Carolina and Slavery

"You may ask: how did the early settlers reconcile their acceptance that even the meanest had rights—including rights to vote—with the institution of slavery? The point was to be made with great force by Dr Samuel Johnson at the time of the American Revolution, and it echoes through American history: ‘How is it that the loudest YELPS for LIBERTY come from the drivers of Negroes?’ The answer is that America was only gradually corrupted into the acceptance of large-scale slavery. The corruption entered through Carolina, whence it came from Barbados. In the West Indian islands, those occupied by the Spanish, Portuguese, and French under Catholic teaching, slaves were treated as actual or potential Christians, with souls and rights—not just property. In the islands occupied by the English and Dutch Protestants, who got their doctrine about slavery from the Old Testament, slaves were seen as legal chattels, with no more rights than cows or sheep. The BarbadianBarbadian planters in Carolina, who set the tone, never troubled themselves to Christianize their slaves and even prevented others from doing so. In any case, it made no difference. Early laws laid down that baptism did not change a person’s free or unfree status. Such laws spread north. Thus in 1692 a Maryland statute insisted that baptism did nothing to change a black’s servile status. Carolina was the first slave colony, properly speaking. From the start it imported black slaves, even before it acquired rice as an agricultural staple. A Carolina promotion pamphlet of 1682 stated flatly: ‘without [negro slaves] a planter can never do any great matter.’ The same year, a settler told a friend: ‘Negroes are more desirable than white servants.’ This was because a white indentured servant cost £2–£4 a year in capital investment. A slave cost £18–£30 outright, plus the likelihood of breeding. Young, healthy female slaves were particularly valuable for this reason. In Maryland, slavery grew only slowly. Until the late 1680s, an estate was more likely to be run by indentured labor. Early probates from the years 1658–70 show that only 15 out of 150 estates had slaves. But the treatment and legal status of slaves, especially black ones, declined as the 17th century wore on. A statute of 1663 recognized black service as perpetual, writing of ‘Negroes and other Slaves who are incapable of making Satisfaction by Addition of Tyme.’ A black had to prove he was under limited contract by producing documents, otherwise the law assumed he (and his children) was a chattel slave. Much legislation of these years strengthened the hands of the planters against slaves. In Carolina, slavery was an early source of corruption in politics. Slavers were heard to boast that they could ‘with a bowl of punch get who they would Chosen of the parliament and afterwards who they would Chosen of the Grand Council.’ The Barbadians in Carolina also enslaved numbers of Indians. This was strictly against the law. The policy of Charles II’s government was ‘to get and continue the friendship and assistance of the Indians and make them useful without force or injury.’ It laid down (1672) that enslavement of Indians was forbidden ‘upon any occasion or pretence whatsoever.’ But the Barbadian planters induced Indian tribes—who did not need much persuasion—to make war on others to produce Indian slaves. An early anti-slaver in Charleston, John Stewart, wrote angry letters home to England, protesting about the behavior of the Barbadians, or ‘Goose Creek Men’ as he called them (this was their densest area of settlement). He said that one of their leaders, Maurice Matthews, an important man because he was the official surveyor as well as a planter and slaver, was ‘Hell itself for Malice, a Jesuit for Design politick.’ All the same American slavery was on a small scale, Carolina being the only exception. Large-scale slavery was an 18th-century phenomenon. Even by 1714 there were fewer than 60,000 slaves in the whole of the English colonies on mainland America. Thereafter the numbers grew steadily—78,000 by 1727, 263,000 by 1754, and 697,000 at the first census in 1790. So in Dr Johnson’s day the existence of huge, black, servile multitudes in America was a recent development, growing daily—one reason he was so outraged by it. In early settler times, by contrast, over most of the colonies, slavery was very marginal, blacks were almost invisible, and servile work was seen in terms of indentured whites, who served their terms, became freemen and soon owned land and exercised their votes. So the leading settlers, creating their assemblies, were not struck by the paradox of free whites and blacks who had no rights at all. That came later—when it was too late and slavery was deeply entrenched."
Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (pp. 73-74). Harper Perennial