Slavery in the United States

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Slavery in the United States began soon after English colonists first settled Virginia and lasted until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Before the widespread establishment of chattel slavery, 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.^[1] 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.^[2] In part because of the Southern colonies' devotion of resources to tobacco culture, which was labor intensive, by the end of the 17th century they had a higher number and proportion of slaves than in the north.^[3]

From 1654 until 1865, slavery for life was legal within the boundaries of the present United States.^[4] Most slaves were black and were held by whites, although some Native Americans and free blacks also held slaves. The majority of slaveholding was in the southern United States where most slaves were engaged in an efficient machine-like gang system of agriculture. According to the 1860 U.S. census, nearly four million slaves were held in a total population of just over 12 million in the 15 states in which slavery was legal.^[5] Of all 1,515,605 families in the 15 slave states, 393,967 held slaves (roughly one in four),^[6] amounting to 8% of all American families.^[7] Most households, however, had only a few slaves. The majority of slaves was held by planters, defined by historians as those who held 20 or more slaves.^[8] The planters achieved wealth and social and political power. Ninety-five percent of black people lived in the South, comprising one-third of the population there, as opposed to 2% of the population of the North.^[9]

The wealth of the United States in the first half of the 19th century was greatly enhanced by the labor of African Americans.^[10][11] But with the Union victory in the American Civil War, the slave-labor system was abolished in the South.^[12] This led to the decline of the antebellum Southern economy. The large southern cotton plantations became much less profitable because of the loss of the efficiencies in the gang system of agriculture.^[13] Northern industry, which had expanded rapidly before and during the war, surged even further ahead of the South's agricultural economy. Industrialists from northeastern states came to dominate many aspects of the nation's life, including social and some aspects of political affairs. The planter class of the South lost power temporarily. The rapid economic development following the Civil War laid the groundwork for the modern U.S. industrial economy.

Twelve million black Africans were shipped to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries.^[14][15] Of these, an estimated 645,000 (5.4% of the total) were brought to what is now the United States. The overwhelming majority were shipped to Brazil^[16] The slave population in the United States had grown to four million by the 1860 Census.^[17]

Contents 1 Colonial America 2 1776 to 1850 2.1 Second Middle Passage 2.2 Treatment of slaves 2.3 Women's rights 2.4 Abolitionist movement 2.5 Rising tensions 2.6 Internal Slave Trade 2.7 Religious institutions 2.8 Distribution of slaves 2.9 Nat Turner, anti-literacy laws 3 1850s to the Civil War 3.1 Bleeding Kansas 3.2 Dred Scott 3.3 1860 presidential election 3.4 War and emancipation 4 Reconstruction to present 4.1 Sharecropping 4.2 Educational issues 4.3 Apologies 5 Arguments used to justify slavery 5.1 "A necessary evil" 5.2 "A positive good" 6 Native Americans 6.1 Enslavement of Native Americans 6.2 Slavery among Native Americans 7 Barbary states 8 Free black people and slavery 9 Historiography of American slavery 10 Modern slavery 11 See also 12 Notes 13 Bibliography 13.1 Primary sources 13.2 Historical studies 14 References 14.1 State and local studies 14.2 Historiography 15 Further reading 15.1 Oral histories of ex-slaves 15.2 Historical fiction 16 Literary and cultural criticism 17 External links

[edit] Colonial America

Main article: Slavery in Colonial America

The first record of African slavery in Colonial America occurred in 1619. A Dutch ship, the White Lion, had captured 20 enslaved Africans in a battle with a Spanish ship bound for Mexico. The Dutch ship 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 [3]. 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,^[18] Scottish,^[19] English, and Germans, were brought over in substantial numbers as indentured servants,^[20] particularly in the British Thirteen Colonies.^[21] Over half of all white immigrants to the English colonies of North America during the 17th and 18th centuries consisted of indentured servants.^[22] 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, and at least one African American, Anthony Johnson, eventually became a landowner on the Eastern Shore and a slave-owner.^[23] 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.

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 area to become the 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.

