Informative Response 300 words

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CHAPTER 4

Transatlantic Moment

European engagement with the Muslim world contributed to a cultural
awakening and commercial expansion resulting in profound political
transformations. An energetic Europe burst upon the world scene in
the fifteenth century, ushering in a new era. Labor exploitation was key
to the expansion, and critical to such labor was the capture and enslave-
ment of Africans. African captives in the Muslim world were important
and numerically significant, but the transatlantic trade was exceptional
for its high volume and compact duration, with the overwhelming ma-
jority of Africans transported in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies. The consequences for Africa and its exported daughters an

sons were catastrophic.

Like the inner workings of a clock, the interconnectedness of sev-
eral global developments gave rise to the transatlantic slave trade.
Christian–Muslim conflict, international commerce, sugar, and New
World incursions were foremost in creating circumstances whereby
the African emerged as principal source of servile labor, laying th

foundations of the modern world.

Reconquista

Muslim forces in al-Andalus, never in control of the entire Iberian
peninsula, were continually threatened by Christian enemies during
their nearly 800-year rule. The latter stages of the struggle for Iberia,
referred to as the “reconquest” by the Christians, unfolded at the same

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60 REVERSING SAIL

time as an equally momentous contest between Christian and Muslim
powers raging near the Black Sea. There, Muslims fought for control
of the old Byzantine or eastern Roman empire (referred to by the
Muslims as Rūm). In both Iberia and the Black Sea region, Muslims
and Christians sold their captives into slavery.

The means by which captives were marketed underscores the pe-
riod’s expansive commercial activity. Maritime innovations allowed the
Italian city-states of Pisa, Genoa, and Venice to participate in an east-
ern Mediterranean trade principally involving silk, spices, and sugar;
but they also trafficked in war captives. The Genoese, for example,
sold Christian captives to Muslims, and Muslim captives to Chris-
tians, by the thousands, while the Venetians purchased captives from
the Black Sea. Many, mostly women, were brought to Italy, where they
performed agricultural and domestic tasks left undone by an Italian
population reeling from the Black Death. The newly enslaved joined
the ranks of the similarly exploited in Crete and Cyprus, but especially
in Sicily, southern Italy, Majorca, and southern Spain, where slav-
ery was of a considerable vintage. The enslaved in Sicily were mostly
Muslim and, like Venice and other Italian sites, female.

If the fourteenth century saw increased reliance upon captive labo

in the Mediterranean, the fourteenth and fifteenth witnessed changes
in the source of that labor. The reconquest of Portugal in 1267 signaled
the beginning of the end of territorial disputes between Muslims and
Christians. Muslim power in Spain also began to gradually decline as a
result of battles and treaties. Iberia as a source of servile labor dried up,
forcing Europe to turn elsewhere. By the end of the fourteenth century,
the demand for slaves was largely met by captives from the Black Sea.
But the struggle for Byzantium ended in 1453 with the Muslim con-
quest of Constantinople (henceforth Istanbul) and the consolidation of
lands in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and adjoining the Black Sea. Captives
were thereafter funneled to Muslim markets. Some forty years later,
the combined forces of Castile and Aragon defeated the last Mus-
lim bastion in Iberia, Granada, bringing the reconquest to an end in
1492.

With these reservoirs of servile labor tapped out, the northern
Mediterranean was in need of workers, a demand occasioned by,
among other projects, the cultivation of sugarcane. Spreading from
southeast Asia to India in antiquity, sugarcane was introduced to Per-
sians and Arabs during Islam’s early years. They transferred its pro-
duction to Syria and Egypt, and later to North Africa, southern Spain,

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TRANSATLANTIC MOMENT 61

Sicily, Cyprus, and Crete. European crusaders first came into contact
with sugar in the Holy Lands, and they developed their own sugar
plantations in Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily by the early thirteenth cen-
tury. Europe gradually acquired a taste for sugar (although expensive
until the nineteenth century and frequently used for medicinal pur-
poses), having known only honey as a sweetener. Italian merchants
spearheaded its production by supplying the capital and technology
for its expansion into southern Iberia and (eventually) Madeira and
the Canary Islands off the West African coast.

While the Italians provided the financing, the Portuguese supplied
the labor. How the Portuguese secured the labor, however, is very
much connected to Indian Ocean commerce. Both the Italians and the
Portuguese had long been interested in accessing its lucrative trade di-
rectly, as opposed to going through the Red Sea and Arabian peninsula.
This long-range goal of eliminating the Muslim middleman, togeth

with such short-term objectives as securing outlets for West African
gold, led the Portuguese and Italians to explore the West African coast
during the first half of the fifteenth century. By 1475, the Portuguese
had crossed the equator, and by 1487 they had rounded the Cape
of Good Hope. By then, the Portuguese were exporting as much as
700 kilograms of West African gold in a peak year, and averaged 41

kilograms per year in the first twenty years of the sixteenth century,
accounting for nearly one-fourth of all West African annual gold pro-
duction. Vasco da Gama’s 1497–1498 voyage signaled Portugal’s en-
trance into the Indian Ocean; by 1520 the Portuguese were an Indian
Ocean power.

Busy with gold and empire, the Portugese also tapped into West
African labor. The Guanches, the indigenous population of the Ca-
naries, were taken by the Portuguese and enslaved in both Madeira and
the Mediterranean in the early fifteenth century. Lisbon began import-
ing as many as 1,000 West Africans annually from 1441 to 1530; from
there they were dispersed to southern Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere
in the Mediterranean. However, it was Madeira that emerged as the
most important Portuguese possession, with its cultivation of sugar-
cane, initially with Guanche and then West African mainland labor
(the Guanches were eventually extinguished as a group by European
diseases). By the 1490s, Madeira was a wealthy Portuguese colony,
exporting sugar throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. In 1495,
the planters of Madeira began operations in the West African islands of
São Tomé and Principe, operations so successful that the Old World

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62 REVERSING SAIL

slave trade remained numerically dominant until the middle of the
sixteenth century.

The use of black slaves to cultivate sugarcane therefore did not be-
gin in the Americas, but in the Mediterranean and on West African
coastal islands. Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the “Indies” (to avoid cir-
cumnavigating Africa) set into motion a process that, among other
things, transferred a system of slavery from the Old World to the New.
The gradual exploitation of African labor was consequently not the
result of some far-reaching European design to demean and debilitate
Africans and Africa – at least not by the fifteenth century. In a real
sense, Africa was a casualty of geography as much as greed.

Scope of the Trade

The trickle of African captives in the second half of the fifteenth cen-
tury turned into a veritable flood by the seventeenth century. Colum-
bus made his “discoveries,” and in 1501 Pedro Cabral returned to
Portugal with claims to Brazil. The movement of the Portuguese and
Spanish into the New World saw the rise of mining and agricultural
industries and an increased reliance on captive African labor that was
due, most importantly, to epidemiology. In sum, Europeans intro-
duced an entirely new disease environment into the Americas, from
which indigenous peoples had no immunity. The latter were subjected
to smallpox, measles, influenza, diphtheria, whooping cough, chicken
pox, typhoid, trichinosis, and enslavement, and the results were catas-
trophic: In central Mexico alone, an estimated pre-Columbian popu-
lation of 25 million fell to 1.5 million by 1650, after which it slowly
recovered; in Hispaniola, native Arawak numbers plummeted from
approximately 7 million to less than 500 by the 1540s. In total, an
indigenous population as high as 100 million (or less than 20 million,
depending on the estimate) was decimated by as much as 90 percent
by the late eighteenth century, a process referred to as the Great Dying.

Africans, in contrast to the indigenous population, shared with
Europeans a certain proportion of the Old World disease environ-
ment. African mortality rates in the Americas were alarmingly high
as a result of other factors, as were those for Europeans in places
like seventeenth-century Virginia, but neither was quite as devastat-
ing as those visited upon the indigenous. The Great Dying, European
familiarity with African enslaved labor, and the cost-effectiveness of

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TRANSATLANTIC MOMENT 63

transporting Africans to the Americas explains their enslavement in
the Americas, one of the most extensive mass movements in history, a
displacement to beat all displacemen

ts.

Within ten years of Columbus’ 1492 voyage, enslaved Africans were
in the New World, along with sugarcane and experienced planters
from Portugal and the Canaries. Hispaniola (current day Haiti and the
Dominican Republic), Cuba, and other Spanish-claimed territories
were early destinations, and by the 1520s, Africans were replacing
the indigenous Taı́no in servile capacities, including gold and silver
mining. From 1521 to 1594, from 75,000 to 90,000 Africans were
brought to Spanish-held territories, with over half going to Mexico.
Approximately 110,525 Africans entered Mexico and Peru between
1521 and 1639; by the time of formal emancipation in 1827, some
200,000 Africans had labored in Mexico alone. By 1560, Africans
outnumbered Europeans in Cuba and Hispaniola, and by 1570 they
equaled the number of Europeans in Mexico City and Vera Cruz.

Not all Africans entering the New World in the sixteenth century
were enslaved. Free Africans took part in the military conquest along-
side white conquistadores. Africans and their descendants had long
resided in various Spanish towns, where they often experienced a free-
dom qualified by substantial financial hardship. The opportunity to sail
for the New World was welcomed by individuals like Juan González
de Léon, who among other things served as an interpreter of the Taı́no
language, and Juan Garrido, who came to Seville in 1496 and there-
after enlisted for service in the Americas. Garrido fought against the
Taı́no in Hispaniola, and both men participated in Ponce de Léon’s
conquest of Puerto Rico beginning in 1508. From Puerto Rico, Ponce
de Léon raided the Caribs for captives in Santa Cruz, Guadaloupe,
and Dominica, with the assistance of both men. The two even accom-
panied Juan Ponce de Léon to Florida in 1513 and 1521, mining for
gold for a time.

Though there were black explorers and conquerors (dubious dis-
tinctions to say the least), slavery in sixteenth-century Spanish-claimed
lands was far more significant, and even more so in Portuguese-held
Brazil. Sugarcane was planted as early as the 1520s in the north-
eastern region of Pernambuco, and with the arrival of planters from
Madeira and São Tomé, the industry grew slowly. Portuguese involve-
ment in Kongo and Angola saw a dramatic increase in the importation
of African captives, and by 1600 Brazil had outstripped Madeira as the
world’s leading sugar producer. Brazil was the port of call for the vast

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64 REVERSING SAIL

majority of captive Africans for the whole of the seventeenth century,
accounting for almost 42 percent of the total.

The early African presence in the Americas was but the beginning of
woes. The export figure remains a matter of debate, with some arguing
for estimates that trend toward 100 million (including losses in Africa).
The scholarly consensus, however, is that approximately 11.9 million
Africans were exported from Africa, out which 9.6 to 10.8 million ar-
rived alive, translating into a loss during the Middle Passage of about
10 to 20 percent. Some 64.9 percent of the total were males, and
27.9 percent children. The transatlantic slave trade spanned 400 years,
from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. The apex of the
trade, between 1700 and 1810, saw approximately 6.5 million Africans
shipped out of the continent. Some 60 percent of all Africans imported
into the Americas made the fateful voyage between 1721 and 1820,
while 80 percent were transported between 1701 and 1850. In com-
parison with the trade in Africans through the Sahara, Red Sea, and
Indian Ocean, the bulk of the Atlantic trade took less than one-tenth
of the time.

Many European nations were involved in the slave trade. Britain,
France, Sweden, Denmark, and Holland all joined Spain and Portu-
gal at different points in time, as did Brazil and the United States.
From the fifteenth century through the middle of the seventeenth,
Spain and Portugal controlled the trade; Spain transported relatively
few captives under its own flag, relying instead upon foreign firms to
supply its territories under a licensing system called the asiento. From
the mid-seventeenth century, a number of European entities entered
the slaving business in addition to those previously mentioned, includ-
ing the Brandenburgers, Genoese, and Courlanders. Throughout the
eighteenth century and into the first decade of the nineteenth, the
height of the trade, British and French involvement accounted for at
least 50 percent of the trade.

