Indian Slavery NYU

Work in progress; please do not use without permission.
Fisher 1
Chapter 6: “Similar to that of negroes from the Coast of Africa”: The Persistence of Indian
Slavery in the English Atlantic and the United States [1750-1810]
Linford D. Fisher
Brown University
The capture happened in broad daylight. There was no sneaking about, no mystery about
who did it. Fifty-three Woolva Indian women and children were chased down, tied up, and
forced to march the one hundred miles to the coast. Miskito Indians, led by two Miskito captains
named Tilas and Dick Allen, were the hunters. But they were merely the middlemen. On arriving
at the gorgeous blue-water coast of the Mosquito Shore, Tilas and Dick sold the Woolva captives
to an English merchant named Abraham Trenawston in 1762.1 [See map at end of paper.]
As Trenawston, Tilas, and Dick finalized the sale, the Woolva women and children likely
overheard snippets of the conversation—possibly a braggadocios recounting of the hunt. Perhaps
those that could understand English even heard enough to piece together the story. Always eager
for profits, and knowing there was a ready market for Indian slaves, Trenawston had hired Tilas
and Dick to take thirty Miskito warriors into the interior under the pretense of trading with the
Woolvas. But after a period of trading, the Miskito men struck, faithfully gathering up captives
for Trenawston.
This wasn’t the first time a raid like this had taken place, but Garrison, a Woolva chief,
tried to ensure it would be the last. Garrison had been given a commission by English
magistrates in Jamaica as a sign of friendship and trade with the English. At first, all had been
well. But then the raids started. Sometimes it was English merchants themselves who hacked
their way into the interior of the Mosquito Shore, capturing and enslaving Woolva men, women,
and children along with other Indians. In other cases, it was the Miskitos, at the instigation of the
English. Garrison had grown increasingly disillusioned and angry. Within a few years Garrison
1
The National Archives (TNA), CO 140/40/379.
Work in progress; please do not use without permission. Fisher 2
had seen his Woolva band (as one subset of the larger Woolva nation) whittled away by the
Indian slave trade – from 300 to 47 people. Who could he trust? The Miskitos were part rivals
and part friends. He thought he could trust the English, but he had learned the hard way that the
English did not speak with one voice. Enterprising English merchants cared little for rules and
regulations on the frontiers of empire.
As he had done before, Garrison made the long trek to Bluefields, a primary coastal
English settlement on the Mosquito Shore. He filed a complaint, but received no satisfaction
from officials there (some of whom were also complicit in the Indian slave trade). Finding no
solutions on the coast, Garrison hitched a ride on a Jamaican merchant ship and made his
presence known in Kingston, where he met with a colonist (and sometime Mosquito Shore
resident) named Richard Jones and relayed the desperate situation to him. Jones heard his
complaint, promised to act, and offered to take him to Spanish Town to meet the governor of
Jamaica. After repeated delays in actually seeing the governor, Garrison gave up and
disappeared, hopping on a ship named Betsey, presumably to return home.2
Garrison’s people had been mistreated, to be sure. But he himself was also involved with
and caught up in the seemingly never-ending cycle of enslaving Indians on the Mosquito Shore.
Before sailing out of Port Royal, Jamaica, Garrison offered to sell at least one resident two
Indian girls as slaves. It was perplexing; Garrison had bothered to come the whole way to
Jamaica to complain about English-driven Indian slavery on the Mosquito Coast, only to offer
his own Native slaves for sale to English colonists.3
But Jones himself was also complicit. Imagine the surprise of the Jamaican Assembly
when Jones—who had testified about the Indian slave trade—admitted that he himself owned
2
TNA, CO 140/40/379.
3
TNA, CO 140/40/379.
two Indian slaves. But of course, he had his reasons. The first one he had received as a present
(presumably from the Miskitos) four years prior, thereby exhibiting a form of the “bonds of
alliance” that scholars have noted in other parts of the Americas, particularly in New France.4
Jones’ second Indian slave was more mysterious. Jones didn’t offer when he purchased this
enslaved Native, or from where, but the Indian had essentially been enslaved from infancy, since
the he had no knowledge of where he was from or what language he originally spoke. Typical for
English slave owners, Jones patronizingly claimed this second slave wouldn’t even know what to
do with his freedom, or where to go. Likely feeling a bit guilty about being revealed to be an
Indian slave owner before a body who was investigating ongoing Indian slavery in Jamaica,
Jones feebly closed by stating that he was ready to free his Indian slaves at the command of the
Jamaican Assembly.5
These activities in 1762 revealed ongoing Indian slavery and the Indian slave trade in the
English Caribbean to be a complicated, confusing business with tentacles that snaked their way
through almost all of colonial society. With deep roots of 150 years of English enslavement of
Natives, plus an active and ongoing English market for Indian slaves, additionally coupled with
the long-term Miskito practices of slave-raiding their Spanish-allied enemies, it seemed
impossible to effectively halt. After hearing about yet another slave raid and sale in Jamaica later
that year in 1762, the Jamaican Assembly assigned a committee to find out exactly how many
Indians had been sold in Jamaica. The committee was also charged with requiring those that had
been sold to be returned, and to prosecute both the sellers and buyers of enslaved Indians.6 There
is no evidence that this was done, however. Enslaved Indians sold on the grey market
4
Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (The University of North
Carolina Press, 2012).
5
Testimony of Richard Jones to Jamaica Assembly, November 15, 1762. TNA, CO 140/40/378.
6
Jamaica Assembly, November 17, 1762. TNA, CO 140/40/378.
disappeared into the larger mass of enslaved Africans in the far-flung plantation system of
Jamaica.
The last half of the eighteenth century brought important changes to Indian slavery in the
English empire and the wider Atlantic world. In most locales, colonial governments seemed to
agree that active, ongoing enslavement of Natives was no longer justifiable, even when done by
Native allies, and even when the targets were enemy “Spanish” Indians. Colonial officials
repeatedly tried to outlaw Indian slave trading even as they continued to accept the ongoing
presence of Indian slaves in colonial society. As a result, thousands of indigenous slaves labored
in almost every British colony and—after 1776—every American state. Although enslaved
Natives found some relief through freedom suits and running away, outside of the northern U.S.
states freedom was still not yet the norm for Native slaves. This included the English Caribbean,
where indigenous slaves still labored in unfree conditions.
Slowly, however, colonial officials and jurists began to question the legality of all Indian
slavery. Questions about ongoing Indian enslavement also intermingled with international
debates regarding black slavery and the trans-Atlantic African slave trade that peaked between
the 1760s and the 1780s. As enslaved Natives began pushing the question of the legality of their
enslavement through court cases and running away, jurist and magistrates increasingly viewed
the Indian slave trade and even Indian slavery itself as unjustified and incompatible with the anti-
slavery impulse in the English Atlantic. In the American colonies, some jurists and magistrates
pondered the incompatibility of slavery (Indian and African) with revolutionary rhetoric rooted
in notions of innate freedom of individuals. Northern American colonies began drifting away
from slavery more generally; most enacted gradual emancipation laws in the 1780s and in some
cases outlawed all slavery entirely. Native Americans who were enslaved were directly affected
by these developments as they, too, were freed in court cases and covered under the gradual
emancipation acts of the 1780s. Times were changing, and Indian slavery seemed to be phasing
out of British and American customary practice. And yet, even if the Indian slave trade was
eventually quashed, Indian slavery itself proved much harder to curb.
*****
By the 1750s, slavery was beginning to gain full steam in the English colonies, both in
North America and the Caribbean. New England was reaching the peak of African slave holding
and importation by mid-century as well. In 1756, there were 4,697 blacks in Rhode Island and
35,939 whites, along with at least 400-600 free Natives in the colony.7 Prominent merchant
families such as the Browns also began slowly testing the waters of the trans-Atlantic slave trade
out of Providence. In the Caribbean, too, British slave ships continually supplied Barbados,
Jamaica, and—to a lesser extent, Bermuda—with shiploads of freshly captured and enslaved
Africans.8 [PERHAPS: have a chart here showing the slave populations in various colonies?]
Still, Indians were present, serving in households in a variety of ways all across the
English North American and Caribbean colonies. Since colonial officials rarely kept separate
listings of enslaved Natives, their presence is less easy to track. But they were there, as recorded
in wills, probate inventories, and newspaper advertisements. Colonial laws, too, register the
ongoing existence of enslaved and enservanted Natives. In October 1777, the state of
Connecticut passed a law that stipulated that “Indian, Molatto and Negro Servants and Slaves”
could only be manumitted by their owners under certain conditions (basically that they are able
to be self-sufficient, and that they are of a good moral character).9
7
William Davis Miller, “The Narragansett Planters,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 43, no. 1
(n.d.): 68–69.
8
**Could do much more here.
9
Connecticut State Records, Vol. 1, pp. 415-416.
New England’s enslaved Indian population still represented the sprawling forced diaspora
that Indian slavery involved. Some had been enslaved locally in New England, but Natives from
the Carolinas and other locales in the wider Atlantic still labored under multi-generational
slavery in a completely foreign context. Some of them, like Indian Ann and her children, had
found their freedom through legal processes. Others were not so lucky. But still, they tried. In
November 1765, a Native man named Isaac slipped away into the cold early New England
winter. He was serving as a slave in the household of Job Almy in Little Compton. Almy’s
runaway advertisement in the Newport Mercury a few days later described him as middling
height at 5 feet 10 inches, with a scar on his forehead, new trousers, two jackets, and thin
shoes.10 Isaac had been born in nearby Tiverton, but his mother was a “Spanish Squaw,” likely
slave raided from Spanish settlements and sold through the Carolinas, Jamaica, or Bermuda
before arriving to New England.11
Newspapers in Virginia reported runaway Indian slaves and servants in the 1780s as well.
In December 1788, Ben Whitehead, an Indian slave in his late teens, ran away from the estate of
S. Kello in Virginia. He absconded with another slave named Ruben, likely heading out into
Indian country to disappear in the mountains.12 Joe, an Indian with African parentage, made the
same self-emancipating decision in 1785 from William Wilkin’s plantation in Virginia. A savvy
runaway who had clearly done this before, Joe’s owner suspected that he would try to change his
name to Pete Tony and pass as a free man.13
10
Newport Mercury, Nov. 11, 1765, Issue 375, p. 3. [O’Toole spreadsheet]
11
O’Toole spreadsheet, ~1768.
12
Virginia Gazette (Davis) January 13, 1790, as reprinted in Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary
History from the 1730s to 1790: Volume 1: Virginia and North Carolina, 411. Database of Indigenous Slavery in the
Americas.
13
Virginia Gazette (Nicolson) June 25, 1785. Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the
1730s to 1790: Volume 1: Virginia and North Carolina, 230. Database of Indigenous Slavery in the Americas.
Similarly, on Barbados, when Hannah Hayes prepared to marry Edward Wiggins Scott in
1778, she sat down and enumerated her property to be put in trust as a way of protecting it from
her soon-to-be husband. Among the items listed were eighteen slaves, which Hayes referred to as
“Negro, Mulatto, and Indian slaves.” Hayes did not indicate which one or ones were Indian, but
her specific word choice indicates she knew she owned at least one indigenous slave.14
Jamaican officials began to get nervous that so many Africans, mulattoes, and Indians
were receiving their freedom that they required parishes (towns) to set up registries of free
persons to record who was being emancipated. Enslaved Natives routinely show up in these
records, demonstrating their enslavement well into the late eighteenth century. An elderly Indian
woman named Elizabeth Johns was set free in Kingston on July 6, 1761. Her four mixed-race
children were set free at the same time: Catherine Johns, Jane Todd, Thomas Vere, and John
Vere.15 Francisca, “an Indian” was set free by her master John Flagstaff on July 10, 1761.16 Even
