Beyond 1619: The Atlantic Origins of American Slavery 1512825018, 9781512825015

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART I. Origins
1. African Slaves to American Settlers
2. “The Unbridled Greed of the Conquistadors”
3. Monopolizing Violence
4. First Enslavements and First Emancipations
PART II. Mobility
5. The Life and Legacy of Francisco Carreño
6. Warfare, Imperial Competition, and Serial Displacement in the Seventeenth-CenturyCaribbean
PART III. Construction
7. The Wife, the “Whore,” and the “Wench”
8. Of Differences and Diagnoses
9. Black Loyalists in Sierra Leone and Black Royalism in the Revolutionary Atlantic
NOTES
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Citation preview

Beyond 1619

THE EARLY MODERN AMERICAS Peter C. Mancall, Series Editor Volumes in the series explore neglected aspects of early modern history in the western hemisphere. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the Atlantic World from 1450 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the USC-­Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. A list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Beyond 1619 The Atlantic Origins of American Slavery

Edited by Paul J. Polgar, Marc H. Lerner, and Jesse Cromwell

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www​.upenn​.edu​/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Hardcover ISBN: 978-­1-­5128-­2501-­5 eBook ISBN: 978-­1-­5128-­2502-­2 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

CONTENTS

Introduction. Repositioning Racial Slavery’s Rise: An Atlantic World Story Paul J. Polgar, Marc H. Lerner, and Jesse Cromwell

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Part I. Origins Chapter 1. African Slavers to American Settlers: The Making of African Americans One Hundred Years Before 1619 Erika Denise Edwards Chapter 2. “The Unbridled Greed of the Conquistadors”: The Real Provisión of 1530 and the Legality of Native Enslavement in the Southern Caribbean Rebecca Anne Goetz

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Chapter 3. Monopolizing Violence: African Slave Trading Companies and the Suppression of Native Slavery in the Americas Brett Rushforth

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Chapter 4. First Enslavements and First Emancipations: Slavery and Capitalism in Early Colonial Virginia, 1547–1660 John N. Blanton

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Part II. Mobility Chapter 5. The Life and Legacy of Francisco Carreño: Practicing and Protecting Freedom Between the Canary Islands and New Spain in the Late Sixteenth Century Chloe L. Ireton

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Contents

Chapter 6. Warfare, Imperial Competition, and Serial Displacement in the Seventeenth-­Century Caribbean Casey Schmitt

104

Part III. Construction Chapter 7. The Wife, the “Whore,” and the “Wench”: Colonial Women and the Development of Racial Hierarchy in Seventeenth-­Century Barbados Jenny Shaw

119

Chapter 8. Of Differences and Diagnoses: Racializing Health and Framing Suffering in the American Atlantic Rana Hogarth

137

Chapter 9. Black Loyalists in Sierra Leone and Black Royalism in the Revolutionary Atlantic James Sidbury

150

Notes 171 Contributors 227 Index 231 Acknowledgments 241

INTRODUCTION

Repositioning Racial Slavery’s Rise An Atlantic World Story Paul J. Polgar, Marc H. Lerner, and Jesse Cromwell

Writing from England’s fledgling and fragile colony of Virginia during the winter of 1619–1620, the planter John Rolfe noted in passing something that would come to occupy a preeminent position in American history. In a letter to a Virginia Company official, Rolfe remarked that at some point in “the latter end of August” 1619, “20. and odd Negroes” had disembarked at Point Comfort, located at the southern edge of the peninsula where the James River meets the Chesapeake Bay. These captive Africans, almost certainly enslaved, became the first recorded persons of African descent to appear in British North America. Their arrival has served as the starting point in the history of slavery, race, and their legacies in what would become the United States. Yet Rolfe’s letter signifies neither the origin story of American slavery nor a uniquely British colonial North American tale. The moment Rolfe described, cataclysmic for the twenty some individuals who stepped foot in Virginia on that late August day, is a historically important one. But it is also a less singular event when placed on the far greater scale that is the Atlantic World.1 By 1619, an Atlantic slave trade that transported many thousands of African peoples into bondage in the Americas was already well established. Led by the Portuguese and adopted by the Spanish, this oceanic trade in an enslaved workforce fed the labor-­hungry colonies in what is now South America and the Caribbean, where the exploitation of African bondspersons had begun in the early sixteenth century. Indeed, the boat that carried the African captives who eventually ended up in Virginia had left Angola—the region of Africa which then served as one of the main sources of enslaved Africans in the

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Introduction

Americas—destined for Vera Cruz, Mexico. While Spain and Portugal then partook in a robust Atlantic slave trade, the English involvement at that time was limited to pirate raids that occasionally netted these privateers’ booty in the form of enslaved Africans. This was exactly what happened to the Angolans whose fate veered when the English privateering ships the White Lion and the Treasurer overtook the slaving vessel the Sáo Joáo Bautista in the Bay of Campeche and each gained possession of around twenty-­to-­thirty African bondspersons. The privateers then sailed to the colonial backwater of the Americas known as Virginia where, arriving first, the White Lion’s captain traded the Angolan captives he had commandeered for provisions. Whereas this transaction in human beings would come to take on epic meaning in the United States, at the time it unfolded, in a location far from the center stage of racial bondage’s development, it represented a minor occurrence that barely registered in the capacious, burgeoning system of Atlantic slavery.2 This more complete and nuanced rendering of that infamous summer day in 1619 colonial Virginia is only possible because of a wave of scholarship that has revolutionized our conception of early American slavery. Over the past two-­to-­three decades, historians have moved far beyond the confines of racial slavery’s emergence in a handful of British North American colonies.3 We have learned much more about the many influences on the British system of race-­based enslavement, stemming not only from Portuguese and Spanish justifications, but also from medieval Muslim conceptions of Black differences, Judeo-­Christian religious worldviews, and even ancient precedents for racial ideologies.4 We continue to learn about the many people of African descent who were forcibly brought across the Atlantic Ocean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and gain valuable perspective on their experiences throughout New World slave societies.5 We have benefitted from a richer Atlantic lens that includes several competing imperial powers—the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, and French—their complex interactions with Africa, and the dizzying collection of sites in the Americas in which slavery played a crucial part, along with the deep cast of characters that fill out the now expansive portrait of slavery in the whole of the early modern Americas.6 We know now that an exclusive focus on the enslavement of those of African descent overlooks the importance of Native slavery. The enslavement of Native peoples was far more widespread, and far more consequential for the history of slavery in the Americas, than previously believed.7 Moreover, the emphasis on 1619 has obscured as much as it has revealed about the long history of race and slavery in the Americas. As the historian

Introduction

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Michael Guasco has argued, an excessive focus on 1619 can be “more insidious than instructive”—in its implicit marginalization of the hundreds of thousands of Africans and people of African descent who were already present in the Americas; in its unabashedly narrow nationalist framework; in its parochial stress on an Anglophone, North American viewpoint; and in the way it underwrites the vantage point of Europeans and steals agency from those who were enslaved, making the latter objects rather than subjects in this history.8 Yet, if making 1619 the center of gravity in accounting for racial slavery’s origins has been abandoned in historical scholarship, the 1619 date itself has, paradoxically, only gained greater prominence in recent years. The 2019 launching of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project triggered a hotly contested and highly public exchange over the United States’ problematic relationship to slavery and race. The 1619 Project focused attention on American racial slavery and its enduing effects. By catapulting these issues into the public sphere, the 1619 Project has pressed Americans to confront the insidious history of race-­based slavery and its aftermath. In this it has served an invaluable educational function. But the project’s centering of the 1619 date, and the resulting debate that derived from this centering, has also acted to reinforce a parochial and proto-­nationalist framework that belies the rich body of hemispheric scholarship described above. As beneficial as the 1619 Project’s contributions have been in foregrounding the long shadow of American slavery and racism in the United States, the project has inadvertently narrowed our understanding of slavery, race, and their repercussions for a wider Atlantic World and, in the process, ironically reinforced an exceptionalist conception of American history. Indeed, absent from the knotty discourse the 1619 Project ignited has been any sustained examination of how a comparative analysis of racial slavery’s ascendance in the Western world furthers the public discussion. While persistent racism in twenty-­first-­century American society and politics promises to keep the issues tackled by the 1619 Project undeniably germane, this same emphasis on the 1619 date and its national connotations continues to limit our understanding of the larger history of which the 1619 moment is only one component. In fact, throughout the century before 1619, enslaved Africans served as auxiliary colonists, laborers, overseers, artisans, miners, and even conquistadors (among other roles) in locations far more consequential to European geopolitics than the early seventeenth-­century Chesapeake. Their work across the Americas continued long after Virginians struggled to understand how the chance arrival of the White Lion had altered their world.

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Introduction

Furthermore, many if not most of the enslaved laborers who toiled in North America after the 1619 disembarkation had been transshipped from other locales in the broader Americas. Appraising 1619 as just one link in a much larger chain of human racial classification, trafficking, and bondage not only places North American slavery in its proper scale hemispherically. It also opens new comparative and connective directions to understand 1619 vis-­à-­ vis older and larger slaveries.9 It was with this goal of branching out from the historical confines of an Anglo, North American–centric perspective, while looking beyond 1619 itself, that the Porter Fortune Symposium at the University of Mississippi convened. This volume showcases the scholarly fruits of the dialogue that followed. It recasts the origins, construction, and significance of racial slavery in exciting ways by demonstrating the intellectual payoff that comes when we shift our gaze from a national to an Atlantic framework. In seeking to more informatively anchor the growing enmeshment of racial slavery in depictions of our past and present, Beyond 1619: The Atlantic Origins of American Slavery makes three overarching contributions to the historical literature. First, it showcases the rich results possible when scholars examine and put into conversation multiple empires, regions, peoples, and cultures in order to get a more textured and holistic view of the rise of racial slavery in the Atlantic World. Here, the goal is not to put forth a singular narrative to take the place of 1619 but rather precisely the opposite—to disrupt and dislodge the more unitary, chronologically and geographically confined approach and, in turn, to further encourage research that applies the themes of origins and construction to a far broader historical plane. Second, this volume shows people of African descent as active agents in constructing and negotiating the contours of race, bondage, and freedom in the Atlantic World. The arrival in 1619 of Africans in Virginia, the essays reveal, is more than a flawed starting point for historical portrayals of racial slavery’s fashioning. This collection demonstrates how people of African descent were not the passive recipients of an evolving slave status. In fact, they actively utilized legal maneuvers to secure and maintain their own freedom and that of their kin, chose itinerancy meant to find safer and more advantageous living situations, and forged networks that provided mutual aid and vital information for the enslaved. In these ways, Africans fought against the pernicious racialization of their personhood. Third, in the most elemental sense, this book further solidifies the centrality of racial slavery, and contests over its rise, in nearly every nook and

Introduction

5

cranny of the early modern Atlantic World. Taken together, the chapters that follow illustrate how racial slavery was imbricated in settler colonialism, capitalism, and empire-­making; existed front and center in the colonizing activities of the English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and other empires; was essential to the experiences of Indigenous, African and African-­descended, and European peoples; was fundamental in the making of gender and racial ideologies; and spanned a multitudinous array of locales—from the Indies, to North, Central, and South America, even to Africa. There was no concerted pattern to this racialization. Ambiguities in borrowed, overlapping, and often contradictory legal terminology and vague social perceptions and pathologies of Blackness meant that defining who should be enslaved based on their innate qualities was a moving target. Asserting the centrality of racial slavery in such diffuse and all-­ encompassing terms is hardly novel. But painting racial slavery’s emergence on such a broad, hemispheric canvass, and in one compact volume, transcends narrow discourses of the 1619 moment that are structured in proto-­nationalist United States’ terms and casts aside an American exceptionalist framework for histories of slavery, racism, antiracism, freedom, and lasting inequalities. Part I of this volume begins a reevaluation of the place of 1619 in our understanding of the origins of race-­based plantation slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Situating the origins of racial slavery in the wider Atlantic World, this section has contributions from scholars of the French, Spanish, and British Atlantic, and highlights the geographical and chronological benefits of moving beyond 1619. The chapters reach back to the sixteenth-­century Spanish Atlantic, and illuminate the wider notions of the meaning of race, slavery, and emancipation that were circulating at the time, with ramifications for understanding the Atlantic World as a whole. Part I thus begins an important discussion about the origins of racial slavery in the Atlantic plantation system by pivoting away from a more narrow, British North American perspective. Erika Denise Edwards’s essay begins the volume by surveying the historiographical implications of enslaved Africans in Spanish America, whose arrival predated those disembarking in British North America by more than a century. Their lives as surrogate settlers, who also maintained itinerant diasporic connections, force us to rethink Blackness and African Americanism in a broader Americas framework prior to 1619. Edwards encourages scholars of Atlantic Africa, the slave trade, and slavery throughout the Americas to embrace the arrival of Africans to the Americas as an inclusive process that

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Introduction

elicits a shared African diasporic experience. She calls for a reexamination of the term African American, proposing a shift from an exclusive meaning that references slave descendants in the United States, to one with a more expansive understanding of Africans who became Americans throughout the Americas. This historiographical essay reinforces how many of the processes of forced migration, racial classification, and acculturation associated with later eras began much earlier, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Chapter 2, Rebecca Goetz reexamines the Real Provisión of 1530 in the Spanish Empire, which theoretically banned slavery, but did not stop the enslavement of Native peoples in practice. Goetz argues that the mere existence of this Provisión demonstrates more early abolitionist sentiment than is widely accepted. Goetz contextualizes the Provisión and explains its failure as largely due to the highly coordinated lobbying effort that slavers mounted in the Spanish Court to ensure that the ban was never enforced. Goetz concludes that examining the context in which the Provisión was written, as well as the resistance to it, exposes the darkest aspects of Spanish colonialism. Even though the Provisión theoretically outlawed the slaving of Native peoples, it did not attempt to abolish the institution of slavery itself, even before the law was rescinded entirely in 1534. Although Goetz recovers the outlines of a short-­term humanitarian argument against slaving in Spanish America, she demonstrates that the Provisión’s failure shaped imperial Spanish support for the continued process of enslaving human beings. The real battle, for Goetz, is whether the crown or the slavers would profit most from Spain’s conquests. In Chapter 3, Brett Rushforth points to the 1680s as an inflection point in the shift from Native slavery to a slave trade based on the enslavement of Africans. Rushforth asks the question, which to a large extent has been ignored, of why investors, slave traders, and officials redistributed their resources toward the expansion of the enslavement of African peoples in the late seventeenth century. Rushforth demonstrates that Native enslavement had been growing and was poised to expand further when the decision to invest in the transatlantic slave trade shifted the nature of New World slavery. He argues that financial incentives structured by the state caused African slave-­trading companies to act in particular ways which prioritized the transatlantic slave trade over the previously dominant enslavement of Native peoples. In the final chapter of Part I, we return to colonial Virginia in order to reconsider the classic historiographical interpretations. John Blanton argues that the development of slavery in early colonial Virginia was shaped by a conflict over capitalist household organization. He places the 1619 arrival of

Introduction

7

the first enslaved Africans into the context of Governor George Yeardley’s emancipation of the colony’s indentured servants earlier that year. Blanton demonstrates that this decision cemented the capitalist household as the basic unit of social and economic organization in the colony and set the stage for the development of chattel slavery. However, he also shows that this development was not the same throughout the Virginia colony and that the development of racial chattel slavery in Virginia was not inevitable. Part II of this volume explores the role of mobility in the formation of racial slavery. When applied to the study of slavery, mobility has mostly conjured up the transatlantic slave trade and the horrors of the Middle Passage. Yet new research on the development of racial difference in the Americas has stressed geographic fluidity and occupational permeability.10 The essays in Part II enrich this scholarly approach. In contrast to more siloed national histories of slavery—like those that emphasize 1619—the chapters in Part II investigate how mobility created wide-­ranging and transimperial connections that strengthened, but also ameliorated, racial slavery. They feature historical actors whose very presence in conflict zones, multi-­point migration networks, and legal suits eschews the one-­way-­voyage narrative. Free and enslaved Africans were part of immigrant stories of kinship and separation that Atlantic historiography has all too frequently centered around Europeans. Itinerancy could be the product of choice, but it also came from displacement, kidnapping, and warfare. Racially perceived traits often superseded the legal status of mobile people of color in white-­supremacist slave societies, contributing to vulnerability in their daily existences. The geographic reach of Africans within the Atlantic World also created rich streams of local knowledge, geopolitical news, and rumors. As these essays remind us, Africans, and the racial classification systems developing around them, were essential for intra-­and intercolonial connections binding together the Americas. In Chapter 5, Chloe Ireton follows the hundreds of free Black men and women who embarked from Castile to New Spain and settled in various regions between the port town of Veracruz and the city of México in the late sixteenth century. The history of free Blacks who circulated between different sites in New Spain, Ireton argues, casts light on how vast social webs operated among Black populations across the early Hispanic Atlantic. These webs are important for understanding how Black populations in New Spain and elsewhere fostered a rich intellectual exchange of information and knowledge. The connections Ireton identifies also encourage historians to trace the varied and sometimes contradictory views and experiences of Blackness in this

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Introduction

period. In contrast to the powerlessness of those later trafficked in the transatlantic slave trade, Ireton reminds us of the intentionality with which many sixteenth-­century Africans arranged their legal affairs and far-­reaching imperial networks. In Chapter 6, Casey Schmitt investigates how the marauding violence of interimperial warfare swept up Africans into new labor regimes and racial paradigms. Throughout the seventeenth-­century Caribbean, imperial competitors engaged in slave-­raiding as a means to hobble one another’s plantation economies. Schmitt argues that the martial chaos and shifting borders of this aqueous world opened up pathways to freedom for captives. Enslaved Africans, who predated those arriving to British North America, served as surrogate settlers while maintaining itinerant diasporic connections. In tracing the vulnerability of enslaved people to captivity and dislocation, even after their sale to Caribbean planters, Schmitt recasts the experiences of the captive Angolans in 1619 as part of a much longer trajectory of violence, piracy, and slavery in the Atlantic World. Slavery here factored into not just the chattel economies of the plantation world, but also into geopolitical rivalries. For generations, historians argued over the emergence of race as a definitive marker of institutional slavery in what became the United States, designating race-­making as a unidirectional undertaking in which people of African descent were defined apart from and acted upon by European colonizers. More recently, scholars have emphasized a broader geographical scope and longue durée approach, tracing how pivotal ideological elements of racial slavery in the Americas originated from a number of intellectual and cultural sources. Additionally, rather than characterizing racialization as something that happened to African descended people in the Atlantic World, historians have shown that people of color were not inert victims but rather critical participants in what should now be understood as a dynamic and fluid process that consistently remained unfinished. The essays in Part III of this volume represent and further reinforce this historiographical move beyond the constraints of the origins debate over the rise of race and slavery in British North America alone. These chapters demonstrate that the construction of race in Atlantic slave societies was unique, ongoing, and shaped by many actors in early modern transatlantic locales. One cannot look at any single place or time period for the birth of racial slavery because the die was never cast. Rather, the construction of racial slavery was, the authors of Part III show us, always contingent, continually contested, and repeatedly made, unmade, and remade by countless people in the Atlantic littoral.

Introduction

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Jenny Shaw’s essay, which opens Part III, provides a case in point for the rewards reaped when applying a multifocal view to race construction and its intersection with Atlantic slavery. Shaw surveys the experiences of three unnamed women—a merchant’s wife, an Irish servant, and an enslaved African—whose lives and labors entwined in a Bridgetown, Barbados household in the 1670s. The women emerge as mere traces in the written archive, the anonymous subjects of a handful of letters between a group of elite Irish brothers from Galway, some of whom had ventured into England’s Caribbean empire. Nonetheless, Shaw reconstructs the women’s experiences and the ways that the brothers deployed the women’s status in the service of bolstering their own rank and reputations. In doing so, Shaw shines new light on an old debate over the timing of the transition to racial slavery in the English Atlantic. Her chapter repositions the spotlight onto the intimate spaces within colonial households, where race construction materialized, thereby uncovering the role women played in the building of hierarchies of race and labor in the English colonial world. While Shaw underscores that ideas of race and power were entangled with categories of gender in the early colonial Caribbean, in Chapter 8, Rana Hogarth captures how perceptions of health and the supposed natures of African and European peoples led to hypotheses about human differences that emerged as justifications as to whom should be enslaved. Hogarth redirects our exploration of race construction in Atlantic World slavery away from proslavery theorists in the US South and toward the role of physicians in the Caribbean, whose observations on alleged differences in sickness and health between white and Black people helped make racial differences real. According to Hogarth, these physicians were instrumental agents in creating the idea that racial differences did exist and were readily discernible when considered in relation to health. Rather than the simple result of proslavery propaganda, this attention to racial difference via sickness and health, Hogarth concludes, emerged as a by-­product of Eurocentric logic and out of an impulse to make sense of the morbidity and mortality in the new disease environments of the Americas. In this way, race-­making was far more than skin deep, as medical practitioners tied race and health to claims about fundamental differences between the bodily constitutions of Black and white people. Like Hogarth and Shaw, James Sidbury challenges orthodox interpretations of race construction in Atlantic World slavery. By taking readers to the late eighteenth century, Sidbury reveals the experiences of an overlooked set of actors whose perspectives do not fit the dominant depiction of race,

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Introduction

slavery, and abolition in the Age of Revolution. In this volume’s final chapter, Sidbury pushes back against the presentation of American Revolutionary ideology as sparking a progressive struggle to overcome racial exclusions and thus make good on the promises of republican doctrines that were at their core egalitarian. Instead, pointing out that African and African descended people living through the Age of Revolution frequently sided with monarchies rather than republics, Sidbury profiles Black British Loyalists from Nova Scotia who immigrated to Sierra Leone after the American Revolution and who sought corporate self-­determination within British legal regimes. Their loyalism and emigration stories reveal more pessimistic visions of the early American republic’s potential to foster liberty than normally acknowledged. Their experiences also unsettle deep-­seated historiographical tendencies to privilege republicanism as the ideological prism through which to view struggles for Black rights in the greater Atlantic. As a group, the chapters in Part III unlock fresh, panoramic vistas on the processes of race construction and their multilayered relationships to slavery and its fallout in the Atlantic World. Considered as a whole, the essays in this book take a transimperial and transnational approach to the origins and construction of racial slavery in ways that open new avenues of analysis to a broad group of historians. Scholars of the United States will appreciate a set of essays that goes beyond the boundaries of the thirteen colonies and offers comparative and overlapping contexts to the traditional 1619 narrative. For historians of the Atlantic World, the volume provides coverage of the British, Spanish, and French Atlantic constructions of racial difference through an integrative methodology. Historians of slavery, the slave trade, and the African diaspora will find new thematic and theoretical approaches to these topics through the volume’s diverse subject matter and geographical focus. The chapters that follow do not center on 1619, but their wide-­ranging regional and chronological focus enriches the vitally relevant discussion that has grown out of an emphasis on that date and its consequences for the course of American history. Ultimately, this volume’s essays, in their geographical, chronological, and thematic breadth, reorient 1619 as an event of historical significance and national origin. This reorienting is driven by a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, 1619 is only a tiny, and often historiographically disconnected, piece of the hemispheric origin story of racial slavery. The White Lion’s arrival in Virginia was but one drop in a vast ocean of human bondage. Other racial slaveries came before it in locales too numerous to mention. By comparison to immense centers of slavery like Brazil and the Caribbean, or even

Introduction

11

more modest territories where bondage proliferated, like Mexico and Peru, demographic and territorial expansion of the institution in the Chesapeake and British North America was paltry for decades after 1619. Clearly then, there exists a potential for parochialism in privileging 1619 in the origins of American slavery. On the other hand, this volume maintains that spotlighting 1619 is valuable for how it signals that the colonies that would become the United States, like most other spaces in the Americas, were built in large part upon inconsistent classification systems that consigned certain populations to kidnapping, forced labor, torture, rape, and murder with impunity. Similar to other locations of enslavement, the thirteen colonies, and later the United States, concocted their own unique parameters of what slavery meant and why one would be enslaved. Indeed, it would have been truly exceptional for the United States not to have been built upon this foundation. The essays in this book, therefore, portray a complex process of racializing slavery that was hemispheric in scope and generative to the subjugation and resistance embodied in the 1619 moment. Only when placed within the kaleidoscopic purview of the Atlantic World can we fully comprehend and appreciate the meaning and legacy of the year 1619.

PA R T I Origins

CHAPTER 1

African Slaves to American Settlers The Making of African Americans One Hundred Years Before 1619 Erika Denise Edwards

In 1619 “20. and odd Negroes” disembarked in Virginia, marking the arrival of Africans to (what would become) the United States. Their descendants and other Black immigrants who came to the United States would later be labeled African American, an exclusive label that has perpetuated an exceptional history in comparison to the rest of the Americas. It is time to make this identity more inclusive of the larger Black American experience. This chapter seeks to complicate African American history by exploring the period of arrival of Africans and their descendants to the Americas. It provides a general overview and synthesis of Africans and their descendants’ arrival to Spanish America one hundred years prior to their disembarkation in what is today the United States. In doing so, this chapter provides a more comprehensive meaning to the arrival of Africans to the Americas, to the meaning of Blackness and the foundations of racial slavery throughout the Americas, and to the integral roles that Africans played in the development of the Americas. As a result, the 1619 arrival of “20. and odd Negros” can be viewed as an integral part of a well-­established transatlantic slave trade that had already existed for more than one hundred years. As Linda Heywood and John Thornton, historians of Atlantic Africa, have argued, Angolan captives who disembarked at “Point Comfort were captured on the high seas from a Portuguese vessel making its way from Luanda, Angola, to Vera Cruz, Mexico,” a prominent slave port during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Moreover, Heywood and Thornton stress this was not a unique occurrence, but rather “all colonies of

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Origins

northern Europeans” procured their slaves in this manner.1 The abrupt shift in their trajectory in 1619 made these Angolan captives more than just slaves; as David Wheat has argued for the Spanish Caribbean, the captives became settlers. Africans in Virginia marked not a beginning but a continuation of the colonization of the Americas, which first began with African disembarkation on the island of Hispaniola and which started the process of making Africans into Americans.2

Iberian Racial Slavery and the Creation of Blackness In making Africans into Americans, race cannot be ignored. This section explores the development of racialized slavery within the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish America during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Racial slavery on the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish America constructed the meaning of Blackness based on religious differences, statutes, and policies, and, over time, African descendants themselves. Robert Schwaller, a historian of racial identities in Mexico, notes that, within the Iberian Peninsula, the use of the word negro or black was based on three interrelated historical processes: the cultural encounter and interchange between Christians and Muslims, the rise of the Saharan and later Atlantic slave trades, and various explanations of physical and cultural traits of sub-­ Saharan Africans.3 The cultural encounter between Christian and Muslims began in the eighth century. James Sweet notes that “racist ideologies . . . grew out of the development of African slavery in the Islamic world” on the Iberian Peninsula. For example, fifteenth-­century historian Ibn Khaldun asserted, “the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because (negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.”4 During the fifteenth century, many Iberian Christians had internalized racist attitudes of the Black Muslims by characterizing them as a “race doomed to servility . . . [and] classed as savages and idolaters.” Under Muslim domination Christians too adopted a color prejudice as Latin texts made distinctions between light-­skinned and dark-­skinned slaves, “thereby distinguishing the black as the Other.”5 The added use of physical difference to define non-­Christians increased as Iberian Christians gained more contact with darker-­skinned Africans. This was largely due to the trans-­Saharan slave trade from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, in which over two million

African Slavers to American Settlers

17

sub-­Saharans were sold, and the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade during the fifteenth century. In general, Schwaller argues that both Christians and Muslims characterized sub-­Saharan Africans as “less intelligent, prone to childish expressions of joy and levity, and barbarous violence” and that those “prejudices cannot be divorced from slavery.”6 Blackness became a “metaphor for servitude” on the Iberian Peninsula and led to infidel and slave associations with Blackness and race as the “driving force in the formulation of Spanish and Portuguese attitudes toward sub-­ Saharan Africans.”7 Sherwin Bryant argues that when the first Black captives brought by the Portuguese disembarked in Iberia in 1441, “Guinea’s subjects were deemed infidels,” and judged “sovereignless and worthy of subjugation through buena guerra (just war)” and subsequent enslavement.8 By the mid-­ fifteenth century, Portuguese trade imported 1,000 African slaves to Lisbon annually; after 1490, the numbers increased to 2,000. Many slaves who disembarked in Lisbon were later traded to Seville. From 1501 to 1525, notarial documents from Seville recorded 5,271 slaves living in the city. 4,000 of those listed slaves were described as Blacks or mulatos.9 By 1492, as many as 35,000 people from West Africa had been sold into slavery on the Iberian Peninsula, so many that by the early sixteenth century African slaves and freed people were ten percent of the population.10 As Bryant further stresses, the growth of a sizable sub-­Saharan African population on the Iberian Peninsula encouraged Castilians to justify the former’s enslavement and unequal treatment. They did so by providing scientific explanations based on theological political practices. According to Bryant, Castilians argued that sub-­Saharan Africans’ “proximity to the sun was said to affect people’s skin pigment, tendencies and physical disposition.”11 Moreover, Bryant notes that Iberians defined sub-­ Saharan Africans as “black and enslaveable” based on three factors: (1) their naturaleza or place and condition of birth, (2) their spiritual heritage as non-­ Christians, and (3) their sovereignless corporate status as individuals lacking a king or sovereign territory that Castile was compelled to recognize.12 The negativity or impurity of Blackness was reinforced with the further development of the Atlantic slave trade and subsequent colonization of the Americas during the sixteenth century. The transformation of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) from a more temporal and punitive act used in Inquisition cases of heresy to a more permanent mancha or stain that could not be removed was the result of three alterations to the relevant statutes. First, impurity was extended to Muslims. Second, maternal and paternal ancestry became factors in determining limpieza de sangre. Lastly, limitations on how

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Origins

many generations were stained disappeared.13 As a result, limpieza de sangre no longer allowed for any level of mutability and, furthermore, assured that newly converted Jews and Muslims could never become “fully realized Christians.”14 These revisions to the statutes “led a number of historians who saw them as mainly a function of a religious problem . . . to admit that they would become more about race.”15 Within Spanish America, the association of Blackness with religious infidelity extended the notion of limpieza de sangre to Africans and their descendants, who increasingly arrived as slaves vis-­a-­vis the Atlantic slave trade. Coupled with the New Laws of 1542, which banned the enslavement of Native people, these policies made “the condition of inheritable slavery exclusive to blacks.”16 Furthermore, the practice of partus sequitur ventrem, which decreed that newborns inherited their enslaved mothers’ status in order to protect the property rights of slaveholders, showed a reluctance to fully incorporate Africans and their descendants as vecinos or naturales in late sixteenth-­century Spanish colonial society.17 The study of the early colonial period has shown that the combination of these statutes led to the complex classification of people known as the sistema de castas (casta system) or géneros de gente (types of people) that ultimately associated slavery with Blackness.18 To be Black in colonial Mexico meant an association with slavery, or at least a continued mark or stain that affiliated an individual with a former slave status they could not escape. This became evident with the term mulato. The term has Iberian roots, deriving from the hybrid mixture that produced mules or from the Arabic terms muwallad (for recently converted Muslims) and malado (signifying servitude).19 Mulato as a legal category appeared in royal slave licenses in the late 1530s. By the 1550s, legislation that dealt with mulatos showed an increase in discriminatory treatment. For instance, as Adrian Masters notes, in 1578, a decree for all of the Indies stated that “Indians . . . were in the company of mulatos, mestizos, and negros” who “teach them bad customs.”20 Another example from a 1586 decree for Bolivia states that, “in those provinces there are many negros, mulatos, and mestizos and people of other mixtures . . . they are all raised in great vices and laxity.”21 Moreover, legal historians Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariella Gross stress how ordinances, policies, and edicts enacted by the Spanish Crown helped to facilitate the idea that Blackness was synonymous with enslavement. By as early as the sixteenth century “negros” were deemed to be people “without honor and faith” and described as ugly, barbarous, and savage.22 Furthermore,

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“Iberian legal ordinances blurred the lines between social status and skin color or African ancestry.” In early sixteenth-­century Lisbon, for instance, a variety of prohibitions applied to Black people, free and enslaved. In 1515, enslaved and free Black women “could only sell their wares in certain designated spaces.”23 In Spanish America, the town council of Santo Domingo created the Ordenanza de los negros (Ordinances for Blacks), the first slave code indigenous to the Americas in 1522. This ordinance’s title conflated Black with slave status, as not all slaves on the island were Black according to de la Fuente and Gross. Terms such as negro huido (runaway Black) and negros alzados (insurgent Blacks) further amplified a racial component to slave status. De la Fuente and Gross further note that the town council ordered “no black man or woman could have his own house to live [in] outside the houses of his master” in 1554. Without using the word slave, this ordinance equated Blackness with enslavement. A review of these ordinances and policies reveals that the terms “black” and “slave” could be interchangeable, and that they legally contributed to the formation of racial slavery.24 The conflation of Blackness and enslaved status remained for freed Africans and African descendants. Despite being legally defined as vassals of the king and thereby gaining all privileges affiliated with freedom, the stain and legacy of former enslaved status continued to hamper free Black mobility. Various policies, such as barring free Black men from serving in municipal offices in 1621 because the free Black population had grown too large, reveal that, despite achieving freedom, the Blackness which tied these men to their enslaved pasts would continue to define their status. This racialization process, de la Fuente and Gross argue, defined Blackness. It was the continued marginalization in their freedom that ultimately helped to define Blackness in the Americas.25 African descendants also partook in defining Blackness. In 1568, Juan Bautista, a mulato tailor, sought royal assistance and license to fund a new hospital “devoted to healing mulatos” in Mexico City. There were already four hospitals in the city, two for Spaniards and two for Indians, and all prohibited African descendants from using their facilities. In his petition, Bautista wrote that “certain native mulato residents . . . sons of blacks and Indian women and of Spaniards and black women . . . of all types of trades,” were not permitted to use the hospitals. He wrote that his petition spoke in the name of “more than . . . 6,000 mulatos” in the city. In response, the council not only supported Bautista’s proposal, but even used his language. The decree stated, “Certain native mulato residents . . . sons of blacks and Indian

20

Origins

women and Spaniards and black women,” had sought a hospital.26 Based on these and countless other examples, Masters joins other scholars such as Robert Schwaller in arguing that the language found in vassals’ petitions in the Americas helped to formulate royal decrees.27 The combination of religious beliefs, statutes, and social practices on the Iberian Peninsula helped usher in racial slavery within Spanish America by the late sixteenth century, nearly one hundred years before the disembarkation of the “20. and odd Negros,” who originally were headed to Veracruz, Mexico. These articulations associate Blackness with slavery and reveal how Africans and their descendants would be perceived by legal and ecclesiastical authorities throughout Spanish America. However, once Africans and their descendants arrived in Spanish America, whether free or, increasingly, enslaved, they played an integral role in the creation of the Americas.

Spanish America and the African Slave Trade, 1519–1619 The arrival of Africans in the Americas has created a historiography that has largely focused on the British, French, and Portuguese Americas. Reasons for the concentration of this scholarship in these areas stem from the legacy of slavery, abolition, and citizenship in the United States, Haiti, and Brazil. The United States remains the most powerful country in the world, and the rich historiography of the Black experience within it continues to acknowledge Black contributions to the making of the nation. Haiti possesses the legacy of the first Black republic in the Americas, having achieved independence in 1804. Brazil imported more slaves than any other colony and was the last country in the Americas to emancipate its slaves in 1888, and today over half of its population are classified as African descendants. These three empires, however, were not the first to bring Africans to the Americas. Instead, the Spanish Crown awarded the first large-­scale slave trade grant in 1518. The Genovese company involved was based in Seville and delivered 4,000 captives to the Indies from 1519 to 1524.28 In total, the transatlantic slave trade brought 1.51 million slaves into Spanish America, while the intra-­American slave trade introduced an additional 0.57 million slaves into Spanish America. Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat argue that Spanish America received “eighty percent more slaves than the French Americas and the entirety of the British Caribbean.”29 There were two major peaks for the Spanish American slave trade: the early seventeenth century and

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the nineteenth century. During the first peak, Cartagena, Veracruz, Buenos Aires, and Hispaniola received the majority of slaves, with many reexported to additional destinations, including Lima and Mexico City. The second peak primarily saw the arrival of African captives to Cuba and Puerto Rico.30 The period prior to the early seventeenth century, noted by Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat as the pre-­1581 period, reveals “84,900 captives disembarking from 299 voyages in the Spanish Americas, with 444,900 (on 1,544 voyages) estimated to have arrived from 1581 to 1640.”31 This estimate is based on documented French, English, Dutch, and Portuguese slave ships and does not include the rescate, the illegal slave trade conducted between Spanish American colonists and these countries.32 Yet, despite these numbers, the Spanish American experience largely remains absent in the discussion of the Atlantic slave trade. This is particularly troublesome to these historians because “more enslaved Africans permanently entered the Spanish Americas than the whole British Caribbean, making Spanish America the most important political entity in the Americas after Brazil.”33 The 1490s discovery of gold in Cibao, Santo Domingo, brought forward the introduction of African slaves to Spanish America. The first voyage of the Atlantic slave trade took place in 1501 with Black slaves coming from Seville. By 1505, seventeen slaves had been sent to Hispaniola to labor in gold and copper mines. Later during the same year an additional one hundred slaves were sent to the island to work in the mines. Due to the devastation of the Indian population, this trade steadily increased over time. Slaves labored in the mines and in households as domestics.34 From 1513 to 1580, the Spanish Crown used two strategies to procure and transport slaves to the Indies. The first involved royal grants of “licenses” in which each license granted permission to transport one slave. This restriction allowed the crown to directly control trade. The asientos (contracts with specific terms) allowed the crown to “farm out” the responsibility of the trade to private individuals.35 In 1518, the Spanish king, Charles V, granted 4,000 licenses to Laurent de Gorrevod, the governor of Bresse, marking royal support for shipping captives directly from Africa to Spanish America by way of private merchants, the second strategy. Gorrevod sold the grant to a Genovese company. An associate of the company, a Burgalese merchant, received permission to purchase 4,300 slaves on behalf of the Portuguese Crown at Arguim, an island off the coast of Mauritania, marking the first captives known to be shipped directly from Africa (Agrium and later São Tomé) to the Caribbean.36 The slave trade from Africa to the Caribbean increased during 1520s with three

22

Origins

voyages carrying 230 captives each from São Tomé to Hispaniola and/or Puerto Rico in 1527, 1529, and 1530.37 Despite the continued and increased legal and documented slave trade, contraband trade was lucrative. For instance, many slaving voyages docked in Spanish Caribbean ports as arribadas (unscheduled arrivals). Despite having a different destination, these voyages claimed that they had to dock because of an emergency such as storm damage or lack of food or water. Eagle and Wheat argue that during the 1560s, arribadas may have exceeded registered arrivals. The acceptance of arribadas often encouraged further contraband trade, but the Spanish Crown was well aware that the dangers of sailing made them a risk worth taking.38 Another example of contraband took place in 1565. Gaspar de Arguijo, a wealthy merchant and resident of Seville, instructed mariners heading to the “Rivers of Guinea” to “try if possible to bring the largest quantity of slaves you can . . . on entering here [Spain] you will say that they come from Cabo Verde and that you bring slaves for senor Diego de Aguinaga and say that you don’t bring more than 60 or 70 slaves, until I come and bring news of what is to be done.”39 In Buenos Aires, manifestos, another contraband strategy, allowed individuals who illegally purchased slaves to pay a fee. Other individuals would claim that they found negros descaminados (unaccompanied disembarked slaves) wandering the countryside. Most likely they found African captives unaccompanied because a ship disembarked them in a location to avoid the authorities.40 Moreover, Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat note that for voyages prior to 1641, on average a vessel was licensed to carry 156 slaves and captains often declared 153 were on board. But for sixty-­five voyages, these scholars found that the actual number of slaves that disembarked was 287, suggesting over 80 percent more slaves than permitted.41 Iberian slave traders not only trafficked slaves to the Caribbean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but they also imported significant numbers to Mexico. Hernán Cortés and Alonso Valiente, conquistadors who subdued indigenous populations in New Spain (Mexico) and Central America, also invested in African slaves.42 According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 47,312 African slaves disembarked in New Spain between 1590–1640.43 Their arrival correlates with increased attacks on the Mbundu populations of the Angolan interior, and the Iberian Union (1580–1640), which permitted the Lusophone merchants to begin shipping West Central Africans to the Spanish circum-­Caribbean in the mid-­1590s. New Spain receive a disproportionate number of those war captives.44

African Slavers to American Settlers

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Slaves could spend up to a month from their initial arrival in Nueva Veracruz to their sale in the highland market. Known as “seasoning,” this time frame involved weeks of traveling one of three established trade routes, along which innkeepers, physicians, and food vendors created subsidiary economies based on the slave trade. These routes developed from the Mexican slave trade bring together in full view the how and why the San Juan Bautista slave ship containing “20. and odd Negros” was originally headed to Veracruz, Mexico, before the Dutch intervened and diverted it to Virginia. Despite their documented presence, Africans brought to Spanish America remain absent in discussions about the Atlantic slave trade. Part of the reason for this absence, according to Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat, is that indigenous workers, rather than enslaved Africans, produced silver in the Spanish Empire. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the Americas, in which Africans and their descendants produced the most significant exports from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.45 This has led some historians to view slave labor as benign, docile, and less of a factor in the building of Spanish America. Lastly, according to Antonio de Almeida Mendes, the archival work has yet to be done, and questions “that have already been answered for other branches of the traffic have yet to be addressed for the first two centuries of the Iberian slave trade.”46 Recent studies of the Spanish American slave trade have been revitalized by use of the Trans-­Atlantic Slave Trade Database. This database has allowed scholars to move beyond isolated datasets that stem from published sources to a single, integrated, digital multisource dataset. The Trans-­Atlantic Slave Trade Database is also a product of a surge of information on the slave trade since 1999.47 Seeing that Portuguese and Spanish voyages were underrepresented from 2001–2005, research intiatives were undertaken in Portuguese and Spanish language archives to “address this deficiency.” Slave Voyages, the website for the Trans-­Atlantic Slave Trade Database, first launched in 2006 and most recently was relaunched in 2018 with a new section on the intra-­American slave trade.48 Jointly led by Alex Borucki and Greg O’Malley, the intra-­American database focuses on slave voyages within the Americas.49 Their findings reveal that the majority of the intra-­American slave trade went to the Spanish American mainland and Caribbean colonies. In total over “38 percent of the total volume of the Intra-­American slave trade” went to the Spanish colonies on the mainland.50 Under Borucki and O’Malley’s direction, researchers have added an additonal 27,000 voyages within the Americas stretching from Newfoundland to Buenos Aires and involving both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.51

24

Origins

Borucki and O’Malley argue that two types of intra-­American slave trade took place. One was defined as intra-­imperial while the other was transimperial. Intra-­imperial slave trading consisted of inland routes, tax-­evasion trade that predominately occurred in British America, and market-­scale distribution, which consisted of slave traders hopping from port to port in search of the highest price.52 Inland routes developed as early as the sixteenth century in Spanish America because their main economic hubs of trade were not located on the Atlantic coast. Slaves traded in Mexico entered the port of Veracruz from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.53 According to Pablo Sierra Silva, slaves bound for the Central Mexican Highlands took one of three routes: the northern route to Mexico City, the southern route to Puebla via the highlands, and a “hybrid of sorts” that provided more flexibility by going to Mexico City or Puebla.54 Spaniards also transported slaves to South America. Some were transported across the Isthmus of Panama and down the Pacific Coast, while others began their inland trek along the riverine pathways from Cartagena. Other overland routes that developed included one from Buenos Aires to Potosí, which consisted of a journey of 3,000 kilometers and another from Buenos Aires to Lima, a journey of 4,000 kilometers. Portugal and Britain would also develop inland routes in the Americas because of mining in Brazil and westward expansion in the Chesapeake region, respectively. The second characteristic of the intra-­American slave trade consisted of transimperial networks.Transimperial trade consisted of asientos in Spanish America, quasi-­legal or illegal trade, and free port trading. The majority of this slave trade was trafficked to Spanish America. Out of two million African captives that arrived in Spanish America, almost 600,000 came from other colonies such as Brazil, Curaçao, and Jamaica rather than directly from Africa. Thus, Spanish America received a higher proportion of Africans delivered via transimperial networks than all other imperial possessions in the Americas. Spanish America’s reliance was based on the lack of direct access to sub-­Saharan Africa. Due to competition with Portugal as early as the fifteenth century, two treaties came about to avoid war prior to the 1580 Iberian Unification. The first, the Treaty of Alaçovas of 1479, limited Spanish access to West Africa, although it did confirm Spanish rule over the Canary Islands. The second, the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, left Spain without access to Africa. As a result, the Lusophone slave traders were the main suppliers of slaves to Spanish America.55 Drawing on the SlaveVoyages database, Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat conclude that the history of the slave trade to Spanish America has implications

African Slavers to American Settlers

25

for Atlantic history “because it drew on all European branches of this traffic, and captives from all African regions engaged in this traffic landed in at least one of the many Spanish colonies.”56 By 1600, due to the extent of conquest, colonization, and the African slave trade, more Africans than Europeans had arrived in the Spain’s circum-­Caribbean colonies and the Pacific coast from Panama to Lima.57 It is important to stress the first and last slave voyages disembarked “not far from each other in the Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico in 1520 and Cuba in 1867. This continent-­size group of colonies developed the first and, until late eighteenth century, the largest free Black population in the Americas.”58

Blackness: Settlement and Subterfuge The remainder of this chapter details the arrival of Africans to Spanish America one hundred years before 1619. It reveals that the field of Spanish American history has evolved significantly from acknowledging a Black presence or a peripheral slave narrative in the fifteenth century to seeing the enslaved as integral figures in the colonization process. First, it delves into the arrival of Afro-­Iberians as soldiers in the Americas. Second, it discusses the roles Africans (both enslaved and free) played in the making of Spanish America as subversives and settlers. Once they arrived in the Americas, many Afro-­Iberians remained and served as unarmed and armed auxiliaries during the Spanish conquest. The earliest evidence of Black conquistadors in Spanish America comes from 1502. Nicolas de Ovando, the governor of Hispaniola, brought them from Spain to work and keep the Indian population subdued. Shortly thereafter, in 1508, Ponce de León took armed Africans to Puerto Rico to assist the conquest.59 After 1510, armed servants and slaves played a more significant role with the expansion to the mainland. Most notably they include Juan Garrido, a Spanish-­speaking Catholic who fought with Spaniards in Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Florida before he helped defeat the Aztecs, and Francisco de Eguia, who supposedly introduced smallpox to Mexico.60 Other Africans included Nuflo de Olano, a “free colored companion of Balboa” who partook in the first transisthmian crossing of Panama.61 Slaves were also a part of Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón’s expedition to the Carolinas in 1526. The small settlement was abandoned after three months when they returned to Santo Domingo, possibly leaving behind the slaves who had already escaped.62

26

Origins

Substantial numbers of Africans and their descendants also played pivotal roles in the founding of South American settlements.63 Enslaved Africans likely accompanied Pedro Mendoza’s exploration of the Rio de la Plata, which resulted in Buenos Aires’s foundation in 1536. The following year, members of this expedition founded Asunción, Paraguay.64 By the late sixteenth century, the Spanish Crown had created standing militias to protect its colonies from English and French pirate activity, most notably from the Englishman Sir Francis Drake, who sacked St. Augustine, Santo Domingo, and Cartagena in 1585–1586. Both free and enslaved Africans became integral parts of these militias, so much so that by the seventeenth century, formal Black militias existed in almost every colony.65 While the majority of unarmed auxiliaries were composed of Afro-­Iberian men, Afro-­Iberian women also were fundamental in the colonization of Spanish America. Leo Garofalo stresses that these Afro-­Iberian women viewed themselves as vecinas (residents) of the Iberian Peninsula and sought the same advantages and privileges as white Portuguese and Spanish vecinas. Evidence of how they saw themselves as Iberians can be found in petitions written by Afro-­Iberian women who sought permission to travel to the Americas. These petitions reveal that they considered themselves to be Christians, often writing that they were “old Christians unsullied by caste and lineage.” The women also brought forth priests to prove that they had been baptized or married in the church, and were subjects of the Spanish or Portuguese monarchies.66 Chloe Ireton, a historian who examines Black experiences on the Iberian Peninsula, further stresses that at times the women clung to their Blackness as proof they were, in fact, old Christians, which meant they could trace their Christianity back three to four generations.67 Travel licenses in the House of Trade from 1500 to 1640 further reveal that African descendants’ skin color and West African origins enabled them to claim that they were as old as “any white Castilian Old Christian.” Ireton further contends that “individuals who could unequivocally claim to be black seemingly found it easier to convince royal officials of their eligibility to travel to the Indies, while descendants of mixed Afro-­ European heritages faced more difficulties in proving their religious origins.”68 Afro-­Iberian criados or servants also aided settlement efforts. At times the agreements to accompany patrons could lead to the servants’ freedom. The criado system, Garofalo argues, resembled other immigrant patterns such as indentured servitude in the British Empire, and bolstered transatlantic movement for free African descendants, peninsulares (Spaniards born in the Iberian Peninsula), and creoles (Spaniards born in the Americas). At times,

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the criado system was also used to achieve manumission. In 1569, Domingo, described as negro, agreed to serve Catalina de Angeles for eight years, which included accompanying her on trips from Cartagena de Indias to Seville in exchange for his freedom. Sometimes these criados were children, who were under the protection and control of the patrons they served.69 Such comparisons are welcome additions to the scholarship and possibly another form of engaging Spanish America within the larger Atlantic historiography. Africans and African-­descended settlers also influenced the development of the Spanish Caribbean during the Iberian Unification (1580–1640). They served a vital role in hato economies (economic activities consisting of animal husbandry and subsistence and commercial crops) in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Panama during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Free women of color known as morenas horras acted as West African female power brokers and commercial agents known as nharas in Upper Guinea. Nharas served as “go-­in betweens” faciliated Portuguese expansion during the sixteenth century, invested in the slave trade, and formed long-­term relationships with Portuguese men.70 Nharas were business women, property owners, and wives or partners of Iberian men. In rural areas a Black peasantry emerged, where they owned farms and ranches oriented toward local seaports. Lastly, similar to West African translators known as chalonas, Africans living in the Spanish Caribbean used their knowledge of Iberian languages, Catholicism, and Iberian culture to faciliate the acculturation of new African arrivals. The chalonas were interpreters and godparents.71 The roles Africans and their descendants played during the inaugural years of Spanish colonization reveal their vital role in the settlement of Spanish America. Despite their roles as armed auxiliaries and vecinos who sought the Americas for a new beginning, Afro-­Iberians and African captives constantly sought ways to resist their marginalization. Shortly after Afro-­Iberian auxiliaries’ arrival at Hispaniola in 1502, Nicolás de Ovando requested that the crown no longer allow Africans in the Indies because “they run away join up with the Indians, teach them bad customs, and cannot be recaptured.”72 Slave resistance culminated in Hispaniola on Christmas Day in 1521 with the first major rebellion in the Americas. The revolt was led by Wolof slaves from Senegambia, spurring Spain to “temporarily forbid the importation of Africans from areas of Muslim influence.”73 The following month, on January 6, the Viceroy Diego Colón signed slave ordinances to prevent future rebellions and implement more control over slaves. They required that sugar mill supervisors maintain slave registers and control the slaves’ whereabouts. These control-­oriented

28

Origins

slave laws “became symbolic of the plantation complex” that evolved in different forms across the Americas.74 Those laws and others that would follow did not stop slaves from resisting their captivity. For instance, the African survivors of the 1521 rebellion fled to the Bahoruco Mountains where they joined forces with Taino insurgents and evaded capture. By the mid-­sixteenth century their numbers had grown to 7,000 people.75 In resisting their enslavement, Africans and their descendants became known as maroons. The term comes from the word cimarron and applied to Indians, Africans, and livestock that had “gone wild,” and rebelled against Spanish authority. It was first used during the 1521 insurgency that took place in Hispaniola when Enrique, described as an indigenous leader, ran away with others from his community to the Bahoruco area where they remained autonomous for over a decade.76 Another noted stronghold of marronage was Panama. The first recorded instance of the term’s use here took place in 1525. Residents of Panama City noted that Africans who escaped the city often raided roadways and estancias. Africans working in mines near Acla fled to the abandoned site of Santa Maria. By the 1540s, marronage had become a common occurrence in Panama. In 1549, Felipo, a maroon leader, led various enslaved pearl divers to escape the arduous conditions of the Pearl Islands.77 Maroons in Panama resisted Spanish control by allying with Spain’s foreigner competitors, such as England, to undermine Spain’s territorial expansion. In 1572, Sir Francis Drake allied with maroons and was able to attack Nombre de Dios and Venta de Chagres.78 By the 1570s, African maroons could be found in every part of Spanish America.79 Robert Schwaller argues that maroons stood as one of the main challengers to the Spanish conquest, rendering the process incomplete, if not fractured.80 In a 1571 decree, the Spanish king authorized the Audiencia of Santo Domingo to “conquer” a community of African cimarrons. Acknowledging that the maroons had established their own community, the decree points out a need to “conquer” it and in effect links “anti-­maroon campaigns to the process of Spanish conquest,” and furthermore “maroons [as] conquerors.”81 Nevertheless, Schwaller cautions that it does not render their challenge, which at times produced self-­governing, autonomous communities or kingdoms, as a “triumphalist narrative of success,” because the groups constantly struggled for survival and remained “the target of near-­constant military campaigns and by determined and better armed adversaries.”82 Sometimes maroon societies evolved into free Black towns.83 In this they drew on various African cultural models, especially in regard to authority.

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Some of the leaders were considered spiritual leaders, such as Yanga, who was described as a “sacred chieftain” or “divine king” in Mexico.84 African maroon societies were “remote strongholds protected by wooden palisades and camouflaged pits concealing sharpened stakes.” If and when discovered by Spanish authorities, maroons “had a disconcerting habit of melting away into jungles, mountains, and swamps, only to coalesce again and form new encampments.”85 Ironically, when left alone, these societies became communities based on diversified agriculture, and the raising of chickens, herds of cattle, and horses.86 As they were initially thought to be subversives, Spanish authorities sought to eradicate maroons if they became too threatening. Spanish authorities sent church intermediaries to negotiate peace and transform these societies into legitimate towns. By 1608, thirty years after Yanga established his maroon community, New Spain’s viceroys had launched various expeditions into the mountain range because he and his followers threatened trade by sabotaging incoming slave trains from Orizaba to Puebla.87 The following year, the Spanish attacked and destroyed Yanga’s maroon society, beginning nine years of battling its survivors. No longer able to fight, Yanga sent the Spaniards a list of eleven conditions, which included the following: “freedom for all those living in his town before 1608, formal recognition as a legitimate town in which he and heirs would be governors, exclusion of Spaniards, and a church ministered by Franciscans.” In return, they would pay tributes and return future runaways.88 Accepting those terms, Spanish authorities recognized the free Black town, which they named San Lorenzo, in 1618. According to Pablo Sierra Silva, this treaty signified a “pragmatic attempt to stabilize commerce” in the region.89 The conversion from maroon societies to free Black towns marked the transition of those who were formally considered subversives into subjects of the crown who served as elected officials, swore to obey Spanish regulations, cared for the well-­being of the town, planted their fields, followed the church, and avoided “drunkenness, unmarried sex, and other sins.” Similarly, to other Spanish vecinos, many Black townspeople lodged complaints to the viceroy when they felt harassed by local hacendados (landowners). According to Jane Landers, viceroys supported the aggrieved Black townspeople, “out of pragmatism, not altruism . . . It was cheaper to ‘reduce’ maroons than to conquer them.” As a result, the Spanish Crown authorized the formation of other towns such as San Miguel de Soyaltepeque in 1670.90 Despite the majority being slaves upon their arrival to the Americas, and their efforts to challenge their enslaved status, Africans played a significant

30

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role in the colonization process as settlers. Free African descendants migrated to Spanish America from the Iberian Peninsula. Between the years 1500 and 1640, 350 free Black men and women obtained royal licenses to travel to Spanish America.91 They “integrated into the Atlantic economies as actors, alms collectors, artisans, colonists, healers, legal representatives, merchants, musicians, sailors . . . and sometimes wealthy and prominent vecinos” in places such as Cartagena de Indias, Panama, Portobelo, Nombre de Dios, Havana, Santo Domingo, Veracruz, Xalapa, and Mexico City.92

Conclusion This essay has provided an overview of how African settlers and Black slaves built Spanish America. The often forgotten Iberian slave trade to Lisbon and Seville highlights how free and enslaved Afro-­Iberians formed integral roles in the formation and colonization of the Americas. Beginning on the Iberian Peninsula, the definition and understanding of Blackness served as a model that was later transferred to the Americas, marking the beginning of racial slavery. There, Africans and their descendants served as unarmed and armed auxilaries, de facto soldiers, or settlers and demonstrated their loyalty to the Spanish Crown through these roles. Many initially subversive maroon communites over time converted into free Black towns. For example, San Lorenzo, a former maroon community, was formally recognized by the Spanish in 1618. This marked the first free Black town in the Americas and reveals that Africans became American settlers in Spanish America one year before the disembarkation of Africans in Virginia. Within these towns, free women of color and enslaved African women, often in the absence of Spanish women, became hidden figures that managed households and supported their families through business activities. From African settlers to Black slaves, these experiences highlight the integral roles African descendants played in the making the Americas as they transformed into African Americans.

CHAPTER 2

“The Unbridled Greed of the Conquistadors” The Real Provisión of 1530 and the Legality of Native Enslavement in the Southern Caribbean Rebecca Anne Goetz

The Real Provisión of 1530 outlawed the slaving of Native people and directly challenged Spanish settlers’ attachment to slaving. It prohibited Spanish settlers in the New World from taking “any Indian as a slave either in a just war or otherwise, nor through rescate, nor purchase, nor trade, nor through any other means, even though they may be Indians who held, hold, or may hold other Indians among them as slaves.”1 The Provisión dismissed the most common reasons Spanish settlers used to justify Native enslavement: that Native people were resisting Spanish efforts at conquest and conversion to Christianity, and so could be enslaved in a just war, or that they had lawfully purchased enslaved Indigenous people from rival Native communities. On the surface this Provisión is an antislavery measure, and it absolutely was a reaction to complaints by regular and secular clergy and to actions of Indigenous people themselves, which made the cruelty of Native enslavement clear even in the imperial court. Yet motivating this antislavery move was a problem that concerned Charles V and his court officials more than the abuse of Native people. Not only did slaving harm the crown’s Indigenous vassals, it also challenged royal authority. The Provisión took aim at slaving because slaving empowered slavers at the expense of royal authority. Underpinning the Provisión’s antislavery outcomes was a profound concern about the excessive power of Spanish slavers and their usurpation of royal prerogatives. To the extent that the Provisión was antislavery, it was an antislavery that conveniently allowed for claims of royal power against that of slavers and conquistadors.

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The Provisión slides easily into a narrative intended to counter the Black Legend of Spain’s abuse of Indigenous people.2 Yet two critical points discourage taking a triumphalist position. First, the Provisión of 1530 outlawed slaving but not slavery itself. It did not free those Native people already enslaved, though it did prohibit new acts of enslavement and it did extend new legal protections to enslaved Native people. Second, the Provisión never was enforced and, in fact, was rescinded entirely in 1534. What are we then to make of this moment in the history of Spanish conquest in the Americas? What did it mean to briefly, and unsuccessfully, ban the slaving of Native people? In asserting the rights of the monarch to protect and control vassals and the lands they inhabited, the crown was not making a specific statement about the morality of slavery. Instead, the Provisión’s assault on slaving was as much about reasserting royal control over conquistadors and aspiring conquistadors as it was about liberating putative Indigenous vassals of the Spanish Crown. Yet, unlike previous efforts to regulate the enslavement of Native people in Spanish colonies, the Real Provisión of 1530 attracted well-­ organized colonial opposition that ultimately thwarted the Provisión’s implementation and enforcement. Slave raiders and slave traders who had secured much of their wealth and power through slaving mounted a lobbying effort in Spain to ensure that the law was never enforced. Because the Provisión was moribund almost from its initial proclamation, most historians have overlooked it in favor of the New Laws (Leyes Nuevas), which appeared in 1542 and which retained some of the language of the Provisión of 1530.3 Yet disregarding the Real Provisión of 1530 distorts our understanding of debates about Native enslavement prior to 1542. Its examination is an ideal medium for exploring the reasoning behind opposition to Native enslavement among Spanish officials as well as well-­organized support for slaving among Spanish settlers in the southern Caribbean. Ultimately, the controversy around the Real Provisión of 1530 was about who would be in control of and who would benefit from Spain’s rich New World conquests. In the early sixteenth century, the southern Caribbean was the edge of empire. Far from the centers of Spanish power in Santo Domingo and Mexico, Spanish slavers used kinship connections and complex commercial relationships to enhance their wealth and influence. On what is presently the coast of Venezuela and Colombia in the mid-­to late 1520s, members of the extended Matienzo family and their retainer, Juan López de Archuleta, used their familial and business connections to help conceal illicit slaving activities and to coordinate opposition to measures intended to limit their slaving.

