prof

1.. he first object that saluted my eyes when

-4*—i arrived on the coast was the sea, and a

Illave ship, which was then riding at

anchor, and waiting for its cargo.

—from The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano

al a

o r a

tin

ru-re de L. pr,

rlafty

Wire Dame

HOW DID the modern system of slavery develop?

WHAT IS the history of the slave trade and the Middle Passage?

HOW DID slavery in the North differ from slavery in the South?

HOW DID African slaves attempt to preserve African

culture in America?

HOW DID slavery fuel the economic development of Europe in the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries?

HOW DID slavery shape southern colonial society?

SLAVERY AND EMPIRE 1 44 1-1 77 0

74 OEM CHAPTER 4 SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-177o

AMER

CAN COI MUN

T

ES

Rebellion in Stono, South Carolina ON SUNDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 9, 1739, WHILE MOST PLANTER families were attending church, a group of twenty slaves gath- ered on the banks of the Stono River, twenty miles south of Charles Town, South Carolina. Led by an Angolan known in some accounts as Jemmy, in others as Cato, the slaves made their way to Hutchinson's general store in the hamlet of Stono Bridge. They killed the two storekeepers, ransacked the place, and arm- ing themselves with firearms and ammunition, set off on the road headed southwest for Florida, where the Spanish governor had issued a proclamation promising freedom for all runaway British slaves. They made no attempt to hide themselves but marched boldly to the beat of drummers and shouts of "Liberty!" The commotion drew the attention of curious slaves from the numerous rice plantations scattered across the swampy country- side, and dozens joined the marchers, women and children as well as men. They plundered and burned the homes of planters and pursued and killed every white person they encountered along the way, with the exception of an innkeeper, who was spared when several rebels spoke up in his defense, saying he had been kind to his slaves.

Word of the rebellion quickly spread throughout the planter community, and soon a heavily armed and mounted posse was hot on the rebels' trail. Late in the afternoon, near the cross- ing of the Edisto River, the posse overtook them. The rebel band, grown to nearly a hundred strong, had halted in a field where, in the words of the report, they "set to dancing, singing, and beating drums to draw more Negroes to them." Bottles of rum were passed and there was a good deal of drinking. Quietly the planters surrounded the field, then opened fire. Most of the slaves scattered, although according to the report the group of original conspirators "behaved boldly," forming themselves into a body and returning several volleys with the stolen firearms. But they were outmanned and outgunned,• and at least two dozen slaves were killed. According to another account, the posse "cutt off their heads and set them up at every mile post" along the road leading back to Charles Town. Over the next few weeks the remaining fugitives were tracked down and killed by Indian allies of the South Carolina colony. A total of forty-five or fifty African Americans died. Thus

ended the Stono Rebellion, the most violent slave uprising of the colonial period.

That slaves would rise up with the odds so stacked against them was a sign of their desperation. Most of these men and women were West Africans who had endured the shock of enslavement. On the rice plantations of low-country South Car- olina, they suffered from overwork, poor diet, minimal clothing, and inadequate housing. Colonial laws permitted masters to dis- cipline and punish harshly and indiscriminately. Slaves were whipped, confined in irons, mutilated, sold away, even murdered.

That slaves would rise up was also a sign of their commu- nity. The Stono Rebellion required the kind of careful organiza- tion possible only with the social trust and confidence built by community ties. Plantation slaves married, raised children, and constructed kinship networks. They passed on African names and traditions and created new ones. Many of the slaves of coastal South Carolina came from the central African rice coast, from Angola or the Kingdom of the Kongo, where men not only knew about the cultivation of rice but also shared a military tra-

dition and knew how to handle firearms. Community is also what enables a people to

remember their history, to pass tales down the generations. In the 1930s, nearly two hun- dred years after the uprising at Stono, George Cato, great-great-grandson of the leader of the Stono Rebellion, had stories

to tell. "As it come down to me, I thinks de first Cato take a darin' chance on losin' his

life, not so much for his own benefit as it was to help others." He and the other rebels died in their

attempt to free themselves, and not only did slavery continue, but also it grew even harsher and more oppressive as planters sought to stamp out the merest possibility of revolt. Yet the slaves' cry of "Liberty!" had not been in vain. Although in the twentieth century most white Americans had never heard of the Stono Rebellion, stories of the rebels' bravery and daring continued to inspire the local African American community. "I sho' does come from dat old stock who had de misfortune to be slaves," said Cato, who had been born into slavery himself. But the rebels "decided to be men," he declared, "and I's right proud of it."

1112=1211="

HOW DID the modern system of

slavery develop?

myhistieylab Review Summary

IMAGE KEY for pages 72-73

a. White Hills map by John Foster, 1677, woodcut. America's first map.

b. Slaves on the deck of the captured ship "Wildfire."

c. Model of the slave ship Brookes, showing plan view of slave positions.

d. William Clark's Ten Views Found in the Island of Antigua shows slaves working on a plantation.

e. "To be sold, a cargo of ninety-four

prime, healthy Negroes."

f. The London Coffee House near the

docks of Philadelphia was the site of many slave auctions in the mid- eighteenth century.

g. The Old Plantation, showing slaves at work.

h. Goods from the American colonies being

unloaded from eighteenth-century ships

on London's Old Custom House Quay.

SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-1770 CHAPTER 4 OM 75

THE BEGINNINGS OF AFRICAN SLAVERY

ousehold slaves had been a part of the Mediterranean world since ancient

times. In the fifteenth century, merchants did a booming business in

-A■16. the sale of captive Slays—the word "slave" derives from "Slav"—as well

as Muslims and Africans. Many Europeans were disturbed, however, by the moral

implications of enslaving other Europeans, and in the early fifteenth century the

pope excommunicated a number of merchants engaged in selling Christians. But

the same penalty did not apply to selling Africans and Muslims.

One of the goals of Portuguese expansion in the fifteenth century was to

gain access to the lucrative West African trade in gold, ivory, textiles, and slaves pre-

viously dominated by the Moors of northern Africa. The first African slaves to

arrive in Lisbon had been kidnapped by a Portuguese captain in 1441. But Euro-

pean traders found it more efficient to leave the dirty work of taking captives

to Africans who were willing to exchange slaves for European commodities. By

the mid-fifteenth century, the Portuguese were shipping a thousand or more slaves

each year from Africa. Most of them were sent to labor on the sugar plantations

on the Portuguese island colony of Madeira, off the coast of northern Africa.

SUGAR AND SLAVERY

Sugar and slaves had gone together since Italian merchants of the fourteenth cen-

tury set up the first modern sugar plantations on islands in the Mediterranean.

Columbus introduced sugar to Hispaniola on his second voyage, and plantations

were soon in operation there. Because the Indian population had been devas-

tated by warfare and disease, colonists imported African slaves as laborers. Mean-

while, the Portuguese, aided by Dutch financiers, created a center of sugar

production in their Brazilian colony that became a model for the efficient and

brutal exploitation of African labor.

This image of Mansa Musa (1312-37), the ruler of the Muslim kingdom of Mali in West Africa, is

taken from the Catalan Atlas, a magnificent map presented to the king of France in 1381 by his

cousin, the king of Aragon. In the words of the

Catalan inscription, Musa was "the richest, the most noble lord in all this region on account of

the abundance of gold that is gathered in his land." He holds what was thought to be the world's largest gold nugget. Under Musa's reign,

Timbuktu became a capital of world renown.

76 4/MWA CHAPTER 4 SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-1770

Skilled at finance and commerce, the Dutch greatly expanded the European market for sugar, converting it from a luxury item for the rich to a staple for ordi- nary people. Once the demand for sugar and its profitability had been demon- strated, England and France began seeking West Indian sugar colonies of their own. They began by seizing islands of the Lesser Antilles, constructing planta- tions, and importing slaves. By the 1640s, English Barbados and French Mar- tinique had become highly profitable sugar colonies. In 1655 the English seized the island of Jamaica from the Spanish, and by 1670 the French had established effective control over the western portion of Hispaniola, which they renamed Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) when they acquired it by treaty. By then, Caribbean sugar and slavery had become the centerpiece of the European colo- nial system.

WEST AFRICANS

The men and women whose labor made these tropical colonies so profitable came from the long-established societies and local communities of West Africa. In the sixteenth century more than a hundred different peoples lived along the coast of West Africa, from Cape Verde south to Angola. Farming sustained large popula- tions and thriving networks of commerce. There were a number of lesser states and kingdoms along the coast, and it was with these that the Portuguese first bargained for Africans who could be sold as slaves.

Varieties of household slavery were common in West African societies, although slaves there were often treated more as members of the family than as mere possessions. They were allowed to marry, and their children were born free. When African merchants sold the first slaves to the Portuguese, they may have thought that European slavery would be similar.

