"The Early Black Diaspora in the Americas: The First Century After Columbus" by Colin Palmer in OAH Magazine of History (Vol. 5, No. 4, Spring 1991, pp. 27-30) The black person is no longer the forgotten early resident of the Americas. During the last twenty years, much scholarly attention has been devoted to the Africans' role in the conquest, colonization, and cultural evolution of these colonial societies. While the broad contours of the african experiences in this hemisphere are known, however, many aspects either remain unstudied or are imperfectly understood. Yet, the recent attention being paid to this dimension of the early American history will deepen our understanding of the black societies' development, their ethos, the changing relationships between elites and non-elites, and race relations. It is worthwhile to recall that not too long ago many historians doubted that the history of blacks in early America could be written given the apparent paucity of credible sources. This perception has, of course, changed as new repositories of materials have been discovered and exploited. In addition, new questions have been asked of the existing sources, the methodology has been refined, and many subtle and creative minds have been hard at work. Still, the study of the early black presence in the Americas is in its infancy and I shall attempt to assess briefly our present state of knowledge and suggest areas for future research. It is not entirely clear when the first Africans arrived in the hemisphere. Some scholars suggest that West African traders had established commercial relationships with the indigenous peoples of the Americas long before the arrival of the Europeans. Others argue that the first blacks arrived with Christopher Columbus during his second voyage. These were free persons who played active roles in the settlement of Hispanola, the first Spanish colony in the Americas. Along with the Spaniards and the Indians, they would lay the foundations of the Iberian empire in the Americas. As an institution, however, African slavery was first introduced into the Caribbean in 1502. In that year, the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, granted their approval to the governor of Hispanola, Nicholas de Ovando to use African slaves. In time, the institution of slavery would spread to other Spanish colonies such as Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico, and Peru. The Spanish example would soon be copied by other European nations. By the mid-seventeenth century, Spain's nominal control of the Caribbean Islands had been challenged by other Europeans, principally the English, the Dutch, and the French. The French colonized Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1635 and acquired St. Dominique in 1697. The Dutch took possession of the islands of Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Maarten, and Curacao between 1630 and 1640 and the Danes settled in St. Thomas in 1672. The English, in their turn, occupied St. Christopher in 1624, Barbados (1627), Nevis (1628), Montserrat and Antigua (1632), and won Jamaica from the Spaniards in 1655. African slaves were imported to meet the economic needs of the Europeans in all of the Caribbean Islands. Similar developments occurred in the Spanish empire on the mainland and in Portuguese Brazil. By 1640 perhaps as many as 175,000 slaves had been imported into the Spanish American colonies. Brazil received about 50,000 African slaves by 1600 and the British West Indies received about 20,000 by 1650 and 174,000 by 1700. British North America is a special case demography. The first Africans did not arrive until 1619. By 1650, 1,600 Africans had been imported into North American colonies and by 1700, at least 28,500 had arrived. It needs to be emphasized in this context that the United States received only about five percent of the slaves who came to the Americas during the entire period of slave trade. The remaining numbers were absorbed by the slave societies of Latin America and the Caribbean. It may be speculated that overall a minimum of ten million Africans arrived in the Americas although the figure could go as high as twelve or fifteen million. Philip Curtin's earlier estimate of 9,566,000 has been modified, albeit not substantially, by a number of more recent studies (1). these figures, to be sure, do not include the sizable portion of persons who were born into slavery in the various societies. Any assessment of current research must, perforce, begin with the slave trade. A number of recent works including those by Philip Curtin, Enriqueta Vila Vilar, and myself have provided a reliable picture of the ethnic origins of the slaves, the sexual composition of the cargoes, the mortality rates during the Atlantic Passage, and the distribution patterns in the Americas (2). These studies make clear, for example, that such colonies like Mexico and Peru received most of their slaves by 1650. In fact, the black population exceeded that of the whites in those two societies by about 1570. These colonies had become quite dependent on African labor in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because of the drastic decline of the Indian population and the resulting need for an alternative source of exploited labor. Although these studies provide the broad outlines of the trade, they fail to address the issues central to our understanding of early traffic in human merchandise. We do not yet have a nuanced understanding of the ethos of those societies from which the Africans were drawn, the processes by which individuals became slaves in Africa, or the post-enslavement mortality rates on the Coast. Nor do we fully understand the nature of the Africans' resistance to their enslavement, the profitability rates of the trade, and the mortality rates in the early months upon their arrival in the Americas. It must also be noted that the domestic slave trade in the early Americas remains essentially unstudied. There are no major studies of the mechanics of this aspect of the trade, its ebb and flow, its principal characteristics and so on. The role of the slaves in the economies of the early colonial societies has received the attention of at least two scholars, Frederick Bowser has examined the role of blacks in early Spanish Peru and I have done a similar study