Slavery: Background - Part 2
From Wikipedia, 1/16/2022
History of slavery
From Wikipedia,
The history of slavery spans many cultures, nationalities, and religions from ancient times to the present day. Likewise, its victims have come from many different ethnicities and religious groups. The social, economic, and legal positions of slaves have differed vastly in different systems of slavery in different times and places.[1]
Slavery was relatively rare in pre-civilisation hunter-gatherer populations,[2] as it develops under conditions of social stratification.[3] Slavery operated in the first civilizations (such as Sumer in Mesopotamia,[4] which dates back as far as 3500 BC). Slavery features in the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi (c. 1860 BCE), which refers to it as an established institution.[5] Slavery was widespread in the ancient world. It was found in almost every ancient civilization, including the Roman Empire. It became less common throughout Europe during the Early Middle Ages, although it continued to be practiced in some areas. Both Christians and Muslims captured each other as slaves during centuries of warfare in the Mediterranean.[6] Islamic slavery encompassed mainly Western and Central Asia, Northern and Eastern Africa, India, and Europe from the 7th to the 20th century. The Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, British and a number of West African kingdoms played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade, especially after 1600.
Although slavery is no longer legal anywhere in the world, human trafficking remains an international problem. An estimated 25-40 million people were enslaved as of 2013, the majority of these in Asia.[7] During the 1983–2005 Second Sudanese Civil War people were taken into slavery.[8] Evidence emerged in the late 1990s of systematic child slavery and trafficking on cacao plantations in West Africa.[9]
Slavery in the 21st century continues and generates $150 billion in annual profits.[10] Populations in regions with armed conflict are especially vulnerable, and modern transportation has made human trafficking easier.[11] In 2019 there were an estimated 40 million people worldwide subject to some form of slavery, 25% of them children.[10] Sixty-one percent[nb 1] are used for forced labor, mostly in the private sector. Thirty-eight percent[nb 2] live in forced marriages.[10] Other types of modern slavery are child soldiers, sex trafficking, and sexual slavery.
Origins
Evidences of slavery predate written records; the practice has existed in many[12] - if not most - cultures.[13] Mass slavery requires economic surpluses and a high population density to be viable.[14] Because of this, the practice of slavery would have only proliferated after the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution, about 11,000 years ago.[15][failed verification]
Slavery occurred in civilizations as old as Sumer, as well as in almost every other ancient civilization, including ancient Egypt, ancient China, the Akkadian Empire, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, ancient Greece, ancient India, the Roman Empire, the Arab Islamic Caliphate and Sultanate, Nubia and the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas.[16] Ancient slavery consists of a mixture of debt-slavery, punishment for crime, prisoners of war, child abandonment, and children born to slaves.[17]
Africa
Main articles: African slave trade, Trans-Saharan slave trade, East African slave trade, and Atlantic slave trade
Further information: Slave Coast of West Africa, Swahili coast, and Barbary coast
13th-century Africa – Map of the main trade routes and states, kingdoms and empires.
Writing in 1984, French historian Fernand Braudel noted that slavery had been endemic in Africa and part of the structure of everyday life throughout the 15th to the 18th century. "Slavery came in different guises in different societies: there were court slaves, slaves incorporated into princely armies, domestic and household slaves, slaves working on the land, in industry, as couriers and intermediaries, even as traders".[19] During the 16th century, Europe began to outpace the Arab world in the export traffic, with its slave traffic from Africa to the Americas. The Dutch imported slaves from Asia into their colony at the Cape of Good Hope (now Cape Town) in the 17th century.[citation needed] In 1807 Britain (which already held a small coastal territory, intended for the resettlement of freed slaves, in Freetown, Sierra Leone), made the international slave trade illegal with the Slave Trade Act 1807,[20]: 42 as did the United States in 1808.[21]
In Senegambia, between 1300 and 1900, close to one-third of the population was enslaved. In early Islamic states of the Western Sudan, including Ghana (750–1076), Mali (1235–1645), Segou (1712–1861), and Songhai (1275–1591), about a third of the population was enslaved. The earliest Akan state of Bonoman which had third of its population being enslaved in the 17th century. In Sierra Leone in the 19th century about half of the population consisted of slaves. In the 19th century at least half the population was enslaved among the Duala of the Cameroon, the Igbo and other peoples of the lower Niger, the Kongo, and the Kasanje kingdom and Chokwe of Angola. Among the Ashanti and Yoruba a third of the population consisted of slaves as well as Bono.[22] The population of the Kanem was about a third slave. It was perhaps 40% in Bornu (1396–1893). Between 1750 and 1900 from one- to two-thirds of the entire population of the Fulani jihad states consisted of slaves. The population of the Sokoto caliphate formed by Hausas in northern Nigeria and Cameroon was half-slave in the 19th century. It is estimated that up to 90% of the population of Arab-Swahili Zanzibar was enslaved. Roughly half the population of Madagascar was enslaved.[23][24][page needed][25][26][27]
