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.
Slave Societies and Slaveowning Societies:
Variations in the Institution of Slavery in Colonial America
Julie Richter
Book 1: True to Our Native Land: Beginnings to 1770, Context Essay 2
2004
Introduction
The English who settled the British North American colonies were familiar with the concept of lifetime servitude, but they did not have a system of slavery to transport to the New World. However, because the colonists needed labor as they established their new settlements, slavery became legal in all of the colonies during the seventeenth century. The institution of slavery in the Chesapeake differed from the slave systems that developed in the Lowcountry area of South Carolina and the Northern Colonies by 1700. The differences reflected the fact that a distinctive way of life and work developed in each of the three regions. By the end of the 17th century, Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina were slave societies; that is, societies in which slavery was the principal institution that shaped life. The Middle Colonies and New England were slaveowning societies—communities in which individuals owned slaves, but slavery was not the main institution.
The Chesapeake Colonies
The English who arrived in Virginia in 1607 found that they had to adapt their way of life to the New World. Factors that made it difficult to recreate English institutions in Virginia included disease, conflicts with the Native Americans, the struggle to find a profitable commodity, and the acute need for labor. The early settlers endured starvation and malaria and feared attacks by members of Powhatan’s chiefdom during the colony’s first decade. Their leaders turned to martial law to establish their authority and order in Virginia. They also wanted the colonists, whom they saw as being lazy, to grow corn and catch fish reducing their dependency on trade with the Indians for food.
The fortunes and direction of the colony changed in 1614 when John Rolfe (after two years of work) raised a strain of tobacco that sold in the English market. The men who grew rich from tobacco exploited the labor of others for their own profit. Those who labored in the tobacco plantations of the colony’s prosperous residents included individuals from England, Europe, and Africa.
The first group of Africans—described in a letter written by John Rolfe, as “20 and Odd Negroes”—arrived in Virginia in August 1619 on a Dutch ship. The Dutch had taken the Africans from a Portuguese vessel; the Portuguese had purchased the individuals from slave traders in Africa. It is possible that the English also saw this group of Africans as slaves.
In the early years of the colony the English did not have precise legal identities for English or African servants. The indenture process was informal and many people—white and black—faced indefinite terms as servants. English and Africans worked together in the tobacco fields and shared a dwelling at night. There were opportunities for Anthony Johnson, and other African men and women and their descendants, to gain their freedom before Virginia’s leaders firmly defined a system of slavery. A precise legal definition for slavery in the colony was not created until 1662 when legislators decided that a child born to an enslaved woman would also be a slave for life.
Maryland followed Virginia and legalized slavery in 1663. The following year, Maryland added three restrictions on slaves. First, the legislators ruled that all Africans and Indians brought into the colony would serve for their lives unless a contract had been made before the arrival of an individual. Next, they decided that baptism had no effect on the legal
status of slaves. Third, the lawmakers passed the first anti-miscegenation law. Virginia added similar statutes in 1669, 1670, and 1691.
Virginia experienced a civil war in 1676. In the spring of that year, Nathaniel Bacon, a member of England’s gentry who had recently arrived in Virginia, became the military leader of a band of Virginians who armed themselves against the Native Americans in defiance of Governor Berkeley. The governor responded by unsuccessfully dispatching men to confront Bacon and declared him a rebel. A number of Bacon’s followers deserted him in early September 1676. He needed to increase the size of his army and he proclaimed freedom for all servants and slaves who joined him. The rebel army that seized Jamestown in September of that year included white indentured servants, recently freed servants, and slaves. Bacon’s decision to include servants, freedmen, and slaves in his army transformed the conflict into a class struggle.
Bacon’s sudden death on October 26th left his men without a strong leader and the rebel movement lost strength. Indentured servants and slaves were among the last of Bacon’s followers to surrender. Bacon’s offer of freedom to indentured servants and slaves helped to unite Virginia’s successful planters because they feared the loss of their labor force. The colony’s large planters consolidated their position in the colony and society after the defeat of the small holders, servants, and slaves in Nathaniel Bacon’s army. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the colony’s legislators strengthened Virginia’s slave laws, made it more difficult for enslaved individuals to gain their freedom, enslaved the Native Americans who were captured during the Rebellion, and placed new restrictions on free people of color.
