Cultures in Contact
ANT 326L (30410) Spring, 2008
Samuel M. Wilson
Thomas Jefferson
African Diaspora in the Americas
Slavery and Freedom at the time of the Revolution
• 25% of White colonial population owned slaves
• 240,000 enslaved people from Africa
• 61% lived in Virginia and Maryland
The African Slave Trade
Middle passage
Demography (by 1750)
• 2.1 million to Brazil
• 1.58 million to British, French, Dutch, and Danish Colonies
• 120 thousand to North America
The Terrible Transformation
From indentured servitude to racial slavery.
Terrible transformation
Why the transformation?
•
The “invention” of race?
• Problem of indentured servants to landed elites
• Key social distinctions for English -- Christianity and class more important
than color
• Labor demands of English agriculture
Ethnic groups ca. 1750-1770
Africans in the Revolution
Who would offer freedom?
Colonel Tye
The “Book of Negroes”
African Americans killed on the side
of the Colonists
Slavery 1780-1865
“ Progress has different meanings for different people. And for people
of African descent, the cotton gin was not progress. It was a further entrenchment
of enslavement. And for African Americans, the Industrial Revolution,
those
technological advances in the textile industry, did not mean progress.
It meant slavery.”
- Margaret Washington, historian
Generations of enslavement, 1750-1863
1860
Population percentages, 1860
Free people of Color
• Philadelphia in 1790
• 2000 free blacks
• By 1830 14,500 blacks (10% of pop.) all free
Abolitionism
The Second Great Awakening
• Late 1700s, early 1800s
• Northern Protestant revival
• Growing strength in the North against Slavery
– Gradualists, with compensation
– Those calling for immediate emancipation
William Lloyd Garrison
I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there
not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising
as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or
write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate
alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher;
tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which
it has fallen; -- but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the
present. I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse
-- I will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy
of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal,
and
to hasten the resurrection of the dead.
Frederick Douglass
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Slavery and the US Constitution
Emancipation
Uncommon knowledge about the African Diaspora in the Americas
Latin American Diaspora
Free black communities
Demographic consequences
After emancipationJim Crow laws
• Restrict voting through poll tax, literacy tests (recite Constitution..)
• Enforce segregation
•
Plessy v. Ferguson 1896 (separate but equal…)