Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (24 page)

In the years up to 1550, some 15,000 African slaves were officially recorded as arriving in the Spanish Indies, and a further 36,300 between 1550 and 1595,72 but the real numbers, swollen by a growing contraband trade, must have been substantially larger. In the six years following the introduction in 1595 of a new monopoly contract between the Spanish crown and a Portuguese merchant, Pedro Gomes Reinel, who ran the Angola slave trade, there was a sudden massive upsurge in the number of Africans shipped to Spanish America. The 80,500 transported in those five years may have pushed the total for the sixteenth century to 150,000, excluding the further 50,000 taken to Brazil.73

The dominance of the Atlantic slave trade achieved by Portuguese merchants in the last quarter of the sixteenth century at the expense of their Genoese rivals followed logically from the establishment of Portuguese trading bases down the coast of West Africa during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and the rise to pre-eminence of Lisbon as the slave trade capital of the western world.74 The Portuguese acquired a further advantage following the union of the crowns of Castile and Portugal in 1580. As the subjects of Philip II they were now well positioned to negotiate profitable deals in Madrid, and they seized their opportunity. In the years during which they held the monopoly contract, between 1595 and 1640, Portuguese merchants shipped between 250,000 and 300,000 Africans into Spanish America, thousands of them clandestinely through the port city of Buenos Aires, refounded by the Spaniards in 1580.75 From here they were sent on to Peru, where their labour was needed to supplement that of the Indians in the mines and the fields. Other ports of entry were Santo Domingo, Havana, Vera Cruz and, above all, Cartagena, which received more than half the total number of slaves legally shipped to Spanish America between 1549 and 1640.76

By the early seventeenth century, therefore, the mechanisms of an international Atlantic slave trade had been firmly established. Sir William Alexander, in his An Encouragement to Colonies of 1624, would castigate the shipping of slaves from Angola and other parts of Africa to the Spanish Indies as `an unnatural mer- chandise',77 but in principle the way was open for the English in America to follow suit. Whether they did so would depend on their own labour requirements and the consideration of relative costs.

Spain's empire of the Indies offered numerous examples of the large variety of ways in which African slaves could be employed. Once on the mainland, they were first established in substantial numbers in the capitals of the two viceroyalties, Mexico City and Lima. Although slavery would soon spread to the countryside, urban slavery was to be a continuing feature of life in a society in which African slaves would come to constitute anything between 10 and 25 per cent of the populations of major cities like Lima, Mexico City, Quito, Cartagena and Santa Fe de Bogota.78 Large numbers of Africans, both slave and free, were employed as household servants; others became skilled craftsmen, at a time when artisans of Spanish origin proved unable to keep pace with the growth in demand.79 Many arrived from Spain in the entourage of officials and other Spanish dignitaries.80 Once in the Indies, the presence of such retainers enhanced the prestige of their masters, both Spanish and creole, as they travelled by coach through the streets or took the evening air. `The gentlemen', wrote the English renegade, Thomas Gage, when describing Mexico City in 1625, `have their train of blackamoor slaves, some a dozen, some half a dozen, waiting on them, in brave and gallant liveries, heavy with gold and silver lace, with silk stockings on their black legs, and roses on their feet, and swords by their sides."'

In the Caribbean islands, and later in New Spain, slaves were employed in the cultivation of sugar cane. The five hundred contracted by Cortes in 1542 to work on his Mexican sugar estates82 were the harbingers of the thousands upon thousands whose backs would bear the burden of working the plantation economies of the Caribbean islands and mainland America in a later age. While extensively employed on the haciendas of encomenderos, African slaves were also drafted into the textile workshops of New Spain and Peru to supplement the native workforce of sweated Indian labour. In the lowlands of New Granada, they replaced a dwindling indigenous population as members of labour gangs panning for gold in the rivers and creeks.83

