“between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa and Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries.”
Not about North American slavery, but to show that blacks were not the only people being enslaved back then.
Not really hard to tell at all. Even if you’re just talking about the English colonies in North America, we know that American Indians were enslaved. For instance, the Virginia colonial assembly legalized Indian slavery in 1667 (although it had occurred before that), then repealed it, then legalized it again, then repealed it again; the last repeal leading to a bunch of lawsuits from 1780-1810, as slaves tried to prove native ancestry.
In South Carolina, in 1740, the law declared:
etc. There’s a lot of evidence for Indian slavery in the US.
Indeed it seems to be so, but this is one area where I am definitely not an expert.
The author of the book explains it much better and it’s ben a while since I read it - but basically, the psychology of hunter-gatherer types is very different. When imprisoned, or faced with any difficult situation, their inclination is to sit quietly and wait rather than run about, scream, pound on the walls, etc. This is a side effect of not having food supplies always at hand - save your energy until there is an opportunity to solve the situation rather than waste energy in futile displays of frustration. Hunters learn to be patient and wait, even if it takes days, even if they are seriously deprived. It’s a cultural thing. (As I said, look at the scenes of the bushman in jail in Gods Must Be Crazy… based on real life behaviour. The author was a prosecutor in northern Canada, and observed a lot of native behaviour first hand.
Full-time farmers, OTOH, must work all the time for the big payoff at harvest. Crops must be planted, tended, without payoff. Work is not its own immediate reward.
We can get into a debate over whether and when a hunter becomes a farmer, but the fact is the native Americans relied a lot more on hunting than on agriculture in many locales. This was not a country of rolling fiels, but more of untamed forest with small settlements; most areas had not made the leap where the field was more important than the forest.
The natives of a lot of the Americas were hunter-gatherers with small fields where they planted crops to supplement their hunting. There were exceptions - larger civilizations like the Maya, Incas, and Aztecs. But generally, the forest and jungle dwellers were in that intermediate range between hunter and farmer, where for most there was still plenty of game to feed them much of the time.
This was the problem with natives. While this is not a hard and fast rule, the agricultural invaders found that the non-agricultural natives tended to act irrationally when enslaved. I remember reading many years ago, growing up, that one reason for importing slaves from Africa was that the natives often would allow themselves to be whipped to death rather than work as slaves.
As for - who is suited for the work - no doubt dark skin tropical residents were better suited to tropical and near-tropical field work than white-skinned fair-haired northern Europeans, but I’m sure the plantation owners did not care. Africans just came cheaper, in more quantities, with less hassle.
And yes, the original intent of slavery was that anyone could be enslaved. The spoils of war for places like the Roman Empire (and others) was that the conquered locals were enslaved and taken into the empire. This removed the threat of resentful locals of a war-like persuasion, plus answered the question of who would look after the widows and children of the dead.
Similarly, as pointed out above, slavery was the fate of many Europeans captured by Barabary pirates and sold into the middle east.
However, most of these systems allowed some rights to the slave. Brazilian slaves, IIRC, were allowed to buy their freedom, like some Roman slaves. many were allowed to own property and sometimes had certain rights. The southern US system diverged from this more humanistic view, to the idea of slaves are subhumans and mere property with zero rights. Roman slaves could be anyone inside or outside the empire, and were freed and joined common society (as citizens) regularly.
This is not correct. As I’ve already pointed out, most societies in the Americas, even in the eastern US and in the Amazon, relied primarily on agriculture for most of their calories, with supplements from hunting and fishing for protein. They were for the most part not hunter-gatherers, and not nomadic. They were mostly farmers in settled villages who also hunted and fished on the side. While there were some cultures that relied primarily on hunting and gathering, they were mainly in the north and far west, not in the areas first colonized by Europeans. The extent of the forest found in the Eastern US during the early period of European colonization was mostly due to the population decline of the native and the regrowth of agricultural fields. Your premise is false.
Some examples here.
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This was the problem with natives. While this is not a hard and fast rule, the agricultural invaders found that the non-agricultural natives tended to act irrationally when enslaved. I remember reading many years ago, growing up, that one reason for importing slaves from Africa was that the natives often would allow themselves to be whipped to death rather than work as slaves.
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Whether this was a real cultural difference or not, it had absolutely nothing to do with whether the natives of the Americas were agricultural, since most of them were just as agricultural as the Africans that were used as slaves.
And? A dog naturally shits and pissed in the house until you train it not to do so. An HG that just sat there in stead of working would be whipped/flogged, and eventually to the point of death. After a few of his compatriots saw that I see no reason an HG wouldn’t work a field. Humans respond to external stimuli, and having your back whipped is a pretty fucking strong stimuli. Slavers weren’t asking their slaves to nicely work for them.
I think you’re very far off base. Most of the North American natives were in settled agricultural societies where farming was their primary activity. Just because they still hunted doesn’t change that. These are mostly agricultural peoples, not HGs. The native Americans that were still true HGs tended to be much further north or west, and were not the natives that Europeans were encountering in the beginning or even for a long while after settling into the New World.
Even many of the tribes that were essentially nomadic hunters/gatherers in the 18th/19th centuries were actually historically farmers. But when white men took all their land they had to adapt in order to survive. Your claim that native Americans made bad slaves because they were hunter gatherers is false both because they weren’t hunter gatherers and because any human that can understand consequences can be made a slave. I could be made a slave tomorrow as could you. The choice would basically be submit or die–and most humans would submit, some wouldn’t, but most would.
