Assignment

The First

were therefore "uncivilized."

3 Black People in a White People's Country GARY B. NASH

In 1619, a year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, a Dutch ship deposited "twenty Negars" on the whaif efJamestown Colony, in what became Virginia. These were the first .!lfricans to enter colonial America, but their exact status is unknown. Like Africans subsequently imported until 1660, they were probably indentured servants whose period of servitude was temporary. After 1660,

however, most Africans who came to America were slaves, purchased through a heinous business oper­

ation , the international slave trade. By the eighteenth century, every English colony from Carolina to

Massachusetts had enacted "slave codes," bodies of law that stripped black people of all rights and re­

duced them to pieces of property, or "chattel ," with their children inheriting that status.

The troubling question is why the Africans were enslaved and white indentures were not. In the

selection that follows, Gary B. Nash , one of the leading experts on colonial America , argues that the

answer lies in a combination of racial prejudice and labor needs in early America , particularly in the

southern colonies. When faced with the problem of cultivating labor-intensive crops, Nash writes, Eng­

lish settlers "turned to the international slave trade to fill their labor needs. " That white colonists

viewed Africans as uncivilized barbarians only made it easier "to fasten chains upon them. "The Af ricans, of course, were no more barbaric than were the Native Americans. As Nash observes, the Afri­

cans had been stolen from richly complex and highly developed cultures. The English settlers, of course, knew nothing about such cultures beyond that they were neither white nor Christian and

As more and more Africans were imported to the English colonies, racial fears intensified in direct

proportion to the number of blacks in a given area. Such fears were worse in the southern colonies,

33

American Revolution.

of colonial New York City or Baltimore. Sick, starving, and frightened, they had to firid some way to endure the unendurable in a strange new land. That such Africans salvaged much of their heritage,

traniforming it into a distinctly African American heritage, was a tribute to their power "to keep on

3 BLACK PEOPLE IN A WHITE PEOPLE'S COUNTRY

where the extensive cultivation of labor-intensive crops necessitated the purchase of large numbers of slaves. In the northern colonies, as Nash point.s out, "slavery existed on a more occasional basis" be­ cause labor-intensive crops were not so widely grown there and far fewer Africans were imported. This is a crudal point. It helps explain why slavery later disappeared in the North, during and after the

In the colonial period, meanwhile, every colony in the North and South alike enacted laws that

severely regulated black people and made them slaves for life. Thus from the very outset, slavery served a twofold purpose: it was both a labor system and a means of racial control in a white people's

country. This "mass enslavement of Africans," Nash points out, only reinforced racial prejudice in a

vicious cycle. "Once institutionalized, slavery cast Africans into such lowly roles that the initial bias

against them could only be confirmed and vastly strengthened."

To provide a faller understanding of slavery in North America, Nash discusses the origins ofAfrican slavery itself and offers a graphic and painful portrait of the Atlantic slave trade, which involved "the

largest forced migration in history" and was thus "one of the most important phenomena in the history of the modern world." Greed and pro.fit kept the trade booming for four hundred years, with European

entrepreneurs reaping fortunes at the expense of millions of human beings. The captain and crew of a

slave ship, whether British, Dutch, Portuguese, or colonial American, had to be monstrously depraved

and utterly inured to human suffering in order to carry out this brutal business. One such slave trader,

Englishman John Newton, later repented, became a minister and an abolitionist, and wrote a hymn

about his salvation, "How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds," popularly known as "Amazing Grace." Grace was indeed amazing, he said, to have saved "a wretch" like him. In an inspiring and engrossing

2006film, Amazing Grace, Albert Finney plays the redemptive Newton.

The horrors of the middle passage, warns one historian, were "so revolting that a writer of the

present day hesitates to give such details to his readers." On one slaver, said an eyewitness, "400

wretched beings" were chained and "crammed into a hold 12 yards in length . . . and only 3 1I2 feet

in height." Because of the hold's "suffocating heat" and stench, the Africans panicked and in their

torment tried in vain to escape. The next morning, the crew lifted ".fifiyjour crushed and mangled

corpses up from the slave deck. "To keep the survivors in line, the crew beat and murdered other Afa­

cans. Such atrocities were commonplace on slave ships, and the captains could not have cared less, be­

cause "insurance companies bore part of the loss, and pro.fits were so high that heavy risks were

cheerfully assumed."

Driven to madness in the rat-filled, claustrophobic bowels of the slave ships, many Africans maimed

themselves or committed suicide. Others starved to death or died of some white man's disease. And

the women, too many of them, were humiliated in unspeakable ways by their white captors. lf the Africans somehow survived the Atlantic passage, they found themselves dumped irito some .fly­

infested slave pen in a port of the New World. Jtfk can imagine such a group iri chains on the wharves

keeping on."

.,

'

1 i ,

th century the Negro's life in Amer-Thus, writes historian Carl Degler, "began in the seventeen h ·

twentieth century." As Nash observes the emergence ef slavery in colonial Amer ca was one ef the

great paradoxes in American histo the building of what some thought as to. be a utopia in the

wilderness upon the backs of black men and women wrenched from their African homeland and forced into a system of abje t slavery.,, That paradox, as we shall see, would pe sist th ough the American Revolution, the early Republic, and well into the nineteenth cen

tury, causing sectional ten­

its history.

