Abstract
“Your image has been always riveted in my heart, from which neither time nor fortune have been able to remove it; so that, while the thought[s] of your sufferings have damp[en]ed my prosperity, they have mingled with adversity and increased its bitterness,” wrote Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa, as he reflected about the fate of his beloved sister. In 1756, one woman and two men raided Isseke, Equiano’s village in present-day Nigeria, while the adults were working in a common field nearly an hour away by foot. The raiders kidnapped Olaudah, whose name means “the fortunate one,” and his sister. He was eleven years of age at the time.2 The children, descendants of a slaveholding Ibo chief, were aware of a previous battle between the Ibos and “their enemy.” The warfare resulted in taking prisoners who were kept within the community or sold away. Fighting among different ethnic and language groups was not unusual in this part of West Africa, and it probably intensified with the increased European demand for slaves.3
[Charlotte] did comfort me when I was torn from my dear native land. 1
—Sarah Margru
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John W. Barber, A History of the Amistad Captives: Being a Circumstantial Account of the Capture of the Spanish Schooner Amistad, by the Africans on Board; Their Voyage, and Capture Near Long Island, New York; With Biographical Sketches of each of the Surviving Africans. Also, An Account of The Trials Had on their Case, Before the District and Circuit Courts of the United States, Tor the District of Connecticut (New Haven: E. L. & J. W Barber, 1840), 3–5.
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Written by Himself edited by Robert J. Allison (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 47, 51.
See Vincent Carretta, “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity,” Slavery and Abolition (hereafter cited as S&A) 20 (December 1999): 96–103.
See Daniel L. Schafer, “Shades of Freedom: Anna Kingsley in Senegal, Florida and Haiti,” in Jane G. Landers, ed., Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 130–135;
Daniel L. Schafer, Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley: African Frincess, Florida Slave, Plantation Owner (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 4–8.
See also Shelia Lambert, ed., House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 68, George III, Minutes of Evidence on the Slave Trade 1788–1789 (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1975), 73–76 for testimony regarding how persons became enslaved in Africa.
David Eltis, “The Volume, Age/Sex Ratios, and African Impact of the Slave Trade: Some Refinements of Paul Lovejoy’s Review of the Literature,” Journal of African History 31 (1990), 489.
See Erik J. W Hofstee, “The Great Divide: Aspects of the Social History of the Middle Passage in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” (Michigan State University, Ph. D. diss., 2001), especially chapter two, “Children and Infants,” 64–105.
See Augustino, “‘It Was the Same as Pigs in a Sty’: A Young African’s Account of Life on a Slave Ship (1849),” in Robert Edgar Conrad, ed., Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984), 37–38;
Belinda (Belinda Royall), “Petition of an African Slave to the Legislature of Massachusetts (1782),” in Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 142–144;
Ottobah Cugoano, “Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species,” in Francis D. Adams and Barry Sanders, eds., Fhree Black Writers in Eighteenth Century England (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc., 1971);
Philip D. Curtin, ed., Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans form the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1967);
Florence Hall, “Memoir of Florence Hall” (unpublished ca. 1820) Powel Family Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania;
Jerome S. Handler, “Survivors of the Middle Passage: Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in British America,” S&A 23 (April 2002): 23–56;
Jerome Handler, “Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in Barbados,” S&A 19 (April 1998): 129–141;
Vernon H. Nelson, ed., “John Archibald Monteith: Native Helper and Assistant in the Jamaica Mission at New Carmel,” Transaction Moravian Historical Society 21 Part I (1966): 29–51;
Related by Himself in Arna Bontemps, ed., Five Black Lives: The Autobiographies of Venture Smith, fames Mars, William Grimes, The Rev. G. W. Offley, fames L. Smith (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 1–35.
See also David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., Trans-Adantic Slave Trade: A Database on CDROM (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Rbert E. Desrochers, Jr., “‘Not Fade Away’: The Narrative of Venture Smith, and African in the Early Republic,” fournal of American History (hereafter cited as JAH) 84 (June 1997), 40.
William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988), 56–60.
Robert Edgar Conrad, ed., Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984), 38.
Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the Literature,” fournal of African History 30 (1989), 374.
Philip A. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).
Colin Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 121;
Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. (Washington: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1930), II: 220;
David Eltis, “Fluctuations in the Age and Sex Ratios of Slaves in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Traffic,” Slavery and Abolition 7 (1986), 258;
Colin Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981);
R. Lynn Matson, “Phillis Wheatley–Soul Sister,” Phylon 33 (Fall 1972), 228;
Phillip M. Richards, “Phillis Wheatley and Literary Americanization,” American Quarterly 44 (June 1992), 166–167, 177.
Robert Edgar Conrad, ed., Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984), 38;
John W. Barber, A History of the Amistad Captives: Being a Circumstantial Account of the Capture of the Spanish Schooner Amistad, by the Africans on Board; Their Voyage, and Capture Near Long Island, New York; With Biographical Sketches of each of the Surviving Africans. Also, An Account of The Trials Had on their Case, Before the District and Circuit Courts of the United States, For the District of Connecticut (New Haven: E. L. & J. W. Barber, 1840), 14–15.
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43.
See Randy J. Sparks, “Two Princes of Calabar: An Atlantic Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom,” W&MQ 59 (July 2002), 562–563.
Donald Wax, “A Philadelphia Surgeon on a Slaving Voyage to Africa, 1749–1751,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 94 (1968), 483.
See George Metcalf, “A Microcosm of Why Africans Sold Slaves: Akan Consumption Patterns in the 1770s,” JAH 28 (1987): 377–394;
Robin Law, “Dahomey and the Slave Trade: Reflections on the Historiography of the Rise of Dahomey,” JAH 27 (1986), 243–247, for discussions focusing upon motives for engaging in the Atlantic slave trade.
See Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 68–70.
Michael L. Conniff and Thomas J. Davis, Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 41–44;
George Francis Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving (Westport: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 172–173.
John Thornton, “Sexual Demography: The Impact of the Slave Trade on Family Structure,” in Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed, eds., “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: A Reader in Black Women’s History (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, Inc., 1995), 58–59;
G. Ugo Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic,” W&MQ 58, (January 2001): 47–67.
Daniel P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865 (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 104–130.
Daniel P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865 (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 104–130.
James Pope-Hennessey, Sins of the Fathers: A Study of the Atlantic Slave Traders, 1441–1807 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 99.
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, “Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species,” in Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: Anthology of Black Authors in the English Speaking-World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 149;
Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell, eds., The Journal of a Slave Trader (John Newton) 1750–1754 (London: The Epworth Press, 1962), 75, 105;
David Richardson, “Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” W&MQ 58 (January 2001), 72.
See Antonio T Bly, “Crossing the Lake of Fire: Slave Resistance During the Middle Passage, 1720–1842,” Journal of Negro History 83 (Summer 1998): 178–186;
John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brazil, and The West Indies in His Majesty’s Ships, The Swallow and Weymouth (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1970), 73.
Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3–26;
See Ellen Nickenzie Lawson, “Children of the Amistad,” Instructor (February 1988): 44–48.
See J. C. Furnas, “Patrolling the Middle Passage,” in Robert M. Spector, ed., Readings in American History, 1607–1865 (New York: American Heritage Custom Publishing, 1993), 155–162;
Robert E. Desrochers, Jr., “Slave-For-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts, 1704–1781,” W&MQ 59 (July 2002): 623–664.
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup in Gilbert Osofsky, ed., Puttin On Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), 338.
See Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Youth in Bondage in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) for a discussion of enslaved children in the South.
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© 2005 Wilma King
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King, W. (2005). Africa’s Progeny Cast upon American Shores. In: African American Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73165-7_1
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