Slavery in the United States

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Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of human chattel slavery that existed in the United States of America in the 18th and 19th centuries after it gained independence and before the end of the American Civil War. Slavery had been practiced in British North America from early colonial days, and was recognized in all the Thirteen Colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

By the time of the American Revolution (1775–83), the status of slave had already become a caste associated with African ancestry, contributing to a system and legacy in which race played an influential role. At the time the United States Constitution was ratified (1789), a relatively small number of free people of color were among its voting citizens. During and immediately following the Revolutionary War, abolitionist laws and sentiment began in the Northern states; in addition, as most of these states had a higher proportion of free labor, they abolished slavery by the end of the 18th century, some with gradual systems that did not free the last slave until into the 1800s. But the rapid expansion of the cotton industry in the Deep South after the invention of the cotton gin led the Southern states to depend on slavery as integral to their economy. They attempted to extend it as an institution into the new Western territories, believing that slavery had to expand, or it would die; they dreamed of annexing Cuba as a slave, plantation-based territory. The United States was polarized over the issue of slavery, represented by the slave and free states divided by the Mason–Dixon line, which separated free Pennsylvania from slave Maryland and Delaware.

The importation of slaves was nationally prohibited in 1808, although illegal importation—smuggling—was not unusual.^[1] Domestic slave trading, however, continued at a rapid pace, driven by demand from the growth of cotton plantations in the Deep South. More than one million slaves were sold from the Upper South, which had a surplus of labor, and taken to the Deep South in a forced migration, splitting up many families. New communities of African-American culture were developed in the Deep South, and the total slave population in the South eventually reached 4 million before liberation.^[2][3]

As the West was developed for settlement, the Southern states wanted to keep a balance between the number of slave and free states, in order to maintain a political balance of power in Congress. The new territories acquired from Britain, France, and Mexico were the subject of major political compromises. By 1850, the newly rich cotton-growing South was threatening to secede from the Union, and tensions continued to rise. With Southern church ministers having adapted to support of slavery, modified by Christian paternalism, the largest denominations, the Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches split over slavery into regional organizations of the North and South. When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election on a platform of no new slave states, the South finally broke away to form the Confederacy; the first six states to secede held the greatest number of slaves. This marked the start of the Civil War, which caused a huge disruption of the slave economy, with many slaves either escaping or being liberated by the Union armies. Due to Union measures such as the Confiscation Acts and Emancipation Proclamation, the war effectively ended slavery, even before the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 formally outlawed the institution throughout the United States.

Colonial America

In the early years of the Chesapeake Bay settlements, colonial officials found it difficult to attract and retain laborers under the harsh frontier conditions, and there was a high mortality rate.^[4] Most laborers came from Britain as indentured servants, who signed contracts of indenture to pay with work for their passage, their upkeep and training, usually on a farm, as the colonies were based in agriculture. These indentured servants were young people who intended to become permanent residents. Some masters treated them as well or as poorly as family members. In some cases, convicted criminals were transported to the colonies as indentured servants, rather than being imprisoned. The indentured servants were not slaves. However, when they arrived in Virginia they were required to work for four to seven years to pay the cost of their transportation and maintenance.^[5] The planters found that the major problem with indentured servants was that many left after several years, just when they had become skilled and the most valuable workers. In addition, an improving economy in England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries meant that fewer workers chose to go to the colonies. Historians estimate that more than half of all white immigrants to the English colonies of North America during the 17th and 18th centuries came as indentured servants. The number of indentured servants among immigrants was particularly high in the South. Many Germans, Scots-Irish, and Irish came to the colonies in the 18th century, settling in the backcountry of Pennsylvania and further south.^[4]

Destination of Enslaved Africans (1519–1867)^[2]

Destination	Percentage
Portuguese America	38.5%
British America (minus North America)	18.4%
Spanish Empire	17.5%
French Americas	13.6%
British North America	6.5%
English Americas	3.3%
Dutch West Indies	2.0%
Danish West Indies	0.3%

The first 19 or so Africans to reach the English colonies arrived in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, brought by Dutch traders who had seized them from a captured Spanish slave ship. The Spanish usually baptized slaves in Africa before embarking them. As English law then considered baptized Christians exempt from slavery, these Africans were treated as indentured servants, and they joined about 1,000 English indentured servants already in the colony. The Africans were freed after a prescribed period and given the use of land and supplies by their former masters. The historian Ira Berlin noted that what he called the "charter generation" in the colonies was sometimes made up of mixed-race men who were indentured servants, and whose ancestry was African and Iberian. They were descendants of African women and Portuguese and Spanish men who worked in African ports as traders or facilitators in the slave trade. For example, Anthony Johnson arrived in Virginia in 1621 as an indentured servant; he became a free person of color and became a property owner, even owning slaves. The transformation of the status of Africans from indentured servitude to slavery – which they could not leave or escape – happened gradually.

There were no laws regarding slavery early in Virginia's history. But, in 1640, a Virginia court sentenced John Punch to slavery after he attempted to flee his service.^[6] The two whites with whom he fled were only sentenced to an additional year of their indenture, and three years' service to the colony.^[7] This marked the first legal sanctioning of slavery in the English colonies and was one of the first legal distinctions made between Europeans and Africans.^[6][8]

Enslaved people imported to those regions that are part of present-day USA^[9]

Date	Numbers
1620–1650	824
1651-1675	0
1676-1700	3,327
1701-1725	3,277
1726-1750	34,004
1751-1775	84,580
1776-1800	67,443
1801-1825	109,545
1826-1850	1,850
1851-1866	476
Total	305,326

In 1641, Massachusetts became the first colony to authorize slavery through enacted law.^[10] Massachusetts passed the Body of Liberties, which prohibited slavery in many instances, but did allow for three legal bases of slavery.^[10] Slaves could be held if they were captives of war, if they sold themselves into slavery or were purchased from elsewhere, or if they were sentenced to slavery by the governing authority.^[10] The Body of Liberties used the word "strangers" to refer to people bought and sold as slaves, and this term would eventually equate to Native Americans and Africans for people of the colony.^[11]

In 1654, John Casor, a black indentured servant, was the first man to be declared a slave in a civil case. He had claimed to an officer that Johnson, his owner, had held him past his indenture term. A neighbor, Robert Parker told Johnson that if he did not release Casor, Parker would testify in court to this fact; which under local laws, may have resulted in Johnson losing some of his headright lands. Under duress, Johnson freed Casor, who entered into a seven years' indenture with Parker. Feeling cheated, Johnson sued Parker to repossess Casor. A Northampton County court ruled for Johnson, declaring that Parker illegally was detaining Casor from his rightful master who legally held him "for the duration of his life".^[12]

During the colonial period, the status of slaves was also affected by interpretations related to the status of foreigners. England had no system of naturalizing immigrants to its island or its colonies. Since persons of African origins were not English subjects by birth, they were among those peoples considered foreigners and generally outside English common law. In 1656 Virginia, Elizabeth Key Grinstead, a mixed-race woman, successfully gained her freedom and that of her son by making her case as the daughter of the free Englishman Thomas Key. She was also a baptized Christian. Her attorney was an English subject, which may have helped her case. (He was also the father of her mixed-race son, and the couple married after Key was freed.)^[13]

Shortly after the Elizabeth Key trial and similar challenges, in 1662 the royal colony approved a law adopting the principle of partus sequitur ventrum (called partus, for short), stating that any children of an enslaved mother would take her status and be considered born into slavery, regardless if the father were a freeborn Englishman or Christian. This was a reversal of common law practice, which ruled that children of English subjects took the status of the father. The change institutionalized the power relationships between slaveowners and slave women, freed the white men from the legal responsibility to acknowledge or financially support their mixed-race children, and somewhat confined the open scandal of mixed-race children and miscegenation to within the slave quarters.

The Virginia Slave codes of 1705 further defined as slaves those people imported from nations that were not Christian. Native Americans who were sold to colonists by other Native Americans(from rival tribes), or captured by Europeans during village raids, were also defined as slaves.^[14] This codified the earlier principle of non-Christian foreigner enslavement.

Implemented in colonial Louisiana in 1724, Louis XIV of France's Code Noir regulated the slave trade and the institution of slavery in the French colonies. It gave Louisiana a very different pattern of slavery compared to the rest of the United States.^[15] As written, the Code Noir gave unparalleled rights to slaves, including the right to marry. Although it authorized and codified cruel corporal punishment against slaves under certain conditions, it forbade slave owners to torture them or to separate married couples (or to separate young children from their mothers). It also required the owners to instruct slaves in the Catholic faith, implying that Africans were human beings endowed with a soul, an idea that had not been acknowledged until then.^[16][17][18]

Together with a more permeable historic French system related to the status of gens de couleur libres (free people of color), often born to white fathers and their mixed-race concubines, a far higher percentage of African Americans in Louisiana were free as of the 1830 census (13.2% in Louisiana compared to 0.8% in Mississippi, whose population was dominated by white Anglo-Americans. Most of this "third class" of free people of color, between the French and mass of slaves, lived in New Orleans.)^[16] The Louisiana free people of color were often literate, had gained educations, and a significant number owning businesses, properties, and even slaves.^[17][18] The Code Noir forbade interracial marriages. But interracial relationships were formed and their mixed-race descendants became an intermediate social caste between the whites and the mass of slaves. In the English colonies the mulattoes and the blacks were considered equal and discriminated against equally.^[15][18]

When control of Louisiana shifted to the United States after the Louisiana Purchase, the contrast with the "Protestant" South was evident, as their English norms prevailed and interracial relationships were officially discouraged. The Americanization of Louisiana gradually resulted in the same binary system about race, with free people of color losing some status and even certain rights as they became characterized as officially "black".^[15][19]

In 1735, the Georgia Trustees enacted a law to prohibit slavery in the new colony, which had been established in 1733 to enable the "worthy poor" as well as persecuted European Protestants to have a new start. Slavery was then legal in the other twelve English colonies. Neighboring South Carolina had an economy based on the use of enslaved labor. The Georgia Trustees wanted to eliminate the risk of slave rebellions and make Georgia better able to defend against attacks from the Spanish to the south, who offered freedom to escaped slaves. James Edward Oglethorpe was the driving force behind the colony, and the only trustee to reside in Georgia. He opposed slavery on moral grounds as well as for pragmatic reasons, and vigorously defended the ban on slavery against fierce opposition from Carolina slave merchants and land speculators.^[20][21][22]

The Protestant Scottish highlanders who settled what is now Darien, Georgia added a moral anti-slavery argument, which became increasingly rare in the South, in their 1739 "Petition of the Inhabitants of New Inverness".^[23] By 1750 Georgia authorized slavery in the state because they had been unable to secure enough indentured servants as laborers; as economic conditions in England began to improve in the first half of the 18th century, workers had no reason to leave, especially to face the risks in the colonies.