Natives from the Mosquito Shore were freed at times. William Timmon, “a Muschetto Shoar
Indian” was freed by Peter Furnell and brought by the Constable straight to the vestrymen in
Kingston, Jamaica, to have the requisite certificate of freedom made out.17
Although active Indian slave trading had largely ended in most parts of North America,
Indian slavery persisted there and in the Caribbean. Not that this should be surprising. Colonial
officials and most colonists in North America and the Caribbean alike were dismissive of
Natives as equals, continuing to see them as wild and uncivilized. Instead, local officials on the
ground viewed Native nations instrumentally—meaning they served a particular military and
14
Hannah Haynes to Samuel Drayton, February 27, 1778. BDA, Barbados Deeds 1775-1779, no. 182, RB 1/146:
454. As cited in Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 90.
15
Kingston Registry of Free Persons, 1761-1795. Jamaica Archives, 2/6/277, p. 11.
16
Kingston Registry of Free Persons, 1761-1795. Jamaica Archives, 2/6/277, p. 10a.
17
Kingston Registry of Free Persons, 1761-1795. Jamaica Archives, 2/6/277, p. 17a.
political purpose that was important to extracting natural resources, defending territory, and
generally allowing the British empire to expand in a peaceful and productive way as possible.
Edward Trelawney, the governor of Jamaica, stated this plainly in a letter to the Secretary of
State in March 1740/1. Trelawney called the Miskito Indians—arguably the most important
Caribbean Native allies the English had, and this during the middle of a major war against the
Spanish—barbarous, wild, and “poor wretches,” and asserted that even attempting to join with
them means that the English “partakes of their littleness.” Still, Trelawney admitted, given that
their alliance could be cultivated for a relatively small expense, it was still worthwhile to
consider “what use may be made of these poor wretches.” 18
There was no Indian slavery policy that governed all of the British colonies in the 1760s.
From the perspective of the Secretary of State and Board of Trade in London, outright and
ongoing Indian slavery was generally unacceptable and unofficially illegal. But merchants,
privateers, planters, and colonists—in addition to some local officials—almost always saw things
differently. Indian slavery was a long and venerable tradition in most locales. Europeans all
around the Atlantic basic had long normalized enslaved and unfree Indian labor, and English
colonists were no different, from the planters in Jamaica to farmers in New England.
Still, there were pockets where Indian slavery had an especially strong grip in the mid-
late eighteenth century. In Essequibo, for almost a century Dutch colonists traded guns,
ammunition, and other desired trade goods with the powerful coastal Carib Indians in exchange
for enslaved Indians. Dutch West India Company officials knew of the trade and tried to
sporadically regulate it over time, even though the vast interior of the colony was a difficult
place to control. Essequibo commander Laurens Storm van Gravesand lamented in 1750 that
lamented that independent, roving traders and merchants (Dutch and otherwise) from also
18
Trelawney to the Secretary of State, March 16, 1740/1. CO 137/48/78.
crisscrossed the interior, supplying Carib bands with guns in exchange for enslaved Indians. But
he also knew that if the DWIC prohibited this trade entirely, the Caribs would turn to other
trading partners, thereby hurting Essequibo financially.19Almost two decades later, the
Franciscan missionary Friar Roque de Aliaga wrote to the Director-General of Essequibo,
complaining about ongoing raids by Dutch-sponsored Caribs on Spanish mission towns in the
interior. These persons of “evil nature” had carried off some Indian men and women to sell as
slaves (with a strongly implied accusation of rape in the process). De Aliaga petitioned—rather
hopelessly—to DWIC officials for their return.20
The most egregious offenders of ongoing slavery in the English Caribbean were almost
always linked to the Mosquito Shore. Despite the 1741 Indian slave trade act in Jamaica—that
was intended to end the Indian slave trade on the Mosquito Shore, not end Indian slavery itself in
either locale—enterprising merchants and colonists refused to turn away the ready prospects of
Indian slaves, either for trade or local usage.21
But given the slow turn against enslaving Indians—and especially the Indian slave
trade—Jamaican captains, merchants, and privateers had to be savvy about offloading their
human cargo. In some locales, especially in non-English territories, they could just sell these
captured Indians as slaves, no questions asked. Colonial officials noted, for example, the English
traders often offloaded their human merchandize in French colonies. But there were still active
markets for Indians slaves in English colonies, too. This was especially true on the periphery of
19
Report and Accompanying Papers of the Commission Appointed by the President of the United States “to
Investigate and Report Upon the True Divisional Line Between the Republic of Venezuela and British Guiana”: Vol.
2: Extracts from Archives, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1897), 331–32.
20
Report and Accompanying Papers of the Commission, 2:428–29.
21
The 1741 law was titled “An Act for recovering and extending the Trade with Indian Settlements in America, and
preventing for the future some evil Practices formerly committed in that Trade.” Acts of Assembly, Passed in the
Island of Jamaica, from the Year 1681 to the Year 1769 Inclusive. In Two Volumes (Kingston, Jamaica, 1787),
2:193-194.
English Caribbean settlement, such as British Honduras (Belize), which had been a growing
colonial outpost since the early eighteenth century.
In places where selling Indian slaves was either illegal or frowned up, English merchants
became more inventive: they called Indian slaves “servants” and sold them for a set period of
time. In Jamaica, governmental sentiment had turned against active, ongoing Indian slave
trading, at least officially. Although some were sold as slaves, many captured Indians were sold
as indentured servants or apprentices for a number of years. But as in almost every other
European colony, limited term enslavement for Indians was functionally a lifelong sentence of
slavery. Indian “servants” could be sold or transported out of the colony, and in many cases the
evidence of the time limits placed on their enslavement was lost. Children of such “servants,”
also were retained as slaves, making Indian “indentured servitude” in reality multi-generational
slavery. “By that clandestine method,” Superintendent Lawrie lamented, “they are kept in
Slavery in Jamaica or wherever they are carried to.”22
In this way, there was a clear parallel to the kinds of covert strategies to enslave Natives
in New England without calling it slavery. When outright, lifelong Indian slavery became
unacceptable for political or practical reasons, colonists simply shifted the terms, from slavery to
indentured servitude, and assigned years of service that, in practice, often held little weight and
led to lifelong slavery. This precisely what happened in Rhode Island after King Philip’s War in
the 1670s. Functional slavery through prolonged servitude, in fact, became the norm for Indian
slavery in many parts of eighteenth century North America. So it is especially interesting to find
colonists in the English Caribbean turning to this method of enslavement in the late eighteenth
century after so many decades of outright enslavement.
22
James Lawrie to Basil Keith, January 27, 1777. TNA, CO 137/72/97.
The Woolva chief’s visit to Jamaica in 1762, then, was important, even if brief. Although
he never got an audience with the governor of Jamaica, Jones and others were able to relay the
predicament of the Woolvas to the Jamaican Assembly later that year as part of a larger
investigation into Indian slavery. Earlier that year—1762—the Jamaican Assembly heard
snippets of news here and there that merchants routinely sold enslaved Indians at slave markets
in Kingston and Port Royal. The assembly formed a committee to investigate, which gathered
witnesses and a report in a few months. Richard Jones, for one, testified to the presence of
enslaved Indians in 1762. Jones told the Jamaica Assembly that he saw Indian slaves in Kingston
that he was quite sure were from the Mosquito Coast somewhere, or perhaps farther to the
south.23
Tellingly, however, these sales were rarely, if ever, publicized in the same ways as
African slaves. When a ship stuffed to the gills with enslaved Africans sailed into Bridgetown
(Barbados) or Kingston or Port Royal (Jamaica), the subsequent public sale of its human cargo
was usually advertised in local newspapers several days in advance, thereby giving the captains
time to go through quarantine, if necessary, complete the required paperwork, and prep the
captive Africans for sale. Local slave factors (agents) Jones and Moe in Bridgetown, for
example, advertised the arrival of a “Cargo of the best SLAVES from the Gold-Coast” on
September 25, 1770.24 But there are few, if any, such shipments of Indians advertised. Indian
sales thus operated in a quasi-grey market, in which the key feature was word of mouth spread of
information and opportunity for sale.
That is how Edward Glasse was offered an Indian for purchase. Glasse, a resident of Port
Royal, was approached by a none other than James Lawrie, a trader with merchant connections
23
24
The Barbados Mercury, No. 15, Vol. IX, September 22, 1770, p. 2. Accessed at the AAS.
to the Mosquito Shore (and, indeed, who in the 1770s would be named British Superintendent of
the Mosquito Shore).25 Lawrie informed Glasse of the availability of Indian slaves for sale.
Glasse turned around and told Richard Jones – perhaps as to a friend with some insider news.
Jones took a look, but declined to buy any, and told Glasse to do the same. Instead, the enslaved
Indians were sold to another planter—supposedly to Jasper Hall.26 Thus, soul by soul, enslaved
Indians continually seeped into the wider enslaved labor force of Jamaica and the wider
Caribbean, often off of the books, following personal connections, and almost entirely
unregulated.
The source of this Indian slave trade was no secret. Enterprising English merchants still
plied the shores of Central and South America, trading cloth, guns, ammunition, gunpowder, and
beads with coastal Natives who offered in return enslaved Indians. And when local Natives
couldn’t produce enough of slaves for trade, English merchants and privateers trolled the coasts
and snatched up unsuspecting Natives or dispatched smaller rowboats to go up rivers and inlets
to Indian villages and take whatever captives they could. Some of these Indian slave merchants
actually had privateering commissions that they stretched into a license for slave raiding, a
practice that dated well back into the seventeenth century.27 All it took was imagining all Natives
to be enemies, which was not difficult when profits were to be made. Despite the 1741 Jamaica
law prohibiting it, the Indian slave trade on the Mosquito Coast was alive and well twenty years
after its passing.
At least this is what Richard Jones told the General Assembly in 1762. But Jones should
have known. He served as a local official for three years in the late 1750s. He saw firsthand the
Indian slave trade, observed both English and Miskitos holding Indians and Africans as slaves,
25
Unsure at the moment if this is the same James Lawrie.
26
27
and noted the existence of such slavery all up and down the Central American coast. And other
reports from the Mosquito Coast repeatedly confirmed Jones’ testimony. Henry Corrin, a
resident at Bluefields on the Mosquito Shore, reported that same year of the actions of several
different merchants who raided interior Indian towns, sometimes in tandem with the Miskitos.
Captain Wardlaw marched against the Commerce Indians and took slaves. The Assembly once
again tried to suppress such practices in 1762 but stopped short of outlawing Indian slavery
entirely.
A decade later, not much had changed. When Edward Long published his monumental
three-volume history of Jamaica in 1774, he included an entire section on the various
“dependencies” of Jamaica, including the Mosquito Coast. Long succinctly summarized at least
one aspect of ongoing indigenous slavery, whereby English merchants incited the powerful
Miskitos to slave-raid into the interior of Nicaragua and Honduras, bringing them to the coast,
and selling them to English traders. These enterprising captains and merchants turned around and
easily found markets for their captive Indians to the Dutch, to English in North American
colonies, and to Jamaica and other English Caribbean islands.28 Like Jamaican officials as well
as members of the Board of Trade in London, Long lamented that Indian slavery continued to
alienate Natives, driving them straight into Spanish arms.
Wider Anti-slavery
The Jamaican Assembly’s investigation into ongoing Indian slavery coincided with a
rising swell of anti-slavery voices in the wider British empire. By the 1760s, there was a growing
chorus of anti-slavery coming from various quarters of the United Kingdom, North America,
28
Edward Long, The History of Jamaica or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of the Island: With
Reflections on Its Situation Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government
(London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 1:322.
