Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Indian Slavery in Colonial America ed. by Alan Gallay
The last half-century has seen an explosion in the understanding of transatlantic slavery. Multiple scholars have worked laboriously to uncover the history of the African diaspora and the experiences of African slaves in the Americas. To a lesser extent, Indian slavery has also been the recent focus of historians and anthropologists, though their stories were often investigated as separate events from those of Africans. Alan Gallay challenges this methodology, claiming that while slavery existed in the Americas long before the arrival of Europeans, the international slave trade dramatically affected indigenous peoples who underwent significant political, cultural, and economic changes. Those who would study slavery without considering the native experience would learn only half-truths. “Indian slavery was not peripheral in the history of Native America,” claims Gallay, “but central to the story” (3). To field the broader questions of indigenous slavery in colonial North America, Gallay has assembled a wide array of scholars whose geographic foci expand from New France along the Eastern seaboard past the Gulf region into Texas.
Margaret Ellen Newell begins with an investigation of indigenous slavery in New England, where “Chattel slavery and freedom were at opposite ends of a broad spectrum, and many Indians occupied points along that spectrum in varying degrees of unfreedom” (34). There, concepts of who could be enslaved (nonwhite, mostly African “outsiders”) began to change as the Crown asserted sovereignty over the colony throughout the seventeenth century. Indians, once considered “outsiders,” became legally protected “insiders.” However, new forms of forced servitude arose and many Indians were unfree well into the eighteenth century.
C. S. Everett suggests a reexamination of colonial Virginia, particularly Bacon’s Rebellion, in which Nathaniel Bacon Jr. tussled with his cousin, Governor William Berkeley, for control of the colony. Everett points to eyewitness and participant accounts that claim the fight was never a rebellion—it was an Indian war. However, an even larger battle loomed in South Carolina, with a group formed in reaction to slave trades, known as the Yamasee. [End Page 709]
No colony experienced the Native slave trade more than South Carolina. From 1670 until the early 1700s, tens of thousands of American Indians were enslaved at the behest of Carolina traders. Alan Gallay observes South Carolina’s entrance into the Indian slave trade. While the trade did not originate in the colony, Carolinians expanded its practice with Native Americans in opposition to the wishes of the lord proprietors, who planned on African slavery, but abhorred the practice being transferred onto indigenes. In defiance of their lords, slave traders created their own moral rationalizations to justify their actions.
Joseph Hall studies Apalachicola (proto-Creek) attempts to withstand the English slave trade. In the face of such a powerful force, the small community had a decision to make: trade or be traded (148). To do so, Apalachicolas reached out to native neighbors to broker an alliance with the English and negotiate Apalachicola security. Along with the Yamasee, they became the dominant slave trading partners with Charles Town at the turn of the eighteenth century. Doing so finally gave the Apalachicolas a measure of security previously unknown against native adversaries but subjected them to the violent mood swings of Carolina.
Apalachicola survival came at the cost of their Southern neighbors, the Apalachees. Jennifer Baszile notes that despite their problems with neighbors, Apalachees suffered under an increasingly oppressive relationship with Spanish officials that approached slavery. Under the repartimiento system, colonial Spaniards forced native workers to labor without pay. The sabana system was another version of de facto slavery in which some Apalachee men were coerced into becoming full-time farmers working without compensation for missionaries. Finally, young men and women were compelled to work on colonial ranches without being allowed to return home. Many Apalachees struggled with these new concepts of unfree labor and openly questioned the nature of their alliance with Spain.
Denise I. Bossy describes the Indian slave trade as “an uneasy partnership between select Indian communities and colonial traders motivated by their mutual desire for economic...
