Trade guns and the Indian slave trade in the Southern Colonies

[Andy A]

I am currently taking a survey course in Colonial history at Texas Tech. In reading one of our texts, Epidemics and Enslavement, by Paul Kelton, I am finding that there is abundant evidence that there existed a large slave trade in the American southeast during the 1650 --1750 time period.

The trade was fueled by trade guns(and other trade goods) for Indian slaves and encompased the whole area from Virginia to the Mississippi River.

Has anyone ever heard of this before? Also you wonder what kinds of weapons were traded?? I wonder when flintlocks came into use??? One of the traders said his "lockes bee, the steeles are long and channelld where ye flints strike". Pg 115. Is this a flintlock?

Interesting stuff! would anyone want to comment on this---it would be nice to bring some tidbits of info to class tomorrow nite!


Andy A

[flintriflesmith]

In colonial Virginia many of the same laws that applied to enslaved Africans also applied to enslaved Native Americans. Unfortunately I don't have access to those laws on line but maybe your library at Texas Tech has a link to the multi volume collection of books called Hennings Statutes which is a year by year account of all the laws passed by the colonial Virginia legislature. It has a great index!

Gary

[Chris Treichel]

I just read a good book about the Mayflower Colonists through King Phillips War and apparently the Massachusets colony financed part of the war effort through selling captured natives to the sugar islands (Carribean).  The book is a pretty good read. "Mayflower" by Nathaniel Philbrick and he documents all of his footnotes directly to his bibliography. One of the books you might like to take a look at is quoted from, "Indian Slavery in Colonial Times" Almon Lauber

[tom patton]

You might want to take a look at "AFRICANS AND NATIVE AMERICANS  The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red- Black Peoples" by Jack D. Forbes.I haven't gotten around to it but it's on my winter list to read and a brief scan looks pretty good.

Tom Patton

[JCKelly]

Not knowing the entire context, the only
". . .steeles . . . channelld where ye flints strike"
that I know of, consistently, are Spanish locks.

Today we call them miquelet locks, back then they were just the Spanish lock. The steel of a Spanish lock has vertical grooves in it. Some steels are dovetailed in & held with a screw so they may easily be replaced when worn out.
The Spanish lock is said to fire reliably even with a lousey flint, as heavy mainspring made the cock strike so hard.

Maybe this indicates that they got their trade guns from Spain? The American southeast bordered on Spanish possessions, e.g. Florida, Mexico &c.

[Dr. Tim-Boone]

From Wikipedia with reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_among_Native_Americans_in_the_United_States

http://web.archive.org/web/20040804001522/http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_indians_slavery.htm

To acquire trade goods, Native Americans began selling war captives to whites rather than integrating them into their own societies.[2]
The West Indies developed as plantation societies prior to the Chesapeake Bay region and had a demand for labor. Colonists in the South began to capture and enslave Native Americans for sale and export to the "sugar islands," as well as to northern colonies.[2] The resulting Native American slave trade devastated the southeastern Native American populations and transformed tribal relations throughout the Southeast.[2] In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English at Charles Town (South Carolina), the Spanish in Florida, and the French in Louisiana sought trading partners and allies among the Native Americans by offering trade goods such as metal knives and axes, firearms and ammunition, liquor and beads, and cloth and hats in exchange for furs (deerskins) and Native American slaves.[2] Traders, frontier settlers, and government officials encouraged Native Americans to make war on other tribes to reap the profits of the slaves captured in such raids or to weaken the warring tribes.[2]
Historians have estimated that tens of thousands of Native Americans were enslaved.[2] It is estimated that Carolina traders operating out of Charles Town shipped an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 Native American captives between 1670 and 1715 in a profitable slave trade with the Caribbean, Spanish Hispaniola, and Northern colonies.[2]