The Making of African America

by Ira Berlin

  In the face of frontier dangers, black men and women worked at quick pace—often under the lash—to get the first crops into the ground. Mastering a new crop and confronting slaveowners eager to ratchet up the level of exploitation took a toll. There was “no time off of’ de change of de seasons and after de crop was laid by. Dey was allus clearin’ mo’ lan’ or sump‘n,”’ remembered one former slave. Beyond the workplace, the forced migrants faced endless difficulties during those first years. Exhaustion compounded a deep melancholy that cast a pall over black life. The transplanted suffered from dejection that bordered on despondency. “[E]very time we look back and think ‘bout home,” recalled one Virginian who had been transported to Texas as a young man, “it make us sad.” Spartan circumstances—shabby housing, inadequate nutrition, and bad water—pushed some slaves over the edge.42

  However, within a generation of their arrival in the Southern interior, black people had recovered their balance and began to make the land their own. They mastered the landscape and the skills the new crops demanded. Like the first generation of Africans in mainland North America, they too created a new life built upon their own experiences and memories. This time, however, their memories were not drawn from Africa, from which they were removed by a century or more of American experience, but the Chesapeake, the low country, or occasionally the North, the world of their parents and often grandparents.

  The new society in the interior emerged slowly and unevenly, since the internal slave trade remained open and slave traders continued to import slaves from the seaboard. Moreover, even as portions of the interior matured into settled plantation societies, other areas remained open to settlement. Transplanted slaves, many of them but recently arrived from the seaboard, thus were subject to resale, from Alabama to Mississippi, from Mississippi to Arkansas, or from Arkansas to Texas. The death of an owner, the failure of the plantation, or a sudden surge of planter ambition might send slaves to the auction block.

  But if the same terror that gripped Africans caught in the transatlantic trade touched African Americans crossing the North American continent, the latter had one advantage. Shared language and common experiences allowed slave deportees from the seaboard to communicate freely. The new generation of forced migrants escaped the linguistic isolation that so weighted upon black men and women in the first Middle Passage. So too had they escaped the shock of seeing white men—faces reddened and hair wild and stringy—for the first time. Such familiarity enabled them to almost immediately begin reconstructing an African American society in their new location.

  Like their forebears who had been shipped across the Atlantic, the black men and women ensnared in the internal slave trade also carried much with them on their transcontinental journey. Although many moved with barely more than the clothes on their backs, they too were nonetheless not without ideas that would shape their lives in the Southern interior. The rapid reemergence of the slaves’ economy, the reconstruction of the slave family, and the growth of African American Christianity offer hints as to the cultural baggage that enslaved black men and women brought with them and how it was remade in the course of the transcontinental journey.

  The slaves’ economy—the complex matrix of customs and laws that allowed slaves to engage in independent economic activities, participate in the marketplace, and accumulate small amounts of property—had been disrupted by the forced movement from the seaboard to the interior. But in time, plantation society matured and slaves revived their economy. As on the seaboard, the independent productive activities grew at the intersection of the complementary interests of masters and slaves. Desperate to expand production, some planters paid their slaves—so-called overwork—for laboring on Sundays and evenings, revealing how the distinction between what was the slave’s time and what was master’s time had gained some legitimacy in the eyes of both slave and slaveholder. The line was blurred still further when slaves liberated some of their owners’ possessions and traded them to white nonslaveholders and others for liquor, tobacco, and other niceties. Slaveowners despised such illicit activities, and, at their behest, lawmakers punished such exchanges severely, but owners often inadvertently encouraged such activities. To avoid the expenses of provisioning their slaves, they provided slaves with land for gardens and the time required to work them if slaves would accept the responsibility of feeding and clothing themselves. Slaves discovered markets for their produce among Native Americans, white nonslaveholders, and even their own masters.

  Once slaveholders conceded the slaves’ ability to work independently and retain a portion of the product of their labor, there was no turning back. Slaves demanded the right to keep barnyard fowl, maintain gardens and provision grounds, and market their produce. Before long, the slaves’ economy metamorphosed from a privilege to an entitlement, much as it had been in the seaboard South. In addition to working the traditional gardens and grounds, slaves sold handicrafts, chopped wood for steamboats, and gathered moss and other marketable commodities. They labored into the night and on Sundays—traditionally the slaves’ own time—for overwork payments. With produce to sell, they established ties with white nonslaveholders, many of whom were delighted to purchase the slaves’ surplus, along with almost anything slaves could purloin from their owners.

