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Origins of American Slavery

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Origins of American Slavery Origins of American Slavery Philip D. Morgan lavery is often termed "the peculiar institution," but it was hardly ued simply by using classical names), the notion that slaves could pos- peculiar to the United States. Almost every society in the history sess a peculium (a partial and temporary capacity to enjoy a range of S of the world has experienced slavery at one time or another. The goods), the common pattern of making fugitive slaves wear a metal col- aborigines of Australia are about the only group that has so far not lar, to clothing domestic slaves in special liveries or uniforms. The Life revealed a past mired in slavery—and perhaps the omission has more of Aesop, a fictional slave biography from Roman Egypt in the first cen- to do with the paucity of the evidence than anything else. To explore tury C.E., is revelatory of the anxieties and fears that pervade any slave American slavery in its full international context, then, is essentially society, and some of the sexual tensions so well displayed are redolent to tell the history of the globe. That task is not possible in the available of later American slavery. Yet, of course, ancient slavery was funda- space, so this essay will explore some key antecedents of slavery in North mentally different from modern slavery in being an equal opportunity America and attempt to show what is distinctive or unusual about its condition—all ethnicities could be slaves—and in seeing slaves as pri- development. The aim is to strike a balance between identifying con- marily a social, not an economic, category. Ancient cultural mores were tinuities in the institution of slavery over time, while also locating sig- also distinctive; Greeks enslaved abandoned infants; Romans routinely nificant changes. The trick is to suggest preconditions, anticipations, tortured slaves to secure testimony; and even though the Stoics were and connections without im- prepared to acknowledge plying that they were neces- the humanity of the slave, sarily determinations (i). neither they nor anyone else Significant precursors in the ancient world ever se- to American slavery can be riously questioned the place found in antiquity, which of slavery in society. Aris- produced two of only a hand- totle, after all, thought that ful of genuine slave societies some people were "slaves by in the history of the world. A nature," that there were in slave society is one in which effect natural slaves (2). slaves played an important Arabs and their Muslim role and formed a signifi- allies were the first to make cant proportion (say, over 20 use of large numbers of sub- percent) of the population. Saharan black Africans. They Classical Greece and Rome developed a long-distance (or at least parts of those en- slave trade, which began tities and for distinct periods in the seventh century and of time) fit this definition lasted into the twentieth. It and can be considered mod- delivered many millions of els for slavery's expansion Africans across the Sahara in the New World. In Rome Desert, Red Sea, and Indian in particular, bondage went This illustration^"ln the Slave Market of Cairo"—appeared in Egypt &. Nubia: From Drawings Ocean to North Africa, the hand in hand with imperial Made on the Spot by Dawid Roberts. (1846-5849) and demonstrates the long history of the Mediterranean, and Per- expansion, as large influxes slave trade in North Africa and the Middle East. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress sian Gulf Although over a of slaves from outlying areas Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-4043.) much longer period of time were funneled into large- and comprising far more fe- scale agriculture, into the latifundia, the plantations of southern Italy males, the number of Africans exported via these trans-Saharan or In- and Sicily. American slaveholders could point to a classical tradition of dian Ocean slave trades probably equaled, or even outmatched, those of reconciling slavery with reason and universal law; ancient Rome pro- its trans-Atlantic counterpart. The pre-existence of these export trades vided important legal formulas and justifications for modem slavery. facilitated Atlantic trade; systems of slave marketing were already in Parallels between ancient and New World slavery abound; from the place. So numerous were black Africans at certain times and in certain dehumanizing device of addressing male slaves of any age as "boy," the places that they were able to launch massive slave revolts—in 869, for use of branding and head-shaving as modes of humiliation, the comic instance, in what is now southern Iraq, where the so-called ZanJ (who inventiveness in naming slaves (a practice American masters contin- came from the Swahih Coast and lands further north) worked in large OAH Magazine of History • July 200$ 51 gangs draining marshlands. While the Qur'an and Islamic Law were gan colonizing the Atlantic islands off their coasts, first using as slaves essentially