A Liberal Dose, October 26, 2023 "How America's Bloodiest Forgotten War Affected Slavery"

A Liberal Dose

October 26, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“How America’s Bloodiest Forgotten War Affected Slavery”

Last week I talked about how slavery started in the English colonies, and the fact that for much of the 1600s plantation labor was done by three groups -African slaves, white indentured servants, and American Indian captives/slaves -who not only worked closely together in the fields, but who learned from one another, interacted socially, and often intermarried. By about 1720, that had changed.

The widespread use of indentured servants on plantations ended after Bacon’s Rebellion (1676). If you recall from earlier columns, in the early 1600s most of those white indentured servants had not lived to the end of their seven-year contracts, due to disease, hardship, and Indian wars. By the late 1600s conditions had improved, and most of them did survive. Which meant that, suddenly, there were large numbers of free, unemployed, landless poor whites who now wanted the land they had been promised, and it was mostly already taken. This led to an armed uprising of -not only angry landless whites -but also angry landless free blacks who wanted the same thing. The rebels actually burned Jamestown to the ground. After that, it no longer seemed like a good idea to planters to import large numbers of indentured servants from Europe. The war also led authorities in Virginia -and soon in other Southern colonies -to start passing laws meant to prevent poor white and black workers from teaming up again. Interracial marriage was made illegal, and free blacks found their rights being whittled away to insert a wedge between the two groups.

After that, then, most of the plantation labor was done by African and Native American slaves. The latter were still being used extensively -in 1700, there were more Indian slaves than black ones in Charleston, South Carolina (the colony with the most slaves overall). From the mid-1650s to the early 1700s, the English had been at the heart of a massive Indian slave trade in the Southern colonies -the same situation that Europeans had exacerbated in West Africa. At first, English authorities and planters would buy extra captives taken by Indians raiding enemy tribes, but eventually the royal governor of South Carolina actually made contracts with certain tribes (and helped arm them), such as the Westo and the Shawnee, to provide slaves to planters. These tribes then made perpetual war on everyone around them, actually wiping out many of the tribes in northern Florida. Again, as with West Africa, this resulted in social chaos.

Incidentally, most of the founders of the Carolina colony were second or third sons of wealthy plantation owners in the English colonies of Barbados, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. They couldn’t inherit their fathers’ estates, so they set up a new colony -and brought with them the much harsher, deadlier slavery practices common in the Caribbean. The South Carolinians operated lucrative rice plantations, which required far more workers than tobacco did.

The Indians figured out that it was against the best interests of all the tribes to be set against each other in the slave trade, so in 1712 virtually all the tribes in the Southeast (except the Cherokees, who tended to stay isolated) stopped raiding each other and decided to wipe out the English colonists of South Carolina instead. In the Yamasee War, so named for one of the leading tribes, they almost succeeded. Only the fact that the English persuaded the Cherokees to come in on their side turned the tide and saved the colony.

After that, enslaving Indians also seemed like a bad idea. After all, if an African slave escaped he would have no idea where he was, whereas Indians knew the area. Africans were hardier than Indians, who lacked resistance to many diseases. Most importantly, an African slave did not have large numbers of heavily armed friends and neighbors living right down the road. Slavery became an exclusively African experience in the colonies -and laws increasingly reflected that.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

 

 

A Liberal Dose, Oct. 19, 2023 "1619: How Slavery Started in the English Colonies"

 

A Liberal Dose

October 19, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“1619: How Slavery Started in the English Colonies”

 

In the last couple of weeks, I have talked about the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, how it started, and the role Portugal and Spain played in its expansion. This week I’m going to discuss it in the context of England and her colonies -the antecedent of the United States, so closer to home for most of us.

England was late getting into the colonizing game (if you don’t count Ireland and Scotland). The first successful English colony in the New World was Jamestown, established in 1607. As we’ve discussed before, most of the labor in the early days of that colony was performed by poor white indentured servants, who had essentially sold themselves into servitude (usually for seven years) for passage to the colony, in hopes of one day being free and owning land.

Twelve years later, a ship called the White Lion landed in the Virginia colony. It was an English privateer operating under a Dutch letter of marque -in other words, the ship and its sailors were English, but they had a license from the Netherlands authorizing them to attack Dutch enemies in their name. The English and Dutch were allies against the Spanish and Portuguese. The White Lion had captured a Portuguese ship and taken her cargo, which included African slaves (remember how active Portugal was in the slave trade). The White Lion’s captain traded about two dozen of these slaves to the Virginia colonists for food and supplies. This was the first incidence of the slave trade in English colonies. It is NOT correct that this was the first instance of slavery in North America, as many modern sources claim; the Spanish had been bringing African slaves to North America for a century or more by that time. It was the first slavery in an ENGLISH colony in North America.

