Primary Source’s Making Freedom: African Americans in United States History, was originally published in 2004, and was composed of five teacher sourcebooks. The forward and context essays, written by scholars of that time, were designed to provide background information necessary to understanding the primary sources and activities in each unit. In the spirit of consistency, we have opted to include the original context essays, as additional “further resources” that educators may opt to review in order to deepen their context knowledge further. It is important to note however, that unless otherwise noted, these context essays are presented here in their original form and have not been edited since their original publication. As a result, these essays may no longer reflect the most up to date historical information and/or may not reflect the instructional, pedagogical or culturally responsive approaches and linguistic expectations of today.
African to African American: An Impact of TransAtlantic Slavery
Edmund Barry Gaither
Book 1: True to Our Native Land: Beginnings to 1770, Context Essay 1
2004
Introduction
The story of how Africans, in successive waves over nearly five centuries, were molded into African Americans in the United States is above all a human story. It arises from the aggregation of millions of personal narratives shaped by powerful socio-economic and political forces played out over time between Europe, Africa and the Americas during the shaping out of the modern, capitalist world. The result was the creation of a new people bound together within new social configurations forged within a crucible of horrific experiences, and impinged by a dawning racial consciousness.
The Situation in Africa
To understand and appreciate the complexity of this extraordinary drama requires careful and constant study of the African socio-cultural and physical environment before and during the period of transatlantic slavery, review of the economic and political forces that fueled European expansionism and colonization, reconstruction of the conditions of the Middle Passage, examination of the various and varied circumstances in which Africans found themselves once they were on American soil, and finally, analysis of the myriad responses which they, by their volition, made in adapting to their new settings. Additional challenge is presented by the fact that all of the processes implied above evolved over time, and differed by degrees–and sometimes by kind–from region to region, or colonial overlord to colonial overlord.
Prior to the late fifteenth century and the commencement of transatlantic slavery, the vast continent of Africa was theater to numerous and shifting demographic groupings organized in an enormous variety of polities ranging from small clusters of related villages to vast kingdoms with courts, royalty, and substantial wealth. Although situated on a single land mass, these peopled reckoned their distinctiveness along ethnic lines, for no compelling need had arisen to require that they define a continental identity. Operational social forces included kinship, religion, and shared cultural traditions. The notion of race did not exist, for here again, no compelling need required it. Africans from different ethnic groups generally lived in relative peace with each other as they met the ongoing demands of securing food, providing shelter and maintaining their cultural integrity, but there were also wars and other conflicts over resources, wealth creation, expansion, and power. Such conflicts are ubiquitous in human experience. Occasionally, these conflicts were sustained, disruptive and wrecked havoc over large areas. Within Africa itself, these conflicts could lead to the enslavement of the vanquished, that is, work obligations might be imposed and freedoms circumscribed; however, the condition of slavery did not usually carry a permanent stigma, nor did it seek to fundamentally dehumanized its victims. In these traits, African slavery was not unlike varieties of slavery widely found throughout the ancient world.
Slavery, as a commercial, international enterprise, flourished in the Byzantine Empire (395-1453) as Arabic merchants developed markets throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and as far away as Turkey. Their endeavors also placed slaves in the caliphates of Spain. Other Africans–non-slaves–were to be found in small numbers in other European countries, often, but not always, in personal services capacities. Thus, slavery was not new to Africans, but they could not have known the full implications of its transatlantic manifestation when they became facilitators of it.
Following initial contacts between Europeans and coastal African Kingdoms in the late fifteenth century, groundwork was laid for what was to become the sustained horror of slave trading across the Atlantic. Coastal kings, in exchange for goods ranging from guns to imported cloths and beads, permitted the construction of slave castles or forts along the Atlantic edge of Africa, and these forts became the holding pens for human cargo consisting largely of Africans captured in wars. Later, some of these captives proved to be unfortunates seized in raids primarily stimulated by the demand for labor in the Americas, for it seems clear that complicity in the African slave trade caused much internecine bloodshed, and general social implosion. The provision of enslaved Africans by Africans accounts, however, for only part of the draining of the continent, since in some regions, such as below the Bight of Benin, European slavers conducted raids directly securing slaves without intermediaries.
Despite the apparent attractiveness of European goods and weaponry, many African groups refused to be seduced into the slave trade, and still others organized resistance to this encroachment. Of course, those whose lives were directly interrupted by slavers resisted heartily, fearing not only the lost of their freedom, but also the chasm of the unknown and the rumors of the horrors that might befall someone taken in this voracious, new catastrophe.
Enslaved Africans awaiting the ships, which would transport them to the Americas begin the fusion which was to prove crucial to surviving the Middle Passage ordeal, and which would, for a generation, provide the basis of a new fraternity. Whether from different, similar or the same language groups, these men, women and children, were forced into a community of bondage. Later, aboard the crowded ships, they would be forced into a degree of inescapable intimacy that virtually robbed them of the barest human dignity, stripping away minimum privacy and crushing, to the maximum extent possible, volition. In this context, suicide and revolt rivaled disease in foreshortening life. The horror of middle passage, which could extend over months as ships sought to fill their holds before setting sail for the Americas, would etch itself on those later remembered as “shipmates” as indelibly as the brands burned into their bodies by the ship captains. Indeed, before captives left Africa for the crossing referred to as the Middle Passage, they had already begun to form new bonds of community which anticipated the process which would—in the end–make Africans in America into African Americans.
Research over the last few decades has greatly clarified the regions from which enslaved men and women who were brought to North America, allowing us to achieve relatively good agreement regarding ship routes, numbers transported, and even ethnic groups represented. Closer examination of records pertaining to the early presence of Africans in British North America has given us a richer understanding of differing situations in which blacks found themselves, and of the strategies that they adopted in order to preserve their humanity. Still richer is our widening appreciation of the complexities of black situations as their numbers grew both before and following the American Revolution. Fresh light has been thrown on such previously under discussed topics as the relationship between African-born and American-born blacks over the extended period when both were substantially represented in the demographic mix, or how African ethnic identities were supplanted by an ascending consciousness of African Americans. Behind all of these explorations are narratives of personal lives characterized, in the main, by longing for freedom and human dignity often translated as respect; autonomy (i.e. ability to secure an arena where individual volition or will could be exercised); belonging (i.e., the joy of family, and communal supports); creativity (i.e., the will to express the life of the imagination through artistic and cultural forms); and spirituality (i.e., the sense of relationship to forces that give meaning to life through ritual and symbolic exchanges).
The earliest presence of Africans in colonial America was a thin distribution of blacks stretching from Virginia through the mid-Atlantic colonies to New England. Some of these blacks were slaves, but many were indentured servants comparable in status to white indentures from Europe. They worked at assorted tasks including domestic services, agriculture and manufacturing, and frequently they lived within or nearby to their masters household. Amid EuroAmerican towns, they existed in cultural isolation, which doubtlessly eroded recollection of African cultural practices. Such losses must have been painful, since, as soon as numbers permitted, Africans sought each others’ company and stamped their imprint on early American holidays such as Pinkster’s Day as observed in upstate New York.
By the turn of the eighteenth century, the numbers of Africans introduced into the Carolinas, Chesapeake Bay and the mid-Atlantic colonies was growing dramatically, and with such growth came a greatly changed social landscape. Despite the severe limitations imposed by the institution of slavery, enslaved African-born and American-born blacks increasingly merged into a single elastic community eager to establish and maintain families, increase arenas of personal volition, and develop strategies for resisting the coercion, which was their daily lot. Although small communities of free blacks were always present throughout the colonies, they were subject to the same racial prejudices that pervaded society. Whites tended to associate them with slaves and indentured servants, even when they asserted their autonomy.
