Indian Slavery in Colonial America

Abstract

Herbert reviews Indian Slavery in Colonial America edited by Alan Gallay.

Gallay, Alan, ed. Indian Slavery in Colonial America. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2009.

The last half-century has seen an explosion in the understanding of transatlantic slavery. Multiple scholars have worked laboriously to uncover the history of the African diaspora and the experiences of African slaves in the Americas. To a lesser extent, Indian slavery has also been the recent focus of historians and anthropologists, though their stories were often investigated as separate events from those of Africans. Alan Gallay challenges this methodology, claiming that while slavery existed in the Americas long before the arrival of Europeans, the international slave trade dramatically affected indigenous peoples who underwent significant political, cultural, and economic changes. Those who would study slavery without considering the native experience would learn only half-truths. "Indian slavery was not peripheral in the history of Native America," claims Gallay, "but central to the story" (3). To field the broader questions of indigenous slavery in colonial North America, Gallay has assembled a wide array of scholars whose geographic foci expand from New France along the Eastern seaboard past the Gulf region into Texas.

Margaret Ellen Newell begins with an investigation of indigenous slavery in New England, where "Chattel slavery and freedom were at opposite ends of a broad spectrum, and many Indians occupied points along that spectrum in varying degrees of unfreedom" (34). There, concepts of who could be enslaved (nonwhite, mostly African "outsiders") began to change as the Crown asserted sovereignty over the colony throughout the seventeenth century. Indians, once considered "outsiders," became legally protected "insiders." However, new forms of forced servitude arose and many Indians were unfree well into the eighteenth century.

C. S. Everett suggests a reexamination of colonial Virginia, particularly Bacon's Rebellion, in which Nathaniel Bacon Jr. tussled with his cousin, Governor William Berkeley, for control of the colony. Everett points to eyewitness and participant accounts that claim the fight was never a rebellion-it was an Indian war. However, an even larger battle loomed in South Carolina, with a group formed in reaction to slave trades, known as the Yamasee. No colony experienced the Native slave trade more than South Carolina. From 1670 until the early 1700s, tens of thousands of American Indians were enslaved at the behest of Carolina traders. Alan Gallay observes South Carolina's entrance into the Indian slave trade. While the trade did not originate in the colony, Carolinians expanded its practice with Native Americans in opposition to the wishes of the lord proprietors, who planned on African slavery, but abhorred the practice being transferred onto indigenes. In defiance of their lords, slave traders created their own moral rationalizations to justify their actions.

Joseph Hall studies Apalachicola (proto-Creek) attempts to withstand the English slave trade. In the face of such a powerful force, the small community had a decision to make: trade or be traded (148). To do so, Apalachicolas reached out to native neighbors to broker an alliance with the English and negotiate Apalachicola security. Along with the Yamasee, they became the dominant slave trading partners with Charles Town at the turn of the eighteenth century. Doing so finally gave the Apalachicolas a measure of security previously unknown against native adversaries but subjected them to the violent mood swings of Carolina.

Apalachicola survival came at the cost of their Southern neighbors, the Apalachees. Jennifer Baszile notes that despite their problems with neighbors, Apalachees suffered under an increasingly oppressive relationship with Spanish officials that approached slavery. Under the repartimiento system, colonial Spaniards forced native workers to labor without pay. The sabana system was another version of de facto slavery in which some Apalachee men were coerced into becoming full-time farmers working without compensation for missionaries. Finally, young men and women were compelled to work on colonial ranches without being allowed to return home. Many Apalachees struggled with these new concepts of unfree labor and openly questioned the nature of their alliance with Spain.

Denise I. Bossy describes the Indian slave trade as "an uneasy partnership between select Indian communities and colonial traders motivated by their mutual desire for economic exchange" (208). Indians traded pelts and people in return for European goods, especially guns, clothes, and alcohol. Charles Town formed the hub of this trade; from there enslaved souls were banished throughout the British Atlantic Empire. Bossy argues that while Europeans and Indians participated in the trade, they came to it from different angles. Europeans saw slaves as property, the exchange of which could drive economies and build empires. American Indians took captives to avenge the death of a loved one, weaken their enemies, or to replenish their own population. Therefore, it should not be surprising that European and Indian motivations collided more often than not, leading to warfare between the two. Afterwards, enslavement of Native Americans continued by both parties, though more for political rather than economic reasons.

