African American life in the United States has been
framed by migrations, forced and free. A forced migration
from Africa—the transatlantic slave trade—carried
black people to the Americas. A second forced migration—the
internal slave trade—transported them from the
Atlantic coast to the interior of the American South.
A third migration—this time initiated largely,
but not always, by black Americans—carried black
people from the rural South to the urban North. At the
end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the
twenty-first, African American life is again being transformed
by another migration, this time a global one, as peoples
of African descent from all parts of the world enter
the United States.
While each of these massive movements shaped and reshaped
African American life, none was more important than
the first, the so-called Middle Passage from Africa
to America. More than any other single migration the
Middle Passage has come to epitomize the experience
of people of African descent throughout the Atlantic
world. The nightmarish weeks and sometimes months locked
in the holds of stinking slave ships speak to the traumatic
loss of freedom, the degradation of enslavement, and
the long years of bondage that followed. But the Middle
Passage also represents the will to survive, the determination
of black people not to be dehumanized by dehumanizing
circumstances, and the confidence that freedom would
eventually be theirs and that they would take their
rightful place as a people among peoples.
The transatlantic slave trade had its beginning in
the middle of the fifteenth century when Portuguese
ships sailed down the West African coast. The intention
was to trade for gold and spices, but the voyagers found
another even more valuable commodity -- human beings.
Over time, the trade in men and women supplanted other
commerce, and the slaves’ destination changed
from Europe to the Americas, where plantations growing
commodities for the international market initiated the
massive transfer of African peoples. In all, some eleven
to twelve million Africans were forcibly carried to
the Americas. Of those, roughly one-half million were
taken to mainland North America or what became the United
States.
The first black men and women arrived in mainland
North America in the sixteenth century, often accompanying
European explorers. For the next century or so, they
continued to trickle onto the continent in small numbers,
often not from Africa itself but from Europe, the Antilles,
or other parts of the Atlantic littoral. Dubbed “Atlantic
Creoles” because of their connection with the
ocean that linked Africa, Europe, and the Americas,
many of these first arrivals spoke the language of their
enslavers and were familiar with the various religions,
commercial conventions, and systems of jurisprudence
of the Atlantic. Entering frontier societies in which
Europeans also labored in some form of bound labor (indentured
servitude being the most prominent), black men and women
employed their knowledge of the Atlantic world to integrate
themselves into the European settlements. Much like
other settlers, free and unfree, they joined churches,
participated in exchange economies, and formed families.
With the advent of the plantation in mainland North
America, the nature of slavery and then the slave trade
changed. The beginnings of plantation production--tobacco
in the Chesapeake in the late seventeenth century and
rice in the Lowcountry in the early eighteenth century--increased
the level of violence, exploitation, and brutality in
these regions. Slaves worked harder, propelling their
owners to new, previously unimagined heights of wealth
and power. As they did, slave owners expanded their
plantations and demanded more and more slaves, as slaves
proved to be an extraordinarily valuable form of labor.
Not only were they workers, but they reproduced themselves,
adding to the owners’ wealth. Rather than arriving
in ones and twos from the Atlantic littoral, boatloads
of captives--generally drawn from the African interior--crossed
the ocean. Although African slavers deposited their
human cargoes in ports from Providence to New Orleans,
the vast majority of slaves who disembarked in mainland
North America did so in the Chesapeake (largely Virginia
and Maryland) and the Lowcountry (largely South Carolina,
and Georgia).
Slaves imported directly from Africa--distinguished
from Atlantic Creoles--first landed in the Chesapeake
in large numbers during the last decades of the seventeenth
century. Following the legalization of chattel bondage
in the 1660s, they slowly replaced European and African
indentured servants as the main source of plantation
labor. Although black people never challenged white
numerical dominance in the region, they achieved majorities
in a few localities. For many European settlers, it
seemed as if the Chesapeake would “some time or
other be confirmed by the name of New Guinea .”
Just as the Chesapeake was about to become an extension
of West Africa, the dynamics of black life changed dramatically.
Slaves in the Chesapeake, in the words of one European
observer, proved “very prolifick among themselves.”
By the 1730s, births to slave women outnumbered imports,
and the black population was increasing naturally. Although
transatlantic slavers continued to deliver their cargoes
to the great estuary, the proportion of Africans declined
as the indigenous African American population increased.
By mid-century, the majority of enslaved men and women
in the Chesapeake had never seen Africa. At the start
of the American Revolution, the first Great Migration
was over in the Chesapeake. A native people began to
sink deep roots in soils of mainland North America.
The slave trade continued, however, in the Lowcountry
of South Carolina and Georgia. There the forced migration
from Africa followed a trajectory similar to that of
the Chesapeake, but it started later and continued longer.
As a result, the number of Africans who entered the
Lowcountry --almost 400,000-- was more than double the
number of Africans who came to the Chesapeake. Sullivan’s
Island, a tiny quarantine station in Charleston harbor,
became the Ellis Island of black America. Although importation
again slackened during the American Revolution, at war’s
end the pent-up demand for slaves pushed importation
to new heights. Lowland slave owners purchased over
100,000 Africans between 1787, when South Carolina reopened
the African trade, and 1808, when the legal trade to
the United States ended. Thereafter, American planters
continued to smuggle slaves into the country, although
the illegal imports composed but a small portion of
the slave population.
For much of eighteenth century, black people in South
Carolina and Georgia--unlike those in Maryland and Virginia--resided
in an immigrant society, more an extension of Africa
than of Europe. With the slave trade open and the influx
of saltwater slaves nearly continuous, lowland slaves
had great difficulty forming families and reproducing
themselves. The gender ratio among the newly arriving
"saltwater slaves" was usually dramatically
skewed, and acculturated slaves sometimes were reluctant
to create families with the new arrivals. But by the
middle of the eighteenth century, the black population
of the Lowcountry began to reproduce itself and the
number of African Americans grew, although it did so
in tandem with newly arrived Africans. If at mid-century
slaves in the Chesapeake had few opportunities to converse
with Africans, Africans and African Americans in the
Lowcountry knew each other well.
Slavers also deposited their cargoes in other parts
of the mainland North America--New England, the middle
colonies, the Floridas, and the lower Mississippi Valley.
Everywhere planters preferred so-called “men-boys,”
along with “women-girls,” young adults whom
they could put to work immediately and who would reproduce
the labor force. “Negroes from 15 to 25 years
of Age suite this market best,” observed one Charleston
slave trader. Among the young, planters preferred men
over women.
The captives’ nationality was no more random
than their age or sex. Europeans slavers developed specialties,
in some measure to meet the demands of their customers
on both sides of the Atlantic, whose preferences and
needs grew increasingly well defined over time. Preferences
on both side of the Atlantic determined, to a considerable
degree, which enslaved Africans went where and when,
populating the mainland with unique combinations of
African peoples and creating distinctive regional variations
in the Americas. Igbo peoples constituted the majority
of African slaves in Virginia and Maryland, so much
so that some historians have denominated colonial Virginia
as “Igbo land.” A different pattern emerged
in Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia, where slaves
from central Africa predominated from the beginning
of large-scale importation, so that if Virginia was
Igbo land, the Lowcountry might be likened to a new
Angola.
But if patterns of African settlement can be discerned,
they never created regional homogeneity. The general
thrust of the slave trade was toward heterogeneity,
throwing different people together in ways that undermined
the transfer of any single culture. Mainland North American
became a jumble of African nationalities. Their interaction--not
their homogeneity--created new African American cultures.
The reasons were many. Nationality or ethnicity in
Africa did not follow neat geographic boundaries. Even
before the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade,
African people were on the move. Numerous peoples--speaking
a variety of languages, embracing different beliefs,
and engaging in a multiplicity of domestic arrangements--shared
the physical space that became catchment areas for slave
traders. A raid on a particular village necessarily
took many different peoples. The long march to the coast--during
which some slaves died, others escaped, and still others
were captured or purchased--added to the diversity of
captives lodged in the seaside barracoons. Likewise,
on the American side of the Atlantic not all slave purchasers
knew or cared much about the origins of their slaves.
As a result, the nature of the slave trade, particularly
to mainland North America, only rarely allowed for transatlantic
continuities.
No matter what their sex, age, and nationality, Africans
shipped to the New World endured the trauma of enslavement.
Captured deep in the African interior, Africans faced
a long, deadly march to the coast. Traveling sometimes
for months, they were passed from group to group, as
many different African nations participated in the slave
trade. But whoever drove the captives to their unwanted
destiny, the circumstances of their travel were extraordinarily
taxing. In some places, some forty percent of the slaves
died between their initial capture in the interior and
their arrival on the coast.
The captives then faced the nightmarish transatlantic
crossing. The depths of human misery and the astounding
death toll of men and women packed in the stinking hulls
still remains difficult to fathom. Stripped naked and
bereft of their every belonging, they boarded the ship
and met--often for the first time--white men. Brandishing
hot irons to mark their captives in the most personal
way, these “white men with horrible looks, red
faces, and long hair” left more than a physical
scar. Many enslaved Africans concluded that the white
men were in league with the devil, if not themselves
devils. For other Africans, the trauma of having their
skin seared confirmed that they were bound for the slaughterhouse
to be eaten by the cannibals, who had stamped them in
much the way animals were marked.
Surviving the Middle Passage was but the first of
the many tests faced by the forced immigrants. Once
African peoples disembarked, new anxieties compensated
for whatever relief they gained from the end of the
seaboard journey. Indeed the shock of arrival only repeated
the trauma of African enslavement. Staggering to their
feet, bodies still bent from their weeks below deck,
shaking with apprehension, the captives were fitted
with a new set of shackles--a painful welcome to their
new homeland. The captives again confronted the auction
block and the prospect of being poked and prodded by
strange white men speaking strange languages, intent
on demonstrating their mastery. Marched in chains to
some isolated, backwoods plantation, forced to labor
long hours at unfamiliar tasks, enslaved black men and
woman began their lives in mainland North America. It
was a grim existence, as their debilitating work regime,
drafty dormitories, and bland rations invited an early
death. Within month of arrival, many of the new immigrants--ridiculed
as "outlandish" by their owners--were dead.
But slowly, inexorably, the survivors made the new
land their own. Transplanted Africans began to master
the languages of North America, learned to traverse
the countryside, formed friendships, pieced together
new lineages from real and fictive kin, and created
a new sacred world. Their children, who knew no other
land, took root in American soil and made the land that
had been forced on their parents their own. Like most
other Americans, they too were the children of immigrants—but
immigrants of a very different kind.
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