Slavery

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SLAVERY

colonial slavery
atlantic economy
resistance
attacks on the atlantic slave trade
africa
consequences
bibliography

At the very time slavery died in Europe—with the exception of Russia—in the fifteenth century, it was revived in the Americas, primarily by Europeans seeking to cultivate export staples from the tropics and semitropics. In order to tap the economic potential of the Americas, Europeans developed a complicated trading system connecting Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Thus, with a few early exceptions of Indian slaves, slave labor in the Americas was performed by imported African slaves. The millions of Africans forcefully shipped across the Atlantic formed the labor force that first won over and then developed key areas of the Americas. They also helped to enrich various European colonial powers. In the years before 1807 African slaves formed the great majority of all the people crossing the Atlantic: something like three million Africans crossed the Atlantic in British slave ships. But in the same period only one million Europeans settled in the Americas. In many key respects it was the African who was the pioneer of settlement in critical regions of the Americas. Africa provided the answer to a problem Europeans had encountered from their early days of settlement: how best to tap the vast potential of land in the Americas. Their settlements and colonies were on such a scale (though initially they had barely a toehold on the continent) that white migrants (free and indentured) and handfuls of local Indians were rarely adequate to the task. Africa seemed to provide the answer.

colonial slavery

Even before Columbus's landfall in the Americas, Europeans were already familiar with African slaves. Their early maritime and trading ventures along the West African coast had yielded African slaves, along with other items of trade. African slaves were transferred to Portugal and Spain, and later to the new Iberian outposts on the Atlantic islands in the late fifteenth century. It was a logical step for settlers in the Americas in need of labor to turn to Africans, especially in the early development of sugar plantations. Effectively pioneered on Brazilian sugar plantations, African slavery was later transferred north, to the Caribbean islands (again for sugar cultivation) before slipping farther north to the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake and, later still, to the rice plantations of the Carolinas. Sugar was the engine that drew Africans in growing numbers.

Slavery differed greatly from one colony to another. Different crops dictated different structures of slave life, and very different patterns of slave work. These ranged from the large, military-like slave gangs on the big sugar plantations in Brazil and Jamaica, to the smaller work groups (black and white together) on Virginia's tobacco plantations, to the task system commonplace on the Carolina rice plantations. African enslaved labor quickly moved into all corners of the local American economies. As settler communities matured and developed into sophisticated societies, slaves could be found everywhere: from the urban life of towns and ports, to cowhands on the expansive frontier;

from enslaved sailors in the Atlantic maritime fleets, to skilled craftsmen and women across the rural and urban Americas. Yet from the beginning to the end, the prime purpose of slavery was to provide the brute manual labor in the fields: in sugar, tobacco, rice, and cotton, and a string of other slave-worked commodities.

atlantic economy

Slavery greatly enhanced the material well-being of the West, and African slaves were integral to the emergence of a massive Atlantic-wide economy that saw Europe, Africa, and the Americas locked into an intimate economic and social interdependence. Goods from Europe, and Asian goods transshipped through Europe (all backed by growing European financial and trading systems) were shipped to Africa to be exchanged for slaves, who were then traded throughout the American slave colonies. Slave-grown tropical staples were shipped back for processing and sale in Europe (and beyond). It was however a hugely complex human, geographic, and economic system (too complex to be described as merely "triangular").

The Atlantic slave system was made possible by a remarkable maritime system. Scholars know of some twenty-seven thousand slave voyages, with the consequent impact on port development on both sides of the Atlantic. There were, in addition, major economic and social ramifications throughout the broader hinterlands of the ports linked to the Atlantic slave system.

The millions of Africans who survived to land-fall in the Americas (many did not, of course) had endured a unique oceanic trauma even before being turned over to the lifetime of American slavery. Africans arrived sick, virtually naked, and with no material possessions. Yet, within a generation, they had shaped a string of vibrant slave societies, which had all the basic ingredients—of family, communities, beliefs, and cultural patterns—that provided the framework for black life (enslaved and free) thereafter. Slave social life, rooted in an African past (itself varied of course) but transformed by the specific circumstances of local life, differed from place to place. Much depended on geography and work (between, say, sugar and tobacco) and on the nature of local white society. What emerged were very different slave societies, between Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. And even then there were marked distinctions among slaves even within those broader regions—distinctions shaped in large measure by the kind of work the slaves undertook. Life was very different for a domestic slave compared to a slave working on a coffee plantation. But whatever the system or work, slaves were kept at their toils by a mix of force, incentives, and—especially in the fields—by crude violence.

resistance

Not surprisingly, what united slaves everywhere was the enslaved people's hostility to slavery itself. Slaves everywhere went out of their way to resist, or to render slavery more tolerable. Resistance ranged from running away, open resistance, and violence (which was inevitably punished by the most draconian of slave owners' brutality), to the smallest acts of passive resistance. Slaves did what they could to change their enslavement. Yet only once, in Saint Domingue/Haiti, was local slavery utterly destroyed by the slaves.

