The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670 - 1717

by Alan Gallay

Winner of the 2003 Bancroft Prize
 
“No one will again be able to deny the significance of Indian slavery in the story of early America or its devastating impact on Native American people.”—Daniel K. Richter, American Historical Review
 
This absorbing book focuses on the traffic in Indian slaves during the early years of the American South. The Indian slave trade was of central importance from the Carolina coast to the Mississippi Valley for nearly fifty years, linking southern lives and creating a whirlwind of violence and profit-making, argues Alan Gallay. He documents in vivid detail how the trade operated, the processes by which Europeans and Native Americans became participants, and the profound consequences for the South and its peoples.
 
The author places Native Americans at the center of the story of European colonization and the evolution of plantation slavery in America. He explores the impact of such contemporary forces as the African slave trade, the unification of England and Scotland, and the competition among European empires as well as political and religious divisions in England and in South Carolina. Gallay also analyzes how Native American societies approached warfare, diplomacy, and decisions about allying and trading with Europeans. His wide-ranging research not only illuminates a crucial crossroad of European and Native American history but also establishes a new context for understanding racism, colonialism, and the meaning of ethnicity in early America.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Native American, Native Americans, American History, Indigenous, Native American History

464 pages, Paperback

First published February 8, 2002

About the author

Alan Gallay is an historian of early America and the Atlantic World, with special interest in Native America, the American South, and the histories of slavery. Gallay has been a Fulbright teaching fellow at the University of Auckland, NZ, a Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Harvard University, and twice received year-long research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He holds the Lyndon B. Johnson Chair of U.S. History at Texas Christian University. Gallay is currently conducting research on First Nations art, stories, and history in the Pacific Northwest.

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of Gallay's The Indian Slave Trade actually seems to mistate the broader scope of this work. He only occasionally focuses in on the details of the trade, instead this is a book about the interaction between empires and the various native peoples inhabiting the American southeast. It addresses the slave trade and South Carolina, but Gallay is more interested in the native peoples and he provided extensive detail of groups from the Arkansas to the Apalachee, even up to the Iroquois, but focused most intensely on those trading with the colony (including the Yamasee, Chickasaw, Creek Confederation). South Carolina and its development sometimes seems a bit of a blur in all of this, a not completely filled in background, (his account of the Yamasee War seemed like an afterthought), though I particularly liked these quotes from the introduction and the afterword of the book (even if they heartily confirmed my biases).

"Between 1670 and 1730, the colony struggled to survive. Institutional weakness, polical and economic uncertainty, and lawlessness characterized the colony, and many Carolina settlers shared no common purpose but to accumulate riches. Unlike Puritan New Englanders, they displayed little interest in building a community. Carolinians had neither patterned settlements not a unifying religious vision. Whereas the Puritan elite created a highly repressive society to keep watch on personal behavior, Carolina's elite brooked no interference with individual activities in pursuit of wealth. No other mainland English colony endured such a long period dominated by an incorrigible and politically corrupt elite. For two generations, few men of wealth and power could be found who would obey laws, whether royal, proprietary, or local, that prohibited their moneymaking schemes. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that slavery turned the children of slaveholders into petty tyrants, but in South Carolina the culture of self-aggrandizement preceded and then was reinforced by slaveholding. From first settlement, South Carolina elites ruthlessly pursued the exploitation of fellow humans in ways that differed from other mainland colonies, and they created a narcissistic culture that reacted passionately and violently to attempts to limit their individual sovereignty over their perceived social inferiors. The radicalism of nineteenth-century South Carolina nullifiers, duelists, and fire-eaters was a product not just of slaveholding but of a singular history and political culture that evolved in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries."

"If the Carolinians were a God-fearing people, it was an exclusive God that permitted them to smite not just their enemies but people they had never met. If they were a law-abiding people, they obeyed only the laws that suited them and then used the law to secure their place in power and the subjection of their social inferiors. If they were a civil people, it was a civility of convenience."

[Claire · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a book that is supposed to be about slavery, this book has surprisingly little to do with slavery. It is more an examination of the Native American and European interactions in the South between 1670-1717, with slavery playing the part of a small case study within the larger text. Very interesting if you're interested in learning how the Carolina colony's geopolitical relationships with its neighboring Native American and European colonizers grew and changed over time, but if you're looking for a thorough investigation of Native American slavery or the slave trade at this time you might want to look elsewhere.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entry #11 in #LarryReadsTheBancroftWinners. Gallay won the award in 2003. Wow, this is a great book. A subject I'm not that interested really came alive in this historiographical gem. Building on the work of Peter H. Wood and James Merrell among others, Gallay fashions a complex but compelling take on the formation of the colonial South, defined by him as the area from east Texas to the Carolinas. He intricately but clearly seeks to describe the nature of the relationship between a dozen or more Native peoples and the English, French, and Spanish colonists in the area, and demonstrate how those relationships affected everyone in the region. A remarkable work, The Indian Slave Trade was not only a deserving winner, but one of the best history books I've read in several years.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is written at a relatively high Lexile level, is well researched and provides a detailed description of the interaction of colonial and Native American culture in the Southeast. Most students were unaware that the practice of capturing Native Americans and selling them into slavery exited as part of the culture and history of the United States. This book is a useful tool for illuminating this often overlooked aspect of American History.

[Kelli Peters · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Indian Slave Trade is set in the southern region in the early 1700s and focuses on the development of trade alliances and the rise of the Indian slave trade. Gallay describes how Native American groups in the south, particularly near the Carolina colony, were critical to the development and success of the colony. Gallay explains how these groups created alliances with one another and how this impacted the violence in the area.

[John Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Could have been 75 less pages.

[Doris Raines · Rating 5 out of 5]

I ADMIRE EVERYTHING ABOUT INDIANS THEY ARE SO INTERESTING AND INTELLIGENT SMART. I LOVE READING EVERYTHING THEY WRITE MOVIES THE WILD WILD WEST. EVERY DAY I HAVE TO WATCH ME A GOOD WESTERN WITH INDIANS IN IT OF COURSE POPCORN 🍿 MY 🥤. I ALSO LOVE THE STAGE COACH WESTERNS PASS THE BOTTLE OLD STAGE COACH TALK,

[James Bechtel · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Bancroft Prize winner from 2002. Very perceptive on the origins and development of South Carolina.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A subject scarcely treated in history books, the Indian slave trade was at the heart of colonial relations in the Southeast. Wars were perpetrated to expand the trade, careers and fortunes were made from it, and the institutions of the British Empire in the south were established partly to protect it. Gallay's strength is is assiduous research and careful analysis. An excellent beginning for anyone interested in the politics of the "southern frontier" in colonial America.

[Jeremy Canipe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-received and fascinating book. The title doesn't exactly explain the history covered, yet Professor Gallay successfully reorients our attention in the 17th and early 18th century history of colonization. The story might be styled as a history of internal factionalism in colonial South Carolina, and its relationships to the fragile colony's various Native neighbors and the region's Catholic European colonies of the French in the Mississippi Valley and the Spanish in Florida.

[Charlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

For grad course this fall.

[David Gross · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a must read for anyone who thinks the European settlers of the Americas were unique in the promulgation of slavery.

[Deodorant Thief · Rating 4 out of 5]

Course reading. Skimmed some chapters. Re-read.