by private traders. The number again multiplied: between 1727 and 1747
it reached 45,440; and from 1741 to 1760 it reached over 100,000.
Ironically, in the 1770s, on the eve of the Revolution, the importation of
slaves dropped to only 3,338 because of the colonists’ boycott of British
goods.
Modern Americans associate slavery with cotton; but a century before
cotton became a major crop, sugar employed the most African slaves. It was
mainly the growth of sugar plantations that brought about the growth of
slavery. Then, in America in the eighteenth century, the spread of rice and
tobacco raised the value of slaves on the African coast fivefold from 1730 to
- Still only about six of 100 Africans came to the British American
colonies. Most of these were sold to whites in the colonial South, but some
were sold in the North. In the North, no “plantation” crops were grown;
but in a site excavated in the 1990s on Shelter Island, there is evidence that
slaves in New York produced provisions and timber for a sugar-producing
plantation on Barbados which was owned by the same family that owned
the Shelter Island plantation.
Getting Africans into the hands of white buyers was usually accom-
plished by advertisements like the following in the South Carolina Gazette
of May 25, 1762:
Just imported from the River Gambia in the Schooner Sally, Barnard
Badger, Master, and to be sold at the Upper Ferry (called Benjamin
Cooper’s Ferry), opposite to this City, a Parcel of likely Men and Women
SLAVES
With some Boys and Girls of different Ages. Attendance will be
given from the Hours of nine to twelve.... It is generally allowed that the
Gambia Slaves are much more robust and tractable than any other Slaves
from the Coast of Guinea and more capable of undergoing the Severity of
the Winter Seasons in the North-American Colonies, which occasions
their being vastly more esteemed and coveted in this Province and those
to the Northward than any other Slaves whatsoever.Many descriptions of what happened next are available. Mary Prince,
who wrote one of the few narratives of this period, remarks that when she
Blacks in America 169