CAPTIVES OF WAR
In
the aftermath of the brutal Portuguese invasion into the Ndongo kingdom,
historian Manuel Bautista Soares recorded that, by September 1619, the
bodies
of thousands of butchered casualties were polluting the rivers and a
"great
multitude of innocent people had been captured without cause."
Professor
John Thorton writes:
"The
demographic impact of this war was starkly obvious when the
[Portuguese]
campaign was
resumed the next year [1619]; the army met no
resistance in any part of
the back country [Sertao],
these provinces having become destitute of inhabitants."
Deaf to the pleas of priests and the protests of Portuguese settlers
whose
land were being ravaged, Vasconelos let the uncontrolled killing and
enslavement continue for many months. The conduct of rampaging
Imbangala
mercernaries was chronicled by Vogado Sotomaior, the ouvidor geral
de Angola.
Sotomaior complained of the fall of the royal Ndongo city
of Kabasa, that it
was "sacked in such a way that many thousands of souls
were captured, killed
and eaten".
Vasconcelos had marched
into the heart of the Angola motivated by a desire
for riches from the sale
of slaves. The historian Soares rebuked
Vasconcelos, that since he
placed the Imbangala at the front, "the wars were
without any danger, but
with discredit to the Portuguese." The general gave
free rein to
rampaging mercenaries passing beyond the Ndongo realm into the
villages of
his own African allies in Congo. Vasconcelos stood by as
Christian
converts, baggage handlers for his military train, were taken by
the
Imbangala in the frantic rush for slaves. There is evidence from
Angolans delivered to Virginia, that many of them had a long-held Christian
faith prior to their abductions by the Portuguese and Imbangala.
THE
SLAVE PENS OF LUANDA
From 1618 through the spring of 1619, the slow
tread of hundreds of Angolan
captives grew to a steady forced march of
thousands streaming into the
Portuguese-built port of Luanda. Tens of
thousands of prisoners from the
highlands choked the capabilities of the
port to hold them. Those surviving
Ndongo who had not been slaughtered
and eaten by the Imbangala, were crammed
into flimsy, hastily-built
facilities which could not nearly contain them
all. In the commotion,
Angolans by the hundreds simply faded into the
forests unchallenged.
The Portuguese had not planned well for the unexpected size of their
slave
harvest. Only 36 merchant-slave ships arrived at Luanda in the
fiscal year
of 1618-1619. Each slaver was capable of holding an
average of from 350-400
captives. The turn-around time of these ships
leaving Africa for Portuguese
and Spanish ports in the New World was several
weeks. The logistics of
sheltering, feeding and guarding 50,000
prisoners were woefully
underestimated. This was one of the largest
slave expeditions ever in the
history of Africa. The Angolans waited,
bound in the heat and rain for
months, as the trickle of slavers loaded them
for the dangerous Atlantic
crossing to the Americas.
Never before in
the slave trade had so many Africans come from so small a
place. Thousands
were uprooted from the Lukala River area; so many people
taken, that the
country immediately afterwards was described as deserted.
Those first
Angolans landing in Virginia in 1619, and the largest percentage
of those
arriving on into the 1650s shared a common regional background,
ethnicity
and language. It may have been this shared identity which led the
Angolans of North America to easily band together in Virginia, Carolina,
Maryland and Delaware. This sense of community can be traced to their
descendants, the Melungeons of Tennessee and Kentucky, and even later to
those settling Ohio, Louisiana and Texas.
The common regionality of
the thousands of Angolan captives assembled at
Luanda differed greatly from
the routine trade of smaller groups of Africans
crossing by single
shiploads, perhaps from a single village, arriving in a
new country, dwarfed
by the numbers already present; their tribal identity
quickly removed
on chattel plantations. These 50,000 Angolans represented a
good part
of a kingdom of many villages. They were all neighbors and kin.
The
Angolans of the 17th century came to the Americas when there were no
Africans and relatively few Europeans to subjugate them. These first
were
not swallowed up and lost. Thorton writes:
"In America, when Kimbundu-speaking people were able
to communicate and
visit each other, a sense
of an
"Angolan Nation" emerged. It was certainly observable in Spanish
America, if not yet at the very
beginnings of
English-speaking Virginia's reception of Africans."
The Angolans in
Virginia and other colonies from 1619-1660 would likely have
recognized new
arrivals as fellow countrymen from the native land. Those sent
to Brazil
retained their ethnic identity and it is becoming apparent that
Angolans arriving in the British-American colonies maintained communal ties
which remain even today among their Melungeon descendants. By the time
Africans came in later as permanent chattel slaves, the Angolans and their
mixed descendants had already become a separate free-born community in
Virginia. Neither white nor chattel, Melungeons were a society apart
from
the three dominant cultures of Indian, white, and African slaves though
some
free blacks assimilated into each of those three cultures.
When
persecution rose, as in the Carolinas, Melungeons sought new frontiers,
often together in large wagon trains like the hundred-family Mayo party
rolling from the Carolinas into Louisiana and Texas in 1857. Other
mixed
descendants of free colonial blacks did not flee, but like the Lumbees
stayed
and fought and won a begrudged distance from their 19th century white
enemies.
NATURAL ADVANTAGES OF ANGOLANS IN THE NEW WORLD
Because
of this common identity as fellow countrymen, we can see how the
Angolan
ancestors of the Melungeons could succeed as a distinctive group in a
new
land. Also, Angolans coming into Virginia, found similarities in the
land itself which favored them over many urbanized English settlers.
The
Ndongo homeland was densely populated in the narrow strip of land
between its
two major rivers. One Ndongo city with its suburbs of the
late 16th century,
was said to have held nearly 100,000 residents.
This was likely an
exaggerated number according to Thornton, but it
gives a perception of the
populous region.
At the same time
Thorton notes the many tightly-packed towns were separated
at intervals by
sections of farmland. These Bantu were urbanized, yet they
grew crops
and kept domesticated animals. They were certainly better
equipped to
face the North American wilderness than were many of their white
colonial
counterparts; indentured Europeans plucked from prisons, poor
houses,
alleys, brothels and taverns in large squalid urban sprawls like
London and
Bristol. The Ndongo were accustomed to markets and town life, but
they
also knew how to grow sorghum and millet and keep large herds of cattle,
goats and chickens long before the Portuguese invasion. They were well
equipped to face the hardships of the vast American wilderness. Lerone
Bennett Jr. in "Before the Mayflower" writes:
"There were skilled farmers and artisans among the
first group of
African-Americans, and there are
indications in the record that they were responsible for
various
innovations later credited to English
immigrants. An early example of this was reported in
Virginia, where the
governor ordered rice to be
planted in 1648 "on the advice of our Negroes."
And he quotes Washington Irving on the early Virginia Africans:
"These Negroes, like the monks of the Dark Ages,
engross all the
knowledge of the place, and being
infinitely more adventurous and more knowing than their
masters, carry on
all the foreign trade;
making
frequent voyages in canoes loaded with oysters, buttermilk, and
cabbages.
They are great
astrologers, predicting the different
changes of weather almost as
accurately as an almanac."
In such an
environment, unhampered by the racial prejudice still decades
away, the
Ndongo thrived. By 1651 in Virginia, the Angolan transplant
Anthony
Johnson owned farms and imported a number of servants, some of them
white. The abstract of his deed reads:
"Anthony Johnson, 250 acres. Northampton County, 24
July 1651...at great
Naswattock Creek, by two
small
branches issuing out of the mayne Creek." "Transfer of persons:
Tho.
Bemrose, Peter Bughby,
Antho. Cripps, Jno Gesorroro,
Richard Johnson."
In 1652, his son John Johnson, owned 550 acres with 11
slaves of different
races and sexes. Their names were listed as; John
Edward, Wm. Routh, Tho.
Yowell, Fra. Maland, William Price, John Owen,
Dorthy Rily, Richard Hemstead,
Law, Barnes, Row, Rith, Mary Johnson.
Along with the acquisitions of other
family members, the Johnsons,
some 30 years after Portuguese slavery,
possessed over one thousand acres of
land and owned no less than 20 black and
white servants in the Virginia
Colony along with at least two slaves.
Bennett adds this about early
achievements:
"Not only did pioneer blacks vote, but
they also held public office.
There was a black surety in York
County, Virginia in the first decades of the 17th
century, and a black
beadle [court crier or bailiff] in
Lancaster County, Virginia."
However, even
by this early date, some Africans were already held as chattel
slaves in the
British-American colonies and within a few decades, legislation
would begin
curtailing the liberties of even free blacks. After 1720, the
growth
of the free black population depended mostly on births alone since all
Africans arriving in the southern colonies by ship after that date usually
passed directly into chattel slavery. The cradlehood of free Melungia
in
North America lasted from about 1620 to about 1720. By the time
hostile laws
began to menace the mixed free-born children of the Angolans,
the Melungeons
were strong enough and wise enough to survive on their own.
THE PORTUGUESE INFLUENCE IN ANGOLA BEFORE 1619
Europeans and
their customs were not entirely alien to Angolan-Africans
before coming to
colonial Virginia. By the 16th century, the Portugal had
already made
contact with people of the Congo immediately north of Angola.
During
this time, Ndongo was a vassal state, subject to Congo rulers. King
Alphonso, [1509-42] of Congo willingly opened his nation to Catholic
missionaries and Iberian merchants. The Angolans had bartered with
European
Christians in a common trade language for many decades.
Portugal was unlike other colonial powers in that it regarded its
colonies
like "states" and, according to "Brittanica", Angola was the
largest state of
Portugal. Catholic Portugal required all hostile
African captives to be
baptized and converted to Christianity before they
were shipped west to the
New World. But not all baptisms were forced.
By 1619, Kimbundu-speaking
Christians were already worshipping in Angola.
Jesuit priests who came in
1575 had produced catechismal literature in
the language spoken by the
Ndongo. Professor Thornton notes of the
impact of Christian ritual even on
those captured in war:
"Such a rudimentary instruction was
probably oriented to the syncretic
practice of the Angolan
church, which followed patterns, already
a century old, from the Kongo
church that had originally
fertilized it. Thus, early 17th century
Spanish Jesuits, conducting an
investigation of the state of
knowledge of the Christian religion
among newly arrived slaves, found
that, for all the problems they
noted, the Angolan slaves seem to have
adequate understanding of the
faith by the time they arrived."
Many
Angolans bound for Mexican mines before free-booters diverted them to
Virginia, had at the very least, a basic education in Christianity before
arriving. In the colonies and later in the states, a number of
Melungeons
argued they were Portuguese Christians and on that basis they
insisted they
should be exempted from life-long chattel slavery. In
1667 in Lower Norfolk,
Virginia, an African slave named Fernando sued in
court for freedom insisting
that he was a Christian. He presented
documents in "Portuguese or some other
language" which the county court
could not read and his suit was denied.
Thorton and Heywood have
found that in the early American colonies:
"People
with a Spanish/Portuguese last name that is also a first name
like John
Francisco or John Pedro
(on the 1625 census) are following
an Angolan naming pattern. The source
of the Iberian names, in
our opinion, is not the forced baptism given by the
Portuguese in Luanda.
In our opinion, whatever
names people might have received in those circumstances
would probably
have been either forgotten
or rejected
when circumstances changed. Rather we think these names were
taken
voluntarily in Africa
long before their owners were
enslaved when the people were baptized.
In
Kongo, the Christian Church goes back to 1491 and was so well
established by the 17th century that
virtually
everyone had a "Portuguese" name, but it was not so well
established
in Kimbundu-speaking
areas. On the other hand the
bishop of Angola did complain that during
the 1619-20 campaign, the
rampaging armies of Mendes de Vasconcelos captured some
4,000 Christian
porters and sold them into
slavery.
