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264 7. Entrepôts and Hinterlands AFRICAN MIGRATION TO THE NORTH AMERICAN BACKCOUNTRY, CA. 1750–1807 Upwards of two thirds that have been imported have gone backwards. —Peter Manigault, 1772 By the mid-eighteenth century, as European settlers in North America pushed well away from the Atlantic coast to colonize interior regions, they forced enslaved Africans to move with them. In the Chesapeake, the quest for arable land prompted ever more settlers to venture to the piedmont. By the 1760s, many piedmont counties saw Africans and people of African descent accounting for well over half of their populations, and with more than 100,000 enslaved people in the piedmont by 1782, more black Virginians resided in that region than in the tidewater. Many of these backcountry slaves had previously toiled for years—perhaps since birth—on tidewater plantations, but recently arrived Africans were also prevalent. In the Carolinas and Georgia, planters also ventured inland, especially with the introduction of indigo as the region’s companion crop to rice. The enslaved population in South Carolina’s backcountry increased from fewer than 2,500 in 1760 to more than 6,500 in 1768, and it continued to grow rapidly thereafter. This explosion led Charleston merchant Peter Manigault to say of arriving Africans in the early 1770s, “Upwards of two thirds that have been imported have gone backwards.” In other words, Charleston was an entrepôt that enslaved people passed through on their way inland. The development of the cotton gin toward century’s end would only accelerate backcountry development.1 1. On the expansion of British colonial settlement away from waterways navigable from the Atlantic, see D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, I, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1986), 244–254. The Virginia piedmont slave population grew by nearly one thousand slaves per year between 1760 and the American Revolution (Philip D. Morgan and Michael L. Nicholls, “Slaves in Piedmont Virginia, 1720– 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XLVI [1989], 215–222); likewise, Allan Kulikoff argues for the “Africanization” of the piedmont, asserting that, by the 1760s, “nearly all Africans who arrived in Virginia landed at Bermuda Hundred,” the best upriver access point for the overland Enterpôts and Hinterlands / 265 Although it is widely understood that slavery expanded outward from coastal population centers in the eighteenth century, little attention has focused on the mechanics of delivering African people to regions distant from their ports of arrival. Study of the Atlantic slave trade tends to end at the water’s edge. Scholars of the antebellum period emphasize the overland trade’s importance for slavery’s expansion, since legal transatlantic importations ceased after 1807, but the antebellum domestic slave trade had an important precursor in the colonial and early national periods, though it was smaller in scale. Enslaved migration to the North American interior can be conceived of in two phases—first, a dispersal of Africans from Atlantic entrepôts between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and second, the forced migration of American-born slaves from older plantation areas to the burgeoning southwest cotton fields, starting in the late eighteenth century and reaching unprecedented levels in the antebellum period.2 Just how eighteenth-century slaves and slaveholders bridged the gap from port to plantation is an important question, given the considerable distances emerging between them by the second half of the eighteenth century. To be sure, some American-born or acculturated slaves migrated inland with plantation owners seeking new lands for themselves (or fleeing the British in the RevolutionaryWar), but many landless colonists moved westward as a strategy for acquiring land, which was increasingly hard to afford in coastal areas. As such, many backcountry planters owned few slaves, if any, before acquiring interior land. These pioneers often sought so-called “New Negroes,” enslaved people just arriving from Africa. For these African immigrants purchased by march (Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1600–1800 [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986], 75, 323–336, esp. 336). See also Richard S. Dunn, “Black Society in the Chesapeake, 1776–1810,” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 54–58. For data on South Carolina in the 1760s, see Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry,1760–1808 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990), 19...

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