Africans in the Old South : Mapping Exceptional Lives Across the Atlantic World

The Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in history, yet most stories from this period are lost, making those that can be reconstructed critical to understanding the trade in all its breadth and variety. Randy J. Sparks examines the experiences of West Africans who lived in the American South between 1740 and 1860. Their stories highlight the diversity of struggles that confronted every African who arrived on American shores. The subjects of Africans in the Old South include the mixed-race daughter of an African slave-trading family who invested in South Carolina rice plantations, passed as white, and joined the planter elite; a man kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery in Georgia, who later won his freedom and joined the abolition movement; and a group of Africans who were picked up by a British ship in the Caribbean, escaped in Mobile, and were recaptured and eventually returned to their homeland. These exceptional lives challenge long-held assumptions about how the slave trade operated and who was involved. The African Atlantic was a complex world of constant movement, intricate hierarchies, and shifting identities. Not all Africans who crossed the Atlantic were enslaved, nor was the voyage always one-way.