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Scholars have long thought it impossible to learn much about the thousands of Africans forcibly transported across the Atlantic to work on Chesapeake plantations. This bleak assessment has come first from the belief that the places in Africa from which slaves were taken are unknown and unknowable. Second, it has been supposed that once brought into a colony, slaves from many different regions and ethnic groups who spoke multiple, mutually unintelligible languages were indiscriminately mixed together. Historians have concluded that Africans were incorporated into a larger African American culture in which European norms and patterns of behavior predominated because of the diverse geographic origins of enslaved people within a large continent, the multiplicity of languages they spoke, and their dispersal throughout the Chesapeake. These suppositions are now beginning to change. Although we will perhaps never know much about the life histories of individual men, women, and children shipped to the Americas, recent work on the transatlantic slave trade is yielding a surprising amount of information on where these people originated, the ethnic groups to which they belonged, and what those captives who survived the Middle Passage experienced.
The recently published Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM traces slaving voyages from their ports of origin in Europe or America to their destinations along the African coast where slaves were purchased and then follows them to the New World where the slaves were sold. This database enables scholars to identify and explore the particular African regions in which slaves originated and link these slaves to the particular colonies to which they were sent (1). The initial results, summarized here for the Chesapeake region, are indeed preliminary, but the possibilities for expanding understanding of the experiences of Africans and their descendants in the various colonies are becoming ever more promising.
Where Chesapeake Slaves Came From
Between 13,000 and 20,000 slaves were brought into Virginia and Maryland between 1619 and 1697, and approximately 96,000 arrived from 1698 (when colonial records of slave imports are more complete) to 1774 when the transatlantic slave trade into the Chesapeake ended. Despite the common perception that many Chesapeake slaves had first worked in the West Indies or perhaps been born there, the new information in the slave trade database demonstrates that most...