On arrival, most of the new captives were moved into holding pens, separated from their shipmates, and put up for auction. They then faced the challenge of surviving in a society that had declared each of them to be private property and that was organized to maintain their subservient status. In the eyes of the law and of most non-African Americans, they had no authority to make decisions about their own lives and could be bought, sold, tortured, rewarded, educated, or killed at a slaveholder's will. All the most crucial things in the lives of the enslaved African American-from the dignity of their daily labor to the valor of their resistance, from the comforts of family to the pursuit of art, music, and worship-all had to be accomplished in the face of slave society's attempt to deny their humanity.
Enslaved Africans, and the African American slaves that followed them, could be found in all parts of the country, and put their hands to virtually every type of labor in North America. They tended the wheat fields and fruit orchards of New York and New Jersey; they traveled underground to mine iron and lead in the Ohio Valley; they piloted fishing boats and worked the docks in New England; they operated printing presses in New York City, dairies in Delaware, and managed households from Florida to Maine. Even in the early 19th century, when the Southern cotton plantation system was at its peak, enslaved African Americans still plied their own specialized skills and worked at a wide variety of tasks and trades.
Africans also brought the skills and trades of their homeland to North America, and their expertise shaped the industry and agriculture of the continent. West Africans with experience navigating the waterways of their homeland helped open the rivers and canals of the Northwest frontier to boat traffic, and seasoned African cattle drivers were able to apply their skills to ox teams and livestock. Many Africans were deeply familiar with large-scale rice and indigo cultivation, which were completely unknown to European Americans; without the skills of Africans and their descendants, the rice fields of South Carolina and Louisiana might never have existed.
African culture was also brought to bear on the business of everyday life in African America, however long the separation from the homeland might have been. The forms of worship, family organization, music, food, and language developed by African Americans in slavery can all be seen to bear the signs of African traditional culture, as can the architecture, art, and handcrafts they left behind. In some areas, such as South Carolina and Florida, several different West African languages were melded over the years to form a new dialect, known as Gullah or Geechee, that partially survives in some rural areas to this day, particularly in songs.
The world that enslaved Africans and that African Americans made for themselves in the New World was rich and complex and was the site of countless human conflicts, challenges to oppression, and the necessary accommodations for survival. For a closer look at life under slavery, read several of the first-person accounts in Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project.
