Yes, Lord, I Know the Road: A Documentary History of African Americans in South Carolina, 1526-2008

249 Pages·2017·14.069 MB·English

by  J. Brent Morris

Yes, Lord, I Know the Road

Yes, Lord,
I Know the Road
A Documentary History of
African Americans in
South Carolina
1526–2008
n
J. Brent Morris
Edited by
The University of South Carolina Press
© 2017 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Morris, J. Brent, editor.
Title: Yes, Lord, I know the road : a documentary history of African
Americans in South Carolina, 1526–2008 / edited by J. Brent Morris.
Description: Columbia, South Carolina : University of South Carolina Press,
[2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2016047778 (print) | lccn 2016049459 (ebook) |
isbn 9781611177305 (hardcover : alk. paper) | isbn 9781611177312
(pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9781611177329 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: African Americans—South Carolina—History—Sources.
Classification: lcc E185.93.S7 Y47 2017 (print) | lcc E185.93.S7
(ebook) | ddc 975.7/00496073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047778
Front cover photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress
“Sheep, sheep, do you know the road?
Yes, Lord, I know the road.
Sheep, sheep, do you know the road?
Yes my Lord, I know the road . . .”
Sea Islands spiritual

Contents
list of illustrations viii
foreword ix
Daniel C. Littlefield
preface and editorial notes xi
acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
chapter 1. “The people commonly called Negroes”:
Becoming African Americans in South Carolina 38
chapter 2. “De bless fa true, dem wa da wok haad”:
The Development of South Carolina’s Slave Society 60
chapter 3. “A jubilee of freedom”: Liberty and
Emancipation in South Carolina 85
chapter 4. “All men are born free and equal”:
The Era of Reconstruction 121
chapter 5. “Each tomorrow will find us farther than today”:
Black Life in the New South 148
chapter 6. “We Shall Overcome”: The African American
Revolution in the Palmetto State 175
chapter 7. “Common ground”: A New Generation
of Black South Carolinians 190
notes 207
index 223
List of Illustrations
Slave runaway advertisement 68
Slave sale advertisement 69
“The Old Plantation” 74
Robert Smalls and the CSS Planter 108
“Marching On!”—The Fifty-fifth Massachusetts
Colored Regiment singing John Brown’s March
in the streets of Charleston 116
Law diploma of Richard Henry Greener 138
“Teaching the Freedmen” 144
“Emancipation Day” (c. 1905) 150
Hoeing rice in South Carolina 155
A Southern baptism, Aiken, South Carolina 155
World War II South Carolina soldier 170
I. D. Newman being sworn in by Mike Daniel 190
Congressman James E. Clyburn 199
viii
Foreword
This documentary narrative of African Americans in South Carolina covers the
broad sweep of the state’s history from early Spanish explorations to the mod-
ern political and social activities of people of African descent. It promises to be
a boon for students, teachers, and the general public interested in the unique
background of a small, complex, and fascinating region. The documents are ex-
traordinary and well chosen. They reveal, for example, that less than thirty-five
years after Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, Spanish explorers incited here
perhaps the earliest rebellion of enslaved Africans on the North American
coast and one of the earliest anywhere in the New World. They contradict any
notion that armed resistance was practically unknown among peoples brought
unwillingly to labor for Europeans in North America (in contrast to what is
conceded for enslaved Africans elsewhere in America) or that the northern
mainland was in any way exempt from the prevailing cultural, political, and
social currents that affected the meeting of black and white people everywhere
during their settlement in America and during and after the development of
plantation economies. There was cooperation and conflict, personal affection
and abiding antagonism. No other time or place offers better examples of these
commonalities than South Carolina, particularly during the colonial period.
Here captive south-central Africans staged the largest slave rebellion in Eng-
land’s continental colonies, featuring a prominent ethnic dimension, and here
planters evinced a more open toleration for interracial dalliance than is often
acknowledged for the English main. But the intriguing features of this province
did not end when it rejected British hegemony. Whether in religion or revo-
lution, this small state offers extraordinary illustrations of African American
agency (to evoke a convenient term too easily used) that discredits the idea
that African peoples lacked intelligence or initiative and leads to the sugges-
tion that those in South Carolina may have had a disproportionate influence
on American society and culture in relationship to the size of the region where
they lived. The state was distinctive in the dimension of its African population
and in the nature of its African-influenced culture. Moreover, these features ex-
tended beyond the colonial period and continue to affect Carolina culture and
society in the modern age. There are examples here of the context within which
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