Slaves and Englishmen

Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Michael Guasco

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780812223941
• eBook ISBN: 9780812209884
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Technically speaking, slavery was not legal in the English-speaking world before the mid-seventeenth century. But long before race-based slavery was entrenched in law and practice, English men and women were well aware of the various forms of human bondage practiced in other nations and, in less systematic ways, their own country. They understood the legal and philosophic rationale of slavery in different cultural contexts and, for good reason, worried about the possibility of their own enslavement by foreign Catholic or Muslim powers. While opinions about the benefits and ethics of the institution varied widely, the language, imagery, and knowledge of slavery were a great deal more widespread in early modern England than we tend to assume.In wide-ranging detail, Slaves and Englishmen demonstrates how slavery shaped the ways the English interacted with people and places throughout the Atlantic world. By examining the myriad forms and meanings of human bondage in an international context, Michael Guasco illustrates the significance of slavery in the early modern world before the rise of the plantation system or the emergence of modern racism. As this revealing history shows, the implications of slavery were closely connected to the question of what it meant to be English in the Atlantic world.

CHAPTER 1

______________

The Nature of a Slave: Human Bondage in Early Modern England

Such as have made forfeit of themselves
By vicious courses, and their birthright lost
’Tis not injustice they are marked for slaves.¹

In late 1583 Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s principal secretary, dispatched a thirty-year-old Oxford cleric named Richard Hakluyt to France to search out information that could be used to promote royal support for the development of English colonies abroad. Walsingham, who had been a backer of Martin Frobisher’s voyages of discovery during the 1570s and would give aid to John Davis during the 1580s, was one among a growing number of luminaries who believed that England needed to accelerate its overseas activities. Elizabethan England faced an array of challenges. Nearby, colonization efforts in Ireland had recently entered a much more violent stage as the English struggled to put down a series of local rebellions, particularly those that had plagued the Munster Plantation during the previous fifteen years. England’s northern frontier was hardly more secure as the apparent machinations of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her Catholic allies encouraged the view that Elizabeth’s grasp on the throne was tentative, at best. The Catholic threat to Tudor rule in England was especially vivid across the English Channel, where thousands of Protestants had recently been killed by rampaging Catholic mobs during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. The revolt of Dutch Calvinists against the Spanish Habsburgs may have loomed even larger as English shipping and, especially, its woolen industry were hamstrung by a surge in piracy and the closing of traditional trading ports like Antwerp. And, of course, there was Spain, with whom England would soon enough be at war because of all of these things. Walsingham was but one among many English leaders who believed that England was endangered and it was therefore with a great sense of urgency and a desire to ensure England’s very survival that he commanded Hakluyt to learn all he could about the world beyond the western horizon.²

Despite outward appearances, Hakluyt was an obvious choice for the job. As the namesake of his older and more renowned cousin, young Hakluyt was already connected to a group of people urging the nation to take a more active role in the Americas and throughout the world. During the 1570s, he had begun to gather information about the Northwest Passage from foreign authorities, including the celebrated mapmakers Abraham Ortelius and Gerard Mercator. In 1581, Hakluyt engaged both Walsingham and Sir Francis Drake, who had only recently returned from his circumnavigation, in discussions about establishing a lectureship in navigation. A year later, he made an even bigger mark when he published Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America, a collection of accounts edited and translated by Hakluyt himself designed to promote overseas colonization.³ Hakluyt may have been working in the shadows of other writers, translators, and editors, such as Richard Eden and Richard Willes, and may not have been as celebrated as some of his contemporaries, such as John Dee and Sir Philip Sidney, but he was nonetheless a man on the rise.⁴

Upon returning from his fact-finding mission in 1584, Hakluyt sat down and composed “A particuler discourse concerninge the greate necessitie and manifolde commodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne discoveries lately attempted” or, as it is more commonly known, “A Discourse of Western Planting.” Hakluyt’s “Discourse,” which he presented to Walsingham and Queen Elizabeth in October, precisely detailed the need for a more comprehensive overseas policy based on the acquisition and settlement of permanent colonies in the Americas. He claimed that colonization was the only way to stem the tide of Spanish expansionism, that it would project Protestant Christianity into a region where the Catholic Church presently exercised a spiritual monopoly, and that it would generate innumerable economic and demographic rewards. Central to Hakluyt’s argument was the idea that North American colonies would be the engine of England’s rise to national greatness, just as overseas conquests had aided Spain’s emergence as a global power during the previous century.