ROYAL AFRICAN COMPANY The British crown chartered

34 THE FIRST CENTURY

" · · ·

" h still besets us at the close of the. " i

·tea. With tt commenced a moral problem for all Americans w IC

sions between the North and the South thatfinally plunged America into the most destructive war in

GLOSSARY

BARRACOONS Fortified enclosures where captured slaves

waited until doctors were ready to inspect them and deem

them worthy to survive the horrendous middle passage.

Slave traders would often brand their captives on the chest

with a hot iron in these holding areas.

BLACK CODES Colonial laws that legalized and enforced

slavery, the black codes deprived Africans of all rights and

reduced them to the status of property. They eventually re­

sulted in hereditary lifetime service that passed from parent

to child; thus, in Nash's words, "slavery had been extended

to the womb."

BLACK GOLD The European expression for slaves, these

captives were in such high demand that they encouraged

warfare between neighboring African tribes. African kings

would trade their captives for iron bars, firearms, cotton

goods, gunpowder, and other desirable items.

COFFLES Slaves marched in these trains for hundreds of

INDENTURED SERVANT These individuals sig ned con­

tracts and served a fixed number of years in return for their

passage to America, food, and shelter. During the colonial era, nearly 300,000 indentured servants vo luntarily came to

. the British colonies, amounting to almost two-thirds of all European immigrants. Unlike slaves, they had legal rights in

colonial courts, and some, upon gaining their freedom, be­ came substantial landowners.

MACKRONS These were Africans whom slave traders con­

sidered too old or infirm to survive the middle passage.

They were left to die on the coast of West Africa, hundreds of m iles from their tribal families.

MIDDLE PASSAGE This trip across the Atlantic from the

coast of Africa to the New World could take up to three

months. Captives were so "tightly packed" in cargo holds

that they could not sit upright. Mortality rates avera ged 16 percent from malnourishment and disease.

this joint stock company to have the exclusive rig ht to carry miles from their point of capture to the sea. Leather thongs

bound them by the neck. Many died of thirst, hunger, dis­

ease, or pure exhaustion.

DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY Active in the international

slave trade, the Dutch West India Company brought Afri­

cans into New York and New Jersey. North of the Chesa­

peake Bay, these were the only colonies to have a sizable

slave labor population.

GON ALVEZ, ANT AM In 1440, this Portuguese sea captain

was the first European to make landfall in Africa, and a year

later he returned home with blacks whom he had kid­

slaves into the English colonies. At its prime in the 1680s, it

l ater,centurybrought in about 5,000 Africans annually. A monopoly,long after the Royal African Company lost its avera geofGreat Britain exported into the colonies a yearly

74,000 slaves.

e SEQUEIRA, RUY DO This Portuguese captai n bega

n th

. us lyprevioEurope an slave trade in 1472. Nash states that . the African trade in gold, ivory, and slaves across th

e conti-

pur-.nent represented a "reciprocal relationsh"1p betwe en

,,

chasers and sellers. napped and enslaved.

35

T he African slave trade, which began in the late fifteenth ce tury and continued for the next 400 years, 1s one of the most important

phenomena in the history of the modern world. In­ volving the largest forced migration in history, the slave trade and slavery were crucially important in building the colonial empires of Europeat1 nations and in generating the wealth that later produced the Industrial Revolution. But often overlooked in the at­ tention given to the economic importance of the slave trade and slavery is the cultural diffusion that took place when ten million Africans were brought to the Western Hemisphere. Six out of every seven persons who crossed the Atlantic to take up life in the New World in the 300 years before the American Revolution were African slaves. As a result, in most parts of the colonized terr itories slavery "defined the context within which transfer red European traditions would grow and change." As slaves, Africans were Euro­

3 BLACK PEOPLE IN A WHITE PEOPLE'S COUNTRY

Brazil and about 30,000 cultivated sugar in English Barbados; but in Virginia only 2,000 worked in the tobacco fields. Cultural interaction of Europeans and Africans did not begin in North America on a large scale until more than a century after it had begun in the southerly parts of the hemisphere. Much that oc­ curred as the two cultures met in the Iberian colonies was later repeated in the Anglo-African inteFaction; and yet the patterns of acculturation were markedly different in North and South America in the seven­ teenth and eighteenth centuries.

THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

peanized; but at the same time they Africanized the culture of Europeans in the Americas. This was an in­ evitable part of the convergence of these two broad

groups of people, who met each other an ocean away from their o riginal homelands. In addition, the slave

trade created the lines of communication for the

movement of crops, agricultural techniques, diseases,

and medical knowledge between Africa, Europe, and

the Americas.

Just as they were late in colonizing the New World,

the English lagged far behind their Spanish and Por­

tuguese competitors in making contact with the west

coast of Africa, in entering the Atlantic slave trade, and

in establishing African slaves as the backbone of the

labor force in their overseas plantations. And among

the English colonists in the New World, those on the

mainland of North America were a half centur y or

more behind those in the Caribbean in converting

.their plantation economies to slave labor. By 1 670, for

example, some 200, 000 slaves labored in Portuguese

Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, 3e, © 1992. Reprinted by permission of Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffi, New Jersey.

