Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680-1807

By Michael Lawrence Dickinson

Beginning in the late seventeenth century and concluding with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, Almost Dead reveals how the thousands of captives who lived, bled, and resisted in the Black Urban Atlantic survived to form dynamic communities.

Michael Lawrence Dickinson uses cities with close commercial ties to shed light on similarities, variations, and linkages between urban Atlantic slave communities in mainland America and the Caribbean. The study adopts the perspectives of those enslaved to reveal that, in the eyes of the enslaved, the distinctions were often of degree rather than kind as cities throughout the Black Urban Atlantic remained spaces for Black oppression and resilience. The tenets of subjugation remained all too similar, as did captives’ need to stave off social death and hold on to their humanity. Almost Dead argues that urban environments provided unique barriers to and avenues for social rebirth: the process by which African-descended peoples reconstructed their lives individually and collectively after forced exportation from West Africa. This was an active process of cultural remembrance, continued resistance, and communal survival. It was in these urban slave communities—within the connections between neighbors and kinfolk—that the enslaved found the physical and psychological resources necessary to endure the seemingly unendurable. Whether sites of first arrival, commodification, sale, short-term captivity, or lifetime enslavement, the urban Atlantic shaped and was shaped by Black lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: May 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780820362243

Michael Lawrence Dickinson

MICHAEL LAWRENCE DICKINSON is an assistant professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Book preview

Almost Dead

RACE IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1700–1900

SERIES EDITORS

Richard S. Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology

Patrick Rael, Bowdoin College

Manisha Sinha, University of Connecticut

ADVISORY BOARD

Edward Baptist, Cornell University

Christopher Brown, Columbia University

Vincent Carretta, University of Maryland

Laurent Dubois, University of Virginia

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Rutgers University

Douglas Egerton, LeMoyne College

Leslie Harris, Northwestern University

Joanne Pope Melish, University of Kentucky

Sue Peabody, Washington State University, Vancouver

Erik Seeman, State University of New York, Buffalo

John Stauffer, Harvard University

Almost Dead

SLAVERY AND SOCIAL REBIRTH IN THE BLACK URBAN ATLANTIC, 1680–1807

Michael Lawrence Dickinson

The University of Georgia Press

ATHENS

Published by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

© 2022 by Michael Lawrence Dickinson

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021943876

ISBN: 9780820362250 (hardback)

ISBN: 9780820362267 (paperback)

ISBN: 9780820362243 (ebook)

Dedicated to my mother,

Alice Dickinson,

continually missed, perpetually loved,

and never forgotten

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1.I Courted Death

CHAPTER 2.A New Master Confused My Mind

CHAPTER 3.The Dread of Punishment

CHAPTER 4.The Same Manner as in Africa

CHAPTER 5.A Feast of Grief Eased Our Swollen Hearts

Epilogue

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There is a lengthy list of people I must thank for their assistance and support in completing this book. Unfortunately, two of the most influential people in my life passed away as I worked on this project: my mother, Alice Dickinson, and my aunt (and self-proclaimed second mother) Minnie Wilson. They were two immensely strong black women who had no shortage of love for those around them. I am especially indebted to my mother for her constant care, devotion, and faith in me. Both women were historians in their own right, always willing to share tales of the past along with warmth and laughter. As I completed this project, I was surrounded by these lovely women regaling me about how my grandfather, a World War II veteran I never had the pleasure of meeting, wrote a book which was unfortunately destroyed in a fire before being published. My hope, then, is to fulfill their hopes along with those of Orville Baynard and the rest of my forebears whose stories deserve recognition.

On a professional note, this project is the result of constant feedback and support from an array of colleagues and institutions. I would first like to thank my academic parents, Erica Armstrong Dunbar and W. O. Maloba. It was Erica who first took an interest in me and persuaded me to abandon my medical school plans to pursue a career in history, easily one of the most significant decisions of my life. Erica, your passion for historical scholarship and selfless support over the years have meant more than words can convey. Maloba, your intellectual vision and endless guidance have made all the difference in completing this journey. Thank you both for your continued encouragement and limitless sacrifice.