QUICK REVIEW

West African Society

• Hundreds of different peoples lived on the coast of West Africa.

• West Africans were sophisticated farmers.

• Local communities were orga- nized by kinship.

African slaves operate a sugar mill on the Spanish island colony of Hispaniola, illustated in a copperplate engraving published by Theodore de Bry in 1595.

Columbus introduced sugar on his sec- ond voyage and plantations were soon in operation. Because the native population was devastated by warfare and disease, colonists imported African slaves as laborers.

West Indies

ATLANTIC

OCEAN

CONGO

ANGOLA

SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441 - 177o CHAPTER 4 AIM 77

THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE he movement of Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas was the

largest forced migration in world history (see Map 4.1). Africans made up the largest group of people to come to the Americas before the

nineteenth century, outnumbering European immigrants by a ratio of six to one. The Atlantic slave trade, which began with the Portuguese in the fifteenth century and did not end in the United States until 1807 (and continued else- where in the Americas until the 1870s), is a brutal chapter in the making of America.

WHAT IS the history of the slave

trade and the Middle Passage?

myhi sb tyl - ab zi Review Summary

MAP EXPLORATION To explore an interactive version of this map, go to http://www.prenhall.com/faraghertIc/map4.1

EUROPE

NORTH

AMERICA

BRAZIL

SOUTH

AMERICA

Azores

Madeira

Canary Islands

Sahara Desert Cape Blanco Cape Verde AFRICA

Timbuktu

Senegambia GUINEA BORNU

Windward Coast Gold Co

ast

Bight of I Benin

Bight of Biafra

West Central

Africa

ASIA

MOZAMBIQUE

PACIFIC

OCEAN

al to British North America 522,400 a to French Americas 1,045,000 ap to Spanish Americas 1,115,000 Ali to Portuguese Brazil 1,428,000

.0 to British Caribbean 1,500,000

MAP 4.1

The African Slave Trade The enslaved men, women, and children transported to the Americas came from West Africa, the majority from the lower Niger River (called the Slave Coast) and the region of the Congo and Angola.

HOW AND why were the people of Africa enslaved and brought to America?

Bahamas Gulf of Mexico

Puerto Rico 0111P- _

Sp /

Caribbean Sea

African-Americans as a percent of the population

I 50-100% 40-49.9%

30-39.9% Chesapeake

Louisiana

Biloxi • • •

New Mobile Orleans

Lower South

Stono

Savannah

St. Augustine

ATLANTIC

OCEAN

78 OM CHAPTER 4 SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441 - 177o

PACIFIC

OCEAN

NEW GRENADA

MAP 4.2 Slave Colonies of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries By the eighteenth century, the system of slavery had created societies with large African populations throughout the Caribbean and along the

southern coast of North America.

QUICK REVIEW

Demography of Slavery

• 10 to 12 million Africans brought to the Americas over the course of four hundred years.

♦ Almost twice as many men as women were enslaved.

♦ Most Africans captured and trans- ported to the Americas were between the ages of fifteen and thirty.

Seven Years' War War fought in Europe, North America, and India between 1756 and 1753, pitting France and its allies against Great Britain and its allies.

HOW DID the sugar boom contribute to the importation of large numbers

of Africans to the Americas?

A GLOBAL ENTERPRISE Scholars estimate that 10 to 12 million Africans arrived in the Americas during the four-century history of the trade. Seventy-six percent arrived from 1701 to 1810, the peak period of colonial demand for labor, when tens of thousands were shipped from Africa each year. Of this vast multitude, about half were delivered to Dutch, French, or British sugar plantations in the Caribbean, a third to Portuguese Brazil, and a tenth to Spanish America (see Map 4.2). A much smaller proportion, about one in twenty, a total of approximately 600,000 individuals, were transported to the British colonies of North America. With the exception of the 1750s, when the British colonies were engulfed by the Seven Years' War, the slave trade continued to rise in importance in the decades before the Revolution (see Figure 4.1).

Numbers of Individuals

Figure 4.1 Estimated Number of Africans Imported to British North America, 1701-70

These official British statistics include only slaves imported legally

and, consequently, undercount the total number who arrived on

American shores. But the trend over time is clear. With the excep-

tion of the 1750s, when the British colonies were engulfed by the Seven Years' War, the slave trade continued to rise in importance in the decades before the Revolution.

R. C. Simmons, The American Colonies: From Settlement to Independence (London: Long- man, 1976), 186.

SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-177o CHAPTER 4 4WFla 79

All the nations of Western Europe participated in the slave trade. Dutch slavers began challenging Portuguese control of the trade at the end of the sixteenth century, and during the sugar boom of the seventeenth century Holland was the most prominent slave-trading nation. The English entered the trade at the same time. As a result, the number of slaves shipped to North America skyrocketed. The Dutch and Portuguese, however, continued to play important roles, alongside slave traders from France, Swe- den, and several German duchies.

The European presence in Africa generally was confined to coastal outposts. As the volume of slave trading expanded, the forts of trading companies gave way to the smaller coastal posts of inde- pendent traders who set up operations with the cooperation of local headmen or chiefs. This informal manner of trading offered opportunities for small operators, such as the slave traders of New England. Many great American fortunes were built from profits in the slave trade.

The slave trade was a collaboration between European or American and African traders. Dependent on the favor of local rulers, many colonial slave traders lived permanently in coastal forts and married African women, reinforcing their commercial ties with family relations. In many areas their mixed-ancestry off- spring became prominent players in the slave trade. Continuing the practice of the Portuguese, the grim business of slave raiding

was left to the Africans themselves.

THE SHOCK OF ENSLAVEMENT

Most Africans were enslaved through warfare. Sometimes large armies launched massive attacks, burning whole towns and taking hundreds of prisoners. More common were smaller raids in which a group of armed men attacked at nightfall, seized everyone within reach, then escaped with their captives. Enslavement was an unparalleled shock. Venture Smith, an African born in Guinea in 1729, was eight years old when he was captured. After many years in North American slavery, he still vividly recalled the attack on his village, the torture and murder of his father, and the long march of his people to the coast.

On the coast, European traders and African raiders assembled their captives. Prisoners waited in dark dungeons or in open pens called "barracoons." To lessen the possibility of collective resistance, traders split up families and ethnic groups. Captains carefully inspected each man and woman, and those selected for transport were branded on the back or buttocks with the mark of the buyer. Olaudah Equiano remembered that he and his fellow captives became convinced that they "had got

into a world of bad spirits" and were about to be eaten by cannibals.

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE In the eighteenth century, English sailors christened the voyage of slave vessels

across the Atlantic as the "Middle Passage," the middle part of a trading triangle

from England to Africa, to America, and back to England. From coastal forts and barracoons, crews rowed small groups of slaves out to the waiting transports and packed them into shelves below deck only six feet long by two and a half feet high. People were forced to sleep "spoon fashion," and the tossing of the ship knocked them about so violently that the skin over their elbows sometimes was worn to the

bone from scraping on the planks.

Middle Passage The voyage between West Africa and the New World slave colonies.

Portrait of Olaudah Equiano, by an unknown English artist, ca. 1780. Captured in Nigeria in 1756 when he was eleven years old,

Equiano was transported to America and was eventually purchased

by an English sea captain. After ten years as a slave, he succeeded

in buying his own freedom and dedicated himself to the antislavery cause. His book, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), was published in numerous editions, translated into several languages, and became the prototype for dozens of other slave narratives in the nineteenth century.

Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, Devon, UK/Bridgeman Art Library.

8o ORO CHAPTER 4 SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-1770

A group of slaves being led from the inte- rior to the West African coast by two

traders, from Rene Geoffroy de

Villeneuve, /' Afrique (1814).

Their holds filled with human cargo, the transports headed up the African coast to Cape Verde where they caught the trade winds blowing toward America.

A favorable voyage from Senegambia to Barbados might be accomplished in as little as three weeks, but a ship from Guinea or Angola, becalmed in the doldrums or driven back by storms, might take as much as three months.

Most voyages were marked by a daily routine. In the morn- ing the crew opened the hatch and brought the captives on deck, attaching their leg irons to a great chain running the length of the bulwarks. After a breakfast of beans the crew commanded men and women to jump up and down, a bizarre session of exercise known as "dancing the slave." A day spent chained on deck was con- cluded by a second bland meal and then the stowing away. Down in the hold, the groans of the dying, the shrieks of women and chil- dren, and the suffocating heat and stench were, in the words of Olaudah Equiano, "a scene of horror almost inconceivable"

Among the worst of the honors was the absence of adequate sanitation. Crews were supposed to swab the holds daily, but so sick- ening was the task that it was rarely performed, and Africans were left to wallow in their own wastes. According to Atlantic sailors, they could "smell a slaver five miles down wind." Many captives sickened and died in these conditions. Others contracted dysentery, known as the "flux." Frequent shipboard epidemics of smallpox, measles, and yellow fever added to the misery. The dying continued even as the ships anchored at their destinations. Historians estimate that one in every six Africans perished during the Middle Passage.

The unwilling voyagers offered plenty of resistance. As long as ships were still within sight of the African coast, hope remained alive and the danger of revolt was great. Once on the open sea, however, the captives' resistance took more desperate form. Equiano witnessed several Africans jump overboard and drown, "and I believe many more would very soon have done the same if they had not been prevented by the ship's crew."

Africans herded from a slave ship to a corral where they were to be sold by the cruel method known as "the scramble," buyers rushing in and grabbing their pick. This image was featured in an antislav-

ery narrative published in 1796.

SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-1770 CHAPTER 4 1111.. 81

Slaves below deck on a Spanish slaver, a sketch made when the vessel was cap-

tured by a British warship in the early

nineteenth century. Slaves were "stowed so close, that they were not allowed above a foot and a half for each in breadth," wrote one observer. The close

quarters and unsanitary conditions

created a stench so bad that Atlantic

sailors said you could "smell a slaver

five miles down wind."

As the vessels approached their destination, crews prepared the human cargo for market. All but the most rebellious were freed from their chains and allowed to wash themselves and move about the deck. Buyers painstak- ingly examined the Africans, who once again suffered the indignity of probing eyes and poking fingers. In ports such as Charles Town in South Carolina, sales were generally made by auction or by a cruel method known as the scramble: with prices fixed in advance the Africans were driven into a corral, and on cue the buyers would rush in among them, grabbing their pick. The noise, clamor, and eagerness of the buyers, Equiano remembered, renewed all their apprehensions. "In this manner, without scruple, are relations and friends sepa- rated, most of them never to see each other again."

POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC EFFECTS ON AFRICA

Africa began the sixteenth century with genuine indepen- dence. But as surely as Europe and America grew stronger as a result of the transport of Africans, so Africa grew weaker by their loss. For every individual taken captive, at least another died in the chronic slave raiding. Death and destruction spread deep into the African interior. Coastal slave-trading kingdoms drew slaves from central Africa. Many of the new states became little more than machines for supplying captives to European traders, and a "gun-slave cycle" pushed them into a destructive arms race with each other. Soldiers captured in these wars

were themselves enslaved. More serious still was the long-term stagnation of the

West African economy. Labor was drawn away from produc- tive activities while imported consumer goods stifled local manufacturing. African traders were expert at driving a hard bargain for slaves, but even when they appeared to get the best of the exchange, the ultimate advantage lay with the

British West Indies

Lower South and Chesapeake

Middle Colonies and New England

Figure 4.2 Africans as a Percentage of Total Population of the British Colonies, 1650-1770 Although the proportion of Africans and African Americans was

never as high in the South as in the Caribbean, the ethnic structure of the South diverged radically from that of the North

during the eighteenth century.

Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L Engerman, Time on the Cross (Boston: Little, Brown,

1974), 21.

82 411110 CHAPTER 4 SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-177o

Europeans, who received wealth-producing workers in return for mere con- sumer goods. This political, economic, and cultural demoralization prepared the way for the European conquest of Africa in the nineteenth century.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF NORTH AMERICAN

SLAVE SOCIETIES

N ew World slavery was nearly two centuries old before it became an impor- tant system of labor in North America. There were slaves in all the British colonies of the seventeenth century, but as late as 1700 slaves accounted

for less than 12 percent of the colonial population. During the eighteenth century, however, slavery expanded greatly, and by 1770 there were 460,000 Africans and African Americans in British North America, making up more than 20 percent of the population (see Figure 4.2).

SLAVERY COMES TO NORTH AMERICA

The first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619 when a Dutch slave trader exchanged "20 and odd Negars" for badly needed provisions with planter John Rolfe, the wid- ower of Pocahontas and pioneering Virginia tobacco planter. But because slaves gen- erally cost twice as much as indentured servants yet had the same appallingly short life expectancy, they proved to have little economic benefit for planters. Conse- quently, seventeenth-century Chesapeake planters employed far more indentured servants than slaves. Servants and the small number of slaves worked together, ate and slept in common quarters, and often developed intimate relationships. The

Chesapeake was what one historian has termed a "society with slaves," a society in which slavery was one form of labor among several.

Under these circumstances the status of black Virginians could be ambiguous. Seventeenth-century Virginia records document Africans acquiring farms, servants, and slaves of their own. Many slaves were Christians, and it raised traditional legal and moral doubts about whether co-religionists could be enslaved. Moreover, sexual relations among Africans, Indians, and Europeans produced a siz- able group of free people of mixed ancestry known as mulattoes. It was only later that dark skin came automatically to mean slavery,

segregation, and the absence of the rights of freemen. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century, however,

the Chesapeake became a "slave society," a place where slavery was the dominant form of labor. Among several developments, perhaps most important was the sharp decline in the number of indentured servants migrating to the Chesapeake. The incentive had been the availability of land after the term of service, but by midcentury most of the arable land had fallen into the hands of the planter elite. Bacon's and Culpeper's rebellions (see Chapter 3) offered examples of the violent potential of the land crisis. They also suggested how much serious trouble servants and former servants could make for planters. After Bacon's Rebellion, English immigrants turned away from the Chesapeake to colonies such as Pennsylvania, where there was more land and, thus, more opportunity.

The British Royal African Company, which began to import slaves directly to North America in the 1670s, was more than happy

=11=1111=111 HOW DID slavery in the North

differ from slavery in the South?

myhistdrylab Review Summary

to 2-12 Robert Beverly, A Virginian Describes the Difference between Servants and Slaves (1722)

0 2-3 William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619

QUICK REVIEW

Growth of Slavery

♦ Slavery grew rapidly in the South. • The use of slaves made economic

sense on tobacco and rice plantations.

*Northern slaves worked as ser- vants, craftsmen, and day laborers.

SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-1770 CHAPTER 4 83

to supply planters' need for labor. Slaves were expensive, but planters expected to keep them in the fields for longer hours, with fewer days off, and hopefully with less risk of an uprising. By 1700 there were 5,000 slaves in Virginia, and more than 22 percent of the Chesapeake population was of African descent.

Slavery had no English legal precedent, no laws or traditions allowing for life- time enslavement or for making that status inheritable. So as the proportions of slaves in the colonial population gradually rose, colonists wrote slavery into law, a process best observed in the case of Virginia. In 1662 the planter assembly declared that henceforth children would be "bond or free only according to the condition of the mother." Five years later they passed a law that Christian baptism could no longer alter conditions of servitude. Thus, two important avenues to freedom were closed. The colony then gave masters the right to administer life-threatening violence, declaring in 1669 that the death of a slave during punishment "shall not be accounted

felony." Such rules accumulated piecemeal until 1705, when Virginia gathered them into a comprehensive slave code that became a model for other colonies.

Thus, slavery was institutionalized just as the Atlantic slave trade reached flood tide in the eighteenth century. In the single decade of 1701 to 1710 more Africans were imported into North America than during the entire previous cen- tury. The English colonies were primed for an unprecedented growth of planta-

tion slavery.

THE TOBACCO COLONIES

During the eighteenth century the European demand for tobacco increased more than tenfold, and it was supplied largely by increased production in the Chesapeake region. Tobacco was far and away the single most important commodity produced in eighteenth-century North America, accounting for more than a quarter of the value of all colonial exports.

The expansion of tobacco production could not have taken place without a corresponding growth in the size of the slave labor force. Unlike sugar, tobacco did not require large plantations and could be produced successfully on small farms. But the crop demanded a great deal of hand labor and close attention. As tobacco production expanded, slaveholding became widespread. By 1770 more than a quarter million slaves labored in the colonies of the Upper South (Mary- land, Virginia, and North Carolina), and because of the exploding market for tobacco, their numbers expanded at about double the rate of the general popu- lation. From 1700 to 1770, an estimated 80,000 Africans were imported into the tobacco region. But natural increase was even more important. In the Caribbean and Brazil, where profits from sugar were extremely high, many planters literally worked their slaves to death, replenishing them with a constant stream of new arrivals from Africa. In the Chesapeake, however, significantly lower profits led tobacco planters to pay more attention to the health of their labor force, establish-

ing work routines that were not as deadly. Moreover, food supplies were more plentiful in North America and slaves better fed, making them more resistant to disease. As a consequence, by the 1730s the slave population of the Chesapeake had become the first in the Western Hemisphere to achieve self-sustained growth. By the 1750s, about 80 percent of Chesapeake slaves were "country-born."

