URGENT ASSIGNMENT

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The Settling of Virginia: Slavery In Colonial America The Settling of Virginia: The Development of a Tobacco Economy and the Arrival of the

Colony’s First Africans The English failed in their first attempt to establish a colony in 1585 on Roanoke Island, one of the barrier

islands off what would become North Carolina. They left little more than terrain named Virginia for the virgin

Queen Elizabeth the First. Twenty-two years later, in 1607 they established a settlement they called,

Jamestown, further north along the Atlantic coast at the confluence of the James River and the mouth of the

Chesapeake Bay.

The Powhatan Confederacy of Native Americans populated the land surrounding the Chesapeake and from the

start the natives resisted the invading English colonists. In time, Native Americans made friendly gestures to the

settlers such as trading foods and introducing the English to tobacco. While the English offered the Native

Americans friendship, they also brought them decimating diseases, occupied their territory, and sought to

enslave or kill them. When the first Africans arrived in 1619, the colony was still under intermittent Indian

attacks.

The pressing need for laborers shaped the Virginia Colony from the very beginning. More than half of the first

104 Jamestown colonists were gentlemen, scholars, artisans, and tradesmen. There were no laborers or yeomen

farmers among the original settlers, people whose skills would have been invaluable in creating a foothold in

the wilderness. (3)

Colliding Cultures Little improved over the next several years. By 1616, 80 percent of all English immigrants that arrived in

Jamestown had perished. England’s first American colony was a catastrophe. The colony was reorganized, and

in 1614 the marriage of Pocahontas, the daughter of Chief Powhatan, to John Rolfe eased relations with the

Powhatan, though the colony still limped along as a starving, commercially disastrous tragedy. The colonists

were unable to find any profitable commodities remained dependent upon the Indians and sporadic shipments

from England for food. But then tobacco saved Jamestown.

By the time King James I described tobacco as a “noxious weed,… loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose,

harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs,” it had already taken Europe by storm. In 1616 John Rolfe

crossed tobacco strains from Trinidad and Guiana and planted Virginia’s first tobacco crop. In 1617 the colony

sent its first cargo of tobacco back to England. The “noxious weed,” a native of the New World, fetched a high

price in Europe and the tobacco boom began in Virginia and then later spread to Maryland. Within fifteen years

American colonists were exporting over 500,000 pounds of tobacco per year. Within forty, they were exporting

fifteen million.

Tobacco changed everything. It saved Virginia from ruin, incentivized further colonization, and laid the

groundwork for what would become the United States. With a new market open, Virginia drew not only

merchants and traders, but also settlers. Colonists came in droves. They were mostly young, mostly male, and

mostly indentured servants who signed contracts called indentures that bonded them to employers for a period

of years in return for passage across the ocean. But even the rough terms of servitude were no match for the

promise of land and potential profits that beckoned English farmers. But still there were not enough of them.

Tobacco was a labor-intensive crop and ambitious planters, with seemingly limitless land before them, lacked

only laborers to escalate their wealth and status. The colony’s great labor vacuum inspired the creation of the

“headright policy” in 1618: any person who migrated to Virginia would automatically receive 50 acres of land

and any immigrant whose passage they paid would entitle them to 50 acres more.

In 1619 the Virginia Company established the House of Burgesses, a limited representative body composed of

white landowners that first met in Jamestown. That same year, a Dutch slave ship sold 20 Africans to the

Virginia colonists. Southern slavery was born. (2)

The First Africans in Jamestown The Africans’ arrival would not only change the course of Virginia history but the course of what would

become the United States of America (See Figure 3-1). There were both men and women in this first group of

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Africans. Three or four days later, a second ship arrived. One

additional African woman disembarked in Virginia. (Travels

and Works of Captain John Smith [1910] 1967:541 as cited in

Russell [1913] 1969:22 ftn.21).

