Even though Georgia was the only colonial region that issued a ban on slavery from its inception in 1733, colonists from South Carolina and other regions brought enslaved people to the city before the ban was lifted by a royal decree in 1751. At that time there were about four hundred enslaved people in Savannah. This means that for them, life in the budding urban center may have been difficult because many worked in the homes of their enslavers and had little contact with other people of African descent.
Some of the early descriptions of experiences in the city from an African perspective come from Olaudah Equiano, an Igbo captive, in the 1760s. Equiano shared his nearly fatal public beating by a well-known physician, his time in jail after the beating, as well as his recovery aided by another prominent physician, in his memoir, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789). The shipping and slave-trading industry brought Equiano and thousands of other African captives to the city.
African people forced into the belly of slave ships crossed the Atlantic and came to Savannah through several different routes, but beginning in the late 1760s, Africans came directly from West Africa. While the trade continued and the colony grew, enslaved Africans and their descendants contributed to a growing religious community. During Equiano’s time in Savannah, he witnessed a moving sermon by George Whitefield. The spirit-filled preaching, such as was common within the African and African American community, impressed him greatly.
Savannah was home to the First African Baptist Church (established in 1777), hailed as the oldest Black church in North America. Reverend Andrew Bryan, an enslaved preacher who became the second leader of this congregation in 1782, used a rice barn on his enslaver’s property for services. Bryan later bought property in Oglethorpe Ward to build a church.
In January 1788, a white minister named Abraham Marshall visited Savannah with one of his Black colleagues, Jesse Peters, and the two baptized more than forty members. Marshall also ordained Bryan. Church membership continued to grow, from 575 members in 1788 to 2,795 in 1831.
In the fall of 1779, while people of African descent worked and worshiped, some had the opportunity to fight for their liberty during the American Revolution. Savannah was home to the second-deadliest battle of the Revolutionary War: the Siege of Savannah. American allies along with the French failed to ward off the British navy when it increased its occupation of the Savannah River by adding “two row galleys.” British Captain Hyde Parker ordered “twelve negroes” to serve as part of the crew.
This military strategy to enlist troops of African descent represented a significant moment in African American history. Guides of African descent “were instrumental in the defense of Savannah” because these men knew the waterways better than anyone in uniform. Fighting against the Franco-American forces, the British enlisted some “two hundred negroes” to help with “skirmishes on the outskirts of the city.” At the same time, Savannah residents feared armed Blacks and petitioned to disarm them because they walked around with “great insolence.”
By October 1779, the American colonists had suffered 752 casualties. When the French tried to lend some naval support, the prepared British sank six French ships in the Savannah River—a humiliating and costly loss for French general Count d’Estaing. D’Estaing’s army of 3,600 contained 545 people of African descent, many from Saint Domingue (later Haiti). An estimated 1,094 of these soldiers, including 650 French troops, lost their lives.
One of the reasons for the British success is that they also used African American guides and laborers. Quimano Dolly was one African American who helped the British capture Savannah by bringing troops through a swamp area behind the city. At the end of the war, nearly four thousand people of African descent left Savannah and headed to Florida, the Caribbean, and Canada.
But many Black people remained. Today African Americans represent 54 percent of the population, the First African Baptist Church still stands, and the battle sites of the American Revolution are recognized in city parks, on historical landmarks, and through the oral traditions of Africans and their descendants. The freedom dreams of the Revolutionary War remain the freedom dreams of today.
1784–1789
THE U.S. CONSTITUTION
Donna Brazile
My name is Richard Allen. I was born enslaved and died a Methodist bishop.
I am an African, and an American. In my lifetime, 1760–1831, I had two enslavers. Both were relatively good men by my own standards and those of my fellow citizens. Still, slavery was a bitter pill to swallow.
My emotions never accepted that my mind, my learning, my labor, my character, my hands, were someone’s personal property. Beginning with the first awareness of my condition, I thought without rest of freedom. I often felt that one day I would be free.
Benjamin Chew of Philadelphia was my first owner. When I was eight, he sold my parents, my siblings, and me to a Delaware planter of modest means. Stokley Sturgis and his wife were aging, kind people. They didn’t work me very hard. In fact, I didn’t know hard work until I left them to earn back my body.
When I was ten, the Boston Massacre took place. All people, both enslaved and free, were living and moving and breathing in an ether of expectation. It hit me hard that Crispus Attucks, a man like me, was the first to give his life. In 1776 we learned the news that the Declaration of Independence was signed and issued. Its message had a deep impact.
The following year, at age seventeen, I became severely aware of my personal deficiencies, my moral shortcomings. They weighed heavily. I struggled daily with these feelings. Then Freeborn Garretson, a white preacher, came. I listened and converted to Methodism.
I was hungry for spiritual discipline and guidance. I took Scripture to heart, especially the teachings of Christ. They were words to live by, and I lived by them.
My life changed.
Then Sturgis’s life changed. He had been attending our meetings when, at one of them, Reverend Garretson said that slave owners had been “weighed in the balance and found wanting.” That struck Sturgis squarely in the heart. He saw he could no longer own slaves.
Sturgis told me I should leave, find work, and pay him what he had paid for me. By age twenty-six in 1786, I had bought my body, literally earned my freedom.
It was in some ways harder to be a free man. Now—no mistake—the ideals of the American Revolution, the words of the Declaration, had triggered the fall of slavery in the northern states.
Although unable to endure the hypocrisy of slavery, most northern white citizens could not bring themselves to be social equals. Accordingly, they did all they could to squelch opportunity for free American Africans.
I felt for those newly freed. Few whites would make loans to buy homes. Those who did, mostly abolitionist Quakers, were tight in reviewing and granting them. It was hard to get jobs. It was hard just to live. We even found it hard to be dead—we were not allowed to own cemeteries in which to bury our deceased.