Racial Slavery Research Paper

Why did the institution of racial slavery develop in every colony in British America?
Slavery has plagued nearly every part of the world, from ancient Greece to modern Mauritania in 2007; countless government bodies have sanctioned the ‘civil relationship in which one person has absolute power over the life, fortune, and liberty of another’. North American slavery began in the early seventeenth century; however the stage was set as early as the fourteenth century, when the wealthy nations of Spain and Portugal began importing captive slaves from Africa to Europe. When these practices extended into the newly conquered Caribbean and West Indies in the mid-1600s, Virginia colonists began to take note of the phenomenal agricultural production
that occurred. Subsequently, directly or indirectly, all thirteen British colonies in North America grew to depend on slavery for their economy. However this was not the case in the early years of colonization. Due to the growing interest in Europe for the labour intensive cultivation of tobacco in Virginia, plantation owners enlisted white indentured servants to perform most of the heavy labour. However by 1660, a small percentage of Virginian planters held slaves; but by 1675 slavery was well established. By 1700 interest in the slave trade boomed, eclipsing the use of indentured servants. With plentiful land and cheap shackled hands to tend it, southern planters prospered over the lucrative crop of tobacco, cotton and sugar. Slavery had elevated into the workings of every-day life, becoming a social and economic norm.
To point the finger to Spain and Portugal, as the sole cause which inspired the struggling Virginian plantation owners to coalesce the sanction of slavery, would be a highly narrow retrospective view. Firstly, “there was no basis for the assertion that such a colony as South Carolina simply adopted slavery from the French or British West Indies”1. Travellers from the mainland may have noted the advantages of Negro labour there; but they hardly thought of chattel slavery. Furthermore the sanction of slavery was a political reform, one which would therefore be enacted in favour of the ruling classes. A booming agriculture subsequently created an upper class of successful, wealthy plantation owners. Up till 1670 Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, New York and New Jersey had already legalized slavery. Carolina (later North Carolina and South Carolina) in particular, was mainly founded by planters from the overpopulated British sugar island colony of Barbados who brought “relatively large numbers of African slaves from that island”2. Seeping into each colony, slavery came to replace the indentured servants that existed. However the turning point which solidified slavery into colonial life was Bacon’s rebellion of 1676. As leader of the poorer planters, Nathaniel Bacon seized control of Virginia from the royal Governor, Sir George Berkeley; on the grounds that Berkeley opposed making war on the Susquehanna Indians and seizing their lands. This partly was also due to the freedmen’s frustration with their constricted status, as after serving indenture many were unsuccessful, as they were dominated by larger plantation owners. Many of the constituents enlisted by Bacon were slaves and indentured servants. Burning Jamestown to the ground and forcing Governor Berkeley to sign a commission of an offensive against the Indians, led to military action from England. Bacon’s rebellion was supressed, each member tried and punished accordingly. Consequently, it led to a “decision among elite planters to substitute more governable slaves for unruly servants”3, as to prevent any recurrence of these events, “royal authority was placed firmly on the side of the richer settlers; their attempts to grab all the best land in Virginia were endorsed, and Africans were rapidly excluded from the privileges of civil society (if free) or thrust down into hopeless servitude (if slaves).”4 With this, a new gentry emerged, one which quickly enriched itself by its effective monopoly of land, labour and political power. The price in which, would be paid for nearly two centuries, by the slaves. Though it was a tragic development, it was not one which was unprecedented. Given the hierarchical social structure both in England and her colonies, the greed of seventeenth-century Englishman and the lust for export of tobacco, it can be considered inevitable. Control of the lower classes by higher powers ordained the rapid spread of the use of slavery as Edmund S. Morgan exemplifies “But for those with eyes to see, there was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class. Virginians did not immediately grasp it. It would sink in as time went on.”5 This creation of an upper class fuelled by agriculture, through means of slavery, is echoed in the creation of a patriarchal ‘father figure’ in the later eighteenth century. This is illustrated by William Byrd II who in a famous passage took a “quasi-spiritual view of his role, likening himself to a biblical patriarch… it required little imagination for a South Carolina planter to fancy [him]self one of the patriarchs of old… being surrounded with near 200 Negroes who are guided by my absolute Command.”6 Phillip D. Morgan in his essay ‘The Effects of Paternalism Among Whites and Blacks’ notes “Plantation owners in the 18th century south were especially prone to think themselves as all-powerful father figures. Plantation America was a remarkably under-institutionalised world. An attenuated social and economic infrastructure enhanced the authority of the household head, as Carole Shammas rightly notes that “a notably higher proportion of people in the Americas”, particularly in plantation America “fell into the category of legal dependants.””7 Morgan demonstrates the growth of self-righteousness that plantation owners came to develop, as well as their stature within society, through Shammas’s highlighting of the dependency of others upon the patriarch plantation owners. The creation of slavery therefore can be attributed to means of social control and solidification of a growing agriculturally fuelled aristocracy. Ironically, Morgan continues to highlight that “Slaves were more and more defined as people without rights; and, because they were viewed increasingly as property, they were said ironically to enhance their owners’ independence”8.
Whilst it is true that the underpinnings which sanctioned slavery were shifted by the upper classes (in order to pursue their interests) it can be considered a mostly reductionist view.
Bacon’s rebellion undoubtedly sent shockwaves across the 13 colonies, but it does not account wholly for the creation of slavery; primarily because the origins of slavery were already deeply seated before the affair. A far more obvious interpretation of history is available as to why slavery was enacted, in necessity. A Virginia lawyer argued in 1772 “Societies of men could not subsist unless there were a subordination of one another… that in this subordination the department of slaves must be filled by some, or there would be a defect in the scale of order”9. This is partly true, subjugation does contribute to the growth of society, every political system features it; subjugation, in this case being the ‘department of slaves’, was necessary. This necessity arose from the Virginia Company’s decision to mainly export tobacco, whilst John Smith and others endeavoured not to rely solely upon one staple product as they attempted to “solve this problem by encouraging silk-manufacturing, glass-manufacturing, soap-manufacturing, the export of timber products, of grain, of wine, of anything but the one thing which proved to be the third necessity for the salvation of Virginia: tobacco”10. For the reliance upon an economy based upon a single staple crop would put the producers at the mercy of the
market, whilst this is true for any producer, it would be far less dangerous to enable diversification of products as farmers would be able to rely upon the sales of other goods if the market declined in one. Moreover, profit could be made in tobacco, but the certainty to how much profit was low. The south however did have fertile soil, which to the unskilled Virginian, made the temptation to grow tobacco all that more appealing. The result was “the first great boom in American history… at one stage even the streets of Jamestown were sown with tobacco”11. However, “tobacco exhausted the soil in seven years”12, causing tobacco planters to search for new lands. Thus, the “destiny of Virginia was fixed. Prices went down, production went up: in 1619 the colony produced 20,000 pounds of tobacco at three shillings a pound, in 1639, 1,500,000 pounds at three pence. A year later the population of the colony was over 10,000 making Virginia the largest English settlement”13. The solution was to import more indentured servants. However this proved futile, “servants had constantly to be replaced, were frequent disobedient and unreliable, and as frequently ran away”14. Furthermore, the appeal to become an indentured servant had dropped as many struggled to compete against the dominant tobacco planters. Slavery then began to trickle into the states when “Dutch traders brought Africans to Virginia for the first time in 1619, and more followed in tiny numbers, over the next few decades”15. However it is vital to note that the first two generations Africans were treated much like any other indentured servants. In one case, “Anthony Johnson was recorded as a freeman owning cattle and 250 acres in 1650”16. This benevolence did not last long however, the market was limitless so long as labour costs could be suppressed; which led to the popularisation of slavery. By purchasing multitudes of able-bodied pubescent and adult Africans, the colonists “avoided waiting for a slave population to increase by native birth, and in the scramble for quick, easy, and substantial profits in the New World, this strategy gave them an edge.”17 It can be said the continual use of indentured servants may have endangered the well-being of the colony, as they would demand a higher price of labour. Left without alternative, planters had to turn to slavery. The advantages therefore were exceedingly apparent, low labour costs, a stable staple crop industry and plenty of land in which to farm was available through the use of slavery.
Conclusively, the institution of racial slavery developed in every colony in British America due to necessity of economic factors.
There was no provided alternative to that of indentured servants; their aspirations and wages could not support the widespread depreciation of value that occurred through cultivation. A budding America needed complete and total subjugation of other peoples in order to build its foundations; whilst that is a harsh reality, it is not unparalleled to the beginnings and heightening of other civilisations, for instance that of Ancient Egypt. Whilst necessity drove each state to consider alternatives, it was however the political actions of Bacon which provided the tipping point of legitimacy. Bacon’s rebellion exemplified the growing problem of the use of indentured servants, as well as their inability to expand their cultivation westward, that solidified legal reform in favour of slavery. The product of the freedman’s frustration led to the shackles of
another.
Word-count excluding footnotes: 2,059
Bibliography
Oscar and Mary F. Handlin, ‘Origins of the Southern Labor System’, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 7, No. 2 (April, 1950), pp. 206
Betty Wood, Origins of American Slavery (New York, Hill and Wang, 1997), pp. 64–65.
Martha W. McCartney, A Study of the Africans and African Americans on Jamestown Island and at Green Spring, 1619-1803,Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, (Virginia, 2003), pg. 18
Phillip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, (University of North Carolina Press, 1998)
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (New York, 1975.) pg. 270
Hugh Bronan, The Penguin History of the United States of America, (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1985)
Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, (London: 1997), p.240
‘Slavery’, West 's Encyclopedia of American Law, 2005, http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/slavery.aspx, Date accessed: 4 Nov. 2014