slavery in colonial america essay

Slavery in Colonial America

Slavery in Colonial America, defined as white English settlers enslaving Africans, began in 1640 in the Jamestown Colony of Virginia but had already been embraced as policy prior to that date with the enslavement and deportation of Native Americans. Although the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, chattel slavery was not institutionalized at that time.

Colonial reports from Jamestown as early as 1610 note the practice of enslaving Native Americans, and the Pequot Wars of the New England Colonies (1636-1638) ended in colonial victory and the enslavement and deportation of members of the Pequot tribe. Although institutionalized chattel slavery did not become policy in Virginia until the 1660s, therefore, the concept and practice were already well-established, having first been introduced by the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas before the arrival of the English.

Slavery in the Americas was widely practiced by indigenous tribes who enslaved those captured in raids, wars, or who were traded from one group to another for various reasons but there was no slave trade per se. Institutionalized chattel slavery was only introduced after the arrival of Christopher Columbus (l. 1451-1506) in 1492, was developed by the Spanish and Portuguese by 1500, and was already integral to Spanish and Portuguese colonial economies by 1519.

As the English colonized North America between 1607-1733, slavery became institutionalized and race-based. Native Americans who were taken as slaves were usually sold to plantation owners in the West Indies while African slaves were imported in what became known as the Triangle Trade between Europe , West Africa , and the Americas. Every one of the English colonies held slaves but the lives of the enslaved differed, often significantly, between them.

Although some colonies, such as Pennsylvania, objected to the practice, the citizens still kept slaves. The abolitionist movement gained some momentum leading up to, and away from, the American War of Independence (1775-1783), but it was not until the 19th century that concerted efforts were made to abolish the practice. The first major legislative blow to slavery was the Emancipation Proclamation issued in January of 1863 which freed slaves in the Confederate States, but slavery was not abolished in the United States until the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 though the effects of the institution of racial slavery would continue to inform American culture up through the present day.

Columbus & the Slave Trade

Columbus did not so much "discover America" as conceive of the means of fully exploiting the people he found already living in the Caribbean, South, and Central America. On his first voyage in 1492, he kidnapped a number of natives to bring back to his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain who had hoped he would return with massive quantities of gold . Having found no gold, Columbus offered the royal couple the natives as slaves.

On his second voyage in 1493, he kidnapped more natives, but Ferdinand and Isabella had not given their consent for this as they were uneasy about the morality and legality of enslaving people who had offered them no offense. They ordered Columbus to stop until the matter could be resolved by their theologians and legal counselors, but he ignored them and sent over 500 enslaved natives to Spain from the West Indies in 1495.

Between 1493-1496, he established the encomienda system in the lands he had claimed for Spain in which Spanish settlers were given large tracts of land worked by natives in exchange for food, shelter, and protection from the Spaniards. Ferdinand and Isabella outlawed slavery in Spain and ordered those who had been brought freed but legalized slavery and the encomienda system in their New World colonies. Once slavery was established there, the slave trade – which Columbus had already initiated – developed quickly with Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and French ships transporting enslaved natives to various points and Spanish colonists enslaving those who remained.

The enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the West Indies, South, and Central America continued throughout the 16th century while, to the north, the French and Dutch attempted to build alliances with the natives at the same time they profited from the slave trade in the south by shipping slaves between points of trade. The English were the last to introduce slavery to the Americas in the Colony of Virginia, first enslaving Native Americans as early as 1610 and Africans between 1640 and 1660.

Jamestown & Virginia Slave Laws

By the time the English began their colonization efforts in North America in 1585, the slave trade was regarded simply as another import-export business and the early colonists of Jamestown saw the natives of the Powhatan Confederacy as another resource to exploit. Captain John Smith (l. 1580-1631) writes of colonists regularly stealing from the natives and a report from another colonist c. 1610 claims that natives were already being taken as slaves by that time.

In 1619, a Dutch ship carrying 20 or 21 enslaved Africans arrived at Jamestown seeking supplies and provisions. Governor Yeardley (l. 1587-1627) traded these for the Africans, but they seem to have regarded as indentured servants, not slaves. The Dutch ship was not bound for Jamestown with its cargo but was forced to put into port due to shortages aboard. Slavery might have developed in the English colonies anyway, and probably would have, but this event signals the arrival of the first unwilling Africans as servants to English landowners.

The claim that these first Africans were indentured servants, not slaves, is supported by evidence that the English colonists themselves regarded them as such. Although the Africans were purchased from the Dutch ship for the necessary supplies, they were not then enslaved by Yeardley but worked for between 4-7 years and then given their own land to farm in accordance with the policy of indentured servitude. One of these, later known as Anthony Johnson, is listed in the census prior to 1640 as a freeman and had purchased a slave of his own named John Casar.

This policy changed in 1640 when a black indentured servant named John Punch objected to the treatment he received from his master and left service in the company of two white servants. When the three were caught and returned to their master, the two whites had their terms of servitude extended by four years while Punch was condemned to lifelong servitude. Many scholars cite the Punch event as the beginning of institutionalized slavery in the English colonies. Virginia Colony passed laws restricting the rights of Africans after 1640 and, especially, during the 1660s when slavery became fully institutionalized.

New England & Middle Colonies

While Jamestown and the Virginia colonies were developing to the south, the New England Colonies were established. Plymouth Colony was founded in 1620 and Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 with other New England Colonies then springing up from the latter. The first record of Native American enslavement appears after the Pequot War when many of the defeated natives were sold as slaves to plantations in the West Indies. Massachusetts Bay Colony passed the first laws regarding slavery in 1641, defining justified enslavement as applying to those who were taken captive in war, convicted of a crime and enslaved as punishment, or as foreigners to the community, already enslaved by others, who were sold to colonists in New England.

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Although the New England Colonies and Middle Colonies are not usually associated with slavery, they all kept slaves to greater or lesser degrees. By 1703, New York City ’s slave population made up 42% of the whole and a slave market operated on the East River on Wall Street. New York also passed one of the first laws setting the death penalty for slaves who rose against or murdered their masters. Pennsylvania, the only English colony to condemn slavery, still practiced it. A petition against slavery, drafted by Quakers in 1688 and submitted to the colonial government, was filed and then forgotten until the mid-19th century.

Massachusetts Bay took the lead in profiting from the slave trade initially by shipping salted fish to plantations in the West Indies to feed their slaves and then by importing Africans as slaves from elsewhere to be sold in New England slave markets. This practice was considered legal as these people had already been enslaved by others and were only being purchased by New Englanders; it ignored, however, the fact that the market the colonies created encouraged those others to enslave and transport more and more Africans via the route known as the Triangle Trade.

The Triangle Trade & Middle Passage

The Triangle Trade was a cyclical exchange of goods and human beings between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas and enabled the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Colonists exported raw goods to Britain where they were processed into finished goods and traded with West Africa, which then sent slaves to the English colonies. Those who were taken as slaves in Africa were forced to endure the Middle Passage – the trip from Africa to North America – loaded below decks as cargo and packed as tightly as possible for maximum profit, especially since over half were expected to die before reaching their destination. Scholar Oscar Reiss elaborates:

If 18 million left Africa during the "trading period" then perhaps 6 million died. Lord Palmerston, who opposed the slave trade, believed that of every three blacks taken from the interior, one reached America. According to the tables kept by the Board of Trade between 1680 and 1688, the Africa Company shipped out 60, 783 "pieces of merchandise" and delivered 46,394 – a loss of 23 percent. In business terms, this was a loss of principal. These slaves were paid for in Africa and failure to deliver them for sale at their destination was a serious loss. (34)

To make up for that loss, the captains packed as many people as possible into the holds of their ships. Reiss continues:

They were forced to lie "spoon fashion" on their sides to conserve space. A fully grown male received eighteen inches’ width by six feet of length; women received five feet ten inches of length by sixteen inches; boys five feet by fourteen inches; and girls four feet, six inches by twelve inches. Lord Palmerston commented that they had less room than a corpse in a coffin. Crowding was so intense that the British Parliament passed a law restricting the numbers of slaves to no more than five slaves per three three-ton capacity in a ship of 200 tons. Like so much unpopular legislation, this was not obeyed by the ships’ captains. (34)

The slaves were all confined below deck in semi- or complete darkness with men, women, and boys separated and only the men manacled. In good weather, the slaves were brought up on deck – chained to prevent anyone throwing themselves overboard – and were left there sometimes all day with little water and, just like in the hold, only small buckets to relieve themselves in, which were too small and too few for the purpose they were supposed to serve.

The Middle Passage was so-called because it was the second (or “middle”) of a three-part trade route that began and ended in Europe. The first passage was from Europe to Africa carrying textiles, metals, alcohol, weaponry, and other valuables which were traded for slaves who then made the middle passage to the Americas where they were traded for other valuables and commodities which were sent on the third passage back to Europe. The Triangle Trade was in full operation between the early 16th through the mid-19th century, and the majority of the slaves brought to North America went to the Southern Colonies .

Southern States Slave Laws

New England Colonies and Middle Colonies held slaves but not as many as the Southern Colonies and the work required of the enslaved was more labor-intensive in the south than in the north. Large southern tobacco, rice, and cotton plantations came to rely heavily on slave labor, while smaller farms in the north, typically worked by a farmer and his family, did not require slave labor, at least not to so great a degree. While slaves in the New England and Middle Colonies primarily worked the ports, loading and unloading ships, those in the south largely worked the fields of the plantations. Slavery in the Southern Colonies followed the model established by the English colony of Barbados. Scholar Alan Taylor notes:

Because English law provided no precedents for managing a system of racial slavery, the Barbadians had to develop their own slave code, which they systematized in 1661. The Barbadian code became the model for those adopted elsewhere in the English colonies, particularly Jamaica (1664) and Carolina (1696), which both originated as offshoots from Barbados. (213)

The code mandated:

• No slave could leave their plantation without written permission by his or her owner.
• Slaves could not play musical instruments, beat drums, sound horns, or make loud noises that could signal rebellion.
• Whites were encouraged to ask any black person for his or her pass on the street and to search them, without cause, for weapons or contraband.
• Blacks were encouraged to inform on fellow blacks, prevent escapes, and turn over fugitives; they were rewarded with new clothes, better treatment, and given "a badge of a red cross on his right arm whereby he may be known and cherished by all good people" (Taylor, 213).

The planters unwittingly paid psychological, social, and demographic costs for adopting the West Indian slave system. And they freely shared those costs with poor whites who owned no slaves…As in the West Indies, the planters suffered from a haunting fear that their African majority would rise up in deadly, burning rebellion. In a desperate search for security, the Carolina planters adopted the West Indian system of strict surveillance and harsh punishment to keep the slaves intimidated and working. The new system criminalized formerly tolerated behavior, revoking the degree of trust and autonomy previously allowed most slaves in the frontier era. (239)

Slaves who were accused of fomenting rebellion were hanged or burned at the stake, often on little to no evidence of their guilt. The fear was fueled not only by the knowledge that the white population had enslaved and dehumanized the black populations of the region but by the memory of two early rebellions by the servant class in Virginia. The Gloucester County Conspiracy of 1663 ended before it began when it was betrayed by another servant but Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 united black and white indentured servants and slaves, resulting in the burning of Jamestown.

In spite of the repressive measures of the Southern Colonies toward the black population, revolts did break out. The Stono Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina is the largest slave revolt launched in the Thirteen Colonies. Led by a slave named Jemmy, around 20 slaves gathered at the Stono River on Sunday, 9 September 1739, raided a warehouse for weapons, and then marched toward the safety of Spanish St. Augustine , Florida where they would be free. The slaves attacked and killed white masters, and their group swelled to at least 100 before the militia counterattacked. 25 white colonists were killed in the uprising and at least 30 blacks in the week-long battles with the militia; afterwards, more slaves were hanged, and executions went on, with little recourse to any legal proceedings, through the following year.