Slavery in Ethiopia persisted until 1942. The Anti-Slavery Society estimated that there were 2,000,000 slaves in the early 1930s, out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million.[28] It was finally abolished by order of emperor Haile Selassie on 26 August 1942.[29]
When British rule was first imposed on the Sokoto Caliphate and the surrounding areas in northern Nigeria at the turn of the 20th century, approximately 2 million to 2.5 million people living there were slaves.[30] Slavery in northern Nigeria was finally outlawed in 1936.[31]
Writing in 1998 about the extent of trade coming through and from Africa, the Congolese journalist Elikia M'bokolo wrote "The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth)." He continues: "Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean"[32]
Sub-Saharan Africa
Main articles: African slave trade, East African slave trade, and Trans-Saharan slave trade
Zanzibar was once East Africa's main slave-trading port, during the East African slave trade and under Omani Arabs in the 19th century, as many as 50,000 slaves were passing through the city each year.[33]
Prior to the 16th century, the bulk of slaves exported from Africa were shipped from East Africa to the Arabian peninsula. Zanzibar became a leading port in this trade.[34] Arab slave traders differed from European ones in that they would often conduct raiding expeditions themselves, sometimes penetrating deep into the continent. They also differed in that their market greatly preferred the purchase of female slaves over male ones.[35]
The increased presence of European rivals along the East coast led Arab traders to concentrate on the overland slave caravan routes across the Sahara from the Sahel to North Africa. The German explorer Gustav Nachtigal reported seeing slave caravans departing from Kukawa in Bornu bound for Tripoli and Egypt in 1870. The slave trade represented the major source of revenue for the state of Bornu as late as 1898. The eastern regions of the Central African Republic have never recovered demographically from the impact of 19th-century raids from the Sudan and still have a population density of less than 1 person/km2.[36] During the 1870s, European initiatives against the slave trade caused an economic crisis in northern Sudan, precipitating the rise of Mahdist forces. Mahdi's victory created an Islamic state, one that quickly reinstituted slavery.[37][38]
European involvement in the East African slave trade began when Portugal established Estado da Índia in the early 16th century. From then until the 1830s, c. 200 slaves were exported from Mozambique annually and similar figures has been estimated for slaves brought from Asia to the Philippines during the Iberian Union (1580–1640).[39][40]
The Middle Passage, the crossing of the Atlantic to the Americas, endured by slaves laid out in rows in the holds of ships, was only one element of the well-known triangular trade engaged in by Portuguese, American, Dutch, Danish-Norwegians,[41] French, British and others. Ships having landed slaves in Caribbean ports would take on sugar, indigo, raw cotton, and later coffee, and make for Liverpool, Nantes, Lisbon or Amsterdam. Ships leaving European ports for West Africa would carry printed cotton textiles, some originally from India, copper utensils and bangles, pewter plates and pots, iron bars more valued than gold, hats, trinkets, gunpowder and firearms and alcohol. Tropical shipworms were eliminated in the cold Atlantic waters, and at each unloading, a profit was made.
The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century when the largest number of slaves were captured on raiding expeditions into the interior of West Africa. These expeditions were typically carried out by African states, such as the Bono State, Oyo empire (Yoruba), Kong Empire, Kingdom of Benin, Imamate of Futa Jallon, Imamate of Futa Toro, Kingdom of Koya, Kingdom of Khasso, Kingdom of Kaabu, Fante Confederacy, Ashanti Confederacy, Aro Confederacy and the kingdom of Dahomey.[42][43] Europeans rarely entered the interior of Africa, due to fear of disease and moreover fierce African resistance. The slaves were brought to coastal outposts where they were traded for goods. The people captured on these expeditions were shipped by European traders to the colonies of the New World. As a result of the War of the Spanish Succession, the United Kingdom obtained the monopoly (asiento de negros) of transporting captive Africans to Spanish America. It is estimated that over the centuries, twelve to twenty million people were shipped as slaves from Africa by European traders, of whom some 15 percent died during the terrible voyage, many during the arduous journey through the Middle Passage. The great majority were shipped to the Americas, but some also went to Europe and Southern Africa.
Arab slave traders and their captives along the Ruvuma river (in today's Tanzania and Mozambique), 19th-century drawing by David Livingstone.
While talking about the slave trade in East Africa in his journals, David Livingstone said
To overdraw its evil is a simple impossibility.[44]
While travelling in the African Great Lakes Region in 1866, Livingstone described a trail of slaves:
19th June 1866 – We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead, the people of the country explained that she had been unable to keep up with the other slaves in a gang, and her master had determined that she should not become anyone's property if she recovered.
26th June. – ...We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path: a group of men stood about a hundred yards off on one side, and another of the women on the other side, looking on; they said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer.
27th June 1866 – To-day we came upon a man dead from starvation, as he was very thin. One of our men wandered and found many slaves with slave-sticks on, abandoned by their masters from want of food; they were too weak to be able to speak or say where they had come from; some were quite young.[45]
The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be broken-heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves... Twenty one were unchained, as now safe; however all ran away at once; but eight with many others still in chains, died in three days after the crossing. They described their only pain in the heart, and placed the hand correctly on the spot, though many think the organ stands high up in the breast-bone.[46]
African participation in the slave trade
See also: Atlantic slave trade and Sara Forbes Bonetta
Gezo, King of Dahomey
African states played a key role in the slave trade, and slavery was a common practice among Sub Saharan Africans even before the involvement of the Arabs, Berbers and Europeans. There were three types: those who were slaves through conquest, in lieu of unpaid debts, or those whose parents gave them as slaves to tribal chiefs. Chieftains would barter their slaves to Arab, Berber, Ottoman or European buyers for rum, spices, cloth or other goods.[47] Selling captives or prisoners was a common practice among Africans, Turks, Berbers and Arabs during that era. However, as the Atlantic slave trade increased its demand, local systems which primarily serviced indentured servitude expanded. European slave trading, as a result, was the most pivotal change in the social, economic, cultural, spiritual, religious, political dynamics of the concept of slave trading. It ultimately undermined local economies and political stability as villages' vital labour forces were shipped overseas as slave raids and civil wars became commonplace. Crimes which were previously punishable by some other means became punishable by enslavement.[48]
Slavery already existed in Kingdom of Kongo prior to the arrival of the Portuguese. Because it had been established within his kingdom, Afonso I of Kongo believed that the slave trade should be subject to Kongo law. When he suspected the Portuguese of receiving illegally enslaved persons to sell, he wrote letters to the King João III of Portugal in 1526 imploring him to put a stop to the practice.[49]
The kings of Dahomey sold their war captives into transatlantic slavery, who otherwise may have been killed in a ceremony known as the Annual Customs. As one of West Africa's principal slave states, Dahomey became extremely unpopular with neighbouring peoples.[50][51][52] Like the Bambara Empire to the east, the Khasso kingdoms depended heavily on the slave trade for their economy. A family's status was indicated by the number of slaves it owned, leading to wars for the sole purpose of taking more captives. This trade led the Khasso into increasing contact with the European settlements of Africa's west coast, particularly the French.[53] Benin grew increasingly rich during the 16th and 17th centuries on the slave trade with Europe; slaves from enemy states of the interior were sold, and carried to the Americas in Dutch and Portuguese ships. The Bight of Benin's shore soon came to be known as the "Slave Coast".[54]
In the 1840s, King Gezo of Dahomey said:[9][55]
"The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery."
In 1807 the United Kingdom made the international trade in slaves illegal with the Slave Trade Act. The Royal Navy was deployed to prevent slavers from the United States, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, West Africa and Arabia. The King of Bonny (now in Nigeria) allegedly became dissatisfied of the British intervention in stopping slave trading:[56]
"We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself."
