I | INTRODUCTION |
Slavery in the United
States, the institution of slavery as it existed in the United States
from the early 17th century until 1865. Slavery played a central role in the
history of the United States. It existed in all the English mainland colonies
and came to dominate agricultural production in the states from Maryland south.
Eight of the first 12 presidents of the United States were slaveowners. Debate
over slavery increasingly dominated American politics, leading eventually to the
American Civil War (1861-1865), which finally brought slavery to an end. After
emancipation, overcoming slavery’s legacy remained a crucial issue in American
history, from Reconstruction following the war to the civil rights movement a
century later.
Slavery has appeared throughout history in many
forms and many places. Slaves have served in capacities as diverse as
concubines, warriors, servants, craftworkers, and tutors. In the Americas,
however, slavery emerged as a system of forced labor designed for the production
of staple crops. Depending on location, these crops included sugar, tobacco,
coffee, and cotton; in the southern United States, by far the most important
staples were tobacco and cotton. A stark racial component distinguished this
modern Western slavery from the slavery that existed in many other times and
places: the vast majority of slaves were black Africans and their descendants,
while the vast majority of masters were white Europeans and their
descendants.
II | INTRODUCTION OF SLAVERY |
There was nothing inevitable about the use of
black slaves. Although 20 Africans were purchased in Jamestown, Virginia, as
early as 1619, throughout most of the 17th century the number of Africans in the
English mainland colonies grew slowly. During those years, colonists
experimented with two other sources of forced labor: Native American slaves and
European indentured servants. The number of Native American slaves was limited
in part because the Native Americans were in their homeland; they knew the
terrain and could escape fairly easily. Although some Native American slaves
existed in every colony the number was limited. The settlers found it easier to
sell Native Americans captured in war to planters in the Caribbean than to turn
them into slaves on their own terrain.
More important as a form of labor was
indentured servitude. Most indentured servants were poor Europeans who wanted to
escape harsh conditions and take advantage of opportunities in America. They
traded four to seven years of their labor in exchange for the transatlantic
passage. At first indentured servants came mainly from England, but later they
came increasingly from Ireland, Wales, and Germany. They were primarily,
although not exclusively, young males. Once in the colonies, they were
essentially temporary slaves; most served as agricultural workers although some,
especially in the North, were taught skilled trades. During the 17th century,
they performed most of the heavy labor in the Southern colonies and also
provided the bulk of immigrants to those colonies.
A | Slave Trade |
For a variety of reasons, foremost among
them improved conditions in England, the number of people willing to sell
themselves into indentured servitude declined sharply toward the end of the 17th
century. Because the labor needs of the rapidly growing colonies were
increasing, this decline in servant migration produced a labor crisis. To meet
it, landowners turned to African slaves, who from the 1680s began to replace
indentured servants; in Virginia, for example, blacks, the great majority of
whom were slaves, increased from about 7 percent of the population in 1680 to
more than 40 percent by the mid-18th century. During the first half of the 17th
century, the Netherlands and Portugal had dominated the African slave trade and
the number of Africans available to English colonists was limited because the
three countries competed for slave labor to produce crops in their American
colonies. During the late 17th and 18th centuries, by contrast, naval
superiority gave England a dominant position in the slave trade, and English
traders transported millions of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean.
The transatlantic slave trade produced one
of the largest forced migrations in history. From the early 16th to the mid-19th
centuries, more than 10 million Africans were taken from their homes, herded
onto ships where they were sometimes so tightly packed that they could barely
move, and sent to a strange new land. Since others died before boarding the
ships, Africa’s loss of population was even greater. By far the largest
importers of slaves were Brazil and the Caribbean colonies; together, they
received more than three-quarters of all Africans brought to the Americas. About
6 percent of the total (600,000 to 650,000 people) came to what is now the
United States.
B | Spread of Slavery |
Slavery spread quickly in the American
colonies. At first the legal status of Africans in America was poorly defined,
and some, like European indentured servants, managed to become free after
several years of service. From the 1660s, however, the colonies began enacting
laws that defined and regulated slave relations. Central to these laws was the
provision that black slaves, and the children of slave women, would serve for
life. By the 1770s, slaves constituted about 40 percent of the population of the
Southern colonies, with the highest concentration in South Carolina, where more
than half the people were slaves.
Slaves performed numerous tasks, from
clearing forests to serving as guides, trappers, craftworkers, nurses, and house
servants, but they were most essential as agricultural laborers. Slaves were
most numerous where landowners sought to grow staple crops for market, such as
tobacco in the upper South (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina) and rice in the
lower South (South Carolina, Georgia). Slaves also worked on large
wheat-producing estates in New York and on horse-breeding farms in Rhode Island,
but climate and soil restricted the development of commercial agriculture in the
Northern colonies, and slavery never became as economically important as it did
in the South. Slaves in the North were typically held in small numbers, and most
served as domestic servants. Only in New York did they form more than 10 percent
of the population, and in the North as a whole less than 5 percent of the
inhabitants were slaves.
III | DISTINCTIVE FEATURES OF U.S. SLAVERY |
By the mid-18th century, American slavery had
acquired a number of distinctive features. More than 90 percent of American
slaves lived in the South where conditions contrasted sharply with those to both
the south and north. In Caribbean colonies, such as Jamaica and Saint-Domingue
(present-day Haiti), blacks outnumbered whites by more than ten to one and
slaves often lived on huge estates with hundreds of other slaves. In the
Northern colonies, blacks were few and slaves were typically held in small
groups of less than five. The South, by contrast, was neither overwhelmingly
white nor overwhelmingly black: slaves formed a large minority of the
population, and most slaves lived on small and medium-sized holdings containing
between 5 and 50 slaves.
The second distinctive characteristic of
slavery in the United States was in many ways the most important: in contrast to
slaves in most other parts of the Americas, those in the United States
experienced natural population growth. Elsewhere, in regions as diverse as
Brazil, Jamaica, Saint-Domingue, and Cuba, slave mortality rates exceeded birth
rates, and growth of the slave population depended on the importation of new
slaves from Africa. As soon as that importation ended, the slave population
began to decline. At first, deaths among slaves also exceeded births in the
American colonies, but in the 18th century the birth rates rose in those
colonies, mortality rates fell, and the slave population became
self-reproducing. This transition, which occurred earlier in the upper than in
the lower South, meant that even after slave imports were outlawed in 1808, the
number of slaves continued to grow rapidly. During the next 50 years, the slave
population of the United States more than tripled, from about 1.2 million to
almost 4 million in 1860. The natural growth of the slave population meant that
slavery could survive without new slave imports.
Natural population growth also hastened the
transition from an African to an African American slave population. By the
1770s, only about 20 percent of slaves in the colonies were African-born,
although the concentration of Africans remained higher in South Carolina and
Georgia. After 1808 the proportion of African-born slaves became tiny. The
emergence of a native-born slave population had numerous important consequences.
For example, among African-born slaves, who were imported for their ability to
perform physical labor, there were few children and men outnumbered women by
about two to one. In contrast, American-born slaves began their slave careers as
children and included approximately even numbers of males and females. Masters
went through a similar process of Americanization. Those born in America usually
felt at home on their holdings. Caribbean planters often sought to make their
fortunes quickly and then retire to a life of leisure in England. American
slaveholders, by contrast, were less often absentee owners. Instead, they
typically took an active role in running their farms and plantations.
IV | COLONIAL OPPOSITION TO SLAVERY |
Throughout most of the colonial period,
opposition to slavery among white Americans was virtually nonexistent. Settlers
in the 17th and early 18th centuries came from sharply stratified societies in
which the wealthy savagely exploited members of the lower classes. Lacking a
later generation’s belief in natural human equality, they saw little reason to
question the enslavement of Africans. As they sought to mold a docile labor
force, planters resorted to harsh, repressive measures that included liberal use
of whipping and branding.
Gradually, changes occurred in the way
masters looked on both their slaves and themselves. Many second-generation
masters, who unlike their parents had grown up with slaves, came to regard them
as inferior members of their extended families. Such slaveowners looked upon
themselves as kindly patriarchs who, like benevolent despots, ruled their people
firmly but fairly and looked after their needs. Slavery remained harshly
repressive: masters continued to rely heavily on the lash for discipline, and
few if any slaves saw their owners as the kindly guardians that they proclaimed
themselves to be. Still, many slaveowners accepted the idea that they should
treat their slaves humanely.
Some slaveowners went further. The last third
of the 18th century saw the first widespread questioning of slavery by white
Americans. This questioning increased after the American Revolution (1775-1783),
which sharply increased egalitarian thinking. The contradiction between the
rhetoric of documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the reality of
slavery was apparent. Many leaders of the new government, including George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson, while slaveholders, were profoundly troubled by
slavery. Although leery of rash actions, they undertook a series of cautious
acts that they thought would lead to gradual abolition of slavery.
These acts included measures in all states
north of Delaware to abolish slavery. A few states did away with slavery
immediately. More typical were gradual emancipation acts, such as that passed by
Pennsylvania in 1780, whereby all children born to slaves in the future would be
freed when they became 28 years old. Two significant measures dated from 1787.
First, the Northwest Ordinance barred slavery from the Northwest Territory, an
area that included much of what is now the upper Midwest. Second, a compromise
reached at the Constitutional Convention allowed the Congress of the United
States to outlaw the importation of slaves in 1808. Meanwhile, a number of
states passed acts making it easier for individuals to free their slaves.
Hundreds of slaveowners, especially in the upper South, set some or all of their
slaves free. In addition, tens of thousands of slaves acted on their own, taking
advantage of wartime disruption to escape from their masters. As a result, the
number of free blacks, which had been tiny before the Revolution, surged during
the last quarter of the 18th century.
Nevertheless, the Revolutionary-era challenge
to slavery was successful only in the North, where the investment in slaves was
small. The antislavery movement never made much progress in Georgia and South
Carolina, where planters imported tens of thousands of Africans to beat the
cut-off of the slave trade in 1808. In the upper South, sentiment in favor of
equality faded, along with revolutionary enthusiasm, in the 1790s and 1800s. The
end of slave imports did not undermine slavery as it did elsewhere because the
slave population in the United States was self-reproducing. The ultimate result
of the first antislavery movement was to leave slavery a newly sectional
institution, on the road to abolition throughout the North but largely intact in
the South.
V | GROWTH OF SLAVERY |
Slavery expanded rapidly, along with the
United States. Fueled by a surging world demand for cotton and the 1793
invention of the cotton gin, which efficiently separated the cotton seeds from
the fiber, cotton cultivation spread rapidly westward. By the 1830s, Alabama,
Mississippi, and Louisiana formed the heart of a new cotton kingdom, producing
more than half of the nation’s supply of the crop. The great bulk of this cotton
was cultivated by slaves. Between 1790 and 1860, about one million slaves were
moved west, almost twice the number of Africans shipped to the United States
during the whole period of the transatlantic slave trade. Some slaves moved with
their masters and others moved as part of a new domestic trade in which owners
from the seaboard states sold slaves to planters in the cotton-growing states of
the new Southwest.
As slavery grew, so too did its diversity.
Slavery varied according to region, crops, and size of holdings. On farms and
small plantations most slaves came in frequent contact with their owners, but on
very large plantations, where slaveowners often employed overseers, slaves might
rarely see their masters. Some owners left their holdings entirely in the care
of subordinates, usually hired white overseers but sometimes slaves. A few
slaveowners were even black themselves: a small percentage of free blacks owned
slaves, in some cases as a ruse so that they could protect family members, but
more often to profit from slave labor. Most slaves on large holdings worked in
gangs, under the supervision of overseers and slave drivers. Some, however,
especially in the coastal region of South Carolina and Georgia, labored under
the task system: they were assigned a certain amount of work to complete in a
day, received less supervision, and were free to use their time as they wished
once they had completed their daily assignments. In addition to performing field
work, slaves served as house servants, nurses, midwives, carpenters,
blacksmiths, drivers, preachers, gardeners, and handymen.
Despite such variations, there were a number
of dominant trends. First, slavery was overwhelmingly rural: in 1860 only about
5 percent of all slaves lived in towns of 2500 people or more. Second, although
some slaves lived on giant estates and others on small farms, the norm was in
between: in 1860 about one-half of all slaves lived on holdings of 10 to 49
slaves. The remaining half of the slave population was evenly divided between
larger and smaller establishments. Holdings tended to be bigger in the deep
South than in the upper South. Third, most slaves lived with resident masters;
owner absenteeism was most prevalent in the South Carolina and Georgia low
country, but in the South as a whole it was less common than in the Caribbean.
Fourth, most able-bodied adult slaves engaged in field work. Owners relied
heavily on children, the elderly, and the infirm for “nonproductive” work such
as house service; only the largest plantations could spare healthy adults for
exclusive assignment to specialized occupations. The main business of Southern
farms and plantations, and of the slaves who supported them, was to grow cotton,
tobacco, rice, corn, wheat, hemp, and sugar.
A | Slave Treatment |
Southern slaveholders took an active role in
managing their property. Viewing themselves as the slaves’ guardians, they
stressed the degree to which they cared for them. The character of such care
varied, but in purely material terms such as food, clothing, housing, and
medical attention, it was generally better in the pre-Civil War period than in
the colonial period. Judging by measurable criteria such as slave height and
life expectancy, material conditions also were better in the South than in the
Caribbean or Brazil.