As the number of indentured servants declined after 1680, the planters turned to a labor force of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Most of the slaves who arrived in Virginia and Maryland after 1680 were transported directly from Africa. By the end of the seventeenth century, both Virginia and Maryland were slave societies. Small groups of slaves tended fields of tobacco during the day under the watch of a white planter or overseer. At night, the enslaved workers slept in slave quarters that were separate from the dwelling of the white owner.
During the first half of the eighteenth century, Virginia legislators imposed harsher restrictions on enslaved laborers and took away many of the rights previously allowed to free blacks. Opportunities for black people to escape slavery all but disappeared, and some whites hoped to reduce those who were free to a lowly status equivalent to slavery. Slave owners attempted to strip the over 50,000 Africans transported to Virginia between 1700 and 1760 of their cultural identities and at the same time put most of the Africans to work at repetitious and backbreaking agricultural labor. Planters often used the newly arrived African’s ignorance of English and their frequent passive and occasionally violent resistance to enslavement as excuses for imposing harsher plantation discipline and more stringent work rules. Justices of the peace applied a separate criminal code to cases involving blacks, and handed down harsher punishments. Informal plantation custom defined minimum levels of provisioning and work requirements.
As Chesapeake planters imported greater numbers of slaves from Africa, the majority of the region’s enslaved population became African. However, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the gentry did not have to import slaves in order to increase their labor force as did their counterparts in South Carolina. The slave population grew through natural increase and many planters encourage their enslaved workers to form families. By the 1760s, Africans did not make up the majority of Virginia’s slave population in the Tidewater. Virginia-born slaves made some gains in their struggles with masters to define work and to reclaim the rights held by seventeenth-century slaves. Enslaved laborers also benefited from changes in Chesapeake society: the decreased productivity of tobacco fields in the Tidewater, the shift to grain production, and the growth of towns. Planters reorganized work on their plantations as they decreased the amount of tobacco grown on their land. Wheat and other grains did not require the same labor-intense work that tobacco did. Some slaves became artisans and others hired themselves out to residents of Virginia and Maryland’s urban areas — Williamsburg, Hampton, Norfolk, Baltimore, and Annapolis. Slaves who hired themselves out or who sold produce that they raised earned money and participated in the economy.
The Chesapeake colonies were committed to slavery one hundred years after lawmakers passed statutes to legalize the institution. Enslaved men, women, and children worked to produce the tobacco and grains that enabled the gentry to live in their plantation houses and to have an elegant lifestyle. At the same time, native-born slaves created their own society based on both African culture and Anglo culture. These enslaved workers, like the first slaves in the region, knew English and negotiated with their masters to define limits on their work and to secure benefits for themselves and their families.
The Lowcountry
In 1670, settlers from Barbados relocated to the area that became known as South Carolina. Many of these individuals brought their slaves to the new colony. South Carolina began its existence as a slave society. Between 1/4 and 1/3 of South Carolina’s early population was enslaved. The colony’s legislators enacted the first restriction on slaves in 1683 when they ruled that servants and slaves could not trade with each other. The lawmakers passed a slave code in 1691 that added restrictions on the colony’s enslaved laborers.
Residents of South Carolina did not have a staple crop for their slaves to tend until the last decade of the seventeenth century. Planters found three products to export in the 1690s—naval stores like tar and pitch, rice, and indigo. These exports shaped the development of South Carolina’s economy and society. Rice replaced pitch and tar as the main crop by the end of the seventeenth century. Large planters purchased plantations and greater numbers of enslaved persons to grow rice. The cultivation of rice began on a small scale as slave owners learned the complex process behind the commercial production of this crop. Slaves also contributed their knowledge about the cultivation of rice in Africa.
As the production of rice increased, planters relied on a greater number of slaves to cultivate this crop. Initially, planters had turned to Indians as enslaved laborers; however, their labor needs exceeded the number of Indians and they turned to Africans. Slaves made up the majority of the working class in the Lowcountry section of South Carolina and Africans comprised the greater part of the enslaved population in the early eighteenth century. Successful South Carolinians established plantations in Georgia and Eastern Florida. Initially, the residents of the Lowcountry area of Georgia did not have slaves because the colony’s trustees banned slavery in 1734. However, Parliament lifted the restriction in the middle of the century and Georgia planters imported large numbers of Africans. Like South Carolina, lowland counties in Georgia had a black majority in their populations on the eve of the Revolution.
