Enslaved People, Native Americans Died Under Lustful Pursuit Of Gold
The lustful pursuit for gold has caused untold bloodshed throughout history, including native Americans who were forced off their lands along a “Trail of Tears” and enslaved African Americans who were forced to toil in the dangerous gold mines of the south.
The genocidal, forced removal of native Americans from the southern states, known as the Trail of Tears, was authorized by President Andrew Johnson in 1839 to pave the way for settlers to exploit native American lands in search of gold. In the years of the Trail of Tears, more than 60,000 indigenous people were forced off their ancestral land and an estimated 11,000 native Americans died during the coerced exodus.
While native Americans lost their lands and their lives because of gold, many African Americans died enslaved while toiling in the dangerous gold mines of Georgia and North Carolina.
At its peak, gold mining was second only to farming in the economies of the southern states, initially Georgia and North Carolina, which at one time led the nation in gold production.
The discovery of gold in California in 1848 led to the Gold Rush which lured 300,000 miners to the Sierra Nevada mountains in California and Nevada. But the nation’s first major gold rush started earlier in North Carolina and Georgia and enslaved African Americans were critical to gold mining efforts, which was fast becoming the economic foundation of the nation.
The Georgia Gold Rush started in 1829 in Lumpkin County near the county seat, Dahlonega, and soon spread through the North Georgia mountains, following the Georgia Gold Belt. Gold mining eventually spread to nearby counties and other southern states, eventually netting more than $1 million a year in gold. North Carolina led the nation in gold production until 1848, when it was eclipsed by the great rush to California.
During America’s first gold rush in the late 1820s and early 1830s, white mine owners transported thousands of enslaved African Americans to labor in the gold fields and mines in northern Georgia and western North Carolina, according to a 2001 essay by Ann Marsh Daly, “Every Dollar Brought from the Earth: Money, Slavery, and Southern Gold Mining.”
The demand for gold accelerated in the early 1830s, when the Second Bank of the United States sought southern gold, which it needed to back up paper money. Just like the federal government drove away the native Americans, the federal government also provided economic and technical support to boost the slave-labor in the mining industry in the name of monetary reform.
By the early 1840s, gold was becoming scarce and many miners moved west when gold was found in the Sierra Nevada.
The Reed Gold Mine in Cabarrus County, N.C., is the site of the first documented gold find in the U.S. It was named after John Reed, a Hessian army deserter, who arrived in 1782. Reed settled and bought land and like many other landowners, he bought slaves to work his land.
The North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources offers tours of the Reed Gold Mine as part of Black History Month with the theme “Black Gold, Slavery and Reed Gold Mine.” The tours outline the origins and impact of slavery in North Carolina, Cabarrus County and the benefits of slave labor to Reed Gold Mine and the area’s social and economic development.
The Reed Gold Mine, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was opened to the public in April 1977 and “Black Gold” tours were started. Visitors were welcomed “to share a forgotten part of North Carolina history, connect with the origins of Reed Gold Mine and discover how Piedmont, North Carolina, was transformed through the years of backbreaking labor of enslaved men, women and children.”
Enslaved African American workers in the gold mines provided a major source of income for many white southerners while filling the national need for gold at a time of limited metal resources. The mine owners also gained valuable experience that prepared them for the later and far more lucrative gold mining in the West.
Before 1829 all the gold mined in the U.S. and coined at the Philadelphia Mint came from the North Carolina mines, and until 1849 from the southern Appalachian States. In the 1830’s gold ranked second only to agriculture in North Carolina as a source of income, and mining continued on a broad scale until the Civil War. Total production in the state from 1799 to 1860 is estimated at about $60 million. At the height of operations in North Carolina, at least 56 mines were operating and employing 30,000 men.
The Queen City Nerve edition of June 7, 2021, reported that gold discovered in a Cabarrus County stream in 1799 sparked a rush of exploration, with as many as 3,000 enslaved workers forced to sift through gravel deposits in a productive stream bed near Rutherford County. The story noted that Mecklenburg County, Va., prospered in the early 19th century by bringing in enslaved labor who had been “hired out” by their owners.
White southerners brought black slaves into the California mines as early as the summer of 1849. Slave owners and slaves came primarily from Texas, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas.
Under the Compromise of 1850, California entered the Union as a free state, in large part so that the state could continue employing formerly enslaved African Americans in the mining economy. While California decreed itself anti-slavery, it did not extend civil rights to California’s African Americans or Native Americans. Both groups were denied the right to vote and the right to testify in court. A movement to ban blacks altogether from California was considered but was dropped from the new constitution.
