The Making of African America

by Ira Berlin

  3 For some historians of Africa even these national affiliations like Igbo were a product of contact with Europeans. Elizabeth Isichei, A History of the Igbo People (New York, 1976).

  4 Rolfe quoted in Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550—1812 (Chapel Hill NC, 1968), 73; also see John Thornton, “The African Experience of the ‘20. and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia in 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly 55 (1998), 421—34. For the struggle over what black people were called and what they called themselves, see Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill NC, 2002), chap. 3, and more generally Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York, 2002).

  5 Quoted in Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill NC, 1998), 67, n. 55.

  6 Miller, “Central Africa in the Era of the Slave Trade” in Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations, 46—48; Sweet, Recreating Africa, 20-22.

  7 Alexander X. Byrd, “Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants Across the 18th Century World of Olaudah Equiano,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Duke University, 2001; Byrd, “Eboe, Country, Nation, and Gustavus Vassa’s ‘Interesting Narrative,’ ” William and Mary Quarterly 63 (2006), 123—148; David Northrup, “Igbo and Myth Igbo: Culture and Ethnicity in the Atlantic World: 1600—1850,” Slavery and Abolition 21 (2000), 1—20; Kristin Mann, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture,” Slavery and Abolition 22 (2001), 3—21.

  8 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge MA, 1982), 53—54: John Thornton, African and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World: 1400—1800 (Cambridge MA, 1998), 13; Kopytoff and Miers, “African ‘Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality” in Kopytoff and Miers, eds., Slavery in Africa, 3—69; Claire Robertson and Martin A. Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison WI, 1977).

  9 Kopytoff and Miers, “African ‘Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality” in Kopytoff and Miers, eds., Slavery in Africa, 26-27; Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 136; Manning, Slavery and African Life, 28, 46—47, 118, 160.

  10 The distinction between societies with slaves and slave societies is elaborated in Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge MA, 1998), 9-13.

  11 A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441—1555 (Cambridge UK, 1982), 60; Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York, 1986), 13.

  12 Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge UK, 1998), chaps. 1—3; B. W. Higman, “The Sugar Revolution,” Economic History Review 53 (2000), 213-36; Alberto Vieira, “Sugar Islands: The Sugar Economy of Madeira and the Canaries, 1450—1650” in Stuart Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450—1680 (Chapel Hill NC, 2004), 42—84.

  13 Curtin, Plantation Complex, chaps. 4—6; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492—1800 (London, 1997), chaps. 3—10; quoted in Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indians Advocate (London, 1680), 101.

  14 Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2007), chap. 3; quoted in William Bosman, New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, 1705: Divided into the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts (London, 1750), 364; Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 61.

  15 Joseph Miller, ”Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Statistic Evidence on Causality,“Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1981), 385-424 and Miller, African Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730—1830(Madison WI, 1988), 384-85; Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 63—64; Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 155—57; quoted in Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade, 19 and Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 156—157. Death became a central experience of the black people in the New World; see Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge MA, 2007).

  16 Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, chap. 2, esp. 36—43; A. W. Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts on West Africa (Palo Alto CA, 1964); Falconbridge, Account of the Slave Trade, 51—52.

  17 Sylviane A. Diouf, ed., Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (Athens OH, 2003); Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, chap. 2, especially 43—57; Eric Robert Taylor, If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Baton Rouge LA, 2006). For an excellent discussion of insurrections, see Colin Palmer, ”The Slave Trade, African Slavers and the Demography of the Caribbean to 1750” in Franklin W. Knight, ed., General History of the Caribbean, 6 vols. (London, 1997), 3: 29—35.

  18 W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge MA, 1997), 50—51; Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton NJ, 1978), 58—59; Ty M. Reese, “The Drudgery of the Slave Trade: Labor at the Cape Coast Castle, 1750—1790” in Peter A. Coclanis, ed., The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel (Columbia SC, 2005), 282—83; Stephanie E. Smallwood, “African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of Power in the Early Modern Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 64 (2007), 679—716; Rediker, Slave Ship, 152, 190—91, 194, 268—67. For Denmark Vesey’s duty on his owner’s slave ship, see Douglas R. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Lanham MD, 2004), 13.

  19 Rediker, Slave Ship, esp. chaps. 5—8; Klein, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 159.

  20 Klein, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, chap. 6; Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, “Long-Term Trends in African Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997), 36—48; Herbert S. Klein, Stanley L. Engerman, Robin Haines, and Ralph Shlomowitz, “Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (2001), 93—117; Kenneth F. Kiple and Brian T. Higgins, “Mortality Caused by Dehydration during the Middle Passage” in Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Durham NC 1992), 321-37.

