The Rise of Atlantic Slavery in the Americas

Abstract

This chapter examines the development of slavery in the early modern Americas in two major periods. The first period consisted of the co-option and expansion of “pre-Columbian” indigenous slaveries by European colonizers in the different societies of the Americas. The second witnessed the introduction, establishment, and development of Atlantic slavery, which gave rise to a massive slave trade from West Africa to the Americas but also included the adoption and further development of many indigenous forms of slavery. This epoch of colonial Atlantic slavery, which some historians have dubbed “the first slavery,” had taken root by the mid- to late seventeenth century (depending on the region) and lasted more or less until 1800. How did slavery take root in the Americas from the earliest phases of European conquest and how was it characterized? This chapter explores the rise of various slave systems and examines how and why people became enslaved, how their labor was exploited, and how some managed to exit situations of enslavement.

Introduction

The history of slavery in the early modern and modern Americas was characterized by three major epochs. Each of these epochs influenced the others, and, especially with the beginning of European colonization, they even partially overlapped and merged into one another. The first period consisted of the co-option and expansion of “pre-Columbian” indigenous slaveries by European colonizers in the different societies of the Americas. The second witnessed the introduction, establishment, and development of Atlantic slavery, which gave rise to a massive slave trade from West Africa to the Americas but also included the adoption and further development of many indigenous forms of slavery, as well as forms of frontier slaveries, including missionary settlements. This epoch of colonial Atlantic slavery, which some historians have dubbed “the first slavery,” had taken root by the mid- to late seventeenth century (depending on the region) and lasted more or less until 1800. The third period constituted what historians have called the period of the “second slavery,” a second phase of Atlantic slavery that was characterized by the capitalist expansion of slavery in certain regions (such as the US South, Brazil, and Cuba) and a massive illegal slave trade in an age of formal abolition.

How did slavery take root in the Americas from the earliest phases of European conquest and how was it characterized? This chapter examines the emergence of slavery in the first two epochs of the early modern Americas. (The third epoch of the “second slavery” is the subject of a separate chapter.) It explores the rise of various slave systems and examines how and why people became enslaved, how their labor was exploited, and how some managed to exit situations of enslavement.

Origins and Entry into Slavery

Slavery and slaving in the pre-Columbian Americas were ubiquitous and had already a very long history by the time of European conquest. Throughout the western hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans, indigenous populations experienced and employed various forms of enslavement, captive-taking (prisoners of war), manhunts or raids, and even sacrificial slavery.

The early conquista and colonial expansion of the Iberians and other Europeans and their allies did not abruptly alter such practices. Indeed, to a certain extent indigenous slavery was co-opted by Europeans almost everywhere, a practice that in many frontier regions continued throughout the entire colonial period in frontier regions and beyond. Indigenous slaves acquired in the conquista marches and raids of the Iberians—which began immediately in 1492—were legally categorized as esclavos de rescate (rescued slaves) and esclavos de guerra (war slaves). Both forms of enslavement came about as a result of violent raids. Esclavos de rescate were already slaves of local indigenous communities, but were subsequently taken by the conquistadors (in the ideological understanding of the conquistadors they were “saved,” although they remained enslaved to the Iberians). Esclavos de guerra, by contrast, were prisoners of war, enslaved either during wars of conquest or as punishment for rebellions and resistance (including “apostasy”) after the initial conquest of various regions.

At the beginning of the colonial era, the adoption by Europeans of indigenous forms of slavery under new power, property, and social relationships was commonplace and formed the basis of all colonial slaveries in the Americas, as recent research has shown.¹ The main change that occurred with the arrival of Europeans in most regions—at least regarding slavery—was not the sudden introduction of Atlantic slavery as such, but rather the shift in the control of slavery and slaving from indigenous elites and slave traders to Europeans and their descendants. In some places this shift was relatively gradual. Especially in the Greater Antilles and its islands and coasts, in which indigenous people (especially Caribs) had long played an active role as enslavers, control of slaving activities shifted slowly but surely during the early colonial period to Europeans and their descendants.

