The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown - Hardcover

Hashaw, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786717181 ISBN 13: 9780786717187

Publisher: Basic Books, 2007

Synopsis

The voyage that shaped early America was neither that of the Susan Constant in 1607 nor the Mayflower in 1620. Absolutely vital to the formation of English-speaking America was the voyage made by some sixty Africans stolen from a Spanish slave ship and brought to the young struggling colony of Jamestown in 1619. It was an act of colonial piracy that angered King James I of England, causing him to carve up the Virginia Company's monopoly for virtually all of North America. It was an infusion of brave and competent souls who were essential to Jamestown's survival and success. And it was the arrival of pioneers who would fire the first salvos in the centuries-long African-American battle for liberation. Until now, it has been buried by historians. Four hundred years after the birth of English-speaking America, as a nation turns its attention to its ancestry, The Birth of Black America reconstructs the true origins of the United States and of the African-American experience.

About this title

About the Author

Tim Hashaw is an investigative reporter who has been recognized as an outstanding journalist by Tom Brokaw and the prestigious National Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA), the National Headliners Club, the Associated Press and United Press International and the Francis C. Moore journalism award. He is also the author of CHILDREN OF PERDITION: MELUNGEONS AND THE STRUGGLE OF MIXED AMERICA. A descendant of the Melungeons—an obscure, mysterious people exclusive to America who are of mixed European, Native American and African ancestry and who are linked to the first generation of Africans at Jamestown—Hashaw's ancestors include two of the first Jamestown African families, the Gowens and the Johnsons. He lives in Houston, Texas.

Reviews

Hashaw (Children of Perdition: Melungeons and the Struggle for Mixed America) offers a welcome variation on early America and the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. Historians have long known that Africans first appeared in the Virginia record in 1619. Hashaw traces those first black Virginians back to Portuguese Angola: they were captives on a Spanish slave ship, which was attacked by two pirate vessels that eventually transported 60 or so Africans to Virginia and Bermuda. Hashaw recreates the lives some of these early African Virginians made for themselves: Benjamin Doll purchased six indentured English servants, became a plantation owner, learned to read and write, and was appointed by a white widow to serve as her attorney. Another eventually purchased African slaves. Perhaps straining to find a partially happy ending to the tragic first scene in the history of American racial slavery, Hashaw notes that Angolan Virginians participated in Bacon's Rebellion, and he suggests that the 1676 revolt was the first expression of a fighting spirit that culminated in abolition. Hashaw offers both an exciting story of crime on the high seas and a fascinating social history of 17th-century black America. Illus., maps. (Feb. 5)
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Perhaps the most fateful year in black American history was 1619, when the first recorded shipment of enslaved Africans landed at Jamestown. Hashaw greatly expands on the central facts encountered in textbooks to connect the unwilling arrivals to their homeland, Angola, and to the financial and political affairs of England's Virginia Company. Hashaw also explores the subsequent lives of these Africans and their immediate descendants, many known by name from traces of their legal affairs as semifree traders and farmers; the shackles of outright chattel slavery took several decades to be applied in Virginia, and never without resistance. Following a description of Angola's constellation of powers in the early 1600s--the Portuguese and African allies on the coast versus Bantu kingdoms in the interior--Hashaw details the seizure of the Jamestown Angolans from a Spanish slave ship by English ships. Whether this was piracy or legal privateering provoked conflict in London, which Hashaw contends had ramifications on other English colonizing projects. Notable in itself, Hashaw's history gains traction in this 400th anniversary year of Jamestown's founding. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786717181
• ISBN 13: 9780786717187
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336