86
A
s early as their fi rst arrival in Virginia in 1619, Africans were imported to
the New World with the idea of making agricultural opportunities such
as tobacco growing more economically attractive. Though most A meri-
cans considered it morally wrong, slavery persisted as part of the economic
engine that European settlement built on these shores. The Founding Fathers
knew that slavery violated the republic’s democratic principles, yet the constitu-
tional debates of 1787–88 show that if it had been outlawed, some colonies would
never have joined the union.
Slavery’s evil touched everyone involved. In regions where blacks outnum-
bered them, the whites’ sense of guilt mingled with fear. Slave rebellions in
the Caribbean in the 1790s—especially the Haitian revolution, which began in
1791 and eventually ousted the French colonial government in 1803—sent shock
waves through North American slaveholding society. Revolts were rare in the
United States, but the threat of revolt was seldom absent. And when slaves did
rebel, panic could lead to tighter repression.
American slaves came from a broad geographical area, stretching from the
western Sudan (present-day Senegal) to Central and Southeast Africa as far as
Mozambique and Madagascar. Most slaves came from West Africa—present-day
Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. The slave population
thus included peoples with many different languages, religions, and traditions.
For all their differences, however, these African peoples shared certain simi-
larities in cultural expression. Their sense of community must also have been
strengthened by the harshness of their lives in America. Custom and law here
treated Africans’ differences from each other as insignifi cant when compared
with their differences from whites.
By 1850 almost one out of every six Americans was of African descent. The
midcentury national census identifi ed 3.6 million people—just over 15 percent
of the population—as black, with 434,000 free and the rest slaves. Though con-
centrated in the South, most heavily on cotton and rice plantations, blacks were
nevertheless present throughout the country. Yet white Americans every where
generally agreed that blacks were inherently inferior. Even among slavery’s
opponents, few whites endorsed the notion of black-white equality. This attitude
must be kept in mind in any discussion of black music making before the CivilCHAPTER
4
“MAKE A NOISE”
African American Music
before the Civil War
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