Assignment

The First

were therefore “uncivilized.”

3 Black People in a White People’s Country
GARY B. NASH

In 1619, a year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, a Dutch ship deposited “twenty
Negars” on the whaif efJamestown Colony, in what became Virginia. These were the first .!lfricans to
enter colonial America, but their exact status is unknown. Like Africans subsequently imported until
1660, they were probably indentured servants whose period of servitude was temporary. After 1660,

however, most Africans who came to America were slaves, purchased through a heinous business oper­

ation , the international slave trade. By the eighteenth century, every English colony from Carolina to

Massachusetts had enacted “slave codes,” bodies of law that stripped black people of all rights and re­

duced them to pieces of property, or “chattel ,” with their children inheriting that status.

The troubling question is why the Africans were enslaved and white indentures were not. In the

selection that follows, Gary B. Nash , one of the leading experts on colonial America , argues that the

answer lies in a combination of racial prejudice and labor needs in early America , particularly in the

southern colonies. When faced with the problem of cultivating labor-intensive crops, Nash writes, Eng­

lish settlers “turned to the international slave trade to fill their labor needs. ” That white colonists

viewed Africans as uncivilized barbarians only made it easier “to fasten chains upon them. “The Af
ricans, of course, were no more barbaric than were the Native Americans. As Nash observes, the Afri­

cans had been stolen from richly complex and highly developed cultures. The English settlers, of
course, knew nothing about such cultures beyond that they were neither white nor Christian and

As more and more Africans were imported to the English colonies, racial fears intensified in direct

proportion to the number of blacks in a given area. Such fears were worse in the southern colonies,

33

American Revolution.

of colonial New York City or Baltimore. Sick, starving, and frightened, they had to firid some way to
endure the unendurable in a strange new land. That such Africans salvaged much of their heritage,

traniforming it into a distinctly African American heritage, was a tribute to their power “to keep on

3 BLACK PEOPLE IN A WHITE PEOPLE’S COUNTRY

where the extensive cultivation of labor-intensive crops necessitated the purchase of large numbers of
slaves. In the northern colonies, as Nash point.s out, “slavery existed on a more occasional basis” be­
cause labor-intensive crops were not so widely grown there and far fewer Africans were imported. This
is a crudal point. It helps explain why slavery later disappeared in the North, during and after the

In the colonial period, meanwhile, every colony in the North and South alike enacted laws that

severely regulated black people and made them slaves for life. Thus from the very outset, slavery
served a twofold purpose: it was both a labor system and a means of racial control in a white people’s

country. This “mass enslavement of Africans,” Nash points out, only reinforced racial prejudice in a

vicious cycle. “Once institutionalized, slavery cast Africans into such lowly roles that the initial bias

against them could only be confirmed and vastly strengthened.”

To provide a faller understanding of slavery in North America, Nash discusses the origins ofAfrican
slavery itself and offers a graphic and painful portrait of the Atlantic slave trade, which involved “the

largest forced migration in history” and was thus “one of the most important phenomena in the history
of the modern world.” Greed and pro.fit kept the trade booming for four hundred years, with European

entrepreneurs reaping fortunes at the expense of millions of human beings. The captain and crew of a

slave ship, whether British, Dutch, Portuguese, or colonial American, had to be monstrously depraved

and utterly inured to human suffering in order to carry out this brutal business. One such slave trader,

Englishman John Newton, later repented, became a minister and an abolitionist, and wrote a hymn

about his salvation, “How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds,” popularly known as “Amazing Grace.”
Grace was indeed amazing, he said, to have saved “a wretch” like him. In an inspiring and engrossing

2006film, Amazing Grace, Albert Finney plays the redemptive Newton.

