by Ira Berlin
Allen’s disdain for the music of the slave quarter revealed the growing division within black society that emerged as some black people gained their freedom and sought respectability in the eyes of white Americans. Enslaved African Americans continued to elaborate just the music that Allen would suppress. The field shouts, with their forceful delivery and their individualized and improvisatory forms, mixed the sounds of Africa with those of America, sometimes chanting, sometimes moaning, and sometimes screaming the pain of bondage. In 1817, John Watson, a white Philadelphia minister, taking his cues from Allen’s Hymnal, launched his own assault on the “practice of singing in our places of worship, merry airs ... most frequently composed and sung by the illiterate Blacks of the society.” Most disturbing to Watson, they “visibly affected the religious manners of some Whites.” Yet even as white congregants embraced the new music, the infectious “merry air,” often accompanied by rhythmic clapping, was becoming the basis of a new African American genre, the spiritual.82
Having successfully—if unwillingly—transplanted Africa to the coast of mainland North America, people of African descent now returned to the larger Atlantic world, initiating an African American diaspora that equaled in significance, although not in numbers, the earlier exodus from Africa. Ironically this movement back to the Atlantic demonstrated how deeply attached to mainland North America people of African descent had become, for the migrants took their language, religion, politics, and music with them.
Many of the immigrants, perhaps a majority, left in chains. Following the Revolution, Loyalist slave masters forced thousands of slaves to follow them to the British West Indies, Spanish Louisiana, the Atlantic islands, and Central America. Betraying the promise of freedom, British soldiers sold others to Barbados, Jamaica, and other sugar islands. In the states that had begun the abolition of slavery, slaveholders—determined to squeeze the last bit of profit from their human property—followed suit, selling slaves to distant places before the emancipationist legislation took effect. Post-Revolutionary movement ironically reinvigorated the slave trade.
But other black men and women traveled as a free people. While individual British officers and soldiers violated the promise of freedom, British commanders honored the commitments made by Lord Dunmore in 1775 and General Henry Clinton in 1779 to exchange military services for liberty. At war’s end, some 1,200 former slaves and free blacks retreated with British soldiers from St. Augustine, Charleston, and Savannah to New York, where they joined an additional 1,500 black Loyalists—making the total roughly 3,000—in a mass exodus to the maritime provinces of Canada. Other “Loyal Blacks”—as they soon came to call themselves—followed British troops back to England, adding substantially to the black population of Liverpool, Bristol, and especially London. Still others found homes in such disparate places as Prussia and Bohemia. From there they spread—literally—to the ends of the earth. A few landed in the Australian outback.
Many of the migrants—whose numbers may have totaled some 10,000—did not stop at their first destination. After a short sojourn, these Exodusters set out again, moving in yet new directions, cutting their own path around the Atlantic. Mired in dismal poverty and facing rank discrimination in maritime Canada, some of the Loyal Black refugees migrated to London. Confronted by the same discrimination in England, they left for Africa, where the various streams of migrants—most from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick—merged in Sierra Leone, an enclave for former slaves on the west coast of Africa established by British abolitionists.83
As they recrossed the Atlantic, African Americans retraced as free men and women the path their ancestors’ had first trod as slaves. In so doing, they transported ideas that had taken root in the Americas into the larger Atlantic world. George Liele carried Afro-Christianity to Jamaica, just as the blind Virginia preacher Moses Wilkerson took it to Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone. Thomas Peters and Harry Washington conveyed American political ideas along the same path, while others transported the commonplaces of everyday life.84
The encounter with the Atlantic in the maritime provinces of Canada, the islands of the Caribbean, England, and Africa revealed in particularly telling ways the self-defining preferences that distinguished African Americans from those whose ancestors had never left Africa. From the perspective of the greater Atlantic, they saw—perhaps for the first time—the full measure of how their American nativity and experience distinguished them from other peoples, especially peoples who shared their ancestry and their color, but not their culture.85
Differences manifested themselves in the most mundane aspects of daily life. The language they spoke, the clothes they wore, and the food they ate—or at least that they preferred to eat—set them apart from the peoples among whom they now resided. African Americans bore European American names and spoke English or occasionally Spanish, French, or Dutch, rarely voicing the language that their forebears had carried to mainland North America. Indeed, few spoke the creole tongue that had become much of the Atlantic’s lingua franca. Sporting beaver hats, wearing trousers, carrying umbrellas, and demanding wheaten—rather than corned—bread, they proclaimed their American nationality.86
In the townships of Nova Scotia, the plantations of Barbados, the streets of London, and the new settlement of Sierra Leone, other touchstones of American identity could be found. Arriving in Nova Scotia and later Sierra Leone, black refugees built houses much like the ones they had left along the Chesapeake and in the Carolinas, often with appointments that bespoke more an American farm or plantation than the African dwellings in which their ancestors had resided. Generally their houses lined a street, rather than taking the form of an African compound or village. Their furnishings would be likewise familiar to other Americans. On the coast of Africa, transplanted black Americans lived, in one estimation, “according to a pattern that owed its characteristics not only to European or even African models but also to the unique experience they shared since their days as slaves in the American colonies.”87
