In the years following King Philip’s War, the remaining Massachusetts Indians were forced to live in small clusters within dramatically reduced homelands. The indigenous people never “vanished” from Massachusetts, they merely disappeared from the English “field of vision.” Descendants of the tribes remain ensconced in New England communities to this day.54
Disrespect for Indians combined with settler colonial expansion gave rise to indiscriminate violence in New York as well as New England. Dutch traders had settled New York and established Albany and New Amsterdam, both on the Hudson River, as pivotal posts in the fur trade and in securing the alliance with the Iroquois. The Dutch famously purchased Manhattan island for a pittance in 1626 but otherwise made little effort to interact with or Christianize the “entirely savage and wild” Indians that one clergyman found “uncivil and stupid” and beset with “wickedness and godlessness.”55 In 1643 Gov. William Kieft orchestrated a nighttime surprise attack that turned into a massacre of a mixed group of about 80 Indians, mostly women and children. The indigenes struck back, killing among others Anne Hutchinson, the religious dissenter from Massachusetts Bay. The Dutch summoned the famous mercenary John Underhill, “hero” of the slaughter of the Pequot, to oversee the burning of villages and the killing of more than 500 Indians in 1644.56
The English seized the colony from the Dutch in 1664 and by the 1670s had solidified their control of the Atlantic seaboard, overwhelming European competitors while killing and driving indigenous people into the woods. The English takeover of New Sweden, founded in 1638 on the Delaware River, did not bode well for the Delaware and Susquehannock Indians, who had not been threatened by the relatively small number of Swedish and Finnish traders in the region. As “great numbers of settlers arrived” in the Delaware valley, Indians who “sought to maintain a traditional lifestyle were displaced westward, while those who remained were forced to adapt as best they could to a new world.”57
Violence and Indian Slavery in the “Shatter Zone”
The powerful and extremely violent forces unleashed by the colonial encounter shattered indigenous cultures, causing the death and displacement of thousands of Indians, and forcing them to reconfigure their identities. Beginning with the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century, a combination of disease, the introduction of a new market economy, and the explosive growth of Indian slavery dramatically altered the colonial landscape. The modernist Europeans, connected with the international market economy, backed by organized trading companies, and fueled by emerging nation-state ideologies, overwhelmed the preexisting economic and political structures.
Going far beyond indigenous captive taking, the Europeans forged an “international trade in American Indian slaves that led to decimation of entire groups and depopulation of large areas.” The brutal history of African slavery, from the Middle Passage to the Civil War, has long overshadowed awareness of the scope and devastating impact of the Indian slave trade. To a far greater extent than popularly recognized, North American slavery was red and white as well as black and white. Indian slavery, not just African slavery, gave rise to the “Old South.” The “discovery” of Indian slavery has been one of the most significant developments within history and anthropology over the past generation.58
The period from roughly 1540 to 1730 brought the destruction of the Mississippian chieftain system that had anchored indigenous culture and diplomacy since the “Middle Ages.” The old system of broad-ranging trade and exchange relations, peppered with episodic warfare and diplomacy, disappeared. Archeological and documentary evidence reveals that the new European slave trade caused widespread death and destruction within indigenous polities. It forced migrations and mass relocations into fortified villages and the coalescence of new groups. Anthropologist Robbie Etheridge described the violent instability of the eastern half of the continent during this era as the “Mississippian shatter zone.”59
The shattering of indigenous culture was a product of colonialism but Indians were more than passive victims of the violent dislocations. As with African slavery, Indians took a direct role in the slave trade as captors and middlemen. The system could not have worked without them. The tumult and dislocations on the international slave trade forced Indians to reconfigure their identities, which spurred ethno-genesis and the creation of new and powerful indigenous groupings. These included the “civilized tribes” that remained ensconced in the American South until the removal program of the 1830s.