During most of the British colonial period, slavery existed in all the colonies. People enslaved in the North typically worked as house servants, artisans, laborers and craftsmen, with the greater number in cities. In 1703, more than 42 percent of New York City households held slaves, the second-highest proportion of any city in the colonies after Charleston, South Carolina.^[24] But slaves were also used as agricultural workers in farm communities, including in areas of New York and Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey.

The South developed an agricultural economy dependent on commodity crops. Its planters rapidly acquired a significantly higher number and proportion of slaves in the population overall, as its commodity crops were labor-intensive.^[25] Early on, enslaved people in the South worked primarily in agriculture, on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice, and tobacco; cotton became a major crop after the 1790s. The invention of the cotton gin enabled the cultivation of short-staple cotton in a wide variety of areas, leading in the 19th century to the development of large areas of the Deep South as cotton country. Tobacco was very labor-intensive, as was rice cultivation.^[26] In South Carolina in 1720, about 65% of the population consisted of enslaved people.^[27] Planters (defined by historians in the Upper South as those who held 20 enslaved people or more) used enslaved workers to cultivate commodity crops. They also worked in the artisanal trades on large plantations and in many southern port cities. Backwoods subsistence farmers, the later wave of settlers in the 18th century who settled along the Appalachian Mountains and backcountry, seldom held enslaved people.

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 enslaved people in 1774. All of the colonies except Georgia had banned or limited the African slave trade by 1786; Georgia did so in 1798. Some of these laws were later repealed.^[28]

Less than 350,000 enslaved people were imported into the Thirteen Colonies and the U.S, constituting less than 5% of the twelve million enslaved people brought from Africa to the Americas. The great majority of enslaved Africans were transported to sugar colonies in the Caribbean and to Brazil. As life expectancy was short, their numbers had to be continually replenished. Life expectancy was much higher in the U.S. and the enslaved population also reproduced; enslaved peoples' numbers grew rapidly, reaching 4 million by the 1860 Census. From 1770 until 1860, the rate of natural growth of North American enslaved people was much greater than for the population of any nation in Europe, and was nearly twice as rapid as that of England.^[29]

Revolutionary era

Enslaved people inside Britain

Origins and Percentages of Africans imported into British North America and Louisiana (1700–1820)[30][31]	Amount %
West-central Africa (Kongo, N. Mbundu, S. Mbundu)	26.1
Bight of Biafra (Igbo, Tikar, Ibibio, Bamileke, Bubi)	24.4
Sierra Leone (Mende, Temne)	15.8
Senegambia (Mandinka, Fula, Wolof)	14.5
Gold Coast (Akan, Fon)	13.1
Windward Coast (Mandé, Kru)	5.2
Bight of Benin (Yoruba, Ewe, Fon, Allada and Mahi)	4.3
Southeast Africa (Macua, Malagasy)	1.8

Slavery in Great Britain had never been authorized by statute. In 1772 it was made partially unenforceable at common law by a decision of Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, but this decision did not govern the Atlantic slave trade, where Britain had become the largest trader,^[32] nor apply in the colonies, where the overwhelming majority of British slaves lived. A number of cases for emancipation were presented to the British courts. Numerous runaways hoped to reach Britain where they hoped to be free. The slaves' belief that King George III was for them and against their masters rose as tensions increased before the American Revolution; some colonial slaveholders feared that rebelling against the Crown might trigger a British-inspired slave revolt.

Lord Dunmore's proclamation

In early 1775 Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, wrote to Lord Dartmouth of his intent to free slaves in case of rebellion.^[33] On November 7, 1775, Lord Dunmore issued Lord Dunmore's Proclamation which declared martial law^[34] and promised freedom for any slaves of American patriots who would leave their masters and join the royal forces. Slaves owned by Loyalist masters, however, were unaffected by Dunmore's Proclamation. Of slaves owned by Rebel masters, approximately 1500 did so; most died of disease before they could do any fighting. Only 300 made it to freedom in Britain.^[35]

Revolutionary War and freedom

In response to the British offer of freedom for slaves who fled rebel masters, tens of thousands of slaves who were owned by Rebel masters went to British lines when it controlled an area. Others used the disruption of war to escape their plantations. For instance, in South Carolina, nearly 25,000 slaves (30% of the total enslaved population) fled, migrated or died during the war. Throughout the South, losses of slaves were high, with many due to escapes.^[36] Slaves escaped throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic, joining the British who had occupied New York. In the closing months of the war, the British evacuated 20,000 freedmen from major coastal cities, transporting more than 3,000 for resettlement in Nova Scotia, with others taken to the Caribbean islands, and some to England.

At the same time, the British were transporting Loyalists and their slaves, primarily to the Caribbean, but some to Nova Scotia. For example, over 5,000 enslaved Africans owned by Loyalists were transported in 1782 from Savannah to Jamaica and St. Augustine. Similarly, over half of the black people evacuated from Charleston to the West Indies and Florida by the British in 1782 were slaves owned by White Loyalists.

In the 18th century, Britain had become the world's largest slave trader. During the revolutionary era, the rebellious colonies banned or suspended the international slave trade. This was done for a variety of economic, political, and moral reasons depending on the colony. The trade was later reopened in South Carolina and Georgia.^[37]

Many Northern states took actions for emancipation during the Revolutionary Era. These state jurisdictions enacted the first abolition laws in the entire "New World".^[38] The 1777 Constitution of the Vermont Republic banned slavery, freeing males over the age of 21 and women over the age of 18. Pennsylvania in 1780 passed An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, which declared all children born after the act to be free. Massachusetts, via the Quock Walker Case of 1783, ended slavery in the state based on its statement of human equality in its constitution.

Constitution of the United States

The Constitution of the United States was drafted in 1787, and included several provisions regarding slavery. Section 9 of Article I forbade the Federal government, from banning the "importation" of persons that an individual state's laws considered "proper to admit" until January 1, 1808, though a tax of ten dollars each was allowed (and which was immediately imposed, after ratification). Article V prohibited amending those portions of Section 9 before 1808. By prohibiting Federal banning of the slave trade for two decades, Article V effectively protected the trade until 1808, giving the States 20 years to resolve this issue. During that time, planters in states of the Lower South imported tens of thousands of slaves, more than during any previous two decades in colonial history.^[39]

As further protection for slavery, the delegates approved Section 2 of Article IV, which prohibited states from freeing slaves who fled to them from another state, and required the return of chattel property to owners.

In a section negotiated by James Madison of Virginia, Section 2 of Article I designated "other persons" (slaves) to be added to the total of the state's free population, at the rate of three-fifths of their total number, to establish the state's official population for the purposes of apportionment of Congressional representation and federal taxation.^[40]

This increased the power of southern states in Congress for decades, affecting national policies and legislation.^[41] The planter elite dominated the southern Congressional delegations and the United States presidency for nearly 50 years.^[41]

1790 to 1850

Growth and prohibiting the international trade

In the first two decades of the postwar era, state legislatures in the North abolished slavery, and individual slaveholders in the South freed numerous slaves, often citing revolutionary ideals in their wills. Methodist, Quaker and Baptist preachers urged manumissions. There was a dramatic rise in the number and proportion of free blacks in the population of the United States by 1810. Most free blacks were in the North, but in the Upper South, the proportion went from less than one percent of all blacks to more than 10 percent, even as the number of slaves was increasing.^[42]

After 1810, the invention of the cotton gin made processing of short-staple cotton profitable, resulting in the cultivation of this type throughout the uplands. The Deep South was rapidly developed for widespread cotton cultivation, responding to demand from Britain and Europe. This dramatically increased the demand for slaves in the southern United States. The domestic slave trade resulted in the forced migration of slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South, with some transported in the coastwise trade by ship.