The horrors of the middle passage, warns one historian, were “so revolting that a writer of the

present day hesitates to give such details to his readers.” On one slaver, said an eyewitness, “400

wretched beings” were chained and “crammed into a hold 12 yards in length . . . and only 3 1I2 feet

in height.” Because of the hold’s “suffocating heat” and stench, the Africans panicked and in their

torment tried in vain to escape. The next morning, the crew lifted “.fifiyjour crushed and mangled

corpses up from the slave deck. “To keep the survivors in line, the crew beat and murdered other Afa­

cans. Such atrocities were commonplace on slave ships, and the captains could not have cared less, be­

cause “insurance companies bore part of the loss, and pro.fits were so high that heavy risks were

cheerfully assumed.”

Driven to madness in the rat-filled, claustrophobic bowels of the slave ships, many Africans maimed

themselves or committed suicide. Others starved to death or died of some white man’s disease. And

the women, too many of them, were humiliated in unspeakable ways by their white captors. lf the
Africans somehow survived the Atlantic passage, they found themselves dumped irito some .fly­

infested slave pen in a port of the New World. Jtfk can imagine such a group iri chains on the wharves

keeping on.”

.,

‘

1
i
,

th century the Negro’s life in Amer-Thus, writes historian Carl Degler, “began in the seventeen
h ·

twentieth century.” As Nash observes the emergence ef slavery in colonial Amer ca was one
ef the

great paradoxes in American histo the building of what some thought as to.
be a utopia in the

wilderness upon the backs of black men and women wrenched from their African homeland and
forced into a system of abje t slavery.,, That paradox, as we shall see, would pe sist th ough the
American Revolution, the early Republic, and well into the nineteenth cen

tury, causing sectional ten­

its history.

ROYAL AFRICAN COMPANY The British crown chartered

34 THE FIRST CENTURY

”
· · ·

”
h still besets us at the close of the. ” i

·tea. With tt commenced a moral problem for all Americans w IC

sions between the North and the South thatfinally plunged America into the most destructive war in

GLOSSARY

BARRACOONS Fortified enclosures where captured slaves

waited until doctors were ready to inspect them and deem

them worthy to survive the horrendous middle passage.

Slave traders would often brand their captives on the chest

with a hot iron in these holding areas.

BLACK CODES Colonial laws that legalized and enforced

slavery, the black codes deprived Africans of all rights and

reduced them to the status of property. They eventually re­

sulted in hereditary lifetime service that passed from parent

to child; thus, in Nash’s words, “slavery had been extended

to the womb.”

BLACK GOLD The European expression for slaves, these

captives were in such high demand that they encouraged

warfare between neighboring African tribes. African kings

would trade their captives for iron bars, firearms, cotton

goods, gunpowder, and other desirable items.

COFFLES Slaves marched in these trains for hundreds of

INDENTURED SERVANT These individuals sig ned con­

tracts and served a fixed number of years in return for their

passage to America, food, and shelter. During the colonial
era, nearly 300,000 indentured servants vo luntarily came to

. the British colonies, amounting to almost two-thirds of all
European immigrants. Unlike slaves, they had legal rights in

colonial courts, and some, upon gaining their freedom, be­
came substantial landowners.

MACKRONS These were Africans whom slave traders con­

sidered too old or infirm to survive the middle passage.

They were left to die on the coast of West Africa, hundreds
of m iles from their tribal families.

MIDDLE PASSAGE This trip across the Atlantic from the

coast of Africa to the New World could take up to three

months. Captives were so “tightly packed” in cargo holds

that they could not sit upright. Mortality rates avera ged 16
percent from malnourishment and disease.

this joint stock company to have the exclusive rig ht to carry
miles from their point of capture to the sea. Leather thongs

bound them by the neck. Many died of thirst, hunger, dis­

ease, or pure exhaustion.

DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY Active in the international

slave trade, the Dutch West India Company brought Afri­

cans into New York and New Jersey. North of the Chesa­

peake Bay, these were the only colonies to have a sizable

slave labor population.