Skin pigmentation can definitely affect how your skin tolerates prolonged sun exposure especially near the equator. However we’ve invented clothes, even white men can work in the tropics. They wouldn’t like it at first, especially if they were European born/bred and not used to the work, but they would adapt. But that’s actually irrelevant. No one was talking about widespread enslavement of Europeans to work in New World plantations. The discussion was Africans vs Natives, and the natives to those regions were certainly well suited to live and work in that climate. It was disease and the fact they could easily escape that made them poor slaves.
That’s not the same discussion as colonial and antebellum slavery in the Americas. Yes, in ancient times anyone who lost a war, ran up debts etc could be and was enslaved. But in the Americas it started off as Christian vs non-Christian primarily. You could indenture a Christian but even in the 1600s in the New World it would have been socially unacceptable to enslave a Christian of European descent. Converted Africans (which wasn’t as common at first but grew over time), became a different story and eventually they adapted by saying their inferior race justified enslavement even if they had converted to Christianity.
Yes, which has little to do with New World slavery.
In Rome the pater familias had the right of life or death over his slaves, and was not required to accept a bid for freedom. Some individuals would willingly become slaves to pay off a debt, in which case it was a matter of contract law and the master would be required to release him once the debt had been paid. But in Rome the head of household had life or death privileges over not just his slaves but even his family. If a son struck his father, under Roman law the father would be justified in killing his son. He couldn’t kill his family members on whim, but with justification it was considered legal. However a slave could indeed be executed on whim.
The differences are many between Roman and antebellum slavery. For one, the Romans had no conception of a permanent “slave caste” because they had a steady influx of slaves throughout the Republic and Imperial period. For them slaves were a profit/loss matter mostly, so if a slave had acquired money more than their worth and wanted freedom the master had no real need to not free them. Whereas in the antebelleum South it became increasingly difficult to manumit slaves, because societally the concept was the blacks were inferior and needed to be enslaved for their own good. Freedmen were an uncomfortable exception to this concept. In Virginia for example a master could not just free his slaves. The master had to, in getting approval to manumit, agree to pay for the freedman’s passage out of Virginia and also demonstrate the freedman would be able to find employment once freed. The desire was that they didn’t want freed blacks in Virginia, and didn’t want freed blacks who would be unable to find work anywhere at all.
The Romans had an us versus them mentality, and wide ranging enslavement of conquered barbarians wasn’t a moral problem for the Romans. But they also had no need to create a racial sub class in order to justify continued enslavement. The justification to the Romans was that they were conquered peoples, and conquered peoples could be enslaved. Or, they were criminals or debtors who had brought slavery “on themselves.” The racial theories underpinning American slavery were a necessary lie that people educated in the Enlightenment (as most slave owners were, especially of large plantations) needed to justify something that otherwise went against everything they were taught/learned. Slavery in Rome was not considered a moral question at all, any more than conquering Carthage and burning it to the ground was considered a moral question.
It always amazes me when people think that Indians were primarily hunter-gatherers, even though every child in America is taught the story of the Pilgrims, and how the Indians taught them how to grow crops in the American way and saved them from starvation.
Indians on the Atlantic coast and Midwest were flat-out farmers, who sometimes hunted and fished the same way farmers in rural areas today sometimes hunt and fish. They were not hunter-gatherers.
Our notion of the iconic indian–a nomadic guy who rode a horse and hunted bison–only existed for a short period of time. Obviously horses were introduced by Europeans. And those horse-riding nomadic bison hunters were former farmers who had been expelled from their ancestral homelands by European settlers.
I just want to say I appreciate this thread. It raised some excellent questions and provided well-researched answers.
Someone must have considered this at some point as well as considered what sort of legal remedies and proceedings would be available to adjudicate disputed cases of slave status.
Suppose, due to some wacky turns of events, our hypothetical Swedish missionary was actually kidnapped at gunpoint from Africa and taken to Centreville, VA and told that unless he does what “Master” tells him to do, he will be beaten. Our guy, being literate and reasonably well educated for his day, picks up English rapidly (or maybe he already knew it). He sneaks some peeks at “Master”'s atlas and decides to make a break for it one night down Little River Turnpike. He reaches Fairfax and seeks refuge at the local Lutheran church, and the local pastor gives him some money, a horse, and the address of a local lawyer.
What sort of legal proceeding could be used to establish the Swede’s freedom and/or prevent “Master” from kidnapping the guy again under penalty of law? A petition for a writ of habeus corpus? A lawsuit for false imprisonment? Trespass to the Person?, Replevin?, Conversion? Did they have stalker restraining orders in those days? Was there a special Request for Formal Determination of Slave Status proceeding that is now defunct?
In reality, the guy would probably just ride on to Alexandria and buy a ticket back home and nobody would seriously suspect him to be a runaway slave, but suppose he wanted to stand up for himself and fight it rather than flee?
That kind of thing happened alot. I don’t know if it was technically legal or not, but the fact was that people got away with it. After all, it was hard for a slave to appeal to a court to say his master wasn’t legally allowed to own him (unless he escaped and went to free territory, like Dred Scott did) and nobody else was likely to do it for him.
To add another tidbit, this one involving North America: