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CHAPTER 1

Labor in Colonial America: The Bound and the Free

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The New World looked much like paradise to European voyagers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Christopher Columbus's first expedition (1492–93) took him to the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, the island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Claiming all of them as colonies for Spain's king Ferdinand and queen Isabella, Columbus described these islands as modern-day Edens in his report to the crown. He found Hispaniola especially breathtaking: "In that island ... there are mountains of very great size and beauty, vast plains, groves, and very fruitful fields, admirably adopted for tillage, pasture, and habitation. The convenience and excellence of the harbors in this island, and the abundance of rivers, so indispensable to the health of man, surpass anything that would be believed by one who had not seen it ... and moreover it abounds in various kinds of spices, gold, and other metals." The island's inhabitants seemed "exceedingly liberal with all that they have; none of them refusing any thing he may possess when he is asked for it, but on the contrary inviting us to ask them."

Such impressions were not confined to the balmy Caribbean. In the 1580s, Englishmen hoping to colonize the rougher shores of today's North Carolina thought they had found an Eden on Roanoke Island. There, wrote Arthur Barlowe, "The earth bringeth forth all things in abundance, as in the first creation, without toil or labor." Thomas Harriot forecast a happy relationship with Roanoke's natives, whose desire for "friendship & love" seemed certain to imbue them with "respect for pleasing and obeying us." These were stock images in the earliest reports from European colonists in the Americas.

Many also told of astonishingly rich mineral deposits, which caught Europe's attention above all else. These rumors began with Columbus, who announced at the end of his first voyage that the islands he had claimed would supply Ferdinand and Isabella with "as much gold as they need." The islanders would presumably be happy to serve it up. In fact, Caribbean gold deposits fell far below Columbus's estimates, and only brutal force could make mine slaves out of the region's natives, a collection of tribes known in retrospect as the Arawaks. The islands he likened to paradise in 1492 soon became hellholes where Spain enforced its rule with troops, heavy armaments, and attack dogs as the Arawaks were literally worked to death harvesting gold. The same befell Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and other islands that came under Spanish control in later years. By the 1530s, the Caribbean's goldfields had been stripped bare; the Arawak population had dwindled from about 10 million to a few thousand at best; and a new cycle of misery had begun as colonists turned from mining to cultivating sugarcane using captive laborers from Africa as well as the Americas.

Dreams of mineral wealth in the New World remained alive and well thanks to Spain's conquests of the Aztec empire in Mexico (1519–21) and the Inca empire in Peru (1532), both exceptionally rich in gold and silver. For decades to come, colonists throughout the Americas would dig for ore before getting down to the more mundane business of farming. Over the long haul, however, agriculture — the production of cash crops for European markets — proved more lucrative than mining; and so did the commerce in slaves, who raised the lion's share of colonial crops.

These developments vindicated Columbus's first impressions of the New World in one respect. Though the soil did not teem with gold and the people would not volunteer for servitude, the profits Europe extracted from American enterprises fully met his expectations. Many nations partook of the wealth: Portugal, England, France, and Holland joined Spain as major colonial and slave-trading powers, and their proceeds fueled economic growth throughout Europe.

Commerce across the Atlantic was not an entirely new phenomenon. Pre- Columbian journeys both to and from the Americas may have been numerous to judge from fragmentary evidence such as Roman coins found in the Americas, Inuit harpoon heads unearthed in Ireland and Scotland, and ancient Mayan sculptures that bear faces with African features. The Norse voyages described in Icelandic sagas are confirmed by archeological evidence of a short-lived settlement in Newfoundland in the early eleventh century, and timber from the region was shipped to Greenland for another 300 years. Columbus himself found evidence of commerce between Africans and Americans: Arawaks sometimes used spearpoints made from guanine, an alloy of gold, silver, and copper developed and used in West Africa, where it was also called guanine. The Arawaks said the alloy had come from dark-skinned traders. Columbus's son Ferdinand reported that his father met people "almost black in color" in what is now eastern Honduras; the Balboa expedition to Panama reportedly encountered a "tribe of Ethiopians."

While transatlantic travel and trade predated Columbus, colonial ventures were something new. Unlike their predecessors, the voyagers of 1492 and after came from societies that had developed military technology to unprecedented levels during the Christian Crusades to seize the Holy Land from Muslims in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. The new tools of war went hand in hand with the certainty of entitlement to any and all lands inhabited by non-Christians. And just as merchants had bankrolled the Crusades in return for trade monopolies, the men who pioneered Europe's colonization of the New World combined Christian piety with a keen eye for business opportunities.

Exploiting the colonies was never a simple matter, however. European monarchs gave giant tracts of American land to favorite courtiers, explorers, military men, and merchants, but land by itself could not make the recipients rich. It seldom contained precious metals; when it did, someone had to mine the ore. Contrary to Europeans' first impressions, moreover, the soil would not feed people without cultivation, let alone yield cash crops. To make a colony pay, its proprietors had to acquire and control a labor force.

