colonies that rebelled against London in 1776 well before 1619.
However, London’s entrance into the ghastliness of the slave trade was not as straightforward as it appears in retrospect. As late as 1620 an English explorer in the upper waters of the Gambia River was offered bonded laborers by an African merchant. He replied that “we were a people who do not deal in such commodities, nor did we buy or sell one another, or any that had our own shapes,”82 a defiant attitude that had disintegrated by century’s end, as we have seen.
Enslavement of the indigenous is another story altogether. By 1622, it was not Spaniards but the indigenous of North America who rebelled and almost wiped out the adolescent settlement.83 And this conflicted tension, driven by the enslavement of the indigenous, was yet another factor impelling the settlers to seek a different supply of bonded labor, one that was unfamiliar with the local landscape and less capable of rallying the neighbors of the settlers to wipe them out.
At this point, enslavement not only ensnared Africans and Native Americans but Christian Europeans as well. A census in Virginia in 1625 identified only twenty-three Africans,84 suggesting that even with the incentive of seeking an alternative to enslavement of the indigenous, other factors would have to arise to bring on increased enslavement of Africans.85
Nonetheless and perhaps not coincidentally, the previous downplaying of the African Slave Trade began to retreat in the early years of the seventeenth century when the settlement in Virginia was formed. A statute in Bermuda in 1623, the first of its kind in the English-speaking world, denied the right of Africans to engage in free movement or to participate in trade and to bear arms.86
Limiting the mobility of Africans and denying their right to be economically independent and to defend themselves by martial means should have indicated to the settlers the innate debility of their project. Instead it was also in the early 1620s that Londoners were to be found on the River Gambia with one of them lasciviously observing that “the women amongst them are … excellently well bodied.” These flesh peddlers should have contemplated more intensively the implications of encountering forty armed men; at least the chronicler “took special note of the blade of … sword[s].”87
Instead, by February 1627 there was the arrival of 80 settlers and 10 enslaved Africans in Barbados.88 Revealingly, although this was an English settlement from its inception, it had a Pan-European patina, which meant that as Europeans became a distinct minority the seeds were already planted for the emergence of a “white” identity politics to confront a growing African population (a similar process unfolded on the mainland). A leader of the initial settlement was Sir William Courteen, a rich London merchant of Flemish descent, who had a wide range of interests in Amsterdam and trade contacts in what became Surinam. From the beginning, there were close ties between Dutch, French, and English in Barbados.89
From the outset there was a basis for moving toward a “whiteness” that transcended ethnic, then religious boundaries. From the outset, one glimpses how the mutual interest in exploiting Africans and the indigenous in the Americas not only generated “whiteness” but also fomented the lessening of religious conflict that had so devastated Europe. In the early stages of French colonialism in the Caribbean there were Catholic Irish, Dutch Calvinists, and Portuguese Jews, all with a mutual interest in enrichment at the expense of “others.”90
However, this too was not a straightforward process. Settlers began receiving land grants on the eastern shore of Virginia in the early seventeenth century These came to include the African Anthony Johnson and his sons John and Richard who were to hold about 800 acres of land in Northampton County. He had arrived in Virginia as a slave in 1621, apparently from Angola, an indicator of London’s ever closer ties to Portugal, an early colonizer in Africa. Seeking to elude being taken over by its larger Iberian neighbor, Lisbon and its relationship with England solidified. There is some doubt if so-called durante vita enslavement—slavery for life as a racial birthmark—existed in Virginia at that moment.91 Yet by the end of the century it was increasingly difficult for the likes of Johnson to climb the class ladder, as intervening events—the seizure of Jamaica from Spain in 1655, the seizure of Manhattan from the Dutch in 1664, and the resultant formation of the Royal African Company in 1672—served to ossify the equivalence of African and slave, which amounted to a grand downfall for Native Americans now subject to the rapacity of land hungry settlers, with said territory then stocked by a growing cascade of enslaved Africans.
As the prospects for the likes of Johnson were falling as the seventeenth century unfolded, the prospects of Maurice Thomson, born in London in the early years of the century, were rising, and he would soon be known as England’s greatest colonial merchant. Like many merchants, he bet heavily on Oliver Cromwell’s revolt against monarchy, an expression of the shoots of capitalism seeking to break through the concrete of feudalism. But before that he became a major planter in Virginia, receiving a massive land grant near what is now Newport News in 1621, just as Johnson was departing a slave ship from Angola. Thomson himself was involved deeply in the pre-feudal institution that was slavery, now hitched to the star of a rising capitalism, transporting bonded Africans to the Caribbean. Straddling the major nodes of the colonialism that was to propel capitalism, he also invested heavily in the fur trade of Canada.92
The rise of Thomson and the decline of Johnson was a synecdoche for the contrasting fates of England and colonialism on the one hand and Africans and Native Americans on the other. As the latter was declining, the former was rising, with the two phenomena being inextricably linked.
CHAPTER 2
No Providence for Africans and the Indigenous
Between 1629 and 1645, thousands of religious dissenters, notably Puritans, migrated to the Americas to escape tyranny. But just as men, women, and children from England endured bondage in North Africa while London abjured abolitionism, the Puritans and other so-called dissenters proceeded to impose a tyranny on the indigenous, dispossessing them, enslaving them, murdering them.1
Although indigenes and Africans were the primary victims, in a manner that would bedevil settler colonialism for centuries to come, other settlers too were disfavored. For example, Roger Williams and his spouse arrived in New England from London on February 5, 1631, slated to reside in Massachusetts Bay, before moving to the separate colony in Plymouth, where they lived about two years. Sometime in 1633 they moved to Salem in the jurisdiction of their original point of arrival. In October 1635 the Massachusetts Bay General Court, which in this reputed “democracy” held all legislative, executive, and judicial power, sentenced Williams to banishment after he spoke out against attempts to punish religious dissension and against the brutal confiscation of the land of the indigenous. Eventually, the authorities sought to ship him back to Europe. He escaped by January 1636 into the wilderness, where he was succored only by his indigenous allies and finally settled in an area he termed “Providence.” Despite a subsequent coloration of “liberalism,” what became Rhode Island was also land confiscated from the indigenous, exposing the contradictions of “progressive” settler colonialism.2
Williams himself facilitated the enslavement of indigenes,3 despite their rescuing him from the wrath of Massachusetts Bay. Of course, it was not as if Massachusetts Bay were sui generis. In the New Haven Colony in Connecticut, the community was centered on the church and the word of the minister was law. Dissent was not permitted. Potential informants were everywhere. Any person so bold as to question the minister risked being brought before the General Court and banished, or worse.4
It is still true that from the inception, settlements—to a degree—evaded the religious snarl of Europe. This was not necessarily because settlers were more enlightened. It was more because the perils of subduing Native Americans meant that the colonial elite could not be too choosy in selecting
