Recently I listened to an interview of the historian Joseph Ellis. Ellis observes that the decimation of Native Americans was a Greek tragedy, while the perpetuation of slavery for three generations of the republic was a Shakespearean one. The distinction which Ellis makes is that Greek tragedy is fated, while Shakespearean tragedies are subject to the whims of our own will and contingent choices. The latter we may theoretically forestall or alter, but the former is subject to the deterministic wheels of history.
I believe that as a factual matter Ellis is correct; the indigenous peoples of the New World died from Eurasian diseases, or secondary consequences of disease (e.g., if 1/3 of the population is ill then labor input to agriculture decreases and results in famine which kills many more). Even with modern medicine the biological parameter is operative for indigenous peoples. High levels of alcohol consumption and “Western diet” are health demerits for Eurasian populations habituated to agriculture and mass society, but they seem to great increase mortality for populations which lived more traditional lifestyles more recently.
Why is slavery different? The United States was a laggard in its abolition, in large part because of structural constraints upon change hard-coded into our Constitution as well as checks on the legislative process implicit in its text (the Southern states could use the Senate to check the numerical superiority of the North in the House). In other ways the United States was not the laggard; unlike Saudi Arabia (which officially banned slavery in 1960, though there are strong suspicions that like Mormon polygamy it persisted a generation beyound its de jure abolition) the United States was shockingly progressive in many ways in the late 18th century, and European elites assumed that its radicalism doomed it to failure. Unlike every other polity since the rise of mass society after the Neolithic its federal government was explicitly de-sacralized in stark contradiction to custom & tradition. It attempted to scale a system of government, the republic, which all realistic thinkers assumed to be viable only for city-states (as evident in the historical precedents as well as for cogent theoretical reasons) on the scale of a continental empire.
Slavery’s perpetuation was of course due social and economic pressures, with a plausible priority on the latter (social rationales likely emerged posterior to the economic priors). As such changes in law and Zeitgest could, and did, affect change, as in the British Empire or during the French Revolution. The decline of the Native peoples of the New World was exacerbated by social and economic factors, but their rapid population contraction in the face of Eurasian diseases opened the door to these processes. The temperate regions of North America, in particular the northern tier of the United States, were relatively optimal ecologies into which European folkways could be transplanted in toto. I think it is a critical observation to remember that the Five Civilized Tribes expelled from the southern United States were in the southern United States! The native peoples of the north were demographically a non-issue; in Albion’s Seed David Hackett-Fischer notes that white fertility increased as one went north along the American coast because the documentary evidence suggests a far lower disease load. In what became Latin America the indigenous peoples were thicker on the ground, the Iberian settlers less numerous (and obviously the lifestyle of Iberia was going to be more difficult to transplant to the tropical New World). Finally, regions like the Andes Altiplano offered the natives their own biological advantages vis-a-vis Europeans.
Does any of this matter? My main rationale for the recitation of these widely accepted facts is to highlight the subtly and importance of Ellis’ point about the difference between what the American polity did to the Native Americans and what it did to black slaves. To be crass about it, the former was inevitable, and Europeans simply played a role on the margins (yes, the Indian Wars were generally “mopping up” expeditions in the wake of demographic collapse). The only way to prevent the population contraction which occurred would have been to sequester the New World from all trade and contact until the emergence of modern medicine. In contrast the institution of slavery was necessarily dependent upon the will & law of the American people, not on Nature’s Law (in particular, the people of the American South). Importantly, even many Southerners admitted that their “peculiar institution” was destined to be relegated to the dust-bin of history prior to the economies of scale enabled by the cotton gin, especially as other European polities began to abolish the practice. This particular distinction does not seem to be evident in the didactic material I’ve seen which put the spotlight on America’s role as the hand on the till of genocide and oppression. As I’m not a philosopher or ethicist I’ll leave it to others to dismiss or extend the implications of this distinction, but, I do know that people care as to whether actions are ultimately outside of someone’s control or not as an empirical matter.
Addendum: One way to thwart genetic elimination is assimilation. So most of the unique Native American genome content in the New World is now resident in peoples of mixed ancestry. It seems plausible that the immediate marginal returns of diversifying Native American immune portfolios would be very high. John Ross, the last great Cherokee chief who presided over the Trail of Tears, was 7/8 Scottish.
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