The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  Before the Hare even arrived in port, Laurens complained that he was too busy to accept them: “The place is quite clog’d with slaves that God knows what we shall do with them.” Upon seeing the cargo, he declared them quite “wretched … a most scabby flock.” Nevertheless, his advertisement for the cargo described them as “Just imported … directly from Sierra Leone, a cargo of likely and healthy slaves to be sold on easy terms.”

  Elias Ball, Jr. (1709–1786), in need of additional slaves, responded to Laurens’s advertisement, wanting to buy several children. Ball owned 1,000 acres of prime land outside of Charleston, making him a man of great wealth and enormous standing, residing at the family’s Comingtee plantation. He was reclusive to a surprising degree for the times and married somewhat late. His father, concerned for his bachelor son’s mental health, once bought him a talking parrot for company. But Elias Ball in fact longed for Lydia Child, a woman of social standing who had instead married another planter inconveniently named George Chicken.

  In 1745, as luck would have it, Mr. Chicken passed from the scene and Ball wed his true love. At the same time, he purchased a new 670-acre plantation, which he dubbed Kensington. At this point, he owned about 75 slaves and with his family estate and lands inherited through his bride, the Ball family lorded over five plantations: Comingtee, Hyde Park, Kensington, St. James, and Strawberry. The Cooper River that runs through Ball family lands and eventually joins with the Ashley at Charleston was generally accepted as part of the Ball domain.39

  On June 30, 1756, Ball purchased six children from the Hare’s cargo, four boys and two girls, among them Priscilla, whom he thought to be about ten years old. He could choose from 13 boys and 9 girls—the vessel may have had even more children, as the surviving cargo of 71 also included 8 unaccounted-for slaves who landed but disappeared from surviving records after arriving at Sullivan’s Island in Charleston Harbor. Perhaps they died shortly after arriving.

  Ball appeared to prefer children over adult slaves—maybe believing that he could more easily train them—and subsequently bought an additional “13 Gambias Young Negroes,” as he recorded in his books, who were about 12 years of age, paying £2,600 (an enormous amount) for this later group. He usually paid cash for his slaves—most planters bought on credit—and gave Oswald’s agent £600, about $100,000 in modern value, for the Hare’s six children. He took them—Sancho, Peter, Brutus, Harry, Belinda, and Priscilla—to his Comingtee plantation. If any of the children had parents on board, they never saw them again.40

  Because the Ball family preserved its records, we have some idea what happened to Priscilla and the other children purchased on that steamy June day. Belinda disappeared from family records almost immediately, either dying or being resold. Harry and Brutus worked as field hands, with Harry living alone until his death. Brutus disappeared from the records in 1784, either dead or resold at age 35. More is known about Peter, whom Ball renamed Mandingo Peter, who went with Ball to the Comingtee plantation. He lived with a woman named Monemia and with her had several children. In 1777, he and his family moved to the Kensington plantation, where he remained until 1816, apparently dying at age 67. Sancho also worked at Comingtee, married a woman named Affie, and had at least three children, Sancho, Saby, and Belinda, a common slave name perhaps derived from Alexander Pope’s narrative 1712 poem The Rape of the Lock. Sancho ran away to the British during the Revolution, but was returned to his owner. His story ends tragically, as his wife and children were sold off in 1819—when he was 72—and he lived alone until 1833 when he died at age 86 on Christmas Day.

  As for Priscilla, we know that within ten years of her arrival in South Carolina, she married another slave named Primus and had one child, Peter, and by 1763 married another slave named Jeffrey with whom she had nine children, the last born in 1786. Did she do the oppressive work in the rice fields, suffering in the heat, murky water, and endless plagues of insects? Or did she work closer to the plantation house—perhaps washing clothes? We do not know how she spent her days, but we can be sure that she proved extremely hardy or lucky, as a slave in rice country bearing so many children and living until 1811, about age 65. What makes her story so fascinating is that we can not only document her enslavement from the start, but identify some of her descendants that still live in the region today, discovered by Edward Ball while researching his popular book. They represent a tiny handful of American families who can without breaks trace their roots directly back to Africa.41

  African Americans like Priscilla, as much as anyone, built this country. Between 1700 and 1780, twice as many Africans as Europeans crossed the Atlantic (including the millions who went to Central and South America), and their labor accounted for two-thirds of all colonial exports. Slavery helped transform the 13 colonies from a scattering of vulnerable settlements into a rising economic power. That history, however, also proved harsh, tragic, and violent, inescapable conditions that shaped the course of American history.

  _____________________________

  1 Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 12–13; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513–2008 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 10.

