Do you all think it's at all plausible if, perhaps due to America securing itself some African allies early on, slavery never gains a racial component? I have vague ideas of America allying with the Barbary pirates to harrass (French?) shipping, instead of warring with them, but this probably requires a rather earlier POD than that. The end goal, of course, is to have black and white serfs and slaves rising up together to overthrow the Southern aristocracy and establish a workers' and farmers' republic.
Could slavery in the American South avoid being racialized?
- Thread starter skozik
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You cannot have the kind of slavery seen in plantations without the racial aspect. Slaves were essentially regarded on the level of farm animals and treated as such. You need the beliefs of racial superiority for that to happen. Indentured service and the like, whilst certainly offering the possibility of farm workers that might not be be treated nicely, would never really go to that point.
The only plausible way not to have racialised slavery is to not have black slaves available due to whatever POD prevents the slave trade, which would then mean no large black populations in the Americas. Large scale voluntary immigration from Africa to the US isn't viable even today much less in that era.
The only plausible way not to have racialised slavery is to not have black slaves available due to whatever POD prevents the slave trade, which would then mean no large black populations in the Americas. Large scale voluntary immigration from Africa to the US isn't viable even today much less in that era.
I'd say no way. Prior to turning to the African slave market, of course there was an alternative supply of labor to work hard on plantations, but importing British convicts and desperate indentured servants was risky in that they could vanish into the general colonial free labor pool if they escaped. An African appearance was better by far than branding someone, and you could only do that to a British subject if they were convicted of committing some serious crime. Whereas when the plantation work became work for permanent African slaves with no prospect of freedom, whites who would be mortal class enemies in Britain could be relied on, generally anyway, to assist in stopping runaway slaves and handing them over to the authorities who would return them to the owner, if only for the bribe of a reward. But with the development of racist ideology in its earliest form, poor whites would generally take pride in helping keep the slaves in their place, and regard their interests as shared with the plantation owners and other well to do. Thus, the teeming legions of British poorhouses and jails could be leveraged into foremen and overseers in America. Thus the total labor force that could be controlled was far larger than would have been the case had British colonies continued to rely on Britain for its lowest classes of laborers.
Of course generalizations that applied to the average British American colony were not strictly the case in the North American continental colonies, not all of them. Those with the largest slave populations like South Carolina most resembled the more profitable sugar islands the evolving imperial system was preoccupied with; the continental colonies were auxiliary to these, and most had far fewer slaves per white colonist. None were free of slavery completely though the northern tier had so few that abolition was easily accomplished there. In the middle, the slaves made up only a small fraction of the total population but were common enough that the system felt threatened by any talk of abolition.
Your post seems to assume the USA popped up out of the ground in the middle of the 1780s, without having a century or so prior history. Most African Americans today descend (on their African sides anyway) from slaves imported before the Revolution. The USA came into being with a huge percentage of its population being African slaves, by then mostly born in America. The pattern of forming stratified racial relations, where even poor whites felt they had to stand in solidarity with richer ones against the perceived dangers of the black population getting out of control, was well-worn then, with even northern colonists witnessing a few instances of slavery every day. By this time entire categories of work in the slave-heavy southern colonies/states were stigmatized as properly slave work, and the local white poor workers would not do it even if well paid--nor would the plantations or small businesses using slave labor be nearly as profitable if they had to offer wages high enough to tempt free whites. Quite a few would probably go straight into the red. Ongoing slavery was immensely profitable for the Union as a whole; even businessmen who would not touch slavery or slave-using enterprises directly benefited from the balance of payments and ease of raising capital. There were people visionary enough to denounce slavery even so but it was hardly a comfortable message.
Now if you want to prevent slavery forming an invidious association with Africans--well pretty much, both slavery and Africans would have to be prevented from being accepted in the colonies at all. Given that the purpose of the colonies was to be profitable for investors in the motherland, I fear this is largely tantamount to saying the colonies should not have been established at all. A few of them could have been justified solely on the grounds of the push of some categories of British subjects to get out of British conditions, but where would a typical malcontent of that type get the funds for the massive investment necessary to establish and secure the colonies? The Puritans were a special case and limited. Overwhelmingly the colonies existed as a scheme to get rich investors in Britain richer.
Perhaps certain categories of Europeans would suffer such bad treatment as transportees they would ally with the desperate Africans--one can imagine the Irish doing so for instance. But in fact steps were taken to prevent and defuse that very alliance, and generally speaking the exploitation of Africans was seen as a ramp that elevated all Europeans to a higher level of social respect and opportunity.
