1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (56 page)

One of the most persistent myths about the slave trade is also one of the most pernicious: that Africans’ role was wholly that of hapless pawns. Except for the trade’s last few decades—and arguably not even then—Africans themselves controlled the supply of African slaves, selling them to Europeans in the numbers they chose at prices they negotiated as equals. To be sure, Europeans tried to play off slavers against each other to get lower prices. But Africans played off European buyers against each other, too, captain against captain, nation against nation.

If Africans were not forced by Europeans to sell other Africans, why did they do it? In some sense, the question is an example of “presentism”—the projection of contemporary beliefs onto the past. Few Europeans or Africans at this time viewed slavery as an institution that needed to be explained, still less as an evil to be decried. Slavery was part of the furniture of everyday life; in both Europe and Africa, depriving others of their liberty wasn’t morally problematic, though it was bad to enslave the wrong person. Christians, for example, were generally not supposed to enslave fellow Christians, though breaking this rule was sometimes permitted. Africans sold their fellows into slavery more often than Europeans less because of their different attitudes toward liberty than because of their different economic systems.

Broadly speaking, according to Thornton, the Harvard historian, “slaves were the only form of private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law.” In western and central Europe, the most important form of property was land, and the aristocracy consisted mainly of large landowners who could buy or sell property with little legal restriction. In western and central Africa, by contrast, land was effectively owned by the government—sometimes personally by the king, sometimes by a kinship or religious group, most often by the state itself, with the sovereign exercising authority in the manner of a chief executive officer. No matter which arrangement held true in a given polity, though, the land could not be readily sold or taxed. What
could
be sold and taxed was labor. Kings and emperors who wanted to enrich themselves thus didn’t think in terms of occupying land but of controlling people. Napoleon sent his army to seize Egypt. An African Napoleon would have sent his army to seize
Egyptians.

As was the case in much of Europe, Africans could be sentenced to slavery if they forfeited their membership in society by committing a crime. People could be enslaved, too, to repay a debt, whether incurred by themselves, their families, or their lineages. In times of drought or flood they pawned family members to other members of their extended families or clans. Sometimes they pawned
themselves.
But the most common way to acquire slaves was by sending troops across the border—that is, by war. Seventeenth-century West Africa was even more politically fragmented than Europe. A map prepared by Thornton shows more than sixty different states of wildly varying size. When leaders in one state wanted to aggrandize their status, a border was always nearby; it was easy to send out raiders. Captives would be taken by the king or given for sale to middlemen, who would take them to customers in North Africa or Europe.

In the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, when European ships first became a constant presence on African shores, the difference between the two systems, European and African, was more a matter of culture than economics. Europeans could buy and sell labor—that was the purpose, to cite one example, of indentured-service contracts. And Africans could effectively own land by controlling the labor from the people who used that land. In both cases the owners ended up profiting from the fruits of the land and labor, even if the route to those profits was different. In economic terms, Europeans could own one of the factors of production (land), whereas Africans could own another (labor). Both systems gave owners the right to claim part or all of the products of that labor. Still, they were far from identical. One big distinction is that labor can be taken from one place to another in a way that land cannot. Labor is portable—a key factor for the later development of the slave trade.

Because labor was the main form of property in West Africa, rich West Africans almost by definition owned a lot of slaves. Plantations were rare in that part of the world—coastal West Africa’s soil and climate typically won’t support them—so big groups of slaves rarely were found working in fields as was common in American sugar or tobacco plantations. Instead slaves were soldiers, servants, or construction workers, building roads and fences and barns. Often enough they did almost nothing; wealthy, powerful slave owners kept more slaves than they needed, in the way that wealthy, powerful landowners in Europe would pile up unused land. In addition, much slave labor consisted of occasional work performed as a tax or tribute.

