In 1995 the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and the Illinois Association of Museums published a booklet titled Generations of Pride: African-Americans in Illinois, A selected Chronology. Katheryn M. Harris compiled a calendar of events arranged by date from 1619 to 1994. The first entry, 1619, tells of a Dutch ship that brought twenty Africans to Jamestown, Virginia. They were, surmises Harris, “the first permanent involuntary settlers of the black race in what is now the United States of America.” And presumably the beginning of Black History in this country.
“Slaves as property” were recognized by Virginia law in 1661. According to the Chronology, the Virginia slave codes protected white society from “‘an alien and savage race.’ Though modeled after indentured servitude laws, the codes prohibit any rights for slaves.”
The French government agreed to sanction slave trade within the Louisiana colony in 1712. Traffic in human flesh then dealt not only in Africans but also in Native Americans.
“Before the French established themselves in the Mississippi valley,” wrote N. M. Miller Surrey in The Commerce of Louisiana During the French Regime, 1699-1763, “there was trade in slaves carried on by the Indians of that area.” Surrey said that Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle while on the Mississippi in 1681 learned “it was necessary to buy war captives in order to deal successfully with the natives. . . . His plan was to buy the slaves and carry them back to their people and there offer them for sale. The parent tribe, La Salle discovered, would pay more liberally for one of their own than [one] of foreign blood.”
Slaves were kept and traded by many Native American tribes. Alvin M. Josephy Jr. wrote in The Indian Heritage of America: “ A principal object of most raids was to secure slaves, one of the main elements of wealth.”
The French accused the British of creating wars among different Indian tribes “solely for the purpose of securing the captives.” French traders in the south and southeast took up the British practice of pitting tribe against tribe and dealing in prisoners. This trade was outlawed by the French king, but the traders continued in secret. “In May, 1709, the Alibamon fell upon the Mobile Indians,” said Surrey, “killed the men and carried some twenty-seven or twenty-eight women and children as slaves to the French at Mobile.”
Colonial officials in Louisiana made a request in 1708 to the crown (it was rejected) to be allowed to exchange Native Americans for Negro slaves in the French West Indies at the rate of two Indians for three Negroes. Indians slaves being in their native land often escaped. It was believed the imported Africans would have less reason to escape.
In 1712 Sieur Antoine Crozat’s patent gave him exclusive right to bring annually to the province of Louisiana from the Guinea coast one cargo of Negroes. It seems Crozat did not import many slaves.
The Company of the Indies, a French syndicate, in 1719 received a patent to govern Louisiana. The Company owned a right to the slave trade. Two years later 1,312 Africans were bound into French servitude in Louisiana by the Company. The total would rise to close to 7,000.
French colonists utilized slaves to clear fields and plant and harvest crops such as tobacco, rice and indigo. The indigo plant is a source of grayish blue dye.
“The Negroes were drawn from Caye, Goree, Juida, Angola and Senegal,” wrote Surrey, “though by far the greater number was obtained from the coast last named. The mortality while on the journey across the ocean was high.” Slaves that arrived in good health often soon fell sick and many died within weeks.
According to Surrey the first man aboard a newly arrived Company slave ship was the health inspector. Each African was examined. The sick were sent to a hospital for treatment, or sold at auction. “Since the supply never was adequate, the bidding was usually brisk, sick Negroes often bringing quite as much as healthy ones. There were some persons in the province who made a business of buying them, taking the chance of being able to cure them and when well of selling them at a considerable advance on the cost. These doctors, it was said, were careful ‘to put their curative secrets in practice only for themselves.’”
In 1720, 500 black slaves from the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo were brought to the upper Mississippi valley by a French mining entrepreneur, Phillip Renault.
LeCode Noir ou Recueil de Reglements (The Black Code), rules for managing slaves in Louisiana, was adopted by the French in 1724.
Between the end of the Revolutionary War and the establishment of the Northwest Territory, Virginia held title to the Illinois country. On giving up that claim in 1784, the Virginia legislature insisted that the French of the Northwest be allowed to keep and practice all their ancient rights and privileges.
The U. S. Congress soon passed the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, which was a code of laws for the newly acquired land north of the Ohio River and south of the Great Lakes. Less than 1,000 blacks remained among the descendants of the French settlers in the old colonial villages of the Illinois country.
Although Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery, Territorial Governor Arthur St. Clair believed it was not applicable to the slaves then in servitude. St. Clair said Article VI “was intended to prevent the further introduction of slaves into the territory.”
The first Territorial Legislature legalized the “Indenture System.” It has been described as follows:
“All Negroes under 15 years of age were required to serve till the age of 35 (women, 32). Children born of slaves then in the territory must be registered with the county clerk within 30 days, and must serve out the full term. Transfers of slaves were permitted and masters were allowed to leave the territory with their property.”
The Northwest Territory then adopted a slave code similar to the one used in Virginia and Kentucky.
Later, between 1800 and 1809, while Illinois was part of the Indiana Territory, laws were enacted to allow slaves to be brought in as indentured servants. The time of indenture could be for 99 years.
Indiana became a state in 1809. Illinois would become a state nine years later. The Census of 1810 enumerates 781 African-Americans within the Illinois Territory. One hundred sixty-eight are slaves; 613 are free persons of color. Free blacks were prohibited from entering the territory and slaves could be imported as hired labor for 12 month periods for work at the Shawneetown salt works.
Although the 1818 Illinois State Constitution prohibited slavery it sanctioned the indenture system. Later legislative acts called “The Black Laws of 1819,” based on the old territorial precepts that slaves were property without legal rights, were enforced. The importation of slaves for emancipation was prohibited. Blacks could settle in Illinois only by possessing certificates of freedom.
Paul Finkleman (“Slavery, the ’More Perfect Union’ and the Prairie State”) wrote that the “The Black Laws had little effect on the actual migration of blacks into Illinois, although many individuals suffered anxiety from registration procedures and fear of prosecution. Between 1820 and 1860 the state’s total black population increased by more than 500 percent, from 1,374 to 7,628.”
In 1852 the Illinois courts concluded all blacks were free—fugitive slaves were the exception—but it wasn’t until 1865 that the Illinois General Assembly repealed The Black Laws of 1819, and became the first state legislature to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which abolished slavery in the United States.
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