Education and the Racial Dynamics of Settler Colonialism in Early America

Georgia and South Carolina, ca. 1700–ca. 1820

James O'Neil Spady

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000047332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

This is the first historical monograph to demonstrate settler colonialism's significance for Early America. Based on a nuanced reading of the archive and using a comparative approach, the book treats settler colonialism as a process rather than a coherent ideology. Spady shows that learning was a central site of colonial struggle in the South, in which Native Americans, Africans, and European settlers acquired and exploited each other's knowledge and practices. Learned skills, attitudes, and ideas shaped the economy and culture of the region and produced challenges to colonial authority. Factions of enslaved people and of Native American communities devised new survival and resistance strategies. Their successful learning challenged settler projects and desires, and white settlers gradually responded. Three developments arose as a pattern of racialization: settlers tried to prohibit literacy for the enslaved, remove indigenous communities, and initiate some of North America's earliest schools for poorer whites. Fully instituted by the end of the 1820s, settler colonization's racialization of learning in the South endured beyond the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Part I

Colonization and Learning to Circa 1770

1 An Overview of the Formation of a Settler Society

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European powers built the imperial trading networks that linked the continents of Africa, America, and Europe to each other as well as to Asia and the Pacific. The nature of the trade has been termed “war capitalism” by Sven Beckert because European vessels made profits through networks of trade and war facilitated by their ships. Shipping technology was one of the few aspects of trade in which Europe enjoyed an advantage. European trade goods were not superior to Asian and African products, and they were not in high demand. In the sixteenth century, European transoceanic mobility enabled Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and, ultimately, English traders to pursue tactics for opening markets that would not otherwise have been possible. One tactic was simply moving goods around. Europeans profited from carrying products made in one part of the non-European world to other parts of the non-European world. They also brought commodities back to Europe: spices, textiles, tobacco, cotton, slaves, and other items from various ports around the globe. Another tactic was more aggressive. Where bargains were refused, they sometimes combined war and divisive diplomacy in order to open markets. These shipping networks built knowledge of many parts of the world, including Native North American homelands. Learning about conquest, commerce, and Christianization possibilities eventually led to settler colonies in North America. Dutch, English, French, Spanish, and even Swedish monarchs and companies created competing settler colonies and outposts. In the southern portions of the Atlantic coast of North America, St. Augustine (Florida, 1565) inaugurated a long Spanish administrative and military presence in the region that did not completely end until the early nineteenth century. England, from its outpost of Charleston (South Carolina, 1670), anchored what would become the most populous and profitable colonial settlement in the region. With the addition of Georgia in 1732, the scale of the English presence eclipsed the Spanish. Historians often refer to this English settler colonial zone as “the Lower South.”¹

The Lower South was more than just a set of English colonial settlements. It was a region within Europeans’ growing global project of colonization and war capitalism. The Lower South was fully immersed in this project. Colonials in the region competed with and fought with their Spanish neighbor colony in Florida. They aggressively sought to expand into Cherokee and Creek homelands. They coerced large numbers of Africans into labor, and the region therefore developed communities with significant cultural debts to West Africa and West Central Africa. This aggressive combination of labor and land expansion would soon earn profits from commodities such as deerskins, rice, and shipping-related supplies. Conditions guaranteed that success required at least some familiarity with diverse peoples.

Figure 1.1Detail of a 1640 map showing the “Lower South” before extensive European colonial settlement. Pictured is part of what would become South Carolina and Georgia. Errors and missing information reveal the depth of colonial ignorance about the geography.

Source: Willem Janszoon Blaeu, Virginia partis australis, et Floridae partis orientalis … [Amsterdam: Jean Blaeu, 1640]. Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library/University of Georgia Libraries.

Familiarity and cross-cultural learning was agonizingly shaped by martial violence, political imposition, and economic exploitation. The homelands of Cherokee, Creek, Catawba, and other Native peoples were relatively nearby; the homelands of slaves were not. The enslaved African-born population reached proportions as high as 90% in some locales. Walking the roads and paths of some districts of the Lower South often meant seeing mostly African people, if anyone at all. In other places, the people were mostly or entirely Indigenous Americans. No English colony actually controlled the full acreage to which their charters laid claim. In fact, the English had to negotiate and strategize in order to have any chance of enforcing their putative authority outside their settlements. This was as true in the Lower South as it was on the coasts of West Africa and West Central Africa where they paid for enslaved laborers. Even in the towns and plantations of the Lower South where English authority was strongest, social power was contested by enslaved Africans and even sometimes by nonelite white settlers. Generations would grow to adulthood learning about themselves, the world, needed skills, and future possibilities within this agonized context. Such a predicament—and its legacies—has been termed “coloniality” by some scholars. I denote it simply as a “settler colonial society.” Such a colonial society is a space that is more than merely engaged in settler colonization. It is, rather, a space suffused by settler colonization at a particular period in its history.²

In the Lower South, learning became a fulcrum of power because the knowledge, skills, and information critical to the success of colonial projects were unevenly distributed. Europeans were ignorant of skills and information that were essential to a favorable outcome, such as the details of the regional geography (see Figure 1.1). Early South Carolina relied on Indian labor and knowledge for its first export commodity (deerskins). Carolina planters eventually learned from Africans to grow their best plantation crop (rice).³ The exchange of goods was the exchange of the products of labor, which is also to say that it was an exchange of knowledge. Native women sold corn and other products of their labor. As Joel Gascoyne put it in 1682, Indians near South Carolina readily offered to “hunt their Game for a Trifle.” Learning to supply this colonial market would change society, and deerskin hunting eventually yielded thousands of skins each year. Annual deerskin export totals exceeded 100,000 by the middle eighteenth century. Learning to strategize around the colonial presence produced a cycle of gun trading and warfare up and down the Appalachian Mountain chain. Attending to that warfare, Native people also became suppliers of Indigenous slaves, as well as slave catchers. By 1715, Carolinians and Natives had enslaved between 24,000 and 51,000 Indians. By then, colonial society had long reached into the most intimate spaces of Native life.⁴

