Why weren't North American Indians considered to be property yet to be acquired (slaves)?
score:17
The Natives were enslaved, and for quite some time, and by 1616 there were laws in every colony which legalized the enslavement of Natives and outright referred to them as slaves. The only way they managed to get a reputation for being hard to enslave was by being enslaved.
From first contact, Natives were enslaved. The enslavement of the Native Americans continued on throughout America's slavery history.
Declining population numbers, rebelliousness, treaties, and the relative availability of African slaves were likely key in the decline of Native slavery, though one could argue that their treatment was akin to slavery for far longer than that, leading into modern times.
Upvote:-3
Possibly because there were few American Indian tribes who stooped so low as to sell their own people to the whites, unlike the many African tribes, such as the Oyo, Benin, Igala, Kaabu, Asanteman, Dahomey, etc., who prospered from selling their black brothers and sisters to the Arabs and Portuguese. There were, of course, some American Indian tribes who enslaved people of other tribes, but this was usually the result of tribal warfare. These Indian war captives were primarily used for religious sacrifice, manual labor, or even for cannibalism, but rarely, if ever, sold as slaves to the whites. You might say the whites viewed the American Indian as too "savage" to be enslaved, but I would rather say they acknowledged them to be too strongly united within their Indian culture to engage in the merchandising of their own people. Hence, as another contributor stated, it was far easier for the whites to simply buy slaves from the already well-developed and reliable African market. Reference: Elikia M’bokolo, "The impact of the slave trade on Africa", and "Slave Trade, a Root of Contemporary African Crisis: African Economic Analysis 2000 "
Upvote:13
One large reason was Pope Paul III. He issued a bull in 1537 stating that American Indians had souls, and forbidding enslaving them except under some very specific circumstances. However, this wouldn't have affected the Protestant colonists, and Catholic ones weren't always very scrupulous about this either.
Another issue was that Indians acquired a reputation of being difficult to enslave. Writings from that time seem to justify this in terms of their own relative racial qualities, but I suspect the fact that they wouldn't have to swim an ocean to get back to their own culture after an escape probably had a lot to do with their attitude. Even today modern "white slavers" try to move their victims as far as possible from their homes as quickly as possible.
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