Of all the voyages for which there is data between 1662 and 1867,
nearly 90 percent of captive Africans wound up in Brazil and the
Caribbean; indeed, Brazil alone imported 40 percent of the total trade.
That part of the Caribbean in which the English and French languages
became dominant yet transformed through African inflections, syn-
taxes, and vocabularies, was not far behind Brazil, receiving 37 percent
of the trade in more or less equal proportions. Spanish-claimed islands
accounted for 10 percent of the Africans, after which

North America

took in 7 percent or less.

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TRANSATLANTIC MOMENT 65

African Provenance

Nearly 85 percent of those exported through the Atlantic came from
one of only four regions: West Central Africa (36.5 percent), the Bight
of Benin (20 percent), the Bight of Biafra (16.6 percent), and the Gold
Coast (11 percent). The busiest ports in these regions were Cabin

and Luanda (West Central Africa), Cape Castle and Anomabu (Gold
Coast), Bonny and Calabar (Bight of Biafra), and Whydah (Bight of
Benin). Slavers (slave ships) often took on their full complement of
captives in single regions of supply, and Africans emanating from the
same regions tended to be transported to the same New World des-
tinations. Captives from West Central Africa comprised the majority
of those who came to Saint Domingue (present day Haiti) and South
America, accounting for an astounding 73 percent of the Africans
imported into Brazil. The Bight of Benin, in turn, contributed dis-
proportionately to Bahia (northeastern Brazil) and the francophone
Caribbean outside of Saint Domingue; six out of every ten from the
Bight of Benin went to Bahia, while two out of every ten arrived in
francophone areas. The Bight of Biafra constituted the major source
for the British Leeward Islands and Jamaica, although the

Gold Coast

supplied 27 percent of those who landed in Jamaica and was clearly
the leading supplier to Barbados, the Guyanas, and Surinam. Sierra
Leone (a region that includes the Windward Coast in this discus-
sion) provided 6.53 percent of the total export figure, followed by
Southeast Africa and Senegambia at 5.14 percent and 4.3 percent, re-
spectively. Transshipments between New World destinations could be
substantial.

A review of these regions reveals considerable complexity not only
with respect to language and culture, but also as it concerns forms of
government, agriculture, regional and transregional commerce, and
technologies relating to each of these categories. Stated differently,
while there were many similarities, there were appreciable differences
of every kind among the captives.

West Central Africa was a vast region dominated by the states and
populations of Kongo and Angola. Life conformed to the four eco-
logical zones (river, swamp, forest, and savannah) of the Congo R

iver

basin, the people further linked by closely related Bantu languages.
Statecraft in the region ranged from kingdoms to villages, with Kongo,
Ndongo, Kasanje, and Loango representing states of substantial size
and elaboration. Agriculture, the material basis for these societies,

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66 REVERSING SAIL

Waalo

St. Louis Futa
Toro

Cayor

Pir
Salum

Siin

Wult

Bundu

Mande
Bissao

Kingdoms

Futa
Jallon

Guidimakha

Khasso

Kaarta

Nioro

Bamako

Dia

Segu

Sikasso

Jenne

Bobo-
Dioulasso

Kong

Wagadugu

Yatenga

Hamdullahi

Mamprussi

Dagomba

Yendi

Wa
Gonja

Salaga
Bighu

AtebubuAsante

Kumase
Akyem

Accra
FanteAxim

Anomabu
Cape Coast

Elmina

AssiniGrand
Lahu

Grand Bassam

Bonduku

Kankan
Bisandugu

Freetown

Monrovia

Timbuktu

Dakar

Bathurst

B
am

buk

M
aa

si
na

G
ajaaga

Senegal
Goree
Island

Gambia Gambia River

Senegal River

B
an

da
m

a
R

Com
oe

R
iver

Sierra Leone

Sberbo Estuary

Liberia

Gold Coast

MAP 4. West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

was usually performed by women (except land clearing), whereas men
hunted and tended fruit and palm trees.

Communities throughout West Central Africa believed in a supreme
deity, often referred to as Nzambi a Mpungu, and related spiritual en-
tities. Since the fifteenth century, a tradition of Christianity was estab-
lished in the region, the result of Portuguese commercial activities. The
social history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Kongo arguably
revolved around the exchange between Christianity and Kongolese
religion, giving rise to an Africanized Christianity best symbolized
by the life of Dona Beatrice Kimpa Vita (1682–1706), leader of a

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TRANSATLANTIC MOMENT 67

Gao

Say
Sokoto

Gwandu

Bussa

Bida

Ilorin

Oyo Ile

Abomey
Ibaban Ife

Whydah L
agos

B
adagry

Porto

ovo

Opobo

Bonny

Abeokuta

Nok

Idah

Igbo-UkwuOnitsha

Arochuku

Town (Brass)

Elem Kalabari
(New Calabar)

Old CalabarAboh

Benin
City

Ebrohimi

Katsina

Maradi

Zinder

Ngazargamu

Kuka Bagirmi

Lake Chad

Cape Lopez

Volta R
iver Yola

Jukun

Igala

Itsekiri

Igbo

Benin
Egba

Oyo
Ibadan

Dahomey

Bight of
Benin

Bight of Biafra

Adamawa

Kanem-Bornu

Fezzan

Kano

Zaria

Hausa
States

Borgu
States

Gaya

iger R
iver

Nupe

MAP 4. (Continued )

religious movement that sought to reconstruct a Kongo reeling from
war. A prophet–priest or kitomi, her claim to be the incarnation of
St. Anthony, combined with her teachings that Jesus, Mary, and the
prophets were all Kongolese, are examples of the way Christianity
was reconfigured to accommodate West Central African values. Dona
Beatrice Kimpa Vita was burned at the stake for heresy.

In West Central Africa, spirits of the dead who had led good lives
were believed to live in mpemba, a subterranean realm separated from
the living by a large body of water, or kalunga. The deceased changed
color within ten months of their demise, becoming white. It is therefore

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68 REVERSING SAIL

FIGURE 1. Cape Coast Castle, Gold Coast, 1948.

no surprise that Europeans were initially viewed as departed spirits,
having crossed the kalunga of the Atlantic.

The Bight of Benin, the second leading source of captives, was the
land of the Fon, Ewe, and Yoruba groups. The Ewe (concentrated in
present-day Togo and southeastern Ghana) were organized into more
than 100 autonomous states, whereas the Fon of Dahomey (contem-
porary Benin) absorbed Weme, Allada, and Whydah to form a single
centralized power in the eighteenth century. The Yoruba of what is now
southwestern Nigeria also witnessed expansionist polities, but they
were more centered on their respective towns and thereby much more
urban than others. There are many exceptional features of Fon–Ewe–
Yoruba cultures, not the least of which are the bronzes and sculptures
of Benin and Ife. However, the gods of the Fon–Ewe (vodun or loas)
and the Yoruba (orishas) are so numerous and unique that they further
distinguish the region. The Yoruba orishas include Olodumare (high
god), Oshun (goddess of fresh water and sensuality), Ogun (warrior
god of iron), Eshu-Elegba (or Ellegua, trickster god of the crossroads),
Shango (god of thunder and lightning), and Yemanja (mother of all
orishas and goddess of the oceans); and they correspond in some in-
stances to the Fon–Ewe loas of Mawu-Lisa (high god), Aziri (a riverain
goddess), Gu (god of iron and warfare), and Legba (god of the cross-
roads; keeper of the gate). Mawu-Lisa, for example, is a composite
of female and male characteristics, representing the Fon–Ewe ideal.

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TRANSATLANTIC MOMENT 69

Loango

Loango Bay

Cabinda
Boma

Kongo

São Salvador

Luanda

Bnguela

Ndongo

Kuba

Luba

Mwato
Yamyo

Lealui

Sesheke

Zumbo

Tete

Sofala

Quelimane

Kilwa

Burundi

Rwanda

Nkore

Bunyoro

Bu
gan

Matamba
(17th-18th

cent.)

Kasanje
(17th-18th

cent.)

Lunda
(17th-18th

cent.)

Lozi
(17th-18th cent.)

Changamire
(17th-18th cent.)

Malawi
(17th cent.)

Kazembe

(18th cent.)

Mozambique

Kazembe

Victoria Falls

Za
mb

ezi
Riv

Sabi Riv
er

Lim
pop

o R
ive

Lake Malawi

Lake Rukwa

Lake Mweru
Lake
Kisale

Lake
Kyoga

Lake Turkana

Lake Victoria

Lake
Tanganyika

Lake
Kivu

Lake
Edward

Lake
Albert

Lake
Bangweulu

C
on

go
R

iv
er

K
w

ango
R

iver

Kasai R
iver

Luapula
Ri

Lu
an

gw
a

R
iv

L
om

ani R
iver

L
ualaba R

iver

MAP 5. West Central Africa, 1600–1800.

These beliefs would become central to practices in such places as Haiti,
Brazil, and Louisiana.

In contrast to the Yoruba, most of the Igbo, Ibibio, Igala, Efik, Ijo,
Ogoni, and other groups of the Bight of Biafra (southeastern Nigeria)
were organized into villages. The Igbo, Ibibio, and Ijo were the largest,
and the Igbo in particular were marked by dense populations and
agrarian economies. For the most part, theirs were independent “vil-
lage democracies,” in which important decisions were made by a male
peasantry individually distinguished by varying statuses of achieve-
ment. Men conducted long-distance commerce, but women controlled
local trade, keeping any money they earned in communities that were

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70 REVERSING SAIL

mostly patrilineal (tracing descent and inheritance through the male
line). Women also regularly fought to defend their villages. Above all
else, though, women were revered as mothers, wives, and keepers of the
soil. Regarding the latter, they enjoyed a special connection to Ala (or
Ana), the earth mother. Ala and the land (ala) were highly esteemed
and inextricably interwoven, forming the basis of Igbo law. Ala was
functionally the most important deity in Igbo society, although she was
not the high, creator god. That honor was held by Chineke or Chukwu,
who, like the Fon–Ewe’s Mawu-Lisa, was a blend of male and female
components (chi and eke), and from whom sprang powerful spiritual
forces known as the alusi or agbara as well as the personal guardian
spirit or chi of each individual. The ancestral dead, the ndichie, added
to the realm of the disembodied.

According to Igbo beliefs, the individual in consultation with his
or her chi undertook a plan of action that resulted in high individual
achievement, guided by a philosophy and value system stressing suc-
cess and known as ikenga. The individual drive of the Igbo, together
with their regard for the earth and belief in destiny, would clearly in-
fluence the direction of African-derived cultures in the Americas.

Regarding the Gold Coast, its southern half was dominated by Akan
and Ga speakers, the former in turn divided into Twi and Baule speak-
ers. As was true of the Igbo, women were prominent in Akan societies,
as is evident in the belief that their ancestresses came from the sky or
earth to found the first Akan towns in the forests. Matrilineal for the
most part, Akan clans each claimed descent from a common mother.
Each clan had a male and a female head, and women played critical
roles as advisors and heads of the matriclans. Similar to the Igbo, the
Akan espoused belief in the earth mother, Asase Yaa, who, together
with the high god Onyame (or Onyankopon), created the world. In
keeping with most African theologies, the Akan high gods were re-
mote, but the next order of deity, the abosom (who numbered in the
hundreds), were accessible.

Akan societies contributed to the wide variety of political contexts
out of which captives were taken. In this case, Akan speakers were
either a part of the expansionist Asante empire (established around
1680) or they lived in its shadow. Asante was a vast realm ruled by
the Asantehene (king) and a bureaucracy intent on maximizing trade
with both the African hinterland and with Europeans on the coast.
Gold, in addition to captives, was a key export; gold dust was the
standard currency of Asante. One of the most militarily powerful and

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structurally complex states in all of Africa, Asante’s political union was
symbolized by the Sika Dwa, the Golden Stool.

Sierra Leone was a region whose interior was dominated by the
large Muslim theocracy of Futa Jallon, and by a series of independent,
small-scale villages along the coast composed of multiple groups. A
discussion of the coast underscores the rural existence of a majority
who were farmers, fishers, and hunters. Although many groups were
patrilineal, women tended to wield extraordinary influence through
their roles as expert agriculturalists and leaders of “secret societies.”
Concerning the former, women cultivated rice, cotton, and indigo,
skills that would be coveted in North America. Secret societies, in
turn, were instrumental in intervillage diplomacy and commerce, and
they were critical to the maintenance of social order. The Sande
or Bundu society of women was one of the better known organi-
zations, but women also played leading roles in such male societies
as the Poro. What therefore emerges from the Sierra Leonian re-
gion are gender relations that may have been more egalitarian than
elsewhere.

