First Generations, page 13
In 1623 Mary Johnson was one of only twenty-three Africans in Virginia. By 1650, she was one of perhaps three hundred. Together, free blacks like the Johnson family and servants “for life” like their fieldworker John Casor made up only 3 percent of the colony’s growing population. Most had made the transatlantic voyage from Africa to the West Indies and only later arrived on the North American mainland. In the decade of Mary Johnson’s death, the African population in the Chesapeake began to rise sharply, reaching 3,000 in Virginia by 1680 and continuing to grow until, by 1700, the colony had almost 6,000 black settlers. African population growth in Maryland was no less dramatic: in 1658 there were only 100 blacks in four Maryland counties, but by 1710 the number had risen to over 3,500, or almost one-quarter of the local population. Nearly 8,000 of Maryland’s 43,000 colonists that year were black. Yet the mass involuntary migration of Africans had only begun. Between 1700 and 1740, 54,000 blacks reached the Chesapeake, the overwhelming majority imported directly to these colonies from Biafra and Angola rather than coming by way of the West Indies. Immigrants from the west, or “windward,” coast of Africa poured into South Carolina as well. By the time of the American Revolution, over 100,000 Africans had been brought to the mainland colonies. For the overwhelming majority, their destination was the plantation fields of the upper and lower South.
The relentless demand for cheap agricultural labor spurred this great forced migration. As the English economy improved in the 1680s and 1690s, the steady supply of desperate young men and women willing to enter indentured servitude in the colonies dwindled. The advantage of African servants over these English workers was already evident, for by this time, white servants had effectively exerted their “customary right” as English citizens to control working conditions. Planters were forced to abide by customs that prevented labor after sunset, alloted five hours’ rest in the heat of the day during the summer months, and forbade work on Saturday, Sunday, and many religious holidays. On the other hand, local courts would not acknowledge or uphold any claims to such “customary rights” by African servants. And as life expectancy increased for black as well as for white colonists of the Chesapeake, the initially larger investment in an African laborer began to make good economic sense. Yet the supply of “black gold”—as Chesapeake planters called these slaves—was limited until the monopoly of England’s Royal African Trading Society was broken by slaving entrepreneurs. By the turn of the century, the English African slave trade offered a steady, seemingly endless supply of reasonably priced, highly exploitable labor—and mainland colonists leaped to take advantage of it.
Slavery—as a permanent and inheritable condition—developed unevenly across the colonies and within individual colonies. In the Chesapeake, the laws that sharply distinguished black bound labor from white were accompanied by laws that limited the economic and social opportunity of free blacks. Together, these laws established race as a primary social boundary. The process began before the greatest influx of Africans to the region. The 1672 law forbidding free black planters to purchase the labor of white servants squeezed those planters out of the competitive tobacco market. This disarming of African Americans in the economic sphere was echoed in Chesapeake laws that forbade blacks to carry or possess firearms or other weapons. In 1691, Chesapeake colonial assemblies passed a series of laws regulating basic social interaction and preventing the transition from servitude, or slavery, to freedom. Marriage between a white woman and a free black man was declared a criminal offense, and the illegitimate offspring of interracial unions were forced into bound service until they were thirty years old. A master could still choose to manumit a slave, but after 1691 he was required to bear the cost of removing the freed woman or man from the colony. Such laws discouraged intimacy across racial lines and etched into social consciousness the notion that African origins were synonymous with the enslaved condition. By 1705, political and legal discrimination further degraded African immigrants and their descendants, excluding them from officeholding, making it a criminal offense to strike a white colonist under any circumstances, and denying them the right to testify in courts of law. While Mary Johnson had never enjoyed the rights of citizenship available to her husband, Anthony, eighteenth-century African-American men of the Chesapeake lost their legal and political identity as well. Thus, the history of most African Americans in the Chesapeake region, as in the lower South, is the history of women and men defined by slavery, even in their freedom.
