The Untold History of Slavery in Early America: Multiple Races, Multiple Masters, and the Complex Truth
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The Untold History of Slavery in Early America: Multiple Races, Multiple Masters, and the Complex Truth
The history of slavery in America extends far beyond the traditional narrative taught in schools. From the violent capture of frontier families by raiding parties to the mass importation of white convicts and indentured servants, early American bondage was a multi-racial institution affecting hundreds of thousands. Between 1620 and 1776, an estimated 350,000 white immigrants arrived in bondage, many involuntarily, with mortality rates exceeding 20% during the journey. This examination reveals that slave ownership crossed racial lines, with black freedmen, Native American tribes, and white colonists all participating in the institution. By 1860, only 1.2% of Americans owned slaves, challenging modern assumptions about widespread complicity. This complex history includes George Washington advertising for white runaway servants, wealthy black planters owning dozens of slaves, and Cherokee and Creek tribes holding captives in brutal conditions.
On the morning of June 14th, 1786, Captain James Moore's family woke up on what seemed to be a normal day in Southwest Virginia. But as they left the family's cabin to tend to their farm animals, the fearful war whoop was heard and a raiding party of Ohio Valley Shawnee Indians rode down a ridgeline and attacked them. Captain Moore was shot seven times before being tomahawked and scalped. The Indians then murdered three of his children, leaving only his family members who were locked inside the cabin.
Much like the Barbary pirates, the Indians broke into the house, shot the dogs, plundered and burned the home, killed the livestock, and took Moore's wife and surviving children captive. The raiding party stole horses and embarked on a journey to Detroit, which was then an open air market for humans captured by Indians. To give a sense of the savagery, when one of the surviving sons, John, fell behind on the journey, the Indians split his head open with a tomahawk and then told John's mother what happened with her son's bloody scalp hanging in his waistband.
They reached Detroit in December where in a drunken exchange, one of the surviving daughters, Mary Moore, was sold into slavery for a few gallons of rum to a man named Stagwell, who had been an active Tory during the war and had removed to Canada after it closed for fear of losing his life if he remained in the United States. Three years later, she was rescued by her brother and returned to United States. Stories like Mary Moore's were common in the early frontier period in America, and often the stories became nationwide bestsellers.
White Slavery and Indentured Servitude in Colonial America
The vast majority of white slaves in the United States were owned by fellow whites. Somewhere between 60 and 70% of white immigrants to the American colonies arrived in bondage, often involuntarily. An estimated 350,000 arrived between 1620 and 1776 in numbers that likely far exceeded the number of black slaves who arrived in the 1600s. Mortality rates on the journey to the colonies often exceeded 20%.
Many of them were legally classified as indentured servants under British law. Indentured servitude was in theory a contract entered between a poor person and a sponsor in which the sponsor pays for the poor person's transit across the Atlantic in exchange for a set period of bondage. That however is the textbook definition. Reality was much harsher.
In the early colonial period, there were not substantial differences between indentured servants and black slaves. Many were subjected to conditions of such brutality, duration, and heritability that historians increasingly regard slave as the more accurate term. There's no question that indentured servitude was slavery. Some indenture contracts literally use the term slave, and ads issued for runaway servants asked for them to be returned to their masters. Some of them were held in bondage for life. Many of them were sent here against their will.
Sources of White Bondage
At the outbreak of the revolution in 1776, more than 50,000 convicts were sent to the colonies as slave laborers. There were all sorts of sources of white slavery: the convicts, the urban poor, political prisoners, thieves, prostitutes, vagrants, prisoners of war, anyone designated undesirable by the British government.
In the winter of 1650, 150 ragged Scottish prisoners of war arrived at Massachusetts Bay Colony where they were sold as indentured laborers for $20 to $30 each. In colonial America, white and black slaves often bonded. According to NPR, which admits America's first slaves were white, there was no sign or little sign of racial tension between the English servants and the African servants. They were treated in much the same way for many decades. They complained together. They ran away together. They rebelled together.
George Washington's White Slaves
George Washington himself had white slaves. At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, there were ads in the Virginia Gazette for runaways. There were something like 11 for white runaways and three for black runaways. And two of the 11 white runaways were being advertised by George Washington.
