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"A Little Flesh We Offer You":
The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France
Brett Rushforth
It is well known the advantage this colony would gain if its inhabitants could securely purchase and import the Indians called Panis, whose country is far distant from this one.... The people of the Panis nation are as necessary to the inhabitants of this country for farming and other tasks as are the Negroes to the Islands. And, as these kinds of engagements are very important to this colony, it is necessary to guarantee ownership to those who have bought or will buy them. Therefore, according to his Majesty's good pleasure, we order that all the Panis and Negroes who have been bought, and who shall be purchased hereafter, shall belong in full proprietorship to those who have purchased them as their slaves.
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| —Jacques Raudot, intendant of New France, 1709 |
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| Between 1660 and 1760, the colonists of New France pursued two seemingly contradictory policies toward their Indian neighbors. Through compromise, gift giving, and native-style diplomacy they negotiated the most far-reaching system of Indian alliances in colonial North America. At the same time, they also developed an extensive system of Indian slavery that transformed thousands of Indian men, women, and children into commodities of colonial commerce in French settlements. Although these slaves never constituted more than 5 percent of the colony's total population, they performed essential labors in the colonial economy as domestics, farmers, dock loaders, millers, and semi-skilled hands in urban trades. They also interacted regularly with French settlers at the market, in church, on village streets, and in their masters' homes. In some areas, such as Montreal's commercial district around Rue Saint-Paul and the Place du Marché, Indian slaves played an especially important role. There, fully half of all colonists who owned a home in 1725 also owned an Indian slave.1 |
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While early American historians have carefully studied the nature and significance of French-Indian alliances, there has been no comparable attention given to the topic of New France's Indian slave system. The only historical work to discuss it at length is Marcel Trudel's L'esclavage au Canada français (1960), a general history of African and Indian slavery in early Canada. Before Trudel, the slave system received a brief conference paper by James Cleland Hamilton in 1897 and less than one chapter in Almon Wheeler Lauber's 1913 survey of Indian slavery.2 Still less have historians considered the relationship between the rising importance of French-Indian alliances and the origins of Indian slavery in New France. Instead, there has been a tendency to take Indian slavery for granted as an inevitable consequence of colonization. "As slavery was practiced in all the European colonies," Trudel characteristically concluded, "one does not see why Canada would have escaped the international practice of reducing blacks and natives to servitude."3 |
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Yet New France's Indian slave system developed for reasons unique to its time and place. In Louisiana and the Caribbean, for example, France officially forbade the enslavement of Indians.4 In the five years preceding Jacques Raudot's ordinance legalizing Indian slavery in New France, the French crown rejected at least three petitions by Louisiana governor Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville to authorize the trade of Indian slaves in his colony.5 Thus, far from representing a general trend in France's American colonies, Indian slavery in New France originated in response to specific historical developments that shaped its character for the rest of the eighteenth century. |
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