Slavery in North America - Part 1

From Wikipedia, 1/16/2022

16th century

Further information: Indentured servitude in the Americas, Redemptioner, and Indian slave trade in the American Southeast

While the British knew about Spanish and Portuguese slave trading, they did not implement slave labor in the Americas until the 17th century.[71] British travelers were fascinated by the dark-skinned people they found in West Africa; they developed mythologies that situated them in their view of the cosmos.[72]

The first Africans to arrive in England came voluntarily in 1555 with John Lok (an ancestor of the famous philosopher John Locke). Lok intended to teach them English in order to facilitate the trading of material goods with West Africa.[73] This model gave way to a slave trade initiated by John Hawkins, who captured 300 Africans and sold them to the Spanish.[74] Blacks in England were subordinate but never had the legal status of chattel slaves.[75]

In 1607, England established Jamestown as its first permanent colony on the North American continent.[76] Tobacco became the chief commodity crop of the colony, due to the efforts of John Rolfe in 1611. Once it became clear that tobacco was going to drive the Jamestown economy, more workers were needed for the labor-intensive crop. The British aristocracy also needed to find a labor force to work on its sugar plantations in the Americas. The major sources were indentured servants from Britain, Native Americans, and West Africans.[77] During this period, the English established colonies in Barbados in 1624 and Jamaica in 1655. These and other Caribbean colonies generated wealth by the production of sugar cane, as sugar was in high demand in Europe. They also were an early center of the slave trade for the growing English empire.[78]

The English entertained two lines of thought simultaneously toward indigenous Native Americans. Because these people were lighter-skinned, they were seen as more European and therefore as candidates for civilization. At the same time, because they were occupying the land desired by the colonial powers, they were from the beginning, targets of potential military attack.[79]

At first, indentured servants were used for labor.[80] These servants provided up to seven years of service in exchange for having their trip to Jamestown paid for by someone in Jamestown. The person who paid was granted additional land in headrights, dependent on how many persons he paid to travel to the colony. Once the seven years were over, the indentured servant who survived was free to live in Jamestown as a regular citizen. However, colonists began to see indentured servants as too costly, in part because the high mortality rate meant the force had to be resupplied. In addition, an improving economy in England reduced the number of persons who were willing to sign up as indentured servants for the harsh conditions in the colonies.

17th century

In 1619, an English Privateer, The White Lion, with Dutch letters of marque, brought African slaves pillaged from a Portuguese slave ship to Point Comfort.[81]

Several colonial colleges held enslaved people as workers and relied on them to operate.[82]

The development of slavery in 17th-century America

The laws relating to slavery and their enforcement hardened in the second half of the 17th century, and the prospects for Africans and their descendants grew increasingly dim. By 1640, the Virginia courts had sentenced at least one black servant, John Punch, to slavery.[83] In 1656 Elizabeth Key won a suit for freedom based on her father's status as a free Englishman, his having baptized her as Christian in the Church of England, and the fact that he established a guardianship for her that was supposed to be a limited indenture. Following her case, in 1662 the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law with the doctrine of partus, stating that any child born in the colony would follow the status of its mother, bond or free. This overturned a long held principle of English Common Law, whereby a child's status followed that of the father. It removed any responsibility for the children from white fathers who had abused and raped slave women. Most did not acknowledge, support, or emancipate their resulting children.

During the second half of the 17th century, the British economy improved and the supply of British indentured servants declined, as poor Britons had better economic opportunities at home. At the same time, Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 led planters to worry about the prospective dangers of creating a large class of restless, landless, and relatively poor white men (most of them former indentured servants). Wealthy Virginia and Maryland planters began to buy slaves in preference to indentured servants during the 1660s and 1670s, and poorer planters followed suit by c.1700. (Slaves cost more than servants, so initially only the wealthy could invest in slaves.) The first British colonists in Carolina introduced African slavery into the colony in 1670, the year the colony was founded, and Charleston ultimately became the busiest slave port in North America. Slavery spread from the South Carolina Lowcountry first to Georgia, then across the Deep South as Virginia's influence had crossed the Appalachians to Kentucky and Tennessee. Northerners also purchased slaves, though on a much smaller scale. Enslaved people outnumbered free whites in South Carolina from the early 1700s to the Civil War. An authoritarian political culture evolved to prevent slave rebellion and justify white slaveholding. Northern slaves typically dwelled in towns, rather than on plantations as in the South, and worked as artisans and artisans' assistants, sailors and longshoremen, and domestic servants.[84]

In 1672, King Charles II rechartered the Royal African Company (it had initially been set up in 1660), as an English monopoly for the African slave and commodities trade—thereafter in 1698, by statute, the English parliament opened the trade to all English subjects.[85] The slave trade to the mid-Atlantic colonies increased substantially in the 1680s, and by 1710 the African population in Virginia had increased to 23,100 (42% of total); Maryland contained 8,000 Africans (23% of total).[86] In the early 18th century, England passed Spain and Portugal to become the world's leading slave-trader.[85][87]

The North American royal colonies not only imported Africans but also captured Native Americans, impressing them into slavery. Many Native Americans were shipped as slaves to the Caribbean. Many of these slaves from the British colonies were able to escape by heading south, to the Spanish colony of Florida. There they were given their freedom if they declared their allegiance to the King of Spain and accepted the Catholic Church. In 1739 Fort Mose was established by African-American freedmen and became the northern defense post for St. Augustine. In 1740, English forces attacked and destroyed the fort, which was rebuilt in 1752. Because Fort Mose became a haven for escaped slaves from the English colonies to the north, it is considered a precursor site of the Underground Railroad.[88]

Chattel slavery developed in British North America before the full legal apparatus that supported slavery did. During the late 17th century and early 18th century, harsh new slave codes limited the rights of African slaves and cut off their avenues to freedom. The first full-scale slave code in British North America was South Carolina's (1696), which was modeled on the colonial Barbados slave code of 1661. It was updated and expanded regularly throughout the 18th century.[89]

A 1691 Virginia law prohibited slaveholders from emancipating slaves unless they paid for the freedmen's transportation out of Virginia.[90] Virginia criminalized interracial marriage in 1691,[91] and subsequent laws abolished free blacks' rights to vote, hold office, and bear arms.[90] Virginia's House of Burgesses established the basic legal framework for slavery in 1705.[92]

The Atlantic slave trade to North America

Main article: Atlantic slave trade

Of the enslaved Africans brought to the New World an estimated 5–7% ended up in British North America. The vast majority of slaves transported across the Atlantic Ocean were sent to the Caribbean sugar colonies, Brazil, or Spanish America. Throughout the Americas, but especially in the Caribbean, tropical disease took a large toll on their population and required large numbers of replacements. Many Africans had limited natural immunity to yellow fever and malaria; but malnutrition, poor housing, inadequate clothing allowances, and overwork contributed to a high mortality rate.

In British North America the slave population rapidly increased via the birth rate, whereas in the Caribbean colonies they did not. The lack of proper nourishment, being suppressed sexually, and poor health are possible reasons. Of the small numbers of babies born to slaves in the Caribbean, only about 1/4 survived the miserable conditions on sugar plantations.

It was not only the major colonial powers of Western Europe such as France, England, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands that were involved. Other countries, including Sweden and Denmark, participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade though on a much more limited scale.

Sexual role differentiation and slavery

"Depending upon their age and gender, slaves were assigned a particular task, or tasks, that had to be completed during the course of the day."[93] In certain settings, men would participate in the hard labor, such as working on the farm, while women would generally work in the household. They would "be sent out on errands but in most cases their jobs required that they spend much of their time within their owner's household."[94] These gender distinctions were mainly applied in the Northern colonies and on larger plantations. In Southern colonies and smaller farms, however, women and men typically engaged in the same roles, both working in the tobacco crop fields for example.

