Africans in America
Life in a Slave Society
When captive Africans first set foot in North America, they found
themselves in the midst of a thriving slave society. During
most of the 17th and 18th centuries, slavery was the law in
every one of the 13 colonies, North and South alike, and was
employed by its most prominent citizens, including many of
the founders of the new United States. The importation of slaves
was provided for in the U.S. Constitution, and continued to
take place on a large scale even after it was made illegal
in 1808. The slave system was one of the principal engines
of the new nation's financial independence, and it grew steadily
up to the moment it was abolished by war. In 1790 there were
fewer that 700,000 slaves in the United States; in 1830 there
were more than 2 million; on the eve of the Civil War, nearly
4 million.
On arrival, most of the new captives were moved
into holding pens, separated from their shipmates, and put up
for auction.
They then faced the challenge of surviving in a society that
had declared each of them to be private property and that was
organized to maintain their subservient status. In the eyes of
the law and of most non-African Americans, they had no authority
to make decisions about their own lives and could be bought,
sold, tortured, rewarded, educated, or killed at a slaveholder's
will. All the most crucial things in the lives of the enslaved
African American-from the dignity of their daily labor to the
valor of their resistance, from the comforts of family to the
pursuit of art, music, and worship-all had to be accomplished
in the face of slave society's attempt to deny their humanity.
Enslaved Africans, and the African American
slaves that followed them, could be found in all parts of the
country, and put their hands to virtually every type of labor
in North America. They tended the wheat fields and fruit orchards
of New York and New Jersey; they traveled underground to mine
iron and lead in the Ohio Valley; they piloted fishing boats
and worked the docks in New England; they operated printing presses
in New York City, dairies in Delaware, and managed households
from Florida to Maine. Even in the early 19th century, when the
Southern cotton plantation system was at its peak, enslaved African
Americans still plied their own specialized skills and worked
at a wide variety of tasks and trades.
Africans also brought the skills and trades
of their homeland to North America, and their expertise shaped
the industry and agriculture of the continent. West Africans
with experience navigating the waterways of their homeland helped
open the rivers and canals of the Northwest frontier to boat
traffic, and seasoned African cattle drivers were able to apply
their skills to ox teams and livestock. Many Africans were deeply
familiar with large-scale rice and indigo cultivation, which
were completely unknown to European Americans; without the skills
of Africans and their descendants, the rice fields of South Carolina
and Louisiana might never have existed.
African culture was also brought to bear on
the business of everyday life in African America, however long
the separation from the homeland might have been. The forms of
worship, family organization, music, food, and language developed
by African Americans in slavery can all be seen to bear the signs
of African traditional culture, as can the architecture, art,
and handcrafts they left behind. In some areas, such as South
Carolina and Florida, several different West African languages
were melded over the years to form a new dialect, known as Gullah
or Geechee, that partially survives in some rural areas to this
day, particularly in songs.
The world that enslaved Africans and that African
Americans made for themselves in the New World was rich and complex
and was the site of countless human conflicts, challenges to
oppression, and the necessary accommodations for survival. For
a closer look at life under slavery, read several of the first-person
accounts in Born
in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project.
Free African Americans
However pervasive slavery was, though, in every colony and in
every state there was always a population of African Americans
living in freedom. Some were freed slaves or the descendents
of freed slaves, some had escaped, some had bought their own
freedom, and some lived in territories or states that had abolished
slavery. This population of free African Americans grew steadily
for the duration of the slave era. In 1790, 60,000 free African
Americans lived in the U.S.; in 1830 there were 300,000; and
500,000 by 1860.
Freedom was never a certainty for this group.
They had very few legal protections, even in ostensibly free
states, and were always in danger of being kidnapped or otherwise
returned to slavery. Most lived in urban areas, and despite the
often strong opposition of European American workers, free African
Americans worked in a number of trades and crafts, including
construction, metalworking, and retail trade. The distinguished
astronomer, draftsman, and publisher Benjamin Banneker was a
free African American, as were the educator Daniel Payne and
the novelist William Wells Brown. Many free African Americans
formed fraternal organizations, such as the Brown Fellowship
Society of South Carolina, for advancement and self-protection,
and others worked to found schools and universities for free
men and women.
Perhaps most important of all, free African
Americans were often at the forefront of the great public crusade
of the 19th century: the campaign to abolish the institution
of slavery. |