How America's first settlers invented chattel slavery : dehumanizing native Americans and Africans with language, laws, guns, and religion

From New England and Virginia to New Spain and the current Southwest, North America's founding householders - English and Spanish alike - took the limited European practice of coerced labor and, over the course of two hundred years, transformed it into a depersonalized and brutal chattel slavery unlike anything that had existed in Europe. What system of language and logic, what visions of religious and civil society, allowed men who saw themselves both as Christians and cultured humanists to dehumanize and enslave people whose cultures and accomplishments were evident to nearly all? In this book we observe the progressive development of a mindset that allowed the settlers to see both Native Americans and Africans as «others» who did not merit human status.

• Introduction p. 1
• Chapter 1 Language, Metaphors, and Creating the "Other" p. 5
• A Note on Metaphor p. 8
• Focus of this Study p. 12
• Symbols in Conflict p. 13
• Guns and Soldiers p. 17
• Religion and the Language of Coercion p. 19
• Households and Householders p. 20
• Re-imaging the Native Peoples p. 27
• Chapter 2 Pilgrims and Visionaries p. 36
• Chapter 3 The Prickly Preacher of Hispaniola p. 46
• Chapter 4 The Merchants of Venice and Visby p. 58
• Chapter 5 The Honorable Householder of Zacatecas p. 68
• Chapter 6 The Seer of Santa Fe, the Iconoclast of Atenango p. 84
• Chapter 7 Coercion and Legitimacy on the Banks of the Rio Grande p. 98
• Chapter 8 Native Resistance and Spanish Repression p. 117
• Chapter 9 Husbanding the "Hideous Wilderness" p. 128
• Chapter 10 Stinking Fumes and Fragrant Profits p. 138
• Chapter 11 The Siren Calafia p. 149
• Chapter 12 The Timid Plowboy and the Periwigged Folk p. 173
• Chapter 13 Laborers in the Mystic Vineyard p. 181
• Appendix p. 193
• Bibliography p. 197
• Index p. 205