  2 Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, eds., Slavery in New York (New York: The New Press and the New-York Historical Society, 2005), 34; Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 6.

  3 John Thornton, “The African Experience of the ‘20. And Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia in 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 55 (July 1998): 421-34.

  4 Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Tribal Origins of Slaves in Mexico (Washington, D.C., 1946?); Jacobo de la Pezuela y Lobo, Historia de la isla de Cuba (Madrid: Carlos Bailly-Bailliere, 1868); Malyn Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 168; David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 23. We are much indebted to Professor Sweet for bringing these figures and sources to our attention.

  5 Eltis and Richardson, eds., Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 23.

  6 Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 38–40.

  7 Thornton, “The African Experience of the ‘20. And Odd Negroes,’” 421–22; Sweet, “African Identity and Slave Resistance in the Portuguese Atlantic,” 225–47.

  8 Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 159–61.

  9 Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112 (June 2007): 769; Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 20–22, 28–33.

  10 See Edmund S. Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History 59 (June 1972): 5–29, and Alden T. Vaughan, “A Sense of Their Own Power: Black Virginians, 1619–1989,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97 (July 1989): 311–54.

  11 Oscar Handlin and Mary F. Handlin, “Origins of the Southern Labor System,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 7, no. 2 (April 1950): 202–04, 208.

  12 John C. Coombs, “Beyond the ‘Origins Debate’: Rethinking the Rise of Virginia Slavery,” in Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion, eds. Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 248.

  13 Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).

  14 Coombs, “Beyond the ‘Origins Debate,’” 255.

  15 Coombs, “Beyond the ‘Origins Debate,’” 243, 258–60; T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980, 2005).

  16 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 35; Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 8 quoted, 10–14.

  17 Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 2–7, 23, 222.

  18 Eldred Jones, The Elizabethan Image of Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1971), 29 quoted.

  19 David Bindman, “The Black Presence in British Art: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in III, pt. 1, The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Age of Discovery to the Age of Abolition, eds. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 235–36; Habib, Black Lives, 7, 24–25. Also see: Mary Floyd-Wilson, “Moors, Race, and the Study of English Renaissance Literature: A Brief Retrospective,” Literature Compass 3 (2006): 1044–52.

  20 H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1979), 477.

  21 Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 272, 282–83; Breen and Innes, “Myne Owne Ground,” 82–83; James O. Horton and Lois E. Horton, Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 27.

  22 Coombs, “Beyond the ‘Origins Debate,’” 253–54.

  23 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 196; Herbert S. Klein and Ben Vinson III, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 119–34. For example, whites and blacks in North America lived longer than Brazilians of any race.

  24 The spelling of her name varies. For a brief biography of Queen Nzinga see: Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., Dictionary of African Biography, 6 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4:527–28; John K. Thornton, “Legitimacy and Political Power: Queen Njinga, 1624–1663,” Journal of African History 32 (1991): 25–40.

  25 Paul E. Lovejoy, Slavery, Commerce, and Production in the Sokoto Caliphate of West Africa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2005), 1–3, 13–15.

  26 John K. Thornton, “Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders in the Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 60 (April 2003): quoted 277, 291.

  27 Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660, 124, 132–33, 134–35, 145, 150–51, 154–55, 163–64.

  28 Thornton, “Legitimacy and Political Power,” 31–32, 36; Thornton, “Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders,” 287; Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 132–33, 150–51; Malyn Newitt, ed., The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 143–45, 147.

  29 Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 161–62.

  30 Thomas Bluett, Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa … (London: Richard Ford, 1734). The text can be easily read at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bluett/bluett.html, and one version of the engraving, from Gentleman’s Magazine in 1750, can be found at http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/resources/images-detail.faces?image=solomon.

  31 The best source for Solomon’s life remains Douglas Grant’s The Fortunate Slave: An Illustration of African Slavery in the Early Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). A biographical sketch of him can be found in African American National Biography, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4:483–85.

  32 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 26, 216.

  33 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 99.

  34 David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 175, 203–04; Bunce Island estimate is from http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces.

  35 Hancock, Citizens of the World, 1–2.

  36 The best source for Priscilla’s story is Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 192–95, 212–14, 250–51, 420; Thornton, “Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders,” 275, 277–82; Ball reports that the Hare was loaded with 170 slaves, but the ship’s captain reported only 80 slaves and landed just 71. See http://www.choices.edu/resources/documents/SlaveVoyage.pdf.

  37 Sam and W[illia]m Vernon to Capt. Caleb Godfrey, November 8, 1755, http://www.choices.edu/resources/documents/SlaveVoyage.pdf; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 161.

