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The origins of slavery in the colonial United States[1] are complex and there are several theories that have been proposed to explain the trade.[2][3]
In 1607, English settlers established Jamestown as the first permanent English colony in the New World.[4] Tobacco became the chief crop of the colony, due to the efforts of John Rolfe in 1611. Once it became clear that tobacco was going to drive the Jamestown colony, more labor was needed. At first, indentured servants were used as the needed labor.[5] These servants provided up to seven years of free service and had their trip to Jamestown paid for by someone in Jamestown. Once the seven years was over, the indentured servant was free to live in Jamestown as a regular citizen. However, colonists began to see indentured servant as too costly, and in 1619, Dutch traders brought the first African slaves to Jamestown.[6]
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The first African slaves arrived in what is now the United States as part of the San Miguel de Gualdape colony (most likely located in the Winyah Bay area of present-day South Carolina), founded by Spanish explorer Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón in 1526. The ill-fated colony was almost immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership, during which the slaves revolted and fled the colony to seek refuge among local Native Americans. De'Ayllón and many of the colonists died shortly afterwards of an epidemic, and the colony was abandoned, leaving the escaped slaves behind on North American soil.
| Destination | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Portuguese America | 38.5% |
| British America (minus North America) | 18.4% |
| Spanish Empire | 17.5% |
| French Americas | 13.6% |
| British North America | 6.45% |
| English Americas | 3.25% |
| Dutch West Indies | 2.0% |
| Danish West Indies | 0.3% |
In 1565, the colony of Saint Augustine in Florida, founded by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés became the first permanent European settlement in North America, and included an unknown number of free and enslaved Africans that were part of this colonial expedition.
Until the early 18th century, African slaves were difficult to acquire in the colonies that became the United States, as most were sold in the West Indies. One of the first major establishments of African slavery in these colonies occurred with the founding of Charles Town and South Carolina in 1670. The colony was founded mainly by planters from the overpopulated sugar island colony of Barbados, who brought relatively large numbers of African slaves from that island. For several decades it was still difficult to acquire African slaves north of the Caribbean. To meet labor needs, colonists had practiced Indian slavery for some time. The Carolinians transformed the Indian slave trade during the late 17th and early 18th centuries by treating slaves as a trade commodity to be exported, mainly to the West Indies. Alan Gallay estimates that between 1670 and 1715, between 24,000 and 51,000 Indian slaves were exported from South Carolina—much more than the number of Africans imported to the colonies of the future United States during the same period.[8]
The first Africans to be brought to English North America landed in Virginia in 1619. These individuals appear to have been treated as indentured servants, and a significant number of African slaves even won their freedom through fulfilling a work contract or for converting to Christianity.[9] Some successful free people of color, such as Anthony Johnson, acquired slaves or indentured servants themselves. To many historians, notably Edmund Morgan, this evidence suggests that racial attitudes were much more flexible in 17th century Virginia than they would subsequently become.[10]
The Dutch West India Company introduced slavery in 1625 with the importation of eleven black slaves who worked as farmers, fur traders, and builders to New Amsterdam (present day New York City), capital of the nascent province of New Netherland,[11] which later expanded across the North River (Hudson River) to Bergen (in today's New Jersey). Later slaves were held privately by the settlers to the area.[12][13] Although enslaved, the Africans had a few basic rights and families were usually kept intact. Admitted to the Dutch Reformed Church and married by its ministers, their children could be baptized. Slaves could testify in court, sign legal documents, and bring civil actions against whites. Some were permitted to work after hours earning wages equal to those paid to white workers. When the colony fell, the company freed all its slaves, establishing early on a nucleus of free negros.[11]
The barriers of slavery hardened in the second half of the 17th century, and imported Africans' prospects grew increasingly dim. In 1656 Elizabeth Key won a suit for freedom based on her father's status as a free Englishman, and his having baptized her as Christian in the Church of England. In 1662 the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law with the doctrine of partus, stating that any child born in the colony would follow the status of its mother, bond or free. This was an overturn of a longheld principle of English Common Law, whereby a child's status followed that of the father. It enabled slaveholders and other white men to hide the mixed-race children born of their rape of slave women and removed their responsibility to acknowledge, support, or emancipate the children.
