Slavery among Native Americans in the United States

Slavery among Native Americans in the United States includes slavery by Native Americans as well as slavery of Native Americans roughly within the present-day United States. Tribal territories and the slave trade ranged over present-day borders. Some Native American tribes held war captives as slaves prior to and during European colonization

European colonization of the Americas

The start of the European colonization of the Americas is typically dated to 1492. The first Europeans to reach the Americas were the Vikings during the 11th century, who established several colonies in Greenland and one short-lived settlement in present day Newfoundland...

, some Native Americans were captured and sold by others into slavery to Europeans, and a small number of tribes, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, adopted the European practice of holding slaves as chattel property, and held increasing numbers of African-American slaves.

Pre-contact forms of slavery were generally distinct from the form of chattel slavery developed by Europeans in North America during the colonial period. European influence greatly changed slavery used by Native Americans

Native Americans in the United States

Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...

. As they raided other tribes to capture slaves for sales to Europeans, they fell into destructive wars among themselves, and against Europeans.

Traditions of Native American slavery

Many Native American tribes practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America; but none exploited slave labor on a large scale.

Native American groups frequently enslaved war captives whom they primarily used for small-scale labor. Some, however, were used in ritual sacrifice. While little is known, there is little evidence that the slaveholders considered the slaves as racially inferior; they came from other Native American tribes and were casualties of war. Native Americans did not buy and sell captives in the pre-colonial era, although they sometimes exchanged enslaved individuals with other tribes in peace gestures or in exchange for redeeming their own members. The word "slave" may not accurately apply to such captive people. Most of these so-called Native American slaves tended to live on the fringes of Native American society and were slowly integrated into the tribe.

In many cases, new tribes adopted captives to replace warriors killed during a raid. Warrior captives were sometimes made to undergo ritual mutilation or torture that could end in death as part of a grief ritual for relatives slain in battle. Some Native Americans would cut off one foot of captives to keep them from running away. Others allowed enslaved male captives to marry the widows of slain husbands. The Creek, who engaged in this practice and had a matrilineal system, treated children born of slaves and Creek women as full members of their mothers' clans and of the tribe, as property and hereditary leadership passed through the maternal line. The children did not have slave status. More typically, tribes took women and children for captives for adoption, as they tended to adapt more easily into new ways.

Several tribes held captives as hostages for payment. Various tribes also practiced debt slavery or imposed slavery on tribal members who had committed crimes; full tribal status would be restored as the enslaved worked off their obligations to the tribal society. Other slave-owning tribes of North America included Comanche

Comanche

The Comanche are a Native American ethnic group whose historic range consisted of present-day eastern New Mexico, southern Colorado, northeastern Arizona, southern Kansas, all of Oklahoma, and most of northwest Texas. Historically, the Comanches were hunter-gatherers, with a typical Plains Indian...

of Texas, the Creek of Georgia; the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, who lived along the coast from what is now Alaska to California; the Pawnee, and the Klamath.

When the Europeans “discovered” the Native Americans, they began to participate in the slave trade. Native Americans, in their initial encounters with the Europeans, attempted to use their captives from enemy tribes as a “method of playing one tribe against another” in an unsuccessful game of divide and conquer.

The Haida and Tlingit who lived along southeast Alaska's coast were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave-traders, raiding as far as California. In their society, slavery was hereditary after slaves were taken as prisoners of war

Prisoner of war

A prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...

. Among some Pacific Northwest tribes, as many as one-fourth of the population were slaves.

European enslavement

European colonists caused a change in Native American slavery, as they created a new demand market for captives of raids For decades, the colonies were short of workers. Especially in the southern colonies, initially developed for resource exploitation rather than settlement, colonists purchased or captured Native Americans to be used as forced labor in cultivating tobacco, and, by the eighteenth century, rice, and indigo. To acquire trade goods, Native Americans began selling war captives to whites rather than integrating them into their own societies.

The West Indies developed as plantation societies prior to the Chesapeake Bay region and had a demand for labor. Colonists in the South began to capture and enslave Native Americans for sale and export to the "sugar islands," as well as to northern colonies. The resulting Native American slave trade devastated the southeastern Native American populations and transformed tribal relations throughout the Southeast. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English at Charles Town (South Carolina), the Spanish in Florida, and the French in Louisiana sought trading partners and allies among the Native Americans by offering trade goods such as metal knives and axes, firearms and ammunition, liquor and beads, and cloth and hats in exchange for furs (deerskins) and Native American slaves. Traders, frontier settlers, and government officials encouraged Native Americans to make war on other tribes to reap the profits of the slaves captured in such raids or to weaken the warring tribes.