Most slaves in South Carolina labored in large groups. By 1720, three-quarters of the enslaved people in the colony resided on plantations with a minimum of ten slaves. Thirty years later, in 1750, one-third of South Carolina’s slaves lived with at least fifty other enslaved persons. Slaves worked under the close supervision of an overseer or driver. As planters saw their profits increase, they pushed their slaves to produce more and intensified their work.
Planters searched for another lucrative crop after a decline in profits following the loss of overseas markets during England’s war with Spain. The 1739 Stono Rebellion also affected the colony’s economic difficulties and increased the fear of whites living in a black majority. Approximately sixty slaves, led by twenty slaves from Angola, tried to escape to Spanish Florida where they would be given their freedom. They encountered the militia at Stono and the rebels killed twenty whites. In the aftermath of the rebellion, South Carolina’s lawmakers imposed a high duty on imported slaves and tightened the slave code. Planters tried to become more self-sufficient and decided to shift some slaves to growing food, making clothes, and cobbling shoes. Other enslaved workers were among those who learned how to produce indigo, a crop that proved to be valuable.
The production of indigo placed additional work on slaves. The unhealthy environment of the Lowcountry and the demanding nature of rice and indigo were too much for many of the Africans. New slaves were weak when they arrived because of the harsh physical conditions of the Middle Passage. The high death rate and imbalance in the sex ratio made it difficult for slaves to form families. Close to two-thirds of the imported Africans were men. The intense work schedule for rice and indigo made it hard for women to conceive and deliver healthy babies. By mid-century, however, the mortality rate began to decline and the sex ratio became more balanced.
Planters relied on the task system—each slave had a set amount of work or a task for each day. After the task was complete, a slave could do his/her own work. Slaves gained some control over their work and the money that they earned from the sale of goods they produced or crafted enabled them to participate in the slave economy. A few slaves worked as slave drivers on plantations when planters realized that they could not control all aspects in the production of rice and indigo crops. On occasion, enslaved artisans were able to hire out some of their own time.
The life of an urban slave in South Carolina differed from that of his/her rural counterpart. Urban slaves lived in closer contact with their white owners than did slaves who tended fields of rice and indigo. Work in urban areas was also different. Enslaved females worked as domestics and had an important role in the public markets. Enslaved men participated in all aspects of work in the port of Charleston. There were a greater number of craftsmen who possessed a wide range of skills. Some owners hired out their slaves and other owners allowed their enslaved men and women to hire out their own time. The opportunities in urban areas enabled slaves to earn money, acquire material goods, and participate in the slave economy.
The differences in urban and rural slavery in the Lowcountry can also be seen in the survival of African culture. Africans and African Americans struggled with whites over work and religion. At mid-century, urban slaves lived among a white majority in which the urban, European culture dominated. In contrast, plantation slaves lived apart from their owners and the culture of their owners. The physical separation of the slave quarters enabled slaves to incorporate aspects of West African culture—language, appearance, dress, names, and religion—into their daily lives.
In 1670, South Carolina was a slave society because its first residents moved their enslaved workers to the colony. The planters did not have a staple crop for their slaves to produce until the last decade of the seventeenth century when they turned to rice. The production of rice shaped life in South Carolina and led to the development of large plantations. Rice and, later, indigo could be grown by large numbers of enslaved workers. South Carolina’s lawmakers passed the harshest slave codes in British North America in order to control slaves who made up the majority of the population in the Lowcountry. The importation of Africans to the Lowcountry continued a full century.
New England and the Middle Colonies
Three factors helped to shape the life of slaves in New England and the Middle Colonies (New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania) in the seventeenth century: (1) the origins of the slaves, (2) the small number of enslaved persons in the region, and (3) the way in which masters managed their labor force. Most of the Africans who labored in the Northern Colonies arrived from the Caribbean or the Southern Colonies in the seventeenth century. A small number of slaves entered the Northern Colonies as prizes taken by pirates and privateers. New England merchants sent three ships to Africa to trade for gold and Africans in 1644, three years after Massachusetts became the first colony to legalize slavery. Connecticut’s lawmakers legalized slavery in 1650.
The majority of the enslaved individuals in the Northern Colonies were familiar with European culture and languages. Once in the colonies, they formed connections to powerful men and institutions in their communities. In the city of New Amsterdam (later New York City), some slaves used their knowledge of the court system to improve their condition, to own property, to secure some rights, and to gain freedom. Africans found that it was difficult to secure their freedom even though there was not a system of legal slavery in New Netherland (later the colony of New York). Blacks participated in all aspects of life in the Dutch colony by the middle of the seventeenth century.