While located in Sierra Leone’s hinterland, Futa Jallon was also
vitally connected to the Senegambian region. We have already dis-
cussed Islam in Africa, so it is sufficient to observe that from the
seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, militant or reformist
Islamic states were founded in Senegambia (and indeed throughout
West Africa), and Futa Jallon was a key participant in this develop-
ment. Muslims captured non-Muslims in wars and were themselves
captured, and captives from both sides wound up in the Americas.
Muslims were exported through Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the
Bight of Benin, the latter mostly the result of conflict between Muslim
Hausa-Fulani (related groups in contemporary northern Nigeria) and
Yoruba combatants (some of whom were Muslims themselves). Mus-
lims were also exported from the Gold Coast, but to a lesser extent. A
number of Malagasy and Swahili captives from the coast of Southeast
Africa were probably Muslim, but many would have been from the
interior and therefore non-Muslim.

Belly of the Whale

The transatlantic transport of all of these various Africans to the Ameri-
cas qualifies as the quintessential moment of transfiguration, the height

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72 REVERSING SAIL

of human alienation and disorientation. It is a phenomenon unlike any
other, with millions forcibly removed from family and friends and de-
posited in lands foreign and hostile. It cannot be compared with the
millions of Europeans who voluntarily crossed the Atlantic, a jour-
ney which for all of their troubles was their collective choice. Words
will never convey the agony, despair, and bewilderment of these inno-
cents, the depth of their suffering, the pain of their separation. The
transatlantic voyage, also called the Middle Passage, was an unspeak-
able horror.

The movement across the Atlantic actually began on African soil,
where those captured in the hinterland were brought to coastal holding
stages, or barracoons. Between initial capture and the barracoon, any-
thing was possible, including escape. Alternatively, they could have
been taken north to the transsaharan trade, or retained in Africa as
slaves, where eventual export to the Americas (or the Mediterranean)
was a continual possibility. Welcome to the realm of uncertainty and
fear, gateway to the land of the macabre.

Reference to captives points to the debate over the capture itself. Do
scholars who maximize African involvement in the capture and sale of
other Africans do so for the purpose of minimizing Western culpability?
Are those who are appalled by the very suggestion of African partici-
pation in the slave trade motivated by the same logic, only in reverse?
The truth of the matter may be more nuanced than straightforward.
There can be no doubt that European and American demand for slave
labor drove the entire enterprise. It is also the case that Europeans en-
tered Africa and hunted humans like prey, especially in the case of the
Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique. But it is equally undeniable
that, as was true of the transsaharan trade, there were African groups
and governments involved in the capture of other Africans, together
with instances of cooperation between European and African traffick-
ers. At Bonny in the Bight of Biafra and points along the Gold Coast,
for example, Europeans used “boating,” or the sailing of small vessels
upriver to purchase captives from villages along the banks, a practice
also found along the Windward Coast. While other African states and
groups resisted the slave trades and may have been successful in de-
fending some, they clearly could not save nearly 12 million others.

Notions of African unity, and even “race” for that matter, were alien
to Africa until relatively recently. As has been discussed, Africa was in-
habited by people of differing cultures, religions, and political agendas,
and these differences were exacerbated (or created) to feed the slave

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FIGURE 2. Slave coffle, western Sudan, 1879–1881. From Joseph Simon
GalliÉni, Mission d’exploration du Haut-Niger: Voyage au Soudan Francais
(Paris, 1885), p. 525. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division,
LC-USZ62-32008.

trade. Raids, kidnaping, and warfare produced most captives, while
individuals found guilty of crimes, or sold into bondage to pay debts,
were also taken. Indeed, with the acceleration of the slave trade came
a corresponding surge in the number of persons convicted of crimes.
Can African participation in the slave trades be divorced from the
engines of European and American demand? Culpability was shared,
but was it symmetrical, and does the answer matter?

Captured Africans, in their forced march from the hinterland to the
sea, could cover substantial distances, anywhere from 100 to 700 kilo-
meters, depending upon place and time. They could take four months
or longer to reach the coast. Loss of life during the trek is conser-
vatively estimated to have averaged 10 to 15 percent, and in Angola
it reached an obscene 40 percent. Captives who reached the shore
could remain there for months, as a result of poor health and the need
to convalesce, or to wait for the next slaver. Ports with established

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74 REVERSING SAIL

traffic attracted larger numbers of slavers with greater frequency and
differed, along with other barracoons, in type and size. Some bar-
racoons were simply pens exposed to the elements, sometimes ad-
jacent to European factories (trading posts). Others ranged from
weather-protected dwellings to fortified castles. Still others, accord-
ing to Mungo Park’s late-eighteenth-century observation along the
Gambia, were compounds attached to nearby communities, for “if no
immediate opportunity offers them to advantage, they are distributed
among the neighbouring villages until a slave ship arrives, or until they
can be sold to black traders who sometime purchase on speculation.”
Park described their circumstances, stating that “the poor wretches are
kept constantly fettered, two and two of them being chained together,
and employed in the labours of the field; and I am sorry to add, are
very scantily fed, as well as harshly treated.”

The Gambian experience paralleled that of the Angolan. The latter
involved coffles averaging 100 captives from the interior. They were fed
the cheapest food, often rotten, which they were forced to carry. Bound
and brutalized, they were taken to Luanda, where conditions remained
deplorable, and there branded three times: on the right breast with a
royal coat of arms, on the left breast or arm to indicate individual
ownership, and on the chest with a small cross, as captives were bap-
tized before embarking for Brazil. They then waited for weeks if not
months, chained and exposed, with little to eat and little to wear, eat-
ing, sleeping, and eliminating in the closest of spaces. As many as
12,000 captives arrived annually in Luanda for export; between 6,000
and 7,000 survived for eventual shipment. The “putrid miasmas” of
human filth and disease and death filled the air, circulating throughout
the city.

The boarding of captives did not necessarily mean that the voyage
was underway. There were often further delays of weeks if not months,
as the slaver sailed from barracoon to barracoon until a full comple-
ment was achieved. A Middle Passage of only two or three month’s
duration was not the experience of many; rather, the total amount of
time from the initial capture to embarkation could last the better part
of a year.

The James departed England on April 5, 1675 and did not arrive
in Barbados until May 21, 1676. Having reached Assini (on the Gold
Coast) on August 30, the James exchanged commodities for both gold
and captives at several points along the coast until January 11, 1676,
when the vessel arrived at the English factory near Wyemba. There the

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TRANSATLANTIC MOMENT 75

slaver boarded captives each day for about a week, most of whom were
described as “very thin ordinary slaves,” indicative of the preceding
ordeal onshore. The James made yet another stop at Anomabu and
did not set sail for Barbados until March 8, 1676.

Similarly, the Dutch slaver St. Jan began loading captives at Ardra
in the Bight of Benin, also called Slave Coast, on March 4, 1659.
The ship continued east, picking up additional captives and supplies
in the Bight of Biafra. By the time the St. Jan left the Biafran area for
the Cameroon River on May 22, it had boarded 219 Africans. From
that time to August 17, the vessel journeyed along the coast in search
of food as far as Cape Lopez (just south of the equator). The search
for provisions was a major preoccupation for slavers, and the captain
of the James complained that his search for food was a “great trouble.”
His concern was echoed by the captain of the Arthur operating in the
Biafran Bight in February of 1678: “This day we sentt our Boat att
Donus to see whatt might be done there, wee findinge negroes to be
Brought on Board of us fast enough but wee nott free to deale in many
fearing lest wee should take in negroes and have noe provitions for
them.” It was Barbot’s calculation at the beginning of the eighteenth
century that a “ship that takes in five hundred slaves, must provide
above a hundred thousand yams; which is very difficult, because it is
hard to stow them, by reason they take up so much room.”

Once purchased by European slavetraders, captives were often
branded with the company’s coat of arms. These became their only
coats, as they were usually stripped of all clothing. In 1699, Bosman
recorded that “they came aboard stark naked as well women as men; in
which condition they are obliged to continue, if the master of the Ship
is not so charitable (which he commonly is) as to bestow something
on them to cover their nakedness.” Some 128 years after Bosman,
Mayer noted in 1827 that two days before captives were loaded onto
the slaver, the heads of both males and females were shaved. And then:

On the appointed day, the barracoon or slave-pen is made joyous by
the abundant ‘feed’ which signalizes the negro’s last hours in his native
country. The feast over, they are taken alongside the vessel in canoes; and
as they touch the deck, they are entirely stripped, so that women as well
as men go out of Africa as they came into it – naked. This precaution,
it will be understood, is indispensable; for perfect nudity, during the
whole voyage, is the only means of securing cleanliness and health.

Brantz Mayer, Captain Canot, or, Twenty Years
of an African Slaver (New York: Appleton, 1854), p. 102.

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76 REVERSING SAIL

While slavetraders may have been primarily concerned with hygiene,
they were not oblivious to the psychological implications of denuding.
Contrary to popular ignorance, most Africans did not go about butt
naked, swinging through trees, but in fact placed great value on textiles,
the primary commodity for which captives were traded to Europeans
in the first place. The humiliation of prolonged nakedness before cap-
tors, the opposite sex, and children seared into the psyche an over-
whelming sense of vulnerability.

Captives did not suffer silently. To the contrary, they often rebelled.
To prevent mutiny and escape, male slaves were chained together at
the wrists and ankles in groups of two as soon as they were boarded.
Women and girls were physically separated from the males and usually
unfettered, an arrangement that became standard procedure by the
last quarter of the eighteenth century. The segregation of the sexes was
maintained throughout the voyage except under certain circumstances
on deck. Europeans had learned to prepare for rebellion as early as
1651, when captain Bartholomew Haward was told that “there is put
aboard your Pinck Supply 30 paire of shackles and boults for such of
your negers as are rebellious and we pray you be veary carefull to keepe
them undr and let them have their food in due season that they ryse
not against you, as they have done in other ships.”

The separation of male and female captives also facilitated the long,
sordid history of the rape of African women and girls by European
men, a humiliation that began before they were ever sold to New World
planters (who promptly went out and did the same). In point of fact,
crews were given sexual access to captive females as a matter of policy.
Even a small number of females violated infrequently was sufficient to
establish the assailability of the captive population.

In addition to fetters, captives were often kept below deck, in the
hold of the slaver, until the African shoreline was no longer in sight.
This was done to discourage revolt, for the African maintaining visual
contact with her homeland was sorely tempted to return. The Hanni-
bal’s Captain Phillips poignantly records the African response: “The
negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their own country, that they have
often leap’d out of the canoes, boat and ship, into the sea, and kept
under water till they were drowned to avoid being taken up and saved
by our own boats, which pursued them; they having a more dreadful
apprehension of Barbadoes than we have of hell.”

That the African viewed the New World as hell is related to her
fear that Europeans were cannibals. Barbot records that it “has been

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TRANSATLANTIC MOMENT 77

FIGURE 3. The Africans of the slave bark Wildfire, brought into Key West on
April 30, 1860. From Harper’s Weekly (June 2, 1860), vol. 4, p. 344. Library of
Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-41678.

observ’d before, that some slaves fancy they are carry’d to be eaten,
which make them desperate; and others are so on account of their
captivity: so that if care be not taken, they will mutiny and destroy
the ship’s crew in hopes to get away.” Olaudah Equiano, upon seeing
whites for the first time, became “persuaded that I had got into a world
of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. . . . When I recov-
ered a little, I found some black people around me. . . . I asked them

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78 REVERSING SAIL

if we were not to be eaten by these white men with horrible looks,
red faces, and long hair.” Equiano’s apprehensions were consistent
with those in West Central Africa (Equiano was an Igbo from what
is now southeastern Nigeria), where Europeans were seen as spirits,
their advent a portent of death. Such was the fear of the New World, so
overwhelming was the sense of separation from family and land, that
many chose to starve themselves; refusing to eat was an option so per-
vasive that crews often had to use force. Those who resisted were given
a “cat,” or flogging. In the face of their past capture, present suffering,
and less-than-bleak future, many chose suicide by other means. Those
who could went over the side; those who could not often went insane.

