The Making of African America

by Ira Berlin

  The tight quarters pushed captives and crews together and afforded the opportunity to know each other as human beings rather than as master and slave. Occasionally captives found patrons among members of the crew—many of whom had been forcibly impressed into slaving—who may have recognized similarities between the slaves’ circumstances and their own. With nothing to offer but themselves, sex became a commodity that might be traded. From such exchanges, slaves secured water, food, or protection that could make the difference between life and death. Relations between captives and crew—however conditional and opportunistic—gave enslaved Africans some inkling of the possible divisions between the crew and their officers, and the officers and their captain. When such divisions manifested themselves, the captives seized the moment, turning them to their advantage as they could. In one instance, slaves joined the crew’s mutiny; in another, a ship captain armed the enslaved against marauding pirates or privateers. Captives sometimes benefited from their cooperation, but the advantages were small and fleeting. If they were promised freedom, the promises were rarely kept. Perhaps such cooperation was only a measure of the slaves’ desperation.30

  Enslaved men and women turned to their fellow captives for support, but conditions below deck hardly promoted solidarity. Tempers flared in the tight quarters, as the enslaved struggled among themselves for space, water, and food. Captives squabbled endlessly. Shipboard alliances among men and women of many diverse polities who spoke many languages and who frequently belonged to nations with histories of animosity to one another did not come automatically or easily. Often collaboration with slavers as an informer was easier—and more rewarding—than joining together with one’s fellows. Slavers depended upon these collaborators as much as they did their own guns. When “the Jellofes [Jolofs, or perhaps Wolofs] rose,” according to one report, “the Bambaras sided with the Master.”31

  But as the inevitability of a common future became clear, the captives found reason to ally themselves. Confederations born of shared anguish and pain made impossible situations more bearable, as captives bolstered each other’s spirits, shared food, and nursed one another through bouts of nausea, fever, and dysentery. “I have seen them,” reported one ship captain, “when their allowance happened to be short, divide the last morsel of meat amongst each other thread by thread.”32 Small acts of kindness provided the basis for resistance, and a new order slowly took shape below deck. Sullen men and women began to forge a new language, from knowing gestures, a few shared words, and a desperate desire for human companionship. New languages—some of which had emerged from shared vocabularies of various African tongues and the common experience of African enslavement—gave birth to pidgins and then creole languages. Men and women with an ear for language took the lead in this new multilingualism, and others soon followed, as the captives shared a need to communicate.33

  The talk was not without purpose. The enslaved watched their captors carefully, studying their routines and habits so that they ultimately knew more about their captors than their captors knew about them. They awaited their chance, and when it arrived, they struck their enslavers hard. About one in ten slave ships faced some kind of unrest, and no slave trader—whether captains or crew—lived without fear of revolt. Most such uprisings failed, and punishment was swift and unforgiving. But even those who watched the proceeding in silence learned powerful lessons. Shipboard alliances marked the beginnings of new solidarities.34

  Nothing more fully reflected the nascent solidarities than the sounds emanating from the ship’s bottom. “Men sing their Country Songs,” reported one slave captain, “and the Boys dance to amuse them.” When they were brought up from below deck, enslaved women joined them singing in the call-and-response pattern that would become a staple of African American music by which performance created collectivity by incorporating all voices. While slavers encouraged singing for their own reasons, the most forthright admitted their ignorance of the meaning of the songs. Those who did, however, identified themes of place and movement, of the loss of a homeland and the migration into the unknown. “In their songs,” observed abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, “they call upon their lost Relations and Friends, they bid adieu to their Country, they recount the Luxuriance of their native soil, and the happy Days they have spent there.” But then they turned to their future and “their separation from friends and country.” Movement and place—the first plaintive utterances of the main themes of African American life—were sounded even before the ships sighted American shores.35 These first sounds of the contrapuntal narrative would be echoed again and again in the centuries that followed.

  The first men and women of African descent arrived in mainland North America in the sixteenth century, often accompanying European explorers. For the next century or so, they trickled onto the continent in small numbers, often not directly from Africa but from Europe, the Caribbean islands, or other parts of the Atlantic littoral. Later they would be dubbed “Atlantic Creoles” because of their origins along the ocean that linked Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Many of these newcomers spoke the language of their enslaver and were familiar with the religions, commercial conventions, and systems of jurisprudence of the various nations of the Atlantic. Entering frontier societies in which many Europeans also labored in some form of unfreedom, black men and women employed their knowledge of the Atlantic world to integrate themselves into the European settlements, working alongside Europeans and Native Americans in a variety of mixed agricultural and artisan production. Likewise, they joined churches, participated in exchange economies, and formed families much like other settlers, free and unfree.36

  With the advent of the plantation in mainland North America, the nature of slavery changed yet again. The beginnings of plantation production—tobacco in the Chesapeake in the late seventeenth century, rice in the low country in the early eighteenth century, sugar and then cotton in the Southern interior in the nineteenth century—increased the level of violence, exploitation, and brutality. Slaves worked harder, propelling their owners to new, previously unimagined heights of wealth and power. Slaveowners expanded their plantations and demanded more and more slaves, as slaves proved to be an extraordinarily valuable asset in themselves. Not only were they workers, but they reproduced themselves, adding to the owners’ wealth. Rather than arriving in ones and twos with other cargo from the Atlantic, boatloads of captives—generally drawn from the African interior—crossed the ocean.37

