{"id":42,"date":"2023-03-06T22:57:19","date_gmt":"2023-03-06T22:57:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/chapter\/module-1-5\/"},"modified":"2023-05-04T16:36:53","modified_gmt":"2023-05-04T16:36:53","slug":"module-1-5","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/chapter\/module-1-5\/","title":{"raw":"1.5 The Colonial Era","rendered":"1.5 The Colonial Era"},"content":{"raw":"
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"768\"]\"Unidentified Unidentified artist, The Old Plantation, c. 1790\u20131800, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum. Wikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nWhether they came as servants, slaves, free farmers, religious refugees, or powerful planters, the men and women of the American colonies created new worlds. Native Americans saw fledgling settlements grow into unstoppable beachheads of vast new populations that increasingly monopolized resources and remade the land into something else entirely. Meanwhile, as colonial societies developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fluid labor arrangements and racial categories solidified into the race-based, chattel slavery that increasingly defined the economy of the British Empire. The North American mainland originally occupied a small and marginal place in that broad empire, as even the output of its most prosperous colonies paled before the tremendous wealth of Caribbean sugar islands. And yet the colonial backwaters on the North American mainland, ignored by many imperial officials, were nevertheless deeply tied into these larger Atlantic networks. A new and increasingly complex Atlantic World connected the continents of Europe, Africa, and the Americas.\r\n\r\nEvents across the ocean continued to influence the lives of American colonists. Civil war, religious conflict, and nation building transformed seventeenth-century Britain and remade societies on both sides of the ocean. At the same time, colonial settlements grew and matured, developing into powerful societies capable of warring against Native Americans and subduing internal upheaval. Patterns and systems established during the colonial era would continue to shape American society for centuries. And none, perhaps, would be as brutal and destructive as the institution of slavery.\r\n

Slavery and the Making of Race<\/h2>\r\nAfter his arrival as a missionary in Charles Town, Carolina, in 1706, Reverend Francis Le Jau quickly grew disillusioned by the horrors of American slavery. He met enslaved Africans ravaged by the Middle Passage, American Indians traveling south to enslave enemy villages, and colonists terrified of invasions from French Louisiana and Spanish Florida. Slavery and death surrounded him.\r\n\r\nLe Jau\u2019s strongest complaints were reserved for his own countrymen, the English. English traders encouraged wars with American Indians in order to purchase and enslave captives, and planters justified the use of an enslaved workforce by claiming white servants were \u201cgood for nothing at all.\u201d Although the minister thought otherwise and baptized and educated a substantial number of slaves, he was unable to overcome masters\u2019 fear that Christian baptism would lead to slave emancipation.1<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nThe 1660s marked a turning point for black men and women in English colonies like Virginia in North America and Barbados in the West Indies. New laws gave legal sanction to the enslavement of people of African descent for life. The permanent deprivation of freedom and the separate legal status of enslaved Africans facilitated the maintenance of strict racial barriers. Skin color became more than a superficial difference; it became the marker of a transcendent, all-encompassing division between two distinct peoples, two races, white and black.2<\/sup><\/a>\r\n

All seventeenth-century racial thought did not point directly toward modern classifications of racial hierarchy. Captain Thomas Phillips, master of a slave ship in 1694, did not justify his work with any such creed: \u201cI can\u2019t think there is any intrinsic value in one color more than another, nor that white is better than black, only we think it so because we are so.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a> \u202fFor Phillips, the profitability of slavery was the only justification he needed.<\/p>\r\nWars offered the most common means for colonists to acquire Native American slaves. Seventeenth-century European legal thought held that enslaving prisoners of war was not only legal but more merciful than killing the captives outright. After the Pequot War (1636\u20131637), Massachusetts Bay colonists sold hundreds of North American Indians into slavery in the West Indies. A few years later, Dutch colonists in New Netherland (New York and New Jersey) enslaved Algonquian Indians during both Governor Kieft\u2019s War (1641\u20131645) and the two Esopus Wars (1659\u20131663). The Dutch sent these war captives to English-settled Bermuda as well as Cura\u00e7ao, a Dutch plantation colony in the southern Caribbean. An even larger number of American Indian slaves were captured during King Philip\u2019s War (1675\u20131676), a pan-American Indian uprising against the encroachments of the New England colonies. Hundreds of American Indians were bound and shipped into slavery. The New England colonists also tried to send American Indian slaves to Barbados, but the Barbados Assembly refused to import the New England American Indians for fear they would encourage rebellion.\r\n\r\nIn the eighteenth century, wars in Florida, South Carolina, and the Mississippi Valley produced even more American Indian slaves. Some wars emerged from contests between American Indians and colonists for land, while others were manufactured as pretenses for acquiring captives. Some were not wars at all but merely illegal raids performed by slave traders. Historians estimate that between 24,000 and 51,000 Native Americans were forced into slavery throughout the southern colonies between 1670 and 1715.4<\/sup><\/a> While some of the enslaved American Indians remained in the region, many were exported through Charles Town, South Carolina, to other ports in the British Atlantic\u2014most likely to Barbados, Jamaica, and Bermuda. Many of the English colonists who wished to claim land in frontier territories were threatened by the violence inherent in the American Indian slave trade. By the eighteenth century, colonial governments often discouraged the practice, although it never ceased entirely as long as slavery was, in general, a legal institution.\r\n\r\nNative American slaves died quickly, mostly from disease, but others were murdered or died from starvation. The demands of growing plantation economies required a more reliable labor force, and the transatlantic slave trade provided such a workforce. European slavers transported millions of Africans across the ocean in a terrifying journey known as the Middle Passage. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Olaudah Equiano recalled the fearsomeness of the crew, the filth and gloom of the hold, the inadequate provisions allotted for the captives, and the desperation that drove some slaves to suicide. (Equiano claimed to have been born in Igboland in modern-day Nigeria, but he may have been born in colonial South Carolina, where he collected memories of the Middle Passage from African-born slaves.) In the same time period, Alexander Falconbridge, a slave ship surgeon, described the sufferings of slaves from shipboard infections and close quarters in the hold. Dysentery, known as \u201cthe bloody flux,\u201d left captives lying in pools of excrement. Chained in small spaces in the hold, slaves could lose so much skin and flesh from chafing against metal and timber that their bones protruded. Other sources detailed rapes, whippings, and diseases like smallpox and conjunctivitis aboard slave ships.5<\/sup><\/a>\r\n

