The Making of African America

by Ira Berlin

  54 Carter to Robert Jones, Oct. 10, 1727 [misdated 1717], Oct. 24, 1729, quoted in Lorena Walsh, “A ‘Place in Time’ Regained: A Fuller History of Colonial Chesapeake Slavery through Group Biography” in Larry E. Hudson, Jr., ed., Working Toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South (Rochester NY, 1994), 14; Lorena S. Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: A History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville VA, 1997), 34.

  55 Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York, 1972), chap. 2; Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 317—35; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 444-45.

  56 Quoted in Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 62 and in Billy Smith and Richard Wojtowicz, comps., Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728—1790 (Philadelphia, 1989), 56—57. Also Hugh Jones, The Present State of Virginia, Richard Morton, ed. (Chapel Hill NC, [1774] 1956), 75—76.

  57 Lathan A. Windley, comp., Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790, 4 vols. (Westport CT, 1983), 3: 468; W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series, 10 vols. (Charlottesville VA, 1983—1985), 7: 65—66; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 444—51. Over time members of various African ethnic or nations groups cooperated: see ibid., 448.

  58 Walsh, “The Differential Cultural Impact.” Also see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 20—21, 524—30.

  59 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 560—80; Philip D. Morgan and Michael L. Nicholls, “Slaves in Piedmont Virginia, 1720-1790,” William and Mary Quarterly 46 (1989), 211—289; see also Charleston South Carolina and American General Gazette, Aug. 21, 1776; Charleston City Gazette, Aug. 17, 1790, Aug 21, 1776.

  60 Steven Deyle makes the case that slave sales increased in frequency after the Revolution: Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York, 2005), 54. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the number of runaway advertisements that mention a previous owner is less than 10 percent; this increased to 28 percent in the 1790s.

  61 Mullin, Flight and Rebellion, 87—88, 124—29; Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 339—41; Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750—1925 (New York, 1976), 347; Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill NC, 1996), 357- 61; Sarah S. Hughes, “Slaves for Hire: The Allocations of Black Labor in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1782 to 1800,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (1978), 260—86; Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge MA, 2004).

  62 John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607— 1789 (Chapel Hill NC, 1985), 123—33; Carville Earle and Ronald Hoffman, “Staple Crops and Urban Development in the Eighteenth Century,” Perspectives in American History 10 (1976), 7-78; Walsh, “Slaves and Tobacco in the Chesapeake,” 179—186; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 523.

  63 Jean Butenhoff Lee, “The Problem of Slave Community in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly 43 (1986), 357; quoted in Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, chap. 9, quoted on 532 and also see 539—40. On the rootedness of eighteenth-century slaves, see Morgan, ibid., 519-30; Edwin Morris Betts, ed., Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book (Princeton NJ, 1953), 19.

  64 Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, chap. 9, and The Beginnings of the Afro-American Family, 177—96; Gutman, Black Family, 75—78; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, chap. 9.

  65 Quoted in South-Carolina Gazette (Timothy) 1, Feb. 7, 1759 in Windley, comp., Runaway Slave Advertisements, 3: 170.

  66 Phillips P. Moulton, ed., Journal and Major Essays ofJohnWoolman (New York, 1971), 65; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 544-46; Gutman, Black Family, esp. chaps. 2—6; Mary Beth Norton, Herbert G. Gutman, and Ira Berlin, “The Afro-American Family in the Age of Revolution” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of Revolution (Charlottesville VA, 1983), 181; Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (New York, 2004), chap. 13.

  67 Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville VA, 1993), chaps. 5—7, 10; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 246—49, 376, 574—79 601—9; Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca NY, 1998), chaps. 1—2; L. Baumgarten, “‘Clothes for the People’: Slave Clothing in Early Virginia,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 14 (1998), 26—70; Barbara J. Heath, “Buttons, Beads, Buckles:Contextualizing Adornment Within the Boundaries of Slavery” in Maria Franklin and Garrett Fesler, eds., Historical Archeology, Identity Formation, and the Interpretation of Ethnicity (Williamsburg VA, 1999), 47—71.

  68 Quoted in John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, 2 vols. (London, 1708), 2: 121—22; Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (Rutherford NJ, 1967), 146; Dana J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana IL, 1977), 84; quoted in Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball (Lewistown PA, 1837), 23; Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill NC, 1998), 189—91. Gomez notes that such antagonism existed into the nineteenth and perhaps into the twentieth century (at least in the minds of some scholars).

  69 Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, chaps. 8—9; quoted in Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 191.

  70 Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, chaps. 2—3; Epstein with Rosita M. Sands, “Secular Folk Music” in Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby, eds., African American Music: An Introduction (New York, 2006), 35—50; Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York, 1971), chaps. 2—3; quoted in Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston, 2005), 8.

  71 S. Max Edelson, “Affiliation without Affinity: Skilled Slaves in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina” in Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-Shute, and Randy J. Sparks, eds., Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of South Carolina’s Plantation Society (Columbia SC, 2001), 221-59; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 131, 136, 212—15, 225—36, 246, 545—46; Mullin, Flight and Rebellion, chap. 3; Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730—1815 (Chapel Hill NC, 1993), 270—74.