When the American War of Independence broke out in 1775, many slaves hoped they would be granted freedom since words like 'liberty' and 'justice' and phrases regarding an 'end to oppression' were frequently heard from white masters. Some black slaves served in the Continental Army in place of their masters in return for their freedom but, when the war ended, slavery was still in place in the colonies.

The New England and Middle colonies abolished slavery by 1850, in part due to pressure from the growing abolitionist movement, but also, they could afford to do so because, as noted, the northern economy was not as dependent on slave labor as that of the south and became even less so through industrialization . The Southern Colonies continued the "peculiar institution", as they called it, until forced to abandon it after the American Civil War ended in their defeat in 1865.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States and freed the slaves but the systemic racism the institution had engendered did not simply vanish away. African Americans in the United States have experienced a very different America than the one lauded in song as the "land of the free and the home of the brave" and continue to do so in the present when the specter of racialized slavery manifests itself in unequal medical care, opportunities, and justice before the law for the descendants of those brought as slaves to the colonies by people claiming to have founded a land based on the concept of freedom for all.

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Bibliography

• de Las Casas, B. & Griffin, N. & Pagden, A. A Short Account of the Destruction of the West Indies . Pantianos Classics, 2007.
• Drake, S. G. History of the Early Discovery of America and Landing of the Pilgrims. Nabu Press, 2010.
• Hawke, D. F. Everyday Life in Early America. Harper & Row, 1989.
• Mann, C. C. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Vintage Books, 2012.
• Musselwhite, P., Mancall, P. C. , Horn, J. Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of America. University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
• Orr, C. History of the Pequot War. Pantianos Classics, 2012.
• Price, D. A. Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation. Vintage Books, 2005.
• Reiss, O. Blacks in Colonial America. McFarland, 2006.
• Reséndez, A. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Mariner Books, 2017.
• Taylor, A. American Colonies: The Settling of North America. Penguin Books, 2002.

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Mark, J. J. (2021, April 22). Slavery in Colonial America . World History Encyclopedia . Retrieved from https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1739/slavery-in-colonial-america/

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Slavery in Colonial America

Many cultures practiced some version of the institution of slavery in the ancient and modern world, most commonly involving enemy captives or prisoners of war. Slavery and forced labor began in colonial America almost as soon as the English arrived and established a permanent settlement at Jamestown in 1607. Colonist George Percy wrote that the English held an “Indian guide” named Kempes in “hande locke” during the First Anglo-Powhatan War in 1610. English colonists exploited Virginia Indians—especially Indian children—for much of the first half of the 17 th century. Some colonists largely ignored Virginia laws prohibiting the enslavement of Indian children, which the Virginia Assembly passed in the 1650s and again in 1670.

While colonists continued to enslave Virginia Indians, the first unfree Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619. In that year, colonist John Rolfe wrote to Sir Edwin Sandys, one of the founders of the Virginia Company and its then-treasurer, of the arrival of the first Africans on Virginia’s shores. According to Rolfe, in late August a 160-ton man-of-war, the White Lion , brought “20 and odd Negroes” to Point Comfort (present-day Hampton, Virginia). Governor George Yeardley and merchant Abraham Piersey purchased them in exchange for victuals and supplies. Days later in September, two or three more Africans disembarked from the ship Treasurer . These Africans were likely from the Angolan kingdom of Ndongo, captured by Angolan warriors allied with the Portuguese.

The 1620 census of Virginia records 32 Africans living in Virginia, 17 women and 15 men, listed as “in service of the English” and “in ye service of several[sic] planters.” This census also lists four Indians laboring in the service of English planters. A 1624 muster of the inhabitants of Virginia lists some of the Africans by name, including a woman named Angelo, listed as having arrived on the Treasurer . The legal status of these first Africans in Virginia is unclear—whether the English settlers in Virginia intended to enslave the Africans for life, or whether they served for a period of years before gaining their freedom (a system of indentured servitude) is unknown, though some of these early Africans did later become free. For example, Anthony Johnson (whom the 1625 census lists as “Antonio the Negro”) gained his freedom and by 1640 lived in a community of other free Africans and African Americans in Northampton County, Virginia. Anthony himself may have even enslaved an African man named John Casar.

As Europeans continued to settle the North American colonies throughout the 17 th century, the legal codification of race-based slavery also continued to grow. Though many historians agree that slavery and indentured servitude coexisted in the early part of the century (with many Europeans arriving in the colonies under indentures), especially throughout the 1640s-1660s colonies increasingly established laws limiting the rights of Africans and African-Americans and solidifying the institution of slavery upon the basis of race and heredity. In Virginia in 1641, officials sentenced “a negro named John Punch” to serve his master “for the time of his natural life,” after Punch attempted to run away with two European indentured servants. Officials sentenced the two Europeans with four-year extensions on their servitude, while Punch’s punishment was life-long servitude. Many historians look to the case of John Punch as the first instance of legally codified, life-long, and race-based slavery. In New England, colonists continued the practice of enslaving indigenous Indians, particularly those captured during warfare, while also legally justifying the enslavement of African and African Americans. Massachusetts is widely regarded as passing the first law to legalize slavery in 1641, sanctioning slavery for “captives taken in just warres…and strangers as willingly selle[sic] themselves or are sold to us.”

The “ triangle trade ” largely defines the economics of slavery in the colonial era. In this cyclical system, slave traders imported enslaved Africans to North American colonies. Colonists in turn exported raw goods like lumber, tobacco, and sugar to Great Britain, where those materials were transformed into the finished, luxury goods like rum and textiles that merchants sold or traded along the African coast for enslaved Africans to be sent to North American colonies. Slave traders violently captured Africans and loaded them onto slave ships, where for months these individuals endured the “Middle Passage”—the crossing of the Atlantic from Africa to the North American colonies or West Indies. Many Africans did not survive the journey.

The 1660s was a watershed decade for slavery in colonial America. It is important to remember that during the colonial period, each colony enacted and enforced laws regarding slavery individually. Virginia’s 1662 law establishing that children born to an enslaved mother would also be enslaved further codified race-based and hereditary enslavement in that colony. Maryland legalized slavery in 1663; New York and New Jersey followed in 1664. In addition, that year Maryland, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia passed laws legalizing life-long servitude. Colonies also adopted laws prohibiting non-whites from owning firearms, and established laws that negated a person’s conversion to Christianity from affecting their status as a slave.

It is in this context of the evolution of slavery in colonial America that in 1688 Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania presented the first petition against the institution of slavery. The petition argued that slavery violated basic human rights-based upon the Biblical Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have done unto you.” The petition was neither adopted nor rejected, and largely forgotten until the 19 th century.

Many factors contributed to the growth of slavery and the slave trade from the end of the 17 th -century through the 18 th century. The history and growth of slavery in colonial America was tied to the rise of land cultivation, and particularly the boom in the production of tobacco (in Virginia and Maryland) and rice (in the Carolinas). The Royal African Company’s expansion in 1672 resulted in a growing surge of the transport of Africans to the colonies. When the RAC lost its monopoly in 1696, trade in captive Africans and their transport to the colonies increased further. As the numbers of enslaved Africans rose in the colonies, the practice of enslaving indigenous Indians decreased, and colonial officials further restricted the rights and movements of enslaved Africans and African Americans, including making it harder—even illegal—for slaves to be emancipated. In the first decades of the 18 th century, some colonies began prohibiting the importation of enslaved Africans, though the internal slave trade—the buying and selling of enslaved people already in the colonies—increased.

Enslaved people were regarded and treated as property with little to no rights. In many colonies, enslaved people could not testify in a court of law, own guns, gather in large groups, or go out at night. Especially on southern farms, enslaved people were expected to work from sun up to sundown, though they may have been given Sundays off to tend to their own small gardens, repair allotted clothing, or tend to other needs that might supplement their meager allotments of clothing and food. As property, slaves were frequently bought and sold, and sometimes family groups were divided across plantations or even colonies, though some slave owners sought to keep families together as a safeguard against slaves running away. Slaves of small households often lived in the kitchen or a small outbuilding, while slaves on larger plantations often lived together in a quarter or a group of quarters with an overseer. Religion, storytelling, music, and dancing were important parts of an enslaved person’s life, and could help share and preserve African cultural traditions across generations. Increasingly in the 18 th century, slaves responded to the Great Awakening and began converting to Christianity, worshiping both alone and together with whites in Baptist and Methodist congregations.

An enslaved person’s experience of slavery was as unique as the individual themselves. Slavery differed greatly from the 17 th to 18 th centuries, in part because of the various slave laws enacted by colonial authorities as time progressed. Further, the geographic location could help to define an enslaved person’s experience of slavery. In the south, many enslaved individuals found themselves working primarily in agricultural labor, such as in tobacco fields, while others (including women and children) worked as grooms, maids, cooks, or other domestic servants to wealthy plantation owners. In the north, as well as in urban city centers in the south, enslaved individuals may have been skilled tradesmen, worked on the eastern seaboard’s many wharves and ports, or worked on the smaller farms of middling landowners.

In the northern colonies, slave-owning households may have only owned two or three slaves, while the enslaved population accounted for less than 5% of the total population of New England (though in larger cities like Newport, Rhode Island, slaves accounted for closer to 20% of the population of the city). In the mid-Atlantic colonies like Virginia, enslaved people made up closer to 50% of the population by the mid-18 th century. This number increased to roughly 60% in colonies like South Carolina, where much of the enslaved population lived and worked on vast plantations together with 50, 100, or more slaves.

As slavery expanded and the numbers of enslaved men, women, and children increased in the colonies, so too did anxieties about possible slave rebellions, uprisings, and insurrections. On September 9, 1739, a group of 20 enslaved men led by an enslaved African named Jemmy marched to a warehouse on the Stono River in South Carolina, where they stole arms and ammunition and killed the men they found there. The party grew in number, and with drums beating, the party continued south towards Florida, where they hoped to find their freedom there under Spanish rule. The party killed more than 20 white men, women, and children along their march before the militia intervened. Some of the slaves were killed during the fight while others were hanged or sold to slave markets in the West Indies (a routine yet harsh punishment for enslaved men, women, and children in the colonies). In New York in 1741, a series of suspicious fires fanned the flames of unrest between the colony’s white, Black, free, and unfree populations. Anxious whites concluded, with little evidence, that enslaved men acted in concert to set fires in the city in a conspiratorial act of rebellion. Thirty enslaved men were executed, while 70 more were sent out of New York. 

Even without large-scale rebellion, some enslaved men, women, and children found ways to passively resist in their daily lives by breaking tools or pretending to be sick so that they could not work. Others stole food, goods, or clothing from their owners. Some attempted to run away. Eighteenth-century newspapers often include owners’ runaway advertisements, spreading the news of runaway slaves and sharing their physical descriptions along with a reward for whomever captured and returned the slave to the owner. A slave returning from a runaway attempt was met with harsh punishment.

By 1775, enslaved people accounted for 20% of the population of the colonies, with over half living in the south. On the eve of the Revolution, aided by the patriot rhetoric of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, enslaved and free African Americans worked to further the growing abolition movement and petitioned governments for gradual manumission and cessation of slavery. Further, enticed by promises of freedom in exchange for their service, enslaved African Americans took advantage of opportunities to serve the British army. Thousands of formerly enslaved men, women, and children left the new United States with the British in 1783, looking towards new lives of freedom in Nova Scotia and other British colonies. Enslaved men also served in patriot forces, sometimes by choice, but sometimes as substitutes for their owners who preferred not to fight. Some received payments and freedom for their service, while others did not.

The American Revolution offered many enslaved African Americans opportunities to pursue freedom that did not exist previously. The Revolution also influenced public opinion of slavery—in 1780 Pennsylvania became the first major slave-holding state to begin the process of ending slavery. Though some other new states followed suit, the Revolution failed to end the institution of slavery in America. Instead, the economy’s reliance on slavery proved to be a defining element in the creation of the new United States government.

Further Reading:

• Indian Slavery in Colonial America   By: Alan Gallay
• Black Americans in the Revolutionary Ear: A Brief History with Documents  By: Woody Holton
• American Slavery, American Freedom   By: Edmund S. Morgan
• New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America   By: Wendy Warren

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Slavery in Colonial North America

Essay by 2016 arcadia fellow teresa mcculla.

Slavery is central to the history of colonial North America. For more than two centuries, European Americans treated enslaved men, women, and children as objects that could be bought and sold .[i] Harvard’s digitized collections can help scholars understand how the institution of slavery suffused every aspect of the colonial world.

The crude logic of enslaving human beings cast people as tools who required input (food and clothing) in order to produce the output of their labor. In the calculations of colonial-era businessmen, all of these components, including the body of the enslaved person, could be given a monetary value. For example, in February 1724, Harvard tutor Henry Flynt speculated as to the financial feasibility of operating a ferry with the assistance of a slave. “ [I]f a man…buys a negro at 60 pounds who lives 20 year[s] his Labour is but 3 pounds a year ,” he reasoned, “and his Victuals 26 pounds per annum makes 29 pounds which with 6 pounds wear and tare and 50 pounds rent makes 85 pounds.”[ii] The man Flynt imagined was an aggregate of calculations: a business investment to manage. Flynt applied such arithmetic to personal matters as well. When Flynt’s elderly mother passed away in the 1730s, he quibbled with his brother-in-law over Toney, the enslaved man who had worked for her. The men cared less for Toney’s fate, though, than the cash he represented. Toney became an element of Flynt’s mother’s estate to settle, alongside “all the household stuff” that Flynt could tally, which included “ Brass Silver Iron bedding Linnen .”[iii] Flynt sold Toney to another enslaver and balanced the price of the man’s sale against the money he paid for his mother’s final expenses: “ the Grave and bel ringing and pall etc .”[iv] Treated as an investment, Toney disappeared from Flynt’s diary after his sale. Most researchers consult the diary of Henry Flynt, an enormous tome, to understand the workings of Harvard College life and colonial accounting practices. However, the experiences of historical figures like Toney count as an equally important, if subtle, presence in this and similar records.

Enslaved people are particularly prominent in archived manuscripts related to trade and agriculture in the colonial Caribbean. For example, in 1763, Britain legislated the regulation of auctions in Barbados , events which included the sale of enslaved people.[v] In 1777, a Barbados official wrote to members of the British Council for Plantation Affairs to ask for more “ India and Guinea Corn for the Negroes ,” who toiled in sugarcane plantations there.[vi] Naval captains throughout the Caribbean also hired local people of color as temporary laborers to assist in the work of getting their ships in and out of ports, as they transported coffee, sugar, rum, and slaves among European colonies.[vii]

Legal manuscripts count as another important genre in the documented history of colonial slavery.[viii] Occasionally, enslaved people used the American court system to sue for their own freedom , but more often they stood at the center of trials, treated as disputed property or accused of crimes.[ix] One Delaware court case at the close of the colonial period demonstrated the multiple implications of interpreting a person as an owned object. In less than fifteen minutes, a jury convicted George, an enslaved man accused of raping a white woman, and sentenced him to death. The court treated George as a human in convicting him of a violent crime and executing him. But George’s execution also represented the destruction of property from the perspective of George’s enslaver. Thus, the judge ordered the jury to not only determine George’s guilt or innocence but also to “ assess the value of the Negro, two thirds of which by law is to be paid by the County to the owner .”[x] Because the state had carried out George’s execution, it owed a debt to George’s owner.

The humanity of enslaved men, women, and children emerges in many other archival sources. For example, under the heading “ January 8th A.M. Family Weighed 1747/8 ,” a teenage John Holyoke recorded in his diary the weights of all members of his household.[xi] Alongside his mother and siblings, Holyoke weighed his father, then president of Harvard College, and Juba, a slave. As this episode demonstrated, even as part of a child’s game, enslaved and free men could be assessed in the same units of measure despite the vast differences in their social situations. A generation later, a man enslaved to Cambridge widow Sarah Bordman left his own mark in an ephemeral document without writing a word. Shoemaker William Manning issued a bill to Bordman listing the costs associated with mending the shoes of “ her negro Cato ” between May 9, 1770 and July 4, 1771.[xii] Every two months, if not more often, Manning mended Cato’s shoes. During this time frame, he also provided four new pairs of shoes. Cato’s rapidly worn shoes recorded his labor for Bordman. Soles that required constant repair testified to the miles walked and work done by an enslaved man in colonial Massachusetts, even if Cato left no written memoir of his own.

In these ways, archival records that track the history of slavery add deep moral complexity to political, economic, and social developments, as well as daily life, in colonial North America and the new United States.

[i] Bordman family. Papers of the Bordman family, 1686-1837. Deed of sale, 1716/7 January 1. HUG 1228 Box 2, Folder 3, Harvard University Archives.

[ii] February 8, 1724. Diary of Henry Flynt, 1723-1747.

[iii] January 22, 1735/6. Diary of Henry Flynt, 1723-1747.

[iv] November 24, 1737. Diary of Henry Flynt, 1723-1747.

[v] Barbados. Laws, etc. An Act of Assembly of Barbadoes to regulate sales at outcry and the proceedings of persons executing the office of Provost Marshall General of the said island and their under officers, 1763. HLS MS 1046, Harvard Law School Library.

[vi] Barbados. A collection of autograph letters and original documents relating to the Island of Barbados in the 18th century, ca. 1730-1778. HLS MS 1047, Harvard Law School Library.

[vii] Bills of lading for the ship Lydia, 1766. Small Manuscript Collection, Harvard Law School Library; Holman, Gabriel. Bill of disbursments [for the] sch[oone]r Lydia: manuscript, 1790. MS Eng 659. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

[viii] Mexican Legal Documents, 1577-1805. " Denunció " of a black slave named Ana or Mariana of the city of Guastepeque, 20 December 1658. 1-8, Harvard Law School Library.

[ix] Saml. Agg. – Negro / John Forbes, Petition for freedom. Delaware. Court of Common Pleas. Records, 1790-1805. Small Manuscript Collection, Volume 3, Harvard Law School Library; Indict _ Felony in Stealing a Negro Woman called Hannah price $200 property of ___ Porter and for aiding Negro David, his slave and her husband, in Stealing said Hannah Plea Not Guilty. Delaware. Court of Common Pleas. Records, 1790-1805. Small Manuscript Collection, Volume 3, Harvard Law School Library.

[x] State / A Negro George the Slave of Susan H__. Delaware. Court of Common Pleas. Records, 1790-1805. Small Manuscript Collection, Volume 3, Harvard Law School Library.

[xi] Holyoke family. Holyoke family diaries, 1742-1748. Diary of John Holyoke, 1748. Interleaved almanac, 1748. HUM 46 Volume 6, Harvard University Archives.

[xii] Bordman family. Papers of the Bordman family, 1686-1837. Bill, 1771 August 23. HUG 1228 Box 2, Folder 39, Harvard University Archives.

Background Essay: The Origins of American Slavery

How did enslaved and free blacks resist the injustice of slavery during the colonial era.

• I can articulate how slavery was at odds with the principle of justice.
• I can explain how enslaved men and women resisted the institution of slavery.
• I can create an argument supported by evidence from primary sources.
• I can succinctly summarize the main ideas of historic texts.

Essential Vocabulary

Written by: The Bill of Rights Institute

American Slavery in the Colonies

Throughout the colonial era, many white colonists in British North America gradually imposed a system of unfree and coerced labor upon Africans in all the colonies. Throughout the colonies, enslavement of Africans became a racial, lifelong, and hereditary condition. The institution was bound up with the larger Atlantic System of trade and slavery yet developed a unique and diverse character in British North America.

Europeans forcibly brought Africans to the New World in the international slave trade. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, European slave ships carried 12.5 million Africans, mostly to the New World. Because of the crowded ships, diseases, and mistreatment, only 10.7 million enslaved Africans landed at their destinations. Almost 2 million souls perished in what a draft of the Declaration of Independence later called an “ execrable commerce.”

Europeans primarily acquired the enslaved Africans from African slave traders along the western coast of the continent by exchanging guns, alcohol, textiles, and a broad range of goods demanded by the African traders. The enslaved were alone, having been separated from their families and embarked on the harrowing journey called the “ Middle Passage ” in chains. They were frightened and confused by their tragic predicament. Some refused to eat or jumped overboard to commit suicide rather than await their fate.

This diagram depicts the layout of a slave ship. (Unknown author – an Abstract of Evidence delivered before a select committee of the House of Commons in 1790 and 1791, reprinted in Phyllis M. Martin and Patrick O’Meara (eds.) (1995). Africa third edition. Indiana University Press and James Currey.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Passage#/media/File:Slave_ship_diagram.png

Most Africans in the international trade were bound for the European colonial possessions in the Caribbean and South America. The sugar plantations there were places where disease, climate, and work conditions produced a horrifying death rate for enslaved Africans. The sugar crop was so valuable that it was cheaper to work slaves to death and import replacements.  About 5 percent of the human cargo in the slave trade landed in British North America.

The African-American experience in the 13 colonies varied widely and is characterized by great complexity. The climate, geography, agriculture, laws, and culture shaped the diverse nature of enslavement.

Enslaved Africans in the British North American colonies did share many things in common, however. Slavery was a racial, lifetime and hereditary condition. White supremacy was rooted in slavery as its victims were almost exclusively Africans. It was a system of unfree and coerced labor that violated the enslaved person’s natural rights of liberty and consent. While the treatment of slaves might vary depending on region or the disposition of the slaveholder, slavery was at its core a violent and brutal system that stripped away human dignity from the enslaved. In all the colonies, slaves were considered legal property. In other words, slavery was a great injustice.

Differing climates and economies led to very different agricultural systems and patterns of enslavement across the colonies. The North had mostly self-sufficient farms. Few had slaves, and those that did, had one or two enslaved persons. While the North had some important pockets of large landowners who held larger numbers of slaves such as the Hudson Valley, its farms were generally incompatible with large slaveholding. Moreover, the nature of wheat and corn crops generally did not support slaveholding the same way that labor-intensive tobacco and rice did. Cities such as New York and Philadelphia also had the largest Black populations.

On the other hand, the Chesapeake (Maryland and Virginia) and low country of the Carolinas had planters and farmers who raised tobacco, rice, and indigo. Small farms only had one or two slaves (and often none), but the majority of the southern enslaved population lived on plantations. Large plantations frequently held more than 20 enslaved people, and some had hundreds. Virginian Robert “King” Carter held more than 1,000 people in bondage. As a result, in the areas where plantations predominated areas of the South (especially South Carolina), enslaved people outnumbered white colonists and sometimes by large percentages. This led to great fear of slave rebellions and measures by whites, including slave patrols and travel restrictions, to prevent them.

Robert “King” Carter was one of the richest men in all of the American colonies. He owned more than 1,000 slaves on his Virginia plantation. Anonymous. Portrait of Robert “King” Carter. Circa 1720. Painting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Carter_I#/media/File:Robert_Carter_I.JPG

The regional differences of slavery led to variations in work patterns for enslaved people. A few Northern enslaved people worked and lived on farms alongside slaveholders and their families. Many worked in urban areas as workers, domestic servants, and sailors and generally had more freedom of movement than on southern plantations.

Blacks developed their own cultures in North and South. Despite different cultures and languages brought from Africa and regional differences within the colonies, a strong sense of community developed especially in areas where they had greater autonomy. Slave quarters on large plantations and urban communities of free blacks were notable for the development of Black culture through resistance, preservation of traditions, and expression. The free and enslaved Black communities kept in conversation with each other to transmit news and to hide runaways.