Native populations shrank due to this warfare and enslavement. The fighting and suffering significantly enhanced the virulence of diseases that radiated out from colonial towns and settlements. Smallpox, measles, yellow fever, and other illnesses took a heavy toll. In 1685, there were possibly 10,000 Native people living in numerous small communities on the coastal plain, but there were just 7,500 in 1700. Wars, disease, diaspora, and slave raids left maybe 4,000 people by the 1730s. Sixty years later, there were probably only a few hundred. Further inland, the more numerous Cherokee still numbered possibly 8,000 at the end of the eighteenth century, much reduced from an estimated 32,000 circa 1685. The Creek or Muskogee population probably numbered about 15,000 in the 1730s. Through absorption of smaller remnant groups and improved survival rates against smallpox and other illnesses, the Creeks may still have numbered about 15,000 in 1790.⁵ All Native peoples lost land, too. Organized colonial settlement, squatting, and war dramatically reduced the Catawbas’ land base by the 1720s. Creeks ceded land in 1733, 1763, 1773, and 1790. Cherokees began making enormous land concessions by the late eighteenth century.⁶

Driving these changes was war capitalism’s expansion of trade and the encroachment of small farms belonging to poorer whites and large plantation enterprises of the wealthier elite. Controlling a supply of enslaved labor became indispensable, as did expanding the supply of land. By 1710, African slaves already outnumbered white settler-colonists in South Carolina. By 1730, there were almost twice as many African slaves as free whites in South Carolina. The population of slaves in 1740 was nearly 40,000.⁷ Georgia introduced slavery at mid-century, and by the time of the American Revolution in 1775, there were probably at least 119,000 Africans in the Lower South, most of them enslaved. The most recent data show that 32% of African captives who disembarked in South Carolina were from rice-growing regions, and that proportion might yet be low. Rice exports became the region’s wealth-producing mechanism. In 1720, South Carolina exported less than half a million pounds of rice. At its peak, the colony exported 43 million pounds annually. Although the wealth generated by these exports went mainly to the white elite and domestic production did not create as much wealth, rice cultivation created a powerful social and political will for expansion of the colonial land base and slave labor population. The resulting African slave majorities thereafter culturally linked the region to West Africa in ways that affected daily life. Until approximately 1790, most of the region’s enslaved laborers probably had been born and raised in Africa. Georgia and South Carolina had substantially “Africanized” districts where the local culture was influenced or even dominated by African patterns.⁸

The Lower South exemplifies the “triangular” trading networks between Africa, America, and Europe. For this reason, the region offers rich material for analyzing how imperial networks created a sharply colonial context for learning. The triangular trade involved three points of commercial networking in the Atlantic world: moving labor from Africa to America, raw materials and agricultural products from America to Europe, and manufactured goods from Europe to Africa and America. The craft and manufactured goods from Europe have often been understood as items of technology, and products such as deerskins or corn have often been considered “raw.” However, cultivated corn and skinned deer are processed, not raw. These items were also “technologies,” as was African rice. Therefore, all directions along the triangle featured trade in skill and knowledge. Ore and rice from Africa and deerskins and other products from America found their way into the Atlantic trading system. The learning of information and skills shaped the process, timing, and prices for these and other goods as they entered the Atlantic imperial market. The exchange of products became learning in a myriad of ways.⁹

Trading was a commonplace practice in Africa and North America long before European colonization began. Archaeological sites throughout North America demonstrate that Native people had traded across long-distance routes for many centuries before colonization. Similarly, in West and West Central Africa, extensive empires, cities, and trade routes had consolidated and then lost power for centuries before European expansion during the fifteenth century. Trade and exchange were not new, but the cross-Atlantic nature of the trade was. This new dimension of trade joined together European settler colonial projects, Native towns and communities, and African states and villages. Modern colonization produced a world-historical, epoch-making, sustained exchange between these differently skilled regions. Trade relationships were also contested power relationships. War capitalism built markets that altered ancient struggles over domination and subordination, introducing Europeans as new actors, aggressive settler-colonists, and imperial traders. People in the Lower South lived lives marked by this combination of war and trade in people and products. Inseparable from the trade, the scarring experiences of diaspora and removal produced unique learning strategies. Witnessing wondrous and grizzly things in their daily lives, people laced the unknown into what they already knew.¹⁰

Colonization, Power, and Learning

A colonial society is an event, not a thing. It has a pattern of (1) aggressively transformative cultural dynamics and (2) subordinating relations of power. The sustaining of this pattern is the event—the epochal event. In the Lower South, large populations of enslaved people who had been born and raised in Africa, European settlers, and powerful Native American towns and confederations capable of independent military and political action struggled over resources and social boundaries. The pattern of struggle in the region endured for nearly tw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments and Dedication
• Introduction: “Like the Spider From the Rose”
• Part I Colonization and Learning to Circa 1770
• Part II Colonization and Learning After Circa 1770
• Appendix: A Note on the Primary Sources
• Index