

SC Slaves | SC Freedmen | SC Soldiers, Sailors | Related SC Resources This guide will help you learn more about slavery in South Carolina, and it also explores the lives of freedmen and black sailors and soldiers prior to the Civil War. When it came to buying and selling human beings, our state stood at the forefront, and whether we are white our black, our collective history is inextricably bound to the lives of the families who were shipped and split apart right here in our own markets.Īlthough some men and women did achieve freedom prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, the vast majority remained enslaved. (An additional 2 million African-American slaves died en route.)Ī giant proportion of these slaves landed in Charleston, making South Carolina especially integral to the slave trade. Over the next 350 years, a total of 10.7 million African-American slaves were shipped to our shores. Six decades before Roanoke Island (1587), eight decades before Jamestown (1607), and almost a century before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock (1620), Ayllon began his North American dream. In June 1526, Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, a wealthy Spanish official in the city of Santo Domingo, Hispaniola, founded a colony at or near the mouth of the Pee Dee River in eastern South Carolina. Nearly 100 years before Jamestown, African actors enabled American colonies to survive, and they were equally able to destroy European colonial ventures.

Those Africans launched a rebellion in November of that year and effectively destroyed the Spanish settlers' ability to sustain the settlement, which they abandoned a year later. In 1526, enslaved Africans were part of a Spanish expedition to establish an outpost on the North American coast in present-day South Carolina. A month later, he was dead, and two months later, the African slaves he held captive revolted, effectively ending the settlement for the Spaniards. Landing along the shores of the Pee Dee River, he established a nascent village, San Miguel de Gualdape. In September of that year, Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, a wealthy Spaniard come slave trader, arrived for the second time to the shores of what would become, more than two centuries later, South Carolina. However, American abduction of men and women from Africa actually dates to November 1526. Because of this, 2019 is remembered as the 400th anniversary of slavery in the United States. and odd Negroes" were captured - twice - and carried to the coast of Virginia. South Carolina SC Black History SC SlaveryĪmerica's First African Slaves Came to South Carolina
