The Origin of Negro Slavery Eric E. Williams narrowly identified with the Negro. A racial twist Protestant and ne (Indian slavery) was never sufficiently extensive to interfere with Negro slavery and the slave trade, it never received any attention from the never declared illegal." home government, and so existed as legal because But Indian slavery never was extensive in the British dominions. Ballagh, writing of Virginia, says that popular sentiment had never "demanded the subjection of the Indian race per se, as was practically the case with the Negro in the first slave act of 1661, but only a portion of it, and that admittedly a very small portion. ... In the case of the Indian slavery was viewed as of an occasional nature, a preventive penalty and not as a normal and permanent condition.” In the New England colonies Indian slavery was unprofitable, for slavery of any kind was unprofitable because it was unsuited to the diversified agriculture of these colonies. In addition the Indian slave was inefficient. The Spainards discovered that one Negro was worth four Indians. A prominent official in Hispaniola insisted in 1518 that “permission be given to bring Negroes, a race robust for labor, instead of natives, so weak that they can only be employed in tasks requiring little endurance, such as taking care of maize fields or farms." The future staples of the New World, sugar and cotton, required strength which the Indian lacked, and demanded the robust "cotton nigger" as sugar's need of strong mules produced in Louisiana the epithet "sugar mules." According to Lauber, “When compared with sums paid for Negroes at the same time and place the prices of Indian slaves are found to have been considerably Slavery in the Caribbean has been too has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. Unfree Tabor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, pagan. The first instance of slave trading and slave labor developed in the New World involved, racially, not the Negro but the Indian. The Indians rapidly succumbed to the excessive labor demanded of them, the insufficient diet, the white man's diseases, and their inability to adjust themselves to the new way of life. Accustomed to a life of liberty, their constitution and temperament were ill-adapted to the rigors of plantation slavery. As Fernando Ortíz writes: “To subject the Indian to the mines, to their monotonous, insane and severe labor, without tribal sense, without religious ritual, ... was like taking away from him the meaning of his life. It was to enslave not only his muscles but also his collective spirit.” The visitor to Ciudad Trujillo, capital of the Dominican Republic (the present-day name of half of the island formerly called Hispaniola), will see a statue of Columbus, with the figure of an Indian woman gratefully writing (so reads the caption) the name of the Discoverer. The story is told, on the other hand, of the Indian chieftain, Hatuey. who, doomed to die for resisting the invaders, staunchly refused to accept the Christian faith as the gateway to salvation when he learned that his executioners, too, hoped to get to Heaven. It is far more probable that Hatuey, rather than the an ing dle SUS the alter cher few, ly be tional me of at the hal on of the and on He has es. His Journals earch of England and France, in their colonies, the Indians. There was one conspicuous s From anonymous woman, represented contemporary Indian opinion of their new overlords. followed the Spanish practice of enslavement of difference—the attempts of the Spanish Crown, however ineffective, to restrict Indian slavery to those who refused to accept Christianity and to the warlike Caribs on the specious plea that they were cannibals. From the standpoint of the British government Indian slavery, unlike later Negro slavery which involved vital imperial interests, was a purely colonial matter. As Lauber writes: "The home government was interested in colonial slave conditions and legislation only when the African slave trade was involved. lower." The Indian reservoir, too, was limited, the African inexhaustible. Negroes therefore were stolen in Africa to work the lands stolen from the Indians in America. The voyages of Prince Henry the Navigator complemented those of Columbus, West African history became the complement of West Indian. The immediate successor of the Indian, however, was not the Negro but the poor white. These white servants included a variety of types. Some were indentured servants, so called because, before departure from the homeland, they had signed a contract, indented by law, binding them to service for a stipulated time in return for their passage. Still others, known as "redemptioners." arranged with the captain of the ship to pay for their passage on arrival or within a specified time Since it 101 thereafter; if they did not, they were sold by the captain to the highest bidder. Others were convicts, sent out by the deliberate policy of the home government, to serve for a specified period. This emigration was in tune with mercantilist theories of the day which strongly advocated putting the poor to industrious and useful labor and favored emigration, voluntary or involuntary, as