THE LOWER SOUTH South Carolina was a slave society from the beginning. The most valuable part of the early Carolina economy was the Indian slave trade. Practicing a strategy of divide and conquer, using Indian tribes to fight one another, Carolinians established a trade in Indian captives during the 1670s. By the early eighteenth century more

84 ONO CHAPTER 4 SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-1770

Residence and Slave Quarters of Mulberry Plantation, by Thomas Coram,

ca. 1770. The slave quarters are on the

left in this painting of a rice plantation

near Charleston, South Carolina. The steep roofs of the slave cabins, an African architectural feature introduced

in America by slave builders, kept living

quarters cool by allowing the heat to rise

and dissipate in the rafters.

Thomas Coram, "View of Mulberry Street, House and

Street." Oil on paper, 10 x 17.6 cm. Gibbes Museum

of Art/Carolina Art Association. 68.18.01.

than 12,000 mission Indians from Florida had been captured and sold into slav- ery and thousands more killed or dispersed.

In the early eighteenth century, however, planter preference turned toward African rather than Indian slaves. Rice production had become the most dynamic sector of the South Carolina economy, and their experience in agriculture made West Africans much better rice workers. Another important crop was added to the mix in the 1740s when a young South Carolina woman named Elizabeth Lucas Pinckney successfully adapted West Indian indigo to the low-country climate. The indigo plant, native to India, produced a deep blue dye important in textile man- ufacture. Rice grew in the lowlands, but indigo could be cultivated on high ground, and with different seasonal growing patterns, planters were able to harmonize their production. Rice and indigo became two of the most valuable commodities exported from the mainland colonies of North America. The boom in these two crops depended on the growth of African slavery. Before the international slave trade to the United States was ended in 1808, at least 100,000 slaves landed in South Carolina.

By the 1740s many of these arriving Africans were being taken to Georgia, a colony created by an act of the English Parliament in 1732. Its leader, James Edward Oglethorpe, hoped to establish a buffer against Spanish invasion from Florida and make the colony a haven for poor British farmers who could sell their products in the markets of South Carolina. Under Oglethorpe's influence, Parliament agreed to prohibit slavery in Georgia. But soon Georgia's coastal regions were being col- onized by South Carolina rice planters with their slaves. By the time Oglethorpe and Georgia's trustees opened their colony to slavery in 1752, the Georgia coast had already become an extension of the Carolina low-country slave system.

By 1770 nearly 90,000 African Americans made up about 80 percent of the coastal population of South Carolina and Georgia. The African American commu- nities of the Lower South had achieved self-sustained growth by the middle of the eigh- teenth century, a generation later than those in the Chesapeake.

SLAVERY IN THE SPANISH COLONIES

Slavery was basic to the Spanish colonial labor system, yet doubts about the enslave- ment of Africans were raised by both church and crown. The papacy denounced slavery as a violation of Christian principles. But the institution remained intact,

QUICK REVIEW

Slavery in the Lower South

• Indian slavery prominent in early Carolina economy.

• Boom in rice and indigo produc- tion depended on African slaves.

• 1770: African Americans make up 80 percent of population of South Carolina and Georgia coast.

SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-177o CHAPTER 4 85

and later in the eighteenth century, when sugar production expanded in Cuba, the slave system there turned as brutal as any in the history of the Americas.

In New Mexico, the Spanish depended on Indian slavery. In the sixteenth century the colonial governor sent Indian slaves to the mines of Mexico. The enslavement of Indians was one of the causes of the Pueblo Revolt (see Chapter 3). In the aftermath of the revolt the Spanish became much more cautious in their treat- ment of the Pueblos, who were officially considered Catholics. But they partici- pated in a robust trade in captured and enslaved "infidel Indians," mostly nomadic people from the Great Plains, employing them as house servants and fieldworkers.

SLAVERY IN FRENCH LOUISIANA

Slavery was also important in Louisiana, the colony founded by the French in the lower Mississippi Valley. In the early eighteenth century, French colonists estab-

lished settlements and forts at Biloxi and Mobile on the Gulf of Mexico and in 1718 laid out the city of New Orleans on the lower Mississippi River. The French Com- pany of the Indies imported some 6,000 African slaves, and planters invested in tobacco and indigo plantations along the river banks north of the city. This was the country of the Natchez Indians, who greatly resented the French intrusion. In 1729 the Natchez joined forces with rebellious slaves in an armed uprising. The Natchez Rebellion claimed the lives of more than 200 French settlers, 10 percent of the population. An alliance of slaves and Indians was the greatest of all planter fears. The French colonial militia put down the rebellion with brutal force, crush- ing and dispersing the Natchez people in the process.

Bitter memories of the Natchez Rebellion kept the Louisiana French from committing themselves totally to slavery. In 1750 African slaves amounted to less than a third of the colonial population of 10,000. It was not until the end of the century that the colony of Louisiana became an important North American slave society.

SLAVERY IN THE NORTH

Slavery was a fundamental, acceptable, thoroughly American institution. None of the northern colonies could be characterized as slave societies, but slavery was an important form of labor in a number of localities. During the eighteenth century

Pueblo Revolt Rebellion in 1680 of Pueblo Indians in New Mexico

against their Spanish overlords.

The London Coffee House, near the

docks of Philadelphia, was the center

of the city's business and political life

in the mid-eighteenth century. Sea

captains and merchants congregated

here to do business, and as this con-

temporary print illustrates (in the

detail on the far right), it was the site

of many slave auctions. Slavery was a

vital part of the economy of northern

cities.

John F. Watson, "Annals of Philadelphia," being a

collection of memoirs, anecdotes, and incidents of

Philadelphia. The London Coffee House. The

Library Company of Philadelphia. London Coffee Haase.

86 ill CHAPTER 4 SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-177o

it grew increasingly significant in the commercial farming regions of southeast Pennsylvania, central New Jersey, and Long Island, areas where slaves made up about 10 percent of rural residents. In Rhode Island—a center of the slave trade— large gangs of slaves were used in cattle and dairy operations, and the proportion of slaves in the population of Narragansett County reached nearly a third.

Slavery was common in all northern port cities, including Boston. Slave own- ership was nearly universal among the wealthy and ordinary among craftsmen and professionals. By 1750 slaves along with small populations of free blacks made up 15 to 20 percent of the residents of Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia.

The Quakers of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, many of whom kept slaves, were the first colonists to voice antislavery sentiment. In 1715, John Hepburn of New Jersey published the first North American critique of slavery, but his was a lonely voice. By midcentury, however, there was a significant antislavery move- ment among the Quakers.

AFRICAN TO AFRICAN AMERICAN

en and women from dozens of ethnic groups, representing many dif- ferent languages, religions, and customs, were transported across the Atlantic without any of their cultural possessions. In America they were

subjected to the control of masters intent on maximizing their work and mini- mizing their liberty. Yet African Americans carved out lives of their own with a degree of independence. Their African heritage was not erased; it provided them with a fundamental outlook, the basis for a common identity.

The majority of Africans transported to North America arrived during the eighteenth century. They joined a rapidly growing population of country-born slaves or "creoles" (from the Spanish criollo and Portuguese creole, meaning "born" or "raised"), a term first used by slaves in Brazil to distinguish their children, born in the New World, from newly arrived Africans. The perspective of creoles was shaped by their having grown up under slavery, and that perspective helped them to determine which elements of African culture they would incorporate into the emerging culture of the African American community. That community was formed out of the relationship between creoles and Africans, and between slaves and their European masters.

2-13 John Woolman, An Early

Abolitionist Speaks Out

Against Slavery, (1757)

HOW DID African slaves attempt

to preserve African culture in

America?

myhishOylab Review Summary

THE DAILY LIFE OF SLAVES

Slaves did the work that made the plantation colonies so profitable. As an agricul- tural people, Africans, both women and men, were accustomed to the routines of field labor. Most slaves were field hands, and even domestic servants labored in the fields when necessary. Masters provided their workers with rude clothing, sufficient in the summer but nearly always inadequate in the winter.

On small plantations and farms, typical in the tobacco country of the Chesa- peake, Africans might work side by side with their owners and, depending on the character of the master, might enjoy a standard of living not too different from that of other family members. The work was more demanding and living conditions far worse on the great rice and indigo plantations of the Lower South, where slaves usually lived separately from the master in their own quarters. But large plantations, with large numbers of slaves, created a concentration of population that made for more resilient African American communities. It was one of the profound ironies of American slavery: life was much harder on the great plantations, but slaves had more opportunity for some autonomy.

