreme Inca chief Sayri Tupac struck a sort of surrender-and-regrant “bargain” with the Spanish – as O’Neill and other Irish chieftains had done a few year earlier in Ireland (see Volume One).30
For at least a century and a half, the caciques of Mexico and Peru served as the principal buffer social control stratum in the Spanish system of social control in those domains.31 But in Mexico, the relatively class-undifferentiated Chichimecs drew a line, and long maintained it, beyond which the Spanish encomienda could not be established.32 In Peru, the Incas defended the remnants of their independent state in two open rebellions. In 1536, Inca Manco and his uncle Titu Yupanqui, taking advantage of a momentary political and military division among the Spanish, rose in revolt to end the desecration of their lands and temples. Manco led a five-month siege of Cuzco, and Titu headed a large army in an assault on Lima.33 Thirty-five years later, Tupac Amaru, youngest son of Inca Sayri Tupac, served as a rallying symbol for a last great uprising to throw off the Spanish yoke.34
The Social Control Problem in Brazil
Brazil, like Hispaniola, presented no previously established social stratum adaptable to the colonizing power’s social control purposes, and Catholic religious orders, most notably the Jesuits and Franciscans, largely succeeded in substituting themselves in that function. It was the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, however, who first raised the standard of battle for “protection of the Indians” of the West Indies in the sixteenth century, but his pleas were brushed aside by the gold-crazed colonists. A basic factor in the genocide of the native peoples of the West Indies in the early sixteenth century was the difficulty of their making a mass flight by sea. The Indians of Brazil, on the other hand, would serve to establish a general principle of social control in European colonies in the Americas: dominance was less easily established and maintained over continental colonies than over insular colonies.35
In the continental expanse of Brazil, there was space, and therefore time, for development of an effective class struggle of the Indian laborers and the Portuguese plantation bourgeoisie (the moradores). The Indians, as we have noted, were successful in making the point in the sixteenth century that they had no desire to become long-term sugar plantation bond-laborers (see this page). Indeed, in the sixteenth century a number of projected areas of Portuguese settlement had to be abandoned in the face of Indian attacks.36 More generally, the Indians resisted plantation servitude by removing themselves to the continental interior.37 The Portuguese plantation owners countered by conducting armed expeditions (entradas) into the interior in order to “entice or force” Indians into Portuguese-controlled villages (aldeias),38 which were located to provide easy access to a supply of Indian plantation laborers, to be used under conditions that were, for all practical purposes, mere slavery.39 Just as elsewhere in the plantation Americas, super-exploitation of labor and the spread of epidemic European diseases took a heavy toll on the indigenous labor supply in Brazil.40 In any case, since Indians, having the continental advantage, “deserted their aldeias in large numbers,”41 the colonists were unable to solve the labor-supply problem by resort to raw force through the entradas.
It was in the Amazon region of Brazil during the seventeenth century that the Franciscans and then the Jesuits, led most prominently by António Vieira, after a campaign lasting from 1624 to 1686, were able to win a royal decree outlawing enslavement of Indians and bestowing custody of the aldeia Indians on the religious orders. These Indians were then to be assigned by the religious authorities as free laborers to plantation owners for a limited part of each year.42 In terms of social control, the religious orders were filling in relation to a class-undifferentiated native population a role similar to that performed by the caciques in relation to the native class-differentiated societies of Mexico and Peru.43
In the Amazon region, Portuguese plantation owners rebelled against the idea of non-enslavability of Indians as government interference with free enterprise; they insisted that the free play of market forces required slave labor. Vieira met the objection by proposing the extension to the Amazon region of the practice that had been in operation in more southern coastal regions of Brazil since the middle of the sixteenth century, namely, by the enslavement of Angolans “of both sexes to assure their propagation.” The principle was to be “The Negroes to the colonists, the Indians to the Jesuits.” A suitable religious exegetical rationale was contrived. The Angolans, by being baptized Christians, were afforded an opportunity to escape the everlasting torment to which they had been certainly doomed as “pagans.” Their souls were to be redeemed by the Calvary-like suffering of lifetime hereditary servitude in the sugar industry. The Indians, having been made wards of a Christian order, could not be consigned to slavery.44 For an indication of the widespread failure of Afro-Brazilian bond-laborers to find comfort in this thesis, see the note on the Palmares guilombo in Appendix II-A.
