Contextual Essay

As much as exploration, adventure, politics, and the religious issues of the Renaissance period propelled Europeans to the Americas, the driving force behind Europe's interest in the New World was economic. As Europeans began to settle in the Americas and initiate cultural change, they brought with them their values and economic institutions. One such institution was that of "mercantalism," a series of policies that established a uniform monetary system and even set wages. Slavery itself was altered by these practices, as various forms of servitude emerged to achieve specific economic ends.

The European Economy of the Middle Ages

Until the fifteenth century, the economy of Western Europe depended upon agriculture. The system of feudalism dictated that wealthy families of "lords" rule certain territories. The peasant farmer, who made up most of the region's population, worked for the lords in exchange for crops and other items of sustenance.

Advancements in farming technology had helped Europe recover from the devastating famine and diseases of the Middle Ages and allowed the population to grow to three times its size. With the support of the wealthy classes, monarchies capitalized on the growing commerce. However, along with economic success and demographic expansion came a depletion of resources. Land grew so scarce that many people could no longer support themselves and no other system of employment offered any alternatives. Thus, in addition to other factors, economic need propelled many European countries to look for opportunity beyond their borders.

European Trade

Under its prince, dubbed "Henry the Navigator," Portugal became one of the first countries to search for markets off the Atlantic coast in North Africa. After the Ottoman Empire blocked the traditional trade routes to the lucrative Far Eastern markets (known as the East Indies), Portuguese explorers set a route around Africa's Cape of Good Hope and established trade posts in India, China, and Africa itself. The success of the route discouraged Portugal from seeking access to the region west via the Atlantic. Into this vacuum stepped a young Genoan sailor who requested and received royal backing to help Spain mark out an alternative trade route and compete with Portugal. Instead of finding and establishing markets in India, Christopher Columbus, in 1492, landed in what we know today as the Bahamas and initiated the "Columbian Exchange" (see VUS-2).

Spain's Economic System: "Gold and Souls"

The Spanish Empire began to colonize what would become known as the "Americas." It sought to exploit the valuable resources of the New World (such as gold and silver) by incorporating the indigenous population, often through force, into its class of laborers. As in Europe, a small number of wealthy Spanish settlers dominated the lives of the peasant class-now made up of Indians and eventually African workers-as part of an economic system known as encomienda, the same system Spain enlisted to govern Muslim regions captured during the Reconquista. By trying to enlist the local population into the economic system, Spain tried to create an "inclusive" society. However, such a society relegated Indians to an inferior state, essentially one of slavery, forcing them to work in fields and mines, granting them few rights and little autonomy. After the system had depleted the valuable minerals on the islands, Spain sent explorers west.

The encomienda system spread throughout Mexico and today's American southwest, subjugating and plundering the native peoples and their communities, often using a combination of religious conversion and military conquest to establish Spanish colonies. In effect, the Spanish employed a colonization strategy of "gold and souls." Converting the native population to Catholicism not only spread the doctrines of the Catholic Church, then under threat in Europe, but could, it was believed, further the control of Indian behavior in the mines and on the plantations. In addition to serving as spiritual centers, missions provided economic bases for whole Spanish communities, with Indians serving as the primary labor force. Conversion meant indentured servitude for Indians not accustomed to continuous work beyond that needed for subsistence. In the Caribbean, where the Indian population had largely been decimated by disease, Spain eventually resorted to the importation of slave labor from Africa, tapping into the lucrative slave trade the Portuguese helped develop.

The violence associated with Spain's conquest of the Americas became known as "The Black Legend," a condemnation of Spain's colonization policies inspired by the protests of a Spanish Catholic priest, Bartolome de Casas who vehemently protested the treatment of Indians in the Caribbean in his widely popular book, The Destruction of the Indies, published in 1552. The Black Legend chronicled the story of Spanish colonization in America. It emphasized and often exaggerated Spanish cruelty, greed, exploitation and laziness. Starvation and disease also contributed to the depletion of the native populations throughout the region. Spain responded by justifying the conquest largely on religious grounds, but the empire's economic success spurred other European countries to participate in the Columbian Exchange, break the Spanish monopoly, and establish colonies in the Americas.

England Looks to Colonies for Land and Profit

England's envy of imperial Spain's growing power and wealth helped prepare and justify English colonization. In Atlantic Virginia, April Hatfield describes how the English utilized Native American trade routes as well as those from England and other European colonies. While they looked at Spain as a model of colonial success, the English promoted the Black Legend to justify a "society of exclusion." In contrast to Spain, England sought to enlist only its own labor to build homes and settlements, choosing not to incorporate native peoples into their economic system. In reality, however, the English colonies would not find success in America until they too established a solid labor class. As in the Spanish Caribbean, slavery would be crucial to the growth and economic success of the English colonies. However, England did not immediately turn to slave labor as a colonization strategy, as Edmund Morgan describes in his seminal work American Slavery, American Freedom.