The first Africans to arrive in Jamestown were welcome

additions to the labor force. They were needed for the tasks of

opening the wilderness, clearing land, and building settlements

around the Chesapeake Bay. The first Africans, as few as they

were, fulfilled a sorely needed and relatively empty labor niche

in Virginia society. They and the African immigrants that

followed also served another equally important purpose. Under

the head-right system, they enabled the growth of a new

landowning middle class located socially between the

gentleman who had been granted the Virginia Company land

by the Crown and the laboring class of indentured servants and

slaves who worked the colony’s expanding tobacco lands (See

Figure 3-2).

Nine months after the arrival of the first Africans, the Census

of March 1620 listed 892 English colonists living in Virginia,

males outnumbering females, seven to one. Also present were

32 Africans, 15 men and 17 women, a more equal sex

distribution that lent it to family formation. (Ferrar Papers

1509–1790 as cited in McCartney 2000 Vol. I: 52).

Illustration titled “Landing Negroes at Jamestown from Dutch

man-of-war, 1619”; signed H. Pyle in lower

left-hand cornerFigure 3-1

– AfricansatJamestown1619 by Howard Pyle

is in the Public Domain .Illustration from

1670 showing African slaves curing and drying

tobacco in the Virginia colony.Figure 3-2

— 1670 Virginia tobacco slaves by Unknown

is in the Public Domain .

Most of the Africans who arrived in

Jamestown in August 1619, remain virtually

anonymous. There were three Negro men and

two Negro women listed later as servants

living in the Yeardley Household. Angelo, a Negro woman who disembarked from the Treasurer three or four

days after the first group became a member of the Captain William Pierce household (Hotten 1874 as cited in

McCartney 2000:174). Antoney, Negro and Isabell, Negro arrived in 1621 with a newborn son they

immediately had baptized. Although these people and the other first African settlers are mostly lost to history,

the act of baptizing their son allows us a small window into the cultural patterns and beliefs of these earliest

African in America (Russell [1913] 1969:24 ftn.34).

Nearly three quarters of the Africans disembarking in the lower-Chesapeake (York and Upper James Basin)

came from more southerly parts of Africa from the Bight of Biafra (Present day eastern Nigeria) and West

Central Africa, then called Kongo and Angola. The inheritance practices of the Virginia gentry, especially those

in York and Rappahannock districts, perpetuated the concentration of enslaved African people who had

common cultural characteristics. The resulting ethnic concentration of enslaved communities originally from

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West Central Africa and the Bight of Biafra in these regions facilitated continuity of family and kinship

networks, settlement patterns, and intergenerational transmission of African customs and languages.

Among the Africans who came, were “Antonio a Negro” in 1621 aboard the James and in 1622 the Margaret

and John brought “Mary a Negro Woman (Hotten 1874 as cited in Russell [1913] 1969:24 ftn.34).” Once in

Jamestown, Mary was taken to Bennett’s Welcome Plantation. There she met Antonio, one of only five

survivors of a recent Tidewater Indian attack that had killed 350 colonists in a single morning. Their meeting

was as fortuitous as Antonio’s survival of the Indian attack.

When Antonio appears in the 1625 muster of Bennett’s Welcome with the anglicized name Anthony Johnson,

Mary appears too as the only woman living at Bennett’s plantation. Sometime after 1625, Mary and Anthony

Johnson married. Once indentured servants, they were now free and owned their own land on Virginia’s Eastern

Shore. They soon acquired their own servants and even slaves. In 1655, Johnson won a court ruling allowing

him to keep a black man named John Casar as an indentured servant despite Casar’s contention that Johnson

kept him as a slave (See Figure 3-3).

Image shows a handwritten 1655 court ruling in favor of Anthony

Johnson and who was accused of keeping one of his servants as a

slave. The court allowed him to continue to keep a black man,

named John Casar, as an indentured servant.Figure 3-3 — Court

Ruling on Anthony Johnson and His Servant by Northampton

County, VA Deeds, Will, etc. is in the Public Domain .