A half century before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, a Portuguese sea captain, Antam Gonr;alvez, made the first European landing on the west African coast south

of the Sahara. W hat he might have seen, had he been able to travel the length and breadth of Africa, was a

continent of extraordinary variation in geography and

culture. Little he might have seen would have caused

him to believe that African peoples were naturally in­

ferior or that they had failed to develop over time as

had the peoples of Europe. This notion of"backward­

ness" and cultural impoverishment was the myth per­

petuated after the slave trade had transported millions

of Africans to the Western Hemisphere. It was a myth

which served to justify the cruelties of the slave trade

and to assuage the guilt of Europeans involved in the

largest forced dislocation of people in history.

The peoples of Africa may have numbered more

than 50 million in the late fifteenth century when Europeans began making extensive contact with the

continent. They lived in widely varied ecological

zones-in vast deserts, in grasslands, and in great for­

ests and woodlands. As in Europe, most people

farmed the land and struggled to subdue the forces

of nature in order to sustain life. That the African population had increased so rapidly in the 2,000 years

before European arrival suggests the sophistication of the African agr icultural methods. Part of this skill in farming derived from skill in iron production, which

Of course, cultural development in Africa, as else­

hili societies facing the Indian Ocean after trading

36 T H E F I R S T C E N T U R Y

had begun in present-day Nigeria about 500 B.C. It was this ability to fashion iron implements that trig­

gered the new farming techniques necessary to sus­

tain larger populations. With large populations carne

greater specialization of tasks and thus additional

technical improvements. Small groups of related fam­

ilies made contact with other kinship groups and over time evolved into larger and more complicated

societies. The pattern was similar to what had oc­

curred in other parts of the world-in the Americas,

Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere-when the

"agricultural revolution" occurred.

Recent studies of "pre-contact" African history

have showed that the "culture gap" between Euro­

where in the world, proceeded at varying rates. Eco­

logical conditions had a large effect on this. W here

good soil, adequate rainfall, and abundance of miner­

als were present, as in coastalWest Africa, population

growth and cultural elaboration were relatively rapid.

Where inhospitable desert or nearly impenetrable

forest held forth, social sy stems remained small and

changed at a crawl. Contact with other cultures also

brought rapid change, whereas isolation impeded

cultural change. The Kingdom of Ghana bloomed in

western Sudan partly because of the trading contacts

with Arabs who had conquered the area in the ninth

century. Cultural change began to accelerate in Swa­ pean and Afr ican societies when the two peoples met

was not as large as previously imagined. By the time

Europeans reached the coast ofWest Africa a number

of extraordinary empires had been forged in the area.

The first, apparently, was the Kingdom of Ghana,

which embraced the irrunense territory between the

Sahara Desert and the Gulf of Guinea and from the

Niger River to the Atlantic Ocean between the fifth

and tenth centuries. Extensive urban settlement, ad­

vanced architecture, elaborate art, and a highly com­

plex political organization evolved during this time.

From the eighth to the sixteenth centuries, it was the western Sudan that supplied most of the gold for

the Western world. Invasion from the north by the

Moors weakened the Kingdom of Ghana, which in

time gave way to the Empire of Mali. At the center

of the Mali Empire was the city of Timbuktu, noted

for its extensive wealth and its Islamic university

w here a faculty as distinguished as any in Europe was gathered.

Lesser kingdoms such as the kingdoms of Kongo,

Zimbabwe, and Benin had also been in the process of

growth and cultural change for centuries before Eu­

ropeans reached Africa. T heir inhabitants were skilled

in metal working, weaving, ceramics, architecture,

and aesthetic expression. Many of their towns rivaled

European cities in size. Many conununities of West

Africa had highly complex religious r ites, well­

.organized regional trade, codes of law, and complex

political organization.

contacts were initiated with the Eastern world in the

ninth century. Thus, as a leading African historian has

put it, "the cultural history of Afr ica is . . . one of greatly unequal development among peoples who,

for definable reasons such as these, entered recogniz­

ably similar stages of institutional change at different

times."

The slave trade seems to have begun officially in 1472 when a Portuguese captain, Ruy do Sequeira,

reached the coast of Benin and was conducted to the

king's court, where he received royal permission to trade for gold, ivory, and slaves. So far as the Africans were concerned, the trade represented no stribngly new economic activity since they had long been in­

volved in regional and long-distance trade ac

their continent. This was simply the opening of con­

tacts with a new and more distant commercial part­

ner. This is important to note because often it has

been maintained that European powers raided the

African coasts for slaves, marching into the interior and kidnapping hundreds of thousands of helpless

and hapless victims. In actuality, the early slave trade involved a reciprocal relationship between European

purchasers and African sellers, with the Portuguese

monopolizing trade along the coastlands of tropical

Africa for the first century after contact was made.

Trading itself was confined to coastal strongholds

w here slaves, most of them captured in the interior

by other Africans, were sold on terms set by the

37

mates place the numbers who reached the shores of

although many million more lost their lives while being marched from the interior to the coastal trading

3 BL A CK P E O P L E I N A W H I T E P E O P L E 'S C O U N T R Y

African sellers. In return for gold, ivory, and slaves, African slave merchants received European guns, bars of iron and copper, brass pots and tankards, beads, rum and textiles. They occupied an economic role not unlike that of the Iroquois middlemen in the fur trade with Europeans.

