Four Hundred Souls
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New York had the largest: Thelma Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 69–70; Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, eds., Slavery in New York (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 8, 60–71.
Among the many ethnolinguistic: Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 55–79.
“sickly” and “melancholy” “refuse”: Lorena Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 76, 79; Douglas Chambers, “ ‘My own Nation’: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora,” in David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity, and Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass & Co Ltd, 1997), 83–84; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “The Clustering of Igbo in the Americas,” in Toyin Falola and Raphael Chijioke Njoku, eds., Igbo in the Atlantic World: African Origins and Diasporic Destinations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 149–53.
1734–1739: From Fort Mose to Soul City
“Spanish bureaucrats”: Jane Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida,” in A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity, ed. Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1:92.
“organized, governed”: Damien Cave, “In a Town Apart, the Pride and Trials of Black Life,” New York Times, September 28, 2008.
“Spanish support”: Landers, “Gracia Real,” 106.
1739–1744: The Stono Rebellion
home to a Black majority: Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 131.
“Carolina looks more”: Samuel Dyssli to family in Switzerland, December 3, 1737, in South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 23, no. 3 (1922): 90.
free any enslaved person: Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 73.
about twenty Black rebels: Mark M. Smith, Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), xiii.
At least twenty-three: Ibid., 83.
“Having found rum”: Alexander Hewatt, An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia (London, 1779), 2:34.
“I sho’ does come”: George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography: Supplement, series 1, vol. 11, North Carolina and South Carolina Narratives (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1977), 56.
1744–1749: Lucy Terry Prince
“over the Green Mountains”: Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, rev. ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 241.
alongside Phillis Wheatley: David R. Proper, “Lucy Terry Prince: ‘Singer of History,’ ” Contributions in Black Studies 9, no. 15 (1992).
“King George’s War”: Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 64.
“wrote” the poem: Frances Smith Foster and Kim D. Green, “Ports of Call, Pulpits of Consultation: Rethinking the Origins of African American Literature,” in A Companion to African American Literature, ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2010), 50.
Baptized in 1735: “Lucy Terry,” in Margaret Busby, ed., Daughters of Africa (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 16–17.
“three divisions”: George Sheldon, Negro Slavery in Old Deerfield (Boston, 1893), 56.
“a place of resort”: Ibid.
“where folks were”: Ibid., 50.
litigated before the Vermont supreme court: Barbara M. Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon Books), 35–36.
“in this remarkable woman”: Quoted in Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, 241.
“know-your-place aggression”: See, for instance, Koritha Mitchell, “Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care,” African American Review 51, no. 4 (2018): 253–62.
bell hooks: See bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Abington-on-Thames, UK: Routledge, 2014).
1749–1754: Race and the Enlightenment
race became an object: Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997); Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Press, 2011), 28–32.
scientists pointed to nature: Terence Keel, Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).
“supernaturalist to scientific”: Joseph L. Graves, “Great Is Their Sin: Biological Determinism in the Age of Genomics,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 661, no. 1 (2015): 24–50.
Benjamin Franklin, one: Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 80.
innately and immutably: Ibid., 84–85; Roberts, Fatal Invention, 30, 83–84.
“the real distinctions”: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. David Waldstreicher (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 176–77.
a religious treatise: Kendi, Stamped, 88; John Woolman, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes. Recommended to the Professor of Christianity of Every Denomination (Philadelphia: James Chattin, 1754).
He advocated: Phillips P. Moulton, ed., The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1989).
many Quakers had concluded: Kendi, Stamped, 88; Brian Temple, Philadelphia Quakers and the Antislavery Movement (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014).
“Who can now find”: Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries (Boston: Kneeland, 1755), 9.
“The number of purely”: Ibid., 10.
1754–1759: Blackness and Indigeneity
dispossession of millions: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 2.
“British were the conquerors”: Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chap. 5, esp. 256.
to justify taking their land: For a visualization, see Claudio Saunt’s interactive map of Indigenous land loss over time: “Invasion of America,” usg.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=eb6ca76e008543a89349ff2517db47e6.
central characters: Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiv.
savagery and civilization: Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 38.
the combined power: Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 99.
Georgia’s enslaved population: Betty Wood, “Slavery in Colonial Georgia,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, June 3, 2019, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/slavery-colonial-georgia.
“To live in Virginia”: “Reverend Peter Fontaine’s Defense of Slavery in Virginia” (1757), Africans in America, www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h6t.html.
Paul Cuffe: Lamont D. Thomas, Rise to Be a People: A Biography of Paul Cuffe (Urbana: University of Illin
ois Press, 1986), 3–9.
1759–1764: One Black Boy
“a Negroe boy”: John Porteous Letter Book, 1767–1769, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The brackets in this quotation indicate the uncertainty about this officer’s last name, which is difficult to decipher in the record. This reference to the African American boy in Porteous’s letter book is discussed briefly in Tiya Miles, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (New York: New Press, 2017), 35.
defenders of the land: I am borrowing the term defenders from Lisa Brooks, who consistently uses it instead of the more commonplace and ideologically laden warriors to describe Native men and women during King Philip’s War. See Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). See also Jon William Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War: Forging New Links in the Anglo-Iroquois Covenant Chain, 1758–1766,” Ethnohistory 44, no. 4 (1997): 617–54, 627–29. For more on Pontiac’s War, especially regarding the spiritual aspects of Native resistance and Neolin’s role, see Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 3, 86, 90. For a new analysis of gender and the representation of women in histories of Pontiac’s War, see Karen L. Marrero, Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2020), chap. 6.
a certain “Negroe boy”: Richard Middleton, Pontiac’s War: Its Causes, Course, and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2007), 72.
