Slavery and the “American Way of War,” 1607–1861 - PDF: https://lnkd.in/gEPibFZC
For the two and a half centuries that followed the establishment of England’s first North American colony at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, the practice of slavery and warfare on that continent were inextricably intertwined. The enslavement of Native Americans taken captive in war was a recurrent objective of early military campaigns in the colonies, from New England to the Carolinas. Slave raiding not only provided labor, it served vital strategic functions. It allowed the militarily weak English colonies to cement alliances with powerful Native American confederacies by providing a ready market for their prisoners. Slave raiding was also a form of proxy-war, by which the authority of rival imperial powers was undermined by the enslavement of their native subjects. The relationship between slavery and warfare was, however, a dynamic and contingent one. Slave raiding declined as a characteristic of North American conflict by the early eighteenth century. As racialized plantation societies developed in the southern colonies, enslaved Africans and their descendants supplanted indentured Europeans and Native Americans in the rice and tobacco fields. Yet war and slavery remained intimately bound. The colonies’ own plantation societies proved strategically vulnerable, as runaways and rebels forged alliances with external enemies. Plantation slavery itself took on the characteristics of an “internalwar.” The fundamental insecurities generated by an actually or potentially rebellious enslaved population forged a militarized southern society and shaped
America’s early military institutions to a degree that has largely gone unrecognized. America’s “way of war” cannot be understood without reference to slavery.
The persistent use of organized military force exemplified by the militia against the enslaved serves to confirm the essential nature of North American slavery as an “internal war.” More broadly, it is just one element in the long and deeply intertwined relationship between slavery and warfare in North America. This began in the earliest days of colonization, as Native Americans seized in war were enslaved in colonial households and plantations or traded within and between colonies. Slave raiding by Native American allies to feed this commerce in captives was a foundation of, in particular, South Carolina’s war making. The business of slave raiding served both to cement alliances with native confederacies and undermine rival colonial powers, through an indirect strategy of attacks on people under their protection. Yet slavery was a strategic “Achilles’ heel” for southern colonies themselves. Fear of enslavement turned the military might of the Yamasee Confederacy against their Carolinian allies in 1715.
