Colonial America
Page 56
This institutional flexibility resulted in part from English settlers' lack of experience with slavery before the seventeenth century. The institution of slavery had not been recognized under English law since before the Norman Conquest, having been replaced by serfdom. Temporary servitude offered the closest legal analogy – and masters were expected to treat servants with the solicitude owed to a family member. Laws in the Chesapeake and New England during the early years thus allowed slaves to earn extra money, assert their rights in the courts, and even purchase their own freedom and acquire property. Some slaves were able to form patronage relationships with masters who gave them protection and helped them to improve their situations.1
Institutional flexibility also developed from the experiences and actions of the slaves themselves, experiences shaped by the demography of slavery during the earliest generations. Before 1680 most slaves brought to North America had already spent time living in the West Indies, in Brazil, or along the West African coast. These Africans were “Creoles,” meaning they were already somewhat assimilated to European culture. As Creoles they had often learned the rules and understood how to maneuver within European societies.2 In North America they lived side by side with white servants and freed persons of both races, and were able to form relationships with other servants, creating integrated communities. They often even married across racial lines. These were, as historian Ira Berlin has explained, “societies with slaves,” meaning they included slaves but were not organized around slavery.
During the last two decades of the seventeenth century, the institution of slavery on the mainland began to change. By 1680, planters in the Chesapeake had a well-established staple crop economy based the production of tobacco for export to Europe. Over the next few decades planters in South Carolina would follow suit, developing a staple crop economy based on the production of rice (and later indigo), also for export. To produce these commodities, planters needed labor above and beyond what a family could provide. By now young English people were becoming reluctant to emigrate to the southern colonies, since their prospects would be better if they stayed in England or became servants in Pennsylvania or the Jerseys. Native Americans east of the Mississippi had proved unsuitable for work in a plantation setting. That left Anglo-American planters in South Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia looking elsewhere for labor.
Meanwhile, thanks to the large numbers of slaves now being shipped from West Africa to Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands, supplies of enslaved Africans were becoming more plentiful. The Atlantic slave trade had already reached substantial numbers between 1600 and 1700, with approximately 1.3 million Africans being shipped to the Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, and French colonies. After 1700, when British carriers came to dominate the trade, the slave trade ballooned in size. Between 1700 and 1800, British merchants alone transported over three million slaves from Africa to the Americas, while carriers of other nationalities (primarily French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish) transported an additional three million or more. The growing volume of transatlantic shipments made African slave traders the obvious suppliers of labor for plantations in the mainland colonies. Slavers transported approximately 350,000 slaves to British North America during the eighteenth century, while carrying about four times that number to the British West Indies.
As Africans through their sheer numbers became a more obvious presence in settler societies, the relationship between African and European populations was altered. Between 1690 and 1750 the total black population in the mainland British North American colonies grew dramatically from about 10,000 to about 240,000. In 1680 Virginia had about 3,000 slaves and 50,000 whites; by 1760 the number of slaves had risen to 120,000, making up 40 percent of the population. South Carolina experienced an even more dramatic change in its demographic structure. In 1690 there were only 1,500 African slaves in the colony; by 1730 the colony had 10,000 whites but 20,000 African Americans and appeared to one observer “more like a Negro country than a country settled by white people.” The composition of the population was coming to resemble that of the British West Indies, where the total black population by 1760 had reached about 260,000, comprising about 86 percent of the population.3
As the total number of Africans in the southern population increased, their demographic origins changed as well. After 1700, responding to the increased demand, slave-traders began to transport captives directly from West Africa to North American ports instead of going first to the West Indies.4 The Africans who arrived during the eighteenth century thus had no previous experience with Europeans. To the European settlers, these new arrivals seemed more foreign and less culturally familiar than their predecessors. The newcomers practiced traditional African religions, wore traditional hairstyles, filed their teeth, and wore strange clothing. Their bodies and faces bore tattoos or scars from initiation rituals that European settlers did not understand. They spoke no English. To the settlers, these practices marked the newcomers as heathens, profoundly different from themselves and from their white servants.5
Much as British West Indian planters had done in the middle of the seventeenth century, British North American planters now began to treat these new arrivals as outsiders rather than like their other servants. They gave the newcomers less responsibility and kept them at arm's length. Instead of housing them with the family, where they could form personal relationships with their masters, they placed slaves in separate, poorly constructed shacks. Slaves became more isolated from poor whites. Legal restrictions on slaves were tightened, and their opportunities to maneuver through the system narrowed. British North American planter societies had at last become “slave societies,” societies organized around the control of slaves.
Historians have for many years debated the question of whether racism preceded slavery, or was created by it. Some stress that Europeans had long associated blackness with sin, evil, and pollution, even before the Atlantic slave trade began. The idea that Africans had been enslaved as a result of Noah's curse upon his son Ham was widely repeated. Such racist beliefs, these historians argue, predisposed the English to embrace African slavery when English servants became less available.6 Other historians, however, point to evidence suggesting that racial ideas were only one component of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans' thinking about Africans. Englishmen before the late 1600s were more conscious of differences based upon rank, lineage, and religion than they were of physical differences such as skin color or facial structure. Only in the eighteenth century did European scientists begin to develop theories suggesting that people should be classified according to skin color and other physical traits, and that groups of people classified in this way possessed inherently different qualities of moral character and intelligence.7
The development of new racial ideologies in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries went hand in hand with legal changes that increasingly separated the experiences of African slaves from those of white servants or farmers. Maryland's first slave legislation, passed in 1664, laid down that all “Negroes or other slaves hereafter imported into the province shall serve” for life, as should their children. A particular focus of these new laws, as we saw in Chapter 12, was to prevent interracial unions. Thus, Maryland's 1664 legislation provided that any white woman so forgetful of her status as to marry a slave would have to serve the master of her husband until his death, and her offspring would also be slaves. When Virginia recognized slavery in 1662, its legislature passed an act stating that the child of any Englishman born to a slave mother would take slave status, effectively discouraging white men from marrying enslaved African women. A 1691 act went further, explicitly banning interracial marriages. Other laws barred slaves from marrying at all, and otherwise closed old avenues to freedom and upward mobility. In an act passed in 1668, the Virginia legislature declared that baptism did not change the status of slaves. In 1670 the legislature prohibited free African Americans from purchasing “Christian servants,” meaning whites, on the a
ssumption that Africans could never be Christian and certainly could not rule over whites. Finally, in 1705 the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a comprehensive slave code that effectively reduced all African Americans, unless already free, to perpetual slavery. Step by step, it had created a system of laws designed to create social distance between blacks and whites.
Legal codes in South Carolina developed along the same lines. Once rice became the basis for a plantation economy and slave imports began to increase, the legislature took action to separate blacks and whites. Since South Carolina had never had as many white indentured servants or poor whites as the Chesapeake, there was less concern about interracial alliances between poor whites and enslaved blacks. But here too the legislature prohibited servants and slaves from trading with one another, barred white women from having sexual relations with black men, and prohibited slave marriages. As the slave population grew larger, more comprehensive slave codes were put into place.
A major motivation for the slave codes was fear, since there was now a real possibility that this larger, more culturally foreign population of enslaved Africans would retaliate against their white masters. In 1723 the Virginian authorities introduced a bill for the “More effectual punishing Conspiracies and Insurrections.” In the future any slave guilty of conspiracy was to suffer death. Those committing perjury were to be nailed by the ear, whipped, and then have that ear cut off. Meetings of slaves were also banned, except when working or attending divine service with their masters, and no African American was to be freed “except for some meritorious services … allowed by the Governor and Council.” This clause was inserted solely to reward informers who betrayed serious conspiracies. A similar tightening of the laws occurred elsewhere. Pennsylvania, hardly a hotbed of slave uprisings, provided that if more than four African Americans met together without permission they were to be whipped. In New York, after 1712 when a group of slaves killed nine whites who were trying to extinguish a fire, the assembly prohibited more than three slaves from congregating together without the consent of their owner.
These developing legal rules succeeded in creating a system that defined Africans as outside the bounds of civil society. A 1692 Virginia law explicitly barred slaves accused of committing capital crimes from asserting a right to trial by jury, or a right to appeal a conviction. South Carolina created special courts that used summary processes to try slaves accused of crimes. Even Pennsylvania, despite its reputation for humaneness, provided for African slaves to be tried not by a full jury but by two justices and six “of the most substantial freeholders.” Civil rights that white men were coming to take for granted were explicitly denied to blacks, as laws were passed to prohibit even free blacks from possessing arms, from assembling together in large gatherings, and from voting. Slaves were prohibited from moving freely on public roads without authorization from their masters, and from conducting ceremonies or rituals in secret. Legal punishments that an eighteenth-century Anglo-American public would no longer have tolerated if imposed on whites were now imposed only on blacks, in ways that accentuated their degraded legal status. A 1691 South Carolina law provided that any African or Native American slaves showing violence to a white person for a second time were to have their noses slit and their faces burned. In Virginia after 1705, a slave who struck a white man would receive 39 lashes. In South Carolina after 1714, the same behavior was a capital crime. South Carolina law explicitly provided that slaves could be castrated or burned alive for certain crimes.