Historians have estimated that tens of thousands of Native Americans were enslaved. It is estimated that Carolina traders operating out of Charles Town shipped an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 Native American captives between 1670 and 1715 in a profitable slave trade with the Caribbean, Spanish Hispaniola, and Northern colonies. Because it was more profitable to have Native American slaves, whites in the Northern colonies sometimes preferred Native American slaves, especially Native women and children, to Africans. Prior to 1720, when it ended the Native American slave trade, Carolina exported as many or more Native American slaves than it imported Africans. The usual exchange rate of captive Native Americans for enslaved Africans during this time period was two or three Native Americans to one African. In the Southwest, Spanish colonists and Native Americans sold or traded slaves at many of the trade fairs along the Rio Grande.

Slave traders preferred captive Native Americans who were under eighteen years old, as they were believed to be more easily trained to new work. In the Illinois Country, French colonists baptized as Catholics Native American slaves whom they bought for labor. They believed it essential to convert Native Americans to the Catholic faith. Church baptismal records have thousands of entries for Indian slaves.

In the Spanish colonies, the church assigned Spanish surnames to Native Americans and recorded them as servants rather than slaves. Many members of Native American tribes in the West would be taken against their will for life as slaves. In the East, Native Americans were recorded as slaves.

Many early laborers, including from Africa, entered the colonies as indentured servants and could be free after paying off passage. Slavery was associated with people who were non-Christian and non-European. In 1705, the Virginia General Assembly defined some terms:

"All servants imported and brought into the Country. . . who were not Christians in their native Country. . . shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto
Mulatto
Mulatto denotes a person with one white parent and one black parent, or more broadly, a person of mixed black and white ancestry. Contemporary usage of the term varies greatly, and the broader sense of the term makes its application rather subjective, as not all people of mixed white and black...

and Indian slaves within this dominion. . . shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resists his master. . . correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction. . . the master shall be free of all punishment. . . as if such accident never happened." – Virginia General Assembly declaration, 1705.

In 1758 the governor of South Carolina James Glen wrote:

"It has always been the policy of this government to create an aversion in them Indians to Negroes."

This was to discourage alliances between the Africans and Native Americans, but they made their own choices.

Slavery in Indian Territory across the United States used slaves for many purposes from work in the plantations of the East, to guides across the wilderness, to work in deserts of the West, and to be soldiers in wars. Native American slaves suffered new European diseases, inhumane treatment, and death.

The dominance of the Native American slave trade lasted only until around 1730, when it led to a series of devastating wars among the tribes. Before 1700, the Westos in Carolina dominated much of the Native American slave trade until the English, allied with the Savannah, who resented Westo control of the trade, wiped them out. The Westo tribal group was completely eliminated; its survivors were scattered or else sold into slavery in Antigua. Those Native Americans nearer the European settlements raided tribes farther into the interior in the quest for slaves to be sold, especially to the British.

A similar pattern of friendly and then hostile relations among the English and Native Americans followed in the southeastern colonies. For example the Creek, a loose confederacy of many different groups who had banded together to defend themselves against slave-raiding, allied with the English and moved on the Apalachee

Apalachee

The Apalachee are a Native American people who historically lived in the Florida Panhandle, and now live primarily in the U.S. state of Louisiana. Their historical territory was known to the Spanish colonists as the Apalachee Province...

in Spanish Florida, destroying them as a group of people in the quest for slaves. These raids also destroyed several other Florida tribes, including the Timucua

Timucua

The Timucua were a Native American people who lived in Northeast and North Central Florida and southeast Georgia. They were the largest indigenous group in that area and consisted of about 35 chiefdoms, many leading thousands of people. The various groups of Timucua spoke several dialects of the...

. Most of the colonial-era Native Americans of Florida were killed, enslaved, or scattered. It is estimated that English-Creek raids on Florida yielded 4,000 Native American slaves between 1700 and 1705. A few years later, the Shawnee

Shawnee

The Shawnee, Shaawanwaki, Shaawanooki and Shaawanowi lenaweeki, are an Algonquian-speaking people native to North America. Historically they inhabited the areas of Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Western Maryland, Kentucky, Indiana, and Pennsylvania...

raided the Cherokee

Cherokee

The Cherokee are a Native American people historically settled in the Southeastern United States . Linguistically, they are part of the Iroquoian language family...

in similar fashion. In North Carolina, the Tuscarora

Tuscarora (tribe)

The Tuscarora are a Native American people of the Iroquoian-language family, with members in New York, Canada, and North Carolina...

, fearing among other things that the English planned to enslave them as well as take their land, attacked the English in a war that lasted from 1711 to 1713. In this war, Carolina whites, aided by the Yamasee

Yamasee

The Yamasee were a multiethnic confederation of Native Americans that lived in the coastal region of present-day northern coastal Georgia near the Savannah River and later in northeastern Florida.-History:...