There was also a growing and unsatisfied demand for enslaved or free black labour in the mines of northern Mexico as Indian workers succumbed to European diseases. By the end of the sixteenth century, blacks and mulattoes (the offspring of Spanish men and African women) had become indispensable to the mining economy of New Spain: as the saying went in Zacatecas, `bad to have them, but much worse not to have them.'84 But expense remained a problem. It was more costly to employ imported African labour than indigenous Indian labour in the mines. In the silver workings of Potosi, for which an indigenous work-force, habituated to working at such an altitude, could be mobilized from the surrounding regions, the relative labour costs proved an overwhelming deterrent to royal officials anxious to relieve the exploitation of Indians by abandoning the mita.85 In other areas of economic activity in Peru, however, black slaves and their descendants came to play a vital role, especially in Lima and the coastal zone, where the Indian population decreased faster than it did in the highlands. They not only supplied a large part of the urban artisan labour force, but they also worked on the irrigated plots that sprang up round the towns. They tended the livestock on the large estates and drove the ox and mule carts on which the transportation system introduced by the Spaniards into America depended.86

African labour, therefore, whether slave or free, made a decisive contribution to economic activity in Spanish America, although it varied in scale and character from region to region. The greatest concentrations of Africans were to be found in the tropical and sub-tropical zones - the Antilles, the coastal regions of the two viceroyalties, and in New Granada and Venezuela.87 The sheer numbers of those of African descent in the two viceroyalties as a whole - in 1640 some 150,000 in New Spain and 30,000 in Peru, of whom 20,000 lived in Lima88 - suggest something of their indispensability to the functioning of the colonial economy, although the silver production on which the fortunes of Spain's empire of the Indies ultimately turned would have been impossible without the toil of the Indians working in the mines of New Spain and Peru.

In British America inadequate numbers, unsuitability for the kind of systematic labour expected by Europeans, and deep distrust - who in Virginia would be willing to take Indians into domestic service after the terrible events of 1622? - all played their part in preventing the early English settlers from systematically building up an indigenous work-force on the Spanish model. The Maryland settlers found that male Indians, unwilling to accept the routine of daily labour in the fields, simply disappeared into the interior when the summer months approached.89 Had it been worth while, institutionalized forms of compulsory Indian labour service would no doubt have been developed in the English settlements, as in the Spanish, although it is hard to know whether they would have assumed the character of outright slavery.

It would have been awkward for the Jamestown settlers to defy Virginia Company policy by enslaving an indigenous people who were to be brought to the faith,90 although, in the absence of a strong religious lobby and a concerned crown, it seems unlikely that scruple would for long have prevailed over necessity. During the course of the seventeenth century, in the absence of any imperial policy on slavery like that developed for Spanish America, individual colonies made occasional moves in the direction of Indian enslavement. They resorted, too, as in New England following King Philip's War, to the pretext of `just war' to turn Indians into slaves, and displayed no scruples about purchasing Indians taken captive by some rival tribe. South Carolina, indeed, between the time of its foundation in 1670 and the end of the Yamasee War in 1713, made the Indian slave trade a major business, in defiance of the objections of its lords proprietors. Its white inhabitants indulged, like those of Spanish border societies, in raids deliberately conducted to enslave Indians, and engaged in the large-scale exchange of European goods for Indians made captive by fellow Indians. While some of these slaves were kept in Carolina itself - there were 1,400 of them in the colony in 1708 - many more were exported, primarily to the West Indies plantations, although they were also sold to the northern colonies for domestic service. As many as 30,000 to 50,000 may have been enslaved over the course of the colony's first fifty years, before the supply trickled away.9'

Yet there were deterrents, both practical and legal, to Indian enslavement as a long-term solution to the shortage of labour in British America. Outside the West Indies it was too easy for slaves to abscond when Indian country was so near at hand. They could also be a dangerous presence. In the early eighteenth century the northern colonies, worried about the impact on their own Indians of slaves imported from South Carolina, imposed an import ban. Yet at the same time New Englanders were forcing growing numbers of their own native population into involuntary servitude. Changes to legal codes led to an expanded sentencing of Indian men and women into labour service for criminal activities and debt. Once indentured, they were liable to be bought and sold, and their children placed in forced apprenticeships on terms less advantageous than those enjoyed by white apprentices. By the middle of the century bound Indian workers, suffering from the imposed stigma of racial inferiority, were to be found throughout the region in substantial numbers.92

