African American Life and Labor in British Colonial North America

AAS 101

Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2004

Lecture Outline

1. Race and Slavery: The Origins Debate

2. The Making of an Atlantic World: From ‘Societies with Slaves’ to ‘Slave Societies’

3. The Atlantic World as Crucible in the Making of African-American Cultures

I.Race and Slavery:The Origins Debate

In The Atlantic Slave Trade, historian Herbert Klein asks:

Why were Africans enslaved and transported to the New World? Why were Africans the only ones enslaved?

To these questions, we might add:

• Was race or racism an historical factor in determining who got enslaved by whom in the trans-Atlantic slave trade?

• Did a pre-existing racism, born of Western civilization, cause “white” Europeans to identify “black “Africans as singularly enslavable based on their biological (i.e., skin color, sexuality, physiognomy) and/or cultural (i.e. language, religious practices, etc.) inferiority?

• Or, did the growth of capitalism and an increasing dependence on an African slave trade for New World labor supplies cause Europeans to develop modern racist ideologies as a rationalization for the enslavement of Africans?

Map of Transatlantic/Mediterranean SlaveTrade

Map of Trans-Saharan and African Trade Routes and Centers

Christian physician Ibn Botlan, writing in the eleventh century:

“At the markets negresses were much in evidence; the darker the uglier and the more pointed their teeth. They are not up to much. They are fickle and careless. Dancing and beating time are engrained in their nature. They say: were the negro to fall from heaven to the earth he would beat time in falling. They have the whitest teeth and this because they have much saliva. Unpleasant is the smell emitted from their armpits and coarse is their skin.”

Muslim historian named Said al-Andalusi, writing in the eleventh century:

“For those peoples … who live near and beyond the equinoctial line to the limit of the inhabited world to the south, the long presence of the sun at the zenith makes the hair hot and the atmosphere thin. Because of this their temperaments become hot and their humors fiery, their color black and their hair wooly. Thus, they lack self-control and steadiness of mind and are overcome by fickleness, foolishness, and ignorance. Such are the blacks, who live at the extremity of the land of Ethiopia, the Nubians, the Zanj, and the like.”

Benjamin of Tudela, an Andalusian Jew who published an itinerary of his travels through Africa in the twelfth century:

“There is a people among them who, like animals, eat of the herbs that grow on the banks of the Nile and in the fields. They go about naked and have not the intelligence of ordinary men. They cohabit with their sisters and anyone they find. When the men of Assuan made a raid into their land, they take with them bread, wheat, dry grapes, and figs and throw the food to these people, who run after it. Thus they bring many of them back prisoners, and sell them in the land of Egypt and in surrounding countries. And these are the black slaves, the sons of Ham.”

In categorizing Africans and other foreign peoples as racially/culturally inferior, Europeans – by logical extension -- categorized themselves as racially/culturally superior.

These ethno-centric prejudices, David Eltis argues, led Europeans to give themselves an “unconscious exemption” from enslavement. This exemption extended to those who might previously have been identified as “outsiders” – convicts, debtors, infidels.

II. The Making of an Atlantic World:

From ‘Societies with Slaves’ to ‘Slave Societies’

The African wing sought mainland products such as slaves, and then gold, as the means to finance short voyages along the coast. Leaders expected to find people to raid or to trade with all along the route.

The Atlantic wing sought exploitable but not necessarily inhabitable land from which to collect valuable wild products or to begin agricultural production of cultivated products in high demand in Europe.

Timeline of New World Charter Settlements & Colonization

1452: Start of the 'sugar-slave complex'. Sugar is first planted in the Portuguese island of Madeira and, for the first time, African slaves are put to work on the sugar plantations.

1462: The Portuguese colony on the Cape Verde Islands is founded, an important way-station in the slave trade.

1486: Portuguese settle the West African island of São Tomé. This uninhabited West African island is planted with sugar and populated by African slaves by the Portuguese. The settlement thus extended and developed the sugar-slave complex that had been initiated in Madeira.

1492: Christopher Columbus “discovers” the New World, setting foot on an unidentified island he named San Salvador (modern Bahamas).

1493: On his second voyage, Columbus again reaches the New World (modern Dominica). On this voyage he initiates the first transatlantic slave voyage, a shipment of several hundred Taino people sent from Hispaniola to Spain.

Timeline of New World Charter Settlements & Colonization

1500: Pedro Cabral of Portugal “discovers” Brazil, landing at Porto Seguro, near Bahia.

1505: first record of sugar cane being grown in the New World, in Santo Domingo (modern Dominican Republic).

1509: Columbus's son, Diego Cólon, becomes governor of the new Spanish empire in the Carribean.

1510: the start of the systematic transportation of African slaves to the New World: King Ferdinand of Spain authorises a shipment of 50 African slaves to be sent to Santo Domingo.

1513: Juan Ponce de Leon becomes the first European to reach the coast of what is now the United States of America (modern Florida).

1520-22: Magellan “discovers” the Pacific; expedition is first to circumnavigate the globe

“Societies with Slaves” v. “Slave Societies”

Defining features:

• place of slavery within economy

• influence of master-slave relationship on other social relations

• place of slaveholders within ruling class

In “societies with slaves” . . .

• slaves are marginal to central productive processes

• master-slave relationship is not model for all social relations

• propertied elite includes others besides slaveholders

In “slave societies” . . .

• slavery is at center of economic production

• master slave relationship is model for all social relations (e.g., husband-wife, parent-child, employer-employee)

• ruling class is dominated by slaveholders

How do “societies with slaves” become “slave societies”?

key factor:

discovery of a commodity – an exportable staple -- that could command an international market

Chesapeake (Virginia, Maryland)

Cultivating Tobacco in Virginia, 1798. (Sketched from life near Fredericksburg

• Tobacco (beginning early 17th C.)