Slavery was not a new social phenomenon for ei­ ther Europeans or Africans. For centuries African soci­ eties had been involved in an overland slave trade that

transported black slaves from West Africa across the Sa­ hara Desert to Roman Europe and the Middle East. But this was an occasional rather than a systematic trade, and it was designed to provide the trading na­ tions of the Mediterranean with soldiers, household servants, and artisans rather than mass agr icultural labor. W ithin Africa itself, a variety of unfree statuses

had also existed for centuries, but they involved per­

sonal service, often for a limited period . . . rather

than lifelong, degraded, agricultural labor. Slavery of

a similar sort had long existed in Europe, mostly as the result of Chr istians enslaving Moslems and Mos­ lems enslaving Christians during centuries of reli­ gious wars. One became a slave by being an "outsider" or an "infidel," by being captured in war, by volun­

tarily selling oneself into slavery to obtain money for one's family, or by committing certain heinous

crimes. The rights of slaves were restricted and their

opportunities for upward movement were severely

circumscribed, but they were regarded nevertheless as

members of society, enjoy ing protection under the

law and entitled to certain r ights, including educa­

tion, marriage, and parenthood. Most important, the

status of a slave was not irrevocable and was not au­

tomatically passed on to his or her children. Thus we find that slavery flourished in ancient

Greece and Rome, in the Aztec and Inca empires, in

African societies, in early modern Russia and eastern

Europe, in the Middle East, and in the Mediterranean

world. It had gradually died out in Western Europe by the fourteenth century, although the status of serf was not too different in social reality from that of the slave. It is important to note that in all these regions

W hen the African slave trade began in the second

half of the fifteenth century, it served to fill labor shortages in the economies of its European initiators and their commercial partners. Between 1450 and 1505 Portugal brought about 40,000 African slaves to Europe and the Atlantic islands-the Madeiras and Canaries. But the need for slave labor lessened in Eu­

rope as European populations themselves began to

grow beginning late in the fifteenth century. It is pos­ sible, therefore, that were it not for the colonization

of the New World the early slave trade might have

ceased after a century or more and be remembered

simply as a short-lived incident stemming from early European contacts with Africa.

W ith the discovery of the New World by Euro­

peans the course of history changed momentously.

Once Europeans found the gold and silver mines of

Mexico and Peru, and later, when they discovered a

new form of gold in the production of sugar, coffee,

and tobacco, their demand for human labor grew as­

tonishingly. At first Indians seemed to be the obvious

source of labor, and in some areas Spaniards and Por­ tuguese were able to coerce native populations into

agricultural and mining labor. But European diseases

ravaged native populations, and often it was found

that Indians, far more at home in their environment

than white colonizers, were difficult to subjugate. In­ dentured w hite labor from the mother country was

another way of meeting the demand for labor, but

this source, it soon became apparent, was far too lim­

ited. It was to Africa that colonizing Europeans ulti­

mately resorted. Formerly a new source of trade, the

continent now became transformed in the European

view into the repository of vast supplies of human

labor-"black gold." From the late fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth cen­

turies, almost four hundred years, Europeans trans­ ported Africans out of their ancestral homelands to fill the labor needs in their colonies of North and South America and the Caribbean. The most recent esti­

slavery and serfdom had nothing to do with racial

characteristics.

the New World at about ten to eleven million people,

by the vast new demand for a New World labor sup­ ply and by a reciprocally higher demand in Africa for European trade goods, especially bar iron and textiles changed the problem of obtaining slaves. Criminal and "outsiders" in sufficient number to satisfy the growing European demand in the seventeenth cen­ tury could not be found. Therefore African kings re­

kidnapping and organized violence in Africa became

Americas rose sharply in the second half of the sev­

enteenth century, European competition for trading

r ights on the West African coast grew intense. By the

end of the century monopolies for supplying Euro­

pean plantations in the New World with their ann ual

quotas of slaves became a major issue of Euro pe n

diplomacy. The Dutch were the primary victor s m

the battle for the West African slave coast. Hence, for

most of the century a major ity of slaves who were

fed into the expanding New World markets fo und

themselves crossing the Atlantic in Dutch ships. '

38 T H E F I R S T C E N T U R Y

English laborer took sugar in her tea by 1750 it wasforts or during the middle passage across the Atlantic. said ... . Even before the English arrived on the Chesapeake in

The regularization of the slave trade brought about1607 several hundred thousand slaves had been trans­ ported to the Car ibbean and South American colo­ nies of Spain and Portugal. Befure the slave trade was outlawed in the nineteenth century far more Africans than Europeans had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and ta.ken up life in the New World. Black slaves, as one eighteenth-century Englishman put it, became "the strength and the sinews of this western world."

sorted to warfare against their neighbors as a way ofOnce established on a large scale, the Atlantic slave obtaining "black gold" with whichtrade dramatically altered the pattern of slave recruit­ to trade. Euro­

ment in Africa. For about a century after Gon alvez pean guns abetted the process. Thus, the spread of brought back the first kidnapped Africans to Portugal in 1441, the slave trade was relatively slight. The slaves whom other Africans sold to Europeans were drawn from a small minority of the population and for the most part were individuals captured in occasional war or whose criminal acts had cost them their r ights of citizenship. For Europeans the African slave trade pro­ vided for modest labor -needs, just as the Black Sea slave trade had done before it was shut off by the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. Even in the New World plantations, slaves were not in great de­

mand for many decades after "discovery."

