History of Slavery in the United States
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Introduction
Slavery, the practice of keeping people in servitude and buying and selling them as chattel (movable) property, was a worldwide phenomenon, especially in areas where there was plenty of land but a shortage of labor.Slavery in Colonial America
Twenty blacks are recorded as being brought by a Dutch man of war and sold to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 as indentured servants. Three are believed to have been named Isabella, Antoney and Pedro. There is evidence that Isabella and Antoney later gave birth to a son named William. This "William Tucker" is now considered the first African American born in the English colonies in North America.
The transformation from indentured servitude (servants contracted to work for a set amount of time) to racial slavery happened gradually. There are no laws regarding slavery early in Virginia's history. By 1640, the Virginia courts had sentenced at least one black servant to slavery.
Three servants working for a farmer named Hugh Gwyn ran away to Maryland. Two were white; one was black. They were captured in Maryland and returned to Jamestown, where the court sentenced all three to thirty lashes -- a severe punishment even by the standards of 17th-century Virginia. The two white men were sentenced to an additional four years of servitude -- one more year for Gwyn followed by three more for the colony. But, in addition to the whipping, the black man, a man named John Punch, was ordered to "serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life here or elsewhere."
It wasn't until 1661 that a reference to slavery entered into Virginia law, and this law was directed at white servants -- at those who ran away with a black servant. The following year, the colony went one step further by stating that children born would be bonded or free according to the status of the mother.
The transformation had begun, but it wouldn't be until the Slave Codes of 1705 that the status of African Americans would be sealed.
Originally in the American colonies, 1600 to 1800, American Indians (Native Americans) and other groups, mostly white Europeans such as captured soldiers, minor criminals, etc., were used as slaves (indentured servants, see Bound Over by John Van Der Zee), but by the 19th century almost all slaves were blacks. During the British colonial period, slaves were used mostly in the Southern colonies and to a lesser degree in the Northern colonies as well. Early on, slaves (indentured servants) were most useful in the growing of indigo, rice, and tobacco; cotton was only a side crop. Nevertheless, it was clear that slaves were most economically viable in plantation-style agriculture. Many landowners began to grow increasingly dependent on slave labor for their livelihood, and legislatures responded accordingly by increasingly stricter regulations on forced labor practices, known as the Slave codes.
1750s to 1850s
Some of the British colonies placed restrictions on the practice of slavery, others banned it completely, such as Rhode Island in 1774. The economic value of plantation slavery was reinforced 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-growing industry by increasing the quantity of cotton that could be processed in a day by fiftyfold. The result was explosive growth in the cotton industry, and a proportionate increase in the demand for slave labor in the South. However, at the same time, the Northern states banned slavery. This was due to the influence of revolutionary ideals.
Just as demand for slaves was increasing, however, supply was restricted. The United States Constitution, adopted in 1787, prevented Congress from banning the importation of slaves before 1808. On January 1 that year, Congress acted to ban further imports. Any new slaves would have to be descendants of ones that were currently in the US. However, the internal U.S. 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 overland 'slave trade' from Tidewater Virginia and the Carolinas to Georgia, Alabama, and Texas continued for another half-century.
Several slave rebellions took place during the 1700s and 1800s including the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831.
Historical records indicate that some slaveowners were more cruel to slaves than others. Some slaveowners raped and whipped slaves, and even cut off limbs of slaves who tried to escape, while other slaveowners provided materially for their slaves and were less physically abusive. In many households, treatment of slaves varied with the slave's skin color. Darker-skinned slaves worked in the fields, while lighter-skinned slaves or "house negroes" were made to work in the house and had better provisions. The United States slave population was the only slave population in history that increased through birth rather than importation. The interpretation of this fact has been a topic of much debate.
Because the Midwestern states decided in the 1820s not to allow slavery and because most Northeastern states became free states through local emancipation, a Northern bloc of free states solidified into one contiguous geographic area. The dividing line was the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon line (between slave-state Maryland and free-state Pennsylvania)..
Anti-Slavery
Throughout the first half of the 19th century, a movement to end slavery, called abolitionism, grew in strength throughout the United States. This reform took place amidst strong support of slavery among white Southerners, who began to refer to it as the "peculiar institution" in a defensive attempt to differentiate it from other examples of forced labor. There were several strains of aformentioned reform movements. Some wanted to ship the slaves back to Africa, and settle them in a new homeland there (some also wanted to deport any free blacks in the country); a movement of this type led to the foundation of the modern-day nation of Liberia. Others wanted to simply end the practice of slavery, leaving free blacks in the United States. Another divide was over whether or not slave-owners would be compensated for the value of their lost "property". There was further disagreement over the degree of militancy to use. Some abolitionists, such as John Brown, favored the use of armed force to foment uprisings amongst the slaves, while others preferred to use the legal system.
Influential leaders of the abolition movement (1810-60) included:
- William Lloyd Garrison - Published The Liberator newspaper
- Harriet Beecher Stowe - Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin
- Frederick Douglass - Nation's most powerful anti-slavery speaker, a former slave
- Harriet Tubman - Helped 350 slaves escape from the South, became known as a "conductor" on the "Underground Railroad".
- New York Revolt of 1712
- The Stono Rebellion(1739)
- New York Slave Insurrection of 1741
- Gabriel's Rebellion (1800)
- Louisiana Territory Slave Rebellion, led by Charles Deslandes (1811)
- George Boxley Rebellion (1815)
- Fort Blount Revolt (1816)
- Denmark Vesey Uprising (1822)
- Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831)
- Amistad Seizure (1839)
North and South grew further apart in 1845 with the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention on the premise that the Bible sanctions slavery and that it was acceptable for Christians to own slaves (the Southern Baptist Convention has long since renounced this interpretation). This split was triggered by the opposition of northern Baptists to slavery, and in particular by the 1844 statement of the Home Mission Society declaring that a person could not be a missionary and still keep slaves as property. The Methodist and Presbyterian churches likewise divided north and south, so that by the late 1850s only the Democratic Party was a national institution, and it split in the 1860 election.
1850s to the Civil War
After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, border wars broke out in Kansas Territory, where the question of whether it would be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state was left to the inhabitants. The radical abolitionist John Brown was active in the mayhem and killing in "Bleeding Kansas." At the same time, fears that the Slave Power was seizing full control of the national government swept anti-slavery Republicans into office.
The Supreme Court tried to resolve the issue, but its 1857 Dred Scott decision only inflamed tempers. The deciding opinion proclaimed that slavery's presence in the Midwest was lawful (when owners crossed into free states)--further proof for Republicans like Abraham Lincoln that the Slave Power had seized control of the Supreme Court.
The divisions became fully exposed with the 1860 presidential election. The electorate split four ways. One party (the Southern Democrats) endorsed slavery. One (the Republicans) denounced it. One (the Northern Democrats) said democracy required the people themselves to decide on slavery locally. The fourth (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 4 million slaves would be problematic for the slaver 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 like Lincoln and Chase 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.
The consequent United States Civil War, beginning in 1861, led to the end of chattel slavery in America. 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. The proclamation made the abolition of slavery an official war goal that was implemented as the Union took territory from the Confederacy.
Tennessee and all of the border states (except Kentucky) abolished slavery by early 1865. Legally, the last 40,000 or so slaves were freed in KentuckyE. Merton Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (1926) pp 268-70. by the final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in December of 1865. Other slaves were freed by the operation of the Emancipation proclamation as Union armies marched across the South. Many joined the Union Army as workers or troops, and others went to refugee camps or fled to cities. Emancipation as a reality came to the remaining slaves after the surrender of all Confederate troops in spring 1865. There still were over 250,000 slaves in Texas. They were freed as soon as word arrived of the collapse of the Confederacy, with the decisive day being (June 19, 1865). As Juneteenth it is celebrated in Texas, Oklahoma, and some other areas, and commemorates the date when the news finally reached the last slaves at Galveston, Texas.
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.
An 1867 federal law prohibited debt bondage or peonage, 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.
See also
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, John F. Blair, Publisher, 1989, trade paperback 125 pages, ISBN 089587069X
- Before Freedom: Forty-Eight Oral Histories of Former North & South Carolina Slaves, Belinda Hurmence, Mentor Books, 1990, mass market paperback, ISBN 0451627814
- God Struck Me Dead, Voices of Ex-Slaves, Clifton H. Johnson ISBN 0829809457
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 0195067843
- Berlin, Ira, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowlands, eds. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 5 vol Cambridge University Press, 1982. primary sources
- 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: [link]), (Audio book at FreeAudio.org [link])
- "The Heroic Slave." Autographs for Freedom. Ed. Julia Griffiths Boston: Jewett and Company, 1853. 174-239. Available at the Documenting the American South website[link].
- Frederick Douglass My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) (Project Gutenberg: [link])
- 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 0940450798
- Rawick, George P., ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography . 19 vols. Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972.
Historical studies: Secondary Sources
- Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. ISBN 0674810929
- Berlin, Ira and Ronald Hoffman, eds. Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution University Press of Virginia, 1983. essays by scholars
- David Brion Davis. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006)
- Elkins, Stanley. Slavery : A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. ISBN 0226204774
- Fehrenbacher, Don E. Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective Oxford University Press, 1981
- Fields, Barbara J. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century Yale University Press, 1985.
- Fogel, Robert W. Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery W.W. Norton, 1989.
- Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made Pantheon Books, 1974. one of the most influential studies
- 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)
- Higginbotham, A. Leon, Jr. In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period. Oxford University Press, 1978. ISBN 0195027450
- Clayton E. Jewett and John O. Allen; Slavery in the South: A State-By-State History Greenwood Press, 2004
- Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877 Hill and Wang, 1993. short survey
- Kulikoff, Alan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
- Patrick N. Minges; 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Scarborough, William K. The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South (1984)
- Sellers, James Benson; Slavery in Alabama University of Alabama Press, 1950
- Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956)
- Sydnor, Charles S. Slavery in Mississippi. 1933
- Tadman, Michael. Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
- 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. Baton Rouge: 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
Historical fiction
- Edward P. Jones. The Known World New York: Amistad, 2003. ISBN 0060557559 2003 winner of the [National Book Critic Circle] for fiction and 2004 winner of the [Pulitzer Prize] for fiction.
External links
- [Born in Slavery]: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
- [The Antislavery Literature Project] major academic center for primary sources
- [Images of slavery] drawn by Thomas Nast (has background music)
- [History of Slavery in America] a historical overview
- [Pierce Butler, Fanny Kemble, et al] by Gilbert Wesley Purdy. A review with considerable information relating to the great slave auction called "The Weeping Time".
- [Slavery in the United States] from EH.NET 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
- [Lanier On The Runaway Slaves at Fort Gadsden.] Sidney Lanier describes the history of a fascinating fort commandeered by runaway slaves.
- [WWW-VL: Online Books on Slavery in America]
- [University of North Carolina Press on finding freedom and liberty in BNA-Canada]
- [Account of an African Prince Sold into Slavery - Islamica Magazine]
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