The Virginia Slave codes of 1705 made clear the status of slaves. During the British colonial period, every colony had slavery. Those in the north were primarily house servants. Early on, slaves in the South worked on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice, and tobacco; cotton became a major crop after the 1790s.^[24] In South Carolina in 1720 about 65% of the population consisted of slaves.^[25] Slaves were used by rich farmers and plantation owners with commercial export operations. Backwoods subsistence farmers 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.^[26]

The West Africa Squadron was assisted by forces from the United States Navy, starting in 1820 with the USS Cyane. Initially this consisted of a few ships but was eventually formalised by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 into the Africa Squadron.^[27]

[edit] 1776 to 1850

[edit] Second Middle Passage

Part of a series on Slavery
Period and context
History · Antiquity Religious views: Biblical · Christian · Islamic · Jewish Slave trades: Atlantic · African · Arab · Asian Human trafficking · Sexual slavery · Abolitionism · Servitude
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As the nation expanded west, so did the cultivation of cotton^[28] 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.^[29] Historian Ira Berlin called this movement 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."^[30]

Although complete statistics are lacking, it is estimated that 1,000,000 slaves moved west 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 Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas received the most. 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 to be sold south by 1860.^[31]

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.^[32] 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 that were subject to sale.^[33]

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."^[34]

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 on their way across the Atlantic Ocean, but they were still higher than the normal death rate. Berlin summarizes the experience:

... the Second Middle Passage was extraordinarily lonely, debilitating, and dispiriting. Capturing the mournful character of one southward marching coffle, an observer characterized it as "a procession of men, women, and children resembling that of a funeral." Indeed, with men and women dying on the march or being sold and resold, slaves became not merely commodified but cut off from nearly every human attachment....

Murder and mayhem made the Second Middle Passage almost as dangerous for traders as it was for slaves, which was why the men were chained tightly and guarded closely. ... The coffles that marched slaves southward – like the slave ships that carried their ancestors westward – became mobile fortresses, and under such circumstances, flight was more common than revolt. Slaves found it easier – and far less perilous – to slip into the night and follow the North Star to the fabled land of freedom than to confront their heavily armed overlords.^[35]

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 in river bottoms with mosquitoes and other environmental challenges threatened the survival of slaves, who 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.^[36]

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 boost the quality of their lifestyle by raising their own livestock or tending vegetable gardens, for either their own consumption or trade, as they could in the eastern south.^[37]

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, and the preference was for 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.”^[38]

[edit] 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:

Now, I speak what I know, when I say it is like ‘casting pearls before swine' to try to persuade a negro to work. He must be made to work, and should always be given to understand that if he fails to perform his duty he will be punished for it.^[39]

According to both the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Brion Davis and Marxist 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,:

Yet we must never forget that these same "welfare capitalist" plantations in the Deep South were essentially ruled by terror. Even the most kindly and humane masters knew that only the threat of violence could force gangs of field hands to work from dawn to dusk "with the discipline," as one contemporary observer put it, "of a regular trained army." Frequent public floggings reminded every slave of the penalty for inefficient labor, disorderly conduct, or refusal to accept the authority of a superior.^[40]

On large plantations, slave overseers were authorized to whip and brutalize non-compliant 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.^[41] 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.^[42]

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 the belief that slave-breeding and sexual exploitation destroyed the black family as a myth. He argues that the family was the basic unit of social organization under slavery; it was to the economic interest of planters to encourage the stability of slave families, and most of them did so. Most slave sales were either of whole families or of individuals who were at an age when it would have been normal for them to have left the family.^[43] However, eye-witness testimony from slaves, such as Frederick Douglass, does not agree with this account. Frederick Douglass, who grew up as a slave in Maryland, reported the systematic separation of slave families. He also reports the widespread rape of slave women, in order to boost slave numbers. ^[44]

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.^[45]

As in President Thomas Jefferson's household, this was not merely an issue of skin color. Sometimes planters used light-skinned slaves as house servants because they were relatives. Several of Jefferson's household slaves were children of his father-in-law and an enslaved woman, who were brought to the marriage by Jefferson's wife.

However, 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.^[43]

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.^[43]

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."^[46]

In 1811, Arthur William Hodge was the first slave owner executed for the murder of a slave in the British West Indies.^[47] He though was not, as some have claimed, the first white person to have been lawfully executed for the killing of a slave.^[48] 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.^[49]

[edit] 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.

In 1837, an Antislavery Convention of American Women met in New York City with both black and white women participating. 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.^[50]

[edit] 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.^[51]

The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 declared 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 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.

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.

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:

• 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. Most famous for his book Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass.
• Harriet Tubman - helped 350 slaves escape from the South, became known as a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad.

