Slavery of Native Americans in New England
In the view of the Plymouth court, the enslavement of natives that were rebelling against English authority was quite lawful. This was a policy that had been going on for decades in Ireland, particularly at least since the time of Elizabeth I, and during the mid-17th century Cromwell wars in Britain and Ireland where large numbers of Irish, Welsh and Scots prisoners were sent as slaves to plantations in the West Indies, especially to Barbados and Jamaica.
The income provided by selling native American captives as slaves was helpful financially in covering war costs and in removing natives from the colony who were considered potentially dangerous - and in effect made more native lands available to English settlers.
One person among the colony hierarchy who did speak out at that time against enslavement of native Americans was military leader Benjamin Church, whose militia company ironically was responsible in August 1676 for the killing of King Philip. He said, in the summer of 1675 regarding the slavery of native Americans, “an action so hateful…that (I) opposed it to the loss of the good will and respect of some that before were (my) good friends.” This said, Church, like many Englishmen in the colony, would be an owner of African slaves himself.
Ships carrying native peoples as slaves began to leave New England ports for places far away late in 1675, and by the next summer the shipping out of slaves had turned into a regular process that removed what was considered dangerous native males by stating that “no male captive above the age of fourteen years should reside in the colony.” That fall, they had King Philip’s nine-year-old son in their hands and not known what to do with him - some wanted to execute the boy - but in the end he, as his mother had been, was shipped off as a slave.
It is estimated that during King Philip's War at least a thousand native Americans of New England were sold as slaves, with over half of those coming from Plymouth. By the end of the war, villages that were once crowded native American population centers were empty of inhabitants.
Read more about this topic: New England Colonies
Famous quotes containing the words slavery, native, americans and/or england:
“The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.”
—Ashley Montagu (b. 1905)
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910)
“It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.”
—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)
“It was always accounted a virtue in a man to love his country. With us it is now something more than a virtue. It is a necessity. When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.”
—Adlai Stevenson (19001965)