Mum Bett, also known as Elizabeth Freeman, was born into slavery

in a Massachusetts household about 1742. As a young woman

she was subjected to the violent abuse of her mistress, who

struck her with a hot shovel, leaving an indelible scar. Fleeing her

owner, Mum Bett enlisted the aid of antislavery lawyer Thomas Sedgwick, who helped win her freedom in 1772. This miniature was painted by Sedgwick's daughter Susan in 1811.

SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-177o CHAPTER 4 OM 87

1

ES AND COMMUNITIES

was the most important institution for the development of unity and culture, but slave codes did not provide for legal slave mar- that would have contradicted the master's freedom to dispose of erty as he saw fit. Planters commonly separated families by sale or

t, dividing husbands from wives and even separating mothers from n. Charles Ball was a mere boy in Virginia when his family was sep- by sale. "Oh, master, do not take me from my child!" his mother

But her new owner gave her two or three heavy blows on the shoul- with a rawhide whip, "snatched me from her arms, and seizing her e arm, dragged her back towards the place of sale." Ball never saw

again. Later, after he had grown and married, his master sold him to e planter in Georgia. "My heart died away within me," Ball remem- d vividly. "I felt incapable of weeping or speaking, and in my despair

ughed loudly." On his journey south he dreamed his wife and chil- n were "beseeching and imploring my master on their knees." He er saw them again.

Despite the odds against them, however, slaves in both the Chesa- ake and the Lower South created the families that were essential for e development of African American culture. On large plantations

throughout the southern colonies, travelers found Africans living in fam- y households. In the Lower South, where there were greater concentra-

tions of slaves on the great rice plantations, husbands and wives often ived together in the slave quarters. On the smaller plantations of the

Upper South, men frequently married women from neighboring farms, and with the permission of both owners visited their families in the evenings or on Sundays.

Emotional ties to particular places, connections between the generations, and relations of kinship and friendship linking neigh- boring plantations and farms were the foundation stones of African American community life. Kinship was especially important. African American parents encouraged their children to use family terms in addressing unrelated persons: "auntie" or "uncle" became a respectful way of addressing older men and women, "brother" and "sister" affectionate terms for agemates. This may

have been one of the first devices enslaved Africans used to humanize the world of slavery.

AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE

The eighteenth century was the formative period in the development of the African American community, for it was then that the high birthrate and the growing numbers of country-born provided the necessary stability for the evolution of cul- ture. During this period, men and women from dozens of African ethnic groups molded themselves into a new people. Distinctive patterns in music and dance, reli- gion, and oral tradition illustrate the resilience of the human spirit under bondage

Great Awakening

FAMILI

The fain' commum riages: his prop beques childre arated cried. ders by on her a ric bere II a dre nev

Pe th

as well as the successful struggle of African Americans to create a spiritually sus-

taining culture of their own. Eighteenth-century masters were reluctant to allow their slaves to become

Christians, fearing that baptism would open the way to claims of freedom or give Africans dangerous notions of universal brotherhood and equality with masters. Large numbers of African Americans were not converted to Christianity until the

, which swept across the South just before the American Revolu-

tion (see Chapter 5).

2-9 James Oglethorpe, The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia (1739)

QUICK REVIEW

Slave Society

• Traces of African culture remained in slave society.

♦ Labor consumed most of slave's time.

♦ Kinship played a key role in solidify- ing African American communities.

Slave codes A series of laws passed mainly in the Southern colonies in the late seventeenth and early eigh- teenth centuries to defend the status of slaves and codify the denial of basic civil rights to them.

Great Awakening Tremendous reli- gious revival in colonial America striking first in the Middle Colonies and New England in the 1740s and then spreading to the southern colonies.

88 EMS CHAPTER 4 SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-177o

One crucial area of religious practice concerned the rituals of death and bur- ial. African Americans generally believed that the spirits of their dead would return to Africa. The burial ceremony was often held at night to keep it secret from mas- ters, who objected to the continuation of African traditions. The deceased was laid out, and around the body men and women would move counterclockwise in a slow dance step while singing ancestral songs. The pace gradually increased, finally reach- ing a frenzied but joyful conclusion. As slaves from different backgrounds joined together in the circle, they were beginning the process of cultural unification.

Music and dance may have formed the foundation of African American cul- ture, coming even before a common language. Many Africans were accomplished players of stringed instruments and drums, and their style featured improvisation and rhythmic complexity, elements that would become prominent in African American music. In America, slaves re-created African instruments such as the banjo, and mastered the art of the European violin and guitar.

One of the most important developments of the eighteenth century was the invention of an African American language. An English traveler during the 1770s complained he could not understand Virginia slaves, who spoke "a mixed dialect between the Guinea and English." But such a language made it possible for coun- try-born and "saltwater" Africans to communicate. The two most important dialects were Gullah and Geechee, named after two of the African peoples most prominent in the Carolina and Georgia low country, the Golas and Gizzis of the African Wind- ward Coast. These creole languages were a transitional phenomenon, gradually giv- ing way to distinctive forms of black English, although in certain isolated areas, such as the sea islands of the Carolinas and Georgia, they persisted into the twentieth century.

THE AFRICANIZATION OF THE SOUTH

The African American community often looked to recently arrived Africans for reli- gious leadership and medical magic. Throughout the South, many whites had as much faith in slave conjurers and herb doctors as the slaves themselves did, and slaves won fame for their healing powers. This was one of many ways in which white and black Southerners came to share a common culture. Acculturation was by no means a one-way street; English men and women in the South were also being Africanized.

Slaves worked in the kitchens of their masters and thus introduced an African style of cooking into colonial diets already transformed by the addition of Indian crops. African American culinary arts are responsible for such southern culinary specialties as barbecue, fried chicken, black-eyed peas, and collard greens. And the liberal African use of red pepper, sesame seeds, and other sharp flavors estab- lished the southern preference for highly spiced foods.

Mutual acculturation was also evident in many aspects of material culture. Southern basket weaving used Indian techniques and African designs. Woodcarv- ing often featured African motifs. African architectural designs featuring high, peaked roofs (to drain off the heat) and broad, shady porches gradually became part of a distinctive southern style.

Even more important were less tangible aspects of culture. Slave mothers nursed white children as well as their own. As one English observer wrote, "each child has its [black] Momma, whose gestures and accent it will necessarily copy, for children, we all know, are imitative beings." In this way many Africanisms passed into the English language of the South. Some linguists have argued that the south- ern "drawl," evident among both black and white speakers, derived from the incor- poration of African intonations of words and syllables.

A Musi in the

cal Celebration Slave Quarters

discovered in South Carolina, dates from the last quar-

ury. It offers a wonderfully detailed depiction of Africans

hered together in the slave quarters celebrating with music.

celebration, involving several families. Seated on the right,

that suggest continuity with the African heritage. One plucks

Ike a banjo, and indeed, the banjo can be traced back to West

proper to them," Thomas Jefferson wrote of his slaves, "is the

ght hither from Africa." The other man plays a drum that resem-

small wooden kettledrum from Nigeria played with two long thin

dancing man with the carved stick may indicate that this is a wed-

rir his anonymous watercolor, ter of the eighteenth cent or African Americans gat This is clearly a community

two men play instruments

on something that looks 1

Africa. "The instrument

banjar, which they brou

bles the gudugudu, a

rawhide sticks. The

ding ceremony that involves jumping the

broom, an African custom for newly married

couples. One planter's description of a slave

dance seems to fit this scene: the men leading

WHY DO you think the plantation master is omitted from this painting?

the women in "a slow shuffling gait, edging

along by some unseen exertion of the feet, from one side to the other—sometimes cour-

tesying down and remaining in that posture while the edging motion from one side to

the other continued." The women, he wrote, "always carried a handkerchief held at

arm's length, which was waved in a graceful motion to and fro as she moved." The paint-

ing is a tribute to the celebration of life amidst adversity. ■

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Founda- tion, VA.

89

g OM CHAPTER 4 SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 144I-1770

Fugitive slaves flee through the swamps in Thomas Moran's The Slave Hunt (1862). Many slaves ran away from their masters, and colonial newspapers included notices urging readers to be on

the lookout for them. Some fled in

groups or collected together in isolated

communities called "maroon" colonies,

located in inaccessible swamps and

woods.

Thomas Moran (American, 1837-1926), Slave Hunt,

Dismal Swamp, Virginia, 1862. Gift of Laura A. Clubb,

1947.8.44. C 2007 The Philbrook Museum of Art,

Inc., Tulsa, Oklahoma.

VIOLENCE AND RESISTANCE

Slavery was made possible by the threat and reality of violence. The only way to make slaves work, Virginia planter Robert "King" Carter instructed his overseer, was "to make them stand in fear." Even the most cultured plantation owners thought noth- ing about floggings of fifty or seventy-five lashes. Some masters were downright sadis- tic, stabbing, burning, maiming, mutilating, raping, and even castrating their slaves.

