On the Indian Slave Trade

This is a peculiar book and, if I’m honest, it’s a bit of a surprise to me that it won the Bancroft Prize in 2003. Alan Gallay’s book spends a lot of time building on The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 - 1815 by looking at the importance of Native Americans to the colonial project, while also taking a continental view of colonial America. That said, I think that Gallay spends a bit too much time on the geopolitical aspect and especially on thinking about regionalizing [picture from the text]; that’s not to say that this isn’t important work, but it seems to lose focus at times.

To me, the real important aspect of the work is explaining how the English and various Native American groups (especially the Creek and Chickasaw) became so deeply intertwined in the late-17th, early-18th century. To him, the key to their mutual relationship is the importance of the Indian trade. Slave raiders, generally Chickasaw and Creek, would go to war and enslave the Choctaw, Natchez, and other groups. These Native American slaves were then sold to English traders and merchants, where they were frequently shipped to other colonies. As an interesting note, Gallay points out that more Native Americans were exported from Charlestown than Africans were imported. This was news to me, and I was shocked to read it. Nevertheless, it was this trade relationship that brought the English and Native groups together.

In addition to the economic benefits, the slave trade transformed the way that the Creek and Chickasaw thought about slavery. To them, enslavement was a way to humiliate enemies—it was fundamentally about status. But, to the English, enslavement was about economic gain and maximizing profit. This rubbed off on other Native American groups and transformed their relationship with the institution.

The other benefit from the book is that it reconceptualized the way I see the South. Thanks to countless writers, I have seen the North in continental terms for a long time, recognizing the importance of Native American groups to trading and diplomatic relationships with colonizers. However, I’m not sure why, but my mind had never thought to think about the South in the same way. Perhaps it’s because so much of the material on Native America deals with the North and West, or perhaps it’s because the literature on the pre-Civil War South mostly focuses on the institution of slavery (rightfully so) and Jacksonian Democracy (which has a really strong connection here that I didn’t make before). Nevertheless, this has opened my eyes quite a bit, and I’m glad I took the time to make sense of it.