Between Slavery and Freedom Read online

  Laboring long hours without pay was certainly something those first black immigrants to Virginia experienced, but it was not what every one of them endured for the rest of their days. African Anthony Johnson, for instance, arrived on another Dutch ship one year after that first cargo of slaves struggled ashore in Jamestown. He gained his freedom—how we do not know—acquired land, and married a free black woman. Anthony and Mary Johnson raised their children in freedom and purchased black slaves as well as the services of white indentured workers. The Johnsons were not alone. Up and down Virginia’s Eastern Shore there were several dozen free black farmers in that first generation or two of settlement who were free because they had bought their way out of bondage, usually by raising their own crops of tobacco on their masters’ land and using that tobacco as currency in what was essentially a barter economy.

  Those early free African people and their American-born children interacted on many levels with English settlers. They traded with them, fought with them, slept with them, and labored alongside them. However, at least some of the influential white men in the colony were uneasy about their presence. These black people were free, but somehow their blackness made them different. The law codes Virginia’s House of Burgesses drew up in the 1660s spelled that out, declaring that free black people “ought not in all respects . . . [to] be admitted to a full fruition of the exemptions and impunities of the English.”2 This was very different indeed from the statement in the Code Noir about the “privileges and immunities” that all free people were entitled to, regardless of race.

  The sons and grandsons of the planters who had come down to the James River in 1619 to inspect the Dutch captain’s cargo were hungry for more land and more labor to stay competitive, and they demanded cheap labor from workers they could treat as brutally as they chose. They were far less reluctant than their fathers and grandfathers had been to enslave Native Americans. Increasingly, though, they turned to black slaves, importing thousands each year from Africa and the Caribbean. White Virginians’ insatiable appetite for slaves undermined the status of the free black community. New, more restrictive ordinances made it much more difficult for black people to bargain with their masters for their freedom, while the descendants of the Johnsons and other black people in the “founding” generation who were already free found their route to modest prosperity blocked at every turn.

  The labor situation in the neighboring colony of Maryland was very similar to that in Virginia. Maryland’s tobacco planters moved quickly from using white indentured servants, who were always in short supply, to buying slaves. They could not afford to buy many in the early days of settlement, and they often worked their farms with a mix of white bound servants and black and Native American slaves. As they grew wealthier, though, they opted for slaves, and increasingly they chose black slaves over captive Indians.

  Gaining one’s freedom in Maryland and Virginia was never easy, but it became much more difficult as time wore on. Nothing obliged an owner to free a slave, not conversion to Christianity, mastery of the English language, or even ties of kinship. In both colonies a child followed the condition of his or her mother. If a white man fathered children with a slave, those children became slaves. It was a different story when a child was born to a white woman and an enslaved black man. Although both colonies passed laws to try to prevent such relationships, they did occur. Initially Maryland’s lawmakers took a tougher stance than their counterparts in Virginia, decreeing in 1664 that if any “free borne woman shall inter marry with any slave . . . [she] shall Serve the master of such slave dureing [sic] the life of her husband.”3 That is what happened to at least one white woman, Eleanor Butler. When “Irish Nell” wed a slave, Charles, she joined him in servitude. Their children were slaves from birth. Then Maryland changed the law and made the status of the mother the status of her child. Ultimately, Eleanor and Charles’s descendants sued for their freedom and won. Not only in Maryland and Virginia but throughout British North America descent from a white woman generally resulted in freedom, although proving one’s ancestry to the satisfaction of the courts presented enormous difficulties. And freedom came with a hefty price. The courts might declare that a child was free, but then order that child bound out to service for many years and the mother whipped or fined for, in the words of a Virginia law, engaging in “abominable” behavior that resulted in the creation of a “spurious issue.”4

  Several factors determined the situation of people of African descent in the region to the south of Maryland and Virginia. What are today North and South Carolina were originally two halves of one huge colony that King Charles II granted to a powerful group of Englishmen in 1663. They named it Carolina, Carolus being the Latin for Charles, in his honor. From the beginning, the Proprietors of Carolina were committed to African slavery. Several invested heavily in Britain’s Royal African Company and engaged in battling the Dutch and the French for control of the major West African slaving ports. At least a couple had financial interests in the emerging plantation systems in Britain’s West Indian colonies.

  The English who settled in what became North Carolina were happy to purchase black people as slaves. But because the economy took time to flourish, they simply lacked the means to acquire as many as they would have liked. Eventually, the settlers grew wealthy from growing tobacco, raising cattle, and supplying the Royal Navy and private shipyards with hemp, pitch, turpentine, and timber. Before long, the wealthier settlers were expanding the size of their workforce by buying additional slaves, generally from planters and traders in Virginia. The enslaved used every strategy they could to gain their freedom. They fled to the Indian tribes of the region, or took refuge with poor backcountry farmers who, so they hoped, might shelter anyone willing to work for little more than their keep. Others cultivated small patches of land and sold the produce or worked at a skilled trade, while bargaining with their owners to purchase themselves. Every strategy had its perils. An owner might cheat a slave out of his money and refuse to free him. A backcountry farmer might exploit and enslave a desperate runaway. Even adoption into an Indian tribe might not lead to lifelong freedom. When tribes made treaties with the British they often had to agree to hand back fugitive slaves. Whatever the risks, though, the enslaved were willing to take them. Some did succeed in gaining their liberty, and although it came with restrictions, it was vastly preferable to lifelong enslavement.

