Could slavery in the American South avoid being racialized?

[Lyly]

Remember too that anti-misecgenation laws were passed pretty early on, especially in Virgina. This made it illegal to marry between races and made any kind of mixed-race company pretty suspect. It wasn't too uncommon for poorer white and black populations, especially while white slavery existed in the early colonial period, to intermarry and exist in their own communities, often in more backwoods areas.

Making it a race thing helps to prevent the enslaved people from taking advantage of the social advantages or knowledge of a partner or community of another race. And prohibiting the slavery of white people further alienates these communities while also obviously making the race argument all the easier and apparently more sensible.

 

[Balaur]

One way to expand slavery could be, instead of de-racializing black slavery, instead racializing Irish and Highland Scots indentured servitude. Have the English come up with some bollocks about Celts being naturally barbaric and needing civilizing Anglo-Saxon influence.

 

[Alexander the Average]

I feel that some sort of racialisation is going to be inevitable in a country that both professes that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights whilst also maintaining that slavery is okay. One thing that could be done to limit it somewhat is to have non-African slaves.

Non-European slaves might be easier to come by. Having the initial plans to enslave Native Americans be more successful, although I don't know how or if that would work. Another idea might be expanding the international slave trade to Asia where there were plenty of slave-owning societies. Maybe if abolitionism keeps getting delayed long enough, European Colonial labour demands might be met by importing Asian slaves instead of Asian indentured labourers.

Of course this in and of itself wouldn't prevent racialisation so long as white owners can define themselves as qualitatively different to their non-white slaves. So expanding slavery to Europeans is in order.

I've been reading Liberalism: A Counter-History, and one of the things that the author mentions is that there were various early British Liberals in the 16th and 17th Century who argued that slavery might be a possible solution to the problems of vagrancy (he also off-handedly mentions that a German Liberal made similar arguments as late as the 1840s, but was widely condemned by his contemporaries). If such plans did go ahead it could lay the foundation for a white slave caste, with transported criminals being sold into slavery instead of indenture. If you want to get into darkest timeline territory imagine what would happen if the British applied such a solution to the Irish (then people who bring up "Irish Slavery" as a derailing tactic might actually have a point).

Later in the timeline some sort of alt-Nietzschean philosophy which values aristocratic cosmopolitanism and classical revivalism could serve as a justifying ideology.

This would be a very dark timeline.

 

[Alexander the Average]

Another area to consider would be to create a non-White slave-owning class. Integrating the Five Civilised Tribes into American society would be a good start, considering that they were slave-owners themselves. Another area would be to weaken America's historically quite stringent anti-manumission laws, which would allow for a greater number of free blacks in the US South, and the possibility of at least some prominent (i.e. whole plantations worth) black slave-owners rising.

 

[joho6411]

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.

Excellent! Excellent! Excellent! I love it when we have someone here who actually knows some history!

Sloreck...you must have been educated sometime prior to the mid 1980's .

Or, if not... you have made my night by showing something that does not always manifest itself in these forums....intelligent discussion with interesting facts.

Three cheers for you Sloreck!

Joho .

 

[sloreck]

Thank you. I finished HS in 1966, and now in my retirement (as a surgeon) have been pursuing a PhD in history (field military history) although, naturally, this has to include an understanding of the milieu/zeitgeist of the period when the military under study exists.

As far as a black slave owning class, this existed in Louisiana. Remember Louisiana was quite distinct from the rest of the slave south having been French (with a brief Spanish rule but primarily French population) until 1803 and the Louisiana Purchase. The black/white (and race mixed) dynamic in Louisiana was quite different from the rest of the south until well after the Civil War. The bulk of the rest of the salve south had very small free black populations, and moved towards making manumissions illegal and not allowing free blacks to remain in the state. The Cherokee and other "civilized" tribes in the south did owned black slaves, I don't enough enough about the details to see how racial difference was promoted here. I suspect given the general Native American history of adoption of captured peoples even if enslaved for a while the Indian/Black lines were not as strictly drawn as the Black/White (single drop of blood) lines.

 

[GeographyDude]

. . . 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.

The following book, at least for Virginia, makes the case that things were already getting worse for imported slaves from Africa, but they got worse faster following Bacon's Rebellion.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, Kathleen Brown, University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

--> Please note, this is an academic book, and not near as exciting as it sounds. I mean, it sounds like a Jackie Collins or James Patterson book. It is not.

