The Marks of an Old Offender: Forced Transatlantic Communities and African Resistance in Low Country Georgia

On July 27, 1768, the Georgia Gazette posted an advertisement from John Mullryne for two runaway enslaved Africans, Carolina and John.  Both men had run away from the Thunderbolt province in Savannah.  Carolina, a newly imported African from the “Guiney Country” had run away several times before and “bore the mark of an old offender.”  His co-conspirator, John, a mulatto, who spoke “bad French” may have been a forced labor immigrant who came to Savannah through the inter-Atlantic trade with the French Caribbean.   Both John and Carolina were very keen men whom Mullryne believed could “pretend to be free.”    Georgia’s colonial slave codes determined the extent to which free blacks and mulattoes could pretend to be free.  The colony’s 1765 slave code granted several citizenship privileges to immigrating free mulattoes and provided free blacks a measure of independence.  The development of statutory restrictions on the free black and mulatto population evolved slowly in the years following the legalization of slavery in Georgia in 1750.  However, the colony lacked the organization for physically monitoring the increasing number of African slaves.  Moreover, Africans and mulattoes who ran away successfully transformed the inland areas of Savannah into havens for fugitive slaves.  The Gazette’s description of these two runaway captive Africans provides important cultural and ideological insights into African origins and ethnicity, resistance, and freedom in low country Georgia. Within transatlantic communities, cultural resistance to enslavement became an integral part of the landscape. By examining materials as divergent as slave ship manifests, slave narratives, plantation records, and journals a composite picture of the enslavement, forced migration, and cultural resistance of enslaved Africans emerges, which illuminate the extent of  the transference of African culture and African knowledge systems in the low country.