The African Slave Trade and South
Carolina
Slavery was well established in the "New World" by the Spanish,
Portuguese, and Dutch, who all sent African slaves to work in both North
and South America during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. The English began aggressively trading in what was called
"black ivory" during the middle of the seventeenth century,
spurred on by the need for laborers in the hot, humid sugar fields on the
West Indian islands of Barbados, St. Christopher, the Bermudas, and
Jamaica.
By the time Charles Towne was settled in 1670, Englishmen from the West
Indies were well acquainted with slavery and the huge profits they could
reap from the toil of others. Slavery was therefore considered an
essential ingredient in the successful establishment of cash crop
plantations in South Carolina.
Like other European nations, England created the Royal African Company
to underwrite the slave trade. A string of forts and "slave
factories" were established from the Cape Verde Islands to the Bight
of Biafra. But the slave trade would likely not have been as
"successful" were it not for the "unholy alliance"
between the English (and other European nations) and the African kingdoms
on whose territories the forts stood. The English slave traders did their
best to dupe the native kings, and each native king did his best to obtain
the maximum amount of goods in exchange for the slaves he had for sale.
For their cargoes of human flesh, the traders brought iron and copper
bars, brass pans and kettles, cowrey shells, old guns, gun powder, cloth,
and alcohol. In return, ships might load on anywhere from 200 to over 600
African slaves, stacking them like cord wood and allowing almost no
breathing room. The crowding was so severe, the ventilation so bad, and
the food so poor during the "Middle Passage" of between five
weeks and three months that a loss of around 14 to 20% of their
"cargo" was considered the normal price of doing business. This
slave trade is thought to have transported at least 10 million, and
perhaps as many as 20 million, Africans to the American shore.
The slave traders discovered that Carolina planters had very specific
ideas concerning the ethnicity of the slaves they sought. No less a
merchant than Henry Laurens wrote:
The Slaves from the River Gambia are preferr'd to all others with us
[here in Carolina] save the Gold Coast.... next to Them the Windward
Coast are preferr'd to Angolas.
In other words, slaves from the region of Senegambia and present-day Ghana
were preferred. At the other end of the scale were the "Calabar"
or Ibo or "Bite" slaves from the Niger Delta, who Carolina
planters would purchase only if no others were available. In the middle
were those from the Windward Coast and Angola.
Carolina planters developed a vision of the "ideal" slave –
tall, healthy, male, between the ages of 14 and 18, "free of
blemishes," and as dark as possible. For these ideal slaves Carolina
planters in the eighteenth century paid, on average, between £100 and £200
sterling – in today's money that is between $11,630 and $23,200!
Many of these slaves were almost immediately put to work in South
Carolina's rice fields. Writers of the period remarked that there was no
harder, or more unhealthy, work possible:
negroes, anckle and even mid-leg deep in water which floats an ouzy mud,
and exposed all the while to a burning sun which makes the very air they
breathe hotter than the human blood; these poor wretches are then in a
furness of stinking putrid effluvia: a more horrible employment can
hardly be imagined.
In fact, these Carolina rice fields have been described as charnel houses
for African-American slaves. Malaria and enteric diseases killed off the
low country slaves at rates which are today almost unbelievable. Based on
the best plantation accounts it is clear that while about one out of every
three slave children on the cotton plantations died before reaching the
age of 16, nearly two out of every three African-American children on rice
plantations failed to reach their sixteenth birthday and over a third of
all slave children died before their first birthday. Rice's macabre record
of slave deaths has been traced to two primary factors - one was malaria,
the other was the infants' feebleness at birth, probably the result of the
mothers' own chronic malaria and their general exhaustion from rice
cultivation during pregnancy.
After their horrific "Middle Passage," over 40% of the
African slaves reaching the British colonies before the American
Revolution passed through South Carolina. Almost all of these slaves
entered the Charleston port, being briefly quarantined on Sullivan's
Island, before being sold in Charleston's slave markets.
Once in South Carolina what was the lives of these slaves like? How did
they live? What did they eat? What did their houses look like? How did
they prepare their food? What kinds of possessions did they have? What did
their pottery look like? White masters had little or no interest in
recording these details for future generations. Slavery was an economic
issue and the only details worthy of being consistently recorded were
those related to the value of their slaves or the value of their
production. The daily lives of these new African-Americans was probably
poorly understood and certainly of little importance to the planters.
These are all questions that can only be answered through archaeology.
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