Joseph Miller states that African buyers would prefer males, but in reality, women and children would be more easily captured as men fled. Those captured would be sold for various reasons such as food, debts, or servitude. Once captured, the journey to the coast killed many and weakened others. Disease engulfed many, and insufficient food damaged those who made it to the coasts. Scurvy was so common that it was known as mal de Luanda (Luanda sickness).[57] The assumption for those who died on the journey died from malnutrition. As food was limited, water may have been just as bad. Dysentery was widespread and poor sanitary conditions at ports did not help. Since supplies were poor, slaves were not equipped with the best clothing, meaning they were even more exposed to diseases.[57]
On top of the fear of disease, people were afraid of why they were being captured. The popular assumption was that Europeans were cannibals. Stories and rumours spread that whites captured Africans to eat them.[57] Olaudah Equiano accounts his experience about the sorrow slaves encountered at the ports. He talks about his first moment on a slave ship and asked if he was going to be eaten.[58] Yet, the worst for slaves has only begun, and the journey on the water proved to be more harrowing. For every 100 Africans captured, only 64 would reach the coast, and only about 50 would reach the New World.[57]
Others believe that slavers had a vested interest in capturing rather than killing, and in keeping their captives alive; and that this coupled with the disproportionate removal of males and the introduction of new crops from the Americas (cassava, maize) would have limited general population decline to particular regions of western Africa around 1760–1810, and in Mozambique and neighbouring areas half a century later. There has also been speculation that within Africa, females were most often captured as brides, with their male protectors being a "bycatch" who would have been killed if there had not been an export market for them.
British explorer Mungo Park encountered a group of slaves when traveling through Mandinka country:
They were all very inquisitive, but they viewed me at first with looks of horror, and repeatedly asked if my countrymen were cannibals. They were very desirous to know what became of the slaves after they had crossed the salt water. I told them that they were employed in cultivation the land; but they would not believe me ... A deeply-rooted idea that the whites purchase negroes for the purpose of devouring them, or of selling them to others that they may be devoured hereafter, naturally makes the slaves contemplate a journey towards the coast with great terror, insomuch that the slatees are forced to keep them constantly in irons, and watch them very closely, to prevent their escape.[59]
During the period from the late 19th century and early 20th century, demand for the labour-intensive harvesting of rubber drove frontier expansion and forced labour. The personal monarchy of Belgian King Leopold II in the Congo Free State saw mass killings and slavery to extract rubber.[60]
Africans on ships
See also: Atlantic slave trade
Stephanie Smallwood in her book Saltwater Slavery uses Equiano's account on board ships to describe the general thoughts of most slaves:
"Then," said I, "how comes it in all our country we never heard of them?" They told me because they lived so very far off. I then asked where were their women? Had they any like themselves? I was told that they had. "And why," said I, "do we not see them?" They answered, because they were left behind. I asked how the vessel could go? They told me they could not tell; but that there was cloth put upon the masts by the help of the ropes I saw, and then the vessel went on; and the white men had some spell or magic they put in the water when they liked, in order to stop the vessel. I was exceedingly amazed at this account, and really thought they were spirits. I there-fore wished much to be from amongst them, for I expected they would sacrifice me; but my wishes were vain—for we were so quartered that it was impossible for any of us to make our escape.[61]
Illustration of slave ship used to transport slaves to Europe and the Americas
Accounts like these raised many questions as some slaves grew philosophical with their journey. Smallwood points out the challenges for slaves were physical and metaphysical. The physical would be obvious as the challenge to overcome capacity, lack of ship room, and food. The metaphysical was unique as the open sea would challenge African slaves' vision of the ocean as habitable.[61] At essence, the journey on the ocean would prove to be an African's biggest fear that would keep them in awe. Combining this with the lack of knowledge of the sea, Africans would be entering a world of anxiety never seen before. Yet, Europeans were also fearful of the sea, but not to the extent of Africans. One of these dilemmas came with the sense of time. Africans used seasonal weather to predict time and days. The moon was a sense of time, but used like in other cultures. On the sea, Africans used the moon to best count the days, but the sea did not provide seasonal changes for them to know how long they were at sea.[61] Counting the days on a ship was not the main priority, however. Surviving the voyage was the main horror. No one escaped diseases as the close quarters infected everyone including the crew. Death was so common that ships were called tumbeiros or floating tombs.[61] What shocked Africans the most was how death was handled in the ships. Smallwood says the traditions for an African death was delicate and community-based. On ships, bodies would be thrown into the sea. Because the sea represented bad omens, bodies in the sea represented a form of purgatory and the ship a form of hell. In the end, the Africans who made the journey would have survived disease, malnutrition, confined space, close death, and the trauma of the ship.
North Africa
Main article: Barbary slave trade
Christian slaves in Algiers, 1706
In Algiers during the time of the Regency of Algiers in North Africa in the 19th century, up to 1.5 million Christians and Europeans were captured and forced into slavery.[62] This eventually led to the Bombardment of Algiers in 1816 by the British and Dutch, forcing the Dey of Algiers to free many slaves.[63]
Americas
A young boy with an enslaved woman, Brazil, 1860.