and, to a much lesser extent, the Caribbean Islands. Most of activity centered on black slavery
and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In 1769, the British anti-slavery activist Granville Sharp
published A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery in
London.29 The lengthy pamphlet was solidly anti-slavery, but it was also more narrow: Sharp
was arguing specifically against slavery in England.
In 1772, Sharp got the chance to turn his pamphlet into precedent when he helped
prosecute the case Somerset v. Stewart. Once again, enslaved self-emancipation was at the core
of the case. An enslaved black man named James Somerset had been brought by his master,
Charles Stewart, from Virginia to London in 1768. Somerset’s time in England and exposure to
anti-slavery activism and the dramatically freer society must have come as a bit of a shock. In
1771, he essentially ran away, refusing to serve as Stewart’s slave. Stewart had him hunted
down, arrested, and thrown in prison. Sharp was involved with the case as it was argued before
William Murray, the Chief Justice of the Court of the King’s Bench in the spring of 1772. When
the ruling was handed down in favor of Somerset in May of that year, it reverberated around the
English Atlantic. Technically, it only dealt with the British Isles. Murray’s carefully worded
judgment was against forcible deportation of slaves, since there was no positive slavery law in
England. This was the technical grounds on which Somerset was freed. The wider public and
some newspapers, however, understood it to mean that enslaved individuals setting foot on
English soil in the British Isles would be free. And slaves and owners alike from Virginia to
29
Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery, or of Admitting
the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men, in England. In Four Parts .. (London: Printed for
Benjamin White and Robert Horsfield, 1769), http://archive.org/details/representationof00shar.
Jamaica must have looked knowingly at each other, wondering what the long-term legal
implications might be.30
For some anti-slavery activists like Sharp, the question of African slavery went hand in
hand with Indian slavery. As indicated in his writings and memoirs, Sharp was well aware of the
long history of Indian slavery in English colonies, and lamented local colonial laws that licensed
it. In A Representation of the Injustice, Sharp repeatedly mentioned enslaved Africans and
Indians when talking about anti-slavery justice and the reach of the law. This was quite logical,
in fact, since so many colonial laws dealt with “negroes, mulattoes, and Indian slaves” as a
collective group of enslaved people. Should not laws regarding anti-slavery also cover all who
were enslaved? In particular, Sharp argued that “a Negro or Indian Slave” who is born outside of
the United Kingdom who comes to England would be considered a subject, and therefore should
be protected by the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 (which required English courts to prevent
unlawful imprisonment).31
Three years later, when Somerset v. Stewart was in progress and gaining national and
international attention, Sharp wrote to Frederick North, the Second Earl of Guilford, that “there
is no instance whatever which requires more immediate redress than the present miserable and
deplorable slavery of Negroes and Indians, as well as white English servants, in our colonies.”32
Sharp seemed especially interested in the aggressive manner in which British colonists in St.
Vincent had encroached on the lands of the so-called “Black Caribs” and, by the 1770s, were
petitioning the British government to forcibly remove this large mixed-race community off of the
30
Steven M. Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery
(Pimlico, 2006).
31
Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery, or of Admitting the Least
Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men, in England. In Four Parts .., 46–57.
32
Prince Hoare, ed., Memoirs of Granville Sharp, Esq. (London: Printed for Henry Colburn, 1820), 78–79,
http://archive.org/details/memoirsofgranvil00hoar.
island entirely. Sharp blamed the violent standoff on the long English practice of enslaving
Natives around the Caribbean basin, “A practice which has rendered the Caribbee Indians
irreconcileable to us ever since.”33 In the years following the Somerset decision, Sharp became
known as a ready legal defender of enslaved Indian and African men and women. He sheltered
and took on the cases of multiple enslaved individuals, including at least one unnamed Indian.34
Others in the Caribbean recognized the parallels between Indian and African slavery as
well. In his testimony to the Jamaican Assembly in 1762, Jones admitted the Indian slave trade
was entirely unethical. It is a “bad practice,” he noted, “ to kidnap and send them away from
their native country.”35 Kidnap and enslave. There is no just war here, no pre-existing Native
warfare, no admissible colonial logic for Indian slavery. Honest colonists knew Indian slavery to
be outright and outrageous. But there was a slippery slope here, that even Jones must have
known. Indian slavery was parallel to and intertwined with African slavery. Deep in the logic of
Jones’ statement was a strongly anti-slavery sentiment, namely, that all slavery was based on an
unethical sham, a play on words that allowed kidnapping and enslavement to become
naturalized, as part of the normal landscape of African or Indian cultural norms that Europeans
incidentally benefited from.
Anti-slavery was not new in the 1760s, of course. Indians and Africans had long served
as the strongest anti-slavery voices from the earliest known instances of slavery, from 1492
onward. Las Casas was perhaps the most well-known Spanish anti-Indian slavery advocate, but
there were many others over time. In the English context, Natives protested their enslavement
during King Philip’s War, and John Eliot officially objected to the practice of enslaving Indian
33
Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery, or of Admitting the Least
Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men, in England. In Four Parts .., 146.
34
Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharp, Esq., 248.
35
surrenderers. More widely, some religious groups, particularly the Society of Friends, or
Quakers, began questioning the legitimacy of slave holding in the late seventeenth century,
prompted by the availability of African slaves in certain regions. As early as 1688 Germantown,
Pennsylvania, Quakers questioned the propriety of buying and selling other humans, based on
the Golden Rule (from the New Testament). Although no formal action was taken, in 1698 the
Yearly meeting of the same group recommended to its members “not to encourage the bringing
in of any more negroes,” a recommendation made sporadically by Quaker Meetings in the
northeast throughout the eighteenth century.36 And the Boston judge Samuel Sewell’s famous
critique of slavery in 1701, The Selling of Joseph, although focused more on African slavery,
caused temporary ripples throughout the English slaveholding world.
But prior to the mid-eighteenth century, anti-slavery voices were in the clear minority.
Even Quakers were far from unified on the question of slavery. Indeed, at the same time the
Germantown Quakers were questioning slaveholding, Quakers in other parts of the Caribbean
were plantation owners and slaveholders themselves. The same was true with Moravians. The
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) owned an entire plantation on
Barbados with its own enslaved Africans, even as it attempted to education and convert enslaved
Africans and Indians around the English Atlantic.37
Throughout much of the colonial period in the English colonies, when official protests
regarding Indian slavery were voiced, they were often less about slavery per se, and more about
other related issues, such as public vs. private gains and wider diplomatic relations with Natives.
In 1713, for example, the Board of Trade and Plantation wrote to the governor and deputies of
36
Benton Sturges, “Dissensions in the American Churches over the Slavery Question; Especially as Illustrated in the
Presbyterian and Methodist Episcopal Denominations,” Technology Quarterly 4 (1891): 79.
37
Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
Carolina regarding the Indian slave trade that operated out of the colonies for several decades.
Despite a lengthy letter from the governor laying out their rationale for enslavement, the Board
of Trade was not convinced that large-scale enslavement of interior Natives was necessary. They
were against the mistreatment of Natives, to be sure. But a major and important objection the
Board raised was financial in nature. Put bluntly, the Indian slave trade was only padding the
pockets of individuals and was not benefitting the empire as a whole.38
But the tide was turning. Many colonial courts and officials began to side with Indian
petitioners. Over the course of the eighteenth century, hundreds of Natives in North America and
the British Caribbean received their freedom, whether through running away, petitioning local
courts, or a combination of the two. In Virginia, one attorney estimated that “hundreds of the
descendants of Indians” had received their freedom over time by 1770.39 While in previous eras,
Indians could gain freedom by proving they or their ancestor had been wrongfully enslaved, but
the 1770s, Natives slowly started petitioning for their freedom based on the fact that they were
Indians and therefore should have never been enslaved. That courts were open to this line of
reasoning is evidence of a shift in views towards seeing all Indian slavery as wrong. Still, no
colony issued a blanket proclamation of Indian emancipation. Immediate abolition for Indian
slavery was just as undesirable and problematic for planters and magistrates as it would have
been for African slavery.
And yet, even in the Caribbean, some leaders publicly wondered if slavery was the best
way to order society. When Jamaica’s Governor Trelawny pondered making the Mosquito Coast
an official colony in 1750, he confided to a correspondent that perhaps slavery should not be
38
Board of Trade and Plantation to the Governor and Deputies of Carolina, September 30, 1713. TNA, CO 5/288, p.
16.
39
Robin v. Hardaway (1772), in Thomas Jefferson, Reports of Cases Determined in the General Court of Virginia
(Charlottesville, F. Carr and Co., 1829), 116. [NEED TO REFORMAT]
allowed at all, or, at minimum, that no new slaves should be introduced, and those who have
slaves should only have them for a set number of years.40
As in previous eras, Natives themselves were often the strongest anti-slavery advocates
regarding their own enslavement. In 1772—the same year Somerset received his freedom in
London—the question of Indian slavery blew up in the Virginia court system. That year, twelve
Natives were listed in a complaint against a Virginia planter named John Hardaway for “trespass,
assault, and battery.” At the heart of the complaint was an assertion of freedom based on Indian
lineage. Robin, Hannah, Daniel, Cuffie, Isham, Moses, Peter, Judy, Autry, Silvia, Davy, and Ned
all claimed to be descended from an Indian woman named Judith Coleman (also called Judy or
Indian Judith in the records). Judith was purchased by Francis Coleman, Sr., a Virginian planter
from Dinwiddie. Sometime between 1708 and 1715, Coleman specifically traveled to South
Carolina to purchase slaves for his planned move to a bigger estate. Among the slaves purchased
was Judith, an Indian who was one of the tens of thousands of Natives enslaved in Carolina,
Georgia, and Florida between 1680 and 1720. Colonists who knew Judith understood her mother
to be an Apalachee Indian, from Spanish Florida. Judith’s mother was possibly among the 4,000
Apalachee Indians taken prisoner and enslaved in a major English attack on Apalachee Spanish
mission towns. Coleman purchased Judith, who approximately thirteen or fourteen years old at
the time, for twenty-five pounds.41
All of the twelve Indians named in the resulting court case, Robin v. Hardaway, were
descended from Judith.42 At least two of them, Hannah and Cate, were her daughters. Robin
40
**See TNA notes on this.
41
Honor Sachs, “‘Freedom By A Judgment’: The Legal History of an Afro-Indian Family,” Law and History Review
30, no. 1 (February 2012): 180.
42
Gregory Ablavsky, “Making Indians ‘White’: The Judicial Abolition of Native Slavery in Revolutionary Virginia
and Its Racial Legacy,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 159, no. 5 (2011): 1457–1531; Kristofer Ray, “‘The
Indians of Every Denomination Were Free, and Independent of Us’: Anglo-Virginian Explorations of Indigenous
became an important case with far-reaching legal implications. Robin and the rest of the
plaintiffs were represented by Thomas Mason, the younger brother of the more famous Virginia
statesman, George Mason. It caught the attention of planters and magistrates far and wide. The
Virginian luminary Thomas Jefferson sat in on the case as well and provided some legal input at
times.43
In prosecuting the case, Thomas Mason waded deep into the realm of international law as
well as, more locally, the history of Virginia laws regarding Native slavery. In particular, Mason
focused on several critical laws that dealt with Natives in 1691 and 1705. The 1691 law legalized
free trade with Natives, which Mason interpreted as implying that Natives should be free, not
