1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (17 page)

In consequence, the English colonies initially turned to indentured servants and largely avoided slaves. Indentured servants comprised between a third and a half of the Europeans who arrived in North America in the first century of colonization. Slaves were rare—only three hundred lived in all of Virginia in 1650. By comparison, the few Dutch in New Amsterdam, the colonial predecessor to New York, had five hundred slaves. As more English ships came to North America, slaves slowly became more common.

Then, between 1680 and 1700, the number of slaves suddenly exploded. Virginia’s slave population rose in those years from three thousand to more than sixteen thousand—and kept soaring thereafter. In the same period the tally of indentured servants shrank dramatically. It was a pivot in world history, the time when English America became a slave society and England became the dominant player in the slave trade.

What accounts for this about-face? Economists and historians have mulled it over for decades. It was not the lure of profits from the trade itself: the slave business was incredibly important as a historical force and moral stain but not all that important as an economic industry. At its height at the end of the eighteenth century, according to the historians David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, slave shipments “accounted for less than 1.5 percent of British ships, and much less than 3 percent of British shipping tonnage.” Caribbean sugar, the main slave crop, then accounted for a bit less than 2.5 percent of British GDP, large but not overwhelmingly so; the textile industry, for instance, was more than six times bigger. (Slaves were producing raw materials, not the far more valuable finished industrial goods.)

Some have argued that England changed its collective mind because its American colonies were especially conducive to slavery—they had so much available real estate. Adam Smith predicted in
The Wealth of Nations
that laborers would see the available land around them and leave their jobs, “in order to become landlords themselves.” They would hire other workers in turn, who would “soon leave them for the same reason they left their first master.” Not for more than a century did other economists fully draw out the implications of Smith’s idea. If employers constantly lost workers to the lure of cheap land, then they would want to restrict their freedom of movement. Bondage was the inevitable end result. Paradoxically enough, America’s wide-open frontier was, from this perspective, an incitement to slavery.

On some level, this notion must be true; slavery wouldn’t exist if employers didn’t want to control workers’ movements. But it doesn’t explain why slavery was uncommon in the English colonies of New England and New York, which had abundant land, and common in the English colonies of Barbados and St. Kitts, Caribbean islands that had little. In consequence, many researchers turned to a second explanation: England’s religious civil war in the mid-seventeenth century, part of the worldwide unrest associated with the Little Ice Age and the uncertainties in the silver trade. The conflict was disastrous; between 1650 and 1680 the country’s population fell almost 10 percent. As economics would predict, the decline in the number of English workers drove up English wages, which inevitably increased the price necessary to lure indentured servants across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the indentured servants who had finished their terms in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Carolina were establishing new plantations and seeking their own indentured servants, increasing demand, which, as one would expect, further lifted prices.

Again, this explanation must be true; any rise in the cost of indentured servants would necessarily make alternatives seem more attractive. But it doesn’t explain why colonists chose the alternative they did: captive Africans. Planters could have found labor in Scotland—and, to a lesser extent, Ireland—which in different ways also had been thrown into turmoil by the English civil war. The Little Ice Age had piled on, making the sea too cold for cod, piling up snow in the hills, and walloping the populace with a series of bad harvests. In the worst period, between 1693 and 1700, the Scottish oat harvest failed in every year but one. Desperate Scots fled their homes in huge numbers. Thousands became mercenaries in Russia, Sweden, Norway, and the German principalities; thousands more set up shop in northern Ireland, setting off a cultural collision that endures to this day. Gangs of Scottish refugees roamed London streets, begging for work and food—obvious candidates, or so it would seem, for American colonies. English farmers had employed indigent Scots for centuries. Yet at the very time the supply of desperate Scots was increasing the colonists turned to captive Africans—people who couldn’t speak the language, had no wish to cooperate, and cost more to transport. Why?