  Many of the earliest white immigrants to South Carolina came not directly from Britain but from Britain’s Caribbean colonies, principally Barbados. The Proprietors lured them with offers of free land, and they came in considerable numbers, bringing with them the black slaves they already owned. They were eager to get more slaves, and when the chance arose, they bought Indians. In South Carolina, at least until the early 1700s, enslaved Africans and Indians toiled on the same plantations. Within a generation, racial lines became blurred as Englishmen fathered children with their African- and Native-American slaves, and the enslaved themselves formed unions that produced offspring who shared the heritage of both parents.

  White South Carolinians put their slaves to all kinds of work, from felling trees to raising cattle and cultivating sugar cane. Some planters did well, but timber, sugar, and livestock did not earn enough to make the colony as a whole economically successful. They turned to rice and indigo, staple crops that provided profits to buy more African slaves, whom they considered best suited to the backbreaking labor these crops required. The port of Charleston became a major hub of the Atlantic slave trade. By 1710, black people, the overwhelming majority of them enslaved, far outnumbered whites in South Carolina.

  Despite the pervasiveness of slavery, through the first century of South Carolina’s existence some Africans and African Americans gained their freedom. Hundreds escaped, either alone or in small groups. A prime destination was Florida, where the Spanish welcomed them and let them settle in freedom, not because Spanish officials opposed slavery but because they saw this as a tactic to weaken the
ir British enemies. They even encouraged the men to become soldiers, knowing they would fight courageously in the event of an English attack because their own liberty and that of their families was at stake.

  While some slaves fled to Spanish territory to gain their freedom, others created independent “maroon” communities in parts of the colony they hoped were too remote for whites to find. Still others opted not for flight but for negotiation, seeing what an owner might accept in return for their liberty. Generally, though, the people who gained their liberty in South Carolina did so because of their close personal ties to whites. Many white men kept slave concubines, and while the law gave female slaves no rights, some masters did free their sexual partners and the children the women bore them. Occasionally they gave their “housekeepers” and their biracial progeny money, land, and even slaves. By the early 1700s, in and around Charleston, and less frequently on the plantations, a small class of mixed-race free people began to emerge.

  Apart from those who were legally free, hundreds of other black people existed in the “shadowland” between lifelong servitude and freedom in South Carolina. Slaves whom their owners trusted to take goods to market and return with the proceeds had a remarkable degree of liberty. Enslaved craftsmen sometimes received permission to hire themselves out by the day, the week, or the month, although they had to hand over to their masters most of what they earned. While local laws and ordinances said one thing about slave mobility, in practice individual slave owners ignored the regulations if it was to their own advantage to do so.

  By the 1750s and 1760s there were tens of thousands of black and mixed race people in South Carolina. A very small number had their legal freedom, and some even enjoyed a modest degree of wealth. However, the majority of South Carolinians of African ancestry were condemned to unrelenting toil. Their only hope lay in rebellion or flight.

  Unlike South Carolina, Georgia, established in 1732, initially outlawed slavery. The founders hoped to make the colony a place where some of the less fortunate members of English society could start over. The Trustees proposed to ship them and their families to Georgia, give them land so that they could become economically self-sufficient, and rely on them to keep the Spanish in Florida at bay. However, white settlers soon learned what the Trustees did not tell them: working the land in a hot, steamy, disease-inducing climate was far from easy. Before long, Georgians were insisting on having slaves and pressuring the Trustees to lift the ban on slave ownership. It took almost two decades, but eventually the settlers prevailed. By the time of the Revolution Georgia was a slightly poorer and less well-developed replica of South Carolina, with gangs of slaves living short, wretched lives in the swampy lowlands to produce rice, the “white gold” that put the youngest of Britain’s North American colonies on the path to becoming one of its richest.

  A few of Georgia’s slaves succeeded in becoming free. Some did so by fleeing to Florida, just as the Trustees had warned they would. Others took refuge with Native peoples, intermarried with them, and in a few short years transformed themselves culturally and linguistically into Cherokees and Choctaws, Creeks and Seminoles. Those who actually remained in the colony and secured their liberty generally did so, as did their counterparts in South Carolina, through ties of affection or blood to white owners. In both colonies, maintaining one’s freedom required constant vigilance. Whites assumed that every black man or woman was a slave unless he or she could present overwhelming proof to the contrary.

  Slavery was not confined to the South in the colonial period or to those areas where white settlers needed workers to grow staples like tobacco, rice, and indigo. The three Mid-Atlantic colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York were different in many respects from the colonies of the South, and those differences fundamentally shaped the lives and the expectations of the region’s black residents. Not only was the labor they performed different, but so were the chances they had to extricate themselves from bondage. What was not different, though, was that slavery was a fact of life. Most whites accepted it, and did not have much use for free black people, whom they generally considered troublesome and lazy. Any suggestion that freedom should confer on black people the same fundamental rights that whites enjoyed provoked anger, derisive laughter, or simply disbelief.

