Modern historians believe that the first Africans to be
encountered by Native Americans were those who accompanied the early Spanish explorations
of the Southeastern United States. Estavanico, "an Arabian black, native
of Acamor," who accompanied Narvaez into Florida distinguished himself by
his linguistic ability and "was in constant conversation" with the Indians.
In 1540, Hernando de Soto encountered the Cherokee and kidnapped the Lady of Cofitachequi,
a prominent Cherokee leader. Escaping from De Soto, she returned home with an
African slave belonging to one of De Soto's officers and "they lived together
as man and wife." Black slaves also played a critical role in Luis Vazquez
de Ayllon's aborted colony in South Carolina; a slave revolt occurred in the colony
and many of the African slaves fled to live among the Cherokee.
When De Soto landed in Florida with his soldiers in 1539, he brought with him
blood-hounds, chains, and iron collars for the acquisition and exportation of
Indian slaves. Hundreds of men women and children were captured by de Soto and
transported to the coasts for shipment to the Caribbean and to Spain.
Booker T. Washington wrote, "The Indians who first met the white man on his
continent do not seem to have held slaves until they first learned to do so from
him." In her pivotal work Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society 1540-1866,
Theda Perdue states that the Cherokee regarded Africans they encountered "simply
as other human beings," and, "since the concept of race did not exist
among Indians and since the Cherokees nearly always encountered Africans in the
company of Europeans, one supposes that the Cherokee equated the two and failed
to distinguish sharply between the races." Kenneth Wiggins Porter, an African
American historian, concurs with this conclusion: [we have] "no evidence
that the northern Indian made any distinction between Negro and white on the basis
of skin color, at least, not in the early period and when uninfluenced by white
settlers."
Cherokee and other Indian tribes were traded in slavery long before any arrived
from Africa. Native American nations throughout the South were played one against
the other in an orgy of slave dealing that decimated entire peoples; during the
latter half of the seventeenth century, Carolina was more active than any other
colony in the exportation of Indian slaves. South Carolina eventually became the
hub of Indian slave trade. This was not only supported by the Governor of South
Carolina John Archdale, but he made money from the trade.
Charleston, and especially a group of men associated with an area north of
Charleston known as the "Goose Creek men," became the center of this
North American commercial slavery. The Carolinians formed alliances with coastal
native groups, armed them, and encouraged them to make war on weaker tribes
deeper in the Carolina interior. By the late years of the seventeenth century,
caravans of Indian slaves were making their way from the Carolina backcountry
to forts on the coast just as they were doing on the African continent. Once
in Charleston, the captives were loaded on ships for the "middle passage"
to the West Indies or other colonies such as New Amsterdam or New England. Many
of the Indian slaves were kept at home and worked on the plantations of South
Carolina; by 1708, the number of Indian slaves in the Carolinas was nearly half
that of African slaves.
With the arrival of twenty "negars" aboard a Dutch man-of-war in Virginia
in 1619, the face of American slavery began to change from the "tawny"
Indian to the "blackamoor" African over a period of some one hundred
years between 1650 and 1750. In spite of a later tendency in the Southern United
States to differentiate the African slave from the Indian, African slavery was
in actuality imposed on top of a preexisting system of Indian slavery.
The Indian slave traders of the Carolinas engaged in successful slaving among
the Westo, the Tuscarora, the Yamasee, and the Cherokee. Though history may
record these encounters as "Indian wars," the "wars" were
simply Native American responses to slaving operations of the English and their
Shawnee allies. In three years of slaving operations against the Westo Indians,
all but fifty of the Nation were reduced to slavery or killed. The English and
the Shawnee reached far out into the Spanish empire in the South; some 10,000
to 12,000 Timucuas, Guales, and Apalachees were taken to Charleston and sold
into slavery and shipped throughout the vast English empire. When the Shawnees
grew sick of their mercenary occupation and dissolved their trading partnership
with the English, Governor John Archdale established a policy of "thinning
the barbarous Indian natives." By 1710, the Shawnees had gone the way of
the Westo.
Around the time of the Declaration of Independence large expeditions of Colonial
forces began to destroy Cherokee towns. Reports of the expeditions said that
practically every Cherokee man or woman encountered was either killed and scalped
or sold into slavery. Over 50 towns were burned and all crops and livestock
taken or destroyed.
Africans and Native Americans shared the common experience of enslavement. In
addition to working together in the fields, they lived together in communal
living quarters, began to produce collective recipes for food and herbal remedies,
shared myths and legends, and ultimately intermarried. The intermarriage of
Africans and Native Americans was facilitated by the disproportionality of African
male slaves to females (3 to 1) and the decimation of Native American males
by disease, enslavement, and prolonged war against the colonists.
As Native American societies in the Southeast were primarily matrilineal, African
males who married Native American women often became members of the wife's clan
and citizens of the respective nation. As relationships grew, the lines of distinction
began to blur and the evolution of red-black people began to pursue its own
course; many of the people known as slaves, free people of color, Africans,
or Indians were most often the product of integrating cultures. Among the people
of the Chickamagua region of the Cherokee Nation and those who spoke the Kituwhan
dialect, there was a particular "ethnic openness." The people native
to this region were "more receptive to racial diversity within their towns
than the mainstream Cherokees."
In areas such as Southeastern Virginia, The "Low Country" of the
Carolinas, and around Galphintown near Savannah, Georgia, communities of Afro-Indians
began to arise. The term "mustee" came to distinguish between those
who shared African and Native American ancestry from those who were a mixture
of European and African. Many wills continued to refer to "all my Slaves,
whether Negroes, Indians, Mustees, Or Molattoes." The depth and complexity
of this intermixture are revealed in slave code in South Carolina that ruled
that:
"all negroes and Indians, (free Indians in amity with this government,
and negroes, mulattoes, and mustezoes, who are now free, excepted) mulattoes
or mustezoes who are now, or shall hereafter be in this province, and all their
issue and offspring...shall be and they are hereby declared to be, and remain
hereafter absolute slaves."
Increasingly toward the end of the century, Africans began to flee slavery
in larger numbers to settle among the Indians in their immediate vicinity. Considering
historic circumstances, environmental associations, and metaphysical affiliations,
the relationships among African Americans and Native Americans was much more
extensive and enduring than contemporary observers have acknowledged.
Afro-Cherokee 
