“Southern states also passed harsh laws regulating the conduct of free blacks, in several cases banning them from entering or settling in the state. In Mississippi, a free negro could be sold into slavery after spending ten days within state lines. Arkansas passed a law in 1859 that would have enslaved every free black person still present by 1860; although it was not enforced, it succeeded in reducing Arkansas’s population of free blacks to below that of any other slave state.”
I believe South Carolina also had a “leave or be sold at auction” law. OTOH, Louisiana had many free blacks living openly. The existence and enforcement of such laws, IMO, correlates with how virulently racist the local white population was.
While slavery (by Europeans) of Native Americans was gradually eliminated in most places in the early 1800s, thanks to pre-existing slavery under the Spanish and Mexicans in California, it persisted there until after the Civil War.
What’s even more ironic is that free blacks could, and sometimes did, own black slaves themselves. Sometimes, this might have been a round-about way of helping relatives, but sometimes not. Further to the Wanda Sykes story, one of her free, black ancestors in fact owned black slaves. There is some evidence, although not fully conclusive, that this was a case of “freeing” relatives.
One of the problems with fully understanding this is that the census records typically contain only the age and gender of black slaves, not their names. This is the problem most African Americans have in tracing their ancestry back before 1870.
I was going to mention that, but I thought it was too well known and I wanted to comment on something obscure. That was one of the insidious aspects about chattel slavery. It gave economic incentives to slaveowners that made it hard for employers to match. And even if some used purchase as a method of eventual freedom, making it legal and accepted and a bedrock part of society appealed to baser parts of human nature that are universal.
Hmm. The minimum wage thread in GD seems to have petered out but I wonder what the ninnies thee who keep arguing that a zero minimum wage would have no effect would say about slavery. Probably argue, well, not everybody was a slave so it couldn’t have made any economic difference.
I was addressing this question (" Under any circumstances, was it legal to enslave people who were not already enslaved?"), especially since the OP seemed unaware of the film.
Since that thread was entitled something like Why Shouldn’t I Have The Right To Volunteer To Be Paid Below The Minimum Wage ?, and would have been more accurately argued Why Shouldn’t I As An Employer Pay As Little As I Want ?, here’s a classic satire on Libertarianism:
Well, it doesn’t need to be illegal. That was when Labour went on a banning splurge, banning things like detonating nuclear weapons and impersonating traffic wardens. Slavery is a series of crimes, kidnapping, false imprisonment, assault, forced labour. Slavery therefore requires the backing of the law and the state. That went with the Slave Trade Act of 1807, the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 and the Indian Slavery Act of 1843.
Exapno and Claverhouse, you both know that political jabs are prohibited in General Questions. No warning issued, but further remarks along these lines will be subject to a warning.
White slaves, that is slaves who were entirely European in appearance, including blond hair and blue eyes, were a small part of the US slave population for most of the institution’s history. They were in high demand as house servants and concubines. There are many reports by Northern visitors to the South, who are amazed at the fact that it was impossible to tell the difference between these slaves and free whites by appearance. If white people like this could be made slaves, then anyone could, and the institution was not just morally despicable, but also threatening to free whites. How US Courts Decided if You Were a Slave
How the Law Decided if You Were Black or White: The Early 1800s
Lifetime slavery based on race wasn’t established in English speaking North America until the late 1600’s. Before that, the forced labor system in the colonies was fixed term indentured servitude, with no particular attention being paid to race. Intermarriage between settlers of African and European origin was common, and some black indentured servants were able to finish their terms and become wealthy land owners in their own rights.
The original intent of slavery was that anyone could be enslaved.
The problem seems to be there is no way to enslave someone, from what little I recall of English law. It’s not like the courts would say “you are now the property of X”, or some such. So slaves tended to be, much like in the Roman Empire days, bought from far off lands that did allow enslavement.
(Convicts from the local population were indentured for X years or for life. IIRC this did not imply their offspring were similarly indentured, since the punishment with the offense could only be attributable to the defendant.)
The problem with enslaving the locals is that they made poor slaves. One item I recall reading (http://www.amazon.ca/Dancing-Ghost-Exploring-Indian-Reality/dp/0143054260 ) suggests that hunter-gatherer types were more likely to sit and do nothing rather than work. (Same mentality displayed by the bushman in prison in The Gods Must Be Crazy) Africans with an agricultural upbringing, however, would work under duress. They were also suited for the US south and the tropical climates of the Caribbean and Latin America.
