The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  THE REPORTS ESTEBAN AND HIS COMPANIONS PROVIDED regarding the lack of wealth found among those northern tribes did nothing to dampen enthusiasm among the Spanish for the Native Americans’ supposed storehouses of gold. In 1539, Spanish Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza purchased Esteban, after the other survivors manifested decidedly little interest in returning north to lead a search for the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola. As a slave, Esteban could not formally head the expedition—although in fact the effort depended entirely upon him—so Mendoza assigned Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza to lead it. But why would Esteban return to such desolate country? Spanish slavery offered him little, and among the northern Indians he was respected, even worshipped.

  By previous arrangement, Esteban set out ahead of the group, leaving crosses behind to mark the trail in New Mexico. He returned to his role as “Son of the Sun” and again gained an extraordinary following. As the Zuñi made preparations to appeal for rain in the windswept high desert, they noted the appearance of a black katsina, dressed in animal pelts and adorned with turquoise, bells, and feathers. The Zuñi considered a katsina to be a powerful rain spirit who expected reciprocity and stood for honor and respect for ancestors. Esteban had found his calling.

  A long train of other Native Americans from various tribes followed him, treating him as a great medicine man, and in turn he spread the word that he could heal them and establish peace. At various stages of his route, Esteban sent Native American runners back to Marcos de Niza with crosses of varying sizes to indicate the significance of his various discoveries. He also set up crosses along his route and instructed his followers to worship them. But at long last, Esteban’s luck ran out. He may have become too demanding, intervened too much in local rituals, been too taken with his own power, or simply not have heeded the warnings to leave that he received from Zuñi chiefs. Ultimately, they saw in him an unwanted harbinger of many more men just like him.12

  He remained in either Hawikuh or Kiakima in New Mexico, situated beneath a stone outcropping known as Corn Mountain that towers over several Zuñi villages, an area thought by the Spanish to be prosperous. The specifics of Esteban’s death are unknown; rumors circulated that the Zuñis murdered him or massacred him with many of his followers. Whatever the case, he was killed, a fact that the Spanish explorer Coronado confirmed the following year.

  For the Zuñi, Esteban’s story became translated into Chakwaina, a black spirit and iconic doll, who came to symbolize the unfortunate aspects of European impact on native life. For us, Esteban’s exploits, like those of his black compatriot, Juan Garrido—a slave and a free man—are emblematic of the complexity of the African presence in the New World, a complicated experience in evidence as early as the very first period of the European exploration and settlement of the lands that would become the United States. In a way, both men can be thought of as “founding fathers,” representatives of the experiences of millions of Africans who would become through forced migration, as both slaves and freed persons, a New World, transatlantic African people, the African Americans.

  _____________________________

  1 David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 25–27; Matthew Restall, “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America,” The Americas 57 (October 2000), 173, 176.

  2 Restall, “Black Conquistadors,” 179–81.

  3 James H. Sweet, “African Identity and Slave Resistance in the Portuguese Atlantic,” in The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624, ed. Peter Mancall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 228.

  4 Restall, “Black Conquistadors,” 171; Jane G. Landers, “Juan Garrido,” in vol. 3, African American National Biography, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 456–57.

  5 Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 11–12.

  6 Perhaps the fullest account is Robert Goodwin, Crossing the Continent, 1527–1540: The Story of the First African-American Explorer of the American South (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).

  7 A translation of Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative can be found at http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/one/cabeza.htm.

  8 Dedra McDonald Birzer, “Esteban,” African American National Biography, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3: 198.

  9 http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/one/cabeza.htm.

  10 Quoted in Goodwin, Crossing the Continent, 1527–1540, 235.

  11 Goodwin, Crossing the Continent, 1527–1540, 254.

  12 Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 10, 39.

  2

  THE WORLDS SLAVERY MADE 1526–1763

  MANY OTHER AFRICANS BESIDES GARRIDO AND ESTEBAN, BOTH FREE AND ENSLAVED, ASSISTED IN THE COLONIZATION OF NORTH AMERICA IN THE CENTURY OR SO BETWEEN THE LANDING OF COLUMBUS AND THE FOUNDING OF THE ENGLISH SETTLEMENT AT JAMESTOWN IN VIRGINIA IN 1607. And these black people played major, integral roles in an Atlantic world that saw a titanic clash of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English cultures with indigenous Native American cultures, out of which came the United States and all the other countries of the Western Hemisphere.