The freedom Johnson and his wife maintained, as well as their

acquisition of their own land and servants and, sometimes, slaves,

provides an example of the fluidity of social and race relations in

Virginia’s early decades. In the ensuing years and decades, as the

colony’s tobacco economy expanded, requiring more and more

labor, legislators would pass new laws restricting black freedom

and increasingly defining black people as slaves. A series of new

laws passed in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century in

Virginia and Maryland would slowly but surely chip away at

freedom and autonomy black people like Anthony Johnson and his

wife, Mary, experienced in the early and middle seventeenth

before all but disappearing. (3)

The Peopling of Maryland Colony Within twenty years following the settlement of Jamestown,

Virginia, the Calvert family obtained a charter from King Charles I

for land along the Chesapeake north of the Potomac River. The

colony was named in honor of the king’s consort, Henrietta Maria. King Charles I was deeply concerned about

the presence of the Dutch in North America and decided to establish Maryland as a buffer between Virginia and

the Dutch controlled New Netherlands colony in what is today the state of New York.

In the 1660s, less than 25% of Maryland’s bound laborers were enslaved Africans. By 1680 the number had

increased to 33% and by the early 1700s, three quarters of laborers were enslaved Africans. About 300 arrived

each year between 1695 and 1708. During this time, at least half of Maryland’s enslaved population lived in

Calvert, Charles, Prince George’s, and St. Mary’s counties. The others lived in Annapolis and Baltimore.

From the beginning, the Maryland population was religiously, socially and racially diverse. Unlike the

Virginians, the Maryland colonists brought Africans with them. At least two men of African descent were

aboard the Ark and the Dove , ships that brought Leonard Calvert, son of George Calvert, first Lord of

Baltimore, up the Chesapeake Bay in 1634. One of these first African Marylanders was Mathias de Sousa. A

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passenger on the Ark , De Sousa was of African and Portuguese descent and, like the Calvert family, he was a

Catholic.

Maryland never experienced protracted Indian warfare or a “starving time” like its neighbor Virginia. Maryland

was able to trade with Virginia for needed items and the Calvert family personally supported the settlers’ early

financial needs. However, like Virginia, Maryland suffered from a labor shortage. In order to stimulate

immigration, in 1640 Maryland adopted the head-right system that Virginia had instituted earlier.

While interested in establishing a refuge for Catholics who were facing increasing persecution in Anglican

England, the Calverts were also interested in creating profitable estates. To this end, they encouraged the

importation of Africans and to avoid trouble with the British government, they encouraged Protestant

immigration.

Indentured laborers, mostly white, dominated the Maryland workforce throughout the seventeenth century. As

the laws infringing upon the rights and status of servitude for Africans grew more stringent in Virginia in the

late seventeenth century, free Africans from Virginia, like Anthony and Mary Johnson and their family,

migrated to Maryland. Enslavement was not absent in seventeenth century Maryland but it was not the principal

form of servitude until the early eighteenth century (Yentsch 1994).

As the seventeenth century closed there were far fewer enslaved Africans in Maryland than in Virginia. In the

four counties along the lower Western shore of Maryland, there were only 100 enslaved Africans in 1658, about

3% of the population. By 1710, their numbers had increased to 3500 making up about 24% of the population,

most were still “country-born,” that is born in Africa, and most were men. Between 1700 and 1780, new

generations of African people born in the colony expanded the enslaved population (Menard 1975). (3)

Tightening the Bonds of Slavery Tightening the Bonds of Slavery In the early years of slavery, especially in Virginia and Maryland, the distinction between indentured servants

and slaves was initially unclear. In 1643, however, a law was passed in Virginia that made African women

“tithable.” This, in effect, associated African women’s work with difficult agricultural labor. There was no

similar tax levied on white women; the law was an attempt to distinguish white from African women. The

English ideal was to have enough hired hands and servants working on a farm so that wives and daughters did

not have to partake in manual labor. Instead, white women were expected to labor in dairy sheds, small gardens,

and kitchens. Of course, due to the labor shortage in early America, white women did participate in field labor.

But this idealized gendered division of labor contributed to the English conceiving of themselves as better than

other groups who did not divide labor in this fashion, including the West Africans arriving in slave ships to the

colonies. For many white colonists, the association of a gendered division of labor with Englishness provided a

further justification for the enslavement and subordination of Africans. (2)

Because of legislation in both Maryland and Virginia, life for those enslaved changed drastically in the 1660’s.

As European servants became scarce and expensive, African labor came to dominate the labor force.