Of all the Ibero-American cases, Brazil was the one that most resembled Anglo-American Virginia with respect to the problem of establishing that degree of social control essential for basing the colonial economy on the forced labor of the indigenous population. Like Brazil, Virginia was a continental colony, not an insular one. Like the indigenous society of Brazil,45 Powhatan society exhibited little significant stratification, lacking a strong rulership46 and concomitant intermediate stratum47 adaptable to the social control purposes of the conquerors. Storage facilities were insufficient to permit long-term accumulation in the hands of the ruling element of products upon which the people were dependent. There was no wealth in the form of domesticated animals, nor did wealth exist in any other form such as to permit accumulations adequate for the support of a permanent leisure class or a non-productive politico-military bureaucracy. The people derived three-fourths of their living from hunting, fishing and gathering, one-fourth from cultivation. With a population density of only one or two persons per square mile,48 the Powhatan Indians for most of the year were on the whole well-provisioned, so that they could even share with the starving English colonists on occasion.49
There was a degree of social stratification; a chief (Powhatan, the person himself, when the English first arrived) lived on the tribute assessed on the people and had privileged access to the best hunting grounds. He received labor tribute by having his fields planted for him, and tended by a multiplicity of women bound to him. But social distinction was insufficient to produce a permanent category “intermediate between rulers and ruled,”50 or any politico-military bureaucracy. Powhatan had authority to make alliances and war, and to control trade with other tribes and the English. But he was not always able to enforce his will on all his subjects, nor was he always able to enforce it upon the supposedly tributary tribes. The result was to limit the intensity of the exploitation of the laborers; indeed, the chief himself did productive labor at “men’s work” such as hunting and hand crafts.
Any attempt by the English plantation bourgeoisie to subjugate the Indians to “drudgery and slavery” would have to face the “Brazilian” problem, but without the agency of the Catholic religious orders; they had been banned in the sixteenth-century English Reformation.51 More immediately to the point, at the time that Smith and others were fantasizing about emulating the Spanish Conquistadors, the English simply did not have the preponderance of military force such as that which the Spanish unleashed against the indigenous peoples upon whom they made war.52 The weakness of the English colony in the early period was such that in the three years 1620–22 the colony was dependent upon trade with neighboring Indians to save itself from “absolute starvation.”53
In these respects, the Powhatan social order was essentially the same as those found among the Pequots, Narragansetts, Wampanoags, and other peoples in New England, and the Yamassees, Creeks, Tuscororas, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and other peoples confronting the colonists of the southernmost region, the Carolinas. With regard to establishing social control, the Anglo-American continental bourgeoisie faced the “Brazilian” problem: a continental people without a cacique class.
Despite their early difficulties, the English from the beginning had a fundamental potential advantage over the Indians due to the discrepancy in the development of productive forces and productivity of labor. This advantage was enhanced by the fact that the Indians could not possibly have known what the appearance of the first handfuls of settlers portended for the land.54 Yet, even if they had foreseen from Powhatan to Powder River, and had been able to mobilize a united resistance to the taking of the Trail of Tears, the Indians probably could not have prevented eventual European colonization in North America,55 although by such a united effort they might have given American history a more humane course than the one it took.