Of course generalizations that applied to the average British American colony were not strictly the case in the North American continental colonies, not all of them. Those with the largest slave populations like South Carolina most resembled the more profitable sugar islands the evolving imperial system was preoccupied with; the continental colonies were auxiliary to these, and most had far fewer slaves per white colonist. None were free of slavery completely though the northern tier had so few that abolition was easily accomplished there. In the middle, the slaves made up only a small fraction of the total population but were common enough that the system felt threatened by any talk of abolition.
Your post seems to assume the USA popped up out of the ground in the middle of the 1780s, without having a century or so prior history. Most African Americans today descend (on their African sides anyway) from slaves imported before the Revolution. The USA came into being with a huge percentage of its population being African slaves, by then mostly born in America. The pattern of forming stratified racial relations, where even poor whites felt they had to stand in solidarity with richer ones against the perceived dangers of the black population getting out of control, was well-worn then, with even northern colonists witnessing a few instances of slavery every day. By this time entire categories of work in the slave-heavy southern colonies/states were stigmatized as properly slave work, and the local white poor workers would not do it even if well paid--nor would the plantations or small businesses using slave labor be nearly as profitable if they had to offer wages high enough to tempt free whites. Quite a few would probably go straight into the red. Ongoing slavery was immensely profitable for the Union as a whole; even businessmen who would not touch slavery or slave-using enterprises directly benefited from the balance of payments and ease of raising capital. There were people visionary enough to denounce slavery even so but it was hardly a comfortable message.
Now if you want to prevent slavery forming an invidious association with Africans--well pretty much, both slavery and Africans would have to be prevented from being accepted in the colonies at all. Given that the purpose of the colonies was to be profitable for investors in the motherland, I fear this is largely tantamount to saying the colonies should not have been established at all. A few of them could have been justified solely on the grounds of the push of some categories of British subjects to get out of British conditions, but where would a typical malcontent of that type get the funds for the massive investment necessary to establish and secure the colonies? The Puritans were a special case and limited. Overwhelmingly the colonies existed as a scheme to get rich investors in Britain richer.
Perhaps certain categories of Europeans would suffer such bad treatment as transportees they would ally with the desperate Africans--one can imagine the Irish doing so for instance. But in fact steps were taken to prevent and defuse that very alliance, and generally speaking the exploitation of Africans was seen as a ramp that elevated all Europeans to a higher level of social respect and opportunity.
Slavery was well established as being a race thing by the time the U.S was independent enough to be making it's own allies.
White indentured servants and Black slaves making common cause was one of the reasons why slavery became a "black" thing in the first place, rather than slaves and other forced labourers being taken from whatever source was available.
White indentured servants and Black slaves making common cause was one of the reasons why slavery became a "black" thing in the first place, rather than slaves and other forced labourers being taken from whatever source was available.
I would disagree, because at the start it wasn't racial. They didn't take black slaves because they were black they did it because of access. They would have taken any slaves that they could.
Now, I imagine that the racial aspect would grow, more to justify the treatment of slaves that was almost necessary for the harsh conditions that they would have work in, like the sugar plantations.
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You saying slavery requirres racial motivations behind it? This goes against the many types of slavery we see in history.
It did succeed; in ending indentured servitude and forcing the English to import Africans en masse.
Deleted member 97083
That's like saying Napoleon's 100 Days were a success because only half of France got occupied after he lost. Bacon's Rebellion didn't end indentured servitude, and the English opting for racial slavery was their response to the rebellion, not the goals of the rebels.
FillyofDelphi
Banned
It makes justifying/being comfortable with the idea quite a bit easier when the entire enslaved population is such an obvious "other", and so can be dehumanized. For the Anglo-Saxon Southerners, this would be particularly thorney as the British had banned slavery in the home country as early as William the Conqueror, meaning they had no resonating cultural traditions of just picking up this or that tribe/city-state's population and dragging them off to the capital to be sold as we saw in the ancient world. Western Europe's states and warfare had advanced far beyond that point before what the colonists were perceive to be the root of their identity came to be. There was also the fact most Europeans were Christian, which raised some moral delemas if you could just go to the market and buy one. The blacks, on the other had, could conveniently be left out of this loop of Christian brotherhood as " pagans in need of Christianizing" and allowed people to not feel like they were condemning their souls to grown sugarcane.
Plus, consider the nature of colonial society; the plantation owners who established the American south couldn't just call London to send in their legions if the slaves got uppity. They needed a portion of the lower class with an interest in maintaining their social order and wouldn't sympathize with the slaves (Hard to do when so many people getting whipped in the field look like they could be you).