of early colonial Mexico (3). The other Spanish societies have not yet received similar scholarly attention. The literature on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--particularly for Cuba--is more abundant, however much more work is needed on the formative years of the black presence (4). One of the principal criticisms of earlier works on Latin American slavery is that they were much too legalistic in their approach and they did not explore adequately the social, cultural, and economic dynamics of the colonial societies. Studies by Stanley Elkins and Frank Tannenbaum, as suggestive as they undoubtedly were, did not utilize fresh archival data (5). Their reliance on such metropolitan slave codes as the Siete Paridas to provide an accurate picture of the slaves' experiences was also misleading. It was one thing for the laws of the metropolitan country to recognize the moral and legal personalities of the slaves, but it was quite another to assume that their rights existed in fact. Accordingly, it was clear to many scholars that before the Tannenbaum-Elkins conclusions could be fully embraced, their assumptions and conclusions would have to be tested against the evidence on treatment uncovered by a series of case studies of Latin American slavery. Regrettably, however, much methodological fuzziness has surrounded the question of the meaning of "treatment" as applied to slavery. In a pathbreaking essay published in 1969, Eugene Genovese brought some clarity to the definition of "treatment" as used in the context of a master's conduct toward his slaves by suggesting that there were three basic meanings of the word (6). First, treatment might mean the day-to-day living conditions of the slaves: diet, clothing, housing, duration of the working day, and the general conditions under which they labored. Second, according to Genovese, treatment might also mean the overall conditions of the slaves' life; for example, the degree to which they were allowed to marry and maintain families, their opportunities for religious expression, and the extent to which they were able to function as autonomous human beings. And finally, treatment could encompass the opportunities that existed for slaves to obtain their freedom and their chances of becoming citizens with equal rights within the larger society. It is clear that historians can only avoid confusion by delineating precisely the sense in which they are using the word "treatment." It is equally important that historians eschew broad generalizations that cover entire regions and cultures; after all, the nature of the treatment accorded the slaves varied in both place and time. Recent studies of early slave holding societies demonstrate that one of the most important determinants of the treatment of slaves was not the legal and institutional framework within which slavery existed but, rather, the economic role the slaves performed and the degree to which the enterprises in which they worked were capitalistic. The more highly capitalized an industry became, the greater the demands placed on the labor resources of the slaves and the more oppressive their condition. The high mortality rate of the slave populations was one measure of the harshness of their day-to-day existence. Frederick Bowser has concluded that for peru during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries "poor diet and living conditions, combined with hard labor assured many blacks an early grave." Early colonial Mexico, according to Barrett and myself, followed a similar pattern (7). In spite of these preliminary findings, however, we have very little date on the physical aspects of the slaves' existence in the early Americas. Only scattered data exist on the diet of these people, their clothing, residential patterns, and diseases. We know next to nothing about their reproductive patterns as reflected in annual rates of increase or decrease. One measure of the everyday conditions of slavery may well be in the extent to which slaves fled or committed suicide to escape from their servitude. These problems, however, merit further examination in the Spanish societies before any firm conclusions can be drawn. So far, we have examined the physical conditions of the slaves' life in early America, but what do we know of their possibilities for marriage and family life, for preserving their ancestral culture, and for pursuing an independent social life? It is not yet possible to give definitive answers to these questions, but the state of knowledge today is far better than it was when Tannenbaum wrote Slave and Citizen in 1946. Recent research has indicated that slaves in Latin America and the Caribbean preserved their African heritage to a far greater extent than their counterparts in North America. This success in retaining aspects of their culture was not due to any greater degree of benevolence or tolerance of the slave masters in these areas. The mortality rate of slaves in Latin America and the Caribbean coupled with a low birth rate fostered a greater dependence on Africa as a source for slaves. This dependence on imported slaves helped to ensure a constant and sustained transmission of African cultures to these societies. Recent research suggests that Catholic officials in Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere tried to suppress African religious beliefs which they thought violated the precepts of the Church. In Mexico and Peru, the Holy Office of the Inquisition aided in the task of persecuting blacks whom it identified as witches and sorcerers. Generally speaking, the masters and the authorities tended to permit those practices that were perceived as not contrary to Catholic dogma or as posing a threat to the survival of slavery. Available evidence suggests that the more spiritual forms of black culture survived not as a result of benevolent concern and encouragement of the whites but in spite of their opposition. By retaining their own beliefs and by borrowing and reinterpreting certain European beliefs, the Africans were ensuring, albeit unconsciously, their survival as spiritually autonomous human beings (8). The extent to which slaves in early colonial America were able to establish and lead a normal family life is uncertain. Few students of Latin America and Caribbean slavery have dealt in any significant