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house slaves vs field slaves - Google Search

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White Lion. In 1619, a Dutch ship, the White Lion, captured 20 enslaved Africans in a battle with a Spanish ship. They landed at Jamestown, Virginia for repairs from the battle. For food and supplies, the Dutch traded the enslaved Africans to the Colonials as indentured servants.

The Great Migration. The Great Migration (1618-1623) was a period where the population grew from 450 to 4,000. However, there was also an extremely mortality rate due to disease, malnutrition, and war with Indians. Due to the high mortality rate, the colonies were in dire need of laborers.

Indentured Servants

Indentured Servants. Indentured servants are laborers who are under a contract with their master to serve the master for a period of time. In exchange for being servants, they received shelter, food, passage across seas, and accommodations.

Indentured Servants in America. In Colonial America, indentured slaves did not only consist of Africans, but a large majority of them were Irish, Scottish, English, and Germans, who were brought over from Europe and were paying their debt for the passage over sea.

Anthony Johnson. Anthony Johnson was one of the first African Americans to have finished his services as an indentured servant and become a landowner on the Eastern Shore and slave-owner himself.

Bacon's Rebellion. Although indentured servants become free and obtained their own land, they were given land that no one wanted. This discrimination led to Bacon's rebellion. Bacon's rebellion was the first rebellion in Colonial America. The rebellion was a protest against Sir William Berkeley, governors of Virginia.

Indentured to Chattel

Gradual Change of Status. There was a gradual change in the status of African Americans from indentured servants to chattel slaves.

1640 Virginia Courts. In 1640, the Virginia courts had sentenced one of the first black indentured servants to slavery.

John Casor. In 1654, John Casor became the first legal slave in America. Anthony Johnson, previously an African indentured slave, claimed John Casor as his slave. The Northampton County rule against Casor, and declared him propter for life by Anthony Johnson.Since Africans were not English, they were not covered by the English Common Law.

Definition of a Slave (Slave Code)

Virginia 1650 - Negroes are not allowed arms and ammunition

Virginia, 1662 - A child's status, free or slave, depends on the mother's status

Virginia, 1667 - Baptism does not alter the condition to the person as to his bondage or freedom

Virginia, 1682 - All servants are not Christian at the time of purchase by some Christian

Virginia 1705 - All servants imported and brought into the country, who was not Christians in their native Country shall be account and be slaves.

Emancipation in the North

1777 Vermont. Vermont, not state at the time, was the first territory to completely abolish slavery.

1780 Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania was the first state to completely abolish slavery

1781 New York. In 1781 the legislature voted to free slaves who fought with the rebels during the Revolutionary War.

1787 Northwest Ordinance. The ordinance was passed by the Congress of the Confederation. The ordinance prohibited slavery in the region; however, northeastern states like New York and New Jersey still allowed slavery. Although owning slaves or having indentured servants was illegal, people still owned slaves and indentured servants illegally.

1808 Congress. In 1808 Congress banned the importation of slaves from Africa.

1827 New York. New York completely abolished slavery.

Abolitionist Movement

William Lloyd Garrison "Liberator". The "Liberator" was a weekly anti-slavery newspaper. Garrison published the Liberator" for thirty five years, from January 1, 1831 to January 1, 1866. Garrison stopped publishing the "Liberator" after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery throughout the United States.

Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin. The anti-slavery novel was published in 1852. The book was the best-selling novel of the 19th century. It helped fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s.

Fredrick Douglass. Fredrick Douglass was an American abolitionist. He was a strong believer in equality among different races and genders. He was inspired people to become part of the abolitionist movement through his anti-slavery lectures.

Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad.The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes for slaves to escape to the free-states in the north. Approximately 6,000 people escaped slavery via the railroad. Harriet Tubman was a big player in the Underground Railroad.

Slave Uprisings

New York Revolt 1712. The 1712 revolt was an uprising in New York City. There were twenty three African American slaves. In the revolt nine whites were shot, stabbed, or beaten to death and six were injured. Unlike the plantations in the South, New York City was a perfect place for African Americans to form a conspiracy. Slaves lived next to each other, which made it easy for them to communicate with each other. Seventy blacks were put in jail, six committed suicide, twenty seven were put on trial of which twenty one were burned to death.

Stono Rebellion 1739. An epidemic weakened the power of slaveholders, and the slaves saw it as a chance to fight back. The revolt was led by Jemmy, an Angolan slave. Jemmy and twenty African American slaves met near the Stono River and marched down the road and seized weapons and ammunition at the Stono Rive Bridge. Along the way they burned seven plantations and killed twenty whites. They also recruited more slaves on the way and their numbers were up to eighty. However, they were eventually suppressed by a mob of plantation owners and slave-holder, under the command of Lieutenant Governor, William Bull. The captured slaves were decapitated and their heads were spiked along the road.

New York Insurrection 1741. The insurrection was plotted by slaves and poor whites in New York. They set a series of fire in Lower Manhattan. They set fire on Fort George, the governor's house. They wanted to burn the city, kill the white men, and elect a new king and governor. Before the insurrectionists were burned or hanged, they named about fifty other co-conspirators. All the suspects were convicted in a show trial and many were hanged or burnt. Exactly how man is uncertain, but some of the remains might've been buried at the New York Burial grounds.

Gabriel's Rebellion 1800. A revolt that planned to attack Richmond. Two slaves betrayed the conspiracy and told their masters. The state then called for a militia and the conspiracy collapsed. Gabriel again was betrayed by a fellow conspirator for the reward on Gabriel's capture. Gabriel and his two brothers were hanged.

Louisiana Territory Slave Rebellion 1811. Charles Deslondes led five hundred slaves down the Mississippi River Road, and along the way killed two whites and burned plantations. A militia and U.S. troops confronted the rebellion. Sixty six slaves were killed in the fight and Deslonde along with twenty two slaves were captured. They were decapitated, and their heads were stacked along the river. This rebellion is considered the largest slave rebellion in the U.S.

George Boxley Rebellion 1815. George Boxley supposedly received a message from God to free the slaves. He planned on to meet at his home for the rebellion, but a slave told on her owner. The plans were crushed and Boxley escaped and helped runaway slaves in the Underground Railroad.

Nat Turner's Rebellion 1831. Turner and seventy enslaved and free blacks went from house to house, freeing slaves and killed whites. They used knives, hatchets, and axes in order to keep their rebellion quiet. Turner and his rebellion were defeated by a militia. Overall Turner's rebellion killed fifty five white men, women, and children.

Harpers Ferry 1859. John Brown led a raid on a federal armor at Harpers Ferry. He wanted to arm slaves. However, the raid failed as Brown's men either fled or were killed by the local militia. Brown himself was captured and was hanged for treason.

Bibliography

Davis, Ronald. "Slavery in America: Historical Overview." 16 April 2008 http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_overview.htm

Goodell, William. "The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice." 16 April 2008. http://www.dinsdoc.com/goodell-1-0a.htm

Jernegan, Marcus W.. "Slavery and Conversion in the American Colonies." 16 April 2008. http://dinsdoc.com/jernegan-1.htm

Mecklin, John M.. "The Evolution of the Slave Status in American Democracy." 16 April 2008. http://dinsdoc.com/mecklin-1.htm

Russell , John H.. "Colored Freedman as Slave Owners in Virginia." 16 April 2008. http://www.dinsdoc.com/russell-1.htm

Sherman, Gordon. "Emancipation and Citizenship." Yale Law Journal 28 June 2006 16 April 2008. http://www.dinsdoc.com/sherman-1.htm

"Slavery and the Making of America." PBS. 2004. Education Broadcasting Corporation. 16 Apr 2008. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/timeline/index.htm l

Wahl, Jenny. "Slavery in the United States." 16 April 2008. http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/wahl.slavery.us

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White Lion. In 1619, a Dutch ship, the White Lion, captured 20 enslaved Africans in a battle with a Spanish ship. They landed at Jamestown, Virginia for repairs from the battle. For food and supplies, the Dutch traded the enslaved Africans to the Colonials as indentured servants. The Great Migration.

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America might win in the eyes of some but in others they didn't

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Revolutionary War Interactive Battle Map and Worksheet w key

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This interactive PowerPoint lesson is centered on an interactive map that allows teachers or students to choose their own Revolutionary War Battle to explore simply by clicking. The 10 slide ppt. file contains a slide vital information for each of six major

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Slavery may be illegal in the United States, but there are still 58,000 working there in conditions that can only be described as such, according to the Global Slavery Index (GSI).

"It's true that Americans have a hard time imagining slavery that isn't like an Alabama plantation, but remember that slavery has been around since the very beginning of human history, in many many forms," said GSI co-author and professor of contemporary slavery Kevin Bales on May 8 in a Reddit AMA. "It never stopped, even when it was made illegal, in the U.S. or anywhere else."

The Global Slavery Index estimates the prevalence of slavery around the world based on more than 50,000 interviews in 53 different languages. It defines slavery as any kind of forced exploitation, including labor trafficking - seen in domestic work, agriculture, traveling sales crews, restaurant and food service, and health and beauty service - as well as sex trafficking.

Trying to measure the number of slaves in the U.S. is not easy, so any number is just a rough estimate. "We've got a real problem trying to get measurements in the U.S., mainly because of the federal system not sharing information," Bales tells Inverse.

As a result, to come up with a number, the GSI had to compare the U.S. to countries with a similar "risk profile," namely the UK.

The data that the GSI is able to use in its effort to track slavery in the U.S. tends to be from independent organizations or researchers working at more localized levels. Some of those numbers suggest an even larger problem. For instance, a study by sociologist Sheldon Zhang at San Diego State University in 2012 found that as many as 38,458 victims of labor trafficking violations were reported just in San Diego County and potentially as many as "2,472,000 trafficking victims just among unauthorized Mexican immigrants in the U.S."

Meanwhile, studies by the Urban Institute show that an underground commercial sex empire thrives in several major U.S. cities.

According to the GSI, some of the most common victims of slavery in America are homeless youth populations and "undocumented workers, migrants, and refugees." The GSI points to research done on migrant laborer populations in San Diego, California, and in North Carolina, which suggests that for many undocumented laborers, language barriers, cultural non-assimilation, and fear of deportation lead many into slavery.

In his AMA, Kevin Bales also warned against for-profit prisons as a potential form of slavery in the U.S. - though one that is not counted in GSI estimates. "[F]or-profit prisons are very much moving into the zone of State Sponsored Slavery - a distinct type that often includes enslaved prison populations - and used extensively in China," Bales wrote. So long as due process and a fair justice system remain in effect, U.S. prison populations won't ever be counted as slaves, but in places like China, long-term prison sentences are often used to bolster a growing workforce in for-profit, state-run prisons.

In terms of sheer numbers of slaves, the United States is ranked 52 out of 167 on the GSI's assessment. In relative terms, however, the U.S. is at the low-end of the scale with an estimated 0.02 percent of the population in slavery.

The U.S. is, at least, one of the leaders in government response to slavery, according to the GSI, with a rating second only to the Netherlands. The GSI applauds initiatives like President Barack Obama's Advisory Council on Human Trafficking and says they are setting the stage for continued declines in slavery.

"[S]lavery may never disappear completely, some people being as they are, but my aim is to see it become as rare as cannibalism," Bales wrote.

The GSI offers the following recommendations for the U.S. to curb slavery:

Improve the provision of appropriate housing for child trafficking victims.

Increase screening of at-risk persons for human trafficking.

Prosecute more cases of labor trafficking.

Obtain bi-partisan legislative support for the bills to address business supply chain transparency, foreign labor recruiting practices, as well as push for the child welfare system reform.

You can find more information about the Global Slavery Index and the state of slavery in many other countries on the official website.
Must Read: There Are 46 Million Slaves in the World - Here's Where They're Found

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There Are Still Thousands of Slaves in the U.S. Right Now

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Slavery may be illegal in the United States, but there are still 58,000 working there in conditions that can only be described as such, according to the Global Slavery Index (GSI).

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Slavery. It is America's open wound. It is the painful injury that a third of America lives with and the rest of the country attempts to ignore because, for them, it is an ancient scar and, well, hasn't it healed by now?

Its very name evokes emotions so strong that many Americans demand that we no longer speak of it, while others - those who live with its enduring impact - cry it aloud in hopes that America will finally have the conversation about it that it has refused to have for nearly 400 years.

Slavery's long legal existence created the American caste system that endures today, one that maintains a false white superiority and black inferiority built on an unfair education system, unfair employment system and social institutions that support this notion while appropriating black language, music and fashion.

No amount of complaint or discrimination has led to a real discussion of slavery and its aftermath - and of what is owed to a people who helped build America. The cost, some say, would be too great.

"There are two reasons that we don't talk about slavery: The first is it's a subject that makes us have to face the ugliness of our history against the beauty of American history," says Michael Simanga, adjunct professor of African-American studies at Georgia State University. "It forces us to then commit to structural changes that the country has not yet gotten ready to address, changes having to do with discriminatory practices - an unequal education system, unequal employment, unequal housing and how we teach our history without including all Americans."

Talking about slavery "would require us to embrace a completely different American narrative," he said, "and we're not ready to let go of the old one."

The unheld conversation is woven into the fabric of 1968, arguably one of the most important years in history as far as race and slavery are concerned. That is the year the British Parliament passed the Race Relations Act making it illegal to refuse housing, employment or public services to a person on the grounds of color, race, ethnic or national origins - and created a Community Relations Commission to promote "harmonious community relations."

America did neither, instead passing, over time, a series of civil rights laws that do not mention race in their titles and that black Americans still must fight to get the government to enforce.

Our rules, our policies, our attempts at equality have all been just a series of poor attempts to hide the origin of this country's poor race relations when the world knows that origin was slavery.

Why don't we talk about it? Because talking about it makes it real, makes it impossible to ignore.

There are still people in America who believe that slavery was a gift to African Americans and that two and half centuries of horror were a small price to pay to escape Africa - a continent they feel was so much worse that slaves' descendants should be honored by the capture. Because there is no education about slavery in America's public schools, there has been no discussion about what the massive residential theft did to Africa or what centuries of maltreatment did to generations of African Americans.

America is defined by continuing injustice rooted in slavery. The lack of education and conversation about it constitute a deficit that shackles our country. It makes America fertile ground for myth and revisionism that attempt to teach schoolchildren that slaves were just immigrant workers, sharecroppers who tended land in exchange for a place to live. The unmentioned rape and torture and maiming and poor nourishment and killings - and even the legally maintained ban on slaves learning to read - were all just minor inconveniences.

Every attempt to discuss some recompense for those years of horror is met, mostly, with outrage by white Americans who say, "It wasn't me."

Yes, it was.

It was America.

It was us.

The quiet beginning of the slave trade in the United States is pictured in this undated engraving. The setting is Jamestown, Va., where in 1619 the captain of a Dutch ship traded 20 Africans for food in a deal with John Rolfe and other settlers. The Africans probably had been hi-jacked from a Spanish vessel. The 20 slaves were to grow to more than 15 million Africans imported and enslaved before the trade was stopped. (Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS)

And by rights, that means it was all of us who continue to pretend that it didn't happen and do not face that something must be done to repair it, or America's problems with race will never go away.

Slavery endures in a legal system that allows black voter suppression and housing restrictions and education policies that continue to make life harder for blacks than whites in America.

Slavery endures in an injustice system that continues to jail more black men than white people for the same crimes.

And slavery will endure a little more than a year from now when we commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans' arrival in Jamestown, Va.

Those slaves' arrival in 1619, according to historical accounts, was described in a letter by John Rolfe, whom schoolchildren are taught was the husband of Pocahontas but who is rarely mentioned for his eyewitness account of the birth of the transatlantic slave trade to the United States. He wrote in a letter to Sir Edwin Sandys, treasurer of the Virginia Company of London, of the arrival of "20. and odd Negroes." These kidnapped people were purchased to be used as involuntary laborers, sold after making a voyage they didn't plan that lasted usually six to 13 weeks, chained in the bowels of ships they'd never seen.

Virginia's first Africans, according to various historical accounts and a 2006 Washington Post analysis, spoke the Bantu languages Kimbundu and Kikongo and were believed to be from the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo, regions of modern-day Angola and coastal regions of Congo. They joined 15 black men and 17 black women already "in the service" of Jamestown planters.

One of the greatest - and most often cited - deterrents to having a discussion about slavery is that slavery wasn't just America's problem. It was recognized as early as 6800 B.C., according to various research projects, when enemies of war were enslaved in Mesopotamia, or 1000, when slavery was routine in England's rural, agricultural economy, or 1444, when Portuguese traders brought slaves from West Africa to Europe.

But citing slavery's historical existence does not change America's participation in it. Massachusetts became the first British colony to legalize slavery in 1641. One hundred and 35 years later, when the country's forefathers declared independence, they did it knowing they were not declaring it for all Americans - and most did not care.

There was even widespread belief that the historic election of 2008 signaled an end to America's race relations problem, and some believed it would open the door to a national discussion of slavery - and possible reparations for it.

Henry Louis Gates, the noted Harvard historian, wrote in a 2010 New York Times opinion article that "thanks to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics - the fact that he is African American and president - Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America's racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors' unpaid labor and bondage."

But such a task was not high on Obama's gargantuan list of missions, and America would not deal with the nation's greatest shame during his tenure.

That has been the sad fact of slavery. Conversations begin and end with who was responsible - and as long as the blame game continues, no real conversations happen.

Meanwhile, slavery remains, as Jamelle Bouie and Rebecca Onion put it in a September 2015 Slate analysis, "a massive institution that shaped and defined the political economy of colonial America, and later, the United States" ... an "institution (that) left a profound legacy for the descendants of enslaved Africans, who even after emancipation were subject to almost a century of violence, disenfranchisement, and pervasive oppression, with social, economic, and cultural effects that persist to the present."

Slavery remains the subject of a conversation that only one side wants to have and the other side continues to put off, decade after decade after decade.

