Afram (AAdos) migratory, maroon, slave population, emigration, slave revolts etc..maps

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Jeroen Dewulf is the Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies and an Associate Professor of German Studies at UC Berkeley, where he also directs the Institute of European Studies. His new book, The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (University Press of Mississippi, 2017), departs from a study of nineteenth-century Pinkster, which has generally been considered a syncretic Dutch-Afro performance clustered in the formerly Dutch colonial territories of New York. Through a careful excavation of these rituals, he resituates an apparently local story in a much broader and deeper Atlantic context. His study casts light on the origins of Pinkster in a very different syncretism–of Iberian and African cultures on African soil–and the crucial role of mutual-aid associations in its transmission and promotion. For students of the intellectual and cultural history of the Atlantic, it provides a compelling model for circum-Atlantic history (to borrow from David Armitage’s typology), while encouraging us to reconsider our understanding of syncretism.

Jeroen: It is important to highlight the topic of language as such. Even within the Dutch community in America, preserving Dutch attachment to the language is an interesting topic, and you see as a general rule that as soon as people of Dutch descent achieved positions of power, their attachment to the language tended to disappear. And those who held on to Dutch were often farmers or rural inhabitants, which has consequences on the way the story is told.

On top of language, we have the matter of religion, another important element here. The Dutch had their own religion in a way: the Dutch Reformed Church. And having your own religion isolated the Dutch community from others. And then you also clearly see a division within the Dutch community, between those who abandon this history as soon as New Netherland becomes New York, and those who hold onto it. And those who hold onto it are not necessarily those who write. So, you have relatively few documents in which you hear a Dutch voice commenting on Dutch traditions in America.

As a result of this, the way we have told the history of New Netherlands is one heavily influenced by an Anglo-Saxon perspective, which would look at this Dutch heritage and make it correspond to a perception that they already had of it. It is also very important to keep in mind that there was no such thing as Dutch newspapers, so the voice of the media was an English voice.

Derek: Your study explores a sort of “double erasure” in this context, of both Dutch voices and members of the Afro-Dutch community.

Jeroen: Who is aware that in the mid-eighteenth century that about 10-15% of blacks in New York still spoke Dutch? The Dutch and African linguistic heritage of the region are similarly forgotten. Little attention has been given to the fact that African-American history is a multilingual history, and not just in the sense of bringing different languages from Africa.

Middle panel of 1733 painting by John Heaton of Van Bergen farm near Albany, NY: One of the few images depicting African American slaves on a Dutch-owned farm at a time when about 10-15% of the slaves living in the states of New York and New Jersey spoke Dutch.

Derek: Ironically, then, the erasure of Dutch voices from the nineteenth-century record seems to contribute to the erasure of the African and Portuguese origins of Pinkster. Your book takes a phenomenon—Pinkster– that has also, like this Dutch-American history, been interpreted in a very malleable way, and pulls it from a local context into a much more complex Atlantic context. In the process, the long-imagined Dutch influence on this Afro-American phenomenon recedes, and it becomes much less a story of the Dutch legacy in America. Much of the past few decades of historiography on the Dutch colonies in the Western Hemisphere have sought to reinsert them into both US and Atlantic history, so in an interesting way your book departs from this—indeed, it distances Dutch influence from a circum-Atlantic phenomenon of Pinkster, and directs us to see its roots elsewhere.

Jeroen: The book didn’t take me in the direction I was planning to go, and in a certain sense the book wrote itself. Originally, I thought this would be about performance culture, but it ended up being much more about mutual aid and solidarity and community-building. I also expected it to be a much more Dutch book, which it did not turn out to be. That was a surprise to me in the sense that what became clear is that we are speaking about a time period when Dutch Atlantic history was starting, and as a newcomer you naturally don’t build things out of nowhere: You build on what is already there. Especially when it comes to the process of slavery, we see how strong the continuation of Iberian model was among those who took over from the Spanish and Portuguese in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. I felt that this element has been underestimated by people who write about Atlantic History.