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Though exposure of the Matienzos and López’s slaving activities likely led to the promulgation of the Provisión, at least in part, the coordinated efforts these slavers mounted in the Spanish court ensured that not only was the law never enforced, but also that Charles V withdrew it completely in 1534. The Real Provisión of 1530 and the colonial reaction to it reveal the tension between royal officials who opposed the power settlers held over Native people and Spanish settlers around the Caribbean who not only favored enslaving Native people but also connected the ability to slave to their continued wealth and success. Examining the context in which the Provisión was written, as well as the resistance to it, exposes the darkest aspects of Spanish colonialism. When settlers failed to generate wealth through gold, silver, or pearls, they turned to slaving as their primary mode of making money. Well-­ organized networks of merchants, slavers, and settlers were able to combat even the most desultory efforts at regulating their slaving activities. Slaving was a common activity for Spanish invaders and settlers in the last decade of the fifteenth century and the first decades of the sixteenth century. Erin Stone gives a credible reading of the penumbra in the sources to suggest 250,000 to 500,000 enslaved people, indicating a demographically devastating trade that began in the late 1490s.4 For example, in 1499, Peralonso Niño led an expedition into the southern Caribbean to trade with Native people for pearls, a venture financed primarily by the Sevillano pilot Cristóbal Guerra. The initial Niño-­Guerra expedition sailed along the Gulf of Paria, to the salt flats at Araya, and beyond to Cumaná, passing Margarita, Coche, and Cubagua, and yielding ninety-­six pounds of pearls. When pearls were not readily available, Spanish raiders settled for the area’s other resource—people.5 The 1499 expedition roused further interest in slaving. Cristóbal Guerra’s brother, Luis, probably acting on information provided by his brother, slaved from Brazil to Paria in 1501, bringing several enslaved Native people back to Spain and selling them in Seville.6 In another expedition, this time funded by the crown in 1501, Cristóbal Guerra was dissatisfied with the small amount of pearls he obtained and raided the island of Bonaire on the way home, killing “certain Indian men and women on the island of Bonaire and the ones they took alive, they brought to Sevilla, Cádiz, Jerez, and Córdoba, and other places, and sold them there.”7 The initial information about this particular slave raid might have come from an unnamed Native woman in Guerra’s possession in November 1501. Queen Isabel ordered Guerra to surrender the woman to the corregidor (magistrate) of Jerez de la Frontera, Gonzalo Gómez de Cervantes,

34

Origins

who was to arrange “to send her safely to me.”8 Perhaps this Native woman already knew some Spanish, and had some familiarity with the Castilian law on enslavement, and thus was able to use her knowledge to attract attention to her situation.9 Because Isabel had funded this expedition, Castilian royal officials also scrutinized the results of the voyage. They wanted to know precisely how many Native people had been killed, how many had been sold in Spain, and to whom they had been sold, information the Native woman that the queen had sent for might be able to provide.10 The Spaniards who bought Native people from Guerra were to get their money back, and Guerra himself ended up paying a fine. The queen also mandated that the enslaved Native people, once recovered, should be returned home at Guerra’s cost, “as they had been brought here unjustly.”11 That Isabel had decided the capture of these Indigenous people had not occurred under the conditions of a just war suggests that the enslavement of Native people might be tolerated in certain situations, but in the absence of actual resistance to conquest, the people of Bonaire had been illegally targeted. Of the more than two hundred people Guerra allegedly enslaved in Bonaire, only six of them reappeared in the archives, living in the household of the corregidor Pedro Fernández in Córdoba. It is not clear if they ever returned to Bonaire.12 Isabel’s interest in the enslaved Indigenous people of Bonaire should not be mistaken for advocacy of an antislavery position. Isabel owned African, Canary Islander, and North African Muslim slaves, and also placed enslaved Canary Islanders in the households of her children.13 Indeed, this brief setback did not prevent Guerra from reaching another agreement with the Catholic monarchs to explore the pearl coast. Isabel made Guerra alcalde mayor (local administrator) of the Urabá region in 1503, and an agreement (capitulación) shortly thereafter reminded Guerra to pay taxes on his gains but did not specifically enjoin him from slaving, suggesting that Guerra’s slaving was a forgivable, even allowable, activity.14 Guerra made his final voyage to the pearl coast in 1504; he was killed while slaving Native people somewhere near what is presently Cartagena. His brother, Luis, still managed to bring over six hundred enslaved Native people to Spain after Cristóbal’s violent and well-­ deserved demise.15 The Guerra brothers slaved at a moment in which it was unclear to what extent slaving Indigenous people in the New World was legal, and how long it would remain legal. In Castile, Isabel was beginning to confront the problem of Native enslavement directly. Though she authorized the enslavement of “gente q come carne humana,” that is, “people who eat human flesh,” in 1494,

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by 1496, she was rethinking that directive (as it became increasingly apparent that the Spanish were seeing cannibals where there were none).16 In June 1500, she ordered that Native people enslaved in Andalucia be freed and returned “to the countries where they were born.”17 Some of the people Niño slaved might have been among those to be freed and repatriated; in May 1501, the queen’s treasurer reported prices for having purchased the freedom of seventeen enslaved Native men (though there were certainly many more Native people who did not escape enslavement at this time).18 In September 1501, the Catholic monarchs instructed their new governor in the Indies, Nicolás de Ovando, that Native people were vassals of the Castilian Crown and “should be well-­treated as our good subjects and vassals.” This was a critical moment: the recognition of Native people in the Caribbean as royal vassals granted them specific legal protections from bad treatment, that they should be “well-­ treated, and that they can pass safely throughout the land, and no one may use force against them, nor rob them, nor do them other harm.” By implication, royal vassals could not be enslaved, though this particular set of instructions did not address enslavement directly.19 Between 1493 and her death in 1503, then, Isabel vacillated between allowing the enslavement of Native people, especially those who had been named cannibals, and working to free enslaved Native people in Castile. This was not about discomfort with slavery per se; both Castile and Aragon had long histories of legal slavery and of slaving around the Mediterranean. Moreover, by the later fifteenth century, enslaved West Africans were arriving by the thousands in Iberian ports through the Portuguese slave trade.20 The questions for Isabel and her policy makers were, fundamentally, who were Indigenous people? And what was their legal status in these newly conquered territories? That Native people were legally vassals of the Castilian Crown made no difference to slavers, and in the absence of firm instructions forbidding enslavement, Spanish invaders continued to slave. In 1502, for example, Alonso de Ojeda received permission to voyage again to the southern Caribbean to trade for pearls, but Ojeda saw this voyage as one of pillage and wealth-­seeking. He went to Margarita, trading for “many pearls and aljófar [small, irregularly shaped pearls].” The wealth seized in pearls was not enough for Ojeda, who then sailed to Coro to slave (a region the Guerra brothers had visiting quite recently). He “killed and captured many of them, and he enslaved [resgató] one who was captured, and the others [who were captured] all died, except perhaps seven or eight of them.” Ojeda’s slave raiding came to light as part of a lawsuit, but that did not prevent him from returning to

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Origins

the pearl coast later. In fact, Ojeda’s slaving experience might have assisted him in getting a commission as governor of Urabá and the area that would become Cartagena de Indias in 1504.21 Ojeda was a fixture in the exploitation of the human and pearl resources of the coast. By 1508, though he was living permanently on Española, he remained interested in the areas around Urabá and Cartagena. Ojeda’s 1508 capitulación added two new requirements explicitly related to slaving. Ferdinand, in his capacity as regent of Castile after Isabel’s death in 1503, ordered Ojeda to bring four hundred Indians “from tierra firme and from neighboring islands” to Española to work on the island’s Spanish haciendas. Ojeda was also to find “forty Indians who are masters of mining gold,” likewise to be brought to Española.22 In other words, Ojeda’s new venture was unambiguously about slaving sanctioned by the crown. After Isabel’s death, Ferdinand openly endorsed slaving. Though Spanish settlers often held Native people on Española and San Juan in encomiendas, which allowed settlers to demand forced labor as tribute from local Native people, Ferdinand’s policies encouraged both slaving and slave trading from much further afield. Ojeda attacked Native people along the coast of tierra firme, though it is unclear how many enslaved people Ojeda was able to seize. Ojeda then proceeded to Panama, where, in an attempt to save the voyage’s finances, he engaged in more slaving and searching for gold. Native people in the area had other plans, shooting Ojeda with a poisoned arrow, making him so sick that he retreated to Española and retired to a monastery where he died in 1515. Slaving was an attractive yet dangerous occupation for Spaniards looking to get rich on the pearl coast. In 1510, Ferdinand reminded Diego Colón, the new governor of the Indies and ne’er-­do-­well son of Cristóbal Colón, that certain areas were off limits to slaving. Spanish officials still sought to trade for pearls along the coast, but Ferdinand forbid any slaving on the island of Trinidad because “they are at peace and they trade with the pearl Indians, and molesting them has already resulted in the loss of trade in pearls.” Ferdinand thus placed Trinidad, along with Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica explicitly off limits to slaving. Still open to slaving were “islands to the north”—the Bahamas—and Native people of the pearl coast who were at war with Spanish armadas de rescate from Puerto Rico. Ferdinand encouraged slaving in those regions, recognizing that the Native population of Española had declined drastically since Spanish arrival in 1492.23 In 1512, Colón began to press for more effective slaving of Spain’s Native enemies. Of principal concern to Colón and other Spanish settlers were the “caribes” of the mainland, whom they recognized both as military

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threats to Spanish colonization and as potentially profitable assets. The king ordered Colón to make sure that the exploratory ships he sent to the pearl coast were armed, both to protect them as they searched for pearls, and in case they encountered caribes. Pearls, of course, were one resource that interested Colón and his henchmen, but enslaving caribes was a profitable alternative. Colón had permission to bring captive caribes from the pearl coast to Española and to Puerto Rico. As marginalia on Colón’s 1512 cédula put it, Colón was to “arm the ships in order to look for pearls and caribes at the same time.” The possible supply of enslaved “caribes” flowing into Española and San Juan was a primary motivator for Spanish incursions into the southern Caribbean.24 By the early 1510s, members of religious orders living in the Caribbean had raised the alarm about Spanish settlers’ abuse of Native people.25 In 1511, the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesino delivered an impassioned sermon in Española condemning Spanish slaveholders and encomenderos (settlers who owned the labor and tribute of groups of Native people).26 At least one Spanish encomendero was convinced by Montesino’s condemnation of Spanish slaving; in 1515, Bartolomé de Las Casas renounced his encomienda and returned to Spain, where he became a Dominican and embarked on a long career of fighting for Native rights in the Spanish empire.27 Montesino’s intervention had some effect. Ferdinand promulgated the Laws of Burgos in 1512, which provided some protections to Native people (without outlawing either slaving or slavery itself). The religious on the islands continued to agitate for better treatment of Native people, but it was the Native people themselves who effectively forced the issue. By the late 1510s, Native people on Española, Puerto Rico, and Cuba were in revolt against Spanish control of their islands.28 Instability in the Greater Antilles led a new generation of Spanish settlers to seek different opportunities. Motivated by Hernán Cortes’s conquests in Mexico, this rising generation looked to settle new areas, including the southern Caribbean. Some of these young people built on substantial family connections. Pedro Ortiz de Matienzo began conducting rescate expeditions in the southern Caribbean in the early 1520s, at first from his base on Española. By 1526, he had relocated permanently to the island of Cubagua. Pedro’s great-­uncle Sancho de Matienzo had been the first royal treasurer of the Casa de Contratación, which oversaw economic activity between the New World and Spain. Pedro’s uncle Juan Ortiz de Matienzo was one of the first judges of the Real Audiencia on Española.29 Pedro intended his own raiding, trading, and pearling activities to both establish himself as a separate

38

Origins

entity from other Matienzos and to contribute to the family’s ongoing New World power. In 1528, Pedro became alcalde mayor of the island of Cubagua, at which point he was already deeply enmeshed in pearling as well as slaving on nearby islands and the mainland. Pedro sought out newcomers with fewer familial connections, weaving them into ongoing slaving arrangements. Juan López de Archuleta was one of these younger men, a Basque who never settled permanently on Española but who wanted to use his seafaring talents to become wealthy. Like many of his fellow Basques, López first dabbled in the church as a career before he took to the sea as a way to make his fortune.30 By 1523, López owned his own ship and was sailing extensively in the Caribbean.31 López envisioned real opportunities for his own gain, especially in the nascent settlements of the pearl coast. He understood that wealth came not just through pearl fishing. In his travels he must have noticed that settlers who made money in the New World controlled not only land or pearl oysters; they also controlled the bodies and labor of Native people. Additionally, López cultivated relationships with men who had slaving expertise such as Pedro Ortiz de Matienzo. Like Ortiz, López successfully pursued all the routes to wealth, power, and influence in the New World: salaried royal offices that gave him power over trade and in local government, grants of land with offshore pearls, and official permission to enslave people. López became veedor real (essentially an inspector, responsible for seeing to it that Spanish residents obeyed local and imperial laws) not just of Cubagua, but of the entire pearl coast, a function that put him in control of trade both on the island and between island settlers and other places.32 He was also named to the governing council of Cubagua.33 Lastly, López acquired a land base outside of Cubagua, gaining sole control of the islet of Coche, about three leagues away from Cubagua. Though the cédula granting López the islet noted that it was unpopulated, López began settling it within fifteen months of his arrival in Cubagua.34 López’s strategy had worked: by the late 1520s, he was one of the elites of Cubagua, a royal official, and by most accounts a wealthy man.35 Between 1524 and 1526, Ortiz, López, and other business associates collaborated on several slaving expeditions. Ortiz in particular was later accused of slaving “indios de paz,” or friendly Indians whom it was illegal to slave, from Chacopatare on the mainland. Ortiz also enslaved Indigenous people from Macanao, on the nearby island of Margarita, and sold at least six Indigenous people he had seized from Araya, also on the mainland. While only some of Ortiz’s slaving activities are documented, and mostly because some royal

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officials believed these examples to be illegal, they suggest the wide but largely undocumented extent of Spanish slaving activity in the southern Caribbean.36 After Ortiz’s appointment as alcalde mayor in 1528, he accelerated his slaving activities. That year, Ortiz and López were involved in at least three slaving expeditions to the mainland that collectively netted at least 330 enslaved Native people.37 Success and power attracted scrutiny, and by late 1528, the audiencia at Santo Domingo had begun to investigate Ortiz and López, exposing both legal and illegal slaving as well as other abuses against Indigenous populations. A 1530 lawsuit alleged that López had “usurped royal power by capturing and devastating people of his own free will, caused ructions with the peaceful Indians of Carioca [on the mainland close to Cubagua] because he wanted to make them his slaves . . . that he examined captive Indians poorly, branding and selling them at public auction some of the principal men of those parts as well as the wives of friendly caciques.” The lawsuit also disclosed other harms as well, alleging that López had evaded taxes, engaged in price fixing, denied those with legitimate licenses the ability to trade, and sold substandard goods to Spanish settlers at inflated prices.38 López was not in trouble for slaving per se, but rather for “usurping” royal authority in dealing with vassals of the Spanish Crown. The audiencia prepared an inventory of López’s goods as part of the investigation—at that time, López owned at least twelve enslaved Native men, women, and children.39 The case against López exposed the widespread abuse and enslavement of Native vassals in the production of pearls in the southern Caribbean. Though there is no direct connection between this case and the Real Provisión of 1530, the timing is suggestive. An investigative report was submitted on August 11, 1530, nine days after the Empress Isabela, Charles V’s Portuguese wife and regent of Castile, issued the Real Provisión. Though she would not have seen the report, she likely would have been aware of the serious allegations against Spanish settlers such as Ortiz and López of usurping royal power and harming Indigenous vassals in the southern Caribbean. The Provisión expressly forbid the kind of slave raiding López, Ortiz, and others practiced in the islands and in the southern Caribbean. The Provisión acknowledged that Charles V’s grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabel, in the past had given explicit permission for Spanish settlers to hold and trade enslaved Native people who refused conversion to Catholicism. This was a gloss on thirty-­eight years of complex legal maneuvering around enslavement, labor tributes, and Native people. The problem, Empress Isabela and her advisors

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Origins

clearly believed, was that Native people suffered “many intolerable harms, to the disservice of God and the Crown . . . that continue every day through the unbridled greed of the conquistadors and other persons who have contrived to make war and capture many slaves from among the Indians who are in truth not slaves.” In other words, they suspected that Spanish settlers were creating wars and instigating resistance from Native people, essentially making a “just” war where one had not been necessary previously. These wars also caught up known Native allies. “The Indians have suffered because of their capture many deaths, thefts, and other harms to their persons and their possessions, and . . . many of the said Indians were peaceful Indians who had not made war nor are making war against our vassals nor doing any other thing for which they neither deserved to be enslaved nor lose their liberty, which natural right they had and continue to have.”40 The wording was a clear shot across the bow of the Spanish elite in the Caribbean. The Provisión’s language was unusually strong: “unbridled greed” in this usage was not only the greed that propelled Spanish slaving, but also likely referenced the conquistadors’ greed as an aspect of disobedience to and usurpation of the crown’s authority. The Provisión “expressly revokes and suspends” any permissions any Spanish settler or official had previously had to capture Native people, and forbid any such captive-­taking in the future in “any lands discovered or to be discovered.” The Provisión effectively eliminated just war as a reason for enslaving Native people. “No person will dare to take any Indian as a slave either in a just war or otherwise, nor through rescate, nor purchase, nor trade, nor through any other means, even though they may be Indians who held, hold, or may hold other Indians among them as slaves.” This was a fundamental recognition that the provenance of any particular enslaved Native person and the circumstances of their enslavement were, to the Spanish at least, unknowable and therefore uncontrollable. As a punishment, any settler found to be enslaving Native people would have all their possessions confiscated for the use of the crown’s treasury (fisco) and the enslaved Native people would be “returned and restored to their own lands” at the expense of the slaveholder. Furthermore, within thirty days of the promulgation of the law, slaveholders were to declare the names and numbers of their enslaved property before a judge, who would keep a registry in each jurisdiction to ascertain that any Native person held as a slave had been enslaved before the 1530 Provisión. This royal Provisión was nothing less than a full-­scale assault on the primary means of wealth building and power accumulation in the pearl fisheries and elsewhere.41

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The Provisión noted that it would go into effect in any given location in the Spanish empire when a notary public published and publicized it. On Cubagua, López in his role as a veedor real, refused permission to publish the Provisión, which was only to go into effect thirty days after such an announcement. In essence, López dodged the new Provisión so that he, Ortiz, and their buddies could continue to slave quasi-­legally.42 For López, this was a risk-­free move: no local authority could force López to publish the Provisión. López’s actions show just how far crown authority was from the southern Caribbean. In resisting the Provisión, López saw himself as a conquistador, and he understood that his wealth and success depended on his ability to slave legally. López rejected the implication that he was “greedy.” In his mind, he was a sea captain turned hidalgo (untitled noble): he was a landowner, a merchant, and a pearl fisher. For him, slave raiding among the Native people of neighboring islands and on the mainland supported the necessary work which made López what he was—a respected Spanish official turning unproductive islands into sites of wealth production. For López, Ortiz, and other settlers like them, the Provisión was an attempt to undermine the basis of their wealth and power, and so their counterargument framed eliminating slaving as dangerous to royal power. In 1531, Ortiz left Cubagua for Spain to fight against the Provisión and to fend off other challenges to Cubagueño slaving and pearling. Ortiz also carried López’s power of attorney with him, evidence of how interconnected their business ventures were.43 Sending Ortiz was a good choice for the Cubagueños; his family was deeply embedded in both the Spanish court and the Caribbean and it thus would be relatively easy for Ortiz to effectively lobby for López and his other business partners. Collectively, the slavers and pearl magnates of Cubagua petitioned the Council of the Indies, through Ortiz, to say that they had never illegally enslaved anyone, but rather that local Native people were the problem. “It is commonly known that the Indians of neighboring islands are rebellious and disobedient to the Catholic faith, and although many times they [the Spanish] tried to instruct them . . . they are persevering in their rebellion.” López and Ortiz framed their slaving activities as efforts to reduce the risk of attack by Native people who refused to accept Christianity. Ortiz cited multiple attacks on the fisheries at Cubagua. Native people “have attacked them [the Spanish] and have committed terrible offenses, going out to kill them [the Spanish] with their arrows.” López further claimed that settlers had repeatedly begged for royal permission to attack Native people, permission which was denied (supposedly). Ortiz and López saw themselves as the defenders

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Origins

of the Spanish people and Spanish interests, especially royal interests, and for that they claimed that they were being persecuted. But López and Ortiz were imperfect articulators of their own position; they wanted to defend their use of illegally enslaved Native people to refashion themselves into wealthy hidalgos.44 By 1532, the crown and the Council of the Indies had rethought the new policy. Even as a new investigation began into settlers in the Caribbean, López, Ortiz, and other Cubagueños regained the right to slave. While the 1530 Provisión prohibited enslavement even in the context of war, Ortiz had successfully made the case that the policy posed certain risks and dangers to Spanish settlers generally and to the pearl islands specifically. López obtained explicit permission to resume slaving via a letter from Charles V to Francisco Prado, an investigative judge then residing on Cubagua. The letter explained that López still had to read the Requerimiento (a document read to Native people in Castilian informing them of the fatal price of resistance to Spanish conquest), but if Indigenous people persisted in “their rebellion and disobedience to our Christian religion . . . then make war with fire and blood against them, and take them as slaves and sell them and bring them where they [Spanish slaveholders] like.” In other words, by late 1533, López and the other elite Cubagueños again had acquired legal cover for their slaving activities.45 All he and others would have to do is remember to read the Requerimiento prior to attacking and enslaving Native people. The Venezuelan historian of Native enslavement Morella A. Jiménez concluded that the 1530 Provisión, however ambitious it was, “was never implemented.”46 The slavers’ intense lobbying was able to overcome any effort to curb their power. Prado, the investigating judge, was particularly furious that López was off the hook, reporting to the king that he had read more than five hundred pages of testimony about the “ugly things proven [against López]” and calling him “very prejudicial to this island.”47 Prado’s complaints had no effect; in 1534, Charles V formally withdrew the 1530 Provisión.48 The crown had realized it too could profit off of Spanish slaving, mandating in 1535 that royal officials collect one tomín of gold for each Indian judged to be a slave. At the same time, the crown put Francisco de Villacorta, the official “protector of Indians” based on the island of Margarita, in charge of the brand used to burn slave status into the skin of newly enslaved Native people, and asked that he personally interview all newly captured Native people to make sure that they were indeed eligible to be enslaved.49 Such “confessions” were common in Castile, Aragon, Valencia, and other Spanish kingdoms, and were meant to ensure that enslaved people had been

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legally captured in the course of a just war.50 Slavers such as López and Ortiz, though, could and did easily evade these kinds of bureaucratic measures to limit their slaving activities. By 1535, López had been reconfirmed in his office of veedor real of the island of Cubagua, and, by all appearances, Villacorta had been effectively sidelined.51 López and Ortiz had adroitly defended the base of their power and their wealth against a royal assault. By the early 1540s, the crown once again had rethought its policy on slaving and American governance. The New Laws, promulgated in 1542, explicitly outlawed the enslavement of Native people in the Spanish Americas. Scholars tend to see the New Laws as evidence of royal goodwill toward Indigenous people, and it is certainly the case that antislavery pressure from Bartolomé de Las Casas and other concerned religious did animate some support for the New Laws.52 Yet the old problems of governance, so apparent in 1530, were also part of the New Laws. Limiting or even ending Indigenous enslavement and slaving would help bring Spanish settlers in the New World under firmer royal control. The New Laws, therefore, cannot be seen apart from the deeper struggle for control that gave rise to the abortive Real Provisión of 1530. Some of the wording of the New Laws is almost identical to the Real Provisión of 1530. The crucial portion of the text reads: “We ordain and command that from henceforth no Indian may be enslaved, not for cause of war or any other cause, even rebellion, nor by rescate or otherwise, and we desire that they be treated as vassals of our royal crown of Castile, for that is what they are.”53 The New Laws also forbid the granting of new encomiendas, that is, grants of quasi-­enslaved Native labor. Particularly shocking for Cubagueños living on both Cubagua and its new satellite settlement of Cabo de la Vela was the blanket prohibition on forcing Native people to fish for pearls against their will. Though this section of the New Laws seemed to accept that some Native people might remain enslaved in the pearl fishery, they also mandated that enslaved people be protected from dangerous work. “The slaves who work in the said pearl fishery, indios as well as negros, must be conserved, and the deaths must stop, and if it is perceived that indios and negros cannot be protected from the danger of death, the pearl fishing must cease.”54 This section of the New Laws intended to protect enslaved Africans as well as Natives from dangerous pearl fishing labor. Yet Spanish pearl magnates and others all over Spanish America protested these laws, as they had the Real Provisión, and ultimately they were able to ignore them. Successive governors in the pearl regions had little success even

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Origins

attempting to implement the New Laws, which also caused serious Spanish rebellions in Peru and Mexico. By 1552, Philip II had agreed to an interpretation of the New Laws indicating that Indians would be free, but if they were lazy, they would “be compelled to [work] as long as they were paid.” The intent of the New Laws was subverted almost completely by the concept of forced, but paid, labor, known by a term that predated its post-­1552 meaning—repartimiento.55 Payments were often nominal and debt peonage was a growing problem. In the pearl fisheries of Cabo de la Vela and on the Cumaná coast, though authorities published the New Laws, they were openly not enforced, with residents of Cubagua, Margarita, and Remedios especially insisting that the brands on the faces of enslaved Native people indicated legal title and could not be overturned by the New Laws.56 Though there were further attempts to prohibit branding Indigenous people, slaving and branding continued for the next several decades in the southern Caribbean.57 The fight against the Real Provisión of 1530 primed slaver and slaveholder interests to resist these later attempts to regulate or abolish Native enslavement. The conflict had also shown the crown the limits of its authority. To continue governing the Indies (and to reap profits from it), successive Spanish monarchs had to tolerate slaving and slavers’ challenges to their authority. No matter the determination of Spanish monarchs, this was the reality on the edge of empire.

CHAPTER 3

Monopolizing Violence African Slave Trading Companies and the Suppression of Native Slavery in the Americas Brett Rushforth

On February 13, 1683, Michel Bégon, the chief legal and civil authority in the French Caribbean, penned two letters to his superiors in France. In one, he presented the first complete draft of what would come to be known in the eighteenth century as the Code Noir, a set of regulations governing slavery in the French-­settled islands. Bégon had spent four months meeting with slaveholders and local officials on these islands to identify successful strategies for controlling enslaved people and maximizing the labor stolen from them. Constituting about 90 percent of the final slave code, Bégon’s draft covered a dizzying array of topics, from regulating the movement of enslaved people to penalizing sexual unions between enslaved and free individuals. In the Sovereign Councils of each island, they also debated the extent of slaveholder autonomy and the role of the French colonial state in constraining the behavior of French subjects toward the enslaved. The resulting synthesis contained more than fifty provisions regulating every conceivable aspect of relations between enslaved people, the French planters who claimed to own them, and the colonial officials tasked with governing them all. It would serve as a template for all slave law in France’s overseas colonies for more than 150 years.1 For all its breadth on the subject of slavery, Bégon’s draft—and the code it would become—remained silent on the topics of enslavement and the slave trade. Unlike contemporary English codes, which made (admittedly clumsy and often inconsistent) reference to enslaving “heathens,” “Negroes,”

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“blacks,” “Indians,” and “mulattos,” the French code avoided the issue altogether, leaving open the question of which populations could be targeted and what forms of slaving violence would be sanctioned.2 Bégon addressed these issues in a second February 13 letter, which briefly discussed a dispute between some Martinique sugar refiners and a West African slave trading company. A few months earlier, privateers in the employ of France’s Compagnie du Sénégal et Côtes d’Afrique had captured a small fleet of ships sailing from the South American mainland toward Martinique. The vessels’ main cargo—fifty-­three Native American and African captives—marked the ships as part of a larger human trafficking network that brought captives from Venezuela, Guiana, Brazil, and neighboring islands to the rapidly expanding sugar plantations of the French Caribbean. The Compagnie insisted that the ships had violated its monopoly on the slave trade, justifying the attack as a defense of their royal privilege exclusif, or trade monopoly. Because it involved Native American captives, unlicensed traders, and local Caribbean practice, the case got to the heart of important questions that Bégon’s slave regulations studiously avoided. Who could legally be enslaved and under what circumstances? Who had the right to traffic in human captives? Who would decide?3 In their answers to these questions, the Compagnie du Sénégal, Bégon, and the Martinique planters shed light on a central problem in the history of early modern slavery that has proven remarkably elusive: why, over the course of the seventeenth century, did Europeans expand the transatlantic slave trade rather than relying on enslaved Amerindian captives in greater numbers? Some scholars have offered demographic explanations for this development, pointing to disease and other causes of demographic collapse among Indigenous Americans. Others have relied on explanations that can only be described as racialist, arguing that—whether for cultural or physiological reasons—“Indians did not make good slaves.” This chapter suggests another answer, arguing that specific economic and political incentives drove French investment away from Amerindian slavery and instead concentrated investments in the transatlantic slave trade. It demonstrates that African slave trading companies actively suppressed Native American slavery to protect their own financial interests, persuading French officials to support them by making Native slavery illegal in the French Caribbean. This was not a decision based on the relative strength or weakness of African and Amerindian people or how readily one group or the other adapted to their enslavement. Instead, it was a choice rooted in the political economy of overseas

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colonialism that favored coerced labor systems more easily controlled by, and more profitable to, the colonizing state.

The Questions Over the past quarter-­century a rich literature has emerged to shed light on the understudied history of Native slavery in the Americas. Especially since the publication of a pair of Bancroft Prize-­winning studies by James Brooks and Alan Gallay in 2002, dozens of books and articles have expanded our knowledge of both the prevalence of Native slavery and its significance in everything from the financial foundations of New World plantation economies to the cultural and legal frameworks that arose to control an expanding enslaved labor force.4 Everywhere scholars have looked, we have found that Native slavery was more prevalent than we once thought, more persistent than anyone realized, and more significant than we could have imagined. Where we once pictured a relatively small population of enslaved Indians, reduced quickly by disease and then abandoned as a viable source of labor, we now see that as many as five million Native North and South Americans were enslaved by Europeans, and that every European colony exploited enslaved Natives to some degree or another.5 It would be difficult to identify another field of study that has been so transformed by twenty-­first-­century historiography. The significance of this transformation, even if still appreciated unevenly by scholars, is making its way slowly into public awareness. Features on enslaving Amerindians have appeared in recent years on NPR, in Slate, and in the Chronicle of Higher Education; a recent book on the topic by Andrés Resendez, The Other Slavery, was named a finalist for the National Book Award. As Margaret Newell noted in a review of that excellent book, “Recent research has shown us that most enslaved persons in the Americas before 1700 were Indians; that Indians constituted a sizable proportion of the global slave population thereafter; and that Europeans enslaved Indians from Quebec to New Orleans, and from New England to the Carolinas.” The same could be said of the Caribbean and South America, where as many as two million Native captives became European slaves.6 Despite this surge in scholarship, there are many basic questions that remain unanswered about the relationship between Native slavery and the more familiar slaveries of the African diaspora. Historians have only begun to explore how Indian slavery changes what we think we know about slavery

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and the law, about race, about the financial structures of the emerging plantation complex, and about the experience of enslaved people. In some cases, the answers have been clear. In places like South Carolina and Bahia, for example, we know that enslaved Native labor and the selling of Native bodies cleared the ground and raised the capital for the enslavement of Africans that would follow.7 But if this research demonstrates the significance of enslaved Native labor to the plantation systems of the Americas, it remains poorly explained why most European colonies shifted from reliance on indigenous American slaves to imported African slaves in the very decades of greatest economic expansion. During the first 150 years of American colonization, Europeans enslaved far more indigenous Americans than people of African descent. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, enslaved Native Americans mined more gold, planted and harvested more tobacco and sugar, and extracted more natural resources—especially pearls and dyewoods—than enslaved Africans. Yet by the later seventeenth century African slaves had come to dominate nearly all key areas of plantation production and in many non-­plantation colonial sites, as well. If enslaved Indians were foundational to the colonial systems they built—if they were effective enslaved laborers whose forced labor built the very systems that would come to be associated with enslaved African labor—why in these places, and why, in general, was there a seventeenth-­century transition away from enslaving Indians and toward enslaving Africans? And why then? On the one hand, these are deceptive questions. The story of new world labor systems did not unfold in a neat dramatic arc from Native slavery to African slavery to free labor. Europeans brought enslaved Africans to the Americas from the beginning, Native slavery ebbed and flowed across the centuries, and depending on the region and empire in question, the arc sometimes operated in the other direction, as in seventeenth-­century São Paulo or eighteenth-­century Montreal. Even in those places where enslaved Amerindians were replaced by enslaved Africans, systems of coercive labor, debt peonage, land dispossession, and various forms of servitude persisted for Native populations. Additionally, in the Spanish colonial world, questions of Native enslavement became central points of contention in the early decades of the sixteenth century, although efforts by some to prevent the enslavement of Native Americans had limited reach. Still, on a hemispheric scale, there was undeniably a general shift from relying on enslaved Indians to relying on enslaved Africans during the seventeenth century. In the aggregate, the

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moment at which the number of enslaved Africans overcame the number of enslaved Indians was somewhere around 1690: almost the precise midpoint in the career of legal chattel slavery in the colonial Americas. The fact of that shift is widely accepted, but its reasons remain poorly understood. This is a case where more research has made questions harder, rather than easier, to answer. There used to be three widely held assumptions about why Indian slavery “failed” and African slavery “succeeded.” One was cultural, and often racial, suggesting that Africans naturally “made better slaves” than their Amerindian counterparts. People of West African descent, in this line of reasoning, were more culturally prepared for agricultural life and more accustomed to practices of slavery and other forms of unfree labor than their presumably more unsettled Native American counterparts. These differences ostensibly made African-­descended people less troublesome and more productive than their indigenous American counterparts. This argument echoes slaveholders’ own racialist reasoning, articulated most fully in the eighteenth, but already present in the seventeenth, century. As a pair of New France officials claimed in 1749, “The Indian, although a slave, does not work. He is not like the Negro. He is lazy and cannot be kept indoors however well or badly treated . . . They cannot breathe unless they are returned to the woods.” This racial logic, rather than reflecting actual cultural or historical differences, was deployed to simultaneously justify enslaving Africans and dispossessing indigenous Americans.8 A second, related, explanation for the shift toward African laborers centers on disease, positing that enslaved Indians succumbed quickly to European-­ introduced epidemics, prompting colonists to turn to the transatlantic slave trade to supply their growing demand for coerced laborers. Although diseases from the Eastern Hemisphere undeniably caused tremendous suffering and death among the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and although slave raiding and slavery were both factors in spreading and intensifying the effects of European-­introduced diseases, there is little historical evidence that epidemics discouraged further enslavement of Native Americans. On the contrary, in sixteenth-­century Hispaniola and Brazil, in seventeenth-­century Virginia and the Carolinas, and in eighteenth-­century Paraguay and Chile, population declines among indigenous people more often prompted expanded slave raiding in search of new sources of coerced Native labor.9 Still others have argued that, because they were supposedly close to home, enslaved Native Americans could more easily escape from colonial settlements, traveling well-­known terrain to return to their homelands or blending

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into neighboring Indigenous communities that would welcome them and keep them safe from recapture. Given the distances traveled by most enslaved captives—Apaches to Montreal, Timicuans to Boston, Mapuches to northern Peru, Kalinagos to central Mexico—most were in foreign climates with unfamiliar landscapes and unintelligible languages. There were hundreds of miles of unknown rivers, trails, and seas between them and their people. Those captured closer to the colonial settlements where they labored were nearly always taken by the very nations whose lands they would have to traverse in their escape. And when Native communities lived in willing proximity to colonial populations, they were eager to capture and return escaped slaves to curry favor or lucrative rewards from their European neighbors.10 None of these oft-­cited explanations for the shift away from Native slavery, then, has withstood scrutiny. Other answers are emerging, focused especially on the legal and geopolitical realities of West African versus Native American relations with Europeans, on distinctions between captive cultures centered on enslavement and those centered on the perpetuation of slavery, and on the global geopolitics of West African and Native American sovereignties. But few have looked closely at the investors, traders, and regulatory officials actually making these decisions to see when and why they channeled their investments from one enslaved population to another. What would imperial officials or influential colonial investors stand to gain by expanding West African slaving and slave trades while curtailing those activities in the Americas?

The Dispute The intercepted slaving voyage that launched Bégon’s inquiry, according to later reports, had been commissioned by the men overseeing Martinique’s main sugar refinery, located in the administrative and commercial capital of St. Pierre. The refinery was feeling the pressure of a recent surge in Martinique’s sugar production, which created an almost insatiable demand for labor—and they complained that the Compagnie du Sénégal was failing to deliver the enslaved workers they had promised. Although this was a case of privateers seizing unlicensed trade vessels operating across imperial boundaries, neither the attackers, nor the slave traders, nor their customers operated in secret. All parties openly agreed on the facts of the case, and all were deeply invested in the ugly business of reducing humans to commodities. They agreed, too, that all of the captives—both Amerindian and

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African—were legal chattel, and in fact both sides’ positions rested on the shared assumption that people of African and Amerindian descent could be considered legal slaves.11 The dispute arose over which French traders were allowed to deliver enslaved people for sale to the Caribbean colonies. The Compagnie du Sénégal cited their monopoly over the delivery of what the letters patent for the company describe as “negres captifs,” or “captive Negroes.” “This company,” read the case summary, “claims that the trade in Negroes belongs exclusively to them against all others.”12 Their charter—reissued and expanded only a year before—provided a fairly compelling case. Not only was the language quite clear on their exclusive right to trade along the West African coast “from Cape Verde to the Cape of Good Hope,” but it also gave the Compagnie a thirty-­ year exclusif on the trade of “Negro Captives, which solely the Company may sell and transport in the islands and mainland of the Americas.”13 In their expansive reading of this provision, all slave trading by other entities violated the Compagnie’s monopoly privilege: a right the company could enforce with violence, if necessary. The slave traders and managers of St. Pierre’s refinery argued for a much more limited interpretation of the Compagnie’s monopoly privileges. Their first argument was geographic: the Compagnie du Sénégal was a West African company with monopolies confined to that continent. “The merchants of the Islands,” the report noted, “maintain that this commerce is permitted to everyone except along the African coast, and that until now the Company has not been opposed to it.” The South American slave trade, they contended, fell outside the bounds of even the most generous reading of the company’s monopoly privileges. What is more, the merchants argued, even if one imagined a broader geographic power for the company, the letters patent specifically gave them the right to deliver only “Captive Negroes” to the islands. As enslaved South American or Caribbean Natives were not “Negroes,” they insisted, the Compagnie could not prevent their delivery.14 The Compagnie was banking on the ambiguity of the term “Negre,” or “Negro,” which in the 1680s held two distinctive but mutually reinforcing meanings. Although its etymology would suggest otherwise, neither of the word’s common French meanings in the later seventeenth century was the equivalent of “Noirs,” a term also in use to refer not only to people from sub-­ Saharan Africa, but also to people from Brazil and many places in the Indian Ocean and the spice islands. The first common usage of “negre” was geopolitical and legal: identifying the peoples occupying the lands of “Nigritie”

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or the “Pays des Negres” who were at war with coastal Africans and thus legitimate targets for just war slavery. By this narrower definition, the Compagnie would have no claim over the Indian slave trade because the legitimate targets of enslavement would not just be limited to West Africa, but further restricted to a specific region of the West African interior. But by the 1660s, “Negre” had taken on a second and increasingly common usage, as a synonym for “esclave,” or slave. In colloquial usage, for example, it was not uncommon for an enslaved Kalinago woman to be referred to as “une negresse, Caribe de nation,” or “a Negress of the Carib nation” or “of Carib birth.” The com­pany’s charter, which granted exclusive right to conduct “la Traite des Négres” would, to many contemporaries, have been synonymous with a monopoly over “the slave trade” more broadly. By this more recent and much broader definition, the Compagnie’s charter would indeed make them the exclusive suppliers of all enslaved people to the French Caribbean “to the exclusion of all others.” The South American slave traders and the managers of the refinery rejected this broader reading, appealing to Martinique’s colonial officials for compensation from the Compagnie.15

The Verdict The decision was rendered by Michel Bégon, a well-­ connected French bureaucrat recently appointed intendant, or chief civil and legal official, in the French islands. Bégon recognized the profound implications for the emerging plantation/slave complex, and asked his superiors to consider making a broader ruling on these questions that would cover all future cases. But for the purposes of this dispute, the officials ruled that they would “prohibit the merchants who trade on the coast of the [South American] mainland to trade in any Negroes without the permission of the Company, but as for the Indian slaves, we do not see that the Company has even the slightest appearance of a right to prevent the said trade.”16 Bégon, who would later oversee enslaved Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Indians in his post as intendant of the king’s galleys at Marseille, for the next two decades made it clear that he supported the enslavement of Native American captives. As late as 1704, Bégon cast a wide net when defining who could become a slave in the French empire, including “Blacks, Indians, and Mulattos, who are peoples accustomed to servitude and who live much more honestly and Christianly being slaves than they would if they were free.”17

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It is easy to imagine the result of an opposing verdict. The Compagnie would have been authorized not only to prevent competing investors from trading in enslaved Native people, which was their original intent, but they also would have been given an incentive to invest in and vastly expand that trade to meet surging demand for captives in the Caribbean. Beleaguered by complaints that the Compagnie was not supplying its contractual minimum of 2,000 enslaved workers per year, its directors would have had every incentive to find other sources of captives to deliver. Indeed, only one year after the decision to limit the Compagnie’s monopoly to West African captives, the crown punished the company for its failure to meet the demand of Caribbean colonizers for more enslaved laborers. A 1684 declaration by the French Conseil d’Etat complained that “the investors in the Compagnie du Sénégal have never executed the said contract nor brought to the islands the said two thousand Negros; but instead they have transported so few that most of the inhabitants of the islands, lacking captives and having no other means to cultivate their lands and plantations, plan to abandon the islands.” As a punishment for these failures, the crown opened the West African slave trade to other companies operating from the south bank of the Gambia River to the Cape of Good Hope, which also nullified the clause in the Compagnie’s monopoly making them the exclusive suppliers of enslaved laborers to the French Caribbean.18 Had their monopoly not been limited to exclude Native slaves, investors likely would have embraced rather than fought the trade in Native captives from South America, and all the more so with new competitors gaining control of most of the West African coast. There was certainly ample opportunity to expand this trade. Between the 1650s and 1680s, the potential supply of enslaved South American Natives had grown exponentially, as Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and French traders widely trafficked in captive Indians at several well-­known points: Rio de Janeiro and Cumana, as well as trade centers along the Amazon River. French traders began buying Native captives from the Oronoco and Guarapiche Rivers in Venezuela sometime during the 1670s or 1680s as well. As one French official noted, “these nations are at war with one another and take prisoners from other Indians whom they treat as slaves, and who serve them and are sold as such.” By the final third of the seventeenth century, Native slavers were traveling directly to Martinique in small watercraft that could traverse the southern Caribbean. “These same Indians,” wrote Martinique’s intendant, François-­Roger Robert, “sometimes leave their rivers in their pirogues and travel to the French islands to conduct the trade and sell their Indian slaves.”

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As a resident of St. Pierre, the hub of Martinique’s slave trade, Robert would have witnessed this traffic firsthand, and he implied that it was both well established and ready to expand.19 Recovering the details of this trade—and even identifying the Native ­people involved in it—has proven nearly impossible. French, Spanish, and Portuguese records barely reach into this region before the mid-­eighteenth century. The rare snippets that survive focus on the potential for expanding peaceful trade, and are dominated by bland lists of merchandise for trade, such as a three-­page French memorandum from 1670 outlining the profits that could be made from trade in the Guarapiche River Valley, with a detailed list of commodities previously exchanged. The range of trade goods reveals that these Native communities demanded mostly practical goods that could be adopted or repurposed to fit into existing patterns of daily life. Merchants brought 800 axes from Dieppe as well as 1,800 pruning hooks, 1,200 knives, 200 pairs of scissors, and 80,000 fishing hooks. They also carried decorative and prestige items, including white, black, and blue glass beads, small mirrors, 800 tinkling bells, and “two dozen cheap rings with fake diamonds and colored stones.” With such a specific list of merchandise—and in such large quantities—it is clear that the French traders had been there before. And like their contemporaries in North America, these merchant-­voyageurs established trade partnerships that included the buying of human captives.20 What is missing from the list is also telling. There were no guns or ammunition, suggesting that Indigenous captive raids were not, or at least not yet, driven by external pressures or expanded by European military technology. Given the scale of demand for European goods, it is clear that this vast South American region could have yielded a large number of captives for the southern Caribbean had the French invested in expanding the trade. On a larger scale, the second half of the seventeenth century was a period of expanding—not contracting—Native slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere. In North America, the trade into South Carolina and Canada grew rapidly during the very years that French officials in the Caribbean were debating where Native slavery fit into the broader legal and financial schemes supporting the brutal forced labor that undergirded colonization. In New France, the Native slave trade became a staple in French diplomatic and commercial exchanges during the 1670s, expanding during the 1680s and 1690s to such a degree that, by the early 1700s, Native slaves dominated that colony’s unfree population and the colony established formal legal protections for those claiming to own Native captives as property. Colonists in South Carolina conducted

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such widespread human trafficking in the Native Southeast that they exported as many as fifty thousand enslaved Native people during the same decades, far outnumbering the importation of enslaved West African captives between the 1670s and early 1700s. In São Paulo, the population of enslaved Native people reached staggering levels in the mid-­seventeenth century. There, legal investment in the captive trade and legal protection of enslaved Native people as property were the key factors that expanded the enslaved Native population of that region into the tens of thousands in the space of a generation.21 Thus, on a hemispheric level, in the 1680s, there was every reason to believe that the enslavement and exploitation of Native Americans as captive laborers would expand to such a point that it could have become a viable alternative to the African slave trade. Bégon’s opinion tacitly supported the expansion of Native slavery by declaring enslaved Amerindians legitimate property and, furthermore, by defining the Compagnie du Sénégal’s monopoly rights narrowly, opening the door to other investors.

The Reaction Cut out of this trade, and restricted from other opportunities to supply captive laborers, the Compagnie du Sénégal pushed against the trend. Lacking the right to all slave trades, the Compagnie worked in subsequent years to suppress the Amerindian slave trade in favor of the trade for which they held unambiguous monopoly. Faced with a double threat to their investments, the limitation of its monopoly to West African captives taken from Senegambia gave the Compagnie du Sénégal renewed incentive to cut out alternative supplies of enslaved laborers. Their first target was hardly a serious threat to their dominance: a handful of traders buying Indian and African captives from the Natives of nearby Dominica. Raiding their enemies and capturing runaway slaves from Martinique and Guadeloupe, Dominica’s Natives had become a small-­scale supplier of enslaved people, “one or two at a time.”22 That the Compagnie took the trouble to cut off such an insignificant competitor suggests something of the seriousness with which they took the potential threat of an expanded Native slave trade. Over the next two decades, the Compagnie would invest heavily in Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Christophe, influencing legal positions there until Native slavery was outlawed locally. The Compagnie’s exact role in these deliberations is unclear—there are no surviving records that show

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who specifically argued for any given law against Indian slavery in the French Caribbean. What is clear from the record is the ways that the 1683 decisions about slave trading monopolies provided every incentive to African slave trading companies to suppress the Indian slave trade at a decisive moment in the history of French slavery. Early changes were subtle, but meaningful. In an ordinance issued in January 1685, the Compagnie worked with French officials in Martinique to allay concerns about sickness spreading through, and then from, their slave ships. Using the term “Noirs” rather than “Negres” to describe the Compagnie’s captives, the officials explained how the “ships of the Compagnie du Sénégal, bringing Blacks to the islands,” spread disease “caused by the infection of a number of the Blacks embarked.” Discussing slaving vessels entering Caribbean ports, the ordinance differentiated “Blacks and other people” who needed to be kept apart from the general population in order to prevent the spread of disease. Although the slight shift in language was not explicitly defended as a means of defining who was subject to enslavement and who was not, the shift itself is unmistakable and corresponded with the Compagnie’s efforts to intercept Native slave shipments.23 As the French Crown authorized new slave trade companies, creating even more competition, the Compagnie du Sénégal—and presumably the new companies as well—expanded their efforts to block those who wished to trade in other captive populations. As the French Crown broke West African trade monopolies into smaller pieces, it made the new monopolies contingent upon each company’s delivery of a specified number of captives from particular regions, providing a powerful incentive for the new companies to favor African over Native American captive trades. The letters patent creating the Compagnie du Guinée in 1685, for example, required the company to deliver “one thousand Negroes of Guinea,” to the Caribbean and other American colonies in order to maintain its monopoly privileges. Again, the specification of the population to be delivered was much narrower than in previous iterations of company charters, limiting the companies to restricted swaths of African territory and, at least by not counting other captives toward the quota, creating incentives against enslaving and trading indigenous Americans. Anything that stood in the way of Caribbean demand, and thus diminished the company’s ability to finance its slaving operations, would threaten the loss of its monopoly privileges, not only for the slave trade but also for the trade in gold, ivory, pepper, and many other items supplied from West and West Central Africa.24

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The Implications These incremental decisions were part of a larger process of working out the legal and philosophical boundaries of slavery in the French Atlantic, something that was always evolving but which stood at a particularly meaningful crossroads in the early 1680s. That this was an especially formative moment in France’s slave system is underscored by the letters of February 13, 1683, revealing that Bégon drafted the Code Noir amid widespread uncertainty about the boundaries of slave trade monopolies. Decisions made during these years would shape French practices for more than a century. The decisions were more often practical than philosophical, resolving immediate questions in ways that, over time, created patterns of colonial practice and generated laws to support them.25 In the seventeenth century, French slavers and legal officials did not imagine two distinctive racial categories—noirs versus indiens/sauvages—with one group destined for enslavement and the other for dispossession. In the French Atlantic at least, those arguments were more a product of the eighteenth than the seventeenth century. In the 1680s, the lines were far less clear. At no point during the drafting of the Code Noir, nor during the deliberations over the Compagnie’s monopoly, did anyone record an objection to enslaving Amerindians. At no point did the code’s authors appeal to racial inferiority as a justification for African rather than Amerindian enslavement. Instead, financial incentives structured by the state and its ability to grant monopoly powers influenced the primary targets of French enslavement in ways that are not yet well understood. Moreover, when it supported their argument, the directors of the Compagnie du Sénégal worked to erase distinctions between Africans and Amerindians, arguing that all slaves could fall under the broad category of “Negre” covered by their monopoly. This position was still supported by Michel Bégon a full two decades after he drafted the Code Noir.26 On the other hand, colonists and investors who argued for clear distinctions—insisting that Amerindians were not “Negres,” as the Compagnie claimed—did so to expand the trade in enslaved Native South Americans rather than to argue that one group was a legitimate target of enslavement but the other was not. Racial (or proto-­racial) categories, in other words, did not map neatly onto categories of enslavability. There can be no question that ethnic othering was a necessary precondition of enslavement, especially on a large scale. Nor is there much doubt

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that northern Europeans projected demeaning and often dehumanizing characterizations onto the peoples of sub-­Saharan Africa and the Americas, which made the unthinkable cruelty and violence of Atlantic slavery more thinkable. By denigrating their bodies and minds, by dismissing the richness of their societies and cultures, and by setting themselves up as not only superior but also somehow salvific, colonizers justified systems of oppression that served their own interests at a devastating cost to others.27 Yet this case suggests the need to rethink the one-­to-­one equation of racial thinking and slavery, not in an effort to disentangle them but rather to suggest that they were bound together with still other factors that were essential to the development of Atlantic slavery. Europeans created categories that racialized and reduced both African and Native American peoples, but that fact alone cannot explain why about three times as many people of African descent were enslaved by Europeans over the course of four centuries. To understand especially the massive juggernaut that was the eighteenth-­century transatlantic slave trade, we must also attend to issues of capital investment, the incentives of state control, and the geopolitics of indigenous slaving on both sides of the Atlantic. It is almost impossible to know how extensive the Native slave trade was, or how large it might have become, given different legal and economic incentives. The clearly defined points that produced records for the transatlantic trade—European supply, points of embarkation, points of debarkation—were largely absent in the Native slave trade. The ports where shipments could be taxed were not controlled by the French, and French trading companies could not regulate a continental trade with so many possible outlets. This was no accident. Both the French state and the companies it relied on for tax revenue and the extension of its sovereignty favored a slave system that was more, rather than less, taxable; more, rather than less, countable; and more, rather than less, French controlled. In other words, the reasons we have a harder time reconstructing the contours of the Native slave system turn out to be significant reasons that investors, and especially revenue-­conscious state officials, favored African over Amerindian slavery. The ability to produce and preserve an imperial paper trail offers a useful shorthand for the many ways that European investors and government officials could use the constraints of the transatlantic journey to their advantage. Trade companies extended French influence and, when they were successful, filled state coffers. If the coastal states in Senegambia, Ghana, or Benin could deliver captives directly to France’s colonies, they would have done what the

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Guarapiches had done: trade directly to circumvent regulations and demand a higher price. The ocean prevented such direct competition in the African trade in a way it never could with Amerindians. The work of the Atlantic itself therefore became profoundly important, not only distancing slaveholding Europeans from the violence that brought enslaved people to them, but also creating intentional inefficiencies that channeled investments and profits into a smaller number of grasping European hands. Indigenous Americans’ success in evading the archive—what I have called in another context “strategic silences”—meant that Native people could control this trade and have it serve their own interests rather than forcing the Native people to become ancillaries in settler colonial slaving wars.28 Native American geographic knowledge, combined with the marine technology of those who lived close to the Caribbean basin, shaped European conceptions of law as well as the foundations of transnational commerce. Guarapiche, “Galibi,” and other Native people traveled in their own pirogues from the South American mainland directly to Martinique, and they evaded exclusive or long-­term alliances with any of the major European powers for the first two centuries of settler colonialism. This made their activities much harder for Europeans to control and thus to profit from. Of course, much the same thing could be said for West and West Central African peoples involved in the slave trade. Placing the Guarapiche River alongside, for example, the Gambia reveals many similarities. In both cases, indigenous knowledge and technology, as well as local political and military rivalries, brought captives into European hands. No French slavers were venturing into the deep interior to take captives in either place. Yet, in the Caribbean, Native American captors could take enslaved people directly to colonial buyers without European officials even knowing, much less controlling, their actions. This made the Atlantic key to the vast scale of the slave trade and incentivized the massive investment of resources by proto-­capitalist financiers. Shipping captives across the Atlantic was extremely inefficient from the perspective of European capital, but it did allow investors to control and profit from the trade in ways that ensured far greater financial and military commitment to its expansion.

CHAPTER 4

First Enslavements and First Emancipations Slavery and Capitalism in Early Colonial Virginia, 1547–1660 John N. Blanton

In April 1619, Sir George Yeardley, governor of the Virginia colony, issued what can be seen as the first emancipation proclamation in Anglo-­American history. Most settlers had, to this point, arrived in Virginia not as free stakeholders in the colonial project but as “company servants,” their labor power claimed by corporate shareholders and directed by corporate agents empowered to extract the maximum surplus value from these bound workers. The technologies of labor extraction employed by the Virginia Company were extremely violent. Under the “cruel Laws” of military rule imposed by Thomas Dale seven years earlier, settlers were forced to labor under martial discipline, including violent whippings and capital punishment for a host of minor offenses.1 The Virginia Company had, in essence, imposed an extreme form of bond servitude on putatively free laborers, one that legitimated the power of life and death—the traditional philosophical basis for enslavement—as a tool of surplus extraction. Without access to the material bases of traditional English liberty, and with violently coerced labor and the ever-­ present threat of death as the norm, it is little wonder that many settlers saw their lives in Virginia as “noe way better than Slavery.”2 This all changed with Yeardley’s proclamation. In place of Dale’s code, henceforth settlers would be governed by “those free laws which his Majesty’s subjects live under in England.” The governor freed all servants who had been in the colony for at least three years and encouraged them to “possesse and plant” parcels of land, turning bound laborers into propertied householders.3

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This first emancipation put colonial Virginia on a firm agrarian capitalist footing—vesting individual heads-­of-­household with recognized legal property rights and empowering them to extract surplus value from the labor of workers bound to their households through a variety of dependent statuses. Though still tied to the Company and its networks of trade, credit, and debt, decisions about how to manage labor would be made, not by company agents or even Dale’s military regime, but rather by heads-­of-­household in the individual households of propertied English settlers. In countless individual acts of primitive accumulation, these “free” householders dispossessed the Indigenous peoples of the Chesapeake and occupied huge tracts of prime real estate, while also “freeing” the vast majority of settlers from control over the means of economic production. The Virginians who benefitted from this microcosm of capitalist transition, though they may have styled themselves manor lords, lived in a recognizably modern world. Yeardley’s proclamation made clear that private property protected by common law, not fiefdoms held at the crown’s pleasure, would form the foundation of colonial society.4 If capitalism arrived in one of the first ships, slavery was not far behind. When the first “Twenty and odd” Africans arrived in Virginia, only four months after Yeardley, they were sold into the agrarian capitalist society his proclamation had created. They would be owned and exploited not by the Virginia Company, but rather by individual settler householders. The first Anglo-­American emancipation set the conditions for the first Anglo-­ American enslavements.5 The temporal coincidence of Virginia’s capitalist transformation with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the colony is not accidental. As a raft of recent scholarship attests, capitalism and slavery were (and remain) perfectly compatible.6 Indeed, this scholarship argues that the development of Anglo-­American capitalism positively relied on the production of cheap commodities and the literally captive markets that slavery provided.7 Yet, for a number of reasons, the relationship between slavery and capitalism at this foundational moment in 1619 remains a point of scholarly (and public) contention. In one sense, this lacuna is the unintended consequence of the entirely necessary and salutary expansion of historians’ fields of inquiry. Eschewing earlier generations’ focus on the origin story of the United States, scholars have now opened up a “vast early America” that began long before 1607 and extended well beyond the North American mainland.8 Knowing what we now do about the longer and deeper relationship between slavery and European colonialism, the arrival of a relative handful of enslaved

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Africans at a struggling, peripheral English settlement hardly seems as significant as it once did.9 But something important did occur when the first twenty Africans were sold at Point Comfort in August of 1619. That moment marked the beginning of the intertwined histories of chattel slavery and Anglo-­American agrarian capitalist colonialism, initiating a seismic shift in global history by building the wealth that would ultimately fuel the world’s first industrial societies.10 Yet, for a number of reasons, 1619 rarely figures in recent studies of slavery and capital. The “new history of capitalism” (NHC) has focused primarily on a later period, illustrating how the emergence of a market-­based industrial and financial economy in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relied on commodities produced by enslaved labor.11 The NHC scholars who have examined earlier periods tend to focus on the role of slavery in promoting the development of mercantile and financial capital.12 Historians working in the “racial capitalism” tradition have given the seventeenth century far more sustained attention, and have argued persuasively that capitalism was racialized from its inception, often focusing on the commoditizing and dehumanizing logics of the slave trade and West Indian bondage.13 All of these ways of viewing the connections between slavery and capitalism have merit, and we have benefitted tremendously from them. But taking another view of capitalism, one that focuses on the immediate relations of production and consumption as they existed on the ground, rather than markets or manufactures, opens up new vistas and resituates conflict and struggle—between working people and their employers, to be sure, but also among capitalists themselves—as the prime movers in the development of slavery, capital, and the relationship between them. A dizzying array of definitions have been applied to the totalizing structure we call capitalism, so many and so various, in fact, that some scholars now avoid defining the term altogether. Implicit markers remain, however. Capitalism has been said to be the rational organization of formally free labor, or the wage relation, or constantly increasing productivity per input, or reliance on credit and debt, or dependence on the market. These are all, surely, elements of a capitalist economy, but they too often elide the essential social conflict that drove capitalist development forward starting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.14 By refiguring peasants’ customary feudal communal rights as landlords’ absolute individual property rights, the capitalist transition created a new social landscape, defined by property ownership and the right to compel labor that such ownership conferred, on

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which the struggle between propertied employers and expropriated workers would play out. Viewed from the level of immediate social relations, then, capitalism is less a fixed structure than an ongoing process, the product of a struggle between those who held property and those who did not, and the constant adjustments and readjustments of the relationship between them. To understand these struggles and their results, we must attend to individual households, the fundamental building blocks of the agrarian, capitalist, socio-­economic order, and the locus where the necessities and luxuries of life were produced and consumed.15 The task is complicated because, then as now, conflicts between labor and capital could be resolved in numerous ways, and the decentered nature of early English capitalism gave individual heads-­ of-­household broad discretion in organizing the labor of their wives, children, apprentices, servants, hired laborers, and slaves as they saw fit. Framing capitalism as a process forces us to grapple with the differing strategies propertied men pursued in navigating these material social relations, and the ways in which dependent laborers resisted and negotiated them, uncovering very real conflicts over the place of slavery in Anglo-­American settler society. In Virginia, this capitalist conflict played out along lines familiar to scholars of early modern English politics. Just as their cousins at the metropole descended into civil war and revolution, Virginians also struggled over the ideal order of their colonial household. The early planter class, linked politically and economically to the Stuart regime, drew on the ideologies and praxes of absolutism in their quest to engross the wealth and power of empire. To the early elites based in the James River littoral, colonial plantations were divine right monarchies in miniature, and they themselves were petty sovereigns entitled to wield the power of life and death—the power of enslavement— at their discretion. But not all Virginians hewed to this absolutist vision. For example, communities of dissenting smallholders clustered across the James in the Southside counties appear to have held quite different beliefs about authority, community, and labor that were less conducive to chattel slavery. Moreover, the fluidity of provisioning labor regimes that dominated the Eastern Shore provided the material bases from which the “charter generation” of enslaved people could press claims to liberty and conditional social integration.16 Though they were certainly not abolitionist, these communities present us with Virginias that might have been, still capitalist but far less reliant on slave labor. To understand why the planter model won out, why there was a “transition” to the slave/plantation complex in the 1660s, we must examine other origin stories and track other moments of transition.17 Yeardley’s

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proclamation and the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619 mark a crucial point in this process.

