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I figured this would be a good thread….anyone who has info to add…go ahead and add it.

As Native American societies in the Southeast were primarily matrilineal, African males who married Native American women often became members of the wife’s clan and citizens of the respective nation. As relationships grew, the lines of distinction began to blur. The evolution of red-black people began to pursue its own course; many of the people who came to be known as slaves, free people of color, Africans, or Indians were most often the product of integrating cultures. In areas such as Southeastern Virginia, The Low Country of the Carolinas, and Silver Bluff, S.C., communities of Afro-Indians began to spring up. The depth and complexity of this intermixture is revealed in a 1740 slave code in South Carolina: all Negroes and Indians, (free Indians in amity with this government, and Negroes, mulattos, and mustezoes, who are now free, excepted) mulattos or mustezoes who are now, or shall hereafter be in this province, and all their issue and offspring…shall be and they are hereby declared to be, and remain hereafter absolute slaves. (Patrick Minges, Beneath the Underdog: Race, Religion and the “Trail of Tears” Union Seminary Quarterly Review Email: pm47@columbia.edu Union Theological Seminary, New York )

Millions of Native Americans were also enslaved, particularly in South America. In the American colonies in 1730, nearly 25 percent of the slaves in the Carolinas were Cherokee, Creek, or other Native Americans. From the 1500s through the early 1700s, small numbers of white people were also enslaved by kidnapping, or for crimes or debts. SUGGESTED READINGS: Herbert Klein’s, African Slavery in Latin American and the Caribbean (1986); Ramon Gutierrez’s When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico 1500-1846 (1991); Great Documents in American Indian History (1995), edited by Wayne Moquin; J. McIver Weatherford’s Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America (1991); Native Heritage: Personal Accounts by American Indians 1790-Present (1995), edited by Arlene Hirschfelder; Robert Edgar Conrad’s Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (1983); and Sidney Mintz’s and Richard Price’s An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (1981). (Ten Myths, Half-truths and Misunderstandings about Black History, Ethnic NewsWatch SoftLine Information, Inc., Stamford, CT) ( For more information about the history of the contact between Native Americans, Africans and Americans of African descent, see the work done by Patrick Minges, Union Theological Seminary )

http://innercity.org/holt/slavechron.html

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South Carolina’s First Slaves – Native Americans

South Carolina’s first slaves were neither black nor were they from Africa. They were Native Americans who had lived along the rivers of the Lowcountry and among the mountains of the Upstate for thousands of years before the first European settler even arrived. As historian Patrick Minges explains, No sooner had they set foot on shore near Charleston than [did] the English set about establishing the “peculiar institution” of Native American slavery. Seeking the gold that had changed the face of the Spanish Empire but finding none, the English settlers of the Carolinas quickly seized upon the most abundant and available resource they could attain. The indigenous peoples of the Southeastern United States became, themselves, a commodity on the open market. Native American tribes in South Carolina were often at war with one another. In consequence, they learned to hunt down and capture members of enemy tribes, selling them to whites as slaves. Others, of course, were captured and sold by the new settlers directly. In either case, Native Americans made up a large share of South Carolina’s seventeenth and eighteenth century slave population.

In time, however, white planters began to “phase out” the use of Native Americans on their plantations. For one thing, they had decided that Africans were far better suited to the back-breaking work of cultivating rice than Indians were. For another, black people seemed to have a stronger resistance to white diseases like small pox and yellow fever. And finally, white people learned that if a Native American slave ran away, they probably weren’t going to find him again. Native Americans were all too familiar with the nooks and crannies of “the new world.” They knew where to hide, and they knew how to find help. If they could escape, they could take refuge in the midst of a nearby tribe.

