Transcript of Labor, Slavery, and Caste in Spanish America [APUSH Unit 1 Topic 5] 1.5

Hey, and welcome back to Himler's History. So, we've been going through unit one of the AP US History curriculum. And in the last video, we dealt with the Columbian Exchange. And in this video, we're going to consider the labor systems and the societal restructuring that the Spanish imposed upon the Americans. So, get them brain cows ready cuz they about to get milked. Let's get to it. So, in the last video on the Colombian exchange, I only mentioned briefly the exchange of people that occurred, most notably enslaved Africans. Well, here's where we really get into it. So when Europeans got involved in the African slave trade, the system of bondage changed significantly. And as you might know, the selling of people into slavery had a long history in Africa, long before this period of time. And usually the people who were sold into slavery were like prisoners of war, people sold in payment for the death of another person. And in general, slaves had some legal rights and their bondage was not a permanent situation and it was almost never an inheritable bondage. But during this period, Europeans began establishing forts along the African coast in places like the Gold Coast and the bite of Bafra and other places further south. In those ports, they traded goods for enslaved people. And the most desired of those goods was guns. You see, many of the Africans who were put up for sale into slavery came from communities that had been raided and conquered by other more powerful African groups. And then once these groups had guns, they became even more powerful. What with the bang bang and the pew pew. And that further led to an increase in the intensity of those raids. And when Europeans found themselves facing these enslaved Africans, they found that the Africans were strange beings to them. They had strange customs and spoken strange languages. But even so, those black Africans look just like human beings. And if they were human, that would be morally unjustifiable to enslave them. I mean, look at them. They look just like human beings. They've got eyes and ears and a nose and elbows. Are we sure they're not human beings? Well, whether they were sure or not, the European purchasers of these enslaved people adopted thought systems that prove the inferiority of the black people and helped them justify purchasing them as enslaved labor. There are many ways they justified this, but I'll just tell you one of the more popular ones and it comes to us from the Bible. You remember Noah? He was the guy who built the ark and the flood and the rainbow. So, he had a son named Ham and Ham had a son named Canaan. As it turns out, one day Noah got good and drunk and passed out naked, which is part of the Noah story that you don't really see on flannel grass in Sunday school. But anyway, Ham came in, saw Noah naked, and instead of covering his father's shame, went out and started gabbing about it. And as a result of this, Noah cursed Ham's son, Canaan. And the substance of that curse is that Canaan would be a servant all of his days. And Europeans during the 15th and the 16th century postulated that Africans had been descended from Canaan, and therefore it was biblical to enslave them. Now, to be clear, if you read it for yourself, that's not in fact what the Bible says, but that's what the Europeans told themselves. Anyway, starting with the Spanish, Europeans brought these enslaved Africans to the Americas in increasing numbers. And the Spanish did so to solve a labor problem that they were already experiencing in the New World. Namely, Native Americans made very bad slaves. And in order to understand why, let's look at native enslavement and labor under the Spanish. And for that, I need to introduce you to the encoma system of labor. So before Christopher Columbus left the Americas for the last time he introduced this system into the Caribbean and soon spread throughout all the Spanish settlements. Incomando was a system in which leading men called incommeneros were granted a portion of land and all the natives who happened to live on that land then became the coerced labor force for the farming or the mining or boats. And this brutal system of labor was justified on religious grounds. Remember one of the motivations for Spanish exploration was the spread of Christianity. And here's how that supported encoma. Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchs of Spain, issued a legal document called the Recquary Meento. In it, the Pope granted Spanish monarchs the authority to claim lands in the Americas and to try to convert whomever they found there. And in order to do the converting, they had to send priests. Therefore, the priests required the protection of the crown. And so, if natives submitted to conversion, they received that protection. And if they resisted, they forfeited the protection of the crown and could therefore be subjugated or killed. Now, it wasn't as tidy in real life as I just described it. Some natives did convert to Christianity and still found themselves enslaved. But that was the basic gist of the incoming system. Now, the reason the system wasn't working out for them is because the natives were rude enough to keep dying from European diseases. And add to that, the natives knew the land way better than the Spaniards did, and therefore there was the constant problem of natives escaping their slavery, never to be found. So, the best solution for them was the importation of African people to replace the natives. And from the Spanish perspective, this worked because the Africans had better immunity than the Native Americans and they knew the land less than the Spaniards did. Now, despite the difficulty of discovering just which coercive labor system would work best for them, by the late 16th century, Spain had completely transformed the Americas and their presence in the Americas completely transformed the homeland, too. All the wealth coming into Spain from the Americas transformed the Spanish economy. And even so, it really only enriched the nobles because with the influx of especially silver, prices rose and contributed to the impoverishment of the peasantry. Okay, back to the Americas. Okay, so at this point we have three distinct groups generally speaking in the Spanish controlled Americas. We've got the Spanish themselves, Africans, and Native Americans. And with this, the Spanish imposed a completely new social order, a kind of cast system in the Americas. Now, the reason why this was established is because the Spanish government needed a way to impose taxes in an orderly way. And since those at the bottom of the order were always taxed more in Spanish society, they needed a way to determine who was at the bottom. So the Spanish put everyone into a cast system based on racial ancestry. And your place in that hierarchy determined how much tax you owed. And the lower you were, the higher were your taxes. And so here's how they ordered it. Peninsulares were on top, and these were folks who were actually born in Spain on the Iberian Peninsula. Creoyos were next, and they were the folks who were Spanish, but were born in the Americas. Then you had the mestisos and these were folks of Spanish and Native American ancestry. Next down were the mulattoos which were folks of Spanish and African ancestry. Next down you had the Africans and last of all you had the Native Americans themselves. And this system is important because it shaped and influenced colonial societies throughout the Western Hemisphere. And we're going to talk more about that in unit 2. So let's leave it there. Okay. That's what you need to know about unit one, topic five of AP US history. If you need help getting an A in your class and a five on your exam in May, then get your little clicky finger out and grab a review packet right here. If you want to join the family of beard enthusiasts here at Himler's History, then subscribe and I'll keep making videos for you. Himler out.