Why did the Americas use enslaved Africans?
Q: Why weren’t Native Americans the primary slave population in America? I understand that Native Americans were enslaved in certain cases, most notably by Christopher Columbus in Puerto Rico. However, why is it that the primary enslaved population in the Americas were African?
A Historian’s Take: “Indigenous people were enslaved in large numbers and their depopulation did force Europeans to look elsewhere for labor. However, the power of Indigenous nations played a large and oft-forgotten role as well. Indigenous groups maintained tremendous power on the continent and Europeans were incapable of forcing their will on them for most of the early colonial period. As late as the Seven Years’ War, primarily Indigenous forces from the Ohio River Valley actually succeeded in rolling back the British “frontier” in Pennsylvania to within a hundred miles of Philadelphia. Ironically given the initial incorrect answer’s premise, during the same conflict thousands of Europeans were captured in the Middle Colonies and taken west as captives and sometimes performed forced enslaved labor.
“In the South, the British initially relied on Indigenous allies to help enslave Native peoples, but this came to a head when the colony of South Carolina was nearly lost to an Indigenous coalition. In the aftermath of the conflict, the ‘Indian Slave Trade’ was seriously curtailed to avoid once again raising the fury of the colony’s Indigenous neighbors… Depopulation still played an important role, as disease and violence took their toll on Indigenous populations or those populations migrated to avoid interacting with Europeans. However, one of the most significant and overlooked reasons for why Europeans looked elsewhere for enslaved labor was because they were too weak to force large populations into slavery in North America. When they used Indigenous allies to overcome this weakness and gather an enslaved labor force, they were often entangled in disastrous conflicts that they barely survived.”