The African American Odyssey of John Kizell

A South Carolina Slave Returns to Fight the Slave Trade in His African Homeland

Kevin G. Lowther

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781611171419, 9781570039607
• eBook ISBN: 9781611171334
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A compelling biography of a South Carolina slave who returned to fight the slave trade in his African homeland

The inspirational story of John Kizell celebrates the life of a West African enslaved as a boy and brought to South Carolina on the eve of the American Revolution. Fleeing his owner, Kizell served with the British military in the Revolutionary War, began a family in the Nova Scotian wilderness, then returned to his African homeland to help found a settlement for freed slaves in Sierra Leone. He spent decades battling European and African slave traders along the coast and urging his people to stop selling their own into foreign bondage. This in-depth biography—based in part on Kizell's own writings—illuminates the links between South Carolina and West Africa during the Atlantic slave trade's peak decades.

Seized in an attack on his uncle's village, Kizell was thrown into the brutal world of chattel slavery at age thirteen and transported to Charleston, South Carolina. When Charleston fell to the British in 1780, Kizell joined them and was with the Loyalist force defeated in the pivotal battle of Kings Mountain. At the war's end, he was evacuated with other American Loyalists to Nova Scotia. In 1792 he joined a pilgrimage of nearly twelve hundred former slaves to the new British settlement for free blacks in Sierra Leone.

Among the most prominent Africans in the antislavery movement of his time, Kizell believed that all people of African descent in America would, if given a way, return to Africa as he had. Back in his native land, he bravely confronted the forces that had led to his enslavement. Late in life he played a controversial role—freshly interpreted in this book—in the settlement of American blacks in what became Liberia.

Kizell's remarkable story provides insight to the cultural and spiritual milieu from which West Africans were wrenched before being forced into slavery. Lowther sheds light on African complicity in the slave trade and examines how it may have contributed to Sierra Leone's latter-day struggles as an independent state. A foreword by Joseph Opala, a noted researcher on the "Gullah Connection" between Sierra Leone and coastal South Carolina and Georgia, highlights Kizell's continuing legacy on both sides of the Atlantic.

1

CHAINED TOGETHER

“If you love your children, if you love your country, if you love the God of love, clear your land of slaves; burden not your hearts nor your country with them.”

Bishop Richard Allen, to slave owners, 1794

“If I was concerned in the African Trade,” Henry Laurens had written from London that March, “I would be cautious this Year of sending many Negroes to Carolina.”

The year was 1773. Laurens—once the leading slave merchant in Charleston— worried that South Carolina's planters risked being “overstocked” with slaves and burdened with debt made all the riskier in the province's “present relaxed State of Government.”

Laurens had abjured selling slaves years earlier, but his instincts for the business remained honed. The rice and indigo crops had been bountiful in 1772. He feared that his fellow planters would now overexpand production and import more slaves than they could afford.¹

Laurens's concern seemed misplaced. Supply was failing to meet demand. On May 31, 1773, the South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal reported that the large number of slave ships arriving in Charleston belied the number of Africans actually on board. “Although there are now no less than Twelve Cargoes of Negroes for Sale here,” the Gazette noted, “yet the Number…does not exceed 1900; most of the vessels having come off the coast with less than Half the Quantity of Slaves they were sent to purchase.”²

The African Trade

Laurens had predicted—with some accuracy—that at least eight thousand Africans would be imported into South Carolina in 1773.³ One of them, in all likelihood, was a spindly thirteen-year-old boy who would be known most of his life as John Kizell. Someone—possibly his African owner—had accused him of being a witch. It was a common pretext for disposing of surplus labor in West Africa.

The boy had been sold to a slave dealer along one of the mangrove-lined creeks feeding the Gallinas River in today's southeastern Sierra Leone. There he would have been confined in a rough stockade, along with those taken in some conflict far from the coast, men falsely accused of “damaging” one of a chief's several wives, and other hapless witches. And there he would have remained until a slave ship captain arrived to negotiate for whatever slaves might be available.

The Blossom, captained by William Briggs, arrived in Charleston on May 24. It had left Cape Mount, just southeast of the Gallinas, with 336 slaves. When it landed—its cargo to be quarantined for several days on Sullivan's Island—274 were still alive. Mortality on the so-called Middle Passage had been substantially higher than normal. About one in seven slaves died on voyages from West Africa to Charleston in the early 1770s. One in five had died aboard the Blossom. Whether it was this ship that had carried him, or some other vessel “concerned in the African Trade,” John Kizell had survived the first of many trials to come.⁴

Slave ships represented both the physical and psychological extremes of human degradation. Captains and crews shared a living—and dying—hell with their captives. In percentage terms, crew mortality often exceeded that of the enslaved cargo. A day seldom passed during the several weeks at sea when someone did not die. There was filth and feces. There was fever and dysentery. There was a stench that suffused every nook and cranny. And there was fear—among the crew, especially when Africa remained near, and among the humans stored below.