Nevertheless, strong ties formed between South Carolina’s Native Americans and the Africans that were brought to her shore. These ties were especially strong in regards to religion. Minges points out some of the other bonds Indians and blacks shared: In addition to working together in the fields, they lived together in communal living quarters, began to produce collective recipes for food and herbal remedies, shared myths and legends, and ultimately intermarried. Apart from their collective exploitation at the hands of colonial slavery, Africans and Native Americans possessed similar worldviews rooted in their historic relationship to the subtropical coastlands of the middle Atlantic. If you are interested in learning more about South Carolina’s Native American slaves, you may want to read Minges’ article in full. It is called All My Slaves, Whether Negroes, Indians, Mustees, or Molattoes, and you can find it by clicking here.

http://www.sciway.net/afam/slavery/flesh.html

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‘We missed you’

By PAULA PETERS

STAFF WRITER

ST. DAVID’S ISLAND, Bermuda – The storm rumbled over the cricket field and through Red Hole, the aquamarine bay named for the crimson earth that encloses it. A clap of thunder ushered a downpour out to sea.

St. David’s Island town crier E. Michael Jones announces the start of the Indian festival at the St. David’s Cricket Club in Bermuda. (Staff photo by STEVE HEASLIP) TRIBES RECONNECT: Part II Spade tooth offers clue to bloodline Finding a link that was never lost Roots emerge in native dance Part I: “Worlds rejoined

At the St. David’s Cricket Club, the violent storm went nearly unnoticed by the 100 people gathered there, overflowing the club’s function room, spilling out onto the stucco porch, propped against iron rails. Instead, they were listening – listening to the closing moments of a historic and emotional reunion with cousins three centuries removed.

For generations on St. David’s, the descendants of Indians sold into slavery had questioned how they ended up transplanted onto a tropical island. Isolated, often scorned by other Bermudans for their differences, they had wondered about their past, and about the people left behind when their ancestors were loaded onto ships.

Now, descendants of those left behind had come to Bermuda to answer what questions they could.

Like the lush plants on the island, the family tree was flowering, each branch reaching out eagerly to the other.

“We did not come here just because you asked us to,” said Mashpee Wampanoag Ramona Peters, one of a delegation of 40 American Indians who had come to St. David’s in June to reconnect cultural ties. “We have been looking for you for 300 years.

“We missed you.”

Historical evidence supports the notion that among the 500 or more North American Indian slaves shipped to Bermuda in the 17th century, many were Pequot and Wampanoag, including the wife and son of Metacom, known as King Philip, the tribal leader whose death in 1676 ended the bloody King Philip’s War.

Delivered to St. George’s, the earliest settlement of the British colony on Bermuda, and sold as livestock, the Indians were sent to live on a neighboring island, St. David’s, where they worked as laborers, farmers, fishermen, and boat builders to support the greater population. As the colony expanded over the major land masses among more than 300 tiny islands, the slaves remained on St. David’s, where many of their descendants live today, though the exact number is hard to define. St. David’s itself has a population of 2,500, but descendants of the Indian slaves live all over Bermuda.

Cultural connectionsMany of those descendants had come earlier to the cricket club to participate in a two-day cultural festival that included traditional singing and dancing. More than 500 people assembled on the cricket field to watch and learn about their native heritage.

A young native of Bermuda joins the circle of dance during a festival at the St. David’s Cricket Club. The celebration drew more than 500 people, including tribes from Mashpee and New England. (Staff photo by )

Before the public festival began, the two groups met for a private ceremony at a place known as “Dark Bottom.” The clearing is now a children’s playground, but is known by the locals as the place where the islanders used to gather around a fire, chanting songs and dancing to the beat of a drum late into the night.

It was, according to the stories heard by St. Clair “Brinky” Tucker, likely the last gasp of Indian culture regularly practiced on the island before the onset of U.S. military occupation during World War I. That was when construction began on a major military base that would take up almost a third of the island and serve the United States for nearly a century. Tucker is chairman of the St. David’s Island Indian Reconnection Committee, a group of islanders who have coordinated the effort to find their links to American Indians.

“The military was good in one respect because they brought money and an improved standard of living here,” he said. “But in another sense, we lost some of our cultural richness.”

Dark Bottom is a long way from 55 Acres, the Mashpee Wampanoag spiritual gathering spot, where sea breezes drift through a scrub pine forest. Dark Bottom is surrounded by palm trees, untrained hibiscus and a village of pastel houses. The air is hot and tropical.

Now, Tall Oak Weeden, Wampanoag-Pequot historian, struck a match to a ready pile of dry kindling and seasoned cedar, and said, “I am rekindling the council fires darkened so long ago.”