Slavery in the Americas was remarkably durable and persistent, and for most of its history, it was able to deflect criticisms and objections. There had been, from the early Spanish settlements, notable critiques of slavery; on ethical, Christian, and even economic grounds. But the simple and pervasive economic success of slavery rendered most criticisms irrelevant. Objections were simply overwhelmed by the sounds and sights of profitable trade and business. Yet all that began to change from the mid-eighteenth century onward.

attacks on the atlantic slave trade

The Atlantic slave trade was at its height when convergent critical forces began to attack. The initial roots of abolition were French and Scottish Enlightenment writers (most influentially Montesquieu [Charles-Louis de Secondat, 1689–1755] and Adam Smith [1723–1790]). But, with the exception of France's Amis des Noirs, Europe lacked the popular abolition base seen in Britain and North America. These Enlightenment writers merged with a new theological voice (led initially by Quakers and other dissenters) to attack the Atlantic slave trade itself. Slaves were instrumental in this campaign to undermine slavery, notably through the major Caribbean slave uprising. The impact of news about slave revolts affected the course of abolition in Europe, especially the revolt in Haiti lead by Toussaint.

The upheavals in France in 1789, and their impact on the French islands produced the greatest slave convulsion in the Americas: the slave revolution in Saint Domingue (1791–1804) and the eventual emergence of an independent Haiti (in 1804). Shock waves from that revolution rippled throughout the Americas, but despite the fears and uncertainties slavery elsewhere held fast—in the short term. In 1807 Great Britain outlawed the Atlantic slave trade, and in 1808 the importation of slaves became illegal in the United States. These actions were intended to cut off supplies of fresh Africans to the American plantations. Yet, even after abolition, something like three million Africans were shipped into the Americas, primarily to Brazil and Cuba. In both those countries, and in the United States, slavery experienced a revival on the back of new slave-grown crops. Cuba wanted labor for its tobacco plantations, Brazil for coffee and tobacco, the United States for the cotton plantations of the South.

In the nineteenth century, slavery seemed anomalous. On the one hand, U.S. cotton slavery illustrated once again the economic returns to be made from slave labor. On the other, slavery was a much denounced and disliked institution. In North America the economic ramifications of cotton slavery were enormous. Cotton was the nation's largest export. Inevitably, the north was deeply involved, via banking, finance, and trade. Yet at the same time there was a growing chorus of northern

religious and ethical opposition. The British on the other hand developed a new role as the world's major abolitionist power. Having abolished their own slave system in 1833, the British henceforth embarked on a global abolitionist crusade, trying to persuade other European slaving nations, and those in the Americas (led by the United States) to see the errors of their ways and to abandon slavery. The power of the Royal Navy and pressure from the Foreign Office was able to impose abolition on swathes of Africa and other regions. But slavery remained stubbornly resistant in the United States, Brazil, and Cuba, largely because of its profitability. Slaves cultivated the coffee for which Brazil became a byword, and the tobacco that made Cuba's name, and in both countries slave numbers were augmented by illicit imports of Africans until the 1860s.

The nineteenth century was, in many respects, the classic period of U.S. slavery; that is, the years most commonly associated with slavery. Yet it was only the latest transformation in a form of bondage that had characterized human settlement across the Americas for centuries. Equally, and like the earlier slave systems, cotton slavery was linked to the economies of the wider world. Cotton from the South fueled the Industrial Revolution in Britain, which in its turn helped to clothe the world in cheap cotton garments. Once again, key areas of economic development in Europe were intimately linked to slavery in the Americas.

africa

Africa, the source of enslaved labor used throughout the Americas, was persistently damaged by this enforced drain of people. Moreover this hemorrhage of Africans continued long after the Atlantic slave trade had ended. African slaves were moved north across the Sahara and east through East African slave ports. At the same time indigenous slave systems were consolidated in the nineteenth century. One result of the external slave trade from Africa was the strengthening of slavery within Africa itself. It was a great irony that abolitionists found themselves tackling the problems of slavery in Africa after they had helped undermine slavery in the Americas. But in both places, on both sides of the Atlantic, the size and strength of slavery was directly linked to earlier European (and later American) economic dependence on slave labor.

Slavery had a slow and long drawn-out death across the Americas. It survived in Cuba until 1886, and in Brazil until 1888, but by then it had been ended elsewhere across the Americas. In some places slavery had simply faded away, devoid of support or friends and overtaken by new economic circumstances. Yet in two main areas where slavery had dominated the economy (in the West Indies and in the U.S. South) demands to end slavery had been resisted. Even in Brazil, where slavery slowly lost influence and importance, it retained a residual importance in some regions until the bitter end.

consequences

The consequences of African slavery were at once both obvious and hidden, but always potent. Demands for African slave labor had scattered millions of Africans and their locally born descendants across the face of the Americas. African sweat converted whole regions of the Americas into profitable cultivation. The cultures of Africa, though transformed in passing from Africa to the Americas, became a basic, and sometimes dominant, feature of American life. Slavery also bequeathed a malignant legacy to later generations (indeed to the modern world). African slavery in the Americas, quite unlike other slave systems in other societies, was a highly racialized system. To be enslaved was to be black: to be black was to be enslaved. Economic usage, legal custom, and perhaps more important, popular convention, rendered the African an item of trade. The African as a thing, an object, was basic to the whole system. The ideas and values that under-pinned that transformation of black humanity to the level of nonhuman survived long after slavery itself.