1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [59]
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.
In time Carolina grew famous as a slave importer, a place where the slave ships arrived from Africa and the captives, dazed and sick, were hustled to auction. But for its first four decades the colony was mainly a slave exporter—the place from where captive Indians were sent to the Caribbean, Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts. Data on Indian shipments are scarce, because colonists, wanting to avoid taxes and regulations, shipped them on small vessels and kept few records. (The big slaving companies in Europe didn’t have this choice.) From the fragmentary evidence, Gallay has estimated that Carolina merchants bought between thirty and fifty thousand captive Indians between 1670 and 1720. Most of these must have been exported, given the much lower number found by the Carolina census. In the same period, ships in Charleston unloaded only 2,450 Africans (some came overland from Virginia, though).3
Here notice a striking geographical coincidence. By 1700, English colonies were studded along the Atlantic shore from what would become Maine to what would become South Carolina. Northern colonies coexisted with Algonkian-speaking Indian societies that had few slaves and little interest in buying and selling captives; southern colonies coexisted with former Mississippian societies with many slaves and considerable experience in trading them. Roughly speaking, the boundary between these two types of society was Chesapeake Bay, not far from what would become the boundary between slave and non-slave states in the United States. Did the proximity of Indian societies with slaves to sell help grease the skids for what would become African slavery in the South? Was the terrible conflict of the U.S. Civil War a partial reflection of a centuries-old native cultural divide? The implication is speculative, but not, it seems to me, unreasonable.
In any case, the Indian slave trade was immensely profitable—and very short-lived. By 1715 it had almost vanished, a victim in part of its own success. As Carolina’s elite requested more and more slave raids, the Southeast became engulfed in warfare, destabilizing all sides. Victimized Indian groups acquired guns and attacked Carolina in a series of wars that the colony barely survived. Working in groups, Indian slaves proved to be unreliable, even dangerous employees who used their knowledge of the terrain against their owners. Rhode Island denounced