These early experiments with co-opting and adopting existing forms and networks of indigenous slaveries by Europeans, especially in frontier regions, began to morph into a new, Atlantic-oriented slavery system from about the mid- to late sixteenth century, however, ushering in new colonial legal concepts (based on Roman law concepts of private property of land and human bodies), new forms of state power, and new types of ideological power. In their attempts to secure new labor for their expanding colonial ambitions, the Iberians no longer dabbled in pre-existing indigenous slave trades and slavery systems but rather greatly expanded their attempts to enslave able-bodied indigenous people in a more systematic fashion, with varying degrees of success. Portuguese Brazil took a major step in this direction in the mid-sixteenth century, for example, when they established sugarcane plantations in Pernambuco and Bahia, where they employed primarily indigenous slave labor (some four-fifths of the enslaved laborers there were indigenous between 1540 and 1570), either purchased from indigenous communities or acquired through raids. Similar developments occurred elsewhere. New large-scale slaving raids spread across the greater Caribbean and in the core territories of indigenous empires and territories. The local populations of the first contact islands and areas bordering the Greater Antilles, as well as along the coasts of northern South America, were subjected to massive slave raids. All along the continental coasts of the circum-Caribbean, indigenous peoples withdrew to the hinterland.

In British and French colonies, including mainland North America, early experiments with indigenous slavery were also commonplace, although beginning at different times in the different colonial regions. There, too, co-option of enslavement practices (especially through captive-taking in wars but also trade) met with only very limited success and failed to meet the labor demands of ever-expanding colonial projects. In British and French colonies, for example, which only began to take root in the seventeenth century, indigenous slavery existed side by side with forms of indentured servitude, whereby European laborers worked in the colonies for a specified period of time (usually without monetary payment). Both African and indigenous slaves were limited in number in the early years of these colonies, where indentured servitude constituted the dominant labor form in these colonies until the mid-seventeenth century.

The failure of indigenous slavery—and, in the case of the British and French, indentured servitude—to fully meet the labor demands of European colonies in specific contexts eventually led to a major shift toward African slaves, however, which either in part or whole or in part came to replace previous forms of slavery and servitude. This transition began around the mid-sixteenth century in the Iberian regions (including Brazil), and roughly between 1650 and 1750 in the British, French, Dutch, Brandenburg, and Swedish colonies. The main reasons had to do with the decimation of indigenous populations through war and disease, and the constant resistance they undertook in the forms of rescue raids and flight in the wilderness. In the case of the British and French, where indentured servants constituted the bulk of plantation workers in the earliest years of plantation agriculture, labor shortages were further compounded by an increasing unwillingness of European laborers to emigrate under the terms of most indentured contracts. In all of these regions, a massive shift occurred to the importation of enslaved Africans, ushering in the epoch of Atlantic slavery and opening the floodgates to a massive Atlantic slave trade. This new “first slavery” was still supplemented on the peripheries by enslavement of indigenous peoples in raids or wars, but the dominant form of Atlantic slavery became that of Africans and their descendants.

Some statistics from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database (www.slavevoyages.org) illustrate this shift. As late as 1584, the number of enslaved Africans purchased in West Africa and bound for the Spanish mainland Americas and Brazil was comfortably less than 1000. By 1600 that number had risen to 20,000 people. By 1700 it was up to 45,000 purchases per year. The same statistic for the Caribbean, where the shift occurred later than in the Iberian-controlled territories, reveals an even greater spike. In 1650 just over 500 Africans were purchased specifically for Caribbean destinations. By 1700 that number was over 22,800; by 1790 some 78,850 Africans were purchased for the Caribbean. In 1655 some 455 Africans were purchased for British mainland North America; in 1698 that number had risen to 1,867; and by 1773 it was 10,346.