--
Rochelle Riley is a columnist at the Detroit Free Press and author of "The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery" (Wayne State University Press, February 2018).
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2nPHUDu

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Column: Why America can't get over slavery, its greatest shame

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Slavery. It is America's open wound. It is the painful injury that a third of America lives with and the rest of the country attempts to ignore because, for them, it is an ancient scar and, well, hasn't it healed by now?

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The History of Slavery In America (FULL)

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What Army Camp Life Was Really Like (Rev. War) 

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What Army Camp Life Was Really Like (Rev. War) 

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Long, cold winters with little clothes

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Related Entries: * Slave quarters on St. Georges Island * Butler plantation slave * Margaret Washington on Butler Island and slave life * Norrece Jones on Butler Island and slave life * Cornelia Bailey on Butler Island and slave life

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A Biography of Pierce Butler 1744-1822 < Biographies < American History From Revolution To Reconstruction and beyond

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When the Revolution broke out, Butler took up the Whig cause. He was elected to the assembly in 1778, and the next year he served as adjutant general in the South Carolina militia. While in the legislature through most of the 1780s, he took over leadership of the democratic upcountry faction in the state and refused to support his own planter group.

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Interpretation of Slave Quarter, Carter's Grove Plantation, Williamsburg

Slave life varied greatly depending on many factors.

Life on the fields meant working sunup to sundown six days a week and having food sometimes not suitable for an animal to eat. Plantation slaves lived in small shacks with a dirt floor and little or no furniture. Life on large plantations with a cruel overseer was oftentimes the worst. However, work for a small farm owner who was not doing well could mean not being fed.

The stories about cruel overseers were certainly true in some cases. The overseer was paid to get the most work out of the slaves; therefore, overseers often resorted to whatever means was necessary. Sometimes the slaves would drive the overseer off the plantation in desperation. When slaves complained that they were being unfairly treated, slaveholders would most often be very protective of their "property" and would release the overseer.

Slaves who worked inside the plantation homes often had better living and working conditions than slaves who worked in the fields.

In some cases, a driver was used rather than an overseer. The difference between the overseer and the driver was simple: drivers were slaves themselves. A driver might be convinced by a master to manage the slaves for better privileges. Drivers were usually hated by the rest of the slaves. These feelings often led to violence.

Large plantations often required some slaves to work in the plantation home. These slaves enjoyed far better circumstances. Domestic slaves lived in better quarters and received better food. They sometimes were able to travel with the owner's family. In many cases, a class system developed within the slave community. Domestic slaves did not often associate themselves with plantation slaves. They often aspired to arrange courtships for their children with other domestic slaves.

This Slave Code booklet for Washington D.C., was published in 1862, only one month before Lincoln abolished slavery in the nation's capitol. More lenient than most states' slave codes, the District's code allowed slaves to hire themselves out and live apart from their masters.

As the Peculiar Institution spread across the South, many states passed "slave codes," which outlined the rights of slaves and the acceptable treatment and rules regarding slaves. Slave codes varied from state to state, but there were many common threads. One could not do business with a slave without the prior consent of the owner. Slaves could be awarded as prizes in raffles, wagered in gambling, offered as security for loans, and transferred as gifts from one person to another.

A slave was not permitted to keep a gun. If caught carrying a gun, the slave received 39 lashes and forfeited the gun. Blacks were held incompetent as witnesses in legal cases involving whites. The education of slaves was prohibited. Anyone operating a school or teaching reading and writing to any African-American in Missouri could be punished by a fine of not less than $500 and up to six months in jail. Slaves could not assemble without a white person present. Marriages between slaves were not considered legally binding. Therefore, owners were free to split up families through sale.

Any slave found guilty of arson, rape of a white woman, or conspiracy to rebel was put to death. However, since the slave woman was chattel, a white man who raped her was guilty only of a trespass on the master's property. Rape was common on the plantation, and very few cases were ever reported.

Virginia's Slave Code of 1705
Virginia's slave code of 1705 was designed to settle the questions about the status of non-Christian servants... they were all made slaves. The law served as a model for codes in other colonies. This webpage from PBS provides a brief overview and links to related topics.

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Antebellum Slavery
What happens when an ardent abolitionist marries a member of one of the largest slaveholders in the South? A disastrous marriage - and a moving epic of slavery in the South. Read excerpts from the account, which includes physical and mental abuse as well as the story of the largest sale of human beings in the history of the United States. Links to other moving stories surrounding antebellum (before the war) slavery abound as well.

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Virginia's slave codes
If any slave resist his master ... correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction ... the master shall be free of all punishment ... as if such accident never happened. Read more about the 1705 slave code which served as a model for future laws.

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Few slaves wrote letters or diaries because they weren't allowed to read or write, but some broke the rules and wrote down their stories.
Learn More...

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Slave Life and Slave Codes [ushistory.org]

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Quaker Abolitionists

The Quakers are considered the first organized group to actively help escaped enslaved people. George Washington complained in 1786 that Quakers had attempted to "liberate" one of his enslaved workers.

In the early 1800s, Quaker abolitionist Isaac T. Hopper set up a network in Philadelphia that helped enslaved people on the run. At the same time, Quakers in North Carolina established abolitionist groups that laid the groundwork for routes and shelters for escapees.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church, established in 1816, was another proactive religious group helping fugitive enslaved people.

What Was the Underground Railroad?

The earliest mention of the Underground Railroad came in 1831 when enslaved man Tice Davids escaped from Kentucky into Ohio and his owner blamed an "underground railroad" for helping Davids to freedom.

In 1839, a Washington newspaper reported an escaped enslaved man named Jim had revealed, under torture, his plan to go north following an "underground railroad to Boston."

Vigilance Committees-created to protect escaped enslaved people from bounty hunters in New York in 1835 and Philadelphia in 1838-soon expanded their activities to guide enslaved people on the run. By the 1840s, the term Underground Railroad was part of the American vernacular.

How the Underground Railroad Worked

Most of the enslaved people helped by the Underground Railroad escaped border states such as Kentucky, Virginia and Maryland.

In the deep South, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 made capturing escaped enslaved people a lucrative business, and there were fewer hiding places for them. Fugitive enslaved people were typically on their own until they got to certain points farther north.

People known as "conductors" guided the fugitive enslaved people. Hiding places included private homes, churches and schoolhouses. These were called "stations," "safe houses," and "depots." The people operating them were called "stationmasters."

There were many well-used routes stretching west through Ohio to Indiana and Iowa. Others headed north through Pennsylvania and into New England or through Detroit on their way to Canada.

Fugitive Slave Acts

The reason many escapees headed for Canada was the Fugitive Slave Acts. The first act, passed in 1793, allowed local governments to apprehend and extradite escaped enslaved people from within the borders of free states back to their point of origin, and to punish anyone helping the fugitives. Some Northern states tried to combat this with Personal Liberty Laws, which were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1842.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was designed to strengthen the previous law, which was felt by southern states to be inadequately enforced. This update created harsher penalties and set up a system of commissioners that promoted favoritism towards owners of enslaved people and led to some formerly enslaved people being recaptured. For an escaped person, the northern states were still considered a risk.

Meanwhile, Canada offered Black people the freedom to live where they wanted, sit on juries, run for public office and more, and efforts at extradition had largely failed. Some Underground Railroad operators based themselves in Canada and worked to help the arriving fugitives settle in.

Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman was the most famous conductor for the Underground Railroad.

Born an enslaved woman named Araminta Ross, she took the name Harriet (Tubman was her married name) when, in 1849, she escaped a plantation in Maryland with two of her brothers. They returned a couple of weeks later, but Tubman left again on her own shortly after, making her way to Pennsylvania.

Tubman later returned to the plantation on several occasions to rescue family members and others. On her third trip, she tried to rescue her husband, but he had remarried and refused to leave.

Distraught, Tubman reported a vision of God, after which she joined the Underground Railroad and began guiding other escaped slaves to Maryland. Tubman regularly took groups of escapees to Canada, distrusting the United States to treat them well.

Frederick Douglass

Formerly enslaved person and famed writer Frederick Douglass hid fugitives in his home in Rochester, New York, helping 400 escapees make their way to Canada. Former fugitive Reverend Jermain Loguen, who lived in neighboring Syracuse, helped 1,500 escapees go north.

Robert Purvis, an escaped enslaved person turned Philadelphia merchant, formed the Vigilance Committee there in 1838. Former enslaved person and railroad operator Josiah Henson created the Dawn Institute in 1842 in Ontario to help escapees who made their way to Canada learn needed work skills.

New York City-based escapee Louis Napoleon's occupation as listed on his death certificate was "Underground R.R. Agent." He was a key figure guiding fugitives he found at the docks and train stations.

John Parker was a free Black man in Ohio, a foundry owner who took a rowboat across the Ohio River to help fugitives cross. He was also known to make his way into Kentucky and enter plantations to help enslaved people escape.