Different systems of work developed on Southern plantations. One was a “gang system ” of labor in which planters or their overseers drove groups of enslaved people, closely watched their work, and applied physical coercion to compel them to work faster. They also worked in the homes, laundries, kitchens, and stables on larger plantations.

On the massive rice plantations of the Carolinas, enslaved people were often assigned tasks and allowed to stop working when they reached their goals. The “ task system ” could foster cooperation and provide incentives to complete their work quicker. Plantation slaves completed other tasks including cooking, cleaning, laundry, childcare, and worked as skilled artisans.

The treatment and experience of enslaved people was rooted in a brutal system but could vary widely. Many slaveholders were violent and cruel, liberally applying severe beatings that were at times limited by law or shunned by society. Others were guided by their Christian beliefs or humanitarian impulses and treated their slaves more paternalistically . Domestic work was often easier but under much closer scrutiny than fieldhands who at times enjoyed more autonomy and community with other enslaved people. Slaveholders in New England were more likely to teach slaves to read or encourage religious worship, but enslaved people were commonly restricted from learning to read, especially in the South.

Enslaved people did not passively accept their condition. They found a variety of ways to resist in order to preserve their humanity and autonomy. Some of the common daily forms of resistance included slowing down their pace of work, breaking a tool, or pretending to be sick. Some stole food and drink to supplement their inadequate diets or simply to enjoy it as an act of rebellion. Young male slaves were especially likely to run away for a few days and hide out locally to protest work or mistreatment. Enslaved people secretly learned to read and that allowed them to forge passes to escape to freedom. They sang spirituals out of religious conviction, but also in part to express their hatred of the system and their hope for freedom.

Slaves developed their own culture as a way to bond together in their hardships and show defiance to their owners. This image depicts slaves on a plantation dancing and playing music. Anonymous. The Old Plantation. Circa. 1790. Painting. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Slave_dance_to_banjo,_1780s.jpg

The enslavement of Africans in British colonies in North America developed differently in individual colonies and among regions. But, the common thread running throughout the experience of slavery was injustice. Blacks were denied their humanity and natural rights as they could not keep the fruits of their labor, lived under a brutal system of coercion, and could not live their lives freely. However, a few white colonists questioned the institution before the Revolutionary War.

Comprehension and Analysis Questions

• How did slavery violate an enslaved person’s natural rights?
• How did slavery vary across the 13 British colonies in North America?
• How did Blacks resist their enslavement?

Related Content

Introductory Essay: The Declaration of Independence and the Promise of Liberty and Equality for All: Founding Principles and the Problem of Slavery

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Origins of the Slave Trade

Why did Africa and Europe engage in the slave trade?

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Slavery in America

By: History.com Editors

Published: April 25, 2024

Millions of enslaved Africans contributed to the establishment of colonies in the Americas and continued laboring in various regions of the Americas after their independence, including the United States. Many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619 , when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved Africans ashore in the British colony of Jamestown , Virginia . The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista. Yet, enslaved Africans had been present in regions such as Florida, that are part of present-day United States nearly one century before.

Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than Indigenous populations and indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans.

Existing estimates establish that Europeans and American slave traders transported nearly 12.5 million enslaved Africans to the Americas. Of this number approximately 10.7 million disembarked alive in the Americas. During the 18th century alone, approximately 6.5 million enslaved persons were transported to the Americas. This forced migration deprived the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern Atlantic coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.

Slavery in Plantations and Cities

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia. Starting 1662, the colony of Virginia and then other English colonies established that the legal status of a slave was inherited through the mother. As a result, the children of enslaved women legally became slaves.

Before the rise of the American Revolution , the first debates to abolish slavery emerged. Black and white abolitionists contributed to the enactment of new legislation gradually abolishing slavery in some northern states such as Vermont and Pennsylvania. However, these laws emancipated only the newly born children of enslaved women.

Did you know? One of the first martyrs to the cause of American patriotism was Crispus Attucks, a former enslaved man who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770. Some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War.

But after the end of the American Revolutionary War , slavery was maintained in the new states. The new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, when it determined that three out of every five enslaved people were counted when determining a state's total population for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, European and American slave merchants purchased enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas and forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco, wheat, indigo, rice, sugar, and cotton. Enslaved men and women also performed work in northern cities such as Boston and New York, and in southern cities such as Charleston, Richmond, and Baltimore.

By the mid-19th century, America’s westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War . Though the Union victory freed the nation’s four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and beyond.

In the late 18th century, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop planted and harvested by enslaved people, but whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a U.S.-born  schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin , a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. His device was widely copied, and within a few years, the South transitioned from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region’s dependence on enslaved labor.

Slavery was never widespread in the North as it was in the South, but many northern businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Although gradual abolition emancipated newborns since the late 18th century, slavery was only abolished in New York in 1827, and in Connecticut in 1848.

Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years. By 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

Living Conditions of Enslaved People

Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many enslavers owned fewer than 50 enslaved people.

Landowners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement were restricted.

Many enslavers raped women they held in slavery, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their enslavers.

Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families. Most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal.

Slave Rebellions

Enslaved people organized r ebellions as early as the 18th century. In 1739, enslaved people led the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, the largest slave rebellion during the colonial era in North America.  Other rebellions followed, including the one led by  Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822. These uprisings were brutally repressed.

The revolt that most terrified enslavers was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Turner’s group, which eventually numbered as many 50 Black men, murdered some 55 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them.

Like with previous rebellions, in the aftermath of the Nat Turner’s Rebellion, slave owners feared similar insurrections and southern states further passed legislation prohibiting the movement and assembly of enslaved people.

Abolitionist Movement

As slavery expanded during the second half of the 18th century,  a growing abolitionist movement emerged in the North.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by formerly enslaved people  such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison , founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator .

While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slaveholding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious “free-labor” argument, which held that slaveholding was regressive, inefficient and made little economic sense.

Black abolitionists  and antislavery northerners led meetings and created newspapers. They also had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad , gained real momentum in the 1830s.

Conductors like Harriet Tubman guided escapees on their journey North, and “ stationmasters ” included such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Secretary of State William H. Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Although no one knows for sure how many men, women, and children escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad, it was in the thousands ( estimates range from 25,000 to 100,000).  

The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North. It also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro-slavery southerners of their northern countrymen’s determination to defeat the institution that sustained them.

Missouri Compromise

America’s explosive growth—and its expansion westward in the first half of the 19th century—would provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion.

In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government’s right to restrict slavery over Missouri’s application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouri’s southern border were to be free soil.

Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was only temporarily able to help quell the forces of sectionalism.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War .

Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out—with considerable bloodshed —in the new state of Kansas.

Outrage in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska Act spelled the downfall of the old Whig Party and the birth of a new, all-northern Republican Party . In 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court (involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his enslaver had taken him into free territory) effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery.

John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry

In 1859, two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery.

John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry , Virginia—in which the abolitionist and 22 men, including five Black men and three of Brown’s sons raided and occupied a federal arsenal—resulted in the deaths of 10 people and Brown’s hanging.

The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South.

The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America ; four more would follow after the Civil War began.

Though Lincoln’s anti-slavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the United States as a nation.

Abolition became a goal only later, due to military necessity, growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the self-emancipation of many people who fled enslavement as Union troops swept through the South.

When Did Slavery End?

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State…in rebellion,…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t officially end all slavery in America—that would happen with the passage of the 13th Amendment after the Civil War’s end in 1865—some 186,000 Black soldiers would join the Union Army, and about 38,000 lost their lives.

The Legacy of Slavery

The 13th Amendment, adopted on December 18, 1865, officially abolished slavery, but freed Black peoples’ status in the post-war South remained precarious, and significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

Previously enslaved men and women received the rights of citizenship and the “equal protection” of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment and the right to vote in the 15th Amendment , but these provisions of the Constitution were often ignored or violated, and it was difficult for Black citizens to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping .

Despite seeing an unprecedented degree of Black participation in American political life, Reconstruction was ultimately frustrating for African Americans, and the rebirth of white supremacy —including the rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—had triumphed in the South by 1877.

Almost a century later, resistance to the lingering racism and discrimination in America that began during the slavery era led to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which achieved the greatest political and social gains for Black Americans since Reconstruction.

Ana Lucia Araujo , a historian of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, edited and contributed to this article. Dr. Araujo is currently Professor of History at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples Projects. Her three more recent books are Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History , The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism , and Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery .

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Exploring Slavery's Roots in Colonial America

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Ira Berlin, Exploring Slavery's Roots in Colonial America, OAH Magazine of History , Volume 17, Issue 3, April 2003, Pages 3–4, https://doi.org/10.1093/maghis/17.3.3

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The history of slavery in the United States has long been tethered to the American Civil War. For years, it appeared the only reason American historians evinced interest in slavery was as a cause of that war. Except for a few articles in the Journal of Negro History and the work of pioneer historians of African American life like Herbert Aptheker, Lorenzo Greene, Luther P. Jackson, and Benjamin Quarles, little was written about slavery prior to the 1830s and hardly anything about seven-teenth- and eighteenth-century slavery. Even when the Civil Rights Movement stirred new interest in slavery as a first cause of America's racial dilemma, historians kept their focus on the nineteenth century, particularly the decades between 1830 and 1860. The works of Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, John Blassingame, Eugene D. Genovese, and Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman—although in sharp disagreement—uniformly maintained a nineteenth-century focus and rarely addressed the years prior to 1830.

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Antecedents and Models

Slavery is often termed "the peculiar institution," but it was hardly peculiar to the United States. Almost every society in the history of the world has experienced slavery at one time or another. The aborigines of Australia are about the only group that has so far not revealed a past mired in slavery—and perhaps the omission has more to do with the paucity of the evidence than anything else. To explore American slavery in its full international context, then, is essentially to tell the history of the globe. That task is not possible in the available space, so this essay will explore some key antecedents of slavery in North America and attempt to show what is distinctive or unusual about its development. The aim is to strike a balance between identifying continuities in the institution of slavery over time while also locating significant changes. The trick is to suggest preconditions, anticipations, and connections without implying that they were necessarily determinations (1).

Significant precursors to American slavery can be found in antiquity, which produced two of only a handful of genuine slave societies in the history of the world. A slave society is one in which slaves played an important role and formed a significant proportion (say, over 20 percent) of the population. Classical Greece and Rome (or at least parts of those entities and for distinct periods of time) fit this definition and can be considered models for slavery's expansion in the New World. In Rome in particular, bondage went hand in hand with imperial expansion, as large influxes of slaves from outlying areas were funneled into large-scale agriculture, into the latifundia , the plantations of southern Italy and Sicily. American slaveholders could point to a classical tradition of reconciling slavery with reason and universal law; ancient Rome provided important legal formulas and justifications for modern slavery. Parallels between ancient and New World slavery abound: from the dehumanizing device of addressing male slaves of any age as "boy," the use of branding and head shaving as modes of humiliation, the comic inventiveness in naming slaves (a practice American masters continued simply by using classical names), the notion that slaves could possess a peculium (a partial and temporary capacity to enjoy a range of goods), the common pattern of making fugitive slaves wear a metal collar, to clothing domestic slaves in special liveries or uniforms. The Life of Aesop , a fictional slave biography from Roman Egypt in the first century CE, is revelatory of the anxieties and fears that pervade any slave society, and some of the sexual tensions so well displayed are redolent of later American slavery. Yet, of course, ancient slavery was fundamentally different from modern slavery in being an equal opportunity condition —all ethnicities could be slaves—and in seeing slaves as primarily a social, not an economic, category. Ancient cultural mores were also distinctive: Greeks enslaved abandoned infants; Romans routinely tortured slaves to secure testimony; and even though the Stoics were prepared to acknowledge the humanity of the slave, neither they nor anyone else in the ancient world ever seriously questioned the place of slavery in society. Aristotle, after all, thought that some people were "slaves by nature," that there were in effect natural slaves (2).