Europeans’ eventual turn to West African slave labor markets to fill the growing labor shortage in the Americas was no coincidence, even if it was far from a predetermined development. The employment of specifically African slaves in European colonial projects—especially plantation agriculture—in fact had its origins before the conquest of the Americas. In an attempt to get a foothold on the Mediterranean sugar trade, the Iberians had established small sugar plantations on the uninhabited Atlantic islands off the coast of West Africa in the mid-fifteenth century (the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde, São Tomé, and the Canary Islands—which including enslaving the indigenous people of the Canary Islands). African slaves, procured from nearby West African slave markets, were employed in these relatively small-scale agricultural operations. Slavery and slave trading—including long-distance slave trading to the Mediterranean—in Africa had existed since time immemorial, and slave laborers were easily purchased. This economic model opened up a major market for sugar in Europe, provided Iberians with experience in West African slave trading, and connected plantation-style sugar production to African slave labor, at least for the Iberians.²

The conquest of the Americas overlapped with these experiments on the Atlantic islands, and African slaves were brought to the New World by the Iberians from the very beginning to perform a wide variety of tasks. This early period of Atlantic slavery, roughly until 1650, witnessed the origins of African slave labor in the Americas, a period in which African slaves were purchased and commodified—largely paid for by silver and precious metals procured (stolen) from the New World colonies—and forcibly migrated to the Americas in order to help build and develop Atlantic colonial economies, particularly in the Iberian regions. In this period African slaves were but one form of labor alongside indigenous slaveries and other forms of coerced labor. With major reserves of precious metals in their coffers and a rising labor demand for their colonial enterprises, the Spanish especially could afford to start experimenting with more expensive African slaves in order to fill the gaps left by depopulation throughout their American possessions. As early as the first half of the sixteenth century, Spanish America was regularly importing enslaved Africans to work in silver mines of New Spain/ Mexico, sift for gold, cultivate supplies on truck farms on the margins of cities, and perform all manner of urban labor.

The massive shift to African slave labor that started in the mid- to late sixteenth century in parts of the Iberian regions (especially Brazil) and in the mid-seventeenth century in the other colonies of the Caribbean and mainland, however, constituted a fundamental shift in the history of slavery in the Americas. Large numbers of enslaved Africans now poured into the Americas—a forced migration that would ultimately lead to over 11 million Africans arriving alive by the time the trade fully ended in the second half of the nineteenth century—mainly in order to cultivate and produce colonial commodities for European and increasingly global markets. Atlantic slavery and slaving were now no longer solely in the hands of Iberians but also northwest Europeans powers (especially the Dutch, English, and French, as well as Baltic powers). As the insatiable demand for slave labor grew, the systematization and capital commodification of African bodies now entered an entirely new phase. European colonial powers and settlers openly agreed that African slaves constituted better long-term investments than indigenous slaves and—in the case of the British and the French—indentured servants. The enslavement of indigenous peoples often provoked wars and conflicts throughout the circum-Caribbean; the purchase and employment of enslaved Africans who came from a myriad of different backgrounds and were cut off from their home communities, by contrast, was “safer” in this regard. Enslaved Africans also suffered lower mortality rates and were visible as slaves, making it more difficult for them to undertake successful flight attempts and somewhat easier to recapture when they tried.³

The leading cause of this shift to African slave labor—and indeed the underlying motor of Atlantic slavery in general—was the widespread adoption of sugarcane cultivation, flanked first by tobacco, cocoa, and, after 1760, coffee and indigo (cotton cultivation, especially on mainland North America, began around 1800 in earnest). As stated above, the first Atlantic sugar plantations arose on São Tomé, Madeira, and on the Canary Islands in the Iberian “Empire of the Islands.” It was this model that was transplanted to the Americas, specifically to the Spanish Caribbean and Brazil in the sixteenth century. The Dutch takeover and occupation of northeast Brazil between 1630 and 1654—and especially their subsequent ouster—helped spread both sugarcane cultivation and African slave labor throughout the non-Iberian circum-Caribbean, as the Dutch actively promoted and financed the development of sugarcane plantations on several islands, and supplied them with African slaves. Dutch and Sephardic merchants helped introduce slave-based sugar plantations on Barbados and Jamaica, for example, as well as in the Wild Coast (Guayanas) and the French Caribbean colonies; they also introduced the first African slaves to the tobacco colonies of English North America (especially the Chesapeake colonies). In Barbados, especially, the model of the modern plantation estate emerged, characterized by columns of slaves from different African “nations” (such as Coromantee, Congos, or Minas) who worked through tasks in competition, and processing cane in modern mills with advanced boiling and drying technologies.