Being new to the game, it took the Virginia colonists a while to get the hang of it. They treated these first Africans as indentured servants, freeing most of them after a few years; they and their children were the beginning of a population of free blacks in the Virginia colony. Meanwhile, starting in earnest after the bloody war with the Powhatans of 1622, the Virginians were enslaving captured Native Americans. A shipment of over a hundred more African slaves arrived in 1628, and before very long the consensus was that Africans were to be enslaved for life, not temporarily. For roughly fifty years, the forced labor in Virginia tobacco plantations was a shared experience between three groups: African slaves, poor white indentured servants, and Native American captives. They worked in the fields together, socialized together, and frequently intermarried. Free blacks, meanwhile, had many of the same rights as other colonists.

Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, the English established colonies in Barbados in 1627, the Bahamas in 1648, and had taken Jamaica from the Spanish by 1661. These colonies became home to sugar plantations, and were operated in the same way the Spanish operated theirs- with a high death rate for the African slaves due to harsh treatment.

A scholar named Gary Taylor did a fascinating study about twenty years ago, published as “Buying Whiteness.” He did a computerized search through digital copies of everything published in London in the 1600s, looking for instances of people being referred to as “white.” He found virtually no such instances in the early 1600s, then they started popping up in the mid-1600s, and by the late 1600s they were extremely common. In other words, the timeline of English people thinking of themselves as “white” (which no one, really, is) perfectly matched the timeline of the growth of slavery in English colonies. Paintings changed, too- instead of having ruddy complexions in portraits, English were painted as almost alabaster white. Did their complexion change? No. Their self-perception changed. They were now defining themselves AGAINST someone -someone they had come to view as inferior.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

 

Killers of the Flower Moon, by... Joe Simon and Jack Kirby?? And Alex Toth??

 

October 20th is the premiere of the newest Martin Scorsese film, Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio. Described in its wikipedia entry as an "epic Western crime drama film," it is an adaptation of the bestselling 2017 nonfiction book by David Grann. The story centers around the murders of at least 20 (perhaps many more) members of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma in the early 1920s, by unscrupulous white men after their oil money. It also happened to be the first major case investigated by the newly-formed FBI. The series of events has faded into obscurity for most Americans (except the Osage people), with most having no idea such a thing ever happened. Grann and Scorcese are not the first to tell the story, though... it was the topic of Chickasaw author Linda Hogan's debut novel, Mean Spirit, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1991. Long before that, in 1959, it was one of the plot threads of the movie The FBI Story, starring James Stewart. 

 

And before that... it was the subject of a 1948 story in a crime comic book, Headline Comics, by the legendary team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, who at the beginning of that decade had co-created Captain America. The story was actually an ideal comic book subject, as by 1948 superheroes had mostly fallen by the wayside and two of the biggest genres replacing them in the racks that year were crime stories and westerns. This tale was both rolled into one.

And then it was in the comics again... when Dell did a movie adaptation of The FBI Story in 1959, by another comics legend, Alex Toth, in Four Color #1069. 

Here are the pages relating to the Osage murders from that Dell comic by Toth: 

And here's the 1948 version by Simon and Kirby:

A Liberal Dose, Oct. 12 2023 "How Slavery Differed in the New World"

 

A Liberal Dose

October 12, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“How Slavery Differed in the New World”

 

This week we are going to see just how the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was different from the various forms of slavery that existed for thousands of years before, and even from the Arab Slave Trade that was taking Africans away from their home continent at the same time.

The Spanish “discovered” the New World in 1492, and Columbus immediately began enslaving the Native Americans he encountered, paving the way for Spain to start their own sugar plantations in the Caribbean islands. Just two years later, in 1494, the pope divided all undiscovered lands between Spain and Portugal, with Portugal getting Brazil and many territories in Asia, while Spain got to keep the Philippines and the rest of North and South America (a pretty good deal for them, as it turned out).

Within a few decades, a movement arose in Spain protesting the harsh treatment of indigenous people, and especially their enslavement. The principal figure in this movement was Bartolomè de las Casas, who as a young man had served as a soldier under Columbus and was repulsed by what he witnessed, and who later entered the priesthood and spent his life fighting for the rights of the people Columbus had called “los Indios.” This led to a ban on enslaving Natives (though they were still terribly mistreated) in Spanish territories. Unfortunately, that led to an increased reliance on the African slave trade, which the Portuguese had already been using heavily.

