Bound Slave by Michelangelo

HUMANITIES 532 SLAVERY IN HISTORY AND LITERATURE

California State University, Dominguez Hills Humanities Master of Arts External Program (HUX) www.csudh.edu/hux HUXCRSGD. 532

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Prerequisites page 4

II. Course Description page 4

III. Books Required page 4

IV. Course-Level Student Learning Goals page 5

V. Description of Student Activities to Fulfill Goals page 5

VII. Grading Policy page 6

VIII. HUX Academic Integrity Statement page 6

IX. Course Organization page 7

X. Schedule of Readings page 7

XI. Writing Assignments page 8

XII. page 10 Websites

XIII. Introduction page 14

XIV. The Nature of Slavery page 15

XV. Origins of Slavery page 31

XVI. Slavery in the Ancient Near East page 32

XVII. Slavery in Ancient Greece page 34

XVIII. Slavery in Medieval Europe page 43

XIX. Slavery in the Islamic World page 47

XX. Slavery in Africa page 49

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XXI. The Transatlantic Slave Trade page 55

XXII. Slavery in the New World page 61

XXIII. American Slavery page 69

XXIV. Slave Narratives page 78

XXV. The African-American Slave Community page 83

XXVI. The Ante-Bellum South and the Civil War page 89

XXVII. Slavery in the Modern World page 97

Course design by Dr. Bryan Feuer, October 2001.

PLEASE NOTE: Due dates have been revised due to the new 14 week calendar.

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PREREQUISITES: HUX 501

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Examines the institution of slavery from an interdisciplinary humanistic perspective utilizing a comparative approach. Surveys slavery from ancient times to the present in all parts of the world, with focus upon American slavery.

COURSE INSTRUCTOR

Be sure to read the faculty letter of introduction accompanying this course guide for information from and about your instructor for this term and section of the course. Any additional instructions or requirements he or she presents supercede this course guide. If you did not receive a letter of introduction from your faculty member, contact the HUX office immediately to request a replacement.

REQUIRED TEXTS

 Orlando Patterson. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press, 1982.

 Milton Meltzer. Slavery: A World History. Da Capo Press, 1993.

 David Brion Davis. Slavery and Human Progress. Oxford University Press, 1986.

 Peter Kolchin. American Slavery 1619-1877. Hill and Wang, 2003.

 Lawrence B. Goodheart, Richard D. Brown and Stephen G. Rabe, eds. Slavery in American Society, 3rd ed. D.C. Heath & Company, 1993.

 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. The Classic Slave Narratives. Mentor, 1987.

 Toni Morrison. Beloved. Signet, 2004.

 Octavia Butler. Kindred. Beacon Press, 2003.

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COURSE-LEVEL STUDENT LEARNING GOALS

Students will gain:

1. an understanding of the nature of slavery and its manifestations in various societies and at various times

2. an understanding of the personal, psychological and social impacts of slavery on the individual, the family and society

3. an appreciation for how slavery has been interpreted by historians and by writers of fiction and autobiography

4. enhanced skills in synthesizing, analyzing and interpreting interdisciplinary materials.

DESCRIPTION OF STUDENT ACTIVITIES TO FULFILL GOALS

Students will be able to:

1. identify and describe the elements of slavery

2. name several societies that have practiced slavery and explain how each is similar to or different from the others

3. summarize the psychological and social impact of slavery on individuals, both slave and master

4. explain the impact of slavery on the family

5. reconstruct the long- and short-term impact of slavery on a society, providing both historical and contemporary examples

6. discuss the way in which slave narratives demonstrate the impact of slavery on individuals

7. interpret the way in which fictional accounts demonstrate the impact of slavery on individuals

8. explain several significant controversies among historians of slavery, providing relevant examples 5 HUXCRSGD. 532

GRADING POLICY

Your course grade will be based upon the individual grades for each of the four writing assignments. Each of the first three assignments will comprise 20% of your grade; the final research paper will be worth the remaining 40%.

HUX ACADEMIC INTEGRITY STATEMENT Most scholars scrupulously uphold their responsibilities to do their own intellectual work on each assignment for HUX courses and to credit sources-primary and secondary- unambiguously and precisely according to Modern Language Association guidelines. In practicing these principles of scholastic honesty, we ensure the value of knowledge and the authority of this master’s degree. In keeping with the University’s commitment to the learning objectives that our academic programs set forth, we want to affirm the benefits of academic integrity, as explained in our 1999 – 2000 University Catalog (15), and to advise students strongly to avoid practices that are dishonest. As discussed in the Catalog (15, 64), academic dishonesty encompasses forms of cheating and plagiarism, including fabrication (“intentional invention of any information or citation in an academic exercise”), facilitating academic dishonest (“knowingly helping or attempting to help another to violate a provision of the institutional code of academic integrity”), plagiarism (“deliberated adoption or reproduction of ideas or words or statements of another person as one’s own without acknowledgement”). The nature of plagiarism is detailed in the Catalog. “Thus, all academic work submitted by a student as his or her own should be his or her own unique style, words and form. When a student submits work [or part of a work] that purports to be his/her original work, but actually is not, the student has committed plagiarism” (64). To elaborate, scholars are legally and morally bound to credit every direct quotation, paraphrase or summary (of work, whole or in part, in the writer’s own words) and to cite sources for information, which is not considered common knowledge. Acknowledgement of sources should be clear and precise, according to the conventions and forms of the Modern Language Association manual. The consequences of violating standards of intellectual honesty can be severe. “Plagiarism is cause for formal university discipline and is justification for an instructor to assign a lower grade or a failing grade in the course…In addition, the University may impose its own disciplinary measures” (64).

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COURSE ORGANIZATION

This course is divided into four sections: 1) an overview of slavery; 2) an historical survey of slavery; 3) historical perspectives on American slavery; 4) American slavery as seen from the perspective of literature, including slave narratives and novels. After completing each of the first three sections you will write a short paper in response to one of the assigned topics; after competing the final section you will write a longer research paper (see the schedule of readings and writing assignments for specific details).

SCHEDULE OF READINGS

SLAVERY: AN OVERVIEW

Read: Course Guide, pp. 14-31 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death

Due: Weeks 1-2

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON SLAVERY

Read: Course Guide, pp. 31-68 Meltzer, Slavery: A World History

Due: Weeks 3-5

AMERICAN SLAVERY: HISTORY

Read: Course Guide, pp. 69-95 Davis, Slavery and Human Progress Kolchin, American Slavery 1619-1877 Goodheart, Brown and Rabe, Slavery in American Society

Due: Weeks 6-8

AMERICAN SLAVERY: LITERATURE

Read: Course Guide, pp. 96-97 Gates, The Classic Slave Narratives Morrison, Beloved Butler, Kindred

Due: Weeks 9-13 7 HUXCRSGD. 532

WRITING ASSIGNMENTS

Each assignment is due in the instructor’s mailbox during the week indicated below. Count Week 1 as the first week that classes begin and Week 13 as the final week of the term. Trimester dates are listed at the upper left hand corner of your registration form.

All papers must be typed and mailed in before the assignment deadline. All papers should include citations of assigned texts where relevant; your research paper should include citations of all sources and a bibliography using the MLA Handbook format. Send in an extra copy, marked “For HUX Files,” and keep a copy for yourself. Also, keep a copy of the title page of the paper returned by the instructor which contains your grades, comments, and date. Send a self-addressed, stamped (with adequate postage) envelope for the return of each assignment. If you do not fully understand the assignment or need help, telephone or e-mail the instructor.

Write a 3-4 page paper on one of the following topics for each of the first three sections; your final paper should be between 10 and 12 pages. The first three assignments require you analyze and synthesize the assigned readings in respect to specific topics; please make sure that you understand what the assignment is and what aspect or aspects of the readings you are being asked to focus on. Since many of the topics are quite broad in their scope, you will also need to make your discussion well-focused and selective. For the research paper, it will be necessary to read materials not specifically assigned for the final section of the course. Given the moderate length of the research paper, you should try to narrow its focus somewhat so as to be able to discuss your topic in some depth.

Week 2

1. Discuss, in some detail, the relationship between the major elements, features or characteristics of slavery. Give your own definition of slavery based upon your discussion.

2. Discuss and evaluate the following quotation from Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death (pp. 341- 342):

It has been my objective in this book to come to a definitive statement of the fundamental processes of slavery, to grasp its internal structure and the institutionalized patterns that support it. Throughout this work, however, the ghost of another concept has haunted my analysis, and in this final chapter I have tried to exorcize it. That is the problem of freedom. Beyond the socio-historical findings is the unsettling discovery that an ideal cherished in the West beyond all others emerged as a necessary consequence of the degradation of slavery and the effort to negate it. The first men and women to struggle for freedom, the first to think of themselves as free in the only meaningful sense of the term, were freedmen. And without slavery there would have been no freedom. We arrive then at a strange and bewildering enigma: are we to esteem slavery for what it has wrought, or must we challenge our conception of freedom and the value we place upon it?

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Week 5

1. In his Politics, Aristotle accepts and defends the institution of slavery as part of the natural order of human relationships. How and why could he have taken this position? What arguments could be made against this position, particularly in respect to “human nature?”

2. Discuss the influence of one or more economic, political, social and/or religious institutions and/or organizations on the nature and structure of slavery in the societies we have studied so far, providing illustrative examples.

3. Has there been, in your opinion, any significant change or evolution in the nature of slavery from its earliest known history to the end of the seventeenth century AD? If so, in which ways did slavery evolve? Do you observe any pattern in these changes? If not, why not?

3. It has been suggested that under certain conditions it was or may have been preferable to have been a slave rather than a free person. Do you agree? If not, why not? If so, under what conditions would slavery be preferable? Provide illustrative examples.

Week 8

1. Discuss some of the variables that might have influenced the nature of the relationship between master and slave, drawing examples from any of the slave or slave-owning societies you have studied. How could people who considered themselves decent and moral human beings have nonetheless owned slaves?

2. Compare and contrast American slavery with one or more other systems of slavery we have studied, discussing the significance of major similarities or differences.

3. Discuss some of the unique and/or distinctive aspects of Afro-American slave culture, including their origin, social context and function.

4. Discuss the origins of slavery in the United States. How and why did slavery develop differently in different parts of the country? What were some of the variables responsible for these differences?

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Week 13

1. Research and discuss in detail slave narratives as a literary genre. Compare slave narratives (including others in addition to those assigned) with Beloved and Kindred or other works of literature dealing with slavery in terms of how they are structured, the way they are written and what they tell us about masters, slaves, the institution of slavery and any other aspect of American slavery.

2. Research and discuss the aftermath and legacy of slavery in the United States, focusing on the period from the Emancipation Proclamation to the present day. Try to include as many different kinds of evidence, including literature, in your discussion as possible.

3. Research and discuss in detail one or more of the controversial issues in the study of slavery.

4. Research and discuss in some detail slavery in a society not discussed in the Course Guide.

5. Research and discuss in some detail slavery in the modern world, comparing and contrasting it to other forms of slavery we have studied.

WEBSITES

This is by no means a complete list of websites concerning slavery, but these sites should serve as an entry point to a number of significant aspects; many of them provide further links to other sites as well. Although some of them provide introductions or overviews, others represent valuable sources of primary materials, which can and should be utilized in your research paper.

 SLAVERY - http://www.religoustolerance.org/slavery.htm

 Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation - http://www2.h- net.msu.edu/~slavery/

 Roman Slavery - http://www.ucd.ie/~classics/96/Madden96.html

 Race and Slavery in the Middle East - http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/lewis1.html

 Slavery Bibliography at the C.W. Post Library - http://www.liunet.edu/cwis/cwp/library/aaslvbib.htm

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 DPLS Archive: Slave Movement During the 18th and 19th Centuries - http://dpls.dacc.wisc.edu/slavedata/index.html

 MIGRATIONS: The Americas, 1600-1800 - http://www.whc.neu.edu/Prototype/migration.html

 Bristol and Slavery - Home Page - wysiwyg://73/http://www.hpslavery/freeservers.com/

 P.E. Lovejoy, “The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture and Religion under Slavery - http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~slavery/essays/esy9701love.html

 Africans in America - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/home.html

 Chronology of the History of Slavery, 1619-1789 - http://innercity.org/holt/slavecrhon.html

 Informed ReSource: Historical Documents Regarding Slavery - http://www.bungi.com/cfip/slavery.htm

 The Avalon Project: Statutes of the United States Concerning Slavery - http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/statutes/slavery/slmenu.htm

 Special Slavery Issue - Common-place - wysiwyg://200/http://www.common-place.org/

 WashingtonPost.com: How the Cradle of Liberty Became a Slave-Owning Nation - http://www.innercity.org/columbiaheights/newspaper/slavery.html

 Thoughts Upon Slavery by John Wesley (1774) – wysiwyg://27/http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/wesley/thoughtsuponslavery.stm

 AFRICAN SLAVERY IN AMERICA - Paine - http://www.mediapro.net/cdadesign/paine/afri.html

 USA: Jefferson on Slavery - http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/tj3/writings/slavery.htm

 AFRO-AMERICAN ALMANAC - African-American History Resource - Thomas Jefferson - http://www.toptags.com/aama/moices/commentary/jeff.htm

 Mount Vernon - http://www.mountvernon.org/education/slavery/

 American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology - http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/wpa/wpahome.html

 Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938 - http:\\memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/

 American Slavery: A Composite Autobiography - http://www.slavenarratives.com/

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 Excerpts from American Slave Narratives - http://vi.uh.edu/pages/mintz/primary.htm

 North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920 - http://metalab.unc.edu/docsouth/neh/neh.html

 Third Person, First Person: Slave Voices from the Special Collections Library, Duke University - http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/slavery/

 Born A Slave - http://ronbooe.freeyellow.com/index.html

 African-American Pamphlet Collection - http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aapchtml

 My Escape from Slavery, by Frederick Douglass - http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Frederick_Douglass/My_Escape_From_Slavery/My_ Escape_From_Slavery_pl.html

 Been Here So Long - http://www.newdeal.feri.org/asn/index.html

 Hannah Valentine & Lethe Jackson Slave Letters - http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/campbell/

 Black Resistance: Slavery in the United States - http://www.afroam.org/history/slavery/main.html

 Nat Turner’s Insurrection - 1861.08 - http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/1861aug/higginson.htm

 USA: Confessions of Nat Turner - intro - http:odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1826- 1850/slavery/confessxx.htm

 Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition - http://www.yale.edu/glc/index.html

 Frank Cass Publishers - Slavery and Abolition Home Page - http://www.frankcass.com/jnls/sa.htm

 The Amistad Case - http://www.nara.gov/education/teaching/amistad/home.html

 Exploring Amistad: Race and the Boundaries of Freedom in Antebellum Maritime America - http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/main/welcome.html

 Amistad Home Page - http://www.law.cornell.edu/background/amistad/

 Civil War Links - Underground Railroad - http://www.civilwar.com/linksrr.htm

 Selected Underground Railroad Resources - http://www.ugrr.org/web.htm

 Underground Railroad: Special Resource Study - http://www.nps.gov/undergroundrr 12 HUXCRSGD. 532

 The Underground Railroad in Rochester, New York - http://www.history.rochester.edu/class/ugrr/home.html

 Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture - http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/

 Freedmen and Southern Society Project - http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Colleges/ARHU/Depts/History/Freedmen/home.html

 The Roanoke Island Freedmens Colony - http://www.roanokefreedmenscolony.com/

 Slavery Today - http://humanrights.about.com/newsissues/humanrights/library/weekly/aa090699.htm

 Fact Sheet No. 14, Contemporary Forms of Slavery - http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu6/2/fs14.htm

 TheBlackMarket.com (Slavery: Frequently Asked Questions) - http://www.theblackmarket.com/slavefaq.htm

 Human Trafficking Resources - http://www.vachss.com/help_text/humanhuman_trafficking.html

 Criminal Justice Resources: Human Trafficking - http://www.lib.msu.edu/harris23/crimjust/human.htm

 Anti-Slavery International - Home Page - http://www.antislavery.org/

 American Anti-Slavery Group Home Page - http://www.iAbolish.com

 Baltimore Anti-Slavery Society - http://users.erols.com/bcccsbs/bass/bass.html

 Sudan Q & A - http://members.aol.com/casmasalc/newpage8

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INTRODUCTION

Slavery is a practice that seemingly defies logic and human understanding, yet it is an indelible part of our heritage and something that challenges us still today. It is ancient yet modern– that is the paradox of slavery–and in exploring the complexities of this societal institution, we learn more about ourselves as the glories and failures of our past become the foundations upon which we measure the human potential for good and evil. Slavery is the dark mirror that allows us to reflect upon past episodes of social injustice as we trace the events, both great and small, that have defined the meaning of civilization for peoples in bondage throughout the ages. –Junius P. Rodriguez, Chronology of World Slavery (xxi)

Slavery, like war, is an ancient human institution which has been practiced in various forms throughout the world, and which continues to exist today. It is difficult to know how long it has existed, since it is almost impossible to recognize in the archaeological record. However, some of the earliest known written documents from Mesopotamia refer to slaves and slavery, and we can therefore state with some certainty that it was present in the earliest civilizations. In fact, as we will see, there is close relationship between war, slavery and civilization. To most of us living in the modern age, slavery seems an archaic and barbaric institution– even though it continues to exist in parts of the world today–and how and why people could accept and participate in it may be difficult to understand. Moreover, unlike other aspects of human behavior or history, there is very little about slavery that is uplifting or has redemptive value. Which perhaps raises a logical question: why study it? In reply, I would suggest that like war, slavery has played a significant role in the history of our species and therefore cannot and should not be ignored. In studying slavery we confront the dark side of human behavior, an abyss into which we must look if we hope to understand the full range of human behavior. Although the depiction of slavery in history and literature often makes for wrenching and painful reading, the study of slavery forces us to ask some hard questions about human nature and society. In addition to the questions I have suggested below, the most basic question is in many ways the hardest to answer: how could people behave toward and treat other human beings in such a fashion? Although we will make use of disciplines in the social sciences such as anthropology, psychology, sociology and economics, the primary approach to slavery taken here will be historical, focusing on the human element, dealing with its impact on human beings as individuals, families, communities and societies. Most of the texts that you will be reading for this course will thus be either history or literature. Our discussion of slavery will be divided into three parts: 1) the nature of slavery, including definitions, related concepts and common elements; 2) a cross-cultural and historical survey of slavery throughout the world, focusing on comparison and contrast of different systems of slavery and on the evolution of the institution of slavery; 3) a more detailed examination of American slavery. Some of the questions that I hope you will ponder before, during and after this course are: What is slavery? How is it related to other human institutions? Why did slavery come into

14 HUXCRSGD. 532 existence and why does it still exist today? How did societies influence slavery and vice versa? What effects did slavery have on both slaves and masters? What was the relationship between master and slave? Were there worse ways of life than slavery, and if so, what were they? How did slaves respond to and/or resist slavery? How was slavery the same and different in different times and places? In addition to thinking about these questions, you will have the opportunity to write about some of them as well.

THE NATURE OF SLAVERY: AN OVERVIEW

DEFINITION OF SLAVERY

Like any term which incorporates a broad range of activities, behaviors and attitudes in a variety of contexts, is complex, diverse and variable, and which carries a good deal of emotional weight, slavery is not easy to define clearly and concisely. Since we will be exploring as many aspects of slavery as possible in this course, it is neither necessary nor desirable to settle on one definition of slavery. On the other hand, it is desirable to begin with some general notion of what slavery entails, particularly since popular notions of slavery tend to evoke only part of the spectrum of what a full comprehension of slavery involves. We may begin by placing slavery within a range of relationships characterized as unfree labor, i.e. work not directly compensated by money or other forms of reward, such as an exchange of services. Unfree labor, as discussed in more detail below, can be envisioned as a continuum from various forms of obligation to labor under the threat of force or coercion. Thus slavery represents one extreme of the continuum. The two definitions which follow, although focusing on different aspects of slavery, provide some broad parameters for approaching the topic. The first, found in Article 1 (1) of the 1926 League of Nations Slavery Convention, deals primarily with political and economic aspects: “Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.” Here the focus is on the slave as property and his or her legal status and political rights, particularly in respect to those of the master. The second definition, from Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death (p. 13), emphasizes the social dimension of slavery: “Slavery is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.” Here Patterson distinguishes the permanence of slavery from other more benign forms of unfree labor, makes reference to the roles of violence and power, and, most crucially, defines slaves as those put into a special social category (natal alienation), setting them apart from others and enabling them to be treated differently than other members of the community.

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ELEMENTS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF SLAVERY

As suggested above, slavery is complex, diverse and variable. Much of slavery’s complexity derives from the fact that it is comprised of a number of defining elements which are different in their emphasis, but which overlap considerably. Thus, although all forms of slavery have certain things in common–including the basic elements and characteristics discussed below–the specific form and expression of these elements varies considerably from place to place and time to time, leading to considerable diversity.

POWER

The first major element of slavery is an inequality of power. We can compare slavery in this respect with other human relationships structured and defined by power, such as that of parent and child, husband and wife (at least in many of the world’s cultures), employer and employee and even teacher and student. Again, if we place slavery along a continuum of such power relationships, we can see that it falls at one extreme, of extreme inequality. Slavery may be distinguished from other power relationships in the following ways: control is maintained, to a greater extent than in other relationships, by force or violence, or the threat thereof; slavery represents dominance in an extreme form; and coercion is always involved, either directly or implicitly. So slavery, at least in theory, is always a relationship between the powerful and the powerless; as we shall see, however, in practice slaves often have found ways to minimize the power imbalance. In terms of power, the slave can be seen as an instrument of the master, a disposable human tool (this idea of the slave as a tool also is present in the concept of the slave as property, as discussed below). As such, the slave lacks autonomy and is thus unable–at least in principle– to control his or her actions in the ways that a free person is able to. We may also note here some further differences between slaves and non-slaves in terms of the relative power of each and in the origins of the power relationship. In respect to relative power, non-slaves in power relationships have at least some power over themselves, whereas slaves do not, and in other power relationships the dominant party’s power is not unlimited, but is restricted to certain areas. In the origination of power relationships, non-slaves usually have some choice in accepting or continuing the relationship, whereas slaves, again, do not. Orlando Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death, notes that ultimately slavery is a substitute for or alternative of death in the sense that the master has the literal power of life and death over the slave. Thus slavery represents not a pardon, but rather a conditional commutation of a death sentence which can be revoked at will. Even if the master initially spares the life of the slave–as, in the most common instance, a prisoner of war–this does not preclude the imposition of death at a later point. In the broadest sense, then, the master is the ransomer of the slave, with the capability of revoking the privilege of life at any time. Finally, most relationships involving power involve rights and obligations on the parts of both parties. In most relationships, free people have both rights and obligations in the society of which they are a part. Slaves, however, have no rights, only obligations.

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PROPERTY

A second element of slavery, as indicated in the first definition given above, is the concept of property. Although there are other kinds of slavery, to be discussed, the most common form–and the form most commonly associated with slavery–is chattel slavery, chattel being an English legal term for property. The aspect of property thus primarily concerns the legal status of slaves, whereby slaves comprise a subcategory of human proprietary objects. As is the case with all of the elements of slavery, one consequence of this perspective is dehumanization, to envision and treat the slave as a thing or object, which like inanimate objects or animals, has value, can be bought and sold, and can be used or treated in any way the owner chooses. Although the treatment of slaves as property represents an extreme, non-slaves also can be bought and sold in a similar fashion; the practice of bride price, in which women are given in marriage in return for goods or property, is common in many societies and even in the Western industrialized world professional athletes can be bought and sold as well.

NATAL ALIENATION

A third element of slavery, contained in the second definition above, is natal alienation. Natal alienation refers to the removal of individuals from their birth families and cultures; in essence slaves have no family, no culture and belong to no community. Natal alienation is, as Orlando Patterson notes, a form of social death, a denial of humanity. Legally, slavery involves the alienation of the rights or claims of birth, a loss of social rights and obligations, isolation from one’s social and cultural heritage and, most devastatingly, a loss of one’s personal history. Natal alienation also results in the loss of independent social existence. The slave has no place in the legitimate social order or in the community; therefore, slave communities are not recognized as legitimate, nor are slave marriages or family relationships considered legal. This delegimitization of slaves thus enables, both legally and emotionally, the separation of couples or families and the sexual exploitation of women. However, in order for natal alienation to be legitimized and effected, the recognition and support of the nonslave community (i.e., those not themselves owning slaves within the community) is required. Patterson also notes that, unlike other forms of unfree labor, natal alienation is both perpetual and inheritable. That is, once a slave loses his or her own natal claims, he or she is unable to pass them to his or her children. Thus children belong to the master, not their parents, and can be disposed of as any other property. This is not to say that natal alienation is irrevocable, for as we will see, there were means by which freedom, either full or partial, could be granted, but such action was always contingent upon the will of the master or of society. Natal alienation not only had the practical consequences described above, but also symbolic aspects as well. Natal alienation, for example, represented the symbolic rejection by the slave of his or her past and all kinship relationships. Commonly the change in status was symbolized by a change of name, indicating a change of identity, a form of degradation and dehumanization by which the slave was denied his or her very name and previous identity. The condition of slavery was also often symbolized by the imposition of visible marks of servitude, including distinctive clothing, tattooing or branding or a specific hairstyle, such as a shorn head. In most societies, the change in status from free to slave was symbolized by a process of transformation involving several transitional phases. The first phase involved the violent 17 HUXCRSGD. 532 uprooting of the individual from his or her original milieu. This was followed by a period of desocialization and depersonalization, a process similar to that endured by those entering prison or the military. The final phase involved the introduction of the slave into his or her new community as an officially recognized nonbeing. In this sense, enslavement can be seen as a process of rebirth. It should be noted, for reasons that will be discussed later, that slaves were usually foreigners, i.e., they were already considered outsiders anyway.

