1.

The First Rebels

Slavery in the Americas began the day Christopher Columbus landed. “I took some of the natives by force,” the explorer wrote in his diary on October 12, 1492. In 1498, British explorer John Cabot seized three Native American people. By 1524, when Giovanni da Verrazzano arrived, he found Native Americans who “are suspicious, hostile, and desirous of obtaining steel implements for defense against kidnappers, who frequent the coast to seize and transport them to the Spanish Islands of the West Indies.”

From Canada to Florida, forced American Indian labor became a thriving European business in North America. Colonizing powers seized Indigenous people and battled each other for domination of a continent. In the next century and a half, international wars engulfed the Americas. When Native American nations along the Atlantic coast were attacked by white settlers, their males were killed, and their widows and orphans were rounded up for sale or exchange.

The French in the Ohio valley, Louisiana Territory, and Canada became active traders. In 1684, King Louis XIV of France announced “these savages are strong and robust” and ordered that Iroquois captives be made to serve on French vessels. In Canada, French officials enslaved Pawnees, and along the Mississippi valley they kidnapped the Natchez.

In British America, the trade in Indigenous people shaped colonial diplomatic, political, and economic policies. The money made by British enslavers helped colonial commerce and filled colonial treasuries. Captive American Indians became forced apprentices in Connecticut. They were given as pay and as bonuses to soldiers in Virginia and Massachusetts. In Rhode Island, Maryland, North Carolina, and South Carolina, they became the leading source of colonial revenue.

The trade in enslaved American Indians, at first run by speculators, soon spread to governors, businessmen, and aristocrats. In 1712, North Carolina’s Governor Hyde expressed his pleasure with “the great advantage that may be made of slaves, there being many hundreds of them, women and children.” Three years later, South Carolina missionary the Reverend M. Johnson said “our military men were . . . so desirous to enrich themselves by taking all the Indians slaves.”

Enslaving Native people was not without severe problems. Relatives of the captured counterattacked or offered refuge to escapees. Indigenous people were able to escape to the forests and hills they knew better than their enslavers. Relatives of those kidnapped living in heavily armed neighboring nations gave British frontier families nervous and sleepless nights. The colonists, convinced that kidnapping people into slavery threatened their lives, began to seek changes. Some demanded this slavery stop; others insisted that local American Indian captives be sold or shipped far from their homeland.

Finally, colonial legislatures passed laws for “transportation” of seized American Indians to distant lands. This would be the first but not the last time that resistance to the system of slavery would alter the rules governing the business.

Long before they seized African people, Europeans had learned slavery works best when enslaved people are kept far from their homes and natural allies. American Indians taken in New England were sent to the West Indies; those seized in the South were traded in the Caribbean, New England, or the Middle Colonies. In 1707, the governor and Council of South Carolina listed “Boston, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia” among “places we export Indian slaves.”

Enslavement of Indigenous people began to decline. Native people died of disease and overwork. Nations retreated into the wilderness to fight. Condemnation of enslaving Native people in the Spanish colonies by Bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas in 1514, and his suggestion of African labor, led traders increasingly to a new source. By the late 1600s, the vast majority of enslaved people in America were African.

A people brought three thousand miles from home had no one to turn to. Without others in the Americas who looked like them, African people who fled their chains could easily be tracked and recaptured. No escape, no friends, and no hope, reasoned Europeans, would soon make frightened, discouraged Africans accept their lot. Traders felt they had found a unique solution.

Under watchful eyes, kidnapped Africans are loaded aboard ships to the Americas.

The first kidnapped Africans were led aboard ships that celebrated Christianity—Gift of God, Jesus, Mary. They were packed into vessels named for admired friends—Elizabeth, Robert, William, Judith, Little George, Young Hero, Don Carlos. They sailed on ships that celebrated great virtues—Justice, Hope, Liberty, Fortune, Charity, Integrity, Friendship, Good Intent. Divided from others of their nation, shackled hand and foot to people who did not speak their language, they spent seven to eight weeks on the stormy Atlantic.

Kings, queens, merchants, nobles, and bankers made huge profits from the voyages. But the hard and heartless work was carried out by smiling or mean-spirited captains and underpaid, mistreated crews. Some officers tried to keep the Africans healthy and alive to make the most money from them. Others packed kidnapped Africans into every corner of their tiny ships. Though many would die this way, they calculated, the many survivors would still insure profits.

Gustavus Vasa described his confinement: “The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us.”

Dr. Falconbridge, a ship’s surgeon, reported to Parliament how he “wedged them in. They had not so much room as a man in his coffin either in length or breadth.” But when Dr. Falconbridge crawled among the chained men, they “bit and pinched him.”

It was commonly said of ships carrying enslaved people, “You could smell them five miles downwind.”

Some pious officers brought the kidnapped Africans on deck each day for Christian worship services or the singing of psalms. Captain John Hawkins’s sailing orders were: “Serve God daily, love one another, preserve your victuals, beware of fire, and keep good company.”

In 1562, Hawkins launched the English trade in enslaved people with a few small ships, one hundred crewmen, and three hundred captured African men, women, and children. Queen Elizabeth first denounced his effort and said it was “detestable and would call down vengeance from heaven.” But after she saw Captain Hawkins’s huge profit, she became a major shareholder in his next African expedition.

The right to supply Spain’s American colonies with enslaved people was a prize eagerly sought by businessmen from Holland, France, Denmark, England, Prussia, Spain, and Portugal. In 1713, the English gained it by treaty. A British scholar reported that the trade in enslaved people “became the daily bread of the most considerable part of British manufacturers.” Money from this trade helped finance the British industrial revolution and built the ports of Bristol and Liverpool. “There was not a brick in the city but was cemented with the blood of a slave,” said a Bristol resident.

Traders of enslaved people became welcome guests in churches, palaces, and parliaments. In 1757, a British merchant of enslaved people returned home after eleven years to find he had many friends, was welcomed “at every great man’s house,” and was called the African Gentleman. He heard his adventures on the high seas compared to Columbus’s expedition.

European traders carried off Africa’s strongest sons and daughters. With bribes and guns they convinced the chiefs of African villages to sell their prisoners and to organize manhunting expeditions. Europeans skillfully played on local rivalries in an Africa as divided as Europe was.

The foreigners promised to pay handsomely for the captives. Europeans exploited disputes among African nations and fostered rivalries between kings. Soon African nations were pitted against one another in wars to sell neighbors into bondage.

About a third of the men, women, and children captured in these wars died on the long trip that brought them from Africa’s interior to the foreign ships at the coast. Others died while the ships swayed at anchor off the coast, and still others died in the long voyage across the Atlantic.

The captives once had lived and worked in happy families. They were diamond, gold, and iron miners, weavers or potters. Many from along the coast or lakes fished for a living. Some worked in bronze, copper, or gold or traded with Asians, Europeans, and other Africans. Some were farmers or herders and others were musicians, priests, and royalty. But now, kings and commoners were packed into narrow holds of foreign ships.

While their homeland was still in sight, men and women took every opportunity to rebel. “We shackle the men two and two, while we lie in port, and in sight of their own country, for ’tis then they attempt to make their escape and mutiny,” reported a captain in 1693. “We always keep sentinels upon the hatchways, and have a chest full of small arms, ready loaded, constantly lying at hand, together with some grenade shells, and two of our quarterdeck guns pointing on the deck, and two more out of steerage.”

There were many desperate efforts to rebel and return home while the ships were in sight of the African coast. A Dutch ship anchored in Africa’s Gulf of Guinea around 1699 had to battle African captives who, “unknown to any of the ship’s crew, possessed themselves of a hammer [and] broke all their fetters in pieces.” The Africans “came above deck and fell upon our men.” Their victory was interrupted when a French ship and a British ship arrived. The combined foreign force killed twenty and drove the Africans belowdecks.

Revolts rocked the trade in enslaved African people, as is depicted in this French drawing.

In 1734, Samuel Waldo, owner of the Africa, commanded his captain and crew to place many armed guards and “put not too much confidence in the Women and Children lest they happen to be instrumental to your being surprised which might be fatal.”

In 1757, Indigenous people from shore attacked several vessels in the harbor and liberated their captured friends and relatives. Two years later on the Gambia River when eighty Africans rebelled, a wounded captain fired his gun into the ammunition room and the ship exploded.

A crewman aboard a New England ship anchored off the African coast reported: “The Negroes got to the powder and Arms at about 3 in the morning, rose upon the whites, and after wounding all of them . . . ran the vessel ashore . . . and made their escape.”

Enslavers knew they carried the most dangerous cargo in the world. In 1776, Edward Long characterized African people as “wolves or wild boars” who committed “many acts of violence . . . murdering whole crews, destroying ships when they had it in their power to do so.” Captives were carefully guarded, and heavily armed crewmen stood ready to crush rebellions. Captains brutally enforced Captain William Snelgrave’s advice in 1727 that “no one that killed a white Man should be spared.”

Sometimes captive people found or made weapons. Aboard the British vessel Don Carlos, Africans made knives, “pieces of iron they had torn off our forecastle floor,” and struck at a crew already weak from disease. Guns saved the whites, reported one. “We stood in arms, firing on the revolted slaves of whom we killed some, and wounded many, which so terrified the rest that they gave way.”

To keep prisoners weak, desperate, and quiet, food and water were cut. To reduce resistance through terror, captains ordered public executions at sea, and torture of any who appeared rebellious. The resistance did not end.

To keep them in good physical condition after so many hours in chains belowdecks, captive Africans were brought on deck each day for what Dr. Thomas Trotter called “dancing the slaves.” With guns trained on them, they were prodded to dance and sing.

People in captivity gave voice to familiar music to express their deep longing for home and establish a bond among the many tongues. A British doctor on the Young Hero wrote: “They sing, but not for their amusement. The captain ordered them to sing, and they sang songs of sorrow. Their sickness, fear of being beaten, their hunger, and the memory of their country . . . are the usual subjects.”

Another doctor at night heard “howling melancholy noise, expressive of extreme anguish.” An African woman explained her people had awakened after dreaming of their own country to find themselves enslaved in a ship. The men and women cried, “Kicheraboo,” which meant, “We are dying.”

Whether they were watched carefully or casually, treated badly or well, captive Africans wanted most to return home to freedom. In 1727, one British captain thought a more charitable and friendly approach might win cooperation from his human cargo. For nine days he joined Africans at mealtime, sitting on deck, eating with them out of the small bowls. On the tenth day, reported a crewman, they “beat out his Brains with the little tubs.”

Europeans mistakenly assumed that their captives had no knowledge of navigation and once at sea would have to accept their fate. But some 150 recorded rebellions at sea marked the centuries of the trade in enslaved people. In 1701, there was a shipboard revolt in which twenty-eight African people were killed or “leapt overboard, and drowned themselves in the ocean with much resolution, showing no manner of concern for life,” reported a white crewman.

African people enslaved at sea. If they could not revolt, they tried to throw themselves overboard or starve themselves to death. At right, a man is forced to eat.

In 1730, about ninety-six African people aboard the Little George slipped out of their chains and overpowered the crew. When some armed crewmen hid in a cabin, they were left alone, their door guarded. The Black rebels concentrated on sailing back to Africa, which they accomplished in nine days.

Two years later Africans slew the captain of the William, set the crew adrift, and also returned home.

Women, allowed more freedom on deck and at night, were at times able to play a key role in mutinies at sea. In 1721, a woman aboard the Robert off the coast of Sierra Leone served as a spy for a “Captain Tomba,” who led a revolt. She sounded the signal, and with Tomba and another man, killed two of the crew. Tomba, the unknown woman, and the mutineers were overwhelmed by crewmen with muskets.

Captain Philip Drake, an enslaver for fifty years, said: “Slavery is a dangerous business at sea as well as ashore.” But the transatlantic trade, fueled by its staggering profits, continued despite its rebellions and despite the “rights of man” promised by the American and French revolutions. It was not outlawed by nations until the early nineteenth century.

Africans arrived in the Americas weary, undernourished, and sometimes racked with disease. Many had suffered disabling injuries and some were near death. Recalled Charles Ball: “More than a third of us died on the passage, and when we arrived in Charleston, I was not able to stand. It was more than a week after I left the ship before I could straighten my limbs.”

Most kidnapped Africans were not sent to North America directly. They were put through a “seasoning” process in the West Indies, which taught them the language, religion, and demands of their captors. A third died resisting the process of seasoning.

Only a year after the first Africans walked down the gangplank in Hispaniola in the West Indies in 1502, Governor Nicolás de Ovando reported they were fleeing to Native Americans and could not be recaptured. King Ferdinand of Spain, convinced of terrible danger, ended the trade in enslaved people. But economic considerations soon overrode fear, and the business reopened.

Rebellions of enslaved people erupted on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1522, in South Carolina in 1526, in Puerto Rico in 1527 and 1533, in Panama in 1531, Mexico City, 1537, Havana, 1538, Honduras, 1548. After the Mexican revolt, the trade in enslaved people was again banned by Spain for eight years.

In 1542, an archdeacon informed authorities in Hispaniola that “no slave is reliable” and “they have more freedom than we have.” Four years later a report claimed seven thousand had liberated themselves “each with spears they had stolen from fallen Spaniards.” “No one dared to venture out unless he was in a group of fifteen or twenty people,” it said. “We lived in constant fear,” admitted a Spaniard.

Europeans tried to end resistance. Dogs were trained to hunt enslaved people seeking freedom. Rebels or people escaping bondage were branded or tortured. A death penalty hung over anyone who aided those rebelling or seeking freedom.

Thousands of people who had escaped from slavery, or maroons as they were called, survived in strongly defended colonies located in distant, remote regions. Their armies challenged the foreign invaders, and their farmers and traders competed with Spain’s. In 1545, maroons in Hispaniola turned down Spain’s offer of peace, saying they could not trust Spaniards. The next year a Spanish court announced that maroons had become so potent a force that planters only dared issue gentle orders to enslaved people.

During the seventeenth century, the Republic of Palmares, a maroon settlement of ten thousand in northeastern Brazil, prospered. Its soldiers drove back a dozen Dutch and Portuguese armies sent to demolish it “by fire and sword.”

Throughout the Americas, enslaved people—African and Indigenous—fled, armed, and formed outlaw colonies in swamps and other remote areas.

In Palmares and in the enslaved people’s huts of the Americas, Black and Native people met and married. This biracial history is captured in the sacred legends of the Saramaka people (dating from 1685) of Dutch Guiana, now Suriname. The African leader of the Saramakas, Lánu was an enslaved person who ran to the woods after his wife was slain. According to Saramaka legend, Wámba, the forest spirit, appeared: “And Wámba came into Lánu’s head, and brought him directly to where some Indians lived. These Indians welcomed him, and gave him food. And he lived with them there.”

When Lánu’s younger brother Ayakô fled slavery, Lánu “found him and saw that he had been well taken care of by the Indians, that he had done well there. He, too, found many things to eat there.” Native American aid for Lánu and Ayakô symbolizes a rebirth of Saramaka people beyond the eyes of their foes. It also describes a common alliance forged by Africans and American Indian people.

Captain John Stedman spent years as a mercenary for the Dutch in the Guianas. His deadly enemies were the maroon descendants of Lánu and Ayakô. In 1776, he wrote: “The Negroes are spirited and brave, patient in adversity, meeting death and torture with most undaunted fortitude, their conduct in the most trying situations approaching even to heroism.”