Lecture 4 – Cheap Labor: Definitive Captivity

According to Ancestry.com, there is an extremely high likelihood that Stanley Ann Dunham, the
white mother of Barack Obama, is a direct descendant of the very first African slave in England’s American
colonies. In July 1640, the highest court in colonial Virginia assigned different sentences to three runaway
servants after they had been captured and returned to their “master.” Besides ordering all three to receive 30
lashes, the court added four years to their term of indentured servitude to two of the runaways. The judges
ruled, however, that the third spend the remainder of his life in servitude, effectively making John Punch the
first recorded slave in the history of this country. Why the different punishments? The first two were of
European descent (Dutch and Scot), while Punch was African. Before his attempted escape, Punch had
married a white woman, probably another indentured servant, and together they had an early example of
what came to be called a mulatto, or “mixed-race,” child.
The most important requirement in the colonies, but especially in one like Virginia that based its
economy on a cash crop, was labor, the cheaper the better. The previous paragraph hints at several
aspects of that labor. First, it was primarily based on indentured servitude rather than slavery. Second, it
was multi-national and multi-ethnic. Third, it included women as well as men. Fourth, indentured
servants were so resentful of their treatment that they risked severe punishment by fleeing their condition.
Before examining indentured servitude and slavery, though, a couple of remarks on skilled labor are
called for. As early as 1608, the Virginia Company, in an interesting variant of Davidson’s “out of many,
one” theme, hired non-English workers to help Jamestown develop some fledgling industries, such as
glassmaking. The earliest recruits came from Italy and Poland; later artisans came from France and
Germany. [Early Virginia’s recruitment of skilled foreign workers might be compared to those foreign
workers who are recipients of employment-based green cards today; other non-English, unskilled
workers were enticed by false promises about their prospects in Virginia.]
In the 168 years between the founding of Jamestown in 1607 and the outbreak of the
Revolutionary War in 1775, roughly 500,000 Europeans immigrated to the mainland American colonies.
55,000 were prisoners, sent involuntarily; most of the remaining 450,000 came willingly. At least half of
them, or approximately 225,000 individuals, were indentured servants. One special group of indentured
servants comprised destitute boys and girls living on the streets of London forcibly transported to early
Virginia, where they invariably died. Thousands upon thousands voluntarily signed indentures in
response to unscrupulous recruiting agents, known as “spirits” as opposed to coyotes, who took
advantage of desperate people by lying about life in the colonies.
An indenture was a contract, an agreement to serve a specified period of time as someone’s servant in
exchange for the presumed cost of the trans-Atlantic voyage. Most contracts were made for periods of five
years, although the length of service could range from three (typically for adults – in those days a person was
not considered an adult until he/she reached the age of 24!) to seven or eight years. Indentured servitude is
best described as “temporary slavery,” for, like slaves, indentured servants were chattel, personal property
(“beasts of burden”) that could be bought, sold, and inherited. Their “masters” could whip them as they
pleased and deny them the right to marry, secure in the knowledge that such servants could not sue them. The
holders of the indenture could add years to the term of service - for instance, if female servants became
pregnant or if a male servant’s actions led to a loss of profits or resources. Five years could become seven
could become ten! Why would anyone become an indentured servant? Upon completion of the term of the
indenture, the servant was eligible for “freedom dues,” the right to freely offer labor to anyone, the right to
vote and use the courts, and, most importantly, the right to own a 50-acre plot of land.
Some 45,000 indentured servants arrived in the English colonies, again disproportionately in
Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, between 1650 and 1675, a time period when there were fewer than
2,000 slaves. Easily exploitable poor whites were more cost-effective than slaves. With mortality rates
still high, investing in four or five servants rather than two, more expensive, slaves spread financial risk.
Starting around 1676, for reasons we’ll examine in a later lecture, the ratios started to reverse, as slaves
came to replace indentured servants in greater and greater numbers. Indentured servitude remained legal
in the United States until the 1865 passage of the13th Amendment that, more significantly, also abolished
slavery.