But many did not go insane or over the side, and because the slave
trade was, in the final analysis, a business transaction, the African had
to be maintained in some fashion. Captives were therefore usually fed
twice a day aboard the slavers. Their diet included horse beans, rice,
yams, limes, lemons, ground Indian corn, and palm oil. Meat was
extremely rare, though fish caught along the voyage was occasionally
provided. Water was obviously highly valued and rationed.

Medical practitioners called surgeons were often included among
the crew to attend the medical needs of the captives. Of dubious abil-
ity and questionable reputation, these surgeons were further restricted
by few resources. They monitored the health of the captives on a reg-
ular basis, segregating those with serious illnesses and treating them
with such physics as wine or sago, a starchlike substance. The sur-
geons examined captives on African coastal shores to determine their
fitness, and they prepared them for market once the New World was
reached.

The consequences of the surgeons’ limitations and the cramped,
filthy conditions aboard the slavers was nothing short of ruinous.
Diseases assailing the captives included dysentery (the “flux” or the
“bloody flux”), measles, scurvy, and “fever.” Ophthalmia, a condi-
tion leading to blindness (possibly related to river blindness), was
widespread. Yaws was as prevalent and potentially fatal. Intestinal
worms added to the collective misery. Aside from the bloody flux,
contracted from food and water contamination, smallpox was of great-
est concern; whole ships were quarantined upon reaching New World
destinations until the pox had run its course and was no longer con-
tagious.

Spacing also contributed to captive misery, and “tight packing”
occurred frequently aboard slavers. Scholars disagree over its precise
frequency and over its impact on the health of the captive population,

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TRANSATLANTIC MOMENT 79

but there can be little doubt that tight packing contributed to suffering,
and suffering is definitely a health issue.

In addition to those who did not survive the Middle Passage, many
perished in Africa itself. Depending upon the specific region in ques-
tion, from 10 to 40 percent of those captured in the interior died en
route to the sea, at which point at least another 10 percent expired while
awaiting export along the coast, during the barracoon phase. When
mortality rates from points of capture through the Middle Passage
are combined, rates that do not take into consideration those initially
killed in slaving raids and wars, from 30 to 70 percent of those cap-
tured for eventual export to the Americas never arrived. Mutinies and
shipwrecks added to the hosts of the dead. Slave ships, in the Dutch-
man Bosman’s words, were “always foul and stinking.” The “stench
of a slave ship could be scented for miles,” the slave deck “so covered
with blood and mucous that it resembled a slaughter-house.” The
surgeon Isaac Wilson was convinced that two-thirds of the 155 who
perished aboard the Elizabeth (out of 602) died from “melancholy,”
observing that once the captives were taken aboard, “a gloomy pensive-
ness seemed to overcast their countenances and continued in a great
many.” The sounds emanating from slavers usually included a “howl-
ing melancholy noise.” To combat this mother of all blues, captives
were brought on deck and forced to dance and sing, and sometimes
had to be beaten to get them to comply. An early form of minstrelsy,
this feigned animation in the midst of such sorrow demonstrates the
deep and complicated history of black performance, its relationship to
coercion both disturbing and instructive.

From the belly of the whale, the sons and daughters of Africa were
dispersed all over the New World, occupying every conceivable place,
performing every imaginable task. The terror of the passage would be
forever seared into the memory of the dispersed, a memory passed
on to descendants. But for all of the horror of the transatlantic slave
trade, it did not completely rupture ties to the homeland. Africa would
remain a central consideration in the hearts and minds of many, the
dream of reconnection, of reversing sail, one of the Diaspora’s central
challenges.

Suggestions for Further Reading

The best place to begin examining the volume of the transatlantic slave
trade is the database compiled by David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt,

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80 REVERSING SAIL

David Richardson, and Herbert Klein entitled The Trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press,
1999), which contains records for over 27,000 voyages, the most com-
prehensive response to Philip D. Curtin’s groundbreaking The Atlantic
Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Works
mentioned in the preceding chapter’s suggested reading section, such
as those of Patrick Manning and Paul E. Lovejoy, are applicable here
as well. The literature on the transatlantic slave trade, exploring the
economic, political, and social implications for all or segments of those
involved, is in fact vast; one would want to include, however, Joseph
E. Inikori’s Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on
African Societies (New York: Africana, 1982); Joseph E. Inikori and
Stanley L. Engerman, The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies,
Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Durham, NC:
Duke U. Press, 1992); and Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant
Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: U. of
Wisconsin Press, 1988).

John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic
World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1998), 2nd ed.,
and David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Ox-
ford U. Press, 1984), have excellent chapters on the emergence of the
trade in the Mediterranean and Iberia. The work of A. J. R. Russell-
Wood, especially A World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia,
and the Americas, 1415–1808 (Manchester: Carcanet Press; New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1992), provides keen insight into Iberian devel-
opments as they relate to the slave trade. Ruth Pike’s Aristocrats and
Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century (Ithaca, NY and Lon-
don: Cornell U. Press, 1972) is also pertinent, while Eric R. Wolf’s
Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: U. of California Press,
1982) remains a pathclearing contribution.

For the Middle Passage, see Olaudah Equiano, The African: The
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (London: Black
Classics, 1998) for a firsthand account. Elizabeth Donnan’s Documents
Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (Washington,
DC: Carnegie Institute, 1930–35) has information on this and other
aspects of the slave trade. For interpretative analyses, see Herbert S.
Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave
Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1978).

A discussion of the Middle Passage as well as the origins and cul-
tures of transported Africans can be found in Michael A. Gomez,

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TRANSATLANTIC MOMENT 81

Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities
in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina
Press, 1998). An interesting and at times technical study of the impact
of Old World migrations into the New is located in Guy A. Settipane,
ed., Columbus and the New World: Medical Implications (Providence, RI:
Oceanside, 1995). Finally, treatment of these and other issues is con-
tained in Joseph E. Harris, The African Diaspora, eds. Alusine Jalloh
and Stephen E. Maizlish (College Station: Texas A & M U. Press,
1996).

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CHAPTER 5

Enslavement

Africans experienced a most painful introduction to the New World.
The forced march to the sea and the subsequent horrific sea voyage
represent the birth of not only the modern African Diaspora but also
modernity itself. Europe’s rise and expansion were undergirded by
slavery; its economic prosperity was fundamentally related to the
exploitation of Africans (an argument championed by Trinidadian
scholar Eric Williams). The vast wealth, considerable privilege, and
seemingly limitless opportunities associated with American elites were
all achieved on the backs of impoverished Africans and subjugated
Native Americans. To be sure, a peasantry and working class from all
points of the globe would eventually find themselves in the Americas,
where they would also make contributions under exploitative condi-
tions. Even so, it was enslaved African labor that paved the way for all
to come.

Focus on the introduction of Africans as enslaved workers does
not reject the possibility of a pre-Columbian African presence. Ar-
tifacts, archaeological remains, linguistic evidence, Native American
traditions, and European explorer accounts render plausible the idea
that Africans crossed the Atlantic at some unspecified point prior to
Columbus. Indeed, there are references in West African sources to
transatlantic voyages under imperial Mali in the fourteenth century,
so the effort was probably made. It would not appear, however, that
these earlier Africans achieved a regular correspondence with Native
Americans, a steady commerce that for subsequent Africans was even-
tually established at their very considerable expense.

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ENSLAVEMENT 83

PA
T

A
G

O
N

IA
Pacific Ocean

(conquered by Argentina, 1878-1879

Miles

0 500 1000

Pan
am

aCos
ta R

ica
Hondura

Bahia

REPUBLIC OF

HAITI

PUERTO RICO

Atlantic Ocean

GUIANA

Caracas

VENEZUELA

GREAT

COLOMBIA

JAMAICA

Bogota

Quito

REPUBLIC

MEXICO

Lima
PERU

ECUADOR

BOLIVIA

EMPIRE OF BRAZIL

La Paz

Santiage

CHILE

CHACO

Rio de Janeiro

(claimed by Bolivia and Paraguay)

LIBRAGUAY

PROVINCES
OF

LA PLATA

CUBA

BELIZE

(Sp.)

(Br.)

(Sp.)

Latin America, 1828

(after the Wars for Independence)

Nicaragua

(Argentine)
Confederation)
Buerios Aires

Amazon R.

PARAGUAY

Asuncion

Montevideo

MAP 6. Latin America, 1828.

Aspects of American Enslavement

A consideration of slavery can begin with Brazil. This vast, Portuguese-
claimed territory has a diverse economic history with fluctuating agri-
cultural periods. Northeastern Brazil was the destination of the vast
majority of Africans from the second half of the sixteenth century
through the whole of the seventeenth, with the captaincies (provinces)
of Bahia and Pernambuco receiving the lion’s share of a work force

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84 REVERSING SAIL

FIGURE 4. Slave market, Pernambuco, Brazil, 1820s. From Maria Graham,
Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (London, 1824), opposite p. 107. Library of
Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-97202.

cultivating sugarcane. From the late seventeenth century through the
mid-eighteenth, gold and diamond mining redirected as many as two-
thirds of all Africans to the captaincies of Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso,
and Goiás. However, with the collapse of the mining boom by the
1770s, the majority returned to Bahia and Pernambuco to produce
sugarcane and tobacco. Cotton became significant early in the nine-
teenth century, but from the 1820s coffee was king, resulting in the
growth of African slavery in central and southern Brazil, particularly
Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo.

The various agricultural regimes, fluctuating demographics, dif-
fering climates, and changing rates of captive importation meant that
slavery in Brazil was multifaceted and complex. However, three aspects
of Brazilian slavery stand out: First, the number of Africans imported
into Brazil was enormous; second, Africans brought to Brazil were
overwhelmingly male, in ratios of nearly 3:1; and third, the percentage
of children brought into central and southern Brazil was astonishing,
accounting for nearly 40 percent of enslaved persons.

Concerning the English-speaking Caribbean, the British arrived in
Jamaica in 1655, having established a presence in St. Kitts (St. Christo-
pher) in 1624, Barbados in 1627, Nevis in 1628, and Montserrat and

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ENSLAVEMENT 85

Antigua in the 1630s. Limited arable land in St. Kitts, Nevis, Montser-
rat, and Antigua meant that these islands could not compete with Bar-
bados, the wealthiest and most densely populated of English colonies
in the seventeenth century. Originally covered by thick tropical growth
with neither mountains or rivers, Barbados had a high percentage of
cultivable land, and it was cleared for sugarcane within the first forty
years of foreign occupation. However, the exactions of sugarcane, com-
bined with territorial limitations, eventually exhausted the soil.

Jamaica was also relatively abundant in arable flat land. The Span-
ish maintained a minimal presence for 150 years before 1655 and the
English incursion. English-speaking Jamaica was “founded in blood,”
seized from the Spanish by a motley crew of unruly soldiers. For the
remainder of the seventeenth century, it was the principal site for buc-
caneering operations against the Spanish. The end of the century,
however, saw a transition from pirating and small-scale farming to
large-scale plantation agriculture, in concert with a dramatic rise in
the number of black slaves, soaring from 514 in 1661 to 9,504 in 1673.
Between 1671 and 1679 another 11,816 Africans arrived, and by 1713
the enslaved population had reached 55,000, larger than that of Bar-
bados. The year 1817 saw the largest number of slaves in Jamaica,

MAP 7. Caribbean map.

U.S.A.
FLORIDA

CUBA

CAYMAN

ISLANDS

JAMAICA
HAITI

TURKS AND
CAICOS U.S. VIRGIN

ISLANDS

BRITISH
VIRGIN

ISLANDS

PUERTO
RICO

DOMINICAN
REPUBLIC

CURACAO

ARUBA

VENEZUELA

BONAIRE

SABA
ST. EUSTATIUS

NEVIS
MONTSERRAT

MARTINIQUE
ST. VINCENT

CANCUN

COZUMEL

MEXICO
BELIZE
Atlantic Ocean

Caribbean Sea

Gulf of

Mexico

B
A

H
A

M
A

S
ANGUILLA

ST. MARTIN
ST. MAARTEN

ST. BARTS

ST. KITTS

ST. LUCIA

BARBUDA

ANTIGUA

GUADELOUPE

DOMINICA

BARBADOS

GRENADA

TOBAGO

TRINIDAD

GUYANA

SURINAME

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some 345,252, but by that time many persons of African descent were
no longer slaves. The island developed a reputation as the preserve of
Akan speakers from the Gold Coast, but in fact more were imported
from the Bight of Biafra. These two regions account for the origins of
some 62 percent of all Africans arriving in Jamaica, and they enjoyed
considerable cultural and social influence.

