Topic: Origins - Slaves
European traders discovered the mix of cultures described in the post for 13 March 2019 when they arrived on the coast of Africa. Their demands for slaves exacerbated existing divisions and encouraged warfare. In this country captives were recombined on plantations in groups of a hundred or less. [1]
The puzzle for historians was how this potpourri was molded into identifiable antebellum cultures when many plantation owners kept their slaves as isolated as possible from those on other plantations.
One factor was the psychological response to bondage, unpredictability, and threats of terror. Stimulated by Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, [2] historians documented ways slaves circumvented the limits placed upon them.
Michael Gomez, as mentioned in the post for 13 March 2019, took a different tact in Exchanging Our Countries Marks. [3] He examined religious beliefs of Africans and highlighted those that were common. Margaret Washington Creel was more specific: she looked at the religion of slaves in the South Carolina lowlands where Gullah was spoken. She argued:
"in the Carolina Lowcountry there was an early cultural dominance of BaKongo peoples of Kongo-Angolan origin, followed by Upper Guinea Africans of the Senegambia and Windward Coasts. Upper Guinea peoples coming to Carolina found a creolized black culture already adjusting and acculturating." [4]
Sterling Stuckey believed the ring shout "gave form and meaning to black religion." [5] Washington thought West African initiation rituals handled by the female Sande and male Poro [6] societies served as the bridge between native religions and Christianity.
During those initiations, adolescents were sent into the wilderness to make contact with the spirit world. How that occurred was one of the carefully held secrets. Washington combed through the work of anthropologists to learn initiates were supervised by "Poro-Sande priests and priestesses, called altar mothers and fathers." She concluded:
"The boys and girls conversed with the spirits and related these conversations to the altar parent, who interpreted them. Little is known of the initiates’ experiences while on the journey through the spirit world. But their soul was considered to be in a state of anxiety and confusion, seeking to ‘recover balance and collect itself.’ The encounter with ‘nameless spirits’ in the sacred grove was manifested in dreams and prayers since these were common forms of revelation and communication." [7]
One reason these rituals survived on plantations was owners were reluctant to prosthelytize their slaves, especially after the Stono Rebellion of 1739 [8] and the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in 1822. In the first case, slaves were able to read Spanish invitations. In the second, several of the condemned freed men, including Vesey, were members of Charleston’s African Methodist Episcopal Church. [9]
Parts of Georgia and southern South Carolina where John Wesley had spent time with James Oglethorpe were the exception to this prohibition. The year after the Stono Rebellion, George Whitefield convinced one family of slave owners to open a religious school for slaves [10] overseen by William Hutson. [11] The authorities soon shut it down. [12]
As a consequence of Methodist activity in Georgia, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney asked the church to recommend an overseer in 1829. He explained a friend had told him of the "happy results which had followed the endeavors of a Methodist overseer." Instead, the local church head offered to send missionaries. [13]
One of William Caper’s evangelists complained in 1846 that African-American converts did not properly atone for their sinful natures before being baptized. Instead, he said conversion began with a "warning in a dream." [14]
The seeker as he was called, selected someone, often a woman, "by the direction of ‘the spirit’." The mentor then, rather than a Methodist minister, "is now a prophet to teach him how to conduct himself, and particularly how to pray. He is also ‘an interpreter of visions’ to whom the seeker relates all his ‘travel’." [15]
The Methodist missionary warned his brethren the word "travel" had a unique meaning for African Americans.
"These travels may differ in some things; and in others they all agree. Each seeker meets with warnings—awful sights or sounds, and always has a vision of a white man who talks with him, warns him, and sometimes makes him carry a burden, and in the end leads him to the river." [16]
In Sierra Leone, F. W. H. Migeod was told in the 1920s , when the male "initiate goes into the Poro bush, the Poro ‘ngafe’ (spirit, or in Creole English ‘devil’) is supposed to have swallowed him, and the marks on his back are said ‘devil’s’ teeth-marks." [17]
During the American Civil War, William Francis Allen made the connection between seeking and the ring shout explicit. First, he told readers of his Slave Song collection that "one of the customs, often alluded to in the songs, is that of wandering through the woods and swamps, when under religious excitement, like the ancient bacchantes. To get religion is with them to ‘fin’ dat ting’." [18]
He then quoted a woman who said her sister "Couldn’t fin’ dat leetle ting—huntin’ for ’em all de time—las’ foun’ ’em." [19] Then, he added, once when he was headed to a ring shout, he asked another man if he was going. He answered:
"No, ma’am, wouldn’t let me in—hain’t foun’ dat ting yet—hain’t been on my knees in de swamp." [20]
End Notes
1. Rice growers had a perception that a manageable plantation was of a certain size; the acreage then determined the number of laborers needed. When Nathaniel Heyward died in 1851 he had 1,900 slaves working on 17 plantations, or an average of 112 per operation. He owned other slaves and some cotton plantations as well, according to William Dusinberre [21] Josephine Pinckney’s family plantation had "ninety-something slaves" before the Civil War. [22]
2. Eugene Genovese. Roll, Jordan, Roll. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.
3. Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
4. Margaret Washington Creel. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 43–44.
5. Sterling Stuckey. Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 10. Ring shouts were discussed in a series posted between 18 September 2018 and 9 October 2018.
6. The groups have had other names. I’m standardizing on Poro and Sande.
7. Washington. 288–289.
8. The Stono Rebellion was mentioned in the posts for 18 September 2018 and 6 January 2019.
9. Wikipedia. "Denmark Vesey." His religion was discussed by Gomez (pages 1–4), Stuckey pages 47, 52–55, 58), and Washington (pages 153–155).
10. William A. Sloat, II. "George Whitefield, African-Americans, and Slavery." Methodist History 33:3–13:October 1994. 3. The slave owner were Hugh Bryan.
11. Hutson was the great-great-grandfather of Mary Elliot Hutson, who was active in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019. (William Maine Hutson. "The Hutson Family of South Carolina." The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 9:127–140:1908.)
12. Nathan E. Stalvey. "Bryan, Hugh." South Carolina Encyclopedia website. 17 May 2016; last updated 24 July 2016.
13. William M. Wrightman. Life of William Capers, D. D. Nashville: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1902. 291–2. Washington brought this to by attention. 176. Barbara L. Bellows said he was the grandfather of Josephine Pinckney, first mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019. (A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 14.)
14. Southern Christian Advocate. 30 October 1846 and 30 October 1847. Quoted by Washington. 286.
15. Southern Christian Advocate. The author is using "he" in the generic sense to refer to both men and women.
16. Southern Christian Advocate.
17. F. W. H Migeod. A View of Sierra Leone. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Company, 1926. 238. The scars were made during the initiation period. The post for 13 March 2019 said the ngafaga were the spirits of the dead.
18. William Francis Allen. "Introduction." The Slave Songs of the United States. Edited by Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867. xii. Allen was assigned to Edgar Fripp’s Seaside plantation on Saint Helena Island.
19. Mosley. Quoted by Allen. xii.
20. Bristol. Quoted by Allen. xii. The unidentified woman addressed as ma’am was probably Allen’s wife. However, she died in 1865, before work had begun on the song collection. The alternative was that Allen was quoting a letter from Charles Pickard Ware. Then the woman would have been his sister Harriet Ware, and the ex-slaves would have been on Thomas Ashton Coffin’s Coffin Point plantation.
21. William Dusinberre. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. 33.
22. "Black and White: Plantation Scenes of South Carolina." Caption for "El Dorado Plantation, 1891." Charleston Museum website.
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