Colonial America
Page 60
The savagery of official repression in the aftermath of both real and imagined slave conspiracies undoubtedly helped to deter further uprisings, functioning like the sadistic punishments inflicted by masters upon slaves to instill terror. It became clear that even knowing a person who talked about rebellion could get a person killed. Slaves in the mainland colonies realized that violent rebellion was suicidal, since these colonial societies had substantial numbers of white men who had been trained and armed through their local militias to suppress slave rebellions. And once African Americans began to form families, the risks of rebellion outweighed the possible rewards. Even so, thousands of slaves grasped at the chance of liberation during the American Revolution, when the British military offered to free slaves who agreed to serve in the king's army.
Slave resistance in the Caribbean colonies provides an instructive contrast. There, slaves outnumbered whites by about ten to one, meaning that rebellions were far more likely to succeed. During the eighteenth century, major slave rebellions occurred in the British colonies of Jamaica and Grenada, and in Dutch, Spanish, Danish, and French colonies elsewhere in the Caribbean. The most successful of these was the Haitian Revolution in 1791, which resulted in the overthrow of the French government on the island of St. Domingue.
Resistance by slaves produced little awareness in the minds of eighteenth-century white colonists of the injustices created by slavery. A few denominations showed an interest in the spiritual well-being of the Africans after 1700, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel attempted to teach some slaves to read. The concern for African American souls increased with the onset of the Great Awakening when both Wesley and Whitefield condemned the spiritual neglect of the slaves. Among those who responded was Samuel Davies, a New Light Presbyterian, who from 1747 began preaching to slaves in Hanover County, Virginia.
Nevertheless, before 1760 the morality of slavery itself was rarely questioned. A few isolated whites protested the institution: Francis Pastorius at Germantown in 1688, and Samuel Sewall, a Boston merchant and Massachusetts superior court judge, in 1700. But not until John Woolman published An Epistle of Advice and Caution in 1754 did the Quakers begin to take a firm stand against slavery. The following year their Philadelphia meeting disowned any member still in the slave trade and advised all others to manumit their slaves as soon as possible. Yet the rest of the white population found slavery too essential to contemplate its abolition.
In the absence of widespread questions about its morality, slavery continued to expand and to become more entrenched in British North American societies. Its legacy would be vast. The African American population would continue to grow, amounting to about a fifth of the colonial population in British North America by the time of the American Revolution. After the Revolution African American slaves and their descendents would continue to play a vital part in the creation of an American culture. Their work would underpin the wealth of the richest single class of Americans, the southern planter class, until the institution was destroyed by the American Civil War. Yet the poverty enforced by their enslavement would keep most African Americans from passing on family farms and other forms of property to their children until well into the twentieth century, whereas most European Americans in the English colonies had come to take such wealth for granted by 1700. Americans would remain in the grip of the system of race relations created by slavery until well after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Slavery was the dark underside of American liberty and opportunity, and its legacy would continue to haunt Americans for centuries to come.
1. Dutch laws in New Netherland, too, allowed slaves to work for wages and eventually earn their freedom under some circumstances.
2. For information about Creoles, see Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African American Society in Mainland North America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 53 (1996), 251–88, and Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
3. Figures are from Richard R. Johnson, “Growth and Mastery: British North America, 1690–1748,” 287, and Richard B. Sheridan, “The Formation of Caribbean Plantation Society, 1689–1748,” 400, both in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (New York, 1998).
4. Susan Westbury, “Slaves of Colonial Virginia: Where They Came From,” William and Mary Quarterly, 42 (1985), 228–37.
5. The arguments made in this section are primarily drawn from Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone.
6. For the emphasis on early English racism towards Africans, see Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), and Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Before Othello: Elizabethan Representations of Sub-Saharan Africans,” William and Mary Quarterly, 54 (1997), 19–44.
7. For the emphasis on the evolution of racial ideologies in the eighteenth century, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1975); Anthony L. Barker, The African Link: British Attitudes to the Negro in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1550–1807 (London, 1978), and Emily C. Bartels, “Othello and Africa: Postcolonialism Reconsidered,” William and Mary Quarterly, 54 (1997), 45–64.
8. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone.
