In British America inadequate numbers, unsuitability for the kind of systematic labour expected by Europeans, and deep distrust - who in Virginia would be willing to take Indians into domestic service after the terrible events of 1622? - all played their part in preventing the early English settlers from systematically building up an indigenous work-force on the Spanish model. The Maryland settlers found that male Indians, unwilling to accept the routine of daily labour in the fields, simply disappeared into the interior when the summer months approached.89 Had it been worth while, institutionalized forms of compulsory Indian labour service would no doubt have been developed in the English settlements, as in the Spanish, although it is hard to know whether they would have assumed the character of outright slavery.
It would have been awkward for the Jamestown settlers to defy Virginia Company policy by enslaving an indigenous people who were to be brought to the faith,90 although, in the absence of a strong religious lobby and a concerned crown, it seems unlikely that scruple would for long have prevailed over necessity. During the course of the seventeenth century, in the absence of any imperial policy on slavery like that developed for Spanish America, individual colonies made occasional moves in the direction of Indian enslavement. They resorted, too, as in New England following King Philip's War, to the pretext of `just war' to turn Indians into slaves, and displayed no scruples about purchasing Indians taken captive by some rival tribe. South Carolina, indeed, between the time of its foundation in 1670 and the end of the Yamasee War in 1713, made the Indian slave trade a major business, in defiance of the objections of its lords proprietors. Its white inhabitants indulged, like those of Spanish border societies, in raids deliberately conducted to enslave Indians, and engaged in the large-scale exchange of European goods for Indians made captive by fellow Indians. While some of these slaves were kept in Carolina itself - there were 1,400 of them in the colony in 1708 - many more were exported, primarily to the West Indies plantations, although they were also sold to the northern colonies for domestic service. As many as 30,000 to 50,000 may have been enslaved over the course of the colony's first fifty years, before the supply trickled away.9'
Yet there were deterrents, both practical and legal, to Indian enslavement as a long-term solution to the shortage of labour in British America. Outside the West Indies it was too easy for slaves to abscond when Indian country was so near at hand. They could also be a dangerous presence. In the early eighteenth century the northern colonies, worried about the impact on their own Indians of slaves imported from South Carolina, imposed an import ban. Yet at the same time New Englanders were forcing growing numbers of their own native population into involuntary servitude. Changes to legal codes led to an expanded sentencing of Indian men and women into labour service for criminal activities and debt. Once indentured, they were liable to be bought and sold, and their children placed in forced apprenticeships on terms less advantageous than those enjoyed by white apprentices. By the middle of the century bound Indian workers, suffering from the imposed stigma of racial inferiority, were to be found throughout the region in substantial numbers.92
The whole question of slavery, however, was fraught with legal ambiguities, and some Indians at least managed to secure redress in the courts. The word `slave' had no meaning in English law when the first settlers moved across the Atlantic, even though slavery did make a brief appearance in Protector Somerset's abortive Vagrancy Act of 1547.93 Yet while slavery itself was unknown to English law, English society was well accustomed to various degrees of unfreedom, ranging from villeinage, or serfdom, to indentured service. It was to indentured white servants from the British Isles that the colonies first turned in their search for additional sources of labour, and it was as indentured servants that the majority of white emigrants crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth century.94 But, as many of them were to find on arrival, the conditions under which they were forced to work their four- or five-year stints made them, in their own eyes, little better than slaves. In one revealing incident, when a Spanish expedition attacked English settlers on Nevis in 1629, servants in the militia threw away their arms crying `Liberty, joyfull Liberty', preferring collaboration with the Spaniards to subjection to tyrannical English masters.95
A shortage of white indentured servants, combined with difficulties in managing men and women whose only thought was to finish their period of service and strike out on their own, encouraged English settlers, both in the Caribbean and on the southern mainland, to turn to the most obvious remaining source of labour - imported Africans. Bermuda, granted to the Virginia Company in 1612 and run by the Bermuda Company from 1615, imported its first blacks in 1616. In its first half-century, however, Bermuda's economy was not heavily dependent on black slave labour.96 The story was very different in the short-lived colony of Providence Island. However reluctant Puritan investors may have been to jeopardize the establishment of a godly community by filling it with slaves, relatively accessible sources of supply made it considerably cheaper to import blacks than white indentured servants to cultivate the tobacco crop. Considerations of godliness therefore lost out to harsh financial realities. By 1641, when its eleven-year existence was abruptly terminated, the Providence Island colony had become an authentically slave society - the first such society in British America.97
Elsewhere, the turn to slavery was slower. If godly arguments proved stronger in New England than on Providence Island, this may have been because the combination of a good supply of immigrants with high survival and reproductive rates, the absence of a staple crop, and the widespread use of family labour, all reduced the necessity for importing slaves. Africans therefore never constituted more than 3 per cent of New England's population.98 Virginia began importing African slaves soon after Bermuda. In 1619 John Rolfe reported the purchase of `20. and odd Negroes' from a Dutch man-of-war - an early indication of the important part that Dutch carriers and traders would play in the seventeenthcentury Atlantic economy" It was only at the end of the seventeenth century, however, that the Chesapeake colonies began to turn massively to African slaves to meet their labour requirements, and to look directly to Africa rather than the West Indies as their source of supply. Before then they had relied heavily on indentured labour, and white servants worked side by side with blacks, both slave and free, in the tobacco fields. The situation began to change in the 1680s, at a moment when a decline in the supply of indentured servants from the British Isles coincided with a fall in the cost of importing slaves. By 1710, 20 per cent of Virginia's population were slaves.100