Two circles, the visiting tribal people inside, and outside the people of St. David’s, stood separately until each could be “smudged” with the smoke from a smoldering thatch of sweet grass and sage carried around by Peters and Arron Goodday, a White Mountain Apache who was also part of the visiting group. They were also given a pinch of tobacco.

“Pray over it,” they were told, before the tobacco was collected and tossed together into the fire, the prayers of the participants channeled to the creator on the fingers of smoke.

Then the two circles became one.

A song for ancestorsThe Mystic River Drum group, led by Sioux singer Kenneth Merrick, performed an honor song, “to tell the ancestors, whose spirits are here with us, that we have found them.”

“It moved me to tears,” Wayne St. John, who was raised on St. David’s, said later. “It was the realization that we had reached this point, a point that seems so far removed from slavery and oppression. I was overwhelmed. I could not speak.”

“I got the sense that all the energy that must have been dormant in that field for so many years had been released.”

St. John, told since childhood he was descended from King Philip, said he always felt his people were not only robbed of their freedom, but also of their tribal roots. On that day in Dark Bottom, he said, those roots were restored.

“We have begun a new tradition,” St. John said. “It is not exactly what it was, but we have a better sense of where we belong and who we are. The British deliberately tried to erase that. Now we have come full circle.”

Following the private ceremony, the public festival began by honoring the memory of the ancestors who did not live to experience the reconnection. A floral wreath was marched down to the bay and tossed into the water. As the somber group paraded back across the field, some wiped tears from their faces.

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“We really need this here,” Corrine Swan said. Her grandfather was born on St. David’s. “I have always wanted to know the real history.”

It was a history told, in part, in performance.

Tall Oak had brought a group of 15 singers and dancers, a mix of Wampanoag, Narragansett and Pequot. The Mystic River Drum, a group of western style Native American singers and dancers, attended courtesy of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation.

Initially shy of the strange beat and unfamiliar dance steps, St. David’s islanders were easily coaxed out onto the field to learn a traditional round dance. Once out of their chairs, they embraced the culture enthusiastically.

Many questions, many answersWhen the drumming stopped, the dancers left the cricket field and began to mingle with the spectators. Children dared to touch the fringe or stroke a feather on the performers’ regalia while their parents flooded their tribal guests with questions, photos and stories to tell.

Tall Oak, who had been featured in news stories for weeks before the event, was an instant celebrity, swarmed by those eager to become validated by his acknowledgment.

“This is my grandmum, her sister, and her other sister,” Vernon Brown said, his accent a mixture of British and Rastafarian influence. Brown proudly fanned out three aged photographs of women he hoped Tall Oak would recognize as similar to his own people.

In a land where no tribal organization exists, it is often a physical distinction that hints at Indian ancestry. The three women had fair skin and dark curly hair that was common among those from St. David’s. With skin tones ranging from fair to dark, they were not considered white. Long, black, straight or wavy hair distinguished them from the country’s Africans.

But it is only assumption. A lack of documentation of slave origins, marriages and births has left a hole in the fabric that weaves the people of St. David’s into their Indian heritage.

Tucker said it was primarily the Indian slaves – though there was intermarriage with African slaves – who settled St. David’s. He said the Indian lineage was maintained so strongly partly because of isolation; the island was cut off from the rest of Bermuda, accessible only by ferry until 1941, when the U.S. Army built a base connecting it to the mainland by a bridge.

“In St. David’s, we like to say there are many branches, one tree,” he said of the close interrelations of St. David’s five major families. “Still today we remain very clannish.”

Watching the Indian dancers perform on the cricket field, in step with the rhythm of the drum and a song so old ancestors many generations past could have sung along, Dellesha Fox felt like she belonged.

The next day, the 11-year-old attended the Father’s Day service at St. Luke’s Church in St. David’s, proudly wearing an oversized commemorative T-shirt from the festival.

“I have always been told my ancestors are Indians,” said the little girl who looks remarkably similar to the children of the Oakley family in Mashpee. Her thick black hair draped down the purple T-shirt, flanking the reconnection logo of two brown hands reaching toward each other over a camp fire. One hand wears the shackles of slavery.

