
An animation showing when United
States territories and states forbade or allowed slavery,
1789-1861.
Slavery in the United States lasted as a legal
institution until the passage of the
Thirteenth
Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865. It had its
origins with the first
English colonization of
North America in
Virginia in
1607, although African slaves were brought to
Spanish Florida as early as the 1560s.Most
slaves were black and were held by whites, although some Native
Americans and free blacks also held slaves; there was a small
number of white slaves as well. Slaves were spread to the areas
where there was good quality soil for large plantations of high
value cash crops, such as cotton, sugar, and coffee. The majority
of slaveholders were in the
southern United States, where most
slaves were engaged in an efficient machine-like gang system of
agriculture, with farms of fifteen or more slaves proving to be far
more productive than farms without slaves. Also, these large groups
of slaves were thought to work more efficiently if guarded by a
managerial class called overseers to ensure that the slaves did not
waste a second of movement.
From 1654 until 1865, slavery for life was legal within the
boundaries of much of the present United States.Before the
widespread establishment of
chattel
slavery (outright ownership of the slave), much labor was
organized under a system of bonded labor known as
indentured servitude. This
typically lasted for several years for
white and
black
alike, and it was a means of using labor to pay the costs of
transporting people to the colonies. By the 18th century, court
rulings established the racial basis of the American incarnation of
slavery to apply chiefly to
Black Africans and people
of African descent, and occasionally to
Native Americans. In
part because of the success of tobacco as a
cash crop in the
Southern colonies, its labor-intensive
character caused planters to import more slaves for labor by the
end of the 17th century than did the
northern colonies. The South had a
significantly high number and proportion of slaves in the
population.
Twelve million Africans were shipped to the
Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Of
these, an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United
States.
The largest number were shipped to Brazil
(see
slavery in Brazil). The
slave population in the United States had grown to four million by
the 1860 Census.
Slavery was one of the principal issues leading to the
American Civil War. After the
Union prevailed in the war,
slavery was abolished throughout the United States with the
adoption of the
Thirteenth
Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Colonial America
The first record of African slavery in Colonial America was made in
1619.
A
British pirate ship under the Dutch
flag, the White Lion, had captured 20 Angolan
slaves in a
battle with a Portuguese ship, the
São João Baptista, bound for Veracruz
, Mexico
. The
Angolans were from the kingdoms of
Ndongo and
Kongo, and spoke languages of the
Bantu group.
The White Lion had been damaged
first by the battle and then more severely in a great storm during
the late summer when it came ashore at Old Point Comfort, site of
present day Fort
Monroe
in Virginia
.
Though the colony was in the middle of a period later known as "The
Great Migration" (1618-1623), during which its population grew from
450 to 4,000 residents, extremely high mortality rates from
disease,
malnutrition, and
war with
Native Americans kept the population of able-bodied laborers
low. With the Dutch ship being in severe need of repairs and
supplies and the colonists being in need of able-bodied workers,
the human cargo was traded for food and services.
In addition to African slaves, Europeans, mostly
Irish,
Scottish,
English, and
Germans, were brought over in substantial numbers as
indentured servants, particularly
in the British
Thirteen Colonies.
Over half of all white immigrants to the English colonies of North
America during the 17th and 18th centuries might have been
indentured servants. In the 18th century numerous Europeans
traveled to the colonies as
redemptioners. The white citizens of Virginia,
who had arrived from Britain, decided to treat the first Africans
in Virginia as indentured servants. As with European indentured
servants, the Africans were freed after a stated period and given
the use of land and supplies by their former owners.
Anthony Johnson, a
former indentured servant from Africa, became a landowner on the
Eastern Shore and a
slave-owner. The major problem with indentured servants was that,
in time, they would be freed, but they were unlikely to become
prosperous. The best lands in the
tidewater regions were already
in the hands of wealthy plantation families by 1650, and the former
servants became an underclass.
Bacon's
Rebellion showed that the poor laborers and farmers could prove
a dangerous element to the wealthy landowners. By switching to pure
chattel slavery, new white laborers and small farmers were mostly
limited to those who could afford to immigrate and support
themselves. In addition, improving economic conditions in England
meant that fewer laborers wanted to migrate to the colonies as
indentured servants, so the planters needed to find new sources of
labor.
The transformation from indentured servitude to racial slavery
happened gradually. There were no laws regarding slavery early in
Virginia's history. However, by 1640, the Virginia courts had
sentenced at least one black servant to slavery.
In 1654,
John Casor, a black man, became
the first legally recognized slave in the present United States.
A court in
Northampton
County
ruled against Casor, declaring him property for life, "owned" by the black colonist
Anthony Johnson. Since persons with African origins were not
English citizens by birth, they were not necessarily covered by
English Common Law.
Elizabeth Key Grinstead successfully
gained her freedom in the Virginia courts in 1656 by making her
case as the baptized Christian daughter of free Englishman Thomas
Key.
Shortly after the Elizabeth Key trial, in 1662 Virginia passed a
law on
partus, stating that any
children of an enslaved mother would follow her status and
automatically be slaves, no matter if the father was a freeborn
Englishman. This institutionalized the power relationships and
confined the possible scandal of mixed-race children to within the
slave quarters. The Virginia
Slave codes
of 1705 further defined as slaves those people imported from
nations that were not
Christian, as well
as Native Americans who were sold to colonists by other
Native
Americans.
In 1735, the trustees of the colony of Georgia passed a law to
prohibitslavery, which was then legal in the 12 othercolonies. It
was meant to eliminate the risk of slave rebellions andmake Georgia
better able to defend against attacks from the Spanish tothe south.
It also supported the vision of Georgia's original charter- to turn
some of England's poor into hardworking small farmers.
The protestant scottish highlanders who settled what is now Darien
GA added amoral anti-slavery argument, which was rare at the time,
in their 1739"Petition of the Inhabitants of New Inverness":
But there was popular support for slavery and skillful lobbying by
the colonists, and in 1750 slavery again became legal in
Georgia.
During most of the British colonial period, slavery existed in all
the colonies. People enslaved in
the North
typically worked as house servants, artisans, laborers and
craftsmen, with the greater number in cities. Early on, slaves in
the South worked primarily in agriculture,
on farms and
plantations growing
indigo,
rice, and
tobacco;
cotton became a major
crop after the 1790s. Tobacco was very labor intensive, as was rice
cultivation. In
South
Carolina in 1720 about 65% of the population consisted of
slaves. Slaves were used by rich farmers and plantation owners who
cultivate crops for commercial export operations. Backwoods
subsistence farmers, a later wave of settlers, seldom owned
slaves.
Some of the British colonies attempted to abolish the
international slave trade, fearing that
the importation of new Africans would be disruptive. Virginia bills
to that effect were vetoed by the
British Privy Council;
Rhode
Island forbade the import of slaves in 1774. All of the
colonies except
Georgia had
banned or limited the African slave trade by 1786; Georgia did so
in 1798 - although some of these laws were later
repealed.
The British
West Africa
Squadron's slave trade suppression activities were assisted by
forces from the
United States
Navy, starting in 1820 with the
USS
Cyane. Initially, this consisted of a few ships. With
the
Webster-Ashburton
Treaty of 1842, the relationship was formalised and they
jointly ran the
Africa
Squadron.
1776 to 1850
Second Middle Passage
As the
nation expanded
west, so did the cultivation of cotton and the institution of
slavery. Historian Peter Kolchin wrote, "By breaking up existing
families and forcing slaves to relocate far from everyone and
everything they knew" this migration "replicated (if on a reduced
level) many of [the] horrors" of the Atlantic slave trade.
Historian Ira Berlin called this forced migration the Second
Middle Passage. Characterizing it as
the "central event” in the life of a slave between the
American Revolution and the Civil War,
Berlin wrote that whether they were uprooted themselves or simply
lived in fear that they or their families would be involuntarily
moved, "the massive deportation traumatized black people, both
slave and free."
Although complete statistics are lacking, it is estimated that
1,000,000 slaves moved west from the
Old
South between 1790 and 1860.
Most of the slaves were moved from
Maryland
, Virginia
, and the
Carolinas. Originally the points
of destination were Kentucky
and Tennessee
, but after 1810 the states of the Deep South:
Georgia
, Alabama
, Mississippi
, Louisiana
and Texas
received the
most. This corresponded to the massive expansion of cotton
cultivation in that region, which needed labor. In the 1830s,
almost 300,000 were transported, with Alabama and Mississippi
receiving 100,000 each. Every decade between 1810 and 1860 had at
least 100,000 slaves moved from their state of origin. In the final
decade before the Civil War, 250,000 were moved. Michael Tadman, in
a 1989 book
Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and
Slaves in the Old South, indicates that 60-70% of
interregional migrations were the result of the sale of slaves. In
1820 a child in the Upper South had a 30% chance of being sold
south by 1860.
Slave traders were responsible for the majority of the slaves that
moved west. Only a minority moved with their families and existing
owner. Slave traders had little interest in purchasing or
transporting intact slave families, although in the interest of
creating a "self-reproducing labor force", equal numbers of men and
women were transported. Berlin wrote, "The internal slave trade
became the largest enterprise in the South outside the plantation
itself, and probably the most advanced in its employment of modern
transportation, finance, and publicity." The slave trade industry
developed its own unique language with terms such as "prime hands,
bucks, breeding wenches, and fancy girls" coming into common use.
The expansion of the interstate slave trade contributed to the
"economic revival of once depressed seaboard states" as demand
accelerated the value of the slaves who were subject to sale.
Some
traders moved their "chattels" by sea, with Norfolk
to New Orleans
being the most common route, but most slaves were
forced to walk. Regular migration routes were established
and were served by a network of slave pens, yards, and warehouses
needed as temporary housing for the slaves. As the trek advanced,
some slaves were sold and new ones purchased. Berlin concluded, "In
all, the slave trade, with its hubs and regional centers, its spurs
and circuits, reached into every cranny of southern society. Few
southerners, black or white, were untouched."
The death rate for the slaves on their way to their new destination
across the American South was much less than that of the captives
across the Atlantic Ocean. Mortality was still higher than the
normal death rate. Berlin summarizes the experience:
Once the trip was ended, slaves faced a life on the frontier
significantly different from their experiences back east. Clearing
trees and starting crops on virgin fields was harsh and
backbreaking work. A combination of inadequate nutrition, bad
water, and exhaustion from both the journey and the work weakened
the newly arrived slaves and produced casualties. The preferred
locations of the new plantations at rivers' edges, with
mosquitoes and other environmental challenges,
threatened the survival of slaves. They had acquired only limited
immunities in their previous homes. The death rate was such that,
in the first few years of hewing a plantation out of the
wilderness, some planters preferred whenever possible to use rented
slaves rather than their own.
The harsh conditions on the frontier increased slave resistance and
led to much more reliance on violence by the owners and overseers.
Many of the slaves were new to cotton fields and unaccustomed to
the "sunrise-to-sunset gang labor" required by their new life.