  The development of American history, especially during its earliest period, cannot be understood outside of the context of these rival colonial efforts, and the black role within them. Even as slaves—more accurately, especially because of their presence as slaves—people of African descent have profoundly and centrally helped to shape the course of our shared American history for the past 500 years.

  Africans would prove essential to Spain’s effort to establish hegemony over its claims from the Florida Keys and the Caribbean to the Pacific, and north to the then-unsettled region of Canada. In 1526, two years before the ill-fated expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez and five years after the death of Ponce de León, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón and a large expedition left Hispaniola for Georgia, probably landing near Sapelo Sound (the heart of Gullah country in the following centuries) on the Atlantic coast. The settlement, known as San Miguel de Gualdape, included about 600 Spanish men, women, and children and an undetermined number of African slaves—the first large group of slaves to arrive in lands that would become the United States. These black slaves may have been Atlantic Creoles or ladinos, people of African descent from other Spanish or Portuguese colonies who had become Catholic—either from birth or descent, as were Africans taken to the New World from the kingdom of Kongo in west-central Africa (which willingly converted to Roman Catholicism in the late 15th century), or forcibly converted as a result of their enslavement. These would have been black people who spoke Spanish fluently, were comfortably bicultural, and who served as skilled tradesmen or domestics. Or they simply may have been unacculturated African slaves removed from their initial enslavement in mines or on plantations on the island of Hispaniola and taken to Georgia to perform the most undesirable labor for their owners.

  The colony struggled from the start and suffered disease and starvation—as would befall Jamestown in the next century—along with a series of tragedies culminating in Ayllón’s untimely death. Chaos ensued, soon followed by a mutiny of the survivors. As winter approached, some of the slaves set fire to the compound of the mutineers—not Ayllón’s men—posing interesting questions about the cultural background and political alignment of the slaves the settlers had brought with them. Local Guale Indians took advantage of the colony’s disarray and attacked, driving out the surviving Spanish settlers. In a fascinating move, the Africans allied with the Guales and became a Maroon or independent, exiled society, a phenomenon that also took place throughout the Caribbean and Mexico and would become an important feature of New World slavery.

  San Lorenzo de los Negros, fou
nded in the 1570s and located near modern Veracruz, Mexico, for instance, became a similar Maroon settlement. Under the military leadership of a former slave named Nyanga (or Gaspar Yanga), it compelled the Spanish Crown to recognize its municipal status and grant it freedom, becoming the first self-governing black entity in the New World shortly after the English settled Jamestown.1

  Several hundred miles north in the comparatively balmy climate of New York harbor in 1613, a Dutch vessel named the Jonge Tobias arrived from the West Indies. The ship anchored off Manhattan Island and deposited a mixed-race adventurer named Jan Rodrigues. Whether the captain, an enterprising merchant named Thije Volckertsz Mossel, set up Rodrigues as his agent or, more likely, simply paid him in supplies and then departed, cannot be fully established. The Dutchman would later claim that Rodrigues was his slave and acted as his agent and guarantor of his monopoly of the trade with the local Indians.

  Rodrigues, however, was a free man, probably born on the island of Santo Domingo (facts that a Dutch court fully established), who lived for several months or years on Manhattan Island, trading with the Native Americans there and marrying into at least one tribe. He later received supplies from other Dutch traders and apparently successfully served as an intermediary between Native Americans and the Dutch. While little else is known about him, he may well have been living on the island when the Dutch West Indies Company arrived in 1625. Africans, thus, were bound up in the history of New York from the very first, just as they were the history of Florida and the early Southwest.2

  Six years after Rodrigues’s arrival on Manhattan, in the less hospitable climes of tidewater Virginia, a group of “20. And Odd Negroes” landed at Jamestown, including slaves seized by a Dutch privateer off a Portuguese vessel headed to the slave-trading port of Vera Cruz.3 While clearly not the first slaves brought to North America, they indeed became the first slaves brought to the region’s English settlements. A small and seemingly ordinary event in the history of slavery, it transpired within a harsh and protean Atlantic world. Seen through the lens of what today we call the “Black Atlantic,” the arrival of this tiny band of Africans at Jamestown in 1619 symbolizes a complex process that drew every major European power, scores of colonial settlements, and hundreds of ethnic groups on three continents into an economic vortex that enriched both Europeans and African monarchs and merchants, helped spread both Christianity to Africa and Islam to the Western Hemisphere, and made the success of the fragile New World settlements possible. This enormously complex process also created creolized Africans like Jan Rodrigues in New York and, later, Mathias de Sousa, who voted and owned land at St. Mary’s settlement in colonial Maryland.

  More important, it wrenched 12.5 million people from their African homes and dislocated them throughout the New World, reduced untold millions more over many generations to the status of property, and did not end until Brazil finally outlawed the institution of slavery as late as 1888. The enslavement of the African people and their relocation to the New World, commencing some five centuries ago, created a breathtaking sweep of history that has proven to be one of the most consequential transformations of civilization in world history, one that shaped every country and every people touched by it.

  Landing of Slaves at Jamestown, 1619, by Howard Pyle. Frontispiece for Harper’s Monthly Magazine, January 1901.

  THE ARRIVAL OF THE JAMESTOWN SLAVES IN 1619 OCCURRED AS PART OF AN ENORMOUSLY CONSEQUENTIAL TRADE IN SLAVES, DOMINATED INITIALLY BY PORTUGAL, WHICH HAD THRIVED FOR THE PREVIOUS 100 YEARS. Given the context of the 17th-century Atlantic world, it would have been extraordinary if slaves had failed to make their way to the English colonies. By 1570, historian James Sweet says that in Mexico, black Africans actually outnumbered people born in Europe by 3 to 1, including 20,569 Africans and 6,644 Spaniards; 11,067 criollos (persons of pure Spanish descent born in Spanish America); 2,435 mulattos (of mixed black and white ancestry); and another 2,437 mestizos (of mixed European and Native American ancestry). Of these, about 2,000 were free Maroons (descendants of former slaves). In Peru, “the viceroy’s census in 1614 recorded 25,454 people in Lima—10,386 Africans, 9,616 Spaniards, 1,978 Native Andeans, 744 mulattoes, and 192 mestizos. According to Governor Ruiz de Pereda in Havana in 1610: 9,800 whites lived alongside 8,900 blacks, 1,300 Indians. In Brazil in 1620, the ratio of Portuguese to Africans was 1 to 1 (about 50,000 each), but quickly unbalanced with more than 6,200 slaves arriving each year between 1620 and 1625. In fact, between 1501 and 1625 Portugal had shipped 268,000 slaves to Brazil.” Even with a high slave-mortality rate, Africans clearly outnumbered those of European descent. And, it is important to emphasize, many of these black people and their mulatto offspring gained their freedom early on.4

  The great slave-trade historian David Eltis estimates that at least 352,800 slaves had been shipped to the New World by 1625.5 In the earliest years of their participation in the trade, especially before 1600, the English obtained most of their slaves by preying on ships supplying the Spanish Indies and Mexico, nearly all of which departed from Cape Verde. The slaves involved mostly came from the regions that include modern-day Sierra Leone and Senegal, with the Portuguese traders drawing on the markets of Lower Guinea. For instance, on one 1527 sugar estate on Hispaniola—in what is today the Dominican Republic—most of the slaves came from the Bight of Benin and Upper Guinea, with an even larger number of slaves in Mexico originating from Upper Guinea, the initial name for the region composed today of eastern Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and northwest Ivory Coast.

  In the following years, however, the source of English slaves would shift dramatically to West Central Africa—present-day Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Portuguese colonization of Angola had much to do with the shift in supply, as did a series of wars between African kingdoms and between the Portuguese and the Africans, as well as the start of direct shipments to Brazil. The trade from this region was largely enabled by agreements made by Angolan kings with Portuguese traders. One, Pedro Gomes Reinel, held an official monopoly (asiento) from 1596 to 1601 and sent an astonishing 116 vessels to the Western Hemisphere, shipping 20,478 slaves, at least half of whom were Angolans.6

  The Slave Trade, by Auguste François Biard, 1840. Oil on canvas. Menil Foundation, Collections of the Image of the Black in Western Art Research Project and Photo Archive. This image was also widely distributed as an engraving by C. E. Wagstaff, London, 1844.

