// 1670
In response to French dominance of the northern fur trade in the Great Lakes regions and further west – where some of the world’s best furs could be found – the English set up the Hudson’s Bay Company by royal charter in May 1670. France had been on the losing end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, which ended in 1667. Arranged by a group of enterprising merchants in London, the new charter arrogantly gave England the sole monopoly of furs traded with the Indians in the entire drainage basin of Hudson Bay, known collectively as Rupert’s Land. Trappers typically traded furs with the Indians in exchange for metal tools and modern hunting equipment. The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) instantly became the largest land-holding in the world and took control of the valuable fur trade in the northern reaches of the American continent. They would establish tens of trading posts – known as factories – along the western shores throughout the 1670s and 1680s. The two principle British trading hubs were Fort Albany, at the mouth of the Albany River, and York Factory, on the mouth of the Nelson River. Many joked that HBC stood for “Here Before Christ”. The company still exists today and is publicly listed.
huckleberry n. (1670)
Hakluyt wrote in 1587 of a particular berry in North America that he described as Blues. We know this fruit today as blueberries – itself a linguistic cousin of the older English blaeberry in northern England and Scotland, as well as the bilberry and whortleberry, hurtilbery or hurtleberry in southern England.
In America, a corrupted spelling of this hurtleberry appeared in a description of a list of berries found on New York Island: “Mulberries, Posimons, Grapes great and small, Huckelberries.” This new spelling of the traditional English form would later appear as blue huckleberry or blueberry because of its blue colour, which was also more in line with the Scottish form.
In American usage, huckleberry (1670) would also become a colloquial word for ‘small’ or a ‘small amount’ – the inspiration behind Mark Twain’s famous character, Huck Finn. Huckleberry did not appear in Webster’s original dictionary of 1828.
Meanwhile, the English titleholders to Carolina were busy setting up their first main settlement. (That first town, Charles Town, then relocated to where Charleston actually stands today in 1680.) The only way to guard against Spanish attacks was to populate the colony quickly so that they would have superior numbers. To help settlement, three boats arrived from Barbados with 200 colonists. The Spanish immediately sent a flotilla to attack the settlement but were deterred by storms.
The Carolina colony was immediately different from its mainland English predecessors; it went directly down the slave-owning route. The picture was made more perverse because of the system adopted from Jamaica, whereby slaves were counted as being “members” of a planters’ family. A planter had the right to own 150 acres for each and every member of his “family”. Thus, the more slaves that were imported to Carolina the more land the planter received. It was a system concocted, no doubt, by already wealthy land-owners to benefit the already wealthy.
Carolina’s wealth would be built off slave labour, rather than the more tradition indentured-servant workforce of the northern colonies. In terms of produce, the colony was too far north to grow sugar. Tobacco prices were too low to consider because of the existing competition from Virginia. Instead, Charles Town became a vital trading hub for commodities; a vital link between the Caribbean and Virginia. In the 1690s, Carolina became the great English rice colony.
Slaves and slavery have existed for millennia in places such as Egypt and North Africa, the Middle East and the Roman Empire – long before the New World. It did not start with the Atlantic slave trade, but it did take on new scale and forms.
The word slave derives from Latin sclava, meaning ‘captive’, coming into English in the late 1200s from the Old French equivalent esclave and older Germanic schlave. These original slaves were ‘servants without time limits’; men and women forced to submit to their master’s authority. Although there were no slaves in England, by the mid-1500s the word slave was used in English as a term of contempt. The Elizabethans used it in this way to describe degraded or contemptible people, similar to rascal –including by Shakespeare around 1607.
The English system of indenture was a ‘deed between two parties’ that had existed since the 1300s, and since the mid-1400s was a contract of apprentice in the sense of carrying out a service. Indentured servants, by contrast, was a system of servitude recognisable in English from the early 1500s as work/service in exchange for food, lodging and (sometimes) earnings. Indentured servants were never called (nor were they) slaves.
As we have seen, the early English colonies had relied on indentured servants from England as the main colonist labour force. This was also known as chattel slavery. Whether voluntary, by coercion or trickery, the indentured servant system had been the norm. Those who survived their contractual period of labour where then freemen. For English plantation owners, the rewards for hiring indentured servants for a relatively short number of years still involved carrying a level of investment, cost and risk. That is why slave holders had been limited to only the wealthiest of landowners. But now – as the cost of transport across the Atlantic (among other things) rose – plantation owners faced a stark economic choice: buying slaves meant securing their labour for the whole extent of their natural lives even though it came with a larger (but diminishing) initial cost. At the same time, few planters could afford to compete against rivals who used slave labour.
There were 1170 black slaves registered in Maryland in 1670 (and 2000 in Virginia). Most had been transported not from Africa but from Barbados, the wider West Indies, Dutch islands and mainland Spanish America. A rare few existed as freemen. Wholesale slave transportation had not yet begun in these regions. One important difference was that many blacks usually lacked contracts and so were indentured servants for life. But their numbers were low. It is perhaps an overlooked point to note that – at this stage – black slaves were treated more harshly than white indentured servants and forced labourers from England. Both were exploited. Both died. Both endured tough conditions and physically hard and often dangerous work – even if blacks weren’t viewed as equal.
But now, English colonists began debating the legal distinction between servitude and chattel slavery. Legal distinctions mattered. For example, did lifetime servitude and bondage apply to the children of slaves? In other words, was slavery heritable? These were questions that wealthy planters were keen to take advantage of and gain maximum exploitation out of their workforce. It is no surprise that wealthy and influential planters lobbied for the passing of new slave laws to shore up legal protections that kept their black workers in perpetual labour though generations.
In so doing, the legal separation between white indentured servitude and black enforced servitude was enshrined in law in the southern English colonies around this time. What is important to note is that for the first time the legal definition of slave was increasingly being applied in the colonies specifically to people of the black race. Slave laws in Maryland, for example, introduced a framework that defined slavery as lifelong servitude to all blacks and mixed-race people, including being passed down through the generations. This was a reality that was enforced by law, backed by vested authority and enforced by every legal means available.
Unlike in Maryland and Virginia, blacks in the Carolina colony made up a quarter of the population during the 1670s and 1680s. In contrast to Massachusetts, where the population believed in the work ethic and were guided primarily by their moral principles, the values in the Carolinas could not have been more different. Here, the “traditional” system of slavery existing in the West Indies was encouraged. The Carolina Lords Proprietor promised planters (typically already rich men from England or Barbados) “absolute power and Authority over his Negro Slaves”. The raison d'être of the Carolina colony was business and riches.