Yet African Americans demonstrated a resisting spirit. In their day-to-day existence they often refused to cooperate: they malingered, they mistreated ani- mals and broke tools, they wantonly destroyed the master's property. Flight was another option. An analysis of hundreds of eighteenth-century advertisements for runaways concludes that 80 percent were young men in their twenties, sug- gesting that most runaways were unattached males.

Runaways sometimes collected together in isolated and hidden communities called "maroons," from the Spanish word cimarron, meaning "wild and untamed." Slaves who escaped from South Carolina or Georgia into Spanish Florida created maroon communities among the Creek Indians there. These mixed African and Indian peoples came to call themselves "Seminoles," a name deriving from their

pronunciation of "cimarron." The most direct form of resistance was revolt. The first notable slave uprising

of the colonial era occurred in New York City in 1712. Taking an oath of secrecy, twenty-three Africans vowed revenge for what they called the "hard usage" of their masters. They armed themselves, killed nine colonists, and burned several build- ings before being surrounded by the militia. Six of the conspirators committed suicide rather than surrender. Thirteen were hanged, another was starved to death in chains, another broken on the wheel, and three more burned at the stake.

A series of small rebellions and rumors of large ones in 1720s' Virginia cul- minated in the Chesapeake Rebellion of 1730, the largest slave uprising of the colonial period. Several hundred slaves assembled in Norfolk and Princess Anne counties where they chose commanders for their "insurrection." More than three

hundred escaped en masse. Hunted down by Indians hired by the colony, their

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Resistance to Slavery

* Refusal to cooperate or destruc- tion of property.

• Running away and establishing fugitive communities.

♦ Revolting.

SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-177o CHAPTER 4 MIRO 91

community was soon destroyed. Twenty-nine leaders were executed and the rest were returned to their masters.

In the Lower South, where slaves were a majority of the population, there were isolated but violent uprisings in 1704, 1720, and 1730. In 1738 a series of revolts broke out in South Carolina and Georgia. These prepared the way for the Stono Rebellion of 1739 (see Introduction), the most violent slave rebellion of the colo- nial period. In the aftermath of Stono several similar uprisings were quickly crushed by planters. Attributing these revolts to the influence of newly arrived Africans, colo- nial officials shut down the slave trade through Charles Town for the next ten years.

Wherever masters held slaves, fears of uprisings persisted. But compared with such slave colonies as Jamaica, Guiana, or Brazil, there were relatively few revolts in North America. The conditions favoring revolt (large African majorities, brutal exploitation with correspondingly low survival rates, little acculturation, and geographic isolation) prevailed only in some areas of the Lower South. Indeed, the very success of African Americans in British North America at establishing families, communities, and a culture of their own inevitably made them less likely to take the risks that rebellions required.

SLAVERY AND THE ECONOMICS OF EMPIRE

T he British slave colonies—the sugar plantations of the West Indies, the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake, and the rice and indigo planta-

tions of the Lower South—accounted for 95 percent of exports from the Americas to Great Britain from 1714 to the eve of the American Revolution. More- over, there was the prime economic importance of the slave trade itself, which one eighteenth-century economist described as the "foundation" of the British econ- omy, "the mainspring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion." The labor of African slaves was largely responsible for the economic success of the British Empire in the Americas. New World slavery contributed enormously to the growth and development of the Old World economy. During the eighteenth century slav- ery was the most dynamic force in the Atlantic economy, responsible for the capi- tal formation that made possible the beginnings of the industrial economy.

SLAVERY: FOUNDATION OF THE BRITISH ECONOMY

Slavery contributed to the economic development of Great Britain in three prin- cipal ways. First, it generated enormous profits. Profits derived from the triangu- lar trade in slaves, plantation products, and manufactured goods (see Map 4.3) furnished from 21 to 35 percent of Great Britain's fixed capital formation in the eigh- teenth century. This capital funded the first modern banks and insurance compa- nies and, through loans and investments, found its way into a wide range of economic activities. Merchant capitalists were prominent investors in the expansion of the merchant marine, the improvement of harbors, and the construction of canals.

Second, slave colonies in the Caribbean supplied 69 percent of the raw cot- ton for British textile mills, the earliest sector of industrial development. The insa- tiable demand for cotton would eventually lead to the development of the cotton gin and the rise of cotton plantations in the United States (see Chapter 11).

Third, slavery provided an enormous stimulus to the growth of manufacturing by creating a huge colonial market for exports. From 1700 to 1740, the growth in American and African demand for manufactured goods accounted for nearly 70 percent of the expansion of British exports.

The multiplier effects of these activities are best seen in the growth of English ports such as Liverpool and Bristol. There the African and American trades provided

Stono Rebellion One of the largest and most violent slave uprisings dur- ing the Colonial Period that occurred in Stono, South Carolina.

HOW DID slavery fuel the

economic development of Europe

in the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries?

myhist6rylab Review Summary

QUICK REVIEW

British Trade Policy

• All trade in empire to be conduct- ed in English or colonial ships.

• Channeling of colonial trade through England or another English colony.

• Subsidization of English goods offered for sale in the colonies.

• Colonists prohibited from large- scale manufacture of certain products.

NORTH

AMERICA

\a\5

\\IVae:c Rai

EUROPE

ATLANTIC

OCEAN

AFRICA

92 IMO CHAPTER 4 SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-1770

MAP EXPLORATION To explore an interactive version of this map, go to http//www.prenhall.com/faraghertic/map4.3

British Isles

SOUTH AMERICA

PACIFIC

OCEAN

MAP 4.3

Triangular Trade Across the Atlantic The pattern of commerce among Europe, Africa, and the Americas became known as the "triangular trade." Sailors called the voyage of slave ships from Africa to

America the "Middle Passage" because it formed the crucial middle section of this trading triangle.

HOW WERE Europe, Africa, and America linked together by commerce?

employment for ships' crews, dockmen, construction workers, traders, shopkeepers, lawyers, clerks, factory workers, and officials of all ranks down to the humblest employ- ees of the custom house. It was said of Bristol that "there is not a brick in the city but what is cemented with the blood of a slave." In the countryside surrounding Liver- pool and elsewhere, capital acquired through slavery was invested in the new indus- trial methods of producing cotton textiles, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

THE POLITICS OF MERCANTILISM

Imperial officials argued that colonies existed solely for the benefit of the mother

country. What they principally had in mind was the great wealth produced by slav- ery. To ensure that this wealth benefited their own nation-state, imperialists cre-

SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-177o CHAPTER 4 93

The New England artist John Greenwood painted this amusing view of New England sea captains in Surinam in 1757. By the early eighteenth century, New England merchant traders like these had

become important participants in the traffic in slaves and sugar to and from the West Indies.

Northern ports thus became important pivots in the expanding commercial network linking slave

plantations with Atlantic markets.

John Greenwood, "Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam," 1758. Oil on bed ticking, 95.9 x 191.1 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum,

Museum Purchase.

ated a system of regulations that became known as "mercantilism." The essence of

mercantilist policy was the political control of the economy by the state. The British monarchy and Parliament established a uniform national monetary system, reg- ulated wages, subsidized agriculture and manufacturing, and protected them- selves from foreign competition by erecting tariff barriers. Britain also sought to organize and control colonial trade to the maximum advantage of its own shippers, merchants, manufacturers, and bureaucrats.

The mercantilists viewed the economy as a "zero-sum game," in which total economic gains were equal to total losses. The essence of the competition between states, the mercantilists argued, was the struggle to acquire and hoard the fixed amount of wealth that existed in the world. The nation that accumulated the largest treasure of gold and silver would be the most powerful.

BRITISH COLONIAL REGULATION

The Spanish monarchy created the Casa de Contratacion, the first state trading monopoly, to manage the commerce of its empire in the sixteenth century. It was widely emulated by other powers. The Dutch East Indies Company, the French Com- pany of the Indies, the English East India Company, the Hudson's Bay Company,

and the Royal African Company were all state-sponsored trading monopolies. English manufacturers complained that the nation's trading monopolies too

frequently carried foreign (particularly Dutch) products to colonial markets, ignor- ing English domestic industry. Parliament reacted by passing a series of Navigation Acts between 1651 and 1696, creating the legal and institutional structure of Britain's eighteenth-century colonial system. The acts defined the colonies as both suppliers

of raw materials and as markets for English manufactured goods. Merchants from

Mercantilism Economic system whereby the government intervenes in the economy for the purpose of increasing national wealth.

94 41111111 CHAPTER 4 SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-1770

other nations were forbidden from doing business in the English colonies, and colo- nial commodities were required to be transported in English vessels.

