Four Hundred Souls
Page 38
most Christian demographic: David Masci, “Five Facts about the Religious Lives of African Americans,” Pew Research Center, February 7, 2018, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/02/07/5-facts-about-the-religious-lives-of-african-americans/.
“It is enacted and declared”: “An Act Declaring That Baptisme of Slaves Doth Not Exempt Them from Bondage” (1667), Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/_An_act_declaring_that_baptisme_of_slaves_doth_not_exempt_them_from_bondage_1667.
could not enslave other Christians: Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 17.
“Whereas some doubts have risen”: “An Act Declaring,” Encyclopedia Virginia.
To challenge slavery on moral grounds: Sean Michael Lucas, For a Continuing Church: The Roots of the Presbyterian Church in America (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2015), 39–45.
1669–1674: The Royal African Company
town hall: Anthony Tibbles, “TextPorts Conference, April 2000,” National Museums Liverpool, www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ports-of-transatlantic-slave-trade.
Cunard Building: “Racism and Resistance,” Historic England, historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/another-England/a-brief-history/racism-and-resistance/.
Martins Bank: “File: Slave relief: Martins Bank Liverpool.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Slave_relief,_Martins_Bank_Liverpool.jpg.
“a reminder that Liverpool”: David Ward, “Martins Bank and Its Slave Trade Iconography,” Liverpool Preservation Trust, February 22, 2011, liverpoolpreservationtrust.blogspot.com/2011/02/martins-bank-and-its-slave-trade.html?m=1.
Royal African Company (RAC): William A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press and Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2013), 11.
precursor to British imperialism: Tahira Ismail, “Royal African Company and Empire,” Janus UMD Undergraduate History Journal, October 28, 2018, www.umdjanus.com/single-post/2018/10/28/The-Royal-African-Company-and-Empire.
Gambia and Ghana: Ana Mosioa-Tunya, “The Role of the Royal African Company in Slavery,” Global Black History, October 9, 2018, www.globalblackhistory.com/2018/10/the-role-of-the-royal-african-company-in-slavery.html.
granted a monopoly: Ann M. Carlos and Jamie Brown Kruse, “The Decline of the Royal African Company: Fringe Firms and the Role of the Charter,” Economic History Review, new series 49, no. 2 (1996): 291.
“had the whole, entire and only trade”: “Britain and the Trade,” National Archives (UK), www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/africa_caribbean/britain_trade.htm.
joint stock company: Derek Wilson, “Royal African Company: How the Stuarts Birthed Britain’s Slave Trade,” History Answers, December 7, 2017, www.historyanswers.co.uk/kings-queens/royal-african-company-how-the-stuarts-birthed-britains-slave-trade/.
stockholders elected: W. R. Scott, “The Constitution and Finance of the Royal African Company of England from Its Foundation till 1720,” American Historical Review 8, no. 2 (1903): 245.
monopolized the trade: Carlos and Kruse, “Decline,” 291.
company was authorized: Kenneth Gordon Davies, The Royal African Company (London: Routledge, 1999), 97–99.
crown was entitled: Scott, “Constitution,” 245.
“Negro Servants, Gold, Elephants teeth”: “Royal Proclamation Regarding the Royal African Company with Signatures, 2 December 1674,” Massachusetts Historical Society, www.masshist.org/database/1927.
convict lease system: Devon Douglas-Bowers, “Slavery by Another Name: The Convict Lease System,” Hampton Institute, October 30, 2013, thehamptoninstitute.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/slavery-by-another-name-the-convict-lease-system/.
criminalized minor offenses: David A. Love and Vijay Das, “Slavery in the U.S. Prison System,” Al Jazeera, September 9, 2017, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/09/slavery-prison-system-170901082522072.html.
immigration industrial complex: Karen Manges Douglas and Rogelio Sáenz, “The Criminalization of Immigrants & the Immigration-Industrial Complex,” Daedalus 142, no. 3 (2013): 199–227.
1674–1679: Bacon’s Rebellion
“a carpenter, formerly”: “A List of Those That Have Been Executed for the Late Rebellion in Virginia, by Sir William Berkeley, 1676,” Virtual Jamestown, www.virtualjamestown.org/exist/cocoon/jamestown/fha/J1055.
Irish dockworkers: Michael C. Connolly, “Black Fades to Green: Irish Labor Replaces African-American Labor Along a Major New England Waterfront, Portland, Maine, in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Colby Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2001): 357–73.
