WASHINGTON – In 1614, six years before the Mayflower crossing, English explorer John Smith led two ships to survey the New England coast.
\nAs he described in his \u201cHistorie of New England,\u201d Smith left shipmaster Thomas Hunt behind to fish and trade with the Natives. But Hunt saw an opportunity in another kind of trade: He kidnapped 27 Wampanoags and sailed to Spain, where he sold \u201cthese poor innocent souls\u201d into slavery.
\nAmong them was Tisquantum, or Squanto, the Wampanoag man from Patuxet (later, Plymouth) who later helped negotiate peace between Pilgrims and Wampanoag Massasoit Ousamiquin and who would help the newcomers through their first year at Plymouth.
\nHistorical accounts state that while Squanto was enslaved, Spanish friars helped him escape to England, where he lived with a shipbuilder and eventually returned to America.
\nSlavery in America is usually associated with Africa and the American South. But Ohio State University historian Margaret Ellen Newell told VOA that up until 1700, Native Americans comprised the majority of slaves in America.
\n\u201cThe first documented case was in 1605, when an English expedition captured four Wabanakis in what\u2019s now Maine and brought them back to London,\u201d Newell said. \u201cThe expedition was run by a man named Ferdinando Gorges, who hoped to establish a colony in northern New England and was looking for captives to use as guides and interpreters.\u201d
\nSince the start of their settlement, Puritan colonists sought Indians as indentured servants as a solution to labor shortages, she said.
\nPrecedent
\nSlavery had existed in England in ancient times but declined under Norman rule.
\n\u201cEngland didn\u2019t have a clear law of slavery the way that countries in the Mediterranean, who were using Roman law, did,\u201d Newell said.
\nBut English law did allow indentured servitude. Courts could sentence beggars and vagrants with terms of forced labor and even place children into service without parental consent.
\nThe lines between slavery and servitude often blurred, both in England and New England, Newell said.
\n\u201cSome of these people were set free after a set term as indentured servants,\u201d she said. \u201cBut some were kept for life.\u201d
\nMost New England slaves were placed in Puritan households.
\n\u201cA lot of economic activity (was) going on in households at all times,\u201d Newell said. \u201cAgriculture, stock raising and many domestic chores. You had to turn raw materials into food and clothing. It all happened in the household.\u201d
\nProfessor Sibylle Scheipers of the University of St. Andrews in Britain said enslavement was a common way to deal with war captives in early Europe. But by the Middle Ages, \u201creligious norms prohibiting the enslavement of Christian adversaries had emerged.\u201d
\nBut treatment of non-Christian adversaries was an entirely different matter, whether in the Crusades or in Africa. In the 15th century, two papal decrees gave Spain and Portugal permission to overthrow \u201cbarbarous nations,\u201d convert pagans, seize property and take slaves.
\nPuritan leaders may also have been inspired by Dutch jurist and scholar Hugo Grotius, who wrote in 1625, \u201cThe goods of every particular prisoner, by the right of war, belong to the captors, so the \u2026 people in general belong to the conquerors.\u201d
\nIt is against this backdrop that, when Massachusetts and Connecticut colonists went to war with the Pequot Indians in the Connecticut River Valley in 1636, they did not hesitate to enslave those refugees and noncombatant Pequots.
\n Foreign exports
\n\u201cThey were not only used in New England but were sold to other regions like Bermuda, the Azores islands or English plantations in the West Indies,\u201d Newell said.
\n Not all colonists were comfortable with Indian slavery, whether out of principle or fear that angry captives posed a threat.
\nIn 1641, Massachusetts passed the so-called Body of Liberties, a list of 98 \u201crights, liberties and privileges,\u201d as a reference for the General Court.
\n\u201cThe new law essentially banned slavery,\u201d Newell said. \u201cBut I think the point was to permit the practice. It started out saying that no one can be enslaved, except people captured in a \u2018just war\u2019 \u2014 in other words, people like the Pequots.\u201d
\nSome historians believe that fear of enslavement helped spark the 1675 King Philip\u2019s War between Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag.
\nThe bloodiest conflict of the period, that war set off a boom in the slave trade. Captives and survivors were put on trial, as detailed in \u201cThis Land is Their Land,\u201d by George Washington University historian David J. Silverman. Those who were suspected of committing \u201chostilities\u201d were hanged; others were sentenced to slavery.
\n\u201cPerhaps 2,000 Indian women, children and even men who somehow convinced the English they had done no harm received sentences of slavery,\u201d he wrote.
\nWomen and children were taken into households, sometimes as slaves, other times as indentured servants for set terms. Males over the age of 14 were shipped to sugar plantations in Bermuda and the West Indies, where some of their descendants have been identified today.
\nA legal path to freedom
\nEnslaved Indians found one important benefit in the colonial legal system: They could petition the courts for their freedom.
\n\u201cCourt cases are a really important source of information on Indian slavery,\u201d Newell said. \u201cThey give insight into the methods of enslavement and also how people were fighting back.\u201d
\nSome Indians convinced juries to free them, she said, which suggests that at least some communities saw Indian slavery as immoral.
\nNewell said she believes that these lawsuits helped seed the abolitionist movement to free all slaves, African and Indian, especially after the Revolutionary War, in which Native Americans fought side by side with colonists against British rule.
\nAfter 1800, courts began imposing prison sentences instead of servitude or slavery for civil and criminal offenders, Newell said.
\nMassachusetts never passed a formal law ending slavery, and isolated cases of involuntary servitude and slavery persisted even after the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed in 1865, banning slavery and servitude \u201cexcept as a punishment for crime.\u201d<\/p>\n
Source: Voice of America<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"