The Illegally African Slaves of Brazoria County
Even in the 1920s, and possibly later, there remained Texan survivors of the Middle Passage
Decades ago, at the tail end of my pre-journalism life, I was a history major at the University of Houston. One summer, one of my classes was purely as a researcher for Dr. Eric Walther, director of the since-abandoned (by him, anyway) Texas Slavery Project, one goal of which was to give a name to every slave who ever worked in Texas.
I was assigned a grab-bag of source material to enter on to spreadsheets, ranging from manifests of ships plying the routes between Galveston and the USA in the Republic of Texas days, on which masters had to enter the names of the human chattel they took with them. Also, various narratives and reminiscences, including one memorable document compiled in the 1920s by an elderly White Austin lady who had grown up on a plantation southeast of town on Onion Creek. She tracked down most of the dozens or so of her family’s one-time slaves in contemporary Austin, one of whom, “Uncle” Junious Washington, happened to be the grandfather of Townes Van Zandt’s 1970s running buddy / mentor “Uncle” Seymour Washington.
Seymour maintained the family tradition of walking the line between races; Junious had been the plantation’s “driver,” or Black slave overseer, a job akin to being union shop steward in the most brutal economic system on earth: he had to see to it that his fellow slaves worked at a pace satisfactory to his White owners, while also keeping himself from being poisoned or murdered in his sleep by the very same slaves. By working as a blacksmith, Uncle Seymour staked out a trade that kept him well-paid, at least before the automobile rendered his craft obsolete. Nevertheless, he retained the “Uncle” honorific so laden today by association with the Uncle Tom stereotype. Not all “uncles” were also Toms. Or Bens, for that matter. But that’s another story….
Other research was on places closer to Houston — namely the 1867 censuses of Fort Bend and Brazoria County, two of the four Lone Star State counties once known collectively (and pejoratively) by Whites from outside the area as “the Senegambia of Texas.”
This quad-county region came by this name because it was the heartland of Texas’s immense plantations, a region that came to closely resemble the Low Country of South Carolina and Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, an area whose hallmark was demography was hallmarked by tiny White majorities lording it over giant Black majorities. Nowhere was this more acute than Brazoria County — by 1860, the county was fully seventy percent Black.
And it would remain at or near that mark for decades to come, despite the flight of many slaves from the sugar cane and cotton fields to nearby cities like Houston and Galveston, initially, and then taking part in the Texas-style Great Migration to places like Oakland and Los Angeles much later. (The East Coast and Central States migrations from Georgia and the Carolina to DC, Baltimore, Philly and New York; and those of places like Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee to the Rust Belt are much more widely known today, but the Texas-to-California exodus was just as profound.)
And again we stray from the point…Back to those Fort Bend and Brazoria county censuses of 1870, the first in which ex-slaves were enumerated as more than 3/5 of a person. Five years after Appomattox, they were deemed fully human and possessed of first and last names and ready to be “onboarded” as Americans.
And on census forms, there is a space for birthplace, and over and over again, perhaps as much as ten or twenty percent of the time in Brazoria County, these freedmen listed their birthplace as “Africa.”
Technically speaking, this should have been impossible for all but the oldest freedmen, and most of these people were too young. The importation of African slaves to United States shores was banned in 1808, and declared piracy in 1820 (thereby punishable by death without benefit of clergy) but if you know the story of the Amistad affair, you get the barest hint of how the trade did not come to a stop on that date. Virtually all of these freedmen who claimed African birth were born after 1808, sometimes decades later.
Therein lies our story.
Beginning around 1820, relatively lawless Texas became an epicenter for the smuggling of African slaves. By then, Spain’s grasp on Texas (and the rest of what would soon be Mexico) was slipping, and there were many, many hundreds of miles of isolated coastline, only some of which came under anything other than the nominal jurisdiction of a likely quite corruptible customs official.
Into this void came first pirates like Jean Lafitte, much of whose riches came from the smuggling of African slaves, many of whom were first brought to Cuba, where the trade in newly-imported bozales was still legal. Since the earliest days of piracy on the high seas, slaves were an expedient way to launder loot plundered from treasure ships. Gold coins and gems were somewhat traceable; slaves, equally valuable in the right markets, infinitely less so. Many a pirate trip, including that infamous and extremely lucrative one by Henry Every, ended with the sale of slaves who in turn had been purchased with the original haul.
The smuggling / laundering of African-born slaves and bozales was the lifeblood of Lafitte’s Galveston pirate camp. It was the port of entry for these unfortunates; from there, they were marched or shipped to Louisiana, the westernmost limit of American slavery at the time. And increasingly, as Spanish Texas became Mexican Texas, the slaves didn’t even have to go to Louisiana. They could be put to work right there in Texas, which after 1821 was filling up with Anglo settlers from the Old South.