English Buying and Selling of Indian Captives
The actual strength of the English colony in relation to the Virginia Indians changed markedly to the disadvantage of the latter in the period between 1622 and 1644, the dates of two concerted Indian attacks on the colony. By 1644, the relative superiority of the forces at the disposal of the colony was well established, and all Indian hope of ousting the settlers from the Chesapeake region was lost. The treaty of 164656 that ended the Indian war begun by Opechancanough, Chief Powhatan’s brother and successor, marked the beginning of Anglo-American “Indian policy.” At first that policy contemplated only the displacement of the Indian tribes obstructing the advance of the Anglo-American “frontier,” but ultimately it would challenge the legitimacy of Indian tribal society itself.57 In the context of this chapter, consideration is limited to the relationship of that policy to the general labor supply and social control problem faced by the continental colonial bourgeoisie. The basic considerations that shaped the policy, the optimizing of the combination of the rate of capital accumulation and social control,58 were essentially the same in Virginia as elsewhere, although in one respect, namely the commerce in Indian chattel bond-laborers, the grossest development occurred in South Carolina and secondarily in New England.
Fourteen years after the 1646 treaty, the Virginia General Assembly declared that if the Indians of Northumberland County failed to pay the damages to be assessed by the court of that county for damages done by the Indians to a colonist there, then “soe many off them as the court shall determine shall be apprehended and sold into a forraigne country to satisfie the award.”59 Although in that particular instance no legal justification was cited, it appears to have been under the principle of lex talionis, simple retaliation. In general, however, the Anglo-Americans throughout the continental colonies drew on the ancient principle that victors in “just” wars who spared the lives of “heathen” captives thereby gained the right to hold them as slaves, which Europeans used to justify the forced transportation of Africans to perpetual servitude in the Americas. The Virginia Assembly gave this principle the force of law regarding Indians during Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. It was reasserted in 1677 following the defeat of Bacon’s Rebellion, and subsequently in 1679, 1682, 1711 and 1722.60 Enslavement of Indian captives – children and women as well as men – was general in Massachusetts following the Pequot War of 1636–37, and again after King Philip’s War of 1675–76.61 In Carolina province (both before and after its division into South and North Carolina, first called Albemarle, in 1691), the Anglo-Americans made direct war on Indians and enslaved the captives.
But the chief means of securing Indian bond-laborers was by trade with Indian tribes, in the course of which captives of intertribal warfare, along with deer skins and beaver pelts, were exchanged for English commodities such as firearms and ammunition, metal tools and containers, woven fabrics and garments, mirrors and rum.62 It was English policy to foment “just wars” between tribes for the particular purpose of securing Indian captives as chattel bond-laborers.63 As tribes became increasingly dependent upon the English for trade goods, some, out of narrow considerations of tribal interests, made war on other tribes in order to maintain their trade with the English.64 Nash states for a certainty that “the number [of Indians] enslaved reached into the tens of thousands in the half-century after Carolina was settled by Europeans.”65
The Abandonment of the Native Sources of Plantation Bond-labor
Yet the fantasy of an Anglo-America based on Indian drudgery and slavery was not to be realized. Why not? The standard reference work in the field is still Almon Wheeler Lauber’s Indian Slavery in Colonial Times within the Present Limits of the United States, published more than eighty years ago.66 Lauber presents four theses to explain “the decline of Indian slavery.” First, depopulation caused by a combination of European diseases, a declining Indian birth rate, and internecine wars in considerable degree fomented by the English interested in trading for the captives whom they would then use in commercial transactions, principally with other English colonies, most often those in the West Indies. Second, Indians “disappeared” as a result of “the amalgamation of red and black slaves.” Third, Indians were “unfitted for servitude,” being “unable to endure sustained labor,” incapable of developing to a “civilized” social level, and bred and reared to be “opposed to all restraint … by an exterior force.” Fourth, if kept in the capturing colony, Indian bond-laborers were possibly even more likely than other bond-laborers to run away, because of the Indians’ hope of “returning to their own people.”67
It is argued here, from a somewhat different perspective, that the failure of the European power to establish a plantation system based on the bond-labor of the native population in the Anglo-American continental colonies was analogous to that of the Portuguese colonizers in Brazil. The decisive factors in each case were two: each colonization was enacted on a continental land mass, as distinct from insular areas such as those in the West Indies; and, second, the indigenous society was not stratified, in any case not stratified enough to produce a separate and distinct social class of caciques, accustomed to command and adaptable for colonialist social control purposes, particularly as mobilizers of forced labor for the European capitalist investors.
