White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (23 page)

Mathieson’s journey to Carolina took, by his account, nineteen weeks. If this was so, then everyone on board must have suffered 164

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terribly. Since voyages were expected to last eight or ten weeks, severe shortages of food and water must have caused real hardship.

Sickness would have become a major problem and many on board could have died. When the voyage ended, Mathieson’s afflictions were not at an end, as, together with his fellow deportees, he rebelled against being sold as an indentured servant.

Their cruelty to us was because we would not consent to our own selling or slavery; for then we were miserably beaten, and I especially received nine great blows upon my back very sore, by one of his sea-fellows, so that for some days I could not lift my head higher nor my breast; which strokes or blows I looked upon to be the beginning of all my bodily pains and diseases that have been upon me since that time until now.

By some chance (he does not tell us how), Mathieson and some of his colleagues escaped from the plantations in Carolina and sailed to Virginia, encountering a storm en route. From there, he and his companions travelled on. How they survived, we are not told but the options would not have gone beyond living from hand to mouth and taking labouring jobs when and where possible. After some period of time, Mathieson was forced to become indentured to keep body and soul together:

. . . whereafter soon I fell sick; and during which sickness I was kindly entertained and taken care of by the man and his wife in whose house I lay, and with whom I had bound myself. For, albeit we had escaped from them that had brought us over, and could not work to them, yet we behoved to work for something to bring us back again. From thence I came to New York on my journey homeward, where I agreed with a shipmaster to bring me to London.

When he finally returned to Scotland, Mathieson had an unusual and poignant homecoming at his farm at harvest time: 165

WHITE CARGO

When he entered the house, his wife was busy preparing dinner for the reapers. She did not recognise him, but took him for a traveller, who had come in to rest himself. She pressed him to take some refreshment, which he did, when she went out to the field with a portion for the reapers.

As she went out, he rose, and followed her at a respectful distance. She turned round, and fancying he had not been satisfied with her hospitality, said to the bystanders, ‘The man wants a second dinner.’ The words drew the eyes of the reapers on him, when one of his sons whispers to his mother, ‘If my father be alive, it is him.’ She turned round, looked into the stranger’s face for a moment, and then ran to his embrace, crying out, ‘My husband!’7

As elsewhere, transportation of undesirables of any and every sort became good business in Scotland. The impetus for the founding of Scottish settlements in America came from a proposal from the Provost of Linlithgow to the Scottish Privy Council in 1681, urging that the advantage of such colonies was that they would

‘void the country of very many both idle and dissenting persons’.8

The good Provost was acting for a group of merchants who stood to make a profit from the transportation of human cargo to the colonies. A few months later, one of those merchants, Walter Gibson – the same man who had expedited the transportation of William Mathieson – wrote to the Privy Council that he was willing to carry to the colonies ‘thieves or robbers sentenced by the Lords of Judiciary or other judges, to be banished thither, and all sorners [vagabonds], lusty beggars or gypsies’.9

Gibson got his warrant. Magistrates were ordered to give into his tender care those who had been convicted of minor crimes and thus would normally clutter up the prisons and be a burden on the parishes:

strong and idle beggars, gypsies, or other vagabond persons who live by stouth [probably here meaning strong-arm tactics] and robbery and have no visible means to support themselves . . . to the effect that they be transported to the 166

DISSENT IN THE NORTH

petitioner’s ships to the plantations and the country freed of them.

As in Ireland and England, Scotland was fortunate to find that its social and colonial policies could fit so comfortably with the needs of its merchants and even of those lawyers and worthies holding senior official positions.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE PLANTER FROM ANGOLA

All through these middle years of the seventeenth century, a vast trade in black slaves was developing but it largely passed by the English colonies on the mainland. The ‘twenty and odd Negroes sold’ in Point Comfort in 1619 were no more or less enslaved than the free-willers or convicts they would have encountered on the shore. It took decades more for the plantation owners of the Chesapeake to begin to buy people in any numbers from the black slave market and much longer for the legal edifice of black bondage to evolve. The story of an African who is believed to have been among those arriving in 1619 shows that the onset of racial slavery in America had the most unlikely twists and turns.

Anthony Johnson, as the African came to be known, not only secured his freedom but also became a successful planter himself and went on to buy servants of his own, white as well as black.

Thirty years after Johnson first touched American soil, he got into a dispute with a servant, a fellow African who was demanding his freedom. Johnson resolved it by persuading a court to enslave the man for life. This was one of the first cases of lifetime slavery being imposed in North America – a black man playing one of the villains in the ghastly tragedy that was beginning to unfold.

The Africans from the
White Lion
are thought to have been bought originally by the two wealthiest planters in Virginia. One was Sir George Yeardley, Governor of the colony, a venal man who 169

WHITE CARGO

seems to have acquired more white servants than anyone else in those early days of the colony.1 The other was Abraham Piersey, the Virginia Company’s trading agent. It is widely claimed that this transaction marked the beginning of slavery: that almost from the start the men and women from the
White Lion
were a separated class, lower in status than all those around them. The picture is of Johnson and the other Africans suffering greater debilities, subject to more degradation than the white servants: one colour chained and kicked; the other merely chained. English racism was supposedly at work, dividing black and white from the moment the Angolans trooped ashore.

In reality, however, the Africans appear to have been treated as indentured servants, no different from the English servants. Racism may well have existed, but in the rush to profit, the colour of a field labourer was a secondary consideration. Having enough hands to hoe the next 10,000 tobacco hills was paramount. Black mixed with white in the tobacco labour gang and would continue do so into the next century in some places.

As the African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr puts it: Not only in Virginia but also in New England and New York, the first Blacks were integrated into a forced labor system that had little or nothing to do with skin color. That came later. But in the interim, a fateful 40-year period of primary importance in the history of America, Black men and women worked side by side with the first generation of Whites, cultivating tobacco, clearing the land, and building roads and houses.2

Between the servants themselves, there appears to have been little if any racism. According to the African-American historian Audrey Smedley: ‘Early references to blacks reveal little clear evidence of general or widespread social antipathy on account of their colour.’ Professor Smedley writes: ‘Records show a fairly high incidence of co-operation among black and white servants and unified resistance to harsh masters.’3 The earlier historian of servitude Edmund S. Morgan found hints ‘that the 170

THE PLANTER FROM ANGOLA

two despised groups initially saw each other as sharing the same predicament’.4

Perhaps the story would have been different had the sale of the
White Lion
’s cargo triggered an overpowering influx of Africans. It had no such impact. No one’s eyes in London or in Jamestown seem to have been opened at this point to the possibilities of using African labour in any major way and for some time only limited numbers of Africans were shipped in. Over the next ten years, several English privateers reportedly did arrive in the Chesapeake with Africans for sale, and men and women were brought in from Dutch territory and from the West Indies, but Virginia continued to rely on the white servant trade. By the mid-seventeenth century, Africans numbered only 300 out of a total settler population of 11,000.

From these small numbers there emerged some stories of individual success. After their indentured period expired, a handful of Africans went on to secure land of their own and to prosper.

They ‘apparently had no difficulty in acquiring property of their own and engaged in business and commercial activities on the basis of equality with whites,’ writes Professor Smedley. ‘Some black men of substance even acquired slaves of their own.’

Anthony Johnson became one such man of substance. His first Jamestown master appears to have sold him to another very wealthy man, Edward Bennett, a merchant ship owner. In 1622, Bennett sent Johnson and fifty or more servants to clear the woods for a plantation on the James River at a point now known as Fort Boykin.

The merchant called the plantation Bennett’s Welcome. His party arrived at the site in February 1622. The following month, before a palisade could be built, the Powhatan Confederacy launched its Good Friday massacre. Anthony Johnson was one of only twelve survivors of the attack at Bennett’s Welcome.

Johnson spent up to another dozen years as a servant before being freed and allotted a tract of land to farm on the Pungoteague River. Over the next three decades, he built a sizeable land-holding and imported more than a dozen servants, some English, some African. The headrights claimed on these people helped Johnson accumulate 1,000 acres. Perhaps the only marked difference between Johnson and the white planters around him was the name 171

WHITE CARGO

that he gave his Northampton County plantation. He called it Angola.

The American dream was also coming true for several other Africans imported as indentured servants. But after 1640, the prospects for Africans overall were worsening right across the eastern seaboard of America. English colonies on the mainland had begun edging in different ways towards racial slavery and at a different pace, with the men in power quite possibly having little idea of where they were heading. Massachusetts, for instance, goes down in history as the first colony to legalise slavery – but no race was targeted when it did so. Indeed, at first glance the Massachusetts declaration on slavery reads more as a trumpet blast for freedom than the reverse. It announces: ‘There shall never be any bond slavery, villinage or captivity amongst us’ and then lists the exceptions – everyone from prisoners of war to ‘such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us’ and anyone else ‘judged thereto by authority’.5

The worsening position of the Africans manifested itself first in the lifetime enslavement of isolated individuals. Who this first happened to isn’t known. But the earliest recorded cases are of men who were being punished for running away, and, what is more, for running away together with white servants. The whites they ran with received especially vicious punishment, too, though short of enslavement for life. This would be reserved for blacks.

The runaway is one of the constants throughout the history of American servitude. From the dreaded days of Sir Thomas Dale, men and women were slipping away into the forests or taking to the water in the hope of finding refuge with Native Americans or losing themselves in another colony. They would continue to do so long after the English period and up to the American Civil War. To run was the only resort of the desperate servant/slave.

Judging from the increasingly harsh deterrents adopted from the 1630s, more and more were running as the seventeenth century advanced.

As with virtually every servant crime, the first stage of punishment was a whipping. In Virginia, constables apprehending runaways were instructed to administer an immediate whipping and every 172

THE PLANTER FROM ANGOLA

constable who escorted them on the journey back to the plantation was told to follow suit: ‘Every constable into whose hands the captive shall be committed shall . . . whip him severely.’6

Maryland flirted briefly with making ‘desertion’ a capital offence but instead adopted the Virginia way – slapping an extra stretch of time on the servants’ indenture period. At first, the formula was two days’ extra servitude for every day on the run but in Virginia that escalated to five days for every day absent and in Maryland to ten days. Other colonies followed the Chesapeake lead but were generally content with the two-for-one ratio. But all added something else to the extra time a runaway faced – compensation for the cost of hunting him or her down. Some planters’ expense claims were staggering, including such items as the planter hiring his own horse to himself. At the end of it, someone who had tasted perhaps a few months of freedom faced years of extra slavery.

This harshness reflected the planters’ determination to stamp on all signs of dissent at a time when the whiff of insurrection was beginning to spread. Discontent could be scented across the Chesapeake in a series of mini-rebellions and plots and acts of violence on the plantations in which black and white servants acted together. In this atmosphere, escape attempts were viewed as part of the same movement.

In 1640, the Virginia planter Hugh Gwyn raised a hue and cry over three servants who had escaped into Maryland. One was a Scot, one a Dutchman and one, John Punch, was an African.

On hearing the news that they had been caught and detained in Maryland, their master Gwyn decided to have the three sold where they had been picked up. That would save him the extra expense of bringing them back in chains and produce enough cash to purchase more tractable servants. However, the idea of runaway servants possibly going unpunished mortified the Virginia court. It ruled against such a ‘pernicious precedent’ and in June 1640 asked the Governor of Maryland to have the three returned to Virginia for ‘such exemplary and condign punishment as the nature of their offence shall justly deserve’.7