Although young children were often
malnourished, most working slaves received a steady supply of pork and corn,
which if lacking in nutritional balance (about which Americans of the era knew
nothing) provided sufficient calories to fuel their labor. Slaves often
supplemented their rations with produce that they raised on garden plots
allotted to them. Clothing and housing were crude but functional: slaves
typically received four coarse suits (pants and shirts for men, dresses for
women, long shirts for children) and lived in small wooden cabins, one to a
family. Wealthy slaveowners often sent for physicians to treat slaves who became
ill; given the state of medical knowledge, however, such treatment—which could
range from providing various concoctions to “bleeding” a patient—often did as
much harm as good.
Masters intervened continually in the lives
of their slaves, from directing their labor to approving or disapproving
marriages. Some masters made elaborate written rules, and most engaged in
constant meddling, directing, nagging, threatening, and punishing. Many took
advantage of their position to exploit slave women sexually.
What slaves hated most about slavery was not
the hard work to which they were subjected, but their lack of control over their
lives, their lack of freedom. Masters may have prided themselves on the care
they provided, but the slaves had a different idea of that care. They resented
the constant interference in their lives and tried to achieve whatever autonomy
they could. In the slave quarters, the collection of slave cabins that on large
plantations resembled a miniature village, slaves developed their own way of
life and struggled to increase their independence while their masters strove to
limit it. The character and resolution of this struggle depended on a host of
factors, from size of holdings and organization of production to residence and
disposition of masters. Masters rarely were able, however, to shape the lives of
their slaves as fully as they wanted.
B | Slave Life |
Away from the view of owners and overseers,
slaves lived their own lives. They made friends, fell in love, played and
prayed, sang, told stories, and engaged in the necessary chores of day-to-day
living, from cleaning house, cooking, and sewing to working on garden plots.
Especially important as anchors of the slaves’ lives were their families and
their religion.
Throughout the South, the family defined
the actual living arrangements of slaves: most slaves lived together in nuclear
families with a mother, father, and children. The security and stability of
these families faced severe challenges: no state law recognized marriage among
slaves, masters rather than parents had legal authority over slave children, and
the possibility of forced separation, through sale, hung over every family.
These separations were especially frequent in the slave-exporting states of the
upper South. Still, despite their tenuous status, families served as the slaves’
most basic refuge, the center of private lives that owners could never fully
control.
Religion served as a second refuge. In the
colonial period, African slaves usually clung to their native religions, and
many slaveowners were suspicious of others who sought to convert their slaves to
Christianity, in part because they feared that converted slaves would have to be
freed. During the decades following the American Revolution, however,
Christianity was increasingly central to the slaves’ cultural life. Many slaves
were converted during the religious revivals that swept the South in the late
18th and early 19th centuries. Slaves typically belonged to the same
denominations as white Southerners, the largest of which were the Baptists and
Methodists. Some masters encouraged their slaves to come to the white church,
where they usually sat in a special slave gallery and received advice about
being obedient to their masters. In the quarters, however, there developed a
parallel, so-called “invisible” church controlled by the slaves themselves, who
listened to sermons delivered by their own preachers. Not all slaves had access
to these preachers and not all accepted their message, but for many religion
served as a great comfort in a hostile world.
VI | SLAVE RESISTANCE |
If their families and religion helped slaves
to avoid total control by their owners, slaves also challenged that control more
directly through active resistance. Their ability to resist was limited. Unlike
slaves in Saint-Domingue, who rebelled against their French masters and
established the black republic of Haiti in 1804, slaves in the United States
faced a balance of power that discouraged armed resistance. When it occurred,
such resistance was always quickly suppressed and followed by harsh punishment
designed to discourage future rebellion. In some instances, planned slave
rebellions were nipped in the bud before an actual outbreak of violence. Such
aborted conspiracies occurred in New York in 1741, in Virginia in 1800, and
South Carolina in 1822. The most notable uprisings included the Stono Rebellion
near Charleston, South Carolina in 1739, an attempted attack on New Orleans in
1811, and the Nat Turner insurrection that rocked Southampton County, Virginia,
in 1831. The Turner insurrection, which at its peak included 60 to 80 rebels,
resulted in the deaths of about 60 whites; the number of blacks killed during
the uprising and executed or lynched afterward may have reached 100. But the
rebellion lasted less than two days and was easily suppressed by local
residents. Like other slave uprisings in the United States, it caused enormous
fear among the whites, but it did not seriously threaten the institution of
slavery.
