SLO 10: What Were Their Influences

As mentioned in previous posts my research is looking at the time surrounding the American Revolution 1763-1783. During the year of 1776, African Americans comprised about 20% of the entire population in the 13 mainland colonies (Zagarri)”. African American’s were a large group of people during the time of America becoming a nation of it’s own. Their presence during the war was not always acknowledged but they did have an influence, for both sides. The colonies shut down ports in a boycott against Britain. African slave soldiers of the tens of thousands were sent into the war. British made a deal with some that if they fight on the British lines they would be granted their freedom, America soon made the same arrangement for some. This directly affected the war and the history that was in the making.

Not only did their wartime presence help the cause of the American Revolution but their enforced labor help make the country of industrialism it is today.  The plantations were mimicking those that were already established in other parts of the world, such as sugar plantations. Here in America it was cotton. The south making up for the majority of the slave holdings had a more desired need for them. During the Revolution, the demand on slaves decreased though directly after the war the demand reached new heights.  After South Carolina reopened the trade in 1787 and when it legally ended in 1808, 100,000 Africans were purchased during those years (Berlin, Ira).

After, the American Revolution the Constitution was constructed. Several individuals did not feel that this document was one they could stand behind; some took the regard to burn copies. Others referred to this text as the “slave holder document (Horton, James)”. Slaves were considered property and this may have been why there are great lengths about property protection in the Constitution. Also, it is very limited in the wording about free man. The freed slaves, even the ones that helped in the fight to become a free nation, did not receive the same protection under the Constitution.

"During the time of the slave trade new culture was being created. The captives’ nationality was no more random than their age or sex. Europeans slavers developed specialties, in some measure to meet the demands of their customers on both sides of the Atlantic, whose preferences and needs grew increasingly well defined over time. Preferences on both side of the Atlantic determined, to a considerable degree, which enslaved Africans went where and when, populating the mainland with unique combinations of African peoples and creating distinctive regional variations in the Americas. Igbo peoples constituted the majority of African slaves in Virginia and Maryland, so much so that some historians have denominated colonial Virginia as “Igbo land.” A different pattern emerged in Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia, where slaves from central Africa predominated from the beginning of large-scale importation, so that if Virginia was Igbo land, the Lowcountry might be likened to a new Angola.

But if patterns of African settlement can be discerned, they never created regional homogeneity. The general thrust of the slave trade was toward heterogeneity, throwing different people together in ways that undermined the transfer of any single culture. Mainland North America became a jumble of African nationalities. Their interaction—not their homogeneity—created new African American culture… But slowly, inexorably, the survivors made the new land their own. Transplanted Africans began to master the languages of North America, learned to traverse the countryside, formed friendships, pieced together new lineages from real and fictive kin, and created a new sacred world. Their children, who knew no other land, took root in American soil and made the land that had been forced on their parents their own. Like most other Americans, they too were the children of immigrants—but immigrants of a very different kind (Berlin, Ira)”.

Berlin, Ira. "The Origins of Slavery." The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 May 2016. 

Slavery And The Constituiton. By. James Horton. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 May 2016.

Zagarri, Rosemarie, PHD. "Slavery in Colonial British North America." Teaching History.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2016.