Indian And African Indian Slaves example essay topic

Although slavery spread in the Americas for more than 300 years, it was not without occurrence and cost. As was true of the preceding 100 years, slavery did not increase without resistance. Neither Indians nor Africans willingly accepted such state of matters, and throughout slavery's continuation, there was a significant number of attacks, revolts, and rebellions that caused huge anxiety and widespread fear among American and Caribbean slave holders. Several of the most famous Indian and slave uprisings occurred during the imposing period and caused major loss of property and life.

These uprisings often involved Indians and maroons, and Europeans often used African and Indian slaves to finish this unrest. As a consequence of the rebellions, slave codes, which existed in all of the slaveholding colonies. White colonists increased their cruel treatment of slaves. One of the most triumphant of these revolts occurred in Brazil, where the Africans victoriously won their freedom and created the African state of Palm ares in 1630. Although most of the insurrections were not as successful, they did show. In a series of world wars waged in the Americas, Europe, and Asia, Europeans fought for control of the Americas and the Caribbean.

Africans played a chief military role in the armies of all the combatants. The English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and the Spanish to protect their colonies from invasion and to disrupt the economic interest of their enemies used maroons, slaves, and free Blacks. By the start of the eighteenth century, slavery was established throughout the Western Hemisphere. It stretched from present day Argentina to Canada. African, Indian, and African-Indian slaves worked the mines of South America, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the rice and cobalt fields of Georgia and South Carolina, and the tobacco fields of North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. They worked as servants and skilled and unskilled laborers in cities from Bahia to Quebec.

British North America saw the creation of the first democratic republic in America and the institutionalization of slavery in that state. As slavery extended and the brutality of slavery became known among Native Americans, many began to sympathize with Africans and despise the establishment of slavery. Many Indian nations began to give shelter to runaway slaves, intermarry with them and help them to run away from their owners. Indians and Africans began to counterfeit alliances and close friendships with nations. Being afraid that Indians and slaves might create alliances that would destroy white settlements, whites painted Indians as distrustful and the enemy of slaves, causing many slaves to fear them and stay loyal to their masters for defense. Colonists also equipped slaves and used them to fight Indians, driving wedges between the two groups in the Tuscarora War and the Yama see War of 1715.

Whites also taught Indians to fear Africans and recruited them to serve as slave catchers and even slaveholders. The most well known Indian nations to approve European slavery were bitter enemies of the Tuscarora even before the entrance of the Europeans. They incorporated the Five Civilized Tribes -- the Seminoles, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees. Though these nations accepted many of the practices of European slaveholders, African slavery among Native Americans was never the same as it was among slave holding whites.

For instance, Native Americans often intermarried with their African slaves and the children of slaves were considered free and full members of the nation. Native Americans often intermarried with their African slaves and the children of slaves were considered free and full members of the nation. The Seminoles of Florida became so mixed that like the Tuscarora and other Iroquois, many of their people were as much African as Indian. The mixing of Europeans and Indians and Africans and Indians finally led to civil wars within the Five Civilized Tribes with most full blooded Indians siding with those mixed with Africans. This might have been because many of the conventional religions and beliefs of Indians and Africans were similar. These beliefs did not identify the racial advantage of any race over another unlike the Christianity taught to mixed Indians of European heritage.

From 1755 to 1763, France and England fought the Seven Years War or the French and Indian War, as it was known in America. Although the clash began in Europe, it rapidly spilled over into their colonies in the Americas. Most of the combating in North America took place along the Western border where the Indians united themselves with the French and attacked American settlements. The British, also armed slaves in the thirteen colonies, particularly South Carolina and Georgia and in frontier areas in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia. In 1763, England defeated France and Spain and, in part as a result of the victories of their African troops in the Caribbean, won constructive concessions at the Paris Peace. In North America, the British obtained control of all the land west of the Appalachian Mountains to Canada.

It left only two European nations in control of North America, Spain and England, both counting on slavery for economic growth and welfare. During the war, hundreds of Indians and slaves fought for the French and the British in return for their freedom or safety. Since most of the struggle occurred on the western border, many French and English slave holders used their slaves to help in protecting their families, houses and belongings. During the war, Indians captured slaves and let many go free or join their own nations.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, the British and their Indian associates set free thousands of slaves. The British themselves took about 15,000 Africans when they left America. While it is unclear precisely how many slaves joined their Indian associates, the number was probably to be in the hundreds if not thousands..