Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco
and even without large numbers of bound Africans living in their midst, slavery mattered. It may have been possible, while in England, to imagine that theirs was that exceptionally rare thing in the early modern era: neither a slave society nor a society with slaves, but a society epitomized by its commitment to the ideals of liberty and freedom. That, at least, is what early modern Englishmen liked to think and what we sometimes choose to think about them. Once they set sail into the Atlantic world and beyond, however, there was little doubt that slavery was ubiquitous.
Long before the establishment of English colonies in the Americas, the subsequent arrival of African peoples to those colonies, and the creation of plantations dedicated to the production of staple crops, England was already wrestling with the pressing problem of slavery. Ideas about slavery were varied in early modern England, but human bondage was perceived by many people to be a serious issue that bore down on them as individuals and as a nation. As such, when Englishmen thought and wrote about slavery during this period, they were typically much more concerned about the possibility of their own enslavement than they were with the condition of African or Indian peoples. By the standards established in eighteenth-century British America and by historians of the mature plantation complex, early modern Englishmen imagined slavery in exceedingly loose terms. Without a doubt, English conceptions of slavery were wide ranging and often incoherent, but the diffuse nature of English ideas also provides a clear guide for understanding the logic of human bondage in the early English colonies. Eventually, the diversity of experiences and excess of precedents that created the problem of how to deal with both slavery and African peoples in the early Anglo-American social order would be simplified. Numerous scholars have worked that problem out. It is important, however, to try to make sense of those ideas and experiences that framed the earliest English colonial efforts and social relations among Europeans, Africans, and indigenous Americans in the New World. Before we move on to the question of how things changed, it is incumbent upon us to grapple with how things stood before the seemingly irresistible power of the plantation complex, with its attendant demographic and economic considerations, overwashed the Anglo-Atlantic world. If we want to make sense of the “20. and odd Negroes,” the Pequot “cannibal negroes,” or the petitioners who claimed that they had been reduced to slavery, we need to think about these stories as a reflection of the English Atlantic world as it was rather than as what it would become. We need to know as much about the “before” as we do the “after.”
CHAPTER 1
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The Nature of a Slave: Human Bondage in Early Modern England
Such as have made forfeit of themselves
By vicious courses, and their birthright lost
’Tis not injustice they are marked for slaves.1
In late 1583 Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s principal secretary, dispatched a thirty-year-old Oxford cleric named Richard Hakluyt to France to search out information that could be used to promote royal support for the development of English colonies abroad. Walsingham, who had been a backer of Martin Frobisher’s voyages of discovery during the 1570s and would give aid to John Davis during the 1580s, was one among a growing number of luminaries who believed that England needed to accelerate its overseas activities. Elizabethan England faced an array of challenges. Nearby, colonization efforts in Ireland had recently entered a much more violent stage as the English struggled to put down a series of local rebellions, particularly those that had plagued the Munster Plantation during the previous fifteen years. England’s northern frontier was hardly more secure as the apparent machinations of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her Catholic allies encouraged the view that Elizabeth’s grasp on the throne was tentative, at best. The Catholic threat to Tudor rule in England was especially vivid across the English Channel, where thousands of Protestants had recently been killed by rampaging Catholic mobs during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. The revolt of Dutch Calvinists against the Spanish Habsburgs may have loomed even larger as English shipping and, especially, its woolen industry were hamstrung by a surge in piracy and the closing of traditional trading ports like Antwerp. And, of course, there was Spain, with whom England would soon enough be at war because of all of these things. Walsingham was but one among many English leaders who believed that England was endangered and it was therefore with a great sense of urgency and a desire to ensure England’s very survival that he commanded Hakluyt to learn all he could about the world beyond the western horizon.2
Despite outward appearances, Hakluyt was an obvious choice for the job. As the namesake of his older and more renowned cousin, young Hakluyt was already connected to a group of people urging the nation to take a more active role in the Americas and throughout the world. During the 1570s, he had begun to gather information about the Northwest Passage from foreign authorities, including the celebrated mapmakers Abraham Ortelius and Gerard Mercator. In 1581, Hakluyt engaged both Walsingham and Sir Francis Drake, who had only recently returned from his circumnavigation, in discussions about establishing a lectureship in navigation. A year later, he made an even bigger mark when he published Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America, a collection of accounts edited and translated by Hakluyt himself designed to promote overseas colonization.3 Hakluyt may have been working in the shadows of other writers, translators, and editors, such as Richard Eden and Richard Willes, and may not have been as celebrated as some of his contemporaries, such as John Dee and Sir Philip Sidney, but he was nonetheless a man on the rise.4
Upon returning from his fact-finding mission in 1584, Hakluyt sat down and composed “A particuler discourse concerninge the greate necessitie and manifolde commodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne discoveries lately attempted” or, as it is more commonly known, “A Discourse of Western Planting.” Hakluyt’s “Discourse,” which he presented to Walsingham and Queen Elizabeth in October, precisely detailed the need for a more comprehensive overseas policy based on the acquisition and settlement of permanent colonies in the Americas. He claimed that colonization was the only way to stem the tide of Spanish expansionism, that it would project Protestant Christianity into a region where the Catholic Church presently exercised a spiritual monopoly, and that it would generate innumerable economic and demographic rewards. Central to Hakluyt’s argument was the idea that North American colonies would be the engine of England’s rise to national greatness, just as overseas conquests had aided Spain’s emergence as a global power during the previous century.
Considering Spain and Portugal’s grip on the Americas, just how England could dislodge the Catholic powers would seem to have been problematic. Not so, Hakluyt argued. The secret, he suggested, lay not simply in English power but in the inherent weaknesses in Spanish colonial policies characterized by “more then barbarous and savage endeles cruelties.” Rehashing a litany of accusations, largely drawn (often verbatim) from Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevíssima relación de la destruyción de las yndias (1552), which had been translated and published in English as The Spanish Colonie in 1583, Hakluyt claimed that a “people kepte in subjection desire nothinge more then freedome. And like as a little passage geven to water it maketh his own way, so give but a small meane to such kepte in tyranie, they will make their own way to libertie, which way may easely be made.” Because Spain ruled “the Indies with all pride and tyranie,” Indians and Africans would “joyne with us or any other moste willinglye to shake of[f] their moste intollerable yoke.” Indeed, they “have begonne to doo yt already in divers places where they were lordes heretofore.” With English encouragement to help root out their oppressors, it would be “like as when people of contrarie nature at the sea enter into Gallies, where men are tied as slaves, all yell and crye with one voice liberta, liberta, as desirous of libertie & freedomme.” Because the Spanish could only lay claim during their tenure to have “exercised moste outragious and more then Turkishe cruelties in all the West Indies,” and future English colonialism would be characterized by “humanitie, curtesie, and freedomme,” a foreign policy premised on the establishment of English colonies in the Americas could only succeed.5
Hakluyt’s references here to the brutality of the Spanish conquest have subsequently become familiar elements of the notorious Black Legend and a predictable part of a document that was drafted