by Herb Frazier
The African American experience in South Carolina, particularly in Charleston, is filled with contradictions. Surnames such as Drayton, Pinckney, and Middleton are the well-known Lowcountry names of slave-owning families. Today many well-educated and influential African Americans carry those names. Local people who know this history understand those linkages, but even the most astute observer may not know the real and sustained impact of the juxtaposition of slavery and freedom, liberty and human bondage, for our society today.
In Virginia as early as 1619, Captain John Smith described buying twenty “Negars” from the Dutch, after describing the first elections in the New World.2 This contradictory interconnection of black bondage and American freedom is deeply embedded in American history. It has pushed this nation into war against itself. It is a source, albeit usually unspoken, of our contemporary racial malaise. We still cannot fathom it—a murderer who makes a church the scene of his crime—and yet this is just one of many examples of how history shapes the complex story of events, such as the shooting at Emanuel.
The New World brand of slavery was unique in that for the first time in human history, bondage was based on race. In the classical world of the Greeks and Romans, masters and slaves were often of the same race. Later, in the medieval years, European slavery was practiced widely in the societies between Scandinavia and the Black Sea. The modern word slave results from the fact that so many Slavic people were enslaved by other Europeans in this premodern period.3 However, when Europeans settled the Western Hemisphere, they only enslaved people of color and Africans in particular. There were no European slaves in the New World. For reasons beyond the scope of this book, the racial and social differences between the enslaved and their masters were greatest in the United States, where, generally, people with even the slightest African ancestry were classified as black. Such arbitrary definitions led to the identification of slaves not as persons but as property, deprived of all human rights, and the development of a voluminous literature rationalizing the enslavement of Africans based on race. Such a system readily promoted the perception of Africans as inferior to Europeans, and in the United States, once emancipation occurred, something had to replace slavery as the means of regulating race relations. The old system was replaced with racial segregation. There is no counterpart to it in any other earlier period of enslavement. These are the factors that make ours a unique system of oppression with a deeply embedded legacy.
The Atlantic slave trade that began in the mid-fifteenth century was the mechanism for transporting masses of Africans to the New World to work in silver mines or on sugar plantations. Today people have no idea of its magnitude or that this was the largest forced migration in human history. Furthermore, and contrary to popular belief, before 1820, of that swell of people who crossed the Atlantic to the Americas, fully three-quarters were Africans.4 The Atlantic slave trade lasted for approximately four centuries and linked the human and commercial destinies of the New World to Europe and Africa, simultaneously enriching the former while devastating the latter.
The slave trade created the first global economy. Based on one model known as the triangular trade, consumer goods manufactured in Europe were transported to Africa and exchanged for people. The enslaved Africans were transported to the Caribbean, where they were exchanged for sugar, which was taken back to Europe. The process was repeated regularly, although with geographical variations.
Guns were among the most important commercial goods Europeans introduced to Africa in the course of the Atlantic slave trade. The new weapons ensured the trade would be fueled by warfare as African leaders and states competed with one another to gain access to guns. Warfare escalated, typically between traditional enemies, and prisoners were taken. Once captured, Africans were marched to the coast, where they were delivered to Europeans waiting at castles or forts that were sometimes referred to as “factories,” and were stripped naked and inspected. In the final step of their dehumanization while still on the African continent, people were branded like cattle with their owners’ marks and loaded onto oceangoing vessels.
Most Africans had never seen a ship, and now disoriented from their capture, they were sold into the hands of strange-sounding and harsh-looking Europeans. Imprisoned in the dark bowels of the vessel, captives faced an unknown future as they experienced a horrifying Atlantic crossing known as the Middle Passage. Enslaved people were chained and jammed together in confined spaces and forced to lie in excrement, blood, and other bodily fluids. Without adequate food, water, and fresh air, sickness was widespread, and the atmosphere quickly became putrid and stultifying. Sometimes women were separated and allowed time outside the darkness of the ship’s hold, but this only made them vulnerable to their captors’ sexual abuse. Crossing the Atlantic might be completed in as few as three weeks, but on average the Middle Passage took about two months.
Under these circumstances large numbers died before they ever reached their destination. Some captives found their confinement so intolerable that they jumped overboard while others lived to plot shipboard rebellions. Although these insurrections were occasionally successful, they generally only resulted in the further loss of African life. It is estimated that 12 to 13 percent of those who embarked did not survive, with most having succumbed to disease.5 That said, during the period of transatlantic slavery, approximately eleven million Africans landed somewhere in the New World. For those who managed to live, their arrival to the New World simply started a new phase in their oppression as they were forced to adjust to lifetimes of harsh labor in new cultural and physical environments.
