Denmark Vesey

From Chapter One A black slave stepped upon the ground that would later be the district of Charleston. In early April 1670, the 220-ton frigate Carolina, six months out from the island of Barbados, entered the waters forming what is now Charleston Harbor. The ship sailed up a shallow river to a point overlooked by a heavily wooded bluff, and there about twenty white Barbadians disembarked as part of the first permanent English-speaking settlement in South Carolina. Although no one recorded the name, the Barbadians had brought with them a black slave to work the new colony. Slavery thus was present from the beginning in South Carolina, uniquely among the North American colonies, where in all other cases it was introduced only after their founding. And for the next two centuries, South Carolina would maintain its preeminence. From the arrival of the white men from Barbados in the seventeenth century to the U.S. prohibition of slave importation in 1807, over one-fourth of all African slaves brought and sold into the United States--at least 132,918 people--entered through Charleston or one of South Carolina's lesser ports. Hence, among the current African-American population of the United States in the late twentieth century, roughly one in four has an ancestor who was sold as a slave at Charleston. There is no reason to think these figures would have displeased the men from Barbados as the Carolina found slippage between the trees at the riverbank. They had come to South Carolina intending to grow rich on a slave economy, just as had their fathers on the small island they had left. Barbados, a piece of "sixpence throwne down" upon a sailor's map of the eastern Caribbean, as one contemporary chronicler described it, was at the time of the Carolina settlement the most densely populated, the richest, and the most lethal of the English colonies in the New World. Established less than fifty years before the Carolina expedition, Barbados also was the first English colony to introduce the gang-labor system of black slavery into the New World. Rather than encouraging the immigration of a free peasantry, the early settlers chose to import African slaves to work the sugar fields which they were clearing on this once rain-forested Caribbean island. Barbadians, as this first generation of Englishmen called themselves, became known throughout the Caribbean as hard masters. They imposed their will upon their new African laborers by frequent floggings, brandings, and mutilations; and by thus coercing large gangs of slaves to repeat monotonously the same task for ten or eleven hours--slashing the sugarcane with curved knives, grinding the canes between heavy stones, then boiling out the dark molasses to produce crystallized white sugar--the Barbadians became rich. By mid-century, Barbados was contributing nearly half of the refined sugar sent to the European market, and it had become the first English settlement to have formed a plantation ruling class. Within two generations, this island with a population in 1660 of forty thousand blacks and whites had produced a planter elite of about sixty-two families who controlled local politics, held the most arable land, and owned the most slaves. Practically all the European visitors to the island in the seventeenth century remarked upon the display of wealth and extravagant consumption of the Barbadian elite--behavior to be repeated, as several scholars of the South have noted, by their South Carolina descendants into the lifetime of Denmark Vesey. There was to be in common between these two ruling classes in the Caribbean and in South CarolinaRobertson, David is the author of 'Denmark Vesey' with ISBN 9780679442882 and ISBN 067944288X.