African Americans

Sources

Black Population. The number of enslaved and free Africans in both New France and the Spanish borderlands was small compared to the slave population of British North America. African slaves accompanied the Spanish who explored and settled the borderlands. In 1763 the Spanish evacuated from Florida eighty-seven free blacks and over three hundred slaves. Black slavery in the Spanish borderlands of the Southwest has not yet been studied extensively. Some black servants and slaves accompanied Juan de Oñate and the colonists he brought into New Mexico in 1598. Their numbers there in the colonial era do not appear to have been great since most slaves were Indian captives, as was the case also in Texas and Arizona. According to a census in 1779 there were 20 slaves out of a population of almost 4,000. Similarly, African slaves trickled into New France, numbering about 1,000 in Canada and 450 in the Illinois Country by 1750. Louisiana had perhaps 4,000 slaves by 1732 and an even larger number by the time France ceded the territory to Spain in 1763. In contrast, of the 1.2 million colonists in British North America perhaps 250,000 were African slaves by 1750. They numbered almost 500,000 by 1776. Most were located in the colonial South, where South Carolina had a black majority by 1730, but slavery existed in the Middle Colonies and New England as well.

Catholic Colonies. The Catholic Church mightily influenced the nature of slavery and slave education in both the Spanish and French colonies. In the Spanish borderlands the church catechized and baptized black slaves as well as Indian slaves, thereby acknowledging that bondsmen possessed souls and were not mere chattel. Under church law slaves could marry, and their family life was to be respected. Masters were expected to provide minimum care for their slaves and not punish them unreasonably. In Spanish America slaves were often allowed to earn money to buy their freedom, and manumission was rather commonplace. Moreover, because of the lack of Spanish women, Spanish men married African women. These conditions are the reasons there were more free blacks than slaves in Spanish America by the end of the colonial era. Aside from some religious training, slaves were usually educated in a particular calling, whether household servant, cook, carpenter, or other artisan. Their training began in childhood and led naturally into its adult role. Literacy training for all but the elite was scarce in the Spanish borderlands, and one may assume that few blacks, slave or free, received much schooling. A similar situation prevailed in New France, where the Catholic Church was much concerned with both public and private behavior of the colonists. In 1685 Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s chief minister, issued a Code Noir (Black Code) for the French West Indies that also applied in Canada and Louisiana. Indians as well as blacks were enslaved in New France, but after 1700 black slaves became the norm. All slaves were to receive religious instruction and be converted to Catholicism. As in the Spanish borderlands, slave marriages were allowed and family life respected. However, frontier conditions, especially in Louisiana, kept the Code Noir from being rigorously enforced. Particularly in Louisiana, some black women who became concubines to white men won their freedom and that of their children born under the union. Such free black children might be schooled and otherwise well educated, but generally slave children seldom got any schooling and were much more apt to learn through formal or informal apprenticeship their life’s work.

New Netherland. Under Roman-Dutch law slavery was a recognized status with certain basic protections for those enslaved. There were both slaves and free blacks in New Netherland, and slavery became quite common, but a slave code was never instituted. Consequently, the status of a slave was more flexible in New Netherland than in most places of colonial America. The Dutch West India Company, which made huge profits importing Africans slaves into Brazil and Spanish America, owned most of the slaves before 1650. The Dutch West India Company was known to manumit bondsmen who served it well. Other slaves were granted “half-freedom” by the company, thus allowing them to live in family groupings and to own property while still working for the company when called upon to do so. As the white population increased in the 1650s, so did the number of privately owned slaves. Whether slave or free, most black parents taught their children the trades they knew, including housekeeping, farming, and craft. Blacks joined the Dutch Reformed Church at New Amsterdam, some of whom may well have been slaves. Whether enslaved or free, Africans were given religious instruction by the domines, though the latter sometimes suspected that slaves wanted baptism for themselves and their children to mitigate the hardship of their bondage. One might assume that few blacks got any schooling in New Netherland, but Peter Stuyvesant hired a schoolmaster for the slave children on his farm, where free blacks’ children probably also received instruction. Free black parents, on occasion, apprenticed their children to whites who promised to treat them well and bring them up in a trade. In 1664, when the English captured New Netherland, there were about five hundred slaves scattered about the colony, concentrated in and around New Amsterdam, where at least seventy-five free blacks lived and worked. Despite the hardships of slavery and racial prejudice, blacks in New Amsterdam shared a community of interest that ran from slavery to freedom in which families and neighbors assisted one another in educating the young as in so much else.

British Colonies. In the Chesapeake colonies slaves were early on taught the laborious tasks that attended growing tobacco, stripping it from the stalk, curing it, and preparing it for shipment to England. Young slaves were also introduced by their elders to household work in the master’s home and to the many arts and crafts that became an integral part of life on the larger plantations. However, literacy training was generally deemed inappropriate for blacks, given racial prejudice and their servile status. Even the issue of religious instruction aroused controversy because of the popular notion that Christians could not enslave fellow Christians. Would not conversion, symbolized by baptism, transform the infidel or heathen slave into a free Christian man or woman? That question made the catechizing of slaves problematic, especially in the colonial South. However, between 1664 and 1706 all the southern colonies, plus New York, passed laws declaring that baptism did not “alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom.”

Reluctance. Despite such legislative assurance most colonial slave owners remained reluctant to give their slaves religious instruction. In 1724 the Anglican rector of Dorchester, Saint George’s Parish, in South Carolina, reported, “I have hitherto indeavored in vain to prevail with their masters to convince them of the necessity of having their slaves made Christians.” In 1740 South Carolina prohibited teaching slaves to read and write under penalty of £100. Slave and free blacks were less likely to be catechized, or even to attend white Anglican congregations, in South Carolina than elsewhere. Some blacks were also given literacy training, but that was certainly the exception. In Virginia a charity school for orphans, poor children, and Negroes opened in 1750 and operated for a few years in Saint Peter’s Parish, and there is evidence that several schools, especially after 1750, admitted at least some blacks, slave and free. Despite the law prohibiting teaching literacy skills to slaves, blacks were taught at schools in Charleston. Due largely to the work of Commissary Alexander Garden, the most significant of these was founded by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.) in 1743 and functioned for the next twenty years, having as many as sixty students at one time. S.P.G. missionaries scattered throughout the Carolinas and Georgia also provided religious instruction and some literacy training to slaves and free blacks on occasion. Quakers in Virginia and the Carolinas preached the Christian message to blacks and sometimes taught them literacy skills, as did various Presbyterian divines. However, without denigrating the impact upon the individuals involved, both white and black, such religious and educational activities were intermittent and affected relatively few African Americans.

New England. By the time of the American Revolution, less than 3 percent of the population of New England were African Americans; most lived in and around Boston. In the seventeenth century John Eliot was an early advocate of catechizing blacks, though there is little indication that his voice was much heeded in that regard. In 1717 Cotton Mather, who advocated more religious instruction for blacks, was a leading spirit behind the founding of a short-lived charity school for Africans and Indians in Boston. There is also evidence that some children of free blacks attended schooling with white children at various times in New England. Again, though, literacy training for blacks was quite limited and took place largely in the household rather than the classroom. A remarkable prodigy by any standard, the young Phillis Wheatley, a slave girl brought from Africa in 1761, learned both English and Latin in her master’s household and became the leading black poetess of her day.

Middle Colonies. Because of the work of the S.P.G. and the Quakers, there may have been more formal instructions of slaves and free blacks in the Middle Colonies than elsewhere in British America. In New York, Dutch Reformed domines continued their limited ministry to catechizing blacks, slave and free. Much more systematic after 1700 were Anglican efforts, especially in New York City. Under the auspices of the S.P.G., Elias Neau, a Huguenot refugee and merchant by trade, opened a catechetical school in the evening for adult slaves in 1704. Neau was an extraordinary teacher whose success at catechizing was roundly praised and prevailed against strong opposition in the wake of the slave revolt in New York City in 1712. Upon Neau’s death in 1722 William Huddleston, master of the S.P.G.-sponsored charity school, continued Neau’s work. Huddleston was followed by a succession of young Anglican clerics—James Wetmore, James Colgan, Richard Charlton, and Samuel Auchmuty. Between 1728 and 1734 John Beasley conducted an S.P.G. school for whites in Albany, where he also taught blacks reading, writing, and Christianity. Outside New York City S.P.G. ministers reported little instruction among African Americans, whether slave or free. In Pennsylvania prominent Quakers opened a school for black children in 1700. Growing Quaker opposition to slavery produced more opportunities for blacks to obtain schooling in Pennsylvania, though the extent to which this occurred is difficult to determine. In 1738 the Moravian brethren began a short-lived mission to blacks at Bethlehem. In Philadelphia the Anglican Christ’s Church began a school just for black children in 1758, as did another Anglican congregation, Saint Paul’s. The antislavery leader Anthony Benezet prodded Quakers to found a school for both black and white children in 1770.

Sources

John Calam, Parsons and Pedagogues: The S.P.G. Adventure in American Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971);

Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970);

Donald Everett, “Free Persons of Color in Colonial Louisiana,” Louisiana History, 7 (1966): 221-250;

Philip S. Foner, History of Black Americans from Africa to the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975);

Joyce Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks: The Evolution of a Slave Society at New Amsterdam,” New York History,59 (1978): 125-144;

Lorenzo Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776 (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1942);

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992);

Edgar J. McManus, Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1973);

McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1966);

Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988);

Jean R. Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985);

Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971);

Donald R. Wright, African-Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins Through the American Revolution (Arlington Heights, III.: Harlan Davidson, 1990).