enslaved (only free nations could be in a free trade arrangement with the English). The 1705 law
prohibited Indian slaves with the major caveat of those who were shipped (echoing a previous
law that allowed enslaving Indians if they were brought by sea, but not by land—which was
intending to ensure that local populations were not enslaved). Mason argued that since only
Africans were shipped, the act was intended to end all future incidences of Indian slavery. Both
interpretations of these laws flew directly in the face of decades of on the ground practice of
ongoing enslavement in Virginia. It surely went directly against the usual understanding of
planters and magistrates in the colony. Mason essentially argued that there was no positive law
regarding Native slavery in Virginia, and there had not been any for almost one hundred years.
But Mason went a step farther. He argued that the natural state of Indians was freedom.
To enslave them went against their natural rights. In this way, he powerfully invoked the natural
language that the American revolutionaries would lean upon so hard in just a few years when
writing the Declaration of Independence. Even more to the point, Mason noted that Natives, as
Slavery, Freedom, and Society, 1772–1830,” American Nineteenth Century History 17, no. 2 (May 3, 2016): 139–
59, https://doi.org/10.1080/14664658.2016.1215019.
43
Sachs, “‘Freedom By A Judgment’: The Legal History of an Afro-Indian Family,” 183.
historically free political entities in the Americas, Indians were naturally free and could not be
enslaved without positive slave law. (Conversely, Mason argued, the natural conditions for
Africans was enslavement, so no positive slave law was needed for them.) In the end, the court
awarded freedom to the twelve Indian plaintiffs and compensated them a measly one shilling
each for their troubles, plus their court costs.44
This rationale as given in this 1772 Robin v. Hardaway reveals the long-term shifts in
attitudes towards Natives from 1492 to the eighteenth century. Indians had always been enslaved
by every empire, even though each empire and colonial context had to deal with questions the
legitimacy of such enslavement in almost every generation. Enslaving Indians was officially only
justifiable through just wars, although it happened in innumerable ways over time. But this 1772
court case represents a shift away from a wider consensus about the enslaveability of Natives
under certain conditions. The notion of all Indians as naturally being free and having rights to
that freedom—that was both old and yet new. Like Somerset v. Stewart earlier that year, Robin v.
Hardaway signaled a new, more positive, legal era for enslaved Indian men and women
(conversely, it bode poorly for African claims to freedom).
Back on the other side of the Atlantic, Sharp had reminded London officials that Indian
slavery was important, too. But nothing drove the point home quite as well as the Miskito chiefs
who arrived three years later, in 1775. English merchants were routinely enslaving Indians and
selling them into the wider French, Dutch, and English slave markets, the Miskito sachems
complained, “similar to that of negroes from the Coast of Africa.”45 To prove their point, an
English merchant named Jeremiah Terry who lived on the Mosquito Shore and accompanied the
Miskito headmen to London produced two Indian slaves that he had purchased. An Indian slave
44
Sachs, 188.
45
T 1/527, pp. 148-149b, The National Archives, Kew, England.
trade that mirrored the African slave trade? London officials began to sit up and take notice,
including some in the administration of King George III, who was at the time distracted with the
seditious activities of thirteen rebellious colonies.
The slave trade the sachems described was complex. English merchants and buccaneers
occasionally kidnapped and directly enslaved individuals, families, and towns up and down the
Central American coast, to be sure. But they also leveraged credit in turning Indian trading
partners into slaves. As was common practice in other English colonies, merchants extended
generous amounts of credit to Natives—intentionally too much credit, in many cases. With this
overextended credit, individual Natives (usually men) went deep into debt, often with little hope
of reasonable recovery. The Miskitos discharged these debts by “hunting down or surprising
their fellow creatures among the surrounding Tribes and delivering over the Captives to their
creditors as slaves at certain prises.” And when the Miskitos failed to produce enough Indian
slaves, the merchants sprung the trap they had set, dragging the indebted Native into court and
demanding that either the Native, one of his or her children, or a regional proxy (captured Indian
from another tribe) be given over as a servant or slave for compensation.46
In this way, the enslavers found themselves the enslaved. The Miskitos had for well over
a century provided English merchants with Native slaves from the interior. But when it was their
own people who were enslaved—and by the English, no less—the Miskito chiefs had to do
something. The two indigenous slaves paraded around by Terry were not, in fact, Miskito
Indians. Terry had purchased these Natives in Central America, traveled to London (one of the
chiefs’ servants died en route), and then marched them around London to illustrate the ongoing
nature of the illicit Indian slave trade in that region of the Americas – all at the hands of English
46
TNA, CO 123/31/17.
traders. Rather interestingly, the 1772 Somerset ruling (which implied slaves brought to England
should be free) did not seem to be applied to these enslaved Natives from Central America.
In the end, the Miskito chiefs won audiences with the Board of Trade and other high-
ranking officials. One member, at least, stated that he was so shocked he was wished he could
propose a bill in Parliament outlawing the Indian slave trade. The Board of Trade demanded that
the complicit superintendent of the Mosquito Shore, John Hodson, be recalled.47 More
importantly, the king himself released a proclamation that, for the first time in the history of the
English empire, expressly forbade the active enslavement of Native Americans. As relayed by
Jamaican governor Basil Keith to the residents of the Mosquito Coast on November 29, 1775,
the king’s proclamation seemed bold. It stated that the Indian slave trade from the Mosquito
Coast was noted, “in violation of the Common Feelings and Rights of Humanity, and also of the
obvious Principles of Sound Policy,” in addition to violating the “Personal Rights of the Said
Native Indians.”48 It was a major victory of sorts. But in other ways, the proclamation was
simply status quo. The proclamation seemed at least equally concerned with the way Mosquito
Shore residents were aggregating power into their own hands, thereby usurping royal control.
When it turned to slavery, it targeted the Indian slave trade, not Indian slavery itself. At least,
that is how everyone on the Mosquito Shore interpreted it. And most residents ignored its
application to slave trading as well.
47
Letter from Jeremiah Terry, 1773. TNA T 1/527, 148-157. Super interesting stuff about the 1780s era and the
conversations regarding Indian slavery and the Miskitos, in Papers Relating to the Slave Trade, pp. 16-18:
https://books.google.com/books?id=2DZbAAAAQAAJ&pg=PR3&dq=miskito+indians+slaves+in+jamaica&hl=en
&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjn_5uNvOfLAhWIOxoKHZLmBwcQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=miskito%20indians%20s
laves%20in%20jamaica&f=false For an analysis of the trade and diplomatic relations between the English and the
Miskitos after the ending of the Indian slave trade, see Michael D. Olien, “After the Indian Slave Trade: Cross-
Cultural Trade in the Western Caribbean Rimland, 1816-1820,” Journal of Anthropological Research 44, no. 1
(April 1, 1988): 41–66.
48
“A Proclamation, By the King,” November 29, 1775. [SOURCE?]
When the newly-appointed James Lawrie took over as the British superintendent of the
Mosquito Coast in 1776, he found a territory (not an official colony) that seemed virtually
lawless and largely in disarray. The basic structures of empire and colonization—governmental
agents, organization, courts, people to take wills, and so forth—were all absent.49 Part of the
problem was the immense expanse of isolated English settlement up and down 500 miles of the
Mosquito Shore. One thing that was firmly in place, however, was an active, ongoing Indian
slave trade, largely still conducted by the Miskito Indians against their own long-time enemies as
well as Spanish-allied Natives in the interior. In a complaint to Jamaican governor Basil Keith,
Lawrie claimed his hands were tied, and he laid most of the blame at the feet of Jamaica
merchants and English colonists on the Mosquito Shore. So long as there was an insatiable desire
for labor, and so long as there were ready markets and money to be made in enslaving Indians,
the Miskito Indians were all in. Lawrie described to the Governor of Jamaica, Basil Keith, how
English merchants regularly showed up on the Mosquito Shore, eagerly expecting to purchase
Indian slaves. As a result, the Miskito Indians were happy to comply, and constantly raided the
interior—both for their own purposes, and to meet the demands of English traders.
But as always, political reasons intermingled with a seemingly genuine humanitarian
concern in Lawrie’s complaint. Ongoing Indian slavery was at odds with the larger “British
Interest” in the region, in addition to being an “inhuman trade,” and should therefore be halted.50
Lawrie was no abolitionist, and yet, given the wider agitation for at least the ending of the slave
trade more generally in the Atlantic in the 1770s, Lawrie seemed to understand that slave trading
was rooted in questionable practices. Applied more broadly, the reasons for ending the Indian
slave trade were also very good reasons for ending the African one. In both instances, English
49
James Lawrie to Basil Keith, January 28, 1777. TNA, CO 137/72/100.
50
James Lawrie to Basil Keith, January 27, 1777. TNA, CO 137/72/97. For regarding Indian slavery as an “inhuman
trade,” see James Lawrie to Lord Germain, May 28, 1777. TNA, CO 137/72/147.
merchants and European demand fueled a never-ending series of slave raids—intertribal “wars,”
Europeans called them, to naturalize and legitimize the process—that resulted in the continual
drain of human bodies from the coast out into the Atlantic and/or Caribbean. Throughout the
eighteenth century, the African slave trade had been done officially, sanctioned by the crown and
with the weight of a slave trading company. The Indian slave trade was largely unofficial,
marginal, and seen as an enterprise more suited for privateers, buccaneers, and others on the
margins of empire. But colonial officials were beginning to see the parallels more clearly.
The Miskito delegation had prompted action from London. The king weighed in against
Indian slavery, a corrupt superintendent was deposed, a new one—James Lawrie—installed, and
a new council called into being on the Mosquito Shore. But still Indian slavery could not be
uprooted. Under pressure from Jamaican governor Basil, and perhaps motivated for his own
reasons to bring greater control to the Mosquito Coast, Lawrie drafted and then pushed through
the Mosquito Coast council yet another act forbidding the ongoing Indian slave trade out of the
Mosquito Coast and into the wider Atlantic world, including Jamaica. This August 22, 1776,
Mosquito Shore act used the exact wording of the 1741 Jamaica act in almost every aspect. The
main difference is that it originated from the government of the Mosquito Shore, not Jamaica.
Otherwise, things were almost exactly the same: Indian slavery was threatening good relations
with the Miskitos and neighboring Indian tribes, and so any that was bought or sold after October
22, 1776, would be deemed free.
But, importantly, this 1776 act, like its 1741 predecessor, explicitly stated that the Act
was not intended to change the status of Indians already enslaved.51 In this way, the 1776 act
51
For a copy of the 1776 law, see The Defence of the Settlers of Honduras against the Unjust and Unfounded
Representations of Colonel George Arthur, Late Superintendent of That Settlement. Principally Contained in His
Correspondence Relative to the Condition and Treatment of the Slaves of Honduras, 1820-1823, and Printed by
mirrored the gradual emancipation acts that were passed within the decade in New England. The
primary difference is that in New England, the children of slaves born after the passage of the
gradual emancipation acts were not allowed to be enslaved. The Mosquito Shore law was silent
on this issue, leaving an enormous loophole through which planters hauled whole families over
time.
The act also required a general registry of Indian slaves to be undertaken on the Mosquito
Shore, which was eventually done. Although later officials would call this 1777 registry partial
and incomplete, it nonetheless is as astonishing record of the extent of Indian slavery on the
Mosquito Shore.52 It lists in exquisite detail the name, age, sex, and owners of 256 enslaved
Indians.53 And these are only the enslaved Indians that planters felt duty-bound to reveal. How
many dozens of colonists and planters up and down the 500 miles of the Mosquito Coast and
dozens more logwood cutters in the interior felt completely uncompelled to report their enslaved
Natives?
