American History - The Terrible Machine

During the seventeenth century, some 1.9 million African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic to the New World.  In the eighteenth century this number exploded to 6.5 million, representing one the largest, albeit forced, migrations in human history.  The number of African slaves brought to the New World during that time period more than tripled the number of Europeans who immigrated.  They largely came from an area ranging from present day Senegal to Angola, with 57% going to the Caribbean, 35% to Brazil, 6% to the Thirteen Colonies, and 3% to New Spain.  The removal of so many people from the African continent, stagnating its population growth, would have a significant affect on its economies and cultures for centuries.  Though the African slave trade had been in place since the fifteenth century, a number of factors combined to fuel this nightmarish growth.

By the start of the eighteenth century, the New World was facing a renewed labor shortage.  Native populations had significantly collapsed due to disease, warfare, and general ill treatment, and the number of people willing to sell themselves into indentured servitude had shrank dramatically thanks to improved economic conditions in Europe.  Between 1500 and 1750, the population of Europe had doubled thanks to improved medicine and food production, an event which destabilized the continent economically, culturally, and politically, but by the start of the 1700s things had begun to stabilize, especially in western Europe.  For the New World, this meant greater demand than ever for products like sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, fruit, and lumber, but a need to keep costs down given the increasing competition from the growing European colonial presence in India.  The solution they came up with was not a novel one for the time, but it was most certainly horrific both in scale and the taking away of humanity from millions of people.

While the New World was facing a looming labor shortage and economic crisis, the situation in Africa was creating a growing cheap supply of human servitude.  Split by political and familial rivalries, the powerful Kingdom of Kongo collapsed into a violent forty-year civil war.  The resulting greatly increased demand for European firearms and the need of the eventual victors to make a large number of people disappear dropped the price for slaves significantly.  At the same time, the British, who had come to dominate the slave trade in the latter half of the seventeenth century, privatized the trade at the beginning of the eighteenth century.  Prior to this point, European trade with Africa required royal charters which granted monopolies to various companies and individuals.  The British privatizing the trade meant anybody who could scrape enough money together to buy slaves and charter a ship to carry them across the Atlantic could do so.  The other major players in the slave trade, the most dominant being France and Portugal, soon after followed suit and numerous new trading posts sprung up on the African coast.  Slaving ventures became a major investment for the wealthy of Europe and the New World, with complex financial instruments which allowed investors to purchase small shares in multiple ventures to mitigate risk being created.    

What followed was one of the worst crash courses in economics in history.  The greatly increased number of traders in the market drove down prices in the New World, resulting in a significant increase in demand, but drove up prices in Africa.  This significantly cut into the traders margins, forcing them to cut costs however they were able, which mostly involved terrible levels of wanton cruelty in the name of profit.  At the same time, the higher price spurred the African kingdoms who sold slaves to go to greater lengths to supply the demand.  Most Africans sold as slaves were either criminals or individuals captured in raids and wars with other ethnic groups.  Though a greater number of crimes became punishable by enslavement, the lion’s share of the new supply came from the latter rather than the former.  As one can probably imagine, this did not sit well with the neighboring kingdoms and city-states.  Though many of them had historically refused to sell slaves to the Europeans, many began doing so, desperate to get their hands on the European firearms needed to defend themselves.  The resulting growing number of suppliers lowered the price, which increased demand, which triggered a cycle with ever growing terrible consequences.

At this point, I shouldn’t have to tell you again about the horrific consequences of stripping away the humanity of millions of people and turning them strictly into a commodity.  Numerous examples have already been stated previously and numerous more will be made before this history of the United States is done.  The mass cognitive dissonance involved is terrifying.  In Africa, it was deemed all right because those sent over were criminals or came from a different ethnic group.  They were in some way others.  Though the common people may not have been aware of the terrible fate with awaited those sold, with some rumors even circulating that the Europeans were cannibals who were eating them, which certainly isn’t better, the elites certainly did.  It was not uncommon for African diplomats to cross the Atlantic, and some former slaves returned home. 

On the other end, amongst the traders and those who bought the slaves in the New World, it was also deemed okay because those enslaved were others.  They looked different and talked different.  They were easily differentiable, and the more differentiable somebody is the easier it is to treat them like shit.  At first, given the price of slaves, it was only the wealthy who had to do this, a group of people who throughout history have shown a willingness to turn a blind eye when it results in the greater accumulation of wealth.  However, as slaves became affordable to the growing middle class of the New World, sparking the significant increase in demand, the dissonance and differentiation needed to grow.  It was not just okay to do it because they were different, it was okay to do it because they were less than human, little different then livestock, their enslavement ordained by god.  Slavery was not a new concept in the eighteenth century, but its combination with capitalistic efficiency created a terrible machine never before seen.