It is important to also thank all the educators throughout my life who fanned the flames of my love for history. Further, I must attribute much of my academic accomplishments to the many programs that fostered my interests and talents. I am grateful to the Delaware Trio Programs, which encouraged me to pursue academic excellence prior to graduate study; in particular, I am grateful to Lin Gordon and Lysbet Murray in this regard. Most significantly of all, I owe a grave debt to the McNair Scholars Program for instructing me in the art of research and empowering me with the means to realize my professional goals. Many years ago, I was a young undergraduate in need of direction and patience, and the McNair Scholars Program provided me with just that. Specifically, I thank Maria Palacas and Heyward Brock for their patience, time, and care—ingredients that helped me to reach my potential. Maria, thank you for always believing in me and always placing the needs of others before your own. I could not have reached these heights without your mentorship. Heyward, I remain greatful for your time, patience, and care in teaching me how to conduct research. Much McNair Love to Vanessa Banegas, Adrian McCleary, Melissa Skolnick-Noguera, Kris Dewberry, Tanya Mejia, Obi Mmagu, and Joseph Stanley for their companionship and laughter over the years. During my time in this research program, I also had the pleasure of consulting with historian Rhys Isaac while in Australia. He passed away shortly after, but his intellectual generosity and willingness to share his time while ill were inspiring. I am considerably grateful as well to Peter Kolchin, who directed my senior thesis so many years ago and taught me the joys of comparative history.

I still reflect on the advice provided by my dissertation committee members, Cathy Matson and Marisa Fuentes, for which I remain deeply grateful. A special thanks to Cathy for expanding my understanding of the Atlantic and for her willingness to always challenge me. The Africana Studies and History Departments at the University of Delaware (UD), where I attended undergraduate and graduate school, deeply shaped my intellectual development. Therefore, I am indebted to faculty and staff in both departments. The list of instructors and advisors who invested in my intellectual and academic development is quite extensive. A special note of gratitude to Gabrielle Foreman, Tiffany Gill, Tammy Poole, Yasser Payne, and Carol Rudisell for their incredible support and for deeply shaping my vision of African American history. Anne Boylan, Eve Buckley, Daniel Callahan, John Davies, Rebecca Davis, Howard Johnson, James Jones, Arwen Mohun, David Suisman, Jorge Serrano, Doug Tobias, Patricia Sloane-White, and Owen White—thank you for your encouragement and kindness. Many thanks to my fellow graduate students at UD for running the tireless race of graduate school with me, in particular Clayton Colmon, Harrison Graves, Alexandra Mairs-Kessler, Nalleli Guillen, Kelsey Ransick, Sarah Patterson, Jessica Conrad, O’Brian Holden, and John Vanek.

Many colleagues and friends were generous enough to provide me with feedback on various parts of the manuscript. At Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), my home institution, I had the privilege of workshopping multiple chapters within an intellectually robust early America reading group. In particular, Richard Godbeer, Sarah Meacham, and Gregory Smithers were among the group members who provided thoughtful feedback. I would like to extend a special thanks to my colleagues Carolyn Eastman, Brooke Newman, and Ryan Smith at VCU, along with Dexter Gabriel at the University of Connecticut and Alexander Byrd at Rice University for providing in-depth commentary on specific chapters along with their friendship. Dexter, my intellectual brother in many ways, has been a friend since graduate school, and I can always turn to him for feedback, laughter, and collaboration. Both Alex and Carolyn have both been incredible mentors going far above and beyond their assigned, official mentorship roles. I am also exceptionally grateful to Richard Newman for his tremendous support, mentorship, and genuine thoughtfulness over the years.

Several institutions were generous enough to support this project. The book incorporates some material from my graduate dissertation, so I remain indebted to the University of Delaware for funding my early research trips all those years ago while I completed my doctorate. In addition, Virginia Commonwealth University has provided funding for research trips, and the VCU Humanities Research Center also funded my efforts to present various parts of the book at conferences. Duke University generously encouraged my efforts to produce the manuscript through its Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Social Sciences. Likewise, the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies awarded me a sabbatical fellowship to complete the book project along with research funds. I am greatly indebted to these programs for their scholarly connections and intellectual engagement. At McNeil in particular, I had the pleasure of briefly mentoring a number of graduate fellows, all of whom are brilliant and have bright futures. I also had the pleasure of receiving feedback on a chapter from the collective McNeil community. The experience was invaluable to the project, and I remain extraordinarily indebted. I would especially like to thank Dan Richter, Laura Spero, the McNeil staff, and my fellowship counterpart Zara Anishanslin for their hospitality and support.