One way to examine the question would be to evaluate the fortunes of the biggest group of Scots who traveled to the Americas in those years: the Scottish colony in Panama. Organized by an ambitious huckster named William Paterson, the scheme proposed using Panama’s strategic location to break Spain’s near monopoly on the silk and silver trades. “Seated between the two vast oceans of the universe,” Paterson rhapsodized, the colony would control “at least two-thirds of what both Indies [that is, silk-rich Asia and the silver-rich Americas] yield to Christendom.” Scottish Panama, he promised, would become “arbitrator of the commercial world,” a financial perpetual-motion machine that would endlessly spew riches as it demonstrated that “trade is capable of increasing trade, and money of begetting money to the end of the world.”

Dazzled by this vision, more than 1,400 Scots subscribed to a joint-stock company, pledging what has been estimated at between a quarter and a half of the poor nation’s available capital. In July 1698 five ships set sail with 1,200 colonists and a year’s food supply. They landed on the Panamanian coast and set about clearing the forest to create the port of New Edinburgh. Just eight months later the ragged survivors—fewer than three hundred people—bolted for home, Paterson among them. They arrived just days after the departure of a second Panama expedition: four ships, 1,300 colonists. Nine months later it, too, fled. Not a hundred people made it home. Lost with the dead was every penny invested in the venture.

Calamity usually has many fathers, and Paterson’s colony was no exception. Thinking to get started by trading with the local Indians, the Scots had stuffed their ships with the nation’s finest woolen hose, tartan blankets, ornamental wigs, and leather shoes—25,000 pairs. Alas, it proved difficult to sell warm socks and itchy blankets in the tropics. Meanwhile, the hard equatorial rain rotted their stores and washed away all efforts to farm. As New Edinburgh grew desperate, William, king of England and Scotland, instructed his other colonies not to help, for fear of offending Spain. Spain for its part knew about the project and periodically attacked.

The main causes of the disaster, though, were malaria, dysentery, and yellow fever. Colonists’ accounts record dozens of deaths a week from disease. The first time Spain assaulted New Edinburgh, its soldiers found four hundred fresh graves. The colony had been well supplied, blessed with an adequate water supply, and never troubled by its Indian neighbors. European and African disease had filled that cemetery.

Back in Scotland, the debacle of New Edinburgh set off riots—it had wiped out much of the nation’s capital. At the time, England and Scotland remained separate nations despite sharing a monarch. England, the bigger partner, had been pushing a complete merger for decades. Scots had resisted, believing they would become an afterthought in a London-dominated economy. Now England promised to reimburse New Edinburgh’s investors as part of a union agreement. “Even some committed Scottish patriots such as Paterson endorsed the Union Act of 1707,” the historian J. R. McNeill wrote in
Mosquito Empires
, a pioneering history of Caribbean epidemiology, ecology, and war. “Thus Great Britain was born, with assistance from the fevers of Panama.”

More than that, New Edinburgh showed that Scots—and other Europeans—died too fast in malarial areas to be useful as forced labor. Individual Britons and their families continued to make their own way to the Americas, to be sure, but businesspeople increasingly resisted sending over large groups of Europeans. Instead they looked for alternative sources of labor. Alas, they found them.

“NO DISTEMPERS EITHER EPIDEMICAL OR MORTAL”

The colony of Carolina was founded in 1670, when about two hundred colonists from Barbados relocated to the banks of a river that empties into Charleston Harbor (it was initially called Charles Town, after the reigning king). Like Virginia, Carolina was a commercial enterprise, founded by eight powerful English nobles who hoped to take advantage of the now-established traffic to Virginia by redirecting some of it to the south. The proprietors intended to lease pieces of the colony to would-be planters, realizing a profit without actually having to expend much effort or money. Barbados, full of sugar plantations, was crowded. Some of its English inhabitants, looking to acquire land, decided to take a flyer on Carolina. Knowing of Virginia’s labor problem, the proprietors promised extra land to anyone who imported indentured servants, as well as the servants themselves.

Whereas Jamestown had confronted a single Indian empire under a strong leader, Carolina began amid a chaotic swirl of native groups. Beginning in about 1000
A.D.,
hundreds of densely packed towns—“Mississippian” societies, as archaeologists call them—arose in the Mississippi Valley and the Southeast. Ruled by powerful theocrats who lived atop great earthen mounds, they were the most technologically sophisticated cultures north of Mexico. For reasons that are not well understood, these societies fell apart in the fifteenth century. The disintegration was accelerated by the onset of European diseases. By the time Carolina came into existence, the fragments of Mississippian societies were coalescing into confederacies of allied communities—Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, Catawba—that were jostling for power across the Southeast.