We still have this assumption that scholars choose “their” nation, and then tend to give too much importance to the colonizer of a specific area: If you focus on New Netherland you focus on the Dutch, if you write about New England you focus on the English, etc. But especially when you focus on a field such as slavery, its Atlantic complexity forces you to use a perspective that tries to capture this vast area, and you realize that holding on to this one-nation perspective is just not providing you with the answers to the challenging questions that manuscripts raise. Pinkster is a good example of this. It has traditionally been reduced to a “syncretic Dutch-African” tradition, which is true in the sense that there certainly are Dutch and African elements to be found in the tradition, but to say that something is syncretic doesn’t mean much. In fact, Pinkster is so much more complex than just a “mixture of Dutch and African” elements.

more here--> On The Pinkster King and the King of the Kongo: An Interview with Jeroen Dewulf


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On July 4th 1827 the last slaves* in New York State became free, and the next day the Black population held a huge parade and celebration along Broadway in New York City. This was a joyous moment, but it came over half a century after the Declaration of Independence declared that “all men are created equal”, and over 25 years after New York had first passed a law mandating freedom for slaves on a gradual basis. It took years of struggle, hardship, and frustration to end the institution of slavery in New York, and this process was mirrored in most of the other Northern States. Because the Southern States fought a war to preserve slavery, the long and hard road to emancipation in the North has been overshadowed and forgotten. The map/slideshow above illustrates this process by showing the percentage of the population that were slaves from 1790 to 1860.

*75 slaves remained in bondage in rural areas of New York according to the 1830 Census, they were likely held by Southerners who until 1841 were allowed to bring slaves into New York for up to 9 months.

Slavery was difficult to end in the North because slaves made up a significant proportion of the population and were hugely important to the economy. The first U.S. census in 1790 counted 40,086 slaves in the 8 Northern States, for a total of about 2% of the population. In some important northern areas slaves made up an even more significant proportion of the population, such as in Kings County (modern-day Brooklyn) where 1 in every 3 residents was held in bondage. Every Northern state except Vermont and Massachusetts (which Maine was a part of at the time) still held slaves in 1790. Slavery in the North wasn’t limited to household servants either: archeological digs have revealed evidence that huge slaveholding plantations existed in the North as late as the beginning of the 19th century.

The map above shows the proportion of slaves for each Northern county according to the 1790 census. The most obvious geographic pattern is the huge concentration of slavery radiating outwards from New York City, with slaves making up a significant proportion of the population in New Jersey, Upstate New York, and southern Connectdicut and Rhode Island. The only other areas with a large proportion of slaves are two pockets in southern and western Pennsylvania. Looking at the 10 Northern counties with the highest proportion of slaves, we can see that all 10 are in New York or New Jersey and most are in the area around New York City:

County (Borough) State Slave % of Population
Kings (Brooklyn) NY 32.58%
Richmond (Staten Island) NY 19.73%
Bergen NJ 18.26%
Somerset NJ 14.72%
Queens (Queens) NY 14.41%
Ulster NY 9.92%
Monmouth NJ 9.43%
Middlesex NJ 8.26%
New York (Manhattan) NY 7.17%
Suffolk NY 6.68%
The high proportion of slavery around New York City is explained by the city’s long history of importing slaves, dating back to its original founding as the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. New Amsterdam faced a severe labor shortage within a few years of it’s founding, and began importing slaves in 1626. Importation of slaves continued even after the British took control of the area. By 1703, 42 percent of all households in New York City owned slaves, second among American cities only to Charleston SC. After the American Revolution the tide began to turn against slavery in the area, as the Black and abolitionist communities campaigned against slavery, and as slaves increasingly rebelled by running away from their masters. Nonetheless, it still took New York and New Jersey until 1799 and 1804 respectively to pass laws instituting gradual emancipation, making them the last two Northern States to do so. Gradual emancipation moved especially slowly in New Jersey, to the point that when the Civil War broke out in 1860 there were still 18 enslaved people in the “free” state!

Despite both New Jersey and New York dragging their feet on the issue of slavery, the institution declined consistently in the decades after Independence. The number of slaves in the Northern States decreased in every US census from 1790 to 1860. The mirror image of this trend was occurring in the South, where the number of slaves increased by an average of almost 30% a decade. Thus while the decline in the total number of slaves in the North is significant, the fall in the North’s share of all slaves is even more impressive:

Nonetheless, while the decline of slavery in the North may seem rapid to us today, it obviously took painfully long for those in bondage at the time.