“hate strikes”: David M. Lewis-Colman, Race Against Liberalism: Black Workers and the UAW in Detroit (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 15–16.
Bacon’s anti-Native fervor: Erin Blakemore, “Why America’s First Colonial Rebels Burned Jamestown to the Ground,” History.com, August 8, 2019, www.history.com/news/bacons-rebellion-jamestown-colonial-america; James D. Rice, “Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–1677),” Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Bacon_s_Rebellion_1676-1677.
“English, and other white”: “An Act for Preventing Negroes Insurrections” (June 1860), in William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (New York, 1823), 2:481–82.
any indentured white servant: “Run-aways” (March 1661–62), ibid., 2:116–17.
“lift[ing] his or her hand”: “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” (October 1705), ibid., 3:447–63.
stopped importing white servants: Theodore Allen, Class Struggle and the Origin of Slavery: The Invention of the White Race (Stony Brook, NY: Center for the Study of Working Class Life, 2006).
1679–1684: The Virginia Law That Forbade Bearing Arms
“happened one law at a time”: Africans in America (documentary), PBS, 1998.
“lift[ed] up his hand”: “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” (October 1705), in William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (New York, 1823), 3:447–63.
“eighty Guns”: Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 389–91.
NRA lent its support: See Thad Morgan, “The NRA Supported Gun Control When the Black Panthers Had the Weapons,” History.com, March 22, 2018, www.history.com/news/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-support-mulford-act; Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).
1684–1689: The Code Noir
“prohibited the exchange”: Gad J. Heuman and James Walvin, eds., The Slavery Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), 199.
“one of the most”: Tyler Stovall, “Race and the Making of the Nation: Blacks in Modern France,” in Michael A. Gomez, ed., Diasporic Africa: A Reader (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 205.
“the French American”: William Renwick Riddell, “Le Code Noir,” Journal of Negro History 10, no. 3 (1925): 321–29.
“salary and a portion”: Thomas N. Ingersoll, “Free Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleans, 1718–1812,” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1991): 176.
“since girls and women”: Ibid., 186.
1689–1694: The Germantown Petition Against Slavery
“are brought hither”: “Germantown Friends’ Protest Against Slavery 1688” (facsi
mile), Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.14000200/?st=text.
“one of the first documents”: Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 70.
1694–1699: The Middle Passage
“in human flesh and blood”: Malyn Newitt, The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 156.
slowly eroded the Portuguese monopoly: Richard Bean estimates that the Portuguese exported nearly 100,000 sterling worth of gold annually in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century; see Bean, “A Note of the Relative Importance of Slaves and Gold in West African Exports,” Journal of African History 15, no. 3 (1974): 351–56. See also Rebecca Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011), 37–40; and Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 87.
number of enslaved people: The estimated number of enslaved men, women, and children from the Gold Coast rose from 2,429 in 1641–50 to 40,443 in 1691–1700. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, National Endowment for the Humanities, www.neh.gov/explore/voyages-the-trans-atlantic-slave-trade-database.
the ruler of Ardra: Carl A. Hanson, Economy and Society in Baroque Portugal, 1668–1703 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 243; C. R. Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750: Growing Pains of a Colonial Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 153.
“Axim, Ackum”: Peter C. W. Gutkind, “The Canoemen of the Gold Coast (Ghana): A Survey and an Exploration in Precolonial African Labour History,” Cahiers d’études africaines 29, nos. 115–16 (1989): 339–76.
“the bigger canoes”: Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, trans. George H. T. Kimble (1506; Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 116, 121, 122, 132.
“the fittest and most experienced”: Robert Smith, “The Canoe in West African History,” Journal of African History 11, no. 4 (1970): 517.
“It was customary for Mina fishermen”: Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea…(London: James Knapton and Dan. Midwinter, 1705), 344.
1699–1704: The Selling of Joseph
“October 12. Shipped”: “Samuel Sewall, Merchant,” in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 52, October 1918–June 1919 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1919), 335.
“been long and much”: Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, vol. 2, 1699–1700–1714 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1879), 16.
“these Blackamores”: Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (Boston, 1700), 2–3.
The opening: From 1676 to 1708, the enslaved population in Massachusetts more than doubled, from about 200 to approximately 550 enslaved people. An estimated two-thirds of them lived in Boston. Some of this demographic change can be attributed to the British Parliament’s revocation of the Royal African Company’s monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade, enabling merchants in Massachusetts to engage more freely in the lucrative trade in enslaved Africans.
