A Brief History of North American Slavery

Columbus meets King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain to sponsor his westward Establishment of Spanish Colonies

PART I: Portuguese and Spanish Origins

In the modern debate about United States history some have attempted to rewrite history and seemingly refocus it upon a culture of selective grievance study. Instead of a neutral assessment with context and substantial evidence these advocates have opted to employ ideology by promoting the censorship of opposing facts and scholars. There are huge periods of history absent from many supposedly insightful texts and reports in the media likely because they do not serve the narrative some want portrayed. Often such personalities mixing social justice with academics will assume they are eminent moral authorities but fail to make factually verifiable arguments that do not rely partially on ideology. We must now ask what have they left out of their historical narrative and is what they claim a full account of how the injustice of slavery began in America?

Do those purporting that slavery began in 1619 honestly believe what they state? Can they imagine despite the many verifiable historical facts they might ignore centuries of history to replace it with ideological bias? Are they unaware that slavery was entrenched within every culture in North America at some period of time? Thus, American slavery could not exist without the prior forms introduced by tribal and imperial powers within North America centuries before its later American version. Such information does not remove the prior American government’s crimes but expands our understanding of this societal crime in America that many cultures are responsible for and whose effects were a combination of at least six centuries of injustice. While some try solely blaming American slavery on the English and American colonists, they neglect to mention the Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Native American societies who did so as well before the English use of slavery. This abominable practice was not a single culture’s pattern but a human pattern that still exists in some forms internationally and has for most of Earth’s history.

The actual reported beginning of slavery in North America occurred at least hundreds of years before the first European settler came to America in the 15th Century. A variation of tribal bondage, which in most cases was tantamount to slavery was practiced by the Native Americans against other tribes. According to The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History “perception of early modern slavery associates the institution almost solely with Africans and their descendants. Yet slavery was a ubiquitous institution…Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Native Americans kept slaves before and after Columbus reached America.” This fact cannot be reiterated enough, slavery was established in North America long before the English and later American racial laws were conceived. It was practiced by all prior cultures in America to become a more pernicious system due to the longstanding practice accepted by every major civilization in North American history. While indeed the specific form of slavery varied in cultures and among each group that used it to dominate rival peoples, its use was nearly universal. “Enslavement meant a denial of freedom for the enslaved, but varied greatly from place to place, as did the lives of the slaves.” While a soldier slave of the Islamic Ottoman Empire “enjoyed numerous privileges and benefits” a Native American “who worked in the silver mines of Peru or an African who produced sugarcane can in Barbados” were deprived of nearly all rights by their imperial Spanish captors.i

PORTUGUESE Slavers Transporting Native People

Portuguese King DuartE Profited Immensely from the Slave Trade

“The first example we have of Africans being taken against their will and put on board European ships would take the story back to 1441…when the Portuguese captured 12 Africans in Cabo Branco…and brought them to Portugal as enslaved peoples.”ii Under the reign of King Duarte of Portugal this first act of enslavement was followed by a public sale of African slaves in 1444 and by 1482 the Portuguese were constructing their first permanent slave trading post in modern day Ghana.iii Imperial Portugal would establish the first slave trade’s transatlantic bases and designed key trading ports to facilitate and expand its profits. These actions would generate massive labor power for the Portuguese while simultaneously displaying the wealth those who did not value all human life might acquire using oppression.  

the SPANISH Massacre of the Taino Queen Anacaona and Some of her people After resisting Conquest and Enslavement

The rise of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile would lend imperial Spain the power to expand its colonial holdings in the United States. Yet these new spacious areas required a huge labor force that Spanish nobles and conquistadores were not willing to pay. The supposed deep religious observance of imperial European powers based upon religious texts which justified the slavery of non-believers, something common to all the Abrahamic religions, was offered to begin the mass bondage of native peoples in America and eventually Africa. “For many Catholics, Popes included, slavery provided the rescue or salvation Africans needed. Not only would African souls be saved, but the Spanish kingdom would benefit as well from the commerce in human bodies…Spaniards and the Portuguese had become accustomed to financing their wars and expeditions by seizing men, women, and children whenever possible.”iv

Christopher “Columbus established the first European colony in the Americas in the island of Hispaniola (present day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Columbus is believed to have had prior experience trading in West Africa, and had certainly visited the Canary Islands, where indigenous people know as Guanches had long been enslaved and exported, in small numbers, back to Spain. Though Columbus was primarily interested in finding gold, he also recognized Caribbean islander’s potential value as slaves.” Despite some uninformed modern claims slavery is not a capitalist invention but imperial command economy creation within North America that was established by Spain and fueled by Portuguese slave trade posts to oppress native populations around the world. Columbus would send five hundred Taino native slaves from the Caribbean to Spain in fourteen ninety-five, over a century before other European nations would emulate the Spanish imperial slave complex. Only three hundred of the Taino survived. While the Spanish monarchs would years later attempt to compensate the remaining Tainos, Spanish colonists ignored these reforms in several portions of North and South America by using mass slavery to fuel the development of their colonial infrastructure. This expansive infrastructure that heavily employed slavery would in time extend from “California to Buenos Aries”.v vi vii