\u201cMiddle\u201d had various meanings in the Atlantic slave trade. For the captains and crews of slave ships, the Middle Passage was one leg in the maritime trade in sugar and other semifinished American goods, manufactured European commodities, and African slaves. For the enslaved Africans, the Middle Passage was the middle leg of three distinct journeys from Africa to the Americas. First was an overland journey in Africa to a coastal slave-trading factory, often a trek of hundreds of miles. Second\u2014and middle\u2014was an oceanic trip lasting from one to six months in a slaver. Third was acculturation (known as \u201cseasoning\u201d) and transportation to the American mine, plantation, or other location where new slaves were forced to labor.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"615\"]\"Drawing Slave ships transported 11\u201312 million Africans to destinations in North and South America, but it was not until the end of the 18th century that any regulation was introduced. The Brookes print dates to after the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788, but still shows enslaved Africans chained in rows using iron leg shackles. The slave ship Brookes was allowed to carry up to 454 slaves, allotting 6 feet (1.8 m) by 1 foot 4 inches (0.41 m) to each man; 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m) by 1 foot 4 inches (0.41 m) to each woman, and 5 feet (1.5 m) by 1 foot 2 inches (0.36 m) to each child, but one slave trader alleged that before 1788, the ship carried as many as 609 slaves. Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the regulated slave trade act of 1788, 1789. Wikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe impact of the Middle Passage on the cultures of the Americas remains evident today. Many foods associated with Africans, such as cassava, were originally imported to West Africa as part of the slave trade and were then adopted by African cooks before being brought to the Americas, where they are still consumed. West African rhythms and melodies live in new forms today in music as varied as religious spirituals and synthesized drumbeats. African influences appear in the basket making and language of the Gullah people on the Carolina coastal islands.\r\n\r\nRecent estimates count between eleven and twelve million Africans forced across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, with about two million deaths at sea as well as an additional several million dying in the trade\u2019s overland African leg or during seasoning.6<\/sup><\/a> Conditions in all three legs of the slave trade were horrible, but the first abolitionists focused especially on the abuses of the Middle Passage.\r\n\r\nSouthern European trading empires like the Catalans and Aragonese were brought into contact with a Levantine commerce in sugar and slaves in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Europeans made the first steps toward an Atlantic slave trade in the 1440s when Portuguese sailors landed in West Africa in search of gold, spices, and allies against the Muslims who dominated Mediterranean trade. Beginning in the 1440s, ship captains carried African slaves to Portugal. These Africans were valued primarily as domestic servants, as peasants provided the primary agricultural labor force in Western Europe.7<\/sup><\/a> \u202fEuropean expansion into the Americas introduced both settlers and European authorities to a new situation\u2014an abundance of land and a scarcity of labor. Portuguese, Dutch, and English ships became the conduits for Africans forced to America. The western coast of Africa, the Gulf of Guinea, and the west-central coast were the sources of African captives. Wars of expansion and raiding parties produced captives who could be sold in coastal factories. African slave traders bartered for European finished goods such as beads, cloth, rum, firearms, and metal wares.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"Drawing The first trading post built on the Gulf of Guinea and the oldest European building southern of the Sahara, Elmina Castle was established as a trade settlement by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. The fort became one of the largest and most important markets for African slaves along the Atlantic slave trade. \u201cView of the castle of Elmina on the north-west side, seen from the river. Located on the gold coast in Guinea,\u201d in Atlas Blaeu van der Hem, c. 1665\u20131668.