The Other Slavery (3 page)

Beyond the question of numbers, I became intrigued by some of the unique features of Indian enslavement. For instance, in stark contrast to the African slave trade, which consisted primarily of adult males, the majority of Indian slaves were actually women and children. In this way, the two slaveries seem like mirror images. Indian slave prices from such diverse regions as southern Chile, New Mexico, and the Caribbean reveal a premium paid for women and children over adult males. As noted by the New Mexico Indian agent James Calhoun, Indian women could be worth up to fifty or sixty percent more than males. What explains this significant and persistent price premium? Sexual exploitation and women’s reproductive capabilities are part of the answer. In this regard, Indian slavery constitutes an obvious antecedent to the sex traffic that occurs today. But there were other reasons too. In nomadic Indian societies, men specialized in activities less useful to European colonists, such as hunting and fishing, than women, whose traditional roles included weaving, food gathering, and child rearing. Some early sources also indicate that women were considered better suited to domestic service, as they were thought to be less threatening in the home environment. And just as masters wanted docile women, they also showed a clear preference for children. Children were more adaptable than grown-ups, learned languages more easily, and in the fullness of time
could even identify with their captors. Indeed, one of the most striking features of this form of bondage is that Indian slaves could eventually become part of the dominant society. Unlike those caught up in African slavery, which was a legally defined institution passed down from one generation to the next, Indian slaves could become menials, or servants, and with some luck attain some independence and a higher status even in the course of one life span (see
chapter 2
).

Another fascinating feature of the traffic of Natives has to do with the involvement of the Indians themselves. As noted earlier, prior to European contact Native Americans practiced various forms of captivity and enslavement. With the arrival of Europeans, they naturally began offering captives to the newcomers. At first Indians occupied a subordinate position in the emerging regional networks of enslavement, serving as guides, informants, intermediaries, guards, and sometimes junior partners, generally dependent on the Europeans’ markets and slaving networks. Europeans had the upper hand because of their superior war technology—specifically, horses and firearms—which allowed them to prey on Indian societies almost at will. What started as a European-controlled enterprise, however, gradually passed into the hands of Native Americans. As Indians acquired horses and weapons of their own, they became independent providers. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, powerful equestrian societies had taken control of much of the traffic. In the Southwest, the Comanches and Utes became regional suppliers of slaves to other Indians as well as to the Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans. The Apaches, who had early on been among the greatest victims of enslavement, transformed themselves into successful slavers. In colonial times, Apaches had been hunted down and marched in chains to the silver mines of Chihuahua. But as Spanish authority crumbled in the 1810s and the mining economy fell apart during the Mexican era, the Apaches turned the tables on their erstwhile masters. They raided Mexican communities, took captives, and sold them in the United States.
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So persistent and widespread was Indian slavery that ending it proved nearly impossible. The Spanish crown prohibited Native bondage under all circumstances in 1542, but the traffic continued. More
than a century later, in the waning decades of the seventeenth century, the Spanish monarchs launched an empire-wide campaign to free all Indian slaves. But this precocious crusade also fell short of what increasingly appeared to be an unattainable goal. In the early nineteenth century, Mexico proscribed all forms of bondage and extended citizenship to the Indians. Yet Indian slavery persisted. One of the most revealing aspects of this other slavery is that since it had no legal basis, it was never formally abolished like African slavery. After the Civil War, the U.S. Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting both “slavery” and “involuntary servitude.” Although the inclusion of the latter term opened the possibility of the liberation of all Indians held in bondage, in the end the U.S. Supreme Court opted for a narrow interpretation of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments that focused on African Americans and generally excluded Indians. It would require the involvement of Congress, President Andrew Johnson, and some of the most dedicated abolitionists and colorful figures of the post–Civil War era to bring some relief to a people who had long been subjected to one of the worst forms of bondage. Even so, the other slavery continued through the end of the nineteenth century and in some remote areas well into the twentieth century. Disguised as debt peonage, which stretched the limits of accepted labor institutions and even posed as legal work, this other slavery was the direct forerunner of the forms of bondage practiced today.