In addition to amassing the largest group of slaves in the British
Caribbean, Jamaica also had one of the most diversified economies
of the region. By 1832, slightly less than one-half of all the enslaved
worked on sugar plantations; 14 percent worked on coffee plantations,
13 percent worked in “livestock pens,” 7 percent inhabited minor sta-
ple plantations, 8 percent lived in towns, and 6 percent performed
general labor. Owing to environmental needs, sugarcane plantations
were concentrated along the island’s northern coast but could also be
found elsewhere.

European occupation of Trinidad began in July of 1498, and for
the next 300 years the island languished under Spanish domination
and neglect. This changed with the cédula (decree) of 1783, by which
migration and slavery’s expansion were encouraged through the of-
fer of land. Any purported Roman Catholic from a nation friendly
to Spain could swear an oath and receive free land; additional land
was provided for every slave imported. The cédula’s terms essentially
excluded all but the French, a group that included wealthy planters,
the Irish (Northern), and others of various backgrounds, who would
later be joined by those fleeing the French Revolution. By 1784, the
island was effectively a French colony, with the French outnumber-
ing the Spanish 20:1. Immigrants arrived that year from Grenada,
Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia, and Cayenne, speaking French
and Creole languages (mixed African and European tongues). Their
numbers would be augmented by Royalist planters fleeing the Haitian
Revolution (1791–1804).

In contrast to Jamaica, Barbados, and other Caribbean islands, the
arrival of substantial numbers of enslaved Africans in Trinidad was rel-
atively late. The absence of both gold and significant Spanish interest in
agriculture meant that Trinidad’s pre-1783 population was never more
than a few thousand; for example, in 1777, there were 200 enslaved
blacks, 870 free “mulattoes,” and 340 whites in Trinidad. However,
by 1789, the population had increased to 18,918, including 2,200 in-
digenous people, 10,100 enslaved persons, 4,467 free “coloreds,” and
2,151 whites. The African distribution in Trinidad reveals that nearly

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63 percent arrived from the Bight of Biafra, followed by 18.2 percent
from West Central Africa, 10.4 percent from the Gold Coast, and 4.5
percent from the Bight of Benin.

The British seized Trinidad in 1797, by which time the island had
over 150 sugar estates. Sugarcane had become the island’s most impor-
tant crop; by 1832, 90 percent of the total value of Trinidad’s exports
was provided by sugar and its by-products, requiring some 70 per-
cent of the enslaved labor. The impact of the 1783 cédula was the
swift peopling of the island and the emergence of a bustling export
economy.

While the sugar industry was important in Trinidad, cocoa, coffee,
and cotton were also grown. Cocoa production had continued from
the Spanish period, expanding even more rapidly during sugar’s spec-
tacular rise. Cocoa, however, was a smallholder’s specialty, principally
cultivated by the free colored and black populations and therefore not
as dependent on slave labor. In 1810, at least 20 percent of Trinidad’s
population was free and colored, owning 37.3 percent of all estates
and 31.5 percent of all the slaves. The large percentage of free per-
sons growing cocoa explains its expansion, but the fact that they were
overwhelmingly smallholders partially accounts for cocoa’s mere 6.2
percent of the total value of exports in 1832, together with the observa-
tion that demand for cocoa only became very significant in the 1860s,
when the taste of the drink chocolat was improved by the addition of
the powderized extract.

Slavery in the Caribbean was distinguished from its North Amer-
ican counterpart by the presence of large plantations and the
widespread absence of plantation owners. By convention, a North
American plantation was an enterprise of 20 or more slaves, whereas
Caribbean plantations had at least 100 slaves and often consider-
ably more than that. Absentee ownership of Caribbean plantations
increased toward the end of legal slavery in the British West Indies,
and it underscores the relatively small number of whites in the islands.
In Jamaica, for example, the black population already constituted 90
percent of the total by 1734.

Captive males were imported into the anglophone Caribbean at
twice the rate of their female cosufferers, although early in the histories
of Jamaica and Trinidad the proportions were more or less the same.
Taking the anglophone Caribbean as a whole, we can see that life and
labor were extremely arduous. Early in the history of the Caribbean,
the relatively low costs of procuring captives from Africa made it less

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expensive to simply replace enslaved workers with new recruits rather
than promote stable families and strategies of reproduction in the is-
lands. Imbalanced sex ratios and appalling working conditions resulted
in a life expectancy of less than ten years upon disembarkation. In Bar-
bados, for example, the importation of some 85,000 captives between
1708 and 1735 raised the enslaved population from 42,000 to only
46,000.

As was true throughout the Americas, newly arriving Africans, re-
ferred to as “fresh” or “saltwater” blacks, often underwent a painful
period of adjustment known as “seasoning,” lasting up to three years.
It was during this time that captives became enslaved, whereas prior
to disembarkation anything was possible, including mutiny. Seasoning
involved acclimating to a new environment, new companions, strange
languages and food, and new living arrangements. Above all, seasoning
involved adjusting to life and work under conditions cruel and lethal.
As a result of brutal treatment, the shock of the New World, disease,
and the longing for home, between 25 and 33 percent of the newly
arrived did not survive seasoning.

Slavery required force, coercion, or it could not operate. The whip
was therefore everywhere employed, supplemented by an assortment
of tortures and punishments in the Caribbean chamber of horrors.
The unimaginable included burning body parts with varying degrees
of heat, chopping off limbs, placing the slave in stocks, and implement-
ing solitary confinement. Women, many pregnant, were whipped on
their bare behinds, after which salt and pepper were often poured into
the wounds along with melted wax – a reflection of slavery’s sadistic
nature.

Throughout the English-claimed Caribbean, women worked in
many of the same capacities as men, particularly on large plantations.
During harvest between October and March, they worked eighteen
hours or more a day in the sugarcane fields and in the sugar mills; by
the early nineteenth century, three-quarters of the enslaved throughout
the Caribbean were working on sugarcane plantations. These planta-
tions required greater female participation in the fields than did coffee
plantations because of the disproportionate use of males in processing
the cane, and it was the sugarcane plantation, generally an unhealthy
place, that had the highest rates of slave mortality, morbidity, and in-
fant mortality rates (followed by coffee plantations, and then cocoa and
cotton plantations). In addition to working as hard as men, women and
girls were susceptible to sexual exploitation in ways and at rates that did

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ENSLAVEMENT 89

not apply to men (the subject of males as victims of sexual assault has
received little scholarly attention, with the exception of lynching and
its attendant castration ritual). Absentee owners had to rely on man-
agers and overseers, both white and black, who viewed sexual access
as their right. Many enslaved children resulted from these unions; the
question of how these interactions should be understood is a matter
of debate. The rewards of voluntary cooperation could have included
an easier life, but avoidance of violation may not have always been
possible, especially when enslaved women (and their families) risked
serious reprisal for refusing advances. The element of coercion was
therefore present in every case, even in romanticized unions of “con-
sent.” Enmity between black and white women was a by-product, the
latter often as harsh in their treatment of slaves as white men.

The official value of the Caribbean’s slave-produced exports to
England was fourteen times that of exports from North American
colonies north of the Chesapeake before 1765, at which time their
value dropped to ten times as great. Indeed, the value of exports to
Britain from the anglophone Caribbean led that of commodities from
Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the whole of North America from
1713 to 1822, while the same anglophone Caribbean was the prin-
cipal importer of British goods in comparison with Africa, Asia, and
Latin America. Clearly, the British-held Caribbean was of enormous
value and importance to Britain, premised on the backs of African
labor.

In 1697, Hispaniola was formally divided into Spanish-held Santo
Domingo and French-controlled Saint Domingue (later Haiti, which
reunited with Santo Domingo from 1822 until 1844, when the latter
declared its independence as the Dominican Republic). As impor-
tant as the British Caribbean was to Britain, the French-held terri-
tory of Saint Domingue was, by 1789, the wealthiest of all West In-
dian colonies. The French national economy benefited from slavery
in Saint Domingue as much as did the rich planters, but events on
the island, particularly the revolution of 1791–1804, were arguably
of even greater significance to the African-descended throughout the
Americas, and these were certainly influential in France’s decision to
cede vast territories to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of
1803.

Engagés, or white indentured servants of peasant and working class
backgrounds from France, were originally called upon to provide la-
bor in Saint Domingue. Under three-year contracts, the engagés were

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eventually working alongside small numbers of Africans. The move to
indigo production by 1685 was a definitive turn in Saint Domingue’s
history, as the importation of Africans increased significantly. With
the introduction of sugarcane twenty years later, Africans became the
overwhelming source of labor, with the engagés acting as the overseers
and tradesmen. Between 1680 and 1776, nearly 700,000 Africans were
brought to Saint Domingue, producing a population of nearly half a
million by 1789. Of that figure, some two-thirds were African born, sig-
nificant in light of the Haitian Revolution. West Central Africans, fol-
lowing the earlier arrival of small groups from Senegal through Sierra
Leone in the sixteenth century, would eventually account for nearly
48 percent of the total number imported, followed by 27 percent from
the Bight of Benin.

As was true of places like Jamaica, Saint Domingue’s plantations
were characterized by increasing absentee ownership, with some own-
ers never having seen the island. Absentee interests were represented
by agents or managers, procureurs, who acquired a kind of power of
attorney and enjoyed all of the advantages of the absentee owner.
Both absentee and in-country owners were known as grands blancs,
as were French merchants and colonial officers in the cities. Other
whites were petits blancs, many descendent from seventeenth-century
engagés, while others were such townspeople as barristers, shopkeep-
ers, carpenters, criminals, and debtors. The petits blancs were some-
times called faux blancs and even nègres-blancs by blacks, an indication
of low esteem. But is this “white trash” characterization convincing as
an expression of derision, or does it ultimately rest upon the dispar-
agement of blacks?

The concept of race, the notion that human beings can be clearly
differentiated into basic, hierarchically arranged categories based upon
certain combinations of shared physical characteristics, developed in
tandem with slavery. The concept emphasizes difference rather than
commonality, and as a tool of power and privilege it has few rivals.
The specifics of race would vary throughout the Americas, but the
essence of the idea was consistent: Whites and blacks, as categories of
contrasting mythical purity, also represent the concentration of power,
wealth, and beauty in the former case and the absence of such in the
latter. Native peoples, Asians, and persons of “mixed” heritage were
located along the continuum between the black–white polarities; in
some societies, mixed groups achieved a stable intermediary status,
where in others they shared economic and social disabilities similar

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ENSLAVEMENT 91

to those of blacks. White elites used race to their personal advantage;
poor whites accepted race because it ennobled them, granting them
a status that could never be challenged by darker people, with whom
they refused to see any similarity of circumstance. On the other hand,
some of African descent also came to embrace the concept of race,
as they suffered as a group and saw benefit in collective resistance.
However, as will be discussed concerning Brazil in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, race could not only be kaleidoscopic in variation
among those born in the Americas, but even the African born did not
always accept associations based upon skin color, preferring a cultural
and linguistic-based identity instead.

Race was also complex in Saint Domingue. In addition to whites
and the enslaved were the affranchis, or free blacks, and gens de couleur
(“persons of color” or mixed ancestry). The affranchis, mostly women,
numbered about 27,500 in 1789, equaling the number of whites and
owning about 25 percent of the enslaved. Some 15 percent of this
group lived in urban areas, including Cap Français and Port-au-Prince,
and accounted for 11 percent of the total urban population. Two-
thirds of the affranchis were gens de couleur, largely the consequence
of liaisons between white slaveholders or their managers and enslaved
females, a system of concubinage in which ties between slaveholder or
manager and enslaved often carried the understanding that children
from such unions would be free. As a result, there developed a sizeable
free colored population by the beginning of the eighteenth century,
and by 1789 their numbers were greater than their counterparts in the
whole of the British- and remaining French-claimed Caribbean com-
bined. Affranchis took advantage of the rapid rise in coffee cultivation,
and by the middle of the eighteenth century they were planters in their
own right. A few even joined the exclusive grands blancs club of sug-
arcane planters, but most were excluded by their inability to inherit or
own money (or its equivalent in land) beyond a specified amount, thus
explaining their concentration in coffee cultivation as well as various
trades and commerce.

