To "doe some good upon their countrymen": The paradox of Indian slavery in early Anglo-America

Journal of Social History

Volumn 41, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 389-411

  Guaseo, Michael ^a,b  

^a DAVIDSON COLLEGE   (United States)

^b History Department   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 38849164264     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2008.0011     Document Type: Article

References (118)

1. The details of this story appear in a number of sources, but sec The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649, Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle, eds. (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 237;
2. Almon Wheeler Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times within the Present Limits of the United States (New York, 1913), 122-25;
3. Alison Games, "'The Sanctuaryc of our rebell negroes': The Atlantic Context of Local Resistance on Providence Island," Slavery & Abolition 19:3 (December 1998): 7. On the distinction between "slave societies" and "societies with slaves,"
4. see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 7-8.
5. James E Brooks, Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the South-west Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2002);
6. Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven, 2002);
7. Brett Rushforth, "'A Little Flesh We Offer You': The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France," William and Mary Quarterly 60:4 (October 2003): 777-808;
8. Juliana Barr, "From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands," Journal of American History 92:1 (June 2005): 19-46.
9. Certainly, this notion of the justice of enslavement that followed from legitimate warfare was essential to Emanuel Downing's determination in the 1640s that captured Narragansetrs could also be taken to the West Indies and sold as slaves. See George H. Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts (New York, 1866), 10;
10. Lorenzo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York, 1942), 60-1;
11. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), 68-9.
12. Betty Wood, The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies (New York, 1997), 20-39.
13. The idea that Indians and Africans were generally part of an undifferentiated class of bondmen is common. Several examples of this emphasis can be found in older works, such as Moore (pp. 15-41) and Lauber (esp. 48-102, 105-17, 211-16, 222-29, and 250-82). More conventional examinations of Indian slavery include John A. Sainsbury, "Indian Labor in Early Rhode Island," New England Quarterly 48:3 (1975): 378-93;
14. Donald Grinde, Jr., "Native American Slavery in the Southern Colonies," Indian History 10:2 (1977): 38-42;
15. Rodney M. Baine, "Indian Slavery in Colonial Georgia," George Historical Quarterly 79:2 (1995): 418-24;
16. and Hilary McD. Beckles, "The Colours of Property: Brown, White and Black Chattels and their Responses on the Caribbean Frontier," Slavery & Abolition 15:2 (1994): 36-51.
17. Two recent works have moved away from the labor paradigm by emphasizing the theme of Indian captivity among the English. See Michael L. Fickes, "'They Could Not Endure That Yoke': The Captivity of Pequot Women and Children after the War of 1637," New England Quarterly 73:1 (March 2000): 58-81,
18. and Joyce E. Chaplin, "Enslavement of Indians in Early America: Captivity Without the Narrative," in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds. (Baltimore, 2005), 45-70.
19. Alden T. Vaughan, "The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia," in Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York, 1995), 136-74. Historians, like Kathleen Brown, tend to be much more skeptical of the utility of race as a meaningful category of analysis before the late seventeenth century when "the social meanings attached to physical appearance" would ultimately be "used in the service of economic and imperial goals." Literary scholars, like Kim Hall, are generally more willing to use race as an interpretive device during the early modern era when "descriptions of dark and light became ... the conduit through which the English began to formulate notions of 'self and 'other' so well known in Anglo-American racial discourse."
20. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), 4;
21. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkeness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1995), 2.
22. See, for example, Edmund Morgan's argument that "it was easy for Virginians to extend to blacks some of the bad feelings they harbored toward Indians" in the 1680s. According to this logic, Indians and Africans were both "seen as slaves," as "outlanders," and it was therefore natural "for their owners ... to lump them together in a lowest common denominator of racist hatred and contempt." Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), 330.
