The Making of African America

As the ships pulled away from the wharves, the captives’ identity underwent yet another and more fateful transformation. No longer were the peoples who filled the holds simply Angolans or Efiks, Kongos or Wolofs—labels that spoke more to how outsiders identified them than how they thought of themselves.³ Instead, they took on new names bereft of any ties to lineage, place of origin, or even port of embarkation. In 1619, noting the arrival of some of the first black men and women in England’s Chesapeake settlements, John Rolfe famously observed that “[a]bout the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars.” Rolfe’s blurt of the not yet benighted N-word would later be made respectable as negro; other names followed, such as colored and Anglo-African, then as Negro (appropriately capitalized), black, Afro-American, and African American. Like Rolfe’s “negars,” these names too announced a new people in the making.⁴

Africans were thus a product of the New World, not the Old. Just as Catalans and Galicians became Spanish when removed from Iberia, the former residents of Abruzzo, Basilicata, Genoa, and Tuscany became Italians outside of Italy, or—more recently—Chileans and Cubans became Hispanics in the United States, so the many peoples of Africa were melded into Africans on the west side of the Atlantic. Like the newly minted Spaniards, Italians, and Hispanics, their identity was not so much a product of who they were but who they would become. The process a making Angolans and Efiks, Kongos and Wolofs into Africans was slow and hardly complete after the captives reached the Americas, where the slaveowners’ shallow understanding of Africa further twisted notions of identity. Even those slaveowners who appreciated the differences among the nations of Africa and carefully recorded the origins of their slaves were mystified by the fine distinctions among the many peoples of Africa. Perhaps Kikongo and Kimbundu or Edo and Ijo sounded alike to an unacquainted ear. More likely, slaveholders did not listen very closely. A South Carolina planter conceded that he could “never make out” the derivation of his slave who had been “imported with a cargo of Eboe negroes” some seven years earlier.⁵

Ultimately the mixing of African nations—not the perceptions of European slave traders or American slaveowners—made the many peoples of Africa into Africans. But even self-identification offered little help in the process of naming. People were sometimes defined by the language they spoke, but allegiance to a single authority did not follow from a shared language, genealogy, or history. Autonomous nations in the modern sense—with fixed territorial boundaries and ruled by a singular authority which claimed a monopoly of loyalty—were the exception (like the eighteenth-century Asante) not the rule. Instead, boundaries were ill defined, authority had multiple sources, and loyalty was divided. Moreover, since the peoples of Africa were undergoing vast changes in the era of the slave trade, they took many names for themselves. Partly as a result of the chaos created by the trade—wars, abductions, sales, and resales mixed with various natural and man-made disasters—African peoples moved frantically within the continent. Families, villages, and nations that had been decimated joined with one another, embracing new identities from the fusion of once distinct peoples. The migrants themselves changed—learned new languages, made new friends, adopted new attitudes, and developed new personas—as they trudged across the continent, lodged in barracoons, and prepared to cross the Atlantic. The fluidity of African nationality meant that captives identified themselves in numerous ways, confusing even the most observant of their captors.⁶

Identities, whether assumed or imposed, became increasingly problematic as the inexorable realities of enslavement trumped ideas respecting national origins. As the captives mixed among themselves, blending the languages and habits of diverse African peoples, the slavers’ designations forfeited any relationship to reality. Often Angolans who looked like Calabars or arrived with Calabars or behaved in the manner of Calabars were labeled Calabars, although they may never have been in or near Calabar. It was the slave trade itself that created the new designations.⁷

Whatever their origins, the captives had a different understanding of slavery than the men who claimed ownership over them. In sub-Saharan Africa, enslavement—although legitmate in custom and law and a nearly universal practice—had been a dreaded misfortune, but not a catastrophe. Slaves, as one of many forms of dependency, were generally not critical to commerce or production. They worked in households as well as the fields and shops, less a source of labor than of status and wealth. Employed at a variety of domestic tasks, they mattered little to the organization of the state or society. African slavery was a porous, familial, and lineage-based system for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Men and women might be enslaved as criminals, debtors, adulterers, sorcerers or witches, or—most commonly—captives of war, who may well have found enslavement preferable to the usual treatment meted out to wartime prisoners. Thereafter, most slaves were employed as domestic or agricultural laborers; their product was for subsistence or local consumption rather than the international market.

Such employment of slaves did not reduce the slaves’ worth, and it sometimes protected them from abuse. Since land in most African societies was owned corporatively by kin groups or the state and not easily transferable, slaves became the most valuable form of revenue-producing property, as well as an excellent means of accumulating capital. Control over slaves was a source of wealth and power, for it also allowed for control over land. In endowing slaveholders with high social standing, slavery was more a political than an economic institution. Men of power, deeply invested in slaves, assured that property rights in man would be respected. Slavery had become ubiquitous in African society prior to the advent of the transatlantic trade. The legal forms and social protocols to enslave were well in place, and slavery’s legitimacy universally accepted.

But in Africa slavery was rarely linear and hereditary over the course of generations; rather it was often a means of incorporation into family and community. Anointed with rights that protected them from arbitrary transfer by a system of mutual obligations, enslaved men and women enjoyed a place within the social life of their owners’ family, village, and community. Many African societies depended upon the incorporation of such enslaved peoples to sustain themselves, which accounted for a distinct preference for females. Some slaves rose to positions of power and distinction as soldiers and administrators—jobs that could only be entrusted to outsiders. From such positions, freedom—not an individualist’s independence but full incorporation in the community—was a real possibility.⁸

The door to slavery swung both ways in Africa, making slavery a remarkable permeable institution. If African societies provided the mechanism for enslavement, they also allowed for liberation. While enslavement was common, so too was manumission. Over time, the emancipated were able to attach themselves to their owners’ society. They too could rise to positions of eminence and perhaps one day become slaveowners themselves.⁹

That former slaves as well as slaves had a place in African society did not always temper the violent nature of slavery. Slavery in Africa—depending upon circumstance—could be as exploitative and brutal as any. Moreover, just as the slaves’ circumstances differed from place to place in Africa, they changed over time. In the centuries after European incursions onto the coast of west Africa, slavery took many forms, especially as new centralized and militarized states arose whose entire concern was the trade in person, either through warfare, kidnapping, or judicially sanctioned captivity. During the eighteenth century, as Islam advanced into west Africa, jihads against non-Muslim peoples added to the number of Africans enslaved. Still, even into the nineteenth century, slavery remained linked to domestic rather than commercial production. Most African societies remained societies with slaves—that is, societies in which slavery was just one form of subordination and generally not the dominant one.¹⁰

As captive Africans entered continental Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, slavery remained largely a domestic institution. Even as the number of African slaves grew in Portugal and Spain, the household—not the field or the workshop—continued to be the primary locus of slave life. Some slaves served as sailors on the very boats that carried them from their homeland, a practice that would be carried over to the Americas. African slaves lived and worked in close proximity to their owners, laboring alongside other Europeans—free and unfree, Christian and Muslim. In time, transplanted Africans spoke Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, or creole tongues; practiced Christian and Islamic faiths; gained familiarity with the trading etiquettes and jurisprudence of the larger Atlantic world; and secured their freedom in substantial numbers. By the middle of the sixteenth century, almost 10 percent of the 10,000 black people residing in Lisbon and a like proportion of the 6,000 in Seville had secured their freedom.¹¹

On the Atlantic islands—Madeira, the Azores, the Canaries, and then São Tome and Principe—the Portuguese and Spanish planters introduced slaves to a new, harsh form of chattel bondage. Geared to the production of sugar and other exotic commodities for sale in distant markets, plantation slavery bore little resemblance to its domestic counterpart either in Africa or Europe. Rather it was a labor system in which slaveowners considered their human property little more than units of production. Eager for the profits that sugar mills produced, planters drove their slaves hard, pushing mortality rates to horrific heights and leaving slaves few opportunities to establish families, participate in independent economies, or create lives of their own. In such a system, the possibility of escape from bondage was small and the chance for incorporation into free society nil.

The emergence of the plantation system changed the nature of slavery throughout the Atlantic. In Africa, the demand for slaves fostered the growth of new states whose very being rested upon slavery. Slave raiding and slave trading became the essence of these new states. African elites became less interested in assimilating captives into their households and more concerned with their sale to Europeans in exchange for guns and other weapons of war that enabled them to gain still more slaves.¹²

The increased availability of Africans made it possible to expand the plantation system, and when the plantation crossed the Atlantic to the Americas beginning in the sixteenth century, African slavery accompanied it. Within a century, slavery had become synonymous with people of African descent in the minds of many Europeans; “these two words, Negro and Slave,” reported one English clergyman in 1680, had “by custom grown Homogeneous and convertible.”¹³ Blackness took on a new meaning.