The regulations specified a list of "enumerated commodities" that could be shipped to England only. Those included the products of the southern slave colonies (sugar, molasses, rum, tobacco, rice, and indigo), those of the northern Indian trade (furs, pelts, and skins), and those essential for supplying the shipping indus- try (pine masts, tar, pitch, resin, and turpentine). The bulk of these products was not destined for English consumption but was exported elsewhere at great profit.

England also placed limitations on colonial enterprises that might compete with those at home. A series of enactments—including the Wool Act of 1699, the Hat Act of 1732, and the Iron Act of 1750—forbade the manufacture of those products in the colonies. Moreover, colonial assemblies were forbidden to impose tariffs on English imports as a way to protect colonial industries. Banking was dis- allowed, local coinage prohibited, and the export of coin from England forbidden.

Robert Walpole, prime minister of the king's government from 1721 to 1742, argued that it made little sense to tamper with such a prosperous system. Walpole pursued a policy later characterized as "salutory neglect." Any colonial rules and regulations deemed contrary to good business practice were simply ignored and not enforced. Between 1700 and 1760 the quantity of goods exported from the colonies to the mother country rose 165 percent, while imports from Britain to North America increased by more than 400 percent. In part because of the lax enforcement, but mostly because the system operated to the profit of colonial mer- chants, colonists complained very little about the operation of the mercantilist sys- tem before the 1760s. It seemed that everyone was getting rich off the labor of slaves.

WARS FOR EMPIRE During the 1720s and 1730s, Prime Minister Walpole steered Great Britain away from war with other mercantilist powers. Earlier in the century, a war pitting Great Britain against Spain and France (known as the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe, Queen Anne's War in America) had ended in a significant British victory and in the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 Britain gained a good deal. France was forced to cede Acadia, Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay to Great Britain in exchange for guarantees of security for the French-speaking residents of those provinces. Spain was forced to open its American ports to British traders, who were also granted the exclusive right to supply slaves to the Spanish colonies.

For more than fifteen years Walpole prevailed over militant factions in the House of Commons that demanded complete elimination of Spanish competition in the Americas. But in 1739, at their urging, a one-eared sea captain by the name of Robert Jenkins testified about the indignities suffered by British merchant sailors at the hands of Spanish authorities in Caribbean ports. In a dramatic flourish, Jenk- ins produced a dried and withered ear, which he claimed the Spanish had cut from his head. The public outrage that followed forced Walpole to agree to a war of Caribbean conquest known as the War of Jenldns's Ear. "They now ring the bells," Walpole declared, "but they will soon wring their hands."

Walpole was right. The British underestimated Spanish strength and the troops were ravaged by yellow fever and other diseases. The only success of the war for the British came when the Georgia militia blocked a Spanish invasion from Florida in 1742. The war ended with no territorial gains on either side.

The war with Spain merged into a war with France that began in 1744. Known as King George's War in America (the War of the Austrian Succession in Europe), it began with a French invasion of their former colony of Acadia, which the British had renamed Nova Scotia. Indian and Canadian raids again devastated the border

Queen Anne's War American phase (1702-1713) of Europe's War of the Spanish Succession.

King George's War The third Anglo- French war in North America (1744-1748), part of the European conflict known as the War of the Austrian Succession.

SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441 - 1770 CHAPTER 4 (Inall 95

OVERVIEW The Colonial Wars 1689-97

1702-13

1739-43

1744-48

1754-63

King William's War

Queen Anne's War

War of Jenkins's Ear

King George's War

French and Indian War

France and England battle on the northern frontiers of New England and New York.

England fights France and Spain in the Caribbean and on the northern frontier of New France. Part of the European conflict known as the War of the Spanish Succession.

Great Britain versus Spain in the Caribbean and Georgia. Part of the European conflict known as the War of the Austrian Succession.

Great Britain and France fight in Acadia and Nova Scotia; the second American round of the War of the Austrian Succession.

Last of the great colonial wars pitting Great Britain against France and Spain. Known in Europe as the Seven Years' War.

towns of New England and New York, and hundreds of British subjects were killed or captured. New England forces attacked and conquered the great French fortress at Louisbourg. But Great Britain fared less well in the European fighting, and the war ended in stalemate with the return of all territory.

THE COLONIAL ECONOMY

Despite the resumption of warfare, the colonial economy continued to operate to the great benefit of planters, merchants, and white colonists in general. South- ern slave owners made healthy profits on the sale of their commodities. They enjoyed a protected market in which competing goods from outside the empire

were heavily taxed. Planters found themselves with steadily increasing purchasing power. Pennsylvania, New York, and New England, and increasingly the Chesa- peake as well, produced grain, flour, meat, and dairy products. None of these was included in the list of enumerated goods and could be sold freely abroad. Most

of this trade was carried in New England ships. The greatest benefits for the port cities of the North came

from their commercial relationship to the slave colonies (see Figure 4.3). In addition to entering the slave trade itself, New England merchants began to make inroads into the export New England trade of the West Indian colonies. It was in the Caribbean that northern merchants most blatantly ignored mercantilist laws. In violation of Spanish, French, and Dutch regulations pro- Middle Colonies

hibiting foreign trade, New Englanders traded foodstuffs for sugar in foreign colonies. By 1750, more than sixty distilleries in Massachusetts were exporting more than 2 million gallons

Chesapeake

of rum, most of it produced from molasses obtained illegally. Because the restrictive rules and regulations enacted by Britain for its colonies were not enforced, the merchants and manu-

Lower South facturers of the port cities of the North prospered.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the Chesapeake and Lower South regions were major exporters of tobacco, rice, and indigo to Europe, and the middle colonies were major exporters of grain. The carrying trade in the products of slave labor made it possible for the northern and middle colonies to earn the income necessary to purchase British imports despite the lack

myhistokylab Overview: The Colonial Wars

Enumerated goods Items produced in the colonies and enumerated in acts of Parliament that could be legally shipped from the colony of origin only to specified locations.

Figure 4.3 Value of Colonial Exports by Region, Annual Average, 1768-72 With tobacco, rice, grain, and indigo, the Chesapeake and Lower South

accounted for nearly two-thirds of colonial exports in the late eighteenth

century.

James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade and the Economic Develop-

ment of Colonial America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 211-27.

96 411111S CHAPTER 4 SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-177o

of valuable products from their own regions. Gradually, the commercial economies of the Northeast and the South were becoming integrated. Like London, Liverpool, and Bristol—though on a smaller scale—the port cities of the North became pivots in the expanding trade network linking slave plantations with Atlantic markets. This trade provided northern merchants with the capital that financed commercial growth and development in their cities and the surrounding countryside. Slavery thus con- tributed to the growth of a score of northern port cities, forming an indirect but

essential part of their economies.

SLAVERY, PROSPERITY, AND FREEDOM

T he prosperity of the eighteenth-century plantation economy thus improved the living conditions for the residents of northern cities as well as for a large

segment of the white population of the South, providing them with the opportunity for a kind of freedom unknown in the previous century. The price of this prosperity and freedom, however, was the enslavement and exploitation of millions of Africans and African Americans. Freedom for white men based on the enslavement of black people is one of the most glaring contradictions in American history.

THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF THE SLAVE COLONIES

Slavery produced a highly stratified class society. At the summit of power stood an elite of wealthy planters who held more than half the cultivated land and over 60 percent of the wealth. Although there was no formal colonial aristocracy—no royal recognition of social rank—the landed elite of the slave colonies sought to present itself as one.

The typical wealthy Virginia planter of the eighteenth century lived in a Tidewater county; owned several thousand acres of prime farmland and more than a hundred slaves; resided in a luxurious plantation mansion, built perhaps in the fashionable Georgian style; and had an estate valued at more than £10,000. Elected to the House of Burgesses and forming the group from which the magis- trates and counselors of the colony were chosen, these "first families of Virginia" were a self-perpetuating governing class.

A similar elite ruled the Lower South, although wealthy landowners spent lit- tle time on their plantations. They lived instead in fashionable Charles Town, where they made up a close-knit group who controlled the colonial government.

A considerable distance separated this elite from typical southern landowners. About half the adult white males were small planters and farmers. But while the gap between rich and middling colonists grew larger during the eighteenth century, the prosperity of the plantation economy created generally favorable conditions for the landowning class as a whole. Slave ownership, for example, became widespread among this group during the eighteenth century. In Virginia at midcentury, 45 percent of heads of household held one to four slaves and even poorer farmers kept one or two.

Despite the prosperity that accompanied slavery, however, a substantial num- ber of white colonists owned no land or slaves at all. Some rented land or worked as tenant farmers, some hired out as overseers or farm workers, and still others were indentured servants. Throughout the plantation region, landless men constituted about 40 percent of the population. A New England visitor found a "much greater disparity between the rich and poor in Virginia" than at home.

