Slavery in the United States

Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of human slavery in the United States. Slaves were mostly Africans and African Americans. Slavery existed in the United States of America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Slavery existed in British America from early colonial days. Slavery was legal in all Thirteen Colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It lasted in about half the states until 1865. This was when it was banned in the entire country by the Thirteenth Amendment.
By the time of the American Revolution (1775-1783), slaves had been institutionalized as a racial caste. The caste associated with African ancestry. When the United States Constitution was ratified in 1789, a small number of free people of color were able to vote. This was because they were men who owned property. During and shortly after the Revolutionary War, abolitionist laws were passed in most Northern states, and there was a movement created to end slavery. Slave states tried to extend slavery into new Western territories. They wanted to do this to keep their share of political power in the country. Southern leaders also wanted to annex Cuba as a slave territory. The United States became split over the issue of slavery. It was split into slave and free states. The Mason-Dixon line divided the country. The line divided (free) Pennsylvania from (slave) Maryland.
While Jefferson was president, Congress prohibited the importation of slaves, effective 1808. Although smuggling (illegal importing) through Spanish Florida was common. Slave trading within the United States, however, continued at a fast pace. This was because there was a need for labor due to the creation of cotton plantations in the Deep South. New communities of African-American culture were created in the Deep South. There were 4 million slaves in the Deep South before they were set free.
Colonial America
The first Africans came to the New World with Christopher Columbus in 1492. An African crew member named Juan Las Canaries was on Columbus's ship. Shortly after, the first enslavement happened in what would later be the United States. In 1508, Ponce de Leon created the first settlement near present-day San Juan. He started enslaving the indigenous Tainos. In 1513, to supplement the decreasing number of Tainos people, the first African slaves were imported to Puerto Rico.
The first African slaves in the continental United States came via Santo Domingo to the San Miguel de Gualdape colony (most likely in the Winyah Bay area of present-day South Carolina). It was created by Spanish explorer Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon in 1526.
The colony was almost immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership. During the fight, the slaves revolted, and they ran away from the colony to hide among local Native Americans. De Ayllon and many of the colonists died shortly after from a sickness. The colony was abandoned. The settlers and the slaves who didn't run away went back to Haiti, from where they came.
On August 28, 1565, St. Augustine, Florida was created by the Spanish conquistador Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles. He brought three African slaves with him. During the 16th and 17th centuries, St. Augustine was the where a lot of the slave trade in Spanish colonial Florida happened. It was the first permanent settlement in the continental United States to have African slaves.
60 years later, in the early years of the Chesapeake Bay settlements, colonial officials found it difficult to convince people to come and work for them. This was because the weather and environment of the settlements was very harsh. There was a very high chance that people would die. Most people came from Great Britain as indentured laborers. They signed contracts that said they would pay with work for their transportation, their upkeep, and their training, usually on a farm. The colonies had agricultural economies. These people were often young people who wanted to become permanent residents. In some cases, convicted criminals were sent to the colonies as indentured laborers, rather than being sent to prison. These people were not slaves, but they were required to work for four to seven years in Virginia to pay for the cost of their transportation and maintenance. Many Germans, Scots-Irish, and Irish came to the colonies in the 18th century, settling in the backcountry of Pennsylvania and further south.
The first 19 or so Africans to reach the English colonies arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. They were brought by English privateers who had seized them from a captured Portuguese slave ship. Slaves were usually baptized in Africa before sending them. As English custom then considered baptized Christians exempt from slavery, colonists treated these Africans as indentured servants. The African indentured servants joined about 1,000 English indentured servants already in the colony. The Africans were freed after a period of time. They were also given the use of land and supplies by their former masters.
There were no laws about slavery in Virginia's early history. However, in 1640, a Virginia court sentenced John Punch, an African, to slavery. This was because he tried to run away from his service. He ran away with two white people. The two white people were sentenced only to one more year of their indenture, and three years' service to the colony. This is the first legal sanctioning of slavery in the English colonies. It was one of the first legal distinctions made between Europeans and Africans.
In 1641, Massachusetts became the first colony to allow slavery through law. Massachusetts passed the Body of Liberties. It banned slavery in many cases, but it allowed slaves to be held if they were prisoners of war, if they sold themselves into slavery or were bought somewhere else, or if they were sentenced to slavery as punishment by the government. The Body of Liberties used the word "strangers" to refer to people bought and sold as slaves; they were generally not English subjects. Colonists believed this term referred to Native Americans and Africans.