Africa and the Slave Trade

Arabs and their Muslim allies were the first to make use of large numbers of sub-Saharan black Africans. They developed a long-distance slave trade, which began in the seventh century and lasted into the twentieth. It delivered many millions of Africans across the Sahara Desert, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean to North Africa, the Mediterranean, and Persian Gulf. Although over a much longer period of time and comprising far more females, the number of Africans exported via these trans-Saharan or Indian Ocean slave trades probably equaled, or even outmatched, those of its transatlantic counterpart. The preexistence of these export trades facilitated Atlantic trade: systems of slave marketing were already in place. So numerous were black Africans at certain times and in certain places that they were able to launch massive slave revolts—in 869, for instance, in what is now southern Iraq, where the so-called Zanj (who came from the Swahili Coast and lands further north) worked in large gangs draining marshlands. While the Quran and Islamic law were essentially color-blind and while Muslims enslaved many so-called "white" people, medieval Arabs came to associate the most degrading forms of labor with black slaves. The Arabic word for slave, `abd , came to mean a black slave. Many Arab writers had racial contempt for black people, and the racial stereotypes of the medieval Middle East were probably transmitted to the Iberian Peninsula (3).

As the long-standing trans-Saharan slave trade reveals, slavery existed in sub-Saharan Africa long before the Atlantic slave trade. In some —perhaps most—places, slavery tended to be a minor institution, with the slave able to pass in time from alien to kin member; in others, most notably a number of Islamicized regimes, slavery was more central, with violence, economic exploitation, and lack of kinship rights more evident. In large part because Africa was underpopulated, a broad spectrum of dependent statuses, with slavery as just one variant, existed; and slaves played a wide range of roles from field workers to soldiers, from domestics to administrators. The ethnic fragmentation of sub-Saharan Africa meant that there were few states strong enough to prevent opportunistic African kings or merchants profiting from slave raiding. Those kingdoms that opposed exporting slaves did not have the means to stop the traffic. Lacking an overall religious or political unity, Africans could enslave other Africans because the concept of "African-ness" had no meaning. Accustomed to tropical climates, inured to agricultural labor, and reared in a harsh epidemiological environment, sub-Saharan Africans made productive slaves (4).

As Europe's economy began to expand in the tenth and eleventh centuries, attention focused on the rich Mediterranean region. By the twelfth century, various Crusader states had been established at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. Venetian and Genoese merchants pioneered the development of these conquered Arab sugar-producing regions and began supplying them with slaves. They first victimized the Slavic inhabitants of the Dalmatian Coast and then transported Circassians, Georgians, Armenians, and the like from the Black Sea region. At this time, the Latin word for people of Slavic descent, sclavus , became the origin of the word slave in English (and in French esclave , in Spanish esclavo , and in German sklave ) and replaced the non-ethnic Latin term servus . In Europe in the Middle Ages, then, the slave population was predominantly "white." Sugar production gradually spread from the eastern Mediterranean, through Cyprus and Sicily, to Catalonia in the west, and the white slave trade followed in its wake. This trade mirrored the later transatlantic version, with its complex organization, permanent forts, and long-distance shipment by sea to multinational markets. When in 1453 the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople, Christian Europe was cut off from its major source of slaves. The only available alternative became sub-Saharan Africans (5).

Two sources of African labor were then available. First, the Arab caravan trade across the Sahara, long in existence, gathered impetus to provide more black slaves to Libya and Tunisia and then to the western Mediterranean region. Second, Genoese capital and technology augmented Portuguese sea power, and from the 1440s onward the Portuguese began importing significant numbers of black African slaves into Lisbon via the Atlantic. Still, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, North African and Muslim slaves exceeded black slaves in Iberia. Nevertheless, by the early seventeenth century black slaves numbered about 15,000 or 15 percent of Lisbon's population. This influx of African slaves into Iberia owed much to a transfer of personnel and knowledge from the Black Sea-Mediterranean slave nexus to that of an emerging Atlantic system (6).

The Atlantic Slave System

Sugar production meanwhile was making its way westward in search of fresh lands. Thus by the late fifteenth century the Iberians began colonizing the Atlantic islands off their coasts, first using as slaves Guanche natives of the Canary Islands. The Spanish and Portuguese enslavement of the Berber-like Canary Islanders is a prelude to the later fate of Caribbean, Mexican, Central American, and Brazilian Indians. Furthermore, the Atlantic islands of Madeira and São Tomé became forerunners for the spread of racial slavery and sugar plantations in the New World. Admittedly, Madeira's slave forces were limited, its properties were often small, and small farmers and sharecroppers supplied much of its cane.

Nevertheless, by the end of the fifteenth century it was Europe's largest producer, and its model would be the one later followed by Brazilians, who soon became the Atlantic world's major suppliers of sugar and who drew directly on the expertise of Atlantic Islanders. From the late fifteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century, São Tomé—situated in the Gulf of Guinea—imported more African slaves than Europe, the Americas, or the other Atlantic islands combined. Particularly in the universality of slave labor, São Tomé was the nearest approximation to an American prototype (7).

As slavery underwent a resurgence in southern Europe, it gradually disappeared from the northwestern part of the continent. Economic changes help to explain this development, but perhaps more important were cultural constraints. Over the course of the Middle Ages, Christians always committed awful atrocities on each other, but increasingly they avoided enslaving one another. Apparently, a sense of unity had emerged in Christian Europe that effectively barred the enslavement of those deemed fellow Europeans. Christianity's long struggle with Islam no doubt played a major role in this development. That from 1500 to 1800 Muslims enslaved well over a million Western Europeans, many of whom were subsequently ransomed and celebrated as symbols of freedom, was a major element in the growing sense that Europeans should never be slaves. Nevertheless, these so-called free labor nations would develop some of the harshest slave regimes in the Americas. As David Brion Davis puts it, "it is an astonishing paradox that the first nations in the world to free themselves of chattel slavery—such nations as England, France, Holland, and even the Scandinavian states—became leaders during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in supporting plantation colonies based on African slave labor." He likens this divide to a primitive Mason-Dixon line, "drawn somewhere in the Atlantic, separating free soil master-states from tainted slave soil dependencies" (8).

This paradox illumines the unpredictability of events in the Americas. No European nation embarked on New World ventures with the intention of enslaving anyone. They had no blueprint but rather proceeded haphazardly and pragmatically. Their first resort was to forced Indian labor (the encomienda , or a semifeudal system of tributary labor), as the Tainos found to their cost on Espanola. To make up for the rapid decline of these earliest Indian laborers, over the course of the sixteenth century Spanish conquistadors first raided islands such as the Bahamas and then shipped more than fifty thousand Indian slaves from Central America to Panama, Peru, and the Caribbean. Similarly, from roughly the 1530s to the 1580s, the Portuguese in Brazil relied on Indian slave labor to produce sugar. Early South Carolina resorted to Indian slaves who, in the first decade of the eighteenth century, comprised one-third of the colony's slave labor force. From 1670 to 1715 an active Indian slave trade saw as many as 50,000 Indians from the Carolinas and Florida sold to the West Indies and to the Northern mainland colonies. There were basic problems, nevertheless, with using Indians as slaves. First, Indians regarded any kind of agriculture as work fit only for women. Second, European opinion was decidedly ambivalent about enslaving Indians, as the famous debate in Spain in 1548 between Juan Ginés Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas revealed. Most important, Indians were remarkably susceptible to Old World diseases. Indian slaves were not able to survive long enough to be profitable. Suffering catastrophic losses, Indian labor literally wasted away. On Hispaniola, the Taino Indians, numbering perhaps 500,000 precontact, were almost extinct a half-century later; in central Mexico perhaps 15 million Indians in 1500 fell to just 1.5 million a century later. The scale of the disaster is staggering (9).

Consequently, Europeans faced a huge labor shortage. The Ottoman Turkish empire blocked access to Black Sea or Baltic captives. European nations no longer enslaved Christian prisoners of war. Some dreamers talked of enslaving the poor or other marginal groups, but the practical and principled problems of reviving European slavery were considerable. Another expedient was the transportation of convicts, but their numbers were never sufficient. Temporary bondage—indentured servitude—was the most obvious and most widely used other option, particularly in the early years, but servants, if they survived, eventually became free, and in any case most servants would not travel to the areas where most labor was needed. Thus, almost by default, African slaves proved by far the best available labor supply. Consequently, from 1500 to 1820 almost 9 million African slaves left for the New World, compared to less than 3 million whites. In terms of migration, the New World was more black than white (10).

The center of gravity of slavery did not, however, immediately shift to the western shores of the Atlantic. Not until 1700 did Africa earn more from the export of its slaves than it did from precious metals and spices. In addition, not until the late seventeenth century did black slaves in the New World outnumber white slaves in the Old World (then located primarily in the Islamic Middle East, North Africa, and Russia). White slaves in the Maghrib became so numerous that they mounted serious rebellions—in 1763 in Algiers four thousand Christian slaves rose and killed their guards, making it "perhaps the largest slave revolt in the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds between the end of the Roman Empire and St. Domingue rebellion" (11).

If the sheer availability of African slaves and the lack of available alternatives is the primary explanation for the development of racial slavery in the New World, did racism have nothing to do with it? Did antiblack racism or protoracism point particularly to African slaves to supply the immense labor demands of the New World? Or did racism intensify only after long-term interaction with black slaves had occurred? Was it there from the beginning, or was it a consequence? This is a complicated subject, and space will not permit a full accounting here. Ancient Greco-Roman art and writing offers caricatures of black Africans, although their relative scarcity is perhaps most telling. Medieval images of Africans ranged from the black magis to agents of the Devil. In various settings—in medieval Europe where peasants were often depicted as "black" because of working in the sun and in close proximity to dirt, or in modern Russia where noblemen even claimed that Russian serfs had black bones—blackness and debasement had a long connection. In western culture the color black evokes a highly negative symbolism, conjuring up images of death and sin. While these pejorative associations existed, European ambivalence toward sub-Saharan Africans seems the dominant response. Medieval Europeans did not, for example, automatically associate the biblical Ham with Africa; Asia was often identified with Ham, and his "Curse" was also used to justify European serfdom and the enslavement of Slavs. Nevertheless, however it happened, slavery became indelibly linked with people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere. The dishonor, humiliation, and bestialization that were universally associated with chattel slavery merged with blackness in the New World. The racial factor became one of the most distinctive features of slavery in the New World (12).

New World slavery's other most distinctive aspect was its highly commercial character. While it is true that plantations—that is, large agricultural enterprises, managed for profit, producing a crop for export, with a hierarchically stratified labor organization—existed outside the New World, they reached their apogee there. The economies of scale, the expansion in unit size, the almost exclusive use of black slaves, a highly regimented and commodified labor force, and a system of close management all raised profit levels significantly. Such a productive system placed enormous demands on its laborers. As early as the 1630s a visitor to a Jesuit-owned sugar plantation in Brazil vividly described the unbearable horror of what had transpired: "People the color of the very night, working briskly and moaning at the same time without a moment of peace or rest, whoever sees all the confused and noisy machinery and apparatus of this Babylon, even if they have seen Mt. Etna and Vesuvius will say that this indeed is the image of Hell" (13).

