Four Hundred Souls

by Four Hundred Souls (retail) (epub)

  While it may seem reckless and self-endangering for masters to have violated gun laws like this, it speaks to planters’ beliefs in their own military power. White nonslaveholding men from the militia could be signaled and employed at any moment. The punishment for rumors of uprisings, let alone rebellions themselves, was death.

  But those were exceptions for the self-interest of individual planters: in general white Americans then and later considered it to be in their self-interest for Black Americans to remain unarmed. One U.S. Supreme Court justice argued, in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sanford decision in 1857, that one of the clear hazards of recognizing Black people as citizens was that it would allow them to “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

  Today the National Rifle Association (NRA) leads the charge in protecting the Second Amendment—a charge it has been leading since it began in 1871. But the NRA has never been a defender of African Americans who purchased weapons for self-defense against white terror. In the late 1960s, when Black Panthers carried weapons in public spaces, it was entirely legal in the state of California. When California passed some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country to disarm the Black Panthers, the NRA lent its support.

  It is nearly impossible to disconnect gun ownership and race in America. Gun ownership has always been a tool to secure power—racist white power.

  1684–1689

  THE CODE NOIR

  Laurence Ralph

  The period of the 1680s was a time of growth and expansion in the English colonies as Africans replaced European indentured servants, and slavery became commonplace. By 1685, when Blacks were becoming more central to the plantation economy, the conditions of slavery, especially the way whites treated Blacks, varied based on location. In South Carolina, whites passed a law that “prohibited the exchange of goods between slaves or slaves and freemen without their master’s permission.” In 1687 whites in Northern Neck, Virginia, caught wind that enslaved people were organizing a revolt under the guise of planning a funeral. They immediately crushed the insurrection and then made it illegal for enslaved Blacks to bury their dead.

  Enslaved people began to flee harsh conditions in Virginia and South Carolina to Spanish Florida. If an enslaved person made it there and professed his belief that Roman Catholicism was “the True Faith,” the Spanish colonists would set him free. As a result, the first Black town, St. Augustine, was founded by freedmen and -women in 1687. A year later Germantown Quakers wrote the first petition against slavery ever drafted by a religious group in the English colonies. Just four years after the Quakers had brought enslaved people to settle the frontier, they argued that it was immoral to treat human beings as if they were cargo. This period also marks the tail end of the Royal African Company’s seventeen-year monopoly on transporting enslaved people to the English colonies. But just as Black people who lived in those colonies were deeply impacted by the decisions of the London-based trading company, the 1685 Code Noir, “one of the most extensive official documents on race, slavery, and freedom ever drawn up in Europe,” transformed the lives of generations of Black people living in the geographical expanse that would eventually become the United States.

  The Code Noir (or Black Code) was written by French politician Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who served as minister of finance for twenty-two years under Louis XIV. The goal of the Code Noir was to ensure the success of the sugar plantation economy. What France needed to do to maintain economic security, Colbert believed, was establish protocols for regulating enslaved people in the colonies. Colbert died an accomplished statesman at the age of sixty-four, but he was buried before the code was complete. In 1683 Colbert’s eldest son, the Marquis de Seignelay, submitted the document to the king, and two years later Louis XIV ratified it.

  In an edict that the king announced in March 1685, which concerned how order was to be enforced in “the French American islands,” Louis XIV asserted that the purpose of the Code was to provide comfort to French officers living in colonies who were said to “need our authority and our justice…[in order] to regulate the status and condition of the slaves.” As the majority of those living in the colonies were enslaved, the king meant for his white subjects to feel at ease.

  In the security regime of the mercantilist period, the colonists’ sense of safety was related to the way their mother country regulated and surveilled enslaved people, who were central to their nation’s ambitions to conquer the globe. Louis XIV’s attempts to “assist” his French officers living in the Americas, in other words, were inextricably bound to the process by which Spanish and European nations enlarged their power at the expense of rival nations through wars, purchases, treaties, and the enforcement of codes.

  A remote part of the French Empire, Louisiana, was settled in 1699, though its most famous city—New Orleans—did not come under French control until 1718. The Code Noir was applied to Louisiana six years later, in 1724. Though Louisiana would eventually come under Spanish rule and then French rule again before being purchased by the United States, the territory was still controlled by the French in 1729 when John Mingo, a Black man who was enslaved in South Carolina, escaped to New Orleans. When Mingo arrived, a colonist granted his freedom, and he worked the land that the colonist hired him to break. Before long Mingo had saved enough money to purchase an enslaved woman, Therese, who also lived and worked on the plantation. John Mingo and Therese then moved in together and made a living by farming another colonist’s land, for which they were granted a “salary and a portion of the yield.”

