The Other Slavery

Details

By Professor Victoria Sutton

June 02, 2025

That Native Americans did not make very good slaves made little difference in the commerce of slavery in early colonial America.

The enslavement of indigenous peoples of the Americas is part of our history that is not well known. Two books that attempted to shed light on this history won book awards in 2003, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 and 2017, The Other Slavery: The uncovered story of Indian enslavement in America. The beginnings of the slave trade arose first in areas colonized by Spain — the southwest and the southeast U.S., beginning with Christopher Columbus’s kidnapping of about 500 Taino people from the Caribbean to be enslaved in Europe. The Spanish enslaved Indigenous peoples through systems like the encomienda and repartimiento, which gave settlers the right to a certain portion of land and Indigenous people as slaves. The British soon found it useful to replace a dwindling fur trade. By 1772, every British colony had Indian slaves. It also means that these Native Nations from these regions share this history which other Native Nations in America do not, and may be unaware how devastating it was.

I am using the title “the other slavery” from the book of the same title, that argues that slavery killed and removed more Native Americans than epidemics and diseases, contrary to generally believed history. But for the courage of a few priests, traders and enslaved captives, little would be known about it, according to the author.

Native Americans (Pequots, Narragansetts, Wampanoags and others) were told during King Phillips War (1675-76), that they should surrender to bring peace, and once they surrendered they were enslaved and sold. Most feared that they were going to be sent abroad to Bermuda, the Azore Islands (Portugal), Jamaica, Spain and Tangier in North Africa. Tens of thousands of Indian slaves went to Europe through the Azore Islands on their way to Europe.

Native American slavery “is a piece of the history of slavery that has been glossed over,” Fisher said. “Between 1492 and 1880, between 2 and 5.5 million Native Americans were enslaved in the Americas in addition to 12.5 million African slaves.”

In The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History (2024), Ned Blackhawk found that “nearly a million Native Americans were enslaved across the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and sent east across the Atlantic, many from Boston and Charleston. In the latter port, it was not until 1715 that more enslaved Africans from West Africa were imported than enslaved Indigenous people were exported.”

Enslavement of Indigenous peoples started with Columbus in his famous 1492 arrival in the Americas, when he took about 500 slaves back to Europe. In fact, each group of colonists had their colonization methods: the English prioritized trade and trade relationships; the French prioritized relationships by intermarrying with Native people as much as possible; and the Spanish were known for using enslavement of Native people in their quests for gold and all the hard labor that entails those missions.

The Spanish colonized the Southwest and the Southeastern U.S., leaving their names and their permanent damage from slavery. The English in New England enslaved Pequot people. Later, the English would continue the tradition of enslavement of Native peoples by land owners. Realizing that enslavement was not diplomatically helping the cause of the colonies, most prohibited the enslavement of Indigenous Americans by the mid-eighteenth century.

A Short Legal History of Indian Slavery in Virginia

In a case styled, Robin v. Hardaway (1772), in the General Court of Virginia, the highest court in the colony, held that Indian enslavement through the 17th Century had been illegal. Virginia passed a law in 1691 making Indian slavery illegal. George Mason, represented Robin, an enslaved Native American and eleven other plaintiffs. The plaintiffs were freed and their owners were ordered to pay nominal damages. The opinion was landmark in that it was the first Anglo-American court to find that if your mother was Indian then you could not be legally enslaved, the principle of partus sequitur ventrem. This led to many freedom suits throughout Virginia.

In 1804, a well-documented case, Charles Evans and others vs. Lewis B. Allen in a Lynchburg, Virginia court, established the requirements for freedom with a geneaology chart.¹⁴

In 1806, the Virginia Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state, took up the issue of Indian slavery. In the landmark decision, Hudgins v. Wright, the court considered whether the plaintiff, the Virginia court, affirmed that enslaving Indians had been illegal since the legislature in 1705 declared it illegal.

Courts in Connecticut, Louisiana, Missouri, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Tennessee all followed with legislatures and courts arguing about Virginia’s cases that followed Robin, and whether descent from an American Indian mother was all that was required to defeat a claim of enslavement.¹⁶

Descendants of Enslaved Indians

Genealogies of enslaved peoples are particularly difficult to build with official documents when only first names are used, and exportations, human sales and movements are undocumented or lost. DNA has provided a new pathway to determining ancestry along with traditional genealogy. Stories and traditions from Tribes can also connect the past with the present.

A group of genealogists and descendants of an enslaved Native American from Isle of Wight, Virginia, citizen of the Cheraw or Saponi Tribe was connected using DNA to the descendants of a returning envoy from Azore Islands, Portugal in the 1600s to known Saponi descendants. In a rare case where genealogies could be constructed enough to establish why this ancestor returned to the Cheraw and Saponi community of Virginia. This can also explain a centuries old “mystery” of why many Virginia and North Carolina Indians said they were “Portuguese”. It was thought by the government and courts that it was untrue and simply used to avoid the application of “people of color” statutes that prevented many civil rights and freedoms enjoyed by the non-people of color population. But this may have cracked that once solid conclusion that it was a lie to avoid the law — these Native Americans were actually Portuguese as their nationality, but their race or ethnicity was Native American at least in part.

Today, St. David’s Island is home to descendants of Indian slaves taken from the Pequot, Narragansett, Nipmuk and other Tribes in New England, and shipped away to Bermuda for profit and to take their land. They have re-connected with several of their ancestral tribes with ceremonies and new bonds among the families.

Reflecting on this period

Native American slavery made much more of an impact in terms of scope, numbers of enslaved Native Americans and the consequences of the loss of people and land than perhaps acknowledged or even understood. More research, award-winning books and DNA studies can provide a better picture of an early history that we should not forget.

Author's Note: I would like to acknowledge and thank my law professor, Prof. James May,¹⁸ American University, Washington College of Law, for opening up the world of legal history for me when I was a law student. It made a profound impact on my career.

To read more articles by Professor Sutton go to:  https://profvictoria.substack.com/ 

Professor Victoria Sutton (Lumbee) is a law professor on the faculty of Texas Tech University. In 2005, Sutton became a founding member of the National Congress of American Indians, Policy Advisory Board to the NCAI Policy Center, positioning the Native American community to act and lead on policy issues affecting Indigenous communities in the United States.