Although slave women and men in some areas performed the same type of day-to-day work, "[t]he female slave ... was faced with the prospect of being forced into sexual relationships for the purpose of reproduction."[95] This reproduction would either be forced between one African slave and another, or between the slave woman and the owner. Slave owners saw slave women in terms of prospective fertility. That way, the number of slaves on a plantation could multiply without having to purchase another African. Unlike the patriarchal society of white Anglo-American colonists, "slave families" were more matriarchal in practice. "Masters believed that slave mothers, like white women, had a natural bond with their children that therefore it was their responsibility—more so than that of slave fathers—to care for their offspring."[96] Therefore, women had the extra responsibility, on top of their other day-to-day work, to take care of children. Men, in turn, were often separated from their families. "At the same time that slaveholders promoted a strong bond between slave mothers and their children, they denied to slave fathers their paternal rights of ownership and authority..."[96] Biological families were often separated by sale.

Further information: Marriage of enslaved people (United States)

Indentured servitude

Some historians such as Edmund Morgan and Lerone Bennett have suggested that indentured servitude provided a model for slavery in the 17th-century Crown Colonies. In practice, indentured servants were teenagers in England whose fathers sold their labor voluntarily for a period of time (typically four to seven years), in return for free passage to the colonies, room and board and clothes, and training in an occupation. After that, they received cash, clothing, tools, and/or land, and became ordinary settlers.

The Quaker petition against slavery

In 1688, four German Quakers in Germantown, a town outside Philadelphia, wrote a petition against the use of slaves by English colonists in the nearby countryside. They presented the petition to their local Quaker Meeting, and the Meeting was sympathetic, but could not decide what the appropriate response should be. The Meeting passed the petition up the chain of authority to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, where it continued to be ignored. It was archived and forgotten for 150 years.

The Quaker petition was the first public American document of its kind to protest slavery. It was also one of the first public declarations of universal human rights. While the petition was forgotten for a time, the idea that every human has equal rights was regularly discussed in Philadelphia Quaker society through the eighteenth century.

18th century

During the Great Awakening of the late eighteenth century, Methodist and Baptist preachers toured in the South, trying to persuade planters to manumit their slaves on the basis of equality in God's eyes. They also accepted slaves as members and preachers of new chapels and churches. The first black churches (all Baptist) in what became the United States were founded by slaves and free blacks in Aiken County, South Carolina, in 1773;[97] Petersburg, Virginia, in 1774; and Savannah, Georgia, in 1778, before the end of the Revolutionary War.[98][99]

Slavery was officially recognized as a serious offense in 1776 by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.[100][101][102] The Yearly Meeting had been against slavery since the 1750s.[103][104]

East Indian slaves

In the early 21st century, new research has revealed that small numbers of East Indians were brought to the colonies as enslaved laborers, during the period when both India and the colonies were under British control. As an example, an ad in the Virginia Gazette of Aug. 4, 1768, describes one young "East Indian" as "a well made fellow, about 5 feet 4 inches high" who had "a thin visage, a very sly look, and a remarkable set of fine white teeth." Another slave is identified as "an East India negro man" who speaks French and English.[105] Most of the Indian slaves were already converted to Christianity, were fluent in English, and took western names.[105] Their original names and homes are not known. Their descendants have mostly merged with the African-American community, which also incorporated European ancestors. Today, descendants of such East Indian slaves may have a small percent of DNA from Asian ancestors but it likely falls below the detectable levels for today's DNA tests, as most of the generations since would have been primarily of ethnic African and European ancestry.[106]

Beginning of the anti-slavery movement

Main article: Abolitionism in the United States

African and African-American slaves expressed their opposition to slavery through armed uprisings such as the Stono Rebellion (1739) in South Carolina. More typically, they resisted through work slowdowns, tool-breaking, and running away, either for short periods or permanently. Until the Revolutionary era, almost no white American colonists spoke out against slavery. Even the Quakers generally tolerated slaveholding (and slave-trading) until the mid-18th century, although they emerged as vocal opponents of slavery in the Revolutionary era. During the Great Awakening, Baptist and Methodist preachers in the South originally urged planters to free their slaves. In the nineteenth century, they more often urged better treatment of slaves.

Further events

Main article: Slavery in the United States

Late 18th and 19th century

During and following the Revolution, the northern states all abolished slavery, with New Jersey acting last in 1804. Some of these state jurisdictions enacted the first abolition laws in the entire New World.[107] In states that passed gradual abolition laws, such as New York and New Jersey, children born to slave mothers had to serve an extended period of indenture into young adulthood. In other cases, some slaves were reclassified as indentured servants, effectively preserving the institution of slavery through another name.[108]

Often citing Revolutionary ideals, some slaveholders freed their slaves in the first two decades after independence, either outright or through their wills. The proportion of free blacks rose markedly in the Upper South in this period, before the invention of the cotton gin created a new demand for slaves in the developing "Cotton Kingdom" of the Deep South.

By 1808 (the first year allowed by the Constitution to federally ban the import slave trade), all states (except South Carolina) had banned the international buying or selling of slaves. Acting on the advice of President Thomas Jefferson, who denounced the international trade as "violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, in which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country have long been eager to proscribe", in 1807 Congress also banned the international slave trade. However, the domestic slave trade continued in the South.[109] It brought great wealth to the South, especially to New Orleans, which became the fourth largest city in the country, also based on the growth of its port. In the antebellum years, more than one million enslaved African Americans were transported from the Upper South to the developing Deep South, mostly in the slave trade. Cotton culture, dependent on slavery, formed the basis of new wealth in the Deep South.

In 1844 the Quaker petition was rediscovered and became a focus of the burgeoning abolitionist movement.

Emancipation Proclamation and end of slavery in the US

On 1 January 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in areas in rebellion during the American Civil War when Union troops advanced south. The Thirteenth Amendment (abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude) was ratified in December 1865.

References

Footnotes

1. Compare: Los Angeles Times, 13 July 2003: "The 'one drop' rule (which 'deemed "black" anyone who had a drop of black blood') and the virtual outlawing of manumission and interracial marriage reinforced white privileges and closed what some historians, writing of Brazil, have called the 'mulatto escape hatch.' The descendants of slaves were denied the hope of ever escaping slavery's curse."

Citations

1. numbers from: Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (2003) pgs 272-276.

2. James A. Cox, "Bilboes, Brands, and Branks: Colonial Crimes and Punishments", Colonial Williamsburg Journal, Spring 2003.

3. E.g., Alisha Ebrahimji, "Slavery as a punishment for crimes is in the books in Ohio and lawmakers have been trying to change that for years", CNN, June 24, 2020; accessed 2021.10.18.

4. Oxford Journals (subscription required)

5. Botzer, Tally (2017-08-15). "Myths and Misunderstandings: Slavery in the United States". American Civil War Museum. Retrieved 2020-07-04.

6. Lauber, Almon Wheeler (1913). "Enslavement by the Indians Themselves, Chapter 1 in Indian Slavery in Colonial Times Within the Present Limits of the United States". 53 (3). Columbia University: 25–48.

7. Gallay, Alan (2009). "Introduction: Indian Slavery in Historical Context". In Gallay, Alan (ed.). Indian Slavery in Colonial America. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 1–32.

8. Hoffman, Paul E. (1980). "A New Voyage of North American Discovery: Pedro de Salazar's Visit to the "Island of Giants"". The Florida Historical Quarterly. 58 (4): 415–426.

9. Peck, Douglas T. (2001). "Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón's Doomed Colony of San Miguel de Gualdape". The Georgia Historical Quarterly. 85 (2): 183–198.

10. Milanich, Jerald T. (2018). Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe. Gainesville: Library Press at UF.

11. No More Negotiation: Slavery and the Destabilization of Colonial Hispaniola's Encomienda System, by Lynne Guitar,

12. Indian Slavery in the Americas- AP US History Study Guide from The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2012-03-22,

13. Lauber, Almon Wheeler (1913). "The Institution as Practiced by the English, Part 2 in Indian Slavery in Colonial Times Within the Present Limits of the United States". 53 (3). Columbia University.

14. Gallay, Alan. (2002) The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670–1717. Yale University Press: New York. pg. 29

15. Gallay, Alan. (2002) The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670–1717. Yale University Press: New York. p. 187–90.

16. "Europeans did not introduce slavery or the notion of slaves as laborers to the American South but instead were responsible for stimulating a vast trade in humans as commodities." (p. 29) "In Native American societies, ownership of individuals was more a matter of status for the owner and a statement of debasement and "otherness" for the slave than it was a means to obtain economic rewards from unfree labor. … The slave trade was an entirely new enterprise for most people of all three culture groups [Native American, European, and African]." (p. 8) Gallay, Alan. (2002) The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670–1717. Yale University Press: New York. pg. 29

17. White, Richard. (1991) The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region. Cambridge University Press.

18. Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw (2010), p. 93.

19. Morgan, Edmund (1975). American Slavery, American Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. pp. 328–329.

20. Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw (2010), pp. 97–98.

21. Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw (2010), p. 109.

22. Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw (2010), p. 65.

23. Figures cited in Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw (2010), p. 237.

24. Phillips, Ulrich. American Negro Slavery (1918)

25. Wood, Origins of American Slavery (1997), pp. 64–65.

26. Gallay, Alan. (2002) The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670–1717. Yale University Press: New York.

27. Cameron, Guy, and Stephen Vermette; Vermette, Stephen (2012). "The Role of Extreme Cold in the Failure of the San Miguel de Gualdape Colony". The Georgia Historical Quarterly. 96 (3): 291–307.

28. Parker, Susan (2019-08-24). "'1619 Project' ignores fact that slaves were present in Florida decades before". St. Augustine Record.

29. Francis, J. Michael, Gary Mormino and Rachel Sanderson (2019-08-29). "Slavery took hold in Florida under the Spanish in the 'forgotten century' of 1492-1619". Tampa Bay Times.

30. Torres-Spelliscy, Ciara; Law, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of (2019-08-23). "Perspective - Everyone is talking about 1619. But that's not actually when slavery in America started". Washington Post.

31. Wood, Betty; et al. "Slavery in Colonial Georgia". New Georgia Encyclopedia.

32. Chipman, Donald. "Estevanico". Texas State Historical Association. Retrieved 2021-05-12.

33. "Before 1861", Florida Memory

34. Hankerson, Derek (2008-01-02). "The journey of Africans to St. Augustine, Florida and the establishment of the underground railway". Patriotic Vanguard. Retrieved 2019-12-06.

35. Gardner, Sheldon (2019-05-20). "St. Augustine's Fort Mose added to UNESCO Slave Route Project". St. Augustine record.

36. "Fort Mose", "American Latino Heritage", National Park Service

37. "Plantations", Florida Memory

38. Teja, Jesús F. de la (1996). San Antonio de Béxar : a community on New Spain's northern frontier (1st ed.). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press

39. Williams, David A. (1997). Bricks without straw : a comprehensive history of African Americans in Texas (1st ed.). Austin, Tex.: Eakin Press.

40. Deetz, Kelley Fanto (August 13, 2019). "400 years ago, enslaved Africans first arrived in Virginia". National Geographic.

41. Waxman, Olivia B. (August 20, 2019). "Where the Landing of the First Africans in English North America Really Fits in the History of Slavery". Time. Retrieved 2019-08-25.

42. Finley, Ben (2019-08-22). "Virginia marks pivotal moment when African slaves arrived". Associated Press.

43. https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/indentured-servants-in-the-us/, Indentured Servants In The U.S.

44. Austin, Beth (December 2019). 1619: Virginia's First Africans (Report). Hampton History Museum. p. 12, 17-20.

45. "America and West Indies: September 1672." Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 7, 1669-1674. Ed. W Noel Sainsbury. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1889. 404-417. British History Online. Web. 31 May 2021. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/america-west-indies/vol7/pp404-417.

46. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), pp.154–157.

47. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, pp.327–328.

48. Wood, Origins of American Slavery (1997), p. 78.

49. Foner, Phillip. "Slaves and Free Blacks in the Southern Colonies." History of Black Americans: From Africa to the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom. Greenwood Press. 1975. (web archive access from October 14, 2013)

50. Gookin, Daniel (1836) [1677]. The Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians . Worcester, etc. But this shows the prudence and fidelity of the Christian Indians; yet notwithstanding all this service they were, with others of our Christian Indians, through the harsh dealings of some English, in a manner constrained, for want of shelter, protection, and encouragement, to fall off to the enemy at Hassanamesit, the story whereof follows in its place; and one of them, viz. Sampson, was slain in fight, by some scouts of our praying Indians, about Watchuset; and the other, Joseph, taken prisoner in Plymouth Colony, and sold for a slave to some merchants at Boston, and sent to Jamaica, but upon the importunity of Mr. Elliot, which the master of the vessel related to him, was brought back again, but not released. His two children taken prisoners with him were redeemed by Mr. Elliot, and afterward his wife, their mother, taken captive, which woman was a sober Christian woman and is employed to teach school among the Indians at Concord, and her children are with her, but her husband held as before, a servant; though several that know the said Joseph and his former carriage, have interceded for his release, but cannot obtain it; some informing authority that he had been active against the English when he was with the enemy.

51. Bodge, George Madison (1906). "Capt. Thomas Wheeler and his Men; with Capt. Edward Hutchinson at Brookfield". Soldiers in King Philip's War: Being a Critical Account of that War, with a Concise History of the Indian Wars of New England from 1620–1677 (Third ed.). Boston: The Rockwell and Churchill Press. p. 109. hdl:2027/. Sampson was killed by some English scouts near Wachuset, and Joseph was captured and sold into slavery in the West Indies.

52. Bodge, George Madison (1906). "Appendix A". Soldiers in King Philip's War: Being a Critical Account of that War, with a Concise History of the Indian Wars of New England from 1620–1677 (Third ed.). Boston: The Rockwell and Churchill Press. p. 479. Captives. The following accounts show the harsh custom of the times, and reveal a source of Colonial revenue not open to our country since that day. Account of Captives sold by Mass. Colony. August 24th, 1676. John Hull's Journal page 398.

53. Winiarski, Douglas L. (September 2004). Rhoads, Linda Smith (ed.). "A Question of Plain Dealing: Josiah Cotton, Native Christians, and the Quest for Security in Eighteenth-Century Plymouth County" (PDF). The New England Quarterly. 77 (3): 368–413. While Philip and the vast majority of hostile Natives were killed outright during the war or sold into slavery in the West Indies, the friendly Wampanoag at Manomet Ponds retained their lands.

54. Wood, Origins of American Slavery (1997), pp. 94–95.

55. Jared Ross Hardesty, "Creating an Unfree Hinterland: Merchant Capital, Bound Labor, and Market Production in Eighteenth-century Massachusetts." Early American Studies 15.1 (2017): 37-63.

56. Wood, Origins of American Slavery (1997), p. 103.

57. Higginbotham, A. Leon (1975). In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period. Greenwood Press.

58. William M. Wiecek (1977). "the Statutory Law of Slavery and Race in the Thirteen Mainland Colonies of British America". The William and Mary Quarterly. 34 (2): 261.

59. Sammons, Mark J.; Cunningham, Valerie (2004). Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage. Durham, New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press.

