slavery (was Re: [asa] Sin, animals, and salvation)

It sounds as though the colonial institution of indentured servitude, in
which a white person would work off their passage to the colonies by serving
unpaid for up to 7 years, was based on the biblical model of limiting the
period for Hebrew slaves.

Blacks, on the other hand, were enslaved for life--and also their children,
etc. Regardless of whether or not they were Christians--as many were at
some point. It was indeed a highly controversial issue, as to whether or
not slaves ought to have the gospel preached to them, since they might then
become Christians and it might be sinful to hold them in captivity. Robert
Boyle's view on this are not known (at least not to me), but among his
papers are copies of documents about this very issue, as it pertained to (I
think) Bermuda or the Bahamas.

Many Enlightenment intellectuals felt that Africans had created no
civilizations--they failed to find evidence of great monuments, cities,
technical and scientific accomplishments, literature, etc. David Hume is in
this category, for example. Thus, as an "inferior" race, blacks were
eligible to be enslaved. And, b/c blacks were mainly from tropical climates
and therefore had some resistance to malaria (which was once a huge problem
in the colonies) and other tropical diseases, and b/c they also had some
resistance to smallpox and other illnesses from the Eastern Hemisphere
(unlike Native Americans, who hadn't been exposed to them), they made
"ideal" candidates to be enslaved on the large sugar and tobacco plantations
in North and South America. Mostly South America, in all honesty--the vast
majority of Africans carried here in the history of the slave trade were
taken to Brazil and the Caribbean, not to what is now the US. At first, the
Europeans had enslaved various tribes of Native Americans, but in many cases
epidemics wiped out those populations; thus, a new source of slave labor was
sought.

Ted

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Received on Thu Nov 20 16:59:42 2008