For the slave trade on Spanish America bankers and trading companies actually had to pay the Spanish king for the license, called the Asiento de Negros, but an unknown amount of the trade was illegal. After 1670 when the Spanish Empire declined substantially they outsourced part of the slave trade to the Dutch (1685-1687), the Portuguese, the French (1698-1713) and the English (1713-1750), also providing Dutch, British and French America from the Caribbean islands were there organized depots. Meanwhile, slave trade became a core business for privately owned enterprises.
Among indigenous peoples
Main articles: Aztec slavery and Slavery among the indigenous people of the Americas
In Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica the most common forms of slavery were those of prisoners of war and debtors. People unable to pay back debts could be sentenced to work as slaves to the persons owed until the debts were worked off, as a form of indentured servitude. Warfare was important to Maya society, because raids on surrounding areas provided the victims required for human sacrifice, as well as slaves for the construction of temples.[106] Most victims of human sacrifice were prisoners of war or slaves.[107] Slavery was not usually hereditary; children of slaves were born free. In the Inca Empire, workers were subject to a mita in lieu of taxes which they paid by working for the government. Each ayllu, or extended family, would decide which family member to send to do the work. It is unclear if this labor draft or corvée counts as slavery. The Spanish adopted this system, particularly for their silver mines in Bolivia.[108]
Other slave-owning societies and tribes of the New World were, for example, the Tehuelche of Patagonia, the Comanche of Texas, the Caribs of Dominica, the Tupinambá of Brazil, the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, that lived along the coast from what is now Alaska to California, the Pawnee and Klamath.[109] Many of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, such as the Haida and Tlingit, were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave-traders, raiding as far as California. Slavery was hereditary, the slaves being prisoners of war. Among some Pacific Northwest tribes about a quarter of the population were slaves.[110][111] One slave narrative was composed by an Englishman, John R. Jewitt, who had been taken alive when his ship was captured in 1802; his memoir provides a detailed look at life as a slave, and asserts that a large number were held.
United States
Main articles: Slavery in the United States and Slavery in the colonial United States
Early events
In late August 1619, the frigate White Lion, a privateer ship owned by Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, but flying a Dutch flag arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia (several miles downstream from the colony of Jamestown, Virginia) with the first recorded slaves from Africa to Virginia. The approximately 20 Africans were from the present-day Angola. They had been removed by the White Lion's crew from a Portuguese slave ship, the São João Bautista.[145][146]
Historians are undecided if the legal practice of slavery began in the colony because at least some of them had the status of indentured servant. Alden T. Vaughn says most agree that both black slaves and indentured servants existed by 1640.[147]
Only a small fraction of the enslaved Africans brought to the New World came to British North America, perhaps as little as 5% of the total. The vast majority of slaves were sent to the Caribbean sugar colonies, Brazil, or Spanish America.
By the 1680s, with the consolidation of England's Royal African Company, enslaved Africans were arriving in English colonies in larger numbers, and the institution continued to be protected by the British government. Colonists now began purchasing slaves in larger numbers.
Slavery in American colonial law
· 1640: Virginia courts sentence John Punch to lifetime slavery, marking the earliest legal sanctioning of slavery in English colonies.[148]
· 1641: Massachusetts legalizes slavery.[149]
· 1650: Connecticut legalizes slavery.
· 1652: Rhode Island bans the enslavement or forced servitude of any white or negro for more than ten years or beyond the age of 24.[150][151]
· 1654: Virginia sanctions "the right of Negros to own slaves of their own race" after African Anthony Johnson, former indentured servant, sued to have fellow African John Casor declared not an indentured servant but "slave for life."[152]
· 1661: Virginia officially recognizes slavery by statute.
· 1662: A Virginia statute declares that children born would have the same status as their mother.
· 1663: Maryland legalizes slavery.
· 1664: Slavery is legalized in New York and New Jersey.[153]
· 1670: Carolina (later, South Carolina and North Carolina) is founded mainly by planters from the overpopulated British sugar island colony of Barbados, who brought relatively large numbers of African slaves from that island.[154]
· 1676: Rhode Island bans the enslavement of Native Americans.[155]
Development of slavery
The shift from indentured servants to African slaves was prompted by a dwindling class of former servants who had worked through the terms of their indentures and thus became competitors to their former masters. These newly freed servants were rarely able to support themselves comfortably, and the tobacco industry was increasingly dominated by large planters. This caused domestic unrest culminating in Bacon's Rebellion. Eventually, chattel slavery became the norm in regions dominated by plantations.