, completely vanquished the Tuscarora, taking thousands of captives as slaves. Within a few years, a similar fate befell the Yuchis and the Yamasee, who had fallen out of favor with the British. In Mississippi and Tennessee the Chickasaw

Chickasaw

The Chickasaw are Native American people originally from the region that would become the Southeastern United States...

played both the French and British against each other, and preyed on the Choctaw, who were traditional allies of the French, as well as the Arkansas, the Tunica

Tunica people

The Tunica people were a group of linguistically and culturally related Native American tribes in the Mississippi River Valley, which include the Tunica ; the Yazoo; the Koroa ; and possibly the Tioux...

, and the Taensa

Taensa

The Taensa were a people of northeastern Louisiana. They lived on Lake Saint Joseph west of the Mississippi River, between the Yazoo River and Saint Catherine Creek...

, establishing slave depots throughout their territories. A single Chickasaw raid in 1706 on the Choctaw

Choctaw

The Choctaw are a Native American people originally from the Southeastern United States...

yielded 300 Native American captives for the English. The French armed the Natchez tribe, who lived on the banks of the Mississippi, and the Illinois against the Chickasaw. By 1729, the Natchez

Natchez people

The Natchez are a Native American people who originally lived in the Natchez Bluffs area, near the present-day city of Natchez, Mississippi. They spoke a language isolate that has no known close relatives, although it may be very distantly related to the Muskogean languages of the Creek...

, along with a number of enslaved and runaway Africans who lived among them, rose up against the French. An army composed of French soldiers, Choctaw warriors, and enslaved Africans defeated them.
The Indian wars of the early 18th century, combined with the growing availability of African slaves, essentially ended the Native American slave trade by 1750. Numerous colonial slave traders had been killed in the fighting, and the remaining Native American groups banded together, more determined to face the Europeans from a position of strength rather than be enslaved. Many of the Native American remnant tribes joined confederacies such as the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Catawba for protection, making them less easy victims of European slavers.

Native American women, whether free or enslaved, were at risk of rape by European colonists. Both Native American and African-American slaves were at risk of sexual abuse by slaveholders and other white men with power.

Native American adaptation of African slaves

The earliest record of African and Native American contact occurred in April 1502, when Spanish explorers brought an African slave with them and encountered a band.

Native Americans interacted with enslaved Africans and African Americans in every way possible. In the early colonial days, Native Americans were enslaved along with Africans, and both often worked with European indentured laborers. "They worked together, lived together in communal quarters, produced collective recipes for food, shared herbal remedies, myths and legends, and in the end they intermarried." Because both races were non-Christian, Europeans considered them other and inferior to Europeans. They worked to make enemies of the two groups. In some areas, Native Americans began to slowly absorb white culture.

Benjamin Hawkins

Benjamin Hawkins

Benjamin Hawkins was an American planter, statesman, and United States Indian agent . He was a delegate to the Continental Congress and a United States Senator from North Carolina, having grown up among the planter elite...

, Superintendent of the tribes south of the Ohio River from the late eighteenth century through the early nineteenth, encouraged the major Southeast tribes to adopt chattel slavery in order to have labor for plantations and large-scale agricultural production, as part of their assimilation

Assimilation

Assimilation may refer to:*Assimilation , a linguistic process by which a sound becomes similar to an adjacent sound...

of European-American ways. The Five Civilized Tribes

Five Civilized Tribes

The Five Civilized Tribes were the five Native American nations—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—that were considered civilized by Anglo-European settlers during the colonial and early federal period because they adopted many of the colonists' customs and had generally good...

adopted some practices which they saw as beneficial; they were working to get along with the Americans and to keep their territory. The Cherokee was the tribe that held the most slaves. In 1809, they held nearly 600 enslaved blacks. This number increased to almost 1,600 in 1835, and to around 4,000 by 1860, after they had removed to Indian Territory

Indian Territory

The Indian Territory, also known as the Indian Territories and the Indian Country, was land set aside within the United States for the settlement of American Indians...

. Cherokee populations for these dates are: 12,400 in 1809;, 16,400 in 1835; and 21,000 in 1860. The proportion of Cherokee families who owned slaves did not exceed ten percent, and was comparable to the percentage among white families across the South, where a slaveholding elite owned most of the laborers. In the 1835 census, only eight percent of Cherokee households contained slaves, and only three Cherokee owned more than 50 slaves. Joseph Vann

Joseph Vann

Joseph H. Vann was a Cherokee leader who owned Diamond Hill , many slaves, taverns, and steamboats that he operated on the Arkansas, Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee Rivers. He born at Spring Place, Georgia on February 11, 1798...

had the most, owning 110 like other major planters. Of the Cherokee who owned slaves, 83 percent held fewer than 10 slaves. Of the slave-owning families, 78 percent claimed some white ancestry.