\u202fWikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nSlavers often landed in the British West Indies, where slaves were seasoned in places like Barbados. Charleston, South Carolina, became the leading entry point for the slave trade on the mainland. The founding of Charleston (\u201cCharles Town\u201d until the 1780s) in 1670 was viewed as a serious threat by the Spanish in neighboring Florida, who began construction of Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine as a response. In 1693 the Spanish king issued the Decree of Sanctuary, which granted freedom to slaves fleeing the English colonies if they converted to Catholicism and swore an oath of loyalty to Spain.8<\/sup><\/a> \u202fThe presence of Africans who bore arms and served in the Spanish militia testifies to the different conceptions of race among the English and Spanish in America.\r\n\r\nAbout 450,000 Africans landed in British North America, a relatively small portion of the eleven to twelve million victims of the trade.9<\/sup><\/a> \u202fAs a proportion of the enslaved population, there were more enslaved women in North America than in other colonial slave populations. Enslaved African women also bore more children than their counterparts in the Caribbean or South America, facilitating the natural reproduction of slaves on the North American continent.10<\/sup><\/a> \u202fA 1662 Virginia law stated that an enslaved woman\u2019s children inherited the \u201ccondition\u201d of their mother; other colonies soon passed similar statutes.11<\/sup><\/a> This economic strategy on the part of planters created a legal system in which all children born to slave women would be slaves for life, whether the father was white or black, enslaved or free.\r\n\r\nMost fundamentally, the emergence of modern notions of race was closely related to the colonization of the Americas and the slave trade. African slave traders lacked a firm category of race that might have led them to think that they were selling their own people, in much the same way that Native Americans did not view other American Indian groups as part of the same \u201crace.\u201d Similarly, most English citizens felt no racial identification with the Irish or even the Welsh. The modern idea of race as an inherited physical difference (most often skin color) that is used to support systems of oppression was new in the early modern Atlantic world.\r\n\r\nIn the early years of slavery, especially in the South, the distinction between indentured servants and slaves was initially unclear. In 1643, however, a law was passed in Virginia that made African women \u201ctithable.\u201d12<\/sup><\/a>\u202f This, in effect, associated African women\u2019s work with difficult agricultural labor. There was no similar tax levied on white women; the law was an attempt to distinguish white women from African women. The English ideal was to have enough hired hands and servants working on a farm so that wives and daughters did not have to partake in manual labor. Instead, white women were expected to labor in dairy sheds, small gardens, and kitchens. Of course, because of the labor shortage in early America, white women did participate in field labor. But this idealized gendered division of labor contributed to the English conceiving themselves as better than other groups who did not divide labor in this fashion, including the West Africans arriving in slave ships to the colonies. For many white colonists, the association of a gendered division of labor with Englishness provided a further justification for the enslavement and subordination of Africans.\r\n\r\nIdeas about the rule of the household were informed by legal and customary understandings of marriage and the home in England. A man was expected to hold \u201cpaternal dominion\u201d over his household, which included his wife, children, servants, and slaves. In contrast, slaves were not legally masters of a household and were therefore subject to the authority of the white master. Slave marriages were not recognized in colonial law. Some enslaved men and women married \u201cabroad\u201d; that is, they married individuals who were not owned by the same master and did not live on the same plantation. These husbands and wives had to travel miles at a time, typically only once a week on Sundays, to visit their spouses. Legal or religious authority did not protect these marriages, and masters could refuse to let their slaves visit a spouse, or even sell a slave to a new master hundreds of miles away from their spouse and children. Within the patriarchal and exploitative colonial environment, enslaved men and women struggled to establish families and communities.\r\n