The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina established a model in which a rigid social hierarchy placed slaves under the absolute authority of their master. With the rise of a plantation economy in the Carolina Lowcountry based on rice cultivation, a slave society was created that later became the model for the King Cotton economy across the Deep South. The model created by South Carolina was driven by the emergence of a majority slave population that required repressive and often brutal force to control. Justification for such a slave society developed into a conceptual framework of white superiority and aristocratic privilege.[156]
Several local slave rebellions took place during the 17th and 18th centuries: Gloucester County, Virginia Revolt (1663);[157] New York Slave Revolt of 1712; Stono Rebellion (1739); and New York Slave Insurrection of 1741.[158]
Early United States law
James Hopkinson's plantation, South Carolina ca. 1862.
Within the British Empire, the Massachusetts courts began to follow England when, in 1772, England became the first country in the world to outlaw the slave trade within its borders (see Somerset v Stewart) followed by the Knight v. Wedderburn decision in Scotland in 1778. Between 1764 and 1774, seventeen slaves appeared in Massachusetts courts to sue their owners for freedom.[159] In 1766, John Adams' colleague Benjamin Kent won the first trial in the present-day United States to free a slave (Slew vs. Whipple).[160][161][162][163][164][165]
The Republic of Vermont banned slavery in its constitution of 1777 and continued the ban when it entered the United States in 1791.[166] Through the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 under the Congress of the Confederation, slavery was prohibited in the territories north west of the Ohio River. In 1794, Congress banned American vessels from being used in the slave trade, and also banned the export of American slaves to other countries.[167] However, little effort was made to enforce this legislation. The slave ship owners of Rhode Island were able to continue in trade, and the USA's slaving fleet in 1806 was estimated to be nearly 75% as large as that of Britain, with dominance of the transportation of slaves into Cuba.[20]: 63 By 1804, abolitionists succeeded in passing legislation that ended legal slavery in every northern state (with slaves above a certain age legally transformed to indentured servants).[168] Congress passed an Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves as of 1 January 1808; but not the internal slave trade.[169]
Despite the actions of abolitionists, free blacks were subject to racial segregation in the Northern states.[170] While the United Kingdom did not ban slavery throughout most of the empire, including British North America till 1833, free blacks found refugee in the Canadas after the America Revolution and again after the War of 1812. Refugees from slavery fled the South across the Ohio River to the North via the Underground Railroad. Midwestern state governments asserted States Rights arguments to refuse federal jurisdiction over fugitives. Some juries exercised their right of jury nullification and refused to convict those indicted under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
After the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, armed conflict broke out in Kansas Territory, where the question of whether it would be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state had been left to the inhabitants. The radical abolitionist John Brown was active in the mayhem and killing in "Bleeding Kansas." The true turning point in public opinion is better fixed at the Lecompton Constitution fraud. Pro-slavery elements in Kansas had arrived first from Missouri and quickly organized a territorial government that excluded abolitionists. Through the machinery of the territory and violence, the pro-slavery faction attempted to force an unpopular pro-slavery constitution through the state. This infuriated Northern Democrats, who supported popular sovereignty, and was exacerbated by the Buchanan administration reneging on a promise to submit the constitution to a referendum—which would surely fail. Anti-slavery legislators took office under the banner of the newly formed Republican Party. The Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 asserted that one could take one's property anywhere, even if one's property was chattel and one crossed into a free territory. It also asserted that African Americans could not be federal citizens. Outraged critics across the North denounced these episodes as the latest of the Slave Power (the politically organized slave owners) taking more control of the nation.[171]
Civil War
Further information: Military history of African Americans in the American Civil War
The slave population in the United States stood at four million.[172] Ninety-five percent of blacks lived in the South, comprising one third of the population there as opposed to 1% of the population of the North. The central issue in politics in the 1850s involved the extension of slavery into the western territories, which settlers from the Northern states opposed. The Whig Party split and collapsed on the slavery issue, to be replaced in the North by the new Republican Party, which was dedicated to stopping the expansion of slavery. Republicans gained a majority in every northern state by absorbing a faction of anti-slavery Democrats, and warning that slavery was a backward system that undercut democracy and economic modernization.[173] Numerous compromise proposals were put forward, but they all collapsed. A majority of Northern voters were committed to stopping the expansion of slavery, which they believed would ultimately end slavery. Southern voters were overwhelmingly angry that they were being treated as second-class citizens. In the election of 1860, the Republicans swept Abraham Lincoln into the Presidency and his party took control with legislators into Congress. The states of the deep South, convinced that the economic power of what they called "King Cotton" would overwhelm the North and win support from Europe voted to secede from the U.S. (the Union). They formed the Confederate States of America, based on the promise of maintaining slavery. War broke out in April 1861, as both sides sought wave after wave of enthusiasm among young men volunteering to form new regiments and new armies. In the North, the main goal was to preserve the union as an expression of American nationalism.
Company I of the 36th Colored Regiment USCT
Rebel leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Nathan Bedford Forrest and others were slavers and slave-traders.
By 1862 most northern leaders realized that the mainstay of Southern secession, slavery, had to be attacked head-on. All the border states rejected President Lincoln's proposal for compensated emancipation. However, by 1865 all had begun the abolition of slavery, except Kentucky and Delaware. The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by Lincoln on 1 January 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 liberated all of the designated slaves. The owners were never compensated.[174] About 186,000 free blacks and newly freed slaves fought for the Union in the Army and Navy, thereby validating their claims to full citizenship.[175]
The severe dislocations of war and Reconstruction had a severe negative impact on the black population, with a large amount of sickness and death.[176][177] After liberation, many of the Freedmen remained on the same plantation. Others fled or crowded into refugee camps operated by the Freedmen's Bureau. The Bureau provided food, housing, clothing, medical care, church services, some schooling, legal support, and arranged for labor contracts.[178] Fierce debates about the rights of the Freedmen, and of the defeated Confederates, often accompanied by killings of black leaders, marked the Reconstruction Era, 1863–77.[179]
Slavery was never reestablished, but after President Ulysses S. Grant left the White House in 1877, white Democrats took control of all the southern states, and blacks lost nearly all the political power they had achieved during Reconstruction. By 1900, they also lost the right to vote – they had become second class citizens. The great majority lived in the rural South in poverty working as laborers, sharecroppers or tenant farmers; a small proportion owned their own land. The black churches, especially the Baptist Church, was the center of community activity and leadership.[180]
Historiography
Historiography in the United States
Wes Brady, ex-slave, Marshall, Texas, 1937. This photograph was taken as part of the Federal Writers' Project Slave Narrative Collection, which has often been used as a primary source by historians.
The history of slavery originally was the history of the government's laws and policies toward slavery, and the political debates about it. Black history was promoted very largely at black colleges. The situation changed dramatically with the coming of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s. Attention shifted to the enslaved humans, the free blacks, and the struggles of the black community against adversity.[419]
Peter Kolchin described the state of historiography in the early 20th century as follows:
During the first half of the twentieth century, a major component of this approach was often simply racism, manifest in the belief that blacks were, at best, imitative of whites. Thus Ulrich B. Phillips, the era's most celebrated and influential expert on slavery, combined a sophisticated portrait of the white planters' life and behavior with crude passing generalizations about the life and behavior of their black slaves.[420]
Historians James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton described Phillips' mindset, methodology and influence:
His portrayal of blacks as passive, inferior people, whose African origins made them uncivilized, seemed to provide historical evidence for the theories of racial inferiority that supported racial segregation. Drawing evidence exclusively from plantation records, letters, southern newspapers, and other sources reflecting the slaveholder's point of view, Phillips depicted slave masters who provided for the welfare of their slaves and contended that true affection existed between master and slave.[421]
The racist attitude concerning slaves carried over into the historiography of the Dunning School of Reconstruction era history, which dominated in the early 20th century. Writing in 2005, the historian Eric Foner states:
Their account of the era rested, as one member of the Dunning school put it, on the assumption of "negro incapacity." Finding it impossible to believe that blacks could ever be independent actors on the stage of history, with their own aspirations and motivations, Dunning et al. portrayed African Americans either as "children", ignorant dupes manipulated by unscrupulous whites, or as savages, their primal passions unleashed by the end of slavery.[422]
Beginning in the 1950s, historiography moved away from the tone of the Phillips era. Historians still emphasized the slave as an object. Whereas Phillips presented the slave as the object of benign attention by the owners, historians such as Kenneth Stampp emphasized the mistreatment and abuse of the slave.[423]
In the portrayal of the slave as a victim, the historian Stanley M. Elkins in his 1959 work Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life compared the effects of United States slavery to that resulting from the brutality of the Nazi concentration camps. He stated the institution destroyed the will of the slave, creating an "emasculated, docile Sambo" who identified totally with the owner. Elkins' thesis was challenged by historians. Gradually historians recognized that in addition to the effects of the owner-slave relationship, slaves did not live in a "totally closed environment but rather in one that permitted the emergence of enormous variety and allowed slaves to pursue important relationships with persons other than their master, including those to be found in their families, churches and communities."[424]
Economic historians Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman in the 1970s, through their work Time on the Cross, portrayed slaves as having internalized the Protestant work ethic of their owners.[425] In portraying the more benign version of slavery, they also argue in their 1974 book that the material conditions under which the slaves lived and worked compared favorably to those of free workers in the agriculture and industry of the time. (This was also an argument of Southerners during the 19th century.)
