South Carolina/African Bondage
"A group declaring themselves the Corporation of Barbados Adventurers wrote to England on August 12, 1663, offering to establish a colony in the unsettled lands south of Virginia, an area that had become known as "Carolina in ye West Indies."
“Records from the Public Record Office, London, at the South Carolina Archives.” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 85, no. 4, South Carolina Historical Society, 1984, pp. 330–34, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27567876.
South Carolina and Georgia held its first enslaved captives in 1526 as part of a Spanish expedition from the Caribbean. A little over a century later, English Loyalist began with cultivating agriculture. By 1708, South Carolina held a Black Majority mainly due to the Caribbean Middle Passages and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Africans suffered much cruelty, and thousands lost their lives at early ages as a result of adverse conditions and brutality in the colonial era of South Carolina and other colonies. It is a holocaust that requires reverence for its victims and reproach. From the perspective of European men, slavery was business, thousands of Africans perished, yet the aftermath brought the descendants perseverance impart due to the institution. Not all was lost.
John Hope Franklin, in his book "Slavery to Freedom", describes that Africans were skilled and diligent in their abilities to cultivate goods for trade and maintain their communities. These transfer skills from their homeland provided the enslaved along with free men and women the ability to work toward landownership also pathways to homogeneous support systems. At the beginning of Reconstruction leading up to the 20th century as Blacks became eager to have a stake in America, several became heavily involved in South Carolinas legislative process. On the national level Blacks contributed to the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company. Many efforts were derailed, however. History notes, pushback in the form of Jim Crow, and other oppressive laws and divisive forces which plagued the Reconstruction Phase and beyond. Today, although the descendants of enslaved and freedmen, have face challenges the Gullah-Geechee still maintain equity in South Carolina. Also, communities continue to thrive, despite obstacles, as several work to secure their property with the help of various agencies, legal aid, and strong family connections.
The Last arriving slave ships to North America
South Carolina was among a few states that did not adhere to the Slave Trade Act of 1794 and the Importation Laws of 1807. On the eve of 1858, a ship called the Wanderer carrying illegal cargo landed near the South Carolina border at Jekyll Island. On board was a large cargo of approximately 400 enslaved people; the ship was stopped and confiscated. The last boat to arrive in the Americas was off the coast of Alabama in 1860, the Clotilda. Its 110 African captives were known to be from Dahomey, what is current-day Benin, Nigeria.
Africans are the oldest human groups known to mankind. On a grand scale, Africans developed thriving commercial centers throughout their continent. Egypt, Lower Kingdom, Upper Kingdom, and Nubia cultures predated civilizations by millennium. Into the 13th and 14th centuries, kingdoms such as Mali became enormous commercial centers for exchanging trade and ideas. Likewise, West Coast Africans thrived as cultivators in agriculture and contributed earthen works, textiles, and metals. At this time in history, Africa had a population of 500 million.
Slavery was not new to Africa. Africans were subjected to an extensive internal slave trade in the 7th BCE of roughly 11 million people (map below). This trade was a frontrunner to the Transatlantic and Middle Passages and waned (but did not stop entirely) as the Africans were captured and redirected to plantations in the Americas beginning in the 15th century. Pope Nicolas V, who initiated a commission, gave permission and started the Portuguese Slave Trade in 1453.
Liberation
Joseph Bologne, aka Chevalier de Saint-George (R) (December 25th, 1745 – June 9th, 1799), was a Master French violinist, conductor, composer, and soldier. He was the product of an interracial union, his father was a plantation owner,
and his mother was an enslaved mistress.
At a young age, Joseph's father realized that his son was gifted and sent him to France for further studies. Joseph was highly honored by Mozart, Marie Antoinette, and American leaders.
He was named Chevalier for his exceptional musical abilities
and later used his voice to speak out against slavery.
Olaudah Equiano was just one such prominent individual who fought for the causes of abolition. As a member of the Sons of Africa (1787), he served as an advocate, bringing issues concerning the British government against slavery. Others included social-political abolitionist voices such as Mary Prince, William Wilberforce, John Stuart aka Ottobah Cugoano, and several more, along with assistance from Quakers and Anglicans, caused
a demand for reform. Their efforts resulted in Parliament producing aggressive laws such as the Regulated Slave Trade Act or Dolben's Act (1788). This mandate restricted ships to liable standards, limiting how many enslaved people would be carried at any time. In 1807, The Slave Trade Act was established with further limitations, legislation was provided, and the final passage of the Slavery Abolition Act was produced in 1833. While Britain's general population sought to obey the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, some merchants continued slavery through illegal apprenticeship. Contracts meant to release apprentices at the end of their term developed into de facto slavery. Several went without pay in exchange for work, somewhere given subpar living conditions.
It took a lot of work to get ahead adding decades or more of servitude without pay. Laws were put in place in 1838 to finalize apprenticeship exploitation.
American lawmakers applied similar laws around 1807 and retrospectively in the 1790s. However, this would not be enough for plantation owners to comply. It would take countless abolitionists to stand against slavery for the institution, numerous Federal and State appeals, and finally,
a culminating bloody Civil War before freedom became available for the enslaved.
The Emancipation Proclamation was enacted on January 1st, 1863, to restrict slavery in the United States. This action angered those who loved the free profits from free labor, especially plantation owners. To appease them, the Federal Government provided a bailout of sorts. In the wake, the landowners devised creative ideas to secure continual residuals, such as tenant/sharecropping and apprentice arrangements unfavorable
to the newly freed. The rest is history.
Source: https://aas.princeton.edu/news/when-slaveowners-got-reparations
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Published - January 1st-2015