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Back
to Great Debates
What
are the origins of American Slavery?
In 1690, one out of every nine
families in Boston owned a slave. In New York City, in 1703, two
out of every five families owned a slave. From Newport, Rhode
Island to Buenos Aires, black slaves could be found in virtually
every New World area colonized by Europeans.
Black slaves arrived in the New
World at least as early as 1502. Over the next three centuries,
slave traders brought at least fifteen million Africans to the
New World (another twenty percent or more Africans died during
the march to the West African coast and an additional twenty percent
perished during the "middle passage" across the Atlantic
Ocean).
Why beginning in the sixteenth
century did Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Danish, and English
colonists all bring African slaves to their New World colonies?
Why did they do something that we find wholly repugnant morally?
Few questions have aroused more
bitter debate or evoked more impassioned controversy than the
origins of black slavery. Was it, as some have argued, the product
of deep seated racial prejudice? Certainly, there is a great deal
of evidence showing that many Europeans held deeply racist sentiments
well before the establishment of the institution of slavery. We
know, for example, that Elizabethan Englishmen associated blackness
with evil, death, and danger. They portrayed the devil as having
black skin and associated beauty with fairness of skin. Through
their religion, too Englishmen denigrated Africans, claiming that
Negroes were the descendants of Noah's son Ham, who, according
to the Old Testament, was cursed by having black offspring for
daring to look upon his father drunk and naked while his brothers
averted their eyes. (In fact, Ham was not the Biblical ancestor
of Africans).
Long before the English had much
contact with Africans racist stereotypes were already widespread.
One English writer claimed that Negroes were naturally "addicted
unto Treason, Treacherie, Murther, Theft and Robberie." Without
a doubt, Englishmen considered Africans an alien and unassimilable
people.
Or was black slavery the product
of a haphazard and random process that took place gradually with
little real sense of the ultimate outcome? Proponents of this
line of argument note that there was nothing inevitable about
European colonists relying upon a black slave labor force. Far
from being the result of a conscious plan, the adoption of black
slavery, it is argued, was the resulted of innumerable local and
pragmatic choices, reflecting such variables as the mortality
of the native Indian population, the availability of white servants,
and the cost of African slaves. In every English colony, for example,
colonists initially relied on white indentured servants for the
bulk of their labor needs--not on black slaves. They finally settled
on African slaves because of supply shortages and the threat of
revolt among white indentured servants.
Still others insist that slavery
was the product not of racism but the outgrowth of European attitudes
toward the poor. European societies were based on the principle
of inequality. Elizabethan Englishmen flogged the poor and forced
them to toil in work houses. Far from finding the idea of slavery
repellant, Elizabethan Englishmen accepted the idea, for example,
adopting a statute in 1547 allowing persistent vagabonds to be
enslaved and branded with the letter "S."
Once slavery was introduced, slavery
carried far-reaching consequences for the future. By assuming
positions formerly occupied by an underclass of unruly and despised
white servants, black slaves helped to create a remarkably "free"
and affluent society of whites, committed to the principles of
liberty and equality.
Questions to
think about:
1. What,
in your view, is the most compelling explanation for why European
colonists adopted racial slavery?
2. How would
you account for the depth of racial prejudice in Elizabethan
England?
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