From those premises I venture a criticism of Lauber’s first and third theses about “the decline of Indian slavery.”68 I take them in reverse order because the third directly confronts the one assumption for which I crave indulgence in the first paragraph of the Introduction to the first volume of this work.
The “unfitness” sour-grapes rationale
Some historians whose approach to the subject is informed with the spirit of the civil rights movement, and whose citations of Lauber have been quite appropriate, have perhaps thought it redundant to take note of the white-supremacist assumptions encountered in a work conceived in what Rayford W. Logan called the “nadir” of the struggle for civil rights in the United States. One latter-day scholar even endorses the Lauber view of this issue, “despite the racist implications of arguments about the relative adaptability of one people over another to tropical labor.”69
In my view, if being “constitutionally unfitted” for servitude could explain the “decline of slavery,” then it should have led to the extinction of bond-servitude in such places as the following:
• Virginia, where for four or five early decades, not one in five of the English chattel laborers survived the period of “indenture.” (Governor William Berkeley in reply to queries of the Lords of Trade and Plantations, in 1671 [Hening 2:511.])
• St Domingue, where the average French engagé or African bond-laborer survived only three years. See note 35 of Chapter 1.
• Barbados, where in 1680 an annual supply of five thousand African laborers was required to maintain a Negro population of forty thousand (Vincent T. Harlow, A History of Barbados, 1625–1685 [1926; Negro Universities reprint, 1969], this page–this page); where from 1680 to 1800 hundreds of thousands of African bond-laborers arrived, but the population increased by less than ten thousand. (David Lowenthal, “The Population of Barbados,” Social and Economic Studies, 6:445–501.)
• The British West Indies as a whole which, between 1700 and 1780, absorbed about 850,000 African bond-laborers, yet the Negro population increased only 350,000. (Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black [Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1974] this page.)
• Mexico and Peru, where in the first centuries after the beginning of Spanish rule, the repartimiento and mita recruitment by the caciques contributed so heavily to the reduction of the Mexican and Peruvian native populations. (See page 7.)
Why were the Spanish so slow to learn what the Portuguese capitalists, with whom they shared a common realm for much of the time, had learned: “the unfitness” of Indians for sustained labor? Was it perhaps because they were laughing so hard all the way to the counting house in Seville? Or could it have been that they felt satisfied that the total value of the gold and silver produced by the Indians of Mexico and Peru was probably as great as, if not greater than, that of the sugar produced by Angolans in colonial Brazil?
Did forced labor itself exact a greater toll among Indians than it did among Africans and their descendants? Despite pious protestations in religious quarters and in occasional formal governmental expressions of sympathy, neither the encomenderos of Mexico and Peru, nor the moradores of Brazil, nor the “planters” of Anglo-America cared a fig about the unfitness of the labor as long as they could be assured of an affordable functioning supply. Time and again in the seventeenth century the Portuguese moradores in northern Brazil rebelled against royal and religious authority in order to keep the Indians enslaved, driving out the religious troublemakers, who themselves were forced to admit that “without the Indians the inhabitants [meaning the Portuguese settlers] would die.”70 In South Carolina, for fifty years, the English colonists ridiculed and evaded the strictures of the London proprietors against trading in captive Indian laborers, the profits of which went to the locals rather than to London.71
On the other hand, as the record shows, laborers throughout the Americas considered forced labor “unfit” for themselves, and resisted servitude as well as they could. In the cacique-habituated countries of Mexico and Peru they could not prevail. But the tribal Indians in continental situations did resist enslavement successfully, and in the process provided the frustrated colonialists with the sour-grapes argument about the “unfitness” of Indians for plantation labor.
