Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the
everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks--their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of life: language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.
Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the
everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks--their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of life: language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.
Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry
736
Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry
736eBook
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Overview
Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the
everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks--their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of life: language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807838532 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2012 |
| Series: | Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 736 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER ONE
Prelude: Two Infant Slave Societies
ááá By the late seventeenth century, Virginia had a plantation economy in search of a labor force, whereas South Carolina had a labor force in search of a plantation economy. A tobacco economy for decades, Virginia imported slaves on a large scale only when its supply of indentured servants dwindled toward the end of the century. By the time Virginia began to recruit more slaves than servants, a large white population dominated the colony. In fact, before the last decade of the seventeenth century, Virginia hardly qualified as a slave society. Only by the turn of the eighteenth century did slaves come to play a central role in the society's productive activities and form a sizable, though still small, proportion of its population. In 1700, blacks formed just a sixth of the Chesapeake's colonial population. By contrast, South Carolina was the one British colony in North America in which settlement and black slavery went hand in hand. From the outset, slaves were considered essential to Carolina's success. With the Caribbean experience as their yardstick, prospective settlers pointed out in 1666 that "thes Setlements have beene made and upheld by Negroes and without constant supplies of them cannot subsist." Even in the early 1670s, slaves formed between one-fourth and one-third of the new colony's population. A slave society from its inception, South Carolina became viable only after settlers discovered the agricultural staple on which the colony's plantation economy came to rest. By the turn of the century, then, the Chesapeake was emerging as a slave society; the Lowcountry, a slave society from its inception, was just emerging as a productive one.
ááá In spite of this fundamental difference, both infant slave societies shared several characteristics. In both societies, seasoned slaves from the Caribbean predominated among the earliest arrivals; early on, the numbers of black men and women became quite balanced; many slaves spent much of their time clearing land, cultivating provisions, rearing livestock, and working alongside members of other races; race relations were far more fluid than they later became. All of these similarities point toward a high degree of assimilation by the slaves of the early Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Many slaves arrived speaking English, could form families and have children (more readily than white servants, for example), worked at diverse tasks, and fraternized with whites both at work and at play.
ááá Nevertheless, as the seventeenth century drew to a close, differences began to outweigh similarities. The Chesapeake imported quite large numbers of Africans long before the Lowcountry; and, by the 1690s, the region had many more slave men than women, whereas the Lowcountry boasted more equal numbers of men and women than ever before--and for many decades thereafter. If these differences seem to point toward a more Africanized slave culture in the Chesapeake than in the Lowcountry, other dissimilarities incline in a different direction and were ultimately more decisive in shaping the lives of blacks in the two regions. Slaveowners in Virginia put most of their new Africans to planting tobacco on small quarters, usually surrounded by whites, whereas their counterparts in South Carolina, though still experimenting with many agricultural products, grouped their slaves on somewhat larger units with little white intrusion. Furthermore, the Lowcountry always was--and increasingly became--a far more closed slave society than the Chesapeake. Lowcountry slaves had less intimate contact with whites and constructed a more autonomous culture than their Chesapeake counterparts.
The origins of the earliest black immigrants to the Chesapeake and Lowcountry were similar. Most came, not directly from Africa, but from the West Indies. Some might have only recently arrived in the islands from their homeland and a few were probably born in the Caribbean, but most were seasoned slaves--acclimatized to the New World environment and somewhat conversant with the ways of whites. Some came with Spanish or Portuguese names; others with some understanding of the English language, none more so perhaps than John Phillip, "Christened in England" in 1612, who acted as a witness in a Virginia court twelve years later; yet others with kinship ties formed in the New World, as with the family of John, Sr., Elizabeth, and John, Jr., who were among the "first fleet" to arrive in South Carolina. Both Lowcountry and Chesapeake received a somewhat gentle introduction, as it were, to New World slavery. Neither experienced a massive or immediate intrusion of alien Africans.
ááá By the late seventeenth century, however, Africans began to arrive, especially in the Chesapeake. From the mid-1670s to 1700, Virginia and Maryland imported about six thousand slaves direct from Africa, most arriving in the 1690s. While the Chesapeake's slave population was being transformed by a predominantly African influx, the Lowcountry did not undergo the same process for another twenty or so years. In the year 1696 the first known African slaver reached South Carolina; a constant trickle of Africans became commonplace only about the turn of the century.
ááá The structures of these two societies' slave populations, much like their origins, were initially similar. By the 1660s in the Chesapeake and by the 1690s in the Lowcountry, a rough balance had been achieved between slave men and women. Although men outnumbered women among the earliest black immigrants to both regions, women apparently outlived men. Moreover, some of the children born to the earliest immigrants reached majority, also helping to account for the relative balance between men and women. When, in 1686, Elizabeth Read of Virginia drew up her will, she mentioned twenty-two slaves: six men, seven women, five boys, and four girls. Twelve of these slaves had family connections: there were three two-parent families and two mothers with children. An incident involving a free black of Northampton County illuminates a typical Chesapeake slave household at this stage of development. On the eve of the New Year of 1672, William Harman, a free black, paid a visit to the home quarter of John Michael. Harman spent part of the evening and parts of the following two days carousing with Michael's slaves, who numbered at least six adults, three men and three women, only one of whom had been newly imported. The rest had been living with their master for ten years or more.