Dellesha said the music and dancing are things she hopes to learn and carry on as part of the traditions she has already come to love about being a native of St. David’s.

A thirst for informationOn the last evening of reconnection events, more than 100 islanders attended the informational meeting at the cricket club.

They came seeking answers, the return of something lost, to be made whole after hundreds of years of being apart.

“With no identity, there is no direction, no pride,” Mira Ingmann said. She grew up on St. David’s and recalls being ridiculed in other parts of Bermuda. “It is what is needed here.”

“I look out into this room and I see so many people I know,” Tall Oak said, remarking on the physical similarities between the St. David’s people and those he knows in Mashpee. “We are all the same people. Our eyes don’t lie.”

Mashantucket Pequot council member Michael Thomas also senses a close relationship to the islanders.

“It has been like a family reunion,” he said, “because that is just what this is to me.”

Ramona Peters gave a brief history lesson, beginning with the colonization of the Wampanoag, Narragansett and Pequot territories. She told of the end of the Pequot War, the massacre, in 1637, of the Pequot village in Mystic, Conn., where Colonial forces surrounded the fort and burned alive as many as 600 people, mostly women, children and elderly.

“That kind of savagery was unheard of,” she said.

“It was the beginning of the effort to dismantle the power of our people,” Tall Oak said.

To prevent further resistance, the Colonists passed a law that Indian men over the age of 14 be sold into slavery, with Bermuda specified as a destination, perhaps as an effort to repay the colony for helping fund the Mayflower pilgrimage from Holland in 1620.

Native American slaves arrived in Bermuda as cargo, listed simply as “Indian man” or “Indian woman.” They were originally called Mohawks as a generic term, though it is highly unlikely any Mohawks were enslaved on the islands at all Tall Oak said.

“I can remember as a child they would say, ‘There goes that little Mohawk from St. David’s,'” said Madge Hunt, who has lived on the island all of her life.

Most St. David’s natives have been told by their parents and grandparents they are descended from American Indians. They turn to aged photos of stiffly posed ancestors who, they are certain, look Native American and are at the very least not African or British.

They turn to photos – and to stories. It is those stories, Tall Oak said, that should show the St. David’s people the way to their past. Even though historical archives fail to document their ancestral lines, he said, the oral histories passed down through generations, over hundreds of years, serve as proof enough for him. The stories that elders would tell their children, and that those children would pass on to their children, are more significant, he said, than any written word.

http://archive.capecodonline.com/special/tribeslink/emissed14.htm

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Slavery and Sanctuary in Colonial Florida

by Jean M. West

From the time of Columbus’ voyages, Spanish colonizers relied on slave labor to make their American empire profitable. Initially, they enslaved indigenous natives of the Caribbean. However, the decimation of Native American populations by disease, war, and slavery fueled the African slave trade to a great degree after 1520. The Spanish were part of the economy’s demand side in the Atlantic African slave trade, while the Portuguese monopolized the supply side from 1440 to 1640. The Portuguese dominated the African Atlantic slave trade due to their exploration of Africa at the earliest years of the “age of discovery” and due to the papal line of demarcation, confirmed by the Treaty of Tordesillas (June 7, 1494), that divided land and trade routes discovered by Catholic nations along an imaginary line approximately 50° W longitude. African slaves began working in mines in the Spanish Antilles as early as 1505.

During the First Spanish Period (1565-1763), the Spanish used ladinos (slaves brought from Spain who had been trained in a craft or as domestics), Native American slaves as agricultural workers, and bozales, (Africans who performed heavy labor in field and mines). Ladinos could live and work away from their owners for pay under an arrangement called jornal. Spanish haciendas during this period used Native American slave or encomienda (tribute) labor rather than African slaves in large numbers. For example, the inventory of Governor Benito Ruíz de Salazar Vallecilla’s hacienda, where Native American workers raised corn, wheat and swine, reveals a single Angolan slave and a mulatto overseer. This in itself is unusual since the Spanish preferred to keep Native American and African slaves apart and even more rarely allowed Africans to supervise Native American workers.

