Chapter 3, Origins of Slavery and Minority Status

1
Chapter 3, Origins of Slavery and Minority Status

• Origins of Slavery
• Noel and Blauner Hypotheses
• Creation of American Slavery
• Creation of Minority Status

2
The Atlantic Slave Trade System and Colonial
Slavery

• The English were late-comers into African slave
  trade.
• The first were the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and
  then the English (1672 the Duke of Yorks Royal
  African Co ended in 1698) slavery also lagged in
  English colonies.
• The foundations of South Atlantic Plantation
  System was laid by the Portuguese in Brazil
  (which was also the last place on the globe to
  end slavery)

3
African Slavery

• Very brutal slavery in the Tagaza salt mines and
  royal farms
• Trans-Sarahan slave trade East African slave
  exports to Muslim world, to India and China
• Sources of Slaves warfare, debt slavery and
  penal slavery

4
Rise of Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade System

• Mediterranean sugar plantation the original
  model a labor-intensive system
• Migrates to Atlantic Islands (Madeira, Azores,
  Sao Thome) then to Brazil and Caribbean Islands
  Africans used co-existently with Indian and White
  labor
• Surging Caribbean and Latin American demand
  tobacco, sugar and coffee plantations mining
• How did a handful of European slave merchants
  involve Africa in the trans-Atlantic slave trade?
  The victimizer-victim model the mutual
  partnership model

5
Colonial servitude v slavery

• Three times the number of African come to the
  Americas than Europeans
• 5 to North America, 90 to South America and the
  Caribbeans 1690-1760
• However, in north American there are twice as
  many Europeans than Africans
• Resulting conclusionlarge mortality rate/low
  birth rate--Cheaper to buy new slaves than to
  raise slave families--20 million die, beyoond
  those who do not survive the middle passate--50
  survival rate once in the colonies
• Rhode Island is the slave trade center of the
  colony. Stock Raising and Ranches for the
  sale and trade of slaves

6
Two Polars of African slavery in Colonial North
America

• Slave owningslaves have greater accessibility to
  freedom more/greater legal protections in the
  courts and owning property more interracial
  mingling greater personal living space economic
  niches
• Slave Societymore repressive and openly racially
  prejudiced no legal protections race
  commingling tabooed and outlawed minimal
  personal space. Slaves represent 20 of
  population, slavery is central underpinnings of
  economy.

7
Distribution, Ownership and Applications

• White owners minority of Southern whites
• Owned slaves (385,000 out of 1,500,00)
• 25 of Southern households owned 1 or more slaves
• A smaller number (planters) owned 20 or more
  slaves, 46,274 families
• Only 2292 families owned 100 or more slaves
• Most slaves lived and worked on plantations and
  farms.
• In 1860, 4 million slaves in America 2 million
  worked on plantations (50), 160,000 lived on
  farms (40)
• This is a minority system with a dominant place
  in American societyso why did a majority of
  people support a system in the minority?
• DeTocqueville, Democracy in America, In the
  Southern, there are no families so poor as not to
  have slaves.

8
Regional Concentration

• 312,000 million slaves (over half) lived in the
  Deep South.
• South Carolina had 57 of the Deep South slaves,
  8 slaves to 1 white in the low country where
  Delaware there was only 1.5 slaves

9
Slave Treatment

• The benign-treatment school Ulrich B. Phillips,
  American Negro Slavery, 1925
• The harsh treatment school Kenneth Stampp, The
  Peculiar Institution, 1956
• Return to the benign treatment school Eugene D
  Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll The World the
  Slaves Made, 1974

10
Southern Rationale for Slavery

• Slavery as a positive good
• Intellectual blockade against anti-slavery
  literature and agitation
• Psychological Intimidation
• Scriptural Justification

11
Contact and Colonization
12
Ethnocentrism and Miscommunication

• Englishmens attitude of cultural superiority led
  to the greatest problems between the two peoples.
• The English thought that the Indians were lazy
  because they hunted. To the English hunting was a
  sport, not a means of survival.
• They looked upon the Indians misuse of the
  land as an abomination. Indians in Virginia

13
John Smith, after an attack on his village by
Indians

• will be good for the Plantation, because now we
  have just cause to destroy them by all meanes
  possible.

14
Smallpox epidemic in Mass 1633/34

• without this remarkable and terrible stroke of
  God upon the natives, we would with much more
  difficulty have found room, and at far greater
  charge have obtained and purchased land.

15
William Bradford, Puritan minister, on the
victory and the massacre of the 2nd and final
Pequot village

• it was a fearful sight to see them thus frying
  in the fire and the streams of blood quenching
  the same, and the horrible was the stink and
  scent thereof but the victory seemed a sweet
  sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to
  God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them,
  thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and
  given them so speedy a victory over so proud and
  insulting an enemy.

16
Andrew Jackson regarding Westward Expansion

• What good man would prefer a county covered with
  forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to
  our extensive republic, studded with cities,
  towns and prosperous farms, embellished with all
  the improvements which art can devise or industry
  execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy
  people, and filled with all the blessings of
  liberty, civilization and religion?