Slavery in Colonial America

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Slavery was introduced in Colonial British North America in the 17th century, in imitation of labor practices used in Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South American colonies.

There were many forms of "Slavery" in the New World. Some have argued that slavery under European rule began with importation of European indentured servants, was followed by the enslavement of local aborigines in the Caribbean, and eventually was primarily replaced with Africans imported through a large slave trade. However, indentured servitude, was not a sytstem of slavery as much as it was a restrictive labor system that for the most part was voluntary although it could be forced (i.e. felons, heretics). Slavery, in the North American context, is most understood in the African context, where Africans and their descendents were held in perpetual bondage (chattel slavery). Most enslaved persons brought to the Americas ended up in the Caribbean or South America where tropical disease took a large toll on their population and required large numbers of replacements. The African slaves had something of a natural immunity to yellow fever and malaria, but the fact that they were severely malnourished, overworked, and poorly housed attributed to their perishing of disease.

The first African slaves arrived in present day United States as part of the San Miguel de Gualdape colony (most likely located in the Winyah Bay area of present-day South Carolina), founded by Spanish explorer Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón in 1526. The ill-fated colony was almost immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership, during which the slaves revolted and fled the colony to seek refuge among local Native Americans. De'Ayllón and many of the colonists died shortly afterwards of an epidemic, and the colony was abandoned, leaving the escaped slaves behind on North American soil. In 1565 the colony of Saint Augustine in Florida became the first permanent European settlement in North America, and included an unknown number of African slaves.

The first Africans to be brought to English North America landed in Virginia in 1619. They were treated as indentured servants at first, and a significant number of African slaves even won their freedom through fulfilling a work contract or for converting to Christianity. But in the 1660's, for unknown reasons, the social status of African slaves was lowered greatly.

By the 1670s slave codes enacted by individual colonies made slavery a legal, racially-based institution throughout Britain's American Colonies. Until the American Revolution, slavery existed legally in all American colonies, north and south.

Fernand Braudel has said:

Such hardships are not to be laid at the door simply of the planters, the mine-owners, the moneylending merchants of the Consulado in Mexico City or elsewhere, the harsh officials of the Spanish crown, the sugar- and tobacco-dealers, the slave-traders, or the grasping captains of trading vessels.... they were essentially middlemen, agents for other people.... In reality the root of the evil lay back across the Atlantic, in Madrid, Seville, Cadiz, Lisbon, Bordeaux, Nantes or Genoa, without question in Bristol, and in later years Liverpool, London and Amsterdam. (Braudel, 1984, p. 393).

Braudel quotes Karl Marx: ""The veiled slavery of the wage-workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World."

In British North America the slave population rapidly repopulated themselves, where in the Caribbean they did not. The lack of proper nourishment, poor health, and depressed sexuality are speculated as reasons. Of the small population of babies that were born to slaves in the Caribbean, only about 1/4 survived miserable conditions on a sugar plantation.

It was not only the major colonial powers in Europe such as France, England, the Netherlands or Portugal that were involved in the transatlantic person trade. Small countries, such as Sweden or Denmark, tried to get into this lucrative business. For more information about this, see The Swedish slave trade.

Image:Slavetreatment.jpe

Following the Revolution, some of the new states began to write constitutions that eliminated slavery, though the new Constitution of the United States limited the ability of the Federal Government to interfere with slavery, or for a time, the slave trade.

The United States prohibited the slave trade in 1808. However, after the War of 1812, the US made a claim that slaves were property and so the United Kingdom should return them, or pay compensation for them, according to the terms of the Treaty of Ghent which ended that war. This dispute was mentioned in the Treaty of 1818.<ref name="Canado-American Treaties Text">{{cite web

| last = LexUM
| year = 1999
| url = http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/ca_us/en/cus.1818.15.en.html
| title = Convention of Commerce between His Majesty and the United States of America.--Signed at London, 20th October, 1818
| work = Canado-American Treaties
| publisher = University of Montreal
| accessdate = 2006-03-27

}}</ref>.

Slavery was first abolished in America by Mexico in 1810 by Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and years later as the first Amendment in Mexican Constitution. 55 years later it was abolished in the United States 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

See also

• Slavery
• Slavery in Canada
• History of slavery in the United States
• Slavery in the Spanish New World colonies

References

<references />

• Braudel, Fernand, The Perspective of the World, vol. III of Civilization and Capitalism 1984 (in French 1979).
• Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery, 4th edition, 1975