While under the Constitution, Congress could not prohibit the import slave trade until 1808, the third Congress regulated it in 1794, by prohibiting the use of ports for ship building and outfitting for the trade in the Slave Trade Act. Subsequent acts in 1800 and 1803, sought to discourage the trade by limiting investment in import trading and prohibiting importation into states that had abolished slavery, which most in the North had by that point.^[43] The final Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was adopted in 1807, effective in 1808. However, illegal importation of African slaves was common.^[1]

The protections afforded slavery in the Constitution strengthened the political power of southern representatives, as three-fifths of the slave population was counted for Congressional apportionment. In addition, many parts of the country were tied to the southern economy. As the historian James Oliver Horton noted, slaveholders and the commodity crops of the South had a strong influence on United States politics and economy; New York City's economy was closely tied to the South through shipping and manufacturing, for instance. By 1822 half of New York's exports were related to cotton.^[44] Horton said,

in the 72 years between the election of George Washington and the election of Abraham Lincoln, 50 of those years [had] a slaveholder as president of the United States, and, for that whole period of time, there was never a person elected to a second term who was not a slaveholder.^[41]

Northern abolition

During and after the American Revolutionary War, between 1777 and 1804, anti-slavery laws or constitutions were passed in every state north of the Ohio River and the Mason–Dixon line. By 1810, 75 percent of all African Americans in the North were free. By 1840, virtually all African Americans in the North were free.^[45] Vermont's 1777 constitution made no allowance for slavery. In Massachusetts, slavery was successfully challenged in court in 1783 in a freedom suit by Quock Walker; he said that slavery was in contradiction to the state's new constitution of 1780 providing for equality of men. Freed slaves were subject to racial segregation in the North, and it took decades for some states to extend the franchise to them.^[46]

Most northern states passed legislation for gradual abolition, first freeing children born to slave mothers (and providing for them to serve lengthy indentures to their mother's masters, often into their 20s as young adults). As a result of this gradualist approach, New York did not free its last slaves until 1827, Rhode Island had seven slaves still listed in the 1840 census, Pennsylvania's last slaves were freed in 1847, Connecticut did not completely abolish slavery until 1848, and slavery was not completely lifted in New Hampshire and New Jersey until the nationwide emancipation in 1865.^[47]

The principal organized bodies to advocate abolition and anti-slavery reforms in the north were the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and the New York Manumission Society. The emancipation of slaves in the North led to the growth in the population of northern free blacks, from several hundreds in the 1770s to nearly 50,000 by 1810.^[48]

Through the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 under the Congress of the Confederation, slavery was prohibited in the territories northwest of the Ohio River (But existing slaves in the Territory were not freed for years, although they could no longer be sold). That was a compromise. Thomas Jefferson proposed in 1784 to end slavery in all the territories, but his bill lost in the House of Representatives by one vote and was not taken up by the Senate. The territories south of the Ohio River (and Missouri) had authorized slavery.^[49] Northerners predominated in the westward movement into the Midwestern territory after the American Revolution; as the states were organized, they voted to prohibit slavery in their constitutions when they achieved statehood: Ohio in 1803, Indiana in 1816, and Illinois in 1818. What developed into a Northern block of free states united into one contiguous geographic area that generally shared an anti-slavery culture. The exceptions were areas along the Ohio River settled by Southerners, for instance, the southern portions of states such as Indiana, Ohio and Illinois, Residents of those areas consequently generally shared in Southern culture and positions, and these areas were devoted to agriculture longer than in the industrializing northern parts of these states.

Post-revolution Southern manumissions

Although Virginia, Maryland and Delaware were slave states, their legislatures made manumission easier following the Revolution. Quaker and Methodist ministers particularly urged slaveholders to free their slaves. The number and proportion of freed slaves in these states rose dramatically until 1810. More than half of the number of free blacks in the United States were concentrated in the Upper South. The proportion of free blacks among the black population in the Upper South rose from less than one percent in 1792 to more than 10 percent by 1810.^[42] In Delaware, nearly 75 percent of blacks were free by 1810.^[50]

In the US as a whole, by 1810 the number of free blacks reached 186,446, or 13.5 percent of all blacks.^[45] More than half of these were located in the Upper South. After that period, few were freed, as the development of cotton plantations featuring short-staple cotton in the Deep South drove up the internal demand for slaves in the domestic slave trade.^[51]

Domestic slave trade and forced migration

The growing demand for cotton led many plantation owners further west in search of suitable land. In addition, the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 enabled more economic processing of short-staple cotton, which could readily be grown in the uplands. The invention revolutionized the cotton industry by increasing fifty-fold the quantity of cotton that could be processed in a day. Results were the explosive growth of cotton cultivation throughout the Deep South and greatly increased demand for slave labor to support it.^[52] Manumissions decreased dramatically in the South.^[53] At the end of the War of 1812, fewer than 300,000 bales of cotton were produced nationally. By 1820 the amount of cotton produced had increased to 600,000 bales, and by 1850 it had reached 4,000,000.

By 1815, the domestic slave trade had become a major economic activity in the United States; it lasted until the 1860s.^[54] Between 1830 and 1840 nearly 250,000 slaves were taken across state lines.^[54] In the 1850s more than 193,000 were transported, and historians estimate nearly one million in total took part in the forced migration of this new Middle Passage. By 1860 the slave population in the United States had reached 4 million.^[54] Of all 1,515,605 free families in the fifteen slave states in 1860, nearly 400,000 held slaves (roughly one in four, or 25%),^[55] amounting to 8% of all American families.^[56]

Most of the slaves sold originated in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, where changes in agriculture decreased demand for slaves. Before 1810, primary destinations were Kentucky and Tennessee, but after 1810 Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas received the most slaves.^[57] Kentucky and Tennessee joined the slave exporting states.

The historian Ira Berlin called this forced migration the "Second Middle Passage", because it reproduced many of the same horrors as the Middle Passage (the name given to the transportation of slaves from Africa to North America). This large migration of slaves broke up many families and caused much hardship. The 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.^[58] Characterizing it as the "central event" in the life of a slave between the American Revolution and the Civil War, Berlin wrote that whether slaves were directly uprooted or lived in fear that they or their families would be involuntarily moved, "the massive deportation traumatized black people, both slave and free."^[59] Individuals lost their connection to families and clans. Added to the earlier colonists combining slaves from different tribes, many ethnic Africans lost their knowledge of varying tribal origins in Africa. Most were descended from families in the United States for many generations.^[54]

In the 1840s, almost 300,000 slaves were transported, with Alabama and Mississippi receiving 100,000 each. During each decade between 1810 and 1860, at least 100,000 slaves were moved from their state of origin. In the final decade before the Civil War, 250,000 were moved. Michael Tadman wrote in Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (1989) that 60–70% of interregional migrations were the result of the sale of slaves. In 1820 a child in the Upper South had a 30% chance of being sold south by 1860.^[60] 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 shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, but mortality was higher than the normal death rate.

Slave traders transported two-thirds of the slaves who moved west.^[61] Only a minority moved with their families and existing master. Slave traders had little interest in purchasing or transporting intact slave families; in the early years, planters demanded only young male slaves for heavy labor. Later, in the interest of creating a "self-reproducing labor force", planters purchased nearly equal numbers of men and women. 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.^[62]

The expansion of the interstate slave trade contributed to the "economic revival of once depressed seaboard states" as demand accelerated the value of slaves who were subject to sale.^[63]

Some traders moved their "chattels" by sea, with Norfolk to New Orleans being the most common route, but most slaves were forced to walk overland. Others were shipped downriver from such markets as Louisville on the Ohio River, and Natchez on the Mississippi. Traders created regular migration routes served by a network of slave pens, yards, and warehouses needed as temporary housing for the slaves. In addition, other vendors provided clothes, food, and supplies for 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."^[64]

Once the trip ended, slaves faced a life on the frontier significantly different from most labor in the Upper South. 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. New plantations were located at rivers' edges for ease of transportation and travel. Mosquitoes and other environmental challenges spread disease, which took the lives of many slaves. They had acquired only limited immunities to lowland diseases in their previous homes. The death rate was so high 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.^[65]

The harsh conditions on the frontier increased slave resistance and led owners and overseers to rely on violence for control. 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 had been in growing tobacco or wheat back east. Slaves had less time and opportunity to improve the quality of their lives by raising their own livestock or tending vegetable gardens, for either their own consumption or trade, as they could in the east.^[66]

In Louisiana, French colonists had established sugar cane plantations and exported sugar as the chief commodity crop. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Americans entered the state and joined the sugar cultivation. Between 1810 and 1830, planters bought slaves from the North and the number of slaves increased from less than 10,000 to more than 42,000. Planters preferred young males, who represented two-thirds of the slave purchases. Dealing with sugar cane was even more physically demanding than growing cotton. The largely young, unmarried male slave force made the reliance on violence by the owners "especially savage."^[67]

New Orleans became nationally important as a slave market and port, as slaves were shipped from there upriver by steamboat to plantations on the Mississippi River; it also sold slaves who had been shipped downriver from markets such as Louisville. By 1840, it had the largest slave market in North America. It became the wealthiest and the fourth-largest city in the nation, based chiefly on the slave trade and associated businesses.^[68] The trading season was from September to May, after the harvest.^[69]

Slave traders were men of low reputation, even in the South. In the 1828 presidential election, candidate Andrew Jackson was strongly criticized by opponents as a slave trader who transacted in slaves in defiance of modern standards or morality.^[70]

Treatment

The treatment of slaves in the United States varied widely depending on conditions, times and places. According to Adalberto Aguirre, there were 1,161 slaves executed in the U.S. between the 1790s and 1850s.^[71] Exceptions existed to virtually every generalization; for instance, there were slaves who employed white workers, slave doctors who treated upper-class white patients, and slaves who rented out their labor.^[72] After 1820, in response to the inability to import new slaves from Africa, some slaveholders improved the living conditions of their slaves, to encourage them to be productive and not escape.^[73] It was part of a paternalistic approach in the antebellum era.

The colonies and states generally denied slaves the opportunity to learn to read or write, a prohibition unique to American slavery, to protect against their forming aspirations that could lead to escape or rebellion.^[76] Some slaves learned from planters' children, or from free laborers, while working alongside them.