In 1621, the campaigns went deep into Kongo, and thousands were
also
captured at the battle
of Mbumbi at the very end of the
year. These would all have been
Christian, indeed, probably third or
fourth generation Christian. Since they took the
Christian names
voluntarily, they would make these
names known to their new masters in Virginia. The
many people who are
not listed with any names in
the
census of 1624 and 1625 and in the headright documents, might be, in
our
opinion, the non-
Christians from the Kimbundu-speaking
areas"
The first African-Americans called themselves "Portuguese" after
the official
religion of the ruling
colonial power in their native
homeland. From New York to Carolina they had
surnames like Big Manuel,
Rodriggus, Manuel de Gerrit de Rens, Anthony
Portuguese, Isabella, John
Pedro and Antonio, reflecting their
Portuguese-African heritage. They
also had more telling names like Paul d'
Angola and Simon Congo.
These claims of Portuguese nationality have often been misinterpreted as
attempts by early Angolan-Americans and their mixed children, to escape
slavery by denying their African blood. This is untrue. Children
of Angolan
parents claimed that their forebears had been voluntarily
baptised as
Christians before slavers had stolen them and sent the to
Virginia. English
custom of the era frowned on the practice of white
Christians taking other
Christians. Legally, to be a documented
Portuguese citizen was to be a
baptised Christian exempt from slavery.
However to keep their slaves, many
Virginia, Maryland and Carolina
slave-owners would be inclined to deny or
conceal evidence of
Portuguese baptisms.
Sometimes the Melungeons were awarded their
claims, sometimes they were not.
This people stubbornly maintained
their Portuguese nationality for more than
two centuries, passing it down by
word-of-mouth when they were forbidden as
people of color, access to white
schools. To the early Melungeons,
"Portuguese" did not mean they were
not African. It meant that as voluntary
Christians, they had a legal
right to share civil freedoms in Christian
lands. Only after about
1830 did Melungeons use the claim of "Portuguese"
nationality to deny
African blood in their frantic bid to escape slavery. By
then, any
protection from slavery based on being a "Christian" had vanished
in many
states.
SLAVES AND SERVANTS IN 17TH CENTURY VIRGINIA
When the
first Angolan-Africans, the famous "20 and odd Negroes" from the
Dutch
man-o-war in 1619 landed in Virginia, they were not the first slaves in
the
colonies. The first slaves of Virginia were white Englishmen, and this
is an important observation to make about the early American colonies.
There
was very little practical distinction between the words
"servant" and "slave"
in the 17th century, though much has been made of the
documented use of the
former title in regards to the status of Africans at
that time. Servants
were temporary slaves. Many white Europeans were
often forced to enter the
colonies like the Africans; with little or no
choice. Hundreds of English
citizens were kidnapped outright,
for not many were eager to face the raw
American challenge in the
1600s. The premature mortality rate in Virginia
before 1620 was an
incredibly high 50%, and for the period of 1620-22, some
have argued
convincingly that the death rate was even higher.
Men, women and
children from England, Scotland and Ireland were coerced into
coming to
America because they were either orphans, or bound servants, or
poor, or
jailed felons, or religious dissenters, or prostitutes or the
riotous
ne'er-do-well sons of gentlemen. The earliest European middle
passage,
though not as terrible as the African passage, could be a
frightening
ordeal. Crammed aboard ships usually already overloaded with
rancid
food supplies and swarming with disease-carrying vermin, sometimes
they were
quarantined offshore to rot. Those whites who survived, were
sold to the highest bidder, often by the ships' captains who had abducted
them from the streets of London. White or black, indentured servants
were
totally at the mercy of masters who could injure and even kill them
without
legal repercussion. Colonial servitude was so harsh, and
certain masters so
hated, that white and black servants joined in groups to
flee into the
wilderness or strike out in desparation for other colonies.
But should the servant survive the term of the indenture, precious
freedom
was the reward for whites and many blacks in 17th century Virginia.
Lerone
Bennett Jr writes about the founders of African-America:
"In Virginia, then, as in other colonies, the first
black settlers fell
into a well-established socio-
economic groove which carried with it no implications of
racial
inferiority. That came later. But in the
interim, a period of forty years or more, the first black
settlers
accumulated land, voted, testified in
court
and mingled with whites on a basis of equality. They owned other
black
servants and certain
blacks imported and paid for white
servants whom they apparently held in
servitude."