American Uprising Read Online Free Page B

slave in order to try to spark a revolt, the captain brought the entire cargo of slaves onto the deck. He ordered sailors to tie a rope around the man’s chest and hoist him up high into the air. A firing squad then unleashed a volley of shots as the man screamed with anger and agony. His blood spattered onto the faces of the slave onlookers. The captain wrote in his journal that he did this “to teach a lesson to all the others.” As the Africans transitioned into their new roles as slaves, they would witness many such lessons.
    Once the slave ship reached open ocean, the traders worked to try to keep the slaves in a semblance of health, lest they lose too much of their cargo. The profit was in delivering laborers—not half-dead corpses—to New World markets. Killing and maiming the cargo was really the last thing wanted by ship captains and their sponsors; that they did it anyway demonstrates the violence and fear prevalent on these journeys. To keep the slaves’ muscles in shape, the sailors would bring the slaves onto the deck and have them dance. As one sailor played the accordion or guitar, other crew members prodded the shackled men to jump up and down in unison on the pitching deck of the vessel. “It was usual to make them dance in order that they might exercise their limbs and preserve their health,” explained one British surgeon on a slave ship in 1789. “This was done by means of a Cat of Nine Tails with which they were driven about one among the other, one of their country drums beating at the same time. On these occasions they were compelled to sing, the Cat being brandished at them for that purpose . . . The men could only jump up and rattle their chains, but the women . . . were driven among one another.” They had other plans for the women. The sailors would strip them completely naked and have them dance unshackled for the amusement of the crew. At nights, the officers went down to the quarters and raped women at will.
    After a journey of a few months, depending on weather conditions, the slave ships arrived at the various entry ports of the New World—Charleston, Havana, or Kingston. Prior to their arrival in these slave marts, experts among the crew rubbed the slaves’ skins with oil to make them shine, gave them rum to clear their eyes and brighten their countenances, covered their sores with iron rust and gunpowder, and closed their lesions. They wanted the slaves to look as healthy as possible before sale.
    Traders would buy and sell the slaves here. Some would be bought to serve in the West Indies, others for transshipment to North America, while still others would serve for a bit in the West Indies before being sent on to North America, having either been bought for the purpose of being broken in and then resold, or simply rejected by the West Indian planters.
    Several thousand of the many slaves caught up in the New World ended up in New Orleans. Here, emerging onto the deck, the slaves would have seen a bustling waterfront—ships from all over the world, hundreds of flatboats packed densely together, stevedores loading and unloading goods, sailors shouting instructions—a cacophony of exchange conducted in half a dozen or more languages. The sailors brought the slaves on deck, then transported them in flatboats to the shore. The slave merchants took the terrified Africans from there, marching them in chains through the central square of the city, past the cathedral and the Cabildo, past the sailors’ district with its shacks, brothels, and bars, to a huge slave market advertised by hanging signs with names such as “Kenner and Henderson.” The merchants packed the slaves into pens the size of home lots surrounded by fences fifteen to twenty feet tall.
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    Sometime between May and September of 1806, the brash American James Brown drove his carriage in from his new plantation on the German Coast and parked it outside one of these slave markets, perhaps outside the full-service