Legislation slowly sealed the fate of African immigrants and their descendants removing opportunities for

freedom and advancement. Laws that made slavery hereditable came to pass in Virginia in 1662 and in

Maryland in 1663. (3)

Virginia law’s, for example, stated that an enslaved woman’s children inherited the “condition” of their mother.

This economic strategy on the part of planters created a legal system in which all children born to slave women

would be slaves for life, whether the father was white or black, enslaved or free. These new laws also gave legal

sanction to the enslavement of people of African descent for life. The permanent deprivation of freedom and the

separate legal status of enslaved Africans facilitated the maintenance of strict racial barriers. Skin color became

more than superficial difference; it became the marker of a transcendent, all-encompassing division between

two distinct peoples, two races, white and black. (2)

The transformation of the “Negro” servant into the “Negro” slave was completed with the Virginia General

Assembly passage of the Slave Codes of 1705 . Thus, as the eighteenth century opened, most Africans and their

American-born descendants lived and worked as slaves growing tobacco on “quarters” or “plantations” in rural,

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lower Chesapeake. They eventually improved their lives and by the 1720’s, there were enough American-born

Africans in Maryland to create their own African-American culture.

Inventories taken in Calvert, Charles, Prince George’s and St. Mary’s counties Maryland between 1658

and1710 found the slave population grew at an extraordinary rate increasing from about 100 enslaved people or

3% of the total counties’ population in 1658 to over 3,500 people, composing 24% of the region’s population in

1710. Almost all of these enslaved adults were African immigrants (Menard 1975:30–31). Within sixty-five

years, almost all enslaved adults would be American-born, or as referred to here, African-Americans. (3)

Slave Life in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake Throughout the eighteenth century, most Africans came to the upper Chesapeake from two West African coast

regions near what is today the nations of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Ghana. (Walsh 1997:6). The

continued importation of Africans from the same areas throughout the eighteenth century probably accounts for

the fact that along with people born in African, many Maryland-born people of African descent continued to use

African naming patterns. For example, a Maryland plantation’s property inventory from 1734 lists a six-month-

old child named Cusey, an African name. Cubit, Nom, Mingo or Tydoe are other African names found in the

inventory. In other cases, Africans had English names that sounded like African names, for example: Jenny for

Heminah, Patty for Pattoe or Sam for Samba. The Dulaney family’s plantation inventories from 1720 to 1740

also included enslaved people with the African names: Toader, Abuer, Jam, Ockery, Hann, Southey, Cuffey,

and Sango. (Yentsch 1994).

Most eighteenth-century Chesapeake Africans, and their native-born descendants, lived and worked as slaves

growing tobacco on “quarters” or “plantations” in the eastern part of Virginia, although some were “industrial

slaves” working at iron forges and others were hired out to work in gristmills and other industries. As plantation

sizes increased, 40% or more of enslaved people lived in quarters away from the home plantation and the slave

owner’s direct supervision. On the largest plantations people lived in small villages on “quarters” of the

plantation holdings (See Figure 3-4). An enslaved man was often responsible for the work in the quarter that

was designated by his name, such as “Mingo’s Quarter.” Relatively few enslaved people lived in urban areas

with the slave owner’s family.

By the last decades of the eighteenth century, 44% of the 46,547 enslaved people in the Chesapeake region

lived in groups of more than 20 people in ten Tidewater counties: Anne Arundel, Prince George’s, St. Mary’s in

Maryland and Essex, Gloucester, Lancaster, Middlesex, James City, Warwick, Charles City and York in

Virginia. Another 34,000 enslaved people lived in similar sized groups on quarters or plantations in the

Piedmont area of Virginia. (Kulikoff 1986:338).