way with the problem and none has produced as exhaustive a study as the one Herbert Gutman has done for the United States (9). Scattered discussions of the subject reveal, however, that the slaves experienced considerable difficulties in enjoying stable conjugal relationships. there was an imbalance in the ratio of the sexes in these societies because two-thirds of the slaves were male. In addition, the male slaves had to compete with white men for the affection of the available female slaves. Demographers have often pointed out that a greater sexual balance tends to occur in a population that changes through natural increase or decrease. But such a balance never seems to have developed in early America because of the higher mortality rate of the children and the consequent dependence on Africa to sustain the slave population. Although family life seemed precarious at best, there were no laws that blocked the path to liberation. It is now generally recognized, however, that slaves in Spanish America and Brazil did not obtain their freedom as easily as earlier scholars like Tannenbaum seemed to argue. There were three principal means by which a slave could be legally freed, as Bowser, Schwartz, and myself have discussed (10). A slave could be manumitted by his master or the state; he could purchase his own freedom or have it purchased in his behalf; and finally, some masters freed at birth their children born of slave women. These incidences of liberation, with the exception of that conferred by the state-- depended primarily upon the disposition of the master since normally he could not be forced to manumit his property. Recent findings seem to indicate that the sick, the elderly, the masters' mistresses and their progeny were the individuals most likely to receive their freedom (11). In the light of such findings, the view that manumission in Spanish America and Brazil stemmed from humanitarian ideals needs careful reexamination. An imaginative use of the data contained in wills and notarial records will help provide answers to questions concerning the individuals most likely to be freed, and the ease and frequency of such manumissions. In spite of the progress we have noted, large gaps still remain in the historiography of slavery in early America. There is, for example, no published study of urban slavery in any of those societies where the institution existed. Studies of urban experiences of the slaves should add enormously to our understanding of the dynamics of slavery in areas, such as households, where commercial specialization was not and could not be practiced. These studies will also provide an opportunity to test the prevailing assumption that urban slaves in general had an easier life than their rural peers. As was indicated earlier, we still lack a detailed analysis of black family patterns in the early colonial societies. Nor do we have any sustained analyses of the social organizations and belief systems of the slaves and of the ethos of the societies they created. Such studies are needed if we are to fully understand the nature and meaning of the coping mechanisms that they created throughout the Americas. Some recent studies suggest that scholars have begun to deemphasize the comparative focus on the study of early American slavery. This is commendable because the study of slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean is in its formative stage and we do not yet know enough about its practice and evolution in most of these societies to make meaningful comparisons with North America. Such comparisons, based as they often are on inadequate date, may tend to mislead rather than produce insightful generalizations that can be sustained. One must also question the value of placing all of Latin American and the Caribbean within a unitary and sometimes static slave system. Slavery, wherever it existed was never a place, and a whole complex of other factors such as the personality of the masters, the social and political institutions and the stage of economic development of the society in which it existed. It is to be hoped that future scholarship will be more slave centered and concerned with the crucial question of how black men and women ordered their lives and coped with the reality of being the property of other people. Endnotes 1. Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) p. 87. 2. Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Hispano-America y el comericio de escalvos: Los Asientos Portugueses (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano Americanos, 1977) and Colin A. Palmer, Human Cargoes, The British Slave Trade to Spanish America 1700-1739 (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1981). 3. Frederick Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524-1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1976). 4. Franklin Knight, Slave Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970); Gwendolyn Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Dominique and Cuba (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1971). 5. Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Vintage Books, 1946). 6. Eugene D. Genovese, "The treatment of slaves in different countries: problems in the application of the comparative method," in Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History, eds. Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese, (Englewood Cliffs, 1969), 202-210. 7. Bowser, The African Slave, 254-272; Edgar F. Love, Slaves of the White God; Ward Barrett, The Sugar Hacienda of the Marqueses del Valle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970). 8. For a discussion of this, see Palmer, Slaves of the White God, 145-166. 9. Herbert Gutman, The Black Family In Slavery and Freedom 1750-1925, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976). 10. Bowser, The African Slave, 272; Edgar F. Love, "Marriage patterns of persons of African descent in a colonial Mexico City Parish," Hispanic American Historical Review, LI: 1 (February 1971), 79-91. 11. Palmer, Slaves of the White God, 172-176; Bowser, The African Slave, 272-301. A useful discussion of Colonial Brazil may be found in Stuart Schwartz, "The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Bahia 1684-1745," Hispanic American Historical Review, LIV: 4 (November 1974), 603-635.