During most of the British colonial period, slavery existed in all the colonies. Slaves in the North usually worked as house servants, artisans, laborers, and craftsmen. Most were in cities. Many men worked on the docks and in shipping. In 1703, more than 42 percent of New York City households had slaves. New York City had the second-highest proportion of slaves of any city in the colonies after Charleston, South Carolina. Slaves were also used as agricultural workers in farming communities. This included 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 not spread out evenly. 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.
The South developed an agricultural economy. It relied on commodity crops. Its planters quickly got more slaves. This was because its commodity crops were labor-intensive.
Revolutionary Era
While there were some African slaves that were kept and sold in England, slavery in Great Britain had not been allowed by statute there. In 1772, it was made unenforceable at common law in England and Wales by a legal decision. The big British role in the international slave trade continued until 1807. Slavery continued in most of Britain's colonies. Many rich slave owners lived in England and had a lot of power.
In early 1775 Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, wrote to Lord Dartmouth. He wrote he was going to free slaves owned by Patriots in case they rebelled. On November 7, 1775, Lord Dunmore issued Lord Dunmore's Proclamation which declared martial law. He 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 not going to be freed by Dunmore's Proclamation. About 1500 slaves owned by Patriots ran away 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.
Many slaves used the war to run away from their plantations. They would run into cities or woods. In South Carolina, nearly 25,000 slaves (30% of the total enslaved population) ran away, migrated, or died during the war. In the South, many slaves died, with many due to escapes. Slaves also escaped throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic, joining the British who had occupied New York.
Slaves and free blacks also fought with the rebels during the Revolutionary War. Washington allowed slaves to be freed who fought with the American Continental Army. Rhode Island started enlisting slaves in 1778. Rhode Island promised money to owners whose slaves enlisted and lived to gain freedom. During the course of the war, about one fifth of the northern army was black. 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. These men included both former slaves and free blacks.
In the 18th century, Britain became the world's biggest slave trader. Starting in 1777, the Patriots made importing slaves illegal state by state. They all acted to end the international trade. However, it was later reopened in South Carolina and Georgia. In 1807 Congress acted on President Jefferson's advice and made importing slaves from other countries a federal crime, as the Constitution permitted, starting January 1, 1808.
1790 to 1860
"Fancy ladies"
In the United States in the early nineteenth century, owners of female slaves could freely and legally use them as sexual objects. This is similar to the free use of female slaves on slave ships by the crews.
"Fancy" was a code word that meant the girl or young woman was able to be used for or trained for sexual use. Sometimes, children were also abused like this. The sale of a 13-year-old "nearly a fancy" is documented.
Furthermore, females who were able to become pregnant were supposed to be kept pregnant, so they could make more slaves to sell. The differences in skin color found in the United States make it obvious how often black women were impregnated by whites. For example, in the 1850 Census, 75.4% of "free negros" in Florida were described as mulattos, of mixed race. 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.
Blacks who owned slaves
Some slave owners were black. An African former indentured servant who settled in Virginia in 1621, Anthony Johnson, became one of the earliest documented slave owners in the American colonies. This was documented when he won a civil lawsuit to own a man named John Casor. In 1830, there were 3,775 black slave owners in the South. They owned a total of 12,760 slaves. 80% of the black slave owners lived in Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland.
References
Bibliography
National and comparative studies
Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves. (2003) .
Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Harvard University Press, 1998.
Berlin, Ira and Ronald Hoffman, eds. Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution University Press of Virginia, 1983. essays by scholars
Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. (2008) .
Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South Oxford University Press, 1979. .
David, Paul A. and Temin, Peter. "Slavery: The Progressive Institution?", Journal of Economic History. Vol. 34, No. 3 (September 1974)
Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006)
Elkins, Stanley. Slavery : A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Fehrenbacher, Don E. Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective Oxford University Press, 1981
Fogel, Robert W. Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery W.W. Norton, 1989. Econometric approach
Foner, Eric. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010), Pulitzer Prize excerpt and text search
Franklin, John Hope and Loren Schweninger. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. (1999) .
Gallay, Alan. The Indian Slave Trade (2002).
Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made Pantheon Books, 1974.
Genovese, Eugene D. The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (1967)
Genovese, Eugene D. and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (1983)
Hahn, Steven. "The Greatest Slave Rebellion in Modern History: Southern Slaves in the American Civil War." Southern Spaces (2004)
Higginbotham, A. Leon, Jr. In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period. Oxford University Press, 1978.
Horton, James Oliver and Horton, Lois E. Slavery and the Making of America. (2005)
Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877 Hill and Wang, 1993. Survey
Litwack, Leon F. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979), social history of how slavery ended in the Confederacy
Mason, Matthew. Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic. (2006) .