Much of a newly arrived slave woman’s energy was devoted to learning the language of her masters, acquiring the skills of an agriculture foreign to her, and adjusting to the climate and environment of the Chesapeake. Weakened by the transatlantic voyage, often sick, disoriented, and coping with the impact of capture and enslavement to an alien culture, many women as well as men died before they could adjust to America. Until well into the eighteenth century, a woman who survived this adjustment faced the possibility of a lifetime as the solitary African on a farm, or as the solitary woman among the planter’s African slaves. Even when there were other Africans on the plantation, the sense of isolation might persist, for “saltwater,” or newly arrived, slaves had no common language, nor did they share the same religious practices, the same kinship systems and cultural traditions. Creole, or native-born slaves, were no less strange to a “saltwater” survivor.
Under such circumstances, African women found it difficult to re-create the family and kinship relations that played as central a part in African identity as they did in Native American identity. In fact, the skewed sex ratio—roughly two to one into the early eighteenth century—and the wide scattering of the slave population, as much as the heterogeneity of African cultures and languages, often prevented any satisfactory form of stable family. Until the 1740s, those women and men who did become parents rarely belonged to the same master and could not rear their children together. The burden of these problems led many African-born women to delay childbearing until several years after their arrival in America. Most bore only three children, and of these, only two were likely to survive. With twice as many male slaves as female, delayed childbearing, and high mortality among both adults and infants, there was no natural increase among the Chesapeake slaves in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.
There was little any Chesapeake slave woman could do to rectify the circumstances of her personal life. While women of any race or class in colonial society lacked broad control over their person or their actions, the restraints of slavery were especially powerful. A woman deprived of physical mobility and unable to allocate the use of her time could take few effective steps to establish her own social world.
Although Mary Johnson may never have worked the fields at Warresquioake plantation, the slave women who came to the Chesapeake after 1650 were regularly assigned to field labor. Organized into mixed-sex work gangs of anywhere from two to a rare dozen laborers, slave women and men worked six days a week and often into the night. Daylight work included planting, tending, and harvesting tobacco and corn by hand, without the use of draft animals. In the evening, male and female slaves stripped the harvested tobacco leaves from stems or shucked and shelled corn. The crops were foreign to most African-born slave women, but the collective organization of workers was not. Indeed, slaves resisted any effort to deny them this familiar, cooperative form of labor.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, slave women on the largest Chesapeake plantations would wake to a day of labor that segregated them from men. As the great planters shifted from cultivation by the hoe to the plow, and as they branched out into wheat and rye production, lumbering, milling, and fishing, they reinstituted a gendered division of labor. Male slaves were assigned to the new skilled and semi-skilled tasks. While men plowed and mastered crafts, women remained in the fields, left to hoe by hand what the plows could not reach, to weed and worm the tobacco, and to carry the harvested grain to the barns on their heads or backs. When new tasks were added to women’s work repertoire, they proved to be the least desirable: building fences, grubbing swamps in the winter, cleaning seed out of winnowed grain, breaking new ground too rough for the plow, cleaning stables, and spreading manure.
If many male slaves were drawn out of the fields and into the workshops or iron mills, few black women in their prime were assigned to domestic duty in the planter’s house or taught housewifery skills. Instead, throughout the eighteenth century, young girls not yet strong enough for field labor and elderly women past their productive years in the hoeing gang were assigned to cleaning, child care, and other domestic tasks in the planter’s home. Thus, much of the work done by Chesapeake slave women in 1750 differed little from the work done by slave women a half century earlier.
