LITMIR.BIZ

       Introduction

       A Particular Ancestral Place

      IN 1796 A WOMAN, reported to be a slave, managed to bring a court case regarding her captivity in Maryland. In the case, Negro Mary v. The Vestry of William and Mary’s Parish of October 1, 1796, the petitioner claimed to be the daughter of a woman who had been captured in Madagascar a generation before, enslaved in North America on her arrival. It is astounding, from a contemporary point of view, that a woman slave in 1796 would be so well informed regarding British law. Nevertheless, on the basis of the former status of her mother, the enslaved woman in Maryland argued that she should be set free. Madagascar, she said, “was not a place from which slaves [usually] were brought.” Her point of view was that Madagascar, and thus Malagasy people, should not be considered as legally imported labor, as in the normal course of the slave trade. It was true that under the New East India Act of 1721, American colonists could no longer legally obtain East India goods unless through Britain, or bring slaves from East India region ports.¹ Unfortunately for Mary, the judge ruled that she could be set free only if she could provide documentation of the original status of her mother. Having thus responded, the judge cleverly avoided the question of whether “out-of-bounds” slavery in Madagascar was a sufficient charge for changing slave status. He knew it would have been exceedingly uncommon for a person such as the enslaved plaintiff to produce papers documenting her claim.² Furthermore, the court argued that since it was known that “petty provinces” in Madagascar made war on each other to produce slaves for the European trade, they should normally fall under the same classification as slaves from the African continent.³

      The case described above gives evidence of the sense of difference that may have been common among Malagasy slaves brought to the English colonies of North America and their compatriots who arrived after independence in the years before the Civil War. The fact that an enslaved woman in Maryland somehow had the wherewithal to take her petition for freedom to the court is remarkable; the fact that she called on her identity as a descendant of a Malagasy goes against most popular assumptions that a first-generation slave in the North American colonies would not identify by a parent’s pre-capture ethnicity, or “tribal” affiliation. Consequently, exploration of the conditions that would produce such an event can potentially tell us more about the process of creolization that took place on American plantations and more specifically, the experience of descendants of Malagasy slaves in that process.

      In the following pages I have taken on the challenge of exploring the conditions that might have created or allowed a “Negro Mary,” or any self-identified Malagasy descendant who had slave or free progenitors in what has become the United States of America, to invoke Madagascar as a signifier of difference. This book was therefore written with the intention of contributing to the study of African diaspora communities in the Americas as well as the study of Malagasy diasporas. It presents an example of how Malagasy captives got caught up in the nexus of two major slaving networks of the modern era: the Indian Ocean and transatlantic slave trades. The Indian Ocean island of Madagascar stood at the intersection of these two systems, and the island furnished slaves at various times to the Indian Ocean world as well as to the Americas.

      The dispersal of people from Madagascar throughout the Indian Ocean is well known, but little scholarly attention has been directed toward the trade of captives from Madagascar to the Americas.⁴ Thousands of slaves from Madagascar were exported to American ports, from Argentina to Canada, and the trade lasted from the seventeenth into the nineteenth century.⁵ One of the destinations of Malagasy captives during the eighteenth century was the Commonwealth of Virginia. Later, during the nineteenth century, Malagasy contract laborers, merchants, sailors, and slaves traveled to American ports and eventually became part of black communities.

      Though my intent is to open a door on one aspect of the New World slave experience that helps us better understand local histories of African Americans, these stories are also part of a larger history of the relationship of North America to the Indian Ocean. This relationship started during the era of pirates, in the seventeenth century, and peaked much later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, with Yankee traders and the pull of the spice trade, British maritime expansion and control of the “Indies,” and the establishment of American diplomatic and commercial representation at Majunga (Mahajanga), in northwestern Madagascar, in the 1820s. Official consulates later served the United States in Antananarivo, in central Madagascar, in the late nineteenth century.

      The narratives are discussed in the context of the era of the transatlantic slave trade and shortly thereafter, focusing on the period between 1719 (when large numbers of Malagasy slaves were imported into the Commonwealth of Virginia) and 1850 (when there were still incidents of foreign slave smuggling into mainland America, and indentured servants arriving to the Americas from the Indian Ocean region).⁶ After 1850 (and until the mid-twentieth century), most Malagasy people who arrived in the United States or Europe were either Christian refugees traveling under the auspices of church missionary societies or sailors on steamships, and that history is beyond the scope of the present volume. This volume begins with the rash of entrepreneurial forays to the western Indian Ocean carried out by American colonists and ends in the period when Britain was a major maritime power and the War of 1812 was past.

      For this story of Malagasy slaves and early immigrants to the Americas, I draw on two kinds of sources: historical documentation and contemporary narratives of remembrance of ancestors from Madagascar. In order to take full advantage of these two compelling but disparate ways of looking at history, the book has a rather unusual approach to treating

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