When brought to the new world, with regard to religion, slaves:

Although these early leaders were black men, women were the majority of the membership of early black congregations, and they frequently took the lead in conversion. Many of these women claimed, and actually exercised, the right to preach, and a large number of them were exhorters (informal preachers).

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By the winter of 1777-78, the Continental Army had dwindled to 18,000 from disease and desertion. This, together with the active recruitment of enslaved blacks by the British, finally convinced Washington to approve plans for Rhode Island to raise a regiment of free blacks and slaves.

Colonel Tye was perhaps the best-known of the Loyalist black soldiers. An escaped bondman born in Monmouth County, New Jersey, he wreaked havoc for several years with his guerrilla Black Brigade in New York and New Jersey. At one time he commanded 800 men. For most of 1779 and 1780, Tye and his men terrorized his home county -- stealing cattle, freeing slaves, and capturing Patriots at will. On September 1, 1780, during the capture of a Patriot captain, Tye was shot through the wrist, and he later died from a fatal infection.

• Colonel Tye
• Runaway ad for Titus

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Part 1: 1450-1750 <---Part 2: 1750-1805 Part 3: 1791-1831 Part 4: 1831-1865

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After the revolutionary war, the Continental Congress awarded General Daniel Morgan a gold plaque for his victory at the Battle of Cowpens, which took place in January 1781 in South Carolina. Morgan's outnumbered troops routed the British dragoons under Colonel Banastre Tarleton, known as "The Butcher" or "Bloody Ben" for killing his prisoners.In 1845, painter William Ranney recreated the scene in oils, probably from a traditional retelling or from an account of the Battle of Cowpens recorded in John Marshall's biography of George Washington. According to Marshall, "a waiter, too small to wield a sword" saved the life of a relative of George Washington during the battle. Just as Lieutenant Colonel William Washington, leader of the patriot calvary, was about to be cut down by a sword, the black man "saved him by wounding the officer with a ball from a pistol." Ranney depicts the unnamed man as a bugler astride a horse, as Morgan and Washington battle three British soldiers. Image Credit: South Carolina State House previous | next

Related Entries: • American foot soldiers, Yorktown campaign • George Washington crossing the Delaware River by Sully • George Washington crossing the Delaware River by Leutze • Portrait of a black Revolutionary War sailor • Free black Patriots

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Columbus before the Queen, painting by Emanuel Luetze, courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, 1843. The Spanish monarchs initially sought to curtail Columbus's slaving exploits in the Caribbean. 

Just as Castilian concessions in 1479 helped put Isabel on the throne of Castile, similar recognition of Portuguese claims in Africa in 1494 helped to secure Spanish interests in the Americas. As a result, it was Spain, rather than Portugal, that first made extensive use of enslaved Africans as a colonial labor force in the Americas. 

Ferdinand II pointing across Atlantic to where Columbus is landing with three ships amid large group of Indians, ca. 1500, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Amerindian Slavery and Coerced Labor

Soon after his famous 1492 voyage, with the backing of the Spanish Crown and over one thousand Spanish colonists, Genoese merchant Christopher Columbus established the first European colony in the Americas on the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Columbus is believed to have had prior experience trading in West Africa, and had certainly visited the Canary Islands, where indigenous people known as Guanches had long been enslaved and exported, in small numbers, back to Spain. Though Columbus was primarily interested in finding gold, he also recognized Caribbean islanders’ potential value as slaves. In early 1495, preparing to return to Spain, he loaded his ships with five hundred enslaved Taínos from Hispaniola; only three hundred would survive the voyage. Columbus’s slaving exploits—often viewed as an attempt to compensate for the gold that was not forthcoming—were quickly cut short by the Spanish monarchs, Fernando II of Aragon and Isabel I of Castile. Nevertheless, coerced Amerindian labor grew increasingly important within the Spanish Royal policies regarding Amerindians were in many ways contradictory. The Spanish Crown intended to protect Amerindians from abuse, but at the same time expected them to accept Spanish rule, embrace Catholicism, and conform to a work regimen designed to render Spain’s overseas colonies profitable. Thus in 1501, for example, the monarchs ordered Hispaniola’s governor to return all property stolen from Taínos, and to pay them wages for their labor. Further reforms were outlined in the Laws of Burgos (1512), and later in the Laws of Granada (1526), though both appear to have been largely ignored by Spanish colonists. 

Meanwhile, Spain’s monarchs broadly granted colonists dominion over Amerindian subjects, compelling native populations to pay tribute, often in the form of labor. The latter practice was largely an extension of the medieval encomienda, a quasi-feudal system in which Iberian Christians who had performed valuable military service were granted authority to govern people and resources in lands conquered from Iberian Muslims. Also, despite their objection to a trans-Atlantic slave trade of Amerindians, the Crown permitted their outright enslavement and sale within the Americas. During the first half of the sixteenth century, Spanish colonists conducted raids throughout the Caribbean, bringing captives from Central America, northern South America, and Florida back to Hispaniola and other Spanish settlements. Two of the principal arguments used to justify the enslavement of Amerindians were the concepts of “just war” (i.e. the notion that anyone who refused to accept Christianity, or rebelled against Spanish rule, could be enslaved), and “rescate” or ransom (the idea that Amerindians held captive by other groups could be purchased in order to Christianize them, and to rescue them from captors who were allegedly cannibals). 

Map of Americas where Spanish settled and often attempted to enslave American Indians, engraving by Theodor de Bry, ca. 1594, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

In most of the Caribbean, even before the mid-sixteenth century, it was evident that Spanish colonization based on the mass forced labor of Amerindians was not a viable option. In addition to the demands of Spanish colonists, Old World diseases such as smallpox, measles, chicken pox, and typhus decimated native populations, and reduced workforces to unsustainable levels. Vocal advocates of reform, most notably Bartolomé de las Casas, persuaded many in Spain that the abuses suffered by Amerindians at the hands of Spanish colonists were unacceptable on moral and religious grounds. Worried by the catastrophic decline of native American populations, and faced with growing opposition to Spanish mistreatment of Amerindians, Emperor Charles V passed a series of laws in the 1540s known collectively as the “New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians,” or just the “New Laws.” Among the first royal decrees issued in 1542 was the abolition of Amerindian slavery. Furthermore, Amerindians were no longer required to work without pay, and Spanish colonists’ children could no longer inherit encomiendas. These changes were met with heavy resistance from colonists in Mexico and Peru, where some colonists possessed vast encomiendas resembling small kingdoms and because of their complaints, some of the New Laws were only partially enforced in these colonies, and some traditional practices were partially reinstated. But in the Spanish Caribbean, Amerindians’ rapidly declining populations led Spanish colonists to look elsewhere for laborers long before the 1540s. With the Portuguese slave trade thriving, they increasingly looked to Africa.