“You mean to say indentured servants were slaves? I was taught in school, and you see it on TV all the time, that you had to be black to be a slave, that anybody else that was forced to work was an indentured servant—a white person that wasn’t doing life. But you never here tell about how they had it. It couldn’t have been good. If whites were slaves, how can it be that we don’t know?”
-Mathias
This was a question from a cab driver, after he asked me what my current writing project was about, and I informed him that I was writing a history of white slavery in Early America.
He’s not an online kind of guy, so below is a paraphrased version of the basic answer I gave him.
The term servant was adopted as the term for an unfree forced laborer in 1611, with the publication of the King James Bible, in which Latin and Greek terms for slaves were translated into English so that regular people could read the Bible. This term was used to describe white, red, brown and black slaves from 1603 up until the emancipation of black American slaves during the Civil War.
The term slave comes from the Arabic word for white slave girls captured from the Slavic tribes of Eastern Europe and trafficked by Russian Vikings in the Dark Ages, and found its way into English via Muslim slave raiders who raided the English coast for sex slaves and galley slaves up until the late 1600s, and possibly from dealing with African slave traders, who did more business with Muslims—and still do—than they ever did with Christians or Jews.
When whites were first kidnapped, captured by authorities in slave raids targeting the poor, taken prisoner in the Scottish or Irish wars, or convicted of a crime and then sold into bondage, they called themselves slaves, and their masters called them servants. Since the masters wrote the books, the poor illiterate white slaves come down in history to us as servants.
The earliest black slaves in America were referred to simply as negroes and then either as negroes, servants, slaves or freemen, depending on their status.
After a couple of joint, white/black slave rebellions, the slave masters began housing white and black slaves separately, buying blacks straight from Africa—instead of English-speaking ones from Barbados—and began to tighten up their terminology by calling whites servants and blacks slaves.
Black slaves generally preferred the term servant.
White slaves seemed inclined to savor the biternes of their predicament with the term slave.
Indian slaves were often called pets.
The one legal term that was universally used by masters and slaves, black and white, from 1607 through 1864, was “bondsman” or “bondswoman.”
To Mathias’s query as to who had it worse, I simply said, “If we both killed a dude, and I ratted you out and got fifteen years and you got life, we would both be convicts, prisoners behind bars, the only difference being you didn’t have a release date. Having a short sentence does not make you free before your release. Between eighty and ninety-eight of every one hundred indentured servants in Maryland and Virginia died in bondage. When a person is owned by another, you tend to see a predictable series of abuses. Imagine if those customers who threaten you when they’re drunk, owned you, had the right to beat you to death if they so chose, and the police were sworn to return you to them or force you to keep driving that cab for free if you quit?”
Mathias, looked down at me, shook his head, and intoned in his big, easy voice, “Shoot, what a life that must have been! I’d rather die than be owned by my wife, and I love the woman. That must have been a hell of a thing, to be another man’s dog.”
Slavery is a fact of human nature.
A slave is an adult dependent. Someone who can't get his shit together enough to provide for himself without another person telling him what to do and without preying on others. There is absolutely nothing you can do to change a natural slave into a natural freeman. You can free slaves, and in 10 years they will all be back in slavery. You can enslave the free, and in a generation they will have bought themselves out.
I'd estimate 40-50% of Americans (and 90% of American blacks) are natural slaves (in Aristotle's sense of the term: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_slavery
Most of the conditions of the existence of American slaves were/are driven by technological and economical factors. If the economy is driven by the need to clear old growth forest with hand tools, or farm cash crops with 18th century technology, you're going to have a lot of people spending their lives in very hard labor, one way or the other. I am sure that if most slaves had had the ability to be more productive in other occupations, their masters would have ensured their employment in those occupations out of a profit motive if nothing else. In fact, the existence of a whole class of freedmen and their descendants suggests this is what happened.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ellison
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Frank_McWorter
If the economy is driven by printing the world's reserve currency and controlling the flow of global commerce across the oceans, you're going to have a lot of slaves playing video games and snorting Oxycontins. A slave whose master doesn't give him any instructions or require him to work is no less a slave; he may even be worse off as a person (as is evidenced by the fact that the slaves of the 19th century seemed to be far less degenerate than their modern descendants.)
The Civil War and the following century didn't free the black slaves, but rather nationalized them, with two intermediate phases: a sharecropping one, where the slaves worked in their old occupation for the same subsistence pay but without a requirement for their masters to take care of them when they got old/sick, and an industrial one (the Great Migration,) when they were brought up to the industrial cities of the North to be used as strikebreaking labor (for instance, Ford's dealings with the black ministers of Chicago.)
So, here we are. The slaves of America are no longer owned by private individuals, but by the bureaucratic government. They no longer have gainful employment, their functions having been reduced to vote blocks/mascots/endangered species predators. An individual master may be cruel or kind. He may be abusive or fair. He may be honorable or craven. He lives with his slaves, as one does with family members or livestock. Most people do not treat their family members or working animals cruelly, for personal reasons, or due to community pressure.
But America's modern slave owning apparatus, consisting of teachers, social workers, cops, prison guards, etc. can only be cruel, abusive, craven. Each one is absolved of responsibility, subject to bureaucratic rigamarole, is doing a job. It is better to be a bum's dog than to be in a state-run dog shelter.
Given that slavery is an institution whose existence is driven by a fact of human nature, it is better to figure out how to have a good, productive slavery than excoriating its existence.
Thanks so much for this, B.
I have always agreed with Aristotle on the fact that most humans have a need, an inner simpering drive, to be a slave, and slavery will therefore always exist.
As a reluctant slave, myself, I rue our now comprehensive form of enslavement to the system, as you so well describe it.
It occurs to me, that our massive slave society—so loved and promoted with rabid eagerness by most women and blacks—is, in fact, a form of mean-spirited vengeance, a way of the natural slave—never better exemplified then by a feminist woman—to make sure that the would-be Aristotle's among us are chained right beside them.
I will repost this comment of yours as an article.
Thank you, again.