American History - Transported

Between 1500 and 1650, the population of England rose from 3 million to 5 million without a similar increase in the number of jobs available.  As you can probably imagine, this fucked some stuff up pretty badly, resulting in a significant number of people falling into poverty which in turn led to an explosion in the crime rate.  Now historically, most less serious crimes had been handled by shaming the shit out of the person, such as via public whippings or brandings, or the ever popular pillory, but with increased urbanization and mobility, these methods became less then effective.  For a while, the English legal system dealt with this by just hanging everybody for just about any crime, which for some reason wasn’t all that popular of a solution, nor was the alternative of sending people to hard labor camps to work themselves to death.  With jails overflowing to the point that they were basically becoming human cesspools where it would’ve been kinder just to hang people in the first place, something had to be done.

By as early as 1615, England began experimenting with dealing with its burgeoning prison population by forcefully turning them into indentured servants and shipping them overseas.  Though never an official government policy, the English legal system just kind of turned a blind eye to merchants basically buying prisoners from jails and shipping them over for profit.  Now while the Caribbean colonies didn’t really seem to mind this arrangement, since after all, when you’re already working to death thousands of African slaves on an annual basis, also working to death a couple of convicts doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, the North American colonies were less than thrilled, and though the total number shipped over was less than 3,000, all of the Thirteen Colonies refused to accept convict ships by 1697.

Unfortunately for England, the Caribbean colonies began doing the same around that time as well, as the sugar plantation owners began to realize mixing together African slaves who hated them and enslaved convicts who hated them probably wasn’t the best idea.  Now this might have been a great time for the British government to look into a new idea, but no, instead they just passed a law in 1718 forcing all of the colonies to take convicts whether they wanted to or not and created a subsidy to help pay for their transportation across the Atlantic.  Prisoners who were selected served out a sentence of seven to fourteen years, after which they were free to do whatever the hell they wanted.  Between 1718 and 1775 some 52,000 convicts were shipped to the Thirteen Colonies, 75% of which went to Maryland and Virginia.  During the same period 100,000 indentured servants, mostly Scot and English, and 275,000 African slaves were also shipped in.

The reaction to these convict shipments was a bit of a mixed bag.  Though improving economic conditions had resulted in fewer people willing to sell themselves into indentured servitude, leading to a labor shortage, especially in the southern colonies, some people were affected more than others.  The wealthy plantation owners, having the means to buy all the slaves they needed to meet their labor needs, were of course against the import of convicts, but the less well-off farmers were less so.  A convict could be purchased for a fraction of the price of a slave or indentured servant, and since they were convicts, nobody really gave two shits what happened to them which opened up all sorts of options regarding the sadistic treatment of others for profit.  Now since one of these groups most definitely had more influence in colonial governments than the other, both Virginia and Maryland repeatedly tried to pass laws to end the practice, to which Britain just laughed because what the hell were the colonies going to do about it, rebel or something? 

Anyways, after serving out their sentences, many of the convicts returned to England, wanting to disappear back into the anonymity of crowded urban life, but others chose to stay in the colonies, sometimes by choice and sometimes because they lacked the means to make their way home.  Those who stayed often moved to a new area, changed their names, and blended into the broader colonial society, some becoming quite successful and respected in their new lives.  The practice of shipping convicts continued unabated until the start of the American Revolution in 1775 for what should be fairly obvious reasons.  As the war drug on, the British began putting prisoners in old leaky ships anchored just off the English coast, which was exactly as terrible as it sounds.  With thousands of prisoners dying every year, and public outrage over it growing, the British government passed a new law in 1786 where they reformed their prison system by shipping them overseas again, this time to Australia.  The British didn’t come up with a new idea until the mid-nineteenth century, by which time they’d shipped some 162,000 convicts to the land down under.    

American History - Hillbillies

During the eighteenth century, there were four primary groups who immigrated to North America.  The second largest was the Germans which we went over last week, followed by the Scots, who largely came over as indentured servants, and French Huguenots, Protestant French fleeing persecution in France, both of whom settled in more coastal areas and quickly integrated into the broader colonial society.  However, the largest group by far were the Scotch-Irish, some of the craziest mother fuckers to cross the Atlantic.