“There is such”: Sewall, Selling of Joseph, 2.
“sons of Adam”: Ibid., 1–2.
“for the freeing”: Diary of Samuel Sewall, 16.
“FOR AS MUCH”: Sewall, Selling of Joseph, 1.
“To persist in holding”: Ibid., 3.
“SEVERAL IRISH MAID SERVANTS”: Boston News Letter, September 13, 1714, in Lorenzo Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 41.
“Cowardly and cruel”: Lawrence W. Towner, “The Sewall-Saffin Dialogue on Slavery,” William and Mary Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1964): 48.
He had made peace: By 1715, the enslaved population of Boston had grown to approximately two thousand. The enslaved Africans and African Americans of eighteenth-century Massachusetts would face even stricter regulations than had preceding generations, including restrictions on buying provisions at market, keeping livestock, carrying canes, and being in public areas at night.
his uncle’s protest: The Selling of Joseph was reprinted only once in the eighteenth century, by the Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay in 1737. It then fell into obscurity and was not reprinted again until 1863.
1709–1714: The Revolt in New York
“gathered in an orchard”: Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham—The History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 148.
“had resolved to revenge themselves”: Ibid.
enslaved to British owners: James E. Allen, The Negro in New York (Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1964), 15.
20,613 enslaved Blacks in New York: Neil Smith and Don Mitchell, eds., Revolting New York: How 400 Years of Riot, Rebellion, Uprising, and Revolution Shaped a City (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 29.
“Koramantines and Pawpaws”: Ibid., 148.
“themselves to secrecy”: Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1943), 172. Aptheker cites an article found in the Boston Weekly News-Letter, April 7–14, 1712.
“Several did”: Ibid., 148.
“Hunted down”: Ibid., 149.
“The real legacy”: Ibid., 149.
1714–1719: The Slave Market
“socially relevant feature”: Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 35.
“grow likely”: Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 21.
“possibilities of their wombs”: Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in the Making of New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 3.
chattel principle: Walter Johnson, The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 1.
One enslaved woman: Richard Shannon Moss, Slavery on Long Island: A Study in Local Institutional and Early African-American Communal Life (New York: Garland, 1993), 51.
between 1715 and 1718: Jeanne Chase, “New York Slave Trade 1698–1741: The Geographic Origins of a Displaced People,” Historie & Measure 18, no. 2 (2003): 95–112, 98.
“undesired testimony”: Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 159–61.
Between 1715 and 1763: Moss, Slavery on Long Island, 35.
plainly visible in their tears: Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 38–39.
1719–1724: Maroons and Marronage
“two good ones”: Le Page du Pratz, The History of Louisiana or of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina (London: T. Becket, 1774), 22, 27.
policy of divide and conquer: E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1855), 5:674.
“lest [Africans] prove as troublesome”: “Documents,” American Historical Review 1 (October 1895–July 1896): 89.
“refuge to the runaway negroes”: Lt. Governor Bull to Board of Trade, May 8, 1760, in Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians Through the Revolutionary Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 74.
“many Times Slaves run away”: Walter Clark, ed., The State Records of North Carolina, 1715–1776 (Goldsboro, NC: Nash Brothers, 1904), 23:201.
“safer among the alligators”: Liverpool Albion, February 20, 1858.
Cornelia Carney: Charles L. Perdue, Jr., and Thomas E. Barden, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville: Uni
versity of Virginia Press, 1976), 66.
Some maroons did not: Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 1, 218, 301.
“I taste how it is”: John George Clinkscales, On the Old Plantation: Reminiscences of His Childhood (Spartanburg, SC: Band & White, 1916), 20.
1724–1729: The Spirituals
“the syncretic Afro-Brazilian”: Jonathon Grasse, “Calundu’s ‘Winds of Divination’: Music and Back Religiosity in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil,” Yale Journal of Music and Religion 3, no. 2 (2017): 43.
“The music is everywhere!”: Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3rd ed. (1971; New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), xxi.
“Song texts generally”: Ibid., 16.
“A most striking”: Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., “Cosmopolitan or Provincial?: Ideology in Early Black Music Historiography, 1867–1940,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996): 14.
“Afro-American music”: Dena J. Epstein, “Black Spirituals: Their Emergence into Public Knowledge,” Black Music Research Journal 10, no. 1 (1990): 59.
1729–1734: African Identities
Samba Bambara’s: Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 107.
Marie-Joseph Angélique: Ibid., 100–101; Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 14–22.