African Americans and the War for Independence 17631783 - Essay Example

AFRICAN AMERICANS Today's Mande (Mandinka means people of Mande) people are heirs to an extremely rich and vibrant historical legacy, the high point of which was the Mali people. The social status of the most ancient families is based on their identification with ancestors who participated with Sunjata in the founding of the empire early in the 13th century. Members of some of these lineages have the status of aristocrat, or horonw. Traditionally, they were proprietors of the land and community leaders, and were expected to conduct themselves with dignity and honor, and to speak only when they had something serious to say. The senior male members of families that traced their descent from a village's founder were eligible to be chiefs. Some lineages claimed descent from distinguished ancestors described in The Sunjata Epic, including Sunjata himself. Mande group is identified its association with Islam. This includes Muslim clerics who are specialists in Islamic studies or leaders of prayer at the mosques. Their Arabic title, imam, has become almami in the Mande languages. Some of these learned Muslims are teachers in Quran schools, where children study the holy book of Islam and are expected to memorize at least part of it in Arabic. The Mande people's own story about the origin of the Mali Empire is usually known as The Sunjata Epic named for Sunjata Keita, who is credited with founding the Mali Empire. The story begins some time around the beginning of the 13th century in Farakoro, Mande chiefdom. Farakoro was near the gold fields of Bur, which had been one of the main sources of gold for Ghana in earlier centuries and would become similarly important for the Mali Empire. The chief of Farakoro was Maghan Konfara (maghan means "chief" and Konfara was another name for his town). Like all chiefs and kings of his day, Maghan Konfara had diviners who would forecast the future. One day the diviners told Maghan Konfara that he would be the father of a great hero, but that the woman who would be the hero's mother had not yet been found. After a long search the woman was finally located in the kingdom of Do ni Kiri. She was Sogolon Cond, a sister of the mansa (king). Sogolon was an ugly, hunchbacked woman, but she had frightening powers as a sorceress and was recognized as the woman who was destined to give birth to this great hero. So she was brought to Farakoro and married to Maghan Konfara, who already had many other wives. Sunjata organized the soldiers of all the Mande chiefdoms into a powerful army that went to war against Soso. After a series of battles, Sunjata's army vanquished Sumaworo and the army of Soso. The unified Mande chiefdoms formed the basis of a powerful kingdom that expanded into all the neighboring territories and became the Mali Empire. The Mande oral traditions do not give dates for the events they describe, but from what was written by Arab geographers, it appears that the defeat of Soso happened some time during the 1230s. African Americans The tendency in the United States was to seek to separate slaves who had come from the same local region in Africa, to make the individuals easier to manage. It was harder for the slaves to develop a common culture, and to organize. Unusually, the slave population in the USA was able to reproduce, meeting the needs of the economy across the growing country, and thus avoiding reliance on illegal slave trading. Increasingly slaves were American-born, rather than recent arrivals from Africa. Families were able to be relatively stable, and many owners saw the economic benefits of an increasing slave population. In the USA, only Africans were kept as slaves, and there was resistance to the idea of emancipation or manumission. White indentured servants and voluntary emigrants, whose living conditions were not necessarily better, but whose legal status was superior, could meet other needs for labor. Where there was discussion of freeing of slaves, from the time of Thomas Jefferson, it was assumed that the freed slaves would be required to leave. In debates about the ending of slavery, which had been so divisive as an issue ever since the War of Independence, there were plans to relocate the former slaves, leaving the USA as a predominantly white nation. There was no plan for the former slaves to achieve the status of citizens. There were no half measures: each person was either black or white. If they were black, they would not be regarded as full participants in society. Political and social turmoil in the decade before the American Revolution presented African Americans with opportunities and frustrations. As did their white counterparts, African Americans in the decade before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775 prepared for the conflict in disparate ways. In New England, where slavery was least common among the colonies, blacks prepared petitions seeking to take part in the Patriot cause against the British and later a significant proportion of them enrolled in state militias. In the mid-Atlantic, where legal restrictions in the system of small farm and urban slavery negated any chances for freedom, some blacks substituted for their masters in the state militias but more sided with the British. In the Upper and Lower South, African Americans seized upon the military and political splits within colonial society to gain freedom through self-emancipation and by siding with the British army. Blacks took part in the Revolutionary struggle throughout the war and played many different roles. Their eventual fate depended upon their location and on the final results of the war. Initial sightings of black Revolutionary activities occurred in New England. African Americans there took part in the riots against the Stamp Act, the tax on tea, and the street clashes with British soldiers from 1765 into the mid 1770s. The first person killed at the Boston Massacre in 1770 was Crispus Attucks, a black man. But mob actions were not the only way by which blacks demonstrated their growing awareness of the political conflict between colony and crown. There were hopeful signs for African Americans in New England. Many felt heartened by the Somerset Decision of 1772, which barred taking enslaved blacks out of England and in effect gave enslaved people civil rights, and blacks were also inspired by the poetry of Phillis Wheatley. Reminding the Patriots and the royal governor of Massachusetts that blacks too expected greater liberty, a committee of slaves sent a number of petitions to Governor Hutchinson and the colonial legislature. The petitions compared the status of blacks with that of whites who had clamored about royal designs to enslave the colonists. Accordingly, the petitioners, calling themselves Free Africans, informed the governor that they aligned themselves with Patriot discontent and asked that slaves be given a free day each week to earn money to purchase themselves. Upon gaining freedom, the petitioners opined, blacks would be eager to return to Africa to enjoy their liberty. Although Hutchinson refused to act upon these requests, blacks in the Northeast continued to send forth petitions seeking general emancipation, even during the war. These petitions combined with Patriot comprehension that enslavement of blacks contradicted white demands for liberty, produced results in the northern states. During the American Revolution, the breakaway Vermont territory abolished slavery by constitutional amendment in 1777. If the black Loyalists had to travel the Atlantic Ocean to find freedom, they at least attained it within a lifetime. For those who stayed in North America, liberty came slowly. The tiny black populations of New England benefited from the extinction of slavery during the 1770s and 1780s. Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1780. But New York and New Jersey, with the largest slave populations in the North, did not legislate gradual emancipation until 1799 and 1804, respectively. In both cases, black men born after 4 July of the year of enactment had to labor for their masters until they were twenty five years of age, while black women were not freed until reaching the age of twenty-one. Facing such long terms, blacks in those states bargained with masters for shorter terms on the basis of good behavior and for cash payments based on work performance. Liberal whites joined blacks in freedom suits against masters who had reneged on promises of liberty, for example, after military service. Many more blacks simply left their masters for freedom in the cities. In the countryside, masters held tightly to slaves. A few years after the adoption of gradual emancipation there, masters from Bergen County petitioned the state legislature to repeal the act because it deprived them of property rights won in the American Revolution. Legally or self-proclaimed free people, African Americans created genuine communities in northern cities of U.S. Centered on black churches that gradually created a black clerical leadership, the black communities featured burial and fraternal associations, vibrant neighborhoods of small entrepreneurs and artisans, and boardinghouse keepers. References Alden, John R. The American Revolution, 1775-1783. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1954. Anderson, William G. The Price of Liberty: The Public Debt of the American Revolution. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 1980. Charry, Eric. Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000. Conrad, David C., and Barbara E. Frank, Eds. Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1995. Schama, S. Rough Crossings: Britain, the slaves and the American Revolution. London: BBC. 2005. Read More