On the Move: Stories of African American Migration and Mobility: Transatlantic Slave Trade
Transatlantic Slave Trade
The Transatlantic Slave Trade is the umbrella term for the 300-year triangular pattern of ship routes which included the forced movement of enslaved people from Africa to the Americas, the shipment of raw materials from the Americas to European manufacturing centers, and the return of finished goods from Europe to Africa. In the United States, we often cite the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia in 1619 as the beginning of the Black experience in this country.
- A new chart of the vast Atlantic or Western Ocean, including the sea coast of Europe, Africa, America and the West India Islands : with the banks, shoals, rocks & course of sailing from one continent to the other laid down from the latest discoveries byCall Number: CCm912 1762bPublication Date: 17621 map : hand color ; 43 x 54 cm. Shows trade routes. Relief shown pictorially; depths shown by soundings. Prime meridian: London. Includes note about survey sources, latitude, and longitude in lower right corner.
Exhibit materials
Port of Roanoke Records, volumes 1 (1771) and 3 (1774)
These port records were kept by future U.S. Supreme Court Justice James Iredell, Sr. (1751–1799). Between 1768 and 1776, Iredell worked as the deputy customs collector for the Port of Roanoke in Edenton, NC. Port Roanoke was one of five official points of entry and served most of the Albermarle settlement. In this role, Iredell would have inspected ships filled with human cargo, recorded the conditions on board, and collected money from the ship’s captain.
In these two volumes we see clear accountings of the import and export patterns at the Port of Roanoke in January 1774. Line 9 of the “imports” ledger records the ship Nancy arriving from Tobago with ten Negroes on board. Line 13 of the “exports” ledger shows Nancy headed to Barbados with foodstuffs and lumber. Exports of goods to Cadiz, a port city in Spain, complete the third leg of this triangular trade. The well-worn path of slaves and supplies from the Caribbean to the Americas is clear.
Slave auction advertisement, 1829-1870
It is unclear whether the Havens and Bonner families kept this advertisement because they were trying to buy or sell enslaved people, or why they were engaged in either practice in Macon, GA, hundreds of miles away from their own plantations near Washington D.C. and Portsmouth, NC. While the largest sales happened around port cities like Savannah, GA, Charleston, SC, and St. Augustine, FL, smaller slave markets existed throughout the Southern states. Slave traders like G.W. Wylly made a fortune selling enslaved individuals around the region and Black families paid the ultimate price.
Accounts of the schooner, Betsy, 1791
Like this account book from the ship Betsy, most records documenting the slave trade in the 18th century are devoid of traces of the humanity of the cargo. Many slaves traders in the Americas and the Carribean took the enslaved Africans through a process called “seasoning,” designed to degrade and strip the individuals of all ties to their homelands, starting with their names. Betsy’s log shows this process with the documented transfer of a man named George from New Bern, NC to Montego Bay in Jamaica on Betsy. He was purchased for £60.00, equivalent to approximately $9,000 in 2019.
This collection contains manifests, bills and certificates of unlading, letters, accounts, and other items pertaining to shipping between New England, South Atlantic ports, and the West Indies. Sales of slaves are mentioned in an accounting document regarding trips between Newbern, N.C. and Montego Bay, Jamaica in 1792. Also included is a book of accounts of Killey Eldredge (fl. 1793-1798), Massachusetts ship captain, with owners of two ships, kept during a voyage from Massachusetts to Charleston, S.C., 1793-1794, and on a voyage to England, Ireland, and France, 1796-1798.
Ships' Papers, 1756-1842 (01065)
The American museum, or, Universal magazineCall Number: AP2.A2 A8Publication Date: 1790-1792This periodical includes a diagram of Brookes, a British slave ship designed to hold 454 (often sailing with more) slaves and sail from Liverpool, to African’s Gold Coast, and on to Jamaica. This configuration calls for about 6 square feet per adult and 5 square feet per child. The average college dorm room is 130 square feet, it is hard to image 20 people laying on the floor there for five minutes, let alone 2-3 months for these journeys across the ocean.
Omar Ibn Said
“Then there came to our place a large army, who killed many men, and took me, and brought me to the great sea, and sold me into the hands of the Christians, who bound me and sent me on board a great ship and we sailed upon the great sea a month and a half, when we came to a place called Charleston in the Christian language." - Omar Ibn Said
Ambrotype of Omar ibn Said, circa 1855
Omar ibn Said was a highly-educated Muslim man who was captured from his homeland of Senegal, West Africa and brought to the United States as a slave in 1807. Said wrote his autobiography in 1831, which includes details about his abduction, his escape from Charleston, SC and his eventual re-capture in Fayetteville, NC. Not only does Said write about his life, he writes about his faith, often in Arabic. Said’s life history challenges perceptions of the educational and language traditions in Africa, the role of religion, and the lived experience of an enslaved person in the United States. At the time that this image was taken, Said was enslaved by General James Owen in Wilmington, NC. Said became well known in the community when rumors spread that he was descended from African royalty. Visitors to Owen’s family also marveled at Said's advanced age, his ability to write in Arabic and his capacity for telling folk tales.