As the western culture became more enlightened, the “justification” for holding slaves became more focussed on the difference - black people were heathens so 'we’re doing them a favour" by brining them to “civilization”. They are “more primitive” therefore do not deserve and could not cope with the same rights as real people, and all the other manure shovelled in justification of slavery.
Slavery may not have been exclusively whites owning blacks, but over time that is what it became and most of the justifications revolved around it.
After Britain banned the slave trade and began actively patrolling to prevent it, breeding was the only source of new slaves; thus the incentive to prevent loss from runaways, and to ensure that every slave born of slaves stayed a slave. Also, if the difference between blacks and whites was the justification for slavery, having a large free black population was dangerous because it showed blacks could get by fine as freedmen, and also gave a dangerous example to slaves that there were other ways of live for them.
IIRC the scene in Amistad shows the queen of Spain demanding that the boat and slaves be returned to Cuba, so Spain by 1840 was not yet actively preventing slavery traffic.
So:
was it legal to have nonblack slaves? Probably, since some were so white they could pass, but it just wasn’t done, because it contradicted all the twaddle justifying slavery. Note too the discussions about enslaving runaways; the major justification was that they were black, and the major way tot tell a runaway was “if they’re black, they must be…” Runaways that could blend into the general population would be hard to find and not terribly desirable.
A lot of the “passing” I read about was slaves passing for less lily-white “whites”. It probably is not difficult for a lot of lighter skinned blacks to pass as Latino, Spaniard, Italian, or similarly “darker” white people, if their facial features were passable. By the time the kids are blue-eyed redheads with freckles, I suspect they would have been freed or sold to a Louisiana brothel. There were cases in South Africa where several members of the same family were classified by the race boards as different races - black, mixed, white… meaning they could not live in the same area.
Depends what you mean by “legal”. After 50 years of civil rights legislation, we have a warped view of how the law used to operate. Is it legal for the small town mayor or sheriff to go 60mph in a school zone? Is it legal for the small town workers to cut the mayor’s lawn? Short answer - who’s going to stop them… So if a person is grabbed, just because they’re black, and tossed into the work gang for the plantation down the road, what are they going to do about it? Do you think 1850’s Missouri would prosecute a white plantation owner on the say-so of a black field hand? A free black “mistakenly” enslaved basically was on his own, nobody was going to help him. Finders keepers.
Nitpick: Cuba still had slavery, and La Amistad was transshipping slaves around the coast when the slaves onboard- which included slaves illegally imported from Africa- revolted. Spanish officials might have hypocritically not cared about the original provenance of their “Cuban” slaves (and doubtless many southern Americans felt the same) but they had agreed (under British pressure) to ban the transAtlantic slave trade.
Basically, a woman recognized a slave as a European immigrant. It turned out that she’d been orphaned young in New Orleans and someone just enslaved her, claiming that she was part African. The case wound through the courts for years.
I also read a non-fiction book years ago (whose title I can’t remember and haven’t been able to find) about a woman whose father was a plantation owner and mother a slave. He freed his daughter (the mother was deceased) and when he died, he willed his considerable estate to her. He had no other children, at least, none that he claimed. You can imagine how thrilled his other relatives were, especially since this was before the Civil War. They took the case to court, and the will was upheld. Does anyone remember this book? I’m pretty sure it took place in Virginia.
The Sally Miller story suggests that the free whites most likely to be enslaved were those without social standing, without strong community ties. An orphan immigrant child was easy pickings, until her German co-ethnics recognized her as one of their own.
It would have been foolish to attempt enslave someone from a family with high social standing, or with extensive local family ties.
Not really; in the earliest colonies white christian might be subject to lengthy indentures but it was seen even then as immoral to own another Christian as property. As enslaved blacks over the years became more and more a Christian population this mindset died out.
A lot of this is actually bunk. The locals made poor slaves in large part because they were dying off from European disease and because they were already at home. Meaning if they fled, they could find people that spoke their language and possibly knew them who would help them escape. I’m not aware of any biological basis for the claim that people from West Africa are physiologically better suited to work in a sugarcane plantation than native Americans. Yes, many of them died from European disease, but that’s not at all the same to them being “unsuited to the work.” I’m pretty sure any adult human who is not disabled can work at essentially any farming technique we’ve developed as a species.
The United States prohibited the slave trade as well, which is the primary reason Southern Americans needed to mostly rely on reproduction to grow the slave population. The United States passed an act prohibiting the slave trade essentially at the same time as the British, and it went into force in 1808–which by an explicit clause in the Constitution was the earliest point at which Congress could prohibit the slave trade.