The work of historians would not be possible without the continued efforts of archivists and library staff. I remain grateful to numerous archives and countless professionals for their guidance and patience. Furthermore, I am deeply appreciative for an array of archives and institutions abroad, which provided crucial guidance and aid necessary to make the project a reality. The University of the West Indies Cave Hill and the University of the West Indies Mona both granted me accommodations during my research trips. The departments of history and philosophy at both campuses were extremely welcoming. I thank the faculty and staff for their aid and generosity. In particular, thank you to Pedro Welch, Frederick Ochieng’-Odhiambo, Veront Satchell, Jenny Jemmott, and James Robertson for their research advice during my stay. I also truly appreciate all the help of archivists at the National Library of Jamaica, the Bridgetown Public Library, the Barbados Department of Archives, and the Jamaica Archives and Records Department. In London, I had the pleasure of researching at the British Library, the British National Archives in Kew, the Lambeth Palace Library, and the University of London. Though much of the immense material I accumulated on my visits did not make it into the final manuscript, the staff at these institutions were helpful and incredibly patient with my seemingly endless document requests. Much of my research in the United States took place in Philadelphia, principally at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Library Company of Philadelphia, both of which also provided funding toward the project. Thank you to the staff at these institutions for their assistance and for supporting the book. Krystal Appiah in particular was exceptionally helpful in this regard. Staff at the Library Company, the Library of Congress, the American Antiquarian Society, and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture were all essential in helping me secure images for the book as well.

I would be terribly remiss if I did not thank a few graduate students for their help in a pinch. As you might imagine, this project was necessarily completed during the COVID-19 epidemic. Thus, I was hampered by the closures of libraries and from accessing some of my own materials across state lines. That said, Maria Hammack, Elise Mitchell, and Sherri Cummings West were all helpful in providing some last-minute materials I was unable to access. You are each so generous and brilliant, and I remain in your debt for your kindness. A special shout-out to Maria, Ron Davis, Nakia Parker, and the rest of the University of Texas (UT) Austin group for their continued conference cheer over the years as well. On a separate but similar note, I would also like to thank the graduate students and history faculty at Rice University who also provided feedback on a chapter I was invited to workshop. Moreover, many thanks to historian G. Ugo Nwokeji for his research consultations. He was extremely generous with his time and expertise, and I remain deeply grateful.

As I reflect on this undertaking, several people provided support, encouragement, and kindness outside of the project. Department chairs John Powers and John Kneebone have helped make VCU a wonderful place to work since my arrival. Numerous other folks at VCU have been invaluable in this journey as colleagues and friends, in particular Emilie Raymond, Karen Rader, Babatunde Lawal, and Rocio Gomez. In addition, I have benefited from the continued encouragement and kindness of Leigh Ann Craig, Brian Daugherity, Adam Ewing, Jared Johnson, Mary Caton Lingold, Melis Hafez, Priscilla Shilaro, and Kathryn Shively, along with the VCU history department as a whole. I work with lovely people who have been exceptionally helpful and caring, especially after my mother passed. I remain very grateful to you all. A special thanks to David Weinfeld and Rohan Kalyan along with Samantha Seeley, Karen Sherry, and others in the Richmond community for their continued friendship. Additionally, I would like to thank Danya Pilgrim, Carl Suddler, J. T. Roane and all the other friends and fellow travelers from numerous institutions who have been sources of support, hilarity, and sanity through the years. A special note of gratitude to Danya for her neverending encouragement and wisdom over the years.

Additionally, I would like to give an extraordinary message of gratitude to Shawna and Rhonda Brace for allowing me to speak with them for the epilogue. Our conversations were revelatory, and I believe your ancestor Jeffrey Brace would be as deeply proud of you both as you are of him. Likewise, thank you to Kari Winter for her support of the project and for helping to bring Brace’s story to light. A special thanks to Orlando Patterson and Stephanie Smallwood as well, whose incredible work inspired this project. On a similar note, I remain grateful to University of Georgia Press, my initial editor, Walter Biggins, and my readers for their faith in the project. A special thanks to my current editor, Nate Holly, for seeing the project through and for providing thoughtful feedback throughout its completion.