60. Acts and laws of His Majesty's province of New-Hampshire, in New-England: With sundry acts of Parliament. Laws, etc. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Daniel Fowle. 1759. p. 40.

61. Hodges, Russel Graham (1999). Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.

62. "Slavery in New Jersey". Slaveryinamerica.

63. Karnoutsos, Carmela. "Underground Railroad". Jersey City Past and Present. New Jersey City University.

64. "The Hidden History of Slavery in New York". The Nation.

65. Ekberg, Carl J. (2000). French Roots in the Illinois Country. University of Illinois Press. pp. 2–3.

66. Martin H. Steinberg, Disorders of Hemoglobin: Genetics, Pathophysiology, and Clinical Management, pp. 725–726 [1]

67. Rodney Stark, "For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-hunts, and the End of Slavery", p.322 [2] Note that the hardcover edition has a typographical error stating "31.2 percent"; it is corrected to 13.2 in the paperback edition. The 13.2% value is confirmed with 1830 census data.

68. Cook, Samantha; Hull, Sarah (2011). The Rough Guide to the USA. Rough Guides UK.

69. Jones, Terry L. (2007). The Louisiana Journey. Gibbs Smith. p. 115.

70. Joseph Cephas Carroll, Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800–1865, p. 13

71. Wood, Origins of American Slavery (1997), p. 21. "Yet those in high places who advocated the overseas expansion of England did not propose that West Africans could, should, or would be enslaved by the English in the Americas. Indeed, West Africans scarcely figured at all in the sixteenth-century English agenda for the New World."

72. Wood, Origins of American Slavery (1997), p. 23. "More than anything else it was the blackness of West Africans that at once fascinated and repelled English commentators. The negative connotations that the English had long attached to the color black were to deeply prejudice their assessment of West Africans."

73. Wood, Origins of American Slavery (1997), p. 26. "It seems that these men were the first West Africans to set foot in England, and their arrival marked the beginning of a black British population. The men in question had come to England willingly. Lok's sole motive was to facilitate English trading links with West Africa. He intended that these five men should be taught English, and something about English commercial practices, and then returned home to act as intermediaries between the English and their prospective West African trading partners."

74. Wood, Origins of American Slavery (1997), p. 27.

75. Wood, Origins of American Slavery (1997), p. 28.

76. Wilford, John Noble (13 September 1996). "Jamestown Fort, 'Birthplace' Of America in 1607, Is Found". New York Times.

77. Wood, Origins of American Slavery (1997), p. 18.

78. "British Involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade". The Abolition Project. E2BN - East of England Broadband Network and MLA East of England. 2009. Retrieved 28 June 2014.

79. Wood, Origins of American Slavery (1997), pp. 34–39.

80. Barker, Deanna. "Indentured Servitude in Colonial America". Mert Sahinoglu. Frontier Resources.

81. "History & Culture - Fort Monroe National Monument". U.S. National Park Service).

82. Wilder, Craig Steven (2014-09-02). Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

83. http://c.mfcreative.com/offer/us/obama_bunch/PDF/main_article_final.pdf

84. Wilson, Thomas D. The Ashley Cooper Plan: The Founding of Carolina and the Origins of Southern Political Culture. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Chapters 1 and 4.

85. "Africans in America | Part 1 | Narrative | from Indentured Servitude to Racial Slavery". PBS.

86. Wood, Origins of American Slavery (1997), p. 88.

87. "European traders - International Slavery Museum, Liverpool museums".

88. "Aboard the Underground Railroad - Fort Mose Site". U.S. National Park Service.

89. Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 213.

90. Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 156.

91. America Past and Present Online - The Laws of Virginia (1662, 1691, 1705) Archived 2008-04-21 at the Wayback Machine

92. Wood, Origins of American Slavery (1997), p. 92. "In 1705, almost exactly a century after the first colonists had set foot in Jamestown, the House of Burgesses codified and systematized Virginia's laws of slavery. These laws would be modified and added to over the next century and a half, but the essential legal framework within which the institution of slavery would subsequently operate had been put in place."

93. Wood, Betty (January 1, 2005). Slavery in Colonial America. Rowman and Littlefield. p. 33.

94. Wood, Betty (January 1, 2005). Slavery in Colonial America. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 39.

95. Hallam, Jennifer. "The Slave Experience: Men, Women, and Gender". PBS.

96. Stevenson, Brenda. "Distress and Discord in Virginia Slave Families, 1830-1860". In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family and Marriage in the Victorian South.

97. Raboteau, Albert J. (2004). Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South. Oxford University Press. p. 139.

98. Edward A. Hatfield, "First African Baptist Church", New Georgia Encyclopedia, 2009

99. Andrew Billingsley, Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)

100. First formal protest against slavery filed in Pennsylvania in 1688, UCLA

101. African Presence in Pennsylvania

102. Slavery and anti-slavery; a history of the great struggle in both hemispheres, by William Goodell (abolitionist)

103. Revolution as Reformation - Protestant Faith in the Age of Revolutions, 1688–1832

104. Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science

105. Assisi, Francis C. (16 May 2007). "Indian Slaves in Colonial America". India Currents.

106. Estes, Roberta (2012). "East India Indians in Early Colonial Records". Native Heritage Project.

107. Foner, Eric (2010). The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. p. 14.

108. Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York, Syracuse University Press, 1966

109. Dumas Malone, Jefferson and the President: Second Term, 1805–1809 (1974) pp. 543–44

Sources

· Ethridge, Robbie Franklyn (2010). From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

· Wood, Betty. The Origins of American Slavery. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997.

Indentured Servants

Further information: Indentured servitude in British America

Decades later, 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.[17] Most laborers came from Britain as indentured laborers, signing contracts of indenture to pay with work for their passage, their upkeep and their training, usually on a farm. The colonies had agricultural economies. These indentured laborers were often young people who intended to become permanent residents. In some cases, convicted criminals were transported to the colonies as indentured laborers, rather than being imprisoned. The indentured laborers were not slaves, but were required to work for four to seven years in Virginia to pay the cost of their passage and maintenance.[18]

Destination of enslaved Africans (1519–1867)[19]

Destination

Percent

British mainland North America

3.7%

British Leeward Islands

3.2%

British Windward Islands and Trinidad (British 1797–1867)

3.8%

Jamaica (Spanish 1519–1655, British 1655–1867)

11.2%

Barbados (British)

5.1%

The Guianas (British, Dutch, French)

4.2%

French Windward Islands

3.1%

Saint-Domingue (French)

8.2%

Spanish mainland North and South America

4.4%

Spanish Caribbean islands

8.2%

Dutch Caribbean islands

1.3%

Northeastern Brazil (Portuguese)

9.3%

Bahia, Brazil (Portuguese)

10.7%

Southeastern Brazil (Portuguese)

21.1%

Elsewhere in the Americas

1.1%

Africa

1.4%

The first Africans to reach the colonies that England was struggling to establish were a group of some 20 enslaved people who arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia, near Jamestown, in August 1619, brought by British privateers who had seized them from a captured Portuguese slave ship.[20][21][22] Colonists do not appear to have made indenture contracts for most Africans. Although it is possible that some of them were freed after a certain period, most of them remained enslaved for life.[23] The historian Ira Berlin noted that what he called the "charter generation" in the colonies was sometimes made up of mixed-race men (Atlantic Creoles) who were indentured servants and whose ancestry was African and Iberian. They were descendants of African women and Portuguese or Spanish men who worked in African ports as traders or facilitators in the trade of enslaved people. The transformation of the status of Africans, from indentured servitude to slaves in a racial caste which they could not leave or escape, happened over the next generation.

First slave laws

There were no laws regarding slavery early in Virginia's history, but in 1640, a Virginia court sentenced John Punch, an African, to life in servitude after he attempted to flee his service.[24] The two whites with whom he fled were sentenced only to an additional year of their indenture, and three years' service to the colony.[25] This marked the first de facto legal sanctioning of slavery in the English colonies, and was one of the first legal distinctions made between Europeans and Africans.[24][26]

Slaves processing tobacco in 17th-century Virginia

Slaves shipped to those regions that are part of the present-day United States[27]

Date

Slaves

1626–1650

824

1651–1675

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

1851–1875

476

Total

305,326

In 1641, Massachusetts became the first colony to authorize slavery through enacted law.[28] Massachusetts passed the Body of Liberties, which prohibited slavery in many instances but allowed people to be enslaved if they were captives of war, if they sold themselves into slavery or were purchased elsewhere, or if they were sentenced to slavery as punishment by the governing authority.[28] The Body of Liberties used the word "strangers" to refer to people bought and sold as slaves; they were generally not English subjects. Colonists came to equate this term with Native Americans and Africans.[29]

In 1654, John Casor, a black indentured servant in colonial Virginia, was the first man to be declared a slave in a civil case. He had claimed to an officer that his master, Anthony Johnson, had held him past his indenture term. Johnson himself was a free black, who had arrived in Virginia in 1621 from Angola. A neighbor, Robert Parker, told Johnson that if he did not release Casor, he would testify in court to this fact. Under local laws, Johnson was at risk for losing some of his headright lands for violating the terms of indenture. Under duress, Johnson freed Casor. Casor entered into a seven years' indenture with Parker. Feeling cheated, Johnson sued Parker to repossess Casor. A Northampton County, Virginia 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".[30]

First inherited status laws

During the colonial period, the status of enslaved people was affected by interpretations related to the status of foreigners in England. 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. The colonies struggled with how to classify people born to foreigners and subjects. In 1656 Virginia, Elizabeth Key Grinstead, a mixed-race woman, successfully gained her freedom and that of her son in a challenge to her status by making her case as the baptized Christian daughter of the free Englishman Thomas Key. 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.)[31]

In 1662, shortly after the Elizabeth Key trial and similar challenges, the Virginia royal colony approved a law adopting the principle of partus sequitur ventrem (called partus, for short), stating that any children born in the colony would take the status of the mother. A child of an enslaved mother would be born into slavery, regardless if the father were a freeborn Englishman or Christian. This was a reversal of common law practice in England, which ruled that children of English subjects took the status of the father. The change institutionalized the skewed power relationships between those who enslaved people and enslaved women, freed 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.

Increasing slave trade

In 1672, King Charles II rechartered the Royal African Company (it had initially been set up in 1660) as an English monopoly for the African slave and commodities trade. In 1698, by statute, the English parliament opened the trade to all English subjects.[32] The trade of enslaved people to the mid-Atlantic colonies increased substantially in the 1680s, and by 1710 the African population in Virginia had increased to 23,100 (42% of total); Maryland contained 8,000 Africans (14.5% of total).[33] In the early 18th century, England passed Spain and Portugal to become the world's leading trader of enslaved people.[34][35] From the early 18th century British colonial merchants, especially in Charleston, South Carolina, challenged the monopoly of the Royal African Company, and Joseph Wragg and Benjamin Savage became the first independent traders of enslaved people to break through the monopoly by the 1730s.[36]

First religious status laws

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.[37] This codified the earlier principle of non-Christian foreigner enslavement.

First anti-slavery causes

In 1735, the Georgia Trustees enacted a law prohibiting 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 12 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 enslaved people. 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 merchants of enslaved people and land speculators.[38][39][40]

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".[41] By 1750 Georgia authorized slavery in the colony because it 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.

Slavery in British 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. Many men worked on the docks and in shipping. In 1703, more than 42% of New York City households enslaved people, the second-highest proportion of any city in the colonies, behind only Charleston, South Carolina.[42] But enslaved people were also used as agricultural workers in farm communities, including in areas of upstate New York and Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey. By 1770, there were 397,924 blacks in a population of 2.17 million. They were unevenly distributed: There were 14,867 in New England, where they were 2.7% of the population; 34,679 in the mid-Atlantic colonies, where they were 6% of the population (19,000 were in New York or 11%); and 347,378 in the five Southern Colonies, where they were 31% of the population[43]

The South developed an agricultural economy dependent on commodity crops. Its planters rapidly acquired a significantly higher number and proportion of enslaved people in the population overall, as its commodity crops were labor-intensive.[44] Early on, enslaved people in the South worked primarily on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice and tobacco; cotton did not become a major crop until after the 1790s. Before then long-staple cotton was cultivated primarily on the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina.

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 enabled the cultivation of short-staple cotton in a wide variety of mainland areas, leading to the development of large areas of the Deep South as cotton country in the 19th century. Rice and tobacco cultivation were very labor-intensive.[45] In 1720, about 65% of South Carolina's population was enslaved.[46] Planters (defined by historians in the Upper South as those who held or more slaves) used enslaved workers to cultivate commodity crops. They also worked in the artisanal trades on large plantations and in many Southern port cities. The later wave of settlers in the 18th century who settled along the Appalachian Mountains and backcountry were backwoods subsistence farmers, and they 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[which?] of these laws were later repealed.[47]

About 600,000 slaves were transported to the United States, or 5% of the twelve million slaves taken from Africa. About 310,000 of these persons were imported into the Thirteen Colonies before 1776: 40% directly and the rest from the Caribbean.

Slaves transported to the United States:[48]

· 1620–1700......21,000

· 1701–1760....189,000

· 1761–1770......63,000

· 1771–1790......56,000

· 1791–1800......79,000

· 1801–1810....124,000[49]

· 1810–1865......51,000

· Total .............597,000

They constituted less than 5% of the 12 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 United States, and the enslaved population was successful in reproduction. The number of enslaved people in the United States grew rapidly, reaching 4 million by the 1860 Census. From 1770 to 1860, the rate of natural growth of North American enslaved people was much greater than for the population of any nation in Europe, and it was nearly twice as rapid as that of England.[50]

The number of enslaved and free blacks rose from 759,000 (60,000 free) in the 1790 U.S. Census to 4,450,000 (480,000, or 11%, free) in the 1860 U.S. Census, a 580% increase. The white population grew from 3.2 million to 27 million, an increase of 1,180% due to high birth rates and 4.5 million immigrants, overwhelmingly from Europe, and 70% of whom arrived in the years 1840–1860. The percentage of the black population dropped from 19.3% to 14.1%,[51] as follows: 1790: 757,208 .. 19.3% of population, of whom 697,681 (92%) were enslaved. 1860: 4,441,830 .. 14.1% of population, of whom 3,953,731 (89%) were enslaved.