While sugar drove the massive transition to African slave labor in the Americas, African slave labor and “other slaveries” were also adopted in non-sugar regions and for a wide variety of economic activities. Throughout the Americas, from the far north (including Canada) to the far south, indigenous and frontier slavery continued to exist. In the middle colonies like Virginia (the Chesapeake), African slave-based plantation slavery emerged around the lucrative cultivation of tobacco. In the Carolina colonies coastal rice plantations also adopted African slavery. In virtually all regions, both African and indigenous slaves were acquired for urban economies, crafts, maritime activities, farming, domestic work, construction, and even lumberjacking and hunting.

The shift to African slave labor in the plantation regions of the Americas, however, in many respects defined Atlantic slavery; it was these regions that absorbed the lion’s share of enslaved people and whose societies became largely dependent on slave labor. The scale and systematic fashion through which African slaves were procured and forcibly migrated to the western hemisphere not only transformed the Americas but also had massive effects on West African coastal communities. Initially—well into the seventeenth century—the demand for African slaves in the Americas could be met by the African slave markets along the coast—especially the Senegambia and Angola—where Iberian and Dutch merchants were already active. The origins of the African slaves sold to European traders varied, but most were from coastal regions or their immediate hinterlands, and most had entered slavery as prisoners of war; some were sentenced to slavery for certain crimes. The increasingly insatiable American demand for slaves by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, changed the scope and organization of the trade for Europeans and Africans. Coastal slave markets aimed at European traders were established all along the West African coast, from the Senegambia to Angola. The transatlantic slave trade developed into one of the largest economic enterprises of the early modern world.

Although most slaves continued to be procured from regions relatively close to the coast—with Loanda and Angolan ports constituting important exceptions, where slaves were brought from well into the interior—the scope of enslavement throughout West Africa grew dramatically. Before the transatlantic slave trade took off in earnest, most African slaves were acquired mainly as by-products of warfare. With the advent of the transatlantic slave trade an increasing amount of violence and coercion were now being committed, at least in part, for the sole purpose of acquiring slaves. No longer mere by-products of violence, slavery now became one of the main justifications for various acts of violence and coercion, as well as state formation, all along the West African coast. Kidnapping became rampant, especially along the frontiers between various kingdoms. Enslavement as a punishment for crime increased. The decision to engage in warfare was now influenced by the certainty that it would produce valuable slaves for export overseas.

In the end millions of African slaves—by 1800 the number of enslaved Africans who had been forced to embark upon voyages across the Atlantic had surpassed 7 million (with over 1.1 million dying en route)—acquired through a wide variety of means, were marched to the coast, sold to European traders, chained and packed into the holds of ships, and forced to endure the tortuous “Middle Passage” as their valuable bodies were transferred to the heart of the Americas to live out their lives in Atlantic slavery. For enslaved people from Africa, enslavement entailed first the horrors and violence of enslavement in Africa and of transport into Atlantic slavery, followed by transports in the Americas. Conditions on board of the slave ships were appalling and terrifying. Mortality rates were high, although they did decrease over time, from around 20 percent in the seventeenth century to around 9 percent by the early nineteenth century.⁴ Although mortality rates were affected by shipwrecks and sometimes even shipboard rebellions, the main culprit appears to have been disease. Mortality rates in fact varied substantially per voyage, with outbreaks of disease (or contaminated foodstuffs and water supplies) sometimes terribly affecting the human “cargo” packed into the ships. As much as a quarter of shipboard mortality indeed occurred while the ships were still cruising the coasts of West Africa in search of more slaves to fill their cargoes, before they even set out to sea. A single visit to a coastal community with a malaria outbreak or contaminated water could wipe out dozens of those chained on board. Slave traders adopted various measures over the years to try and reduce mortality rates and thereby increase their profit margins. They built faster ships and that could make the crossing in less time and were better ventilated, for example. They also improved their methods of health control (even employing slave ship doctors) or of storing food and water for the journey. Still, high death rates plagued the trade to the very end of its existence.

Enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas after a tortuous journey that usually lasted anywhere from one to three months, depending on the wind and the destination. By then most had been on board the ships much longer, since the initial cruising and piecemeal purchase of small groups of slaves along the African coast itself usually took several months, sometimes even half a year. Upon arrival in the Americas the enslaved were finally disembarked, transported often over long distances, and sold to colonial slaveholders, who put them to work at a wide variety of tasks.

How People Lived and Worked as “Slaves”

What did these slavery regimes mean for the enslaved? No form of slavery, no regime of slavery, was in any way “good” for the enslaved. But there were differences in the experiences of enslaved people according to a variety of local circumstances, and one might distinguish between some of the “better” and “worse” versions. For some of those who experienced the earliest phases of frontier slavery in the so-called hato (or hacienda; estancia) economies of Spanish America, for example (which included indigenous and small numbers of specialized enslaved Africans), daily life was far different from life on the later plantations. The hato slavery economies were especially common in the Pacific areas of Central America, in the llanos of Northern South America, the pampas of Río de la Plata/ Southern Brazil and North of New Spain/ Mexico. These slaves were essentially employed as surrogate settlers and put to developing frontier regions in relative autonomy. They ran their own farms on the hatos/estancias (tobacco, sugar, wood, leather, and food); sometimes even directed the work of other enslaved and dependent people; consumed decent amounts of protein and ate beef and fresh fish; married and developed communities. They even defended the hatos (estancias) against colonial indigenous resistance. Other forms of frontier slavery were also less regimented than later plantation slavery systems.

Such cases formed exceptions to the rule, however. Plantation slavery—slavery for the production of colonial commercial agriculture, especially sugar—was a completely different experience for the enslaved, and was in virtually all respects a specifically harsh and extreme economic slavery regime. The plantation regime varied from region to region but shared certain characteristics throughout the Americas. Most striking was the demographic profile of the plantation regions of the Americas—specifically, the relatively high proportion of enslaved people in them. Unlike indigenous, frontier, or urban slaveries, the plantation regions constituted a world in which slavery was not simply one of many parallel (unfree) labor forms—slavery was the main labor form. Enslaved people transported to the plantation regions entered a world in which they were far from alone. Dense populations of black slaves formed either a majority or a very large minority of the total population, ranging in extremes from the sugar islands (in Jamaica black slaves formed over 90 percent of the population by the 1770s, for example) to the relatively small tobacco plantations of Chesapeake colonies (where slaves constituted between one-third and slightly less than one-half of the population by the second half of the eighteenth century). The largest plantations were set up to reflect the racial hierarchy that dominated labor relations, with a central “big house” for the slaveholder’s family, and at some distance rows of modest huts (that looked like villages) where the enslaved people lived.⁵

Work patterns were systematized to ensure maximum profit. Most plantation work forces were organized by gangs of enslaved people marching through the fields at throughout most of the year. They worked under the supervision of one or more white overseers or black “drivers” (the latter of whom were usually slaves themselves), who inflicted physical punishments (especially whippings) if the work did not meet specific standards. In most regions, work under the gang system lasted from sunup to sundown, six days a week. Only in some regions (such as the rice plantations of the Carolinas; on tobacco plantations) or during certain parts of the year did enslaved people work by the “task,” being assigned a certain task to be completed by the end of the day. The division of labor on most plantations was also heavily influenced by gendered notions of work. Women were overwhelmingly relegated to the most unskilled tasks, such as hoeing. The more skilled positions such as ploughing and processing reserved for men.