The boy and the others chained to one another knew what was happening. They understood that they were being separated from family, friends, and—equally important— from their ancestors. They understood that they would never again know their world. They probably had at least anecdotal awareness of where they were being taken and the alien experience in store.

Many may have shared the long-standing belief that they were to be consumed by the white men, which was not altogether illogical in the context of West African history. But it was their sense of loss—not of liberty per se but of their ties to kinship networks, to the land, and to their place in the African continuum of existence—that most frightened them.

An experienced slave ship captain knew this. He knew that, given the chance, many among his cargo would hurl themselves into the sea—to die and join their ancestors. He knew that many would be depressed or suicidal. He also knew that they had every reason—and the capability—to seize the ship and sail back toward the rising sun. It had happened often enough.

So it is no surprise that a woman aboard John Kizell's ship refused to eat, intending to die and return home. Nor was it surprising that the captain had her tied on deck, with Kizell and others brought up to witness her flogged—deliberately—to death. Better to let this one woman “go home” on his terms—terms that would dissuade others from starving themselves to death and depriving him and the vessel's owners of their profit.⁵

It would have meant nothing to the boy that the rice and indigo harvests had been bountiful in South Carolina the year before.⁶ If he was not helping his father in their own field, he might have been hunting birds with a slingshot or catching fish in a nearby stream. He might have been sitting with his age-mates beneath a majestic cotton silk tree, talking in hushed tones about their approaching initiation into Poro, into manhood.

In the evening, seated with the other children as the village gathered to be entertained, he might have listened raptly to an old man recite fables and fearsome stories about animals behaving like humans and devils living in the bush. Of such nights, a Sherbro remembered of his youth, “we trembled in the darkness and avoided the loneliest places” for days to come.⁷

The rice and indigo harvests in a place called South Carolina would have been far beyond their ken or caring. They knew about slaves, however. Many of the people in the village were bound to others, who “owned” them and their families, within a traditional framework of mutual obligations. They knew as well about people—even some who lived among them—who were sold to the white men, in their large ships draped with billowing cloth.

They were aware that the white men wanted slaves of their own and were willing to trade rum, muskets, gunpowder, tobacco, and other goods to which their people had become accustomed. But they would not have known about the large crops of rice and indigo that the white men's slaves had grown in the South Carolina lowcountry in 1772. Nor would they have known that the people to whom these slaves were bound planned to clear and drain swaths of new land to grow even more rice and indigo; and that to do so they would need to send more ships to buy more of their people than ever before in a single year.

The importation of slaves into South Carolina over the preceding decade had been extremely volatile—but not entirely unpredictable. Henry Laurens was prescient in 1773. As many as 9,000 Africans may have arrived in Charleston that year—nearly twice the 4,800 in 1772. A mere 2,500 had been imported in 1764, but nearly three times as many in the following year as planters expanded in the lowcountry. Then no slaves were brought in during four of the next five years. In 1766-68 high customs duties virtually shut down the trade in slaves, as did South Carolina's agreement in 1769 to ban importation of British goods.⁸

The legislature, subscribing to the nonimportation strategy taking hold among the colonies, promised that South Carolinians would adopt the “utmost economy in our persons, houses, and furniture, particularly that we will give no mourning, or gloves or scarves at funerals.” They would also forgo wine and one other form of consumption: fresh slaves.⁹

Abstinence lasted for a year. While some British manufactures slipped through the colonies' boycott, England in 1770 repealed some of the despised imposts on paper, glass, and painter's pigments. Tacitly conceding Americans' right to refuse to pay taxes without representation, Parliament stubbornly left one duty standing: on tea.¹⁰

The economy immediately bloomed in Charleston and South Carolina, at least for the merchants and planters. But it was a false prosperity. In her classic analysis of Charleston's business climate in the years leading to the Revolution, Leila Sellers recalls what seemed a bounteous era. “From the spring of 1771 until the fall of 1774,” she writes, “was a time of great business activity. Great quantities of East India tea were being imported despite the non-importation agreement, great numbers of slaves were being brought in and sold at fancy prices, and bills of exchange were selling at a premium, a sure sign that the planter was in debt to the merchant.”¹¹

The dozen or more recently arrived cargoes of slaves prompted mixed reactions in Charleston in mid-1773. Artisans and mechanics already regarded the city's abundant pool of skilled slaves as direct competition. Nor were they benefiting from the reopening of trade with England. Peter Timothy, the publisher of the South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, championed the artisan class. Though a slave owner himself, he was dubious that importing large numbers of slaves was in everyone's best interest.¹²

“Nothing,” the Gazette warned on June 7, “could have happened more injurious to the British merchants concerned in the Slave Trade, than the recent Stop put to granting of Lands, at the same Time that the First Cutting of Indico is lost: But for these Events, the Cargoes of Negroes now here…would have been sold at considerably higher Prices than they are now likely to be.”¹³

Merchants and planters—dependent respectively on the trade in slaves and on slave labor—were vulnerable to the crosscurrents of revolutionary ferment and a mercantile system controlled by the mother country. The slave trade, which operated like any other business—on credit—was becoming a financial burden to its principals as the numbers increased dramatically. By late 1773 hard money and bills of exchange had become “very scarce” in Charleston, according to one merchant. “All the Dollars and Heavy Gold has been sent to Great Britain for Remittance.”¹⁴ Some of it had paid for a thirteen-year-old boy accused of witchcraft.