It was Barbados in the 1640s and 1650s that would provide the model and set the trend. As sugar became the staple crop, the drawbacks of dependence on indentured labour became increasingly clear to the planters. Not only did white servants often prove unruly and rebellious when they found themselves condemned to effective servitude on the sugar plantations, but they were naturally reluctant to continue as wage-earners when their period of indenture expired. Some of the Barbados planters had seen African slave gangs at work in Brazil, and began to realize that African labour, even if initially more expensive, offered longterm advantages, since slaves would provide life-long service and could be more cheaply clothed and fed. Best of all, their condition as bondsmen made them absolute servants of their masters, as no white man could be.10' As the demand for sugar soared, and with it the pressure to produce, so too did the numbers of imported blacks. By 1660 there were as many blacks as whites on the island - perhaps 20,000 of each race - and by the end of the century Barbados, along with its companion slave societies of Jamaica and the Leewards, had absorbed 250,000 slaves from Africa.102
Condemned by the `curse of Ham' and set apart from the beginning by the colour of their skin, blacks stood little chance in societies which had as yet no developed code of law relating to slavery, and which, with little or no Indian labour available, were otherwise overwhelmingly white. As Virginia's House of Burgesses realized in the wake of Bacon's rebellion in 1676, it was in the
interests of masters to prevent the development of an alliance between aggrieved indentured servants and slaves by drawing a sharper dividing line between them in terms of legal status, a process already under way before the rebellion began.103 Gradually the legal shackles were tightened round the Africans, and British America moved inexorably towards the establishment of chattel slavery.
This chattel slavery would make possible the development of plantation economies on the British American mainland whose nearest Iberian equivalent was to be found not in the territories settled by the Spaniards but in Portuguese Brazil.104 In principle, the Spanish Caribbean islands - Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Jamaica - might have seemed to offer the same potential in the sixteenth century for the development of monocultures based on slave labour as that which was to be realized in the British island of Barbados in the seventeenth century, or indeed in Spain's own possession of Cuba in the later eighteenth. But, after the early years of plunder and ruthless exploitation were over, the Spanish Caribbean became something of an economic backwater. The more ambitious settlers moved on in search of richer prizes on the mainland, and with their departure the white population of the islands stagnated or declined. The sugar estates of Hispaniola and Cuba, although enjoying some initial successes, found it increasingly hard to compete with the sugar produced in New Spain and Brazil. It was cheaper and easier to concentrate on the less labour-intensive activity of cattle herding and ranching to meet the steady demand in Spain for hides. Moreover, the consequences for Spanish American economic life of the primacy of silver mining in the mainland viceroyalties extended to the Caribbean. As Havana became the port of departure for the annual silver fleets, it was understandable that islanders should lose their enthusiasm for the development of local products for export. There were quicker profits, illicit as well licit, to be made out of Havana's growth as the emporium of a transatlantic trade that was now attracting the predatory interest of Spain's European rivals.'05
It was Brazil, not the Spanish Caribbean, that offered the first, and most spectacular, example of the enormous wealth to be made from large-scale plantations worked by black slave labour. Serious colonization had begun only in the 1540s after the Portuguese had become alarmed by reports of French designs on the vast region that had nominally come into their possession after its accidental discovery by Pedro Alvares Cabral on his expedition to India in 1500. Initially appreciated for their brazilwood trees, which produced a highly prized reddish-purple dye, the coastal regions of the Brazilian north-east, thinly settled by Portuguese colonists, turned out to be well suited to the growing of sugar cane. As the Portuguese crown moved in the years leading up to the union with Spain in 1580 to establish a tighter grasp over its promising new territory, it also began to take a close interest in the creation of a sugar industry. The Tupinamba Indians failed to live up to expectations as a work-force for the new plantations, whether as chattel slaves or as European-style wage-labourers, and large numbers were wiped out by European diseases. With the European demand for sugar expanding, the response to the labour shortage was the same as it was in the Spanish Indies. From the 1560s growing numbers of African slaves were imported to supplement or replace an unsatisfactory and diminishing Indian work-force, and by the end of the century Brazil, now dependent on African labour, had become the world's largest supplier of sugar.'°6
The production techniques responsible for Brazil's spectacular success in growing and exporting sugar could not be kept secret indefinitely. When the Dutch West India Company seized Pernambuco from the Portuguese in the 1630s, the information fell into the hands of their Protestant rivals; and when the settlers chased the Dutch out of Brazil in the course of the decade following Portugal's recovery of independence from Spain in 1640, Sephardic Jews anxious to escape the attention of the Portuguese Inquisition fled Pernambuco for the Antilles, where they instructed the islanders in Brazilian production and processing techniques.107 With Dutch merchants happy to provide the settlers of Barbados with African slaves, the necessary ingredients were at hand for the dramatic expansion of the slave-based sugar plantations of the British Caribbean.
