History of slavery in the United States

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Slave sale in Easton, Maryland
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Slave sale in Easton, Maryland

The history of slavery in the United States began soon after Europeans first settled in what in 1776 became the United States. It legally ended with the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865.

From about 1619 until 1865, people of African descent were legally enslaved within the boundaries of the present United States. Indian slavery was widely practiced as well, especially in the 17th century. The economy of the early country was made possible in large part by the free labor afforded by slavery. Over a half million Africans were brought over from Africa during the slave trade, but because laws made the offspring of slaves as slaves, the slave population in the United States grew to 4 million by the 1860 Census.

Contents

[edit] Colonial America

Main article: Slavery in Colonial America

[edit] Indentured servitude to slavery

The first record of African slavery in Colonial America is of a Dutch ship which brought twenty blacks recorded and sold them to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 as indentured servants.

The transformation from indentured servitude 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."

Several Viriginian statutes with regard to slavery were enacted prior to 1660. One, Act XX, dated March 1642 involved the curtailment of marriage between slaves and non-slaves as well as slaves to each other. Subsequent acts were passed the following year assigning a punishment to runaway slaves.

The transformation had begun, but it would not be until the Slave codes of 1705 that the status of African Americans would be sealed.

This poster depicting the conditions on slave ships was influential in mobilizing public opinion against slavery in Britain and the United States.
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This poster depicting the conditions on slave ships was influential in mobilizing public opinion against slavery in Britain and the United States.

Originally in the American Colonies, Native Americans and other groups—mostly white Europeans such as captured soldiers or minor criminals—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, with few in the Northern colonies. Early on, slaves (indentured servants) were most useful in the growing of indigo, rice, and tobacco; cotton was a minor crop until the 19th century. 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.

[edit] Native Americans

During the 17th century, enslavement of Indians was common. Many of these Indian slaves were exported to other colonies, especially the "sugar islands" of the Caribbean. Historian Alan Gallay estimates the number of Indians in the South sold in the British slave trade from 1670-1715 at between 24,000 and 51,000. He also notes that during this period more Indian slaves were exported from Charles Town than African slaves were imported. Most of the Indian slaves were sent to the West Indies, but significant numbers were shipped north to Virginia, New York, and New England. Charles Town dominated the slave trade in the colonial era of the United States.[1]

Indian tribes often enslaved captives taken from other tribes; the slaves were not always treated as harshly as slaves who belonged to white slaveowners, although in some cases they were ritually tortured and killed.[2] Indian slaves were sometimes treated more like family than property. Some tribes deliberately increased their population by enslaving and assimilating other tribes. While these slaves had more freedom than African slaves, they were typically denied many rights and tribal status. They were not treated as trade commodities except when traded with Europeans.[3]

After 1800, the Cherokees and other tribes started buying and using black slaves, a practice they continued after being relocated to Indian Territory in the 1830s. The Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole tribes sent troops to both the Confederacy and the Union during the Civil War.[4] Their slaves were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.

[edit] Decline of slave trade

Some of the British colonies attempted to abolish the international slave trade, fearing that new Africans would be disruptive. Virginia's Acts to that effect were vetoed by the British Privy Council; Rhode Island forbade the importation of slaves completely in 1774. All of the states except Georgia had banned or limited it by 1786; Georgia did so in 1798 - although some of these laws were later repealed.[5]

[edit] 1776 to 1850

[edit] Treatment of slaves

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 (flogged in front of everyone, even little children), 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 were made to work in the house and had better provisions.

[edit] Beginnings of abolitionism

Main article: Abolitionism

Beginning in the 1750s, Quaker meetings attempted to persuade their members that they should not own slaves; some who resisted were expelled. Quakers dominated all the abolition societies. 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. [6]

The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 declares all men "born free and equal"; the slave Quork 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 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.

The large, well-funded American Colonization Society had an active program of shipping ex-slaves and free blacks who volunteered back to Africa to the American colony of Liberia.

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.

A very few abolitionists, such as John Brown, favored the use of armed force to foment uprisings among the slaves; others preferred to use the legal system.