European colonialism did not introduce violence and captive taking, as masculinized warfare had long been integral to Indian culture, but the dislocations it brought intensified the violence that cascaded across the land. Scholars have identified different places and times in which the introduction of colonialism into the “tribal zone” has accelerated and intensified the already existing structures of violence. These changes underscore the significance of “colonial violence and other changes in indigenous life with the rise of the nation state and the incorporation of indigenous peoples into the world economy.” The introduction of new and more sophisticated weaponry contributes to the spike in violence but does not fully explain it. Still, “The introduction of firearms led to a revolutionary change in aboriginal warfare.”60
Though warfare and captive taking existed before the arrival of the Europeans, the various chiefdoms that battled one another had “abided by certain cultural rules. The arrival of the Europeans disrupted these rules.”61 Colonialism introduced violent competition among indigenous groups to gain a foothold in the new globalized market economy. Colonialism sparked an arms race to secure weapons and ammunition as well as horses and other European-introduced technologies that might provide an advantage or enhance the prospects of survival. The slave trade gave rise to a terror-filled environment of long-distance raiding that confronted masses of indigenous people with a stark choice of either taking slaves or becoming one.
Disease and the fur trade, which linked the Midwest and ultimately the Far West with Europe in the globalizing market economy, combined to spark violent competition, destruction, and reconfiguration of indigenous identities. The market extended horizontally to Europe but the shatter zone also extended vertically from the Great Lakes to Florida, radiating death, terror, and arms and slave trafficking across the continent. The colonial encounter thus initiated a “frenzy of slaving that extended from the Atlantic coast to Texas, and from the Ohio River south to the Gulf of Mexico.”62
In the late seventeenth century, the Iroquois, driven by the loss of the overwhelming majority of their population to disease, launched their “mourning wars” against other tribes in order to rebuild their numbers and secure their position as the pivot in the beaver trade. From their base in the Finger Lakes region of New York, the confederated Five Nations of the Iroquois (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca) took their aggression further south into the Ohio Valley, seizing captives and forcing other indigenes to flee, remobilize, and reconfigure their identities as new bands. Many of the remaining Hurons relocated on the southern side of the Great Lakes and joined with other Indians to become the Wyandot. The Shawnee formed in the Ohio Valley in response to the threat posed by the powerful Iroquois. Driven all the way south to Carolina, the Erie reconfigured themselves as the Westos and for a time became one of the most lethal tribes in the region.63
As the driving force in the Indian slave trade, the English instituted slavery virtually from the outset of colonization. An already existent slave trade accelerated after the Pequot War in which Indian men were killed but women and children sold as slaves. In addition, New England men spoke of their “desire” for Indian women and took them as domestic servants and sex slaves. The settlers of Massachusetts and Connecticut auctioned hundreds of slaves in the aftermath of King Philip’s War, including Metacomet’s wife and son. Even “savages” who fought with the English were enslaved. Despite the outlawing of slavery in New England in the early eighteenth century, the practice continued in the form of “jud
icial enslavement” for alleged crimes committed by indigenes.64
Enslavement facilitated settler colonialism by removing Indians from the land. Thus the English took and sold slaves after the Powhatan Wars. The selling of Indians to international markets in the Caribbean or South America, where the sugar industry depended on slavery, also helped defray the costs of the wars. Later in the seventeenth century, Virginia Governor William Berkeley, citing the need for “revenge” for alleged murders and “mischiefs” carried out by Indians, authorized enslavement of Rappahannock River area tribes.