Patterns of New World Slavery

Variations over time and space existed within New World slavery. Three stand out. First, although all New World regions imported more African men than women (thereby in part explaining the harshness of New World slavery because of the policing problems associated with large gangs of men), over time the gender ratio among New World slaves became increasingly balanced. In that regard, the North American slave population is most notable, because, as its number of slave women increased the most rapidly, so it became one of the few self-reproducing slave populations in world history. This early and rapid natural increase explains why North America received such a small percentage of the overall transatlantic slave trade—about 5 percent. Second, North America was also distinctive in being much less tolerant of racial intermixture than Latin America or the Caribbean. Once again demography—particularly the ratio of white men to white women (more balanced in North America than in Latin America and the Caribbean) and the availability of black women—was a crucial part of the explanation, but also important were the role of the Church and cultural mores, based as much in Old World patterns of racial coexistence or segregation. The Spanish had mixed with Muslims for centuries; the English had created a Pale in their settlement of Ireland. Only in North America did the extremely arbitrary concept of "Negro"—denoting anyone with allegedly visible African ancestry—assume such a marked stigma. Third, the chances of gaining freedom varied from one society to the next. Except for the period surrounding the American Revolution, the North American colonies, and later the states, imposed the severest restrictions on the chances of a slave becoming free. Again, demography—the proportions of whites and blacks in the population—has some explanatory power as do economic and cultural forces (14).

North American slavery itself was hardly of a piece. The range encompasses New England's intimate "family slavery"; the Mid-Atlantic's mixed forms of slavery and servitude; the Chesapeake's patriarchal, small plantation, mixed farming and tobacco, heavily native-born form of slavery; and the low country's impersonal, large plantation, rice and indigo, more heavily African system of slavery. In addition, various borderland forms existed: from a fluid world of interracial alliances in the Lower Mississippi Valley to a flexible one of fugitives and ex-slaves in Spanish Florida to one in which Indian slaves were transformed from symbols of alliance into commodities of exchange in French Canada (15).

Racial slavery played an intrinsic and indispensable part in New World settlement. The institution was no abnormality, no aberration, no marginal feature; rather, its development is the grim and irrepressible theme governing the development of the Western Hemisphere. The truly distinctive features of North American (and to varying degrees, New World) slavery were its racial bedrock and its thoroughly commercial character. Increasingly, the stark polarity between freedom and bondage became glaringly evident, for the debasement of slaves liberated others to take control of their destiny and to dream of liberty and equality. This profound contradiction lay at the heart of the United States, a country conceived in freedom but based on slavery. The American dream always had its dark underside. Yet the dreamers would eventually try to rid themselves of the nightmare—with considerable prodding from the victims, it might be added. Unlike other previous forms of slavery, the New World version did not decline over a long period but came to a rather abrupt end. The age of emancipation lasted a little over one hundred years: beginning in 1776 with the first antislavery society in Philadelphia, through the monumental Haitian Revolution of 1792, and ending with Brazilian emancipation in 1888. An institution that had been accepted for thousands of years disappeared in about a century. One last watershed, therefore, is the unprecedented novelty and speed of the abolitionist moment (16).

The term "peculiar institution" became commonplace among Southerners in the nineteenth-century United States: Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956).  

Moses I. Finley, "Slavery," International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills and Robert King Merton (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 14: 307-13; Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology , reprint (Hammondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983, 1980), 9, 96, 102, 111, 113-14; Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History , vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Hopkins, "Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery," Past and Present 138 (1993): 3-27; Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 12-13, 87; Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For studies that explore the classical legacy over a long sweep of time, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), especially 29-90, and William D. Phillips Jr., Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). In addition to the sanctions for slavery that the classical literature of antiquity provided and that assumed new force during the Renaissance, the religious undergirding for slavery evident in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles ideally should be explored.  

Ralph A. Austen, "The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade: A Tentative Census," The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of Atlantic Slave Trade , ed. Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 23-76; Austen, "The Mediterranean Islamic Slave Trade out of Africa: A Tentative Census," Slavery and Abolition 13 (1992): 214-48; and his most recent, "Slave Trade: The Sahara Desert and Red Sea Region," Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara , ed. John Middleton (New York: Scribners, 1997), 4: 103; Pier Larson, "African Diasporas and the Atlantic" (unpublished paper, 2004); Ghada Hashem Talhami, "The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered," International Journal of African Historical Studies 10 (1977): 443-61; Alexandre Popovic, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the IIIrd-IXth Century , trans. Léon King (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1998); Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). For newer works on Ottoman and Islamic slavery, see Ehud R. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); Shaun E. Marmon, ed., Slavery in the Islamic Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1998); Minra Tora and John Edward Philips, eds., Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa: A Comparative Study (London: Kegan Paul International, 2000); John O. Hunwick and Eve Trout Powell, eds., The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2001); and Paul Lovejoy, ed., Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2004).  

Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977); Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa , 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).  

Charles Verlinden, "L'Origine de 'sclavus-esclave,'" Archivum latinitatis medii aevi 17 (1943): 97-128; Verlinden, L'Esclavage dans l'Europe médiévale , vol. 1, Pénisule Ibérique—France (Bruges: De Tempel, 1955); vol. 2, Italie, Colonies Italiennes du Levant, Levant Latin, Empire Bysantin (Ghent: 1977); and Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization: Eleven Essays with an Introduction , trans. Yvonne Freccero (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970). For newer work on medieval slavery, see Ruth Mazo Karras, Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988); David A. E. Pelteret, Slavery in Early Mediaeval England: From the Reign of Alfred Until the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1995); Steven Epstein, Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Sally McKee, "Inherited Status and Slavery in Late Medieval Italy and Venetian Crete," Past and Present 182 (February 2004): 31-53.  

A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441-1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 21-24, 48-86.  

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Canary Islands After the Conquest: The Making of a Colonial Society in the Early Sixteenth Century (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1982); Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), especially 1-26, 42-84, 201-236. For more on São Tomé, which requires more study, see Tony Hodges and Malyn Newitt, São Tomé and Príncipe: From Plantation Colony to Microstate (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988), and Robert Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island, 1470-1655: The Key to Guinea (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992).  

David Brion Davis, "Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives," American Historical Review 105 (April 2000): 458, and his Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 14; Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003). For more on the development of freedom and slavery, see David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).  

Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), and Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); William L. Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002); Joyce E. Chaplin, "Enslavement of Indians in Early America: Captivity Without the Narrative," The Creation of the British Atlantic World , ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 75-121. For a recent discussion of Indian population decline, see David S. Jones, "Virgin Soils Revisited," William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., 60 (October 2003): 703-42.  

David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Timothy Coates, "Convict Labor in the Early Modern Era," The Cambridge World History of Slavery , ed. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman (forthcoming); David Eltis, "The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment," William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., 58 (January 2001): 17-46. Two good microhistories of the transatlantic slave trade are Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002), and Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).  

David Eltis and William G. Clarence-Smith, "White Servitude," The Cambridge World History of Slavery , ed. Eltis and Engerman (forthcoming). For slavery compared to other forms of coerced labor, see M. L. Bush, ed., Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage (London: Longman, 1996); Stanley L. Engerman, ed., Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Bush, Servitude in Modern Times (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000).  

Frank M. Snowden Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970); Snowden, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 2, From the Early Christian Era to the "Age of Discovery" (Cambridge, Mass.: Menil Foundation, 1979); Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 133-73, 300-03; Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 170-73; Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996); the essays in "Constructing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World," William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., 54 (January 1997): 3-252; David M. Goldenburg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). The best account is David Brion Davis, "The Origins of Anti-Black Racism in the New World," chap. 3 in Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).  

Robert Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton, 1989); Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons , 3.  

Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946); Carl N. Degler, Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971).  

For some examples, see William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Daniel H. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); and Brett Rushforth, "'A Little Flesh We Offer You': The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 60 (October 2003): 777-808. To this list might be added other forms of aboriginal slavery: see Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979); William A. Starna and Ralph Watkins, "Northern Iroquoian Slavery," Ethnohistory 38 (Winter 1991): 34-57; and Leland Donald, Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).  

Slavery, however, continued in Africa until about the 1930s. There the abolitionist moment was rather prolonged, and slavery underwent what has been termed a "slowdown."

• Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 . London: Verso, 1997. Covers all the European slave systems in the Americas and connects them to the advent of modernity.
• Brooks, James F. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Reveals the importance of slavery and slave-raiding to the intercultural exchange networks that emerged in the early American Southwest.
• Carretta, Vincent, ed. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century . Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Features such black voices as Briton Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Banneker, and Venture Smith.
• Conrad, Robert Edgar, comp. Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. An excellent source book for the American slave society that received the most Africans.
• Davis, David Brion. Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. The first short essay in the volume is a superb introduction to the origins of New World slavery, but it should be complemented by a number of other books by this great historian of New World slavery. I particularly recommend his Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
• Davis, Robert C. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 . Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. A useful reminder that slavery arose and flourished in the Mediterranean world at the same time as across the Atlantic. Explores the dimensions of white slavery and slave life.
• Drescher, Seymour, and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. A Historical Guide to World Slavery . New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. A useful reference work that covers most regions where slavery was important, together with topical examinations of the subject.
• Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. A stimulating exploration of the paradox that the northern European countries most renowned for their commitment to individual freedom created the harshest systems of slavery in the New World.
• Eltis, David, et al., eds. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM . CD-ROM. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Contains information on 27,233 transatlantic slaving expeditions. An expanded, online version (with information on 35,000 voyages) should be available by 2008.
• Finkelman, Paul, and Joseph C. Miller, eds. Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery . 2 vols. New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1998. Another useful reference work that covers similar ground to the volume edited by Drescher and Engerman but is more comprehensive in nature.
• Finley, M. I. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology . Reprint. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983, 1980. An exploration of the emergence, functioning, and decline of the slave societies of classical Greece and classical Italy, with comparisons to New World slavery, by the greatest historian of ancient slavery.
• Fredrickson, George M. Racism: A Short History . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. An authoritative introduction to the subject.
• Handler, Jerome S., and Michael L. Tuite Jr. "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record." http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery . Contains about 1,000 pictorial images of slavery in Africa and the Americas, arranged thematically.
• Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877 . New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. A good general account by a historian alert to comparative history.
• Lewis, Bernard. Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry . New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. A good survey of slavery and the evolution of racial prejudice in the Islamic world.
• Miers, Suzanne, and Igor Kopytoff, eds. Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977. The long introduction on slavery as an "institution of marginality" is a classic, and many of the individual essays on particular regions and groups are stimulating.
• Miller, Joseph. C., ed. Slavery and Slaving in World History: A Bibliography, 1900-1996 . 2 vols. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. The most comprehensive work of its kind. Annual updates are available in the journal Slavery and Abolition . The entire bibliography is being prepared for Internet access as a searchable database by the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia.
• Morgan, Philip D. "African Americans." In A Companion to Colonial America , edited by Daniel Vickers. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 138-71. A concise, up-to-date survey of the black experience in early America, with an extensive bibliography.
• Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. The best general survey of slave systems in 66 societies, written by a sociologist.
• Phillips, William D. Jr. Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. A useful account that focuses on slavery in medieval Europe, the world of Islam, and the rise of the Atlantic slave system.
• Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 . 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A provocative account that emphasizes African agency in the development of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.

Philip D. Morgan is the Sydney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University. He is the author of Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and coeditor (with Sean Hawkins) of Black Experience and the Empire: The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). He would like to acknowledge in particular the assistance of David Brion Davis, who generously sent him two early chapters from his forthcoming manuscript, "Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery."

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Philip D. Morgan Princeton University Princeton, New Jersey

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Preserving American Freedom

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Gold box by Clares LeRoux, 1735, given to Alexander Hamilton, Esq., for his defense of freedom of the press in the trial of Peter Zenger. Historical Society of Pennsylvania Treasures Collection (Collection 978), X-88.

The United States of America has a reputation as a beacon of freedom and diversity from the colonial period of its history. From the beginning, however, Americans' freedoms were tied to a mixture of religious and ethnic affiliations that privileged some inhabitants of North America over others. Although European ideas of liberty set the tone for what was possible, those liberties looked somewhat different in colonial North America, where indigenous and African peoples and cultures also had some influence. The result was greater freedom for some and unprecedented slavery and dispossession for others, making colonial America a society of greater diversity—for better and for worse—than Europe.