Peter, a slave from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863. The scars are a result of a whipping by his overseer, who was subsequently discharged. It took two months to recover from the beating.
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Peter, a slave from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863. The scars are a result of a whipping by his overseer, who was subsequently discharged. It took two months to recover from the beating.

Influential leaders of the abolition movement (1810-60) included:

Slave uprisings that used armed force (1700 - 1859) include:

[edit] Rising tensions

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.

At the same time, the northern states banned slavery, though as Alexis De Toqueville pointed out in Democracy in America (1835), this was not always done with the best of motives. As the northern states abolished slavery, it did not always mean that the slaves were freed. In many cases, it simply encouraged slave owners to move their slaves to states which still allowed slavery. This resulted in a population movement of black Americans to the South. The southern states did not have this option of removing their black population since slaves were already a much higher proportion of the total population, and the international slave trade had been abolished. This led to a hardening of opinions in favor of slavery in the southern states out of fear of what the slaves would do if they were freed.

Just as demand for slaves was increasing, supply was restricted. The United States Constitution, adopted in 1787, prevented Congress from banning the importation of slaves before 1808. On January 1, 1808, Congress acted to ban further imports. Any new slaves would have to be descendants of ones that were currently in the U.S. 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.

Because of the three-fifths compromise in the United States Constitution, slaveholders exerted their power through the Federal Government and the resulting Federal Fugitive slave laws. Refugees from slavery fled the South across the Ohio River to the North via the Underground Railroad, and their physical presence in Cincinnati, Oberlin, and other Northern towns agitated Northerners. After 1854, Republicans fumed that Slave Power, especially the pro-slavery Democratic Party, controlled two or three branches of the Federal government.

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).

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 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.

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


[edit] 1850s to the Civil War

[edit] Bleeding Kansas

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.

[edit] Dred Scott

The Supreme Court tried to resolve the issue, but its 1857 Dred Scott decision only inflamed tempers. The deciding opinion claimed 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.

[edit] 1860 presidential election

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 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 like Lincoln 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.

[edit] War and emancipation

The consequent American 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. 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.

Simon Legree and Uncle Tom: A scene from Uncle Tom's Cabin, history's most famous abolitionist novel.
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Simon Legree and Uncle Tom: A scene from Uncle Tom's Cabin, history's most famous abolitionist novel.

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. Legally, the last 40,000 or so slaves were freed in Kentucky[7] by the final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in December 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. 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.

[edit] 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.

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. In actual practice, however, sharecropping arrangements often resuled in peonage for both black and white farmers in the South.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ 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
  2. ^ 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, pp. 187-191
  3. ^ 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, pg. 29
  4. ^ Meinig, D.W. (1993). The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Volume 2: Continental America, 1800-1867. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05658-3, pg. 487
  5. ^ Morison and Commager: Growth of the American Republicpp 212-220
  6. ^ Richard S. Newman, Transformation of American abolitionism : fighting slavery in the early Republic chapter 1
  7. ^ E. Merton Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (1926) pp 268-70.

[edit] References

  • 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. 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: [1]), (Audio book at FreeAudio.org [2])
  • "The Heroic Slave." Autographs for Freedom. Ed. Julia Griffiths Boston: Jewett and Company, 1853. 174-239. Available at the Documenting the American South website[3].
  • Frederick Douglass My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) (Project Gutenberg: [4])
  • 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
  • Rawick, George P., ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography . 19 vols. Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972.

[edit] Historical studies

  • Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge: 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
  • 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 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.
  • Gallay, Alan. The Indian Slave Trade (2002).
  • 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 0-19-502745-0
  • Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877 Hill and Wang, 1993. short survey
  • 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.
  • 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)
  • Tadman, Michael. Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

[edit] 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. 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.

[edit] 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 (1999) ch 2-4

[edit] Further reading

[edit] 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 0-89587-069-X
  • Before Freedom: Forty-Eight Oral Histories of Former North & South Carolina Slaves, Belinda Hurmence, Mentor Books, 1990, mass market paperback, ISBN 0-451-62781-4
  • God Struck Me Dead, Voices of Ex-Slaves, Clifton H. Johnson ISBN 0-8298-0945-7

[edit] Historical fiction


[edit] External links

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