Less organized resistance was both more
widespread and more successful. This included silent sabotage, or foot-dragging,
by slaves, who pretended to be sick, feigned difficulty understanding
instructions, and “accidentally” misused tools and animals. It also included
small-scale resistance by individuals who fought back physically, at times
successfully, against what they regarded as unjust treatment.
The most common form of resistance, however,
was flight. About 1000 slaves per year escaped to the North during the pre-Civil
War decades, most from the upper South. This represented only a small percentage
of those who attempted to escape, however, since for every slave who made it to
freedom, several more tried. Other fugitives remained within the South, heading
for cities or swamps, or hiding out near their plantations for days or weeks
before either returning voluntarily or being tracked down and captured.
VII | SECTIONAL TENSIONS |
Slavery was an increasingly Southern
institution. Abolition of slavery in the North, begun in the revolutionary era
and largely complete by the 1830s, divided the United States into the slave
South and the free North. As this happened, slavery came to define the essence
of the South: to defend slavery was to be pro-Southern, whereas opposition to
slavery was considered anti-Southern. Although most Southern whites did not own
slaves (the proportion of white families that owned slaves declined from 35
percent to 26 percent between 1830 and 1860), slavery more and more set the
South off from the rest of the country and the Western world. If at one time
slavery had been common in much of the Americas, by the middle of the 19th
century it remained only in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the southern United
States. In an era that celebrated liberty and equality, the slaveholding
Southern states appeared backward and repressive.
In fact, the slave economy grew rapidly,
enriched by the spectacular increase in cotton cultivation to meet the growing
demand of Northern and European textile manufacturers. Southern economic growth,
however, was based largely on cultivating more land. The South did not undergo
the industrial revolution that was beginning to transform the North; the South
remained almost entirely rural. In 1860 there were only five Southern cities
with more than 50,000 inhabitants (only one of which, New Orleans, was in the
Deep South); less than 10 percent of Southerners lived in towns of at least 2500
people, compared to more than 25 percent of Northerners. The South also
increasingly lagged in other indications of modernization, from railroad
construction to literacy and public education.
The biggest gap between North and South,
however, was ideological. In the North, slavery was abolished and a small but
articulate group of abolitionists developed. In the South, white spokesmen, from
politicians to ministers, newspaper editors, and authors, rallied around slavery
as the bedrock of Southern society. Defenders of slavery developed a wide range
of arguments to defend their cause, from those based on race to those that
stressed economic necessity. They made heavy use of religious themes, portraying
slavery as part of God’s plan for civilizing a primitive, heathen people.
Increasingly, however, Southern spokesmen
based their case for slavery on social arguments. They contrasted the
harmonious, orderly, religious, and conservative society that supposedly existed
in the South with the tumultuous, heretical, and mercenary ways of a North torn
apart by radical reform, individualism, class conflict, and, worst of all,
abolitionism. This defense represented the mirror image of the so-called
free-labor argument increasingly prevalent in the North: to the assertion that
slavery kept the South backward, poor, inefficient, and degraded, proslavery
advocates responded that only slavery could save the South from the evils of
modernity run wild.
From the mid-1840s, the struggle over
slavery became central to American politics. Northerners who were committed to
free soil, the idea that new, western territories should be reserved exclusively
for free white settlers, clashed repeatedly with Southerners who insisted that
any limitation on slavery’s expansion was unconstitutional meddling with the
Southern order and a grave affront to Southern honor. In 1860 the election of
Abraham Lincoln as president on a free-soil platform set off a major political
and constitutional crisis, as seven states in the Deep South seceded from the
United States and formed the Confederate States of America. The start of the
Civil War between the United States and the Confederacy in April 1861 led to the
additional secession of four states in the upper South. Four other slave
states—Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri—remained in the Union, as did
the new state of West Virginia, which split off from Virginia.
Ironically, although Southern politicians
supported secession in order to preserve slavery, their action led instead to
the end of slavery. As the war dragged on, Northern war aims gradually shifted
from preserving the Union to abolishing slavery and remaking the Union. This
goal, which received symbolic recognition with the Emancipation Proclamation
that President Lincoln issued on January 1, 1863, became reality with the 13th
Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress in January and ratified by the
states in December 1865. Although slavery was ended, it was followed by an
intense struggle during Reconstruction over the status of the newly freed
slaves. In subsequent decades, black Americans continued to struggle against
poverty, racism, and segregation, as they sought to overcome the bitter legacy
of slavery.
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