Labor, Slavery, and Caste in Spanish America [APUSH Unit 1 Topic 5] 1.5

hey and welcome back to heimlich history so we've been going through unit 1 of the ap us history curriculum and in the last video we dealt with the colombian exchange and in this video we're going to consider the labor systems and the societal restructuring that the spanish imposed upon the americans to get them brain cows ready because they bout to get milked let's get to it so in the last video on the colombian exchange i only mentioned briefly the exchange of people that occurred most notably enslaved africans well here's where we really get into so

when europeans got involved in the african slave trade the system of bondage changed significantly and as you might know the selling of people into slavery had a long history in africa long before this period of time and usually the people who were sold into slavery were like prisoners of war people sold in payment for the death of another person and in general slaves had some legal rights and their bondage was not a permanent situation and it was almost never an inheritable bondage but during this period europeans began establishing forts along the african coast in places

like the gold coast and the bite of biafra and other places further south in those ports they traded goods for enslaved people and the most desired of those goods was guns you see many of the africans who were put up for sale into slavery came from communities that had been raided and conquered by other more powerful african groups and then once these groups had guns they became even more powerful what with the bang bang in the pew pew and that further led to an increase in the intensity of those rage and when europeans found themselves

facing these enslaved africans they found that the africans were strange beings to them they had strange customs and spoken strange languages but even so those black africans looked just like human beings and if they were human that would be morally unjustifiable to enslave them i mean look at them they look just like human beings they've got eyes and ears and a nose and elbows are we sure they're not human beings well whether they were sure or not the european purchasers of these enslaved people adopted thought systems that proved the inferiority of the black people and

helped them justify purchasing them as enslaved labor and there are many ways they justify this but i'll just tell you one of the more popular ones and it comes to us from the bible you remember noah he was the guy who built the ark and the flood and the rainbow so he had a son named ham and ham had a son named kanan as it turns out one day noah got good and drunk and passed out naked which is part of the noah's story that you don't really see on flannelgrass in sunday school but anyway

ham came in saw noah naked and instead of covering his father's shame went out and started gabbing about it and as a result of this noah cursed ham's son kanan and the substance of that curse is that kanan would be a servant all of his days europeans during the 15th and the 16th century postulated that africans had been descended from canaan and therefore it was biblical to enslave them now to be clear if you read it for yourself that's not in fact what the bible says but that's what the europeans told themselves anyway starting with

the spanish europeans brought these enslaved africans to the americas in increasing numbers and the spanish did so to solve a labor problem they were already experiencing in the new world namely native americans made very bad slaves and in order to understand why let's look at native enslavement and labor under the spanish and for that i need to introduce you to the encomienda system of labor so before christopher columbus left the americas for the last time he introduced this system into the caribbean and soon spread throughout all the spanish settlements encomiendo was a system in which

leading men called encomanderos were granted a portion of land and all the natives who happened to live on that land then became the coerced labor force for the farming of the mining or boat and this brutal system of labor was justified on religious grounds remember one of the motivations for spanish exploration was the spread of christianity and here's how that supported encomiendo ferdinand and isabella the monarchs of spain issued a legal document called the requery miento in it the pope granted spanish monarchs the authority to claim lands in the americas and to try to convert

whomever they found there and in order to do the converting they had to send priests therefore the priests required the protection of the crown and so if natives submitted to conversion they received that protection and if they resisted they forfeited the protection of the crown and could therefore be subjugated or killed now it wasn't as tidy in real life as i just described it some natives did convert to christianity and still found themselves enslaved but that was the basic gist of the incoming endo system now the reason the system wasn't working out for them is

because the natives were rude enough to keep dying from european diseases and add to that the natives knew the land way better than the spaniards did and therefore there was the constant problem of natives escaping their slavery never to be found so the best solution for them was the importation of african people to replace the natives and from the spanish perspective this worked because the africans had better immunity than native americans and they knew the land less than the spaniards did now despite the difficulty of discovering just which coercive labor system would work best for

them by the late 16th century spain had completely transformed the americas and their presence in the americas completely transformed the homeland too all the wealth coming into spain from the americas transformed the spanish economy and even so it really only enriched the nobles because with the influx of especially silver prices rose and contributed to the impoverishment of the peasantry okay back to the americas okay so at this point we have three distinct groups generally speaking in the spanish-controlled americas we've got the spanish themselves africans and native americans and with this the spanish imposed a completely

new social order a kind of caste system in the americas now the reason why this was established is because the spanish government needed a way to impose taxes in an orderly way and since those at the bottom of the order were always taxed more in spanish society they needed a way to determine who was at the bottom so the spanish put everyone into a caste system based on racial ancestry and your place in that hierarchy determined how much tax you owed and the lower you were the higher were your taxes and so here's how they

ordered it peninsulares were on top and these were folks who were actually born in spain on the iberian peninsula cryos were next and they were the folks who were spanish but were born in the americas then you had the mestizos and these were folks of spanish and native american ancestry next down were the mulattos which were folks of spanish and african ancestry next down you had the africans and last of all you had the native americans themselves and this system is important because it shaped and influenced colonial societies throughout the western hemisphere and we're gonna

talk more about that in unit two so let's leave it there okay that's what you need to know about unit one topic five of ap u.s history if you need help getting an a in your class and a five on your examined may then get your little clicky finger out and grab a review packet right here if you want to join the family of beard enthusiasts here at heimler's history then subscribe and i'll keep making videos for you heimler out