After the failure of the Newfoundland and Roanoke colonies, three ships of 120 Englishmen would land at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Initially, the group sought to establish a business venture with the express purpose of returning a profit to shareholders. However, the Virginia Company was uncertain about how they would do this: through gold like Spain? Trade with Indians? Forest products? Developing a fishing industry? Passage through the continent to the Far East?

Jamestown almost met the fate of Roanoke. First, the colonists did not discover the gold the Spanish found much further South. Nor could the English entrepreneurs subjugate the sparsely settled Indians of the eastern coast. The Chesapeake valley's 20,000 Algonquian people were partially united by the Powhatan Chiefdom. Although many of the colonists attributed their own survival to God, the assistance of the Powhatan Indians no doubt aided in the adjustment. The Powhatans were savvy and suspicious of these settlers. The Powhatans had wiped out a Spanish Jesuit mission settlement on the James River and they had witnessed the Spanish governor sail into the Chesapeake, capture several Powhatans, and hang them from the mast in retaliation just thirty years earlier. Undoubtedly, they had heard word of the Roanoke settlement, both its auspicious beginning and its violent end. The English and the Indians traded items like canoes, medicinal herbs, corn, pumpkin, and rice for the English's iron-age items like kettle, fishhooks, traps, needles, knives, and guns. In spite of the aid, many of the English saw no need to incorporate Native populations into their economic system, and thus unlike encomienda, Indians were pushed to the periphery of English colonial society.

As the Virginia Company's numbers continued to shrink, England's colonization strategy turned to land acquisition and the idea of land ownership. Under the feudal system, land ownership translated to economic independence and political power, and thus land acquisition became one of the central objectives of English colonization. English settlers believed in the continuous cultivation or "improvement" of the land, which they interpreted as a commodity deserving of individual ownership. They tended to view Indians as obstacles and interpreted Indian farming techniques such as burning and field rotation, and the use of limited farming tracts, as a lack of respect or use for the ample available land. Indians, rather, viewed land as a source of sustenance that held sacred qualities, and which should be held in common by whole communities. In 1617, England offered 100 acres to anyone wanting to become an independent landowner, thus allowing poor, landless Englishmen an opportunity virtually non-existent in England. Two years later, the English government established a representative assembly to stabilize and bind settlers to the colony and sent a boatload of single women to boost morale and population. By the 1670s, after several Anglo-Powhatan wars and the ravages of diseases, 40,000 English outnumbered 2,000 Algonquians.

More than the infusion of population, colonist John Rolfe's discovery of a profitable "cash" crop-tobacco-sealed the fate of the Virginia colony. Economically, tobacco became to the Chesapeake what sugar was to West Indies and silver was to Mexico.

However, tobacco required a great deal of labor to cultivate. As the colony grew slowly, indentured servants came to Virginia to work for landowners, the company, and the church. Such workers would be largely landless young men and boys from the lowest rungs of English society who would sell their labor as indentured servants for 4 to 7 years in exchange for the promise of gaining title to 50 acres of land. Indentured servants often worked in harsh conditions and in some places were worked to death. Mortality rates in Virginia reached staggering numbers comparable to those during the peak years of European plague.

Ironically, as the colonies became safer and healthier after 1640, it became harder and harder for growing numbers of settlers to find opportunities for land ownership. This was partly due to English-Indian treaties that promised land to Indian tribes. By 1676, poor whites, many of them newly freed servants unable to obtain land they believed they had earned, erupted in Bacon's Rebellion. Disgruntled with living in poverty, they attacked local Indian groups as a way of gaining access to Indian lands on their own terms. The event convinced powerful landowners to open lands for settlement, ignore various Indian treaties, and search for another source of colonial labor. As people lived longer, the use of slaves, whom one owned for life, made more sense from an economic viewpoint. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Chesapeake area and the southern colonies, with their enormous rice plantations, developed an economic system wholly dependent on slavery.

Slavery Comes to the Americas

Africans did labor in the English colonies before Bacon's Rebellion, but their status was akin to that of indentured servants. Both groups shared the right to testify in court, to hold property, to participate in the legal process, to obtain an education, and to practice their religion. Nevertheless, legal restrictions on Africans increased in proportion to the growth of slavery itself. The result was a "society of exclusion," segregation, and discrimination. Gradually most Africans in the English colonies lost all semblance of human and civil rights and were relegated to the same status as property. In many ways, restricting rights by race served to protect the rights of poor Englishmen. While the average white yeoman farmer had little economic standing, white-skinned people held several legal advantages and rights over Africans, especially in the South. Children of inter-racial relationships also fell into a separate legal category apart from other white children.

