The origins of Alabama’s slaves are more obscure than those of owners, like the ones mentioned in the post for 1 September 2019. The French founded Mobile in 1702, [1] and imported their first shipload in 1721. [2] Gwendolyn Midlo Hall found the Compagnie des Indes exported Bambara through its station in the Sénégal river. [3]
The British held Mobile as part of West Florida from 1763 until 1780, when the Spanish captured Florida Occidental. [4] During the time the Spanish held New Orleans, they imported slaves from Sénégal-Gambia and the Nigerian coast. [5] When the British held the city, slaves were brought from the parts of Senegambia it controlled. [6]
During, and immediately after, the American Revolution, British supporters were forced out of South Carolina and Georgia. While some, like the fathers of Thomas Spalding and Alexander William Wylley, went to East Florida, [7] others went west and settled north of Mobile in what now is Washington County. [8]
Congress banned the import of African slaves when it organized the Mississippi Territory in 1798. It then included northern Alabama. [9] Mobile wasn’t acquired until the War of 1812 when it was seized by United States forces. [10]
Slaves either were brought by their owners or were purchased from traders. Since it generally was agreed no owner parted with a good slave, the state outlawed "the importation of slaves for sale or hire" in 1826. [11]
Attitudes began changing in the 1830s when cotton acreage and profits increased. In 1842, the state changed course and used the internal trade to raise money by selling licenses to traders. [12] By then, Richmond, Virginia, had emerged as the wholesale hub. [13] Speculators, who purchased slaves in large lots, either took them by ship to Mobile or drove them south like cattle. Montgomery replaced Mobile as the largest retail slave market in Alabama. [14]
Interviewers for the Works Progress Administration between 1936 and 1938 asked individuals born into slavery where they had been born. [15] Most, 72 of the 129, were from Alabama or the contiguous sections of Georgia (13) and Mississippi. (9) Of the 13 who were born in Virginia, six said they were sold to speculators. Two of the four from North Carolina had been sold to traders, as were three of the four from South Carolina.
Yellow - Ruby Pickens Tartt’s Sumter County
Red - Counties where former slaves were born
Blue - Counties where parents of former slaves were born
Purple - Counties where former slaves or their parents were born; Richmond is enlarged
Only one person, Esther King Casey, mentioned a parent or grandparent who was from Africa. [16] However, nine said one of their parents was from Virginia and three mentioned South Carolina.
More than likely the ancestors of the Virginia slaves had been Igbo. Between 1718 and 1726, 60% of the captives taken to Port York "came from the Bight of Biafra (the Ibo area)." [17] From 1826 to 1750, more than 40% of the slaves shipped to the Chesapeake came from the Bight of Biafra east of the Niger River mouth. After that, more came from Senegambia. [18]
Graphics
The original map is from the United States Census Bureau. Abe Suleiman uploaded a copy to Wikimedia Commons on 7 February 2010.
End Notes
1. Wikipedia. "History of Mobile, Alabama."
2. James Benson Sellers. Slavery in Alabama. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1950; reprinted in 1990. 4.
3. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. Africans in Colonial Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. 41, 43–44.
4. Wikipedia.
5. Hall, Louisiana. 284.
6. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 93–94.
7. For more on their fathers, see the post for 2 June 2019.
8. Sellers. 16.
9. Sellers. 15.
10. Wikipedia.
11. Sellers 174. Hall quoted the French Minister of Maritime who, in 1708, wrote: "the inhabitants of America in general, French as well as English, do not part with their blacks unless they know them to be bad and vicious." [19]
12. Sellers. 177.
13. Kimberly Merkel Chen and Hannah W. Collins. "The Slave Trade as a Commercial Enterprise in Richmond, Virginia." National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Multiple Property Documentation Form. 25 July 2006; updated 9 April 2007. Section E.
14. Sellers. 154.
15. George Rawick. A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume 1, Alabama Narratives. Compiled by The Library of Congress from interviews by the Works Projects Administration, Federal Writers’ Project. Washington: Library of Congress, 1941. Ruby Pickens Tartt, mentioned in the post for 23 January 2019, was one of the interviewers.
16. David Elred Holt included his memories of Louis, whose ancestors had been born in Guinea. It was taken from his unpublished Old Plantation Days. Holt was "a native of Buffalo Plantation, near Natchez, Mississippi."
17. Elizabeth Donnan. Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade in America, IV, The Border Colonies and the Southern Colonies. Washington, D. C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1933. Cited by Allan Kulikoff. Tobacco and Slaves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. 321. Ibo is a simplified pronunciation of Igbo.
18. Hall, Ethnicities. 137. She analyzed the shipping manifests in The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database. [20]
19. Hall, Louisiana. 57, 182.
20. David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen D. Behrendt, and Herbert S. Klein. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
No comments:
Post a Comment