This registry also gives an unusually rich window into the social mechanisms of Indian
slavery as well as its geographical spread. Colonists held Indian slaves from at least ten different
regional Native nations, largely from the interior of the vast area that now covers Mexico down
to Panama. Only a small percentage of the Indians listed have tribal identification given, which
means that the actual geographical spread was likely even greater. Notably absent are Miskito
Indians, although we know from other sources that colonists held them, too, as slaves.
Order of the House of Commons, 16th June, 1823, 101 p. (Jamaica: Printed by A. Aikman, Jun., 1824), 84–85,
//catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009723328.
52
This is how James Lawrie characterized it when he reviewed these documents in 1821. George Arthur to Earl
Bathurst, February 28, 1822. TNA, CO 123/31/80. [CHECK – NAMES AND DATES SEEM OFF]
53
“Return of the Registry of Indians on the Mosquito Shore in the year 1777.” TNA, CO 123/31/123-132. See also
Slaves at Honduras: Correspondence Relative to the Condition and Treatment of Slaves at Honduras, 1820-1823
(London, 1823), 54-57.
Additionally, the registry also reveals that some families suffered under enslavement
together, for reasons that are not always entirely clear. In some cases, of course, Indian children
born into slavery are claimed and used by the owners, as was always the case with African
slavery. Lorena, Lucinda, Phillis, and Dorinda, four of the twenty-three Indian slaves of William
Anderson, are noted in the registry as “Children born in the family.”54 The parents’ information
is not given. The passive, anonymous note of “born” leaves open the possibility of repeated rape
by Anderson of his female Indian slaves that resulted in childbirth. It is also possible that the
children were born within a Native or Native-African relationship on his plantation, of course.
Other family units on different plantations are clearly marked—sometimes, it would
seem, due to a more careful owner who made sure such relationships were entered into the
records. Nine different family units of enslaved Indians labored on the estate of Joseph Wood – a
full thirty-six of the thirty-eight Indian slaves belonged to family units. Seven of the family units
consisted only of a mother and her children; two of the family units had both the father and
mother listed.55 More generally in the registry, females outnumbered males by a ratio of 2:1 (87
males, or 33.2%; 175 females, or 68.8%), and almost all of the younger enslaved Indians were
women.
This registry, however, is more than counting of Indians enslaved on the Mosquito Shore
in 1777. It is that, of course, but it is more. Its presence also implies an absence. The registry
records enslaved Natives who were not shipped away. But there are no similar records for the
thousands of Indians who were unceremoniously, silently, sold off into the wider Atlantic world
of slavery, only to largely disappear without a trace. In its presence, then, this registry reminds us
of these other archival absences.
54
“Return of the Registry of Indians on the Mosquito Shore in the year 1777.” TNA, CO 123/31/124.
55
“Return of the Registry of Indians on the Mosquito Shore in the year 1777.” TNA, CO 123/31/130.
For Jamaican officials, however, the September 1776 Mosquito Coast law was too timid.
So determined was Jamaica to end both the Indian slave trade as well as Indian slavery in
Jamaica that the Assembly passed its own anti-Indian slave trading law on December 22, 1776,
that revised the original 1741 law. The full title was “An act to explain and amend an act entitled,
‘An act for recovering and extending the trade with the Indian settlements in America, and
preventing for the future some evil practices formerly committed in that trade.’”56 This amended
law, unlike the Mosquito Coast version of the 1741 act, declared that any Indians brought to
Jamaica after December 28, 1741, were free people, including their descendants. It levied a hefty
penalty of 500 pounds for buying and selling Indian slaves in Jamaica. But more importantly, it
made Indian slave trading a felony. Anyone who was convicted of “kidnapping or stealing of any
Indian, and transferring them from their settlements or elsewhere, to this island or elsewhere, for
sale,” would be put to death as a felon, without the benefit of clergy.57
This 1776 law is an astonishing testament to the power of anti-slavery sentiment in
London. If taken seriously, it would have amounted to a general emancipation for Indian slaves
in Jamaica who had been enslaved or brought as a slave after December 28, 1741, and imposed
the death penalty on persons who traded in Indians. While the death penalty might seem harsh,
other Jamaican laws passed in the mid-1770s carried the same punishment, including purchasing
stolen property from free or enslaved Africans and Indians and trading in or even importing
counterfeit gold and silver coins.58 Nonetheless, it was the strongest statement against Indian
slavery (not just the Indian slave trade) that Jamaica had passed. And, importantly, it also
56
CO 123/31/120-121. See also The Laws of Jamaica: 1760-1792 (A. Aikman, printer to the King’s Most Excellent
Majesty, 1802), 216–17.
57
CO 123/31/120-212. See also The Laws of Jamaica, 216–17.
58
The Laws of Jamaica, 138, 159.
recognized the sneaky ways that English merchants used indentured servitude as a backdoor to
continue the slave trade.
And yet, this 1776 Jamaican act seems to have fallen flat and was largely ignored. It was
sometimes hard to prove whether an Indian had been purchased before or after December 28,
1741. There is no evidence of anyone being convicted and executed for Indian slave trading, of
course. Nor is there evidence of a generalized Indian slave emancipation. Although the law
opened up the window for legal action for currently-enslaved Natives, there was no mechanism
for actual emancipation: no census, no investigation into numbers and ownership, no plans to
reimburse owners of Indians who had to set them free. So, in reality, Indian slavery—while now
mostly illegal in Jamaica, especially for those brought in after 1741—continued on much as it
had before, with existing Indian slavery unprosecuted. The almost complete silence regarding
existing Indian slaves, repeatedly over time, and then again in the 1770s demonstrates the
relative conservativism of the crown and colony governments regarding outright and widespread
emancipation. Magistrates were coming to terms with the idea of ending both the African and
Indian slave trades. They were also increasingly willing to free enslaved Natives who could
show they had been wrongfully enslaved. But enforcing general emancipation for enslaved
Indians was a bridge too far.
After the passage of these various anti-Indian slave trade laws, Mosquito Coast
Superintendent Lawrie was quick—too quick—to announce success. He reported that the Indian
slave trade had come to an end (something he could not have possibly known for sure over such
a large expanse of coastline), but acknowledged that Indian slavery itself still existed on the
Mosquito Coast. English colonists, merchants, and Miskito Indians themselves still held
indigenous slaves, as the 1777 registry of Indian slaves revealed. Lawrie knew this full well, of
course, as he is seemingly listed as owning Indian slaves in 1777. Even with the slave trade once
again officially outlawed, Lawrie’s attempts to woo the interior Indians away from the Spanish
was proving impossible due to ongoing Native slavery. Native nations far to the interior were
often the very ones the Miskitos slave raided. It made no sense for these nations to make peace
with the English and their Indian allies (the Miskitos) while their relatives and friends were being
held as slaves by the very same people.59
But Lawrie was determined. He proposed an audacious plan to buy the Indian slaves right
out from under the noses of the Miskitos and English colonists. Once their family and friends
were returned to them, the interior Natives would likely come over to the English side, thereby
extending English influence and presence well into the Spanish territory. Lawrie hoped to
dismantle the Spanish empire in the region one Indian nation at a time, and making amends for
Indian slavery was key. To accomplish this, Lawrie wrote his superiors in London that he would
need approximately three thousand pounds – a fairly small sum, all things considered. But with
this estimated ransom fund, Lawrie also tipped his hand regarding the numbers of enslaved
Indians in the region. Assuming a range of 15-30 pounds per enslaved Indian, this meant he
believed there were between 100-200 enslaved Indians on the Mosquito Shore, which seemingly
lines up with the census records of this time period.60
The Mosquito Indians likely believed that they were not beholden to English laws passed
locally or in faraway places. Although there is not much commentary from Mosquito Indians on
the 1776 law, one of the Mosquito chiefs told Lawrie directly that he reserved for himself the
right to continue to exact “Justice” on the Spanish and their Indian allies by raiding them as
59
James Lawrie to Lord Germain, September 29, 1777. TNA, CO 137/73/22
60
James Lawrie to Lord Germain, September 29, 1777. TNA, CO 137/73/22
necessary (which almost always involved taking captives).61 Even as Miskito chiefs asserted
their right to keep slave raiding, they drew a line in the sand regarding the enslavement of their
own people. The Miskitos were angered by what they felt was the nefarious betrayal of English
merchants and magistrates who lured their people into functional slavery through overextension
of credit. This was, in essence, the thrust of the Miskito chiefs’ complaints in London in 1775.
Superintendent Lawrie’s solution was to prohibit any future credit offered by British colonists to
Miskito Indians. In November 1776, he recommended that the Miskito chief Colvil Briton try to
end the reliance of Miskitos on British credit.62
Colvil was surely in a bind by the request, as his rather tortured and dutiful proclamation
in late 1776 suggests. On the one hand, he wanted to protect his people from additional
enslavement. And getting into debt was surely a major source of enslavement. But Colvil also
must have known that to cut off credit was essentially to isolate the Miskitos from the trade
goods on which they had come to expect. It was a form of economic suicide and almost as bad as
cutting diplomatic ties. So Colvil released a statement in which he says he is doing it at Lawrie’s
request. And in it, he does prohibit British colonists from extending credit to the Miskitos. Colvil
included a few other orders, seemingly additionally protecting his men who were serving on
British vessels, as well as asserting control of the tortoise shell trade. But even as Colvil tried to
prohibit a certain kind of slavery, he inexplicably used slaves as a form of currency and reward.
He offered a “Young able Indian Slave” as a reward to “any White Man” for catching Indians
selling valuable tortoise shells to English merchants.63 Indian slavery was so much a part of the
61
James Lawrie to Lord Germain, May 28, 1777. TNA, CO 137/72/147.
62
Colvil Briton goes out of his way several times to state that he is making the proclamation at the request of
Lawrie. Order of Colvil Briton, November 29, 1777. TNA, CO 123/31/17-18.
63
Order of Colvil Briton, November 29, 1777. TNA, CO 123/31/17-18.
culture of the Mosquito Shore that even the Miskito chiefs had a hard time envisioning a society
completely free from Indian slavery.
The Mosquito chiefs were excellent diplomats, however, just like the Haudenosaunees in
New York, the Powhatans in Virginia, and the Narragansetts in Rhode Island. At the same time
they were maintaining good relationships with the English in 1777 (and having an anti-Indian
slave trade law imposed on them), they were also negotiating with the Spanish. For years
Spanish officials in the region had tried to curb the worst of the Miskito raids on their
settlements. In 1777, the Spanish once again tried to impose a set of regulations and agreements,
which largely were about halting Miskito raiding against Spanish towns and Spanish-allied
Natives. The Miskitos refused most of the terms, asserted their “duty” to wage war against the
Spanish if the English needed it. With their own amendments in place, the Miskitos also insisted
on exchanging “Canes” as a way of ratifying the agreement instead of signing the written
document.64 Instead, In short, the Miskito chiefs had no intention of complying with either
Spanish or English dictates that went against their own interests. This defiance of Europeans had
kept them strong and independent for hundreds of years; there was no reason to change now.
What English colonial officials failed to see—or chose to ignore—is that by inviting the
Miskitos as allies, they were by default enabling ongoing slave raiding and captive taking. The
Miskito chiefs were up front about this at several key points. In a large meeting between Lawrie
and other English officials and two of the main Miskito chiefs in October 1780, the English
asked thirteen free-ranging questions and got as many pointed responses. One of the questions
got at core English concern: could they count on the Miskitos as allies against the Spanish? The
answer was yes, so long as the Miskitos were free to fight in their own way. Stating they were
“strangers” to English modes of fighting, the Miskitos preferred traditional warfare:

64
Letter from Colvill Cairns, April 3, 1777. TNA, CO 137/72/170.
“distress[ing]” their enemies, burning their towns, and carrying off their slaves and cattle.65 Their
whole motivation was “hopes of Plunder.”66 Essentially, this was what the Miskitos had been
doing all throughout the interior since the coming of Europeans, and English alliance and trade
partnership enabled it.
The struggle over the existence and meaning of Indian slavery and the Indian slave trade
in England, Jamaica, and the Mosquito Shore can only be understood in these larger contexts of
broader anti-slavery activism and legislation. It seems evident that some officials all across
English Atlantic colonies began understanding the two slave trades and the two slaveries as
parallel and even connected. The fate of one should logically be tied to the fate of the other.
Especially powerful was the up-close perspective on the unjust mechanics of the Indian slave
trade that gave them pause regarding the African slave trade. Still, not everyone saw things this
way. And as King George III’s North American colonies turned from rascally to rebellious, these
differences and tensions only grew deeper.
Indian Slavery and the American Revolution
Perhaps in part because of these changing sentiments regarding Indian slavery, and,
additionally, the need for Indian allies, the Revolutionary War was one of the first wars in British
North America that did not result in a noticeable increase in Indian enslavement. In virtually all
prior wars, English soldiers freely scalped or enslaved “enemy” Natives—and often with the
direct bounties or other incentives proffered by colonial governments. This change was partly
due to the fact that, by 1776, state governments increasingly saw Indians as free entities who
were allies to be courted. Localized Indian slavery almost always soured colonial relations with
65
General Congress with the Miskito Indians, October 1, 1780. TNA, CO 137/79/164b.
66
General Congress with the Miskito Indians, October 1, 1780. TNA, CO 137/79/165.
Indians. Both Americans and British colonists and armies needed to retain or secure prominent
Indian allies, like the Iroquois, Cherokees, and Delawares; as the English had long observed,
Indian slavery ran counter to these goals.
Also influencing these changes was a growing presumption that simply killing Natives or
forcing them off of the land was a preferable solution to enslaving them.67 This mentality had
been cultivated in the many frontier raids over a decade prior during the French and Indian War
(1754-1761, as part of the larger, global Seven Years’ War). European encroachment on Native
lands in the Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia backcountry led to raids by Natives on
English towns. The fear these raids provoked a deep hatred of Natives on the frontiers and
contributed to a printed genre of Indian fear and animosity.68
This hatred and fear of Natives continued during the Revolutionary War. In response to
several raids on American towns, and as a punishment for aiding the British, none other than
George Washington, as commander of the Continental Army, ordered a “scorched earth”
campaign against the Haudenosaunee in New York. Three generals converged on
Haudenosaunee territory in 1779 and proceeded to burn the crops, houses, and general landscape,
killing the few remaining Natives who had not fled in advance.69 Given these circumstances, it
was barely a perversion of wartime policy when Pennsylvania militiamen massacred 96 pacifist
Moravian Indian Christians at Gnadenhutten, Ohio, on March 8, 1782.
Somewhat confusingly, however, jurists and magistrates increasingly subscribed to the
view that the natural state of Indians was freedom (something that apparently was not
incompatible with scorched earth campaigns). Mason had argued as much in the 1772 Robin v.
67
Could perhaps put in a quick parallel to the island of St. Vincent.
68
Peter R. Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America, vol. 1st (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2008).
69
Max M. Mintz, The Seeds of Empire - The American Revolutionary Conquest of the Iroquois (New York; London:
NYU Press, 2001).
Hardaway case in Virginia. Some colonies and states applied this logic of innate human freedom
more broadly as well. In Rhode Island, for example, the assembly banned the importation of
enslaved Africans in 1774, noting that “those who are desirous of enjoying all the advantages of
liberty themselves, should be willing to extend personal liberty to others.” The assembly
primarily targeted the African slave trade, however. Enslaved Africans brought into the colony
after June 1774 would be freed immediately and given the right of private property “in the same
manner as the Native Indian.” Violators would be slapped with a hefty 100-pound fine.70 But left
untouched were the thousands of Africans already in slavery in Rhode Island.
Free blacks and Native served in the American Revolution throughout in various
capacities. But enslaved blacks, Indians, and mixed-race individuals also sometimes used the
messiness of wartime to pursue their own purposes through opportunities provided on both sides
of the British-American divide. The British, of course, tried to drain plantations of labor in the
American south by proclaiming freedom for enslaved blacks who would fight against the
Americans. This was publicized most famously in the declaration of Virginia’s Governor, Lord
Dunmore, in December 1775. Colonists were so resentful of the move that they even mentioned
the “domestic insurrections” incited by the king in the Declaration of Independence half a year
later.
But loyalist enslaved blacks came from other, surprising locations, to fight the
Americans. In Jamaica, at least nineteen men and nine women were sent for nine-year terms to
the American south with the Nineteenth Regiment. Their first task was to fight against the
Americans in the Revolution, but their service continued after that as well, elsewhere. After their
nine-year term, these former slaves were granted their freedom, as records from Kingston
70
Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England
vol. VII 1770-1776, ed. John Russell Bartlett (Providence: Knowles, Anthony and Co, 1862),
251. [REFORMAT; JUST CUT AND PASTED]
show.71 Other individuals, too, were given their freedom for fighting in the American
Revolution.72
Enslaved Natives served, too, in official capacities, and were granted freedom in return.
In Jamaica, Governor Archibald Campbell freed three Africans and two Indians for their service
to him.73 One of the most prominent examples of this on the American side was the Rhode Island
First Regiment. In return for service in the war, the Rhode Island Assembly in 1778 offered
freedom for every “able-bodied negro, mulatto, or Indian man slave” who served and a financial
compensation of up to 120 pounds for their owners. A total of 225 enslaved men enlisted in this
program, including 85 Indians.74 After the war, most of the Indians who had served in the Rhode
Island First Regiment received their freedom papers and tried to integrate into whatever
community of color they could find. In some cases, this meant the Narragansett reservation in
Charlestown, RI. Others started new lives entirely. After his discharge from the Rhode Island
First on December 25, 1783, Daniel Perry married a free black woman named Ruth and settled in
South Kingstown.75
Africans who were liberated by the British found themselves forced out of the United
States and into the wider Atlantic world and beyond, even to Africa and Australia, in
undoubtedly the largest diasporas of free Africans in Atlantic history. British officials shuffled
71
Kingston Register of Free Persons, 1761-1795, Jamaica Archives, 2/6/277, p. 93. See also the discussion in Alan
Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (University of
Chicago Press, 2012), 186.
72
Kingston Register of Free Persons, 1761-1795, Jamaica Archives, 2/6/277, p. 97a.
73
Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists, 186. Campbell also freed Mary Miles, an Indian, on January 29, 1783.
Kingston Register of Free Persons, 1761-1795, Jamaica Archives, 2/6/277, p. 43.
74
Robert A Geake and Lorén M Spears, From Slaves to Soldiers: The 1st Rhode Island Regiment in the American
Revolution, 2016.
75
Robert Geake’s paper on RI First [NEED TO FIND REFERENCE IN HIS BOOK]
free blacks into specific locales in Nova Scotia and the newly created free African territory of
Sierra Leone in 1787. Others languished in England or ended up in Australia.76
It is tempting for Americans today to ignore the British Caribbean after the Revolutionary
War. After all, the political divisions from the perspective of the twenty-first century seem clear
and fixed. The lived reality was far different, however. The Revolutionary War was, in many
senses, the first civil war the United States experienced. Communities, churches, and families all
experienced some level of rupture. And those divisions trickled out into the British Empire more
widely. For over a century, families in New England, New York, and other colonies in British
North America had moved back and forth seamlessly between the mainland and the Caribbean,
between Massachusetts and Barbados, Carolina and Jamaica. Planters in Barbados, Bermuda,
and Jamaica especially had family members, relatives, and even land in New England.
At the outbreak of the Revolution, in fact, some settlers in the British Caribbean voiced
support for the American Rebels. Many of the smaller Caribbean islands in the Lesser Antilles
depended heavily on New England and North America for generally for supplies. Sympathizers
in Barbados contemplated sending provisions to Bostonians during the blockade of the Boston
Harbor.77 Colonists in Jamaica vocalized support of the Americans early in the war and for
several years tried to covertly send supplies.78 Bermudians were nervous about maintaining
adequate food supplies if trade with New England dried up.
During and after the war, Loyalists fled from the United States to other parts of the
British Empire, taking their slaves with them, but often maintaining many personal, family, and
76
Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global
Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006).
77
Need to find this citation.
78
Rear Admiral Sir Peter Parker to Secretary of the Admiralty Philip Stephens, April 19, 1778. Naval History &
Heritage Command (U.S.), Naval Documents of the American Revolution Volume 12 (Government Printing Office,
2014), 143.
trade contacts and networks back in the United States. Many went to Canada, famously, but other
Loyalists spread out throughout the English Caribbean, including the Bahamas, Jamaica, and the
Mosquito Coast. By 1786, the Mosquito Shore had attracted sixty-six white American Loyalists.
But these anti-revolutionaries did not come alone.79 They brought with them their most valuable
possessions: their enslaved humans. A full half of the Loyalist families that came to the Shore
dragged their enslaved Africans along with them—143 total—across the 2,000-plus miles of
stormy Atlantic and Caribbean waters to this vibrant but lawless outpost on the edge of the
English Caribbean empire. A few of the families had between one and four slaves. But some had
many more: 17, 23, even 31.
These were no marginal members of colonial American society. Rather, they were likely
planters and masters the mid-Atlantic or southern colonies, hoping to continue in their prior
business in a completely foreign environment. Other Loyalist planter migrations can be traced as
well. William Bull, for example, the royal governor of South Carolina, in 1783 was given land in
Jamaica, in the parish of St. Elizabeth, and he brought two hundred slaves with him after the
war.80 In 1784, at least six ships from East Florida landed in the Bahamas, bringing dozens of
loyalists and 426 slaves.81
In part because of these ongoing connections, the deep commercial and shipping
connections between New England and the English Caribbean continued on immediately after
the war. It was almost as if the war had never happened, at least in terms of shipping. A mere
two years after the war ended, merchant ships from the United States constantly arrived and
departed at ports in the English Caribbean, loaded with the same trade goods the British Empire
79
“A Return of the American Loyalist & the number of Negro Slaves their Property now on the Mosquito Shore”
TNA, CO 137/86/168.
80
Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists, 186.
81
A. Talbot Bethel, The Early Settlers of the Bahamas and Colonists of North America, 3rd ed. (Rounce & Wortley,
Holt, Norfolk, England: 1937), 99ff.
leaned on for almost a century and a half. The bills of lading show that these American ships still
brought the very items that supported and sustained the same never-ending process of turning
humans into the expendable cogs of the machinery of plantation production.
Take the mid-sized sloop Industry from Connecticut, for example, which docked at
Bridgetown, Barbados on June 21, 1785. Its commander, Asa Benton, reported thirty-six horses,
16,000 hoops, staves, and shingles, and 4,000 bricks.82 The horses were critical components of
the plantation. Depending on the breed, horses could be used to turn the heavy press to squeeze
out the sugarcane. Riding horses, like the Narragansett Pacer, could be used to patrol the
plantation and give overseers better perspectives on the sugarcane fields.83 Pacers and good
riding horses also could be used for planters and couriers to cover the long distances between
outlying plantations and towns, ports, and cities. Hoops and staves—barrels—were the central
component of export shipping out of the sugar islands. They arrived hewn out of the raw wood of
New England forests, flatboxed, so to speak, but ready for assembly by capable coopers on each
plantation. Once fashioned into barrels, they held the precious sugar and rum that made up the
vast majority of exports out of Barbados and Jamaica. Finely crafted New England bricks were
reserved for high-end planter mansions and the homes of wealthier urban elites, all bought with
slave-produced capital and credit.
Sloops like Benton’s stayed in Caribbean harbors only long enough to load up the slave-
produced export products. A ship named Speedweel from New York commanded by Enoch
Welsh left Barbados on April 2, 1785, loaded with 7500 gallons of rum and 7200 pounds of
muscovado sugar (browner, partially processed). That same month the Harrison returned to
82
Outward shipping returns, Barbados, April-July 1785. Barbados Department of Archives, RB 9/1/5.
83
Need to cite something by Charlotte Carrington here.
Georgia with rum, sugar, dry goods, and empty casks. Another, different Connecticut-based ship
also named Industry left on May 27, 1785, with 500 pounds of sugar and 5,220 gallons of rum.
In the British Caribbean, the end of the American Revolution brought about a series of
negotiations between Britain, Spain, and France regarding their Caribbean and American
holdings. In the Treaties of Versailles (1783), Spain and Great Britain agreed to terms that ended
hostilities, allowed for an exchange of captives, and returned territories to the respective
countries. Spain had fifteen months to vacate Providence Island and the Bahamas; Britain had
the same time to hand over Menorca (in the Mediterranean Sea) and East and West Florida to
Spain. But perhaps even more importantly, Spain saw an opportunity to finally dislodge the
British from the Mosquito Shore. Article Six stipulated that in the “Spanish Continent”—
meaning most of the Americas south of the United States—British logwood cutters would vacate
their settlements and instead move to a swatch of land between the Belize and Hondo rivers
(roughly where British Honduras was already established). An agreement was eventually drafted
that gave a deadline in 1786 for the full removal of English colonists from all other Spanish
mainland regions.
The only winner in this arrangement was Spain. England had to give up a coveted
territory that for 150 years had served as an important base of piracy, privateering, Indian slave
raiding, Indian slave trading, and trade and commerce more broadly. The Mosquito Coast
anchored an important Native alliance in the region. The Miskitos were really the only reason the
English could possibly have survived so long deep in Spanish territory.
But the Mosquito Coast was also home. For well over a century, thousands of English
colonists had cultivated alliances, tilled the land, built houses, and learned to navigate waterways
deep into the interior along the 500-mile coastline. Entire generations of English men and
women had been born and raised on the Mosquito Shore. In 1786, there were 1,500 English men,
women, and children on the Mosquito Coast, who held 1,891 slaves (Africans and Indians). But
moving families and slaves was only half the problem. Together these colonists held thousands
of acres of land, and all of the tools, buildings, and machinery to cultivate the land, process
sugarcane and other raw materials, cut down and cut up logwood and mahogany, and otherwise
do the work of empire by producing export goods. The colonists additionally held 415 heads of
cattle, 130 horses, 163 sheep, and 305 pitpans (small boats).84 Furthermore, there was mahogany
and logwood that was cut up in the mountains but could not be processed by the mandated
departure date, representing a serious financial loss for the colonists (and the empire). The
mandate coming from the Secretary of State was mind numbing. Move?
Residents from the town of Black River wrote a long letter to Superintendent Lawrie,
listing out half a dozen reasons why they could not possibly uproot. Tellingly, however, one of
the reasons is that they feared their slaves, upon learning they were being forced to move, would
run away and join the Miskito Indians.85 Such threats were far from empty, and likely reveal the
potential family connections some of the Indians and Africans had within the wider Miskito and
Zambos communities.
When rumors of the English leaving the Mosquito Shore reached the ears of the Miskito
chief General Lee, he marched straight to Superintendent Lawrie to see if it was true. Lee sat in
Lawrie’s house for a bit, completely and profoundly silent. A tear ran down his cheek. Was it
true? Yes, Lawrie told him. Lee then declared that he would move his Miskito people with the
English to wherever they were going. Lawrie tried to do damage control, assuring General Lee of
the Spanish promise that they would not punish the Miskitos for their past loyalty to the English,
84
List of settlers on the Mosquito Shore, 16 October 1786. TNA, CO 137/86/164-167.
85
Black River residents to Lawrie, c. 1786. TNA, CO 137/86/162.
which Lee said he fundamentally disbelieved. Lee was rightfully dumbfounded. His people had
provided the English with generations of loyalty, protection, trade, and Indian slaves. The
English departure was nothing less than an abandonment, and he was angry. He later told some
residents he would “blow out the brains” of any colonist who tried to leave. Lee also resolved to
go to Jamaica in person to complain and, failing any resolution, he would move his people far
into the interior, away from any Spanish colonists who might later arrive.86
Moving hundreds of colonists and their slaves from the Mosquito Coast was an enormous
undertaking. For the recently arrived Loyalists and their slaves from North America, it was their
second major move in a few years. Nonetheless, in 1787 hundreds of Mosquito Shore residents
packed up their Indian and African slaves, livestock, machinery, boats, and lives and set sail up
the coast of Central America to British Honduras. In this way, the Indian slavery so prevalent on
the Mosquito Coast followed the British to Honduras, where it would create legal ripples and
spawn freedom suits in the decades to come.