relieving the poor rates and finding more profitable occupations abroad for idlers and vagrants at home. "Indentured servitude," writes C. M. Haar, "was called into existence by two different though complementary forces: there was both a positive attraction from the New World and a negative repulsion from the Old." In a state paper delivered to James I in 1606 Bacon emphasized that by emigration England would gain "a double commodity, in the avoidance of people here, and in making use of them there." This temporary service at the outset denoted omen and children and on a shipp to be conveyed beyond the sea captain of a ship trading to Jamaica wordt the Clerkenwell House of Correction, p drink the girls who had been imprisoned Indies. The temptations held out to the disorderly, and “invite" them to go to the and the credulous were so attractive that mayor of Bristol complained, husband induced to forsake their wives, wives wanted criminals found on the t husbands, and apprentices their masters refuge from the arms of the law. The the labor agent of those days, who traveled German immigration developed the needs peasants to sell their belongings and er down the Rhine Valley persuading the transport the most c another, a sending he latter were rattlesnakes Franklin sh convicts increase of i would have innocuous, poured in convicts the colonies in been impos however, we was summec would be mc than their vi nothing stra problem in a and convict was equival government t latter with governor of temie no inferiority or degradation. Many of the servants were manorial tenants fleeing from the irksome restrictions of feudalism, Irishmen seeking freedom from the oppression of landlords and bishops, Germans running away from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War. They transplanted in their hearts a burning desire for land, an ardent passion for independence. They came to the land of opportunity to be free men, their imaginations powerfully wrought upon by glowing and extravagant descriptions in the home country. It was only later when, in the words of Dr. Williamson, "all ideals of a decent colonial society, of a better and greater England overseas, were swamped in the pursuit of an immediate gain," that the introduction of disreputable elements became a general feature of indentured America, receiving a commission emigrant. Much has been written about the these “newlanders” were not averse to email But whatever the deceptions practiced, ita true, as Friedrich Kapp has written, that ground for the emigration fever layi unhealthy political and economic conditie The misery and oppression of the conditirse little (German) states promoted emigrabint more dangerously and continuously worse 'newlander. Convicts provided another steady se white labor. The harsh feudal laws off recognized three hundred capital crimes hanging offenses included: picking a pu more than a shilling; shoplifting to the welcome con readie way t allways with Indies were p even the spawi goale-bird [sic] hope of his ca preferment, experimented." The politica between 1640 a white servar nonconformists transportation, the fate prisoners, who thoroughly was prescribed by the punishment was service. A regular traffic developed in these servants. Between 1654 and 1685 ten thousand sailed from Bristol alone, chiefly for the West Indies and Virginia. In 1683 white servants represented one- sixth of Virginia's population. Two-thirds of the immigrants to Pennsylvania during the eighteenth century were white servants; in four years 25,000 came to Philadelphia alone. It has been estimated that more than a quarter of a million persons were of this class during the colonial period, and that they probably constituted one-half of all English five shillings; stealing a horse or a sheep.pl rabbits on a gentleman's estate. Offenses i transportation comprised the stealing burning stacks of corn, the maiming and cattle, hindering customs officers in the Proposals made in 1664 would have how of their duty, and corrupt legal! the colonies all vagrants, rogues and ideas thieves, gypsies, and loose persons for unlicensed brothels. A piteous petition prayed for transportation instead of sentence for a wife convicted of study valued at three shillings and four pene transportation was the penalty for the immigrants, the majority going to the middle emancipation of the Negro slaves tramo silver spoon and a gold watch. One peu was the penalty for trade union actie some connection between the law and difficult to resist the conclusion that encouraged to a great degree and became regular business in such towns as London and needs of the plantations, and the marve few people ended up in the colonies orze Benjamin Franklin opprustrasts of ** Bristol. Adults would be plied with liquor, were called "spirits," defined as "one that taketh upon the New World of the verb was adde "barbadoes" a p an Irish colony frequently heard British West Indie servants. They ha ready to aid Engl the Leeward Isla signs of that burns colonies. picture. to Lecky, gave soldiers. The van campaigns were to and Scotsmen cam travaillers and so Religious intolera plantations. In 166 was As commercial speculation entered the