African Americans in the Colonial Era

From African Origins through the American Revolution

Donald R. Wright

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119133896
• Edition: 4
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

What are the origins of slavery and race-based prejudice in the mainland American colonies? How did the Atlantic slave trade operate to supply African labor to colonial America? How did African-American culture form and evolve? How did the American Revolution affect men and women of African descent?

Previous editions of this work depicted African-Americans in the American mainland colonies as their contemporaries saw them: as persons from one of the four continents who interacted economically, socially, and politically in a vast, complex Atlantic world. It showed how the society that resulted in colonial America reflected the mix of Atlantic cultures and that a group of these people eventually used European ideas to support creation of a favorable situation for those largely of European descent, omitting Africans, who constituted their primary labor force.

In this fourth edition of African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution, acclaimed scholar Donald R. Wright offers new interpretations to provide a clear understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and the nature of the early African-American experience. This revised edition incorporates the latest data, a fresh Atlantic perspective, and an updated bibliographical essay to thoroughly explore African-Americans' African origins, their experience crossing the Atlantic, and their existence in colonial America in a broadened, more nuanced way.

CHAPTER 1
Atlantic Origins

Sullivan's Island, a flat, three-by-one-mile stretch of sand facing the Atlantic Ocean at the north entrance of Charleston Harbor in South Carolina, has had a prominent role in America's history. The island's Fort Moultrie held out against the bombardment of British warships in an early battle of the American Revolution and, 85 years later, housed guns that fired on Fort Sumter to begin the Civil War. But Sullivan's Island has a deeper and more difficult history. Through most of the eighteenth century, it was on this island's southern beach that more enslaved men, women, and children from Africa took their first steps onto American soil than anywhere else on the North American mainland. A “pest house,” standing near the island's southern tip, was where many of the captive Africans stayed during a period of quarantine before being taken to Charleston for sale. Planters from around the region purchased such individuals to augment their labor supply, essential to their prosperity, but they wanted nothing to do with any infectious diseases the Africans might bring from their homeland or from nearly two months spent in the incubator-like holds of slave ships.

What occurred in Charleston was going on, if in lesser volume and with difference in details, at other ports and in various large bays and rivers of North America, but the phenomenon was much larger still. A trans-Atlantic trading of slaves existed for over three and a half centuries along the Atlantic side of the Americas, from these mainland North American colonies down to the Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French colonies of the Caribbean, Central America, and mainland South America. All of the colonies were part of an enormous economic system that linked the four continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean. The system relied on European management, capital, and shipping for American production of staple goods, mostly sugar, for European consumption. By the seventeenth century, those in control of the system preferred African slaves as their labor force in the colonies.

The idea of importing labor from some distance for intensive work on export crops was an old one. Romans had done this on a grand scale two centuries before the Christian era, when slaves made up 40 percent of the population of the Italian Peninsula and gangs of enslaved men and women worked the estates of the Roman grandees. Although slavery declined as a European economic institution following the Roman Empire's collapse, populations around the Mediterranean heart of the old empire and in much of continental Europe continued to accept the Roman legal status of slaves, which considered such humans as chattel, the property of another. Much later, this would help provide a legal basis for Crusaders to enslave their captive enemies—as Muslims had been doing to Christians for some time, using their own rationale—and to sell such captives off to the agricultural enterprises that were popping up in the eastern Mediterranean after the eleventh century.

By the end of the thirteenth century, a plantation system had come into being, centered on the island of Cyprus and geared to providing sugar to a European market. Like the plantations across the Atlantic half a millennium later, these relied on European capital, management, and shipping. Some who worked in the cane fields were free and some were serfs, but increasingly sugar production came to be identified with slave labor. Mediterranean shippers brought in workers from the Balkans and southern Russia (people who spoke Slavic languages; thus the word “slave,” from “Slav”) along with others from Asia Minor and North Africa. Some of those purchased in North Africa had been marched across the Sahara Desert from their homes in the Western Sudan. For over two centuries the Mediterranean plantations thrived and slavery spread, first to Crete and Sicily and then to coastal Spain and Portugal. By 1450, on the eve of European expansion into the South Atlantic, slave-based sugar plantations existed in the western Mediterranean and even on nearby Atlantic islands.

Many of the men who ventured away from their European homelands after the middle of the fifteenth century and established outposts or acquired lands on both sides of the Atlantic had motives less selfless than spreading Christianity or increasing geographical knowledge. European rulers sponsored many such enterprises to garner wealth for the state, and most individuals involved had an eye out for personal gain as well. Some state-sponsored enterprises found wealth in the parts of Africa or America that held gold or silver, but most of the lands bordering the Atlantic did not possess such obvious riches. So in the coastal and insular areas the newcomers turned to export agriculture, following the existing model with sugar as the focus. Thus developed, at a slow but regular pace, an agricultural economy along the tropical Atlantic rim, first on islands off West Africa, with São Tomé becoming the leading sugar producer by the beginning of the sixteenth century, and then, by the end of that century, in northeastern Brazil. By 1640 an export economy had spread to the great sugar islands of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean and, on a smaller scale and outside the tropics, to English tobacco-growing colonies on the North American mainland. As the Atlantic economy expanded, the plantation model, on a larger scale than ever before, became the accepted way of making profits from the great expanses of land.