  In 1664, when the British took over the colony of New Netherland from the Dutch and renamed it New York, they found themselves coping with black people who were neither enslaved nor free. This part of the Dutch legacy was something with which the British were decidedly uncomfortable. The Dutch had been as ready as any of the other European colonizers to use slave labor when they came to North America in the early 1600s. In the first generation of settlement they had shipped thousands of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean to New Netherland. Some they had employed in their households and on their farms, others they had sent to labor on the wharves in the port of New Amsterdam (today’s New York City) loading and unloading their trading vessels. By the 1640s, though, they had another use for at least some of their slaves. Violence between the colonists and the Native peoples of the Manhattan area was escalating, which led the Dutch to extend “half-freedom” to some enslaved men. Purely from motives of self-interest they settled those men on land between the white settlement of Manhattan and the Indian lands and modified the conditions of their servitude to give them an incentive to fight the Indians, rather than unite with them. The half-free lived and farmed independently and had the right to keep any money they earned. In return for their privileged position they had to make an annual payment to the ruling Dutch West India Company. These half-free men struggled to secure the freedom of their wives and, despite what the Company said about half-freedom not being hereditary, they explored every avenue to make sure their children were free.

  After New Netherland changed hands, the British not only renamed the colony but dispensed with the institution of half-freedom. They instinctively distrusted black people who occupied a position in between slavery and full freedom. They worried about the numbers claiming half-free status. The half-free were much too independent-minded and the authorities suspected that they were sheltering runaway slaves on their small farms. Step by step, the new British regime undermined the position of the half-free, especially their ownership of land. They drew lines of demarcation between themselves and both free and enslaved blacks. For example, after 1697 no person of African descent, regardless of status, could be buried in the same graveyard as whites, hence the origin of New York’s long-lost and recently rediscovered African Burial Ground. Whites did not want black people too close to them, even in death, and they certainly did not want black mourners traipsing across their final resting places.

  Following the brutal suppression of a slave uprising in New York City in 1712, piecemeal legislation gave way to the wholesale reworking of the laws relating to black people. The new code applied to the free, the half-free, and the enslaved. It had not escaped the notice of the authorities that at least one of those accused of instigating the uprising, “Peter the Doctor,” was a free man. Under the new law, free people could not own any real estate. It also became difficult and expensive for owners to free their slaves because they now had to pay a heavy financial penalty for the privilege of doing so. Blacks in bondage had a place in the grand scheme of things, but those who were free most definitely did not.

  The situation was much the same in New Jersey. Slaves were present in appreciable numbers, especially in the eastern part of the colony, by the last decades of the seventeenth century. The growth of New York City resulted in a constant demand for food. East Jersey’s farmers made good money keeping the expanding metropolis fed, and they used some of that money to buy slaves. West Jersey had fewer slaves because its farms were smaller and more isolated and the need for labor was less pressing. Generally, though, whites in both sections of New Jersey displayed little reluctance to acquire slaves when they had the means to do so. They did not welcome the creation of a significant free black population. In t
heir minds, freedmen and women posed a continual threat to white authority. New Jersey lawmakers responded to that unease created by the presence of free blacks by placing restrictions on the securing of freedom very similar to those in force in New York.

  Those blacks in New Jersey who succeeded in extricating themselves from slavery faced a daily battle simply to survive. By law, they could not own land. It was impossible, though, to prevent them from trying to find some small patch on which they could plant crops and raise livestock, even if they had to resort to squatting on land that no one else seemed to want. In coastal areas and along the rivers they fished. Away from the water they hunted small game. Those who had trades tried to practice them. Generally, however, they were condemned to poverty, and they confronted the unpalatable truth that whites assumed they were slaves unless they could prove otherwise. New Jersey had one of the harshest slave codes of any of the northern colonies for the simple reason that it had so many slaves—almost 12 percent of its overall population by the 1770s. Free people lived on the margins in colonial New Jersey, literally and figuratively. One false step and they could find themselves back in bondage.

  To the south of New Jersey, most of Pennsylvania’s Quaker colonists had no misgivings whatsoever about importing Africans and profiting from their unpaid labor. The colony’s founder, William Penn, was at first perturbed about the morality of slave ownership. However, he soon gave way, and even acquired several slaves himself. In 1684, just three years after Pennsylvania received its royal charter, the slaver Isabella docked in the Delaware River with 150 Africans on board, and white settlers vied with one another to buy them. Further shipments soon followed. Within a generation, black slaves were a common sight on the streets of Philadelphia. Although a few whites condemned human bondage as a sin, most were happy to purchase a slave or two. Slaves did almost every conceivable type of labor. In the countryside they worked on farms, in homes, and in all kinds of rural industries, most notably the iron foundries that sprang up to exploit Pennsylvania’s mineral wealth. Slaves moved back and forth between the countryside and the city. Philadelphia newspapers often carried advertisements describing a particular woman or man as “fit for all manner of Town or Country Work.”5 Pennsylvania’s slaves were expected to be versatile, and many of them were.