More than any thing else it was sugar that trans­

formed the African slave trade. Produced in the

Mediterranean world since the eighth century, sugar

was for centuries a costly item confined to sweeten­

ing the diet of the r ich. By the mid-1400s its popu­

larity was growing and the center of production had

shifted to the Portuguese Madeira Islands, off the

northwest coast of Africa. Here for the first time an

a part of maintaining commercial relations with Eu­ ropean powers.

In the forcible recruitment of slaves, adult males

were consistently preferred over women and children. P rimarily this represented the preference of New World plantation owners for male field laborers. But

it also rdlected the decision of vanquished African

villagers to yield up more men than women. to raid­

ing parties because women were the chief agricultur­ alists in their society and, in matrilineal and matrilocal

kinship sy stems, were too valuable to be spared. For the Europeans the slave.trade itself became an

immensely profitable enterprise. In the several centu­ ries of intensive slave trading that followed the estab­

lishment of New World sugar plantations, European

nations warred constantly for trading advantages on

the West African coast. The coastal forts, the focal

points of the trade, became key strategic targets in the

wars of empire. . . . As the demand for slaves in the

expanding European nation established an overseas

plantation society based on slave labor. From the

Madeiras the cultivation of sugar spread to Portu­

guese Brazil in the late sixteenth century and then to

the tiny specks of land dotting the Caribbean in the

first half of the seventeenth century. By this time Eu­

ropeans were developing an almost insatiable taste

for sweetness. Sugar-regarded by nutritionists today

as a "drug food"-became one of the first luxuries

that was transformed into a necessary item in the

diets of the masses of Europe.The w ife of the poorest

3 39BL A C K P E 0 P L E I N A W H I T E p E 0 P L E ' S C 0 U N T Fl Y

Once they arrived in the New i¥orld, slave5 were auctioned to the highest bidder. Families were often divided, and

slaves were stripp ed of their clothes to show how little whipping they required. Having been poked and prodded,

one captive compared the horrid experience to that of a horse being examined by a jockey.

Not until the last third of the seventeenth cen­ the Royal African Company's monopoly was bro­ tury were the English of any importance in the ken due to the pressure on Parliament by individual

slave trade. Major English attempts to break into merchants who demanded their rights as English­ the profitable trade began only in 1663, when men to participate in the lucrative trade. Thrown

Charles II, recently restored to the English throne, open to indiv idual entrepreneurs, the English slave

granted a charter to the Royal Adventurers to Af­ trade grew enor mously. In the 1680s the Royal Af­

rica, a joint-stock company headed by the king's r ican Company had transported about 5,000 to

brother, the Duke of York. Superseded by the Royal 6,000 slaves annually (though interlopers brought

African Company in 1672, these companies en­ in thousands more). In the first decade of free trade

joyed the exclusive r ight to car ry slaves to Eng­ the annual average rose above 20,000. English in­

land's overseas plantations. For thirty -four years volvement in the trade increased for the remainder

a fter 1663 each of the slaves they brought across of the eighteenth century until by the 1790s Eng­

the Atlantic bore the brand "DY" for the Duke of land had become the foremost slave-trading nation

York, who himself became king in 1685. In 1698 in Europe.

.fO THE FIRS T CENTURY

CAPTURE AND TRANSPORT

OF SLAVES

No accounts of the initial enslavement of Africans,

no matter how vivid, can quite convey the pain and demoralization that must have accompanied the

forced march to the west coast of Africa and the sub­

sequent loading aboard ships of those who had fallen

captive to the African suppliers of the European slave

traders. As the demand for African slaves doubled and

redoubled in the eighteenth century, the hinterlands

of western and central Sudan were invaded again and

again by the armies and agents of both coastal and

interior kings. Perhaps 75 percent of the slaves trans­ ported to English North America came from the part

of western Africa that lies between the Senegal and

Niger rivers and the Gulf of Biafra, and most of the

others were enslaved in Angola on the west coast of

Central Africa. Slaving activities in these areas were

responsible for considerable depopulation of the re­

gion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Once captured, slaves were marched to the sea in

"coffies," or trains. A Scotsman, Mungo Park, de­

scribed the coffie he marched with for 550 miles through Gambia at the end of the eighteenth cen­

tury. It consisted of 73 men, women, and children tied together by the neck with leather thongs. Several

captives attempted to commit suicide by eating clay,

another was abandoned after being badly stung by

bees; still others died of exhaustion and hunger. After

two months the coffie reached the coast, many of its

members phy sically depleted by thirst, hunger, and

exposure, where they were herded into fortified en­

closures called barracoons.

