The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  Queen Nzinga, just as every other African leader of the era, exemplified the integral role slavery played in the social and political life of West Africa. She and her rivals all sought slaves and used them as a common currency with Europeans and with local enemies and allies. Even before the queen assumed leadership, she participated in diplomatic missions to representatives of Portugal—the major European power in the area, along with the Dutch—and used gifts of slaves to facilitate negotiations. During the 1620s, she attempted to court her Portuguese rivals by sending them about 800 slaves as a gift, although the gesture failed to win their cooperation. And in the 1640s, King Garcia II of Kongo did precisely the same thing, sending to the Dutch West India Company a gift of 1,200 slaves, with another 170 going directly to the company director Cornelis Nieulant, hoping to solidify Dutch military assistance.

  In 1637, Queen Nzinga sent ivory and slaves to Jesuits in Luanda, hoping to influence Portuguese diplomacy; and when the Portuguese captured her sisters, she paid a ransom in slaves. When diplomacy turned to war, as it almost always did throughout her reign, she seized as many slaves as possible, and in 1648 turned her capital into a major slave-trading center. When not fighting the Portuguese or seeking alliances with the Dutch, she fought her African political rivals and in the process gained thousands of slaves.27

  When her fortunes reversed and the Portuguese defeated her army and expelled her from her capital, she allied with the Imbangala—violent bands or cults of local mercenary soldiers with a reputation for murder and cannibalism—and even married an Imbangala leader to strengthen her weakened forces. In doing so, she joined with men who recruited new members through the enslavement of adolescent boys and who represented a major force in the region’s slave trade. Equally important, she used the sale of slaves—usually the captured subjects of her rivals—to fund her military campaigns and retain her hold on power. Slavery proved so ubiquitous and so central to political life that some slaves held important political positions within her power structure and that of her clan.28

  Next to the number and skill of her archers, the ferocity of Queen Nzinga’s Imbangala allies, and the guns and cannon of the Dutch, slavery must stand as the single most important element that made possible whatever success she achieved. As the currency of diplomacy and tribute, it brought her the wealth essential to her survival. The numbers are indeed staggering. Before 1640, at least 5,000 slaves went into the international market per year from her territory. But from 1641 to 1660, it is likely that as many as 13,000 slaves per year were shipped to the New World just from the lands she controlled. As one contemporary account maintained, Queen Nzinga’s lands were “over flowing with slaves.”29

  WITHOUT THIS BACKGROUND OF THE AFRICAN ROLE IN THE SLAVE TRADE, WE CANNOT COMPREHEND HOW SLAVERY BECAME TRANSPLANTED TO THE NEW WORLD or how it permeated the Atlantic world during the formative period of North American colonization—and that of all the Americas. How slavery insinuated itself in the cultures bordering the Atlantic is perhaps best illustrated by the case of Ayuba ibn Suleiman Diallo, better known as Job ben Solomon (1702?–1773?).

  Job ben Solomon, circa 1750. Etching. Private Collection/Michael Graham-Stewart, Bridgeman Art Library.

  Solomon’s 1734 memoir is the first of a long line of English-language reminiscences by former slaves. The work made Solomon extremely popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and he had his portrait painted, with at least two versions of it widely distributed in engravings.30

  Born to a wealthy and educated Muslim family in Bondu, West Africa, in what is now Senegal, Job ben Solomon became both a religious leader and a successful merchant trader, which included slave trading. Angering a mysterious Englishman named Captain Pyke during an expedition on the Gambia River in 1730, Mandingo kidnappers captured and sold Solomon and his interpreter, Loumein Yoai, to Pyke. Although Solomon’s father attempted to ransom him, he and several other slaves were carried off to Annapolis, Maryland. He was handed over to a trader named Vachell Denton, a well-connected Maryland businessman who worked for a London merchant named William Hunt, who in turn sold Solomon to a planter named Alexander Tolsey. Yoai also ended up in Maryland but went to another owner, near the farm on Kent Island that held the tobacco plantation that became Solomon’s unhappy home.31

  Solomon (whom Tolsey renamed Simon) proved ill suited to the new work and grew sick, so his owner put him to tending cattle. While this task proved easier—it was something he had done in Africa—Solomon nevertheless ran away and made it north to Kent County on the Delaware Bay, where he was captured and imprisoned. His conduct, his strange language, the references to Allah and Mohammed he wrote down (which must have astonished everyone), and his refusal to drink alcohol (the jail that housed him was also a tavern) created quite a local stir.

  Word of the strange slave reached Thomas Bluett, a Kent County attorney and a converted member of the Anglican Church who was also a missionary for the Church’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Bluett later traveled with Solomon and wrote and published his story in the form of a memoir. A local slave who could communicate with Solomon discovered his owner, who eventually retrieved his property. Rather than punish his slave with a whipping or by severing a foot—an effective means of preventing escape—he gave Solomon a place to pray.

  But freedom, rather than kind treatment, was what this Muslim slave trader desired. Astonishingly, he decided to write his father back in Africa to find a way to freedom from American slavery. In a highly unlikely series of events—detailed in his memoir—the letter, written in Arabic, was given to Vachell Denton, who probably believed that Solomon was an African prince who might prove useful in African trade, who sent it to Captain Henry Hunt with instructions to give it, in London, to the same Captain Pyke who had started the whole drama.

  Pyke, however, had already left for Africa, and the letter remained land-bound. In another improbable series of events, a colleague of Hunt’s gave the letter to the famed James Oglethorpe, soldier, philanthropist, founder of the Georgia colony, and member of the Royal African Company (RAC)—the nation’s primary trader in slaves. Oglethorpe advised the company director, Sir Bibye Lake, about the strange case of Job ben Solomon. Lake then recruited Professor John Gagnier, who held the Laudian Chair in Arabic at Oxford, to translate the letter.

  Oglethorpe read the translation and was so moved by Solomon’s plea to his father that the Englishman determined to seek the African’s freedom. In a complicated set of negotiations that involved Denton, Hunt, Oglethorpe, Bluett (who traveled with Solomon to England), and Tolsey, the RAC eventually paid for Solomon’s freedom, almost £60—perhaps equivalent to $13,000 today. On December 27, 1733, the RAC issued Solomon a certificate of manumission.

  Yet Solomon’s freedom hardly represents the end of the story. What interest would the Royal African Company, England’s primary slave dealer, have in freeing one Muslim slave? The African had met with royalty and took up residence in the RAC’s house in London. Enjoying fame and influence, he was able to get the RAC to agree to allow any Muslim enslaved to buy himself out of servitude, “in exchange for two other good slaves.” He also used his newfound fame to convince the Duke of Montagu to arrange for the freedom of his servant, Loumein Yoai, still in Maryland. His relationship with the RAC became very close; he literally depended upon the RAC for his freedom and agreed to return to Africa to help promote the company’s interests. Fearing that since the French had established such a large presence in Senegambia he risked re-enslavement without official documents, he obtained a passport assuring him of protection from the French. He sailed in July, under the care of the RAC, which even provided him with a letter of introduction to company officials in Gambia.

  Solomon’s association with the RAC could not have been stronger. The firm counted on him to increase access to the region’s resources and to help resist encroaching French economic interests. The company expanded its reach in the region, seeking to exploit African natural resources, especially g
old, gum, cotton, lumber, spices, and the like. The English established an arrangement with the French to gain huge amounts of gum in exchange for slaves and an agreement not to trade in slaves, except in payment for the gum. Solomon did what he could to help promote the company’s trade, quite properly feeling deeply indebted to it.

  Although he won his own freedom with an astonishing stroke of his pen and was the first to publish a story of enslavement and redemption in English, his extraordinary experiences had no impact whatsoever on his attitude regarding the institution of slavery. One of the first things he did upon returning home was to buy two horses and a female slave. Unlike the many slave narratives that would follow, Solomon’s story could not be construed as anti–slavery, only anti–his own enslavement. The world of slavery would not be so easily altered.

  OVER THE COURSE OF THE 18TH CENTURY, THE NUMBERS OF SLAVES SHIPPED TO THE NEW WORLD BECAME STAGGERING AND VERY PROFITABLE TO EVERYONE CONNECTED WITH THE TRADE. Charleston, South Carolina, alone received some 187,000, just under half of all of the slaves imported to the United States. By the close of Great Britain’s official slave trade in 1807, about 3.2 million slaves had been shipped just to the British Caribbean, and another 1.2 million to the French West Indies. (Another 193,000 would come to the French West Indies between 1808 and 1867, while 779,000 Africans would arrive through the Spanish trade, largely to Cuba, in the same period.) Hundreds of thousands of Africans—more than came to the United States—endured the Middle Passage to end their days in Mexico and Peru.32 And just over five million Africans would arrive in Brazil between 1526 and 1867.

  Nearly all individuals’ stories have been lost. Job ben Solomon was one of the precious few who emerged recognizable from the infamous trade and only because of an extra-ordinary set of circumstances. Most names are eradicated from the record. Despite remarkable advances in the use of DNA to trace a person’s haplogroup and autosomal DNA to their African regional origins, today only a handful of African Americans—if that many—can trace their ancestry to an individual forebear, identified by name, who was first taken out of Africa.

  One from that handful began at Bunce (or Bance) Castle, now a ghostly ruin on the coast of Sierra Leone. The post, built around 1670 by the British to protect slave merchants of the Royal African Company, occupied about 14 acres of land on an island in the Sierra Leone River. Abandoned by the RAC in 1730, the fortified trading post was taken over by the London firm Grant, Oswald & Company, then given over to John and Alexander Anderson, who operated the slave trading post until the abolition of the trade in 1807.33

  While controlled by the English, about 12,300 slaves passed through the island; and when Richard Oswald and his associates controlled the Bunce facility, most of the slaves went directly to Charleston, South Carolina, others to Florida and Virginia. Estimates of the total number of slaves from Africa’s Windward Coast (stretching from Cape Mount, Liberia, to the Assini River in the Ivory Coast), plus those from Bunce Island upstream from Freetown in Sierra Leone, reached about 5,000 per year by the mid-18th century.

  Even though so many nameless humans passed through Oswald’s hands, he thought of himself as an enlightened businessman. This was despite the fact that as many as 80 or 90 of the total number of slaves he shipped each year died in transit. It’s likely that he comforted himself with the idea that his orders not to brand his property with a hot iron and to keep slave families together if possible somehow made the trade more palatable. In the end, however, he was a cool businessman with a keen eye for the bottom line.34

  Bunce Island, Sierra Leone, circa 1805. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England.

  Europeans occupied dozens of such fortifications up and down the African coast. Crucial to the trade, these posts served as intermediary, liminal spaces in the hugely profitable commerce between African and European elites. African monarchs such as Queen Nzinga sent their captives to these depots to sell as slaves to European factors. But Bunce Island was also a colonial outpost, a “plain” and “neat” facility, as one observer noted in 1773, with a “very cool & convenient gallery in the front” from which traders and guests could survey the island and its activities. When not conducting “business,” the Europeans could play “golf,” a game more like croquet that employed a large ball and just two holes, each the size of a man’s head. The players donned white cotton shirts and trousers brought from India, and were attended by black caddies clothed in woolen loincloths manufactured in Glasgow, Scotland. At the end of the day, the players could retire to a meal of ape, antelope, boar, and fish, drink Madeira wine, and smoke Virginia tobacco, tying together the four corners of the British empire.35

  BECAUSE OF THE LABORS OF EDWARD BALL, A DESCENDANT OF SOUTH CAROLINA SLAVE MASTERS, WE CAN PERSONALIZE THE JOURNEY of slaves from Bunce Island by focusing on one story—the 1756 voyage of a ten-year-old girl taken from Sierra Leone. We know her only as “Priscilla,” a name given to her by her new owners in colonial Charleston. She set out on the Hare, an American sloop that began its journey in the great slave-trading center of Newport, Rhode Island, and stopped twice along the Windward Coast before docking off Bunce Island. By the time the vessel readied to leave, it had taken on 80 slaves. There are no records regarding where they came from. They may have been captured or seized nearby in Sierra Leone—or perhaps far inland—and more than likely ended up in the trade as victims of yet another war in the region. They may have marched hundreds of miles in chains or been rowed to the coast, lashed together in canoes. Each may have changed hands several times along the way.

  We can only surmise how Priscilla and the other children on board, an astonishingly high 34.9 percent, experienced the Middle Passage. Perhaps she was separated from her family, tossed in with strangers—we do not know. Did she and her peers watch other children their age die on board? What we can know is that she would have endured cramped quarters belowdecks for endless hours at a stretch, enduring thirst, hunger, and buckets of filth. Perhaps she also feared that at her journey’s end she would be eaten, a common fear among Africans taken in the trade.36

  While we are familiar with the tragedy of the Middle Passage, what actually happened on board the slave ships and what the slave merchants intended may not have been the same. From a purely business standpoint, ill treatment of the cargo could have disastrous consequences for everyone connected to the trade, and owners encouraged their captains to take good care of their valuable cargoes. Such care, however, had to be coupled with eternal vigilance to prevent suicides and insurrections, a real possibility. It is entirely possible that one in ten slave ship voyages, over the history of the trade, experienced some kind of insurrection or was attacked along the African coast. Additionally, in about 26 instances, slaves seized control of their vessels and forced them to return to Africa. It was a hazardous business. The captain of the Hare, Caleb Godfrey, was given clear instructions from the ship’s owners as to what slaves to buy at Bunce Island and how to treat them on board:

  Don’t purchase any small or old Slaves or as far as possible—Young Men Slaves answer better than Women—Keep a watchful Eye over ’em and give them no Opportunity of making an Insurrection, and let them have a Sufficiency of good Diet, as you are Sensible your Voyage depends upon their Health. Use your utmost Endeavors to make all the Dispatch possible, as your Vessel is small and your Expenses great, and proceed from the Coast to—Charles-Town in South Carolina….37

  The Abolition of the Slave Trade, Or the Inhumanity of Dealers in Human Flesh Exemplified in Captn. Kimber’s Treatment of a Young Negro Girl of 15 for her Virgen [sic] Modesty, by Isaac Cruikshank, London, April 10, 1792. Library of Congress.

  Fearing suicides—and attendant loss of investment—ships were sometimes rigged with netting to keep the slaves, who feared a horrid end to their lives, from killing themselves by jumping overboard. Beatings certainly happened during such journeys, disease was rampant for both cargo and crew, and death common. It took 69 days to sail from Bunce Island to Charleston
. Nine slaves died along the way, and during the night crew members threw their bodies into the ocean. As the ship drew close to Charleston, the 71 surviving slaves were most likely rubbed with powder and oil to make them look healthy, hiding the effects of skin disease or maltreatment. Upon landing, they were inspected by the owner of the cargo, one Henry Laurens.

  Laurens (1724–1792) was no ordinary Charlestonian. South Carolina’s wealthiest and most successful planter and merchant, he carried on an extensive international trade in rice, indigo wine, sugar, and slaves. In fact, one of his close business partners was Richard Oswald, the London merchant who controlled Bunce Island. A man of rigid principles, he fought duels and alienated many of his peers during his political rise as a state and national leader of the American Revolution. He helped write the state’s first constitution, served in the Continental Congress, and succeeded John Hancock as its president. He also served on the peace commission, along with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay, that resulted in the Treaty of Paris that formalized American independence from Britain; Oswald, Laurens’s business partner, served on the British negotiating team.

  Henry Laurens slave sale advertisement, circa 1780. Library of Congress.

  Laurens began his merchant career in 1749 and by 1763, when he quit the business, he had achieved enormous wealth, much if it through his slave importation business, Austin & Laurens (later Austin, Laurens & Appleby). In a given shipment he might receive as many as 250 “fine healthy negroes,” prized for their experience in rice growing. But by 1763, he had grown weary of business and slavery. “I abhor slavery,” he once wrote to his son John, although like his contemporary Thomas Jefferson he never manumitted any of them, and two years before his death he still owned 298.38