The more I learned, the more I became convinced that the other slavery had been a defining aspect of North American societies. And yet it has been almost completely erased from our historical memory. At last count, there were more than fifteen thousand books on African slavery, whereas only a couple of dozen specialized monographs were devoted to Indian slavery. To be sure, scholars of Latin America have broached the topic of labor coercion in considerable detail. But such work is often subdivided under various rubrics such as
encomiendas
(grants of Indians given to meritorious Spanish overlords) and
repartimientos
(compulsory labor drafts to which Indians were subjected), which are generally distinguished from outright enslavement. The end result is a failure to grasp the common threads running through all these institutions and
gain a better appreciation of their combined scope. The consequences are plainly visible today. Whenever the conversation turns to slavery, people typically imagine black slaves. Hardly ever does anyone think of Indians. It is as if each group fits into a neat historical package: Africans were enslaved, and Indians either died off or were dispossessed and confined to reservations.

Such an oversimplification is troublesome, because Indian slavery actually explains a great deal about the shared history of Mexico and the United States and casts new light on even familiar events. If we want to find answers to such varied questions as why the Pueblo Indians launched a massive rebellion in 1680 and drove the Spaniards out of New Mexico; why the Comanches and Utes became so dominant in large areas of the West; why the Apache chief Geronimo hated Mexicans so much; why article 11 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo prohibited Americans from purchasing “Mexican captives held by the savage tribes”; why California, Utah, and New Mexico legalized Indian slavery, disguising it as servitude or debt peonage; or why so many Navajos appear in New Mexico’s baptismal records in the aftermath of Colonel Kit Carson’s Navajo campaign of 1863–1864, we have to come to terms with the reality of this other slavery. Anyone who reads about the history of northern Mexico or the American Southwest will invariably run into indigenous rebellions prompted by exploitation, raids on Indian communities, and labor coercion. And yet it remains hard to see the forest for the trees. Lacking a sense of the overarching system of enslavement, it is impossible to put such scattered and localized practices in their proper places, just as it would be extremely difficult to make sense of the kidnappings or intertribal warfare of West Africa without reference to the transatlantic slave trade. With
The Other Slavery,
I hope to provide a broad but detailed portrait of the system of Native enslavement that loomed over North America for four centuries and is a key missing piece of this continental history.

Before embarking on this exploration, I feel compelled to issue two caveats. First, this book does not offer a running history of Indian slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Such a gargantuan task—the equivalent of writing the history of African slavery in the New World—could
not be accomplished in twenty or even fifty volumes. Instead, I focus on some areas that experienced intense slaving. Thus the story begins in the Caribbean, continues through central and northern Mexico, and ends in the American Southwest—with occasional glimpses of the larger context. And even within this restricted geography, I limit myself to examining moments when the evidence is particularly abundant or when the traffic of Indians underwent significant change.

The second caveat concerns the definition of Indian slavery. Who exactly counts as an Indian slave? The honest answer is that no simple definition is possible. Although some scholars of African slavery have attempted to specify the defining qualities of the “peculiar institution,” such an exercise is very difficult to complete when confronted with the extremely variable labor practices to which Native Americans were subjected. Initially, Indian slavery was legal, and therefore the victims of this traffic were clearly labeled as slaves in the documentation. But after the Spanish crown prohibited the enslavement of Indians, owners resorted to a variety of labor arrangements, terms, and subterfuges—such as encomiendas, repartimientos, convict leasing, and debt peonage—to get around the law. Although these forms of labor are impossible to fit into a simple definition, they generally shared four traits that made them akin to enslavement: forcible removal of the victims from one place to another, inability to leave the workplace, violence or threat of violence to compel them to work, and nominal or no pay. Like a deadly virus, Indian slavery mutated into these strains and became extraordinarily resistant through the centuries.