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

• New York Revolt of 1712
• The Stono Rebellion (1739) in South Carolina
• New York Slave Insurrection of 1741
• Gabriel's Rebellion (1800) in Virginia
• Louisiana Territory Slave Rebellion, led by Charles Deslondes (1811)
• George Boxley Rebellion (1815) in Virginia
• Denmark Vesey Uprising in South Carolina (1822)
• Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831) in Virginia
• The Amistad Seizure (1839) on a Spanish ship

See also: List of notable opponents of slavery‎

[edit] 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-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 greatly increased demand for slave labor in the South.^[52]

At the same time, the northern states banned slavery, though as Alexis de Toqueville pointed out 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 provide any documentation that such transfers actually occurred to any great extent.^[53] In fact, the emancipation of slaves in the North led to the growth in the population of northern free blacks from several hundred in the 1770s to nearly 50,000 by 1810.^[54]

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 until 1808. On January 1, 1808, Congress acted to ban further imports. Any new slaves would have to be descendants of ones who were currently in the United States. 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.

[edit] 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 solidified into one contiguous geographic area which shared culture. The dividing line was the Mason-Dixon Line (between slave-state Maryland and free-state Pennsylvania) and the Ohio River.

[edit] 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.) 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.

[edit] Distribution of slaves

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^[55]

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	-

[edit] 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", led what became known as Nat Turner's Rebellion or the Southampton Insurrection. On a crusade 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 white militia.

Nat Turner was hanged and skinned. His fellow freedom fighters were also hanged. In addition to killing Turner and his fellow insurrectionists, more than a hundred innocent slaves who had nothing to do with the rebellion were also massacred by the white militia. 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 Virginia law against educating slaves, free blacks and children of whites and blacks. These laws were often defied by individuals, among whom was noted future Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.

[edit] 1850s to the Civil War

[edit] 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.

[edit] Dred Scott

Dred Scott was a 62-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 1847 and went through two state trials, the first denying and the second granting freedom. Ten 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 blacks 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.^[56]

[edit] 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.

[edit] War and emancipation

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.

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^[57] by the final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865. Slaves still held in New Jersey, Delaware, West Virginia, Maryland and Missouri also became legally free on this date.

[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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Educational issues

The anti-literacy laws after 1832 undoubtedly contributed greatly to the widespread illiteracy facing the freedmen and other African Americans after the Civil War and Emancipation 35 years later. After Emancipation, the unfairness of such laws helped draw attention to the problem of illiteracy as one of the great challenges confronting these people as they sought to join the free enterprise system and support themselves during Reconstruction and thereafter.

Consequently, many 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. They helped create normal schools to generate teachers, such as those which eventually became Hampton University and Tuskegee University. Stimulated by the work of educators such as Dr. Booker T. Washington, by the first part of the 20th century over 5,000 local schools had been built for blacks in the South using private matching funds provided by individuals such as Henry H. Rogers, Andrew Carnegie, and most notably, Julius Rosenwald, each of whom had arisen from modest roots to become wealthy.

[edit] 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."^[58] With the passing of this resolution, Virginia became the first of the 50 United States 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.

[edit] Arguments used to justify slavery

[edit] "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:

We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.^[59]

Robert E. Lee wrote in 1856:

There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence.^[60]

[edit] "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."^[61]

[edit] Native Americans

[edit] Enslavement of Native Americans

During the 17th 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.^[62]

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.^[63] 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".^[64]

[edit] 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, the slaves being prisoners of war. Among some Pacific Northwest tribes, about a quarter of the population were slaves.^[65][66] 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.^[24]

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.^[67]

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. Blacks 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 it was illegal to teach blacks to read and write.^[68][69]

By contrast, the Seminoles welcomed into their nation African Americans who had escaped slavery (Black Seminoles).

