How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (38 page)

Sir Francis Drake sailed around the world in 1577–1580, robbing Spanish treasure ships as he went and extensively exploring the western coasts of South and North America on his way.
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He then made a brilliant
attack on the Spanish fleet gathered in the Cádiz harbor and two years later played a leading role in the defeat of the Armada. But he established no New World colonies.

Initially the most lucrative English colonies were in the Caribbean: Saint Kitts (1624), Barbados (1627), and Nevis (1628). In 1655 the English took Jamaica from Spain, and in 1666 they colonized the Bahamas. All of these island colonies specialized in producing sugar and rum.

Of course, eventually the English colonized the entire East Coast of North America, having defeated the French in Canada and seizing New Amsterdam from the Dutch, renaming it New York.

The Dutch

The Dutch were remarkably successful in colonizing Asia, keeping many of these colonies until after World War II. They also founded successful colonies in the New World. The most famous of these was the New Netherlands, located on the Hudson River in what is now New York State. Fort Nassau was founded in 1614 on the site of modern Albany, and New Amsterdam was founded in 1625 on what now is known as Manhattan Island. In 1655 the Dutch annexed the Swedish settlement of Fort Christina (in modern Delaware), ending Sweden’s involvement in the New World. But within twenty years the Dutch lost these North American settlements, ceding them to the English in 1674, following their third war with England.

Unfortunately, one of the most immediate and longest-lasting effects of European colonialism in the New World was slavery.

Slavery

As will be seen, the arrival of Europeans in the New World brought with it diseases such as smallpox and measles to which the Indians had no natural immunity, dying by the millions. Much less notice has been taken of the fact that, especially in the Caribbean, there were tropical diseases such as yellow fever (which originated in Africa) to which Europeans had no immunity, and they, too, died in large numbers. It was against this background that European colonialists confronted the need for laborers.
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Recall that the Portuguese had exiled convicts to labor in their Atlantic island possessions when it proved impossible to recruit volunteers.
Faced with a similar problem, the Spanish tried to impose slavery on the indigenous population of the Canaries but were deterred from doing so not only by the pope but also by the rebelliousness of the natives. This labor problem became acute in the New World, particularly on the Caribbean islands best suited to plantation agriculture, which required a huge labor force. Here, too, efforts to enslave the native population failed for several reasons. First, those natives exposed to Europeans suffered a high death rate. Second, the Indians were rebellious, and it took so much force to coerce them to work that it wasn’t profitable. Third, the Church condemned enslavement of the Indians, with the missionary Bartolomé de las Casas’s book
A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies
(1542) playing a major role. Nor was it possible to recruit workers from Europe, given the death rates. Only the immense gains to be made in running plantations were enough to justify the risks, and even those Europeans who came to the Caribbean stayed only long enough to become rich.

But it wasn’t long before European colonizers recognized that a suitable labor force, having substantial immunity to tropical diseases, could be purchased, cheaply, on the west coast of Africa.

The Slave Trade

Despite being politically correct, it is absurd to claim that Europeans forced slave trading on Africans.
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The enslavement and sale of black Africans by other black Africans goes back at least to ancient Egypt—the pharaohs bought large numbers of black slaves. Moreover, as the historian John Thornton pointed out, slavery was intrinsic to “many if not all pre-colonial African societies.”
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By the time the New World was discovered, the exportation of black slaves had been going on for several thousand years—in recent centuries, mostly to Islamic societies—and African dealers were well organized and prepared to offer a seemingly endless supply of prime laborers.

From the first shipment in about 1510 until the very end when Cuba abolished the slave trade in 1868, about 9.5 million slaves
reached
the New World slave markets, meaning that at least 15 million (and probably more) began the journey from the African interior. The distinguished historian Philip Curtin calculated that of the roughly 9.5 million who survived the trip, about 400,000 went to North America, 3.6 million to Brazil, 1.6 million to Spanish colonies, and the remaining 3.8 million to British, French, Dutch, and Danish colonies in the Caribbean.
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The slave trade was extremely profitable. In Africa some slaves were obtained by raiding another tribe and selling the captives, but most were sold by their own tribal leaders, who remained in power partly because of the wealth they could shower on their supporters from the sale of slaves. Between 1638 and 1702 prices in the West African ports averaged
£3.8
(English pounds) per slave. During this same period, the average price per slave upon arrival in an English colony was £21.3. Of course, there were many costs to be subtracted, including the not infrequent loss of an entire ship and its cargo, but most slave merchants expected to turn a profit of 200 to 300 percent in a period of three to four months.
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Powerless Popes

Even some Catholic writers parrot the claim that it was not until modern times that the Roman Catholic Church repudiated slavery.
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Nonsense! As seen in chapter 6, the Church took the lead in outlawing slavery in Europe, and Thomas Aquinas formulated the definitive antislavery position in the thirteenth century. A series of popes upheld Aquinas’s position. First, in 1435, Pope Eugene IV threatened excommunication for those who were attempting to enslave the indigenous population of the Canary Islands. Then, in 1537, Pope Paul III issued three major pronouncements against slavery, aimed at preventing enslavement of Indians and Africans in the New World.
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Historians have almost uniformly ignored these papal efforts against slavery, in part perhaps because so many Catholics involved in New World slavery ignored them. In fact, many Catholic slave owners and dealers probably knew nothing of them. In this era the popes had very little power among the Spanish and Portuguese. The Spanish ruled most of Italy and in 1527 had even sacked Rome. Under the resulting treaty, it was illegal even to publish papal decrees in Spain or in Spanish colonial possessions without royal consent, and the king of Spain appointed all Spanish bishops.
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When Jesuits read a papal bull against slavery in public in Rio de Janeiro, a mob attacked the local Jesuit college and injured a number of priests. When a similar effort to publicize the pope’s attack on slavery was made in Santos, the Jesuits were expelled from Brazil. Eventually all Jesuits were violently expelled from Latin America, and then from Spain.