But establishing plantations in distant territories had a hitch. Although sugar remained in great demand, the land was productive, the weather was appropriate, and the technology for processing cane existed and steadily improved, finding adequate numbers of workers to grow this labor-intensive crop became difficult. Those native to America never worked out as field workers in the way European landowners hoped they would. Once in captivity or even in close proximity to Europeans, Native Americans died rapidly from diseases long endemic to the Eurasian and African landmasses—smallpox, mumps, and measles—that the newcomers brought with them. Those who did not perish after having been enslaved proved remarkably able to resist pressures to adapt to strict work regimes, partly because they could run away relatively easily—their homes and extended families being close and their knowledge of the surroundings often superior to that of their captors.

But what about Europeans? Even with labor needs in the Americas rising sharply, Europeans were unwilling to enslave other Europeans in the same way they enslaved people they encountered off the continent. “Bonded” persons—often criminals sentenced to labor or men who willingly agreed (in a document called an indenture) to a period of labor in exchange for passage to America and, they hoped, subsequent opportunity—were not a great deal better at regimented work across the Atlantic than the Indians. White laborers fell victim to different diseases, among them the tropical scourges malaria and yellow fever. And should they run away, white servants might pass themselves off as members of the ruling society. Just as important, rising opportunities for Europeans at home, either with armies during the almost continual continental warfare of the era or in jobs paying wages that rose steadily over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, limited the number of those willing to make the arduous ocean passage for the rigorous labor that awaited them, with only a sketchy promise of economic or social gain.

Africans, however, performed effectively, in a relative sense, as plantation workers under the regimented conditions in the Americas, and European planters soon recognized this even if they did not understand why. The African homelands of black slaves were places where Afro-Eurasian and tropical diseases were endemic. Africans who survived into adolescence had already acquired some immunity to smallpox, mumps, and measles as well as to malaria and yellow fever. So in the fresh mix of diseases up and down the Atlantic rim of the Americas, even under the harsh conditions of the plantation environment, Africans lived three to five times longer than their white counterparts. This alone made them more productive workers and, hence, better investments. Finally, Africans could not run home or be mistaken for a member of the society of planters.

None of this, of course, would have made any difference had African laborers been in short supply or too expensive for American planters to purchase. But through most of the years of the Atlantic trade, prices for Africans remained favorable in relation to the price of the crops they produced. For example, an English planter on the Caribbean island of Jamaica in 1690 had to pay £20 for a “prime” male African, direct from Guinea. That laborer could produce about five hundred pounds of sugar in a year, which the planter could sell for £20, and thus in a year recover the original cost of the slave. In short, African laborers turned out to be the best deal in economic terms, which were the only terms of interest to the landowners, shippers, financiers, and merchants involved in the plantation system.

Atlantic Africa

Slaves came to the North American mainland colonies over one of two routes. One was from the West Indies and involved shippers of merchandise, who topped off their cargoes with slaves as opportunities offered. A good number of ships came to the colonies so laden, especially in the earlier years of slave trading, but they brought relatively few slaves before the fledgling United States abolished the importation of slaves in 1808. The overwhelming number of slave imports, close to nine out of ten of the men, women, and children, arrived directly from Africa or a West-Indian island after a short layover following the trans-Atlantic passage. With notable exceptions, especially in the early years of settlement, these newcomers were unacculturated, raw, frightened—Chesapeake planters characterized them as “outlandish”—persons not long away from their homes in Africa.

Nearly all slaves brought to North America came from the coast and interior of West and West-Central Africa. Traders from England, one of the English North American mainland colonies, or (after 1783) the United States of America acquired and carried 97 percent of the 383,000 slaves arriving in the North American mainland over the 189 years of legal slave trading to the region,¹ and these slavers never developed close, long-standing links with merchants of just one or two specific African regions. Instead, they purchased captives at different markets along over 3,000 miles of African coastline, from Senegal in the north to Angola in the south. Certain regions supplied more captives at some times than at others, depending on population density, level of warfare, religious conflict, and environmental conditions. Conflicts in Europe that spilled onto the high seas affected when and where slavers sought cargoes. The particular market a captain visited might depend on long-standing trade relationships with a local merchant community, but it might depend also on intelligence of good trading at a given port.