The English did not invent slavery. They inherited the practice from the Portuguese and the Spanish, who had been at it for centuries. Labor was scarce in the New World because the European settlements developed plantation-based economies to supply the world with lucrative crops such as sugar. Sugar was probably the New World’s most complex and labor-intensive crop because its production involved not only planting and harvesting but industrial processing. Later, other products, such as tobacco and cotton, cultivated on the North American mainland, while less taxing than sugar, further contributed to the labor demands of the New World. In South Carolina—and particularly in the coastal lowlands north and south of Charleston—rice was the crop that made plantation owners wealthy. That wealth was accumulated at a huge cost of African life, and ultimately demand for labor guided increasing numbers of ships to the African continent.
Initially, indigenous Native American populations were sources of labor, but aspects of their backgrounds made them unsuitable as plantation workers. Africans were less vulnerable to European diseases and had well-developed agricultural traditions. Once enslaved in the New World, Africans were especially easy to control because they were now in a strange landscape where their racial differences made them readily identifiable should they flee.
Virginia was founded in 1607, and as early as 1616, Jamestown settler John Rolfe had developed a mild form of tobacco that suited European tastes; tobacco production and export soon sustained the colony and later other colonies, such as Maryland. Tobacco was more labor-intensive than the crops that Europeans traditionally cultivated. Jamestown soon became a boomtown not unlike those that later developed during the 1848–1855 California gold rush. In the mad pursuit of tobacco, the demand for labor was intense. The first Africans arrived in the Chesapeake colony, where slavery became law in the late 1600s. Before then slavery was practiced as a social custom in Virginia and Maryland.6
The perception the English held of Africans was based on color, religion, sexuality, and gender. The complexion of Africans was called black; this term signified something dirty, foul, or polluted. Conversely, Europeans were white to convey purity, cleanliness, wholesomeness, and morality. That differences in skin color made a great impression on the English should not be surprising given their location in the North Atlantic, which placed them farther away from darker people than most other Europeans.7 Secondly, in their encounters with Af
ricans, the English and other Europeans did not find the practice of anything they considered a legitimate religion. Sub-Saharan Africans were generally preliterate, and most didn’t possess books. They didn’t have the equivalent of European churches; instead, they worshiped gods and spirits found in the natural world. Christians of that time considered Muslims heathens even though they shared much with Christianity: Muslims built mosques and had written sacred texts, which even included characters from the Bible. Many sub-Saharan Africans practiced Islam but most did not, so when the English encountered Africans, they concluded they lacked religion entirely, and this suggested a total absence of civilization.8
Gender and sexuality also influenced the European perception of African life. Since they lived in the tropics, Africans had different standards of clothing compared to the English; because their bodies were less than fully covered, Europeans concluded they lacked morals and were promiscuous and without shame. The practice of polygamy was another source of degradation, suggesting to observers that only men with animalistic sexual appetites needed to have multiple wives; women in such relationships were deemed similarly lecherous.9 According to some observers, such as the early eighteenth-century traveler Pieter de Marees, African women could give birth relatively painlessly and recover very quickly just like animals in the field. The African women were not only different, but in the European mind they were inferior, savage, and thus so degraded they could legitimately be enslaved.10 If these conclusions could be reached about women, it stood to reason they applied even more to the men.
These cultural judgments about Africans contributed mightily to the status they would occupy in the Chesapeake. This is readily observed in a 1640 Virginia judicial decision. In this case three indentured servants, two white and one black, ran away together and were apprehended and punished. The two whites had four years added to their indentures, but the black man was condemned to serve his owners for the rest of his life. To discourage servants (mainly white) from absconding with slaves, the Virginians enacted an additional law in 1661. It required runaway servants apprehended in the company of fugitive slaves to make up the time that the slaves were absent.11
The social and legal distance between blacks and whites increased and divided this society along racial lines. Over time these attitudes have persisted, shaping the perception of people of African descent in modern-day America—and may have been among the racial factors that distorted Dylann Roof’s perception of black people in the United States and of the church members at Emanuel.
The decade of the 1660s also witnessed the increased sophistication of the Virginia colonists in the legal operation of the slave system. During this period, they eliminated legal loopholes and expanded the owners’ authority over their chattel. For example, one of the justifications for the enslavement of Africans was that they were religious heathens. Debate eventually arose over whether the baptized children of slaves were entitled to their freedom. The matter was laid to rest with the Virginia Act of 1667, which stated that conversion did not alter the status of slavery or freedom in such cases.12
Virginia’s slave population grew significantly in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and masters wanted to ensure they had all the necessary power to control the expanding black labor force. To get a slave to obey the rules or to work hard, that slave had to be made to fear for his or her life. However, the slave owners had to be protected from legal liability, should—in the course of punishing “misbehavior”—they kill a slave. Legal statutes generally provided this protection to the master class, and in Virginia it was the Act of 1669 that served this purpose. The title of that law is particularly revealing: “An act about the casual killing of slaves.”13 Casual and killing would not usually be used together when discussing human beings, except if a certain class of beings was fundamentally considered to be property. Such language shows how little in the relative sense black lives mattered at this time.14 The chances that taking a black life would lead to retribution were slim. The attitudes associated with the system of slavery didn’t end with emancipation in 1863 but were passed on to subsequent generations. Was Dylann Roof influenced in this way and from these sources?