Because the affranchis were dominated by gens de couleur, they
constituted a third racial category and were used as a buffer group
between whites and the enslaved masses. Striving to be accepted by
whites, the affranchis adopted their tastes and habits, and because
many were slaveholders, they identified with powerful, white property
interests. However, although at least 300 planters were married to
women of color by 1763, there was no reciprocation of policy in kind.

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Affranchis could not hold public office, vote, practice law or medicine,
or participate in certain trades. By the 1770s, they could not take the
names of their former owners, they could not enter France for any
reason, and they were subject to sumptuary laws. However, they were
required to render militia duty to protect the colony, serving in their
own units commanded by white officers. Affranchis exclusively com-
prised the maréchaussée, whose chief function was to hunt down run-
away slaves, a role played by poor whites in the United States (where
they were called patrollers, or “patty-rollers” by blacks). By making
the maréchaussée exclusively colored, the whites in power drove a
deep wedge between them and the vast majority of Africans and their
descendants. However, by refusing to grant them full rights and privi-
leges, whites denied the affranchis access to full freedom. They there-
fore became a subject caste, with serious implications for the future of
Saint Domingue.

By 1789, Saint Domingue was the site of more than 3,000 indigo
plantations, 2,500 coffee plantations, nearly 800 cotton plantations,
and 50 cocoa plantations. Such was the island’s coffee production that
it became the world’s leader after 1770. But it was Saint Domingue’s
dominance in sugar production that distinguished it. By the time of
the Haitian Revolution in 1791, Saint Domingue’s sugarcane indus-
try was operating at peak capacity, with almost 500,000 enslaved la-
borers on nearly 800 plantations producing 79,000 metric tons of
sugar, compared with the 60,900 metric tons of Jamaica’s 250,000
enslaved population. France reexported rather than consumed most
of the 1791 sugar crop from its colonies, thereby supplying 65 per-
cent of the world’s market in sugar, 50 percent of which came from
Saint Domingue. In contrast, Britain consumed most of its Caribbean-
produced sugar and only reexported 13 percent to the world market
between 1788 and 1792. The divergence between France and Britain
is partially explained by wine and rum; the French were far more in-
terested in the former, whereas Saint Domingue sugar was used in the
rum production of various colonies as a result of its higher sucrose
content and lower production costs.

The riches of Saint Domingue were built on the backs of black
suffering. The context for that suffering was a shortened life span,
when in the eighteenth century half of all newly arriving Africans lived
another three to eight years. As for those born into slavery in Saint
Domingue, the so-called creoles, they could expect a working life of
fifteen years. As was true of the early British strategy in the Caribbean,

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ENSLAVEMENT 93

the French determined it more cost-effective to simply replace worn-
out, useless, or dead slaves with new arrivals.

By the 1780s, the male-to-female ratio in Saint Domingue stood at
120:100, down from the high of 180:100 in 1730. Both women and
men were organized into work groups or ateliers, and both sexes per-
formed heavy labor in the fields that included tilling, weeding, clearing
trees and brush and stones, digging trenches and canals, and plant-
ing and picking. Work days averaged eighteen hours, with some slaves
working twenty-four-hour shifts. For those on sugarcane plantations,
the grinding season between January and July followed the harvest
and was just as arduous, whereas coffee plantation workers labored
under a seasonal system that was different yet taxing. Field hands
were the backbone of the labor regime, but enslaved workers were also
boilermen, furnacemen, carpenters, masons, coopers, wheelwrights,
and stockmen. Males dominated such jobs, while women and girls
performed most agricultural tasks; in the 1770s and 1780s, some 60
percent of the field hands were female. Females were also dominant
as washerwomen, house servants, and seamstresses, tasks that would
inordinately feature women of African descent throughout the twenti-
eth century in various parts of the Americas. Most cooks were males,
while valets and coachmen were always so. Creoles rather than the
African-born filled most domestic jobs; whites were more comfortable
with those who could speak their language and who were, in many
instances, of partial European descent.

Like their counterparts in the British-claimed Caribbean, the en-
slaved in Saint Domingue maintained their own provision grounds,
small plots of land upon which they cultivated crops for personal con-
sumption. The enslaved had to squeeze in time to attend their gardens,
usually on Sundays, holidays, and around noon during the week, when
they had a two-hour respite. Surpluses from their provision grounds
were sold in nearby towns on Sundays and holidays, an activity domi-
nated by women. Women-controlled markets may have resulted from
restrictions placed upon men by slaveholders, but such markets were
probably a continuation of West African practices, where women were
often in charge of local markets. As West African organizational con-
tinuities, the provision grounds and market days of the Caribbean are
often cited as features further distinguishing the experiences of blacks
there from their cosufferers in North America.

Provision grounds and markets notwithstanding, the enslaved of
Saint Domingue were, generally speaking, perpetually hungry and

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consistently malnourished. This should not have been the case, since
the institution under the French (like slavery in the Islamic world) was
regulated, at least in theory, by a body of rules known as the Code Noir,
first promulgated in 1685. The idea was to minimize the brutality of
the slave regime as a whole and the slaveholder in particular by re-
quiring certain minimum standards of treatment. The hours worked
by the enslaved, the amount of food they received, and the types of
punishment permissible were all covered by the Code Noir. As was
true in the Islamic world, however, there was often a chasm between
theory and reality. The enslaved were overworked and underfed.

They were also severely abused, and in ways as savage and shock-
ing as could be found anywhere in the New World. In addition to
the tortures mentioned as part of the British Caribbean experience,
slaveholders in Saint Domingue added such measures as hurling hu-
mans into blazing ovens; cramming their orifices with gunpowder and
igniting the powder, transforming their bodies into human fireballs;
mutilating their body parts (especially the genitalia, male and female);
burying victims alive after forcing them to dig their own graves; bury-
ing individuals up to the neck, allowing for the slow dismantling of
sugar-covered heads by insects and animals; and so on. Could anything
concocted in the Western imagination regarding African “savagery” be
any more perverse?

Given Saint Domingue’s prominence in the production of sugar,
the Haitian Revolution instigated a “dramatic transformation” of the
world sugar market, occasioning an upsurge in sugarcane production
elsewhere. Jamaica and the British isles were the initial beneficiaries
of Saint Domingue’s demise, with Jamaican sugar production dou-
bling between 1792 and 1805. Jamaica’s production continued to be
substantial if not quite so prodigious, but it would be replaced as the
leading sugar producer by Cuba in the 1820s. Brazil would compete,
but its market share was hampered by outdated technology and inade-
quate transport. Cuba continued to dominate world sugar production
in the second half of the nineteenth century, but it suffered a decline
in sugar prices from the rise of the French beet sugar industry between
1827 and 1847.

Regarding slavery in Spanish-held territories, Hispaniola was prob-
ably the first site to which enslaved Africans were brought early in
the sixteenth century, and ladinos, or Africans with some command
of either Spanish or Portuguese, were the first to be imported. But as
early as 1503, Nicolás de Ovando, Hispaniola’s first royal governor,

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petitioned Spain to stop sending ladinos to Hispaniola because they
were suspected of inciting revolt. Instead, de Ovando requested the im-
portation of bozales, or “raw,” unacculturated Africans directly from
West Africa. The governor did not appreciate, however, that ladinos
and bozales were coming out of the same region, Senegambia, and
that the former’s familiarity with European culture was mitigated by
their shared cultural ties with the latter, with Islam as an important
factor. The revolts therefore continued, and it was not until 1513 that
the Spanish began to import Africans from West Central Africa. By
1514, there were some 1,000 ladinos and bozales in Hispaniola, along
with 689 Europeans.

Nicolás de Ovando may have also been responsible for introducing
Africans in Puerto Rico in 1509, when he brought them from Santo
Domingo. By the following year, an unspecified number of Africans
were on the island along with 200 Europeans. The 1516 appeal of
Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas to prohibit the enslavement
of Native Americans and enslave Africans and Europeans instead
reinvigorated the African trade. Charles I restarted the shipment of
Africans in 1517, an important decision for Puerto Rico, whose boricua
or native population was in decline, as was its gold supply. Colonists,
faced with the choice of either abandoning the island or developing an
alternative source of income, chose the latter and planted sugarcane.
The first ingenio (sugar mill and surrounding lands) was established
on the grasslands of San Germán (contemporary Añasco) in 1523. In
addition to Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, there was also a Senegam-
bian presence in early-sixteenth-century Costa Rica and Panama.

By 1529, Africans had arrived in Venezuela in small numbers. Ini-
tially a “poverty-stricken outpost” of Spanish imperialism, Venezuela
by the eighteenth century had become a leading source of cacao. The
slave trade, insignificant before the eighteenth century, accelerated
between 1730 and 1780, providing labor for the production of cacao,
sugar, indigo, and hides. Pearl divers of African descent were also used
in Venezuela (and Colombia). The end of the “cacao boom” around
the turn of the century led to the eventual cessation of the slave trade
in 1810, by which time there were some 60,000 enslaved persons in
Venezuela. As for Colombia and Peru, Africans destined for Lima,
Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico in the late fifteenth to early six-
teenth centuries arrived initially in Cartagena. Those headed for Peru
voyaged another nine to ten days to Portobelo, where they made a dif-
ficult two-day crossing through the isthmus. Africans began arriving

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96 REVERSING SAIL

in Peru as early as 1529 to work the silver mines (high up in the An-
des), and by the middle of the century the African population in Lima
was near 3,000. In 1640 there were probably 20,000 Africans in Lima,
one-half of the city’s population and two-thirds of the Africans in the
whole of Peru.

The Peruvian economy in general and agriculture in particular ben-
efitted from the increased African numbers. Olives, plantains, oranges,
sugarcane, wheat, and barley were all cultivated by Africans, who also
produced sugar and wine. They tended the cart-pulling oxen and
mules, and they fulfilled various roles in trade and shipping along
the Pacific coast. They were prominent as masons, carpenters, ship-
wrights, bricklayers, blacksmiths, and tailors, and they were employed
as jornaleros, or day wage workers hiring out their labor. Africans were
also domestics in the urban areas, especially Lima, where they were on
conspicuous display. In 1791, there were 40,000 enslaved and 41,398
free blacks and persons of mixed ancestry in Peru; by the time of aboli-
tion in 1854, there were about 17,000 slaves in Peru. The 1876 census
estimated the black population at 44,224.

Briefly concerning the Rio de la Plata (the estuary formed from the
combination of the Uruguay and Parana Rivers), early-nineteenth-
century Montevideo (Uruguay) was the port through which south-
eastern slave trafficking was required to pass before going on to
Buenos Aires (Argentina), Paraguay, and Bolivia. Some remained in
Uruguay, and from 1770 to 1810 about 2,691 Africans were imported.
From 1742 to 1806, perhaps half of the slaves entering the Rio de
la Plata came from Brazil, with the other half hailing directly from
Africa.

We end the discussion of Spanish slavery with Cuba. Except for
Havana, there were no large concentrations of Africans in Cuba prior
to the eighteenth century. The slave trade was irregular, and slaves who
arrived were used for diverse tasks. The island’s planter class would be
encouraged, however, by England’s transformation of Barbados into
a sugar colony, the English seizure of Jamaica in the mid-seventeenth
century for the same purpose, and the corresponding establishment
of the French in Saint Domingue. The cultivation of sugarcane was
unevenly developed until the 1740s, when the Spanish Crown lifted
all taxes on Cuban sugar entering Spain at a time when the world
market was paying more for sugar. From 1750 to 1761 the number of
ingenios (sugar mills and surrounding lands) increased from sixty-two
to ninety-six, a portent of things to come.