http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_florida_slavery.htm

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In 1739, South Carolina countered by offering whites and “free Indians” rewards for raiding south of the Savannah River to return fugitive African slaves (ten-40£) or scalp them (20£). Part of the impetus was the Stono Rebellion, a slave revolt that broke out in South Carolina on September 9, 1739. Early that morning, about 20 slaves from Stono River armed themselves and began marching south proclaiming “Liberty!” Led by an Angolan named Jemmy, they attracted 80 more slaves, some of whom were probably Native American. As the slaves marched, they burned homes and killed 23 white South Carolinians. A militia force of 120 caught up with the group late in the afternoon. In the battle that followed, the militia killed 30 slaves outright, while another 30 escaped. Over the next months, Indian agents assisted in capturing the remainder, most of whom were executed. Contemporaries such as Colonel Miles Brewton asserted, “That the Negroes would not have made this Insurrection had they not depended on St. Augustine for a Place of Reception afterwards, was very certain; and that the Spaniards had a Hand in prompting them to this particular Action, there was but little room to doubt.”

Spanish law defined slavery as form of labor in the colonial economy rather than in racial or ethnic terms. Unlike the English, the Spanish used white European slaves and imposed slavery as a sentence for crimes committed by whites. Notwithstanding this distinction, Spanish administrators were not entirely color-blind. They endeavored to separate Native Americans from African slaves; divided militia units based on racial mixture; and tended to punish petty criminals of African background more severely than those of Spanish heritage. While the life of a slave in colonial Florida was not necessarily better than the life of a British slave in Virginia, the institutions of government and church offered them better legal protection and far greater opportunity for freedom.

http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_florida_slavery.htm

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Spanish Slavery versus English Slavery Their experiences fighting the Muslims in the 1400s shaped the Spanish view of slavery, which they viewed to be accidental and unnatural rather than a hereditary condition. Following the Moorish Wars, the Spanish and Portuguese imported 100,000 slaves to the Iberian Peninsula. These African slaves assimilated into the Iberian population, and, consequently, the peninsulars (Spanish-born settlers) who colonized Florida typically had at least one African great-great grandparent.

In contrast British, and subsequently U.S., law viewed slavery as a permanent, hereditary, and eventually race-defined condition. Enforcement of slavery and slave codes largely rested with each slave’s owner. There were no laws comparable to those of the Spanish Crown or Catholic Church that encouraged lenient treatment of slaves or discouraged brutal or arbitrary treatment of slaves. Much like their approach to their colonial economies, the British-American approach to slavery was far more laissez-faire or autonomous than that of Spain. While the colonial government would intervene in cases of crime, accused slaves did not have the same rights as white defendants. For instance, slaves’ testimony was not admissible in court. In the case of slave rebellion, colonial assemblies responded with “Negro Acts,” prohibiting slaves from growing food, assembling, earning money, or being educated. Because slavery was race-linked, English colonies passed additional laws punishing interracial marriages (miscegenation) and relegating all persons of mixed blood to second-class status, even if they were free.

http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_florida_slavery.htm

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Spivey, Michael.

Black Indian Slave Narratives (review)

The American Indian Quarterly – Volume 29, Number 3&4, Summer/Fall 2005, pp. 718-720

University of Nebraska Press Michael Spivey – Black Indian Slave Narratives (review) – The American Indian Quarterly 29.3 & 4 The American Indian Quarterly 29.3 & 4 (2005) 718-720 Patrick Minges, ed. Black Indian Slave Narratives. Winston-Salem NC: John F. Blair Publishers, 2004. 200 pp. Paper, $10.95. There has been a growing literature over the past decade concerning the extent and nature of Native American slavery within the United States. This literature provides a platform from which to ignite debates within the academy over old conceptual frameworks, which held a binary view of African Americans as enslaved within the borders of the United States, while Native American slaves were systematically exported to the West Indies and beyond in return for imported goods. Generally, this argument still prevails in many textbooks on race and ethnicity today. Under this modernist, binary vision, the cultures and histories of African Americans and Native Americans were seen as separate, making us blind to the complexities and contradictions of this controversial relationship. Spurred on by the emerging postmodern deconstruction of historical…

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/american_indian_quarterly/v029/29.3spivey.html

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The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 | Book Reviews

Published by EH.NET (April 2003)

Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. xviii + 444 pp. $45.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 0-300-08754-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Peter C. Mancall, Department of History, University of Southern California.

