The Indians who in the early settlement of the continent, before an
African captive had ever been introduced thereon, were reduced to the
most abject slavery, toiling day and night in the mines, under the
relentless hands of heartless Spanish taskmasters, but being a race of
people raised to the sports of fishing, the chase, and of war, were
wholly unaccustomed to labor, and therefore sunk under the insupportable
weight, two millions and a half having fallen victims to the cruelty of
oppression and toil suddenly placed upon their shoulders. And it was
only this that prevented their farther enslavement as a class, after the
provinces were absolved from the British Crown. It is true that their
general enslavement took place on the islands and in the mining
districts of South America, where indeed, the Europeans continued to
enslave them, until a comparatively recent period; still, the design,
the feeling, and inclination from policy, was the same to do so here, in
this section of the continent.
Nor was it until their influence became too great, by the political
position occupied by their brethren in the new republic, that the German
and Irish peasantry ceased to be sold as slaves for a term of years
fixed by law, for the repayment of their passage-money, the descendants
of these classes of people for a long time being held as inferiors, in
the estimation of the ruling class, and it was not until they assumed
the rights and privileges guaranteed to them by the established policy
of the country, among the leading spirits of whom were their relatives,
that the policy towards them was discovered to be a bad one, and
accordingly changed.
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