On virtually all estates, some enslaved people were put to non-agricultural work, especially household work but also as waggoners, boatmen, carpenters, and all manner of skilled and artisanal tasks. House slavery and handicraft slavery is often said to have been less harsh than the experiences of field laborers. That is also only true to a very limited extent. The lives of enslaved people who worked and lived in direct contact with their owners could be hell. And in many plantation regions, enslaved people were even employed by the state in non-productive capacities. In the process of increased defense efforts and the expansion of Havana into a fortress and naval base between 1763 and 1790, for example, the state became the largest slave owner in Cuba. Royal slaves were employed in shipbuilding, as longshoremen in the harbor, in the construction of fortifications, and in military capacities.⁶

Work dominated the lives of the enslaved, but every slavery regime also had its cultural dimensions. Especially on the plantations, where most enslaved people ended up, for example, slave populations in the slave huts, barracks (barracones) or villages could lead relatively quasi-autonomous lives outside of working hours, especially at night. The larger the plantation, the more likely cultural elements from Africa (such as music, drums, food, dances, medicine, and resistance religions) were to survive and be infused into daily life. Families and communities were created; rituals were performed; and cultural and social bonds were continually created and reinforced. In most plantation regions, negative population growth ensured a continued dependence on the transatlantic slave trade, meaning regular “fresh” arrivals of West Africans and the continual “reafricanization” of the slave population. Mainland North America constituted a striking exception to this rule. There, the slave population “creolized” relatively early—by the second half of the eighteenth century a majority of the slave population had been born in America, spoke English as a mother tongue, and had no direct memories of Africa or African cultures. As enslaved people in most parts of North America also constituted an absolute minority of the total population—with the sole exception of the Carolina rice plantations—daily life there also entailed far more contact with local white populations than their counterparts in most of the Caribbean.

Exits from Slavery

In indigenous slavery there was no formal abolition or emancipation in the legal European sense. There were individual rituals of either killing captured men or taking them into families and clans as replacements for their own fallen warriors. Women and children were also often accepted into the social and kinship structures of the enslavers—though most of them were only accepted as full members in the next generations. The most common method of exiting indigenous slavery, therefore, was running away, or “marronage,” a term adapted from what the Iberian conquerors dubbed cimarrón (maroon). The word is probably taken from Aruak, the language of the indigenous in the Greater Antilles. Its meaning was initially possibly “lost arrow.”⁷ When the Europeans came to the Caribbean, it was used in the sense of escaped enslaved people for all forms of slavery. The concepts of maroon (English), marron (French), and marron (Dutch) developed from cimarrón.

Although flight and marronage as a method of escaping slavery predated the European arrival in the Americas, and remained especially prevalent during the initial phase of indigenous slavery—it indeed helped convince Europeans that African slaves were a better investment long-term—the flight of enslaved Africans and their descendants is usually approached as a separate topic in the historical literature. Most historians distinguish between three basic forms of slave flight during the “first slavery”: short-term absenteeism; more permanent marronage and slave flight across colonial borders; and so-called “maritime marronage,” by which enslaved people fled by water to different islands or coasts of the circum-Caribbean.⁸ To these a fourth can be added, that has only recently begun to be explored in depth by historians: urban flight, by which enslaved people fled to colonial towns (especially port towns) and attempted to remain at large in neighborhoods where free black or colored populations lived. The four strategies of flight were quite different in their goals and outcomes. Short-term absenteeism—whereby individual enslaved people escaped to nearby wilderness areas or towns, or remained hidden with friends or family for a number of days or even weeks—was not employed to permanently exit slavery. The life stories of recaptured runaways show that absenteeism (also often called “truancy”) was very common, especially among young men and women, throughout the Caribbean. Regular short-term absenteeism served as a safety valve for enslaved people: removal from the workplace constituted a relief from plantation work, an outlet for swelled emotions, a tool for negotiations, and a way to visit family and friends. Most went back to their owners of their own accord.