It would seem that little time needs be spent in this post–World War Two era on Lauber’s notion that the North American Indians were not enslavable because of their inability to become “civilized.” Are we to believe that, to paraphrase Chairman Mao, “civilization grows out of the barrel of a gun”? Without that one advantage, the work of the Anglo-American “blessings-of-civilization trust,” as Mark Twain called it, would surely have been brought to an end before it ever got to South Carolina. In reacting to Lauber’s doubt about the “capacity of the Indian for civilization,” because “the dominant idea of Indian life was the love of liberty,” one can only ask, “What price civilization?” Looking at the figures on the depopulation of the indigenous Americas, one might better ask: If “civilization” is assumed to correlate with increased well-being, did the age of colonization of the Americas demonstrate a “capacity for civilization”? Finally, how was it that Lauber could ignore that precisely the opposite premise was the mainstay of slaveholder ideology, namely that slavery was the only possible normal basis for “civilized” people like themselves to relate to the “uncivilized”?72
Enslavement of Indian labor not a problem of supply, but of social control
Lauber’s first thesis, namely that European colonization had a devastating depopulating effect through infections of smallpox, tuberculosis, and other exotic diseases, is undoubtedly true. So also did the intensification of warfare, both against the English and between Indian tribes. These general conditions, coupled with the English policy of trading away a disproportionate number of male captives, would certainly tend to lower the birth rate among the Indians. Before South Carolina came to be chiefly a producer of rice and cotton early in the eighteenth century, the colony was primarily dependent upon commerce with the Indian tribes. It was in that colony’s trading sphere, therefore, that the depopulating effect of enslavement was most in evidence. In 1708, the Spanish governor of Florida charged that some 10,000 to 12,000 Florida Indians, chiefly Apalachee people, had been taken as slaves by Creek and Yamassee Indians, directed by English Carolinians; only 300 Florida Indians survived, by finding refuge in St Augustine.73 The extension of slave-trading into the interior in that same year was justified by South Carolina businessmen on the ground that “it serves to lessen their [the Indians’] number before the French can arm them.”74 The shipment of Indian captives from Carolina to bond-servitude in other English colonies, particularly those in the West Indies,75 was, while it lasted, a major cause of Indian depopulation. The practice was also a factor in New England in the wake of the defeat of the forces commanded by the Wampanoag chieftain Metacom (called King Philip by the English) in 1675–76. An undetermined number of the captives were sent as bond-laborers “to various parts,” namely the Spanish West Indies, Spain, Portugal, Bermuda, Virginia, and the Azores.76 The Virginia colony Indian trade was primarily for beaver pelts and deer skins in the seventeenth century;77 the labor supply was mainly English, together with a number of other European bond-laborers, and, to an increasing extent at the end of the seventeenth century, Afro-Caribbean and African.78 Consequently, in Virginia the employment of and trade in Indian labor was comparatively limited.79 But whatever the degree of involvement of the respective colonies, it is certain that depopulating wars were, paradoxically, the necessary condition for the beginning and continuation of Indian slavery, while it lasted, in the continental Anglo-American colonies. I know of no study, however, which concludes that the ending of enslavement of Indians within the capturing colony, or for trading abroad, was the result of the depopulating effect of that practice.80 It was not the “supply’ aspect, but rather the “control” aspect that was decisive in ending the labor policy of Indian enslavement in continental Anglo-America.