* * * Englishmen did not encounter slavery for the first time in 1619. They were acutely aware of the slave labor regimes of the Mediterranean and early Iberian Atlantic worlds. Indeed, there were enslaved Africans resident in England throughout the medieval and early modern eras.18 But the English had also recently experimented with enslaving their fellow subjects. In 1547, an Act for the Punishing of Vagabonds decreed that unemployed vagrants could “be marked with an whott Iron in the brest the marke of V” and handed over to a propertied householder “to be his Slave” for two years. These penal-­term slaves could be compelled to perform labor, “how vyle so ever it be,” by “beating cheyninge or otherwise,” and fed “onelye . . . breade and water or small dryncke and . . . refuse of meate.” An enslaved vagabond caught attempting to escape would be condemned as a “Slave for ever.”19 This kind of violent coercion, though here taken to an extreme, was a built in feature of early English “free labor.”20 But this 1547 act was different in a crucial way: unlike other bound labor statutes that commoditized labor power, the Vagrancy Act commoditized the laborer’s person.21 An English enslaver could “let sett furthe sell bequethe or give [away]” his penal slaves “after suche like sorte and manner as he maye doo of anny other his movable goods or Cattels.” Slaves, the law flatly stated, were a species of property.22 The year 1547 was not the first time English subjects had been classed as property. Slavery had been widespread in Roman and Anglo-­Saxon Britain.23 Feudal serfs and villeins were considered a species of property, tied to the lord’s estate and bound to produce a surplus for his consumption. But this was a recognizably different relation than that mandated by the Vagrancy Act. Being tied to the manor rooted feudal laborers in the community and provided a number of customary rights and protections.24 Enslaved vagrants, on the other hand, were bound as the property of an individual master who was expressly granted extreme coercive power. The difference between feudal serfdom and penal slavery demonstrates how the transition to capitalism altered the social relations of production and allowed for new kinds of labor exploitation, up to and including enslavement.25 It is no coincidence that Marx looked to the Vagrancy Act as the ultimate example of “so called primitive accumulation”—the complete alienation of the laborer from the means

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of production, to the point of alienability, and the absolute commoditization of human labor, beyond the bounds of common humanity, made slavery the ne plus ultra of capitalist social relations.26 Within two years the Vagrancy Act was repealed. With peasant rebellions rocking the countryside, penal slavery was, in the words of one historian, “bound to fail.”27 The refusal of the laboring classes to be reduced to chattels, and the accommodation of employers to their demands, made the enslavement of fellow Englishmen untenable.28 Indeed a broad, if inchoate, popular antislavery sentiment seems to have emerged in mid-­sixteenth century England.29 In one famous example, a slaveholder who publicly beat his Russian slave was brought up on charges of assault and rebuked by the court with the oft-­quoted reminder that “England was too pure an Air for Slaves to breath in.”30 If the blackletter law of the Vagrancy Act illustrates how slavery could coexist with capitalist social relations, the ephemeral Cartwright’s Case suggests that not all Britons—certainly laboring people themselves, but a critical mass of propertied heads-­of-­household as well—agreed that it should. Property-­in-­persons did not abolish itself in early modern England— the resistance of laboring people, and the accommodations of their employers, had resulted in the first capitalist emancipations. The paltry freedom of the early English laboring classes was, then, not a natural outcome of capitalist development but rather the outcome of a specific struggle over the terms of agrarian capitalist labor. The transition to capitalism meant that this struggle would take place in the individual households of the propertied men who reaped the benefit of primitive accumulation. As alienated laborers were left with no option but to sell their labor to these domestic patriarchs, the basic unit of social organization—the site where the necessities of human life were produced and consumed, where society and the species were reproduced—shifted from the feudal manor to the individual household.31 Indeed, ownership of the kinds of “property” created by primitive accumulation constituted the rights-­bearing English freeman, while alienation from it was the defining property of those who labored for him.32 Simultaneously, the increasingly centralized state delegated much of its sovereign authority to these same propertied men, who wielded the king’s absolute sovereignty in loco parentis over their household dependents.33 By the mid-­sixteenth century, these twin processes—“so-­called” primitive accumulation and the devolution of absolutism—had created a new kind of capitalist domestic patriarchy, one that could, as the Vagrancy Act illustrates, certainly accommodate chattel slavery.

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The ways in which labor and capital negotiated this new social terrain ultimately resulted in a new “free labor” system that represented a delicate balance of interests.34 The patriarch, his dependents, and the state all had an interest in the household, and so all theoretically had to give their consent to its relations. The transfer of a married woman’s property to her husband through coverture and his right to coerce her productive and reproductive labor may have been a domestic articulation of primitive accumulation, but wives also remained members of the broader community, subject to its laws and entitled to its protections.35 The reliance of children on the patriarch for their very survival could be used to justify shocking levels of physical punishment, but minors could call on outside authorities in cases of extreme cruelty or neglect.36 The social relations of apprenticeship, servitude, and casual wage labor were closely regulated, and local justices of the peace were empowered to determine controversies between laborers and employers “according to thequite [the equity] of the cause.”37 As an influential guidebook for local magistrates put it, domestic patriarchs had the authority to “chastise” their dependents “with moderation,” but servants had “good cause” to seek injunction against masters who “beat” them or withheld “wages, meat or drinke.”38 From the perspective of a later wage-­labor system, this all seems decidedly archaic. But it would have been unrecognizable to a feudal serf or manor lord. The devolution of sovereign power to heads-­of-­household opened up new kinds of conflict. English patriarchs disagreed about the ideal mode of household organization, a critical issue as claims to domestic authority were closely associated with, and couched in the same terms as, claims to social and political power. James I, for example, described the power of fathers, the divine right monarchs, and the role of enslavers as sprung from the same font. “The King towards his people,” he claimed, “is rightly compared to a father of children,” vested with the power to mete out “fatherly chastisement” at will. To James, the “father’s wrath and correction” were unlimited—even if an enraged patriarch were to “furiously [follow] his sonnes with a drawen sword,” they could not “make any resistance but by flight.”39 Robert Filmer went even further. The father/king, he argued, “governs by no other Law than by his own Will; not by the Laws and Wills of his Sons or Servants.” Though ultimate sovereignty resided with the king, “the First Parent,” the practical operation of absolutism required that the “Rights and Privileges” of regal authority be “distribute[d] to every subordinate and inferiour Father.” The power of these “inferiour” fathers over their households was hardly diminished by the theoretical unity of royal sovereignty. Filmer, like James, asserted

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that patriarchs had the “power of Life and Death over their Children.” And so, the absolute power of life and death—the power of enslavement—had devolved from the absolutist monarch to the absolute individual proprietor.40 While the devolution of sovereignty that Filmer invoked made the household a potential incubator for slavery, it also empowered individual patriarchs to pursue other models of domestic organization. English Puritans and revolutionaries repeatedly invoked the free household as a “commonwealth in miniature,” defined by mediated forms of consent and the bracketing of legitimate authority in the interest of the common good.41 The implications of this corporatist model for slavery were made explicit in the work of Henry Parker, a leading advisor to parliamentary revolutionaries in the mid-­1640s.42 Showing a clear understanding of the law as well as the practice of Atlantic slavery, Parker defined a slave as an “absolute possession” indistinguishable from “a horse, or any reall or personall chattell.” This proprietary claim gave enslavers, like divine right monarchs, absolute and arbitrary authority over the bodies of persons subject to their dominion. But in societies where masters (or monarchs) were given free rein over their bondspeople, slavery proved “publikely fatall”— slaves who were “governed with cruelty” tended to seek “desperate revenge.” Only where bondspeople were “protected . . . by courteous Laws” could bound labor be of any “private use.” But state mediation of the master/slave relation undermined the chattel principle. As Parker put it, “where slaves are under the protection of other Laws than their lords wills, and where they are truly parts and members of the State, and so regarded; they cease to be slaves.”43 Parker was laying out an alternative Anglophone definition of slavery— enslaved people would labor for their enslavers, but their bodies could not be owned, and so they must be seen not as articles of property but rather as bound workers whose lives and bodily integrity should be guarded by the state. This was not an abolitionist position. Parker and the Commonwealth program he argued for were just as invested in extracting wealth from bound laborers as Robert Filmer. Parker simply believed this would be better achieved under a state-­regulated form of servitude than by the violent caprice of individual enslavers. He wanted not to abolish slavery, but to domesticate it, to make an institution rooted in violence safe for Anglo-­American, agrarian, capitalist households. That these competing visions of domestic power and enslavement came from opposing sides in the mid-­seventeenth century crisis of English capitalism and the English state is not coincidental. The devolution of sovereignty to individual proprietors through primitive accumulation exposed tensions

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between absolutist individualists (like Cartwright and James I) and associative communitarians (like Henry Parker and his fellow revolutionaries). Drawing on an extreme vision of domestic patriarchy, the Stuart absolutists claimed total individual authority over their dominions, naturalizing the absolute claims of proprietary householders to their estates and dependents. Members of the anti-­absolutist coalition that overthrew the monarchy, while they disagreed on just about everything else, all believed that no authority— save that of God and, possibly, the Commonwealth—could be absolute, and called for the institutionalized mediation of all social relations by the state. Both groups were capitalist, and both required the subjugation of the many to the propertied male few. But the institutions and cultures the two groups supported were different, and they had very real implications for the simultaneous development of plantation slavery in Virginia.44

* * * If Yeardley’s 1619 proclamation was a microcosm of the broader English transition to capitalism, then it should come as no surprise that similar conflicts over the ideal mode of domestic and community governance quickly emerged. Early Virginia was no monolith, and regional differences in economic orientation and social organization shaped the development of distinctive household practices in three sub-­regions: the Eastern Shore, the James/York Peninsula, and the Southside of the James River. While practice within these regions varied substantially, and slavery certainly existed in all three, the provisioning economies of the Eastern Shore, the Puritan-­inflected smallholder communities of the Southside, and the proto-­plantations of the James/York tidewater were recognizably different. By examining these distinct agrarian capitalist communities and the place of slavery within them we gain a clearer picture of the different social and domestic contexts into which the first twenty enslaved Africans were embedded.45 Partly because of its rich source base, Northampton County on the Eastern Shore has received extensive scholarly attention. But this emphasis can distort our understanding of early Virginia because the Eastern Shore differed from the rest of the colony in a number of crucial ways. First, the settler community was tiny—even as late as the 1660s there were fewer than 200 households in all of Northampton—and they were spread over a relatively large area.46 Estates tended to be big, many well over one thousand acres, and early elites seem to have tried to keep their landholdings intact through

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primogeniture. Not surprisingly, these large landholders employed the most bound laborers, and nearly all focused on tobacco production for export.47 A few independent proprietors and tenants farmed smaller provisioning plots, but the great planters dominated the landscape. Opportunity for the few bound laborers who managed to gain their freedom was extremely limited— by the 1660s, only 9 percent of servants would go on to become freeholders.48 With its large estates and substantial bound labor pool, the Eastern Shore might appear to be ideal ground for the development of plantation slavery. But these sprawling estates did not look like Tidewater plantations. Even among large landholders, production was geared as much toward local and Atlantic provisioning as primary commodity production, and forms of labor organization associated with subsistence-­plus farming and livestock husbandry would have been common.49 Livestock represented a substantial chunk of the total wealth on the Eastern Shore.50 Just as important as the distribution of land, then, was the ownership of domesticated animals, and poorer decedents passed on their cattle and swine in much the same ways as planters did their lands.51 Booming imperial trade in the 1630s and 1640s incentivized market-­ oriented production and opened up new kinds of economic opportunity to petty producers.52 Small subsistence-­plus households could produce livestock and foodstuffs for export using family labor, perhaps augmented with a servant or two. This provisioning economy was more like pre-­plantation Puerto Rico than the nearby Tidewater.53 The structural similarity of Eastern Shore tenants to smallholders back in England is also suggestive—they likely continued to employ many of the same methods of domestic management that had proved so effective in the smaller households of the English countryside.54 Given the importance of livestock to the local economy, labor patterns associated with animal husbandry must also have shaped social relations. Tending to herds of cattle and swine was certainly demanding work, but it did not require the kind of oversight or constant toil typical of tobacco plantations, and pastoralists would have had substantial freedom and mobility in their working lives. The importance of animal husbandry may also have opened up alternate avenues of wealth accumulation for bound laborers who, with little prospect of attaining a freehold, might still make lives for themselves with the acquisition of a breeding sow; with cattle selling at five to six hundred pounds of tobacco a head, even a small herd could provide a subsistence.55 The Eastern Shore, then, combined the capitalist triad of landlord/ tenant/laborer with the provisioning economies typical of the early Atlantic periphery. The social and economic clout of Northampton landholders

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would have been the envy of the English gentry, and there was precious little room for independent smallholders, but the peculiar needs of the provisioning economy cut against planter power and gave working people, including the enslaved, space to negotiate the terms of their labor. Little wonder, then, that colonial Virginia’s most famous free Black householder—Anthony Johnson—was a resident of the Eastern Shore.56 If the Eastern Shore drew on English and Atlantic precedents, the social and economic organization of the Virginia Tidewater was recognizably new in a number of crucial ways. While company rule and early instability retarded the growth of large estates in the earliest years of settlement, the geography of the plantation was already evident by the early 1640s.57 Early grandees tended to be favorites of the crown or linked to prominent merchant firms, and many brought substantial wealth with them, giving such individuals an advantage in the scramble for prime land, which they augmented by importing fresh workers and claiming headright grants.58 With mortality rates staggeringly high, planter patriarchs expanded their holdings through advantageous marriages, tying the ruling class together into an extended colonial household.59 Savvy planters also kept their estates intact through primogeniture and the entail. Indeed, Virginia law mandated primogeniture for intestate decedents and, while rarely used in this early period, the entail would guarantee their estates’ integrity in perpetuity.60 This extensive developmental pattern, with a few smallholders and tenants scattered among huge plantations, allowed an extreme version of absolutist domestic patriarchy to flourish in tidewater households. In October 1624, for example, the General Court looked into the violent deaths of servants Elizabeth Abbott and Elyas Hintone.61 Abbott was severely beaten at the command of her master, John Proctor, after attempting to run away. William Nayle, another servant, told the court that Proctor had ordered him to “whip [Abbott] from the waist to the hand wrists & fleay her or ells his Mr wold flay him.” One witness claimed the maid had received at least five hundred lashes. Shortly after Abbot’s death another of Proctor’s servants, Elyas Hintone, was also found dead, his head bashed in with a rake.62 Empowered by his property ownership, motivated by power and profit, and far removed from any meaningful intercession by public authorities, Proctor had arrogated the ultimate power of life and death—the power to enslave—to himself. The deaths of Abbot and Hintone drew the attention of local magistrates, however, and Proctor was indicted for murder—heads-­of-­household, however broad their power, were not supposed to flay their servants. But if English

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law brought Proctor into court, it also provided him with extensive cover. Planter neighbors testified that Proctor “never ymmoderately” chastised his servants. Besides, Abbott had “often tymes rann away” and Hintone “was a very stubborne and desperat fellowe”—he threatened to “shoote himselfe wth a pistoll” rather than continue in his servitude. Intractable workers required stern management. Sadly, if predictably, justice would not be forthcoming for Elizabeth Abbot or Elyas Hintone. Proctor was cleared of all charges, affirming the near absolute power of planter-­patriarchs.63 If Tidewater masters could already wield the power of life and death over fellow subjects with near impunity, the enslavement of strangers was hardly likely to raise an eyebrow. But, as we have seen, some Britons believed that no individual, no matter how great his estate, could claim absolute authority over another, and sought to bracket all legitimate power with the rule of law. We do not often think of this tradition, associated as it is with Puritans and other mid-­century radicals, as shaping the development of early Virginia. Yet there were Puritan communities, clustered in Isle of Wight, Nansemond, and Lower Norfolk Counties on the south bank of the James River, as early as 1621. While their numbers were never great—probably no more than 750 people in the 1640s—these Southside Puritan communities offer a brief glimpse of a Virginia that might have been.64 A few of these Southside dissenters, like Richard Bennett, were connected to prominent “new merchants” back in England, and amassed large tobacco estates worked by bound labor.65 Most of their fellow “schismaticks,” however, did not have the connections or capital for such large-­scale operations. Estate sizes appear to have been smaller, usually no more than 300 to 500 acres, and property holders seem to have favored partible inheritance, breaking up estates among heirs rather than keeping large plantations intact.66 In a near perfect example of the practice, Henry Woodhouse’s 900 acres were divided among his sons at his decease in 1655, with 500 acres going to his eldest, Henry, and 200 acres each to younger brothers Horatio and John.67 While this was clearly a substantial amount of land, and was a far cry from the town-­based settlement patterns of early New England, this social model created tighter-­knit communities, with like-­minded godly settlers clustering closer together rather than spreading out over the landscape.68 One historian has noted that the Southside was a region that “attracted smallholders”—it may be more apt to say that Puritan smallholder settlement is what made the Southside distinctive.69 The overrepresentation of Puritan smallholders shaped how labor was deployed and governed on the Southside. Most of the smaller farms clustered

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along the Elizabeth River in Lower Norfolk were subsistence-­plus households, largely self-­sufficient yet able to produce a small marketable surplus, usually tobacco, that funneled through grandees like Bennett to their new merchant backers in London. Bound labor appears to have been relatively rare. Few wills mention servants, and those that do typically list only one or two.70 Most headright grants issued in Lower Norfolk were for fewer than five laborers, hinting that Virginia Puritans tended to migrate with small numbers of servants, likely kin or the children of friends.71 For many of these Southside smallholders, family labor, augmented by one or two servants, was sufficient to meet subsistence needs and produce a small surplus. Moreover, with estates being subdivided through partible inheritance, landholdings continued to shrink, further reducing demand for bound labor. By 1690, for example, George Ivy, son of an early settler along the Elizabeth River, held only 100 acres.72 The result of this unique configuration was a distinctive Southside Puritan smallholder community that contemporaries recognized as different. As in England, this smallholder ethos was linked to specific assumptions about the nature and extent of legitimate authority that, at least in theory, bracketed the power of householders through community regulation. When a controversy over labor agreements arose in 1622, for example, officials hoped to balance the claims of masters and servants by requiring that all indentures be registered with local magistrates. This would clarify the rights and duties of all parties and ensure that “upon complaint of wronge either by Mr or Servant right and justice might be done.”73 As John Proctor’s acquittal illustrates, meaningful justice for servants was in short supply, but the fact that the broader community retained the ability to regulate servitude (as well as marriage and minority) through legal invigilation gave servants (and wives and children) recognized avenues through which they might mediate their relations with domestic patriarchs. This tendency was clearly not limited to radical Puritans—it would hardly have been enshrined in law if it were—but it was particularly accentuated in dissenting communities, and surely played a role in how actual Southside households were governed. None of this is to say that Puritan settlement was somehow benign or benevolent. It relied on the same processes of Indigenous dispossession that formed the huge estates across the James. The surpluses Puritan settlements produced were channeled into the same Atlantic markets. Extreme coercion of labor, including enslavement, could and did occur. Especially on larger estates like the Bennett plantations, the demands of plantation agriculture might even dovetail with Puritan ideals of discipline and predestination to

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produce a particularly harsh labor regime.74 And the intimate relations of Puritan domesticity could be notoriously coercive.75 But the power of the Puritan householder was not arbitrary or absolute, and it had to be approved or enacted by a superior authority outside the household. Doubtless there were many Southside patriarchs who strayed from the godly ideal, but the ways they thought about their relations with dependents and with one another marked them as distinctive. Their Anglican/planter neighbors certainly saw them in this way. The Puritan congregation at Elizabeth River in Lower Norfolk had been a thorn in the side of area planters for years when sheriff Richard Conquest rode up to their small chapel on the morning of Sunday, May 28, 1647. Flanked by Thomas Ivy and John Sibsey,76 local planters and vestrymen, Conquest burst into the church to find lay preacher William Durand “in the pulpitt” leading “much people (men women & children) assembled and met together” in prayer. The sheriff ordered the dissenters to “forbeare and desist from theire frequent meetings and unusuall assembling.” Despite Conquest’s demand that they “retorne to theire severall dwellings, or habitations,” the congregants defied the “highe Sherriffe” of Lower Norfolk and helped their preacher escape arrest. In a report to the county court, Conquest noted an even more troubling fact—several prominent local settlers, including two county commissioners and a number of current or future vestrymen, were “Mayneteynors and Embraceors” of Durand’s conventicle, “Abbettors to much sedition and Mutiny.”77 Regular meetings of zealous Puritan smallholders aided by substantial local settlers with the internal solidarity to resist state power were a real threat to the ambitions of planter elites. By 1649, the planter faction, led by Sibsey and Conquest, was seeking to stamp out this troublesome community of “Seditious Sectaries” and “Schismatics” and had charged its leaders with violating the Act of Conformity. The court fined the Puritans for non-­attendance at established churches and “contempt of his highnes Lawes,” warning that they set a “prnitious example of all other male factors.”78 If left unchecked, these seditious smallholder congregations could unsettle the power of the great planters. Conquest and Sibsey were not just being paranoid, as the temporal overlap with the revolutionary victory of Parliamentary forces back at the metropole clearly illustrated. Their defeat at the Elizabeth River church and partial victory in the Norfolk courts illustrate how the same tensions within the propertied classes that were ripping England apart also tore at the Old Dominion. The kind of community the “unusuall assembling” of the Elizabeth River dissenters

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represented was actively turning the world upside down in England. If these Puritan smallholders had their way, what kind of commonwealth would they build in Virginia? No bishops—no king. No planters—no bondspeople?

* * * This regional division is admittedly schematic, and there are a great many exceptions to the broad outlines sketched above. Still, in broad strokes, this tripartite schema illustrates how the emergence of capitalist social relations in Virginia led to conflict over the structure of household, society, and state. Slavery could and did exist in all three models, but the distinctive social structures and laboring cultures that differentiated the Eastern Shore, the Tidewater, and the Southside also contributed to distinct systems of enslavement. Early Virginia was an agglomeration of overlapping slave societies, each of which made certain assumptions about what chattel status entailed and how (or whether) formerly enslaved people should be integrated into free society. That these models could coexist, often literally next door to one another, is a testament to the ability of early capitalist householders to reorganize labor to suit their needs. But, as the planter elites’ worries about Southside “schismaticks” illustrate, they could make for strange bedfellows. There is no better illustration of the vagaries of slavery in this “charter generation” than Virginia’s Eastern Shore. There were bound African laborers in the region from an early date, and they were understood to be a species of property akin to livestock. Anglican minister William Cotton’s 1640 will passed on his “plantation of Bunbury, my negro Domingo, and one young heifer” to his heir.79 Raphaell Barlowe, a merchant, left his plantation to his unborn child in 1652, along with “six cowes, six breeding sowes, and my Negro maid Mary.”80 Eastern Shore slaveholders also saw chattel bondage as heritable. One Northampton decedent, for example, listed a “Negro woman and all her increase (which for future tyme shall bee borne of her body)” as part of his estate.81 In 1656, Ann Littleton of Nandue in Northampton County left “seaven Negros”—Robin and his wife Fallassa with their three sons, Little Tony, and Jane—along with “all the sd Negros increase that it shall please God to send them.”82 To at least some Eastern Shore planters, chattel status meant total control over productive and reproductive labor.83 Virginians did not need a statute to tell them that slavery was heritable. But if slavery could be a lifetime, heritable status, it was not always so. The Eastern Shore’s provisioning economy gave laboring people a degree of

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independence and the potential to accumulate wealth, and there is abundant evidence that enslaved people exploited these openings. The result was a high rate of manumissions. Private manumissions seem to have been particularly common among the region’s largest planters, perhaps not surprising considering their disproportionate employment of bound labor. Stephen Charlton, gentleman planter, spelled out the terms of emancipation for two enslaved people in his 1654 will. “Blacke Jacke” was to be granted his freedom in 1659, a confirmation of the “free deed” Charlton had “granted him” earlier. An enslaved woman named Christyan was also granted “her freedom forever,” on the condition that she pay 2,500 pounds of tobacco or serve an additional three years for Charlton’s daughters.84 Captain Richard Vaughan, a planter and merchant, provided for the emancipation of four of his slaves—“my old negro woman” would continue to serve Vaughan’s widow “until her death, and then to be free,” while “my negro girl Temperance,” “negro Susan the eldest, and Jane the youngest” were to serve his stepson John Waltome “until they are 20.” His heirs would be the beneficiaries of these bondswomen’s labor, but Vaughan also required that, as future free persons, the girls be “brought up in the fear of God and . . . taught to read and make [their] own clothes.”85 The negotiations that led to these manumissions can only be guessed at, but it is hard to imagine them as simple acts of slaveholder beneficence. Through the individual choices they made about how to navigate their bondage, enslaved men and women were active agents in their own emancipations. As a result of these manumissions, a small but visible free Black community developed on the Eastern Shore, and some freed people claimed the rights of propertied heads-­of-­household. For most, lacking the properties that would constitute them as independent householders, a life of continued dependent labor was all to which they could look forward. Others, however, found a modicum of stability as small producers, particularly in animal husbandry. Sarah Driggus, for example, registered a cattle mark with the Northampton clerk that had previously been in use by her late husband, Thomas.86 Even enslaved people could hold their own separate property. In February 1646, for example, Thomas Yeoman left “all that I have in the Colony” to “Frank a Negro of (Capt.) Taylor’s.” Four hundred pounds of tobacco, three barrels of corn, and “a case with a shirt in it” hardly made for a substantial windfall, but even this paltry inheritance might have made a difference to Frank.87 If enslaved people could get their hands on commodities valued in the provisioning economy, they might be able to leverage

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them to secure their own liberty, a fairly common practice in the wider Atlantic world.88 For a few formerly enslaved people, ownership of land and livestock put them on par with English smallholders and tenants. Richard Vaughan, for example, left substantial bequests to the enslaved women he manumitted in his 1645 will. In addition to their liberty, Temperance, Susan, and Jane each received “2 cows, 2 suites of clothes, bed, bolster, rug, 2 blankets, pot, and a great brass kettle, four barrels of corne and a sowe,” the basic necessities required to start a new household. But this was not all. As a condition of his own inheritance, John Waltome, Vaughan’s stepson, was to transfer his 444-­acre plantation to Temperance, Susan, and Jane, “they and theirs wholly injoying it forever.”89 When these three enslaved girls reached their majority, they would immediately become not just free persons, but propertied women capable of supporting a household on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Like their more famous neighbor Anthony Johnson, they exploited the porous nature of slavery in the Atlantic provisioning economy and carved out a place for themselves in settler society.90 If the Eastern Shore was typical of the kinds of social relations associated with the “charter generations” of Atlantic slavery, the Tidewater looked ahead to the permanent, heritable bondage of the later “plantation generation.”91 As we have seen, estates on the James/York Peninsula started out big and only got bigger, and planters’ early commitment to tobacco monoculture created tremendous demand for labor. Enslaved people were part of this labor pool from 1619, and the evidence suggests Tidewater planters viewed them as chattels bound to lifetime labor from the outset. Captain William Pierce, for example, was one of the “ancient planters” who had leveraged the advantages of early settlement into substantial wealth and power. By 1643, he had patented over 5,000 acres, making him one of the largest landholders along the James.92 As his estates expanded, so did his need for bound labor. When John Rolfe noted the purchase of the first enslaved Africans by leading planters, he was describing men like William Pierce.93 Whether Pierce had purchased people in 1619, we know that he had acquired at least one enslaved laborer by 1640. On July 18 of that year, seven “servants” attempted to escape from one of his plantations and one of them, Emmanuel, was African. The runaways were apprehended and the punishments they received demonstrate the violent coercion built into early English capitalism. English servant Peter Wilcocke was to receive thirty lashes, be “burnt in the cheek with the letter R,” and had three years of colony servitude

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added to his indenture. The ringleader, Dutch servant Christopher Miller, was whipped and branded, forced to “worke with a shakle on his legg for one whole year,” and had a whopping seven years added to his servitude.94 These were terrible punishments to be sure, but they were not new—they fit the terms of the 1547 Vagrancy Act almost to the letter—and Pierce, who had previously served as captain of the guard at Jamestown, was just the kind of man to ensure they were rigorously applied.95 With his term extended to what was, in Virginia, essentially a lifetime of servitude and his body subject to the violent discipline of a master inured to cruelty, Christopher Miller might well have wondered what separated him from a slave. But he was not a chattel, as the sentence handed down to Emmanuel, the sole African runaway in the group, suggests. Like Miller, Emmanuel was whipped, branded, and shackled but, unlike the Dutchman, he was not sentenced to additional labor. Historians have pointed to this case as early evidence for the lifetime servitude of Africans in Virginia—Emmanuel could not have time added because he was already a slave for life.96 This is surely correct. But there is another significance to this case. Unlike his European comrades, Emmanuel’s punishment could be extended or extenuated “as his master shall see cause.”97 If similar experiences of bound labor blur the line between Miller and Emmanuel, the chattel principle makes the distinction between them clear. Miller may have been a servile Dutchman, but he remained a legal person, and punishment for his crimes was determined by the colonial state— as a slave, Emmanuel’s punishment was left to Pierce’s arbitrary discretion. Miller would serve the colony as punishment for a crime against the broader community. Emmanuel would continue to serve Pierce as punishment for a crime against his enslaver. In the Tidewater, the confluence of factors that made Emmanuel a lifetime slave also made manumissions extremely rare. Indeed, Tidewater planters seem to have done just the opposite, forcing African term-­servants into lifetime slavery. In June 1640, for example, John Punch, an African servant, escaped from his master, Hugh Gwyn, along with two other servants, “Victor, a dutchman” and “a Scotchman called James Gregory.” Like William Pierce’s servants, Victor and Gregory were sentenced to receive thirty lashes and serve extra time—one year for Gwyn “in recompense of his Loss sustained by their absence,” and three years for the colony. But Punch, “being a negro,” was to “serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural Life here or elsewhere.”98 Punch’s case has rightly been seen as evidence that English settlers associated African ancestry with enslavability.99 But it also illustrates

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that Virginia settlers understood the line between servitude and slavery perfectly well. The Dutchman and the Scot were bound to serve Gwyn, but they were also tied to the community they had offended. They served the colony because they were subjects of the colony and were thus subject to its laws. Punch was subject to Gwyn alone. Virginia had an interest in the labor of Victor and Gregory. Gwyn’s interest in Punch’s body was absolute and alienable. It was proprietary. The chattel principle may seem like a theoretical abstraction, but Tidewater laborers like Emmanuel and John Punch would have understood its material realities all too well. What of the Southside Puritan smallholders? Did their distinctive ideals of a godly community seep into their local practice of slavery? The evidence for this period is so thin as to admit only speculation. Unlike in Northampton, there are few recorded manumissions in Lower Norfolk wills. But the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The paucity of manumission records may suggest that there were few enslaved people in the smallholder-­dominated county to begin with, or that Puritan heads-­of-­household simply assumed that all domestic relations had to be consensual and freed enslaved laborers on the same terms as English servants without feeling the need to document their liberation. Certainly, Puritans had a complex view of enslavement, filtered through biblical injunctions against cruelty and the traditions of jubilee and conversion, that must have influenced decisions about labor management on the ground.100 The few glimpses we get of enslaved or formerly enslaved ­people in the region suggest that Southside Puritans viewed bound Africans as laborers conditionally integrated into the community, not socially dead chattel properties. In 1649, for example, English settler William Watts and Mary, a bound African, atoned for their fornication by standing before the Elizabeth River congregation and admitting their sin, the same punishment regularly handed down to white fornicators.101 Mary may very well have been enslaved, and we cannot know the nature of her sexual encounter with Watts. However, the fact that she was held to the same behavioral standard as other settlers, and faced the same punishments, hints that Lower Norfolk Puritans, while perfectly capable of employing slave labor, thought differently about the place of enslaved people in settler society than did their Tidewater neighbors.102 One final example, though seemingly contradicting the regional divisions argued for above, illustrates the tensions between these overlapping iterations of slavery. On March 31, 1641, John Graweere, “a negro servant” to William Evans, appeared before the General Court seeking custody of a child he fathered with “a negro woman belonging to Lieut. Robert Sheppard,”

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a large landholder in James City County.103 In the heart of the Tidewater, we might assume that a bound African like Graweere would have had little chance of freeing his son. As we have seen, children born to enslaved mothers were already considered chattels, and Tidewater planters were loath to give up control over valuable laborers. But surprisingly, the General Court declared Graweere’s son “free from the said Evans . . . to be and remain at the disposing and education” of his father.104 Here, in the heart of Virginia’s early plantation zone, John Graweere, a bound African laborer, was treated like an English domestic patriarch and given custody of his child. Though obviously a singular example, a number of factors similar to those that opened up routes to freedom and conditional inclusion in Northampton and the Southside may have worked in Graweere’s favor. First, he was a Christian. He told the court that he wanted custody of his son primarily to ensure that the child would be “taught and exercised in the church of England.”105 Perhaps the more hierarchical Anglicanism common among the elites reassured the planter-­judges that freeing one child from bondage would not threaten the social order. Or perhaps some justices still took the colonial injunction to proselytize seriously. Contemporary ideas of enslavement expressed in the law of nations emphasized religion as grounds for enslavement, but also argued that Christians could not enslave their coreligionists.106 Whatever their motivations, religion clearly played an important role in the case. Though the Anglicanism of Tidewater planters was worlds away from the dissenting Puritanism of Southside smallholders, membership in a corporate body—particularly one as integral to the English colonial state as the Anglican Church—made enslavement harder to justify and opened up a route to freedom for Graweere’s son. And if this was true in the early Tidewater, it may have been doubly so in the close-­knit Puritan communities of the Southside. Graweere’s ownership of productive property also played a role. Like many bound laborers on the Eastern Shore, he was “pmitted by his . . . master to keep hogs and make the best benefit thereof to himself,” provided Graweere remitted half the profits to Evans. The father’s ownership of commodities valued in the region’s provisioning economy ultimately redounded to the benefit of the son. Like many of the free Black householders in Northampton County, Graweere found a way to make the Virginia economy work for him, and this may have convinced the court that he could support his child. But the logic of the chattel principle muddies the picture. Graweere’s son was not freed from his master and simply placed in the custody of his father. The court had declared the son “free from the said Evans”—it was Graweere’s master who

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manumitted the boy. It was Evans who “pmitted” Graweere to keep hogs, who took half of Graweere’s surplus directly and who held the remainder in trust “for his own benefit,” and who ultimately made the transaction that united father and son. This kind of property transfer required the “good liking and consent” of a number of parties—Evans, Sheppard, and overseer Thomas Goodman all approved of the arrangement—but Graweere himself was not one of them. Indeed, aside from testifying that he was a Christian, John Graweere was hardly a party to the case at all.107 What would it really mean, then, for the young Graweere to be at his father’s “disposing and education”? Wasn’t John Graweere still “a negro servant unto” William Evans? Was Evans the godfather tasked with ensuring the child’s proper Christian upbringing, and what would happen if the father or son lapsed in their faith or their labor? And what of the boy’s mother? The Graweeres’ material experience of bondage is an important reminder that war-­slavery doctrine and its totalizing, violent commodification of labor and body, was not yet hegemonic. But the conditional nature of their freedom and social inclusion should also remind us that John, whatever his religion, was still bound. Everything he had—his hogs, his son, his life—he held only because Evans “pmitted” it. Graweere the younger’s freedom and Graweere the elder’s bondage were intimately linked.

* * * If the regional specificity of early Virginia slavery orients us in space, briefly sketching out its development over time helps to explain why the Tidewater model ultimately triumphed over its competitors in the last third of the seventeenth century. Something clearly changed in the 1660s and 1670s, and the traditional markers of “transition”—Bacon’s Rebellion, the codification of slavery, and the growth of transatlantic slave trade—are crucial parts of the story.108 But this transitional moment was also the result of a prior struggle, one that came to a head before Nathaniel Bacon or the Royal African Company. That this conflict played out in the same period—the mid-­1630s through the 1660s—and along many of the same valences—royalist versus Puritan, slavery versus liberty—as the contemporaneous English Civil Wars is not coincidental. The same dialectical tensions within early capitalism that informed the mid-­century English revolutions also drove a hidden civil war in colonial Virginia, one that ultimately determined the timing, shape, and significance of the “transition” to slavery.

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When revolution broke out in England, the Virginia elite declared themselves resolutely for royalism. Berkeley and the Burgesses unleashed a wave of violent repression against religious and political dissenters, and many Southside Puritans fled into exile. Upon learning of the regicide, Virginia officially declared Charles II the rightful monarch and denied the legitimacy of the Commonwealth. But a parliamentary fleet brought the colony to heel in 1652, ousting Berkeley and the great planters and replacing them with loyal commonwealth men. Richard Bennett, a leading Southside Puritan, was installed as governor, and the restructured colonial government worked to reform Virginia society. The law code was digested and streamlined. Suffrage was extended to all free men. Puritan moral reforms augured greater state regulation of private households, and all residents, including “servants and others,” were to be instructed in the Christian religion. In short, the Interregnum government of Virginia hoped to make the colony less like the James/ York Tidewater and more like the Southside.109 Whether these revolutionary reforms had much impact on African slavery is unclear. The overwhelming majority of Virginia’s small Black population surely remained enslaved. Some, however, challenged their bondage in ways that clearly resonated with Interregnum Virginians. In the godly commonwealth, conversion to Christianity could problematize the definition of enslaved people as outsiders subject to the cold logic of the chattel prin­ ciple. Mihill Gowen, an enslaved African who had converted to Christianity, exploited this opening by having his son William baptized in 1655. Three years later father and son were both emancipated on the grounds that slavery was incompatible with Christianity.110 Elizabeth Key, the mixed-­race daughter of white planter Thomas Key and an enslaved woman, gained her freedom on the grounds that her descent from a free English father, her Christianity, and the terms of a prior indenture all made her outright enslavement illegal.111 The ways Gowen and Key’s claims intersect with revolutionary ideals of Christian community and domestic order suggest an appeal to the sensibilities of the Puritan commonwealth men who ran Virginia after 1652. These were not arguments likely to sway royalist planters. Whatever its immediate impact, the revolutionary commonwealth of Virginia was not to last. The Stuart Restoration of 1660 marked a counterrevolution in both England and the Old Dominion.112 Even before receiving official word of Charles II’s return to the throne, Berkeley was reelected as governor and the Burgesses repealed all Interregnum legislation, declaring any residents who spoke out against the new regime “enemies of the peace,” .

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and unleashing another wave of repression.113 As far as the planter class was concerned, the revolution had never happened. The arrival of royalist exiles in the 1650s and new crown favorites in the 1660s reinforced the social base of the colonial planter class,114 and metropolitan support for transatlantic slaving provided an increasingly reliable source of bound labor.115 By replicating many of the strategies that had undergirded the power of the “ancient planters,” the post-­1660 planter elite reinvigorated the Tidewater model and began to establish ever-­larger plantations on fresh lands north and west of the original core areas of settlement.116 That absolutists, both monarchs and domestic patriarchs, were the beneficiaries of this imperial counterrevolution goes a long way to explaining why their nightmare vision of society became a reality in Virginia.117 The dominance of the Tidewater plantation model, then, was not the inevitable outcome of English greed or racism, though both were obviously significant factors, but rather the political and economic triumph of a specific subset of Virginia planters, deploying specific material and ideological regimes, over rival dissenting smallholders and, of course, bound laborers. Starting shortly after the Restoration, these planters enshrined their model of colonial society into law, codifying the assumptions about enslavement under which they had been operating since at least 1619. Slavery was defined as lifetime, heritable bondage. Enslaved people were classed as a species of property, subject to the absolute physical dominion of their enslavers. In Virginia, enslavement meant war. And, crucially, the traditional safety valves that had accompanied contemporary Iberian Atlantic slave systems were systematically eliminated—routes to freedom, like baptism, self-­purchase, or private manumission, were closed off, and free Black households were targeted with punitive legislation.118 Virginia’s slave law was a near-­perfect expression of the capitalist-­absolutist agenda: the deregulation of the plantation household, the devolution of sovereign authority to domestic patriarchs, and the revocation of legal protections for Black bodies. The Old Dominion had cemented the terrible logic of enslavement, the conceptual move that Marx later saw at the heart of primitive accumulation, in blackletter law. This process accelerated after the Tidewater planters’ victory in 1660, but it did not begin there. It was already well underway when the first enslaved Africans arrived back in 1619. Alternative visions of Virginia society did not disappear with the Commonwealth government, however. The corporatist ideals and belief in basic human equality that informed revolutionary anti-­absolutism (and Southside Puritanism) remained influential in Anglo-­American society, and would influence

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future criticisms of slavery.119 In other regions of English settlement, particularly in New England, forms of household organization reminiscent of Vir­ginia’s Southside dominated colonial society, and slavery never took root in these regions to the same extent as it did in the Chesapeake or the West Indies.120 The critique of slavery expressed by theorists like Henry Parker, and the lived experiences of early enslavement epitomized by men like the enslaver/manumitter Richard Vaughan or the freedman Anthony Johnson, survived the Restoration and would continue to inform both the law and practice of enslavement in Virginia. The planters had won the first critical battle, but the struggle over slavery and its place in the broader Anglophone world was far from over. Would we know Anthony Johnson’s name if he had been enslaved in the Tidewater instead of the Eastern Shore? What would the Elizabeth River Puritans have thought of interracial sex if they had settled on the north side of the James? Could John Proctor have gotten away with murdering his servants on the Southside? The hyperlocal and highly contingent relations of enslavement under early agrarian productive regimes illustrate that the relationship between slavery and capitalism is not monolithic or uniform across time and space. Understanding the articulation of slavery and capitalism requires examining not only how some (and eventually most) Anglo-­Americans defined the enslaved as properties subject to the absolute authority of enslavers, but also how and why others (and eventually a majority) opposed them. Critics of slavery like Parker, or the handful of slaveholders who freed select bondspeople, were not abolitionists. Their attempts to manage the violence of slavery were rooted in a desire to rationalize the productive relations of the agrarian capitalist household, not to emancipate bound laborers. But the ways in which they pursued this program put them at odds with other householders, equally rooted in capitalist forms of property ownership and labor exploitation, who hoped to wield the power of life and death—the power of enslavement—over their laborers. We cannot, this essay has argued, fully understand the significance of either of these historical relationships between slavery and capitalism without putting them in dialectical tension with one another. But we must always recall that the prime movers behind it all were the ideas and praxes of working people themselves. Bound laborers like the Africans Emmanuel and John Punch (or the Dutchman Christopher Miller, or James Gregory the Scot) refused to be bound by the capitalist household and directly resisted their masters. Elizabeth Key and John Graweere found other ways to navigate their particular experiences of bondage, probing the openings created by competing definitions of enslavement to build lives at

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least partly of their own making. What would histories of slavery and capitalism that centered these bound lives alongside the ideas and practices of masters and enslavers look like? Recent scholarship points in exciting new directions, demonstrating how enslaved Black people mobilized cultural resources drawn from diverse African diasporic experiences to create their own social worlds and radical traditions within and beyond those defined by their enslavers.121 The interracial resistance practiced by Emmanuel and Miller and the interracial social relations that blurred the line of enslavement for Key and Graweere hint that this Black radical tradition dovetailed with the praxis of bound European laborers in profound, potentially revolutionary ways in early colonial Virginia. Working people, Black and European, certainly labored in contexts largely beyond their control, but in the ways they responded to, resisted, and negotiated those contexts, they made history. This struggle, which had been the beating heart of capitalism since the days of the Vagrancy Act, was not new. But it took a crucial turn with the first enslavements, and the first emancipations, of 1619.

PA R T I I Mobility

CHAPTER 5

The Life and Legacy of Francisco Carreño Practicing and Protecting Freedom Between the Canary Islands and New Spain in the Late Sixteenth Century Chloe L. Ireton

On his deathbed in Mexico City, a free-­born mulato named Francisco Carreño carefully assembled paperwork that documented his complex negotiations with slavery and freedom throughout his life in late sixteenth-­century New Spain (present-­day Mexico).1 Compiling his final will and testament in 1603, Carreño sought to assure the free status of his mulato son, Juan Carreño. The elder Carreño outlined how he had liberated an unnamed Black woman from slavery by paying the price of her liberty to her former owner because she was the mother of Carreño’s only son and heir, Juan Carreño. Born thousands of miles away to a free Black mother named Violante in the Canary Islands probably imbued in the elder Carreño the importance of a Black mother’s freedom in assuring the freedom of her children. While the younger Carreño’s mother presumably kept a copy of her own carta de alhorría (freedom certificate), Carreño detailed how he also retained a copy that he wished his executor to safeguard. These precautions were wise; the existence of this freedom certificate prevented royal officials from selling Juan Carreño into slavery after his father’s death. In addition to documenting his son’s free status, Carreño deliberated on whether to liberate from slavery the five Black people who were enslaved to him. Carreño sought to manumit Juana, a Black woman whom Carreño had purchased on credit a few years earlier in the port of Veracruz, and to settle his various credits and debts with merchants sprawled across New Spain. The documents that Carreño assembled

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to assure the freedom of Juan Carreño and to grant freedom to Juana also tell the story of Francisco Carreño’s own cartography and experiences across the Spanish Empire, from his birth thousands of miles away on the Isla de Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, to his arrival in the port of Veracruz around 1588, to becoming a skilled “master of sugar” in New Spain—a skill that he may have first developed in the sugar-­production regions of the Canary Islands. Over the sixteen years that Carreño resided in New Spain, he plied his trade on sugarcane plantations across vast areas of New Spain, from the province of Michoacan, to Malinalco, Metepec, and Xalapa. He also engaged in commerce in Mexico City, Veracruz, and Xalapa. Carreño’s choices on his deathbed highlight how he practiced freedom and sought to protect the freedom of his heir, revealing an important intellectual history of slavery and freedom in Black thought in late sixteenth-­century New Spain, especially in the region between Carreño’s first port of arrival, Veracruz, and the viceregal capital where Carreño perished in 1603. This chapter builds a history of Black thought about slavery and freedom in late sixteenth-­century New Spain among the free Black population that resided in the Atlantic port town of Veracruz and its environs, specifically, along the Camino Real (official royal trading route) that connected Veracruz to the viceregal capital of Mexico City. The vast geographical horizons and demographic heterogeneity of the free Black people who resided in the port meant that Veracruz served as an epicenter of knowledge about slavery and freedom in New Spain. In the first part of the chapter, I build a tapestry of the dynamics of life among free Black residents in the port town of Veracruz and its environs, documenting how free and enslaved Black residents often lived lives that were connected to the broader Atlantic World and to other key towns on the Camino Real. Black residents’ forced and voluntary interactions with various institutions of colonial and religious governance led to the generation of documents that sometimes recorded fragmentary and mediated evidence of Black people’s biographies and varied Atlantic cartographies. The records include petitions by free Black individuals for royal licenses to cross the Atlantic Ocean at institutions such as Seville’s House of Trade and the Council of the Indies in Madrid and to various local authorities in key cities in the American viceroyalties, testimonies gathered in trials at the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Mexico City, testimonies and documents gathered by judges presiding over investigations for Assets of the Deceased Courts, and notarial records from the towns of Xalapa and Veracruz. Collectively, the evidence that emerges from these disparate sources reveals the

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vast social webs that existed between Black populations across the early Hispanic Atlantic as well as their intellectual histories of slavery and freedom. The second part of the chapter focuses on the life and legacy of Francisco Carreño, exploring how he operated between different sites in New Spain as he plied his trade as a master of sugar, and how he conceptualized and practiced freedom in his own life, as well as his work to protect and assure the freedom of his son. Transitioning between micro and macro lenses through an array of archival fragments that catalogued Black life in sixteenth-­and early seventeenth-­century New Spain might help to chart a tentative methodological path to writing more diverse histories of Black thought in the early Spanish Empire. The discussion that follows interweaves the varied ways that free Black individuals, whose lives were connected to the broader Atlantic World in the Spanish Empire, reckoned with the meanings of freedom and slavery in their daily lives.

Veracruz: A Site of Freedom and Economic Opportunity for a Black Population on the Move, and a Crossroads of Gossip and Knowledge for Black Populations in the Spanish Atlantic Veracruz served as the principal Atlantic port of entry to the viceroyalty of New Spain via the Camino Real between Castile (in present-­day Spain) and Mexico City; the port also connected Castile to overland trading routes to the Pacific and the port of Manila in the Philippines.2 By the mid-­sixteenth century, commercial, political, and social life in Veracruz was intimately connected with the broader Spanish Caribbean, especially Havana (in Cuba), Santo Domingo (in Isla Española, present-­day Dominican Republic), and the inland towns of Xalapa and Puebla de los Ángeles that lay on the Camino Real route between Veracruz and Mexico City.3 By the turn of the seventeenth century, there were two port towns of Veracruz: Old Veracruz, where the port had been located for most of the sixteenth century, and a new port fortified by the garrison of San Juan de Ullua called New Veracruz (henceforth, Veracruz) that was established in 1599.4 Free and enslaved Black Africans and their descendants comprised the majority of the year-­round population in the Veracruz ports as the coastal littoral proved inhospitable for Spaniards who tended to prefer to settle in the northwestern inland town of Xalapa or further afield in Puebla de los Ángeles.5 Although royal officials in New Spain encouraged residents to

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move their places of dwelling from Old Veracruz to Veracruz, the old port maintained a small population throughout the period under study.6 Black individuals in the region often resided in both ports over the course of their lifetimes, and thus maintained ties between both. A significant number of the year-­long Black dwellers of both Veracruz ports were enslaved to owners who lived in the inland town of Xalapa and endured labor-­for hire arrangements. Often, the Black residents lived and labored semiautonomously in the ports of Veracruz while their owners resided in plantation estates in the mountainous region of Xalapa and received a portion of the formers’ wages.7 The ports of Veracruz also included a large transient population of merchants, soldiers, royal officials, priests, friars, maritime laborers, and individuals who passed through the town, especially in the spring when fleets arrived from Castile and the port’s population trebled.8 The town also served as the first port of entry for the Atlantic trade in enslaved Black Africans to New Spain, with ships carrying enslaved cargo arriving annually. Many of the enslaved Africans who were forcibly displaced to Veracruz would endure another overland journey to either the town of Xalapa or Puebla de los Ángeles on the Camino Real to Mexico City, where merchants would sell them in slave markets.9 The local Franciscan monastery played a central role in Black dwellers’ religious life as many residents confessed in that institution throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.10 Veracruz-­based Franciscan friars also served as deputies to the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Mexico City during the same period, meaning that these religious figures were embedded in Black residents’ confessional lives in addition to policing their Christianity and informing inquisitors of any suspect behavior in the port.11 Autonomous Black maroon communities formed by fugitive enslaved people formed in the regions near Veracruz as well, and members of such polities sometimes moved across the varied geographies of New Spain, often while negotiating peace with—or waging war against—the Spanish monarchy.12 In both Veracruz ports, Black residents often maintained ties with inland plantations and the towns of Xalapa and Puebla de los Ángeles, both located inland on the Camino Real. This is because a significant demographic of the Black population of Veracruz had previously resided across the rural and urban hinterlands of the Camino Real before eventually settling in Veracruz. For example, inquisitors arrested two free mulatas, Inés de Villalobos and Ana de Herrera, in Old Veracruz in 1594, on accusations of witchcraft; both women had been born in Mexico City, but their respective parents had taken them to reside in Old Veracruz when they were children.13 Available historical

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documents do not indicate whether the pair ever met in Old Veracruz, but they may have heard about each other as Black residents of the small port town who both hailed from Mexico City. In other cases, recently liberated and free Black people who had previously toiled on plantations also gravitated toward the economic opportunities and greater degrees of freedom that they perceived in Veracruz. Such was the case of Juana Jalapa (also known as Juana Gutiérrez), a free Black woman who was born at a sugarcane plantation in the mountainous hinterlands of the inland town of Xalapa in the early seventeenth century, where her father, a “Black congo” named Miguel Manuel, was enslaved to the owner of the plantation.14 Juana Jalapa’s freedom probably stemmed from her mother, Ysavel de Arriaga of “lucumí caste,” a free Black woman who also lived and labored at the sugarcane estate. Juana Jalapa married Hernando Negro, an enslaved Black man from the same plantation. Perilous enslaved labor conditions on the plantation likely led to her enslaved husband’s early demise; by the age of twenty Juana Jalapa was a widow and had given birth to a daughter, fathered by a free mulato laborer on the same plantation. Years later, Juana Jalapa explained to inquisitors in Mexico City that she left the plantation in 1635, when she was twenty years old in order to avoid marrying another slave, which she noted “had been expected of [her].” Juana Jalapa abandoned the plantation and its particular hierarchies of freedom, enslavement, family, slave-­owners, and intense, sugar-­production labor and moved to the coastal region of Veracruz with her young daughter, first settling in the Atlantic port of Old Veracruz and then in Veracruz where she spent the next twenty years of her life. Upon arriving in the Veracruz region, Juana Jalapa—who had been baptized as Juana Gutiérrez reflecting the name of her enslaved father’s owner—became known as Juana Jalapa and a free Black vecina (loosely, resident) of Veracruz. The name Jalapa indicated to her contemporaries her region of naturaleza (birth) in the plantation near the town of Xalapa. A vignette of Francisco Camacho’s ties between the inland town of Xalapa and Old Veracruz evidence how Black individuals sometimes lived in the Veracruz ports while maintaining economic relationships with Xalapa. Camacho was born into slavery in Isla de la Palma in the Canary Islands and had endured a forced displacement as a slave from there to New Spain. His birth in the Canary Islands likely meant that he spoke Spanish prior to his arrival in New Spain. While enslaved in Xalapa, Camacho married a free Black woman named Juana de la Cruz.15 The pair subsequently negotiated Camacho’s freedom in 1642, when he was fifty years old, agreeing to pay his owner 100 pesos de oro común in installments over five months.16 Thereafter,

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the couple lived as vecinos in Xalapa where they purchased a small plot of land (in the Xallitic area); they later moved from Xalapa to Old Veracruz.17 They maintained ties to Xalapa during their initial residency in Old Veracruz through ownership of the land in Xalapa, until 1658, when Camacho gave a vecino of Xalapa named Bartolomé de Oliveros authority to sell the plot, which the latter sold for 20 pesos.18 Black individuals from the rural hinterlands often gravitated to Veracruz due to the economic opportunities of the port town. Depositions in Inquisition trials highlight how Black men and women who hailed from rural plantations often eked out a living by servicing the annual passing trade in the port. For example, after arriving from the sugarcane plantation near Xalapa in 1635, Juana Jalapa worked as a seamstress and a clothes-­washer, and also labored in chocolate production.19 In 1653, Juana Jalapa recounted to inquisitors that she owed twenty pesos for rent to a free mulata named Francisca de Arzola, ten pesos for rent to another person, four reales to a Black female baker, and a few loose reales to different free Black female traders in Veracruz. In 1655, after inquisitors determined that Juana Jalapa was innocent of the charges of witchcraft, she pleaded that they pardon the 216 pesos and 2 reales of debt that she had accrued in costs for her imprisonment and trial at the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Mexico City as she did not have enough money to pay for the cost of her return journey to Veracruz. Such pleas, when combined with her paltry debts for rents and other minor transactions in Veracruz, suggest that Juana Jalapa did not become particularly wealthy in the port. In contrast, one of Juana Jalapa’s acquaintances named Adriana Ruíz de Cabrera, a free Black woman from Cartagena de Indias (in New Granada, present-­day Colombia) who resided in Veracruz in the same period, owned at least two Black slaves. The Black population of Veracruz also comprised a significant number of free Black people who hailed from other regions of the Spanish Empire, beyond New Spain. As Veracruz was the Atlantic port of entry to (and exit from) New Spain, Black naturales (those born in New Spain) of the region who travelled to Castilla or elsewhere in the Hispanic Caribbean usually passed through the town when leaving and entering New Spain.20 Many of the free Black men and women who arrived in Veracruz from Castilla with passenger and embarkation licenses issued by the Council of the Indies and the House of Trade were naturales of New Spain, often of Mexico City, who were returning to the region. They had previously travelled to Castilla as wage-­earning servants, or as slaves who were later freed in Castilla, or independently—sometimes to tend to business matters, or to deliver petitions to

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the Council of the Indies in Madrid.21 Those who resided in other cities of New Spain would invariably sojourn in the port of Veracruz when leaving and returning to New Spain, and often spent a few days in Veracruz—probably renting rooms from free Black female innkeepers, while organizing onward journeys.22 Testimonies from Inquisition trials of free Black men and women in Veracruz reveal that many Black residents of Veracruz had previously lived in other sites in the Spanish Atlantic. The histories of free Black men and women, who had previously resided in other regions in the Spanish Atlantic World who settled in Veracruz and along the Camino Real, demonstrate the need to expand our understanding of the demographic composition of late sixteenth-­century Atlantic New Spain to include free Black men and women who brought lived experiences and memories from Castile and other regions of the Spanish Empire, including different sites in New Spain.The punitive trials against Black Veracruz dwellers led by the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Mexico City sometimes recorded Black residents’ heterogenous social webs that spanned the Atlantic world. For example, the Inquisitorial trial against Juana Jalapa evidences how her social world in Veracruz was defined by geographical itinerancy across the Atlantic, as well as by commercial, religious, and personal ties to the wider Castilian Empire.23 The coterie of Black men and women who Juana met in Veracruz brought knowledge and experiences from the various places where they had previously dwelled, which included Cartagena de Indias, Castile, Havana, Cordoba (in New Spain), and Guatemala. The accusations levied against Juana Jalapa commenced when a free Black woman named Ana María Vásquez, who had previously resided in the cities of Santiago (in Guatemala), Cartagena de Indias, and Havana, testified against Juana Jalapa to the Inquisition. In Veracruz, Vásquez claimed that Juana Jalapa and a coterie of other Black women had conspired to commit sorcery in her presence. This group of Black women included Adriana Ruíz de Cabrera and Doña Lucía la Prieta, who were two free Black women who resided in Veracruz after arriving from Cartagena de Indias, and Adriana Ruíz de Cabrera’s two Black slaves named Juana and Elena whom she had also brought from Cartagena de Indias. In addition, Ana María Vásquez named a Spanish woman who also lived in Veracruz. Another accusation levied against Juana Jalapa recounted how Juana had sought the help of a free Black man from the town of Córdoba in New Spain for a love potion in a desperate attempt to restrain her violent son-­in-­law. This accusation and Juana Jalapa’s defense reveal that her networks extended to the town of Córdoba, which lay southwest of Veracruz and along a different route to Mexico City from the

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Camino Real that connected Veracruz with her place of birth, Xalapa, which lay northwest of Veracruz. It is likely that Juana Jalapa possessed knowledge of the hinterlands and familiarity with networks of healers who resided inland due to her early life in a plantation in Xalapa. The accusations in the Inquisitorial trial suggest that Juana Jalapa became adept at drawing on her geographical knowledge of the region, while establishing relationships with individuals who arrived in Veracruz from the Caribbean. After her arrest and during her subsequent Inquisitorial trial in Mexico City, Juana Jalapa presented various witnesses from Veracruz to aide in her defense (and to discredit Ana María Vásquez’s testimony) who also hailed from varied regions of the Atlantic World. For instance, a sixteen-­ year-­old enslaved Black criolla from Cartagena de Indias named Dominga Ybañez explained to inquisitors that the free Black woman named Ana María Vásquez had abducted Ybañez from her owner in Cartagena de Indias and forcibly brought her to Veracruz via Havana. As Juana Jalapa and other witnesses in Veracruz began to present accusations to inquisitors about Ana María Vásquez and her history of robberies and elaborate lies, Vásquez subsequently changed her testimony in the Inquisitorial court. She claimed that, contrary to her previous assertions that she hailed from Guatemala, instead she was a free Black woman who had been born in Barajas (near Madrid in Castile), where she had married a soldier. She claimed that she had travelled to New Spain to try and locate her absent husband. While it is difficult to assess whether Ana María Vásquez indeed travelled to Veracruz from Guatemala or from Madrid, witnesses agreed that she arrived in Veracruz onboard a ship that sailed from Havana along with the young enslaved Ybañez whom she had stolen in Cartagena de Indias, thereby suggesting that Vásquez had sojourned in two of the major ports of the Spanish Caribbean, Cartagena de Indias and Havana, prior to arriving in Veracruz. A Spanish vecina of Veracruz recounted arriving in Veracruz on the same ship from Havana with Ana María Vásquez and Ybañez; the witness detailed how she had become acquainted with Vásquez’s poverty and tendency to spin outlandish fabrications while onboard the ship. These testimonies of Veracruz-­based Black women who had each previously resided in other sites in the Spanish Atlantic highlight that Juana Jalapa had become part of a Black population and social milieu in early seventeenth-­century Veracruz whose horizons spanned the Hispanic Atlantic, and who each brought to Veracruz particular knowledge and experiences from different regions of the Atlantic World. The heterogeneous free Black population of Veracruz in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries combined with the town’s central position in

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trade, travel, and communication in the Spanish Atlantic with the viceroyalty of New Spain and the Philippines meant that the port served as a site for gossip and the exchange of information between Black populations across the Atlantic World. Many testimonies attest to Veracruz—in addition to Mexico City—serving as a site for gathering news about Castile and other regions of the empire. News and gossip arrived by word of mouth and in epistles brought by passengers and sailors on fleets that docked in the port. Veracruz-­based Black residents from Castile sometimes received written correspondence, likely arriving on fleets carrying royal mail or with appointed messengers.24 For example, three Black Castilians—María Gerónima, Cristobal de Castroverde, and Antonio Sigarra—received written correspondence in Veracruz in the early seventeenth century from family members in Castile.25 Veracruz was also a site where individuals met other passersby who relayed news from different ports of the Hispanic Atlantic World. Two Iberian mulatos accused of bigamy in Inquisitorial trials in 1579 and 1622, Antonio de Arenas and Cristobal de Castroverde, suggested to inquisitors that they had heard of the deaths of their respective mulata wives in Cádiz and Seville through information relayed by travelers passing through the port of Veracruz.26 Neither of these individuals lived in the port. Instead, they resided in Mexico City and the rural and mining environs of the viceregal capital. But the two men’s pinpointing of Veracruz as the site where they received news of their wives’ deaths highlights that they travelled through that port on their way to Mexico City, and shows how Veracruz often connected Black populations in New Spain with the wider Atlantic world.27The types of information and knowledge that passed through bustling port towns like Veracruz were sometimes mundane, as passersby in Veracruz often trafficked in information about the whereabouts of family members. Trading centers in Castile and the Spanish Americas were often connected through hearsay, whispers, and gossip about people’s lives—which in turn were sometimes formalized through webs of informants to the Inquisition—as well as friendship ties across vast geographical distances.28 Antonio de Arenas, a Portuguese mulato, became a victim of the webs of information that connected Castile and the Spanish Americas.29 Born in the village of Estrema in Portugal in the mid-­sixteenth century, Arenas had labored on ships between ports in Castile since the age of eight. He lived in Cádiz for a few years, where he was known as a “man of the sea,” and he later crossed the Atlantic to New Spain via Cabo Verde. Upon arriving in the viceroyalty of New Spain, Arenas spent a year or so residing in the viceregal capital of Mexico City, where residents testified to knowing him as a Portuguese-­speaking mulato and vinegar peddler around the city center near

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the Cathedral, before he moved to the nearby village of Yztlavaca.30 There, he married Catalina de Esquevel, a fourteen-­year-­old mulata, who worked as a servant. In 1578, two separate travelers—one from Portugal and the other from Cádiz—appeared in the Inquisition courts in Mexico City accusing the Portuguese-­speaking mulato of bigamy.31 According to these witnesses, Arenas had married Catalina de Esquevel while he was already married in Cádiz. They testified that Arenas’ first wife, a free Portuguese mulata named Isabel who lived in Cádiz, was still alive. Arenas’ defense strategy highlights his vision of an interconnected Atlantic World, even if spread over vast distances. Arenas argued that, in fact, he had not been married in Cádiz.32 Instead, he claimed that he had merely cohabited with a free mulata named Isabel who owned a dried fruits shop in that city. He admitted that the pair had known each other for five or six years in Cádiz, but he stated that they had only cohabited for two years.33 Arenas argued that many people in Cádiz incorrectly thought that the two were married because they lived together, when in fact the two were merely amancebados (lovers). After sailing as a seafaring laborer from Cádiz to Cabo Verde and subsequently to New Spain, Arenas claimed to have received news from two people in different cities of New Spain—one in Veracruz and the other in Mexico City—that his amancebada (lover) had passed away.34 To that end, he recalled encountering someone in Veracruz who informed him that Isabel had died in the Hospital of Nuestra Señora de Los Ángeles in Cádiz.35 Upon further investigation and the discovery of a marriage record in Cádiz, inquisitors convicted Arenas of bigamy.36 His defense strategy of naming specific individuals who had informed him of Isabel’s demise failed, and perhaps historians should construe it as just that—a strategy employed in order to circumvent the justice that awaited him at the hands of the Inquisition. Nonetheless, Arenas presented a vision of an interconnected Spanish Atlantic World, even if the particulars were mere fabrications spun in an attempt to evade justice.

