This paper examines four interconnected questions about Colonial American history. It investigates whether race determined whom colonists enslaved, contrasting slavery in the Chesapeake region with practices in South Carolina and Georgia. It then analyzes how disease, military force, and religion pacified Native Americans in New England by 1670, identifying epidemic disease — especially smallpox — as the single most devastating factor in native population decline. Finally, the paper explores British mercantilist policy and its economic stranglehold on the colonies, tracing how Navigation Acts, unfair taxation, and trade restrictions fueled colonial discontent and contributed directly to the American Revolution. Drawing on works by Betty Wood, Russell Thornton, Michael E. Newton, and others, the paper synthesizes key themes in early American colonial history.
In Slavery in Colonial America, 1619–1776, author Betty Wood delves deeply into the dynamics of the labor demands emerging in Virginia — and the question of who would perform that labor — beginning with the Roanoke settlement in the 1580s (though that community vanished without a trace). Before British settlers had even left Europe for the New World, it was well known that Spanish galleons "laden down with gold and other precious metals" were making their way back to Europe from the Americas. The desire among other Europeans to settle the Americas and find some of that gold and silver was therefore considerable.
The English wanted to emulate the Spaniards, and so in 1606 they established the Virginia Company, envisioning it as a profitable enterprise. Initially, the blueprint for the Virginia Company did not involve enslaving any human beings to accomplish this work. The Spaniards and Portuguese had used "racially based systems of slavery that involved large numbers of" African and Native American slaves to carve out profitable colonies in Latin America and the Caribbean, but the British did not believe they needed to do the same.
Eventually, however, when the Virginia Company realized that tobacco could be grown in the Chesapeake region, the settlers who had survived "against all odds" — including Indian attacks — knew they needed additional labor to produce the crop. Even though the settlers had driven Native Americans from their own land in order to plant tobacco, enslaving the Indians was not part of the Virginia Company's plan (although in South Carolina, Native Americans were indeed made into slaves). And although the British immigrants of the Virginia Company had traditionally found slavery abhorrent, the demand for labor ultimately led them to bring in enslaved Africans.
The rationalization for placing Africans in chains drew on deep-seated cultural prejudice. The English "commonly associated the color black with sin," and it therefore became "all too easy to arrive at the conclusion that God had decreed perpetual bondage as part of the Africans' punishment" (Wood). This racial logic provided the ideological justification that allowed the Virginia colonists to reconcile their enslavement of Africans with their stated moral objections to the institution. By contrast, in South Carolina and Georgia, the use of enslaved Native Americans was far more prevalent in the early colonial period, reflecting regional differences in available labor sources, relationships with indigenous populations, and the nature of the colonial economy.
There were certainly missionaries who attempted to convert Native Americans to Christianity. As essayist David Murray explains in Spiritual Encounters: Interactions Between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America, those attempts met with both failure and success. Initially, the Puritans in New England began baptizing Indians, assuming the natives understood the purpose of the sacrament. However, it turned out that the Indians "had accepted baptism solely as a sign of friendship, and were unpleasantly surprised to discover that it entailed obligations like monogamy" (Murray, 46).
It should not have surprised the Christians that one cannot expect "a rational being of competent age to make a solemn profession of the law of God (which is done through Baptism) when he has never been taught the rules and duties of the profession" (Murray, 46). The proposed solution was therefore to educate and "civilize" the Indian first, after which the missionaries could introduce the Christian message.
Many other Native Americans were killed in wars and in what some authors characterize as genocide. However, author Russell Thornton argues that the diseases introduced into North America by Europeans were by far the most devastating factor in native population decline. Thornton asserts: "Without doubt, the single most important factor in American Indian population decline was an increased death rate due to diseases introduced from the Eastern Hemisphere" (Thornton, 1987, p. 44).
"Smallpox and other epidemics decimated native populations"
"Navigation Acts and trade restrictions fueled colonial resentment"
In conclusion, it is easy — all these years later — to sit in judgment of the behavior of the British and of the American colonists during the early years of the country. But this is what history is all about: digging into issues and understanding why things happened the way they did. Slavery is a repugnant institution from any perspective, and the fact that the Virginia Colony needed enslaved laborers in order to plant and harvest the one crop that could make it self-sufficient is no justification — in hindsight — for forcing Africans to work in tobacco fields. Further, what stands out in this paper is the terrible scourge that Europeans brought with them in the form of diseases to which Native Americans had no immunity. The fact that so many innocent natives were killed by diseases like smallpox is tragic, and every American — regardless of ethnicity — should feel a measure of sorrow for the way this country was taken from the indigenous peoples who had built worthy civilizations and deserved to be allowed to flourish and thrive.
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