W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 1969 The Royal African Company Slave Trade to Virginia, 1689-1713 Charles Lintner Killinger College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the African History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Killinger, Charles Lintner, "The Royal African Company Slave Trade to Virginia, 1689-1713" (1969). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539624680. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-92be-5k39 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE ROYAL AFRICAN COMPANY SLAVE TRADE TO VIRGINIA, 1689-1713 A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of History The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts By Charles L. Killinger, III 1969 ProQuest Number: 10625100 Al! rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10625100 Published by ProQuest LLC (2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 - 1346 APPROVAL SHEET This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Author George Reese, Ph.D£ ii 469845 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The writer expresses his appreciation to Professor Thad W. Tate who directed, criticized, and cheerfully encouraged all phases of this project. The author is also indebted to Professors John E. Selby and Edward M. Riley for their guidance in research and their careful reading of the manuscript; to Professor George K. Reese, whose knowledge of the major sources and whose patient assistance were invaluable; to Mr. Harold Gill, Research Associate, and to the staff of Colonial Williamsburg, Research Department; to Mr. James R. Bentley, Curator of Manuscripts, and the staff of The Filson Club, Louisville, Kentucky; to the staff of the Louisville Free Public Library; and to Miss Mary Catherine Coll for her meticulous and unselfish efforts in editing and proof-reading. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ......................................... iii LIST OF FIGURES . v ABSTRACT ..................................................vi INTRODUCTION ........................................... 1 CHAPTER I. THE ROYAL AFRICAN COMPANY, 1672-1688 . 6 CHAPTER II. THE COMPANY AGENTS IN VIRGINIA ............ 12 CHAPTER III. VIRGINIA AS A MARKET FOR COMPANY SLAVES . 51 A. ORIGINS OF VIRGINIA SLAVES ..................... 51 B. IDENTITY AND DISTRIBUTION OF VIRGINIA PURCHASERS. 63 C. ENGLISH FINANCIERS ........................ 70 D. PRICES OF S L A V E S ......................... 72 CHAPTER IV. AFRICAN COMPANY OPERATIONS IN VIRGINIA . 78 A. OBSTRUCTIONS OF TRADE BY NAVAL WARFARE ..... 79 B. THE TRADE, 1689-1697 92 C. THE TRADE, 1698-1701 98 D. THE TRADE, 1702-1713 ..... 102 E. CONCLUSION ........................................ 124 APPENDICES ...............................................127 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................... 149 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. COMPANY SALES AND AGENTS’ EARNINGS ................ 27 2. SLAVES AND SLAVE SHIPS ARRIVING IN VIRGINIA, 1700-1710 48 3. AFRICAN ORIGINS OF VIRGINIA SLAVES ............... 53 4. MAP OF WEST AFRICA ................................. 54 5. SLAVES PURCHASED IN VIRGINIA FROM THE ROYAL AFRICAN COMPANY, 1689-1713: RELATIVE SIZES OF TRANSACTIONS 67 6* LANDHOLDINGS OF VIRGINIA PURCHASERS OF AFRICAN COMPANY SLAVES, 1704 ............. 69 7. MAP OF VIRGINIA: GEOGRAPHIC CONCENTRATION OF PURCHASERS ................................ 70 8. LEADING ENGLISH FINANCIERS OF THE AFRICAN COMPANY SLAVE TRADE TO VIRGINIA, 16 89-1713 ............... 71 9. AVERAGE PRICES OF COMPANY SLAVES SOLD IN VIRGINIA, 1689-1713 74 v ABSTRACT Chartered in 1672 with a monopoly of the British slave trade, the Royal African Company initially prospered amid speculative enthusiasm. However, before its first decade of business closed, the company ominously had begun to suffer from various difficulties. These were compounded by loss of royal favor and general discredit which enabled opponents to revoke the company's monopoly by a Parlimentary act of 1698. This paper describes the Virginia slave trade of the African Company from 1689 to 1713, using as the basic source microfilms of the company 1s own records. During the 1690s, the company increased its delivery of slaves to Virginia, although on a much smaller scale than its sales in the West Indies. As Virginia became an increasingly attractive outlet for Africans, the company commissioned agents there to manage its business and protect its monopoly against smugglers. Virginians chosen as agents were knowledgeable of Virginia's affairs, held political favor in the colony, and maintained exceptionally strong ties in England. They were commissioned at a rate which increased over the period from four to ten per cent of the bills they collected and paid them a substantial sum annually. The slaves which the Royal African Company imported to Virginia came from the same regions of the West Coast of Africa as most American slaves, but their origins were scattered, with no evident patterns of concentration in areas thought among slave traders of that day to be the sources of the best slaves. These Africans were generally purchased in small lots by a varied cross-section of farmers, with no direct correlation between size of landholdings and number of slaves purchased. However, the typical purchaser, who resided in one of the "Middle Peninsula" counties, owned over three times as much land as the average Virginia landholder. English traders, the most outstanding of whom was Micajah Perry, financed the credit purchases. Prices remained generally stable throughout the period despite fluctuations in supply and demand. The dominant factor influencing the relative success of company sales to Virginia was the frequent interruption of naval warfare and depression. Because of the wars of the League of Augsburg, 1689-97, and the Spanish Succession, 1702- 13, the company employed emergency precautions during most of the period; both wars intensified tobacco depressions in Virginia. The inter-war period, however, provided a stimulus to the slave trade which doubled the slave population of Virginia in a decade. Despite the renewal of the colonial wars, the trade flourished in 1705, a year when the import duty on slaves expired. But soon the London merchants strangled the trade by tightening credit to Virginians. Before the Treaty of Utrecht was signed, the African Company, mired in mismanagement, unable to compete on an equal basis with private traders, its stock practically worthless, temporarily ended its slave trade to Virginia. vi THE ROYAL AFRICAN COMPANY SLAVE TRADE TO VIRGINIA, 1689-1713 INTRODUCTION The study of American Negro slavery has drawn the attention of scholars with increasing frequency and intensity in the quarter-century since World War II, partially as a result of the concurrent campaigns for political independence by black majorities in Africa and for social, political, and economic gains by black minorities in America. Equipped with new attitudes of the post-war era and borrowing the methods of the social scientists, historians concentrated on such subjects as the social and economic effects of slavery and the development of racial attitudes and concepts in America. Some historical evidence intrinsically lent itself to this vein of treatment: translations from the Arabic and oral histories shed new light on the African past; field case studies by anthropologists added dimension to Western knowl­ edge of the origins of slaves and their New World cultural survivals; descriptions from the journals of early European witnesses were revived to illustrate the horrors of the "middle passage"; the writings of literate slaves and of early Negro intellectuals were reviewed in an attempt to understand their seldom articulated attitudes, to portray the humanity of the race and to overcome the "Sambo" stereo­ type; and local laws were re-evaluated as landmarks in the sequential institutionalization of Negro inferiority. 2 This paper will discuss the slave trade to Virginia in the two decades which closed the seventeenth and began the eighteenth century. Although it has scanned the subject, the scholar's spotlight has not often been focused on the trade in slaves to Virginia in this period. Except for the arrival of the original twenty Africans in 1619, the Virginia slave trade has most often been treated as an appendage of the tobacco trade, and with some merit, for the slave trade to colonial Virginia was inextricably tied to the fortunes of the venerated weed. Nor has the period at the beginning of the eighteenth century been a frequent target for students