In August 1619, a Dutch privateer, a sailing vessel whose crew had been conducting maritime raids in the West Indies for months, dropped anchor in the James River, seeking provisions. In exchange for food and supplies, the captain of the ship gave the governor of Jamestown Colony twenty Africans (whom the captain had likely seized from a Portuguese slave ship in the Caribbean). In popular culture, these twenty people are memorialized as the first African slaves in North America. However, while the arrival and sale of these individuals serve as a critical marker in the longer history of African Americans in the United States, they were not the first Africans on the continent, nor were they slaves.
European powers—Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands—had been exploring North and South America as well as the Caribbean for close to a century before the English established their first permanent base in Jamestown Colony, in 1607. The most famous African in this regard is Estevanico (also referred to as Esteban), who was one of four survivors of a Spanish-funded expedition that landed in 1528 on what is now the west coast of Florida. After its arrival, the expedition team was decimated by the environment and indigenous people who fought to protect their land. Estevanico was captured and enslaved, but eventually escaped and joined with fellow survivor Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca on a mission to reach Mexico City. The record of their eight-year journey is one of the very first accounts of an African traveling across North America.1
Eighty years after Estevanico’s death, the twenty Africans were brought ashore in Jamestown. Unlike the records we have from Estevanico and Cabeza de Vaca, which are rich and detailed, what we know about the life experiences of those first Africans in Jamestown is frustratingly sparse. We do know that they were purchased, that they worked alongside English laborers who were brought to the colony as indentured servants, and that they survived harsh working conditions that extended much longer than the typical seven-year contract associated with indentured servitude. We also know that their importation was the beginning of an increasing traffic in unfree African labor in the English colonies and that the pace, scope, and scale of that traffic would increase dramatically as the demand for labor similarly increased throughout the colonized Atlantic world.
Much of the labor in the English colonies existed as indentured service. In order to pay off the cost of their transatlantic passage and earn their freedom, white European workers were required to labor for seven years in the colonies. For these workers, life opportunities were so limited at home that the chance for a new beginning and, in time, independence was too enticing to ignore. As they would soon discover, conditions in the colonies were unforgiving and, given the resistance that indigenous populations exerted against the European settlers, dangerous. All that said, for the African workforce, life in the English colonies was substantially more challenging than that experienced by the average European indentured servant. While there are records, even in Jamestown, of unfree African laborers earning their independence and acquiring property, there were decades of ambiguity about what it meant to be African in colonial North America. You could be an indentured servant, a slave, a free person, or even in rare instances a slave owner. However, as the demand for labor increased and as the population of the colonies grew, the ambiguity about the state of African labor began to diminish, and not in the Africans’ favor.
By midcentury, colonial societies in the Americas had adopted unfree labor systems that relied upon religious, cultural, and physical differences. The logic behind each step in the shaping and implementation of these systems was as convenient as it was increasingly brutal. To start, practices that allowed unfree Africans to secure their freedom began to weaken as it became more difficult to recruit European workers to the colonies. From the property owner’s perspective, being able to own access to someone’s labor for that person’s life allowed the owner to manage his resources with greater efficiency. The evolving mindset aligned neatly with and laid the foundation for the interdependence of unfree labor and capitalism.
Further facilitating the move toward lifetime servitude was the moral relaxation around the propriety of Christian slavery. New England Puritans were already at peace with the practice of slavery because the Bible made clear that slavery was permissible. In 1641, Massachusetts Bay Colony was the first English colony to recognize the legality of slavery. This law did not assign a racial aspect to slavery, but in the following years other English colonies went further than the Puritans in terms of instituting a slave system logic that explicitly targeted Africans. The clear turning point came in the 1660s with the propagation of slave codes addressing a range of matters. In 1662, for example, Virginia declared that the freedom of children born in the colony would be determined by the status of the mother. The significance of this change was immediate: from that point forward, slavery became an inherited status in Virginia. It also meant that the sexual exploitation of enslaved women by free white men was codified and legitimized. Other colonial statutes emerged that, taken together, built an economic system that increasingly relied upon enslaved people who held diminishing rights, whose children were born directly into servitude, and for whom being Christian afforded no physical protection. And quite distinct from the “race-blind” slave system originally rationalized by the Puritans, these new slave codes made it clear that black people were the intended targets. In less than two generations, then, slavery became racialized and hereditary in the English colonies.
Long before North American colonial legislatures took these steps, there were thriving societies in sub-Saharan Africa in which slavery was present. As historian Heather Williams points out, slavery functioned in a different register in these societies. People found themselves enslaved because they had been captured in wars or raids or as punishment for crimes. One’s status as an enslaved person was not necessarily passed down through birth, however, and most enslaved people held domestic jobs in their captors’ villages and farms, while some were exchanged for goods and materials that ran along the sub-Saharan trade routes.2
The tenor of that trade changed in the early 1400s when Portuguese explorers began to appear along the western African coast, navigating inlets, going upriver, and working with local leaders to secure commodities and unfree labor to bring home. Over the course of the next two centuries, Dutch, Swedes, French, British, and Danes arrived and established their respective military, economic, and administrative presence, which stretched from modern-day Senegal to Angola. This presence was definitively embodied in the European fortifications that dotted the western African coast. Impressive coastal buildings that dominated the landscape, these structures resembled castles with their impregnable walls, large courtyards, military barracks, and mounted cannons. Their storerooms were originally designed to house precious metals, ivory, mahogany, pepper, gold, cloth, brass, and salt. However, when Europeans became aware of the demand for unfree labor in the New World, those basement storerooms were converted into dungeons.
This highly condensed narrative should not be taken as a suggestion that the turn toward slave trading as a major European strategy was free from complication or resistance. In fact, slave traders met resistance at every moment of the process. Enslaved Africans would rebel against their captors while they were en route to the coastal fortresses where slave ships were waiting to collect their human cargo. Those who were unable to escape found themselves in one of the dozens of fortresses along the coastline, forced into rank and fetid dungeons. Captives fought their imprisonment regularly, but were met with brutal and public displays of force that were meant to instill fear among other captives. If they survived the dungeons, they were forced through the so-called doors of no return and transferred to the holds of slave ships anchored offshore. The resistance did not end there, though, as captains’ logs regularly made note of captives’ efforts to start mutinies, of hunger strikes, and in the most horrible of circumstances, of suicides when captives threw themselves overboard.3
Captains’ and ship physicians’ records catalog a list of miseries that Africans were forced to endure while they were crossing the Atlantic. They were crammed into the ships’ holds, forced to lie down in rows, unable even to shift from one side to the other, stacked in horizontal columns where they were victim to the vomit, blood, and other bodily excretions of strangers above them, and chained together at all times, sometimes waking to discover the person to whom they were shackled had died overnight. Historians often cite Alexander Falconbridge, a ship’s surgeon, who regularly visited the holds where the enslaved Africans were kept and documented his experience: “The deck was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughterhouse.” He continued, “It is not in the power of the human imagination to picture a situation more dreadful or disgusting.”4
Created in 1787 and widely circulated in Britain by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, this image of the hold of a slave ship implores the viewer to confront the cramped conditions and brutal cruelty that enslaved people endured during the Middle Passage. Library of Congress, Printed Ephemera Collection, LC-USZ62-44000.
There are very few records of what is referred to as the “Middle Passage” that were written by Africans themselves. The most famous memoir of that experience was written by Olaudah Equiano, born in what is now Nigeria, kidnapped when he was a child, and sold repeatedly until he purchased his freedom at the age of twenty-one. Equiano’s prose is restrained, but his experiences on the slave vessel that took him across the Atlantic were nonetheless indelible: “the stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential.”5 (While Equiano’s narrative is valuable to historians, we suffer from the fact that there are no extant narratives written by women who survived the transatlantic crossing. This absence means that the archive of this experience is incomplete in important ways.)
Historians will never know the exact number of Africans who were captured, sold into slavery, and then packed into slave ships bound for the Americas. Captains’ logs have proved useful for developing a strong approximation of the scale of the transatlantic trafficking. In 1999, historian David Eltis released the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, drawing from records related to thirty-six thousand individual slaving expeditions beginning in 1514 and running through the official end of the Atlantic slave trade in 1866. On the basis of this data, Eltis concludes that approximately 12.5 million enslaved people departed from the African coast in this time period. Ten million disembarked in the Americas.6 The history of the 2.5 million who did not survive the Middle Passage is metaphorically found on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
Most captive Africans found themselves in locations ranging anywhere from modern-day Buenos Aires to several major ports on the east coast of South America, continuing north through Jamaica and Cuba. No matter where they disembarked in South America and the Caribbean, enslaved Africans encountered the most physically punishing and cruel labor environment in the New World. In those areas, enslaved indigenous workers—mostly laboring in the sugarcane fields—were dying at alarming rates from overwork and disease. Importing wave after wave of enslaved Africans was the only solution that the colonists could muster. “Creative” means of torture became part of daily life as overseers sought new ways to motivate their captive laborers. John Hope Franklin and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham refer to the Brazilian tronco, libambo, novena, and trezena as examples. The first involved holding the enslaved person’s ankles in place for several days, the second method was the same but the arms were held, and the last two were devices that held the worker face down to be beaten for nine and thirteen consecutive nights respectively.7 (Over half of the Africans who arrived in the New World ended up in Brazil.)
Although it does not diminish the horror of enslavement, the actual number of enslaved Africans who disembarked in mainland North America was relatively small in comparison with the full scale of the Atlantic slave trade. Of the 12.5 million who were taken from Africa, Eltis projects that close to 390,000 came to what is now the United States. Another 90,000 did not survive the Middle Passage.
Surviving the Middle Passage was but a phase in a series of grotesque challenges. Arriving in North America did not mean stepping onto shore and being handed to a master to begin work. First, individuals had to be inspected to make sure that they were healthy. Considering that the slave ships were frequently overrun with smallpox, cholera, and other communicable diseases, their human cargo were often quarantined for weeks before they were released to the mainland.
The most prominent site for quarantine in North America was Sullivan’s Island, just off the coast from Charleston, South Carolina. Here diseased Africans would find themselves moved into “pesthouses,” where they remained in quarantine until they could be incorporated into the larger captive community being prepared for auction. These houses were small, uncomfortable, multiroomed holding areas where they remained until the disease had run its course. This experience was not known to only a few Africans. The general consensus is that 40 percent of the enslaved Africans who entered North America came through Sullivan’s Island, making Charleston the largest slave port in North America. As one scholar put it, Sullivan’s Island was a “macabre Ellis Island” for African Americans.8
The quarantine served another purpose as well. It allowed slave merchants to prepare their captives for market. The traders wanted to make sure that the captives regained some of the weight they had lost during the Middle Passage, grooming them and oiling their bodies so that they would appear robust and healthy when it came time to go to auction. The enslaved Africans were, in so many ways, treated like animals being fattened for slaughter.
It had to have been bewildering and terrifying to leave Sullivan’s Island and find yourself brought to market. Everything around you would have reinforced the uncertainty of the moment. Foreign languages, customs, dress, flora, fauna, and diet would be only the start of the confusion. Being poked and prodded by merchants, being stripped naked, and then suffering further degradation in order to satisfy the curious—these were standard practices in the slave marketplace.
Whether one went through Charleston or not, being sold into labor was an ending and a beginning. It marked the completion of the Middle Passage, certainly, but there was a robust intracontinental trade and enslaved individuals found themselves being moved from place to place, typically without warning. Sales were ordered to cover debts, to remove “difficult” laborers (those deemed “lazy” or those who were disruptive and posed a threat to the status quo) from a local worksite, to curry political and social favor, and to raise cash for future investments. The disorientation that was built into capture, diaspora, and arrival never ceased.
Even if one could ignore the psychological confusion of the moment, there is no moving beyond the fact that young women’s bodies were commodified when they were being assessed for sexual and reproductive value. Then there was the sheer horror visited upon parents, primarily women, of being separated from their children at the point of sale.9
While these aspects of the slave system—dehumanization, disorientation, commodification—universally applied wherever slavery took root, the types of labor that enslaved Africans performed varied widely. Although slavery was first legalized in New England, the number of enslaved Africans was lower in that region than in other areas in North America. Most enslaved workers did domestic work in households or learned trades that were of value in the small cities along the New England coast, as blacksmiths, painters, shoemakers, and such.
In the Mid-Atlantic region and then farther into the South, forced labor took on a decidedly different orientation. In those areas, enslaved Africans were used in agriculture and the structural economy that surrounded it. They cleared forests; built roads and eventually rail lines; raised plantation houses, slave quarters, stables, and barns; supported white planters and their families; fed everyone on the property; and more than anything else, worked the land. Not all southern agriculture was based on plantations; there were far more modest homesteads with fewer than five enslaved laborers tending to various needs, much as they would have done in New England. However, with each passing decade, the political and socioeconomic power in the South became more highly concentrated in the hands of plantation owners. The majority of enslaved Africans were to be found on plantations, and their labor was increasingly valuable given the southern economy’s reliance upon the global demand for tobacco, rice, and eventually cotton.
Plantation farming was substantially different from that based in smaller landholdings. On large plantations, Africans worked in teams that were managed by white overseers. Cultivating tobacco, rice, and cotton was grueling work, and overseers became known for pushing the workers as hard as they possibly could in order to maximize the plantation’s profits. Plantations with absentee landlords were particularly dangerous places for enslaved Africans to work. In those instances, the overseer was merely an employee himself and had little vested interest in protecting the owner’s property. The use of the whip became a staple of plantation life. It was deployed in the belief that strict discipline would generate more productive labor. It was also used as a means of terrorizing a population into abject compliance. Rape, too, was used as a means of social control, just as it was an articulation of warped pleasure for the perpetrators.10
There are many stories one can tell about slavery that raise important questions about the extent to which people were willing to rationalize abhorrent behavior. There are also ironies that tell us a lot about our national values. Historian Edmund Morgan argued this point in American Slavery, American Freedom. He charted the changes in seventeenth-century Virginia law regarding the nature of slavery while also observing the heightened rhetoric around the value of freedom. His main point was elegant and damning: the ideal of freedom, which would become the organizing principle of the United States, was reliant upon the growth of slavery. Much of freedom’s meaning and value came from the fact that those who were free lived their lives in close proximity to the absolute denial of freedom. Further, as slavery became racialized, whites understood that the color of their skin had material consequences that were dependent upon slavery’s perpetuation.11
This was not just a feeling held by Virginians; it became an ideology throughout British North America. This ideology was propagated so successfully because enslaved Africans could be easily disregarded in any space that was unrelated to their physical labor. One example from colonial New England illustrates the breadth and depth of the colonists’ commitment to the belief that enslaved Africans could not ever be their peers.
Phillis Wheatley, a native of western Africa, was captured as a child. She survived the Middle Passage and arrived in Boston in 1761, when John Wheatley purchased her. Phillis served as a domestic servant to Susanna Wheatley, who in turn taught her to read and write English. Susanna introduced Phillis to poetry, and the young domestic servant developed a talent for the form. Wheatley’s poems began to appear in the region’s newspapers and she soon became a local celebrity. By the early 1770s, Wheatley was internationally known, partly for her poetry and partly because people viewed her as a curiosity: an enslaved person with intellect enough to compose creative literature? In 1773, Wheatley accompanied her master’s son to England, where she hoped to find a press willing to publish her poetry. Although she enjoyed support from leading British figures, Wheatley had to undergo an examination and then secure an attestation from leading Bostonians that she was, in fact, the author of the poems in question. With that final piece of support in place, Wheatley published Poems on Subjects, Religious and Moral in late 1773, becoming the first African woman to publish a book of poetry in the Americas. Not all colonial leaders, however, were similarly enlightened. When asked a few years later about Wheatley’s poetry, Thomas Jefferson, at that point the author of the Declaration of Independence, declared, “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”12
There are many other examples that illuminate the fundamental ironies embedded in the narrative of American exceptionalism. The denial of Phillis Wheatley’s human and civic potential on the grounds of her race and the condition of servitude that had been forced upon her, however, is particularly galling given the colonists’ simultaneous determination to secure their own freedom. That these refusals took place in the same physical spaces where the American Revolutionary War would begin a few years later is further evidence of the new nation’s commitment to ignoring its own deep inconsistencies.
In the years between the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution, the United States moved from being a concept to a country. The debates about the power of state governments, the role and authority of a federal government, and the creation of a national judiciary offer a fascinating portrait of a people determining the possibilities of their freedom as well as the limits on that freedom that they were willing to endure. What one does not find in that portrait, however, is a sensitivity to the possibilities of freedom for those who were systematically denied it. In fact, with little more than a moment’s glance, an image that is quite the opposite appears.
The Constitution was a remarkable document for the ways in which it delineated a country that would eschew the trappings of monarchy and would be led by representatives of the country’s citizens. The authors of the Constitution spoke to the issue of citizens’ voice in the new representative government. In an effort to appease the delegates from the slaveholding states who were threatening to derail the Constitutional Convention, a compromise was reached regarding the apportionment of representatives and taxes. The result: written into the first article of the Constitution was the declaration that each enslaved person would count as three-fifths of a person, thereby increasing the size of the southern population and, thus, southern representative power. This three-fifths compromise did nothing to benefit enslaved people, of course, as they were not to be considered citizens.
Later, in Article 4, the delegates to the convention rationalized the idea that slavery had a proper place in the new country. The Constitution declared that self-emancipating people (“runaway slaves” in the popular parlance) had no rights to freedom, even in those parts of the country where slavery had been declared illegal. The rhetorical irony that this would be a nation bound by freedom was lost on the authors of these founding documents.
The accumulating effects of the authority given to the new nation’s states, the overprivileging of southern representation, and the protection that allowed slave owners to cross state lines in pursuit of self-emancipated people were mortally significant. The consequences were decades in coming, but what many considered the outgrowth of a rational politics of compromise turned out to be the preparation of the soil, the planting of the seed, and the nurturing of a crop that would burst forth as the sectional crisis leading to the Civil War.
The most important author of this nation’s founding document was Thomas Jefferson. A passionate defender of liberty and of states’ rights, Jefferson embodied the bitter ironies and illogics that were built into the country’s foundation. He criticized King George for promoting slavery in the English colonies, but he himself owned as many as six hundred slaves; he believed that enslaved people should be emancipated, but he freed only two of his laborers while he was alive and, as stipulated in his will, freed another five upon his death; finally, Jefferson was deeply opposed to the mixing of the races, but there is overwhelming evidence that Jefferson partnered with his slave Sally Hemings and fathered her six children.13
Scholars have been fighting over Jefferson’s contradictions for over three hundred years now. Reading his 1785 book, Notes on the State of Virginia, doesn’t clear up matters. In one moment, the reader finds Jefferson delineating differences between the races that resonate loudly and sympathetically with the brute force arguments of white supremacy. Yet elsewhere, Jefferson perceptively discusses the absurdities of the slave economy, anticipating today’s ideological and racial battles: “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made . . . will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end.”14
The injuries, of course, were real. They came in the form of a denial of one’s claims to citizenship status, in the form of disbelief regarding human capability, in the form of the whip ripping into bare flesh, in the form of the invasive clinical examinations when one was standing on the auction block, and in the form of the ships’ holds where one was shackled before crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Olaudah Equiano’s words are a powerful reminder of the deep wounds inflicted by this brutalizing and dehumanizing system. Recalling the scene when he first went below deck on the slave ship that carried him to the new world, Equiano wrote, “The shrieks of the women, and groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror most inconceivable.”15
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was an instant sensation when it was published in Britain. Although Equiano would not live to see his abolitionist ambitions realized, his memoir would play an important role in the rise of the international antislavery movement. The Interesting Narrative was published in 1789, eight years before Equiano died. It bears noting that the US Constitution, the instantiation of the ideas articulated in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson’s masterwork, was ratified that same year.