  As free Black people, John and Therese Mingo were rare but not completely alone. They joined the small population of free Black servants, drivers, hunters, artisans, and domestics who had accompanied French colonists when they arrived from Europe. The public record does not mention any Mingo children, but if Therese gave birth, her offspring were subject to the 1685 Code Noir. If John and Therese Mingo had a boy, they might have warned him that marrying an enslaved woman would turn his offspring into slaves. If they had a girl, they might have warned her about the perils of marrying an enslaved man. Having children with a white man was also dangerous under the Code, as both mother and child could become property of the New Orleans hospital. Since sexual relations with a white man could endanger her freedom and since marrying someone white was outlawed, it would have been reasonable for John and Therese to encourage their daughter to marry another free Black person.

  Informed by the Code, their advice might have sounded something like this:

  Don’t marry a slave; if you marry a slave, your life will be full of worry: if your slave husband were to carry a weapon, or even a large stick, you may find him flogged with his back bleeding at your doorstep; you would not be able to invite other slaves to your wedding; your husband could not sell sugar or fruits or vegetables or firewood or herbs at the market, and he could not travel without a written note; if you or your husband were to be violated in any way he could never win a judgment; and if he were to strike his master, his mistress, or their children, his punishment would be death; know that if you were to save your money and purchase your husband’s freedom, he would still have to maintain respect for his former master and his former master’s family; rest assured, your children would be free despite the condition of their father; but for you, free girl, best not marry a slave at all.

  In the system of chattel slavery from which Europe benefited, Black people were considered the property of colonists. However, they never stopped imagining ways to be free. Precisely because Black girls, in particular, were devalued, they were most likely to have their freedom purchased by family members. That is, “since girls and women had lower market values, they were more likely to be freed.”

  Despite the fact that free Blacks in New Orleans were a relatively large group compared to those living in other American cities, the legacy of the 1685 Code Noir should not be mistaken for a mythical story of progress in which the document tra
veled out of France and paved the way for freedom purchases, creating space for the emancipation of all Blacks. That mythology covers over the backlash to free Blacks in New Orleans under U.S. rule when the white planter class systematically excluded them from the halls of power. The legacy that I want to resurrect, rather, is the way that this piece of legislation helped colonial officers govern through enforcing and exploiting a society’s racial divisions. What might be reduced to anti-Black sentiment or self-hate, in those imagined words of advice to a free Black girl, accurately reflect codified law that inscribed a racial caste system within New Orleans civil society.

  In this way, our imagined advice given to the Mingo daughter also echoes the enduring dialogue about the law and the police that Black parents and their children have had for generations. (I am speaking of that coming-of-age conversation about racial awakening, commonly referred to as “the talk.”) And thus, although one would never be able to prove it definitively, it would likewise be impossible to deny that the control, regulation, vigilance, and surveillance indicative of the 1685 Code Noir are still embedded in the place where the Mingos gained their freedom: New Orleans, the U.S. city that recently possessed the highest rate of incarceration.

  1689–1694

  THE GERMANTOWN PETITION AGAINST SLAVERY

  Christopher J. Lebron

  The idea of “allies” often comes up in our current resistance struggles. The #MeToo movement would do better if men were good allies in fighting the sexual predation of women; Black Lives Matter would benefit if whites were good allies in resisting racism and racist institutions; the queer movement would be stronger if cis-normative people were good allies in promoting understanding of gender fluidity and combating both ignorance and damaging public policies that limit access to traditionally gender-normed spaces.

  But what makes a good ally? As it is used these days, it means someone who is not being directly harmed by the injustice in question yet who stands with those being harmed, even if it’s against the self-interest of their identity privilege. In many ways, it asks more of the privileged than they are often willing to give but less than what those of us on the other side of that privilege need.

  This was not the case in 1683, when thirteen families founded Germantown, a neighborhood in what would become the city of Philadelphia. Quakers were prominent among the founding families and, from this base, established a long-term presence in the city. History celebrates those of the Quaker faith as being reliably antislavery. But there were differences between early Quaker groups, as the 1688 Germantown petition shows.

  In addition to being at the historical forefront of abolitionist tracts, the German Quaker petition represented a position that was importantly different from that of English Quakers. Although the English Quakers resisted the presence of slavery, their concern tended to focus on the inconsistency that slavery presented to the ostensible principles of this still-forming new country—a free land for free people. Thus for them, slavery was wrong because it impeded those of African descent from partaking of the bounty of the land as a reward for hard work and from participating in the processes that were collectively shaping the nascent nation.

  These are fine abolitionist principles, but the German Quakers had a more fundamental disagreement with slavery: they found it an affront to the human condition. Consider the demands in the petition, written by its four authors, Gerret Hendericks, Derick up de Graeff, Francis Daniell Pastorius, and Abraham op den Graeff. They declared that Blacks

  are brought hither against their will and consent, and that many of them are stolen. Now, tho they are black, we can not conceive there is more liberty to have them slaves, as it is to have other white ones….This makes an ill report in all those countries of Europe, where they hear off, that ye Quakers doe here handel men as they handel their ye cattle….

