Slave Names in Colonial South Carolina

Abstract

AN INADEQUATE use by scholars and compilers of dictionaries of at least one colonial newspaper, the South Carolina Gazette published at Charleston from 1732 to 1775, has left relatively untouched an important source of Southern contributions to American English. It is quite probable that a more careful examination of the Gazette would yield a number of citations of Americanisms earlier than have been noted previously and perhaps would establish the American origin of a limited number of vocabulary items as well. This would be true, of course, of almost any colonial newspaper of a comparable period and state of preservation which has not been examined thoroughly; the unique opportunity presented by the Gazette lies in the materials it contains concerning the vocabulary associated with the slave system, concerning African influences on the dialect of the sea island, and concerning patterns in the nomenclature of slaves. An example of an earlier unrecorded usage from the Gazette is the word driver in the sense of a Negro slave appointed to the position of overseer. The earliest citation of this word in the NED is dated 1796, and the earliest DAE citation is 1772. The first citation in the DA is from James Grainger's Sugar-Cane, a didactic poem on the cultivation of sugar cane in the British West Indies, written at St. Kitts in the Leeward Islands and published in London in 1764. Driver in the sense of a Negro overseer, was used in the South Carolina Gazette of May io, 1760. Another example, both an earlier usage and an Africanism, is the word signifying the Negroes of coastal South Carolina and their dialect. For their definition and etymology of the NED, DAE, and DA rely upon a monograph by Reed Smith published in 1926,1 and the first instance of its use which they cite is a reference found by Smith in an official publication relating to the Denmark Vesey slave uprising of 1822. This reference mentions the part played in the insurrection by 'Gullah Jack and his company of Gullah or Angola Negroes.'2 A similar reference to occurs in an advertisement in the Gazette of May 12, 1739, for a runaway slave described as 'a short well set Negro, named