It comes as no surprise to state that slavery was a crucial part of the economy of the southeastern colonies of British North America. As historians and economists have long recognized, the enslavement of Africans imported from Africa or the West Indies was crucial for the development of plantation agriculture in the region. By 1708 individuals of African descent amounted to approximately one-half of the population of South Carolina, and by 1720 or so their numbers constituted two-thirds of the population. Their presence gave this region a unique demographic profile in the British North American colonies. That story, told brilliantly by the historian Peter Wood in his classic study from 1974 entitled Black Majority, has dominated scholars’ understanding of forced labor in this area.

Allan Gallay, a professor of history at Western Washington University, has now complicated this narrative. During the same decades that Carolina became a stable province, its colonists looked to Native Americans to provide labor for them. Often this labor was coerced by nothing more than the lure of the market itself: Native Americans hunted whitetail deer for colonists or offered food to them in exchange for manufactured goods from Europe. But this free labor was not sufficient to satisfy colonists, who needed people to produce crops for export. English colonists recognized that selling captured Indians was doubly beneficial. By exporting captives to other parts of the Atlantic basin as slaves, Carolinians made a profit and removed individuals and groups who might have stood in the way of colonial expansion into the interior.

Gallay’s book is more than a history of efforts by British (and other European) colonists to enslave and sell Native Americans and then, eventually, to bring that noxious commerce to its end. In fact, the vast majority of the book has little to do with the Indian slave trade itself. What Gallay offers here is a thorough, up-to-date, readable and engaging history of Carolina — and much of the old southeast — from approximately 1670 to 1717. There is much here on diplomacy and debates between colonists, including many details that reveal how difficult it was for Carolina’s proprietors to maintain order in the nascent colony. Gallay’s real insights about the local slave trade are primarily confined to the penultimate chapter in the book.

Yet the fact that Gallay, as the journalists’ phrase has it, has buried his lead should not put off economists and historians who want to understand the colonial southeast. Quite the contrary: Gallay’s mastery of the primary and secondary source literature provides readers with abundant information about crucial colonial politicians, traders, and missionaries. He makes readers realize that it is irresponsible to lump all Native peoples together under the heading “Indian.” Some of those Native peoples, captured in war and sold into bondage, ended their lives far from their ancestral homes. Others, also Native, were crucial players in this trade, a part of the story that echoes John Thornton’s analysis of the participation of some Africans in the Atlantic slave trade (see his Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, second edition, Cambridge University Press, 1998). Gallay provides a series of maps of the entire southeast, a great service to the many readers who will not know the location of particular indigenous nations. He shows where Indian slaves went and extracts valuable clues from the writings of perceptive observers and from legal codes — some of them the product of northern colonists who came to fear southern Indian slaves and sought to prevent their continued importation. He recognizes the crucial role of conflict, especially the devastations of the Yamasee War that raged from 1714 to 1717. Further, Gallay writes with a sense of urgency that should be welcomed by readers who have grown tired of reading lightly revised dissertations that would have made better articles than full-length books.

Still, the part of the book that will be of most interest to economic historians will be the chapter in which Gallay provides some estimates for the number of Native American slaves. Gallay claims that “the drive to control Indian labor — which extended to every nook and cranny of the South — was inextricably connected to the growth of the plantations and that the trade in Indian slaves was at the center of the English empire’s development in the American South. The trade in Indian slaves was the most important factor affecting the South in the period 1670 to 1715: its impact was felt from Arkansas to the Carolinas and south to the Florida Keys” (p. 7). He adds that the “Indian slave trade provided the strongest link between the South’s many peoples in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries” (p. 9). These are bold claims that can only be supported by careful demonstration of the ways that the Indian slave trade worked and some quantitative evidence revealing the actual number of individuals captured and sold for their labor.