Practicing and Protecting Freedom Across the Atlantic: A Case Study of Francisco Carreño The movement of information and knowledge among and between free Black populations in New Spain, and beyond, had a bearing on how Black individuals conceptualized and practiced freedom. In the remainder of this chapter, I explore how Francisco Carreño, a freeborn mulato who lived in various

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sites in New Spain, conceptualized and practiced freedom, including his deathbed attempts to assure the freedom of his son. Carreño arrived in the port of Veracruz from his native Isla de Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands in approximately 1588. He did not reside in the port for long but would return to the town many times over the subsequent sixteen years. After arriving in New Spain, Carreño became a skilled master of sugar, and over the following sixteen years, he plied his trade on sugarcane plantations across New Spain, from the province of Michoacan, to Malinalco, Metepec, to Xalapa, and also engaged in commerce in Mexico City, Veracruz, and Xalapa. For instance, Carreño toiled as a master of sugar every year for four months in the province of Michoacan, while spending other months of the year laboring in the hinterlands of Xalapa, and residing intermittently in the village of Malinalco (southwest of Mexico City).37 The information that Carreño provided in his final will, particularly the 1602–1603 financial transactions his will unveils, as well as commercial contracts signed with notaries in Xalapa and Veracruz, reveal his extensive travel and connections. For example, in 1602, Carreño borrowed 200 pesos de oro común from Diego de Salazar in Xalapa; Carreño pawned a Black slave named Isabel as guarantee for repayment within three months.38 The following year, Carreño labored on a sugarcane plantation in Michoacan, and subsequently travelled from there to Mexico City with his horses and slaves.39 On his deathbed in 1603, Carreño noted that the owner of the Michoacan sugarcane plantation owed him 850 pesos de oro común for his labor, while a Xalapa landowner had deposited 1,700 pesos with a Mexico City merchant in payment for Carreño’s salary for work that he had completed in the Xalapa region.40 The respective 1,700 pesos and 850 pesos suggest that Carreño commanded a significant salary for his work as a master of sugar. Around the same time, a healthy enslaved Black person skilled in the sugarcane industry would sell for approximately 300 pesos in a public auction in Mexico City. The sale of Carreño’s own Black slaves, María and her young daughter, raised 550 pesos in an auction that took place in Mexico City a decade after Carreño’s demise.41 While Carreño spent time in Mexico City, he did not appear to be embedded in Black life in the viceregal capital. Instead, Carreño’s testament reveals his financial obligations and credits across the urban hubs of New Spain, including Mexico City, Xalapa, and Veracruz.42 In 1603, Carreño owned 150 pesos de oro común, two horses, and five Black slaves, in addition to various outstanding credits for his labor and loans. In his testament, Carreño requested his executors repay a Gaspar de Mendoza for the worth of a horse

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that the latter had provided Carreño. Separately, a Mexico City merchant named Baltasar Luis Álvarez had received 1,700 pesos of oro común from Juan de Castillete, an encomendero of Francisco Hernández in Xalapa in payment for Carreño’s labor in sugar production. Carreño instructed his execu­ tors to collect an outstanding 1,400 pesos from the Mexico City merchant. Further, Carreño noted that he had purchased a Black slave, named Juana Criolla, on credit in the port of Veracruz with a local guarantor, adding that he still owed 200 of the 450-­peso sale price. In Mexico City—where Carreño fell ill in 1603—Carreño convalesced at the house of his friend, and possibly also a former employer or commercial associate in the sugarcane industry named Francisco Galindo de Herrera, who also owned a house and sugarcane plantation in the village of Malinalco, where Carreño had spent time residing (and probably working) in the past. Carreño was also embroiled in political disputes that shed light on the ambiguities of his life as a property-­owning, free mulato, master of sugar in New Spain.43 He detailed in his testament an ongoing legal battle with the alcalde mayor of the village of Metepec (west of Mexico City, near Toluca) about payment of royal tribute.44 Debates about tribute payment and who must pay the royal tax were acute in the early colonial period.45 Royal decrees of the late sixteenth century specified that free Black people should pay tribute because so many free Black men and women in the Indies had accumulated significant “riches” after they had been freed, but many free Black populations petitioned the crown for exceptions.46 Carreño detailed how—as a result of his refusal to pay tribute—the alcalde of Metepec had embargoed fine Castile-­made clothes that Carreño had sold on credit to the alcalde’s wife.47 Carreño asked that his executor represent Carreño’s interests in the ongoing case with the alcalde, and retrieve the dresses from embargo. One intention of resolving the tribute dispute posthumously with the alcalde might have been to assure that his son and future heirs would also be exempt from paying tribute . Carreño’s final will was the product of a specific intellectual milieu and personal cartography that evidenced particular theological interpretations of Catholicism, the meanings of Blackness, and freedom. Individuals used their testaments to record final decisions about investments in religious institutions that would shoulder the responsibility for moving their respective souls through purgatory. Carreño’s endowments and theological choices reflect his Atlantic life between the Canary Islands and New Spain. His bequests to certain churches and images in the Canary Islands highlight

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that he developed a theological proximity to the Franciscan Order and its early Christianization efforts in his birthplace, the Canary Islands, while his choice to endow certain churches in Mexico City also reflected his life and ties in New Spain.48 Carreño also made provisions to liberate from slavery one of his slaves in his will, Juana, a “negra criolla” whom he had purchased in the port of Veracruz for 450 pesos.49 Additionally, he bestowed significant trust in Juana by requesting that she administer the outstanding debt for the purchase of her own body. Carreño stipulated that his executors liberate Juana from slavery and give her thirty pesos de oro común and one of his horses with a saddle so that she could “go to her natural [Veracruz] if she wishes, or do whatever she like.”50 Furthermore, Carreño asked that his executors obtain 200 pesos that a Xalapa landowner named Diego Salazar owed Carreño, in order for him to repay his debt to Alonso Pérez in Veracruz; Carreño still owed Pérez 200 of the 450 pesos for the price of Juana as a slave. Carreño asked his executors to give those 200 pesos to Juana so that she could distribute them to his Veracruz-­based guarantor who had provided credit for the sale, or to Pérez who had sold Juana, or to whomever seemed appropriate to Juana. Carreño thus gave Juana the power to freely administer the 200 pesos that he owed for the previous purchase of her body as a slave. Juana’s fate after obtaining her freedom following Carreño’s death fades from the historical archive, but the image of her galloping from Mexico City along the Camino Real to Veracruz on the horse and saddle that Carreño gave her, towards a life of freedom with the thirty pesos that she received upon her liberation from slavery, and an additional 200 pesos that she should administer to repay her former owner for her own body, raises many questions about the relationship and apparent camaraderie that existed between this mulato slave owner and Juana. Only sparse information exists about Carreño’s relationship with his other slaves, but two of the enslaved people whom Carreño did not manumit in his testament, María and Mateo, who were both described as “Black Angola,” had worked alongside Carreño in sugarcane plantations.51 Carreño had purchased Mateo in Veracruz, and Mateo later described that he was from tierra Angola and that he was a “master of sugar.” After Carreño’s death, the enslaved pair reported that they autonomously administered Herrera’s sugarcane plantation near Malinalco, suggesting that they possessed particular skills in sugar production.52 A fourth slave was María’s young daughter named Gerónima, whom Carreño did not manumit either. The fifth was a Black slave named Isabel who Carreño had pawned to Diego de Salazar in

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Xalapa for a 200-­peso loan in 1602.53 Notarial records show that by 1603, it was Salazar who owed Carreño 200 pesos.54 Perhaps Carreño had not repaid the loan on time and Salazar had subsequently sold Isabel to recuperate his losses, an eventuality that the pair had agreed on in their initial notarial contract of 1602.55 In any case, Carreño did not mention Isabel in his 1603 testament, nor did she appear in the subsequent Assets of the Deceased Court’s investigation into Carreño’s property, which suggests that Carreño no longer owned Isabel by the time that he composed his will in 1603. Even though Carreño was a free mulato property owner who commanded a significant salary, he was acutely aware of the ambiguities and heightened risk of being free while Black. Carreño took particular measures to navigate colonial law in order to ensure his heir’s freedom. Carreño declared his son, a mulato named Juan Carreño, his universal heir.56 Naming as his executor Herrera—the friend or employer in whose house Carreño was residing while taken ill in Mexico City—Carreño asked that Herrera safeguard his property and adopt the young mulato as though the boy were his own. Carreño wished for Herrera to feed, clothe, teach, cure, and indoctrinate Juan Carreño until he was old enough to inherit the property. Carreño explained that Juan Carreño’s mother was a Black criolla slave of another owner, whom Carreño had liberated by purchasing her freedom.57 Perhaps the purchase of her freedom represented a bid to secure or assure Juan Carreño’s free status, or perhaps the action stemmed from charitable or affectionate feelings towards the enslaved Black criolla whose name Carreño did not mention in his will. Carreño explained in his will that he possessed notarized transcripts of the purchase of her liberty and a copy of her carta de alhorría (freedom certificate), which he asked his executors to safeguard in case his son might need the documents at a later date. Carreño’s specifications served as an acknowledgement that individuals racialized as Black in the early Spanish Empire often needed thorough layers of documentation to prove their legal status as free people. Carreño’s own birth to a free Black mother named Violante in the Isla de Gran Canaria— who may have been enslaved before obtaining her freedom—perhaps imbued in him a particular awareness of how a mother’s legal free status would shape Afro-­descendants’ own freedom in the Spanish Empire.58 Indeed, Carreño’s precautions foresaw problems that occurred a decade after his death, when royal officials assumed that his son was a slave and briefly imprisoned him. In fact, had Carreño not safeguarded the freedom documents of his son’s mother nor composed a will, judges of the Real Consejo in Mexico City may

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well have sold his son and heir into slavery.59 In 1613, a decade after Carreño’s death, Doctor Juan Quesada de Figueroa of the Real Consejo in Mexico City noted that he had received information about a Castile-­native who had perished intestate and whose abundant property, including slaves, were in the hands of Hernando Herrera in the village of Malinalco.60 In other words, Figueroa was concerned that the assets of this deceased man had not been correctly administered.61 Although Carreño had not died intestate, it would take a few weeks for such a fact to become evident. In the meantime, Quesada de Figueroa dispatched a deputy named Felipe de Medina from Mexico City to the village of Malinalco to investigate the death. In Malinalco and the surrounding environs, Medina found two of Carreño’s slaves, Mateo and María—whom he described as “between bozal and ladino”—toiling in Herrera’s sugarcanes while the enslaved child, Gerónima, and Carreño’s young son, Juan Carreño, lived in Herrera’s house. Medina interviewed numerous residents of Malinalco to build a biography of Francisco Carreño. Unconvinced that Carreño’s property had been correctly administered following his death, Medina confiscated and imprisoned the four Afro-­descendants and took them to Mexico City, noting that he was embargoing Carreño’s slaves. Having protested the confiscation, Herrera followed the party to the viceregal capital where he retrieved a copy of Carreño’s testament from a notary and presented it to the Real Consejo. After examining Carreño’s testament, the judge of the Real Consejo in Mexico City recognized Juan Carreño as the universal heir and Herrera as Juan Carreño’s guardian, and freed the young mulato from custody.62 The judge also noted a clause in the will that asked executors to send monies to churches in the Canary Islands. Because Herrera could not provide documentation of having sent the funds, the judge ordered the sale of two of Carreño’s slaves, María and her daughter Gerónima, to raise the necessary sums for this endowment.63 A town crier administered the auction of mother and daughter at the Portal de los Mercaderes by the Cathedral in the central square of Mexico City and sold the pair for 550 pesos de oro común.64 The court then sent the relevant sums to the Canary Islands, and returned the difference to Herrera for the young Carreño to inherit. The vignette of Juan Carreño’s brief imprisonment in 1613—ten years after his father’s demise—highlights how law and legal status often superseded discriminatory attitudes towards skin color when individuals were in possession of pertinent paperwork to prove their liberty. Medina’s assumption of Juan Carreño as a mulato slave, in spite of hearing sworn testimony by vecinos of Malinalco who assured him that the “mulatillo” was free, evidences that royal

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officials often linked Blackness to slavery, at least until evidence through written documents proved one’s freedom. However, upon production of the relevant documentation, the court reversed its position and recognized Juan Carreño as the legal heir, regardless of Medina’s views about Blackness that associated the young Carreño with the former enslaved conditions of his mother, and perhaps also his paternal grandparents in the Canary Islands. It is worth noting too that Medina arrived in Malinalco in search of information about “a deceased Castilian” and did not report any surprise upon learning that the property-­owning Castilian whose life he was investigating was a free mulato, even though he later assumed that the deceased’s son, Juan Carreño, was a slave.65 More importantly though, it was Francisco Carreño’s intentional explanations about his son’s status in his testament and his purchase of his son’s mother’s freedom, thereby liberating her from slavery, that eventually assured the young Carreño’s freedom. The elder Carreño’s precautions to guarantee his son’s freedom evidence his astute engagement with a legal culture of written documents in the early Spanish Empire. He navigated colonial society, legislation, and attitudes to Blackness with dexterity.

Conclusion Arguably, any exploration of how free and formerly enslaved Black people lived in colonial regimes of racial slavery in late sixteenth-­century New Spain must include the interconnected histories of Black life and knowledge across different sites in New Spain. This chapter has sketched out how the Black population in the port town of Veracruz often comprised people who had previously resided in other regions of the Spanish Atlantic, and has traced select examples of broader communication ties between Black populations in Veracruz and the Atlantic World. These biographical snippets demonstrate the need to expand our understanding of the free Black population of late sixteenth-­century New Spain to include free Black men and women, who often hailed from Castile and other regions of the Spanish Empire (including different sites in New Spain). Many Black residents of the port of Veracruz, for example, were naturales of other regions of the Hispanic Atlantic and New Spain, and a world of free Black property owners who accumulated significant wealth developed in the ports of Veracruz and in rural regions between Veracruz and Mexico City. Some accumulated significant property—including ownership of enslaved Black men and women—while

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maintaining commercial and religious ties in key cities and across the Atlantic. Others composed testaments that organized endowments to churches across the empire that evidence specific theological choices that mirror their geographical trajectories in the Atlantic World. A close reading of Francisco Carreño’s life across the Atlantic World, and his deliberations in his final will reveals a rich intellectual history of slavery and freedom among Black and mulato dwellers of this region.

CHAPTER 6

Warfare, Imperial Competition, and Serial Displacement in the Seventeenth-­Century Caribbean Casey Schmitt

Hours before dawn on Sunday July 23, 1665, the free and enslaved residents of Dutch St. Eustatius awoke to the sounds of cannon fire echoing across the island. From the fort, Governor Peter Adrianson and the island militia watched several English frigates cruise along the coast as they prepared for an invasion. Simultaneously, 450 Englishmen led by the lieutenant governor of Jamaica, Edward Morgan, disembarked unseen on the opposite side of the island. After a brief skirmish, Adrianson surrendered, preferring capitulation to testing the “angry soldiers” from whom he did “not expect any quarter.” As the Dutch and English leaders met to discuss terms of surrender, the invaders fanned out across the island to seize “all [the] plunder” that they could before “equally divid[ing]” it between seamen and soldiers.1 For the enslaved captives on St. Eustatius, the English invasion began another in a repeated process of “serial displacements” that punctuated the lived experience of slavery.2 Searching the island, the English bands of “angry soldiers”—composed of individuals who signed onto the expedition for the promise of gain—seized women and men, young and old, and marched them to the recently occupied Dutch fort. Along with “coppers and stills” taken from plantations on the island, the English soldiers of fortune took people, dividing the captives based on perceived value, prizing young, healthy, and experienced captives, described by a contemporary as “brawny [and] knowing blacks.”3 In the end, the English seized 942 people between St. Eustatius and neighboring Saba. Of those, they selected nearly 500 individuals to carry

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back to Jamaica, selling the remainder into slavery on St. Christopher and Nevis.4 For the captives, the sorting process by the English paralleled other moments during slavery in which their bodies were physically handled, appraised, and priced based on their anticipated productive capacity. Raids like the one carried out by Anglo-­Jamaicans against the Dutch in 1665, point to the continuity of the kind of interimperial captive-­taking that resulted in the sale of the first enslaved Africans in Point Comfort, Virginia in 1619. During a century of near-­constant warfare, raiding and captivity in the Caribbean remained a constant threat for communities of African descent. In this chapter, I examine mid-­seventeenth-­century raiding and captive-­taking in the Caribbean from two perspectives. First, I seek to understand the impact of violent raids and serial dislocation on Afro-­descended individuals and communities, including how some individuals used their knowledge of European rivalries and Caribbean geography to change their circumstances. And, second, how European governors’ and colonial officials’ reliance on captive-­taking to marshal armed forces and improve their local economies led to competing claims of ownership over captives. Soldiers and sailors used their understanding of the Laws of War to defend their claims to captive people, while colonial governors negotiated for the rendition of captives using rhetoric drawn from their understanding of the Law of Nations. Crucially, these competing claims unfolded in the context of multiple raids on many of the islands of the Lesser Antilles between the 1660s and 1680s, raids in which African and Indigenous captives experienced repeated violence and forced dislocation. Mobility for people of African and Indigenous descent in the context of mid-­ seventeenth-­ century Caribbean warfare represented a double-­ edged sword. On the one hand, people taken captive faced forced dislocation, abuse at the hands of captors, and voyages in ships not outfitted for the transportation of human captives. The disruptions of interimperial warfare, on the other hand, enabled some enslaved people to escape their circumstances. This chapter builds at the intersection of two vibrant threads of scholarship, the first on European raiding during wartime and, the second, on the nature of maritime mobility for African and Indigenous people in the greater Caribbean. Scholars such as Wim Klooster and Mark G. Hanna discuss English raiding and captive-­taking within a wider history of interimperial warfare and competition. Both scholars argue for the centrality of raiding and pillaging in the development of the Dutch and British Empires, respectively, with English raids during the 1660s signaling, for Klooster, the decline of the Dutch West India Company and, for Hanna, the advancement of the

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Anglo-­Jamaican colonial economy.5 With a focus on the elaboration of networks of intercolonial trade in enslaved Africans, Gregory E. O’Malley analyzes mid-­century raiding and captive-­taking as a moment of transition between an English slave trade conducted by pirates, privateers, and other interlopers to one undertaken by monopoly trade companies such as the Royal African Company. Alongside the focus on interimperial trade, O’Malley traces the uncertainty and violence confronted by African captives whom he describes as having been “twice stolen—enslaved in Africa for sale to Atlantic traders and then seized in American waters by pirates who viewed African people as loot.”6 The English raids against St. Eustatius and Saba demonstrate that soldiers, too, viewed the capture of people of African descent as a means for personal economic advancement. The raiding economy of the mid-­seventeenth century ensnared a wide array of people of African and Indigenous descent, although recent scholarship has cautioned against viewing captives only through the lens of victimhood. Historians Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva and Arne Bialuschewski explore the varied responses of Afro-­Mexican and Indigenous captives, respectively, in the context of raids against Spanish territory. For Bialuschewski, buccaneering raids in the western Caribbean produced Indigenous captives but also Indigenous participants in raiding and slaveholding; they were, as he writes, “perpetrators as well as victims.”7 Focusing on the experiences of Afro-­Mexican women seized during the 1683 buccaneer raid on Veracruz, Sierra Silva traces how the Afro-­Mexican women negotiated slavery and, crucially, freedom after being transported to Saint Domingue.8 People of African and Indigenous descent experienced mid-­century raiding and warfare in myriad ways and, as recent scholarship on maritime mobility has shown, not all African and Indigenous movement in the greater Caribbean during this period was forced. Historians Kevin Dawson and Tessa Murphy demonstrate the importance of canoes for people of African and Indigenous descent and their use of watercraft to construct social worlds removed from European control. For Dawson, African canoe-­making and handling permitted cultural retention for Africans in the diaspora as they navigated the waterscapes of the Americas.9 Those waterscapes emerge as creole archipelagos in Murphy’s treatment of the seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Lesser Antilles, where Kalinago and Afro-­descendant seafarers used canoes to forge and maintain social connections between islands visible to the naked eye, even when those islands fell on opposite sides of imperial borders.10 Mid-­century raiding occurred in the context of a multifaceted maritime world in which people of African and

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Indigenous descent could face violent dislocation but, also, opportunities to build or maintain social connections and, as this chapter will show, to exploit imperial rivalries. A focus on the English raids against St. Eustatius and Saba provides useful context for thinking about the importance of 1619 in the wider Atlantic history of race and slavery. The captive Angolans seized in the Gulf of Mexico in 1619 experienced the terror of an aquatic assault on the São João Bautista, the slaving vessel that had been their floating prison across the Atlantic. They then experienced confinement in the hold of a second vessel, this one built for war, not transportation, as their captors rerouted their final passage to Virginia. The raiding economy that created those conditions predated the Anglo-­Dutch seizure of a Portuguese slaving vessel and would continue to shape intercolonial trade, warfare, and the experiences of people of African descent well beyond 1619. Throughout the 1660s and 1670s, demand for enslaved labor meant that few questions were asked about the provenance of enslaved captives brought to certain ports, fueling Caribbean-­wide raids. Mid-­century raiding gained official sanction as a result of interimperial war. In this context, soldiers and sailors signed on to Anglo-­Jamaican-­sponsored expeditions against rival Dutch and Spanish colonies with the goal of targeting landed settlements and the enslaved African populations of those colonies.11 Tracing the vulnerability of enslaved people to captivity and dislocation, even after their enslavement on Caribbean plantations, recasts the experiences of the captive Angolans in 1619 as part of a much longer trajectory of violence, raiding, and slavery in the Atlantic World. The inability of seventeenth-­century European monopoly slave-­trading companies to meet European demand for enslaved labor in the Caribbean, and those companies’ tendency to ignore smaller markets, reinforced the practice of raiding the territories and ships of rivals.12 Before the 1670s, the Company of Adventurers Trading to Africa and the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, of England and France respectively, sold licenses to private traders who conducted much of the slave trade.13 With the high demand for labor unmet by formal slave trading companies, residents and officials in smaller ports grew accustomed to trading for enslaved captives with private merchants. Peripheral markets, therefore, absorbed bound laborers without inquiring too much into their provenance.14 Although the raiding economy was nothing new in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, growing demand for labor and the lack of a regularized system of rendition across imperial and ethnic borders meant that bound laborers throughout the

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Caribbean became even more vulnerable to being seized and sold elsewhere.15 By the 1660s, imperial tensions escalated and Europeans began raiding the plantations of rival colonies as a method of conducting imperial war—using the promise of captive-­taking and plunder to generate volunteers for expeditions. Free and enslaved people of African descent like Ignacio Hernández, who was taken captive by the English from the estancia in Cartagena and sold into slavery in Jamaica, became increasingly vulnerable to this kind of violence.16 Throughout the Caribbean, in the words of Jamaican governor Edward D’Oyley, people of African descent remained vulnerable to becoming “the prize of soldiers, who receive[d] no pay” otherwise.17 Smuggling, alongside raiding, had long served as a means for peripheral colonies to purchase enslaved Africans, although the English passage of the Navigation Acts attempted to limit English colonial trade with Dutch intermediaries. The experiences of 209 enslaved captives from the Bight of Benin provide a window onto how European economic competition and imperial tensions during the 1660s heightened the suffering and dislocation of survivors of the Middle Passage. For nearly three months, the 350-­ton S. Maarten van Russen purchased men, women, and children along the West African coast. Cramped below decks in wretched conditions, the 209 enslaved captives suffered an Atlantic crossing of 212 days. During that time, they bore witness to the deaths of twenty-­nine of their fellow captives.18 Upon their arrival in English Jamaica in February of 1662, however, the enslaved captives onboard the S. Maarten van Russen became the subjects of a protracted legal struggle as a result of the growing commercial competition between the English and Dutch. The debarkation of the 180 captives at Cagway was more chaotic than most. Emerging from the ship that had been their floating prison for more than half a year, the Dutch crewmen rushed the African captives onto waiting ferryboats. Some of the enslaved made it to shore before an English frigate, the Diamond, approached from across the harbor and seized the Dutch slaver. The Diamond’s captain viewed the Dutch ship as a legal prize caught smuggling in defiance of an act of Parliament that prohibited the importation of commodities in foreign-­owned ships to English colonies after December 1, 1660.19 The unloading stopped as the governor, Edward D’Oyley, and the Dutch captain of the slaving vessel, Leenert Jansen, petitioned the island council to allow the sale of the African captives. D’Oyley eventually prevailed, but not before the captives who remained on the Dutch ship languished for nearly a month just offshore. Captain Whiting and the crew of the Diamond spent years petitioning for reimbursement after this incident,

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demanding recompense by citing their service to the king and their subsequent economic hardships.20 The prominence of the Dutch in the carrying trade to England’s American colonies contributed to tensions between England and the Netherlands that erupted into war three times during the seventeenth century.21 Those smuggling networks between English colonies and Dutch intermediaries throughout the greater Caribbean also carried the unintended consequence of making the English familiar with the Dutch entrepôts involved in the slave trade. Many enslaved Africans entered bondage in the English and French Caribbean through Dutch intermediaries—either through informal trading networks, like the S. Maarten van Russen, or through the coasting trade to Dutch islands in the Lesser Antilles. Demand for enslaved labor meant that English residents in the Caribbean responded to prohibitions on trade with the Dutch and periods of open warfare in different ways. English merchants, planters, port officials, and, even governors continued to purchase enslaved captives from the Dutch throughout the seventeenth century, regardless of imperial prohibitions.22 At the same time, the knowledge about the presence of large populations of enslaved labor in Dutch colonies made those islands tempting targets for raids during periods of war between the two nations. The English raids on St. Eustatius and Saba in 1665, for example, were commissioned by Governor Thomas Modyford, who was a Royal African Company factor on the island of Barbados before he became governor of Jamaica. Modyford knew from his time in Barbados that planters in the Leeward Islands established dense trade networks with the Dutch out of St. Eustatius and Saba for enslaved labor. In fact, the initial commission ordered Morgan to sail first to St. Christopher to seize Dutch ships that Modyford assumed would be trading there.23 And, as governor of Jamaica, Modyford used the promise of plundering the Dutch islands to encourage Jamaican privateers and soldiers of fortune to raid them.24 The seizure of enslaved captives was not a by-­product of the Anglo-­ Jamaican raid in the Dutch Antilles, but central to it. Nearly half of the captives seized on the Dutch islands were transported back to Jamaica along with Modyford’s soldiers of fortune. Forced onto the four ships remaining in the English fleet—the St. John, the Civilian, the Trueman, and the Galliott—the captives experienced anew the disruption and horror of a saltwater journey from one place of bondage to another.25 Unlike transatlantic slaving vessels, the pairs of frigates and snows were low-­tonnage ships outfitted for speed and maneuverability, not the transportation of large numbers of enslaved people.26 The enslaved captives were squeezed among

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the goods taken from Dutch plantations onto ships “not fit to carry more than the seamen and soldiers, with their provisions.” As the English sailed from St. Eustatius, a storm “so disabled and scattered” the fleet that the ships limped back to Jamaica with provisions “much spoiled.”27 Ripped from what emotional and communal bonds they might have formed on St. Eustatius, cramped, wet, and hungry, the enslaved captives endured the passage to Jamaica at the hands of unruly soldiers and seamen. On their arrival at Port Royal, the captives were sold along with Dutch plantation tools to what the governor of Jamaica described as the “great furtherance” of the English colony.28 As Modyford anticipated when he issued the commission to attack the Dutch islands, the profits from those raids were extremely high. According to one English observer, they took “plunder above eighty thousand pounds . . . in [captives] and other things of value.”29 In the case of the invasions of St. Eustatius and Saba, the rapaciousness of soldiers of fortune could be tied to the desires of imperial agents, like Modyford, which allowed both parties to accomplish their goals. But, Modyford’s plan included a more devastating series of raids on Dutch possessions further to the south, with the coup de grâce being the invasion of Dutch Curaçao. In the aftermath of the invasion, with nearly a thousand enslaved captives already seized, the soldiers and mariners refused to continue with the raids. According to Theodore Cary, when the English commanders proposed sailing south, “all the Soldiers and Seamen cried out, they would not stir thence until the booty gotten was shared.”30 Dividing the “spoils” of these raids, though, necessitated the transportation of the enslaved captives to markets where the soldiers and sailors could sell the captives they had seized. Unable to force the men under their command to proceed south, the English commanders permitted the sale of nearly half the captives between St. Christopher and Nevis before charting a course back to Jamaica. In terms of imperial objectives, then, warfare-­by-­ raiding proved less than ideal in the long run. For the enslaved captives, this sale marked the likely permanent separation from community members. Among the captives taken from St. Eustatius and Saba, nearly five hundred people were sold to the English on Antigua and St. Christopher. For the captives who arrived in St. Christopher, their enslavement among the English would soon be disrupted by warfare again. Competition over land and coerced labor reshaped relations between the English and the French, who shared the island of St. Christopher, by the second half of the seventeenth century. Starting in the 1620s, threats from the island’s Kalinago inhabitants and the Spanish drove the English and French governors on the island to

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sign treaties of alliance and neutrality regardless of warfare in Europe.31 Over the course of the seventeenth century, however, tensions mounted between the Europeans on the island, specifically over demand for enslaved labor and land. Both English and French settlers on St. Christopher expressed repeated concerns that their neighbors had better access to enslaved Africans, supplies, and money for defenses. French planters objected to the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, formed in 1664, claiming that it failed to supply a sufficient number of enslaved Africans.32 For their part, English planters argued that they would “be constrained to desert” St. Christopher due to the lack of coerced laborers to work the soil.33 At the same time, the English and French on the island competed in attracting Dutch merchants through informal trade networks.34 As war loomed at mid-­century, English and French residents on St. Christopher eyed one another as impediments to their economic development rather than as useful allies against external threats. At the same time, a French alliance with the Dutch in the war between England and the Netherlands opened the possibility for raiding on St. Christopher. With the promise of seizing enslaved captives from the enemy, French and English residents broke the island-­wide treaties of neutrality and invaded one another’s possessions. For the African descendant captives from St. Eustatius and Saba, this new warfare marked the second time in less than five years that they would confront an invading army. For enslaved people throughout the Lesser Antilles, the Second Anglo-­ Dutch War increased the instability and violence that were already component parts of slavery. On St. Christopher, French forces invaded the English portion of the island in 1666, seizing enslaved Africans from the plantations of their rivals. According to English observers, the French committed “many wastes, damages & devastations” during the invasion in order to prevent English settlers from returning, “to resettle and plant again.”35 French soldiers carried away English valuables and burned plantations to the ground, destroying “the sugar canes and all sorts of provisions” in the process.36 Among the buildings the French destroyed were the quarters built and inhabited by the enslaved and among the fields burnt were the provisioning grounds cultivated by enslaved communities. Hunger compounded the uncertainty and fear that many enslaved people might have felt during the violent dislocation of being seized for gain. The archival record remains silent on how enslaved captives experienced the emotional and physical disruptions of war. But, taken by French soldiers of fortune who one observer described as “accomodat[ing] themselves therewith as victorious soldiers do,

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who have gained the field of battle, and plunder their enemies who make no further resistance,” enslaved people doubtless suffered rape, physical abuse, and terror during the conflict.37 In the Lesser Antilles, these raids violently separated members of the enslaved communities, especially since many captives were subsequently sold throughout the greater Caribbean. The French seized enslaved captives, for example, on Antigua and Montserrat shortly after their successful invasion of the English portion of St. Christopher in 1666. Between the three islands, English officials after the war claimed that the French took over 1,700 enslaved captives worth an estimated £34,000.38 Understanding what percentage of the total enslaved population those captives represented is complicated by a lack of precise demographic information for the three islands before the official censuses of the 1670s and 1680s.39 In 1678, over a decade after the French invaded St. Christopher, Antigua, and Montserrat, the total population of enslaved people held by the English between the three islands was 4,530.40 Although the enslaved population was likely higher in the English portion of St. Christopher before the war and, possibly, lower on Antigua and Montserrat, the population levels from the 1678 census can still give a sense of the scale of displacement experienced by enslaved populations from these islands during the Second Anglo-­Dutch War. Using the total number recorded during the 1678 English census, the 1,700 enslaved people taken by the French represented over 37 percent of the total enslaved population. For English planters, this represented a devastating blow to their plantation economy. For the enslaved, this meant permanent separation from almost two-­fifths of the people from their communities. European raids on rivals during the Second Anglo-­Dutch War followed over a century of Caribbean precedents, but peace negotiations were hampered by the question of returning enslaved captives. The war drew to a close with the Treaty of Breda in 1667, just two years after the conflict began. At the conclusion of the war, negotiators in Europe ordered the French to return the land and property seized from the English on St. Christopher, Antigua, and Montserrat, unless the former English owners received a purchase price for the property from the French. But, the question of returning enslaved p ­ eople to the individuals who originally claimed ownership over them proved complicated by the many times captives had changed hands during the war. To settle these disputes, negotiators in Europe proposed a solution: enslaved Africans and their descendants would settle rival claims to their labor themselves. According to article thirteen of the treaty:

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13. But if any of those slaves, that served the English in that part of the island of St. Christopher belonging to the aforesaid King of Great Britain, and also in the islands called Antigua and Montserrat, when they were taken by the arms of the aforesaid Most Christian King, shall wish to return again under the dominion of the English (but without any force or constraint), they shall be at liberty to do so within the period of six months reckoned from the day on which these islands shall be restored. But if the English before leaving the said islands shall have sold any slaves and the money shall have been paid for them, those slaves shall not be restored unless the price be returned and repaid.41 Unlike other forms of property, according to French and English negotiators in Europe, enslaved people could decide if they preferred to stay with the French or return to the English. For six months after the signing of the treaty, as one official in England declared, enslaved people would be “absolutely free and at their own perfect liberty” to decide if “they would return or not return as they themselves best liked.”42 English and French colonial officials, however, refused to enact the article. From across the expanse of the Atlantic, the men who negotiated Breda doubtless considered article thirteen a useful expedient to quickly resolve disputes over the ownership of enslaved people. For colonists, however, phrases such as “absolutely free” and “at their own perfect liberty” could not have been more discordant with their legal understanding of bondage or with the realities of raiding and warfare in the seventeenth-­century Caribbean. The promise of raiding rival territories helped European governors and ship captains in the Caribbean recruit men and mariners, with the distribution of enslaved captives often serving in lieu of payment in specie. The French soldiers who invaded the islands of St. Christopher, Antigua, and Montserrat understood the goods and captives that they seized had become their property according to “the Law of Arms.” They argued that “goods” taken during war legally belonged to the conquering army and, therefore, the enslaved people they seized during the fighting were their legal property.43 And many of the French soldiers also received enslaved captives as payment for their service to the French Crown. According to one observer, following the invasion of English territories enslaved captives “were distributed among the [French] officers and soldiers for pay and for boot.”44 The captives were sorted and distributed by French officers in much the same way that the Jamaicans divided the enslaved people seized on St. Eustatius and

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Saba. Many of the French soldiers then transformed the enslaved captives into more fungible assets through sale to local planters or to distant markets.45 French soldiers, as well as the merchants and planters who purchased enslaved captives from them, defended their property rights, claiming that they would “die before [they] will part with” the enslaved people taken from the English during the war.46 Long accustomed to mediating disputes about bound labor on the local level, the English and French negotiators on St. Christopher turned to an island-­based legal system that had been worked out over the first half of the seventeenth century. During the two meetings held on St. Christopher, the English and French delegations devised an “Instrument of rendition” for mediating disputes over enslaved captives and seized property.47 According to Governor Charles Wheeler, the English and French called together a “National Court,” which was “the ancient known Court for both Criminal and Civil causes, in all cases, wherein an Englishman and a Frenchman, were concerned together.”48 Referring back to the treaty-­based legal system created on St. Christopher in the 1620s, Wheeler and his French counterpart, Jean-­ Charles de Baas-­Castelmore, appointed commissioners to meet together, as jury members formerly had, to negotiate disputes over the restitution of enslaved people and payments for damages done to estates during the years of fighting. This jury of English and French planters decided the fate of enslaved people without the input of the captives themselves, contrary to the intent behind article thirteen of the Treaty of Breda. Imperial competition and warfare, however, provided some enslaved Africans and their descendants with another option for determining the circumstances of their bondage. Throughout the warfare of the mid-­seventeenth century, enslaved communities developed networks of information about imperial competition and local geography.49 While the vast majority could not leave circumstances of servitude, some enslaved Africans and their descendants found chances to flee using their access to boats and maritime skills, or through exploiting the chaos of open warfare. While on larger islands and mainland colonies, formerly enslaved people created or joined maroon settlements that were largely autonomous from colonial society; on smaller, more heavily populated Caribbean islands permanently escaping bondage often required maritime marronage. Freedom at sea exposed the formerly enslaved to a variety of dangers including shipwreck, hunger, or being captured and, because of the voracious demand for captive labor in the Caribbean, resold into slavery. Navigating the complex political geography of rival European territories and

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Kalinago-­controlled islands provided the opportunity for permanent freedom for some, while the journeys of others resulted in death or a return to unfreedom. The risks associated with fleeing by boat did not dissuade some whose experiences populate the documentary record and the countless others who left no archival trace of their flight from bondage. Enslaved people learned about the competition between Europeans in the Caribbean through various channels. Most directly, enslaved captives seized during violent raids bore the trauma of imperial warfare and their transportation to rival territories provided experiential knowledge about the political tensions among Europe’s Caribbean colonies. Knowledge of these rivalries also filtered into enslaved communities that remained free of direct wartime violence. Enslaved boatmen, market women, and fishermen had access to networks of information sharing that connected the geographically proximate Lesser Antilles. Through experience or networks of communication through harbors, enslaved communities likely gained enough knowledge of imperial rivalries to exploit those tensions when opportunities arose. The absence of formal treaties of rendition meant that European governors regularly negotiated over the return of enslaved people who escaped across imperial boundaries, resulting in a legal vernacular of property rights in people. At the same time, some enslaved people used their knowledge of imperial rivalries to achieve a modicum of freedom or to ameliorate their circumstances. Archival traces of enslaved people who fled during the warfare of the 1660s and 1670s remain slim, but the experiences of fifteen people of African descent in the 1670s can demonstrate the opportunities and perils confronted by enslaved people who sought freedom by exploiting imperial rivalries. In 1673, fifteen Africans arrived on the French island of Guadeloupe. The mixed group of women and men arrived not in shackles but in command of their own fishing boat. French authorities seized the maritime refugees as they made their way inland and demanded to know their origins. When pressed, one among the fifteen told the French that they had sailed from Tobago. Assuming that they were runaways, French governor de Baas attempted to inform the Dutch about the group’s capture—a task made difficult by the fact that the English had invaded Tobago in December of 1672, and “had not left a servant or slave or beast upon” Tobago.50 After holding the Africans for four months without any claims made on them, de Baas sold the group at public auction and pocketed the money for the island’s treasury.51 But, by spring of the following year, de Baas received a letter from his English counterpart on Nevis, William Stapleton, who demanded the restitution of the fifteen

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Africans.52 De Baas refused, citing the length of time that had passed since the Africans arrived and the fact that they had already been sold. For the fifteen Africans, their manipulation of imperial rivalries ended in their re-­enslavement in Guadeloupe but it also prevented their restitution to Antigua, where the punishment for maritime marronage was physical disfigurement or death.53 Knowing their motivations for fleeing Antigua or for telling de Baas that they sailed from Tobago is impossible. Likely, they were enslaved on Tobago before being seized during an English invasion and sold to planters in Antigua. Perhaps they hid their connection to Antigua simply to avoid being returned and punished. Perhaps they saw the French governor as a means to be returned to their enslavement among the Dutch and whatever communities or connections they had formed on the island. The archive remains frustratingly silent about motivations, designs, and feelings of those fifteen Africans. Their case, however, provides a lens onto how some enslaved Africans and their descendants manipulated imperial rivalries and the reactions of European officials to that mobility. Like the enslaved Angolans who were seized at sea and transported to Virginia in 1619, the violence of imperial competition at mid-­century marked the experiences of many Africans and their descendants. Europeans raided rival settlements and transatlantic slave ships throughout the seventeenth century. Casting the experiences of enslaved people in the same frame as European demand for enslaved labor during the tumultuous decades of the 1660s and 1670s reveals the centrality of raiding and captivity to both. From this perspective, European warfare in the Caribbean takes on new dimensions as soldiers and mariners raided some islands and not others, and retired from fighting when they acquired captives, rather than when wartime objectives had been met. The movement of enslaved people between polities—by choice and coercion—defined the opportunities and perils of mari­ time mobility. In this sense, the experiences of the captive Angolans in 1619 illuminate the route that many African captives took into slavery, but in the aquatic environment of the mid-­seventeenth-­century greater Caribbean, the violence of imperial competition could sever communities or offer a means of changing one’s circumstances.

PA R T I I I Construction

CHAPTER 7

The Wife, the “Whore,” and the “Wench” Colonial Women and the Development of Racial Hierarchy in Seventeenth-­Century Barbados Jenny Shaw

Three women, one an Irish servant, one an enslaved African, one a merchant’s wife from Galway, met each other in a Bridgetown household sometime in 1675. Their journeys to Barbados had taken different forms. The Irish servant and the merchant’s wife traveled across the Atlantic together. The enslaved African also traversed the ocean but as human cargo, stowed in  the  hold of one of the scores of slave ships that journeyed between Africa and the Americas every year. Both laboring women were employed in the Bridgetown house allegedly because the merchant’s wife was sickly and incapable of performing household duties. On the surface, the working lives of the Irish servant and the enslaved African followed similar patterns. They cooked food, served drink, washed pots, dishes, and floors, and cleaned clothes. Bound together by their sex, their service, and their master (John Blake, of Galway, Ireland, an ambitious merchant in Barbados’s burgeoning port city), these women provided crucial labor in his Batson’s Alley residence. Although apparently too ill to work, John’s wife still brought value to the household. For a man aspiring to elite status, the presence of his spouse proved vital to John’s ability to perform his role as a master.1 As John’s possessions, his wife, his servant, and his enslaved woman occupied prominent and strategic places in his household. But just as important, their differing labor statuses, ethnicities, and racial identities meant that the three women contributed to and reinforced the burgeoning hierarchies of the colonial society in which they lived.

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The merchant’s wife, the Irish servant, and the enslaved African are visible in the historical record largely through a set of letters exchanged between John and his male siblings.2 Of the nine letters that have survived, the women are only mentioned in two (although references make clear their presence in other missives). John’s spouse was marked by her relationship to her husband: “your wife” or “my wife” peppered the family correspondence.3 The Blake brothers described the Irish servant alternatively as “that whore,” or “the wench”; John made the only extant reference to the enslaved woman, describing her (modifying the word with a racial slur) as a “wench.” None of the women appear in the 1678 records noting John’s departure from Barbados on the sloop Resolution.4 Neither wife nor servant was included, like John, in the Montserrat census taken later that year, not even appearing as disembodied marks in the column that noted the number of “white women,” in John’s household. The enslaved woman, however, may well have been counted as one of the thirty-­ eight “negroes” listed as part of John’s estate.5 Despite their relatively scant archival references, an analysis of the discourses surrounding the women reveals one of the most significant transformations in the early English Atlantic world: the circumscribing of white servant labor, and the corresponding emergence of the first slave society in English America.6 Much has been written about the transition from servitude to racial slavery in the English colonies.7 On Barbados, scholarship has tended to focus on the precise timing of the shift, rather than the question of which came first, racism or enslavement. In his classic interpretation of the English Caribbean in the seventeenth century, Richard Dunn noted that the rise of racial slavery was rapid and more or less complete by the 1650s.8 Russell Menard ties the decline of servitude to the sugar revolution of the 1640s, while Susan Dwyer Amussen points to the 1661 slave code as the determining moment of differentiation between white and Black, and between free and enslaved.9 Certainly, the mid-­seventeenth century was the era when the influx of captives from Africa far outstripped the arrival of servants from the British Isles.10 But the precise ways in which this process played out often took place in the most intimate spaces—like the family home of John Blake. Moreover, as Jennifer Morgan shows, the shift was predicated on enslaved women’s bodies and their reproductive labor.11 In a colony where women—free, enslaved, African, and European—comprised the demographic majority, their role in shifting ideas about race and labor cannot be overstated.12 Women’s actions are especially evident when we examine a household not mastered by a member of the English elite, but rather one headed by an aspiring Irish merchant. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Irish Catholics had come to be viewed with

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suspicion by English imperial officials and colonists alike.13 Deemed degenerate, savage, and of the wrong religion, in the 1650s, thousands of ordinary Irish women and men had been shipped to the Caribbean as part of Oliver Cromwell’s policy of transportation. Those of a higher social class were not completely spared these indignities and found themselves subjected to English discrimination both at home and abroad.14 Examining a household driven by aspiration, rather than one already at the apex of colonial society, allows us to see and understand both the actions of the women and the implications of their presence in John’s Batson’s Alley residence. Scholars have used the brothers’ account of the wife, the whore, and the wench to demonstrate the connection between the acquisition of enslaved property, particularly of women domestics, and the rise in social status of the Blakes and other men like them.15 Certainly, that is how the Blake brothers used the women: to mark their place among an Atlantic elite. Spouses assisted men in achieving prominence because such women underscored the stability of the family and organized domestic labor.16 In the late seventeenth century, interactions between elite men and laboring women were equally crucial when figuring colonial hierarchy as masters exerted power through coercion, seeking to establish both sexual and physical dominance over the women in their service. This was no less true for Irish merchants. Drawn into the Blake family correspondence as reference points, the women (portrayed as objects) helped Thomas, Henry, and Nicholas contextualize their brother John’s West Indian experience. Managing his wife’s perceived weakness, his servant’s alleged wantonness, and his enslaved woman’s assumed suitability for domestic labor enabled John to articulate his position as a man in firm control of his Caribbean household. But just as important is recognizing these women as subjects and agents of their time and place. Rather than merely relitigating the attitudes of elite men toward women in this period, this essay focuses on the discourse at the center of the correspondence and uncovers the ways that concepts of racial slavery developed even among those Europeans, like the Irish, who were not considered fully civilized or “white” themselves.17 As the objects of racial and gendered discourse, the women were deployed by John and his brothers as these men grappled with articulating their patriarchal standing and control. Equally, if not more, significant is the opportunity provided by the letters to explore how the women lived and worked—exploring their everyday activities and relationships to one another is key to understanding how women’s subjectivity was central to developing hierarchies of race and labor.18 Each woman was subordinated in a particular way—through her economic, sexual, racial,

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or marital status, or some combination thereof. We need to acknowledge the other scales informing their experience: John’s wife held power over both serving women; the indentured Irish servant’s subjugation was less severe than her enslaved counterpart. At the same time, in the relationships they forged with one another, and in their challenges to John, the women articulated their own sense of hierarchy and belonging. While these visions never seriously imperiled either white patriarchal authority or the emerging system of racial slavery, studying them is still an important reminder of how the women themselves were imbricated in the shift from servitude to enslavement. These women were not mere objects of colonial discourse. They actively participated in shaping the hierarchies of gender, labor, and race in the early modern English Atlantic world.

The Merchant’s Wife The year 1675 was a tumultuous one on Barbados, the jewel in England’s imperial crown.19 Two disasters—one man-­made, one natural—shook island society to its core and threatened the colony’s lucrative sugar trade. In May, planters discovered and foiled a revolt by enslaved Africans. The anonymous author of Great Newes from the Barbados explained to metropolitan readers that “Coromantee or Gold Coast Negroes” had plotted to overthrow the planter hierarchy. Had it not been for intelligence provided by “Anna, a house Negro Woman,” the plan might have succeeded.20 Instead, “threescore and odd more” enslaved people were rounded up, and seventeen executed for their part in the alleged conspiracy, yet elites continued to worry about the threat to colonial security. Just a few months later, at the height of the summer of 1675, a devastating hurricane hit Barbados. According to Governor Jonathan Atkins, the casualties included at least “200 people killed, whole families being buried in the ruins of their houses.” Atkins noted that the sugarcanes were “twisted and broken off,” and six months of provisions, such as corn and other foodstuffs, were “laid flat or rooted up.”21 In the midst of this upheaval, another entirely ordinary event occurred: a woman of some means arrived in Barbados from Galway, Ireland. Agnes Blake (whose name we know only because of its inclusion in a fragmented 1691 deed) was accompanied by an Irish servant woman and together they headed for the Bridgetown home of Agnes’s husband, John.22 John Blake had arrived on the island seven years earlier. The bustling port town offered

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good prospects for merchants and John had been working in that business on Barbados since 1668. Despite a shaky beginning (or perhaps because of this unsure start), John’s wife now joined him in the family residence on Batson’s Alley, between Palmetto and High streets, on a lot “containing by estimation four thousand six hundred seventy and three square feet or there about.”23 A wife in the Bridgetown home offered John respectability. By joining him in the Caribbean, she completed his household. Protecting her virtue ensured his continued ascent up the social ladder: a potential scandal could tarnish her reputation and ruin his aspirations or blunt his success.24 Whether John’s wife chose to cross the Atlantic or was forced to join her husband by family loyalty and expectations of obedience is unclear. When John, the third of four brothers, traveled to the Caribbean with his older brother Henry, both men left their wives and children behind in Ireland. Henry expected to make a fortune on the Montserrat plantation and to return home to Galway, explaining in a letter that, “my living here was to recruite my great losses whereby I should be able to pay my debts at hoame.”25 Using his oldest brother, Thomas, and youngest sibling, Nicholas, as his factors in Ireland, Henry slowly built a fortune, harnessing the networks created by the colonial provisioning trade centered out of Galway and Cork.26 John may have held similar desires. But, although he had a stake in their Montserrat plantation, on Barbados his merchant business struggled.27 Perhaps these failings led John to believe that he would never be in a position to return home, and so he sent for his wife to join him. If she did not wish to comply, Agnes may have had very little choice in the matter. In Galway, surrounded by family members who were no doubt aware of John’s request, she would have felt pressure to make the voyage and reunite with her spouse.28 It is also possible that Agnes desired to join her husband. She may have missed him and wanted to be by his side. More importantly, Agnes might well have understood that she stood to wield a great deal of power over her subordinates in Barbados and perhaps earn a more prestigious position than she held in Galway. As a mother, one of her duties was ensuring that her children find suitable partners, and she could have believed that arranging respectable marriages for their children in the Caribbean would be easier than in Ireland.29 Indeed, her daughter would later wed a member of the prominent Galway-­based Lynch family, who owned a plantation on Antigua, and John eventually joined the governing class on Montserrat, reaching the position of Speaker of the Assembly on the island by the 1680s.30 Without Agnes at his side it is likely neither of these events would have been possible.

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Despite Agnes’s marginal inclusion in the historical record, it was her arrival on Barbados that sparked the family discussion about the Irish servant and John’s assertions about his need for an enslaved domestic. Until she appeared on the island, none of the letters between the brothers discussed household arrangements or the service staff that John surely employed. It was not simply that Agnes’s presence opened up the domestic sphere for critique. Her arrival in the home meant that John’s ability to perform the role of master came under scrutiny from the community around him. His brothers (who would have been concerned about the ability for scandal to tarnish the family reputation) perhaps felt they had no choice but to offer criticism and advice.31 It is noteworthy that the extant letters came from, and were sent to, John’s elder siblings. They were the figures John had to impress, especially because his brothers appeared to worry about John’s weakness when faced with temptation in the form of a subordinate woman. And so, John insisted to his siblings that responsibility for the servant woman’s presence lay with his spouse, noting that, “the wench came over along with my wife.”32 John’s association of the servant with Agnes reflected his understanding of the connection between spouses and domestic management. The only time that Agnes was explicitly discussed was on the subject of her inability to complete chores in the household. John remarked to Thomas that he found her “of a very weake constitution” and that she could not “discharge all herself.”33 However, his claim that Agnes’s ill health prevented her from engaging in household tasks was more than a little disingenuous. As a man who hoped to emulate English elites in the Caribbean, John would not have wanted his wife to perform lowly domestic labor, even if she had been capable of doing so.34 It is also unclear to what extent her “weake constitution” rendered Agnes unable to issue orders to subordinates. A healthy woman would have been expected to manage domestic laborers, and the fact that Agnes had likely been running John’s Irish household in his absence only reinforced the notion that she would perform the same role in the Caribbean.35 From Agnes’ perspective, however, her position in charge of both a servant and (later) an enslaved woman only served to elevate her position as an Irish woman in England’s premier colony. By underscoring the relative status differences among them, she was able to partake in one of Barbados’s most insidious elite practices: using servant and enslaved women to advance oneself in the hierarchy. Irish Catholics had been performing this move for some time by the mid-­1670s, in locations across the English Caribbean.36 As mistress of the household, Agnes issued orders, made demands, and set

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expectations for the women who served her and John. But she also meted out punishments for perceived substandard work, insubordination, or simply because she wanted to exert her authority. Whether kind or cruel, impetuous or calm, predictable or erratic, or, most likely, all of the above depending on the day, Agnes enforced a hierarchy that emphasized her own whiteness at the expense of the Irish servant and enslaved African. The reasons that Agnes brought the Irish servant with her to Barbados are fraught with uncertainty. If Agnes were truly ill, the woman would have provided support on the transatlantic voyage. But, even if Agnes was in good health, she may have viewed the servant woman as a trusted confidant and taken comfort from her presence on this voyage into the unknown. Elite women often presumed a closeness and intimacy with little care or attention for how their subordinates understood the relationship. If the servant woman had been with the Blakes for a long time, Agnes may well have considered her to be a good worker whose familiarity with the ways of the Blake household would provide continuity in Barbados. It is also possible that Agnes viewed the servant woman in terms of her sexual utility. Perhaps she brought the domestic laborer with the reputation for being a “whore” on the journey precisely because she hoped to avoid John’s unwanted sexual advances herself. Agnes had at least two living children, a son and a daughter, and so would not have been worried about her security as his wife.37 Moreover, although John referred to his spouse as his “beloved wife Agnes,” in the deed for his Bridgetown home, such declarations of affection do not necessarily reflect Agnes’s feelings toward her husband. If John did have proclivities toward servant women, no one was better placed to have knowledge about his behavior than she. Alternatively, Agnes may have worried about the rumors surrounding John and the servant. She could have argued for the purchase of an enslaved woman to reduce the threat of a potential sexual scandal and to assure their standing in Bridgetown society. After all, the acquisition of an enslaved woman to labor inside the home was entirely normalized in Barbados: 91 percent of Bridgetown homes included at least one enslaved person in the 1680 census.38

The Irish Servant The servant woman was first mentioned in a postscript to a letter that Henry Blake penned on May 29, 1675, from Montserrat to his brother Thomas in

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Galway. Following a request to “pray remember my love to father Daniell,” the family priest, Henry wrote: Brother I am much troubled for that whore (as I am credibly informed) came out along with my brother John’s wife. I am afraid she may be the occasion of his confusion by her seducement. I pray God preserve him. Robert and Nicho[las] advised him to put her out of the company of his wife by telling her quality, and he would not; a strange alteration in one that hated the name of a whore as much as any in the world: by the first, I will advise him to throw her away, which I pray God he may do for his own future content.39 This postscript is longer than the letter about finances to which to which it is attached. The late addition may indicate that Henry only learned of the servant woman’s arrival in Barbados after he had written to Thomas about business matters. Or it reflects Henry’s desire for efficiency—why use more paper, or send two letters, when one would suffice? It is equally possible that Henry considered his economic and family business to be separate entities. Correspondence about finances was not supposed to include digressions on the ways in which John chose to run his household.40 But was there really such a distinction between economic and personal matters? After all, a servant in a household was an economic consideration, and a servant’s good behavior was necessary to the efficient running of a household.41 Yet Henry marked his discussion of the “whore” off. By referring to the servant woman in terms of her sexual worth, not that of her labor, Henry (whether consciously or not) made clear his stance on this indentured woman—she was primarily a sexual object (and threat); her economic value was of secondary concern. Henry’s choice of language in the postscript tells us much about his opinion of John’s servant woman. First, he described her as “that whore,” indicating that he was familiar with the woman and her reputation.42 Indeed, it seems likely that there had been a scandal in Galway. According to the surviving letters, all three of John’s brothers, and his brother-­in-­law, Robert French, had specifically mentioned the servant woman’s poor reputation to John. Henry stated that Nicholas and Robert had “advised [John] to put her out of the company of his wife by telling her quality.”43 The context makes clear that John’s relations believed that this woman was not virtuous, or of a good nature. That the brothers were so sure of her character indicates that they had evidence about this woman’s prior bad behavior in Ireland.

