American Indian slaves

Scholars long have known about the Indian slave trade, but the scattered nature of the sources deterred a systematic examination. Slavery was not unique to Europeans. Sadly, the institution of slavery is about as old as humanity. As for me, I come here to apologize to all slaves of all nations during all time frames of human existence, but specifically to our American Indian First Nation brothers and sisters. i apologize because there is nothing else I can do to set the wrong right. Someday, someway I hope their tears and angry will dry and go away. Meantime, I do my part by asking those of you who read this sentence, to offer up your own words of regret for the past actions of peoples who obviously did not think like we do today. Perhaps, in a few ways, the world is getting a little better. Maybe it is because the Dalai Lama has reminded us that first and foremost we are all ONE HUMAN FAMILY.

More on American Indian Slavery

No one had any conception of the trade's massive extent and that it played such a central role in the lives of early Americans and in the colonial economy.

Indian slavery complicates the narrative we have created of a white-black world, with Indians residing outside on a vaguely defined frontier. The Indian slave trade connects native and European history, so that plantations and Indian communities become entwined. We find planters making more money from slave trading than planting, and if we look more closely we find Indians not only enslaved on plantations but working as police forces to maintain those plantations and receiving substantial rewards for returning runaway slaves.

We are also learning a great deal more about American-Indian peoples. Most importantly we can now tell the stories - the tragedies - that befell so many who were killed in slaving wars or spent their days as slaves far from their homes. They and their peoples have been largely forgotten. The Natchez, Westo, Yamasee, Euchee, Yazoo and Tawasa are among the dozens of Indian peoples who fell victims to the slaving wars, with the survivors forced to join other native communities. These are tales that Indians themselves have not told: Just as the story of Indian slavery was excluded from the European past, it was largely forgotten (like a horrible nightmare no one wants to remember or talk about) in American-Indian traditions.

_______________________________Reference Book for a detailed study
The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 | Book Reviews
Published by EH.NET (April 2003)

Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. xviii + 444 pp. $45.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 0-300-08754-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Peter C. Mancall, Department of History, University of Southern California.

It comes as no surprise to state that slavery was a crucial part of the economy of the southeastern colonies of British North America. As historians and economists have long recognized, the enslavement of Africans imported from Africa or the West Indies was crucial for the development of plantation agriculture in the region. By 1708 individuals of African descent amounted to approximately one-half of the population of South Carolina, and by 1720 or so their numbers constituted two-thirds of the population. Their presence gave this region a unique demographic profile in the British North American colonies. That story, told brilliantly by the historian Peter Wood in his classic study from 1974 entitled Black Majority, has dominated scholars' understanding of forced labor in this area.

Allan Gallay, a professor of history at Western Washington University, has now complicated this narrative. During the same decades that Carolina became a stable province, its colonists looked to Native Americans to provide labor for them. Often this labor was coerced by nothing more than the lure of the market itself: Native Americans hunted whitetail deer for colonists or offered food to them in exchange for manufactured goods from Europe. But this free labor was not sufficient to satisfy colonists, who needed people to produce crops for export. English colonists recognized that selling captured Indians was doubly beneficial. By exporting captives to other parts of the Atlantic basin as slaves, Carolinians made a profit and removed individuals and groups who might have stood in the way of colonial expansion into the interior.

Gallay's book is more than a history of efforts by British (and other European) colonists to enslave and sell Native Americans and then, eventually, to bring that noxious commerce to its end. In fact, the vast majority of the book has little to do with the Indian slave trade itself. What Gallay offers here is a thorough, up-to-date, readable and engaging history of Carolina -- and much of the old southeast -- from approximately 1670 to 1717. There is much here on diplomacy and debates between colonists, including many details that reveal how difficult it was for Carolina's proprietors to maintain order in the nascent colony. Gallay's real insights about the local slave trade are primarily confined to the penultimate chapter in the book.