The changed meaning of blackness put a growing number of African peoples in harm’s way. Although the initial captives may have been drawn from enslaved adulterers, criminals, debtors, and wartime prisoners, by the eighteenth century—when most Africans arrived in mainland North America—enslaved peoples were rarely guilty of anything more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A few may have been sold by desperate or depraved kinsmen and neighbors for some real or invented offense, but Africans rarely sold their own people, as they understood it. “Not a few in our country fondly imagine that Parents here sell their Children, Men their Wives, and one Brother the other,” wrote a Dutch trader from the coast of Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century. “But those who think so deceive themselves.” Instead, black people were taken by mercenary armies, bandits, and professional slavers.¹⁴

Taken from deep within the African interior, Africans faced a long, deadly march to the coast. Traveling sometimes for months, they were passed from group to group, and slaves might find themselves sold and resold many times over. Each time they would be imprisoned in some filthy pen, poked and prodded, and perhaps auctioned off to yet another set of strangers, as many peoples participated in the slave trade. Even before they reached some central distribution point, according to one account, “great numbers perished from cruel usage, want of food, traveling through inhospitable deserts, &c.” But whoever drove the captives to their unwanted destiny, the circumstances of their travel were extraordinarily taxing. Ill clothed and ill fed, the captives moved at a feverish pace, only to stop again and languish in some pen, while middlemen bartered over their bodies, sold some, and purchased yet others to add to the sad coffle.

Captives did not go quietly. Resistance that began at the point of capture continued as the enslaved marched to the coast. Rebellions rarely succeeded and, while some captives escaped, most of the fugitives were recaptured; the journey then began again. Conditions improved over time, but in the 1790s one in four slaves taken in central Africa died before reaching the coast. In some places, more than half the slaves perished between their initial capture in the interior and their arrival on the coast. Overall, the movement to the coast was nothing more than a death march for many.¹⁵

Conditions in coastal factories were, if anything, even more lethal. Often built in low-lying swamps, they were breeding grounds for disease. Captives found themselves packed away in dank dungeons with little ventilation and little concern for the most elementary sanitation. There they could languish for weeks, sometimes months, depending on the nature of the trade. The weak and traumatized fell by the thousands, as epidemics swept through their crowded pens. The corpses, according to one account, were simply dumped into the surrounding marshes, as a kind of human landfill. Inevitably they reeked of death.¹⁶

Exhausted and emaciated, the survivors did not simply await their fate. Even at this last moment, captive men and women sought to regain their freedom. Some tried to get word to their families, so they might be ransomed. A few well-connected captives were redeemed. The vast majority of captives with neither the connections nor the resources needed to buy themselves out of bondage sought to escape. However, once they entered the walled castles, flight became increasingly difficult; the handful who succeeded were soon recaptured and returned, as the towns that grew up around the barracoons had little sympathy for the fugitives. Still, the barracoons were rife with conspiracies and insurrections. Revolts and escapes, though rare, punctuated the history of the coastal enclaves, perhaps because the captives’ desperation pushed them to risk all. Carried from holding pens to the awaiting slavers, some jumped overboard and swam toward shore. Others, refusing to see their loved ones shipped across the Atlantic, banded together with friends and relatives in order to assault the canoe men. But only a handful of these last gasps for freedom succeeded.¹⁷

These were the fortunate few. Most captives faced the nightmarish transatlantic crossing. The depths of human misery and the astounding death toll of men and women packed in the stinking hulls shamed the most hard-hearted. Slave traders themselves testified to the deleterious effects of the trade. Even among those who defended slavery, there were those who condemned the Middle Passage as an abomination. But, like all human experiences—even the worst—the Middle Passage was not of one piece. While the vast majority suffered below deck, a few men and women chosen from among the captives helped set the sails, steer the ships, and serve the crews that carried the mass of Africans across the Atlantic. A few were armed to guard the enslaved. Denmark Vesey, the former slave whose alleged conspiracy shook South Carolina in the 1820S, was but one of many slaves who sailed the Atlantic as the personal servant of the ship captains. Some slave ships employed free black sailors among their crews, and a handful sailed with black crews. Others were elevated from the mass of captives to the crew when the ship was shorthanded or required some special service, such as a pilot or translator. Guardian slaves—many of them drawn from the gramettoes who defended the barracoons—continued their collaboration with slavers on board. In addition, “privilege slaves,” who were the property of the captain and other officers, were given an indulgence as part of their compensation and mixed with others of no special rank. Such slaves received special treatment, if only to allow their owners to realize this benefit. The Atlantic passage of these captives differed greatly from those stowed below deck.¹⁸

The Middle Passage differed from place to place and changed over time. While some slave ships shuttled from port to port purchasing and selling slaves to amass the most marketable cargo, others loaded a full complement and proceeded directly across the Atlantic. Once in the Americas, slavers might discharge their entire payload at a single port or travel to different ports, peddling slaves in small lots. Depending upon the port of embarkation and the port of arrival, the transatlantic crossing could take weeks or months. Slave ships, no less than other vessels, suffered the hazards of ocean travel, be they pirates, privateers, or shipwrecks. Seasonal changes in trade winds made a difference, as did the skill of the captain and crew, the nature of maritime technology, and the vessel’s construction. In general, the shorter the voyage, the better the slaves’ chances of survival—although short journeys under unfavorable circumstances could be more deadly than months at sea.¹⁹

Slave captains appreciated the benefit of delivering their captives alive and healthy. If they needed a reminder, the great merchants who financed the trade instructed them as to the care of their valuable cargo, issuing orders respecting rationing, exercise, and medical attention. Corpses, after all, found few buyers. But aboard ship the alleged rationality of the market faltered before the irrationality of the trade in human flesh. While captain and crew might be directed to allow slaves “every indulgence Consistent with your own Safety,” the safety of the ship and the profits rendered its owners always trumped indulgences granted to slaves, with disastrous results for the captives. Fear of shipboard insurrection induced slave traders to keep captive men cramped below deck for weeks and sometimes months, and pressure to reduce expenses left many slave ships short of provisions, water, and medical supplies. Even the most enlightened captains—whether alert to their own pecuniary interests or mindful of the needs of their captives—often lacked the ability or resources to deliver their cargoes alive and well. Some slave ships were well supplied and directed by seasoned mariners; others lacked proper provisions and were captained by incompetent or simply untested seamen. But the best-supplied ship, directed by the ablest mariners, could suffer disastrous consequences if it ran short of provisions, was struck by disease, or was thrown off course. The highly competitive trade in slaves, with its thin profit margins, fostered the wildest speculation. Some traders took risks that lacked only intent to be criminal. Skimping on food, filling the hold with extra slaves—so-called tightpacking—redounded to great profits for the trader, but they also meant great pain for the traded. The ever-changing mortality rates speak to the fact that the Middle Passage was always a nightmare, but it was not always the same nightmare.²⁰

For the captives, however, some things never changed. Fear was omnipresent as the captives, stripped naked and bereft of their every belonging, boarded the ship and met—often for the first time—white men. Brandishing knives, whips, shackles, neck rings, and—perhaps most frightening—hot irons to mark their captives in the most personal way, these “white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair” left more than a physical scar. Many enslaved Africans concluded they were in league with the devil, if not devils themselves. For others, their seared skin confirmed that they were bound for the slaughterhouse to be eaten by the cannibals who had stamped them in much the way domesticated animals were marked.²¹

The branding iron was but the first of many instruments of savagery the captives faced. Eighteenth-century ships were violent places where imperious captains ruled with the lash, and the barbarity of maritime life reached even greater heights on the slave ship, where whips, chains, shackles, and thumbscrews were standard equipment. When it came to subduing slaves, the captains’ autocratic power was extended to the crew, and men who had been themselves brutalized often felt little compunction in brutalizing others. Indeed, the inability of the captives to defend themselves unleashed the most sadistic impulses, promoting appalling cruelties, as the lines between the callous and the cruel, the cruel and the vicious, and the vicious and the sadistic were fine indeed. Under the best of circumstances, slaves could expect the lash for the slightest infraction and various other punishments for actions that threatened or even appeared to threaten the success of the voyage.

While violence was ubiquitous on the slave ship, it was neither random nor purposeless. Rather it was calculated to intimidate captives in circumstances where there could be few incentives for men and women to submit peacefully. By awing captives with overwhelming power wielded without regard for life or limb, slavers hoped the display of force would convince the captives that resistance was futile. To that end, captives were stripped of the trappings of humanity: denied personal possessions, privacy, and other prerogatives accorded the meanest members of free society. Slavers used every occasion to emphasize the captives’ degraded status and utter isolation—indeed their lack of status. The filth and violence dissolved the carefully developed distinctions between the pure and the impure upon which many African societies rested. The humiliation that accompanied such degradation was almost always public, giving the captives little means to maintain their dignity. Among the lessons taught in this systematic debasement was the sacrosanctity of white skin. More than any single place, the origins of white supremacy can be found in the holds of the slave ship. Speaking through a black interpreter, one captain informed his captives that “no one that killed a white man would be spared.” Few were.²²

Equally inescapable was the horror and anguish that accompanied the captives’ stark realization of what transport across the Atlantic entailed. Sometime during their journey, in one terrifying moment, they understood that family, friends, and country were gone, never to be seen again. The markers of identity—many of which had been physically inscribed upon their bodies in ritual scarification, tooth filing, body piercing, and tattooing—were denigrated, if not transformed into a source of ridicule. Lineage, the most important source of social cohesion in African society, was dissolved. Sons could no longer follow fathers or daughters their mothers. The captives had been orphaned, and their isolation shook them to the very essence of their being, as they realized they were no longer subordinates within communities of mutual—if unequal—obligations but rather excluded from all communities. Observers universally commented on the captives’ consternation—“terrible apprehension,” “deepest distress,” and, most tellingly, “the terror”—as they confronted the stark reality of death in life.²³

In like fashion, other critical social distinctions lost their meaning, as the complex hierarchies and webs of dependencies that gave form to African societies were swept away. Unlike Europeans who crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—even those coerced as indentured servants, debtors, or criminals—there would be almost no possibility of going back, no connections to relatives and friends in their homeland, and no aspirations for a brighter future. Perhaps for that reason, most shipboard rebellions took place within sight of the African coast. Once land fell from view, the captives’ appreciation of their separation from everything they knew and loved deepened. The effect was devastating. As one observer noted, “All cried very much at going away from their home and friends, some of them saying they would kill themselves.”²⁴

The violence and horror of isolation soon yielded to an even more pervasive companion. As the sharks that trailed the slave ships well knew, death was a universal presence aboard the slave ship. Its ubiquity was matched only by its variety, as men and women sickened from disease, dehydration, and the ever-present effects of the rolling yaw of the ship. Many died. The damp, dank, crowded holds spawned endless varieties of deadly afflictions. Children, whose mortality exceeded that of adults, fared particularly poorly. Although mortality rates of those crossing the Atlantic improved over time, on average more than one in seven Africans who boarded a slave ship did not leave alive. The count was generally higher among men than women and higher still among children of both sexes. Slave ships left a trail of dead bodies across the Atlantic.²⁵

For those who survived, few escaped some kind of disability or illness. Fevers from a variety of diseases to which Africans had no immunity as well as crippling dysentery—the feared bloody flux—were a fate shared by almost all aboard the ship at one time or another. The numerous pathogens that accompanied tainted water exacerbated the effects of the various contagions. These, in turn, were multiplied by the primitive medical care offered by the ship’s physician, who might be a barber by training. The emaciated condition and deranged psyches of those who disembarked on the west side of the Atlantic were a measure of the frightful costs of the transatlantic slave trade.

After weeks at sea, the routine became familiar. Days and nights blurred in the darkened holds so that the captives could no longer distinguish the two. Packed between decks with hardly enough room to move or even sit, the slaves’ muscles stiffened and their minds numbed as the unrelenting odor of sweat, urine, and excrement generated by the dozens—sometimes hundreds—of men and women stuffed into small, unventilated compartments overwhelmed all. The stench was unforgettable. “Such a salutation in my nostrils ... I had never experienced in my life,” remembered one survivor. Equally unsettling were the sounds—the groans of the dying, the snap of the lash, the creak of the ship itself. Amid the ordeal came the daily ration of foul water, hardtack, and nondescript stews of yams and palm oil with a small piece of salted meat hardly made more palatable by a shot of rum. The only break from the putrid air and darkness was few moments on deck, where slaves—squinting at the light and savoring a sea breeze—took a silent count of who had survived yet another day. Then came the forced “dance”—the captain’s pathetic attempt to keep the slaves’ bodies limber—always under the watchful eye of armed men, fearful that the slaves’ brief release from their confinement would spark rebellion.²⁶

But if the routine grew familiar, it also grew more depressing, and a deep melancholy blanketed the captives as even the most sanguine became resigned to their fate. The sense of hopelessness increased as the ship sailed west. Some captives—distracted by the violence, weakened by malnutrition, sickened by the primitive sanitation, and crazed by lack of water—were determined to destroy themselves. They waited for the right moment and threw themselves into the sea and the waiting sharks. When the crew—determined to protect its valued cargo—blocked the way with nets and other barriers, slaves starved themselves. The crew force-fed some, employing the speculum oris, a diabolical device designed to hold the slave’s mouth open while some gruel was poured down his or her throat. Others were beaten into submission. But having lost the will to live, many slaves were determined to die, and they did.²⁷

Captive women faced special dangers. Although rarely shackled and often housed above deck, enslaved women found themselves prostituted to their captors. Ottobah Cugoano, who endured the Middle Passage in the eighteenth century, recalled that “it was common for the dirty filthy sailors to take the African women and lie upon their bodies.” Officers and crew believed sexual access to the enslaved women to be simply one of their prerogatives. Some captains issued strict orders against dalliances with captives; others partook in the raping, taking multiples “wives” from among the captive women. Vulnerable and available, women, in the words of one captain, “[a]fforded us abundance of recreation.” Surrounded by sexual predators, with but small means to protect themselves, they became subject to outrageous abuse on their person. Although women—in large measure because of their superior ability to retain water—survived the Middle Passage better than men, the scars were deep.²⁸

At no time in the long history of slavery were slaves more at the mercy of their captors than during the Middle Passage. Yet, linked together by a shared determination to survive, black men and women found small ways to control their own destinies. If the enormous differences in power between themselves and their captors left enslaved Africans little room to negotiate, their very desperation forced them to try. Slaves scrutinized the captain and crew, searching for some evidence of empathy in the hard-bitten men who lorded over them. Slavers, despite their monopoly on force, understood even they could not rely on coercion alone. They searched for collaborators who might serve as the captain’s eyes and ears below deck in return for some small shard of privilege. Slavers also enlisted “guardians” chosen from the castle slaves who served a similar function in the barracoons. They purchased others precisely for this purpose, generally from among captive peoples with a long history of animosity against those aboard the slave ship. Slaves from the Gold Coast thus were enrolled to control slaves from the Windward Coast and vice versa. Guardians were dressed in the symbols of European superiority—trousers, blouses, and caps—and given the badges of their office—whips, special foods, and other advantages—to set them apart from those chained below. But like the slaves they lorded over, they too were sold upon reaching the Americas.²⁹

The tight quarters pushed captives and crews together and afforded the opportunity to know each other as human beings rather than as master and slave. Occasionally captives found patrons among members of the crew—many of whom had been forcibly impressed into slaving—who may have recognized similarities between the slaves’ circumstances and their own. With nothing to offer but themselves, sex became a commodity that might be traded. From such exchanges, slaves secured water, food, or protection that could make the difference between life and death. Relations between captives and crew—however conditional and opportunistic—gave enslaved Africans some inkling of the possible divisions between the crew and their officers, and the officers and their captain. When such divisions manifested themselves, the captives seized the moment, turning them to their advantage as they could. In one instance, slaves joined the crew’s mutiny; in another, a ship captain armed the enslaved against marauding pirates or privateers. Captives sometimes benefited from their cooperation, but the advantages were small and fleeting. If they were promised freedom, the promises were rarely kept. Perhaps such cooperation was only a measure of the slaves’ desperation.³⁰

Enslaved men and women turned to their fellow captives for support, but conditions below deck hardly promoted solidarity. Tempers flared in the tight quarters, as the enslaved struggled among themselves for space, water, and food. Captives squabbled endlessly. Shipboard alliances among men and women of many diverse polities who spoke many languages and who frequently belonged to nations with histories of animosity to one another did not come automatically or easily. Often collaboration with slavers as an informer was easier—and more rewarding—than joining together with one’s fellows. Slavers depended upon these collaborators as much as they did their own guns. When “the Jellofes [Jolofs, or perhaps Wolofs] rose,” according to one report, “the Bambaras sided with the Master.”³¹

But as the inevitability of a common future became clear, the captives found reason to ally themselves. Confederations born of shared anguish and pain made impossible situations more bearable, as captives bolstered each other’s spirits, shared food, and nursed one another through bouts of nausea, fever, and dysentery. “I have seen them,” reported one ship captain, “when their allowance happened to be short, divide the last morsel of meat amongst each other thread by thread.”³² Small acts of kindness provided the basis for resistance, and a new order slowly took shape below deck. Sullen men and women began to forge a new language, from knowing gestures, a few shared words, and a desperate desire for human companionship. New languages—some of which had emerged from shared vocabularies of various African tongues and the common experience of African enslavement—gave birth to pidgins and then creole languages. Men and women with an ear for language took the lead in this new multilingualism, and others soon followed, as the captives shared a need to communicate.³³

The talk was not without purpose. The enslaved watched their captors carefully, studying their routines and habits so that they ultimately knew more about their captors than their captors knew about them. They awaited their chance, and when it arrived, they struck their enslavers hard. About one in ten slave ships faced some kind of unrest, and no slave trader—whether captains or crew—lived without fear of revolt. Most such uprisings failed, and punishment was swift and unforgiving. But even those who watched the proceeding in silence learned powerful lessons. Shipboard alliances marked the beginnings of new solidarities.³⁴

Nothing more fully reflected the nascent solidarities than the sounds emanating from the ship’s bottom. “Men sing their Country Songs,” reported one slave captain, “and the Boys dance to amuse them.” When they were brought up from below deck, enslaved women joined them singing in the call-and-response pattern that would become a staple of African American music by which performance created collectivity by incorporating all voices. While slavers encouraged singing for their own reasons, the most forthright admitted their ignorance of the meaning of the songs. Those who did, however, identified themes of place and movement, of the loss of a homeland and the migration into the unknown. “In their songs,” observed abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, “they call upon their lost Relations and Friends, they bid adieu to their Country, they recount the Luxuriance of their native soil, and the happy Days they have spent there.” But then they turned to their future and “their separation from friends and country.” Movement and place—the first plaintive utterances of the main themes of African American life—were sounded even before the ships sighted American shores.³⁵ These first sounds of the contrapuntal narrative would be echoed again and again in the centuries that followed.

