Will of Michael Cassin planter of Nevis proved 18/07/1782. He left his wife one of the two dwelling houses on his unnamed 'estate', 1/7th of its produce and the 'following slaves' [the will omitted to specify them and in a codicil of August 1781 he left her a 'negro woman slave named Mary' and her five children 'Betty George[,] George Brown[,] Phibba, Sally and Tim' and also a 'mulatto boy' named Tyrrell]. He left his residuary estate to his children Timothy, Michael, Henry, Coleman, Sarah and Mary.
Tim Richards Slaves Of 18
Utilizing few if any hired hands or servants, the small family farm quickly established itself in New England, a region favoring Indian corn since it could be cultivated by hand labor, but one where diversified crops were also raised. In contrast to New England's subsistence farming, the area stretching between the Hudson and Potomac needed a somewhat larger labor force (much of it recruited from Europe) for its commercial farms, which specialized in the production of wheat and other cereals. In the South the planter soon turned to raising a specialized crop for export--tobacco in Maryland and Virginia, rice and indigo in South Carolina. The size of the plantations and the requirements for cultivating such crops necessitated a substantial labor force of both white bound labor and black slaves.
Benjamin Franklin charged that the British practice of "emptying their jails into our settlements is, an insult and contempt, the cruellest, that ever one people offered to another." Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, remarked that the early settlers brought with them "a collection of peasants and servants remarkable for their profligacy." Although the colonies placed prohibitive duties on imported convicts or required ship captains to give bond for their good behavior, the contractors of convicts back in England saw to it that the home government would void such laws. In the colonies, however, employers, finding the purchase of convict labor less expensive than acquiring redemptioners or slaves, were responsible for the continuation of the traffic.
For black Africans a very special system of bound labor evolved. Slavery, it must be remembered, was not invented in the English colonies. For nearly two centuries before the settlement of Virginia, a trade in slaves had been carried on along the West African coast. As the English empire expanded to the New World, slave traders grabbed at the chance to make huge profits from this sordid business. Slave traffic became an integral part of a pattern of commerce, known as the "triangular trade," which operated between New England, Africa, and the West Indies or the Southern colonies. New England rum, guns, gunpowder, utensils, textiles, and food were bartered for slaves provided by West African chiefs. The human cargo was packed aboard ship, chained together by twos, with hardly any room to stand, lie, or sit down. During voyages that sometimes lasted as long as fourteen weeks, epidemics took an alarming death toll.
By 1775 the stepped-up slave trade, along with a natural increase of population, had brought the total number of blacks in America to half a million. More than three-fifths lived in Virginia and the Carolinas. In South Carolina slaves comprised the majority of the population. Some colonies imposed prohibitive restrictions on the slave trade, not from humanitarian considerations but out of fear of a huge, unmanageable black population, a fear kept alive by occasional not more than a few hundred such cases. Sometime in the 1640s, the practice began, of selling imported blacks as servants for life. In short, this form of de facto slavery preceded legalized slavery. In the 1660s and 1670s statutes in Virginia and Maryland gave slavery its formal distinguishing features, an inheritable status of servitude for life. Soon restrictions on slave mobility, along with a harsh system of discipline, were written into the "Black Codes" of all the Southern colonies.
At times bound servants went on strike, deserted, or broke the contract of employment. Such incidents were by no means uncommon in the tobacco provinces, particularly in the seventeenth century. An example of this was Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, a broad based uprising in 1676 to unseat an unpopular royal governor and his administration. Almost invariably such actions were ruthlessly put down by the authorities. Concerted action taken by slaves would be viewed as an insurrection, even though it might be a form of labor protest. Sporadic examples of such uprisings in New York in 1712 and 1741 and in South Carolina in 1739 were crushed with savage reprisals.
Throughout the colonies white mechanics joined forces to protest against black competition, but the problem seems to have been especially critical in Charleston, South Carolina. There, in 1744, the shipwrights complained that they were reduced to poverty owing to black competition. Their protest, supported by white mechanics in other trades, persuaded the town authorities to enact an ordinance forbidding the inhabitants from keeping more than two slaves "to work out for hire as porters, labourers, fishermen or handicraftsmen." This resentment on the part of white mechanics was also evident in most Northern towns. But in the long run the interests of the slave owners, not the free white mechanics, prevailed.