Even though those in Maryland were more isolated and with limited social contact as compared to Virginian

Africans, in both locales they formed families that slave owners recognized and recorded as family units in

inventories (Menard 1975:33–37). Family and community formation was compromised from 1710 to 1730, the

period of heaviest African immigration to the Chesapeake. During this time, African or “country-born” men, as

they were called, competed with “native born” men for wives. Disproportionate sex ratios, resulting from the

importation of greater numbers of African men than women, fostered internal conflicts and competition

between African and African American men. In 1712, one African American complained “his country-men had

poysened [sic] him for his wife.” Another killed himself because he could not have more than one wife

(Kulikoff 1986:334). At Carter’s Grove plantation in 1733, “country-born” men lived in sex-segregated

barracks. “Seasoned immigrants,” as one historian refers to them, lived in conjugal units but without children,

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while native-born African Americans lived as families. These were optimal conditions. Native-born women at

Carter’s Grove preferred native-born men as husbands, limiting their opportunities for marriage.

A photograph from the 1930s showing an old slave

quarter.Figure 3-4 — Old Quarters, Wisconsin Avenue &

State Route 193, Bethesda, Montgomery County, MD by

Thomas Waterman has no known copyright restriction.

Newly enslaved African-born women often waited two or

three years before taking a husband (Kulikoff 1986). These

personal preferences impeded formation of families.

Some families were polygamous, a sanctioned form of

marriage in West Africa. Fictive kin families were formed

of children sold onto a plantation community or left behind

when their parents were sold or sent off to work in a far

quarter of the plantation. Many enslaved people also

participated in “abroad marriages,” that is they were married

to someone on another plantation or in another city.

(Chambers 1996:121).

From 1736 to the end of the colonial period, kinship ties

increasingly figured into enslaved people’s decisions to run

away, where they would run and with whom they would flee

slavery. People ran away to their kin in other parts of the

Chesapeake. The texts of some newspaper advertisements

for runaways support the contention that knowledge

Africans gained through travel must have been

communicated throughout the African community and used

to facilitate running away to distant places. In September

1776, James Scott, Jr. who lived in Fauquier County, Virginia, advertised in the Virginia Gazette for a woman

named Winney who in the past, as a runaway, traveled as far as “Maryland, near Port Tobacco, where she

passed for a free woman, and hired herself in that neighbourhood [sic] several months.”

By the end of the eighteenth century, the Chesapeake landscape was a network of large and small plantations.

Although many planters on Maryland’s western shore still held fewer than a dozen enslaved people, as the

colonial period came to a close, African American family and kin-based social networks spread across several

counties. (3)

Africans in the Low Country Africans in the Low Country Unlike the Virginia and Maryland colonies, the Carolina colony essentially imported a preexisting slave system

from the Caribbean in the late seventeenth century. King Charles II of England chartered the Carolina colony in

1663 and it quickly developed a thriving economy based on African, African-American, and Native American

slave labor. Nearly half of the colony’s first white settlers came from Barbados in the eastern Caribbean where

English landowners used African slaves on their sugarcane plantations. By the early 1700s, white plantation

owners in Carolina relied almost exclusively on African and African-American slaves for labor on their rice and

indigo plantations. Founded in 1670, Charles Town (later Charleston), soon became the colony’s capital, a

center of culture, commerce, and political power rooted in slavery. During the eighteenth century, more than

half of all enslaved Africans who came to British North America would pass through the city. (Carson, THE

STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM , 54–55)

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In 1712, Carolina split into two colonies, North and South Carolina

(See Figure 3–5). Later, in 1733, James Oglethorpe settled the

Georgia colony with a charter from King George the II to the land

between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers. The Low Country, an

area of fertile fields and swampy salt marshes, includes 79 barrier

islands or “Sea Islands” along the Atlantic coast from southeastern

North Carolina to the St. John River in northeast Florida.

Map of the colonies of North and South Carolina and Georgia and

their origin dates.Figure 3-5 — Carolinacolony by Kmusser is

licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5

Rivers and tidewater streams lace the coastal plain creating

widespread wetland landscapes. For Africans arriving in the Low

Country, the climate and the wetlands, rivers and winding streams,

if not the pine forests, must have seemed familiar, reminiscent of

the landscapes they left behind in the wetlands of West or West

Central Africa.

From the very earliest years of the colony, 20 to 30% of the settlers were Africans of diverse ethnic origins.

