Salih Bilali

Salih Bilali was born at Massina, on the Niger River in present-day Mali, into a Fulbe family — one tradition calls it a powerful family. When he was born is not settled: the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative's exhibit says about 1790; a University of South Carolina Press study gives 1765 and has him captured in 1790 as the Bambara consolidated their hold on the Upper Niger; magazine and study retellings put his birth in the 1770s and his capture at about twelve years old. The record keeps all three readings. {cite:source/ldhi-salih-bilali} {cite:source/claiming-freedom-salih-bilali} {cite:source/message-international-first-muslims}

Captured, he was carried to Anomabu on the Gold Coast and shipped across the Atlantic to the Bahamas. There the Couper family bought him — the exhibit names James Hamilton Couper as the purchaser, the Press study names his father John Couper — and took him to Cannon's Point plantation on St. Simons Island, Georgia. In the sale records he appears under the name "Tom", or "Old Tom"; he himself, the Press study notes, continued to call himself Salih. {cite:source/ldhi-salih-bilali} {cite:source/claiming-freedom-salih-bilali}

He was not on Sapelo Island: that, one island north, was where his friend Bilali Muhammad was head driver, and the two men are sometimes confused. Salih Bilali's island was St. Simons. {cite:source/ldhi-salih-bilali}

In 1816 Salih Bilali became head driver of the Couper plantations, in charge of more than four hundred enslaved people. Under the Sea Islands' task system he ran the plantation's daily work, and the Coupers routinely left Cannon's Point in his sole charge for weeks at a time while they were away. James Hamilton Couper, who knew him for decades, wrote that "his industry, intelligence, and honesty, soon brought him notice, and he was successively advanced, until he was made head driver". {cite:source/ldhi-salih-bilali}

Couper's account, quoted in the scholarship, is also the record of his Islam: he was, Couper wrote, "a strict Mahometan; [he] abstains from spirituous liquors, and keeps the various fasts, particularly that of the Rhamadan". The Lowcountry exhibit records that he was known on St. Simons and beyond for his Muslim practices, and the Couper family tradition, retold in Message International, remembers his owner's son calling him the most religious man he had ever known, and his last words as the shahada. No text read names a school or branch for him; Massina's Maliki tradition is the world he came from, not an attestation about the man, and the record says so. {cite:source/ldhi-salih-bilali} {cite:source/message-international-first-muslims}

When Salih Bilali died, the scholarship read does not establish. One web tradition gives 1846, unverified; the year 1857 sometimes attached to his name is the death year of Bilali Muhammad of Sapelo, a different man. His life survives because his enslaver wrote about him; the exhibit is frank that the surviving records are the enslavers' and their descendants', and everything known of him passes through them. {cite:source/ldhi-salih-bilali} {cite:source/claiming-freedom-salih-bilali}