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I wonder what slaves fought off slave hunters with when they were being captured

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Black resistance against slavery | Against Slavery | Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery | PortCities Bristol

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Between 9 and 11 million enslaved Africans were bought by European traders from Africa between 1450 and 1870. They were taken across the Atlantic Ocean to work on the European-owned plantations and mines of the Americas. Hence the name the transatlantic slave trade.

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I wonder if any enslaved mother killed her children to save them from the rough life of a slave ?

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Margaret Garner Incident (1856) | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed

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Best known as the inspiration for Toni Morrison's award winning novel, Beloved , The Margaret Garner Incident of 1856 contains one of the most ground breaking fugitive slave trials of the pre- Civil War era. Margaret Garner was born into slavery on June 4, 1834 on Maplewood plantation in Boone County, Kentucky.

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I wonder what the slave owners would do if the females were pregnant?

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Most people know of slavery, but we don't know about slavery. Specifically, we don't know how dehumanizing it was to be a slave.

We might understand what it's like to be denied freedom or dignity at an intellectual level. But for many of us, we don't have a grasp on how horrible the institution was, in the day to day life of an enslaved person. Most of us don't "get" what it was about inhuman bondage that made it so inhuman.

For example: what was it like to be slave mother?

Some insights on this are given in the book [easyazon_link identifier="0674034929″ locale="US" tag="trehottop-20″]Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South[/easyazon_link], by Marie Jenkins Schwartz. The book tells the history of a somewhat esoteric subject: the need of slaveholders, and the doctors they hired, to control and manage the bodies and reproductive lives of slave women.

But while the subject is esoteric, the details of how this played out in plantation life are chilling and disturbing.

The first chapter of the book, titled "Procreation," has a gripping account of the stakes involved in the reproductive ability of slave women. I've provided some excerpts from that chapter below. Upon reading this, you will understand how lacking in humanity and dignity this peculiar institution was:
...an important aspect of slavery... has been all too often ignored: slaveholders expected to appropriate and exploit the reproductive lives of enslaved women. Control of one's body was not a fundamental right of slaves. Emboldened by law and custom to do with human chattels as they wished, (slave) owners felt entitled to intervene in even the most intimate of matters. Women's childbearing capacity became a commodity that could be traded on the open market.

During the antebellum era the expectation increased among members of the owning class that enslaved women would contribute to the economic success of the plantation not only through productive labor but also through procreation. The idea was at once both powerful and seductive and shaped the way women experienced enslavement, the way owners thought about the future of slavery, and the way doctors practiced medicine.

As of 1808, when Congress ended the nation's participation in the international slave trade... the only practical way of increasing the number of slave laborers was through new births. If enslaved mothers did not bear sufficient numbers of children to take the place of aged and dying workers, the South could not continue as a slave society.
***
Women entering their childbearing years-especially those who had proven their fertility through the birth of a baby-sold easily and for a high price. Former slave Boston Blackwell, who witnessed the sale of two women in Memphis, Tennessee, reported that a girl of fifteen who had no children sold for $800, but a breeding woman sold for $1,500.

Human reproduction was so important to the continuation of slavery that members of the South's ruling class willed their heirs the unborn children of slaves as well as living people. Anna Matilda King of Georgia assured her daughter that she would inherit not only the slave Christiann but also "her child and future children." This wish to benefit future generations of slaveholding families pressed owners to look for ways of ensuring that enslaved mothers bore plenty of children. "If it was not for my children I would not care what became of the negroes," Elizabeth Scott Neblett wrote her absent husband during the Civil War... Neblett maintained that she would gladly do without slaves to save the bother of managing them, but for her children's sake she could not let them go.
***

Southern slaveholders' perceived need for additional slaves did not play out solely as abstract political or economic rhetoric. It helped to justify the increased emphasis on the birth of children in the slave quarters. Every woman of appropriate age needed to bear children. Women who did not readily become mothers were subjected to scrutiny and possible action.

Purchases of slaves could be calculated to ensure that a planter had a sufficient number of women "of breeding age" and that each woman had a suitable sexual partner at hand. After purchasing Fanny from Virginia and Jim from Louisiana, Mississippi master Bill Gordon arranged for them to live together, which they did. Georgia slaveholder David Ferguson purchased Jacob Gilbert specifically as a husband for an enslaved woman.

Rewards for motherhood followed the birth of children. These included "extra clothing," exemption from harsh treatment, even (rarely) freedom. Lula Cottonham Walker had to work hard as a slave in Alabama, according to her later testimony, but the mother of eight children was never beaten. If the master had a sow that gave birth to a litter of pigs each year, he would not take a stick and beat it. It was the same with slaves, she offered by way of explanation.
***

Barren women were a cause of concern.

Childless women could not expect any of the rewards or concessions available to mothers. Their work regimens were similar to those of men. Mary Buford did the same work as the men on her Arkansas plantation because, according to her niece, "she wasn't no multiplying woman." The disparity between men's work and women's work could be considerable. On the Bertrand estate in Jefferson County, Arkansas, the men were expected to pick 300 pounds of cotton, women 200. Childless women could be pressed to do as much as a man.

There were other repercussions for barrenness. Young women who had not demonstrated fertility faced the possibility of separation from family... If a married couple lived together for long without having a baby, North Carolina planter Joe Fevors Cutt would force both husband and wife to choose new partners. Former slave Henry Bobbitt maintained that many marriages did not last longer than five years because if no children were born within that period, husbands and wives were expected to find other spouses.

More commonly, childless women were sold. If a woman did not "breed," in the parlance of the slaveholder, she was put on the market... "You better have them whitefolks some babies iffen you didn't wanta be sold," former Tennessee slave Alice Douglass recalled. Mary Grayson, enslaved in the Oklahoma territory, was sold twice for infertility.

The emotional pain of losing family members in this way is impossible for postslavery generations to fathom. Marriages were broken up, siblings split apart, older children separated from parents. Much of the selling occurred in states of the upper South, where there was a surplus of labor.

In the South, rhetoric surrounding barrenness took a peculiar turn. The focus was on enslaved women in general and on the reproductive history of specific women. The topic came up in everyday conversations related to the profitability of plantations, the management of labor, and the monetary worth of individual slaves.

Read More At https://jubiloemancipationcentury.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/birthing-a-slave-reproduction-and-inhumanity-during-americas-slavery-era/

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She's Breeding Age: Dehumanizing Price For Getting Pregnant During Slavery

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Most people know of slavery, but we don't know about slavery. Specifically, we don't know how dehumanizing it was to be a slave. We might understand what it's like to be denied freedom or dignity at an intellectual level. But

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I wonder if slaves ever thought about suicide

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I wonder if slaves were clothed and fed when crossing the ocean ?

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For weeks, months, sometimes as long as a year, they waited in the dungeons of the slave factories scattered along Africa's western coast. They had already made the long, difficult journey from Africa's interior -- but just barely. Out of the roughly 20 million who were taken from their homes and sold into slavery, half didn't complete the journey to the African coast, most of those dying along the way.

And the worst was yet to come.

The captives were about to embark on the infamous Middle Passage, so called because it was the middle leg of a three-part voyage -- a voyage that began and ended in Europe. The first leg of the voyage carried a cargo that often included iron, cloth, brandy, firearms, and gunpowder. Upon landing on Africa's "slave coast," the cargo was exchanged for Africans. Fully loaded with its human cargo, the ship set sail for the Americas, where the slaves were exchanged for sugar, tobacco, or some other product. The final leg brought the ship back to Europe.

The African slave boarding the ship had no idea what lay ahead. Africans who had made the Middle Passage to the plantations of the New World did not return to their homeland to tell what happened to those people who suddenly disappeared. Sometimes the captured Africans were told by the white men on the ships that they were to work in the fields. But this was difficult to believe, since, from the African's experience, tending crops took so little time and didn't require many hands. So what were they to believe? More than a few thought that the Europeans were cannibals. Olaudah Equiano, an African captured as a boy who later wrote an autobiography, recalled . . .

When I looked round the ship too and saw a large furnace of copper boiling, and a mulititude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate and quite overpowered with horrow and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. . . . I asked if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces and long hair?"

The slaves were branded with hot irons and restrained with shackles. Their "living quarters" was often a deck within the ship that had less than five feet of headroom -- and throughout a large portion of the deck, sleeping shelves cut this limited amount of headroom in half.4 Lack of standing headroom was the least of the slaves' problems, though. With 300 to 400 people packed in a tiny area5 -- an area with little ventilation and, in some cases, not even enough space to place buckets for human waste -- disease was prevalent. According to Equiano, "The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died."

Faced with the nightmarish conditions of the voyage and the unknown future that lay beyond, many Africans preferred to die. But even the choice of suicide was taken away from these persons. From the captain's point of view, his human cargo was extremely valuable and had to be kept alive and, if possible, uninjured. A slave who tried to starve him or herself was tortured. If torture didn't work, the slave was force fed with the help of a contraption called a speculum orum, which held the mouth open.

Despite the captain's desire to keep as many slaves as possible alive, Middle Passage mortality rates were high. Although it's difficult to determine how many Africans died en route to the new world, it is now believed that between ten and twenty percent of those transported lost their lives.

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Africans in America/Part 1/The Middle Passage

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For weeks, months, sometimes as long as a year, they waited in the dungeons of the slave factories scattered along Africa's western coast. They had already made the long, difficult journey from Africa's interior -- but just barely.

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I wonder if any black people sold each other as slaves?

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Did black people sell each other as slaves?

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Answer (1 of 11): Did black people sell each other as slaves? As many other answerers clearly stated, yes, black people sold each other as slaves, mainly through "middlemen". I remember learning about this in Senegal, when I attended primary school. As Oyaba Olatunji-Agyare wrote, Africans were ...

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What are the consequences of a slave killing a slave owner?

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The Counter-Revolution of 1776, American Hypocrisy & Slave Revolts!

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We were joined by historian and professor, Dr. Gerald Horne, to discuss his recent books, "The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States" and " Race to Revolution: The US and Cuba during Slavery & Jim Crow".

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I wonder if the child of a slave woman and the master were ever recognized?

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I wonder how many slaves wrote about there story.

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I ponder whether or not the first slave lived to at least thirdway through the amount of time slavery existed

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I wonder at what age children were expected to start working

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I wonder how often the slaves were fed?

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I wonder how the slaves survived in that ship and how they went when they needed to go?

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I wonder why they chose certain people to become there slaves?

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I wonder what they did to the kids who tried to escape from their owners?

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According to Walter Hawkins slaves constantly talked about the possibility of escape: "There arose in some an irrepressible desire for freedom which no danger or power could restrain, no hardship deterred, and no bloodhound could alarm. This desire haunted them night and day; they talked about it to each other in confidence; they knew that the system which bound them was as unjust as it was cruel, and that they ought to strive, as a duty to themselves and their children, to escape from it".

Harriet Jacobs was a slave in Edenton, North Carolina. In her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she described what happened to her brother Benjamin, when he was caught trying to escape from the plantation: "That day seems but as yesterday, so well do I remember it. I saw him led through the streets in chains, to jail. His face was ghastly pale, yet full of determination. He had begged one of the sailors to go to his mother's house and ask her not to meet him. He said the sight of her distress would take from him all self-control. She yearned to see him, and she went; but she screened herself in the crowd, that it might be as her child had said."

Sometimes slaves ran away because they feared punishment for breaking one of the master's rules. Henry Clay Bruce, a slave in Virginia, explained in his book, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave (1895): "During the summer, in Virginia and other southern states, slaves when threatened or after punishment would escape to the woods or some other hiding place. They were then called runaways, or runaway Negroes, and when not caught would stay away from home until driven back by cold weather. Usually they would go to some other part of the state, where they were not so well known, and a few who had the moral courage would make their way to the North, and thus gain their freedom. But such cases were rare. Some, if captured and not wishing to go back to their masters, would neither give their correct name nor that of their owner; and in such cases, if the master had not seen the notice of sale posted by the officers of the county wherein they were captured, and which usually gave the runaway's personal description, they were sold to the highest bidders, and their masters lost them and the county in which the capture was effected got the proceeds, less the expense of capture. A runaway often chose that course in order to get out of the hands of a hard master, thinking that he could not do worse in any event, while he might fall into the hands of a better master. Often they were bought by Negro traders for the cotton fields of the South."

Runaways also knew that successful escapes were rare. Slaveowners used bloodhounds to trace their slaves. Problems of finding food and shelter in a hostile environment and the absence of maps were also other factors in understanding why most slaves failed in their bids for freedom. Moses Grandy explained the problems that runaways faced: "They hide themselves during the day in the woods and swamps; at night they travel, crossing rivers by swimming, or by boats they may chance to meet with, and passing over hills and meadows which they do not know; in these dangerous journeys they are guided by the north-star, for they only know that the land of freedom is in the north. They subsist on such wild fruit as they can gather, and as they are often very long on their way, they reach the free states almost like skeletons."

Solomon Northup was badly treated by his master and decided to runaway back to his former owner, William Ford: "Presently, looking up the bayou, I saw Tibeats and two others on horse-back, coming at a fast gait, followed by a troop of dogs. There were as many as eight or ten. Distant as I was, I knew them. They belonged on the adjoining plantation. The dogs used on Bayou Boeuf for hunting slaves are a kind of blood-hound, but a far more savage breed than is found in the Northern States. They will attack a negro, at their master's bidding, and cling to him as the common bull-dog will cling to a four footed animal. Frequently their loud bay is heard in the swamps, and then there is speculation as to what point the runaway will be overhauled - the same as a New York hunter stops to listen to the hounds coursing along the hillsides, and suggests to his companion that the fox will be taken at such a place. I never knew a slave escaping with his life from Bayou Bouef. One reason is, they are not allowed to learn the art of swimming, and are incapable of crossing the most inconsiderable stream. In their flight they can go in no direction but a little way without coming to a bayou, when the inevitable alternative is presented, of being drowned or overtaken by the dogs. In youth I had practiced in the clear streams that flow through my native district, until I had become an expert swimmer, and felt at home in the watery element."

Within a few days of leaving the plantation most runaways were brought back and heavily punished. Francis Fredric was free for nine weeks but was captured and received 107 strokes of the whip. Moses Roper, received 200 lashes and this was only brought to an end when the master's wife pleaded for his life to be spared.

A study of runaway notices of local newspapers revealed that 76 per cent of all fugitives were under 35, and 89 per cent of them were men. Another study suggested that field slaves were more likely to try and escape than house slaves. This is probably because house slaves were often better treated. This is probably because house slaves were often better treated. In some cases the slaves were treated like the slave-owners children. When this happened close bonds of affection and friendship usually developed. Trusted house slaves who had provided good service over a long period of time were sometimes promised their freedom when their master's died. However, there are many cases where this promise was not kept.

In 1834 Harriet Jacobs became a runaway. Her master, Dr. Norcom published an advert in the local newspaper: "Ran away from the subscriber, an intelligent, bright, mulatto girl, 21 years age. Five feet four inches high. Dark eyes, and black hair inclined to curl; but it can be made straight. Has a decayed spot on a front tooth. She can read and write, and in all probability will try to get to the Free States. All persons are forbidden, under penalty of the law, to harbor or employ said slave. $150 will be given to whoever takes her in the state, and $300 if taken out of the state and delivered to me, or lodged in jail."

Henry Bibb, a slave from Shelby County, Kentucky managed to escape in 1837. "One of the most self-denying acts of my whole life was to take leave of my affectionate wife, who stood before me on my departure, with dear little Frances in her arms, and with tears of sorrow in her eyes as she bid me a long farewell. It required all the moral courage that I was master of to suppress my feelings while taking leave of my little family."

The most famous case of a successful runaway was Henry Box Brown, with the help of Samuel Smith, a store-keeper in Richmond, he decided to try and escape. The two men devised a plan where the slave would be shipped to a free state by Adams Express Company. Brown paid $86 to Smith, who contacted the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, who agreed to receive the box. Smith sent the box to Philadelphia on 23rd March, 1849. According to one account "Brown's box traveled by wagon, railroad, steamboat, wagon again, railroad, ferry, railroad, and finally delivery wagon. Several times during the 27-hour journey, carriers placed the box upside-down or handled it roughly, but Brown was able to remain still enough to avoid detection." The box containing Brown was received by William Still and James Miller McKim.

The development of the underground railroad increased the number of slaves who were able to reach safety. By the middle of the 19th century it was estimated that over 50,000 slaves had escaped from the South using this method. Plantation owners became so concerned by these losses that in 1850 they managed to persuade Congress to pass the Fugitive Slave Act. In future, any federal marshal who did not arrest an alleged runaway slave could be fined $1,000. Any person aiding a runaway slave by providing shelter, food or any other form of assistance was liable to six months' imprisonment and a $1,000 fine.

I saddled my pony, went into the cellar where I kept my grass seed apparatus, put my clothes into a pair of saddlebags, and them into my seed-bag, and thus equipped set sail for the North Star. What a day was that to me. This was on Saturday, in August, 1841. I wore my common clothes, and was very careful to avoid special suspicion, as I already imagined the administrator was very watchful of me. The place from which I started was about fifty miles from Lexington. The reason why I do not give the name of the place, and a more accurate location, must be obvious to any one who remembers that in the eye of the law I am yet accounted a slave, and no spot in the United States affords an asylum for the wanderer. True, I feel protected in the hearts of the many warm friends of the slave by whom I am surrounded, but this protection does not come from the laws of any one of the United States.

Monday morning, bright and early, I set my face in good earnest toward the Ohio River, determined to see and tread the north bank of it, or die in the attempt. I said to myself, one of two things, freedom or death. The first night I reached Mayslick, fifty odd miles from Lexington. Just before reaching this village, I stopped to think over my situation, and determine how I would pass that night. On that night hung all my hopes. I was within twenty miles of Ohio. My horse was unable to reach the river that night. And besides, to travel and attempt to cross the river in the night, would excite suspicion. I must spend the night there. But how? At one time, I thought, I will take my pony out into the field ,and give him some corn, and sleep myself on the grass. But then the dogs will be out in the evening, and if caught under such circumstances, they will take me for a thief if not for a runaway. That will not do. So after weighing the matter all over, I made a plunge right into the heart of the village, and put up at the tavern.

After seeing my pony disposed of, I looked into the barroom, and saw some persons that I thought were from my part of the country, and would know me. I shrunk back with horror. What to do I did not know. I looked across the street, and saw the shop of a silversmith. A thought of a pair of spectacles, to hide my face, struck me. I went across the way, and began to barter for a pair of double eyed green spectacles. When I got them on, they blind-folded me, if they did not others. Every thing seemed right up in my eyes. I hobbled back to the tavern, and called for supper. This I did to avoid notice, for I felt like any thing but eating. At tea I had not learned to measure distances with my new eyes, and the first pass I made with my knife and fork at my plate, went right into my cup. This confused me still more, and, after drinking one cup of tea, I left the table, and got off to bed as soon as possible. But not a wink of sleep that night. All was confusion, dreams, anxiety and trembling.

I was well acquainted with a store-keeper in the city of Richmond, from whom I used to purchase my provisions; and having formed a favourable opinion of his integrity, one day in the course of a little conversation with him, I said to him if I were free I would be able to do business such as he was doing; he then told me that my occupation (a tobacconist) was a money-making one, and if I were free I had no need to change for another. I then told him my circumstances in regard to my master, having to pay him 25 dollars per month, and yet that he refused to assist me in saving my wife from being sold and taken away to the South, where I should never see her again. I told him this took place about five months ago, and I had been meditating my escape from slavery since, and asked him, as no person was near us, if he could give me any information about how I should proceed. I told him I had a little money and if he would assist me I would pay him for so doing.

The man asked me if I was not afraid to speak that way to him; I said no, for I imagined he believed that every man had a right to liberty. He said I was quite right, and asked me how much money I would give him if he would assist me to get away. I told him that I had $I66 and that I would give him the half; so we ultimately agreed that I should have his service in the attempt for $86. Now I only wanted to fix upon a plan. He told me of several plans by which others had managed to effect their escape, but none of them exactly suited my taste.

One day, while I was at work when the idea suddenly flashed across my mind of shutting myself up in a box, and getting myself conveyed as dry goods to a free state.

The first thing I heard after that, was some person saying, "there is no room for the box, it will have to remain and be sent through to-morrow with the luggage train; but the Lord had not quite forsaken me, for in answer to my earnest prayer He so ordered affairs that I should not be left behind; and I now heard a man say that the box had come with the express, and it must be sent on. I was then tumbled into the car with my head downwards again, but the car had not proceeded far before, more luggage having to be taken in, my box got shifted about and so happened to turn upon its right side; and in this position I remained till I got to Philadelphia, of our arrival in which place I was informed by hearing some person say, "We are in port and at Philadelphia." My heart then leaped for joy, and I wondered if any person knew that such a box was there.

Here it may be proper to observe that the man who had promised to accompany my box failed to do what he promised; but, to prevent it remaining long at the station after its arrival, he sent a telegraphic message to his friend, and I was only twenty seven hours in the box, though travelling a distance of three hundred and fifty miles.

I was now placed in the depôt amongst the other luggage, where I lay till seven o'clock at which time a waggon drove up, and I heard a person inquire for such a box as that in which I was. I was then placed on a waggon and conveyed to the house where my friend in Richmond had arranged I should be received.

A number of persons soon collected round the box after it was taken in to the house, but as I did not know what was going on I kept myself quiet. I heard a man say, "let us rap upon the box and see if he is alive" and immediately a rap ensued and a voice said, tremblingly, "Is all right within?" to which I replied - "all right." The joy of the friends was very great; when they heard that I was alive they soon managed to break open the box, and then came my resurrection from the grave of slavery. I rose a freeman, but I was too weak, by reason of long confinement in that box, to be able to stand, so I immediately swooned away. After my recovery from the swoon the first thing, which arrested my attention, was the presence of a number of friends, every one seeming more anxious than another, to have an opportunity of rendering me their assistance, and of bidding me a hearty welcome to the possession of my natural rights, I had risen as it were from the dead.

