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African Americans: Slaves
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Although the vast majority of African Americans were slaves until 1865, the relatively small free black community that began to form during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries played a very important role in African American history. The free black community established institutions such as independent black churches, schools, fraternal organizations, and mutual aid societies. Free blacks were ... extremely important in the abolitionist movement. African Americans' post-emancipation hopes for full and equal citizenship were ultimately dashed; nonetheless, the freed people developed their own distinct culture and institutions that would shape black American life in the decades that followed.
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During the American Revolutionary War, African Americans fought on Pennsylvania soil at Brandywine and served at Valley Forge. Among those who crossed the Delaware River with George Washington in December 1776 were Isaac Jones, Billy Lee, and Prince Whipple. Many African Americans won their freedom fighting either for the British or the Americans in that war. In 1780, Pennsylvania formally ended slavery by passing a gradual emancipation law. The law stipulated that no African American born after 1780 in Pennsylvania would be enslaved past the age of twenty-eight.
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One reason for the attention African Americans have given to group designations is that group classifications by the white majority were highly instrumental in attempting to justify slavery, deny basic human rights, and restrain social opportunities. These oppressive practices had the effect of subordinating African Americans. Richard B. Moore in a book entitled The Name "Negro": Its Origin and Evil Use described how the skin color and other physical features of Africans who were brought into slavery "were identified in the mind of the people generally with ugliness, repulsion, and baseness." During earlier periods of the twentieth century, white media, publishers, and the scientific community largely refused to capitalize group designations such as Black, Colored, Negro, or African. This practice was in clear contrast to references in print to whites or the Caucasian "race." Moreover, scientific research and theories about so-called racial group differences (e.g., eugenics) were highly influential in promoting white supremacy.
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When Reconstruction officially ended in 1877, many African Americans were forced to return to their previous life on the plantation. They were no longer slaves, but they were badly treated and received poor wages. Approximately 3/4 of African Americans living in the South after the Reconstruction were farmers and farm laborers. Many dealt with cash crops; some were owners of farms; and others were tenant farmers. Strict payments for credit due on a harvested crop and share cropping under rules of Southern Laws made it difficult for these African American farm people to survive.
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The first African Americans were transported to the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland in the early 1600s in order to work as indentured servants on tobacco farms, similar to many European emigrants. However, throughout the 1600s, the practice gradually developed where blacks were presumed to be slaves for life rather than bound for a term of years. By the early 1700s, African slavery was established in all of the British North American colonies, north and south.
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Although slavery in Berks County declined rapidly after 1780 when the Assembly passed an act ordering gradual emancipation, African Americans continued to work at Hopewell Furnace as paid employees. "Black Bill" Jacobs lived his entire life of about 100 years at Hopewell Furnace, working first as a teamster and then as a coachman and a gardener.
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