The people who later became known as the Scotch-Irish originally came from the borderlands region between England and Scotland, a contested area between the two kingdoms for most of the Middle Ages.  As a result of the constantly shifting nature of the border, the people living there took on a decidedly fuck it and we don’t take shit kind of attitude.  Living in tight knit self-sufficient communities, they gained a reputation for both their fighting prowess and independent streak, often giving both countries the middle finger.  Thanks to their tendencies to hire out as mercenaries to the highest bidder and conduct raids on not just their neighbors but also each other, they were often called Border Reavers.  Beginning in the sixteenth century, these Border Reavers followed the majority of Scotland in converting from Catholicism to Presbyterianism, a Protestant sect which not only had individual churches run by elected councils, but also had the interesting belief that God had already chosen who would go to heaven and hell before the world was even created, so it didn’t really matter what people did while alive.  Given this basically gave the Border Reavers a free pass to do whatever the hell they wanted, they took to their new religion with a significant amount of zealotry.

Now when England and Scotland became ruled by a single king, James I, in the early seventeenth century, the Border Reavers became a bit of a problem given there was no longer the need to have a bunch of crazy asshats living on a suddenly pretty pointless border.  However, luckily James I was also king of Ireland, another area which gave him constant headaches.  Eager to better control the Irish, James had disposed many of the Irish chieftains in Ulster and given their lands to random English and Scottish flunkies, though most had little interest in going to a country full of Catholics who didn’t want them there.  To solve both problems, James moved some 100,000 of the Border Reavers to Ulster, a feat he accomplished by hiring some as mercenaries to fight in Ireland and then just leaving them there and convincing others to move on threat of seriously fucking things up if they didn’t.  Over the preceding generations the Border Reavers firmly established themselves in Ulster, mostly through violence and stubbornness, and became known as the Scotch-Irish.

Now unfortunately for the Scotch-Irish, things weren’t always all that great for them in Ulster.  At the time Ireland was under a set of laws which stripped rights from anyone who wasn’t Anglican, which not only screwed over the native Catholics, but also the Presbyterian Scotch-Irish.  Furthermore, the absentee lords of the lands they lived on, far off in England and Scotland, didn’t give two fucks about them, jacking up rents whenever they could so they could drink fine wines and afford fancy mistresses and foppish hats or whatever.  As a result, by the start of the eighteenth century many of the Scotch-Irish were looking to move on.  Luckily, around this same time the colonies of New England had a little problem in that Queen Anne’s War had thoroughly depopulated their frontier, leaving them vulnerable to attacks by the French and their native allies.  To solve this, they sent representatives to Ulster specifically to recruit Scotch-Irish to immigrate, figuring their Protestant zealotry and famed fighting prowess was just what they needed.

The first mass migration of Scotch-Irish to North America took place in 1717, with several thousands immigrating to the New England frontier and excitedly writing home about the seemingly endless supply of cheap land.  As a side note, they also brought with them the potato, which though originally from South America, had never been grown in North America before.  Anyways, unfortunately it quickly became obvious that the New England colonists viewed the Scotch-Irish as at best second class citizens, so as a result the next wave to Scotch-Irish immigrants shifted south to Pennsylvania, a colony famous for not really giving a shit who moved there.  Unlike many other immigrant groups, few of the Scotch-Irish crossed the Atlantic as indentured servants, but lacking money when they arrived, they were largely forced to in the eastern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, the so-called frontier of European civilization.  Building small farms, churches, and grist mills, they formed tight-knit communities made up of small networks of related families who lived together, worshipped together, intermarried, and avoided outsiders.  Though tolerated, they were generally looked down upon by the descendants of the earlier English colonists.

Between 1717 and 1775, some 250,000 Scotch-Irish crossed the Atlantic, the biggest wave being in the 1740s when a drought and famine struck Ulster.  The influx of new migrants combined with the Scotch-Irish propensity for having a ridiculous number of children, many of whom were beginning to come of age, created a shortage of land in Pennsylvania.  As a result, the Scotch-Irish began pushing their way south along the Appalachian foothills, settling in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, and even pushing their way across the mountains into what is today Tennessee and Kentucky.  As they moved south they also became more involved in the deer hide trade, crossing the mountains to hunt in lands claimed by the Iroquois, Shawnee, and Cherokee, who depended on the deer hide trade to access European trade goods.  As one can imagine, this led to all sorts of conflict and violence, though the two groups often traded with each other as well.

By the time of the American Revolution, some 10 percent of the population of the Thirteen Colonies were Scotch-Irish.  Considered backwards by those belonging to the long-established colonial society, they were famed for their restless nature, constantly pushing deeper into the frontier, loyalty to kin, extreme distrust of government authority, and propensity to not only bear arms, but also use them, traits that had a profound effect on the future nation which became known as the United States of America.