The anger, bewilder ment, and desolation that ac­

companied the forced march, the first leg of the

5, 000-rnile journey to the New World, was only in­

creased by the actual transfer of slaves to European

ship captains, who carried their human cargo in

small wooden ships to the Americas. "As the slaves

come down to Fida from the inland country," wrote

one European trader i n the late seventeenth

century,

"they are put into a booth or prison, built for that purpose,

near the beach ... and when the Europeans are to receive

them, they are brought out into a large plain, where the

(ships'] surgeons examine ever y part of every one of them,

to the smallest member, men and women being all stark naked. Such as are allowed good and sound, are set on one

side, and the others by themselves; which slaves so rejected

are called Mackrons, being above 35 years of age, or defec­ tive in their lips, eyes, or teeth, or grown grey; or that have

the venereal disease, or any other imperfection:'

Such dehumanizing treatment was part of the

commercial process by which "merchandise" was

selected and bargained for. But it was also part of

the psy chological process that attempted to strip

away self-respect and self-identity from the Africans.

The middle passage from the African coast to the New "WOrld was

incredibly brutal. White slave traders preferred "tight packing" in

cramped cargo holds filled with foul smells and poisonous air.

When the weather permitted, the traders allowed the slaves to

come on deck for meals and exerdse.

41 3 B L A C K P E 0 P L E I N A W H I T E P E 0 P L E ' S C 0 U N T R Y

Cruelty followed cruelty. After purchase, each slave was branded with a hot iron signifying the company, whether Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, or Dutch, that had purchased him or her. Thus were member s of "preliterate" societies first introduced to

the alphabetic symbols of "advanced" cultures. "The branded slaves," one account related, "are returned to their former booths" where they were imprisoned until a full human cargo could be assembled. The next psychological wrench came with the ferrying of slaves, in large canoes, to the waiting ships at anchor

in the harbor. An English captain described the des­ peration of slaves who were about to lose touch with

their ancestral land and embark upon a vast ocean

that many had never previously seen.

"The Negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their own

country, that they have often leap'd out of the canoes, boat

and ship, into the sea, and kept under water till they were

drowned, to avoid being taken up and saved by our boats,

which pursued them; they having a more dreadful appre­

hension ofBarbadoes than we can have of hell."

Part of this fear was the common belief that on the

other side of the ocean Africans would be eaten by

the white savages.

The kind of fear that inspired suicide while still on

African soil was prevalent as well on the second leg of

the voyage--the "middle passage" from the West Afri­

can coast to the New World. Conditions aboard ship

were miserable, although it was to the advantage of the

ship captains to deliver as many slaves as possible on the

other side of the Atlantic. The preservation rather than

the destruction of life was the main object, but brutal­

ity was sy stematic, both in pitching overboard any slaves

who fell sick on the voyage and in punishing offenders

with ahnost sadistic intensity as a way of creating a cli­

mate of fear that would stifle insurrectionist tendencies.

John Atkins, aboard an English slaver in 1721, described

how the captain " whipped and scarified" several plot­

ters of rebellion and sentenced others "to cruel deaths,

making them first eat the Heart and Liver of one of

them killed. The Woman he hoisted up by the thumbs,

whipp 'd and slashed her with Knives, before the other

slaves, till she died." Though the naval architects of Europe competed to produce the most efficient ships for carrying human cargoes to the New World, the mortality on board, for both black slaves below decks and white sailors above, was extremely high, averaging between 10 and 20 percent on each voyage.

That Africans frequently attempted suicide and mutiny during the ocean crossing provides ev idence that even the extraordinary force used in capturing, branding, selling, and transporting them from one

continent to another was not enough to make the captives submit tamely to their fate. An eighteenth­ century historian of slavery, attempting to justify the

terroristic devices employed by slavers, argued that

"the many acts of violence they (the slaves] have com­

mitted by murdering whole crews and destroying

ships when they had it in their power to do so have made these rigors wholly chargeable on their own

bloody and malicious disposition which calls for the

same confinement as if they were wolves or wild

boars." The moder n reader can detect in this charac­

terization of enslaved Afr icans clear proof that submis­ siveness was not a trait of those who were forcibly

carried to the New World. So great was this resistance

that special techniques of torture had to be devised to

cope with the thousands of slaves who were deter­

mined to starve themselves to death on the middle

passage rather than reach the New World in chains.

Br utal whippings and hot coals applied to the lips

were frequently used to open the mouths of recalci­

trant slaves. W hen this did not suffice, a special instr u­

ment, the speculum oris, or mouth opener, was

employed to wrench apart the jaws of a resistant slave.

Taking into consideration the mortality involved

in the capture, the forced march to the coast, and the

middle passage, probably not more than one in t wo

captured Africans lived to see the New W orld. Many

of those who did must have been psychologically

numbed as well as physically depleted by the experi­

ence. But one further step remained in the process of

enslavement-the auctioning to a New World master

and transportation to his place of residence. All in all, the relocation of any African brought westward across

the Atlantic may have averaged about six months

lation and probably a majority of the labor force. A

bound laborers and 4,657 black slaves. Five years later

the slave population had almost doubled. Within an­

other generation white indentured servants were de­

clining rapidly in number, and in all the Southern

colonies African slaves made up the backbone of the

agr icultural work force. "These two words, Negro

and slave," wrote one Virginian, had "by cust om

grown Homogenous and Convertible."