Bartolomé de Las Casas was a wealthy Spaniard who arrived in Española in 1502, where he
became a slave raider, participating in expeditions to capture local Taínos, and a slave owner himself. In
1510, he simultaneously joined the priesthood and joined in the conquest of Cuba. There he remained
wealthy, enjoying the benefits of the Spanish practice of encomienda, whereby Indians were “granted” to
prominent individuals as servants for unspecified periods of time, often as many as twenty years. His
priestly responsibilities eventually led his conscience to question the brutal treatment of the natives. He
became so disgusted at the continuous violence directed at them that he wrote a letter to the Spanish
Crown pleading for an end to the practice of using Indians as slaves. He further suggested that less-than-
human Africans were more suitable for slavery than Indians, whom he identified as fully human. The
king of Spain heeded him. In 1518, Charles V of Spain granted permission (known as the asiento) to
transport 4000 African slaves to Jamaica. Later, in 1542, Charles passed a law outlawing the use of
Indians as slaves throughout the Spanish Empire. Local authorities refused to enforce that law, however,
and every year thousands of Indians were reduced to slave status. Owners circumvented the law by
resorting to a series of subterfuges, including encomiendas, convict leasing, and debt peonage, all of
which shared the following characteristics: forcible removal of victims from one place to another,
inability to leave the workplace, violence as a means to force them to work, and no pay for their labor.
[We will encounter these practices again further along in the semester.]
In later life, when he wrote his famous History of the Indies, Las Casas expressed regret for
proposing the enslavement of Africans: “I came to realize that black slavery was as unjust as Indian
slavery.” Las Casas additionally concluded that greed was the underlying motive that led Christians to
“murder on such a vast scale,” killing “anything and anyone who has shown the slightest sign of
resistance” and subjecting “all males to the harshest and most iniquitous and brutal slavery that ever man
has devised for oppressing his fellow-men, treating them worse than animals.”
Among the individuals Las Casas criticized for their cruelty was Columbus, who was the first
European to attempt to enslave natives. Andrés Reséndez, in his recent examination of Indian slavery
titled The Other Slavery, claims that the number of Indian slaves in the Western Hemisphere from
Columbus’s first venture to the end of the 19th century runs from a low estimate of 2.5 million to a high
figure of 5 million. One particular area favored by early slave traders was the Pánuco region of northeast
Mexico, whose natives were sent to the goldfields of Española and Cuba as early as the 1520’s. Juan de
Zumárraga, the first bishop of Mexico, wrote that by 1529, “around nine or ten thousand branded Indians
from Pánuco had been traded for animals.” Since the favored animals were cattle, northeastern Mexico
became home to the largest cattle herds in North America, setting the stage for the ranching empire that
would later spread into Texas. Northern Mexico would play a prominent role in the next phase of Indian
slavery when silver mines were opened there in the 1540s and 1550s.
The wealthiest mines were in Zacatecas. One of the wealthiest Zacatecan silver barons was Juan de
Oñate, selected by the viceroy in Mexico City to lead an expedition to colonize New Mexico. Oñate’s
stated mission in settling New Mexico was to convert the natives, but his real reasons were to find gold
and silver, protect Mexico’s silver mines from any potential northern threat, and capture as many slaves as
possible. Oñate “took possession” of New Mexico in the name of the king of Spain in April 1598; soon
thereafter, on July 4, 1598 (the original 4th of July!), he founded a city he called San Juan de los
Caballeros, the first European settlement in the central region of what would become the United States.
The land he entered was heavily populated by Pueblo Indians—some 60,000 when he arrived—suitable,
in his eyes, for enslavement. Oñate also indulged in the ruthlessness, the use of terror as an instrument of
pacification, so typical of this age by ordering his soldiers to sever a foot of any captured Pueblo rebel.
Around this time Indians in the region acquired horses and weapons, transforming life on the
southern Plains. By the 18th century, one very powerful horse-based empire had emerged: Comanchería.
The Comanches became the major suppliers of slaves to other Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, and
Americans. Their major prey were Apaches, whose would eventually become predatory slavers
themselves.
 A similar trade in Indian slaves developed in the southern English colonies, especially in the
Carolinas. English colonists offered to certain Natives peoples, including Westos, Savannahs, and
Yamasees, large quantities of weapons and ammunition in exchange for animal skins and Indian slaves.