Considering Spain and Portugal’s grip on the Americas, just how England could dislodge the Catholic powers would seem to have been problematic. Not so, Hakluyt argued. The secret, he suggested, lay not simply in English power but in the inherent weaknesses in Spanish colonial policies characterized by “more then barbarous and savage endeles cruelties.” Rehashing a litany of accusations, largely drawn (often verbatim) from Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevíssima relación de la destruyción de las yndias (1552), which had been translated and published in English as The Spanish Colonie in 1583, Hakluyt claimed that a “people kepte in subjection desire nothinge more then freedome. And like as a little passage geven to water it maketh his own way, so give but a small meane to such kepte in tyranie, they will make their own way to libertie, which way may easely be made.” Because Spain ruled “the Indies with all pride and tyranie,” Indians and Africans would “joyne with us or any other moste willinglye to shake of[f] their moste intollerable yoke.” Indeed, they “have begonne to doo yt already in divers places where they were lordes heretofore.” With English encouragement to help root out their oppressors, it would be “like as when people of contrarie nature at the sea enter into Gallies, where men are tied as slaves, all yell and crye with one voice liberta, liberta, as desirous of libertie & freedomme.” Because the Spanish could only lay claim during their tenure to have “exercised moste outragious and more then Turkishe cruelties in all the West Indies,” and future English colonialism would be characterized by “humanitie, curtesie, and freedomme,” a foreign policy premised on the establishment of English colonies in the Americas could only succeed.⁵

Hakluyt’s references here to the brutality of the Spanish conquest have subsequently become familiar elements of the notorious Black Legend and a predictable part of a document that was drafted at a time when so many Englishmen believed that their lives and liberties were imperiled.⁶ Less familiar are his uses of the language of slavery, galleys, Turkish cruelties, and the intolerable yoke of bondage. But as striking as Hakluyt’s choice of words may seem in retrospect, they were unremarkable for the period and likely would not have confused English readers had this private document been distributed more widely. Indeed, Hakluyt could toss about references to these different forms of human bondage without explanation because he understood that both his immediate audience and the English public at large had well-formed and often quite sophisticated ideas about slavery. A few prescient souls were able to perceive the developing plantation system on the horizon, involving as it did a commitment to chattel slavery, but few people living at the time thought about slavery as a labor system or a way of organizing human populations in terms of superficial phenotypical categories. Both the received wisdom of the ages and contemporary experience suggested that slavery could manifest itself in a variety of ways and that it was a characteristic feature in many parts of the world. It was hardly shocking, then, when Hakluyt claimed that Spanish America was besotted by slavery.

Slavery, for all intents and purposes, was alive and well in England even if actual slaves were hard to find. Slavery lived in England’s most important texts: the Christian Bible, where bondage was both a defining spiritual theme and an acknowledged historical condition, and the classical works being read in both Latin and newly fashionable English translations by England’s educated elite. Slavery also existed in English society as a contemporary social issue that manifested itself, variously, in the lingering vestiges of manorial villeinage, in intermittent proposals to expand galley slavery, and even as a practical solution to a range of social ills that plagued the nation. Thus, when English men and women wrote or talked about slavery, when they heard references to it from the pulpit or from government officials, they were not necessarily inclined to dream up something far off, foreign, or characterized by groups of people whose race, nation, ethnicity, or religion set them apart. Instead, slavery made Englishmen think, and worry, about themselves as individuals and a nation whose personal liberty and collective autonomy hung in the balance.

* * *

Sixteenth-century Englishmen liked to claim that they were uniquely free, yet slavery was undoubtedly an integral part of their national story. In particular, the idea of slavery resonated in English religious and intellectual circles. Indeed, it would have been difficult to avoid the issue, if only because slavery pervaded the nation’s most ubiquitous text, the Christian Bible. Literate English men and women may have been especially aware of the specific contents of the Bible as a result of the publication of the Geneva Bible in English in 1560.⁷ The Geneva Bible was laced with references to slaves and slavery and established human bondage as an apt metaphor for the complete submission of humankind and particular individuals to God. Throughout the book of Exodus, one could read of the children of Israel who “sighed for the[ir] bondage and cryed” (2:23) in an Egypt so miserable and cruel that when Moses told them that Yahweh would free them of their burdens and lead them to a better place they could not listen, “for anguish of spirit & for cruel bondage” (Exodus 6:9). But even as the Bible could be read as a story of liberation, of God freeing his chosen people from slavery, the Old Testament also granted tacit justification for the legality of human bondage, provided it conformed to certain religious precepts. The book of Leviticus, for example, made it clear that slaves should come from foreign nations and that “ye shal take them as inheritance for your children after you, to possesse them by inheritance, ye shal use their labours for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel ye shal not rule one over another with crueltie” (Leviticus 25:44–46).⁸ The New Testament, particularly the letters of Paul, also endorsed slavery as a legitimate human institution and contained injunctions that upheld the status quo, such as the assertion that slaves must “counte their masters worthie of all honour, that the Name of God, and his doctrine be not evil spoken of” (1 Timothy 6:1).⁹ Resistance to earthly slavery, in this instance, was an affront to God.