HONOR/DISHONOR AND DEGRADATION

As noted above, all of the elements or characteristics of slavery are in some form related to each other. For example, honor is related to power in that to be without honor is to be powerless and vice versa; likewise honor and social death are related because those without honor lie outside the social community. This is particularly the case in so-called timocratic societies in which honor is valued above life itself, or to put it another way, death is preferable to dishonor. Slavery by definition involves life without honor, along with the loss of dignity, public esteem and self-worth. And if, as noted above, the slave lives at the sufferance of the master, then perforce in continuing to live he or she has chosen life over honor. Although slaves cannot possess honor themselves, paradoxically they can represent a source of honor to the master. As property slaves represent status and prestige; in general, the more slaves and the more different kinds of slaves the master possesses, the greater his or her honor. Moreover, a master could gain honor by freeing slaves, either during his or her lifetime or posthumously.

LACK OF FREEDOM

Another obvious characteristic of slavery is lack of freedom. As Orlando Patterson has suggested in his conclusion to Slavery and Social Death, freedom and slavery go hand in hand in the Western world, and that there can be no concept of freedom without the concept of slavery. That is, freedom derives its meaning from slavery. Without slavery, Patterson argues, the idea of personal freedom could not exist. This seeming paradox seems to be borne out by the existence of slavery in the two societies most strongly associated with the most radical forms of democracy: 5th-century BCE Athens and the United States.

DEPRIVATION

Yet another obvious element of slavery is deprivation. Although it is within the power of the master to determine otherwise, slaves are by the nature of their status deprived of their ability to marry, to bear their own children, to possess or inherit property or, if they have property, to will it to others. Slaves are also routinely deprived of the profits of their labor or of freedom of movement.

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EXPLOITATION

Finally, as just described above, these deprivations result in exploitation, in that, as we have seen, the labor of slaves is utilized without compensation. Sexual exploitation, particularly of women, is also a common feature of slavery.

SLAVERY AND OTHER FORMS OF DEPENDENT, FORCED OR UNFREE LABOR

As noted above, slavery can be placed at one extreme of the spectrum of human relationships ranging from absolute freedom (which is more of an abstract concept than an actuality, given the physical, legal and ethical constraints on the actions of all human beings) on the one hand to total powerlessness on the other. They include obligations imposed by kinship, bride service, communal service, indenture and forced labor. Obligations imposed by kinship are common in less complex societies–i.e., hunting and gathering bands, tribal societies and simple chiefdoms--in which kinship functions as the primary mechanism of social and political integration and organization; such labor might involve household tasks, child care, agricultural labor, construction or contribution of labor toward important group functions such as feasts, religious ceremonies, weddings or funerals. Bride service is an obligation imposed upon a husband by the bride’s family as compensation for the loss of their daughter, particularly in societies in which material wealth–ordinarily presented as a gift in the form of bridewealth to the bride’s family–is limited or entirely lacking; in such instances, the husband is required to contribute his labor to his in-laws for a specified period of time, usually at least several years. Communal service, usually in the form of group labor projects such as land clearance or construction for the benefit of the entire community, is often imposed by its leaders on all able- bodied individuals. Indenture is a form of temporary servitude in which an individual agrees to work for a specified period of time in return for room and board or some other compensation; one form of indentured servitude occurred during the early colonial period in North America, in which young men (and occasionally women) agreed to work for a specified number of years in return for their transportation to the New World. Forced labor is often imposed by the state on prisoners of war or criminals as a form of punishment. Thus, unlike slavery, other kinds of obligatory labor are more or less conditional and usually temporary.

MODES OF SLAVERY

Slavery can also be categorized in terms of open or closed systems. Open systems encourage the incorporation of outsiders, and therefore the differences between slaves and nonslaves are often minimized. Open systems originate and continue to exist due to an institutionalized need for more people, either due to low population, an unfavorable birth/death ratio or an abundance of land. In such systems people are considered a more significant form of wealth than land, and female slaves in particular are valued for their ability to reproduce, thereby creating more slaves. Ancient Rome and African societies are examples of open systems.

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In closed systems, on the other hand, a limited amount of land makes it more valuable than people, and therefore the high value of land restricts the number of those with rights to it. In these societies, which include ancient Greece and many Asian societies, slaves are not incorporated (which would ultimately enable them to own land), but are maintained as separate ethnic groups outside of the existing kinship system. Moreover, when slaves in such societies are freed, they are not incorporated into the society, but continue to exist separately with reduced or limited rights. Female slaves tend to be less valued because females in general are less valued in these societies.

KINDS OF SLAVE SOCIETIES

The ancient historian M.I. Finley made a different kind of distinction, between what he called slave-owning societies, on the one hand, and genuine slave societies on the other. In slave-owning societies, slavery is an adjunct to other forms of free and unfree labor, and relatively small numbers of individuals are enslaved, compared to other laborers such as tenant farmers, peasants, serfs, etc. Examples of slave-owning societies include ancient Egypt, China and India. In genuine slave societies, of which there have only been five in history (Greece, Rome, the southern United States, the Caribbean and Brazil), slavery is essential to the society’s economic functioning. In these societies, even though other kinds of labor coexisted with slavery, slaves comprised up to one-third of the total population and were the main labor force, engaged in large-scale production. The two kinds of societies form an evolutionary sequence, since all genuine slave societies began as slave-owning societies, and were transformed from one to the other when slaves began to perform an essential role in the economy, first in agriculture and later in industrial activities. Thus slavery began in all societies as a marginal institution, and in a few cases eventually became an essential one. It is important to recognize, however, that in most societies the conditions or motivations for such a transformation never occurred.

DISTRIBUTION OF SLAVERY

In Slavery and Social Death, Patterson reports the following geographic distribution of slavery: it was unknown in Australia, rare in aboriginal North America except for the Pacific coast, rare in Central Asia, and common everywhere else. In terms of sociocultural organization, slavery was virtually absent in hunting and gathering societies, present in 43% of all agricultural societies, and present in 73% of pastoralist societies. In general, the more complex the society and its economy, the greater the amount of social, political and economic inequality and the greater degree of social stratification. And the greater degree of inequality and stratification, the greater the likelihood of slavery.

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KINDS OF SLAVERY

Although I have broadly outlined and discussed some general parameters of slavery above, there are many variables within and among different systems of slavery that resulted in considerable differences in the treatment and conditions of individual slaves or groups of slaves. Some of the most significant of these variables include the nature of the society within which slavery evolved or to which it was introduced, the rights given to slaves in a particular society, and the nature of the individual owner or master. As we shall see, these and other variables to be discussed below insured that the experience of slavery could be very different for different people in different places and at different times. Unlike most other tools, slaves as human instruments were more flexible and adaptable, and could therefore be used for different functions. There could thus be different kinds of slaves, depending upon the need and/or desire of the owner. One basic distinction was between urban and rural slaves. Urban slaves were mostly employed as household servants or craftsmen, while rural slaves were employed in agricultural labor on farms and plantations and industrial jobs in mines or factories. Another, less common, kind of slave was the administrative slave. Different kinds of slavery can also be classified by the nature of ownership, whether individual or collective. The most common type of slavery was chattel slavery, whereby slaves were owned by individual masters; unlike other kinds of slaves, their servitude was both perpetual and inheritable. The other major kind of slavery was serfdom; in this form of slavery serfs were owned by the state. Serfs were bound to the land, which meant that they could not leave it of their own free will, nor could they be removed or sold away from it. Like slaves, serfs were obligated to provide service and were not free to change their status, but the services demanded of them were almost always limited in some fashion. And unlike chattel slaves, serfs were allowed to marry and have families, the children of which belonged to the parents, although the children were bound the land and assumed the same obligations as their parents.

THE PROCESS OF ENSLAVEMENT

There are essentially only two ways in which people became slaves; through the enslavement of formerly free persons or by birth. Since the conditions or the nature of enslavement could change and be inherited, we can also distinguish between original and current means of enslavement; i.e., an individual could be enslaved though one of the means discussed below, and then his or her offspring could become slaves through birth. Probably the most common means of enslavement overall was through capture during war. As I noted above, warfare and slavery are related, and this is the primary reason; war has occurred with great frequency in the past and into the present day, and enslavement is one of its most common outcomes. Capture during warfare was also one of the major sources of slaves in certain kinds of societies: kin-based or tribal cultures; the formative phases of advanced societies with large-scale slavery; and complex societies in which captivity was always the dominant mode. Capture during warfare did not, however, inevitably result in enslavement, for slavery was only one alternative available to the captor. In fact, for various reasons, some of them logistical, the majority of prisoners of war were not enslaved. If large numbers of people were 21 HUXCRSGD. 532 captured within their own territory–if, for example, an entire settlement of some size were captured–enslavement was not usually considered desirable because it was the conquerors, not the slaves, who were the outsiders, and it was easier for such groups to offer resistance on their native ground. On some occasions, to be discussed later, such populations became serfs, but this was rare. Alternatives to enslavement included the massacre of prisoners, torture and sacrifice, temporary imprisonment, exchange for other prisoners and outright release. Ransom was one of the most common alternatives to enslavement, but its likelihood depended at least in part on the rank and/or status of the prisoner; the higher the rank or the greater the wealth of the prisoner, the more likely his or her ransom. Another very common method of enslavement was kidnapping. In some instances, particularly in pre-modern societies, kidnapping and capture during warfare could be quite similar. Overall, however, kidnapping usually involved single individuals, whereas capture during warfare often involved groups. In addition, warfare often was not involved in kidnapping, which, unlike warfare, usually was for the sole purpose of acquiring captives. Kidnapping was also a major means of enslavement in societies where warfare was a significant activity; piracy, for example, in the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Caribbean was often endemic, either during war when it often received government support and approval or during periods of relative peace when piracy became a form of entrepreneurial crime. Most societies, however, forbade the kidnapping and sale of their own free citizens; thus, as with prisoners of war, most slaves obtained by kidnapping were by definition foreigners or outsiders. In some instances, such as in the New World, the majority of slaves were kidnapped in Africa and transported across the Atlantic. Until the inception of the Atlantic slave trade, however, most slaves obtained by kidnapping were women. This was because women (and children) were easier to capture and control than men, were less likely to resist or escape, and were more desirable for the uses to which most slaves were put, i.e. domestic servitude. It was for the same reason that most male prisoners of war were put to death rather than enslaved. A third fairly widespread form of enslavement was through debt. Debt could represent both a direct and an indirect cause of slavery. Of course, people can fall into debt for a variety of reasons, including gambling, taxation, fines, or high interest rates on borrowed money. In some cases, one could pawn oneself or one’s relatives as security or collateral for a loan. If a person could not repay the debt, the collateral was then forfeit. In parts of the Near East, debt was, after warfare, the second most important source of slaves. On the other hand, enslavement for debt was specifically forbidden in many other societies. We must make a distinction here between debt-servitude and true chattel slavery, since slavery for debt was usually conditional in that it could be revoked upon repayment of the debt, was often for a limited and specified period of time and could not be inherited. Another means of enslavement was as punishment for crimes, usually for offenses such as murder, theft, adultery and sorcery. This form of enslavement was commonly practiced in the majority of pre-modern slave systems, and was a primary source of slaves in Asia and some small-scale slave systems. Yet another means of enslavement was through the abandonment or sale of children. This method of enslavement was widespread, but rarely if ever represented a major source of slaves. This expedient occurred where children were unwanted either because their parents were too poor to support an excessive number of children, because of the sex of the child (almost always females in patriarchal societies which did not value them), or, more rarely, because of some undesirable attribute or characteristic of the child. In many societies parents–usually the father–had absolute power over their children and therefore had the authority to make such decisions. Abandonment refers to the practice of taking the child–usually a newborn or very 22 HUXCRSGD. 532 young infant–to a remote location where it would either die of exposure or be raised as a slave by anyone willing to assume responsibility for it. A less common method of enslavement was in the form of tribute or tax payment. In societies with an excess of people and a shortage of material goods, people could be offered in lieu of payment in money and/or goods. In some cases people were already slaves in tributary states; in such cases they would simply be transferred from one master to another. Most advanced pre-modern societies acquired some slaves in this manner, but not usually in significant quantities. A final method was self-enslavement. The main reason people sold themselves into slavery was poverty; in essence one was exchanging one’s freedom for some minimal level of support. In societies in which kinship represented the primary means of social and economic organization, those unable to support themselves or without kin to support them might of necessity have to sell themselves in order to survive. In some–but not all–cases, marrying a slave might involve enslaving oneself as well. Self-enslavement was a major source of slaves at times in both China and Japan. The other major means of enslavement was enslavement by birth. This was the single most important source of slaves in mature slave systems, i.e., those which had been in existence for some time and which relied upon biological reproduction for the majority of their slaves rather than social reproduction. In most cases–and in all of the genuine slave societies–societies which began by acquiring most of their slaves through warfare, kidnapping or the other methods described above came to rely upon the offspring of existing slaves not only to replace those who died or were freed, but also to increase the slave population. As was demonstrated in these genuine slave societies, most slave communities were capable of efficient reproduction when this was considered desirable by the slave-owning community. Inheritance of slave status, however, was not always straightforward, for it depended upon the laws and traditions of a given society, as well as the sex and status of the parents, and was complicated by sexual relationships between those who were free and those who were slaves. In some cases, if either the mother or the father were a slave, the child would become a slave regardless of the other parent’s status; in other cases, the status of the child would be determined by the parent who had the higher status, or the lower status; in rarer instances the child would be free regardless of the parents’ status. In other words, the status of the child of a slave or slave could be highly variable, depending on a variety of factors.

ACQUISITION OF SLAVES

Slaves could be acquired either directly, as described above, or indirectly. The most common means of obtaining slaves indirectly was through internal or external trade. Internal trade–i.e., the sale or exchange of slaves within a given society or system of slavery–was relatively unusual, due to the reluctance of most masters to sell locally-born slaves. Such sales were usually a form of punishment in cases where slaves were considered incorrigible or were persistent runaways. Internal trade took place on a significant scale only in the Americas. External trade, on the other hand, was widespread, and historical records indicate that slaves were often among the earliest articles of external long-distance trade. Particularly in societies in which there was a surplus of people, slaves were often the only commodity of sufficient value to obtain money or luxury products. And slaves, viewed as objects or property, were particularly desirable because they could function both as commodities and as producers. 23 HUXCRSGD. 532

Because of their value, slaves came to be seen as prestigious possessions for persons of high rank, and could be accumulated for their own sake rather than necessarily for their utility as laborers. In this fashion, slaves came to represent the closest approximation to modern multifunctional money, and could thus be used as units of value or as a means of payment. In a non-monetary or barter economy the value of slaves would therefore vary relative to the value of other commodities, depending in part on their current scarcity or desirability. Slaves could become a commodity in this sense in two ways: they could be sold by the master who had acquired them directly, or they could be resold by subsequent masters or by professional slave traders. Over time a number of trade systems evolved in different time and places, the largest and best-known being the Indian Ocean slave trade, the Black Sea and Mediterranean slave trade, the medieval European slave trade, the trans-Sahara slave trade, and the transatlantic slave trade. In all of these systems, other items and commodities were traded for and along with slaves.

THE CONDITION OF SLAVERY

The actual conditions of slavery could vary considerably according to both public and private determinants. In most cases the single greatest private determinant was the relationship between master and slave, which was in turn influenced, among others, by the following: 1) the primary use to which the slave was put; in general, the conditions of slavery were more favorable for domestic slaves than those performing hard labor; 2) the manner in which the slave was integrated into the workforce; 3) the mode of the slave’s acquisition; slaves bought as adults tended to be less well treated than those born or raised in a household; 4) the residence of the slave and his or her proximity to the master; in most cases living with or in proximity to the master meant better treatment; 5) the original means of enslavement; those enslaved within their own society usually fared better than those from outside it; 6) the degree of absenteeism by owners; the degree of personal involvement of masters varied considerably, and although genuine absenteeism was relatively rare, many masters left much of the administration of slaves to supervisors or overseers, who could be quite brutal; tenant-farming slaves, on the other hand, had the greatest autonomy and the least supervision. Other private determinants were personal characteristics of the slave, including race, ethnicity, gender, and skills. Slaves who belonged to the same race as the master were usually treated better than those who were not; a study involving a sample of fifty-five societies showed that slaves and masters were of the same race in 75% of the cases, were of different races 21% of the time, and in 4% of cases slaves were the same and different races as the master. Physical appearance was also significant in terms of the degree to which slaves resembled the ideal physical type of the master. Statistics concerning the ethnicity of slave and master were similar to those of race. However, ethnicity appears to have been a more significant factor than race, with more widespread repercussions. Although there was in general a reluctance to enslave those of the same ethnicity, this did nonetheless happen at times; usually, the slaves were reclassified in some fashion in order to redefine them as outsiders. In terms of the alternatives to enslavement discussed above, individuals of the same ethnicity tended to be killed, ransomed or sold into slavery in another society rather than being enslaved within their own. Gender could also be a significant determinant; women tended to be treated less harshly than men, although they were on the other hand more vulnerable to sexual exploitation. The possession of skills also 24 HUXCRSGD. 532 often determined how a slave was treated, in that some skills were valued more than others and those who possessed valued skills usually received better treatment. Public determinants also affected the conditions of slavery. The nature of a society’s laws and customs could thus affect the quality of slave’s lives. One such feature was the peculium, which was virtually universal, although at the discretion of the individual master. One fundamental legal feature of slavery was that slaves could not own property. However, the peculium represented the partial and temporary capacity of a slave to possess and enjoy a given range of goods. Such use was always conditional; it never included all the proprietary capacities of free citizens, and the master always reserved a claim on the slave’s possession, which could be actuated at any time. The usual practice, though, was for the slave to have the use of goods during his or her lifetime. Even real property could be part of a peculium, so that slaves could use the produce from land in their possession, or, paradoxically, could even own other slaves. The peculium was often used by masters as a means of motivating their slaves, i.e. through the promise of being allowed to keep some or all of the fruits of their labor. Marriage and other unions could also be permitted if the master were willing. In such instances slave marriages were recognized, with the permission of the master, but the parents were denied the rights to any children that resulted. Allowing female slaves to marry did not necessarily prevent the master from continuing to use them sexually. The murder of slaves was treated somewhat differently in different legal systems. In many cases, slaves were murdered for ritual purposes, often on the death of the master, whereby they might accompany their master and continue to serve him or her in the afterlife; they could also be offered as sacrifices to gods. Slaves could even be murdered as a form of conspicuous consumption, to display the master’s prestige. In most societies, masters had the freedom to kill slaves at will, but some legal codes treated the murder of slaves like other murders. However, usually the penalty for murdering a slave was less severe than for the murder of a free person. When crimes were committed by a third party against slaves, these were considered crimes against the master, since the slave was of course the master’s property, and therefore the master received compensation for the crime. Because of their lack of legal status, slaves could not give evidence in court except under torture. On the other hand, slaves were held responsible for the crimes they committed, and the masters were not held responsible for the crimes of the slave. Since most legal codes distinguished between free and slave, slaves were usually punished more severely if the victim were free rather than another slave. If the slave was convicted of a civil crime, the penalty was taken from his or her peculium. Although it is clear that slaves could be– and often were–badly treated, overall the treatment of slaves was considered to be relatively mild in 80% of the societies in which slavery existed. As a generalization, harsher treatment occurred when large groups of slaves involved in productive labor were involved, such as agricultural laborers on plantations or workers in mines or factories. In attempting to assess the conditions of slavery in specific places and times or for particular individuals, one must also keep in mind the difference between social norms and actual practice. In some cases norms might be more stringent than actual behavior; in other cases, a given master might flout the norms of more beneficent behavior. It should also be stressed that the master-slave relationship was by no means static or uniform, and that in addition to legal strictures there were also certain constraints on the master, particularly where his or her own self-interest was involved. Most masters used a combination of punishments and rewards in order to extract the most efficient production from their slaves, and most rational individuals were aware that excessive punishment was in the long run counterproductive. It should also be emphasized that slaves were not entirely powerless to affect the conditions of their lives. There was usually a struggle between master and slave, a process of mutual adjustment whereby the 25 HUXCRSGD. 532 slaves tried to establish limited expectations on the part of the master. And slaves always took every opportunity to establish and assert their human identity whenever possible. Thus the relationship between master and slave was almost always a dynamic one.

RESPONSES TO ENSLAVEMENT

Of course, the responses to enslavement were influenced to some considerable degree by the conditions of slavery discussed above. Under any given set of conditions, however, slaves could respond in a variety of ways to their situation. At one extreme of response, slaves could adapt as fully as possible to the condition of slavery; they could become acculturated to the culture of their enslavers and might assimilate as completely as would be permitted, given their outsider status. They might become model slaves, loyal and obedient, wholly accepting the values and beliefs of their masters. Psychologically, this response would be akin to the bonding of captors and captives or hostages; such bonding has sometimes been referred to as the Stockholm syndrome, derived from an instance in Sweden in which the hostages of a botched bank holdup identified with their captors and attempted to aid them in escaping. Most slaves, however, did not acculturate to this extent, although many of them, particularly those born into slavery, may have accepted their fates. The majority of slaves found occasion to resist their condition in one form or another. One common form was passive resistance, one of the ways in which slaves reduced the expectations of their masters by working at less than their maximum capacity or by conforming to the stereotypes of slaves as stupid, lazy or venal. If, for example, slaves wanted to minimize the likelihood of being sold and separated from family and friends, they would attempt to reduce their value as property by being less productive. Slaves might also feign illness to avoid work or pretend to misunderstand directions. More active forms of resistance included theft and sabotage. Many women practiced either abortion or infanticide as an alternative to giving birth to a child of the man who enslaved them. Another form of resistance involved escape. Running away was common, and although attempting to escape was severely punished, many slaves were not deterred, making numerous efforts. One ultimate form of escape was suicide, and although this did not happen very often– given the will to survive under even the most adverse conditions–it always remained the final option. Active physical resistance was less frequent. Although it has usually been difficult to verify, many stories circulated concerning the poisoning of slaveowners by their cooks. Male slaves would on occasion physically attack or resist masters or overseers, with mixed results. The most extreme form of resistance was slave rebellions. Rebellions of any size were extremely rare, and were rarely if ever successful. Usually the response to such rebellions was vastly out of proportion to the actual threat they represented, and the very threat or idea of rebellion was sufficient to mobilize the entire slaveowning community. Some of the more notable examples of rebellions will be discussed subsequently.