Slaves were driven much harder than when they were involved in
growing tobacco or
wheat back east. Slaves
also had less time and opportunity to improve the quality of their
lives by raising their own
livestock or
tending vegetable gardens, for either their own consumption or
trade, as they could in the eastern south.
In Louisiana it was
sugar, rather than cotton,
that was the main crop. Between 1810 and 1830 the number of slaves
increased from under 10,000 to over 42,000. New Orleans became
nationally important as a slave port and by the 1840s had the
largest slave market in the country. Dealing with sugar cane was
even more physically demanding than growing cotton. Planters
preferred young males, who represented two-thirds of the slave
purchases. The largely young, unmarried male slave force made the
reliance on violence by the owners “especially savage.”
Treatment of slaves
Historian
Kenneth M. Stampp describes the role of coercion in
slavery,
- "Without the power to punish, which the state conferred upon
the master, bondage could not have existed. By comparison, all
other techniques of control were of secondary importance."
Stampp further notes that while rewards sometimes led slaves to
perform adequately, most agreed with an Arkansas slaveholder, who
wrote:
According to both the
Pulitzer
Prize-winning historian
David
Brion Davis and historian
Eugene
Genovese, treatment of slaves was both harsh and inhumane.
Whether laboring or walking about in public, people living as
slaves were regulated by legally authorized violence. Davis makes
the point that, while some aspects of slavery took on a "welfare
capitalist" look,
Slaves that worked and lived on
plantations were commonly punished. This
punishment could come from the plantation
owner or master, his wife, children (white males), and most often
by the overseer. Slaves were punished with a variety of objects and
instruments. Some of these included: whips, placed in chains and
shackles, various contraptions such as
metal collars, being hanged, and even forced to walk a treadmill.
Those who inflicted pain upon the slaves also used weapons such as
knives, guns, field tools, and objects found nearby. The
Whip was the most common form of punishment performed
on a slave. One slave said that, “The only punishment that I ever
heard or knew of being administered slaves was whipping,” although
he knew several that had been beaten to death for offenses such as
sassing a white person, hitting another negro, fussing, or fighting
in their quarters. Slave overseers were authorized to whip and
brutalize non-compliant slaves. According to an account by a
plantation overseer to a visitor, "Some Negroes are determined
never to let a white man whip them and will resist you, when you
attempt it; of course you must kill them in that case". A former
slave describes his witness to females being whipped. “They usually
screamed and prayed, though a few never made a sound.” If the women
were pregnant they often dug a hole for them to place their bellies
in while being whipped. After many of the slaves were whipped they
would further torture the slaves by bursting the blisters and rub
the soars with turpentine and red pepper. Other incidents reported
that after being beaten they would take a brick, grind it up into a
powder, mix it with lard and rub it all over them.
Metal collars were also commonly used so that the slave would be
reminded of his wrongdoings. Many collars were thick and heavy;
they would often have spikes protruding, hassling the slave while
doing fieldwork and preventing them from sleeping lying down. Louis
Cain, a former slave describes his witness to another slave being
punished, “One nigger run to the woods to be a jungle nigger, but
massa cotched him with the dog and took a hot iron and brands him.
Then he put a bell on him, in a wooden frame what slip over the
shoulders and under the arms. He made that nigger wear the bell a
year and took it off on Christmas for a present to him. It sho’ did
make a good nigger out of him.”
Plantation owners would sometimes hang their slaves because the
slave was causing more trouble than he was worth or the owner
didn’t deem them valuable any more. Slaves were punished for a
variety of reasons, most of the time it was for working too slow,
breaking a law such as running away, leaving the plantation without
permission, or not following orders given too them. Myers and Massy
describe the extent of many punishers, “The punishment of deviant
slaves was decentralized, based on plantations, and crafted so as
not to impede their value as laborers.” Myers, Martha, and James
Massey. "Race, Labor, and Punishment in Postbellum Georgia." JSTOR
38.2 (1991): 267-286. Web. 18 Nov 2009. /www.jstor.org/. Laws made
to punish the whites for punishing their slaves were often weakly
enforced or could be easily avoided. An example being in the case
Smith v. Hancock, here the defendant was justified in punishing his
slave with physical abuse because he showed the courts that the
slave was attending an unlawful meeting, discussing rebellion, that
he refused to surrender, and resisted the arresting officer by
force. Whites often punished slaves in front of others to make an
example out of them. A man named Harding describes an incident
where a woman assisted several men in a small rebellion, “The women
he hoisted up by the thumbs, whipp’d and slashed her with knives
before the other slaves till she died.” Men and women were
sometimes punished differently than the other sex, according to the
1789 report of the Committee of the Privy Council, males were often
shackled and women and girls were left freely to go about.
By law, slave owners could be fined for not punishing recaptured
runaway slaves. Slave codes authorized,
indemnified or even required the use of violence,
and were denounced by
abolitionists for
their brutality. Both slaves and free blacks were regulated by the
Black Codes and had their
movements monitored by
slave patrols
conscripted from the white population which were allowed to use
summary punishment against escapees, sometimes maiming or killing
them. In addition to physical abuse and murder, slaves were at
constant risk of losing members of their families if their owners
decided to trade them for profit, punishment, or to pay debts. A
few slaves retaliated by murdering owners and overseers, burning
barns, killing horses, or staging work slowdowns. Stampp, without
contesting Genovese's assertions concerning the violence and
sexual exploitation faced by slaves,
does question the appropriateness of a Marxian approach in
analyzing the owner-slave relationship.
Genovese claims that because the slaves were the legal property of
their owners, it was not unusual for enslaved black women to be
raped by their owners, members of their owner's families, or their
owner's friends. Children who resulted from such rapes were slaves
as well because they took the status of their mothers, unless freed
by the slaveholder. Nell Irwin Painter and other historians have
also documented that Southern history went "across the color line."
Contemporary accounts by
Mary Chesnut
and
Fanny Kemble, both married in the
planter class, as well as accounts by former slaves gathered under
the
Works Progress
Administration (WPA), all attested to the abuse of women slaves
by white men of the owning and overseer class.
However, the Nobel economist
Robert
Fogel controversially describes as a myth the belief that
slave-breeding and sexual exploitation destroyed black families. He
argues that the family was the basic unit of social organization
under slavery, and to the economic interest of slave owners to
encourage the stability of slave families, and most of them did so.
Most slave sales were either of whole families or of individuals at
an age when it would have been normal for them to leave the family.
However, eyewitness testimony from former slaves does not support
Fogel's view.
Frederick Douglass,
who grew up as a slave in Maryland, reported the systematic
separation of slave families and widespread rape of slave women to
boost slave numbers.
In the early 1930s, members of the
Federal Writers' Project
interviewed former slaves, and in doing so, produced the only known
original recordings of former slaves.
In 2007, the
interviews were remastered and reproduced on modern CDs and in book
form in conjunction with the Library of Congress
, Smithsonian Productions
and a national radio project. In the book
and CD oral history project called
Remembering Slavery: African
Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and
Emancipation, the editors wrote,
As masters applied their stamp to the domestic life of
the slave quarter, slaves struggled to maintain the integrity of
their families.
Slaveholders had no legal obligation to respect the
sanctity of the slave's marriage bed, and slave women—married or
single — had no formal protection against their owners' sexual
advances.
...Without legal protection and subject to the master's
whim, the slave family was always at risk."
Some slave women, were used for breeding more slaves. Plantation
owners, would have intimate relations with a female slave in order
to produce more slaves. some slaves were even force to have sex
with others to increase population and to increase the slave
product on the markets.
The book includes examples of enslaved families torn apart when
family members were sold out of state and it contains examples of
sexual violations of the enslaved people by individuals who held
power over them.
According to Genovese, slaves were fed, clothed, housed and
provided medical care in the most minimal manner. It was common to
pay small bonuses during the
Christmas
season, and some slave owners permitted their slaves to keep
earnings and gambling profits. (One slave,
Denmark Vesey, is known to have won a lottery
and bought his freedom.) In many households, treatment of slaves
varied with the slave's skin color. Darker-skinned slaves worked in
the fields, while lighter-skinned house servants had comparatively
better clothing, food and housing.
As in President
Thomas Jefferson's
household, the presence of lighter-skinned slaves as household
servants was not merely an issue of skin color. Sometimes planters
used mixed-race slaves as house servants or favored artisans
because they were their children or other relatives. Several of
Jefferson's household slaves were children of his father-in-law
John Wayles and the enslaved woman
Betty Hemings, who were brought to the
marriage by Jefferson's wife. In turn the widower Jefferson had a
long relationship with Betty and John Wayle's daughter
Sally Hemings, a much younger enslaved woman
who was mostly of white ancestry and half-sister to his late wife.
The Hemings children grew up to be closely involved in Jefferson's
household staff activities; one became his chef. Two sons trained
as carpenters. Three of his four surviving mixed-race children with
Sally Hemings passed into white society as adults.
Planters who had mixed-race children sometimes arranged for their
education, even in schools in the North, or as apprentices in
crafts. Others settled property on them. Some freed the children
and their mothers. While fewer than in the Upper South,
free blacks in the
Deep South were more often mixed-race children of
planters and were sometimes the recipients of transfers of property
and social capital.
For instance, Wilberforce
University
, founded by Methodist and
African Methodist
Episcopal (AME) representatives in Ohio
in 1856 for
the education of African-American youth, was in its first years
largely supported by wealthy southern planters who paid for the
education of their mixed-race children. When the war broke
out, the school lost most of its 200 students. The college closed
for a couple of years before the AME Church bought it and began to
operate it.
Fogel argues that the material conditions of the lives of slaves
compared favorably with those of free industrial workers. They were
not good by modern standards, but this fact emphasizes the hard lot
of all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the 19th
century. Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field
hand received about 90% of the income he produced. In a survey, 58%
of historians and 42% of economists disagreed with the proposition
that the material condition of slaves compared favorably with those
of free industrial workers.
Slaves were considered legal non-persons except if they committed
crimes. An Alabama court asserted that slaves "are rational beings,
they are capable of committing crimes; and in reference to acts
which are crimes, are regarded as persons. Because they are slaves,
they are incapable of performing civil acts, and, in reference to
all such, they are things, not persons."
In 1811,
Arthur William Hodge
was the first slave owner executed for the murder of a slave in the
British West Indies. However, he
was not, as some have claimed, the first white person to have been
lawfully executed for the killing
of a slave. Records indicate at least two earlier incidents.
On
November 23, 1739, in Williamsburg, Virginia
, two white men, Charles Quin and David White, were
hanged for the murder of another white man's black slave; and on
April 21, 1775, the Fredericksburg
newspaper, the Virginia Gazette reported that a white
man, William Pitman, had been hanged for the murder of his own
black slave.
Slave Codes
To help regulate the relationship between slave and owner,
including legal support for keeping the slave as property,
slave codes were established. While each state
would have their own, most of the ideas were shared throughout the
slave states. In the codes for the District of Columbia, a slave is
defined as “a human being, who is by law deprived of his or her
liberty for life, and is the property of another.” A paragraph from
the Black Code of South Carolina, still valid in 1863, declared
death as the penalty for him who dared "to aid any slave in running
away or departing from his master's or employer's service." Codes
from other states placed limits on relations allowed between black
and white people. Louisiana's Code Noir did not allow interracial
marriage, and if children were a result a fine of three hundred
livres would have to be paid. This code also stated children of a
slave "shall share the condition of their mother” if the child’s
parents had different masters they would stay with the mother, and
if the father was free and the mother a slave the children would
also be slaves.
Women's rights
While working on plantations and farms, women and men had equal
labor-intensive work. However, much of the hard labor was taken
care of by men or by women who were past the child-bearing stage.
Some of the labor-intensive jobs given to women were: cooking for
the owner's household as well as the slaves themselves, sewing,
midwifery, pruning fields, and many other laborious occupations.
Emily Winslow - one of the women delegates not allowed into the
1840 World Convention
In 1837,
an Antislavery Convention of American Women met in New York City
with both black and white women
participating. While Frederick Douglass claims the unity of
the anti-slavery cause and the fight for women's rights, saying,
"When the true history of the antislavery cause shall be written,
women will occupy a large space in its pages, for the cause of the
slave has been peculiarly woman's cause." [Life and Times of
Frederick Douglass , 1881]
Lucretia
Mott and
Elizabeth Cady
Stanton had first met at the convention and realized the need
for a separate
women's rights
movement.
At the London
gathering
Stanton also met other women delegates such as Emily Winslow, Abby
Southwick, Elizabeth Neal, Mary Grew, Abby
Kimber, as well as many other women. However, during the
Massachusetts
Anti-slavery Society meetings, which Stanton and
Winslow attended, the hosts refused to seat the women
delegates. This resulted in a convention of their own to
form a "society to advocate the rights of women". In 1848 at
Seneca Falls, New York,
Stanton and Winslow launched the women's rights movement, becoming
one of the most diverse and social forces in American life.
Abolitionist movement
Beginning in the 1750s, there was widespread sentiment during the
American Revolution that slavery
was a social evil (for the country as a whole and for the whites)
and should eventually be abolished.
All the Northern states passed
emancipation acts between 1780 and 1804; most of these arranged for
gradual emancipation and a special status for freedmen, so there
were still a dozen "permanent apprentices" in New Jersey
in 1860.
The
Massachusetts
Constitution of 1780 declared all men "born free and equal";
the slave
Quock Walker sued for his
freedom on this basis and won his freedom, thus abolishing slavery
in Massachusetts.
Throughout the first half of the 19th century, a movement to end
slavery grew in strength throughout the United States. This
struggle took place amid strong support for slavery among white
Southerners, who profited greatly from the system of enslaved
labor. These slave owners began to refer to slavery as the
"
peculiar institution" in a
defensive attempt to differentiate it from other examples of forced
labor.
In the early part of the 19th century, a variety of organizations
were established advocating the movement of black people from the
United States to locations where they would enjoy greater freedom;
some endorsed
colonization, while others
advocated
emigration.
During the 1820s and
1830s the American
Colonization Society (A.C.S.) was the primary vehicle for
proposals to return black Americans to greater freedom and equality
in Africa, and in 1821 the A.C.S. established colony of Liberia
, assisting thousands of former African-American
slaves and free black people (with legislated limits) to move there
from the United States. Many white people saw this as
preferable to
emancipation in America,
with A.C.S founder
Henry Clay believing;
"unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, they never
could amalgamate with the free whites of this country".
Slaveholders opposed freedom for blacks, but saw
repatriation as a way of avoiding
rebellions.
After 1830, a religious movement led by
William Lloyd Garrison declared
slavery to be a personal
sin and demanded the
owners repent immediately and start the process of emancipation.
The movement was highly controversial and was a factor in
causing the American Civil
War.
Very few abolitionists, such as
John Brown, favored the use of
armed force to foment uprisings among the slaves; others tried to
use the legal system.
Influential leaders of the
abolition movement
(1810-60) included:
Slave uprisings that used
armed force (1700 -
1859) include:
Rising tensions
The economic value of plantation slavery was magnified in 1793 with
the invention of the
cotton gin by
Eli Whitney, a device designed to
separate cotton fibers from seedpods and the sometimes sticky
seeds. The invention revolutionized the cotton industry by
increasing fiftyfold the quantity of cotton that could be processed
in a day. The result was the explosive growth of the cotton
industry and greatly increased the demand for slave labor in the
South.
At the same time, the northern states banned slavery, though, as
Alexis de Toqueville noted in
Democracy in America
(1835), the prohibition did not always mean that the slaves were
freed. Toqueville noted that as Northern states provided for
gradual emancipation, they generally outlawed the sale of slaves
within the state. This meant that the only way to sell slaves
before they were freed was to move them South. Toqueville does not
document that such transfers actually occurred much. In fact, the
emancipation of slaves in the North led to the growth in the
population of northern free blacks, from several hundreds in the
1770s to nearly 50,000 by 1810.
Just as demand for slaves was increasing, the supply was
restricted. The
United States
Constitution, adopted in 1787, prevented
Congress from banning the
importation of slaves until 1808. On January 1, 1808,
Congress banned further imports. Any new slaves would have to be
descendants of ones currently in the United States. However, the
internal American slave trade and the involvement in the
international slave trade or the outfitting of ships for that trade
by U.S. citizens were not banned. Though there were certainly
violations of this law, slavery in America became, more or less,
self-sustaining.
The War of 1812 and slavery
During the
War of 1812, British
Royal Navy commanders of the blockading fleet,
based at the
Bermuda
dockyard, were given instructions to encourage the defection of
American slaves by offering freedom, as they did during the
Revolutionary War. Thousands of black slaves went over to the Crown
with their families, and were recruited into the (3rd Colonial
Battalion)
Royal Marines on occupied
Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake. A
further company of colonial marines was raised at the Bermuda
dockyard, where many freed slaves, men women and children, had been
given refuge and employment. It was kept as a defensive force in
case of an attack.
These
former slaves fought for Britain throughout the Atlantic campaign,
including the attack on Washington D.C.and the Louisiana Campaign,
and most were later re-enlisted into British West India regiments,
or settled in Trinidad
in August, 1816, where seven hundred of these
ex-marines were granted land (they reportedly organised themselves
in villages along the lines of military companies). Many
other freed American slaves were recruited directly into existing
West Indian regiments, or newly created British Army units. A few
thousand freed slaves were later settled at Nova Scotia by the
British.
Slaveholders primarily in the South experienced considerable "loss
of property" as tens of thousands of slaves escaped to British
lines or ships for freedom, despite the difficulties. The planters'
complacency about slave "contentment" was shocked by seeing slaves
would risk so much to be free.
Afterward, when some freed slaves had been
settled at Bermuda, slaveholders such as Major Pierce Butler of South Carolina
tried to persuade them to return to the United
States, to no avail.
Internal Slave Trade
With the movement in Virginia and the Carolinas away from tobacco
cultivation and toward mixed agriculture, which was less labor
intensive, planters in those states had excess slave labor. They
hired out some slaves for occasional labor, but planters also began
to sell enslaved African Americans to traders who took them to
markets in the Deep South for their expanding plantations. The
internal slave trade and forced migration of enslaved African
Americans continued for another half-century. Tens of thousands of
slaves were transported from the
Upper
South, including Kentucky and Tennessee which became
slave-selling states in these decades, to the
Deep South. Thousands of African American
families were broken up in the sales, which first concentrated on
male laborers. The scale of the internal slave trade contributed
substantially to the wealth of the Deep South. In 1840, New
Orleans—which had the largest slave market and important
shipping—was the third largest city in the country and the
wealthiest.
Because of the
three-fifths
compromise in the U.S. Constitution, slaveholders exerted their
power through the Federal Government and passed Federal
fugitive slave laws.
Refugees from slavery
fled the South across the Ohio River and
other parts of the Mason-Dixon Line
dividing North from South, to the North via the
Underground Railroad.
The
physical presence of African Americans in Cincinnati
, Oberlin
, and other Northern towns agitated some white
Northerners, though others helped hide former slaves from their
former owners, and others helped them reach freedom in Canada
.
After 1854,
Republicans fumed that
the Slave Power, especially the
pro-slavery
Democratic
Party, controlled two of the three branches of the Federal
government.
Most Northeastern states became free states through local
emancipation. The settlement of the
Midwestern states after the
Revolution led to their decisions in the 1820s not to allow
slavery. A Northern block of free states united into one contiguous
geographic area which shared an anti-slavery culture.
The boundary was the
Mason-Dixon Line (between slave-state Maryland
and free-state Pennsylvania
) and the Ohio River.
The slave
trade (though not the legality of slavery) was abolished by
Congress in the District of Columbia
as part of the Compromise of 1850.
Religious institutions
North and South grew further apart in 1845 when the Baptist Church
and other denominations split into Northern and Southern
organizations. The
Southern
Baptist Convention formed on the premise that the
Bible sanctions slavery and that it was acceptable for
Christians to own slaves. (In the 20th
century, the Southern Baptist Convention renounced this
interpretation.) Currently American Baptist numerical strength is
greatest in the former slave-holding states. Northern Baptists
opposed slavery. In 1844, the
Home
Mission Society declared that a person could not be a
missionary and still keep slaves as property. The
Methodist and
Presbyterian churches likewise divided north
and south. By the late 1850s only the Democratic Party was a
national institution, although it split in the
1860
election.
Distribution of slaves

Distribution of slaves in 1820
Census
Year
|
# Slaves |
# Free
blacks
|
Total
black
|
% free
blacks
|
Total US
population
|
% black
of total
|
1790 |
697,681 |
59,527 |
757,208 |
7.9% |
3,929,214 |
19% |
1800 |
893,602 |
108,435 |
1,002,037 |
10.8% |
5,308,483 |
19% |
1810 |
1,191,362 |
186,446 |
1,377,808 |
13.5% |
7,239,881 |
19% |
1820 |
1,538,022 |
233,634 |
1,771,656 |
13.2% |
9,638,453 |
18% |
1830 |
2,009,043 |
319,599 |
2,328,642 |
13.7% |
12,860,702 |
18% |
1840 |
2,487,355 |
386,293 |
2,873,648 |
13.4% |
17,063,353 |
17% |
1850 |
3,204,313 |
434,495 |
3,638,808 |
11.9% |
23,191,876 |
16% |
1860 |
3,953,760 |
488,070 |
4,441,830 |
11.0% |
31,443,321 |
14% |
1870 |
0 |
4,880,009 |
4,880,009 |
100% |
38,558,371 |
13% |
Source:
http://www.census.gov/population/documentation/twps0056/tab01.xls |
Total Slave Population in US 1790-1860, by State
Census
Year
|
1790 |
1800 |
1810 |
1820 |
1830 |
1840 |
1850 |
1860 |
All States |
694,207 |
887,612 |
1,130,781 |
1,529,012 |
1,987,428 |
2,482,798 |
3,200,600 |
3,950,546 |
Alabama |
- |
- |
- |
47,449 |
117,549 |
253,532 |
342,844 |
435,080 |
Arkansas |
- |
- |
- |
- |
4,576 |
19,935 |
47,100 |
111,115 |
California |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
Connecticut |
2,648 |
951 |
310 |
97 |
25 |
54 |
- |
- |
Delaware |
8,887 |
6,153 |
4,177 |
4,509 |
3,292 |
2,605 |
2,290 |
1,798 |
Florida |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
25,717 |
39,310 |
61,745 |
Georgia |
29,264 |
59,699 |
105,218 |
149,656 |
217,531 |
280,944 |
381,682 |
462,198 |
Illinois |
- |
- |
- |
917 |
747 |
331 |
- |
- |
Indiana |
- |
- |
- |
190 |
3 |
3 |
- |
- |
Iowa |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
16 |
- |
- |
Kansas |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
2 |
Kentucky |
12,430 |
40,343 |
80,561 |
126,732 |
165,213 |
182,258 |
210,981 |
225,483 |
Louisiana |
- |
- |
- |
69,064 |
109,588 |
168,452 |
244,809 |
331,726 |
Maine |
- |
- |
- |
- |
2 |
- |
- |
- |
Maryland |
103,036 |
105,635 |
111,502 |
107,398 |
102,994 |
89,737 |
90,368 |
87,189 |
Massachusetts |
- |
- |
- |
- |
1 |
- |
- |
- |
Michigan |
- |
- |
- |
- |
32 |
- |
- |
- |
Minnesota |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
Mississippi |
- |
- |
- |
32,814 |
65,659 |
195,211 |
309,878 |
436,631 |
Missouri |
- |
- |
- |
10,222 |
25,096 |
58,240 |
87,422 |
114,931 |
Nebraska |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
15 |
Nevada |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
New Hampshire |
157 |
8 |
- |
- |
3 |
1 |
- |
- |
New Jersey |
11,423 |
12,422 |
10,851 |
7,557 |
2,254 |
674 |
236 |
18 |
New York |
21,193 |
20,613 |
15,017 |
10,088 |
75 |
4 |
- |
- |
North Carolina |
100,783 |
133,296 |
168,824 |
205,017 |
245,601 |
245,817 |
288,548 |
331,059 |
Ohio |
- |
- |
- |
- |
6 |
3 |
- |
- |
Oregon |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
Pennsylvania |
3,707 |
1,706 |
795 |
211 |
403 |
64 |
- |
- |
Rhode Island |
958 |
380 |
108 |
48 |
17 |
5 |
- |
- |
South Carolina |
107,094 |
146,151 |
196,365 |
251,783 |
315,401 |
327,038 |
384,984 |
402,406 |
Tennessee |
- |
13,584 |
44,535 |
80,107 |
141,603 |
183,059 |
239,459 |
275,719 |
Texas |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
58,161 |
182,566 |
Vermont |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
Virginia |
292,627 |
346,671 |
392,518 |
425,153 |
469,757 |
449,087 |
472,528 |
490,865 |
Wisconsin |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
11 |
4 |
- |
Nat Turner, anti-literacy laws
In 1831,
a bloody slave rebellion took place in Southampton
County, Virginia
. A slave named
Nat
Turner, who was able to read and write and had "visions,"
started what became known as
Nat Turner's Rebellion or the
Southampton Insurrection. With the goal of freeing himself and
others, Turner and his followers killed approximately fifty men,
women and children, but they were eventually subdued by the
militia.
Nat Turner and his followers were
hanged,
and Turner's body was
flayed. The militia
also killed more than a hundred slaves who had not been involved in
the rebellion. Across the South, harsh new laws were enacted in the
aftermath of the 1831 Turner Rebellion to curtail the already
limited rights of African Americans. Typical was the following
Virginia law against educating slaves, free blacks and children of
whites and blacks:
. . . [E]very assemblage of negroes for the
purpose of instruction in reading or writing, or in the night time
for any purpose, shall be an unlawful assembly.
Any justice may issue his warrant to any office or other person,
requiring him to enter any place where such assemblage may be, and
seize any negro therein; and he, or any other justice, may order
such negro to be punished with stripes.
If a white person assemble with negroes for the purpose of
instructing them to read or write, or if he associate with them in
an unlawful assembly, he shall be confined in jail not exceeding
six months and fined not exceeding one hundred dollars; and any
justice may require him to enter into a recognizance, with
sufficient security, to appear before the circuit, county or
corporation court, of the county or corporation where the offence
was committed, at its next term, to answer therefor[sic],
and in the mean time to keep the peace and be of good
behaviour.
These laws were often defied by individuals, among whom was noted
future
Confederate
General
Stonewall Jackson .
1850s
Bleeding Kansas
After the passage of the
Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854, the border
wars broke out in
Kansas Territory,
where the question of whether it would be admitted to the Union as
a
slave or
free state was left to the inhabitants.
Abolitionist
John Brown
was active in the rebellion and killing in "
Bleeding Kansas" as were many white
Southerners. At the same time, fears that the Slave Power was
seizing full control of the national government swept anti-slavery
Republicans into office.
Dred Scott
Dred Scott was a 46 or 47-year old slave
who sued for his freedom after the death of his owner on the
grounds that he had lived in a territory where slavery was
forbidden (the northern part of the
Louisiana Purchase, from which slavery
was excluded under the terms of the
Missouri Compromise). Scott filed suit
for freedom in 1846 and went through two state trials, the first
denying and the second granting freedom.
Eleven years later
the Supreme Court
denied Scott his freedom in a sweeping decision
that set the United States on course for Civil War
. The court ruled that Dred Scott was not a
citizen who had a
right to sue in the Federal courts, and that Congress had no
constitutional power to pass the Missouri Compromise.
The 1857
Dred Scott decision,
decided 7-2, held that a slave did not become free when taken into
a free state; Congress could not bar slavery from a territory; and
people of African descent imported into the United States and held
as slaves, or their descendants could not be citizens. Furthermore,
a state could not bar slaveowners from bringing slaves into that
state. This decision, seen as unjust by many Republicans including
Abraham Lincoln, was also seen as
proof that the
Slave Power had seized
control of the Supreme Court. The decision, written by
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney,
barred slaves and their descendants from citizenship. The decision
enraged abolitionists and encouraged slave owners, helping to push
the country towards civil war.
Civil War and Emancipation
1860 presidential election
The divisions became fully exposed with the
1860 presidential
election. The electorate split four ways. The Southern
Democrats endorsed slavery, while the Republicans denounced it. The
Northern Democrats said democracy required the people to decide on
slavery locally. The
Constitutional Union
Party said the survival of the Union was at stake and
everything else should be compromised.
Lincoln, the Republican, won with a plurality of popular votes and
a majority of
electoral
votes. Lincoln, however, did not appear on the ballots of ten
southern states: thus his election necessarily split the nation
along sectional lines. Many slave owners in the South feared that
the real intent of the Republicans was the abolition of slavery in
states where it already existed, and that the sudden emancipation
of four million slaves would be problematic for the slave owners
and for the economy that drew its greatest profits from the labor
of people who were not paid.
They also argued that banning slavery in new states would upset
what they saw as a delicate balance of free states and slave
states. They feared that ending this balance could lead to the
domination of the industrial North with its preference for high
tariffs on imported goods. The combination of
these factors led the South to
secede from the Union, and thus began
the
American Civil War. Northern
leaders had viewed the slavery interests as a threat politically,
and with secession, they viewed the prospect of a new southern
nation, the
Confederate
States of America, with control over the
Mississippi River and the
West, as politically and militarily
unacceptable.
Civil War
The consequent
American Civil
War, beginning in 1861, led to the end of chattel slavery in
America. Not long after the war broke out, through a legal maneuver
credited to Union General
Benjamin F. Butler, a lawyer by
profession, slaves who came into Union "possession" were considered
"contraband of war".
General Butler ruled that they were not subject to return to
Confederate owners as they had been before the war. Soon word
spread, and many slaves sought refuge in Union territory, desiring
to be declared "contraband." Many of the "contrabands" joined the
Union Army as workers or troops, forming
entire regiments of the
U.S.
Colored Troops.
Others went to
refugee camps such as the Grand
Contraband Camp near Fort Monroe
or fled to northern cities. General Butler's
interpretation was reinforced when Congress passed the
Confiscation Act of 1861, which
declared that any property used by the Confederate military,
including slaves, could be confiscated by Union forces.
Lincoln's
Emancipation
Proclamation of January 1, 1863 was a powerful move that
promised freedom for slaves in the Confederacy as soon as the Union
armies reached them, and authorized the enlistment of African
Americans in the Union Army. The Emancipation Proclamation did not
free slaves in the Union-allied slave-holding states that bordered
the Confederacy. Since the Confederate States did not recognize the
authority of President Lincoln, and the proclamation did not apply
in the
border states, at
first the proclamation freed only slaves who had escaped behind
Union lines. Still, the proclamation made the abolition of slavery
an official war goal that was implemented as the Union took
territory from the Confederacy. According to the Census of 1860,
this policy would free nearly four million slaves, or over 12% of
the total population of the United States.
The
Arizona Organic Act
abolished slavery on February 24, 1863 in the newly formed
Arizona Territory.
Tennessee
and all of the border states (except Kentucky
) abolished slavery by early 1865. Thousands
of slaves were freed by the operation of the Emancipation
Proclamation as Union armies marched across the South. Emancipation
as a reality came to the remaining southern slaves after the
surrender of all Confederate troops in spring 1865.
At the beginning of the war, some Union commanders thought they
were supposed to return escaped slaves to their masters. By 1862,
when it became clear that this would be a long war, the question of
what to do about slavery became more general. The Southern economy
and military effort depended on slave labor. It began to seem
unreasonable to protect slavery while blockading Southern commerce
and destroying Southern production. As one Congressman put it, the
slaves "…cannot be neutral. As laborers, if not as soldiers, they
will be allies of the rebels, or of the Union." The same
Congressman—and his fellow Radical Republicans—put pressure on
Lincoln to rapidly emancipate the slaves, whereas moderate
Republicans came to accept gradual, compensated emancipation and
colonization.
Copperheads,
the
border states and
War Democrats opposed emancipation,
although the border states and War Democrats eventually accepted it
as part of
total war needed to save the
Union.
In 1861, Lincoln expressed the fear that premature attempts at
emancipation would mean the loss of the border states. He believed
that "to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole
game." At first, Lincoln reversed attempts at emancipation by
Secretary of War
Simon Cameron and
Generals
John C. Fremont (in Missouri) and
David Hunter (in South Carolina, Georgia and
Florida) in order to keep the loyalty of the border states and the
War Democrats.
Lincoln mentioned his Emancipation Proclamation to members of his
cabinet on July 21, 1862. Secretary of State
William H. Seward told Lincoln to wait for a victory
before issuing the proclamation, as to do otherwise would seem like
"our last shriek on the retreat".
In September 1862 the Battle of
Antietam
provided this opportunity, and the subsequent
War Governors' Conference
added support for the proclamation. Lincoln had already
published a letter encouraging the border states especially to
accept emancipation as necessary to save the Union. Lincoln later
said that slavery was "somehow the cause of the war". Lincoln
issued his preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation on
September 22, 1862, and said that a final proclamation would be
issued if his gradual plan based on compensated emancipation and
voluntary colonization was rejected. Only the District of Columbia
accepted Lincoln's gradual plan, and Lincoln issued his final
Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In his letter to
Hodges, Lincoln explained his belief that "If slavery is not wrong,
nothing is wrong … And yet I have never understood that the
Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act
officially upon this judgment and feeling ... I claim not to have
controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled
me."
Since the Emancipation Proclamation was based on the President's
war powers, it only included territory held by Confederates at the
time. However, the Proclamation became a symbol of the Union's
growing commitment to add emancipation to the Union's definition of
liberty. Lincoln also played a leading role in getting Congress to
vote for the Thirteenth Amendment, which made emancipation
universal and permanent.
Enslaved African Americans did not wait for Lincoln's action before
escaping and seeking freedom behind Union lines.
From early years of
the war, hundreds of thousands of African Americans escaped to
Union lines, especially in Union-controlled areas like Norfolk and the Hampton Roads
region in 1862 Virginia, Tennessee from 1862 on,
the line of Sherman's march, etc. So many African Americans fled to
Union lines that commanders created camps and schools for them,
where both adults and children learned to read and write.
The
American Missionary
Association entered the war effort by sending teachers south to
such contraband camps, for instance, establishing schools in
Norfolk and on nearby plantations. In addition, nearly 200,000
African-American men served with distinction as soldiers and
sailors with Union troops. Most of those were escaped slaves.
Confederates enslaved captured black Union
soldiers, and black soldiers especially were shot when trying to
surrender at the Fort Pillow Massacre
. This led to a breakdown of the prisoner
exchange program, and the growth of prison camps such as Andersonville prison
in Georgia, where almost 13,000 Union prisoners of
war died of disease and starvation.
In spite of the South's shortage of manpower, until 1865, most
Southern leaders opposed arming slaves as soldiers. However,a few
Confederates discussed arming slaves since the early stages of the
war, and some free blacks had even offered to fight for the South.
In 1862 Georgian Congressman Warren Akin supported the enrolling of
slaves with the promise of emancipation, as did the Alabama
legislature. Support for doing so also grew in other Southern
states. A few all black Confederate militia units, most notably the
1st Louisiana Native
Guard, were formed in Louisiana at the start of the war, but
were disbanded in 1862. In early March, 1865, Virginia endorsed a
bill to enlist black soldiers, and on March 13 the Confederate
Congress did the same.
There still were over 250,000 slaves in Texas. Word did not reach
Texas about the collapse of the Confederacy until June 19, 1865.
African
Americans and others celebrate that day as Juneteenth, the day of freedom, in Texas
, Oklahoma
and some other states. It commemorates the
date when the news finally reached slaves at Galveston,
Texas
.
Legally, the last 40,000 or so slaves were freed in Kentucky by the
final ratification of the
Thirteenth
Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865.
Slaves still held in
New Jersey, Delaware
, West
Virginia
, Maryland,
Missouri and Washington,
D.C.
also became legally free on this
date.
Reconstruction to present
During
Reconstruction, it
was a serious question whether slavery had been permanently
abolished or whether some form of semi-slavery would appear after
the Union armies left. Over time a large
civil
rights movement arose to bring full civil rights and equality
under the law to all Americans.
Sharecropping
An 1867 federal law prohibited a descendant form of slavery known
as
sharecropping or
debt bondage, which still existed in the
New Mexico Territory as a
legacy of
Spanish imperial rule. Between
1903 and 1944, the Supreme Court ruled on several cases involving
debt bondage of black Americans, declaring these arrangements
unconstitutional. In actual practice, however, sharecropping
arrangements often resulted in
peonage for
both black and white farmers in the South.
Convict leasing
With emancipation a legal reality, white Southerners were concerned
with both controlling the newly freed slaves and keeping them in
the labor force at the lowest level. The system of
convict leasing began during Reconstruction
and was fully implemented in the 1880s. This system allowed private
contractors to purchase the services of convicts from the state or
local governments for a specific time period. African Americans,
due to “vigorous and selective enforcement of laws and
discriminatory sentencing” made up the vast majority of the
convicts leased. Writer Douglas A. Blackmon writes of the
system:
Educational issues
The anti-literacy laws after 1832 contributed greatly to the
problem of widespread illiteracy facing the
freedmen and other African Americans after
Emancipation and the Civil War 35 years later. The problem of
illiteracy and need for education was seen as one of the greatest
challenges confronting these people as they sought to join the
free enterprise system and
support themselves during Reconstruction and thereafter.
Consequently, many black and white religious organizations, former
Union Army officers and soldiers, and wealthy philanthropists were
inspired to create and fund educational efforts specifically for
the betterment of African Americans in the South. Blacks started
their own schools even before the end of the war.
Northerners helped
create numerous normal schools, such
as those that became Hampton University
and Tuskegee University
, to generate teachers. Blacks held teaching
as a high calling, with education the first priority for children
and adults. Many of the most talented went into the field. Some of
the schools took years to reach a high standard, but they managed
to get thousands of teachers started. As W. E. B. Du Bois noted,
the black colleges were not perfect, but "in a single generation
they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South" and "wiped
out the illiteracy of the majority of black people in the
land."
Northern philanthropists continued to support black education in
the 20th century, even as tensions rose within the black community,
exemplified by Dr. Booker T. Washington and Dr.
W. E.
B. Du
Bois, as to the proper emphasis between industrial and
classical academic education at the college level. Collaborating
with Dr.
Booker T. Washington in the early decades of the
20th century, philanthropist
Julius
Rosenwald provided matching funds for community efforts to
build rural schools for black children. He insisted on white and
black cooperation in the effort, wanting to ensure that
white-controlled school boards made a commitment to maintain the
schools. By the 1930s local parents had helped raise funds
(sometimes donating labor and land) to create over 5,000 rural
schools in the South. Other philanthropists such as
Henry H. Rogers and
Andrew
Carnegie, each of whom had arisen from modest roots to become
wealthy, used matching fund grants to stimulate local development
of libraries and schools.
Apologies
On
February 24, 2007, the Virginia General Assembly
passed House Joint Resolution Number 728
acknowledging "with profound regret the involuntary servitude of
Africans and the exploitation of Native Americans, and call for
reconciliation among all Virginians." With the passing of
this resolution, Virginia became the first state to acknowledge
through the state's governing body their state's negative
involvement in slavery. The passing of this resolution came on the
heels of the 400th anniversary celebration of the city of
Jamestown, Virginia, which was one of
the first slave ports of the American colonies.
On July 30, 2008, the
United States House of
Representatives passed a resolution apologizing for American
slavery and subsequent discriminatory laws. The U.S. Senate
unanimously passed a similar resolution on June 18, 2009; it also
explicitly states that it cannot be used for restitution
claims.
Arguments used to justify slavery
"A necessary evil"
In the 19th century, proponents of slavery often defended the
institution as a "necessary evil". It was feared that emancipation
would have more harmful social and economic consequences than the
continuation of slavery. In 1820,
Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter that
with slavery:
Robert E. Lee wrote in 1856:
Alexis de Tocqueville, in
Democracy in America,
also expressed an oppostion to slavery, but felt that the existence
of a multiracial society without slavery untenable, and observed
prejudice against negroes increasing as they were granted more
rights (for example, in northern states). He considered the
attitudes of white southerners, and the concentration of the black
population in the south–due to exportation resulting from
restrictions in the north, and climatic and economic reasons–that
was bringing the white and black population to a state of
equilibrium, as a danger to both races. Thus, because of the racial
differences between master and slave, the latter could not be
emancipated.
"A positive good"
However, as the abolition agitation increased and the planting
system expanded, apologies for slavery became more faint in the
South. Then apologies were superseded by claims that slavery was a
beneficial scheme of labor control.
John
C. Calhoun, in a famous speech
in the
Senate in 1837, declared
that slavery was "instead of an evil, a good—a positive good."
Calhoun supported his view with the following reasoning: in every
civilized society one portion of the community must live on the
labor of another; learning, science, and the arts are built upon
leisure; the African slave, kindly treated by his master and
mistress and looked after in his old age, is better off than the
free laborers of Europe; and under the slave system conflicts
between capital and labor are avoided. The advantages of slavery in
this respect, he concluded, "will become more and more manifest, if
left undisturbed by interference from without, as the country
advances in wealth and numbers."
Others who also moved from the idea of necessary evil to positive
good are
James Henry Hammond and
George Fitzhugh. Hammond, like
Calhoun, believed slavery was needed to build the rest of society.
In a speech to the Senate on March 4, 1858, Hammond developed his
Mudsill Theory defending his view on slavery stating, “Such a class
you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads
progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very
mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as
well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the
one or the other, except on this mud-sill.” He argued that the
hired laborers of the North are slaves too: “The difference… is,
that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is
no starvation, no begging, no want of employment,” while those in
the North had to search for employment. George Fitzhugh wrote that,
“the Negro is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a
child.” In "The Universal Law of Slavery" Fitzhugh argues that
slavery provides everything necessary for life and that the slave
is unable to survive in a free world because he is lazy, and cannot
compete with the intelligent European white race.
Native Americans
Enslavement of Native Americans
During the 17th and 18th century,
Indian
slavery, the enslavement of Native Americans by
European colonists,
was common.
Many of these Native slaves were exported to
off-shore colonies, especially the "sugar islands" of the Caribbean
. Historian Alan Gallay estimates that from
1670-1715, British slave traders sold between 24,000 and 51,000
Native Americans from what is now the southern part of the
U.S.
Slavery
of Native Americans was organized in colonial and Mexican California
through Franciscan
missions, theoretically entitled to ten years of Native labor, but
in practice maintaining them in perpetual servitude, until their
charge was revoked in the mid-1830s. Following the 1847–1848
invasion by U.S. troops, Native
Californians were enslaved in the new state from statehood in 1850
to 1867. Slavery required the posting of a bond by the slave holder
and enslavement occurred through raids and a four-month servitude
imposed as a punishment for Indian "
vagrancy".
Slavery among Native Americans
The
Haida and Tlingit
Indians who lived along southeast Alaska
's coast
were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave-traders,
raiding as far as California. Slavery was hereditary after
slaves were taken as
prisoners of
war. Among some
Pacific
Northwest tribes, about a quarter of the population were
slaves. Other slave-owning tribes of North America were, for
example,
Comanche of Texas,
Creek of Georgia, the fishing societies, such
as the
Yurok, that lived along the coast from
what is now Alaska to California, the
Pawnee,
and
Klamath.
After 1800, the
Cherokees and some other
tribes started buying and using black slaves, a practice they
continued after being relocated to
Indian Territory in the 1830s.
The nature of
slavery in
Cherokee society often mirrored that of white slave-owning
society. The law barred intermarriage of Cherokees and blacks,
whether slave or free. Cherokee who aided slaves were punished with
one hundred lashes on the back. In Cherokee society, blacks were
barred from holding office, bearing arms, and owning property, and
they made it illegal to teach blacks to read and write.
By contrast, the
Seminoles welcomed into
their nation African Americans who had
escaped slavery (
Black Seminoles).
Indian slavery after the Emancipation Proclamation
A few captives from other tribes who were used as slaves were not
freed when African-American slaves were emancipated. Ute Woman, a
Ute captured by the Arapaho and later sold to a Cheyenne, was one
example. Used as a prostitute for sale to American soldiers at
Cantonment in the Indian Territory, she lived in slavery until
about 1880 when she died of a hemorrhage resulting from "excessive
sexual intercourse".
Barbary states
According to Robert Davis, between 1 million and 1.25 million
Europeans were captured by
Barbary
pirates and sold as slaves in
North
Africa and
Ottoman Empire between
the 16th and 19th centuries. Because of the large numbers of
Britons captured by the Barbary States and in other venues,
captivity was the other side of exploration and empire. Captivity
narratives originated as a literary form in the 17th century. They
were widely published and read, preceding those of colonists
captured by American Indians in North America. Slave-taking
persisted into the 19th century when Barbary pirates would capture
ships and enslave the crew.
Between 1609 and 1616, England
alone had 466 merchant ships lost to Barbary
pirates.
United States
commercial ships were not immune from pirate
attacks. In 1783, the United States made peace with, and
gained recognition from, the
British
monarchy.
In 1784 the first American ship was seized
by pirates from Morocco
. By late 1793, a dozen American ships had
been captured, goods stripped and everyone enslaved. After some
serious debate, the government created the
United States Navy in March 1794. This
new military presence helped to stiffen American resolve to resist
the continuation of tribute payments, leading to the two
Barbary Wars along the North African coast: the
First Barbary War from 1801 to
1805 and the
Second Barbary War
in 1815. Payments in ransom and tribute to the Barbary states had
amounted to 20% of United States government annual revenues in
1800. It was not until 1815 that naval victories ended tribute
payments by the U.S. Some European nations continued annual
payments until the 1830s.
Free black people and slavery
Some slaveholders were black or had some black ancestry. In 1830
there were 3,775 such slaveholders in the South, with 80% of them
located in Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. There
were economic differences between free blacks of the Upper South
and Deep South, with the latter fewer in number, but wealthier and
typically of mixed race.
Half of the black slaveholders lived in
cities rather than the countryside, with most in New Orleans and
Charleston
. Especially New Orleans had a large,
relatively wealthy
free black population
(
gens de couleur) composed
of people of mixed race, who had become a third class between
whites and enslaved blacks under French and Spanish rule.
Relatively few slaveholders were “substantial planters.” Of those
who were, most were of mixed race, often endowed by white fathers
with some property and social capital. Historians John Hope
Franklin and Loren Schweninger wrote:
Historian Ira Berlin wrote:
Free blacks were perceived “as a continual symbolic threat to
slaveholders, challenging the idea that ‘black’ and ‘slave’ were
synonymous.” Free blacks were seen as potential allies of fugitive
slaves and “slaveholders bore witness to their fear and loathing of
free blacks in no uncertain terms." For free blacks, who had only a
precarious hold on freedom, “slave ownership was not simply an
economic convenience but indispensable evidence of the free blacks”
determination to break with their slave past and their silent
acceptance – if not approval – of slavery.”
Historian James Oakes notes that, “The evidence is overwhelming
that the vast majority of black slaveholders were free men who
purchased members of their families or who acted out of
benevolence.” After 1810 southern states made it increasingly
difficult for any slaveholders to free slaves. Often the purchasers
of family members were left with no choice but to maintain, on
paper, the owner-slave relationship. In the 1850s “there were
increasing efforts to restrict the right to hold bondsmen on the
grounds that slaves should be kept ‘as far as possible under the
control of white men only.”
In his 1985 statewide study of black slaveholders in South
Carolina, Larry Koger challenged this benevolent view. He found
that the majority of black slaveholders appeared to hold slaves as
a commercial decision. For instance, he noted that in 1850 more
than 80% of black slaveholders were of mixed race, but nearly 90%
of their slaves were classified as black. He also noted the number
of small artisans in Charleston who held slaves to help with their
businesses.
Historiography of American slavery
Historian Peter Kolchin, writing in 1993, noted that until recently
historians of slavery concentrated more on the behavior of
slaveholders than on slaves. Part of this was related to the fact
that most slaveholders were literate and able to leave behind a
written record of their perspective. Most slaves were illiterate
and unable to create a written record. There were differences among
scholars as to whether slavery should be considered a benign or a
“harshly exploitive” institution.
Kolchin described the state of historiography in the early
twentieth century as follows:
Historians James Oliver Horton and Louise Horton described
Phillips' mindset, methodology and influence:
The racist attitude concerning slaves carried over into the
historiography of the Dunning School of reconstruction history,
which dominated in the early 20th century. Writing in 2005,
historian Eric Foner states:
Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, historiography moved away from
the “overt” racism of the Phillips era. However, historians still
emphasized the slave as an object. Whereas Phillips presented the
slave as the object of benign attention by the owners, historians
such as Kenneth Stampp changed the emphasis to the mistreatment and
abuse of the slave.
In the culmination of the slave as victim, Historian Stanley M.
Elkins in his 1959 work “Slavery: A Problem in American
Institutional and Intellectual Life” compared United States slavery
to the brutality of the
Nazi
concentration camps. He stated the institution destroyed the
will of the slave, creating an “emasculated, docile
Sambo” who identified totally with the
owner. Elkins' thesis immediately was challenged by historians.
Gradually historians recognized that in addition to the effects of
the owner-slave relationship, slaves did not live in a “totally
closed environment but rather in one that permitted the emergence
of enormous variety and allowed slaves to pursue important
relationships with persons other than their master, including those
to be found in their families, churches and communities.”
Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman in the 1970s, through their
work "Time on the Cross," presented the final attempt to salvage a
version of the Sambo theory, picturing slaves as having
internalized the
Protestant work
ethic of their owners. In portraying the more benign version of
slavery, they also argue in their 1974 book that the material
conditions under which the slaves lived and worked compared
favorably to those of free workers in the agriculture and industry
of the time.
In the 1970s and 1980s, historians made use of archaeological
records, black folklore, and statistical data to describe a much
more detailed and nuanced picture of slave life. Relying also on
autobiographies of ex-slaves and former slave interviews conducted
in the 1930s by the Federal Writers' Project, historians described
slavery as the slaves experienced it. Far from slaves' being
strictly victims or content, historians showed slaves as both
resilient and autonomous in many of their activities. Despite the
efforts at autonomy and their efforts to make a life within
slavery, current historians recognize the precariousness of the
slave's situation. Slave children quickly learned that they were
subject to the direction of both their parents and their owners.
They saw their parents disciplined just as they came to realize
that they also could be physically or verbally abused by their
owners. Historians writing during this era include John Blassingame
(“Slave Community”), Eugene Genovese (“Roll, Jordon, Roll”), Leslie
Howard Owens (“This Species of Property”), and Herbert Gutman (“The
Black Family in Slavery and Freedom”).
Important work on slavery has continued; for instance, in 2003
Steven Hahn published the Pulitze Prize-winning account (
A
Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South
from Slavery to the Great Migration), which examined how
slaves built community and political understanding even while
enslaved, so they quickly began to form new associations and
institutions when emancipated, including a black church separate
from white control.
Modern slavery
Although slave ownership by private individuals and businesses has
been illegal in the United States since 1865, the Thirteenth
Amendment to the United States Constitution specifically exempts
the judiciary, permitting the enslavement of individuals "as a
punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly
convicted".
The
United
States Department of Labor
occasionally prosecutes cases against people for
false imprisonment and involuntary servitude. These
cases often involve
illegal
immigrants who are forced to work as slaves in factories to pay
off a debt claimed by the people who transported them into the
United States. Other cases have involved
domestic workers.
There have been incidents of slavery amongst illegal immigrants
working in agriculture.
The Immokalee
region in southern Florida, which grows most of the
tomatoes eaten in the United States during the cold months, has had
many cases of slavery. Since 1997, several prosecutions have
resulted in over 1,000 slaves being freed.
The New York Times, ABC News, and
The San Francisco
Chronicle, among others, have reported on child and teenage
sexual slavery in the United States.
There are also reports on children working in organized criminal
businesses and in legitimate businesses under both humane and
inhumane conditions.
In 2002,
the U.S.
Department of State
repeated an earlier CIA estimate
that each year, about 50,000 women and children are brought against
their will to the United States for sexual exploitation.
Former
Secretary of
State Colin Powell said that "Here
and abroad, the victims of trafficking toil under inhuman
conditions -- in brothels, sweatshops, fields and even in private
homes."
See also
Notes
- David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage:
The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford
University Press. 2006. p. 124.
- The shaping of Black America: forthcoming 400th
celebration reminds America that Blacks came before The Mayflower
and were among the founders of this country.(BLACK
HISTORY)(Jamestown, VA)(Interview)(Excerpt) - Jet |
Encyclopedia.com
- The First Black Americans - US News and World
Report
- Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and David Eltis,
W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for
African and African-American Research, Harvard
University. Based on "records for 27,233 voyages that set out
to obtain slaves for the Americas".
- Introduction - Social Aspects of the Civil War
- Welcome to Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Black
History
- "The Irish in the Caribbean 1641-1837: An
Overview"
- "White Slavery, what the Scots already
know"
- Gottlieb Mittleberger, "Indentured Servitude",
Faulkner University
- Indentured Servitude in Colonial America, By
Deanna Barker, Frontier Resources
- "The curse of Cromwell", A Short History of
Northern Ireland, BBC. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
- White Servitude
- Price & Associates: Immigrant Servants
Database
- Frontline: Famous Families
- Taunya Lovell Banks, "Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth
Key's Freedom Suit - Subjecthood and Racialized Identity in
Seventeenth Century Colonial Virginia", Digital Commons Law,
University of Maryland Law School, accessed 21 Apr 2009
- "Slavery in America", Encyclopedia
Britannica's Guide to Black History. Retrieved October 24,
2007.
- Trinkley, M. "Growth of South Carolina's Slave Population",
South Carolina Information Highway. Retrieved October 24,
2007.
- Morison and Commager: Growth of the American Republic,
pp. 212-220.
- Africa Squadron: The U.S. Navy and the Slave
Trade, 1842-1861
- Kolchin p. 96. In 1834, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana grew half the nation's cotton; by 1859,
along with Georgia, they grew 78%. By 1859 cotton
growth in the Carolinas had fallen to just 10% of the national
total. Berlin p. 166. At the end of the War of 1812 there were less than 300,000
bales of cotton produced nationally. By 1820 this figure had
increased to 600,000, and by 1850 it had reached 4,000,000.
- Kolchin p. 96
- Berlin, Generations of Captivity" pp. 161-162
- Berlin, Generations of Captivity" pp. 168-169. Kolchin p.
96. Kolchin notes that Fogel and Engerman maintained that 84% of
slaves moved with their families but "most other scholars assign
far greater weight ... to slave sales." Ransome (p. 582) notes that
Fogel and Engermann based their conclusions on the study of some
counties in Maryland in the 1830s and attempt to extrapolate that
as reflective of the entire South over the entire period.
- Berlin, Generations of Captivity" pp. 166-169
- Kolchin p. 98
- Berlin, Generations of Captivity" pp. 168-171
- Berlin, Generations of Captivity" p. 174
- Berlin, Generations of Captivity" p. 175-177
- Berlin, Generations of Captivity" pp. 179-180
- Rawick, George P. "From Sundown to Sunup." Making of the Black
Community 1. (1972): n. pag. Web. 21 Nov 2009. .
- Howard
Zinn A People’s History of the United States. New
York, New York: Harper Collins Publications, 2003.
-
http://aae.greenwood.com/doc.aspx?i=14&fileID=2000db8f&chapterID=2000db8f-p2000db8f9970053001&path=/books/dps/
.
- Rawick, George P. "From Sundown to Sunup." Making of the Black
Community 1. (1972): n. pag. Web. 21 Nov 2009. .
- Rawick, George P. "From Sundown to Sunup." Making of the Black
Community 1. (1972): n. pag. Web. 21 Nov 2009. .
-
http://aae.greenwood.com/doc.aspx?i=4&fileID=WHL0748&chapterID=WHL0748-1046&path=/primarydoc/greenwood
.
- Lasgrayt, Deborah. Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the
Plantation South. 2. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
1999. Print. .
- Lasgrayt, Deborah. Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the
Plantation South. 2. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
1999. Print. .
- Genovese (1967)
- Stampp, Kenneth M. "Interpreting the Slaveholders' World: a
Review." Stampp writes, "Genovese writes with verve, and certainly
he is never dull. But, in my opinion, his attempt to demonstrate
the superiority of the Marxian interpretation of history must be
adjudged a failure. Some may explain this by arguing that the
book's point of view is not in fact very Marxian. My own
explanation is that the antebellum South, with its essentially
racial defense of slavery, and with its emphasis on caste rather
than class, is just about as unpromising a place for the
application of a Marxian interpretation of history as one can
imagine."
- Weiss, T. "Review of Robert William Fogel and Stanley L.
Engerman, "Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro
Slavery", Economic History News Services - Book
Reviews, November 16, 2001. Book review. Retrieved October 24,
2007.
- Douglass, Frederick "Autobiography of Frederick Douglass,
Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, 1845. Book. Retrieved June
10, 2008.
- Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their
Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation edited by
Ira Berlin, Marc
Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, p. 122-3. ISBN 978-1595582287
- Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of
Monticello: An American Family, New York: W.W. Norton,
2008
- James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p.259-260, accessed 13 Jan
2009
- Catterall, Helen T., Ed. 1926. Judicial Cases Concerning
Slavery and the Negro, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institute,
p. 247
- John Andrew, The Hanging of Arthur Hodge[1], Xlibris, 2000, ISBN 0-7388-1930-1. The assertion is
probably correct; there appear to be no other records of any
British slave owners being executed for holding slaves, and, given
the excitement which the Hodge trial created, it seems improbable
that another execution could have occurred without attracting
attention. Slavery as an institution in the British West Indies
only continued for another 23 years after Hodge's death.
- Vernon Pickering, A Concise History of the British Virgin
Islands, ISBN 10-0934139059, page 48
- Blacks in Colonial America, p101, Oscar
Reiss, McFarland & Company, 1997; Virginia Gazette, April 21, 1775,
University of Mary Washington
Department of Historic Preservation archives
- "Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 Slave code for
the District of Columbia, 1860."The Library of Congress.
Retrieved on July 19, 2008
- Mee, Arthur; Hammerton, J. A.; Innes, Arthur D., "Harmsworth history of the world, Volume 4", 1907,
Carmelite House, London; (at section: "Social Fabric of the Ancient
World, IV": in article: William Romaine Paterson: "The effects of
the slave system: man's inhumanity to man its own retribution"); at
page 2834; where the author cites this excerpt from the South
Carolina Black Code after saying:"Christian slave states in the
nineteenth century passed laws which are identical in spirit and
almost in letter with the slave laws of Babylon. We saw that in
Babylon death was the penalty for anyone who assisted a slave to
escape. The Code declared that ' if a man has induced either a male
or female slave from the house of a patrician or plebeian to leave
the city, he shall be put to death.'"
- "Louisiana's Code Noir (1724)" Copyright:
Blackpast.org. Retrieved on July 19, 2009
- Sklar, Kathryn. "Women who speak for an Entire Nation".
American British Women Compared at the World Anti-slavery
Convention, London 1840. The Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 59,
Wo. 4, November 1990. pp. 453-499.
- Richard S. Newman, Transformation of American abolitionism:
fighting slavery in the early Republic chapter 1
- .
- The People's Chronology, 1994 by James Trager
- de Toqueville p. 367.
- Berlin, "Generations of Captivity" p. 104
- Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the
American Revolution, New York: HarperCollins, 2006, p.406
- Department of Geography and Meteorology, "Baptists as a Percentage of all Residents,
2000" Valparaiso University, Valparaiso,
Indiana.
- Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance
in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978)
- McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom page 495
- McPherson, Battle Cry page 355, 494–6, quote from
George
Julian on 495.
- Lincoln's letter to O. H. Browning, September 22, 1861
- Stephen B. Oates, Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the
Myths, page 106
- Images of America: Altoona, by Sr. Anne Francis
Pulling, 2001, 10.
- Letter to Greeley, August 22, 1862
- Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865
- Lincoln's Letter to A. G. Hodges, April 4, 1864
- James McPherson, The War that Never Goes Away
- James McPherson, Drawn With the Sword, from the article Who
Freed the Slaves?
- Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat, page 335
- James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pages 791–798
- Bergeron, Arthur W., Jr. Louisianans in the Civil War,
"Louisiana's Free Men of Color in Gray", University of Missouri
Press, 2002, p. 107-109.
- Jay Winik, April 1865. The Month that Saved America,
p.51-59
- E. Merton Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in
Kentucky (1926) pp 268-270.
- Litwack (1998) p. 271
- James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South,
1860-1935, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 1988, pp.244-245
- Congress Apologizes for Slavery, Jim Crow
- Beard C.A. and M.R. Beard. 1921. History of the United States. No
copyright in the United States, p. 316.
- James Henry Hammond. "The 'Mudsill' Theory". Senate floor speech, March 4,
1858. Retrieved July 21, 2008.
- George Fitzhugh. "The Universal Law of Slavery" in The Black
American: A Documentary History, Third Ed. (Leslie H. Fishel,
Benjamin Quarles, ed.). 1970. Retrieved July 21, 2008.
- Gallay, Alan. (2002) The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of
the English Empire in the American South 1670-171. Yale
University Press: New York. ISBN 0-300-10193-7.
- Castillo, E.D. 1998. "Short Overview of California Indian History",
California Native American Heritage Commission, 1998. Retrieved
October 24, 2007.
- Beasley, Delilah L. (1918). "Slavery in
California," The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 3, No. 1.
(Jan.), pp. 33-44.
- Digital "African American Voices", Digital
History. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
- "Haida Warfare", civilization.ca.
Retrieved October 24, 2007.
- A history of the descendants of the slaves of Cherokee can be
found at Sturm, Circe. Blood Politics, Racial Classification,
and Cherokee National Identity: The Trials and Tribulations of the
Cherokee Freedmen. American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 22, No.
1/2. (Winter - Spring, 1998), pp. 230-258. In 1835, 7.4% of
Cherokee families held slaves. In comparison, nearly one-third of
white families living in Confederate states owned slaves in 1860.
Further analysis of the 1835 Federal Cherokee Census can be found
in Mcloughlin, WG. "The Cherokees in Transition: a Statistical
Analysis of the Federal Cherokee Census of 1835". 'Journal of
American History, Vol. 64, 3, 1977, p. 678. A discussion on the
total number of Slave holding families can be found in Olsen, Otto
H. "Historians and the extent of slave ownership in the Southern
United States", Civil War History, December 2004 (Accessed
here June 8, 2007)
- Duncan, J.W. 1928. "Interesting ante-bellum laws of the Cherokee, now
Oklahoma history". Chronicles of Oklahoma
6(2):178-180. Retrieved July 13, 2007.
- Davis, J. B. 1933. "Slavery in the Cherokee nation".
Chronicles of Oklahoma 11(4):1056-1072.
Retrieved July 13, 2007.
- Page 124, Donald J. Berthrong, The Cheyenne and Arapaho
Ordeal: Reservation and Agency Life in the Indian Territory, 1875
to 1907, University of Oklahoma (1976), hardcover, 402 pages,
ISBN 0-8061-1277-8
- Davis, Robert. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White
Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy,
1500-1800.[2]
- "When Europeans were slaves: Research suggests
white slavery was much more common than previously believed",
Research News, Ohio State University
- Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World,
1600-1850, London: Jonathan Cape, 2002, pp. 9-11
- Rees Davies, "British Slaves on the Barbary Coast",
BBC, 1 July 2003
- The Mariners' Museum: The Barbary Wars, 1801-1805
- Richard Leiby, "Terrorists by Another Name: The Barbary
Pirates", The Washington Post, October 15,
2001
- Stampp p. 194. Oakes pp.47-48.
- Mason pp. 19-20
- Berlin, Generations of Captivity, p. 138
- Oakes pp. 47-48
- Oakes pp. 47-49
- Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Masters in South
Carolina, 1790-1860, Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press, 1985, Foreword
- Kolchin p. 134
- Kolchin p. 135. David and Temin p. 741. The latter wrote, “The
vantage point correspondingly shifted from that of the master to
that of his slave. The reversal culminated in Kenneth M. Stampp's
‘The Peculiar Institution’ (1956), which rejected both the
characterization of blacks as a biologically and culturally
inferior, childlike people, and the depiction of the white planters
as paternal Cavaliers coping with a vexing social problem that was
not of their own making.”
- Kolchin p. 136
- Kolchin pp. 137-143. Horton and Horton p. 9
- Politics of the Plate: The Price of Tomatoes,
by Barry Eastbrook, Gourmet Magazine, March 2009
Bibliography
Primary sources
- Albert, Octavia V.
Rogers. The House of
Bondage Or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves. Oxford
University Press, 1991. Primary sources with commentary. ISBN
0-19-506784-3
- Berlin, Ira, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowlands, eds.
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867
5 vol Cambridge University Press, 1982. Very large collection of
primary sources regarding the end of slavery
- Berlin, Ira, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, eds.
Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their
Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation The New
Press: 2007. ISBN 978-1595582287
- Blassingame, John W., ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of
Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies.Louisiana
State University Press, 1977.
-
A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave (1845) (Project Gutenberg: [34143]),
(Audio book at FreeAudio.org [34144])
- "The Heroic Slave." Autographs for Freedom. Ed. Julia
Griffiths Boston: Jewett and Company, 1853. 174-239. Available at
the Documenting the American South website[34145].
- Frederick Douglass My
Bondage and My Freedom (1855) (Project Gutenberg: [34146])
- Frederick Douglass Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass (1892)
- Frederick Douglass Collected Articles Of Frederick Douglass, A
Slave (Project Gutenberg)
- Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies by Frederick
Douglass, Henry Louis Gates,
Jr. Editor. (Omnibus of all three) ISBN 0-940450-79-8
- Litwack, Leon Been in the Storm
So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. (1979) Winner of the 1981
National Book Award for history
and the 1980 Pulitzer Prize
for History.
- Litwack, Leon North of Slavery:
The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (University of Chicago
Press: 1961)
- Document: "List Negroes at Spring Garden with their
ages taken January 1829" (title taken from document)
- Missouri History Museum Archives Slavery Collection
- Rawick, George P., ed. The American Slave: A Composite
Autobiography . 19 vols. Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972.
Collection of WPA interviews made in 1930s with ex-slaves
Historical studies
- Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African
American Slaves. (2003) ISBN 0-674-01061-2.
- Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries
of Slavery in North America. Harvard University Press, 1998.
ISBN 0-674-81092-9
- Berlin, Ira and Ronald Hoffman, eds. Slavery and Freedom in
the Age of the American Revolution University Press of
Virginia, 1983. essays by scholars
- Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The
Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War
II. (2008) ISBN 978-0-385-50625-0.
- Blassingame, John W. The
Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South
Oxford University Press, 1979. ISBN 0-19-502563-6.
- David, Paul A. and Temin, Peter. Slavery:The Progressive
Institution? The Journal of Economic History. Vol. 34, No. 3
(September 1974)
- David Brion Davis. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of
Slavery in the New World (2006)
- De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. (1994
Edition by Alfred A Knopf, Inc) ISBN 0-679-43134-9
- Elkins, Stanley. Slavery : A Problem in American
Institutional and Intellectual Life. University of Chicago
Press, 1976. ISBN 0-226-20477-4
- Fehrenbacher, Don E. Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred
Scott Case in Historical Perspective Oxford University Press,
1981
- Fogel, Robert W. Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and
Fall of American Slavery W.W. Norton, 1989. Econometric
approach
- Foner, Eric. Forever Free.(2005) ISBN
0-375-40259-4
- Franklin, John Hope and Schweninger. Runaway Slaves: Rebels
on the Plantation. (1999) ISBN 0-19-508449-7.
- Gallay, Alan. The Indian Slave Trade (2002).
- Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the
Slaves Made Pantheon Books, 1974.
- Genovese, Eugene D. The Political Economy of Slavery:
Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South
(1967)
- Genovese, Eugene D. and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of
Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and
Expansion of Capitalism (1983)
- Hahn, Steven. "The Greatest Slave Rebellion in Modern History: Southern
Slaves in the American Civil War." Southern Spaces
(2004)
- Higginbotham, A. Leon, Jr. In the Matter of Color: Race and
the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period. Oxford
University Press, 1978. ISBN 0-19-502745-0
- Horton, James Oliver and Horton, Lois E. Slavery and the
Making of America. (2005) ISBN 0-19-517903-X
- Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877 Hill and
Wang, 1993. Survey
- Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the
Age of Jim Crow. (1998) ISBN 0-394-52778-x.
- Mason, Matthew. Slavery and Politics in the Early American
Republic. (2006) ISBN 13:978-0-8078-3049-9.
- Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The
Ordeal of Colonial Virginia W.W. Norton, 1975.
- Morris, Thomas D. Southern Slavery and the Law,
1619-1860 University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
- Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American
Slaveholders. (1982) ISBN 0-393-31705-6.
- Ransom, Roger L. Was It Really All That Great to Be a
Slave? Agricultural History, Vol. 48, No. 4 (October
1974)
- Scarborough, William K. The Overseer: Plantation Management
in the Old South (1984)
- Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the
Ante-Bellum South (1956) Survey
- Stampp, Kenneth M. "Interpreting the Slaveholders' World: a
Review." Agricultural History 1970 44(4): 407-412. ISSN
0002-1482
- Tadman, Michael. Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders,
and Slaves in the Old South University of Wisconsin Press,
1989.
- Wright, W. D. Historians and Slavery; A Critical Analysis
of Perspectives and Irony in American Slavery and Other Recent
Works Washington, D.C.: University Press of America
(1978)
References
- Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance
and Rebellion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007.
- Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. Encyclopedia of Emancipation and
Abolition in the Transatlantic World. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe,
2007.
State and local studies
- Fields, Barbara J. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle
Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century Yale University
Press, 1985.
- Clayton E. Jewett and John O. Allen; Slavery in the South:
A State-By-State History Greenwood Press, 2004
- Kulikoff, Alan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of
Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 University of
North Carolina Press, 1986.
- Minges, Patrick N.; Slavery in the Cherokee Nation: The
Keetoowah Society and the Defining of a People, 1855-1867 2003
deals with Indian slave owners.
- Mohr, Clarence L. On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and
Slaves in Civil War Georgia University of Georgia Press,
1986.
- Mooney, Chase C. Slavery in Tennessee Indiana
University Press, 1957.
- Olwell, Robert. Masters, Slaves, & Subjects: The
Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790
Cornell University Press, 1998.
- Reidy, Joseph P. From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the
Cotton Plantation South, Central Georgia, 1800-1880 University
of North Carolina Press, 1992.
- Ripley, C. Peter. Slaves and Freemen in Civil War
Louisiana Louisiana State University Press, 1976.
- Rivers, Larry Eugene. Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days
to Emancipation University Press of Florida, 2000.
- Sellers, James Benson; Slavery in Alabama University
of Alabama Press, 1950
- Sydnor, Charles S. Slavery in Mississippi. 1933
- Takagi, Midori. Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction:
Slavery in Richmond, Virginia, 1782-1865 University Press of
Virginia, 1999.
- Taylor, Joe Gray. Negro Slavery in Louisiana.
Louisiana Historical Society, 1963.
- Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South
Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion W.W. Norton
& Company, 1974.
Historiography
- John B. Boles and Evelyn T. Nolen, eds., Interpreting
Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford
W. Higginbotham (1987).
- Richard H. King, "Marxism and the Slave South", American
Quarterly 29 (1977), 117-31. focus on Genovese
- Peter Kolchin, "American Historians and Antebellum Southern
Slavery, 1959-1984", in William J. Cooper, Michael F. Holt, and
John McCardell, eds., A Master's Due: Essays in Honor of David
Herbert Donald (1985), 87-111
- James M. McPherson et al., Blacks in America:
Bibliographical Essays (1971).
- Peter J. Parish; Slavery: History and Historians
Westview Press. 1989
- Tulloch, Hugh. The Debate on the American Civil War
Era (1998) ch 2-4
Further reading
Oral histories of ex-slaves
- Before Freedom When I Just Can Remember: Twenty-seven Oral
Histories of Former South Carolina Slaves Belinda Hurmence,
1989. ISBN 0-89587-069-X
- Before Freedom: Forty-Eight Oral Histories of Former North
& South Carolina Slaves. Belinda Hurmence. Mentor Books:
1990. ISBN 0-451-62781-4
- God Struck Me Dead, Voices of Ex-Slaves Clifton H.
Johnson ISBN 0-8298-0945-7
Historical fiction
- David Bradley. The Chaneysville Incident.
New York: Harper and Row, 1981. ISBN 0-06-010491-0. An exploration
of the long-term effects of slavery, set mainly in Pennsylvania in
the 1970s, but also including scenes set in the antebellum South.
- Edward P. Jones. The
Known World. New York: Amistad, 2003. ISBN 0-06-055755-9.
The 2003 winner of the National Book Critic Circle for fiction and 2004
winner of the Pulitzer Prize
for Fiction.
- Toni Morrison. Beloved. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1987. ISBN
1-58060-120-0. The winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize, this novel by Nobel Prize laureate Morrison examines the
effect of slavery on one African-American family.
- Alice Randall. The Wind Done Gone. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 2001. ISBN 0-618-11309-7. A reimagining of the story of
Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936) from the
point of view of Scarlett O'Hara's
half-sister Cynara, a mulatto slave on the
O'Hara plantation.
- Barry Unsworth. Sacred Hunger. London: Hamish Hamilon,
1992. ISBN 0-241-13003-4. A 1992 winner of the Booker Prize, this novel by a British novelist
centers around a rebellion on a British slave ship bound for
America in the mid-18th century. The novel's climactic sequence is
set on the coast of colonial Florida.
Literary and cultural criticism
External links
- Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the
Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
- Voices from the Days of Slavery, interviews of
23 former slaves recorded between 1932 and 1975, American Folklife
Center, Library of Congress
- Report of the Brown University Steering Committee
on Slavery and Justice
- "John Brown's body and blood" by Ari Kelman: a
review in the TLS, February 14, 2007.
- Slavery and the Making of America - PBS - WNET, New
York (4-Part Series)
- Timeline of Slavery in America
- Images of slavery drawn by Thomas Nast (has background music)
- History of Slavery in America at Slaveryinamerica
- Teaching resources about Slavery and Abolition on
blackhistory4schools.com
- Slavery in the United States from EH.Net -
Economic History Services by Jenny B. Wahl of Carleton College
- Map of 1820 showing free and slave territories.
- Classics on American Slavery collection of old
documents available on-line through Dinsmore Documentation
- Slavery: A Dehumanizing Institution by Nell Irvin
Painter, historian and author of Creating Black Americans
- New Georgia Encyclopedia (Slavery in Antebellum
Georgia)
- American
topics sidebarbooks.html WWW-VL: Online Books on Slavery in
America
- Slavery Illustrated, in the Histories of Zangara
and Maquama, Two Negroes Stolen From Africa and Sold Into
Slavery. Related by Themselves. Manchester: Wm. Irwin, London:
Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1849.
- Recollections of Slavery by a Runaway Slave. The
Emancipator, August 23, September 13, September 20, October 11,
October 18, 1838.
- University of North Carolina Press on finding
freedom and liberty in BNA-Canada
- Account of an African Prince Sold into Slavery -
Islamica Magazine
- The Underground Railroad: Escape from Slavery |
Scholastic.com
- Stace
England & The Salt Kings concept Music CD on "The Old Slave
House" in Illinois
- Grand Valley State University Civil War and Slavery
digital collection
- Susan Harbage Page
and Juan Logan. "Prop Master at Charleston's Gibbes Museum of
Art", Southern Spaces, 21 September 2009.
http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2009/propmaster/1a.htm.