I am glad to say also, that numbers of my coloured brethren now escape from slavery; some by purchasing their freedom, others by quitting, through many dangers and hardships, the land of bondage. The latter suffer many privations in their attempts to reach the free states. They hide themselves during the day in the woods and swamps; at night they travel, crossing rivers by swimming, or by boats they may chance to meet with, and passing over hills and meadows which they do not know; in these dangerous journeys they are guided by the north-star, for they only know that the land of freedom is in the north. They subsist on such wild fruit as they can gather, and as they are often very long on their way, they reach the free states almost like skeletons. On their arrival, they have no friends but such as pity those who have been in bondage, the number of which, I am happy to say, is increasing; but if they can meet with a man in a broad-brimmed hat and Quaker coat, they speak to him without fear-relying on him as a friend. At each place the escaped slave inquires for an abolitionist or a Quaker, and these friends of the coloured man help them on their journey northwards, until they are out of the reach of danger.

I had been flogged for going to a prayer-meeting, and, before my back was well, my master was going to whip me again. I determined, therefore, to run away. It was in the morning, just after my master had got his breakfast, I was ordered to the back of the premises to strip. My master had got the thong of raw cow's-hide; when off I ran, towards the swamp.

He saw me running, and instantly called three bloodhounds, kept for the purpose, and put them on my track. I saw them coming up to me, when, turning round to them, I clapped my hands, and called them by name; for I had been in the habit of feeding them. I urged them on, as if in pursuit of something else. They instantly passed me, and flew upon the cattle. I saw my master calling them off, and returning. No doubt, he perceived it was useless to pursue me, with dogs which knew me so well.

I now hurried on further, into a dismal swamp, named the Bear's Wallow; and, at last, wearied and exhausted, I sat down at the foot of a tree, to rest, and think what had best be done. I knelt down, and prayed earnestly to the Almighty, to protect and direct me what to do. I rose from my knees, and looked stealthily around, afraid that the dogs and men were still in pursuit. I listened, and listened again, to the slightest sound, made by the flapping of the wings of a bird, or the rustling of the wild animals among the underwood; and then proceeded further into the swamp. My path was interrupted, every now and then, by large sheets of stagnant, putrid, green-looking water, from which a most sickening, fetid smell arose; the birds, in their flight, turning away from it. The snakes crawled sluggishly across the ground, for it was autumn time, when, it is said, they are surcharged with their deadly poison.

When awake in the morning, I tried to plan out some way of escape, over the Ohio River, which I knew was about thirty miles from where I was. But I could not swim; and I was well aware that my master would set a watch upon every ferry or ford, and that the whole country would be put on the alert, to catch me; for the planters, for self-protection, take almost as much interest in capturing another man's slaves, as they do their own.

At length, driven by hunger and desperation, I approached the edge of the swamp; when I was startled by seeing a young woman ploughing. I knew her, and called her by name. She was frightened, and shocked at my appearance - worn, from hunger, almost to a skeleton; and haggard, from the want of sound sleep. I begged of her to go to get me something to eat. She, at first, expressed her fears, and began to tell me of the efforts which my master was making to capture me. He had offered $500 reward - had placed a watch all along the Ohio River - had informed all the neighbouring planters, who had cautioned all their slaves not to give me any food or other assistance, and he had made it known, that, when I should be caught, he would give me a thousand lashes.

The woman went, and fetched me about two ounces of bread, of which I eat a small portion, wishing to keep the rest to eat in the swamp, husbanding it, as much as possible. When she told me that I should receive a thousand lashes, I felt horrified, and wept bitterly. The girl wept also. I had seen a slave, who had escaped to the Northern States, and, after an absence of four years, had been brought back again, and flogged, in the presence of all the slaves, assembled from the neighbouring plantations. His body was frightfully lacerated. I went to see him, two or three weeks after the flogging. When they were anointing his back, his screams were awful. He died, soon afterwards--a tall, fine young fellow, six feet high, in the prime of life, thus brutally murdered.

Mr. Gooch then obtained the assistance of another slave-holder, and tied me up in his blacksmith's shop, and gave me fifty lashes with a cow-hide. He then put a long chain, weighing twenty-five pounds, round my neck, and sent me into a field, into which he followed me with the cow-hide, intending to set his slaves to flog me again.

He then chained me down in a log-pen with a 40 lb. chain, and made me lie on the damp earth all night. In the morning after his breakfast he came to me, and without giving me any breakfast, tied me to a large heavy barrow, which is usually drawn by a horse, and made me drag it to the cotton field for the horse to use in the field. Thus, the reader will see, that it was of no possible use to my master to make me drag it to the field, and not through it; his cruelty went so far as actually to make me the slave of his horse, and thus to degrade me.

Mr. Gooch had a female slave about eighteen years old, who also had been a domestic slave, and through not being able to fulfill her task, had run away; which slave he was at this time punishing for that offence. On the third day, he chained me to this female slave, with a large chain of 40 lbs. weight round the neck. It was most harrowing to my feelings thus to be chained to a young female slave, for whom I would rather have suffered a hundred lashes than she should have been thus treated. He kept me chained to her during the week, and repeatedly flogged us both while thus chained together, and forced us to keep up with the other slaves, although retarded by the heavy weight of the log-chain.

In about three-fourths of an hour several of the slaves shouted and made signs for me to run. Presently, looking up the bayou, I saw Tibeats and two others on horse-back, coming at a fast gait, followed by a troop of dogs. There were as many as eight or ten. Distant as I was, I knew them. They belonged on the adjoining plantation. The dogs used on Bayou Boeuf for hunting slaves are a kind of blood-hound, but a far more savage breed than is found in the Northern States. They will attack a negro, at their master's bidding, and cling to him as the common bull-dog will cling to a four footed animal. Frequently their loud bay is heard in the swamps, and then there is speculation as to what point the runaway will be overhauled - the same as a New York hunter stops to listen to the hounds coursing along the hillsides, and suggests to his companion that the fox will be taken at such a place. I never knew a slave escaping with his life from Bayou Bouef. One reason is, they are not allowed to learn the art of swimming, and are incapable of crossing the most inconsiderable stream. In their flight they can go in no direction but a little way without coming to a bayou, when the inevitable alternative is presented, of being drowned or overtaken by the dogs. In youth I had practiced in the clear streams that flow through my native district, until I had become an expert swimmer, and felt at home in the watery element.

I stood upon the fence until the dogs had reached the cotton press. In an instant more, their long, savage yells announced they were on my track. Leaping down from my position, I ran towards the swamp. Fear gave me strength, and I exerted it to the utmost. Every few moments I could hear the yelpings of the dogs. They were gaining upon me. Every howl was nearer and nearer. Each moment I expected they would spring upon my back-expected to feel their long teeth sinking into my flesh. There were so many of them, I knew they would tear me to pieces, that they would worry me, at once, to death. I gasped for breath - gasped forth a half-uttered, choking prayer to the Almighty to save me - to give me strength to reach some wide, deep bayou where I could throw them off the track, or sink into its waters. Presently I reached a thick palmetto bottom. As I fled through them they made a loud rustling noise, not loud enough, however, to drown the voices of the dogs.

Continuing my course due south, as nearly as I can judge, I came at length to water just over shoe. The hounds at that moment could not have been five rods behind me. I could hear them crashing and plunging through the palmettoes, their loud, eager yells making the whole swamp clamorous with the sound. Hope revived a little as I reached the water. If it were only deeper, they might loose the scent, and thus disconcerted, afford me the opportunity of evading them. Luckily, it grew deeper the farther I proceeded - now over my ankles - now half-way to my knees - now sinking a moment to my waist, and then emerging presently into more shallow places. The dogs had not gained upon me since I struck the water. Evidently they were confused. Now their savage intonations grew more and more distant, assuring me that I was leaving them. Finally I stopped to listen, but the long howl came booming on the air again, telling me I was not yet safe. From bog to bog, where I had stepped, they could still keep upon the track, though impeded by the water. At length, to my great joy, I came to a wide bayou, and plunging in, had soon stemmed its sluggish current to the other side. There, certainly, the dogs would be confounded - the current carrying down the stream all traces of that slight, mysterious scent, which enables the quick-smelling hound to follow in the track of the fugitive.

After crossing this bayou the water became so deep I could not run. I was now in what I afterwards learned was the "Great Pacoudrie Swamp." It was filled with immense trees - the sycamore, the gum, the cotton wood and cypress, and extends, I am informed, to the shore of the Calcasieu river. For thirty or forty miles it is without inhabitants, save wild beasts - the bear, the wild-cat, the tiger, and great slimy reptiles, that are crawling through it everywhere. Long before I reached the bayou, in fact, from the time I struck the water until I emerged from the swamp on my return, these reptiles surrounded me. I saw hundreds of moccasin snakes. Every log and bog - every trunk of a fallen tree, over which I was compelled to step or climb, was alive with them. They crawled away at my approach, but sometimes in my haste, I almost placed my hand or foot upon them. They are poisonous serpents - their bite more fatal than the rattlesnake's. Besides, I had lost one shoe, the sole having come entirely off, leaving the upper only dangling to my ankle.

I saw also many alligators, great and small, lying in the water, or on pieces of floodwood. The noise I made usually startled them, when they moved off and plunged into the deepest places. Sometimes, however, I would come directly upon a monster before observing it. In such cases, I would start back, run a short way round, and in that manner shun them. Straight forward, they will run a short distance rapidly, but do not possess the power of turning. In a crooked race, there is no difficulty in evading them.

About two o'clock in the afternoon, I heard the last of the hounds. Probably they did not cross the bayou. Wet and weary, but relieved from the sense of instant peril, I continued on, more cautious and afraid, however, of the snakes and alligators than I had been in the earlier portion of my flight. Now, before stepping into a muddy pool, I would strike the water with a stick. If the waters moved, I would go around it, if not, would venture through.

At length the sun went down, and gradually night's trailing mantle shrouded the great swamp in darkness. Still I staggered on, fearing every instant I should feel the dreadful sting of the moccasin, or be crushed within the jaws of some disturbed alligator. The dread of them now almost equaled the fear of the pursuing hounds. The moon arose after a time, its mild light creeping through the overspreading branches, loaded with long, pendent moss. I kept traveling forwards until after midnight, hoping all the while that I would soon emerge into some less desolate and dangerous region. But the water grew deeper and the walking more difficult than ever. I perceived it would be impossible to proceed much farther, and knew not, moreover, what hands I might fall into, should I succeed in reaching a human habitation. Not provided with a pass, any white man would be at liberty to arrest me, and place me in prison until such time as my master should "prove property, pay charges, and take me away." I was an estray, and if so unfortunate as to meet a law-abiding citizen of Louisiana, he would deem it his duty to his neighbor, perhaps, to put me forthwith in the pound. Really, it was difficult to determine which I had most reason to fear - dogs, alligators or men!

After midnight, however, I came to a halt. Imagination cannot picture the dreariness of the scene. The swamp was resonant with the quacking of innumerable ducks! Since the foundation of the earth, in all probability, a human footstep had never before so far penetrated the recesses of the swamp. It was not silent now - silent to a degree that rendered it oppressive, - as it was when the sun was shining in the heavens. My midnight intrusion had awakened the feathered tribes, which seemed to throng the morass in hundreds of thousands, and their garrulous throats poured forth such multitudinous sounds - there was such a fluttering of wings - such sullen plunges in the water all around me-that I was affrighted and appalled. All the fowls of the air, and all the creeping things of the earth appeared to have assembled together in that particular place, for the purpose of filling it with clamor and confusion. Not by human dwellings - not in crowded cities alone, are the sights and sounds of life. The wildest places of the earth are full of them. Even in the heart of that dismal swamp, God had provided a refuge and a dwelling place for millions of living things.

The moon had now risen above the trees, when I resolved upon a new project. Thus far I had endeavored to travel as nearly south as possible. Turning about I proceeded in a north-west direction, my object being to strike the Pine Woods in the vicinity of Master Ford's. Once within the shadow of his protection, I felt I would be comparatively safe.

My clothes were in tatters, my hands, face, and body covered with scratches, received from the sharp knots of fallen trees, and in climbing over piles of brush and floodwood. My bare foot was full of thorns. I was besmeared with muck and mud, and the green slime that had collected on the surface of the dead water, in which I had been immersed to the neck many times during the day and night. Hour after hour, and tiresome indeed had they become, I continued to plod along on my north-west course. The water began to grow less deep, and the ground more firm under my feet. At last I reached the Pacoudrie, the same wide bayou I had swam while "outward bound." I swam it again, and shortly after thought I heard a cock crow, but the sound was faint, and it might have been a mockery of the ear. The water receded from my advancing footsteps - now I had left the bogs behind me - now - now I was on dry land that gradually ascended to the plain, and I knew I was somewhere in the "Great Pine Woods."

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According to Walter Hawkins slaves constantly talked about the possibility of escape: "There arose in some an irrepressible desire for freedom which no danger or power could restrain, no hardship deterred, and no bloodhound could alarm.

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I wonder how slaves were punished in America?

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Sexual Assault and Abuse
During slavery, white male plantation owners, their sons, brothers and other male acquaintances raped Black women without fear of punishment. Their reasons ranged from lascivious desire to acts of punishment. Black men were also sexually abused by slaveholders, and, sometimes, their wives.

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10 Barbaric And Heartbreaking Ways Enslaved Black People Were Punished by Their Slave Masters

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Sexual Assault and Abuse During slavery, white male plantation owners, their sons, brothers and other male acquaintances raped Black women without fear of punishment. Their reasons ranged from lascivious desire to acts of punishment. Black men were also sexually abused by slaveholders, and, sometimes, their wives.

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I wonder if many Americans secretly kept slaves after the civil war.

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While students may know about the Underground Railroad, which moved enslaved persons north to freedom, they may know less about the reverse movement of free African Americans in the north who were moved south and forced into slavery. Last week we shared The Documents Behind Twelve Years a Slave, the story of Solomon Northup's kidnapping into slavery. The newly released movie Twelve Years a Slave is based on Northup's autobiography. Northup's story may be the most well known, but he was by no means the only one who endured this calamity.

The nature of this crime makes it impossible to know how many free African Americans were kidnapped and enslaved. Many of the kidnapped African Americans were sold "down the river" and, unlike Solomon Northup, no one heard from them again. Today we share a document from the Center for Legislative Archives in the National Archives that illustrates the devastating problem of pre-Civil War kidnapping of free African Americans.

The number of free African Americans in the north increased after the American Revolution, due to emancipation laws in northern states, private manumissions, and the ability of some slaves to buy their own freedom. These free African Americans were easy prey for kidnappers, who, under the guise of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, kidnapped and sold them into slavery. Some slave catchers did not take the time to ensure that the identity of the person they captured matched the one they were legally allowed to seize.

Once kidnapped, it was nearly impossible for a person to regain his freedom. Kidnappers often destroyed freedom papers. In the rare instance that a case made it to court with papers intact, judges could dismiss them as forged. Also, the kidnapped person's family or friends could rarely testify on their behalf, as most courts did not allow the testimony of African Americans and white witnesses would refuse to testify altogether to avoid retribution from their neighbors. In fact, many whites did not pay much attention to the problem at all because although they would never own slaves themselves, they still carried racist attitudes toward people of color.

White abolitionists witnessed the problem and worked to address it. In 1811, Elisha Tyson met with Representative Alexander McKim (R-MD), to explain the kidnapping problem. Tyson was a Quaker from Maryland who was well known in Baltimore for his efforts to protect free African Americans and to end slavery. Tyson followed up with this letter, which provides the details on several kidnapping cases that were known to Tyson. He hoped to convince McKim that federal legislation was necessary to address the problem. Congress did not act and kidnappings, like that of Solomon Northup, continued.

As your students read the letter (or the transcript), ask them to gather information about the facts of these cases and the scope of the problem. How were these people abducted? Is there a pattern? How were they able to regain their freedom? What factors make it difficult to trace kidnapped people?

The letter does not explain who the writer is, or who he was writing to. Ask your students to identify information that can help them create a hypothesis about the purpose of the letter. Before your students watch Twelve Years a Slave, ask them to watch for anything in the movie that aligns with or contradicts Tyson's illustrations of kidnapping.

Understanding the historical context of kidnappings of free African Americans before the Civil War will help your students better understand the movie, and will make Solomon Northup a character to remember.

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While students may know about the Underground Railroad, which moved enslaved persons north to freedom, they may know less about the reverse movement of free African Americans in the north who were moved south and forced into slavery. Last week we shared The Documents Behind Twelve Years a Slave , the story of Solomon Northup's kidnapping into slavery.

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I wonder if the free people ever felt sorry for slaves and tried to help them escape?

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Introduction

The Underground Railroad is an important part of our nation's history; however, many of the fascinating and lesser known details regarding it are not included within many textbooks. This booklet will provide a window into the past through a variety of primary sources regarding the Underground Railroad. These primary sources consist of broadsides, reward posters, newspaper clippings, historical documents, sheet music, photographs and narratives pertaining to the Underground Railroad. These items are found within the digitized collections of the Library of Congress.

The Underground Railroad was a secret system developed to aid fugitive slaves on their escape to freedom. Involvement with the Underground Railroad was not only dangerous, but it was also illegal. So, to help protect themselves and their mission secret codes were created. The term Underground Railroad referred to the entire system, which consisted of many routes called lines. The free individuals who helped runaway slaves travel toward freedom were called conductors, and the fugitive slaves were referred to as cargo. The safe houses used as hiding places along the lines of the Underground Railroad were called stations. A lit lantern hung outside would identify these stations.

A Dangerous Path to Freedom

Traveling along the Underground Railroad was a long a perilous journey for fugitive slaves to reach their freedom. Runaway slaves had to travel great distances, many times on foot, in a short amount of time. They did this with little or no food and no protection from the slave catchers chasing them. Slave owners were not the only pursuers of fugitive slaves. In order to entice others to assist in the capture of these slaves, their owners would post reward posters offering payment for the capture of their property. If they were caught, any number of terrible things could happen to them. Many captured fugitive slaves were flogged, branded, jailed, sold back into slavery, or even killed.

Not only did fugitive slaves have the fear of starvation and capture, but there were also threats presented by their surroundings. While traveling for long periods of time in the wilderness, they would have to fend off animals wanting to kill and eat them, cross treacherous terrain, and survive severe temperatures. For the slaves traveling north on the Underground Railroad, they were still in danger once they entered northern states. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 allowed and encouraged the capture of fugitive slaves due to the fact that they were seen as stolen property, rather than abused human beings.

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 also outlawed the abetting of fugitive slaves. Their safety and freedom would not be reached until they entered into Canada. Not all slaves traveled north. There were also Underground Railroad lines that lead south en route for Mexico and the Caribbean.

One of the many fugitive slaves impacted by the Fugitive Slave Law was Anthony Burns. He was taken from his northern residence, arrested, and tried under this law in Boston, Massachusetts. His arrest spurred black and white abolitionists and citizens of Boston to riot and protest. After the trial, Burns was taken back to cruelty of the south which he thought he had escaped from. While he was enduring his return to slavery, abolitionists were working to raise funds and within a year of his trial they had enough money to buy his freedom. Library of Congress American Memory and America's Library. Accessed 10.20.08

Frederick Douglass was another fugitive slave who escaped slavery. He escaped not on the Underground Railroad, but on a real train. He disguised himself as a sailor, but this was not enough. He needed to show proof that he was free, and since he was a runaway slave who did not have any "free papers" he borrowed a seaman's protection certificate that stated a sailor was a citizen of the U.S. Luckily, the train conductor did not look closely at the papers, and Douglass gained his passage to freedom.

Unfortunately, not all runaway slaves made it to freedom. But, many of those who did manage to escape went on to tell their stories of flight from slavery and to help other slaves not yet free. Harriet Tubman, Henry Bibb, Anthony Burns, Addison White, Josiah Henson and John Parker all escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad.

Henry "Box" Brown, another fugitive slave, escaped in a rather different way. He shipped himself in a three foot long by two and a half foot deep by two foot wide box, from Richmond, Virginia to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When he was removed from the box, he came out singing.

Conductors & Abolitionists

Underground Railroad conductors were free individuals who helped fugitive slaves traveling along the Underground Railroad. Conductors helped runaway slaves by providing them with safe passage to and from stations. They did this under the cover of darkness with slave catchers hot on their heels. Many times these stations would be located within their own homes and businesses. The act of harboring fugitive slaves put these conductors in grave danger; yet, they persisted because they believed in a cause greater than themselves, which was the freeing of thousands of enslaved human beings.

These conductors were comprised of a diverse group of people. They included people of different races, occupations and income levels. There were also former slaves who had escaped using the Underground Railroad and voluntarily returned to the lands of slavery, as conductors, to help free those still enslaved. Slaves were understood to be property; therefore, the freeing of slaves was viewed as stealing slave owners' personal property. If a conductor was caught helping free slaves they would be fined, imprisoned, branded, or even hanged.

Jonathan Walker was a sea captain caught off the shore of Florida trying to transport fugitive slaves to freedom in the Bahamas. He was arrested, imprisoned and branded with the letter "S.S." which stood for slave stealer. The abolitionist poet John Whittier paid tribute to Walker's courageous acts in one of his poems saying: "Then lift that manly right hand, bold ploughman of the wave! Its branded palm shall prophesy, 'Salvation to the Slave!'"

Harriet Tubman, perhaps the most well-known conductor of the Underground Railroad, helped hundreds of runaway slaves escape to freedom. She never lost one of them along the way. As a fugitive slave herself, she was helped along the Underground Railroad by another famous conductor...William Still. He went on the write The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters..., a book which contains descriptions of fugitive slaves' escape to freedom by way of the Underground Railroad. John parker is yet another former slave who escaped and ventured back into slave states to help free others. He conducted one of the busiest sections of the Underground Railroad, transporting fugitive slaves across the Ohio River. His neighbor and fellow conductor, Reverend John Rankin, worked with him on the Underground Railroad. Both of their homes served as Underground Railroad stations.

Conductors of the Underground Railroad undoubtedly opposed slavery, and they were not alone. Abolitionists took action against slavery as well. The abolition movement began when individuals such as William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur and Lewis Tappan formed the American Anti-Slavery Society. The organization created the Declaration of Anti-Slavery in which they gave reasons for the construction of the society and its goals. The society distributed an annual almanac that included poems, drawings, essays and other abolitionist material.

Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who became a famous abolitionist. He published a newspaper called the North Star in which he voiced his goals for the abolishment of slavery. He also published another abolitionist paper called the Frederick Douglass Paper, as well as giving public speeches on issues of concern to abolitionists.

Susan B. Anthony was another well known abolitionist who spoke and wrote for the efforts to abolish slavery. She urged her audience to "make the slave's case our own."

Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, provided the world with a vivid image of the hardships faced by slaves. Much of her book was based on the experiences of fugitive slave Josiah Henson.

Efforts of Abolitionists Telling Their Story: Fugitive Slave Narratives

Henry Bibb was born into slavery, in Kentucky during the year of 1815. He made many failed attempts to escape slavery; yet, he still had the courage and perseverance to continue in his fight for freedom after every capture and punishment. His perseverance paid off when he made a successful and much anticipated escape to the northern states and then on to Canada with the help of the Underground Railroad. The following is an excerpt from his narrative in which he discussed one of his many escapes and the challenges he had to overcome.
"In the fall or winter of 1837 I formed a resolution that I would escape, if possible, to Canada, for my Liberty. I commenced from that hour making preparations for the dangerous experiment of breading the chains that bound me as a slave. My preparation for this voyage consisted in the accumulation of a little money, perhaps not exceeding two dollars and fifty cents, and a suit which I had never been seen or known to wear before; this last was to avoid detection. On the twenty-fifth of December, 1837, my long anticipated time had arrived when I was to put into operation my former resolution, which was to bolt for Liberty or consent to die a Slave. I acted upon the former, although I confess it to be one of the most self-defying acts of my whole life, to take leave of an affectionate wife, who stood before me on my departure, with dear little Frances in her arms, and with tears of sorrow in her eyes as she bid me a long farewell. It required all the moral courage that I was master of to suppress my feelings while taking leave of my little family. Had Matilda known my intention at the time, it would not have been possible for me to have got away, and I might have this day been a slave. Not withstanding every inducement was held out to me to run away if I would be free, and the voice of liberty was thundering in my very soul, 'Be free, oh, man! be free,' I was struggling against a thousand obstacles which had clustered around my mind to bind my wounded spirit still in the dark prison of mental degradation. My strong attachments to friends and relatives, with all the love of home and birth-place which is so natural among the human family, twined about my heart and were hard to break away from. And withal, the fear of being killed, or captured and taken to the extreme South, to linger out my days in hopeless bondage on some cotton or sugar plantation, all combined to deter me. But I had count the cost, and was fully prepared to make the sacrifice. The time for fulfilling my pledge was then at hand. I must forsake friends and neighbors, wife and child, or consent to live and die a slave." "These kind friends gave me something to eat, and started me on my way to Canada, with a recommendation of a friend on my way. This was the commencement of what was called the under ground rail road to Canada. I walked with bold courage, trusting in the arm of Omnipotence; guided by the unchangeable North Star by night, and inspired by an elevated thought that I was fleeing from a land of slavery and oppression, bidding farewell to handcuffs, whips, thumb-screws and chains.
I travelled on until I had arrived at the place where I was directed to call on an Abolitionist, but I made no stop: so great were my fears of being pursued by the pro-slavery hunting dogs of the South. I prosecuted my journey vigorously for nearly forty-eight hours without food or rest, struggling against external difficulties such as no one can imagine who has never experienced the same: not knowing what moment I might be captured while travelling among strangers, through cold and fear, breasting the north winds, being thinly clad, pelted by the snow storms through the dark hours of the night, and not a house in which I could enter to shelter me from the storm."

This is only one of the many narratives written by fugitive slaves. Another former slave who was well known for her efforts to end slavery was Sojourner Truth. She too along with Josiah Henson, J.D. Green and many others wrote narratives that shared their experiences. Their stories of strength and freedom provide much insight to the time in which they lived. Perhaps, so many fugitive slaves chose to write down their experiences to help others understand their trials and tribulations; or maybe they did this to help individuals learn from the mistakes of the past, in hopes of creating a better future.

In Frederick Douglass's book entitled Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, he stated his intention for writing his narrative: "Sincerely and earnestly hoping that this little book may do something toward throwing light on the American slave system, and hastning the glad day of deliverance to the millions of my brethren in bonds-faithfully relying upon the power of truth, love, and justice, for success in my humble efforts-and solemnly pledging my self anew to the sacred cause, --I subscribe myself, Frederick Douglass."
Library of Congress American Memory and Exhibits. Accessed 10.20.08

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Eastern Illinois University :: Teaching with Primary Sources - Underground Railroad: A Path to Freedom

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The Underground Railroad is an important part of our nation's history; however, many of the fascinating and lesser known details regarding it are not included within many textbooks. This booklet will provide a window into the past through a variety of primary sources regarding the Underground Railroad.

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Why did slavery start in the united states?

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Up until 1676, indentured servants were the primary source for labor in the New World. Slavery, as noted, had begun almost as soon as the English colony of Virginia began to be settled, but slaves were a poor source for labor -- they were very expensive and they usually died within 7 years of arriving. Indentured servants were much cheaper; they too usually died within 7 years of arrival, but their sponsor was out much less money, as it was cheaper to pay for an indentured servant's passage across the Atlantic than it was to purchase a slave for life.

Tobacco became the primary export; its cultivation was labor intensive.

Slavery began in earnest after Bacon's Rebellion, in 1676. The indentured and newly freed servants and small poor white farmers stormed various plantations and destroyed what they could in protest against the abusive practices of the large scale farmers. The rebellion was put down, but afterwards racism was legally enshrined in a series of acts that were designed to give the poor white farmers more of a stake in the agrarian economy by excluding black farmers (up until this time, there were free black farmers who owned slaves!) Conditions had improved so that life expectancy was greater; slaves, rather than troublesome indentured servants, became the mainstay labor force for nearly the next 200 years; racism upheld the social and political structures in the South and has finally rapidly diminished in our own time.

American Slavery, American Freedom, 1975 HW Brands.

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Why did slavery start in the United States? How long did it last for? | eNotes

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Up until 1676, indentured servants were the primary source for labor in the New World. Slavery, as noted, had begun almost as soon as the English colony of Virginia began to be settled, but slaves were a poor source for labor -- they were very expensive and they usually died within 7 years of arriving.

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When was slavery legalized?

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Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

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.

When Did Slavery Start?

Hundreds of thousands of Africans, both free and enslaved, aided the establishment and survival of colonies in the Americas and the New World. However, many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship Sao Jao Bautista.

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

Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.
READ MORE: The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s. It Just Surfaced
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, counting each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress and guaranteeing the right to repossess any "person held to service or labor" (an obvious euphemism for slavery).

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 would transition from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region's dependence on enslaved labor.
READ MORE: 40 Years a Slave: The Extraordinary Tale of an African Prince Stolen from His Kingdom
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.
READ MORE: The Shocking Photo of 'Whipped Peter' That Made Slavery's Brutality Impossible to Deny
History of Slavery

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.
READ MORE: Enslaved Couples Faced Wrenching Separations, or Even Choosing Family Over Freedom
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.
READ MORE: How the Underground Railroad Worked
Missouri Compromise
WATCH: 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 able to help quell the forces of sectionalism only temporarily.

Kansas-Nebraska Act
WATCH: 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.
READ MORE: How Many US Presidents Owned Enslaved Workers?
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.
READ MORE: What Is Juneteenth?
The Legacy of Slavery
WATCH: The Civil War and Its Legacy
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.
PHOTOS: See America's First Memorial to its 4,400 Lynching Victims

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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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What are the consequences of a slave killing a slave owner?

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what would slaves have needed in order to rebel...

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Posted previously on PBS and BayAreaIntifada

One of the most pernicious allegations made against the African-American people was that our slave ancestors were either exceptionally "docile" or "content and loyal," thus explaining their purported failure to rebel extensively. Some even compare enslaved Americans to their brothers and sisters in Brazil, Cuba, Suriname and Haiti, the last of whom defeated the most powerful army in the world, Napoleon's army, becoming the first slaves in history to successfully strike a blow for their own freedom.

As the historian Herbert Aptheker informs us in American Negro Slave Revolts, no one put this dishonest, nakedly pro-slavery argument more baldly than the Harvard historian James Schouler in 1882, who attributed this spurious conclusion to " 'the innate patience, docility, and child-like simplicity of the negro' " who, he felt, was an " 'imitator and non-moralist,' " learning " 'deceit and libertinism with facility,' " being " 'easily intimidated, incapable of deep plots' "; in short, Negroes were " 'a black servile race, sensuous, stupid, brutish, obedient to the whip, children in imagination.'

Consider how bizarre this was: It wasn't enough that slaves had been subjugated under a harsh and brutal regime for two and a half centuries; following the collapse of Reconstruction, this school of historians - unapologetically supportive of slavery - kicked the slaves again for not rising up more frequently to kill their oppressive masters. And lest we think that this phenomenon was relegated to 19th- and early 20th-century scholars, as late as 1959, Stanley Elkins drew a picture of the slaves as infantilized "Sambos" in his book Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, reduced to the status of the passive, "perpetual child" by the severely oppressive form of American slavery, and thus unable to rebel. Rarely can I think of a colder, nastier set of claims than these about the lack of courage or "manhood" of the African-American slaves.

So, did African-American slaves rebel? Of course they did. As early as 1934, our old friend Joel A. Rogers identified 33 slave revolts, including Nat Turner's, in his 100 Amazing Facts. And nine years later, the historian Herbert Aptheker published his pioneering study, American Negro Slave Revolts, to set the record straight. Aptheker defined a slave revolt as an action involving 10 or more slaves, with "freedom as the apparent aim [and] contemporary references labeling the event as an uprising, plot, insurrection, or the equivalent of these." In all, Aptheker says, he "has found records of approximately two hundred and fifty revolts and conspiracies in the history of American Negro slavery." Other scholars have found as many as 313.

Let's consider the five greatest slave rebellions in the United States, about which Donald Yacovone and I write in the...companion book to my...PBS series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

1. Stono Rebellion, 1739. The Stono Rebellion was the largest slave revolt ever staged in the 13 colonies. On Sunday, Sept. 9, 1739, a day free of labor, about 20 slaves under the leadership of a man named Jemmy provided whites with a painful lesson on the African desire for liberty. Many members of the group were seasoned soldiers, either from the Yamasee War or from their experience in their homes in Angola, where they were captured and sold, and had been trained in the use of weapons.

They gathered at the Stono River and raided a warehouse-like store, Hutchenson's, executing the white owners and placing their victims' heads on the store's front steps for all to see. They moved on to other houses in the area, killing the occupants and burning the structures, marching through the colony toward St. Augustine, Fla., where under Spanish law, they would be free.

As the march proceeded, not all slaves joined the insurrection; in fact, some hung back and actually helped hide their masters. But many were drawn to it, and the insurrectionists soon numbered about 100. They paraded down King's Highway, according to sources, carrying banners and shouting, "Liberty!" - lukango in their native Kikongo, a word that would have expressed the English ideals embodied in liberty and, perhaps, salvation.

The slaves fought off the English for more than a week before the colonists rallied and killed most of the rebels, although some very likely reached Fort Mose. Even after Colonial forces crushed the Stono uprising, outbreaks occurred, including the very next year, when South Carolina executed at least 50 additional rebel slaves.

2. The New York City Conspiracy of 1741. With about 1,700 blacks living in a city of some 7,000 whites appearing determined to grind every person of African descent under their heel, some form of revenge seemed inevitable. In early 1741, Fort George in New York burned to the ground. Fires erupted elsewhere in the city - four in one day - and in New Jersey and on Long Island. Several white people claimed they had heard slaves bragging about setting the fires and threatening worse. They concluded that a revolt had been planned by secret black societies and gangs, inspired by a conspiracy of priests and their Catholic minions - white, black, brown, free and slave.

Certainly there were coherent ethnic groups who might have led a resistance, among them the Papa, from the Slave Coast near Whydah (Ouidah) in Benin; the Igbo, from the area around the Niger River; and the Malagasy, from Madagascar. Another identifiable and suspect group was known among the conspirators as the "Cuba People," "negroes and mulattoes" captured in the early spring of 1740 in Cuba. They had probably been brought to New York from Havana, the greatest port of the Spanish West Indies and home to a free black population. Having been "free men in their own country," they rightly felt unjustly enslaved in New York.

A 16-year-old Irish indentured servant, under arrest for theft, claimed knowledge of a plot by the city's slaves - in league with a few whites - to kill white men, seize white women and incinerate the city. In the investigation that followed, 30 black men, two white men and two white women were executed. Seventy people of African descent were exiled to far-flung places like Newfoundland, Madeira, Saint-Domingue (which at independence from the French in 1804 was renamed Haiti) and Curaçao. Before the end of the summer of 1741, 17 blacks would be hanged and 13 more sent to the stake, becoming ghastly illuminations of white fears ignited by the institution of slavery they so zealously defended.

3. Gabriel's Conspiracy, 1800. Born prophetically in 1776 on the Prosser plantation, just six miles north of Richmond, Va., and home (to use the term loosely) to 53 slaves, a slave named Gabriel would hatch a plot, with freedom as its goal, that was emblematic of the era in which he lived.

A skilled blacksmith who stood more than six feet tall and dressed in fine clothes when he was away from the forge, Gabriel cut an imposing figure. But what distinguished him more than his physical bearing was his ability to read and write: Only 5 percent of Southern slaves were literate.

Other slaves looked up to men like Gabriel, and Gabriel himself found inspiration in the French and Saint-Domingue revolutions of 1789. He imbibed the political fervor of the era and concluded, albeit erroneously, that Jeffersonian democratic ideology encompassed the interests of black slaves and white workingmen alike, who, united, could oppose the oppressive Federalist merchant class.

Spurred on by two liberty-minded French soldiers he met in a tavern, Gabriel began to formulate a plan, enlisting his brother Solomon and another servant on the Prosser plantation in his fight for freedom. Word quickly spread to Richmond, other nearby towns and plantations and well beyond to Petersburg and Norfolk, via free and enslaved blacks who worked the waterways. Gabriel took a tremendous risk in letting so many black people learn of his plans: It was necessary as a means of attracting supporters, but it also exposed him to the possibility of betrayal.

Regardless, Gabriel persevered, aiming to rally at least 1,000 slaves to his banner of "Death or Liberty," an inversion of the famed cry of the slaveholding revolutionary Patrick Henry. With incredible daring - and naïveté - Gabriel determined to march to Richmond, take the armory and hold Gov. James Monroe hostage until the merchant class bent to the rebels' demands of equal rights for all. He planned his uprising for August 30 and publicized it well.

But on that day, one of the worst thunderstorms in recent memory pummeled Virginia, washing away roads and making travel all but impossible. Undeterred, Gabriel believed that only a small band was necessary to carry out the plan. But many of his followers lost faith, and he was betrayed by a slave named Pharoah, who feared retribution if the plot failed.

The rebellion was barely under way when the state captured Gabriel and several co-conspirators. Twenty-five African Americans, worth about $9,000 or so - money that cash-strapped Virginia surely thought it could ill afford - were hanged together before Gabriel went to the gallows and was executed, alone.

4. German Coast Uprising, 1811. If the Haitian Revolution between 1791 and 1804 - spearheaded by Touissant Louverture and fought and won by black slaves under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines - struck fear in the hearts of slave owners everywhere, it struck a loud and electrifying chord with African slaves in America.

In 1811, about 40 miles north of New Orleans, Charles Deslondes, a mulatto slave driver on the Andry sugar plantation in the German Coast area of Louisiana, took volatile inspiration from that victory seven years prior in Haiti. He would go on to lead what the young historian Daniel Rasmussen calls the largest and most sophisticated slave revolt in U.S. history in his book American Uprising. (The Stono Rebellion had been the largest slave revolt on these shores to this point, but that occurred in the colonies, before America won its independence from Great Britain.) After communicating his intentions to slaves on the Andry plantation and in nearby areas, on the rainy evening of Jan. 8, Deslondes and about 25 slaves rose up and attacked the plantation's owner and family. They hacked to death one of the owner's sons, but carelessly allowed the master to escape.

That was a tactical mistake to be sure, but Deslondes and his men had wisely chosen the well-outfitted Andry plantation - a warehouse for the local militia - as the place to begin their revolt. They ransacked the stores and seized uniforms, guns and ammunition. As they moved toward New Orleans, intending to capture the city, dozens more men and women joined the cause, singing Creole protest songs while pillaging plantations and murdering whites. Some estimated that the force ultimately swelled to 300, but it's unlikely that Deslondes' army exceeded 124.

The South Carolina congressman, slave master and Indian fighter Wade Hampton was assigned the task of suppressing the insurrection. With a combined force of about 30 regular U.S. Army soldiers and militia, it would take Hampton two days to stop the rebels. They fought a pitched battle that ended only when the slaves ran out of ammunition, about 20 miles from New Orleans. In the slaughter that followed, the slaves' lack of military experience was evident: The whites suffered no casualties, but when the slaves surrendered, about 20 insurgents lay dead, another 50 became prisoners and the remainder fled into the swamps.

By the end of the month, whites had rounded up another 50 insurgents. In short order, about 100 survivors were summarily executed, their heads severed and placed along the road to New Orleans. As one planter noted, they looked "like crows sitting on long poles."

5. Nat Turner's Rebellion, 1831. Born on Oct. 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Va., the week before Gabriel was hanged, Nat Turner impressed family and friends with an unusual sense of purpose, even as a child. Driven by prophetic visions and joined by a host of followers - but with no clear goals - on August 22, 1831, Turner and about 70 armed slaves and free blacks set off to slaughter the white neighbors who enslaved them.

In the early hours of the morning, they bludgeoned Turner's master and his master's wife and children with axes. By the end of the next day, the rebels had attacked about 15 homes and killed between 55 and 60 whites as they moved toward the religiously named county seat of Jerusalem, Va. Other slaves who had planned to join the rebellion suddenly turned against it after white militia began to attack Turner's men, undoubtedly concluding that he was bound to fail. Most of the rebels were captured quickly, but Turner eluded authorities for more than a month.

On Sunday, Oct. 30, a local white man stumbled upon Turner's hideout and seized him. A special Virginia court tried him on Nov. 5 and sentenced him to hang six days later. A barbaric scene followed his execution. Enraged whites took his body, skinned it, distributed parts as souvenirs and rendered his remains into grease. His head was removed and for a time sat in the biology department of Wooster College in Ohio. (In fact, it is likely that pieces of his body - including his skull and a purse made from his skin - have been preserved and are hidden in storage somewhere.)

Of his fellow rebels, 21 went to the gallows, and another 16 were sold away from the region. As the state reacted with harsher laws controlling black people, many free blacks fled Virginia for good. Turner remains a legendary figure, remembered for the bloody path he forged in his personal war against slavery, and for the grisly and garish way he was treated in death.

The heroism and sacrifices of these slave insurrectionists would be a prelude to the noble performance of some 200,000 black men who served so very courageously in the Civil War, the war that finally put an end to the evil institution that in 1860 chained some 3.9 million human beings to perpetual bondage.

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Henry Louis Gates: "Did African-American Slaves Rebel?"

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Posted previously on PBS and BayAreaIntifada One of the most pernicious allegations made against the African-American people was that our slave ancestors were either exceptionally "docile" or "content and loyal," thus explaining their purported failure to rebel extensively.

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I wonder is free African American people owned there own slaves...

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One of the most vexing questions in African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves owned slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect, is yes, of course; some free black people in this country bought and sold other black people, and did so at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the Civil War. For me, the really fascinating questions about black slave-owning are how many black "masters" were involved, how many slaves did they own and why did they own slaves?

The answers to these questions are complex, and historians have been arguing for some time over whether free blacks purchased family members as slaves in order to protect them-motivated, on the one hand, by benevolence and philanthropy, as historian Carter G. Woodson put it, or whether, on the other hand, they purchased other black people "as an act of exploitation," primarily to exploit their free labor for profit, just as white slave owners did. The evidence shows that, unfortunately, both things are true. {snip}

In a fascinating essay reviewing this controversy, R. Halliburton shows that free black people have owned slaves "in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery," at least since Anthony Johnson and his wife Mary went to court in Virginia in 1654 to obtain the services of their indentured servant, a black man, John Castor, for life.

And for a time, free black people could even "own" the services of white indentured servants in Virginia as well. Free blacks owned slaves in Boston by 1724 and in Connecticut by 1783; by 1790, 48 black people in Maryland owned 143 slaves. One particularly notorious black Maryland farmer named Nat Butler "regularly purchased and sold Negroes for the Southern trade," Halliburton wrote.

Perhaps the most insidious or desperate attempt to defend the right of black people to own slaves was the statement made on the eve of the Civil War by a group of free people of color in New Orleans, offering their services to the Confederacy, in part because they were fearful for their own enslavement: "The free colored population [native] of Louisiana ... own slaves, and they are dearly attached to their native land ... and they are ready to shed their blood for her defense. They have no sympathy for abolitionism; no love for the North, but they have plenty for Louisiana ... They will fight for her in 1861 as they fought [to defend New Orleans from the British] in 1814-1815."

These guys were, to put it bluntly, opportunists par excellence: As Noah Andre Trudeau and James G. Hollandsworth Jr. explain, once the war broke out, some of these same black men formed 14 companies of a militia composed of 440 men and were organized by the governor in May 1861 into "the Native Guards, Louisiana," swearing to fight to defend the Confederacy. Although given no combat role, the Guards-reaching a peak of 1,000 volunteers-became the first Civil War unit to appoint black officers.

