Proposal:
The
“New World” meant many new experiences for both men and women. As the time came
to populate the colonies, roles shifted. Virginia Dare was born in Roanoke in
1587. She was the first English subject born in the new world. Her parents were
Ananias Dare and Eleanor White. Her death date is not known, as she disappeared
with the rest of the members of the colony of Roanoke. There were many people
in the American colonies, the Indies and the west African coast who were in
some cases forced into new roles. There were slaves who were forced to work,
Europeans fleeing religious persecution and others who saw the New World as a
place of resources and a place to spread Christianity.
Wives, husbands, widows, widowers, boys and girls were
all an integral part of life around the world, but the New World saw a shift
and reassignment of roles and experiences for men and women. Men, women and
children would be forced into slavery. There were many men who wanted to make a
new life, and women who came later to help populate and sustain the new
colonies. The roles and work were divided among many walks of life and people.
Religion was important and there was also an introduction of new religion in a
world where Christianity was not the norm. This forced many into religious
roles they had not expected as well.
This paper will be an examination of the life stages for
the men and women of the Atlantic World. Based on location and country, it will
examine the ages and life stages at which things happened, such as marriage,
bearing children and eventually death, in several major areas of the Atlantic
world, including western Europe, the West African coast, the colonies and
central/south America. This paper will focus on the lives of men and women in
the New World and the new experiences they would have endured in the New World
including roles in work, religion and their everyday lives and how it would
have differed from their former lives.
Intro
The lives of people were different based on sex, age and race. The day to day lives of men and women were very different. The women were tasked with taking care of the home and the children. When they did work, depending on age and race, they were usually in roles such as teaching, house slaves, making home goods, clothing and working in the fields depending on race typically. For men, the work included mostly manual labor. For slaves it required working sun up to sun down on plantations, usually harvesting cotton, sugar cane or tobacco. For white men and Europeans, their roles were typically working plantations in a non-slave capacity, overseeing plantations, government roles and some apprentice work and general merchant and tradesman work. Race, gender and age were the three defining factors for life in the Atlantic World. The individual lives of the natives and colonists was dependent, almost entirely, on those factors.
The
Role of Women in the New World
Roanoke was one of
the first English colonies in the America. It is most famous for being “the
lost colony.” John White was the Governor of the colony, the third time they
attempted to colonize, as the first two attempts had failed. Sir Walter Raleigh
sent White to the Americas to re-establish a colony and create an English
foothold. On August 18, 1587 Virginia Dare was born. She was the first English
child to be delivered in the New World.[1] The birthing conditions
for Virginia’s mother Eleanor, the daughter of John White would have likely
been very minimal and not ideal. Midwives were typically called to the home to
help deliver the child, and doctors had very little to do with the birthing
process at the time. An expectant young mother would have likely been unaware
of the changes taking place in her body but may have been informed that her
“four humors,” were out of balance. Studies of birth in colonial America have
been conducted and show that many women were unaware of pregnancy until they
felt the quickening, which would have been the beginnings of fetal movement. An
article written about motherhood in colonial America states, “Although it is impossible to
determine how many women or men in the English colonies in North America read
articles and books about women's sexuality and reproductive functions, or were
influenced by them, it is possible to categorize these works into two distinct
types: I) those intended to inform readers about the reproductive processes and
2) those intended to exhort readers to change their behavior. The latter type
was often the work of moralists and Puritan theologians who sought to bring the
sexual behavior of their readers into conformity with specific religious beliefs.
Both shared assumptions about the natural functions of women's
bodies-assumptions which shaped the advice that they gave their readers.”[2]
For Eleanor, she likely would have had a midwife to help her through the
process. In early colonial America, the main role of women was as wives and
mothers. Women were brought over to the New World so that they could help
increase the population and be wives to the many men that had already come to
the New World. For slaves, birthing conditions would have been even more
deplorable. For slaveowners, their female slaves served one purpose. Labor. To
labor in childbirth and to labor in the fields. “Slaveowners in the
early English colonies depended upon and exploited African women. They required
women’s physical labors in order to reap the profits of the colonies and they
required women’s symbolic value in order to make sense of racial slavery. Women
were enslaved in large numbers, they performed critical hard labor, and they
served an essential ideological function. Slaveowners appropriated their
reproductive lives by claiming children as property, by rewriting centuries-old
European laws of descent, and by defining a biologically driven perpetual
racial slavery through the real and imaginary reproductive potential of women…”[3] Slaves giving birth would
have had far less access to proper care and they were expected to be back in
the fields as soon as possible, to work day in and day out, or else the
resources and supplies needed to support the new colonists would have dwindled
and people would go hungry.
There was another reason that women were sent to the New
World. As indentured servants or because they had been banished. This was the
case for Elizabeth Sprigs. Sprigs was a white Englishwomen who had been sent to
the colonies as an indentured servant. This did not work quite the same as
slavery, because indentured servants were often freed at the end of their work
contract, typically around 7 years. Sprigs is an unusual case, as there is not
much known about her other than what is written in a letter to her father.[4] It reads, “O dear Father,
believe what I am going to relate the words of truth and sincerity, and
Ballance my former bad conduct [to] my sufferings here, and then I am sure
you’ll pitty your destress [ed] daughter, What we unfortunate English people
suffer here is beyond the probability of you in England to conceive…”[5] The letter, written by
Sprigs in 1756, is another example of the conditions that faced women in the
New World, and her contempt for the state of affairs in 1756, says a lot about
the lack of improvement made since the initial colonization began.
“May it please you, her Majesties
subjects of England, we your friends and countrey-men, the planters of
Virginia, doe by these presents let you and every of you to understand, that
for the present and speedy supply of certaine our knowen and apparent lackes
and needes, most requisite and necessary for the good and happie planting of
us, or any other in this land of Virginia, wee all of one minde & consent,
have most earnestly intreated, and uncessantly requested John White, Governour
of the planters in Virginia, to passe into England, for the better and more
assured helpe, and setting forward of the foresayd supplies: and knowing
assuredly that he both can best, and wil labour and take paines in that behalfe
for us all, and he not once, but often refusing it, for our sakes, and for the
honour & maintenance of the action, hath at last, though much against his
will, through our importunacie, yeelded to leave his governement, and all his
goods among us, and himselfe in all our behalfes to passe into England, of whose
knowledge and fidelitie in handling this matter, as all others, we doe assure
our selves by these presents, and will you to give all credite thereunto, the
25 of August 1587.”[6]
This was a letter written on behalf of the colonists of Roanoke. They were in
desperate need of supplies. The colony of Roanoke is known as the “lost
colony,” because it when White returned several years later, he found no sign
of the men, women and children he had left behind several years prior. It is
likely that the colonists died of starvation or may have integrated with local
native American tribes to help preserve what was left of their lives. This is
just one account and request on behalf of the colonists of Roanoke, but it
gives some insight in to what they were thinking when they sent White for
supplies. Their daily lives were becoming so difficult, and the crops they had
planted were yielding nothing. The fear that they would have felt would not
have been based on race, age or gender, because the one force in life that does
not discriminate is death.
The letters above and the journal
articles about life in the New World for women and mothers all show historians
today the conditions that would have been facing the citizens of the colonies
in the Atlantic. The conditions in the early American colonies were not great,
which is very evident in the letter to the queen as the colony of Roanoke was
failing. The letter from Elizabeth Sprigs in 1756 shows the same thing, that
she was miserable. The journal articles about childbirth for Englishwomen and
slaves show a distinct difference based on race. Children born to slaves were
the property of the slaveowners, whereas Englishwomen were encouraged to have
children in the New World in an effort to establish a foothold, and to populate
the new colonies being established.
There is one example of a former slave, who was eventually became the first black woman to become ordained in the Christian church. Jon F. Sensbach’s book, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World, sheds light on an often forgotten about role of women, women in the church. His book describes the life of Rebecca Protten, a former slave who went on to create one of the first African Protestant congregations in the America’s. She eventually moved to Europe, after many years of working in the Caribbean where she went door to door to minister to African slaves on the islands.[7] Protten’s main role was not that of a slave or as a wife and mother, though she did serve in those roles during her life. Her most important role was bringing hope and the gospel to the slaves of the islands and giving them hope that this was not their only purpose in life.