  21 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (London, 1789), reprinted in Vincent Carretta, ed., The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (New York, 1995), 59; William D. Piersen, “White Cannibals, Black Martyrs: Fear, Depression, and Religious Faith as Causes of Suicide Among New Slaves,” Journal of Negro History 62 (1977), 147—51; Rediker, Slave Ship, 108, 117, 266. See Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 136—144.

  22 Rediker, Slave Ship, 9—10, 260, 306—7; Smallwood, Saltwater Slaves, chaps. 4—6; Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. (Washington DC, 1930), 1: 442 (quoted), 438; 2, 352, 359, 557, 634; William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Ports of Guinea and the Slave Trade (London, 1734), 163. By the same token, the slave ship was also the place where black people distinguished themselves from whites, as they understood their captors as the enemy. The watchword of ship rebellions was “Kill the whites.” Quoted in David Eltis, Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge UK, 2000), 226—27.

  23 Quoted in Bosman, New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea, 394; Snelgrave, A New Account, 163; John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brazil and the West Indies in His Majesty’s Ships, The ‘Swallow’ and ‘Weymouth’ (London, 1735), 41; Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (London, 1799), 353-54.

  24 Rediker, Slave Ship, 17—19, 120-21, 212—13, 289-91; quoted in John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge LA, 1977), 227.

  25 Colin A. Palmer, “The Middle Passage” in Captive
Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the Americas (Newport News VA, 2002), 54; Klein and Engerman, “Long-Term Trends in African Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” 36—48; Klein, Engerman, Haines, and Shlomowitz, “ransoceanic Mortality,” 93—117. Estimates 40 percent of the captives died in crossing the Atlantic during the sixteenth century, 15 percent during the seventeenth century, and 5 to 10 percent in later years. Many more died while waiting for transit and in the journey across Africa; the total number who were enslaved may have been as high as twenty million.

  26 Klein, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 94—95, 130—160; Genevieve Fabre, “The Slave Ship Dance” in Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen, eds., Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (New York, 1999); Palmer, “The Middle Passage,” 60—65; quoted in Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 56.

  27 Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade, 1: 289—90, 2: 460; Piersen, “White Cannibals, Black Martyrs,” 155; J. M. Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600—1815 (Cambridge UK, 1990), 241; Rediker, Slave Ship, 17—19, 120—21; 212-14, 289-91.

  28 James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York, 1981), 296; Rediker, Slave Ship, 128, 142—146, 151—52, 179, 203—4, 215-16, 241-44, 265-66; quoted in Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade, 1:463.

  29 Smallwood, “African Guardians,” 679—716; Rediker, Slave Ship, 229, 349; Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 226—29; Klein, African Slavery in Latin American, 76—77; also see castle slaves in Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven, Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585—1817 (Boston, 2003), 71—73; Miller, African Way of Death, 409—10.

  30 Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade, 2: 357, 486; Rediker, Slave Ship, 149—50; Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell, eds., The Journal of a Slave Trader (John Newton), 1750—1754 (London, 1962), 72.

  31 Quoted in Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 229—30; Rediker, Slave Ship, 271—76, 297—98; Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 103—9, quoted on 103.

  32 Quoted in Rediker, Slave Ship, 101, 270—276; Snelgrave, A New Account, 49.

  33 Ibid.

  34 Taylor, If We Must Die; Rediker, Slave Ship, 259-62, 279-81; David Richardson, “Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (2001), 69—92; Klein, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 159; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca NY, 1982), 24.

  35 Quoted in Rediker, Slave Ship, 282, 284.

  36 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge MA, 1998), pt. 1; Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585—1660 (Cambridge UK, 2007).

  37 Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, pt. 2.

  38 Alan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake 1680—1800 (Chapel Hill NC, 1986), 37—42, 65, 319—20; Kulikoff, “A ‘Prolifick’ People: Black Population Growth in the Chesapeake Colonies, 1700—1790,” Southern Studies 16 (1977), 391—96, 403—5; and Kulikoff, “The Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater Maryland and Virginia, 1700 to 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (1978), 229—31; Russell R. Menard, ”The Maryland Slave Population, 1658 to 1730: A Demographic Profile of Blacks in Four Counties, William and Mary Quarterly 32 (1975), 30—32.

  39 Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 37-42, 65, 319—24; Kulikoff, “A ‘Prolifick’ People,” 391—96, 403—5; Kulikoff, “Origins of Afro-American,” 229—31; Menard, “From Servants to Slaves,” Southern Studies 16 (1977), 366—69; Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650—1750(New York, 1984), 72; quoted in Marion Tinling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684—1776, 2 vols. (Charlottesville VA, 1977), 2: 487.

  40 Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 336—39, chap. 9, esp. 359—80; Kulikoff, “The Beginnings of the Afro-American Family in Maryland” in Aubrey C. Land et al., eds., Law, Society, and Politics in Early Maryland (Baltimore MD, 1977), 177—96; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 82.