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Although generic prejudices of the time viewed all single servant women as potentially degenerate, the family’s response to this servant woman demonstrates their faith that she was a threat specifically to John. The suspicions raised by the Blake brothers fit into seventeenth-­century narratives about the supposed desire harbored by servant women to rise above their station in the Caribbean. Many European arrivals on the islands were forced overseas, or (in the slang of the day), “Barbadosed.”44 Although initially servant women were as likely as men to work in the fields of the island’s sugar plantations, increasingly women performed their labor in plantation homes, or Bridgetown houses, placing them in close proximity to their masters.45 Moreover, a 1652 law that punished men who impregnated servants with extra time in service “effectively ‘priced’ sexual relations with women servants out of the reach of their fellow servants,” and left access to working women’s bodies in the hands of elite men.46 Contemporaries were well aware of the situation. Henry Whistler, who visited Barbados in 1655, commented on the ability of certain young single women to advance socially on the island if they behaved appropriately, even if their virtue was called into question, suggesting, “A bawd brought over puts on a demure comportment, a whore if handsome makes a wife for some rich planter.”47 Because planters believed that women of dubious reputation might marry into island elites, they resisted attempts by Oliver Cromwell to export those he called “loose wenches” from the streets of London to the colonies.48 Henry felt that he knew the servant woman well enough to state definitively that she would be the cause of John’s ruin, and that she was the sexual aggressor. The “strange alteration” that the woman had caused in John was, in Henry’s eyes, evidence of her skills at the art of “seducement.”49 How otherwise could John transform from a man “that hated the name of a whore as much as any in the world,” to one willing to embrace a servant woman who could be the cause of his demise?50 Here Henry was engaging in a “discourse of seduction” that made the servant woman responsible for John’s lack of rational masculinity.51 Although the dynamics of power in this relationship between servant and master precluded issues of consent, Henry’s assumptions that it was the woman who held the upper hand in this potential sexual encounter allowed him to obfuscate the violence at play in any of John’s possible interactions with the servant.52 Moreover, his assertion that John should “throw her away,” indicates Henry’s utter refusal to believe that the “whore” had any redeeming qualities, an attitude in keeping with the morality of the time, when women who were perceived to have poor reputations were viewed as disposable.53

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John responded to his brother’s concerns five months later, on November 5, 1675, also writing to Thomas in Galway. After discussing plans for educating his son and asking to be remembered to his parents and the family priest, John launched into an impassioned defense of his decision to allow the servant woman to remain in his employ: The wench came over along with my wife; I am most sensible what my brother Henry hath written me heretofore of her as likewise what you intimated p[er] your s[ai]d letter, to which I say that though I find her as yet most vitious lesse here perhaps deterred through the most severe correction I keepe her under yet because of s[ai]d bad reports I would not at all abide her under my roofe but I thereunto am as yet inevitably compelled by reason my wife being as I find her of a very weake constitution cannot discharge all herself: for washing starching making of drinke and keeping the house in good order is no small task to undergoe here; if I would dismiss her another I must have which may prove tenne times worse than her; for untill a neger wench I have be brought to knowledge I cannot considering my present charge be without a white maid.54 Challenging Henry, John insisted that he was “most sensible”—of a clear mind—when it came to understanding the servant woman’s alleged proclivities. In fact, John suggested that in his household he found the woman to be “most vitious lesse.”55 “Here,” John kept the woman under “the most severe correction,” an indication that orders of punishment not tolerated in Ireland were acceptable in plantation settings.56 Although the harshest punishments were reserved for enslaved Africans, everyday tortures were so pervasive that they rendered mundane even the more excessive expressions of control exercised by masters.57 If the servant woman was immoral or depraved in Ireland, in Barbados, John claimed to have found a way to control both her body and her behavior. The power that John exerted over the servant woman extended beyond the physical realm and into the discursive. His decision to switch the term of reference from “whore” to “wench” made the opposite move to that of his elder brother, allowing John to make himself, and the situation his family feared he was embroiled in, more respectable. “Wench” connoted a young woman of the servant class, a simple but hardworking individual; it also signaled affection for a wife or a daughter.58 Here, John’s placement of the “wench” in his

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letter demonstrates the dual meaning of the word. The subjects that bound the references to the servant woman were those of family and commerce. The education of John’s children and his request to be remembered to various loved ones in Galway preceded his defense of the “wench”; the vagaries of the trade in beef immediately followed.59 Her integration into the correspondence demonstrates the delicate balance between the woman’s place as a servant and her role in John’s household as more than a laborer. Yet his seemingly abrupt segue back to his worries about the provisioning trade suggests that John’s understanding of the woman as economically valuable was equally in play. The rape and abuse of servant and enslaved women, especially those who performed domestic duties, was commonplace in the English Caribbean, making the servant woman vulnerable.60 In the late seventeenth century, interactions between elite men and laboring women were crucial when figuring colonial hierarchy, as masters sought to establish both sexual and physical dominance over the women in their service.61 Although the brothers suggested that it was John who was at risk of “seducement,” it is probable that he was the predator. John’s stubborn refusal to remove the servant (after four different requests to do so) hints that there was some additional anxiety at play on the part of his relations. Henry, Thomas, Nicholas, and Robert might have believed John to be a weak master. Certainly, his insistence that it took “severe correction” to control the woman was evidence that he was in full control of his emotions. John may have been less concerned that his brothers believed him to be engaged in a sexual relationship with his servant than he was about what such behavior might imply about his failures as a rational household head.62 Despite the fact that the servant woman belonged to one of the lowest orders in the West Indies, confined in her choices by her sex and class, she may have pursued a sexual relationship with John—with an ailing wife who was perhaps not long for this world, she could have hoped to gain favor and become the new Mrs. Blake. If she was eighteen or so when she left Ireland (a common age for servants to move overseas), she would have been born during the tumult of the Cromwellian era. Her parents may well have found themselves in Galway because of Cromwell’s transplantation policies.63 In that lively port city there was plenty of opportunity to learn about life in the Caribbean, even if rumor and tall tales dominated discussions of the Americas in the taverns, on the streets, and at the docks. She may have been convinced that the best way to improve her lot in life was to go overseas, where she might be lucky enough to marry a man with land and prospects.64 Her

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standard of living in the Caribbean would have been no worse, and likely may have been a lot better, than her outlook in the west of Ireland. Whatever her hopes and dreams, the servant woman could not have understood, at first, the role she would play in cementing the racial hierarchy in Barbados. Before she crossed the Atlantic Ocean, she was probably aware that at some stage she would be in a position to move beyond a life of service. But it was only upon arrival in the West Indies that she likely became cognizant of the fact that her potential freedom was predicated upon the bondage of someone of African descent. Moving from a position of full subordination to one where she was no longer on the bottom rung of society was a tantalizing proposition. Perhaps she countered her own vulnerability in the Bridgetown household by helping to persuade John that he and Agnes needed to replace her with an enslaved woman from Africa.

The Enslaved African “If I would dismiss her another I must have which may prove tenne times worse than her; for untill a neger wench I have be brought to knowledge I cannot considering my present charge be without a white maid.”65 So ended John’s justification for keeping the Irish servant woman in his home, at least in the short term. He could not trust that a servant replacement would have a better reputation, and he needed his current charge to train his recently purchased enslaved woman in the appropriate tasks for running the Bridgetown household. This sentence contains the only reference to the enslaved woman in the correspondence between the brothers. How Thomas reacted on receiving John’s letter is lost to the archive. He may not have been surprised to hear that an enslaved woman was a necessary addition to a Bridgetown merchant’s estate, or an appropriate replacement for an Irish servant. After all, status was attached to one’s ability to staff a Caribbean house with enslaved Africans rather than indentured servants, and the numbers of available servant women were in decline.66 On Montserrat, the success of Henry’s plantation was dependent on the toil of enslaved women and men, and Thomas had reaped the benefits of their labor, even though the letters discussing the goods that the brothers traded in never acknowledged the people who produced these commodities. It is difficult to know when John purchased the enslaved woman he so desired. That she was present in his household, but had yet to be “brought to

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knowledge,” suggests that she had recently arrived on the island. Thousands of enslaved women were forced to endure captivity, the middle passage, and the indignity of the auction block precisely because men like John demanded their labor. Living in the bustling port of Bridgetown, John would have had ample opportunity to observe sales of enslaved people and would have been familiar with different purchase prices for saltwater slaves, and those who had undergone a period of seasoning on the island.67 Because the “wench” he brought into his home had to be trained in the domestic arts, John most likely had chosen an enslaved woman who had come directly to Barbados from Africa. In the year before John wrote his letter, the year he probably purchased his “wench,” at least ten slave ships, and over 2,000 enslaved people, left the west coast of Africa with Barbados as their primary destination.68 Three of these ships had loaded captives in the Bight of Biafra and had cargoes of between forty-­five and sixty percent women, increasing the chances, statistically, that the woman John purchased came from that region of West Africa.69 Wherever she originated, the enslaved woman endured the horrors of the middle passage. If she felt alone as she stepped onto the slave ship that carried her across the ocean, or whether she embarked in the company of others that shared her language is unknown. She may have had someone to rely on, to talk to, on her voyage across the Atlantic, or she may have endured the journey bereft of any kind of companionship.70 Even if she had been able to talk to other captives, their presence would not automatically have assuaged the profound pain of dislocation. In this way, she is unlike the Irish servant woman who traveled with John’s wife. Whatever their relationship, John’s wife and her servant were held together by a defined set of circumstances, practicalities, and shared language.71 Each knew the role that they were supposed to play, as they crossed the Atlantic, and in John’s household in Barbados. The African captive, however, knew very little of what to expect. She may have learned, while on board the slave ship, how to behave to avoid punishment or to resist the attention of the sailors on board, but once in Barbados, she would have to learn a new way of being all over again. She had transitioned from being a captive, to becoming a commodity, and then to being a fully realized enslaved woman in a slave society.72 In John’s Bridgetown home the enslaved woman was estranged to a degree from the rest of the African population on Barbados. Thrust into a forced intimacy with the Irish servant, John likely anticipated that the latter would become the educator of the former, instructing the enslaved woman in the particular way of “washing starching making of drinke and keeping

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the house in good order,” that he and Agnes expected.73 Working alongside one another may have brought some relief to the servant woman who had probably previously performed all of this work on her own. Laundry, for example, was traditionally a communal effort, with women pooling resources to reduce the onerous nature of the task.74 It is unclear whether the enslaved woman would have been comfortable with this arrangement. The potential camaraderie between the two women was by no means assured, not least because of the language barrier that must have made communication difficult. Although her place within the Bridgetown household would have meant that the enslaved woman would have been forced to speak English or Gaelic rather than her native tongue, the Irish woman would have had to wait for her to develop these skills.75 The Irish servant might have felt jealousy toward the enslaved woman, if she knew that the enslaved woman’s presence underscored her own redundancy. More likely still, the servant recognized her elevated status in the developing racial hierarchy that was emerging and treated her new work partner accordingly.76 “Washing” and “starching” offer a way to explore the relationship between the servant and the enslaved woman. To emulate the elite status he so fervently aspired to reach, John would have expected a constant supply of crisp linen shirts to wear beneath his clothing.77 The Irish woman was probably familiar with the elite habit of shirt changing, even if she did not follow such prescriptions herself. In Ireland, elites had adopted this English practice but followed the Spanish custom, preferring yellow shirts dyed with saffron to those that were plain white.78 The African woman might have wondered why John and his wife did not rely on palm oil soaps and more regular bathing given the importance of both ritual and daily cleansing in many West African societies.79 Sartorial preferences among West African elites tended to combine European-­bought cloths with local styles, and these blended fashions were brought across the Atlantic by captives on slave ships.80 The enslaved woman therefore may have been familiar with the fabrics that she was being asked to launder. Such knowledge would not reduce the labor involved, although familiarity with the cloth may have led to fewer mistakes and quicker results. Maintaining a fresh supply of clean linens was exhausting, and included time spent hauling water, building a fire to heat the water, making soap to wash the linens, and then soaking, stirring, wringing, starching, and mending the cloth itself.81 If John aspired to certain standards of cleanliness that would help to signify his civilized self, the Irish servant woman and enslaved African had very different relationships to the production of fresh linens.

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John’s assertion that the enslaved woman had to be educated in the ways of a Bridgetown household precluded the possibility (in his eyes) that she brought knowledge of her own to Barbados. He probably did not consider, for example, that she was likely familiar with the core ingredient of one of the island’s most popular drinks. Although plantains were not native to Africa, by the seventeenth century, the fruit played a large role in the diet in the west-­ central part of the continent.82 Given Europeans’ unfamiliarity with plantains, and enslaved Africans preferences for the fruit, it seems possible that the enslaved woman brought knowledge about how to prepare “Plantain drink” with her across the ocean.83 As with other island beverages, the labor involved in making this drink was not inconsequential. The plantains had to be peeled, boiled, mashed, strained, and bottled for around a week before the liquor was fit for human consumption. John’s myopia on her potential expertise and his ability to only see the enslaved woman as an untrained “wench,” was more than a reduction of a person to a commodity (although it was that as well): it was a silencing, intentional or not, of the skills of the woman who prepared the food he ate and the drink he imbibed. A domestic enslaved woman had reportedly foiled the recent slave uprising on Barbados, and John may have hoped that he would ensure similar loyalty from his new charge. But the enslaved woman may not have felt so removed from the broader enslaved community; her location in the port city brought opportunities of its own. To obtain the ingredients for the food she cooked, the enslaved woman had to navigate Bridgetown’s diverse streets. Moving from the swampy area in which John’s home stood to the busy docks, she passed by numerous stalls, many of them run by enslaved women who had traveled from plantations in the interior to sell their goods.84 The markets where she purchased fruits, vegetables, meats, and fish provided access to familiar ingredients, community, and to news from the large sugar estates. In a city where the enslaved population equaled the English population, and where almost every merchant or factor owned at least one enslaved domestic, the enslaved woman not only had freedom of movement, she had a social world to navigate and engage.85 While such mobility offered some scope for escaping John and Agnes’s watchful eyes, the servant and the enslaved woman would have been reminded of their low status and the ever-­present violence of colonialism when they stepped outside the doors of the Batson’s Alley residence. The stocks, pillory, whipping post, and ducking stool that Bridgetown boasted, as well as the public cage in which runaway servants and enslaved Africans were housed, were visible reminders of their subordinate status.86

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There were other ugly realities about life in Barbados about which the enslaved woman would be “brought to knowledge.” Like so many other enslaved women who labored in urban homes, she could have been subjected to unwanted sexual advances, unable to defend her body.87 As the seventeenth century progressed, enslavers became aware that an enslaved woman’s body was doubly valuable, held not only in her productive labor, but also in her reproductive service.88 No one would have been more intimately aware of this connection than the enslaved woman herself. The “discourse of seduction” created in the Blake brothers’ depictions of the Irish servant does not have its corollary in John’s brief discussion of her replacement. Perhaps the men were unable to conceive of John engaging in sex with an African. But it is just as likely that the dynamic did exist, the words unspoken, as it did for so many other enslaved women like her who labored in such intimate proximity to their masters.89 Given that she likely ran the Batson’s Alley home, John’s wife would have made demands of her subordinate charges as well. As the servant woman and Agnes were familiar with one another, Agnes may have felt less need to issue instructions and lessons on a regular basis. But such knowledge does not preclude the possibility that their relationship was fraught.90 As the first enslaved person owned by John and Agnes, the enslaved woman was an unknown entity. Agnes may not have held the same opinion as her husband about the levels of knowledge the African woman brought with her, but John’s assessment that she needed to be trained could well have reflected conversations he had with his wife. For her part, the enslaved woman would have had to learn quickly to meet Agnes’s expectations. If John had no compunction about using excessive violence to curb the servant woman’s behavior, he surely would not have balked at using similar forms of “correction” to keep the enslaved woman on task. And, like so many female enslavers, there is no reason to suppose that Agnes did not impose acts of violence on the enslaved woman herself.91 The enslaved woman would also come to understand that the longer she tarried in John’s household, the more valuable she became. As she gained knowledge, so John’s need for the Irish servant diminished. When John moved to Montserrat in February 1678, he did not travel with his servant or his wife.92 The enslaved woman probably followed him to Montserrat like the enslaved property of other masters who left Barbados that year.93 Perhaps she was looking forward to heading to a large plantation where she could perform a different kind of labor and connect with other enslaved women

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and men. The enslaved woman possibly appears one final time in the historical record. “Mr. John Blake” is listed three lines from the bottom of Captain Devereux’s Division in the Montserrat census. In the “white men” column a clear Arabic number “1” references John himself. The “white women” and “white children” categories were scored through with single dashes indicating that there was no longer an Irish servant woman in John’s household, and that his wife was either dead or still residing in Bridgetown. And in the column labeled “negroes” rests the number 38, an accounting that underscores the shift in the enslaved women’s experience from a solitary existence in the Batson’s Alley residence to a life alongside other Africans on a sugar producing plantation. This change of circumstances also emphasizes the broader move in the English Caribbean to fully fledged slave societies, even on the smaller Leeward Islands where demographics took longer to reflect such a transformation.94 The anonymous enslaved woman, like so many of her peers, was at the vanguard of this transition.

* * * If, as Ann Stoler maintains, “matters of the intimate are critical sites for the consolidation of colonial power,” then it is imperative to attend to the lives of all historical actors present in colonial settings.95 The Blake residence in Bridgetown, Barbados, offers the prospect of accounting for women whose daily lives reflected so many of the major transformations that unfolded in England’s fledgling empire. Changes within John Blake’s household—replacing a European servant with an enslaved woman, both women laboring under the supervision of his wife—mirrored the broader transition from servitude to slavery that transpired in the last quarter of the seventeenth century and that turned Barbados into the first slave society in the English Atlantic. These women’s lives also represent how a complex set of colonial hierarchies developed in domestic spaces. The urban household enabled European men, even those who were Irish Catholics like John, to perform their conventional roles as good husbands and masters. Their success in this endeavor was guaranteed by wives who provided respectability, and subordinates (especially female servants and enslaved Africans), whose inclusion in the household assured the social status of their owners by bolstering their gender and (in John’s case) their racial superiority. John only referred to the enslaved woman once, but when he did, he specifically juxtaposed her position against that of the Irish woman he now

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referred to as his “white maid.” Elsewhere in the correspondence the servant was not given a racial marker, but when comparing her directly to an enslaved woman, John emphasized that the key difference between the two was in their physical appearance. In claiming whiteness for the Irish servant, John was also underscoring his own racial identity. By consolidating what it meant to be white, and by putting himself, his wife, and the servant woman in that category alongside the English inhabitants of Barbados, John was marking a bright line between his Irish self, and the enslaved woman who now occupied his household. And yet attending to the particular circumstances surrounding these three women shows that the powerful forces of a burgeoning imperial system were nowhere near as absolute and oppressive as they might first appear. The women’s interactions with one another and with John not only counter a narrative of European male dominance within the household, they also provide an opportunity to embrace other accounts of intimate and familial colonial relationships.96 Women in these colonial spaces are not merely the objects through which systems of power were articulated and enforced, they are also central agents in the colonizing mission themselves, building and contesting the emerging slave society on Barbados. By focusing on the particulars of these women who occupied a seemingly limited and confined arena, the complexities of their lives as wife, servant, and enslaved are revealed. It is thus in the “interplay of power and subjectivity” that the merchant’s wife, the Irish servant, and the enslaved African become fully realized historical actors and it is through examining their daily lives and the discourses that contained and constrained their experiences, that their stories enable us to understand how racial slavery developed in and came to dominate the early modern English Caribbean.97

CHAPTER 8

Of Differences and Diagnoses Racializing Health and Framing Suffering in the American Atlantic Rana Hogarth

Skin color remains one of the most cited features in both scholarly and lay explanations for the origins of racism and slavery in the Americas. Indeed, skin color has long served the purpose of marking difference and making race legible upon the human body (whether one views it as a social construction or not). Thomas Jefferson encapsulated these sentiments in the now infamous and frequently cited passage from his Notes on the State of Virginia. The first difference which strikes us is that of color. Whether the black of the Negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf skin or in the scarf skin itself, whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood . . . the bile or from other secretions, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us . . . there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidnies [sic].1 A tribute to his home state, written at the request of François de Marbois in 1781, the secretary of the French legation, Notes contains Jefferson’s most jarring, albeit brief, anti-­Black sentiments.2 In many ways, the appearance of Notes (completed in France in 1781, and then published in London in 1787) roughly coincided with what a number of scholars have identified as the period in which the modern concept of race crystalized.3

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Notes, however, was not a treatise on race. It was a detailed description of the distinctly American landscape, inhabitants, and system of government meant for foreign audiences. It was also a non-­subtle attempt to discredit European naturalists’ negative views of America. As historian Cara Rogers points out, one of the main audiences for Notes was elite French thinkers, some of whom believed the “New World had an inferior (cold, damp) climate, and that this moldy atmosphere rendered every bit of flora and fauna— as well as Native Americans—inferior to their Old World counterparts.”4 In setting the record straight about America, Jefferson waded into bigger discussions about human variation. As the quotation that opens this chapter illustrates, Jefferson was unequivocal in his view that bodily differences between the races were real and immutable. Many historians have interpreted Jefferson’s commentary on Black people’s physical appearance as an articulation of the grim prospects for a harmonious multiracial society where Blacks and whites could live as coequals.5 From the 1500s, generations of whites had relied on perceptions of difference (be it bodily, linguistic, religious, or cultural) to enslave Black people or, in the very least, to deny them the same rights as whites in the Americas.6 Indeed, historians still debate whether early modern Europeans’ negative a priori views of Africans’ different bodily features (and customs) led to slavery in the Americas, or if slavery spurred the creation of a European racial logic that held Black people as inferior, thereby justifying their inhumane treatment. Well before Jefferson, then, race—more specifically Blackness—had already become a feature that distinguished who was enslaveable and who was not in the Americas.7 Thus Jefferson’s words are perhaps more instructive for understanding how race became (erroneously) viewed as an aspect of one’s biology—something that could not be altered or removed in the same way that cultural practices, language, or religion could be. Deep-­seated differences in bodily functions, along with observations of Black people’s different susceptibilities to certain diseases appeared to provide unassailable proof that innate racial differences were real.8 Incidentally, Jefferson wrote Notes at a time when the fixity of Black skin color was undergoing debate—at least in intellectual circles. It was partially because of the views of elite French naturalists like Georges-­Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who held that external environmental factors—diet, custom, climate—could make human features, including skin color, change over time, that Jefferson voiced his firm stand on the permanency of Black skin. As Jefferson did so, he also challenged the views of highly esteemed American

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thinkers such as Benjamin Rush and Samuel Stanhope Smith—two figures sympathetic to the plight of Black people, but nevertheless open to the idea that Black people’s features could be “improved” under the right conditions.9 Disagreements about skin color’s permanence aside, many white commenters, especially physicians, conceded that there were unseen, innate differences between Blacks and whites vis-­à-­vis the kinds of internal differences to which Jefferson alluded. Physicians, especially those who practiced in the slave societies of the American Atlantic (including even those who opposed slavery), entertained the view that Blacks and whites were not biologically the same. The process through which physicians transformed race into a matter of biology—noting racial differences in suffering and susceptibility— was hardly linear. It is a topic that this essay explores at length. At the same time, this essay also shows how the notion of racial differences solidified, not around differences in skin color, but rather around perceptions that Black people’s constitutions differed from whites, as evidenced through how each race experienced disease differently.10 Skin color certainly mattered, but it was just the tip of the innate-­ differences iceberg, so to speak. Susceptibility to disease, I contend, helped make race real and gave credence to the idea that Africans were in fact too different from whites to merit being treated the same. Gesturing toward the idea of innate racial difference was dependent in part on an ability to compare suffering between Blacks and whites. In this way, slavery played a significant role in the production of this kind of medical knowledge. Physicians in the Americas could compare bodies in a way that was not possible in Europe, thus this essay also foregrounds the ways in which physicians relied on the slave system to compare Black and white experiences with disease. And while it is true that anatomical studies of Black skin that thrived in Europe buttressed claims of innate racial difference, those endeavors reflected just one part of process of constructing race. The process of making race a real biological entity depended upon both medical knowledge produced from the disease environments of the Americas and knowledge produced from the study of Black people’s bodies in Europe.11 Like Londa Schiebinger, I underscore how medical knowledge from the Americas facilitated the process through which physicians argued that Black and white people responded to suffering and disease differently.12 One disease—yellow fever—is particularly useful for understanding the construction of racial difference through susceptibility. According to historian Suman Seth, yellow fever was understood “as the seasoning sickness par excellence.”13

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Newcomers to the greater Caribbean needed to survive a number of sicknesses, including yellow fever, in order to become acclimatized. There was no shortage of medical theories about yellow fever. Physicians debated whether yellow fever was contagious, a result of foul airs and inhospitable climate, or a combination of those factors. But most agreed that yellow fever was a deadly scourge and fact of life in the Americas.14 As a fever that was largely unknown in Europe but common in the Americas, yellow fever caught the attention of medical and lay commenters alike because they observed it to be milder, or even absent, in Black people than in white people—two groups transplanted to the Americas, albeit under very different circumstances. These observations of differential immunity would later buttress proslavery arguments that surfaced toward the beginning of nineteenth century; however, the belief in perceived differences in immunity did not initially emerge out of a desire to protect slavery.15 To note differences in suffering and susceptibility from yellow fever relied on a version of medical thinking that had existed since antiquity—a form of thinking premised on bodily differences that predated the modern idea of race. The humoral system of medicine acknowledged all people’s composition of black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood, in addition to their diets, customs, behaviors, and external surroundings.16 A few scholars have pointed out that white settlers to the Americas simply relied on humoral medical frameworks in addition to ideas that privileged the environment’s role in affecting health to understand the distinct health experiences of Black and white people.17 If one could believe in distinctive bodily constitutions, then believing that race was an outward manifestation of difference was hardly farfetched, and by no means unthinking.

Constitutions The concept of race that we now use to distinguish and group different types of people did not exist when European settlers first set foot in the Americas, and certainly not when the English transitioned to using enslaved African labor.18 That said, English settlers did recognize the material and cultural differences between themselves and non-­Europeans. It would not have been extraordinary for Anglo settlers to see Native American and African bodies as different from their own for many reasons. Joyce Chaplin’s incisive work on early English settlement in mainland North America offers compelling assessments of how seventeenth-­century English settlers began to see and act

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upon the differences they noted between their bodies and Indigenous bodies. Their acknowledgement of these differences was apparent in how the English saw the impact of Old World diseases (smallpox, measles, etc.) on Native American populations. Chaplin notes how the English recognized that “constitutional failing: either inadequate seasoning to their climate or a fateful propensity within their bodies” explained morbidity and mortality among America’s Indigenous inhabitants.19 Resting on this logic of constitutions as a driving force behind mortality and morbidity meant that the English had to confront the fragility of their own bodies in the new climates of the Americas. It also meant that they had a framework with which to conjecture about bodies seemingly more fragile than their own (read: Native Americans). Anglo newcomers to the Americas needed to be properly seasoned—that is, adjusted to the diseases and warm weather in the Americas—otherwise their bodies, accustomed to relatively more temperate climates than what the Americas offered, would face difficulty. Thus, English settlers, and the imported enslaved Africans they would eventually rely on, would need to take proper precautions to adjust their constitutions in the Americas.20 But what these precautions were, and how long it took for that process to occur, depended on the individual’s constitution as well as their habits and customs. The embrace of climatic explanations that prevailed in English understandings of bodily durability or weakness left open the possibility that something unique within the body—something deep within—played a role. For Native Americans to fare so poorly when faced with diseases common to the English, and in their own “natural” environment, suggested a possible weakness inherent to the Native constitution as far as the English were concerned. If we take “constitution” to mean the composition, function, and physical characteristics of the human body, we can begin to understand how a physician might assume that peoples from different places, cultures, and with different features, might have different constitutions. Physicians’ accounts of yellow fever frequently brought up the distinct reactions of groups within larger discussions of seasoning. This point is evident in John Lining’s well-­known description of yellow fever—a description that literally singled out “Negro constitutions” for being unique in their ability to resist the disease. This account, one of the first descriptions of yellow fever in English transmitted from the colonies to the United Kingdom, was written in the format of a letter to Dr. Robert Whytt of the University of Edinburgh. It was published by the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh in 1754, and provided white practitioners with valuable

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information about a disease that would soon have a well-­known and deadly reputation for generations to come.21 John Lining arrived in South Carolina from Scotland in 1730, likely with some form of medical training, though not formally obtained from any medical school. His first job while in Charleston was as a pharmacist; eventually, Lining began to practice medicine and did reasonably well. According to a brief biography, Lining was appointed parish doctor and had close ties to the St. Philips Hospital, which functioned as both hospital and poorhouse.22 While we know little of his medical training and education, there is no reason to suspect that he was trained in a way that strayed from traditional medicine. In other words, Lining would have likely been familiar with theories of epidemic disease etiology that stressed “infectious miasmata” (foul airs), or sudden or abrupt changes in weather and temperature, or some combination of those factors. The potential dangers the climate of the Americas might pose to the human body—especially the diseases common to the Carolinas—would not have been lost on Lining, or any European settler to the Americas for that matter.23 According to one biographer, “Charleston was periodically subjected to diseases of epidemic proportions.” This included “yellow fever,” which “kept the city in constant fear.” More to the point, “An epidemic of yellow fever had recently ended when Lining arrived in 1730.”24 That said, Lining did not believe that weather alone could be responsible for yellow fever’s repeated visitations in Charleston.25 He did, however, understand how and why weather, temperature, and environment could help explain etiology for some diseases. But for yellow fever, Lining saw miasma, or some external infectious agent, as responsible for bringing the disease.26 In his famous account Description of the American Yellow Fever, which prevailed at Charleston South Carolina in the year 1748, Lining identified yellow fever as a frequent visitor in the so-­called Torrid Zones but one that was not always dependent upon weather. Lining erroneously thought the disease contagious, noting that when cases of yellow fever appeared in Charleston, it was “easily traced to some person who lately arrived from the West Indian islands where it was epidemical.”27 He was also cognizant that some people, who had been likely exposed to the fever before, did not contract it. Lining dutifully listed those that he thought were less likely to succumb to yellow fever, including those previously exposed, and those who might escape the disease due to their constitutions. Lining was not necessarily alone in holding this belief. Eighteenth-­century practitioners saw an individual’s constitution

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as having some influence on susceptibility to disease. Lining, however, singled out the constitutions of a specific group of people as being especially liable to escape the disease. “There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever; for though many of these were as much exposed as the nurses to the infection, yet I never knew one instance of this fever amongst them.”28 Earlier in his treatise, Lining had underscored his belief in the fever’s contagious nature by noting “almost all the nurses catched [sic] it and died of it.”29 Lining’s conclusions seem to hinge upon observations of the different experiences of two groups with similar patterns of exposure. There is no evidence to suggest that he singled out Black people as not vulnerable for reasons related to defending slavery. In Lining’s mind, persons without prior exposure to yellow fever that came in close contact with one afflicted with yellow fever (much like nurses) should then also contract it. That Black people seemed to defy this was more a testament to his belief in the contagious nature of the disease than a desire to denigrate Black people. Prior to his suggestion of possible differential immunity to the disease based on race, Lining asserted that “its origin from any particular constitution of the weather, independent of infectious miasmata, as Dr. Warren has formally well observed,” was unlikely.30 Referencing another experienced practitioner before advancing a claim about the disease that, on first glance, might appear to depart from established expectations about fevers, was a shrewd move. The Dr. Warren to whom Lining referred was Dr. Henry Warren, author of A Treatise Concerning the Malignant Fever in Barbados and the Neighbouring Islands: With an Account of the Seasons There, from the Year 1734 to 1738. Lining tethered his own assertion to that of an experienced practitioner—one that had lived in a Caribbean slave colony and disease environment where yellow fever was no stranger. This was typical in the genre of eighteenth-­century medical treatises. This tactic was a way to shore up Lining’s credibility, especially when his reference to Warren was bolstered by his own observations of the weather patterns in South Carolina—noting that the wetness or dryness of the seasons did not cause the fever. In comparison to Warren, Lining was slightly more circumspect in his claims about yellow fever. Warren boldly rejected the possibility that humors alone explained susceptibility to the disease, and he implied that an unhealthy environment alone was not responsible for causing illness. “Bile, derived from the cystis fellea [gallbladder] and flowed through the Porus Biliarus [duct near the liver],” wrote Warren, “was a particularly “alaclescent or putrescent Humor in the human Body.” Changes to it that seeped into “the

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blood” could “give violent disturbance to the animal spirits and whole oeconomy, [sic] and even occasion dangerous putrid Fevers.”31 Warren did not see yellow fever to be a simple matter of humoral disturbance in unhealthy surroundings. For, if that was the case, Warren explained: how comes it that Strangers and New-­comers, whose Blood is purest and least impregnated with exalted Oils and Salts should be most liable to this Disease? How comes it that the Natives of the Torrid Zone whose Juices we may reasonably suppose to be more acrid and alcalescent are however much less obnoxious to it, if the malignant symptoms proceeded merely from a suffusion of Bile? . . . How comes it that the Negroes whose food is mostly rancid Fish or Flesh, nay often the Flesh of Dogs, Cats, Asses, Horses, Rats, etc, who mostly lead very intemperate Lives, and who are always worse clad, and most exposed to Surfeits, Heats and Colds, and all the Injuries of the air, are so little subject to this Danger? Nay supposed the Bile were ever so alacalescent or even corrupted or mixed ever so plentifully with the/blood, I cannot comprehend that it should be able to act so cruel a tragedy in so short a Time.32 Warren never explicitly claimed that morbidity and mortality depended upon an individual’s race. But in pointing out that the disease acted in such a way as to defy explanations based upon humoral imbalances, climatic extremes, or dietary deficiencies, he left open the possibility of other, possibly racial, factors being influential in one’s resistance or vulnerability to outside miasmas. In the very least, Warren singled out “Negroes” from all other groups as being resilient in the face of this fever, despite having the exposure and diet that should have left them vulnerable to this malignant fever (perhaps more likely to be exposed to infectious agents). In other words, Black people may have suffered through much deprivation, which could very likely be responsible for them having worse health outcomes than whites in many other circumstances. But in the case of yellow fever, they did not. For Warren, this was worthy of comment. Warren published his work in the 1740s, and only very cautiously hinted at racial disparities in who contracted yellow fever. He did not explicitly argue that Blacks and whites were subject to different complaints solely because of their race. The distinction of being the first to do that went to John Atkins, the British naval surgeon, writing nearly a decade earlier than

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Warren. Atkins articulated a belief in innate racial differences by invoking polygenesis—or the belief of separate origins of humans (though he would later revise his theory).33 Drawing upon his numerous travels around the “Guinea coast” and the West Indies, Atkins openly speculated that African-­ descended people were subject to different complaints than Europeans. His reason for this had to do not only with their different constitutions, habits, and customs, but also with what he called each race having “sprung from different first parents.” Atkins’s view was more than just a little “heterodox” as he mildly put it; it was controversial, for most Europeans (though not all) adhered to monogenesis.34

Difference Atkins was an outlier among Anglo physicians whose practices spanned the warm climates of the Atlantic, but he was not too far afield in highlighting the differences rather than the similarities between Black and white ­people’s bodies. The challenging question remains why perceived differences in suffering (or susceptibility) became a point worth mentioning in medical writings. It seems unlikely that this attention to difference was collectively orchestrated to justify slavery. Atkins’s main audience would have been other physicians, and not necessarily those who owned slaves. As James H. Sweet argues, negative associations with Blackness were commonplace in the medieval Muslim world and certainly in the Iberian Peninsula before the slave trade peaked. Meanwhile, María Elena Martínez has suggested that negative associations with dark skin already had taken hold among Iberians, intensifying with Portuguese entry into the trade in sub Saharan Africans.35 When Anglo practitioners like Atkins, who worked as a slave ship surgeon, or Lining, who inspected newly arrived African captives in Charleston, made claims about differences between Blacks and whites, they were doing so at a time when slavery was in no danger of ending.36 Later, claims about innate racial difference and Black peculiarities were even propagated by opponents of slavery, such as Benjamin Rush.37 Taken together, there is good evidence to suggest that the impulse to see Black people as distinct or peculiar was independent of a desire to see Black people as enslaved. Such a prospect leaves open the possibility that conscious or unconscious negative views towards Blackness, not slavery, may have undergirded the impulse to create differences.

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It remains difficult to know just how diffuse the negative associations that the English had with Blackness were, especially, those which were grounded in biblical interpretations of the curse of Ham. A few scholars have hinted at long-­held suspicions whites harbored about the nature of Black Africans prior to settlement in the Americas, but how much those views informed later medical thought is unclear.38 In Lining’s case, evidence suggests an attribution of racial immunity, rather than acquired immunity, to Africans who seemed to suffer less from yellow fever than whites did. If we return to John Lining’s famous description of yellow fever and examine the entire (and only passage) where he makes reference to racial immunities, perhaps we can see more clearly how the transformation of race as a matter of internal physiology took place—through the emphasis of constitutional differences. The subjects which were susceptible of this fever, were both sexes of the white colour, especially strangers lately arrived from cold climates, Indians, Mistees, Mulattoes, of all ages, excepting young children, and those only such as had formerly escaped the infections. Indeed, it is a great happiness that our constitutions undergo such alterations in the smallpox, measles, and yellow fever as forever afterwards secure us from a second attack from those diseases. There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever.39 Here, Lining gestured toward the climatic framework for understanding yellow fever susceptibility, but he clearly privileged constitution as a driving force. Moreover, given that mixed race people shared the same susceptibility as white newcomers, whatever unnamed thing protected Black people from yellow fever, Lining must have thought that it was corrupted or weakened when they mixed with other races. And while the groups he mentioned as susceptible to yellow fever likely would have had lighter skin than “negroes,” it appears that dark skin factored little into Lining’s rationale. He continued, “many of [them] were as much exposed as the nurses to the infection, yet I never knew one instance of this fever among them, though they are equally subject with the white people to bilious fever.”40 As previously noted, Lining thought yellow fever was contagious and he expected it to strike down all who were exposed to it, including nurses. Building upon that frame of reference, Lining made a case for what appeared to be innate Black immunity

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based upon their exposure to the disease being similar to that of nurses. Black ­people should have fallen victim, just as nurses did after exposure; but because they did not, Lining pondered whether Black people’s constitutions (race) made them escape the disease. Moreover, even though Lining grouped people into categories of difference that largely corresponded with skin color, it was the difference in perceived susceptibility that made him think that “negroes” were peculiar. More importantly, as he argued for differential racial immunity, Lining acknowledged that Blacks and whites shared susceptibility to another, more common, complaint—bilious fever. According to historian Randal Packard, “Bilious remitting fever referred to any fever that rose and fell but did not completely disappear and that was accompanied by the copious expulsion of bile in the form of vomiting and/or diarrhea. It was applied to a range of ailments.”41 It seems that Lining entertained the possibility that both races had some kind of biological parity, in the same way that a person of choleric and a person of sanguine temperament might; for example, both could suffer from headaches, but treatments for each might differ. Lining may have assumed, however, that those similarities were not fixed, and could disappear altogether under the right circumstances, such as a case of epidemic disease. Lining’s seemingly contradictory views about racial difference was not uncommon. The messiness of whether innate racial differences existed between Blacks and whites peppers historical writings about race and health. It is a messiness that has not escaped the gaze of scholars. Londa Schiebinger grapples with this confusion when unpacking how it was that results from smallpox inoculation experiments in the 1760s, carried out by English physician John Quier on enslaved Africans in Jamaica, were to be applied to whites back home in England.42 Margot Minardi hints at a similar conundrum when writing about how some colonial Bostonians gauged the efficacy of smallpox inoculation in the 1720s. The preventative technique worked on both Black people and white people—either a truly divine therapy or evidence that Black and white people were more similar than different.43 In Lining’s description, mixed race people’s bodies complicate the concept of sameness and difference. This is apparent in Lining’s observation about the distinction between a “mulatto” body and a “negro” body, although it is unclear why the presence of traits from a Black parent would not provide protection against yellow fever. As a fluid concept, one’s constitution could be altered based on climate and residence in a distinctive climate, or, as Lining seemed to suggest, one’s constitution could be altered due the mixing of

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Black and white people’s bodies.44 It remains unclear what the magnitude of difference would be between a mulatto and white person’s body versus a mulatto and Black person’s body. Lining’s description of yellow fever would go on to become a major authoritative account of the disease in the Americas thanks to Benjamin Rush, who consulted it during Philadelphia’s 1793 yellow fever epidemic. It was Lining’s observation that persuaded Rush, an antislavery physician, to ask representatives of Philadelphia’s free Black population, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, to stay behind and nurse the sick and dying during the epidemic.45 Rush could not have known how devastating his request to Jones and Allen would be. But when Rush did find that Philadelphia’s Black population did not escape yellow fever, as he had predicted it would, he fully admitted his mistake. “I was led to believe that the negroes in our city would escape it. In consequence of this belief, I published the extract from Dr. Lining’s history of the yellow fever as it had four times appeared in Charleston in South Carolina.”46 In his 1796 Account of the Bilious remitting Yellow Fever, Rush disavowed the idea of Black immunity, but he did not give up on the idea of deep-­seated racial differences. Instead, Rush qualified the conditions under which Black people fell ill, noting of course the role of climate suggesting that Black people were likely to become ill when the evenings were cool—leaving open the possibility that cooler climates and Black constitutions did not mix.47 Such a possibility would eventually harden into truth in the nineteenth century, when champions of slavery would argue that Blacks fared worse in the free North, succumbing to all sorts of complaints, while as forced laborers in the (warmer) South they were perfectly content.

Conclusion The creation of race as biology became the foundation on which arguments in favor of innate racial differences rested, but this process was far from straightforward and not without contradiction. Tracing claims of differential susceptibility to yellow fever in eighteenth-­century medical texts, however, provides a compelling approach for making sense of how it was that whites were able to see and treat Black people differently. This approach minimizes the significance of superficial markers (skull shape, skin color, and nose and lip size) that historians have traditionally relied on to make the case for the construction of race, and the fallacy of innate racial difference. While these superficial

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markers were indeed instrumental for propping up proslavery positions, and nurturing the development of race science, they were not necessary for the concept of racial difference to germinate in the white imagination. Though one could not visualize disease susceptibility in the same way as they could skin color, the ability of one race to escape from a terrifying disease proved to be a convincing point for arguing the case for innate racial difference. The assumption that there was some as yet unnamed but well-­defined source of innate difference between Black and white people is traceable in several eighteenth-­century medical and scientific texts—even those not explicitly about race. In these texts, the assumption of difference rather than sameness between Black and white people’s bodies was often an offhand comment or an aside, but it was nevertheless present. Also assumed in these texts was the notion that whiteness was a control, the standard to which Black suffering was to be compared. Thus, it is hardly surprising that when circumstances arose where Black people’s bodies diverged from the ways that white people experienced illness, the common response was to frame Blackness (or Black constitutions) as distinct. What emerged as an impulse to make sense of racial disparities in morbidity and mortality became a way of positioning the Black body as peculiar; it was a body whose suffering could only be acknowledged or registered in relationship to its white counterpart. Sadly, viewing Black ­people’s bodies in this way continues. Indeed, claims of innate racial difference from the past have proven to be unfortunately durable; the collective residue from these claims occasionally surface in contemporary medical thought and haunt people of color as they receive medical care hundreds of years later.48

CHAPTER 9

Black Loyalists in Sierra Leone and Black Royalism in the Revolutionary Atlantic James Sidbury

The effort to understand the origins of American racism has inspired some of the best and most important writing about the history of the United States. Winthrop D. Jordan’s White Over Black and Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom appeared within a few years of each other and set the terms that have shaped the origins debate for nearly five decades.1 Both books have remained compelling long after they were written, in part because they are exemplary works of history and in part because they address questions which, sadly, show no signs of receding from the spotlight. But for all of the ways that the issues animating the two books remain current, some of the books’ assumptions have been called into question by increasingly popular transnational approaches to the past. Jordan and Morgan were historians of the United States, and both sought to explain the beginnings of racism in the United States. Seventeenth-­century Virginia loomed large for them, because both assumed that the path to understanding Jeffersonian Virginia, with its slaveholding Founding Fathers and seemingly paradoxical expressions of devotion to liberty and equality, passed through the early Chesapeake. Both also assumed that the path to understanding the complex and contradictory place of race in the history of the United States passed through Thomas Jefferson and his Virginia. A number of recent historians have sought to place seventeenth-­century Virginia in a broader Atlantic context, suggesting that Virginia’s seventeenth-­ century turn to slavery can only have been Jordan’s “unthinking decision” or Morgan’s specific response to the social dynamics produced by tobacco

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production if one seeks to explain that turn by focusing narrowly on what happened in Virginia. Things look significantly different, these more recent scholars insist, when artificial blinders are removed and due attention is paid to precedents in the Iberian and British Caribbean worlds.2 Plantations and African slavery were, those historians point out, well established in the Atlantic long before Virginia settlers started growing tobacco. Less attention has been paid to the shared endpoint of the two books. Given that each seeks to explain the pathological place of race and racism in the American founding, Jordan and Morgan both close by seeking to account for the roles that racial distinctions played in the putatively egalitarian republic that emerged from the American Revolution. In some ways, the two men’s takes differ. Jordan looks to repressed psycho-­sexual drives to explain what he sees as the deeply irrational pathology of racism that was present at the nation’s birth, a pathology that has continued to fester to the present day. Morgan sees much more rational roots to white racism. In his account, racism solved problems rooted in economic inequality, allowing Virginia’s Founding Fathers to believe in and pursue egalitarian goals despite living off the exploited labor of others. Morgan closes his book by decrying the continued use of racism to divide Americans. Jordan ends his narrative with a plaintive hope that white Americans might reach the equivalent of a psychoanalytic breakthrough and come to grips with the psychic tensions that give anti-­Black racism libidinal control over American culture. However different their accounts of the nature of racism’s grip on the nation’s founding, Jordan and Morgan’s interpretations had the cumulative effect of fundamentally shifting many early American historians’ approaches to the Revolutionary and Early Republican Eras. Neither comity nor consensus has broken out in the debates surrounding the origins and role of racism in American society. Many distinguished scholars see slavery and racism as ugly imperfections in an egalitarian republic, imperfections that the founders’ successes both overshadowed and, just as importantly, offered the tools to fix.3 Others follow Jordan’s and Morgan’s darker implications and see slavery and racism as fundamentally and inextricably entangled in the founding, and especially in the Constitution.4 For them, one cannot quarantine and celebrate the legacies of the Revolution that we value—popular sovereignty, religious liberty, the Bill of Rights—without acknowledging the ways they were linked to racial exclusions. In this reading, slavery and racism are better understood not simply as important flaws that marred the founding but more as the nation’s original sin.

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Whether historians see slavery and racism as important but discreet blemishes on the founding or as distressingly central to and even constitutive of it, they largely agree on some broad principles. They see the blow that the Revolution struck against monarchy as progressive; they see the exclusion of Blacks from the republic created by the Revolution as a central failing; they see the struggle to end slavery and then to include Blacks and other excluded groups in the circle of full citizenship as one of the central challenges faced by n ­ ineteenth-­, twentieth-­, and now twenty-­first-­century American society. There is much that is true in this narrative. There is also much that fits neatly—too neatly—into a progressive narrative of American history, one in which a nation which was born in imperfect opposition to inherited privilege struggles mightily to recognize and exorcise the inherited privileges on which it was built. Black political activists are slotted into the progressive narrative as prophets calling the nation to live up to its creed. A straight line can be drawn from Paul and John Cuffe’s 1780 petition to the Massachusetts’ legislature demanding that Blacks and Native Americans either be given the right to vote or be excused from paying taxes—the new nation was born, the two men insisted, on the principle that there could be no taxation without representation—to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s characterization of the long Black freedom struggle as an effort to “cash a check” that had long gone unpaid, despite having been written by “the architects of our Republic.”5 These activists—along with Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and so many more—demanded that the United States live up to its professed belief in equality by including the excluded—Blacks, Indigenous peoples, women, Asians, Latinx—in the national community of rights-­bearing citizens. These Black activists have been at the heart of progressive movements that have pushed the nation to live up to its professed principles in ways designed to justify progressive faith in the United States.6 But this narrative writes a different set of Black political actors out of American history, because the progressive struggle for inclusion overshadows their much less optimistic vision. Substantial evidence suggests that, when given a choice, African Americans were more inclined to join the British in the fight against independence than to follow the example of those, like the Cuffe brothers, who demanded inclusion within the new republic. The Black Loyalists have hardly been ignored by historians, but their stories are usually seen as part of British history, or of Canadian history, or even of the history of Sierra Leone.7 They are all that. But the Black men and women

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who joined the British are also a part of American history. Those men and women rejected the promise of the newly independent states, choosing to fight for Britain, not the rebellious colonies, and for monarchy rather than republicanism. What does their decision to side with the crown say about the American revolutionary tradition? About Atlantic revolutionary traditions? About republicanism during the Age of Atlantic Revolutions? This essay focuses on what might seem to be an obscure event that involved a group of Black Loyalists who left the United States after the Revolution, first to settle in Nova Scotia and then in Sierra Leone. There, they rose up against the Sierra Leone Company in 1800, and authored a remarkable document which offers a powerful, if indirect, critique of Atlantic republican movements. Theirs is not the only example of African and African-­descended people seeking to escape the ideological bounds that racism placed on them in the revolutionary Atlantic. Blacks living in the northern United States alternately worked to develop an independent African national ideology and fought to gain inclusion within the circle of United States citizenship.8 Other African Americans responded to American and French revolutionaries’ failures to acknowledge racial equality by casting their lot with monarchical or, in the case of Haiti, republican regimes that promised greater respect for the rights of some Black communities.9 Upon arriving in Africa, these Black Loyalists began to refer to themselves as the “Nova Scotians,” and they took a different approach than most.10 They had grown up in North America and had lived through the American Revolution. In the process, they had come to take as natural many legal and social traditions of British North America. When they, like contemporary Blacks in St. Domingue and then Haiti, found themselves in a position to formulate rules to govern themselves as a society, they drew on the political culture they had learned as youths. Like other Americans, the Nova Scotians wanted to live in communities of independent householders who owned the land that they worked, and they wanted to live under the protective canopy of the rule of law. But these classically “Anglo-­American” goals were transported to a region whose economy was dominated by the slave trade, whose population was dominated by Temne people who were native to the region, and whose government was dominated by British Sierra Leone Company officials operating under the umbrella of crown authority. Under these peculiar conditions, the Nova Scotians forged a constitutional vision that parted ways from the emerging dominant forms present in the United States. Unlike those who founded the white republics they had escaped during the

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Revolutionary War, the Nova Scotians did not seek national independence. Instead, they sought to create a governing structure that would afford them corporate autonomy within a monarchical structure accustomed to recognizing different groups’ privileges.11

* * * The British colony that became Sierra Leone dates from the spring of 1787, when Granville Sharp led an effort to redeem several hundred of the “Black Poor” from London, most of whom were Black Loyalists from North America who had found themselves destitute in London following the Revolutionary War. Hoping to show that Blacks were capable of self-­government and self-­ sufficiency, as well as to undercut arguments against emancipation by offering freed slaves a home of their own, Sharp helped found what he optimistically called the Province of Freedom near the mouth of the Sierra Leone River. As was true of many European colonizing efforts, the first expedition to West Africa proved disastrous. Settlers died in droves from tropical diseases for which they lacked immunities. Some gave up on their settlement at Granville Town and sought safety and employment by moving to Bance Island, a slaving fort a few miles upriver.12 Within two years of the settlers’ arrival in Africa, a local headman named Jimmy responded to an unprovoked Royal Navy attack on his village by warning the residents of Granville Town to abandon their homes; he then sacked the town. The Province of Freedom went up in smoke—literally.13 Sharp did not abandon the colony, but he realized that making a go of it would require greater financial resources than he could muster on his own. He turned to wealthy and politically connected evangelical friends who organized and won a crown charter for the Sierra Leone Company (SLC). At that moment, a group of Black Loyalists, most of whom had been transported from New York City to Nova Scotia after the Revolutionary War, sent Thomas Peters, who had escaped slavery in North Carolina, to ask the British government to move them away from Nova Scotia. The SLC took advantage by sending John Clarkson, brother of the famous abolitionist Thomas, to Nova Scotia to recruit unhappy former North American slaves as founding settlers for the new colony. Clarkson organized and led more than 1,000 self-­ styled “Nova Scotians” across the Atlantic. They reached the Sierra Leone River in the spring of 1793 to find scattered remnants of Sharp’s colony.14

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* * * The settlers set about building a colony in West Africa, at first in uneasy cooperation with the men the SLC sent to lead them, but increasingly over the course of the 1790s, in opposition to them. The story of the growing split between the company and its settlers has been told often and well; what I would like to do is use that story to untangle the different ideological strands that came together in the Nova Scotians’ understandings of themselves as a people.15 Forced by what they saw as the SLC’s abandonment of its commitment to their freedom, the settlers fought to build their own sacred, legal, and, finally, constitutional order under the authority of the British Crown. Latent tensions between the settlers and the company predated arguments that would emerge over land tenure and, later, informed them. Thomas Peters, the Nova Scotian who had first traveled to England to ask the crown to provide his people with a more desirable home, had cooperated with Clarkson in recruiting and organizing potential migrants to leave Canada. Clarkson and Peters were both surprised when the SLC asked the Englishman to stay on as the colony’s initial governor, and Peters took exception to a white Briton presiding over a colony of supposedly free and equal Black settlers in Africa. Rumors that Peters was fomenting a rebellion reached Governor Clarkson, who enjoyed enough support among the settlers to win a confrontation. Nonetheless, this early protest against the leadership of an Englishman, even one who had earned the settlers’ affection and admiration, reflects the instability of the company’s model of governance. The company recalled Clarkson within a year and, without his mediating presence, the seeds of instability germinated. When recruiting in Nova Scotia, Clarkson had warned that material conditions in Sierra Leone would be difficult. All he promised was that, in return for the hardships settlers would face, the SLC would recognize their legal equality and give them land on which to build farms through which they could achieve personal independence. Clarkson was perplexed when he arrived in Africa and learned that the company expected him to charge settlers an annual quitrent for their land. He explained to the directors that quitrents violated the promises he had made, but his words fell on deaf ears. After recalling Clarkson, the SLC sent a series of successors to enforce its land policies. The Nova Scotians blocked quitrents for most of the decade, but the company directors continued to push, finally insisting that the fees be paid in 1799.

