In a multiple part series, Madison365 columnist Matthew Braunginn will be analyzing the history of the United States to explore ideas of change, from the European invasion of what became the Americas, to the enslavement of Africans, racial oppression, the Civil Rights Movement, to the current day changing demographics in a shrinking world facing a new crisis of climate change and what the United States, and, in turn, the world are facing today.
You can read part 1 here and part 2 here. (-Ed.)

1619 is the date enslaved Africans were brought to North American colonies, brought by a Dutch ship to Jamestown. The British colonies needed to supply cheap new labor, labor that didn’t know the land, couldn’t blend in, and wasn’t susceptible to disease. It just so happened new colonies in Africa were the perfect sources for this type of labor. The colonies in Africa, North America, and South America fueled European nations conquering an astonishing 84% of the globe between 1492 and 1914.

These empires were one of conquest, enslavement, and robbery. They fueled the growing merchant and industrial classes in Europe. Something resembling the middle class was slowly starting to appear. Living standards were slowly rising as well in these nations. It fueled strife between these nations jockeying for position as the proverbial king of the hill.

This robbery is still felt today and is still going on today. But the roots of today were laid a long time ago. 1492 they started to dig deep, as a genocide started, and 1619 industrial enslavement of a people helped build the superstructure of these empires.

Ideas that would lead to the “enlightenment” in Europe were starting to be spoken, ideas of men, of science, turning away from superstitions. Ideas of racial superiority based on skin color, skull composition, a hierarchy of beings began to appear.

In North America, or what was dubbed the new world, enslaved Africans and whites in indentured servitude worked and lived side by side much of the time. There were also poor white workers that lived and worked closely with these servant classes. The new world saw a growing wealth stratification, between those doing the labor and those collecting the benefits. Tobacco, sugarcane, and cotton grew in plentiful amounts in the Americas, making luxury items a global trade.

Some distinctions between classes must be made first. Irish and other people that became white did not come to the Americas as slaves, or at least as what became chattel slavery. There was white slavery in Europe, it was a mixture of individual servitude that wasn’t generational and also sex work. This mostly happened through war. There were not entire nations of people enslaved to serve life-long servitude as property, with their bondage becoming hereditary.

These poor white workers were indentured servants, many times serving out a sentence or selling themselves into servitude for a period of time for passage to the Americas. Their legal class of indentured servants was temporary, over a period of years they would work off their monetary or criminal debt. After their release, they were often given some pay and property to begin anew. This must be repeated, the Irish did not come to America as slaves, this is a myth, but many did come as indentured servants.

The nature of African enslavement was much different. European nations would set up colonies on the coasts of African nations, using trade as their foot in the door. They would then use natural splits and conflicts between peoples within the continent to fuel their need for human property. Eventually taking more and more land, power, natural, and human resources away from these nations. Robbing them, and fully conquering them. But yes, African nations sold people of other African nations into slavery, but none knew the nature of the evil of chattel slavery.

The majority of enslaved Africans that were forced to migrate to the Americas was at its highest peak during the 16th century, tapering off in the 17th as went on. The vast majority of them sent to South America. Overall, it is estimated that 12.5 million humans were captured, forced into dehumanizing conditions to travel the Atlantic, with 10.5 million surviving this forced migration to a strange land and had their culture and history stolen from them, forcing to live in dehumanizing conditions. About 350,000 of that 10.5 million ended up in what became the United States as chattel.

Chattel slavery was lifelong and generational servitude. Howard Zinn in the ‘People’s History of the United States’ talked about how slave masters had to enforce a slave mindset, by any means, through the entire life of an enslaved person. And then because this was generational, any children their human property had, would, in turn, become human property at birth. There was very little chance of buying one’s way to freedom. The best way out was escape or death.
As these enslaved humans and indentured servants worked and lived side by side, they formed bonds with one another, and saw each other’s struggle as one in the same. There were sections of colonies and entire colonies where the enslaved population would outnumber free whites.

As these two groups grew close ties, revolts against such servitude began to become more frequent. It became an arduous process holding these revolts at bay, especially as the French, Spanish, British, and other European nations were in a constant conflict with one another. Proxy wars would break out in their colonies around the globe.

One of the most famous rebellions in American colonial history was Bacon’s Rebellion. It led to one of the most impactful events in the Americas, the idea of white privilege was created, and for the first time “white” and “black/negro” became legal standards.

In 1677, Nathaniel Bacon led an uprising in the Virginia colony against Governor William Berkeley. This rebellion included enslaved Africans as well as indentured and poor whites, at its largest it included around 1,000 people. This came to be through a combination of growing class divide as well as the governor failing to protect its frontier settlements from Indigenous raids.

This wasn’t the first rebellion in the Americas, but was the largest up to that point in North America, in both North and South America slave rebellions started to become more frequent. In 1705, Virginia enacted the first full “slave codes.” Laws enacted that created the first full legal structures of an apartheid state, it created legal racial class, with its impact felt through today. These slave codes established that if any slave resisted their master, the master can kill them and not see punishment. It created the first legal example of blacks, referenced as enslaved Africans, who were forbidden to hold property. It stated that whites could not be employed by blacks, prohibited blacks from owning firearms, and created a legal slave trade in Virginia. But, most importantly, it also created a clear legal distinction between indentured whites and enslaved blacks, granting property rights and ability to own firearms to the former. It created white privilege. Slave codes and laws quickly spread throughout the colonies, many taking cues from Virginia.

There was a free city in Brazil called Quilombo dos Palmares, that lasted nearly a century, 1605 t0 1694 before it was finally suppressed. But the spark was lit and St. John’s Slave Rebellion launched in 1733 in what was the Danish West Indies at the time. It lasted close to a year before finally ending in August of 1734. As the 1700’s and 1800’s progressed, slave rebellions became more frequent.

So, in the Americas, millions of enslaved Africans were forced to come to a new strange land, to build it off their backs with no compensation. Their work fueled the growing empires in Europe and made many white men in the Americas very wealthy as well. These enslaved Africans intermarried more with indigenous populations in South and Central America than in what became the United States; although there definitely was some mixing of populations in the USA.

At the same time, indigenous populations were killed off in mass and also colonized. Whiteness became something subtly different in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, but was still present. What this created, specifically, in what became the United States, were some fairly distinct sets of populations and the creation of whiteness which changed and evolved with time. These distinct sets of populations sowed the seeds of the cultural changes being seen in the United States at this time were planted long ago.

In Europe, during this same time period, one saw the rise of white supremacist ideologies, using what they defined as science as justification. There was also the rise of ideas of democracy and “freedom,” especially in what became the United States. The Revolutionary War, in the grand context of colonial era Europe, was another proxy war between powers, as well as full on war between these powers.

These wars in both Europe and “frontier America,” the rise and fighting of the American Revolution, as well as the development of these ideas in Europe will be explored in part 4 of this series.