English Colonies<\/h3>\r\nBy the late 17th century, the English had firmly planted their colonies along the Atlantic coast of North American, and life had taken on a development increasingly independent of that in the mother country. In southern colonies such as Virginia and Maryland (the Chesapeake region), tobacco culture and a plantation system that required spreading out meant that colonial society was largely rural. In the Middle Colonies of New York, Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, merchants, craftsmen, and small farmers prospered. In New England, the religious zeal declined and the area grew with an economy based largely on small farms and mercantilism.\r\n\r\nLater the Middle Colonies received an ever-larger proportion of the new immigrants, particularly from the German principalities and states, and the Scots-Irish. The immigrants were not attracted to the Puritan lifestyle, and they didn\u2019t want to compete with slavery in the South, particularly a place like South Carolina, the only colony in which black people were the majority. It was said that some places in New York were more German than the Rhine River in Germany and \u201cPennsylvania Dutch\u201d doesn\u2019t mean the Dutch (Netherlands). It\u2019s a bastardization of the word \u201cDeutsche\u201d, meaning German.\r\n

New Colonies<\/h2>\r\nIn 1632, King Charles I granted a tract of land on the northern side of the Chesapeake Bay to his friend and supporter Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore. Baltimore created the colony of Maryland, named after Charles\u2019 wife, as a haven for fellow Catholics who were persecuted in England. In Maryland, both Protestant and Catholic colonists were meant to create a colony where they could coexist peacefully. Maryland, like Virginia, found its wealth as a tobacco colony. Lord Baltimore\u2019s plans to create a haven for all Christians were thwarted, however. Most of those who settled in Maryland moved north from Virginia and many were more radical Christians like Puritans and Quakers. After a revolt which ended in 1658, Catholics lost much of their status just as they had back home.\r\n\r\nBack in England, in 1641, a civil war broke out between royal supporters and the Puritan dominated Parliament. Parliament triumphed leading to the execution of King Charles I. England temporarily became a Commonwealth under the rule of Oliver Cromwell. The Parliamentary government became a dictatorship and after Cromwell\u2019s death in 1649, Parliamentary leaders invited Charles\u2019 son, Charles to resume the throne as a constitutional monarch. This is a monarchy where the monarch is accountable to law. Charles will agree and will become King Charles II. The new king subsequently rewarded nobles and others who had supported him with large land grants in North America. The colonies created by these land grants became known as the Restoration colonies. The colonies established make up six of the original thirteen colonies: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania (including Delaware), and North and South Carolina.\u202f All of these colonies were proprietorships. In each of them, like Maryland before, one or several men held title to all the land. These men could subsequently create and control the governments of the colonies.\r\n

New York was created by a land grant that included New Netherlands to James, the Duke of York. James then regranted part of his land to Sir George Carteret and John Lord Berkeley. Those proprietors formed East and West Jersey, later combined into New Jersey. Charles II granted the region between Maryland and New York to William Penn, in recompense for a gambling debt owed to Penn\u2019s deceased father. Penn, a prominent Quaker, saw his province named Pennsylvania, as a haven for persecuted peoples. He offered land to settlers on very liberal terms, promised religious toleration, guaranteed English liberties such as the right to bail and trial by jury, and pledged to establish a representative assembly. He also publicized the availability of land in the Germanies, France, and the Netherlands to encourage settlement. This will give rise to a migration whose magnitude equaled that of the Puritan migration of the 1630s. Pennsylvania\u2019s plentiful and fertile lands soon enabled the residents to export surplus grain and other food stuffs to the Caribbean and Philadelphia began challenging Boston for commercial dominance. Unfortunately, Penn\u2019s utopian vision of a diverse and peaceful population would also fail to pass as settlers took advantage of Penn\u2019s generosity and brought their animosities with them to the new colony.<\/p>\r\nCarolina was the southernmost proprietary colony, granted by King Charles II in 1663. This colony was originally envisioned as a buffer colony between Virginia and Spanish Florida and thus was considered strategically important. Parts of the region were semi-tropical, so the founders held out hope that the colony would allow them to produce exotic goods such as figs, olives, wine, and silk. While these commodities did not flourish in Carolina, rice and indigo did with the help of the labor and know-how of slaves, many of whom had experience with the produce in Africa or the Caribbean. Due to the diversity of the land in Carolina, the lack of a deep harbor in the northern area, and the sheer size of Carolina, which weakened governmental control, the colony was split into North Carolina and South Carolina in 1691.13<\/sup><\/a>\r\n

Notes<\/h4>\r\n
    \r\n \t
  1. Edgar Legare Pennington, \"The Reverend Francis Le Jau's Work Among Indians and Negro Slaves,\" Journal of Southern History<\/em>, 1, no. 4 (November 1935): 442\u2013458. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  2. William Waller Hening, Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia<\/em>, Vol. 2 (Richmond, VA: Samuel Pleasants, 1809\u20131823), 170, 260, 266, 270. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  3. Captain Thomas Phillips, \"A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London, 16,\" in Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America: Volume 1<\/em>, 1441\u20131700 (New York: Octagon Books, 1969), 403. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  4. Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670 -1717<\/em> (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 299. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  5. Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa<\/em> (London: J. Phillips, 1788). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  6. Phillip Curtin estimated that 9 million Africans were carried across the Atlantic. Joseph E. Inikori's figure estimated 15 million, and Patrick Manning estimated 12 million transported with 10.5 million surviving the voyage. See Phillip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census<\/em> (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Joseph E. Inikori, \"Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade: An Assessment of Curtin and Anstey,\" Journal of Africa<\/em> 17 (1976): 197-223; and Patrick Manning, \"Historical Datasets on Africa and the African Atlantic,\" Journal of Comparative Economics<\/em> 40, no. 4 (2012): 604-607. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  7. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa<\/em> (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 36. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  8. Jane Landers, \"Slavery in the Lower South,\" OAH Magazine of History<\/em> 17, no. 3 (2003): 23\u201327. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  9. Lynn Dumenil, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 512. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  10. \"Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery,\" Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History<\/em>. https:\/\/www.gilderlehrman.org\/history-by-era\/slavery-and-anti-slavery\/resources\/facts-about-slave-trade-and-slavery, accessed April 23, 2018. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  11. Willie Lee Nichols Rose, ed., A Documentary History of Slavery in North America<\/em> (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 19. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  12. Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South<\/em> (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 63\u201364. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  13. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, eds., \u201cChapter 3,\u201d The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open US History Textbook<\/em> (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), IV. New Colonies, at http:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/text\/03-british-north-america\/#IV_New_Colonies. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"
    \n
    \"Unidentified
    Unidentified artist, The Old Plantation, c. 1790\u20131800, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
    \n

