The Making of African America (11 page)

The slave trade continued, however, in the low country of South Carolina and Georgia. There the forced migration from Africa followed a trajectory similar to that of the Chesapeake, but it started later and continued longer. As a result, more than twice as many Africans—upward of 250,000—entered the low country than the Chesapeake. Sullivan's Island, a tiny quarantine station in Charlestown harbor, became the Ellis Island of black America.
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The entry of Africans began slowly in the low country, as it had in the Chesapeake, but it increased far more rapidly. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, slavers were delivering more Africans to South Carolina than to Virginia, and Africans constituted the majority of the low country's population. African arrivals declined sharply following the Stono Rebellion in 1739, as fears of insurrection led planters to restrict the trade. But greed soon overwhelmed fear, and slave importation resumed during the 1740s and exceeded anything previous. During the 1760s, South Carolina and Georgia planters imported 20,000 slaves. Although importation again slackened during the American Revolution, at war's end the pent-up demand for slaves pushed importation to new heights. Lowland slaveowners purchased more than 100,000 Africans between 1787, when South Carolina reopened the African trade, and 1808, when the legal trade to the United States ended. Thereafter, American planters continued to smuggle slaves into the country, although the illegal imports composed but a small fraction of the slave population.
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With the slave trade open and the influx of saltwater slaves—that is, newly imported Africans—nearly continuous, black men and women in the lowlands had great difficulty forming families and raising children. But, as in the Chesapeake, the number of men and women slowly came into balance. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the black population of the low country began to reproduce itself and African Americans began to outnumber Africans. But even as the African American population grew, it did so in tandem with newly arrived Africans. At midcentury, when enslaved black people in the Chesapeake had few opportunities to converse with other Africans, Africans and African Americans knew each other well in the low country. They lived in close proximity, worked together, frequently married, and often stood shoulder to shoulder against their owners. Their intimacy spoke directly to the unique development of African and African American life in the low country.

Slavers also deposited their cargoes in other parts of mainland North America—New England, the Middle Colonies, the Floridas, and the lower Mississippi Valley. Everywhere planters preferred so-called men-boys and women-girls, young adults whom they could put to work immediately and who would reproduce the labor force. “Negroes from 15 to 25 years of Age sute this market best,” observed Charlestown's largest slave trader. Among the young, planters desired men over women. The male majority was slightly more pronounced in South Carolina, where men outnumbered women more than two to one, constituting two-thirds of the Africans imported between 1720 and 1774. But the disproportion of men elsewhere on the mainland was not far behind. Although the balance of slave imports changed over time, as long as the trade remained open, the black population remained younger and more male than that of the white population.
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The movement of African nationalities was not nearly as obvious. With the regularization of commercial relations between European and African merchants, slave captains studied their markets on both sides of the Atlantic. They repeatedly returned to the same ports, delivering the merchandise Africans desired and purchasing the slaves their American customers preferred. In time, European slave traders became specialists, in some measure to meet the demands of their customers on both sides of the Atlantic whose preferences grew increasingly well defined.

Such preferences meant that the national and familial divisions within African society sometimes survived the Middle Passage. These divisions manifested themselves in the supply that reached deep into the interior of Africa. In local interior markets or fairs, where the enslaved had been initially auctioned, slaves desired on the coast brought higher prices and thus made some individuals targets for enslavement. Warlords—sometimes heads of state and sometimes freebooting thugs—thus chose their victims carefully, with a fine understanding of the market. They also had an appreciation for the vulnerability of certain peoples. Eager to maximize their profits in an increasingly competitive market, they too directed particular peoples to particular ports.
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While hardly in a position to control their own fate, Africans—many of them potential captives—also influenced who would be shipped across the Atlantic. From the first, would-be captives resisted, banding together, fortifying villages, and even establishing client relationships with the enemies of their enemy to protect themselves. By playing one slave raider against another, Africans reduced their vulnerability, at least to the degree that raiders left them alone. As the full dimensions of the transatlantic slave trade become known, resistance stiffened. As a general rule, slavers avoided those who fought back.
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Slaveowners in the Americas likewise influenced the forced migration, particularly in places where the number of imports was large and the trade remained open for long periods. Having seen tens of thousands of slaves, planters became extraordinarily opinionated about the slaves they wanted, based upon their understanding of the physique, skills, culture, and even food preferences of various African peoples. Yet while these opinions were often shallow stereotypes resting upon crude understandings of African nationality—Angolans ran away; Calabars destroyed themselves; Coromantees revolted—such assumptions nonetheless carried great weight. In the low country, buyers emphasized their preference for Gambian people (whom they called Coromantees) above all others. “Gold Coast or Gambia's are best, next to them the Windward Coast are prefer'd to Angola's,” observed a South Carolina slave trader in describing the most salable mixture in 1755. “There must not be a Calabar amongst them.”
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Pressures and preferences on both sides of the Atlantic determined, to a considerable degree, which enslaved Africans went where and when, populating the mainland with unique combinations of African peoples and creating, in some small measure, distinctive regional variations in the Americas. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, captives from Senegambia and the Bight of Biafra (present-day Nigeria) constituted about three-quarters of the slaves entering the Chesapeake. Even within the Chesapeake, various polities came to inhabit different regions, with Africans from north of the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) disembarking in the Potomac Valley and those from south of the Bight of Biafra in Virginia's York and Upper James river basins. The proportion changed with time, as many more slaves arrived from central Africa. But over the course of the eighteenth century, Igbo peoples constituted the majority of African slaves in Virginia and Maryland, so much so that some historians renamed colonial Virginia “Igbo Land.”
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A different pattern emerged in low-country South Carolina and Georgia, where slaves from central Africa predominated from the beginning of large-scale importation. Although imports from the Bight of Biafra entered the low country in considerable numbers in the 1740s and those from the Windward Coast in the 1760s, Angolan and Kongo peoples maintained their commanding presence among the forced immigrants even as the slave population of the low country grew more diverse. After the Revolution, the pattern changed again, as central Africans once more dominated the new arrivals. If Virginia was Igbo Land, the low country might be likened to a New Angola.
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But the patterns of African settlement never created lasting regional identities. The overall thrust of the slave trade threw different people together in ways that undermined the consistent transfer of any unified culture or lineage. Mainland North America became a jumble of African nationalities. Their interaction—not their homogeneity—created new African American cultures.