The
Role of Men in the New World
Olaudah Equiano is an interesting example of someone who
began his early life in Africa and ended his life a free man in England.
Equiano was born circa 1745 in the Eboe province. He was kidnapped and sold
into slavery around age 11 and was loaded onto a slave ship and taken to the
West Indies.[8]
He was sold to Captain Pascal in Virginia and from there, he traveled the world
with the Navy captain. He received an education and was able to purchase his
freedom later. Later in his life, Equiano would move to England. In 1789, he
published his autobiography The
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The
African. He details his life and travels, including his early enslavement.
While in England, he joined the London Corresponding Society and wrote letters
to the Queen, campaigning for the vote for all working men in England. “I
presume, therefore, gracious Queen, to implore your interposition with your
royal consort, in favour of the wretched Africans; that, by your Majesty's
benevolent influence, a period may now be put to their misery; and that they
may be raised from the condition of brutes, to which they are at present degraded,
to the rights and situation of freemen, and admitted to partake of the
blessings of your Majesty's happy government; so shall your Majesty enjoy the
heartfelt pleasure of procuring happiness to millions, and be rewarded in the
grateful prayers of themselves, and of their posterity.”[9]He was an early
abolitionist, but passed away in 1797. Ten years later, England passed the
Slave Trade Act which abolished the slave trade in England. Slavery would
officially be banned in the 1830s.[10]
There were many Europeans who thought that African slaves
would make better workers than Native Americans because they believed that
Africans would be immune to the diseases that were wiping out the Native
Americans. “Early modern Europeans did believe that Africans were less
susceptible to tropical diseases, but unless African slaves had had previous
exposure, they were no more likely to be immune to small pox, malaria, or
yellow fever than any of the Indian or European populations.”[11] This was untrue and the
only Africans that were resistant to the diseases were those who had been
exposed to them before. This was yet another way that Europeans thought that
the lives of their slaves were disposable. They favored male Africans as
workers and repeatedly put them in terrible working conditions that put their
bodies through trials and put them at further risk for disease and infection
from wounds, sometimes inflicted as punishment.
The men in serving in government during the age of revolutions in the Americas and the Caribbean had the ability to change what the definitions of citizenship was. In America, they opted to not give full citizenship to Africans, African Americans or to Native Americans, this was done via the Three Fifths Compromise. “The three-fifths clause was part of a series of compromises enacted by the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The most notable other clauses prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territories and ended U.S. participation in the international slave trade in 1807. These compromises reflected Virginia Constitutional Convention delegate (and future U.S. President) James Madison’s observation that “…the States were divided into different interests not by their…size…but principally from their having or not having slaves.”[12] In Haiti, the men in government opted to grant citizenship to all their inhabitants. The Haitian Constitution of 1805 stated in Article One that, “The people inhabiting the island formerly called St. Domingo, hereby agree to form themselves into a free state sovereign and independent of any other power in the universe, under the name of empire of Hayti…” and point 14, “All acception (sic) of colour among the children of one and the same family, of whom the chief magistrate is the father, being necessarily to cease, the Haytians shall hence forward be known by the generic appellation of Blacks.”[13] In America, it took until the end of the Civil War for African Americans and African slaves to be freed and given equal rights on paper. These were rights they continued to fight for, for many years to come. Even when given power, some men were still unable to make the right choice to protect the people they served.
Conclusion
During
the time that the Transatlantic Slave Trade was up and running from about 1510
to 1870, there were 10,257,500 slaves embarked on ships bound for the New World.[14] Of those men, women and
children, only 9,113,356 disembarked from those voyages.[15] The men went to work on
plantations. They harvested cotton, tobacco, indigo, rice, sugar and other
resources. They worked in horrid conditions and worked sunrise till after dark.
The only thing that mattered to the Europeans was that they felt superior, and
they felt superior to the Native Americans and the Africans, because of the
color of their skin.
