any remaining Paiutes, or “Diggers” as the locals called them, enslaved by first the Mountain Men and trappers, and later Mormon settlers. All had access to the slave trade along the Old Spanish Trail.7
Indian and African slavery was always a tool of European expansion. To depopulate the Carolinas and Florida of their original inhabitants in order to introduce plantation agriculture (along with the international market for commodities and labor), English and American settlers and their Indian allies captured hundreds of Indians and forced their removal from their native lands. This was accompanied by violence, rape, and warfare. From 1670 to 1720 more Indians were exported out of Charleston, South Carolina, than Africans were imported as slaves—even though Charleston was a major port city for African slaves. The Choctaws and their neighbors in the Lower Mississippi Valley, battered by raiders spent most of their lives working on plantations in the West Indies.8
One peculiarity of American history was the possession of African slaves by Native Americans. From the early times of colonial America Indian slaves, African slaves, and European indentured servants all lived and worked together. Over time many of the Native Americans became partially assimilated and absorbed many aspects of white European–American culture, including the “peculiar institution” of African chattel slavery.
While the practice was limited in the American Southwest,9 the Indians of “cotton culture” country held the most enslaved blacks. This was especially true for the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Southeast, especially the Cherokees who by 1809 held 600 enslaved blacks, a number that grew to 21,000 in 1860. The Cherokee constitution, written by the Indians themselves, prohibited slaves and their descendants (including mixed-races) from owning property. When the Indian Removal Act was enforced during the 1830s, the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles took their slaves (6% of the aggregate population, or 5,000 black slaves) with them to Indian Territory (today’s Oklahoma), and later supported the Confederate cause during the Civil War.10
By the middle of the nineteenth century Indian slavery in the Southwest was a mix of three distinct traditions. The first, of course, was the kin-ordered system of the Native Americans themselves. The second was an amalgam of Indian and Spanish practices, and was not unlike the kin-based slave societies of Africa. This borderland “slave system” paralleled the African situation in several ways, including war captives, the dominance of women and children as slaves, the absence of plantations, the practice of pawnage, the role of kinship and related customs (including, for the Spanish, compadrazgo sanctified by the Church, and other kinds of social interchange that extended family relations such as intermarriage, concubinage, and miscegenation), and the agency of a “conquest” state that curtailed or promoted slavery.11
Finally, of course, the chattel slavery that was introduced to America by Europeans and promoted in the Southwest by Anglo-Americans. Chattel slaves, unlike land or buildings, were simply movable pieces of property. This third system, while part of an international economy that did not always penetrate the borderlands, did share with the Spanish tradition the custom of discrimination (most Indians, especially the “wild” ones, were savages) and a belief in the slaveholder group of cultural and religious superiority. Racism, especially dark skin color denoting racial inferiority, and sexism were more prevalent among white Americans than Spaniards and Mexicans.
The European trade in Indian slaves was initiated by Columbus in 1493. Following the Italian mercantile tradition of the trading company (compañía), a small group of passive, wealthy individuals would invest in a venture in which the active partners would be shareholders. The gold seekers and/or slave traders would receive a share in the gold and/or slaves that were found or captured. Needing funds to support his New World adventures, Columbus shipped Indians to Spain where there existed a slave market that sold Africans and Muslims. The entrada or entry by slave raiders into the Caribbean followed this basic form. When the original inhabitants of the West Indies died out due to disease, warfare, and slavery, this mercantile tradition was carried to the Indian communities of Central America (about 650,000 Indians in coastal Central America were enslaved in the sixteenth century) and fringe regions south and north of central Mexico.12
As these expeditions moved from coast to mainland, the activity of slave hunting was transformed from the Italian compañía to the Iberian reconquest tradition of compaña or band of men (sometimes called “soldiers”).13 The leader(s) and ordinary men would finance the entire expedition and be whole or partial shareholders, with each man receiving a share of the booty (slaves, gold, encomiendas, etc.) based on the size of their share and their importance for the mission. For example, a powerful leader might receive several shares, while a horseman would only get one share and a foot soldier a half share. Many of these conquerors had personal servants, often Indians, whose skills, including slave hunting, were in high demand. These auxiliaries were known as naborías and were also a prelude to the history of slavery and the slave trade in Sonora and New Mexico.14 It was a blending of these Italian and Spanish heritages that was used to conquer the Greater American Southwest.
The most common arrangement between conquered and conquerors in the sixteenth century was known as the encomienda. The first conquerors who received a royal grant of encomienda to the labor and tribute of the conquered Indians were known as encomenderos. Encomienda Indians were not technically slaves since they lived in their own villages or sedentary communities. They could not be sold as individuals or separated from their own ethnic group to live under direct European influence. Yet, in the early sixteenth century, as a group they owed the encomendero both personal service and tribute. The encomienda also furnished Spanish men with Indian concubines. Although the New Laws of 1542 tried to limit the encomienda to tribute only, outlawed Indian slavery, and guaranteed the ecomienda’s existence for the life of its present holder and one successor, the encomienda (usually as a subterfuge for slavery) continued to exist well into the eighteenth century in the frontier areas of Venezuela, Chile, Paraguay, the Mexican Yucatan, and the Spanish borderlands of the Greater American Southwest. And even though the Spanish state had a stake in curtailing the owning of slaves by colonists, cannibals (such as the Caribs of the West Indies) or rebellious Indians (e.g., the Chichimeca [Apaches] of northern Mexico) could be enslaved, the latter by military personnel in the presidios.15 The institution of the encomienda was one of the major grievances that led the Indians to rebel in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico and Arizona.16
As the Indian population declined and the price of labor increased, the state moved to reduce the number of encomenderos and colonists who had access to Indian labor and preserve ever scarce Indian labor for state and public projects. The name for this institution was taken from the earlier period when a share was an allocation or repartimiento. The repartimiento was in full force in central Mexico from about 1560 to 1620, while it continued to exist in Peru (known there as the mita) until the end of the colonial period. Under the repartimiento Indian laborers worked in the silver mines, built forts, roads, and buildings for the army and government, and did agricultural work and construction for the Church. Again, like the encomienda, repartimiento continued to exist in frontier areas of Mexico, especially around missions and presidios in northern Mexico and the borderlands, including Florida. Although repartimiento laborers were supposed to be paid a minimal wage, and their working hours were limited, institutional means of enforcement were weak and temporary workers were often unsatisfactory laborers. Thus the colonists tended to replace them with contract workers or personal servants and/or slaves.17
Because the institution of Indian slavery on the frontier continued in one form or another after the New Laws of 1542, the government made a continued effort to outlaw the enslavement of Indians. This was partly simply a struggle between the royal bureaucracy and the colonists over control of Indian labor, but it was also the position of the Church based on Christian principles. In spite of a history of legislation opposing slavery, the institution persisted in the frontier zone beyond 1800 and the colonial era.
In 1769 an emancipation proclamation was issued by the