When New Orleans fell in late April 1862 to the Union, about 10 percent of these men, not missing a beat, now formed the Native Guard/Corps d'Afrique to defend the Union. {snip}

{snip}

So what do the actual numbers of black slave owners and their slaves tell us? In 1830, the year most carefully studied by Carter G. Woodson, about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black population was free. Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves, out of a total of 2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so the numbers of slaves owned by black people over all was quite small by comparison with the number owned by white people. {snip}

{snip} So why did these free black people own these slaves?

It is reasonable to assume that the 42 percent of the free black slave owners who owned just one slave probably owned a family member to protect that person, as did many of the other black slave owners who owned only slightly larger numbers of slaves. {snip}

{sni}

{snip} Halliburton concludes, after examining the evidence, that "it would be a serious mistake to automatically assume that free blacks owned their spouse or children only for benevolent purposes." {snip} In other words, most black slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but far too many turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit.

{snip}

If we were compiling a "Rogues Gallery of Black History," the following free black slaveholders would be in it:

John Carruthers Stanly-born a slave in Craven County, N.C., the son of an Igbo mother and her master, John Wright Stanly-became an extraordinarily successful barber and speculator in real estate in New Bern. As Loren Schweninger points out in Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915, by the early 1820s, Stanly owned three plantations and 163 slaves, and even hired three white overseers to manage his property! He fathered six children with a slave woman named Kitty, and he eventually freed them. Stanly lost his estate when a loan for $14,962 he had co-signed with his white half brother, John, came due. After his brother's stroke, the loan was Stanly's sole responsibility, and he was unable to pay it.

{snip}

Antoine Dubuclet and his wife Claire Pollard owned more than 70 slaves in Iberville Parish when they married. According to Thomas Clarkin, by 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, they owned 100 slaves, worth $94,700. During Reconstruction, he became the state's first black treasurer, serving between 1868 and 1878.

Andrew Durnford was a sugar planter and a physician who owned the St. Rosalie plantation, 33 miles south of New Orleans. In the late 1820s, David O. Whitten tells us, he paid $7,000 for seven male slaves, five females and two children. He traveled all the way to Virginia in the 1830s and purchased 24 more. Eventually, he would own 77 slaves. When a fellow Creole slave owner liberated 85 of his slaves and shipped them off to Liberia, Durnford commented that he couldn't do that, because "self interest is too strongly rooted in the bosom of all that breathes the American atmosphere."

{snip}

Most of us will find the news that some black people bought and sold other black people for profit quite distressing, as well we should. But given the long history of class divisions in the black community, which Martin R. Delany as early as the 1850s described as "a nation within a nation," and given the role of African elites in the long history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, perhaps we should not be surprised that we can find examples throughout black history of just about every sort of human behavior, from the most noble to the most heinous, that we find in any other people's history.

The good news, scholars agree, is that by 1860 the number of free blacks owning slaves had markedly decreased from 1830. In fact, Loren Schweninger concludes that by the eve of the Civil War, "the phenomenon of free blacks owning slaves had nearly disappeared" in the Upper South, even if it had not in places such as Louisiana in the Lower South. {snip}
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Topics: American History

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Did Black People Own Slaves? - American Renaissance

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One of the most vexing questions in African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves owned slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect, is yes, of course; some free black people in this country bought and sold other black people, and did so at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the Civil War.

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I wonder what was the most caused deaths of slaves was?

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The American slave trade caused 5 million deaths "or more."

By Jon Greenberg on Tuesday, March 18th, 2014 at 1:43 p.m.

Every war is filled with grim statistics, and Andrew Napolitano took a debate with Comedy Central's Jon Stewart down that road when he brought up the Civil War's casualties. President Abraham Lincoln, Napolitano argued, could have undone slavery "without causing the deaths of 785,000 human beings."

"How many deaths of human beings were caused by the American slave trade?" Stewart shot back.

"Unfortunately, a million and a half," Napolitano said.

"Try 5 million or more," Stewart said.

We are fact-checking several claims from the Civil War debate between Napolitano, a libertarian pundit and former judge, and Stewart. Here we are looking at if the American slave trade, the process by which people were acquired and sold into slavery, resulted in the death of 5 million people or more. (Statistics focus on the slave trade, because experts say it's impossible to know the overall death toll caused by slavery in America.)

We asked Comedy Central for Stewart's source and did not hear back. But it seems likely Stewart got his information from another Daily Show guest. Historian Manisha Sinha from the University of Massachusetts was part of a panel in a mock game show called

Asked during the game to estimate the number of deaths, Sinha said 2 million to 5 million might have perished.

So that would put Stewart on the high end of one estimate. But Stewart made an error in his characterization.

Sinha was talking about the Atlantic slave trade, which included slaves bound for South America, the Caribbean as well as North America, while Stewart focused on the American slave trade.

So what's the American share? Starting in the late 1960s, historians began culling hard numbers on the slave trade from shipping manifests and other original documents. The result is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database. It has tabulated an estimated 80 percent of the traffic in human beings and found about 10.7 million people survived the passage from their homeland between 1500 and 1866. Of that, about 390,000 made it to North American soil. This was about 3 percent of the total.

Historian Herbert Klein of Columbia and Stanford universities, who worked on the database, said that the data suggest about 85,000 people destined for North America did not survive the trip across the Atlantic -- far below 5 million.(The same data show deaths caused by the slave trade in all of North and South America at about 1.8 million.)

However, as exact as this information might be, it only goes so far. Much data is missing, either because it was lost or because no records were kept of the illegal shipments of slaves to North America that took place after 1808. That was the year when the United States banned the importation of slaves from Africa.
Our ruling
Plus, as we noted, the database counts only the deaths due to the capture and transport of slaves and says nothing about the people who died in bondage from brutality, disease and deprivation.

When the Civil War began, about 4 million people lived in slavery. According to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, half of all their babies died in the first year of life. That was twice the rate for white babies. Stanford Medical School cites the statistic that in 1850, the life expectancy of slaves was four years less than for whites.

Stewart said the American slave trade caused the deaths of at least 5 million people. Stewart appears to be using an estimate for deaths associated with the slave trade in North and South America. America's portion is much smaller, an expert told us.

We rate Stewart's claim False.

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Jon Stewart: Slave trade caused 5 million deaths

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Every war is filled with grim statistics, and Andrew Napolitano took a debate with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart down that road when he brought up the Civil War’s casualties. President Abraham Lincoln, Napolitano argued, could have undone slavery "without causing the deaths of 785,000 human beings."

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I wonder what diseases were on the boat

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ColonialDiseaseDigitalTextbook - 7.2 The Slave Trade and Disease

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Scurvy This disease was also prevalent aboard slave ships. It is a disease which is caused by deficiency or lack of vitamin C. It causes spots to form on gums and the rest of your body. It also causes the loss of teeth, and it can be fatal.

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I wonder if slaves ever had conflict with eachother ?

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Yes, all the time. This was, in fact, one of the strategies against rebellions. You would buy slaves from different places, with different religions, languages etc. They could be even from rival groups, so they would hardly be able to develop mutual feelings.

So, how would those people plan something? How could they sit together and be united if, in several times, they would hate each other? Or even have a hard time to communicate?

Those kind of actions did worked and made the process of planning a rebelion a lot more complex. But rebelions just keep happening, from the first day of slavery to the last.

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Did slaves coming to America have tribal conflicts amongst themselves?

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Answer: Yes, all the time. This was, in fact, one of the strategies against rebellions. You would buy slaves from different places, with different religions, languages etc. They could be even from rival groups, so they would hardly be able to develop mutual feelings. So, how would those people p...

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From what part of Africa were most slaves taken from?

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Though exact totals will never be known, the transatlantic slave trade is believed to have forcibly displaced some 12.5 million Africans between the 17th and 19th centuries; some 10.6 million survived the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic. Though descendants of these enslaved Africans now make up considerable segments of the population in the United States, Brazil and many Caribbean islands, written records of their ancestors' origins are difficult-if not impossible-to find. Through extensive research, however, scholars have been able to make educated guesses about where many of the slaves brought to the New World originated.

Explore the Mapping Slave Voyages interactive to find out more about the 350-year history of the transatlantic trade.

Slaves brought to the United States represented about 3.6 percent of the total number of Africans transported to the New World, or around 388,000 people-considerably less than the number transported to colonies in the Caribbean (including more than 1.2 million to Jamaica alone) or to Brazil (4.8 million). Of those Africans who arrived in the United States, nearly half came from two regions: Senegambia, the area comprising the Senegal and Gambia Rivers and the land between them, or today's Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Mali; and west-central Africa, including what is now Angola, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon. The Gambia River, running from the Atlantic into Africa, was a key waterway for the slave trade; at its height, about one out of every six West African slaves came from this area.

In addition to the nearly 50 percent of the total number of enslaved Africans in the United States from these two regions, a considerable number of slaves had their origins on the so-called Gold Coast or "Slave Coast," which is now the West African nation of Ghana, as well as neighboring parts of the Windward Coast, now Ivory Coast. Others originated in the Bight of Biafra (including parts of present-day eastern Nigeria and Cameroon), an inlet of the Atlantic on Africa's western coast that was a hub of extensive slave-dealing operations.

Watch the groundbreaking series reimagined. Watch ROOTS now on HISTORY.

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What part of Africa did most slaves come from?

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Though exact totals will never be known, the transatlantic slave trade is believed to have forcibly displaced some 12.5 million Africans between the 17th and 19th centuries; some 10.6 million survived the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic.

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I wonder if any slave invent anything...

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John P. Parker, abolitonist and inventor

*On this date in 1827, we celebrate the birth of John P. Parker. He was a Black businessman and abolitionist.

From Norfolk, Virginia he was the son of a White father and a slave mother. He was sold to a slave agent from Richmond, Virginia at age eight, who then sold him to a slave caravan that took him to Mobile, Alabama. In Mobile, Parker was purchased by a physician who employed him as a house servant where he was taught to read and write. In 1843 the sixteen-year-old Parker accompanied the physician's sons north to attend college; however, Parker was returned to Mobile when the owner feared the slave would escape to the north.

There he was apprenticed to a foundry and iron manufacturer and learned the trade of plastering. After attempting to escape he was returned to the physician. While in Alabama Parker's skill as a molder maker caused ill will with his fellow workers and he was transferred to a New Orleans foundry where he alienated his co-workers and was released. Fearing that he would become a field hand, Parker worked for two years at a foundry and at the New Orleans shipping docks as a stevedore. He purchased his freedom from his earnings; the price of freedom for John P. Parker in 1845 was $1800.

That year Parker obtained a pass to travel north to Indiana, where he was offered work the in foundries near New Albany or Jefferson, Indiana. Near Cincinnati, Parker began his career as a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad. Working with a local barber, Parker was once able to move two young girls from Kentucky to freedom in Indiana and Ohio. As an abolitionist, he devoted his life in Kentucky to scouting on both sides of the Ohio River, to taking care of the helpless slaves who had found their way to Ohio and could not get across, to actually fighting for them against their pursuing masters. Around 1848 Parker left Cincinnati and opened a small general store in Beachwood Factory, Ohio.

In 1850 he moved to Ripley, Ohio, which was also the home of Reverend John Rankin, abolitionist and operator of the Underground Railroad there. Parker worked independently of Rankin and before the Emancipation Proclamation took an active role in removing an estimated 1000 slaves from bondage. Unlike other abolitionists Parker remained separate from organized church groups, which he viewed as an "enemy of the people." In 1854 Parker built a small foundry near Ripley, Ohio, which expanded and at its peak employed up to twenty-five men. Following federal approval of Colored troops for Union service in 1863, Parker became a recruiter for the 27th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops (one of two Ohio units).

Parker's foundry also furnished castings to the war effort. Parker's business, which was known as the Ripley Foundry and Machine Company, manufactured slide valve engines and reapers. In 1871 an establishment known as the Phoenix Foundry with John P. Parker and William Hood, proprietors, was listed in the records of Brown County, Ohio. The foundry was still operating in 1981, though no longer under family ownership. Parker remained in the foundry business until his death in January 30, 1900.

Reference:
The John P. Parker Historical Society,
P.O. Box 246,
Ripley, OH 45167
The Anti-Slavery Society Global Black Inventors

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John P. Parker, abolitonist and inventor - African American Registry

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On this date in 1827, we celebrate the birth of John P. Parker. He was a Black businessman and abolitionist. From Norfolk, Virginia he was the son of a White father and a slave mother. He was sold to a slave agent from Richmond, Virginia at age eight, who then sold him to a slave caravan that took him to Mobile, Alabama.

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Did slave owners ever breed slaves and sale them or did they breed them and use them for free labor?

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Largest African American Slave Owner And Breeder

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I wonder what the purpose of slavery was

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Slavery, the word has a bitter taste flowing off the tongue. Instantaneous images of inhumane conditions appear that give an aversion to saying the word. Now on the brink of the 21st century, slavery is such an ancient practice that it is embedded within every society.

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When did slavery begin?

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Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

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.

When Did Slavery Start?

Hundreds of thousands of Africans, both free and enslaved, aided the establishment and survival of colonies in the Americas and the New World. However, many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship Sao Jao Bautista.

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

Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.
READ MORE: The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s. It Just Surfaced
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, counting each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress and guaranteeing the right to repossess any "person held to service or labor" (an obvious euphemism for slavery).

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 would transition from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region's dependence on enslaved labor.
READ MORE: 40 Years a Slave: The Extraordinary Tale of an African Prince Stolen from His Kingdom
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.
READ MORE: The Shocking Photo of 'Whipped Peter' That Made Slavery's Brutality Impossible to Deny
History of Slavery

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.
READ MORE: Enslaved Couples Faced Wrenching Separations, or Even Choosing Family Over Freedom
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.
READ MORE: How the Underground Railroad Worked
Missouri Compromise
WATCH: 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 able to help quell the forces of sectionalism only temporarily.

Kansas-Nebraska Act
WATCH: 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.
READ MORE: How Many US Presidents Owned Enslaved Workers?
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.
READ MORE: What Is Juneteenth?
The Legacy of Slavery
WATCH: The Civil War and Its Legacy
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.
PHOTOS: See America's First Memorial to its 4,400 Lynching Victims

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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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I wonder how many slaves actually got to eat a day.

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Slavery and the Making of America . The Slave Experience: Living | PBS

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Different circumstances surrounded fieldwork. Laboring together in task groups, enslaved blacks might develop a sense of united welfare. Yet, they might also be supervised by a black driver or overseer responsible for representing the master's interests, a position which could prove divisive within the slave community particularly because the driver would be obliged to mete out punishments on other blacks.

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I wonder if child slaves were ever hung too. Like if slaves were to escape with their children. Would they get the same treatment?

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I wonder what slaves did when they got separated from their families.

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How Slavery Affected African American Families, Freedom’s Story, TeacherServe®, National Humanities Center

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How Slavery Affected African American Families

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I wonder if Africans ever sold their own people as slaves?

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did slaves ever fight back before being captured?

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They did
Slaves were not caught en masse by unstoppable Europeans who ran around Africa enslaving thousands upon thousands of helpless Africans. Europeans were (usually) mere traders* who showed up at a few coastal trading posts. The actual slaving was carried out by local African lords who waged wars and sold those captured or performed dedicated slaving raids into various villages and towns. The newly captured slaves were then brought to the aforementioned trading posts where they were traded for manufactured goods, especially muskets. Remember, there was or is hardly anything close to a Pan-African identity so conquering local kingdoms or tribes was seen as much more important than opposing the monolithic white race, which is also something that never existed as a concept.
EDIT:
After being captured and placed on trading ships, slaves still sometimes attempted to resist. For example, on ships like the Creole and La Amistad, several slaves were able to free themselves and kill most of the crew, taking command of the vessels in question. They commanded the survivors to take them to free territory (back to Africa for the Amistad, British territory for the Creole). The Amistad was secretly steered to the USA while the Creole successfully arrived in the Bahamas. The slaves in both instances were later freed by the courts of the local governments. However, such rebellions were not too common as slave traders typically did not have an issue with throwing dozens of slaves overboard to maintain submission, as expensive as it might be.

*This does not in any way the horrors of the African Slave Trade or make excuses for the crimes of slave traders

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Why did the blacks not fight before they were brought to America as slaves?

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Answer (1 of 3): They did Slaves were not caught en masse by unstoppable Europeans who ran around Africa enslaving thousands upon thousands of helpless Africans. Europeans were (usually) mere traders* who showed up at a few coastal trading posts. The actual slaving was carried out by local Afri...

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I wonder what would slaves do when they got rebellious.

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I wonder how slavery affected enslaved families?

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How Slavery Affected African American Families, Freedom’s Story, TeacherServe®, National Humanities Center

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How Slavery Affected African American Families

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I wonder if sea animals ever just waited for slave to jump as food? =D

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I wonder if any slaves still committed suicide because they didn't want to go into slavery?

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I wonder if any of the ships were taken over by the slaves?

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With Black people all over the world getting majority of their education from European and American-centered institutions, many may think that our African ancestors were completely submissive on the ship vessels on their way to the Americas during the Trans Atlantic slave trade. That is far from the truth.

The truth is, roughly 15 percent to 20 percent of the ships which left Africa never made it to the "new world." Thousands of vessels were overtaken by the enslaved Africans on board. During some of these takeovers, these Africans, who were sometimes warriors, rose up and killed every white man on these ships. Some of these ships were sailed back to Africa by the once captured men, thousands of the ships disappeared at sea, and many never made it far from the African shores before being overrun.

Below are 5 great examples of these revolts:

The Creole Ship UprisingOn Oct. 27, 1841, the vessel ship the Creole sailed from Richmond, Va., with 135 enslaved Africans, bound for New Orleans. On board was Madison Washington, who had escaped slavery to Canada in 1840 at age 25, but was later captured and sold when he returned to Virginia in search of his wife Susan.

Unbeknown to Washington, Susan was among the captives on board the Creole. S usan had been considered the faithful servant of her mistress, and traveled to places like White Sulphur Springs and Norfolk on vacations. She was sold because her mistress believed she knew where Washington had escaped to and refused to reveal his whereabouts.

During the trip, at least 14 African men unshackled themselves in the forward hold of the ship. They waited for the right moment to take action, moving to the quarter deck, picking up weapons as they moved along. Officers and crew were quickly overcome in the surprise attack. Washington reportedly "plunged into [the fight] without any care for his own preservation or safety." By one account, Washington and the men clubbed some of crew members to death and held the rest of the them captive. With loaded muskets, the Africans took command of the Creole with Washington as captain. He demanded that the ship be steered into British territory, which at the time had already abandoned slavery.

On the ship, enslaved women were kept in a different quarters than the men, so it was not until after Susan was set free from her shackles that she saw her husband aboard the Creole. The two reportedly ran to each other, tearfully hugging as they wept while their fellow-survivors cheered.

The Creole later arrived at Nassau, New Providence, where they were all set free by British authorities.

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5 Slave Ship Uprisings Other Than Amistad

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With Black people all over the world getting majority of their education from European and American-centered institutions, many may think that our African ancestors were completely submissive on the ship vessels on their way to the Americas during the Trans Atlantic slave trade. That is far from the truth.

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I wonder if slaves worked while in the ship.

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▼ Primary Sources ▼

An estimated 15 million Africans were transported to the Americas between 1540 and 1850. To maximize their profits slave merchants carried as many slaves as was physically possible on their ships. By the 17th century slaves could be purchased in Africa for about $25 and sold in the Americas for about $150. After the slave-trade was declared illegal, prices went much higher. Even with a death-rate of 50 per cent, merchants could expect to make tremendous profits from the trade.

The journey from Africa to the West Indies or North America Usually took about two months. One study shows that the slave ship provided an average of about seven square feet per slave. Gad Heuman and James Walvin, the authors of The Atlantic Slave Trade (2003) have argued that: "About half of all deaths were from stomach complaints (notably dysentery) and fevers brought on board from Africa, and made worse by the ships' conditions. A substantial proportion of slave deaths took place on the African coast, in the period when the captain was trying to fill his ship's holds with other slaves. The white crews of the slave ships also suffered unusually high death rates (again, worst on the African coast), though that too declined with time. In addition, there were always the unpredictable attacks of diseases and ailments which could cause havoc at sea, in the filth of the slave quarters.... We know of rebellions on more than 300 voyages, and of violent incidents on the African coast."

Thomas Phillips, a slave-ship captain, wrote an account of his activities in A Journal of a Voyage (1746): "I have been informed that some commanders have cut off the legs or arms of the most willful slaves, to terrify the rest, for they believe that, if they lose a member, they cannot return home again: I was advised by some of my officers to do the same, but I could not be persuaded to entertain the least thought of it, much less to put in practice such barbarity and cruelty to poor creatures who, excepting their want of Christianity and true religion (their misfortune more than fault), are as much the works of God's hands, and no doubt as dear to him as ourselves."

John Newton was a slave-captain between 1747 and 1754. He wrote in Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade (1787): "With our ships, the great object is, to be full. When the ship is there, it is thought desirable, she should take as many as possible. The cargo of a vessel of a hundred tons, or little more, is calculated to purchase from two hundred and twenty to two hundred and fifty slaves. Their lodging-rooms below the deck, which are three (for the men, the boys, and the women) besides a place for the sick, are sometimes more than five feet high, and sometimes less; and this height is divided towards the middle, for the slaves lie in two rows, one above the other, on each side of the ship, close to each other, like books upon a shelf. I have known them so close, that the shelf would not, easily, contain one more."

Working on a slave-ship could be very profitable. James Irving was a surgeon on the ship Vulture that sailed to Jamaica in November 1782. It has been argued by Suzanne Schwarz:, the author of Slave Captain: The Career of James Irving in the Liverpool Slave Trade (1995): "Assuming that Irving was paid £4 wages a month, together with the value of two privilege slaves and one shilling head money for each of the 592 slaves delivered alive to the West Indies, it is likely that Irving earned approximately £140 from this voyage. This is consistent with the average voyage earnings of slave-ship surgeons in the late eighteenth century, which were typically between £100 and £150."

In 1787 Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp formed the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Of the twelve members on the committee, nine were Quakers. Influential figures such as John Wesley and Josiah Wedgwood gave their support to the campaign. Later they persuaded William Wilberforce, the MP for Hull, to be their spokesman in the House of Commons. Clarkson was given the responsibility of collecting information to support the abolition of the slave trade. It is estimated that he was to ride some 35,000 miles in the next seven years. His work included interviewing 20,000 sailors and obtaining equipment used on the slave-ships such as iron handcuffs, leg-shackles, thumb screws, instruments for forcing open slave's jaws and branding irons. The misery which the slaves endure in consequence of too close a stowage is not easy to describe.

In 1787 Clarkson published his pamphlet, A Summary View of the Slave Trade and of the Probable Consequences of Its Abolition. He argued: "I have heard them (slaves) frequently complaining of heat, and have seen them fainting, almost dying for want of water. Their situation is worse in rainy weather. We do everything for them in our power. In all the vessels in which I have sailed in the slave trade, we never covered the gratings with a tarpawling, but made a tarpawling awning over the booms, but some were still panting for breath."

Slaves also began to publish their accounts of being aboard slave-ships. Ottobah Cugoano was only a child when he was taken from Africa: "We were taken in the ship that came for us, to another that was ready to sail from Cape Coast. When we were put into the ship, we saw several black merchants coming on board, but we were all drove into our holes, and not suffered to speak to any of them. In this situation we continued several days in sight of our native land. And when we found ourselves at last taken away, death was more preferable than life; and a plan was concerted amongst us, that we might burn and blow up the ship, and to perish all together in the flames: but we were betrayed by one of our own countrywomen, who slept with some of the headmen of the ship, for it was common for the dirty filthy sailors to take the African women and lie upon their bodies; but the men were chained and pent up in holes. It was the women and boys which were to burn the ship, with the approbation and groans of the rest; though that was prevented, the discovery was likewise a cruel bloody scene."

Olaudah Equiano was captured and sold as a slave in Benin. He wrote about his experiences in The Life of Olaudah Equiano the African (1789): "I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a greeting in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life; so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across, I think, the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely. The white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner; for I had never seen among my people such instances of brutal cruelty. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. The air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died. The wretched situation was again aggravated by the chains, now unsupportable, and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable."

A House of Commons committee in 1788 discovered that one slave-ship, The Brookes, was originally built to to carry a maximum of 451 people, but was carrying over 600 slaves from Africa to the Americas. "Chained together by their hands and feet, the slaves had little room to move." It has been estimated that only about half of the slaves taken from Africa became effective workers in the Americas. A large number of slaves died on the journey from diseases such as smallpox and dysentery. Others committed suicide by refusing to eat. Many of the slaves were crippled for life as a consequence of the way they were chained up on the ship.

Thomas Clarkson met Alexander Falcolnbridge, a former surgeon on board a slave ship. Falconbridge was willing to testify publicly about the way slaves were treated. He accompanied Clarkson to Liverpool where he acted as his bodyguard. Clarkson later called him "an athletic and resolute-looking man". In 1790 Falconbridge gave evidence to a privy council committee, and underwent four days of questions by a House of Commons committee. He explained how badly the slaves were treated on the ships: "The men, on being brought aboard the ship, are immediately fastened together, two and two, by handcuffs on their wrists and by irons rivetted on their legs. They are then sent down between the decks and placed in an apartment partitioned off for that purpose.... They are frequently stowed so close, as to admit of no other position than lying on their sides. Nor will the height between decks, unless directly under the grating, permit the indulgence of an erect posture; especially where there are platforms, which is generally the case. These platforms are a kind of shelf, about eight or nine feet in breadth, extending from the side of the ship toward the centre. They are placed nearly midway between the decks, at the distance of two or three feet from each deck, Upon these the Negroes are stowed in the same manner as they are on the deck underneath."

Thomas Trotter, a physician working on the slave-ship, Brookes, told the committee: "The slaves that are out of irons are locked spoonways and locked to one another. It is the duty of the first mate to see them stowed in this manner every morning; those which do not get quickly into their places are compelled by the cat and, such was the situation when stowed in this manner, and when the ship had much motion at sea, they were often miserably bruised against the deck or against each other. I have seen their breasts heaving and observed them draw their breath, with all those laborious and anxious efforts for life which we observe in expiring animals subjected by experiment to bad air of various kinds."

The slave-ship Brookes (1788)

James Irving worked on slave-ships for nine years. It has been claimed by his biographer that "during his career he was involved in a number of voyages accounting for the delivery of some 3,000 slaves to the Americas". In May 1786 Irving sailed to Tobago. He wrote to his wife that "our black cattle are intolerably noisy and I'm almost melted in the midst of five or six hundred of them." David Richardson has argued: "Irving's insensitvity suggests that, even at a time when moral outrage in Britain at the enslavement of Africans was spreading, participation in the slave trade was still capable of promoting racism and blinding otherwise apparently quite caring individuals to the appalling suffering that they were helping to inflict on others."

Thomas Clarkson pointed out: "Men in their first voyages usually disliked the trade; and, if they were happy enough then to abandon it, they usually escaped the disease of a hardened heart. But if they want a second and a third time, their disposition became gradually changed... Now, if we consider that persons could not easily become captains (and to these the barbarities were generally chargeable by actual perpetration, or by consent) till they had been two or three voyages in this employ, we shall see the reason why it would be almost a miracle, if they, who were thus employed in it, were not rather to become monsters, than to continue to be men."

Some captains, like Hugh Crow, agreed with the regulation of the slave-trade. However, he rejected the criticism of William Wilberforce: "His proposition... that badges should be worn by African captains, who toiled at the risk of their lives for the accommodation of our colonies, and that he and others might enjoy their ease at home, was impertinent as well as ungracious; and his regulation that captains should land their cargoes without losing a certain number of black slaves, was absolutely ridiculous. Not a word was said about the white slaves, the poor sailors; these might die without regret.... And with respect to the insinuation thrown out, in this country, that African captains sometimes threw their slaves overboard, it is unworthy of notice, for it goes to impute an absolute disregard of self interest, as well as of all humanity. In the African trade, as in all others, there were individuals bad as well as good, and it is but justice to discriminate, and not condemn the whole for the delinquencies of a few."

John Newton wrote in Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade (1787): "Epidemical fevers and fluxes, which fill the ship with noisome and noxious effluvia, often break out, infect the seamen likewise, and the oppressors, and the oppressed, fall by the same stroke. I believe, nearly one half of the slaves on board, have, sometimes, died; and that the loss of a third part, in these circumstances, is not unusual. The ship, in which I was mate, left the coast with two hundred and eighteen slaves on board; and though we were not much affected by epidemical disorders, I find, by my journal of that voyage (now before me) that we buried sixty-two on our passage to South Carolina, exclusive of those which died before we left the coast, of which I have no account. I believe, upon an average between the more healthy, and the more sickly voyages, and including all contingencies, One fourth of the whole purchase may be allotted to the article of mortality. That is, if the English ships purchase sixty thousand slaves annually, upon the whole extent of the coast, the annual loss of lives cannot be much less than fifteen thousand."

In 1796 Mungo Park joined an American slave ship, Charlestown, bound for South Carolina. He later recalled the journal: "The number of slaves received on board this vessel... was one hundred and thirty; of whom about twenty-five had been, I suppose, of free condition in Africa, as most of them, being Bushreens, could write a little Arabic. Nine of them had become captives in the religious war between Abdulkader and Damel.... My conversation with them, in their native language, gave them great comfort; and as the surgeon was dead, I consented to act in a medical capacity in his room for the remainder of the voyage. They had in truth need of every consolation in my power to bestow; not that I observed any wanton acts of cruelty practised either by the master or the seamen towards them; but the mode of confining and securing Negroes in the American slave ships, owing chiefly to the weakness of their crews, being abundantly more rigid and severe than in British vessels employed in the same traffic, made these poor creatures to suffer greatly, and a general sickness prevailed amongst them. Besides the three who died on the Gambia, and six or eight while we remained at Goree, eleven perished at sea, and many of the survivors were reduced to a very weak and emaciated condition."

Stephen D. Behrendt, carried out a study of 1,709 muster rolls for Liverpool slave voyages between 1780 and 1807. He discovered that 17.8 per cent of original crew died (10,439 out of 58,778). The time spent on the African coast was particularly dangerous. Although large numbers of men died from drowning, Behrendt discovered that various types of fevers accounted for the majority of deaths. Gastrointestinal diseases including flux, dysentery and diarrhoea accounted for 11 per cent of the sample.

After William Wilberforce retired in 1825, Thomas Fowell Buxton became the leader of the campaign in the House of Commons. Buxton, with the help of Thomas Clarkson, set about collecting information about slavery and compiling demographic statistics. In a speech on 23rd May 1826 he described the conditions on board a slave-ship: "The voyage, the horrors of which are beyond description. For example, the mode of packing. The hold of a slave vessel is from two to four feet high. It is filled with as many human beings as it will contain. They are made to sit down with their heads between their knees: first, a line is placed close to the side of the vessel; then another line, and then the packer, armed with a heavy club, strikes at the feet of this last line in order to make them press as closely as possible against those behind... Thus it is suffocating for want of air, starving for want of food, parched with thirst for want of water, these poor creatures are compelled to perform a voyage of fourteen hundred miles. No wonder the mortality is dreadful!"

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We were taken in the ship that came for us, to another that was ready to sail from Cape Coast. When we were put into the ship, we saw several black merchants coming on board, but we were all drove into our holes, and not suffered to speak to any of them. In this situation we continued several days in sight of our native land. And when we found ourselves at last taken away, death was more preferable than life; and a plan was concerted amongst us, that we might burn and blow up the ship, and to perish all together in the flames: but we were betrayed by one of our own countrywomen, who slept with some of the headmen of the ship, for it was common for the dirty filthy sailors to take the African women and lie upon their bodies; but the men were chained and pent up in holes. It was the women and boys which were to burn the ship, with the approbation and groans of the rest; though that was prevented, the discovery was likewise a cruel bloody scene.

But it would be needless to give a description of all the horrible scenes which we saw, and the base treatment which we met with in this dreadful captive situation, as the similar cases of thousands, which suffer by this infernal traffic, are well known. Let it suffice to say that I was thus lost to my dear indulgent parents and relations, and they to me. All my help was cries and tears, and these could not avail, nor suffered long, till one succeeding woe and dread swelled up another. Brought from a state of innocence and freedom, and, in a barbarous and cruel manner, conveyed to a state of horror and slavery, this abandoned situation may be easier conceived than described.

The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast, was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled, and tossed up to see if I were sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me.

I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a greeting in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life; so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across, I think, the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely.

The white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner; for I had never seen among my people such instances of brutal cruelty. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us.

The air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died. The wretched situation was again aggravated by the chains, now unsupportable, and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.

Captain Winton told me in the course of our voyage, that, in the early part of his experience in the slave-trade, he had seen slaves where they were literally packed on the top of each other; and consequently, from ill air, confinement, and scanty or unwholesome provision, disease was generated to such an extent that in several cases he had known only one-half survive to the end of the voyage; and these, as he termed it, in a very unmarketable condition. He found, therefore, that, by allowing them what he called sufficient room and good provisions, with kind treatment, his speculations turned out much better in regard to the amount of dollars received; and that was all he cared for.

After being about 15 days out to sea a heavy squall struck the ship. The poor slaves below, altogether unprepared for such an occurrence, were mostly thrown to the side, where they lay heaped on the top of each other; their fetters rendered many of them helpless, and before they could be arranged in their proper places, and relived from their pressure on each other, it was found that 15 of them were smothered or crushed to death. The captain seemed considerably vexed; but the only grievance to him was the sudden loss of some five or six thousand dollars.

(4) Thomas Phillips, a slave-ship captain, wrote an account of his activities in A Journal of a Voyage (1746)

I have been informed that some commanders have cut off the legs or arms of the most willful slaves, to terrify the rest, for they believe that, if they lose a member, they cannot return home again: I was advised by some of my officers to do the same, but I could not be persuaded to entertain the least thought of it, much less to put in practice such barbarity and cruelty to poor creatures who, excepting their want of Christianity and true religion (their misfortune more than fault), are as much the works of God's hands, and no doubt as dear to him as ourselves.

The misery which the slaves endure in consequence of too close a stowage is not easy to describe. I have heard them frequently complaining of heat, and have seen them fainting, almost dying for want of water. Their situation is worse in rainy weather. We do everything for them in our power. In all the vessels in which I have sailed in the slave trade, we never covered the gratings with a tarpawling, but made a tarpawling awning over the booms, but some were still panting for breath.

I have, to the best, of my knowledge, pointed out the principal sources, of that immense supply of slaves, which furnishes so large an exportation every year. If all that are taken on board the ships, were to survive the voyage, and be landed in good order, possibly the English, French, and Dutch islands, and colonies, would be soon overstocked, and fewer ships would sail to the Coast. But a large abatement must be made for mortality. After what I have already said of their treatment, I shall now, that I am again to consider them on board the ships, confine myself to this point.

In the Portuguese ships, which trade from Brazil to the Gold Coast and Angola, I believe, a heavy mortality is not frequent. The slaves have room, they are not put in irons, (I speak from information only) and are humanely treated.

With our ships, the great object is, to be full. When the ship is there, it is thought desirable, she should take as many as possible. The cargo of a vessel of a hundred tons, or little more, is calculated to purchase from two hundred and twenty to two hundred and fifty slaves. Their lodging-rooms below the

deck, which are three (for the men, the boys, and the women) besides a place for the sick, are sometimes more than five feet high, and sometimes less; and this height is divided towards the middle, for the slaves lie in two rows, one above the other, on each side of the ship, close to each other, like books upon a shelf. I have known them so close, that the shelf would not, easily, contain one more.

And I have known a white man sent down among the men, to lay them in these rows to the greatest advantage, so that as little space as possible might be lost. Let it be observed, that the poor creatures, thus cramped for want of room, are likewise in irons, for the most part both hands and feet, and two together, which makes it difficult for them to turn or move, to attempt either to rise or to lie down, without hurting themselves, or each other. Nor is the motion of the ship, especially her heeling, or stoop on one side, when under sail, to be admitted; for this, as they lie athwart, or across the ship, adds to the uncomfortableness of their lodging, especially to those who lie on the leeward, or leaning side of the vessel.

The heat and the smell of these rooms, when the weather will not admit of the slaves being brought upon deck, and of having their rooms cleaned every day, would be, almost, insupportable, to a person not accustomed to them. If the slaves and their rooms can be constantly aired, and they are not detained too long on board, perhaps there are not many die; but the contrary is often their lot. They are kept down, by the weather, to breathe a hot and corrupted air, sometimes for a week: this, added to the galling of their irons, and the despondency which seizes their spirits, when thus confined, soon becomes fatal. And every morning, perhaps, more instances than one are found, of the living and the dead, like the Captives of Mezentius, fastened together.

Epidemical fevers and fluxes, which fill the ship with noisome and noxious effluvia, often break out, infect the seamen likewise, and the oppressors, and the oppressed, fall by the same stroke. I believe, nearly one half of the slaves on board, have, sometimes, died; and that the loss of a third part, in these circumstances, is not unusual. The ship, in which I was mate, left the coast with two hundred and eighteen slaves on board; and though we were not much affected by epidemical disorders, I find, by my journal of that voyage (now before me) that we buried sixty-two on our passage to South Carolina, exclusive of those which died before we left the coast, of which I have no account.

I believe, upon an average between the more healthy, and the more sickly voyages, and including all contingencies, One fourth of the whole purchase may be allotted to the article of mortality. That is, if the English ships purchase sixty thousand slaves annually, upon the whole extent of the coast, the annual loss of lives cannot be much less than fifteen thousand.

(7) Dr. Thomas Trotter, a physician working on the slave-ship, Brookes, was interviewed by a House of Commons committee in 1790. This is how he replied when he was asked if the "slaves had room to turn themselves".

No. The slaves that are out of irons are locked spoonways and locked to one another. It is the duty of the first mate to see them stowed in this manner every morning; those which do not get quickly into their places are compelled by the cat and, such was the situation when stowed in this manner, and when the ship had much motion at sea, they were often miserably bruised against the deck or against each other. I have seen their breasts heaving and observed them draw their breath, with all those laborious and anxious efforts for life which we observe in expiring animals subjected by experiment to bad air of various kinds.

From the time of the arrival of the ships to their departure, which is usually near three months, scarce a day passes without some negroes being purchased, and carried on board; sometimes in small, and sometimes in larger numbers. The whole number taken on board, depends, in a great measure, on circumstances. In a voyage I once made, our stock of merchandize was exhausted in the purchase of about 380 negroes, which was expected to have procured 500. The number of English and French ships then at Bonny, had so far raised the price of negroes, as to occasion this difference.... I was once upon the coast of Angola, also, when there had not been a slave ship at the river Ambris for five years previous to our arrival, although a place to which many usually resort every year. The failure of the trade for that period, as far as we could learn, had no other effect than to restore peace and confidence among the natives, which, upon the arrival of ships, is immediately destroyed by the inducement then held forth in the purchase of slaves.....

Previous to my being in this employ I entertained a belief, as many others have done, that the kings and principal men bred Negroes for sale as we do cattle. During the different times I was in the country, I took no little pains to satisfy myself in this particular; but notwithstanding I made many inquires, I was not able to obtain the least intelligence of this being the case.... All the information I could procure confirms me in the belief that to kidnapping, and to crimes (and many of these fabricated as a pretext) the slave trade owes its chief support....

No European vessel had arrived at Gambia for many months previous to my return from the interior; and as the rainy season was now setting in, I persuaded Karfa to return to his people at Jindey. He parted with me on the 14th with great tenderness; but as I had little hopes of being able to quit Africa for the remainder of the year, I told him, as the fact was, that I expected to see him again before my departure. In this, however, I was luckily disappointed; and my narrative now hastens to its conclusion; for on the 15th, the ship Charlestown, an American vessel, commanded by Mr. Charles Harris, entered the river. She came for slaves, intending to touch at Goree to fill up; and to proceed from thence to South Carolina. As the European merchants on the Gambia had at this time a great many slaves on hand, they agreed with the captain to purchase the whole of his cargo, consisting chiefly of rum and tobacco, and deliver him slaves to the amount, in the course of two days. This afforded me such an opportunity of returning (though by a circuitous route) to my native country, as I thought was not to be neglected. I therefore immediately engaged my passage in this vessel for America; and having taken leave of Dr. Laidley, to whose kindness I was so largely indebted, and my other friends on the river, I embarked at Kaye on the 17th day of June.

The number of slaves received on board this vessel, both on the Gambia and at Goree, was one hundred and thirty; of whom about twenty-five had been, I suppose, of free condition in Africa, as most of them, being Bushreens, could write a little Arabic. Nine of them had become captives in the religious war between Abdulkader and Damel, mentioned in the latter part of the preceding chapter; two of the others had seen me as I passed through Bondou, and many of them had heard of me in the interior countries. My conversation with them, in their native language, gave them great comfort; and as the surgeon was dead, I consented to act in a medical capacity in his room for the remainder of the voyage. They had in truth need of every consolation in my power to bestow; not that I observed any wanton acts of cruelty practised either by the master or the seamen towards them; but the mode of confining and securing Negroes in the American slave ships, owing chiefly to the weakness of their crews, being abundantly more rigid and severe than in British vessels employed in the same traffic, made these poor creatures to suffer greatly, and a general sickness prevailed amongst them. Besides the three who died on the Gambia, and six or eight while we remained at Goree, eleven perished at sea, and many of the survivors were reduced to a very weak and emaciated condition.

In the midst of these distresses, the vessel, after having been three weeks at sea, became so extremely leaky, as to require constant exertion at the pumps. It was found necessary, therefore, to take some of the ablest of the Negro men out of irons, and employ them in this labour; in which they were often worked beyond their strength. This produced a complication, of miseries not easily to be described. We were, however, relieved much sooner than I expected; for the leak continuing to gain upon us, notwithstanding our utmost exertions to clear the vessel, the seamen insisted on bearing away for the West Indies, as affording the only chance of saving our lives. Accordingly, after some objections on the part of the master, we directed our course for Antigua, and fortunately made that island in about thirty-five days after our departure from Goree. Yet even at this juncture we narrowly escaped destruction; for on approaching the north-west side of the island, we struck on the Diamond Rock, and got into St John's harbour with great difficulty. The vessel was afterwards condemned as unfit for sea, and the slaves, as I have heard, were ordered to be sold for the benefit of the owners.

(10) James Irving, letter to Mary Irving (2nd December 1786)

We have been in Tobago since the 25th November and have not yet disposed of any of our very disagreeable cargo... I'm nearly wearied of this unnatural accursed trade, and think... when convenience suits of adopting some other mode of life, although I'm fully sensible and aware of the difficulties attending any new undertaking, yet I will at least look around me.

The voyage, the horrors of which are beyond description. For example, the mode of packing. The hold of a slave vessel is from two to four feet high. It is filled with as many human beings as it will contain. They are made to sit down with their heads between their knees: first, a line is placed close to the side of the vessel; then another line, and then the packer, armed with a heavy club, strikes at the feet of this last line in order to make them press as closely as possible against those behind. And so the packing goes on; until, to use the expression of an eyewitness, "they are wedged together in one mass of living corruption". Thus it is suffocating for want of air, starving for want of food, parched with thirst for want of water, these poor creatures are compelled to perform a voyage of fourteen hundred miles. No wonder the mortality is dreadful!