Low Country (South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida)

• naval stores (rosin, turpentine, tall oil, pitch) • indigo • rice

Rice cultivation on the Ogeechee, Near Savannah, Georgia, ca. 1867

What was the impact of the “Plantation Revolution” in the

Americas?

“What distinguished the slave plantation from other forms of production,” historian Ira Berlin notes, “was neither the particularity of the crop nor the scale of its cultivation. The plantation’s distinguishing mark was its peculiar social order, which conceded nearly everything to the slave owner and nothing to the slave.”

Virginia Black Codes, 1723:

“It is reenacted that if slaves are found notoriously guilty of going abroad at night or running away and lying out and cannot be reclaimed from such disorderly discourses, it shall be lawful to direct every such slave to be punished by dismemberment, or any other way not touching life.”

III.The Atlantic World as Crucible

in the Making of African-American Cultures

What impact did the Diaspora – including African capture in Africa, the Middle Passage, and New World resettlement -- have on the maintenance, transformation, and transmission of African cultures?

New World Destinations of Atlantic Slave Trade

The Frazier-Herskovits Debate

• Beginning in the 1930s, the African-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier argued that African culture among African-Americans was almost totally destroyed under the brutal conditions of the slave trade, Middle Passage, and New World slavery

• At about the same time, the white anthropologist Melville Herskovits was arguing for significant African cultural survivals among African Americans.

Frazier’s Thesis: Unique Conditions of American Negro Slavery Result in

Further “Ethnic Cleansing”

“In the English colonies on the mainland, and later in the United States, [the slaves] were widely scattered on plantations which had fewer slaves on the whole than did the plantations in the West Indies. On the plantations in the southern states the Negro sloughed off almost completely his African cultural heritage. The African family system was destroyed and the slave was separated from his kinsmen and friends. Moreover, in the United States there was little chance that he could reknit the ties of kinship and old associations. If by chance he encountered slaves with whom he could communicate in his native tongue, he was separated from them.”

Frazier’s thesis emphasized the destruction of African languages

and kinship ties

The Herskovits Thesis cited evidence of African cultural “retentions” or “survivals”

Myth #1Since the Negroes were brought from all parts of the African continent,

spoke diverse languages, represented greatly differing bodies of custom, and as a matter of policy, were distributed in the New World so as to lose tribal identity, no least common denominator of understanding or behavior could have possibly been worked out by them.

Herskovits’ reply: This is far from the truth. In light of population distribution in Africa itself, with respect to the location of European slaving factories, as evidenced in the documents of the period, and as proved by the survival of African personal names, place names, names of deities, and specific traits of culture where these survived in the New World, the region where the slavery took its greatest toll was a relatively small part of Africa; while of these slaves the major portion was drawn from certain fairly restricted areas lying in the coastal belt of West Africa and the Congo. In many respects, the entire area of slaving may thus be thought of as presenting a far greater degree of unity than is ordinarily conceived in the face of New World contact.

Myth 2Even granting enough Negroes of a given tribe had the opportunity to live

together, and they had the will and the ability to continue their customary modes of behavior, the cultures of Africa were so savage and relatively so low in the scale of human civilization that the apparent superiority of European custom as observed in the behavior of their master would have caused and actually did cause them to give up such aboriginal traditions as they may have otherwise desired to preserve.

Herskovits’ response: This has been seen to be poor ethnology and poorer psychology. The evaluation of one culture in terms of another has been given over by modern ethnologists for many years, since it has become increasingly apparent that lacking adequate criteria, customs can only be subjectively compared in terms of better or worse, higher or lower. This means that scholars drawing comparisons of this nature have merely reacted to their own conditioning, which has given them a predisposition to bring in verdicts which favor their own customs and to place differing cultures on levels that are deemed less advanced.

In recent years, scholars have revisited the issue of African ethnicities and cultural survivals in the New World. Aided by new technologies and methodologies, they ask:

• How culturally heterogeneous were the slaves who came to America?

• How successful were Africans in interacting with other Africans who shared their culture in the setting of American plantation, mine, or town?

• What were the dynamics of cultural development that changed the various African cultures into Afro-Atlantic or African-American cultures?

Anthropologists define culture as “the total lifeway of a society,” including

• kinship• political structure• language• aesthetics (art, music, dance, literature)• material culture• religion

These bundles of traits coexist and are more or less harmonized within a given society.

Some cultural traits are more “flexible” or “variable”

– family structure/kinship– aesthetics (art, music and dance, literature)

Some are more “fixed” or “stable,” and are thus more resistant to change.

– language– religion

Cultural change is a response to both internal and external dynamics

• Internal dynamics include shifting political forces, environmental changes, population growth, etc.

• External dynamics include interaction with other cultures, whether voluntary or involuntary

How do these dynamics apply to the transformation of African cultures in the New World?

What variables/conditions affected the learning of English by slaves?

• Age of immigrant

• Degree of contact with creoles and whites (related to work assignments)

• Predisposition to learn the new language

• Linguistic abilities

Language Skills in Runaway Ads

Virginia Runaways Database (search for keywords, such as “English,” “tongue,” etc.)

Geography of Slavery Database (pull down menu under “skills” and click on “foreign language ability”)

Examples of Gullah

1. Everyday activitiesBumbu – for “to carry in the hands”Nam – “to eat”Nini – “female breast”Tima – “to digTutu – “excrement”

2. Kin terms or nouns denoting age/sexDa – “mother/elderly woman”Dindi, do, and li – “child”Na – “mother”Tata – “father”

3. Interjections and exclamationsBan! – “it is done!”Dede – “exactly”Kange – an exclamation indicating shockKi -- -- also indicates shock