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Slavery and Philly: Since arrival of first enslaved Africans, deep scars exists here, across Commonwealth
Enslaved Africans were present in the region well before William Penn planted England’s flag here in 1681.
Arrival in Pennsylvania
Enslaved Africans were present in the region well before William Penn planted England’s flag here in 1681.
As far back as 1639, Africans were present in the region during the days when the Dutch and Swedes ruled the Delaware River and the land around it.
In 1684, a ship named the Isabella anchored in Philadelphia’s port with approximately 150 captured Africans, which is considered the first shipment of enslaved Africans to arrive in the city after Penn’s arrival.
Few port records survive to document the early trafficking of enslaved Africans to Pennsylvania (which included Delaware until 1776). Instead, newspapers and other records sketch an incomplete story about the slave trade in the region, but those only date back to 1720.
Between 1718 and 1804, at least 10 vessels that participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade docked in Pennsylvania ports carrying an estimated 1,000 enslaved Africans, according to the online database Slave Voyages.
Another 103 vessels carried more than 1,400 enslaved Africans from South America, the Caribbean and other American colonies to Pennsylvania between 1709 and 1776, according to the database.
The Slave Voyage database is in no way a complete list, said Gregory O’Malley, a historian working on the project.
“We know from other sources that enslaved Africans were [in Pennsylvania], we just don’t know how they got there or when,” he said. “That’s true in a lot of places. … We just don’t have the systematic records.”
Nonetheless, the enslavement of Africans in Pennsylvania followed a pattern similar to those established in older settlements, Asante said, but their numbers remained less than in the other colonies, including Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland.
Pennsylvania received deliveries of enslaved Africans primarily from the West Indies and Charleston, South Carolina, with shipments peaking between the late 1730s and 1750s, according to historians.
Blacks in Pennsylvania were sometimes referred to as “Guineas,” because they were taken from Africa’s Guinea coast, writes local historian Charles Blockson in “African Americans in Pennsylvania: A History and Guide.”
The Dutch and Swedes originally sold slaves from auction blocks in Philadelphia on modern-day Delaware Avenue near Market Street (then called Water and High streets), markets the English later continued to operate, Blockson said in an interview.
Slave owners publicly lashed enslaved Africans at a whipping post nearby at 2nd and Market streets.
The lack of official reports combined with no definite census make it difficult to determine the number enslaved Africans in Pennsylvania during the colonial era, writes historian Edward Raymond Turner in “The Negro in Pennsylvania: Slavery-Servitude-Freedom 1639-1861.”
Different work
In Pennsylvania, enslaved Africans were used in agriculture, metallurgy and felling trees in the forests to make room for farm lands, Asante said. In the towns and cities, Africans were used for physical labor, including shoemaking, shoveling, cooking and carpentering.
Unlike the plantation colonies of the South, Philadelphia merchants in some cases sought enslaved children to suit the preference of city dwellers seeking domestic servants, O’Malley said.
The enslaved children, O’Malley said, could better assimilate in the urban environment compared to the manual, rote labor of work on plantations. Many also were trained as artisan craftsmen, including bakers and jewelers.
“Bringing in enslaved people at a young age, they could train them to a profession as a way that they would a white apprentice,” O’Malley said.
“But, of course, that white apprentice, once they go through that period of apprenticeship, then becomes a competitor,” he added. “An enslaved worker trained in the craft has the advantage that they never leave.”
Philadelphians also preferred enslaved women to help with domestic tasks, said Erica Dunbar, the Erica Armstrong Dunbar Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
“Women were, in their minds, well suited for the domestic tasks that they needed completed,” she said.