Gradual Emancipation in the Northern United States
The American Revolution set the United States and Great Britain on two different tacks
regarding slavery, although the sails of both ships were powered by the winds (and windfalls) of
slavery for decades to come. Perhaps strangely, the divergence was not so much about the reality
of long-term slavery, but rather what to do about it. The British Caribbean continued to embrace
slavery for the foreseeable future, and one would have perhaps predicted that it would have
lasted longer there than in the United States. The opposite was true.
Americans were divided; southern states—like Great Britain—dug even deeper into
slavery and had the political power and clout to ensure its longevity for another eighty years.
86
Letter from Superintendent Lawrie, October 14, 1786. TNA, CO 137/86/157-158.
Many northern American states were already taking steps towards ending slavery. Instances of
individual acts of emancipation of both Africans and Indians litter the records of New England
between the early 1770s and the late 1780s. Sometimes these deeds of emancipation record
reasons and sentiments by owners. When the Providence, Rhode Island, merchant Caleb Greene
freed an Indian man named Peter in 1774, he noted that it was because he was “under a Sense of
the Oppression and Injustice of Buying and Selling of Men as Slaves and a Desire to remove as
far as may be the evil Practice thereof.”87 Then again, not all northerners thought that
emancipation—gradual or not—was the right solution. Some slave owners headed south after the
Revolution with their slaves in tow to start anew in a much more slave-friendly environment.88
Some northern states embraced the revolutionary push for freedom by prohibiting slavery
outright. Vermont’s constitution of 1777 outlawed all slavery entirely, although the slave
population was not large by the 1770s. New Hampshire’s Bill of Rights was generally
interpreted as prohibiting slavery. More ambiguously, a 1783 court case in Massachusetts
interpreted the 1780s state constitution as not allowing slavery in the first place. In this case, it
seemingly placed the onus upon enslaved people to prosecute their owners for wrongfully
enslaving them.
But in some New England and mid-Atlantic colonies (and then states), the tension
between a general desire to be done with slavery and the societal paralysis that emerged in the
face of full emancipation resulted in the awkward legal construction commonly known as
gradual emancipation. Generally, this meant that states set a date after which all persons born—
87
Providence Archives. Providence Deeds (manuscript), 19:315.
88
Need to pull specific examples from Marjory O’Toole, If Jane Should Want to Be Sold, Stories of Enslavement,
Indenture and Freedom in Little Compton, Rhode Island (Little Compton, RI: Little Compton Historical Society,
2016).
whether white, black, Indian, or of mixed heritage—would be free. Over time, slavery would end
by attrition as slaves died off, ran away, or were freed by their masters.
Gradual emancipation was a cowardly dodge, really. Later generations of northerners
touted it as an example of northern resistance to slavery, and used it to compare themselves
favorably with the southern American states in the nineteenth century. From the distance of time
it looks better than southern insistence on continuing chattel slavery. But it was a compromise at
best, an attempt to appease the consciences of the anti-slavery crowd while not angering and
alienating slave owners or making too nervous a wider public that had mixed feelings about
slavery.
Most of the gradual emancipation acts were worded inclusively as to effectively cover the
children of black, Indian, and mixed-race slaves. Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual
Emancipation of Slavery (1780), the first of such acts, covered “all persons, as well Negroes and
Mulattoes as others.”89 Similarly, Rhode Island’s was titled “An Act authorizing the
Manumission of Negroes, Mallattoes, & others, and for the gradual Abolition of Slavery,”
making implicitly clear that Natives—“others”—were covered as well.90 The gradual
emancipation acts that northern colonies and states passed starting in 1780, while ensuring
slavery would be phased out over time as the enslaved population aged and died off, Other states
soon followed: Connecticut (1784), Rhode Island (1784), New York (1799), and New Jersey
(1804).
Still, the gradual emancipation acts—some of which explicitly permitted the immediate
emancipation of slaves—opened up a window that encouraged slave owners to free their slaves.
89
“Avalon Project - Pennsylvania - An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, 1780,” accessed April 19, 2017,
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/pennst01.asp.
90
Rhode Island. General Assembly, "Manumission Act, 1784," in Virtual Exhibits, Item #71,
http://sos.ri.gov/virtualarchives/items/show/71 (accessed November 14, 2017).
Immediately after Rhode Island passed its gradual emancipation law in 1784, Amaziah
Waterman of Providence, Rhode Island set free his five black slaves Eve, Phillis, Violet, Prime,
and Sarah (ranging from 30 to 2 years old). The freedom papers he signed specifically mentioned
the Rhode Island law as a motivating factor. His rationale was an astonishing application of the
lofty language of the Declaration of Independence to his own African slaves: “being convinced
of the Reasonableness and Justice of the Emancipation and Freedom of the Negroes as a Part of
the Human Species and intitled to Life Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness in the Acquisition of
Property of their own.”91
In New York, the move toward gradual emancipation progressed slowly, and often on the
backs of black activists and community organizers. In 1785, the New York Legislature passed a
law banning the importation of additional black slaves. Three years later, in 1788, a separate law
also made it illegal to export enslaved people out of the state. It wasn’t until 1799 that the
legislature passed a gradual emancipation act that mirrored similar laws in Rhode Island and
Pennsylvania. As with other gradual emancipation laws, it only freed all children born to
enslaved mothers after a particular date, in this case July 4, 1799. New York’s law required these
“free” children to remain servants to their mother’s master until they reached adulthood. Local
black abolitionists continue to press for more thorough legislation, however, and succeeded in
getting the legislature to pass “An Act relative to slaves and servants” in March 1817. This law
decreed that every enslaved person born before the passage of the gradual emancipation act—
July 4, 1799—would be free on July 4, 1827. Children born to slave mothers between 1817 and
1827 would be forced to labor as servants until the age of twenty-one. This meant that a child
born as a slave in early 1827 would—rather depressingly—only gain his or her complete
91
April 15, 1784. Providence Archives. Providence Deeds (manuscript), 19:449.
freedom in 1848. Officially, New York went from 10,088 slaves in 1820 to zero in 1827.92 July
4, 1827, was indeed an important moment in New York’s history of slavery in that it did
officially abolish outright, chattel, heritable slavery, but it had a murkier reality due to the
ongoing presence of forcibly bound “servants” that still had to serve out their time.93
By the time of the first federal census in 1790, New England states only had 3,763 slaves
to report (undifferentiated between blacks and Indians), out of 16,822 blacks total and a much
smaller population of several thousand free Indians. Although gradual emancipation ensured that
slave populations decreased over time, it took a long time for these states to be completely slave
free. In 1810, Rhode Island and Connecticut still contained 418 slaves.94 Nineteenth century
newspapers recognized the ambiguous legacy of gradual emancipation. In 1827, the Vermont
Chronicle noted that although there were six states that were completely free of slaves (Maine,
New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio), slavery was still present in
several northern states. This included Rhode Island, which had 48, Connecticut (98),
Pennsylvania (211), Indiana (190), and Illinois (917).95
Debates regarding the abolition of the slave trade
The United States and Britain approached the question of slavery in different ways in the
1780s, although they did agree on one thing: the transatlantic African slave trade needed to end
at some point in the future. In London, anti-slavery activists increasingly amassed heartbreaking
testimony of the horrors of the Middle Passage, which included the now-famous image of
inhumanly tight packing of human cargo as depicted in the slave ship Brookes. Certain that
92
“Termination of Slavery in N. York,” the Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics, July 21, 1827.
93
Drawn from Sarah Gronningsater’s paper, “The Children of Gradual Emancipation: Black Abolitionism and the
Origins of Immediatism,” delivered at the Brown University 19th Century Workshop.
94
Willie Lee Rose, Slavery and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1982), 7.
95
“Termination of Slavery in N. York,” the Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics, July 21, 1827.
outright emancipation would never be accepted (indeed, immediate emancipation was the most
radical position among a wide variety of options for anti-slavery activists), abolitionists poured
their energies into legislation that would end the trans-Atlantic African slave trade. As in the
United States, immediate abolition was virtually inconceivable for the British colonies in the
1780s.
In Britain, powerful factions banded together to make strong economic arguments for the
ongoing necessity of the slave trade for the health of the empire as a whole. The question was not
the morality of slavery itself, or even the slave trade, but rather the enormously wide-ranging and
energetic industries that had arisen to support the slave trade. Every single ship that sailed out of
Liverpool or Bristol or London required tons—literally—of specialized iron chains, collars,
locks, handcuffs, whips, guns, swords, food, beer, and other provisions to allow ship masters to
carry a full crew and several hundred enslaved Africans in their holds. In May 1798 Alderman
Newnham and Lord Penrhyn presented petitions to the House of Commons in London against
the abolition of the slave trade. They represented a host of slave-trade based industries including:
merchants and ship owners in London; merchants, planters, mortgagees, and annuitants from
Liverpool; manufacturers of iron, copper, brass, sail makers, gun makers, black makers, and
bakers of Liverpool. All of these merchants and industries—plus many more—had much to lose
if the slave trade ended. As such, even though they held no slaves, they had a direct interest in
the business of slavery and the slave trade and fought hard to keep it going.96
Others who favored the ongoing slave trade and slavery itself took a different approach.
John Matthews, a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy, argued in 1789 that African slavery (and, by
extension, the slave trade) was rooted in ongoing warfare between natural enemies in the interior
of Africa. Matthews argued that, if not for the slave trade, these African captives would be killed.
96
The Royal Gazette (Bermuda), May 21, 1789.
By this logic, slavery was better than death for Africans – which he pitched as a reason for
keeping the trans-Atlantic slave trade alive.97
Americans were divided over this same question, too. The difference was that, while
Parliament could largely push slavery out of sight within England, the United States, as a former
colony, was the very site of large-scale and active slavery. The new United States Constitution
studiously avoided the question of slavery and kicked the question to the next generation by
promising a future date for the end of the trans-Atlantic African slave trade. In the meantime,
American shipbuilders, ironworkers, sail makers, rum distillers, captains, and merchants all had
great stake in the ongoing slave trade in ways that mirrored the ones in Liverpool. This was
especially true in northern states that, while slowly emancipating Indians and Africans in their
midst, wholeheartedly embraced the profits of carting human cargo from Africa to the American
south and the British Caribbean.
Tellingly, however, nobody was seriously arguing for the continuation of an Indian slave
trade. Although similar arguments had been made for Natives over the years—that purchasing or
accepting Native captives and enslaving them kept them from death and allowed them a chance
to be civilized—by the 1780s this logic had generally fallen out of society fashion and legal
acceptance with regard to Natives. Indians still served as slaves, of course, but most Americans
and Britons saw it as a remnant of an older order, and the law increasingly favored their freedom.
Perhaps somewhat grudgingly, both the United States and Great Britain did bring an end
to the trans-Atlantic African slave trade. In Britain, the 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave
Trade intended to finally turn off the dreadful spigot and halt the flow of human bodies out of
Africa into British American colonies – one that had been endlessly running for well over two
hundred years. But the 1807 act also potentially affected Indian slavery as well. The actual
97
The Royal Gazette (Bermuda), February 14, 1789.
wording of the act does not mention Native Americans, but it does explicitly prohibit the sale
and movement of peoples from Africa as well as “from any Island, Country, Territory, or Place
whatever, in the West Indies.”98 But this only applied to colonies and territories not under the
authority of the British crown, as the text clearly states. This meant that, as in the United States,
the transfer of slaves between British colonies (or states in the U.S.) was still legal. It was not
until 1824 that Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act of 1824, which officially outlawed the
transportation of enslaved people between British colonies.
The United States approved its own law intended to end the trans-Atlantic African slave
trade. Passed in March 1807 as The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807, it went into
effect on January 1, 1808—something that had been mandated by the U.S. Constitution in 1789.
Imperfectly prosecuted, it did largely end the official slave trade but over time led to an
enormous internal African slave trade that has been well-documented by historians. Essentially,
this led to the unprecedented long-term and slow shifting of slaves from traditional centers of
slavery in the upper south – Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas – to the deep south states like
Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana.
But the U.S. act to end the slave trade, too, implicitly affected Indian slavery. The law
prohibited the importation of “any negro, mulatto, or person of colour” – a broad reference and
series of catch-all racial tags that had been used in colonial and state laws for almost two
centuries as a way to cover the entire spectrum of non-white slavery. No longer was it legal for
enslaved Natives to be brought to the United States. Although, after the American Revolution,
plantation owners, farmers, and urban elites rarely looked to Caribbean Natives for labor supply.
There was an abundance of Indian labor to be coerced within the bounds of the North American
98
For the full text, see http://www.esp.org/foundations/freedom/holdings/slave-trade-act-1807.pdf [need to find
print reference or better online reference]
continent, if only the right reasons and leverage could be utilized (more through debt peonage
and less through outright enslavement).
Officially, at least, the United States neither permitted nor outlawed Indian slavery. This
silence was nothing new; for over 150 years colonial American officials were virtually silent on
Indian slavery, even thought it existed in every colony. Although Indian slavery and unfree
servitude continued on in most states, it was strongest in the backcountry southern and western
states and territories. Its presence is hard to trace, but officials knew it to be present, and had
persistently found it to trouble relations with local Natives.
This is partially why, when the federal government began eyeing up the enormous tract
of Indian land south of the Great Lakes (termed the Northwest Territory), it took great pains to
theorize about the need for good relations with Natives and to outlaw all slavery and involuntary
servitude. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 laid out in fourteen sections and six articles the
general principles behind this massive extension into Indian lands. It was politically important
territory, of course, since it provided an extra buffer against the British to the north. But the
Northwest Ordinance was hopelessly optimistic and idealistic. It imagined an orderly progression
of development in which education, culture, and religious freedom would march across the upper
northwest. Natives would be treated with respect and would easily stand aside, giving proper title
to American speculators and proprietors. It promised that the “property, rights, and liberty” of
Natives would never be “invaded or disturbed.” But there were caveats. Official wars against
Natives nullified all of these idealistic guidelines, according to Article 3. And slavery and
involuntary servitude could legally be imposed on anyone as a punishment for a crime, according
to Article 6.
In theory, then, the 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (British) should have
effectively dried up any ongoing Indian slave trade, as least as it concerned the importation of
Indian slaves from non-British colonies and provinces. In Berbice (an English South American
colony), for example, at least officially local magistrates reported to the Commissioners of Legal
Inquiry in 1825 that Indian slavery had been greatly diminished since the legal ending of the
slave trade.99
But not everyone saw things this way. With the end of the legal trans-Atlantic African
slave trade, some—perhaps many—enterprising merchants and slave traders began eyeing up the
large and numerous Natives within British colonial boundaries as possible sources for ongoing
slaves and revenue. The ink was barely dry on the 1807 act ending the slave trade when at least
some merchants and magistrates considered the “Traffic in Indian Slaves” as a “substitute for the
abolished African Slave trade.”100 In this way, it is possible that the ending of the African slave
trade actually increased incidences of Native slavery and encouraged the additional importation
of indigenous slaves, since it was much more murky than African slavery and had almost always
operated on the legal fringes of colonial society.
By the time Britain and the United States dropped the curtain on the trans-Atlantic slave
trade in 1808, Indian slavery was seemingly on its way out. Indian slave trading—much like the
African slave trade—had waned in most territories either through legal mechanisms or cultural
practice. But left untouched were the hundreds of thousands of enslaved blacks and Indians in
the territories of both countries. In the decades after 1808, both Indians and Africans would have
to fight for their freedom, particularly in parts of the British Caribbean where Indian slavery was
still particularly strong. And in the United States, another element went unaddressed—and
99
Responses from Berbice to the Commissioners of Legal Inquiry; answer to question 321. TNA, CO 318/75 (no
folio numbers).
100
John Daly to __ [royal officials], February 20th, 1811. TNA, CO 111/14, f. 48.
perhaps unanticipated: the annexation of North American territory that already contained Indian
slaves.