Colonial traders even encouraged their Native partners to go to war with their enemies in order to acquire
captives, who would be exported to other English colonies, from New England to the Caribbean. The
profits from this Indian slave trade permitted South Carolina to establish its own plantations, focused
mainly on rice and indigo, and to import African slaves to work on those plantations. South Carolina
actually exported more Indians slaves than it imported African slaves. In 1708, the South Carolina
population, estimated at 9500, included 4100 African slaves and 1400 Indian slaves. Since Indian women
outnumbered Indian men and African men outnumbered African women, unions between African men
and Indian women were common. By 1720, however, the Carolinas abandoned the use of Indian slaves
and came to rely exclusively on African slaves. Indian slavery continued elsewhere, though, and coexisted
with African slavery into the later 19th century.
Exactly one year before the Mayflower landed in New England, the Bona Nova brought 120
settlers to Jamestown. One hundred of the passengers were tenants sent to work for the Virginia
Company for seven years. The other twenty were African captives, who had endured an unimaginable
journey. Captured in the interior of Angola and then marched in chains some 200 miles to the Angolan
coast, 350 slaves were forced below deck on the São João Bautista, a Portuguese slave ship bound for
Vera Cruz, Mexico. Off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, two pirate ships attacked the São João
Bautista and seized its human cargo. Most of the cargo was sold in the Caribbean; the last twenty
individuals were “sold” in Jamestown.
One of those individuals was given the name Anthony Johnson. Contrary to common
assumptions, Johnson and the other Angolans were not sold into slavery but into indentured servitude. In
fact, by 1623 Johnson had completed his indenture and become a “free Negro,” eligible to receive fifty
acres. The first African landowner in Virginia, Johnson kept purchasing more land, owning 250 acres by
1651. He was sufficiently wealthy that he acquired five indentured servants of his own, earning himself
an additional 250 acres. In 1653, one of Johnson’s servants, an African named John Casor, sued for his
freedom, claiming that he had completed the “seven or eight years” of his indenture. Casor then went to
work for Robert Parker. Johnson sued Parker in 1654, and the case (Johnson v. Parker) was resolved the
following year, when a Virginia county court sided with Johnson by ruling that Casor never had an
indenture but was, instead, a slave for life, the first time a person of African heritage was declared a slave
for life as the result of litigation. Casor (also known by his Portuguese name of Cazara) then might
challenge John Punch as the first African slave in Virginia, but neither was hardly the first African taken
to the Western Hemisphere.
In 1434, the modern slave era began in earnest. Seven years later, in 1441, the first slaves, obtained
by means of raids on coastal African communities, arrived in Portugal. As the Portuguese advanced
southward, they forsook raids for exchange, finding a niche as middlemen in an expanding West African
trade network. Within a half century, the Spanish would become competitors. Cursed by genetics in being
doubly immune, to European (actually Eastern Hemisphere) diseases, as American Indians were not, and
to tropical diseases, as Europeans were not, Africans were seen as essential to the growing need for
plantation labor, at first in the east Atlantic sugar islands and then in those of the West Indies.
Thus began the first (1450-1550) of three major phases of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, one
dominated by the two Iberian nations. Phase two, from 1550-1650, brought Dutch, French, and English
interlopers, and phase three, from 1650-1830, would be dominated by the English, each later phase seeing
a dramatic explosion of numbers. In order to obtain slaves, Europeans had to ingratiate themselves with
local leaders, who welcomed both Europeans (at least their commodities) and the slave trade (typically
non-coastal African peoples), for that exchange ensured their hold on increasingly centralized states. One
possible summary of the Atlantic Slave Trade follows:
African Immigrants to the Western Hemisphere
(figures in thousands of persons)
Region To 1600 1600-1640 1640-1700 1700-1760 1760-1800
N. America 1 20 171 177
Br. Caribbean 8 255 900 1085
Fr. Caribbean 1 155 474 573
Other Carib. 44 249 151
Subtotal 10 474 1794 1986
Span. Carib. 7 20 14 27 140
Mexico &
Cent. Amer. 23 70 48 13 5
Venezuela &
Colombia &
Peru 45 135 93 160 60
La Plata &
Bolivia 44 30 71 30
Subtotal 75 269 186 271 235
Brazil 50 160 400 960 726
Total 125 439 1060 3025 2947
Annual
average 1 11 18 50 70
By 1820 8.4 million African immigrants had come to the Americas contrasted to 2.4 million European
immigrants, yet the Euro-American population was 12 million while the African-American population
was 11 million. By the end of the Atlantic slave trade somewhere between 11 and 12 million Africans
arrived in the Western Hemisphere. Some 2 to 4 million who left Africa died during the ocean voyage.
