Photographer: Timothy O'Sullivan, 1862.

Photograph of Five Generations of Slaves on the J.J. Smith Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina.

African-American History Forum

Negro Spirituals in America

The chronicle of Negro Spirituals begins deep in the bowels of slave ships where Africans from a multitude of nations, ethnicities and religions were chained together on the perilous Middle Passage from West Africa to the Americas. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, approximately 12 to 20 million Africans shared this plight and from their collective experience, fashioned new cultures in the Caribbean, South America, the United States and other destinations of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.*

In the American colonies, the first Africans landed in Virginia in 1619 as a cargo of slaves stolen by a Dutch trader from a Spanish merchant ship in the Caribbean. Initially, their status was unclear. Some of the Africans were classified as slaves for life while a few served as indentured servants and were able to gain their freedom after a time. Anthony Johnson, for example, arrived in Virginia in 1621 as a slave aboard the English vessel James.** By the 1630s, Anthony Johnson and his wife Mary had gained their freedom and had acquired a 250-acre plantation in Northampton County on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. By the end of the seventeenth century however, the status of Blacks in the American colonies had been set -- Blacks were presumed to be slaves for life.

Despite the wrenching degradation of perpetual bondage, African-Americans forged their own cultures and identities. They preserved elements of their African heritage and adopted some components of the Europeans' Christianity, thereby creating something neither African nor European, but new -- African-American. Their praise and worship songs -- Negro Spirituals -- document the lived experiences of Blacks in bondage. Songs such as "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and "Oh Freedom" attest to the alienation associated with enslavement and faith in a forthcoming liberation. And Spirituals such as "This Little Light of Mine" and "There Is A Balm in Gilead" still resonate today in American Churches.

*Due to lack of definitive documentation, historians disagree on the number of African captives involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Phillip D. Curtin, author of The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), suggests approximately 6 million. Recent scholars, however, place the figure between 12 and 20 million and point out that Curtin's figure does not include kidnapped Africans who died on the trek to the coast, those who perished during the Middle Passage or undocumented enslaved Africans. See, for example, Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1997).
**Historians T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes use 17th-century Virginia records to reconstruct the lives of Anthony and Mary Johnson and their progeny in Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shores, 1640-1676 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).