During the first twenty-five years, about one in every four settlers was African. By 1720, Africans had

outnumbered the Europeans for more than a decade. South Carolina was the one British colony in North

America in which settlement and African slavery went hand in hand (Wood 1974; South Carolina 2004a).Over

40% of the Africans reaching the British colonies before the American Revolution passed through South

Carolina. Almost all of these enslaved people entered the Charleston port. After a brief quarantine on Sullivan’s

Island they were sold in Charlestown, later called Charleston, slave markets (See Figure 3-6). Many of these

enslaved people were almost immediately put to work in South Carolina’s rice fields. Writers of the period

remarked that there was no harder, or unhealthier, work possible. In fact, colonial travelers described the

Carolina rice fields as charnel houses for enslaved African-Americans (Wood 1974; Morgan 1998).

Reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction, in Charleston,

South Carolina, in 1769Figure 3-6 — Slave Auction Ad by Unknown

is in the Public Domain .

In spite of the high death toll, a fortuitous combination of geographic

and demographic factors, allowed these enslaved African peoples to

shape their daily lives and customs according to African cultural

traditions and to produce new African American cultural patterns. The

first wave of Africans had more freedom to shape their culture than in

any other part of the North American mainland (Morgan 1998:19). Not

only did they live in autonomous units, in society as a whole, they

made up a significantly large proportion of the population. As the

eighteenth century opened Africans in South Carolina numbered 2,444,

making up 75% of the total population. Within thirty years, there were

20,000 Africans, out-numbering Europeans 2:1. This was still the case

in 1740. (Adams and Barnwell 2002). (3)

Rice Cultivation and Slavery in the Low Country The second wave of African slaves brought to Carolina and Georgia after 1750 came from the Windward Coast

of West Africa, a region stretching from Senegal down to Sierra Leone and Liberia. Traders acquired and sold

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Africans from this region because they came from rice growing cultures and brought with them technological

and agricultural skills that were crucial to developing a thriving rice plantation system in the Low Country.

Geographer Judith Carney makes the case that Africans introduced sophisticated soil and water management

techniques to Carolina and Georgia plantations. For tidal rice cultivation, an elaborate system of irrigation

works—levees, ditches, culverts, floodgates, and drains—had to be constructed (and maintained) to control and

regulate the flow of water onto and off of the fields. Carney explains that this agricultural technology and the

hollow cypress logs known as “trunks” or “plugs,” used to control water flow in embankments, were African

innovations in Low Country rice cultivation.

In the ten years following the Stono Rebellion, a 1739 slave uprising near Charleston that resulted in the deaths

of more than two dozen whites, the colony developed indigo as a second cash crop. Indigo, like rice, was labor

intensive and its cultivation and processing for trade was well also known to Africans from the Windward

Coast.

With both indigo and rice production depending upon the importation of Africans skilled in their cultivation and

processing, economics won out over fear of more slave rebellions. In the aftermath of the Stono Rebellion in

1739, the South Carolina legislature began a ten year moratorium on the importation of slaves from Africa,

which ended in 1750. Over 58,000 Africans entered South Carolina in the twenty-five years from 1750 and

1775 making South Carolina the largest direct importer of Africans for enslavement on the North American

mainland. (Carney 2001:89). Over time, descendants of these early generations of Africans came to be known

as the Gullah-Geechee people who had and continue to have distinctive cultural characteristics and a shared

heritage.

Between 1730 and 1774, Low Country rice exports increased from 17 million pounds of rice annually to 66

million pounds. For the enslaved African people, particularly the women upon who successful rice production

depended, there was an accompanying increase in hard labor and physical disability.

Rice cultivation and processing were mainly women’s work. So it was in Africa and so it was on South Carolina

and Georgia rice plantations. Enslaved men carried out skilled work making barrel staves for the crop’s

shipment. Men also monopolized blacksmithing, and cooperage and performed the hard work of preparing rice

embankments and ditches (Carney 2001:199–120). Ultimately, however, it was the labor of African women and

their daughters that made the phenomenal growth of the Low Country rice economy possible (See Figure 3-7).

Figure 3-7 — Rice Culture on the Ogeechee,

near Savannah, Georgia by A.R. Waud is in

the Public Domain .