It was the common rule that enslaved Indian war captives, most particularly the men, be shipped out of the colony, sometimes to other continental colonies, even to England or Spain, but most commonly to England’s West Indian sugar plantation colonies.81 The proportion of Indian bond-laborers was by far the highest in South Carolina. There it peaked in about 1708, when 1,400 Indians (500 men, 600 women and 300 children) constituted one-fourth of the total lifetime hereditary bond-labor force.82 Yet “only a small proportion of the whole number of Indians enslaved were kept in the [South Carolina] colony.”83 The total numbers of Indians enslaved in the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies was far less, but it was policy to send male captives “outside the colonies.”84 Shipping value-producing Indian labor out of the colony was not what policy advisers to the Virginia Company had in mind in the early 1620s. Why was it, then, that the great majority were transported by sea to other colonies or countries?85
It was not that Indian laborers were unemployable in plantation labor; after all, that is why they were wanted in the West Indies. Nor was it that those colonies were oversupplied with plantation laborers; indeed, the Indians shipped to the West Indies were traded for Afro-Caribbean plantation laborers to be employed in the continental colonies.86 It was not that Indians could not learn trades; actual instances of Indian craftsmen working within the colonies showed that they could, even as chattel bondmen.87 Rather, the reasons were rooted in three intractable problems of “white race” social control: (1) resistance by the Indian bond-laborers, principally by running away, which merged sometimes with the same form of resistance of African and European bond-laborers; (2) the necessity to maintain nearby friendly, or “treaty,” Indians in the buffer role,88 in the first instance between the Anglo-American colonies and the more remote “hostile,” or foreign-allied, tribes; and then against the escape of African-American bond-laborers beyond the Anglo-American “frontier”; and (3) with the institution of the “white race” system of social control, the key necessity of preserving “white skin” privileges of laboring-class European-Americans vis-à-vis all non-European-Americans.
Indian resistance to being reduced to plantation bond-labor
In the absence of a cacique class89 that from positions of traditional upper-class authority could be co-opted as recruiters of plantation bond-labor, the Anglo-American bourgeoisie adapted the phenomenon of inter-tribal rivalries for their purposes. This was a basic element of the colonialist “Indian policy,” and it was made to dovetail with the strategy according to which Indian “allies” were to serve as a protective buffer for the colony against the generally more remote tribes.
But if the English colonizers had the advantage of firearms and the buffer of dependent tribes, the victim tribes had a continental space at their backs.90 This “continental factor” made possible Indian resistance by migration. When the Savannah Indians of South Carolina migrated north in 1707, “[t]he Iroquois themselves received [them] as brothers and the Delaware called them grandsons.”91 Sometimes migration would enable a tribe largely to avoid the enslaving onslaught;92 sometimes victim tribes retained sufficient cohesion to be able to maintain their identity even as they migrated; and in other cases broken remnants found refuge with other tribes into which they were adopted.93
Unlike the African bond-laborers displaced from home by thousands of ocean miles into an utterly strange land, those relatively few Indian captives retained in a given colony were not so “completely broken from their tribal stems,”94 and were still in at least somewhat familiar terrain, facing a familiar enemy whom they had already met in open battle. South Carolina Provincial policy was focused on the constant danger of Indian bond-laborers escaping into the woods, or conspiring with enemy tribes, or mounting insurrections, such as the one suspected in 1700.95
Colonialist concern was heightened by fears of Indians joining with African-Americans in resistance to their common bondage. In 1729, the French governor of Louisiana expressed his concern that “Indian slaves being mixed with our negroes may induce them to desert.”96 That same year he abandoned a mission of revenge against one Indian tribe, the Nabanez (Natchez?), lest Choctaws and Negroes seize the opportunity to attack New Orleans “to free themselves from slavery.”97 In South Carolina, precautions were advised to prevent “intimacy” between Indians and Negroes, “any Intercourse between Indians and Negroes” being seen as a threat to the colony.98 In his signal study of the relationship of the Indians and African-Americans in the southeastern Anglo-American colonies, William S. Willis found that “[t]he determination [on the part of the English colonial authorities] to prevent Indian-Negro contacts within the White settlements was a main cause for curtailing the enslavement of Indians.”99