William Still was a prominent Philadelphia citizen who had been born to fugitive enslaved parents in New Jersey. An associate of Tubman's, Still also kept a record of his activities in the Underground Railroad and was able to keep it safely hidden until after the Civil War, when he published them, offering one of the clearest accounts of Underground Railroad activity at the time.

Who Ran the Underground Railroad?

Most Underground Railroad operators were ordinary people, farmers and business owners, as well as ministers. Some wealthy people were involved, such as Gerrit Smith, a millionaire who twice ran for president. In 1841, Smith purchased an entire family of enslaved people from Kentucky and set them free.

One of the earliest known people to help fugitive enslaved people was Levi Coffin, a Quaker from North Carolina. He started around 1813 when he was 15 years old.

Coffin said that he learned their hiding places and sought them out to help them move along. Eventually, they began to find their way to him. Coffin later moved to Indiana and then Ohio, and continued to help escaped enslaved people wherever he lived.

John Brown

Abolitionist John Brown was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, during which time he established the League of Gileadites, devoted to helping fugitive enslaved people get to Canada.

Brown would play many roles in the abolition movement, most famously leading a raid on Harper's Ferry to create an armed force to make its way into the deep south and free enslaved people by gunpoint. Brown's men were defeated, and Brown hanged for treason in 1859.

By 1837 Reverend Calvin Fairbank was helping enslaved people escape from Kentucky into Ohio. In 1844 he partnered with Vermont schoolteacher Delia Webster and was arrested for helping an escaped enslaved woman and her child. He was pardoned in 1849, but was arrested again and spent another 12 years in jail.

Charles Torrey was sent to prison for six years in Maryland for helping an enslaved family escape through Virginia. He operated out of Washington, D.C., and had previously worked as an abolitionist newspaper editor in Albany, New York.

Massachusetts sea captain Jonathan Walker was arrested in 1844 after he was caught with a boatload of escaped enslaved people that he was trying to help get north. Walker was fined and jailed for a year, and branded on his right hand the letters "SS" for Slave Stealer.

John Fairfield of Virginia rejected his slave-holding family to help rescue the left-behind families of enslaved people who made it north. Fairfield's method was to travel in the south posing as a slave trader. He broke out of jail twice. He died in 1860 in Tennessee during a rebellion.

End of the Line

The Underground Railroad ceased operations about 1863, during the Civil War. In reality, its work moved aboveground as part of the Union effort against the Confederacy.

Harriet Tubman once again played a significant part by leading intelligence operations and fulfilling a command role in Union Army operations to rescue the emancipated enslaved people.

Sources

Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad. Fergus Bordewich.
Harriet Tubman: The Road To Freedom. Catherine Clinton.
Who Really Ran the Underground Railroad? Henry Louis Gates.
The Little Known History of the Underground Railroad in New York. Smithsonian Magazine.
The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad. The New Yorker.

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Underground Railroad - Definition, Background & Leaders | HISTORY

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The Underground Railroad was a network of people, African American as well as white, offering shelter and aid to escaped enslaved people from the South. The exact dates of its existence are not known, but it operated from the late 18th century to the Civil War, at which point its efforts continued to undermine the Confederacy.

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The following excerpt is from a document which describes in great detail the financial affairs of one Mr. Pierce M. Butler, a resident of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who had had extensive interests in the South. However, Mr. Butler's financial situation had suffered during the financial panic of 1857-58. What was one of the immediate results of Mr. Butler's declining financial situation? What does this document suggest to you about slavery?

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SALE OF SLAVES
The largest sale of human chattels that has been made in Star-Spangled America for several years, took place on Wednesday and Thursday of last week, at the Race-course near the City of Savannah, Georgia. The lot consisted of four hundred and thirty-six men, women, children and infants, being that half of the negro stock remaining on the old Major Butler plantations which fell to one of the two heirs to that estate. Major Butler, dying, left a property valued at more than a million of dollars, the major part of which was invested in rice and cotton plantations, and the slaves thereon, all of which immense fortune descended to two heirs, his sons, Mr. John A. Butler, sometime deceased, and Mr. Pierce M. Butler, still living, and resident in the City of Philadelphia, in the free State of Pennsylvania.

Losses in the great crash of 1857-8, and other exigencies of business, have compelled the latter gentleman to realize on his Southern investments, that he may satisfy his pressing creditors. This necessity led to a partition of the negro stock on the Georgia plantations, between himself and the representative of the other heir, the widow of the late John A. Butler, and the negroes that were brought to the hammer last week were the property of Mr. Pierce M. Butler, of Philadelphia, and were in fact sold to pay Mr. Pierce M. Butler's debts. The creditors were represented by Gen. Cadwalader, while Mr. Butler was present in person, attended by his business agent, to attend to his own interests.

The sale had been advertised largely for many weeks, though the name of Mr. Butler was not mentioned; and as the negroes were known to be a choice lot and very desirable property, the attendance of buyers was large. The breaking up of an old family estate is so uncommon an occurrence that the affair was regarded with unusual interest throughout the South. For several days before the sale every hotel in Savannah was crowded with negro speculators from North and South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, who had been attracted hither by the prospects of making good bargains.

Nothing was heard for days, in the bar-rooms and public rooms, but talk of the great sale; criticisms of the business affairs of Mr. Butler, and speculations as to the probable prices the stock would bring. The office of Joseph Bryan, the Negro Broker, who had the management of the sale, was thronged every day by eager inquirers in search of information, and by some who were anxious to buy, but were uncertain as to whether their securities would prove acceptable. Little parties were made up from the various hotels every day to visit the Race-course, distant some three miles from the city, to look over the chattels, discuss their points, and make memoranda for guidance on the day of sale. The buyers were generally of a rough breed, slangy, profane and bearish, being for the most part from the back river and swamp plantations, where the elegancies of polite life are not, perhaps, to their fullest extent. In fact, the humanities are sadly neglected by the petty tyrants of the rice-fields that border the great Dismal Swamp, their knowledge of the luxuries of our best society comprehending only revolvers and kindred delicacies. ...

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What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation? - American Memory Timeline- Classroom Presentation | Teacher Resources - Library of Congress

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The following excerpt is from a document which describes in great detail the financial affairs of one Mr. Pierce M. Butler, a resident of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who had had extensive interests in the South. However, Mr. Butler's financial situation had suffered during the financial panic of 1857-58.

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The event wasn't just notable because of the size of the auction. In 1859 the country was on the verge of a national bloodbath, and the historic threads that weave through the story of the Weeping Time are so far-reaching and remarkable, it's perplexing that more hasn't been written or remembered about this time.

* * *

Pierce Mease Butler, the owner of the slaves who were sold, inherited his wealth from his grandfather, Major Pierce Butler, one of the largest slaveholders in the country in his time. One of the signatories of the U.S. Constitution, Major Butler was the author of the Fugitive Slave Clause and was instrumental in getting it included under Article Four of the Constitution.

When Major Butler died, most of his estate and holdings were passed on to Pierce M. Butler and his brother John, including two sprawling island plantations on the coast of south Georgia, one that produced rice and one cotton, and more than 900 slaves who worked the plantations.

Pierce M. Butler was a profligate steward of his inheritance, regularly engaging in risky speculations and accruing a considerable amount of gambling debt over the years due to his compulsive card playing. It was these two factors that necessitated the appointment of a group of trustees who, in 1856, seized control of his financial assets in an effort to return him to solvency. Over the next few years the trustees proceeded to sell off various Butler properties.

By 1859 the trustees were still unable to extricate Pierce Butler from his debts, and it was decided that the "movable property" on the Georgia plantations would be split between Pierce and his brother John, and the half of the slaves that were allotted to Pierce would be sold at auction to relieve his remaining financial obligations. A small fraction of those obligations were the quarterly payments Pierce Butler was required to pay to his then-estranged ex-wife Frances Anne Kemble as part of their divorce agreement 10 years prior.

In one of the many ironies, Fanny Kemble, as she was called, was an avowed and outspoken abolitionist and had made much of the fact during the time she was married to Pierce Butler. This difference was a constant source of contention throughout their tumultuous 15-year marriage and ultimately contributed to its dissolution. At the time they were wed in 1834, Fanny claimed she knew nothing of how the Butler wealth was acquired, but it soon became apparent after a trip to visit the plantations in 1838-39 what the true nature of the Butler inheritance was.

Fanny Kemble was a revered Shakespearean actress from London on tour when she met Butler in Philadelphia. Kemble was, by all accounts, a strong-willed and independently minded woman of her own making, tendencies Butler aimed to tame. Nevertheless, they were married two years after Butler's unremitting courtship and Kemble reestablished herself in America.

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The event wasn't just notable because of the size of the auction. In 1859 the country was on the verge of a national bloodbath, and the historic threads that weave through the story of the Weeping Time are so far-reaching and remarkable, it's perplexing that more hasn't been written or remembered about this time.

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Butler Island Plantation (Darien) - 2018 All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (with Photos) - TripAdvisor

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The Plantation is the white house on the right side of the highway. In front of it is a tall brick smokestack. There is no sign. Remember that you can't go in the house and the grounds are very limited, though you can part and walk a little ways behind the house along the river and several ponds.