  And in case you find it to be good to handel these blacks at that manner, we desire and require you hereby lovingly, that you may inform us herein, which at this time never was done, viz., that Christians have such a liberty to do so. To the end we shall be satisfied in this point, and satisfied likewise our good friends and acquaintances in our natif country, to whose it is a terror, or [fearful] thing, that men should be handeld so in Pennsylvania.

  The most important part of the petition—the part that compelled historian Katharine Gerbner to describe it as “one of the first documents to make a humanitarian argument against slavery”—is the plain affirmation that Blacks are first and foremost human beings and not salable animals for toil and labor. A humanitarian argument is different from an argument based on inclusion and exclusion. Inclusion—in this case, being included as beneficiaries of the bounty of America—is important, but it is not fundamental because if the people who want to be included are not considered worthy or even really people at all, then your commitment to inclusion will evaporate. But if you start from the idea that Blacks are indeed human, then every commitment to equality after that will be unshakable. And that is the thing to be learned from the 1688 petition. Blacks do not need allies who fight for our inclusion; rather, we need people who are possessed of the basic belief that we are human and that any arguments that depend on rejecting that proposition are tyrannical, unjust, and to be fought.

  This may seem to be a semantic point. After all, can’t allies do exactly that? Yes, but there’s more to consider. By their very nature, alliances are agreements, explicitly or implicitly, and usually the most essential part of an alliance is that it is made for mutual benefit and advantage. But think about that. What does it mean to rely on a system of racial support founded on people entering into that kind of pragmatic agreement?

  The 1688 Germantown petition is a model of, if nothing else, a quality that Black people need in white Americans—the uncompromising belief that what is wrong with racism is not that it inhibits full access to American goods and treasures but that it is an affront to the human standing of Black Americans. Black people don’t need allies. We need decent people possessed of the moral conviction that our lives matter.

  1694–1699

  THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

  Mary E. Hicks

  From the 1400s to the 1600s, Portuguese merchant interests on the vast coast of West Africa experienced the ebbs and flows of fortune characteristic of any form of early modern commerce. But the Portuguese were not exclusively involved in trading spices, textiles, specie, and other luxury goods; the fledgling empire increasingly specialized in the disreputable commerce “in human flesh and blood.”

  The tiny Iberian nation originated the Atlantic world’s first transoceanic slave trade. It connected Europe with sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas through the brutal commerce of buying and selling human beings. The pioneering maritime technologies and trading strategies of the Portuguese made the once commercially insignificant territory into the preeminent importer of gold and enslaved men, women, and children on the continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

  The incursions of Dutch, English, and French traffickers slowly eroded the Portuguese monopoly. In the region surrounding Elmina—the most prolific gold-producing area in West Africa—the Portuguese were supplanted by the Dutch in 1637. The rush of European merchants to the Gold Coast following the Dutch victory prompted the once modest number of slaving ships trolling West African waters to metastasize. The number of enslaved people whom slavers violently embarked from the sandy strip of coast reached an average of 4,494 per year.

  In the final decade of the seventeenth century, slave traders under Portugal’s banner began to reassert their regional dominance by regaining the coveted asiento or commercial monopoly to supply enslaved laborers to Spanish America. In 1698 the ruler of Ardra, a powerful African polity to the east of Elmina, invited the Portuguese monarch to build a fortified trading post there in recognition of the nation’s lucrative dealings in the port. Meanwhile in Brazil, Portugal’s largest and most opulent colony, gold d
eposits were discovered in a remote, mountainous region west of Rio de Janeiro, which further stimulated Portuguese efforts to exploit a steady stream of laboring hands to mine for precious metals. But the Portuguese also exploited the expertise of another group of unlikely laborers.

  West African mariners provided the critical labor necessary to make slaving voyages profitably efficient. And their seafaring skills became the hidden element in the slave trade’s surging growth. A string of coastal communities, “Axim, Ackum, Boutroe, Tacorary, Commendo, Cormentim and Wineba,” furnished Portuguese and other Europeans with highly skilled contracted canoemen to ferry goods and people from ship to shore, as well as carry provisions and trade goods along the coast.

  Their expertise in fashioning lithe, maneuverable watercraft was unmatched. So too was their knowledge of the contours of coastal geographies and the rhythms of the powerful local surf, which often confounded European seamen. The canoes of the Fanti especially captivated European navigators for their size and complexity. These vessels, able to navigate on the open waters of the Atlantic, made a striking impression. Visitors noted “the bigger canoes…made from a single trunk, the largest in the Ethiopias of Guinea; some of them are large enough to hold eighty men, and they come from a hundred leagues or more up this river bringing yams in large quantities….They also bring many slaves, cows, goats, and sheep.” On larger craft, crewmen remained stationed for long periods, just as they would on European sailing ships, eating and sleeping aboard.