23. Morgan's view of slavery follows from David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966). According to Davis: "In spite of a widespread tendency to differentiate the Negro from the Indian and to associate the latter with the freedom of nature, Negro slavery was in actuality imposed on top of a pre-existing Indian slavery; in North America, at least, the two never diverged as distinct institutions" (176).
24. See, especially, Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
25. Important early critics of African slavery included Thomas Tryon, Morgan Godwyn, and George Fox. See Phillipe Rosenberg, "Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-Century Dimensions of Antislavery," William and Mary Quarterly 61:4 (October 2004): 609-42;
26. Daniel Carey, "Sugar, Colonialism, and the Critique of Slavery: Thomas Tryon in Barbados," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (2004:09): 303-21;
27. Kenneth L. Carroll, "George Fox and Slavery," Quaker History 86:2 (1997): 16-25;
28. and Alden T. Vaughan, "Slaveholders' 'Hellish Principles': A Seventeenth-Century Critique," in Roots of American Racism, 55-81.
29. So, too, did the French. See Sue Peabody, "There Are No Slaves in France": The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York, 1996).
30. New Englands First Fruits (London, 1643), 8. This critique was directed at both other English and other European settlements.
31. Robert Johnson, Nova Britannia (London, 1609), C2; 'Philo-Caledon', A Defence of the Scots Settlement in Darien with an Answer to the Spanish Memorial against it (Edinburgh, 1699), 24.
32. Both works cited in Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500-c. 1800 (New Haven, 1995), 88.
33. See also Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge, UK, 1995).
34. The literature on climates, natural philosophy, and history is steadily expanding. See, for example, Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, UK, 2003);
35. Joyce E. Chaplin, "Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies," WMQ 54:1 (January 1997): 229-52;
36. Chaplin, Subject Matter; Kupperman, "Climate and Mastery of the Wilderness in Seventeenth-Century New England," in David D. Hall and David Grayson Allen, eds., Seventeenth-Century New England (Boston, 1984), 3-37;
37. Kupperman, Indians & English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, 2000);
38. Alden T. Vaughan, "From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian" and "Early English Paradigms for New World Natives," in Roots of American Racism.
39. Alexander Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia (London, 1613), 24.
40. Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company of London, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1906-33), 3:3, 27, 71.
41. Richard Eden, The First Three English Books on Americo [1511?]-1555 A.D., Edward Arbor, ed. (Birmingham, 1885), 50-55. Edmund Morgan has characterized English awareness of Spanish activities in the New World as a "horror story" from the first appearance of Peter Martyr's De Orbo Novo in 1511. Clearly, however, there was plenty of room for more positive assessments, at least through the 1550s, as evidenced by Eden's lavish praise. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 7;
42. Smith, A Description of New England (London, 1616), in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631), 3 vols., Philip L. Barbour, ed. (Chapel Hill, 1986), 1:348.
43. Bartolomé de las Casas, The Spanish Colonie, or Briefe chronicle of die acts and gestes of the Spaniardes in the West Indies (London, 1583), Alv. On emerging European perceptions of Spain,
44. see William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558-1660 (Durham, 1971 ),
45. and J.N. Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 1500-1700: The Formation of a Myth (Ann Arbor, 2000).
46. Cited in Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670 (Cambridge, 2001), 86-8. Schmidt argues convincingly that the changing political and constitutional situation in the Low Countries resulted in "a revolution in Dutch representations of America" (68).
47. Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of die English Nation, 12 vols. (New York, 1965), 10:390-1.
48. See the useful discussion of Raleigh's narrative in Louis Montrose, "The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery," in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., New World Encounters (Berkeley, 1993), 177-217. The Dutch, too, were not beyond characterizing the Spanish as exceptionally lascivious. Marnix argued in 1578 that the Spanish intended to steal their "wives and daughters to satisfy their unchaste desires."
49. Cited in Schmidt, Innocence Abroad, 86.
50. Certain Inducements to Well-Minded People (London, 1643), 21;
51. Daunce, A Briefe Discourse of the Spanish State (1590),
52. cited in Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 388.