    Whether they came as servants, slaves, free farmers, religious refugees, or powerful planters, the men and women of the American colonies created new worlds. Native Americans saw fledgling settlements grow into unstoppable beachheads of vast new populations that increasingly monopolized resources and remade the land into something else entirely. Meanwhile, as colonial societies developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fluid labor arrangements and racial categories solidified into the race-based, chattel slavery that increasingly defined the economy of the British Empire. The North American mainland originally occupied a small and marginal place in that broad empire, as even the output of its most prosperous colonies paled before the tremendous wealth of Caribbean sugar islands. And yet the colonial backwaters on the North American mainland, ignored by many imperial officials, were nevertheless deeply tied into these larger Atlantic networks. A new and increasingly complex Atlantic World connected the continents of Europe, Africa, and the Americas.<\/p>\n

    Events across the ocean continued to influence the lives of American colonists. Civil war, religious conflict, and nation building transformed seventeenth-century Britain and remade societies on both sides of the ocean. At the same time, colonial settlements grew and matured, developing into powerful societies capable of warring against Native Americans and subduing internal upheaval. Patterns and systems established during the colonial era would continue to shape American society for centuries. And none, perhaps, would be as brutal and destructive as the institution of slavery.<\/p>\n

    Slavery and the Making of Race<\/h2>\n

    After his arrival as a missionary in Charles Town, Carolina, in 1706, Reverend Francis Le Jau quickly grew disillusioned by the horrors of American slavery. He met enslaved Africans ravaged by the Middle Passage, American Indians traveling south to enslave enemy villages, and colonists terrified of invasions from French Louisiana and Spanish Florida. Slavery and death surrounded him.<\/p>\n

    Le Jau\u2019s strongest complaints were reserved for his own countrymen, the English. English traders encouraged wars with American Indians in order to purchase and enslave captives, and planters justified the use of an enslaved workforce by claiming white servants were \u201cgood for nothing at all.\u201d Although the minister thought otherwise and baptized and educated a substantial number of slaves, he was unable to overcome masters\u2019 fear that Christian baptism would lead to slave emancipation.1<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    The 1660s marked a turning point for black men and women in English colonies like Virginia in North America and Barbados in the West Indies. New laws gave legal sanction to the enslavement of people of African descent for life. The permanent deprivation of freedom and the separate legal status of enslaved Africans facilitated the maintenance of strict racial barriers. Skin color became more than a superficial difference; it became the marker of a transcendent, all-encompassing division between two distinct peoples, two races, white and black.2<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    All seventeenth-century racial thought did not point directly toward modern classifications of racial hierarchy. Captain Thomas Phillips, master of a slave ship in 1694, did not justify his work with any such creed: \u201cI can\u2019t think there is any intrinsic value in one color more than another, nor that white is better than black, only we think it so because we are so.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a> \u202fFor Phillips, the profitability of slavery was the only justification he needed.<\/p>\n

    Wars offered the most common means for colonists to acquire Native American slaves. Seventeenth-century European legal thought held that enslaving prisoners of war was not only legal but more merciful than killing the captives outright. After the Pequot War (1636\u20131637), Massachusetts Bay colonists sold hundreds of North American Indians into slavery in the West Indies. A few years later, Dutch colonists in New Netherland (New York and New Jersey) enslaved Algonquian Indians during both Governor Kieft\u2019s War (1641\u20131645) and the two Esopus Wars (1659\u20131663). The Dutch sent these war captives to English-settled Bermuda as well as Cura\u00e7ao, a Dutch plantation colony in the southern Caribbean. An even larger number of American Indian slaves were captured during King Philip\u2019s War (1675\u20131676), a pan-American Indian uprising against the encroachments of the New England colonies. Hundreds of American Indians were bound and shipped into slavery. The New England colonists also tried to send American Indian slaves to Barbados, but the Barbados Assembly refused to import the New England American Indians for fear they would encourage rebellion.<\/p>\n

    In the eighteenth century, wars in Florida, South Carolina, and the Mississippi Valley produced even more American Indian slaves. Some wars emerged from contests between American Indians and colonists for land, while others were manufactured as pretenses for acquiring captives. Some were not wars at all but merely illegal raids performed by slave traders. Historians estimate that between 24,000 and 51,000 Native Americans were forced into slavery throughout the southern colonies between 1670 and 1715.4<\/sup><\/a> While some of the enslaved American Indians remained in the region, many were exported through Charles Town, South Carolina, to other ports in the British Atlantic\u2014most likely to Barbados, Jamaica, and Bermuda. Many of the English colonists who wished to claim land in frontier territories were threatened by the violence inherent in the American Indian slave trade. By the eighteenth century, colonial governments often discouraged the practice, although it never ceased entirely as long as slavery was, in general, a legal institution.<\/p>\n