Almost all of those White men we Texans were once taught to revere without question were “blackbirders” to some degree: either enthusiastic participants in or beneficiaries (regretful or not) of the illegal kidnapping and lifetime enslavement of human beings from Africa. Jim Bowie had made a small fortune in cahoots with Lafitte, smuggling African slaves into New Orleans from Galveston. Stephen F. Austin looked the other way while his flock of Anglo-Texan migrants engaged in the practice with gusto. Members of his own family owned illegal slaves at Peach Point Plantation on the lower Brazos. Dithering West Point dropout “Colonel” James Fannin was more directly involved: in 1835, along with a consortium of area planters including Benjamin Fort Smith and brothers Leander and Sterling McNeel, Fannin traveled to Cuba and returned with hundreds of African slaves.
And then you had Monroe Edwards. Had Texas Monthly been around to bestow Bum Steer of the Year awards in the 1830s, Edwards would likely have claimed that dishonor on multiple occasions. He is a strong to very strong contender for the title of Worst Texan of All Time. I’ll tell this infamously handsome devil’s story in full on another occasion, but Edwards combined slave smuggling, both from Cuba and direct from Africa, with forgery, prison escapes and con artistry in such a way as to win a small measure of national infamy, mention in a minor work of Herman Melville, and death, possibly at the hands of vengeful prison guards, in The Tombs prison in New York City. And his whole career began at Chenango Plantation in Brazoria County, one of two such in the area with a weirdly African-sounding name. (“Orozimbo” being the other; both come not from Africa but from romance novels of the 1820s with Spanish / Latin American settings.)
I’ve become more and more convinced that slavery was the true impetus behind the Texas Revolution…And ultimately, a primary cause of the Civil War, as annexation and the Mexican War set the stage for conflict inalterably.
But back to Brazoria County. By 1838, it is estimated that half of all of the area’s slaves were smuggled from Africa. 32 years later, a census worker with the Freedmen’s Bureau reported that he had (up to that point) found 500 African-born Brazoria County freedmen. He wanted to know if they should be counted as American citizens. (Mercifully, DC said they should.)
Again, in 1870. What until relatively recently was believed to have been the last shipment of African slaves to what is now the United States came in 1840, where a ship disembarked its human cargo at the mouth of the San Bernard River, about twenty miles as the crow flies from where I type this.
Ned Thompson, a survivor of that trip, shared his memories with local historian J.P. Underwood: "[He] remembered well the battle in which his tribe had been defeated by a rival tribe and he had been taken prisoner, only to be sold by his captors to a slave trader. He remembered the trip over, first to Cuba and then straight to the mouth of the Bernard,” wrote Underwood.
This was in 1913. Thompson reported his age then as somewhere in the vicinity of 90 years old; he’d been in his twenties when captured. Around the same time, an American-born slave named Nancy Antwine told an interviewer her father had a similar tale of capture in war and subsequent enslavement. Her mother’s tale was even more heart-rending: According to the research of Sean Kelley, whose “Blackbirders and Bozales: African-born slaves on the lower Brazos River of Texas in the 19th Century” is required reading on the subject, it happened like this:
“As a girl in Africa her mother had gone down to the riverside with her sister (Antwine's aunt) to wash peanuts. A boat suddenly appeared and the ‘white folks’ on it asked the girls if they wanted to trade the nuts for ‘lots of red cloth and things.’ They boarded the boat, but it left before they could debark. The boat eventually stopped in a ‘big place,’ where Antwine's mother could see ‘lots of more black folks.’ (Perhaps the “big place” was Goree Island, off the coast of Senegal.)
Kelley offers a critique of Antwine’s “parable,” as he terms it:
Antwine's story was apparently repeated so many times over the years that it more closely resembled a parable, with its moral and symbolic qualities eclipsing the specific personal histories. The most obvious function of the tale was to keep the memory of Africa alive by representing the true experience of a member of the local black community. More importantly, it offered a coded critique of the slave regime and its origins. Significantly, Antwine did not use condemnatory language in her retelling. Noting only that that her mother's captors were white (which was unlikely to have been the case), Antwine expressed no ill will toward them. She did not say that her mother was kidnapped or captured; rather, she "came from Africa." Similarly, the boat simply "starts goin'" while Antwine's mother and aunt are "lookin' around." She did not mention violence and did not give details of the middle passage, nor is there any specific mention of Cuba. In fact, Antwine's story is sandwiched between two paragraphs, stressing how good her "white folks" were.
The white interviewer found the story "interesting," but the tale's moral relevance should have been clear to anyone who bothered to listen closely. First, it offered a historical explanation for slavery, a Book of Genesis that told what happened in the Beginning. Second, while Antwine's recollection that the captors were white probably did not reflect historical reality, it did articulate a certain moral principle: as the ultimate beneficiaries of black labor, whites assumed the ultimate culpability for slavery. In other words, the narrative of events condemned slavery, despite being told in language calculated not to provoke a reaction from the descendants of local slaveholders. Antwine's ability to tell whites what they needed to hear, likely honed over her long life, was apparently still sharp. Lastly, her statement that her mother arrived at a place with "lots of black folks" probably speaks to the eventual solidarity that emerged between African-born slaves and creoles, an identity rooted primarily in race rather than ethnicity.