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The company’s insistence on quitrents, while misguided, was not malicious.16 The bankers who ran and funded the Sierra Leone Company had invested a great deal of money in the fledgling colony, and they were not so deluded as to expect the colony to turn a quick profit. They were engaged in expensive philanthropy. They wanted quitrents to help recoup a modest financial contribution from the settlers, who were, the directors believed, the main beneficiaries of the colony. Of course, things looked different to the Nova Scotians. They battled slave traders, an unfamiliar climate, and untold invisible pathogens, while the bankers in Clapham met in ease and comfort to plot the colony’s future. Surely, the leisured directors would honor the promises their representative had made in Nova Scotia, and in doing so grant basic rights to those who were working to establish the company’s new colony, often while watching their friends and family members succumb to tropical diseases. Surely company directors would not expect virtually destitute Black settlers to send back a portion of their meager income to patrons who were so patently well off, especially given the fact that pushing the settlers into commercial exchange meant encouraging them to sell the produce they grew on their farms to the slave factory on Bance Island. Just as there was more than one side to the quitrent issue, there was more than one issue dividing the Nova Scotians and the company’s representatives in Africa. Some of the most explosive divisions arose over religion. The Black settlers were divided among three denominations—Baptists, Huntingtonian Methodists, and Wesleyan Methodists—but all shared a deeply rooted conviction that theirs was a gathered community and all shared an antinomian theology. The Englishmen who succeeded Clarkson as the SLC’s representatives in Freetown, especially the abolitionist Zachary Macaulay who served as governor for several years during the 1790s, were, like the settlers, evangelicals, but they were evangelicals of a more conventional cast. To adapt a phrase, settlers and company officials were divided by a common religion, constantly concerned that those who claimed to be acting according to God’s plan were unknowingly in thrall to darker forces. Conflicts also arose between the settlers and the company over the right to salvage and over the treatment of slave traders who stopped in at Freetown. These disputes touched on the Nova Scotians’ sense of themselves as a people. All ultimately influenced the Nova Scotians’ demands for collective autonomy. And all contributed to the rocky history of the colony during its first decade, a history that included at least two near uprisings, as well as periodic confrontations

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between company officers and settlers, the secession of a group from the colony, and, finally, a short-­lived settler rebellion in 1800.17 It would be misleading, then, to suggest that disputes over land tenure were the single source of instability in early Freetown. They were, however, a constant and exacerbating factor that pushed uncertain settlers to believe that the company was less concerned about their well-­being than its own profits. As Thomas Clarkson noted when conducting an 1815 review of the colony’s history for Parliament, the quitrent had been a source of “universal Discontent” among the Nova Scotians, causing “constant Contention between them and the Directors” (emphases in original). He quoted Thomas Ludlum, the governor of the colony at the time of the 1800 uprising, who had identified the “Demand of a Quit-­Rent for the Lands held of the Company” as the “Chief Matter of Complaint” (emphasis in Clarkson’s letter).18 Dissatisfaction over the quitrent pushed the Nova Scotians to reject the company’s vision for the colony and to constitute themselves as an autonomous people. It is clear why quitrents became a source of discord. From the SLC’s perspective, the quitrent was a standard tool of empire.19 The settlers believed, however, that paying a quitrent meant conceding that their land remained the company’s and thus that they remained dependents. Not surprisingly, the settlers used the word “slaves.” This too made sense on both a practical and a legal level. However much work a settler put into a farm, secure tenure would depend on paying an annual fee to the company. Severe weather that took out a harvest might mean more than a lean year; it could mean forfeiting one’s land. In a colony with staggering mortality, the unexpected death of a young father responsible for working the fields would almost surely mean his wife and children would lose the farm to the company.20 Quitrents threatened the vision of a society of free Christian households that the Nova Scotians had moved to Sierra Leone to create. The settlers’ objections to company rule did not appear fully formed; they developed over the 1790s as disagreements involving land became tied up with feelings of disenfranchisement. In 1794, Governor Zachary Macaulay punished two Nova Scotians without trial, and the settlers became concerned that company officials were infringing on their rights as free subjects of the Crown. Macaulay exacerbated the settlers’ anxiety with his authoritarian response: “No one, within the Colony” could “censure the Governor and Council.” For a day or two it looked as if a rebellion might ensue, but the conflict dissipated.21 Less than a year later a French warship entered the Sierra Leone River and sacked Freetown. In a dispute over who owned property that the French

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had taken but settlers had salvaged, Macaulay peremptorily threatened severe repercussions for any settler who failed to “faithfully restore all the Company’s property.” A group of settlers complained to John Clarkson that they used to call their new home Freetown, but that they had increasing “Reason to call it A town of Slavery.”22 Disputes over land, representation, and respect were poisoning relations between company officials and many of the settlers. Most Nova Scotians remained in Freetown and sought to defend their claims within the company structure, but some moved away to take up land beyond company grounds under the authority of a local Temne headman. Macaulay realized that the breakaway community at Pirate’s Bay represented a rejection of his leadership, and he took great joy in recording any problems that arose there. In the process, he provided brief snapshots of some Nova Scotians’ understandings of themselves as a people and a potential polity. The breakaway settlement began before Clarkson left Freetown, and while it reflected many settlers’ frustrations with the company’s land policies—frustrations that Clarkson had openly shared—it does not appear that those who originally took up Temne land rejected the SLC or its colony in any fundamental sense. They maintained good relationships with Clarkson, and they carried on social and commercial relationships with white and Black residents of Freetown. Over the course of the 1790s, the settlement gradually became an alternative and a protest to company rule—in Zachary Macaulay’s words, the secessionists “explicitly renounced our government”—allowing the breakaway settlers to develop their own experiment in sacred and secular government.23 The two realms were closely related, in part because a group of Wesleyan Methodists withdrew more or less as a congregational community to form the settlement. They built a system in which one of their religious leaders, Nathaniel Snowball, served as their governor. The community at Pirate’s Bay provided neither trial by jury nor separation of powers. Disputes were settled at judicial hearings with Snowball serving as judge, a process that vaguely resembled Temne practice.24 The community’s subordinate offices are not clear, but it appears that Methodist Class Leaders played important administrative roles parallel to those they played in the church. The community probably governed itself through consensus, but when consensus broke down, settlers were left as precariously dependent on authority beyond their control as had been the case when living in Freetown. This became clear when Snowball adjudicated a dispute involving an allegation that one of his advisors had stolen buried treasure that had been revealed to another resident in a dream. Snowball sided with the defendant. The plaintiff alleged favoritism and appealed to

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King Tom, the Temne headman whose land included Pirate’s Bay. King Tom ruled according to Temne understandings of communal legal responsibility: it did not matter to him who among the villagers had the treasure—the village as a whole owed him 700 bars.25 This incident provided a partial glimpse of the settlers organizing themselves. They adapted their church governance to secular ends by borrowing titles (governor) and assumptions (individual ownership) from the Anglo-­American legal regimes under which most had lived their lives, and they melded those with judicial procedures that may have been borrowed or adapted from the Temne. That may have been a template for the way other issues were handled in Pirate’s Bay, but other issues did not create conflicts that attracted Macaulay’s attention, so they remain opaque in the records.26 Disputes over land tenure continued to arise among the settlers who remained in Freetown. They struggled first to reach accommodation with the company, and then, when that came to seem unattainable, to resist the company’s control. That the vast majority of Nova Scotians remained within the colony despite disputes over land is explained in part by the uncertainty of living under Temne authority, and in part by the fact that the SLC, for all of its flaws, afforded respect to a broader array of rights for Black people than did any other contemporary, white-­dominated polity. In fact, the SLC directors included protections for the settlers’ rights that most Blacks living in the United States would be denied until well into the twentieth century. Nor was the company’s commitment limited to formal rights. It explicitly instructed its employees to “conduct” themselves “towards Black and White Men not only with the same impartial Justice in your public capacities but with the same condescension and familiarity in all the intercourses of private life.”27 Notwithstanding an important dispute over whether a charge stemming from a specific incident required a jury trial, the company created a judicial system in which Black settlers routinely held the offices of sheriff and constable and dominated the colony’s juries. The small group of whites sent out by the company—certainly never as many as a hundred people at a time—always included the governor, but the Nova Scotians, most of whom had grown up in American slavery, enjoyed more public authority in Freetown than they could have dreamed possible in the United States or England.28 For example, the colony inherited Granville Sharp’s legislative structure. Based on his reading of the Old Testament and on England’s ancient constitution, he had mandated that a bicameral legislative body of Tythingmen and Hundredors be elected by all settlers.29 It was inaugurated in Freetown

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by Clarkson, but there was no clear definition of the legislative body’s powers. Macaulay moved to create a constitution that specified the powers of the legislature in 1796. The settlers tested his commitment to democratic government by electing a group of Tythingmen and Hundredors who were hostile to the governor just as he was about to unveil the plan. Macaulay withheld the new constitution, only putting it into effect after the following election, when a legislature friendlier to the company was chosen. The struggle surrounding the new constitution, and the settler uprising that resulted from that struggle, pushed some Nova Scotians to develop a clearer vision of themselves as a corporate body distinct from the SLC, and to explain to one another how they should govern themselves. In the process, some asserted their status as a people, defined in part by their shared history in Nova Scotia and in part by racial exclusion. Moreover, the Nova Scotians as a whole debated one another and company officials about how to understand themselves as Britons, as Africans, and as Christians. As is true of many of the political formulations of racially subordinate groups in the Atlantic World, the entangled nature of these debates means that they simultaneously mirrored and critically revised elite discussions that have dominated interpretations of the Age of Revolution. How did struggles over corporate self-­determination emerge from disputes about quitrents? The company’s periodic efforts to collect quitrents created a base of discontent among the settlers. When the company made practical moves to collect the quitrents, the party of disaffected settlers would gain the upper hand in the annual elections for Tythingmen and Hundredors. In those years, allies of the secessionist Wesleyan Methodists would take office, and beginning in December of 1796, they started to move beyond fighting for settlers’ land rights and began pushing for more fundamental changes in the colony’s government. With elections on the horizon, Ishmael York and Stephen Peters quietly began approaching other settlers and arguing not just that they should choose Black representatives, but also that they should “prevent whites from voting.” Macaulay confronted York and Peters and dared them to offer such a law to the legislature, finding the notion that “a white face” might entail a “civil disqualification” to be so ludicrous that it “provoked . . . laughter.”30 No doubt the humor was less obvious to the Nova Scotians, who had lived most of their lives in polities that denied them the vote because of the color of their faces. Despite Macaulay’s argument that “advantages . . . would accrue . . . by the election of some of the whites,” the voters returned an all-­Black legislative body. It was composed, Macaulay

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thought, of “the most ignorant, hardheaded and perverse” among the settlers. When the results were announced and it became known that no whites had been elected, the settlers “got together and gave three cheers.”31 Quitrents were implicated in these disputes—Macaulay reported that settlers had the “foolish notion . . . that a vote of their representatives would ease them of the quitrent to the Company.”32 This “foolish notion” reflects the settlers’ uncertainty about the extent to which the SLC was willing to endorse a constitution that extended democratic control over the colony to the representative institutions it recognized, but the move to institute racially restrictive voting laws, or, short of that, to use the advantage of their numbers to exclude whites from the legislative body, represents a turning point. From the election of 1796 until the uprising in 1800, those settlers most disaffected with company government would increasingly turn away from protests focused on the quitrent and toward efforts to transform the way the colony was governed. They began to articulate a vision of Sierra Leone in which the SLC and the colony were separate, though related, corporate entities, organizations that enjoyed different privileges and responsibilities under the authority of the crown. This vision did not appear immediately, nor was the movement toward it steady and consistent. Macaulay came to believe that “a few” settlers had, “since the foundation of the Colony,” hoped to throw “off the jurisdiction of the Company’s servants” and place one of their own as “a kind of Dictator,” who would “rule them after the manner of the natives.”33 But the leaders of the emerging separatist faction, however upset they were with Macaulay, continued to use Western political forms and techniques to mobilize followers. Aspiring leaders got their followers to sign on to their plans and then petitioned the company for the redress of specific grievances; they sought votes with classic Anglo-­American electoral techniques like plying the voters “with drams”; and they sent delegations to Macaulay to discuss and seek to influence the new constitution.34 Would-­be leaders faced fluctuating opposition from other Nova Scotian settlers along the way, especially from settlers who worshipped in Baptist churches and proved much less willing to endorse a separatist vision than were members of Wesleyan and Huntingtonian Methodist congregations. In short, though at least some of the separatists would make the claim that Africa should be the province of “Africans”—Africans who referred to themselves as “Nova Scotians,” which can create confusion—the political techniques they used, and the political structure they sought to defend, which included a racially exclusive form of settler home

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rule, mirrored in obvious ways things that had happened in North America during the American Revolution. If, however, the parallels between the ways Americans mobilized to fight the crown and the ways the Nova Scotians mobilized to fight the company are real—and they are—there is a particularly important area of divergence that has significance for our understandings of the relationship between social and political constitutional rights in the Age of Revolution; a divergence that sheds light on the appeal of royalism to Blacks in the Age of Revolutions. The Nova Scotians’ struggles for autonomy began at the level of process. The separatists’ desire to exclude white voters from legislative elections led to more expansive moves toward corporate autonomy. The Tythingmen and Hundredors elected in December 1796, moved to consolidate their support among the settlers, convincing two-­thirds to “subscribe papers authoriz’g their Tythingmen to act generally and without limitation in behalf of their rights.” With this expression of confidence, the Tythingmen demanded that all settlers give up company land grants until the quitrent was withdrawn, and they created a “Court in the country”—on the outskirts of Freetown—to enforce the Tythingmen’s ruling. Macaulay perceived an uprising in the making, so he armed and fortified the SLC headquarters and ordered the settlers’ court disbanded.35 Perhaps due to Macaulay’s intimidation or perhaps because too many settlers thought that the separatists had gone too far, the December 1797 elections brought in a group of Tythingmen and Hundredors who were much friendlier to Macaulay and the company. The dissidents regrouped.36 Macaulay was recalled and Thomas Ludlum, who replaced him as governor, inherited the contention that had arisen over the previous decade. By the fall of 1800, the dissidents had articulated new and more expansive goals. They decided to create a parallel governmental system with laws for the Nova Scotians that would be distinct from the laws that governed Europeans in the colony. On September 3, 1800, the “Hundredors and Tythingmen” posted their “setlers laws”: If any one shall deny the Settlers of any thing that is to be exposed of in the Colony, and after that shall be found carrying it out of the Colony to sell to any one else, shall be fined £20 or else leave the Colony, and for Palm Oil 1/. Quart, whose ever is found selling for more than 1/ Quart is fined 20/ Salt Beef 6d/lb any one selling for more shall pay the fine of 40/ and Salt pork 9p/lb shall pay the fine of 40/ and for rice

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50 Wt. to a Dollar 5/ and whosoever is found selling for less than for a Dollar shall pay the fine of £10 and Rum is to be 5/ Gallon at the wholesale and any one that sells for more than 5/ shall pay the fine of £3 and the Retailers is not to sell for more than 6/3 by the Gallon and to sell as low as a Gill at 6/3 Gallon as low a single glass as 3 cents and if any one should sell for more than that shall pay the fine of £3 Soap at 15 p/lb and whosoever shall sell for more than 15 p shall pay the fine of 20/. Salt Butter 15 p/ lb and if any more than 15 p/lb shall pay the fine of 20/ and if any one found keeping a bad house is fined 20/ or for abuse £1 for trespass 10/ for stealing shall pay for time the value for stealing, a blow £5 for removing his neighbour’s landmark shall pay £5 for cutting timber or wattles on any persons land without their leave shall pay 5 for drawing a weapon or any edge tool shall pay £5 and for threatening, shall pay £2..10 and for lying or scandalizing, without a proof shall pay £2..10 for Sabbath breaking shall pay the fine of 10/ Cheese to be sold 1/ lb. and if more than 1/ shall pay the fine of 20/ Sugar 15p/lb and whosoever is found selling for more than 15 p/lb is fined of 20. And if any person shall kill a Goat, Hogs or Sheep any shall serve a summons or warrant or execution without orders from the hundredors and Tythingmen must pay the fine of £20. And if any person shall kill a goat, hog, or sheep or cause her to slink her young shall pay the fine of £5 or shall kill Cow or Horse shall pay the fine of £5. and if a man’s fence is not lawful he cannot recover any damage, and if a man that has a wife shall leave her and go to another woman, shall pay the fine of £10 and if a woman leave her husband and take up with another man he shall pay £10, and if Children shall misbehave they shall pay a fine of 10/ or otherwise be severely corrected by their parents. And this is to give notice by the Hundredors and Tythingmen that the laws they have made that if the Settlers shall owe a debt to the Company they shall come to the Hundredors and Tythingmen and prove their account, and swear to it and swear to every article agreeable to the proclamation that they shall take the produce for their goods and not for their good pay any percent on it, and all that come from Nova Scotia, shall be under this law or quit the place. The Governor and Council shall not have anything to do with the Colony no farther than the Company’s affairs, and if any man shall side with the Governor, etc. against this law shall pay £20.

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This is to give notice that the law is signed by the Hundredors and Tythingmen and Chairman they approved it to be just before God and Man.37 There are several things worth noting. First, the rebellion itself lasted little more than a day. The Nova Scotians had the misfortune to begin their uprising on the same day that a Royal Navy ship arrived at Freetown carrying Royal Marines and Jamaican Maroons; both helped repress the rebellion. The Nova Scotians did not get to carry out their vision. Second, the settlers were clearly committed to a notion of moral economy and believed that Nova Scotians were being cheated, or were cheating themselves, by selling goods at inflated prices to people outside the settlement. This was not a new problem.38 Third, the Tythingmen and Hundredors’ document drew no sharp line separating acts that violated the community’s sense of moral economy, and those that would, in other legal systems, be seen as matters of criminal or moral law (robbery, “bad houses,” livestock rustling). Fourth, the document interposes the settlers’ legislature between the SLC and the settlers, insisting on an intermediary role in adjudicating debt cases. With these laws, the Tythingmen and Hundredors laid out a vision of a just commercial society and insisted on their collective right to shape it through courts. Fifth, that vision of a just commercial society was incorporated into the community’s fundamental law, not only as a deeply engrained tradition in local governance but as an integral part of the Nova Scotians’ charter document.39 Variations in the sanctions for violating different laws reveal the different values that the settlers placed on different behavior. Violations of all individual laws were punished with fines. Settlers who broke the commercial laws faced fines ranging from the modest—five shillings—to the substantial (a couple of pounds) to fines of £20, which would surely have bankrupted anyone ordered to pay it. The amount depended on how grievously the offense threatened the community’s well-­being. Infringing on another settler’s person or property— whether by assault, breaching another’s land rights, or killing livestock—constituted a serious offense against the social order that was to be punished with a £5 fine. Men offending against the family household order, either by abandoning their wives for other women or by beginning relationships with women married to other men, faced stiff fines of £10, penalties that would surely have bankrupted those who incurred them. By far the largest fines (£20), which were surely intended to ruin offenders, were reserved for those who undercut the new constitutional order by withholding needed goods to sell outside the

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settlement, by serving court papers without the sanction of the Hundredors or Tythingmen, or by siding with “the Governor, etc. against this law.” The Nova Scotians envisioned a market economy and sought to regulate commercial exchange in accordance with community values. They had traveled to Sierra Leone in families and in search of family farms, and their laws placed a high priority on protecting men’s rights to land, livestock, and women, rights that they clearly saw as central to the household structures that lay at the theoretical and social foundation of their society. Over the 1790s, as they had battled the company for their rights, the Black settlers had come to see themselves as a people, and the highest fines, as well as banishment from the community, were reserved for those who committed treason against the corporate body of settlers by siding with the company. Notwithstanding their rebellion against SLC officials, the settlers’ laws mesh nicely with the goals that had inspired Granville Sharp and the Sierra Leone Company in the first place. The laws envisioned and reflected a community built on households that would hold one another to account for the common good. This was the essence of Sharp’s idealized frankpledge system.40 In some ways, the moral economy provisions are in keeping with longstanding European plebeian traditions, but there are important variations. The settlers’ laws focus not on bread and subsistence crops, but rather on the sale of meat to outsiders. Who would these outsiders have been for the settlers of Freetown? Almost surely the biggest market for salted beef and pork, palm oil, and rice consisted either of slave ships or the slaving fort at Bance Island. Other regulated commodities—rum, butter, cheese, soap—might have found buyers in Temne villages, but it seems probable that Bance Island offered the most lucrative market for those goods as well. The settlers’ laws instituted a regime of moral economy that empowered the community of householders, through their representatives, to foster a commercial economy while preventing its producers from falling prey to the tempting profits that could be found by selling to slavers. These regulatory laws are followed virtually seamlessly by a kind of law that elite constitutionalism has long treated as different in kind, and the relationship between these two kinds of law within the document reveals something innovative in the Nova Scotians’ constitutional vision. The document explicitly moved from what elite Anglo-­American systems would have seen as statutory law into what those same systems would have seen as fundamental when it insisted that “all that come from Nova Scotia, shall be under this law or quit the place.” This was one of only two offenses punished by

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anything other than a monetary fine.41 The community’s corporate autonomy was non-­negotiable. The document does not, however, declare independence from either the crown or the company. Instead, it asserts a new relationship between the settlers and the SLC. Settlers would govern the “Colony”; the governor and council remained responsible for “the Company’s affairs.” The document closes by claiming legitimacy through natural and divine law, declaring the laws “just before God and Man.” The combination of these different elements offers an unusual angle from which to view constitutionalism in the revolutionary Atlantic. These people who had suffered slavery, the hardship of war, destitution in Canada, and a history of struggle in Sierra Leone constituted themselves as a political p ­ eople before god and man in this document. They did not claim independence. They sought to win recognition for a specific set of privileges for their corporate community under the umbrella of crown government, including the privilege to adjudicate disputes within their own community and to interact as a corporate body with the company and, presumably, with surrounding communities. Monarchs had been extending such privileges for centuries, and the ability to do so—to grant rights to Black communities rather than leaving Black individuals to fight losing battles to claim or defend their rights in white republics—proved appealing to many people of African descent throughout the Americas, from pardo militias in Spanish America, to the followers of Jean François in revolutionary St. Domingue, to Black men and women who escaped from Virginia plantations and became “Merikens” in Trinidad following the War of 1812.42 Convenience and contingency unquestionably influenced Blacks’ allegiances during the dislocations created by the Age of Revolution, just as they influenced whites’ allegiances. But it’s time to think more carefully and more deeply about the ideological appeal of monarchism to Blacks who confronted the rise of white republics.

* * * What were the sources of the Nova Scotians’ ideology? Different strands of Temne political and jurisprudential thought surely influenced the Nova Scotians’ vision of themselves. At different times settlers experimented with various aspects of Temne government, and following the 1800 rebellion, a number of Nova Scotians left the colony to live and work in Temne villages. But the strands of their constitutional thought that found their way into the 1800 “setlers’ laws” suggest that the idiosyncrasies of their unsuccessful demand

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to be recognized as a corporate community within Sierra Leone were forged first when they were slaves in North America and then in response to their experiences with crown and SLC government in Canada and Sierra Leone. In this sense the Novia Scotians’ ideas underscore the degree to which Black political thought was Atlantic as far back as the eighteenth century.43 Within the context of the history of the United States, the “setlers laws” and the uprising that produced them underscore the degree to which the Nova Scotians’ understanding of political mobilization was a product of the American independence movement. The settlers petitioned the government, they sought to work through representative assemblies and out of doors as well, they elected committees to enforce the community’s consensus, and they ultimately turned to arms in an effort to establish a government of their choosing. The parallels to North America are unsurprising. Most of the Nova Scotians had grown into young adulthood while their owners were moving unsteadily toward declaring independence. From this perspective—and this is the perspective from which they are most often viewed—these Black Loyalists wanted more or less the same liberty that their masters sought, but white Americans’ commitment to racial slavery forced the former to turn to the British Crown to get it. When their story is told as part of the history of the United States, Black Loyalists like the Nova Scotians generally represent those excluded from the progressive promise of American republicanism, and they become emblems of the struggle for inclusion that would be necessary for that promise to be fulfilled. A shift in perspectives that places the Nova Scotians in a broader Atlantic context casts different light on their decision to side with the crown. They stand alongside many other people of African descent who embraced royalism rather than republicanism during the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. The number Blacks who sided with monarchical power and the number of places where they did so suggest that royalism may have exerted a more complicated pull on Blacks during the Age of Atlantic Revolutions than has sometimes been recognized. But what was the nature of that appeal? And why has it gone relatively unnoticed for so long? The simplest explanation for the relative inattention is that Black Loyalists picked the losing side. The dominant grand narrative of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the inexorable transition from monarchy to different forms of popular government, from the inherited privilege of rank to the equality of citizenship. Slaves and former slaves—among the strongest contenders for the title of groups most oppressed by inherited status—should

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not, in this narrative, have been siding with the forces of reaction, aristocracy, and privilege. To the extent that they did, it makes sense to treat their allegiance as a pragmatic decision rooted in republican governments’ failure to offer Blacks freedom and equality. Otherwise, it can only have been a form of false consciousness. There was, furthermore, the Haitian expression of Black republicanism which has been held up as fulfilling the non-­racist potential of the revolutionary Atlantic. Toussaint Louverture’s volte face—his turn away from the Spanish Crown to cast his and his people’s lot with the French Republic— effectively revised republicanism and helped redeem the incomplete commitments to equality that had emanated out of Philadelphia and Paris. Toussaint’s government issued a constitution that famously declared that all men living in St. Domingue were “born, live and die . . . free and French.” “The law,” the constitution declared, was “the same for all, whether it punishes or protects.” By ending slavery, legal racial discrimination, and promising equality before the law, the leaders of revolutionary St. Domingue pushed Atlantic republicanism toward its true promise through the elimination of inherited advantage based on race, and they seemed to promise equality before the law to all of the island’s citizens.44 There is much to that story. Toussaint styled himself a republican and became, as historian Julius S. Scott has clearly established, a beacon in the struggle for Black equality throughout the Western Hemisphere. Scholars have pointed out that royalism exerted a strong pull on many Blacks in revolutionary St. Domingue, which complicates the narrative of triumphant Black republicanism.45 But it is the nature of Toussaint’s republic that points toward a more fundamental complication. Toussaint’s St. Domingue was not a society of equal citizens. The constitutional promise that “no distinctions” other than “those of virtues and talents” would be allowed included an exception for “superiority . . . granted by the law in the exercise of a public charge.” The constitution proceeded to apply that loophole. Rather than a society of autonomous citizens, Toussaint’s constitution created one that consisted of ranked corporate groups. The building block of society was the “habitation,” each of which was “a manufactory.” The landowner was “the father” of a “constant family” that included “cultivators and workers.” In order to increase sugar production, the state would be responsible for “balance[ing] the diverse interests” necessary to the smooth operation of the sugar estates. The point is not that the political structure of Toussaint’s republic was authoritarian, though it was. That has been true of

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many republics. The point is that his vision for St. Domingue was not built on independent autonomous citizens. It was built on corporate bodies—cultivateurs, landowners, military officers—that were granted specific privileges and responsibilities by the state. Toussaint’s republic was, in short, remarkably monarchical in its social vision.46 This is not unlike the vision of Jean François, Toussaint’s royalist rival, who ended up in Spanish Florida. François—Jorge Francisco in Florida— petitioned the Spanish Crown seeking recognition for himself, his officers, and the militiamen who had fought with him. The crown readily granted the recognition and the privileges it had customarily granted to Black militias throughout its American empire. It was not unlike what the enslaved Virginians who joined the British during the War of 1812 received when they settled as an autonomous community of “Merikins” in Trinidad after the war. And it was not unlike what the Nova Scotians sought when they demanded the privilege of governing themselves as an autonomous corporate body within British Sierra Leone.47 None of these groups articulated an explanation for their rejection of republicanism, but they all shared a social vision of Black communities requesting and receiving privileges as corporate bodies. The granting of corporate privilege, rather than the recognition of individual rights, was a hallmark of early modern monarchical rule.48 If we remember this preference, then the Nova Scotians’ “setlers laws” in particular and Black royalism more generally offer a fundamental challenge to the progressive narrative of Atlantic republicanism’s assault on inherited privilege. Blacks who sided with monarchs against rising creole republics chose a political structure that would allow them to organize and defend themselves as legally recognized corporate bodies—as communities—rather than casting them loose as, in the best cases, legally autonomous citizens forced to fight for substantive equality in republics dominated by those who thought them inferior and unworthy of social equality. That was a fight that has not yet been won, a reality that helps explain the appeal of Monarchianism to those most oppressed by inherited status during the Age of Atlantic Revolutions.

NOTES

Introduction 1.  The Records of the Virginia Company of London, ed. Susan Myra Kingsbury (Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1933), 3: 243. 2.  Linda Heywood and John Thornton, “In Search of the 1619 African Arrivals,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 127, no. 3 (2019): 200–211; Phillip D. Morgan, “Virginia Slavery in Atlantic Context, 1550–1650,” in Virginia, 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America, ed. Paul Musselwhite, Peter C. Mancall, and James Horn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 85. Virginia, 1619 places the development of early colonial Virginian slavery in an Atlantic and global context. 3.  Beginning in the 1950s, the historiography of racial slavery’s rise in British colonial North America predominately focused on early Virginia. For decades following, the “origins debate” was dominated by a dialectic between those who argued that race emerged as a result of and a justification for the shift towards the widescale enslavement of African descended peoples in the thirteen colonies and others who insisted that powerful ideas of racial difference preceded Black bondage and served as a necessary precondition for the rise of African-­based slavery in British North America. For an overview of this debate, long and tangled, though narrowly confined by time and space, see Alden T. Vaughan, “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 97, no. 3, (July 1989): 311–354. 4.  James Wood Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54, no. 1 (January 1997): 143–166; Keith Bradley, “Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction,” Journal of Roman Studies, 90 (2000): 110–125; David Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Rebecca Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Antonio Feros, Speaking of Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Katherine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

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5.  Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America, ed. Jane Landers and Barry M. Robinson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006); Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660, ed. Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from African to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); The Black Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, ed. Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Gregory O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020); Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); Jennifer Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). 6.  John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400– 1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Laura E. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); John Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-­Domingue (New York: Palgrave, 2006); Linda A. Newson and Susie Minchin, From Capture to Sale: The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Joanne Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Susan Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-­Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Jennifer L. Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); David Wheat, Atlantic African and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Holly Brewer, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery,” American Historical Review, 122, no. 4 (October 2017): 1038–1078; Herman Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Edward B. Rugemer, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

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Press, 2018); Brian Hoonhout, Borderless Empire: Dutch Guiana in the Atlantic World, 1750–1800 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020). 7.  Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade and the Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Margaret Ellen Newell, New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Andres Resendez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). 8.  Michael Guasco, “The Misguided Focus on 1619 as the Beginning of Slavery in the U.S. Damages Our Understanding of American History,” Smithsonian Magazine, September 2017. 9.  The contentious and high-­profile debate over The 1619 Project has been consumed almost exclusively by issues relating to the origins, course, and legacies of slavery and race in the United States. For an overview, see “Letter to the Editor, Re: 1619 Project,” New York Times Magazine, December 20, 2019; “We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued the 1619 Project,” New York Times Magazine, December 20, 2019; Adam Serwer, “The Fight Over the 1619 Project is Not About the Facts,” The Atlantic, December 23, 2019; David Waldstreicher, “The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy,” Boston Review, January 24, 2020; Alex Lichtenstein “1619 and All That,” American Historical Review, 125, no. 1 (February 2020); Leslie M. Harris, “I Helped Fact-­Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me,” Politico, March 6, 2020; Matthew Karp, “History As End: 1619, 1776, and the Politics of the Past,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2021; Sean Wilentz, “The 1619 Project and Living in Truth,” Opera Historica 22, no. 1 (September 2021): 87–101; Jake Silverstein, “The 1619 Project and the Long Battle Over US History,” New York Times Magazine, November 9, 2021; James Oakes, “What the 1619 Project Got Wrong,” Catlyst, 5, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 1–24; and Emily Sclafani, “The Danger of a Single Origin Story: The 1619 Project and Contested Foundings,” Perspectives of History, 60, no. 3 (March 2022). 10.  See, for example, Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011); David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-­American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (New York: Verso, 2018); Kevin Dawson, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Tessa Murphy, The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021); “Forum: Maritime Marronage: Archaeological, Anthropological,

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and Historical Approaches,” ed. Elena Schneider, Slavery and Abolition 42, no. 3 (Aug. 2021): 419–642.

Chapter 1 1.  Linda Heywood and John Thornton, “In Search of the 1619 African Arrivals: Enslavement and Middle Passage,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 127, no. 3 (2019): 200. 2.  Antonio de Almeida Mendes, “The Foundations of the System: A Reassessment of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 64. 3.  Robert Schwaller, Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico: Defining Racial Difference (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 31. 4.  James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 147. 5.  Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” 150. 6. Schwaller, Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico, 32, 34. 7.  Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” 145, 149. 8.  Sherwin Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 11. 9.  Jane G. Landers, “Introduction,” in Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America, ed. Jane G. Landers and Barry M. Robinson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 2. 10.  Leo J. Garofalo, “The Shape of the Diaspora: The Movement of Afro-­Iberians to Colonial Spanish America,” in Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora, ed. Sherwin K. Bryant, Rachel Sarah O’Toole, and Ben Vinson III (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 28–29. 11. Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage, 12. 12. Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage, 13. 13.  María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 51–52. 14. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 52. 15. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 58. 16. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 155. 17. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 144-­145. 18.  Schwaller argues that the use of the word “casta” to describe the sixteenth century is anachronistic. Schwaller, Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico. 19. Schwaller, Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico, 46. 20.  Adrián Masters, “A Thousand Invisible Architects: Vassals, the Petition and Response System, and the Creation of Spanish Imperial Caste Legislation,” Hispanic American Historical Review 98, no. 3 (2018): 398. 21.  Masters, “A Thousand Invisible Architects,” 399.

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22.  Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 16. 23.  De la Fuente and Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black, 17. 24.  De la Fuente and Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black, 23. 25.  De la Fuente and Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black, 25. 26.  Masters, “A Thousand Invisible Architects,” 400. 27.  Masters, “A Thousand Invisible Architects,” 384. 28.  Marc Eagle and David Wheat, “The Early Iberian Slave Trade to the Spanish Caribbean 1500–1580,” in From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas, ed. Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020), 51. 29.  Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat, “The Size and Direction of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas,” in From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas, ed. Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020), 24. 30.  Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat, “The Size and Direction of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas,” 16. 31.  This estimate includes slaves that came directly from Africa, not those that crossed the Atlantic from Spain before 1641 or the 666 vessels that Huguette and Pierre Chaunu identified as departing from the Canary Islands to Spanish America before 1580. Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat, “The Size and Direction of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas,” 22. 32.  Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat, “The Size and Direction of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas,” 22. 33.  Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat, “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America,” American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (April 2015): 434. 34.  De Almeida Mendes, “The Foundations of the System,” 63–64. 35.  Eagle and Wheat, “The Early Iberian Slave Trade to the Spanish Caribbean 1500–1580,” 54. 36.  Eagle and Wheat, “The Early Iberian Slave Trade to the Spanish Caribbean 1500–1580,” 54. 37.  Eagle and Wheat, “The Early Iberian Slave Trade to the Spanish Caribbean 1500–1580,” 53. 38.  Eagle and Wheat, “The Early Iberian Slave Trade to the Spanish Caribbean 1500–1580,” 62. 39.  Eagle and Wheat, “The Early Iberian Slave Trade to the Spanish Caribbean 1500–1580,” 63. 40.  Erika Denise Edwards, Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020), 16. 41.  Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat, “The Size and Direction of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas,” 21.

176

Notes to Pages 22–25

42.  Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, “The Slave Trade to Colonial Mexico: Revising from Puebla de Los Angeles, 1590–1640,” in From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas, ed. Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020), 79. 43.  Sierra Silva, “The Slave Trade to Colonial Mexico,” 74. 44.  Sierra Silva, “The Slave Trade to Colonial Mexico,” 79. 45.  Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat, “Introduction: Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America,” in From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas, ed. Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020), 3. 46.  De Almeida Mendes, “The Foundations of the System,” 67. 47.  David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David Eltis, Stephen Behrendt, and Herbert Klein, eds., The TransAtlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-­ROM (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 48.  David Eltis, “Trans-­Atlantic Slave Trade—Understanding the Database,” SlaveVoyages (2018), accessed March 17, 2019, https://​www​.slavevoyages​.org​/voyage​/about. 49.  For more information on the intra-­American slave trade see Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 50.  Clifton Sorrell III, “The Intra-­American Slave Trade Database: A Review and Interview with Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki,” Not Even Past (February 4, 2022), accessed March 18, 2022, https://​notevenpast​.org​/the​-transatlantic​-slave​-trade​-data base​-a​-review​-and​-interview​-with​-gregory​-omalley​-and​-alex​-borucki/. 51.  Alex Borucki and Greg O’Malley, “Intra-­American Slave Trade—Understanding the Database,” Slave Voyages (2018), accessed March 18, 2022, https://​www​.slavevoyages​.org​/american​/about​%22​%20​%5Cl​%20​%22methodology​/0​/introduction​/0​/en​/​ #methodology​/0​/introduction​/0​/en/. 52.  Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki, “Patterns in the Intercolonial Slave Trade across the Americas before the Nineteenth Century,” Tempo 23, no. 2, (August 2017): 314–338, https://​www​.scielo​.br​/j​/tem​/a​/cZmRvYM8FzJxBHvmPfWcfTw​/​?lang​=​en. 53.  O’Malley and Borucki, “Patterns in the Intercolonial Slave Trade across the Americas before the Nineteenth Century,” 314–338. 54.  Sierra Silva, “The Slave Trade to Colonial Mexico,” 80–83. 55.  O’Malley and Borucki, “Patterns in the Intercolonial Slave Trade across the Americas before the Nineteenth Century,” 314–338. 56.  Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat, “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America,” 435. 57.  Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat, “The Size and Direction of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas,” 34. 58.  Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat, “Introduction: Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America,” 1.

Notes to Pages 25–28

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59. Mathew Restall, “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America,” The Americas 57, no. 2 (October 2000): 176, 178. 60.  Restall, “Black Conquistadors,” 179; Jane Landers, “Cimarron and Citizen: African Ethnicity, Corporate Identity, and the Evolution of Free Black Towns in the Spanish Circum-­Caribbean,” in Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America, ed. Jane Landers and Barry Robinson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 113. 61.  Robert C. Schwaller, African Maroons in Sixteenth-­Century Panama: A History in Documents (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021), 15. 62.  Restall, “Black Conquistadors,” 182. 63.  Restall, “Black Conquistadors,” 187–188. 64.  Buenos Aires was refounded in 1580. Kara D. Schultz, “‘The Kingdom of Angola Is Not Very Far from Here’: The South Atlantic Slave Port of Buenos Aires, 1585–1640,” Slavery & Abolition 36, no. 3 (July 3, 2015): 426–427. 65.  Restall, “Black Conquistadors,” 195. 66.  Leo J. Garofalo, “Afro-­Iberian Subjects: Petitioning the Crown at Home, Serving the Crown Abroad 1590s–1630s,” in Afro-­Latino Voices: Translations of Early Modern Ibero-­Atlantic Narratives, ed. Kathryn Joy McKnight and Leo J. Garofalo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2015), chapter 4. 67.  Her claims join a growing group of scholars, such as Karen Graubart, Pablo Gómez, Matthew Restall, Antonio García de León, Leo J. Garofalo, and Herman Bennett, who reject the notion that free Black individuals were barred from being vecinos. Chloe Ireton, “‘They Are Blacks of the Caste of Black Christians’: Old Christian Black Blood in the Sixteenth-­and Early Seventeenth-­Century Iberian Atlantic,” Hispanic American Historical Review 97, no. 4 (2017): 588, 591. 68.  Ireton, “‘They Are Blacks of the Caste of Black Christians,’ ” 607. 69.  Garofalo, “The Shape of the Diaspora,” 35. 70.  David Wheat, “Nharas and Morenas Horras: A Luso-­African Model for the Social History of the Spanish Caribbean, c. 1570–1640,” Journal of Early Modern History 14, no. 1–2 (2010): 126. 71.  David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 72.  Lynne Guitar, “Boiling It Down: Slavery on the First Commercial Sugarcane Ingenios in the Americas (Hispaniola, 1530–45),” in Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America, ed. Jane Landers and Barry Robinson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 45. 73.  Landers, “Cimarron and Citizen,” 117. 74.  Guitar, “Boiling It Down,” 49. 75.  Landers, “Cimarron and Citizen,” 117. 76.  Robert C. Schwaller, “Contested Conquests: African Maroons and the Incomplete Conquest of Hispaniola, 1519–1620,” The Americas 75, no. 4 (2018): 610. 77. Schwaller, African Maroons in Sixteenth-­Century Panama, 17.

178

Notes to Pages 28–31

78. Schwaller, African Maroons in Sixteenth-­Century Panama, 1. 79.  Schwaller, “Contested Conquests,” 609. 80.  Schwaller, “Contested Conquests,” 611. 81.  Schwaller, “Contested Conquests,” 609–10. 82.  Schwaller, “Contested Conquests,” 611, 617. 83.  Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 84.  Landers, “Cimarron and Citizen,” 124. 85.  Landers, “Cimarron and Citizen,” 123. 86.  Landers, “Cimarron and Citizen,” 124. 87.  Sierra Silva, “The Slave Trade to Colonial Mexico,” 83. 88.  Landers, “Cimarron and Citizen,” 127. The extent to which maroons actually tracked and returned runaways is under debate. 89.  Sierra Silva, “The Slave Trade to Colonial Mexico,” 83. 90.  Landers, “Cimarron and Citizen,” 128–30, 132. Other converted towns were Mandigna in 1735 and Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Morenos de Amapa in 1769. 91.  Ireton, “‘They Are Blacks of the Caste of Black Christians,’ ” 580. 92.  Ireton, “‘They Are Blacks of the Caste of Black Christians,’ ” 581.

Chapter 2 1.  “Provisión que no se pueda cautivar, ni hacer esclavo a ningún indio,” August 2, 1530, in Colección de Documentos para la Historia de la Formación Social de Hispanoamerica, 1493–1810, ed. Richard Konetzke (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953), 1: 134–136. A provisión was a particular type of royal decree, for use in “special situations such as where the crown wanted to assert its power directly.” See Mark C. Mirow, Latin American Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 45. I generally leave the words rescate (noun) and rescatar (verb) untranslated. These words covered a multitude of sins. “Rescatar” literally means to redeem, ransom, save, or rescue. In the medieval Iberian kingdoms, opposing Christian and Muslim armies might use the word rescatar to describe redeeming prisoners of war, other captives, or enslaved people. In this sense, rescate transactions always involved intercultural interactions, usually with a sense of duress surrounding the exchange or redemption of people between Christian and Muslim societies. See Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-­Century Valencia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), esp. 200–206. In the Spanish Caribbean, the word came to mean to trade between the Spanish and Native people, often with the Spanish threatening force. Rescate in these circumstances could involve gold, silver, pearls, other precious objects, foodstuffs or other supplies, and of course people. In the context of Native enslavement, rescate was an activity that could include everything from purchasing already enslaved people from Native allies to outright slave raiding, often combined with trading expeditions for other products. Thus, a ship captain might obtain a license for rescate, and consider that permission to trade for precious metals or other

Notes to Pages 32–33

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objects as well as to trade or raid for enslaved people. For a nuanced discussion of the many meanings of rescate, see Nancy E. van Deusen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-­Century Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 154–159. Erin Woodruff Stone shows how Spanish rescate practices became increasingly violent over the course of the sixteenth century. Erin Woodruff Stone, Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 5. I am grateful to Sherwin K. Bryant and Juan José Ponce Vázquez for helping me think about how to express the complexity surrounding the term rescate. 2.  See, for example, Jesús María García Añoveros, “Carlos V y la Abolición de la Esclavitud de los Indios: Causas, Evolución, y Circunstancias,” Revista de Indias, 60, no. 218 (2000), 57–84. 3.  The literature on Native enslavement in the Spanish Caribbean prior to 1542 is part of an increasingly vibrant and informative field. See, for example, José Antonio Saco, Historia de los Indios en el Nuevo Mundo, 2 vols. (Havana: Cultural, s.a., 1932); Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Morella A. Jiménez G., La Esclavitud Indígena en Venezuela, siglo XVI (Caracas: Fuentes para la Historia Colonial de Venezuela, 1986); Carlos Esteban Deive, La Española y la Esclavitud del Indio (Santo Domingo, DR: Fundación García Arévalo, 1995); Esteban Mira Caballos, El Indio Antillano: Repartimiento, Encomienda, y Esclavitud, 1492–1542 (Bogotá: Muñoz Moya, 1997); Esteban Mira Caballos, Conquista y destrucción de las Indias, 1492–1573 (Bogotá: Muñoz Moya, 2009); Bethany Aram and Rafael Obando Andrade, “Violencia, Esclavitud, y Encomendia en la Conquista de Ámerica, 1513– 1542,” Historia Social 87 (2017), 129–148; Karen Anderson-­Córdova, Surviving Spanish Conquest: Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation on Hispaniola and Puerto Rico (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017); Ida Altman, Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean: The Greater Antilles, 1493–1550 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021); and Stone, Captives of Conquest. For an overview of Native enslavement in the Southern Caribbean specifically, see Eduardo Barrera Monroy, “Los Esclavos de Perlas: Voces y rostros indígenas en la Granjería de Perlas del Cabo de la Vela, 1540–1570,” Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico [Colombia] 39, no. 61 (2002), 2–33; Molly A. Warsh, “Enslaved Pearl Divers in the Sixteenth-­Century Caribbean,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 3 (September 2010), 345–362. To date, no work does an in-­depth examination of the origins and failure of the Real Provisión of 1530. For an overview of legal developments related to Native enslavement, see Añoveros, “Carlos V y la Abolición de la Esclavitud de los Indios.” 4. Stone, Captives of Conquest, 7. Anderson-­Córdova arrives at a “very rough estimate” of 34,000 enslaved Native people brought to Hispaniola and Puerto Rico alone between 1509 and 1544; see Anderson-­Córdova, Surviving Spanish Conquest, 145. 5.  For a narration of this voyage, see Louis-­André Vigneras, “The Three Brothers Guerra of Triana and their Five Voyages to the New World, 1498–1504,” Hispanic American Historical Review 52, no. 4 (November 1972), 621–641; information on Niño, 624–627.

180

Notes to Pages 33–34

6.  Vigneras, “The Three Brothers Guerra,” 627–634. Some of these Native people became ill after they were sold, and Luis Guerra had to fend off irate lawsuits from buyers. 7.  “Orden de informe de los indios traído por Cristóbal Guerra,” December 2, 1501, Indiferente General, leg. 418, libro 1, fols. 70r–70v. There are three printed copies of the Real Cédula regarding Guerra and the enslaved Native people he sold. See “Real cédula al Corregidor de Xeres de la Frontera, para que averigüe los indios que mataron Cristóbal Guerra e sus compañeros; los que an vendido e tengan en su poder, con lo demás de sespresa,” December 2, 1501, Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista, y organización de las antiguas posesiones españolas (Hereafter CODOIN, ser. I) (Madrid: Manuel G. Hernández, 1879), 31: 104–107; “R.C. sobre los indios que Cristóbal Guerra trajó y vendió,” December 2, 1501, Documentos, ed. Konetzke, 1: 7–8; and “A Gonzalo Gómes sobre los indios que traxó Cristóbal Guerra,” December 2, 1501, Cédulas Reales Relativas a Venezuela, ed. Enrique Otte (Caracas: Fundación John Boulton y Fundación Eugenio Mendoza, 1963), 11–12. 8.  The cédulas regarding this unnamed Native woman predate all the other orders regarding Native people enslaved during this Guerra voyage, which is why I think she might have been a key source of information about the raid. See “Real Cédula a Cristóbal Guerra ordenándole que entregue al Corregidor la india que truxó,” November 10, 1501, Indiferente General, leg. 418, libro 1, fol. 68r and “Real Cédula al Nuestra Corregr de Xerez pa qe remita a S.M. la india qe traxó Christóbal de Guerra,” November 11, 1501, Indiferente General, leg. 418, libro 1, fol. 68r. 9.  Nancy van Deusen notes that many Native people in Castile learned about the law and either sued for or negotiated for their freedom. See van Deusen, Global Indios, 21–27. 10.  “A Gonzalo Gómes sobre los indios que traxó Cristóbal Guerra,” December 2, 1501, in Venezuela, ed. Otte, 11–12. 11.  “A Gonzalo Gómes sobre los indios que truxó Cristóbal Guerra,” December 9, 1501, in Venezuela, ed. Otte, 13. 12.  “Orden para tomar seis indios de Pedro Fernández,” December 12, 1501, Indiferente General, leg. 418, libro 1, fols. 74v–75r. This order also reiterates that the end purpose was to “return them from whence they came.” Printed version, “Para el corregidor de Córdova sobre los indios que están en Córdova que truxó Cristóbal Guerra,” in Venezuela, ed. Otte, 14. 13.  Bethany Aram, Juana the Mad: Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 27. 14.  Vigneras, “The Three Brothers Guerra,” 638; “Orden de asiento de la Capitulación de Cristóbal Guerra,” July 12, 1503, Indiferente General, leg. 418, libro 1, fols. 110v–112r. That capitulación was briefly updated in early 1504. See “Nota de asiento y capitulación con Cristóbal Guerra,” February 14, 1504, Indiferente General, leg. 418, libro 1, fol. 126v. 15.  Vigneras, “The Three Brothers Guerra,” 640.

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16.  Antonio Rumeu de Armas outlines legal developments between 1493 and 1498. See Antonio Rumeu de Armas, La Política Indigenista de Isabel la Católica (Valladolid, 1969),135–136. See also Esteban Mira Caballos, “Isabel la Católica y El Indio Americano,” in La Española, Epicentro del Caribe en el Siglo XVI (Santo Domingo: Academia Dominicana de la Historia, 2010), 41–58. 17.  “R. C. mandando que los indios que se trajeron de las islas y se vendieron por mandado del Almirante se pongan en libertad y se restituyan a los paises de su naturaleza,” June 20, 1501, in Documentos, ed. Konetzke, 1: 4. Rumeu de Armas calls this the first “libertad” for Native people living in Spain, indicating that it was the first time Native people were freed en masse and promised repatriation to the Caribbean. 18. “Nómine de indemnizaciones acordados a las personas,” May 28, 1501, in Rumeu de Armas, La Política Indigenista, 166–171; Rumeu de Armas claims that this document shows the freedom of all enslaved Native people in Castile, but Nancy van Deusen thinks this document represents only a fraction of the enslaved Native men and women in Castile in 1501. See van Deusen, Global Indios, 3. 19.  “Instrucción al comendador Frey Nicolás de Ovando, gobernador de las islas y tierra firme del mar oceano,” September 16, 1501, in Documentos, ed. Konetzke, 1: 4–6 (quotation on page 5). 20.  See Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars, 9–45. 21.  “Executoria en el pleito de Alonso de Hojeda, contra Juan de Vergara e Garçia Docampo, veçinos de çibdad de Sevilla,” February 4, 1504, in Venezuela, ed. Otte, 17–38. “Asiento y capitulación con Alonso de Ojeda,” September 30, 1504, Indiferente General, leg. 418, libro 1, fols. 134r–137v; for a print copy see Venezuela, ed. Otte, 39–48. The use of “rescatar” here is particularly interesting; it signals that Ojeda “saved” or “rescued” an Indigenous man by not killing him once he was captured; it also implies the saved man’s enslavement. 22.  “Asiento con Diego de Nicuesa and Alonso de Ojeda ir a la tierra de Urabá y Veragua,” June 9, 1508, Indiferente General, leg. 415, libro 1, fols. 3v–8v (quotations regarding slaving on fol. 7r). For a brief discussion of the capitulación, see Mira Caballos, El Indio Antillano, 268. The Spanish were aware that some Indigenous polities on the coast of what is presently Panama kept enslaved people for the purposes of mining gold. See Fernando Santos-­Granero, Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 1. 23.  “Respuesta al Almirante e Oficiales de la Española,” June 15, 1510, in CODOIN, ser. 1, 31: 79–95; on depopulation, see Ibid., 89; on Trinidad, see Ibid., 90–91. 24.  “Instrucción a Don Diego Colón,” December 10, 1512, Indiferente General, leg. 419, libro 4, fols. 36v–45v; references to pearling and slaving on fols. 37v, 37r, 41r, 42r, and on Native people in Cuba, fol. 40r. The revealing marginalia is on fol. 37r: “que procurren armar los Navios, pa qe busquen Perlas al mismo tiempo que Caribes.” 25.  For a good narration of how the religious orders faired in the southern Caribbean, see Erin Stone, “Slave Raiders vs. Friars: Tierra Firme, 1513–1522,” The Americas 74, no. 2 (April 2017), 139–170.

182

Notes to Pages 37–39

26. Stone, Captives of Conquest, 54–55; Altman, Life and Society, 102–103. 27.  For the text of the Laws of Burgos, see “Las Ordenanzas para el tratamiento de los Indios (Las Leyes de Burgos)” in Documentos, ed. Konetzke, I: 38–57. See also the beautiful facsimiles and recent scholarly explorations of the implications of the Leyes in Leyes de Burgos de 1512: V Centenario, ed. Rafael Sánchez Domingo and Fernando Suárez Bilbao (Madrid: Dykinson S. L., 2012). Esteban Mira Caballos remains skeptical that the laws were anything more than a restatement and codification of disparate previous orders and cédulas, see Mira Caballos, El Indio Antillano, 113–114. 28.  Ida Altman, “The Revolt of Enriquillo and the Historiography of Early Spanish America,” The Americas 63, no. 4 (2007), 587–614; Erin W. Stone, “America’s First Slave Revolt: Indians and African Slaves in Española, 1500–1534,” Ethnohistory 60, no. 2 (Spring 2013), 195–217. 29.  On Sancho de Matienzo, see Mario Hernández Sánchez-­Barba, “El Doctor Sancho de Matienzo, la Casa de Contratación, y Villasena de Mena,” Mar Oceano: Revista del Humanismo Euroamericano 14–15 (2003), 43–63. See also the biography of Pedro’s uncle, Juan Ortiz de Matienzo, an oidor of the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo found at “Juan Ortiz de Matienzo,” Real Academia de la Historia, accessed 2 February 2022, https://​dbe​.rah​.es​/biografias​/32613​/juan​-ortiz​-de​-matienzo. For more on “los Matienzo,” see Enrique Otte, Las Perlas del Caribe: Nueva Cádiz de Cubagua (Caracas: Fundación John Boulton, 1977), 379–380. 30.  For some biographical details, see Otte, Las Perlas del Caribe, 381–384. 31.  “Liçençia de nao a Juan López de Archuleta, maestre,” April 24, 1523, Indiferente General, leg. 420, libro 9, fols. 125r–126v. López was later compensated for a ship seized during the naval war against France in 1525. See “Reclamación de Juan López de Archuleta,” July 28, 1525, Indiferente General, leg. 420, libro 10, fol. 39v. The words “nao” and “navío” were often used interchangeably, but the use of nao here indicates that López’s ship was large, ocean-­going, and primarily used for cargo. See Alejandro de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic World in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 34. 32.  “Juan López de Archuleta, veeduría de la costa de las perlas,” Sevilla, April 28, 1526, Cedulario de la Monarquía Española Relativo a la Isla de Cubagua, ed. Enrique Otte(Caracas: Fundación John Boulton y Fundación Eugenio Mendoza, 1961), 1: 8–10. The originals of all the cédulas related to Cubagua are in Santo Domingo, leg. 1121, libro 3 (misfiled with items from Cuba). 33.  “Archuleta, Para que vaya derecho a la isla de Cubagua,” May 11, 1526, in Cubagua, ed. Otte, 1: 10–11. 34.  “Iohan López de Archuleta, Liçençia para tener una isleta,” July 28, 1526, in Cubagua, ed. Otte, 1: 12–13. 35. Otte, Las Perlas del Caribe, 342. 36.  Residencia investigating the royal officials of Cubagua, 1528–1529, Testimony of Juan Juárez de Figueroa, Justicia, 50, fols. 860v–861v. 37.  Mira Caballos, Indio Antillano, 398.

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38.  Gonzalo Hernández de Roxas, alcalde Mayor contra Juan López de Archuleta, veedor general, October 20, 1529–11 August 1530, Justicia 8, N.1, fols. 1v–1r, 73r. 39.  For the judicial inventory, see Justicia, leg. 8, fols. 68r–69v, undated, contextually May or June 1530. 40.  “Provisión que no se pueda cautivar ni hacer esclavo a ningún indio,” August 2, 1530, in Documentos, ed. Konetzke, 1: 134–136. 41. Ibid. 42. Jiménez, La Esclavitud Indigena en Venezuela, 182. 43. Otte, Las Perlas del Caribe, 379. 44.  Letter from don Carlos to Francisco de Prado, “sobre hazer guerra a los indios,” December 30, 1533, in Cubagua, ed. Otte, 1: 189–191. 45.  Ibid. The language of fire and blood “se les pueda hazer e haga guerra a fuego e a sangre” is a common formula for describing violence. 46. Jiménez, La Esclavitud Indigena en Venezuela, 183. 47.  Letter of Francisco Prado to Charles V, April 6, 1533, Santo Domingo, leg. 183, ramo 4, no. 142. 48.  “Real Provisión donde se declara la forma y orden que se ha de guardar en haver esclavos en la Guerra y con rescates,” February 20, 1534, in Documentos, ed. Konetzke, 153–159. 49.  “Para que el hierro con que se hierran los esclavos se ponga en poder de Villacorta,” August 3, 1535, in ed, Cubagua, ed. Otte, 2: 15. 50. Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars, 20–28. 51.  “Real Cédula a Juan López de Archuleta, veedor general de Cubagua,” August 27, 1535, Guatemala, leg. 393, libro 1, fol. 131. 52.  Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 46–47. 53.  “Leyes y Ordenanzas nuevamente hechas por S.M. [Su Magestad] para la gobernacion de las Indias y buen tratmiento y conservación de los indios,” inColección de documentos para la historia de México, ed. Juaquin García Icazbalceta, (México: Antigua Librería, 1866), 2: 204–227 (quotation on page 212). 54.  Ibid., 213. 55.  Quoted in Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 71. 56. Jiménez, La Esclavitud Indigena en Venezuela, 247–253; Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 74. 57.  See for example, “Real Cédula prohibiendo herrar a los indígenas,” August 8, 1544, Indiferente General, leg. 427, libro 30, fols. 20v–21v.

Chapter 3 1.  Michel Bégon, “Projet de Reglement de M[onsieu]rs de Blenac et Begon sur la police et autres matieres concernant les Esclaves des isles de l’Amerique concerté avec les principaux habitans et les off[ici]rs des con[sei]ls Souverains,” Feb. 13, 1683, FR Archives nationales d’outre-mer (hereafter ANOM), Collection Moreau de Saint-­Méry,

184

Notes to Pages 46–47

F3, vol. 90, np. For more context on this draft, see Vernon Valentine Palmer, “The Origins and Authors of the Code Noir,” Louisiana Law Review, 56 (1995), 363–407; and Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2012), 122–123. 2.  Michel Bégon, “Projet de reglement.” For English codes, see Edward Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 70 (July 2013), 429–458. 3.  Michel Bégon and Charles de Courbon, comte de Blénac, Feb. 13, 1683, Archives nationales d’outre-­mer, FR ANOM COL C8A 3, f. 251. For the origins and evolution of the Compagnie du Sénégal, see Abdoulaye Ly, La Compagnie du Sénégal (Paris: Présence africaine, 1958). 4.  James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2002); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). For overviews, see Rebecca Anne Goetz, “Indian Slavery: An Atlantic and Hemispheric Problem,” History Compass 14, no. 2 (2016), 59–70; and Rebecca Onion, “America’s Other Original Sin,” Slate, Jan. 18, 2016. For a compendium of earlier works, see Russell M. Magnaghi, Indian Slavery, Labor, Evangelization, and Captivity in the Americas: An Annotated Bibliography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998). 5.  For numbers, Rushforth estimated 2–4 million in Bonds of Alliance, 9. Using additional Spanish records, Andrés Reséndez adjusted that figure upward to 5 million in his The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 324. For the broader historiography on which these claims rest, see David Graham Sweet, “A Rich Realm of Nature Destroyed: The Middle Amazon Valley, 1640–1750” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974); David Graham Sweet, “Francisca: Indian Slave,” in Struggle and Survival in Colonial America, ed. David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 274–291; John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Stuart B. Schwartz, “Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil,” American Historical Review 83 (February 1978), 43–79; Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); John Monteiro, “São Paulo in the Seventeenth Century: Society and Economy” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1985); and John Monteiro, Negros da terra: Índios e bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994); Nancy E. van Deusen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-­Century Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Sherwin Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of

Notes to Pages 47–51

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Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016); Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Paul Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492–1715 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Gallay, Indian Slave Trade; Brooks, Captives and Cousins; Estevan Rael-­Galvez, “Identifying Captivity and Capturing Identity: Narratives of American Indian Slavery, Colorado and New Mexico, 1776–1934” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2002); and Denise Ileana Bossy, “The ‘Noble Savage’ in Chains: Indian Slavery in Colonial South Carolina, 1670–1735” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2007); Hayley Negrin, “Possessing Native Women and Children: Slavery, Gender, and English Colonialism in the Early American South, 1607–1772” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2017). More recent treatments include Rebecca Anne Goetz, “The Nanziatticos and the Violence of the Archive: Land and Native Enslavement in Colonial Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 85 (February 2019), 33–60. 6. Resendez, The Other Slavery; and Margaret Newell, “The Forgotten Slaves,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 11, 2016. 7. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade; Schwartz, “Indian Labor and New World Plantations.” 8. Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 362. 9. Resendez, The Other Slavery, 127–146; Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, Chapter 1; John Monteiro, Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America, ed. and trans. James Woodard and Barbara Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Muriel Nazzari, “Transition toward Slavery: Changing Legal Practice regarding Indians in Seventeenth-­Century São Paulo,” The Americas 49 (Oct. 1992), 131–155. 10. Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance; Gallay, Indian Slave Trade; Resendez, The Other Slavery. 11. Michel Bégon and Charles de Courbon, comte de Blénac, Feb. 13, 1683, Archives nationales d’outre-­mer, FR ANOM COL C8A 3, f. 251. 12.  Bégon and Blénac, Feb. 13, 1683, Archives nationales d’outre-­mer, FR ANOM COL C8A 3, f. 251. “Cette Compagnie pretendant que le commerce des Negres luy apartient privat__[cut off by binding] a tous . . . autres.” “les marchants des Isles au contraire soustinants que ce Commerce est permis a tout le monde a la Reserve de la Costi d’affrique, et que jusquau a present la Compagnie ne s’y estoit point oposée.” 13.  “Lettres-­Patentes du Roi en forme d’Edit, pourtant confirmation de la nouvelle Compagnie du Sénégal et Côtes d’Afrique, et de ses Privileges,” in M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-­Méry, Loix et constitutions des colonies françoises de l’Amerique sous le vent (Paris, 1784), 1: 356–359. “Negres Captifs, que la Compagnie pourra seule vendre et transporter dans les Isles et Terres-­Fermes de l’Amérique, le tout pendent le cours et espace de trente années consécutives.” The Compagnie du Sénégal was restructured in 1681 after

186

Notes to Pages 51–55

its proprietors sold the original letters patent to a new set of investors. This document spells out the terms of the newly formed company’s monopoly and was registered in the Parlement de Paris in early 1682. See Ly, La Compagnie du Sénégal, 168–171. I translate “l’Amérique” as “the Americas” here because that geographic designation in French law comprised North and South America as well as the Caribbean. 14. Michel Bégon and Charles de Courbon, comte de Blénac, Feb. 13, 1683, Archives nationales d’outre-­mer, FR ANOM COL C8A, vol. 3, fol. 277v. 15.  Jean-­Baptiste Gaby, Relation de la Nigritie (Paris, 1689); Nicholas Sanson, “Afrique” (Paris 1650); and Herman Moll, “Negroland and Guinea: With the European Settlements, Explaining what belongs to England, Holland, Denmark, etc.” (London, 1727). See, also, Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 95–110; Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 16–20. 16.  Bégon and Blenac, Feb. 13, 1683, ANOM, C8A, vol. 3, fol 277v. “Nous avons jugé apropos de deffendre aux marchants qui vont traitter sur la costi de terre ferme d’y traitter aucuns Negres sans la permission de la Compagnie, Mais pour les sauvages Esclaves, nous ne voyons point que la Compagnie aist la moindre aparence de droit d’en empescher le d. commerce.” 17.  Michel Bégon, “Mémore sur les esclaves des habitants des Isles françoises de l’Amérique qui prétendent etre libres lorsqu’ils ont touché à la terre de France,” Nov. 10, 1704, ANOM, Colonies, C8B, vol. 2, fols. 3–4. “Les Noires, les Sauvages, et les Mulastres qui sont gens accoûtumés à la servitude, et qui vivent beaucoup plus honnestement et Chretiennement étant Esclaves qu’ils ne seroient s’ils étoient libres.” 18. “Arrét du Conseil d’Etat, qui revoque le Privilege accorde aux Intéressés en la Compagnie du Sénégal,” September 12, 1684, in Moreau de Saint-­Méry, Loix et constitutions, 1: 400. “Esdits Intéressés en la Compagnie du Sénégal n’ont point exécuté ledit Contrat, ni porté aux Islas lesdits deux mille Negres; mais même qu’ils y ont transporté si peu, que la plupart des Habitans des Isles qui en manquent, et n’ont point d’autres moyens de faire cultiver leurs Terres et Habitations, projettent d’abandonner les Isles.” 19.  For Rio, see Froger, Relation d’un voyage fait en 1695, 1696, et 1697 aux Côtes d’Afrique (Paris: Michel Brunet, 1698), 81, 127. For the Orinoco and Guarapiche River trades, see François-­Roger Robert to the Minister of the Marine, January 29, 1703, FR ANOM COL C8A, vol. 15, fol. 69v. “Il y a de ces nations dans les rivières D’Orenoque et houarabiche et autres, ces nations ont entr’elles la guerre et font des prisonnieres d’autres Indes qu’elles tiennent comme esclaves, dont elles se servent comme tels et qu’elles vendent de mesme . . . ces mesmes Indes sortent quelquefois de leur Rivieres dans leur pyrogues et viennent dans les isles françoises pour y faire la traitte et y vendre des Indes esclaves.” 20.  Jean Charles de Baas-­Castelmore, “Mémoire concernant le commerce que peuvent faire les Français habitans de l’isle de la Grenade en la terre ferme de l’Amérique en la rivière appelée par les Français Ouarabiche ou autrement dicte Monopado,” Nov. 20, 1670, FR ANOM COL C8A, vol. 1, fols. 88–89v.

Notes to Pages 55–58

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21. Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance; Gallay, Indian Slave Trade; Nazzari, “Transition toward Slavery,” 131–155; Monteiro, Blacks of the Land, esp. 92–122; Sweet, “A Rich Realm of Nature Destroyed.” 22.  Michel Bégon, “Projet de reglement.” 23.  “Ordonnance des Administrateurs Généraux des Isles, touchant les Maladies apportées par les Bâtiments Négriers,” January 18, 1685, Moreau de Saint-­Méry, Loix et constitutions, 1: 406. The title of the document used the term “négrier” in the generic sense of slave. “Dans les Vaisseaux de la Compagnie du Sénégal, apportant des Noirs aux Isles, il s’y met souvent dans le trajet des maladies contagieuses, par l’infection que le nombre des Noirs embarqués cause”; “Noirs et autres gens.” 24. “Lettres-­Patentes sur l’Etablissement d’une Compagnie pour le Commerce exclusif aux Côtes d’Afrique, depuis la riviere de Serre-­Lyonne, jusqu’au Cap de Bonne-­ Espérance, sous le nom de Compagnie de Guinée,” January 1685, Moreau de Saint-­Méry, Loix et constitutions, vol. 1, 409–414, 413 (quotation). “La quantité de mille Negres de Guinée.” 25. Michel Bégon, “Projet de reglement.” For more context on this draft, see Palmer, “The Origins and Authors of the Code Noir”; and Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 122–123. For English codes, see Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race”; Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996); Simon P. Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); John C. Coombs, “Building ‘the Machine’: The development of slavery and slave society in early colonial Virginia” (Ph.D. diss., William & Mary, 2004). 26.  Michel Bégon, “Mémoire sur les esclaves des habitants des Isles françoises de l’Amérique qui prétendent être libres lorsqu’ils ont touché à la terre de France,” Nov. 10, 1704, FR ANOM COL C8B, vol. 2, fol. 74. 27.  Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2016); Jennifer Morgan, “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 54 (January 1997), 167–192; Herman Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); Winthrop  D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2012); Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in English America, 1580–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010);

188

Notes to Pages 59–61

William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530– 1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 28.  For “strategic silences,” see Brett Rushforth, “The Gauolet Uprising of 1710: Maroons, Rebels, and the Informal Exchange Economy of a Caribbean Sugar Island,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 76 (January 2019), 76, 82.