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ENSLAVEMENT 97

The period between 1763 to 1838 brought dramatic change to
Cuba. In 1763 the English occupied Havana for ten months, effectively
ending the asiento system. This intervention, together with Cuban
planter initiative, opened up the island to greater numbers of Africans.
From 1763 to 1792, some 70,000 entered the island, followed by some
325,000 between 1790 and 1820. The second dramatic increase was
in response to several developments. First, the Haitian Revolution cre-
ated a tremendous void in the production of sugar and coffee, sparking
a sharp rise in the price of sugar in Europe. Second, some planters
fleeing Saint Domingue resettled in the eastern parts of Cuba, bring-
ing the enslaved with them (their ranks would be joined by planters
from Louisiana after the 1803 Purchase). These developments, cou-
pled with technological improvements, led to skyrocketing sugar pro-
duction in Cuba, with the number of ingenios tripling from 529 in
1792 to 1,531 by 1861. A concomitant rise in coffee production also
drew heavily upon enslaved labor, with their numbers swelled by a slave
trade officially abolished in 1820 but proceeding unabated through the
1860s. By 1838, Cuba had been transformed from a land of few towns,
scattered ranching (potreros), and tobacco farms (vegas) to a huge sug-
arcane and coffee complex. By 1862, when there were more people of
African than European descent in Cuba, the island held 368,550 en-
slaved persons, 60 percent of whom were male, working on sugarcane
and coffee plantations as well as small-scale farms (sitios), ranches, and
in tobacco fields.

Taking the slave trade to Cuba as a whole, we see that approxi-
mately 28 percent and 23 percent of the captives came from West Cen-
tral Africa and the Bight of Biafra, respectively, followed by the Bight
of Benin (19 percent), southeast Africa (12 percent), and Senegam-
bia (2 percent). Over 80 percent of all Africans imported during the
nineteenth century wound up on a plantation as opposed to a town
(where they were domestics, tradespersons, or jornaleros). By the late
1860s, nearly 50 percent of all the enslaved worked on ingenios under
white overseers (administradores) and their assistants (contramayorales),
some of whom were black. Whites also occupied “skilled” positions on
these plantations, while semiskilled jobs were performed by Asian in-
dentured servants, so-called Chinese coolies, nearly 125,000 of whom
entered Cuba between 1853 and 1874 and labored under slave-like
conditions.

Like other Caribbean societies, Cuba also developed a free mixed
race or pardo category of individuals; their tally was 33,886 in 1791, a

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98 REVERSING SAIL

figure that nearly tripled fifty years later to 88,054, when the number
of the enslaved of mixed ancestry is estimated to have been 10,974.
Altogether, those of mixed ancestry represented almost 10 percent of
the total 1841 population of 1,007,624. The free pardo group, to-
gether with free blacks (or morenos), were concentrated in the towns
and eastern provinces.

Like the French Code Noir, the Spanish had the Siete Partidas, a
series of regulations originally developed in the thirteenth century that
included slave codes. The Siete Partidas served as the basis for slave
laws developed in 1680 and revised in 1789, 1812, and 1842, but
in many if not most cases the slave codes constituted an exercise in
semantics, as either they were not implemented or, in the case of the
1789 revision, not even read in Spanish-held territories.

As was true in the British and French Caribbean, slaves in early
Cuba were worked to death and replaced with new recruits from
Africa. The zafra (crop time) and tiempo muerte (dead season) of the
agricultural cycle were both regulated by whips, stocks, and shack-
les. Females, outnumbered by males on the plantations 2:1, were
required to return to work forty-five days after giving birth, hav-
ing labored alongside males into their ninth month of pregnancy.
As expected, infant mortality soared. A key indicator of the de-
plorable plight of those of African descent comes from a decline
in their population, from 596,396 in 1860 to 528,798 in 1887, a
shift from 43.7 to 32.5 percent of the total population. The de-
cline suggests their inability to maintain their numbers absent a slave
trade abolished in the 1860s, a picture inconsistent with the claim
that Cuban slavery was more benign than its counterpart in North
America.

And North America was no picnic. The proverbial twenty Africans
who landed in Jamestown in 1619 are usually cited as the first to step
foot in North America, but as early as 1526 a contingent of African
captives was brought to South Carolina by the Spanish. Further, the
Jamestown Twenty were indentured servants, not slaves. It was only
in the second half of the seventeenth century that the fast association
between African ancestry and slavery was legislatively achieved. By
1756 the African population had increased markedly, numbering some
120,156 and nearly matching the white population of 173,316. Slav-
ery spread quickly, with Virginia, South Carolina, Maryland, Georgia,
and Louisiana serving as its foundational colonies in the South, where
the enslaved initially cultivated rice and indigo with women-developed

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ENSLAVEMENT 99

North America

WORLDWORLD

Abc Spanish N. AMERICA S. AMERICAEUROPE OCEANIA AFRICA ASIA OCEANS

0
0

1,000 Miles

1,000 Kilometers

180º

0º Equator

160º W

20º W

40º W

20º N

20º W

40º N

60º N80º N

0º

ARCTIC OCEAN

PACIFIC
OCEAN

ATLANTIC
OCEAN

SOUTH
AMERICA

CARIBBEAN

EUROPE

United
States

Canada

Alaska
(U.S.)

Greenland
(Denmark)

Cuba Haiti
Jamaica
Belize

Honduras

Mexico

Guatemala
El Salvador

Costa Rica Panama

Nicaragua

Dominican
Republic

Puerto Rico (U.S.)

Labrador
Sea

Beaufort
Sea

Bering
Sea

Hudson
Bay

Buffin
Bay

Hawaii (U.S.)

Gulf of
Mexico

Bermuda
(U.K.)

Tropic of
Cancer

Arctic
Circle

C
a

n
a

i a n
S h

e
l

R
o

c
k

y
M

t
s

C
oa

st
R

an
ge

pu
la

ch
ia

n
M

ts.

G
r

e
a

t
P

l
a

i
n

HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON

MAP 8. North America.

skills and techniques brought from Africa and introduced to whites.
However, captive Africans were also as far north as New England,
though not as numerous. Colonial New England primarily invested
in slavery as a commercial enterprise; a number of slavetraders were
there, and the slave trade was a major economic engine for New Eng-
land until 1776. Slavetraders exchanged fish and rum for Africans,
molasses and sugar, and while some Africans remained in New Eng-
land to help build its ports, many were shipped elsewhere, including the
Caribbean. Conversely, captives originally enslaved in the Caribbean
were often shipped to New England in small parcels. By 1776, Mas-
sachusetts had the largest number of blacks with 5,249, but Rhode
Island boasted the heaviest concentration, with 3,761 blacks to 54,435
whites. The Mid-Atlantic colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Penn-
sylvania were also slaveholding, but after the war with England the per-
centages of the enslaved fell; by 1790 only 28 percent of some 50,000
blacks, half of whom were in the state of New York, were enslaved.
Slavery was dying out in New England even more rapidly, so that only
3,700 out of 13,000 blacks were enslaved by 1790. While rural for
the most part, the total North American black population of 750,000
in 1790 also featured an urban component, principally in New York
City, where there were 3,252 (of whom 2,184 were enslaved), and in

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100 REVERSING SAIL

Philadelphia, where only 210 out of 1,630 were in formal bondage. In
contrast to New York City, all 761 black Bostonians were free.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the South shifted from
indigo, rice, and tobacco production to cotton, made possible by the
cotton gin and the introduction of the upland, short-staple variety
of the plant. The area under cultivation increased dramatically, and
with it the demand for servile labor. In contrast to the early pattern
elsewhere in the Americas (with the exception of Barbados), North
American planters elected to create conditions in which the enslaved
could sustain their numbers. The strategy worked, because by 1860
an importation of no more than 750,000 had produced a population
of slightly less than 4.5 million people, more than 10 percent of whom
were not formally enslaved.

Approximately 48 percent of Africans arriving in what would
become the United States originated in West Central Africa and
Senegambia (27 percent and 21 percent, respectively). Next came the
Bight of Biafra (19 percent), Sierra Leone (17 percent, including the
Windward Coast), the Gold Coast (12 percent), and the Bight of Benin
(3 percent). Those from the Bight of Biafra were numerically domi-
nant in Virginia, whereas West Central Africans were the majority in
South Carolina and significant in Georgia. Senegambians were numer-
ically superior in Maryland and Louisiana, followed (in Louisiana) by
those from the Bight of Benin and West Central Africa. Senegambians
were substantially represented everywhere, as were those from Sierra
Leone (except in Louisiana). Of those imported, males constituted
68.7 percent and prepubescent children 19.6 percent.

The legal importation of captive Africans ended in 1808, but a clan-
destine trade directly from Africa, together with transhipments from
the Caribbean (especially Cuba), continued until the outbreak of the
Civil War. The domestic slave trade became very important, facilitat-
ing the westward expansion of white settlers and their enslaved workers
by 1815. Planters relocated from the seaboard states to Alabama, Mis-
sissippi, and Louisiana, and then on to Texas. Manifest Destiny came
at a high price, paid largely by Africans, Native Americans, and (later)
Asians.

Although there were 8 million white Southerners in 1860, only
384,884 were slaveholders. This would suggest that the vast major-
ity of whites had no relationship to slavery, had no vested interest in it,
but just the opposite was true. Particularly after 1830, the vast major-
ity of whites supported slavery, and the regional economy was entirely
dependent upon it. The large white population was in stark contrast

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ENSLAVEMENT 101

with the demographic picture in the Caribbean, as was the fact that
some 88 percent of slaveholders in 1860 held less than twenty of the en-
slaved, with the vast majority of slaveholders living on their plantations.
While blacks may not have been concentrated on large, Caribbean-
style plantations, over 50 percent lived on holdings of twenty-five
slaves or more, and some 25 percent lived on properties with fifty or
more. They furthermore tended to be “clustered” on farms and plan-
tations along rivers, in the Tidewater of Virginia, in the Georgia–South
Carolina Low Country, and on the Gulf Coast, representing veritable
“black belts” of people and soil. Within such concentrations, individ-
uals from different holdings maintained a regular commerce, so that
the physical configuration and frequency of interaction allowed the en-
slaved to somewhat approximate the intimacy of the larger Caribbean
setting. Clustering not only characterized the South, but also New
England as well, helping to explain significant African influences in its
culture.

Unlike Spain with its Siete Partidas and Saint Dominque with its
Code Noir, neither the British Caribbean nor North America devel-
oped a single system of laws governing slavery. What emerged instead
was a hodgepodge of rules and regulations developed in each of the
slaveholding states and colonies, in North America collectively known
as the Slave Codes, which were in many ways complementary. As op-
posed to the French and Spanish notions of providing protections for
the enslaved, the Slave Codes were more concerned with protecting the
rights of the slaveholder. The enslaved were considered to be chattel,
property to be bought and sold like cows and horses. As property,
the enslaved could not participate in legal proceedings (unless those
deliberations involved other blacks), make a contract, defend them-
selves against whites, buy or sell, and so on. Punishments included
the infamous whip. But of course, all of this assumes an applica-
tion of the law, such as it was, to cases involving slaves, when in fact
whites often were a law unto themselves, treating black folk as they
saw fit.

In 1850, there were 3.2 million enslaved persons in the United
States, of whom 1.8 million worked on cotton plantations; others
performed a variety of tasks, including raising cane in places like
Louisiana. The calculation in general was that one slave was needed
for every three acres of cotton. During harvest, adults were expected
to pick 150 pounds of cotton per day, sunup to sundown. Given the
emphasis on the cash crop, little time was available for subsistence
farming. In contrast to parts of the Caribbean, some of the larger

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102 REVERSING SAIL

plantations featured a central kitchen where food was prepared for all,
and even when there was no central facility, many received regular
rations of meal and salt pork, supplemented at times with peas, rice,
syrup, sweet potatoes, and fruit. It is possible for one to venture some
interpretive comparisons between this North American distribution
system and the provision grounds of the Caribbean, and one could
assert that the different arrangements engendered docility and pas-
sivity in the recipients of the former while encouraging independence
and entrepreneurship in the participants of the latter. A difficulty with
such an analysis is the “collapsing” of history, or the failure to con-
sider intervening periods of time that also affected later developments.
The postemancipation period in the United States, for example, saw
freedpersons more self-reliant than ever. Furthermore, many slaves in
North America maintained gardens and livestock and regularly hunted
and fished. North American slave gardens did not approach the scope
of the Caribbean provision ground, but too much can be made of the
differences.