  The few dollars slaves earned by their own labor—or the “overplus” gained from the overwork—had great significance. This money supplemented the slaves’ diet, allowed them to clothe themselves far better than their masters’ dole, and permitted them small luxuries to ease the hard realities of frontier enslavement. “Den each fam’ly have some chickens and sell dem and de eggs and maybe go huntin’ and sell de hides and git some money,” remembered one former Alabama slave. “Den us buy what am Sunday clothes with dat money, sech as hats and pants and shoes and dresses.” The benefits black people derived from their own economies tied them to the land—sometimes directly as they took pride in their gardens and grounds, and sometimes indirectly as the benefits they enjoyed became necessities. The trading networks they established with others—slaves and nonslaves alike—familiarized them with their neighbors, creating family ties, communities of interest, and, before long, political alliances. Such work required that available hands do their share. Charles Ball, sold south from Maryland, gained acceptance among the slaves of his new plantation only when he agreed to contribute his overwork “earnings into the family stock.”43

  As Ball’s experience suggests, the slave family reemerged slowly. While planters still relied upon the slave trade to reproduce their labor force, they—like their seaboard counterparts—found value in allowing slaves to maintain their own domestic institutions. Slave masters recognized that the birth of slave children added to their wealth, and they followed the practice established on the seaboard of allowing slave men to visit their “broad wives” and of easing the burden on slave women during the last months of pregnancy.

  Despite the lack of legal sanction and enormous practical difficulties, the family once again became the center of slave life. As in the seaboard South, the family served as the locus of education, governance, and occupational training. Families established courting patterns, marriage rituals, and child-rearing practices. The family defined the domestic division of labor and shaped the aspirations of young and old. From cradle to grave, the family was more than a source of love and affection. From the slaves’ perspective, the most important role they played was not that of field hand or house servant, but of husband or wife, son or daughter—the precise opposite of their owners’ calculation.44

  New families began to take shape as strangers anointed each other as kin. The pain of loss remained, but black people kept the memories of those losses alive. With their fathers and mothers gone, young men and women selected parents from among the few elderly slaves who had been transported west. “Uncles” and “aunts” became revered figures on the pioneer plantations, for they represented a tie to the world that was lost. While elderly slaves, many of whom had bee
n forcibly separated from husbands or wives, were slow to establish new families, perhaps for fear that new unions would again be broken, young men and women married and soon became parents. Joe Kirkpatrick, separated from his wife and daughters, carried to Florida a five-year-old orphan boy named George Jones and raised him as his son. Jones grew up and eventually married, naming his own daughters after the sisters, Lettice and Nellie, he had known only through the memory of his foster father. The second great migration, like the first, dismantled families, but not the idea of family.45

  Children soon populated the new plantation region. For enslaved men and women the arrival of a child affirmed their survival as a people. The new children also provided transplanted slaves with the opportunity to link the world that they had lost to the world that had been forced upon them. In naming their children for some loved one left behind, slave parents restored the ties that had been forever severed by the second great migration. In so doing, they reconnected themselves and their children with the ancestors they would never know. Some transplanted slaves reached back beyond their parents’ generation to grandparents or other ancestors, suggesting how slavery’s long history in mainland North America could be collapsed by a single act.46

  Along those same pathways flowed other knowledge. Rituals for celebrating marriage, coming of age, breaking bread, and giving last rites to honored elders which had been transferred across the Atlantic and were reconstructed along the coast of mainland North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were passed on to new ground during the nineteenth. Along with the unfulfilled egalitarian promise of the Age of Revolution and the Great Awakenings, these rites survived in the minds of those forcibly deported from their seaboard homes. Such memories became the building blocks for reconstructing new communities in the black belt, Mississippi delta, trans-Mississippi west, and other parts of the land black men and women were making their own.

  As the networks expanded, slave society grew increasingly complicated. Kin connections not only joined men and women together in bonds of mutual support but also created new enmities and alliances. From among various networks of kin, work groups, and acquaintances emerged multiple hierarchies. Differences within the slave community required mediation, if only to prevent slaveowners from entering their disputes, a circumstance that slaves much preferred to avoid. Such responsibilities also fell to a new class of leaders, for the enforcement of the norms established by slaves could not be left to the slave masters.47

  Along with the new structure of leadership grew a host of new institutions, foremost among which was the African Christian church, which had generally been the province of free blacks prior to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The slaves’ commitment to Christianity expanded rapidly during the second great migration. By the eve of emancipation, one-quarter to one-third of the slave population and perhaps an even larger share of the free black population identified themselves as Christians. Although antebellum planters—themselves in the thrall of evangelical Christianity—generally supported the conversion of their slaves, Christianity took on a different meaning in the slave quarter than the Big House. While slave masters dwelled upon the Pauline doctrine of slave obedience as their entrée into Christianity, slaves found a different message in the Old Testament. Anointing themselves as the modern counterparts to the Children of Israel, they appropriated the story of Exodus as a parable of their own deliverance from bondage. The appearance of plantation chapels and the growth of a cadre of preachers and deacons, like the reemergence of the slaves’ economy and the slave family, tied black people even more firmly to place. The commitment to Christ added to the slaves’ sense of proprietorship over the site of their enslavement.48

  Another survivor of the transcontinental transfer of people of African descent—and one intimately connected to their embrace of Christianity—was the slaves’ music. Like the slave family and economy, the music of the quarter was also transformed by the second great migration, giving rise to a sound whose deep religiosity gained it the name “spiritual” when references to it first appeared in print. Although a recognizable descendant of the shouts of earlier years, spirituals had taken a new form, which some white observers characterized as “extravagant and nonsensical chants... and hallelujah songs.” They still contained much of the same rhythmic structure, antiphony, atonal forms, and various guttural interjections and were accompanied by hand clapping and foot stomping. They were almost always performed in a circular formation with the singer moving in a counterclockwise direction. But increasingly, Christian imagery and Jesus himself became central to the new music.49

