Native Americans and Colonists: The Beginnings of Slavery in the South
Slavery in the South was not always linked directly to race. The history of forced bondage begins before European arrival and eventually evolves toward racialized chattel slavery based on the colonizers’ needs. The phrase “antebellum South” conjures an image of gently rolling hills, cotton plantations, and the cast of Gone With the Wind. This picturesque view contrasts starkly with the backbreaking slave labor and dehumanization that supported the region’s economy and lifestyle: black labor that provided white profit. But slavery and forced captivity in the South did not begin this way.
Different types of slavery have proliferated in North America, both before and after colonization. Prior to European arrival in North America, Native American tribes regularly waged war on each other. During these battles, warriors often took captives from other tribes. Men usually died on the battlefield or were killed after being taken captive. Women and children, on the other hand, were kept alive. They were sometimes adopted or married into their new tribe to improve their status. Alternatively, they were sometimes sold to another tribe for profit or given as a gift to smooth over disputes.
Native Americans did not take captives for labor. This earlier form of slavery differs starkly from the European slave trade in Africa, where people were captured and enslaved for life. For instance, pre-colonization slavery was not racialized, which gave the captives some potential social mobility. Slaves in Native American societies could become a part of the tribe or eventually be returned to their own home. In later years, the racialized nature of European slavery made escaped slaves an easy target for re-capture and placed freed black men and women in a constantly precarious position.
In the early 1600s, the English colonizers arrived in present-day Virginia. Even at this time period, it was unethical to simply conquer a people and take their land without a legal reason. As part of a means to justify colonization, the British wanted to convert the Native Americans to Christianity, as well as profit from abundant natural resources.
At first, relations between Native Americans and the English resembled the traditional method of Native American captivity and slavery. The two groups both took captives from battles and built their initial cultural exchanges off the spoils of war. Often the captive’s status was ambiguous: an undefined place between slave and visitor.
While becoming accustomed to the Native Americans, English settlers tried to determine the best way to live alongside native tribes. However, rather than being peaceful and pluralistic, the English were primarily interested in how the Native Americans could benefit the new colonies. Many also saw the natives as a way to fulfill the missionary goal of colonization. Stanwood Owen writes that because of the Spanish Catholic’s reputation as violent and cruel colonizers, many English Protestants believed that Native Americans would naturally be inclined toward Protestantism. Disseminating both English civilization and Protestant religion would in theory strengthen the relationship between the colonists and Native Americans, and it would thus engender a prosperous cohabitation. This rosy outlook on race relations was contingent upon the Native Americans willingly abandoning their religious traditions, languages, tribes, and cultures, and happily exchanging it for the English way of life.
Needless to say, most Native Americans resisted Anglicization. In 1622, for example, the Powhatans rose up against the English and killed several hundred settlers. After efforts to Christianize were continually met with this type of resistance, the English mindset toward Native Americans began to change.
At the same time that they were attempting to civilize and incorporate Native Americans into their society, the English were also experimenting with enslaving natives throughout the colonies. Male captives were often sold as labor slaves to the West Indies or Virginian farmers. Because women and children were worth less as a labor source, colonizers more commonly attempted to convert or civilize them. English settlements tended to include English women as well as men, so there was little need or opportunity to marry Native American women.
In contrast, settlers in French Louisiana were predominately male and lacked the forces to subdue Native American tribes in the same way that the English and the Spanish did. In an article on female captivity in Louisiana, Juliana Barr writes that the French relationship to natives focused less on conversion and more on trade, military alliances, and intermarriage. The French traded goods and horses in exchange for women that their Native American allies had captured from other tribes, often Apache. As a result, racial lines were more malleable in Louisiana, but this cultural exchange was dependent on using women as diplomatic currency. In Virginia, meanwhile, settlers focused more on converting women or using them for domestic work. Without this type of intermarriage, settlers in Virginia began to draw racial lines sooner instead of seeking a beneficial life alongside Native Americans.
As the English were figuring out the best way to profit from the Native Americans, either by Christian conversion or slave labor, the plantation system was evolving as the primary source of production in the colonies. With such a large output of crops, the demand for labor was very high. As the large output of crops increased, so did the demand for labor. At first, the House of Burgesses discouraged prohibited selling Native Americans. “A 1658 law restricted the sale of any Indian by an Englishman,” but Virginia simply did not have enough manpower to cultivate crops at this time. People in need of laborers began to turn toward Native Americans. In order to circumvent this law, some Englishmen bought Native Americans from tribes further inland. Others would buy or capture them under the pretense of Christianizing them, but in reality forced their captives to work as slaves. The labor laws regarding Native Americans gradually became more lenient until it became legal to enslave them for life.
Even as the enslavement of Native Americans became legal for Native Americans, they were very rarely employed as plantation laborers. Instead, the men were hunters, scouts, or guides, and the women— less commonly enslaved — were translators or domestic help. African slaves were preferable, the English colonists reasoned, because they were far removed from their homes, mixed among people of many African civilizations, and had a relatively stronger immunity to diseases. The more prominent that Africans slaves became on the plantations, the less people looked toward to Native Americans as a source of chattel and labor. Additionally, as Claudio Saunt argues, the importance of the cash crops decreased the need for settlers to trade with Native Americans for furs and skins.
Slowly, the English need for Native Americans decreased. They had proved difficult to Anglicize, and Africans were a more reliable source of labor. The remaining way in which they the English colonists could benefit from the indigenous natives tribes was by seizing native land. The plantation system required large swathes of land, and in order to maximize their financial benefits, the colonizers expanded out onto Native American land to grow tobacco, rice, and cotton.
As British plantations transitioned to African labor, the society became increasingly biracial. Race started to become the defining factor in society, rather than class. Because Native Americans did not provide the same economic benefit to the English, they were gradually shunted out of the English’s line of sight. Their resistance to Christianity supposedly proved to the Europeans that they were inferior, and English missionaries lessened their efforts. Native Americans were neither useful for fulfilling their Godly mission nor as a source of labor. When the English realized that the Native American’s land was their most valuable resource, they abandoned their previous pursuits, seized the land, and began converting it to plantations.
Slavery in the South existed before European colonization, but in a vastly different form. It began as a non-racialized means of using prisoners of war, and evolved into a system for labor exploitation based entirely on race. As attempts to Christianize or enslave Native Americans were largely unfruitful, the colonists transitioned to African slaves and appropriated Native American land for plantations. These early racial divisions in the labor system were the beginnings of the slave society that characterized the antebellum South.
