Slavery and the Slave Economy in Colonial America

Introduction

Modern observers likely know in general terms that many Africans were enslaved throughout the 17th to 19th centuries, but few probably know the extent of suffering that newly enslaved Africans endured from the outset, nor are many likely aware of the legal sources used to justify and legitimize the practice in the Old and New Worlds. Some authorities argue that it was not until the end of the 17th century that racial divisions had become sufficiently codified to protect the "peculiar institution" of slavery in the New World. Given the profound impact that slavery has had on American society, gaining a better understanding of the origins of the slave economy and its implications for civil rights in the United States represents a timely and valuable enterprise.

This paper provides a review of the relevant literature to describe the historical background in which slavery emerged and to examine the structure of the slave economy. Throughout most of the 17th century, the tobacco economies of Virginia and Maryland depended on the contract labor of white indentured servants, who were employed for a term of four to five years and then freed. Only in the late 17th century — particularly after Bacon's Rebellion in 1675–76 — did the planter aristocracy shift to the use of permanently enslaved African labor, which had been relatively uncommon in the Chesapeake colonies up to that time. Unlike white servants, slaves were almost never freed during the colonial period and thus had no opportunity to acquire land and property, let alone civil and voting rights. In South Carolina, however, slavery had existed from the beginnings of the colony in 1670 and increased rapidly with the expansion of rice production, while white indentured servants were uncommon. That colony imported slaves at double the rate of Virginia and Maryland and, like the West Indies, was only able to maintain its slave population through continued imports, while the Chesapeake's slave population began to replace and expand itself through natural increase in the 18th century.

Background and Overview

Sea voyages are dangerous enterprises even today, but it is probably difficult or even impossible for modern observers to imagine the conditions that millions of Africans experienced during their transportation to the New World in the 17th century. Some indication of these experiences can be gained from Stephanie Smallwood's book Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora, in which the author describes the sufferings endured by 300,000 Africans caught up in the slave trade in the Gold Coast region of Africa — now Ghana — during the half-century period from 1675 to 1725. Starting in 1672, the Royal African Company held a monopoly on the slave trade, although it was forced to accept competition in the 18th century. Throughout the period of the slave trade, over 90% of Africans were transported to the sugar-producing islands of the West Indies — such as Jamaica, Barbados, and Santo Domingo — and only a small minority were sent to the English mainland colonies (Smallwood 3).

Like their counterparts from other regions of Africa, these hundreds of thousands of unfortunates were transported to the English American colonies aboard slave ships in the most miserable conditions imaginable, and many did not survive the ordeal and were simply thrown overboard. In this regard, Sowande Mustakeem reports that "despite the efforts used to procure healthy bondpeople, no sea captain or physician could anticipate the diseases capable of wreaking havoc on the bodies and minds of African captives. The intermingling of bondpeople in close confinement in the holds of ships facilitated the exchange of contagious ailments" such as measles, influenza, and smallpox (Mustakeem 475). Despite efforts to recruit the healthiest Africans possible, the toll was enormously high, and "regardless of race or gender, individuals traveling across the Atlantic were never granted immunity to various seaborne ailments or spared from subsequent death. Even more importantly, medical complaints and treatment required for restoration played out much differently at sea than on land" (475). The survivors of this nightmarish voyage found themselves truly strangers in a strange land, though some fared better than others, especially prior to the 18th century.

While Africans from the Gold Coast region were not unique in this experience, Smallwood maintains that their stories provide an authentic example of the factors that contributed to their predicament, including the powerful economic forces at play during this period. There were even social and cultural distinctions among the enslaved themselves: newly arrived Africans were referred to as "saltwater Negroes" or "newcomers" and were regarded as inferior by their American-born counterparts because they could not speak English and were unfamiliar with local laws, customs, and work routines (Jacobs 2008). According to S. M. Jacobs, "American-born slaves were favored by slave-owners, and even among the enslaved there were clear advantages to having been born in the Americas" for those same reasons (568). These advantages would carry important implications for the slave economy that emerged in the Old South, particularly once the slave population there began to grow through natural increase rather than importation. Similarly, slaves with certain skills — such as carpentry or blacksmithing — were valued at least double the price of field hands and ordinary laborers.