Plantation life
By the turn of the eighteenth century, as large-scale plantations spread from the Chesapeake Bay southward, the objective condition of black life became more difficult. Race became a marker for enslavement, and white privilege became the norm. The plantation now constituted the principle site where blacks could be found, and its organization provided the framework for their lives. Despite the near total power that plantation owners held over their slaves, countervailing forces often restrained the most brutal excesses and rendered the plantation, as an enterprise, dependent upon a modicum of cooperation, or at least compliance, from the slaves. Slaves were able to exert negative pressures ranging from sabotage to slowdowns when they felt especially violated, and these actions could seriously depress productivity, and therefore, profitability.
Large plantations, which often employed white overseers to enforce productivity, and to assure control of slaves, generally gave wide latitude to these supervisors who were free to whip or impose discipline on disobedient or recalcitrant blacks. Many accounts document great cruelties inflected by drivers, yet it is also clear that many masters and drivers developed grudging respect for willful slaves and sometimes accommodated themselves to an acceptable status quo vis-a-vis productivity and privileges. After all, if the plantation failed, everyone, slaves included, was adversely effected. In some cases, drivers were trusted blacks whose experiences were almost certainly plagued with some ambivalence, for on the one hand, they had rise in rank and demonstrated skills of management, yet on the other hand they were agents of the master even though they remained slaves. Perhaps they were better at mediating the divide between the big house and the slave quarters. Doubtlessly, some coveted privileges, such as a wider range in which to exercise personal freedoms and judgments, that went with this heightened status. This latitude could be used to favor family and friends within the slave community.
The plantation was largely self-sufficient, meaning that not only did it produce agricultural products and practice animal husbandry, it also manufactured many of its basic needs whether furniture, tools, or textiles. No area of substantial work on the plantation was without black workers. Slaves were blacksmiths making nails, plows and numerous other implements as needed. They were carpenters whose skills ranged from construction of houses and barns to cabinet-making, that is, creating chairs, cupboards, bedsteads, and the like. Many were distinguished as potters and brick makers, and also as masons working in bricks or stone. In some extraordinary situations, as demonstrated by the African American potters who created the face vessels of Edgewood, South Carolina, works of quite different characters seem to have been made for intra-group use, along with ordinary utilitarian ware. Such artisans and craftsmen sometimes were hired out to earn additional money for their master and themselves. They too had reason to take pride in the quality of their work, even though the overall context of their productivity remained problematic, and their just earnings were controlled by their masters who generally allowed them to keep all or part of their wages.
Slaves engaged in artisan and crafts endeavors had the opportunity to sometimes build upon skills which were valued in the world of their African ancestors. This was especially true on the rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia where not only the practice of growing rice, but also the related paraphenelia of fanner baskets, and mortars and pestles, were modeled on West African procedures. In these cases, operation of the plantation was absolutely dependent upon knowledge that the slaves themselves had brought. Other skills and knowledge that Africans brought, ranging from how to cultivate tobacco to how to navigate swamps, were impressed into service in the South. Boatmen skilled in managing flat boats on swamps and rivers were extremely valuable, for they provided the means of transporting goods in much of the South before railroads were common. Blacks predominated in this work, and those who did it not only enjoyed greater freedom compared to agricultural workers, they also provided extremely important channels of communication between plantations, as well as between plantations and cities.
Much has been made of the presumed breach between field and domestic slaves, but this case may be easily overstated. To be sure, domestic slaves were more finely dressed, performed less strenuous work, and enjoyed more privileges, but they were under the constant supervision of the master’s family. This likely imposed its own psychological stresses. Nevertheless, domestic slaves also had a life within the slave community that was beyond the plantation owner’s view. It was there that mates could be found and social sanction secured.