Medical care for slaves, which was limited in terms of medical knowledge available to anyone, was generally provided by other slaves or by slaveholders' family members. Many slaves possessed medical skills needed to tend to each other, and used folk remedies brought from Africa. They also developed new remedies based on American plants and herbs.^[77]

Slaves were prohibited from associating in groups, with the exception of worship services (a reason why the Black church is such a notable institution in black communities today). Following Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, which raised white fears throughout the South, some states also prohibited or restricted religious gatherings of slaves. Planters feared that group meetings would facilitate communication and could lead to rebellion.^[78]

According to Andrew Fede, a master could be held criminally liable for killing a slave only if the slave he killed was "completely submissive and under the master's absolute control."^[79] For example, in 1791 the North Carolina legislature defined the willful killing of a slave as criminal murder, unless done in resisting or under moderate correction (that is, corporal punishment).^[80]

Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, and imprisonment. Punishment was most often meted in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was carried out simply to re-assert the dominance of the master or overseer over the slave.^[81] Treatment was usually harsher on large plantations, which were often managed by overseers and owned by absentee slaveholders; in contrast with small slave-owning families, where the closer relationship between the owners and slaves sometimes resulted in a more humane environment.^[82] William Wells Brown, who escaped and became a fugitive slave, reported that on one plantation, slave men were required to pick 80 pounds per day of cotton, while women were required to pick 70 pounds; if any slave failed in his or her quota, they were given lashes of the whip for each pound they were short. The whipping post stood next to the cotton scales.^[83] A New York man who attended a slave auction in the mid-19th century reported that at least three-quarters of the male slaves he saw being sold had scars on their backs from whipping.^[84]

Historian Lawrence M. Friedman wrote: "Ten Southern codes made it a crime to mistreat a slave. ... Under the Louisiana Civil Code of 1825 (art. 192), if a master was "convicted of cruel treatment," the judge could order the sale of the mistreated slave, presumably to a better master."^[85]

Because of the power relationships of the institution, slave women in the United States were at high risk for rape and sexual abuse.^[86][87] Many slaves fought back against sexual attacks, and some died resisting. Others carried psychological and physical scars from the attacks.^[88] Sexual abuse of slaves was partially rooted in a patriarchal Southern culture which treated black women as property or chattel.^[87] Southern culture strongly policed against sexual relations between white women and black men on the purported grounds of racial purity but, before the late 18th century, the many mixed-race slaves and slave children showed that white men had often taken advantage of slave women.^[87] Wealthy planter widowers, notably such as John Wayles and his son-in-law Thomas Jefferson, took slave women as concubines; each had six children with his partner: Elizabeth Hemings and her daughter Sally Hemings (the half-sister of Jefferson's late wife), respectively. Both Mary Chesnut and Fanny Kemble, wives of planters, wrote about this issue in the antebellum South in the decades before the Civil War. Sometimes planters used mixed-race slaves as house servants or favored artisans because they were their children or other relatives.^[89]

While slaves' living conditions were poor by modern standards, Robert Fogel argued that all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the 19th century were subject to hardship.^[90]

Slave codes

To help regulate the relationship between slave and owner, including legal support for keeping the slave as property, states established slave codes, most based on laws existing since the colonial era. While each state had its own slave code, many concepts were shared throughout the slave states.^[91] According to the slave codes, teaching a slave to read or write was illegal, although it often took place as children taught each other.

In Alabama, slaves were not allowed to leave the premises of the owner without written consent, nor were slaves allowed to trade goods among themselves. In Virginia, a slave was not permitted to drink in public within one mile of his master or during public gatherings. In Ohio, an emancipated slave was prohibited from returning to the state in which he or she had been enslaved. Slaves were not permitted to carry firearms in any of the slave states. The code for the District of Columbia defined a slave as "a human being, who is by law deprived of his or her liberty for life, and is the property of another."^[92]

Abolitionist movement

Main article: Abolitionism in the United States. See also Abolition of slavery timeline, List of notable opponents of slavery

Soon after the Revolutionary War, northern states began to abolish slavery. Many states, including southern ones, passed laws prohibiting the importation of slaves to end the transatlantic slave trade.

After Great Britain and the United States outlawed the international slave trade in 1807 and 1808 respectively, the British West Africa Squadron's slave trade suppression activities began in 1808. They were assisted by forces from the United States Navy, starting in 1820. With the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, the relationship with Britain was formalised, and they jointly ran the Africa Squadron.^[93]

Throughout the first half of the 19th century, abolitionism, a movement to end slavery, grew in strength throughout the United States; most abolitionist societies and supporters were in the North. This struggle took place amid strong support for slavery among white Southerners, who profited greatly from the system of enslaved labor. Slavery was entwined with the national economy; for instance, the banking, shipping and manufacturing industries of New York City all had strong economic interests in slavery, as in some other major cities in the North.

Slaveholders began to refer to slavery as the "peculiar institution" to differentiate it from other examples of forced labor. They justified it as less cruel than the free labor of the North.

In the early part of the 19th century, a variety of organizations were founded that advocated moving free black people from the United States to locations where they would enjoy greater freedom; some endorsed colonization in Africa, while others advocated emigration. During the 1820s and 1830s, the American Colonization Society (ACS) was the primary organization for proposals to "return" black Americans to Africa.^[94] The ACS was made up mostly of Quakers and slaveholders, who disagreed on the issue of slavery but found common ground in support of "repatriation". Most black Americans did not want to emigrate; rather, they wanted full rights in the United States, where they were native born, often for generations.

In 1822 the ACS established the colony of Liberia in West Africa.^[95] The ACS assisted thousands of freedmen and free blacks (with legislated limits) to emigrate there from the United States. Many white people saw this as preferable to emancipation in the United States. Henry Clay, one of the founders, said that blacks faced

unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, they never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country. It was desirable, therefore, as it respected them, and the residue of the population of the country, to drain them off.^[96]

After 1830, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison promoted this goal, associating slaveholding as a personal sin. He demanded the owners repent and start the process of emancipation. His position increased defensiveness on the part of some southerners, who pointed to the long history of slavery among cultures. A few abolitionists, such as John Brown, favored the use of armed force to foment uprisings among the slaves. Most tried to raise public support for changed laws and to use the legal system.

High demand and smuggling

The United States Constitution, adopted in 1787, prevented Congress from completely banning the importation of slaves until 1808, although Congress regulated it in the Slave Trade Act of 1794, and in subsequent Acts in 1800 and 1803.^[43] Knowing the trade would end, in the eight years from 1800 until December 31, 1807, the states of Georgia and South Carolina reopened their trade and traders imported about 100,000 enslaved Africans into the country. Numerous states individually passed laws against importing slaves after the Revolution.

By January 1, 1808, when Congress banned further imports, only South Carolina was still importing slaves. Congress allowed continued trade only in slaves who were descendants of those currently in the United States. The domestic slave trade became more profitable than ever with the expansion of cultivation in the Deep South for cotton and sugar crops. In addition, US citizens could participate in the international slave trade and the outfitting of ships for that trade. Slavery in the United States became, more or less, self-sustaining by natural increase among the current slaves and their descendants.

Despite the ban, slave imports continued, if on a smaller scale, with smugglers continuing to bring in slaves past U.S. Navy patrols to South Carolina, and overland from Texas and Florida, both under Spanish control.^[97] Congress increased the punishment associated with importing slaves, classifying it in 1820 as an act of piracy, with smugglers subject to harsh penalties, including death if caught. After that, "it is unlikely that more than 10,000 [slaves] were successfully landed in the United States."^[98] But, some smuggling of slaves into the United States continued until just before the start of the Civil War.

War of 1812

During the War of 1812, British Royal Navy commanders of the blockading fleet, based at the Bermuda dockyard, were instructed to offer freedom to defecting American slaves, as the Crown had during the Revolutionary War. Thousands of escaped slaves went over to the Crown with their families. Men were recruited into the Corps of Colonial Marines on occupied Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake Bay.

The freedmen fought for Britain throughout the Atlantic campaign, including the attack on Washington D.C. and the Louisiana Campaign. Seven hundred of these ex-marines were granted land (they reportedly organised themselves in villages along the lines of their military companies). Many other freed American slaves were recruited directly into existing West Indian regiments, or newly created British Army units The British later resettled a few thousand freed slaves at Nova Scotia.

Slaveholders, primarily in the South, had considerable "loss of property" as thousands of slaves escaped to British lines or ships for freedom, despite the difficulties.^[99] The planters' complacency about slave "contentment" was shocked by seeing that slaves would risk so much to be free.^[99] Afterward, when some freed slaves had been settled at Bermuda, slaveholders such as Major Pierce Butler of South Carolina tried to persuade them to return to the United States, to no avail.

The Americans protested that Britain's failure to return all slaves violated the Treaty of Ghent. After arbitration by the Tsar of Russia the British paid $1,204,960 in damages (about $25.2 million in today's money) to Washington, which reimbursed the slaveowners.^[100][101]

Religion

Prior to the American Revolution, masters and revivalists spread Christianity to slave communities, supported by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. In the First Great Awakening, Baptists and Methodists from New England preached a message against slavery, encouraged masters to free their slaves, converted both slaves and free blacks, and gave them active roles in new congregations.^[102] The first black congregations were started in the South before the Revolution.