The first men and women of African descent arrived in mainland North America in the sixteenth century, often accompanying European explorers. For the next century or so, they trickled onto the continent in small numbers, often not directly from Africa but from Europe, the Caribbean islands, or other parts of the Atlantic littoral. Later they would be dubbed “Atlantic Creoles” because of their origins along the ocean that linked Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Many of these newcomers spoke the language of their enslaver and were familiar with the religions, commercial conventions, and systems of jurisprudence of the various nations of the Atlantic. Entering frontier societies in which many Europeans also labored in some form of unfreedom, black men and women employed their knowledge of the Atlantic world to integrate themselves into the European settlements, working alongside Europeans and Native Americans in a variety of mixed agricultural and artisan production. Likewise, they joined churches, participated in exchange economies, and formed families much like other settlers, free and unfree.³⁶

With the advent of the plantation in mainland North America, the nature of slavery changed yet again. The beginnings of plantation production—tobacco in the Chesapeake in the late seventeenth century, rice in the low country in the early eighteenth century, sugar and then cotton in the Southern interior in the nineteenth century—increased the level of violence, exploitation, and brutality. Slaves worked harder, propelling their owners to new, previously unimagined heights of wealth and power. Slaveowners expanded their plantations and demanded more and more slaves, as slaves proved to be an extraordinarily valuable asset in themselves. Not only were they workers, but they reproduced themselves, adding to the owners’ wealth. Rather than arriving in ones and twos with other cargo from the Atlantic, boatloads of captives—generally drawn from the African interior—crossed the ocean.³⁷

Slaves imported directly from Africa—distinguished from Atlantic Creoles—first landed in large numbers in the Chesapeake during the last decades of the seventeenth century. Following the codification of chattel bondage in the 1660s, the new African arrivals slowly replaced European and African indentured servants as the main source of plantation labor. Between 1675 and 1695, some 3,000 enslaved black men and women arrived in Maryland and Virginia, mostly from Africa. During the last five years of the century, Chesapeake tobacco planters purchased more African slaves than they had in the previous twenty. The number of black people in the Chesapeake region, almost all of them derived directly from Africa, expanded rapidly, particularly on the estates of the great tobacco planters. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Africans composed a majority of the enslaved population.³⁸

The number of Africans in Maryland and Virginia increased rapidly during the first third of the eighteenth century. Chesapeake planters purchased nearly 8,000 African slaves between 1700 and 1710, and the proportion of the Chesapeake’s black population born in Africa shot ever upward. Another 13,000 landed in the 1720s, and the transformation of Virginia and Maryland into slave societies sped forward with increasing velocity in the 1730s. During that decade, the number of forced African immigrants averaged over 2,000 annually and sometimes rose to twice that number, so that by 1740 enslaved black people—again, most of them Africans—constituted some 40 percent of the population in parts of the Chesapeake. Although black people never challenged the whites’ numerical dominance in the region, they achieved majorities in a few localities. For many European settlers, it seemed like the Chesapeake would “some time or other be confirmed by the name of New Guinea.”³⁹

By midcentury, the majority of enslaved men and women in the Chesapeake had never seen Africa. Slaves in the Chesapeake, in the words of one European observer, proved “very prolifick among themselves.” Despite the long hours of work by slaves, by the 1730s births to slave women outnumbered imports, and the black population was increasing naturally at the annual rate of 3 percent, a rate higher than most contemporary European societies. Although transatlantic slavers continued to deliver their cargoes to the great estuary, the proportion of Africans declined as the indigenous African American population increased. The growth of the African American or creole population reduced the slaveowners’ need for African imports, and fewer than 10,000 African slaves entered the region in the 1750s. At the start of the Revolution, the first passage was over in the Chesapeake, and the region was no longer an immigrant society. A native-born people began to sink deep roots into the soils of mainland North America.⁴⁰

The slave trade continued, however, in the low country of South Carolina and Georgia. There the forced migration from Africa followed a trajectory similar to that of the Chesapeake, but it started later and continued longer. As a result, more than twice as many Africans—upward of 250,000—entered the low country than the Chesapeake. Sullivan’s Island, a tiny quarantine station in Charlestown harbor, became the Ellis Island of black America.⁴¹

The entry of Africans began slowly in the low country, as it had in the Chesapeake, but it increased far more rapidly. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, slavers were delivering more Africans to South Carolina than to Virginia, and Africans constituted the majority of the low country’s population. African arrivals declined sharply following the Stono Rebellion in 1739, as fears of insurrection led planters to restrict the trade. But greed soon overwhelmed fear, and slave importation resumed during the 1740s and exceeded anything previous. During the 1760s, South Carolina and Georgia planters imported 20,000 slaves. Although importation again slackened during the American Revolution, at war’s end the pent-up demand for slaves pushed importation to new heights. Lowland slaveowners purchased more than 100,000 Africans between 1787, when South Carolina reopened the African trade, and 1808, when the legal trade to the United States ended. Thereafter, American planters continued to smuggle slaves into the country, although the illegal imports composed but a small fraction of the slave population.⁴²

With the slave trade open and the influx of saltwater slaves—that is, newly imported Africans—nearly continuous, black men and women in the lowlands had great difficulty forming families and raising children. But, as in the Chesapeake, the number of men and women slowly came into balance. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the black population of the low country began to reproduce itself and African Americans began to outnumber Africans. But even as the African American population grew, it did so in tandem with newly arrived Africans. At midcentury, when enslaved black people in the Chesapeake had few opportunities to converse with other Africans, Africans and African Americans knew each other well in the low country. They lived in close proximity, worked together, frequently married, and often stood shoulder to shoulder against their owners. Their intimacy spoke directly to the unique development of African and African American life in the low country.

Slavers also deposited their cargoes in other parts of mainland North America—New England, the Middle Colonies, the Floridas, and the lower Mississippi Valley. Everywhere planters preferred so-called men-boys and women-girls, young adults whom they could put to work immediately and who would reproduce the labor force. “Negroes from 15 to 25 years of Age sute this market best,” observed Charlestown’s largest slave trader. Among the young, planters desired men over women. The male majority was slightly more pronounced in South Carolina, where men outnumbered women more than two to one, constituting two-thirds of the Africans imported between 1720 and 1774. But the disproportion of men elsewhere on the mainland was not far behind. Although the balance of slave imports changed over time, as long as the trade remained open, the black population remained younger and more male than that of the white population.⁴³

The movement of African nationalities was not nearly as obvious. With the regularization of commercial relations between European and African merchants, slave captains studied their markets on both sides of the Atlantic. They repeatedly returned to the same ports, delivering the merchandise Africans desired and purchasing the slaves their American customers preferred. In time, European slave traders became specialists, in some measure to meet the demands of their customers on both sides of the Atlantic whose preferences grew increasingly well defined.

Such preferences meant that the national and familial divisions within African society sometimes survived the Middle Passage. These divisions manifested themselves in the supply that reached deep into the interior of Africa. In local interior markets or fairs, where the enslaved had been initially auctioned, slaves desired on the coast brought higher prices and thus made some individuals targets for enslavement. Warlords—sometimes heads of state and sometimes freebooting thugs—thus chose their victims carefully, with a fine understanding of the market. They also had an appreciation for the vulnerability of certain peoples. Eager to maximize their profits in an increasingly competitive market, they too directed particular peoples to particular ports.⁴⁴

While hardly in a position to control their own fate, Africans—many of them potential captives—also influenced who would be shipped across the Atlantic. From the first, would-be captives resisted, banding together, fortifying villages, and even establishing client relationships with the enemies of their enemy to protect themselves. By playing one slave raider against another, Africans reduced their vulnerability, at least to the degree that raiders left them alone. As the full dimensions of the transatlantic slave trade become known, resistance stiffened. As a general rule, slavers avoided those who fought back.⁴⁵

Slaveowners in the Americas likewise influenced the forced migration, particularly in places where the number of imports was large and the trade remained open for long periods. Having seen tens of thousands of slaves, planters became extraordinarily opinionated about the slaves they wanted, based upon their understanding of the physique, skills, culture, and even food preferences of various African peoples. Yet while these opinions were often shallow stereotypes resting upon crude understandings of African nationality—Angolans ran away; Calabars destroyed themselves; Coromantees revolted—such assumptions nonetheless carried great weight. In the low country, buyers emphasized their preference for Gambian people (whom they called Coromantees) above all others. “Gold Coast or Gambia’s are best, next to them the Windward Coast are prefer’d to Angola’s,” observed a South Carolina slave trader in describing the most salable mixture in 1755. “There must not be a Calabar amongst them.”⁴⁶

Pressures and preferences on both sides of the Atlantic determined, to a considerable degree, which enslaved Africans went where and when, populating the mainland with unique combinations of African peoples and creating, in some small measure, distinctive regional variations in the Americas. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, captives from Senegambia and the Bight of Biafra (present-day Nigeria) constituted about three-quarters of the slaves entering the Chesapeake. Even within the Chesapeake, various polities came to inhabit different regions, with Africans from north of the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) disembarking in the Potomac Valley and those from south of the Bight of Biafra in Virginia’s York and Upper James river basins. The proportion changed with time, as many more slaves arrived from central Africa. But over the course of the eighteenth century, Igbo peoples constituted the majority of African slaves in Virginia and Maryland, so much so that some historians renamed colonial Virginia “Igbo Land.”⁴⁷

A different pattern emerged in low-country South Carolina and Georgia, where slaves from central Africa predominated from the beginning of large-scale importation. Although imports from the Bight of Biafra entered the low country in considerable numbers in the 1740s and those from the Windward Coast in the 1760s, Angolan and Kongo peoples maintained their commanding presence among the forced immigrants even as the slave population of the low country grew more diverse. After the Revolution, the pattern changed again, as central Africans once more dominated the new arrivals. If Virginia was Igbo Land, the low country might be likened to a New Angola.⁴⁸

The reasons were many. Nationality or ethnicity in Africa did not follow neat geographic boundaries. Even before the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade, the people of Africa had been on the move. Numerous peoples—many of them multilingual, embracing different beliefs, and engaging in a multiplicity of domestic arrangements—shared the physical space that became catchment areas for slave traders. A raid on a particular village necessarily took many different peoples. On the long march to the coast, some slaves died, others escaped, and still others were sold locally. Meanwhile, traders captured or purchased others, and all added to the heterogeneous mixture of peoples lodged in the seaside barracoons.⁴⁹

As traders transferred slaves from shore to ship, the process of mixing people continued and even intensified. Few ships took on a full contingent in a single port and sailed for the Americas. Most moved from place to place, collecting slaves as they could, rarely purchasing more than a handful at a time. During the eighteenth century, slave ships often cruised along the African coast for months before obtaining a full cargo. Trawling for slaves along the Gold Coast in 1712, the Sarah Bonadventure collected some one hundred slaves over five months. Its officers boarded their captives in groups of two to eight, hence creating a diversity in the holds. In 1787, the captain of the Hudibras purchased 150 men and women along the coast of west Africa; among them were “fourteen different tribes or nations.” The Babel of languages emanating from the ship spoke to the diversity of African peoples that slave traders carried to the Americas.⁵⁰

While most slave traders disembarked from specific African ports to land at specific American ones, they might also stop in numerous places along the way. At these stopovers, commitment to the most lucrative deal encouraged traders to sell a few slaves and purchase others. Jumbling their cargos offered an advantage that slave traders appreciated, for they understood that slaves who spoke the same language and shared the same culture might more easily act in concert.⁵¹

On the American side of the Atlantic, not all slave purchasers knew or cared much about the origins of their slaves. For many, youth, health, and fitness mattered more than origins. “If they are likely young negroes, it’s not a farthing matter where they come from,” asserted one Virginia slaveowner in 1725, articulating a view common among Chesapeake tobacco planters. Moreover, even if they wished for specific slaves, the most knowledgeable planters could not bend the international market to their will, as the market for slaves was constantly shifting and beyond the control of even the most powerful. Despite their stated preferences, planters often received precisely the slaves they disliked. While lowland planters desired Gambians from the west coast of Africa, they generally received Angolans and Kongos from central Africa.⁵²

The barriers to transatlantic cultural continuity were enormous for slaves sent to mainland North America. Unlike free European immigrants, few kinfolk and fellow villagers followed one another—what historians call “chain migrations”—from points of African departure to American destination. Over time, the slave trade rudely mixed peoples of different geographic origins, nationalities, language groups, and religious beliefs. The predominance of men and teenagers and the absence of family groups further militated against cultural cohesion. Within a given plantation population, newly arrived slaves could at best find fragments of their previous lives. Only on rare occasions might they discover a fellow villager or kinsman, as later European immigrants would find a paisano or a landsman. No friend or relative greeted the newly arrived Africans, offered a helping hand, or provided insight into the strange and forbidding world of the plantation.⁵³

Once disembarked, new anxieties compensated for whatever relief African peoples gained from the end of the seaboard journey. Indeed the shock of arrival only repeated the trauma of African enslavement. Staggering to their feet, bodies still bent from their weeks below deck, trembling with apprehension, the captives were again fitted with shackles—a painful welcome to their new homeland. They again confronted the auction block and the prospect of being poked and prodded by strange white men speaking strange languages.

New owners tried to sunder whatever connections survived the Middle Passage and assured that those made anew among shipmates did not survive long. At the docksides, newly arrived Africans were often sold singly or in small groups. When great planters and merchants purchased slaves in large lots, they generally resold them in small ones. That the majority of American slaveholders owned only a handful of slaves assured that the heterogeneous assemblages of peoples who crossed the Atlantic together had little opportunity to remain together. As the new arrivals were dispersed across the North American countryside, they individually confronted men determined to demonstrate their mastery. Having selected from among the frightened, tired men and women who crossed the Atlantic, Robert “King” Carter, perhaps the largest slaveholder in eighteenth-century Virginia, began the process of initiating newly arrived Africans to their American captivity. “I nam’d them here & by their names we can always know what sizes they are of & I am sure we repeated them so often to them that every one knew their names & would readily answer to them.” Carter then forwarded his slaves to a satellite plantation or quarter, where his overseer repeated the process, taking “care that the negros both men & women I sent ... always go by the names we gave them.” In the months that followed, the drill continued, with Carter again joining in the process of stripping newly arrived Africans of the signature of their identity and reminding them, at every opportunity, of their subordination.⁵⁴

Marched in chains to some isolated, backwoods plantation, forced to labor long hours at unfamiliar tasks, enslaved black men and women began their lives in mainland North America. It was a grim existence, as their debilitating work regime, drafty shelters, and bland rations invited a familiar visitor. Within months of arrival, many of the new immigrants—ridiculed as “outlandish” by their owners—were dead. In all, perhaps as many as one-quarter to one-third would perish in the first year from overwork, exposure, and diseases to which they had but scant resistance. A few survivors took to the woods and others tried to paddle east in a futile effort to retrace their path across the Atlantic. Still others resisted more directly, assaulting overseers with fists, knives, and axes, burning barns, and occasionally organizing rebellions. Their efforts were met with overwhelming force backed, when necessary, by the local constabulary: the lash and pillory for first-time offenders; dismemberment for those who persisted; death for those who were deemed incorrigible. Against this carnival of violence, many simply collapsed and a few destroyed themselves. Most accepted the grim reality, turned inward, did their owners’ bidding, and waited for their moment. The repeated shocks—African enslavement, the Middle Passage, and American captivity—took their toll.⁵⁵

Lonely and disoriented, transplanted Africans lived amid a Babel of languages. Linguistic isolation was especially painful and depressing. His shipmates having been sold, Olaudah Equiano found “no person to speak to that I could understand. In this state, I was constantly grieving and pining, and wishing for death rather than any thing else.” Thus many new arrivals struggled for comprehension, not so much to understand the orders shouted by their owner or his representatives—who had their own ways of making their wishes known—but to break the silence that isolated them.

Fluency was achieved in many different ways. Some slaves had an ear for language and became considerable linguists as they mastered various languages of the New World. When he ran off from Philadelphia, one Joseph Boudron, who had been born in Guadeloupe, but lived in New York and Charlestown, spoke “good English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.” Others participated in the creation of pidgins or trading languages and later so-called creoles or more formal languages that slaves forged from the cacophony of African, European, and Native American tongues. From just this process the Gullah language emerged in low-country South Carolina. But the creation of full-blown creole languages were rare occurrences; in the case of Gullah, it was the product of the unique circumstances of low-country slavery: the black majority, the open slave trade, the planters’ withdrawal to the rice ports, and the isolation of plantation life. Elsewhere on the continent, where the special circumstances of the low country did not exist, African slaves bent to their owners’ language, adding their own intonation, vocabulary, and sometimes even syntax to English, Dutch, Spanish, or French, thus making the foreign familiar.⁵⁶

Once the barrier of language had been breached, the business of making the foreign familiar proceeded along a broad front, as Africans began to create a society of their own. Transplanted Africans began to master the countryside, form friendships, and piece together new lineages from real and fictive or adoptive kin. “Families” derived from the occasional blood connections that survived the Atlantic crossing, as well as from shipmates and new friends who were elevated to the status of brothers and sisters. Having learned that members of his nation were held captive on a nearby plantation, a newly arrived South Carolina slave set off “to visit a countryman of his.” To these countrymen, others were added as newly arrived Africans joined together. Upon occasion, friendships created in the holds of slave ships conquered old enmities. One Neptune—whose body was scarred by “many small Marks or Dots running from both Shoulders down to his Waistband” and whose teeth were “fil’d sharp”—fled George Washington’s Dogue Run Quarter with his shipmate Cupid and another whom Washington called their “Countryman.” Runaway advertisements from various parts of the mainland confirm that Kongos fled with Wolofs; Calabars with Coromantees.⁵⁷

The thicket of connections grew as the newly arrived explored their environs, traveling at night or—if released from work on Sunday—in a single day to meet with old friends or make new ones. Before long, such ventures became regular outings. Try as they might, slaveholders could not prevent enslaved men and women from “rambling” and gathering, according to one frustrated master, in “considerable Numbers of Negroes together in some Certain places.” Those certain places—plantations with a compliant overseer or hidden forest clearings—became the loci of black life. Funerals became especially important occasions, since the burial of the dead was such an elemental human rite that slaveowners rarely forbade them. But there were other occasions, as men and women from various estates exchanged ideas, shared memories, honored the passing of a respected elder, celebrated weddings, or marked a child’s coming of age. Whatever the initial impetus, such occasions came to serve every purpose from the sacred to the profane. If the forced immigrants sometimes reinforced their connections to the Old World by reenacting ancient rites and affirming customs, they were also mixing the many cultures of Africa, allowing them to emerge in new combinations. The sounds of these gatherings—the mixture of languages and music—signaled the arrival of something new.⁵⁸