ááá By the last decade of the seventeenth century, however, Harman would have found it harder to find such a compatible group. By this time, many Chesapeake quarters included at least one newly imported African. In addition, most plantations could no longer boast equal numbers of men and women, because the African newcomers were predominantly men and boys. In fact, evidence from a number of Chesapeake areas during the 1690s indicates that men now outnumbered women by as much as 180 to 100. The impact of this African influx was soon felt. Before 1690, one Virginian planter had boasted of his large native-born slave population; by the first decade of the eighteenth century, another Virginian despairingly found "noe increase [among his blacks] but all loss." In 1699, members of the Virginia House of Burgesses offered an unflattering opinion of these new black arrivals, referring to "the gross barbarity and rudeness of their manners, the variety and strangeness of their languages and the weakness and shallowness of their minds." Prejudice aside, these legislators were responding to the increased flow of African newcomers.
ááá Even as the Africans started arriving, Chesapeake planters put their slaves to more than just growing tobacco. Ever since 1630, when Virginia's tobacco boom ended, the colony's planters had gradually begun to diversify their operations. They farmed more grains, raised more livestock, and planted more orchards. Pastoral farming in particular gained impetus during the last few decades of the seventeenth century when the Chesapeake tobacco industry suffered a prolonged depression. Some planters devoted more attention to livestock than ever before, and large herds of cattle became commonplace. Slaves were most certainly associated with this development. In late-seventeenth-century Charles County, Maryland, there were more cattle in the all-black or mixed-race quarters than in those composed solely of whites. Whether this was coincidental or represented a recognition of black skills in caring for livestock is an open question. What it undoubtedly meant, however, is that some blacks worked closely with stock. In 1697, for instance, at an all-black quarter in Charles County, one old black man and two elderly black women, together with four children, managed a herd of fifty cattle and forty-eight hogs.
ááá The diversified character of the youthful South Carolina economy owed little to the fluctuating fortunes of a dominant staple and more to the harsh realities of a pioneer existence. Many slaves spent most of their lives engaged in basic frontier activities--clearing land, cutting wood, and cultivating provisions. If late-seventeenth-century South Carolina specialized in anything, it was ranch farming--the same activity into which some Chesapeake planters were diversifying. Indeed, some Virginians took advantage of the opportunities presented by the nascent colony. In 1673, Edmund Lister of Northampton County transported some of his slaves out of Virginia into South Carolina. Presumably they had already gained experience, or displayed their native skills, in tending livestock, because Lister sent them on ahead to establish a ranch. The extensiveness of this early cattle ranching economy became apparent when South Carolinians took stock of their defensive capabilities. In 1708, they took comfort in the reliance that could be placed on one thousand trusty "Cattle Hunters."
ááá The multiracial composition of the typical work group suggests yet another similarity between Chesapeake and Lowcountry. In both societies in the late seventeenth century, blacks more often than not were to be found laboring alongside members of other races. The South Carolina estate of John Smyth, who died in 1682, included nine Negroes, four Indians, and three whites. All sixteen undoubtedly worked shoulder to shoulder at least some of the time. The picture of Elias Horry working "many days with a Negro man at the whip saw" was hardly an isolated incident in the late-seventeenth-century Lowcountry. Similarly, in late-seventeenth-century Virginia, white servants and slaves--both Indian and black--often worked side by side. An incident involving William Harman, the free black already encountered, underscores the lengths to which work time cooperation extended. In the summer of 1683, Harman's neighbors came to assist him in his wheat harvest. As was the custom, once the task was accomplished, they relaxed together, smoking pipes of tobacco in Harman's house. Nothing unusual in this pastoral scene, one might surmise, except that those who came to aid their black neighbor were whites, including yeomen of modest means and well-connected planters. Harman was not, of course, a typical black man, but his story proves that blacks and whites of various stations could work together, even cooperate, in the late-seventeenth-century Chesapeake.
ááá In spite of these similarities, the economic situations of these two societies diverged. By the late seventeenth century the Chesapeake possessed a fully fledged plantation economy. No matter what the level of diversification of a late-seventeenth-century Chesapeake estate, therefore, most slaves were destined to spend the bulk of their time tending tobacco. There were some all-black quarters; accordingly, a few slaves acted as foremen, making decisions about the organization of work, the discipline of the laborers, and the like. However, most slaves simply familiarized themselves with the implements and vagaries of tobacco culture. Seventeenth-century South Carolina, by contrast, was a colony in search of a plantation economy. Experiments were certainly under way with rice, which was first exported in significant quantities in the 1690s. In June 1704, one South Carolina planter could bemoan the loss of a Negro slave because the season was "the height of weeding rice." This was still a pioneer economy, however, with no concentration on one agricultural product. Indeed, if South Carolinians were "Graziers" before they were "planters," they were just as much "lumbermen," too. About the turn of the century, a South Carolinian wrote to an English correspondent extolling the virtues of a particular tract of land. If only the proprietor had "twelfe good negroes," the writer asserted, "he could get off it five Hundred pounds worth of tarr yearly." From 1704 to 1706, Daniel Axtell and others operated a tar kiln in which at least four slaves tended the fire, made and carted barrels, and occasionally received cash for their work. On March 30, 1796, for example, Axtell paid five shillings in cash to Nero f
or minding the kiln. South Carolinians might have been thinking in terms of large profits and sizable labor forces from the first, but, as yet, these were not to be derived from any single agricultural staple.
ááá In one final area--the flexibility of early race relations--the Chesapeake and Lowcountry societies also resembled each other. The once-popular view that the earliest black immigrants in the Old Dominion were servants and not chattels is no longer tenable. Rather, from the outset, the experience of the vast majority of blacks in early Virginia was slavery, although some were servants and even more secured their freedom. In fact, the status of Virginia's blacks seems singularly debased from the start, evident in their impersonal and partial identifications in two censuses dating from the 1620s; their high valuations in estate inventories, indicating lifetime service; the practice of other colonies, most notably Bermuda, with which Virginia was in contact; and early legislation, such as a Virginia law of 1640 that excepted only blacks from a provision that masters should arm their households--perhaps the first example of statutory racial discrimination in North American history--or an act of 1643 that included black, but not white, servant women as tithables.