In this book, therefore, I use the phrase “the other slavery” in the double sense that it targeted Native Americans rather than Africans and that it involved a range of forms of captivity and coercion. Some scholars may object to this broad usage, which glosses over conventional labor distinctions, but my reasons are threefold. First, since masters and officials devised these newfangled terms and practices to retain control of Native Americans when formal enslavement was no longer possible, it makes sense to lump them together in recognition of their ultimate purpose, which was to forcibly extract labor from Natives. Kaleidoscopic labor categories have long prevented us from assessing the labor
system as a whole and making fundamental distinctions between voluntary and coerced work. Second, these labor practices may have seemed quite distinct to officials and masters at the time, and continue to seem so to researchers today, but they were decidedly less so to the victims themselves, who experienced the everyday reality of labor coercion with little or no compensation—whether on account of debt, because they had allegedly committed a crime, or for some other circumstance. The third reason is that a similar multiplicity of coercive arrangements is still prevalent today in what is often called “the new slavery.” There is no single institution or business model in the contemporary trafficking of humans; instead, there are several related practices adapted to different regions of the world and types of trade, such as sex trafficking or child labor. And even though these modern forms of bondage cannot be neatly defined or reduced to fit into a single all-encompassing definition, they are no less real. It was no different with the other slavery.
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1

Caribbean Debacle

I
NDIAN SLAVERY POSES
a fundamental demographic puzzle. The first Europeans in the New World found a thriving archipelago: islands large and small covered by lush vegetation, teeming with insects and birds, and alive with humans. The Caribbean was “a beehive of people,” wrote Bartolomé de Las Casas, the most well known of the region’s early chroniclers, who accompanied several expeditions of discovery. “As we saw with our own eyes,” he added, “all of these islands were densely populated with natives called Indians.” The people who greeted Columbus were indeed plentiful. Modern scholars have proposed wildly varying population estimates for the Caribbean, ranging from one hundred thousand to ten million. But while the initial population is debatable, no one doubts the cataclysmic collapse that followed. By the 1550s, a mere sixty years, or two generations, after contact, the Natives so memorably described by Columbus as “affectionate and without malice” and having “very straight legs and no bellies” had ceased to exist as a people, and many Caribbean islands became eerie uninhabited paradises.
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As every schoolchild knows, epidemic disease was a major reason for this devastation. Europeans introduced pathogens to which the Natives had little or no resistance, triggering “virgin soil” epidemics. It was like “dropping lighted matches into tinder,” wrote Alfred W. Crosby in his pioneering work on the depopulation of early America. Measles,
malaria, yellow fever, influenza, and above all smallpox ravaged the indigenous population in deadly bouts that spread across the islands. Surely some Indians succumbed in pitched battles against the white intruders, who, after all, possessed superior steel weapons and unmatched mobility with their horses. But by far the Spaniards’ most devastating weapon was germs.
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And yet there is a profound disconnection between this biological explanation and what sixteenth-century Europeans reported. Bartolomé de Las Casas, who arrived in the New World in 1502, averred that greed was the reason Christians “murdered on such a vast scale,” killing “anyone and everyone who has shown the slightest sign of resistance,” and subjecting “all males to the harshest and most iniquitous and brutal slavery that man has ever devised for oppressing his fellow-men, treating them, in fact, worse than animals.” It is true that Las Casas was a passionate defender of Indian rights and therefore had every reason to dwell on Spanish brutality. But we do not have to take his word for it. Early chroniclers, crown officials, and settlers all understood the extinction of the Indians as a result of warfare, enslavement, famine, and overwork, as well as disease. King Ferdinand of Spain—no Indian champion and probably the most well-informed individual of that era—believed that so many Natives died in the early years because, lacking beasts of burden, the Spaniards “had forced the Indians to carry excessive loads until they broke them down.”
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