In 1852, California passed the Fugitive Slave Law, allowing white slave owners to reclaim escaped black slaves. The new law had tragic implications for many formerly enslaved African Americans, including three who traveled west to find wealth in gold mining, according to “Gold Chains: The hidden history of Slavery in California: Gold Rush and Shattered Dreams,” a report by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.
In 1849, Charles Perkins, a white plantation owner from Mississippi, ventured to mine gold in the west with a formerly enslaved man, Carter Perkins. They were later joined by Robert Perkins and Sandy Jones, two other enslaved men from the Perkins plantation.
Charles Perkins returned to the South and left his slaves in the care of a friend, with the stipulation that the three would be released on the condition that they work for six months longer. The trio was set free in November 1851, and began transporting mining supplies, eventually earning the equivalent of $100,000 in today’s dollars. But in 1852, California passed the fugitive slave law and Charles Perkins filed a legal action in California, demanding the return of his human “property.”
Carter Perkins, Robert Perkins and Sandy Jones were seized from their cabin in a midnight raid and were quickly forced onto a steamboat with Charles Perkins’s representatives, their freedom once again seized.
Gold still fuels modern-day enslavement in many countries around the world. Insightcrime.org reported that in Peru, informal and illegal mines directly enslave and employ 100,000 people and indirectly employ another 400,000. Such mines produce 15 to 22 percent of all the country’s gold, worth almost $3 billion annually.
Poor Peruvians, known as “indocumentados,” have no national identity documents and cannot legally work so they travel to mining regions with hopes of escaping poverty. Typically recruited by middle men paid by the mine owners, the workers are lied to about pay and employment conditions, Insightcrime.org reported.
Workers often fall ill to tropical diseases, animal bites or mercury exposure and they are often injured in workplace accidents. They cannot leave because of work agreements they previously signed, essentially as indentured servants.
Matthew Wojcik wrote in a Jan. 11, 2021, Medium column that “for 40 million people around the globe, slavery is not a historical fact, it is a present-day reality.”
Modern slavery is characterized by its recruitment process and the techniques used to detain victims. Modern slavery includes forced labor, child and sexual exploitation, and human trafficking. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), women and girls are disproportionately affected by forced labor and 1 in 4 victims of modern slavery are children.
It is estimated that two million workers are directly involved in forced labor in the artisanal and small-scale mining sector in the Eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with countless more people whose livelihood depends on the sector. Most mining is by hand because relentless, regional conflicts have prevented the development of large-scale industrial mining. The work is dangerous, pay is meager and collapses are common in the makeshift mine pits.
“This is but one the many different masks worn by modern slavery. Once we become aware of its true nature, we understand its implications in our everyday life and why we need to do something about it. We cannot unsee it,” Wojcik wrote.
Gold also was the incentive for American settlers to seize lands owned by indigenous people. Settlers pressured the federal government to remove native Americans from the Southeast. Shortly after the 1828 election, Georgia passed a series of laws abolishing the independent Cherokee government and extending state law over their territory. Cherokee officials were forbidden to meet for legislative purposes, white people were barred from living in Cherokee country without a state permit and Cherokees were forbidden to testify in court cases involving European Americans.
After gold was discovered in Georgia in late 1829, the Georgia Gold Rush increased white residents’ determination to see the Cherokee removed. The Cherokee were forbidden to dig for gold, and Georgia authorized a survey of their lands to prepare for a lottery to distribute the land to whites. The state held the lottery in 1832. In the following session, the state legislature stripped the Cherokee of all land other than their residences and adjoining improvements.
President Andrew Jackson won Congressional passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the government to extinguish any Indian title to land claims in the Southeast.
Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s laws limiting the rights of Native Americans, ruling that only the federal government had power to deal with the Native American tribes. Soon after the ruling, Jackson again urged the Cherokee National Council to leave their land. The Cherokees agreed to a treaty that provided western land and other benefits, if the Cherokees left the south. The treaty was concluded at New Echota, Ga., on Dec. 29, 1835, and signed on March 1, 1836. The trail of tears was about to begin.
The Native American population in southern states was decimated in the early- to mid-19th century. The largest tribes, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole, were dubbed the “Five Civilized Tribes” as they were the first tribes that Anglo-European settlers considered to be “civilized.” The tribes once occupied much of the land in current day Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee.
In the 1830s, Congress forcibly removed the tribes from their ancestral homelands to designated Indian Territory, an ethnic cleansing and forced displacement that affected about 60,000 people of the five tribes between 1830 and 1850. The final forced removal east of the Mississippi of the Cherokee nation, began in 1838 after gold was discovered near Dahlonega, Ga.
Those forced along the trail of tears, suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation as thousands died from disease before reaching their destinations or shortly after.