![]() Slavery was established in the New World by the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, all of whom sent African slaves to work in both North and South America during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Whatever the reason, African kings were implicit in the slave trade and profited from it. Still other tribes sold members when forced to by famine or debt. More commonly, however, tribes sold their own members to Europeans as punishment for an infraction or crime, including such offenses as murder, theft, or treachery against the tribal king. South Carolina and the African Slave TradeĪs with Native Americans, Africans were often sold into slavery by enemy tribes. It is called All My Slaves, Whether Negroes, Indians, Mustees, or Molattoes, and you can find it by clicking here. If you are interested in learning more about South Carolina's Native American slaves, you may want to read Minges' article in full. Apart from their collective exploitation at the hands of colonial slavery, Africans and Native Americans possessed similar worldviews rooted in their historic relationship to the subtropical coastlands of the middle Atlantic. In addition to working together in the fields, they lived together in communal living quarters, began to produce collective recipes for food and herbal remedies, shared myths and legends, and ultimately intermarried. Minges points out some of the other bonds Indians and blacks shared: These ties were especially strong in regards to religion. Nevertheless, strong ties formed between South Carolina's Native Americans and the Africans who were brought to her shore. If they could escape, they could take refuge in the midst of a nearby tribe. Native Americans were all too familiar with the nooks and crannies of "the new world." They knew where to hide, and they knew how to find help. And finally, white people learned that if a Native American slave ran away, they probably weren't going to find him again. For another, black people seemed to have a stronger resistance to white diseases like small pox and yellow fever. For one thing, they had decided that Africans were far better suited to the back-breaking work of cultivating rice than Indians were. In time, however, white planters began to "phase out" the use of Native Americans on their plantations. In either case, Native Americans made up a large share of South Carolina's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century slave population. Others, of course, were captured and sold by the new settlers directly. In consequence, they learned to hunt down and capture members of enemy tribes, selling them to whites as slaves. How did the Native Americans come to be slaves? The tribes in South Carolina were often at war with one another. The indigenous peoples of the Southeastern United States became, themselves, a commodity on the open market. Seeking the gold that had changed the face of the Spanish Empire but finding none, the English settlers of the Carolinas quickly seized upon the most abundant and available resource they could attain. ![]() ![]() No sooner had they set foot on shore near Charleston than the English set about establishing the "peculiar institution" of Native American slavery. As the noted American historian Patrick Minges explains, These men and women had lived along the rivers of the Lowcountry and among the mountains of the Upstate for thousands of years before the first European settler arrived. South Carolina's First Slaves – Native Americansīefore we begin to discuss African slaves, however, let us first look at our state's original slaves, South Carolina Native Americans. The sale of 94 African-Americans in Charleston, SC.
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