Spain and Portugal wanted all the African slaves money could buy (and they were making plenty of money from their new possessions to do so). The demand escalated -there were a LOT of Spanish settlements established in the New World. In particular, though, slave labor was used in the Spanish holdings in the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, etc.) and the Portuguese colony of Brazil -places where the incredibly lucrative sugar was grown on plantations. There was a high labor turnover rate -a polite way to say death rate -because the growing season was year-round, meaning that -unlike in places like the English colony of Virginia, which had tobacco plantations -there was no winter lull during which slaves could have lighter duties and recover their strength. Spanish and Portuguese planters -and later English and French ones when those countries took over some Caribbean islands -figured out that it was cheaper to work your slaves to death and then buy more than to invest the money it would take in clothing, food, and healthcare to keep them alive.

The result was that, of the 13 million Africans sold from their homes in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 11 million were sent to the New World (the rest mostly to Europe to be house servants). Of those 11 million, about 500,000 (or around 5%) were sent to the English colonies on the North American mainland. Almost all the rest were sent to South America (mostly Brazil) or the Caribbean, where they would lead short, difficult lives. Meanwhile, the demand for new slaves went through the roof, leading African tribes and kingdoms to engage in perpetual, large scale warfare with one another. Whereas captives had once been a by-product of occasional war, they now became the primary purpose of constant war. This was ultimately due to the demand created by a global capitalist economy (a brand-new thing) and the colonial/imperial forces making it turn. It was like slavery as it existed before had been give a massive dose of steroids and plunged into overdrive. Slaves were no longer just house servants or public labor for the government or limited businesses like shipyards or mines. They were cogs in a massive, global agricultural economy that gobbled up exponentially more and more human chattel. Nor should we delude ourselves that their forced labor was NECESSARY; it was only necessary insofar as being cheaper and producing more profit for owners and investors. 

There had never been anything like it.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

 

A Liberal Dose, Oct. 5, 2023 "How the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Began"

 

A Liberal Dose

October 5, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“How the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Began”

 

Last week I told you about the Arab slave trade, which involved mostly captives from sub-Saharan Africa but also involved some other groups of people, including Europeans captured on or near the Mediterranean (perhaps as many as a million over a couple of centuries), and which lasted around a thousand years. It has been estimated that as many as 17 million people were sold as slaves in that millennium. How does that compare with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, wherein Europeans transported African slaves to the New World? That has been estimated at around 13 million -but over only 350 years. So, during that 350 years, Europeans were trading two-and-a-half times as many slaves as were their Arab counterparts. So that’s one big difference -sheer scale. Let’s discuss how that happened.

It all started in the “Age of Discovery,” roughly the early-to-mid 1400s. Europeans had been exposed to luxury items from the Far East (like silks and spices -and sugar) during the Crusades in the Middle East. It was impossible to trade directly with East Asian lands like India and China, because the Muslim-controlled Middle East was in-between Europe and those far eastern markets. It’s fair to say that European Christendom and Islamic lands were not on the best terms, post-Crusades. It was therefore either impossible to get at those Far Eastern trade goods, or you could only get them by going through Middle Eastern middlemen who had a considerable markup attached. This is why so many Europeans in the 1400s were wanting to explore oceans, hoping to find a way to bypass the Muslim World and get at those treasured items. There was also a strong desire for access to the gold and gems (and, later, coffee) of southern Africa -and Muslims were blocking them there, too.

Enter Prince Henry of Portugal, alias Henry the Navigator. Henry supervised the construction of a new, lighter and more maneuverable ship, the caravel -and invested money in the training and hiring of cartographers and navigators, convinced they could make their way down the (unknown to Europeans at the time) coast of Africa and find the source of all that gold. The plan was to sail west and swing wide around northwest Africa and the Arabs and Berbers there, looping back east south of the Sahara Desert.

While making that initial swing into the Atlantic, though, the Portuguese stumbled across several uninhabited islands previously unknown to them, namely Madeira and the Azores (still part of Portugal today). These semi-tropical islands, it turns out, were capable of growing sugarcane. It would no longer be necessary to buy it from India or intermediaries. The Portuguese government encouraged Portuguese farmers to move to the islands to work in cane fields -to be transplanted, in other words. Which is why such farms began to be called, in English, plantations. However, it proved hard to convince even poor Portuguese people to move out to the middle of nowhere for very low wages, so another tack was tried -slavery. Initially, the slave labor consisted of the native people of the nearby Canary Islands, which Portugal had already claimed. However, they had low resistance to disease, and quickly died off.

Meanwhile, the Portuguese had, in fact, made contact with the African peoples south of the Sahara -people who had been participating in the Arab slave trade for centuries by selling off the captives they took when warring with one another. The Portuguese began buying African slaves from them, as well, to work on their sugar plantations off the coast of Africa. And so had been planted -on a very small scale -both the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the genocide of indigenous people…  for the sake of trade and profit.

In ensuing decades, both the Portuguese and their Spanish allies/competitors/frenemies would push farther into the Atlantic looking for trade routes. They would find two huge continents ripe for cultivation -but, inconveniently, already inhabited.

To be continued.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE