Transcription
[Music] They came from different lands, all facing an uncertain future. English and Ashante, Meni and Portuguese, German and Ewe, Fanti and Spaniard, French and Angolan. Some seeking adventure, or riches, or religious freedom. Others were captives, bartered and sold like cattle. Together, they would build a nation and struggle over the very meaning of freedom, and create the America we have inherited today.
I don't think you can understand race relations today without understanding slavery. Even though people will say, "I didn't do it, my father didn't do it, even my grandparents, they didn't do it." One of the things it's essential is to know that slavery is not just a Southern institution. It's an American [Music] institution. What evolves in North America as a belief system where to be black meant to be a slave, and to be a slave meant to be black.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident." Why is it self-evident? It came from God. They're inalienable. Government secures them. Remarkable document, didn't apply to black folks. And the man who wrote those words, Thomas Jefferson, kept slaves. He also wrote, sometime later, to a friend, "If there is a just God, we're going to pay for [Music] this."
Slavery and freedom existed side by side in this country. I think the issue is, did it always have to be that way? And the early history of America indicates that it probably did [Music] not.
"How came it yours before the PS landed? We were here. Your country. How came it yours before the PS landed? We were here." In the year 1645, in the colony that was called Virginia, in the county of Northampton, after a season of disputes, a white man and a black man went into the field and there divided their crop and their land. According to the testimony given in court, the man named Anthony, the Negro, said, "Mr. Taylor and I have divided our corn, and I am very glad of it, for now I know my own ground." In America, it seemed all men would be equal. All men would be free. [Music] [Music]
In April 1607, three vessels carrying 105 colonists landed at a place they named Jamestown, at the edge of the Virginia wilderness. They hoped to establish the first permanent English settlement in the New World. There, Englishmen would build a new Promised Land, the Brave New World that their poet Shakespeare dreamed. A free land built by free men. The dreams were utopian initially, colonies without coercion, without oppression, where each man would be regarded as free and equal.
There was a lot of idealism, I think, in the among the early settlements in in the New World. Uh, a lot of idealism which I think didn't didn't stand much to the test of uh of of experience. Englishmen believed that their God had ordained them to spread his word, and that they had the God-given right to drive out all unwilling to live according to English law. But in the first two years, the colonists learned that they were unprepared for life in the American wilderness.
"The fourth day of September, died Thomas Jacob. Sergeant. The fifth day, there died Benjamin Beast. Our men were destroyed with cruel diseases of swellings, flexes, burning fevers, and by wars, and some departed suddenly. But for the most part, they died of mere famine. There were never Englishmen left in a foreign country in such misery as we were in this new discovered Virginia." George [Music] Percy.
In 1609, 500 settlers lived in the Jamestown Colony. By the spring of 1610, only 60 were left [Music] alive.
"About the latter end of August, the Dutch man of war arrived at Point Comfort. The Commander's name, Captain Job. He brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes, which the governor bought in exchange for food." John Rolfe, Virginia [Music] colonist.
In 1619, a year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, a mystery ship appeared out of a violent storm off the Virginia coast. No one recorded the ship's name, but somewhere on the high seas, she had robbed a Spanish vessel of a cargo of [Music] Africans. In search of supplies, she traded the Africans for food. They had been baptized and given Christian names. As Christians, they could not be enslaved for life under English law. Like most Europeans in the colony, they were purchased to work as servants for a limited number of [Music] years.
The new arrivals supplied much-needed labor for the tobacco crop that was making men rich. Settlers were planting tobacco in the streets of Jamestown, carving plantations out of the surrounding wilderness, and shipping some 60,000 a year back to England.
Once tobacco is established as a viable commodity, then the more land you control, the bigger profits you can make. And in order to make those profits, you need more labor, and you look for that labor wherever you can find it. Well, the colony builders uh initially intended to rely almost exclusively on white indentured servants as a labor force to cultivate the crops that were being grown in Virginia, principally tobacco. And in order to create these raw materials or goods, you often needed [Music] labor.
The world the Africans entered was controlled by wealthy Englishmen and populated by the English poor, most under the age of [Music] 25. In return for passage to Virginia, they had traded four to seven years of their labor. They were bound to a master by an indenture form, a contract that defined length of service and the conditions of [Music] servitude. Most were promised freedom dues after their service: a bushel of corn, a new suit of clothes, and 100 acres of land.
Under Virginia's headright system, a planter was entitled to 50 acres of land for each servant brought into the colony. The issue always was how long that indenture would be and under what conditions you would be forced to work. At its best, it was a short, friendly apprenticeship. You know, at its worst, it was a long and exploitative situation in which you might die before you ever obtained your freedom.
By 1622, 3,000 new settlers, drawn by the opportunities of the tobacco boom, had arrived in Virginia. Two years later, the first negro child was born in the colony. He was named William Tucker, after a Virginia planter. [Music]
The prosperity that began in 1619 and the dream of a new Eden of people peacefully coexisting under English law was seriously threatened in March 1622. On Good Friday, some 30 nations of the Powhatan Confederacy, angered by English violation of land treaties, attacked without warning and attempted to drive the English back into the sea. Along the James River, the Indians killed 350 colonists. On the Bennett Plantation alone, 52 people died. Among the 12 who survived was a man named Antonio.
Here's an individual that that arrives as one of the first African-Americans in the history of what became the United States. He does what almost no one in early Virginia managed to do, and that is live. Everyone that's dying of disease, violence. And since he's lucky, he had been brought to the colony the year before to work to backo along the James River. His name appeared in the 1625 Virginia census as Antonio, a negro. He was listed as a servant.
He comes to Virginia, he finds a society that is just developing. He's getting in on the ground floor, as it as it were. Um, I don't know if he was able to immediately envision that there would be opportunities for him here that weren't available elsewhere. I don't know that anyone could have foretold that. Who, when Antonio arrived, the laws of Virginia did not as yet define racial slavery. They governed only the status of servants.
At some point, Antonio changed his name to Anthony Johnson and married a negro servant named Mary from a neighboring plantation. She bore him four children. By 1640, it is clear Anthony and Mary were no longer servants. They had acquired their own modest estate on Virginia's Eastern Shore. As Johnson prospered, as he obtained land and cattle, he also acquired dependent laborers.
What made all of this society go was property. Your identity in the society was determined, rather obviously, by the amount of land, the amount of labor that you owned. Anthony Johnson was enjoying privileges belonging to a free English. He claimed five workers as headrights and expanded his property to 250 acres along the Potic Creek. At least some of his workers were white. By 1650, Anthony was one of 400 black people in Virginia out of a population of almost 19,000 settlers. In Northampton County, where Johnson lived, nearly 20 African men and women were free, and 13 owned their own homes. [Music]
As Anthony Johnson is accumulating property, it seems as though his situation is secure. You get a sense of this individual, this black man, being treated like any white planter, and his wife and daughters being treated like the wife of a planter. At an early moment when men and women were sorting themselves out, when the rules, the etiquette of race, labor, we're not so clear. At this moment, in one county in Virginia, it was not foreordained that race relations would become what they did [Music] become.
In 1640, the year Anthony Johnson purchased his first piece of land, three servants had run away from a Virginia plantation and headed for Maryland. Captured and returned to their owner, they were tried for breaking their contract.
"The said three servants shall receive the punishment of whipping and have 30 stripes a piece. One called Victor, a Dutchman. The other, a Scotchman called James Gregory, shall first serve out their times according to their indentures and one whole year a piece after, and after that to serve the colony for three whole years a piece. The third, being a negro named John Punch, shall serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life." Jamestown Court Recorder.
The time of his natural life. According to all the legal records that survive, no white servant in America ever received such a sentence. So what begins to happen in the 1640s is that those who are controlling the Virginia colony say to themselves, the fluidity that we've seen in the past, the fluidity that has allowed in Anthony Johnson to serve less than a life term, to acquire his own piece of ground, to develop a free status, is not something that we we want to project is going further in the future. We want to close down that opportunity. We want to begin to show some distinctions.
The English definition of who could be enslaved began to shift from non-Christian to non-white. For Anthony and other Africans in America, the idea of an equal chance in the colonies was now under attack. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first colony on the British American mainland to recognize slavery as a legal institution. Connecticut followed in 1650, Maryland in 1663, New York and New Jersey in 1664. Virginia legally recognized slavery in 1661, and a year later, a Virginia court decided that all children born in the colony would be free or slave, according to the condition of the mother. In Virginia, slavery would be defined by race and perpetuated through heredity.
Perhaps in the middle of the 17th century, if you were one of several thousand Africans living in Virginia, uh, you certainly knew that your children would would uh be free. You might have that expectation. And to suddenly find themselves involved in lifelong servitude, and then to realize that in fact their children might inherit the same status, that was a terrible blow. That was a terrible transformation.
I looked in the East for the first 50 years of the colony, most of the unfree labor force had been European. But that was about to [Music] change. Word of the hard life in Virginia had gotten back to England, and the colonial government faced a growing shortage of servant labor. Also troubling the colony were the thousands of free men, most former indentured servants, who were unemployed and roaming the countryside.
Slavery and indentured servitude. The problem they face is not only a decreasing supply of indentured servants, but they face this increasing problem of what to do with all these indentured servants once they live out their term. And a lot of them were surviving. They had to be given land, they had to be given their freedom dues, and one of those dues included even guns. And there was a lot of unrest in Virginia. In 1661, servants rebelled in York County. Two years later, Gloucester County authorities foiled a plot by nine servants to steal arms and ammunition and march on the seat of colonial government.
In 1676, the unrest in Virginia exploded into civil war. An army of 500 freemen, servants, and slaves rebelled against the colonial establishment's restriction on available lands. They attacked peaceful Indians, ransacked property, and burned Jamestown, sending the government into hiding.
This disorder that the indentured servant system had created made racial slavery to Southern slaveholders much more attractive. Because what, what were black slaves now? Well, they were a permanent dependent labor force who could be could be defined as a people set apart. They were racially set apart. They were outsiders. They were strangers. And in many ways, throughout the world, with with a couple of possible exceptions, slavery has taken root especially well when the people who are enslaved are defined as strangers, as outsiders, and can therefore be put into an inheritable, permanent status of slavery.
"I understand there are some slave ships expected into York River now every day. I desire you to buy me five or six slaves, whereof three or four to be boys, a man and a woman. The boys from 8 to 17 or 18. The rest as young as you can procure them." William Fitzhugh, Virginia planter, 1681.
Few ships coming from Africa made the voyage beyond the Caribbean to sell their cargo on the mainland of British America. In 1672, the King of England chartered the Royal African Company, encouraging it to expand the British slave trade. Shareholders included 15 English lords and 25 sheriffs, the governor of Virginia, and John Locke, the philosopher of liberty. In its first 16 years, the company transported nearly 90,000 Africans to the Americas. In the last decade of the 17th century, it was possible to imagine that in a single year, the number of new Africans arriving would equal the total black population in the colony, or close to it.
These were men and women that had no sense of the world they were getting into. And they seemed to whites as very alien, foreign, unknowable. The Europeans look upon these people, and they project an image on them. They project an identity. And that identity is African. What that means is non-American. What that means is non-European. What that means is separation.
"All servants imported and brought into this country who are not Christian in their native land shall be counted and be slaves. If any slave resists his master correcting such slave and shall happen to be killed in such, it shall not be accounted felony. If any negro shall absent himself from his master's service and lie hid and lurking, and if he shall resist any person employed to apprehend the said negro, then it shall be lawful for such person to kill the said negro." Virginia General Assembly, June 1680.
We think about slavery as this complete package. It just came two evil landowners. And it didn't happen that way. It happened one law at a time, one person at a time. And as landowners felt the need to control a different behavior year after year, they added more laws until finally, in 1691, they passed the law that made it illegal to free a black slave unless they were leaving the colony. So by then, it was pretty much said that this was going to be a slave society.
To move from indentured servitude to racial slavery means that they're setting their own history on a course where freedom is going to depend on slavery, where the political economy of a major portion of these colonies is going to depend on slavery, where the freedom of some is going to depend on the bondage of others. It means that the American colonies, this jewel of the British Empire, is living this contradictory history now of a society that is increasingly rooted in a labor system that's human bondage, that's racial. [Music] [Music]
Anthony Johnson moved his family out of Virginia and north to Maryland. There, he leased three acres. He called it Tony's Vineyard. On that farm, Anthony Johnson died. Back in Virginia, a jury decided that the land Anthony had left behind could be seized by the state because he was a negro and, by consequence, an alien. One wonders how Johnson would have viewed this changing world of Virginia. He lived a very long time. He survived and did quite well by the standards of the day, building up properties, hundreds, hundreds of acres and cattle. By the standards of the time, anyone would say he did quite well. There's no reason to believe as of say, the 1670s, that the Johnson family is going to be squeezed out.
Within a few years, Anthony's grandson, John, purchased another 40 acres and, in memory of his grandfather's homeland, called the farm Angola. By the time the end of the century came, Anthony Johnson's children and grandchildren may well have been fighting to stay free. Many free people were sold into slavery. You know, they couldn't prove that they were free. They had no way of letting anybody know that they were free. So if a plantation owner came by and said, "This is my slave, and I want to sell them," you were [Music] sold.
By the end of the century, nearly 58,000 people lived in the colony. 16,000 were listed as Negroes. In 1705, the Virginia Assembly passed laws clearly defining the distinction between a slave and a servant, relegating all slaves to the status of real estate. The next year, John, the third generation of Johnsons in America, died without an heir. That would be the last mention of the plantation named for Anthony's birthplace, Angola Plantation. Like the Johnsons themselves, disappeared from the record books of colonial [Music] America.
"The African trade is a trade of the most advantage to this kingdom of any we derive, and as it for all profit, it is indeed the best traffic the kingdom have. As it does occasionally give so vast an employment to our people, both by sea and land." John Cary, Bristol, England.
In 1698, the English Parliament ended the monopoly of the Royal African Company on the African slave trade. It became the right of every freeborn British subject to trade in slaves. Over the next half-century, the number of Africans transported to the British colonies in British ships increased from 5,000 to 45,000 a year. England became the largest trafficker in slaves in the Western World.
"It is the first principle and foundation of all the rest," said one British writer. "The main spring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion." He was born Equiano, the son of a tribal elder, the favorite of his mother. He died an Englishman, the father of two daughters and the husband of an English woman. At the age of 11, Equiano was kidnapped by Africans and sold to Europeans. [Music]
"When the grown people were gone far in the fields to labor, the children generally assembled together to play, and some of us often used to get up into a tree to look out for any assailant or kidnapper that might come upon [Music] us. One day, when only I and my sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both without giving us time to cry out or to make any resistance. They stopped our mouths and ran off with us."
"Who are we looking for? Who are we looking for? It's a we looking for. Zal? Has he gone to the stream? Let him come back. Has he gone to the market? Let him come back. Has he gone to the farm? Let him return. It's Equiano we looking for. Zal." [Music]
For more than four centuries, people disappeared from the savannas, the rainforests, and the villages of black Africa. Farmers and craftspeople, commoners and African nobility. Most were strong young men, age 15 to 25, but women and children were also taken and sold. To obtain slaves, Africans waged war, destroying communities, stealing people. To escape the spreading violence, many moved into the interior, abandoning family compounds, farms, entire villages. In West Africa, more than 20 million people were kidnapped into slavery. Only half would survive the journey to the coast. The boy Equiano was one of the survivors. [Music]
"At last, I came to the banks of a large river. I was beyond measure surprised at this, as I had never before seen any water larger than a pond or [Music] river. And to my surprise, was mingled with no small fear when I was put into one of these canoes, and we began to paddle and move along the river." On the journey to the coast, Equiano passed from one African master to another. Once, he was sold for 172 cowrie shells. He learned three different languages, traveled some 800 miles, and encountered people and systems unfamiliar and frightening to [Music] him.
After close to seven months of travel on foot and by boat, he reached the African coast. "The first object that saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, that was soon converted into terror." L. [Music]
It was an ancient business, this trade in human beings between Africa and [Music] Europe. 50 years before Columbus sailed to the New World, Portuguese explorers had sailed to West Africa, at first seeking gold. They built a fort in 1482 and called it Elmina, "The Mine." The Portuguese pointed their guns toward the Atlantic to guard not against Africans, but against European competitors. Over time, the castle changed hands from the Portuguese to the Dutch, and finally the British. And the trade changed from gold to human beings.
"Concerning the trade on this coast, we notified your Highness already that it has completely changed into a slave coast, and that nowadays the natives no longer occupy themselves with the search for gold, but rather make war on each other in order to furnish slaves. The Gold Coast has changed into a complete slave coast." William De La Palma, Director, Dutch West India [Music] Company.
Along the west coast of Africa, from Senegal in the north to the Cameroons in the south, the Europeans built some 60 forts and castles, warehouses for European merchandise and for African slaves, called factories. They were commercial centers where agents or factors traded rum, cloth, and guns for human beings and gold.
"The most notable item is the slave house, which lies below ground. It consists of vaulted cellars divided into several apartments, which can easily hold a thousand slaves." Captain John Barbot, French slave [Music] trader.
In dungeons built deep into the ocean rock, people waited. Sometimes a day, sometimes a year. These chambers would be their last memory of Africa. When a slave ship arrived and anchored off the coast, they would be led out from the darkness to the beach.
"As the slaves come down to feed her from the inland country, they are put into a booth or prison near the beach. When the Europeans are to receive them, they are brought out into a large plane where the surgeons examine every one of them, all stark naked. Each which have passed as good is marked on the breast with a red hot iron, imprinting the mark of the French, English, or Dutch companies. In this particular, care is taken that the women, as tenderest, to not be burnt too hard." Captain John Barbot, French slave trader.
The white people did not need to be present in the interior of Africa. All they needed to do was to supply the weapons. The people they dealt with were um those coastal peoples right on the on on the coastline who controlled the the territory down there. So Equiano would not have met, maybe not even heard of, white people.
"I have found no place where I can enlarge my fortune so soon as where I now live. In this manner, we spend the prime of youth among Negroes, scraping the world for money, the universal God of mankind, until death overtakes us." Nicholas Owen, slave trader.
Europeans died like flies in that climate. The average expectation was three or four years. You know, really. And so they had to make money while they could, because they knew they didn't have much time. So in that sense, of course, they were they were trapped. They were caught in the web of the system and held there and died there.
The Europeans made more than 54,000 voyages to trade in human beings. No one will ever know the exact number of people taken from the shores of West Africa, but more than 11 million have been counted in the records that remain. Most headed for South America and the Caribbean islands. Some half a million to the mainland of North America. [Music]
December 29th, 1724. "No trade today, though many traders came on board. They informed us that the people are gone to war within land and will bring prisoners enough in two or three days, in hopes of which we [Music] stay."
December 30th, 1724. "No trade yet, but our traders came on board today and informed us the people had burnt four towns of their enemies, so that tomorrow we expect slaves." Liverpool surgeon.
"Received on this cargo: 46 men, 34 women, 14 boys, six girls, and 147 chests of corn. The rest of the goods delivered on shore to Cape Coast and Accra to Mr. Harban." William Dexter, ship's captain.
Ship captains were cautioned not to buy all their slaves from one place. Africans who knew each other, who spoke the same language, were more likely to conspire and rebel.
There would be maybe 25 seamen and the ship's officers. There might have been a crew of 30, and these 30 had to um control maybe 300 men, black men and women, who were aware of being abducted and who were in who were desperate and who were dangerous because they were obviously waiting to seize any opportunity that was was offered to to rebel and to take over the ship and to kill to kill the crew. And that that did happen fairly frequently. The only way that this could be contained was by a system of fear.
"I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits, and they were going to kill me. Their complexions to differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke, which was very different from any I had ever heard, united to confirm me in this belief. I no longer doubted my fate. I asked if we were going to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair." Oh, Equiano.
Captains called the voyage from West Africa to the New World the Middle Passage, the middle leg of a triangular course that began and ended in Europe. From English ports, ships sailed to Africa to trade goods for slaves. Then the human cargo was taken to the Americas and traded for raw materials, which were then carried back to England and sold. The crossing from Africa to the Americas usually took 60 to 90 days, but some voyages took as long as four or even six months. Bad weather and sickness could turn any trip into a nightmare.
The cramped quarters of ships, being packed in such a way that a slave will be between the legs of another slave, and having to lie in the feces. [Music] The lack of air. The longer this trip takes, um, the more [Music] suffocating.
"The surgeon, upon going between decks in the morning to examine the situation of the slaves, frequently finds several dead, and sometimes a dead and living negro fastened by their irons together. When this is the case, they are brought upon the deck. The living negro is disengaged, and the dead one thrown overboard." Alexander Falconbridge, ship's [Music] surgeon.
There are no doubt people who went mad. Inability to communicate. Decisions having to be made. And this person is suffering as yourself. Does one help? Does one simply try to make it the best that one can alone? Not knowing where am I being taken? What is my fate? Um, for weeks, months, depending what the point of origin was. [Music] [Applause] [Music]
"One day, two of my weary countrymen, who were chained together, somehow made it through the nettings and jumped into to the sea. Immediately, another quite dejected fellow also followed their example, and I believe many more would have very soon done the same if they had not been prevented by the ship's crew, who were instantly alarmed." Equiano.
The idea, I think, was that the slave cannot be allowed to die by his own will and intention. He cannot be allowed to die voluntarily. If he's going to die, it must be at the hands of his captors, so that in that case, he doesn't, he doesn't spread a dangerous example.
"Monday, 11th December. By the favor of Divine Providence, made a timely discovery today that the slaves were forming a plot for insurrection. Surprised two of them attempting to get off their arms, and in their rooms found knives, stones, shot, etc., and a cold chisel. There appeared eight principally concerned in protecting the mischief, and four boys in supplying them with the above instrument. Put the boys in arms and slightly in the thumb screws to urge them to a full confession." Captain John Newton.
"We stood in arms, firing on the revolted slaves, of whom we killed some and wounded many. And many of the most mutinous leapt overboard and drowned themselves in the ocean with much resolution." James Barbot, English sailor, 1701.
"Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much happier than myself. Every circumstance I met with served only to render my state more painful and heighten my apprehensions, and my opinion of the cruelty of whites." Olaudah Equiano.
The slavers, they knew one level that these were human beings, because they were obviously clearly human beings. At the same time, they were objects of profit. And those two concepts couldn't, obviously, be really reconciled, and they never were reconciled. It was just, I think, that the the humane, the sense of the humanity of these people was simply suppressed for the sake of gold. And the shocking thing is that human beings are able indefinitely to suppress the urge of their common humanity and to deny it for the sake of making profits.
"Is not the slave trade entirely a war with the heart of man? And surely that which is begun by breaking down the barriers of virtue involves in its continuance destruction to every principle, and buries all sympathy and ruin." Equiano. [Music]
The Middle Passage ended for Equiano on the island of Barbados, one of the most profitable colonies in the British Empire. On Barbados, it was calculated that it was cheaper to work slaves to death and replace them with new slaves than to treat them humanely. Within three years of arrival, one out of three slaves would die. The boy Equiano, judged too small to cut sugar cane, was shipped north to the mainland of British America.
On the mainland, the plantation system of Barbados was admired and imitated, particularly on the Carolina coast. South Carolina started as the colony of a colony, Barbados. Barbados had become overpopulated with the younger sons of English merchants and with their slaves, and in both cases, they began to look around, cast around for new places. And within the first decade after South Carolina's initial settlement, there were just loads of immigrants from Barbados, uh, who brought with them, uh, slaves from Barbados. But more important than just bringing slaves, unlike Virginia, they brought a fully conceived idea of [Music] slavery.
On the shores of the Ashley River stands Middleton Place, home to one of Carolina's oldest families. Middleton family members were destined to become part of the Carolina elite: a governor, a congressman, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. [Music] The family had been among the first settlers, arriving from Barbados in 1678 with a land grant in Goose Creek, just 14 miles north of Charleston, Carolina's slave trading center. By 1706, a second generation of Middletons had almost tripled the size of the family's landholdings to 5,000 acres of Carolina wilderness. At age 25, young Arthur Middleton was master of the Oaks Plantation.
"Dear Sarah, Mr. Arthur Middleton is married to my sister and was a school fellow with me when I was at Carolina. He is a sensible man and one of the richest in the country, with upwards of 100 Negroes." Thomas Amey.
Racial slavery turns out to be extraordinarily profitable for the people who have seized control. The planter can complain in his diary that it's been a bad year, or the crop is weak, or the rainy season lasted too long. But year in and year out, tremendous profits are being made. The immigrants from Barbados had searched for a cash crop that would make them rich. Families like the Middletons found it. It was rice.
The most prized Africans in Carolina were from Angola, Sambia, and the Windward Coast, people who brought the rice-growing skills the Europeans did not have. "Rice is the most unhealthy work in which the slaves were employed, and they sank under it in great numbers. The causes of this dreadful mortality are the constant moisture and heat of the atmosphere, together with the alternate floodings and drying of the fields on which the Negroes are perpetually at work, or or an ankle deep in mud with their bare heads exposed to the fierce rays of the sun." Captain Basil Hall.
"Many masters can't be persuaded that Negroes and Indians are otherwise than beasts, and use them like such. I daily perceive that many things are done here out of a worldly principle, little for God's sake." Francis Le Jau, Anglican [Music] minister.
In 1706, the Middletons donated four acres of land for a church in Goose Creek. Francis Le Jau, the first full-time Anglican minister, was not opposed to slavery, but he preached that all men, regardless of color, had immortal souls. He earned a reputation for spending time with the Negroes, baptizing and teaching them to read the Bible. He spoke out often against the brutality of Carolina slaveholders who were seeking to control the growing population of Africans.
"I have had of late an opportunity to oppose with all my might a very unhuman law in relation to runaway Negroes. Such a negro must be mutilated by amputation of testicles if it be a man, and an ear if a woman. I've openly declared against such a punishment, grounded upon the law of God." Francis Le Jau.
The Anglican missionaries probably described the black community better than anyone at the time. In early Carolina, they described it as a nation within a nation. The Africans lived separated from the rest of society. Being fresh from Africa, their frame of reference was African. They were very much familiar with this kind of subtropical environment that they found themselves in in Carolina. There's still communities of people who live, love, raise children, and work, and they feel that as people, as humans, they have a right to come and go. They have a right to visit their wives and their husbands on other plantations. It was, as one traveler said, a negro country.
"Their numbers increase every day, as well by birth as importation, and in case there should arise a man of desperate courage, exasperated by a desperate fortune, he might kindle a servile war. Such a man might be dreadfully mischievous before any opposition could be formed against him, and tinge our rivers, as wide as they are, with blood." William Byrd, Virginia [Music] planter.
In 1710, just 15 years after rice took hold in Carolina, Africans began to outnumber Europeans in the colony. As the number of Africans rose, so too did white fear and retaliation. [Music]
"Mr. D told me once he cut off a negro man's leg for running away. I asked him if the man had died in the operation, and how he, as a Christian, could answer for the hor act before God. And he told me, 'Answering was a thing of another world. What he thought and did were policy.' He then said his scheme had the desired effect. It cured that man and some others of running away."
If you're a white authority, you're constantly trying to figure how tightly you want to impose the lid with respect to people running away. How fierce should the punishments be? You know, should it be a whipping? Should it be the loss of a finger or a hand or a foot? You know, should it be wearing uh shackles perpetually? The entire system of control is based on physical punishment, often making examples out of people so that others will be intimidated.
The colonial legislature passed laws designed to more tightly control the growing black majority. Planter records reveal punishments inflicted for infractions large and small.
"8 February 1709. I rose at 5:00 this morning and read a chapter in Hebrew and 200 verses in Homer's Odyssey. I ate milk for breakfast. I said my prayers. Jenny and Eugene were whipped."
"17 April. Anaka was whipped yesterday for stealing the rum and filling the bottle up with water. I said my prayers and I danced my dance. Eugene was whipped again for pissing in bed, and Jenny for concealing it. I took a walk about the plantation. Eugene was whipped for running away and had the bit put on him. I said my prayers. I had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, thanks be to God Almighty." William Byrd, Virginia planter.
When you enslave a person, in some ways, you become a slave yourself. Because masters and slaves are natural enemies, and that's what the Europeans had to deal with. They had to deal with a population living amongst them, sometimes the majority of the population, in hostility. They lived amongst enemies. And as one Carolina planter said, "Nowhere on earth is mankind so plagued by enemies living within them as we are in our own homes."
"The Spanish are receiving and harboring all our runaway Negroes. They have found out a new way of sending our own slaves against us to rob and plunder us. We are not only at a vast expense in guarding our southern frontiers, but the inhabitants are continually alarmed." Arthur Middleton, Acting Governor, 1728.
On the South Carolina frontier, word spread of Africans and Indians coming up from Spanish Florida to attack planters, and of Spanish authorities offering runaways freedom on Florida soil. In Goose Creek, an Anglican minister complained of secret poisonings and bloody insurrections by certain Christian slaves.
"South Carolina is a pot ready to boil over. Imagine coming into a setup that seems almost unbearable and finding that people have have many of them have somehow rationalized it or or are enduring it. You know, that's the best they can do. But you, as a newcomer, might feel, I'm not going to put up with this. Better to die trying to change this. And there must have been hundreds of people like that in South Carolina in the 1730s."
By the 1730s, close to 2,000 Africans were arriving at the port of Charleston each year. From 1735 to 1739, out of 11,000 slaves landed, more than 8,000 were listed as Angolans. What develops is a sense among Europeans that slaves from certain areas have particular characteristics. Slaves from the Angola area are reputed among the English to be particularly difficult, to be rebellious.
In St. Paul's Parish, there were close to a thousand new people who just a few years before had been taken from the Angola region of Africa. One of them, we only know his name, a man named Jemmy. Apparently, he had come recently from Angola. He may not even have spoken English, but he may have had strong contacts with other Angolans. He had to try to build alliances not only with other Angolans, other new arrivals, but with other Africans, African-Americans, people from from a community that he was not that familiar with. And apparently, he succeeded.
During the early morning hours of September 9th, 1739, almost as soon as word is received in South Carolina that England and Spain are at war, some 20 Angolan slaves, led by the man named Jemmy, began marching towards St. Augustine and the promise of [Music] freedom. Just 30 miles from the Middletons' Oaks Plantation, at the Stono Bridge, they seized a general store where there were arms and powder. They killed the storekeepers and left their heads on the doorstep.
"What better moment to start an uprising and try to strike out for St. Augustine and find freedom in Florida, in the hope that the Spanish authorities are willing to grant freedom to English-speaking slaves who escape from the Carolinas into Florida." On the march south, the Africans did not kill every white they encountered. They spared Mr. Wallace, an innkeeper they knew to be kind to his slaves. But before the day ended, they had killed more than 20 people. As other slaves joined them, they became an army of almost 100, camped at the Edisto River, waiting for others to gather under their flag.
The entire force of English North America was going to come down on them, because this was an issue not merely for those in South Carolina immediately surrounding this area. This, this was an issue for every European colonist everywhere in the colonies, to quash this and to provide some exemplary punishment. Around noon, the nearest white settlers were alerted. By 4:00 in the afternoon, they called up with the Negroes along the Edisto River and fired upon them. Eyewitnesses recorded that the rebels fought boldly, but at least 14 were killed or wounded in the first attack. Others were surrounded, questioned, and then shot. The armed colonists then turned toward Charleston, and on mile posts along the way, they left the heads of the executed men.
Just the way war transforms people, this terrible transformation into race slavery had changed people. By the middle of the 18th century, the violence you see at Stono, uh, is a violence that had become pervasive in the culture. By the middle of the 18th century, this had become a way of life in the English colonies. Stono was sort of the beginning of the concept that the black population had to be utterly controlled. And the legislation that came out of Stono, the Negro Act, took away whatever liberties the Africans had. Freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, to earn money, to learn to read, all were outlawed. South Carolina imposed duties on all slave importations and encouraged European immigration in order to change the ratio of whites to blacks. The Negro Act became the model for slave laws throughout the mainland of British America. [Music]
"Why do you use those instruments of torture? Are they not fit to be applied by one rational being to another? And are ye not struck with shame and mortification to see the partakers of your nature reduced so low? But above all, are there no dangers attending this mode of treatment? Are you not hourly in dread of an insurrection?" Olaudah Equiano.
News of the rebellion traveled quickly to New York, now the third largest city in British America. Most of Manhattan Island was unbroken wilderness, crossed by streams emptying into both the Hudson and East Rivers. By 1740, except for Charleston, South Carolina, no city in colonial America had so high a density of slave population as New York. Crowded onto the southern tip of the island lived 11,000 people, of which more than 2,000 were black.
There was really an illusion of intimacy between enslaved blacks and their white slave owners who lived under the same roof. These people could not trust one another. In fact, the slave owners considered the enslaved blacks domestic enemies. [Music]
New York, November 18th, 1731. "Be it ordained by the authority of this city that all negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves that shall die within the city be buried by daylight. And for the prevention of great numbers of slaves assembling and meeting together at their funerals, under pretext whereof they have great opportunities of plotting and confederating together to do mischief, be it further ordained that not above 12 slaves shall assemble or meet together at their funeral." Minutes of the Common Council of New [Music] York.