Cautious businessman and plantation owner that he was, Laurens had looked beyond planters' unbridled enthusiasm for more land and thus for more slaves. He may not have been alone. While he remained in London, his fellow planters and merchants in the provincial congress never mentioned the slave trade when debating a renewed nonimportation association to take effect on December 1, 1774. By now many may have doubted its benefits.¹⁵ They would import less than half the slaves in 1774 that they had the previous year. They would boycott the trade altogether in 1775. None could know that it would be eight years before another slave ship came up from Rebellion Road.

Charleston and its lowcountry hinterland were the wealthiest—and yet the most dangerous—places in colonial North America. Wealth was measured in land, rice, indigo, and slaves. Danger was measured in violence and disease. Laurens not only feared that the “vast importation of Negroes” would lead to greater indebtedness; he believed it would “greatly expose the capital to Infectious Distempers, Smallpox or Fevers,” which in turn would further degrade the sale price of new slaves.¹⁶

Although slave ships were required to quarantine their human cargoes for ten days, the pesthouse on Sullivan's Island could not effectively handle the thousands of Africans arriving during the peak months. Judging from the arrival and auction dates in newspaper advertisements for large slave shipments in mid-1773, the quarantine process often was cut short.

Like many such announcements, the notice in the May 25 Gazette assured the public that the “NEGROES” aboard the Blossom were “prime and healthy” and “directly from…Africa.” Slave merchants and planters could only be certain that the new arrivals were indeed straight from Africa—and thus not “contaminated” by exposure to West Indies slavery. They could not be sure that they were “prime and healthy.” What counted was that they were survivors.¹⁷

Survival preoccupied whites. “It was the violence of eighteenth-century life that kept Charleston society fluid,” writes historian George C. Rogers Jr. “Disease, fire, hurricanes, and wars kept the people from settling down to a long-term routine. Life was short.” Malaria was omnipresent; yellow fever was a periodic reaper; but smallpox was the most dreaded.¹⁸

Whites internalized what many perceived every day as the greatest threat: a black population that outnumbered them and that—in spite of its enslavement—exerted considerable control over white people's lives and over the economy of the town. When Peter A. Coclanis, in his history of the lowcountry economy, refers to the “spirit and soul” of Charleston on the eve of the Revolution, he is alluding to its embodiment of the area's burgeoning wealth and the white society that fed upon it.¹⁹ Charleston's spirit and soul, however, reflected the vibrancy of its African and African American majority as much as—if not more than—the planter-merchant aristocracy or the white artisans and mechanics. When John Kizell was led in chains onto a Cooper River wharf, he joined the second largest urban black community in the world. Only London's was greater.

Not far to the west of that wharf—somewhere on King Street—the widow of a German innkeeper, Conrad Kysell, was still sorting out his affairs. As his executrix Esther Kysell had already auctioned Lucca and Nancy, their two “negro wenches,” as Kysell described them in his will.²⁰ He had bequeathed to his brother-in-law, George Fulker, most of his other possessions—his land, horses, a watch, and silver buckles, as well as his “artillery regimentals and accoutrements.” The latter bespoke a former life in the Palatine.

Esther had the tavern to run and money—perhaps from the sale of Lucca and Nancy—to invest in land. While the Blossom's “New Negroes” were being dispersed, Esther was about to purchase two and a half acres in Charleston, originally part of the “general plan of George Anson, Esquire.”²¹ Lucca and Nancy each would have been worth the land's price of three hundred pounds.

“New Negroes” in South Carolina would soon detect the tension brewing among whites. The genie of rebellion was out of the bottle. One of the first things a young arrival from Africa learned was that the white people were divided over their loyalty to a king who ruled from a great distance. He would also hear rumors that Africans who lived under that king, in his own country, had recently been restored their freedom. In Africa a good king protected his people—even his slaves. The “New Negroes” from the Blossom would begin to form their own opinions about the white people's king and listen closely to what was said about him and his policies.

Blacks throughout the American colonies, and especially in Charleston, were at least vaguely aware that a judge in England had recently “freed” the slaves there. Slavery remained legal, but the decision effectively meant that one could not be a slave in England. If the nuances of Chief Justice Lord Mansfield's decision were lost among most in America, slave and free, there was a general apprehension that something important had occurred and that it threatened the basis of slavery. Laurens's servant—”my foolish Rascally Robert”—had followed the Somerset case, as it was known, and fraternized with London's black community. He came and went more or less as he pleased and had begun acting as thou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology
• 1 | Chained Together
• 2 | The Uprooting
• 3 | The Overturning
• 4 | Exodus
• 5 | Ransomed Sinners
• 6 | Abolition and Illusion
• 7 | “The Land of Black Men”
• 8 | “What a Creature Man Is!”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author