While some white Americans saw the society that transplanted African Americans carried with them as merely a darker reflection of their own society—one observer declared it “a burlesqued reflection of white society”—African American returnees, however, wanted no simple imitation of white America. They picked and chose what they borrowed from the larger American culture of which they themselves had been a part, embracing only what they deemed admirable or useful. The language of liberty proved to be both. Just as their petitions for freedom in the United States were loaded with assertions that “the divine spirit of freedom, seems to fire every humane breast” and with appeals for “equity and justice,” so their petitions to British administrators in Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere spoke of natural rights, liberty, and the promise of equality.88
From their own experience—as well as the Revolution, in which they had been full participants—black people placed great emphasis on matters of rights. The settlers took great offense at any attempt to limit their liberties, and they were not above stretching them beyond the bonds that British authorities found acceptable. According to the governor of Sierra Leone, the settlers “have a great idea that their freedom gives them equality.” While claiming the protection due His Majesty’s subjects, the Loyal Blacks encased themselves in the rhetoric of American republican liberty.89
Like their political sensibility, the settlers’ sacred world also derived from their American experience. As in the United States and Nova Scotia, the Black Loyalists’ most important institution was the African church and the leading figures were preachers. Indeed, during the first years of settlement, African Americans like David George and Thomas Peters, both refugees from South Carolina through Nova Scotia, were among the dominant figures in Sierra Leone. The settlers not only drew upon the Christian Bible, but also chanted Christian hymns and organized their churches in a manner most Americans would recognize. African American society in Sierra Leone rested upon the diverse denominational allegiances
of the immigrants, with the division between Baptists and Methodists being most prominent. Difference between them grew as each struggled for land and power in the new settlement, but the solidarity of African Americans soon asserted itself with the arrival of black people of a different stripe— Jamaican maroons—who had no tradition of Christian pietism and little interest in attending church. Their presence reminded African Americans—even when they divided among themselves into warring factions—of their common heritage and their shared mission as bearers of civilization. They soon joined together in tutoring native Africans—with no small sense of condescension—in the importance of trousers and frocks, the sin of polygamy, and the sanctity of the Sabbath.90
The post-Revolutionary African American diaspora and the transplantation of the African American culture around the Atlantic demonstrated the deep roots black people had established in what had become the United States of America. This sense of place was represented in every aspect of African American life. The region between the Atlantic and the Alleghenies had become home. When white Americans suggested otherwise, they stated forthrightly, “Here we were born.”91 All that, however, would change with the arrival of a new century.
CHAPTER THREE
The Passage to the Interior
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, people of African descent—having survived the trauma of enslavement, the horror of the Atlantic crossing, and the nightmare of American slavery—had rooted themselves on the west side of the Atlantic. Most were American born. Many had American-born parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Black life took a variety of forms—slave and free, rural and urban, and plantation and farm—and it differed from place to place. But, for the most part, African Americans were confined to the long arc along the North American coast reaching from New England to the Mississippi Valley, with the majority crowded into a narrow strip of land between the Atlantic tidewater and the Appalachian Mountains. There, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, distinctive African American cultures had emerged, a confluence of the diverse heritage of Africa, the American experience, and the unique status of peoples of African descent. Following the American Revolution, African Americans incorporated as many as 100,000 newly arrived Africans into their ranks and challenged slavery directly, often employing the new ideology of American nationality. Those who gained their freedom constructed scores of “African” institutions. Some moved back into the larger Atlantic world as missionaries for their own way of life: republicanism, Christianity, and commercial capitalism. But, for the vast majority still locked in bondage, the world of transplanted Africans and their African American descendants underwent a change of cataclysmic proportions, in a transformation that would ultimately propel millions of African Americans across the continent.
For more than half of the nineteenth century, movement defined African American life under slavery. Then, almost as quickly as it began, the movement stopped, leaving black people again rooted in place.
Between the elections of Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and Abraham Lincoln in 1860, more than one million black people—slave and free—were forced from the homes they and their forebears had created in the most difficult of circumstances. This great migration, really a second Middle Passage, dwarfed the transatlantic slave trade that had carried African peoples to mainland North America. Driven by a seemingly insatiable demand for cotton and an expanding market for sugar, the massive migration sent black people across the continent, assigning the vast majority to another half century of captivity and providing immediate freedom for a few who had somehow escaped bondage. Some of the latter fled northward to the free states or Canada; others reentered the Atlantic from where they or their ancestors had come, completing the diasporic circle. But, for the mass of black migrants, movement only tightened the constraints of bondage. Ousted from their seaboard residence, they were forcibly transported into the American interior as part of slavery’s expansion, redefining African American life.