[edit] 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.^[70][71] 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.^[72] Even the United States was not immune. In 1783 the United States made peace with, and gained recognition from, the British monarchy, and 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 United States Navy was born 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^[73] and the Second Barbary War in 1815. Payments in ransom and tribute to the Barbary states amounted to 20% of United States government annual revenues in 1800.^[74] It was not until 1815 that naval victories ended tribute payments by the U.S., although some European nations continued annual payments until the 1830s.^[75]

[edit] 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. Half of these lived in cities rather than the countryside, with most in New Orleans and Charleston. Only a few were “substantial planters”, and, of those that were, most were of mixed race.^[76] Historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger wrote:

A large majority of profit-oriented free black slaveholders resided in the Lower South. For the most part, they were persons of mixed racial origin, often women who cohabited or were mistresses of white men, or mulatto men ... . Provided land and slaves by whites, they owned farms and plantations, worked their hands in the rice, cotton, and sugar fields, and like their white contemporaries were troubled with runaways.^[77]

Historian Ira Berlin wrote:

In slave societies, nearly everyone – free and slave – aspired to enter the slaveholding class, and upon occasion some former slaves rose into slaveholders’ ranks. Their acceptance was grudging, as they carried the stigma of bondage in their lineage and, in the case of American slavery, color in their skin.^[78]

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.^[79] 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 of – if not approval – of slavery.”^[80]

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.”^[81] In the early part of the 19th century, 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.”^[82]

[edit] 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.^[83]

Kolchin described the state of historiography in the early twentieth century as follows:

During the first half of the twentieth century, a major component of this approach was often simply racism, manifest in the belief that blacks were, at best, imitative of whites. Thus Ulrich B. Phillips, the era's most celebrated and influential expert on slavery, combined a sophisticated portrait of the white planters' life and behavior with crude passing generalizations about the life and behavior of their black slaves.^[84]

Historians James Oliver Horton and Louise Horton described Phillips' mindset, methodology and influence:

His portrayal of blacks as passive, inferior people, whose African origins made them uncivilized, seemed to provide historical evidence for the theories of racial inferiority that supported racial segregation. Drawing evidence exclusively from plantation records, letters, southern newspapers, and other sources reflecting the slaveholder's point of view, Phillips depicted slave masters who provided for the welfare of their slaves and contended that true affection existed between master and slave.^[85]

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:

Their account of the era rested, as one member of the Dunning school put it, on the assumption of “negro incapacity.” Finding it impossible to believe that blacks could ever be independent actors on the stage of history, with their own aspirations and motivations, Dunning et. al. portrayed African Americans either as “children”, ignorant dupes manipulated by unscrupulous whites, or as savages, their primal passions unleashed by the end of slavery.^[86]

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.^[87]

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.^[88] 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”).^[89]

[edit] 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.^[90]

Reports of child sexual slavery and on the business of working children in organized criminal businesses as well as in legitimate businesses and trading sexual favours for contracts and business in the United States under both inhuman and human conditions exist.

In 2002, the U.S. Department of State repeated an earlier CIA estimate^[91] that each year, about 50,000 women and children are brought against their will to the United States for sexual exploitation.^[92] 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."^[93]

President George W. Bush says he has taken action to combat human trafficking within U.S. borders and abroad.^[94][95]

[edit] See also

• Abraham Lincoln on slavery
• Cherokee freedmen controversy
• Colonization and the founding of Liberia
• Cornerstone Speech
• Frances Anne Kemble
• History of slavery
• History of slavery in Kentucky
• History of slavery in Missouri
• Hush harbor
• Partus
• Slave rebellion
• York (Lewis and Clark)
• White guilt

[edit] Notes

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] 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
  • The House of Bondage, or, Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves, Original and Life-Like complete text of original 1890 edition, along with cover & title page images, at website of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 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
• 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: [4]), (Audio book at FreeAudio.org [5])
• "The Heroic Slave." Autographs for Freedom. Ed. Julia Griffiths Boston: Jewett and Company, 1853. 174-239. Available at the Documenting the American South website[6].
• Frederick Douglass My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) (Project Gutenberg: [7])
• 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. Collection of WPA interviews made in 1930s with ex-slaves

[edit] 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
• 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
• 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.

[edit] 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.

[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. 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

• Edward P. Jones. The Known World New York: Amistad, 2003. ISBN 0-06-055755-9, 2003 winner of the National Book Critic Circle for fiction and 2004 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

[edit] Literary and cultural criticism

• Ryan, Tim A. Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with the Wind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2008.
• Van Deburg, William. Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture. Madsion: U of Wisconsin P, 1984.

[edit] 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
• "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 a historical overview
• Teaching resources about Slavery and Abolition on blackhistory4schools.com
• 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
• New Georgia Encyclopedia (Slavery in Antebellum Georgia)
• 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
• The Underground Railroad: Escape from Slavery | Scholastic.com
• Stace England & The Salt Kings concept Music CD on "The Old Slave House" in Illinois

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