  72 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 425; Sylvia R. Frey, “‘The Year of Jubilee is Come’: Black Christianity in the Plantation South in Post Revolution America” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Religion in a Revolutionary Age (Charlottesville VA, 1994), 94—124 and Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton NJ, 1991), chap. 8; Russell E. Rickey, “From Quarterly to Camp Meeting: A Reconsideration of Early American Methodism,” MethodistHistory 23 (1985), 199—213, especially 205—6; Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997), 217—18.

  73 Quoted in Roger Bruns, ed., Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America, 1688—1788 (New York, 1977), 428; Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, 2 vols.(New York, 1951), I: 8-9.

  74 Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago, 1967), chaps. 5—8; Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York, 1991); Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770—1810 (Athens GA, 1991); Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery:African Americans in New York City, 1626—1863 (Chicago, 2003), chap. 2.

  75 Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974), chap.I, esp., 46—47.

  76 Berlin, Slaves Without Master
s, 51—53; Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720—1840(Cambridge MA, 1988), 79-88, 99; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 451—52; Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Explicatus (New York, 1984), 100.

  77 Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, chap. 3.

  78 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, chaps. 4—6; Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago, 2000); Benjamin Quarles, “The Revolutionary War as a Black Declaration of Independence,” in Berlin and Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, 283—305.

  79 For the “Union Association,” see William H. Robinson, ed., The Proceedings of the Free, African Union Society and the African Benevolent Newport, Rhode Island, 1780—1824 (Providence RI, 1976), x-xi. Later, when many of the blacks migrated to Sierra Leone, partisan divisions were between the two largest religious factions, Methodists and Baptists. James W. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783—1870 (New York, 1976), 180.

  80 Robinson, ed., Proceedings of the Free, African Union, x—xi; White, Somewhat More Independent, 166—71; Nash, Forging Freedom, 75—76. One of the first matters of business of Philadelphia’s Free African Society, founded in 1787, was to establish “a regular mode of procedure with respect to ... marriages.” William Douglass, Annals of the First African Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1862), 34—42.

  81 Allen, A Collection of Spiritual Songs quoted in Dorothy Porter, ed., Early Negro Writing, 1760—1837(Boston, 1971), 571; Southern, Music of Black Americans, 84—93; Southern, ed., Readings in Black American Music (New York, 1971), 52—61; “Hymnals of the Black Church,” Journal of Interdenominational Theological Seminary 14 (1987). For the dispute over the social purposes of Allen’s Hymnal, see Kenneth L. Waters, Sr., “Liturgy, Spirituality, and Polemic in the Hymnody of Richard Allen,” The North Star 2 (1999).

  82 John F. Watson, “Methodist Error” in Southern, ed., Readings in Black American Music, 2nd. ed. (New York, 1983), 62—64; Mellonee V. Burnim, “Religious Music” in Burnim and Maultsby, eds., African American Music, 51—61.

  83 Frey, Water from the Rock, chap. 6; Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston, 2006); Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, Slaves, and the American Revolution (New York, 1907); Walker, Black Loyalists, chap. 1, esp. p. 12; Ellen G. Wilson, The Loyal Black (New York, 1976), chaps. 2—3; Graham R. Hodges, ed., The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile after the American Revolution (New York, 1996); Walker, The Black Loyalists; The Book of Negroes.

  84 John W. Davis, “George Liele and Andrew Bryan, Pioneer Negro Preachers,” Journal of Negro History 3 (1918), 119—27; Pybus, Epic Journeys; Sidney Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of theAmerican Revolution (Washington, DC, 1973); James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787—2005 (New York, 2006), 29—30.

  85 James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New York, 2007); Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill NC, 1998).

  86 Walker, The Black Loyalists, chap. 9, especially 207.

  87 Quoted in Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (London, 1962), 308. Sierra Leone, as its leading historian notes, was shaped early by the “social distinctions and peculiarities brought from North America.” Also see Walker, The Black Loyalists, chap. 9, esp. 195.

  88 Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People, 1: 7—8.

  89 Quoted in Walker, Black Loyalists, 339, 204—5.

  90 Walker, Black Loyalists, esp. 251—252.

  91 James Forten, Letters from a Man of Colour, on a late Bill before the Senate of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1813), 13.

  Chapter Three: The Passage to the Interior

  1 Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison WI, 1996); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge MA, 1999); Robert H. Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transportation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge LA, 2003); Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York, 2005); Edward E. Baptist, “‘Stol and Fitched Here’: Enslaved Migration, Ex-Slave Narratives, and Vernacular History” in Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp, eds., New Studies in the History of American Slavery (Athens GA, 2006), 243-74 guide the discussion of the second great migration.

  2 Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, chap. 1; Tadman, “The Interregional Slave Trade in the History and Myth-Making of the U.S. South” in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven CT, 2004), 123; Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce, 8; also see Edward E. Baptist, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier before the Civil War (Chapel Hill NC, 2002), 65—66.