Plantations where there were many slaves generally provided housing, either behind the master’s house and at a little distance in clustering referred to as slave quarters. The structures were grossly inferior houses offering meager protection from the elements and very limited privacy. The chief virtues of the slave quarter was that it was out the master’s view, and thus it allowed slaves a space where they could exercise control. Here they could speak to each other as they wished, find mates, exercise the prerogatives of family life, and socialize their children into the cultural forms that would later define them as African American. Within the slave community itself there were divisions. Recalling directly or via memories, slaves who shared ethnic traditions could enjoy special relationships. The elderly, merging the high regard accorded them in almost all African traditions, were rewarded with genuine respect. Persons believed to have access to ancient knowledge of medicine or magic were duly honored and sought out, or feared. Tellers of stories, along with singers and dancers, found places of deep appreciation, as they both extended and reinvented African traditions of dance, music and storytelling. It was within these dimly lighted nests that the essential elements of African cultural continuities were reinforced and transformed. It was also from within these quarters that African religious retention such as shout rings continued to flourish and evolve.
Not all plantations were large enough to have quarters, but even on smaller plantations where slaves lived closer to, and sometimes worked side by side with their masters, blacks maintained as nearly as they could families and households. They also sought to sustain communication with other blacks in their vicinity, as well as with any whom them knew in towns or villages. They still experienced themselves as belonging to a community of blacks larger than their own plantation.
Many dimensions of the plantation overlapped from blacks and whites, and these often provided bridges for human sharing. Floods and droughts effected both, as did other natural calamities and epidemics. As property, the master had to care about the general health of his slaves. Moreover, whites were so dependent upon the services of the blacks that if the latter should be effected by contagion, the former was also endangered. For these reasons, a minimum level of medical attention was provided by the master. Childbirth and deaths, causes of excitement in both sectors, were of much interest to masters and slaves, though for obviously different reasons.
Although plantations normally achieved a certain balance of expectations between masters and slaves, volatility was never far beneath the surface, and whites always harbored some fear of slave resistance and/or revolts. Slaves had come to understand that in general there were limits they were obliged to respect, but they knew that these limits were unjust and not permanently tolerable. Thus they were forever devising strategies for subverting white control. Strategies were as abundant as slaves, since every slave asserting even the most trivial dimension of his/her right to freedom had to do so with a guise that would not bring immediate calamity upon his/her head. In the manner of a low level war, slaves were truculent, uncooperative, insolent, and reluctant to the degree that they could muster without dire consequences. Others feigned cooperation and devotion while at the same time undercutting their mistress and master. Still others won favors and enjoyed their masters’ grace while in fact being involved in numerous duplicities. All of the aforementioned actions belong to a broader general strategy of intransigence expressed as chronic underproduction. This design sought to slowly undermine slavery by maximizing its inefficiencies and indirectly eroding its control over slaves.
Slave Resistance and Rebellion
Slaves made other responses to their condition, ones more commonly associated with the Caribbean islands and Brazil. For example, numerous documented cases report slaves escaping to Native American communities and there joining forces with resisters, particularly in the swampy lowlands of Georgia and Florida. These black runaways allied themselves with others who, like themselves, were seeking freedom and autonomy. Some blacks also escaped to Spanish controlled Florida and Mexico where they were offered the promise of freedom. Perhaps the most remarkable resisters were those who sought to organize revolts against their masters, with the aim of taking control of the land and ending the involuntary servitude of their black brothers and sisters.
In majority black South Carolina in the mid-eighteenth century, the Stono Rebellion marked an early effort at change by force. Early nineteenth century insurrections, such as those planned in 1800 by Gabriel Prosser (1775?-1800) near Richmond, Virginia, and by Denmark Vesey (1767-1822) in Charleston, South Carolina, in l822, as well as the partially executed revolt in 1831 led by Nat Turner (1800-1831) in Southampton County, Virginia, reveal the deep-seated and seething anger felt by blacks who refused to accept slavery as their natural condition. These men, often inspired by the Bible, the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1802), dared to conceive of literally overthrowing the prevailing power of the slave states. Their ambitions show the power of ideas in hungry imaginations yearning for freedom. Emboldened by the success of the slaves of Santo Domingo in casting off France, a major European colonial overlord, men like Vesey anticipated a consciousness that only fully ripened in the twentieth century. Though not successful, these revolutionaries helped creative a narrative of heroic resistance, which fueled later black struggle in the United States.