Though colonial labor systems differed from place to place and changed over time, bondage was invariably their linchpin. Slaves, indentured servants, and other captives vastly outnumbered wageworkers, and the latter enjoyed few civil liberties beyond the enviable right to quit an unbearable job. For free laborers as well as the unfree, subordination was the central fact of life. Yet both groups repeatedly challenged their masters' authority. The things they endured and the ways they resisted form the core themes of colonial labor history in territories that are now part of the United States.

Legacies of Conquest

Spaniards were the first to colonize land that would be incorporated into the United States. They explored Florida in the early 1500s, hunting for gold and for Indian captives to work in Caribbean gold mines. By 1565, when Spain claimed Florida as a colony, Spanish expeditions had also explored much of what is today the southwestern United States and had established outposts as far north as Virginia and Kansas. By the mid- 1700s, the Spanish frontier in North America was confined to southern latitudes but stretched all the way from Florida to California. Free laborers — Spaniards, Native Americans, Africans, and many people of mixed ancestry — were part of the workforce on this frontier. They included artisans, domestic servants, cotton sharecroppers, and herders on cattle and sheep ranches. Native American servitude was the mainstay of Spanish colonies, however, and fairly common in the sections of North America controlled by England and France.

In the late 1500s, the Spanish crown forbade the outright enslavement of indigenous people, but other forms of Native bondage remained legal, and slavery was often practiced despite the law. From Florida to California, Spain's North American colonies were dotted with missions established by Franciscan friars working to convert Indians to Christianity. This project proceeded on an especially large scale in the colony of New Mexico, established in 1598. By 1629, there were fifty Franciscan missions in the colony, and a reported 86,000 Pueblo Indians had been baptized. The majority of the converts lived in the mission settlements, where men, women, and children spent most of their waking hours at labor under the friars' supervision. Mainly, they raised crops and livestock, not only feeding the settlement but also producing surpluses that the friars marketed for consumption in America or for shipment to Spain. Mission industries expanded as time went on and grew especially large in California. By the early 1800s, the products included butter, tallow, hides and chamois leather, maize, wheat, wine, brandy, vegetable oils, and textiles. While Spanish law did not define mission Indians as slaves, neither were they free to come and go as they wished. Floggings awaited those who failed to do their assigned work, missed the compulsory religious services, or otherwise broke the friars' rules. Soldiers guarded the missions not only to keep rebellious Indians out but also to keep the converts in.

Still, many Indians preferred mission life to their treatment under secular Spanish rule. In New Mexico, colonists regularly violated the law by sending Navajo and Apache captives into slavery in Mexico's mines. Outside the missions, Pueblo peoples labored under the encomienda system in which recipients of royal land grants collected tribute from the land's inhabitants. Under this system, the Pueblos produced maize, cotton blankets, and hides for export to Mexico or Spain. Tribute in the form of forced labor was prohibited by the crown, but encomenderos habitually ignored that rule.

In both New Mexico and Florida, colonists also foisted repartimiento and rescate on native peoples. The system of repartimiento de indios drafted Indians for labor on public works projects — unloading ships, transporting supplies, and building and repairing roads, bridges, and fortifications. By law, the draftees served for limited terms, labored only on public projects, and received fair compensation. In practice, colonial officials often extended service beyond the legal term, dispensed with wages, and compelled repartimiento workers to labor for private businesses and households. Rescate was practiced in all Spanish colonies: Indians taken captive by other Indians were ransomed and bound over for domestic service in colonists' households. Technically these indios de depósito were not slaves, and did not pass their condition to their children. But they could be bought and sold, and some were sold into outright slavery in Mexico.

In New Mexico unbaptized Indians — especially women and children — were often seized and sold as domestic slaves in violation of the law. Officials tolerated the practice on the theory that it "civilized" the slaves; but like all forms of slavery, this one was more likely to barbarize the masters. In 1751, the wife of Alejandro Mora complained to authorities in Bernalillo, New Mexico, that he mistreated the Indian woman Juana, a slave in the Mora household. The investigating constable found Juana covered with bruises and burns, her ankles raw from manacles, her knees festering with sores. Mora had broken her knees to keep her from running away and periodically reopened the wounds with flintstone. Juana gave this testimony:

I have served my master for eight or nine years now but they have seemed more like 9,000 because I have not had one moment's rest. He has martyred me with sticks, stones, whip, hunger, thirst, and burns all over my body. ... He inflicted them saying that it was what the devil would do to me in hell, that he was simply doing what God had ordered him to do.

