Savannah and the Slave Trade

Although slavery was illegal when Georgia was founded, it was already well established in other American colonies, and settlers in Georgia faced economic pressure to compete with slave labor as Carolinians used enslaved labor to produce cash crops that significantly undersold commodities made in Georgia by freedmen. South Carolina planters supplied the first enslaved people brought into Georgia, and other settlers soon sought permission to own slaves. By 1748, about 350 enslaved people worked in Georgia, and officials took no action against owners who violated the law. In 1750, Georgia Trustees resisted legalizing slavery, but economic pressure forced a reversal of policy. In eighteenth-century Savannah, advertisements promoted the "superior attributes" of enslaved Africans from Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Angola, and New Calabar, and during the early 1790s Rhode Island slavers dominated this trade in coastal Georgia. Cyprian Sterry of Providence delivered about 13 human cargoes carrying more than 1,200 African slaves to Savannah. In March 1859, Pierce Butler auctioned 436 men, women, and children to pay plantation debts after they were housed at a Savannah racetrack and families were forcibly separated; this largest sale in the United States became known as "The Weeping Time" for the profound despair it caused. European slavers transported approximately 300,000 African captives and 25,000 seasoned slaves to the American colonies from 1619 to 1775. Although Georgia prohibited slave importation in 1798, smuggling was condoned, as shown by a Savannah notice openly offering 330 "New Negroes" from Angola for sale. Olaudah Equiano, captured in Africa as a young child in 1745, later wrote of his life as a slave, including experiences in the Port of Savannah aboard a trading vessel and an account of being nearly beaten to death there by a drunken slave owner; in 1766 he earned enough through side trading to buy his freedom. On October 6, 1821, the schooner Gustavus of Duxbury, Massachusetts, landed 26 Africans at the Port of Savannah, ranging in age from two months to 36 years.

Savannah, Georgia · United States