Ambrotype Collection, 1852-1880 (P0007)
Albumen print of Omar ibn Said
The reverse of this photograph has a short biography about Omar ibn Said by Alfred Moore Waddell, written in 1905. Waddell and the DeRosset family were associates of the Owen family. Reproduced and transcribed on Documenting the American South.
DeRosset Family Papers, 1671-1940 (00214)
23rd Psalm written in Arabic by Omar ibn Said and laid into the scrapbook of John Frederick Foard, 1856.
John Frederick Foard, an associate of the Owen family, asked Said to write the 23rd Psalm in Arabic during his visit to the Owen home in 1855. Foard pasted the passage in his scrapbook and included an image of it in his 1904 publication, North America and Africa: Their Past, Present and Future, and Key to the Negro Problem.
Sūrat al-Naṣr, سورة النصر, circa 1857.
A verse from the Qur’an written in Arabic by Omar ibn Said, roughly translates as praise of God and a prayer for forgiveness in the belief that God is returning soon. At the time of its writing, Said attended a Presbyterian church regularly and had, at least ostensibly, converted from Islam to Christianity. Said’s conversion may simply have been a means of survival though he may sincerely have found solace in the similarities he perceived between Christian and Muslim scripture. Sūrat al-Naṣr is understood to be Omar ibn Said's latest known extant writing. A note on the verso incorrectly states that it is the Lord's Prayer. Reproduced and transcribed at Documenting the American South.
Additional resources
The Waterman's Song by Call Number: E444.N8 C43 2001ISBN: 080782643XPublication Date: 2001-10-01The first major study of slavery in the maritime South, The Waterman's Song chronicles the world of slave and free black fishermen, pilots, rivermen, sailors, ferrymen, and other laborers who, from the colonial era through Reconstruction, plied the vast inland waters of North Carolina from the Outer Banks to the upper reaches of tidewater rivers. Demonstrating the vitality and significance of this local African American maritime culture, David Cecelski also reveals its connections to the Afro-Caribbean, the relatively egalitarian work culture of seafaring men who visited nearby ports, and the revolutionary political tides that coursed throughout the black Atlantic. Black maritime laborers played an essential role in local abolitionist activity, slave insurrections, and other antislavery activism. They also boatlifted thousands of slaves to freedom during the Civil War. But most important, Cecelski says, they carried an insurgent, democratic vision born in the maritime districts of the slave South into the political maelstrom of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Speculators and Slaves by Call Number: E442 .T33 1996xISBN: 0299118541Publication Date: 1996-02-15In this groundbreaking work, Michael Tadman establishes that all levels of white society in the antebellum South were deeply involved in a massive interregional trade in slaves. Using countless previously untapped manuscript sources, he documents black resilience in the face of the pervasive indifference of slaveholders toward slaves and their families. This new paperback edition of Speculators and Slaves offers a substantial new Introduction that advances a major thesis of master-slave relationships. By exploring the gulf between the slaveholders' self-image as benevolent paternalists and their actual behavior, Tadman critiques the theories of close accommodation and paternalistic hegemony that are currently influential.
A Muslim American Slave by Call Number: CB S132mISBN: 9780299249540Publication Date: 2011-07-20Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling "the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language," as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said's narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said's Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes's comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that "Islam" and "America" are not mutually exclusive terms. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said's Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes's comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that "Islam" and "America" are not mutually exclusive terms. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians- Autobiography of Omar ibn Said, slave in North Carolina, 1831 by Call Number: Full text onlinePublication Date: 1831Autobiography of Omar ibn Said, Slave in North Carolina, 1831. Ed. John Franklin Jameson. From The American Historical Review, 30, No. 4. (July 1925), 787-795.
Washington, D. C.: American Historical Association, 1925. - The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano : or, Gustavus Vassa, the African by Call Number: CT2750.E5 A3 1793Publication Date: 1793Providing a vivid account of the eighteenth-century Western world through his own experiences, the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano combines Eqiano's own words about issues such as slavery and independence.. From the Rare Book Collection.
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade DatabaseProvides data on over 35,000 slave ship voyages which forcibly carried over 10 million Africans to the Americas from the early 16th to the mid-19th centuries. You can search for particular voyages, use the African name database of 67,000 names, view and even create maps, retrieve numerical data, read explanatory essays, and find and use lesson plans.