Like those who had been forcibly transported across the Atlantic, the lives of men and women ensnared in the second great migration were changed forever. Husbands and wives were separated and children orphaned. As some families were torn apart, others forged new domestic relations, marrying or remarrying, becoming parents and adoptive parents, and creating yet new lineages and networks of kin. Migrants came to speak new languages, practice new skills, worship new gods, and sing new songs, as thousands of men and women abandoned beliefs of their parents and grandparents and embraced new ideas, even if they held fast to some old ones. In the process, tobacco and rice cultivators came to grow cotton and sugar while some craftsmen lost their skills and a few laborers gained new responsibilities and status.
Those left behind did not escape the impact of this second great migration. In portions of the settled seaboard South, the slave population fell especially precipitously, but in no part of the South did black people escape the nightmarish effects of the massive deportation, as the trauma of loss weighed as heavily on those who remained as on those carried off. Just as those who remained in Africa had to rebuild their lives as fully as those who had been shipped across the great ocean, so those left in the seaboard South were changed. Their families also had to be remade, their communities rebuilt, their leaders chosen anew, and—perhaps most importantly—their social order rethought.1
The massive deportation took two forms. Hundreds of thousands of slaves marched west with their owners, their owners’ kin, or their agents as the shock troops of the massive expansion of cotton and sugar production in the states of the lower South. Seeing opportunities westward, some prominent planters transferred their entire retinue of slaves to new plantation sites. Others, perhaps a bit more cautious, moved with a few chosen hands—generally young men—to begin the creation of new empires of cotton and cane. Once settled, additional slaves followed.
Through the first two decades of the nineteenth century, planters in transit carried most of their slaves with them to the interior. Having brought their own slaves South, some slave masters—wanting to augment their labor force—journeyed back to the seaboard to purchase others. A few shuttled back and forth, buying a few slaves at every turn. But over time, the westward-moving slaveowners surrendered control of slave transit to a new group of merchants whose sole business became the trade in human beings. Although the balance between the two trades was forever changing, it fell heavily in favor of the slave traders. The number of black-belt and delta planters who returned to the seaboard to purchase slaves declined, leaving slave traders in command. During the course of the nineteenth century, traders carried roughly two-thirds of the slaves from the seaboard to the interior.2
This second great migration began slowly in the years following the American Revolution when so-called “Georgia men” transported slaves southward in the wake of emancipation in the northern states and widespread manumission in the northern portions of the seaboard South.3 On the eve of freedom, black men and women saw liberty snatched from their grasp as slaveholders and slave traders conspired to defeat the promise of post-Revolutionary emancipation. In the rush to transform men and women into cash, Georgia men cared little about the distinction between those enslaved for a term and those enslaved for life, or even the distinction between slavery and freedom. Free people of color found themselves swept into the transcontinental dragnet. Kidnapping increased sharply and remained an omnipresent danger to free black men and women. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the practice had become so pervasive that it gained a name: “blackbirding.” Although many states legislated against it, enforcement proved difficult against the insidious combination of greed and stealth.4
As planters—aided by the American soldiers and militiamen—ousted native peoples and took possession of some of the richest land on the continent, the Georgia trade outgrew its name. Increasingly, slaves moved more west than south into Alabama and Mississippi and then across the Mississippi river into Louisiana, Arkans
as, and Texas. The internal slave trade became the largest enterprise in the South outside of the plantation itself, rivaling the transatlantic trade of centuries past. It too developed its own language: “prime hands,” “bucks,” “breeding wenches,” and “fancy girls.” Its routes were regularized and dotted by pens, jails, and yards that provided hostelries for slave traders and warehouses for slaves. Its seasonality—when best to move slaves and when to retain them—became part of the rhythm of Southern life, much like planting and harvest. Its terminals—Alexandria, Baltimore, Richmond, Norfolk, and Washington at one end and Natchez, New Orleans, and Vicksburg at the other—became infamous. There was hardly a Southern town, no matter how inconsequential, without an auction block, prominently located near the courthouse or the busiest tavern. In all, the slave trade, with its hubs and regional centers, its spurs and circuits, reached into every cranny of Southern society. Forced movement had again become an integral part of black life.
In the half century following the close of the transatlantic slave trade, both planters and traders expanded the transcontinental transfer of black men and women. The cascade of humanity flowing from the seaboard South swelled ever larger. During the second decade of the nineteenth century, traders and owners sent out an estimated 120,000 slaves westward and southward, with the states and territories of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana being the largest recipients. That number increased substantially and reached a high point during the following decade. It increased yet again during the 1830s, when slave traders and migrating planters ousted almost 300,000 black men, women, and children. Most of the slaves still came from Maryland and Virginia, but South Carolina and Georgia—once destinations—became points of departure for transporting black people to Alabama and Mississippi. During the 1830s, South Carolina and Georgia each forwarded nearly 100,000 slaves, with most being sent to the rich ribbon of alluvial soil that soon denominated the black belt. Others took up residence along the great rivers of the region: the Alabama, Tombigbee, Tennessee, and Mississippi.