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11 Facts About Modern Day Slavery - End Slavery Now

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Showing you how to join the anti-slavery movement

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404 - Page not found - Georgia Historical Society

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In March of 1857, the largest sale of human beings in the history in the United States took place at a racetrack in Savannah, Georgia. During the two days of the sale, raindrops fell unceasingly on the racetrack. It was almost as though the heavens were crying. So, too, fell teardrops from many of the 436 men, women, and children who were auctioned off during the two days. The sale would thereafter be known as "the weeping time."

The owner of the slaves, Pierce Butler, had inherited the family's Georgia plantations some twenty years earlier, along with his brother John. But Pierce had squandered away his portion of the inheritance, losing a rumored $700,000; now he was deeply in debt. Management of Pierce Butler's estate was transferred to trustees. The trustees sold off Butler's once-grand, now-neglected Philadelphia mansion for $30,000. Other Butler properties were sold as well. But it was not enough to satisfy creditors, much less to ensure that Butler would continue to live in luxury. So the trustees turned to the Georgia plantations and their "moveable" property -- their slaves.

At the time, the overall holdings of the Butler family included 900 slaves. These would be divided into two groups of 450. Half would go to the estate of John, who had since died. These slaves would remain on the plantations. The fate of the other 450 -- Pierce's half -- was more precarious. About 20 would continue to live on Butler property. The remainder, some 429 men, women, and children, were boarded onto railway cars and steamboats and brought to the Broeck racetrack, where each would be sold to the highest bidder.

There were naturally differing viewpoints regarding the auction, Pierce Butler, and the large fortune he would gain after paying his debts. Philadelphia socialite Sidney George Fisher noted in his diary, "It is highly honorable to [Butler] that he did all he could to prevent the sale, offering to make any personal sacrifice to avoid it." Of the auction, Fisher wrote:

It is a dreadful affair, however, selling these hereditary Negroes. . . . Families will not be separated, that is to say, husbands and wives, parents and young children. But brothers and sisters of mature age, parents and children of mature age, all other relations and the ties of home and long association will be violently severed. It will be a hard thing for Butler to witness and it is a monstrous thing to do. Yet it is done every day in the South. It is one among the many frightful consequences of slavery and contradicts our civilization, our Christianity, or Republicanism. Can such a system endure, is it consistent with humanity, with moral progress? These are difficult questions, and still more difficult is it to say, what can be done? The Negroes of the South must be slaves or the South will be Africanized. Slavery is better for them and for us than such a result.

Mortimer Thomson, a popular newsman of the day known affectionately as "Doesticks," wrote a lengthy, uncomplimentary article about the auction for the New York Tribune entitled "What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation." He reported how the slaves, eager to impress potential masters who they perceived as kind, would sometimes cheerfully respond to buyers "pulling their mouths open to see their teeth, pinching their limbs to find how muscular they were, walking them up and down to detect any signs of lameness, making them stoop and bend in different ways that they might be certain there was no concealed rupture or wound. . . ." And Thomson commiserated with the unfortunate slaves after the sale, stating, "On the faces of all was an expression of heavy grief; some appeared to be resigned to the hard stroke of Fortune that had torn them from their homes, and were sadly trying to make the best of it; some sat brooding moodily over their sorrows, their chins resting on their hands, their eyes staring vacantly, and their bodies rocking to and fro, with a restless motion that was never stilled. . . ."

The two-day sale netted $303,850. The highest price paid for one family -- a mother and her five grown children -- was $6,180. The highest price for one individual was $1,750. The lowest price for any one slave was $250.

Soon after the last slave was sold, the rain stopped. Champagne bottles popped in celebration. And Pierce Butler, once again wealthy, made a trip to southern Europe before returning home to Philadephia.

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In March of 1857, the largest sale of human beings in the history in the United States took place at a racetrack in Savannah, Georgia. During the two days of the sale, raindrops fell unceasingly on the racetrack. It was almost as though the heavens were crying.

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Slavery was so popular that they put flyers up every where with everything they new about the slaves that they were selling printed out

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I n early March 1859 an enormous slave action took place at the Race Course three miles outside Savannah, Georgia. Four hundred thirty-six slaves were to be put on the auction block including men, women, children and infants. Word of the sale had spread through the South for weeks, drawing potential buyers from North and South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. All of Savannah's available hotel rooms and any other lodging spaces were quickly appropriated by

the influx of visitors. In the days running up to the auction, daily excursions were made from the city to the Race Course to inspect, evaluate and determine an appropriate bid for the human merchandise on display.
The sale's magnitude was the result of the break-up of an old family estate that included two plantations. The majority of the slaves had never been sold before. Most had spent their entire lives on one of the two plantations included in the sale. The rules of the auction stipulated that the slaves would be sold as "families" - defined as a husband and wife and any offspring. However, there was no guarantee that this rule would be adhered to in all cases.

The sale gained such renown that it attracted the attention of Horace Greeley, Editor of the New York Tribune, one of America's most influential newspapers at the time. Greeley was an abolitionist and staunchly opposed to slavery. He sent a reporter to cover the auction in order to reveal to his readers the barbarity inherent in one human being's ability to own and sell another.

"The slaves remained at the race-course, some of them for more than a week and all of them for four days before the sale. They were brought in thus early that buyers who desired to inspect them might enjoy that privilege, although none of them were sold at private sale. For these preliminary days their shed was constantly visited by speculators. The negroes were examined with as little consideration as if they had been brutes indeed; the buyers pulling their mouths open to see their teeth, pinching their limbs to find how muscular they were, walking them up and down to detect any signs of lameness, making them stoop and bend in different ways that they might be certain there was no concealed rupture or wound; and in addition to all this treatment, asking them scores of questions relative to their qualifications and accomplishments. All these humiliations were submitted to without a murmur and in some instances with good-natured cheerfulness - where the slave liked the appearance of the proposed buyer, and fancied that he might prove a kind 'mas'r.'

The following curiously sad scene is the type of a score of others that were there enacted:

'Elisha,' chattel No. 5 in the catalogue, had taken a fancy to a benevolent looking middle-aged gentleman, who was inspecting the stock, and thus used his powers of persuasion to induce the benevolent man to purchase him, with his wife, boy and girl, Molly, Israel and Sevanda, chattels Nos. 6, 7 and 8. The earnestness with which the poor fellow pressed his suit, knowing, as he did, that perhaps the happiness of his whole life depended on his success, was interesting, and the arguments he used were most pathetic. He made no appeal to the feelings of the buyer; he rested no hope on his charity and kindness, but only strove to show how well worth his dollars were the bone and blood he was entreating him to buy.

'Look at me, Mas'r; am prime rice planter; sho' you won't find a better man den me; no better on de whole plantation; not a bit old yet; do mo' work den ever; do carpenter work, too, little; better buy me, Mas'r; I'se be good sarvant, Mas'r. Molly, too, my wife, Sa, fus rate rice hand; mos as good as me. Stan' out yer, Molly, and let the gen'lm'n see.'

Molly advances, with her hands crossed on her bosom, and makes a quick short curtsy, and stands mute, looking appealingly in the benevolent man's face. But Elisha talks all the faster.

'Show mas'r yer arm Molly - good arm dat mas'r - she do a heap of work mo' with dat arm yet. Let good mas'r see yer teeth Molly - see dat mas'r, teeth all reg'lar, all good - she'm young gal yet. Come out yer Israel, walk aroun' an' let the gen'lm'n see how spry you be.'

Then, pointing to the three-year-old girl who stood with her chubby hand to her mouth, holding on to her mother's dress, and uncertain what to make of the strange scene.

'Little Vardy's on'y a chile yet; make prime gal by-and-by. Better buy us mas'r, we'm fus' rate bargain" - and so on. But the benevolent gentleman found where he could drive a closer bargain, and so bought somebody else..."

"The buyers, who were present to the number of about two hundred, clustered around the platform; while the Negroes, who were not likely to be immediately wanted, gathered into sad groups in the background to watch the progress of the selling in which they were so sorrowfully interested. The wind howled outside, and through the open side of the building the driving rain came pouring in; the bar down stairs ceased for a short time its brisk trade; the buyers lit fresh cigars, got ready their catalogues and pencils, and the first lot of human chattels are led upon the stand, not by a white man, but by a sleek mulatto, himself a slave, and who seems to regard the selling of his brethren, in which he so glibly assists, as a capital joke. It had been announced that the Negroes would be sold in "families," that is to say; a man would not be parted from his wife, or a mother from a very young child. There is perhaps as much policy as humanity in this arrangement, for thereby many aged and unserviceable people are disposed of, who otherwise would not find a ready sale...