Yet the fact that Gallay, as the journalists' phrase has it, has buried his lead should not put off economists and historians who want to understand the colonial southeast. Quite the contrary: Gallay's mastery of the primary and secondary source literature provides readers with abundant information about crucial colonial politicians, traders, and missionaries. He makes readers realize that it is irresponsible to lump all Native peoples together under the heading "Indian." Some of those Native peoples, captured in war and sold into bondage, ended their lives far from their ancestral homes. Others, also Native, were crucial players in this trade, a part of the story that echoes John Thornton's analysis of the participation of some Africans in the Atlantic slave trade (see his Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, second edition, Cambridge University Press, 1998). Gallay provides a series of maps of the entire southeast, a great service to the many readers who will not know the location of particular indigenous nations. He shows where Indian slaves went and extracts valuable clues from the writings of perceptive observers and from legal codes -- some of them the product of northern colonists who came to fear southern Indian slaves and sought to prevent their continued importation. He recognizes the crucial role of conflict, especially the devastations of the Yamasee War that raged from 1714 to 1717. Further, Gallay writes with a sense of urgency that should be welcomed by readers who have grown tired of reading lightly revised dissertations that would have made better articles than full-length books.

Still, the part of the book that will be of most interest to economic historians will be the chapter in which Gallay provides some estimates for the number of Native American slaves. Gallay claims that "the drive to control Indian labor -- which extended to every nook and cranny of the South -- was inextricably connected to the growth of the plantations and that the trade in Indian slaves was at the center of the English empire's development in the American South. The trade in Indian slaves was the most important factor affecting the South in the period 1670 to 1715: its impact was felt from Arkansas to the Carolinas and south to the Florida Keys" (p. 7). He adds that the "Indian slave trade provided the strongest link between the South's many peoples in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries" (p. 9). These are bold claims that can only be supported by careful demonstration of the ways that the Indian slave trade worked and some quantitative evidence revealing the actual number of individuals captured and sold for their labor.

To his substantial credit, Gallay shows how the business operated and he makes a valiant effort to estimate the number of individuals enslaved. The evidence enables him to describe how individuals and even groups became ensnared. But it is less useful as a source for quantitative measures for the entire Indian slave trade. The most important numbers appear in a single table (on p. 299). Here Gallay carefully separates the number of slaves from various places or indigenous nations and estimates that from 1670 to 1715 there were between 24,000 and 51,000 Natives enslaved in the entire "South." The region includes Florida, which lost the most individuals to slavery, through the southeast to the lower Mississippi Valley. There were significant differences between the trade in Native slaves and the African slave trade. Gallay believes that the commerce in Indian bodies and labor "was akin more to the resale of Africans from the West Indies than to the African slave trade" (p. 314). But despite the differences in terms of final destinations and the scale of the trade, Gallay recognizes that slavery in this period in the Americas meant the same for Africans and Native Americans: "removal from their homes, denial of their rights and basic humanity, subjection to lifelong servitude, and the passage of slave status from mother to child" (p. 314).

The trade in Native slaves came to an end when colonists devoted more of their efforts to purchasing Africans. By the end of the 1710s the British came to realize that the capture and sale of Indian slaves was more difficult for them than participating in the transatlantic African slave trade. The enslavement of Indians was also a problem for the Spanish and French in the region. Yet though Gallay describes these other Europeans' attitudes towards the taking of captives and the use of forced labor, in the end this is primarily a book about the British and their ability to overcome internal divisions, ignore their earlier claims that they would avoid mistreating Indians, and embrace a system of labor exploitation that sent Native men, women, and children far from their homes. Later scholars might be able to provide more accurate measures of the scale of the trade, but Gallay's work will remain crucial for anyone who wants to know how the various peoples of the South interacted in the colonial period.

Peter C. Mancall, Professor of History at the University of Southern California and the President, from 2002 to 2004, of the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction, is the author (with Eric Hinderaker) of At the Edge of Empire: