Balantas taken to north carolina
Excerpt taken from Volume 3 of Balanta B’urassa, My Sons: Those Who Resist Remain.
“The NEGROES are sold on the Coast of Guinea, to Merchants trading to those parts, are brought from thence to Carolina, Virginia, and other Provinces in the hands of the English, are daily increasing in this Country, […]” John Brickell, The Natural History of North Carolina, (1737, reprint, Murfreesboro, N.C.: Johnson Publishing Co., 1968), 272
“Since our last, the schooner Joseph, Capt. Williams, arrived here from Barbados, with a Parcel of fine healthy young Slaves;[…]” September 21, 1764 – North Carolina Magazine; or, Universal Intelligencer (New Bern)
“Just imported in the SCHOONER HOPE, Thomas Foster, Master, from AFRICA, A Parcel of likely healthy SLAVES, Consisting of Men, Women and Children, which are to be sold for Cash, or Country Produce, by EDWARD BATCHELOR & Co. at their store at UNION POINT.” North Carolina Gazette (New Bern), January 13, 1775
A History of African Americans in North Carolina by Jeffery J. Crow, Paul D. Escott, and Flora, J. Hatley explain:
“Even before Sir Walter Raleigh planted an English colony on Roanoke Island in the 1580’s, Africans had visited North Carolina’s shores. In 1526 Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, a Spanish explorer and slave trader, led an expedition of 500 men and women from the West Indies to settle in the vicinity of Cape Fear. Among the adventurers were several black slaves. The expedition ultimately ended in disease, starvation, and failure, but the short-lived Spanish colony on the banks of the Cape Fear River was a harbinger of future efforts. . . .
With the planting of the Raleigh colonies on the North American continent between 1584 and 1590, Sir Francis Drake inadvertently furnished North Carolina with its first permanent black inhabitants. Drake raided the Spanish held West Indies in 1585 and 1586 and acquired numerous prisoners, including Moorish galley slaves and soldiers, a group of Negro slaves (to whom he promised their freedom), and approximately 300 South American Indians. Drake then sailed to Roanoke Island to relieve the Ralph Lane colony. Departing Roanoke for England in June 1586, Drake evidently freed the Indian and Negro captives, although he kept the Moorish prisoners. What became of the South American Indians and West Indian slaves is not known, but they probably melted into the local Indian population. . . .
In 1663, soon after his restoration to the English throne, Charles II granted eight Lords Proprietors a huge tract of territory south of Virginia. The Lords Proprietors sought easy profits by renting lands and selling a wide variety of commodities. They recognized that a slave colony in Carolina held the greatest commercial promise. A group of colonists from Barbados wished to settle in Carolina and bring their slaves with them. They pressed the Lords Proprietors to establish a headright system under which the heads of all households would be allotted acreage on the basis of the number of people who accompanied them. The proprietors assented by granting ‘the Owner of every Negro-Man or Slave, brought thither to settle within the first year, twenty acres, and for every Woman Negro or Slave five acres.’
Moreover, the Lords Proprietors made certain that the Negro’s status was fixed and distinctive. Carolina’s Fundamental Constitutions, drafted in 1669, stated explicitly,
“(Article 101) Every Freeman of Carolina shall have absolute Authority over his Negro Slaves, of what opinion or Religion soever.”
The commercially minded Lords Proprietors and Barbadian planters thus prepared the way for slavery’s introduction into Carolina.
Because of North Carolina’s treacherous coast and lack of good harbor, the large plantations envisioned by the Lords Proprietors and Barbados planters took root in South Carolina, where many of North Carolina’s principal rivers reach the sea. The northern province’s other rivers empty into the shallow sounds of the Outer Banks. Thus, while slavery expanded rapidly in South Carolina, it grew more slowly in the northern precincts. Still, the headright system accomplished its purpose. In 1702, for example, John Shaw of Perquimans Precinct received 74 acres for two Negroes – Dick and Will. The following year Colonel William Wilkerson of the same precinct converted eight headrights into 400 acres; among his headrights were two Indian slaves and one mulatto slave. Major General Thomas Pollock of Chowan Precinct received 640 acres on February 26, 1711/12, for headrights that included eleven Negroes: London, Joe, Tom, Betty, Jenny, Tatte, Pompey, Tom, Scipio, Bowman and Moll.
By 1710 Pasquotank and Currituck counties reported 308 Negroes and 1,871 whites. The number of blacks in the whole colony was estimated in 1712 at only 800. South Carolina, by comparison, was already 50 percent black in 1708 with 4,100 slaves. By 1720 the number of slaves there grew to 18,000, fully three times the number of whites.
Before 1730 most slaves in North Carolina lived in the tobacco-growing region of the colony’s northeast. With the establishment of rice-growing and the naval stores industry in the southeast, however, slavery expanded much more quickly. Between 1730 and 1767 the black population grew from approximately 6,000 to 40,000. While much of that growth resulted from natural increase, more than half of it probably represented slave imports, particularly during the period 1755-1767.
Slaves had been shipped directly from Guinea to Virginia and North Carolina as early as the 1680’s, but most of the colony’s slave trade originated elsewhere. With its dangerous coastline, North Carolina depended on overland trade from Virginia and South Carolina to meet its needs in slaves and other commodities. In 1733 Governor George Burrington complained: “Great is the loss this Country has sustained in not being supplied by vessels from Guinea with Negroes; in any part of the Province the people are able to pay for a ships load; but as none come directly from Africa, we are under a necessity to buy, the refuse refractory and distempered Negroes, brought from other Governments….” A majority of the 70,000 to 75,000 slaves who entered South Carolina between 1735 and 1775 were reexported, with Georgia and North Carolina, in that order, the principal destinations. When the first federal census was taken in 1790, North Carolina reported 100,572 slaves and 288, 204 whites. . . . Large Negro populations existed in Northampton, Halifax, and Warren counties, where on the eve of the American Revolution 40 to 60 percent of households owned slaves.
The Lower Cape Fear region, on the other hand, had the greatest concentration of slaves. The area was settled in the 1720’s by planters from South Carolina who brought rice culture and slaves with them . . .
That same year [1715] North Carolina enacted it first slave code. “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” attempted for the first time to define the social, economic and even physical place of the Negro population. Blacks could not leave their ‘Plantations without a Ticket or White servant along with them….’ Whites were authorized to ‘apprehend all such servants & Slaves as they conceive to be runaways or travel without a Ticket or that shall be seen off his Master’s ground Arm’d with any Gun, Sword or any other Weapon of defence…’ Executions of slaves were to be held publicly “to the Terror of other Slaves.”
The 1715 law also discouraged miscegenation. A white indentured woman who bore ‘a Bastard child’ with a Negro, mulatto, or Indian father had her term of service extended two years or paid a fine of 6 pounds to the Anglican church wardens. Similarly, the law forbade the intermarriage of any white man or woman ‘with any Negro, Mulatto or Indian Man or Woman under the penalty of Fifty Pounds for each White man or woman.’
Once planters began concentrating on exportable staples – tobacco, rice and naval stores – and expanded their holdings in slaves, a division of labor and specialized jobs became more prevalent. Blacks performed many different tasks and provided crucial know-how to the agricultural economy. To cultivate rice, for example, required harsh, constant labor. But blacks from the west coast of Africa were noted rice farmers as well as ‘cattle chasers.’. . . At least thirty slaves were needed to work a rice plantation because much of the labor was performed by hand. Janet Schaw, a Scottish visitor to the Lower Cape Fear, commented in 1775: ‘The rice too is whitening…. But there is not living near it with the putrid water that must lie on it, and the labor required for it is only fit for slaves, and I think the hardest work I have seen them engaged in.’ Each slave was expected to produce four or five barrels of rice averaging 500 pounds each – roughly the produce of two acres. Black hands broke the soil with a hoe, used a gourd to sow the seeds, harvested the crop with a sickle, flailed the rice for threshing, and polished the white grains with a mortar and pestle. . . . If the cultivation of rice required backbreaking labor, agricultural techniques were hardly more advanced elsewhere in the province….’
Occasionally, masters sold slaves to keep black families together. In 1769 Edward Stabler and Richard Bennehan arranged the sale of a ‘Negro boy’ at 40 pounds so that ‘he will be with his Relations.’ Two-years later another Bennehan slave, Jack, asked a local planter to buy him because he feared Bennehan might ‘send him to some other part of the Country to be sold. . . .
In the 1770s perhaps one third of the slaves in North Carolina were of African origin. Language, religion, work patterns, naming of children, and much else reflected that African heritage. Recalling visits to Somerset Place, Josiah Collin’s plantation on the shore of Lake Scuppernong in the Albemarle region, Dr. Edward Warren described the old ‘Guinea negroes’ who had been imported from Africa before the turn of the nineteenth century. Those Africans retained many of the ideas and traditions of their native land. Dr. Warren detailed how “they still had faith in evil genii, charms, philters, metempsychosis, etc., and they habitually indulged in an infinitude of cabalistic rites and ceremonies, in which the gizzards of chickens, the livers of dogs, the heads of snakes and the tails of lizards played a mysterious but very conspicuous part. . . .
Fugitive slaves from Virginia and North Carolina turned the Great Dismal Swamp into a sanctuary. The swamp was an ideal hideout. According to a 1780’s traveler, runaways were ‘perfectly safe, and with the greatest facility elude the most diligent search of their pursuers.’ Blacks had lived there ‘for twelve, twenty, or thirty years and upwards, subsisting themselves…upon corn, hogs, and fowls….; The runaways cultivated small plots of land that were not subject to flooding but ‘perfectly impenetrable to any of the inhabitants of the country around….’ In 1777, during the Revolutionary War, another observer reported that the Dismal Swamp ‘was infested by concealed royalists, and runaway negroes, who could not be approached with safety.”
Before the Revolution, Africans comprised perhaps half of the runaways. Shocked and bewildered by their enslavement, Africans defected at the earliest opportunity. They were the least acculturated slaves, still bearing the marks and scars of African rituals. [Siphiwe note: My sons, since it is likely that your great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather was taken when he was a boy, this may explain why he did not escape to the Dismal Swamp which would have been very similar to the situation of his moranca back in Guinea. In otherwords, terrorized and indoctrinated as a boy, by the time he became a man, he had already integrated into plantation life unlike the mature African who escaped to the Dismal Swamp as soon as they arrived.]
As ignorant of African religions as Africans were of Anglicanism, missionaries decried the native beliefs of slaves. Slaves from Guinea, for instance, were said to be ‘strongly prepossessed in favor of superstition and Idolatry.’ [Siphiwe note: the Anglicans had been taught the false religion of Christianity that lacked the true knowledge or gnosis of our ancestors. Thus, unable to ‘understand’ or ‘explain’ the vital life force energy which our ancestors perceived in all things, the Anglicans, like foolish children, thought we worshiped pieces of wood and stones . . . . ]
Baptists and Methodists proved the most successful in conveying the message to blacks. Both denominations conducted services in a democratic atmosphere. Members called each other brothers and sisters, emphasized fellowship, and shunned the rank and deference of the Anglican church. In its fledgling years the Methodists, denounced slavery as an evil institution, and Methodist preachers were instructed to approach the Negroes and whites on a basis of religious equality. Between 1782 and 1790 the number of Methodists in North Carolina grew to more than 8,000 whites and nearly 1,800 blacks. In 1785 Tar Heel Methodists even considered forcing slaveholders to manumit their slaves as a condition of membership. [Siphiwe note: My sons, here then is a rationale for why your great, great, great grandfather John Addison founded the Union Bethel African Methodist Church in 1898 on North Academy Street, in Wake, North Carolina].
To raise white troops for the Continental Line, the North Carolina legislature in 1780 offered ‘one prime slave between the age of fifteen and thirty years’ to soldiers who signed up for three years…. To the master class, however, protection of slavery remained a paramount goal of the Revolution. When Georgia and South Carolina slaveholders tried to sue for recovery of their confiscated slaves after the war, the North Carolina legislature swiftly passed laws affirming the titles to Negroes then held by North Carolinians.
Research in They Had No King: Ella Baker and the Politics of Decentralized Organization Among African Descended Populations John Horhn shows that,
“During 17th century the Balanta learned how to create rice paddies and flotillas within the estuarial zones of the Guinea Bissau coast. The b’alante b’ndang would organize the labor of blufos to construct dikes and tidal pools surrounded by the white mangrove trees that pervaded the coastal area. The artificial pools would flood, filling the interior with fresh water filtered from the surrounding barriers encompassing the pools. The water would slowly flood and kill the roots of the white mangroves used to anchor the pool in position. The pool could then be harvested using wooden tools because of the fragile nature of the rotten roots of the white mangrove trees. These rice cultivation techniques would be practiced into the colonial era and would be transported with enslaved Balanta captives to the North Carolina and Virginia regions of British North America. Bought to secure labor for the early colonial tobacco industry they would eventually pioneer the rice industry that expanded in these areas.
The Balanta ethnic group has a recorded presence in the Portuguese colonies of Suriname and Brazil. Their presence in the British colonial areas of the Carolinas and Virginia are evident in the history of those regions rice production industry.
The Guinea-Bissau region produced a disproportionately large number of captive Africans from the early-18th century until 1810, populations which were distributed throughout the Chesapeake region, Carolinas, and Georgia. The evidence reflects that the majority of African captives taken from Guinea-Bissau were sourced from the coastal littoral regions inhabited by the Balanta and other acephalous societies. A large percentage of these captives were therefore ethnic Balanta, Diola, and Bijago, ethnic groups who were renowned for their tidal rice farming techniques. Their presence in North America not only brought change to rice industry, but also affected the political economy of early America, when escaped African captives began to form maroon societies.
The latest and most complete data available for the trans-Atlantic slave trade provides empirical confirmation of the importance of the West African Rice Coast and West-Central Africa in supplying captives to the South Carolina and Georgia markets. Of the 171,538 captives who disembarked in the Carolinas, 54,425 or 32 percent of the total embarked slaving vessels in West Africa’s Rice Coast region. This figure is larger than the 44,432 captives that originated in West-Central Africa, constituting 26 percent of the total. Of the 15,240 captives to disembark in Georgia, 6,832 (45 percent of the total) originated in West Africa’s Rice Coast region.”
Alan D. Watson writes in African Americans in Early North Carolina: A Documentary History,
“Slaves exhibited their opposition to bondage in various ways. From obstinate behavior, to petty theft, to felonious crimes, they challenged the slave code. Most were disciplined by slave owners. Those committing felonies might be tried in slave courts, legally sanctioned judicial bodies that possessed plenary powers of investigation and judgment. In addition to the slave courts, the slave patrols represented the principal means by which white society attempted to maintain control over slaves. The patrollers searched the living quarters of slaves for weapons, apprehended runaways, guarded against insurrections, and in general enforced the slave code. Still, the patrol, like the slave courts, proved less than fully effective in intimidating or restraining the actions of slaves. . . .
Unable to endure their bondage, countless slaves ran away, and some even threatened to engage in insurrection, though such organized action never materialized in North Carolina. Runaways, whether recent arrivals or long-time inhabitants of North Carolina, departed singly and in groups. A few looked for temporary respite from the rigors of slavery; most sought permanent freedom.
The arrival of the British military in North Carolina during the American Revolution offered an immediate opportunity for some slaves to obtain their freedom by fleeing to British lines. Otherwise, runaways tried to make their way to safety in nearby colonies or states, took surreptitious passage by boat from North Carolina, or hid in inaccessible areas such as swamps, where their presence was difficult to detect and dislodge.
In 1800, North Carolina’s 7,043 free African Americans constituted 5.3 percent of the state’s black population, but only 1.5% of the total population. Relatively few lived in town: 144 in New Bern, 67 in Fayetteville, 19 in Wilmington, and 18 in Raleigh. Free blacks in North Carolina suffered from legal discrimination, though many led lives resembling those of average non-slaveholding whites. Nonetheless, their color set them apart, and their greatest apprehension was enslavement or re-enslavement by unscrupulous whites.”
The History of American Women Blog has a section entitled “Slavery in North Carolina” which states,
“Many of the first slaves in North Carolina were brought to the colony from the West Indies or other surrounding colonies, but a significant number were brought from Africa. . . . Because of its geography, North Carolina did not play a large part in the early slave trade. The string of islands that make up its Outer Banks made it dangerous for slave ships to land on most of North Carolina’s coast, and most slave traders chose to land in ports to the north or south of the colony.
The one major exception is Wilmington – located on the Cape Fear River, it became a port for slave ships because of its accessibility. By the 1800s, blacks in Wilmington outnumbered whites 2 to 1. The town relied on slaves’ abilities in carpentry, masonry, and construction, as well as their skill in sailing and boating, for its growth and success. . . .
As in the colonial period, few North Carolina slaves lived on huge plantations. Fifty-three percent of slave owners in the state owned five or fewer slaves, and only 2.6 percent of slaves lived on farms with over 50 other slaves during the antebellum period. In fact, by 1850, only 91 slave owners in the whole state owned over 100 slaves.
Because they lived on farms with smaller groups of slaves, the social dynamic of slaves in North Carolina was somewhat different from their counterparts in other states, who often worked on plantations with hundreds of other slaves. In North Carolina, the hierarchy of domestic workers and field workers was not as developed as in the plantation system. There were fewer numbers of slaves to specialize in each job, so on small farms, slaves may have been required to work both in the fields and at a variety of other jobs at different times of the year.
Another result of working in smaller groups was that North Carolina slaves generally had more interaction with slaves on other farms. Slaves often looked to other farms to find a spouse and traveled to different farms to court or visit during their limited free time.
The Life of a Slave
Daily life for a slave in North Carolina was incredibly difficult. Slaves, especially those in the field, worked from sunrise until sunset. Even small children and the elderly were not exempt from these long hours. Slaves were generally allowed a day off on Sunday, and on holidays such as Christmas or the Fourth of July.
During their few hours of free time, most slaves performed their own personal work. The diet supplied by slaveholders was generally poor, and slaves often supplemented it by tending small gardens or fishing. Although there were exceptions, the prevailing attitude among slave owners was to allot their slaves the bare minimum of food and clothing.
Shelter provided by slave owners was also meager. Many slaves lived in small stick houses with dirt floors, not the log slave cabins often depicted in books and films. These shelters had cracks in the walls that let in cold and wind and had only thin coverings over the windows.
One area of their lives in which slaves were able to exercise some autonomy from their masters was creating a family. Slave owners felt it was to their advantage to allow slaves to marry, because any children from the marriage would add to their wealth. According to law, a child took on the legal status of its mother; a child born to a slave mother would in turn become a slave, even if the father was free.
Because the large plantations of the Lower South needed more slaves than the smaller farms of North Carolina, it was not uncommon for slaves in the state to be sold to slave traders who took them south to Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, or Alabama. Once a family member was sold and taken to the Deep South, they became almost impossible to locate or contact.
Although slaves had no way to publicly or legally complain about unfair treatment and abuse, they developed other methods of resistance. Slaves could slow down, pretend to be sick, or sabotage their work as a way to object against long hours of backbreaking labor. Slaves could also steal small amounts of food as a method of protesting their inadequate diet and providing for their families.
The Great Dismal Swamp, which is located in the northeastern part of the state and stretches from Edenton, North Carolina to Norfolk, Virginia, was a common destination for North Carolina runaways. The swamp was an ideal spot in which to hide and forage for food, and some escaped slaves chose to stay and make their homes there. The swamp was also known as a destination for escaped slaves from other states.
As in other states, the Underground Railroad developed in North Carolina to help escaped slaves reach safety. The North Carolina stops were primarily organized by members of the Religious Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers. Levi Coffin was well-known for assisting escaped slaves in Guilford County, North Carolina.
The North and the South clashed over the issue of slavery throughout the 1850s, and the conflict soon boiled over into Civil War. Southern slave owners felt they would quickly defeat the Union. The Union states had about 21 million people, while the Confederate states had approximately 9 million, and over three and a half million of those Southerners were slaves.”