In addition to cultivating cash crops, the enslaved in North America
were carpenters, coopers, wheelwrights, painters, seamstresses, tailors,
shoemakers, masons, and the like, and they were hired out by slave-
holders to earn additional income. The hiring out process, more vig-
orous during the “lay-by” period between harvest and new planting,
was similar to the Spanish jornal system, although the latter appears
to have afforded more autonomy. In urban areas there were other uses
for slaves, such as working on the docks as porters. While most of the
enslaved in the various towns were used in domestic capacities and as
common laborers, others built southern railways; some found them-
selves in the iron and lead mines of Kentucky or in textile mills from
Florida through Mississippi.

The issue of nonagricultural, vocational skills raises the question of
literacy among the enslaved. Through the nineteenth century, many
people, white, black, and red, could not read or write in the Ameri-
can South (or anywhere else, for that matter). Given that the overall
rate of literacy was low, it comes as no surprise that the Slave Codes
often included laws against educating the enslaved; the ability to read
and write could be used against slaveholder interests. Despite these
concerns and the overall abysmal level of literacy among slaves, there
are numerous instances of their learning to read and write. In fact,
slaveholders themselves sometimes taught those they claimed to own;
Frederick Douglass, for example, was taught by his mistress. But

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ENSLAVEMENT 103

beyond the realm of the exceptional experience, and contrary to ex-
pectation, there were even a few schools in the South established for
the education of black children, or in which a few black children were
enrolled along with white children.

Literacy among the enslaved did not exclusively depend on receiv-
ing an education in American schools or at the feet of a slaveholder.
Many slaves, perhaps thousands, entered North America already liter-
ate, some having learned Portuguese or Spanish or French, and others
Arabic. Recent research has shown that the number of Muslims enter-
ing North America from West Africa was much higher than formerly
believed. Individuals such as Umar b. Said (d. 1864), who wound up
in North Carolina, and Bilali, who lived on the Georgia sea island of
Sapelo during the early nineteenth century, were just two of a num-
ber of individuals who left written documents and represent the many
literate in Arabic.

Differing skills and varying sorts of responsibilities meant that, while
most were enslaved, not all experienced the institution in the same way.
While too much can be made of the divide between so-called field and
house negroes, as there are many instances of cooperation and col-
laboration between the two categories, they nevertheless represented
different levels of material comfort, exposure to abuse, and even sta-
tus, however relative. In the same way, the enslaved who were hired
out in urban areas, or who enjoyed skills beyond the agricultural, had
the potential to pass through enslavement in a fashion less brutaliz-
ing than the average field hand. Such distinctions provided one of the
bases for eventual class distinctions within the African-derived com-
munity. Another basis was color differentiation, but this factor had
to be teamed with some vocational distinction to make a difference.
Stated another way, there were plenty of lighter-complexioned per-
sons who remained field hands and who made common cause with
their darker-hued brethren, but those who were selected to learn other
trades, or who were put to work as domestics, were disproportionately
lighter-skinned persons.

Those who acquired additional skills were in instances able to save
money and purchase their freedom. Likewise, those whose fathers were
white (the 1850 census states there were 246,000 mixed race persons
out of 3.2 million enslaved) were in better position to acquire their
freedom, although this was far from guaranteed. As a result, the acqui-
sition of freedom was another basis for eventual class divisions within
the black community and was related to vocational training. In 1790

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104 REVERSING SAIL

there were 59,000 free blacks in the United States, with 27,000 in
the North and 32,000 in the South. By 1860 there were 488,000 free
blacks, 44 percent of whom lived in the South. Of course, the concept
of a “free” black in a slaveholding society has many limitations, and
there were any number of laws issued for the purpose of inhibiting such
freedom, in the North as well as the South. Nevertheless, in spite of
heavy repression, those of African descent were able to register modest
gains. In 1860, black folk owned over 60,000 acres of land in Virginia,
with urban properties worth $463,000; in Charleston, 359 blacks paid
taxes on properties valued at more than $778,000. In Maryland they
paid taxes on properties exceeding $1 million in value. New Orleans
represented the pinnacle, as blacks in 1860 owned properties worth
more than $15 million.

One of the more interesting anomalies of North American slavery
was the black slaveholder. He or she was usually someone who pur-
chased his or her spouse, or some other relative, to deliver the person
from slavery. However, there were blacks who were clearly slaveholders
in the grandest sense, such as Cyrian Ricard of Louisiana, a slaveholder
of ninety-one persons. It can be observed in his personal, written com-
munications with neighboring white planters that he fancied himself a
peer. As such, Monsieur Ricard joins the company of many in places
like Trinidad, Saint Domingue, and Brazil, who also saw no contradic-
tion in the observation that they, as descendants of Africans, claimed to
own others of similar descent. In the long annals of history, Europeans
have held other Europeans in bondage, as have Asians and Africans.
That the Ricards of North America appear an oddity underscores the
degree to which slavery in the New World was racialized. But the exam-
ple of Ricard, as unsavory as it seems, cannot be interpreted to mean
that anyone in America could have become a slaveholder (assuming
the desirability of such a goal). Does the example of Cyrian Ricard
have any implications for contemporary society, where success stories
of African Americans are often employed as an argument against the
existence of systemic barriers over which so many of African descent
have yet to vault?

Although scholarly debate continues, the essence of the thesis raised
by Eric Williams concerning the relationship between slavery, the
transatlantic slave trade, and the economic development of Europe
and North America remains viable. While scholars may bicker over
the profitability of the slave trade, there can be little doubt that partic-
ipation in it provided a boost to such port cities as Lisbon, Nantes,
Liverpool, and Bristol, stimulating a commercial expansion that

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ENSLAVEMENT 105

resulted in the rise of such related industries as shipbuilding, port
expansion, the establishment of businesses to service the ports, and so
on. These secondary and tertiary economic benefits were important
and are not unlike the central role played by slavery and the slave trade
in the economy of the United States. The tentacles of both the trade
and the institution were far-reaching, touching if not enveloping the
lives of many. Even leading universities such as Brown, Harvard, and
Yale were the beneficiaries of the nefarious enterprise. Brown Univer-
sity was founded in part by slavetraders John and Nicolas Brown, while
the founder of Harvard Law School endowed the school with money
from slavetrading in Antigua. As for Yale University, its first profes-
sorship was endowed by one of the most notorious slavetraders of his
day, Philip Livingston, and the school’s first scholarships came from
the profits of slaveholder George Berkeley’s New England plantation.
We could go on.

By 1840, the American South was cultivating some 60 percent of
the world’s cotton, representing more than 50 percent of the value
of all exports from the United States. This means that goods and
capital imported to develop the United States were largely paid for
by slaves. Ports such as Charleston and New Orleans were not only
paid for with cotton grown by slaves but also were literally dug out of
the earth by the enslaved, as was true of a significant proportion of
the country’s colonial and antebellum infrastructure. New York City,
for example, was a major and direct beneficiary of enslaved labor, as
cotton was distributed and exported from there in exchange for fees
and services connected to insurance, interest, commissions, shipping
and handling charges, and so on. Thus, it is not at all surprising that
Wall Street, site and symbol of the world’s leading financial markets,
was originally the site of a slave market. The argument can even be
extended, as 70 percent of the cotton grown in the American South
was used by Britain’s textile industry, and it was by means of textile
exports that Britain financed its empire. The statement, “We built this
country,” commonly heard in African American casual conversation,
is no groundless assertion; indeed, not to take anything away from the
millions of European and Asian immigrants who also labored in the
United States, the statement is more accurate than not. In fact, it leads
to the following query: Just who were the founding fathers, and what
about the founding mothers?

A bloody apocalypse would bring the institution of slavery to
an end in the United States. But neither did that war, nor myriad
emancipatory actions throughout the Americas, simply materialize out

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106 REVERSING SAIL

of thin air. Rather, all such actions developed out of a context of long
and bitter struggle waged by people of African descent, a struggle to
which the next chapter turns.

Suggestions for Further Reading

The literature on slavery in the Americas is massive, examining gen-
eral trends and specific regions and locales; the treatment, cultures,
and societies of the enslaved; the lives of slaveholders; relations with
other societal components, the economies affected, the role of ideolo-
gies; and so on. One could begin with Eric Williams, Capitalism and
Slavery (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina, 1944), for a discussion of
its impact on capitalist development, and contrast it with David Eltis,
The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge U. Press, 2000). David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery
in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U. Press, 1996) and The Prob-
lem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
U. Press, 1975) remain valuable contributions, although they are not
so much concerned with the slave experience as with the implications
of slavery for Western society.

As for Caribbean slavery, Carolyn E. Fick’s The Making of Haiti:
The Saint Domingue Revolution From Below (Knoxville: U. of Tennessee
Press, 1990) is a wonderful introduction to Haitian slavery and is a re-
sponse to the pioneering contribution of C. L. R. James, The Black
Jacobins; Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New
York: Dial Press, 1938). Both of these works inform the next chapter
of this book. Another highly useful compilation is Verene Shepherd
and Hilary McD. Beckles, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A
Student Reader (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle; Oxford: James Currey;
Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner, 2000). Others include Orlando Pat-
terson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development
and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: MacGibbon
and Kee, 1967); Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the
Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: U.
of North Carolina Press, 1972); B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of
the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U.
Press, 1984); James Millette, Society and Politics in Colonial Trinidad
(Curepe, Trinidad: Omega, 1970); Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux
Antilles françaises, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Basse Terre: Société d’histoire

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ENSLAVEMENT 107

de la Guadeloupe, 1974); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place
of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985); Carl Campbell,
Cedulants and Capitulants: The Politics of the Coloured Opposition in the
Slave Society of Trinidad, 1783–1838 (Port of Spain Trinidad: Paria
Pub. Co. 1992); and Bridget Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad,
1783–1962 (Port of Spain, Trinidad: Heinemann, 1981). For the cocoa
industry in Trinidad, see Kathleen E. Phillips Lewis, “British Impe-
rial Policy and Colonial Economic Development: The Cocoa Industry
in Trinidad, 1838–1939” (PhD dissertation, University of Manitoba,
Winnipeg, Canada, 1994).

Works focusing on women and gender in the Caribbean include
Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey, eds., Engen-
dering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective (Kingston,
Jamaica: Ian Randle and London: James Currey, 1995); and Hilary
McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Women in
Barbados (London: Zed, 1989). Darlene Clark Hine and David Barry
Gaspar, eds., in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the
Americas (Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1996), expand the scope of
the discussion.

For Latin America and Brazil, see Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La
población negra de México: estudio ethnohistórico (Mexcio, DF: Fondo
de Cultura Economica, 1972), 2nd ed.; Frederick P. Bowser, The
African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford, CA: Stanford U.
Press, 1974); Colin Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico,
1570–1650 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1976); Leslie B. Rout,
Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day
(Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1976); Franklin W. Knight, Slave
Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century (Madison: U. of Wiscon-
sin Press, 1970) and The African Dimension in Latin American Societies
(New York: Macmillan, 1974); Rolando Mellafe, La introducción de
la esclavitude negra en Chile: tráfico y rutas (Santiago, Chile: Editorial
Universitaria, 1984); Laird W. Bergard, Fe Iglesias Garcı́a, and Marı́a
del Carmen Barcia, The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880 (Cambridge:
Cambridge U. Press, 1995); Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the
Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge U. Press, 1985); Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio
de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1987); and
Katia M. de Queirós Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550–1888,
trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U. Press,
1986).

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For what becomes the United States, there are myriad studies. For
the experience of slaves, John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr.,
From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York:
McGraw Hill, 1994), 7th ed., is a helpful place to start. Among the
more beneficial monographs are John W. Blassingame, The Slave Com-
munity: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford U.
Press, 1972); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries
of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard U.
Press, 1998), or his more accessible Generations of Captivity: A His-
tory of African-American Slaves (Cambridge and London: Belknap of
Harvard U. Press, 2003); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The
World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971); Kenneth
M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South
(New York: Knopf, 1956); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty
Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial
Virginia (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1996); Brenda E.
Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave
South (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1996); Nathan I. Huggins, Black
Odyssey: The Afro-American Ordeal in Slavery (New York: Pantheon,
1977); and David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the
Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso,
1991). A classic remains Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: Amer-
ican Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: U. of North
Carolina Press, 1968).

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