Robbie Ethridge charts the rise of the Chickasaw polity, a "militaristic slaving society" that arose from the chaos created by the international fur and Indian slave economies (252). Chickasaw ascent began as the Westos wilted from the scene in the early-1680s. By this time, the Chickasaws had established trade networks ranging as far north as the Great Lakes and up the Ohio and Wabash Rivers. They fielded overtures in the 1690s to supply the English with Indian slaves and by 1702 scourged a swath of land extending from their home in present-day Northern Mississippi south to the Gulf of Mexico and 150 miles west of the Mississippi River and possibly as far north as Detroit (257-58). Such was the effect of their raids that they may have been the primary force behind the coalescence of the Choctaw Confederacy. Slaving presented a problem to Chickasaw society, however, by threatening the balance between peace and war moieties. Because slavery was an inherently violent act, decisions on the institution were strictly limited to war leaders. The resulting prestige and power gained by successful slave raids overshadowed peace leaders, leading them to attempt to negotiate their own trade with the French. Ultimately, Chickasaw society split into factions of Anglophile and Francophile partisans, demonstrating that the European trade system could redefine "the basis of the dual moiety organization from one of complementarity to one of competition" (267). Fortunately for the Chickasaws, Ethridge notes, this factionalism actually assisted in brokering between European powers.

Juliana Barr begins with the first of two essays that move the collection away from the Southeast and towards the Gulf Borderlands. According to her, Indians and Spaniards confronted bondage in other ways in Texas throughout the eighteenth century. Texas was different from nearby provinces in that it did not feature wide-scale Indian or African servitude, nor did it have the market system in place to facilitate a major slave trade. Instead, it was slave systems in neighboring lands that greatly affected Texas, such as raids in Mexico that resulted in Texas refugees. Spaniards answered Apache challenges to power via the sale of war captives, but never attempted to build the province by way of forced labor.

James F. Brooks follows by probing the relationship between genízaros (a caste of enslaved Catholic Indians who also functioned as soldiers) and New Mexico, which both exploited and depended upon its servants. Brooks finds an interesting link with other Native-European relationships, stating that "although New Mexico stood far from the political upheavals of the American Revolution, its position amid the larger transformations of the Atlantic world produced social phenomena not unlike those erupting east of the Mississippi River" (322-23).

France constructed two wildly contradictory ways of treating American Indians. On one hand, they created the most extensive and successful system of alliances with indigenes in North America. On the other, they ushered thousands of aboriginal peoples into bondage in colonial communities. Indian slavery was an anomaly amongst French colonial possessions. It was forbidden in Louisiana and the Caribbean, but found use due to three unique reasons. French traders found captives to be excellent currency with which to fortify trade relationships. They also proved to be vital tokens of political camaraderie via their exchange with other indigenous nations. Finally, the practice was legalized in order to settle disputes over slaves' status, as many were brought into French estates as laborers. Brett Rushforth claims that New France's adoption of native slavery was in and of itself a "partial defeat" in that the colony acceded to the wishes and customs of its indigenous neighbors (379). That defeat, however, afforded New France the ability through labor to expand its empire onto other Indian nations.

Finally, E. A. S. Demers follows the transformation of Indian slavery in present-day Canada during its French and English colonial occupation in the eighteenth century. "Unlike the Atlantic plantation complex, exchange, captivity, and kinship relations lay at the heart of indigenous slavery in the eighteenth-century Great Lakes," claims Demers. "More than a labor system, Indian system was basically a family affair with roots in the region's network of French and Indian villages" (391). The slave trade declined significantly after Pontiac's Rebellion, likely because Indians were hesitant to turn their children and captives over to English traders, who were neither Catholic nor possessing any ties to native kinship networks. Eventually, English use of slavery became a means of fostering economic, not kinship, growth, even as British traders maintained familiar relationships with their chattel.

Indian Slavery in Colonial America is an insightful collection into the workings of Native American and European relationships in the eighteenth century. By the editor's own admission, no essay is a definitive study of a particular topic, but rather serves hopefully as the foundation for additional research. It is almost without question, the perfect introduction to the field. This anthology is of significant importance for scholars of colonial America, slavery, American Indian, and Atlantic World history.

-Jason Herbert