visible status symbol: Pontiac sought a Black servant as a status symbol decades before the most prominent Native American slaveholders in the South—the Cherokees and Choctaws—installed Black servants in their homes and adopted plantation agriculture in part to display “civilizational” status and wealth. For more on Black slavery in southern Indian nations, see Celia Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Fay A. Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (2005; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); and Christina Snyder, Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
approximately sixty-five others: Donna Valley Russell, ed., Michigan Censuses 1710–1830: Under the French, British, and Americans (Detroit: Detroit Society for Genealogical Research, 1982), 121. The 1762 British census of Detroit counted five enslaved people with no designation of race. The 1865 census did not include numbers for enslaved people.
network of merchant elites: Norman McRae, “Blacks in Detroit, 1736–1833: The Search for Freedom and Community and Its Implications for Educators” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1982), 55; James Sterling Letter Book, 1761–1765, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Miles, Dawn of Detroit, 30–31; Marrero, Detroit’s Hidden Channels, 150–55.
state prison in Jackson: “Jackson: Prison System,” Michigan History, michiganhistory.leadr.msu.edu/jackson-an-introduction/jackson-prisonsystem; Michigan State Industries, “History of Michigan Industries,” www.michigan.gov/msi/0,9277,7-383-89195---,00.html; “Michigan’s Prison Museum at the State Prison of Southern Michigan,” Cell Block 7, www.cellblock7.org/; Howard B. Gill, “The Prison Labor Problem,” American Academy of Political and Social Science 157, no. 1 (1931): 83–101, 84, 93; Blake McKelvey, “Prison Labor Problem: 1875–1900,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 25, no. 2 (1934): 254–70.
largest incarcerated group: “Michigan Profile,” Prison Policy Initiative, www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/MI.html (based on 2010 data).
Racialized sentencing policies: Melanca Clark, “How Michigan Can Reduce Its Prison Population,” Detroit Free Press, August 31, 2018. Clark’s figures are supported by “Michigan Profile,” Prison Policy Initiative.
expansion of convict labor: Heather Thompson and Matthew Lassiter to author, July 17 and August 3, 2019; Heather Ann Thompson, “Unmaking the Motor City in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” Journal of Law and Society 15 (2013): 41–61, esp. 47, 48, 49, 50 (“vicious cycle”), 54, 55; and Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 191–202.
“carceral landscape”: Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 209.
1764–1769: Phillis Wheatley
The date Phillis: Phillis Wheatley’s first published poem, “On Messers Hussey and Coffin,” and the accompanying note, were published in the Newport Mercury on December 21, 1767.
“the difficult miracle”: June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America,” Poetry Foundation, August 15, 2006.
“extraterrestrial and the supernatural”: James Levernier, “Style as Protest in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley,” Style 27, no. 2 (1993): 172–93.
1769–1774: David George
“had not the fear of God”: David George, “An Account of the Life of Mr. David George from Sierra Leone, Africa, Given by Himself,” in Woody Holton, ed., Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era: A Brief History with Documents (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), 112.
first Black Baptist church: Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 91.
shared religious life and culture: Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 37.
any religious tradition: See the Pew Research Center’s surveys of the “religiously unaffiliated,” www.pewresearch.org/topics/religiously-unaffiliated/.
1774–1779: The American Revolution
“All men are born”: Constitution or Frame of Government, Agreed upon by the Delegates of the People of the State of Massachusetts Bay (Boston: Benjamin Edes & Sons, 1780).
These same rights: Emily Blanck, “Seventeen Eighty-Three: The Turning Point in the Law of Slavery and Freedom in Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 75, no. 1 (2002): 24–51; Arthur Zilversmit, “Quok Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly 25, no. 4 (1968): 614–24; and Christopher Cameron, “The Puritan Origins of Black Abolitionism in Massachusetts,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 39, no. 1–2 (2011): 78–107.
Mumbet’s political education: Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
“all indentured servants”: John Murray, “Printed copy of John Dunmore’s Proclamation…, November 7, 1775,” National Archives, Kew (UK).
carried into subsequent conflicts: Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
characterized the founding texts: George William Van Cleve, We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
“Brom & Bett”: “Brom & Bett vs. J. Ashley, 1781,” in Catherine M. Lewis and J. Richard Lewis, eds., Women and Slavery in America: A Documentary History (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2011), 150–52.
incomplete and misleading monument: Blanck, “Seventeen Eighty-Three”; Zilversmit, “Quok Walker, Mumbet”; Cameron, “Puritan Origins of Black Abolitionism�
�; and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, “Slavery in New England,” Bentley’s Miscellany (1853): 417–24.
1779–1784: Savannah, Georgia
“were expected to become”: Walter J. Fraser, Jr., “James Edward Oglethorpe and the Georgia Plan,” in Leslie Harris and Daina Ramey Berry, eds., Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 2–3. For a general overview of the history, see Harris and Berry, Slavery and Freedom; and Whittington B. Johnson, Black Savannah, 1788–1864 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996).
“built around central squares”: Buddy Sullivan, “Savannah,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/counties-cities-neighborhoods/savannah.
about four hundred enslaved people: James A. McMillin, “The Slave Trade Comes to Georgia,” in Harris and Berry, Slavery and Freedom, 9.
oldest Black church: “The Oldest Black Church in North America,” First African Baptist Church, August 10, 2019, www.firstafricanbc.com/history.php.
Reverend Andrew Bryan: Sandy D. Martin, “Andrew Bryan (1737–1812),” New Georgia Encyclopedia, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/andrew-bryan-1737–1812.
“twelve negroes”: Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 154.
“were instrumental in the defense”: Ibid., 148.
1,094 of these soldiers: Ibid., 82.
1784–1789: The U.S. Constitution