Thread by @michaelharriot

I love this tweet.

Always remember the technical term for cowboys like Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill is: "white cowboys."

The first cowboys were Africans in South Carolina...

Until white South Carolinians panicked.

A thread:

https://twitter.com/africanarchives/status/1377993095137140739

First, you gotta remember that the first English colonies like Jamestown were basically a failure. It turns out, the rich aristocrats who came over weren't good at doing stuff.

"Stuff" includes farming, hunting, and even getting here.

The only reason they survived is welfare.

That's right. They basically depended on the indigenous natives for food for the first few years. It got so bad that the white people started eating their belts, their clothes & each other.

So who were the savages?

smithsonianmag.com/history/starvi…

So they came up with this idea called "headrights."

Basically, the rich people in the colonies paid the fare for poor whites to come over and work as indentured servants. For each person they brought over, the rich would get 50 acres.

That's how the "founding fathers" got down

I know, I know...There goes that lie about the American Dream, "hard work" and "rugged individualism."

Anyway... When 8 "Lord Proprietors" started the Carolina colony, they put headrights in the Fundamental Constitutions.

They also included a clause called "Article 110."

But no one wanted to come to SC. It was too dangerous, hot and disease ridden. Plus, there was literally nothing there.

So the Lord proprietors replanned a city and used headrights to recruit Brits who owned slave labor camps in Barbados.

It was a good deal.

Instead of using headrights for white indentured servants who would only serve a few years, the Brits brought over perpetually enslaved Africans who were accustomed to the climate.

In 1670, Charles Town (Charleston) became the first preplanned English settlement on the continent

And since they already owned enslaved people in Barbados, they claimed headrights based on their enslaved in Barbados, earning THOUSANDS of acres just because they owned human beings

Like this one family, the Draytons. They got 1872 acres on the Ashley River

If you're wondering, that's more than 2 Harlems.

But there was another problem. They couldn't grow tobacco like they did in Va. or citrus like in Barbados. Silkworms didn't work. And, because Doordash didn't service the area, they were hungry AF.

Just the white people, though.

They wondered why the Africans weren't starving. Then they realized what was going on:

The Africans were growing rice.

Now, growing rice is hard AF. It requires levees, dams, dikes, & a certain kind of soil.

Only 3 places in the world grew it on a large scale: Asia, Italy...

And the west coast of Africa.

They started raiding Africa's "rice coast" for humans.

The new cash crop not only fed SC, but the rest of the colonies because the Africans engineered the levees, dams, dikes & that gave the whites generational wealth ("Hard work..." HA!)

Wait... You think I'm poking fun of white people? I'd never do that. I said that for a reason.

See, because the work was so hard and the white people didn't know what they were doing, they basically left the Africans alone to themselves.

One Charleston rice plantation owner remarked that he “would as soon stand fifty feet from the best Kentucky rifleman and be shot at by the hour, as to spend my night on a plantation in summer."

But because the Africans were left alone, something started happening:

All those West African and Caribbean people, languages and cultures started to blend together into the people we now call "Geechie" or "Gullah"

Of course, because of headrights claimed from the stolen people, these plantations were HUGE AF.

And the livestock and cattle just roamed over hundreds of acres. They didn't even know how much livestock they had until they counted once a year.

The Drayton cattle land was LITERALLY 1,000 acres

Who was going to rustle up this livestock?

Again, the West coast of Africa had plains where Black people herded oxen and cattle all the time.

So they raided Africa for more humans. Then the black cattle hunters became commodities.

Just as the white plantation owners called Africans who planted the rice & cotton "field boys" or a women who cooked, "house girls," the men who hunted the cattle were...

You know it: "Cow boys."

They would roam the countryside & even carried guns. And no one bothered them.

Then, early in the morning of Sept. 9, 1739, about 20 Africans got together and hooked up with Jemmy.

Legend has it that Jemmy was a cow boy. We don't know this for sure. But we know that he was allowed to meet with enslaved Africans on other plantations without supervision.

We know that Jemmy could speak at least 4 languages: His native tongue, Portuguese, English & a little Spanish.

It only makes sense that Jemmy was a cow boy for a few reasons:

1. He interacted with other enslaved Africans who were allowed to roam free,

2. He probably had military training (which would have made him a natural fit for a cow boy)

3. Either he or someone he knew had spoken to some Spanish "vaqueros" or "cow boys"

The vaqueros told him about an all-black town Fort Mose in Spanish Fla. about 150 miles away

If Jemmy could get there, he could be free. But Jemmy didn't want to go...

He wanted to take ALL THE BLACK PEOPLE WITH HIM. And the only way he could do that was to kill all the white people.

That sounds like a crazy plan, right?

Well, actually...

Because of headrights, because of rice, because of cow boys, and because of the lazy whites, there was something else different about SC...

The Black people outnumbered the whites.

Of the roughly 45,000 people, only 15,000 were white.

Doesn't seem so crazy now, does it?

So, before daybreak, Jemmy and his boys went to Hutchenson's store, killed the 2 shopkeepers, cut off their heads and stole all the guns and ammo.

Then, they just went from house to house killing the white people & setting the houses on fire.

Let's be clear, they weren't mad.

They were just trying to get to Fort Mose and it was part of their strategy. If they killed ALL the white people, the word of the rebellion wouldn't spread.

They let one white man live because he was said to be "a good man who was nice to his slaves," a few hid

And there was one guy who was on a horse, so they couldn't catch him.

As they marched, their ranks grew. People say they were drunk because they were partying, chanting, playing drums and dancing.

But that's because they didn't know, part of the West African military tradition

Actually includes dancing as a form of communication and strategy.

By late afternoon, they decided to stop in an open field and rest. They figured more Africans would join them when they found out. Plus, the white people were dead.

But remember the white dude on the horse?

It turns out it was William Bull, who was on his way to work.

William Bull just happened to be the Lt. Governor of the SC colony.

He rustled up a miltia and they attacked Jemmy's boys.

Jemmy nem killed a lot of them, some of the enslaved actually escaped.

One of the original cresw wasn't found until 3 years later.

But for months, they white folks were scared AF. They sent their wives and daughters out of the state. They stopped trafficking humans from certain parts of Africa and they passed the Negro Act of 1740

Whats that?

Well basically, it's the law that almost all SOuthern slave laws were based on. It forbade teaching slaves to write. It only allowed them to wear certain colors. It outlawed drumming, chanting and even growing their own food.

It also set up a formal slave patrol.

But it also forbade more than 7 Black man from being together without a white man accompanying them and for any Black person to be roaming around for any reason. Charleston later set up a tag system that was the most heavily regulated part of the law. Without a "tag,"...

A slave couldnt be just wandering the countryside or even working for another white man.

The cow boys of SC were essentially eliminated. They would return in western expansion and one out of every 4 of THOSE "cowboys" were Black, including Bass Reeves the original lone ranger

But the first ones were from SC.

40% of every enslaved African EVER imported to America came through SC. By the time of the revolution, SC had the highest per capita income in the colonies. 13 generations later, the Draytons are still one of the richest families in SC

They still own that property: The levees and dams engineered and built by the enslaved people STILL WORK and still protects the property

azaleas.org/wp-content/upl…

So when you eat SC chicken bog, or rice perloo, when you see the beautiful plantation homes, when you hear that weird Lowcountry accent (we call it "Geechie") just remember, that's not SC culture.

Black people built South Carolina.

FROM SCRATCH.