9. There was once considerable debate among historians over the humaneness of slavery. Ulrich B. Philips, American Negro Slavery (New York, 1929), argued that slavery was essentially benign, as did Margaret Mitchell in her novel Gone with the Wind (New York, 1936). Both were southerners, part of a movement of southern writers who sought to rehabilitate the reputation of the antebellum South. Their views of slavery's humaneness have now been thoroughly repudiated. In The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956) Kenneth M. Stampp, writing after the first Supreme Court judgments against segregation, argued that the slaves and their masters were in a mutually antagonistic relationship, a view supported since 1956 by numerous other writers. One problem with this approach has been that the slaves themselves were portrayed merely as slavery's victims rather than as participants in shaping American history. More recently the trend has been to suggest that the African Americans adapted as best they could to the realities of slavery, developing their own culture and lifestyle and influencing the societies they shared with whites. See for example Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986), as well as works by Ira Berlin, Philip Morgan, and numerous other historians cited in this chapter. For a cautionary note on this approach, see Jean Butenhoff Lee, “The Problem of Slave Community in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly, 43 (1986), 333–61.
10. The human experience of the Atlantic slave trade is explored in Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to the American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass., 2007) and Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2007).
11. See David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York, 2000); G. Ugo Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic,” William and Mary Quarterly, 58 (2001), 47–67.
12. Historians who emphasize the shared ethnic identities of slaves in the Americas include John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1998), Michael Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998), and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill, 2007). For an emphasis on change and fluidity in the identities of Africans once they were enslaved, see Robin Law, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: ‘Lucumi’ and ‘Nago’ as Ethnonyms in West Africa,” History in Africa, 24 (1997), 205–19.
13. According to Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 59, during the eighteenth century, Virginia imported a total of 77,650 African slaves and South Carolina 110,900.
14. In Slave Counterpoint, Philip Morgan extensively explores the ways in which work routines in rice, tobacco, indigo, and wheat production shaped the lives of slaves in the different regions of the South.
15. Gardens were not usually a feature of slave life in the West Indies, since slaves on sugar plantations were expected to devote all of their labor to sugar production.
16. The experiences of enslaved women in British North America were initially obscured both from American women's history and from the history of American slavery, though more recently historians have sought to bring their experiences to light. Scholarship on enslaved women in the colonial period includes Jacqueline Jones, “Race, Sex, and Self-Evident Truths: The Status of Slave Women during the Era of the American Revolution,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds, Women in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, 1989), 293–337; Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: 1996); David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds, More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington, 1996); and Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, 2004).
17. Statistics on fertility and population growth are discussed in Allan Kulikoff, “‘A Prolifick People’: Black Population Growth in the Chesapeake Colonies, 1700–1790,” Southern Studies, 16 (1977), 391–428. See also Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves. Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women, observes that enslaved women were the major agents in creating Creole African American communities, in deciding to bear children.
18. The ordeal of enslaved women on one plantation in colonial Jamaica is vividly described in Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, 2004).
19. See especially Leland Ferguson, Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800 (Washington, DC, 1992); and Anne Elizabeth Yentsch, A Chesapeake Family and Their Slaves (Cambridge, 1994).
20. See Patricia Samford, “The Archaeology of African American Slavery and Material Culture,” William and Mary Quarterly, 53 (1996), 87–114.
21. See Margaret Washington Creel, “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs (New York, 1988). The idea that African Americans retained part of their African roots was first stated by the activist W. E. B. Du Bois, who received considerable support from the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits's Myth of the Negro Past (New York, 1941). Most of Herskovits's material related to Brazil and the Caribbean, and its relevance to America was fiercely denied by E. Franklin Frazier in The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago, 1939). Scholarly opinion in the past 30 years has moved back towards the position taken by Du Bois and Herskovits, following the work of Sydney Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia, 1976); and the novel by Alex Haley, Roots (New York, 1976). See especially John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (New York, 1992); Ferguson, Uncommon Ground; Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks; and Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities.
22. See especially Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, 1987).
23. For the Kongo connection, see John Thornton, “The African Dimension of the Stono Rebellion,” American Historical Review, 96 (1991), 1101–13.
24. Punishments for white offenders who committed treason, which colonial authorities would have considered approximately analogous to slave rebellion, were hardly less gruesome. Those guilty of treason were first hanged by their necks, then cut down while still conscious so that their bowels could be cut out and burned in front of them, after which they were beheaded and their bodies cut into four parts.
25. Historians have disagreed about the actual extent of the 1741 New York conspiracy. For the conclusion that it was not the major plot imagined by New York authorities, see Peter Hoffer, The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law (Lawrence, 2003), and Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York, 2005).