For the most part, revolts were organized from city bases, and frequently involved free blacks. Free blacks, the vast majority of whom lived in only a half dozen cities such as Charleston, New Orleans, Richmond and Baltimore, were precariously placed in the slave holding states. They sometimes maintained a separate society from slave blacks, yet they were not regarded as whites. Sometimes, especially within the Creole order of New Orleans, they were educated and employed in trades and the professions, and held real estate, yet more typically, they were a little less grandly placed in the metropolitan centers of the upper and lower south. In these centers, the borders between free and slave blacks were porous, and many in the former group saw their fate as inseparable from that of their less fortunate brothers. As part of the acquisition of African American identity, these groups realized that in the eyes of the controlling white political and cultural order, they were all inferior.
African Legacies
Over the centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, different ethnic, cultural and religious groups were represented in shifting patterns in the cargoes unloaded at such major ports as Newport, RI, Charleston, New Orleans and along the Chesapeake Bay. Various qualities were attributed to different groups according to reports current among buyers of slaves and those who ran the slave factories. Within colonial American and later the United States, these views influenced the distribution of slaves by ethnicity, since opinion had established expectations of behavior and skills. Some recent scholars have addressed considerable time to examining the records in order to clarify the extent to which particular regions were influenced by the presence of large representations from specific ethnic groups. This promises to be a fruitful arena for exploration since we know from witnesses (WPA interviews with blacks who remembered slavery and the immediate post slavery period) that throughout the entire nineteenth century, many blacks still knew others who were born in Africa, or had retained memories of African languages and cultural practices.
South Carolina and Georgia offer extremely rewarding dividends for researchers and historians, because the culture of the Sea Islands (Gullah culture) remained intact for such a long period into the twentieth century. The tale of Ibo Landing, for example, not only builds on the Ibo ethnic group as lovers of Africa and of freedom, but it also it underscores the central place of oral tradition in preserving important ideas and values. Specific relationships of language and basketry between the peoples of Sierra Leone and the Sea Islands have bridged across the Atlantic and laid the foundation for a new dialogue between populations long lost to each other. Oral traditions and material links tell us that many Muslims were among those enslaved in that region, and this suggests more discussions such the very useful “Muslims in Antebellum America”.
Artistic documents such as the Harriet Power’s “Bible Quilt” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, strongly suggest the influence of the applique traditions of old Dahomey or of the Akan cultures of Ghana. Likewise, the aforementioned face vessels of Edgefield, South Carolina, offer vivid testimony to the power of Congo/Angola representations of Nkisi figures. Growing evidence supports the idea that we can bring extraordinary clarity to our understanding of African retention within African American cultures. In so doing, we will gain new depth in our understanding of how those who survived the Middle Passage, and their descendants, created a complex of cultures in rural and urban settings which, though informed by African elements, are nevertheless peculiarly American. These manifestations, which in their aggregate constitute African American culture, are both a black and an American commonwealth.
Although Africans who were brought to America came with fresh memories of their own ethnic heritages, and although some found reinforcement of those traditions through discovering compatriots here, all sooner or later had to accommodate to their new situation, and learn usable English and prevailing ways of doing things. Even though differences might have existed within slave communities regarding ethnic roots or in which colony their children were born, circumstances forced recognition of the need to make common cause. Simple observation made clear that all of the blacks, whether African born or not, whether “mixed” or “pure” blooded, whether free or slave, were subject to the whites and perceived by whites as inferior to them. Self worth told the slaves that this was not true, and compelled them to constantly revolt in small and large ways in order to assert their volition and declare their humanity. So despite their disparate origins and their varying intervening experiences, by the late nineteenth century, blacks in the United Stated has acquired a consciousness of themselves as a people who, since the Middle Passage, had developed bonds forged by racial discrimination, prejudices, and economic injustices. The totality of these shared experiences has drawn black people into a group with considerable cultural distinctness, and for whom Africa remains an ancestral symbolic legacy. Moreover, this specifically American consciousness has broadened itself into a global concept that identifies with all of the black peoples of the world and more generally with colonized peoples everywhere.