  Slaves imported directly from Africa—distinguished from Atlantic Creoles—first landed in large numbers in the Chesapeake during the last decades of the seventeenth century. Following the codification of chattel bondage in the 1660s, the new African arrivals slowly replaced European and African indentured servants as the main source of plantation labor. Between 1675 and 1695, some 3,000 enslaved black men and women arrived in Maryland and Virginia, mostly from Africa. During the last five years of the century, Chesapeake tobacco planters purchased more African slaves than they had in the previous twenty. The number of black people in the Chesapeake region, almost all of them derived directly from Africa, expanded rapidly, particularly on the estates of the great tobacco planters. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Africans composed a majority of the enslaved population.38

  The number of Africans in Maryland and Virginia increased rapidly during the first third of the eighteenth century. Chesapeake planters purchased nearly 8,000 African slaves between 1700 and 1710, and the proportion of the Chesapeake’s black population born in Africa shot ever upward. Another 13,000 landed in the 1720s, and the transformation of Virginia and Maryland into slave societies sped forward with increasing velocity in the 1730s. During that decade, the number of forced African immigrants averaged over 2,000 annually and sometimes rose to twice that number, so that by 1740 enslaved black people—again, most of them Africans—constituted some 40 percent of the population in parts of the Chesapeake. Although black people never challenged the whites’ numerical dominance in the region, t
hey achieved majorities in a few localities. For many European settlers, it seemed like the Chesapeake would “some time or other be confirmed by the name of New Guinea.”39

  By midcentury, the majority of enslaved men and women in the Chesapeake had never seen Africa. Slaves in the Chesapeake, in the words of one European observer, proved “very prolifick among themselves.” Despite the long hours of work by slaves, by the 1730s births to slave women outnumbered imports, and the black population was increasing naturally at the annual rate of 3 percent, a rate higher than most contemporary European societies. Although transatlantic slavers continued to deliver their cargoes to the great estuary, the proportion of Africans declined as the indigenous African American population increased. The growth of the African American or creole population reduced the slaveowners’ need for African imports, and fewer than 10,000 African slaves entered the region in the 1750s. At the start of the Revolution, the first passage was over in the Chesapeake, and the region was no longer an immigrant society. A native-born people began to sink deep roots into the soils of mainland North America.40

  The slave trade continued, however, in the low country of South Carolina and Georgia. There the forced migration from Africa followed a trajectory similar to that of the Chesapeake, but it started later and continued longer. As a result, more than twice as many Africans—upward of 250,000—entered the low country than the Chesapeake. Sullivan’s Island, a tiny quarantine station in Charlestown harbor, became the Ellis Island of black America.41

  The entry of Africans began slowly in the low country, as it had in the Chesapeake, but it increased far more rapidly. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, slavers were delivering more Africans to South Carolina than to Virginia, and Africans constituted the majority of the low country’s population. African arrivals declined sharply following the Stono Rebellion in 1739, as fears of insurrection led planters to restrict the trade. But greed soon overwhelmed fear, and slave importation resumed during the 1740s and exceeded anything previous. During the 1760s, South Carolina and Georgia planters imported 20,000 slaves. Although importation again slackened during the American Revolution, at war’s end the pent-up demand for slaves pushed importation to new heights. Lowland slaveowners purchased more than 100,000 Africans between 1787, when South Carolina reopened the African trade, and 1808, when the legal trade to the United States ended. Thereafter, American planters continued to smuggle slaves into the country, although the illegal imports composed but a small fraction of the slave population.42

  With the slave trade open and the influx of saltwater slaves—that is, newly imported Africans—nearly continuous, black men and women in the lowlands had great difficulty forming families and raising children. But, as in the Chesapeake, the number of men and women slowly came into balance. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the black population of the low country began to reproduce itself and African Americans began to outnumber Africans. But even as the African American population grew, it did so in tandem with newly arrived Africans. At midcentury, when enslaved black people in the Chesapeake had few opportunities to converse with other Africans, Africans and African Americans knew each other well in the low country. They lived in close proximity, worked together, frequently married, and often stood shoulder to shoulder against their owners. Their intimacy spoke directly to the unique development of African and African American life in the low country.

  Slavers also deposited their cargoes in other parts of mainland North America—New England, the Middle Colonies, the Floridas, and the lower Mississippi Valley. Everywhere planters preferred so-called men-boys and women-girls, young adults whom they could put to work immediately and who would reproduce the labor force. “Negroes from 15 to 25 years of Age sute this market best,” observed Charlestown’s largest slave trader. Among the young, planters desired men over women. The male majority was slightly more pronounced in South Carolina, where men outnumbered women more than two to one, constituting two-thirds of the Africans imported between 1720 and 1774. But the disproportion of men elsewhere on the mainland was not far behind. Although the balance of slave imports changed over time, as long as the trade remained open, the black population remained younger and more male than that of the white population.43

  The movement of African nationalities was not nearly as obvious. With the regularization of commercial relations between European and African merchants, slave captains studied their markets on both sides of the Atlantic. They repeatedly returned to the same ports, delivering the merchandise Africans desired and purchasing the slaves their American customers preferred. In time, European slave traders became specialists, in some measure to meet the demands of their customers on both sides of the Atlantic whose preferences grew increasingly well defined.