Despite imperial “attempts” at reforming slavery the Spanish monarchs allowed colonial leaders feudal dominion over their “subjects” which included “compelling native populations to pay tribute, often in the form of labor” similar to Native American bondage of opposing tribes.viii While the Spanish crown claimed to oppose the transatlantic slave trade of Native Americans “the Crown permitted the outright enslavement and sale within the Americas. During the first half of the sixteenth century, Spanish colonists conducted raids throughout the Caribbean, bringing captives from Central America, northern South America, and Florida back to Hispaniola and other Spanish settlements. One of the “principal arguments” justifying “the enslavement of Amerindians” was the concept “of ‘just war’ (i.e. the notion that anyone who refused to accept Christianity, or rebelled against the Spanish rule, could be enslaved).”

Following additional later reforms adopted in the wake of irreparable damage to Native American populations the Spanish began “to look elsewhere for laborers long before the 1540s. With the Portuguese slave trade thriving, they increasingly looked to Africa.”ix One letter that written during 1501 by the Spanish monarchs to one of their agents states that travel by non-Catholics and the recently converted to their American colonies would be prohibited except in the case of “black slaves, or other slaves, that have been born under the dominion of our natural Christian subjects”. Spanish military leader and Governor of the West Indies Nicolas de Ovando oversaw “the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Americas when he imported black slaves from Spain to the island of Hispaniola.” Consequently, despite the modern claims of some in academia, it was not the white English colonists who established and expanded slavery in the American continents but the imperial dictates of Spain.x Not only do the historical facts, trade papers, and royal decrees support this chain of events but even the bones of African slaves under Spain provide supporting forensic evidence of this historical period.

an African Slave Beaten publicly before a Crowd in BRAZIL

The Spanish would deem African slaves “negros” and commenced using them to replace the decreasing Native American populations in their quest for financial enrichment. “The King was even more ambitious than Ovando about using slave labor to increase gold production” and in just five years they “proved so effective that Ovando had 250 more slaves transported from Europe to work in the gold and copper mines.” Subsequently in 1518 the Spanish Holy Roman Emperor Charles the V would issue a charter “allowing four thousand Africans to be purchased directly from the Portuguese traders in the Cape Verde Islands and transported to the New World.” Spain’s first slave vessels would reach the Americas amid the 1520s and “expanded over the following decades, with the Spanish crown selling ‘licenses’ for specific numbers of slaves to individuals who would either arrange a slaving voyage, or attempt to make a profit by reselling the same license to a third party.” Clearly the legalized and entrenched system of human bondage in the New World was established to serve the imperial dominions of Portugal and Spain. This system of institutionalized human bondage was developed for centuries by imperial powers using slavery for profit in North and South America.

For Spain’s mass enslavement of Native Americans and Africans, establishing the European slave trade complex, and depriving untold future generations of their freedom King Ferdinand and his agent Columbus who filled the Church’s coffers with untold stolen riches were made saints. Queen Isabella’s beatification was denied because of her reported laws enacting the legal expulsion of many native groups who did not convert to Catholicism from Spain at the end of the Reconquista. Yet for some reason these foundational events leading to greater amounts of oppression and injustice within both American continents are left out of some modern assessments. No matter the basis of the historical omission any future revisions are likely to be reasonably challenged and hopefully dispelled by those who are willing to offer more of the facts without relying on mere ideology.
Sincerely,
C.A.A. Savastano

References:
i. Indian Slavery in the Americas, AP US History Study Guide, The Americas to 1620: 1491-1607, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, ap.gilderlehrman.org
ii. Crystal Ponti, August 14, 2019, America’s History of Slavery Began Long Before Jamestown, History, history.com
iii. Chronology- Who banned Slavery when?, March 22, 2017, Reuters, reuters.com
iv. Africans in Spanish America, History 301, Saylor Academy, resources.saylor.org 
v. Slavery and Spanish Colonization, 2019, University of Houston, digitialhistory.uh.edu 
vi. Martin Macias Jr, April 30, 2020, Bones Tell the Story of African Slaves in Spanish Colonies, Courthouse News Service, couthousenews.com
vii. Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat, April 6, 2015, Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America, Oxford Academic Journals, Oxford University Press, academic.oup.com
viii. Colonial enslavement of Native Americans included those who surrendered, too, February 15, 2017, Brown University, brown.edu
ix. Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, The Spanish and New World Slavery, College of Charleston, ldhi.library.cofc.edu
x. American Beginnings: 1492-1690, Toolbox Library: Primary Resources in U.S. History & Literature, National Humanities Center, nationalhumantiescenter.org

Related Article
A Brief History of North American Slavery Part II (England circa 1640s)
A Brief History of North American Slavery Part III (France circa 1629)
Related Podcast
A Brief History of Slavery in light of the 1619 Project and 1776