  41 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 58; Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), xiv.

  42 Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670—1920 (New York, 1988), 64—65, 80—81; Peter H. Wood, “‘More Like a Negro Country’: Demographic Patterns in Colonial South Carolina, 1700—1740” in Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton NJ, 1975), 131—45; Wood, Black Majority, 13—91; Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge LA, 1981); Russell R. Menard, “Slave Demography in the Lowcountry, 1670—1740: From Frontier Society to Plantation,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 96 (1995), 291—302; Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730—1775 (Athens GA, 1984), 91—98; James A. McMillan, The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783—1810 (Columbia SC, 2004).

  43 Jennifer L. Morgan, “Slavery and the Slave Trade” in Nancy A. Hewitt, ed., A Companion to American Women’s History (Oxford UK, 2002), 20—24; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 68—75, quoted on 71; Rediker, The Slave Ship, 101; David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, “Was the Slave Trade Dominated by Men?” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23(1992), 237-57.

  44 David Eltis, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Davis Richardson, “Slave-Trading Ports: Toward an Atlantic Wide Perspective, 1676—1821” in Robin Law and Silke Stickrodt, eds., Ports of the Slave Trade (Bights of Benin and Biafra). Papers from the Centre for Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, June 1998 (Stirling UK, 1999), 12—34; David Eltis, “Free and Coerced Migration from the Old World to the New” in Eltis, ed., Coerced and Free Migration (Palo Alto CA, 2002), 49—50; Rediker, Slave Ship, chap. 3; Horn and Morgan, “Settlers and Slaves,” 38-39; David Northrup, Trade without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in SouthEastern Nigeria (Oxford UK, 1978), 65—80; James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700—1860 (Cambridge UK, 1993); Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge UK, 1998); Miller, African Way of Death; Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave, 12.

  45 Diouf, ed., Fighting the Slave Trade; Taylor, If We Must Die. The high number of shipboard insurrections by Africans taken from the Senegambia coast may have led slave traders to look elsewhere for slaves, despite the proximity of Senegambia to Europe.

  46 Littlefield, Rice and Slaves, 8-11; Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 60, 243—44, n. 44; W. Robert Higgins, “Charleston Terminus and Entrepot of the Colonial Slave Trade” in Martin L. Kilson and Robert Rotberg, eds., The African Diaspora: Interpretative Essays (Cambridge MA, 1976), 118—27; Philip Hamer et al., eds., Papers of Henry Laurens, 16 vols. (Columbia SC, 1968—2003), 1: 275, 294—95 (quoted), 331; 2: 179—82, 186, 357, 400—2, 423, 437; 4: 192—93.

  47 The case for the Igbo preeminence in the Chesapeake region is made most vigorously by Douglas B. Chambers, “‘He is an African But Speaks Plain’: Historical Creolization in Eighteenth-Century Virginia” in Alusine Jalloh and Stephen Maizlish, eds., Africa and the African Diaspora (College Station TX, 1996), 100—33 and “‘My Own Nation’: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997), 73—97. Also Lorena S. Walsh, “The Differential Cultural Impact of Free and Coerced Migration to Colonial America” in David Eltis, ed., Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives (Palo Alto CA, 2002), 129—35; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill NC, 2005). Even if the Igbos dominated the region, there remains a question of exactly who the Igbos were. David Northrup points to the complex social divisions within Igbo culture in “Igbo and the Igbo Myth,” 1�
�20. For the collapse of African nationality into the term “New Negro,” see Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736—1831 (Urbana IL, 1992), 3.

  48 Linda M. Heywood, “Introduction” in Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, 12; Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundations of the Americans, 1585—1660, chaps. 2—5; Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicity in the Americas.

  49 Philip D. Morgan, “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997), 122—45; Morgan, “Trends in the Study of Early American Slavery of Potential Interest to Archaeologists” presented at the Digital Archaeological Archive of Chesapeake’s Slavery Steering Committee Workshop, International Center for Jefferson Studies, Charlottesville VA, Oct. 6, 2000; Rediker, Slave Ship, 212—13; Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 155—56.

  50 Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 90—93, 104, 122—24; quoted in Rediker, Slave Ship, 279.

  51 Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 65—66 and chap. 3; Klein, Transatlantic Slave Trade, 90—91. According to one leading student of the slave trade, “there is no recorded instance of a slave vessel sailing direct from Africa to a port on the North American mainland.” David Eltis, “The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1644—1867: An Assessment,” Civil War History 54 (2008), 354.

  52 Quoted in David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, Away, I’m Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (Richmond VA, 1993), 60—68, quoted on 62.

  53 Charles Tilly, “Transplanted Networks” in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, ed., Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics (New York, 1990), 83—84; Douglass Massey et al., “Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal,” Population and Development Review 19 (1993), 448—62.