by Ira Berlin
The visible marks of identity also reinforced the deepening sense of place. As filed teeth and ritual scarification disappeared from the slave quarter, other forms of bodily adornment emerged. With limited resources but seemingly limitless ingenuity, enslaved black men and women improvised physical repertoires from the masters’ and mistresses’ discarded finery and small pieces of metal, glass, leather, and animal bone. Clothing and the way it was draped, hats and kerchiefs and the way they were worn, and—especially—hair and the way it was prepared became reflections of self, markers of social standing, and evidence of the emergence of a variety of African American aesthetics. Most of these developed within the Americas, although they drew on African practices or the memory of African practices. By the middle of the eighteenth century, astute observers could categorize distinctive regionally defined styles much as they identified different African American dialects.67
Physical appearance, like kin and property, set the boundaries of neighborhoods and transformed localities into places with which black men and women identified. Such boundaries—social as well as physical—defined community membership, both who was of the community as well as who was not. Slaveowners appreciated the unity and divisions of black society. They exploited existing fissures within the slaves’ ranks and instigated new ones by bestowing favor on some slaves at the expense of others. But the owners’ understanding paled in comparison to that of the slave.
As Africans and African Americans worked together, and intermarried, the web of friendship and kinship bridged the divide that once separated them. In parts of the Americas, much was made of the differences between bozales and criollos, and some like the Spanish and Portuguese even set both apart from ladinos, men and women of foreign birth who had some knowledge of the masters’ culture. According to one keen observer of Barbadian society, black men and women born in the Americas “value themselves much on being born in Barbadoes,” “despise” newly arrived Africans, and “hold them in the utmost contempt, stiling them ‘salt-water Negroes’ and ‘Guiney Birds.’ ” Such differences also appeared on the mainland, along with evidence that Africans returned the condescension as immigrant Africans and native-born African Americans struggled among themselves. On one South Carolina rice plantation, African slaves refused to join a collective singing and instead set to “clapping their hands ... and distorting their frames into the most unnatural figures ... emiting the most hideous noises in their dancing.” Somewhat later, Charles Ball, a Maryland slave, remembered that his African-born grandfather “always expressed great contempt for his fellow slaves, they being ... a mean and vulgar race, quite beneath his rank, and the dignity of his former station.”68
The rapid emergence of an African American majority—even in the low country, where the transatlantic slave trade remained open and active—diminished the distinction between those born on the east side from those born on the west side of the Atlantic. Aside from occasional references to saltwater slaves, such terminology as bozales and criollos had little relevance in mainland North America, for either slaveholders or slaves. It rarely appears in the utterances of either. The African American majority was quick to incorporate new arrivals into its ranks, integrating them into their families and sharing their knowledge of the peculiar circumstances of their American captivity. Indeed, the rarity of Africans made them an object of veneration among some African Americans. “[A]mong the very old slaves whom he had known as a boy,” recalled a survivor of slavery in 1936, were Africans “looked up to, respected, and feared as witches, wizzards, and magic-workers. These either brought their ‘learnin’ with them from Africa or absorbed it from their immediate African forebears.”69 African and African American had become one.
The music emanating from the slave quarter provided yet another signal that black people had made a place for themselves on the west side of the Atlantic. The haunting groans that slave traders heard rising from the holds of Atlantic transports mixed with the musical forms that have since been identified with west Africa: multipart rhythmic structures, repetitive verses, and call-and-response, in which a lead singer and a chorus addressed one another with a variety of melodic embellishments. These performances were accompanied by drumming, hand clapping, and foot stomping, and often played out in a circle that moved with counterclockwise motion. While slaveholders denigrated them as mere “shouts,” black people adopted the name. By the middle of the eighteenth century, and probably before, such west African forms had become inextricably linked with European melodies and European instrumentation, most particularly fiddles and horns of various sorts as well as a stringed instrument that was the precursor to the banjo. A 1736 account of an African American festival in New York described slaves dancing to the “hollow Sound of a Drum, made of the Truck of a hollow Tree ... the grating rattling Noise of Pebles or Shells in a small Basket”—along with the ever-present “bangers.”70
The slaves’ music was only one indicator of the relationship that the rising generation of African Americans had forged with the land and its people. While newly arrived Africans had been assigned the meanest of drudgery, by the end of the eighteenth century some black men and women—almost always African Americans—escaped mind-numbing field labor. They began to move into positions of responsibility as drivers, foremen, and artisans. Taken as a whole, their skill level increased steadily. In many places, one-quarter to one-third of the slave men labored as skilled workers. Others drove wagons, sailed boats, and guided ferries, allowing them to move freely around the countryside. Their familiarity with the roads and trails, rivers and streams confirms how the strange land had become a familiar one.71
As African Americans—men and women who had no direct knowledge of Africa and rarely bore marks of ritual scarification or uttered more than a few words of their parents’ native tongue—moved into positions of leadership, black society underwent a profound transformation. Unlike their parents and grandparents, these American-born men and women—“artful,” “sensible,” and “smooth tongued”—spoke the language of their enslavers, knew the countryside, and often practiced skilled crafts. They understood the slaveowners’ religion even when they rejected it, and their laws even when the judicial system was arrayed against them. Linguistic fluency, knowledge of the landscape, and skills enabled African Americans to counter the exploitation and secure a measure of control over their lives. Whether achieving the ability to name their own children or the rights to a garden, such small victories fed the desire to be free of slavery. If their parents and grandparents had survived the shock of African enslavement, the Middle Passage, and captivity in mainland America, the new generation of African Americans wanted something more. As they replaced aging African fathers and mothers at the top of black society, African Americans searched for cracks in the edifice of slavery. They were not long in finding them.