America's indigenous traditions of immigration and freedom created the context that made European colonization possible. Since time immemorial, the original inhabitants of the Americas were accustomed to dealing with strangers. They forged alliances and exchange networks, accepted political refugees, and permitted people in need of land and protection to settle in territories that they controlled but could share. No North American society was cut off from the world or completely autonomous. Thus, there was no question about establishing ties with the newcomers arriving from Europe. Initially arriving in small numbers, bearing valuable items to trade, and offering added protection from enemies, these Europeans could, it seemed, strengthen indigenous communities. They were granted rights to use certain stretches of land, much in the way that other Native American peoples in need would have been, especially in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. However, Europeans, and all they brought with them—disease, beliefs regarding private property, ever more immigrants, and, occasionally, ruthless violence—undermined indigenous liberty. When Native Americans contested this, wars erupted—wars they could not win. Those who were able to avoid living as slaves or virtual servants of the Europeans (as some did) were driven from their homes.

Occasionally, a colonial ruler who wanted to preserve peace, like William Penn, would strive to respect the rights of indigenous Americans . However, given that both indigenous and European ideas of liberty rested on access to land and its resources , it was difficult for both Europeans and Native Americans to be free in the same territory at the same time without some sort of neutral arbiter. On the eve of the American Revolution , it seemed as if the British government might be able to play that role. After all, British Americans also looked to the monarchy to guarantee their liberties. American independence ended that option. Thereafter, America's original inhabitants had no one to mediate between them and the people who gained so much from exploiting them. Nor did the Africans brought as slaves to work what had once been their land.

For Africans, as with Native Americans, liberty was inseparable from one's family ties. Kinship (whether actual or fictive) gave an individual the rights and protection necessary to be able to live in freedom. To be captured by enemies and separated from one's kin put a person in tremendous danger. Although some captives could be adopted into other societies and treated more or less as equals, most were reduced to a condition of slavery and had little influence over their destiny. Even before they arrived in North America, Africans brought to the New World as slaves had already been separated from their home communities within Africa. Without kin, they had to forge new relationships with complete strangers—and everyone, including most fellow Africans they encountered, was a stranger—if they were to improve their lot at all. Escape was very difficult, and no community of fugitive slaves lasted for long. Unlike Native Americans, who could find a degree of freedom by moving away from the frontier, Africans had to struggle for what liberty they could from within the British society whose prosperity often depended on their forced labor .

Europeans, particularly those with wealth enough to own land or slaves, possessed the greatest freedoms in early America. The French, Spanish, and Dutch established colonies on land that would eventually become part of the United States. Each brought a distinct approach to liberty. For the French and Spanish, who came from societies where peasants still did most of the work of farming, liberty lay in the avoidance of agricultural labor. Aristocrats, who owned the land and profited from the peasants' toil, stood at the top with the most freedom. Merchants and artisans, who lived and worked in cities free of feudal obligations, came next. In North America, the French fur traders who preferred to spend their lives bartering among Native Americans rather than farming in French Canada echoed this view of freedom. Missionaries attempting to convert those same peoples could be seen as another variant of this tradition of liberty, one unknown to the Protestant British. In every colony, Europeans lived in a range of circumstances, from poor indentured servants to wealthy merchants and plantation owners.

Religion was inseparable from the experience of liberty in the European empires. The French and Spanish empires were officially Roman Catholic and did all within their power to convert or expel those who would not conform. The Dutch, on the other hand, had a different approach, befitting their condition as a small, newly independent, but economically dynamic nation. Though only Reformed Protestants enjoyed the full benefits of Dutch citizenship, they displayed an unusual openness to talented foreign immigrants, like Iberian Jews, while they relegated native-born Roman Catholics to second-class status. It was through their ties to Amsterdam, Dutch Brazil, and the Dutch Caribbean that Jews first staked a claim to live and work in North America .

The English colonies played the definitive role in early America's experience of liberty. As immigrants from Scotland, Germany, France, Scandinavia, and elsewhere became incorporated into the Anglo-American world, they staked a claim to liberty through British culture and institutions. The heritage on which the British Empire rested was complicated, however, encompassing a great deal of political conflict (two revolutions in the seventeenth century alone) and religious diversity. The British colonies in North America were home to the Puritans of New England, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, and the Roman Catholics of Maryland, as well as to Anglicans, members of the Church of England. Living in America offered an excellent chance to claim the rights and liberties of Englishmen, even when it seemed like those liberties were imperiled back in Europe. Indeed, the desire to preserve those liberties from the threat of a new British government prompted colonists to fight for independence in 1776.

Liberty in eighteenth-century Britain was associated with the national representational body of Parliament and the Protestant religion, which had been declared the official faith of England in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, a long cycle of constitutional crises, civil wars, and revolution drove home what by the eighteenth century was a commonplace ethos for many Englishmen: liberty depended on Protestantism, property ownership, and a monarchy mixed with representative government. Conversely, Catholicism and absolute monarchy, as existed in Spain and France, brought tyranny and a loss of liberty.

Liberty thus began in America with a peculiar mix of religious, ethnic, political, economic, and legal associations, all of them based on denying civil, religious, and economic liberty to others. Among the free, European-descended, Protestant colonists who enjoyed the most liberty, only men with property—who were deemed eligible to vote and hold public office—gained the full benefits. The liberties of women, children, and men without property depended on their connections to propertied men, whether as relatives, patrons, or employers. As most British colonists understood history, English liberties had been secured only after a long, hard fight, and these liberties were under constant threat—from Roman Catholics, the French, or the greed and corruption that, they thought, inevitably arose when those in government grew too powerful. Liberty, they believed, was limited. The idea that everyone could enjoy similar liberties did not cross their mind; they worried instead about the possibility that everyone in America could be a slave or servant to someone else.

In many ways, the story of American liberty is about how people of different religious and ethnic origins gradually acquired rights that had been associated only with Protestant English men of property. Despite their original association with a particular national, ethnic, and religious group, English liberties proved fairly flexible in America. Americans lived in a society with more chances to attain the ideal of liberty associated with owning property—particularly a farm of one's own—than was possible in England, where property ownership was increasingly restricted to a small elite. Colonies like Pennsylvania granted far more religious freedom than existed in England. The colonial charters granted by the British monarchy protected these liberties, and, in fact, Pennsylvania celebrated the anniversary of these constitutional freedoms guaranteed by the English crown when it the commissioned the liberty bell .

The early American belief in the limited nature of liberty helps us to understand why it was so difficult for those who had it to extend it to others. Americans lived in a world full of slavery—the ultimate opposite of freedom—an institution that had not been present in England for hundreds of years. And yet, the colonial history of America, tied very early to the promotion of slavery, convinced many colonists that the ability to hold non-European people (mostly African, but also Native American) as slaves was a fundamental English liberty. Some even returned to England with their slaves, and expected English laws to protect their property in people as they did in the colonies. Free colonists were surrounded by people—servants and slaves—who either lacked liberty or, as in the case of Native Americans, were rapidly losing it. This paradox helps explain the reluctance of colonial Americans to allow others, like more recent German immigrant s, to share the same liberties they enjoyed. In many ways, their prosperity depended on those peoples' lack of liberty and property. All could try for freedom in colonial America, but not all had equal access to it.

America's history of liberty is inseparable from its history of immigration and colonization dating back to the first Native American treaties. Unfortunately, the liberty Europeans claimed in America was accompanied by slavery and reduced liberties for many others. The possibility of liberty for some was always accompanied by a struggle for freedom for many others.

Evan Haefeli is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, where he researches and teaches on Native American history, colonial American history, and the history of religious tolerance.

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Slavery in Colonial America

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While there has been a great amount of attention on the white colonial women experience with legalities in the traditional retelling of US history, it is important to note the the experiences of women of color differ remarkably. Furthermore, even the term women of color is too broad to explain the diversity of legal treatment of women. This term is faulty as it fails to discuss if she was of African American or Native American origin and whether a woman was enslaved or indentured.

Within each group, there were other factors that could also influence their legal position such as wealth and religion. By examining primary resources, we can see the influence of law and legal practices in European settlements of North America that shaped women’s experience regardless of birthplace, race, marital status, religion, and wealth. Colonial leaders used legal codes to establish and maintain roles and women’s rights in British American colonies.

To understand this, we must realize that the rhetoric during colonial America was rooted in classical assumptions of a dichotomy between private and public spheres. Women were assumed to be part of a private realm. They were expected to only be concerned with the issue of forming a household and maintaining it for means of survival. Any challenge to this organization was perceived as a threat to the role of women in colonial America. Legal codes then were written to maintain this structure of dichotomy. Although the goal of maintaining a household was anticipated from both races, different legal codes were written for black and white women in order to distinguish the two groups of women. As the gradual change of the definition of slavery harden and became stricter, laws increased in order to separate the women. Even though indentured servitude existed for white women, and the legal systems coexisted, laws were put into place to differentiate indentured and enslaved labor. This was a way to distinguish white women and women of color.

New laws emerged in late 17th century as a result of increased slavery in colonial America. Efforts to set distinctions and boundaries on race were formed to reduce blurred lines between races. As slavery became more permanent, it was important to colonial leaders to separate white colonial women from African American women. The description of slavery saw racial stipulations increasing as slavery became a major economic resource. We see a trend of slavery beginning to be hereditary in laws of descent. Gender, according to Nancy Woloch, began to play a role in establishing slavery under the law in the 17th century. In her third chapter, we see laws attempting to discourage intermarriage in order to separate the populations. In the span of approximately thirty years, enough intermarriage influenced the effort to discourage being associated with black people. In 1962, Maryland proposed that legal status be determined by the condition of the father, whereas in 1992, any person born to a black parent was expected to be enslaved. In Virginia, laws had a greater emphasis of relationships between white women and black men. In both states, women were held more accountable for acts of interracial sex. Based on this chapter we can conclude that the laws pertaining white women were often stricter and demeaning than those concerning white men. Penalization against women who had sex with other races was met with greater criticism.

There a was also a greater degree of penalization in terms of marriage. The legal status of women depended greatly on her martial status. By examining records of marriage, we see a continuous transfer of property to men upon marriage. Women lost the right to their property unless they acted as feme sole traders. Feme sole traders had the option of partial autonomy with the condition of being responsible for any hardship. Furthermore, absolute divorce was only allowed in two states. European women had greater protection under law of colonial America. While the government remained patriarchal, white women did have the opportunity to petition against the men. Divorce settlements during colonial America, however illustrate that requirements made it difficult for women to ask for absolute divorce. In most states, only legal separation was offered to keep a positive reputation of men involved in the marriage. African American women, by contrast, often did not enjoy the opportunity of marriage recognized by the states.

The laws introduced by colonial leaders as settlements grew shaped the households of colonial America. The dichotomy of public and private spheres based of gender was encouraged by laws to maintain a patriarchal society. When examining the laws pertaining to black and white women, we see a trend of harsher laws for the women of African descent. The authority of law had great influence in the experience of women. Colonial leaders used laws to reduce anxieties that would disrupt norms of race and class. The laws established created distinctions of races to promote white supremacy. Furthermore, even within the European classification, more power and levels of authority were given to men. In the coming generations, these laws would be responsible for setting African American women as inferior.

