The Shackles in the Shadows of History

Uncanny connections crop up when you least expect them, as when black activist Al Sharpton discovered that one of his ancestors had been owned by an ancestor of a former segregationist, the late South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond.

And consider the case of Tim Hashaw, a white Houston writer who discovered that his ancestry dates back to those first Africans sold at Jamestown.

"The reason I am white with a small part of African is because of that first generation," says Hashaw, author of "The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown." His research revealed that his black ancestors slipped into freedom in those early decades after Jamestown's settlement, before the iron fist of slavery clamped shut on the possibility of liberty. They bought land and intermarried with whites, as did their descendants.

Sometimes, the slaves themselves reach across the centuries to remind us. In lower Manhattan, an 18th-century African burial ground with the remains of nearly 20,000 people was discovered during a construction project. It is now a national monument. There's a similar, though smaller, burial ground over in Alexandria, sitting under a gas station.

Remembering is not static. It changes with time and discovery, creating new historic theories.

Take, for instance, Denmark Vesey, the former slave who was executed and is remembered as a hero for planning a huge slave insurrection in 1822 to kill whites and set Charleston, S.C., afire. Johns Hopkins University historian Michael Johnson says his research indicates that Vesey led no such plot; rather, the Charleston conspiracy was fabricated by a politician hoping to gain advantage in the fears of his fellow whites.

It's a disturbing twist for Henry Darby, a Charleston County Council member who's been pushing for the erection of a Vesey memorial. Along with some scholars, Darby rejects the new Vesey theory and is holding fast to his belief in Vesey's heroism.

"The thing I love about Vesey is he was a free black man and he did not have to do what he did," says Darby. "But he was saying there was a larger calling. All African Americans needed to be free."

It seems so long ago. And yet, U.S. shores knew slavery far longer than they've known freedom.

American slavery dates at least to 1565 in Florida, when Spanish settlers held African slaves at St. Augustine, the nation's oldest city. But it was the English, beginning at Jamestown, who spread slavery so intensely, as the British colonies' crops of tobacco, rice and cotton demanded more and more laborers. And in the Caribbean and South America, demand for slaves was far greater. A torrent of slaves were shipped from Africa, roughly 15 million, destined for points from Brazil to New York. Historians estimate that millions died in the crossing.

President Thomas Jefferson signed legislation effective in 1808 to outlaw the import of slaves. But the domestic trade in slaves raged on, with slaves sold from one region to another, their broken families scattered hither and yon.

By the time of the Civil War, there were some 4 million slaves in the United States, and their impact on the nation's economy was deep, says David Brion Davis, a Yale historian and author of "Inhuman Bondage."