Changes in American society in the last third of the eighteenth century sped the search. Some of these changes derived from the transformation of the American economy, as small grain production replaced tobacco in the Chesapeake region, new techniques of tidal cultivation supplanted old inland production of rice in the low country, and trade and commerce expanded in the Atlantic ports, particularly in the Northern colonies. These changes, although initiated by slaveowners for their own benefit, inadvertently gave slaves additional control over their own lives. The decline of tobacco reduced the need for season-long labor in the Chesapeake region. Wheat and other small grains required systematic labor only at planting and harvest, which in turn created a seeming surplus of enslaved workers. Slaveholders sold some slaves but hired others and permitted yet others to hire themselves. The new economy also required many more skilled workers: carpenters and coopers, boatmen and wagoners, warehouse keepers and wharfingers. Such positions gave slaves new freedoms, even if they did not make them free.
An upsurge of evangelical religion created another breach in the slave regime, opening a new arena for black people to assert themselves. Believing all w
ere equal in the eyes of God and eschewing the austere formalism and racial exclusivity of the established denominations, the sectarians welcomed black people as brothers and sisters in Christ. Many slaves rushed to the evangelical standard, attracted by the evangelicals’ egalitarian enthusiasm and the message that “Jesus Christ loved them and died for them, as well as for white people.” They soon demanded that the equality of the afterworld be extended to the here and now. To that end, some evangelicals readily joined black men and women in their opposition to slavery and, on occasion, in a commitment to full equality. While egalitarians were always in short supply, slaves nonetheless employed their evangelical connections to gain a measure of independence and occasionally freedom.72
But the largest crack in the edifice of slavery came with the outbreak of revolutionary warfare, beginning with the American War for Independence and extending through the French and Haitian revolutions. Each created massive divisions within the slaveholders’ ranks, as the planter class split, initially into Patriot and Loyalist factions. Serving in the armies of one belligerent or another, slaves played master against master to their own advantage, eventually inducing commanders of both armies to offer freedom in exchange for military service. Likewise, black men and women seized the language of liberty and the ideology of equality that revolutionaries throughout the Atlantic employed to justify their cause, claiming—as did a group of Massachusetts slaves—“with all other men a Natural and Unalinble Right to that Freedom which the Grat Parent of the Unavers hath Bestowed equally on all menkind and which they have Never foruted by any compact or agreement whatever.”73
As black people and their white allies denounced the hypocrisy of slavery in the land of liberty, demands for freedom echoed across the new republic. Slaves petitioned legislatures, went to court, and opened direct negotiations with their owners for freedom. Under the unrelenting assault, slavery tottered and in some places it fell, propelling large numbers of black men and women—mostly African Americans—to freedom. The Northern colonies began the liquidation of slavery as one state after another, through constitutional mandates, judicial degrees, and legislation, provided for slavery’s eventual demise. But even in the North, slavery lingered, its death delayed by gradualist measures that extended the process of emancipation over years and sometimes decades. Elsewhere freedom arrived at an even more glacial pace, as individual slaves negotiated their release from bondage by securing deeds of manumission, purchasing their liberty and that of their loved ones, or taking flight. The birth of freedom was slow, often painfully so.74
Still, over time, the change was nothing less than revolutionary. Free people of African descent had gone from being nearly nonexistent in the early eighteenth century to being the fastest-growing segment of the American population. The number of black people enjoying freedom doubled and doubled again in the decades following the American Revolution. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, more than 100,000 black people—or more than one in ten black Americans—enjoyed freedom. The Revolution broke the coincidence between blackness and slavery. No longer could every black person be presumed a slave.75
The sudden and spectacular expansion of the free black population initiated a massive restructuring of black life. Newly freed black people took new names, established new residences, reconstructed their families, found jobs, purchased property, and organized churches, schools, and fraternal orders along with a variety of other associations. As former slaves rebuilt their society in freedom, they revealed the complex culture that had taken root both beyond their masters’ eyes and under their noses. The names they chose, the residences in which they lived, the families they assembled, the jobs they took, the churches they attended, the associations they organized, and the music they sang all spoke to the new societies that black people created on the west side of the Atlantic.