The threat was made more acute by the constant efforts of the Spanish in Florida and the French in Louisiana to encourage resistance to and flight from the English colonies.100 In 1716 and for some years thereafter, Yamassees and some Creeks, as well as numbers of Negroes, deserted English Carolina for Spanish Florida; from there Yamassees and Negroes carried on raids against the English colony, spreading the word to the South Carolina Indians and Negroes that freedom was theirs for the having in Florida.101 When the English commanded by General Oglethorpe invaded Spanish Florida in 1740–42, they were opposed there by joint forces of Indians, Negroes, and Spanish.102
As time went on, Indian peoples grew less inclined to engage in internecine wars simply to provide slaves for the trade and exploitation of English “planters” who were intruding on villages of “friendly” and “hostile” Indians alike.103 This trend matured in the great Indian revolt in 1715, called the Yamassee War (see this page), which marked the beginning of the irreversible discontinuation of enslavement of Indians in South Carolina, the province where it had been most extensively practiced.104
The inherent ambivalence of the “buffer” role
The buffer tribes had a dual role in the English colonial system of social control.105 They served as a shield for the English against hostile tribes, including those linked to French and Spanish colonial rivals. Prior to 1715, South Carolina colonial policy “sought to consolidate a double bulwark of Indian allies in the zone of the Savannah and Altamaha Rivers” (present-day east-central Georgia). In the northwestern region, it was the mountain-dwelling Overhill Cherokee who long “bore the brunt of the French Indians.” In 1723 the South Carolina Assembly solemnly affirmed, “The safety of this Province does, under God, depend on the friendship of the Cherokees.”106 In England the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations communicated to the King their concern that this dependence had even wider ramifications: if the Cherokees were to desert “your Majesty’s interest,” then “not only Carolina, but Virginia likewise would be exposed to their excursions.”107
The buffer tribes were also a buffer between the runaway African-American bond-laborer and refuge beyond the boundaries of the Anglo-American colony.108 This function was a regular provision in every treaty or memorandum of understanding between the colonies and their “tributary,” “friendly,” or newly “subject” tribes. Nash notes the “persistent inclusion in Indian treaties of a clause providing for the return of escaped slaves.”109 “Most treaties,” Willis writes of the southeastern region in the eighteenth century, “stipulated that Indians surrender all Negroes and return all future runaways at an agreed price.”110 But the pattern had been set more than half a century earlier in the 1646 treaty between the Virginia colony and “Necotowance, King of the Indians.”111 Under the terms of the treaty made in 1700 between the Maryland colonial government and the chief of the Piscataway Indians, “[i]n case any servants or slaves runaway from their masters” to any Piscataway town, “the Indians shall be bound to apprehend them and bring them to the next English Plantation,” or be subject to the penalties of Maryland law for the harborers of fugitives.112
By definition, “buffer” tribes were those located nearer to,113 more accessible to, and, above all, economically more dependent upon the English colonists than were other tribes. But by the same token they were therefore more vulnerable to the predations of colonists who were ready to risk, to some degree, the buffer’s protective function. It was precisely this sort of undermining of the buffer understanding that led to the Westo War of 1708. For the same reason, in the 1701–8 period the Savannah Indians acted out their resentment by emigrating northward out of South Carolina, “much to the annoyance of the white government, which found them useful as a bulwark against other tribes, and what was probably more important, as slave raiders.”114 As mentioned above, the aggravation of Indian grievances culminated in the Yamassee War (1715–17). The fate of southeast Anglo-America hung by a single thread, namely the loyalty of the Cherokees to the English, and that linkage was itself gravely weakened. But the tie held, and as a result the rebellion was defeated.115 But it was, nevertheless, a historic victory over Indian enslavement, which immediately went into decline. “Justice to the Indians,” Crane writes, “and, in particular the suppression of the traffic in Indian slavery, these were injunctions to successive [South Carolina Provincial] governors and councils,” from 1680 to 1715.116 In the wake of the Yamassee War, the issue could no longer be avoided. South Carolina was becoming a rice, cotton and indigo plantation enterprise for which were wanted African bond-laborers, such as many of the colony elite had been exploiting in the Barbadian sugar plantations. In 1690 the Lords Proprietors had sent an urgent instruction to the Carolina authorities:
We hear that Indians are still being shipped away underhand.… You will do your best to prevent this.… [W]ithout them you cannot recover runaway Negroes.117
Twenty-five years later, the logic of their lordships’ warning finally struck home. That logic was fundamentally dictated by the “continental factor” – providing the vast area for bond-labor escape that no army could patrol, and no navy could surround – and by the absence of an Indian cacique class.