abuses crept in. Kidnapping a Williams/The Origin of Negro Slavery 103 latter were justified in sending to England their the most cruel insult ever offered by one nation to another, and asked, if England was justified in sending her convicts to the colonies, whether the rattlesnakes in exchange? It is not clear why Franklin should have been so sensitive. Even if the convicts were hardened criminals, the great increase of indentured servants and free emigrants would have tended to render the convict influence innocuous, as increasing quantities of water poured in a glass containing poison. Without convicts the early development of the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century would have been impossible. Only a few of the colonists, oath for the third time were to be transported; in 1664 transportation, to any plantation except Virginia or New England, or a fine of one hundred pounds was decreed for the third offense for persons over sixteen assembling in groups of five or more under pretense of religion. Many of Monmouth's adherents were sent to Barbados, with orders to be detained as servants for ten years. The prisoners were granted in batches to favorite courtiers, who made handsome profits from the traffic in which, it is alleged, even the Queen shared. A similar policy was resorted to after the Jacobite risings of the eighteenth century. The transportation of these white servants shows in its true light the horrors of the Middle Passage-not as something unusual or inhuman but as a part of the age. The emigrants were packed like herrings. According to Mittelberger, each servant was allowed about two feet in width and six feet in length in bed. The boats were small, d al to a ery ng ains real the of the much 7 the however, were so particular. The general attitude was summed up by a contemporary: “Their labor would be more beneficial in an infant settlement, than their vices could be pernicious.” There was nothing strange about this attitude. The great problem in a new country is the problem of labor, and convict labor, as Merivale has pointed out, was equivalent to free present by the government to the settlers without burdening the latter with the expense of importation. The governor of Virginia in 1611 was willing to welcome convicts reprieved from death as “a readie way to furnish us with men and not allways with the worst kind of men." The West Indies were prepared to accept all and sundry, even the spawn of Newgate and Bridewell, for "no goale-bird [sic] can be so incorrigible, but there is hope of his conformity here, as well as of his preferment, which some have happily experimented." The political and civil disturbances in England between 1640 and 1740 augmented the supply of servants. Political and religious for their unorthodoxy by transportation, mostly to the sugar islands. Such was the fate of many of Cromwell's Irish prisoners, who were sent to the West Indies. So was this policy pursued that an active verb was added to the English language-to an Irish colony, and the Irish brogue is still the voyage long, the food, in the absence of refrigeration, bad, disease inevitable. A petition to Parliament in 1659 describes how seventy-two servants had been locked up below deck during the whole voyage of five and a half weeks, "amongst horses, that their souls, through heat and steam under the tropic, fainted in them." Inevitably abuses crept into the system and Fearon was shocked by “the horrible picture of human suffering which this living sepulchre” of an emigrant vessel in Philadelphia afforded. But conditions even for the free passengers were not much better in those days, and the comment of a Lady of Quality describing a Scotland to the West Indies on a ship full of indentured servants should banish any ideas that the horrors of the slave ship are to be accounted for by the fact that the victims were Negroes. "It is hardly possible,” she writes, “to believe that human nature could be so depraved, as to treat fellow creatures in such a manner for so little gain." rce of ngland ypical ket for alue of Daching which w was of cloth, voyage from r white nonconformists pai Killing of execution practices. nished to ers, petty equenting thoroughly ** servants. They hated the English, and were always the Leeward Islands in 1689 we can already see n in 1667 the death ling goods ce. In 1745 theft of a ar after the nsportation Stivity. It is t there was id the labor vel is that so verseas. s "dumping of the Old" as "barbadoes" a person. Montserrat became largely frequently heard today in many parts of the British West Indies. The Irish, however, were poor ready to aid England's enemies, and in a revolt in signs of that burning indignation which, according soldiers. The vanquished in Cromwell's Scottish campaigns were treated like the Irish before them, travaillers and soldiers in most foreign parts." Religious intolerance sent more workers to the plantations. In 1661 Quakers refusing to take the Negro slavery, thus, had nothing to do with climate. Its origin can be expressed in three words: in the Caribbean, Sugar; on the mainland, Tobacco and Cotton. A change in the economic structure produced a corresponding change in the