 

[GeographyDude]

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia

page 108:

‘ . . . Only twenty-three Africans appear on the 1625 muster for the colony [Virginia], which numbered nearly twelve hundred English. The name of eight of the twenty-three — including “Angelo,” “Antonio,” “Anthony," [emphasis added] “Isabell,” and “John Pedro” — suggest previous contact with the Portuguese, perhaps even Catholic baptism. Mary [emphasis added] was one of only ten African women. In the twenty years after the muster, as these other Africans faded from colonial records, she and Anthony reemerged on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. With status accruing from both his property and his responsibility for legally dependent family members — an arrangement that would have been the envy of many of his English male contemporaries — Anthony might have considered himself a successful man in both an English and African sense.

‘Had Mary and Anthony arrived in Virginia a generation later, however, their chances of achieving freedom would have been significantly compromised by a set of laws distinguishing between the privileges and work roles of English and African women. . . '

PDF file --> http://brookscollegeprep.org/sites/...ering_racial_difference_1640-1670_exceprt.pdf

Yes way!

Provided we get started earlier.

 

[Johannes Parisiensis]

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)

First, in the Baltic and Polish regions, the lords were often from a different ethnicity from their serfs: they were German when the serfs were Esthonians or Latvian or Polish when the peasants were Ukrainian, Belarussian or Ruthenian; even in Russia proper, post-Peter and Catherine, the Russian nobles were, more often than not, culturally nearer from France and Germany than from their peasants, speaking French or German and generally using cultural references from these regions.

Second, the Russian empire passed more and more laws allowing for the sale of serfs apart from their land; other serfs were directly bound to their owner, as domestics.

I've been reading Liberalism: A Counter-History, and one of the things that the author mentions is that there were various early British Liberals in the 16th and 17th Century who argued that slavery might be a possible solution to the problems of vagrancy (he also off-handedly mentions that a German Liberal made similar arguments as late as the 1840s, but was widely condemned by his contemporaries). If such plans did go ahead it could lay the foundation for a white slave caste, with transported criminals being sold into slavery instead of indenture. If you want to get into darkest timeline territory imagine what would happen if the British applied such a solution to the Irish (then people who bring up "Irish Slavery" as a derailing tactic might actually have a point).

Likewise, there is a XVIIIth French book written by an unnamed person advocating for the enslavement of vagrants in France.

 

[Jürgen]

A suggestion New Netherlands/New Sweden survive longer cutting New England from Virginia, at the same time finding a way to limit the number of White women emigrating early on to Virginia and the Carolinas, so we get a large biracial free group.

 

[GeographyDude]

Second, the Russian empire passed more and more laws allowing for the sale of serfs apart from their land; other serfs were directly bound to their owner, as domestics.

Well, shit, so instead of getting better, things were getting worse.

No wonder Russia remained an economic backwater! And yes, I'm happy to advance a pro-human rights argument in practical, economic terms, realizing that it probably won't get me all of the way there, but it will get me much of the way there.

 

[Alexander the Average]

Second, the Russian empire passed more and more laws allowing for the sale of serfs apart from their land; other serfs were directly bound to their owner, as domestics.

Maybe if emancipation of serfdom can be put off long enough a "successful" Confederacy or a US that still practice slavery might resort to importing Russian serfs?

 

[Cryptic]

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?

Maybe the transatlantic slave trade gets interrupted earlier?

Meanwhile, the plantation owners still need labor of the forced or coerced kind. So, they go looking for other "workers". One such source, as another poster mentioned, was expanding the indentured servitude concept to the point where Irish and celtic Scots were classified not as slaves per se, but as some sort of permanently bonded laborer- many with inherited contracts ala serfs.

The Carribean could serve as a model: As slave imports fall, US plantation owners seek sources in Cuba and Brazil. They soon notice that slavery in these places is not race based per se, but rather class based (with probably a disproportionate number of blacks classed as slaves). US plantation owners see that the class based system is viable and start importing "serfs".

Maybe if emancipation of serfdom can be put off long enough a "successful" Confederacy or a US that still practice slavery might resort to importing Russian serfs?

Or, the CSA owners contact the Ottoman empire and offer to purchase the "labor contracts" of selected and possibly problematic Greeks, Bulgars and Albanians? The Ottomans lack any ethnic connection to their serfs, espescially the non muslim ones. They then see that exporting excess "contracts" is a good business and also a good way to get rid of potential insurgents.