42 TH E F I R S T C E N TU R Y

from the time of capture to the time of arrival at the

plantation of a European slave master. During this

protracted personal crisis, the slave was completely

cut off fi:om most that was familiar-family, wider

kinship relationships, conununity life, and other

forms of social and psy chological secur ity. Still facing these victims of the European demand for cheap labor was adaptation to a new phy sical environment, a new language, new work routines, and, n1ost im­

portant, a life in which bondage for themselves and their offipring was unending.

TuE DEVELOPMENT OF SLAVERY IN THE ENGLISH COLONIES

Even though they were long familiar with Spanish,

Dutch, and Portuguese use of African slave labor,

English colonists did not turn immediately to Africa

to solve the problem of cultivating labor-intensive

crops. When they did, it could have caused little sur­

prise, for in enslaving Africans the English were

merely copying their European rivals in attempting

to fill the colonial labor gap. No doubt the stereotype

of Africans as uncivilized made it easier for the Eng­

lish to fasten chains upon them. But the central fact

remains that the English were in the New World, like

the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French, to make

a fortune as well as to build religious and political

havens. Given the long hostility they had borne to­

ward Indians and their experience in enslaving them,

any scruples the English might have had about en­

indentured servant and not the African slave who la­ bored in the tobacco fields. Moreover, those blacks who were imported before about 1660 were held in various degrees of servitude, most for limited periods and a few for life.

The transformation of the labor force in the Southern colonies; from one in which many white and a rel atively small number of black indentured ser vants labored together to one in w hich black slaves served for a lifetime and composed the bulk of un­ free labor, came only in the last third of the seven­ teenth century in Virginia and Maryland and in the first third of the eighteenth century in North Caro­ lina and South Carolina. The reasons for this shift to a slave-based agricultural economy in the South ai:e twofold. First, English entr y into the African slave trade gave the Southern planter an opportunity to

purchase slaves more readily and more cheaply than

before. Cheap labor was what every tobacco or rice

planter sought, and when the price of slave labor

dipped below that of indentured labor, the demand for black slaves increased. Also, the supply of white ser vants from England began to dr y up in the late seventeenth century, and those who did cross the At­ lantic were spread among a growing number of colo­ nies. Thus, in the late seventeenth centur y the number of Africans imported into the Chesapeake colonies began to grow and the flow of white inden­ tured servants diminished to a trickle. As late as 1671

slaves made up less than 5 percent of Virginia's popu­

lation and were outnumbered at least three to one by

white indentured servants. In Mar yland the situation

was much the same. But within a generation, by

about 1700, they represented one-fifth of the popu­

slaving Africans quickly dissipated .... whiteMaryland census of 1707 tabulated 3,003It is not surpr ising, then, that the North American

colonists turned to the inter national slave trade to fill

their labor needs. Africans were simply the most

available people in the world for those seeking a

bound labor force and possessed of the power to ob­

tain it. W hat is surprising, i n fact, is that the North

American colonists did not turn to slavery more

quickly than they did. For more than a half century

in Virginia and Maryland it was primarily the white

43 3 B L A C K P E O P L E I N A W H I T E P E O P L E ' S C O U N T R Y

To the north, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Dela­

ware, where English colonists had settled only in the

last third of the seventeenth century, slavery existed on

a more occasional basis, since labor-intensive crops

were not as extensively grown in these areas and the

cold winters brought fanning to a halt. New York was

an exception and shows how a cultural preference

could alter labor patterns that were usually determined

by ecological factors. During the period before 1 664

when the colony was Dutch, slaveholding had been

practiced extensively, encouraged in part by the Dutch

West India Company, one of the chief international

suppliers of slaves. The population of New York re­

mained largely Dutch for the remainder of the century,

and the English who slowly filtered in saw no reason

not to imitate Dutch slave owners. Thus New York be­

came the largest importer of slaves north of Maryland.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the areas of original

settlement around New York and Albany remained

slaveholding societies with about 20 percent of the

population composed of slaves and 30 to 40 percent of

the white householders owning human property.

As the number of slaves increased, legal codes for

strictly controlling their activities were fashioned in

each of the colonies. To a large extent these "black

codes" were borrowed from the law books of the

English West Indies. Bit by bit they deprived the Af­

rican immigrant-and a small number of Indian

slaves as well-of rights enj oyed by others in the so­

ciety, including indentured servants. Gradually they

reduced the slave, in the eyes of society and the law,

from a human being to a piece of chattel property. In

this process of dehumanization nothing was more

important than the practice of hereditary life-time

service. Once servitude became perpetual, relieved

only by death, then the stripping away of all other

rights followed as a matter of course. When the con­

dition of the slave parent was passed on to the child,

then slavery had been extended to the womb. At that

point the institution became totally fixed so far as the

slave was concerned.

Thus, with the passage of time, Africans in North

America had to adapt to a more and more circum.

scribed world. Earlier in the seventeenth century they

had been treated much as indentured servants, bound

to labor for a specified period of years but thereafter

free to work for themselves, hire out their labor, buy

land, move as they pleased, and, if they wished, hold

slaves themselves. But, by the 1640s, Virginia was for­ bidding blacks the use of firearms. In the 1 660s mar­

riages between white women and black slaves were

being described as "shameful Matches" and "the Dis­

grace of our Nation"; during the next few decades

interracial fornication became subject to unusually se­

vere pu nishment and interracial marriage was banned.