Over the decades and with the growth of slavery throughout the South, Baptist and Methodist ministers gradually changed their messages to accommodate the institution. After 1830, white Southerners argued for the compatibility of Christianity and slavery, with a multitude of both Old and New Testament citations.^[103] They promoted Christianity as encouraging better treatment of slaves and argued for a paternalistic approach. In the 1840s and 1850s, the issue of accepting slavery split the nation's largest religious denominations (the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian churches) into separate Northern and Southern organizations.^[104]

Southern slaves generally attended their masters' white churches, where they often outnumbered the white congregants. They were usually permitted only to sit in the back or in the balcony. They listened to white preachers, who emphasized the obligation of slaves to keep in their place, and acknowledged the slave's identity as both person and property.^[103] Preachers taught the master's responsibility and the concept of appropriate paternal treatment, using Christianity to improve conditions for slaves, and to treat them "justly and fairly" (Col. 4:1). This included masters having self-control, not disciplining under anger, not threatening, and ultimately fostering Christianity among their slaves by example.^[103]

Slaves also created their own religious observances, meeting alone without the supervision of their white masters or ministers. Plantations that held groups of slaves numbering twenty, or more, lent the opportunity for nighttime meetings of one or several plantation slave populations.^[103] These congregations revolved around a singular preacher, often illiterate with limited knowledge of theology, who was marked by his personal piety and ability to foster a spiritual environment. One lasting influence of these secret congregations is the African-American spiritual.^[105]

Nat Turner

In 1831, Nat Turner, a literate slave who claimed to have spiritual visions, organized a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, sometimes called the Southampton Insurrection. Turner and his followers killed nearly 60 white inhabitants, mostly women and children, as many of the men in the area were attending a religious event in North Carolina.^[106] Eventually Turner was captured with 17 other rebels, who were subdued by the militia.^[106]

Turner and his followers were hanged, and Turner's body was flayed. In a frenzy of fear and retaliation, the militia killed more than 100 slaves who had not been involved in the rebellion. Planters whipped hundreds of innocent slaves to ensure resistance was quelled.^[106]

Anti-literacy

Across the South, harsh new laws were enacted to curtail the already limited rights of African Americans. Virginia prohibited blacks, free or slave, from practicing preaching, prohibited blacks from owning firearms, and forbade anyone to teach slaves or free blacks how to read.^[106] It specified heavy penalties both for student and teacher if slaves were educated, including whippings or jail.^[107]

[E]very assemblage of negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing, or in the night time for any purpose, shall be an unlawful assembly. Any justice may issue his warrant to any office or other person, requiring him to enter any place where such assemblage may be, and seize any negro therein; and he, or any other justice, may order such negro to be punished with stripes.^[108]

Economics

Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793, made processing of short-staple cotton profitable, and it was cultivated throughout the South to satisfy US and international demand. Statistical data shows that while less than 10% of the inhabitants of the North were slaves, by 1790, Virginia had 44% of the total slave population. Slavery in the antebellum US was the use of Negro labor in bondage.^[109] It was common in agriculture, with a more massive presence in the South – region where climate was more propitious for agricultural activity. Some economists and historians regard slavery as a profitable system. They do not fully account for the government costs necessary to maintain the institution, nor for human suffering. The transition from indentured servants to slaves is cited to show that slaves offered greater profits to their owners.^[110] The relative price of slaves and indentured servants in the antebellum period did decrease. Indentured servants became more costly with the increase in the demand of skilled labor in England.^[111] At the same time, slaves were mostly supplied from within the United States and thus language was not a barrier and the cost of transporting slaves from one state to another was relatively low. In the decades preceding the civil war, the United States experienced a rapid natural increase of black population.^[112] The slave population multiplied nearly fourfold between 1810 and 1860 although the international slave trade was banned in 1808.^[109]

Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, in their controversial 1974 book Time on the Cross, argued that the rate of return of slavery at the market price was close to 10 percent, a number close to investment in other assets. Fogel's 1989 work, Without Consent or Contract The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, elaborated on the moral indictment of slavery which ultimately led to its abolition.

Efficiency of slaves

Scholars disagree on how to quantify efficiency of slavery. In Time on the Cross, Fogel and Engerman equate efficiency to total factor productivity (TFP)—the output per average unit of input on a farm. Using this measurement, southern farms that employed slaves using the Gang System were 35% more efficient than Northern farms which used free labor. Under the Gang System, groups of slaves perform synchronized tasks under the constant vigilance of an overseer. Each group was like a part of a machine. If perceived to be working below his capacity, a slave could be punished. Fogel argues that this kind of negative enforcement was not frequent and that slaves and free laborers had similar quality of life; however, there is controversy on this last point.^[113]

Prices of slaves

Controlling for inflation, prices of slaves rose dramatically in the six decades prior to Civil War, reflecting demand due to commodity cotton, as well as use of slaves in shipping and industry. Although the prices of slaves relative to indentured servants declined, both got more expensive. Cotton production was rising and relied on the use of slaves to yield high profits. Fogel and Engeman initially argued that if the Civil War had not happened, the slave prices would have increased even more, an average of more than 50 percent by 1890.^[113]:96

Prices reflected the characteristics of the slave—such factors as sex, age, nature, and height were all taken into account to determine the price of a slave. Over the life-cycle, the price of female slaves was higher than their male counterparts up to puberty age, as they would likely bear children and produce more slaves, in addition to serving as laborers. Males around the age of 25 were the most valued, as they were at the highest level of productivity and still had a considerable life-span. If slaves had a history of fights or escapes, their price was lowered reflecting what planters believed was risk of repeating such behavior. Slave traders and buyers would examine a slave's back for whipping scars—a large number of injuries would be seen as evidence of laziness or rebelliousness, rather than the previous master's brutality, and would lower the slave's price^[84] Taller male slaves were priced at a higher level, as height was viewed as a proxy for fitness and productivity.^[113]

The conditions of the market led to shocks in the supply and demand of slaves, which in turn changed prices. For instance, slaves became more expensive after the decrease in supply caused by the ban on importation of slaves in 1808. The market for the products of their work also affected slaves' economic value: demand for slaves fell with the price of cotton in 1840. Anticipation of changes also had a huge influence on prices. As the civil war progressed, there was great doubt that slavery would continue to be legal, and prime males in New Orleans were sold at $1,116 by 1862 as opposed to $1,381 in 1861.^[114]

Effects on Southern economic development

While slavery brought profits in the short run, discussion continues on the economic benefits of slavery in the long-run. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that "the colonies in which there were no slaves became more populous and richer than those in which slavery flourished".^[115] Historian Gavin Wright says that the investment of monetary resources in the cotton industry, among others, delayed development in the South of commercial and industrial institutions. Railroads were less developed in the South, but Wright argues that agricultural technology was far more developed in the South, representing an economic advantage of the South over the North of the United States.^[116] Economists Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, in a pair of articles published in 2012 and 2013, found that despite the American South initially having per capita incomes roughly double that of the North in 1774, incomes in the South had declined 27% by 1800 and continued to decline over the next four decades, while the economies in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states vastly expanded. By 1840, per capita income in the South was well behind the Northeast and the national average, which incidentally is also true of contemporary incomes in the United States.^[117][118] Lindert and Williamson argue this period is exemplary of what economists Daron Acemoğlu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson call "a reversal of fortune."^[119] Economist Thomas Sowell in his essay "The Real History of Slavery," confirms the observation made by de Tocqueville, by comparing slavery in Brazil to slavery in the United States and notes similar economic trends surrounding slavery in those and other parts of the world, and suggests that the trend Lindert and Williamson identify may have continued until the American Civil War:

Both in Brazil and in the United States—the countries with the two largest slave populations in the Western Hemisphere—the end of slavery found the regions in which slaves had been concentrated poorer than other regions of these same countries. For the United States, a case could be made that this was due to the Civil War, which did so much damage to the South, but no such explanation would apply to Brazil, which fought no Civil War over this issue. Moreover, even in the United States, the South lagged behind the North in many ways even before the Civil War.

Although slavery in Europe died out before it was abolished in the Western Hemisphere, as late as 1776 slavery had not yet died out all across the continent when Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations that it still existed in some eastern regions. But, even then, Eastern Europe was much poorer than Western Europe. The slavery of North Africa and the Middle East, over the centuries, took more slaves from sub-Saharan Africa than the Western Hemisphere did…But these remained largely poor countries until the discovery and extraction of their vast oil deposits.^[120]

Sowell also notes in Ethnic America: A History, citing historians Clement Eaton and Eugene Genovese, that three quarters of Southern white families owned no slaves at all,^[121] those that did mostly lived on farms rather than plantations,^[122] and that few plantations grew as large as the fictional ones depicted in Gone with the Wind.^[123] In the "The Real History of Slavery," Sowell draws the following conclusion regarding the macroeconomics of slavery:

In short, even though some individual slaveowners grew rich and some family fortunes were founded on the exploitation of slaves, that is very different from saying that the whole society, or even its non-slave population as a whole, was more economically advanced than it would have been in the absence of slavery. What this means is that, whether employed as domestic servants or producing crops or other goods, millions suffered exploitation and dehumanization for no higher purpose than the transient aggrandizement of slaveowners.^[124]

1850s

Because of the three-fifths compromise in the U.S. Constitution, in which slaves counted in the calculation of how many representatives a state had in Congress (though only three-fifths as much as a free person), the elite planter class had long held power in Congress out of proportion to the total number of white Southerners. In 1850 they passed a more stringent Federal fugitive slave law. Refugees from slavery continued to flee 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 argued that the Slave Power, especially the pro-slavery Democratic Party, controlled two of the three branches of the Federal government.

Congress abolished the slave trade (though not the legality of slavery) in the District of Columbia as part of the Compromise of 1850.

Bleeding Kansas

After the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, border wars broke out in Kansas Territory, where the question of whether it would be admitted to the Union as a slave or free state was left to the inhabitants. Abolitionist John Brown was active in the rebellion and killing in "Bleeding Kansas", as were many white Southerners. At the same time, fears that the Slave Power was seizing full control of the national government swept anti-slavery Republicans into office.

Dred Scott

Dred Scott and his wife Harriet Scott each sued for freedom in St. Louis after the death of their master, based on their having been held in a free territory (the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase from which slavery was excluded under the terms of the Missouri Compromise). (Later the two cases were combined under Dred Scott's name.) Scott filed suit for freedom in 1846 and went through two state trials, the first denying and the second granting freedom to the couple (and, by extension, their two daughters, who had also been held illegally in free territories). For 28 years, Missouri state precedent had generally provided for freedom in such freedom suit transit cases during the 19th century, but the State Supreme Court ruled against Scott, saying that "times were not what they once were."

After the state appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Taney denied Scott his freedom in a sweeping decision that set the United States on course for civil war. The court ruled that, under the Constitution, neither Dred Scott nor any descendant of Africans, slave or free, was considered a citizen who had a right to sue in the Federal courts, and that Congress had had no constitutional power to pass the Missouri Compromise.