 Slaves were exchanged for the following items: (mostly Indian) cotton textiles (50%), weapons
(15%), manufactured goods (12%), alcohol and tobacco (12%), iron bars (5%), cowrie shells (2%),
jewelry and miscellaneous items (3%). Prices for slaves varied depending on region, age, sex, health,
and other factors. Typically, prime adult males (at least 50%, and perhaps 70%, of all slaves) garnered
the highest prices, with women and non-prime males ‘fetching’ 20% less. Nine months might pass
between capture and departure. Europeans did not guard the slaves in stockades or warehouses; rather,
Africans controlled the slaves until delivery at central trading ports. Until such time, slaves could be
forced to perform local labor.
The ship voyage across the Atlantic became known as the Middle Passage, a voyage that
customarily took one month to Brazil and double that duration to the Caribbean. Debate, as usual, has
dwelt on conditions aboard ship. For the aggregate 400 years of the trans-Atlantic trade, estimates posit a
20-25% loss of life. The death rate was much higher before 1650 and significantly lower, perhaps down to
10%, thereafter. As the volume of trade increased in the second phase, especially after 1700 when the slave
trade surpassed the value of all other African exports and as the trade became an integral component of a
constantly expanding capitalist system, the Dutch, French, British, and, later, Americans would join the
Portuguese and Spanish in competing for slaves. The Portuguese and Spanish tradition of state monopolies
passed to emerging free trade capitalist partnerships or joint-stock companies, which sponsored fleets of
ships averaging 300 tons displacement, each ship manned by a crew of 30-40 sailors, intent on maximizing
profits on their initially large outlays of capital and in an increasingly complex long-term credit system.
Ensuring survival aboard slave ships became sound business. A 17th-century French study concluded that
each death on a ship with 300 slaves (the average number) reduced profit by 0.67%. An overall mortality
rate of 15% became a 30% loss of profit. So, improving sanitation, diet, and exercise secur(itiz)ed profits.

Mortality, or survival, figures do not tell the entire story. Each leg of the long journey to the Western
Hemisphere was traumatic: seizure and separation from family and community; shackled marches along
paths strewn with sun-bleached human skeletons; collisions with speakers of a babble of incomprehensible
languages; arrival at the ocean, entryway to the land of the dead; the sudden emergence of large, strange
objects, filled with white-skinned ‘spirits” out of the underworld of the west; forced aboard a ship heading to
the land of the dead; followed by seasickness, lack of privacy, cramped quarters, vomit, dysenteric bowels,
strange food, unknown after unknown after unknown. Stories from West African oral traditions capture some
of that trauma. Proof that Europeans were spirits from the land of the dead became evident when no captive
who sailed west ever returned. The ultimate image of Africans in European minds was the cannibal. The
ultimate image of the European in African imagination was the cannibal. Africans panicked when they
glimpsed the large copper kettles aboard every ship because, in their minds, that’s where Europeans turned
captives’ flesh into salt meat, their brains into cheese, and their blood into European wine. African deaths
aboard ship rose when they refused to eat the food distributed to them, believing that they were being served
the remains of those who had preceded them. That not all was well with slave ships can be gleaned from
Lloyds of London, the famous insurer, which kept records of slave ships after 1689. Numerous ships in the
trade filed claims for damages. In 20% of the claims, the ship captains blamed the slaves aboard ship, coastal
populations acting in concert with slaves, or plundering by African peoples. Resistance was part of the trade.