Since the process of enslavement had begun with the loss of their African names, the reverse of this revealed how fully people of African descent had been transformed during their two-hundred-year residence in mainland North America and how deeply black people had sunk their roots into American soil. Once free, black men and women quickly sloughed off the names that identified them as slaves, jettisoning the degrading names that associated them with barnyard animals—Buster and Postilion—and the comic classic names—Hercules and Cato—that ridiculed their lowly status. But, as they searched for new names to stamp on their new identity, newly freed black men and women rarely returned to the names their forebears had carried across the Atlantic. Instead, they tied themselves to their American experience, adopting common American names. Some identified themselves with their work (Barber and Cooper), their color (Brown and Black), their aspirations (Prince and Bishop), their place of residence (Boston and York), or their status (Freeman or Liberty).76 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, a distinctive African American culture became far more visible, with names no longer always concealed behind the facade of bondage.
To be sure, Africa maintained a presence, but in a radically new guise. While newly liberated black men and women eschewed the names of their Angolan, Kru, or Kongo ancestors, they designated the institutions they created after the continent from whence they came. Former slaves worshipped in African churches, attended African schools, joined together in African lodges, and buried their own in African cemeteries. Their two-hundred-year sojourn to mainland North America had reconstituted them into a new people, transforming their identity. In making visible the distinctive culture that had been created clandestinely in bondage, the national or ethnic affiliations enslaved peoples carried to America had disappeared entirely, either through a process of slow attenuation or deliberate termination. Ancestral affinities had no visible impact on the choice of marriage partners, child-rearing practices, funeral ceremonies, or religious affiliations. Ijo, Fulbe, Ga, Kikongo, Mandinka, Soninke, or Temne could rarely be heard on the streets of American cities.77
The Christian church quickly became the center of free black life. While most slaves remained strangers to Christianity, free black churchmen and women began the process of bending the biblical narrative to their own purposes, identifying themselves with the Israelites of the Old Testament and the story of their deliverance from bondage. Exodus became the central text of African American Christianity, just as the Declaration of Independence had become the central text of African American politics.78 But as free people of color embraced Christianity, the absence of the influence of African nationality in black religious life was especially striking. Most African churches were the denominational offspring of European American organizations and followed the polity and the liturgy of their denominational root. Rather than drawing upon particular African nationalities, be they Efik or Igbo, denominational affiliations appeared to follow regional differences in the development of American religious life with black Christians adhering to Protestantism in the English colonies and to Catholicism in the colonies of France and Spain. Within this framework, even more specific connections developed, as black people joined Methodists in the areas where this denomination had a strong following, and they joined Baptists in places where that church predominated. Much the same was true of the host of fraternal and benevolent societies that appeared in cities along the Atlantic seaboard. The “Union” in the African Union Society of Newport referred not to the joining together of Angolans and Wolofs and their descendants, but rather to the uneasy alliance between black Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists.79
The African churches and the allied institutions affirmed the invention of a new nationality. It represented the place black people had made for themselves in the difficult circumstances of slavery and unequal freedom in the United States. The phalanx of African churches, Masonic temples, and benevolent associations that could be found in the cities that stretched along the periphery of North America from Boston to New Orleans revealed how people of African descent gave institutional form to their American experience. These buildings and meet
ing halls were not simply places to gather but geographical pinpoints that marked transformation of black life during the nearly two centuries of American captivity. The charismatic leaders, cadres of officers, finely crafted qualifications for membership, diverse constituencies, evolving political agendas, and music emanating from these institutions provided evidence that black people had taken root on the west side of the Atlantic.80
African institutions also revealed the complexity of African American society, none more so than the church. In 1801, Richard Allen, the leader of Philadelphia’s newly established African Methodist Episcopal Church, published a hymnal for his congregation. While it drew on many standard Methodist hymns, it contained many of Allen’s own compositions, which he distinguished from the shouts or hollers that had become identified with black people. There would be no “groaning and shouting” in the African church, as such religion was “only a dream.”81
