African Tobacco and Cotton Workers in Colonial British America
Slowly but mightily these black workers were integrated into modern industry. On free and fertile land Americans raised, not simply sugar as a cheap sweetening, rice for food and tobacco as a new tickling luxury; but they began to grow a fiber that clothed the masses of a ragged world.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1835)
The remains from slave quarters and burial grounds point to the role that Africans played in material production in the British American colonies. West and West Central Africans, working in the Anglo-American tobacco fields, left behind tobacco pipes that have been unearthed in the Chesapeake region and Barbados. In the tobacco colony of Maryland, slaves placed a tobacco pipe in the grave of a departed woman to take on her ancestral journey. And while tobacco had faded as an export crop from Barbados, slaves still cultivated and consumed it on a small scale well into the eighteenth century. There, slaves left a pipe in the grave of an African diviner, which he carried into the ancestral realm. Produced in Africa or the Americas, the pipes carried distinctive African motifs. Paralleling the presence of clay pipes, an artifact unearthed from a colonial South Carolina archeological site represents the work of Africans in the Diaspora.1 On the colonial South Carolina Howell plantation, slaves left behind an African ceramic spinning tool.2 These findings, significant alone, indicate that Africans in the Anglo-American colonies had experience with cotton and tobacco cultivation. African captives entered colonial worlds where Indian and English workers grew these crops on a commercial scale, yet in every case Africans took over the primary role of raising them. And as with their knowledge of staple food production, Africans brought cultural capital to the New World that fostered cotton and tobacco production in the Anglo-American colonies.
The slaves who crafted these material goods lived in a violent world of mass agricultural production. While Africans by no means transplanted their agricultural knowledge into the Americas wholesale, the written record clearly indicates that many enslaved people from Africa had previous experience with tobacco and cotton. During the years of the Atlantic slave trade, agriculturalists in West and West Central Africa incorporated tobacco production and consumption into their daily lives, integrating the American crop into their routine agricultural practice and social life. Tobacco consumption expanded in West Africa from the sixteenth century onward along parallel and at times converging paths. Along one route, tobacco grown on American plantations entered West Africa through the Atlantic trade. At the turn of the eighteenth century, it was not unusual for Portuguese, French, or English merchants to find markets for American tobacco on the Gold or Slave Coast, where in some cases they traded the leaves for slaves.3 While imports from the Americas met part of West Africa’s demand, local tobacco production expanded concurrently. “Tobacco is planted about every mans house,” noted the British merchant William Finch, who arrived in Upper Guinea in the early seventeenth century.4 Shortly thereafter, the British commercial agent Richard Jobson noted about people in the same region that “onely one principall thing, they cannot misse, and that is their Tabacco pipes, whereof there is few or none of them, be they men or women[,] doth walke or go without.” Echoing Finch, Jobson added that tobacco “was ever growing about their houses.”5
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tobacco plants and seeds moved through established trading networks and became part of West African material life. In the shadows of the British trading and military castle at Cape Coast in the late seventeenth century, women traders sold “Country tobacco” in the town’s bustling market.6 People in what is now southeastern Nigeria, Olaudah Equiano tells us, grew “vast quantities” of tobacco.7 A British official noted in the 1760s about the Senegambia region “that it abounds in prodigious quantities of Wax, Rice, Cotton, Indigo, and Tobacco,” and the Scottish traveler Mungo Park made similar observations at the end of the century.8 The maintenance and expansion of tobacco culture required skilled cultivation, which was described by a nineteenth-century observer in the Senegambian town of Nomou: “The people take great pains in cultivating it. They first sow the seeds in beds, and when the plant has attained a certain growth, they transplant it; for this purpose they prepare the ground by two diggings, and dividing it into little squares, the plants of tobacco are there placed at a distance of eighteen inches asunder; they are watered twice a day, there being wells for that purpose near the plantations.”9 The way that Senegambians transplanted tobacco from seedbeds to other fields paralleled rice production methods. And African women’s skills in crafting ceramic bowls for eating and cooking rice dishes translated into making tobacco pipes, for while they imported some clay pipes through the Atlantic trade they also relied upon local manufacture. Drawing on practical and artistic skills that they employed to produce earthenware, sculptures, and other forms, local potters shaped and fired clay pipes for tobacco smoking from the seventeenth century on.10 First cultivated as a garden crop near their housing compounds, later developed on larger scales and stuffed into locally manufactured tobacco pipes, tobacco was part of the material life of West African workers.
Concurrent with its spread in West Africa, tobacco entered the Central African agricultural world during the height of the Atlantic slave trade. By the early seventeenth century, tobacco arrived in West Central Africa, with women playing a prominent role in its development. As with maize and other American crops, tobacco seeds “were at first planted in little plots near the houses where women could watch their growth.”11 From these garden plots tobacco production expanded, with seeds and plants passing through local and more long-range exchange networks. Some communities came to specialize in tobacco production and by the nineteenth century grew enough for export. And as in West Africa, tobacco transformed other dimensions of Central African material life, particularly clay pipe production.12 During the years of the Atlantic slave trade, both West and West Central Africans had incorporated tobacco into their daily lives, and it is from such contexts that they landed on American tobacco estates.
Africans moved into environments already under cultivation by English and Indian labor. The tobacco plantations of the early British American islands first relied heavily upon English laborers, who crossed the Atlantic as tenant farmers or indentured servants. In the process of claiming Bermuda after the first British colonists landed on the island in 1609, officials from the Somers Island Company leased land to tenant farmers or had indentured servants sent to the island. In 1615, the English servant Edward Dun wrote to colonial authorities in England, hoping for a small grant of land to cultivate tobacco, and tobacco fields opened on the island.13 In these early years of tobacco production in the British Americas, planters also used African workers, and at least one of them had a reputation for his agricultural knowledge. The colonist Robert Rich asked his brother Nathaniel to send a slave named Francisco to the island because of “his judgement in the cureing of tobackoe.”14 Francisco came out of a Central African material environment where tobacco production was spreading, much as it was on the island.15 So with a combination of English and African labor, tobacco production in Bermuda arose.
Cultivated by English and Native American labor, tobacco grew on a number of British Caribbean islands, including Nevis, Jamaica, and Barbados. It arrived in Barbados in 1626 with the first expedition by the British, who carried Indian laborers along with tobacco plants from the mainland to the island. Tobacco growing expanded in Barbados despite the competition the island faced from other British colonies and the problem of overproduction. Tenant farmers, who were heavily in arrears, argued that the only way to pay off their debts was by growing tobacco. As a result, it remained an export crop for decades, even though colonial elites cautioned against it.16 Around midcentury Barbados had areas of regional agricultural specialization, with over two thousand acres of land farmed by “poor Catholiquos” who raised tobacco on the northwestern part of the island.17
In the following decades, colonial planters relied more heavily on slaves to work the island’s tobacco fields.18 During this period of transition to slave labor, tobacco production was expanding on both sides of the Atlantic, so a number of Africans in Barbados would have had experience with the crop. Some of the tobacco produced in Barbados was intended for local use. Father Antoine Biet noted in the mid∇seventeenth century that “tobacco is only produced on the island for the use of the English and the slaves who are given some time off when working, in addition to the meal time, to rest and smoke tobacco.”19 Placing limits on the demands of their owners, Africans received temporary relief from the pain of agricultural labor by consuming some of the tobacco they grew. On other plantations, planters drove their slaves to cultivate tobacco on a scale large enough for export. For example, the African majority on Thomas Modiford and William Hilliard’s Barbados plantation worked alongside English and Indian laborers to cultivate thirty acres of tobacco land. But while tobacco provided an early opportunity for Barbadian planters, it could not compete in quality with tobacco produced elsewhere.20 As it exhausted the island’s soil, one contemporary complained that Barbadian tobacco was becoming “earthy and worthless”; it could not match the quality of competitors such as Virginia, which had a greater supply of fresh lands to grow the crop.21 By the middle of the 1660s, tobacco was no longer an important cash crop on the island: its value was being outstripped by sugar, and it constituted less than 1 percent of exports.22 Tobacco exports from Barbados gradually declined in the second half of the seventeenth century as sugar and other crops pushed the leaf off the island as a major export.23 But before then, a generation of planters had depended on enslaved Africans to carry on production of the labor-intensive tobacco plant, a crop that a substantial number of them probably already knew how to grow and that they continued to grow for domestic consumption into the eighteenth century.24
Other British Caribbean islands went down a similar path. Tobacco became one of the commercial crops of Nevis during the early years of the British colony there, and by the second half of the seventeenth century in Jamaica tobacco was said to be “so good, that the Merchants give Six pence a Pound for it, and buy it faster than the planters can make it.”25 The island continued to produce tobacco on small scales after the decline of indentured labor there and the expansion of the African labor force, with slaves producing it into the eighteenth century. Describing the skills required to grow tobacco, the naturalist Hans Sloane wrote that the slaves planted it alongside indigo, and he described its requirements:
It is sown in Beds: when the Leaves are about two Inches long, the Plants are drawn, and planted at four Foot distance one way, and three and an half another, then they are kept clean, and when grown about a Foot high, and going to shoot out their Stalks or Tops, the top of the Stalk or Bud is snipt off. That day seven night the Buds rising ex alis foliorum on the sides, are snipt off likewise, and seven days thence the other Under-buds. It stands some time longer, and then the Stalks and Leaves are cut off, hang’d up in a Shed, and if wet weather come, a Fire is made in it to hinder the Corruption of the Tobacco. Some time after the Leaves are stript off and preserv’d in great heaps from the injuries of the Air till ’tis made fit for the Market.26
Sloane added that the slaves’ tobacco-related skills were not limited to methods of cultivation but extended to a knowledge of its medical uses. He reported how an African woman, described as “a Queen in her own Country,” had treated a “Chego,” a flea that infects the skin and plants eggs that can multiply if not removed, by piercing “the Skin with a Pin above the swelling, and carefully separat[ing] the Tumour from the Skin, and then pull[ing] it out, putting into the Cavity whence it came, some Tobacco Ashes which were burnt in a Pipe she was smoking. After a very small smarting it was cured.”27 She had most likely learned this skill from an Amerindian woman.28
Slave-based tobacco production continued in the British Caribbean into the eighteenth century, with colonists mapping tobacco onto their possessions. In the 1720s, one of the Bahaman islands was said to be a “fine Island for oranges, Lemons, pomgranatts, ffiggs—cotton Tobacco Indigo.”29 Planters on the island of St. Vincent, where sugar production predominated, still devoted five hundred acres to tobacco production in 1783.30 Building on precedents set by Indian and English laborers, the constant waves of African forced laborers who landed in the Caribbean continued to make tobacco a viable crop, one that they had had experience growing before landing in the Americas.
The first wave of forced migrants to early colonial Virginia from Africa worked in the maize and tobacco fields next to Indian and English laborers. As in the Caribbean, Chesapeake planters used their enslaved Africans not only for their physical labor but also for their experience with tobacco cultivation, so Francisco of Bermuda probably had Virginia counterparts. When planters in Virginia made the transition from indentured servitude to slavery after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, they imported over one hundred thousand slaves from the Senegambia region, the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast, and West Central Africa. Nearly half the slaves brought to Virginia came from the Bight of Biafra, and a similar percentage from the Senegambia region landed in Maryland in the eighteenth century.31 And as demonstrated above, merchants on the West African coast and figures such as Olaudah Equiano recounted that tobacco production was fairly widespread in these regions. As a result, planters would have had to provide little to no training in tobacco production to slaves from these parts of Africa.
Like food crops, tobacco had seasonal rhythms of production. The labor force went into the fields in March to prepare the land by felling trees and burning brushwood on the soil, a practice similar to Amerindian and West and West Central African land clearing and fertilizing methods. By May, they sowed the seeds in the soils nourished with the remaining ashes. They then weeded the soil and transplanted the plants after they were about two inches high. Concurrently, workers prepared the soil that received the transplanted plants by “digging holes of about a foot square, and as deep, three feet apart every way, in rows.” Then laborers returned the loosened soil into the holes, building hills into which they transplanted the young plants. Over the following months, workers weeded the plants, “topped” and “succoured” them (i.e., removed their top and secondary leaves), and finally judged the proper time for cutting them. Under the management of their owners or overseers, they then cured and “stripped” the leaves and packed them into hogsheads for the market.32
With the transition from indentured servitude to slavery, British American colonial tobacco plantations continued to thrive, with many workers bringing experience with the crop across the Atlantic Ocean. By the seventeenth century, tobacco had become an Atlantic World crop, not only because of tobacco shipments from the Americas to Europe but also because of the spread of tobacco seeds and the crop’s cultivation in Africa. During the years of the Atlantic slave trade, African agriculturalists, particularly women, from the Senegambia region to West Central Africa incorporated tobacco into their agricultural fields. From these African tobacco-growing regions, Virginia, Maryland, and other Anglo-American colonies drew a substantial portion of their labor force for their tobacco plantations. Africans not only maintained and expanded tobacco production in the colonies but also shaped other areas of tobacco plantation development. For instance, they applied their experience as woodworkers and boatmen to the commercial development of tobacco.33 Drawing on their woodworking skills and knowledge about storage units, coopers made barrels for the dried tobacco and carpenters constructed curing barns and sheds to store the hogsheads before planters shipped them off.34 In a system of unfree labor that maintained a high level of production and quality of tobacco, Africans and their descendants fostered the economic development of the British colonies. And they left reminders of their role in the agricultural fields through tobacco pipes that they interred with the dead.
During its development into a plantation economy, colonial Virginia revolved around tobacco and slavery much as the British Caribbean revolved around sugar and slavery. On the margins, slaves cultivated food crops, raised staples, and used agricultural techniques from West and West Central Africa. And while cotton plantations boomed in the antebellum South, the Anglo-American colonies produced cotton as well, both for domestic consumption and for export. The production of cotton, like that of tobacco, rice, maize, and guinea corn, was familiar to West Africans. Several accounts written during the years of the Atlantic slave trade reveal the extent of African cotton textile production. Cotton cultivation and textile production date back well before the fifteenth-century arrival of the Portuguese on the Atlantic coast of Africa, and by the time they began trading on the Guinea Coast, cotton already pervaded much of West Africa. Like tobacco and food crop production in the Americas, cotton cultivation in the British colonies was stimulated by the labor of Africans who had mastery over the crop.
Cotton and its products helped define the political, economic, social, and cultural life of West Africa, from the Senegambia region to the Bight of Biafra and from the coast into the interior. African cotton production caught the attention of European traders who saw from West Africans’ agricultural fields, workshops, markets, and clothing styles that these people were accustomed to cotton, even though they also imported textiles from European merchants. Many of them, through trade, observation, and interaction along the Guinea Coast, came to reflexively associate West Africa with cotton.35 European merchants encountered cotton crops and cloth production during their early years of contact with West Africans. For example, the Venetian merchant Alvise Cadamosto wrote in the mid∇fifteenth century that in the Senegambia region “the chiefs and those of standing wear a cotton garment—for cotton grows in these lands. Their women spin it into cloth of a span in width.” Cadamosto recounted that men also spun cotton, and he added that men and women traveled from a radius of up to five miles to sell cotton produce, thread, and textiles at coastal periodic markets, open on Mondays and Fridays.36 Also, the Portuguese sailor Pacheco Pereira suggested that the Gola produced cotton farther down the coast in Sierra Leone and Liberia.37
Early English merchants made similar observations along the coast. Richard Jobson, representing the British after they increased their ties with West Africa, left a record of cotton cultivation in Upper Guinea. He reported that “with great carefulness, they prepare the ground, to set the seedes of the Cotton wooll, whereof they plant whole fields, and coming up, as Roses grow, it beareth coddes, and as they ripen, the codde breaketh and the wooll appeareth, which shewes the time of gathering.”38 While something of a novelty to early English traders, cotton was fairly commonplace in West African material life. Hoping to take advantage of this, European trading companies sought to develop cotton plantations in West Africa, where the crop was already well established on its own terms. These efforts failed, primarily because Africans effectively resisted outside efforts to control trade, land, or labor. At this moment, effective European control over African labor could be had only in the Americas.39
Though they realized the extent of local textile production, European merchants sought to tap into West African markets, selling textiles to its commercial and political elites. But despite the opening of its markets to Asian and European textiles, West African cotton cultivation and textile production remained viable.40 The European trade failed to dislodge local production, which was carried out on a wide range of scales and required specific production techniques and skills. For example, textile workers in the coastal village of Keta just to the east of the Volta River produced textiles on a small scale in the early eighteenth century, a time of significant social change. During this period, pressures from the Akwamu and Asante states to the northwest, waves of migration into the region, and opportunities for trade with Europeans on the coast altered gender and ethnic relationships in Keta and neighboring communities.41 Yet in the face of these commercial and political transformations, textile workers continued to carry out textile production within the context of kinship units. In 1718, a Dutch commercial agent witnessed “a large number of children and men constantly busy spinning cotton” on spindles “of about a foot in length.” He added, “They said they collected this cotton in order to maintain their children.” Within this social arena of kinship relationships, youth came to embody textile production skills.42
Keta’s textile production was carried out largely in response to kinship demands, but in other parts of West Africa textile workers produced for regional markets or to fulfill taxation requirements. In the Gonja state, fabrics entered internal and regional markets and satisfied levies imposed by the Asante Empire during its eighteenth-century northern expansion. In meeting market and political demands, textile producers worked within gender divisions of labor, with women producing the raw cotton and thread and men weaving it into fabrics. For instance, in the Gonja town of Bole, women collected and ginned the cotton, which was locally grown or acquired from the town of Bonduku to the west. Using a tool called a karadea, women textile producers spun the cotton fibers into yarn and took it to local male weavers, who accepted some of the yarn as payment for their workmanship.43
Women were instrumental in West African textile production. More often than not, African women performed the labor of cotton cultivation and spinning. For example, textile production in the city of Kano depended upon the labor of free and unfree women to cultivate the raw materials and transform the cotton into thread. One observer in the early nineteenth century described the task of ginning the cotton, stating that the women placed “a quantity of [cotton] on a stone, or a piece of board, along which [were twirled] two slender iron rods about a foot in length.”44 Whereas in Keta men played a role in spinning cotton, in Senegambia women working within their household compound spun locally cultivated cotton into thread; according to one estimate in the eighteenth century, the most productive workers spun enough cotton thread in one year to make six to nine garments. They turned the thread over to male artisans who wove it into five- to six-inch strip cloths, which when sewed together created cloths measuring three by one and one half yards. Women were also responsible for growing, cultivating, and processing indigo, dyeing the cloth, and entering the cloth into trade.45
While a clear gender division of labor restricted women from occupations such as weaving, some women exercised considerable social power and could accumulate substantial wealth through the textile trade. As accounts from the nineteenth century suggest, women traders traveled throughout the countryside to buy cotton from local peasants, thereby achieving a degree of autonomy not realized by women bound to labor for others.46 And modern ethnography shows how women exercised power by managing cotton production, which they did through distinct gender and class divisions of labor. For example, in some Senegambian communities one’s social status depended upon, among a number of factors, membership in one of three basic classes: rim e (free persons), nyeenybe (persons of skill), and rimaybe (bondspersons). The rim e, especially the Muslim clerics, controlled the vast majority of the land, cultivated primarily by rimaybe. Also, rim e, particularly women from the major cleric households, controlled cotton production and devoted their premium land to that crop. To cultivate, harvest, and process the cotton, rim e mobilized rimaybe, with women undertaking “all stages of production, from planting to weeding and finally harvesting, except for clearing of land.” After the harvest, they ginned and spun the cotton into thread, and the free women sold it to local weavers in exchange for cloth, which free women in turn marketed or used to consolidate their patronage networks.47
From Senegambian villages and towns and from other regions, the labor of textile producers moved into local and regional West African markets. For instance, Senegambian communities exported their textiles by way of the Atlantic to Gold Coast markets.48 Other textile producers traded over land. In the state of Wuli, where according to Mungo Park “the chief productions are cotton, tobacco,” and other crops, the town of Sansanding housed a bustling textile market. The town, with a population of approximately eight thousand people, was located about ten miles from the town of Sego on the Niger River. In Sansanding’s market, traders exchanged salt from the Sahara and beads from the Mediterranean for gold dust and West African textiles. Within this regional trading network, San-sanding specialized in textile production and through trade along the Niger was linked to Sego and Timbuktu. Within the towns, “each craft was the monopoly of an ethno-professional corporation.” Workers from some towns had a monopoly on leather working, while workers in Sansanding held the monopoly on indigo dyeing. Interwoven through trade, these production centers exchanged raw materials, finished products, ideas, and knowledge.49
Like Sansanding, Kano supplied an extensive regional textile market. “The market is crowded,” one early nineteenth-century English traveler recalled, “every day, not excepting their Sabbath, which is kept on Friday.” Kano’s regulated market stocked luxury items such as writing paper, silk, swords from the Mediterranean world, and West African crafts.50 German physician Heinrich Barth, who surveyed West Africa in the mid∇nineteenth century, “enumerated and described twenty different types of cloth made in Kano and other towns.” Giving a sense of its scale, he stated that textile exports from Kano brought in an estimated three billion cowry shells in revenue. To place this in historical perspective, he stated that an annual income for a prosperous family was fifty to sixty thousand cowries.51 Kano’s textile industry fed into distant markets and required support from the agricultural sector of the economy, particularly supplies of cotton, indigo, and food staples.
Between Kano and the Bights of Benin and Biafra to the south, textile production and markets dotted the landscape. Cotton markets flourished in the city of Benin, the capital of the Benin Empire that in the sixteenth century and, later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries supplied labor to American plantations. The empire’s agricultural and craft workers supplied the Benin market with “much Cotton yarn, from which they make many clothes to clothe themselves.”52 Some used cotton for lamp wicks that lit the evening markets of coastal towns. Dutch merchants along the coast took note and hoped to tap into this textile market. Scouting prospects to export West African cotton, a Dutch trader along the Slave Coast stated that “cotton can be found everywhere, and a large quantity could be had if the Negroes did not use it themselves for weaving of cloth of various qualities.”53 People on the Benin Empire’s periphery also grew the crop. “We have,” noted Olaudah Equiano about his community, “plenty of Indian corn, and vast quantities of cotton and tobacco.” He added that they produced cotton textiles, some to be used as bed linens and others for dress, consisting of “a long piece of calico or muslin.” Equiano added, “This is usually dyed blue, which is our favourite colour.”54
West Africans encountered cotton textiles in their daily lives, particularly in the large markets and trading networks that connected the landscape. During the years of the Atlantic slave trade, West Africans were surrounded by cotton.55 In environments that ranged from the southern rain forests to the savannahs in the north, West African workers, often women and in many cases unfree, raised cotton for domestic consumption, trade, or tributary demands. The assiduous toil of cotton cultivation taxed their bodies while cotton cloth covered them. Cotton made up essential fibers of West African material life.
Paralleling the production of cotton in West Africa, cotton expanded in the British American colonies from the early seventeenth well into the eighteenth century. While sugar, rice, and tobacco became the most important exports from the Anglo-American colonies, cotton was also produced both for local consumption and for European markets. Cotton grew in southern European countries such as Spain, where Moors introduced it in the tenth century, and Italy, where it was introduced in the early fourteenth century, but it did not have a long history in England. By the middle of the sixteenth century, some English families cultivated and spun cotton for household consumption, but cotton was not very widespread.56 So most English colonists in the Americas would have had little familiarity with the cotton plant. However, during the early years of their colonial projects, they looked to cotton as a possible commercial crop.
In the early years of their colonial project in Barbados, the English tapped into the knowledge and labor of Amerindians to raise cotton. Amerindians entered the island during the initial colonization of Barbados in 1627, carried out under the direction of the merchant William Courteen and Captain Henry Powell. Along with fifty Englishmen who migrated to the island, Powell enticed “32 Indians from the mayne” there “to assist and instructe the english to advance the said plantation.” Powell also carried tobacco, sugarcane, potatoes, manioc, and cotton to Barbados.57 Early authorities on the island complained that the island would not be able to maintain cotton as an export, with the planter Daniel Fletcher suggesting that most of the island would “not bear cotton” and that merely “one acre in ten” would yield the crop.58 But despite such pessimism from some quarters, the island continued to produce cotton, cultivated by Indian, English, and African labor, and by 1640 cotton production was among the colony’s most important enterprises.
At the same time that cotton production expanded in Barbados, the African workforce on the island increased. For example, the Barbados planters William Hilliard and Thomas Modiford relied upon slaves, who, as in West Africa, cultivated cotton alongside other crops on the partners’ five-hundred-acre estate. Their ninety-six slaves, as well as three Indian women and their offspring, and twenty-eight “Christians,” managed pasture land, raised food provisions, and cultivated two hundred acres of sugar, five acres of ginger, and five acres of cotton. The mixed labor force operated Hilliard and Modiford’s four-thousand-square-foot carding house.59
The Hilliard and Modiford estate was but one of many cotton plantations in mid-seventeenth-century Barbados, when slave labor dominated the island, as the German indentured servant Alexander Heinrich von Uchteritz attested. Uchteritz, who worked in Barbados in 1652, later recalled that in the hills “they plant entire fields in cotton” and that “sugar, tobacco, ginger and cotton” were “produced in great quantities.” It is significant that slaves grew cotton in the hills, for cotton is generally an upland, dry-soil plant. Uchteritz added, perhaps with a degree of exaggeration, that while English and Native American servants lived on Barbados plantations, “slaves must do all the work.”60 With many of them bringing experience with cotton cultivation from West Africa, the island’s labor force sped up the development of that crop. Producing their own food, toiling on sugar plantations, or raising cotton, slaves proved to be a valuable asset to planters in several ways. As Father Antoine Biet stated about Barbados slaveholders, “Their greatest wealth is their slaves.” In this way, Barbados slave society was not unlike parts of Equatorial Africa where people with knowledge constituted the basis for wealth.61
Slaveholders’ control over their slaves yielded cotton exports. Even with the ascendancy of sugar production in the mid∇seventeenth century, Barbados continued to produce cotton. In the 1660s, cotton fields, located primarily in the south and southeast of the island, covered over 15 percent of its 135,000 acres of arable land.62 In 1665 and 1666, Barbados exported approximately 749 metric tons of cotton, valued at over 21,000 pounds sterling. Over the next three decades, exports declined, with the island exporting an estimated 78 metric tons (3,800 pounds sterling) in 1688, 1690, and 1691 and approximately 127 metric tons (8,000 pounds sterling) in 1699 and 1700. In the first three decades of the following century, mass cotton production was eventually phased out.63
Soon after colonizing Barbados, Englishmen turned to other Caribbean islands to extend plantation agriculture, particularly cotton, tobacco, and indigo production. For example, in May 1632, officials from the Company of Providence Island instructed Thomas Punt to recruit English labor to build plantations on the Bahaman Islands. Punt carried out the orders. He first passed through Barbados and other West Indian islands on the way to the Bahamas “to procure cotton seeds” and other provisions.64 Decades later, British colonists in Barbados migrated to the Bahamas, taking slaves with them. For example, John Dorrell and Hugh Wentworth had established a plantation on New Providence Island by 1670. Their estate consisted of eight Africans and five English servants, and within a few years they had carved out a plantation. The island elite soon boasted about the possibilities for lucrative plantations, reporting that they were self-sufficient in food production and noting that the island was amenable to indigo. Dorrell and Wentworth also reported that the island “produceth as good Cotten as ever grew in America and gallant Tobacco.”65 Given this experience using slave labor, the Bahaman elite hoped to “persuade the people to plant provisions and ground for cattle and planting tobacco, indigo, and specially cotton.”66 While the Bahamas later became more oriented toward the sea and profited from salt manufacture, shipbuilding, turtling, timber production, and trading rather than agriculture, the slave population affected the islands’ early economic development.67
In Jamaica, in contrast, elites turned not to the sea but to the land and looked to cotton as a commercial crop. By the early 1670s, Jamaican planters had established at least three cotton plantations, and as the century progressed cotton estates proliferated on the island. Favorable reports about Jamaican cotton arrived in England, leading the British geographer Richard Blome to write about the island that “cotton here hath an especial fineness, and is by all preferred before that of the Carribbee Isles.”68 Africans cleared the land and cultivated the soil, production grew apace, and cotton plantations dotted the island. Contemporary mapmakers indicated that by the middle of the 1680s cotton estates spread across the northern and southern coasts, with a concentration of cotton plantations in St. Elizabeth’s parish, in the southwestern corner of the island.69 By the end of the century, cotton plantations worked by African women and men ringed the mountainous island.
The input of labor from West Africa enabled Jamaica to develop a reputation for its cotton, which was sent to protected markets in England and on the North American mainland. As one writer observed, “The cotton not inferior to any in the Indies, they find by experience, it grows in the worst of land in the island, so it be within three or four miles of the sea in the southside, it being there warmest; the great product, and returns from New England, make it very profitable, especially to the middle sort of planter, that cannot compass a sugar work.”70 British geographer John Ogilby reported Jamaican cotton to be “very firm and substantial, and preferr’d before any that grows in the neighboring islands.”71 The Jamaican governor Thomas Lynch reported to the Lords of Trade and Plantation that “much cotton, sugar, indigo, &c. is made in the Island” and figured that “every Negro’s labour that produces cotton … is worth twenty pounds to the Customs.” He added, “It is impossible to hinder the importation of Negroes, for the Island is large and slaves as needful to a planter as money to a courtier, and as much coveted.”72 Yet another contemporary postulated that “if the Planters were furnished with Negroes from Africa, Answerable to their Industry, … four times the Sugar, Indico, Cotton, etc. would be Imported every Year.”73 Using African labor, Jamaican planters continued to export cotton into the eighteenth century. As a 1757 map of Jamaica by the French cartographer Jacques-Nicolas Bellin indicates, cotton production was concentrated in the northern parishes, particularly in St. Anne’s and St. Marie’s, signaling a shift from the more diffuse distribution of cotton plantations of the previous century.74
British Caribbean cotton production extended into the British Leeward Islands as well. Confronted by the capital- and labor-intensive demands of sugar production, British colonists with more modest means migrated to these islands hoping to establish a foothold in the Caribbean by investing in small-scale cotton estates. Cotton required less in start-up costs and though it was oriented toward economies of scale did not require as large a slave labor force as sugar. So operating on a comparatively smaller scale, colonists in the British Leewards turned toward cotton and slaves from Africa to work their plantations. For instance, planters in Anguilla and Tortola reaped the fruits of the labor of slaves, who outnumbered the free population by 1.5 to 1 by the early eighteenth century. On the basis of slave labor, the islands produced approximately one million pounds of cotton at midcentury.75 On a consistent basis, ships laden with cotton left the British Caribbean islands; this enabled planters to buy more slaves who grew more cotton, a process that proved to be a boon to colonial elites throughout the eighteenth century. And with knowledge of the crop, African workers in the British Caribbean spun out worlds of cotton.
As cotton production expanded in the British Caribbean, the crop shaped the daily life, visual landscape, and contests over power on the islands where cotton grew. Throughout the British Caribbean, Africans and their descendants cultivated and ginned different varieties of the crop. In Jamaica, slaves cultivated a wide range of cotton seeds, including “Common Jamaica,” which bore strong but coarse wool and was the least valuable; “Brown Bearded,” which yielded finer fibers, had seeds that were tightly attached to the fibers, and was generally planted along with Common Jamaica; “Nankeen,” similar to Brown Bearded cotton but with a different color fiber; “French,” which produced fine fibers; and “Kidney or Brazilian,” which generated plants with seeds that were easy to remove.76 In the Bahamas and Anguilla, slaves cultivated Sea-Island cotton.77
Over the seventeenth century, enslaved Africans were fundamental to the rise of cotton plantations in the Anglo-American world, and by the following century colonial planters further systematized their fields and labor forces for mass cotton production and export. In allocating labor, they took a number of factors into consideration. They required slaves to cultivate sugarcane between October and December and to harvest it sixteen months later from January until May. During sugar’s slack period from May through September, slaves cultivated cotton along with maize and other food crops.78 As one planter noted, “Dryness, both in respect of the soil and atmosphere, is indeed essentially necessary in all its stages; for if the land is moist, the plant expends itself in branches and leaves, and if the rains are heavy, either when the plant is in blossom or when the pods are beginning to unfold, the crop is lost.” For that reason and because of the demands on slave labor for sugar production during other times of the year, cultivation began in May so that the plant would mature after the heavy rains of the hurricane season had subsided. As with sugar production, planters envisioned their fields in linear form, suggesting that the ideal cotton plantation should have straight rows set eight feet apart with the plants being grown every four feet. Africans workers on the British Caribbean cotton plantations engaged in ongoing weeding of the soil and also “topped” the plants by breaking off an inch of the growing stems to increase the number of branches.79
They also employed gins to separate the seed from the fiber. While in West Africa workers manually rolled metal rods over cotton to gin the fiber, Caribbean cotton estates adopted mechanical gins from India. “The Instrument by which they separate the Seeds and Filth from the Cotton,” noted Hans Sloane, “stands as a turning Loom, and is made of two, long, small, round, Cilinders of Wood, on which are three or four small Furrows; these have more or less Space between them, as the Master desires, but generally are so close, as only to suffer the fine Cotton to go thro’, whereas the Seeds are kept back, and the Cotton is drawn by one of these Cilinders, and thrust away by the other, they being turned by the Feet two contrary Ways, one from the other.”80 Tapping into a global flow of labor and information, British Caribbean plantations combined agricultural and mechanical knowledge from across the Atlantic to yield cotton exports.
African workers in the Caribbean, already familiar with intercropping practices that included cotton production, helped transform Caribbean landscapes, and their know-how generated fortunes for British American colonial elites. Hoping to use their knowledge of cotton production to their advantage, some of the enslaved grew cotton in their provision grounds or garden plots, thereby adding to the material life of the slave quarters. For example, as in the markets of West Africa, Caribbean slaves used locally produced cotton for candle wicks.81 And while they used cotton for domestic consumption, their efforts to market the crop met with planter resistance. Fearing competition from slaves or concerned that slaves might pilfer cotton from the main cotton fields, colonial assemblies throughout the British Caribbean prohibited slaves from selling cotton. For instance, in the late eighteenth century, Barbados levied fines on white colonists who bought ginger or cotton from slaves.82
Through their agricultural practices, Africans shaped the British Caribbean material landscape. As in West Africa, slaves cultivated combinations of food crops such as rice, maize, root crops, and sorghum to maximize yields from the soil. African workers in the Anglo-American colonies cultivated food for subsistence, and the fruits of their labor also entered into the larger Atlantic economy. On the margins of the sugar estates, they also grew cotton and tobacco, cultivating them for domestic consumption and as cash crops. In essence, the cultural capital that Africans embodied and carried across the ocean ultimately enriched Atlantic merchants and British Caribbean planters, and this process happened concurrently on the North American mainland.
During the first decades of colonial Virginia, the British tried a number of experiments with cotton, importing seeds from the Caribbean and the Mogul Empire. For instance, Governor Berkeley ordered his workers to plant tobacco, indigo, and “a considerable area of land in flax, hemp, and cotton.”83 Berkeley’s slaves, who told him that they knew how to grow rice, probably had experience with cotton, indigo, and tobacco, which were raised simultaneously in West Africa’s upland fields. Virginia’s small-scale experiments with cotton continued into the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And though tobacco dominated the colony’s agricultural and social landscape, cotton grew in its shadows, particularly in periods when overproduction of tobacco led to a drop in prices and weakened the region’s ability to import textiles from Great Britain. During such crises, colonial leaders hoped to substitute imported goods with local products. For instance, Edmund Andros, appointed governor of Virginia in 1692, embarked on plans to raise cotton and promote local textile manufacturing. Furthermore, under the administration of Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood (1710∇22), the colony became more self-sufficient in textile production. Addressing the Council of Trade, Spotswood noted that parts of the colony “have been forced into the same humour of planting cotton and Sowing Flax, and by mixing the first with their wool to supply the want of coarse Cloathing and Linnen, not only for the Negros, but for many of the poorer sort of house keepers.”84
While Virginia’s leaders saw domestic cotton textile production as a path to independence, cotton production depended, ironically, on slaves. On the plantations of Landon Carter, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, slaves, particularly slave women, produced textiles.85 They were most likely supplied by locally grown cotton, which slaves grew in the interstices of the tobacco production schedule. After slaves cleared the fields for tobacco cultivation in early spring, prepared seedling tobacco plants, and transferred them to the furrowed soils in May, they in some cases shifted their labor toward cotton cultivation. As William Hugh Grove noted in his 1732 account of Virginia, “Cotton is planted Early in ye Spring in July & beginning of Aug.” Taking advantage of the warmer and moister climate of the season, slaves worked the crop until the boll ripened and became ready to be harvested in October.86 So as on Caribbean sugar plantations, Africans on Virginia’s tobacco estates cultivated cotton during the slack periods.
Across the Chesapeake Bay on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, African laborers performed similar work on the colony’s tobacco plantations. To meet the needs of their families, slaves apportioned small plots of land for cotton production. The Revolutionary economic booster Tench Coxe recounted that his mother Mary Francis had told him that “the cultivation of cotton, on the garden scale—though not at all as a planter’s crop,—was intimately known and familiarly practised, even among the children of the white and black families, in the vicinity of Easton in the county of Talbot, on the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay, so early as the year 1736.”87 During this era, when an influx of people entered Virginia and Maryland from the Senegambia region and the Bight of Biafra, colonial plantations experimented with small-scale cotton production. Used to growing cotton or wearing cotton textiles, African workers in the Chesapeake reproduced familiar worlds.
They played a comparable role in colonial South Carolina. Looking to precedents in Barbados, Jamaica, and other British Caribbean islands, the early settlers of South Carolina viewed cotton as one of several crops with commercial potential. Though some colonial planners thought that producing cotton in South Carolina would produce a glut in the world market, colonists persisted in their hopes and promoted cotton cultivation for domestic consumption or as a commercial crop. Scouting his prospects, Joseph West reported in 1671 that “the planters that came now from Barbados doe say that they doe not question but the ground will produce as good ginger, Cotton &c as they have in Barbados.” The early British colonist Maurice Mathews recounted that “Guiney Corne growes very well here, butt this being ye first I euer planted ye perfection I will not Auer till ye Winter doth come in, ginger thriues wll butt ye perfection &c. Cotton growes freely butt ye perfection &c.”88 The demise of cotton cultivation in Barbados fueled hopes for cotton production in South Carolina. For example, in the early eighteenth century one observer found that in the colony, “Flax and Cotton thrive admirably.”89 Africans forced into the colony in the earliest years of British settlement constituted from one-fourth to one-third of the colonial population in the 1670s, and they performed a considerable amount of the field work.90
Over the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the slaves’ largest contribution would be in transplanting rice production knowledge systems from Africa, but they also cultivated cotton on small scales to meet domestic clothing needs. For example, slaves on the Lucas estate raised cotton for the plantation. Eliza Lucas’s plantation records indicate that the estate held workers from the Gold Coast and a carpenter named Sogo, probably from Africa. They raised a combination of crops, as Lucas wrote to her father on the efforts on the plantation in July 1740. She reported the estate’s efforts to “bring the Indigo, Ginger, Cotton and Lucerne and Casada to perfection.”91 Within four years, cotton production had expanded so much that the plantation overseer requested two cotton cards and reported, “We shall have Cotton to make a good part of the cloaths but a grate deal of trouble for want of a gine.” Indeed, her slave Sogo built the plantation’s cotton-weaving loom.92 Though it had first been primarily a rice plantation, the estate mobilized its African and American-born labor force to produce cotton.
Lucas was one of several Lowcountry planters who used their slaves to raise cotton. During the wave of forced migration from Upper Guinea to South Carolina and Georgia, the region’s slaves churned out cotton. By midcentury it was well rooted, leading the doctor and naturalist Alexander Garden to note that “Gossipium, grows extreamly well, and yields very fine Cotton,” and to add that slave women, particularly elderly women, played a prominent role in spinning the fiber.93 In some cases, it is clear that planters hired white artisans to train their slave labor force in textile production. For example, during the early years of the American Revolution, one planter reportedly hired a white woman to instruct slaves on how to use the spinning wheel and a white man to train slaves in weaving.94 In other cases, the work that slaves did in the Lowcountry more closely paralleled West African patterns. As in the Senegambia region, slaves grew rice and cotton simultaneously in the Lowcountry. Henry Laurens reported that on his Broughton Island, Georgia, plantation his slaves grew “fine Rice, Corn, Pease, Hemp, and Cotton.”95
During the Revolution, cotton production expanded in South Carolina and Georgia, where Africans and their descendants grew cotton and subsistence crops to survive the crisis. For example, the South Carolina planter Ralph Izard, who was in Europe on the eve of the Revolution, requested that his plantation manager Henry Laurens have his slaves plant cotton to make their own textiles, given the colonial boycott on English imports. John Lloyd reported to Izard that “cotton is produced in such plenty, that considerable quantities may be bought. Mr. Heyward, who I suppose has as many negroes as any gentleman in the State—makes clothing sufficient for their service.” And while one colonial figure suggested that workers from France be sent to the colony to set up cotton manufacturing, most of the work done during the Revolutionary period in cotton production was performed by the enslaved.96 Shortly after the war, the United States considered a range of economic alternatives to help the new nation stay afloat and maintain its independence from Great Britain. Having found themselves dependent upon fluctuations in British markets for tobacco and rice during the colonial era, the leaders of the new republic searched for other exports. Among a number of available choices, they looked to and eventually decided upon cotton production to meet the nation’s commercial needs.97 Prompted by technological innovations in cotton processing and manufacturing, the United States could also look to a history of cotton cultivation in the colonial era. In worlds dominated by rice, indigo, wheat, and tobacco, indentured servants, free farmers, and enslaved workers produced cotton for domestic consumption or for export. These initial experiments, in which African workers played a significant role, established foundations upon which the new nation eventually built.
In a number of different contexts, the enslaved in the North American mainland colonies reproduced African agricultural practices. Africans and their descendants in North America, as in the Caribbean, raised crops and employed production methods that turned the agricultural scene into one that resembled West Africa. Some colonial officials took note, acknowledging the contributions of Africans to colonial agriculture, while others more unwittingly relied upon it. Through the cultural capital and knowledge systems that they embodied, Africans shaped the agricultural landscape of the colonial British North American mainland in several ways. They grew food crops, tobacco, and cotton. They also produced textiles, and their knowledge of that craft included indigo production, the subject of the next chapter.