In the 1970s and 1980s, historians made use of sources such as black music and statistical census data to create a more detailed and nuanced picture of slave life. Relying also on 19th-century autobiographies of ex-slaves (known as slave narratives) and the WPA Slave Narrative Collection, a set of interviews conducted with former slaves in the 1930s by the Federal Writers' Project, historians described slavery as the slaves remembered it. Far from slaves' being strictly victims or content, historians showed slaves as both resilient and autonomous in many of their activities. Despite their exercise of autonomy and their efforts to make a life within slavery, current historians recognize the precariousness of the slave's situation. Slave children quickly learned that they were subject to the direction of both their parents and their owners. They saw their parents disciplined just as they came to realize that they also could be physically or verbally abused by their owners. Historians writing during this era include John Blassingame (Slave Community), Eugene Genovese (Roll, Jordan, Roll), Leslie Howard Owens (This Species of Property), and Herbert Gutman (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom).[426]
Important work on slavery has continued; for instance, in 2003 Steven Hahn published the Pulitzer Prize-winning account, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, which examined how slaves built community and political understanding while enslaved, so they quickly began to form new associations and institutions when emancipated, including black churches separate from white control. In 2010, Robert E. Wright published a model that explains why slavery was more prevalent in some areas than others (e.g. southern than northern Delaware) and why some firms (individuals, corporations, plantation owners) chose slave labor while others used wage, indentured, or family labor instead.[427]
A national Marist Poll of Americans in 2015 asked, "Was slavery the main reason for the Civil War, or not?" 53% said yes and 41% said not. There were sharp cleavages along lines of region and party. In the South, 49% answered not. Nationwide 55 percent said students should be taught slavery was the reason for the Civil War.[428]
In 2018, a conference at the University of Virginia studied the history of slavery and recent views on it.[429]
British slave trade
Main article: Atlantic slave trade
Illustration from the book: The Black Man's Lament, or, how to make sugar by Amelia Opie. (London, 1826)
Britain played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade, especially after 1640, when sugar cane was introduced to the region. At first, most were white Britons, or Irish, enslaved as indentured labour – for a fixed period – in the West Indies. These people may have been criminals, political rebels, the poor with no prospects or others who were simply tricked or kidnapped. Slavery was a legal institution in all of the 13 American colonies and Canada (acquired by Britain in 1763). The profits of the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to under 5% of the British economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution.[365]
A little-known incident in the career of Judge Jeffreys refers to an assize in Bristol in 1685 when he made the mayor of the city, then sitting fully robed beside him on the bench, go into the dock and be fined £1000 for being a "kidnapping knave"; some Bristol traders at the time were known at the time to kidnap their own countrymen and ship them away as slaves.[366]
Somersett's case in 1772 was generally taken at the time to have decided that the condition of slavery did not exist under English law in England. In 1785, English poet William Cowper wrote: "We have no slaves at home – Then why abroad? Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs receive our air, that moment they are free. They touch our country, and their shackles fall. That's noble, and bespeaks a nation proud. And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then, And let it circulate through every vein."[367] However, slavery continued to thrive in England itself, much like it did in the British Empire, until full emancipation in the 1830s.[368] In 1807, following many years of lobbying by the abolitionist movement, led primarily by William Wilberforce, the British Parliament voted to make the slave trade illegal anywhere in the Empire with the Slave Trade Act 1807. Thereafter Britain took a prominent role in combating the trade, and slavery itself was abolished in the British Empire (except for India) with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard.[369] Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade. Akitoye, the 11th Oba of Lagos, is famous for having used British involvement to regain his rule in return for suppressing slavery among the Yoruba people of Lagos in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers.[370] In 1839, the world's oldest international human rights organization, British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (now Anti-Slavery International), was formed in Britain as by Joseph Sturge, which worked to outlaw slavery in other countries.[371]
After 1833, the freed African slaves declined employment in the cane fields. This led to the importation of indentured labour again – mainly from India, and also China.
In 1811, Arthur William Hodge was executed for the murder of a slave in the British West Indies. He was not, however, as some have claimed, the first white person to have been lawfully executed for the murder of a slave.[372][373]
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