In launching his Virginia rebellion in 1676, Nathaniel Bacon spurred the Occaneechee to attack the Susquehannock, and then Bacon turned on his allies. After a 12-hour gun battle, the Virginians killed the indigenous men and took mostly women prisoners. During his brief takeover of Virginia, Bacon’s Laws included the right to plunder and enslave Indians in order to secure land and labor. This popular law became the only one not overturned after Bacon died and Berkeley restored Crown authority. Thus Bacon’s Rebellion was not only a struggle for landed expansion at the expense of Indians but also for control of a profitable Indian slave trade.65
The Crown colony of Carolina, founded in 1670, became the epicenter of the eastern woodland shatter zone. Enslavement was not the goal of the Proprietors who received the royal patent for Carolina and sought to Christianize the tribes. However—and typical of triangulated settler colonial settings regardless of place and time—the local government and settler-driven “facts on the ground” outweighed desires expressed in faraway metropolitan capitals. Carolina elites and settlers ignored the wishes of the Proprietors because Indian slavery was lucrative. They pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy of killing, enslaving, and removing Indians from the land to make way for new plantations and settlers. As Jennings notes, “By the time Carolina was founded, the English were savvy enough to recognize the benefits of exploiting existing Indian rivalries.”66
As they launched the largest slaving enterprise in North America, the Carolinians underscored the connection between war and slavery: “Only through warfare could Carolinians obtain the slaves they desired to exchange for supplies to build their plantations.”67 Carolinians used pressure and incentives, especially guns and ammunition, to spur Indians to attack and enslave other indigenes. Slave-based warfare meant that untold thousands of Indians would die so that others could be captured. Moreover, these assaults triggered the Indian cultural imperative of blood revenge for the killing of family and tribe members, precipitating a boomerang of violent indigenous conflict throughout the Southeast. “As Indian commercial interests intensified,” Ethridge explains, “so did warfare and the militarization of those Native groups who sought to control the trade.”68
By the first decade of the eighteenth century, “all southeastern Indians were either slave traders or their targets.” The indigenous Southeast was “a powder keg of anxiety” in which “no one knew who’d be enslaved next.”69 The newly formed Westos transitioned from victim to victimizer as they joined with the Carolina elite and entered into the predatory slave trade. However, settler colonial expansion into the interior soon spurred conflict with the Westos. In 1682 the Carolina settlers allied with migratory Shawnee, whom they called Savannahs, to attack and destroy the Westos as a distinct entity. Like William Bradford in Plymouth, South Carolina Governor John Archdale perceived “the hand of God” in service of “the thinning of the Indians, to make room for the English.”70
In the 1690s the Carolina slavers provided weapons and trade goods to the Yamasee and other tribes who proceeded to enslave “tens of thousands” of Indians throughout the Southeast and west to Texas and Arkansas. As slaves often had to be moved a long distance, the very young, old, and weak either died or were killed during the initial raids. Slaves were transported in pens to ports for shipment out to the West Indies, South America, or on occasions to northern ports.71
The indigenous residents of La Florida suffered the most devastating consequences of the slaving frenzy. Tribes such as the Timucua and Apalachee lived in the northern third of today’s Florida. They for the most part successfully resisted French and Spanish efforts at colonization, as relatively few Indians converted or worked willingly for the Europeans. Nearly all of those pulled into the missions resented the friars’ demands that they give up dances, celebrations, games, and indigenous spirituality and rituals. In 1597 the attempt to sustain missions on the Georgia coast (Guale) provoked an Indian raid on St. Augustine in response to which Spanish soldiers “burned aboriginal villages and stored crops.”72
By the early eighteenth century slaving raids from Carolina had carried out a “reign of terror” upon the Timucua, Apalachee, and other tribes of northern Florida. Incentives and the threat of their own enslavement prompted the Yamasee and other mercenary Indians to carry out relentless slave raids against Florida tribes already weakened by smallpox and other diseases. The invaders sacked Spanish missions on the Georgia coast and in Florida, as only St. Augustine survived, and took thousands of Indian slaves back to their benefactors in Charlestown. The remaining Timucua and Apalachee fled either west to join coalescent tribes or south to the swamps. “By the early 1760s,” Jerald T. Milanich points out, “the indigenous population of Florida, once numbering hundreds of thousands, was reduced to almost nothing.”73
Until their destruction in 1704, the Apalachee chiefdom had reproduced itself for 600 years through the traditional system of social, economic, and political legitimation. Colonialism and predatory slave trading “initiated the processes that ultimately led to the end of the Apalachee polity.” If not for this, the Apalachees, a strong and distinctive people for centuries, might well have emerged “as a sixth Civilized Tribe” of the Southeast.74
Colonial violence and slavery could regenerate as well as destroy indigenous societies. The new societies that formed out of the slaving frenzy included the Creeks, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Seminole, who would remain on their land for more than 130 years after the dissolution of the Apalachee. Through marriage, fictive kinship ties, adoption, shared language, alliances, and other means, dislocated indigenes coalesced into the new bands. Slavery, colonialism, and ethno-genesis thus reconfigured indigenous identities throughout the shatter zone.