ááá In spite of the blacks' debased status, race relations in early Virginia were more pliable than they would later be, largely because disadvantaged blacks encountered a group of whites--indentured servants--who could claim to be similarly disadvantaged. Fraternization between the two arose from the special circumstances of plantation life in early Virginia. Black slaves tended to live scattered on small units where they were often outnumbered by white servants; more often than not, the two groups spoke the same language; the level of exploitation each group suffered inclined them to see the others as sharing their predicament. In short, the opportunity, the means, and the justification for cooperation between black slaves and white servants were all present. Racial prejudice, moreover, was apparently not strong enough to inhibit these close ties."
ááá Not only did many blacks and whites work alongside one another, but they ate, caroused, smoked, ran away, stole, and made love together. In the summer of 1681, a graphic example of white-black companionship occurred in Henrico County. One Friday in August, Thomas Cocke's "servants" were in their master's orchard cutting down weeds. The gang included at least two white men, who were in their midtwenties and presumably either servants or tenants, and at least three slaves. After work, this mixed complement began drinking; they offered cider to other white visitors, one of whom "dranke cupp for cupp" with the "Negroes." One of the white carousers, Katherine Watkins, the wife of a Quaker, later alleged that John Long, a mulatto belonging to Cocke, had "put his yard into her and ravished" her; but other witnesses testified that she was inebriated and made sexual advances to the slaves. She had, for instance, raised the tail of Dirke's shirt, saying "he would have a good pricke," put her hand on mulatto Jack's codpiece, saying she "loved him for his Fathers sake for his Father was a very handsome young Man," and embraced Mingo "about the Necke," flung him on the bed, "Kissed him and putt her hand into his Codpiece." Thus, a number of white men exonerated their black brethren and blamed a drunken white woman for the alleged sexual indiscretion. If this was sexism, at least it was not racism.
ááá Black and white men also stood shoulder to shoulder in more dramatic ways. In 1640, six servants belonging to Captain William Pierce and "a negro" named Emanuel belonging to Mr. Reginald stole guns, ammunition, and a skiff and sailed down the Elizabeth River in hopes of reaching the Dutch. Thirty years later, a band of white servants who hoped to escape their Eastern Shore plantations and reach New England put their faith in a black pilot as a guide. In 1676, black slaves and white servants joined together in a striking show of resistance. With Nathaniel Bacon dead and his rebellion petering out, one of the last groups to surrender was a mixed band of eighty blacks and twenty white servants. In the 1680s, a slave named Frank and a servant named Peter Wells, who were drinking in Mrs. Vaulx's parlor in York County, joined forces in fighting two yeoman whites who had insulted the slave by saying "they were not company for Negroes" and the servant by referring to his lowly status as an indentured tailor. This willingness to cooperate does not mean that white laborers regarded blacks as their equals; it may connote only a temporary coalition of interests. Nevertheless, the extent to which whites, who were exploited almost as ruthlessly as blacks, could overlook racial differences is notable. Apparently, an approximate social and economic (as opposed to legal) parity sometimes outweighed inchoate racial prejudices.
ááá The flexibility of race relations in the early Chesapeake is illustrated most dramatically in the incidence of interracial sex. At first glance, this might seem an odd proposition, for surely interracial sex is largely synonymous with sexual exploitation--particularly of black women. Abuse of slave women undoubtedly occurred in the early Chesapeake, as in all slaveowning societies. At the same time, the evidence of sexual relations between the races suggests that choice, as much as coercion, was involved--as might well have been the case for Katherine Watkins. For one thing, much recorded miscegenation in early Virginia was, not between white men and black women, but between black men and white women. Many white female servants gave birth to mulatto children. The only realistic conclusion to be drawn from this evidence--and Virginia's ruling establishment was not slow to see it--was that "black men were competing all too successfully for white women." In addition, many black women shared relationships of mutual affection with white servant men, and many of their mulatto children were the offspring of consensual unions. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, one in six of the Burwell family slaves were mulattoes born to slave women. Finally, there were a number of marriages between blacks and whites in the early Chesapeake. In 1671, for example, the Lower Norfolk County Court ordered Francis Stripes to pay tithes for his wife, "shee being a negro." Occasionally, even a male slave was able to engage the affections of a white woman. The most celebrated example concerns Lord Baltimore's Irish maidservant, Nell Butler, who fell in love with Major Boarman's "saltwater" (or African) sl
ave, Charles. When, in 1681, she informed Lord Baltimore of her intention to marry Charles, he attempted to dissuade her by pointing out that she would thereby enslave herself and her children. For his pains, he learned that "she had rather Marry the Negro under them circumstances than to marry his Lordship with his Country." Nell Butler was not alone in the annals of the early Chesapeake in preferring a black partner.
ááá The access slaves had to freedom is a third area that reveals the flexibility of race relations in the early Chesapeake. Some slaves were allowed to earn money; some even bought, sold, and raised cattle; still others used the proceeds to purchase their freedom. This phenomenon may be attributable, in part, to the Latin American background of some of the earliest black immigrants. Perhaps they had absorbed Iberian notions about the relation between slavery and freedom, in particular that freedom was a permissible goal for a slave and self-purchase a legitimate avenue to liberty. Perhaps they persuaded their masters to let them keep livestock and tend tobacco on their own account in order to buy their freedom. Perhaps, however, some of the first masters of slaves were somewhat unsure about how to motivate their new black laborers and assumed that rewards, rather than sheer coercion, might constitute the best tactic. Two blacks who showed an unwillingness to work were given an indenture guaranteeing their freedom in return for four years' labor and seventeen hundred pounds of tobacco. Finally, the confusion that reigned in early Virginia concerning the legal status of the new black immigrants created other paths to liberty: some seventeenth-century Chesapeake slaves even sued for freedom in colonial courts. In 1656, for example, Elizabeth Key, the illegitimate child of a slave woman and a white planter, successfully sued for freedom on the grounds of her paternity, her baptism, and the violation of a contractual agreement to serve a master a period of nine years. The earliest petitions for freedom often stressed baptism as the key rationale; after this loophole was closed in 1667, black petitioners
generally charged white masters with breach of contract to effect a manumission. But whatever their origins and precise numbers (which were certainly small), free blacks in late-seventeenth-century Virginia seem to have formed a larger share of the total black population than at any other time during slavery. In some counties, perhaps a third of the black population was free in the 1660s and 1670s.
ááá And, once free, these blacks interacted with their white neighbors on terms of rough equality. At least through the 1680s, Virginians came close to envisaging free blacks as members or potential members of their community. Philip Mongon, a Northampton County free black and former slave, was certainly a full participant in the boisterous, bawdy, and competitive world that was seventeenth-century Virginia. Mongon arrived in Virginia as a slave in the 1640s. While still a slave, he entertained and harbored an English runaway maidservant. Early in 1651, now a free black, he arranged to marry a white woman, a widow. Perhaps the marriage never took place, for, if it did, his bride soon died, and Mongon took a black woman as his wife. However, his contacts with white women were not over: in 1663, he was charged with adultery and with fathering an illegitimate mulatto child whose mother was an unmarried white woman. Mongon gave security for the maintenance of the child. Like many a lower-class white, Mongon was not always deferential to his erstwhile superiors. Accused of hog stealing in 1660, he was able to prove his innocence, but then elicited a fine for his "presumptious actions" in throwing some hogs' ears on the table where the justices presided. Mongon, like many another Virginian, both borrowed money and extended credit--in his case, primarily with neighbors of another race. He stood up for his rights, as in 1681, when he claimed six hundred pounds of tobacco for dressing the meat for his landlord's funeral dinner. Relations with his neighbors occasionally descended into outright friction. He came to court in 1685 to confess that he "had most notoriously abused and defamed my most loveing friend
s and neighbours John Duparkes and Robert Jarvis." Two years later, Mongon was a member of an interracial fracas. One Sunday, a number of whites, both tenant farmers and yeomen, both husbands and wives, came to Mongon's house. After much "drinking and carousing as well without doors as within," some of the men began to victimize one of the tenant farmers present. Both Mongon and his son as well as a number of his guests joined forces to inflict a severe beating on the hapless man. Surely seventeenth-century Virginia could claim the pugnacious, truculent, and enterprising Philip Mongon as one of its very own.
ááá The most celebrated free black family, the Johnson clan, also met with little apparent discrimination. Their activities and opportunities seem not much different from their fellow white planters' They owned land, paid taxes, and acquired servants and slaves. They went to court, signed legal documents, served as witnesses, and transacted openly with white planters. They not only borrowed money from but extended credit to whites. Although they were excluded from military duties, they might well have voted and served on juries.
ááá The fluidity and unpredictability of race relations in early Virginia gradually hardened into the Anglo-American mold more familiar to later generations. The cooperation between white servants and blacks began to dissolve as the numbers of white servants declined and slaves increased. Moreover, a greater distance between lower-class whites and blacks inevitably arose as more and more black newcomers arrived direct from Africa, unable to speak English and utterly alien in appearance and demeanor. As T. H. Breen has put it, "No white servant in this period, no matter how poor, how bitter or badly treated, could identify with these frightened Africans." There was, of course, more to this distancing than natural antipathies. The Chesapeake ruling establishment did all it could to foster the contempt of whites for blacks. Legislation enacted in the late seventeenth century was designed specifically to this end: no black was to "presume to lift up his hand" against a Christian; no Christian white servant was to be whipped naked, for nakedness was appropriate only for blacks; the property of servants was protected, whereas slaves' proper was confiscated.
ááá Legislation was not the only way in which this separation occurred. At midcentury, Lancaster County court appointed Grasher, a black man, to whip offenders who were almost exclusively white, an action that certainly strained good feelings between blacks and lower-class whites. More than a generation later, an Accomac County planter enlisted his mulatto slave Frank to help beat a white maidservant who was ill and not pulling her weight At about the same time, a white tenant farmer of neighboring Northampton County invented a scheme to take advantage of the worsening climate for free blacks. He told Peter George, manumitted just six years earlier, that "there was a law made that all free Negroes should bee slaves againe." He promised to look after George's property--three head of cattle and hogs--and encouraged him, by providing his cart, to leave the colony. Three years later, George returned to Virginia and successfully brought suit to recover his livestock. More significant than George's small victory was the growing constriction of status and opportunities for free blacks, a transition that prompted whites of modest means to exploit their black neighbors.
