Indigenous Americans Introduced Slavery to America. European Liberalism Abolished Slavery.

The second Monday in October has long been celebrated as Columbus Day.  But in recent years, many people have insisted that this day should be celebrated as Indigenous Peoples Day or as Native Americans Day.  On Monday, even South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem recognized Native Americans Day.  The justification for this is that Columbus should be seen as the villain who initiated the European conquest of the indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere, while the Native Americans should be seen as the heroic victims of colonial exploitation and enslavement.  A similar kind of rhetoric runs through the "1619 Project" of The New York Times, with the claim that American history began in August of 1619, when 20 African slaves were sold to the governor of the Virginia colony: American history is a history of slavery that exposes the fraudulent hypocrisy of the American principle of equality of rights in the Declaration of Independence.

This rhetorical argument of anticolonialism and antiracism is partly true and partly false.  It is partly true because the European settlers of the New World were indeed brutal oppressors of the Native Americans and the African slaves.  It is partly false, however, because it ignores two historical facts about slavery in the New World.  First, it ignores the fact that Indigenous Americans had enslaved one another before the Europeans arrived in the New World.  Second, it ignores the fact that Europeans debated the justice of slavery, and the European liberal principle of equal human liberty led eventually to the abolition of slavery.

In his book--The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016)--Andres Resendez has shown how Indigenous slavery arose in every part of the Western Hemisphere before the arrival of the Europeans and before the establishment of African slavery.  For example, the Maya and the Aztecs enslaved captive people who could be used for human sacrifice.  The Iroquois waged war to enslave captives.  And the native Americans along the North Pacific Coast of North America enslaved people captured in war.  Resendez has written a short summary of his book for a Smithsonian Institute publication.  What this shows is that the natural human propensity to tribalistic xenophobic/us-against-them thinking has throughout human history supported the enslavement of those identified as out-group members.

But even if the history of slavery manifests a natural inclination to exploitation and social parasitism, the human resistance to slavery manifests a natural moral sense that opposes such exploitative parasitism.  Throughout the history of the debate over slavery--from Aristotle to Bartolome de Las Casas, to John Locke, to Thomas Jefferson, to Charles Darwin, to Abraham Lincoln--one can see the natural moral sentiments expressed as a joint product of emotional capacities for feeling moral passions like sympathy and anger and rational capacities for judging moral principles like kinship and reciprocity.  (I wrote about this in chapter 7 of Darwinian Natural Right.)

In this debate, we can see the fundamental incoherence in slavery, which requires treating some human beings as if they were not human, as if enslaved human beings do not feel the natural human resistance to exploitation.  Aristotle pointed to this incoherence in his account of natural slavery as distinguished from conventional slavery.  Any careful reader of Aristotle can see that slavery as actually practiced is purely conventional (based on force) rather than natural (based on justice).  Bartolome de Las Casas saw that, and it supported his argument that the native American Indians could not be natural slaves, and therefore their enslavement by the Spanish was naturally unjust.  The American Indians were equally entitled to their human rights because they were equal in their humanity as members of the human species.  He made this argument before the Spanish judges of the Royal Council convoked at Valladolid in 1550.  The Spanish Crown prohibited the enslavement of the Native American Indians.  But Spanish colonists were able to evade this prohibition through legal arrangements such as encomiendas, which was a disguised form of slavery.

As I have indicated in a series of posts, the Lockean liberal principle that all human beings were naturally equal in their liberty supported the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence that rendered human slavery unjust, which led finally to the abolition of slavery in America through Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.