The American Revolution diverted labor from seeking economic ends to securing more immediate political gains. In such a program workers were often allied with their employers. There was no clear employer worker conflict evident either in the Revolution's preliminaries or during its long and intense course. While a substantial portion of the laboring class supported the Patriot cause, many workers were Loyalists. To understand why there were divisions even among working people, in what proved to be both a civil war and an anticolonial war for independence, one must recognize that there is no simple economic explanation for the American Revolution. It was not an uprising of the proletariat against a privileged class. Excluding half a million black slaves, there was not a significant segment of the population that could be considered either hopelessly deprived or condemned to poverty. On the other band, business conditions were not highly favorable. The close of the Seven Years' War brought on a depression, culminating in unemployment and an increase in welfare payments. Commercial boycotts, initiated after the Stamp Act in 1765, the Townsend Act of 1767, and by the first Continental Congress in 1774, hit the shipping and importing trades hard. The closing of the port of Boston in 1774 created acute economic distress.
Freedom may have been the ultimate prospect for all white workers, but that status was not within the expectation of most blacks. Slavery darkened the Revolutionary skies as a great, brooding omnipresence. Would a revolution overtly dedicated to the principles of equality end this greatest of all inequalities? Some Southerners, like the contentious Carolina planter and ex-slave trader Henry Laurens, asserted their readiness to take positive steps. They would apply the ideals of the Declaration to the slaves on their estates in the face of opposition from "great powers," as Laurens expressed it, as well as by "the laws and customs of my country, my own and the avarice of my countrymen." Other southern Patriots, like Patrick Henry, regarded slavery as a "lamentable evil" and looked forward to the time when it would be abolished. Jefferson tried repeatedly to restrict slavery and even to bar it from all the territories, but he could not overcome sectional opposition to so drastic a social revolution. By the end of the war, slavery already was attaining the dimension of a great divisive issue. Five of the original Thirteen States, all from the North, in addition to Vermont, initiated programs of emancipation before the Federal Convention of 1787; two others followed soon thereafter. These notable actions reflected the strong antislavery impulse fostered by the American Revolution. However, even in the North the leadership seemed unable to plan effectively for the black population after emancipation, while the white laboring classes were less than receptive to the prospect of competition from skilled black workers.
Maroon communities arose wherever slavery took hold in the Americas. As early as the 1540s sizeable groups of several hundred runaway slaves had formed their own communities away from Spanish colonists in Mexico, Cuba, and Santo Domingo. By the 17th century, as slavery increased its stranglehold among the societies of the New World, maroon communities emerged on the mainland of South and Central America in Brazil and Columbia, and on some of the smaller Caribbean islands. The 18th century saw marronage spread to North America and reach its greatest extent in Jamaica, Surinam, and Brazil with large and well-organized groups of maroons able to defend their independence by military means against the attempts of European colonizers to defeat them.
In Jamaica, Mexico, and Surinam well-established maroons were supposed to capture and return runaway slaves under peace treaties with whites, which they apparently did relatively diligently. In this sense maroons allied with whites to maintain the oppression of other black people. Another example of the tensions between maroons and the wider black community can be found in Brazil. New arrivals in Palmares who found maroon life not to their liking, and who later attempted to leave, were hunted down and killed by more established maroons fearful that their hideouts might be betrayed.
For white planters, masters, militias, and governments, maroon communities posed a particular problem. Masters certainly did not want to lose valuable property to marronage, but the rewards of recapturing maroons had to be weighed against significant effort and risks. Maroon settlements were located in remote and deliberately inaccessible areas. Days spent hunting maroons were days lost from managing the plantation which might mean that remaining slaves were able to damage crops, and therefore profits, either through willful vandalism or, perhaps more likely, through simple inaction while unsupervised. Some slaves might even take advantage of the absence of the master to flee themselves. The swamps, woods, and mountains where maroons resided were formidable environments full of dangerous fauna that preyed on the unwary. It is doubtful that many whites ventured anywhere near these locales, except when they absolutely had to, and these zones in effect became spaces which were traversed and occupied only by Africans and African Americans. 2ff7e9595c
Comments