chapter 10
Blacks in America
L
ike a giant whirlpool, the transatlantic traffic sucked out of
Africa perhaps as many as 12 million people. Of them,
about half a million were sent to North America as slaves. The objective of
this chapter is to show how they were transformed from Africans into Afro-
Americans and how their presence altered white society.
This process was begun in Africa by African slave dealers; the captives
were then taken over by ships’ crews who carried forward what had begun
in Africa and delivered their “black cargoes” to slave markets in the New
World, where the Africans were parceled out to white Americans. At each
stage, we today are tempted to stop to express our astonishment—and
horror—at how otherwise decent human beings, even clergymen like Rev-
enend Cotton Mather of Boston, could participate in such a barbaric, inhu-
man, vicious enterprise. Here I will try to understand. I begin with the
context in which black slavery fit.
As we have seen, large numbers of whites who became Americans
arrived from Europe in bondage, either having been expelled or having
traded such “liberty” as they had for an escape from poverty, oppression, or
insecurity. Difficult as their position sometimes was, however, it was allevi-
ated by three considerations: the condition was temporary, they had some
legal safeguards, and no one suggested that they were not fellow human
beings. None of these considerations pertained either to the native Indians
or to the arriving Africans. Both groups were regarded (and treated) as
nonhuman, but the way they were treated differed. After initial attempts to
use Indians as slaves, the whites drove them away or killed them. By con-
163