England's entry into the slave trade fueled an already extant and profitable industry based on a "trade triangle" between Europe, the Americas, and Africa. By the 1790s, however, England was the foremost slave-trading nation in Europe. Slavery had existed in Africa before the Portuguese and Spanish trade as a way to pay off debt or as a result of war, but it was not a permanent institution. Like Europe, Africa's economy was largely agricultural, but various empires and kingdoms also established well-organized trade networks of metalwork, weaving, ceramics, and architecture. Initially, the slave trade was reciprocal, with Africans themselves exchanging people and their services for gold, ivory, guns, iron and copper bars, brass pots, beads, rum, and textiles. Were it not for Europe's discovery of the Americas, the slave trade would have evolved very differently, since few slaves could have been absorbed into Europe's society and economy. As it happened, the southern slave colonies produced enormous exports of raw materials for industrial production and at the same time created new markets for European manufactured goods. The markets and the raw materials that came out of the "Triangular Trade" system between Europe, Africa, and America made European governments extremely wealthy.

The slave trade generated the largest forced migration in history with over 10 to 11 million Africans transported during four centuries, 66 percent between the years 1701 and 1810. The horrible journey was known as the Middle Passage (the middle rung of the trade triangle), a trip so brutalizing and demoralizing that captured Africans frequently resorted to suicide. The successful mutiny made famous in the story of the Amistad is evidence that not all slaves went through the Middle Passage passively. As slavery spread throughout Virginia and England's southern colonies, providing cheap labor to produce tobacco and rice, millions of Africans lost contact with their homeland, culture, and loved ones. Many resisted complete subjugation both covertly (by continuing to practice African customs and religion, and by running away) and overtly in violent confrontations like the Stono Rebellion. Throughout the colonies, African culture infiltrated white society through food, language, architectural styles, crafts, childcare, and music.

The slave system in English colonies was somewhat different from its status in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, which were under strict royal and church oversight. Once a population was subdued and converted, the Catholic Church devoted itself to preserving the rights of all Catholics. Roman law had traditionally protected slaves with certain rights albeit under a conservative, paternalistic system (except in the periphery of the empire like the present American Southwest where such controls were weak and slaves were treated more harshly). England's colonies were less centralized, and the government left planters with far more individual discretion. Slave treatment also depended on several factors including the efficacy of working the slave to death and then replacing him/her, or the geography of servitude. Slaves in the North had a great deal more interaction with white society than those on the large rice plantations in the South, while slave life in the northern colonies was largely relegated to domestic work or artisan-related activities. Since the colonists in the North established settlements largely for religious reasons, they did not develop a "cash" crop and thus did not require the same numbers of slaves as the southern plantations. However, it is important to note that the northern colonies depended increasingly upon the slave system as the two regions developed a highly efficient commercial relationship.

Colonies and Economies of Trade and Inclusion

The colonies of Spain and England stood in contrast to those of the Dutch and the French, which largely sought trading opportunities in the Americas above riches or lands. The most famous "middle colony" settlements are New Amsterdam (later New York) and parts of present-day Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. Colder winters dissuaded settlers there from profitable agricultural pursuits, but New Amsterdam became a major port when the Dutch government granted the West India Company exclusive rights to trading in America. Its focus on business and profit over religious or political ends contributed to a more heterogeneous European population than in any of the other colonies. The French, meanwhile, extended highly successful and profitable fur trade routes along a "crescent" shaped region that connected Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. There they established trade dominance through their somewhat distinctive relationship with Indian peoples (see VUS-2).

European Mercantilism in Colonial America

European trade and mercantalism exacerbated the already fierce religious and economic competitions among the countries of Europe in the New World. Each empire, while possessing different economic goals, imposed economic values and systems onto America's Indians and the people of Africa. In 1776, the colonists had revolted against the regulations imposed by England's mercantile practices and declared independence based on the ideals of liberty. Eventually, the Age of Enlightenment that inspired the American Revolution would lead to a change in sentiment toward the issue of slavery. When Britain outlawed the international slave trade in 1807, the new nation of the United States of America also introduced a bill prohibiting the importation of slaves. However, by the time that Britain freed slaves throughout its empire, including in the West Indies in 1833, the slave system was too ingrained to do likewise in the United States. The paradox of slavery operating within a nation based on ideals of freedom would persist for almost a century.

Works Cited and Further Reading

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Countryman, Edward, ed. How Did American Slavery Begin? New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999.

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975.

Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America. 4th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2000.

Roark, James L. et. al. The American Promise: A History of the United States. 2nd Compact Edition. Vol. 1: to 1877. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003.

Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press, 1998.