There had undoubtedly been a number of slave deaths before reaching the African coast - on the protracted movement of slaves within Africa - though the evidence for this is sparse. We also know that a considerable number of slaves died after landfall in the Americas, not surprising perhaps given the levels of sickness on board the Atlantic vessels. What is clear is that European and American slave traders generally sought to preserve the lives and health of their African slaves. They were, after all - and however crude it may seem - a valuable investment. Moreover, many slave traders tried to improve the shipboard conditions, with the result that slave mortality fell on all European and American ships over time. Yet there remains the unavoidable fact that slaves continued to die at a rate which would have horrified shippers of military or emigrant Europeans. And they died "not only from disease and accident, but from rebellion, suicide, and natural disasters". We know of rebellions on more than 300 voyages, and of violent incidents on the African coast. There were some 443 shipwrecks of slave ships, while more than 800 vessels were seized by privateers. In the nineteenth century 1,871 slave ships were impounded by anti-slave-trade patrols. Yet the great majority of slaves packed into the slave ships on the African coast arrived, whatever their condition, for sale to the slave owners of the Americas.

Landfall brought relief to the crew but almost certainly more fears and uncertainties among the Africans. They were sold as soon as was possible, having been prepared on board ship to look fit for sale and work. They were sold either on the ship or at a local market. Sicker slaves, of course, took longer to sell. The slave traders usually accepted a percentage of the agreed price, the rest to be paid later, normally in local produce. Contrary to popular belief, the slave ships returned to Europe not loaded with colonial produce but often in ballast (normal cargo vessels shipped colonial produce back to Europe), and with a greatly reduced crew, many of whom were shabbily treated and simply paid off in the Americas. On return to Britain (or elsewhere), the slave captain's main task was securing repayment on his outlay, and, over the next few years, selling goods arriving from the Americas from people who had bought his slave cargo. It was a protracted business that might last up to six years. And yet there seems to have been no reluctance among shippers and investors to involve themselves in the Atlantic slave trade. They clearly thought that it had profitable potential.

Despite some highly inflated estimates, the slave trade yielded profits averaging about 10 per cent. And there seem to have been important linkages between the African trade and early European industry. The slave trade made use of and expanded complex systems of international finance and credit, and became central to a genuinely global economy which linked the trades of Asia to those of Africa, Europe and the Americas. At the heart of this Atlantic slave system was a consumer revolution which saw Europeans consuming the crops from the slave colonies of the Americas in enormous volumes. All this was made possible by the imported Africans. In the words of Herbert Klein, "Until European immigrants replaced them in the late nineteenth century, it was African slaves who enabled this consumption revolution to occur. Without that labor most of America would never have developed at the pace it did."

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▼ Primary Sources ▼ An estimated 15 million Africans were transported to the Americas between 1540 and 1850. To maximize their profits slave merchants carried as many slaves as was physically possible on their ships. By the 17th century slaves could be purchased in Africa for about $25 and sold in the Americas for about $150.

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I wonder why the wives of a slave owner punished innocent slave women for being sexually abused by their master?

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Slave women were forced to comply with sexual advances by their masters on a very regular basis. Consequences of resistance often came in the form of physical beatings; thus, an enormous number of slaves became concubines for these men. Most often the masters were already bound in matrimony, which caused tension and hatred between the slave and the mistress of the house. Many "mulatto" or racially mixed children also resulted from these relations. Because the "status of the child" followed that of his or her mother, the child of a white man would not be freed based upon patriarchal genealogy. These children also became a sore reminder for the mistress of her husbands infidelity.

The following passages sketch the nature of the master-slave relations, and their consequences:

"Maria was a thirteen-year-old house servant. One day, receiving no response to her call, the mistress began searching the house for her. Finally, she opened the parlor door, and there was the child with her master. The master ran out of the room, mounted his horse and rode off to escape, 'though well he knew that [his wife's] full fury would fall upon the young head of his victim.' The mistress beat the child and locked her up in a smokehouse. For two weeks the girl was constantly whipped. Some of the elderly servants attempted to plead with the mistress on Maria's behalf, and even hinted that 'it was mass'r that was to blame.' The mistress's reply was typical: 'She'll know better in the future. After I've done with her, she'll never do the like again, through ignorance'" (Stanley Felstein, Once a Slave: The Slaves' View of Slavery, p.132).

Here, the mistress was able to take out her aggressions on the girl rather than the guilty master. I suppose we could empathize with the frustration and betrayal these wives felt, but the outlet of their aggressions often became the slave girl. Women in the south were quite powerless. Because the option of divorce was not readily available, the mistresses often times punished the slave women for their husbands' wrong-doings.

The slave husband also had little control over master-female slave sexual relations. Although a conjugal bond existed, the slave wife could still be used to fulfill the master's desires. We can obviously relate with the helpless hostility slave husbands must have felt in such a situation. Sometimes the relations would become so striking that the husband would release his anger on the master in the form of violence.

"I was born June 15th, 1789, in Charles County, Maryland, on a farm belonging to Mr. Francis Newman, about a mile from Port Tobacco. My mother was a slave of Dr. Josiah McPherson, but hired to the Mr. Newman to whom my father belonged. The only incident I can remembered which occurred while my mother continued on Mr. Newman's farm, was the appearance one day of my father with his head bloody and his back lacerated. He was beside himself with mingled rage and suffering. The explanation I picked up from the conversation of others only partially explained the matter to my mind; but as I grew older I understood it all. It seemed the overseer had sent my mother away from the other field hands to a retired place, and after trying persuasion in vain, had resorted to force to accomplish a brutal purpose. Her screams aroused my father at his distant work, and running up, he found his wife struggling with the man. Furious at the sight, he sprung upon him like a tiger. In a moment the overseer was down, and, mastered by rage, my father would have killed him but for the entreaties of my mother, and the overseer's own promise that nothing should ever be said of the matter. The promise was kept- - like most promises of the cowardly and debased- - as long as the danger lasted" ( Josiah Henson, Uncle Tom's Story of His Life: An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson )

Often, children were conceived from master-slave relations. Although the masters would not admit their paternity, the fair skinned children were and obvious clue for the inquiring public. Sometimes paternal manumission where a master frees his children out of fatherly affections would occur.
"Louisa Picquet had even less choice. Interviewed after she was set free, she recalled: Mr. Williams told me what he bought me for soon as we started for New Orleans. He said if I behave myself he'd treat me well; but, if not, he'd whip me almost to death. He was over forty; I guess pretty near fifty.
Q. Had you any children while in New Orleans?

A. Yes; I had four

Q. Who was their father?

A. Mr. Williams.

Q. Was it known that he was living with you?

A. Everybody knew I was housekeeper, but he never let on that he was the father of my children. I did all the work in his house nobody there but me and the children. When he had company, gentlemen folks, he took them to the hotel.

When Mr. Williams told me what he bought me for I thought, now I shall be committin' adultery, and there's no chance for me, and I'll have to die and be lost. I had this trouble with my soul the whole time. I begin to pray that he might die, so that I might get religion. It was some time before he got sick, He said that if I would promise him that I would go to New York, he would leave me and the children free. In about a month, he died. I didn't cry or nothin', for I was glad he was dead. I was left free, and that made me so glad I could hardly believe it myself" (Dorothy Sterling, ed., We are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century, p. 24)

Think about it:Rape and other forms of sexual exploitation are still a part of todays society, but hidden much better than those master-slave relations of antebellum America. Do you think these women became emotionally frozen because of these relationships? Or, do you think the advancements served to ignite more resistance? These relationships often persisted for years; they were not isolated events. What are some parallels in todays society?

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Slave women were forced to comply with sexual advances by their masters on a very regular basis. Consequences of resistance often came in the form of physical beatings; thus, an enormous number of slaves became concubines for these men.

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I wonder if slaves had kids how would the parents provide their kids?

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I wonder if slaves were able to get sicknesses and diseases from being 'punished' and hurt.

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I wonder if slaves were only black people.

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I wonder if some slaves thought that being a slave was their purpose in life.

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For those who are wondering about the retro title of this black-history series, please take a moment to learn about historian Joel A. Rogers, author of the 1934 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof, to whom these "amazing facts" are an homage.
Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 39: Why did free black people living in the South before the end of the Civil War stay there?
Like most of you, I suspect, I was raised to believe three things about slavery in America: first, that slaves who gained their freedom did so by escaping on the Underground Railroad to the North; second, that all of the black people living in the South before and during the Civil War were slaves; and third, that all of the free black people in pre-Civil War America lived in the North. If any of us knew anything at all with certainty about the history of slavery in our country, it was these three things, right?

But in a previous column we learned that, quite surprisingly, this is not the way it was. In fact, the Free Negro population (to use the contemporary term for them) in the South before the Civil War actually outnumbered that in the North by a substantial margin. Of the 488,070 free African-American people in the United States in 1860 - 11 percent of the total black population - according to the federal census, some 35,766 more lived in the slave-holding South than in the North, as analyzed in Ira Berlin's magisterial study, Slaves Without Mastersand more recently in Eva Sheppard Wolf's graceful book Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia From the Revolution to Nat Turner's Rebellion. Just as remarkably, the vast majority of these free Southern black people stayed put in the Confederate states even during the Civil War. How was this possible?

As you can imagine, the comments that column received were wide-ranging. "White people back then made the Freeman's life a living hell. It was almost better for them to be slaves than to be free," one reader responded. Another took a rather different view: "All the talk about slavery all these years and now we are finding out it wasn't nearly as bad ... a lot of the blacks were actually free." But remember, while almost half a million free black people before the Civil War is no insignificant number, 89 percent of all African Americans in 1860 remained enslaved.

Moreover, the plight of the Free Negroes, as I pointed out in the previous column, could be quite perilous, leading some people in places such as New Orleans and Pensacola to flee just before and during the Civil War to Mexico, Haiti and Cuba. Some who were living in border cities such as Baltimore chose to move to Northern cities such as Philadelphia and New York, only to return after the War was won.

Still another reader points out, with a great deal of common sense, that given the fact that Free Negroes were sometimes given land by their masters upon being granted their freedom, we shouldn't be surprised to learn these facts: "I'm not really sure why it's so confusing," this reader added, "moving is hard." And moving away from loved ones, whether slave or free, is even harder.I think this was true in the case of my own freed ancestors, on two of my own family lines, living for about a century in the slave state of Virginia (and from 1823 on another line) rather than resettling in the North. Ira Berlin helps us to understand why the vast majority of these former slaves stayed in the slave states.
So, Why Did They Stay?
One of the most important reasons Free Negroes stayed in the South, Berlin suggests, was uncertainty: They couldn't be so sure things would be better for them in the North. In many cases they were right, especially in states that restricted the admission of free blacks, among them Ohio, Iowa, Indiana and Illinois (the last two in their state constitutions).

Interestingly, an antebellum case from Massachusetts, Roberts v. Boston (1849), upholding segregation in Boston's public schools, was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its dreaded 1896 opinion reinforcing Jim Crow segregation, Plessy v. Ferguson. Even though the Massachusetts decision was later overruled by legislative action, the point was made. "In the North," Berlin writes, "blacks were despised and degraded as in the South." (For more, see James and Lois Horton's invaluable book, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860).

But comparative dread was not the only reason that most free blacks remained in the South. At the top of the list was family unity. After all, when a slave family was split up, often the free members remained close, attempting to raise the funds needed to buy the remaining members of the family. They built churches in their communities, so they worshipped, and worked, in proximity with family members and friends who were still slaves, sometimes even in the same fields and workshops. And while they "were not a revolutionary caste," according to Berlin, many did what they could to "help individual slaves to ease the burden of bondage or escape it altogether."

Another reason they stayed: economic opportunity. While most free blacks in the South remained tied to the land, a number, especially in cities, acquired skills that allowed them to earn and own property as artisans and craftsmen. Over time, some trades became so associated with free blacks that they were known as "nigger trades," Berlin writes. On those trades free blacks had a virtual lock, in part because whites didn't want the work or because blacks were willing to accept cheaper wages for it (often to compete with slaves).

In Richmond, Va., in 1860, for example, Berlin shows that there were 174 skilled free blacks, and of those, 19 percent were barbers, 16 percent were plasterers and another 16 percent were carpenters (others included blacksmiths, shoemakers and bricklayers). In Charleston, S.C., in the same year, there were 404 skilled free black craftsmen, dominated by carpenters (33 percent). Working-class whites, especially immigrants, resented them, with some refusing to work by their side. Of course, of all places of work in the South, Berlin reminds us, "Brothels were perhaps the most integrated."

In some ways, it seemed, the more that white Southerners (especially those who found it impossible to reconcile the presence of free blacks with their defense of slavery as a "positive-good") pushed for solutions to their free black population "problem," the more free blacks clung to home out of defiance. "Terrified by the unknown," Berlin writes, "free blacks resigned themselves to the familiar oppressions of their homeland. Frequently they pleaded with local officials for permission to remain where they had long resided, and sometimes they simply ignored the law and settled on worthless, abandoned land near their former master's plantation. Some even refused to leave the old homestead and adamantly claimed it as their rightful home despite the stunned objections of their former owners."

This does not mean they always stayed put. In fact, early on, Berlin shows, blacks manumitted by their owners preferred changing their names and often tried to move away to start new lives. They also "voted with their feet" within the South by migrating back and forth over bordering state lines depending on which government offered a friendlier climate. In a few remarkable cases, blacks in the North even moved into the South, including New Orleans, for economic opportunity (you can imagine how this infuriated white government officials).

But don't be deceived, Berlin warns. The pull blacks felt toward greater degrees of freedom was real - to the North, including all the way to Canada, and to the South, including the swamps of Florida (see Amazing Fact No. 15, "Where Was the 1st Underground Railroad?"). Over time, this created a "brain drain" that saw some of the South's most talented free blacks leave for leadership opportunities outside the region.

As Berlin writes, "During the nineteenth century, the proportion of American free Negroes living in the South shrank steadily, and the center of the free Negro population slowly moved northward. More important, this outward migration stripped the free Negro caste of some of its most talented, ambitious, and aggressive members. Among the blacks born free in the South who later rose to prominence in the North were Martin Delany, Daniel Payne, Robert Purvis, and David Walker."

Those who stayed were reminded constantly that whites would never be comfortable with their presence - or, at the same time, be able to let go of such a comparatively cheap labor supply. This push-pull continued through the antebellum period, so that every time it seemed the anti-free black lobby was about to legislate a final solution of deportation to the North, colonization in Africa, the Caribbean or South America, or re-enslavement, the business community prevailed in retaining the status quo. (In many ways, this anticipated the various sides of the immigration debate today.) "The inability to subjugate free Negroes frustrated whites and incited harsher repression, but still the free Negroes remained," Berlin writes. "And they multiplied."
In the Family
As the sectional crisis intensified in the 1850s, so, too, did whites' fury at their increasingly confident and politically conscious free black populations, but if Berlin's detailed account proves anything, it is that there was and would always be a huge gap between the laws as written on the books and those that operated on the ground. Not only were many whites lax in enforcing their states' black codes, free blacks themselves were nimble, they were resistant, they continued to live where they wanted to live, and when secession finally spilled over in 1860, a majority of them still called the South home.

All of this was the case with my Bruce, Redman and Clifford ancestors (on both my mother's and my father's lines), Free Negroes who remained in Virginia despite the General Assembly's warning that any slaves emancipated after May 1, 1806, would face possible re-enslavement if they stayed in-state longer than a year. Those who wanted to remain in the state beyond this grace year saw petitioning the legislature as the only way to make this possible, and so petition they did. Actually, because my Clifford and Redman fourth-great grandparents had been freed long before this 1806 cutoff date, they and their descendants, living about 30 miles from where I was born, could continue to live as freed people in the state, free of this new necessity of petitioning.

Joe and Sarah Bruce (the third set of my free fourth-great grandparents) and their children weren't as fortunate, however. Following the Nat Turner Rebellion in 1830, the Virginia General Assembly passed a slew of stricter black codes. Joe and Sarah were freed in their master's will in 1823, and were granted permission to remain in the state until the master's wife died, which she did in 1840. But they had no desire to move to the North, especially since the master's wife deeded them a thousand acres of land in her will. But in the aftermath of Nat Turner's Rebellion, the laws changed.

As Eva Sheppard Wolf, a professor at San Francisco State University and an expert on this very subject, explains in Race and Liberty in the New Nation:

The legislature's final act regarding Virginia's African American population in 1832 - in fact the only legislation actually passed - was to amend the black code in order (whites hoped) to make future insurrections less likely. The new law barred black Virginians from preaching, placed tighter restrictions on the movements and assembly of slaves, and prescribed harsh punishments for anyone who promoted slave rebellion.

The law also further reduced free blacks toward the status of slaves by requiring that they be tried in the slave courts (courts of oyer and terminer) in cases of larceny or felony instead of before a regular judge and jury and by barring them from owning guns (earlier laws allowed free people of color to own guns if they had a license, which was not required for whites). Important for the future of manumission in Virginia, the law also made it illegal for free people of color to purchase slaves except immediate family members, thus reducing the ability of the free black community to help enslaved fellow African Americans attain liberty. Surely this provision underscores the legislature's interest in preventing rather than encouraging emancipation.

As if all this wasn't enough, the Virginia legislature did (at least) one more thing to tighten the screws on its free black population after Nat Turner. Amending the state's original 1806 "get out or risk re-enslavement" law, the legislature in 1831 gave local sheriffs the authority to sell free black people at auction. A "slight amendment," Joan W. Peters writes in her introduction to the 1995 edition of June Guild's Blacks Laws of Virginia (1936), but soon the legislature was so flooded with new petitions to remain from free blacks and their white employers that in 1837 it redirected the process to the county courts.

To my amazement, my third-great grandfather Charles Bruce's family appears twice in Guild's book (and I'm most grateful to the genealogist Jane Ailes and to Frances Pollard of the Virginia Historical Society for helping me track this all down; references to my family's petitions can also be found in the Library of Virginia's online database of Free Negro petitioners). From what I can tell, they made their first petition to stay in 1833 after a fellow citizen of Hardy County accused them of remaining in the state past their time. The Virginia legislature granted their petition but only until one year after Abraham's widow Elizabeth died. Of course, "The permit may be revoked," the legislature added, "if any of the persons of color are convicted by a jury of an offense."

So they stayed, and when Elizabeth Van Meter died, my third-great grandfather Charles and nine members of his family petitioned again, to stay indefinitely. In December 1841, they were denied and instead given only another "four years to dispose of the estate" that Elizabeth had willed to them - I guess that's how long Virginia thought it would take for them to sell off a thousand acres of land! Remarkable to me is that whatever limited time Virginia gave my Bruce ancestors, they never left the Old Dominion, except of course when their farm in Hardy County, Va., became part of the new Northern state of West Virginia in June of 1863.

By then, the Civil War was in full swing. But to them, just as for most of the other Free Negroes at the time, home was home. What is also counterintuitive is the fact that, for all those years in between Elizabeth Van Meter's death and the war, countless white neighbors ignored the law as well, refusing to inform on my great-great-great grandfather's family or enforce the law all those miles away from Richmond. To read more about these particular African American Lives, as detailed in my PBS television series, follow the trail to PBS.org.

Even if, as was reported by Salon, the South today is more racist than the North (at least in making political decisions), this is not necessarily an outgrowth from some mythic (or monochromatic) past defined by absolute slave and free states, Southern and Northern. Rather, these lingering attitudes stem from sources far more complicated and blurred than that simple dichotomy on which my generation was raised. The complex truth of American history, as Joel A. Rogers was so determined to show us, was never simply black and white.

Postscript: In a very gratifying response to my column about the absence of black soldiers at Gettysburg, my friend, Allen Guelzo, the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War and director of the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College, informed me that while no black men fought officially, in uniform, for either the Union or the Confederate troops, he did discover that one unidentified black man spontaneously entered the fray, and fought quite nobly. Here is what Professor Guelzo wrote to me, information that is summarized from his fine new book, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion:

On the left of the 5th Ohio, a sergeant noticed something he had not expected: "an American citizen of African descent had taken position, and with a gun and cartridge box, which he took from one of our dead men, was more than piling hot lead into the Graybacks." There is no way of knowing whether this solitary black fighter was a civilian teamster who decided to join the Ohioans, or a refugee from the town who had come out of hiding to do his bit, or even a member of the Adams County company that had tried, unsuccessfully, to volunteer itself to the all-black 54th Massachusetts. He was certainly not a soldier, since none of the new black regiments recruited since the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation were attached to the Army of the Potomac. Whoever he was, he is the only African-American on record as a combatant, fighting at Gettysburg. "His coolness and bravery was noticed and commented upon by all who saw him," and the Ohio sergeant who described him thought that "if the negro regiments fight like he did, I don't wonder that the Rebs ... hate them so."

We are all indebted to professor Guelzo for this important revelation, and I hope that others will find the time, as I now have, to read his book as part of last year's 150th-anniversary commemoration of the battle.

As always, you can find more "Amazing Facts About the Negro" on The Root, and check back each week as we count to 100.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is also editor-in-chief of The Root. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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Why Did Free Blacks Stay in the Old South?

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For those who are wondering about the retro title of this black-history series, please take a moment to learn about historian Joel A. Rogers, author of the 1934 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof, to whom these "amazing facts" are an homage. Amazing Fact About the Negro No.

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I wonder where and why slavery started.

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Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

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.

When Did Slavery Start?

Hundreds of thousands of Africans, both free and enslaved, aided the establishment and survival of colonies in the Americas and the New World. However, many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship Sao Jao Bautista.

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

Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.
READ MORE: The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s. It Just Surfaced
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, counting each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress and guaranteeing the right to repossess any "person held to service or labor" (an obvious euphemism for slavery).

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 would transition from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region's dependence on enslaved labor.
READ MORE: 40 Years a Slave: The Extraordinary Tale of an African Prince Stolen from His Kingdom
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.
READ MORE: The Shocking Photo of 'Whipped Peter' That Made Slavery's Brutality Impossible to Deny
History of Slavery

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.
READ MORE: Enslaved Couples Faced Wrenching Separations, or Even Choosing Family Over Freedom
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.
READ MORE: How the Underground Railroad Worked
Missouri Compromise
WATCH: 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 able to help quell the forces of sectionalism only temporarily.