In early Virginia and Maryland, indentured servants, mostly English, Irish, and Scottish, did the same jobs that enslaved Africans would do in the 19th century, mostly tobacco farming. Conditions were so bad that 40 to 50% died before completing their terms. A 1671 report from Virginia Governor William Berkeley noted that the number of white slaves arriving vastly outnumbered black. He wrote: "We suppose there come in of servants, about 1,500, of which most are English, few Scotch, few are Irish, and not above two or three ships of Negroes in seven years." He then went on to note that in the early years of the colony, 80% of servants did not survive the first year.
Native American Slave Holders
But it wasn't just the slaves that were multi-racial. It was the slave holders, too. At slavery's peak in 1860, thousands of slaves were owned by Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw Indians. As Alan Taylor writes in the book American Colonies, the Iroquois were particularly brutal in this regard.
In colonial America, the Iroquois would often subject captives—the ones they did not enslave—to ritualistic slaughter and cannibalism in which captives would be tied to the stake, stabbed, then prodded with hot pokers. After the victim died, the women butchered his remains, cast them into cooking kettles, and served the stew to the entire village so that all could be bound together in absorbing the captive's power.
Black Slave Owners
At the outbreak of the Civil War, one of South Carolina's wealthiest citizens was a planter and slaveholder named William Ellison. Census records show that at the outset of the Civil War, he owned 63 slaves, making him one of the biggest slave owners in the region. During the Civil War, he and his sons made substantial donations to the Confederate government. But what makes Ellison remarkable is that he was a black man.
In fact, he was a freed slave whose former master had given him the business skills he needed to become a successful cotton gin manufacturer. He was such a prominent member of South Carolina society that the Charleston Mercury newspaper noted that he was a large slaveholder and is much respected throughout the district for his integrity and general good character.
When the American journalist and social critic Frederick Law Olmsted visited Mississippi in the early 1860s, he described meeting a black man who told him there were many free blacks all about this region. Some were very rich. He pointed out three plantations within 20 miles owned by colored men. They bought black folks and had servants of their own. They were very bad masters, very hard and cruel. If he had to be sold, he would like best to have an American master by him. The French black Creole masters were very severe, and they whipped their slaves most to death. They whipped the flesh off them.
In total, an estimated 3,000 blacks owned roughly 20,000 slaves in 1860. And in some cases, black slave holders purchased relatives and spouses philanthropically, rescuing them from other slaveholders. But according to the black historian Carter Godwin Woodson, they often simply bought and sold slaves like white traders. He even described one case in which a black shoemaker in Charleston, South Carolina, purchased his wife for $700, but on finding her hard to please, he sold her a few months thereafter for $750.
The 1860 Census and Slave Ownership Statistics
The 1860 census offers some context that's left out of the history textbooks in this country. That year there were 3,953,760 slaves and 487,970 total free colored population in the slave states in 1860. The reality is that a very small percentage of freed blacks and American Indians owned slaves. But the same is true for white Americans.
In the 1860 census, at the very height of slavery, there were 393,975 slave owners in the US, out of a total population of over 31 million. That translates to about 1.2% of the population. The vast majority of American whites never owned any slaves. That's a critical point in the context of modern calls for reparations.
Comparative Conditions of Slavery
As a rule, black slaves in the American South had a life expectancy of 40 years and an annual mortality rate of 3 to 5%. Their odds of getting married, having children, and attaining freedom were dramatically higher than slaves in the Caribbean, Brazil, East Africa, or other regions. Slaves in the Caribbean lived in barracks. In the south, they had cabins. There's no doubt that being a slave was a bad life, but if you were to be enslaved, it was better to be enslaved in the United States.
The clearest metric on this is that the US slave population kept growing after slave imports were banned in 1808. Unlike other parts of the Americas where deaths exceeded births, the US ended up with nearly 4 million slaves in 1860 despite only 400,000 arrivals.
Economic Incentives and Slave Treatment
One reason for the better conditions could be incentives. With the import ban, slave owners' best source of slaves was high birth rates. Buying more was really expensive. Typical price for an able-bodied male field hand in New Orleans in 1860 was about $2,000. And if you track inflation based on the price of gold, that would be over $100,000 today. For this reason, there are well-documented cases of slaveholders preferring to use less valuable lower-class whites for dangerous tasks.
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