5. Colonial America in the Eighteenth Century, 1701–1770

THE BROTHERS AMBOE ROBIN JOHN AND LITTLE EPHRAIM ROBIN JOHN lived in Old Calabar on the Bight of Biafra in West Africa. The Robin Johns were part of a slave-trading dynasty headed by their kinsman Grandy King George, one of the most powerful leaders of the Efik people. Grandy King George owned hundreds of slaves whom he employed to capture still more slaves in the African interior. He sold these captives to captains of European slave ships for transport to the sugar, tobacco, and rice fields in the New World.

British slave ship captains and Grandy King George’s African rivals conspired in 1767 to destroy the king’s monopoly. In a bloody battle, Little Ephraim and Ancona Robin John were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic to the West Indies.

Unlike most slaves, the Robin Johns spoke and wrote English, a skill they had learned as slave traders in Old Calabar. The Robin Johns escaped from the man who bought them in the West Indies and boarded a ship “determined to get home,” Little Ephraim wrote. But the ship captain took them to Virginia instead and sold them as slaves. Their new master “would tie me up & whip me many times for nothing at all,” Ancona testified, adding that he “was exceedingly badly man ever I saw.” After their master died in 1772, the Robin Johns heard that a slave ship from Old Calabar had recently arrived in Virginia, and the captain promised to take them back to Africa if they would run away. They did, but the captain took the Robin Johns to Bristol, England, and sought to sell them as slaves yet again.

While imprisoned in Bristol harbor, the Robin Johns smuggled letters to a Bristol slave trader they had known in Old Calabar. With his help, the Robin Johns appealed to the chief justice of England for their freedom on the grounds that they were unjustly enslaved because they “were free people . . . [who] had not done anything to forfeit our liberty.” After complex negotiations, they won their freedom.

As free Africans in Bristol, the Robin Johns converted to Christianity, but they longed to return to Africa. In 1774, they left Bristol as free men on a slave ship bound for Old Calabar, where they resumed their careers as slave traders.

The Robin Johns’ quest to escape enslavement and redeem their freedom was shared but not realized by millions of Africans who were victims of slave traders such as Grandy King George and numberless merchants, ship captains, and colonists. In contrast, tens of thousands of Europeans voluntarily crossed the Atlantic to seek opportunities in North America—often by agreeing to several years of contractual servitude. Both groups illustrate the undertow of violence and deceit beneath the surface of the eighteenth-century Atlantic commerce linking Britain, Africa, the West Indies, and British North America. Many people, like the Robin Johns, turned to the consolations of religious faith as a source of meaning and hope in an often cruel and unforgiving society.

The flood of free and unfree migrants crossing the Atlantic contributed to unprecedented population growth in eighteenth-century British North America. In contrast, Spanish and French colonies in North America remained thinly populated outposts of European empires interested principally in maintaining a toehold in the vast continent. While the New England, middle, and southern colonies retained regional distinctions, commercial, cultural, and political trends built unifying experiences and assumptions among British North American colonists.