Kansas-Nebraska Act
WATCH: 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.
READ MORE: How Many US Presidents Owned Enslaved Workers?
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.
READ MORE: What Is Juneteenth?
The Legacy of Slavery
WATCH: The Civil War and Its Legacy
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.
PHOTOS: See America's First Memorial to its 4,400 Lynching Victims

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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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I wonder how was the relationship between the slaves and the master?

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The Nature of Master/slave (Owner/property) Relationships

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I wonder how was life for a slave child ?

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If you were a slave child 150 years ago, your life would be hard. How hard? Harder if you worked on a huge plantation in the Deep South rather than on a smaller one in Virginia or Maryland. Harder if you worked in the fields rather than in the house. And hardest if your owner used cruel punishments or broke up your family by selling off a parent or sibling.

Let's pretend you're a house servant in southeastern Virginia. You are busy with chores at least from dawn till dusk, but it's easier than field work. At night you sleep on a mat somewhere in the Big House instead of in a slave cabin with your mother and siblings. (Your father doesn't live with your family because he belongs to the owner of a nearby plantation.)

Life for slave child

What do you do all day? Whatever you're told to do. Let's say your main job is caring for one of the white family's children who is a bit younger than you. You are that child's personal servant and companion. The two of you might also be friends, but no one would ever forget that you are the property of that other child's family.

Because you spend a lot of time around the master's family, you often listen to the grown-ups talk. That's how you hear about a man named Abraham Lincoln, who is against the spread of slavery. That's how you know that "secession" and "the Confederacy" are important, even though you don't know what the words mean. And that's how you learn there might be a war between North and South. You hid your excitement when you heard that, because you knew people in the North hated slavery.

Talk of an invasion

Last month, you pretended you weren't listening when the family's oldest son announced that Yankees had invaded Virginia and he was leaving home to fight them. (You figured out that "Yankees" meant Northerners.) And you pretended not to care when the master told the family that thousands more Yankee soldiers had come to Fort Monroe - and that they had camps outside the fort, too. The frightened faces around the table told you that the fort and those soldiers were nearby, and you wondered what would happen next - and what it would mean to you.

What happened next was important to slaves throughout the South. Three slaves seeking freedom fled to Fort Monroe. The Union commander there decided that the U.S. law that runaway slaves must be returned to their masters had no effect in Confederate Virginia, so he refused to return the men to their master. Instead, he let them stay at the fort and work for the Union army.

Fleeing to safety

By June, whole families of slaves were making their way to Fort Monroe. As word spread, more and more slaves took refuge in Union camps. They probably worked as hard there as they had on the plantations. Maybe even harder. Their living conditions were usually crowded and unhealthful. And the soldiers thought of them as property, just as their owners had. They were called "contrabands," or items taken from the enemy.

So if you had found your way from the plantation to Fort Monroe in June 1861, your life would still be hard and you still wouldn't be free. But you would have taken an important step toward freedom.
-Carolyn Reeder
Reeder writes a series giving readers a kid's-eye view of the Civil War. Her books include " Shades of Gray" and " Captain Kate. "

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If you were a slave child 150 years ago, your life would be hard. How hard? Harder if you worked on a huge plantation in the Deep South rather than on a smaller one in Virginia or Maryland. Harder if you worked in the fields rather than in the house.

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I wonder what slaves had to do daily ?

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Most of the LEARN NC Content has been archived using the Wayback Machine. Instructions for how to access that content is below, including links to frequently requested materials.

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I wonder why were slaves being targeted?

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The History of Slavery In America (part 1 of 3)

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I wonder how many slaves would try to escape to get their freedom...

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Introduction

The Underground Railroad is an important part of our nation's history; however, many of the fascinating and lesser known details regarding it are not included within many textbooks. This booklet will provide a window into the past through a variety of primary sources regarding the Underground Railroad. These primary sources consist of broadsides, reward posters, newspaper clippings, historical documents, sheet music, photographs and narratives pertaining to the Underground Railroad. These items are found within the digitized collections of the Library of Congress.

The Underground Railroad was a secret system developed to aid fugitive slaves on their escape to freedom. Involvement with the Underground Railroad was not only dangerous, but it was also illegal. So, to help protect themselves and their mission secret codes were created. The term Underground Railroad referred to the entire system, which consisted of many routes called lines. The free individuals who helped runaway slaves travel toward freedom were called conductors, and the fugitive slaves were referred to as cargo. The safe houses used as hiding places along the lines of the Underground Railroad were called stations. A lit lantern hung outside would identify these stations.

A Dangerous Path to Freedom

Traveling along the Underground Railroad was a long a perilous journey for fugitive slaves to reach their freedom. Runaway slaves had to travel great distances, many times on foot, in a short amount of time. They did this with little or no food and no protection from the slave catchers chasing them. Slave owners were not the only pursuers of fugitive slaves. In order to entice others to assist in the capture of these slaves, their owners would post reward posters offering payment for the capture of their property. If they were caught, any number of terrible things could happen to them. Many captured fugitive slaves were flogged, branded, jailed, sold back into slavery, or even killed.

Not only did fugitive slaves have the fear of starvation and capture, but there were also threats presented by their surroundings. While traveling for long periods of time in the wilderness, they would have to fend off animals wanting to kill and eat them, cross treacherous terrain, and survive severe temperatures. For the slaves traveling north on the Underground Railroad, they were still in danger once they entered northern states. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 allowed and encouraged the capture of fugitive slaves due to the fact that they were seen as stolen property, rather than abused human beings.

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 also outlawed the abetting of fugitive slaves. Their safety and freedom would not be reached until they entered into Canada. Not all slaves traveled north. There were also Underground Railroad lines that lead south en route for Mexico and the Caribbean.

One of the many fugitive slaves impacted by the Fugitive Slave Law was Anthony Burns. He was taken from his northern residence, arrested, and tried under this law in Boston, Massachusetts. His arrest spurred black and white abolitionists and citizens of Boston to riot and protest. After the trial, Burns was taken back to cruelty of the south which he thought he had escaped from. While he was enduring his return to slavery, abolitionists were working to raise funds and within a year of his trial they had enough money to buy his freedom. Library of Congress American Memory and America's Library. Accessed 10.20.08

Frederick Douglass was another fugitive slave who escaped slavery. He escaped not on the Underground Railroad, but on a real train. He disguised himself as a sailor, but this was not enough. He needed to show proof that he was free, and since he was a runaway slave who did not have any "free papers" he borrowed a seaman's protection certificate that stated a sailor was a citizen of the U.S. Luckily, the train conductor did not look closely at the papers, and Douglass gained his passage to freedom.

Unfortunately, not all runaway slaves made it to freedom. But, many of those who did manage to escape went on to tell their stories of flight from slavery and to help other slaves not yet free. Harriet Tubman, Henry Bibb, Anthony Burns, Addison White, Josiah Henson and John Parker all escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad.

Henry "Box" Brown, another fugitive slave, escaped in a rather different way. He shipped himself in a three foot long by two and a half foot deep by two foot wide box, from Richmond, Virginia to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When he was removed from the box, he came out singing.

Conductors & Abolitionists

Underground Railroad conductors were free individuals who helped fugitive slaves traveling along the Underground Railroad. Conductors helped runaway slaves by providing them with safe passage to and from stations. They did this under the cover of darkness with slave catchers hot on their heels. Many times these stations would be located within their own homes and businesses. The act of harboring fugitive slaves put these conductors in grave danger; yet, they persisted because they believed in a cause greater than themselves, which was the freeing of thousands of enslaved human beings.

These conductors were comprised of a diverse group of people. They included people of different races, occupations and income levels. There were also former slaves who had escaped using the Underground Railroad and voluntarily returned to the lands of slavery, as conductors, to help free those still enslaved. Slaves were understood to be property; therefore, the freeing of slaves was viewed as stealing slave owners' personal property. If a conductor was caught helping free slaves they would be fined, imprisoned, branded, or even hanged.

Jonathan Walker was a sea captain caught off the shore of Florida trying to transport fugitive slaves to freedom in the Bahamas. He was arrested, imprisoned and branded with the letter "S.S." which stood for slave stealer. The abolitionist poet John Whittier paid tribute to Walker's courageous acts in one of his poems saying: "Then lift that manly right hand, bold ploughman of the wave! Its branded palm shall prophesy, 'Salvation to the Slave!'"

Harriet Tubman, perhaps the most well-known conductor of the Underground Railroad, helped hundreds of runaway slaves escape to freedom. She never lost one of them along the way. As a fugitive slave herself, she was helped along the Underground Railroad by another famous conductor...William Still. He went on the write The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters..., a book which contains descriptions of fugitive slaves' escape to freedom by way of the Underground Railroad. John parker is yet another former slave who escaped and ventured back into slave states to help free others. He conducted one of the busiest sections of the Underground Railroad, transporting fugitive slaves across the Ohio River. His neighbor and fellow conductor, Reverend John Rankin, worked with him on the Underground Railroad. Both of their homes served as Underground Railroad stations.

Conductors of the Underground Railroad undoubtedly opposed slavery, and they were not alone. Abolitionists took action against slavery as well. The abolition movement began when individuals such as William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur and Lewis Tappan formed the American Anti-Slavery Society. The organization created the Declaration of Anti-Slavery in which they gave reasons for the construction of the society and its goals. The society distributed an annual almanac that included poems, drawings, essays and other abolitionist material.

Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who became a famous abolitionist. He published a newspaper called the North Star in which he voiced his goals for the abolishment of slavery. He also published another abolitionist paper called the Frederick Douglass Paper, as well as giving public speeches on issues of concern to abolitionists.

Susan B. Anthony was another well known abolitionist who spoke and wrote for the efforts to abolish slavery. She urged her audience to "make the slave's case our own."

Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, provided the world with a vivid image of the hardships faced by slaves. Much of her book was based on the experiences of fugitive slave Josiah Henson.

Efforts of Abolitionists Telling Their Story: Fugitive Slave Narratives

Henry Bibb was born into slavery, in Kentucky during the year of 1815. He made many failed attempts to escape slavery; yet, he still had the courage and perseverance to continue in his fight for freedom after every capture and punishment. His perseverance paid off when he made a successful and much anticipated escape to the northern states and then on to Canada with the help of the Underground Railroad. The following is an excerpt from his narrative in which he discussed one of his many escapes and the challenges he had to overcome.
"In the fall or winter of 1837 I formed a resolution that I would escape, if possible, to Canada, for my Liberty. I commenced from that hour making preparations for the dangerous experiment of breading the chains that bound me as a slave. My preparation for this voyage consisted in the accumulation of a little money, perhaps not exceeding two dollars and fifty cents, and a suit which I had never been seen or known to wear before; this last was to avoid detection. On the twenty-fifth of December, 1837, my long anticipated time had arrived when I was to put into operation my former resolution, which was to bolt for Liberty or consent to die a Slave. I acted upon the former, although I confess it to be one of the most self-defying acts of my whole life, to take leave of an affectionate wife, who stood before me on my departure, with dear little Frances in her arms, and with tears of sorrow in her eyes as she bid me a long farewell. It required all the moral courage that I was master of to suppress my feelings while taking leave of my little family. Had Matilda known my intention at the time, it would not have been possible for me to have got away, and I might have this day been a slave. Not withstanding every inducement was held out to me to run away if I would be free, and the voice of liberty was thundering in my very soul, 'Be free, oh, man! be free,' I was struggling against a thousand obstacles which had clustered around my mind to bind my wounded spirit still in the dark prison of mental degradation. My strong attachments to friends and relatives, with all the love of home and birth-place which is so natural among the human family, twined about my heart and were hard to break away from. And withal, the fear of being killed, or captured and taken to the extreme South, to linger out my days in hopeless bondage on some cotton or sugar plantation, all combined to deter me. But I had count the cost, and was fully prepared to make the sacrifice. The time for fulfilling my pledge was then at hand. I must forsake friends and neighbors, wife and child, or consent to live and die a slave." "These kind friends gave me something to eat, and started me on my way to Canada, with a recommendation of a friend on my way. This was the commencement of what was called the under ground rail road to Canada. I walked with bold courage, trusting in the arm of Omnipotence; guided by the unchangeable North Star by night, and inspired by an elevated thought that I was fleeing from a land of slavery and oppression, bidding farewell to handcuffs, whips, thumb-screws and chains.
I travelled on until I had arrived at the place where I was directed to call on an Abolitionist, but I made no stop: so great were my fears of being pursued by the pro-slavery hunting dogs of the South. I prosecuted my journey vigorously for nearly forty-eight hours without food or rest, struggling against external difficulties such as no one can imagine who has never experienced the same: not knowing what moment I might be captured while travelling among strangers, through cold and fear, breasting the north winds, being thinly clad, pelted by the snow storms through the dark hours of the night, and not a house in which I could enter to shelter me from the storm."

This is only one of the many narratives written by fugitive slaves. Another former slave who was well known for her efforts to end slavery was Sojourner Truth. She too along with Josiah Henson, J.D. Green and many others wrote narratives that shared their experiences. Their stories of strength and freedom provide much insight to the time in which they lived. Perhaps, so many fugitive slaves chose to write down their experiences to help others understand their trials and tribulations; or maybe they did this to help individuals learn from the mistakes of the past, in hopes of creating a better future.

In Frederick Douglass's book entitled Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, he stated his intention for writing his narrative: "Sincerely and earnestly hoping that this little book may do something toward throwing light on the American slave system, and hastning the glad day of deliverance to the millions of my brethren in bonds-faithfully relying upon the power of truth, love, and justice, for success in my humble efforts-and solemnly pledging my self anew to the sacred cause, --I subscribe myself, Frederick Douglass."
Library of Congress American Memory and Exhibits. Accessed 10.20.08

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Eastern Illinois University :: Teaching with Primary Sources - Underground Railroad: A Path to Freedom

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The Underground Railroad is an important part of our nation's history; however, many of the fascinating and lesser known details regarding it are not included within many textbooks. This booklet will provide a window into the past through a variety of primary sources regarding the Underground Railroad.

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I wonder how long did it take for the underground railroads to actually be safe enough to leave slavery?

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Underground Railroad, The (1820-1861) | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed

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Sources: William Still, The Underground Railroad (Chicago, Johnson Publishing Company, 1970) David W. Blight, Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books in association with the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, 2004); J.

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I wonder how slaves survived on the ship when they were being sold or shipped to other places.

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i wonder if some slave owners genuinely cared for their slaves

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Yes, most Southern slave owners had good relations with their slaves. Things were not like what most of the abolitionists said, not for the average slave. Many horror stories of slavery are true, as reflected in The Federal Writers' Project Slave Narratives, but there were very good things to be said about those days by the ex-slaves, whose names are in bold below. Here are selections from Prison & Slavery - A Surprising Comparison followed by selections of the Alabama interviews made as part of The Federal Writers' Project Slave Narratives and with page referencesin parentheses:
Paternalistic & Family Institution with Bonds of Love and Concern.
Most slaves remembered happy, carefree childhoods. Childhood play bonded the races on the plantation. Most first-hand accounts of isolated plantation life describe play between white and black children, at a time when the two races were not as divided as they would be later. Kids can play, or kids may fight, but the proximity was undeniable. Silas Abbott said, "Ely Abbott and Maggie Abbott was our owners. They had three girls and two boys - Eddie and Johnny. We played together till I was grown. I loved em like if they was brothers." Planters knew carefree childhoods were best to develop well-adjusted adults. With their parents working much of the day, black and white children of sufficient age were free to play games and sports, swim, explore the plantation, rest, eat, fish, trap animals and have the day to themselves.

Frederick Douglass, in his more balanced second autobiography, fondly described his boyhood. "Thus, freed from all restraint, the slave-boy can be, in his life and conduct, a genuine boy, doing whatever his boyish nature suggests; enacting, by turns, all the strange antics and freaks of horses, dogs, pigs, and barn-door fowls, without in any manner compromising his dignity, or incurring reproach of any sort. He literally runs wild . . . he may trot on, in his joyous and roguish tricks, as happy as any little heathen under the palm trees of Africa. . . . and our sable boy continues to roll in the dust, or play in the mud, as bests suits him, and in the veriest freedom. If he feels uncomfortable, from mud or from dust, the coast is clear; he can plunge into the river or the pond, without the ceremony of undressing, or the fear of wetting his clothes; his little tow-linen shirt -- for that is all he has on -- is easily dried; and it needed ablution as much as did his skin. His days, when the weather is warm, are spent in the pure, open air, and in the bright sunshine. In a word, he is, for the most part of the first eight years of his life, a spirited, joyous, uproarious, and happy boy, upon whom troubles fall only like water on a duck's back. And such a boy, so far as I can now remember, was the boy whose life in slavery I am now narrating."

Years ago, it was written that slave mothers were forced to leave their children in a common plantation nursery under the care of their Auntie. The slave mothers had to return from their work to the nursery to nurse their children at regular intervals during the working day. This was considered deplorable: "The cries of these little ones, who were cut off almost entirely from motherly care and protection, were heart-rending," said slave narrative author Louis Hughes in 1897. The trouble with that argument at this point is that millions of American parents of all races now do the same thing, although nursing at periodic intervals is not an option for most modern working moms. On the plantation Louis Hughes described, nursing mothers were given light work and allowed to nurse their babies as periodic intervals during the day, 9:00 AM, 12:00 noon, and 3:00 PM. I remember my own daughters crying on the way to day-care. Today, on-site employer-sponsored childcare is rare in the United States, but antebellum plantations always provided it.

The master-servant relationship - good or bad - best-defined antebellum slavery. Where that relationship was good, slaves more naturally tolerated the institution and were content with their lifestyle. Many slaves loved and revered their owners. Uncle Washington "Wash" Allen was "a literal worshipper of the memory of his 'old time white fokes.'" Affection was a more common emotion than the resistance and hatred portrayed in literature, TV and movies. Jack Atkinson said his owner "wuz as fine man as ever broke bread." Most historians of slavery do not favor the "apologist" view that slaves and masters were on good terms. Wheeler Gresham loved all three of his masters and said, "the happiest time of his life was those days of slavery and the first years immediately after." Lizzie Barnett said, "My old mammy . . . was owned by my old Miss, Fanny Pennington . . . I shore did love Miss Fanny." "I don't believe any of Marse John's slaves ever went to war" Minnie Davis said, "He was good to them and everyone of them loved him."

Masters commonly loved, appreciated and most prominently had concern for their servants. Yes, people love their money. In particular, planters had very strong attachments to their body servants, their mammies and other slaves they grew up with during childhood. One good master told Frederick Law Olmsted, "'Oh, they are interesting creatures, sir,' he continued, 'and, with all their faults, have many beautiful traits. I can't help being attached to them, and I am sure they love us.' In his own case, at least, I did not doubt; his manner towards them was paternal-familiar and kind; and they came to him like children who have been given some task, and constantly are wanting to be encouraged and guided, simply and confidently. At dinner, he frequently addressed the servant familiarly, and drew him into our conversation as if he were a family friend, better informed, on some local and domestic points, than himself." John Brown stayed on Brown Plantation in Alabama until the last Brown died and missed the old plantation when he was 87 in Oklahoma; the white folks were good to them, they had prayer meetings and plenty of food even during the War, and the mistress - "God bless her!" - was with them during every childbirth and sickness.
Alabama Slave Narratives Sam Aleckson
In antebellum days, there was more love and concern between the races than is usually shown in modern times. Frederick Law Olmsted observed, "When the negro is definitely a slave, it would seem that the alleged natural antipathy of the white race to associate with him is lost." The subservient position of servants took away tension from relations between the races. Another Northern observer said, "There is something in the apparent meekness of slaves in their work at such times that makes one love them greatly and feel an intense desire to protect them from imperious, unfeeling words and treatment." Slaves received kinder treatment in the South, before Emancipation, than free blacks in the North at the time. On this point, Frederick Douglass, Alexis de Tocqueville and Dinesh D'Souza agree. Southern whites and Southern slaves were not competing for the same social niche. The real problems erupted when the declining fortunes of whites collided with the new aspirations of freed people.
Oliver Bell
"My father and my mother were both under the "yoke", but were held by different families. They made their home with my father's people who were, of all slave holders, the very best; and it was here that I spent the first years of my life." (9).
Virginia Birdsong
" . . . ev'ybody thought dey marster was de bes' in de lan'." . . . "an' Marse Jess was de bes' white frein' a nigger ever had; dis nigger, anyhow." (27, 32).
Ank Bishop
. . . she always spoke of Mr. Joe, as "my Papa," instead of "my maser," for "he sho'" was good to me."" (34).
Nannie Bradfield
"Dey was good to us . . ." (35).
Martha Bradley
"What I keer 'bout bein' free? Didn't old Marster give us plenty good sompin to eat and clo's to wear?" (45).

"Our Marster wuz sho good to all his "niggers" she said. Us allus had plenty to eat and plenty to wear, but de days now is hard . . ." (46).

Uncle Allen Brown
Uncle Gus
"A'ter de Surrender nothin' neber was de same. Jest hahd times mos'ly. Neber been any times lak de days when I was drivin' my ca'iage amongst de Eufaula high steppers, and I reckon dere neber will be ag'in." (48).

"In all de years since de war I cannot forget old massa. He was good and kind." (50).

" Aunt" Hattie Clayton

". . . she was mighty good to us niggers." (76).

" Shorty" Wadley Clemons

"I had a good ole massa and mistis, de bes' dere was." (78).

" Aunt" Tildy Collins
Mandy McCullough Cosby
"Yes, ma'am, I sho' was borned in slavery times, an' I wish to Gawd I could git now what I useter hab den, 'caze dem was good times for de black folks. Dese free niggers don't know what 'tis to be tuk good keer of." (84).
Carrie Davis
"Ol' Miss, she don't lak to see dem sold, an' she cry ever' time, she so tender-hearted. . . But he was good to his black folks. . . Folks called us 'McCullough's free niggers.' Wasn't much whippin' went on 'roun' our plantation . . . Mist' McCullough always give his folks plenty of sumpin' t'eat an' then he say, 'I's lookin' for plenty uv work Niggahs fat an' greasy can't do nothin' but work." (90-91).