  3 On Georgia men, see Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back, chap. 2 and especially p. 63; Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce, 73.

  4 Deyle, Carry Me Back, 90; Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce, 62—63, 73—74, 99—100, 154—60; Carol Wilson, Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780—1865 (Lexington KY, 1994), chap. 1; Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom By Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York, 1991), 195—99.

  5 Like the number of slaves who crossed the Atlantic in the first Middle Passage, the number of slaves transported to the Southern interior is also contested. Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross (Boston, 1974), 47, estimate it at 835,000 between 1790 and 1860. Herbert G. Gutman and Richard Sutch, “The Slave Family: Protected Agent of Capitalist Masters or Victim of the Slave Trade?” in Paul A. David et al., eds., Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York, 1976), 99, put the total at “more than a million”; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, chap. 2 and 237—47, estimates that interregional movement averaged some 200,000 slaves each decade between 1820 and 1860 and that the total for the period between 1790 and 1820 was at least 200,000. Also see Peter McClelland and Richard Zeckhauser, Demographic Dimensions of the New Republic: American Interregional Migration, Vital Statistics and Manumissions, 1800—1860 (New York, 1982), 159—64.

  6 Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 12; Richard H. Steckel, “The African American Population of the United States” in Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, eds., A Population History of North America (Cambridge UK, 2000), 437—53.

  7 Deyle, Carry Me Back, 144—45, 166—73; Thomas D. Russell, “Sale Day in Antebellum South Carolina: Slavery, Law, Economy, and Court-Supervised Sales,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 1993; Russell, “A New Image of the Slave Auction: An Empirical Look at the Role of Law in Slave Sales and a Conceptual Reevaluation of Slave Property,” Cardozo Law Review 18 (1996), 493—523.

  8 Wilma A. Dunaway, The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Cambridge UK, 2003), 20, 42—45; quoted in Baltimore American, Feb. 21, 1860; Max L. Grivno, “‘There Slavery Cannot Dwell’: Agriculture and Labor in Northern Maryland, 1790—1860,” unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Maryland, 2007; T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (Lexington KY, 1997), chaps. 1,4.

  9 Quoted in Nicholas B. Wainwright, ed., A Philadelphia Perspective: The Diary of Sidney George Fisher Covering the Years 1834—1871 (Philadelphia, 1967), 188—89; George P. Rawick, comp., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 41 vols. (Westport CT, 1972—79) ser. 1, vol. 6, 72; Gudmestad, Troublesome Commerce, 44—45. See slaves sold for impertinence and sauciness. Deyle, Carry Me Back, 469; Noreen T. Jones, Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina (Middleton CT, 1
990), 3, 174—75.

  10 Deyle, Carry Me Back, 100—108.

  11 Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce, 20—21.

  12 Baptist, Creating an Old South, 69—70; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 25—31; McClelland and Zeckhauser, Demographic Dimensions, 8; Jonathan P. B. Pritchett and Herman Freudenberger, “A Peculiar Sample: The Selection of Slaves for the New Orleans Market,” Journal of Economic History 52 (1992), 110; Steven Miller, “Plantation Labor Organization and Slave Life” in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville VA, 1993), 157. Computed from the published U.S. census: Census for 1820 (Washington DC, 1821); Fifth Census... 1830 (Washington DC, 1832); Sixth Census ... 1840 (Washington DC, 1841); Seventh Census of the United States 1850 (Washington DC, 1853); Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington DC, 1862).

  13 Computed from the published U.S. census: Censusfor1820;Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York, 1996), 177—78; Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce, 10—11.

  14 David L. Lightner, “The Interstate Slave Trade in Antislavery Politics,” Civil War History 36 (1990), 119—36; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 180—84, 212—216. On slave breeding, see Richard Sutch, “The Breeding of Slaves for Sale and the Westward Expansion of Slavery, 1830-1860” in Stanley Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton NJ, 1975), 173-210; Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, “The Slave Breeding Thesis” in Fogel and Engerman, eds., Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery: Technical Papers, 2 vols. (New York, 1992), 2: 455-72.

  15 Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 25-31; McClelland and Zeckhauser, Demographic Dimensions, 8; Pritchett and Freudenberger, “A Peculiar Sample: The Selection of Slaves for the New Orleans Market,” 110; Miller, “Plantation Labor Organization and Slave Life,” 157. Computed from the published U.S. census; see note 12, above. On the sexual balance, see Baptist, Creating the Old South, 69-70. 16 Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 211-12; Tadman, “The Interregional Slave Trade” in Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle, 117-142; Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750—1925 (New York, 1976), 145-48; Cheryll Ann Cody, ”Sale and Separation: Four Crises for Enslaved Women on the Ball Plantation, 1764-1854” in Larry Hudson, Jr., Working Toward Freedom: Slave Society and the Domestic Economy of the American South (Rochester NY, 1994), 119-42.