Maroons, by contrast, sought to permanently escape bondage and create communities that were largely independent from slaveholding society. Marronage came in several main forms, each with its own space and its own spiritual and historical cultures. The basis of marronage in the plantation zones was collective and usually armed flight of entire groups of enslaved people and their subsequent settlement in wilderness areas near to plantations—especially mountainous and jungle areas—beyond the immediate control of their owners or military might of the state. Maroon communities also sprang up in poorly defined and often contested frontier regions between colonial states, such as in northern New Spain; between the frontiers of the Guayanas (Suriname, Essequibo, Demerara, Cayenne, and their hinterlands); on Trinidad; in northern Florida; and between Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo. Maroon settlements were called different things in the historical sources, depending on the colonial system: palenques, quilombos, cumbes, maroon settlements, rochelas. Most functioned as independent communities with their own power structures. There were even autonomous areas of maroons that a kind of colonial state structure (such as the Quilombo de Palmares in seventeenth-century Brazil; the maroon settlements in the jungles of Suriname; or the settlements in the so-called Oriente, the extreme east of Cuba). Some succeeded in fighting off colonial attempts at recapture and even winning a measure of recognition from colonial states. Several quilombos in Brazil, as well as maroon settlements in Jamaica (such as for example Nanny Town and Trelawny Town) and in the Guyanas (especially Suriname) became tolerated peasant subsistence societies—tacitly, but also formally institutionalized by colonial powers.⁹

Maritime marronage has been relatively little studied, although it was common throughout the circum-Caribbean. Maritime maroons fled by water to the islands and coasts of other colonial powers. Puerto Rico, for example, was for a long time an important destination for maritime marronage in the Caribbean because of Spanish promises of freedom (under certain conditions) for escaped slaves from rival empires, especially the English. In the first half of the nineteenth century, after the Haitian Revolution and subsequent abolition of slavery by various colonial powers, maritime marronage was especially employed by enslaved people trying to reach “free soil.” Indeed, all refugees from slavery who crossed into free soil territories or sought asylum with their masters’ enemies in wartime situations—including those who fled by land—used the political landscape to attempt to legally exit bondage. This was one of the main ways in which the Spanish Empire used the resistance of the enslaved against competing colonizers, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: they offered asylum (usually under various conditions, such as conversion to Catholicism, depending on the context) to runaways from neighboring colonies. Such policies were directed mainly at runaways from the British, Dutch, and French plantation societies. In so doing, they turned places like Spanish Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Venezuelan coast into important destinations for refugees from slavery in the wide region.

In recent years urban slave flight has begun to receive more attention from scholars. These were permanent freedom seekers who sought refuge in towns and cities (especially port towns and cities) by immersing themselves in the large neighborhoods of colored populations and among the marginalized urban population groups. Throughout the Americas, urban runaways were the subject of constant concern among local authorities from very early on. In the large agglomerations of enslaved and free colored and black populations that settled in certain quarters, living conditions were often dire and dominated by the activities of smugglers, thieves, and the unemployed. To these neighborhoods runaway house slaves and refugee slaves from the rural hinterlands directed their course, helping to develop a small universe of marginalized, refugee and desperately poor communities within urban centers. For very few there was regular work. But they lived in very dynamic slavery societies. Subcultures and countercultures formed in the port cities, the members of which also lived from illegal activities, gambling, theft and stolen goods, illegal renting, prostitution, theft, murder, and crime.

Legal exits from slavery in the period of the “first slavery” were achieved by some through a limited number of avenues. The main path to freedom was manumission, which entailed a formalized individual release from slavery by an enslaved person’s owner. Manumission was usually affected through the slaveholder’s will—in other words, slaveholders sometimes released one, some, or all of their enslaved people upon their death. Sometimes enslaved people were manumitted as rewards for “meritous services”—such as military service in various wars with either indigenous populations or colonial rivals. The exact nature and legal mechanisms that determined the conditions of manumission varied throughout the Americas, and some colonies were stricter than others in their conditions than others—in some regions it was a relatively straightforward matter while in others, such as the British colony of Virginia in the eighteenth century for example, special approval was needed from the governor. But manumission as at least possible—if rare—throughout the Americas. The Spanish colonies stood out in their adoption of manumission schemes based on formalized self-purchase arrangements, an arrangement usually referred to as coartación. Under this arrangement, enslaved people entered into a oral formal contract with their owners whereby a price was set for the self-purchase of the enslaved person’s freedom. The enslaved person then attempted to pay this sum in installments, usually through paid extra work and various other activities. When the price had been paid in full, the enslaved person was released from slavery. This could last up to ten years or more.¹⁰