The reasons were many. Nationality or ethnicity in Africa did not follow neat geographic boundaries. Even before the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade, the people of Africa had been on the move. Numerous peoples—many of them multilingual, embracing different beliefs, and engaging in a multiplicity of domestic arrangements—shared the physical space that became catchment areas for slave traders. A raid on a particular village necessarily took many different peoples. On the long march to the coast, some slaves died, others escaped, and still others were sold locally. Meanwhile, traders captured or purchased others, and all added to the heterogeneous mixture of peoples lodged in the seaside barracoons.
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As traders transferred slaves from shore to ship, the process of mixing people continued and even intensified. Few ships took on a full contingent in a single port and sailed for the Americas. Most moved from place to place, collecting slaves as they could, rarely purchasing more than a handful at a time. During the eighteenth century, slave ships often cruised along the African coast for months before obtaining a full cargo. Trawling for slaves along the Gold Coast in 1712, the
Sarah Bonadventure
collected some one hundred slaves over five months. Its officers boarded their captives in groups of two to eight, hence creating a diversity in the holds. In 1787, the captain of the
Hudibras
purchased 150 men and women along the coast of west Africa; among them were “fourteen different tribes or nations.” The Babel of languages emanating from the ship spoke to the diversity of African peoples that slave traders carried to the Americas.
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While most slave traders disembarked from specific African ports to land at specific American ones, they might also stop in numerous places along the way. At these stopovers, commitment to the most lucrative deal encouraged traders to sell a few slaves and purchase others. Jumbling their cargos offered an advantage that slave traders appreciated, for they understood that slaves who spoke the same language and shared the same culture might more easily act in concert.
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On the American side of the Atlantic, not all slave purchasers knew or cared much about the origins of their slaves. For many, youth, health, and fitness mattered more than origins. “If they are likely young negroes, it's not a farthing matter where they come from,” asserted one Virginia slaveowner in 1725, articulating a view common among Chesapeake tobacco planters. Moreover, even if they wished for specific slaves, the most knowledgeable planters could not bend the international market to their will, as the market for slaves was constantly shifting and beyond the control of even the most powerful. Despite their stated preferences, planters often received precisely the slaves they disliked. While lowland planters desired Gambians from the west coast of Africa, they generally received Angolans and Kongos from central Africa.
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The barriers to transatlantic cultural continuity were enormous for slaves sent to mainland North America. Unlike free European immigrants, few kinfolk and fellow villagers followed one another—what historians call “chain migrations”—from points of African departure to American destination. Over time, the slave trade rudely mixed peoples of different geographic origins, nationalities, language groups, and religious beliefs. The predominance of men and teenagers and the absence of family groups further militated against cultural cohesion. Within a given plantation population, newly arrived slaves could at best find fragments of their previous lives. Only on rare occasions might they discover a fellow villager or kinsman, as later European immigrants would find a
paisano
or a landsman. No friend or relative greeted the newly arrived Africans, offered a helping hand, or provided insight into the strange and forbidding world of the plantation.
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One shared experience joined them together. It would be central to the restoration of a sense of place. No matter what their sex, age, or nationality, Africans who survived the journey to the New World faced the trauma of enslavement.

 

Once disembarked, new anxieties compensated for whatever relief African peoples gained from the end of the seaboard journey. Indeed the shock of arrival only repeated the trauma of African enslavement. Staggering to their feet, bodies still bent from their weeks below deck, trembling with apprehension, the captives were again fitted with shackles—a painful welcome to their new homeland. They again confronted the auction block and the prospect of being poked and prodded by strange white men speaking strange languages.

New owners tried to sunder whatever connections survived the Middle Passage and assured that those made anew among shipmates did not survive long. At the docksides, newly arrived Africans were often sold singly or in small groups. When great planters and merchants purchased slaves in large lots, they generally resold them in small ones. That the majority of American slaveholders owned only a handful of slaves assured that the heterogeneous assemblages of peoples who crossed the Atlantic together had little opportunity to remain together. As the new arrivals were dispersed across the North American countryside, they individually confronted men determined to demonstrate their mastery. Having selected from among the frightened, tired men and women who crossed the Atlantic, Robert “King” Carter, perhaps the largest slaveholder in eighteenth-century Virginia, began the process of initiating newly arrived Africans to their American captivity. “I nam'd them here & by their names we can always know what sizes they are of & I am sure we repeated them so often to them that every one knew their names & would readily answer to them.” Carter then forwarded his slaves to a satellite plantation or quarter, where his overseer repeated the process, taking “care that the negros both men & women I sent ... always go by the names we gave them.” In the months that followed, the drill continued, with Carter again joining in the process of stripping newly arrived Africans of the signature of their identity and reminding them, at every opportunity, of their subordination.
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