The city of New Amsterdam was more dependent than the Chesapeake colonies on slave labor by the mid-seventeenth century because prosperity in the Netherlands and opportunities in the Dutch Empire reduced the number of people who wanted to journey to the colony. In 1664, slaves accounted for 20% of New Amsterdam’s population and close to 5% of the entire colony’s population (similar to the population in the Chesapeake). About one out of five slaves had secured their freedom by the time the English gained control of the colony in 1664. English officials passed laws that legalized slavery soon after the Crown took possession of the Dutch colony. However, slaves in New York continued to enjoy privileges such as property ownership and to be a part of public life into the first quarter of the eighteenth century in spite of the new laws.
Although a number of slaves lived and worked in northern cities—New York, Philadelphia, Newport, and Boston—the majority of slaves labored in the region’s agricultural areas. In southern New England, the Hudson Valley, Long Island, and northern New Jersey, enslaved persons tended crops on farms with their master, white indentured servants, and hired workers. They did not work in gangs as did slaves in the Lowcountry. Farms designed to produce goods for the provisioning trade, not plantations, dotted the countryside in New England and the Middle Colonies. Africans and their descendants also worked in rural industries—tanneries, saltworks, lead and copper mines, iron furnaces—with white laborers. Many northern slaves had one day a week to work for themselves and were able to hire themselves out. Most enslaved workers did not sleep in a separate building as did their southern counterparts. Slaves in New England and the Middle Colonies usually slept in garrets, back rooms, closets, and cellars.
The fact that many slave owners decided to move their enslaved workers between town and country meant that there was not a strong division between urban and rural slaves. The close living quarters made it possible for slaves, urban and rural, to learn about the world of their owners. The opportunities for interactions between slaves and indentured white laborers created a social division between free and unfree, not white and black.
At the end of the seventeenth century, a few divisions between whites and blacks in the Middle Colonies and New England appeared. In 1699, less than twenty years after the first slaves arrived in Philadelphia, there was a decision to allocate a separate area in the Strangers’ Burial Ground for blacks. The following year, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island established race-based slavery. Several northern colonies also passed laws to prohibit slaves from gathering, especially on Sunday.
In the eighteenth century, there was change in the character of slave life in the Middle Colonies and New England, even though there was not a “plantation revolution” as there was in the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry. Between 1725 and 1775 there was a slow, uneven transformation across the region. The change had a greater impact on the Middle Colonies than in New England where the economy was based on family and wage labor. The transformation was also stronger in cities than in rural areas.
Slavery became more significant in the Northern Colonies as the residents became incorporated into the Atlantic economy to a greater degree. There was an increased demand for labor in areas that enjoyed economic expansion. First, city residents acquired additional slaves. In the eighteenth century, one-fifth to one-quarter of slaves in New York lived in New York City, Portsmouth was home to one-third of slaves in New Hampshire and Boston was home to a similar number of the enslaved residents of Massachusetts. Almost half of Rhode Island’s slaves were in Newport. In 1750, 90% of Pennsylvania’s population lived outside of Philadelphia but 40% of colony’s slaves lived in this city. In urban areas, female slaves worked as domestics as did a few male slaves. Most enslaved men were wagoners, carters, stockmen in warehouses, sailors, or workers in ropewalks, shipyards, and sail factories. A greater number of slaves became artisans.
The number of slaves grew in grain producing areas of Pennsylvania, northern New Jersey, the Hudson Valley, and Long Island. Farmers in Southern New England, around Narragansett Bay, also increased their enslaved laborers by mid-century. However, farmers in the Middle Colonies and New England did not create plantations. Enslaved men still labored in small groups made up of indentured servants and wage laborers, black and white. Some enslaved women continued to work in the fields while many became domestic workers.
Residents of the Middle Colonies and New England began to purchase slaves who had been imported directly from Africa to meet their labor needs. After 1741, 70% of the slaves imported into New York were from Africa and 30% were from the Caribbean and other mainland colonies. These proportions had been reversed before 1741.
The importation of slaves from Africa had an impact on the family life of the black population in the New England colonies. The mortality rate for the Africans was high as they adapted to a new disease environment. The majority of the new slaves were males and it was difficult for all enslaved persons to find a partner. Some masters made it difficult for their slaves to form families and slave families rarely lived together in urban or rural areas.