Perhaps most oppressive for enslaved people were the ways in which the legal system removed them from its protection and left them under the virtually unchecked control of their owners. In place of a system of discipline organized by the patriarchal family, which was coercive but limited by the moral oversight of neighbors and friends, the slave codes made masters legally immune from prosecution for most acts of violence towards their slaves short of premeditated murder. A 1669 Virginia law, for example, provided that a slave-owner or overseer who killed a slave in the course of a beating was to suffer no penalty, since it could never be presumed that a man would destroy his own property except for good reason. Masters became free to use extraordinary brutality towards slaves without interference from neighbors or courts. Slaves who resisted their masters' authority could be flogged, tortured, humiliated, permanently removed from their families – all with public sanction. Robert “King” Carter, the most powerful planter in Virginia, was in 1708 granted official permission to cut off the toes of two of his female slaves in order to punish them for persistent disobedience. South Carolina planters not uncommonly cut slaves' hamstrings or amputated one of their feet as punishment for running away. Obviously slaves who had been maimed in these ways were less valuable to their owners, but the slaveholders' violence did have a purpose (perverse as it was). Public demonstrations of sadistic violence towards disobedient slaves were essentially terror tactics that enabled owners to control their other workers through intimidation. The legal system tacitly endorsed this kind of privately imposed terror by refusing to stop it.
The new codes not only sanctioned unprecedented violence by masters; they highlighted the centrality of race as the characteristic that determined status. They defined slavery not only as a lifetime status, but also as an inherited one, invariably passed on to one's children. They closed off the possibility for slaves to achieve freedom for themselves or their children by being baptized or marrying a free person. They made it more difficult for a slave to purchase his or her freedom. The effect of these rules in combination was to destroy the old system whereby it was relatively common for slaves to earn their freedom, and replaced it with a system in which virtually all blacks could be assumed to be slaves. Meanwhile, local colonial governments enlisted the help of poor whites in enforcing the new system of discipline over slaves by creating all-white militias to catch runaways and punish disobedient slaves. The effect of the militias was to define white men as the enforcers of law and blacks as lawbreakers. They created a system of slavery more clearly based on race than any previous one, and created a racial divide in British North American societies that permanently relegated Africans and their descendents to a degraded status.8
2 Slaves' Experiences
Slavery imposed extraordinary constraints on the lives of Africans in British North America. Yet slave codes and the relations of power that they supported were not the only things that defined the scope of experience for enslaved Africans. Collectively, they not only survived but transcended the obstacles they faced, eventually forging African American communities and cultures that coexisted alongside and intersected with the cultures of European American settlers. That process of cultural creation and adaptation has continued to make vital contributions to American collective life since it began in the eighteenth century. To understand it, we must look not only at the institution of slavery, but at the experiences of slaves.9
The ordeal of a newly enslaved person began, of course, in Africa. Most slaves transported to the British North American colonies in the eighteenth century came from the Slave Coast, a region of West Africa that now comprises the states of Benin, Nigeria, Cameroun, Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, and Angola. Smaller numbers originated in Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, and Ghana. People from these regions identified with a wide variety of ethnic and political groups, including the Dahomey, Mali, Songhay, Asante, Yoruba, Benin, Igbo, Luango, Kongo, and Luba, among others. Most captives belonged to inland nations that were at war with the coastal African nations that actually ran the slave trade. A small number of slaves came from East Africa and Madagascar, where Arab traders were active.
Map 12 Africa as known to Europeans in the mid eighteenth century. Based on D'Anville's map of 1749, one of the best and most accurate maps of Africa made before the era of modern European exploration.
The nightmare of slavery began with capture, followed by a forced march to the coast, invariably as part of a group of captives tied togeth
er with ropes around hands and necks. The journey often lasted weeks or even months. On arrival, captives were sold to European traders, who, after branding their purchases, put them on board a vessel for the Americas. Revolts on board slave ships were very common, so traders adopted procedures designed to intimidate the captives and deter collective uprisings. Families were routinely sold apart, except for nursing infants who were left with their mothers. The captives were stripped and shaved to prevent disease, a degrading and depersonalizing procedure, and separated into all-male or all-female groups for the duration of the voyage. The journey across the Atlantic was extraordinarily traumatic. Most captives had never seen the sea, and its strangeness increased their desperation. Some believed that their European captors were cannibals who had eaten their own people before turning to Africans. Many committed suicide even before the ships sailed. During the voyage, slaves were kept chained below deck on platforms, each having a space 18 inches across and six feet deep to lie on. The most a slave could do was sit, for the height of the deck above was usually about four and a half feet. Toilet facilities were at best an open tub.10
In good weather the slaves might be taken on deck for exercise to the beat of a drum or cat-o'-nine-tails. In bad weather, or if the crew were fearful of being overpowered, the slaves were kept chained permanently below deck in conditions whose horror can only be imagined. One doctor commented about his ship, “The floor of their rooms was so covered with the blood and mucus, which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughterhouse.” The “flux” was usually dysentery, which was quick to take hold. In such circumstances it was surprising that so many slaves survived the voyage. Certainly slave-traders expected a substantial proportion of their cargo to perish before arrival. Modern estimates suggest that on average between 12 and 18 percent died, though individual voyages would vary, depending on the weather, length of voyage, and care of the crew. Diseased slaves were often thrown overboard. But whatever the casualty rate, a deep melancholy afflicted every slave ship, each voyage being punctuated by incessant weeping, hysteria, refusal to eat, and attempted suicide.