Who was the subject of an advertisement in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“TO BE SOLD at YAMMACRAW, A PARCEL OF NEW NEGROES.”
Several advertisements in the August 10, 1768, edition of the Georgia Gazette offered slaves for sale. Some concerned individual slaves (“A VERY HANDY YOUNG COUNTRY BORN WENCH”) or small groups of slaves (“Four Prime Negroes” and “ONE NEGROE WENCH, and TWO CHILDREN”) to be sold by their owners, but colonists who made their livelihood from trading in human property placed other advertisements for larger quantities of enslaved men, women, and children. The latter included a brief notice inserted by John Graham and Company announcing the sale of “A PARCEL OF NEW NEGROES” slated for sale at Yamacraw Bluff, the site where James Oglethorpe landed when he founded the Georgia colony in 1733. The place named for and formerly inhabited by the Yamacraw, a group of Creek Indians, became the point of arrival in North America for Africans involuntarily transported across the Atlantic.
Yet Georgia was not the first colony where these captives from Africa entered port on the western side of the Atlantic. Graham and Company’s advertisement indicated that these “NEW NEGROES” from Gambia were “Part of the Cargo of the Schooner Fortune.” Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database provides more information about the experiences of the human cargo aboard the Fortune. After acquiring 121 Africans in Gambia, James Baird and his crew set sail for Barbados. Only 109 of the captives survived the Middle Passage to disembark at some point after the Fortune arrived at an unspecified port in Barbados on June 25, 1768. The Fortune returned directly to Africa to trade for more slaves.
Some of the slaves who disembarked in Barbados then experienced what Gregory E. O’Malley has termed transshipment. Surviving the Middle Passage was not the end of their journey. Instead, lacking sufficient buyers at their original port of arrival in the Americas, they were loaded aboard other vessels and shipped between colonies to other markets for purchase. Graham and Company’s advertisement does not indicate how many of the 109 “NEW NEGROES” who disembarked in Barbados then made another journey to Georgia, nor does it indicate how many friends and relatives who survived the Middle Passage to the island colony only then found themselves separated from each other by slave traders who dispersed them to even more distant places in hopes of finding buyers.