From their experiences in the New World and memories of the Old, enslaved Africans dispersed along the periphery of mainland North America constructed African America. The new society took a variety of forms depending upon the transplanted Africans’ origins, the time of their arrival, their numbers, and the site of their enslavement—as well as the culture of their owners and the character of their localized American experience. Such differences created distinctive immigrant cultures in the North, the Chesapeake region, low-country Carolina and Georgia, and the Mississippi Valley. Indeed, within these broad regions still finer differences could be found, such as between black life in New England and the Middle Colonies, the backcountry and tidewater of the Chesapeake, and urban New Orleans and its hinterland. Even in the smallest hamlet, black people experienced a different slavery than those who resided in the countryside. Not only did slaves in different regions speak different languages, but even when they spoke the same language they conversed with distinctive regional intonations and dialects. Elijah, a Virginia-born fugitive, spoke “with the accent of that country,” and William, another runaway, was reported to have the “Virginia accent.” Seally, a slave sold from Maryland to South Carolina, stood out in that he too “spoke the Virginia language.”⁵⁹

Slowly, often reluctantly but inexorably, Africans and their African American descendants took root in American soil, as they made their own the land that had been forced upon them. But black people did not embrace some generic America. Rather they were connected to a particular county, parish, or even plantation. During the eighteenth century, generations of slaves lived and died in the same neighborhood and sometimes on the same estate, often surrounded by family and friends. Planters often spoke of their slaves as “born and bred” within their own families. In one Maryland county, fully three-quarters of the slaves remained on the same plantation or farm between 1776 and 1783, despite the turmoil of those years.⁶⁰

Such ties did not constitute immobility. Nowhere in mainland North American were black people frozen in one spot. Within particular locales, they were ever on the move, transacting their owners’ business and their own. Even in areas of large plantations, the boundaries of the estates proved to be remarkably porous. As carters and boatmen, they traversed the countryside, often stopping to visit relatives, trade goods, or exchange gossip. Slaveholders, while condemning the subversive effects of slave mobility, inadvertently promoted it by renting or loaning slaves to neighbors, a practice that seemed to grow during the eighteenth century. Others sent them on long-distance errands, delivering goods or messages. Sometimes such journeys kept slaves on the road for days or even weeks. Upon their return, these wayfarers carried their knowledge of the terrain back to their plantation, so that few slaves did not know something about the adjoining countryside and many had a good sense of the geography of their region even if they had never left their owner’s estate.⁶¹

In addition, the ground upon which slaves resided was hardly stable. Eighteenth-century Chesapeake planters, eager to find more productive land, steadily transferred their operations from the tidewater to the piedmont and beyond. In the Carolinas, indigo production, which had once flourished in the low country, moved to the upcountry. Northern farmers opened new lands in the Hudson Valley, northern New Jersey, and western Pennsylvania, and settlements in the Mississippi Valley crept northward. But the absence of transportation and communication between the North American colonies assured that Africans rarely moved from the region in which they had disembarked. To a remarkable degree, their children and grandchildren did not stray very far. According to one estimate, only a minority—about one-fifth—were removed by their owners to the new areas of production or sold to some distant place.⁶² While white free men and women became famous for pulling up stakes in search of some new opportunity, slaves remained in place.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, black people became increasingly identified with place. A Maryland slave scheduled to be sold across the Potomac “declar’d Several times that he will Loose his life, or had rather Submit to Death then go to Virginia to leave his Wife and Children.” Slaveholders recognized their slaves’ attachment to the land of their birth. As Thomas Jefferson noted, the threat of deportation to “any other quarter so distant as never more to be heard of among us” was a far more fearsome weapon than the lash. The peril of physical removal became the most powerful weapon in the masters’ arsenal, precisely because they appreciated the slaves’ deep attachment to place. Slave masters employed the threat of deportation carefully, saving this terrifying weapon for only the most intractable rebels.⁶³

The transfer of black men and women often became a subject of intense negotiations between themselves and their owners. Rather than chance the disruption—and incur the anger—which the movement of established residents entailed, slaveholders generally preferred to send newly arrived Africans to the upcountry quarters. For transplanted Africans and their African American children, the dense web of kinship created over the course of more than a century of American captivity endowed place with an ever-deepening meaning. In low-country Carolina, as the slaveholdings expanded—with estates in the rice region averaging more than a hundred slaves—the plantation often became a series of extended families. In the Chesapeake region and the towns and cities along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, where units were generally smaller, “broad marriages” became common. Husbands and wives, parents and children lived apart, but they were accorded visiting privileges, often on Saturday and Sunday. Visiting also allowed slaves to sustain more distant kin connections, with aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews, as well as with brothers and sisters. By the middle of the eighteenth century, enslaved black people lived surrounded by kin connections.⁶⁴

Patterns of flight revealed the increasingly dense network of kinship and friendship. Fugitives looked first to their relatives. The proclivity of runaways to find refuge with kin forced slaveowners to follow their slaves’ family connections. When Cyrus and his wife, Dorinda, fled their South Carolina plantation in 1759, their owner recited Cyrus’s genealogy in an advertisement he hoped would lead to their capture. Dorinda “has a mother and a sister at the honourable William Bull, esqr’s plantation on the Ashley-river a sister at the late Thomas Hohnan’s and several relations at doct. William Elliott’s, and many others; amongst whom theire is great reason to believe both are harboured.” Slaveholders tried to constrain such networks by forbidding slaves to marry off the plantation, but to little effect.⁶⁵

The dense network of kinship and friendship also became the primary link that fastened slaves to place. By the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves—according to the Quaker John Woolman—“married after their own way.” While slave masters claimed the mantle of the patriarch, slave parents took control over their own children. They named their sons and daughters—having wrestled that perogative from their owners—after some worthy forebear, generally a father or grandfather, although sometimes also female relations. Slave parents protected their children and, as best they could, guided their future prospects. A system of inheritance allowed parents to give their children “a start.” Slave children also began to follow their parents into trades, so that both sons of Cooper Joe on Charles Carroll’s great Doohoregan Manor in Maryland were also barrel makers. In a like fashion, house servants secured positions for their children within the house. Children, for their part, succored their elderly parents, so much so that Landon Carter—one of the wealthiest planters in Virginia—could only envy his elderly slave Nassaw for the respect accorded him by his own children. While Carter received only disdain from his own children, Nassaw’s progeny honored their father.⁶⁶

As African American slaves regularized protocols of courtship, marriage, and even divorce during the eighteenth century, ties to place deepened. Marriages between slaves became not simply the joining of two people, but the expansion of a lineage. Members of extended kin groups—which often included fictive as well as blood kin—were expected to assist one another and, when possible, advance a common interest. Such assistance took a variety of forms, from a good word with the master to concealing a fugitive. Where slaves were able to pass their possessions from one generation to another, the material linkages stabilized home life and strengthened neighborhood ties. Slave gardens and provision grounds, handicrafts and other various small bits of property affirmed the slaves’ ability to participate in the marketplace, negotiate with free people—including their owners—and, upon occasion, collect wages like free men and women. Acquired at great personal cost, such holdings—although infinitesimal compared to their owners’ wealth—created responsibilities and entitlements, which in turn rested on both obligations and expectations. Inheritance bolstered the family relations.

The visible marks of identity also reinforced the deepening sense of place. As filed teeth and ritual scarification disappeared from the slave quarter, other forms of bodily adornment emerged. With limited resources but seemingly limitless ingenuity, enslaved black men and women improvised physical repertoires from the masters’ and mistresses’ discarded finery and small pieces of metal, glass, leather, and animal bone. Clothing and the way it was draped, hats and kerchiefs and the way they were worn, and—especially—hair and the way it was prepared became reflections of self, markers of social standing, and evidence of the emergence of a variety of African American aesthetics. Most of these developed within the Americas, although they drew on African practices or the memory of African practices. By the middle of the eighteenth century, astute observers could categorize distinctive regionally defined styles much as they identified different African American dialects.⁶⁷

Physical appearance, like kin and property, set the boundaries of neighborhoods and transformed localities into places with which black men and women identified. Such boundaries—social as well as physical—defined community membership, both who was of the community as well as who was not. Slaveowners appreciated the unity and divisions of black society. They exploited existing fissures within the slaves’ ranks and instigated new ones by bestowing favor on some slaves at the expense of others. But the owners’ understanding paled in comparison to that of the slave.

As Africans and African Americans worked together, and intermarried, the web of friendship and kinship bridged the divide that once separated them. In parts of the Americas, much was made of the differences between bozales and criollos, and some like the Spanish and Portuguese even set both apart from ladinos, men and women of foreign birth who had some knowledge of the masters’ culture. According to one keen observer of Barbadian society, black men and women born in the Americas “value themselves much on being born in Barbadoes,” “despise” newly arrived Africans, and “hold them in the utmost contempt, stiling them ‘salt-water Negroes’ and ‘Guiney Birds.’ ” Such differences also appeared on the mainland, along with evidence that Africans returned the condescension as immigrant Africans and native-born African Americans struggled among themselves. On one South Carolina rice plantation, African slaves refused to join a collective singing and instead set to “clapping their hands ... and distorting their frames into the most unnatural figures ... emiting the most hideous noises in their dancing.” Somewhat later, Charles Ball, a Maryland slave, remembered that his African-born grandfather “always expressed great contempt for his fellow slaves, they being ... a mean and vulgar race, quite beneath his rank, and the dignity of his former station.”⁶⁸

The rapid emergence of an African American majority—even in the low country, where the transatlantic slave trade remained open and active—diminished the distinction between those born on the east side from those born on the west side of the Atlantic. Aside from occasional references to saltwater slaves, such terminology as bozales and criollos had little relevance in mainland North America, for either slaveholders or slaves. It rarely appears in the utterances of either. The African American majority was quick to incorporate new arrivals into its ranks, integrating them into their families and sharing their knowledge of the peculiar circumstances of their American captivity. Indeed, the rarity of Africans made them an object of veneration among some African Americans. “[A]mong the very old slaves whom he had known as a boy,” recalled a survivor of slavery in 1936, were Africans “looked up to, respected, and feared as witches, wizzards, and magic-workers. These either brought their ‘learnin’ with them from Africa or absorbed it from their immediate African forebears.”⁶⁹ African and African American had become one.

The music emanating from the slave quarter provided yet another signal that black people had made a place for themselves on the west side of the Atlantic. The haunting groans that slave traders heard rising from the holds of Atlantic transports mixed with the musical forms that have since been identified with west Africa: multipart rhythmic structures, repetitive verses, and call-and-response, in which a lead singer and a chorus addressed one another with a variety of melodic embellishments. These performances were accompanied by drumming, hand clapping, and foot stomping, and often played out in a circle that moved with counterclockwise motion. While slaveholders denigrated them as mere “shouts,” black people adopted the name. By the middle of the eighteenth century, and probably before, such west African forms had become inextricably linked with European melodies and European instrumentation, most particularly fiddles and horns of various sorts as well as a stringed instrument that was the precursor to the banjo. A 1736 account of an African American festival in New York described slaves dancing to the “hollow Sound of a Drum, made of the Truck of a hollow Tree ... the grating rattling Noise of Pebles or Shells in a small Basket”—along with the ever-present “bangers.”⁷⁰

The slaves’ music was only one indicator of the relationship that the rising generation of African Americans had forged with the land and its people. While newly arrived Africans had been assigned the meanest of drudgery, by the end of the eighteenth century some black men and women—almost always African Americans—escaped mind-numbing field labor. They began to move into positions of responsibility as drivers, foremen, and artisans. Taken as a whole, their skill level increased steadily. In many places, one-quarter to one-third of the slave men labored as skilled workers. Others drove wagons, sailed boats, and guided ferries, allowing them to move freely around the countryside. Their familiarity with the roads and trails, rivers and streams confirms how the strange land had become a familiar one.⁷¹

As African Americans—men and women who had no direct knowledge of Africa and rarely bore marks of ritual scarification or uttered more than a few words of their parents’ native tongue—moved into positions of leadership, black society underwent a profound transformation. Unlike their parents and grandparents, these American-born men and women—“artful,” “sensible,” and “smooth tongued”—spoke the language of their enslavers, knew the countryside, and often practiced skilled crafts. They understood the slaveowners’ religion even when they rejected it, and their laws even when the judicial system was arrayed against them. Linguistic fluency, knowledge of the landscape, and skills enabled African Americans to counter the exploitation and secure a measure of control over their lives. Whether achieving the ability to name their own children or the rights to a garden, such small victories fed the desire to be free of slavery. If their parents and grandparents had survived the shock of African enslavement, the Middle Passage, and captivity in mainland America, the new generation of African Americans wanted something more. As they replaced aging African fathers and mothers at the top of black society, African Americans searched for cracks in the edifice of slavery. They were not long in finding them.

Changes in American society in the last third of the eighteenth century sped the search. Some of these changes derived from the transformation of the American economy, as small grain production replaced tobacco in the Chesapeake region, new techniques of tidal cultivation supplanted old inland production of rice in the low country, and trade and commerce expanded in the Atlantic ports, particularly in the Northern colonies. These changes, although initiated by slaveowners for their own benefit, inadvertently gave slaves additional control over their own lives. The decline of tobacco reduced the need for season-long labor in the Chesapeake region. Wheat and other small grains required systematic labor only at planting and harvest, which in turn created a seeming surplus of enslaved workers. Slaveholders sold some slaves but hired others and permitted yet others to hire themselves. The new economy also required many more skilled workers: carpenters and coopers, boatmen and wagoners, warehouse keepers and wharfingers. Such positions gave slaves new freedoms, even if they did not make them free.

An upsurge of evangelical religion created another breach in the slave regime, opening a new arena for black people to assert themselves. Believing all were equal in the eyes of God and eschewing the austere formalism and racial exclusivity of the established denominations, the sectarians welcomed black people as brothers and sisters in Christ. Many slaves rushed to the evangelical standard, attracted by the evangelicals’ egalitarian enthusiasm and the message that “Jesus Christ loved them and died for them, as well as for white people.” They soon demanded that the equality of the afterworld be extended to the here and now. To that end, some evangelicals readily joined black men and women in their opposition to slavery and, on occasion, in a commitment to full equality. While egalitarians were always in short supply, slaves nonetheless employed their evangelical connections to gain a measure of independence and occasionally freedom.⁷²

But the largest crack in the edifice of slavery came with the outbreak of revolutionary warfare, beginning with the American War for Independence and extending through the French and Haitian revolutions. Each created massive divisions within the slaveholders’ ranks, as the planter class split, initially into Patriot and Loyalist factions. Serving in the armies of one belligerent or another, slaves played master against master to their own advantage, eventually inducing commanders of both armies to offer freedom in exchange for military service. Likewise, black men and women seized the language of liberty and the ideology of equality that revolutionaries throughout the Atlantic employed to justify their cause, claiming—as did a group of Massachusetts slaves—“with all other men a Natural and Unalinble Right to that Freedom which the Grat Parent of the Unavers hath Bestowed equally on all menkind and which they have Never foruted by any compact or agreement whatever.”⁷³

As black people and their white allies denounced the hypocrisy of slavery in the land of liberty, demands for freedom echoed across the new republic. Slaves petitioned legislatures, went to court, and opened direct negotiations with their owners for freedom. Under the unrelenting assault, slavery tottered and in some places it fell, propelling large numbers of black men and women—mostly African Americans—to freedom. The Northern colonies began the liquidation of slavery as one state after another, through constitutional mandates, judicial degrees, and legislation, provided for slavery’s eventual demise. But even in the North, slavery lingered, its death delayed by gradualist measures that extended the process of emancipation over years and sometimes decades. Elsewhere freedom arrived at an even more glacial pace, as individual slaves negotiated their release from bondage by securing deeds of manumission, purchasing their liberty and that of their loved ones, or taking flight. The birth of freedom was slow, often painfully so.⁷⁴

Still, over time, the change was nothing less than revolutionary. Free people of African descent had gone from being nearly nonexistent in the early eighteenth century to being the fastest-growing segment of the American population. The number of black people enjoying freedom doubled and doubled again in the decades following the American Revolution. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, more than 100,000 black people—or more than one in ten black Americans—enjoyed freedom. The Revolution broke the coincidence between blackness and slavery. No longer could every black person be presumed a slave.⁷⁵

The sudden and spectacular expansion of the free black population initiated a massive restructuring of black life. Newly freed black people took new names, established new residences, reconstructed their families, found jobs, purchased property, and organized churches, schools, and fraternal orders along with a variety of other associations. As former slaves rebuilt their society in freedom, they revealed the complex culture that had taken root both beyond their masters’ eyes and under their noses. The names they chose, the residences in which they lived, the families they assembled, the jobs they took, the churches they attended, the associations they organized, and the music they sang all spoke to the new societies that black people created on the west side of the Atlantic.

Since the process of enslavement had begun with the loss of their African names, the reverse of this revealed how fully people of African descent had been transformed during their two-hundred-year residence in mainland North America and how deeply black people had sunk their roots into American soil. Once free, black men and women quickly sloughed off the names that identified them as slaves, jettisoning the degrading names that associated them with barnyard animals—Buster and Postilion—and the comic classic names—Hercules and Cato—that ridiculed their lowly status. But, as they searched for new names to stamp on their new identity, newly freed black men and women rarely returned to the names their forebears had carried across the Atlantic. Instead, they tied themselves to their American experience, adopting common American names. Some identified themselves with their work (Barber and Cooper), their color (Brown and Black), their aspirations (Prince and Bishop), their place of residence (Boston and York), or their status (Freeman or Liberty).⁷⁶ By the beginning of the nineteenth century, a distinctive African American culture became far more visible, with names no longer always concealed behind the facade of bondage.

