Why early American plantation owners preferred to import African slaves vs enslaving indigenous people.
In: Economics
The catholic church decided that native Americans had souls and were capable of being saved and entering heaven, could not be enslaved. The catholic church also decided African and others could be enslaved/didn’t have souls.
Source: Bartolomé de las Casas, primary source.
Two reasons. The first is because of historical inertia. In the early Caribbean colonies, the planters did initially try to use the native peoples as labor. But the natives quickly began to die due to the introduction of European diseases and the conditions of labor. It became clear fairly quickly that another source of labor would need to be secured, so this is why they began importing African slaves. The life expectancy of slaves in the Carribean was fairly short, given the disease-ridden conditions of growing sugarcane in the carribean at the time. So they needed to be importing more slaves constantly, which created a constant trans-atlantic slave trade. Once that was in place, the obvious choice for cheap labor for north American planters were African slaves, not native Americans.
The second reason is that indigenous people had a lot of options for escaping and going back to their own people. A lot of indigenous people were enslaved in North America at various times but they often escaped – Tisquantum, one of the first indigenous people to contact the Pilgrims at Plymouth was one such person. Africans didn’t have that option, and didn’t know the land of North America so it was thought that they would be easier to control.
There were a lot of factors but I’ll mention a couple of big ones
1) Disease had wiped out a huge number of the native population, making it difficult to rely on them as a labor force.
2) The remaining natives were spread out over huge areas, keenly aware of the land, and liable to band together in retaliation if numbers of them were taken by force.
3) Africans already had skills in agriculture, were accustomed to the hot climates of the Caribbean and American south, and carried more resistance to diseases the Europeans carried.
4) The Transatlantic Slave Trade was already an established system with relatively cheap prices. A constant supply of human labor was already existent.
If I kidnapped you but didn’t leave your neighborhood you’d probably know how to get home if you escaped.
Even worse, you probably have friends nearby who will help you kill me because they don’t want to risk getting kidnapped.
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