In 1827 the Cherokee developed a constitution, which was part of their acculturation. It prohibited slaves and their descendants (including mixed-race) from owning property, selling goods or produce to earn money; and marrying Cherokee or European Americans. It imposed heavy fines on slaveholders if their slaves consumed alcohol

Alcohol

In chemistry, an alcohol is an organic compound in which the hydroxy functional group is bound to a carbon atom. In particular, this carbon center should be saturated, having single bonds to three other atoms....

. No African Americans, even if free and of partial Cherokee heritage, could vote in the tribe. If a mother was of partial African descent, her children could not vote in the tribe, regardless of the father's heritage. Such laws reflected state slavery laws in the Southeast, but Cherokee laws did not impose as many restrictions on slaves nor were they strictly enforced.

The writer William Loren Katz

William Loren Katz

William Loren Katz is an American educator, historian, and author of many books on African-American history, including a number of titles for young adult readers...

suggests that Native Americans treated their slaves better than European Americans in the Southeast. Federal Agent Hawkins considered the form of slavery the tribes were practicing to be inefficient because the majority didn't practice chattel slavery. Travelers reported enslaved Africans "in as good circumstances as their masters." A white Indian Agent, Douglas Cooper, upset by the Native Americans failure to practice a harsher form of bondage, insisted that Native Americans invite white men to live in their villages and "control matters." Katz thought that slaveholding contributed to divisiveness among tribes of the Southeast and promoted a class hierarchy based on "white blood." Historians such as Greg O'Brien believe that class division was related more to the fact that several of the leadership clans accepted mixed-race chiefs, who were first and foremost on these tribes, and promoting assimilation or accommodation.

In the nineteenth century, European Americans began to migrate west from the coastal areas, and, despite treaties, encroach on tribal lands. Bands along the frontier, in closer contact with traders and settlers, tended to become more assimilated, often led by chiefs who believed they needed to change to accommodate a new society. Some mixed-race chiefs had family relationships to elected American officials. Others were educated in American schools, to learn their language and culture. These were the most likely to become slaveholders and adopt other European practices. Others of their people, often located at more of a distance, held to more traditional practices. Cultural divisions were the cause of the Creek Wars (1812–1813), and other Southeast tribes suffered similar tensions.

With the US increasing pressure for Indian Removal

Indian Removal

Indian removal was a nineteenth century policy of the government of the United States to relocate Native American tribes living east of the Mississippi River to lands west of the river...

, tensions became higher. Some chiefs believed removal was inevitable and wanted to negotiate the best terms possible to preserve tribal rights, such as the Choctaw

Choctaw

The Choctaw are a Native American people originally from the Southeastern United States...

Greenwood LeFlore

Greenwood LeFlore or Greenwood Le Fleur was elected Principal Chief of the Choctaw in 1830 before removal. Before that, the nation was governed by three district chiefs and a council of chiefs...

. Others believed they should resist losing ancestral lands. For instance, members of the Cherokee Treaty Party, who believed removal was coming, negotiated cessions of land which the rest of the tribe repudiated. This conflict was carried to Indian Territory, where opponents assassinated some of the signatories of the land cession treaty, for alienating communal land. The tensions among the Native Americans of the Southeast was principally about land and assimilation rather than slavery. Most chiefs agreed that armed resistance was futile. The Five Civilized Tribes all took their African-American slaves with them to Indian Territory

Indian Territory

The Indian Territory, also known as the Indian Territories and the Indian Country, was land set aside within the United States for the settlement of American Indians...

(present-day Oklahoma) during removal.

American Civil War

Traditionalist groups, such as Pin Indians and the intertribal Four Mothers Society, were outspoken opponents of slavery during the Civil War. The Five Civilized Tribes allied with the Confederates during the American Civil War, in part because they resented the US government's having forced them out of the Southeast. The Confederates suggested they might establish a Native American-controlled state if victorious, but their settlers had been the ones to push for Indian Removal.

External links

Ablavsky, Gregory. "Making Indians 'White': The Judicial Abolition of Native Slavery in Revolutionary Virginia and its Racial Legacy." University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 159, p. 1457, 2011, via Social Science Research Network.
Lauber, Almon Wheeler. http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:MUV5CzD--J4J:www.rhodesia.nl/indslavchap1.pdf+America+Indian+slavery+and+law&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjs0a1bT4xbBEUOmsgfevk3ONV_Oe3HGcDiTCF9jT3gpLS7O4iM6zf-NDpttj6LG3g1iFcB5Ko9wSwc9fXZfqbBSJObLhFlC56EkLUtpNqTh_QsR6c3UGvvkfXK8dN5gyVMHXbp&sig=AHIEtbQOCIPgcHftGQXseWEubGN0mXlU_A"Indian Slavery in Colonial Times in the Present Limits of the United States."] New York: Columbia University, 1913.

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Traditions of Native American slavery

European enslavement

Native American adaptation of African slaves

American Civil War

See also

External links