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MANUMISSION

Manumission refers to the granting of freedom to a slave or slaves by their master. In most societies there were several modes of release which were used. Like many other aspects of slavery, manumission varied widely at different times and places in terms of the numbers of slaves freed and the conditions under which manumission occurred; in addition, the relationship between master and slave often determined if, how and when it would take place. Among the possible forms were immediate full release, gradual manumission and semi-manumission. Like the peculium, the promise of manumission was often used by masters to motivate slaves to work hard and behave well; that is, it was an incentive that might be used along with or instead of more negative means such as beatings. Very rarely were slaves freed without conditions; in almost every case there were both legal and cultural limitations on who could be freed and in what fashion. In general, agricultural slaves were less likely to be freed than domestic ones, and those most likely to be freed were those who performed valuable personal services for the master, such as secretaries or accountants. One of the most widespread and probably one of the earliest modes of release was postmortem manumission, the freeing of slaves upon the death of the master. This was a popular method because there was no personal cost to the master and it was an effective means of motivation. The actual mechanism of manumission could be expressed in the master’s will, as a wish to be honored by his or her heirs or by an act of the heir or heirs themselves. As Orlando Patterson points out, posthumously either killing or freeing slaves were equivalent symbolic acts in that they both represented forms of sacrifice. Another mode of release which was widespread throughout the world was cohabitation, i.e. manumission by means of marriage or concubinage. This was the most common form of manumission among kinship-based or preliterate societies. It was also the predominant form in the Islamic world, in which cohabitation with slaves was encouraged, since slaves and concubines were the only women with whom men could have lawful premarital or extramarital relations. However, in almost all cases such relationships were between free men and enslaved women; marriage between free women and male slaves was rare and often forbidden. Whereas marriage to a free man brought freedom to a slave woman, most male slaves couldn’t afford to marry a free woman, and free status was not necessarily the outcome of such unions. Another ancient and widespread mode of release was adoption, which was common in preliterate societies, but was rarely significant in terms of numbers and was not universally employed as a means of manumission. Adoption can be seen as an extension of the process of assimilation begun with the enslavement of an individual, and could take several generations before the process was complete. A less common mode of release was political manumission, whereby the state or a community adopted a slave without the master’s consent, usually as a reward for acts of valor or service to the state. In many ways this was the least conditional and most complete method of manumission, granting the greatest degree of integration into society. Obviously the status of slaves changed upon manumission, with the establishment of new legal relationships between slave and master and slave and society. In most instances, however, the personal and social relationship between master and slave remained virtually the same after manumission; not only was there a strong psychological bond of interdependence between them, but the slave rarely had sufficient resources to live an autonomous existence. Thus even after manumission there was a strong patron-client bond between the master and the freed slave, a bond usually sanctioned by law. In addition, as noted above, manumission was almost always conditional, and certain obligations were expected of the slave; the slave was also expected to be 27 HUXCRSGD. 532 grateful to the master and to continue to honor him or her. Under these conditions, the master often had little to lose by granting a slave freedom. In terms of the slave’s relationship to society, the freed slave’s political and legal status was rarely if ever equivalent to that of a freeborn citizen; some civil disability almost always existed and freed slaves were barred from assuming leadership roles in the community. Freed slaves also ranked lower in prestige than free citizens. Although there was some degree of acceptance and respect, manumitted slaves were rarely perceived as equal, as some stigma of slavery usually remained. In general, the prestige of freed slaves tended to be lower than their political-legal status. Quite often, full freedom equivalent to that of free citizens was only achieved by the freed slave’s descendants. The nature of the relationship between slaves, masters and the community varied, depending on a number of factors. Unless a manumitted slave had acquired sufficient property or was able to physically remove himself or herself from the master’s community, there was usually little change in the actual relationship of master and slave before and after manumission. Close ties of dependency, in the great majority of preliterate societies, continued in perpetuity, and sometimes after the death of both master and former slave, as not only the slave, but also his descendants were physically absorbed into the master’s family, becoming poor relations of the family. Eventually they became legally full-fledged members of the community, although the degree of absorption of those of the first generation depended to some extent on whether the slave was originally part of the community or an outsider. The degree of absorption was also determined at least in part by the gender of the slave and the mode of manumission. Most freed female slaves were readily absorbed as concubines or wives, and their children were wholly accepted into the family; therefore, the stigma of slavery disappeared relatively quickly. On the other hand, male freedmen and their spouses occupied a distinct status group in between slave and free, retaining strong ties of dependence. These freedmen often resided separately from the master’s family and though culturally assimilated, remained socially excluded. In societies where there were little or no racial differences, but where ethnic differences may have existed, the relationship between freedmen and their former masters and society at large was highly formalized in law. Under these circumstances a freedman became a citizen with full legal capacities; he could not hold office, but his descendants could. Socially, however, freedmen in these circumstances were still considered second-class citizens, with some stigma of slavery often remaining. These conditions were found in open slave systems such as ancient Rome, Asia and the Near East. In other societies, including ancient Greece and Latin America, there was no formal institutionalization of these relationships. Economic ties of dependence remained strong, manumitted slaves were rigidly excluded from citizenship, a strong and persistent stigma remained, and freedmen formed a separate social caste. Because of this there was a lack of economic conflict between citizens and freedmen. In yet other societies, mostly in the Caribbean, the master class was racially distinct and represented a small minority of the population. In such cases there was a strong prohibition against manumission, no institutionalization of the relationship of freedmen and citizens, and the persistence of a strong stigma. Those manumitted were mostly women and older men, the former obtaining their freedom largely through concubinage. In these societies freedmen were viewed as buffers between masters and slaves, with freedmen identifying more strongly with the master class. Finally, in the southern United States freed slaves remained at the bottom of the social hierarchy. There was essentially no place for freed slaves in the American South, and there was considerable hostility to manumission. Freed slaves were seen as marginal and dangerous, and 28 HUXCRSGD. 532 freedmen were always suspected of either actively or by example inciting the slave population to rebellion or seeking their own freedom. To sum up, the incidence and frequency of manumission was affected by variables similar to those affecting other conditions of slavery, i.e., sex, status of parents, age, skill, race and/or ethnicity. In general, females were manumitted at a higher rate than males; this was due to a number of factors, including the prevalence of sexual relations between masters and slaves, the mother-child bond with the offspring of such relations, and the fact that females were generally more dependent than males and therefore were more likely to remain in the same relationship after being freed. Also, urban slaves, because they often had more skills and were more acculturated, were more likely to be freed than rural ones, and slaves who were inherited were more likely to be freed than those who were bought. Manumission also tended to occur more often during periods of crisis, when slaves were perhaps more likely to be viewed as liabilities or because of the greater opportunities presented by crisis situations. In most cases, after three or four generations the descendants of slaves had become free; as will be seen, however, this was not the case in the southern United States.

ABOLITION

It is first necessary to distinguish between abolition and emancipation. Emancipation refers to the freeing of slaves in large numbers, usually as a matter of state policy, the best- known example being the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 which freed all slaves in the southern United States. Abolition, on the other hand, refers to the elimination of the institution of slavery itself. As such, abolition is a relatively recent concept, and was not seriously contemplated or advocated until quite late in human history, the first recorded instance being the abolition of slavery in Great Britain in the eighteenth century. In the ancient world and until quite recently slavery was widely accepted, entirely legal and, as far as can be determined, seems to have been considered by most people, even some renowned thinkers, as morally justifiable.

Bibliography

Leonie J. Archer (ed.), Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour, London, 1988

M.L. Bush, Serfdom and Slavery, London, 1996

M.C. Campbell, The Dynamics of Change in a Slave Society, 1976

Lambros Comitas and David Lowenthal (eds.), Slaves, Free Men, Citizens, New York, 1973

Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, The Economics of Slavery, Chicago, 1964

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Michael Craton (ed.), Roots and Branches: Current Directions in Slave Studies, Toronto, 1979

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Ithaca, 1963

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Ithaca, 1975

David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, New York, 1984

Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman (eds.), A Historical Guide to World Slavery, New York, 1998

J. Duffy, A Question of Slavery, Oxford, 1967

Paul Finkelman (ed.), Slavery and the Law, 1997

C.W.W. Greenidge, Slavery, London, 1958

Gwendolyn Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies, Baltimore, 1971

Graham W. Irwin (ed.), Africans Abroad: A Documentary Survey of the Black Diaspora in Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean during the Age of Slavery, New York, 1977

Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom, Cambridge MA, 1987

Julius Lester, To Be a Slave, New York, 1972

John Francis Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church, London, 1975

Joseph Miller, Slavery: A Worldwide Bibliography, White Plains NY, 1985

Joseph Miller, Slavery and Slaving in World History, 2 v., London, 1992

James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom, New York, 1990

Stephan Palmie (ed.), Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery, Knoxville, 1995

Peter J. Parish, Slavery: History and Historians, New York, 1989

Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, New York, 1972

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge, MA, 1982

Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, Vol. I, London, 1991

William D. Phillips, Jr., Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade, Minneapolis, 1985

Patrick Richardson (ed.), Empire and slavery, New York, 1970 30 HUXCRSGD. 532

Junius P. Rodriguez, The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, 2 v., Santa Barbara, 1997

Junius P. Rodriguez (ed.), The Chronology of World Slavery, Santa Barbara, 1999

Eric Eustace Williams and Colin A. Palmer, Capitalism & Slavery, Chapel Hill, 1994

Robin Winks (ed.), Slavery: A Comparative Perspective, New York, 1972

ORIGINS OF SLAVERY

Since the existence of slavery undoubtedly precedes the beginning of recorded history, it is not possible to offer anything but informed speculation concerning its origins. It is possible, however, to extrapolate from our knowledge and understanding of historical and current preliterate societies and the nature of prehistoric societies as well. It is likely, for example, that many early societies had relatively low populations and large amounts of available land, thus creating a situation of supply and demand in which labor would be deemed desirable to work the land. In the absence of other forms of dependent labor, slavery might have seemed a viable solution. In the earliest civilizations, for example, slave labor could well have represented a significant aspect of economic organization for the purpose of producing surpluses of food or products for trade or consumption by an elite class. Slavery also undoubtedly arose, as suggested earlier, as a consequence of the development of social stratification, leading to the establishment of inequality within societies, as well as between societies. As some societies became more powerful than others, they would have been able to dominate their neighbors, to seize their land and property and to enslave their people. As such powerful societies expanded and eventually became states and then empires, many of these captured and peoples became a class of slaves. Warfare, which, like slavery, extends into the past well beyond recorded history, was also very likely involved in the origins of slavery. As we have seen, capture during warfare was in most times and places the most common form of enslavement. Although killing captives might have been more emotionally satisfying action following the heat of battle, where there was a need for labor enslavement might have seemed more practical. Thus, as suggested earlier, warfare, civilization and slavery seem to have become inextricably related from very early on, since warfare and civilization are also closely connected and the rise of civilizations involved increasing economic, political and social complexity, including the development of social stratification and the need for a labor force to produce food and surpluses for an elite class and to work land that was being acquired through warfare.

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SLAVERY IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST

The earliest historical records of slavery come from Sumer, the world’s first civilization. Writing was invented by the Sumerians, and among the earliest documents are references to slaves and slavery, some as early as 2500 BCE. By that time Sumer had already become a socially stratified society, with three main classes: 1) citizens, all of whom were theoretically equal in legal terms, but were highly diverse socially and economically, including nobility and wealthy individuals and the laboring population and the poor, who comprised the majority of the population; 2) a class of dependent groups, equivalent to serfs, most of whom were attached to high-ranking or wealthy individuals or temples; 3) and at the lowest level of society, slaves. Slaves were greatly outnumbered by citizens and dependent laborers. Most of them were women, hundreds of whom labored on temple estates, while others, ranging from several dozen to several hundred, were employed in commercial enterprises, such as textile manufacturing. Still others were domestic servants; a well-to-do family usually had three to five slaves on the average. Most slaves were acquired as prisoners of war, many of them coming from less complex tribal societies of the hill country surrounding the Mesopotamian plain. Some were also prisoners from wars against other Sumerian city-states. As prisoners of war, they could be ransomed at any time their families could raise the price of their freedom. A second means of enslavement in Mesopotamia was as punishment for crimes. The third major source was debt slavery, which became increasingly less important over time, as self-sale gradually disappeared and the sale of wives was eventually prohibited; the sale of children was legal, but rare. In Mesopotamia, enslavement for debt was for a limited period, usually a maximum of three years. In some of the earliest known legal documents, such as the Code of Ur-Nammu, which dates to about 2050 BCE, there are references to the sale of slaves. From this law code and subsequent legal documents we learn that slaves had no rights, only obligations, in regard to their master, and that there were no laws to protect slaves against maltreatment by their masters. On the other hand, slaves could make contracts in the same manner as freemen, could borrow money, could act as witnesses and testify in court, and could litigate against others, with the exception of their masters. The law code also made distinction between native-born slaves, more likely debt slaves or criminals, and foreign captives, who were likely to be prisoners of war. Slaves were distinguished by a distinctive hairstyle. In some regions slaves had to wear irons if they were outside the master’s house, and they could be branded and flogged as punishment, usually for attempting to escape. Overall, though, the documentary evidence we possess suggests that slaves in Mesopotamia usually seem to have been well treated. Manumission was legal, but extremely rare. Adoption was the most common method. Slaves were not permitted to buy their own freedom; manumission was the right of the master only. According to the Sumerian legal system, the children of a free person and a slave were considered free and could inherit goods and property from their parents. One of the most common uses of slaves was in agricultural labor, mostly on temple estates, where they were employed in large numbers and were supplemented by hired seasonal workers. Such workers required constant supervision due to frequent efforts at escape and their general reluctance to work. Other agricultural slaves were employed privately, but their use in this sector was limited, since they couldn’t compete with or replace free tenant labor. Many of

32 HUXCRSGD. 532 them were tenant farmers who rented fields and equipment from their masters in return for a large portion of their yield. Such slaves could work independently or be hired out, and required less supervision than plantation slaves. Slaves were also employed in large numbers in various crafts, but were nevertheless outnumbered by freemen. As with agricultural workers, the temples had their own slave artisans, but usually had to employ free craftsmen as well. The third major use of slaves, mostly women, was as domestic servants. There was very little organized resistance to slavery; i.e., there are no records of slave rebellions. The most common form of resistance was escape, which was, even so, relatively rare and was punished by imprisonment. In economic terms, slaves did not play a major role in the agricultural economy compared to free labor. Most of them were owned by the king or by the temples, and they were mostly used for unskilled year-round employment not requiring extensive supervision. Thus, Mesopotamia was a slave-owning society, not a slave society, mainly because of the scarcity of land, which meant that the city-states could not absorb large numbers of captives. However, the number and importance of slaves increased in Mesopotamia after Sumerian times. Although not all did, slaves could have an independent economic existence. They could have families, own land, houses and property, could engage in business transactions, could mortgage, buy and sell possessions, and could buy and sell slaves and hire free persons. In some cases slaves were more profitable to have as tenants than free people. Our knowledge of slavery in ancient Egypt comes primarily from the New Kingdom period of empire, when Egypt behaved more aggressively toward its neighbors and expanded its territory in several directions. As a result, most Egyptian slaves were prisoners of war, who probably numbered in the tens of thousands. However, as in Mesopotamia, most of the labor, agricultural and otherwise, was done by peasants. Ownership of slaves was also similar to Mesopotamia, in that the pharaoh, the nobility and the temples employed the majority of them. Unlike Mesopotamia, slaves were not sharply delimited from freemen. In fact, household slaves were generally better off than peasants, since they had a greater opportunity for improving their lot, with the potential for assuming administrative positions if they displayed sufficient skill and initiative. Slaves could serve as messengers for government bureaus, royal butlers or chamberlains, or even army officers. Egyptian slaves were used in a variety of occupations, including domestic service, administration, public works projects, the army, and mining and quarrying in the Sinai Desert. From the Bible we learn that the Hebrews were both slaves and masters. As a conquered people, they were enslaved by the Egyptians and the Babylonians. Likewise most slaves of the Hebrews were prisoners of war, acquired during the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, when Israel was a state often at war with the Canaanites, Philistines, and other neighboring societies in the Near East. In addition to warfare, slaves also were acquired through purchase from the Phoenicians and through debt slavery. Although foreigners were enslaved for life, the enslavement of other Jews was limited to six years. In the Hebrew Bible we find contradictory statements about slavery. On the one hand, slavery is considered essential and necessary, and slaves are described rather matter-of-factly. On the other hand, we also find laws protecting slaves, admonitions to masters to treat slaves well, and provision for the protection of fugitive slaves. In later times, there are brief references to small egalitarian sects such as the Essenes and the Theraputae, who actively opposed slavery; this is probably the earliest evidence of opposition to slavery on a level beyond that of individuals.

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ANCIENT GREECE

Slavery in ancient Greece can be traced back at least as far as the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean civilization (c. 1200-1400 BCE), a hierarchically organized stratified society whose written records make reference to slaves, mostly women. In the succeeding Dark Age and Archaic period (c. 1000-600 BCE), society was less highly organized, but still stratified. Homer’s epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, also refer to slaves and slavery. Again, it was mostly women who were slaves, representing the fruits of battle, as prizes to be won. Such slaves were primarily symbols of honor and prestige, with little economic significance; these slaves became part of the master’s family and seem to have been reasonably well treated. By the end of the eighth century BCE slavery had become the preferred form of dependent labor in Greece, and thus slavery became more important economically as Greece became more populous and more prosperous, beginning in the sixth century. By this time, Greece was becoming more urbanized, with an intensification of commerce, trade and industry, a change in economic organization for which the traditional rural dependant labor was less suitable. In addition, as Greek city-states began expanding, colonizing areas further afield where they came into increasing contact with foreigners, and as the frequency of war and piracy increased, the significance of slavery increased as well. Nevertheless, free unskilled workers continued to outnumber slaves until about 500 BCE, and slave labor also was still supplemented by seasonal wage labor, especially during the harvest period. Capture during warfare supplied by far the greatest number of slaves. Victorious soldiers could dispose of their captives as items of property, for the Greeks considered victory in battle the best possible title to property, whereby the winners owned the losers. As discussed previously, the conqueror had a number of options concerning his captives, including execution, immediate or delayed liberation–either for ransom, as exchange for other prisoners or simply as a gratuitous gesture–or enslavement, either by the victorious soldier himself or by sale to others. This decision was influenced by a number of factors, including whether the losing side had resisted, negotiated surrender or simply capitulated, whether the victor was more interested in vengeance or profit, and the kind of prisoner (i.e., age, sex, physical health and/or social rank). In earlier times, as described in the Homeric epics, it was inevitably the practice to kill all men of fighting age and enslave the women and children. Later, during the Classical period, practices varied with the circumstances discussed above. In some cases, fighting men taken prisoner might be enslaved; in other cases the entire population of the losing side would be enslaved; in still other cases fighting men would be killed and civilians enslaved; in yet other cases the entire population would be slaughtered. Despite the fact that most Greek slaves were acquired through warfare, there is little evidence that going to war was a primary motive for obtaining slaves; i.e., slaves were a byproduct of war, not its goal. Almost all of these slaves acquired through warfare were non-Greeks, or barbarians (to the Greeks, anyone who didn’t speak Greek was considered a barbarian). There were a number of reasons for this, including institutionalized practices against the enslaving of other Greeks. First, there was a widespread feeling that enslaving fellow Greeks was wrong. Second, communal solidarity imposed a moral duty on family, kin or the state to ransom captives; only elite members of barbarian societies could expect such efforts on their behalf. And third, Greeks made less satisfactory slaves than barbarians because they tended to be less docile and 34 HUXCRSGD. 532 manageable, being more used to personal freedom and also finding it easier to escape and survive within Greek territory than foreigners. The second major source of slaves was through their purchase from slave dealers or in a slave market. Every large city had a slave market where such transactions took place. The major sources of slaves were cultures to the north and east of Greece, from Thrace, the lower Danube region and Asia Minor. Many of these societies had a long tradition of slavery, and enslavement could result from piracy, warfare and raiding, the expulsion of undesirables or the sale of children. The price of slaves was determined by their age, sex, physical condition and skills, as well as supply and demand. Thus the value of slaves varied considerably at different times in different places, although the price was usually equivalent to a workman’s yearly income, if not more. Slave traders were generally held in contempt, for it was not considered a prestigious occupation. Debt slavery was also practiced initially, but was abolished in Athens around 600 BCE and became increasingly rare elsewhere in Greece as well. The elimination of debt slavery, along with the prohibition against enslaving fellow Greeks, thus created a need for more slaves from outside Greek society. Another source of slaves, though the numbers obtained were relatively small, was through the exposure of children, mostly girls, who would be abandoned as newborns or infants, to be taken up as slaves by anyone willing to bear the cost of their support. In Greece, relatively few slaves were obtained by birth, since there were few male slaves and marriage between slaves was discouraged. In Greece there were two kinds of slavery: serfdom and chattel slavery. The first, community servitude, or serfdom, involved the wholesale enslavement of indigenous populations, both Greek and barbarian, who had been conquered by stronger societies and who continued to live as families on the lands of their ancestors. As was the case elsewhere where serfdom occurred, almost all of these slaves were agricultural. Since they could not be sold from the land and were allowed to have wives and families, their population was maintained purely through reproduction. Although there were serfs in Thessaly (there called penestai) and Crete, as well as in colonies established by Greeks outside of the Greek mainland, the best-known of these were the Spartan helots. This was the indigenous population of the territories of Lakonia and Messenia in the southern Peloponnese, conquered by the Spartans and subjugated thereafter. During Classical times, they numbered around 200,000, greatly outnumbering the Spartans themselves, who kept them under control by force. Although helots were assigned to individual masters, they were by the state. Helots could not be bought or sold, paid fixed rent for the land they worked and lived on, and kept any excess crops for themselves. Helots could be freed only by the state, usually for military service, for they served in the army when necessity required. On the other hand, helots were not trusted and were kept under close watch, since they had rebelled several times and had come close enough to succeeding to make the Spartans nervous whenever part of their army went abroad. The most common form of slavery in Greece, however, was chattel slavery, the least free of all types of unfree labor. Unlike the helots and other serfs, chattel slaves were individuals uprooted from their societies and were mostly not of Greek origin. Also unlike helots, chattel slaves had to be replaced by the methods discussed above, i.e., capture in warfare or purchase from slave traders. Chattel slavery increased in significance with the development of long- distance commercial exchange accompanied by imperialistic expansion and the establishment of colonies throughout the Mediterranean beginning in the ninth century and continuing through the third century BCE. Thus chattel slavery flourished particularly in most commercial cities and ultimately replaced other forms of dependent labor. As noted above, the revocation of debt bondage in Athens, the largest and most economically developed city-state, forced rich creditors

35 HUXCRSGD. 532 to look elsewhere for compulsory labor; thus, outlawing the milder form of debt slavery increased the harshness of slavery overall and substituted barbarian slaves for Greek ones. Slaves usually received the same pay for their labor as citizens or metics (resident foreigners); the difference was that their wages went to their master rather than themselves; slaves, however, were often allowed to keep a portion of their day’s wages for themselves. Owners often contracted the services of their slaves to others or to the state; they were thus often seen as an investment by middle class citizens, especially widows or the elderly, capable of bringing in a certain, steady income. Slaves might also be contracted on a seasonal basis when the master’s business was slow. Hiring out slaves thus was usually more profitable than lending out money at interest. As property, slaves were relatively cheap. Frank J. Frost, in Greek Society, states that in Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE prices ranged from 140 to 360 drachmas ($2800-7200 in 1970 U.S. currency), depending on factors such as age, sex, skills and ethnicity; this was roughly equivalent to ten woolen cloaks or seven cows. In regard to slavery, as with so much else concerning ancient Greece, most of what we know is from Athens, since we have little or no evidence from other city-states. At the peak of Athenian wealth and power, in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, the slave population is estimated at 80,000-100,000, which probably represented about a third of the total population. (Population estimates such as these tend to vary considerably; this figure, by John V.A. Fine in The Ancient Greeks: A Critical History, is a moderate one and is consistent with those of a number of other ancient historians). Athens was the largest slaveholding city-state of its time. Most citizens owned slaves, the average per household being three, while the wealthy had as many as fifty. In appearance they differed little from metics, and compared to other city-states, they appear for the most part to have been treated mildly. The primary exceptions were those slaves assigned to the silver mines at Laurion, which employed as many as 30,000-40,000 at their peak of production. Many of the slaves working at Laurion were leased by their owners to entrepreneurs to whom the labor was subcontracted by the state. Work in the mines was difficult, the slaves were treated harshly, and there was a high mortality rate. Because Greece was a slave society, slaves were employed in every occupation except the military. The most prestigious occupations were those of the public slaves, who formed an elite group within slave society. Many able young male slaves were encouraged by their masters to educate themselves, to learn skills and to take responsibility for their work; if they demonstrated ability, they could become civil servants, administrators, assistants to officials, and even bankers. The Athenian state police force of three hundred Scythian archers was also part of this elite. Other highly regarded slaves were skilled craftsmen, many of whom came from the Near East. Such slaves often worked alongside craftsmen of other classes, were often hired out by their masters, and in many instances set up independent workshops in return for a percentage of their earnings. The most common and ubiquitous slaves were domestic slaves, who performed the entire range of household tasks. Although slaves in poorer households with only a few slaves did whatever work needed to be done, in larger households, there was more specialization, with slaves serving as maids, cooks, grooms, errand boys and attendants, nurses and nannies, and tutors (this latter function usually performed by older males). Agricultural slaves were also numerous, although large farms or plantations were rare in Greece. Most agricultural operations were relatively small-scale; even so, masters usually relied on slave overseers, preferring to spend most of their time in the city. Most agricultural slaves were from Thrace or Scythia. Likewise, industrial production was relatively small-scale, although there was a fair amount of specialization of activities, with each slave performing a different job. Many slaves were trained as assistants to craftsmen, and might eventually become 36 HUXCRSGD. 532 craftsmen themselves. As noted above, mining was the lowest form of slavery; the work was hard, living conditions were severe, and most slaves sent to the mines died within a few years. Slaves were therefore often sent to the mines as punishment. In the Greek legal system, slaves had no legal protection, recognition or political status. Legal testimony from slaves could only be obtained through torture, due to the suspicion of excessive bias either toward or against the master; masters were therefore usually loath to allow such testimony because of the potential damage to their property. Manumission rarely occurred in Greece. Most instances of manumission were at the behest of institutions such as the state or temples. In almost all cases, there were many restrictions or conditions attached to the granting of freedom, and even if a slave could pay the price of freedom, some social obligation to the master remained. Freed slaves could never become full citizens, but rather attained the status of metic, or resident foreigner. However, the children of a master and slave inherited the free status of the master. In addition to gaining an understanding of details of Greek slavery from historical, administrative and legal documents and literature, we can also discover Greek attitudes toward slavery. As elsewhere in the ancient world, slavery was seen as natural and was accepted as a part of life. It was understood that one could become a slave through misfortune not of one’s own doing. Nevertheless Greek aristocrats and citizens generally had an attitude of superiority toward slaves, partly because they had contempt for manual labor and working for others, aspects of life that were essentially part of the life of a slave. Slaves were considered things, instruments or tools, rather than human beings; thus, slaves were viewed as a kind of labor- saving machinery, and as such they were mostly maintained in the same manner as non-human tools. This attitude can be seen, for example, in The Republic, in which Plato states that some people by nature have an inadequate grasp of reason and should therefore subordinate themselves to their intellectual and moral superiors. Given the widespread belief in the inferiority of barbarians to Greeks, Plato therefore found the enslavement of foreigners acceptable. Similar attitudes can be found in Aristotle’s Politics, which was often subsequently cited as justification for slavery. In the Politics Aristotle attempts to justify slavery on the grounds that it provided necessary economic and political functions, enabling the functioning of the city- state by allowing citizens to devote themselves to higher pursuits rather than degrading manual labor. Like Plato, Aristotle believe that slaves were incapable of autonomous life, and that barbarians were slaves by nature; moreover, slavery was beneficial for both the slave and the master, since slaves were incapable of effectively looking after themselves. For Aristotle, like other Greeks, the mark of a truly free man was to be able not to live for someone else’s sake. In Athens particularly there was both irony and paradox in the coexistence of freedom, slavery and democracy. The Greeks–and above all the Athenians–valued freedom, independence and human dignity highly. Freedom represented a lack of dependence and the leisure for creative work and activities; for the citizen, leisure did not equate with idleness, for it was considered the duty and responsibility of citizens to devote themselves not only to personal fulfillment, but also the welfare of the community. Yet it was only though the economic contribution of slavery that citizens were able to devote themselves to participation in government, and thus to maintain the system of participatory democracy that was the pride and glory of Athens.