The 1857 decision, decided 7–2, held that a slave did not become free when taken into a free state; Congress could not bar slavery from a territory; and people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants, could not be citizens. A state could not bar slaveowners from bringing slaves into that state. Many Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln, considered the decision unjust and as proof that the Slave Power had seized control of the Supreme Court. Written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the decision effectively barred slaves and their descendants from citizenship. Abolitionists were enraged and slave owners encouraged, contributing to tensions on this subject that led to civil war.^[125] Critics note that at the time the Constitution was drafted, five states including North Carolina allowed free blacks to vote.

Expansion of slavery

The abolitionists, realizing that the total elimination of slavery was, as an immediate goal, unrealistic, took as a short-term goal the prevention of the expansion of slavery into the new states formed out of the Western territories. All the slavery compromises of the first half of the nineteenth century—the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Bleeding Kansas crisis—dealt with whether new states would be slave or free, or how that was to be decided, and what effects that would have on the balance of power (pro-slavery and anti-slavery senators were equal in numbers) in the Senate. Popular sovereignty was, in part, a ruse to permit slavery.

Abraham Lincoln's and the Republicans' political platform in 1860 was not to eliminate slavery, but to prevent its expansion. The South, for its part, believed that if slavery did not expand it would die. If it needed to be contained, that meant it was noxious; this the Southerners vigorously rejected.

Civil War and emancipation

1860 presidential election

The divisions became fully exposed with the 1860 presidential election. The electorate split four ways. The Southern Democrats endorsed slavery, while the Republicans denounced it. The Northern Democrats said democracy required the people to decide on slavery locally, state by state and territory by territory. The Constitutional Union Party said the survival of the Union was at stake and everything else should be compromised.

Lincoln, the Republican, won with a plurality of popular votes and a majority of electoral votes. Lincoln, however, did not appear on the ballots of ten southern states: thus his election necessarily split the nation along sectional lines. Many slave owners in the South feared that the real intent of the Republicans was the abolition of slavery in states where it already existed, and that the sudden emancipation of four million slaves would be problematic for the slave owners and for the economy that drew its greatest profits from the labor of people who were not paid.

They also argued that banning slavery in new states would upset what they saw as a delicate balance of free states and slave states. They feared that ending this balance could lead to the domination of the industrial North with its preference for high tariffs on imported goods. The combination of these factors led the South to secede from the Union, and thus began the American Civil War. Northern leaders had viewed the slavery interests as a threat politically, and with secession, they viewed the prospect of a new southern nation, the Confederate States of America, with control over the Mississippi River and the West, as politically and militarily unacceptable.

Civil War

The consequent American Civil War, beginning in 1861, led to the end of chattel slavery in America. Not long after the war broke out, through a legal maneuver credited to Union General Benjamin F. Butler, a lawyer by profession, slaves who came into Union "possession" were considered "contraband of war". General Butler ruled that they were not subject to return to Confederate owners as they had been before the war. Soon word spread, and many slaves sought refuge in Union territory, desiring to be declared "contraband." Many of the "contrabands" joined the Union Army as workers or troops, forming entire regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops. Others went to refugee camps such as the Grand Contraband Camp near Fort Monroe or fled to northern cities. General Butler's interpretation was reinforced when Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1861, which declared that any property used by the Confederate military, including slaves, could be confiscated by Union forces.

At the beginning of the war, some Union commanders thought they were supposed to return escaped slaves to their masters. By 1862, when it became clear that this would be a long war, the question of what to do about slavery became more general. The Southern economy and military effort depended on slave labor. It began to seem unreasonable to protect slavery while blockading Southern commerce and destroying Southern production. As one Congressman put it, the slaves "…cannot be neutral. As laborers, if not as soldiers, they will be allies of the rebels, or of the Union."^[126] The same Congressman—and his fellow Radical Republicans—put pressure on Lincoln to rapidly emancipate the slaves, whereas moderate Republicans came to accept gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization.^[127] Copperheads, the border states and War Democrats opposed emancipation, although the border states and War Democrats eventually accepted it as part of total war needed to save the Union.

Emancipation Proclamation

The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863. In a single stroke it changed the legal status, as recognized by the U.S. government, of 3 million slaves in designated areas of the Confederacy from "slave" to "free." It had the practical effect that as soon as a slave escaped the control of the Confederate government, by running away or through advances of federal troops, the slave became legally and actually free. Plantation owners, realizing that emancipation would destroy their economic system, sometimes moved their slaves as far as possible out of reach of the Union army. By June 1865, the Union Army controlled all of the Confederacy and had liberated all of the designated slaves.^[128]

In 1861, Lincoln expressed the fear that premature attempts at emancipation would mean the loss of the border states. He believed that "to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game."^[129] At first, Lincoln reversed attempts at emancipation by Secretary of War Simon Cameron and Generals John C. Fremont (in Missouri) and David Hunter (in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida) in order to keep the loyalty of the border states and the War Democrats.

Lincoln mentioned his Emancipation Proclamation to members of his cabinet on July 21, 1862. Secretary of State William H. Seward told Lincoln to wait for a victory before issuing the proclamation, as to do otherwise would seem like "our last shriek on the retreat".^[130] In September 1862 the Battle of Antietam provided this opportunity, and the subsequent War Governors' Conference added support for the proclamation.^[131] Lincoln had already published a letter^[132] encouraging the border states especially to accept emancipation as necessary to save the Union. Lincoln later said that slavery was "somehow the cause of the war".^[133] Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, and said that a final proclamation would be issued if his gradual plan based on compensated emancipation and voluntary colonization was rejected. Only the District of Columbia accepted Lincoln's gradual plan, and Lincoln issued his final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. In his letter to Hodges, Lincoln explained his belief that

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong … And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling ... I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.^[134]

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.

Since the Emancipation Proclamation was based on the President's war powers, it only included territory held by Confederates at the time. However, the Proclamation became a symbol of the Union's growing commitment to add emancipation to the Union's definition of liberty.^[135] Lincoln also played a leading role in getting Congress to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment,^[136] which made emancipation universal and permanent.

Enslaved African Americans did not wait for Lincoln's action before escaping and seeking freedom behind Union lines. From early years of the war, hundreds of thousands of African Americans escaped to Union lines, especially in Union-controlled areas like Norfolk and the Hampton Roads region in 1862 Virginia, Tennessee from 1862 on, the line of Sherman's march, etc. So many African Americans fled to Union lines that commanders created camps and schools for them, where both adults and children learned to read and write. The American Missionary Association entered the war effort by sending teachers south to such contraband camps, for instance, establishing schools in Norfolk and on nearby plantations. In addition, nearly 200,000 African-American men served with distinction as soldiers and sailors with Union troops. Most of those were escaped slaves. The Confederacy was outraged by black soldiers and refused to treat them as prisoners of war. Many were shot, as at the Fort Pillow Massacre, and others re-enslaved.^[137]

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.

In spite of the South's shortage of manpower, until 1865, most Southern leaders opposed arming slaves as soldiers. However, a few Confederates discussed arming slaves, and some free blacks had offered to fight for the South. Finally in early 1865 General Robert E. Lee said black soldiers were essential, and legislation was passed. The first black units were in training when the war ended in April.^[138]

The end of slavery

The war ended on June 22, 1865 and following that surrender, the Emancipation Proclamation was enforced throughout remaining regions of the South that had not yet freed the slaves. Slavery continued for a couple of months in some locations.^[139] Federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas on June 19, to enforce the emancipation, and that day is now celebrated as Juneteenth in several states.

The thirteenth amendment, abolishing slavery except as punishment for a crime, was passed by the Senate in April 1864, and by the House of Representatives in January 1865.^[140] The amendment did not take effect until it was ratified by three fourths of the states, which occurred on December 6, 1865, when Georgia ratified it. On that date, all remaining slaves became officially free.^[141]

Legally, the last 40,000-45,000 slaves were freed in the last two slave states of Kentucky and Delaware^[142] by the final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution on December 18, 1865. Slaves still held in Tennessee, Kentucky, Kansas, New Jersey, Delaware, West Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, Washington, D.C., and twelve parishes of Louisiana^[143] also became legally free on this date. American historian R.R. Palmer opined that the abolition of slavery in the United States without compensation to the former slave owners was an "annihilation of individual property rights without parallel...in the history of the Western world".^[144] Economic historian Robert E. Wright argues that it would have been much cheaper, with minimal deaths, if the federal government had purchased and freed all the slaves, rather than fighting the Civil War.^[145] Another economic historian, Roger Ransom, writes about how Gerald Gunderson compared compensated emancipation to the cost of the war and "notes that the two are roughly the same order of magnitude — 2.5 to 3.7 billion dollars" ^[146][147] Ransom also writes that compensated emancipation would have tripled federal outlays if paid over the period of 25 years and was a program that had no political support within the United States during the 1860s.^[147]

Booker T. Washington, remembered the day in early 1863, when he was a boy of nine in Virginia:^[148]

As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of the plantation songs had some reference to freedom.... Some man who seemed to be a stranger (a United States officer, I presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long paper—the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see.

Reconstruction to present

In spite of the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation and the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the road to freedom remained elusive for most former slaves in the United States. While the Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land, it is not self-enforcing, nor was the Emancipation Proclamation. The text and principles outlined in them were only words without enforcement, and so alone, they could not and did not abolish slavery. The enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment simply made slavery and all forms of involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime, unconstitutional. The actual abolition of slavery – that is the full enforcement of the 13th Amendment took many decades beyond 1865 to be realized. Enforcement of the 13th amendment began during the Reconstruction period, but there were many setbacks between that time and full enforcement.