53. English authors paid special attention to the genealogical make-up of identifiable human populations during the early modern era in great part because they were engaged ar home in an intellectual enterprise concerned with demonstrating the origins of the English "race." In 1605, for example, Richard Verstegan vociferously argued that English national greatness was closely tied to Germanic origins. Therefore, it was significant, as the increasingly fashionable writings of Tacitus revealed, that "the Gemans are homebred & the natural people of their country, & not mixt with others, coming from other places." Verstegan, The Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (Antwerp, 1605), 43. It was this sentiment that underlay Reverend William Symonds's admonition, during the initial years of the Virginia settlement, that God promised Abraham to make him a great Nation, as long as "Abraham's posterity keep to themselves. They may not marry nor give in marriage to the heathen, that are uncircumciscd. . . . The breakers of this rule may break the neck of all good success of this voyage. . . ."
54. Cited in Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London, 1997), 237.
55. Thomas More, A fruteful pleasaunt, & wittie work, of the best state of a publique weak, and of the newe yle, called Utopia, Raphe Robynson, trans. (London, 1556), 23.
56. It could be argued that the process of manumission amounted to a ceremony of inclusion in the Tudor world, by which the tainted individual became part of the community, or truly "English." Edward VI declared that the charges that bondmen should pay into Augmentations should be "such fees and charges as are paid for making denizens." Calendar of the Patent Rolls: Edward VI, 6 vols. (London, 1924-1929), 3:215-6.
57. Michael Guaseo, "Settling with Slavery: Human Bondage in the Early Anglo-Atlantic World," in Envisioing and English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet, eds. (Philadelphia, 2005), 236-253. On English slaves in the Mediterranean world,
58. see Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York, 1999), csp. 71-81.
59. The Holy Bull and Crusado of Rome (London, 1588), cited in Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 384.
60. Calender of State Papers: Spain (Elizabeth), 4 vols. (London, 1892-1899), 2:535-8;
61. "The Primrose Journal," in Mary Frear Keeler, ed., Sir Francis Drake's West Indian Voyage, 1585-86 (London, 1981), 199;
62. Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumous, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (Glasgow, 1905), 19:295-6.
63. Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times, 212. The Powhatan perspective on these issues is treated by Helen Rountree, Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries (Norman, 1990). A number of instructive sources concerning the Anglo-Indian detente after 1646 are reprinted in Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century : A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689 (Chapel Hill, 1975), 226-32.
64. William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large, being a collection of all the Laws of Virginia, 18 vols. (Richmond, 1809), 1:396, 2:143, 404, 440. On Bacon's Rebellion, sec Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 250-79.
65. Even John Smith, who otherwise had little room for a generous attitude toward the natives and regularly applauded Spain, sounded a regretful tone when he recalled that Thomas Hunt had "abused the Salvages . . . and betrayed twenty seaven of these poore innocent soules, which he sould in Spaine for slaves." Smith, "A Description of New England," in Barbour, ed, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 1:352.
66. Richard Blome, A Description of the Island of Jamaica . . . (London, 1672), 52; A Declaration of His Highnes, By the Advice of His Council; Setting forth . . . the Justice of their Cause against Spaine (London, 1655), 138-9.
67. On the events of 1622, see Alden T. Vaughan, " 'Expulsion of the Salvages': English Policy and the Virginia Massacre of 1622," William and Mory Quarterly 35:1 (1978): 57-84,
68. and J. Frederick Fausz, "George Thorpe, Nemattenew, and the Powhatan Uprising of 1622," Virginia Colvocoae 28:3 (1970): 110-117.
69. Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company of London, 3:557-8, 672. On the Spanish debates concerning slavery and the nature of Indians,
70. see Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, UK, 1982).