...The expression on the faces of all who stepped on the block was always the same, and told of more anguish than it is in the power of words to express. Blighted homes, crushed hopes and broken hearts was (sic) the sad story to be read in all the anxious faces. Some of them regarded the sale with perfect indifference, never making a motion save to turn from one side to the other at the word of the dapper Mr. Bryan, that all the crowd might have a fair view of their proportions, and then, when the sale was accomplished, stepping down from the block without caring to cast even a look at the buyer, who now held all their happiness in

his hands. Others, again, strained their eyes with eager glances from one buyer to another as the bidding went on, trying with earnest attention to follow the rapid voice of the auctioneer. Sometimes, two persons only would be bidding for the same chattel, all the others having resigned the contest, and then the poor creature on the block, conceiving an instantaneous preference for one of the buyers over the other, would regard the rivalry with the intensest (sic) interest, the expression of his face changing with every bid, settling into a half smile of joy if the favorite buyer persevered unto the end and secured the property, and settling down into a look of hopeless despair if the other won the victory...
The auctioneer brought up Joshua's Molly and family. He announced that Molly insisted that she was lame in her left foot, and perversely would walk lame, although, for his part, he did not believe a word of it. He had caused her to be examined by an eminent physician in Savannah, which medical light had declared that Joshua's Molly was not lame, but was only shamming. However, the gentlemen must judge for themselves and bid accordingly. So Molly was put through her paces, and compelled to trot up and down along the stage, to go up and down the steps, and to exercise her feet in various ways, but always with the same result, the left foot would be lame. She was finally sold for $695. [equivalent to approximately $15,300 in today's dollars]

Whether she really was lame or not, no one knows but herself, but it must be remembered that to a slave a lameness, or anything that decreases his market value, is a thing to be rejoiced over. A man in the prime of life, worth $1,600 [equivalent to approximately $35,200 in today's dollars] or thereabouts, can have little hope of ever being able, by any little savings of his own, to purchase his liberty. But, let him have a rupture, or lose a limb, or sustain any other injury that renders him of much less service to his owner, and reduces his value to $300 or $400, and he may hope to accumulate that sum, and eventually to purchase his liberty. Freedom without health is infinitely sweeter than health without freedom.

And so the Great Sale went on for two long days, during which time there were sold 429 men, women and children. There were 436 announced to be sold, but a few were detained on the plantations by sickness...

The total amount of the sale foots up $303,850." [equivalent to approximately $6,700,000 in today's dollars]

References:
New York Daily Tribune, March 9, 1859 reprinted in Hart, Albert B., American History Told by Contemporaries v. 4 (1928).

How To Cite This Article:
"Slave Auction, 1859", EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2005).

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I n early March 1859 an enormous slave action took place at the Race Course three miles outside Savannah, Georgia. Four hundred thirty-six slaves were to be put on the auction block including men, women, children and infants. Word of the sale had spread through the South for weeks, drawing potential buyers from North and South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana.

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"Tobacco Farm," Cuba, ca. 1850. [Album Pintoresco de la Isla de Cuba (Havana [?], 1851 [?]), plate 27]

Collar and chain to prevent escape, Brazil, 1846. [Thomas Ewbank, Life in Brazil (New York, 1856), p. 277]

Porters carrying baskets of coal, Brazil, 1853. [Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1853), vol. 7, p. 729]

Shipping Tobacco, Virginia (USA), ca. 1755. [Cartouche from A Map of the Most Inhabited Part of Virginia..., by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson (ca. 1755)]

Slave quarters on a sugar plantation, Martinique, 1826. [Alcide Dessalines d'Orbigny, Voyage pittoresque dans les deux Amériques... (Paris, 1836), facing p. 19, fig. 1]

The first Africans taken to the Americas went in small numbers, not directly from Africa, but via Spain and Portugal and the Atlantic sea islands. The development of Brazilian sugar plantations, however, created a growing demand for African slaves. Other Europeans settling their own colonies in the Caribbean and North America followed the Brazilian pattern and became slaveholders, creating profitable plantations that produced commodities for international markets.

At first, European planters used combinations of free, indentured, and enslaved labor. But for many crops-notably sugar, tobacco, and rice-they soon realized that African slave labor was most profitable and most easily and cheaply acquired. Today, the formula looks perplexing: people enslaved in Africa were shipped across the Atlantic to cultivate exotic commodities for western consumption. In each case, what had once been a luxury quickly was re-imagined as a necessity. Thus, sugar, once the preserve of the rich and the privileged, became viewed as a necessity for ordinary people in all corners of the world. But all was made possible by the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants.

Slave Colonies

Power and prosperity in the Atlantic flowed from colonial settlements, and especially from slave colonies. Barbados, for example, (home to 50,000 enslaved people by 1700) proved the point. Bridgetown was, by then, the most prosperous town in British America. A century later, 118,000 Africans in Jamaica had made that island the jewel in the British Atlantic crown. A similar pattern emerged elsewhere. In the French islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, but especially Saint-Domingue (Haiti after 1804), the number of Africans imported was astonishing-some 140,000 had been settled in the French islands by 1700, and another 450,000 enslaved Africans in other non-Spanish Caribbean islands. Half a million had been landed in Brazil. The numbers of Africans shipped to North America were smaller. By 1750 about 145,000 slaves were working in Virginia and Maryland, mainly in tobacco, and another 40,000 were transported to South Carolina for work in rice cultivation.

Only about 6 percent of all Africans shipped across the Atlantic were taken to North America. The largest numbers went to Brazil and to the Caribbean. North American enslaved populations, however, soon increased naturally, enabling North American slave owners to acquire slaves not from slave ships but from local plantations and slave traders. The newly founded United States was home to 700,000 enslaved people (one million lived and toiled in Brazil at the same time).

But wherever sugar dominated, enslaved populations tended to increase only from the importations of Africans. As planters converted more land to sugar cultivation, they sought more African laborers. Yet the higher proportion of Africans, the worse the levels of sickness and death (a clear link to the trauma of enslavement and the Middle Passage). In addition, work in the sugar fields, where men tended to outnumber women, was severely taxing and general health was worse than in other slave work.

Products and Labor

One obvious result of slave labor was the transformation of western tastes. What, for instance, could be more British than a sweet cup of tea (the tea, imported from China, sweetened with slave-grown sugar)? Tobacco quickly became the addictive habit of men everywhere, and, as snuff, it was consumed by fashionable women. Rice was used to starch clothing, indigo was a common dye, and rum became a hugely popular drink (and was the mainstay of the Royal Navy.) Coffee, cultivated on high-altitude slave plantations, became a popular drink in Europe and North America. Even the stylish furniture was fashioned from wood, especially the mahogany, felled and cut by enslaved laborers in the Caribbean and Central America.

Though plantations had long existed in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic islands, they proved their worth in the Americas. In sugar, the plantation became a regimented and brutal system, though it was less punishing than other crops. In tobacco and rice, the work of enslaved people was done by task. Whatever the work, the plantation enabled planters to make the best use of the slave labor, shifting slaves to whatever task suited their age and condition. For the enslaved, the plantation meant a lifetime's labor. From the moment they arrived at, or were born on a plantation, to the moment they died, enslaved men, women, and children were allotted to appropriate work. Even the weaker ones-the young and the old-had work to do. Theirs was a life defined by labor.

Across the Americas, slavery required more than gangs of field laborers. It also needed skilled workers-masons, carpenters, distillers, cattlemen and drovers, nurses and seamstresses. As the slave colonies developed into complex social and economic communities, slavery spilled out into most walks of life. Enslaved people were everywhere. They lived and worked in towns, they labored on the varied American frontiers (as cowboys, for example). Enslaved people worked on board the Atlantic ships, and they manned the small craft in inland waters and rivers. They toiled at the quayside, they drove the goods (and beasts) back and forth between rural properties and the nearest towns and ports. As towns developed, slave owners employed slaves-mainly women-in a host of domestic roles. Visitors were often surprised by the numbers and inescapability of slave domestics. The wealthy and fashionable even employed enslaved domestics in their town houses and rural estates in Europe.

The greatest concentrations of Africans and their children were to be found at the heart of local economic life: in the fields. There, the pace and rhythms of slave labor varied enormously, depending on the crop involved. Slave work differed between sugar, tobacco, rice, and cotton. In sugar, slaves worked intensely, throughout the six-month crop cycle. Tobacco slaves worked at tasks (often alongside freemen) as did slaves in back-breaking rice cultivation. By 1860, cotton was the dominant form of slave labor in the United States, employing 2.5 million slaves, to produce 5 million bales of cotton each year. On the eve of the Civil War, there were 4 million enslaved people in the United States.

South America

Slavery could be adapted to any number of tasks and locations, and was easily shifted from one occupation to another. It was widely used in mining in South America, for example. It managed to reassert itself in new regions of cultivation,even when under political attack (notably by the British in the early nineteenth century). The Cuban sugar industry boomed in the nineteenth century, thanks largely to the decline of British and French sugar production. Despite the supposed efforts of the British and American navies to enforce the legal abolition of the transatlantic slave trade after 1807 and 1808, respectively, upward of 20,000 Africans were landed each year in Cuba. Cuban tobacco plantations also boomed in the same period. By the mid-nineteenth century, Cuba's thriving economy was rooted in the revived slave system. All told, almost 750,000 million Africans had been shipped to the island.