Indian Labor and the Invention of the White Race
If not by compulsion, if not as “drudges” for the English colonists of every class, what were the possibilities of voluntary enlistment by Indians in the work of the colony, alongside the “surplus” English men and women who were brought to Anglo-America? In the period ending in 1622, there were instances of Indians who did work voluntarily within the Virginia colony.118 In 1709 Robin, an Indian shoemaker, was granted leave to practice his trade among the English colonists “wherever he shall find encouragement.”119 But in general the Indians found their tribal life more comfortable and better supplied than the life offered by the English community so sore beset with starvation and disease. The English laboring people after 1622 worked as bond-laborers for terms which most of them did not survive, for debts they should not have had to owe for the trip to America. The Indians, as natives of the country, could not be bound by any such “transportation charges.” It was hardly to be expected that Indians would submit voluntarily to the oppressive life endured by the English bond-laborers. Nor would the English employers be willing to spend more for Indian laborers than they had to spend for English laborers in such plentiful supply.
Was there another way? Despite the general inaccessibility of Indians as plantation laborers and the continual displacement of the tribal settlements, could they not, as groups or individuals, still have abandoned the Indian way of life for the English way? Although by far the greater number of the European immigrants arriving in the southern colonies came as bond-laborers, there were some who were able to make the trip from Europe at their own expense, and who began their lives in Anglo-America as independent farmers or artisans. Why might not Indians have opted for the same sort of enterprise within the colony? The English homeland itself was mainly a nation of immigrants, Saxons, Angles, Danes, Normans, Flemings, consolidating with the ancient Angles, Celts and Scots. True, the Indians’ tribal lands were being taken away, but might not the inducements for individual Indians entering into the Anglo-American common economic life well have outweighed the disinclining factors, just as it did for some Scots-Irish, for example? Such inducements included credit from capitalist land speculators and freedom from taxes for as much as ten years.120 With access to English-made iron implements and utensils, and other manufactured goods and supplies, the prospects might well have persuaded enterprising Indians to take up the life of the free yeoman farmer or artisan. Evidence of the appeal of Anglo-American commodity culture would become woefully evident in its ability to dissolve Indian society. Why should not at least a few individual Indians be successful in that culture as members of the colony?
This avenue to use of the labor of the Indian was never taken. The policy of special inducements to independent farmers referred to above was not developed until the early eighteenth century. The immigrants to whom this opportunity was opened were counted upon to provide a barrier against external dangers from French and hostile Indian attacks, and against the establishment of maroon centers of freedom and resistance by African-American bond-laborers in the Allegheny Mountains.121 By that time, by a historical transformation which is the central concern of this volume, the bourgeoisie had drawn the color line between freedom and slavery, and established white supremacy as article one of the Anglo-American constitution. Only European-Americans, as “whites,” were thereafter to be entitled to the full rights of the free citizen, Indians being by definition not “white.”122 The presence within the colony of free independent Indian farmers or tenants would have been a constitutionally intolerable anomaly.
The fate of the Indians under the principle of racial slavery and white supremacy was thus in the end controlled by twin parameters: nonenslavability and nonassimilability. These parameters would eventually govern Anglo-American “Indian policy” throughout the continental colonies.