color-blind and while Muslims enslaved many so-called Guanche natives of the Canary Islands. The Spanish and Portuguese "white" people, medieval Arabs came to associate the most degrading enslavement of the Berber-like Canary Islanders is a prelude to the later forms of labor with black slaves. The Arabic word for slave, 'abd, came fate of Caribbean, Mexican, Central American, and Brazilian Indians. to mean a black slave. Many Arab writers had racial contempt for black Furthermore, the Atlantic islands of Madeira and Sao Tome became people, and the racial stereotypes of the medieval Middle East were forerunners for the spread of racial slavery and sugar plantations in probably transmitted to the Iberian Peninsula (3). the New World. Admittedly, Madeira's slave forces were limited, its As the long-standing trans-Saharan slave trade reveals, slavery properties often small, and small farmers and sharecroppers supplied existed in sub-Saharan Africa long before the Atlantic slave trade. In much of its cane. Nevertheless, by the end of the fifteenth century it some—perhaps most—places, slavery tended to be a minor institution, was Europe's largest producer, and its model would be the one later with the slave able to pass in time from alien to kin member; in oth- followed by Brazilians, who soon became the Atlantic world's major ers, most notably a number of Islamicized regimes, slavery was more suppliers of sugar, and who drew directly on the expertise of Atlantic central, with violence, economic exploitation, and lack of kinship rights Islanders. From the late fifteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century, more evident. In large part because Africa was underpopulated, a broad Sno Tome—situated in the Gulf of Guinea—imported more African spectrum of dependent statuses, with slavery just one variant, existed; slaves than Europe, the Americas, or the other Atlantic islands com- and slaves played a wide range of roles from field workers to soldiers, bined. Particularly in the universality of slave labor, Sao Tome was the from domestics to administrators. The ethnic fragmentation of sub-Sa- nearest approximation to an American prototype (7). haran Africa meant that there were few states strong enough to prevent As slavery underwent a resurgence in southern Europe, it gradu- opportunistic African kings or merchants profiting from slave raiding. ally disappeared from the northwestern part of the continent. Economic Those kingdoms that opposed exporting slaves did not have the means changes help to explain this development, but perhaps more important to stop the traffic. Lacking an overall religious or political unity, Afri- were cultural constraints. Over the course of the Middle Ages, Chris- cans could enslave other Africans because the concept of African-ness tians always committed awful atrocities on each other, but increasingly had no meaning. Accustomed to tropical climates, inured to agricul- they avoiding enslaving one another. Apparently, a sense of unity had tural labor, and reared in a harsh epidemiological environment, sub- emerged in Christian Europe that effectively barred the enslavement of Saharan Africans made productive slaves (4). those deemed fellow Europeans. Christianity's long struggle with Islam As Europe's economy began to expand in the tenth and eleventh no doubt played a major role in this development. That from 1500 to centuries, attention focused on the rich Mediterranean region. By the 1800, Muslims enslaved well over a million Western Europeans, many of twelfth century, various Grusader states had been established at the east- whom were subsequently ransomed and celebrated as symbols of free- ern end of the Mediterranean Sea. Venetian and Genoese merchants dom, was a major element in the growing sense that Europeans should pioneered the development of these conquered Arab sugar-producing never be slaves. Nevertheless, these so-called free-labor nations would regions and began supplying them with slaves. They first victimized the develop some of the harshest slave regimes in the Americas. As David Slavic inhabitants of the Dalmatian Coast and then transported Circas- Brion Davis puts it, "it is an astonishing paradox that the first nations in sians, Georgians, Annenians, and the like from the Black Sea region. the world to free themselves of chattel slavery—such nations as England, At this time, the Latin word for people of Slavic descent, sclavus, became France, Holland, and even the Scandinavian states—became leaders dur- the origin of the word slave in English (and in French esclave, in Span- ing the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in supporting plantation ish esclavo, and in German sklave), and replaced the non-ethnic Latin colonies based on African slave labor." He likens this divide to a primitive term serious. In Europe in the Middle Ages, then, the slave population Mason-Dixon line, "drawn somewhere in the Atlantic, separating free was predominantly "white." Sugar production gradually spread from soil master-states from tainted slave soil dependencies" (8).
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