ááá In these and other ways, the slaveowning planter class of late-seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century Virginia attempted to drive a wedge between servants and slaves, whites and blacks. They were undeniably successful. As slaves grew more numerous in the work force, claims to English customary rights, such as reasonable amounts of food, adequate clothing, and observance of holidays, could more easily be ignored. Onerous work, harsh punishment, and rudimentary conditions became associated primarily with black laborers. In 1672, complaints were heard in Surry County against the "apparrell commonly worne by negroes" that heightened "theire foolish pride"; henceforth, the county court proclaimed, "Noe Negro shall be allowed to weare any white Linninge, but shall weare blew shirts and shifts." Cheap, coarse clothing was to be worn by blacks. Two decades later, the minister of Christ Church in Middlesex County, with the assistance of others, beat his slave Jack to death, at one point giving him "two or three knocks with the Branding Iron about the head." In a matter-of-fact way that speaks volumes about the violence directed against slaves, he stated that "such Accidents will happen now and then." By the end of the seventeenth century, the indentures of white female servants invariably contained a clause that exempted them from field labor. One woman's indenture stated that "she shall do no manner of slaveish work, that is, she is not to work in the ground at the hoe nor further in the tending of a garden or to help plant." A stigma was doubtless attached to working in the fields alongside or near slaves: some servants even agreed to longer terms to avoid such work. Resistance to authority now came
largely from blacks, not from the mixed groups of earlier years. At the same time, the authorities were not reticent in proclaiming the new dangers, thereby fostering a sense of caste consciousness among all whites.
ááá Nowhere were Virginia's rulers more assiduous in separating the races than in the realm of sex. In 1662, they passed a law doubling the fine for interracial fornicators. Almost thirty years later, Virginia took action to prevent all forms of interracial union by providing that any white man or woman who married a black, whether bond or free, was liable to permanent banishment, and by laying down fines and alternative punishments for any white woman who engaged in illicit relations with blacks. This legislation can be ascribed to practical, moral, and religious concerns; but, in part at least, it sprang from deeper anxieties. In Winthrop Jordan's words, the legislators lashed out at miscegenation "in language dripping with distaste and indignation." A Maryland law of 1664 referred to interracial unions as "shamefull Matches" and spoke of "diverse free-born English women ... disgrac[ing] our nation"; Virginia legislators in 1691 denounced miscegenation and its fruits as "that abominable mixture and spurious issue." This legislation reflected a desire to cordon off the "white, Christian" community--and particularly its female sector. Though never completely successful, the laws gradually had the desired effect, and voluntary interracial sexual relations occurred much less frequently after the turn of the century.
ááá A strenuous attempt to limit the numbers of free blacks began in 1691, when the Virginia assembly forbade masters from freeing slaves unless they were willing to pay for their transportation out of the colony. The law was effective, as Okree, an Essex County slave who had recently secured his freedom, could testify. Okree chose reenslavement rather than exile in order to remain with his slave wife and children. Furthermore, manumissions after 1691 tended to be conditional rather than absolute. Bridget Foxcroft's will, for example, written in 1704, stipulated that her slave, Betty, he set free for a term of thirty years, after which she was to be placed in the custody of one of Bridget's relations to whom Betty was to pay one ear of corn annually "in ... acknowledgement of her subjection." With few additions to their numbers, the proportion of free blacks in the total black population declined. Their numbers had always been small: by the third quarter of the seventeenth century, the celebrated and intensively studied free colored population of Virginia's Eastern Shore totaled no more than fifty individuals. But even some of these pulled up stakes in the middle to late seventeenth century, no doubt because of the growing hostility they faced. Those who remained might cling to freedom, but only as a pariah class. Poverty, landlessness, and dissociation from whites increasingly constituted their lot. Occasional amicable relations between free blacks and whites were perhaps still possible, but such associations had to be conducted more furtively than before. By the turn of the century, Virginia, like all the other mainland plantation colonies, was set to become a dosed slave society. There was to be
no room for an intermediate body of freedpersons.
ááá South Carolina was never at any time an open slave society. And yet seventeenth-century Lowcountry society also had more flexible race relations than its eighteenth-century successor. By comparison with seventeenth-century Virginia, early South Carolinian race relations scarcely seem flexible, but, in the overall history of Lowcountry slave society, the first thirty or so years of slavery constitute something of a privileged era, a time when relations between the races contained an element of spontaneity and unpredictability that they subsequently lost. White servants and black slaves resided on the same plantations in early South Carolina, and where white immigrants might work "comme une esclave," as one Huguenot arrival put it, black newcomers might labor like hired hands. Servants and slaves traded with one another, leading the colony's legislators to pass laws against the practice in 1683, 1687, and again in 1691. In play, as in work, blacks participated rather fully in early Lowcountry life--to the point that their involvement in the trade for strong liquors elicited official displeasure in 1693. In politics, as in leisure, black involvement led one observer to protest that, in the elections for the assembly in 1701, "Strangers, Servants, Aliens, nay Malatoes and Negroes were Polled." In the first decade of the eighteenth century, white Baptists in South Carolina apparently had enough scruples about slavery, if not sympathy for slaves, to ask for advice from their brethren in England concerning a church member who had castrated a runaway. Some thought such an action was "not becoming" a church.
ááá The degree of cooperation between blacks and lower-class whites was far more attenuated in the Lowcountry than in the Chesapeake--and this, of course, applied to interracial sexual relations as in other spheres. The reason was simple: South Carolina never had a substantial class of white indentured servants. There was therefore little basis for the anxieties about the sexual preferences of white servant women that existed in the Chesapeake. Furthermore, South Carolina had fewer nonslaveholding whites than the Chesapeake and therefore less need or occasion to encourage caste consciousness by outlawing interracial marriages. In the Lowcountry, as in the plantation societies of the West Indies, the yawning social chasm between most whites and most blacks bred a self-confidence about the unthinkability of interracial marriage that was absent in the Chesapeake. Whereas interracial marriage did not have to be prohibited, open concubinage between male planters and female slaves could be treated more casually than elsewhere in North America, precisely because it presented less of a danger to fundamental social distinctions. Nevertheless, in spite of these social realities, sexual relations between whites and blacks probably occurred more frequently in the seventeenth than in the eighteenth century. And, although white servant women were few in early South Carolina, enough of them gave birth to mulatto children that the assembly took notice. In 1717, it legislated against such behavior.