  38 John A. Garrity and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 24 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 13:261–63; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513–2008 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 15; Ball, Slaves in the Family, 193.

  39 Ball, Slaves in the Family, 142–48.

  40 Ball, Slaves in the Family, 193–94; images of the original records are at http://www.choices.edu/resources/documents/SlaveVoyage.pdf.

  41 Ball, Slaves in the Family, 450–51.

  3

  THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS 1700–1811

  FROM 1701 UNTIL THE CLOSE OF THE LEGAL SLAVE TRADE IN 1808, ABOUT 187,000 SLAVES WERE SHIPPED FROM AFRICA DIRECTLY TO CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA. Between 1710 and 1740 alone, more than 38,000 slaves were shipped to the Georgia-South Carolina region, creating enormous imbalances between white and black populations and a very large body of slaves with direct memory of African freedom. Additionally, from 1700 to 1740, about 39,000 more slaves were shipped to lands controlled by Spain in North America, which included Florida.

  Until Great Britain ended Spanish domination of Florida in 1763, the hundreds of free black people who lived there remained a powerful symbol and a serious threat to the English colonies. The Spanish governor’s offer of freedom to any slaves who fled the Carolinas and Georgia for Florida, converted to Roman Catholicism, swore allegiance to the King of Spain, and pledged to serve for four years in the militia destabilized the English settlements and encouraged insurrections. This, effectively, was the first Underground Railroad, and it ran from Charleston to St. Augustine.1

  In 1693, King Charles II issued a proclamation making it known that runaway slaves could come to Florida and be granted their freedom, in effect ratifying an unofficial policy that the governor of Florida, Diego de Quiroga, had instituted in 1687. Recall that many of the African slaves shipped to the American colonies from the kingdoms of Kongo and Angola were Catholics already. Catholic Spain, an inveterate enemy of Protestant Britain, sought to weaken, if not destroy, the colonies of its British rivals, and both countries were becoming increasingly dependent upon an unobstructed source for African slaves. Between 1720 and 1740, South Carolina rice production grew from 8.2 million pounds a year to 35 million, demanding a commensurate increase in slave labor. By encouraging runaways, the Spanish aimed a dagger at the heart of British power.2

  From the very beginning of English settlements in the Carolinas, Spain plotted their ruin. The fierce and bloody conflicts that resulted took place within a rivalry that pitted the Spanish, English, various Indian tribes, and Africans against one another for power and survival. As early as 1686, Spanish forces in Florida organized a combined Spanish, Indian, and African raid on Edisto Island, one of the Carolina Sea Islands. They not only killed several Englishmen, but burned a Scots settlement on Port Royal and made off with 13 slaves belonging to the English governor. The Spanish so often attacked English settlements that their African allies and the slaves they seized in the process became extremely familiar with the routes back and forth between St. Augustine and the Carolina coast. When i
n 1687, eight male and two female slaves escaped by canoe from Carolina and arrived in Florida, the governor had them baptized. They not only entered the Catholic faith, but also the defense forces of the colony and helped construct the grand Castillo de San Marcos, the large, star-shaped coquina fortification that still overlooks St. Augustine and dominates the coast.

  English agent William Dunlop visited St. Augustine to protest the Spanish offers of freedom to runaway slaves, but left with only vague promises and no cessation of the flow of fugitives to Florida. In fact, the numbers would only increase as a kind of black-slave grapevine (as crusty John Adams would describe this method of communication in his diary as early as September 1775) spread word among the English slaves about the freedom that awaited them in Florida.3 The number of runaways became so large that the English governor complained to the Spanish that the slaves ran away “dayly to your towns.” The flow grew so much that even the Spanish governor sought royal guidance. And this is why Charles II—seeing the value in thereby weakening the English and simultaneously strengthening Spain’s Florida settlement—on November 7, 1693, issued his edict proclaiming that Spain would give “liberty to all … the men as well as the women … so that by their example and by my liberality others will do the same.” The astonishing move offered hope to English slaves and also created an unusual multiethnic community in St. Augustine that, while still permitting slavery, also provided freedom and, for a time, a measure of security for African Americans and Native Americans.4

  From 1702 until 1718, the region saw conflict at unprecedented levels, including two Indian wars, the Tuscarora War of 1711 and the even more catastrophic Yamasee War of 1715, which nearly destroyed the English colony in the Carolinas. All the conflict of this era involved the Spanish at St. Augustine and their African and Indian allies, and took place during Queen Anne’s War (known in Europe as the War of the Spanish Secession), which only increased the levels of conflict in the region, along with the competition for slaves. Indeed, one of the prime motives for Native American opposition to the English was their fear of enslavement.