Emergence of the Slave Economy

Although the first slaves arrived in Virginia as early as 1619, they were far outnumbered by white indentured servants for most of that century — a situation that was never the case in South Carolina. Virginia had a population of about 50,000 whites in the 1670s but only 3,000–4,000 slaves, or about 7% of the total population. Not until that decade did the importation of slaves even exceed 1,000, although 7,000 were imported in 1700–10 and 13,500 in the 1730s. By 1700, there were 20,000 slaves in Virginia, constituting about 20% of the population (Tomlins 25). Georgia and the Carolinas had about 13,000 whites in 1700, a number that had increased to 300,000 by 1780. Slavery existed in South Carolina from the founding of the colony in 1670, and unlike the Chesapeake it had few white indentured servants but rapidly increased the importation of African slaves as rice production expanded — at an average of 17,000 per decade compared to 6,000 in Virginia and Maryland. Blacks were already half of the population of South Carolina by 1750, and unlike Virginia and Maryland, that colony had to continue importations just to maintain its slave population (Tomlins 26). This indicates that the environment and the slavery regime in the Deep South was already noticeably harsher than that of the Upper South even in the 18th century, very similar to conditions in Brazil and the West Indies, where slave life expectancies were very short.

Africans were already being actively traded as slaves in Virginia even in the early Jamestown phase of settlement, and some were already enslaved for life, owned by the Virginia Company. This does not mean that all blacks were being enslaved, since records show that at least some were treated similarly to white indentured servants and freed after a term of years. Prior to the end of the 17th century, there was some degree of social mobility available for some free blacks in the burgeoning American colonies, and some blacks even gained prominence and owned slaves themselves. Thomas D. Morris relates the famous story of Anthony Johnson, "a black who acquired property and became the owner of slaves in his own right," which would become almost impossible once slavery became a thoroughly rigid and codified system applying to all blacks and their children (41). Likewise, in their study of free blacks in Northampton County, Virginia, T. H. Breen and S. Innes report that during the early and middle decades of the century, "Englishmen and Africans could interact with one another on terms of relative equality for two generations," which never happened again in the South after this period (72).

In the 17th century, black and white indentured servants could socialize together and even run away and rebel together, and the ruling planters always feared such combinations of freed slaves, servants, and poor whites. While the exact legal or other mechanisms by which many blacks in 17th-century America gained their freedom remain unclear, the historical record does show that many were successful in doing so. Morris adds that "by whatever legal or circumstantial route, scores of Virginia's blacks became free during the middle decades of the seventeenth century" (41).

Although the historical record is relatively silent on the precise point in time when this situation changed, Breen and Innes maintain that "not until the end of the seventeenth century was there an inexorable hardening of racial lines" (11). Irrespective of the precise moment that racial lines hardened, there remains the issue of what legal authority was used to legitimize the way these extralegal racial divisions were put into action. Morris emphasizes that "the question here is not the nature and sources of racial attitudes; rather, it is the treatment of blacks as slaves at law and the sources of that law" (41). The answer to that historical question remains largely unanswered, though Morris suggests that the institutions of slavery existed long before their actual codification in law. According to Morris, "There is sufficient evidence to suggest that blacks were treated as slaves at a very early time. But information revealing the precise sources of the legal notions that defined slavery is simply not present" (41).

Conclusion

While the suffering Africans experienced during their sea passage was horrific and the depredations they were subjected to worked a heavy toll, these were short-term miseries compared to the long-term servitude the survivors found upon their arrival. During the early part of the 17th century, though, some blacks managed to gain their freedom and even became slave-owners themselves. In Virginia and Maryland in the 17th century, white indentured servants were the main source of labor, producing the tobacco that was the chief export of these colonies. At the time, slaves were still a small minority of the population and slavery as an institution was still flexible and had not yet been as rigidly codified as it would be in the Black Codes of 1681 and 1705.