Even if bulls against slavery were ignored in the New World, the Catholic Church’s efforts resulted in less brutal treatment of slaves in Catholic than in Protestant societies.

Catholic Slave Codes

When I began to read works on slavery, I was stunned to discover that it was widely considered unacceptable to mention variations in the treatment of slaves across different settings. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning
Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
(1966), for example, David Brion Davis condemned as apologies for slavery all claims that variations in treatment had existed. According to Davis, “Negro bondage was a single phenomenon, or
Gestalt
, whose variations were less significant than underlying patterns of unity.”
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He was especially disdainful of claims that because of slave codes originating with the Catholic Church, slavery was less destructive in Catholic areas—a disdain expressed by most other historians as well, none louder than Marxists such as Marvin Harris.
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To be sure, slavery is an abomination in any circumstances. But these historians distort the record when they deny that slaves were treated more brutally in some areas than others.

The
Code Noir
(Black Code) was formulated in 1685 by Louis XIV’s minister of finance in collaboration with leading French churchmen to regulate the treatment of slaves in French colonies (slavery was, of course, illegal in France).
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To the extent that it hasn’t simply been ignored by most recent historians, the
Code Noir
has been fraudulently characterized. Peter Gay wrote that the code was “extraordinarily severe—toward the slave, of course.”
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Davis complained that, despite the fact that Article 39 ordered officers of justice “to proceed against the masters and overseers who will have killed their slaves or mutilated them,” “there is apparently no record of a French master being executed for killing a slave.”
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But Davis failed to quote the context of this statement given in his source, which reported that “there are records of cases having been brought against [masters and overseers], although no master appears to have suffered the death penalty.”
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Most of the misrepresentations have been the result of omissions. Many historians have noted that the
Code Noir
prohibited slaves from carrying guns or from gathering in crowds. But these same writers have not reported that owners were required to have their slaves baptized, provide them with religious instruction, and permit them the sacrament of holy matrimony, which served as the basis for prohibiting the selling of family members separately. Slaves were exempted from work on Sundays and holy days (from midnight to midnight), with masters being subject to fines or even to the confiscation of their slaves for violating that provision.
Other articles specified minimum amounts of food and clothing that masters must provide and ordered that the disabled and elderly must be properly cared for.

The Spanish
Código Negro Español
included most of the provisions of the
Code Noir
and also guaranteed slaves the right to own property and to purchase their freedom. Specifically, slaves were enabled to petition the courts “to have themselves appraised and to purchase themselves from even unwilling masters or mistresses at their judicially appraised market value.”
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They could do so because the
Código
gave slaves the right to work for themselves on their days off, including the eighty-seven days made up of Sundays and holy days. In rural areas, slaves typically were permitted to sell the produce raised in their own gardens and keep the proceeds.
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These were not empty promises. As Columbia University historian Herbert S. Klein pointed out, “the lower clergy, especially at the parish level, effectively carried this law into practice.”
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They did so by maintaining close contacts with their black parishioners and also by baptizing newborn slaves in formal church services that emphasized their humanity, holding church weddings for slave couples, and holding a church ceremony when a slave was freed.
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In contrast, the British and Dutch colonies had no regulations governing the treatment of slaves. They did not baptize slaves. As the historian Robert William Fogel reported, masters had the acknowledged right to “apply unlimited force to compel labor,” even if this resulted in death.
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Slaves were not allowed to marry, and for a long time it was illegal to set a slave free. In 1661 the English colony of Barbados adopted a slave code holding that should an owner decide to sentence a slave to death for an infraction, two neighbors should be brought in on the hearing and sentencing, although this was not mandatory.
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In Barbados the legal prohibition on freeing a slave was lifted, but it was replaced by a tax so heavy as to prevent such an action from occurring.

Far too many recent historians say that legal codes didn’t matter. David Brion Davis argued that no claim for better treatment of slaves in French and Spanish colonies could be assumed because of a “lack of detailed statistical information.”
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He was wrong. Reliable statistics establish that the death rate for slaves was substantially higher in English than in French and Spanish colonies.
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In addition, there were some long-available statistics that somehow no historian had noticed—until I did so.
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Compare the situation in heavily Catholic Louisiana with that in the rest of the
South, which was largely Protestant. Louisiana came under the French
Code Noir
in 1724. Then, when Louisiana shifted to Spanish control in 1769, slaves there were subject to the
Código
, which included the right to buy their freedom. France regained Louisiana in 1800, and even after the area was sold to the United States in 1803, Catholic norms concerning slavery were deeply rooted there. Those norms had a real impact: the U.S. Census of 1830 found that a far higher percentage of blacks in Louisiana were free (13.2 percent)
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than in any other American slave state—all of them overwhelmingly Protestant. The contrast is especially sharp in comparison with other neighboring states having similar plantation economies: Alabama (1.3 percent), Mississippi (0.8 percent), and Georgia (1.1 percent). In New Orleans in 1830, an astonishing 41.7 percent of the city’s blacks were free, compared with 1.2 percent in nearby Natchez, 1.0 percent in Montgomery, and 3.9 percent in Nashville. Historians like Davis could have easily consulted such census data to recognize the truth: slave codes mattered.