A few years back, Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown (a Muslim convert) delivered a lecture in which he defended Islamic slavery as “kinder and gentler” than slavery in America. Part of Brown’s defence rested on the fact that Muhammad was a slave trader: “Are you more morally mature than the Prophet of God?”
At the same time, many American students sincerely believe that slavery was invented in America, or that American slavery was somehow unique. This is garbage, of course, but it’s fed by such a-historical nonsense as The 1619 Project.
In fact, contrary to 1619’s claims, slavery in the Americas long predated European settlement.
And, right now, several tribes of American Indians are actively trying to expel descendants of their slaves from their tribes.
The Cherokee were not anti-slavery and were in fact slaveowners. In 1835, 15,000 Cherokee owned 1,592 African slaves; by the Civil War onset, 17,000 Cherokee owned 4,000 African slaves (see William G McLoughlin’s 1974 article “Red Indians, Black Slavery and White Racism: America’s Slaveholding Indians”). Cherokee, Seminole and other American Indian tribes bought, stole and sold slaves from one another and from whites […]
Thousands of people who were once enslaved by tribes were given their freedom when slavery was abolished in the US. American Indians promised the freedmen tribal citizenship and equal stakes in land and fortune. But many of these promises have been broken. Descendants of slaves won lawsuits to be included in the Cherokee Nation, yet they struggle to gain access to services. Their struggle is exacerbated by chiefs who want to kick the descendants out of the tribes. Another tribe that is attempting to oust slave descendants is the Muscogee Creek Nation located in Okmulgee, Oklahoma and the fourth largest tribe in the US with 86,100 citizens.
Historian Christina Snyder points out that tribes like the Creek owned slaves for centuries before Europeans arrived. Slavery was a standard fate of captives of war, including noncombatant women and children. Intertribal slave raids were also common.
Another common argument is that transatlantic slavery was unique for being “racial”. Again, this is rank nonsense. Muslim slavers prized white slaves so highly that they raided deep into Europe and Britain.
As for the American Indians, while their slaves might have been the same colour as them, they were most definitely regarded as inferior “Others”. Historian William C MacLeod observes that, among the Columbia River tribes, Indians of outside tribes and white men when first met with, were regarded as “something less than exactly human”.
In some tribes, such as the Creeks, nontribal members were regarded as less than human just because they were from other tribes. The Creeks, and many other American Indians, believed in polygenesis, which means different and separate origins for different people (polygenesis was disproved by Charles Darwin over 150 years ago).
According to their beliefs, Indians were the peak of creation, whites were “knowledgeable and greedy”, while blacks “were the least lucky, for their lot was toil and hardship”. While slaves could – as the current efforts to expel their descendants from tribes shows – be adopted into the tribe, the Creek considered Africans and some other Indian tribes as unadoptable, and fit only to be slaves.
Another common argument is that American slavery was “different”, because it was “chattel slavery”: the owning of humans, and often their offspring, as property, able to be bought, sold and forced to work without wages.
In fact, some Indian tribes indeed kept slaves as lifelong chattels.
Among the Northern Iroquois, slaves were sold, exchanged and bought, and child slaves were the most sought after. By the 1670s, slavery began to erode the Northern Iroquois community because of the large number of captives who were continually trying to escape […] hereditary chattel slavery wasn’t a common feature in American Indian slavery, but it was present among the non-agriculture Northwest Coast tribes and quite possibly on the Yucatan peninsula.
Contending for the biggest lie about transatlantic slavery is that it was more brutal than slavery elsewhere. This ignores the fact that Arab slavers routinely castrated male slaves, while prizing European females especially as sex slaves.
In the Americas, the Northern Iroquois waged a 17th century war of extermination against the Hurons. Noncombatant captives were enslaved, tortured and often ritually killed. Among the Northwest Coast tribes, mutilation of slaves was common.
Slaves had their noses split; they were also beaten, and amputations of fingers and toes was common. Among the East Woodland American Indians and the Chinook of the Columbia River, slaves’ feet were mutilated to make escape difficult and footprints easy to identify. Even adopted captives were mistreated and beaten. When Hernando de Soto invaded the Southeast in the 16th century, he noted that American Indian masters severed the Achilles tendon to make escape nearly impossible.
History Reclaimed
There is, though, one key difference about slavery among Europeans, and the transatlantic slave trade: Europeans took up arms to be the first culture to stamp out slavery forever.