  As would so many other Africans who followed, the first slaves that landed at Jamestown originated in the Angolan port of Luanda, probably captured in the Kingdom of Ndongo. They were part of a contract that had been secured to deliver slaves to the Spanish colonies and had been seized on the high seas.

  The Portuguese had monopolized the export of slaves from Angola since the early 16th century, working closely with African monarchs, merchants, and intermediaries. Since King Álvaro of Kongo carried on a running dispute with several of his uncles, the slaves that ended up in Virginia probably had been captured as a result of a series of internecine conflicts that had begun in 1616 and ran until 1621, which also included a Portuguese-led war with the Kingdom of Ndongo in which thousands of Kimbundu-speaking people ended up in the slave trade.7 The rivalry between the Portuguese and Dutch in West Central Africa led to horrific battles as Álvaro’s successor, King Pedro II of Kongo, sought alliances to drive out the Portuguese.

  Many of the victims of these wars ended up in the transatlantic slave trade. The 1618–1621 campaign, for instance, destroyed Ndongo’s capital city and sent thousands of farmers, urban dwellers, craftsmen, and others with the status of serfs into the trade—perhaps as many as 50,000 Africans—many of whom were likely to have Christian names because of the missionary work of the Catholic Church. The wars took a terrible toll. In the three years following the landing of slaves in Virginia, the Portuguese traders sent 15,403 slaves to Brazil and 32 vessels landed another 6,886 slaves in Veracruz, Mexico—all from Angola. And after the conflicts, the trade only increased
. From 1624 to 1640, traders sent as many as 5,000 slaves per year just to the Spanish colonies.8

  Nor did the well-known cargo of slaves that landed in Jamestown represent the first Africans that Englishmen attempted to import. Sir Walter Raleigh’s short-lived colony at Roanoke, founded in 1585, was intended to serve as a base for privateering against Spanish commerce, especially raids on the slave trade. Francis Drake had deposited 250 captured slaves there, ones he had seized in raids throughout the Caribbean. Additionally, the English settlement at Wiapoco in 1605 at the mouth of the Amazon had been supplied with African slaves by the Dutch, just as Jamestown would be a few years later.

  The same year, Raleigh attempted to establish another colony at Trinidad, this time with several hundred black slaves. While these early English efforts failed, they did so only because an alliance of Spanish and native peoples destroyed them. Equally important, the English modeled their imperial expansion upon Spain and continued to establish similar colonies with slave labor in the Caribbean following the famed landing at Jamestown, firmly establishing a continuity of purpose. Clearly, the English, like their Portuguese and Spanish rivals, considered slavery integral to their colonial ventures. Thus, the introduction of slavery into Virginia was neither accidental nor incidental, but reflected a developing Atlantic-wide effort by England to increase its power and extract wealth from the New World.9

  FOR MANY GENERATIONS, HOWEVER, SOME HISTORIANS UNDERSTOOD THE ARRIVAL OF AFRICAN SLAVES IN COLONIAL VIRGINIA AS AN EXCEPTIONAL EVENT in the inevitable growth of human liberty, a kind of unfortunate misstep or afterthought.10 As Oscar Handlin, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, erroneously wrote in a once well-regarded essay, during most of the 17th century few blacks lived in the colonies, and they were not concentrated in any particular region or district. More important, they were not slaves as one would ordinarily define that term: “They came into a society in which a large part of the population was to some degree unfree; indeed in Virginia under the Company almost everyone, even tenants and laborers, bore some sort of servile obligation. The Negroes’ lack of freedom was not unusual…. They were certainly not well off. But their ill-fortune was of a sort they shared with men from England, Scotland, and Ireland, and with the unlucky aborigenes [sic] held in captivity.” Until the 1660s, this argument goes, black Africans were simply servants, and while some were labeled “slaves,” the word more accurately connoted a term of contempt or derogation than it did a permanent status. Historians who subscribed to this interpretation, as in Handlin’s case, took pains to disavow assertions of inherent racial inferiority as a determining cause, but the explanation given for slavery’s rise placed blame or responsibility squarely upon the shoulders of the enslaved: “The rudeness of the Negroes’ manners, the strangeness of their languages, the difficulty of communicating to them English notions of morality and proper behavior occasioned sporadic laws to regulate their conduct.”11 Thus, in this view, slavery as it would be known in the 18th and 19th centuries did not exist in 17th-century Virginia.