As far as a black slave owning class, this existed in Louisiana. Remember Louisiana was quite distinct from the rest of the slave south having been French (with a brief Spanish rule but primarily French population) until 1803 and the Louisiana Purchase. The black/white (and race mixed) dynamic in Louisiana was quite different from the rest of the south until well after the Civil War.

As a side note, the coastal south shared Louisiana's culture to varying degrees. Black slave owners, though not as common as in Louisiana, were not unheard of in Mobile, Savannah and Charleston, with pre-war Charleston having a noticeable number of them.

 

[GeographyDude]

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia

page 180:

" . . . As of 1682, all servants ‘whether Negroes, Moors, Mollattoes and Indians’ were to be considered slaves if their parents and native country were not Christian at the time of their first purchase.[116] . . "

-----------

[116] SAL [Statutes at Large], Feb. 20, 1677, II, 404; Nov. 10, 1682, II, 490, 492. [William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, 13 vols. (1823; facsimile reprint, Charlottesville, Va., 1969).]

Again, Wow. Redefining 'Christian' in order to allow slavery to roll forward.

 

[Johannes Parisiensis]

Maybe if emancipation of serfdom can be put off long enough a "successful" Confederacy or a US that still practice slavery might resort to importing Russian serfs?

Unfortunately for this scenario, exporting serfs outside the Empire wasn't allowed and, moreover, the Royal Navy might treat these ships as pirates.

And large-scale enslaving White Christians, even Orthodox, wouldn't be accepted in the antebellum South.

Or, the CSA owners contact the Ottoman empire and offer to purchase the "labor contracts" of selected and possibly problematic Greeks, Bulgars and Albanians? The Ottomans lack any ethnic connection to their serfs, espescially the non muslim ones. They then see that exporting excess "contracts" is a good business and also a good way to get rid of potential insurgents.

As said in the previous paragraph, enslaving White Christians wouldn't be popular in the South, especially since, in this scenario, they would be buying them from non-Christians; moreover, and even if TTL CSA/USA allows internationnal slave trade, other navies, and especially the British one, treated slave trade as piracy, i.e. universal jurisdiction.

 

[Balaur]

Unfortunately for this scenario, exporting serfs outside the Empire wasn't allowed and, moreover, the Royal Navy might treat these ships as pirates.

And large-scale enslaving White Christians, even Orthodox, wouldn't be accepted in the antebellum South.



As said in the previous paragraph, enslaving White Christians wouldn't be popular in the South, especially since, in this scenario, they would be buying them from non-Christians; moreover, and even if TTL CSA/USA allows internationnal slave trade, other navies, and especially the British one, treated slave trade as piracy, i.e. universal jurisdiction.

You could get around that by having some sort of anti-slav racism and hatred for Orthodox Christians become common in the U.S
I've no clue how, though.

 

[Cryptic]

As said in the previous paragraph, enslaving White Christians wouldn't be popular in the South, especially since, in this scenario, they would be buying them from non-Christians; moreover, and even if TTL CSA/USA allows internationnal slave trade, other navies, and especially the British one, treated slave trade as piracy, i.e. universal jurisdiction.

I agree, enslaving white Christians was not feasible. But..... we are not talking about slavery. Rather, we are talking about the importation of uhmm...."indentured long term contract laborers".
Likewise, such humans would never be bought at auctions. Rather, "transfers of contracts" were arranged.

Though the two systems could closely resemble each other, they were not seen as synonyms. This allowed the Russian nobility to de facto enslave ethnic Russians of the same religion via the serf system and the Protestant Prussian Germans to create a similar serf system in largely Protestant Estonia.

As for the Royal Navy intervention, Great Britain was later willing to import Indian "indentured long term contract laborers" into their Carribean holdings. I don't think they would have interfered with similar laborers coming from the Ottoman Empire. Many in Britain at the time considered these peoples to be "barely white" or even largely "non white".

In short, the importation of European "indentured long term contract laborers" was not going to be stopped by squeamishness regarding the religion or race of the needed potential laborers. Rather, the only limitations would be a mild psychological preference for more clearly non white "laborers", cost, and the availability of other labor pools. If Europeans from the Ottoman empire were the only viable source for you know- "special agricultural laborers" , then that source was going to be tapped. Much like the Russian nobility tapped their readily available labor pool.