Actually it was in fact done, there are many accounts of slaves who were indistinguishable from free whites. It wasn’t that common, but it certainly happened. All this stuff about “one drop” and speculation about how they determined how “black” you were ignores the reality. Slave status was determined by your birth, it didn’t matter what you looked like, everyone knew you were a slave if you were born of a slave. Simple as that. Your mother’s master would know you were a slave. Slaves that appeared truly white, however, probably had a much better hope of escaping and getting to the North. Being white in appearance they would not be stopped by slave patrols unless members of the patrol recognized them, and would not need to show their papers or any of that. Once they got to the North they would be impossible to find. It still wouldn’t be easy though, as they’d have little money or knowledge of how to get from A to B .
Generally yes, it was easy to get away with enslaving a free black person in the South; and it would typically take an interested white person willing to take the matter to court to get the free black person released. As to the OP and white slaves; it was in fact possible to own a white slave and it did in fact happen. This was because, through mixing of the races many of the slaves had largely white ancestry, and if one of those slaves was impregnated by a white man (through rape or some illicit consensual relationship) then the child had a very high likelihood of looking entirely white. And of course genetic variability being what it was, two slaves who both had a large amount of white ancestry could easily produce a child that looked indistinguishable from a white child.
But most legal issues were local back then. So the local courts would know about this and accept that “yes, that is one of Jim’s slaves, he was born looking almost entirely white.” No one would question him being slave though, because he was born from a slave. Just randomly enslaving any foreign born white person would be more difficult. If an unknown white woman just appeared in someone’s possession, who spoke with a foreign dialect and was obviously not from around there then even local neighbors might intercede as that would not be a socially or legally acceptable thing to enslave say, a German person who happened to be traveling through the South.
I don’t have much to add about the legal methods that hasn’t already been covered, but I can direct anyone interested in why Africans became the slaves to the books 1491 and 1493 by Charles C Mann.
Quite simply, Malarial mosquitos were brought to the Americas by early African and European explorers and settlers, which blossomed in the climate of the American South, and which the majority of the Europeans and Natives were unable to resist while the Africans had much higher survival rates having been living in malarial climes for thousands of years.
There are other related causes, but the early slaves and indentured servants were of all skin tones and heritages and not readily differentiated but only the Africans had high survival rates in the climate where the plantation culture settled in. An examination of early settlements shows massive die-offs due to mosquito-borne illness within a matter of a couple of years; without referencing the book I don’t recall the numbers but for natives and Europeans it was something like 50% dead in 9 months, 85% dead in 2 years upon arrival. Africans were more like 40% lost in 2 years, with the survivors being immune.
1493 spends about 300 pages going into further detail about malaria and related topics and how it all interplays, but it pretty much all comes back to the globalization of disease and food brought about by the trade that suddenly blossomed between Europe/Africa and the Americas, as well as the Americas and Asia across the Pacific. And specifically and demonstrably Malaria made the largest impact on creating the African slave culture - African slavers wouldn’t have been so eager to sell their captives if the prices weren’t so good, and the prices were good because of the demand, generated by Malaria and the susceptibility of the Europeans and Americans.
This is all certainly true, but there is a further nuance that should be added.
Indians were natives. They knew the area, spoke the local languages, and could blend in with non-slaves in areas outside of settled communities. Africans had none of these advantages. It would have been much easier for an Indian to survive, even thrive, after having escaped from slavery than for an African thrown into a strange land thousands of miles from kin. Although familiarity with the land and language would be greater for descendents, settled lands also grew around them. It’s likely that during the colonial period, when Indian slavery gradually reduced, one of the reasons that Indians were considered inferior slaves is that they had a higher success rate in escaping.
Virtually none of the Native American societies encountered by the first European explorers were hunter-gatherers, except perhaps in the far north. In Mesoamerica and the Andes there were highly developed agricultural societies. Even in the US the native cultures along the east and Gulf coasts were basically agricultural.
No more so than the indigenous populations of those areas.
This is exactly the sort of stuff I’m interested in. What I find fascinating is that slavery is so monstrous and immoral, and yet was practiced by a society that was in so many ways modern and civilized, including having a fully fledged constitutional legal system with many levels of court review, etc. There were clearly plenty of extremely intelligent, well-informed, articulate and ethical-in-other-ways Southerners who supported slavery. It would have been interesting to hear their answers to questions such as the ones robert_columbia poses.
(A somewhat related question, I suppose, is whether previous civilized societies that practiced slavery on a large scale had abolitionist movements. Were there people in ancient Rome writing pamphlets about how slavery was just plain evil?)