The death of slavery in the North teaches us that even the most vile of institutions take time to destroy. This applies to slavery in the South as well: the Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves in the United States, and even after the Thirteenth Amendment banned slavery there were still Blacks being held in near-bondage under the South’s sharecropping systems.

One last thing to realize when talking about the destruction of slavery in the North is that the role of politicians and abolitionists is often overemphasized, while the role of slaves in ending this institution is overlooked. It took a huge number of slaves running away from their masters in the 1790s to convince the New York legislature to pass a bill for gradual emancipation. After gradual emancipation was put in place, the death of slavery in New York was sped up by an “epidemic” of slaves fleeing. The likelihood that their slaves would run also encouraged slaveowners in the North to free them voluntarily. It was Dubois that pointed out that “slaves freed themselves” during the Civil War, and this applies equally to the end of slavery in the North.

Slavery in the Northern United States, 1790 to 1860

 

[frush11]

1 Part of my history.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

1 Part of my history.

you're sierra leone creole?

 

[frush11]

you're sierra leone creole?

Yep Yep

 

[xoxodede]

Maroonage is one of my fave topics.

Marooner -- A runaway slave; a maroon.

Some of the Known Maroon Communities: the maroons of Bas du Fleuve, Louisiana; Belleisle and Bear Creek in Georgia and South Carolina; and the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina.

Source: Sylviane Anna Diouf - Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons

Armed Fugitive Slaves and Slave Riots (more than likely Maroon Communities)

Joseph Vallence Beven papers, MS 71
Contains correspondence dating from 1787 between George Mathews, Thomas Pinckney, and General James Jackson concerning armed fugitive slaves

Joseph Frederick Waring II papers, MS 1275
Contains 35 items on African-American churches (not dated); 18 items on African-American members of the Republican Party of Georgia from 1867-1869; slave bills of sale from 1856-1859; a list of slaves from 1859, leases to African-Americans from 1865-1866, and a letter from 1851 which discusses a fugitive slave riot.

Source: http://savannahnow.com/accent/2014-...roup-helps-african-americans-research-history​

Maroon books/resources:
12 Years a Slave. What About 15 Years in a Cave?
Six years in a Georgia prison. Narrative of Lewis W. Paine
The Underground Railroad: An Encyclopedia of People, Places, and Operations
Acts Passed by the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina
Richard Price, Omar Ali and Sylviane Diouf on maroons in Suriname, Colombia, and the US
Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation
American Negro Slave Revolts : Aptheker, Herbert. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
The Slave in the Swamp: Disrupting the Plantation Narrative
Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A Documentary Record

Florida/Black Seminole Maroons:
Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America
Immokalee's Fields of Hope
Florida's Forgotten Rebels

Fugitive Slave Resources:
Runaway slaves : rebels on the plantation : Franklin, John Hope, 1915-2009 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Fugitive slaves (1619-1865) : McDougall, Marion Gleason : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Slavery, resistance, freedom : Boritt, G. S., 1940- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

 

[Bawon Samedi]

What a dope ass gem of a thread.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[2Quik4UHoes]

I work for a film maker whose current project is an extensive history of the maroons. It spans from the dismal swamp all the way to Mexico. I’ve seen some clips and it looks fukkin amazing. I’ll be sure to find this thread once it’s ready for release.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Yep Yep

You ever met any americo liberians? If so, how similar or different did you find them to Sierra Leone Creoles?

 

[frush11]

You ever met any americo liberians? If so, how similar or different did you find them to Sierra Leone Creoles?

Yeah, one of my good friends is one. Honestly I don't really know much about them. But from the lil I do, they have a very distinct accent when speaking English(liberians all do) from other West Africans.

I would also say our culture is a lot more heavily Carribean influence, as a lot more came from that area.

 

[315]

5 star thread

 

[T'krm]

Great thread,and informative as well.
We tend to think of the AA migration as being linear- typically from the deep south, into northern, industrial regions, but there were cross migratory patterns of many of our people into territories and countries, otherwise unknown. Great lesson in history.