 

[sloreck]

There are several problems with "indentured" whites being imported for labor in the south, assuming that there are no legal impediments to doing so such as US laws and international antislavery patrols. One of the problems is that these laborers will, in many places, be co-mingled with African slaves. As happened in early colonial America, this will result in mixed race offspring whether "legal" or not on plantations and elsewhere, and any imports who get "freed'/contracts expire and free blacks will tend to mix freely. This sort of race mixing, as opposed to white masters "sporting" with blacks, is anathema to the southern society - especially since you would see white women voluntarily having sex with black men! Another problem is that white "serfs" who escape will be harder to track than black slaves. The USA, even the south, has immigrants so speaking English with an accent is not necessarily going to expose you. A large percentage of the lower class southern population is illiterate, so that is also not an issue. Will serfs be tattooed for identification like in the Draka books?

Once you allow for white serfs, other issues come up. Are the white offspring of serfs bound from birth? Can poor whites sign their children up for contracts (and advance "payment" of wages as opposed to outright "sale"), a practice that might be the only way to keep the rest of the family afloat. As you saw black (especially mulatto) women serving as "sex workers" will white women be used/imported for this reason?

 

[Cryptic]

Once you allow for white serfs, other issues come up. Are the white offspring of serfs bound from birth?

Though the southern land owners would prefer to copy the Russian serf system with children of serfs being bound from birth, I don't think this would be sustainable with the more egalitarian national government in the USA. Children of serfs would be unbound at adulthood providing that..... there are A. no inherited debts and B. that their parents did not sign a new "contract" for them as juveniles. My guess is that inherited debts and "contract" extensions would be common.

Can poor whites sign their children up for contracts (and advance "payment" of wages as opposed to outright "sale"), a practice that might be the only way to keep the rest of the family afloat?

I don't think the landowners would have a problem with even full whites giving children serf "contracts". Not only would such a practice help continue the serf system, but would also reinforce the idea of a natural hierarchy even with in fully whites that many land owners believed existed.

This sort of race mixing, as opposed to white masters "sporting" with blacks, is anathema to the southern society - especially since you would see white women voluntarily having sex with black men!

I don't think the land owners would mind black sex workers or even intermarriage between white and black serfs. If anything, children from these relationships would be easier to identify people as belonging to the serf class.

The social prohibition against such mixing would be gotten around by emphasize that serf classed whites are simply not fully white. Fully white sex workers or intermarriage with serf classed would be an entirely different matter as this would make identification harder and also raise questions as to whether the children could every be classified as serfs.

Another problem is that white "serfs" who escape will be harder to track than black slaves. The USA, even the south, has immigrants so speaking English with an accent is not necessarily going to expose you. A large percentage of the lower class southern population is illiterate, so that is also not an issue. Will serfs be tattooed for identification like in the Draka books?

That was a problem that the Russians, Germans and in earlier times, Poles faced as well. The imported serfs would be more Mediterranean featured than most local WASP or Celtic whites. This would aid in identification to a degree. Likewise, land owners would probably prohibit the taking of Anglo, Irish or French last names. I imagine that the southern landowners would duplicate the historical Russians and rely on groups of rewarded thugs to identify and apprehend escaping serfs. Who knows, some successful escapees may form Cossack groups in Texas? But yes, there would be a higher escape rate with serf classed whites than with blacks.

 

[funnyhat]

There are several problems with "indentured" whites being imported for labor in the south, assuming that there are no legal impediments to doing so such as US laws and international antislavery patrols. One of the problems is that these laborers will, in many places, be co-mingled with African slaves. As happened in early colonial America, this will result in mixed race offspring whether "legal" or not on plantations and elsewhere, and any imports who get "freed'/contracts expire and free blacks will tend to mix freely. This sort of race mixing, as opposed to white masters "sporting" with blacks, is anathema to the southern society - especially since you would see white women voluntarily having sex with black men! Another problem is that white "serfs" who escape will be harder to track than black slaves. The USA, even the south, has immigrants so speaking English with an accent is not necessarily going to expose you. A large percentage of the lower class southern population is illiterate, so that is also not an issue. Will serfs be tattooed for identification like in the Draka books?

How does this differ from the indentured servitude of OTL? According to the wikipedia article on the topic, it was a very large-scale phenomenon - between half and two-thirds of white immigrants to the 13 colonies arrived indentured.