Slave women’s work may have remained constant, but other aspects of their lives did not. By 1750, some of these women had the opportunity to create stable families and to participate in a cohesive slave community. These opportunities were linked to changes in the size of plantations and in the composition of their labor forces. Throughout the eighteenth century, great plantations developed, and the number of slaves on these plantations grew, too, ending the isolation the earliest generations had experienced. Many of these slaves were native-born rather than “saltwater,” and their energies were not drained by the efforts of adjustment and acculturation. As English-speakers, they shared a common language, and in Christianity, many shared a common religion as well. Both were factors in helping creole slaves begin to create a distinctive community. The gradual equalization of the sex ratio among creoles also helped, and, so did the lower mortality rate. Finally, the evolution of this slave community and slave culture in the Chesapeake was aided by a growing opportunity for slaves to live away from the intrusive eyes of their white masters. The retreat from contact was mutual: many white colonists sought relief from the alien impact of Africanisms by creating separate slave quarters. In these slave quarters blacks acquired a social as well as a physical space in which to organize everyday domestic activities, establish rituals, and develop shared values and norms. Most important, they were able to establish families through which to sustain and uphold this shared culture.
Newly arrived Africans found it difficult to participate in this developing community. On Robert Carter’s plantation in 1733, for example, creole slaves lived in families of wives, husbands, and children, while saltwater slaves were housed in sex-segregated barracks. Although the plantation master established these barracks and viewed them as the most efficient way to deal with new arrivals, the isolation of African-born males was not entirely the master’s decision. The truth was that few creole women were willing to establish households or families with an African male, preferring to take their husbands from among the creole population. From their point of view, the steady influx of African males may have been a disruptive force in their community. By mid-century, however, this issue was growing moot, for importation slowed dramatically and what one historian has called a “black life cycle” came to define the social world of many creole slaves.
This black life cycle did not develop evenly or uniformly across the Chesapeake, although it was evident in the pre-Revolutionary decades. And while gender ties rarely diminished racial distances, black and white women of the Chesapeake did have life-cycle experiences in common. The earliest creole generations of both races married younger and bore more children than their immigrant mothers’ generation. And like white women, creole black women were frequently impelled by an imbalanced sex ratio to marry men considerably older than themselves. Black women delivered their children in the company of other women, just as English colonists continued to do throughout most of the eighteenth century, and midwives saw the mother through these births. The differences are perhaps more telling than the similarities, however. African nursing customs, retained by many slave women, produced wider intervals between children than English weaning patterns. Slave women bore an average of nine children, giving birth every twenty-seven to twenty-nine months. The power of masters to separate wives and husbands—through hiring-out practices or sales—led to wide gaps in many slave women’s childbearing histories. Conception and birth cycles in King William Parish, Virginia, reveal other ways in which race interposed upon gender. Two-thirds of the black births in King William Parish occurred between February and July, while white women bore their children in the fall and early winter months. For black women, this meant that the most disabling months of pregnancy often fell in the midst of heavy spring planting chores. Perhaps this accounts for the greater risk of childbirth for slave mothers and the higher infant mortality rate among slave children.
Family organization depended on the size of the plantation. On the larger plantations, children under ten could expect to live with both their father and their mother, often in two-family slave cabins. When the parents came from different small plantations, the children lived with their mother, sometimes in cabins that housed all the slaves, whether related or not. The large plantations offered other advantages besides the opportunity for families to live as a unit. Here, mothers could rely on a growing kin network or on friends to help in the complex tasks of child-rearing. When husband and wife lived on separate plantations, the couple’s main concern was maintaining contact. Where their master’s regulation permitted and where there were roads linking plantations, many husbands and fathers undertook nightly and Sunday journeys to visit their families.
Thus, after 1750, a Chesapeake slave woman might be able to live out her life in the company of her family, as Mary Johnson had done. Yet she knew that powerful obstacles stood in her way. Husbands often lived on other plantations. Children between the ages of ten and fourteen, especially sons, were commonly sold. Sisters and brothers were moved to different slave quarters. And on a master’s death, slaves were often dispensed along with other property to his heirs. A master who might never separate a family during his lifetime thought it his obligation to his survivors to divide them at his death. Hard times could prompt a master to sell a slave woman’s family members in order to provide for his own. A planter’s widow might keep her family intact by hiring out her slave’s sons or daughters. Even the wedding celebration of a planter’s daughter might mean the tragic separation of a slave woman and her own young daughter, sent to serve in the bride’s new home. in the 1770s, the westward expansion of agriculture into the Piedmont and beyond led to mass dispersal of slave families among the new farms and plantations. Slave women, and their men, could succeed in creating effective family structures despite the many demands of slavery, but they could not ensure their permanence.