Other often-cited religious authorities similarly elaborated on the subject of slavery. Most notably, within the Christian tradition, theologians debated whether either the condition or the institution of slavery was natural. St. Augustine of Hippo’s conception of slavery as a consequence of man’s fall from a state of innocence was typical of the views expressed by the early church fathers and those who followed them during the first millennium. In the City of God, a work first published in English in 1610, Augustine recounted that, before man’s fall from a state of grace, God made man “reasonable,” and wished for human beings to rule “onely over the unreasonable, not over man, but over beastes.” Servitude was only subsequently “layde upon the backe of transgression. And therefore in all the scriptures wee never reade the word, Servant, untill such time as that just man Noah … layd it as a curse upon his offending sonne. So that it was guilt, and not nature that gave originall unto that name.” Slavery, in Augustine’s schema, was brought upon mankind not by God’s design but by man’s actions. Slavery was therefore a natural condition insofar as human beings no longer lived in a world of God’s original design.¹⁰

The centerpiece of Augustine’s explanation for slavery—the “transgression” to which he referred—was Noah’s curse. According to Genesis 9:21–27, as it appeared in the 1560 edition of the Bible, Noah became intoxicated on the ark and “was uncovered in ye middes of his tent. And when Ham the father of Canaan sawe the nakednes of his father, he tolde his two brethren without. Then toke Shem and Japeth a garment and put it upon bothe their shulders and went backward, and covered the nakednes of their father.” When Noah awoke “from his wine, and knewe what his yonger sonne had done unto him” he said “Cursed be Canaan: servant of servantes shall he be unto his brethren. He said moreover, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.” In case there was any doubt about the severity of the punishment, a marginal notation was attached to the phrase “servant of servantes” reading: “That is, a moste vile slave.”¹¹

Whether St. Augustine’s work was read widely in England, his characterization of slavery as a product of sinfulness remained the dominant strain of thought within Christian theology for more than a thousand years and Augustine continued to influence English theologians well into the seventeenth century.¹² Western Europeans also leaned heavily on secular sources. In the twelfth century, Europeans famously rediscovered Aristotle’s Politics, a work that was subsequently influential in the thirteenth-century writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, who incorporated many of Aristotle’s ideas into Christian thought. Aristotle’s treatment of the subject of slavery in his Politics, ultimately translated into English from an older French source, was therefore doubly important in early modern England. Here, readers could learn that slavery was not only natural, it was part of a “universal natural pattern” in which those with the capacity to reason should rule over those whose “function is the use of their bodies and nothing better can be expected of them.” Aristotle even declared that it was “nature’s purpose to make the bodies of free men to differ from those of slaves, the latter strong enough to be used for necessary tasks, the former erect and useless for that kind of work, but well suited for the life of a citizen of the state.”¹³

Working within the confines of Augustinian doctrine, Aquinas maintained the presumption that slavery could not have existed before the Fall, yet he allowed that natural disparities existed among individuals based on sex, age, strength, and wisdom. Aquinas believed that “the condition of men in the state of nature was not more honourable than the condition of the angels. Yet among the angels some lord over others.” Hierarchy and dominion almost certainly existed in a state of nature, something repeatedly urged in Tudor sermons on the ever popular theme of obedience.¹⁴ Therefore, the emergence of full-fledged slavery and mastery, much less dependency and bondage, in the post-lapsarian world could only be viewed as a logical extension of things and not necessarily inconsistent with, much less contrary to, natural design. In rationalizing the legitimacy of slavery this way, Aquinas challenged Roman and earlier Christian ideas, both of which suggested that slavery was inconsistent with natural law. Aquinas therefore lined up much more closely with Aristotle in his assertion that slavery was in accord with what he called the second intention of nature and that it ultimately benefited both masters and slaves.¹⁵

The influence of the Bible and Christian thought clearly shaped the meaning of slavery throughout Tudor and early Stuart society, even as they often did so on the continent as well. Nonetheless, other intellectual reference points shaped English society’s ideas and attitudes about slavery, many of which tended to characterize slavery as commonplace but not necessarily a product of natural law. Most elite Englishmen, for example, including not only many gentry and professionals but also a few of the “middling sort,” were remarkably well-informed about human bondage through their university or grammar school education in the classics. Legal and political slavery were important themes in the writings of Sallust and Cicero, whose works were routinely used in the instruction of Latin.¹⁶ Livy’s Romane Historie and Tacitus’s Germania were also fundamental and popular refere...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction. The Problem of Slavery in Pre-Plantation America
• Chapter 1. The Nature of a Slave: Human Bondage in Early Modern England
• Chapter 2. Slaves the World Over: Early English Encounters with Slavery
• Chapter 3. Imaginary Allies: Englishmen and Africans in Spain’s Atlantic World
• Chapter 4. Englishmen Enslaved: The Specter of Slavery in the Mediterranean and Beyond
• Chapter 5. “As Cheap as Those Negroes”?: Transplanting Slavery in Anglo-America
• Chapter 6. Slavery before “Slavery” in Pre-Plantation America
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments