Lil’ Anthonys
American Moses
The Stuart family's fall from British royalty was the Morning Star of the New World, the Commonwealth and then the colonies' "democratic" upheaval against the Hanovers was seen as the beginning of a new age. England's family of fallen angels needed alternative sources of income besides taxation, and the Gold Coast seemed like the perfect place to start. Not only did Western Africa seem to have endless amounts of precious metals, stones, and capable slaves, the dark-skinned "pagans" provided a class beneath the white peasant class of England, to relieve class tension that threatened to doom the English kingdom to the fate of Bourbons. In addition to their battle for the right to the English throne, the Stuarts established the Guinea and the Royal Africa Company to reinvigorate the absolute rule of monarchy. But try as they might to erase it, the many spiritual identities that fell under the label of blackness created something new and powerful.
When the Founders (Adams, Franklin, Jefferson) were creating the marketing material for the Early United States, the Seal (logo, branding) was of symbolic importance. Moses is such a central figure in American self-mythology that Benjamin Franklin suggested putting Moses on the national seal. The founding fathers (Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin) had considered "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God" as the fledgling nation's motto, but probably reconsidered it because of the Southern tyrants central to the colony's economic independence.
But in declaring the room of men's independence from the crown, the founders may have silently acknowledged their growing dependence on thousands of black men, women, and children enslaved to ensure the colony's economic success.
More than a hundred years before Bostonians were protesting the King's new tax on tea, colonialists in the Caribbean and slave-owning states in America were protesting in courts for more rights to own slaves. As early as the 1670s the people we consider America’s founders considered themselves the true fulfillment of Moses and saw the King of England as a pharaoh. Or did they? In his vision for the seal and Moses’ place in it, Benjamin Franklin was extremely specific.
“Moses in the Dress of a High Priest standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head & a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by the Command of the Deity Motto, Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”
The slogan “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God” is borrowed from Benjamin Franklin’s poem written under a pseudonym in 1772 and published in 1775. The poem specifies that the tyrant in question is Charles I. This is extremely important because the implication seems to be that the current King is not the true tyrant in question. Thomas Jefferson, aware of the poem, also borrowed the motto and the image of Moses for one side of his seal. But Thomas Jefferson’s seal was unique in that he proposed it be dual-sided, with one side as the Moses depiction and Franklin's motto.
So why would Benjamin Franklin make such a statement about tyrants and call out Charles I, who had been dead for nearly years, rather than the sitting king? Was this to avoid the wrath of a direct call-out? Or was it a statement meant to be taken broadly about the English crown in contrast to the Puritan-run Commonwealth?
Perhaps because it was because the Stuarts started England's participation in the Atlantic Slave trade.
The Royal Africa Company was a Stuart creation and had a monopoly on the legal slave trade for a hundred years.
During those years, the Stuarts operated a kingdom outside of England. A privatized kingdom in Senegambia, formerly the land of Mansa Musa, and used chattel slavery to create a class of citizens below the peasant class.
The imagined cultural chasm between enslaved black African people was a way for the Stuarts to propagandize the God-appointedness of the English crown. For the Stuarts, their God had made it possible for England's success in subduing Western Africa. The racialized labor force allowed white citizens in England to feel they were part of the increasingly unpopular Royal family. The Stuarts couldn't have anticipated citizens owning hundreds of black people and the land they had been granted by the English crown co-opting the struggle of the enslaved to seek independence from England. Or maybe they did.
The lives of five generations of Carroll men in Maryland, a colony named after Charles Stuart I's wife, Henrietta Maria, acting as proxies for the Stuarts in the United States, built their own empire of slaves in the United States in a place where the interests of the Jesuit Society, the Stuarts, and the United States aligned– Maryland. Not only was slaveholding profitable but black Africans ’ color also coded the lower class and gave the Irish Catholics a pass into the ruling class.
Weirdly, Franklin and Jefferson seem to acknowledge this relationship and possibly the presence of enslaved men named Moses on the Carroll plantations. Jefferson aims to make his seal double-sided, as Jefferson would do, specifically to address race, just in case somebody sees the irony of the slave owner speaking about tyranny in the negative, and using imagery of the Biblical liberator. The implication is that the Stuarts are truly responsible for slavery, not the Hanovers or their American subjects and that both George III and the Protestant slaveholders in the colonies were innocent bystanders, forced into chattel slavery by the invisible hand of capitalism and God’s divine racial preference (Calvinist Pre-determinism). In his deleted portion of the Declaration of Independence that vilified slavery, Thomas Jefferson also blames the King of England for slavery. Is this related?
Mansa Musa, Black King Moses (1312-1337)
What Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin don’t acknowledge in their attempt to whitewash Moses for their purposes is that the Biblibal Moses was African. Not the Greco-Roman-Anglo fiction depicted in Jefferson and Franklin’s American mythology.
Europeans, specifically the Portuguese, initiated the Atlantic slave trade out of jealousy for a black Malian king named Moses.
Before the Portuguese brought Catholicism to the Kongo, the African people with whom the Atlantic slave trade began, already knew of an incarnation of Moses. In the 14th-century, before a three-hundred-year global freeze, an Arabic king named Mansa Musa (‘Priest King Moses’ in Arabic) dominated Western Africa, the same region where European slavery began. As the globe began to freeze into a mini Ice Age, and the violent seas of the Atlantic began to calm, this African Moses, the wealthiest man in the history of the world, began to lose his grip on his empire.
Hardened by a hundred years of war between themselves and enabled by the relatively cool conditions, Western Europeans began to venture outside the Mediterranean, motivated by envy of what they had seen and heard about the great Malian prince and his endless supplies of Gold. What Europeans likely did not know was that Mansa Musa had a delicate arrangement with the gold mining tribes of his Malian empire. The African Muslim ruler did not attempt to convert the gold mining tribes to Islam, instead, he respected their religious practice. Since it was closely tied to their craft and the gold, Priest King Moses allowed them to maintain their independent religious practices. In addition to respecting local religious customs, Mansa Musa built universities, mosques and libraries that still exist today.
As early as the late 14th-century, the Portuguese began to venture Southwest into the Senegambia region of West Africa looking for slaves and gold left "unclaimed" at the fall of the Priest-King Moses. But over the next few centuries the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and eventually, the British, that followed, would become impatient with the formality of gold and slave extraction that the Western African people had created over centuries.
From the fall of Mansa Musa in the late 13th century to the middle of the 17th, the Dutch, French, Portuguese, and English plundered Western Africa. With this extractive colonialism, loosely justified by the missionary aspirations of Western European Christianity, came a new, uniquely African, anti-colonial, post-Islamic religious practice that would come to define North American religion both white and black.
Mansa Musa’s hajj
Mansa Musa’s wealth was legendary. Stories of his hajj, or mandatory Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, were told for hundreds of years after his death. “Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage to Mecca in the 1320s left many traces and by no means only in the Catalan Atlas of Abraham Cresques. Writing in the 17th-century, the Timbuktu Al-Sa’di described how Mansa Musa ‘set off in great pomp with a large party including sixty thousand soldiers and five hundred slaves, who ran in front of him as he rode. Each of the slaves bore in his hand a wand fashioned from five pounds of gold.” As Portugal began to venture below the Mediterranean, emboldened and desperate for wealth after a Hundred-Years War “The pilgrimage of Mansa Musa to Mecca, via Cairo, triggered a boom of gold production in the forests of the Gold Coast in which technologies pioneered by Akan peoples were crucial. An expanding gold trade in the late 14th century (evidenced in maps such as Cresque’s) led to the consolidation of important new states in West Africa in the 15th century, such as Kano in northern Nigeria and Mossi in Burkina Faso.” And try as they might, despite the land's reputation for bountiful gold, Arabic kings were unable to conquer Musa’s empire. The Europeans who came at the beginning of the 15th century would not be as humble as the black Arabic king. Even Musa himself had to come to terms with the gold mining regions' own religious hierarchy. During Musa’s time, gold miners of various regions and different political economies held enormous power in African society and were brought together by shared ritual practice. In this careful ritual arrangement, there was an economic understanding that kept the politics of Western Africa stable.
A Cold Wind
But a cold wind would blow through West Africa for the next 400 years and the countries, people and resources would be swept up in its gale. The temperature may have calmed the seas, but human trafficking, and the tsunami of violence and betrayal that accompanied it, flooded all the shores of the Atlantic.
The prophetic African responses to European Imperialism occurred from the outset. Portuguese incursions into Western Africa began in the 15th century. African religious leaders opposed to religious imperialism were targeted by profiting chiefs and failing Catholic missionaries seeking to bless the slave traders with divine approval. When first introduced and accepted by the Kongo people, Catholicism was reserved for the Kongo royal family and those close to the court. Over time, the Italian, Portuguese, and eventually, Capuchin missionaries, with Alfonso I support, became more successful, converting more and more of the population. Many rural people refused. And in the movement to conversion, something important happened: the Catholic monks strategically utilized Kongo spiritual practices to translate Christianity, which had the unintentional effect of sanctioning the melding of the native religions with Catholicism, allowing the Kongo people to create a Catholicism all their own. Though the Portuguese enjoyed the financial benefits of being the middlemen between the Roman Catholic Church and the increasingly Catholic Kongo people, unbeknownst to the Portuguese collaborators, the translation of Kongo spiritual terms into Catholicism created a new form of spirituality.
In Islam, a true believer and follower must learn Arabic to learn the Quran's true teachings. The Quran translated out of Arabic, alters the message of the book. In Christianity, however, especially Catholicism, the language of the text of the Bible is less important than accepting Jesus Christ as the one true son of God, and God himself by extension. Though the words and language did not matter as much as wealth extraction to the Portuguese, the words and language of the Kongo people are central to their religious practice. For instance, according to Young, “Catholic missionaries in Congo made a significant error when they translated church into kikongo as nzo a nkisi, or “house of the holy.” For in fact, nzo a nkisi was the common word used by the Kongolese to mean “grave.” The Roman Catholic Church was translated as nzo a nkisi a Roma, which meant for the Kongolese, the “Roman grave.” On one hand, the misunderstanding followed the logic that in pre-colonial Kongo religion, whiteness symbolized otherworldliness. On the other hand, the association between the Church and death would foreshadow the nation’s near future. The Church brought only momentary glory, but ultimately, centuries of death, erasure, and exploitation.
The Portuguese would be pushed South by the growing British presence as global temperatures continued to decrease. “While the Portuguese controlled the southern port at Luanda, British traders, who entered the fray in West-Central Africa relatively late, focused their attention northward at Loango, where between 1660 and 1793, an estimated one million slaves were sent to varied New World locations.”
At the beginning of the 16th century, the Kingdom of Kongo, whose rich mountainous jungle created natural borders, actually embraced Catholicism, an embrace that would play out like Jesus' embrace of Judas. The legend is that King Alfonso I defeated his pagan brother when he and his soldiers called on Saint James for intercession. As the legend goes, St. James answered their prayers by appearing in the clouds as a large white cross accompanied by a great number of armored horsemen. Alfonso I and his men were greatly outnumbered but won a decisive victory that they credited to the Saint. As a result, "Saint James Day became Kongo's national holiday, and the events of the battle were commemorated in Kongo's coat of arms, adopted in 1512, and were still seen in Dona Beatriz's day on official documents, seals, the throne and the royal regalia."
James Carroll, CCS’ nephew, was born around the same time as Dona Beatriz, but in Ireland and to an Irish man named Anthony, CCS’ brother, who died poor. In a dark twist of fate James Carroll, son of Anthony Carroll, would benefit greatly from the death of Kongo’s Saint Anthony Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita. The year CCS died was the year that Kongo importation into Northern America took off, a coincidence his nephew would not shy away from. The fractionalization of Kongo would steady the stream of bodies from Kongo and Angola which made James Carroll's position in the Jesuit Order of Maryland so profitable and powerful.
Perhaps knowledge of the importance of St. James in the region from which he extracted his slaves had emboldened James Carroll's dealing with African-descended people, as his dealing with Mima Queen might suggest. Or perhaps Mpanzu a Nzinga, King Alfonso's "pagan" rival brother, (who retreated with a superior army after seeing a vision of a white cross and St. James army in the sky) had seen the meteorological future in the skies as well. Whether a meteorological phenomenon or a white cross, the victory of Alfonso I changed Kongo forever. Temperatures would continue to drop and European imperialism would continue to spread.
Anthony Carroll may have died a poor religious zealot, but his son James Carroll died with enormous wealth. 150 years before James Carroll was born, the Kongo heir-in-contest was conquered by a vision of a white cross and the army of St. James the Moor-killer. From the moment of Mpanzu a Nzinga’s vision, the world was only going to get colder for three hundred more years and there would be whiter, more dangerous, men to come with their violence and their plunder.
The Kongo people’s embrace of Catholicism was a deal with the devil. Though it may have led to the initial victory that spawned an empire, the only miracle the Church performed was making the country’s vast natural resources disappear with accelerating greed.
The rivalry between Portuguese Catholic priest Bernard de Gallo (a St. James advocate), and the possessed Kongelese holy woman, Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, (St. Anthony) embodies the two opposing forces of this once fruitful collaboration. Kimpa Vita used her visitation from St. Anthony to gain political might and ardent followers, and though her reign of influence was relatively long, it did not end well for her or her Little Anthonys.
When it came to Africa, the British were late to the party. The Dutch, Portuguese, French, and Spanish had been in Western Africa for nearly two centuries before the Royal Africa Company leveraged England's growing naval might to make its presence felt in the region. Kimpa Vita's battle and spiritual warfare with the Portuguese was at its height as England began to creep into Guinea and Senegambia. This is the land of Mansa Musa. The people in King Moses’ former kingdom made up the majority of the enslaved people in the Chesapeake. (CITE)
But even then, the English preferred to acquire Kongo slaves second-hand by way of the Caribbean, Lowcountry (South Carolina, Georgia), and later in Alabama and Mississippi. The Little Anthonys became some of the first enslaved people to land in Brazil, the Caribbean, and South Carolina.
The thread that ties the Carrolls to the Little Anthonys is Catholicism and the RAC.
When the Europeans first entered the African slave trade, their use of African slave labor was largely aspirational. The Portuguese missions who ventured into the Senegambia delta sought to acquire the wealth and power wielded by Mansa Musa. The aspirations are made clear in the 1375 Catalan Atlas that mapped Northwest and West Africa where the Senegambia region was marked by an illustration of Musa on a golden throne, with a golden scepter and crown, holding a large golden ball 40 years after his death. The map's illustration colors are muted except for the African King which the illustrator took great pains to decorate with actual gold leaf.
Musa’s 13th century wealth is considered the largest amassed by any person, even today. And the legend of his outrageously-manned pilgrimage to Mecca would inspire lore that was still vivid with detail hundreds of years after Musa’s death. The Portuguese sought the wealth of this Priest King Moses. As such, long before Africans traveled in chains to the Americas, they had fully formed notions of Moses as a name imbued with importance, prominence, and transcendent power.
White Failed Moses
Before they would become the quintessential American slaveholder and exploit thousands of black people in Maryland, the Carrolls were undermining Irish resistance to the crown of England. It wouldn’t be until CCS landed on Maryland shores, 100 years later, that men named Charles Carroll would benefit from generations of betraying the Irish cause, on behalf of the crown.
Despite Carroll family-scholar Ronald Hoffman’s creative weaving,Sir Charles Carroll, the Gaelic chief, had little to do with the success of the Carroll family in the United States, besides similar allegiance to a specific branch of the English royal family.
The thousands of black slaves they owned are more relevant to the success than their lack of direct familial ties to Sir Charles Carroll in Ireland, despite Hoffman’s musings.
Anthony Carroll would prove that.
The Carrolls also owed no small part of their success in the States to the persistence of George Calvert, 1st Lord Baltimore, our story’s white failed Moses.
Maryland was founded by George Calvert, though he would never step foot on its soil. Calvert was a Catholic man who sought to find asylum outside of England where Catholics and Protestants could get along. An ambitious man, Calvert trekked throughout North America and despite his few attempted efforts to settle in various places near eastern Canada, the harsh weather would force his further exploration across the country and eventually land him in what would later become Maryland. He passed away before receiving approval to begin building his congregation or the colony. A Catholic convert, Calvert made his way up the ranks in the Stuart court. George Calvert would die thinking he had secured English Catholics a safe haven, when in reality he destroyed one for the native people, and paved the way for the enslavement and oppression of thousands of enslaved Africans. George Calvert’s plight was weathering Protestant opposition in order to find a potential sanctuary for Catholics, and the Englishmen who could tolerate them. The instability of the English monarchy during Calvert’s lifetime added another layer of complexity to Calvert’s already ambitious plans to colonize North of Virginia. Calvert’s fervor was shaped by the fact that he was a Protestant converted to Catholicism in 17th century England, which is the equivalent of becoming a Dallas Cowboys fan in 1997. Calvert’s first attempt at creating a Catholic tolerant Utopia was a fishery in Newfoundland that he named Avalon. Avalon was a fleeting success, and after an especially cold and deadly winter, Calvert was forced to abandon the fishery and seek a new outpost in Virginia. Calvert was an early investor in the Virginia Company, but was not tolerated by the Puritan Virginians.
“[Calvert] and Lady Baltimore sailed southward and visited Jamestown, whose leaders greeted him with guarded politeness; besides being ‘Romish’ in religion, Calvert threatened to reduce the original compass of Virginia. When the impatient Virginians asked him to take the Oath of Supremacy, the Lord of Avalon left and returned home to work levers in the office of the privy seal. As he struggled against poor health, he managed to win a deadly backstairs and official game with agents of Virginia. In June 1632, two months after Calvert died, King Charles signed the final charter and established a new English colony in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria. The grant went to Calvert’s eldest son and heir, Cecil, namesake of Sir Robert Cecil.”
The Stuart monarchs promoted hereditary slavery throughout the empire and Charles II chartered the Royal African Company with the exclusive right to the slave trade on the African coast. The Royal African Company signed contracts with British slaveholders and imported slaves to the colonies in vast numbers. These and other contracts included collateral held in the form of human property. According to historian Holly Brewer, the Stuart monarchs ‘legitimated the formal enslavement of Africans’ at the same time as they were ‘suppressing representative government’ and establishing a hierarchical social order based exclusively on ‘inheritable blood.’ The amount of money was insurmountable and with it, they prioritized world domination through destruction and exploitation at the costs of millions of lives over everything else, camouflaged through religion. Charles II and James II appointed judges in England that were favorable to slavery in the expectation that the King’s Bench might establish precedents that would legitimate slaveholding throughout the realm, including even England.
Calvert sought to be England’s Moses by founding Maryland, but instead unwittingly became responsible for bringing pharaoh to Maryland’s shores instead.
Thousands of African people were to follow; scientists, astronomers, fisherman, laborers, holymen, fathers, mothers and children were kidnapped and chained to the bottom of boats. These men, women and children would never directly benefit from their labor, and their thoughts, dreams and feelings are unknown to all except those who would seek them beyond written history. Their kidnappers attempted to erase their memory of Africa, but only succeeded in creating a robust new combination of multiple Western African and European cultural traditions. And despite violent and grinding indoctrination of Catholic hyper-capitalism, the enslaved African people on Carroll family plantations created rituals that lasted, and could not be denied.
Naming was at the center of their rituals and it did not originate in the United States. The prophetic response to the cannibalistic blood lust of Western European colonialism had begun in Africa at the middle of the 17th century and was brought across the sea by those Africans who were kidnapped and forced to come up with new symbols and names that signified resistance. When an early 1990s archaeological dig found Western African religious artifacts from the Kongo beneath the Carroll house in Annapolis, the names in the slave lists, wills, and letters took on a new dimension.