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ANCIENT ROME

Like Greece, Rome was a slave society. According to Keith Hopkins, in Conquerers and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History, slaves comprised approximately 35% of the population during the reign of Augustus. A majority of Roman citizens in Italy owned slaves, wealthy Romans drew most of their income from unfree labor, and slaves in Roman Italy dominated and monopolized large-scale production. Despite the significant economic role of slaves, however, many Roman historians consider slavery primarily a social institution, with economic aspects subsidiary. As far as can be determined, slavery was practiced on a small scale in Rome from its very beginnings as a tribal society in central Italy, and may have become a significant institution by as early as the fifth century BCE. As in Greece, slavery increased in size and significance with the expansion of the Roman empire, and during the large-scale development following the Punic Wars in the third century BCE Rome was transformed from a slave-owning society into a full- fledged slave society. As the empire expanded through the conquest of new territories, slaves were sent back to Rome as prisoners of war. At first slaves were a byproduct of this imperialist expansion, but later their acquisition also became a goal of warfare. In The Ancient Economy M.I. Finley notes that Julius Caesar sent one million captured Gauls back to Rome as slaves, and often entire captured communities numbering from 20,000-100,000 people were enslaved. Some of these captives were brought back as property of the state, others were taken to Rome as the personal property of soldiers, and others were sold on the spot to slave dealers who often accompanied the armies. This influx of slaves engendered a social and economic transformation of Rome. One consequence was increased landholdings and wealth on the part of the Roman elite, who established large estates called latifundia which employed hundreds of agricultural slaves. Large urban populations were considered a sign of social status, and large numbers of urban slaves contributed to the growth of cities, which then required more food produced by other slaves. Another consequence of urbanization was the dispossession of the rural peasantry, many of whom joined the army or left to colonize territories outside of Rome itself. This labor shortage also created a greater need for rural unfree labor. Economic expansion and perceived social need thus created an ever-increasing demand for slaves. Hopkins states that in the first century BCE the estimated demand for slaves in Italy alone was 100,000 per year and in the first century AD the estimated demand throughout the empire was 500,000 per year; we may compare this demand to that to the later Atlantic slave trade, estimated at an average of 28,000 slaves per year and perhaps 60,000 at its height. At the end of the Republican period in the first century BCE the free population–including one million dispossessed peasants–was four million, while the slave population was two million (thus about 30 % of the population); in the early empire, perhaps a century later, the free population was forty million and the slave population ten million, and as much as three-fourths of the population of Rome itself may have been comprised of slaves and freedmen. After the establishment and stabilization of the empire, however, decreasing expansion and the elimination of piracy–another primary source of slaves–led to a decrease in the number of new slaves, beginning the decline of the system of slavery. Due to the decrease in slaves by traditional means, Romans were forced to rely upon existing slaves and their offspring, who were

38 HUXCRSGD. 532 themselves insufficient to meet the demand. Thus it became necessary to purchase slaves beyond the borders of the empire, creating problems of transportation over increasing distances and leading, through the forces of supply and demand, to an increase in the price of slaves. These developments would then have made other forms of labor more economical than slavery. Thus, during the latter stages of the Roman empire the system of villas or latifundia with gangs of slaves was replaced by even larger estates employing tenant farmers, called coloni. As the empire continued to expand, albeit more slowly, the increasing incorporation of groups into the empire meant that fewer and fewer of these societies were considered foreigners or outsiders, and therefore were no longer suitable as slaves. By the fourth and fifth centuries AD chattel slavery was no longer the predominant form of labor in Italy, as coloni became more common; rather than being kept in gangs, even slaves were increasingly treated more like coloni. And in other parts of the empire there was already a heavy reliance on tenants or day-laborers, who were easier to control than slaves. As already noted, the primary sources of slaves during most of Roman history were war captives and victims of piracy, and as in Greece, slave traders also supplied a large number. However, the indigenous population also provided considerable numbers of slaves. Reproduction was a major source, since the children of slave mothers, called vernae, assumed their status. Kidnapping or sale of children was another source, as was the exposure or abandonment of children, which, as in Greece, was a fairly widespread practice. In Rome, abandonment of children usually led to enslavement rather than death, since the demand for slaves was high. Since methods of birth control were commonly unknown or not practiced, exposure represented an alternative method of getting rid of unwanted children. In essence, abandonment, like adoption, was a form of redistribution of consumption and labor from the poorer classes to the richer ones, and was a major source of slaves after the rate of expansion of the empire began to slow. As in Greece and other patriarchal societies, females were much more likely to be exposed than males. Most abandoned female children were raised and sold as prostitutes. Romans could also be enslaved for nonpayment of taxes and other crimes; forced labor was the sentence for minor crimes, but slavery was the sentence for more serious crimes or for criminals of low status. Those legally sentenced to slavery were more harshly treated than other slaves; often they were sent to the mines. One final source of slaves was debt bondage; adults could sell themselves and share the purchase price with their new master. However, debt slavery was abolished in the fourth century BCE Since Rome, like Greece, was a slave society, there was a very wide range of kinds of slaves. Those with the highest status were the imperial slaves who served the family of the emperor. This was a special group of skilled technicians, managers and bureaucrats who formed two major categories: the imperial household staff and state administrators who managed the water and postal systems and state factories. These imperial slaves often married free women and had a high probability of manumission. Other high status slaves were those involved in trading and banking and those with specialized skills, such as gladiators. Craftsmen, of whom more than 90% were slaves, also had higher status because of their skills. The most numerous kinds of slaves were domestic and agricultural slaves. Most of the domestic slaves were male, many of whom were Greek. Rich households had anywhere from dozens to hundreds of slaves, many of whom were highly specialized in the tasks they performed, including education, medicine (most of whom were Greek) and child care, as well as more familiar domestic functions as maids, cooks and guards. In the wealthiest households,

39 HUXCRSGD. 532 many were attendants whose sole function was to be available for work if necessary, a kind of conspicuous consumption. Compared to other slaves, domestic slaves were often relatively well treated. Female slaves were less well educated, and were thus more limited in the occupations they could have. Females were also more likely to be sexually exploited or prostituted. It was a tradition in Roman society for men to marry late; slaves therefore provided sexual release before marriage, and often thereafter. Since another Roman custom was equal division of inheritance among legitimate children, and since the children born of male masters of children were illegitimate, this practice tended to limit the number of legitimate children and maximize the size of their inheritance. Agricultural slaves were almost all male and led harsher existences, working in large gangs overseen by supervisors who motivated them with both rewards and punishments, the latter including the use of chains, beating with whips, branding and imprisonment. Similar treatment was also accorded slaves employed in various commercial and industrial activities. The only profession from which slaves were barred was, as in Greece, military service. The legal status of slaves was based upon the concept of absolute ownership; this concept, in turn, was due to the economic importance of slaves. Roman law therefore recognized the need to legalize social distinctions, to emphasize the differences between owners and their property and between the corporeal and the incorporeal. In Roman law absolute ownership equated to absolute power, which was similar in both ideological and practical terms to the power of the father over his family, particularly his children. However, the status of all slaves as legally equivalent did in fact mask real social and economic distinctions, between, for example, imperial slaves on the one hand and those sent to the mines on the other. As in Greece, slaves themselves had no legal status and were considered legally incompetent except as witnesses under torture, since it was assumed that they would otherwise lie. If a master was murdered, all slaves living under the same roof would be put to death, presumably on the assumption that none would implicate the others and that all therefore were guilty. The legal status of children born to slaves was variable; they could be slaves, freeborn illegitimate children or legitimate freeborn children, depending on the status of the parents, including the nature of manumission if freedmen. Also, according to Roman law citizens could not be legally enslaved. These aspects of Roman law concerning slavery are particularly significant because the Roman legal system strongly influenced subsequent legal concepts of slavery in Europe. It is, of course, always somewhat misleading to generalize about things like the treatment of slaves, given the wide range of occupations, statuses, masters and other circumstances. It is the case that treatment could be extremely harsh, involving the use of chains and severe whippings. There were, however, a number of mitigating factors influencing treatment. In Roman society, domestic slaves were considered part of the family; the terms for slaves were included in those for family, although distinctions were made between the core nuclear family and the broader group of dependents–including slaves–who formed the larger household. As members of the family, such slaves participated in the family’s religious and social activities. Other mitigating factors included the peculium and the possibility of manumission, to be discussed below. The term peculium is Latin and although the concept itself did not originate in Roman society, it was quite widespread. The peculium represented working capital or property of the slave, and although legally the master’s property, belonged in practical terms to the slave. The peculium enabled slaves to have an independent economic function, and could be used as an

40 HUXCRSGD. 532 investment or, if the master were willing, to buy the slave’s freedom. According to M.I. Finley, the peculium represented a substantial portion of urban financial, commercial and industrial activity in Rome from the third century BCE onward. Using his peculium a slave could purchase a wife, or even other slaves. One major difference between Greece and Rome was that although infrequent and difficult in the former civilization, manumission was a common and frequent practice in the latter society from the earliest known times. However, partly because of this, as well as a desire to limit the foreign element in the citizen population, some limitations on manumission were imposed by the emperor Augustus. His modifications of the practice of manumission included the creation of an intermediate status between slave and citizen, a limitation of the number of slaves that could be freed by a master’s will and a legal minimum age of thirty for manumission (although some female slaves could be freed at an earlier age if, for example, they married the master). Manumission was usually the prerogative of the master, and could take place for a number of reasons, including gratitude for service, monetary gain through payment as compensation for the loss of labor and property, for the purpose of marriage, as a dying wish or through the desire to be free of the burden of supporting a slave or slaves. Manumission could occur during the lifetime of the master or by testament after his death. In addition, manumission could result from the direct intervention of the state, as a reward for service or for revealing the perpetrator of a crime, or as a consequence of the punishment of the master for various crimes. Also unlike the case in Greece or Mesopotamia, manumission in Roman society could result in citizenship for the slave. There were, however, usually some limitations: slaves could not hold public office or officer rank in the army, often still owed duties to their former masters, and their children, if born while they were still slaves, remained slaves even after their parents’ manumission. Such manumission was often conditional and freed slaves still retained some measure of social inferiority. Even though the reforms of Augustus were clearly designed to limit manumission, the number of slaves freed increased over time during the course of the Roman empire. Forms of resistance to slavery were various. Escape was quite common and suicide, though less common, was nonetheless frequent. Petty sabotage was also frequent. Probably the most notable form of resistance was slave rebellions. There were three major rebellions in Sicily and southern Italy between 139 and 71 BCE, i.e. roughly during the period of transition from a slave-owning to a slave society. These major rebellions involved as many as 70,000 slaves and required considerable military power to put down. The primary motivation for these rebellions was resentment at mistreatment and the desire for personal freedom, rather than a desire to abolish slavery as a system or institution. In addition to these major rebellions, there were smaller outbreaks at other times and places as well. One final aspect of slavery worth noting was its effect on the structure of the Roman family. As noted above, slaves comprised part of the family, and were therefore omnipresent in most Roman households. In addition to depriving wives of their normal economic functions– thus contributing to the idleness and the frivolity of the lives of married women–the presence of concubines within the household often led to sexual tension and jealousy. It can also be argued that, as in other slave societies, the usurpation of usual economic functions by slaves led to a loss of morality and enhanced decadence, due to the effect of having things done for oneself. Some Roman social historians have also suggested that the presence of slaves led to a distancing

41 HUXCRSGD. 532 between husbands and wives and between the mother and her children. As in the American South, children often had a closer relationship with the slaves who actually raised them and interacted with them than with their parents.

Bibliography

R.H. Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire, London, 1928

Keith R. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control, New York, 1987

Keith R. Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World, 140 B.C.-70 B.C., Bloomington, 1989

Keith R. Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome, Cambridge, 1994

Dev Raj Chanana, Slavery in Ancient India, New Delhi, 1960

G. Corcoran, St. Augustine on Slavery, Rome, 1985

M.A. Dandamaev, Slavery in Babylonia from Nabopolassar to Alexander the Great (626-331 BC), DeKalb, 1984

M.I. Finley (ed.), Slavery in Classical Antiquity, New York, 1968

M.I. Finley, The Ancient Economy, Berkeley, 1973 (Chapter III)

M.I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, London, 1980

M.I. Finley (ed.), Classical Slavery, London, 1987

P.V. McC. Flesher, Oxen, Women, or Citizens? Slaves in the System of the Mishnah, Atlanta, 1988

Yves Garlan, Slavery in Ancient Greece, Ithaca, 1988

K. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History, Vol. I, Cambridge, 1978

Bernard Lewis, Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry, New York, 1990

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Isaac Mendelsohn, Slavery in the Ancient Near East: A Comparative Study of Slavery in Babylonia, Assyria, Syria and Palestine from the Middle of the Third Millennium to the End of the First Millennium, Oxford, 1949

G.R. Morrow, Plato’s Law of Slavery, Urbana, 1939

L.C. Reilly, Slaves in Ancient Greece: Slaves from Greek Manumission Inscriptions, Chicago, 1978

K. Synodinou, On the Concept of Slavery in Euripides, Ioannina, 1977

Joseph Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man, Oxford, 1974

Watson, Roman Slave Law, Baltimore, 1987

William L. Westerman, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, Philadelphia, 1955

Thomas Wiedemann (ed.), Greek and Roman Slavery, London, 1981

Toro Yuge and Masaoki Doi (eds.), Forms of Control and Subordination in Antiquity, Leiden, 1988

Z. Yavetz, Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Rome, New Brunswick NJ, 1988

SLAVERY IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE

In the fourth and fifth centuries AD the vast Roman empire declined and collapsed and was replaced by smaller German kingdoms. Slavery already existed in the German tribes which had occupied the Roman frontier in northern and central Europe, and as they first became acculturated to the Roman way of life and then eventually supplanted Roman civilization, a number of developments took place. The cities of the Roman empire declined and dwindled, leading to a progressive ruralization of society, with a corresponding de-emphasis on commerce and a greater reliance on agriculture. Also, the collapse of the centralized Roman political structure led to the process of feudalization, a system of mutual rights and obligations based upon a strict hierarchy of lord and vassal, master and servant at local, regional and national levels; due to the trend toward decentralization, however, the local relationships between superior and inferior were by far the strongest and most significant.

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One consequence of these developments, already presaged by the substitution of chattel slaves by coloni, was the gradual replacement of rural slaves by dependent peasants, or serfs. There were a number of reasons for this: serfs required less supervision and expense of maintenance; serfs were more self-sufficient, since they grew their own food, and could recompense their lord by payment in kind; serfs, although semi-autonomous, could be and were required to contribute their labor for specified periods on the lord’s demesne; the loss of urban markets made this form of agricultural labor more desirable; and technological innovations decreased the demand for labor, thus requiring fewer full-time dependent laborers. This transformation from slavery to serfdom, however, was never total, and slavery continued to exist alongside serfdom; although the majority of slaves and coloni eventually were amalgamated into the class of serfs, some slaves remained as domestic servants or artisans. This process began earliest and was most complete in France, while in Italy, which remained a more urbanized society with stronger links to the Roman past, the transformation was probably the least thorough. Because of this shift in the nature of dependent labor, however, medieval Europe must be considered a slave-owning society rather than a slave society like ancient Greece or Rome. People mostly became slaves in the same ways as in earlier times, except that enslavement as a result of criminal punishment or self-sale was more common. As in the societies we have already discussed, enslaving members of the same society was either prohibited or strongly discouraged, so most slaves were members of different ethnic or religious groups. Germans enslaved Celts, and vice versa; different German tribes, such as Saxons and Franks enslaved each other; Catholics enslaved Arians; Christians enslaved pagans and Jews. And everyone enslaved the Slavs, who, along with Moors and the British Angles and Saxons, all of whom lived at the edges of the more settled medieval world, were considered most suitable for such servitude. In fact, the medieval term that is still most commonly used in English and other European languages derives from the widespread enslavement of Slavs; it may also be noted that this term refers to a specific ethnic origin, whereas the equivalent Greek and Roman terms refer to labor, work or service. As the demand for slaves within Europe decreased due to the conversion to serfdom, the primary market shifted to areas outside western Europe, especially Byzantium and the Muslim world; theoretically, however, the sale of Christians to non-Christians was prohibited. The medieval slave trade was mainly carried out by the Franks, Venetians and Vikings, although other peoples also were involved; the primary trade route ran from the north and the east through the Frankish kingdoms to the Mediterranean. In this trade system, slaves represented a medium of exchange for manufactured goods and luxury items. Through the amalgamation of Roman and German law, most of the Roman laws governing slavery described earlier were incorporated and preserved. As in Roman law, medieval European law recognized a significant distinction between free and slave; for example, whereas slaves were punished by their masters, freemen were punished by their lord or king. In addition, the monetary compensation for crimes was different for each, and of course any compensation given a slave went to his or her master. Unlike serfs, who had certain guaranteed rights, slaves could not bear arms, could not initiate legal action, required the master’s permission to marry and could be tortured to obtain information; moreover, a slave’s testimony was invalid without corroboration by the master. Masters, on the other hand, had the right to judge or punish their slaves and could sell, trade or otherwise dispose of them with few

44 HUXCRSGD. 532 limitations. Medieval law also prescribed strict penalties for fugitive slaves or those who aided them. Manumission occurred primarily as the voluntary action of a master, but could also result from the conviction of the master of a crime. The process was largely handled by the church, which was the dominant institution in medieval times. Freedom usually meant a change of status from slave to serf, was often granted with various limitations, and could be revoked, usually for ingratitude to the former master. As noted above, the church played a very large role in medieval life. As the predominant institution in medieval Europe, the church was also one of the largest slaveholders, acquiring most of its slaves as donations or through inheritance. While the church neither preached nor practiced abolition and routinely preached to slaves that they should be resigned to their fate and be obedient to their masters, it did attempt to impose restraints on the treatment of slaves and advocated improved living conditions for them. The church also prescribed excommunication for killing a slave. Although they too were dependent laborers, the condition of serfs was generally superior to that of slaves. Unlike slaves, they were not absolutely dependent on their lord. However, like the master, the lord also had a monopoly on the provision of justice. Like slaves, serfs were also economically exploited, required to contribute labor to the service of their lord, subject to various fines and charges, as well as inheritance tax, and at the mercy of lord, who had a monopoly on facilities and necessary supplies. In the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries AD, the late medieval period, continuing recovery from the collapse of the ancient world system led to a gradual strengthening and development of economic institutions. In addition, a number of significant developments in late medieval Europe led to conditions and traditions which strongly influenced the origins of slavery in the New World. These include the consequences of the crusades, the reconquest of Iberia, the revival of Roman law and the consequences of the Black Death. The revival of Roman law created the legal foundation for later slavery, as already discussed; one of the most significant consequences of the Black Death, which occurred during the latter half of the fourteenth century and killed from one-third to one-half of Europe’s population, was the subsequent labor shortage and the consequent demand for both paid and unfree labor. There were two major consequences of the crusades. One was economic expansion in Europe caused by increased contact between East and West, particularly between the Eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea and Egypt on the one hand and Italian traders–most notably those of Genoa and Venice–on the other. Thus the crusades helped to end the isolation of the early medieval period, leading to increased trade and contact with the East, which in turn stimulated the growth of the European economy, which led to further trade and contact, and so on. The return of crusaders and later merchants with knowledge and evidence of the wealth of the East stimulated the demand for luxury goods such as spices, silks, slaves and sugar. As will be discussed in greater detail subsequently, the demand for sugar became widespread and seemingly insatiable, leading to an exponential increase in the West of the production and trade of sugar, particularly in the crusader kingdoms established in the Eastern Mediterranean. Creating both increased revenue and demand, the cultivation and manufacturing of sugar gradually spread westward, particularly after the collapse of the crusader kingdoms, to the islands of the Mediterranean such as Cyprus, Crete and Sicily.

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Another form of trade which grew and expanded with increased contact between East and West was the slave trade operated by long-distance traders. The main source of slaves during this period was the Western Mediterranean, which supplied Muslims from North Africa and Spain and non-Muslims from the Mediterranean islands. Demand for slaves was fairly limited until the fourteenth century, when the depopulation caused by the Black Death increased the need for labor. Another development which was to have some impact on New World slavery, at least initially, was a shift from slavery to indentured servitude, a system which originated in Venice. Due to the decreasing number of non-Christians available in Europe, and given the prohibition against enslaving fellow Christians, the Venetians established a form of servitude in which poor individuals, usually young women, obligated themselves for limited service for a defined period of time in return for room and board. The legal status of indentured servants differed from that of slaves not only in the limitations on servitude, but also in that they could not be sold or exchanged and could buy back their freedom afterward if they acquired sufficient money. The area of late medieval Europe which had the most significant impact on New World slavery was the Iberian peninsula, i.e. Spain and Portugal. During the early medieval period the overall poverty and weak economy of this region prevented the large-scale use of slaves. It was, in fact, only because the southern part of Iberia was Islamic that slavery persisted to any extent. During the early phase of the Christian reconquest in the eighth to the twelfth centuries, two systems of slavery coexisted. The first of these represented a continuation of Roman and later Visigothic traditions, in which the slaves were primarily Christian, and which gradually declined into a system of serfdom as elsewhere in Europe, due at least in part to a labor shortage in reconquered lands. The second system involved Muslim prisoners of war who were at first victims of the reconquest and later captives acquired in raids specifically for the purpose of acquiring slaves. Thus in Iberia, as long as the border between Christian and Muslim lands existed, Christians captured, ransomed and enslaved Muslims, and vice versa. After the reconquest was completed, the focus shifted to the Mediterranean as a source of slaves. Subsequently, due to the disappearance of the Islamic frontier, and as the Portugese began sailing down the western coast of Africa, they began to obtain slaves there by purchase or by raiding, even before they had begun any real exploration of the African coast. Thus, in Iberia, conditions for the subsequent expansion of slavery to the New World were established, based on the historical experience with slavery there, the existence of a legal code which structured and justified slavery as an organized system, and the economic stimulus provided by the expansion of sugar cane agriculture, which was introduced by Muslims in southern Spain in the eighth century.