Perhaps most importantly, I must thank all those who have been personal pillars of my life. Much gratitude to Asha Davis, Lance Flowers, Patricia Mann, Michael Serafinas, and Peter Cheung, along with Vernon and Jamia Garrett. Thank you to my spiritual family for their continued love and support, in particular Woodrow and Alice Burse and Raymond Wilson, along with Domingo Reyes, Jim Friederichsen, Ryan Flatt, Rob Miller, and Brian Pulliam in addition to Maurice Williams and my Tuesday morning Bible study crew. My brothers and sisters in Christ have motivated and uplifted me both intentionally and unintentionally more than words can express. Thank you to my newfound family for their continued encouragement and support: my mother-in-law and father-in-law, Marveen and Michael Johnson, and sisters-in-law Kaelie Johnson and Kimberly Logan. And, of course, thank you to my biological family—once again to my mother, Alice, who I miss dearly and to my father, Lawrence, who is a spectacular role model and friend, along with a source of wisdom and strength. Thank you both for being there. I am also grateful to my sister, Christina, brother-in-law, Jonathan, and a host of loving aunts and uncles: Joseph, Leonard, Richard, and Clarence Dickinson, Joanne Talbot, and Alvera Hammond. And an extra special thank you to my remarkable niece and nephews—Melanie, a.k.a. Mel-belle, Matthew, Jonathan, and Jacob, aka Jake Monster—for keeping me grounded and always smiling. Thank you profoundly to my sister, Angela Mitchell. Thank you, Angela, for reading drafts, for your words of inspiration, and for always caring. Last but certainly not least, I must thank my magnificent wife, Arielle Dickinson, for her love and cheer and for suffering me as I completed this book. Whether it was listening to my scattered ideas, reading through drafts with me in the final stretch, or any of your other countless acts of support and care, you have been vital to finishing this project. I am truly blessed to have you as a wife and helpmate, and I love you more than words can convey. I thank God for you all, for His help, and for this opportunity. I am truly blessed to have completed this journey and am infinitely blessed to have had this unparalleled support system along the way.

Almost Dead

INTRODUCTION

At the age of sixteen, Jeffrey Brace lost everything—all but the memories of the loved ones ripped from his grasp and recollections of a community an ocean away. He left his West African village as an untroubled adolescent. The Atlantic slave trade forcibly conscripted this son of Africa into manhood. To be aged by the lash of the whip and sights of suffering was to reach maturity by a cruel path. On the slave ship, Brace’s senses were overwhelmed by pleas for mercy, odors of excrement, scents of death, and visions of agony. In 1759, after months in the floating prison, Brace arrived in Bridgetown, Barbados: the second largest slave-trading port in eighteenth-century British America. Brace’s cries were merely a handful of countless tears in a flood—a stream of lamentations stemming from thousands of souls forced along the city’s wharves, crossing the threshold from Atlantic sojourn into urban captivity. Close to forty thousand enslaved Africans arrived in Barbados in the 1750s alone, most through the island’s premier port, Bridgetown.¹ For those African captives not sold in West Indian markets, Caribbean ports were merely a degrading detour to a lengthier journey ultimately reaching the ports of urban North America.

Jeffrey Brace’s story, like thousands of others, was an urban Atlantic story linking Anglo-Atlantic ports in a lived tapestry of suffering and survival spanning the African diaspora. It was in Bridgetown that traders inspected Brace and his shipmates like livestock, selling many to the highest bidder. It was in the Caribbean city that Brace endured commodification, as merchants worked to systematically transform captives into commodities through brutality and deprivation. Starving, dehydrated, heartbroken, and sickly with innumerable physical and emotional wounds, Brace bemoaned to a fellow African, I am almost dead. These words supply the title of this book, for Brace’s words spoke volumes of the diasporic struggle to survive for people of African descent in the Black Urban Atlantic. The statement spoke as much to a physical condition as to a social reality. His body was a vessel almost destroyed as he fought to keep his spirit on this earthly plane. Abduction and separation removed his tangible ties to the society he knew from birth. Nevertheless, he would survive. He would survive the days of horror. He would survive the nights of loneliness. He would survive the physical and psychological trauma of enslavement. However, that survival meant entering a world where free labor meant more than lives—toiling in an institution where profit mattered more than human beings—struggling in a realm where black bodies were dispensable objects to be expertly exploited and senselessly destroyed. Indeed, Brace was almost dead, and urban Atlantic slave communities would prove critical to his survival. His words, hardships, and resiliency would be echoed through the lives of numerous captives who found themselves within the urban Atlantic.