As Africans began to predominate in the black population in the North, masters in this region followed the practices of owners in the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry. They increased discipline to control a work force of slaves who did not understand the English language. Masters also imposed harsher work requirements on their enslaved laborers. Lawmakers placed restrictions on an owner’s ability to free slaves and on the rights of free people of color. The number of free blacks in the Middle Colonies and New England declined. The free people of color in this region were less prosperous than their seventeenth-century counterparts. Whites began to equate blackness with slavery.
The presence of slaves imported directly from Africa helped other slaves to learn about African culture. Slaves born in the colonies heard new slaves speak African languages and saw slaves with tribal scars and pierced ears. The influence of the African slaves can be seen in the Negro Election Day in New England and Pinkster Day in New York and New Jersey. At these festivals, black men and women satirized white society as they dressed in fine clothes, marched in parades, and held elections. The inaugural festivities included dances, athletic events, cockfights, and games of chance. The officials—kings, governors, and judges—had symbolic power in the entire community and some real authority in the black community. The elected leaders took on the role of their owners and ruled in small disputes. The festivals and role reversals gave slaves an opportunity to gather, express themselves, and recognize the leaders of their community.
Many white residents of New York were concerned that slaves rejected Christianity in favor of African religions. An investigation of the 1712 Insurrection in New York City found that “a free Negro who pretended to sorcery” and who gave the slaves “a powder to rub on their clothes to make them invulnerable” played a pivotal role in the revolt (Berlin, p. 190). Slaves, both African and Native American, set fire to a building in the town and then killed nine of the white men who arrived to put out the flames. A generation later, New York City experienced unrest again. In March and April 1741, New York City experienced a rash of fires and thefts. People believed that slaves set the fires and also stole goods. The discovery of illicit meetings among blacks at a tavern owned by a white man increased the fears of the white residents in the city. Tensions in New York were already high due to economic depression, a harsh winter, suspicion of strangers, dislike of people of a different ethnic or religious background, concern over the growing number of blacks in the city, and discontent among the poor—both black and white.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, areas of the Northern Colonies began to resemble the slave societies in the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry. Urban centers in the Middle Colonies and New England had larger slave populations than did the rural areas in these regions. A greater proportion of the enslaved people in the North arrived directly from Africa in the eighteenth century than in the previous century. Northern lawmakers increased restrictions on their slaves and restricted the rights of free people of color. However, the Middle Colonies and New England did not complete the transformation from a society with slaves to a slave society. Slavery did not become central to the economy of the Northern Colonies as it was on the plantations in the Southern Colonies.
Conclusion
On the eve of the American Revolution, slavery was legal in each of the thirteen colonies. The regional variation in the institution of slavery reflected the different ways in which owners managed the labor of slaves, the size of the enslaved population, and the role that slavery played in the social and economic organization of the Chesapeake, the Lowcountry, and the Northern Colonies. In spite of the regional differences, slavery in the British North American colonies had some things in common. Each colony passed statutes to legalize the practice of enslaving another human being. The increased commitment by residents to slavery in the eighteenth century led to the importation of a greater number of slaves, most of who arrived directly from Africa. Lawmakers reacted to the presence of more Africans by passing laws that made slavery harsher. They also limited the rights that free blacks had secured in the seventeenth century. As a result, the white race became equated with freedom and the black race, including free people of color, with slavery.
Slaves in each of the three regions shared a desire for freedom. From the time that the British enslaved Africans in their North American colonies in the seventeenth century, slaves resisted the institution of slavery in a variety of ways. Enslaved men, women, and children might negotiate with their master, pretend to be sick, work slowly, break tools, or run away. In addition, some slaves decided to rebel against their masters and the slave system in order to gain their freedom. Virginia slaves seized an opportunity for freedom in 1676, enslaved laborers in South Carolina tried to escape to Florida for their freedom in 1739, and New York City’s slaves rebelled against the institution in 1712 and 1741. In the 1770s, slaves in the thirteen colonies heard their masters discuss the need to declare independence from Great Britain because they did not want to be enslaved to King George III. Fighting between British troops and the American colonies gave some slaves an opportunity to gain their freedom. Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, proclaimed that he would free all indentured servants and slaves who joined his forces to fight against the rebel colonists. Dunmore and other British leaders knew that liberty was sweet to slaves from New England to the Lowcountry.