Proponents of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution knew that without legislation that codified the 13th Amendment in the form of laws and statutes along with law enforcement agencies to uphold the laws, there would be no true end to slavery, and this is the reason for the inclusion of Section 2 of the 13th Amendment authorizing Congress to establish laws upholding the amendment. The federal government also sent troops to the south to provide protection to the former slaves who were still living among their former captors.

During the Reconstruction era from January 1, 1863 to March 31, 1877, federal troops were stationed in the south specifically to keep blacks from being re-enslaved. However, in the Gilded Age that followed the withdrawal, blacks were left at the mercy of their former captors. When African Americans in the south no longer had the protection of the federal troops, whites found other ways to practice involuntary servitude

This lasted well into the 20th century, until President Lyndon B. Johnson abolished Peonage in 1966, which rapidly decreased sharecropping in every plantation nationwide. Although slavery is commonly understood to have ended with the Emancipation Proclamation, or the Thirteenth Amendment, exhaustive research conducted by journalist Douglas A. Blackmon and reported in his Pulitzer Prize winning book Slavery By Another Name shows that thousands of African Americans were re-enslaved with shocking force and brutality after the period of Reconstruction was over.

The continued involuntary servitude took various forms but the primary forms included convict leasing, peonage, and sharecropping, with the latter eventually encompassing poor whites as well and by the 1930s, they made up the vast majority. Using convict leasing programs, African American men, often guilty of no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters. Sharecropping as it was practiced during this period often involved severe restrictions on the freedom of movement of sharecroppers who could be whipped for leaving the plantation. Both sharecropping and convict leasing were legal and tolerated by both the north and south. However, peonage was an illicit form of forced labor. Its existence was ignored by authorities while thousands of African Americans and poor Anglo Americans were subjugated and held in bondage until the mid 1960s to the late 1970s.

With the exception of cases of peonage, beyond the period of Reconstruction, the federal government took almost no action to enforce the 13th Amendment until December 1941 when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt summoned his attorney general. Five days after Pearl Harbor, at the request of the president Attorney General Francis Biddle issued Circular No. 3591 to all federal prosecutors, instructing them to actively investigate and try any case of involuntary servitude or slavery. Several months later, convict leasing was officially abolished.

During Reconstruction, it was a serious question whether slavery had been permanently abolished or whether some form of semi-slavery would appear after the Union armies left. Over time a large civil rights movement arose to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans.

Convict leasing

With emancipation a legal reality, white Southerners were concerned with both controlling the newly freed slaves and keeping them in the labor force at the lowest level. The system of convict leasing began during Reconstruction and was fully implemented in the 1880s and officially ending in the last state, Alabama, in 1928. It persisted in various forms until it was abolished in 1942 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, several months after the attack on Pearl Harbor involved the U.S. in the conflict. This system allowed private contractors to purchase the services of convicts from the state or local governments for a specific time period. African Americans, due to "vigorous and selective enforcement of laws and discriminatory sentencing" made up the vast majority of the convicts leased.^[149] Writer Douglas A. Blackmon writes of the system:

It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery – a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.^[150]

The constitutional basis for convict leasing is that the Thirteenth Amendment, while abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude generally, expressly permits it as a punishment for crime.

Educational issues

The anti-literacy laws after 1832 contributed greatly to the problem of widespread illiteracy facing the freedmen and other African Americans after Emancipation and the Civil War 35 years later. The problem of illiteracy and need for education was seen as one of the greatest challenges confronting these people as they sought to join the free enterprise system and support themselves during Reconstruction and thereafter.

Consequently, many black and white religious organizations, former Union Army officers and soldiers, and wealthy philanthropists were inspired to create and fund educational efforts specifically for the betterment of African Americans; some African Americans had started their own schools before the end of the war. Northerners helped create numerous normal schools, such as those that became Hampton University and Tuskegee University, to generate teachers, as well as other colleges for former slaves. Blacks held teaching as a high calling, with education the first priority for children and adults. Many of the most talented went into the field. Some of the schools took years to reach a high standard, but they managed to get thousands of teachers started. As W. E. B. Du Bois noted, the black colleges were not perfect, but "in a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South" and "wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of black people in the land."^[151]

Northern philanthropists continued to support black education in the 20th century, even as tensions rose within the black community, exemplified by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, as to the proper emphasis between industrial and classical academic education at the college level. An example of a major donor to Hampton Institute and Tuskegee was George Eastman, who also helped fund health programs at colleges and in communities.^[152] Collaborating with Washington in the early decades of the 20th century, philanthropist Julius Rosenwald provided matching funds for community efforts to build rural schools for black children. He insisted on white and black cooperation in the effort, wanting to ensure that white-controlled school boards made a commitment to maintain the schools. By the 1930s local parents had helped raise funds (sometimes donating labor and land) to create over 5,000 rural schools in the South. Other philanthropists, such as Henry H. Rogers and Andrew Carnegie, each of whom had arisen from modest roots to become wealthy, used matching fund grants to stimulate local development of libraries and schools.

Apologies

On February 24, 2007, the Virginia General Assembly passed House Joint Resolution Number 728 acknowledging "with profound regret the involuntary servitude of Africans and the exploitation of Native Americans, and call for reconciliation among all Virginians."^[153] With the passing of this resolution, Virginia became the first state to acknowledge through the state's governing body their state's negative involvement in slavery. The passing of this resolution was in anticipation of the 400th anniversary commemoration of the founding of Jamestown, Virginia (the first permanent English settlement in North America), which was an early colonial slave port.

On July 30, 2008, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing for American slavery and subsequent discriminatory laws.^[154]

The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a similar resolution on June 18, 2009, apologizing for the "fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery".^[155] It also explicitly states that it cannot be used for restitution claims.^[156]

Justification

"A necessary evil"

In the 19th century, proponents of slavery often defended the institution as a "necessary evil". White people of that time feared that emancipation of black slaves would have more harmful social and economic consequences than the continuation of slavery. In 1820, Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, 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.^[157]

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.^[158]

Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, also expressed an opposition to slavery, but felt that the existence of a multiracial society without slavery untenable, and observed prejudice against negroes increasing as they were granted more rights (for example, in northern states). He considered the attitudes of white southerners, and the concentration of the black population in the south–due to exportation resulting from restrictions in the north, and climatic and economic reasons–that was bringing the white and black population to a state of equilibrium, as a danger to both races. Thus, because of the racial differences between master and slave, the latter could not be emancipated.^[115]

"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."^[159]

Others who also moved from the idea of necessary evil to positive good are James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh. They presented several arguments to defend the act of slavery in the South.^[160] Hammond, like Calhoun, believed slavery was needed to build the rest of society. In a speech to the Senate on March 4, 1858, Hammond developed his Mudsill Theory defending his view on slavery stating, "Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill." Hammond believed that in every class you must have one group to do all the menial duties, because without them the leaders in society could not progress.^[161] He argued that the hired laborers of the North are slaves too: "The difference… is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment," while those in the North had to search for employment.^[162] George Fitzhugh, like many white people of his time, believed in racism and used this belief to justify slavery, writing that, "the Negro is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child." In "The Universal Law of Slavery" Fitzhugh argues that slavery provides everything necessary for life and that the slave is unable to survive in a free world because he is lazy, and cannot compete with the intelligent European white race. He states that "The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and in some sense, the freest people in the world."^[163] Without the South "He (slave) would become an insufferable burden to society" and "Society has the right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery."^[164][165]

On March 21, 1861, new southern Confederate, Vice President Alexander Stephens, delivered the Cornerstone Speech. The speech explained the differences between the constitution of the Confederate Republic and that of the United States, and laid out the cause for the American Civil War, and a defense of slavery.^[166]

The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.^[166]

Native Americans

During the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, Indian slavery, the enslavement of Native Americans by European colonists, was common. Many of these Native slaves were exported to the Northern colonies and to off-shore colonies, especially the "sugar islands" of the Caribbean.^[14] Historian Alan Gallay estimates that from 1670 to 1715, British slave traders sold between 24,000 and 51,000 Native Americans from what is now the southern part of the U.S.^[167]

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 1847–48 invasion by U.S. troops, the "loitering or orphaned Indians" were de facto enslaved in the new state from statehood in 1850 to 1867.^[168] 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".^[169]

Inter-tribal slavery

The Haida and Tlingit Indians who lived along southeast Alaska's coast were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave-traders, raiding as far as California. Slavery was hereditary after slaves were taken as prisoners of war. Among some Pacific Northwest tribes, about a quarter of the population were slaves.^[170][171] 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.^[26]

After 1800, the Cherokees and the other civilized tribes started buying and using black slaves, a practice they continued after being relocated to Indian Territory in the 1830s, when as many as 15,000 enslaved blacks were taken with them.^[14][172]

The nature of slavery in Cherokee society often mirrored that of white slave-owning society. The law barred intermarriage of Cherokees and enslaved African Americans.^[14] Cherokee who aided slaves were punished with one hundred lashes on the back. In Cherokee society, those with African-American descent were barred from holding office even if they were a mixed blood Cherokee, bearing arms, and owning property, and they made it illegal to teach African Americans to read and write.^{[14][173][174]}

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

Post-Emancipation Proclamation slavery

A few captives from Native American tribes who were used as slaves were not freed, when African-American slaves were emancipated.

"Ute Woman," a Ute captured by the Arapaho and later sold to a Cheyenne, was one example. Used as a prostitute for sale to American soldiers at Cantonment in the Indian Territory, she lived in slavery until about 1880 when she died of a hemorrhage resulting from "excessive sexual intercourse".^[175]

Black slaveholders

Some slaveholders were black or had some black ancestry. An African former indentured servant arrived to Virginia in 1621, Anthony Johnson, became one of the earliest documented slave owners in the mainland American colonies when he won a civil suit for ownership of John Casor.^[176] In 1830 there were 3,775 such slaveholders in the South who owned 12,760 slaves,^[177] with 80% of them located in Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. There were economic differences between free blacks of the Upper South and Deep South, with the latter fewer in number, but wealthier and typically of mixed race. Half of the black slaveholders lived in cities rather than the countryside, with most in New Orleans and Charleston. Especially New Orleans had a large, relatively wealthy free black population (gens de couleur) composed of people of mixed race, who had become a third social class between whites and enslaved blacks, under French and Spanish colonial rule. Relatively few slaveholders of color were "substantial planters." Of those who were, most were of mixed race, often endowed by white fathers with some property and social capital.^[178] For example, Andrew Durnford of New Orleans was listed as owning 77 slaves.^[177] According to Rachel Kranz: "Durnford was known as a stern master who worked his slaves hard and punished them often in his efforts to make his Louisiana sugar plantation a success."^[179] The 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.^[180]

The 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.^[181]

African American history and culture scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote: "...the percentage of free black slave owners as the total number of free black heads of families was quite high in several states, namely 43 percent in South Carolina, 40 percent in Louisiana, 26 percent in Mississippi, 25 percent in Alabama and 20 percent in Georgia."^[182]

Free blacks were perceived "as a continual symbolic threat to slaveholders, challenging the idea that 'black' and 'slave' were synonymous." Free blacks were sometimes seen as potential allies of fugitive slaves and "slaveholders bore witness to their fear and loathing of free blacks in no uncertain terms."^[183] For free blacks, who had only a precarious hold on freedom, "slave ownership was not simply an economic convenience but indispensable evidence of the free blacks' determination to break with their slave past and their silent acceptance – if not approval – of slavery."^[184]

The historian James Oakes in 1982 notes that "[t]he 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."^[185] After 1810 southern states made it increasingly difficult for any slaveholders to free slaves. Often the purchasers of family members were left with no choice but to maintain, on paper, the owner–slave relationship. In the 1850s "there were increasing efforts to restrict the right to hold bondsmen on the grounds that slaves should be kept 'as far as possible under the control of white men only.'"^[186]

In his 1985 statewide study of black slaveholders in South Carolina, Larry Koger challenged the benevolent view. He found that the majority of black slaveholders appeared to hold at least some of their slaves for commercial reasons. For instance, he noted that in 1850 more than 80 percent of black slaveholders were of mixed race, but nearly 90 percent of their slaves were classified as black.^[187] Koger also noted that many South Carolina free people of color operated small businesses as skilled artisans, and many owned slaves working in those businesses.

Barbary pirates

Barbary pirates from North Africa began to seize North American colonists as early as 1625,^[188] and roughly 700 Americans were held captive in this region as slaves between 1785 and 1815.^[189] Some captives used their experiences as a North African slave to criticize slavery in the United States, such as William Ray in his book Horrors of Slavery.^[190]

The Barbary situation led directly to the creation of the United States Navy in March 1794. While the United States managed to secure peace treaties, these obliged it to pay tribute for protection from attack. Payments in ransom and tribute to the Barbary states amounted to 20% of United States government annual expenditures in 1800.^[191] The First Barbary War in 1801 and the Second Barbary War in 1815 led to more favorable peace terms ending the payment of tribute.

Distribution

Distribution of slaves

Census Year	# Slaves	# Free blacks	Total blacks	% Free blacks	Total US population	% Blacks of total
1790	697,681	59,527	757,208	8%	3,929,214	19%
1800	893,602	108,435	1,002,037	11%	5,308,483	19%
1810	1,191,362	186,446	1,377,808	14%	7,239,881	19%
1820	1,538,022	233,634	1,771,656	13%	9,638,453	18%
1830	2,009,043	319,599	2,328,642	14%	12,860,702	18%
1840	2,487,355	386,293	2,873,648	13%	17,063,353	17%
1850	3,204,313	434,495	3,638,808	12%	23,191,876	16%
1860	3,953,760	488,070	4,441,830	11%	31,443,321	14%
1870	0	4,880,009	4,880,009	100%	38,558,371	13%
Source:"Distribution of Slaves in US History". Retrieved May 13, 2010.

Total Slave Population in US 1790–1860, by State^[192]

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	–

Distribution of slaveholders

As of the 1860 Census, one may compute the following statistics on slaveholding:^[193]

• Enumerating slave schedules by county, 393,975 named persons held 3,950,546 unnamed slaves, for an average of about ten slaves per holder. As some large holders held slaves in multiple counties and are thus multiply counted, this slightly overestimates the number of slaveholders.
• Excluding slaves, the 1860 U.S. population was 27,167,529, yielding about 1 in 70 free persons (1.5%) being slaveholders. By counting only named slaveowners, this approach does not acknowledge people who benefited from slavery by being in a slaveowning household, e.g. the wife and children of an owner. Only 8% of all US families owned slaves,^[194] while in the South, 33% of families owned slaves. According to recent research by historian Joseph Glatthaar, the number of soldiers of the Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia who either owned slaves or came from slave owning households is "almost one of every two 1861 recruits". In addition he notes that, "Untold numbers of enlistees rented land from, sold crops to, or worked for slaveholders. In the final tabulation, the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery."^[195]
• The distribution of slaves among holders was very unequal: holders of 200 or more slaves, constituting less than 1% of all US slaveholders (fewer than 4,000 persons, 1 in 7,000 free persons, or 0.015% of the population) held an estimated 20–30% of all slaves (800,000 to 1,200,000 slaves). Nineteen holders of 500 or more slaves have been identified.^[196] The largest slaveholder was Joshua John Ward, of Georgetown, South Carolina, who in 1850 held 1,092 slaves,^[197] and whose heirs in 1860 held 1,130 or 1,131 slaves^[196][197] – he was dubbed "the king of the rice planters",^[197] and one of his plantations is now part of Brookgreen Gardens.

Historiography

The historian Peter Kolchin, writing in 1993, noted that until the latter decades of the 20th century, historians of slavery had primarily concerned themselves with the culture, practices and economics of the slaveholders, not with the slaves. This was in part due to the circumstance that most slaveholders were literate and left behind written records, whereas slaves were largely illiterate and not in a position to leave written records. Scholars differed as to whether slavery should be considered a benign or a "harshly exploitive" institution.^[198]

Much of the history written prior to the 1950s had a distinctive racist slant to it.^[198] By the 1970s and 1980s, historians were using archaeological records, black folklore, and statistical data to develop a much more detailed and nuanced picture of slave life. Individuals were shown to have been resilient and somewhat autonomous in many of their activities, within the limits of their situation and despite its precariousness. Historians who wrote in this era include John Blassingame (Slave Community), Eugene Genovese (Roll, Jordan, Roll), Leslie Howard Owens (This Species of Property), and Herbert Gutman (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom).^[199]

See also

History of slavery in individual states

Notes

Bibliography

National and comparative studies

State and local studies

Video

• Jenkins, Gary (director). Negroes To Hire (Lifedocumentaries, 2010); 52 minutes DVD; on slavery in Missouri

Historiography

Primary sources

Further reading

Scholarly journals

• Singleton, Theresa A., "The Archaeology of Slavery in North America" Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 24, (1995), pp. 119–140
• McCarthy, Thomas. "Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II: On the Morality and Politics of Reparations for Slavery" Political Theory, Vol. 32, No. 6 (Dec., 2004), pp. 750–772

Oral histories of ex-slaves

• Before Freedom When I Just Can Remember: Twenty-seven Oral Histories of Former South Carolina Slaves Belinda Hurmence, 1989. ISBN 0-89587-069-X
• Before Freedom: Forty-Eight Oral Histories of Former North & South Carolina Slaves. Belinda Hurmence. Mentor Books: 1990. ISBN 0-451-62781-4
• God Struck Me Dead, Voices of Ex-Slaves Clifton H. Johnson ISBN 0-8298-0945-7

Literary and cultural criticism

• Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014. ISBN 046500296X
• Ryan, Tim A. Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with the Wind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.
• Van Deburg, William. Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Slavery in the United States.

• How Slaves Built American Capitalism. By Garikai Chengu. CounterPunch, December 18, 2015
• "Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936–1938", American Memory, Library of Congress
• "Voices from the Days of Slavery", recordings of interviews of 23 former slaves, 1932–1975, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
• Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice
• "Slavery and the Making of America", PBS– WNET, New York (4-Part Series)
• Wahl, Jenny. "Slavery in the United States", EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. March 26, 2008, Economic History Net
• North American Slave Narratives, Documents of the American South, University of North Carolina
• "Slavery and Civil War digital collection", scanned original documents including bills of sale, letters related to war issues, et al., Grand Valley State University Library
• How Slavery Really Ended in America New York Times.
• Bill Bigelow, "The Color Line", 6-page lesson plan for high school students, Zinn Education Project/Rethinking Schools
• Gayle Olson-Raymer, "The First Slaves", 15-page teaching guide for high school students, Zinn Education Project/Rethinking Schools
• Harvesting Cotton-Field Capitalism: Edward Baptist's New Book Follows the Money on Slavery. The New York Times, October 3, 2014.
• 5 Things About Slavery You Probably Didn't Learn In Social Studies: A Short Guide To 'The Half Has Never Been Told'. The Huffington Post. October 23, 2014.
• "Slavery" maps in the U.S. at the Persuasive Cartography, The PJ Mode Collection, Cornell University Library

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Brazil) Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua (1845–1847, Brazil) Books Non-fiction The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) The Narrative of Robert Adams (1816) American Slavery as It Is (1839) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) The Life of Josiah Henson (1849) Twelve Years a Slave (1853) My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) The Underground Railroad Records (1872) Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) Up from Slavery (1901) The Slave Community (1972) Fiction Oroonoko (1688) Sab (1841) Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) The Heroic Slave (1852) Clotel (1853) Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) The Bondwoman's Narrative (1853?–1861?) 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