Almost half of all enslaved persons coming to the British mainland came from one of two regions of Atlantic Africa, in nearly equal proportions: Senegambia, the coastal region beginning north of the Senegal River and ending five hundred miles south, in today's Guinea, and including the Cape Verde Islands; and West-Central Africa, which includes all of Africa's Atlantic coast south of Cape Lopez, 450 miles north of the Congo River. For Senegambia, cyclical drought, warfare across a broad hinterland, and late-eighteenth-century conflict associated with the spread of Islam lay behind this region's steady supply of slaves. Europeans identified men and women from this region as Mandingo (Mandinka), Fula (Fulbe), Wolof, Serer, Floop (Jola), Bambara, Balanta, or Papel.²

In West-Central Africa, ecological crises played a role in this region's large supply of slaves. Portuguese merchants dominated the southern part and carried most of their slaves to Brazil, but English slavers frequented ports north of the Congo and brought persons they identified as Kongo, Tio, and Matamba. As the eighteenth century progressed, more slaves came to North America from the Portuguese ports of Luanda and Benguela and were identified as Ovimbundu and Kwanza.

The Bight of Biafra—today's coastal southeastern Nigeria where the Igbo (Ibo) and Ibibio languages are spoken, and also today's Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and northern Gabon—was the supplier of another 19 percent. Here, high population density and commercial relationships between English shippers and local suppliers were reasons for the volume of slave exports to English America. Other regions of supply for the mainland market included the Gold Coast (roughly today's coastal Ghana), 15 percent (Ashanti, Fanti); Sierra Leone, the region including most of today's Guinea and all of Sierra Leone, 11 percent (Susu, Mandinka, Jalonka, Temne, Mende); and the Windward Coast (on both sides of Cape Palmas, between Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast), 6 percent (Vai, Gouru, Kpelle, Kru). Two percent each came from the Bight of Benin, between the Gold Coast and the Bight of Biafra, and the Indian Ocean Islands, around the Cape of Good Hope and up the eastern side of the continent.

The lands of West and West-Central Africa's Atlantic zone are among the continent's most livable. The population, if light by comparison to recent times, seems generally to have been substantial back through the centuries. At the heart of the region are the rain forests of the Guinea Coast and Congo River basin. Here, proximity to the equator keeps the land under the influence of tropical convergence zones that generate regular and often bountiful rainfall. Vegetation is lush; palms and hardwoods abound, overshadowing smaller plants that compete for sunlight filtering through the canopy of leaves. As one moves away from the equator, rainfall diminishes, as does plant life. North of the Guinea Coast, forests give way gradually to wooded savanna, the ground cover becoming less dense going northward. Across the central belt of West Africa stretch the enormous sky and seemingly endless horizons that make up the broad reaches of the Western Sudan. For British colonials, it was “miles and miles of bloody Africa.” Most of the population here sustains itself through farming and herding. Farther north still, rolling grasslands peppered with trees become drier until vegetation grows sparse. North African Arabs called this dry zone the Sahel, the southern “shore” of the Sahara Desert. It holds a small population of herders who move their animals with the rainfall.

Similarly, to the south the Congo forests blend into the southern savannas, and even into desert below Angola. Rains come to both savanna areas seasonally, through their respective summer months, when vegetation takes on new life and crops thrive. Human life is not so healthy during the rains, however, for disease-spreading mosquitoes come out in profusion, using standing water for breeding. Back through time it was in the dry season, when crops were in and lands dried out, that the savannas saw more travel, long-distance trade, and warfare.

Any broad discussion of the lives of Africans prior to their enslavement and shipment to America has to misrepresent the way things were. Individual and localized African societies differed greatly to begin with, and they changed over time. More and more, too, we are finding out how the centuries-long procurement of captives for the Atlantic trade fundamentally altered the way people lived across vast regions inland from the ocean. The peoples of West and West-Central Africa spoke several hundred mutually unintelligible languages and practiced social customs that, in some extremes, were as different from one another as they were from those of Europeans. Furthermore, the English colonies of North America imported Africans for nearly two hundred years, and African societies changed as much over this time as did the American society the slaves entered—or perhaps, because of all of the slave capturing, even more. Life in, say, Angola in 1600 was different in many ways from life in Senegal at the same time, just as it was different from life in Angola in 1800. So the task of describing the “African background” of African Americans seems even more difficult than describing life in America from 1607 to 1790.

Africa in the Era of Atlantic Trade, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Still, Africans from the slave-trading area exhibited some elements of cultural homogeneity through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as they did before and after. Most identified primarily with family and descent groups. An extended family, occupying a section of a village, lived and worked together. West Africans, with the exception of the Akan of the Gold Coast, traced descent through the male side of the family, while West-Central and Central Africans followed matrilineal descent. Most practiced polygyny, men exhibiting their wealth and status with the number of their wives and size of their families. Security lay in kinsmen, sometimes distant, upon whom one's family could rely in times of need, and in stores ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Atlantic Origins
• Chapter 2: Development of Slavery in Mainland North America
• Chapter 3: African-American Culture
• Chapter 4: The Revolutionary Era
• Epilogue
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index
• EULA