Such were the memories of the second generation of these African slaves. Paradoxically, it seems we know less of the first generation.
While Underwood said Ned Thompson still “[rememebered] the customs and habits of the wild people of his native land. Speaks the language or dialect of his native land," he did not tell is what those customs were or what that language was.
Ned Thompson and wife Sarah, 1913.
In 1889, and elderly ex-slave named Washington Edwards was also reported to still be able to speak his native language. (Per Kelley’s research, probably Yoruba or Ki-Kongo.)
An American-born slave named San Jacinto “Cinto” Lewis (who I’d encountered in my UH studies; he and his fellow centenarian bride were still living in their old slave quarters in the 1930s) told a WPA slave narrative interviewer that the African slaves were notorious for running away, thus requiring constant supervision and brutal punishment.
Most of the African-born Brazoria slaves lived near Chenango, seven miles north of Angleton on FM 521, which exists today as a straggling exurb of Houston, and around the Mims settlement and others like it closer to the coast. To this day, those Spanish moss-draped live oak and palmetto thicket backroads are heavily African American, inasmuch as they are populated at all. In “Blackbirders and Bozales,” Kelley wondered if Old World customs might be stronger there than elsewhere in the Old Slave South today:
“Assessing their impact on the local community is difficult, given the nature of the evidence, but the Africans seem to have made their presence felt on two levels,” he wrote. “At the household level, it appears Africans did all they could to find partners of similar background and likely perpetuated Old World understandings of family, gender, and perhaps the sacred, at least among those with whom they were most intimate. At the community and even regional level, they seem to have claimed a special symbolic and moral place in the consciousness of all black residents of the lower Brazos.”
Per Kelley’s research, while African-born slave men often married “creole” (American-born) women, African-born women tended to only marry men also from Africa. All four enslaved African women at the Mims Plantation did so, for example, but it was a trend county-wide. As Kelley wrote:
“This discrimination on the part of the women suggests that they chose partners with particular criteria in mind, probably having to do with communication and compatibility And this tendency toward endogamy was pronounced off the Mims plantation as well. The 1870 census reveals that twenty-eight of thirty-three married or partnered African-born women in Brazoria County chose African-born men. The consistency with which Africans sought out African marriage partners suggests not merely that "African" constituted a distinct identity among Brazos slaves but that African-born men and women of specific linguistic, religious, and cultural backgrounds sought--and in many cases found--marriage partners with similar backgrounds.
The Mims records reveal not only endogamous relationships among Africans but enduring and fertile ones. Though by 1845 both groups averaged 3.5 children per woman, the creole mean was distorted by one mother with 8 children, while several others had only one or two. Most of the African women, in contrast, bore 3 or 4 children. The comparatively high fertility rate (which runs counter to those for other plantation societies) suggests that the Africans would have been able to pass on select beliefs and practices to a second generation. However, we should be careful not to overstate the point. Virtually all of the Africans' children had English names, and they showed no particular preference for marriage partners with African parents. They were, in other words, creoles, though with particularly strong and immediate connections with their African past.
In studying the history of Brazoria County, I’ve come to a sense of tragedy and frustration. For such an old county, there is very little “history.” Which doesn’t mean that a lot of things didn’t happen here, that many lives and souls have passed through. Very little of it was recorded. With at least seven of ten Brazoria Countians enslaved up until 1865, and probably about half of the remaining people here illiterate, we have only the selective memories of the elite Whites to go from.
How much music and culture and folklore and wisdom has been lost on these haunted and brutal former plantation lands? I am grateful my ancestors captured some of what remained in the 1930s, when they visited the prison farms that literally evolved out of the plantations on the very same grounds, but little of what they found was unadulterated by contact with people from the rest of Texas and the nation. What could we have learned of early 19th Century Africa had anyone the heart, head and soul to listen to those they’d enslaved?
Guess we now need to rename Fannin street and our state capitol.
If Texans were willing to leave and fight the Union to maintain slavery, it stands to reason that was also a major reason they were previously willing to do the same with Mexico. Granted, there were some compelling reasons to leave Mexico that had nothing to do with slavery, but few things motiviate people to fight as much as the threat of losing their "property." And Mexico was threatening the Texan slave owners with that prospect. So I agree with your contention that it was likely a major cause. Even if it was downplayed in my year long 7th Grade Texas History Class in College Station. Which itself was once cotton and slave country, and still had the look, when I lived there, of Jim Crow sharecropper country when you went for a drive in the country.