Sun Up to Sun Down for a Trillion Dollar People

A Historical Survey of African American Wealth

By Kamau Odinga

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Ours was an economic entry, part of early 17th century globalization. Late in August 1619 20 Africans confined in a Dutch vessel bearing Spanish names the likes of Isabella and Pedro came to an English colony perched on Native American lands: Jamestown, Virginia. There, the Africans were handed over to one John Rolfe—some historians say in exchange for food supplies ( victualle )—others simply say they were sold. Thus began in the English colonies later to become The United States of America an era of African servitude, enslavement and segregation.

As was the case for other Americans, the first step along the road to wealth accumulation for African-Americans was ownership. But unlike other Americans, the first asset which had to come under African-American ownership was freedom itself. Fundamental to slavery’s existence was an assault on the humanity of the labor force, but it was at its core an economic system. Persons were transformed into valuable capital property ( at least according to the laws and mores of the enslavers), which could be sold, leased, used as collateral in banking transactions and as currency over gambling tables. By 1860 the skills and motive power of enslaved Africans were of immense value to the American economy. There were four million slaves worth close to $3 billion. The estimated cost of a complete “slave buyout” would have been about 61 percent of the gross national product of roughly $4.4 billion. Walter Johnson, professor of history at New York University, has even made a compelling case for the psychological impact of the slave based economy: “The entire economy of the antebellum South was constructed upon the idea that the bodies of enslaved people had a measurable money value whether they were actually sold or not.”

Enslaved Africans, in simple daily acts and less frequent bursts of violent revolt, spent the next four centuries trying to reverse this equation—to defeat this diabolical definition of property. Efforts on the part of the enslaved to reclaim ownership of their labor and lives began not long after their arrival in the 1600s. According to noted historian Ira Berlin, one of the first Africans to escape the prism of property and pursue the accumulation of wealth was “Antonio a Negro,” who was sold into slavery at Jamestown in 1621. By 1653, and under a new name, Anthony Johnson, Antonio had acquired his freedom and together with his sons owned estates in the hundreds of acres which were passed down to succeeding generations. Sadly, bending to the tenets of his time, Antonio himself became a slave master.

As slavery (d)evolved and slaveholders stretched the system to garner greater profits, they inadvertently created opportunities for the enslaved to develop the rudiments of an underground economy. In the early years, when indentured servitude coexisted with the beginnings of institutionalized slavery, servants and slaves were given Sundays off to tend their personal gardens of subsistence crops. This arrangement benefited the slaveholder because it decreased the cost of feeding his workforce. Slaves often pushed the envelope in these arrangements and generated cash for themselves, which they used to make life more bearable. The more industrious and fortunate often accumulated enough funds to purchase their freedom and that of family members. In some instances slaves moved beyond subsistence crops and challenged their masters by producing the going cash crop, whether it was tobacco or cotton. The overriding posture of the slaveholders was to meet the challenge head on and ban the production of the cash crop in question. In a broad sense, this was a tentative step in the formation of a nascent Black economy. A clear pattern began to emerge among enterprising slaves: where possible acquire land and put it to use ( as did “Antonio the Negro”), create a market or plug into an existing one, produce commodities, engage in trade and learn to read the market in order to supply its needs.