Sure, its not nessicery. But in a post-Medieval European society its really hard to construct an intellectually coherent, morale-sounding argument to defend slavery without some kind of qualifier that makes the slaves below human dignity as a class... preferably in such a way you NEVER risk falling into that class yourself.
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Yup. Indentured servitude survived in the British Empire right into the 20th century. If I recall correctly, it wasn't formally outlawed until near the end of the First World War.
How would the racial aspect of slavery be affected if more free (and baptized) Negroes and Mulattoes get rich, acquire plantations, slaves and white indentured servants, sit in legislatures etc. of colonial America?
Considering serfs in eastern Europe in the 1500-1800 period, say in Estonia or wherever, were there any similar theories or beliefs regarding their situation in relation to their noble masters?
Yes, but access is important. West Africa is the most geographically proximate place to the wealthier parts of the Americas (even more so than Europe). Plus the malarial and climatological resistance that someone else mentioned. Getting slaves from anywhere else is going to be logistically harder and more expensive.
Now, in many parts of Latin America, things turned out less racialised in the long run than they did in the United States, with ethnic mixing and no obscene segregationist hangover, but even there they were just devoid of America's weird pathology on the subject rather than simply non-racialized.
Having slaves in servitude and in horrible conditions does not always lead to racialization. Perhaps, an early system whereby slaves could be freed by accepting some sort of other form of servitude?
I'm not sure I would go this far. Racial classifications in Latin America are different than in the United States (the "one drop of blood" idea generally does not exist) but racism is very much present. Lighter skin tone is seen as advantageous, and lighter-skinned people occupy dominant socio-economic positions, in virtually every country in the region.
FillyofDelphi
Banned
Not that I'm aware of, and there are a few key difference between slavery and serfdom. One can not sbhy and sell serfs, for one; they're tied to the land they work as a fixture of the noble's estate. They also exist in a feudal hierarchy and have some rights their lord is bound to respect. The entire concept of socitial ordering through divine right does put the Lord above his peasant... but the later are still people. They just happen to owe you something.
It doesn't help that most Southern slave masters didn't have long noble bloodlines, and slave dealers wanted to be able to sell to anybody who could afford it (creating the oddity that was the occasional free black slaveholder)
Which in no way compares to Jim Crow, sundown towns, lynching, Tuskegee or any of America's myriad other post-slavery atrocities. Hence "less racialised". They were racist, they weren't psychotic.
The bulk of the Anglosphere slave trade from Africa went to the sugar islands/Caribbean. Even before the end of slave importation in 1809 the increase in the Negro population in the Colonies/USA was due to natural increase. Initially the English colonies tried to use native Americans as slaves but this worked poorly, as they had the skills to vanish in to the wilderness never to return - although as in Africa other "natives" were happy to apply enemies for slavery. In the Caribbean on the sugar islands the life span of an adult male slave was appallingly brief due to the horrendous conditions. Africa represented an "infinite" resource for replenishing this population. White slaves, convicted criminals and political prisoners like rebellious Scots or Irish were sent to the islands as slaves, not voluntary indentures. However, as these folks were "wasted" either through death or release after a non-life sentence, the supply from England was simply far too small to meet replacement levels let alone the expansions that went on in the 18th century.
As far as "race" went, this construct was not only a skin color (white/red/black/yellow) thing, but race was associated with other factors as well. Discussions about the Irish race, the Hebrew race, the racial characteristics of the Latin peoples were consider to be equally as valid as racial divisions based on skin color. Because of the ready source of slaves from Africa, "skin color" racial slavery became the norm and the ideology went from seeing blacks as "primitive" morphed in to seeing them as racially discinct in an immutable and inferior way. After all "primitive" people can individually and as a group be "elevated" to civilized and equal status, those distinct racially - as a different species in a sense - cannot alter their relative position on the ladder.
As far as "race" went, this construct was not only a skin color (white/red/black/yellow) thing, but race was associated with other factors as well. Discussions about the Irish race, the Hebrew race, the racial characteristics of the Latin peoples were consider to be equally as valid as racial divisions based on skin color. Because of the ready source of slaves from Africa, "skin color" racial slavery became the norm and the ideology went from seeing blacks as "primitive" morphed in to seeing them as racially discinct in an immutable and inferior way. After all "primitive" people can individually and as a group be "elevated" to civilized and equal status, those distinct racially - as a different species in a sense - cannot alter their relative position on the ladder.