Slavery in French Louisiana

Louisiana was founded as a French colony. Colonial officials in 1724 implemented Louis XIV of France's Code Noir, which regulated the slave trade and the institution of slavery in New France and French Caribbean colonies. This resulted in a different pattern of slavery in Louisiana, purchased in 1803, compared to the rest of the United States.[52] As written, the Code Noir gave some 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 from torturing them or separating married couples (or separating young children from their mothers). It also required the owners to instruct slaves in the Catholic faith.[53][54][55]

Together with a more permeable historic French system that allowed certain rights to gens de couleur libres (free people of color), who were 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 Louisiana's "third class" of free people of color, situated between the native-born French and mass of African slaves, lived in New Orleans.[53] The Louisiana free people of color were often literate and educated, with a significant number owning businesses, properties, and even slaves.[54][55] Although Code Noir forbade interracial marriages, interracial unions were widespread. Whether there was a formalized system of concubinage known as plaçage, is subject to debate. The mixed-race offspring (Creoles of color) from these unions were among those in the intermediate social caste of free people of color. The English colonies, in contrast, operated within a binary system that treated mulatto and black slaves equally under the law, and discriminated against equally if free. But many free people of African descent were mixed race.[52][55]

When the U.S. took over Louisiana, Americans from the Protestant South entered the territory and began to impose their norms. They officially discouraged interracial relationships (although white men continued to have unions with black women, both enslaved and free.) The Americanization of Louisiana gradually resulted in a binary system of race, causing free people of color to lose status as they were grouped with the slaves. They lost certain rights as they became classified by American whites as officially "black".[52][56]

Revolutionary era

Origins and percentages of Africans
imported into British North America
and Louisiana (1700–1820)[57][58]

Amount %
(exceeds 100%)

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

As historian Christopher L. Brown put it, slavery "had never been on the agenda in a serious way before," but the American Revolution "forced it to be a public question from there forward."[59][60]

Freedom offered as incentive by British

See also: Black Nova Scotians

While a small number of African slaves were kept and sold in England and Scotland,[62] slavery in England had not been authorized by statute there, though it had in Scotland. In 1772, in the case of Somerset v Stewart, it was found that slavery was no part of the common law in England and Wales. The British role in the international slave trade continued until it abolished its slave trade in 1807. Slavery flourished in most of Britain's North American and Caribbean colonies, with many wealthy slave owners living in England and wielding considerable power.[63]

In early 1775 Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia and a slave-owner, wrote to Lord Dartmouth of his intent to free slaves owned by patriots in case of rebellion.[64] On November 7, 1775, Lord Dunmore issued Lord Dunmore's Proclamation which declared martial law in Virginia[65] 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. About 1500 slaves owned by patriots escaped and joined Dunmore's forces. Most died of disease before they could do any fighting. Three hundred of these freed slaves made it to freedom in Britain.[66]

Many slaves used the very disruption of war to escape their plantations and fade into cities or woods, or to the British lines. Upon their first sight of British vessels, thousands of slaves in Maryland and Virginia ran away from their owners.[67]: 21 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.[68] Slaves also escaped throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic, with many joining the British who had occupied New York.

In the closing months of the war the British evacuated freedmen and also removed slaves owned by loyalists. The British evacuated 20,000 freedmen from major coastal cities, transporting more than 3,000 for resettlement in Nova Scotia, where they were registered as black loyalists and eventually granted land. They transported others to the Caribbean islands, and some to England. Over 5,000 enslaved Africans owned by loyalists were transported in 1782 with their owners from Savannah to Jamaica and St. Augustine, Florida (then a British colony). Similarly, over half of the black people evacuated in 1782 from Charleston by the British to the West Indies and Florida were slaves owned by white loyalists.

Slaves and free blacks who supported the rebellion

The rebels began to offer freedom as an incentive to motivate slaves to fight on their side. Washington authorized slaves to be freed who fought with the American Continental Army. Rhode Island started enlisting slaves in 1778, and promised compensation to owners whose slaves enlisted and survived to gain freedom.[69][70] During the course of the war, about one-fifth of the Northern army was black.[71] In 1781, Baron Closen, a German officer in the French Royal Deux-Ponts Regiment at the Battle of Yorktown, estimated the American army to be about one-quarter black.[72] These men included both former slaves and Blacks born free. Thousands of free blacks in the Northern states fought in the state militias and Continental Army. In the South, both sides offered freedom to slaves who would perform military service. Roughly 20,000 slaves fought in the American Revolution.[73][74][75][76][77]

The birth of abolitionism in the new United States

In the first two decades after the American Revolution, state legislatures and individuals took actions to free slaves. Northern states passed new constitutions that contained language about equal rights or specifically abolished slavery; some states, such as New York and New Jersey, where slavery was more widespread, passed laws by the end of the 18th century to abolish slavery incrementally. By 1804, all the Northern states had passed laws outlawing slavery, either immediately or over time. In New York, the last slaves were freed in 1827 (celebrated with a big July 4 parade). Indentured servitude (temporary slavery), which had been widespread in the colonies (half the population of Philadelphia had once been indentured servants), dropped dramatically, and disappeared by 1800. However, there were still forcibly indentured servants in New Jersey in 1860. No Southern state abolished slavery, but some individual owners, more than a handful, freed their slaves by personal decision, often providing for manumission in wills but sometimes filing deeds or court papers to free individuals. Numerous slaveholders who freed their slaves cited revolutionary ideals in their documents; others freed slaves as a promised reward for service. The number of free blacks as a proportion of the black population in the Upper South increased from less than one percent to nearly ten percent between 1790 and 1810 as a result of these actions.[78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87]

Starting in 1777, the rebels outlawed the importation of slaves state by state. They all acted to end the international trade, but after the war it was later reopened in South Carolina and Georgia.[citation needed] In 1807 Congress acted on President Jefferson's advice and, without controversy, made importing slaves from abroad a federal crime, effective the first day that the Constitution permitted this prohibition: January 1, 1808.[88]

During the Revolution and in the following years, all states north of Maryland took steps towards abolishing slavery. In 1777, the Vermont Republic, which was still unrecognized by the United States, passed a state constitution prohibiting slavery. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society, led in part by Benjamin Franklin, was founded in 1775, and in 1780, Pennsylvania began gradual abolition. In 1783, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled in Commonwealth v. Jennison that slavery was unconstitutional under the state's new 1780 constitution. New Hampshire began gradual emancipation in 1783, while Connecticut and Rhode Island followed in 1784. The New York Manumission Society was founded in 1785, and was led by John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. New York state began gradual emancipation in 1799, and New Jersey followed in 1804.

Shortly after the Revolution, the Northwest Territory was established, by Manasseh Cutler and Rufus Putnam (who had been George Washington's chief engineer). Both Cutler and Putnam came from Puritan New England. The Puritans strongly believed that slavery was morally wrong. Their influence on the issue of slavery was long-lasting, and this was provided significantly greater impetus by the Revolution. The Northwest Territory (which became Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota) doubled the size of the United States, and it was established at the insistence of Cutler and Putnam as "free soil" – no slavery. This was to prove crucial a few decades later. Had those states been slave states, and their electoral votes gone to Abraham Lincoln's main opponent, Lincoln would not have become President. The Civil War would not have been fought. Even if it eventually had been, the North might well have lost.[89][90][91][92]

Constitution of the United States

Slavery was a contentious issue in the writing and approval of the Constitution of the United States.[93] The words "slave" and "slavery" did not appear in the Constitution as originally adopted, although several provisions clearly referred to slaves and slavery. Until the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865, the Constitution did not prohibit slavery.[94]

Section 9 of Article I forbade the Federal government from preventing the importation of slaves, described as "such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit", for twenty years after the Constitution's ratification (until January 1, 1808). The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807, adopted by Congress and signed into law by President Thomas Jefferson (who had called for its enactment in his 1806 State of the Union address), went into effect on January 1, 1808, the earliest date on which the importation of slaves could be prohibited under the Constitution.[95]

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.[96]

Three-Fifths Compromise

Main article: Three-Fifths Compromise

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.[97] The "Three-Fifths Compromise" was reached after a debate in which delegates from Southern (slaveholding) states argued that slaves should be counted in the census just as all other persons were while delegates from Northern (free) states countered that slaves should not be counted at all. The compromise strengthened the political power of Southern states, as three-fifths of the (non-voting) slave population was counted for congressional apportionment and in the Electoral College, although it did not strengthen Southern states as much as it would have had the Constitution provided for counting all persons, whether slave of free, equally.