African women brought three rice cultivation

techniques to Low Country plantations: sowing

in trenched ground, open trench planting, and

tidal rice cultivation. A description of enslaved

people’s preparation of rice for open trench

planting in the nineteenth century corresponds

with the contemporary rice planting system in

Sierra Leone in West Africa as well as with

descriptions of late eighteenth early nineteenth

centuries methods used in South Carolina:

Young men brought the clay water in

piggies[sic] from the barrel and poured it over the rice, while young girls, with bare feet and skirts well

tied up, danced and shuffled the rice about with their feet until the whole mass was thoroughly

clayed,…When it is completely covered with clay, the rice is shovelled [sic] into a pyramid and left to

soak until the next morning, when it is measured out into sacks, one and one-fourth bushels to each half

acre…(Pringle 1914:375–376).

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Enslaved women pressed the rice seeds into the muddy ground with their heels. Afterwards men called “trunk

minders” flooded the fields to encourage seed germination.

“It is literally casting one’s bread on the waters … for as soon as the seed is in the ground the trunk door is

lifted and the water creeps slowly up and up until it is about three inches deep on the land. That is why the

claying is necessary; it makes the grain adhere to the earth, otherwise it would float (Pringle 1914:12–13).”

Once the seeds sprouted, enslaved men drained the fields and the women weeded them. Weeding the rice fields

had to be done by hand. The fields were then alternately flooded and drained to keep the soil moist and the

weeds under control, and to deter the birds and other animals. The final flooding took place under the watchful

eye of the “trunk minder,” who was responsible for gradually raising the water level in the fields to support the

top-heavy rice stalk.

After harvesting the rice, allowing for a short period during which it dried, the enslaved women processed the

rice. First, they threshed the rice to remove the rice grains from the stalks. Threshing entailed beating the rice

with a stick or having the farm animals trampling the stalks. Next, they pounded the rice using a hand-pounding

mortar and pestle to separate the indigestible hulls from the rice.

Pounding rice required great skill to insure that the majority of the end product was clean whole grains rather

than partially broken or small broken pieces of rice. African women were highly skilled in pounding rice.

However, processing rice for subsistence use as they had done in their West African homeland was quite

different from processing rice as a cash crop.

Pounding rice was grueling work. In West Africa, women pounded enough rice for a family’s meals. In the Low

Country, throughout the eighteenth century, enslaved women pounded about 44 pounds of rice a day,

cumulatively millions of pounds of rice for export.

After pounding, they then poured the rice onto a fanner for winnowing. Then they removed the indigestible

hulls, or chafe, by tossing the rice up and down in the wide shallow fanner basket. During this process the

basket was gently tilted back and forth, tossing the rice upward and outward, allowing the husk to be blown

away by the wind. (Careny 2001)

In eighteenth century South Carolina, African women made the winnowing baskets from light grasses and

palmetto leaf. Anthropologist Dale Rosengarten has established that the weaving style of winnowing baskets

and the process of winnowing passed down from South Carolina slaves to their Low Country-born African

Americans descendants, are West African, not Native American, in origin (Rosengarten, 1986; Carney

2001:114). Coiled grass baskets are a tradition in many parts of West Africa. Descendants of enslaved Africans

who came to the Low Country made baskets for winnowing and other purposes in the 1700s, and the tradition

continues among many Low Country African-Americans today.

After harvest, men and women both worked to prepare the fields for the next rice crop. This was arduous work

but none was as arduous as processing the millions of pounds of rice for shipment overseas, mostly within a few

months when the crop was in greatest demand.

As onerous as pounding seven mortars of rice or splitting 100 poles for fences, trenching, hoeing, or

plowing 1 / 4 to a 1 / 2 acre of land per day must have been, the burden was mitigated by the knowledge that at the

end of the task was “free time.” The task system of work assignment was perhaps the most distinctive and

central feature of enslaved African life in the Low Country. By the end of the eighteenth century, the task

system was firmly entrenched from South Carolina to Florida, wherever rice was cultivated, and planters

extended the system to organization of labor in raising Sea Island cotton.