GON ALVEZ, ANT AM In 1440, this Portuguese sea captain

was the first European to make landfall in Africa, and a year

later he returned home with blacks whom he had kid­

slaves into the English colonies. At its prime in the 1680s,
it

l ater,centurybrought in about 5,000 Africans annually. A
monopoly,long after the Royal African Company lost its
avera geofGreat Britain exported into the colonies a yearly

74,000 slaves.

e
SEQUEIRA, RUY DO This Portuguese captai n bega

n th

. us lyprevioEurope an slave trade in 1472. Nash states that .
the African trade in gold, ivory, and slaves across th

e conti-

pur-.nent represented a “reciprocal relationsh”1p betwe
en

,,

chasers and sellers.
napped and enslaved.

35

T
he African slave trade, which began in the
late fifteenth ce tury and continued for the
next 400 years, 1s one of the most important

phenomena in the history of the modern world. In­
volving the largest forced migration in history, the
slave trade and slavery were crucially important in
building the colonial empires of Europeat1 nations
and in generating the wealth that later produced the
Industrial Revolution. But often overlooked in the at­
tention given to the economic importance of the
slave trade and slavery is the cultural diffusion that
took place when ten million Africans were brought
to the Western Hemisphere. Six out of every seven
persons who crossed the Atlantic to take up life in
the New World in the 300 years before the American
Revolution were African slaves. As a result, in most
parts of the colonized terr itories slavery “defined the
context within which transfer red European traditions
would grow and change.” As slaves, Africans were Euro­

3 BLACK PEOPLE IN A WHITE PEOPLE’S COUNTRY

Brazil and about 30,000 cultivated sugar in English
Barbados; but in Virginia only 2,000 worked in the
tobacco fields. Cultural interaction of Europeans and
Africans did not begin in North America on a large
scale until more than a century after it had begun in
the southerly parts of the hemisphere. Much that oc­
curred as the two cultures met in the Iberian colonies
was later repeated in the Anglo-African inteFaction;
and yet the patterns of acculturation were markedly
different in North and South America in the seven­
teenth and eighteenth centuries.

THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

peanized; but at the same time they Africanized the
culture of Europeans in the Americas. This was an in­
evitable part of the convergence of these two broad

groups of people, who met each other an ocean away
from their o riginal homelands. In addition, the slave

trade created the lines of communication for the

movement of crops, agricultural techniques, diseases,

and medical knowledge between Africa, Europe, and

the Americas.

Just as they were late in colonizing the New World,

the English lagged far behind their Spanish and Por­

tuguese competitors in making contact with the west

coast of Africa, in entering the Atlantic slave trade, and

in establishing African slaves as the backbone of the

labor force in their overseas plantations. And among

the English colonists in the New World, those on the

mainland of North America were a half centur y or

more behind those in the Caribbean in converting

.their plantation economies to slave labor. By 1 670, for

example, some 200, 000 slaves labored in Portuguese

Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North
America, 3e, © 1992. Reprinted by permission of Prentice-Hall,
Englewood Cliffi, New Jersey.

A half century before Columbus crossed the Atlantic,
a Portuguese sea captain, Antam Gonr;alvez, made the
first European landing on the west African coast south

of the Sahara. W hat he might have seen, had he been
able to travel the length and breadth of Africa, was a

continent of extraordinary variation in geography and

culture. Little he might have seen would have caused

him to believe that African peoples were naturally in­

ferior or that they had failed to develop over time as

had the peoples of Europe. This notion of”backward­

ness” and cultural impoverishment was the myth per­

petuated after the slave trade had transported millions

of Africans to the Western Hemisphere. It was a myth

which served to justify the cruelties of the slave trade

and to assuage the guilt of Europeans involved in the

largest forced dislocation of people in history.

The peoples of Africa may have numbered more

than 50 million in the late fifteenth century when
Europeans began making extensive contact with the

continent. They lived in widely varied ecological

zones-in vast deserts, in grasslands, and in great for­

ests and woodlands. As in Europe, most people

farmed the land and struggled to subdue the forces

of nature in order to sustain life. That the African
population had increased so rapidly in the 2,000 years

before European arrival suggests the sophistication of
the African agr icultural methods. Part of this skill in
farming derived from skill in iron production, which

Of course, cultural development in Africa, as else­

hili societies facing the Indian Ocean after trading

36 T H E F I R S T C E N T U R Y

had begun in present-day Nigeria about 500 B.C. It
was this ability to fashion iron implements that trig­

gered the new farming techniques necessary to sus­

tain larger populations. With large populations carne

greater specialization of tasks and thus additional

technical improvements. Small groups of related fam­

ilies made contact with other kinship groups and
over time evolved into larger and more complicated

societies. The pattern was similar to what had oc­

curred in other parts of the world-in the Americas,

Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere-when the

“agricultural revolution” occurred.