In addition, many parts of the country were tied to the Southern economy. As the historian James Oliver Horton noted, prominent slaveholder politicians and the commodity crops of the South had a strong influence on United States politics and economy. 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.[34]

The power of Southern states in Congress lasted until the Civil War, affecting national policies, legislation, and appointments.[34] One result was that justices appointed to the Supreme Court were also primarily slave owners. The planter elite dominated the Southern congressional delegations and the United States presidency for nearly fifty years.[34]

1790 to 1860

See also: Treatment of the enslaved in the United States

Further information: Slave and free states

Slave trade

Main article: Domestic slave trade

The U.S. Constitution barred the federal government from prohibiting the importation of slaves for twenty years. Various states passed bans on the international slave trade during that period; by 1808, the only state still allowing the importation of African slaves was South Carolina. After 1808, legal importation of slaves ceased, although there was smuggling via Spanish Florida and the disputed Gulf Coast to the west.[98]: 48–49 [99]: 138 This route all but ended after Florida became a U.S. territory in 1821 (but see Wanderer and Clotilda).

The replacement for the importation of slaves from abroad was increased domestic production. Virginia and Maryland had little new agricultural development, and their need for slaves was mostly for replacements for decedents. Normal reproduction more than supplied these: Virginia and Maryland had surpluses of slaves. Their tobacco farms were "worn out"[100] and the climate was not suitable for cotton or sugar cane. The surplus was even greater because slaves were encouraged to reproduce (though they could not marry). The white supremacist Virginian Thomas Roderick Dew wrote in 1832 that Virginia was a "negro-raising state"; i.e. Virginia "produced" slaves.[101]: 2 According to him, in 1832 Virginia exported "upwards of 6,000 slaves" per year, "a source of wealth to Virginia".[102]: 198 Another writer gives the figure in 1836 as 40,000, earning for Virginia an estimated $24,000,000 per year.[102]: 201 Demand for slaves was the strongest in what was then the southwest of the country: Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and, later, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. Here there was abundant land suitable for plantation agriculture, which young men with some capital established. This was expansion of the white, monied population: younger men seeking their fortune.

The most valuable crop that could be grown on a plantation in that climate was cotton. That crop was labor-intensive, and the least-costly laborers were slaves. Demand for slaves exceeded the supply in the southwest; therefore slaves, never cheap if they were productive, went for a higher price. As portrayed in Uncle Tom's Cabin (the "original" cabin was in Maryland),[103] "selling South" was greatly feared. A recently (2018) publicized example of the practice of "selling South" is the 1838 sale by Jesuits of 272 slaves from Maryland, to plantations in Louisiana, to benefit Georgetown University, which has been described as "ow[ing] its existence" to this transaction.[104][105][106]

Traders responded to the demand, including John Armfield and his uncle Isaac Franklin, who were "reputed to have made over half a million dollars (in 19th-century value)" in the slave trade.[100]

"Fancy ladies"

See also: Children of the plantation and Enslaved women's resistance in the United States and Caribbean

In the United States in the early 19th century, owners of female slaves could freely and legally use them as sexual objects. This follows free use of female slaves on slaving vessels by the crews.[107]: 83

The slaveholder has it in his power, to violate the chastity of his slaves. And not a few are beastly enough to exercise such power. Hence it happens that, in some families, it is difficult to distinguish the free children from the slaves. It is sometimes the case, that the largest part of the master's own children are born, not of his wife, but of the wives and daughters of his slaves, whom he has basely prostituted as well as enslaved.[108]: 38

"This vice, this bane of society, has already become so common, that it is scarcely esteemed a disgrace."[109]

"Fancy" was a code word which indicated that the girl or young woman was suitable for or trained for sexual use.[110]: 56 In some cases, children were also abused in this manner. The sale of a 13-year-old "nearly a fancy" is documented.[111] Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr., bought his wife when she was 13.[112]: 191

Furthermore, enslaved women who were old enough to bear children were encouraged to procreate, which raised their value as slaves, since their children would eventually provide labor or be sold, enriching the owners. Enslaved women were sometimes medically treated in order to enable or encourage their fertility.[113] The variations in skin color found in the United States make it obvious how often black women were impregnated by whites.[114]: 78–79 For example, in the 1850 Census, 75.4% of "free negros" in Florida were described as mulattos, of mixed race.[115]: 2 Nevertheless, it is only very recently, with DNA studies, that any sort of reliable number can be provided, and the research has only begun. Light-skinned girls, who contrasted with the darker field workers, were preferred.[111][116]

As it was put by Caroline Randall Williams in the New York Times: "You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument." "I have rape-colored skin," she added.[117]

The sexual use of black slaves by either slave owners or by those who could purchase the temporary services of a slave took various forms. A slaveowner, or his teenage son, could go to the slave quarters area of the plantation and do what he wanted, with minimal privacy if any. It was common for a "house" female (housekeeper, maid, cook, laundress, or nanny) to be raped by one or more members of the household. Houses of prostitution throughout the slave states were largely staffed by female slaves providing sexual services, to their owners' profit. There were a small number of free black females engaged in prostitution, or concubinage, especially in New Orleans.[110]: 41

Slave owners who engaged in sexual activity with female slaves "were often the elite of the community. They had little need to worry about public scorn." These relationships "appear to have been tolerated and in some cases even quietly accepted." "Southern women ...do not trouble themselves about it".[118] Franklin and Armfield, who were definitely the elite of the community, joked frequently in their letters about the black women and girls that they were raping. It never occurred to them that there was anything wrong in what they were doing.[119]

Light-skinned young girls were sold openly for sexual use; their price was much higher than that of a field hand.[110]: 38, 55 [120] Special markets for the fancy girl trade existed in New Orleans[110]: 55 and Lexington, Kentucky.[121][122] Historian Philip Shaw describes an occasion when Abraham Lincoln and Allen Gentry witnessed such sales in New Orleans in 1828:

Gentry vividly remembered a day in New Orleans when he and the nineteen-year-old Lincoln came upon a slave market. Pausing to watch, Gentry recalled looking down at Lincoln's hands and seeing that he "doubled his fists tightly; his knuckles went white." Men wearing black coats and white hats buy field hands, "black and ugly," for $500 to 800. And then the real horror begins: "When the sale of "fancy girls" began, Lincoln, "unable to stand it any longer," muttered to Gentry "Allen that's a disgrace. If I ever get a lick at that thing I'll hit it hard."[123]

Those girls who were "considered educated and refined, were purchased by the wealthiest clients, usually plantation owners, to become personal sexual companions." "There was a great demand in New Orleans for 'fancy girls'."[124]

The issue which did come up frequently was the threat of sexual intercourse between black males and white females. Just as the black women were perceived as having "a trace of Africa, that supposedly incited passion and sexual wantonness",[110]: 39 the men were perceived as savages, unable to control their lust, given an opportunity.[125]: 212–213

Another approach to the question was offered by Quaker and Florida planter Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr. He advocated, and personally practiced, deliberate racial mixing through marriage, as part of his proposed solution to the slavery issue: racial integration, called "amalgamation" at the time. In an 1829 Treatise, he stated that mixed-race people were healthier and often more beautiful, that interracial sex was hygienic, and slavery made it convenient.[112]: 190 Because of these views, tolerated in Spanish Florida, he found it impossible to remain long in Territorial Florida, and moved with his slaves and multiple wives to a plantation, Mayorasgo de Koka, in Haiti (now in the Dominican Republic). There were many others who less flagrantly practiced interracial, common-law marriages with slaves (see Partus sequitur ventrem).

