Slaves and Indians
Europeans did not introduce slavery to North America – although they did change the way it was practised.
In his autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote:
The slave finds more of the milk of human kindness in the bosom of the savage Indian, than in the heart of his Christian master. He leaves the man of the bible, and takes refuge with the man of the tomahawk.
Douglass echoed a popular view in the 19th century and one that remains largely in place today: that Native American slaveholding was more lenient than the slavery practised by whites, as the Indigenous peoples of North America were natural allies to enslaved Africans. Native American slaveholding was in fact an institution with a long history, yet was rarely as compassionate as Douglass thought.
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