Atlantic Bonds

A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa

Lisa A. Lindsay

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781469652153, 9781469631127
• eBook ISBN: 9781469631134
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

A decade before the American Civil War, James Churchwill Vaughan (1828–1893) set out to fulfill his formerly enslaved father’s dying wish that he should leave America to start a new life in Africa. Over the next forty years, Vaughan was taken captive, fought in African wars, built and rebuilt a livelihood, and led a revolt against white racism, finally becoming a successful merchant and the founder of a wealthy, educated, and politically active family. Tracing Vaughan’s journey from South Carolina to Liberia to several parts of Yorubaland (present-day southwestern Nigeria), Lisa Lindsay documents this “free” man’s struggle to find economic and political autonomy in an era when freedom was not clear and unhindered anywhere for people of African descent.

In a tour de force of historical investigation on two continents, Lindsay tells a story of Vaughan’s survival, prosperity, and activism against a seemingly endless series of obstacles. By following Vaughan’s transatlantic journeys and comparing his experiences to those of his parents, contemporaries, and descendants in Nigeria and South Carolina, Lindsay reveals the expansive reach of slavery, the ambiguities of freedom, and the surprising ways that Africa, rather than America, offered new opportunities for people of African descent.

one: SCIPIO VAUGHAN’S SOUTH CAROLINA

In 1840, a dying Scipio Vaughan gathered his family together and imparted his final wish: that they should leave South Carolina for Africa, the continent of their ancestors. Although he had spent most of his life as a slave, Scipio was by then a free man, proprietor of his own carpentry business, and owner of land and houses. His wife and their many children had never carried the burdens of slavery. They did not have to fear being sold away from one another, worked to death on a plantation, or abused by a master or overseer. Scipio and Maria Vaughan’s adult offspring were settled in their own households, making a living and raising their own families; their younger ones were learning to read and write. How had a son of Africa, a slave in South Carolina, managed to achieve this? And having given them such a foothold in life, why then did Scipio want his loved ones to leave?

Scipio Vaughan’s story forms one trickle in the vast river of nineteenth-century American history, flowing together with the forced removal of Native Americans from the Southeast and the expansion of plantation societies into what was formerly the frontier of European settlement. Scipio came to Kershaw County, South Carolina from Virginia as a slave around 1800, the year before his future wife, Maria Conway, was born to an Anglo-Catawba mother and a free black father. Though the numbers of white settlers and black slaves increased steadily, it remained possible for some Africans and African Americans to maintain degrees of autonomy and even attain their freedom. The pathways out of slavery were always limited, though, and they narrowed as planters became increasingly powerful and, paradoxically, fearful of threats to their dominance. Scipio barely slipped through, but even as a free man his safety and livelihood had to be guarded. Whenever white southerners felt threatened, free people of color suffered. Scipio’s children, including his second son James Churchwill Vaughan, grew up in a society convulsed by a series of panics over slavery and race, officially free from slavery but not from violence and insecurity.

Echoes of that anxiety persist in Camden, South Carolina, even now. The seat of Kershaw County, Camden is South Carolina’s oldest inland town, located twenty miles northeast of Columbia along what used to be the Catawba Path, a native trading route linking Charleston to the deep interior. These days its ten square miles hold seven thousand people, a bit more than half of the town’s nineteenth-century population peak. A visitor to Camden is struck by the public nostalgia for a lost antebellum era: some thirty historic sites are marked with placards and annotated in a text and map published by the Chamber of Commerce. Most are former plantation houses, largely restored to grandeur, and some have been transformed into bed and breakfasts. Yet in a less grand part of town, small, mostly dilapidated dwellings house African Americans whose per capita income is one-third that of Camden’s whites, and whose unemployment rate is three times as high.¹ Though they comprise 40 percent of the population, African Americans in Camden barely impinge on its public presentation; only two of the historic markers have anything to do with their forebears. The cemetery where the town’s early black inhabitants are buried is difficult to find, despite its location next to the historic graveyard for whites. When I asked for directions, a white lady told me the place was dangerous.

There is no sign of Scipio Vaughan in Camden’s old African American cemetery, though headstones for some of his relatives are there. He presumably lies in an unmarked grave, his leave-taking no better documented than his early years. Scipio was born on March 26, 1780 in Richmond, Virginia.² Of the first two decades of his life, we know only that he was a slave, and he learned carpentry. He came to Kershaw County with his master Wylie Vaughan (1775–1820), one of many thousands of white Virginians seeking their fortunes to the South and West as soil depletion and land scarcity undermined the old tobacco-based economy of the Tidewater region.³ Wylie’s father and older brother both died when he was a young man, and his father’s plantation did not continue in the Vaughan name. Scipio may have been the only member of the estate not transferred to another owner when it was liquidated. This, his training for a trade that would spare him from agricultural labor, the singular status he later held among Wylie Vaughan’s slaves, and the five-year age difference between them all raise the possibility that Scipio and Wylie may have been half-brothers. No written records refer to Scipio as “mulatto,” however, and it may be that the two men forged whatever bond was between them through lifelong association and the shared experience of leaving home for a new life in South Carolina.

South Carolina and its counties in 1824. Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina.

Wylie and Scipio Vaughan arrived as Kershaw County was rapidly changing from a frontier to a plantation society. The earliest English settlers had come to what was then known as Camden District in the first half of the eighteenth century from Charleston, mostly to trade with native peoples. In the 1740s, the Indian trading path from Charleston was linked to the Philadelphia Wagon Road, opening the Carolina backcountry to settlers who trickled in over the next decades from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina, joining others from the coast. Some brought slaves with them or purchased laborers from dealers in Charleston. The settlers planted wheat and tobacco and raised livestock, selling their surplus to coastal merchants and trading with native people. Camden grew as a transfer point for hinterland products, with a grist mill, tavern, general store, and a main street (today’s Broad Street) laid out over part of the old Catawba Path.⁴

Kershaw County’s real prosperity, however, came after Eli Whitney’s cotton gin was patented in 1793. In spite of steady demand for cotton in industrializing Britain, the short-staple variety that grew well in most of the American South was previously unprofitable because it required so much labor to extract the seeds from the fiber. The cotton gin performed this task fifty times faster than an individual person could—effectively removing all limits on cotton profits, as long as there was land and labor to produce the crop. In the South Carolina upcountry, farmers rapidly converted open land and existing slaveholdings to cotton production, expanding the state’s annual exports of the crop from less than ten thousand pounds in 1790 to some six million in 1800 and amassing personal fortunes to rival those of the Charleston-area rice planters.⁵ Camden, already a commercial crossroads, developed into a bulking center for cotton produced on nearby plantations. By 1802 there were two hundred houses in Camden, more than twice the number in the nearby state capital Columbia, and enslaved people made up about a third of the population.⁶ “The discovery of the cotton crop is but a new thing in Carolina & Georgia,” a traveler through Kershaw County reported in 1806, yet it “has within these fifteen years made the fortune of half the great landholders whose estates now bring them in from $10,000 to $50,000.”⁷

Wylie Vaughan quickly joined the ranks of cotton planters. Around the time that he moved to South Carolina, he married into the family of Richard Champion, an immigrant from England who possessed thousands of acres of land and some thirty-six slaves in Kershaw County as well as a small fortune invested in a Charleston-based mercantile company. Champion had been a Bristol merchant and owner of a pottery factory, with strong interests in North America not only through political sentiment—in the 1780s he had published proindependence pamphlets—but through a trade and shipping partnership with his brother-in-law John Lloyd of Charleston. Champion and his family had immigrated to Camden and acquired a plantation at Rocky Branch, eight miles away, in 1784. He and his wife both died in the early 1790s, however, and their estate was divided equally among their five surviving children. One of these was Sarah (born in 1774), who married Wylie Vaughan. As a wife, Sarah Vaughan could not hold property in her own name, so her considerable assets belonged by law to her husband.⁸ These he augmented with land grants in Kershaw District totaling nearly twenty-five hundred acres, along with some three thousand acres in nearby Richland and Fairfield Districts.⁹

Like other land “opened up” to American settlement, Vaughan’s holdings previously bore the footprints of Native Americans. By the mid-eighteenth century, Catawba communities had incorporated various native peoples living on South Carolina’s northwestern frontier. Speakers of a Siouan language, Catawbas hunted in the fall and winter and farmed corn, beans, and squash in the spring and summer; they were also known as fierce warriors. Even after absorbing other peoples, however, they faced a series of crises: hostilities with rival native groups like the Cherokees to their west, incursions of white settlers, and imported diseases. From a reported population of about 1,500 warriors and 6,000 total in 1683, their numbers dropped to some 400 warriors 60 years later. A smallpox epidemic in 1759 reduced their population again, from perhaps 1,500 inhabitants to roughly 500. Under such threats, they formed strategic alliances with the English, solidified by a cordial relationship between Catawba King Haglar (who reigned from 1749 to 1763) and Samuel Wyly, a prominent settler of Camden. His people devastated by illness, and seeking to avoid the kind of bloody encounter then being waged between Anglo-American settlers and nearby Cherokees, Hagler agreed in 1760 to a treaty by which the Catawba gave up claims to Kershaw County lands in exchange for a fifteen square mile reservation forty miles north of Pine Tree Hill, as Camden was then called. In the following decades, the Catawbas began leasing most of that land, so that by 1800 nearly every acre of it was rented to Anglo-American settlers.¹⁰ Meanwhile, the state government began granting the Catawba lands taken earlier to settlers such as Wylie Vaughan.