  Such preferences meant that the national and familial divisions within African society sometimes survived the Middle Passage. These divisions manifested themselves in the supply that reached deep into the interior of Africa. In local interior markets or fairs, where the enslaved had been initially auctioned, slaves desired on the coast brought higher prices and thus made some individuals targets for enslavement. Warlords—sometimes heads of state and sometimes freebooting thugs—thus chose their victims carefully, with a fine understanding of the market. They also had an appreciation for the vulnerability of certain peoples. Eager to maximize their profits in an increasingly competitive market, they too directed particular peoples to particular ports.44

  While hardly in a position to control their own fate, Africans—many of them potential captives—also influenced who would be shipped across the Atlantic. From the first, would-be captives resisted, banding together, fortifying villages, and even establishing client relationships with the enemies of their enemy to protect themselves. By playing one slave raider against another, Africans reduced their vulnerability, at least to the degree that raiders left them alone. As the full dimensions of the transatlantic slave trade become known, resistance stiffened. As a general rule, slavers avoided those who fought back.45

  Slaveowners in the Americas likewise influenced the forced migration, particularly in places where the number of imports was large and the trade remained open for long periods. Having seen tens of thousands of slaves, planters became extraordinarily opinionated about the slaves they wanted, based upon their understanding of the physique, skills, culture, and even food preferences of various African peoples. Yet while these opinions were often shallow stereotypes resting upon crude understandings of African nationality—Angolans ran away; Calabars destroyed themselves; Coromantees revolted—such assumptions nonetheless carried great weight. In the low country, buyers emphasized their preference for Gambian people (whom they called Coromantees) above all others. “Gold Coast or Gambia’s are best, next to them the Windward Coast are prefer’d to Angola’s,” observed a South Carolina slave trader in describing the most salable mixture in 1755. “There must not be a Calabar amongst them.”46

  Pressures and preferences on both sides of the Atlantic determined, to a considerable degree, which enslaved Africans went where and when, populating the mainland with unique combinations of African peoples and creating, in some small measure, distinctive regional variations in the Americas. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, captives from Senegambia and the Bight of Biafra (present-day Nigeria) constituted about three-quarters of the slaves entering the Chesapeake. Even within the Chesapeake, various polities came to inhabit different regions, with Africans from north of the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) disembarking in the Potomac Valley and those from south of the Bight of Biafra in Virginia’s York and Upper James river basins. The proportion changed with time, as many more slaves arrived from central Africa. But over the course of the eighteenth century, Igbo peoples constituted the majority of African slaves in Virginia and Maryland, so much so that some historians renamed colonial Virginia “Igbo Land.”47

  A different pattern emerged in low-country South Carolina and Georgia, where slaves fro
m central Africa predominated from the beginning of large-scale importation. Although imports from the Bight of Biafra entered the low country in considerable numbers in the 1740s and those from the Windward Coast in the 1760s, Angolan and Kongo peoples maintained their commanding presence among the forced immigrants even as the slave population of the low country grew more diverse. After the Revolution, the pattern changed again, as central Africans once more dominated the new arrivals. If Virginia was Igbo Land, the low country might be likened to a New Angola.48

  But the patterns of African settlement never created lasting regional identities. The overall thrust of the slave trade threw different people together in ways that undermined the consistent transfer of any unified culture or lineage. Mainland North America became a jumble of African nationalities. Their interaction—not their homogeneity—created new African American cultures.

  The reasons were many. Nationality or ethnicity in Africa did not follow neat geographic boundaries. Even before the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade, the people of Africa had been on the move. Numerous peoples—many of them multilingual, embracing different beliefs, and engaging in a multiplicity of domestic arrangements—shared the physical space that became catchment areas for slave traders. A raid on a particular village necessarily took many different peoples. On the long march to the coast, some slaves died, others escaped, and still others were sold locally. Meanwhile, traders captured or purchased others, and all added to the heterogeneous mixture of peoples lodged in the seaside barracoons.49

  As traders transferred slaves from shore to ship, the process of mixing people continued and even intensified. Few ships took on a full contingent in a single port and sailed for the Americas. Most moved from place to place, collecting slaves as they could, rarely purchasing more than a handful at a time. During the eighteenth century, slave ships often cruised along the African coast for months before obtaining a full cargo. Trawling for slaves along the Gold Coast in 1712, the Sarah Bonadventure collected some one hundred slaves over five months. Its officers boarded their captives in groups of two to eight, hence creating a diversity in the holds. In 1787, the captain of the Hudibras purchased 150 men and women along the coast of west Africa; among them were “fourteen different tribes or nations.” The Babel of languages emanating from the ship spoke to the diversity of African peoples that slave traders carried to the Americas.50