These discriminatory steps were slight, however, in

comparison with the stripping away of rights that

began toward the end of the century. In rapid succes­

sion slaves lost their right to testify before a court; to

engage in any kind of commercial ac tivity, either as

buyer or seller; to hold property; to participate in the

political process; to congregate in public places with

more than two or three of their fellows; to travel

without permission; and to engage in legal marriage

or parenthood. In some colonies legislatures even

prohibited the right to education and religion, for

they thought these might encourage the germ of

freedom in slaves. More and more steps were taken

to contain them tightly in a legal system that made

no allowance for their education, welfare, or future

advancement. The restraints on the slave owner's free­

dom to deal with slaves in any way he or she saw £it

were gradually cast away. Early in the eighteenth c en­

tury many colonies passed laws forbidding the manu­

mission of slaves by individual owners. This was a step

designed to squelch the strivings of slaves for free­

dom and to discourage those who had been freed

from helping fellow Africans to gain their liberty.

The movement to annul all the slave's rights had both pragmatic and psychological dimensions. The

greater the proportion of slaves in the population, the

greater the danger to white society, for every colonist

knew that when he purchased a man or woman in

chains he had bought a potential insurrectionist. The

larger the specter of Wack revolt, the greater the ef­ fort of white society to neutralize it by further re­ stricting the rights and activities of slaves. Thus, following a black revolt in 1 7 1 2 that took the lives of nine whites and wounded others, the New York leg.,. islature passed a slave code that rivaled those of the

5 Why was a slave-based economy less appealing to

the English settlements to the north? What made

New Yo rk an exception to that general pattern?

6 What was "one of the great paradoxes in Ame rican

history"? Why does Nash believe that slavery and ra­

cial prej udice influenced each other? What im plica­

tions does his conclusion have for twenty-first-ce ntury

44 T H E F I R S T C E N T U R Y

Southern colonies. Throughout the Southern colo­ nies the obsessive fear of slave insurrection ushered in institutionalized violence as the means of ensuring

social stability. Allied to this need for greater and

greater control was the psychological compulsion to

dehumanize slaves by taking from them the rights

that connoted their humanity. It was far easier to ra­

tionalize the merciless exploitation of those who had

been defined by law as something less than human.

"The planters," wrote an Englishman in eighteenth­

century Jamaica, "do not want to be told that their

Negroes are human creatures. If they believe them to

be of human kind, they cannot regard them . . . as no

better than dogs or horses."

Thus occurred one of the great paradoxes in

American history-the building of what some

thought was to be a utopia in the wilderness upon

the backs of black men and women wrenched from

their African homeland and forced into a system of

abject slavery. America was imagined as a liberating

and regenerating force, it has been pointed out, but

became the scene of a " grotesque inconsistency." In

the land heralded for freedom and individual oppor­

tunity, the practice of slavery, unknown for centuries

in the mother country, was reinstituted. Following

other parts of the New World, North America be­

came the scene of "a disturbing retrogression from

the course of historical progress."

The mass enslavement of Africans profoundly af­

fected white racial prejudice. Once institutionalized,

slavery cast Africans into such lowly roles that the

initial bias against them could only be confirmed and

vastly strengthened. Initially unfavorable impressions

of Africans had coincided with labor needs to bring

about their mass enslavement. But it required slavery

itself to harden the negative racial feelings into a deep

and almost unshakable prej udice that continued to

grow for centuries. The colonizers had devised a

labor system that kept the African in the Americas at

the bottom of the social and economic pyramid. Ir­

revo cably caught in the web of perpetual servitude,

the slave was allowed no further opportunity to prove

the white stereotype wrong. Socially and legally

defined as less than people, kept in a degraded and

debased position, virtually without power in their

relationships with white society, [African Americans) became a truly servile, ignoble, degraded people in

the eyes of the Europeans. This was used as further

reason to keep them in slavery, for it was argued that

they were worth nothing better and were incapable

of occupying any higher role. In this long evolution

of racial attitudes in America, nothing was of greater

importance than the enslavement of Africans.

Q U EST IONS TO CONSI D E R

1 Were you surprised to learn that "six out of every

seven persons who crossed the Atlantic to take up

life in the New World in the 300 years before the

American Revolution were African slaves"? What

impact did this forced migration have on the cul­

tures of transplanted Europeans and Africans? De­

scribe the culture of "pre-contact" Africa and

compare it to Europ e.

2 What impact did the discovery of the New World

have on the African slave trade? What were the diffi­

culties associated with a labor force that consisted of

Indians or white indentured servants? Why would

Nash state that "more than anything else it was sugar

that transformed the African slave trade"?

3 Imagine that you are an African en route to the

New World. Describe the physical and psychological

trauma you face as an unwilling victim of the slave

trade. What was the middle passage? What was the

fate of those slaves who attempted to rebel against

their captors?

4 How did English colonists become familiar with the African slave trade? What factors motivated them

to transform their agricultural labor force from in­

dentured servants to slaves?

America?