71. In so doing, Spanish precedents came to be viewed as more worthy of emulation. The broader issue of the relationship between Anglo-Virginia colonialism and information derived from Spanish precedents is the subject of April Lee Hatfield, "Spanish Colonization Literature, Powhatan Geographies, and English Perceptions of Tscnacommacah/Virginia," Journal of Southern History 69:2 (2003): 245-82.
72. Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:558-9, 706, 4:58.
73. Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:672.
74. "Virginias Verger," in Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumous, 19:246;
75. Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company 3:706.
76. Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 2:397, 3:552.
77. The Planters Plea, Or the Grounds of Plantations Examined, And usuall Objections answered (London, 1630), in Peter Force, Tracts and Other Papers, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1836-47), vol. 2.
78. Jill Lepore, in a generally excellent treatment of the issue of Indian slavery in the context of King Philip's War, notes that the enslavement of Indians in the wake of that conflict was yet another "critical step in the evolution toward an increasingly racialized ideology of the differences between Europeans and Indians." She is surely correct, but it should be noted that this was an ongoing struggle throughout the seventeenth century and would not be resolved for several more generations. Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1998), 166.
79. The use of Oviedo to demean Indians was, in reality, quite a significant departure from the prevailing trends in English publishing, where more favorable sources like Las Casas and José de Acosta were more well known. Oviedo, for example, has only been translated into English in the twentieth century, while both Las Casas and Acosta were printed in English in 1583 and 1604 respectively. Moreover, Acosta was clearly central to Purchas' collections, whereas only "Extracts" concerning the physical landscape were translated and reprinted from Oviedo. See C.R. Steele, "Latin America," in The Purchas Handbook, 2 vols., L.E. Pennington, ed. (London, 1997), 1:303.
80. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdês, Natural History of the West Indies, Sterling A. Stoudemire, ed. (Chapel Hill, 1959);
81. José de Acosta, The Natural & Moral History of the Indies, Edward Grimston, trans. (London, 1604).
82. Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:562; Eliot to Richard Baxter, 7 Oct. 1657,
83. cited in Michael Leroy Oberg, Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585-1685 (Ithaca, 1999), 126.
84. Kupperman, Providence Island, 166-7.
85. Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5 vols., Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed. (Boston, 1853-54), 1:83, 394.
86. True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia (London, 1610), in Force, Tracts, 3:1.
87. New Englands First Fruits, 3; Mason cited in Fickes, "'They Could Not Endure That Yoke'," 73-74.
88. Morgan Godwyn, The Negro's and Indians Advocate (London, 1680), 36. Godwyn's concerns about the plight of Africans and Indians is treated more fully in Alden T. Vaughan, "Slaveholders' 'Hellish Principles': A Seventeenth-Century Critique," in Roots of American Racism, 55-81.
89. Games, " 'The Sanctuarye of our rebeli negroes'," 7. On the significance of the use of the word "negro" in the colonial era, see Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples, 2nd ed. (Urbana, IL, 1993). The literature on European conceptions of cannibalism is rich, but for a suggestive analysis
90. see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europeans and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London, 1986), esp. ch. 1: "Columbus and the cannibals" (13-42). On the tension between English conceptions of civility in the New World and cannibalism,
91. see Michael Zuckerman, "Identity in British America: Unease in Eden," in Nicholas Canny & Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton, 1987), esp. pp. 143-57.
92. J.H. Lefroy, Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas or Somers Islands, 2 vols. (1879; reprint, Toronto, 1981), 1:698, 700.
93. Moore, Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts, 2, 3. The Narragansett and Mohegan perspective on this subject is considered in Michael Leroy Oberg, Uncos: First of the Mohegans (Ithaca, 200.3), 72.
94. Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company, 3:69, 93 (2).