    Native American slaves died quickly, mostly from disease, but others were murdered or died from starvation. The demands of growing plantation economies required a more reliable labor force, and the transatlantic slave trade provided such a workforce. European slavers transported millions of Africans across the ocean in a terrifying journey known as the Middle Passage. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Olaudah Equiano recalled the fearsomeness of the crew, the filth and gloom of the hold, the inadequate provisions allotted for the captives, and the desperation that drove some slaves to suicide. (Equiano claimed to have been born in Igboland in modern-day Nigeria, but he may have been born in colonial South Carolina, where he collected memories of the Middle Passage from African-born slaves.) In the same time period, Alexander Falconbridge, a slave ship surgeon, described the sufferings of slaves from shipboard infections and close quarters in the hold. Dysentery, known as \u201cthe bloody flux,\u201d left captives lying in pools of excrement. Chained in small spaces in the hold, slaves could lose so much skin and flesh from chafing against metal and timber that their bones protruded. Other sources detailed rapes, whippings, and diseases like smallpox and conjunctivitis aboard slave ships.5<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    \u201cMiddle\u201d had various meanings in the Atlantic slave trade. For the captains and crews of slave ships, the Middle Passage was one leg in the maritime trade in sugar and other semifinished American goods, manufactured European commodities, and African slaves. For the enslaved Africans, the Middle Passage was the middle leg of three distinct journeys from Africa to the Americas. First was an overland journey in Africa to a coastal slave-trading factory, often a trek of hundreds of miles. Second\u2014and middle\u2014was an oceanic trip lasting from one to six months in a slaver. Third was acculturation (known as \u201cseasoning\u201d) and transportation to the American mine, plantation, or other location where new slaves were forced to labor.<\/p>\n

    \"Drawing
    Slave ships transported 11\u201312 million Africans to destinations in North and South America, but it was not until the end of the 18th century that any regulation was introduced. The Brookes print dates to after the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788, but still shows enslaved Africans chained in rows using iron leg shackles. The slave ship Brookes was allowed to carry up to 454 slaves, allotting 6 feet (1.8 m) by 1 foot 4 inches (0.41 m) to each man; 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m) by 1 foot 4 inches (0.41 m) to each woman, and 5 feet (1.5 m) by 1 foot 2 inches (0.36 m) to each child, but one slave trader alleged that before 1788, the ship carried as many as 609 slaves. Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the regulated slave trade act of 1788, 1789. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    The impact of the Middle Passage on the cultures of the Americas remains evident today. Many foods associated with Africans, such as cassava, were originally imported to West Africa as part of the slave trade and were then adopted by African cooks before being brought to the Americas, where they are still consumed. West African rhythms and melodies live in new forms today in music as varied as religious spirituals and synthesized drumbeats. African influences appear in the basket making and language of the Gullah people on the Carolina coastal islands.<\/p>\n

    Recent estimates count between eleven and twelve million Africans forced across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, with about two million deaths at sea as well as an additional several million dying in the trade\u2019s overland African leg or during seasoning.6<\/sup><\/a> Conditions in all three legs of the slave trade were horrible, but the first abolitionists focused especially on the abuses of the Middle Passage.<\/p>\n

    Southern European trading empires like the Catalans and Aragonese were brought into contact with a Levantine commerce in sugar and slaves in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Europeans made the first steps toward an Atlantic slave trade in the 1440s when Portuguese sailors landed in West Africa in search of gold, spices, and allies against the Muslims who dominated Mediterranean trade. Beginning in the 1440s, ship captains carried African slaves to Portugal. These Africans were valued primarily as domestic servants, as peasants provided the primary agricultural labor force in Western Europe.7<\/sup><\/a> \u202fEuropean expansion into the Americas introduced both settlers and European authorities to a new situation\u2014an abundance of land and a scarcity of labor. Portuguese, Dutch, and English ships became the conduits for Africans forced to America. The western coast of Africa, the Gulf of Guinea, and the west-central coast were the sources of African captives. Wars of expansion and raiding parties produced captives who could be sold in coastal factories. African slave traders bartered for European finished goods such as beads, cloth, rum, firearms, and metal wares.<\/p>\n

    \"Drawing
    The first trading post built on the Gulf of Guinea and the oldest European building southern of the Sahara, Elmina Castle was established as a trade settlement by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. The fort became one of the largest and most important markets for African slaves along the Atlantic slave trade. \u201cView of the castle of Elmina on the north-west side, seen from the river. Located on the gold coast in Guinea,\u201d in Atlas Blaeu van der Hem, c. 1665\u20131668.\u202fWikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Slavers often landed in the British West Indies, where slaves were seasoned in places like Barbados. Charleston, South Carolina, became the leading entry point for the slave trade on the mainland. The founding of Charleston (\u201cCharles Town\u201d until the 1780s) in 1670 was viewed as a serious threat by the Spanish in neighboring Florida, who began construction of Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine as a response. In 1693 the Spanish king issued the Decree of Sanctuary, which granted freedom to slaves fleeing the English colonies if they converted to Catholicism and swore an oath of loyalty to Spain.8<\/sup><\/a> \u202fThe presence of Africans who bore arms and served in the Spanish militia testifies to the different conceptions of race among the English and Spanish in America.<\/p>\n

