The practice of combining African slaves and Native American women was especially common in South Carolina during the early modern world. Records show that many Native American women bought African men, but unbeknownst to European merchants, women freed men from their tribe and married them. Slavery was a pervasive institution in the early modern world, with Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Native Americans all keeping slaves before and after Columbus arrived in America. The life of a slave varied greatly from place to place, as did the privileges and benefits they enjoyed. In some societies, slaves were fundamental to the economy.
In many areas of West Africa, for example, slaves were the predominant form of property and the main producers of wealth. Tribal territories and the slave trade extended beyond today's borders. Some Native American tribes held war captives as slaves before and during European colonization. Some Native Americans were captured and sold by others as slaves to Europeans, while others were captured and sold by Europeans themselves. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, a small number of tribes, such as the five so-called civilized tribes, began to increase their holding of African-American slaves.
The map includes the names of American Indian groups that already settled on the coast that would become the Carolina colony, including the Secotan and the Weapemoec. While Native Americans were familiar with the lowland landscape and could often escape Carolina plantations, they couldn't easily escape West Indian plantations. The Yamassee War in the Carolina Colony (1715-171) was due to growing tensions between American Indians and English colonists, in particular because of commercial disagreements, the invasion of land and the enslavement of American Indians. Another form of Spanish enslavement of Indians in the Americas was Yanaconaje, which was similar to European serfdom, according to which the Indians were tied to specific lands to work instead of being lords. But in reality, the expulsion of the indigenous people not only forces the natives to move westward, it also facilitates the expansion of slavery in the deep South. This federal indigenous expulsion policy is driving thousands of Native Americans out of their countries of origin in the Southeast and Midwest of the United States.
Many indigenous people from Central America were sent to the West Indies, which were also a common destination for Indians transported from Charleston (South Carolina) and Boston (Massachusetts). In attempting to replicate the Barbadian system of plantation agriculture, which relied on enslaved African labor, the Carolina colonists also enslaved significant numbers of American Indians. Gallay also states that the indigenous slave trade was one of the pillars of the development of the English empire in the southern United States. Archaeologists have found shell rings, or shell dumps, in various parts of the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia.
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