To his substantial credit, Gallay shows how the business operated and he makes a valiant effort to estimate the number of individuals enslaved. The evidence enables him to describe how individuals and even groups became ensnared. But it is less useful as a source for quantitative measures for the entire Indian slave trade. The most important numbers appear in a single table (on p. 299). Here Gallay carefully separates the number of slaves from various places or indigenous nations and estimates that from 1670 to 1715 there were between 24,000 and 51,000 Natives enslaved in the entire “South.” The region includes Florida, which lost the most individuals to slavery, through the southeast to the lower Mississippi Valley. There were significant differences between the trade in Native slaves and the African slave trade. Gallay believes that the commerce in Indian bodies and labor “was akin more to the resale of Africans from the West Indies than to the African slave trade” (p. 314). But despite the differences in terms of final destinations and the scale of the trade, Gallay recognizes that slavery in this period in the Americas meant the same for Africans and Native Americans: “removal from their homes, denial of their rights and basic humanity, subjection to lifelong servitude, and the passage of slave status from mother to child” (p. 314).

The trade in Native slaves came to an end when colonists devoted more of their efforts to purchasing Africans. By the end of the 1710s the British came to realize that the capture and sale of Indian slaves was more difficult for them than participating in the transatlantic African slave trade. The enslavement of Indians was also a problem for the Spanish and French in the region. Yet though Gallay describes these other Europeans’ attitudes towards the taking of captives and the use of forced labor, in the end this is primarily a book about the British and their ability to overcome internal divisions, ignore their earlier claims that they would avoid mistreating Indians, and embrace a system of labor exploitation that sent Native men, women, and children far from their homes. Later scholars might be able to provide more accurate measures of the scale of the trade, but Gallay’s work will remain crucial for anyone who wants to know how the various peoples of the South interacted in the colonial period.

Peter C. Mancall, Professor of History at the University of Southern California and the President, from 2002 to 2004, of the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction, is the author (with Eric Hinderaker) of At the Edge of Empire: The British Backcountry in North America, forthcoming in May 2003 from Johns Hopkins University Press.

• Geographic area: North America (7)
• Time period: 17th Century (5), 18th Century (6)
• Subject: Economywide Country Studies and Comparative History (F), Historical Demography, including Migration (J), Servitude and Slavery (N)

Copyright © 2003 by EH.NET. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and EH.Net. For other permission, please contact the EH.NET Administrator (admin@eh.net; telephone 513-529-2229; fax: 513-529-6992). Published by EH.NET Apr 4 2003 All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://eh.net/bookreviews/.

Citation

Peter C. Mancall, “Review of Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717.” EH.Net Economic History Services, Apr 4 2003. URL: http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/0615

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1542 Under pressure from religious leaders, especially the Dominican friar Bartolome de Las Casas, Spanish Emperor Carlos V attempted to impose “New Laws” on the Spanish colonies, ending the encomienda system that gave settlers the right to Indian slave labor.

1546 The “New Laws” barring Indian enslavement were repealed at the insistence of New World colonists, who developed a society and economy dependent on slave labor

1637

In the colony of Massachusetts the Pequod Indians were the first slaves, but as they “would not endure the yoke,” they were sent to the Bermudas and exchanged for Negroes in the hope that the latter would bear slavery more patiently. The first exchange of Indians for Negroes was made in 1637, the first year of the Pequod war and was doubtless kept up for many years.

On May 26, Captains John Mason and John Underhill attacked and burned Pequot forts at Mystic, Connecticut, massacring 600 Indians and starting the Pequot War.

On June 5, English settlers in New England massacred a Pequot Indian village.

1639

Captain William Pierce of Salem, Massachusetts sailed to the West Indies and exchanged Indian slaves for black slaves.

1704 On June 23, former Governor of South Carolina, James Moore, led a force of 50 British, and 1,000 Creek Indians against Spanish settlements. They attacked a Mission in Northwestern Florida. They took many Indians as slaves and killed Father Manuel de Mendoza.

1709 A slave market was erected at the foot of Wall Street and here Negroes and Indians, men, women and children were daily declared the property of the highest cash bidder.

1711 Hostilities break out between Native Americans and settlers in North Carolina after the massacre of settlers there. The conflict, known as the Tuscarora Indian War will last two years.

