The World полностью

The Atlantic trade was one part of a world of bondage, but its record-keeping allows historians to estimate that in total over four centuries around 12.6 million were enslaved. The Portuguese/Brazilians transported almost half of the 12.6 million; the British a quarter; the French 10 per cent, the Dutch 5 per cent. During the four modern centuries, it is likely that over thirty million people were enslaved: twelve million across the Atlantic, approximately ten million from east Africa across the Indian Ocean, and ten million Turks, Russians, Georgians and Circassians from the Eurasian steppes. That does not include the Barbary–Moroccan trade in western Europeans nor the several million Serbs and Albanians enslaved by the Ottomans: some of these enslaved children became viziers and valide sultans, but that does not diminish their tragedy. Many Islamic slaves were females who served in households – but domestic service almost always included sexual abuse. It is estimated that the Crimean khans alone enslaved four million. Since there is no paperwork whatsoever for any of these trades, it is likely they are grossly underestimated.

From Ouidah and other slave castles, the ships were loaded with hundreds of slaves in their holds ‘crammed together like herrings in a barrel’ and set off on the dread trip to Portuguese Brazil, French Saint-Domingue or the British ‘Old Dominion’ – Virginia.

THREE AMERICAN FAMILIES: HEMINGSES, JEFFERSONS AND TOUSSAINTS

In 1735, a newly arrived ‘full-blooded African’ woman, in the words of her great-grandson, who had been enslaved in west Africa, was either raped or seduced by an English sea captain named Hemings at Williamsburg, possibly arriving as a captive on his slave ship. Slaves preserved their African origins as baKongo or Akan as long as they could. Masters, fearful of such affinities, were keen to sever any dangerous links, granting fresh enslaved identities with new, often classical names: there were many Hannibals and Caesars. Her name might have been Parthenia.

She became pregnant. In 1662, the Virginians had ruled that partus sequitur ventrem – if the mother was a slave, the child was. So when she delivered a daughter, Elizabeth known as Betty, Captain Hemings offered ‘an extraordinarily high price’ for his ‘own flesh’, but her owner refused.

Hemings tried to kidnap the baby but finally gave up. Betty Hemings found herself owned by Martha Eppes, who had inherited her from her father, himself descended from founding settlers who had acquired lands. In 1746, Martha married a self-made frontier lawyer and slave broker named John Wayles, born in Lancashire, England, who had been brought over as a gentleman’s indentured servant and had gained an estate and wealth – an early version of what would one day be called the American Dream. All the American colonies had elected assemblies – Virginia’s was called the House of Burgesses – dominated by planters of tobacco who created a legal infrastructure to protect their human property and their lives against any rebellion: 40–50 per cent of Virginians were slaves. In 1723, Virginia decreed that ‘no negro, mulatto, or Indian slaves shall be set free upon any pretense’. Wayles became the owner of Elizabeth Hemings.

Two years after the marriage, Martha Wayles died giving birth to a second daughter, named Martha after her. Wayles married two more wives, both of whom died young, after which he took Betty Hemings, described as a ‘bright mulatto’ woman – ‘bright’ meaning light – as a ‘concubine’. Although society disapproved, this was so common it was almost universal. ‘The pervasive doctrine of white supremacy supposedly inoculated whites against interracial mixing,’ writes Annette Gordon-Reed, but that proved ‘unreliable when matched against the force of human sexuality’. Wayles and Hemings had six children together. It is clear that sexual bondage was always a part of enslavement, whether in pagan Rome, Islamic Istanbul or here in Virginia: sex between owners and slaves was ‘on the terms of the males, beyond the eyes and scrutiny of the outside world … either through rape, using outright or implied force, or, in some cases, when men and women were genuinely attracted to each other’. It is impossible to evaluate such relationships on our terms: ‘enslaved women practically and legally could not refuse consent’ and testimony ‘makes clear the prevalence of rape during slavery’.

When Wayles died, Betty, her children and the rest of his 124 slaves would be inherited by his daughter Martha – and by her future husband, one Thomas Jefferson, who had been born in 1743, not long after Betty.