The Atlantic slave trade

Hey Becca, hey Kim! So in this video we're going to continue talking about how this arbitrary racial hierarchy was established in America, specifically about the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and how our society became so stratified by race so early on.

Okay, interesting! The Portuguese had started to buy slaves and bring them to Europe as early as 1526, but it wasn't until the 1600s when slaves were transported across the Atlantic and sold into servitude in the new colonies.

All right, so I'm going to draw us a little Atlantic World here, so we—please forgive my terrible maps! This was directly connected to this competition between European powers for a stronghold in the New World. This began with the Spanish in 1492 with Christopher Columbus, but slowly also the English, the Dutch, and the Portuguese—all of them are trying to establish their own stronghold that they could hopefully gain a lot of new resources from and just establish glory, really, in this New World. Having slaves was a really big part of being able to do that.

Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, just imagine kind of living in, I don't know, England and hearing about how well Spain is doing getting all this gold and silver from the New World. So, Spain is definitely improving its national standing in Europe and the rest of Europe is thinking, "Sounds to me like we need to get in on this game."

To get in on the game, really what the European powers needed were laborers to work in these new plantations. As you may know, when the Europeans came over, they brought a ton of disease which decimated these Native American populations, which they had previously used to labor through the encomienda system. So, the African slaves actually had immunities to these diseases that the European powers really wanted to capitalize upon.

Yeah, I think what's interesting here—and the reason that I drew this map—is because I think it really helps us understand why it was that people who lived over here had no immunity to European disease and why the people who lived over here did. Because if you think about sailing, so here's Europe, and people had been trading with Europe and West Africa and into the Middle East here for hundreds of years. Exactly! So that gave them plenty of time to kind of build up immunities to each other.

So, not only do people in Africa have the immunity to disease, they're also kind of a readily available labor source because the practice of taking prisoners of war and selling them as slaves on the west coast of Africa was already established. So, Europeans are looking for a labor force that isn't going to die of disease, and there are people being sold as slaves on the west coast of Africa already.

So, at this point, there are kind of two competing labor forces between the Native Americans and the African slaves. Colonists start realizing that the African slaves are actually a more economical labor force than the Native Americans since they had this immunity. Right! And they're also easier to keep as slaves for Europeans because they're not on their home territory. You know, if someone showed up to your town and said, "You're my slave now," you're going to run away to the hills, and they don't know anything about where your town is, so you're fine!

Right! It's hard to enslave people on their home territory. But if you are buying someone who has been wrestled away from their home in Central Africa, brought to the coast, they're with people who don't even speak the same language as them, they're put on a ship to the New World, which is incredibly deadly. Say, probably about 30% of enslaved Africans who were put in this what's called the Middle Passage died during the voyage.

I think that's a really good point, and the reason that some colonists actually preferred Native American slaves is because of their knowledge of the land and agriculture. So, the subordination of both the Native Americans and the African slaves led to lots of intermarriage between the two groups. And so, in the colonies, there became a sense of racial mixing that we had never seen before.

Interesting! And I can see how this might pose a problem if you're trying to figure out who should be a slave and who should not because if you have someone who belongs to both groups, where do you categorize them? So, a lot of the Spanish that were coming over had trouble distinguishing who was supposed to be a slave and who was a Native American as these two groups intermarried.

So, let's check out this painting to learn a little bit more about how the different groups were mixing at the time and how racial hierarchy really solidified at this time period. So, you can definitely see that they've put things in multiple layers here. Here's Virgin Mary, sort of representation of God or the higher power, and then here you see the Spanish whites. And below that, Native Americans who might be the offspring of white Spanish settlers and Native Americans—a Spanish and a Native American—that was called mestizo, right?

Right! Or they might be the offspring of a Native American and an African. Those people are referred to as Creoles. So, there's a very complex system of racial hierarchy in this Spanish society, basically organized around how much white blood a person had. The more privileges and rights you had in their society.

And you see the inverse in early America, right? In the early 1800s, when even one drop of African blood would make a person a slave. Right! And that's one thing that is always very confusing even to the people of the time period because it would be possible for someone who looked quite light-skinned to still be enslaved by virtue of their parentage.

Exactly! And so, this is the system by which society in the early colonial time period was organized around a completely arbitrary factor like race. It was simply the easiest way to identify people and create a working class. And you know, as we move forward, as the English begin to settle North America and shortly after their settlement, import African slaves, the United States will become heir to a version of this system.