Even that enormous figure pales when compared to Brazil. In the half century to 1867 more than 1.5 million African slaves were landed there, shipped overwhelmingly in Brazilian and Portuguese ships. Slaves were used in a great variety of Brazilian industries that used slavery extensively: sugar, gold mining, and later, agriculture in Amazonia. By the time the British abolished their slave trade in 1807, almost 2 million Africans had been transported to Brazil. Rio de Janeiro became and remained the major slaving port in the Atlantic system (closely followed by Liverpool).

The vastness of Brazil afforded a host of economic prospects, many of which used enslaved labor. The country's size also involved enormous internal journeys for the slaves. Those arriving from Africa (and almost a half million had undertaken the enormous sea voyage round the Cape from Mozambique) often faced huge onwards journeys. Slaves were uprooted from their homes in Pernambuco, Bahia, and Amazonia and shifted onwards, by land and water, to the new booming economies of southern Brazil. Brazilian sugar boomed in the early nineteenth century, increasing six fold in the thirty years to 1855. Coffee registered an even more staggering growth. The 125,000 tons exported in 1821-1825 had rocketed to 1.5 million tons from 1851 to 1855. That was made possible by two related factors: the huge numbers of imported African slaves and the explosive increase in coffee consumption, especially in the United States. By the mid-nineteenth century, Brazil's slaves were producing half the world's coffee. By 1900, Brazil produced five times as much coffee as the rest of the world put together.

Slavery Becomes Entrenched

The era of slavery in the Americas was also the era of rising prosperity in the west. But who made the connection between the mass consumption of these products and the labor of enslaved Africans scattered across the Americas? Did the citizens of the United States (themselves growing at a dramatic rate from mass immigrations, primarily from Europe) even consider who cultivated their coffee or their sugar? And who, when buying cheap cotton goods even thought about the cotton slaves of the U.S. South? The truth was that slave labor, and the products of slave labor had become an integral part of western life. The benefits of slavery were at their most obvious in the profits and wealth of the great planters and merchants: in the fabulous mansions in New Orleans, Charleston, or Natchez, or in the eighteenth-century British stately homes. Yet the material benefits of Atlantic slavery went deeper than that, for they had established themselves as unchallenged features of western life itself. It was to take a political upheaval in western attitudes to bring down slavery.

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Through sites and objects from across the globe, Slavery and Remembrance aims to broaden our understandings of a shared and painful past, the ways in which we collectively remember and forget, and the power of legacies to shape our present and future.

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Pre-Civil War African-American Slavery | National Expansion and Reform, 1815 - 1880 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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African Americans had been enslaved in what became the United States since early in the 17th century.

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TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE VOYAGES

Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million slaves had been shipped from Africa, and 10.7 million had arrived in the Americas. The Atlantic Slave Trade was likely the most costly in human life of all of long-distance global migrations.

The first Africans forced to work in the New World left from Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century, not from Africa. The first slave voyage direct from Africa to the Americas probably sailed in 1526.

The volume of slaves carried off from Africa reached thirty thousand per year in the 1690s and eighty-five thousand per year a century later. More than eight out of ten Africans forced into the slave trade made their journeys in the century and a half after 1700.

By 1820, nearly four Africans for every one European had crossed the Atlantic. About four out of every five females that traversed the Atlantic were from Africa.

The majority of enslaved Africans were brought to British North America between 1720 and 1780. The decade 1821 to 1830 still saw over 80,000 people a year leaving Africa in slave ships. Well over a million more - one tenth of the volume carried off in the slave trade era - followed within the next twenty years.

Africans carried to Brazil came overwhelmingly from Angola. Africans carried to North America, including the Caribbean, left from mainly West Africa.

Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were imported into the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US had a quarter of blacks in the New World.

The Middle Passage was dangerous and miserable for African slaves. The sexes were separated, kept naked, packed close together, and the men were chained for long periods. About twelve percent of those who embarked did not survive the voyage.

US SLAVERY COMPARED TO SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS

American plantations were dwarfed by those in the West Indies. In the Caribbean, slaves were held on much larger units, with many plantations holding 150 slaves or more. In the American South, in contrast, only one slaveholder held as many as a thousand slaves, and just 125 had over 250 slaves.

In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the slave death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. Rates of natural decrease ran as high as 5 percent a year. While the death rate of US slaves was about the same as that of Jamaican slaves, the fertility rate was more than 80 percent higher in the United States.

US slaves were more generations removed from Africa than those in the Caribbean. In the nineteenth century, the majority of slaves in the British Caribbean and Brazil were born in Africa. In contrast, by 1850, most US slaves were third-, fourth-, or fifth generation Americans.

Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of the sexes and the ability of the slave population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. Unlike any other slave society, the US had a high and sustained natural increase in the slave population for a more than a century and a half.

CHILDREN

There were few instances in which slave women were released from field work for extended periods during slavery. Even during the last week before childbirth, pregnant women on average picked three-quarters or more of the amount normal for women.

Infant and child mortality rates were twice as high among slave children as among southern white children. Half of all slave infants died in their first year of life. A major contributor to the high infant and child death rate was chronic undernourishment.

The average birth weight of slave infants was less than 5.5 pounds, considered severely underweight by today's standards.

Most infants of enslaved mothers were weaned within three or four months. Even in the eighteenth century, the earliest weaning age advised by doctors was eight months.

After weaning, slave infants were fed a starch-based diet, consisting of foods such as gruel, which lacked sufficient nutrients for health and growth.

HEALTH AND MORTALITY

Slaves suffered a variety of miserable and often fatal maladies due to the Atlantic Slave Trade, and to inhumane living and working conditions.

Common symptoms among enslaved populations included: blindness; abdominal swelling; bowed legs; skin lesions; and convulsions. Common conditions among enslaved populations included: beriberi (caused by a deficiency of thiamine); pellagra (caused by a niacin deficiency); tetany (caused by deficiencies of calcium, magnesium, and Vitamin D); rickets (also caused by a deficiency of Vitamin D); and kwashiorkor (caused by severe protein deficiency).

Diarrhea, dysentery, whooping cough, and respiratory diseases as well as worms pushed the infant and early childhood death rate of slaves to twice that experienced by white infants and children.

DOMESTIC SLAVE TRADE

The domestic slave trade in the US distributed the African American population throughout the South in a migration that greatly surpassed in volume the Atlantic Slave Trade to North America.

Though Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, domestic slave trade flourished, and the slave population in the US nearly tripled over the next 50 years.

The domestic trade continued into the 1860s and displaced approximately 1.2 million men, women, and children, the vast majority of whom were born in America.

To be "sold down the river" was one of the most dreaded prospects of the enslaved population. Some destinations, particularly the Louisiana sugar plantations, had especially grim reputations. But it was the destruction of family that made the domestic slave trade so terrifying.

PROFITABILITY

Prices of slaves varied widely over time, due to factors including supply, and changes in prices of commodities such as cotton. Even considering the relative expense of owning and keeping a slave, slavery was profitable.

In order to ensure the profitability of slaves, and to produce maximum "return on investment," slave owners generally supplied only the minimum food and shelter needed for survival, and forced their slaves to work from sunrise to sunset.

Although young adult men had the highest expected levels of output, young adult women had value over and above their ability to work in the fields; they were able to have children who by law were also slaves of the owner of the mother. Therefore, the average price of female slaves was higher than their male counterparts up to puberty age. Men around the age of 25-years-old were the most "valuable."

Slaveholding became more concentrated over time, particularly as slavery was abolished in the northern states. The fraction of households owning slaves fell from 36 percent in 1830 to 25 percent in 1860.

During the Civil War, roughly 180,000 black men served in the Union Army, and another 29,000 served in the Navy. Three-fifths of all black troops were former slaves.

WORKS CITED AND RESOURCES
University of Virginia, American Slave Narratives The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Emory University The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African (1789) Special thanks to Steven Mintz, University of Texas

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Historical Context: Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery

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Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million slaves had been shipped from Africa, and 10.7 million had arrived in the Americas. The Atlantic Slave Trade was likely the most costly in human life of all of long-distance global migrations.

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When Did Slavery Start in America?

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.

After the American Revolution, many colonists-particularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the agricultural economy-began to link the oppression of enslaved Africans to their own oppression by the British, and to call for slavery's abolition.

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 Revolutionary War, the new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, when it valued each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress. The Constitution's drafters also guaranteed the right to repossess any "person held to service or labor" (an obvious euphemism for slavery).

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton.

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.

Cotton Gin

In the late 18th century, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt.

Around the same time, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a young Yankee 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 itself was never widespread in the North, though many of the region's businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Between 1774 and 1804, most of the northern states abolished slavery or started the process to abolish slavery, but the institution of slavery remained vital to the South.

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 masters 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 masters raped enslaved women, 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 masters.

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

Rebellions among enslaved people did occur-notably, ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822-but few were successful.

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 around 75 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.

Supporters of slavery pointed to Turner's rebellion as evidence that Black people were inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them. And fears of similar insurrections led many southern states to further strengthen their slave codes in order to limit the education, movement and assembly of enslaved people.