    About 450,000 Africans landed in British North America, a relatively small portion of the eleven to twelve million victims of the trade.9<\/sup><\/a> \u202fAs a proportion of the enslaved population, there were more enslaved women in North America than in other colonial slave populations. Enslaved African women also bore more children than their counterparts in the Caribbean or South America, facilitating the natural reproduction of slaves on the North American continent.10<\/sup><\/a> \u202fA 1662 Virginia law stated that an enslaved woman\u2019s children inherited the \u201ccondition\u201d of their mother; other colonies soon passed similar statutes.11<\/sup><\/a> This economic strategy on the part of planters created a legal system in which all children born to slave women would be slaves for life, whether the father was white or black, enslaved or free.<\/p>\n

    Most fundamentally, the emergence of modern notions of race was closely related to the colonization of the Americas and the slave trade. African slave traders lacked a firm category of race that might have led them to think that they were selling their own people, in much the same way that Native Americans did not view other American Indian groups as part of the same \u201crace.\u201d Similarly, most English citizens felt no racial identification with the Irish or even the Welsh. The modern idea of race as an inherited physical difference (most often skin color) that is used to support systems of oppression was new in the early modern Atlantic world.<\/p>\n

    In the early years of slavery, especially in the South, the distinction between indentured servants and slaves was initially unclear. In 1643, however, a law was passed in Virginia that made African women \u201ctithable.\u201d12<\/sup><\/a>\u202f This, in effect, associated African women\u2019s work with difficult agricultural labor. There was no similar tax levied on white women; the law was an attempt to distinguish white women from African women. The English ideal was to have enough hired hands and servants working on a farm so that wives and daughters did not have to partake in manual labor. Instead, white women were expected to labor in dairy sheds, small gardens, and kitchens. Of course, because of the labor shortage in early America, white women did participate in field labor. But this idealized gendered division of labor contributed to the English conceiving themselves as better than other groups who did not divide labor in this fashion, including the West Africans arriving in slave ships to the colonies. For many white colonists, the association of a gendered division of labor with Englishness provided a further justification for the enslavement and subordination of Africans.<\/p>\n

    Ideas about the rule of the household were informed by legal and customary understandings of marriage and the home in England. A man was expected to hold \u201cpaternal dominion\u201d over his household, which included his wife, children, servants, and slaves. In contrast, slaves were not legally masters of a household and were therefore subject to the authority of the white master. Slave marriages were not recognized in colonial law. Some enslaved men and women married \u201cabroad\u201d; that is, they married individuals who were not owned by the same master and did not live on the same plantation. These husbands and wives had to travel miles at a time, typically only once a week on Sundays, to visit their spouses. Legal or religious authority did not protect these marriages, and masters could refuse to let their slaves visit a spouse, or even sell a slave to a new master hundreds of miles away from their spouse and children. Within the patriarchal and exploitative colonial environment, enslaved men and women struggled to establish families and communities.<\/p>\n

    English Colonies<\/h3>\n

    By the late 17th century, the English had firmly planted their colonies along the Atlantic coast of North American, and life had taken on a development increasingly independent of that in the mother country. In southern colonies such as Virginia and Maryland (the Chesapeake region), tobacco culture and a plantation system that required spreading out meant that colonial society was largely rural. In the Middle Colonies of New York, Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, merchants, craftsmen, and small farmers prospered. In New England, the religious zeal declined and the area grew with an economy based largely on small farms and mercantilism.<\/p>\n

    Later the Middle Colonies received an ever-larger proportion of the new immigrants, particularly from the German principalities and states, and the Scots-Irish. The immigrants were not attracted to the Puritan lifestyle, and they didn\u2019t want to compete with slavery in the South, particularly a place like South Carolina, the only colony in which black people were the majority. It was said that some places in New York were more German than the Rhine River in Germany and \u201cPennsylvania Dutch\u201d doesn\u2019t mean the Dutch (Netherlands). It\u2019s a bastardization of the word \u201cDeutsche\u201d, meaning German.<\/p>\n

    New Colonies<\/h2>\n

    In 1632, King Charles I granted a tract of land on the northern side of the Chesapeake Bay to his friend and supporter Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore. Baltimore created the colony of Maryland, named after Charles\u2019 wife, as a haven for fellow Catholics who were persecuted in England. In Maryland, both Protestant and Catholic colonists were meant to create a colony where they could coexist peacefully. Maryland, like Virginia, found its wealth as a tobacco colony. Lord Baltimore\u2019s plans to create a haven for all Christians were thwarted, however. Most of those who settled in Maryland moved north from Virginia and many were more radical Christians like Puritans and Quakers. After a revolt which ended in 1658, Catholics lost much of their status just as they had back home.<\/p>\n

