The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism. Gerald Horne
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In March 1636 it was decided that “Negroes” were “to be disposed into families and divided amongst officers and industrious planters,” though, it was cautioned, “a strict watch” must be “kept to prevent plots or any danger to the island being attempted.”48 A year later the investors in Providence Island were complaining that there were “too many Negroes in the island” with a fervent plea for “directions concerning them.” It was urged that “some” should be “transported to Virginia and the Somers Islands,”49 meaning Bermuda. But this was simply exporting problems, a perilous version of musical chairs.
Providence Island did not have many options. The investors had many reasons, they announced, for “disliking so many Negroes in the island,” principally because of their “mutinous conduct.” Their presence was becoming unproductive since it was mandated that “whoever keeps a Negro shall maintain a servant one day in the week upon the public works.”50 “Restraint of buying Negroes” was mandated, but a central directive was one thing, compliance was quite another.51
It did not take long for investors to order that the “taking in of Negroes” be “excused,” though it was well recognized that there was an abject “danger of too great a number.” Somehow they wanted to “send 200 English to be exchanged for as many Negroes,” swapping slaves for settlers or indentured servants, but it was unclear as to who would volunteer willingly to arrive in a kind of war zone. Yet the rule crafted was “to two English men in a family, one Negro may be received and no more.” Barring Negroes altogether was apparently out of the question; instead, the superfluous advice was rendered that “special care … be taken” to avoid at all costs “the Cannibal Negroes brought from New England.” Instead, the recommendation was “buying Negroes from the Dutch,” though placing coin in the pockets of antagonists was hardly a sound solution.52 Besides, what was to keep the sly Dutch from smuggling their agents into the island under the guise of selling the enslaved? This may serve to illuminate why many of the vanquished Pequots wound up being enslaved on Providence Island and Africans from there wound up in New England.53
On 1 May 1638—in anticipation of the late nineteenth-century salutations to laborers worldwide—the enslaved of Providence Island executed the first slave rebellion in any English colony. Thereafter, frightened oppressors engaged in a fire sale of Africans, which indicated that this settlement’s shelf life was to be limited. In possible response, in 1638 the first known attempt to “breed” enslaved Africans happened in Boston, as if in anticipation of twenty-first-century bio-engineering, to produce slaves and become less dependent on the market.54
Providence Island was soon to be overrun and destroyed by Spaniards (not the Dutch), but just before that investors were revealing their dilemma. “Laid aside” were “thoughts of selling their Negroes,” said the investors, though their presence would not enhance settler security when the inevitable Spanish invasion occurred. “If the number be too great to be managed,” they said disconsolately, “they may be sold and sent to New England or Virginia.”55 But like many investors before and since, they held on to this asset too long and lost when marauders dispatched from His Catholic Majesty arrived.
The inherent frailty of island settlements was an inference drawn from the fate of Providence Island. Yes, mainland settlements had their own problems, but as of that moment, New England and Virginia were surviving. The destruction of this island colony, however, sent an ominous signal about the destiny of Barbados and its neighbors. Were island settlements harder to defend than their mainland counterparts? Was it easier to deliver aid to hurricane wracked mainland settlements, as opposed to their island counterparts? If both queries were answered affirmatively, this was further reason for a great trek to the mainland, which was a condition precedent for the emergence of what became the United States of America.
THE MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL relationship between New England and London’s island colonies meant that the Crown could afford to import more enslaved Africans. The population of the latter in Barbados jumped from about 2,000 in the 1630s to over 20,000 by the 1650s. The mainland also benefited from this boom, as a trickle of migrants to Jamestown in 1607 became a stream by 1629, then a flood by the 1640s: 100,000 were said to have arrived during the seventeenth century.56
The mainland was a satellite floating in the orbit of the Caribbean. The so-named West Indies were probably far more key to New England’s prosperity than New England was to the Caribbean.57 This allowed more latitude for the mainlanders and more opportunity to collaborate with the Crown’s opponents, particularly in French Hispaniola, an exercise that eventuated in a unilateral declaration of independence in 1776 that was to be backed by Paris.
Though London’s emphasis on the Caribbean made sense in the short term, in the longer term the North American mainland held more potential for exploitation compared to small islands. In the latter, Africans would soon become the majority, making security problematic at best. Yes, the mainland delivered security threats too, but a retreat from islands across open seas was more difficult than across land. Similarly, it was easier to build linked settlements in a chain-like fashion in the vast mainland than across disparate islands of varying size.58
Part of the problem was on the mainland during this period. A major reason was the tyranny of the Massachusetts theocracy, which repelled many besides Roger Williams. Instead of wandering into the wilderness and founding a Providence, others fled to the warm embrace of the more cultivated and congenial Caribbean, underlining the continuing importance of these settlements. Though increasingly surrounded by bonded labor on the verge of revolt, the islands seemed to be more inviting than a colder Boston.59 Besides, opportunities and concessions were easier to obtain in the Caribbean, even though Europeans were increasingly being outnumbered by Africans, as opposed to Boston, which would not endure this dicey fate.
Meanwhile, as the migrants from the Isle of Wight indicated, Europeans on the open seas continued worrying about being taken by the Ottoman Turks and their proxies. As we have seen, this bracing experience did not tend to make these Western Europeans more sensitive to enslavement but, to the contrary, seemed to spur them along this road.60 It was “worse than the Egyptian bondage,” complained one Londoner speaking of what occurred in Morocco. “What misery can be more than for a man or woman to be bought and sold like a beast”—said with seeming indifference to what English merchants were doing in the Americas and Africa.61 It was as if the mantra was “be an enslaver or a slave.”
The settlements delivered wealth along with storminess in the form of revolts by bonded labor and the “creative destruction” delivered by the rise of new centers of capital. At the same time, London was being pressed on all sides by the Dutch and the Spaniards, as well as the French and the Ottoman Turks. (As for the French, the considerable unrest across the Channel was bound to have an impact in what became known as the British Isles.62 And, as so often happened, rebellion in mostly Catholic France often meant corresponding revolt in mostly Catholic Ireland.)63 This was not a prescription for steadiness, a reality that would become clear when civil war erupted and a monarch was beheaded by comrades of Oliver Cromwell, some of whom had whetted their seemingly bottomless appetite for violence in battles on the North American mainland. The violence that had become normative ignited cycles of revenge, which was not ideal when merchants sought to muster settlers for colonial occupation, though many were still smarting from religious, class, and ethnic repression and licking their wounds.64 When the tenure of Cromwell, the Lord Protector, expired and royal restoration occurred, the clock was not turned back. Instead, the merchants and those who flexed their increasingly powerful muscles in temporarily deposing the Crown moved aggressively to weaken the Spanish (taking Jamaica) and weakening the Dutch (taking Manhattan), both of which set the stage for an increase in the arrival of enslaved Africans, who brought with them more wealth, and more storminess as well.
CHAPTER 3
The Rise of the Merchants and the Beheading of a King
Oliver Cromwell was “the greatest Englishman of the seventeenth century,” said Theodore Roosevelt in the midst of a fiery philippic against the Lord Protector’s foe in Madrid, words that