Source: African Founders: How enslaved people expanded American ideals - David Fischer
Summary
Most slaves in New England were Coromantee, from Akan speaking Fante and Asante tribes. They had a strong military tradition which they carried into the New World. They were very militant & led most of the great slave revolts or rebellions. Many fought in the Revolutionary War.
They were far from docile in the twenty-first-century meaning of being easily controlled. Europeans on the coast often observed that Akan-speaking people shared a strong warrior ethic. Males in Fanteland were organized into military companies called asafo, and trained for war with elaborate regalia, rituals, dances, and huge cloth flags that were symbols of their culture and history. A very strong warrior tradition existed also among Asante to the north. The scale and violence of warfare increased in the eighteenth century, when a great king, Osei Tutu, founded the Asante empire. Here as elsewhere in other African regions, periods of dynastic warfare increased the flow of captives to slave markets. 66 These Fante and Asante military traditions were brought to the New World. On West Indian islands where slaves were severely abused, Coromantees earned a reputation as among the most militant and violent of Africans. They led the great Jamaica slave revolt in 1690, founded major Jamaican communities of maroons or escaped slaves by 1739, and organized the Antigua independence movement of 1736. They were at the center of Tacky’s War in Jamaica, the Berbice slave war in Guyana in 1763, and Demerara’s great slave rebellion of 1823. These events were among the largest and most successful slave risings in the history of the British West Indies.
Coromantee leaders were highly respected for their honor, courage, and endurance, especially by British soldiers who fought them in repeated “Ashantee wars.” In the Leeward Islands, Governor Christopher Codrington wrote of Coromantees, “There was never a rascal or coward of that Nation. Not a man of them but will stand to be cut to pieces without a sigh or a groan. 967
Some West Indian planters felt differently. A leading slave owner, Edward Long of Jamaica, disliked and feared Coromantee slaves. He introduced a special bill to prohibit their import.68 /…
At least three different onomastic data sets survive for African naming patterns in New England. Several lists supply the names of Africans who were elected “Negro governors” in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, from 1740 to 1845. Most had British, biblical, or classical names. Of thirty identifiable Negro governors in New England, ten had African names, of which seven were Akan, and came from Fante and Asante cultures. 71
Another onomastic source in New England are military muster rolls. They include hundreds of African Americans in New England who took up arms against British forces in 1775. Here again, the names of most slaves were British, biblical, or classical. But in one set of lists, twenty militiamen “of color” on Massachusetts muster rolls had African names, of which twelve (60 percent) were Akan names, both Fante and Asante. The other names were scattered through African regions. Another sixteen militiamen were American Indians, mostly Algonkian and Iroquoian.72
The largest source of African names in New England is advertisements for runaway slaves, which yielded similar results. Once again most African names were of Akan origin.
These onomastic tests of African ethnic origin yielded very small samples, but all three found that a majority of 60 to 70 percent of African names in eighteenth-century New England came from Akanspeaking Fante and Asante cultures. These results are consistent with evidence of geographic ports of departure in shipping records, both in data gathered by Elizabeth Donnan, and also in the TransAtlantic Slave Database. They also match the testimony of traders, owners, and colonial officials.74