Justifications in the South

See also: Proslavery and Fire-Eaters

"A Necessary Evil"

In the 19th century, proponents of slavery often defended the institution as a "necessary evil". At that time, it was feared that emancipation of black slaves would have more harmful social and economic consequences than the continuation of slavery. On April 22, 1820, Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, wrote in a letter to John Holmes, 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.[126]

The French writer and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, in his influential Democracy in America (1835), expressed opposition to slavery while observing its effects on American society. He felt that a multiracial society without slavery was untenable, as he believed that prejudice against blacks increased as they were granted more rights (for example, in northern states). He believed that the attitudes of white Southerners, and the concentration of the black population in the South, were bringing the white and black populations to a state of equilibrium, and were a danger to both races. Because of the racial differences between master and slave, he believed that the latter could not be emancipated.[127]

In a letter to his wife dated December 27, 1856, in reaction to a message from President Franklin Pierce, Robert E. Lee wrote,

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.[128][129]

"A Positive Good"

Main article: Slavery as a positive good in the United States

See also: Mudsill theory

However, as the abolitionist movement's agitation increased and the area developed for plantations expanded, apologies for slavery became more faint in the South. Leaders then described slavery as a beneficial scheme of labor management. 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".[130]

South Carolina Army officer, planter, and railroad executive James Gadsden called slavery "a social blessing" and abolitionists "the greatest curse of the nation".[131] Gadsden was in favor of South Carolina's secession in 1850, and was a leader in efforts to split California into two states, one slave and one free.

Other Southern writers who also began to portray slavery as a positive good were James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh. They presented several arguments to defend the practice of slavery in the South.[132] Hammond, like Calhoun, believed that 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 by 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 one group must accomplish all the menial duties, because without them the leaders in society could not progress.[132] He argued that the hired laborers of the North were 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.[132]

George Fitzhugh used assumptions about white superiority 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."[133] 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."[133]

On March 21, 1861, Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, delivered his Cornerstone Speech. He explained the differences between the Constitution of the Confederate States and the United States Constitution, laid out the cause for the American Civil War, as he saw it, and defended slavery:[134]

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.[134]

This view of the Negro "race" was backed by pseudoscience.[135] The leading researcher was Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, inventor of the mental illnesses of drapetomania (the desire of a slave to run away) and dysaesthesia aethiopica ("rascality"), both cured by whipping. The Medical Association of Louisiana set up a committee, of which he was chair, to investigate "the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race". Their report, first delivered to the Medical Association in an address, was published in their journal,[136] and then reprinted in part in the widely circulated DeBow's Review.[137]

Proposed Expansion of Slavery

Whether or not slavery was to be limited to the Southern states that already had it, or whether it was to be permitted in new states made from the lands of the Louisiana Purchase and Mexican Cession, was a major issue in the 1840s and 1850s. Results included the Compromise of 1850 and the Bleeding Kansas period.

Also relatively well known are the proposals, including the Ostend Manifesto, to annex Cuba as a slave state. There was also talk of making slave states of Mexico, Nicaragua (see Walker affair), and other lands around the so-called Golden Circle. Less well known today (2019), though well known at the time, is that pro-slavery Southerners:

· Spoke openly of their desire to reopen the Atlantic slave trade (see Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves Antebellum proposals by Fire-Eaters to reopen).[138]

· Wanted to reintroduce slavery in the Northern states, through federal action or Constitutional amendment making slavery legal nationwide, thus overriding state anti-slavery laws.[139][140] (See Crittenden Compromise.) This was described as "well underway" by 1858.[141]

· Said openly that slavery should by no means be limited to Negros, since in their view it was beneficial. Northern white workers, who were allegedly "wage slaves" already, would allegedly have better lives if they were enslaved.[142]

None of these ideas got very far, but they alarmed Northerners and contributed to the growing polarization of the country.

Abolitionism in the North

Main article: Abolitionism in the United States § Abolition in the North

“Slavery is a volcano, the fires of which cannot be quenched, nor its ravishes controlled. We already feel its convulsions, and if we sit idly gazing upon its flames, as they rise higher and higher, our happy republic will be buried in ruin, beneath its overwhelming energies.”

— William Ellsworth, attorney for Prudence Crandall, 1834[143]: 193–194

Beginning during the Revolution and in the first two decades of the postwar era, every state in the North abolished slavery. These were the first abolitionist laws in the Atlantic World.[144][145] However, the abolition of slavery did not necessarily mean that existing slaves became free. In some states they were forced to remain with their former owners as indentured servants: free in name only, although they could not be sold and thus families could not be split, and their children were born free. The end of slavery did not come in New York until July 4, 1827, when it was celebrated with a big parade.[146] However, in the 1830 census, the only state with no slaves was Vermont. In the 1840 census, there were still slaves in New Hampshire (1), Rhode Island (5), Connecticut (17), New York (4), Pennsylvania (64), Ohio (3), Indiana (3), Illinois (331), Iowa (16), and Wisconsin (11). There were none in these states in the 1850 census.[147]

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 and discrimination in the North, and in many cases they did not have the right to vote until ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870.[148]

Most Northern states passed legislation for gradual abolition, first freeing children born to slave mothers (and requiring them to serve lengthy indentures to their mother's owners, often into their 20s as young adults). In 1845, the Supreme Court of New Jersey received lengthy arguments towards "the deliverance of four thousand persons from bondage".[149] Pennsylvania's last ex-slaves were freed in 1847, Connecticut's in 1848, and while neither New Hampshire nor New Jersey had any slaves in the 1850 Census, and New Jersey only one and New Hampshire none in the 1860 Census, slavery was never prohibited in either state until ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865[150] (and New Jersey was one of the last states to ratify it).

None of the Southern states abolished slavery before 1865, but it was not unusual for individual slaveholders in the South to free numerous slaves, often citing revolutionary ideals, in their wills. Methodist, Quaker, and Baptist preachers traveled in the South, appealing to slaveholders to manumit their slaves, and there were "manumission societies" in some Southern states. By 1810, the number and proportion of free blacks in the population of the United States had risen dramatically. Most free blacks lived in the North, but even in the Upper South, the proportion of free blacks went from less than one percent of all blacks to more than ten percent, even as the total number of slaves was increasing through imports.[151]

One of the early Puritan writings on this subject was "The Selling of Joseph," by Samuel Sewall in 1700. In it, Sewall condemned slavery and the slave trade and refuted many of the era's typical justifications for slavery.[152][153] The Puritan influence on slavery was still strong at the time of the American Revolution and up until the Civil War. Of America's first seven presidents, the two who did not own slaves, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, came from Puritan New England. They were wealthy enough to own slaves, but they chose not to because they felt it was morally wrong. In 1765, colonial leader Samuel Adams and his wife were given a slave girl as a gift. They immediately freed her. Just after the Revolution, in 1787, the Northwest Territory (which became the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota) was opened up for settlement. The two men responsible for establishing this territory were Manasseh Cutler and Rufus Putnam. They came from Puritan New England, and they insisted that this new territory, which doubled the size of the United States, was going to be "free soil" – no slavery. This was to prove crucial in the coming decades. If those states had become slave states, and their electoral votes had gone to Abraham Lincoln's main opponent, Lincoln would not have been elected president. The Civil War would not have been fought. Even if it eventually had been, the North would likely have lost.[89][90][91]

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the abolitionists, such as Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Douglass, repeatedly used the Puritan heritage of the country to bolster their cause. The most radical anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, invoked the Puritans and Puritan values over a thousand times. Parker, in urging New England Congressmen to support the abolition of slavery, wrote that "The son of the Puritan ... is sent to Congress to stand up for Truth and Right ..."[154][155]

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 was a Northern block of free states united into one contiguous geographic area that generally shared an anti-slavery culture. The exceptions were the areas along the Ohio River settled by Southerners: the southern portions of Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. Residents of those areas generally shared in Southern culture and attitudes. In addition, these areas were devoted to agriculture longer than the industrializing northern parts of these states, and some farmers used slave labor. In Illinois, for example, while the trade in slaves was prohibited, it was legal to bring slaves from Kentucky into Illinois and use them there, as long as the slaves left Illinois one day per year (they were "visiting"). The emancipation of slaves in the North led to the growth in the population of Northern free blacks, from several hundred in the 1770s to nearly 50,000 by 1810.[156]