Beneath the Underdog: Race, Religion, and the Trail of Tears

Abstract

the fields and homes of the colonial plantations of the United States in the late eighteenth century, African Americans and Native Americans forged their first intimate relations in their collective oppression at the hands of the peculiar of slavery.' The institution of the chattel slavery, as it developed in the United States, was based on the lessons learned in the enslavement of the traditional peoples of the Americas. spite of a later tendency in the Old South to differentiate the African slave from the Indian, the peculiar was built on a preexisting system of Indian slavery.2 North America, the two systems never diverged as distinctive institutions.3 Racism and religious intolerance were critical components in the European dispossession and enslavement of Native Americans in the colonial period.4 Originating in the Aristotelian notion of natural rights, the concept of white supremacy as it found expression in colonial expansion had its roots in the classical traditions of philosophical idolatry.f Juan Gines de Sepulveda met with Bartholomeo de las Casas at Valladolid, Spain, in 1555 in a disputation over enslavement of the people of the New World. Sepulveda argued for the enslavement of the indigenous people on the basis of the intellectual and moral superiority of the Spaniard: In wisdom, skill, virtue and humanity, these people are as inferior to the Spaniards as children are to adults and women to men; there is a great a difference between savagery and forbearance, between violence and moderation, almost-I am inclined to say-as between monkeys and men.6 Though Sepulveda did not carry the day in Valladolid, the moral argument against slaverywas soon swept aside by a European continent facing a vast world with countless treasures inhabited by a people who could, themselves, become a commodity in the open market. Many of the early explorations of the New World were quite simply slaving expeditions. Vast numbers of indigenous peoples toiled to their death in the fields and mines of the Spanish colonists from the earliest points of contact. A Cherokee from Oklahoma remembered his father's tale of the Spanish slave trade: At an early state the Spanish engaged in