As Virginian tobacco growers came to imitate the example of the Barbadian sugar producers, so the English word `plantation' became more narrowly and specifically defined.108 When the Reverend John Cotton preached a sermon in 1630 on the departure of Winthrop's fleet for New England, he chose as his text a passage from the book of Samuel: `Moreover, I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them."09 The Irish `plantations' of the sixteenth century were essentially plantations of people, which would flourish in the right soil, and offer scope for infinite possibilities. Sir Philip Sidney, as an Irish planter, could write that he had `contrived' a `plantation' that would be `an emporium for the confluence of all nations that love or profess any kind of virtue or com- merce'.110 But, a hundred years later, the developments of the intervening century had begun to accustom people to think of `plantation' as an overseas settlement producing a cash crop for export, and as an emporium for the confluence of nations that professed the least virtuous of all kinds of commerce - the commerce in slaves.
The conditions of that commerce, as it was developed by the Portuguese and then appropriated by the Dutch and the English, were uniformly barbaric, although the ministrations of members of the religious orders at the ports of entry in the Iberian world did something to mitigate the sufferings of the sick and dying as they sought the salvation of their souls. If the seventeenth-century Anglo-American world had its equivalent of the Jesuit Fray Pedro Claver, who embraced the slaves on their arrival in Cartagena and even went down into the stinking holds of the slave-ships," his deeds remain unsung. For those who survived the ordeal of the Atlantic crossing, and subsequently of exposure to the unfamiliar disease environment of the New World, prospects were bleak. Their fate was described in vivid and moving words by Claver's colleague and fellow Jesuit, Alonso de Sandoval, in a work first published in Seville in 1627. Denouncing the treatment to which the new arrivals were subjected, he described how they would be made to work in the mines `from sunrise to sunset, and also long stretches of the night', or, if they were bought as house-slaves, would be treated with such inhumanity that `they would be better off as beasts'."2
Yet, for all the horrors of their situation, African slaves in Spain's American possessions seem to have enjoyed more room for manoeuvre and more opportunities for advancement than their counterparts in British America. Uprooted and far from home, they were regarded as representing less of a potential security threat than the indigenous population. This meant that Spanish settlers tended to use them as overseers or auxiliaries in dealing with the Indian work-force, thus raising them a rung on the increasingly complicated ladder of social and ethnic hierarchy. 113 The settlers' confidence was frequently misplaced, and marauding bands of cimarrones, or fugitive slaves, sometimes operating in collusion with local Indians, became a danger to Spanish settlements, especially in the Caribbean and Panama. 114 Yet the ambiguous status of slaves placed among a population itself subjected to a form of servitude offered opportunities that the shrewd and the fortunate could turn to their advantage.
Paradoxically, slaves in Spanish America also benefited from the fact that peninsular Spain, unlike England, possessed a long experience of slavery. This had led to the development of a code of law and practice which, at least juridically, tended to mitigate the lot of the slave. On the grounds that `all the laws of the world have always favoured liberty',i"' the thirteenth-century code of the Siete Partidas laid down certain conditions governing the treatment of slaves. These included the right to marry, even against the wishes of their masters, and a limited right to hold property. The code also opened the way to possible manumission, either by the master or by the state.
The transfer of slavery to the Spanish Indies inevitably brought departures from peninsular practice.' 16 In the vast areas under Spanish rule it was not easy to enforce the more generous provisions of the Siete
Partidas, even when there was a will to do so, and the lot of the slave inevitably varied from region to region and from master to master. Yet the rules relating to marriage, manumission and the holding of property allowed slaves some latitude, and urban slaves in particular quickly became adept at exploiting the rivalries between the different institutions of control, together with the openings offered by the law. In principle, as Christians, they enjoyed the protection of the church and the canon law, and as vassals of the crown could seek redress from royal justice. No doubt many were in no position to take advantage of these possibilities, but the numerous cases that came before the courts in New Spain suggest that, in common with members of the indigenous population, they soon learnt to play the game by Spanish rules. 117 As they battled to establish their rights to marriage or their entitlement to freedom, they managed, with the help of church and crown, to erode the claims of masters to hold them as mere chattels and dispose of their bodies as they wished.
Since children took their mother's and not their father's status, zambos - the offspring of African slave fathers and Indian mothers - were free-born, although in practice this might mean little more than exchanging one wretched lifeprospect for another, since they now became subject to the tribute and labour demands imposed on the Indian population. Legally, however, their status was superior to that of the slave, and although the colonial authorities frowned on the growing number of Afro-Indian unions, the crown refused to break with a custom which favoured a libertarian trend."' Slavery, after all, ran counter to natural law, and natural law exercised a powerful hold over the Hispanic imagination.
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Page 19