By the time the trans-Atlantic trade ended, millions of Africans had participated, against their
will, in the maafa, a Kiswahili (East African language) term meaning “disaster” or “horror.” Some refer
to the maafa as the African genocide. Again, how many millions continues to be a matter of intense
debates. The most commonly accepted numbers range between 10 and 15 million, with about 75-80%
of that number surviving the ocean ordeal, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, only to
encounter yet more horror.

Let’s take South Carolina, which had by far the greatest proportion of slaves, who outnumbered
Europeans by 1708 and made up 60% of the colony’s population by 1750. Slave ships deposited their human
cargo on Sullivan Island, in the harbor of Charleston, where they were quarantined in a “pest house” to
prevent the spread of any diseases contracted during the one- to three-month voyage. Then Africans were
shifted to dockside holding pens, where they might linger for months until they were sold, either individually
or in lots. Once they arrived at the plantation of their new “owner,” they underwent a period of “seasoning,”
regaining their health but also being introduced to their future tasks and receiving new names. Most
importantly, they were taught to submit immediately to any demand from the “master” or overseer. Every
slave felt the periodic tip of the bullwhip, not just as punishment but also as a means to break their spirits and
crush their hopes – to dehumanize them. Note the scars left by multiple whippings on the back of the slave
shown on the previous page. South Carolina plantations were slave labor camps, which slaves could leave
only if they obtained a pass and where they had to abide by curfews. Plantation owners limited their
opportunities for day-to-day communication with relatives and neighbors. Slaves were the ultimate captives.
Slaves quickly developed their own means of retaliation to their unending abuse, which
simultaneously restored a modicum of control over their own lives. Victims resisted victimization. They
spread false rumors, stole food, damaged tools, faked illnesses, ran away, torched barns at harvest time,
and even threatened violence. Slaveholders went out of their way to ensure their domination. They
rewarded slaves who informed on other slaves, using an age-old practice known as “divide-and-conquer”
or “divide-and-control.” They whipped and whipped; they mutilated (cutting off a foot or branding); they
sold recalcitrant slaves, separating them from loved ones (spouses or children); they murdered those they
suspected of revolt (several occurring from the 1710s to the 1740s, which we’ll explore in the next
lecture); they passed law after law after law, which, in sum, came to serve as the basis of America’s
notion of “separate” “races.”
1630 Virginia court ordered Hugh Davis, a white man, “to be soundly whipped for abusing himself to the
dishonor of God and shame of Christianity by defiling his body in lying with a Negro (woman).”
1662 Virginia determined that children of free males and slave females inherit the status of the mother
(reversing traditional English practice whereby a child always inherited the status of the father),
making slavery hereditary.
1664 Maryland determined that conversion to Christianity did not automatically win freedom for
slaves (shift in fundamental identification of slavery from non-Christian to non-European).
1670 Virginia prohibited free and baptized (Christian) Negroes and Indians from purchasing (that is,
buying indenture contracts of) Europeans.
1680 Virginia forbade a slave or free black from accusing or testifying against a white person in court;
ordered any Negro who raised a hand, even in self-defense, against any Christian (i.e., white
person) to receive thirty lashes; further stated that any slave who ran away from his master’s
service may be killed.
1691 Virginia banned individual manumissions (since it inspired other slaves to hope for their
freedom); condemned the “abominable mixture and spurious issue (child)” that resulted from
“Negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English or other white people” and ordered
such a couple to be banished forever from the colony; amended the 1662 law so that a “mixed-
race” child had to serve as an indentured servant for 30 years and the mother of such a child had
one month from its birth to pay a fine of 15 pounds sterling; if she did not pay the fine, she
would have to serve a five-year indenture.
1699 Virginia deported all free blacks.
1705 Virginia’s Negro Act declared that white servants, but not blacks, who were mistreated could sue in
court; proclaimed that any enslaved person who tried to escape could be tortured and dismembered
in the interests of “terrifying others”; announced that any master or overseer who killed a slave
during a whipping would not face felony charges; directed that if a slave was executed by law, the
“owner” would receive compensation out of public funds for the “loss of property.”
References: