Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco
If there continued to be some debate about the real presence of slavery in England, Chapter 2 leaves little doubt about the pervasiveness of human bondage throughout the world. Even as many of their countrymen were able to think and write about slavery from a comfortable remove, thousands of Englishmen were coming face-to-face with human bondage as they spread out across the globe during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. And regardless of where they traveled, English observers routinely noted both the presence of slaves and the important role played by slavery in non-English settings. Because they came from a place largely untouched by the actual practice of slavery, noting its pervasiveness in foreign lands was an easy way to set the English apart from and above the people and nations they encountered in Europe, Asia, and Africa. It is important to note, however, early English impressions of slavery as it existed beyond England’s borders were not determined by racial—or even proto-racial—conceits. Initial English accounts of the nature of slavery in Africa are therefore worth scrutinizing because they highlight how the pursuit of economic gain at the expense of European competitors, particularly the Portuguese, played a larger role in how English merchants and mariners encountered and interacted with African peoples than did any abstract anti-black ideology or any persistent interest in the emerging transatlantic slave trade.
The complicated relationship between Englishmen and Africans in the broader Atlantic world during the late sixteenth century comes in for fuller treatment in Chapter 3. The Atlantic world was tainted by the stain of slavery from an early date and the number of captive Africans being transported across the ocean in the holds of European ships was on the rise as English sailors began to traverse the seas in greater numbers. Although a loose link between Africans and slavery already existed in the minds of early modern Englishmen, the English were much more likely to make a direct connection between the descendants of African peoples and the opprobrious practice of slavery when they happened to be in Spain’s Atlantic empire. English pirates and privateers, particularly when they operated in the West Indies, were among the first of their nation to conceive of, and treat, Africans as simple commodities. At the same time, the English acceptance of racial slavery in this context in no way prevented them from engaging Africans as translators, concubines, shipmates, soldiers, intermediaries, and more. Indeed, they had little choice; Spain’s Atlantic world would have been impenetrable and incomprehensible to the English without African allies. Thus, although Englishmen in Africa and the Spanish colonies can be accused of callousness toward Africans, they do not seem to have wedded themselves to an intransigent view of dark-skinned peoples.
The English did not immediately accept either that Africans were necessarily best suited to slavery or that the definitive slave in the Atlantic world was most easily identified by the color of his or her skin. Crucially, just as Englishmen were becoming more familiar with the practice of slavery and the enslavement of African peoples, they were confronted by the harsh prospect that they, too, were legitimate candidates for human bondage under the right circumstances. Chapter 4 reveals that Tudor and early Stuart Englishmen devoted a great deal of attention to explaining what it meant to be English and repeatedly emphasized that theirs was a heritage colored by the efforts of others to enslave Englishmen and subjugate the English nation. When, beginning in the late sixteenth century, tens of thousands of English mariners and merchants were captured and enslaved in other parts of the world, Englishmen scrutinized these developments and nervously identified an emerging threat to their national integrity. Because some English slaves escaped or were ransomed, former slaves were able to publish firsthand accounts that cultivated fearful stereotypes and generated shocking images, which were disseminated throughout the land in royal proclamations, in sermons, and on stage. Nothing else did as much to shape the way the general English public thought about slavery, especially what it meant to be enslaved, before the elaboration of England’s Atlantic plantation complex in the mid-seventeenth century.
The final two chapters of this book follow these separate threads to the English colonial world, particularly during the first half of the seventeenth century. In the half century after the settlement of Jamestown, slavery and other forms of human bondage could be found in every English colony, but how slavery manifested itself between 1607 and the mid-seventeenth century was quite different from the condition at the heart of the race-based plantation labor system that would prevail in a later era. Africans, Indians, and Europeans all could be (and were) subjected to enslavement in early America, but the reasons why individuals from each of these groups might be enslaved varied greatly. So, too, did the meaning of slavery itself. Slavery was often only loosely related to the need for labor during the early seventeenth century. The meaning of slavery was more closely connected to the question of what it meant to be English in the Atlantic world, especially with regard to the practice of holding fellow English men and women in bondage, but this attitude also impacted Indians. When Anglo-American colonists held Africans in bondage, however, they had a much harder time explaining their actions. Of course, the manifestation of racial slavery in the early English colonies was consistent with the prevailing customs of Spain and Portugal’s Atlantic world. It should hardly be surprising that characteristic features of Iberian and Iberian Atlantic slavery were present in the English colonies before the institution was defined in positive law. The presence of free blacks, the tacit acceptance of racial intermixture, and the effort to integrate African peoples into the Christian community—all things that would be discouraged later—are revealing evidence of the lingering influence of what Englishmen had been witnessing and experiencing in the Americas since the late sixteenth century. It may have looked a bit different from what would be commonplace later, but slavery was present in the English colonies from the beginning.
This brings us back to the stories recounted at the beginning of this book. About fifty years ago the historian Winthrop Jordan quipped, “[W]ere [it] possible to poll the inhabitants of Jamestown, Virginia, concerning their reaction to those famous first ‘twenty Negars’ who arrived in 1619 I would be among the first to be at the foot of the gangplank, questionnaire in hand.”13 Judging by the response to his seminal study over subsequent decades and the important place the date “1619” has played in scholarly enterprises, a number of people would love to know the results of such a survey.14 I, for one, would especially like to know what those early Anglo-Virginians thought about slavery in general terms, not just as it may have applied to the new arrivals. We know, of course, that racial slavery would ultimately become a characteristic feature of every English colony in the Americas and the defining institution in virtually every settlement south of the Potomac River and throughout the West Indies. Yet, English peoples neither thought about nor used slavery during the early modern era in ways that were consistent with how things would stand at the end of the seventeenth century. The cultural, intellectual, and legal worlds out of which English colonists emerged prepared them to think about human bondage in different ways and under different circumstances. Few historians will challenge the notion that Anglo-American slavery came to full fruition in England’s colonies during the last half of the seventeenth century, but it is important to acknowledge that slavery was not simply invented out of whole cloth, in situ, by people trying to figure out how to do things for the first time.
It is customary these days to distinguish between “slave societies” and “societies with slaves” as a way of measuring the relative impact slavery had on local and regional cultures and economies.15 By this measure, no English slave societies existed before the plantation revolution reconfigured English America in a way that would make some of those settlements largely unrecognizable to their founders. A good case could even be made that, before the mid-seventeenth century, most English colonies barely even qualified as “societies with slaves,” possessing as they did a supply of primarily European laborers and lacking even a rudimentary infrastructure for employing and managing bound African slaves. In raw economic and demographic terms, the institution of slavery and the presence of African peoples were equally unimpressive and bordering on insignificant. Regardless, it is the central premise of this work that both African peoples and slavery—often quite apart from each other—were central to the articulation of an Anglo-Atlantic world in the century before 1660. Englishmen repeatedly defined themselves and their nation