Chapter 4 1. David Thomas Konig, “‘Dale’s Laws’ and the Non-­Common Law Origins of Criminal Justice in Virginia,” American Journal of Legal History 26, no. 4 (October 1982): 254–275; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 79–91. 2. “A Briefe Declaration of the Plantation of Virginia” (1619), British National Archives, Kew Gardens, (formerly Public Records Office), Colonial Office Papers, 1/3/21.i. 3. Ibid.; The Records of the Virginia Company of London, ed. Susan Myra Kingsbury, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1906–1935), 3: 98–109. On planting in early Anglo-­America, see Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1856 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 67–92. 4.  Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2017 [1999]), esp. 34–70. On the privatization of early colonial Virginia, see William E. Nelson, The Common Law in Colonial America, Volume I: The Chesapeake and New England, 1607–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25–26. 5.  Carl Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 2. The classic statement of the connection between enslavement and liberty—Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom—remains an indispensable entry point to the literature on slavery in colonial Virginia. 6.  An older scholarship debated whether slavery was itself capitalist, with Eugene and Elizabeth Fox Genovese prominently arguing that it was not [see especially their The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989)] while other scholars argued that slavery was compatible with liberal capitalism [see James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)]. This debate now seems to have been largely settled, with most scholars agreeing that slavery was at least in, if not of, the world of capitalism. Most scholarly debate is now focused on questions of causal directionality—did the emergence of modern capitalism determine the nature of slavery, or did the existence of slavery underpin capitalist development? For the former position, see Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); for the latter, see Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014). This essay takes the position that, rather than viewing the relationship between slavery and capitalism as an either/or or chicken/egg problem, we should see specific forms of capitalist

Notes to Pages 61–63

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social organization and enslavement in any given historical moment as dialectically articulated, mutually constituting, and thus subject to continual negotiation and reorientation. 7.  For a good representation of the state of the field, see Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, ed. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 8.  For an important examination of early Virginia in an Atlantic context, see April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 9.  Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 1–10. 10.  The classic argument is Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). 11.  See, for two recent examples, Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 12.  See for example, Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). 13.  The foundational text is Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021 [1983]). For a stimulating critique, see Michael Ralph and Maya Singhal, “Racial Capitalism,” Theory and Society 48, no. 6 (December 2019): 851–881. 14.  For a useful definitional overview, see Jurgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 1–24. For differing approaches to the history of capitalist development in early America, see John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British North America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Alan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992); Marc Egnal, New World Economies: The Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Early Canada (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-­Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620–1877 (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2012); Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-­Century North America and the Caribbean (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017). For a sampling of New History of Capitalism approaches to early economic development, see the essays from Woody Holton, Eliga Gould, Peter Coclanis, and Kris Manjapra in American Capitalism: New Histories, ed. Sven Beckert and Christine Desan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 15.  Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Stephanie E. Jones-­ Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019); Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with

190

Notes to Pages 63–64

Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). 16.  Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 21–50. 17.  For useful overviews, see Alden T. Vaughan, “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-­Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97, no. 3 (July 1989): 311–354; Rebecca Anne Goetz, “Rethinking the ‘Unthinking Decision’: Old Questions and New Problems in the History of Slavery and Race in the Colonial South,” Journal of Southern History 75, no. 3 (Aug. 2009): 599–612. For an important recent contribution, see John C. Coombs, “The Phases of Conversion: A New Chronology for the Rise of Slavery in Early Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (July 2011): 332–360. 18.  On enslaved and free people of African descent in early modern England, see Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Miranda Kaufmann, Black Tudors: The Untold Story (London: Oneworld Publications, 2017). On the influence of civil law slave regimes on English colonial slavery, see Alan Watson, Slave Law in the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 63–82; Bradley J. Nicholson, “Legal Borrowing and the Origins of Slave Law in the British Colonies,” American Journal of Legal History 38, no. 1 (January 1994): 38–54; Thomas Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619– 1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 37–59. 19.  1 Edward VI, c. 3. 20.  Susan Dwyer Amussen, “‘Being Stirred to Much Unquietness’: Violence and Domestic Violence in Early Modern England,” Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 70–89 and Idem, “Punishment, Discipline, and Power: The Social Meanings of Violence in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 34, no. 1 (January 1995): 1–34; Violence, Politics and Gender in Early Modern England, ed. Joseph P. Ward (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 21.  On English householders’ proprietary claims to dependent labor power, see Robert Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870, new ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 15–26. 22.  1 Edward VI, c. 3. 23.  Peter Salway, Roman Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 114– 124; Sandra R. Joshel, Slavery in the Roman World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 48–75. 24.  Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968 [1961]); M. M. Postan, Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain, 1100–1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013 [1974]); Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Notes to Pages 64–66

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25.  In locating the transition to capitalism in the fifteenth-­and sixteenth-­century English countryside, I draw from the mid-­twentieth-­century debates among British Marxist historians, and the subsequent “Brenner debate” of the 1970s–1980s. The critical texts in these debates are The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, ed. Rodney Hilton(London: New Left Books, 1976); T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-­Industrial Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For an excellent and accessible summary and reappraisal of these debates, see Wood, Origin of Capitalism, Part I. 26.  Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Penguin Books, 1990 [1867]), 1: 896, 898 n2. See also, Nikhil Pal Singh, “On Race, Violence, and So-­ Called Primitive Accumulation,” Social Text 34, no. 3 (September 2016): 27–50. 27.  C. S. L. Davies, “Slavery and Protector Somerset: The Vagrancy Act of 1547,” Economic History Review 19, no. 3 (December 1966): 533–549, quote at 548. 28.  In locating “class” struggle in this period, see James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle and the English Revolution (New York: Verso, 2000). 29.  Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (New York: Verso, 1988), 36–41. 30.  John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, (London: 1721), 2: 461–481. 31.  Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 34–66; Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 30–68. 32.  On multiple meanings of property in early modern Europe, see Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (New York: Routledge, 1996). 33. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (New York: Verso, 1979); Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 3–48, 110–161. 34. Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labor, chapters 2–4; Tomlins, Freedom Bound, esp. 231–295. 35.  Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England: 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); Amussen, Ordered Society, 39–50; Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 40–48. 36.  Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-­American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Amussen, Ordered Society, 38–41; Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 48–50. 37.  5 Elizabeth I, c. 4. 38.  Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (London, 1618), 59–65. 39.  James VI, The True Lawe of Free Monarchies: or the Reciprock and Mutuall Dutie Betwixt a free King, and his naturall Subjects (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1598), [unpaginated].

192

Notes to Pages 67–69

40. Robert Filmer, Patriarcha: Or the Natural Power of Kings (London: Walter Davis, 1680), 24, 38, 78. 41. Amussen, Ordered Society, 56–66, Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 27–28, 149– 158. Literary scholar James Holstun has termed this tendency “associative communitarianism” in his Ehud’s Dagger, 1–9 and passim. 42.  Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 184–192. 43.  Henry Parker, Jus Populi, or, A Discourse Wherein clear satisfaction is given, as well concerning the Rights of Subjects, as the Right of Princes (London: Robert Bostock, 1644), 36–42. 44.  Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1991 [1972]); Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–1649 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976); Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (New York: Verso, 2003 [1993]); Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger. For competing overviews of the historiography, see J. C. D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); G. E. Aylmer, Rebellion or Revolution? England, 1640–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, 9–140. 45.  For a similar strategy of sub-­regional analysis, see Coombs, “Phases of Conversion”; Lorena Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 46. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 138. Hereinafter cited as Morgan, ASAF. 47.  Abstracts of the Wills and Administrations of Northampton County, Virginia, 1632–1802, ed. James Handley Marshall, 2nd revised ed. (Camden, ME: Picton Publishing, 2001), 15, 39, 41, 43, and passim. 48. James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-­ Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 154. 49.  Alan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 100; Coombs, “Phases of Transition,” 335–336; Walsh, Motives, 137, 189. 50. Morgan, ASAF, 137–141. 51.  Abstracts, ed. Marshall, 8 and passim. 52.  For statistics on local consumption and export of foodstuffs, see Walsh, Motives, 57–58, 232, 272, 332–334. 53. Walsh, Motives, 103–104, 145–146; David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 183–194.

Notes to Pages 69–72

193

54.  James L. Huston, The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015). 55. Morgan, ASAF, 138–139. 56.  T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 57. Walsh, Motives, ch. 1. 58. Morgan, ASAF, 395–432; Horn, Adapting, 151–154; Walsh, Motives, 111–112, 141–142, 368–369. 59.  Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 75–105. 60. Holly Brewer, “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia: ‘Ancient Feudal Restraints’ and Revolutionary Reform,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 2 (April 1997): 307–346. 61.  Martha W. McCartney, Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers, 1607–1635: A Biographical Dictionary (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing, 2007), 70–71, 348, 401, 511, 583. 62.  General Court Minutes for 10 October 1624 in Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 1622–1632, 1670–1676, with Notes and Excerpts from Original Council and General Court Records, into 1683, now lost, ed. H. R. McIlwaine (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1924), 23–25. 63.  Ibid., 24. 64.  Kevin Butterfield, “Puritans and Religious Strife in the Early Chesapeake,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 109, no. 1 (2001): 5–36; Rebecca Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 120–121; Horn, Adapting, 54–58; Morgan, ASAF, 149–151. 65. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 99–101, 141–143, 181–187, 593–594. 66. Horn, Adapting, 166–169. 67.  Charles Fleming McIntosh, Brief Abstract of Lower Norfolk County and Norfolk County Wills, 1635–1710 (Norfolk, VA: Colonial Dames of America, 1914), 17. 68. McIntosh, Lower Norfolk County Wills, 5, 6, 15, 16, and passim. On modes of property distribution and early settlement in New England, see David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 232–235. 69. Horn, Adapting, 168. 70. McIntosh, Norfolk County Wills, 1–25. 71. Horn, Adapting, 168–169. 72. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 334. 73.  The Records of the Virginia Company of London, ed. Susan Myra Kingsbury, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1906), 2: 128–131.

194

Notes to Pages 73–77

74.  David Whitford, “A Calvinist Heritage to the ‘Curse of Ham’: Assessing the Accuracy of a Claim about Racial Subordination,” Church History and Religious Culture 90, no. 1 (2010): 25–45. 75.  Cornelia Hughes Dayton, “Was There a Calvinist Type of Patriarchy?: New Haven Colony Reconsidered in the Early Modern Context,” in The Many Legalities of Early America, ed. Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 337–356. 76.  Conquest and Sibsey also had familial connections—Conquest was married to Sibsey’s daughter, Mary, and would receive a substantial bequest in Sibsey’s 1652 will— further illustrating the importance of marriage alliances in the socio-­political order of colonial Virginia. McIntosh, Lower Norfolk County Wills, 9. 77.  Lower Norfolk County Virginia Antiquary, ed. Edward W. James (Baltimore, MD: Friedenwald Co., 1897), 14–15. 78.  Ibid., 84–85. 79. Marshall, Abstracts, 18. 80.  Ibid., 32. 81.  Quoted in Morgan, ASAF, 154, n69. 82.  Virginia Will Records: From the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the William and Mary College Quarterly, and Tyler’s Quarterly, ed. Judith McGhan (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing, 1993), 790–791. 83.  Jennifer L. Morgan, “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe 22, no. 1 (March 2018): 1–17; Brown, Good Wives, 107–136. 84. Marshall, Abstracts, 38–39. 85.  Ibid., 42. 86. Marshall, Abstracts, 37. 87. Marshall, Abstracts, 17. 88. Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no 4 (November 2007): 659–692. 89. Marshall, Abstracts, 42. 90.  Breen and Innes, Myne Owne Ground, passim. 91. Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 21–96. 92. “Historical and Genealogical Notes,” William and Mary Quarterly 9, no. 4 (April, 1901): 268–272; Adventurers of Purse and Person, ed. John Frederick Dorman, 4th ed. (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2007), 797–800. 93.  John Thornton and Linda Heywood, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 246–247. 94. McIlwaine, Minutes, 466–467. 95. “Historical and Genealogical Notes,” William and Mary Quarterly 9, no. 4 (April, 1901): 268–272. 96.  A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race & the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 27; Anthony

Notes to Pages 77–82

195

Parent, Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 110. 97. McIlwaine, Minutes, 467. 98. McIlwaine, Minutes, 466. 99. Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012 [1968]), 75; Higginbotham, Matter of Color, 28–29; Parent, Foul Means, 109–110. 100. Bernard Rosenthal, “Puritan Conscience and New England Slavery,” New England Quarterly 46, no. 1 (March 1973): 62–81; Heather Miyano Kopelson, Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (New York: New York University Press, 2014), esp. 74–100. 101.  See Morgan, ASAF, 155–156. 102.  See also the case of Robert Sweat in McIlwaine, Minutes, 477; Higginbotham, Matter of Color, 23–24; Parent, Foul Means, 109. 103. Higginbotham, Matter of Color, 24–26; Parent, Foul Means, 110; Brown, Good Wives, 131. 104. McIlwaine, Minutes, 477. 105. Ibid. 106. Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia. 107. McIlwaine, Minutes, 477. 108. Morgan, ASAF, stresses the significance of Bacon’s Rebellion; Parent, Foul Means emphasizes the codification of slavery; and see Coombs, “Phases of Conversion,” on access to Atlantic slaving. 109.  Butterfield, “Puritans and Religious Strife”; Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 115–120 and passim. 110. Brown, Good Wives, 131–135. 111. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery, 1–4; Brown, Good Wives, 132; Warren M. Billings, “The Cases of Ferdinando and Elizabeth Key: A Note on the Status of Blacks in Seventeenth-­Century Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 1, no. 3 (July 1973): 467–474. 112.  Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). 113.  The Statutes at Large; being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619, ed. William Waller Hening, 13 vols. (New York: R. & W. & G. Bartow, 1823), I: 529–534. 114. Parent, Foul Means, 29. 115.  William Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 116.  Coombs, “Phases of Transition.” 117. For example, Holly Brewer, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery,” American Historical Review, 122, no. 4 (October 2017): 1038–1078.

196

Notes to Pages 82–89

118. Morgan, ASAF, 310–315; Higginbotham, Matter of Color, 32–57; Parent, Foul Means, 105–134; Brown, Good Wives, 108–136. 119.  See Brewer, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood.’ ” 120.  Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016); Jared Ross Hardesty, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-­Century Boston (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 121. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery; Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

Chapter 5 1.  Autos sobre los bienes de Francisco Carreño, mulato libre, natural de la isla de Gran Canaria, hijo de Santos de Valverde y de Francisca Herín, que estuvo al servicio de Hernando de Herrera, en cuya casa de México falleció, Archivo General de Indias (henceforth, AGI) Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5. 2.  Antonio García de León. Tierra adentro, mar en fuera: El puerto de Veracruz y su litoral a Sotavento, 1519–1821 (México: CONACULTA, 2011). 3.  Selected scholarship on Black life in Veracruz, Xalapa, and Puebla de los Ángeles: Patrick J. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991); Adriana Naveda Chávez-­Hita, “De San Lorenzo de los negros a los morenos de Amapa: Cimarrones veracruzanos, 1609–1735,” in Rutas de la esclavitud en Africa y América Latina, ed. Rina Cáceres Gómez (San José: Universidad de Costa Rica, 2001), 157–176; J. M. H. Clark, “Environment and the Politics of Relocation in the Caribbean Port of Veracruz, 1519–1599,” in The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century, ed. Ida Altman and David Wheat (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 189–210. J. M. H. Clark, Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). Citlalli Domínguez Domínguez, “Entre resistencia y colaboración: Los negros y mulatos en la sociedad colonial veracruzana, 1570–1650,” e-­Spania 25 (2016): 1–14; Nicole Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-­Mexicans (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006); Jane Landers, “Movilidad de la diáspora y comunicación entre poblaciones de origen africano en el Circuncaribe,” in Debates históricos contemporáneos: africanos y afrodescendientes en México y Centroamérica, ed. María Elisa Velásquez (Mexico: INHA, 2005), 59–83; Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, Urban Slavery in Colonial México: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531–1706 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, “The Slave Trade to Colonial Mexico: Revising from Puebla de los Ángeles,” in From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas, ed. Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020), 73–102; Danielle Terrazas Williams, “‘My Conscience Is Free and Clear’: African-­Descended Women, Status, and

Notes to Page 89

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Slave Owning in Mid-­Colonial Mexico,” Americas 75, no. 3 (2018): 525–554; Danielle Williams Terrazas, The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022). For scholarship on Black life in the Yucatan, see Matthew Restall, The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). For scholarship on Black life in Mexico City, see Nicole von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers; María Elisa Gutiérrez Velázquez, Mujeres de origen africano en la capital novohispano (México: INAH, 2006), Lourdes Mondragón Barrios, Esclavos africanos en la Ciudad de México: el servicio doméstico durante el siglo XVI (México: Ediciones Euroamericanas, 1999), Tatiana Seijas and Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, “The Persistence of the Slave Market in Seventeenth-­ Century Central México,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-­Slave Studies 37, no. 2 (2016), 307–333. Recent work on Black life in Mexico City through Inquisition sources has also led to an increased focus on the geographical itinerancy of free Black men and women, especially between Castile and New Spain. See especially, Herman L. Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-­Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009) and Robert C. Schwaller, Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico: Defining Racial Difference (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). Finally, for an important study on African cattle herders that eschews site-­specific analyses, see Andrew Sluyter, Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). See also: Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial México: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-­Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Nicole von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-­Mexicans (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006); Norah L. A. Gharala  Taxing Blackness: Free Afromexican Tribute in Bourbon New Spain (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019); Cynthia Milton and Ben Vinson III, “Counting Heads: Race and Non-­Native Tribute Policy in Colonial Spanish America,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 3, no. 3 (2002); Ramón Alejandro Montoya, El esclavo africano en San Luis Potosí durante los siglos xvii y xviii (San Luis de Posoti: Universidad Autonoma de San Luis de Potosi, 2016). María Elisa Velázquez Gutiérrez and Ethel Correa Duró, eds., Poblaciónes y culturas de origen africano en México (México: INAH, 2005); Ben Vinson III, Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial México (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). For scholarship on Black life in Cuba and Isla Española, see David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Alejandro de la Fuente, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Juan José Ponce Vázquez, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Pablo M. Sierra Silva, “Afro-­Mexican Women in Saint-­Domingue: Piracy, Captivity and Community in the 1680s and 1690s,”  Hispanic American Historical Review 100, no. 1 (Feb. 2020): 3–34.

198

Notes to Pages 89–91

4.  J. M. H. Clark, “Environment and the Politics of Relocation in the Caribbean Port of Veracruz, 1519–1599,” in The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century, ed. Ida Altman and David Wheat (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 189–210. 5.  García de León, Tierra adentro, mar en fuera, 536–575. 6. Domínguez Domínguez, “Entre resistencia y colaboración”; García de León, Tierra adentro, mar en fuera. 7.  García de León, Tierra adentro, mar en fuera. For slave-­for-­hire practices in New Spain, see Terrazas Williams, “‘My Conscience Is Free and Clear.’ ” For slave-­for-­hire practices across the Iberian Atlantic World, see The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, ed. Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 8.  García de León, Tierra adentro, mar en fuera, 536–575. 9.  J. M. H. Clark, “Environment and the Politics of Relocation in the Caribbean Port of Veracruz”; Tatiana Seijas and Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, “The Persistence of the Slave Market in Seventeenth-­Century Central Mexico”: 3; Sierra Silva, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico. 10.  Autos sobre bienes de difuntos: Antonio Sigarra. negro, difunto en Veracruz, AGI Contratación, 303, n. 2, fols. 20v–20r; Trial of Juana Gutiérrez Jalapa, Year 1653, Volume 36, 1650–1684, Huntington Library (henceforth, HL), HM 35130. 11.  García de León, Tierra adentro, mar en fuera, 468. 12.  Jane G. Landers, “Cimarrón and Citizen: African Ethnicity, Corporate Identity, and the Evolution of Free Black Towns in the Spanish Circum-­Caribbean,” in Slaves, subjects, and subversives: Blacks in colonial Latin America, ed. Jane G. Landers and Barry  M. Robinson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 111–145; Naveda Chavez-­Hita, “De San Lorenzo de los negros a los morenos de Amapa,” 157– 174; García de León, Tierra adentro, mar en fuera, 555–563. 13.  Proceso contra Inés de Villalobos, mulata, mujer de Bartólome García, por hechicerias. (contiene: una pintura a la aguada de Santa Marta y una bolsa de tafetan de seda), Veracruz, Archivo General de la Nación de México (henceforth, AGN Mexico), GD61 Inquisición vol. 206, exp. 9; Proceso contra Ana de Herrera, mulata, por hechicera (tormento), Veracruz, AGN Mexico GD61 Inquisición, vol. 207, exp. 1. 14.  Trial of Juana Gutiérrez Jalapa, Year 1653, Volume 36, 1650–1684, HL, HM 35130, Discurso de vida, sin foliación; all further quotations in this paragraph are from this source. 15.  Juan Martín de Abreo[Abreu], vecino de Jalapa, dio carta de libertad a su esclavo negro nombrado Francisco Camacho, natural de la isla de La Palma, en Las Canarias, de más de 50 años de edad, por haberle servido con fidelidad y mucho amor, y porque le prometió que para de la fecha de esta escritura en cinco meses, le dará cien pesos de oro común,Unidad de Servicios Bibliotecarios y de Información, Jalapa (henceforth USBI, Xalapa), Protocolos Notariales, Xalapa, Nov. 7, 1641, Año del protocolo: 1632 al 1645, n. 6, fols. 210vta.–211, Clave del acta: 27_1632_3297.

Notes to Pages 91–93

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16.  Francisco Camacho y Juana de la Cruz, su legítima mujer, morenos libres, vecinos de Jalapa, se obligaron a pagar a Juan Martín de Abreo[Abreu], vecino de este pueblo, cien pesos de oro común que son procedidos de la libertad del dicho Francisco Camacho, para el día 7 de abril de 1642, con las costas de cobranza, USBI Xalapa, Protocolos Notariales, Xalapa, 7 Nov. 1641, Año del protocolo: 1632 al 1645, no. 6, fols. 211vta.-­212vta, Clave del acta: 27_1632_3298; Juan Martín de Abreo[Abreu], vecino de Jalapa, dio carta de libertad a su esclavo negro, USBI Xalapa, Protocolos Notariales, Xalapa, 7 Nov. 1641, Año del protocolo: 1632 al 1645, n. 6, fols. 210vta.-­211, Clave del acta: 27_1632_3297. 17.  Francisco Camacho, negro libre natural de la Isla de la Palma en las Canarias, dio su poder cumplido a Bartolomé de Oliveros, vecino de Jalapa, para que venda un solar en dicho pueblo que linda con casas de Juana Ruiz, el cual es de su propiedad y de su esposa llamada Juana de la Cruz, negra libre, USBI Xalapa, Protocolos Notariales de Veracruz Vieja, 2 May 1658, Año del protocolo: 1645 al 1651, n 7, fols. 218–218vta, Clave del acta: 19_1645_4037. 18.  Ibid., and and: Bartolomé de Oliver, vecino de Jalapa, en nombre y con poder de Francisco Camacho y de Juana de la Cruz, su legítima mujer, negros libres, vecinos de la Antigua Veracruz, vende a Gaspar de los Reyes, vecino de este pueblo, un solar ubicado donde llaman Xallitic, por el precio de 20 pesos de oro común, USBI Xalapa, Protocolos Notariales, Jalapa, Año del protocolo: 1645 al 1651, 22 March 1658, n. 7, fols 216–217vta, Clave del acta: 27_1645_4033. 19.  Trial of Juana Gutiérrez Jalapa, Year 1653, Volume 36, 1650–1684, HL, HM 35130, Discurso de vida, sin foliación. 20.  See Chloe Ireton, “‘They are Blacks of the Caste of Black Christians’: Old Christian Black Blood in the Sixteenth-­and Early Seventeenth-­Century Iberian Atlantic,” Hispanic American Historical Review 97, no. 4 (2017): 579–612. 21.  The most well-­known example of free Black men travelling to Castile from New Spain to deliver a royal petition to the Council of the Indies is Sebastian de Toral, see Restall, The Black Middle, 6–16, and: Sebastian de Toral, 1578, AGI Indiferente, 1969, libro 22, fol. 195v; Sebastian de Toral, 1578, AGI Indiferente, 2059, no. 108. 22.  A free mulata from Castille named María Gerónima testified that she owned many posadas, in: Trial of María Gerónima [de Vallejo], mulatto, for witchcraft, HL, HM 35165. A free Black woman from Cartagena named Adriana Ruíz de Cabrera who resided in Veracruz in the early seventeenth century reportedly rented out rooms in Veracruz, mentioned in: Juana Jalapa’s trial, Trial of Juana Gutiérrez Jalapa, HLSM, HM 35130, see Discurso de vida, sin foliación. A formerly enslaved Black woman named Margarita de Sossa rented out beds in Puebla de los Ángeles in the late sixteenth century, as witnesses explained that Sossa’s “trade and way of living has been and is to provide food and beds in her house to some people and she lives in the small houses,” in Margarita de Sossa, AGN Mexico, GD61, Inquisición 208, exp.3, fols. 80–82. 23.  Trial of Juana Gutiérrez Jalapa, Year 1653, Volume 36, 1650–1684, HL, HM 35130, Discurso de vida, sin foliación; all further quotations in this and next paragraph are from this source.

200

Notes to Pages 95–97

24.  For a discussion of systems of mail delivery in the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century, see Nelson Fernando González Martínez, “Comunicarse a pesar de la distancia: La instalación de los Correos Mayores y los flujos de correspondencia en el mundo hispanoamericano (1501–1640),” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [En ligne], Débats (11 décembre 2017), https://​doi​.org​/10​.4000​/nuevomundo​.71527. Nelson Fernando González Martínez, “Communicating an Empire and Its Many Worlds: Spanish American Mail, Logistics, and Postal Agents, 1492–1620,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 1 November 2021; 101 (4): 567–596. 25.  Autos sobre bienes de difuntos: Antonio Sigarra, negro, difunto en Veracruz, AGI Contratación, 303, no. 2, fols. 10r, 18v–20v; Proceso contra Cristobal de Castroverde, mulato, natural de Sevilla, por bígamo. México, AGN Mexico, GD61 Inquisición, vol. 310, exp. 7, testimonio, 32v (549v); Trial of María Gerónima [de Vallejo], mulatto, for witchcraft, HL, HM 35165, declaración de genealogía fol. 34. 26.  Proceso contra Cristobal de Castroverde AGN Mexico, GD61 Inquisición, vol. 310, exp. 7, fols. 30v (547v), 31 (548); Proceso contra Antonio de Arenas, mulato portugués, por casado dos veces. Mexico, AGN Mexico, GD61 Inquisición, vol. 107, exp. 4, fol. 209v. 27. Proceso contra Cristobal de Castroverde, AGN Mexico, GD61 Inquisición, vol. 310, exp. 7, discursos de vida, fols. 32 (549)–32v ((549v). 28. Proceso contra Cristobal de Castroverde, AGN Mexico, GD61 Inquisición, vol. 310, exp. 7, fs. 53. 29.  Proceso contra Antonio de Arenas, mulato portugues, por casado dos veces. Mexico, AGN Mexico, GD61 Inquisición, vol. 107, exp. 4, fs. 38. fojas 187. The following description is a reconstruction from Arenas’ Discurso de Vida. Arenas’ case is also discussed in Schwaller, Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico. 30.  Proceso contra Antonio de Arenas, mulato portugués, por casado dos veces. Mexico, AGN Mexico, GD61 Inquisición, vol. 107, exp. 4, fols. 189r–189v. 31.  Proceso contra Antonio de Arenas, mulato portugués, por casado dos veces. Mexico, AGN Mexico, GD61 Inquisición, vol. 107, exp. 4, fols. 191–193. 32.  Proceso contra Antonio de Arenas, mulato portugués, por casado dos veces. Mexico, AGN Mexico, GD61 Inquisición, vol. 107, exp. 4, fols. 205–11. 33.  Proceso contra Antonio de Arenas, mulato portugués, por casado dos veces. Mexico, AGN Mexico, GD61 Inquisición, vol. 107, exp. 4, fol. 206v. 34.  Proceso contra Antonio de Arenas, mulato portugués, por casado dos veces. Mexico, AGN Mexico, GD61 Inquisición, vol. 107, exp. 4, fols. 207–209v. 35.  Proceso contra Antonio de Arenas, mulato portugués, por casado dos veces. Mexico, AGN Mexico, GD61 Inquisición, vol. 107, exp. 4, fol. 209v. 36.  Proceso contra Antonio de Arenas, mulato portugués, por casado dos veces. Mexico, AGN Mexico, GD61 Inquisición, vol. 107, exp. 4, fol. 209v. 37.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 12v, 21v.

Notes to Pages 97–99

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38.  Diego de Salazar, dueño de la Venta de Lencero, dijo que Francisco Carreño, maestro de azúcar del ingenio de Francisco Hernández de la Higuera, le prestó 200 pesos de oro común y como garantía de pago le dejó empeñada una esclava negra llamada Isabel, y asimismo, se obligó a pagar el adeudo para fines de junio de 1602, USBI Xalapa, Protocolos Notariales Xalapa, Año del protocolo: 1600 al 1608, March 28, 1602, n. 3, fols. 223–223vta, Clave del acta: 27_1600_1353. 39.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fol. 12v. 40.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 19r–24r. 41.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 26–32. 42.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 19r–24r; all further quotations in this paragraph are from this source. 43.  Selected examples of scholarship on racial categories in New Spain: María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Race and Blood in the Iberian World, ed. Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg (Zurich: LIT Verlag, 2012); Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, “La trampa de las castas,” in La sociedad novohispana: Estereotipos y realidades, ed. Solange Alberro and Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2013), 17–191; El peso de la sangre: Limpios, Mestizos y Nobles en el mundo Hispánico, ed. Nikolaus Bottcher, Bernd Hausberger, and Max S. Hering Torres (México City: El Colegio de México, 2011); Daniel Nemser, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017); Milton and Vinson, III, “Counting Heads”; Vinson, III, Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico; Ursula Camba Ludlow, Imaginarios ambiguos, realidades contradictorias: Conductas y representaciones de los negros y mulatos novohispanos, siglos XVI–XVII (México: El Colegio de México, 2008). 44.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 19r–24r. 45. Gharala, Taxing Blackness. Milton and Vinson, “Counting Heads.” 46.  Real Cédula a los virreyes, presidentes y oidores de las Audiencias y gobernadores de Indias mandándoles que cobren tributo anual, proporcionando a sus habares, a los negros y negras, mulatos y mulatas libres que haya en el territorio de su jurisdicción, 1574, AGI, Indiferente 427, libro 30, fols. 248r–249r. 47.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 19r–24r. 48.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 19r–24r. 49.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 19r–24r.

202

Notes to Pages 99–102

50.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 19r–24r. 51.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 19r–24r. 52.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fol. 5v. 53.  USBI Xalapa, Protocolos Notariales Xalapa, Año del protocolo: 1600 al 1608, March 28, 1602, n. 3, fols. 223–223vta, Clave del acta: 27_1600_1353. 54.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 19r–24r. 55.  USBI Xalapa, Protocolos Notariales Xalapa, Año del protocolo: 1600 al 1608, March 28, 1602, n. 3, fols. 223–223vta, Clave del acta: 27_1600_1353. 56.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 19r–24r. 57.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 19r–24r. 58.  Another person who had also been born in the Canary Islands and who also lived in Malinalco testified to having met Carreño in the the island of Gran Canaria and in Malinalco, New Spain, and provided information about Carreño’s family, see Autos sobre los bienes de Francisco Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 11r–11v. 59.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 1–15. 60.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 1–15. 61.  Scholars who have explored bienes de difuntos collections in detail include: Amelia Almorza Hidalgo, No se hace pueblo sin ellas: mujeres españolas en el Virreinato del Perú: emigración y movilidad social (siglos XVI–XVII) (Madrid: CSIC and Diputación de Sevilla,  2018); Carlos Alberto González Sánchez, Dineros de ventura. La vana fortuna de la emigración a Indias (siglos XVI-­XVII) (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1995); Jane E Mangan, Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-­Era Peru and Spain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Delphine Tempère, Vivre et mourir sur les navires du Siècle d´Or (Paris, Presses de l´Université Paris-­Sorbonne, 2009). 62.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 24–24v. 63.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fol. 27. 64.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 26–32. 65.  Autos sobre los bienes de  Francisco  Carreño, AGI Contratación, 515, no. 1, ramo 5, fols. 1–15.

Notes to Pages 104–107

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Chapter 6 1.  The National Archives (hereafter TNA), CO 1/19, No. 130, “A true & perfect Narrative by Colonell Theodore Cary, declaring the proceedings in the late expedition from this Island of Jamaica against the Dutch, under the management of Lt. General Edward Morgan until his death, and afterward by Colonell Theodore Cary,” Jamaica, November 1665. Wim Klooster, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-­Century Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 104–9. 2. Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2014), 44. O’Malley adapts this term from Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-­Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008). 3.  TNA, CO 1/19, No. 127, “Governor Sir Thos. Modyford to Lord Archingdale [Sec. Lord Arlington],” Jamaica, Nov, 16, 1665. 4.  TNA, CO 1/19, No. 30, “Col. Theodore Cary to Sec. Lord Arlington,” Jamaica, November 1665; TNA, CO 1/19, No. 127, “Modyford to Lord Arlington,” Jamaica, Nov. 16, 1665. News of the number of enslaved captives seized in the English raid on St. Eustatius and Saba spread throughout the Caribbean. See, for example, Jean Baptiste DuTertre, Histoire Generale de Antilles Habitées par les François (Paris, 1667), 3: 245. 5. Klooster, The Dutch Moment, 104–5; Mark G. Hanna, Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740 (Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2015), 102–15. 6. O’Malley, Final Passages, 86. 7.  Arne Bialuschewski, “Juan Gallardo: A Native American Buccaneer,” Hispanic American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (May 2020): 235. 8.  Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, “Afro-­Mexican Women in Saint-­Domingue: Piracy, Captivity, and Community in the 1680s and 1690s,” Hispanic American Historical Review 100, no. 1 (Feb. 2020): 31. 9.  Kevin Dawson, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 10.  Tessa Murphy, The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). 11.  As O’Malley argues, “In the labor-­starved Americas, exploitable workers were the next best thing to coin.” See O’Malley, Final Passages, 86. 12.  Johannes Postma, “The Dispersal of African Slaves to the West by Dutch Traders, 1630–1803,” in The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and P ­ eoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, ed. Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 283–300; Holly Brewer, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery,” American Historical Review 122, no. 4 (Oct. 2017): 1038–78.

204

Notes to Pages 107–109

13. K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (New York: Atheneum, 1970); P. Chemin-­Dupontés, Les Compagnies de Colonisation en Afrique Occidentale sous Colbert (Paris: A Challamel, 1903). 14.  Ernst van den Boogaart, Pieter Emmer, Peter Klein, and Kees Zandvliet, La Expansión Holandesa en el Atlántico, 1580–1800 (Madrid: EditorialMapfre, 1992), 155. 15.  Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Indiferente General 2536, “Decretos, consultas, expedientes, y cartas de las armadas de Barlovento: año de 1625 a 1644”; also, Kenneth R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering During the Spanish War, 1585–1603 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1966); John C. Appleby, “Jacobean Piracy: English Maritime Depredation in Transition, 1603–1625” in The Social History of English Seamen, 1485–1649, ed. Cheryl A. Fury (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), 277–300; Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998); Jean-­Pierre Moreau, Les Petites Antilles de Christophe Colomb à Richelieu (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1992). 16.  AGI, Escribanía 1033B, legajo 28, pleito del consejo numero 37, “Consejo Año de 1668.” 17.  TNA, CO 1/15, No. 37, “Col. Edward D’Oyley, Governor of Jamaica, to his kinsman, Sec. Nicholas,” Jamaica, March 1661. 18.  Voyages: The Trans-­Atlantic Slave Trade Database, accessed December 2022, https://​www​.slavevoyages​.org​/voyage​/database, Voyage #21196. 19.  “Charles II, 1660: An Act for the Encourageing and increasing of Shipping and Navigation,” in Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5, 1628–80, ed. John Raithby (s.l, 1819), pp. 246–50. British History Online http://​www​.british​-history​.ac​.uk​/statutes​-realm​/vol5​ /pp246​-250 [accessed 29 December 2022]; Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1930– 1935), 1: 153–54; TNA, SP 29/85, No. 12, “Petition of the officers and mariners late of H.M.S. Diamond,” Dec. 2, 1663. 20.  TNA, CO 1/15, No. 63, “Narrative of the buying and forfeiture of a shipload of negroes,” Jamaica, June 14, 1661; TNA, CO 140/1, 39–40, “Orders of the Governor and Council of Jamaica,” Jan. 16, 1662; TNA, CO 1/16, Nos. 30, 31, “Captain Whiting to the Officers of his Majesty’s Navy. Aboard the Diamond, Jamaica,” March 10, 1662; TNA, CO 1/17, No. 99, “Petition of Col. Godfrey Ashbey, Major John Harrington, and Capt. Tho. Gladstone to the King,” 1663; and TNA, SP 29/85, No. 12, “Petition of the officers and mariners late of H.M.S. Diamond,” Dec. 2, 1663. 21.  This chapter focuses on the period of the Second and Third Anglo-­Dutch Wars from 1665–1667 and 1672–1674, respectively. There is a robust historiography on the causes of the Second Anglo-­Dutch War, including arguments that focus on the political machinations of the Restoration Monarchy and, specifically, the anti-­Dutch stance taken by James, Duke of York. See N. A. M. Rodger, Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). An older historiography places the causes of the war strictly in mercantile competition between the Dutch and English, see Charles Wilson, Profit and Power: A Study of England and the Dutch Wars (London:

Notes to Pages 109–111

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Longmans, Green, 1957). Steve Pincus, however, argues that the war developed over political and religious controversies, Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For a discussion of the historiographical debates, see Gijs Rommelse, The Second Anglo-­Dutch War (1665–1667) Raison d’état, mercantilism, and maritime strife (Hilversum: Verloren, 2006), especially the introduction. 22.  Christian Koot, “Anglo-­Dutch Trade in the Chesapeake and the British Caribbean, 1621–1733,” in Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800: Linking Empires, Bridging Borders, ed. Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 88. 23.  Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (Gainesville: Library Press of the University of Florida, 2017), 389. 24.  W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies 1574–1739, Vol. 5 (London: Longman & Co., 1880), 281–82: “[Sir Thos. Modyford’s] Proposition of a design for rooting the Dutch out of the West Indies and increasing the settlements at Jamaica, (Feb. 1665).” 25.  Some of the enslaved laborers on the Dutch islands would have been transshipped from Curaçao after completing the transatlantic middle passage. Others would have been seized from slave ships belonging to European rivals of the Netherlands. Still others were either born in the Americas or were Indigenous peoples who entered slavery after being seized by Europeans. For more on the role of Curaçao as a transshipment point, see Postma, “The Dispersal of African Slaves,” 283–99; Koot, “Anglo-­Dutch Trade in the Chesapeake,” 88; TNA, CO 1/19, No. 130, “A true & perfect Narrative by Colonell Theodore Cary.” 26.  The English fleet consisted of nine ships when they left Jamaica, but, during the voyage, various captains decided to leave the fleet to seek plunder elsewhere. The frigates were likely around 120 tons and the snows around 20–40 tons. For estimates on tonnage based on the number of guns onboard, see R. Baetens, “The Organization and Effects of Flemish Privateering in the Seventeenth Century,” in Naval History, 1500– 1680, ed. Jan Glete (New York: Ashgate, 2005), 48–75. 27.  TNA, CO 1/19, No. 130, “A true & perfect Narrative by Colonell Theodore Cary.” 28.  TNA, CO 1/19, No. 127, “Governor Sir Thos. Modyford to Lord Archingdale [Sec. Lord Arlington],” Jamaica, Nov. 16, 1665. 29.  TNA, CO 1/19, No. 112, “Governor Will. Watt to St. Christopher’s,” Oct. 18, 1665. 30.  TNA, CO 1/19, No. 130, “A true & perfect Narrative by Colonell Theodore Cary.” 31.  Copies of the treaty can be found at the British Library, Egerton MS 2395, “Articles agreed upon by Capt. Warner, Mr Desnambucq, and Mr. Roisy to be maintained according to ye Commands they have from the Kings of France and England by virtue of their Commissions, 13 May 1627” and the Archive National d’Outre Mer (hereafter, ANOM), F3 52 Colonies. 32.  ANOM, C7 A1 folio 26, “Correspondence de Du Lion, governeur en la provence de la Guadeloupe,” April 8, 1665.

206

Notes to Pages 111–114

33.  TNA, CO 1/18, No. 104, “Petition of the Council of St. Kitts to Lord Willoughby,” Sept. 20, 1664. 34.  ANOM, C8, “Correspondence de Prouville de Tracy,” July 1, 1664; Klooster, The Dutch Moment, 172; and Philip P. Boucher, France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008): 155. 35.  TNA, CO 1/29, No. 71, “An answer to the inquiries of his Majesty,” Dec. 9, 1671; TNA, CO 153/1, No. 63, “Report from Secretary Benjamin Worsley,” Feb. 1, 1673. 36.  TNA, CO 153/1, No. 92, “A Narrative of Lord Willougby’s Proceedings,” July 21, 1667. 37.  TNA CO 153/1, “Articles transmitted by Sir Charles Wheeler and Monsieur De Baas to their Majesties for Deteminacion,” Nov. 25, 1671, f. 116. 38.  TNA, CO 153/1, No, 63, “Memorial for Secretary Benjamin Worsley to the Council for Trade and Plantations,” Feb. 1, 1673. 39.  One of the earliest censuses that I have found for the English Leeward Islands comes from Charles Wheeler in 1672. See TNA, CO 153/2, No. 41, “A particular account of the Leeward Islands,” July 17, 1672. 40.  Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972): 311–13; Jenny Shaw discusses the 1678 census of the Leeward Island conducted by William Stapleton at the request of Lords of Trade and Plantations. See Jenny Shaw, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), chapter 2. 41.  “Treaty of Peace between Great Britain and France, concluded at Breda, July 21/31, 1667. Ratifications exchanged, August 14/24, 1667,” in European Treaties Bearing on the History of the States and Its Dependencies, ed. Frances Gardiner Davenport (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1920), 140. Emphasis my own. 42.  TNA, CO 1/30, “Report of Dr. Worsley to the Council for Plantations,” Feb. 25, 1673. 43.  ANOM, F3 53, “Memoire de le qui s’est passé eu l’affaire de St. Christophe, Sur la Restitution de la Partie del Anglois,” 1669; TNA, CO 153/1, No. 93, “Letter from de la Barre to Lord Willoughby,” May 8, 1668. 44.  TNA, CO 153/2, No. 15, “Letter from Charles Wheeler to Robert Southwell,” Sept. 2, 1675. 45.  TNA, CO 153/2, No. 15, “Letter from Charles Wheeler to Robert Southwell,” Sept. 2, 1675. 46.  TNA, CO 153/2, No. 15, “Letter from Charles Wheeler to Robert Southwell,” Sept. 2, 1675. 47.  TNA, CO 153/1, Nos. 53–62, “An account given by Sir Charles Wheeler late Governor of the Leeward Islands to the Council for Trade and Plantations,” Dec. 7 and 10, 1672; ANOM, F3 53, “Lettre du Charles II,” May 1670. 48.  TNA, CO 153/1, No. 71, “To the Right honorable Council for Trade & Foreign Plantations,” Feb. 25, 1671; ANOM, F3 53, July 15, 1670.

Notes to Pages 114–120

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49. Dawson, Undercurrents of Power. 50.  TNA, CO 1/31, No. 52; CO 389/5, Nos. 184–88, Nevis, July 23, 1674; Karin Jekabson-­Lemanis, “Balts in the Caribbean: The Duchy of Courland’s Attempts to Colonize Tobago Island, 1638 to 1654,” Caribbean Quarterly 46, no. 2 (June 2000): 25–44. 51.  TNA, CO 1/31, No. 52; CO 389/5, Nos. 184–88, Nevis, July 23, 1674. 52.  TNA, CO 1/31, No. 52; CO 389/5, Nos. 184–88, Nevis, July 23, 1674. 53.  David Barry Gaspar, “‘Deep in the Minds of Many’: Slave Women and Resistance in Antigua, 1632–1763,” in More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and D. C. Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

Chapter 7 1.  Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Hilary McD. Beckles, Centering Women: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston, Jamaica: James Randle Publishers, 1999), 60–72; Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 61–62; Barbara Bush, “White ‘Ladies,’ Coloured ‘Favourites,’ and Black ‘Wenches’: Some Considerations on Sex, Race, and Class in Social Relations in White Creole Society in the British Caribbean,” Slavery and Abolition 2 (1981): 245– 262. On domestic servants in Ireland, see Mary O’Dowd, A History of Women in Ireland, 1500–1800 (Edinburgh: Pearson/Longman, 2005), 91–92. 2.  These letters can be found in two places: Caribbeana: Being Miscellaneous Papers Relating to the History, Genealogy, Topography, and Antiquities of the British West Indies, ed. Vere Langford Oliver (London: Mitchell, Hughes, and Clark, 1910–1919), 1: 51–57; and Martin J. Blake, Blake Family Records, 1300 to 1700: A Chronological Catalogue with Notes, Appendices, and the Genealogies of Many Branches of the Blake Family, 2 vols. (London: Elliot Stock, 1905). The originals perished in a fire in the Irish Records office in 1922. 3.  Caribbeana, ed. Oliver, 1: 51–57. 4.  The National Archives, London (hereafter, TNA) CO1/44 no. 47 xxvi. 5.  TNA CO1/42 fol. 227. 6.  Scholars who have influenced my approach include Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives; Saidiya V. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (June, 2008): 1–14; Heather M. Kopelson, “‘One Indian and a Negroe, the first thes Ilands ever had’: Imagining the Archive in Early Bermuda,” Early American Studies 11 (2013), 275–278; Laura T. Keenan, “Reconstructing Rachel: A Case of Infanticide in the Eighteenth-­Century Mid-­Atlantic and the Vagaries of Historical Research,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 80 (2006): 361–385; Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-­Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), esp. 1–4; Herman Bennett, “The Subject in the Plot: National Boundaries and the

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‘History’ of the Black Atlantic,” African Studies Review 43, no. 1, Special Issue on the Diaspora (2000): 101–124; and Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 7.  Overviews of the racism/slavery debate can be found in George M. Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) and David Brion Davis’s introduction (as well as the other essays) in the 1997 William and Mary Quarterly special edition, “Constructing Race,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (January 1997). Classics include David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca. NY: Cornell University Press, 1966); Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975); and Hilary McD. Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery, 1627–1715 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989). In the 1990s, Kathleen Brown’s field-­changing Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) reframed the question by employing a gendered analysis. Work emphasizing religious influences on the development of racism includes Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Heather M. Kopelson, Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (New York: New York University Press, 2014); and Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). On English conceptions of race, see Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). For studies that interrogate the connections between race, slavery, and identity from African perspectives, see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 8.  Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1627–1713, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 188–189. 9.  Russell Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 39–41; Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 129–125. 10.  Enslaved Africans outnumbered Europeans four-­to-­one by 1680, their number doubling from a roughly equal number of black and white inhabitants in 1660. TNA, CO1/44 no. 47, fols. 142–379; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 75–76.

Notes to Pages 120–121

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11.  Jennifer Morgan centered reproduction as a key element in inscribing race in Laboring Women. Her most recent work—Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021)— develops this line of thought, tying black women’s bodies to the rise of capitalism. Rana A. Hogarth also concentrates on the embodied nature of racial inscription in Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 12. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 1; Morgan, Laboring Women. 13. “Gaelic Irish” were understood to be descended from the island’s original inhabitants. “Old English” were the descendants of Anglo-­Norman settlers who were believed to have been corrupted through their intermarriage with Gaelic Irish clans. “New English” denoted those English who had arrived between the Elizabethan conquests of the 1580s and the Cromwellian era. By the time of the Restoration, the categories “Gaelic Irish” and “Old English” had been conflated in English minds to one category, Irish Catholics. See Jane H. Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English: The Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); and Nicholas P. Canny, Making Ireland British (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). The Blakes were “Old English” who lost their ancestral lands when Cromwell confiscated their holdings in Galway. Jenny Shaw, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 163. 14. Shaw, Everyday Life; Natalie A. Zacek, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Canny, Making Ireland British; Donald Harman Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630– 1730 (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1997); Hilary McD. Beckles, “‘A Riotous and Unruly Lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644–1713,” William and Mary Quarterly 47 (1990): 503–22; Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly 30 (1973), 575–98. 15. Shaw, Everyday Life, 163–167; Morgan, Laboring Women, 148; Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery, 139; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 108. Natalie A. Zacek uses the dialogue to explore hierarchies within the Irish colonial community. See Zacek, Settler Society, 86. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815, ed. Hannah Akenson, Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) focus on what they refer to respectively as the “moral or immoral universe” and “ménage a trois” elements of the story. See Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World, 69–70. Also, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Caanan, ed. Akenson et al., 126. 16.  Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 57; O’Dowd, A History of Women in Ireland, 91–92; Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 86; Beckles, Centering Women, 61–62.

210

Notes to Pages 121–126

17. Shaw, Everyday Life, 2; Michael J. Monahan, The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 75–76. 18.  Terri L. Snyder, “Refiguring Women in Early American History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 69 (2012): 421–450; Karin Wulf, “Women and Families in Early (North) America and the Wider (Atlantic) World,” History Compass 8 no. 3 (2010): 238–247. 19. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 59–67. 20.  Great Newes from the Barbadoes . . . (London: Printed for L. Curtis in Goat-­ Court upon Ludgate-­Hill , 1676), 9 (emphasis in original). On Coromantees, see John K. Thornton, “War, the State, and Religious Norms in Coromantee Thought,” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 181–200. Jerome S. Handler discusses the revolt in full in “Slave Revolts and Conspiracies in Seventeenth-­Century Barbados,” Nieuwe West-­Indische Gids 56 (1982): 5–42. On Anna’s role, see Morgan, Laboring Women, 175–76; Block, Ordinary Lives, 175–78; and Shaw, Everyday Life, 137–40. 21.  Governor Jonathan Atkins reported back to London about both the revolt and the hurricane. TNA CO 1/35 no. 29, Oct. 3–13, 1675. 22.  Barbados Department of Archives (BDA), RB3/16 fols. 297–298, May 13, 1691. 23.  BDA, RB3/7 fols. 487–489, Oct. 29, 1674. 24. Norton, Founding Mothers, 57, 95; Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 86–87; Zacek, Settler Society, 169–173. 25.  Caribbeana, ed. Oliver, 1: 51–52, Montserrat, July 22, 1673. 26.  For Irish imports/exports see John D. Rockefeller Library, Colonial Williamsburg, “Colonial Port Commodity Import and Export Records,” M-­1892.5, 1680–1692. 27.  Montserrat had more available land in part because some planters who had sided with the French in a recent war lost their estates. See Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World, 69. 28. Norton, Founding Mothers, 10, 29–30, 57, 77. 29. Canny, Making Ireland British, 412–414, 456, 553. 30.  Caribbeana, ed. Oliver, family tree, 1: 53–54; O’Dowd, A History of Women in Ireland, 14–15; Huntington Library (HL), BL 364, 15 Apr. 1681. 31. Norton, Founding Mothers, 95, 122. Norton notes that peers from outside the family rarely intervened in matters of sexual misconduct when they remined confined within a household. 32.  Caribbeana, ed. Oliver, 1: 55–56, Barbados, Nov. 1, 1675. 33.  Ibid., 1: 56, Montserrat, May 11, 1676. 34. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 250–252. 35. O’Dowd, A History of Women in Ireland, 92–93. 36. Shaw, Everyday Life; Akenson, If the Irish Ran the World. 37.  I thank Nicole Eustace for suggesting this possibility. Norton, Founding Mothers, 57. 38. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 108. 39.  Caribbeana, ed. Oliver, 1: 55, Montserrat, May 29, 1675.

Notes to Pages 126–128

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40. Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter ­ riting in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, W 2005). 41. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 101. 42.  Emphasis mine. 43.  Caribbeana, ed. Oliver, 1: 55, Montserrat, May 29, 1675. “Quality” in this context means character, and the brothers’ questions suggest the woman lacked virtue. 44. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 87–88. Between 15,000 and 25,000 Irish were transported to the Caribbean and Virginia during the Cromwellian era. See William J. Smyth, Map-­Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c. 1530–1750 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2006), 160. 45.  Jerrold Casway, “Irish Women Overseas, 1500–1800,” in Women in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 125–127; Cecily Forde-­Jones, “Mapping Racial Boundaries: Gender, Race, and Poor Relief in Barbados Plantation Society,” Journal of Women’s History 10 (1998), 13; Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges, 228. 46. Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges, 126. 47.  Henry Whistler, Journal of the West Indies Expedition, in The Narrative of General Venables, with an appendix of papers relating to the West Indies and the conquest of Jamaica, 1654–1655, ed. C. H. Firth (London: Longmans, Green,1900), 145–147. 48. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 76–77. See also Block, Ordinary Lives, 125; and Zacek, Settler Society, 170. 49.  “Seducement” connoted both the act of seducing someone, and an insidious temptation. 50.  “Confusion” in this case refers to John’s possible ruin or destruction. 51.  Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 89–90. 52. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Kristen Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Morgan, Laboring Women; Tiya Miles, Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-­Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), especially chapter 3; Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 78–80; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 89–90. 53.  Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Women in Barbados (Camden, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 56; Bush, Slave Women, 26. 54.  Caribbeana, ed. Oliver, 1: 55–56, Bridgetown, Barbados, Nov. 5, 1675. 55.  “vitious lesse” or “viciousless” here means “without immorality”. 56. At this time “correction” specifically meant corporal punishment or even flogging. 57. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection. 58.  For meanings of “wench” see OED, s.v. “wench,” accessed Oct. 4, 2010, http://​ dictionary​.oed​.com​.libdata​.lib​.ua​.edu.

212

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59.  Caribbeana, ed. Oliver, 1: 55–56, Bridgetown, Barbados, Nov. 5, 1675. 60.  Barbara Bush, “White ‘Ladies’,” 246; Block, Rape; Terri L. Snyder, “Sexual Consent and Sexual Coercion in Seventeenth-­Century Virginia,” in Sex Without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America, ed. Merrill D. Smith (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 46–60; Jenny Shaw, “In the Name of the Mother: The Story of Susannah Mingo, a Woman of Color in the Early English Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 77, no. 2 (April 2020): 177–210. 61. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 331. 62. Norton, Founding Mothers, 29. 63.  Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London: Faber & Faber, 2008); Jane H. Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Political Career of Randall MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 64.  Cecily Jones, Engendering Whiteness: White Women and Colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 82. 65.  Caribbeana, ed. Oliver, 1: 55, Montserrat, May 29, 1675. 66. Morgan, Laboring Women, 148; Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges, 88–89. 67.  Caribbeana, ed. Oliver, 1: 55–56, Bridgetown, Barbados, Nov. 5, 1675. 68.  Trans-­Atlantic Slave Trade Database (accessed Feb. 20, 2012), http://​slavevoyages​.org​/tast​/database​/search​.faces​?yearFrom​=​1675​&​yearTo​=​1676. 69.  Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 163–164; Morgan, Laboring Women, 51. 70. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 77–80, 104–109; Jennifer L. Morgan, “Accounting for ‘The most Excruciating Torment’: Trans-­Atlantic Passages,” History of the Present 6 (2016): 184–207; Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 136–152; Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), 17–19, 241–243, 289–291; Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016). 71.  On the Irish use of Gaelic, see Shaw, Everyday Life, 145–146; and Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 291–292. 72. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 49. 73.  Caribbeana, ed. Oliver, 1: 55–56, Bridgetown, Barbados, Nov. 5, 1675. Michelle A. McKinley, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), introduction. 74.  Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 66. 75.  Carol Barash, “The Character of Difference: The Creole Woman as Cultural Mediator in Narratives about Jamaica,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 23 (1990), 413. 76.  Jones, “Mapping Racial Boundaries,” 13; Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges, 148.

Notes to Pages 132–134

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77. Brown, Foul Bodies, 110; Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France Since the Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 59–61. 78. Brown, Foul Bodies, 32. 79.  For European impressions of African bathing, see Brown, Foul Bodies, 49–50. 80.  Robert W. Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 80–81; John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43–53, 231–234; John K. Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 354–356; Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 218; Jerome S. Handler, “The Middle Passage and the Material Culture of Captive Africans,” Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 1 (2009): 1–26. 81. Brown, Foul Bodies, 30–31. 82.  Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 43, 114–117. 83.  Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery, 43. Richard Ligon described the plantain drink in A True and Exact History of Barbadoes (London: Peter Parker, 1673), 32. 84. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 13–45; Pedro V. Welch, Slave Society in the City: Bridgetown, Barbados 1680–1834 (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2003); Bush, Slave Women, 48–50. 85. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 88, 107; Denise Challenger, Luther Johnson, John Bannister, and Arlene Waterman, “The Streets of Bridgetown Circa 1765,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 45 (1999): 76–87. 86. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 292; Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 13–45. 87.  Beckles suggests that while enslaved women often had to accept favors from the men who raped them, these were “offers they could not possibly reject.” Beckles, Centering Women, 22–37, quotation on 23. 88. Morgan, Laboring Women, 93–102. 89. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 89–90; Barash, “Character of Difference,” 411; McKinley, Fractional Freedoms, introduction. 90. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 102–103. 91. Jones, Engendering Whiteness, 3, 161; Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative (New York: Dover Publications, 2004), 10. For comparison with the United States, see Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Stephanie Jones-­Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

214

Notes to Pages 134–138

92.  TNA CO1/44 no. 47 xxvi. Henry returned to Ireland in 1676, having made sufficient money to purchase an estate to replace the one confiscated by Cromwell. Caribbeana, ed. Oliver, 1: 56, Montserrat, May 23, 1676. 93.  Jones, “Mapping Racial Boundaries,” 22. 94. Shaw, Everyday Life, chapter 2. 95.  Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 4. Cecily Forde-­Jones notes the applicability of Stoler’s work to Barbados in the plantation era. Jones, “Mapping Racial Boundaries,” 18. 96.  Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 97.  Snyder, “Refiguring Women in Early American History,” 445.

Chapter 8 1.  Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia. Written by Thomas Jefferson. Illustrated with a map, including the states of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania (London: John Stockdale, 1787), 229–230. 2.  There remains some confusion about the original publication date of Notes on the State of Virginia. According to Douglas Wilson, “It was first published in English in London in 1787, but it had been privately printed by Jefferson in Paris two years earlier in 1785. That edition, however, confused matters further by carrying on its title page an even earlier date, MDCCLXXXII (1782), a date that, having the appearance of a publication date, understandably found its way into many accounts.” For more, see Douglas L. Wilson, “The Evolution of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 112, no. 2 (2004): 98–133, 103. 3.  Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 13; Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181, no. 1 (May/June 1990): 95–118, 101. 4.  Cara J. Rogers, “Jefferson’s Changing Audiences: A Reevaluation of Notes on the State of Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 87 (May 2021): 171–208, 175. 5.  As historians Peter Onuf and Bruce Dain suggest, Jefferson gestured toward a Hobbesian view that the legacy of white prejudice and the injustices “Negroes” endured at the hands of whites presaged a race war should slavery end. See Peter Onuf, “‘To Declare them a Free and Independant People’: Race, Slavery, and National Identity in Jefferson’s Thought,” Journal of the Early American Republic 18 (Spring 1998):1–46; and Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 20. 6.  Spanish forces, for example, relied on enslaved Africans in their incursions into the Carolinas in 1526. See Michael Guasco, “The Fallacy of 1619: Rethinking the History of Africans in Early America,” Black Perspectives 4 (September 5, 2017): 1717–1725 .

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7.  A number of scholars have persuasively shown how racism existed before a formalized classification system for race existed in both English and Spanish experiences with non-­Europeans. See Joyce E. Chaplin, “Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian Bodies” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 54, no. 1 (January 1997): 229–252; James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (January 1997): 143–166; María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). For an excellent summary on older debates about the role of racial prejudice in steering the course of slavery and vice versa, see Alden T. Vaughan’s discussion of the works of Carl Degler, Winthrop Jordan, and Mary and Oscar Handlin in “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-­Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97, no. 3 (July 1989): 311–354. 8.  Jefferson expressed his belief in distinct Black physiology along with a number of other spurious claims about Black people’s bodies regarding odor and secretions. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 231–232. To hold this view was not just a position exclusive to slaveholders. “The big lip, and flat nose so universal among the negroes, are symptoms of the leprosy,” wrote Benjamin Rush, a physician and contemporary of Jefferson well-­known for his support of the patriot cause and his abhorrence of slavery. Rush continued, pointing out yet another physical feature he found unique to Black people, “the woolly heads of the negroes cannot be accounted for from climate, diet, state of society, or bilious diseases, for all those circumstances, when combined have not produced it in the natives of Asia and America who inhabit similar latitudes.” These words, found in Rush’s treatise that surmised that Black skin was a form of leprosy, were actually part of a larger argument against the unfair treatment of African Americans. A champion of antislavery causes, Rush embraced a negative view of Blackness as a means of solving racial slavery; he adhered to the idea that racial difference was legible on the body. Benjamin Rush, “Observations Intended to Favour a Supposition that the Black Color (as It Is Called) of the Negroes is the Leprosy,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 4 (1799): 289–297, 293; Eric Herschthal, “Antislavery Science in the Early Republic: The Case of Dr. Benjamin Rush,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 274–307. 9.  Eric Herschthal, “Antislavery Science in the Early Republic”; Joanne Pope Melish, “The ‘Condition’ Debate and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum North.” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Winter 1999): 651–672, 655. 10. In 1813, American-­born, Scottish-­trained physician William Charles Wells articulated an incipient theory evolution and human difference based on the idea that innate racial differences between Blacks and whites could be discerned by differences in disease susceptibility between the two races. For more, see Rana Hogarth, “The Strange Case of Hannah West: Skin Colour and the Search for Racial Difference,” Social History of Medicine 29 (August 2016): 557–572, 559.