Recent studies of “pre-contact” African history

have showed that the “culture gap” between Euro­

where in the world, proceeded at varying rates. Eco­

logical conditions had a large effect on this. W here

good soil, adequate rainfall, and abundance of miner­

als were present, as in coastalWest Africa, population

growth and cultural elaboration were relatively rapid.

Where inhospitable desert or nearly impenetrable

forest held forth, social sy stems remained small and

changed at a crawl. Contact with other cultures also

brought rapid change, whereas isolation impeded

cultural change. The Kingdom of Ghana bloomed in

western Sudan partly because of the trading contacts

with Arabs who had conquered the area in the ninth

century. Cultural change began to accelerate in Swa­
pean and Afr ican societies when the two peoples met

was not as large as previously imagined. By the time

Europeans reached the coast ofWest Africa a number

of extraordinary empires had been forged in the area.

The first, apparently, was the Kingdom of Ghana,

which embraced the irrunense territory between the

Sahara Desert and the Gulf of Guinea and from the

Niger River to the Atlantic Ocean between the fifth

and tenth centuries. Extensive urban settlement, ad­

vanced architecture, elaborate art, and a highly com­

plex political organization evolved during this time.

From the eighth to the sixteenth centuries, it was the
western Sudan that supplied most of the gold for

the Western world. Invasion from the north by the

Moors weakened the Kingdom of Ghana, which in

time gave way to the Empire of Mali. At the center

of the Mali Empire was the city of Timbuktu, noted

for its extensive wealth and its Islamic university

w here a faculty as distinguished as any in Europe was
gathered.

Lesser kingdoms such as the kingdoms of Kongo,

Zimbabwe, and Benin had also been in the process of

growth and cultural change for centuries before Eu­

ropeans reached Africa. T heir inhabitants were skilled

in metal working, weaving, ceramics, architecture,

and aesthetic expression. Many of their towns rivaled

European cities in size. Many conununities of West

Africa had highly complex religious r ites, well­

.organized regional trade, codes of law, and complex

political organization.

contacts were initiated with the Eastern world in the

ninth century. Thus, as a leading African historian has

put it, “the cultural history of Afr ica is . . . one of
greatly unequal development among peoples who,

for definable reasons such as these, entered recogniz­

ably similar stages of institutional change at different

times.”

The slave trade seems to have begun officially in
1472 when a Portuguese captain, Ruy do Sequeira,

reached the coast of Benin and was conducted to the

king’s court, where he received royal permission to
trade for gold, ivory, and slaves. So far as the Africans
were concerned, the trade represented no stribngly
new economic activity since they had long been in­

volved in regional and long-distance trade ac

their continent. This was simply the opening of con­

tacts with a new and more distant commercial part­

ner. This is important to note because often it has

been maintained that European powers raided the

African coasts for slaves, marching into the interior
and kidnapping hundreds of thousands of helpless

and hapless victims. In actuality, the early slave trade
involved a reciprocal relationship between European

purchasers and African sellers, with the Portuguese

monopolizing trade along the coastlands of tropical

Africa for the first century after contact was made.

Trading itself was confined to coastal strongholds

w here slaves, most of them captured in the interior

by other Africans, were sold on terms set by the

37

mates place the numbers who reached the shores of

although many million more lost their lives while
being marched from the interior to the coastal trading

3 BL A CK P E O P L E I N A W H I T E P E O P L E ‘S C O U N T R Y

African sellers. In return for gold, ivory, and slaves,
African slave merchants received European guns, bars
of iron and copper, brass pots and tankards, beads,
rum and textiles. They occupied an economic role
not unlike that of the Iroquois middlemen in the fur
trade with Europeans.