ááá Access to freedom, though never widespread in the Lowcountry, was likewise more extensive in the early than in the late colonial period. From the earliest settlement until the conclusion of the Yamassee War in 1718, black men played a significant role in the defense of the colony, acting not only as messengers, drummers, and pioneers but also as armed militiamen. As early as 1680, an observer touted the fighting qualities of the "many trusty negroes" in the colony. Thirty years later, Thomas Nairne added his testimonial, pointing out that "a considerable Number of active, able Negro slaves were enrolled in the militia." In fact, Nairne continued, any slave "who in the time of an Invasion, kills an Enemy" gained his freedom. A number of such manumissions occurred. Freedom was also occasionally available to those who could purchase it and to those who received it for specific purposes. However, manumissions, for whatever reason, were never numerous in the Lowcountry. Encumbered, conditional freedom, which became the rule in turn-of-the-century Virginia, was the norm from the first in South Carolina. In 1702, for example, a slave named Tickey was guaranteed his release in four years' time provided he was not convicted of any insubordination toward his mistress in the interim. Whatever "crude and egalitarian intimacies" arose between the races on the South Carolina frontier, they were always fragile ties, easily rendered asunder.
To compare the infant slave societies of the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry is, in essence, to engage in different ways of measuring time. In fact, three forms of historical time must be kept simultaneously in mind. First, the obvious youthfulness of these two seventeenth-century societies accounts for many of their shared features: both acquired their first slaves from the same places, race relations tended to be flexible in the early years, and whites and blacks often worked alongside one another. To make such a comparison is to employ the time scale common to all social organisms: they are born, develop, and die. What could be more natural, then, but to see the likenesses in these two societies in the youthful stages of their development?
ááá Yet, fundamental differences arose from another facet of historical time--the sheer fact of precedence. Virginia was founded almost three-quarters of a century before South Carolina. From this perspective, to compare Virginia and South Carolina is to compare two societies that, in their historical trajectories, were moving in parallel paths but from different starting points. Virginia acquired slaves, imported Africans, and inserted them into a fully fledged plantation economy much earlier than did South Carolina. This comparison draws on the simplest, most basic form of historical time: the sheer fact of chronological precedence.
ááá Another set of differences comes into view if historical time is conceived in one further way--not which society was founded first, but which was the more developed as a slave society. In this respect, turn-of-the-century Virginia was a late developer while its southern cousin was thoroughly precocious. To make this comparison is to measure these two societies, not by the implacable uniformity or fixed divisions of clock-and-calendar time, but by their internal rhythms. In this comparison, the rank order needs to be reversed, with South Carolina being placed ahead of Virginia, for, in 1700, the Lowcountry contained a much larger proportion of slaves and depended more fundamentally on slave labor than its Chesapeake counterpart.
ááá The significance of this juggling act in temporalities lies in our being able not only to situate these two turn-of-the-century slave societies more clearly but also to see in what directions they were pointing. The similarities of youthfulness were most important in defining these two societies in their mid-to late-seventeenth-century phases. At this point, most blacks spoke English, worked alongside whites, and associated fairly easily with them. The cultural distinctions between the two races were muted. The black population was not generally numerous enough to provide the critical mass for autonomous cultural development. Many of the earliest blacks in both the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry assumed the customs and attitudes of their white neighbors and acquaintances.
ááá Furthermore, the early emergence of an assimilationist culture among the slaves of both societies diminished, much more than might otherwise seem possible, the African influences that accompanied the later infusion of African immigrants. In other words, the recently arrived Africans were probably incorporated into an embryonic cultural system that, though creole, nevertheless approximated the Anglo-American model. Later arrivals faced a double challenge. They had to adjust not only to new surroundings but to the rules and customs already worked out by the earliest migrants. The first colonists acted as a "charter group," determining many of the terms under which the newcomers were incorporated.
ááá But the contrasts that were soon evident between these two youthful societies, arising from the timing of their settlements and the rate of their social developments, point in a different direction by the end of the seventeenth century. In the Lowcountry, an assimilationist slave culture had little chance to put down roots before it was swept aside by a rising tide of African slaves. Although these growing numbers of Africans had to adapt to an embryonic cultural system, they swamped it more than they were incorporated within it. Moreover, from the first, Carolina blacks had more freedom to shape their culture than blacks had elsewhere on the North American mainland. Their numbers were not large in the seventeenth century, but most blacks lived in units made up of more than a few of their fellows; and, in the society as a whole, blacks always formed a significantly large proportion of the population. An important urban center that provided a key gathering place for Lowcountry slaves also emerged quickly. As early as 1698, South Carolina legislators took action against the "great numbers of slaves which do not dwell in Charles Town [who] do on Sundays resort thither to Drink Quarrel Curse Swear and pro[p]hane the Sabboth." The autonomy of the cowpen and the freedom of movement inherent in stock raising also contributed to the latitude early Carolina blacks enjoyed. It is not difficult to envisage these seventeenth-century Lowcountry slaves incorporating significant elements of their African past into an embryonic African American cultural system. This early Africanization gained momentum, of course, when the floodgates opened in the early eighteenth century and African immigrants poured into the
region.