Foreign observers noticed that the surplus and tribute slaves didn’t always have to work hard or for long periods of time, and they often concluded that African slavery was inherently less brutal than slavery in the Americas. In terms of long-term survival, this seems to have been true. On a tobacco plantation in the Americas, slaves who couldn’t work had no value, and were treated that way. The same slaves would have some value in Africa—they were adornments to the owner, in somewhat the same manner that diamond necklaces are valuable despite their lack of practical use. Even the oldest, most infirm slaves could wear fine clothes and walk in a procession, chanting praises of their masters. Or they could simply be interesting to their owners. For several years the king of Dahomey had an utterly useless palace slave who had been seized as a debt repayment: a hapless Briton named Bulfinch Lamb, whom the monarch enjoyed talking to. Moreover, African slaves were more likely to be granted liberty after a period of service than they were in the Americas, both because captives often had a kin connection to their captors and because as subjects they were still valuable to the monarch (freed slaves were a total loss to plantation owners if they were still capable of work). The two factors mitigated the callousness of the institution, helping to satisfy Adam Smith’s economic objections to slavery. Still, one suspects the Africans wrested from their homes in military raids would not have celebrated the humanity of the system.

When Europeans arrived, they easily tapped into the existing slave trade. African governments and merchants who were already shipping human beings could increase production to satisfy the foreigners’ demands. Sometimes political leaders would hike criminal penalties to obtain slaves. Scofflaws, tax cheats, political exiles, unwanted immigrants—all went in the hopper. Usually, though, armies were sent to raid other nations. Or soldiers could abduct an important person in a neighboring polity and demand a ransom of slaves. If demand increased still further, private traders might seize captives without approval, angering the state. If no other source was available, Africans bought slaves from Europeans. In the seventeenth century, the Yale historian Robert Harms has estimated, Europeans sold forty to eighty thousand slaves to Africans in what is now Ghana.

African demand was as important as European demand in the growth of the trade. When the flintlock replaced the undependable matchlock at the end of the seventeenth century, Africans were as keen to acquire the new guns as the Indians in Georgia and Carolina. In April 1732, traders from the rapidly growing Asante empire appeared at the Dutch fort of Elmina, in Ghana. They had a convoy of captives which they demanded to exchange for guns. Frightened by the threatening tone of the conversation, Harms wrote, Elmina’s “governor-general sent a desperate circular to all the other forts ordering that all flintlocks be sent to Elmina at once.” Asante had become the dominant regional power by a calculated exchange of slaves for guns and gunpowder. The waves of slavery that fueled Asante’s arms buildup, Harms remarked, “account for much of the rise in Dutch slave exports in the 1720s.”

African merchants bought slaves from African armies, raiders, and pirates and paid Africans to convey them to African-run holding tanks. Once the contract was arranged, Africans loaded the slaves aboard the ships, which often had crews with significant numbers of Africans. Other Africans supplied the slave ships with food, rope, water, and timber for the voyage out. Europeans naturally played a role: they were customers, the demand side of the basic economic equation. A few even braved the African coast, marrying Africans; their children frequently became negotiators and middlemen in the African slave trade. A combination of disease and watchful African armies otherwise kept them confined to outposts on the edge of the continent.
¹

Tiny outposts, for the most part. The Dutch West Indies Company long held a legal monopoly on the Dutch slave trade, shipping out about 220,000 captives by 1800. Elmina, its African headquarters, had a European population that rarely exceeded four hundred, and was usually smaller. Three miles away was Gold Coast, the biggest base of the English Royal African Company, which had an equivalent legal monopoly on the English slave trade. From its docks left tens of thousands of enchained men, women, and children. Yet Gold Coast had fewer than a hundred foreign inhabitants. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European maps proudly depicted African’s Atlantic coast as bristling with Danish, Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish forts, garrisons, and trading posts. But most of the stars on the maps had fewer than ten expatriate residents and many had fewer than five. The principality of Whydah, in today’s Benin, exported 400,000 people in the first quarter of the eighteenth century—it was the most important depot in the Atlantic slave trade in that time. Not one hundred Europeans lived there permanently. The largest groups of foreigners were the slavers who camped on the beach as they waited to fill their ships with human cargo.