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SLAVERY IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD

The Islamic world can be both compared and contrasted with the contemporary medieval European world. Although some elements of slavery in the two civilizations are similar, the Islamic world was larger, more urbanized, more advanced politically, economically and technologically, and shared a common language. These differences are also to some extent reflected in the nature of slavery in the two societies. As was the case with medieval Europe, Islam was not a slave society, but slavery was nonetheless a persistent feature from its origins in seventh- and eighth-century Arabia and played a larger role than in Europe. Slavery was an established institution in pre-Islamic Arabia, and as Islam began its rapid expansion in the ninth century it encountered and conquered other societies in which slavery was already present. Islamic slavery was as fully developed as Roman slavery, for example, and lasted considerably longer, i.e. into the twentieth century. Unlike Rome, however, slaves were mostly given non-productive tasks, due to the availability of indigenous free agricultural labor and the reversion of much agricultural land to pasturage, which required considerably less manpower. As in medieval Europe, slavery was not seen as incompatible with the state religion. Like the Bible, the Koran treated slavery as an established institution, but contained explicit provisions that slaves be well treated. The crucial question dealt with in the Koran, and thus in Islamic law, was who could be legally enslaved. The primary means of enslavement were those already encountered in earlier civilizations. During the early centuries of Islam, prisoners of war resulting from its expansion from Arabia into the Near East, Africa and Europe provided the bulk of slaves, but, as with the Roman empire, declined in importance as expansion slowed and then ceased. Many slaves were purchased from slave traders, who were the greatest source of female slaves. The third major source was by birth to women already enslaved. Islamic law prohibited debt bondage and selling family members into slavery; the enslavement of Muslims and certain protected aliens–including Christians and Jews–was also prohibited. The major sources of slaves were Europe and Russia-- particularly Slavs--Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Africa eventually became the primary source of slaves as Islam expanded its control further and further into the continent and as the demand for slaves increased; this is indicated by the increase in the number of slaves involved in the trans-Sahara slave trade, from 3000 to 8700 per year from AD 900 to 1100. It is estimated, by William D. Phillips, Jr. in Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade, that when these figures are added to an equivalent number for the Indian Ocean trade the total figures may equal or even surpass the number of Africans sent to the New World. As discussed by David Brion Davis in Slavery and Human Progress, the enslavement of black Africans was in part justified by their perceived status as barbarians, compared to the civilized societies of Byzantium, India and China with whom Islam was in contact. Seen more as animal than human, blacks were assigned the hardest work and received the harshest treatment. Although earlier societies recognized and to some extent enforced distinctions based upon ethnicity, it was within the Islamic world that racial stereotypes in both scientific and literary works were first developed. In these writings, various physical and mental defects and inferiorities were discussed, and black skin was associated with certain negative traits, sin, the devil and damnation. However, although these writings clearly reflected racist attitudes, racism 47 HUXCRSGD. 532 was not institutionalized within Islamic society to any great degree. Moreover, the considerable mixing of races and cultures within the Islamic world acted to inhibit rigid racial barriers. Slaves were involved in a wide range of occupations. The most common employment of slaves was in household tasks and as business agents, as was the use of female slaves as entertainers and prostitutes. However, slaves were only rarely employed in the mines or in agriculture. The most unusual and virtually unique aspect of Islamic slavery was the presence of slaves in military occupations, which was considerably more widespread than in other societies. These slaves, who were mostly Turks or western Asians, were used almost exclusively as the sultan’s imperial guard, primarily because they were considered more loyal and trustworthy than others. As a result they had higher status and were better treated than other slaves, comparable to that of the imperial slaves of the Roman emperor. According to Islamic law, which discussed in detail relationships between slaves and free persons, slaves had no legal rights; they were considered to be the absolute property of their masters and to be legally, morally and physically inferior. Masters could legally sell, bequeath, hire out, punish or kill their slaves; however, the state could punish them for denying slaves religious rights or overworking them. It was also illegal to separate mothers and daughters. Domestic slaves, especially females, were often well treated; sometimes they were adopted into the family and they were rarely sold unless they behaved offensively. Many slaves, such as business agents and entertainers, received extensive training. Religious laws particularly emphasized the humanity of slaves, and there is considerable evidence in documents of their generally humane treatment. Slaves could also join fraternal organizations and were encouraged to participate in religious activities. A master could marry off his female slaves without their permission; however, if a master wanted to marry one of his own slaves, he had to free her first and then ask her permission. Women who had children by the master also acquired some rights; they could not be sold, but could be married to another and they, as well as their children, became free when their master died. Male slaves required permission to marry from their master, and if the bride was a slave, her master as well; their children became slaves of the wife’s master. Marriages between free men and slave women were quite common, and the children of such unions inherited the free status of the father. Manumission in the Islamic world was widespread and was regarded as a pious and meritorious act. As in medieval Europe, the master could free his slaves by testament or through a special act during his lifetime. Slaves could also purchase their freedom if the master agreed. Slave women who gave birth to the master’s children automatically gained their freedom, as did slaves who were bequeathed to relatives by a master’s testament. After emancipation, slaves became clients of the master’s family, providing services or payment in return for protection and/or patronage; eventually most became part of the master’s family. There were two ways in which Islamic slavery particularly influenced the later development of slavery in the New World. The first was through the development of sugar cane production. Cultivation of sugar cane originated either in the Pacific islands or in southeastern Asia, and gradually spread westward; the major early centers of sugar cane production were Khuzistan in Central Asia and later Egypt. Since sugar cane could be grown where grain could not, and because there was such a demand for the refined product, more and more land and labor was devoted to its production. Muslims used mostly free labor in the cultivation of sugar cane, but some black Africans were used as well. The economic requirements of sugar cane

48 HUXCRSGD. 532 production–large areas of land and expensive processing equipment–restricted ownership to the wealthy, who were also the largest owners of slaves. A second influence was the establishment of the trans-Sahara slave trade. Arabs had traded slaves even before the advent of Islam, but the demand for slaves throughout the Islamic world greatly increased the scope of this trade. Once northern Africa had been conquered, Muslims began to extensively exploit the black sub- Saharan population, which was considered most desirable slave material. Traders set up overland caravan routes across the Sahara to various places in North Africa, over which merchandise and salt from the north were exchanged for slaves and gold in the south.

Bibliography

Pierre Bonnassie, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-western Europe, Cambridge, 1991

Marc Bloch, Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages, trans. William R. Beer, Berkeley, 1975

Pierre Dockes, Medieval Slavery and Liberation, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago, 1982

Allan G.B. Fisher and Humphey J. Fisher, Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa: The Institution in Saharan and Sudanic Africa and the Trans-Saharan Trade, London, 1970

Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora, New York, 2001

J.R. Willis (ed.), Islam and the Ideology of Enslavement, London

J.R. Wills (ed.), Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, London, 1985

SLAVERY IN AFRICA

There are several important aspects to consider in approaching slavery in Africa and comparing it to other societies. One is that since Africa is a large continent with considerable geographical and sociopolitical variability, slavery existed in a great variety of conditions. A second is that slavery in Africa existed well before the inception of the European slave trade and continued to exist after the abolition of slavery elsewhere; it is, in fact, one of the areas of the world in which modern slavery still flourishes. 49 HUXCRSGD. 532

Another significant aspect of African slavery is its conceptual and cultural background. Africa, like many other non-Western areas of the world, contains many societies which were primarily organized according to kinship, age and sex, and this kind of social, political and economic structure in turn influenced the nature of slavery as a social, political and economic institution. One of the key ideas in African social life was the concept of rights-in-person, which was an integral part of systems of kinship and marriage. In these systems rights to persons were held by various kin groups as corporate bodies, as well as by political offices, such as chiefs. For example, in these societies bridewealth–a payment to the bride’s family at the time of marriage– represented the acquisition of the rights to the bride by the husband from her kin group; these rights included sexual rights and the rights over any children. Because most African societies were patrilineal–with authority and inheritance residing in and passing through the male line– both free and slave women were considered outsiders within the husband’s lineage. In complex societies with legal systems, rights-in-person were explicitly recognized and defined by law. Such rights were usually mutual, but were not always reciprocal and were seldom equal; examples of such relationships are those of parent and child and husband and wife. Slavery, therefore, must be viewed as one status within the larger category of acquired persons and their dependents (other statuses would include wives and adopted children). There was, however, considerable social mobility within this category. Although first-generation male slaves usually retained inferior legal status for their lifetimes, females could gain their freedom by marrying the master. The second generation of slaves, unlike their parents, was born into the culture of their masters; they were thus strangers, outsiders or foreigners only by origin and also unlike their parents already had some local kinship ties. Because of the social emphasis on kinship and rights-in-person, the aspect of slaves as property was less significant in Africa than it was in Western societies, and consequently the use of slaves was never a purely economic matter. Because Africa was for the most part a continent with an excess of land and a deficit of people, people were seen as valuable resources, and slaves in particular were useful as sources of labor which were versatile, mobile and self-reproducing. African societies were therefore almost always willing to incorporate outsiders as dependents and retainers. Political and social power in Africa were primarily demonstrated by the number of dependents one could claim, and conversely the status of the master determined that of the slave in that the master sponsored the placement of his dependents–including slaves--within the social structure. There were several dimensions, each independent of the other, along which outsiders were incorporated into the institutions of the host society and by which their marginality was reduced. The first of these was status mobility, involving formal and legal incorporation of the slave; such statuses were clearcut and discrete, each involving specific rights and obligations; such changes in legal status occurred rarely in the first generation of slaves. The second dimension was emotional mobility, which involved acceptance of the outsider within the group, and unlike changes in status, tended to be gradual and subtle. Emotional mobility was influenced by factors such as personal attractiveness, length of residence, age, social skills and willingness to serve, and occurred more rapidly within the household than outside it. The third dimension was worldly success mobility, involving wealth, quality of life and political influence, and like emotional mobility, tended to be graduated and subtle. Slaves could achieve considerable worldly success (without necessarily changing their emotional acceptance or legal status) because, as in the Islamic world, slaves were often considered more trustworthy and loyal

50 HUXCRSGD. 532 than those who were competitors for power, wealth and status within a given society. In general, males had more options and possibilities in this respect than females. There are two more or less diametrically opposed views concerning the origins of African slavery. The first is that slavery, as suggested above, was an indigenous characteristic of African society. According to this view African societies were open and socially inclusive, leading to the kinds of dependency described above; then, as societies become more complex, the social and political competition for power–of which the number of dependents was one index–led to an inflationary spiral of demand for more and more slaves. The second view is that slavery was introduced to Africa by outsiders, first by Muslims during the medieval period and subsequently by Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since Africa was relatively isolated from other regions during the ancient and medieval periods and since African societies were preliterate until the appearance of literate foreigners, definitive evidence to support one view or the other is largely lacking. It seems to be the case, however, that slavery–however remote its origins or widespread it might have been in pre-contact times–was essentially a marginal institution in the earlier, less complex societies of Africa. It was not until the creation of the powerful and militaristic states of the northern Sudan that slavery came to assume a more dominant role. Africa is comprised, very broadly, of four geographical and ecological zones. From north to south these are: North Africa, comprising the Mediterranean coast and the interior desert; the arid Sahara/Sahel region; the Sudan, a savannah environment; and the sub-Saharan tropical forest. Of these zones, only the Sudan is particularly well suited for agriculture which can produce sufficient surplus to support more complex societies. It was in the Sudan, then, that the earliest states began to emerge; the first of these was Ghana, which came into existence in the eighth and ninth centuries AD and lasted into the twelfth century, followed by Mali, which flourished between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, which was succeeded by Songhay, dominant in the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Each of these states was larger than its predecessor, and each of them acted as an intermediary in the trade between north and south Africa. As they expanded these states conquered and subjugated neighboring peoples, who assumed a status similar to that of helots or serfs who provided agricultural labor and paid tribute in crops and services. These slaves represented a large proportion of the population, and as the contrast between freeman and slave increased over time as a part of increasingly elaborate social stratification, they came to form occupational castes within these societies. Thus, when Muslims began entering Africa from the north and east and later Europeans from the west, slavery came to satisfy the mutual needs of the rulers of these states. Initially the primary mechanism of exchange was the trans-Sahara slave trade between the Sudanese states and the Muslim world, and the supply of slaves was tied to the development of the African states by providing goods for northbound caravans. As Islamic control and influence continued to spread and as the Islamic religion was adopted by the rulers of these states, attitudes toward slavery-- already discussed--within the Islamic world were also adopted and in turn may have influenced the evolution of slavery by changing prior practices and enlarging its scope. Environmental and technological constraints within the Sudan also affected the nature and scope of slavery. The unsuitability of the soil for continuous cultivation, in addition to the lack of plows and draft animals, meant that the kind of shifting or extensive agriculture that could be practiced required less intensive labor, thus reducing the value of labor. In addition, low population compared to the availability of land resulted in a consistently high demand for

51 HUXCRSGD. 532 the absorption of new people, leading to the exchange of people from one group to another, from economically pressed groups needing to reduce their population to expanding states requiring more and more labor. Moreover, the military power of the expanding states was based in part on the use of cavalry, which in turn increased the demand for horses. Thus one element of the trans- Sahara trade involved trading slaves for North African horses, the use of which to conquer more territory resulted in the acquisition of more slaves, contributing to the inflationary spiral alluded to above. Until around 1450 primary external contacts were with the Islamic world, which, during its expansionist jihads (holy wars) captured and enslaved indigenous African peoples. As many of the enslaved Africans converted to Islam, the need for non-Muslim slaves and the desire for more slaves as status indicators stimulated the demand for slaves outside the conquered areas. Ultimately this demand led to the development of middlemen and entrepreneurs who initiated the slave trade. In the succeeding post-medieval and colonial periods the institutionalization of slavery spread from the savannah region of the Sudan to other regions of Africa. There, the development of state-level societies and a concomitant increase in trade and production further stimulated the need for labor. Thus, even as the external demand for slaves slackened in the nineteenth century, the internal demand for slaves increased, and the expansion of slavery continued until the end of the nineteenth century. Overall, the percentage of slaves in various African societies ranged from 1% to 50%, with lower proportions in small-scale and undifferentiated societies and higher proportions in highly stratified states. The majority of African slaves were women and children. The main source of slaves was raiding and kidnapping, which often involved middlemen, and is the only historically attested method. The acquisition of slaves as prisoners of war and as tribute was also widespread and, as noted above, increased with the development of state societies and other political and economic development. Slaves could also be obtained through the pawning or exchange of individuals, which represented part of the spectrum of the transfer of individuals between groups, and included the purchase of orphans or abandoned children, the bartering or selling of people for grain during periods of famine, and the transfer of individuals as compensation for homicide or other serious crimes; in such exchanges the rights of individuals were subordinated to those of the family or the state. Another means of acquiring slaves was as bridewealth, and a final source of slaves was the selling of individuals as punishment for criminal behavior. The use of slaves and the social positions they occupied tended to become more varied with increasing social, political and economic complexity. The possibility of assimilation varied according to gender; adult male slaves from local areas were more likely to be sold to masters from more remote territories since it was more difficult for them to integrate into society and they were more likely to escape, while women and children were more likely to be retained. The status of slaves and their marginality within a given society largely determined their disposability during times of crisis. The uses and occupations of slaves in Africa were extremely varied. Women, because they could be more easily integrated into families and societies, filled roles within kinship systems as wives and children or as concubines. Concubines were often considered desirable since the price of a slave might well be less than the bride price for a wife. Both wives and concubines were valued as producers of children; concubines might increase their status by giving birth to children, or might be sold if they did not. Women were also widely employed in domestic tasks and, to a lesser degree, in various craft activities. Women also were used as

52 HUXCRSGD. 532 agricultural labor in many regions, particularly those which practiced extensive rather than intensive agriculture. There were greater options and opportunities for men. Many men lived in slave villages which produced agricultural surplus for the king’s disposition. Male slaves also could be miners, construction workers, fishermen, herdsmen, canoemen, caravan porters, guards, trading agents, messengers, administrators, officials, warriors, or even commanders. Both men and women were used for ritual sacrifice and were used as commodities as a form of wealth or as tribute or reward. In addition to such utilitarian usage, slaves could fulfill symbolic functions as retainers, gifts, symbols of status and power and as part of the master’s entourage on pilgrimages. The treatment of slaves was highly variable and depended at least to some extent on their degree of marginality and the uses to which they were put. Treatment also depended upon specific cultural domains. Slaves received relatively equal treatment within family or kin groups, but were often denied participation in ceremonial rituals, secret societies or public offices. The worst treatment was accorded those slaves who had been captured or purchased, as opposed to those born into a family or kin group. Escape was the most common form of resistance to slavery. Since the domain of jurisdiction of small-scale societies was relatively restricted, escape was often difficult to prevent, and if an escapee was able to travel far enough from his master’s society, his chances of being caught were less. This factor tended to encourage the sale and purchase of slaves to and from more distant regions. Escape was most common in large groups of first-generation slaves. Rebellions, on the other hand, were relatively rare, since slaves were rarely gathered in large isolated groups, but rather tended to vary in their placement and occupation. In addition, many slaves, particularly those after the first generation, maintained considerable loyalty and attachment to specific kin groups. Thus there was generally a lack of shared identity and interests conducive to mass rebellion. Manumission was relatively uncommon, since it generally involved the abolition of one state of marginality and its replacement with another. Many slaves were wary of dissociating themselves from their master without some assurance that they would be incorporated into another group.

Bibliography

E.A. Alpers, The East African Slave Trade, Nairobi, 1967

R.W. Beachey (ed.), A Collection of Documents in the Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, New York, 1976

Stephen Clissold, The Barbary Slaves, Totowa NJ, 1977

Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa, New Haven, 1977

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Philip Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade, Madison, 1975

Victor de Kock, Those in Bondage: An Account of the Life of the Slaves at the Cape in the Days of the Dutch East India Company, Cape Town, 1950

Isobel E. Edwards, Towards Emancipation: A Study in South African Slavery, Cardiff, 1942

Mohammed Ennaji, Serving the Master: Slavery and Society in Nineteenth-Century Morocco, trans. Seth Graebner, New York, 2000

John Grace, Domestic Slavery in West Africa, New York, 1975

Martin L. Kilson and Robert I. Rothberg (eds.), The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays, Cambridge, MA, 1976

Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, Oxford, 1991

Paul E. Lovejoy (ed.), The Ideology of Slavery in Africa, Beverly Hills, 1981

Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, Cambridge, 1983

Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental and African Slave Trades, Cambridge, 1990

Suzanne Miers and Martin Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa, 1998

Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (eds.), Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, Madison, 1977

Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts (eds.), The End of Slavery in Africa, Madison, 1988

Moses D.E. Nwulia, Britain and Slavery in East Africa, Washington DC, 1975

Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (eds.), Women and Slavery in Africa, Madison, 1983

James L. Watson (ed.), African and Asian Systems of Slavery, Berkeley, 1980

Nigel Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa, New York, 1985

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TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

When Europeans began colonizing the New World in the sixteenth century, the problem of obtaining sufficient labor rapidly became a pressing issue. For many years the number of settlers was limited and many European colonists were unwilling to perform hard labor overseas. The initial attempts to use the indigenous peoples or indentured servants failed for reasons to be discussed, and thus, beginning with the Spanish and the Portugese, African slaves came to be the primary labor source in much of the New World; by 1650 only black Africans could be legally enslaved in the Iberian colonies. As previously discussed, the evolution of slavery in medieval Europe, Islam and Africa contributed to the nature and structure of New World slavery. However, due to the factors just discussed, plus the effects of distance and geography, there were some significant differences between Old World and New World slavery. Although slavery in the New World had its roots in the Old World, some aspects had to be modified, and the nature of the institution changed accordingly. In the New World the rights of the master tended to be more inclusive and permanent and other elements were adjusted to fit the specialized plantation society which emerged. The prototype of the New World pattern of exploitation was established by the Portugese and Spanish in the islands of the Atlantic, which were strategically placed in respect to transatlantic trade routes. The Portugese seized control of the previously uninhabited Cape Verde Islands, the Azores and Madeira islands in order to extend their political authority over them. In order to maintain possession, the Portugese government granted large tracts of land to military leaders and aristocrats as reward for service, with the provision that they maintain a presence on the islands. The islands had a climate suitable for growing sugar cane, which, as we have seen, was extremely profitable due to a seemingly insatiable worldwide demand and which was well suited to slave labor. Since a labor source was required, the Portugese, who had already established trading posts along the African coast, began importing black African slaves. Subsequently the Spanish, who gained control of the Canary Islands, did likewise. Beginning with the earliest voyages of discovery and colonization, the model of economic exploitation based upon the reconquest of Iberia and the colonization of the islands of the Atlantic was transferred to the New World. When he encountered the indigenous inhabitants on his first voyage to the Caribbean, Columbus, who, like most other European explorers, was primarily interested in profit and economic gain, almost immediately began to envision how the peaceful Indians could be enslaved. And when, as the result of abuses by the Spanish, the natives rebelled, the captives resulting from the failed uprising were indeed enslaved. Noting that the Caribbean islands had suitable soil and climate (especially abundant rainfall) for growing sugar cane, Columbus introduced it as a crop. As had occurred earlier in the Atlantic islands, land was distributed among the leaders of the expedition, who subdued the natives and established plantations. Bringing with them the appropriate knowledge and technology for the production and processing of sugar cane, the Spanish were able to adapt their methods to the tropical and semi-tropical climates of the New World. However, soon the Spanish began to lose their source of labor, the indigenous Americans, due to their catastrophic depopulation from the effects of European diseases, especially smallpox, for which they had no immunity. Although it varied somewhat by region, it is 55 HUXCRSGD. 532 estimated that between 75% and 90% of the initial pre-contact New World population was wiped out in the first one hundred years of European colonization. In addition to the loss of the majority of the adult native American population–i.e., the putative workforce–social organization was disrupted by political and economic reorganization imposed by the Spanish, as well as by the uprooting of groups from their native territories and the assignment to kinds of work different from those to which they were accustomed. The remaining native population was also psychologically devastated by these developments, which did not necessarily represent deliberate policy on the part of the Spaniards, since they needed the labor force that was disappearing. A second obstacle to the employment of native labor was royal regulations issued by the crown to protect natives from exploitation; unfortunately, however, such laws were often difficult to enforce. The earliest attempt to moderate the treatment of native Americans was the encomienda system, whose goal was to christianize the natives and to promote their assimilation by resettling them as families grouped together in villages under the control of a Spanish colonist. Secondarily, this arrangement was designed to provide the colonists with a source of labor. Because natives were consistently mistreated, however, further laws were passed to limit the authority of settlers over the natives. Ultimately, native slavery was entirely abolished in 1542 and the encomienda system itself was abolished in 1550. The encomienda system was then replaced by the repartimiento system, which specified the use of native workers from nearby communities based on demonstrated need, as well as decent working conditions and wages. Again, however, abuses of natives by colonists led to the abandonment of the repartimiento system as well. Thus the Spaniards were motivated to find alternative labor sources as their needs increased due to the declining native population, their perceived unsuitability as workers, and the desire of the Spanish government to improve the treatment of native peoples. Similar developments occurred in the Portugese colony of Brazil. As sugar became an increasingly important product, the Portugese, who then had a monopoly on trade with the African coast, began to import more and more black African slaves. The importation of African slaves was legalized in 1549, and significant numbers of slaves began to reach Brazil by 1570. Thus there developed a mutual feedback process between the importation of African slaves and the expansion of sugar cultivation between 1575 and 1600, and the transition from the use of native labor to the predominant use of black slaves which began in the mid-1580's was substantially complete by the early decades of the seventeenth century. The English colonial experience in the New World was, however, rather different. First of all, it began over a century later than that of Spain and Portugal. Second, the English did not adopt slavery on a large scale until the late seventeenth century. There were several reasons for this. One is that they had a different relationship with native Americans than did the Iberian colonists. In North America, native American groups were less populous and were less complexly organized, which meant that they were less suitable as a labor source. A second reason was that the English initially relied less on native populations as a labor source due to their use of indentured servants. These indentured servants were mostly young men who were obligated for a limited term of service in return for their transportation to the New World. However, indentured servants were less easily exploited than slaves, and often had difficulty assimilating themselves into the colonial communities after they completed their term of service. In addition, the English colonists lacked the means to buy slaves since they did not then have direct commercial contacts with Africa and had to rely upon Dutch intermediaries, which raised

56 HUXCRSGD. 532 the cost of slaves. Thus the use of black African slaves was not well entrenched until after 1650, when increased capital and commercial contacts made their wider use feasible. For a number of reasons, then, Europeans came to perceive black Africans as a source of labor superior to all others. In Europe itself, the switch from white to black slaves had alreadyoccurred by the mid-fifteenth century, as Ottoman control of the Black Sea and the Balkans–the primary source of white slaves--coincided with Portugese exploration of the African coast. Thus African slaves were cheaper due to their relatively low transport cost and purchase price. Moreover, most of them, unlike many indigenous New World peoples, were already familiar with large-scale agriculture and the discipline of laboring in gangs of workers. Many Africans also had knowledge of metal-working, a valuable skill. Finally, Africans, unlike indigenous American peoples, were not subject to the same restrictions on their exploitation and had less susceptibility to European diseases. As we have already seen, various slave trade systems were already in existence prior to the European colonization of the New World, most notably the Mediterranean trade dominated by Venice and Genoa and the trans-Sahara trade controlled by Islam and various African states. As outsiders gradually penetrated Africa and began trading for slaves, these existing trade routes were simply expanded. And when the Portugese initiated their slave trade along the western coast of Africa, at first solely to supply the demand for slaves within Portugal itself, there was ample precedent for such a system. As noted in the previous discussion of African slavery, there was considerable African complicity in the slave trade. In possible extenuation of this complicity, it has been suggested that the political fragmentation of the continent, with various rulers competing for power and wealth, created social, political and economic pressures which facilitated their participation. It may also be said in retrospect that no one, African or European, could grasp the consequences that this participation would have on the continent overall. Europeans–initially the Portugese and Spanish–acquired some slaves directly through piracy and raiding the African coast. Additionally they formed alliances with African kings and chiefs who traded slaves for European goods, establishing holding stations for slaves along the coast. The first slave cargo was shipped to the Americas in 1505, and a regular trade was established within a few years; by 1510 the demand for slaves was already considerable. In 1513, as part of its system of colonial regulation, the Spanish government introduced a licensing system whereby it was paid a fee for each legal shipment of slaves; many licenses were sold by their holders to third parties, most of whom were Genoese or Portugese merchants (especially after 1580, when Spain annexed Portugal), each of whom was granted an annual quota, paid a fee for each slave and specified the African source and American destination of their cargo. Like other colonial regulations, the licensing was difficult to enforce, and the smuggling of slaves was prevalent. The Spanish licensing system was succeeded by the asiento system operated by the Portugese from 1595 to 1640, which required the use of Spanish and Portugese ships–most of which were quite small–the inspection and registration of ships and other complex legal requirements. The voyages typically lasted from one and a half to four years, following a route southward along the African coast to various slaving stations; it often took as long as a year to assemble a full cargo, and while the ships waited in harbor they were subject to damage from worms and their crews and cargo risked the danger of disease. Once they had acquired a full cargo, the ships sailed westward to America, which took two months or more. William D.