Mora protested that he was only looking out for Juana's welfare. He had raped her, he said, only to test her claim to virginity, and he had tortured her only to keep her from becoming a loose woman. Authorities removed Juana from the Mora household; that was her master's only penalty.

English and French colonists enslaved indigenous people too, though never in the same numbers as did the Spanish. In the 1620s, Virginians sold Indian survivors of the Second Anglo-Powhatan War into slavery in the West Indies; in 1637, Indian survivors of the Pequot War in New England were enslaved in Bermuda. During the Tuscarora and Yamasee Wars (1711–15), Englishmen and their Indian allies captured and enslaved natives of the Carolina interior. In 1731, the French in Louisiana rounded up most of the surviving Natchez nation for sale to West Indies plantations. And while English and French colonies typically sent Indian captives to the Caribbean, quite a few were enslaved on the mainland. About a tenth of the slaves in French Louisiana were Indians, mostly women assigned to domestic work. French settlers in Detroit bought Pawnee, Osage, and Choctaw captives and held them and their descendants as slaves for most of the 1700s. A census of South Carolina in 1708 counted 3,960 free whites, 4,100 African slaves, 1,400 Indian slaves, and 120 indentured whites. In New York in 1712, about a quarter of all slaves were Indians. A census of Kingston, Rhode Island, in 1730 counted 935 whites, 333 African slaves, and 223 Indian slaves. By the late 1700s, Indian and African slaves had amalgamated to the point that census takers did not distinguish between the two, instead listing all slaves as "colored."

Indigenous people also labored for Europeans in relationships that did not involve bondage. Many hunted and trapped for pelts to sell to colonial fur traders. Since Native Americans valued commodities differently than Europeans, they often failed to get market value for their goods. From the mid-1600s onward, some New England Indians were wage earners, working as farmhands, domestics, whalers, or construction laborers. This movement into wage work — a pattern that would eventually extend across the continent — reflected the losses of land that undermined Native Americans' ability to live without hiring out.

In 1742, the Seneca leader Canassatego spoke to Pennsylvania officials on behalf of the Iroquois nations: "We know our lands are now become more valuable. The white people think we do not know their value; but we are sensible that the land is everlasting, and the few goods we receive for it are soon worn out and gone. ... Besides, we are not well used with respect to the lands still unsold by us. Your people daily settle on these lands, and spoil our hunting. We must insist on your removing them, as you know they have no right to settle." In this instance and countless others, colonial authorities failed to remove the squatters, and Indians' economic independence eroded.

Indentured Labor in British Colonies

Indentured workers — commonly called "servants" — were a key source of labor for British colonies. They planted the first crops at the Jamestown colony founded in Virginia in 1607, Britain's first permanent settlement in what is now the United States. Twelve of them were aboard the Mayflower when it brought the Pilgrims to Ply-mouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. By the time the American Revolution broke out in the mid-1770s, more than half of all European immigrants to the colonies had entered as indentured servants. Estimates put their proportion at 60 to 77 percent. In the 1600s, the vast majority came from England as individuals, and the males far outnumbered the females. The next century saw a large influx of Irish and German families, and the gender ratio grew more even.

Until the 1660s, most Africans who came to British North America arrived as indentured workers too. The first twenty, at least three of them women, landed in Jamestown on a Dutch ship in 1619. Over the next forty-odd years, many hundreds of black indentured servants entered Britain's mainland colonies, from New England in the north to the Carolinas in the south. The majority came from England, Spain, or Portugal, where Africans had lived for two generations or more; others came from the West Indies.

Indenture placed workers in bondage for a limited term — typically three to five years, though some served considerably more time. What had promised to be a short term might stretch into a long one. Magistrates customarily extended the terms of servants hauled into court for fleeing their masters or otherwise breaking the law. For the duration of the indenture, they were their masters' property, and many were repeatedly bought and sold before their terms expired.

Mostly they were put to hard labor, clearing land and plowing new fields, cultivating crops that required constant work, draining swamps and building roads, laundering and cooking, hauling heavy loads. A man with special skills might enjoy lighter duty as an artisan's helper. That was the lot of William Moraley, an apprentice watchmaker back in England and for three years the servant of a New Jersey clockmaker who purchased him fresh off a ship that docked in Philadelphia in 1729. Craftwork was seldom the whole of a servant's assignment, however; in addition to cleaning timepieces, Moraley herded livestock and labored in an iron foundry. He was fortunate in that the clockmaker beat him only once, as a punishment for trying to run away. Other masters had less self-control. Writing from Maryland in 1756, Elizabeth Sprigs told her father in London of repeated floggings: "I one of the unhappy Number, am toiling almost Day and Night ... and then tied up and whipp'd to the Degree that you'd not serve an Annimal."

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Excerpted from "From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend"
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Copyright © 2018 Priscilla Murolo and A.B. Chitty.
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