Much
like the rest of the world, there were many stages of life and similar problems
that faced the people in the New World. Many of the same events that they
experienced in their home countries of Spain, France, Portugal, England and the
Netherlands would transfer with them to the New World. For African slaves,
their culture and heritage would become intermingled with their New World
surrounding, and it led to the creation of a new culture altogether. In the New
World, your worth was determined by the color of your skin, your gender and
your age. For men to be in power, you had to be white and had to have money.
Slaves needed to be strong males who could work long hours, but the female
slaves needed to be of childbearing age so that they could produce in the field
as well as produce more workers for the field. They faced the horror and the
reality that any children they had would be taken from them and sold or forced
into the atrocious working conditions they were enduring themselves. For white
Englishwomen, some of the letters made their lives in the New World sound
merely like an inconvenience to them. They did not know an did not see the
horrors that their African counterparts had to endure at the hands of their
masters. There were some who were able to make it out and back to Europe in a
time where slavery was coming to an end. Former slaves like Olaudah Equiano and
Rebecca Protten were able to make lives for themselves in Europe. Protten as
the first black female ordained in the church and Equiano as an abolitionist
and trader in England. Equiano used his story to inspire others and to plead
for change. The slave trade, in England, was abolished ten years after his
death. There were many that were not so lucky as Protten and Equiano. The New
World was a representation of the old world. Old customs with a new face,
slavery and divisions of labor based on age, gender and race. David Armitage
and Michael J. Braddick summed up the idea of relationships between Europeans,
Africans and Native Americans the best, “This new social and economic world was
mostly of European creation – it was Europeans who first crossed the Atlantic
and then bound its societies into a common network of exchanges, though
Africans would be dominant numerically in transatlantic migration, and the
societies of native people would be those most dramatically altered by the
encounter.”[16]
The men and women, slaves and freeman, wives and husbands, mothers and fathers
all served their place and important individual roles in Atlantic World
history.
Bibliography
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Braddick, David Armitage and Michael J. The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
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[1]
Shaeffer, Mathew. Virginia Dare. 2016.
https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/virginia-dare-1587/ (accessed
March 3, 2019).
[2] Treckel, Paula A. "Breastfeeding and Maternal Sexuality in Colonial America." The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1989: 25-51.
[3]
Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women:
Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery . Philidelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
[4] Ginn, Alyson. Elizabeth Sprigs. December 13, 2013. https://throughtheeyesofafemaleimmigrant.weebly.com/elizabeth-sprigs.html (accessed March 2, 2019).
[5]
Sprigs, Elizabeth. "Elizabeth Springs Begs
for Help, 1756." In Major Problems in Atlantic History, by Alison
Games and Adam Rothman, 172-173. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008.
[6] White, John. ""The Voyage of Edward Stafford and John White" ." In The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, by Richard Hakluyt, 3:285. Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1600.
[7] Sensbach, Jon F. Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. London: Harvard University Press, 2005.
[8] PBS and CET. Olaudah Equiano . n.d. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p276.html (accessed February 11, 2019).
[9] Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African. London: Author, No. 10, Union-Street, Middlesex Hospital, 1789.
[10] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Olaudah Equiano. March 24, 2018. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Olaudah-Equiano (accessed February 11, 2019).
[11] Carter, Karen E. "Disease in the Atlantic World, 1492-1900." OAH Magazine of History, 2004: 27-32.
[12] Simba, Malik. The Three-Fifths Clause of the United States Constitution (1787). October 3, 2014. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/three-fifths-clause-united-states-constitution-1787/ (accessed March 2, 2019).
[13] Thomas G. Patterson. "Chapter 12: Social Revolution." In Major Problems in Atlantic History, by Alison F. Games and Adam Rothman, 354-384. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008.
[14] Benjamin, Thomas. The Atlantic World. New York City: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
[15] Emory University. Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. 2019. https://slavevoyages.org/voyage/database (accessed March 1, 2019).
[16]
Braddick, David Armitage and Michael J. The
British Atlantic World, 1500-1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
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