Few modern scholars disagree that interplantation and intra-plantation networks of kin grew more dense as the century passed, or that a regional slave culture spread and was passed down to new generations. Yet historians do disagree over the pace of community and family development, and they debate how best to interpret the evidence available on the subject. For example, it is true that large plantations did become part of the Chesapeake landscape in the eighteenth century, but the smaller ones did not vanish. In the 1790s, many planters on Maryland’s western shore still held fewer than a dozen slaves, and only one in ten held twenty slaves. Indeed, in some communities over half the free, white population lived in poverty and in the crowded, barren surroundings common to tenant farm families. Throughout the century, therefore, many Chesapeake slaves were destined to live in their master’s home, surrounded by a white majority and enveloped by English colonial culture. Even on large plantations, the division of slaves into small groups, living and working in separate quarters, may have made the creation of a community difficult. And even when the slave population on a plantation was both numerous and densely quartered, we cannot always be confident of its composition. There may have been an equal number of males and females, but were the majority of males youngsters of ten to fourteen? Were many of the females elderly or still children themselves? Nor can we always assume that the presence of adult males, adult females, and young children was synonymous with the presence of families. Not all planters kept meticulous records, and the hiring out of slaves meant the creation of transitory groups, with children from one plantation paired for a year or two with adult women or men who were hired from other planters’ holdings. As yet, scholars do not know how slave quarters were organized on many plantations. Nor do we know the intimate relationships of the men, women, and children we find living on these plantations. And we are also not certain if the solutions to the problems of divided families, such as regular Sunday visiting by fathers and other family members, were widespread. In its own way, our uncertainty mirrors the uncertainty that was a central fact of slave life.
Perhaps it is most useful to say that while legal codes created a uniform definition of enslavement in the Chesapeake, there was no uniform set of conditions under which slaves lived. Nor could there be as long as uniform living conditions for their masters and mistresses failed to exist. The circumstances and the choices made by great planters and struggling ones, by tobacco growers and wheat farmers, by residents of the Piedmont and those of the tidewater, by cruel men and kind ones set the parameters of life for the enslaved. However, if the black life cycle and the slave culture that emerged on larger plantations do not account for all eighteenth-century slave women and men, or even for the majority, they are still significant. Their reconstruction reveals basic social choices that slaves made when conditions permitted. The culture that emerged shaped the expectations and channeled the energies of slaves throughout the Chesapeake.
The slave quarters were the heart of the slave community, the houses and the yards surrounding them were the focal points of daily life. Inside each cabin were straw beds, seats made of barrels, pots, pans, and a grindstone for beating corn into meal. The older women looked after the children, the men hunted to provide extra food, and the women defined themselves, in part, by taking up domestic chores and housewifery. The culture that developed within these communities suggests a flexible adaptation of both African and European customs and beliefs. In this Chesapeake slave community dominated by creoles, African traditions were more muted than they would be in the Lower South. But on Virginia and Maryland plantations, slaves preserved African folk traditions of magic and magic charms, much, of course, as English colonists preserved their own magic traditions. In music and the instruments used to make it, and in the rhythms and patterns of dance, the slave community drew distinct lines that separated them from the dominant white culture and linked them to their African roots. Christianity, however, became the primary religion within the quarter, and sometimes this produced tensions between African values and European ones. In the Piedmont, in particular, where many slaves embraced the teachings of the Baptists, evangelical codes of morality condemning adultery and fornication conflicted with an African-based tolerance for premarital intercourse and older sexual mores arising from traditions such as polygyny.