To be sure, Africa maintained a presence, but in a radically new guise. While newly liberated black men and women eschewed the names of their Angolan, Kru, or Kongo ancestors, they designated the institutions they created after the continent from whence they came. Former slaves worshipped in African churches, attended African schools, joined together in African lodges, and buried their own in African cemeteries. Their two-hundred-year sojourn to mainland North America had reconstituted them into a new people, transforming their identity. In making visible the distinctive culture that had been created clandestinely in bondage, the national or ethnic affiliations enslaved peoples carried to America had disappeared entirely, either through a process of slow attenuation or deliberate termination. Ancestral affinities had no visible impact on the choice of marriage partners, child-rearing practices, funeral ceremonies, or religious affiliations. Ijo, Fulbe, Ga, Kikongo, Mandinka, Soninke, or Temne could rarely be heard on the streets of American cities.⁷⁷

The Christian church quickly became the center of free black life. While most slaves remained strangers to Christianity, free black churchmen and women began the process of bending the biblical narrative to their own purposes, identifying themselves with the Israelites of the Old Testament and the story of their deliverance from bondage. Exodus became the central text of African American Christianity, just as the Declaration of Independence had become the central text of African American politics.⁷⁸ But as free people of color embraced Christianity, the absence of the influence of African nationality in black religious life was especially striking. Most African churches were the denominational offspring of European American organizations and followed the polity and the liturgy of their denominational root. Rather than drawing upon particular African nationalities, be they Efik or Igbo, denominational affiliations appeared to follow regional differences in the development of American religious life with black Christians adhering to Protestantism in the English colonies and to Catholicism in the colonies of France and Spain. Within this framework, even more specific connections developed, as black people joined Methodists in the areas where this denomination had a strong following, and they joined Baptists in places where that church predominated. Much the same was true of the host of fraternal and benevolent societies that appeared in cities along the Atlantic seaboard. The “Union” in the African Union Society of Newport referred not to the joining together of Angolans and Wolofs and their descendants, but rather to the uneasy alliance between black Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists.⁷⁹

The African churches and the allied institutions affirmed the invention of a new nationality. It represented the place black people had made for themselves in the difficult circumstances of slavery and unequal freedom in the United States. The phalanx of African churches, Masonic temples, and benevolent associations that could be found in the cities that stretched along the periphery of North America from Boston to New Orleans revealed how people of African descent gave institutional form to their American experience. These buildings and meeting halls were not simply places to gather but geographical pinpoints that marked transformation of black life during the nearly two centuries of American captivity. The charismatic leaders, cadres of officers, finely crafted qualifications for membership, diverse constituencies, evolving political agendas, and music emanating from these institutions provided evidence that black people had taken root on the west side of the Atlantic.⁸⁰

African institutions also revealed the complexity of African American society, none more so than the church. In 1801, Richard Allen, the leader of Philadelphia’s newly established African Methodist Episcopal Church, published a hymnal for his congregation. While it drew on many standard Methodist hymns, it contained many of Allen’s own compositions, which he distinguished from the shouts or hollers that had become identified with black people. There would be no “groaning and shouting” in the African church, as such religion was “only a dream.”⁸¹

Allen’s disdain for the music of the slave quarter revealed the growing division within black society that emerged as some black people gained their freedom and sought respectability in the eyes of white Americans. Enslaved African Americans continued to elaborate just the music that Allen would suppress. The field shouts, with their forceful delivery and their individualized and improvisatory forms, mixed the sounds of Africa with those of America, sometimes chanting, sometimes moaning, and sometimes screaming the pain of bondage. In 1817, John Watson, a white Philadelphia minister, taking his cues from Allen’s Hymnal, launched his own assault on the “practice of singing in our places of worship, merry airs ... most frequently composed and sung by the illiterate Blacks of the society.” Most disturbing to Watson, they “visibly affected the religious manners of some Whites.” Yet even as white congregants embraced the new music, the infectious “merry air,” often accompanied by rhythmic clapping, was becoming the basis of a new African American genre, the spiritual.⁸²

Having successfully—if unwillingly—transplanted Africa to the coast of mainland North America, people of African descent now returned to the larger Atlantic world, initiating an African American diaspora that equaled in significance, although not in numbers, the earlier exodus from Africa. Ironically this movement back to the Atlantic demonstrated how deeply attached to mainland North America people of African descent had become, for the migrants took their language, religion, politics, and music with them.

Many of the immigrants, perhaps a majority, left in chains. Following the Revolution, Loyalist slave masters forced thousands of slaves to follow them to the British West Indies, Spanish Louisiana, the Atlantic islands, and Central America. Betraying the promise of freedom, British soldiers sold others to Barbados, Jamaica, and other sugar islands. In the states that had begun the abolition of slavery, slaveholders—determined to squeeze the last bit of profit from their human property—followed suit, selling slaves to distant places before the emancipationist legislation took effect. Post-Revolutionary movement ironically reinvigorated the slave trade.

But other black men and women traveled as a free people. While individual British officers and soldiers violated the promise of freedom, British commanders honored the commitments made by Lord Dunmore in 1775 and General Henry Clinton in 1779 to exchange military services for liberty. At war’s end, some 1,200 former slaves and free blacks retreated with British soldiers from St. Augustine, Charleston, and Savannah to New York, where they joined an additional 1,500 black Loyalists—making the total roughly 3,000—in a mass exodus to the maritime provinces of Canada. Other “Loyal Blacks”—as they soon came to call themselves—followed British troops back to England, adding substantially to the black population of Liverpool, Bristol, and especially London. Still others found homes in such disparate places as Prussia and Bohemia. From there they spread—literally—to the ends of the earth. A few landed in the Australian outback.

Many of the migrants—whose numbers may have totaled some 10,000—did not stop at their first destination. After a short sojourn, these Exodusters set out again, moving in yet new directions, cutting their own path around the Atlantic. Mired in dismal poverty and facing rank discrimination in maritime Canada, some of the Loyal Black refugees migrated to London. Confronted by the same discrimination in England, they left for Africa, where the various streams of migrants—most from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick—merged in Sierra Leone, an enclave for former slaves on the west coast of Africa established by British abolitionists.⁸³

As they recrossed the Atlantic, African Americans retraced as free men and women the path their ancestors’ had first trod as slaves. In so doing, they transported ideas that had taken root in the Americas into the larger Atlantic world. George Liele carried Afro-Christianity to Jamaica, just as the blind Virginia preacher Moses Wilkerson took it to Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone. Thomas Peters and Harry Washington conveyed American political ideas along the same path, while others transported the commonplaces of everyday life.⁸⁴

The encounter with the Atlantic in the maritime provinces of Canada, the islands of the Caribbean, England, and Africa revealed in particularly telling ways the self-defining preferences that distinguished African Americans from those whose ancestors had never left Africa. From the perspective of the greater Atlantic, they saw—perhaps for the first time—the full measure of how their American nativity and experience distinguished them from other peoples, especially peoples who shared their ancestry and their color, but not their culture.⁸⁵

Differences manifested themselves in the most mundane aspects of daily life. The language they spoke, the clothes they wore, and the food they ate—or at least that they preferred to eat—set them apart from the peoples among whom they now resided. African Americans bore European American names and spoke English or occasionally Spanish, French, or Dutch, rarely voicing the language that their forebears had carried to mainland North America. Indeed, few spoke the creole tongue that had become much of the Atlantic’s lingua franca. Sporting beaver hats, wearing trousers, carrying umbrellas, and demanding wheaten—rather than corned—bread, they proclaimed their American nationality.⁸⁶

In the townships of Nova Scotia, the plantations of Barbados, the streets of London, and the new settlement of Sierra Leone, other touchstones of American identity could be found. Arriving in Nova Scotia and later Sierra Leone, black refugees built houses much like the ones they had left along the Chesapeake and in the Carolinas, often with appointments that bespoke more an American farm or plantation than the African dwellings in which their ancestors had resided. Generally their houses lined a street, rather than taking the form of an African compound or village. Their furnishings would be likewise familiar to other Americans. On the coast of Africa, transplanted black Americans lived, in one estimation, “according to a pattern that owed its characteristics not only to European or even African models but also to the unique experience they shared since their days as slaves in the American colonies.”⁸⁷

While some white Americans saw the society that transplanted African Americans carried with them as merely a darker reflection of their own society—one observer declared it “a burlesqued reflection of white society”—African American returnees, however, wanted no simple imitation of white America. They picked and chose what they borrowed from the larger American culture of which they themselves had been a part, embracing only what they deemed admirable or useful. The language of liberty proved to be both. Just as their petitions for freedom in the United States were loaded with assertions that “the divine spirit of freedom, seems to fire every humane breast” and with appeals for “equity and justice,” so their petitions to British administrators in Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere spoke of natural rights, liberty, and the promise of equality.⁸⁸

From their own experience—as well as the Revolution, in which they had been full participants—black people placed great emphasis on matters of rights. The settlers took great offense at any attempt to limit their liberties, and they were not above stretching them beyond the bonds that British authorities found acceptable. According to the governor of Sierra Leone, the settlers “have a great idea that their freedom gives them equality.” While claiming the protection due His Majesty’s subjects, the Loyal Blacks encased themselves in the rhetoric of American republican liberty.⁸⁹

Like their political sensibility, the settlers’ sacred world also derived from their American experience. As in the United States and Nova Scotia, the Black Loyalists’ most important institution was the African church and the leading figures were preachers. Indeed, during the first years of settlement, African Americans like David George and Thomas Peters, both refugees from South Carolina through Nova Scotia, were among the dominant figures in Sierra Leone. The settlers not only drew upon the Christian Bible, but also chanted Christian hymns and organized their churches in a manner most Americans would recognize. African American society in Sierra Leone rested upon the diverse denominational allegiances of the immigrants, with the division between Baptists and Methodists being most prominent. Difference between them grew as each struggled for land and power in the new settlement, but the solidarity of African Americans soon asserted itself with the arrival of black people of a different stripe— Jamaican maroons—who had no tradition of Christian pietism and little interest in attending church. Their presence reminded African Americans—even when they divided among themselves into warring factions—of their common heritage and their shared mission as bearers of civilization. They soon joined together in tutoring native Africans—with no small sense of condescension—in the importance of trousers and frocks, the sin of polygamy, and the sanctity of the Sabbath.⁹⁰

The post-Revolutionary African American diaspora and the transplantation of the African American culture around the Atlantic demonstrated the deep roots black people had established in what had become the United States of America. This sense of place was represented in every aspect of African American life. The region between the Atlantic and the Alleghenies had become home. When white Americans suggested otherwise, they stated forthrightly, “Here we were born.”⁹¹ All that, however, would change with the arrival of a new century.