95. Bermuda Colonial Records (microfilm), 3:63-4.
96. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 2:268;
97. Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series, 40 vols. (London: 1860-1939), 2:28-9 (12 April 1622);
98. The Rich Papers: Letters from Bermuda, 1615-1646, Vernon A. Ives, cd. (Toronto, 1984), 237-9.
99. Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5 vols., Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed. (Boston, 1853-54), 1:246, 269 (Andrews). Other cases appear at 1:284, 297, 300, and 2:21,
100. and Records of the Court of Assistants of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1630-1692, 3 vols., John Noble and John F. Cronin, eds. (Boston, 1901-28), 2:78-9 (3), 86, 87, 90, 94, 97, 118 (2).
101. Book of General Lowes and Libertyes Concerning the Inhabitants of the Massachusetts (facsimile reprint of the 1648 ed.; San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1975), 4.
102. European observers, when it suited their needs, also commented upon the existence of human bondage among the English. The Spanish Ambassador to England, Don Diego de Molina, highlighted the instability in early Virginia when he reported to Don Alonso de Velasco in 1613 that the English were not only struggling to maintain a settlement, but also that many settlers believed they were "treated like slaves, with great cruelty." A half-century later, Peter Stuyvesant reported that the Dutch settlers at New Amstel (Delaware) had been "stripped, utterly plundered and many of them sold as slaves to Virginia" by callous English invaders. Alexander Brown, Genesis of the United States, 2 vols. (New York, 1890), 2:648;
103. Peter Stuyvesant, "Report on the Surrender of New Netherland, 1665 ,"in Narratives of Ne w Netherland. 1609-1664, J. Franklin Jameson, ed. (New York, 1909), 465. On the changing fortunes of Spain and England in Dutch writings, see Schmidt, Innocence Abroad, 298-303.
104. Commons Debates 1621, 7 vols., Wallace Notestein, Frances Helen Relf, and Hartley Simpson, eds. (New Haven, 1935, 7:54-55.
105. Sir Henry Mainwaring, "Of the Beginnings, Practices, and Suppression of Pirates," in The Life and Works of Sir Henry Mainwaring, 2 vols., G.E. Manwaring and W.G. Petrin, eds. (London, 1922), 2:42.
106. The Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson, 5 vols., M. Oppenheim, ed. (London, 1913), 4:107-09. The shorn head of slaves was a common feature of most early modern slave societies. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA, 1982), suggests that not only has hair, or lack thereof, been singularly important in setting slaves apart in all slave societies, but also that the shorn beard was a symbol of castration (60).
107. "Discours of the Turkes by Sir Thomas Sherley," E. Denison Ross, ed. (ca. 1607), in Camden Miscellany, XVI, 3rd series, 52 (London, 1936), 10-11.
108. Alden Vaughan, "Sir Walter Raleigh's Indian Interpreters, 1584-1618," William and Mary Quarterly 59:2 (April 2002): 341-76.
109. Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times, 157-9.
110. Similar proposals, however, would continue to emerge in the British Isles for several more generations. See Michal J. Rozbicki, "To Save Them from Themselves: Proposals to Enslave the British Poor, 1698-1755," Slavery & Abolition 22:2 (August 2001): 29-50.
111. See especially, Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial Soudi Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1975), 37-42,
112. and Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade.
113. Lefroy, Memorials, 2:54-5, 154-5;
114. V.T. Harlow, ed., Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623-1667 (London, 1925), 30, 32, 37-8.
115. Brief mention and the context of the Barbados Indians can be found in Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972), 227.
116. The exception to this rule occurred when slaveowners purposely characterized all their bondmen as "negroes," perhaps in an effort to evade the greater opposition to Indian as opposed to African slavery. This occurred in sixteenth-century Spanish America, where the enslavement of indigenous peoples was condemned by the papal bull Veritas Ipsa in 1537, and generally prohibited after the promulgation of the New Laws in 1542. Indian slavery was outlawed in Brazil in 1570.
117. Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (London, 1673), 54;
118. John Smith, A Map of Virginia (Oxford, 1612), cited in Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century, 214. The ever-expanding slave population and the increasing significance of marronage would, by the last half of the century, reorient English apprehension in the general direction of their African slaves.