Yet these minute stations were the catalytic points for an enormous change. In the past, most African slaveholders had known something about their slaves’ previous lives. Sometimes they were related to their bondsmen, distant cousins or in-laws; other times they understood exactly what familial, lineage, or tribal obligation had resulted in their enslavement. Even prisoners of war had been obtained in a known location, in a known conflict. Chattel slavery on colonial plantations, by contrast, made slaves anonymous—they were, so to speak, something bought in a store, selected purely on physical characteristics, like so many cans of soup. (In account books, slavers called their human cargo “pieces,” a revealing term.) European slaveholders usually didn’t even see their human property; they were thousands of miles away, safe from disease in London, Paris, and Lisbon. When they wanted to expand production of sugar or tobacco, they borrowed money from equally distant financiers and dispatched written instructions to acquire so many pieces at such-and-such a price. This transformation was not understood as it occurred. But it removed a bond, however tenuous, between slave and owner. No longer were captives an owner’s relatives or vanquished enemies. Instead they were anonymous units of labor, production inputs on a balance sheet, to be disposed of purely according to an estimate of their future economic value.

Hovering in their vessels along the coast, Dutch, Portuguese, and English slavers thus had little knowledge about the origins of the unhappy men and women on their ships. The colonists who rushed to buy their cargo on the quays of Jamestown, Cartagena, and Salvador had even less. According to Thornton, “only a handful of American slave owners seem to have actually known … that many thousands of them were prisoners of war.” When captive soldiers organized escapes and rebellions, some owners learned the import of their military backgrounds. From the beginning, American slave owners were dogged by the problem that their army of slaves could be an enslaved army.

The first bondsmen in Hispaniola came mainly from the civil war–torn Jolof empire in what is now Senegal and Gambia. It seems likely that many of the slaves sent to the Caribbean were POWs—military men. In any case Spanish records note that the first large-scale slave revolt in the Americas was led by Jolofs. It occurred on Christmas Day, 1521, at a sugar mill owned by Diego Colón, son and heir of the admiral. About forty slaves raided a cattle ranch, killed several celebrating Spaniards, burned down a few buildings, and took numerous prisoners, including a dozen Indian slaves. Colón assembled a cavalry force that charged the renegades. The classic response for foot soldiers facing horses is to bunch together tightly, spears facing out from a defensive wall—the tactic used by Greek infantry to win the battles of Marathon and Plataea. Despite their lack of weapons, the slaves did exactly that, their line holding together until the third charge. Eventually the renegade captains fell. Survivors were hunted down and hanged along the road to deter other would-be troublemakers.

The Spaniards’ troubles were not over. Even as the bodies dangled along the highway, a Taino leader called Enriquillo was setting up a European-free village in the southwestern mountains. Enriquillo, a devout Christian who had been taught by Franciscan monks, was initially co-opted by the
encomienda
system. Exactly as its designers had hoped, he sent out his people to work in exchange for status and trade goods. But Enriquillo’s trustee—his
encomendero
—didn’t like having to negotiate with him for workers. In a fit of anger the
encomendero
assaulted Enriquillo’s wife and stole his horse. The Taino man furiously confronted him. As the Indian advocate Bartolomé de las Casas tells the story, the
encomendero
reacted to Enriquillo’s protests by threatening to beat him with a club. The beating, he mocked, would complete the proverb: it would add injury to insult.

Enriquillo decamped for the hills with the rest of his family and a handful of followers. Escaped Africans and other Taino joined the revolt, swelling its numbers to perhaps five hundred. The maroons built a covert village in the hills that the Spaniards hunted in vain for more than a decade. Tired of the escapees’ raids, the colonists finally negotiated a treaty in 1533. The Spaniards promised to obey the
encomendero
law and respect Enriquillo’s status if his rebels would return to their homes. Enriquillo and other Taino accepted the deal—but their African allies did not. Led by one Sebastian Lemba, they refused to come back.