There were probably a lot of other issues going on in New York City at that time that made whites suspicious of blacks. There was, among the lower classes of blacks and whites, a lot of racial amalgamation. There was a lot of activity in the grog shops between blacks and whites. Blacks frequenting taverns. New York City was a cosmopolitan place with people from various ethnic groups converging, lots of seamen, and blacks were very much a part of that. In taverns, black men illegally gathered, drank, and mingled with white New York residents.
Many, many enslaved men in New York were hired out by their masters. They had relative freedom of movement and control over their own time. The African-American adult male is seen as the most troublesome, the most intractable, the most rebellious. Those are the persons who are growing in the population. By law, they're not supposed to be out after sunset. By law, they're not supposed to uh have any currency of their own. By law, they're not supposed to go gather in numbers, uh, of three or greater. By law, they're not supposed to be out drinking. Yet, every night, they're out doing all of these things.
There developed in colonial New York City a lively street life amongst black men and uh enslaved and free. Uh, these black men organized into clubs or uh gangs, and they were a constant presence on the streets. They even gathered at night at the docks or in taverns, and they presented, according to the English authorities, an anxious white residents, a public threat.
On March 18th, 1741, a fire broke out at Fort George, the governor's official residence. Whipped by violent winds, it burned until a rain shower cooled the blaze, keeping it from torching the entire city. A week later, another fire broke out, and then in the next three weeks, fires raged. As this rash occurs, a sense that there is some evil hand behind this develops. And then people begin to see a black hand. They begin to worry that slaves are behind this, that this is some act of vengeance, that this is some prelude uh to rebellion.
1741 England was now at war with Spain, and many of the colonial authorities in New York City feared that the enslaved blacks would have been influenced by promises from Spain of freedom.
It was the English authorities who claimed that they had discovered a combination between enslaved blacks and the lawless orders of white town dwellers, transients, and vagabonds to destroy the town, to burn it to the ground, and to set up a black or negro regime that would owe allegiance to Spain.
Just 30 years earlier, in New York, fire had been instrumental in the Negro Plot of 1712, where nine whites were killed and five were seriously wounded. Now, the city's officials did not waste any time finding an explanation for the mysterious events. A general dragnet goes out, and just about every African American male over 16 years of age is taken up and put in jail, crowded under the city hall.
The court used the testimony of Mary Burton, a 16-year-old indentured servant, to accuse the alleged conspirators. Burton worked at a tavern and brothel in the city, a business that regularly served black customers. Promised her freedom from servitude, Mary Burton started implicating a constant stream of men and women, some white, but most young black men. For close to four months, black men were dragged into court off New York streets.
New Yorkers are so incensed over what they conceive of as a conspiracy that they create this wave of paranoia that leads to incredible murders and incredible punishments. It speaks to the whole entrenchment of slavery, even in the North, and also it speaks to racial attitudes as well, that they are very much afraid of racial egalitarianism and people in the lower echelons of their society coming together to form any kind of bond.
In May, New Yorkers witnessed the public execution of Caesar and Prince, two black men accused of participating in a robbery connected to the fires. Caesar's corpse was then hung in chains until it decomposed. From the spring of 1741 through the following winter and into the spring of 1742, some 160 slaves and at least a dozen whites were accused of conspiracy against the city of New York. Thirty-one Africans were put to death, 13 of them burned at the stake, and four whites were hung.
23 June 1741. To Dr. Cadwall of the Council, Governor's Council, Province of New York. Sir, the horrible executions among you puts me in mind of our New England witchcraft in the year 1692. I am humbly of the opinion that such confessions are not worth a straw, for many times they are obtained by foul means, by force or torment, or in hopes of a longer time to live, or to die an easier death. I entreat you not to go on making bonfires of the negroes and loading yourselves with greater guilt than theirs, for we have too much reason to fear that the Divine Vengeance does and will pursue us for our ill treatment to the bodies and souls of our poor slaves. Anonymous letter from Massachusetts.
The encroachment of slavery in American society that began in Virginia culminated in 1750 with the decision to legalize slavery in Georgia, the last free colony. It had been a little over 100 years since Anthony Johnson first arrived in Virginia. Now slavery existed everywhere in the 13 colonies, but the argument over who would be free and who would be equal had just begun. For generations to come, slavery would continue to trouble the soul of America.
"When you make men slaves, you deprive them of half their virtue; you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war." - Olayano, enslaved African.
Country how came before land were to learn more about Africans and America and to see the teacher's guide for the series, visit the Africans and America website at www.pbs.org.
Next time on Africans in America: America's struggle for independence begins with the threat of war. Black men become soldiers in exchange for the promise of freedom. "It gave you a purpose in life. You were part of a national effort." To purchase the Africans and America home video, companion book, or CD soundtrack, call 1-800-255-944.