Radio Script #1250
Little Talks on Common Things
October 19, 1980
Well known is the fact that Maine led the movement in this country against the abuses caused by intoxicating beverages when, in 1851, it became the first state to prohibit the sale of liquor within its borders. What is not so well known is the connection of the movement against liquor with another movement that reached its critical climax at the same time – the crusade against slavery. In fact the prohibition movement and the anti-slavery cause were vitally connected.
Black slavery in the Americas began nearly forty years before the earliest English settlement in what is now the U.S. In 1569, John Hawkins, a British navigator, raided the Guinea coast of West Africa and took 300 captive Negroes to the island of Haiti, thus performing the first invasion by an Englishman into a traffic previously monopolized by the Spanish and Portuguese. Shortly afterward, an agreement was made by England, Spain and Portugal for equal shares in the profitable trade.
A kind of half-slavery began soon after the settlement of the earliest colonies. Individuals and families were granted passage to the New World on the agreement of members of families to become indentured servants to some merchant or. plantation owner in a colony for a specified number of years. This was different from the more common practice of child indenture – the binding-out of a son or daughter to another person as an unpaid servant until the age of 21. This semi-slavery indenture concerned adults – grown men and women who were bound for a stated number of years similarly without pay, but actually to repay a debt already incurred for passage across the Atlantic.
By the middle of the 17th century a black slave brought from the West Indies to Virginia brought double the price of an indentured white – servant, and by 1700 the black slaves constituted more than half of Virginia’s labor force. What is not generally understood is that black slavery in the southern colonies had actually begun as an act of mercy toward the Indians of the West Indies. Under the Spanish Conquest, those Caribbean Indians who had not been killed were enslaved to work in the gold and silver mines that produced the precious metal that loaded the numerous treasure ships which plied between the Caribbean and Spanish ports on the Mediterranean. The death rate of those Indians became so great that Negroes were brought from Africa to replace them as the more humane of the mine operators saw that this kind of labor was annihilating the Indians. Of course, humanitarian feelings were not the only reason for the supply change. The mortality of the Indian workers endangered the slave-labor. At any rate, blacks from Africa replaced them.
As early as 1597, a Spanish nobleman, Bartholemew de las Casas, petitioned for the right to transport, for work in the New World mines, the stronger and more durable black Africans. The Spanish king gave his consent to this method of rapidly building the las Casas family fortune. For the next two centuries, the African slave trade became the pivot of European empires as they contested with Spain, for supremacy in the traffic. Portugal, Holland, France and England all made the slave trade a lucrative part of commerce.
New England slave trade also had begun with Indians, not with Negroes. It had started at the end of King Philip’s War in 1678, when the Massachusetts Bay government had to decide what to do with Indian warriors captured in that war. A ship left Boston in April 1679 carrying a cargo of Indians who were sold as slaves in Haiti. Only three years later in 1682, a Boston vessel was sent to the African coast for a cargo of Negroes which it conveyed to Barbados and sold for salt, sugar, and tobacco to be brought back to Boston.
That was the beginning of what became a notorious triangular trade – a trade that did much to establish New England mercantile prosperity, what Cotton Mather called “the hot, terrible, hellish liquor” made from sugar and molasses in the West Indies – what came to be known as West Indies rum – became the main currency of New England’s slave trade. By 1700 it was not so much the rum brought to Boston from the Indies that constituted this kind of commodity currency. By that time a large number of distillers were operating in New England itself, turning out a product called New England rum competing profitably with the older West Indies rum. The New England rum was made near Boston from molasses brought from the Caribbean. By 1750 the Puritan commonwealth of New England had 150 distillers turning out that rum.
The triangular trade came to operate as follows. A ship would leave Boston for the African coast loaded with New England rum. There it would trade the rum for Negroes kidnapped by African slave traders. It would than take those slaves to Haiti. Barbados, Jamaica and other Caribbean locations – to be traded for molasses and sugar which in turn went to Boston to be distilled into more rum to repeat the triangular process.
Liquor thus became an important factor in the slave trade. It had already played a large part in colonial settlement, that colonial New England eccentric. Thomas Morton, famed for the Maypole frivolity at his plantation of Marrymount denounced by the Puritans, wrote in 1640: “The planters and traders gain much profit by selling strong liquor to the natives who are much taken with the delight of it and will pawn their lives to get it. We can have no trade with the Indians unless we provide them with lusty liquors.”
The effects of liquor on the Indians were far more devastating than on the whites. The Red Men gathered in communal drinking bouts that resulted in serious injuries and deaths. Many tribal conflicts could be traced to liquor. An intoxicated Indian became a savage indeed – a beastly human entirely out of control. A Virginia governor wrote in 1690: “The frequent
use of rum has destroyed more Indians than have all their wars put together.”
The liquor that had been so disastrous for the Indian made possible the rapid rise of Negro slavery. The more slaves the more rum – the more rum the more slaves. It became a vicious circle. Out of it came financial prosperity both to the southern plantation and the New England merchant.
Despite the increasing recognition of slavery as unchristian and inhumane, its financial profitability made it so difficult to combat that only a bitter civil war could end it in America, the land of the free. Liquor was not the only questionable stimulus to American prosperity.
Tobacco also played an important part. By 1550 that native American product was being used in Europe as a medicine, appearing in powders and unguents. Its pleasurable effects appealed to the numerous sailors on the world’s oceans. Then Sir Walter Raleigh made its smoking fashionable in England, so the thing to do to keep up with the Jones was to smoke the long-stemmed pipes used by the courtiers of Elizabeth I. So common, both medicinally and pleasurably, was the use of tobacco where it was raised, that the Indians around Chesapeake Bay considered it the fourth element along with earth, man and woman.
In 1614 the ship Elizabeth returned to England from Jamestown carrying four hogsheads of a variety of tobacco greatly improved by John Rolfe, husband of the legendary Indian maiden, Pocahontas. Two years later, 2000 pounds were shipped from Virginia, and by 1630 the annual shipments exceeded 50,000 pounds a year. Ten years later, it had passed a million pounds year after year.
The tobacco industry needed an increasing supply of labor. To encourage immigration, the Virginia Company, chartered by the King in England with its headquarters in Plymouth, the British town for which the first New England settlement was named, made an offer that greatly encouraged indenture, the kind of semi-slavery to which we have already referred. It offered free passage from England to Virginia to anyone who would bind himself as an indentured servant for five years to the tobacco plantation owner who would pay for the passage, and guaranteed to the indentured man the ownership of 100 acres of land when his indenture was completed. In the year 1619 alone, the year before the first settlement in New England, eight British ships with 1200 immigrants, many of them indentured servants, landed at Jamestown. The next three years saw the coming of 2500 more,
As long as tobacco was Virginia’s chief staple, it actually became a kind of currency – the principal object of exchange for goods and services. Planters paid their obligations to British merchants entirely in tobacco. The more tobacco, the more need for black slaves to cultivate it. When cotton later vied with tobacco for export, the need was increased.
So it became a fact of American history that the slave trade and our own nation’s long perpetuation of black slavery was closely linked with liquor and tobacco.
Year: 1980