In many sources that discuss the origin of African slavery in the “New World”, it is mentioned that Columbus and other conquistadors first attempted to capture “Indians” and enslave them. Makes sense: if you don’t believe in the essential humanity of those who are not European, there’s no more reason to have moral qualms about enslaving indigenous peoples of the Americas than enslaving indigenous peoples of Africa. And of course the former don’t have to be hauled across an entire ocean to work in a Caribbean sugar plantation.
But these sources inevitably go on to say something to the effect of “…but these Indians proved unsuitable for slavery, so…” without elabourating. Unsuitable how? Did they simply refuse to work, stop eating, etc., under those conditions? And why didn’t Africans react the same way?
What about the fact that Native Americans are in their home environment? If they refuse to work/try to run away, they at least have somewhere to go back to. African Americans were on an entirely new continent.
They died of Afroeurasian diseases that they had no resistance to.
And you’ve got it backwards. You don’t enslave people because you don’t believe in their humanity. First you enslave them, and then you stop believing in their humanity. It wasn’t because africans were inferior so they should be enslaved, it’s that they were enslaved, and therefore must be inferior.
Yes, the primary reason was that Indians were not resistant to Old World diseases. In some areas, 90% of the original indigenous population died off within a few years of the arrival of Europeans. (Or in some cases before Europeans arrived, because the diseases spread before them.) Africans in contrast had resistance to malaria and other diseases.
Indians were in fact were often enslaved or made to engage in forced labor. But in many places, especially the Caribbean, there wasn’t enough manpower remaining so Africans were imported to replace them.
There are accounts of Indians committing suicide, dying of depression, or refusing to work after being enslaved. In the case of Africans, any individuals who were unable to mentally withstand slavery would have died or been killed before they made it to the New World. Likewise weak individuals would not survive the rigors of the Middle Passage. So those that arrived were pre-selected to be relatively hardy compared to Indians.
And note that in places like Mexico that started with a high population density, the native population recovered to become serfs rather than slaves, serfdom being a slightly different form of forced labor than chattel slavery.
True. However, in the New World many African slaves fled to take refuge in unsettled areas to either be adopted by Indian tribes or found their own communities. In Panama and elsewhere there were communities of “cimmarones” or “maroons,” escaped slaves that established fortified settlements in the jungles. The population of some parts of the Panama like Darien and the Pearl Islands is descended from them. In the Guianas there are groups traditionally referred to as “Bush Negros” who are descended from escaped slaves that still preserve some African culture and language. And many US Indian tribes, especially in the East and South, have significant African admixture because of intermarriage with escaped slaves.
Despite what the textbooks say, American Indians were enslaved, and were often removed a great distance from where they were captured, therefore making their situation similar to that of the African slaves. It’s often overlooked (or people don’t realize) that Tituba, the slave famous in the Sale Witchcraft trials was NOT african – she and her husband, John Indian, were (as his name suggests), Indians. They were Carib, and had been transported to the wilds of Massachusetts.
In the era of the Conquistadors I don’t think people were enslaving others because they saw different peoples as lacking “essential humanity.”
Keep in mind that at that point in time while slavery wasn’t a common state in Europe due to economics, various forms of forced labor were very common and hardly different from most people’s conception of slavery. At that time (late 15th early 16th century) it was also still a common practice for Muslim pirates and slave catchers to kidnap white Europeans and send them back to Northern Africa or the Ottoman Empire to live the rest of their lives as slaves. Over a million Europeans met a fate like that during the time of the Conquistadors.
It’s easy to let Columbus and Cortes run together in your mind with guys like Jefferson and Washington, but they were hundreds of years apart with very different moral systems. In Cortes and Columbus’ day people were enslaved because it was profitable and they had the power to do so, not much was thought of it other than that. By the age of Washington and Jefferson civilized thought had advanced to a point that slavery was being widely condemned on moral grounds.
Guys like Jefferson were great readers who were reading all of the Enlightenment and Humanist writings. Jefferson even had those sort of philosophies himself. So how did these people and their next few generation of descendants justify continuing slavery? Well, they basically tried to warp the enlightenment so that they could justify a system they profited from, that is where the idea that blacks were “lesser humans” came from. Prior to the Enlightenment most people more or less were fine with the concept of enslaving “other full humans”, it wasn’t a big thing. The reason American slave holders started advancing disgusting theories about how blacks “needed” slavery in order to be controlled and properly civilized (because they were inferior and needed paternal guidance) was so they could essentially say that keeping slaves was the proper thing to do because the alternative was akin to “not providing proper supervision to a child who might hurt themselves.” I know that sounds incredibly racist (and well, it was), but disgusting as it was it’s actually what happens when you have people that accept the theories of the Enlightenment but are unwilling to abandon certain immoral practices because they benefit from them, so you had Enlightenment thinkers who continued to own slaves so they created an Enlightenment-branded set of ideas to justify it.
Keep in mind that while slavery may not have been in Europe, plenty of Europeans were involved in slavery. And much farther back than many people realize. The Frankish Empire under Charlemagne, for example, had a major slave trade going on. They’d buy slaves from Eastern Europe (all supposedly pagan Slavs because church law forbid the enslavement of Christians - but as you can guess slave traders were willing to overlook a slave’s origins and religion if a sale was involved) and then sell them to the Muslims. The value of this trade was a factor in Charlemagne’s invasion of Italy - the Lombards had a competing slave trade going on and by conquering them, the Franks protected their own trade.