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• DOI: 10.1111/hisn.12420
• Corpus ID: 151454311

Liberty and Slavery in Colonial America: The Case of Georgia, 1732–1770

• Andrew C. Lannen
• Published 1 March 2017
• The Historian

4 Citations

Liberty, slavery, and biography: the hidden shapes of free speech, george whitefield's preaching: an evangelical response to the enlightenment, slavery: annual bibliographical supplement (2017), there is no racial order, but a racialised order in american society: a critique of emirbayer and desmond., 16 references, the formation of a planter elite: jonathan bryan and the southern colonial frontier, 'we are against the traffik of men-body': the germantown quaker protest of 1688 and the origins of american abolitionism, letters from a farmer in pennsylvania, to the inhabitants of the british colonies, idleness ethic and the liberty of anglo-americans@@@american slavery--american freedom: the ordeal of colonial virginia., "a warm & zealous spirit" : john j. zubly and the american revolution : a selection of his writings, the short life of free georgia: class and slavery in the colonial south, on the rim of the caribbean: colonial georgia and the british atlantic world, oglethorpe in perspective: georgia's founder after two hundred years, gracia real de santa teresa de mose: a free black town in spanish colonial florida, the darien antislavery petition of 1739 and the georgia plan, related papers.

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Struggles for Freedom: Essays on Slavery, Colonialism, and Culture in the Caribbean and Central America

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Darién J. Davis; Struggles for Freedom: Essays on Slavery, Colonialism, and Culture in the Caribbean and Central America. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 February 1999; 79 (1): 110–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-79.1.110

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This important collection of essays brings together newly edited materials and previously published work by the author on the English-speaking Caribbean. Bolland, a sociologist, aims to look at the economic, political, and cultural forces that have shaped Caribbean societies from colonial times to the present day. Divided into four sections— “Colonial and Creole Societies,” “Colonization and Slavery,” “From Slavery to Freedom,” and “Class, Culture and Politics”— Struggles for Freedom is diverse in its approach and subject matter. In the introductory essay, “Creolization and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History,” Bolland makes clear that “creolization” constitutes a central dynamic of Caribbean social history, and this assertion reverberates throughout the book.

Bolland begins part 2 by looking at the colonization of Central America and the enslavement of its inhabitants, while demonstrating the economic links that existed between Central America and the Spanish-dominated Caribbean prior to 1550. He focuses on indigenous slavery and offers the generally accepted argument that the impact of African slavery in any particular region was inversely related to the availability of indigenous labor. The chapter on Belize is more specific, as it examines labor practices related to timber extraction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bolland makes clear that Belize’s creole culture evolved from the complex interaction among slaves from different cultural backgrounds, slaves and their masters, and men and women who were not primarily engaged in plantation slavery. The final essay in this second section examines changing European perceptions of Amerindians in Belize, from the early European colonizers of the time of Columbus to the British overlords of the nineteenth century. Bolland surveys the perceptions of colonizers and chroniclers during the initial phase of contact and colonization, although he pays particular attention to the ethnocentric views of the British, a legacy that persists to this day.

In part 3 Bolland questions the notion that social relations changed after the abolition of slavery. He demonstrates that in many cases slaves had opportunities to engage in wage labor while so-called “freed men and women” were often coerced. This same theme is more specifically treated in chapter 6, which examines how after abolition the British ensured continued control over land and labor in the West Indies in general and Belize in particular. This section concludes with an essay on the politics of freedom in the British West Indies. Bolland tackles the complex question of how former slaves gave meaning to their freedom by examining issues of worker autonomy after emancipation. As he shows, the answer to this question varied, and must be interpreted within the complex relationship between “dominance, resistance and accommodation” (p. 187).

In part 4, Bolland analyzes four important West Indian novelists (Victor Stafford Reid, Ralph de Boissiére, John Hearne, and George Lamming). Although his frame of analysis is not as clear as in other chapters, he does offer us a glimpse into the cultural history of the region in the preindependence era of the 1940s and 1950s. As he searches for authentic articulations of “Creole culture,” Bolland offers little in the way of a historical or nationally-specific context for understanding the novelists and their novels. Moreover, the reader is never quite sure why the author has chosen to examine these four novelists. Nonetheless, Bolland makes us understand why he believes it is Lamming who best “makes the concept of an authentic Caribbean nation possible” (p. 256).

The final essay of the book focuses on the role of ethnicity in decolonization and political struggle in two English-speaking Caribbean nations on the mainland: Belize and Guyana. Both countries have remarkably similar histories and thus make for a superb comparison. Bolland forcibly argues that party politics, which many have analyzed through the prism of ethnicity, in fact cuts across ethnic lines. Moreover, in both countries, as in the region as a whole, cultural and ethnic identities are intimately related to class formation, emerging nationalism, and state formation.

This volume is an important contribution to the literature on the English-speaking Caribbean. It is particularly helpful in placing Anglophone communities in a context that extends beyond the island-nations (although comparative material from the major island-nations of Jamaica, Barbados, or Trinidad is minimal). Bolland inevitably faced the challenge of many Caribbean scholars who must balance broad regional trends with in-depth analysis of specific nation-states. In light of this, it is remarkable that one author is able to provide so much depth and breadth to the subject. For the historian, many of the general essays may not be historically specific enough. Others will lament the lack of comparison with the Spanish, French, and Dutch Caribbean. Yet, these essays provide important themes and issues that will allow for cross-cultural comparison. This volume is well organized and conceptualized (although it does not include the index listed in the table of contents) and will be an important reference for years to come.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Slavery in The World — Slavery And Indentured Servitude In Colonial America

Slavery and Indentured Servitude in Colonial America

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Slavery In Colonial America Analysis Essay Example

• Pages: 4 (923 words)
• Published: May 3, 2017
• Type: Essay

Slavery in America is regarded as one of the darkest moment in history of this great nation. Slavery however did not start during the colonial period as slaves begun flocking to the Americas way back during the 16th century.

It is estimated that by mid 16th century, over 10,000 slaves found their way to America every year most of whom were from Africa. Slave trade was a booming business and they were bought for about 25 dollars and sold for 150 dollars to the America (Wood, p 5).Slavery is associated with inhumane treatment of the African Americans most of whom were to work in plantations and the homes of the whites while being denied the basic civil rights such as access to education, conducive working condition, voting rights, and general mistreatment. Though slavery is a wide area of study, this paper

shall focus on the slavery during the colonial times. The slave Trade: Slavery is not a new concept in human history as Africans had engaged in the practice during the earliest times.Slaves were captured during the war and later sold to Arab merchants from North Africa.

In the early 16th century, the Portuguese and Spaniards got involved in the slave trade activities at a time when they had established colonial territories in the Americas. The Portuguese took the African slaves to work in the sugar plantations in South America whereas Spaniards took them to West Indies. In the early 17th century, Netherlands, France, and England began using slaves from Africa in their colonial establishments (Andy, para 1).Slave trade was rampant on the West African coast as the European exchanged goods and especially guns t

Africans in exchange for the slaves who were then taken across the Atlantic to the West Indies.

Here the salves were exchanged at greater profits and much of the proceeds from the sales of slaves were used to buy sugar, coffee, and tobacco which were shipped to Europe. This formed the great Atlantic triangular trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas (Andy, para 2).The Atlantic slave trade is believed to have been operational from the 16th century up to the mid 19th century. It is estimated that over 10 million slaves were brought in from Africa with several other millions having perished on the way to Americas. North America is said to have received about 6% of the slave population (Andy, para 6).

Slavery in Colonial America: The British established colonies in America in the early 17th century when they first occupied Jamestown.They were later to expand their occupation to thirteen states which were divided into the New England, Middle and Southern regions with each region having specific social, economic and political characteristics. The southern colonies were known to engage in cash crop farming and thus labor requirement was in high demand. This was later to shape the slavery trend in the south (Kelly, para 7).

Slavery in colonial America is said to have begun in the first quarter of the 17th century when twenty African slaves arrived on the Dutch Man-of-War ship (Georgii, para 1).The very first slaves were regarded as indentured slaves much like the other indentured servants from different races but this was to change during the colonial times (Wood, p 2). Slavery was perpetuated by the fact that settlers who had

come to America possessed vast land and thus needed labor to economically exploit their land resource (Georgii, para 3). Slavery was however opposed in the US from the very beginning with the Mennonites in Germantown, Pennsylvania being the first group to openly denounce slavery in 1688 based on Christian values (Georgii, para 5).There is also some proof that members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were against slavery as documents during the time indicate that slavery was not encouraged (Georgii, para 6).

Due to the need for labor in the white owned farms coupled by racial overtones, settlers in Maryland during the 1660s enacted legislations that ensured perpetual slavery of the black people (Georgii, para 7). Such legislations ensured that slavery was perpetual in the Southern states to provide the much required labor force in the farms.During the 18th century, African slaves in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolina states were in great numbers. The North did not regard slavery as a necessity for their stay contrary to the south where the white settlers subsisted on slave labor (Georgii, para 7).

The slaves particularly in the south were treated in a horrible manner (Searle, para 8). Slaves were mistreated by their masters with the slave women bearing children with their masters but the status of such children being determined by that of the mother (Searle, para 9).Slaves were whipped in any case they tried to escape or they were presumed to be lazy. They were to work under strenuous conditions and some were being starved to death. The slaves were subjected to inhumane treatment and some tortured to death in an effort to impart docility in others

(Searle, para 9).

Slavery continued especially in the South until the 19th century which led to events such as the Civil War when the South wanted to break away from the North and the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century (Searle, para 11).Conclusion: Slavery is often associated with subjection of African Americans to inhumane treatment by the white settlers who were obsessed with the economic value that slavery brought to them. Slavery during its practice was horrific as the slave masters never thought of the slaves as humans. Slaves were regarded as unintelligent, ill-bred and non-believers who never deserved to live in the first place leave alone seeking freedom.

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Guest Essay

End Legal Slavery in the United States

By Andrew Ross ,  Tommaso Bardelli and Aiyuba Thomas

The writers, members of the New York University Prison Education Program Research Lab, are the authors of “Abolition Labor: The Fight to End Prison Slavery.”

Today we celebrate Juneteenth, the day when word of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the farthest outpost in America. Many people do not realize that Emancipation did not legally end slavery in the United States, however. The 13th Amendment — the culmination of centuries of resistance by enslaved people, a lifetime of abolitionist campaigning and a bloody civil war — prohibited involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

In the North, that so-called exception clause was interpreted as allowing the private contracting of forced prison labor, which was already underway, and in the ex-Confederacy it gave rise to the much more brutal system by which freed men and women were routinely arrested under false charges and then leased out to plantation owners and industrialists to work off their sentence. Some historians have described this convict leasing system as “worse than slavery,” because there was no incentive to avoid working those people to death.

Over time, courts accepted that all people who are incarcerated lose the protection against slavery or involuntary servitude. The legacy of that legal deference is a grim one. Today, a majority of the 1.2 million Americans locked up in state and federal prisons work under duress in jobs that cover the entire spectrum, from cellblock cleaning to skilled manufacturing, for wages as low as a few cents per hour or, in several states, for nothing at all. And though members of Congress denounce imported goods made with prison labor in places like China’s Xinjiang province, the offices of many government agencies in Washington and elsewhere are stocked with furniture and supplies made by prisoners in this country. In fact, federal agencies are mandated to purchase goods from federal prisons, just as state or municipal agencies, including public schools and universities, often must consider sourcing from state penitentiaries. In many states, prison-made goods are freely available on the open market and shipped overseas.

Labor that people have no meaningful right to refuse and that is enforced under conditions of total control is, unquestionably, slavery. It’s a different model from the chattel slavery over which the Civil War was fought, but by all norms of international law, it is a violation of fundamental human rights.

The nation that deigns to teach the rest of the world lessons in liberty should ban this practice on its own shores rather than integrating its products into the economy. For those who want to work while serving their sentence, we should guarantee fair pay for their labor.

The prisoner rights movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s called for raising prisoners’ hourly pay. One of the top demands during the 1971 Attica uprising was to “apply the New York State minimum wage law to all state institutions.” More radical Black nationalists saw the nation’s overcrowded penitentiaries as akin to modern slave ships and argued that even if they were to offer prevailing wages, collective bargaining and workplace protections, they would still be instruments of racial capture and control.

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