A series of statutes enacted during the years 1670–1705 further divided society along racial lines. The language used in the statutes is also revealing because frequently the term Christian was used synonymously with white; religious conversion was not sufficient to overcome the burden of blackness in this society. Slaves were prohibited from attempting to strike a white person. A 1691 Act prohibited miscegenation between singles or married people and imposed banishment on the white person who married a black, mulatto, or Indian. By this time the prevailing view was that freed slaves had no legitimate place in this society.
As the seventeenth century ended and the Chesapeake region was becoming a slave society, another settlement to the south was just beginning. This was the Carolina Colony, and its significance for black life would be immediate and profound. In contrast to the Chesapeake region, where African slavery was not part of the initial vision, in Carolina the institution was embedded in its very conception. In the earliest planning phase, even before the first settlers arrived, the decision was made to rely on slave labor. This was in part because several of Carolina’s founders had plantations or investments in Barbados, the slave-reliant sugar-producing island in the English Caribbean, founded half a century earlier. Since Carolina was founded much later than other slave-based English colonies, it was able to anticipate and surmount some of the potential problems associated with slave labor. The initial organizing principles for the settlement were contained in its 1669 Fundamental Constitution, and the document anticipated the matter of slave conversion to Christianity, declaring that afterward the enslaved person remained in the “same State and Condition as he was in before.” It was a rather peculiar document that points out another of those interesting and amazing contradictions in Carolina’s racial history. The Fundamental Constitution granted religious liberty to slaves but simultaneously confirmed the masters’ “absolute power and authority over Negro Slaves, of what opinion or Religion soever.”15 Once again liberty and slavery joined together.
Those first years of settlement were characterized by experimentation to place the colony on a firm economic footing. By the last two decades of the seventeenth century, Carolinians began making extensive efforts to produce rice. Rice cultivation proved successful because of the colonists’ ability to harness African technological know-how. The English lacked any experience with a tropical crop like rice, but Africans from certain parts of the continent were thoroughly familiar with every aspect of its planting, harvesting, and consumption. Rice production became the major economic enterprise, accounting for more than half the value of South Carolina’s total exports in 1720; it completely transformed every aspect of colonial life in the colony.16 Rice was probably the most labor-intensive crop in the mainland colonies and required a large labor force, which came originally from other Caribbean sources but was increasingly obtained directly from Africa.
We know that black people were present in the very first year of Carolina’s settlement. One of the earliest was a slave named Emanuel who was owned by a carpenter and may have helped construct the earliest buildings in Charleston. By 1740, Africans comprised 66 percent of the slave population in Carolina. Rice planters were more selective than most slave owners when constructing a labor force, and they preferred to purchase people already familiar with rice culture when possible. About 40 percent of all the Africans entering the British mainland colonies passed through the port of Charleston in the eighteenth century. Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is situated only a few blocks away from Gadsden’s Wharf, which was the most significant of the city’s several historic wharfs where so many Rice Coast Africans and others disembarked.17
Based on the growth of labor demands, as early as 1708 Carolina developed its most distinctive demographic characteristic: it was the only one of the mainl
and English colonies with a majority black population. At first it was only a slight majority, but it rose to two-thirds by the eve of the American Revolution.18 As South Carolina’s black labor force grew and reduced whites to minority status, their fears rose accordingly, especially given their perception of African people. Carolina’s first comprehensive slave code, passed in 1712, confirms this. After its preamble explains why slavery was an absolute necessity, it issued a stern warning about the dangerous presence of African people. The Negroes, it said, “are of barbarous, wild, savage natures,” wholly unfit to be governed under the enlightened law of the province. Therefore special laws were required “for the good regulating and ordering of them, as may restrain the disorders, rapines and inhumanity, to which they are naturally prone and inclined; and may also tend to the safety and security of the people of this Province and their estates.” Under these circumstances and to maintain order, it was necessary for all whites to cooperate and, if necessary, use violence to enforce the law. The 1712 Act required whites who apprehended slaves without passes to administer “moderate whipping” or face a fine. Furthermore, if a slave refused to show a pass or attempted to run away under questioning, the law empowered any white person to “beat, maim or assault” the slave; if the person could not readily be taken alive, a white citizen could kill the recalcitrant.19