ááá In the Chesapeake, an assimilationist slave culture took much firmer root. To be sure, Africans began to enter the region in large numbers at least by the 1690s. But, in comparison with Lowcountry patterns, they were dispersed more widely, formed a much smaller proportion of the overall population, and for the most part were unable to constitute enclaves within an increasingly black countryside. Of course, they did not abandon their African heritage entirely. The Johnson clan of the Eastern Shore, for example, could hardly have behaved more like typical white settlers. And yet, in 1677, John Johnson, grandson of Anthony Johnson, "the patriarch of Pungoteague Creek," purchased a tract of land that he called "Angola." As T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes put it, "If the Johnsons were merely English colonists with black skins, then why did John, junior, name his small farm `Angola'?" This small shred of evidence, the authors declare, suggests the existence of a deeply rooted, separate culture, a judgment that, although it likely goes too far, at least points to memories of a homeland being kept alive by at least one third-generation free black (and presumably others).
ááá There is also evidence, both for this clan and for other free black families, and by implication for slaves, of blacks' seeking out other blacks. No doubt, the colony's earliest black residents wove webs of friendship and kinship through which they transmitted cultural values. Racial identity was not necessarily sacrificed even where blacks associated widely with whites. As early as 1672, Surry County "Negroes" were said "to mete together upon Satterdayes and Sundayes ... to consult of unlawful p[ro]jects and combinations," Eight years later, Virginians discovered a "Negro Plott," hatched in the Northern Neck, which they again blamed on the relative autonomy of the black community, particularly "the great freedome and Liberty that has beene by many Masters given to their Negro Slaves for Walking on broad on Saterdays and Sundays and permitting them to meete in great Numbers in makeing and holding of Funeralls for Dead Negroes." Clearly, then, late-seventeenth-century Chesapeake blacks participated in their own social and cultural events.
ááá One way that late-seventeenth-century Chesapeake slaves transmitted values was through their naming patterns. Among the eighty-nine Virginia slaves that Lewis Burwell owned between 1692 and 1710, the vast majority became known at least to their master by English names. Nevertheless, one in nine Burwell slaves achieved something more distinctive: at least five men retained African names, two couples chose an African name for one of their children, and another three parents seem to have combined an English name with a West African naming principle--that is, the father's first name became the son's second name. In this way, African memories were not lost altogether.
ááá A further tantalizing glimpse of possible African influences derives from the decorated clay tobacco pipes produced in the early Chesapeake. Although most known pipe forms were either Native American or European in shape, all three major social groups in the region--Indians, Europeans, and Africans--seem to have made and decorated them. Although many of the decorative techniques (repeated patterns of dots or dashes known as pointille and rouletted or white inlay) and motifs (hanging triangles, stars, and diamonds) might have been African in inspiration, they also can be traced in prehistoric Indian and European decorative arts traditions. Perhaps African slaves incorporated abstract designs and representational motifs drawn from their homelands, but most likely the pipes are evidence of a vibrant cultural syncretism in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. A bone handle discovered at Utopia quarter along the James River in Virginia has been dated to the early eighteenth century, when a large community of Africans was transferred to the site. The bone handle is intricately carved in ways reminiscent of the abstract designs found on many Chesapeake pipes.
ááá Overall, syncretism was more pronounced than African influence in the culture of early Chesapeake slaves, whereas the scales tipped in the other direction in the culture of early Lowcountry slaves. The emergence of an assimilationist cultural amalgam structured later developments in both regions, helping to explain the relative paucity (in New World terms) of of African cultural features in eighteenth-century British North American slave life. But the Lowcountry slave world was, from the first, more autonomous than that of the Chesapeake. Carolinian slaves took advantage of this relative measure of latitude to shape a culture more in touch with memories of an African past than Chesapeake slaves could construct. By 1700, the paths on which these two slave societies were embarked had diverged; they moved even farther apart as time passed.