labor supply. The fundamental fact was "the creation of an inferior social and economic organization o exploiters and exploited.” Sugar, tobacco, and cotton required the large plantation and hordes a cheap labor, and the small farm of the ex- indentured white servant could not possibl survive. The tobacco of the small farm in Barbado was displaced by the sugar of the large plantatio The rise of the sugar industry in the Caribbea to Lecky, gave Washington some of his best and Scotsmen came to be regarded as "the general 104 Section Four: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade made up squeezed out. apprehensive The resident planter was the signal for a gigantic dispossession of the small farmer. Barbados in 1645 had 11,200 small white farmers and 5,680 Negro slaves; in 1667 there were 745 large plantation owners and 82,023 slaves. In 1645 the island had 18,300 whites fit to bear arms, in 1667 only 8,300. The white farmers were squeezed out. The planters continued to offer inducements to newcomers, but they could no longer offer the main inducement, land. White servants preferred the other islands where they state," wrote Weston, “could be supposed to be of continuous plantations, the white pa would be not merely starved out, but literalls of the growing disproportion between whites and blacks, passed Deficiency to keep white servants. The absentees preferred Laws to compel absentees, under penalty of fines white survive in the "Red-legs" of Barbados pay the fines. In the West Indies today the past pallid, weak and depraved from in-breeding The resea exploded was an seventeen landholde servants. numerous worse as Spanish wear could hope for land, to Barbados, where they were sure there was none. In desperation the planters proposed legislation which would prevent a landowner from purchasing more land, compel Negroes and servants to dimity manufactured in Barbados (what would English mercantilists have said?) to provide employment for the poor whites, and prevent Negroes from being taught to trade. The governor of Barbados in 1695 drew a pitiful picture of these ex-servants. Without fresh meat or rum, “they are domineered over and used like dogs, and this in time will strong rum, insufficient food and abstinence from manual labor. For, as Merivale wrote, "in, country where Negro slavery prevails extensively no white is industrious." It was the triumph, not of geographical conditions, as Harlow contends, but of economic The victims were the Negroes in Africa and the small white farmers. The increase of wealth for the few whites was as phenomenal as the increase of misery for the many blacks. The Barbados crops in 1650, over a twenty-month period, were word over three million pounds, about fifteen million in modern money. In 1666 Barbados was computer to be seventeen times as rich as it had been before the planting of sugar. “The buildings in 1643 were demandec "those pe islands i quantities Nonethele exports of than six explanatic which che slaves, on were one- insignifica colony, h undoubtedly drive away all the commonalty of the white people." His only suggestion was to give the right to elect members of the Assembly to every white man owning two acres of land. Candidates for election would “sometimes give the poor miserable creatures a little rum and fresh provisions and such things as would be of nourishment to them," in order to get their votes—and elections were held every year. It is not surprising that the exodus continued. The poor whites began their travels, disputing their way all over the Caribbean, from Barbados to Nevis, to Antigua, and thence to Guiana and which it v Virginia, small farr could no Virginian squeezed been so la become th else there house and their houses like castles, their sugar skyrocketed. A castle." The price of land The w nothing crossing British an where the the dollar American transform Dominica (thought was not capitalist undertaking but the was and is essentially a as well. A report om Trinidad, and ultimately Carolina. Everywhere they were pursued and dispossessed by the same inexorable economic force, sugar; and in Carolina they were safe from cotton only for a hundred years. Between 1672 and 1708 the white men in Nevis decreased by more than three-fifths, the black population more than doubled. Between 1672 and 1727 the white males of Montserrat declined by more than two-thirds, in the same period the black population increased more than eleven times. "The more they buie," said the crude stages of refining mean, with things only for necessity, but in 1666 plate, jewels, and household stuff were estimated at £500,000, their buildings very fair and beautiful and negroes huts show themselves from the sea like so many small towns, each defended by is plantation of five hundred acres which sold for £400 in 1640 fetched £7,000 for a half-share in 1649 eight hundred acres, had at one time been split up The estate of one Captain Waterman, comprising among no less than forty proprietors. For sugar involving not only agricultural operations French sugar islands stated that to make ter as great 21 hogsheads of sugar required expenditure in beasts of burden, mills and utensils estimated that it