During the second half of the 17th century, the British economy improved and the supply of British indentured servants declined, as poor Britons had better economic opportunities at home. At the same time, Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 led planters to worry about the prospective dangers of creating a large class of restless, landless, and relatively poor white men (most of them former indentured servants). Wealthy Virginia and Maryland planters began to buy slaves in preference to indentured servants during the 1660s and 1670s, and poorer planters followed suit by c.1700. (Slaves cost more than servants, so initially only the wealthy could invest in slaves.) The first British colonists in Carolina introduced African slavery into the colony in 1670, the year the colony was founded, and slavery spread rapidly throughout the Southern colonies. Northerners also purchased slaves, though on a much smaller scale. Northern slaves typically dwelled in towns and worked as artisans and artisans' assistants, sailors and longshoremen, and domestic servants.
English colonists not only imported Africans but also captured Native Americans, impressing them into slavery. Many Native Americans were shipped as slaves to the Caribbean. Many of these slaves from the British colonies were able to escape by heading south, to the Spanish colony of Florida. There they were given their freedom, if they declared their allegiance to the King of Spain and accepted the Catholic Church. In 1739 Fort Mose was established by African American freedmen and became the northern defense post for St. Augustine. In 1740, English forces attacked and destroyed the fort, which was rebuilt in 1752. Because Fort Mose became a haven for escaped slaves from the English colonies to the north, it is considered a precursor site of the Underground Railroad.[14]
Curiously, chattel slavery developed in British North America before the legal apparatus that supported slavery did. During the late 17th century and early 18th century, harsh new slave codes limited the rights of African slaves and cut off their avenues to freedom. For example, a 1691 Virginia law prohibited slaveholders from emancipating slaves unless they paid for the freedmen's transportation out of Virginia.[15] Virginia criminalized interracial marriage in 1691,[16] and subsequent laws abolished blacks' rights to vote, hold office, and bear arms.[15] The first full-scale slave code in British North America was South Carolina's (1696), which was modeled on the Barbados slave code of 1661 and was updated and expanded regularly throughout the 18th century.[17]
Only a fraction of the enslaved Africans brought to the New World ended up in British North America—perhaps 5%. The vast majority of slaves shipped across the Atlantic were sent to the Caribbean sugar colonies, Brazil, or Spanish America. Throughout the Americas, but especially in the Caribbean, tropical disease took a large toll on their population and required large numbers of replacements. Many Africans had a limited natural immunity to yellow fever and malaria, but malnutrition, poor housing and inadequate clothing allowances, and overwork contributed to a high mortality rate.
In British North America the slave population rapidly increased themselves, where in the Caribbean they did not. The lack of proper nourishment, being depressed sexually, and poor health are possible reasons. Of the small numbers of babies born to slaves in the Caribbean, only about 1/4 survived miserable conditions on a sugar plantation.
It was not only the major colonial powers in Europe such as France, Spain, England, the Netherlands or Portugal that were involved in the transatlantic person trade. Small countries, such as Sweden or Denmark, tried to get into this lucrative business. For more information about this, see The Swedish slave trade.
African and African-American slaves expressed their opposition to slavery through armed uprisings such as the Stono Rebellion and the New York Slave Insurrection of 1741, through malingering and tool-breaking, and most commonly, by running away, either for short periods or permanently. Until the Revolutionary era, almost no white American colonists spoke out against slavery. Even the Quakers generally tolerated slaveholding (and slave-trading) until the mid-18th century, although they emerged as vocal opponents of slavery in the Revolutionary era.
In 1688, 4 German Quakers in Germantown, a town outside Philadelphia, wrote a petition against the use of slaves by the English colonists in the nearby countryside. They presented the petition to their local Quaker Meeting, and the Meeting was sympathetic, but could not decide what the appropriate response should be. The Meeting passed the petition up the chain of authority to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, where it continued to be ignored and was archived and forgotten for 150 years. In 1844 the petition was rediscovered and became a focus of the burgeoning abolitionist movement. It was the first public American document of its kind to protest slavery. It was also one of the first public declarations of universal human rights. Thus although the petition itself was forgotten, the idea that every human has equal rights was discussed in Philadelphia Quaker society over the next century. Slavery was officially sanctioned by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1776. Following the Revolution, the northern states all abolished slavery, with New Jersey acting last in 1804. By 1808 all states (except South Carolina) had banned the international buying or selling of slaves. Acting on the advice of President Thomas Jefferson, who denounced the international trade as "violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, in which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country have long been eager to proscribe" in 1807 Congress banned the international slave trade. However, the domestic slave trade continued.[18]
The French colony of St. Domingue abolished slavery in the massive slave uprising that accompanied the Haitian Revolution; emancipation was officially proclaimed in 1793. Haiti was the first American government to abolish slavery, and the Haitian Revolution inspired some copycat movements in North America, notably Gabriel's Rebellion of 1800, which failed. Slavery proved to be a key contributing issue to the American Civil War (1861–1865) and the United States finally abolished slavery by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.
Critics of slavery as an economic institution argued that the practice was inherently inefficient and unprofitable in the long run. A popular myth suggests that slavery in the South would have died out even without a Civil War due to its inability to maintain lasting economic gains. Southern abolitionists reasoned that slaves did not have the necessary personal incentive needed to propel productivity in the farming sector. Studies have since shown that slavery was indeed a highly efficient mode of production for particular crops like sugar and cotton. A plantation's gang system made use of an effective division of labor wherein slaves worked on tasks that suited their physical capabilities in an organizational setting not unlike that of a factory.
Some historians, notably Edmund Morgan, have suggested that indentured servitude provided a model for slavery in 17th-century Virginia. In theory, indentured servants sold their labor voluntarily for a period of years (typically four to seven), after which they would be freed with "freedom dues" of cash, clothing, tools, and/or land. In practice, indentured servitude could be like slavery and was often a violent system; some Englishmen and Englishwomen (felons and those who were kidnapped) were compelled to become indentured servants, and in the early 17th century, many indentured servants did not live long enough to be freed. The principal significance of indentured servitude, Morgan argues, is that it accustomed 17th century Virginia planters to use physical violence (including beating and rape) to compel workers to work. This set a precedent for the violence of African chattel slavery, which the British colonies first adopted on a large scale in the 1660s and 1670s.
Another view on early colonial slavery is that of historian Alan Gallay. His book on the Native American slave trade describes the flourishing trade during the 17th century in Virginia, South Carolina, and elsewhere in America. Indigenous tribes had practiced a form of slavery since prehistoric times, sometimes for the purpose of ritualized torture and sacrifice, and sometimes for assimilating other tribes.[19] The way in which the Native Americans treated war captives was witnessed and eventually emulated by European colonists, especially the practice of scalping.
This view is considered inaccurate by many modern historians because of the nature of Native American slavery. In North America, among the indigenous people, slavery was more a 'rite of passage' or system of assimilating outside individuals into groups rather than a property or ownership right. Richard White, in 'The Middle Ground' gives a clear explanation of the complex social relationships between American Indian groups and the early empires, including 'slave' culture and scalping.[20]
Historian Ulrich Phillips argues that Africans were inculcated as slaves and the best answer to the labor shortage in the New World because American Indian slaves were more familiar with the environment, and would often successfully escape into the wilderness that African slaves had much more difficulty surviving in. Also, early colonial America depended heavily on the sugar trade, which led to malaria, a disease the Africans were far less susceptible to than native slaves.[21]