Moon, Dannell, "Slavery", article in Encyclopedia of rape, Merril D. Smith (Ed.), Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004
Moore, Wilbert Ellis, American Negro Slavery and Abolition: A Sociological Study, Ayer Publishing, 1980
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia W.W. Norton, 1975.
Morris, Thomas D. Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860 University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. (1982) .
Ransom, Roger L. "Was It Really All That Great to Be a Slave?" Agricultural History, Vol. 48, No. 4 (1974) in JSTOR
Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. Encyclopedia of Emancipation and Abolition in the Transatlantic World. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007.
Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007.
Scarborough, William K. The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South (1984)
Schermerhorn, Calvin. The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.
Snyder, Terri L. The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956) Survey
Stampp, Kenneth M. "Interpreting the Slaveholders' World: a Review." Agricultural History 1970 44(4): 407-12. ISSN 0002-1482
Tadman, Michael. Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
Wright, W. D. Historians and Slavery; A Critical Analysis of Perspectives and Irony in American Slavery and Other Recent Works Washington, D.C.: University Press of America (1978)
State and local studies
Fields, Barbara J. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century Yale University Press, 1985.
Jewett, Clayton E. and John O. Allen; Slavery in the South: A State-By-State History Greenwood Press, 2004
Jennison, Watson W. Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860 (University Press of Kentucky; 2012)
Kulikoff, Alan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Minges, Patrick N.; Slavery in the Cherokee Nation: The Keetoowah Society and the Defining of a People, 1855-1867 2003 deals with Indian slave owners.
Mohr, Clarence L. On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia University of Georgia Press, 1986.
Mooney, Chase C. Slavery in Tennessee Indiana University Press, 1957.
Olwell, Robert. Masters, Slaves, & Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 Cornell University Press, 1998.
Reidy, Joseph P. From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South, Central Georgia, 1800-1880 University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Ripley, C. Peter. Slaves and Freemen in Civil War Louisiana Louisiana State University Press, 1976.
Rivers, Larry Eugene. Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation University Press of Florida, 2000.
Sellers, James Benson; Slavery in Alabama University of Alabama Press, 1950
Sydnor, Charles S. Slavery in Mississippi. 1933
Takagi, Midori. Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond, Virginia, 1782-1865 University Press of Virginia, 1999.
Taylor, Joe Gray. Negro Slavery in Louisiana. Louisiana Historical Society, 1963.
Trexler, Harrison Anthony. Slavery in Missouri, 1804-1865 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1914) online edition
Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion W.W. Norton & Company, 1974.
Video
Jenkins, Gary (director). Negroes To Hire (Lifedocumentaries, 2010); 52 minutes DVD; on slavery in Missouri
Historiography
Ayers, Edward L. "The American Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction on the World Stage," OAH Magazine of History, January 2006, Vol. 20, Issue 1, pp. 54-60
Berlin, Ira. "American Slavery in History and Memory and the Search for Social Justice," Journal of American History, March 2004, Vol. 90, Issue 4, pp. 1251-1268
Boles, John B. and Evelyn T. Nolen, eds., Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (1987).
Brown, Vincent. "Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery," American Historical Review, December 2009, Vol. 114, Issue 5, pp. 1231-49, examined historical and sociological studies since the influential 1982 book Slavery and Social Death by American sociologist Orlando Patterson
Campbell, Gwyn. "Children and slavery in the new world: A review," Slavery & Abolition, August 2006, Vol. 27, Issue 2, pp. 261-85
Dirck, Brian. "Changing Perspectives on Lincoln, Race, and Slavery," OAH Magazine of History, October 2007, Vol. 21, Issue 4, pp. 9-12
Farrow, Anne; Lang, Joel; Frank, Jenifer. Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery. Ballantine Books, 2006
Fogel, Robert W. The Slavery Debates, 1952-1990: A Retrospective (2007)
Frey, Sylvia R. "The Visible Church: Historiography of African American Religion since Raboteau," Slavery & Abolition, January 2008, Vol. 29 Issue 1, pp. 83-110
Hettle, Wallace. "White Society in the Old South: The Literary Evidence Reconsidered," Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South, Fall/Winter 2006, Vol. 13, Issue 3/4, pp 29-44
King, Richard H. "Marxism and the Slave South", American Quarterly 29 (1977), 117-31. focus on Genovese
Kolchin, Peter. "American Historians and Antebellum Southern Slavery, 1959-1984", in William J. Cooper, Michael F. Holt, and John McCardell, eds., A Master's Due: Essays in Honor of David Herbert Donald (1985), 87-111
Laurie, Bruce. "Workers, Abolitionists, and the Historians: A Historiographical Perspective," Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, Winter 2008, Vol. 5, Issue 4, pp. 17-55
Neely Jr., Mark E. "Lincoln, Slavery, and the Nation," Journal of American History, September 2009, Vol. 96 Issue 2, pp. 456-58
Parish; Peter J. Slavery: History and Historians Westview Press. 1989
Penningroth, Dylan. "Writing Slavery's History," OAH Magazine of History, April 2009, Vol. 23 Issue 2, pp. 13-20, basic overview
Rael, Patrick. Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1865. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015.
