Middle Passage and Beyond

"Sail Away" 

By Randy Newman

In America you get food to eat
Won't have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It's great to be an American

Ain't no lion or tiger, ain't no mamba snake
Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake
Ev'rybody is as happy as a man can be
Climb aboard, little wog, sail away with me

Sail away, sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away, sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay

In America every man is free
To take care of his home and his family
You'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree
You're all gonna be an American

The United States of America – the cradle of freedom and the home of liberty. Yet, from its humble beginnings, the country would also be known as the land of the oppressed for its participation in an evil forced migration from Africa – the transatlantic slave trade.

Why did this contradiction of values occur? The answer is shocking yet simple: Across three and a half centuries – from 1501 to 1867 – more than 12.5 million Africans were captured, sold, and transported to the Americas because these human beings were a valuable commodity in a system of forced labor.

Where and when did American slavery begin? Such a simple question for a schooled audience that claims they know all about slavery and its long history in the United States. Do me a favor and try to answer the query before reading the rest of this entry. Harder than you thought?

In late August 1619, a shipment of “20 and odd Negroes” arrived on a ship to Virginia. They were not the first Africans in Virginia, but this human cargo is widely viewed as the beginning of slavery in the English colonies.

Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to African slaves as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans. Though the vast majority of Africans were bought by American slave owners for field work, enslaved people could be found in most occupations in the Americas. There were great variations in slavery across the Americas, much depending on the dominant local crop and geography, as well as the regional economic, political, and legal systems in place at any given time.

The Beginnings of Slavery

The early 1600s was a time of war and empire-building in Southwest Africa; Portuguese traders under the rule of the king of Spain had established the colony of Angola. It was part of a fight that the Portuguese king hoped would open a corridor to his colonies in East Africa. The Portuguese waged war against the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo to the north, capturing and deporting thousands of men and women.

Weakened by decades of internal strife and battles with rival kingdoms, Ndongo succumbed. The mercenaries sacked the capital and took thousands of captives.

The exporting of slaves to the Spanish New World was a profitable enterprise, so they were marched to the coast. Adults were yoked together with forked tree branches; children too small to keep up were carried in bags. About a fifth of the captives died en route.

They passed through a slave fortress at the port city of Luanda, still Angola's capital. There, they were forcibly baptized, branded, and jammed into pens until there was room for them on one of 36 slave ships that left in 1619 for the New World, carrying a total of about 15,000 enslaved people. where tens of thousands of people were forcibly baptized, marched out the door and eventually put on ships headed west toward what Europeans called the Americas and Angolans called “the land of the dead.’’

“Never in the history of the Atlantic slave trade would so many Africans from so small an area be taken in so short a time,’’ Tim Hashaw writes in his book The Birth of Black America.

The Africans who arrived in Jamestown in 1619 did so by chance. In Angola more than 300 of them had been packed aboard the San Juan Bautista, bound for Mexico. As the Spanish slaver entered the Gulf of Mexico, two English privateers, the White Lion and the Treasurer, set upon it. The pirates hoped they'd corralled a treasure ship. Discovering only human cargo, they took as many slaves as they could carry.

The Earl of Warwick, a British aristocrat, owned the Treasurer, and the governor of Jamestown was the Earl's man, so the privateers carried their booty to the Virginia coast. There they sold about 30 slaves, roughly split between males and females, to five or six plantation owners.

In an excerpt from a letter to Sir Edwin Sandys, treasurer of the Virginia Company of London, the Jamestown colonist John Rolfe describes events in the Virginia colony: “20. and odd Negroes” arrived off the coast of Virginia, where they were “bought for victualle” by labor-hungry English colonists.

In the preface to his 1968 classic, White Over Black, professor of history and renowned writer Winthrop Jordan wondered what did the white inhabitants of Virginia think when these dark-skinned people were rowed ashore and traded for provisions? Were they shocked? Were they frightened? Did they notice these people were black? If so, did they care?

In truth, the answer to how whites thought is likely more about “unthinking” than thinking, as attitudes towards Africans had already been implanted long before. While Europeans assigned blackness and African descent priority in codifying slavery, skin color was secondary to broad dismissals of the value of “savage” societies, beliefs, and behaviors in providing a legal foundation for dispossession.

By March 1620, 32 Africans were recorded in a muster as living in Virginia but by 1625 only 23 were recorded. In 1649 there were 300, and in 1690 there were 950. These Africans, scattered throughout homes and farms of the James River Valley, were the first of hundreds of thousands of Africans forced to endure slavery in colonial English America.

There is a continuing debate regarding whether racism against blacks preceded the adoption of a legal system supporting lifetime slavery in Virginia, or whether the practice of slavery triggered the colonists' racist attitudes. Blacks were not automatically slaves in the early colonial days. Some held property, married, and raised families outside the institution of slavery.

Some number of enslaved Africans earned freedom by fulfilling a work contract or for converting to Christianity. At least one of these, Anthony Johnson, in turn acquired slaves or indentured servants for workers himself. Historians such as Edmund Morgan say this evidence suggests that racial attitudes were much more flexible in early 17th-century Virginia than they would later become. Over this period, legal distinctions between white indentured servants and "Negros" widened into lifelong and inheritable chattel-slavery for Africans.

The Virginia colony lacked a legal framework for slavery until 40 years after the 1619 delivery. In the 1660's, the government of the colony (not the officials in London) established the legal framework for perpetual servitude based on color.

"Every year between 1667 and 1672 the General assembly enacted legislation which increasingly defined a Virginian's status by skin color. Similar laws followed in 1680, 1682, and 1686. By the final decade of the seventeenth century, those characteristics most associated with the plantation society of the eighteenth century were already evident."

(Laura A. Croghan, "'The Negroes to Serve Forever: The Evolution

of Blacks's Life and Labor in Seventeenth-Century Virginia."

Masters Thesis, William and Mary. 1994.)

As plantation agriculture spread up the Potomac River, the demand for field workers exceeded the supply of people in the colonies and England willing to do such work. The economic solution was to obtain laborers from another source – slaves from Africa, imported through the Caribbean islands as well as directly from that continent. In the 1660's, the demand for labor in Virginia exceeded the supply of indentured servants from England after the end of the civil war there.

Like most huge changes, the imposition of hereditary race slavery was gradual, taking hold by degrees over many decades. For blacks, freedom, or even the guise of it, certainly remained a matter of heredity. And, for our greatest Fathers, a matter of hypocrisy. 

The Father of the Country, himself, called slavery “the only unavoidable subject of regret,” yet Washington did not release his own slaves during his lifetime, preferring to leave that a subject of his will …

"Upon the decease [of] my wife, it is my Will and desire th[at] all the Slaves which I hold in [my] own right, shall receive their free[dom] . . . . The Negroes thus bound, are (by their Masters or Mistresses) to be taught to read and write; and to be brought up to some useful occupation, agreeably to the Laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, providing for the support of Orphan and other poor Children. And I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth, of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever.”

At the dawn of the American Revolution, 20 percent of the population in the thirteen colonies was of African descent. The legalized practice of enslaving blacks occurred in every colony. The majority, but not all, of these African Americans were slaves. In fact, the first official United States Census taken in 1790 showed that eight percent of the black populace was free.

(Edgar A. Toppin. "Blacks in the American Revolution" Published essay, Virginia State University. 1976.)

Slavery was the foundation of Virginia's agricultural system and essential to its economic viability. Initially, planters bought slaves primarily to raise tobacco for export. By the last quarter of the 18th century, wealthy Virginia farmers were using slave labor in a diversified agricultural regime. Enslaved African Americans also worked as skilled tradesmen in the countryside and in the capital city of Williamsburg. Many also served as domestics in the households of wealthier white Virginians.

In time, the bodies of the enslaved served as America’s largest financial asset, and they were forced to maintain America’s most exported commodity. In 60 years, from 1801 to 1862, the amount of cotton picked daily by an enslaved person increased 400 percent. The profits from cotton propelled the US into a position as one of the leading economies in the world, and made the South its most prosperous region.

P.R. Lockhart, Vox journalist, reports: “The ownership of enslaved people increased wealth for Southern planters so much that by the dawn of the Civil War, the Mississippi River Valley had more millionaires per capita than any other region.” This is just a part of the role of money and servitude in the history of a country still struggling with racial identity.

Note:

“By 1650, hereditary enslavement based upon color, not upon religion, was a bitter reality in the older Catholic colonies of the New World. In the Caribbean and Latin America, for well over a century, Spanish and Portuguese colonizers had enslaved 'infidels': first Indians and then Africans … So by making color the key factor behind enslavement, dark-skinned people brought from Africa to work in silver mines and on sugar plantations could be exploited for life. Indeed, the servitude could be made hereditary, so enslaved people’s children automatically inherited the same unfree status …

“The dominant English came to view Africans not as 'heathen people' but as 'black people.' They began, for the first time, to describe themselves not as Christians but as whites. And they gradually wrote this shift into their colonial laws. Within a generation, the English definition of who could be made a slave had shifted from someone who was not a Christian to someone who was not European in appearance. Indeed, the transition for self-interested Englishmen went further. It was a small but momentous step from saying that black persons could be enslaved to saying that Negroes should be enslaved.”

(Peter H. Wood. Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America. Oxford University Press. 1996.)