The southeastern tribes who survived the slaving frenzy became slavers rather than enslaved and coalesced into the new tribes. The Choctaw acquired weapons sooner than most other groups and their base in modern-day Mississippi was far enough removed from the slaving epicenter in Carolina to enable them to survive and flourish. Even further west, the Chickasaw amalgamated and became known for mounting large virtual armies of ruthless slavers. The Creeks (named by Europeans because they observed them encamped along streambeds) were born of violence and slaving, as they played a major role as mercenaries in the virtual depopulation of Florida. The Cherokee coalesced in closest proximity to the Europeans, prompting frequent alliances with the English in warfare. The Seminole, from the Spanish cimarrone, meaning Indians living away from missions, coalesced in Florida as refugees resisting colonialism and enslavement. Some Africans and small numbers of Europeans also joined these newly coalescent tribes.75
Despite the creation of these new and powerful Indian confederacies, the frenzy of slaving delivered so much death and destruction that the indigenes as a whole turned against it and ceased working with the European slave traders. Indians had joined the British in the Tuscarora War (1711–1715) in which South Carolinians helped North Carolinians defeat the Tuscarora. They enslaved some 1,000–2,000 Tuscarora, who had been slavers themselves, and what remained of the tribe removed to the north and in 1722 became the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederation.76
Under the threat of becoming slaves, the Yamasee helped the Carolinians subdue the Tuscarora yet as settlers continued to take Yamasee land the indigenes responded with a major anticolonial war of resistance in 1715. “Suffocated by the British who increasingly encroached on their lands, livelihood an
d families,” the Yamasees struck back ferociously and killed more than 400 colonists and slave traders. The Carolinians responded with a boomerang of indiscriminate violence replete with massacres fueled by scalp bounties. The Carolinians killed masses of Indians, hunted down the remnants of the tribe in Florida, and ultimately “destroyed the Yamasees as a political entity.”
The Yamasee War marked the end of the slaving frenzy across the southeastern shatter zone, as “the partnership between British traders and Indian slave raiders was irrevocably broken.” The Cherokee and the Creeks had aided the British at the outset but then turned against each other. The Yamasee War thus “catalyzed a Cherokee-Creek cycle of war unprecedented in intensity and scope.” Indians continued to take captives and engage in blood vengeance and masculinity affirming warfare, but the frenzy of slave armies and mass raids for sale to Europeans came to an end.77
The end of the Indian slave trade after the Yamasee War produced a singular focus on African slavery. Thus, Alan Gallay argues that the Yamasee War marked “the birth of the Old South.” Traumatized by the scope of the Yamasee attack, the South Carolinians ever after remained fearful of the potential violence of racially defined others. Over time, phobias of a “black majority” replaced the perception of Indian threat, as South Carolina was to remain the epicenter of American slavery.78
Although the “Old South” shifted to African slavery after 1720, Indian slavery, violence, and warfare pervaded the continent, implicating countless Indian groups and all of the colonizing states. Despite the French reputation for cultivating a reciprocal “middle ground” with Indians, New France developed an “extensive system of Indian slavery that transformed thousands of Indian men, women, and children into commodities of colonial commerce.” With the burgeoning fur trade centered at the French outpost at Michilimackinac, located at the confluence of Lakes Michigan and Huron, “slavery was embedded in the domestic and economic relationships of the eighteenth century Great Lakes.” Indigenous groups, eager to access weapons, tools, and other European goods, brought slaves to the French whether they asked for them or not. As reciprocal relations required accepting as well as giving gifts, even when reluctant the French went along with the human trafficking.79
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