Slavery was not a new social phenomenon for ei­
ther Europeans or Africans. For centuries African soci­
eties had been involved in an overland slave trade that

transported black slaves from West Africa across the Sa­
hara Desert to Roman Europe and the Middle East.
But this was an occasional rather than a systematic
trade, and it was designed to provide the trading na­
tions of the Mediterranean with soldiers, household
servants, and artisans rather than mass agr icultural
labor. W ithin Africa itself, a variety of unfree statuses

had also existed for centuries, but they involved per­

sonal service, often for a limited period . . . rather

than lifelong, degraded, agricultural labor. Slavery of

a similar sort had long existed in Europe, mostly as
the result of Chr istians enslaving Moslems and Mos­
lems enslaving Christians during centuries of reli­
gious wars. One became a slave by being an “outsider”
or an “infidel,” by being captured in war, by volun­

tarily selling oneself into slavery to obtain money for
one’s family, or by committing certain heinous

crimes. The rights of slaves were restricted and their

opportunities for upward movement were severely

circumscribed, but they were regarded nevertheless as

members of society, enjoy ing protection under the

law and entitled to certain r ights, including educa­

tion, marriage, and parenthood. Most important, the

status of a slave was not irrevocable and was not au­

tomatically passed on to his or her children.
Thus we find that slavery flourished in ancient

Greece and Rome, in the Aztec and Inca empires, in

African societies, in early modern Russia and eastern

Europe, in the Middle East, and in the Mediterranean

world. It had gradually died out in Western Europe
by the fourteenth century, although the status of serf
was not too different in social reality from that of the
slave. It is important to note that in all these regions

W hen the African slave trade began in the second

half of the fifteenth century, it served to fill labor
shortages in the economies of its European initiators
and their commercial partners. Between 1450 and
1505 Portugal brought about 40,000 African slaves to
Europe and the Atlantic islands-the Madeiras and
Canaries. But the need for slave labor lessened in Eu­

rope as European populations themselves began to

grow beginning late in the fifteenth century. It is pos­
sible, therefore, that were it not for the colonization

of the New World the early slave trade might have

ceased after a century or more and be remembered

simply as a short-lived incident stemming from early
European contacts with Africa.

W ith the discovery of the New World by Euro­

peans the course of history changed momentously.

Once Europeans found the gold and silver mines of

Mexico and Peru, and later, when they discovered a

new form of gold in the production of sugar, coffee,

and tobacco, their demand for human labor grew as­

tonishingly. At first Indians seemed to be the obvious

source of labor, and in some areas Spaniards and Por­
tuguese were able to coerce native populations into

agricultural and mining labor. But European diseases

ravaged native populations, and often it was found

that Indians, far more at home in their environment

than white colonizers, were difficult to subjugate. In­
dentured w hite labor from the mother country was

another way of meeting the demand for labor, but

this source, it soon became apparent, was far too lim­

ited. It was to Africa that colonizing Europeans ulti­

mately resorted. Formerly a new source of trade, the

continent now became transformed in the European

view into the repository of vast supplies of human

labor-“black gold.”
From the late fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth cen­

turies, almost four hundred years, Europeans trans­
ported Africans out of their ancestral homelands to fill
the labor needs in their colonies of North and South
America and the Caribbean. The most recent esti­

slavery and serfdom had nothing to do with racial

characteristics.

the New World at about ten to eleven million people,

by the vast new demand for a New World labor sup­
ply and by a reciprocally higher demand in Africa for
European trade goods, especially bar iron and textiles
changed the problem of obtaining slaves. Criminal
and “outsiders” in sufficient number to satisfy the
growing European demand in the seventeenth cen­
tury could not be found. Therefore African kings re­

kidnapping and organized violence in Africa became

Americas rose sharply in the second half of the sev­

enteenth century, European competition for trading

r ights on the West African coast grew intense. By the

end of the century monopolies for supplying Euro­

pean plantations in the New World with their ann
ual

quotas of slaves became a major issue of Euro
pe n

diplomacy. The Dutch were the primary victor
s m

the battle for the West African slave coast. Hence,
for

most of the century a major ity of slaves who
were

fed into the expanding New World markets fo
und

themselves crossing the Atlantic in Dutch ships. ‘

38 T H E F I R S T C E N T U R Y

English laborer took sugar in her tea by 1750 it wasforts or during the middle passage across the Atlantic.
said … . Even before the English arrived on the Chesapeake in