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Phillips, Jr. states that the average load of slaves was 248; the ships were overloaded to compensate for the inevitable losses due to death, which averaged 22% but could be as much as one-half. This high mortality rate was caused, among other things, by crowding, disease, malnutrition and piracy. In the early seventeenth century the Dutch began to challenge the monopoly of the Portugese and Spanish by raiding their African ports and New World settlements. Around the same time, the Dutch and the English also began to penetrate the Caribbean and to establish their own colonies. A mid-seventeenth century treaty with the Portugese also gave the Dutch some of their own ports on the African Gold Coast. Although the English sailor John Hawkins made several voyages to the New World in the early 1560's, the failure of his third voyage discouraged further efforts until the seventeenth century. Later, however, the English took over and perfected the slave transport system, and through faster voyages and increased immunities to diseases, were able to reduce the mortality rate of slaves during the Middle Passage (from Africa to the Americas) to 5-10% by the end of the eighteenth century. It should be said, however, that the mortality of white sailors was often higher than that of their black cargo. There have been a number of efforts to quantify the number of slaves transported legally by the transatlantic slave trade. Estimates of the total number of slaves involved range from nine and one-half to over thirteen million (although larger, more controversial figures up to thirty million have been suggested), averaging about 120,000 per year at its peak in 1840. The frequency of the slave trade increased gradually until 1650, rose rapidly and maintained a high rate until 1850, then declined rapidly. Up to 1650 the number of slaves brought to Spanish America was 350,000 and to the Portugese colony in Brazil 250,000. The numbers of slaves imported to the New World during the first three hundred years of colonization vastly surpassed the number of Europeans. This hemorrhage of slaves from the continent known as the African diaspora lasted almost one thousand years, but the greatest losses occurred in the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. As a migration it was perhaps unique in human history due to the involuntary participation of the migrants, the long distances involved and the number of people, probably the largest population movement between continents up to that time. The results of the diaspora were not uniform; the coastal areas of Africa were affected earliest and most strongly, and some African states cooperated more willingly with slave traders than others; thus, although the western coastal areas suffered a population decline in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the total population of tropical Africa remained stable. The demographic effect was to remove a high proportion of young and healthy individuals (because they would fetch a higher price and would be more likely to survive the Middle Passage), two-thirds of whom were male; this contrasted with the internal African demand for slaves, which, as noted previously, was primarily for women and children. Another consequence was political, social, economic and psychological disruption, partly as the result of the demographic changes described above. The depletion of men led to more women doing men’s work and a rise in the number of polygamous marriages. As slavery itself became a more significant institution in Africa, some rulers were able to build up their wealth and power by participating in the slave trade, but ultimately the slave trade created conditions for their instability and collapse since it created a further motive for warfare through the capture of prisoners and also increased the practice of kidnapping for profit.

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Bibliography

Richard N. Bean, The British Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1775, New York, 1975

Thomas F. Buxton, The African Slave Trade and its Remedy, London, 1840

Jay Coughtrey, The Notorious Triangle, Philadelphia, 1981

Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, Madison, 1969

Basil Davidson, Black Mother: The Years of the African Slave Trade, Boston, 1961

Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade, Rev. ed. Boston, 1980

E. Donnan (ed.), Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols., Washington, 1930-1935

W.E.B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, New York, 1896

David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, New York, 1987

David Eltis and David Richardson (eds.), Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Morality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1977

David Eltis and James Walvin (eds.), The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Madison, 1981

Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight, 1998

Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, London, 1788

Saul Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade, 1998

Christopher Fyfe (ed.), The Transatlantic Slave Trade from West Africa, Edinburgh, 1965

Henry Gemery and Jan Hogendorn, The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, New York, 1978

P.E.H. Hair, The Atlantic Slave Trade and Black Africa, London, 1978

Raymond Howell, The Royal Navy and the Slave Trade, London, 1987

Joseph E. Inikori (ed.), Forced Migration: the Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies, New York, 1982

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Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman (eds.), The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples, Durham, 1992

Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade, Princeton, 1978

Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, Cambridge, 1999

Phillip E. LaVeen, British Slave Trade Suppression Policies, 1821-1865, New York, 1977

Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1949

Daniel P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518-1865, London, 1963

Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade, London, 1975

Joseph E. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830, Madison, 1988

Colin Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700-1739, Urbana, 1981

Dale H. Porter, Abolition of the Slave Trade in England, 1784-1807, 1970

Johannes Menne Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815, Cambridge, 1990

James A. Rawley, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A History, New York, 1981

Barbara L. Solow (ed.), Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, Cambridge, 1991

Robert Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business, Madison, 1978

Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1140-1870, New York, 1997

James Walvin, Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Short Illustrated History

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SLAVERY IN THE NEW WORLD

According to historian Robert Fogel, New World slavery can be distinguished by three general characteristics. The first is a strong connection with long-distance trade. Slaves comprised less than 20% of the population of the New World, but slave-produced commodities, including sugar--the single most important product, representing 20% of all English imports– grain, meat, fish, tobacco, cattle, spices, cloth and metals, dominated world trade. Most English shipping was involved in the triangular trade from Europe to Africa to the New World and back to Europe, and more than 50% of English exports went to their American colonies. The second characteristic is an emphasis on commercial production, compared to a focus on subsistence production in other slave societies; this emphasis meant that since the New World colonies did not produce their own food, tools and other necessities, they had to rely on imports, thus tying them more tightly into the triangular trade network. The third characteristic of New World slavery, related to the first two, is the large scale of production employing slaves. Although the primary use of slaves was for agricultural labor, not all slave occupations were unskilled. In addition to domestic servants, slaves were used as artisans, assistants and overseers, and even performed auxiliary military service in the conquest of Mexico and Peru; both free blacks and black slaves filled this latter role, which was intermediate between Spaniards and natives. Treatment of slaves was related to a hierarchy based on the level of skill a slave possessed. Although all slaves legally had the same status, domestics, artisans and assistants generally received better treatment than those who worked in gangs on plantations and in mines. The main source of demand for slave labor–between 60% and 70% of all African slaves– was the sugar plantations. The earliest sugar plantations were established in the Caribbean and were developed by immigrants from the Atlantic islands and Portugal. The Caribbean was a particularly desirable location for sugar production due to its tropical climate, sufficient rainfall to grow sugar cane without irrigation, more reliable sources of water for irrigation than in the Mediterranean, and abundant forests which provided fuel for refinery boilers. Sugar cane was first introduced to the island of Hispaniola (now comprised of Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and the first sugar mill, which transformed molasses into sugar and made large-scale production of refined sugar possible, was constructed in 1517. Africans were first imported to replace natives as a labor source in 1518. With royal support for sugar manufacturing, including privileges and loans granted to prospective owners, a supply of experts to advise them and exemption of all processing equipment from taxation, the industry grew rapidly, with six mills in operation by 1520 and 40 more under construction. The first exports of sugar to Europe took place in 1522. Between the 1530's and the 1570's thirty-four mills were in operation, and by 1560 black slaves greatly outnumbered whites on the island. Subsequently sugar cultivation and processing spread to other parts of the Caribbean, to Jamaica in 1520, to Puerto Rico in the 1530's and to Cuba in the 1570's. Later, however, the rate of growth in the Caribbean slowed due to a shift in focus to Mexico and Peru, as settlers were drawn to migration there in search of gold and other opportunities. By the end of the sixteenth century the Spanish Caribbean colonies had begun to decline economically and concurrently the English, French and Dutch began to attack them, eventually dislodging the Spanish from most of them.

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The British were particularly aggressive, beginning with their settlement of Barbados in the 1620's. By the early 1640's there were 2500 whites and 6400 slaves on the island; in 1650 there were 20,000 slaves; and by 1680 there were 17,000 whites and 37,000 slaves. They also seized Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655. By 1670, the population included 7000 slaves and white colonists; in 1690 the ratio between blacks and whites was four to one; by 1700 there were 45,000 slaves on the island; by 1720, at which time Jamaica was the world’s largest sugar producer, the ratio of blacks to whites was six to one; and by 1780, the island housed 200,000 slaves. For the British, their Caribbean colonies were vastly more profitable than those in North America; fourteen times more profitable in 1725 and ten times more profitable in 1765. By 1787 the British West Indies exported more than five times as much sugar as Brazil and by 1806 they accounted for 55% of the world’s sugar trade. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of all British Caribbean slaves were involved in sugar production. In addition to British penetration of the Caribbean, the French acquired Haiti from the Spanish and the Dutch gained control of Guiana. In Mexico, Hernan Cortez had ambitions similar to those of Columbus, introducing the growing of sugar cane on his own lands and trading sugar for slaves to Genoese merchants. Mexican sugar production underwent a major expansion in the second half of the sixteenth century; by 1570 slaves represented half of the population and there were 40 licensed mills in Mexico by 1600. A similar process occurred in Peru. Thus the development of the sugar industry followed the same pattern and used the same techniques as in the Canary Islands and the Mediterranean, but was on a larger scale and therefore employed many more slaves. And as we have seen, there was a strong association between the sugar industry and slavery, since slaves were involved in all phases of production and processing. The majority of them were unskilled laborers, divided into teams directed by overseers, many of whom were themselves slaves. For the most part this work was harsh and unrelenting, so harsh that eventually natives were prohibited from performing it, although they did provide supplementary unskilled labor. In Mexico skilled labor positions were primarily held by Spaniards; in the Caribbean, however, which lacked a sufficient number of Spaniards, skilled jobs were carried out by black slaves as well. Although the Portuguese colony in Brazil did not receive large numbers of African slaves until the 1570's, black slavery lasted there longer than anywhere else in the New World, and eventually Brazil came to utilize almost 40% of all slaves sent to the New World. More than 40% of these Brazilian slaves were used in the production of sugar, which, as elsewhere, was highly profitable. Sugar production began in the 1520's, but did not become significant until the 1570's; by 1600 Brazil was Europe’s leading supplier of sugar. The slaves lived in barracks near the mills and worked in nearby fields either growing sugar cane or food for the estate. Those who worked in the mills endured the harshest existence; the work was so physically demanding and dangerous that the demand for mill workers could not be met through reproduction, but required a continual importation of new slaves from Africa. Fewer slaves were used in other kinds of agriculture, growing grain or indigo or herding cattle and sheep. Mining, which employed about 20% of the slaves, with the harshest environments and the highest death rates of all, was even more hazardous than working in the sugar mills. Mining began early in the colonization of Brazil, which first utilized encomienda and repartimiento labor; however, black slaves were considered most desirable for this work because they could be used permanently, while natives had the right to temporary terms of

62 HUXCRSGD. 532 service. Slaves were also used in sea and land transportation and construction, including lumbering, quarrying, building and brick- and tile-making. Slaves also worked as artisans, mostly in urban environments, at weaving, iron-working, tanning and leather-working; such artisans were often valued for their skills and consequently received better treatment and greater opportunities. Finally, slaves were used as domestic servants, gradually replacing natives because they were considered more docile and reliable because they lacked ties to the local community. Like artisans, domestic slaves were usually better treated. In the Iberian colonies considerable efforts were made to promote the assimilation of slaves into colonial society. Although their subordinate role was still emphasized, royal, church and local rules attempted to moderate their living and working conditions, as long as their economic usefulness was not affected. One of the primary efforts was directed toward Christianization and Hispanization of slaves. Through baptism and language instruction, slaves were encouraged to adopt shared religious and cultural values which would, it was hoped, lead to a slave regime based on consent rather than coercion. Participation in the church, whereby slaves were treated as spiritual equals in return for their deference and obedience, was also designed to provide an outlet for tensions and discontent. Since it was a sacrament of the church and part of the effort at Christianization, royal and canon law allowed slaves permission to marry, and it was required that at least one-third of imported slaves be female for that reason. It was also believed that marriage would create a more settled life for slaves and make them more docile. However, many slaveowners resisted these efforts of the crown and church because it reduced their flexibility in employing slaves, and often punished them for marrying and/or denied them their conjugal rights. Marriage was usually more difficult for rural slaves than urban ones. Unlike the British New World colonies, there was considerable racial mixing and miscegenation in the Iberian colonies. One factor responsible for this was an unbalanced ratio between males and females. White males had the widest choice of partners, which included whites, natives and blacks. It was, however, more difficult for black slaves to find partners of their own race. To begin with, there were more male slaves than females; in addition, some female black slaves were monopolized by whites; moreover, most males resided in rural areas, while most female slaves lived in towns. Therefore, male black slaves often married or lived with local native women. Theoretically, limitations were placed on the kinds of punishments that masters could inflict on their slaves, with major punishments reserved for the courts and civil authorities. Whipping and branding were common punishments, as were the use of chains and stocks. Persistent runaways might be castrated or mutilated. The government could intervene in cases of abuse, but rarely did. As elsewhere resistance can be seen as an indication of the lack of success of various efforts toward amelioration of conditions or assimilation into society. Escape was the most common form of resistance due to the possibility of finding asylum in remote areas such as mountains or jungle; most slaves who were caught, therefore, were apprehended close to the place they had escaped from. Even those who were recaptured were often successful in obtaining better treatment from their masters as a result or succeeded in having themselves sold to other masters. In part this was because the chronic shortage of labor made them desirable workers under any conditions; for the same reason punishment for escape was often not as severe

63 HUXCRSGD. 532 as mandated. In some cases attempts were made to found colonies of runaway slaves in land beyond the territories of settled lands. A more serious form of resistance by escaped slaves was guerilla warfare. There were several revolts whose purpose was to free all slaves and drive out Europeans. In addition to a revolt of black slaves and native peoples in Hispaniola in 1519, there were several rebellions in Mexico and there was generally widespread resistance in Central America. In many cases attempts were made to establish independent states of escaped slaves; there were a number of such fugitive communities in Mexico and Brazil, some of which maintained themselves successfully for considerable periods of time. However, these communities involved only a small fraction of the slave population, and their actual rate of success is unknown, since most documents refer to the capture of slaves rather than the fate of those who escaped. Due in part to the influence of Roman law, manumission was frequent in the Iberian colonies. As elsewhere, it was mostly dependent on the will of the master, who could free slaves posthumously by testament, grant freedom during the slave’s lifetime for exceptional service, or allow slaves to purchase themselves with their own or someone else’s money. Less commonly, the state also manumitted slaves, usually when their master was convicted of their mistreatment masters. In part this was because the chronic shortage of labor made them desirable workers under any conditions; for the same reason punishment for escape was often not as severe as mandated. In some cases attempts were made to found colonies of runaway slaves in land beyond the territories of settled lands. A more serious form of resistance by escaped slaves was guerilla warfare. There were several revolts whose purpose was to free all slaves and drive out Europeans. In addition to a revolt of black slaves and native peoples in Hispaniola in 1519, there were several rebellions in Mexico and there was generally widespread resistance in Central America. In many cases attempts were made to establish independent states of escaped slaves; there were a number of such fugitive communities in Mexico and Brazil, some of which maintained themselves successfully for considerable periods of time. However, these communities involved only a small fraction of the slave population, and their actual rate of success is unknown, since most documents refer to the capture of slaves rather than the fate of those who escaped. Due in part to the influence of Roman law, manumission was frequent in the Iberian colonies. As elsewhere, it was mostly dependent on the will of the master, who could free slaves posthumously by testament, grant freedom during the slave’s lifetime for exceptional service, or allow slaves to purchase themselves with their own or someone else’s money. Less commonly, the state also manumitted slaves, usually when their master was convicted of their mistreatment or for service to the state. The chances of manumission varied with time and place, as well as the personal characteristics of the slave. For example, urban slaves, mulattos and women and children (or any combination thereof) were more likely to be freed than rural slaves, blacks or men. When economic crises created a temporary labor surplus, slaves were also more likely to be manumitted. Manumission was often granted conditionally, in return for specified services for a stated period of time or a schedule of payments. In conclusion, slavery was well established in the New World by 1650. It was practiced on both large and small scales, including on the one hand gang plantation and mine labor and on European settlers, fewer natives and an increasing mestizo population, the role of black slaves changed as well. Eventually there was less need for blacks to fill intermediary roles between natives and European settlers, and eventually African slaves were imported solely for their labor

64 HUXCRSGD. 532 value in gang slavery. New World slavery demonstrates both continuity and change from earlier forms of slavery in the Old World. All general features of European slavery from Roman times onward were also introduced in the Americas; only features with restricted development, such as eunuchs and the use of slaves as administrators, were missing in the New World. Thus in many respects slavery in the New World was the logical outcome of patterns already established in Europe. The changes in New World slavery can mainly be attributed to the different environments and circumstances that the European settlers encountered; these conditions led to the dominance of gang slavery and consequently a harsher regime than usually found in the Old World. Historians have disagreed about the harshness of Iberian slavery compared to that of the English colonies. Some historians, such as Freyre and Tannenbaum, take a relatively benign view of Iberian slavery, believing that it was overall a more benevolent system, with more egalitarian racial relations. They point, for example, to the lack of institutional or social bars to racial mixing, leading to a more democratic form of racial blending than found in the North American colonies. They also suggest that nonwhites in the Iberian colonies had a somewhat more favorable position in the multiracial societies that existed after emancipation, due to royal legislation based on Roman law, the influence of the Catholic church and more enlightened attitudes of Spanish and Portugese settlers. Historians such as Boxer and Degler, on the other hand, offer a more critical interpretation, and noting the harsh features of the Portugese slave system, exhibit greater skepticism concerning the purported lack of color barriers and conclude that the Iberian and English systems were basically similar, except that mulattos were more readily accepted in Brazil.

Bibliography

NEW WORLD

Ira D. Berlin (ed.), Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, 1993

Ira D. Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (eds.), The Slaves’ Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas, London, 1991

Wolfgang Binder (ed.), Slavery in the Americas, Wurzburg, 1993

Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery from the Baroque to the Modern, 1492- 1800, New York, 1997

David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene (eds.), Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies in the New World, Baltimore, 1972 65 HUXCRSGD. 532

Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History, Cambridge, 1990

Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States, New York, 1971

Stanley L. Engermann and Eugene D. Genovese (eds.), Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Quantitative Studies, Princeton, 1975

Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese (eds.), Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History, Englewood Cliffs, 1969

David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, Bloomington, 1996

Harry Hoetink, Slavery and Race Relations in the Americas, New York, 1973

Herbert S. Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba, Chicago, 1974

Herbert Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, New York, 1986

Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831, Urbana, 1992

Richard Price (ed.), Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, Garden City, NJ, 1973

Vera Rubin and Arthur Tuden (eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292, 1977

William Frederick Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, Oklahoma City, 1976

John David Smith, Black Slavery in the Americas: An Interdisciplinary Bibliography, 1865- 1980, Westport CN, 1982

Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas, New York, 1947

John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 2nd ed., Cambridge, 1998

Alan Watson, Slave Laws in the Americas, Athens GA, 1990

66 HUXCRSGD. 532

CARIBBEAN

H.S. Aimes, A History of Slavery in Cuba, New York, 1907

Hilary M. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Women in Barbados, London, 1989

Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838, Bloomington, 1990

Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796, Granby, CN, 1988

Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slave and Plantation Life in Jamaica, Cambridge, MA, 1978

Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies, Ithaca, 1982

Richard S. Dunn and Gary B. Nash, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713, Chapel Hill, 2000

Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Frank Moya Pons and Stanley L. Engerman (eds.), Between Slavery and Freedom: The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century, Baltimore, 1976

David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relationships in Antigua, Baltimore, 1985

Neville T. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies, Mona, 1992

Barry Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834, Baltimore, 1984

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, New York, 1963

Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century, Madison, 1970

Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean, Lawrence, 1989

Edward J. Mullen (ed.), The Life and Poems of a Cuban Slave: Juan Francisco Manzano, 1791- 1854, trans. R.R. Madden, Hamden CT, 1981

David Murray, Odious Commerce, Cambridge, 1983

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Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica, Rutherford, NJ, 1967

Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623- 1775, Barbados, 1974

Dale W. Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830- 1848, Baltimore, 1990

J.R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750-1834, Oxford, 1988

LATIN AMERICA

Frederick Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524-1650, Stanford, 1974

R.E. Conrad, Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil, Princeton, 1983

Christine Hunefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor Among Lima’s Slaves, 1800-1854, trans. Alexandra Stern, Berkeley, 1994

Mary Karasch, Slave Life and Culture in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850, Princeton, 1987

Rolando Mellafe, Negro Slavery in Latin America, trans. J.W.S. Judge, Berkeley, 1975

Colin Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650, Cambridge, MA, 1976

Leslie B. Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America, Cambridge, 1976

Robert Brent Toplin (ed.), Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America, Westport, 1974

68 HUXCRSGD. 532

AMERICAN SLAVERY

Slavery in North America has a number of distinctive aspects which give it a character somewhat different character than slavery in other societies already discussed, particularly the Iberian New World colonies. One is the lack of a tradition of slavery in England; not only did England have strong traditional values of personal and political freedom, but unlike the influence of Roman law in the Iberian colonies, England had few laws dealing with slavery. Moreover, English law emphasized property rights to a greater extent than other legal systems, and therefore those laws which dealt with slaves treated slaves as objects like other forms of chattel or belongings. A second distinctive feature of American slavery was that, unlike the Iberian colonies, it was a bi-racial system, with a rigid separation of the races. A third distinctive characteristic was the role of capitalism applied to agriculture, which emphasized the economic aspects of slavery and led to generally harsh conditions for slaves due to the effort to achieve maximum production from the agricultural labor force. A final characteristic aspect was the relative infrequency of manumission, which will be discussed further. The evolution of slavery in North America was a complex process characterized by considerable diversity due in part to the interaction of English colonists with different environments. The system that emerged, like other colonial situations, was largely the result of unplanned consequences, perhaps to an even greater extent than in other areas of the New World because of the aforementioned lack of a tradition of slavery. One of the major differences between the English approach to indigenous peoples and that of the Spanish and Portugese settlers is that the English colonists were unwilling to promote the assimilation of native peoples. Rather than fostering the processes of Christianization and Hispanization advocated by the governments of Spain and Portugal, the English attempted to establish a racially homogenous Christian society by rejecting, displacing and destroying the native Americans who inhabited the lands they desired. During the colonial period–i.e., until the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States of America–a unique aspect of slavery was the influence of American nationalism as shaped by the landed aristocracy. These plantation owners envisioned a kind of patriarchal independence based upon traditional English values of autonomy and self- sufficiency. Unfortunately, however, there were a number of constraints ameliorating this vision. One was the role of the British North American colonies in the larger world-wide mercantile system; within this system the colonies were designated as the suppliers of raw materials, which the continent possessed in abundance. As only one element in the system, though, the American planters had little control over other parts of the system such as manufactured goods, credit and prices; for all of these, they were at the mercy of others. A second constraint, of course, was the external political authority over them by the English government. And the third major constraint was their dependence on slaves as a source of labor, since this too was a commodity which had to be obtained and maintained, at least initially, from abroad. In order to understand the evolution of chattel slavery in North America, it is necessary to consider several factors. One is the economic conditions of the colonial environment: abundant land, a shortage of labor, and the need for cash crops to exchange for finished goods. The 69 HUXCRSGD. 532 second is the aforementioned value of personal freedom that the English settlers brought with them and the relative lack of unfree labor compared to other New World colonies. By the sixteenth century serfdom had long disappeared and there was no existing model for chattel slavery in England; the closest analogue was the imposition of compulsory labor for vagabonds (i.e., homeless and propertyless men who roamed the countryside in search of food, work and things to steal). The English therefore made a stronger distinction between servitude on the one hand and bond slavery on the other than in most other societies. To the English the latter implied a loss of liberty (equivalent to a loss of humanity), captivity and life-long, perpetual, open-ended and hereditary enslavement. Thus the establishment of chattel slavery resulted in the emergence of a servant class, a class which was necessary, but feared, disdained and excluded from social and economic mobility, a class that was in, but not of, American society. Ultimately this came to mean that anyone with at least one African parent or grandparent was condemned to lifelong hereditary servitude. Blacks were assumed de facto to be slaves unless they could provide written proof of free status, and lacked even the minimum rights of English subjects. The precedent and examples of slavery in the Iberian New World colonies provided the English, with their desire to profit from the slave trade, an inexorable association between black Africans and slavery. As black slaves were introduced to the English colonial environment they underwent a process of acculturation whereby they were transformed from Africans to Negroes. This process of increasing cultural assimilation occurred concurrently with increasing social and political separation. Essentially this process involved three stages. In the first stage they viewed themselves and were viewed as native Africans who had a minimal knowledge of English and retained an essentially African orientation which was tribal and communal, whereby slavery was seen as a temporary misfortune to be met with cooperative confrontation and rejection. During this phase there were numerous attempts by escaped slaves to establish a semblance of their old village life in wild areas beyond control of the colonial government, as had also occurred in South America. During the second phase, as they were introduced to field labor, they became “new Negroes,” and in the third stage, as they became more fully assimilated, resistance shifted from the group to the individual, which was not as threatening to the system of slavery and which had the effect of diminishing the cohesiveness of slave communities. Rather than escaping into the wilderness, slaves–particularly artisans–escaped to the cities, where there was always a demand for skilled labor and which offered a relatively greater degree of freedom. As the process of acculturation continued and as more Africans were imported, a series of cultural differences between slaves of mixed race and the newly-arrived Africans began to emerge. There were a number of factors which influenced slave behavior. One of the most significant of these was the extent of owner absenteeism, i.e., the degree to which the plantation was the base of the master’s operations. This was determined to some extent by the slaveowner’s orientation to the world: either inward, focusing on the plantation as a microcosm or self-contained world, or outward, focusing to a greater extent upon urban life. This orientation considerably influenced the master’s personal involvement in affairs of the plantation and the extent to which his attention was focused on the plantation. If the focus were inward, there tended to be more interaction between the master’s family and his slaves, with a closer relationship between them and the master’s family serving as a model of acculturation. Masters whose focus of attention was primarily on the plantation often had a benevolently patriarchal attitude toward their slaves; this greater degree of familiarity between master and slave tended to