  While the spirituals carried deep religious meaning and articulated multiple messages—joy and sorrow, hope and despair—as befitted a musical form that emerged from a collectivity, they also spoke both directly and in veiled allusions to the primal experience of people uprooted and forced to create place anew. The pain of separation—motherless children, for example—and the hope for a better life to which men and women might “steal away” were among the spiritual’s most persistent images. Movement abounded in references to roads and rivers, chariots and ships, and eventually trains. Slaves sang of running, traveling, and “travelin’ on.” They crossed rivers, forded streams, and flew “all over God’s Heab’n,” affirming how enslavement and forced migration had become the central experiences of African American life in the first half of the nineteenth century. Even when such movement was wrapped in the imagery of the Old Testament, the journey of the “weary travelers” was as much a part of this world as the next. But the spirituals—in the same biblical language—also emphasized place: sometimes the nostalgia for a place lost, the desire to be “returned” and “carried home”; sometimes that other place, of final rewards. Like the improvisational character of music itself, black life amid the second great migraton was a process of continuous recreation. 50

  The movement and place that became so much a part of the slaves’ music remained a part of the slaves’ life. Black men and women continued to be sold and traded, and planters continued to move. Even in areas that were well established, planters—and their slaves—were constantly in motion. In Jasper County, Georgia, which had been settled for more than a generation by midcentury, nearly 60 percent of the slaveholders present in 1850 had gone elsewhere within the ten years that followed. While rates of persistence were generally higher for large slaveholders, even the grandees were constantly on the move. Planter mobility kept the slave community in flux, so that geographic mobility continued to be a feature of African American life. The origins of black men and women who opened accounts in the Little Rock branch of the Freedman’s Bank following the Civil War provide a sense of how the second Middle Passage had scattered black people across the Southern landscape: they traced their origins to some seventeen states, 142 different counties, and three foreign countries.51

  The arrival of freedom amid civil war changed black life dramatically, altering the relationship between movement and place in African American life. The revolution of emancipation destroyed the sovereignty of the master and put in its place the discipline of the market. While former slaves found that Mr. Cash could be as hard a master as Mr. Lash, they appreciated the difference. There would be no more beatings, no more overseers, and no more intrusions into the most intimate relations between husbands and wives and parents and children. They would escape the endless days of forced sunup-to-sundown labor and enjoyed the right to quit for cause or even whim. Freedpeople celebrated these changes, embracing a new order that allowed them to enjoy the produce of their own labor and promised the opportunity to remake their world—perhaps the world—in accordance to the principles they had nourished as slaves.52

  Even before the shooting stopped, black men and women began the process of transforming themselves into a free people. They took new names, some of which were borrowed from former masters but most of which harked back to a lineage established by parents and grandparents in the Americas or, occasionally, g
randparents and great-grandparents in Africa. They reconstructed families, searching out spouses and children who had been sold to distant parts of the South. Churches and schools that had operated clandestinely emerged from behind the veil of secrecy, and dozens of associations were created. The reinvigoration of African American civil society spawned a new politics as new men and women came to the fore and challenged old leaders. Everywhere freedpeople schemed to find new ways to put their knowledge, skill, and muscle to work to earn a living. Freedom commenced the process whereby black people would become, in the words of one black soldier, a “[p]eople capable of self support.”53

  At first, it appeared that the grand hopes initiated by the war and wartime freedom would be crushed as Andrew Johnson’s accession to the presidency empowered the old slaveholding class. But in the spring of 1867, the Radicals in Congress gained control over federal policy toward the South and expanded the rights of black people far beyond those defined by the Johnsonian settlement. In quick order, black men became citizens, voters, and—in some places—officeholders. Although the power of black lawmakers was limited by the covert enmity of their white Republican allies as well as the overt hostility of white Democratic enemies, they helped enact legislation providing black people with access to justice, schools, and a variety of social services. The revolution in black life would stall again, and before long, would move backward, as the Northern interest in remaking the South waned and the old regime reasserted itself. But the transformation that accompanied wartime emancipation changed the lives of black Southerners forever.54

  Among the most momentous of those changes that followed emancipation was the sudden termination of the second Middle Passage. For more than a half century, black people had been forcibly propelled across the continent, separated from their families and friends, and required to remake their lives anew. Freedom called a halt to the massive, forced deportation. After decades on the move, black people could deepen their roots on the land to which they had been exiled. Movement—or at least forced movement—was no longer the defining feature of African American life. In 1860, some 90 percent of the black population resided in the slave states. That figure did not change significantly over the course of the next four decades. At the beginning of the twentieth century, nine out of ten African Americans still lived in the South and fully three-quarters of these in the Southern countryside.55 Once again, place emerged as the dominant force shaping African American society.