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11.  In the Anatomy of Blackness, Curran devotes much time to explaining how European travel writers and natural scientists both textually and materially exploited the African body. And while he does explain how experiments with human skin took place in French slave colonies in the Atlantic, most of Curran’s analysis focuses on the ways in which French thinkers and naturalists studied human variation. For more, see Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). For more on the centrality of location in the creation of racialized identity and the production of medical knowledge, see Rana Hogarth, “Race, Place, and Power in the Production of Medical Knowledge: Perspectives from the Greater Caribbean,” History Compass 19, no. 11 (November 2021) e12694 https://​doi​.org​/10​.1111​/hic3​.12694. 12.  Londa Schiebinger’s scholarship has foregrounded the role that slavery, settlement, and colonization played in the transportation of ideas, medicinal plants, and knowledge to European metropolitan spaces. She devotes less time to explaining differences in bodily suffering, although her Secret Cures of Slaves does unpack how white physicians in the slave-­holding Caribbean interpreted the results of their experiments upon enslaved people’s bodies in light of the formers’ desire to apply knowledge gained from them to white people. See Londa Schiebinger, “Medical Experimentation and Race in the Eighteenth-­Century Atlantic World,” Social History of Medicine 26 (August 2013): 364–382; and Londa Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-­Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017). 13.  Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-­Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 5. 14.  Yellow fever is an equal opportunity disease; it can infect victims of all races. It confers immunity upon its survivors regardless of race. That said, debates over whether Black immunity is genetic or acquired continue among scholars of the disease and the African Diaspora. See Sheldon Watts, “Yellow Fever Immunities in West Africa and the Americas in the Age of Slavery and Beyond: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Social History 34, no 3 (Summer 2001): 955–967; Kenneth F. Kiple, “Response to Sheldon Watts, ‘Yellow Fever Immunities in West Africa and the Americas in the Age of Slavery and beyond: A Reappraisal,’ ” Journal of Social History 34, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 969–974; and Sheldon Watts, “A Response to Kenneth Kiple,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 975–976. Historian Margaret Humphreys also describes the perceptions of Black immunity to yellow fever in the South, noting, “Blacks had significant immunity to yellow fever and malaria, two diseases their genetic pool had known well in Africa. This protection was well enough known in the antebellum period to be used as a justification for slavery; labor under southern conditions killed whites, so blacks were the ‘natural’ choice for plantations.” Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 7. Historian Jo Ann Carrigan echoes Humphreys’s claim noting, “The contrast between yellow fever’s effects in white and black populations was so great during the first half of the nineteenth century that

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many physicians considered blacks completely immune.” Jo Ann Carrigan, The Saffron Scourge: A History of Yellow Fever in Louisiana, 1796–1905 (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1994), 253. 15.  Rana Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World 1708–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 16.  Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996), 29. To clarify, Hippocrates identified different groups of people with distinctive health complaints but did not necessarily view them as “races” of people. For Hippocrates, references to the Scythians as corpulent, or their men as effeminate, did not reference some innate biological basis for these alleged traits; instead, his reasoning stressed the interaction of external, environmental factors and cultural practices as the reasons for their appearance and attributes. 17. Sean Morey Smith, “Seasoning and Abolition: Humoral Medicine in the Eighteenth-­Century British Atlantic,” Slavery & Abolition, 36, no. 4 (2015): 684–703. 18.  Rebecca Goetz, in her 2009 essay on the “unthinking decision,” demonstrates that there is more or less a consensus among historians that English settlers in Virginia embraced racialized chattel slavery in earnest between 1660 and 1690. During that period, there were not agreed upon categories for different types of humankind. Rebecca Goetz, “Rethinking the ‘Unthinking Decision’: Old Questions and New Problems in the History of Slavery and Race in the Colonial South,” Journal of Southern History 75 (August 2009): 599–612. For more on historiographic debates over early modern versus modern conceptions of race and racism, see Vanita Seth, “‘When Did Racism Begin?’ Review Essay,” Chronicle of Higher Education (August 19, 2022), https://​www​ .chronicle​.com​/article​/when​-did​-racism​-begin. 19.  Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-­ American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 175–177. 20.  Smith, “Seasoning and Abolition.” 21.  “A Description of American Yellow Fever, in a Letter from Dr. John Lining, Physician at Charles-­town in South Carolina to Dr. Robert Whytt, Professor of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh,” Philosophical Society of Edinburgh. Essays and observations, physical and literary. (Edinburgh, 1754), 2: 370–395. 22.  Everett Mendelsohn, “John Lining and His Contribution to Early American Science,” Isis 51 (September 1960): 278–292. 23.  Smith, “Seasoning and Abolition”; Gary Puckrein, “Climate, Health and Black Labor in the English Americas,” Journal of American Studies 13 (August 1979): 179–193; Karen O. Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-­American Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly 41 (April 1984): 213–240. Not all climates in the Americas, including the Carolinas or the West Indies, were uniformly considered inhospitable. See Katherine Johnston, “The Constitution of Empire: Place and Bodily Health in the Eighteenth-­Century Atlantic,” Atlantic Studies 10 (2013): 443–466. 24.  Mendelsohn, “John Lining and His Contribution to Early American Science,” 281.

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Notes to Pages 142–145

25.  John Lining, A Description of the American Yellow Fever, which prevailed at Charleston South Carolina in the year 1748 (Philadelphia: Printed for Thomas Dobson, 1799), 6. 26.  In some cases, the particular situation of a town or settlement, be it too close to marshes or swamps, could be seen as especially conducive for the creation of bad airs. For more, see Johnston, “The Constitution of Empire.” 27. Lining, A Description of the American Yellow Fever, 6. 28.  Lining’s treatise described Charleston’s 1748 epidemic and was published posthumously. Lining, A Description of the American Yellow Fever, 7. 29.  Lining believed that yellow fever was both contagious and infectious: “that this is really an infectious disease, seems plain.” See Lining, A Description of the American Yellow Fever, 6. 30. Lining, A Description of the American Yellow Fever, 5. 31.  Henry Warren, A Treatise Concerning the Malignant Fever in Barbados and the Neighbouring Islands: With an Account of the seasons there, from the year 1734 to 1738 in a letter to Dr. Mead (London: Printed for Fletcher Gyles, 1741), 13. 32. Warren, A Treatise Concerning the Malignant Fever, 13–14. 33.  Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-­Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 204–205. 34.  Rather boldly, John Atkins proclaimed, “I have taken notice in my Navy Surgeon, how difficulty the colour is accounted for; and tho’ it be a little Heterodox, I am persuaded the black and white Race have ab origne, sprung from different coloured first parents.” John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-­Indies (London: C. Ward and R. Chandler, 1735), 39. For more on this early form of polygenesis see Norris Saakwa-­Mante, “Western Medicine and Racial Constitutions: Surgeon John Atkins’ Theory of Polygenism and Sleepy Distemper in the 1730s,” in Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1960, ed. Waltraud Ernst and Bernard Harris (New York: Routledge, 1999), 29–57; and Hayley Rebecca Johnson, “‘Distempers Peculiar to Negros’: Colonial Physicians, Etiological Investigations, and the Racialization of Medicine in the Eighteenth-­Century British West Indies” (M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 2012). Seth is less certain of Atkin’s racialist beliefs. See Seth, Difference and Disease, 201. Polygenesis eventually grew more popular among some physicians and thinkers as the eighteenth century progressed. 35.  James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (January 1997): 143–166; Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 155. Jennifer Morgan’s classic work Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) highlights the negative assumptions and associations the English made about Black women’s bodies. 36.  While both men profited from the slave trade, it is unclear that their observations were meant to shore up or protect their livelihoods. Lining eventually owned several slaves through marriage, but he signaled out Africans’ peculiar resistance to yellow fever based on his observations and his understanding of climate and constitutions—he

Notes to Pages 145–149

219

made no references to slavery or Africans’ suitability for labor in his description of yellow fever. 37.  Rush, “Observations Intended to Favour a Supposition that the Black Color (as It Is Called) of the Negroes is The Leprosy.” 38.  Scholarly debates remain regarding the origins of racism before the modern concept of race. See Jordan, White Over Black; and Sean P. Harvey, “Ideas of Race in Early America,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, ed. John Butler (April 2016), 7, 10. 39. Lining, A Description of the American Yellow Fever, 7. 40. Lining, A Description of the American Yellow Fever, 7. 41.  Randall M. Packard, “‘Break-­Bone’ Fever in Philadelphia, 1780: Reflections on the History of Disease,” The Fielding H. Garrison Lecture, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 90 (Summer 2016): 193–221. 42.  Schiebinger, “Medical Experimentation and Race in the Eighteenth-­Century Atlantic World.” 43.  Margot Minardi, “The Boston Inoculation Controversy of 1721–1722: An Incident in the History of Race,” William and Mary Quarterly 61 (January 2004): 47–76. 44.  Johnston, “The Constitution of Empire.” 45.  Rana Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World 1708–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 17–47. 46.  Benjamin Rush, An Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever as it appeared in the City of Philadelphia in 1793 (Edinburgh: Printed by John Moir, 1796), 72. 47.  For more on Rush’s disavowal of Black immunity to yellow fever, see Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness, 17–47. 48.  The Hoffman et al. 2016 study on white medical residents’ assumption that Black people do not feel pain as much as whites made headlines as evidence of racial bias in medicine and continued beliefs in fundamental biological differences in Blacks and whites. References to Black people’s supposed ability to bear pain better than whites appear as casual references in a number of medical sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Well-­known examples from the eighteenth century appear in the lecture notes of Dr. Benjamin Rush. For more see “Of local diseases, of the black color of the Africans, and of the proximate cause of death,” undated. Series 3, Subseries VII, Vol. 161, Rush Family Papers, Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA; and Rush, “Observations Intended to Favour a Supposition that the Black Color (as It Is Called) of the Negroes is The Leprosy.” For more on the 2016 study, see Kelly M. Hoffman, Sophie Trawalter, Jordan R. Axt, and M. Norman Oliver, “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs About Biological Differences Between Blacks and Whites,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 16 (April 2016): 4296–4301, and Darshali A. Vyas, Leo  G. Eisenstein, and David S. Jones. “Hidden in Plain Sight—Reconsidering the Use of Race Correction in Clinical Algorithms,” New England Journal of Medicine 383, no. 9 (2020): 874–882.

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Notes to Pages 150–152

Chapter 9 1.  Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). 2.  James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (January 1997): 143–166; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1490–1800 (London: Verso, 1997); April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). John C. Coombs, “The Phases of Conversion: A New Chronology for the Rise of Slavery in Early Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 68 (July 2011): 332–60 focuses on Virginia to produce an important revision to Edmund Morgan’s chronology that complements the transnational turn. 3.  The most distinguished current exponents of that view include Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991); Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); and Sean Wilentz, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 4.  For an example of the way that the work of Morgan and Jordan (among others) slowly changed a leading historian’s understanding of the place of race and slavery in the founding, compare William W. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers and Slavery,” American Historical Review 77 (February 1972): 81–93, to his “The Founding Fathers, Conditional Antislavery, and the Nonradicalism of the American Revolution,” in William W. Freehling, The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 12–33. Other examples of works that identify slavery and racism as inseparable from the U.S. Constitution and the nation’s founding era writ large include David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Macmillan, 2009); and Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014). For the most powerful current line of analysis that builds on the psychoanalytic approach used by Jordan, see Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: Liverlight, 2020); and Frank B. Wilderson III, Saidiya Hartman, Steve Martinot, Jared Sexton and Hortense J. Spillars, Afro–Pessimism: An Introduction (Minneapolis, MN: Racked and Dispatched, 2017). Afropessimists are less inclined to take seriously what the historians listed above see as the positive legacies of the American Revolution. 5.  Petition, “Petition signed by John Cuffe and Paul Cuffe regarding taxation,” Dec. 19, 1780, NMAAHC Collection, National Museum of African American History & Culture, the Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. https://​nmaahc​.si​.edu​/object​/nmaahc​_2009​

Notes to Pages 152–153

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.26​.1; Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream” (speech), August 28, 1963, NPR Talk of the Nation, transcript and mp3 audio file, https://​www​.npr​.org​/2010​/01​/18​/122701268​/i​ -have​-a​-dream​-speech​-in​-its​-entirety. 6.  For powerful recent arguments for Black activism’s centrality to progressive politics in the nineteenth-­century United States, see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017) and Nikole Hannah-­ Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverman, eds., The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (New York: One World, 2021). 7. Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006); Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976); Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976); Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). 8. James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Richard S. Newman, Roy E. Finkenbine, Peter P. Hinks, Julie Winch, Stephen G. Hall, Manisha Sinha and Douglass Mooney, “Forum: Black Founders in the New Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 64 (January 2007): 83–166. 9. Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, esp. chaps. 1–4; Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), esp. chaps. 2–5; Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), esp. chaps. 4–11; Nathaniel Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013); Marcela Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), esp. chaps. 3, 5. Ada Ferrer, “Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” American Historical Review 117 (February 2012): 40–66; Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); John Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-­Domingue (Basingstroke: Palgrave McMillan, 2006), esp. chaps. 8, 9. Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) ties the radicalism of the Haitian Revolution to legacies of the monarchical old regime. Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) sees the turn toward abolition as deeply tied to chance. David Geggus argues that Haitian Revolutionaries “differed from the other Atlantic revolutions . . . in that the central pursuit of freedom came to be construed in

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Notes to Pages 153–156

the profound but narrow sense of freedom from slavery rather than as political rights.” David Geggus, “The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution,” in The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840, ed. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 100. 10.  For a collection of letters written by the settlers in which they repeatedly refer to themselves as “the Nova Scotians,” see “Our Children Free and Happy”: Letters from Black Settlers in Africa in the 1790s, ed. Christopher Fyfe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991). 11.  As I will show in this essay, the Nova Scotians’ constitutional vision implicitly rejected the way in which what Christopher L. Tomlins calls the “law paradigm” placed a “harness” on “constitutionalism” by exiling eighteenth-­century notions of communal well-­being that were encompassed in the “police paradigm” from fundamental law. Christopher L. Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 39. See Jean Casimir, The Haitians: A Decolonial History, trans. Laurent Dubois (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020) for a powerful argument that the African-­descended leaders of the revolution in St. Domingue/Haiti did not represent the truly revolutionary spirit and beliefs of the Haitian people. 12.  While generally spelled Bance Island in eighteenth-­century sources, it is now called Bunce Island. The slaving fort was owned by a group of British merchants. See David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 172–220. 13.  The best account of the settling of the Province of Freedom, its triumphs, difficulties, and destruction is Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants Across the Eighteenth-­Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 200–243. Also see Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 16–25; Schama, Rough Crossings, 199–213. 14.  For the history of the Nova Scotians in Canada and Africa, see Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone; Walker, The Black Loyalists; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks; Schama, Rough Crossings; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom; Sidbury, Becoming African in America; and Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Vintage, 2011). 15. For various complementary accounts, see Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone; Walker, The Black Loyalists; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks; Schama, Rough Crossings; Pybus, Epic Journeys; Sidbury, Becoming African in America; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles. 16.  Neither side operated in bad faith. The company had promised “That every free Black” would receive a “grant of not less than Twenty Acres of Land for himself, Ten for his Wife and Five for every child upon such terms and subject to such Charges and Obligations (with a view to the general prosperity of the Company) as shall hereafter be settled by the Company in respect to the Grants of Land to be made by them to all Settlers, whether Black or White.” John Clarkson, Clarkson’s Letterbook and Journal,

Notes to Pages 157–158

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Endangered Archives Programme, 284/3/1, British Library, London, https://​eap​.bl​.uk​/ archive​-file​/EAP284​-3​-1 (accessed January 22, 2023). Clarkson and the settlers had not understood the “Charges and Obligations” to include quitrents; the SLC directors did. 17.  For more detailed discussions of these disputes, see Sidbury, Becoming African in America, chapter 5. For the company directors’ concerns about the expenses of founding the colony, see Autographs, Manuscript Orders from the Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, EAP 284/5, 36–9, 46–7, Endangered Archives Programme, British Library, London, https://​eap​.bl​.uk​/archive​-file​/EAP284​-5​-1. For an important reading of the event as a food riot rather than a rebellion, see Rachel B. Herrmann, “Rebellion or Riot?: Black Loyalist Food Laws in Sierra Leone,” Slavery & Abolition 37 (2016), 680–703. 18.  Thomas Clarkson to Bathurst, Bury St. Edmunds, June 22, 1815, CO 267/41, National Archives of the U.K., Kew (hereafter NAUK). Ludlum’s original letter is in CO 270/6, Council Records for 1801, Nov. 17, 1801, NAUK. 19.  The quitrent was commonly used in both proprietorial and crown colonies in America, and it remained in use in Australia long after it had been forgotten by everyone in Sierra Leone, except for the Nova Scotians. For the imposition and administration of quitrents throughout British America, see Beverley W. Bond, Jr., The Quit-­Rent System in the American Colonies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919); and William Pember Reeves, State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand, 2 vols. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1902), I: 197–199. Ludlum made the case in his 1801 letter that the quitrents charged in Sierra Leone were much higher and more damaging to settlers than any charged in America, but the SLC directors probably did not realize that when they set them (CO 260/6, Council Records for 1801, Nov. 17, 1801 Meeting, NAUK). 20.  See Ludlum’s explanation of why he was going to give up the land of a settler’s orphan for whom he was guardian, because the sum of the annual quitrents would total more than it would cost to buy comparable land when the child reached maturity if he did then want to farm. CO 260/6, Council Records for 1801, Nov. 17, 1801 Meeting, NAUK. Renner-­Thomas, Land Tenure in Sierra Leone: The Law, Dualism, and the Making of a Land Policy (Milton Keynes, UK: AuthorHouse, 2010), 56 argues that what was called the quitrent in Sierra Leone is better understood as a simple land tax, but Ludlum’s explanation of the way the tax would have worked to undermine settler autonomy illustrates that its effect was greater than that of a normal land tax. 21.  CO 270/2, June 16, 1794–June 30, 1794, NAUK. For this incident, see Walker, The Black Loyalists, 178–81, or accounts in the other works listed in n. 7 above. 22. Zachary Macaulay’s Journal, Oct. 13, Oct 14, Nov. 26, 1795, Abolition and Emancipation Microfilm Collection, Adam Mathews, Part I, Sources from the Huntington Library, reel 7 (originals in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California). Luke Jordan, John Jordan, Rubin Simmons, Amarica Tolbert, Moses Wilkinson, preacher, Isaac Anderson, Stephen Peters, James Hutcherson, A Great Many More tho paper wont afford to John Clarkson, Sierra Leone, Nov. 19, 1794, Clarkson Papers, Vol. 3, British Library, London. As Christopher Tomilins reminded me, the law of salvage gave the

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Notes to Pages 158–162

company no legitimate claim to this salvaged property. Macaulay’s demand underscores his view of the settlers as subordinates. Christopher Tomilins, personal communication to the author, September 3, 2012. 23.  Zachary Macaulay’s Journal, Saturday, January 5, 1799, reel 6 for quotation. 24.  John Matthews, A Voyage to the River Sierra-­Leone On the Coast of Africa; Containing an Account of the Trade and Productions of the Country, and of the Civil and Religious Customs and Manners of the People; in a Series of Letters to a Friend in England (London: B. White and Son, 1788), 79–80; Thomas Winterbottom, An Account of the Native Africans in the Neighborhood of Sierra Leone (London: John Hatchard, 1803), 124–25. 25.  For the account of this dispute, see Macaulay’s Journal, Jan. 5, 1799, reel 6. For the tensions the incident reveals between Temne and Nova Scotian conceptions of law and property, see James Sidbury, “‘African’ Settlers in the Founding of Freetown,” in Slavery, Abolition and the Transition to Colonialism in Sierra Leone, ed. Paul Lovejoy and Suzanne Schwarz (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2015), 127–42. For treasure digging elsewhere in West Africa, which, if common in Sierra Leone, might have informed the legal traditions that King Tom invoked, see Letters on West Africa and the Slave Trade, ed. and trans. Selena Axelrod Winsnes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 84–85. 26.  Land tenure among the settlers remains obscure, but it seems likely that the community’s land tenure was probably governed by landlord-­stranger conventions that prevailed throughout much of West Africa. See George D. Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000–1630 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), esp. chaps. 2 and 9. 27.  Autographs, Endangered Archives Programme, 284/5, 33–34, British Library, London, https://​eap​.bl​.uk​/archive​-file​/EAP284​-5​-1. 28.  Ibid., 17–22. 29. For Sharp on household-­ based government, liberty, and the frankpledge (including Tythingmen and Hundredors), see Prince Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharpe, Esq. Composed from his own Manuscripts, and other Authentic Documents in the Possession of His Family and of the African Institution, https://​www​.google​.com​/ books​/edition​/Memoirs​_of​_Granville​_Sharp​_Esq​/PrUEAAAAIAAJ​?hl​=​en​&​gbpv​=​1 (accessed Jan. 22, 2023), 266–267, 373, 519–52. 30.  Macaulay’s Journal, Dec. 10, 1796, reel 7. 31.  Macaulay’s Journal, Dec. 15, 1796, reel 7. 32. Ibid. 33.  Macaulay’s Journal, Sept. 30, 1797, reel 7. 34.  Macaulay’s Journal, Sept. 30, 1797 (petitioning), Dec. 22, 1796 (drams), Dec. 19, 1796 (delegation to Macaulay), all reel 7. There are other examples of petitioning, electioneering (though not with alcohol), and sending delegations throughout the records of Sierra Leone in the 1790s. 35.  Macaulay’s Journal, Sept. 30, 1796, Oct. 2, 1797, reel 7.

Notes to Pages 162–167

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36.  Macaulay’s Journal, Dec. 20, 1797, January 1798, reel 7; Macaulay’s Journal, Jan. 22, 1798, Jan. 29, 1798, April 23, 1798, reel 6. 37.  “No. 2 Copy—Paper of Laws stuck up at Abram Smith’s house by the Hundredors and Tythingmen,” Appendix to the Minutes for the Year 1800, CO 270/5 (Council Sessions in Sierra Leone, Jan. 1, 1800–April 1801), NAUK. 38.  Thomas Clarkson restricted access to the settlement in its first year because “some of the Inhabitants of this Town” told him that outsiders had entered and “offered such extravagant prices to our Settlers for the various Articles issued out to them for the preservation of their Health, that they have been induced to part with them, altho” doing so put “their health and Lives” at risk. Clarkson’s Letterbook and Journal, Endangered Archives Programme, 284/3/1, 21–23, British Library, London, https://​eap​.bl​ .uk​/archive​-file​/EAP284​-3​-1​#​?c​=​0​&​m​=​0​&​s​=​0​&​cv​=​0​&​xywh​=​-659​%2C​-203​%2C4053​ %2C4053 (accessed Jan. 22, 2023). 39.  For the way these beliefs were excluded from elite constitutional visions, see Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology, esp. chap 2. 40.  Memoirs of Granville Sharpe, Esq., 266–267, 373, 519–521 for Sharp’s system. 41.  Refusing to sell goods to a settler and then selling those same goods outside the colony could also be punished with banishment, but the laws offered the offender the opportunity to pay a £20 fine and stay. 42.  For Black militias in non-­Anglo American societies, see Ben Vinson, III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-­Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-­Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolution, esp. chaps. 2, 4. For royalism among Blacks and Natives in what is now Columbia, see Marcela Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For the “Merikens,” see Taylor, The Internal Enemy; and John McNish Weiss, The Merikens: Free Black American Settlers in Trinidad, 1815–16 (London: McNish and Weiss, 2002). 43.  Much of the work internationalizing our understanding of Black culture and political thought has focused on the twentieth century. See, for example, David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1969 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000); Robin D. G. Kelley, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002); Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Also see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-­Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel

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Notes to Pages 168–169

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). For work looking at earlier transnational political thought among African Americans, see Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-­American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London: Verso, 2018); Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-­Century Atlantic World, ed. Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-­ Greene (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021); and James Sidbury, Becoming African in America. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) bridges the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, as does James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) and James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), which pushes into the twenty-­first century. 44.  Haiti Constitution of 1801, trans. Mitch Abidor, Marxists​.org, accessed Feb. 24, 2019, https://​www​.marxists​.org​/history​/haiti​/1801​/constitution​.htm.) 45.  In addition to the works cited in note 9 above, see John K. Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4 (Fall 1993): 181–214, which highlights the important appeal of African monarchicalism, which exerted an influence that I have not traced in this essay. 46.  Haiti Constitution of 1801, trans. Mitch Abidor. 47.  Jean Casimer, The Haitians: A Decolonial History, trans. Laurent Dubois (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020) explores the deep-­rooted opposition to elite visions of Haitian society on the part of the mass of formerly enslaved people and their descendants who lived on the island. That opposition was neither “republican” nor “monarchical” but profoundly local, anti-­authoritarian, and decolonial. 48.  This vision is most often associated with the French and Iberian Atlantic, but Brooke E. Newman, A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018) shows free Jamaicans of color seeking recognition of corporate rights in early nineteenth-­century Jamaica. For French Canadian settlers seeking similar kinds of corporate privileges and for the hostility this met from English Canadians, see Nancy Christie, The Formal and Informal Politics of British Rule in Post-­Conquest Quebec, 1760–1837 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

CONTRIBUTORS

John N. Blanton is Assistant Professor of History at the City College of New York, CUNY. Blanton’s work focuses on the histories of slavery and emancipation in the seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Anglophone Atlantic. He is currently revising a book manuscript, The Household War: Property, Labor, and the Domestication of Slavery, which examines how specific local iterations of Anglo-­American capitalism shaped the development of slavery, as both an abstract legal institution and as a lived social relation of domestic labor extraction, in Virginia and Massachusetts from the beginnings of colonization through the American Revolution. Jesse Cromwell is Associate Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-­Century Venezuela (2018). His research focuses on commerce, commodities, migration, and mobility in the early modern Atlantic World. At the University of Mississippi, he teaches courses in Caribbean, Latin American, and Atlantic history. Erika Denise Edwards is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is the author of the award-­winning book Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (2020). Rebecca Anne Goetz is Associate Professor of History at New York University. She is currently writing a book about enslaved Indigenous people in the Caribbean. Rana Hogarth is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign. She is the author of Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840 (2019).

228

Contributors

Chloe L. Ireton is a Lecturer in the History of Iberia and the Iberian World 1500–1800, at University College London, and works on the histories of race, slavery, freedom, and empire in the early Southern Atlantic World. She is currently at work on Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic, a monograph that explores how free and enslaved Black men and women conceptualized two strands of political thought—freedom and slavery. She is the author of various articles, including “Black Africans’ Freedom Litigation Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire,” which was awarded the Renaissance Society of America William Nelson Prize for best article published in the Renaissance Quarterly in 2020. Marc H. Lerner is Associate Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. He is working on a cultural history of the Age of Revolutions. Paul J. Polgar is Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi. His work examines slavery, race, and emancipation in the United States, with a particular interest in Black freedom and rights movements from the Revolution through Reconstruction. He is the author of Standard-­Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement (2019). Brett Rushforth is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon, where he teaches courses on the history of slavery, Indigenous America, and colonialism. He is the author of Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (2012), and, with co-­author Chris Hodson, of the forthcoming Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Age of Crusading to the Age of Revolutions. Casey Schmitt is Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University. She is working on a book about Caribbean practices of captive-­taking, human trafficking, and colonization during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Jenny Shaw is Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama where she teaches classes on race, slavery, and Caribbean history. She is the author of Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (2013) and has published in Past & Present, Slavery & Abolition, and William and Mary Quarterly. She is currently finishing a project entitled  The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery.

Contributors

229

James Sidbury is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of History at Rice University. He is the author of Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810 and Becoming African in American: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic.

INDEX

Abbott, Elizabeth, 70–71 abolitionists, 6, 9–10, 20, 154–56, 221n9, 223n22 Account of the Bilious remitting Yellow Fever (Rush), 148 Act of Conformity, 73–74 Adrianson, Peter, 104 Africa: African Slave Trade, 20–25; Americas and, 1–2; Caribbean and, 21–22; Company of Adventurers Trading to Africa, 107–8; Europe and, 2, 25, 132–33; North, 34; Spain and, 5–6; sub-­Saharan Africans from, 16–17; in Treaty of Tordesillas, 24; West, 24, 35, 46, 50–55, 132, 224nn25–26. See also specific topics African slave trading companies: authority for, 52–55; geopolitics of, 55–59; Native slavery to, 45–47; politics of, 47–52 Africans: in Americas, 20–25, 208n10; from Angola, 61; Black populations and, 89–96; Caribbean to, 115–16; in colonialism, 6–7, 29–30; culture of, 28–29, 106–7; diaspora of, 5–6, 10–11, 84; enslaved, 119–22, 130–35; free people of color and, 7; indigenous people and, 5, 48–50; marginalization of, 2–3; in Middle Passage, 7, 108–9, 131, 205n25; on plantations, 74–78; as property, 36–37, 50–51; in settler colonialism, 15–16; slave raiding and, 8, 35–41, 55, 105–14, 116, 178n1; in South America, 46; to Spain, 214n6; in Spanish America, 25–30; sub-­Saharan, 16–17, 24, 51–52, 145; in Virginia, 4, 15–16, 76–77, 105; from West Africa, 50–55; West Central, 22. See also specific topics Afro-­Iberians, 26–30 Afro-­Mexicans, 106–7 Age of Revolution, 9–10, 80–84, 150–54, 160–62, 166–68

Allen, Richard, 148 Álvarez, Baltasar Luis, 98 American Slavery, American Freedom (Morgan, Edmund), 150 Americas: Africa and, 1–2; Africans in, 20–25, 208n10; colonialism in, 17–18; disease in, 140–45, 217n23; France and, 10; indigenous people of, 28; stereotypes of, 137–40; unaccompanied disembarked slaves in, 22; violence in, 45–47, 55–59. See also specific countries Amussen, Susan Dwyer, 120 Anatomy of Blackness (Curran), 216n11 Angeles, Catalina de, 27 Angola: Africans from, 61; Netherlands and, 116; Portugal and, 15–16; race and, 99–100 anti-­slavery, 31–32, 221n9 Arenas, Antonio de, 95–96 Arguijo, Gaspar de, 22 Armas, Rumeu de, 181n18 arribadas, 22 Arzola, Francisca de, 92 Asia, 215n8 asientos, 21, 24, 181n21 Atkins, Jonathan, 122, 144–45, 218n34 Atlantic World: Black rights in, 10; to Britain, 5; culture of, 4; economic opportunity in, 89–96; Europe and, 208n10; history of, 102–3; in modernity, 5; Portugal in, 95–96; race in, 8; racialized health in, 137–40, 148–49; violence in, 121–23; white supremacy in, 7; wills in, 66–67, 72, 78, 194n76 authority: for African slave trading companies, 52–55; of Bégon, 50–52; of Berkeley, 81–82; to Black Loyalists, 161–62; in colonialism, 28–29, 37–44; in geopolitics, 41–42; of Isabel, 33–36; in monarchy, 31–37, 39–40, 42–43, 56, 66–67, 81–82;

232

Index

authority (continued) in New Laws, 43–44; republicanism and, 168–69; of Robert, 53–54; in “setler’s laws,” 162–67, 169, 223n20, 225n41; in Spain, 89; of Temne people, 158–59, 224n25; for violence, 32–33 de Baas-­Castelmore, Jean-­Charles, 114–16 Bacon, Nathaniel, 80 Bacon’s rebellion, 80, 195n108 Barbados: colonialism in, 135–36; contemporary scholarship on, 143–45; culture of, 125–30; enslaved Africans in, 130–35; racial hierarchies in, 119–22; women in, 122–25 Barlowe, Raphael, 74 Batson, John, 121 Bégon, Michel, 45–46, 50–52, 55, 57 Bennett, Richard, 81 Berkeley, William, 81–82 Bialuschewski, Arne, 106 Black American experience, 15, 20 Black British Loyalists, 10 Black Loyalists: authority to, 161–62; philosophy of, 166–69; politics of, 157–61, 165–66, 222n16; religion of, 156–57; republicanism and, 167–69; in Sierra Leone, 150–55 Black populations, 88–96 Black royalism, 150, 162, 167–69 Blacke Jacke, 75 Blackness: history of, 7–8; from Iberian racial slavery, 16–20; philosophy of, 5, 137–45, 148–49; in racial hierarchies, 16–17; racialized health and, 145–48, 218n34, 219n48; racism against, 100–102; scholarship on, 216n11; in settler colonialism, 25–30 Blake, Agnes, 122–30, 132–34 Blake, Henry, 121, 123, 125–29, 214n92 Blake, John, 119–22, 125–35 Blake, Nicholas, 121, 126–27, 129 Blake, Thomas, 121, 123–24, 128–30 Blake brothers, 119–22, 125–27, 134–35 Borucki, Alex, 23–24 Britain: Atlantic World to, 5; Black British Loyalists, 10; capitalism in, 191n25; Caribbean to, 20–21; Civil War in, 80–81; Cromwell for, 121, 127, 129–30, 211n44, 214n92; culture of, 72; disease in, 141–42; France and, 26, 107–8, 110–11, 113–16;

Ireland and, 120–21, 209n13; Jamaica and, 205n26; Netherlands and, 104–5, 107–11, 204n21; North America to, 8, 11; politics in, 63–65; Puritans in, 67–68; Sierra Leone to, 152–53, 162–64; Spain and, 10, 215n7; Stuart Restoration in, 81–82; United States and, 2, 159; Virginia to, 217n18; in War of 1812, 169. See also specific colonies Brooks, James, 47 Bryant, Sherwin, 17 Buffon, Comte de, 138 Cabrera, Adriana Ruíz de, 92–93, 199n22 Camacho, Francisco, 91–92 Camino Real. See New Spain Canada: France and, 226n48; history of, 152– 53, 166–67; United States and, 153–54; in War of 1812, 169 Canary Islands, 87–89, 97–101, 175n31, 202n58 capitalism: in Britain, 191n25; culture of, 74–80; labor in, 68–74; NHC, 62; philosophy in, 5; scholarship on, 188n6; in Virginia, 60–68, 80–84 Caribbean: Africa and, 21–22; to Africans, 115–16; Bégon in, 45; to Britain, 20–21; colonialism in, 39–44; culture of, 104–5; Europe and, 53–54, 107–16, 216n12; France and, 46–47, 109; mobility in, 105–6; Native slavery in, 31–39; physicians in, 9; raiding economy of, 106–7; South America and, 1–2, 10–11, 51–52; Spain and, 16, 107, 110–11; violence in, 8; West Africa and, 46; yellow fever in, 139–40. See also specific topics Carreño, Francisco, 87–89, 96–103, 202n58 Carreño, Juan, 87–88, 100–102 Carreño, Juana, 87–88 Carreño, Violante, 87 Cartwright’s Case, 65, 68 Cary, Theodore, 110 Casas, Bartolomé de Las, 37 casta system, 18, 174n18 Castroverde, Cristobal de, 95 Catholicism, 25, 27, 39–40, 98–99, 119–22, 125–30, 135. See also Inquisition chalonas, 27 Chaplin, Joyce, 140–41 Charles II (king), 81–82 Charles V (king), 31, 33, 39, 42–43

Index Charlton, Stephen, 75 Christians: in Britain, 81; culture of, 16–17, 79–81; Jews and, 18; Judeo-­Christian religions, 2; Muslims and, 178n1; race to, 26; revolts to, 42; from Spain, 31. See also Puritans citizenship, 152, 167–68 Clarkson, John, 154–56, 158, 160 Clarkson, Thomas, 154, 157, 225n38 Code Noir, 45–46, 51–52, 56–57 Colombia, 32–33 Colón, Cristóbal, 36–37 colonialism: Africans in, 6–7, 29–30; in Americas, 17–18; authority in, 28–29, 37–44; in Barbados, 135–36; culture of, 1–2, 25–30, 60–61; Europe and, 15–16, 48–49, 138, 140–45; France in, 55–59, 210n27; gold in, 36; immigration in, 10; labor in, 107–8; in Mexico, 2, 11, 15–16, 18–25; mobility in, 19, 24; monarchy and, 33, 42–43; Netherlands in, 115–16, 205n25; in North America, 54–55, 61–62; in Nova Scotia, 153–54; Portugal in, 17; power in, 40–41; racial hierarchies in, 122–25; religion and, 157–58; scholarship on, 216n12; serial displacements in, 107–16; “setler’s laws” in, 162–67, 169, 223n20, 225n41; in Southern Caribbean, 39–44; in Spanish America, 20–25; tobacco in, 150–51; in Virginia, 3–4; war in, 8, 104–6; in West Africa, 224nn25–26; women in, 119–22, 130–35. See also settler colonialism Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, 107–8, 111 Compagnie du Guinée, 56 Compagnie du Sénégal et Côtes d’Afrique, 46–47, 50–57, 185n13 Company of Adventurers Trading to Africa, 107–8 confessions, 42–43 Conquest, Richard, 73, 194n76 conversions (religious), 39–40, 81 Cortés, Hernán, 22 Cotton, William, 74 creoles/criollos, 26, 94, 98–100, 106–7, 169, 221n9 criado system, 26–27 Cromwell, Oliver, 121, 127, 129–30, 211n44, 214n92

233

de la Cruz, Juana, 91–92 Cubagua, 37–44 Cuffe, John, 152–53 Cuffe, Paul, 152–53 culture: of Africans, 28–29, 106–7; of Afro-­ Iberian women, 26; of Atlantic World, 4; of Barbados, 125–30; of Britain, 72; of capitalism, 74–80; of Caribbean, 104–5; of Christians, 16–17, 79–81; of colonialism, 1–2, 25–30, 60–61; of France, 52–55; of Ireland, 119–22, 125–32; legal, 99–102; of Mexico, 19–20; patriarchy in, 66–67; of plantations, 68–69, 72–73; of Puritans, 71–74; race and, 49; servants in, 7, 9, 25–26; of Spain, 92–93; of Temne people, 153–54, 158–59; of United States, 3, 5; of Veracruz, 89–96; of Virginia, 1–2, 6–7, 74–80 Curran, Andrew S., 216n11 Dain, Bruce, 214n5 Dale, Thomas, 60–61 Dawson, Kevin, 106 Description of the American Yellow Fever (Lining), 142–43 Deusen, Nancy van, 181n18 Diamond (ship), 108–9 diaspora, of Africans, 5–6, 10–11, 84 Douglass, Frederick, 152 D’Oyley, Edward, 108–9 Drake, Francis, 26, 28 Driggus, Sarah, 75 Dunn, Richard, 120 Durand, William, 73 Dutch West India Company, 105–6 economic opportunity, 89–96 emancipation, 5, 7, 20, 60–61, 65, 75, 81–84 England. See Britain Esquevel, Catalina de, 96 ethnic othering, 57–58 Europe: Africa and, 2, 25, 132–33; alliances in, 110–11; Atlantic World and, 208n10; Caribbean and, 53–54, 107–16, 216n12; colonialism and, 15–16, 48–49, 138, 140–45; ethnic othering by, 57–58; geopolitics of, 3–4, 52–55; history from, 58–59; immigration in, 7; indigenous people and, 47, 205n25; labor in, 84; racial hierarchies and, 125–30, 137–40; rivalries in, 114–15;

234

Index

Europe (continued) slavery in, 61–62; Treaty of Breda in, 112–14; West Africa to, 50–52. See also specific countries Evans, William, 78–80 exploitation, 35–36

Gross, Ariella, 18–19 Guasco, Michael, 3 Guerra, Cristóbal, 33–35 Guerra, Luis, 33–35, 180n6 Gutiérrez, Juana. See Jalapa Gwyn, Hugh, 77–78

Ferdinand (king), 36–37, 39–40 Fernández, Pedro, 34 feudalism, 62–65 Filmer, Robert, 66–67 France: Americas and, 10; Britain and, 26, 107–8, 110–11, 113–16; Canada and, 226n48; Caribbean and, 46–47, 109; in colonialism, 55–59, 210n27; culture of, 52–55; naturalism in, 138–39, 216n11; Netherlands and, 111–12; New France, 49; race to, 45–46; United States and, 214n2 Franciscan friars, 90 Francisco, Jorge, 169 François, Jean, 166, 169 free labor system, 66 free people of color: Africans and, 7; Carreño, F., as, 87–89, 96–103; in Jamaica, 226n48; laws for, 82, 177n67; mulatos and, 199n22; in New Spain, 7–8, 96–103; to Sierra Leone Company, 222n16; in Spain, 199n21; tributes from, 98; in Virginia, 70, 75; women as, 19, 91–94 de la Fuenta, Alejandro, 18–19

hacendados, 29 Haiti, 20, 222n11, 226n47 Hanna, Mark G., 105–6 Hernández, Francisco, 98 Hernández, Ignacio, 108 Herrera, Hernando, 101 Heywood, Linda, 15–16 hierarchies: language for, 57–58; among servants, 209n15; among women, 19–20. See also racial hierarchies Hintone, Elyas, 70–71 Hippocrates, 217n16 Hispaniola, 16, 21–22, 25, 27–28, 49, 179n4 historiography, 27, 171n3, 217n18 history: of abolitionists, 6, 9–10, 20, 154–56, 221n9, 223n22; of African Slave Trade, 20–25; Age of Revolution in, 9–10; of Atlantic World, 102–3; of Blackness, 7–8; of Canada, 152–53, 166–67; of emancipation, 60–61, 65, 75, 81–84; from Europe, 58–59; of geopolitics, 7; of indigenous people, 181n21; Marxism and, 191n25; of medical diagnoses, 140–45; of Mexico, 87–96; of Native slavery, 2–3, 6, 18–20, 180n8; NHC, 62; of racial slavery, 1–5; of racialized health, 140–45, 215n10, 216n14, 217n16; of racism, 137–38, 215n8, 220n4; scholarship and, 82–83; of Sierra Leone, 10, 154, 222n11, 223n19; of slavery, 188n6; from SlaveVoyages database, 24–25; of South America, 20–21; from Trans-­ Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 22–25; of United States, 5–6; of Venezuela, 42; of Virginia, 30 Humphreys, Margaret, 216n14 husbandry, 69–70

Gallay, Alan, 47 Gambia, 27, 53, 55, 58–59 Garrido, Juan, 25 geopolitics: of African slave trading ­companies, 55–59; authority in, 41–42; of Europe, 3–4, 52–55; history of, 7; of war, 107–16 Gerónima, María, 95, 199n22 Goetz, Rebecca, 217n18 gold, 21, 36 Gómez de Cervantes, Gonzalo, 33–34 gossip, 89–96 Gowen, Mihill, 81 Gowen, William, 81 Graweere, John, 78–80, 83–84 Great Newes from the Barbados (anonymous), 122 Gregory, James, 77–78, 83

illegal slave trade, 21 immigration, 7, 10 imperialism. See colonialism indentured servants, 6–7 indigenous people: Africans and, 5, 48–50; of Americas, 28; confessions by, 42–43;

Index Europe and, 47, 205n25; history of, 181n21; laws for, 34; Mbundu people, 22; to Spain, 32, 181n22; violence against, 38–39. See also specific people inheritance laws, 74–76 Inquisition, 88–96, 196n3 Ireland, 119–22, 125–32, 209n13, 211n44, 214n92 Irish servants, 119–22, 125–30 Isabel (queen), 33–36, 39–40 Isabela (empress), 39–40 Islamic Iberia: concepts of race, 16–20, 22–30, 82, 95–96, 145, 178n1, 218n35 Ivy, Thomas, 73 Jalapa, Juana, 91–94, 199n22 Jamaica, 24, 36, 104–10, 113–14, 147, 205n26, 226n48 James I (king), 66–67 Jansen, Leenert, 108–9 Jefferson, Thomas, 137–40, 214n2, 214n5, 215n8 Jews, 18 Jiménez, Morella A., 42 Johnson, Anthony, 70, 76, 83 Jones, Absalom, 148 Jordan, Winthrop D., 150–51, 220n4 Key, Elizabeth, 81, 83–84 Key, Thomas, 81 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 152 King Tom (Temne headman), 158–59, 224n25 Klooster, Wim, 105–6 knowledge, 89–96, 115 labor: in capitalism, 68–74; in colonialism, 107–8; in Europe, 84; in feudalism, 62–63; free labor system, 66; with penal slavery, 65; race and, 3–4; in sugarcane industry, 97; Vagrancy Act, 64–65; in Virginia, 150–51; women in, 119–22 landholders, 69–70 language: to chalonas, 27; for hierarchies, 57–58; of Ireland, 209n13; of racism, 45–46, 51–52, 56; of scholarship, 5–6 Law of Nations, 105 Laws of Burgos, 37 Leclerc, Georges-­Louis, 138 legal culture, 99–102

235

limpieza de sangre, 17–18, 215n7 Lining, John, 142–44, 146–48, 218n29, 218n36 Littleton, Ann, 74 livestock, 69–70 López de Archuleta, Juan, 32–33, 38–39, 41–43, 182n31 Louverture, Toussaint, 168–69 Ludlum, Thomas, 162–64, 223n19 Macaulay, Zachary, 156–62, 223n22 manifestos, 22 marginalization, of Africans, 2–3 maroons, 28–30, 90, 114–15, 164, 178n88 marronage, 28, 114–16 Martínez, María Elena, 145 Martinique, 46–47, 50–56, 59 Marx, Karl, 64–65, 82 Marxism, 191n25 Masters, Adrian, 18 Matienzo, Juan Ortiz de, 37 Matienzo, Sancho de, 37 Mbundu people, 22 Menard, Russell, 120 Mendoza, Gaspar de, 97–98 Mendoza, Pedro, 26 merchant wives, 119–25 Mexico: colonialism in, 2, 11, 15–16, 18–25; culture of, 19–20; history of, 87–96; ­Inquisition in, 196n3; Yanga, 29–30. See also New Spain Middle Passage, 7, 108–9, 131, 205n25 Miller, Christopher, 77, 83 Minardi, Margot, 147 mobility: in Caribbean, 105–6; in colonialism, 19, 24; escape as, 133–34; in racial slavery, 7–8 Modyford, Thomas, 109–10 monarchy: authority in, 31–37, 39–40, 42–43, 56, 66–67, 81–82; to Black royalism, 150, 162, 167–69; colonialism and, 33, 42–43; religion and, 113 Montesino, Antonio de, 37 Morgan, Edmund, 150–51, 220n2, 220n4 Morgan, Edward, 104 Morgan, Jennifer, 120, 209n11 mulatos, 17–20, 46, 52, 87–91, 95–103, 146–48, 199n22 Murphy, Tessa, 106 Muslims. See Islamic Iberia: concepts of race

236

Index

Native Americans, 138, 140–41, 144, 152, 215n8 Native slavery: to African slave trading companies, 45–47; in Hispaniola, 179n4; history of, 2–3, 6, 18–20, 180n8; politics of, 52–55; in Real Provision of 1530, 31–33, 39–44; scholarship on, 47–50, 179n3; in Southern Caribbean, 31–39; to Spain, 181n17; violence in, 47–52 naturales, 18, 92–93 Nayle, William, 70 Netherlands: Angola and, 116; Britain and, 104–5, 107–11, 204n21; in colonialism, 115–16, 205n25; France and, 111–12; Portugal and, 107 New France, 49 new history of capitalism (NHC), 62 New Laws of 1542, 18, 32, 43–44 New Spain: Canary Islands and, 87–89, 175n31; free people of color in, 7–8, 96–103; Veracruz, 88–96 New World. See Atlantic World NHC. See new history of capitalism Niño, Peralonso, 33 North Africa, 34 North America, 8, 11, 54–55, 61–62. See also specific topics Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), 137–39, 214n2, 215n8 Nova Scotia. See Sierra Leone Ojeda, Alonso de, 35–36 Olano, Nuflo de, 25 Oliveros, Bartolomé de, 92 O’Malley, Gregory E., 23–24, 106 Onuf, Peter, 214n5 Ordinances for Blacks, 19 Ortiz de Matienzo, Pedro, 37–39, 41–43 The Other Slavery (Resendez), 47 Ovando, Nicolas de, 27 Packard, Randal, 147 Parker, Henry, 67–68, 83 parochialism, 11 partus sequitur ventrem, 18 patriarchy, 66–67, 70 penal slavery, 65 Pérez, Alonso, 99 Peters, Thomas, 155

philosophy: from Black American experience, 15; of Black Loyalists, 166–69; of Blackness, 5, 137–45, 148–49; in capitalism, 5; of citizenship, 152, 167–68; of Jefferson, 214n5; of Judeo-­Christian religions, 2; of limpieza de sangre, 17–18; of Puritans, 78–83; race construction, 9–10; of racial slavery, 20; of racism, 18–19; of rebellion, 166–67; scholarship and, 4–5; in settler colonialism, 16–25; of sovereignty, 66–68; of war, 17 physicians, 9, 139–48, 216n14, 217n23, 218n29 Pierce, William, 76–77 plantations: Africans on, 74–78; censuses from, 206n40; culture of, 68–69, 72–73; patriarchy on, 70; race and, 5; scholarship on, 63–64; Tidewater plantation model, 68–71, 76–79, 81–83; in Virginia, 68–74 Point Comfort, 62 politics: of African slave trading companies, 47–52; of Black Loyalists, 157–61, 165–66, 222n16; in Britain, 63–65; geopolitics, 3–4, 7, 41–42, 52–59, 107–16; landholders in, 69–70; of mulatos, 98; of Native slavery, 52–55; of racial slavery, 8–11; of republicanism, 10, 151–53, 167–69, 226n47; revolts and, 37–38; of serial displacements, 104–6; of Sierra Leone Company, 154–62, 164–67; of society, 3–4; in United States, 9–10, 152; of war, 204n21 Porter Fortune Symposium, 4 Portugal: Angola and, 15–16; in Atlantic World, 95–96; in colonialism, 17; Netherlands and, 107; Spain and, 1–2, 17, 23; sub-­Saharan Africans to, 24 power, 9, 40–42 primogeniture, 70 Proctor, John, 70–72, 83 Punch, John, 77–78, 83 Puritans, 67–68, 71–74, 78–83 Quesada de Figueroa, Juan, 101 Quier, John, 147 race: Angola and, 99–100; in Atlantic World, 8; as biology, 148–49; to Christians, 26; construction, 9–10; culture and, 49; to France, 45–46; identity with, 16; labor

Index and, 3–4; laws for, 47–48; naturales, 92–93; Ordinances for Blacks, 19; plantations and, 5; power and, 9; race wars, 214n5; scholarship, 8, 209n11; in Virginia, 137–38, 220n2. See also specific topics racial hierarchies: in Barbados, 119–22; Blackness in, 16–17; in colonialism, 122–25; Europe and, 125–30, 137–40; with women, 135–36 racial slavery: historiography of, 171n3; history of, 1–5; Iberian, 16–20; mobility in, 7–8; origins of, 5–7; philosophy of, 20; politics of, 8–11 racialized health: in Atlantic World, 137–40, 148–49; Blackness and, 145–48, 218n34, 219n48; history of, 140–45, 215n10, 216n14, 217n16 racism: against Blackness, 100–102; historiography of, 217n18; history of, 137–38, 215n8, 220n4; language of, 45–46, 51–52, 56; philosophy of, 18–19; scholarship on, 208n7, 215n7 Real Provision of 1530, 6, 31–33, 39–44 religion: of Black Loyalists, 156–57; in Canary Islands, 98–99; Catholicism, 25, 27, 39–40, 98–99, 119–22, 125–30, 135; colonialism and, 157–58; conversions, 39–40, 81; Franciscan friars, 90; Inquisition and, 88–96, 196n3; Judeo-­Christian religions, 2; law and, 178n1; monarchy and, 113; of North Africa, 34; of Puritans, 67–68, 71–74, 78–83. See also Christians repartimientos, 44 republicanism, 10, 151–53, 167–69, 226n47 Requerimiento, 42 Resendez, Andrés, 47 revolts, 27–28, 37–38, 42, 80, 195n108 Robert, François-­Roger, 53–54 Rogers, Cara, 138 Rolfe, John, 1, 76 Royal African Company, 80, 106, 109 Rush, Benjamin, 145, 148, 219n48 S. Maarten van Russen (ship), 108–9 Salazar, Diego, 99–100 Sáo Joáo Bautista (ship), 2, 107 Schiebinger, Londa, 139, 216n12 scholarship: on Black royalism, 150, 162, 167–69; on Blackness, 216n11; on

237

capitalism, 188n6; on codification, 182n27; on colonialism, 216n12; contemporary, 143–45; historiography, 27; history and, 82–83; language of, 5–6; on Native slavery, 47–50, 179n3; NHC, 62; philosophy and, 4–5; on plantations, 63–64; race, 8, 209n11; on race wars, 214n5; on racism, 208n7, 215n7; on slave raiding, 105–6 Schwaller, Robert, 16–17, 28 Scott, Julius S., 168 seasoning, in slavery, 23 sedition, 73–74 “seducement,” 126–27, 129, 134, 211n49 serial displacements: in colonialism, 107–16; politics of, 104–6 servants: in culture, 7, 9, 25–26; hierarchies among, 209n15; indentured, 6–7; Irish, 119–22, 125–30; slaves compared to, 60–63, 66–72, 76–79, 81–83; women as, 125–30 Seth, Suman, 139 “setler’s laws,” 162–67, 169, 223n20, 225n41 settler colonialism: Africans in, 15–16; Blackness in, 25–30; philosophy in, 16–25 Sharp, Granville, 154 Sheppard, Robert, 78–80 Sibsey, John, 73, 194n76 Sibsey, Mary, 194n76 Sierra Leone: Black Loyalists in, 150–55; to Britain, 152–53, 162–64; history of, 10, 154, 222n11, 223n19; “setler’s laws” in, 162–67, 169, 223n20, 225n41; Sierra Leone Company, 154–62, 164–67, 222n16 Sierra Silva, Pablo Miguel, 106 Sigarra, Antonio, 95 1619 Project, 3, 11. See also specific topics slave laws, 27–28 slave raiding, 8, 35–41, 55, 105–14, 116, 178n1 slave trade, 20–25. See also specific topics slavery. See specific topics SlaveVoyages database, 24–25 slurs, against women, 120–21, 125–29, 131 smuggling, 108–9 Sossa, Margarita de, 199n22 South America: Africans in, 46; Caribbean and, 1–2, 10–11, 51–52; history of, 20–21; West Africa and, 53–55. See also specific topics

238

Index

Southern Caribbean: colonialism in, 39–44; Native slavery in, 31–39 sovereignty, 66–68 Spain: Africa and, 5–6; Africans to, 214n6; authority in, 89; Britain and, 10, 215n7; Caribbean and, 16, 107, 110–11; Christians from, 31; culture of, 92–93; Florida to, 169; free people of color in, 199n21; indigenous people to, 32, 181n22; Inquisition, 88–96, 196n3; Native slavery to, 181n17; Portugal and, 1–2, 17, 23; Real Provision of 1530 in, 6; Spanish America, 20–30; in Treaty of Alaçovas, 24. See also New Spain Stapleton, William, 115–16 Stoler, Ann, 135 strategic silences, 59 Stuart Restoration, 81–82 sub-­Saharan Africans, 16–17, 24, 51–52, 145 sugarcane industry, 97 Sweet, James, 16, 145 Temne people, 153–54, 158–59, 224n25 testaments, 87–88, 97–103. See also wills Thornton, John, 15–16 Tidewater plantation model, 68–71, 76–79, 81–83 tobacco, 150–51 Tobago, 115–16 Trans-­Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 22–25 translation, by chalonas, 27 travel licenses, 26 Treasurer (ship), 2 A Treatise Concerning the Malignant Fever in Barbados (Warren), 143–45 Treaty of Alaçovas, 24 Treaty of Breda, 112–14 Treaty of Tordesillas, 24 tributes, 98 Truth, Sojourner, 152 unaccompanied disembarked slaves, 22 United Kingdom. See Britain United States: Black American experience, 15; Britain and, 2, 159; Canada and, 153–54; Constitution of, 151, 220n4; culture of, 3, 5; France and, 214n2; history of, 5–6; politics in, 9–10, 152; “setler’s laws” in, 167; 1619 Project in, 11; in War of 1812, 169. See also specific states

vagabonds, 64 Vagrancy Act, 64–65, 77, 84 Vásquez, Ana María, 93–94 Vaughan, Richard, 75–76 Vázquez de Ayllón, Lucas, 25 vecinos, 18, 27–30, 92, 101–2, 177n67 Venezuela, 32–33, 42 Veracruz, New Spain, 88–96 violence: in Americas, 45–47, 55–59; in Atlantic World, 121–23; authority for, 32–33; in Caribbean, 8; exploitation and, 35–36; against indigenous people, 38–39; in Native slavery, 47–52; power of, 41–42; against slaves, 70–72, 76–78; in Wolof slaves revolt, 27–28; against women, 33–34, 213n87 Virginia: Act of Conformity in, 73–74; Africans in, 4, 15–16, 76–77, 105; to Britain, 217n18; capitalism in, 60–68, 80–84; colonialism in, 3–4; culture of, 1–2, 6–7, 74–80; free people of color in, 70, 75; history of, 30; labor in, 150–51; plantations in, 68–74; race in, 137–38, 220n2 war: British Civil War, 80–81; captives from, 22; in colonialism, 8, 104–6; geopolitics of, 107–16; philosophy of, 17; politics of, 204n21; race wars, 214n5; War of 1812, 169 Warren, Henry, 143–45 Watts, Mary, 78 Watts, William, 78 Wells, William Charles, 215n10 West Africa: Caribbean and, 46; colonialism in, 224nn25–26; to Europe, 50–52; in slave trade, 35; South America and, 53–55; stereotypes of, 132; in Treaty of Alaçovas, 24. See also specific countries West Central Africans, 22 Wheat, David, 16 Wheeler, Charles, 114 Whistler, Henry, 127 White Lion (ship), 2–4, 10–11 White Over Black (Jordan), 150 white supremacy, 7 Whytt, Robert, 141–42 Wilcocke, Peter, 76–77 wills: in Atlantic World, 66–67, 72, 78, 194n76; contracts in, 97; inheritance

Index laws, 74–76; slaves in, 74; testaments and, 87–88, 97–103 Wilson, Douglas, 214n2 Wolof slaves revolt, 27–28 women: Afro-­Iberian, 26; in Barbados, 122–25; in colonialism, 119–22, 130–35; as free people of color, 19, 91–94; hierarchies among, 19–20; in labor, 119–22; racial hierarchies with, 135–36; “seducement” and, 126–27, 129, 134, 211n49; as servants, 125–30; in slavery, 9; slurs against, 120–21,

239 125–29, 131; violence against, 33–34, 213n87

Xalapa. See New Spain Yanga (chieftain), 29–30 Ybañez, Dominga, 94 Yeardley, George, 7, 60, 63–64, 68 yellow fever, 139–40, 142–48, 216n14, 218n29 Yeoman, Thomas, 75

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the product of the 2019 Porter Fortune Symposium, which was convened at the University of Mississippi in order to discuss the origins of racial slavery in the Atlantic World. We would like to thank the participants and discussants of that symposium, including the contributors to this volume as well as Holly Brewer, Sherwin K. Bryant, John Garrigus, Allison Madar, Tessa Murphy, Hayley Negrin, Juan José Ponce Vázquez, and Edward Rugemer. The Porter Fortune Symposium is a yearly conference hosted by the University of Mississippi History Department. In order to produce the 2019 version of the Porter Fortune, we were heavily dependent on the help and support of Noell Wilson, Kelly Houston, and Suneetha Chittiboyina. In conjunction with this symposium and the commemoration of the events of 1619, the University of Mississippi Slavery Research Group, led by Jeff Jackson and Charles Ross, followed Jay Watson’s suggestion to use the already existing infrastructure of the university to construct a program of events focused on the issue of slavery and to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first recorded African-­descended people in British North America. Over a three-­day period, participants engaged in far-­ ranging and enlightening discussions covering the topics of slavery and race construction from a diverse array of geographical, chronological, and thematic perspectives. Beyond 1619 is situated in this rich and rewarding context. For their cooperation in organizing the year-­long series of events, we would like to thank the History Department, the Department of English, the Department of Classics, the Department of Philosophy and Religion, the Croft Institute for International Studies, the Department of Modern Languages, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the Department of Sociology & Anthropology, the Department of Archives & Special Collections, the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies, the Department of Theatre & Film, and the Center for Civil War Research. Speakers for these events included: Edward Baptist, Tim Armstrong, W. Ralph Eubanks, John T. Matthews, Christina Sharpe, Stephen Best, Jeff Forret, James Oakes,

242

Acknowledgments

Sonja L. Lanehart, Deirdre Cooper Owens, Brian Foster, Ramesh Mallipeddi, Andrés Reséndez, Paul Lovejoy, Marisa Fuentes, Anthony Pinn, Austin Choi-­ Fitzpatrick, Chris Callow, Max Grivno, Joe McGill, and Ayanna Thompson. Organizers of the Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference, the Dalrymple Lecture, the Gilder-­Jordan Lecture, the Christopher Longest Lecture, the Lucy Sommerville Howarth Lecture, the Commemoration of Elwood Higginbottom, the Edith T. Baine Lecture, the Native American Heritage Month speaker series, the Special Collections exhibitions, the Hal Furr Dialogue on Religion, the Croft Lecture Series, the Medieval Speaker Series, the Behind the Big House project, and the Savage Lecture include Jay Watson, Paul Polgar, Marc Lerner, Shennette Garrett-­Scott, Ted Ownby, Chris Sapp, Jaime Harker, Anne Twitty, April Grayson, Katie McKee, Mikaëla M. Adams, Bashir Salau, Jennifer Ford, James Bos, Jennifer Mizenko, Oliver Dinius, Ana Velitchkova, Lindy Brady, Jodi Skipper, Carolyn Freiwald, John Neff, April Holm, Molly Pasco-­Pranger, and Steven C. Skultety. A big thank you to Bob Lockhart of the University of Pennsylvania Press. He expressed early interest in the idea of this volume, provided key editorial advice, and was pivotal in shepherding the book to publication. Our thanks as well to Gregory E. O’Malley and a second reader for the University of Pennsylvania Press who vetted the contributions and provided timely, thorough, and prescient feedback. This volume is immeasurably better because of the entire University of Pennsylvania Press production team, especially N ­ oreen O’Connor-­Abel, who oversaw the editing process, and Michelle Hawkins, who copyedited the manuscript. For extra funding for this volume, we thank Chair Noell Wilson and the University of Mississippi History Department. The editors thank their families for their support.