Abolitionist Movement

In the North, the increased repression of southern Black people only fanned the flames of the growing abolitionist movement.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by free Black people such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published the bestselling antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

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.

Free Black people and other antislavery northerners 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 Tubmanguided 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. Althoughestimates vary widely, it may have helped anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 enslaved people reach freedom.

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 master 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.

Civil War

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.

America's First Memorial to its 4,400 Lynching Victims

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U.S. Slavery: Timeline, Figures & Abolition | HISTORY

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Slavery in America was the legal institution of enslaving human beings, mainly Africans and African Americans. Slavery existed in the United States from its founding in 1776 and became the main cause behind the country's bloody Civil War. Slavery officially ended in America with the passage of the 13th Amendment following the Civil War's end in 1865.

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Michigan has passed several laws since 2006 banning and addressing human trafficking.

May 7, 2015 - Author: Emily Proctor , Michigan State University Extension

Human trafficking, a multi-billion dollar global industry, is considered the modern day slavery. This global enterprise occurs within our towns, villages, cities, tribes and counties throughout our country. There continues to be human trafficking activity in Michigan. One possible reason includes the shared borders between Michigan and Canada, tribal nations, other states and waterways. In addition, there are several large cities and events that occur frequently that increase the opportunity for individuals to be trafficked across the borders. In order to combat trafficking of individuals some states have taken a stronger stance than others against such activity. Michigan has passed several laws banning human trafficking:

According to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center ( NHTRC ) there have been 33 human trafficking cases reported as of March 31, 2015. The majority of the victims were female adult/minor United States citizens. The Polaris Project, an anti-human trafficking non-profit advocacy organization, provides an annual national report with state specific ratings. These ratings are based on 10 specific statute rating categories: (Michigan's rating is in bold) Polaris Project - Michigan State Report: State Ratings 2014

Sex Trafficking - Included

Labor Trafficking - Included

(a) Asset forfeiture for human trafficking (b) Investigative Tools for Law Enforcement - Included

(a) Training on Human Trafficking for Law Enforcement (b) Human Trafficking Commission or Task Force - Still Needed

Lower Burden of Proof for Sex Trafficking of Minors - Included

Posting a Human Trafficking Hotline - Still Needed

Safe Harbor-Protecting Sexually Exploited Minors - Included

Victim Assistance - Still Needed

Access to Civil Damages - Still Needed

Vacating Convictions for Sex Trafficking Victims - Still Needed

In order to continue addressing this devastating criminal activity State Senator Judy K. Emmons has taken a strong stand with Michigan communities to address human trafficking at a grassroots level Senator Judy K.Emmons - Human Trafficking. In addition, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette and the State of Michigan Human Trafficking Task Force a non-profit organization, housed within the Michigan State University School of Criminal Justice are committed to assist victims, educate Michigan communities and prosecute offenders Michigan Human Trafficking Task Force. Please stay tuned for the next article regarding Human Trafficking in Tribal Nations.

To learn more about government and public policy programs offered through Michigan State University Extension, please contact me, Emily Proctor, Tribal Extension Educator with questions or comments at (231) 439-8927 or proctor8@anr.msu.edu.
Other articles in this series:
This article was published by Michigan State University Extension. For more information, visit http://www.msue.msu.edu. To have a digest of information delivered straight to your email inbox, visit http://www.msue.msu.edu/newsletters. To contact an expert in your area, visit http://expert.msue.msu.edu, or call 888-MSUE4MI (888-678-3464).

Tags: community, government, msu extension, public policy

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What are Michigan's human trafficking laws and policies?

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Michigan has passed several laws since 2006 banning and addressing human trafficking. May 7, 2015 - Author: Emily Proctor , Michigan State University Extension Human trafficking, a multi-billion dollar global industry, is considered the modern day slavery. This global enterprise occurs within our towns, villages, cities, tribes and counties throughout our country.

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American Experience
Clip: Season 25 Episode 12 | 1m 46s |

In the late 1820s there were 2 million men, women, and children living in bondage in the United States. What was the economic value of slavery to 19th century American life?

Aired: 01/08/13

Rating: NR

The full episode is no longer available for online streaming. Why?

Please continue to enjoy extra(s) from this episode. The full episode is still available for purchase through the "Buy Now" links.

Problems Playing Video? Report a Problem |

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American Experience | The Economics of Slavery | Season 25 | Episode 12

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American Experience Clip: Season 25 Episode 12 | 1m 46s | In the late 1820s there were 2 million men, women, and children living in bondage in the United States. What was the economic value of slavery to 19th century American life? Aired: 01/08/13 Rating: NR The full episode is no longer available for online streaming.

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There's an increase in human trafficking in communities across our state. Now, law enforcement is trying to get more information out to the public.

In a Facebook live on the Michigan State Police's Facebook page, Trooper Amy Belanger with the Flint Post said Michigan is ranked 10th in human trafficking across the country. However, the state is ranked No. 2 in the nation for victim recovery.

The most common age of victims is between 13 and 16 years old. Belanger said 20 percent are male victims, though she believes that number to be much higher. She said younger victims are worth more money.

Belanger said the amount of major highways running through the state, as well as its proximity to Canada and surround states make it easier to transport victims from one place to another.

Belanger stressed human trafficking is happening everywhere in Michigan.

"Trafficking can happen anywhere. This is literally happening in every county, in every city of the state," she said.

Belanger said another common misconception is trafficking involves children from other countries. She said the majority of victims are "homegrown" and in 40 percent of cases, traded by family members.

Belanger said in Genesee County, the youngest victim known to be trafficked was 4 months old. Belanger said the infant was traded by its parents.

While many people focus on kidnappings related to human trafficking, Belanger said only three percent of victims are forced into the trade and most victims are tricked. The traffickers, or pimps, use social media to build relationship with their victims online. Children are groomed for long periods of time to believe they are in a relationship and loved by the trafficker, then they're asked to meet up or runaway with their abuser.

Another tactic used by pimps is to trick young teens using a marketing campaign. They claim to be from a modeling agency, offering security and health insurance. In another Genesee County case, investigators executing a search warrant found several posters advertising a modeling agency.

The posters had photos of beautiful young women, including the victim.

If you suspect a child is a victim, you're asked to call police or the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888.
Copyright 2018 WNEM (Meredith Corporation). All rights reserved.

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What you need to know about human trafficking in Michigan

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There's an increase in human trafficking in communities across our state. Now, law enforcement is trying to get more information out to the public. In a Facebook live on the Michigan State Police's Facebook page, Trooper Amy Belanger with the Flint Post said Michigan is ranked 10th in human trafficking across the country.

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After investigating more than 300 missing children cases, officials have more information regarding the sweep and what has happened since finding 123 of those reported missing.

At least 301 missing children cases were given another look recently, encompassed in an overall human trafficking operation to identify potential victims, but a small percentage of the children found were actually suspected of having been victims of trafficking.

In their efforts, the teams began investigating cases and looking through files of children reported missing. Participating officers then started visiting locations where the children were reportedly last seen. They also spoke with friends and schools to question about the children who were being sought out.

The initial number of 123 kids that were recovered included at least 16 from a previous sweep. The search overall was to find the missing children, but its emphasis was on identifying victims of trafficking abuse.

All of the children who were recovered were interviewed by authorities. Investigators said at least three of the children showed signs that they were victims of sex trafficking or sexually victimized. Officials are still working to determine if three of the children were victims of sexual abuse.

According to the Detroit News, all of the children found were under the age of 17.

Only four of the children found were still actually missing. The others were merely still listed as missing in police computers because a guardian never confirmed they were relocated after reporting them gone.

At least 107 kids were placed back with parents or guardians.

The process revolving around returning the children to a safe environment is kept private, however. Michigan Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Bob Wheaton told The Detroit News he isn't allowed to divulge any information about the children.

The search was conducted with the support of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as well as the Michigan State Police Department. Overall, the sweep took place over the course of one day totaling eight hours.

Michigan State Police Lt. Michael Shaw said they are continuing to look for the 200 children still listed as missing.

"We get more than 1,000 runaway complaints per month," he said. "Most of those who are still missing are runaways. The investigators will continue looking for them."

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Officials clear more than 120 missing children cases after human trafficking sweep

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After investigating more than 300 missing children cases, officials have more information regarding the sweep and what has happened since finding 123 of those reported missing. At least 301 missing children cases were given another look recently, encompassed in an overall human trafficking operation to identify potential victims, but a small percentage of the children found were actually suspected of having been victims of trafficking.

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Although children may legally engage in certain forms of work, children can also be found in slavery or slavery-like situations. Some indicators of forced labor of a child include situations in which the child appears to be in the custody of a non-family member who requires the child to perform work that financially benefits someone outside the child's family and does not offer the child the option of leaving, such as forced begging.

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Official Georgia Tourism & Travel Website | Explore Georgia.org

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One of the largest plantations in the South was the Butler Island Plantation, located just south of Darien, across the Darien River on what is now US Highway 17. The story of the plantation is a fascinating one, beginning in the 1790s, when Major Pierce Butler planted the land on the Altamaha Delta, which provided perfect conditions for growing rice.