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations and Tables
Abbreviations
Introduction
Prelude. Two Infant Slave Societies
Part I. Contours of the Plantation Experience
1. Two Plantation Worlds
Two Landscapes
Two Plantation Systems
Two Populations
2. Material Life
Housing
Dress
Diet
3. Fieldwork
Seasons of Labor
Organization of Labor
Patterns of Labor
4. Skilled Work
Occupational Structures
The Life Cycle of Skilled Workers
Drivers and Foremen
Artisans
Watermen
Household Slaves
Part II. Encounters between Whites and Blacks
5. Patriarchs, Plain Folk, and Slaves
Masters and Slaves
Plain Folk and Slaves
6. Economic Exchanges between Whites and Blacks
Channels of Communication
Field Hands and Overseers
Slaves in the Middle
Constant Companions
Trade
7. Social Transactions between Whites and Blacks
Violence
Sex
Recreation
Religion
Part III. The Black World
8. African American Societies
Africans
Creoles and Africans
Creoles
Blacks and Indians
Slaves and Free Blacks
9. Family Life
Structures
Stability
Moving and Staying
The Significance of Kin
10. African American Cultures
Words
Play
Soul
Coda. Two Mature Slave Societies
Acknowledgments
Index
Illustrations and Tables
Plates
1. Industry and Idleness
2. Artifacts
3. Residence and Slave Quarters of Mulberry Plantation
4. Extraordinary Appearances in the Heavens, and on Earth
5. Ferry Tract Plantation
6. SW View of the Settlement of Hartford
7. Fairlawn Plantation
8. Frogmore Plantation
9. Plantation of John Middleton
10. Mortar and Pestle
11. Plantation of John Bull
12. Indigo Culture
13. Perry Hall Slave Quarters with Field Hands at Work
14. Residence of George Heinrick Repold, Lexington Street near Fremont Avenue
15. Colono Ware Jug
16. Blacks Working on the James River
17. Portrait of a Man / Virginia Luxuries
18. Alic, a Fairthful and Humerous Old Servant
19. An Overseer Doing His Duty
20. The Old Plantation
21. Drum and Cane
22. Preparations for the Enjoyment of a Fine Sunday among the Blacks, Norfolk
23. A South View of Julianton Plantation, the Property of Francis Levett, Esqr.
Maps
1. The Coastal Origins of African Slaves
2. The Distribution of Black Slaves in South Carolina, 1720-1790
3. The Distribution of Black Slaves in Virginia, 1750-1790
Figures
1. Adult Sex Ratios among Slaves in the Chesapeake and South Carolina, 1705-1775
2.Female-Child Ratios among Slaves in the Chesapeake and South Carolina, 1705-1775
3. Population Pyramids of Slaves in the Chesapeake, 1709-1791
4. Population Pyramids of Slaves in the Lowcountry, 1758-1780
5. The Months When Slaves Ran Away, 1732-1781
6. Labor to Cultivate and Process Rice, circa 1800
7. Age Profile of Africans and Creoles among Adult Male Slaves on Elias Ball's Comingtee Plantation, 1778
8. Age Profile of Africans and Creoles among Slaves Belonging to Colonel Stapleton on Saint Helena Island, 1810
9. Age Profile of Runaways in the Chesapeake and Lowcountry, 1732-1787
Tables
1. Plantation Size in South Carolina, 1720-1779
2. Plantation Size in Virginia, 1720-1779
3. Landholding in South Carolina Parishes, 1745-1785
4. Landholding in Virginia Counties, 1768-1778
5. Primary Production of Virginia and South Carolina Plantations, 1730-1776
6. Primary Equipment on Virginia and South Carolina Plantations, 1730-1776
7. Livestock on Virginia and South Carolina Plantations, 1730-1776
8. Secondary and Tertiary Equipment on Virginia and South Carolina Plantations, 1730-1776
9. African Immigration to Virginia and South Carolina, 1700-1790
10. Africans in the Virginia and South Carolina Slave Populations, 1700-1800
11. Coastal Origins of Virginia and South Carolina Africans, 1710s-1770s
12. Origins of South Carolina's African Immigrants and African Runaways, 1730-1782
13. Passage Time from England via Africa to British America, 1720-1798
14. Age and Sex Composition of Slavers to the Chesapeake and Lowcountry, 1710-1774
15. Children among African Immigrants to South Carolina, 1735-1774, and to the West Indies, 1791-1798
16. Months of Arrival of Virginia and South Carolina Slave Vessels, 1700-1744
17. Time between Arrival of Slave Vessel and Sale Dates, Virginia and South Carolina, 1730-1774
18. The Distribution of Africans among Purchasers in the Chesapeake and Lowcountry, 1689-1786
19. Black Population Growth in Virginia, 1700-1800
20. Black Population Growth in South Carolina, 1700-1800
21. Age at First Conception of Slave Women in the Chesapeake and Lowcountry, 1700s-1790s
22. Skilled Slaves among Inventoried South Carolina Adults, 1730-1799
23. Skilled Workers among South Carolina Runaway Slaves, 1730-1799
24. Occupations of Adult Male Slaves in the Rural Lowcountry, 1730s-1810
25. Occupations of Adult Male Slaves in the Chesapeake, 1733-1809s
26. Age of Runaway Skilled Workers, 1732-1779
27. Age of Skilled Male Slaves, 1730-1809
28. Occupations of Female Slaves on Large Estates in the Lowcountry and Chesapeake, 1757-1809
29. South Carolina Slave Families, 1730-1799
30. Household Structures among Slaves in the Chesapeake, 1733-1775
31. Houshold Structures among Slaves in South Carolina, 1739-1797
What People are Saying About This
[Morgan] demonstrates how the slaves created a distinctive culture in the teeth of oppression. A must read.
A master of the historian's craft, Morgan demonstrates truly breathtaking range and originality. His command of contemporary sources and the scholarly literature is second to none. Future studies of the origins of slavery in North America will necessarily take Slave Counterpoint as their point of departure.—Journal of Southwest Georgia History
A genuine glimpse of what it felt like to be a slave and an admiration for slaves' determination to shape their own destinies in the face of overwhelming barriers to autonomy.—Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review
A successful and enduring analysis. . . . Vital to a balanced understanding of slave culture.—Southern Historian
Scholars who have long been tantalized by Philip Morgan's many essays on slavery can now see the bigger picture to which these pieces belong. His book is a painstaking comparative study, rich in detail and deft in its use of the secondary literature.—Joyce E. Chaplin, Vanderbilt University
An exhaustive and authoritative synthesis of slavery in the Chesapeake (Virginia and Maryland) and the South Carolina Lowcountry, Slave Counterpoint is also a fine example of comparative history.—Richmond Times-Dispatch
Provides the fullest and closest examination of slave life in America since Eugene D. Genovese's monumental work Roll, Jordan, Roll.—Journal of Southern History
Philip Morgan's Slave Counterpoint should prove a landmark in the study of southern slavery. Supported by an impressive command of the sources, primary and secondary, Morgan's judicious, sometimes bold interpretations inspire confidence. And, as a bonus, this well-written book is refreshingly free of jargon and cant.—Eugene D. Genovese
The first comprehensive work to synthesize the wealth of documentary sources with the range of recent studies by archaeologists, architectural historians, anthropologists, and folklorists of African American culture in the Chesapeake and Lowcountry.—Winterthur Portfolio
A massive reconstruction of life in the 18th-century American South. . . . [Morgan] sets out to provide 'a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and of the ability of slaves to reshape their lives.' He has succeeded splendidly, and in the process reminded modern readers that the world of the 18th century is not so distant as they sometimes imagine.—New York Times Book Review
A bold and comprehensive examination of colonial slavery, and a welcome addition to scholarship.—Left History
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Far and away the fullest and most comprehensive analysis of the two principal colonial American slave societies, it is breathtaking in its scope.