required four hundred acres as to make a hundred. James Knight of Jamais start a sugar plantation. According Long, another planter and the historian of the fifty hogsheads of sugar a year, £14,000 for of three hundred acres, producing from thirty # island, it needed £5,000 to start a small plantation plantation of the same size producing hundred hogsheads. There could be only two classes in such a society, wealthy planters The moral is reinforced by a consideration of economy was based not on sugar but on tobacz the history of Virginia, where the plantation Edwant to OR and Barbadians, referring to their slaves, "the more they are able to buye, for in a yeare and a halfe they will earne with God's blessing as much as they cost." King Sugar had begun his depredations, changing flourishing commonwealths of small farmers into vast sugar factories owned by a camarilla of absentee capitalist magnates and worked by a mass of alien proletarians. The plantation economy had no room for poor whites; the proprietor or overseer, a physician on the more prosperous plantations, possibly their families, these were sufficient. "If a oppressed slaves. Williams/The Origin of Negro Slavery 105 was an aristocratic dominion. In the early owned abroad and operated by alien labor, on the British West Indian pattern. That this process is taking place with free labor and in nominally landholders had neither slaves nor indentured The researches of Professor Wertenbaker have exploded the legend that Virginia from the outset seventeenth century about two-thirds of the independent areas (Puerto Rico excepted) helps servants. The strength of the colony lay in its numerous white yeomanry. Conditions became worse as the market for tobacco was glutted by phase in the history of the plantation. In the words us to see in its true light the first importation of Negro slave labor in the British Caribbean—a 2 31 Spanish competition and the Virginians demanded in wrath that something be done about "those petty English plantations in the savage islands in the West Indies" through which quantities of Spanish tobacco reached England. Nonetheless, though prices continued to fall, the exports of Virginia and Maryland increased more than six times between 1663 and 1699. The explanation lay in two words—Negro slavery, which cheapened the cost of production. Negro slaves, one-twentieth of the population in 1670, were one-fourth in 1730. "Slavery, from being an insignificant factor in the economic life of the colony, had become the very foundation upon which it was established." There was still room in Virginia, as there was not in Barbados, for the small farmer, but land was useless to him if he could not compete with slave labor. So the Virginian peasant, like the Barbadian, squeezed out. “The Virginia which had formerly been so largely the land of the little farmer, had become the land of Masters and Slaves. For aught else there was no room. The whole future history of the Caribbean is more than a dotting of the i's and a British and French than in the Spanish islands, the dollar diplomacy of our own time. Under have witnessed the of Professor Phillips, the plantation system was upon it. "less dependent upon slavery than slavery was The plantation system formed, so to government speak, the industrial and social frame of , while slavery was a code of written laws enacted for that purpose." Where the plantation did not develop, as in the Cuban tobacco industry, Negro labor was rare and white labor predominated. The liberal section of the Cuban population consistently advocated the cessation of the Negro slave trade and the introduction of white immigrants. Saco, mouthpiece of the liberals, called for the immigration of workers “white and free, from all parts of the world, of all races, provided they have a white face and can do honest labor." Sugar defeated Saco. It was the sugar plantation, with its servile base, which retarded white immigration in nineteenth century Cuba as it had banned it in seventeenth century Barbados and eighteenth century Saint Domingue. No sugar, no Negroes. In Puerto Rico, which developed relatively late as a genuine plantation, and where, before the American regime, sugar never dominated the lives and thoughts of the population as it did elsewhere, the poor white peasants survived and the Negro slaves never exceeded fourteen percent of the population. Saco wanted to "whiten” the Cuban social structure. Negro slavery blackened that structure all over the Caribbean while the blood of the Negro slaves reddened the Atlantic and both its shores. Strange that an article like sugar, so sweet and necessary to human existence, should have occasioned such crimes and bloodshed! e e was d 1, es га its I nothing crossing of the t's. It happened earlier in the A or 48. ng up where the process was delayed until the advent of gar American capital we ng the the ten transformation of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic into huge sugar factories (though the large plantation, especially in Cuba, was not unknown under the Spanish regime), an asils aica s to vard the ation y to or a one two and on of tation рассо.
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