The new arrivals wanted labor to work the land. In the early 1700s, Indian traders had offered their prisoners of war for sale as slaves, but that trade was replaced by increasing numbers of captives from a different source: Africa. From its slow beginnings in the mid-1600s, the Atlantic slave trade to the territory that became the United States carried nearly four hundred thousand forced migrants away from Africa. Initially, their primary North American destinations were the Chesapeake Bay area, where they toiled in tobacco fields, and the rice-producing lowcountry around Charleston. Over the next century, American settlement and slavery expanded together. In the 1760s, nearly one in five backcountry South Carolina settlers was black, nearly all of them enslaved farm and other laborers. Four decades later, Baltimore merchant Robert Gilmor traveled through Kershaw County en route to Charleston and observed three hundred to four hundred slaves toiling in the fields of the district’s largest slaveholder, Colonel John Chesnut. Cotton had made them valuable, he noted, “and on enquiring I find that $250 to $280 is given for new Negroes at Charleston, say for boys & $300 to $350 for grown persons.”¹¹

Shortly thereafter, Gilmor witnessed the source of some of these “new Negroes”: slave ships from Africa docked at Charleston. Gilmor’s visit there took place during the frantic, final year of legal slave importation to the United States from Africa. During the colonial period, approximately ninety thousand foreign slaves had arrived in South Carolina, first via the West Indies and then as of the 1720s directly from Africa. But rebels had closed American ports to Atlantic slaving during the Revolution, not out of solicitude for liberty but rather a general embargo on British commerce. By then, the slave population of the mid-Atlantic was reproducing naturally, if slowly, while tobacco planters were moving into less labor-intensive enterprises.¹² With the dramatic new investment in cotton, however, came a revitalized demand for enslaved labor. In 1803 state legislators reopened the African slave trade to South Carolina. Over the next five years, until Americans were prohibited from Atlantic slaving once and for all, Charleston imported 95 percent of the roughly 66,000 Africans entering the United States. This new trade re-Africanized slavery in a state where American-born slaves had predominated for decades. By 1810, captives from Africa comprised more than 20 percent of South Carolina’s slaves. Most of them came from West Central Africa (in and around present-day Angola), though many also originated in Sierra Leone, modern Ghana, Senegambia, and elsewhere in West Africa. The Bight of Benin, where Church Vaughan spent most of his life, accounted for only about 1 percent of the Africans forced into Charleston in the early nineteenth century.¹³

Regardless of where they had last set foot on African soil, these forced immigrants arrived in the United States after a voyage of several hungry, thirsty, sickly, and violent months. After sailing past the Charleston bar, Africans were required to proceed to the “Pest House” at James Island (formerly on Sullivan’s Island), where they were confined on their ships until declared free of contagious diseases. If the weary captives were sick, their onboard ordeal continued for another month or two, or until they died. After being released from quarantine, slave ships proceeded to the eastern edge of Charleston and docked at Gadsden’s Wharf. There, as many as a thousand slaves would spend several more weeks trapped on their putrid ships while sales were advertised and transacted. Visiting in 1806, Robert Gilmor was “shocked with the sight of 400 on board of one ship, all stowed away separately, in places which almost suffocated me.”¹⁴ Eventually, many of the “new negroes” were purchased by Charleston agents who then transferred them upcountry, including to Camden. Wylie Vaughan purchased at least one African man, and probably more.¹⁵ Their country marks, plaited hair, unfamiliar languages, and African memories distinguished them from the enslaved African Americans who had been born in South Carolina, even as they worked and lived side by side.

Joining them were other captive newcomers. Between 1780 and 1810, slaveholders from Virginia and Maryland sent or brought an estimated 115,000 slaves south and west in what was known as the “Georgia trade,” which in fact reached from the Carolinas through Kentucky and Tennessee and south to the lower Mississippi Valley. Some white migrants from the Upper South brought their slaves with them when they themselves moved. Other slaveholders sold their human chattel to dealers who marched them south for sale in cotton country. This domestic slave trade—the “Second Middle Passage” as historian Ira Berlin calls it—was not yet as massive as it would become in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, but for those forcibly separated fr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations & Map
• The Vaughan Family Tree
• Introduction 
• 1 Scipio Vaughan’s South Carolina
• 2 Leaving Home
• 3 The Love of Liberty
• 4 Troubled Times in Yorubaland
• 5 Reconstructions
• 6 Vaughan’s Rebellion
• 7 Afterlives
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index