These are fine abolitionist principles, but the German Quakers had a more fundamental disagreement with slavery: they found it an affront to the human condition. Consider the demands in the petition, written by its four authors, Gerret Hendericks, Derick up de Graeff, Francis Daniell Pastorius, and Abraham op den Graeff. They declared that Blacks
are brought hither against their will and consent, and that many of them are stolen. Now, tho they are black, we can not conceive there is more liberty to have them slaves, as it is to have other white ones….This makes an ill report in all those countries of Europe, where they hear off, that ye Quakers doe here handel men as they handel their ye cattle….
And in case you find it to be good to handel these blacks at that manner, we desire and require you hereby lovingly, that you may inform us herein, which at this time never was done, viz., that Christians have such a liberty to do so. To the end we shall be satisfied in this point, and satisfied likewise our good friends and acquaintances in our natif country, to whose it is a terror, or [fearful] thing, that men should be handeld so in Pennsylvania.
The most important part of the petition—the part that compelled historian Katharine Gerbner to describe it as “one of the first documents to make a humanitarian argument against slavery”—is the plain affirmation that Blacks are first and foremost human beings and not salable animals for toil and labor. A humanitarian argument is different from an argument based on inclusion and exclusion. Inclusion—in this case, being included as beneficiaries of the bounty of America—is important, but it is not fundamental because if the people who want to be included are not considered worthy or even really people at all, then your commitment to inclusion will evaporate. But if you start from the idea that Blacks are indeed human, then every commitment to equality after that will be unshakable. And that is the thing to be learned from the 1688 petition. Blacks do not need allies who fight for our inclusion; rather, we need people who are possessed of the basic belief that we are human and that any arguments that depend on rejecting that proposition are tyrannical, unjust, and to be fought.
This may seem to be a semantic point. After all, can’t allies do exactly that? Yes, but there’s more to consider. By their very nature, alliances are agreements, explicitly or implicitly, and usually the most essential part of an alliance is that it is made for mutual benefit and advantage. But think about that. What does it mean to rely on a system of racial support founded on people entering into that kind of pragmatic agreement?
The 1688 Germantown petition is a model of, if nothing else, a quality that Black people need in white Americans—the uncompromising belief that what is wrong with racism is not that it inhibits full access to American goods and treasures but that it is an affront to the human standing of Black Americans. Black people don’t need allies. We need decent people possessed of the moral conviction that our lives matter.
1694–1699
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
Mary E. Hicks
From the 1400s to the 1600s, Portuguese merchant interests on the vast coast of West Africa experienced the ebbs and flows of fortune characteristic of any form of early modern commerce. But the Portuguese were not exclusively involved in trading spices, textiles, specie, and other luxury goods; the fledgling empire increasingly specialized in the disreputable commerce “in human flesh and blood.”
The tiny Iberian nation originated the Atlantic world’s first transoceanic slave trade. It connected Europe with sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas through the brutal commerce of buying and selling human beings. The pioneering maritime technologies and trading strategies of the Portuguese made the once commercially insignificant territory into the preeminent importer of gold and enslaved men, women, and children on the continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The incursions of Dutch, English, and French traffickers slowly eroded the Portuguese monopoly. In the region surrounding Elmina—the most prolific gold-producing area in West Africa—the Portuguese were supplanted by the Dutch in 1637. The rush of European merchants to the Gold Coast following the Dutch victory prompted the once modest number of slaving ships trolling West African waters to metastasize. The number of enslaved people whom slavers violently embarked from the sandy strip of coast reached an average of 4,494 per year.
In the final decade of the seventeenth century, slave traders under Portugal’s banner began to reassert their regional dominance by regaining the coveted asiento or commercial monopoly to supply enslaved laborers to Spanish America. In 1698 the ruler of Ardra, a powerful African polity to the east of Elmina, invited the Portuguese monarch to build a fortified trading post there in recognition of the nation’s lucrative dealings in the port. Meanwhile in Brazil, Portugal’s largest and most opulent colony, gold deposits were discovered in a remote, mountainous region west of Rio de Janeiro, which further stimulated Portuguese efforts to exploit a steady stream of laboring hands to mine for precious metals. But the Portuguese also exploited the expertise of another group of unlikely laborers.
West African mariners provided the critical labor necessary to make slaving voyages profitably efficient. And their seafaring skills became the hidden element in the slave trade’s surging growth. A string of coastal communities, “Axim, Ackum, Boutroe, Tacorary, Commendo, Cormentim and Wineba,” furnished Portuguese and other Europeans with highly skilled contracted canoemen to ferry goods and people from ship to shore, as well as carry provisions and trade goods along the coast.
Their expertise in fashioning lithe, maneuverable watercraft was unmatched. So too was their knowledge of the contours of coastal geographies and the rhythms of the powerful local surf, which often confounded European seamen. The canoes of the Fanti especially captivated European navigators for their size and complexity. These vessels, able to navigate on the open waters of the Atlantic, made a striking impression. Visitors noted “the bigger canoes…made from a single trunk, the largest in the Ethiopias of Guinea; some of them are large enough to hold eighty men, and they come from a hundred leagues or more up this river bringing yams in large quantities….They also bring many slaves, cows, goats, and sheep.” On larger craft, crewmen remained stationed for long periods, just as they would on European sailing ships, eating and sleeping aboard.
European slavers such as Jean Barbot called Gold Coast canoemen “the fittest and most experienced men to manage [to] paddle the canoes over the bars and breakings.” Though at the behest of slaving ship captains and merchants, these laborers were not without leverage. They bargained for higher wages and used their proximity to transatlantic commerce to deal on their own behalf. As one European trader noted, “It was customary for Mina fishermen [canoemen] to go out in their canoes and contact ships from Portugal before they reached the [trading] castle. Out at sea they conducted private trade to the detriment of the [Portuguese] crown.”
Maritime middlemen were vectors between avaricious European and American merchants and the West African brokers who sold them Black people. These middlemen occupied a paradoxical position within the transatlantic slave trade. They bore witness to and participated in heart-wrenching scenes of violence: enslaved peoples being shackled, branded, and forcibly moved aboard ships. Facing these disturbing scenes, as well as the inherent dangers of the Gold Coast’s tumultuous waters, they carved out individual benefits for themselves on the margins of the infamous trade. Like many participants in the Middle Passage, the individual inducements for cooperation bound them to a ruthless process that enriched the few at the expense of many.