70 HUXCRSGD. 532 increase the rate of the slaves’ assimilation, as well as the degree of their compliance. In order to minimize resistance, owners typically adopted one of two approaches. One was to reside on the plantation, since the presence of a master tended to reduce the level of resistance. Absentee owners, who had more of an outward orientation, interacted less with their slaves, relying instead on supervisors and overseers and a hierarchy of authority with a defined system of rules, routine and command. This approach could be quite efficient in terms of productivity, and if carried out with efficiency and fairness could also minimize resistance, but the lack of direct involvement by the master could lead to a harsh regime which could have negative consequences. In addition to the presence of master, other important factors influencing slave behavior were the origin of the slave and his or her occupation. The initial experience of white settlers on the eastern North American coast was disheartening and unsettling. The environment was unfamiliar, and they were disoriented and isolated; a large proportion of the population became ill and many died. Although most of the native American tribes were initially either friendly or neutral, eventually conflict between the white settlers and the indigenous Americans became endemic, and those natives who did not die of European diseases were ultimately expelled from their territories. As a result, three major systems of labor emerged: free wage labor, indentured servitude and chattel slavery. Between 1600 and 1700 these first two systems provided the majority of labor, since the European population during this period reached one-half million, including 1500 indentured servants brought annually to Virginia, while black slaves numbered between 10,000 and 20,000. As the cultivation of tropical crops such as tobacco and rice increased, the demand for black slaves grew as well. The first Africans were brought to Virginia in 1619, and between 1720 and 1740 the number of black slaves increased to 50,000, representing 40% of Virginia’s population in the 1730's; in South Carolina in 1720 the ratio of blacks to whites was two to one. Overall, a total of 750,000 blacks were imported to the American colonies in the eighteenth century. Although there were initial similarities throughout the American colonies, eventually, due to the variability of environments and circumstances, three major colonial slave systems emerged. In the first of these, the northern non-plantation system, there was no compelling economic need for slaves; because of the seasonal nature of agriculture in the northern colonies, indentured servitude was sufficient to satisfy labor demands. Black slaves, therefore, were more often status symbols than agricultural workers, and comprised only 3% of the total population; the highest proportion was 15%, in New York and Rhode Island. Very few of these slaves were directly imported to the North, but were brought north from other colonies. Most northern black slaves worked in the countryside, primarily in agriculture; most raised food to be shipped to the West Indies sugar islands on small, non-plantation farms, while some others performed a variety of occupations, including laboring in ironworks. Unlike the other colonial regions, almost all of these slaves worked in close proximity to whites, and because of this they underwent a relatively rapid and complete acculturation. Even though most slaves worked in rural environments, there was nonetheless a higher proportion of urban slaves than further south. In the northern cities slave ownership was fairly common among the elite and the middle class, who employed them mostly as domestic servants, and a few as artisans; due to limitations of space, however, most homes had only one or two slaves. Slaves in the northern colonies received relatively better treatment and had greater autonomy than elsewhere; since they were a numerical minority they were less threatening to whites and their acculturation and urban

71 HUXCRSGD. 532 environment gave them a greater ability to manipulate their masters and the system to their advantage than their southern counterparts. Increased labor demands, however, led to an increase in the number of slaves in the mid- 18th century. Slaves came to be seen at that time as a substitute for indentured servants, and the demographic structure of the northern colonies changed to include more Africans and more male slaves. There was also an increasing division between newly-arrived Africans and the more acculturated Afro-Americans. Due in part to religious injunctions and a greater perception of the differences between free and slave, white and African, there was a stronger ambivalence concerning slavery than in the other two slave systems. The second major slave system was the Chesapeake region of Maryland and Virginia, comprised of large, scattered, relatively self-sufficient plantations connected by a network of navigable rivers. This situation gave rise to a society in which there was an absence of town life and where the relatively isolated plantations promoted a strong desire for independence and self- sufficiency. Although the main crop was tobacco, there was also some degree of agricultural diversification. The nature of plantation farming in the Chesapeake region required a labor force which was cheap, but not temporary, mobile, but not independent, and tireless rather than skilled. Although it largely disappeared after the colonial period, Maryland and Virginia were dominated by a pre-modern outlook modeled on that of the rural English gentry, small-scale, corporate, and comprised of God-fearing plantation owners. The more or less indigenous development of slavery in the Chesapeake region occurred in three stages. The first stage, from 1619 to 1640, was characterized by the slow and gradual introduction of Africans, who during this period comprised approximately two percent of the population, and who underwent a pattern of acculturation similar to elsewhere. There is little evidence for this period to show how blacks were treated compared to white servants; it seems, though, that there was little distinction between them in terms of working conditions and both appear to have been treated equally brutally, although their status was probably never equal. There is some evidence from census documents of efforts to distinguish whites from blacks even in this early stage; for example, while whites were specifically named, blacks were listed without names. However, even though such efforts were being made, there was at this time a considerable degree of intermarriage and racial mixing. During the second stage, from 1640 to 1660, blacks began to be treated more like slaves, including the introduction of the concepts of lifelong servitude and inherited status, and in 1639 Maryland passed laws explicitly excluding slaves from the rights of other inhabitants. During this period, although some blacks were enslaved, others were still free. During the third stage, after 1660, slavery was legalized, indentured servants were replaced by slaves, and the proportion of black African slaves increased; by 1700 they represented one-half of the agricultural work force and an even larger percentage of plantation workers. As their numbers increased, their treatment became harsher, laws were passed against miscegenation, whites made greater efforts to create divisions in the slave community and freemen became an increasingly smaller proportion of the population. We might stop and ask at this point what made the white Chesapeake settlers think that these actions were acceptable or right? There are several possible answers, all related, which derive from the English heritage of the colonists. Since England was an island–which to a great degree isolated its inhabitants from contact with other peoples–and also because of its relative racial and cultural homogeneity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the English developed

72 HUXCRSGD. 532 considerable contempt for non-English peoples, whom they arranged in a hierarchy of increasing social distance. At the apex of this hierarchy were, of course, the English themselves. One level below them were other clearly inferior inhabitants of the British Isles, i.e., the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish. Below them were other Europeans. A step lower were native Americans, with whom they had less personal contact than with blacks and because they were more cohesively organized offered greater resistance. Finally, at the bottom of the hierarchy were blacks, who in the New World lacked tribal identity or nationalism and for that reason were considered more governable. It was this sense of difference that empowered the English colonists to enslave black Africans, who were perceived as heathens. White colonists and black slaves came to be distinguished by a series of dichotomies, based on religion and nationalism, of white and black, Christian and heathen, civilized and barbaric, free and slave. In the Chesapeake region we find the most refined example of the patriarchal role of the master, a paternalistic attitude through which slaves were considered part of the family and rebelliousness was seen as a transgression of the Fifth Commandment. This paternalism reflected the inward-looking model described earlier, involving the direct supervision of the master who lived with his family on the plantation and consequently had more intimate involvement with and exercised greater control over his slaves. The acculturation of slaves was encouraged, in part because of the need for skilled artisans and in part because it tended to diffuse rebellious tendencies. This ideal of patriarchal self-sufficiency, however, was challenged by the lack of the colonists’ self-determination in the larger world market and by the eventual decline of the tobacco market, which created increasing economic stress. Initially there were some significant differences between creoles, who were well- acculturated, and Africans. Creoles comprised most of the initial slave population, and because they were more assimilated, could manipulate the system to their advantage better than Africans. As a result creoles were able to obtain higher-level jobs with more variety and when they escaped were better able to blend in in areas with large populations. Africans, who were later arrivals, eventually formed the majority of the population, were restricted primarily to heavy agricultural labor, had less desire for assimilation, and tried to escape in groups toward wilderness areas. Ultimately these two populations merged into a unified Afro-American culture as blacks became increasingly concentrated into larger groups. It was the tendency of whites to include all slaves in the same category and over time as differences between slaves decreased, differences between whites and blacks increased. One later development was the importation of more female slaves in order to increase the growth of the slave population through reproduction, which led to a greater emphasis on family life within the slave community. Eventually, the number of new Africans decreased as the birthrate within the slave community increased. The third major colonial slave system was in Georgia and the Carolinas, a lowland environment more suitable for growing rice (which eventually became a more lucrative crop than tobacco) and indigo, which was settled about fifty years later than the Chesapeake region. This region was also more urbanized than the Chesapeake, with the city of Charleston becoming the focus of activity. The development of white and black society along parallel lines, with considerable overlap between them, was initially similar to the process which occurred in the North. This was in part because the white settlers depended upon blacks to a greater extent than elsewhere. Many blacks had served in the military fighting against the Indians, Spanish and French, and escape was fairly easy because the environment was the most similar to that of west Africa; because of these factors blacks initially were initially enabled to have a considerable

73 HUXCRSGD. 532 degree of independence and autonomy. The system began to change, however, toward the end of the seventeenth century. Unlike the more diversified economy of the Chesapeake region, there was greater agricultural specialization in the lowland area, and due to the availability of white urban artisans there was less demand for black craftsmen. There was a great demand for unskilled agricultural labor, and 40% of all pre-Revolutionary slaves arrived in North America at the port of Charleston; most of them came directly from Africa and soon outnumbered whites by two to one and then three to one. This resulted in a higher proportion of unacculturated and untrained Africans than elsewhere. Compared to the Chesapeake region there was a greater degree of planter absenteeism, as they tended to spend more time in Charleston and less time on their plantations; one result of this was a slower rate of acculturation than further north, with a greater separation between white and blacks, and with the delegation of authority to overseers, greater impersonality in the relationship between master and slave. In the lowland region there was also a greater trend toward commercialization and a profit orientation. Activities were highly regularized and routinized, with an emphasis on efficiency, precision and uniformity and an increasing use of management techniques. This resulted in the reformation and restructuring of the plantation community as plantation owners abandoned economic diversity and focused on the production of commercial staple crops. The plantation was organized hierarchically, with elaborate record-keeping. Although the plantation owners used a number of methods to maximize favorable working conditions, such as slave chapels, nurseries for children, games and contests, the work was long and demanding and slaves as a result lost their individuality as the value of life was cheapened and they became increasingly alienated. In addition to the increasing distinction between Africans and Afro- Americans found elsewhere, cultural and social divisions also emerged between urban and rural blacks. Urban slaves, due to greater contact with whites, were more acculturated, had a greater diversity of occupations and generally had more autonomy. Prior to the Revolutionary War a number of trends were already becoming apparent, including the increasing marginality of slavery in the northern colonies and a transformation of the southern colonies from a slave-owning to a slave society in the middle decades of the eighteenth century; by this time more than 90% of the North American slave population resided south of the Mason-Dixon line. Although there had been some mutual acculturation between Afro-American and Euro-American cultures, most blacks still were acutely conscious of their African heritage. The Revolutionary War had various effects on the institution of slavery: it brought freedom to some blacks and gave encouragement to others; it allowed slaveholders to legitimize property claims and mechanisms to defend slavery; it strengthened the plantation system in the South; it stimulated the expansion of slavery to areas of the western frontier; and it affected relationships between blacks and whites to the extent that some were improved and others worsened. The American Revolution also had different effects on different areas and on the different types of slave systems described above. It stimulated the abolition movement in the northern states, leading to the disappearance of slavery there by 1820; as a result the freed slaves adopted new names, found new residences and created new institutions and communities. There was considerable dislocation in the rice-growing lowland South both during and after the war, which facilitated the escape of slaves and resulted in less supervision and control than previously, along with the aforementioned reorganization of plantation life; thus, paradoxically, there was the

74 HUXCRSGD. 532 simultaneous expansion of slavery on the one hand and slave autonomy on the other. In the Chesapeake region, intermediate between the North and the lowland South, many slaves were freed, and the region contained approximately one-third of the free black population by 1790; these free blacks were still a small minority of the total black population, however. As an intermediate region, the effects of migration and resettlement were varied; in the Upper Chesapeake region of Maryland, slaves had relative freedom, while in the Lower Chesapeake region of Virginia slavery became more entrenched. In the frontier region to the west, there was a significant growth and development of cotton farming, which created an increasing demand for labor and the expansion of slavery westward. After the war the frontier accounted for the largest growth of the slave population, which totaled 2,800,000 in 1840. Because cotton farming was less taxing and disruptive for slaves than sugar production or mining, there was less open resistance and a greater reproduction rate, and thus the frontier region became the center of plantation slavery. After the war, a single Afro-American society emerged, as well as a common American racial ideology and practice in the South. Differences between creoles and Africans, which during the colonial period represented the most important social distinction, grew less significant due to the increasing effect of acculturation and assimilation. And with the end of the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, Africans gradually disappeared as a distinctive element within the slave community. The major postwar distinctions were between free blacks and slaves and status within the slave community was substituted for distinctions based on the degree of acculturation. And it was only after the Revolution that racial thinking became dominant and that blacks were truly seen as an inferior minority.

Bibliography

GENERAL

Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South, New York, 1974

Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy and Leslie S. Rowland (eds.), Free at Last: Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom and the Civil War, New York, 1992

John B. Boles, Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740-1870, Lexington, 1988

Ben A. Botkin (ed.), Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, Chicago, 1945

William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828-1856, Baton Rouge, 1978

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J.D. Cornelius, When I can Read my Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery and Religion in the Antebellum South, Columbia, SC, 1991

Marcus Cunliffe, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830-1860, Athens GA, 1979

Thomas J. Durant, Jr. and J. David Knottnerus (eds.), Plantation Society and Race Relations: The Origins of Inequality, Westport CN, 1999

Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, Chicago, 1967

Louis Filler, Slavery in the United States of America, New York, 1972

Paul Finkelman (ed.), Articles on American Slavery, New York, 1990

Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, New York, 1989

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South, Chapel Hill, 1988

John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 6th ed., New York, 1988

Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, New York, 1974

Nathan I. Huggins, Black Odyssey: The African American Ordeal in Slavery, New York, 1990

Aubrey C. Land (ed.), Bases of the Plantation Society, Columbia SC, 1969

Marion G. McDougall, Fugitive Slaves 1619-1865, New York, 1891

Howard McGary, Between Slavery and Freedom: Philosophy and American Slavery, Bloomington, 1992

Edgar J. McManus, Black Bondage in the North, Syracuse, 1973

Randal M. Miller and John D. Smith (eds.), Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, New York, 1988

James Morgan, Slavery in the United States: Four Views, Jefferson NC, 1985

Michael Mullen, American Negro Slavery: A Documentary History, New York, 1976

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James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South, New York, 1990

Frederick Law Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, London, 1861

Harry P. Owens (ed.), Perspectives and Irony in American Slavery, Jackson MS, 1976

Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery, Baton Rouge, 1966

William D. Powell, The Health of Slaves on Southern Plantations, Gloucester MA, 1951

C. Duncan Rice, The Rise and Fall of Black Slavery, Baton Rouge, 1975

Donald Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820, New York, 1979

Willie Lee Rose (ed.), A Documentary History of Slavery in North America, New York, 1976

Willie Lee Rose, Slavery and Freedom, New York, 1982

Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, New York, 1956

Raymond Starr and Robert Detweiler (eds.), Race, Prejudice and the Origins of Slavery in America, Cambridge MA, 1975

Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South, Madison, 1989

William L. Van Deburg, Slavery & Race in American Popular Culture, Madison, 1984

Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860, New York, 1964

Allan Weinstein, Frank O. Gatell and David Sarasohn (eds.), American Negro Slavery, New York, 1979

Deborah Grey White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, New York, 1985

Theodore Wilson, The Black Codes of the South, Tuscaloosa, 1965

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COLONIAL AMERICA

Annie Heloise Abel, Slaveholding Indians, Vol. 1-3, Cleveland, 1915-1925

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, Cambridge, MA, 2000

Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (eds.), Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, Charlottesville, 1983

Edward Countryman (ed.), How Did American Slavery Begin?, Boston, 1999

Leland Donald, Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America, Berkeley, 1997

Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age, Princeton, 1991

Richard Haliburton, Jr., Red Over Black: Black Slavery Among the Cherokee Indians, Westport, 1977

Barbara Heath, Hidden Lives: The Archaeology of Slave Life at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest, 1999

Almon Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times, 1970

Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution, London, 1974

John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, New York, 1977

Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866, Knoxville, 1979

Donald R. Wright, African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins Through the American Revolution, Arlington Heights IL, 1990

SLAVE NARRATIVES

As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. notes, slave narratives form the original basis of the Afro- American literary tradition. More than six thousand slave narratives were written between 1704 and 1944, comprising approximately half of the literary production of African-Americans from 1760 to the present. In establishing this literary tradition these narratives not only represented powerful refutations of various justifications of slavery and vividly portrayed the struggle for freedom; they also made a convincing and persuasive connection between literacy and freedom, 78 HUXCRSGD. 532 confirming in the most positive possible manner that literacy is freedom. By their very existence such narratives also refuted the widely bruited assertion that blacks were incapable of thought, feeling and expression as whites were and eloquently demonstrated the essential humanity of the slave. As a literary genre, slave narratives were extremely popular. Since a number of them– most notably that of Frederick Douglass–represent the outgrowth and extension of speeches made against slavery, they often have a powerful oratorical quality and were used, along with speeches and other literary productions, as ammunition in the fight against slavery. The first- person point of view enabled the narrator-protagonist to shape his or her experience in order to make certain points, but also to do so in his or her own unique voice. As autobiographies and manifestoes against slavery, these works shared certain similarities in their structure. The format quickly became standardized: an engraved portrait of the author, followed by a title page including, as part of the title, the phrase “Written by Himself,” various testimonials and/or prefaces by white abolitionists or editors, a poetic epigraph, the actual narrative, and an appendix composed of documentary material. One reason for this is that later narratives used earlier stories as models. Although the experiences of individuals differed, all of their lives as translated into literary form followed the same trajectory from bondage to freedom, from darkness into light. In addition to conveying these individual experiences, most authors of slave narratives also understood that they were in some sense exemplars whose singular lives also represented a communal and collective experience as well, and that each of them was therefore conveying the story of untold thousands as well. Writers of slave narratives also incorporated elements of other well-established and conventional genres such as picaresque and sentimental novels. Moreover, in telling their stories, the authors were aware that they needed to address the dual expectations of writing a meaningful and compelling tale on the one hand and serving as an emblem of the struggle for freedom on the other. Thus when we read slave narratives as part of this course, we need to be aware that they can and should be read from multiple perspectives: as a story; as part of a literary genre; and as an important primary source of evidence–particularly in respect to the relationship between master and slave, the abuses slaves suffered and the nature of the slave community and slave culture--concerning slavery in the American South. Although the format of slave narratives was more or less standardized, it is possible to identify several structural variants in terms of the incorporation of different narrative forms and voices. It is also possible to view these variants as successive phases of narration. The first phase can be characterized as a basic eclectic narrative, wherein authenticating documents and strategies—i.e., various means by which the veracity of the narrative was established--are appended to the narration; a second phase, of integrated basic narrative, the authenticating documents and strategies are integrated into the narrative and formally become voices and/or characters within it; the third phase is comprised either of a generic narrative, in which the authenticating documents and strategies are totally subsumed by the narrative and the narrative becomes an identifiable generic text (an autobiography) or an authenticating narrative, in which the narrative is subsumed by the authenticating strategy, and the slave narrative becomes an authenticating document for other generic texts such as novels (such as Kindred) or histories. Most of the earliest slave narratives were not in fact written by slave themselves, but were transcribed, “improved,” edited and arranged by sympathetic whites. Thus these narratives, while reflecting the experiences of former slaves, were presented within a different context and

79 HUXCRSGD. 532 framework than that of the slaves themselves, often with a structure and an emphasis that was more indicative of the editor’s perspective than that of the ostensible narrator. The resulting narratives thus more often represented the literary and cultural values of early American white society and were presented in a manner that would make them appealing to the book-buying public, i.e. white people. In the later antebellum narratives white editors, usually strongly abolitionist, often used narrative techniques and literary devices beyond the ability and/or education of most slaves, elaborating and sometimes distorting the original simple slave narrative in order to reflect their own points of view or ideas. And even when narratives began in the nineteenth century to be composed by slaves themselves, it was often necessary that they be introduced or prefaced by testimonials from prominent white literary figures in order to testify to their authenticity, accuracy and/or legitimacy. In addition to slave narratives, another significant source of information concerning slave life was the over two thousand interviews with ex-slaves compiled by the Works Progress Administration between 1936 and 1938. Although many interviewers (almost all of whom were white) were inexperienced, asked leading questions and often edited the responses, these interviews nonetheless reveal much about the nature of slavery and offer a somewhat different perspective than the slave narratives. In treating the slave narratives as historical documents, then, it is necessary to look for possible biases in the ways that they were written and edited, and when at all possible to located independent sources of evidence that would corroborate or confirm them. Moreover, even though most slave narratives were authentic and offer an accurate representation of slave life, it must be kept in mind that the published narratives represent a very limited sample of the total slave population in a number of ways: there are more accounts of slavery in the upper South than the lower South, and practically none for Florida, Arkansas and Texas; black women wrote less than 12% of the narratives; the percentage of fugitive slaves (i.e., those who obtained their freedom by running away)–about 35%--was much higher than the total percentage of slaves who escaped slavery–less than 5%; and a great majority of the authors of slave narratives were exceptional in terms of personal qualities such as writing ability, perceptiveness or resourcefulness. It should be kept in mind, too, that the works collected in Classic Slave Narratives are just that, classics, and are consequently of higher literary quality than the great majority of slave narratives.