Other than manumission and self-purchase schemes, the only other “legal” methods of exiting slavery in the period of the “first slavery” came with formal abolition in some regions at the tail end of the period, in the late-eighteenth century and turn of the nineteenth century. These came about as a result of the political turmoil and ideologically charged revolutions that broke out across the Atlantic world in the Age of Revolutions. The northern states of the United States all adopted mostly gradual emancipation policies at the state level in the period 1777–1804, for example. The Haitian Revolution brought about formal abolition policies in the period 1791–1803. So too did some movements of Spanish American Independencia wars (like the Hidalgo rebellion in New Spain/Mexico). Abolition in most other parts of the Atlantic world would occur later in the nineteenth century (in the British colonies in 1833; the French colonies in 1848; most of the Latin American republics in the 1850s, the US South and Dutch colonies in the 1860s; and Cuba and Brazil only in the 1880s).

From the perspective of the enslaved, formal release from slavery only referred to a cessation in their masters’ ownership of their bodies. It did not necessarily entail a release from asymmetrical dependencies upon their owners, the state, or other powerful people and institutions, certainly not in the period of the first slavery. Whether they exited slavery through flight, manumission, or sweeping legislation, former slaves often remained trapped in situations of dependency and poverty, undergirded by powerful structural forces and limitations related to the racism and racial hierarchies that defined the colonial societies of the Americas. Some freedpeople indeed remained working for their previous owners; others became indebted to more powerful elites; while others gravitated to the shadows of marginalized communities that were characterized by extreme exploitation.

Conclusion

By the time the third epoch of slavery arose in the nineteenth-century Americas—the so-called “second slavery” (subject of a separate chapter in this volume)—various forms of slavery had already been employed, developed, and institutionalized by European colonial powers for hundreds of years. From the earliest days of conquest, colonizers utilized systems of slavery in order to help conquer and develop the territories of the New World. Initially, they co-opted and further developed pre-existing as well as co-existing systems of indigenous slaveries, which themselves had been common practice since time immemorial. As their territorial claims became larger, however, they eventually turned to massive importation of enslaved Africans—acquired through a vast and highly developed transatlantic slave trade—to meet many of their labor needs. An entire plantation system based on sugar and other plantation commodities such as tobacco, rice and cocoa arose in the regions of the circum-Caribbean, stretching from the southern parts of North America through the Caribbean and into the northern parts of South America. Elsewhere, enslaved Africans were also present, performing all manner of work, from mining to construction to unloading ships in port towns across the region. Formal release from slavery was possible but rare and dependent on the whims of slaveholders and local authorities, leaving flight and marronage as the most common forms of exiting slavery.

Notes

• 1. Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).

• 2. Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13–15; Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

• 3. Alex Borucki, “Trans-imperial History in the Making of the Slave Trade to Venezuela, 1526–1811,” Itinerario 36, no. 2 (2012): 29–54.

• 4. This is according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD) database (https://slavevoyages.org), which contains the most definitive compilation of historical data for transatlantic slaving voyages.

• 5. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 103–23.

• 6. Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

• 7. Jean-Pierre Tardieu, “Cimarrón-Maroon-Marron: An Epistomological Note,” Outre-Mers: Revue d’Histoire 94, no. 350/351 (2006): 237–47.

• 8. Viola Franziska Müller, “Runaway Slaves in the Antebellum Baltimore: An Urban Form of Marronage?” International Review of Social History 65 (2020): 169–95.

• 9. Alvin O. Thompson, Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006); Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (3d ed. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996); Jane G. Landers, “Maroon Women in Spanish America,” in Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Slave Societies of the Americas, eds. David Barry Gaspar and Darcele C. Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 3–18.

• 10. Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks, eds., Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009); Marc Kleijwegt, ed., The Faces of Freedom: The Manumission and Emancipation of Slaves in Old World and New World Slaver (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006); Claudia Varella and Manuel Barcia, Wage-Earning Slaves. Coartación in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2020).