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overheard snippets of the conversation—possibly a braggadocios recounting of the hunt. Perhaps

regulations on the frontiers of empire.

disappeared, hopping on a ship named Betsey, presumably to return home.2

his own Native slaves for sale to English colonists.3

the long-term Miskito practices of slave-raiding their Spanish-allied enemies, it seemed

where indigenous slaves still labored in unfree conditions.

eventually quashed, Indian slavery itself proved much harder to curb.

to be self-sufficient, and that they are of a good moral character).9

before arriving to New England.11

name to Pete Tony and pass as a free man.13

Kingston, Jamaica, to have the requisite certificate of freedom made out.17

consider “what use may be made of these poor wretches.” 18

Franciscan missionary Friar Roque de Aliaga wrote to the Director-General of Essequibo,

hopelessly—to DWIC officials for their return.20

Indian slaves, either for trade or local usage.21

colonial outpost since the early eighteenth century.

Slavery in Jamaica or wherever they are carried to.”22

century after so many decades of outright enslavement.

information and opportunity for sale.

after its passing.

three-volume history of Jamaica in 1774, he included an entire section on the various

alienate Natives, driving them straight into Spanish arms.

published A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery in

was arguing specifically against slavery in England.

implications might be.30

incidentally benefited from.

in of any more negroes,” a recommendation made sporadically by Quaker Meetings in the

caused temporary ripples throughout the English slaveholding world.

Africans and Indians around the English Atlantic.37

pockets of individuals and was not benefitting the empire as a whole.38

been for African slavery.

slaves should only have them for a set number of years.40

the time, for twenty-five pounds.41

each for their troubles, plus their court costs.44

(conversely, it bode poorly for African claims to freedom).

seditious activities of thirteen rebellious colonies.

from another tribe) be given over as a servant or slave for compensation.46

application to slave trading as well.

But as always, political reasons intermingled with a seemingly genuine humanitarian

22, 1776, would be deemed free.

Other family units on different plantations are clearly marked—sometimes, it would

of these other archival absences.

sale,” would be put to death as a felon, without the benefit of clergy.57

This 1776 law is an astonishing testament to the power of anti-slavery sentiment in

continue the slave trade.

Indians was a bridge too far.

held as slaves by the very same people.59

lines up with the census records of this time period.60

end the reliance of Miskitos on British credit.62

completely free from Indian slavery.

“strangers” to English modes of fighting, the Miskitos preferred traditional warfare:

partnership enabled it.

differences and tensions only grew deeper.

Indian Slavery and the American Revolution

Indian slavery ran counter to these goals.

contributed to a printed genre of Indian fear and animosity.68

George Washington, as commander of the Continental Army, ordered a “scorched earth”

campaign against the Haudenosaunee in New York. Three generals converged on

Moravian Indian Christians at Gnadenhutten, Ohio, on March 8, 1782.

Somewhat confusingly, however, jurists and magistrates increasingly subscribed to the

untouched were the thousands of Africans already in slavery in Rhode Island.

Sierra Leone in 1787. Others languished in England or ended up in Australia.76

adequate food supplies if trade with New England dried up.