1715 Yamasee tribes attack and kill several hundred Carolina settlers.

1716 South Carolina settlers and their Cherokee allies attack and defeat the Yamassee.

http://www.legendsofamerica.com/NA-Timeline.html

[Ga-Nc Collins]

1752 In the 1752 census, 147 “Indian” slaves — 87 females and 60 males — were listed as living in French households in what would later be called Illinois. These people were from different cultural groups than the local Native American population and were often captives of war.

1754 On April 9, an Indian slave trader sent a letter to South Carolina Governor J. Glenn asking for permission to use one group of Indians to fight another: “We want no pay, only what we can take and plunder, and what slaves we take to be our own.”

1758 On August 1, the first Indian reservation in North America was established by the New Jersey Colonial Assembly.

1790

The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act is passed, placingnearly all interaction between Indians and non-Indians under federal, rather than state control, established the boundaries of Indian country, protected Indian lands against non-Indian aggression, subjected trading with Indians to federal regulation, and stipulated that injuries against Indians by non-Indians was a federal crime. The conduct of Indians among themselves, while in Indian country, was left entirely to the tribes. These Acts were renewed periodically until 1834.

Military battle between US Army and Shawnee. The army, some 1,500 strong, invaded Shawnee territory, in what is now western Ohio. The Americans were defeated in 1791 after suffering 900 casualties, 600 of whom died.

On March 1, the first U.S. Census count included slave and free Negroes. Indians were not included.

[Ga-Nc Collins]

1820 By this year, more than 20,000 Indians lived in virtual slavery on the California missions.

1821

South Carolina settlers and their Cherokee allies attack and defeat the Yamassee.

The U.S. government began moving what it called the “Five Civilized Tribes” of southeast America (Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw) to lands west of the Mississippi River.

1823

Johnson v. McIntosh Supreme Court decision – This case involved the validity of land sold by tribal chiefs to private persons in 1773 and 1775. The Court held that that Indian tribes had no power to grant lands to anyone other than the federal government. The government, in turn, held title to all Indian lands based upon the “doctrine of discovery” – the belief that initial “discovery” of lands gave title to the government responsible for the discovery. Thus, Indian “…rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished, and their power to dispose of the soil, at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased, was denied by the original fundamental principle, that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it.”

1824 The Indian Office federalagency was established by the Secretary of War and operated under the administration of the War Department. The Office becomes the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in 1849.

1825 Creek chief William McIntosh signs treaty ceding Creek lands to the U.S. and agrees to vacate by 1826; other Creeks repudiate the treaty and kill him.

1827 Creek Indians sign a second treaty ceding lands in western Georgia

1831 to 1832 Two U.S. Supreme Court cases change the nature of tribal sovereignty by ruling that Indian tribes were not foreign nations, but rather were “domestic dependent nations.” As such, both cases provided the basis for the federal protection of Indian tribes, or the federal trust relationship or responsibility.

1831

• Black Hawk of the Sauk and Fox tribes agrees to move west of Mississippi.
• Cherokee Nation v. Georgia – The Cherokee Nation sued the State of Georgia for passing laws and enacting policies that not only limited their sovereignty, but which were forbidden in the Constitution. The Court’s decision proclaimed that Indians were neither US citizens, nor independent nations, but rather were “domestic dependent nations” whose relationship to the US “resembles that of a ward to his guardian.” In this case, the federal trust responsibility was discussed for the first time.
• On December 6, President Andrew Jackson, in his Third Annual Message to Congress, praised the beneficial results of Indian Removal for the States directly affected and the Union as a whole, as well as being “equally advantageous to the Indians.”
• On December 25, a force of Black Seminole Indians defeated U.S. troops at Okeechobee during the Second Seminole War.

1832

• [FONT=Arial]Worcester v. Georgia – A missionary from Vermont who was working on Cherokee territory sued the State of Georgia which had arrested him, claiming that the state had no authority over him within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation. The Court, which ruled in Worchester’s favor, held that state laws did not extend to Indian country. Such a ruling clarified that Indian tribes were under protection of the federal government, as in Cherokee v. Georgia.

[blackindiangirl]

From where does your wife’s Richardsons originate from? I have Richardsons on both my father’s and mother’s sides.

[PowhatanBlood]

good read…

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