Slavery occurred in most Indian societies, but the institution differed from place to place. Among Algonkian-language societies like the Powhatan, for instance, slavery was usually a temporary state. Slaves were prisoners of war who were treated as servants until they were either tortured and slain, ransomed back to their original groups, or inducted into Powhatan society as full members. Occasionally, Jamestown’s
tassantassas
were able to buy Indian captives for their fields, but they were not generally a source of labor either for the Powhatan or the English. South of Chesapeake Bay was a cultural border where Algonkian societies ran into the nascent confederacies, many of which spoke Muskogean languages. War captives also became slaves in the confederacies, but there slavery was both more common and longer-lasting—traditions dating back to the Mississippians, whose leaders viewed captives as symbols of power and vengeance. Slaves worked in fields, performed menial tasks, and could be given away as gifts; female slaves provided sexual services to honored male visitors (a gesture frequently misunderstood by Europeans, who thought that the Indians were offering their wives). When foreigners appeared in Carolina, the confederacies were more than willing to trade surplus captives for axes, knives, metal pots, and, above all, guns.

In the late seventeenth century, the new flintlock rifle was becoming available—the first European firearm that native people regarded as superior to their bows. The matchlocks John Smith brought to Virginia used a lever to lower a burning match onto a small pan of gunpowder; the resultant flash pushed the projectile down the barrel. Heavy and unrifled, matchlocks had to be braced on tripods; because soldiers had to carry around burning fuses to fire them, the weapons were unsuitable for beaver wetlands and almost useless in rain. In optimal conditions, matchlocks could shoot a deadly projectile farther than a bow. But in warfare, conditions are never optimal. Colonial records are replete with descriptions of
tassantassas
unhappily discovering that as a practical matter their weapons were outmatched by native bows—weapons with no moving parts, weapons that could get wet, weapons that could be fired in an instant. Flintlocks, by contrast, ignited the gunpowder by snapping a chunk of flint against a piece of steel, creating a spark. The spark ignited a small charge that in turn set off a bigger charge in the barrel. Smaller, lighter, and more accurate than matchlocks, they could be fired quickly and used in wet weather.

The southeastern confederacies, quickly understanding the new weapons’ superiority, determined not to be outgunned, either by the English or their native rivals. An arms race ensued across the Southeast. To build up their stores of flintlocks, native people raided their enemies for slaves to sell—an action that required more firearms. Needing guns to defend themselves, they in turn staged their own slaving raids, selling the captives to Europeans in return for guns. Demand fed demand in a vicious cycle.

Despite the fears of the Virginia Company, Jamestown never was directly threatened by Spain or France. Carolina, closer to Spanish Florida and French Louisiana, had much more reason to worry; indeed, Spain tried to extinguish the colony within months of its founding. Carolina’s leaders came up with an elegant scheme; they asked nearby native groups to provide them with slaves by raiding the Indians who were allied with Spain and France, destabilizing their enemies and reducing their labor shortage at the same time.

Economically speaking, indigenous slavery was a good deal for both natives and newcomers. In the Charleston market Indians sometimes could sell a single slave for the same price as 160 deerskins. “One slave brings a Gun, ammunition, horse, hatchet, and a suit of Cloathes, which would not be procured without much tedious toil a hunting,” a Carolina slave buyer noted, perhaps with some exaggeration, in 1708. “The good prices The English traders give them for slaves Encourages them to this trade Extreamly.”

“Good prices” from the Indian point of view, but cheap to the English. Indian captives cost £5–10, as little as half the price of indentured servants, according to the Ohio State University historian Alan Gallay, author of
The Indian Slave Trade
(2002), a widely lauded account of its rise and fall. More important, the annual cost of ownership was much lower, because slaves did not have to be released after a few years—the purchase price could be amortized over decades. Unsurprisingly, the colonists chose Indian slaves over European servants. A 1708 census, Carolina’s first, found four thousand English colonists, almost 1,500 Indian slaves, and just 160 servants, the majority presumably indentured.