    Back in England, in 1641, a civil war broke out between royal supporters and the Puritan dominated Parliament. Parliament triumphed leading to the execution of King Charles I. England temporarily became a Commonwealth under the rule of Oliver Cromwell. The Parliamentary government became a dictatorship and after Cromwell\u2019s death in 1649, Parliamentary leaders invited Charles\u2019 son, Charles to resume the throne as a constitutional monarch. This is a monarchy where the monarch is accountable to law. Charles will agree and will become King Charles II. The new king subsequently rewarded nobles and others who had supported him with large land grants in North America. The colonies created by these land grants became known as the Restoration colonies. The colonies established make up six of the original thirteen colonies: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania (including Delaware), and North and South Carolina.\u202f All of these colonies were proprietorships. In each of them, like Maryland before, one or several men held title to all the land. These men could subsequently create and control the governments of the colonies.<\/p>\n

    New York was created by a land grant that included New Netherlands to James, the Duke of York. James then regranted part of his land to Sir George Carteret and John Lord Berkeley. Those proprietors formed East and West Jersey, later combined into New Jersey. Charles II granted the region between Maryland and New York to William Penn, in recompense for a gambling debt owed to Penn\u2019s deceased father. Penn, a prominent Quaker, saw his province named Pennsylvania, as a haven for persecuted peoples. He offered land to settlers on very liberal terms, promised religious toleration, guaranteed English liberties such as the right to bail and trial by jury, and pledged to establish a representative assembly. He also publicized the availability of land in the Germanies, France, and the Netherlands to encourage settlement. This will give rise to a migration whose magnitude equaled that of the Puritan migration of the 1630s. Pennsylvania\u2019s plentiful and fertile lands soon enabled the residents to export surplus grain and other food stuffs to the Caribbean and Philadelphia began challenging Boston for commercial dominance. Unfortunately, Penn\u2019s utopian vision of a diverse and peaceful population would also fail to pass as settlers took advantage of Penn\u2019s generosity and brought their animosities with them to the new colony.<\/p>\n

    Carolina was the southernmost proprietary colony, granted by King Charles II in 1663. This colony was originally envisioned as a buffer colony between Virginia and Spanish Florida and thus was considered strategically important. Parts of the region were semi-tropical, so the founders held out hope that the colony would allow them to produce exotic goods such as figs, olives, wine, and silk. While these commodities did not flourish in Carolina, rice and indigo did with the help of the labor and know-how of slaves, many of whom had experience with the produce in Africa or the Caribbean. Due to the diversity of the land in Carolina, the lack of a deep harbor in the northern area, and the sheer size of Carolina, which weakened governmental control, the colony was split into North Carolina and South Carolina in 1691.13<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    Notes<\/h4>\n
      \n
    1. Edgar Legare Pennington, “The Reverend Francis Le Jau’s Work Among Indians and Negro Slaves,” Journal of Southern History<\/em>, 1, no. 4 (November 1935): 442\u2013458. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    2. William Waller Hening, Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia<\/em>, Vol. 2 (Richmond, VA: Samuel Pleasants, 1809\u20131823), 170, 260, 266, 270. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    3. Captain Thomas Phillips, “A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London, 16,” in Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America: Volume 1<\/em>, 1441\u20131700 (New York: Octagon Books, 1969), 403. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    4. Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670 -1717<\/em> (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 299. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    5. Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa<\/em> (London: J. Phillips, 1788). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    6. Phillip Curtin estimated that 9 million Africans were carried across the Atlantic. Joseph E. Inikori’s figure estimated 15 million, and Patrick Manning estimated 12 million transported with 10.5 million surviving the voyage. See Phillip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census<\/em> (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Joseph E. Inikori, “Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade: An Assessment of Curtin and Anstey,” Journal of Africa<\/em> 17 (1976): 197-223; and Patrick Manning, “Historical Datasets on Africa and the African Atlantic,” Journal of Comparative Economics<\/em> 40, no. 4 (2012): 604-607. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    7. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa<\/em> (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 36. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    8. Jane Landers, “Slavery in the Lower South,” OAH Magazine of History<\/em> 17, no. 3 (2003): 23\u201327. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    9. Lynn Dumenil, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 512. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    10. “Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery,” Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History<\/em>. https:\/\/www.gilderlehrman.org\/history-by-era\/slavery-and-anti-slavery\/resources\/facts-about-slave-trade-and-slavery, accessed April 23, 2018. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    11. Willie Lee Nichols Rose, ed., A Documentary History of Slavery in North America<\/em> (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 19. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    12. Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South<\/em> (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 63\u201364. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    13. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, eds., \u201cChapter 3,\u201d The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open US History Textbook<\/em> (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), IV. New Colonies, at http:\/\/www.americanyawp.com\/text\/03-british-north-america\/#IV_New_Colonies. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"menu_order":5,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-42","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/42\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":698,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/42\/revisions\/698"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/3"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/42\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}