The whole question of slavery, however, was fraught with legal ambiguities, and some Indians at least managed to secure redress in the courts. The word `slave' had no meaning in English law when the first settlers moved across the Atlantic, even though slavery did make a brief appearance in Protector Somerset's abortive Vagrancy Act of 1547.93 Yet while slavery itself was unknown to English law, English society was well accustomed to various degrees of unfreedom, ranging from villeinage, or serfdom, to indentured service. It was to indentured white servants from the British Isles that the colonies first turned in their search for additional sources of labour, and it was as indentured servants that the majority of white emigrants crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth century.94 But, as many of them were to find on arrival, the conditions under which they were forced to work their four- or five-year stints made them, in their own eyes, little better than slaves. In one revealing incident, when a Spanish expedition attacked English settlers on Nevis in 1629, servants in the militia threw away their arms crying `Liberty, joyfull Liberty', preferring collaboration with the Spaniards to subjection to tyrannical English masters.95

A shortage of white indentured servants, combined with difficulties in managing men and women whose only thought was to finish their period of service and strike out on their own, encouraged English settlers, both in the Caribbean and on the southern mainland, to turn to the most obvious remaining source of labour - imported Africans. Bermuda, granted to the Virginia Company in 1612 and run by the Bermuda Company from 1615, imported its first blacks in 1616. In its first half-century, however, Bermuda's economy was not heavily dependent on black slave labour.96 The story was very different in the short-lived colony of Providence Island. However reluctant Puritan investors may have been to jeopardize the establishment of a godly community by filling it with slaves, relatively accessible sources of supply made it considerably cheaper to import blacks than white indentured servants to cultivate the tobacco crop. Considerations of godliness therefore lost out to harsh financial realities. By 1641, when its eleven-year existence was abruptly terminated, the Providence Island colony had become an authentically slave society - the first such society in British America.97

Elsewhere, the turn to slavery was slower. If godly arguments proved stronger in New England than on Providence Island, this may have been because the combination of a good supply of immigrants with high survival and reproductive rates, the absence of a staple crop, and the widespread use of family labour, all reduced the necessity for importing slaves. Africans therefore never constituted more than 3 per cent of New England's population.98 Virginia began importing African slaves soon after Bermuda. In 1619 John Rolfe reported the purchase of `20. and odd Negroes' from a Dutch man-of-war - an early indication of the important part that Dutch carriers and traders would play in the seventeenthcentury Atlantic economy" It was only at the end of the seventeenth century, however, that the Chesapeake colonies began to turn massively to African slaves to meet their labour requirements, and to look directly to Africa rather than the West Indies as their source of supply. Before then they had relied heavily on indentured labour, and white servants worked side by side with blacks, both slave and free, in the tobacco fields. The situation began to change in the 1680s, at a moment when a decline in the supply of indentured servants from the British Isles coincided with a fall in the cost of importing slaves. By 1710, 20 per cent of Virginia's population were slaves.100

It was Barbados in the 1640s and 1650s that would provide the model and set the trend. As sugar became the staple crop, the drawbacks of dependence on indentured labour became increasingly clear to the planters. Not only did white servants often prove unruly and rebellious when they found themselves condemned to effective servitude on the sugar plantations, but they were naturally reluctant to continue as wage-earners when their period of indenture expired. Some of the Barbados planters had seen African slave gangs at work in Brazil, and began to realize that African labour, even if initially more expensive, offered longterm advantages, since slaves would provide life-long service and could be more cheaply clothed and fed. Best of all, their condition as bondsmen made them absolute servants of their masters, as no white man could be.10' As the demand for sugar soared, and with it the pressure to produce, so too did the numbers of imported blacks. By 1660 there were as many blacks as whites on the island - perhaps 20,000 of each race - and by the end of the century Barbados, along with its companion slave societies of Jamaica and the Leewards, had absorbed 250,000 slaves from Africa.102