WHITE SKIN PRIVILEGE

But all the white colonists of eighteenth-century North America shared the privi- leged status of their color. In the early seventeenth century, there had been more diversity in views about race. As slavery became increasingly important, however, Vir-

QUICK REVIEW

Colonial Exports

• Chesapeake colonies: tobacco.

• South Carolina: rice and indigo.

• Middle colonies: wheat.

=111111111.1.111111="' HOW DID slavery shape southern colonial society?

myhist4Oylab Review Summary

QUICK REVIEW

Southern Social Structure

• Topped by small elite of wealthy planters.

• About half of all white adult males were small planters and farmers.

• A substantial portion of colonists owned no land or slaves.

nwhist8iylab Exploring America: Racism in American History

R UN away from the fuhfcriher in Albareath, a Mulatto have called Sandy, about 35 years of age, his nature is rather low, inclining to corpulence, and his complexion light ; he is a thoemaker by trade, in which he ufes his lett hand principally, can do coarfe carpenters work, and is fornething of a horfe jockey 1 he is greatly addiEted to drink, and when drunk is info- lent and diforderly, in his converfation he (wears

much, and in his behaviour is artfui and knavith. He took with him a white honk, much retitled with traces, of which it is ex. peaed the will endeavour to difpoie ; he a lto carried his (hoe- makers tools, and will probably endeavour to get employment that way, Whoever conveys the aid {lave to me, in Albin:ark', fhall have 4o 1. re aid, if taken ue within the county, 41. if elfewbere within the colony, and 10 I. if in any other colony, from

THOMAS JEFFERSON.

Thomas Jefferson placed this advertisement in the Virginia Gazette on September 14, 1769. Americans need to seriously consider the historical relationship between the prosperity and freedom of white people and the oppression and exploitation of Africans and African Americans.

SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-177o CHAPTER 4 AMIN 97

ginia officials took considerable care to create

legal distinctions between the status of colonists and that of Africans. Beginning in 1670, free

Africans were prohibited from owning Chris-

tian servants. Ten years later, another law

declared that any African, free or slave, who

struck a Christian would receive thirty lashes

on his bare back. One of the most important measures was designed to suppress intimate

interracial contacts between white servants and

enslaved Africans. A 1691 act "for prevention

of that abominable mixture and spurious issue

which hereafter may encrease in this domin- ion" established severe penalties for interra-

cial sexual relationships. Such penalties were

rarely applied to masters who had sexual

relations with their slave women. Because by

law the children of slave mothers were born into bondage, many plantations included light-skinned slaves who were the masters' kin.

Relationships between free whites

and enslaved blacks produced a large mixed-ancestry group known as mulat- toes. The majority of them were slaves; a minority, the children of European women and African men, were free. According to a Maryland census of 1755, more than 60 percent of the mulattoes of that colony were slaves. But mulat- toes also made up three-quarters of the small free African American popula- tion. This group, numbering about four thousand in the 1770s, was denied the right to vote, to hold office, or to testify in court—all on the basis of racial background. Denied the status of citizenship enjoyed by even the poorest white men, free blacks were an outcast group who raised the status of white colo- nials by contrast. Racial distinctions were a constant reminder of the freedom of white colonists and the debasement of all blacks, slave or free.

Racism set up a wall of contempt between colonists and African Americans.

CONCLUSION

D uring the eighteenth century, nearly half a million Africans were kidnapped from their homes, marched to the African coast, and packed into ships for up to three months before arriving in British North America. They pro-

vided the labor that made colonialism profitable. Southern planters, northern mer- chants, and especially British traders and capitalists benefited greatly from the commerce in slave-produced crops, and that prosperity filtered down to affect many of the colonists of British North America. Slavery was fundamental to the operation of the British empire in North America. Mercantilism was a system designed to chan- nel colonial wealth produced by slaves to the nation-state, but as long as profits were high, the British tended to wink at colonists' violations of mercantilist regulations.

African Americans helped to build the greatest accumulation of capital Europe had ever seen, receiving nothing in return but blood, sweat, and tears. It is little wonder that slaves resisted, by malingering, by fleeing, by rising up in rebellion, as did the slaves of the Stono River. Yet that rebellion itself was a sign that despite enormous hardship and suffering, African Americans were forming new communities, rebuilding families, restructuring language, and reforming

2-11

William H. Browne, Maryland Addresses the Status of Slaves (1664)

4111111111111

98 41///• CHAPTER 4 SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441 - 1770

CHRONOLOGY

1441 African slaves first brought to Portugal 1712 Slave uprising in New York City

1619 First Africans brought to Virginia 1713 Peace of Utrecht

1655 English seize Jamaica 1721-48 Robert Walpole leads British cabinet

1662 Virginia law makes slavery hereditary 1729 Natchez Rebellion in French Louisiana

1672 Royal African Company organized 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina

1691 Virginia prohibits interracial sexual contact 1739-43 War of Jenkins's Ear

1698 Britain opens the slave trade to all its merchants

1741

1744-48

Africans executed in New York for conspiracy

King George's War

1699 Spanish declare Florida a refuge for escaped slaves

1752 Georgia officially opened to slavery

1770s Peak period of the English colonies' slave 1702 South Carolinians burn St. Augustine

trade

1705 Virginia Slave Code established 1808 Importation of slaves into the United 1706 French and Spanish navies bombard Charles States ends

Town

1710 English capture Port Royal in Acadia

culture. African American culture added important components of African knowl-

edge and experience to colonial agriculture, art, music, and cuisine. The African

Americans of the English colonies lived better lives than the slaves worked to

death on Caribbean sugar plantations but lives of misery compared with the men

they were forced to serve.

REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. Trace the development of the system of slavery and discuss the way it

became entrenched in the Americas.

2. Describe the effects of the slave trade both on enslaved Africans and on

the economic and political life of Africa.

3. Describe the process of acculturation involved in becoming an African

American. In what ways did slaves "Africanize" the South?

4. Explain the connection between the institution of slavery and the building

of a commercial empire.

5. In what ways did colonial policy encourage the growth of racism?

myhistaiMab Flashcard Review

KEY TERMS Enumerated goods (p. 95)

Great Awakening (p. 87)

King George's War (p. 94)

Mercantilism (p. 93) Middle Passage (p. 79)

Pueblo Revolt (p. 85) Queen Anne's War (p. 94)

Seven Years' War (p. 78)

Slave codes (p. 87) Stono Rebellion (p. 91)

SLAVERY AND EMPIRE, 1441-177o CHAPTER 4 99

RECOMMENDED READING Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

(1998). A history of colonial slavery with attention to the differences between the regions of the Chesapeake, the Lower South, Louisiana, and the North. Emphasizes the distinction between slave societies and societies with slaves.

Andrew Burstein, Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello (2005). An examina- tion of the last decade of Jefferson's life, as he looks back on political strug- gles, slavery, and personal relationships.

Michael Craton, Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery (1974). An intro- duction to the British mercantilist system that emphasizes the importance of slavery. Includes a comparison of the mainland colonies with the Caribbean.

Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550 —1812 (1968). Remains the best and most comprehensive history of racial attitudes. A searching examination of British and American literature, folklore, and history.

Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (1999). A new and important synthesis of the most recent studies of the slave trade, covering the social and cultural ef- fects of the trade, especially for Africans.

Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998). A comprehensive and detailed examination of cultural forms and ways of life in the two regions that leaves hardly a stone unturned.

Anthony S. Parent Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660 —1740 (2003). A vivid and disturbing portrayal of colonial Virginia's patri- archal and violent character. An analysis of the apparatus of oppression from the planters' seizure of land to the efforts to keep poor whites and slaves apart.

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1974). This highly influential book

traces the relationship between Europe and Africa from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, and demonstrates how Europe's industrialization became Africa's impoverishment.

Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Cen-

tury Virginia (1987). Demonstrates the ways in which both Africans and Euro- peans shaped the formation of American values, perceptions, and identities.

Lucia Stanton, Some Free Day: The African American Families of Monticello (2001). The sto- ries of six enslaved families who lived and worked for Jefferson at Monticello.

Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (1994). A new synthesis of the

colonial wars from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries that places Indi- ans as well as empires at the center of the action.

Henry Wiencek, Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of Ameri- ca (2003). The story of Washington as planter and slave master, a man tor- mented by the contradictions.

myhistchlab Where ifs a good time to connect to the past!

For study resources for this chapter, go to www.myhistorylab.com and choose Out of Many, Teaching and Learning Classroom Edition. You will find a wealth of study and review material for this chapter, including pretests and posttests, customized study plan, key-term review

flash cards, interactive map and document activities, and documents for analysis.