This examination uses the urban Anglo-Atlantic as an active window into the concepts of social death and cultural retention: active precisely because the urban Atlantic served an active role in shaping and being shaped by captives’ social processes. Historian Orlando Patterson first applied the concept of social death to slavery to describe the isolated social existence of those enslaved in his seminal text Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Patterson viewed the harsh sufferings of capture and bondage as weapons destroying the social reality of the enslaved. Therefore, he defined social death as the fundamental nonexistence of acknowledged social personhood for captives apart from the master-slave relationship. Power dynamics lay at the center of Patterson’s theory. The system of slavery required the social alienation of those enslaved along with the denial of enslaved social relationships. Therefore, captive social death was vital to human bondage according to Patterson. But this perspective belies a more nuanced understanding of captivity through the perspectives of bondspeople. Social alienation was indeed essential in slavery and cultural linkages were certainly damaged by bondage, but this did not equate to a permanent state of social death. More recently, scholars, particularly Stephanie Smallwood, have provided a more expansive interpretation of enslaved black trauma. Smallwood rightly postulates that while captives were the victims of social death, they could achieve a measure of rebirth in newly established lives as bondspeople. Her book Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora develops this argument largely through an examination of capture and forced migration across the Atlantic during the seventeenth century. Smallwood’s study provides the reader with illustrations of social rebirth emerging on the journey from West Africa, and the text begins to grapple with conceptualizing the lived reality of social rebirth after arrival in the Americas.²

This book is an effort to shed further light on how captives pieced together their lives in the Americas by establishing, shaping, reimagining, and preserving their world in urban Anglo-Atlantic communities—a world in many ways socially apart from mainstream society yet vital to enslaved black survival. More specifically, I argue that urban environments provided unique barriers to and avenues for social rebirth. The Black Urban Atlantic, therefore, is a valuable framework to investigate the complex social realities of those captives whose lives influenced and were influenced by the urban Atlantic. Like Smallwood's, my study works to see captives as actors with agency beyond the purview or bonds of hegemonic societal structures while also acknowledging the continued confines of oppression. I define the term social rebirth as the process by which African-descended peoples reconstructed their lives and formed communities after forced exportation from West Africa. At issue, then, is the extent to which captives were able to rebuild and reconstitute fractured cultural and social ties and how they were able to build new social networks upon memories of the old. It was in urban slave communities—within the connections between neighbors and kinfolk—that enslaved blacks found the physical and psychological resources necessary to endure the seemingly unendurable. Enslaved black efforts to bear bondage in early port cities reveal the dynamics of urban Atlantic slave communities, the ways these communities changed over time, and that Anglo-American port cities formed an interconnected Black Urban Atlantic landscape. Whether sites of first arrival, commodification, sale, short-term captivity, or lifetime enslavement, the urban Atlantic shaped and was shaped by black lives. It is only through a close analysis of urban slave communities and adopting captive perspectives that this interconnected world of the Black Urban Atlantic, a network linking West Indian and mainland ports in black oppression, becomes clear.

In recent years, historians have worked to examine slave communities within expansive frameworks rather than in isolation. The Atlantic, the Black Atlantic more specifically, has yielded fruitful historical insights. Even more recently, scholars have further expanded the framework to include the Black Urban Atlantic, a concept born of the lived realities of many bondspeople whose lives traversed Atlantic cities. The recently published edited volume The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade was a significant foray into this framework.³ However, the vital work of its contributors and other historians remains largely geographically isolated, often focused on individual urban centers. Therefore, my study seeks to enhance our perception of the Black Urban Atlantic through a more expansive and comparative analysis of urban slave communities and their Atlantic connections. Indeed, the lives of bondspeople illuminate connections between urban centers in important ways. Brace, for instance, entered his Atlantic voyage aboard a ship departing from a West African port en route to Bridgetown, Barbados.

The study uses three cities with close ties to uncover the unique obstacles and opportunities urban spaces posed to social rebirth: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Bridgetown, Barbados; and Kingston, Jamaica. The study investigates the lives of captives who inhabited the three cities and the communities they formed within these urban centers. The study begins in the 1680s as the three cities developed and matured. The investigation then concludes in 1807 when Great Britain and the United States passed legislation outlawing the Atlantic slave trade, which would dramatically alter the institution of slavery in Anglo-America. This book examines North American and West Indian urban slave communities to shed light on similarities, variations, and linkages between urban Atlantic communities. The three cities were deeply connected through lines of commerce as Philadelphia merchants exchanged wheat, lumber, and foodstuffs to West Indian trading partners for sugar, rum, and black lives. Indeed, this commerce means that Philadelphia was in many ways tied to the Greater Caribbean. Such a realization complicates traditional narratives of slavery and freedom. Philadelphia, in many ways the most prominent beacon of