Chapter 15
Expanding Spanish and French Empires in North America
1565 St. Augustine founded by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés.
1595 The Franciscans arrive to convert the Florida Indians.
1598 Juan de Oñate conquers the Pueblo towns on the Rio Grande.
1610 The founding of Santa Fe.
1630 The conversion of the Apalachees in western Florida begins.
1670 The founding of Charlestown (later Charleston).
1672 Catholic Mohawks begin to settle at Kahnawake.
1673 The French discover the Mississippi.
1680 The revolt of the Pueblo peoples.
1681 French begin to assist Illinois and Miami peoples in wars with the Iroquois. The revolt of the Apalachicolas or the Lower Creeks.
1684–7 The failure of La Salle to establish a colony in the Gulf of Mexico.
1693 Spanish return to New Mexico led by Diego de Vargas.
1699 The French establish themselves at Biloxi.
1702–8 The final destruction of the Spanish missions in Florida, except at St. Augustine.
1716 Spanish missions established in East Texas.
1718 New Orleans founded by the French as the capital of Louisiana.
1729 The defeat of the Natchez Indians by the French.
1733 The founding of Georgia.
LONG INTO THE eighteenth century both Britain and France continued to be tantalized by the possibility that some great source of riches might still be found in the North American West. It was true that no explorer had managed to find a fabulously wealthy civilization north of the Rio Grande, and pragmatic English and French investors had found ways during the seventeenth century to make money through other means than plunder. Yet dreamers continued to imagine that it might be possible to find great mineral deposits in the West, or better yet a water route leading through the continent to the Pacific which could facilitate trade with China or Japan or with the immensely rich Spanish colony of Peru. Indeed the French and British governments both remained open to the possibility that the control of North America might give them a decisive strategic advantage over their rivals. Spain, meanwhile, maintained a number of colonies in North America for the purpose of guarding the rich silver mines in New Spain and Peru upon which its imperial ambitions continued to ride.1
For nearly two centuries, the Spanish, French, and British conducted a three-way chess game to control the continent. Their contest would be vitally important for all the peoples of North America, for it impelled continued exploration and interaction between Europeans and Indians ever further west and north. Spanish colonizers in Florida, New Mexico, and Texas and French colonizers in Canada, the Great Lakes region, Illinois, and Louisiana would create alliances and change diplomatic relationships. They would introduce European microbes, plants and animals, trade goods and religions into the societies of vast numbers of indigenous North American peoples. Meanwhile for British North Americans, the various colonies created by the Spanish and the French would be profoundly significant, shaping the development of their colonial societies by destabilizing their borders and limiting their ability to expand across space.2
1 Florida
As we have seen, Spain began its first colony north of Mexico for defensive purposes, when it established a permanent settlement in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565 in order to sustain its claim to the area and protect its Treasure Fleets as they made their way through the Straits of Florida. The colony was effectively a joint venture in which the Spanish Crown supplied naval and military assistance while the colony's leader, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, financed the costs of settlement. In exchange he received the right to exploit all lands to the north of New Spain, as Mexico was then called. Menéndez initially established fiv
e separate forts along the coast.3 However, they proved difficult to defend, and after an attack by Sir Francis Drake on St. Augustine in 1586, it was decided to concentrate resources at St. Augustine. Almost the entire Hispanic population of 500 was now concentrated in just one settlement, and half of this comprised the garrison. It was an expensive colony to maintain. Yet the Spanish government helped bear the cost because of its strategic importance, which was reinforced after 1607 with the establishment of the English colony at Jamestown in the Chesapeake.
Figure 29 Portrait of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés/Josef Camaron lo dibo. Engraving by Francisco de Paula Martí, 1791. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
The Spaniards were never able to attract significant numbers of European settlers to their colony in Florida. Although several hundred thousand Spaniards emigrated to the New World,4 they found little to appeal to them in comparison with the opportunities offered in Mexico to the south. Therefore the Spanish government sought to control the region not by sending Spanish settlers but by converting the native peoples to Christianity. Conversion meant Hispanicization and a loyal Indian population, which it was hoped would consolidate Spanish control, solve the endemic labor problem, and allow sustained development. Also, conversion of the native peoples had been one of the conditions of the papal bull of 1493 authorizing Spain to take possession of the New World, and the Spanish government felt some obligation to carry out its mandate.