Under the task system, a person was assigned a certain amount of work for the day after which he or she could

use their time as they pleased (Morgan 1982:566). “Owning” time, making one’s own decisions, owning the

products of one’s labor, were powerful ideas, empowering incentives and in the end led to positive outcomes for

enslaved low country Africans.

After they [slaves] finished “their required day’s work, they were given as much land as they could handle on

which they planted corn, potatoes, tobacco, peanuts, sugar, watermelons, and pumpkins and bottle pumpkins…

They plant for themselves on Sundays…They sell their own crops and buy some necessary things…” wrote

Johan Bolzius of low country slaves in the mid-18 th century (Bolzius 1750:259–60, Translated and edited by

Loewald, Starika and Taylor, 1957).

10

Once gained, “free” time expanded allowing enslaved people not only the opportunity to tend their own crops

but also to socialize, grow and sell surplus products, gain personal property through such sales and ultimately to

accumulate money to purchase their own freedom and that of their family members.

In South Carolina a series of laws passed between 1686 and 1751 reflect the growing concern of slave holders

over the ways in which the Africans chose to spend their “own time.” A 1686 law prohibited the exchange of

goods between slaves or slaves and freemen without their master’s permission. Ten years later the lawmakers

tried to prohibit slaves felling and carrying away timber on lands other than their masters. In 1714, the

legislature prohibited that “slaves plant for themselves any corn, peas, or rice,” apparently to no avail since 20

years later another act was passed allowing patrollers to confiscate all fowls and other provisions found in the

possession of “stragling [sic] negroes.” Many planters came to depend upon the foods, goods and services

provided to them by the Africans. At best, their dependency must have made them ambivalent about enforcing

the prohibitive laws.

Low Country slaves raised crops that reflected their African origins such as okra, groundnuts (peanuts) sesame

seed, called Benni, and “Read {sic} peppers.” African vegetables and rice became part of the staple diet of new

generations of African Americans and were eaten by planters as well. Both Elias Ball and Eliza Lucas Pinckney

mention, for example, “negro” grown peppers in their letters (Morgan 1982:574). Enslaved entrepreneurs

branched out from huckstering foods to making and selling other commodities such as canoes, baskets and wax

(Ball, 1837).

Over time, enslaved people used surplus income from the internal economy to buy livestock, including horses,

and one at least negotiated his own freedom (Morgan 1982:580). After completing their tasks for the slave

master, the African men hunted, fished, worked as carpenters and in other trades to earn money. The women

washed clothes, prepared food and cooked for their families, raised chickens and vegetables to eat and to sell.

These activities allow the Africans to participate in trade and cash sales through which some men and women

earned and saved money to buy themselves and their kin out of slavery. By the time of the Revolutionary War,

two or more generations of native-born African Americans, had a variety of occupational skills that they used to

earn enough money to buy freedom. However, even those who continued enslavement gained a degree of

autonomy through internal economies that developed throughout the colonies. (3)

Conclusion By late eighteenth century, before the colonies convulsed during the American Revolution, racial slavery had

become rooted in the soil and law of colonies stretching from Georgia north to New England. But nowhere was

slavery more important to British North American economy than in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and

Maryland, and the Low Country colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. The extraordinary wealth African and

African-American slaves produced for white plantation owners not only created an economic aristocracy, but a

political ruling class who also cherished the liberty and freedom slave labor made possible for them.

As colonists began to revolt against British rule during the 1760s and 1770s, they often viewed their plight

through the lens of slavery. They saw Parliament’s infringement upon their rights and privileges as British

subjects as akin to enslavement and many colonial leaders in turn used the language of natural rights, of liberty

and freedom, in their fight for independence from Britain.

During the American Revolution, many African-American slaves would seize upon this language to demand

their own freedom from slavery. Others would flee their masters during the chaos of war and fight alongside the

British against the rebellious colonists or else join the patriot cause and fight in the Continental Army and Navy

in hope of securing their freedom at the end of the war. Regardless of the side they fought on, African-

Americans forced whites to confront the ironies and contradictions of fighting a revolution in the name of

natural rights and liberty while choosing to maintain slavery. (1)