A “State of War Continued”
White Fear, Black Warriors
English philosopher John Locke predicted that West Africans who were compelled by force to become the slaves of Europeans and who understood that the “rights of freedom” pertained to them as much as they did to any other man would always be a threat to European colonists.1 Indeed, some West Africans came from a culture where warfare prevailed to the extent that women, children, and old people were often the victims of war. The brutality exhibited by British colonists was matched by a ruthlessness that facilitated the African slave trade. And white colonists were well aware of how the people they brought across the Atlantic had become slaves. Thus, European dependence on African labor and the exponential increase in importations heightened white fear of a dangerous enemy whom they perceived had the potential to fight back ferociously—whereby Africans might dismantle the entire system and even possibly become the Europeans’ masters.
The institution of African slavery in America emerged as a “state of war continued” between the English colonists and those who became their slaves. African slaves in America were not acquired through direct confrontations between “a lawful Conqueror and a Captive” but rather were purchased from African traders.2 Subsequently, as third parties to West African warfare, Europeans held an arbitrary power over those enslaved that was never consensual.3 In South Carolina, for example, the colonists had the power to kill and maim their slaves at any time. But slave masters knew that their dominance was never absolute. Whites, fearing the cataclysmic nature of African slavery, believed that bloodshed might be necessary in self-defense and in the control of a very large and highly militarized servile population.4
The reason that English colonists were so fearful of slave insurrections and ultimately black mastery had much to do with the fact that they knew that many West Africans had been warriors in their own countries. What white slave owners understood about their slaves’ military past drove European obsessions about the possibility of a war between them and their African slaves.
Many of the Africans who became slaves in South Carolina were highly trained in war. A vibrant military culture had developed over the centuries in West Africa to meet the needs of European traders, pitting one African group against another in a struggle to either conquer or be conquered. Indeed, trade with European nations fostered a militarism that was both offensive and defensive. At the height of the slave trade, West African wars resulted in the loser becoming a captive who was sold, sacrificed, or retained within the conquering nation. In this age of warlordism, a period in African history that lasted from approximately 1600 to 1800, Africans were responding to the same lure for profits and power in Africa that drove English colonists in the American South to foment wars for slaves among Native Americans.5 This warlordism, coupled with the heightened violence of the slave trade itself, produced Africans who were well trained in offensive and defensive warfare and subsequently sold into slavery in the South. Slaves in South Carolina came from the West Coast of Africa (Sierra Leone, the Bight of Biafra, the Congo, Angola, Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, and the Gold Coast regions), which had a distinguished military milieu that planters paid attention to.
Almost one-eighth of the slaves who came to South Carolina from the Windward / Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone / Liberia regions had been obtained through local wars there.6 Prisoners of war included male soldiers as well as women and children, and because the trade in slaves had become central to the economies of various nations in Africa, they were all considered enemy combatants.7 A fellow slave in South Carolina recounted his capture in Africa to ex-slave Charles Ball: “We were alarmed one morning, just at break of day, by the horrible uproar caused by mingled shouts of men and blows given with heavy sticks upon large wooden drums. The village was surrounded by enemies, who attacked us with clubs, long wooden spears, and bows and arrows. After fighting for more than an hour, those who were not fortunate enough to run away, were made prisoners. It was not the object of our enemies to kill; they wished to take us alive, and sell us as slaves.” Although it is not possible to determine the region in which this event occurred, the people who captured the narrator were those “my protectors were at war with . . . a nation whose religion was different from ours.”8
The English explorer Joseph Corry recalled a chief named Smart who commanded an extensive area of the Windward Coast (Ivory Coast) region, and “in one of his wars with his opposite neighbors and rivals,” he began his attack “during the night to some of their towns, surprising them before they had arisen from sleep.” Corry corroborates that the element of surprise became an African tactic of war and that preying upon innocent people by marauding armies became commonplace.9 West African people were well aware of the danger that the slave trade created for all nations, and this matrix of violence and enslavement forced some African leaders to develop sophisticated strategies to circumvent the capture of their people. This is evident in Corry’s description of “Morrey Samba’s town,” which he describes as “one of the most regular built towns I have observed in Africa. . . . The town is surrounded by a mud wall, and . . . there are towers erected for the purposes of defence. The wall, with the towers . . . serve as a guard against any depredations of enemies, while it shelters the inhabitants from the effects of their arrows or musquetry.”10 The engineering of “walled and fortified villages” was an effective military strategy that West Africans used to protect themselves against enslavement, and it is strikingly similar to the one that South Carolinian plantation owner Col. John Barnwell depicts in his journal.11 Barnwell was a general of the first militia regiment organized to fight against the Tuscarora, and he was highly active in the Native American slave trade in South Carolina. Leading five hundred men to defeat the Tuscaroras in 1712, Barnwell noted: “I imeadiately viewed the Fort with a prospective glass and found it strong . . . as Workmanship, having a large Earthen Trench . . . with 2 teer of port holes . . . & large limbs of trees lay confused about it to make the approach intricate. . . . [T]he enemy says it was a runaway negro taught them to fortify thus, named Harry, whom Dove Williamson sold into Virginia for roguery & since fled to the Tuscaruros.”12 It is possible that Harry was a soldier from the Sierra Leone region familiar with the ways of war, but even if he was not, he clearly transported West African indigenous practices in a way that was helpful to those Native Americans who were fighting against enslavement. European Carolinians no doubt benefited from these military skills as well.
West Africans from the coastal regions known as the Bight of Biafra and Bight of Benin also brought knowledge of the “arts of war” that English colonists would have been aware of.13 The testimony of Olaudah Equiano, an Igbo who was born in Benin around 1745, informs us of the predatory nature of wars in this region and how enslavement was the motivation for much of the aggression between states. Yet, Equiano pointed out that a warlord had a lot at stake, because “if he prevails and takes prisoners, he gratifies his avarice by selling them; but if his party be vanquished, and he falls into the hands of the enemy, he is put to death; for, as he has been known to foment their quarrels, it is thought dangerous to let him survive.”14
As was the custom, Equiano was trained as a youth in the “art of war: my daily exercise was shooting and throwing javelins.” Interestingly, Igbo women were given military training as well. Equiano stated, “All are taught to use these weapons; even our women are warriors, and march boldly out to fight along with the men. Our whole district is a kind of militia.” The constant drilling with “fire-arms, bows and arrows, broad edged swords, and javelins” was necessary because these communities were living under the constant threat of conflict induced by the slave trade.15
Equiano recalled one day witnessing a battle waged against his people, the Igbo, who were suddenly attacked: “There were many women as well as men, on both sides; among others my mother was there, and armed with a broad sword. After fighting for a considerable time with great fury, when many had been killed, our people obtained the victory.” Although the purpose was to obtain slaves, many people, both men and women, were killed in the process, and Equiano noted, “Those prisoners which were not sold or redeemed we kept as slaves.”16 Igbo women fighting in wars might seem unusual, but there seems to be evidence that in the eighteenth century, Igbo women were encouraged to “fight along side their husbands in defense of their homeland” due to the diminishing population of able-bodied men.17
Yoruba ex-slave Joseph Wright, however, had a more troubling memory of the violence that slavery encouraged when his town of Ake in Nigeria was under siege: “The enemies satisfied themselves with little children, little girls, young men, and young women; and so they did not care about the aged and old people. They killed them without mercy. Father knew not son, and the son knew not the father. Pity had departed from the face of mothers. Abundant heaps of dead bodies were in the streets, and there were none to bury them. Suckling babies were crying at the point of death, and there were none to pick them up.”18 As it was with Native American slaves, certain limitations were placed upon those captives who were either too young or too old. And very few European slave ships carried infants or pregnant women across the Atlantic if they could help it. Thus, as Paul Lovejoy argues, very young children would have been a nuisance to African traders and others involved in procuring slaves through wars.19
Evidence of the killing of infants by traders can be found in the narrative of ex-slave Charles Ball. A South Carolinian slave from Africa recounted to Ball that when they were placed on the ships “the men who fastened the irons on these mothers, took the children out of their hands, and threw them over the side of the ship, into the water. When this was done two of the women leaped overboard after the children—the third was already confined by a chain to another and could not get into the water, but in struggling to disengage herself she broke her arm, and died a few days after.”20
James Arnold, a ship’s surgeon on board the African slaver Ruby, also affirmed that the barbarous treatment of babies in this region was fueled by the demand for slaves. When the ship banked at the island of Bimbe (located off the coast of present-day Cameroon), “a woman was brought out to us to be sold. As she had a child in her arms, the captain refused to take her and she was taken back to shore; but the next morning she was brought out again, this time without the child which had been killed the night before by the black trader in order to accommodate a sale of the mother.”21 As noted earlier, very young African children apparently had little value in the slave market and were “perceived to be a liability” up until the end of the eighteenth century.22 Indeed, purveyors of slaves made it plain that they did not want any slaves beyond the age of forty and under the age of ten.23 Ironically, this business model would have helped facilitate the continuity of African warfare practices, as many of the slaves who arrived in South Carolina and the colonies would have already received or been exposed to military training in their youth.
One of the largest groups of Africans deported to South Carolina with military skills came from Central Africa, from the Congo-Angola region to the island of Madagascar.24 Using psychological methods of terror and rejecting any kinship loyalty among the general population, Imbangala warriors from the southern part of the Congo facilitated the enslavement of large numbers of Africans from West-Central Africa. Although the Imbangala enlarged their army with captured slaves, only uncircumcised boys, a ritual that identified those who were part of the opposing side’s warrior class, received military training.25 The Imbangala sold the rest as slaves, took whatever women they chose as wives, and killed the rest of the captives. Their rationale for doing so was probably based on the fact that by the eighteenth century lengthy civil wars would have produced a number of slaves who had military training and who were organized and efficient in the use of guns26 And as Equiano argued, this was not a population to leave behind, as they might entice others to rebel.27
Still, slaves from West-Central Africa and Madagascar were known to be captives who had military experience in their own countries. According to a slave from the Congo region named Adam, “His father, Scindia Quante, was a chief or captain under the king, and a great warrior, and had taken many people, whom he sold as slaves.”28 African American abolitionist, writer, and physician Martin R. Delany’s paternal grandfather was a “pure Golah [Angolan]” who had been “a chieftain, captured with his family in war, sold to the slavers, and brought to America. He fled at one time from Virginia, where he was enslaved.” He was caught and brought back from Canada to the United States, where “the fallen old chief afterwards is said to have lost; his life in an encounter with some slaveholder, who attempted to chastise him into submission.”29 A Maryland petition for freedom in 1796 by the descendant of “negro Mary” sheds light on the nature of warfare and the politics of slave trading in Madagascar. The court noted that the people “of Madagascar make war upon each other for slaves and plunder; and they carry on the slave trade with Europeans.”30 The story of former slave Aunt Ciller validates this assessment by the court. Aunt Ciller knew that her father was a king “from the Island of Madagascar” who was brought from Virginia to South Carolina after the Revolution in 1783 by Capt. James Sims: “Her Daddy was taken prisoner in battle by another king, and instead of being beheaded, as was their custom, the king sold him and his family to a ‘white-slave-trade-ship.’”31
In the Senegambia region, the slaves that Carolinian traders prized because of their expertise in rice cultivation were also warriors, as the peasantry who performed agricultural labor also received military training. As “warrior-cultivators,” the Bambara in particular had a reputation for being skilled military men who captured huge numbers of captives in reoccurring wars for export from the Goree and Gambia Rivers.32 Apparently, many Europeans often named all slaves whom they considered soldiers Bambara, which is the ethnic identification given to people from the greater Senegambian region. The true ethnic identity of the Senegambian people who ended up across the Atlantic, however, is Bamana (with their “warrior-cultivator culture” intact), and Bamana were known to have a rebellious nature.33 Thus, the many Senegambians, Sierra Leonians, and West-Central Africans deported to South Carolina in large numbers heightened the fear among whites about their African slaves. Africans did not shed their experiences from their native countries during the Middle Passage; instead, they retained a warrior/military culture that had been formulated within their own nation.34
An account of the military culture of African slaves imported into South Carolina would be incomplete without mentioning the Gold Coast states (present-day Ghana) and the state of Dahomey (present-day Benin). These two regions offer perhaps the clearest examples of the violence and warfare employed in the acquisition of slaves. Although they would rank as a favorite of South Carolina traders, only small numbers of slaves procured from the powerful Gold Coast states of Bono and Denkirya were sold to Europeans prior to the eighteenth century. This was because, according to Samuel Brun, a Swiss surgeon on three Dutch voyages to West Africa, the victors of wars in that region “cut off all their enemies’ heads, be they young or old, female or male: indeed they do not spare babies in their mother’s wombs, just so that they bring home many heads and be considered mighty warriors.” On another occasion, Brun noted that when he and his men supported the king of Sabou (Asebu) and his army, “Our people occupied the paths in time, so that no-one could escape. The three hundred Blacks then pounced quickly on the confident little mob and in two hours obtained three hundred human heads, the majority of which were of women and children; for the Blacks say it is better to strangle women and children than men, because then they will not reproduce quickly; and the children, if they came of age, would seek revenge.”35 The war tactics of Africans on the Gold Coast paralleled the brutal theories behind English warfare: because “nits make lice,” women and children had to be killed as a means of eliminating future confrontations.
By the mid-seventeenth century, it was no longer necessary to kill captives of Gold Coast wars because of the surging demand for slaves by European nations. This Atlantic commerce also gave Gold Coast Africans access to guns and thus the military power to wage even more aggressive wars against their neighbors.36 Casualties of war numbered well over 375,000 people from 1700 to 1750, and that number would double by the end of the century.37 Gold Coast slaves were highly valued by South Carolinians for their tenacity at work and purported physical superiority to other slaves. Yet, slave owners also viewed them as “ferocious if angered, unmindful of danger, unwilling to forgive, but loyal if their devotion could be captured.”38
Although few slaves in South Carolina came from Dahomey, every state in West Africa would have been aware of the most powerful slave-raiding nation in the region. Dahomeans were aggressively militaristic and innovative in their intentional inclusion of women as warriors. Through constant warfare, they had achieved great wealth as a people.39 It was a nation much feared, and fear was part of the military strategy that Dahomeans used; their policy of extermination, King Kpengla explained, “makes my enemies fear me.”40
Dahomeans used brutal “demonstration[s] of power” to illustrate their greatness in all military endeavors.41 For example, despite the fact that the king of the Whydah nation (along the coast of the Bight of Benin) had already surrendered, the Dahomean army continued to kill five thousand Whydah soldiers and then held ten to eleven thousand more as captives for sale in the slave trade. Generally, after campaigns they would strip the dead and cut off their heads as trophies of war.42 Additional evidence of this method of warfare appears in the narrative of Capt. Thomas Phillips, who recounts that he saw “nine or ten bags full of men, women, and childrens heads at a time brought to the king’s town, when the soldiers return’d from ravaging.”43 King Adandozan, who would later be deposed in 1818, supposedly wrote a letter to England that was published in the New York Weekly Magazine in 1792. In it he challenged Europeans to not sit in judgment of how slaves were procured for the Atlantic market in Dahomey: “God made war for all the world; and every kingdom, large or small, has practiced it. . . . Did Weebaigah [a former king] sell slaves? No; his prisoners were all killed to a man. . . . Was he to let them remain in this country to cut the throats of his subjects? . . . [T]he Dahoman name would have long ago been extinguished, instead of becoming as it is at this day, the terror of surrounding nations.”44 Part of the political strategy that facilitated the control of their expansive empire was that Dahomeans offered protection to anyone within their borders, so that only Africans outside of the Dahomey nation ran the risk of being enslaved. To be sure, Dahomeans were known throughout West Africa for their callous extermination of enemy combatants and their ruthlessness in capturing slaves. They were also known among Europeans as the “Black Spartans” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.45
Thus, West African slaves brought with them an understanding of warfare that was based on ideas of conquest, as well as resistance to the internecine conflict between slave-raiding nations. Europeans knew about African warrior traditions generally, and they knew that many of the enslaved retained military skills honed in various parts of West Africa.46 For South Carolinians, this was a significant problem. It shaped their participation in the African slave trade and informed how they went about supplying the South Carolina market with slaves.
South Carolina colonists were very attentive to the slave trade in West Africa. Many of them were not only slave owners but also slave merchants and ship owners involved in the lucrative and global business of slave trading around the world. The volatile nature of the slave market, however, made them concerned about the insurrections that frequently took place off the coast of Africa and across the British colonies. They also feared that the enslaved might threaten the security of South Carolina because of their military experiences in Africa. Hence, the colonists viewed Africans in America as dangerous adversaries who were poised to oppose their condition of bondage and who, given the right opportunity, might successfully win in a fight for their freedom.
Although African slaves were expensive in the seventeenth century, slaves made up one-fourth to one-third of the population in the first decades of English settlement in South Carolina, and three out of four were men. Many of the first British citizens who migrated from Barbados brought their slaves with them. By 1671 half of the settlers in South Carolina were from Barbados. Men like Sir John Yeamans, Thomas Drayton, Robert Daniel, Arthur Middleton, Stephen Fox, Richard Quintyne, Christopher Portman, and John Ladson had all emigrated with slaves from Barbados by 1679. They were given huge tracts of land in Carolina, whereupon these powerful men effectively planted the Barbadian model of colonial development in South Carolina, especially the plantation system.47 Planters from other British colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Antigua, and Saint Kitts, also settled with slaves, but the largest numbers of settlers were from Barbados.48 Eventually, South Carolina had the largest number of Africans held by any colony, which was four times greater than the number held in Virginia.49 The Native American slave trade had almost entirely dissipated by 1730, and the news of high prices and high demand drew large numbers of ships directly to the port of Charleston with Africans for sale.50
Colonial Americans involved in the slave trade were also attentive to the provenance of Africans brought to South Carolina.51 Advertisements submitted by slave traders to the South-Carolina Gazette ran compelling bylines: “This day arrived from the Windward Coast of Africa . . . a choice Parcel of young healthy slaves” and “Whidah is esteemed to be the finest Country in Africa and Slaves from thence.”52
Many slave merchants and plantation owners in South Carolina were from some of the wealthiest families in England. They worked hard at developing and maintaining potentially profitable partnerships in the resale of their human cargo.53 Many slave merchants operating out of Bristol, London, and Liverpool (the latter the largest of the slave ports in England) had also lived in the Carolina colony for many years and therefore understood the needs of the planters.54 The governor, Robert Johnson, appointed a council of some of the most respectable men involved in slave trafficking in the colony to assist him in managing the affairs of the region in 1731.55 Among them were Joseph Wragg, a Londoner and leading slave dealer who owned a company in Charleston; John Guerard, the fourth largest slave trader in South Carolina, who was a partner with the English ship captain and merchant William Jolliffe; and James Crokett, who, although he returned to London in 1739, remained a Carolina merchant and retained a business relationship with slave trader Henry Laurens, who himself had consistent and extensive correspondence with slavetrading companies and ship owners all over the West Indies and in Liverpool, London, and Bristol. Laurens and other South Carolinians formed strategic partnerships with merchants across the Atlantic for the procurement of slaves once direct trade between Africa and South Carolina commenced in 1699.56
These men in England and South Carolina paid attention to the frequency of shipboard insurrections and wars in the various regions of Africa out of concern for their own business ventures.57 From the first year that the Atlantic slave trade began in South Carolina, there were insurrections aboard the ships. Historian Eric Robert Taylor has documented 493 cases that occurred between 1509 and 1865, confirming that slave rebellions were “an ordinary occurrence” that plagued the African slave trade and provoked anxiety among the businessmen invested in it who knew, in their core, that these Africans would resist their captivity.58
In a scheme to protect their interests, investors and traders purchased “insurance” against insurrection. That they did so indicates just how tenuous and speculative the business of trading in human cargo was.59 As Robert Norris, the captain of five slave ships with trading interests in Carolina, stated: “So far are the Whites from being accessary to these wars, as has been unjustly alleged; it is notorious, that the Europeans trading there, deprecate a war. . . . [T]rade is entirely suspended . . . and the term of their voyages is thereby protracted. . . . Hence arises an inevitable increase of expence, and an additional risk of sickness and mortality.”60 Norris might have added the risk of insurrection to his accounting, since European slave ships that remained along the coast of Africa were at great peril of experiencing the resistance of their captives. Because about half of all shipboard insurrections occurred when the vessels were still off the coast of Africa, many ship revolts may have occurred before the slavers were even fully loaded with slaves.61 Such information increasingly shaped the business of purchasing slaves in the eighteenth century and alerted Europeans to the challenges they faced.
Indeed, South Carolina traders and merchants could ill afford not to be watchful of what transpired along the slave coasts of Africa and in the Caribbean islands, as news of an insurrection or war among nations could significantly affect their bottom line. Consequently, reports of slave uprisings on the islands of Jamaica, Barbados, Bermuda, Antigua, Saint Croix, Saint Kitts, Saint Thomas, and Saint John and aboard ships laden with Africans for sale circulated around the colonies and in the South-Carolina Gazette.62 In 1729 a slave ship bound for South Carolina from the “Coast of Guinea” had “not got 10 Leagues on her Way, before the Negroes rose and making themselves Masters of the Gunpowder and Fire Arms, the Captain and Ships Crew took to their Long Boat, and got shore near Cape Coast Castle. The Negroes run the Ship on Shore within a few Leagues of the said Castle, and made their Escape.”63 According to another report in the Gazette, it was believed that the “negro traders” had instigated the uprising aboard a “sloop from Guinea”: “A considerable Number of Negroes came off afterwards in Canoes, and endeavored to get on board, but were beat off. . . . About the same time the Slaves on board a Guinea-man belonging to Bristol, rose and destroyed the whole Crew, cutting off the Captains Head, Legs, and Arms.”64 Slaves rose on slave merchant Samuel Wragg’s ship, the Mary: “[It was] drove ashore, plundered, and destroy’d in the River Gambia, by the Natives. . . . The Slaves rose, in the most barbarous Manner murdered the Ship’s Crew, and obliged the said Captain and the Mate, Mr. David Donahew, to confine themselves in the cabin for 27 Days.”65 The slave ships from Bristol, the Polly and Mercury, were both “lost on the coast of Africa with a Cargo of Slaves.” A captain on another slave ship from Bristol was also “attacked . . . and desperately wounded.” But the captain, “rather than fall into the Hands of such merciless Wretches, when about 80 Negroes had boarded his Vessel, discharged a Pistol into his Magazine, and blew her up; himself and every Soul on Board perished.” Laurens instructed his business partners to “remember to charge your Captain and others to be upon their guard constantly without discovering to the Negroes that they are so.”66
Uprisings upon slave ships and in the West Indian colonies drew universal consternation, and they also made whites fear for their own safety. Robert Pringle, a prominent Carolina slave trader, wrote to his colleague Francis Guichard in Saint Kitts that he heard “of your being alarm’d for fear of an insurrection of the Negroes but hope their wicked Designs will prove abortive” in the attempted insurrection there in 1739.67 Commissary Von Reck commented after meeting on board his ship with his “Excellency Robert Johnson Esq; and Mr. Oglethorpe,” the former the sitting governor of South Carolina and the latter the founder of the colony of Georgia, that the slaves in Charleston were treated as if “they were a Part of the Brute Creation.” According to Von Reck, this fostered an environment where Africans, “being thus used, [lay] amongst them a Foundation of Discontent; and they are generally thought to watch an Opportunity of revolting against their Masters, as they have lately done in the Island of St. John and of St. Thomas. . . . [A]nd it is the Apprehension of these and other Inconveniences, that has induced the Honorable Trustees for Georgia, to prohibit the Importation and Use of Negroes within their Colony.”68
The South-Carolina Gazette’s extensive coverage of Jamaica’s troubles signifies the anxiety that slaveholders had concerning the possible replication of these disastrous events of resistance in their own colony69 Indeed, the founder of Richmond, William Byrd II, speaking on behalf of many of the colonists in the Americas, argued that Parliament should consider ending the trade of “making merchandize of Our Fellow Creatures. At least the farther Importation of them in Our Colonys should be prohibited lest they prove as troublesome and dangerous everywhere, as they have been lately in Jamaica, where besides a vast expence of Mony, they have cost the lives of many of his Majesty’s Subjects. We have mountains in Virginia too, to which they may retire as safely, and do as much mischief as they do in Jamaica.”70
Although other South Carolina slave owners believed that “this Province cannot be well . . . managed and brought into use, without the labor and services of negroes and other slaves,” what emerged in the beginning of the eighteenth century was a racial paranoia about the numbers of oppressed people in their midst and the possibility of Negro mastery.71 White South Carolinians were presciently aware of the danger that African slaves represented to their community. The governor of South Carolina, John Gibbes, who had lived in the region for forty-eight years, told the Assembly in 1711 that because of the “large increase” in African slaves, he had observed that they were “beginning to exhibit a malicious disposition.” He then urged members of the Assembly to consider increasing the white population of the colony for their own defense.72 Yet, despite the fact that English settlers were becoming fearful of their growing slave population, they continued to view their dependency on Africans as a necessity.73
These fears had not always existed, however. Initially, blacks played a fundamental role in the defense of the colony against any opposition to English settlement. In the early years, African, mulatto, and Indian slaves were required to serve in the militia “toward the defence and preservation of this Province, in case of actual invasion,” as colonists viewed “a great number of them” to be “trusty slaves.”74 Blacks served willingly in all capacities, as soldiers against the powerful Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Choctaws and in other conflicts with European nations such as Spain and, after 1699, France, and as drummers, messengers, and translators. Whites did not attempt to restrict the military service of slaves until 1712, around the time that South Carolina gained a black majority and after a notable rise in slave conspiracies in South Carolina and other colonies.75
Africans may have agreed to fight against southern Native Americans because they knew that indigenous people were paid by the English colonists to capture runaway slaves who attempted to reach Spanish territory.76 At some point, however, the African and Indian communities must have ascertained that the European strategies of divide and conquer merely worked to strengthen European dominance in the region. The Goose Creek minister, Richard Ludlam, unequivocally stated it was the policy in South Carolina “for our present security to make the Indians and negroes a check upon each other lest by their vastly superior numbers we should be crushed by one or the other.”77 Still, Native Americans and Africans were not entirely at odds with each other even in the early colonial era in South Carolina.
For example, there is no doubt that black militiamen were instrumental on the side of the Europeans in both the Tuscarora and Yamassee Wars, but there were also significant collaborations among Africans and Native Americans who worked against South Carolina colonists in this period as informants and as soldiers.78 Africans used their condition of enslavement and their employment in the Indian trade, where they learned Native American languages and customs, to create possibilities for their own liberation. A white Indian trader named Richard Smith was told that three runaway blacks had plotted with the Keowee people in 1751, telling them that “the white People was coming up to destroy them all.” After the plot was discovered, some other slaves came to an elderly Keowee warrior and “told him that there was in all Plantations many Negroes more than white People, and that for the Sake of liberty they would join them” if they decided to go to war with the English.79 African slaves clearly understood European tactics of war and the power of their numerical supremacy in the region.
Colonists were afraid, according to Lieutenant Governor William Bull, that “their negroes may . . . become their enemies, if not their masters,” and that they would be “unable to withstand or prevent” slaves from taking over the region after a successful insurrection.80 Sir Alexander Cuming chronicled that whites in South Carolina were constantly “in danger of the Blacks Rising up against them.” And no doubt out of frustration that earlier policies put in place had been ineffective in keeping their African population from rising against them, council members of the South Carolina Assembly declared in 1739 that those enslaved were indeed an “intestine Enemy, the most dreadful of Enemies.”81
The increased demand for African labor over the years only amplified the conditions that heightened white fear. The perceived restlessness of the slaves and the importations of ever larger numbers of Africans created the possibility in 1760 of fifty-seven thousand “intestine black enemies” insurrecting a real threat. The council reportedly only had six thousand white men ready for warfare.82 Although whites exaggerated the disparity in numbers, they accurately captured the fear of insurrection. And matters only got worse in the decades that followed. In 1769, according to Lieutenant Governor Bull, there were eighty thousand Africans and forty-five thousand whites living in South Carolina because the number of slaves purchased had nearly doubled.83 Between the years 1733 and 1785, 67,769 Africans were imported into South Carolina as slaves, the majority of them from Angola, the Congo, the Gold Coast, and Gambia.84 And in anticipation of the end of the slave trade in 1808, traders purchased forty thousand more Africans in Charleston from 1804 to 1807.85 Ironically, the merchants in Bristol, England, who were deeply invested as buyers and sellers in the trade acknowledged that South Carolinian fears of those enslaved needed redress and that because “South Carolina is overstock’d with blacks, in proportion to the number of white people . . . it must be allow’d that three independent companies . . . be serviceable to awe and terrify the slaves.” They also, however, criticized South Carolinians for not “making proper laws and regulations to restrain the rich planters from keeping dangerous numbers of negroes,” rather than expecting “the mother country” to pay for “a standing force to keep them in obedience.”86
What white colonists feared most was their total annihilation in internecine warfare. If those enslaved had “an opportunity of knowing their own strength and superiority in point of number,” stated missionary John Wikhead, the colonists felt certain that Africans would insurrect in order “to recover their liberty tho’ it were the slaughter and destruction of the whole colony.”87 Another South Carolinian had similar concerns in 1720 that “ye whole province was lately in danger of being massacred by their own slaves.”88 Moreover, colonist John Brickell stated that because Africans were “a People of very harsh and stubborn Disposition . . . if the severest Laws were not strictly put in [place] against these People, they would overcome the Christians” and destroy “many Families.”89 According to an official British account of the colony in 1775, “massacres and insurrections were words in the mouth of every child.”90
Nor were the colonists who envisioned their African slaves as dangerous adversaries complacent or dismissive about their familiarity with the ways of warfare. As the wealthy plantation owner William Byrd II in Virginia expressed, he was “sensible of many bad consequences of multiplying these Ethiopians amongst us.” For those enslaved, as “descendants of Ham, [who were] fit to bear Arms . . . might with more advantage kindle a Servile War . . . and tinge our Rivers as wide as they are with blood.”91 The colonists in South Carolina, like Byrd in Virginia, also believed that Africans were accustomed to waging war, as the “Negroes that most commonly rebel, are those brought from Guinea, who have been inured to War and Hardship all their lives.”92 And although African warrior culture was not viewed ominously by this slaveholder, its continuity is also evident in the example of Gen. William Moulton, who was greeted in 1782 by shouts of joy upon his return to his plantation in Charleston by “the old Africans joined in a war-song in their own language.”93 Moreover, many of the advertisements for runaway slaves in the South-Carolina Gazette pictured them with a lance in hand after 1750, but by the 1760s, South Carolina colonists depicted Africans with the more potent weaponry of cutlasses and spears and as warriors in their notices of slaves for sale from across the Atlantic World.94 English colonists in South Carolina had an acute understanding that the environment of master and slave, of domination and subjugation, was laden with the potential of danger and violence. Colonists understood that the methods of African warfare that facilitated the abundance of slaves for purchase in America did not fade away upon arrival to a new land.
Indeed, Europeans had a long and studied history of being concerned about the military heritage of those enslaved. In the early eighteenth century, the English Parliament sought to determine whether African slaves were lawful captives or whether Europeans were responsible for instigating military confrontations for slaves. Ultimately, the debates about whether slaves were gotten from just wars or predatory wars only furthered a universal awareness of African military prowess in colonial America. Moreover, these discussions provide evidence that whites had a healthy fear of and respect for African soldiers.
According to abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, in the early years only those individuals directly involved in the market knew much about the African slave trade.95 An outline for an investigation into the state of the slave trade by the Royal African Company (RAC), however, was reported out of committee on February 23, 1720. It proposed that Africans brought before their agents for sale should be asked questions, and the agents were to “make as strict an Enquiry as possible to find out what Sort of Country they came from. . . . What form of Government [did] they have? and in what manner Justice is exercised?” The RAC wanted agents to find out if Africans were “guided by written Laws, or Customs, or Absolutely by the Will of their Prince?” The most important information that the committee sought was, “How many fighting Men their Armys generally Speaking Consist of? Their manner of making slaves? Whether they become so by any other misfortune than that of being taken Prisoners in War time? And whether they have any other method of Trading for them than this of bringing them down to the Coast of Africa to Sell to the Europeans?” The RAC committee wanted “these Examinations to be very Carefully made and Sent over constantly with their Journals, for the Perusal and Information of the Royal African Compa.”96
The fundamental purpose of recording this information was to ensure the continuity of the slave trade, yet these reports, held up as evidence that European culture was far different from the savagery exhibited by Africans, popularized ideas about African warfare. The proslavery proposition that evolved was that African captives sold into slavery would have otherwise lost their lives in warfare. The English also argued that slavery operated as a safety valve for the barbarianism practiced by African people, overlooking the horrific suppression by the English of the Irish in Europe and of Native Americans.
Although many of the reports claimed that Africans were brutal savages in warfare, which justified in British minds why slaves taken from that region were lawful captives, what is most apparent in many of the accounts is the British respect for the military capacity of the West African nations, their warrior chiefs, and their armies.97 For example, Capt. William Snelgrave recounts of his travels in 1727 and 1734 that the Dahomey military “made, according to their barbarous Custom, a terrible Carnage of the People.” It is worth noting that despite his harsh description, Snelgrave respected the king of Dahomey. He described him before this battle as “being a restless ambitious Prince.” At other times, he called him a “great Man.” Snelgrave also wrote admiringly about the king’s soldiers, who were “marching in a much more regular Order than I had ever seen before, even amongst the Gold Coast Negroes; who were always esteemed amongst the Europeans that used the Coast of Guinea, the best Soldiers of all the Blacks.”98 Not only were Dahomean soldiers impressive, but apparently they surpassed the pristine reputation of the military men along the Gold Coast.
The warrior abilities of Africans from the Gold Coast region were even recognized by the eighteenth-century proslavery historian Bryan Edwards, who had the highest regard for the “Koromantyns,” who were “heroic and martial.” For Edwards, “the circumstances which distinguish the Koromantyn, or Gold coast, Negroes, from all others, are firmness both of body and mind; a ferociousness of disposition; but withal, activity, courage, and a stubbornness, or what an ancient Roman would have deemed an elevation, of soul, which prompts them to enterprises of difficulty and danger; and enables them to meet death, in the most horrible shape, with fortitude or indifference.” He goes on to say, “Even the children brought from the Gold Coast manifest an evident superiority” in their aptitude for becoming warriors.99
Europeans also commented positively on West African military practices from other regions. John Hippisley, another English author on the slave trade in Senegambia and Angola, noted that in Africa by 1764, “the wars are infinitely less bloody than ours. Scarce any of the prisoners taken in battle are put to death, but are almost all sold, and brought to some part of the coast.” From Hippisley’s perspective (as an advocate of the slave trade), almost all the slaves that came from the Senegambia and Angola regions were prisoners taken in war, and many of them were soldiers.100
Mungo Park, the famous explorer, disagreed with Hippisley that African wars were less bloody, although he used the example of the Bamana in the Senegambia region to discuss all of Africa. He corroborated, however, that “every free man is accustomed to arms and fond of military achievements, where the youth, who has practiced the bow and spear from his infancy, longs for nothing so much as an opportunity to display his valour.” Park also observed that there were two kinds of wars. The one in which war is previously declared, where the aggressor will “call out” his opponent, reminded him of the European method. The end result, however, was that victors gain captives of war, whom they carry off, although “the weakest know their own situation, and seek safety in flight.” Noting the other “exterminating system” in the African trade, Park assessed that “such of the prisoners as through age or infirmity, are unable to endure fatigue, or are found unfit for sale, are considered as useless, and I have no doubt are frequently put to death.”101 Although Park uses the term “extermination” to describe the killing of women, children, and the elderly who were not fit for sale, these acts were not based upon tactics of war but rather in response to the European slave trade.
Many European Americans would have read about a courageous group of West African warriors who, with total unanimity, rejected their condition of enslavement as an outcome of war. An article printed in the New York Magazine in April 1796 recounts an attempted insurrection on Goree Island, during which “five hundred captives abhorring slavery more than any of their neighbors, after making themselves acquainted with the situation of the island and the fort, laid a plan for revolting.” When asked the next morning by the commandant of the island if what he had heard was correct, “the two chiefs, without showing any signs of fear or terror, and without offering any excuse for their conduct replied boldly, that they intended to have put to death all the white men on the island, not through any hatred that they bore to them, but that no obstacles might oppose their flight, and prevent them from joining their young king, adding that they were all ashamed not to have died for him in the field of battle, with their arms in their hands; and that since their design had miscarried, they preferred death to slavery,” after which the rest of the slaves cried out, “It is true, it is true.”102
The published accounts of the lives of West African nationals, read by members of the RAC, the “Ten Percenters,” the Privy Council, members of Parliament, plantation owners, and even those who had no interest in Africans as commodities, provided fodder for a growing anti—slave trade movement in England as early as 1735.103 And religious groups and individuals living in America also condemned the rise in African warfare and the buying and selling of African slaves.104 Over time, the Enlightenment philosophy of natural rights and the Great Awakening in America, which began in the 1730s, made necessary a clear rationale for why Britain should continue to participate in the African slave trade.105
Anthony Benezet, a Huguenot and notable American abolitionist living in Philadelphia, argued that Europeans had instigated the wars among African tribes, much as they had among Native Americans. Thus, Africans, through “hard usage” and because of burgeoning slave populations, “will always be a just cause of Terror: In Jamaica, and South Carolina.” The exploitive and brutal nature of slavery created the warlike environment that whites took advantage of in order to justify their commerce in humans as lawful captives taken in a just war. It did not save their lives, as some argued.106
American religious leaders were at the forefront in broadcasting the way in which African slaves were both participants in and products of warfare. Evangelist George Whitefield wrote an open letter in 1739 to all white citizens of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, asking them if “it be lawful for Christians to buy slaves, and thereby encourage the nations from whence they are brought to be at perpetual war with each other.”107 The Quaker communities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey issued their position on the slave trade in 1754, asking, “How then can we, who have been concerned to publish the Gospel of universal love and peace among mankind, be so inconsistent with ourselves, as to purchase such as are prisoners of war, and thereby encourage, this anti-Christian practice; and more especially as many of these poor creatures are stolen away. . . . What dreadful scenes of murder and cruelty those barbarous ravages must occasion in these unhappy people’s country are too obvious to mention.” Eventually, those Quakers residing in Virginia, North and South Carolina, Maryland, and New York petitioned their own legislatures on this subject.108 Alexander Hewatt, pastor of the Scotch Presbyterian Church in Charleston, argued that although “in war the conquerors were supposed to have a right to the life of their captives, insomuch that they might kill, torture or enslave them, as they thought proper,” he challenged the European community’s willingness “to vindicate the conqueror’s right to murder or enslave a disarmed army.”109 By the end of the 1780s, public pressure forced King George III to command that the Privy Council establish another special committee “to take into their consideration the present state of the African Trade, particularly as far as [it] related to the practice and manner of purchasing or obtaining slaves on the coast of Africa.” During the thirteen months in which the committee met, they printed and distributed 26,526 reports, written accounts of the parliamentary debates, and over 51,432 pamphlets or books on the issue of the African slave trade.110
Reports that supported the position that the slave trade positively served humanity, that espoused the “double argument of the humanity and holiness of the trade,” or that claimed that the extermination of war captives was common were touted by “all the higher circles.” Indeed, these were the reports that “the planters and merchants did not fail to avail themselves. They boasted that they would soon do away [with] all the idle tales which had been invented against them.”111 The Liverpool merchants and others invested in the continuation of the slave trade specifically used Dahomeans and their exterminatory method of warfare as evidence that the trade was actually a blessing. Dahomeans became the poster nation for why the slave trade ultimately served a positive good.112 The ruthlessness and barbarity of African warfare were used extensively as a proslavery argument, even after the slave trade became illegal in 1808.
Although slave traders who testified acknowledged that these practices were not common among all African nations, they continued to trade with anyone who had slaves for sale. This market-driven approach was supported by the fact that African leaders made conscious decisions about how to retain their involvement in the global market for slaves. Writing about “the Cries of the poor Women and Children” who were beheaded as part of the ritual sacrificing of their enemies, William Snelgrave stated that he asked a Dahomean military man “why so many old Men were sacrificed in particular? He [the African colonel] answered, ‘It was best to put them to death; for being grown wise by their Age and long Experience, if they were preserved, they would be ever plotting against their Masters, and so disturb the country; for they never would be easy under Slavery, having been the chief Men in their own Land. Moreover, if they should be spared, no European would buy them, on account of their Age.’”113 The model of interdependent trade that evolved from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century between Europe and Africa was driven and facilitated by Europeans, but it was sustained by mutual consent.114
The European markets for slaves facilitated the exponential increase in the business of enslavement in Africa, but slaves taken in wars who had a wealth of life experience behind them would continue to be part of the military outcomes between African nations despite legislation ending the trade in England and America.115 Additionally, an important aspect of African culture that Europeans talked about extensively was the volatility of military life and, despite their fears, their respect for African military abilities. They knew that Africans rejected enslavement and that, given the opportunity, they would fight to free themselves. As Rev. Hewatt told his fellow South Carolinians, “All men must confess, that those Africans, whom the powers of Europe have conspired to enslave, are by nature equally free and independent, equally susceptible of pain and pleasure, equally averse from bondage and misery, as Europeans themselves.”116
Thus, slavery was always a “state of war continued,” because the supremacy of white power, at least in the colonists’ minds, always remained insecure.117 The consequential violence directed toward Africans in America was not driven by the desire for land and conquest but by the need for labor, which the Atlantic slave trade facilitated. Africans brought to South Carolina as slaves were essential to the development of the region, but they were always perceived to be dangerous resources of labor that would topple the colonial enterprise if they were not carefully controlled. Yet slave owners and the English colonial economy remained deeply invested in African slave labor. And, having already experimented with Native American slavery, South Carolinians believed that only extreme violence and judicially sanctioned performances of torture could keep their slaves at bay, making fear and the possibility of death a central feature of white mastery.
Despite the service that African slaves played in helping secure the colony, eventually colonists were fearful of “negroes and other slaves brought unto the people of this Province,” because now, whites claimed, they were of “barbarous, wild, [and] savage natures.” Unlike earlier times, these conditions of which Africans were “naturally prone and inclined” made it necessary for the people of South Carolina to enact legislation to “restrain the disorders, rapines and inhumanity” of those enslaved in order to secure the “safety and security of the people of this Province and their estates.”118
The problem that the early settlers faced was that many African laborers simply ran away into the frontier, jeopardizing the stability of the region and making the deployment of heinous measures for colonial control appear necessary. When in 1712 the laws changed and slaves became chattel, or slaves for life, as did their children, the problem of Africans running away not only continued but also became more pervasive.
The laws enacted to address the problem of flight indicate the level of violence that the early colonists were willing to use upon those who they believed disrupted the system of chattel slavery. For the first offense, the penalty was a severe public whipping. But after the fourth offense, the slave, if he was male, was castrated, and if the slave was female, she was severely whipped and then branded on her left cheek with the letter R, and her left ear was cut off. For the fifth offense, the slave was either put to death or had one of his Achilles tendons severed. Not only would the runaway suffer, but also any “Negro” or slave who was found to have aided or encouraged the slave to run away would “suffer the pains of death” upon conviction.119
Some religious leaders in England (and only Le Jau in South Carolina) publicly rejected the South Carolinian law, in place for over twenty-five years, that required the castration of slaves as punishment for running away. They cited it as “an Abomination,” especially if done outside the law or in the spirit of revenge, or “if he aimeth by it at his Slaves death.” The Baptist Association in South Molton, in Devon, England, however, later reversed its position to conclude: “We apprehend, the Master, Acting according to the Law of your Province, in gelding his Slave, hath not committed any Crime, to give any Offence to Any Member to break Communion with him in the Church; because we finde by Scripture, that ’tis lawfull to buy them. . . . And if lawfull to buy them ’tis lawful to keep them in order, and under government; and for Self preservation, punish them to prevent farther Mischief that may Ensue by their running away and [?] rebelling against their Masters.”120 The use of the word gelding, which is the term used for the castration of horses or mules in order to make them physiologically nonaggressive and docile, is important for what it signifies. The attitude of the master that slaves could be manipulated and controlled like animals is well documented. But the castration of runaway slaves in the colonial era seems to be suggestive of early experiments in social engineering.121 It is also indicative of the difficulty slave owners had in getting Africans to submit to their will. In reality, Anglo-Americans could only fantasize that they could make the enslaved perform like animals, dependent docile slave creatures living only to serve their masters. Despite the brutal way whites sought to control the runaway slave population in South Carolina, Africans continued to resist enslavement.
By the 1720s African slaves comprised 65 percent of the total population of South Carolina, and in an effort to alleviate already existing tensions, regulations over slave mobility were established. The colonists believed that racialized laws that affirmed white mastery would curtail “any disorders Insurrections or Tumultuous Designs formed and carried on by any Negroes or other slaves.”122 White male patrols were responsible for keeping the province safe from slave rebellion, and legislation regulating what that entailed became more extensive. Slave owners wanted to know at all times where their slaves were and what they were doing. For example, in 1722 slaves were no longer allowed to be involved in “keeping and breeding horses, whereby they convey intelligences from one part of the country [and] carry on their secret plots and contrivances for insurrections and rebellions.”123
Nevertheless, despite regulations, slaves continued to move about the province, threatening the security of the white community and the institution of African bondage. According to one colonist, who chose to remain anonymous: “The stranger had once an opportunity of seeing a Country-Dance, Rout, or Cabal of Negroes, within 5 miles distance of this town, on a Saturday night.” Upon this occasion the enslaved formed “private committees,” where they talked “in too low a voice, and with so much caution, as to not be overheard by the others.” The European interloper observed, “Members of this secret council, had much the appearance of Doctors, in deep and solemn consultation upon life or death; which indeed might have been the scope of their meditations at that time.” Moreover, slaves who were outlaws as fugitives and other slaves came freely to this event well equipped to make their escape if necessary: “Not less than 12 fugitive slaves joined this respectable company . . . 8 of whom were mounted on good horses. . . . The Stranger is informed, that such assemblies have been very common, and that the company has sometimes amounted to 200 persons.” The cautious secrecy of these discussions should make it clear to everyone, the letter writer argued, that “whenever or wherever such nocturnal rendezvouses are made, may it not be concluded, that their deliberations are never intended for the advantage of the white people?”124 Chastising the region’s leaders in 1772 for not enforcing the slave laws of 1740, the “Stranger” feared that blacks plotted insurrections and the death of their white masters at these “meetings.” Yet what this anonymous report also signifies is how the enslaved continued to contest their condition of bondage and to exert considerable control over their own lives, despite white efforts to curtail black freedom.
South Carolinians also implemented new regulations against gun usage by slaves in order to gain greater racial control over an ever-increasing number of Africans, over 90 percent of whom came directly from West Africa.125 The termination of the slaves’ usage of firearms, a change from earlier colonial times, is indicative of how serious the colonists were about the threat of their slave population rising in rebellion. Since the enslaved were now forbidden to carry or use firearms, patrols were instructed to “search for guns, pistols, swords, cutlaces [sic], lances, and other offensive weapons in negro houses.” And the legislation required that “every master or head of any family” also “keep all his guns and other arms . . . locked up” or else face serious penalties.126 Despite these laws, however, in his 1787 message South Carolina governor William Moultrie complained to the legislature that there were armed slaves “too numerous to be quelled by patrols” who were causing much trouble for the colonists in the region of Saint Peter’s Parish.127
The prohibition against Africans playing drums in 1740 provides further evidence of whites’ fears that their slave population could rise in violent confrontation. Now black people could no longer be found “using or keeping of drums, horns or other loud instruments, which may call together or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes.”128 Drums had long been associated with African rebellion in the European mind. The first laws established against drum usage occurred in Barbados. Sir Hans Sloane noted in 1689 that the slaves “formerly on their Festivals were allowed the use of trumpets . . . and Drums. . . . But making use of these in their Wars at home in Africa, it was thought too much inciting them to Rebellion, and so they were prohibited.”129 South Carolina waited a full forty years before enacting laws against drums based on their potential use for wars of insurrection. Yet in 1775, when colonists were fearful of British-inspired slave insurrections during the Revolutionary War, Charleston was reportedly filled with “the daily and nightly sounds of Drums and Fifes.” Again, it appears that the legislation enacted did not exert complete control over the slave population in South Carolina, nor did it quell white fears.130
Indeed, the challenges of controlling an ever-growing African population in South Carolina were well known, and for many it required that slaves be abused nearly to death. Colonist John Brickell’s observations support this in his claims to have “frequently seen them [slaves] whipt to that degree, that large pieces of their skin have been hanging down their backs.” Yet despite the brutality, Brickell stated he had “never observed one of them shed a Tear, which plainly shews them to be a People of very harsh and stubborn Dispositions.”131 According to Benjamin Martyn, a Georgian who used South Carolina to demonstrate the problems of slavery, the first thing that white settlers had to do on the frontier where the population of Africans grossly outnumbered whites was to “secure herself [South Carolina] against them.” Martyn believed that all slaves were “secret enemies . . . ready to join with her open ones upon the first occasion.”132 Johann Martin Bolzius, a German settler living in the Carolina region, argued that the ratio of whites to black slaves was a “dangerous disorder” that could lead to rebellion. Any Africans who fomented rebellion, however, would find themselves “punished in a very harsh and nearly inhuman way (which is not the way of the English), for example, slowly roasted at the fire.” We know, however, that this was indeed the English way during the Pequot War, and similar brutal retaliation occurred during the aftermath of the 1712 and 1741 New York insurrection attempts.133 Bolzius, like the colonists in South Carolina, believed that harshness was necessary, for if Africans “gain the upper hand in a rebellion they give no mercy, but treat the whites very cruelly.” After all, he acknowledged, “eternal slavery to them as to all people is an unbearable yoke, and very harsh treatment as regards food and work exasperates them greatly. New Negroes therefore must be treated very carefully, for they frequently take their own lives out of desperation, with the hope of resurrection in their homeland, and of rejoining their people.”134 Both men were aware of the underlying problem. Martyn also noted that the antagonistic relationship between the black and white population was sustained by the fact that Africans were “fond of liberty just like white men, and he will struggle for it, when he knows his own strength, when he sees this is equal, at least very little inferior to his master’s.”135
The conundrum that faced those who needed labor to sustain their plantation economy and who needed to control a burgeoning population of nonwhite people was a serious one. African slaves were valuable because they brought with them skills in agriculture, animal husbandry, working with metal and wood, and masonry; as interpreters or “linksters” on the frontier; and in military service. Free and enslaved Africans who had skills were welcomed in those early years because “workers who were merely submissive and obedient would have been a useless luxury,” which these new colonists could ill afford when so many of them had limited or no skills in agriculture or animal husbandry.136 Nor were the colonists wrong in their perceptions that the slaves were restless, as the intensity of the plantation system led to an increase in slavery’s brutality, which ultimately led to greater animosity and black rebellion.137
Informed about their slaves’ artfulness at war, white South Carolinians grappled with what Africans made clear, that they would if they could fight for their freedom. The question was always whether colonists or Africans would win. Perceptions of this possibility changed over time depending on what was happening not only on the ground in South Carolina but also across the diaspora. The colonists’ general lack of military training was very different from the experiences of many of their African slaves, and eventually the knowledge of this generated threats of unrestrained violence upon Africans in the New World.138
In truth, unlike with Native Americans, the colonists believed that they could not completely rid themselves of their African slaves, because they needed them. In a later debate over the importation of Africans in 1785, Charles Pinckney, a general in the American Revolution and a member of the Continental Congress, asked, “Was it not well understood, that no planter could cultivate his land without slaves?” Moreover, Pinckney argued, “this country was not capable of being cultivated by white men; as appeared on the attempt made by Georgia,” and that “Negroes were to this country what raw materials were to another country.”139
Ralph Izard, however, also a planter and the first senator from South Carolina, was not convinced that slaves would always remain invaluable. Izard imagined in a 1794 letter to Mathius Hutchinson what would happen if “the same horrid Trajedies among our Negroes, which have been so fatally exhibited in the French Islands” during the Haitian Revolution, were to occur in America. Izard predicted that the “proprietors of Negroes should themselves be the instruments of destroying that species of property” rather than see their slave population freed in South Carolina or in any other American colony.140 Slave owners nevertheless made a calculated choice to perpetuate the institution of African bondage not only in South Carolina but also across the Atlantic World, and they used violence and the threat of death to sustain it.
Thus, whites’ fears of African slaves’ capacity to overwhelm them in any confrontation were not fantasies. Europeans understood what enslavement represented to Africans—that, as losers, they had been taken and removed from their own countries in the aftermath of warfare. This knowledge also heightened the colonists’ fears that just as Africans were able to subjugate other Africans to their will, so might they be able to turn the tables on their white masters. Yet Europeans were poised to defend themselves and their insatiable demand for slaves in the New World. Although the lure of extraordinary profits generally protected the African slave population in South Carolina, exterminatory warfare was never completely off the table if those who were enslaved attempted to free themselves by force. White Americans knew that they had placed an enemy in their midst, an enemy procured to satisfy the ever-rising demand for African slaves, who continued to resist chattel slavery—who, after crossing the Atlantic Ocean, intended to effect total and unlimited warfare against a previously unknown adversary, white slaveholders.