The Problem of Slave Community in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake

Abstract

I N the spring of I774, a young Englishman named Nicholas Cresswell crossed the Atlantic, entered Chesapeake Bay, and came to safe anchorage on the Rappahannock River. From there, three black oarsmen rowed him north on the bay as far as the broad mouth of the Potomac River, then upriver along the shores of St. Mary's and Charles counties, Maryland. On the afternoon of May 2I, Cresswell reached his destination, the tiny village of Nanjemoy in southwestern Charles County.1 A week later, as he was becoming acquainted with the sights and sounds of the Tobacco Coast, Cresswell attended what he called a Negro Ball near Nanjemoy. Sundays being the only days these poor creatures have to themselves, he wrote, generally meet together and amuse themselves with Dancing to the Banjo, a four-stringed gourd something in the imitation of a Guitar. Some of the slaves also sang droll music indeed, songs in which generally relate the usage they have received from their Masters or Mistresses in a very satirical stile and manner. The newcomer pronounced the music and verse Rude and uncultivated, the dancing most violent exercise ... irregular and grotesque. With a hint of disbelief he concluded that the slaves all appear to be exceedingly happy at these merry-makings and seem as if they had forgot or were not sensible of their miserable condition.2 Cresswell's account is the kind of infrequent literary evidence that historians of the black experience in early America cherish for its clues to