Bibliography

Orland Kay Armstrong, Old Massa’s People: The Old Slaves Tell Their Story, Indianapolis, 1931

John W. Bayliss (ed.), Black Slave Narratives, New York, 1970

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Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau and Steven F. Miller (eds.), Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about the Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom, New York, 1998

Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, New York, 1850

John W. Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, Baton Rouge, 1977

Arna Bontemps, Great Slave Narratives, Boston, 1969

Benjamin Drew (ed.), The Refugee: A North-Side View of Slavery, Reading MA, 1969

Martha Griffin Browne, Autobiography of a Female Slave, New York, 1969

Anne Burton, Six Women’s Slave Narratives, New York, 1988

Ronnie W. Clayton, Mother Wit: The Exslave Narratives of the Louisiana Writers Project, New York, 1990

Philip D. Curtin (ed.), Africa Remembered: Narratives of West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, Madison, 1967

Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (eds.), The Slave’s Narrative, New York, 1985

P.D. Escott, Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives, Chapel Hill, 1979

Stanley Feldstein, Once A Slave: The Slave’s View of Slavery, New York, 1971

Jennifer Fleischner, Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives, New York, 1996

Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives, Westport, 1979

Josiah Henson, “Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life”: An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson, London, 1877

William Lorenkatz (ed.), Five Slave Narratives, New York, 1968

J. Mellon (ed.), Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember: An Oral History, New York, 1988

Milton Meltzer (ed.), The Black Americans: A History in Their Own Words, New York, 1987

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R.M. Miller (ed.), Dear Master: Letters of a Slave Family, Athens GA, 1990

Charles H. Nichols, Many Thousand Gone: The Ex-Slaves’ Account of Their Bondage and Freedom, Leiden, 1963

Charles H. Nichols (ed.), Black Men in Chains: Narratives by Escaped Slaves, New York, 1972

Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, ed. Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon, Baton Rouge, 1853 (1968)

Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Barden and Robert K. Phillips (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-slaves, Charlottesville, 1976

Kate E. Pickard (ed.), The Narratives of Peter and Vina Still after Forty Years of Slavery, Lincoln NE, 1970

C. Peter Ripley et al. (eds.), Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery and Emancipation, 1993

John Anthony Scott (ed.), Hard Trials on my Way, New York, 1974

Marion Wilson Starling, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History, Boston, 1981

Robert S. Starobin (ed.), Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves, 2nd ed., Princeton, 1994

John Thompson, The Life of John Thompson: A Fugitive Slave, Worcester, 1856

Ronnie C. Tyler and Lawrence R. Murphy (eds.), The Slave Narratives of Texas, Austin, 1974

James Williams, Narrative of James Williams, An American Slave, Boston, 1838

Robin W. Winks, Larry Gara, Jane H. and William H. Pease and Tilden G. Edelstein (eds.), Four Fugitive Slave Narratives, Reading MA, 1969

Norman R. Yetman (ed.), Voices from Slavery: Selections from the Slave Narratives Collection of the Library of Congress, New York, 1970

82 HUXCRSGD. 532

THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN SLAVE COMMUNITY

One problem in the study of slavery is that we have much more documentation and therefore understanding of the lives of slaveowners than slaves. It is essentially the same issue that obtains in other areas of history: we know much more about kings and the aristocracy than we do about average citizens, let alone the poor. Slaves were rarely able to speak for themselves; nor could they leave a written record, since they were, with few exceptions, illiterate. This is, of course, also the case with American slavery. Although we do have a considerable literature of slave narratives, the fact remains that until recently it has been very difficult to find a perspective on slavery from slaves themselves. Coverage of slave life from documentary sources is quite uneven; there are few documents from the colonial period, and for all periods some areas or aspects are less well documented than others. Furthermore, many of the sources that we do have are ambiguous; many slave narratives suffer from the effects of distance and time, since they were often written or dictated from memory decades after the event, the memoirs of slave owners clearly reflect their own values, attitudes and self-interest, and later nineteenth-century writings raise issues of credibility concerning the motives and interests of their writers, both pro and con. The lack and ambiguity of data, then, raise some questions about the nature of the slave community and private slave culture and about the nature of adaptation and resistance. Some of these questions include: Was there a distinctive slave culture? What was the source of slave culture? Was it African traditions or was it a response to slavery itself, or both? What was the relationship between slave culture and the social community? Was there truly a slave community, or were the lives of slaves essentially chaotic and unstructured? How long-lasting were the effects of slavery on blacks and whites? It is only within the last few decades that historians have begun questioning many of the assumptions underlying the study of American slavery, such as the degree of passivity and/or rebelliousness of slaves. Other topics largely ignored by historians until recently include life in the slave quarters, the nature of slave drivers and house slaves and differences in the cultural attitudes of slaves toward time, work and leisure. Many historians have also paid little attention to the interdependent relationship of master and slave, particularly in terms of the profound ambivalence on both sides and the process of negotiation which often determined the limits of treatment. One of the most important questions we can ask, then, in this respect is, what did slaves do for themselves and how did they do it? One such area is religion. Although most slaves became Christians at the behest of their masters, who believed that this would save their eternal souls and, not incidentally, make them more docile and obedient, most slaves came to see Christianity as a means of active resistance; messianic preachers, motivated by concepts of deliverance and judgment inherent in the notion of apocalypse, played a significant role in many slave revolts and there was active slave participation in the formation of the religious community. Slave churches served as centers from which authority could be challenged, offered the opportunity for physical and spiritual separation from whites, allowed slaves to create their own standards of morality, provided a context for them to question the values of their masters and, finally, enabled them to develop their own leaders. In addition, Christianity, like other 83 HUXCRSGD. 532 religions, represented a means of coping and survival, providing the slaves with a rare opportunity for expressing their cultural autonomy, since this was one of the few slave activities not closely monitored by the master. Part of this cultural autonomy came with the infusion into Christianity of African and other non-Christian elements, such as a lack of distinction between sacred and profane and between past and present. A second area was family life. The family was viewed differently by masters and slaves; the former saw their slaves as part of the family, while the latter included only fellow slaves within the family unit. Unlike the Spanish colonies, there was no legal recognition of marriage and family ties. Nevertheless, slaves found many ways to circumvent legal restrictions and the desires of masters to separate family members. In the post-colonial antebellum period in the South the slave population was indigenous, not imported; this was one result of the formal end of the slave trade in 1808. Although there is little evidence for large-scale slave breeding, it was nonetheless a self-reproducing population, with a rate of increase similar to that of the white population; it was, in fact, the only significant New World slave society which was able to reproduce itself. Slaveowners recognized that family stability enhanced population growth. Moreover, plantation life was organized around family units; the average plantation slave lived in a family setting and the nuclear family was seen as the proper social norm. This does not mean that masters did not violate the slave family structure by taking women as concubines or selling off family members, as vividly described in many slave narratives. However, these data do raise questions about the nature of such violations: did they take place with such frequency as to be a regular occurrence or were such actions mostly symbolic in asserting the power of the master over the slave and asserting his ability to break up families as a form of social control? Some historians have also questioned some common assumptions made about slave families, such as the role of males and the extent to which the black family was a matriarchy. Although it is clear that husbands and fathers who were slaves were restricted and limited in these roles by a loss of autonomy and control and restrictions on their expressions of masculinity, research has shown that there was customarily a division of labor between husband and wife, and that men contributed to the household though hunting and trapping and by serving as authority figures responsible for the disciplining of children. Other assumptions under examination are the extent of psychological and emotional support of slave husbands by their wives and the extent to which the current black family structure represents a heritage of slavery, reflecting the view of some scholars that slave families were fragmented and fragile, thus providing an unstable legacy for their descendants. A more moderate approach has been to redefine slave family life in terms of adaptation to the circumstances of slavery, with a narrower role for the father (and consequently lowered expectations concerning his responsibilities) and the development in compensation of extended kin networks (including surrogate parents and siblings) which functioned as vehicles for the transmission of culture. Recent research concerning the last generation of slaves prior to emancipation has shown that most slave marriages, contrary to previous belief, were relatively long-lasting: 10% lasted more than thirty years, 20% lasted at least twenty years, and 25% lasted between ten and nineteen years; these figures were not strongly affected by factors including degree of urbanization, sex ratio, density of slave population, access to free blacks or patterns of slave ownership. Thus over half of all slave marriages lasted at least ten years, serving as models of family stability to the slave community. Another index of family and stability is that most slaves in this study knew who their grandparents were. More than three-fifths of them had parents who

84 HUXCRSGD. 532 were both black. On the other hand, in 25% of all slave marriages one or both partners were forcibly separated from their spouse; of those at least 40 years old, the percentage was 35%. A second study of slave birth registers from South Carolina indicated that most children lived with two parents and that most adults had long-lasting marriages. A third area concerns assumptions made about house slaves, such as that they were a special caste leading a privileged existence, and were generally more assimilated and docile than field slaves, and therefore functioned as agents of acculturation and cultural repression. Demographic data, however, do not support the notion that house slaves were a superior class within the slave community. Most plantation slaves lived in small units in which the distinction between house and field slaves was not that sharp, and the social life of house slaves was with field hands as well. The exceptions–those who more closely fit these stereotypes–tended to live in urban settings. In addition, large numbers of house slaves were runaways, perhaps as many as those who were loyal to their masters. Based on evidence from the letters and diaries of planters, their behavior was not substantially different than that of field hands; they betrayed their masters and participated in slave rebellions in roughly the same proportions as field hands. To a much greater extent than field slaves, the situation of house slaves was ambiguous and this was reflected in their ambivalence about whites. Much of this ambivalence resulted from their physical closeness to whites, a forced intimacy which usually mandated a closer adherence to some white standards, but which at the same time was not inconsistent with resistance. Thus house slaves were pulled between the black and white cultural spheres. Their treatment by whites could also be inconsistent, not only from one white person to another, but by the same person at different times; they could be treated on the one hand as children, on the other as adult individuals, on the one hand with contempt and the other with consideration. What this suggests is that such assumptions often lead to misleading stereotypes about all slaves or even all domestic slaves. A fourth and final area in which certain assumptions hold sway has to do with drivers, or black slave foremen. Like that of the house slave, this was a role fraught with ambivalence as the drivers negotiated between the demands of the master and the needs of the slaves. It was a position of indigenous leadership requiring strength and intelligence, for the drivers served as intermediaries and mediators between master and slave. It was a position of trust and respect on the part of master and slaves, and black drivers were often more trusted by masters than white overseers, who often provided less continuity of leadership than their black counterparts. It was a role that required active rather than passive participation, a role of considerable authority with the power of discipline which at the same time offered the danger, from the slave perspective, of collaboration or compromise with or co-optation by the master. Thus, by its very nature the position of driver inspired hatred. If the driver violated this trust or authority, he was likely to be identified as a “bad nigger,” by the master, or the slaves, or in the worst cases, both. The traditional view of social status within the slave community was that house servants had more status than field hands, that they formed a distinct social class and that they generally felt superior to field slaves. Drivers, artisans and mulattos were also considered to have had higher status, and it was also believed that to some extent one’s status derived from their value as property. However, these assumptions–such as that status was based on the amount of personal contact with and the value of services to the master--clearly reflect the master’s perspective and the point of view of the white community. So it is important to make a distinction between status as perceived by slaveowners and as perceived by the slave community.

85 In fact, evidence from the slave community contradicts many of these assumptions. Among slaves white blood was viewed as a sign of degradation, and light skin generally was a liability in the slave quarters, as it indicated miscegenation, which was despised by blacks as well as by whites; most mulattos carried with them considerable hatred for their white fathers. Likewise, house servants were distrusted by other slaves precisely because of their increased contact with whites, and being a house slave was considered less desirable because of the amount of contact with and the increased surveillance by whites. Thus there was an inverse relationship in the slave community between contact with whites and status, and any attitude of superiority was fostered by whites, and not the slaves themselves. Finally the value of slaves was insignificant in terms of status; not only did such valuation remind slaves that they were property, no matter how expensive, but increased value also carried with it increased expectations on the part of the master. The actual bases for status were internal, from within the slave community subculture, and they included service to other blacks, personal qualities, the nature of the slave’s occupation, his or her place of birth and age. The most prestigious individuals in the slave community included conjurers and preachers, physicians and midwives, those who demonstrated verbal skills, entertainers during courtship, in church or during leisure activities, those who demonstrated skills in weaving, cooking or craftsmanship, and teachers who could transmit their knowledge of folklore or reading and writing. Personal qualities which enhanced status included loyalty, trustworthiness, cunning and rebelliousness. Those occupations considered most prestigious were those involving mobility, freedom from supervision and the opportunity to earn money and those which provided direct service to other slaves. Variables affecting slave behavior and culture include the extent of isolation/involvement of the master (discussed previously), constraints on the power of the master, and principles of labor management such as the physical needs of slaves and the effects of incentives and rewards; other variables were the need for approval by the white community, which had standards of conventional morality and decency, and which could be manipulated by slaves to obtain concessions, and the nature of the work slaves did. According to the 1860 census (i.e., just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War), one- quarter of the four million Southern slaves lived on farms with ten or more slaves, one- half lived on plantations with twenty or more slaves, and one- quarter lived on plantations with fifty or more slaves. However, no more than half of these slaves were full-time field laborers. As we have seen, the size of the local slave community and the number of slaves in a given place often had a considerable influence on their treatment. As we have also seen, the regular, regimented nature of staple crop production (including cotton, rice, tobacco and sugar) led to uniform standards of performance; these fixed duties allowed room for social maneuvering, enabling delimited time for public obligations and the development of a private persona. By the 1750's a distinct Afro-American life cycle had developed in which children under ten lived with their mother, and sometimes both parents; children between ten and fourteen left their parents’ home to live with siblings and their families, lived with other kin or unrelated people or were sold to other owners; women married in their late teens, had children and established their own households. Two-fifths of men on large plantations lived with women and children, compared to one-fifth on small farms. As they moved through the life cycle, slaves lost and gained kin and friends, maintaining ties through night and weekend visiting and through the creation of kinship networks which HUXCRSGD. 532 were maintained through illegal or clandestine visits, harbored escaped or escaping slaves and offered an alternative system of status and authority. Critical events in the slave life cycle included: infancy–the first few months of life–during which time the infant accompanied its mother while she worked in the fields; childhood, when the child associated with other children in its peer group and was cared for by others while its mother worked in the fields; beginning work in the fields between the ages of seven and ten, trained by masters, overseers and parents in work routines, with full participation in adult daytime activities; leaving home with consequent removal from parental authority and the childhood community, a time of tension and unhappiness as many young slaves were forced to leave the plantation for smaller farms. Courtship and marriage were usually initiated by men, who married in their mid- to late twenties, usually to women from near their home area (there being few eligible women in their immediate home quarter); the majority of couples remained separated, due either to the inability of the master to buy the spouse or insufficient space for a common residence; because of the lack of shared property and spousal support, marriage seems to have been less important for female slaves than for white women. Women stayed with their family until the birth of their first child, an important rite of passage in the slave community since it signified a new stage which was accompanied with some privileges. The bonding of mother and child was in many cases more important than that between husband and wife, although resident fathers did help raise children, teach them skills and protect them. On large plantations mothers belonged to extended kin groups upon which they could also rely. Old age began stages of downward mobility, whereby artisans became field hands; owners refused to maintain elderly slaves or sold them or granted them manumission so that they didn’t have to support them. The care of elderly slaves varied, however, depending on a variety of factors, including the relationship between master and slave.

Bibliography

Roger D.S. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South, New York, 1992

John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, New York, 1979

Hansonia L. Caldwell, African American Music - Spirituals: An Introduction to the Fundamental Folk Music of Black Americans, 2nd ed., Culver City, 2001

Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr. and Kym S. Rice (eds.), Before Freedom Came: African- American Life in the Antebellum South, Richmond VA, 1991

Ronnie W. Clayton (ed.), Mother Wit, New York, 1990

Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925, New York, 1976

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Joseph E. Holloway, Africanisms in American Culture, Bloomington, 1990

Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America, Bloomington, 1995

Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana, Chapel Hill, 1992

Elinor Miller and Eugene D. Genovese (eds.), Plantation, Town, and Country: Essays on the Local History of American Slave Society, Urbana, 1974

Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective, Boston, 1992

James S. Olson, Slave Life in America: A Historiography and Selected Bibliography, Lanham MA, 1983

Leslie Howard Owens, This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South, New York, 1976

Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible’ Institution in the Antebellum South, New York, 1978

George P. Rawick (ed.), The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Westport CN, 1977

Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, New York, 1987

William L. Van Deburg, The Slave Drivers: Black Agricultural Labor Supervisors in the Antebellum South, New York, 1979

T.L. Webber, Deep Like Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831-1865, New York, 1978

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THE ANTE-BELLUM SOUTH AND THE CIVIL WAR

Beginning in the 1830's the North and South began taking increasingly different courses of economic, cultural and political development. Eventually these diverging courses of development led to the emergence of antagonistic value systems and ideologies that were increasingly incapable of being diffused by the existing political system. What resulted was the re-orientation of political parties along sectional lines, so that the Democratic party became associated with the South and the issues of slavery and states’ rights and the Whig party and the newly-formed Republican party with halting the spread of slavery into new territories and the preservation of the Union. In particular, it was differences concerning slavery which constituted a serious obstacle to the formation of a national community. The first major challenge to national unity was the Missouri Controversy of 1819- 1821, which set some positive precedents through the temporary obliteration of party lines and the possibility of compromise, as well as serving as a rehearsal of later economic, political and moral arguments against slavery. These arguments against slavery went back to the colonial period; almost all of the Northern founding fathers of the country, such as John Adams and Benjamin Franklin (who thought that slavery degraded white labor and retarded the nation’s economic development) opposed slavery, as did Federalists such as Madison and Monroe; even slaveowners including Washington and Jefferson were ambivalent about slavery as an institution (although neither was willing to free his slaves during his lifetime). These arguments and those of the emerging abolitionist movement also stimulated slaveowners to fabricate a coherent defense of slavery. However, as a result of the Missouri Compromise, which stipulated that slavery would not be legal in any new states north of a designated latitude, a national two-party system emerged, for a time, as an alternative to sectional conflict. The early years of the 1830's represented a period of crisis in the South, with the emergence of militant abolitionism in the North, the nullification crisis, Nat Turner’s rebellion of 1831 and the subsequent debate in Virginia concerning slavery. The ultimate result was a backlash in the South against opponents of slavery: the rejection of the Jeffersonian tradition of free debate, the suppression of civil liberties and an increasingly strident defense of slavery. Southerners reoriented their approach from the defense of slavery against its critics to a more overtly pro-slavery position, which stimulated in turn a renewal of the anti-slavery movement at the end of the decade and the increasing isolation of the South from the rest of the country. In the 1840's slavery became a political party issue, most specifically the expansion of slavery to new territories and states to the west. Politicians began to exploit the issue, becoming linked to one side of the issue or the other and political sectionalization proceeded apace, as agitators on both sides of the issue inflamed the populace and further polarized the country. One of these politicians, Steven Douglas, in his debates with Abraham Lincoln in 1858, attempted to separate politics and morality in respect to slavery; he was successful in winning election over Lincoln to the Senate (whether he won the debates themselves is a matter of opinion), but his efforts to defuse slavery as a moral issue failed. The new Republican party was able to fuse the egalitarian ideology of the North with the anti-slavery movement and in the 1850's became the primary political vehicle for the expression of anti-slavery sentiment. Finally, however, issues of local autonomy and other related concerns loomed larger and larger and the

89 HUXCRSGD. 532 forces of compromise were overwhelmed by increasingly polarized sectional parties, each fired by a strong sense of moral certainty. Thereby followed the Civil War, in which these and other issues became the focus of four years of the bloodiest war ever fought in this country.

Bibliography

ECONOMICS OF SLAVERY

Hugh G.J. Aitken (ed.), Did Slavery Pay? Readings in the Economics of Black Slavery in the United States, Boston, 1971

P.A. David, H.G. Gutman, R. Sutch, P. Temin and G. Wright (eds.) Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery, New York, 1976

Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, Boston, 1974

Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South, New York, 1967

Eugene D. Genovese (ed.), The Slave Economies, Historical and Theoretical Perspectives, New York, 1973

Claudia Dale Goldin, Urban Slavery in The American South, 1820-1860: A Quantitative History, Chicago, 1976

Herbert G. Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game, Urbana, 1975

Ulrich B. Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South, Baton Rouge, 1968

William K. Scarborough, The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South, Baton Rouge, 1966

Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South, New York, 1970

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SLAVEOWNERS

John Spencer Bassett (ed.), The Southern Plantation Overseer as Revealed in His Letters, Northampton MA, 1925

Malcolm Bell, Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family, Athens GA, 1987

Carol Bleser (ed.), Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder, New York, 1988

D.G. Faust, The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, Baton Rouge, 1981

Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820-1860, Columbia, SC, 1992

Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery, Baltimore, 1985

William S. Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South, Chapel Hill, 1935

E.L. McKitrick, Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South, Englewood Cliffs, 1963

James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders, New York, 1982

James Johnson and Michael Roark, Black Masters, New York, 1984

L.E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840, Athens, GA, 1987

REGIONAL HISTORIES OF SLAVERY

Joseph Boskin, Into Slavery: Racial Decisions in the Virginia Colony, Philadelphia, 1976

Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century, New Haven, 1985

Ralph Flanders, Plantation Slavery in Georgia, Chapel Hill, 1933

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro- Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Baton Rouge, 1992

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Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community, Urbana, 1984

Alan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1600-1800, Chapel Hill, 1986

Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina, Baton Rouge, 1981

Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York, Syracuse, 1966

Clarence L. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia, Athens GA, 1986

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery–American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, New York, 1975

Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia, Urbana, 1987

Elizabeth Silverthorne, Plantation Life in Texas, College Station TX, 1986

Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth- Century Virginia, Princeton, 1987

Charles S. Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi, Baton Rouge, 1966

Joe Gray Taylor, Negro Slavery in Louisiana, Baton Rouge, 1963

J. Mills Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860, Baton Rouge, 1978

Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730-1775, Athens GA, 1985

Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina, From 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion, New York, 1974

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SLAVE RESISTANCE AND REBELLIONS

Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, New York, 1943

Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860, Chapel Hill, 1968

Michael Craton, Testing the Chains, Ithaca, 1982

Larry Gata, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad, Lexington KY, 1961

Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World, Baton Rouge, 1979

Peter Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance, Penn State, 1997

Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad, New York, 1987

Winthrop D. Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy, Baton Rouge, 1993

John Lofton, Denmark Vesey’s Revolt: The Slave Plot that Lit a Fire to Fort Sumter, Kent OH, 1983

Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia, New York, 1972

Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, New York, 1975

Gary Y. Okihiro (ed.), In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History, Amherst, 1986

Richard Price (ed.), Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, Garden City, 1973

ABOLITION

Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760-1810, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1975

Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848, London, 1988

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Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade, Cambridge, 1970

R.J.M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860, Baton Rouge, 1983

Terence Brady and Evan Jones, The Fight Against Slavery, New York, 1975

Kathleen Mary Butler, The Economics of Emancipation, London, 1995

Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process, New Haven, 1984

Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America, Gloucester MA, 1950

Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, Pittsburgh, 1977

Dwight Lowell Dumond, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, New York, 1966

Louis Filler, The Crusade Against Slavery, New York, 1960

Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and its Legacy, Baton Rouge, 1983

Sylvia R. Frye and Betty Wood, From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World, 1999

William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830-1865, Oxford, 1976

Daniel Liebowitz and Peter Duignan, The Physician and the Slave Trade: John Kirk, the Livingstone Expeditions, and the Crusade Against Slavery in East Africa, New York, 1998

Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation Cambridge, 1977

Rebecca J. Scott, Seymour Drescher, Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro, George Reid Andrews and Robert M. Levine, The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil, Durham, NC, 1988

James B. Stewart, Holy Warriors: Abolitionists and American Slavery, New York, 1976

H. Temperley, British Antislavery: 1833-1870, Columbia SC, 1972

Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North, Chicago, 1967

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THE AFTERMATH OF SLAVERY

Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family, New York, 1998

William Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861-1915, Baton Rouge, 1991

Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt and Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor and Citizenship in Post-Emancipation Societies, Chapel Hill, 2000

Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969, Urbana, 1972

W. Kloosterboer, Involuntary Labour Since the Abolition of Slavery, Leiden, 1960

Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery, New York, 1979

Frank McGlynn and Seymour Drescher (eds.), The Meaning of Freedom: Economics, Politics and Culture after Slavery, Pittsburgh, 1992

MODERN TREATMENTS OF SLAVERY

Novels and Memoirs

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family Taylor Caldwell, Great Lion of God Howard Fast, Spartacus William Faulkner, The Unvanquished Ernest Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman Alex Haley, Roots Kyle Onstott, Mandingo Mary Renault, The Persian Boy Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner Margaret Walker, Jubilee Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose

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Films

Amistad Adanggaman The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman Beloved Sally Hemmings: An American Scandal The Handmaid's Tale Mandingo Roots Gladiator Sankofa Spartacus

SLAVERY IN THE MODERN WORLD

Given the success of the abolitionist movements of the nineteenth century, it would be desirable to end this examination of slavery on a positive and optimistic note by stating that such an archaic and barbaric institution has no place in the modern world. Unfortunately, however, slavery is still widespread, although it has taken different forms, thus necessitating some redefinition of slavery in a contemporary context. Although chattel slavery still exists today in countries such as Sudan and Mauritania, for the most part other forms of unfree labor comprise modern slavery. One common twentieth-century form has been forced labor. During World War II, for example, both Germany and Japan not only used captive peoples for slave labor, but also prostituted women. Serfdom existed in Russia up until the 1917 revolution and forced labor, in gulags and other forms, was a feature of the Soviet Union until its demise in the early 1990's. In China, too, millions of those imprisoned by the communist regime were forced to perform labor on behalf of the state; today in China prisoners still perform forced labor. In the 1970's and 1980's Cambodia, under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, became a giant forced labor camp. Currently forced labor also exists in Angola and various countries of southeast Asia. Most other forms of unfree labor are the result of the widespread poverty that still remains in the world. The most common of these involve the exploitation of women and children. Poor families, as they have done from the beginning of recorded history, have used or sold children for child labor, prostitution or child pornography. Women have also been exploited in similar ways, as prostitutes, in pornography or in sweatshops. Debt slavery still exists as well, as do modern forms of serfdom. Most of these forms of unfree labor are found in the underdeveloped or developing countries of the Third World, in Africa, Asia, and Arabia, including the

96 HUXCRSGD. 532 countries of Mozambique, Ghana, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Myanmar, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. In the New World, these conditions also occur in Haiti and Brazil, as well as the United States, where immigrants are smuggled in to work in sweatshops or as prostitutes. Despite its persistence in the modern world, however, there are some reasons to believe that its presence and influence of slavery are diminishing. Slavery is, after all, illegal everywhere in the world, and attitudes toward and acceptance of slavery is considerably reduced compared to earlier eras. Moreover, there are various organizations, both public and private, dedicated to the amelioration and the elimination of slavery. Although it would perhaps be naïve to expect that people will entirely cease oppressing and exploiting their fellow humans, it is not unreasonable to hope that the reduction of poverty—the source of much modern slavery—will lead to a consequent diminution of slavery as well.

Bibliography

Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, Berkeley, 1999

Jonathan Derrick, Africa’s Slaves Today, London, 1975

Martin A. Klein (ed.), Slavery, Bondage and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia, 1993

Sean O’Callaghan, The Slave Trade Today, New York, 1961

L.H. Ofasu-Appiah, People in Bondage: African Slavery in the Modern Era, 1993

Roger Plant, Sugar and Modern Slavery: A Tale of Two Countries, London, 1987

Roger Sawyer, Children Enslaved, London, 1998

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