Sidbury, James. "Globalization, Creolization, and the Not-So-Peculiar Institution," Journal of Southern History, August 2007, Vol. 73, Issue 3, pp. 617-30, on colonial era
Stuckey, P. Sterling. "Reflections on the Scholarship of African Origins and Influence in American Slavery," Journal of African American History, Fall 2006, Vol. 91 Issue 4, pp. 425-443
Sweet, John Wood. "The Subject of the Slave Trade: Recent Currents in the Histories of the Atlantic, Great Britain, and Western Africa," Early American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal, Spring 2009, Vol. 7 Issue 1, pp. 1-45
Tadman, Michael. "The Reputation of the Slave Trader in Southern History and the Social Memory of the South," American Nineteenth Century History, September 2007, Vol. 8, Issue 3, pp. 247-71
Tulloch, Hugh. The Debate on the American Civil War Era (1998), ch. 2-4
Primary sources
Albert, Octavia V. Rogers. The House of Bondage Or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves. Oxford University Press, 1991. Primary sources with commentary.
The House of Bondage, or, Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves, Original and Life-Like complete text of original 1890 edition, along with cover & title page images, at website of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Berlin, Ira, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowlands, eds. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 5 vol Cambridge University Press, 1982. Very large collection of primary sources regarding the end of slavery
Berlin, Ira, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, eds. Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation The New Press: 2007.
Blassingame, John W., ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies.Louisiana State University Press, 1977.
Burke, Diane Mutti, On Slavery's Border: Missouri's Small Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865,
De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. (1994 Edition by Alfred A Knopf, Inc)
A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) (Project Gutenberg ), (Audio book at FreeAudio.org)
"The Heroic Slave." Autographs for Freedom. Ed. Julia Griffiths Boston: Jewett and Company, 1853. 174-239. Available at the Documenting the American South website.
Frederick Douglass My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) (Project Gutenberg )
Frederick Douglass Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)
Frederick Douglass Collected Articles Of Frederick Douglass, A Slave (Project Gutenberg)
Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies by Frederick Douglass, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Editor. (Omnibus of all three)
Litwack, Leon Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. (1979) Winner of the 1981 National Book Award for history and the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for History.
Litwack, Leon North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (University of Chicago Press: 1961)
Document: "List Negroes at Spring Garden with their ages taken January 1829" (title taken from document)
Missouri History Museum Archives Slavery Collection
Rawick, George P., ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography . 19 vols. Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972. Collection of WPA interviews made in the 1930s with ex-slaves
More reading
Scholarly books
Scholarly pages
Oral histories and autobiographies of ex-slaves
Literary and cultural criticism
Ryan, Tim A. Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with the Wind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.
Van Deburg, William. Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.
Documentary movies
Kovgan, A. Ray, J. Browne, K. (Director). (2008). Traces of the Trade [Video file]. California Newsreel.
Other websites
"How Slaves Built American Capitalism", CounterPunch, December 18, 2015
"Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938", Library of Congress
"Voices from the Days of Slavery", audio interviews of former slaves, 1932-1975, Library of Congress
Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice
"Slavery and the Making of America", WNET (4-part series)
"Slavery in the United States", Economic History Encyclopedia, March 26, 2008
North American Slave Narratives, Documenting the American South, Louis Round Wilson Library
"Slavery and Civil War digital collection", scanned original documents, Grand Valley State University
"How Slavery Really Ended in America", New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2011
"The Color Line", 6-page lesson plan for high school, Zinn Education Project
"The First Slaves", 15-page teaching guide for high school, Zinn Education Project
"Not Your Momma's History", historical education about slavery and the 18th and 19th-century African experience in America
"Harvesting Cotton-Field Capitalism: Edward Baptist's New Book Follows the Money on Slavery", The New York Times, October 3, 2014
"5 Things About Slavery You Probably Didn't Learn In Social Studies: A Short Guide To 'The Half Has Never Been Told'", HuffPost, October 25, 2014
9 Facts About Slavery They Don't Want You to Know
"Slavery" maps in the U.S. Persuasive Cartography collection, Cornell University Library
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages
Slavery in the United States
African-American history