The regularization of the slave trade brought about1607 several hundred thousand slaves had been trans­
ported to the Car ibbean and South American colo­
nies of Spain and Portugal. Befure the slave trade was
outlawed in the nineteenth century far more Africans
than Europeans had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and
ta.ken up life in the New World. Black slaves, as one
eighteenth-century Englishman put it, became “the
strength and the sinews of this western world.”

sorted to warfare against their neighbors as a way ofOnce established on a large scale, the Atlantic slave
obtaining “black gold” with whichtrade dramatically altered the pattern of slave recruit­ to trade. Euro­

ment in Africa. For about a century after Gon alvez pean guns abetted the process. Thus, the spread of
brought back the first kidnapped Africans to Portugal
in 1441, the slave trade was relatively slight. The slaves
whom other Africans sold to Europeans were drawn
from a small minority of the population and for the
most part were individuals captured in occasional war
or whose criminal acts had cost them their r ights of
citizenship. For Europeans the African slave trade pro­
vided for modest labor -needs, just as the Black Sea
slave trade had done before it was shut off by the fall
of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. Even in the
New World plantations, slaves were not in great de­

mand for many decades after “discovery.”

More than any thing else it was sugar that trans­

formed the African slave trade. Produced in the

Mediterranean world since the eighth century, sugar

was for centuries a costly item confined to sweeten­

ing the diet of the r ich. By the mid-1400s its popu­

larity was growing and the center of production had

shifted to the Portuguese Madeira Islands, off the

northwest coast of Africa. Here for the first time an

a part of maintaining commercial relations with Eu­
ropean powers.

In the forcible recruitment of slaves, adult males

were consistently preferred over women and children.
P rimarily this represented the preference of New
World plantation owners for male field laborers. But

it also rdlected the decision of vanquished African

villagers to yield up more men than women. to raid­

ing parties because women were the chief agricultur­
alists in their society and, in matrilineal and matrilocal

kinship sy stems, were too valuable to be spared.
For the Europeans the slave.trade itself became an

immensely profitable enterprise. In the several centu­
ries of intensive slave trading that followed the estab­

lishment of New World sugar plantations, European

nations warred constantly for trading advantages on

the West African coast. The coastal forts, the focal

points of the trade, became key strategic targets in the

wars of empire. . . . As the demand for slaves in the

expanding European nation established an overseas

plantation society based on slave labor. From the

Madeiras the cultivation of sugar spread to Portu­

guese Brazil in the late sixteenth century and then to

the tiny specks of land dotting the Caribbean in the

first half of the seventeenth century. By this time Eu­

ropeans were developing an almost insatiable taste

for sweetness. Sugar-regarded by nutritionists today

as a “drug food”-became one of the first luxuries

that was transformed into a necessary item in the

diets of the masses of Europe.The w ife of the poorest

3 39BL A C K P E 0 P L E I N A W H I T E p E 0 P L E ‘ S C 0 U N T Fl Y

Once they arrived in the New i¥orld, slave5 were auctioned to the highest bidder. Families were often divided, and

slaves were stripp ed of their clothes to show how little whipping they required. Having been poked and prodded,

one captive compared the horrid experience to that of a horse being examined by a jockey.

Not until the last third of the seventeenth cen­ the Royal African Company’s monopoly was bro­
tury were the English of any importance in the ken due to the pressure on Parliament by individual

slave trade. Major English attempts to break into merchants who demanded their rights as English­
the profitable trade began only in 1663, when men to participate in the lucrative …