Like African slaves, Indian slaves escaped when they could. This notice comes
from the Boston Weekly News-Letter for October 4, 1739.
For many tribes the motive for the increased combat was the enslavement of
other Natives to sell to the Europeans for more guns and kettles. As northern
tribes specialized in fur, certain southern tribes specialized in people. Some
Native Americans had enslaved each other long before Europeans arrived.
Now Europeans vastly expanded Indian slavery.^30 I had expected to find in our
textbooks the cliché that Native Americans did not make good slaves, but only
two books, Triumph of the American Nation and The American Tradition, say
even that. American History buries a sentence, “A few Indians were
enslaved,” in its discussion of the African slave trade. Otherwise, the
textbooks are silent on the subject of the Native American slave trade in what
is now the United States—except for one surprising standout. The American
Pageant contains a paragraph that tells how the Carolina colonists enlisted the
coastal Savannah Indians to bring them slaves from the interior, making
“manacled Indians... among the young colony’s major exports.” Pageant goes
on to tell how Indian captives wound up enslaved in the West Indies and New
England.^31
Europeans’ enslavement of Native Americans has a long history. Ponce de
Leon went to Florida not really to seek the mythical fountain of youth; his main
business was to seek gold and capture slaves for Hispaniola.^32 In New
England, Indian slavery led directly to African slavery: the first blacks