importation of slaves into Hispaniola, as quite ominously, this would-be chattel had been fleeing and setting up outlaw settlements of their own in the mountains and forests and from there executing violent raids on Spanish towns and haciendas. Thus, by 1522, the first large-scale uprising of the enslaved occurred during the Christmas holiday (which was to become a prime time in following centuries to attack dulled and inebriated settlers), as a sugar mill belonging quite appropriately to the son of Columbus was victimized, with a number of his comrades slaughtered. That same year an enslaved man named Miguel led an army of 800 former chattel that forced the closing of profitable mines and delivered horror to the homes of settlers due south. By 1529, four years after being built, Santa Marta on the northern coast of South America was razed by rebellious Africans. In Mexico, there were slave insurrections in 1523, 1537, and 1546. Puerto Rico experienced severe trouble of this type in 1527, and by the 1540s it was again Hispaniola’s turn as settlers were terrorized by maroons or cimarrones.27 Slave revolts hit Cuba in 1530, not to mention the capital along the coast of today’s Colombia that same year, which was destroyed. Africans fled to today’s Ecuador and formed an independent polity that Madrid was compelled to recognize in 1598.28
This earlier North American revolt of 1526 made it possible for Londoners, many decades later, to make their own claim to this vast territory, which was then inherited by their preening settler colony, now known as the United States of America. In other words, those who triumphed in what is now the United States had a kind of “second mover’s advantage,” advancing in the wake of Spanish retreat and, as shall be seen, learning lessons from this competitor’s defeat that proved to be devastating to Africans particularly.
Today’s Dixie is well aware of the debt owed to Madrid: the conquistador Hernando de Soto nowadays is venerated as the “first white hero” of the region; towns and cities annually hold parades, barbeques, and pageants in his honor, downplaying his conspicuous role as an enslaver and his catastrophic impact on indigenes, while pooh-poohing the massive evidence that depicts his savage quest as the handiwork of a psychopathic killer.29
Though often neglected, the contemporary United States remains ensconced in the shadow of the original colonizers. Before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s, the population of the Caddo people in the southeastern quadrant of what is now the United States was an estimated 200,000, but by the eighteenth century, as the new nation was being launched, their population had shrunk reportedly to about 1,400, making the final ouster of indigenes more likely.30 By the nineteenth century, the northern reaches of Mexico, soon to be incorporated into the United States, was regarded widely as the “land of war,” indicative of how indigenous resistance had not only been longstanding but also had been weakening the original inhabitants of the land.31 The genocide that was visited upon the indigenous of North America was a rolling process, with the republican knockout blow facilitated mightily by the preceding blows inflicted by Madrid.32
Thus, it was in the twentieth century that enraged settlers in the newly minted republican state New Mexico remained furious about the indigenous challenge to their alleged right to the land. The settler delegate returned to a 1551 decree by Charles V for justification supposedly sketching “separation of races” that was said to castigate “’Negroes, Mulattos and Mixed Bloods” who were said to “teach … evil ways” to indigenes. Then the rationalizer returned to Spanish law of 1513 for justification for what would have been deemed “Anglo” occupation of the land.33
Washington was even able to co-opt, to a degree, settlers dispatched by Spain. Recently, for example, the New York Times reported the story of Patricia Aragon Luczo, a retired flight attendant from New Mexico, who traced her Sephardic legacy to Juan de Vitoria Carvajal, a member of the Spanish expedition that sought to seize the area surrounding Santa Fe in 1598.34
TODAY A SELF-DESCRIBED “New Conquest History” has arisen that stresses the sixteenth-century presence of African maroons whose very existence called into question the purported control of Spain, even in Hispaniola, to the point where the notion of “maroons as conquerors” has to be taken seriously.35 As events in 1526 in what is now South Carolina indicate, there was a kind of advantage of the latecomer, the tardy, enjoyed by London, which could profit as Africans and indigenes, on the one hand, pounded would-be conquistadors and, on the other hand, allowed Englishmen to administer knockout blows to the exhausted survivors in succeeding decades.
Debilitating blows were also unleashed by the initial invaders too. For the land upon which Dixie was built still groans from the excruciating dread delivered by the likes of de Soto and his comrades, groans that continue to resound in the form of dispossessed indigenes and severely oppressed Africans. These conquerors bulled their way into indigenous settlements, murdering all they encountered, including small children, old men, pregnant women—especially pregnant women. They hacked them mercilessly, slicing open their bulging bellies with their sharpened swords with macabre intensity. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashing them headlong against the ground.36 There were “Holocaustic levels of slaughter and enslavement,”37 asserts scholar Matthew Restall with accuracy, speaking of Mexico in words that are hardly unique to this territory.
The deadliness of the resultant apocalypse commenced virtually from the day Columbus reached terra firma in October 1492.38 In the decades immediately following, an estimated 650,000 indigenes were enslaved and by 1580, in Algiers, enslaved indigenes from the Americas were to be found.39 In other words, it was not just European microbes that devastated indigenes, it was also a conscious strategy of naked profiteering from enslaving combined with a maniacal desire to remove the existing population, with enslaved Africans then arriving to develop the land. Thus, by 1530, 69 percent of the enslaved in Puerto Rico—now a U.S. “possession”—were African.40 Simultaneously, a market in Europe quickly developed involving indigenous American women and children deployed as domestic or household slaves.41
For as early as 1514, a few decades after the epochal voyage of Christopher Columbus, Madrid was frightened by the rapid increase in the number of enslaved Africans in Hispaniola, their initial foothold, and as one twentieth-century observer put it, “By 1560 the natural increase of that prolific race,” meaning Africans, “coupled with the constant inflow brought by the slave traders”—intoxicated by the maddening scent of profit—“had created a most alarming preponderance in their number” compared to the colonizers.42
As early as 1570, Africans in the Caribbean exceeded the number of Europeans and, after bloodily targeted violence, probably that of indigenes too; that year, there were an estimated 10 million indigenes, 250,000 Africans—“mulattos” or “mestizos”—and 140,000 “Europeans” in Iberian America. That first figure fell sharply in succeeding years, while that of Africans continued to rise relative to that of Europeans. By 1576 there were reportedly more Africans than colonizers in the important node that was Mexico City. Part of Madrid’s problem was overweening ambition; more Spaniards reached Manila in 1580 than any other year of the sixteenth century, and it was near then that the grasping power began dreamily to contemplate an invasion of China, to then be followed by thrusts into India, Cochin China (or Vietnam), Siam, the Moluccas, Borneo, and Sumatra. Still, by 1600, Madrid controlled the largest collection of territories the world had seen since the fall of the Roman Empire and the heyday of Genghis Khan, as it also dominated Italy, southern Netherlands (the ancestor of modern Belgium), a good deal of the Americas, and its pioneering neighbor, Portugal. Yes, it was a Pan-European project, albeit with a Catholic tinge from the start; after all, Columbus’s roots were in Genoa; there were Basques, of course, and Florentines and Frenchmen (Magellan was Portuguese), Greeks and Cordobans.43 Yet, as the following pages suggest, it was also a religious project, as signaled by the vanguard role played by Jesuits.44
Spain’s vaulting ambition, according to one assayer, led to the commencement of the dominating process known as “globalization,” in that in 1571 Manila was founded as a crucial entrepot linking the Americas and Asia in the trading of silver bullion between China and Spain, with knock-on effects worldwide, including in Africa, increasingly the favored source of labor supply. Silver traded for Chinese silk, tea, and porcelain fueled the rise