"I had a purty good marster. . . Dey was real good to us, too. Us et at de big house. . . Us had sech good times on Sattidy nights; frolic, dance an' corn-shuckin's. Most of 'em would be drinkin' and sing and holler!" (105-106).
George Dillard
Aunt Clara Davis. "Was Marse Moseley good to us? Lor', honey, how you talk. Co'se he was! He was de bes' white man in de lan'. Us had eve'y thing dat we could hope to eat: turkey, chicken, beef, lamb, poke, vegetables, fruits, aigs, butter, jmile . . (109).
Ella Dilliard
" . . . Mr. Steele was always fair and good to him; always giving him the best of everything." (112).
Katherine "Ma" Eppes
" Ella Dilliard . . . says she was a small girl during slavery time, and does not know the hardships of it, because she was owned by good people." (113).
Bert Frederick
"Marsa Frank an' Miss Sarah was good to de black folks, too. . . Ah 'members one thing jes' lack it was yestiddy. Miss Sarah went to 'Mospolis (Demopolis) to visit wid her sister, an' whilst she were gone de oberseer, what go by de name of Allen, whupped my Mammy crost her back 'twell de blood runned out. When Miss Sarah comed back an' foun' it out, she was de maddes white lady I ever seed. She sont for de oberseer, an' she say: 'Allen, what you mean by whupping Mammy? You know I don't allow you to tech my house servants.' She jerk her dress down an' stan' dere lookin' like a sojer wid her white shoulders shinin' lack a snow bank, an' she say: "I druther see dem marks on my own shoulders dan to see 'em on Mammy 's. Dey wouldn't hurt me no wuss.' Den she say: 'Allen, teck your fambly an' git offen my place. Don't you let sundown ketch you here. 'So he lef.' He wasn't nothin' but white trash nohow." (119).
Angie Garrett
"Honey, Ol' Master usta sing dat good song to us niggers; an' he allus could sing it so purty. . . Yes, chile, dey was good days. Some of de white peoples was bad to de niggers, but my Ol' Master warn't dat kind. Dat de reason he would let all de niggers sit aroun' whilst he was singin'; an' he could sing." (127).
Fannie Gibson
"But Mr. John Rogers right here, (he's dead an' gone now), he was whut he was and wasn't 'ceitful. Go to him ef you got into anything, and he more'n apt to tell you whut to do. He was wile when he was young, but he settle down and was de bes' white man to de niggers I ever know'd. He'd he'p me right now ef he was livin' and seen me wearin' dis here rag nasty, he sho' would." (136).
Frank Gill
"She has very pleasant memories of slave days, and "wishes to God dat she wuz as comforbly (comfortably) fixed now as she wuz den. Her antebellum owner she pictures as a very humane, Christian gentleman - - a man that took great interest in the material and spiritual welfare of his slaves." (145).
Jim Gillard
"She had lots ob log cabin quarters, whut had de cracks daubed wid mud, an' den ceiled wid boards. I'se tellin' you dey was twice as warm as de houses we lib in now. . . big wide, fireplaces, dat we cooked on, an' de beds was homemade, but Lor' dey was heaps stronger dan dey is now, in dese times. Dem beds were morticed together. . . 'Ol' Missy an' Mister Arthur both was good to me an' all de slaves , dey 'low de slaves to make dere own patch ob cotton, an raise chickens, an' he would sell hit for dem. . . Lord, at sheep shearing time! hit was big times. . .Let me tell you, dey really fed us slaves good, up 'til such a length o' time atter de war broke out, den food began to git scarce. . . .dey had to gib so much to feed de soldiers. Even den us had a good time, I 'members how de li'l chillum played ball, and marbles, 'specially marbles, hit was our big game. Even atter night, dey had a big light out in de backyard, an' us would play. Sometimes us would hunt at night, and well I 'members one Sat'day night I went huntin' wid mah uncle, an' didn't git in 'til daylight nex' mawning, an' I was sleepy an' didn't git de shoes all cleaned before church time. . . De Ol' Missy got up out ob de bed an' woluldn't let Ol' Marster whip me, an' she got so mad dat she tol' him dat she warn't going to church wid him dat morning, an dat lack to kill de Ol' Marster, 'ca'se he shore loved an' was proud ob Ol' Missy. She was a beautiful woman. Dat ended de whippun', an' dats de only time I 'members him tryin' to whip me. . . Ol' Missy didn't 'low dem to whip de women either . . . Course dey kept de young women wid babies 'roun' de house, an' dey eat de same grub as de white folks eat. . . Talking 'bout log rollin', dem was great times, 'ca'se if some ob de neighborin' plantations wanted to get up a house, dey would invite all de slaves, men and women, to come wid dere masters. De women would help wid de cookin' an' you may be shore dey had something to cook. Dey would kill a cow, or three or four hogs, and den hab peas, cabbage, an' everything lack grows on de farm. An' if dere was any meat or food lef' dey would gib dat to de slaves to take home, an' jes' b'fore dark de o'seer or Ol' Marster would gib de slaves all de whiskey dey wanted to drink. Sometimes atter de days work, dey would hab a frolic, such as dancin', an' ol' time games. . . Dey would hab dese same kind ob gatherin's at cornshucking time, an' cotton pickin' time . . .Christmas time was de bes' ob all, 'ca'se us allus had a big dinner, an' de Ol' Marster gib de women calico dresses an' shoes, an' de men shoes an' hats, an' would gib us flour, an' sugar, molasses, an' would buy beer, whiskey an' wine. . . . De Ol' Marster tuk good keer ob us too, when any ob us got sick he send for de doctor, den when dey order de medicine to be giben at night, he'd see dat us got hit. But nowadays if you git sick, you hab to git de Doctor, an' den pay him yo' se'f. Den de Ol' Marster had to find clothes an' shoes for us, but now us has to scuffle an' git dem de bes' way us can." (149-152).
Henry Garry
" Jim remembers catching partridges as a boy, taking them to the train and selling them to Charlie Crowder for ten cents each. Game was plentiful in dem days . . . Us cooked on a great big fireplace. I 'members dat dere was plenty of meat in de winter, 'case Ol' Marster used to kill as many as thirty hogs at a time. Us had meat an' bread an' home-made light bread an' de white folks was might kind. I 'members us was carried to Sunday School every Sunday . . . Ol' Mistus'd teach us de lesson. . . .I allus went to Sunday School, but on de week days us little niggers would slip off an' go huntin' when we could. . . . the food was always good . . . Yes'm, us had purty good clothes . . . I 'members lots 'bout Mistus 'Lizabeth, 'case she useter read de Bible to us niggers. She would talk to us 'bout de 'Good Book an' have prayer meetin' wid us. Us frolics on Sattidy night was fine an' us'd dance 'twel mos' day. Marster's brother would fiddle for us, an' at Christmas time us would have six days to frolic. Us also had a big time at de cornshuckin's, an' us'd whoop an' holler an' sing mos' all night. De big niggers had plenty of liquor de boss give 'um. . . My aunt married up at de big house an' dey give her a big dance. Dey had de fiddle and had a great time. Dey jes' jumped over de broom to marry, so atter slavery dey had to git married agin. . . An' all de little niggers did have lots of fun." (154-156).

"His name was Henry Garry. He wore a suit of faded and extensively patched Confederate gray and a cap of the regulation porter's style. His face bore the expression worn only by those of his race who had lived and toiled in a much earlier and in many instances, happier day. In the presence of "white folks" he was at ease, indicating an intimate association and relationship among them and in their service. . . . "Oh, nawsah, I ain't neber done nothin' to nobody no time. But I sho' don't know what dis new generation of nigguhs comin' to. . . Dat boy kin sho' git into mo' kin's of trouble . . . Wisht I could git dat boy back down to Sumter County on Marse John Rogers' plantation.
"Aunt" Esther Green
Dat's whar he b'longs at. Betch Marse John wouldn' take none of his foolishment. . . . My mammy . . . neber did leave de plantation atter de slaves was freed but stayed right dar till she died, she an' my daddy bofe. But dey was good hones', 'spectable, chu'ch-going' people, my daddy an' mammy was. De little log chu'ch house is still dar an' de niggers still keeps up de services. . . . I don't know 'bout uyther parts, but from what my mammy tell me de slaves in Sumter County mus' hab had a mighty good time, had plenty of ebvery t'hing an' nothin' to worry 'bout. Seems lak dar warn't no trouble 'mongst de whites an' blacks 'twell atter de wah. Some white mens come down from de Norf' an' mess up wid de niggers." (137-139).
Charles Hayes
". . . my whitefolks was allus good to us . . . he never whipped . . . Ole Massa jus' didn't b'lieve in dat. Massa was shorely a good man." (165).
Aunt Lizzie Hill
"Marse Ben was good to his slaves . . ." (174).
Jane Holloway
My Marster (Richard Dozier) and my Mistis was good to all dey niggers and dey raised me right." (176).
Aunt Hannah Irwin
"Us had a good old time den, effen us jes' had knowed it, 'caze us was always fed good . . . Mr. Billy Taylor was mighty good to his niggers." (188).
Jane
"An' as for dey a-settin' me free! Miss, us niggers on de Bennett place was free as soon as we wuz bawn. I always been free." (219).
Uncle Hilliard Johnson
"Ole Marster dead en' gone en' Ole Mistis too, but I 'members 'em jes' lak dey was, when dey looked atter us whenst we belonged to 'em or dey belonged ter us, I dunno which it was. De times was better fo' de wah. Us had good things to eat en' plenty of it, en' we had good clos en' clean clo's fer Sunday." (226).
Randolph Johnson
"Dey was good to us, 'bout seventy-five of us all together, I reckon." (229).
Abraham Jones
" Randolph Johnson . . . never worked hard. His hours were too filled with the joy of playing, for he belonged to a little crippled boy about his own age and guarded him all the time." (231).
Emma Jones
"I was workin' . . . after de war . . . She sent word back for me to go to her house and let her see if I shore 'nuff was de same man . . . Her husband say, 'Well, dey is jest one thing we kin do. If he ever need a place to stay or vittles to eat, we must see dat he gits dem.'" (235).
Aunt Hannah Jones
"Our food den was a-way better dan de stuff we eats today . . . Ole Massa had a big garden an' we useta git de vega'tables we et f'um his garden. De folks was plenty good to us. Sometimes de mens would hunt . . . Us had eve'ything . . . We had a happy fambly. At night some of de house niggers would gather 'roun' de fire, an' mistis would read us de scriptures . . ." (236).
Lucindy Lawrence Jurdon
"Us had good houses built outten cedar logs . . . We had good beds an' plenty of vittels to eat: greens, cawn bread, meat an' all kinds of sweets . . . Marster had a big vegetable garden an' we was 'lowed to help our-selves f'um dis here garden . . . most of us never went offen the plantation, jus' stayed 'roun an' had a good time playin' amongst ourselves. . . None of us slaves ever tried to run away to de nawth 'ca'se dey was good to us. . . We useta have a doctor dat'd come roun' eve'y two weeks to see how de slaves was doin' . . . Some Saddays we had to work after dinner, but most of the time Marster would let us have a good time. . . I guess maybee I'll have 100 descendants fo' I shuffle off." (238-240).
Mammy Lucy Kimball
"Ol' Marster had 'bout three or four hundred acres on his plantation . . . Us lived in a two-room log house wid a lean-to next it. Us was well off in dem times, but us didn't have sense enough to know it. I 'members dat us always had plenty of good victuals . . . My grandmammy had sixteen chillums . . . On Sattidy nights dey would have dances an' dance all night long. Somebody would clap hands, beat pans, blow quills or pick de banjer strings . . . Dem was good days, honey; mighty good." (243).
Lightnin'
" Mammy Lucy talked of the Hall and Sibley families and of the wealth that they once had, and what happiness she found in being slave to such good people." (245).
Tom McAlpin
"Massa Joel musta been bawn on a sunshiny day 'cause he sho' was bright an' good natured. Eber nigger on de place love him lak he was sont from Heaben. Mos' eber day he come to de quarters wid de fambly doctor to look atter de niggers, fer he say a well-fed, healthy nigger, next to a mule, is de bes' propersition a man kin 'ves' his money in. An' us slaves fared as good as anybody. Naw suh! Massa Joel ain't neber hit me a lick in his life. He say a well nigger whut doan wuhk, sho' ain't got no eats an care comin' his way, an ought'er be sont down de Ribber . . . I done had fo' wives, an' raise 'leben chillum. But 'taint lak in de old days. Chillun all gone . . . 'Fo young Massa Tom passed on - he was Massa Joel's boy - I ain't neber wanted fer nothin'. (258-259).
Anne Maddox
"Yassuh, I was sont to Richmond to bring home some of our wounded Federates. Dey sont me 'caze dey knowed I was agoin' to do my bes', an' caze dey knowed I warn't afeered of nothin'. Dat's de way I've always tried to be, white boss, lak white folks what raised me. God bless 'em" (271).
Frank Menefee
"Marster was good to us niggers, dough. He never 'lowed us to be whupped; just scolded us. . . Ol' Mistis read us de Bible, an' us went to de white folks church an' sat in de back, wid de white peoples sittin' up front. . . Ol' Marster give us plenty of licker, an' us laked dat. One of de funniest things us had aroun' de plantation was a little goat dat could walk a fence jist lak us little niggers. . . Marster call all us niggers up to de house an' tol' us dat us was free. He said us could go away or stay wid him. I stayed 'twel I wuz grown an' married Doc Maddox." (273).
Uncle Mose
"Us had good Marsa and Misties, iffen you wukked an' 'haved yourse'f. Dey was marsa Willis an' Miss Hannah Menefee. . . Mr. Sadler, de overseer, was good, too, but you sho' had to wuk. . . . On Sunday mornin' Mistiss would try to teach us niggers de Bible. Den us would go to church at white church an' sit in de back wid white folks in front. . . Dat Sunday mornin' breakfast sho' was good to us niggers. Us had meat, sugar, lard an' butter. I used to love to hear dem sing. When My Soul Be Resting in de Presence of My Lord, I'll Be Satisfied. . . When any of de niggers would pass on, old Mistiss would stand over de casket and weep. Us would pull off our hats an' Marsa was nice as he could be, too. . . On Sadday nights us would frolic an' dance all night long iffen you wanted to, buck-dance, sixteen-hand reel and cake walk. Dey would blow reed quills an' have all the licker dey wanted. . . Oh, dem cornshuckings! . . De li'l niggers had big times. Us used to play, Green grow the willow tree, you swing my gal an' I swing yourn. Green grow the willow tree. . . The Yankees did plenty of harm. . . Marsa called us all up an' told us we was jes' free as him. He give us all a suit of clo'es, some money, a mule, a cow, wagon, hog and a li'l corn to start off on." (278-280).
Sally Murphy
"'Come h'yer Mose, 'say Ole Marster in dat big way er his'n. 'Come h'yer en choose yer marster. I'm gwine to give yer ter de one you picks out.' I 'gan at Mars' Eddard. He wuz older 'en me an' sorter se'rus lak so I passed him by. I looked at Mars' Ted er long time sorter hes'tatin', but den I jess chanced ter look at Mars' Wat, en dem blue eyes er his'n wuz fa'rly dancin' wid sump'n sorter lak ole Nick en I say ter mahself' dats de marster fer Mose, so I say out loud, 'I chooses Mars' Wat,' en bress yer heart, honey, I ain' nebber been sorry er minute sence." (291- 292).
Hattie Anne Nettles
"When dey dried de fruit us would cook our kind of fruit cake. I can't recollect what went in it. Dere was a plenty though. . . Ole Marster Joe and Miss Rosa Clayton was good as gold. . . Dey let de little niggers have all de fun dey wanted. Us played jump rope and swung in de grapevine swings mostly. Den us had rag dolls. . . One day my daddy says, ' Hannah, Marster said us is free now to do what we want to do.' But us stayed on two years mo'." (294 - 296).
Molly Parker
Hattie called her master "a good Christian-hearted man who did de bes' he could for de niggers. . . In de ol' days niggers axed de white marster for de bride an' no license was needed. Iffen dey lef' de plantation, de other white marster bought 'em so de girl could go wid her man. . . Our ol' marster was as good as he could be like I done tol' you. He looked atter de slaves when dey got sick an' sont for de doctor." (297- 298).
Simon Phillips
"Mr. Digby blowed a big bugle early every morning t get us all up and going by bright light. Mr. Digby was a good overseer and treated all de slaves de best he knew how. . I married Dick Parker on a Sunday and dey fixed us a bit dinner wid more good things to eat, but I was too happy to eat much myself. . . . I'd hate to see slavery time ag'in, 'cause hit sho' was bad for some of de niggers, but us fared good though." (310).
Aunt Irene
". . . every plantation had a still and there was much brandy, but he rarely ever saw a drunk man. . . Not since those days," he states, "have I had such good food. . . Them niggers jus' stays right there and works. . . . Most of 'em died on the old grounds." (312-315).
Aunt Nicey Pugh
"His name was Jeff Anderson Poole an' he was de bes' man in de world. Mah old miss was name Mollie. . . Yas ma'am dere was always plenty to eat. A thousan' poun's o' meat wasn't nothin' to kill on our plantation. . . After de surrender us staid on with Marse Jeff. Us didn't keer nothin' 'bout bein' free 'cause us had good times on de plantation. On Sadday dey had corn shuckin's an' de niggers had a week at Chris'mas wid presents for eve'ybody. Camping at de big house an' mo' to eat in one day den I sees now in a year." (320 - 322).
Uncle Maugan Shepherd
"But all and all . . . den was de really happy days for us niggers. Course we didn't hab de 'vantages dat we has now, but dere wus somp'n' back dere dat we ain't got now, an' dats secu'aty. Yassuh, we had somebody to go to when we was in trouble. . . I kin see the cool-house now packed wid fresh butter an' milk an' cream. . . de joy you gits fum lookin' for dewberries an' ahuntin' guinea pigs, an' settin' in de shade of a peach tree, reachin' up an' pullin' off a ripe peach and eatin' it slow . . your people gathered 'bout an' singin' in de moonlight or heered de lark at de break of day . . . I was bawn a slave, but I ain't neber been one. I'se been a worker for good peoples. You wouldn't calls dat bein' a slave would you, white folks?" (323 - 325).
Allen Sims
"I'se proud I was borned a slave. I'se too young to 'member much, but I knows I always had enough to eat and wear den, and I sho don't now." (340).
John Smith
"When us got sick, Old Mistis looked at-ter us herself, and she gin us oil and turpentine and lobelia and if dat didn't cure us, she sont for de doctor - de same doctor dat come to see her own fambly. Sometime a old nigger die, and Old Marster and Old Mistis dey cry jes' lak us did. Dey put 'em in a coffin . . . wid de white preacher dar and nobody didn't work none dat day, atter us come back fum de graveyard." (343).
Uncle Theodore Fontaine Stewart
"My marster was de best in dis country. He didn't had many niggers, but he sho' tuck good keer o' dem what he did had. He didn't 'low nobody to hit 'em a lick. Sometime when I would git cotch up wid in some diverment de white folks would say, 'Whose nigger is you?' and I say, 'Marse Saddler Smith' Den dey look at each oder an' say kinder low, 'Better not do nothin' to ole Smith's nigger, he'll raise de debil." (350).
Cull Taylor
"Ol' Marster was good to de niggers, but his overseers was mean. Ol' Marster fired de matter awhile an' got some good overseers. He didn't 'low dem to whip a nigger 'cept when he say, an' he didn't say so much. . . My mammy was name Sarah, an' her an' pappy stayed right wid Ol' Marster when de surrender come. Dey as right in de room when Ol' Marster died, an' dey cried something awful. . . Us all stayed dar 'twel pappy an' mammy die; den us chillums split up an' went everywhere. . . Mammy raise all her chillums right, an', long as I knowed dem, none of dem ever got in a jailhouse." (356-358).
Uncle Daniel Taylor
"As I said, Ol' Marse Tom was a good man . . . Mah white folks not only tuk keer ob us durin' slavery times, but dey gib us things atter us was freed. . . Den dere was de big times, sich as de hog killin' time, an' corn shucking, an' 'specially cotton pickin' time." (364 - 365).
George Taylor
"Among the thrilling moments of my life well do I remember the visits of President Jefferson Davis (the first and only President of the Confederate States of America) to the home of my Master. Mr. Davis always gave me a quarter of a dollar for holding his horse . . . I could stand it no longer, so rushed right through the smoke and flames, finally found Mr. Floyd, and dragged him out to safety. My God! I loved that white man, he was one of the finest men I ever knew!" (368).
Amanda Tellis
"Dere was plenty of pecan, walnut, an' ches'nut trees on de place, an' us could eat all de nuts us wanted; and den de slaves had dere own gardens if dey wanted to. . . My! When I think ob dat big smoke house, mah mouth jes' waters. . . Ol' Marster made his own whiskey . . . When any one did die, dey allus had a big funeral . . . folks is pretty much de same, if de white folks treat de niggers right, you couldn't get dem to leave dem." (371 - 373).
Elizabeth Thomas
"Amanda's life was a very easy one in comparison to some of the other slaves. She said she had seen many of the slaves cruelly mistreated, but her people were fortunate in having a good master and mistress." (374).
Aunt Mollie Tillman
"I lived mighty fine in dem days. I tel' you. Mister Ben Martin Jones wuz my Marster, and I wuz born on de Red Bridge Road. I wuz a house servant. . . O, dem wuz happy days, I tell you." (380).
Alonza Fantroy Toombs
"Marse Dan wuz a Baptis' preacher, an' he shorely wuz a good man. He wuz a chaplain in de big war and he didn't get hurt. . . Mistus Lucy wouldn't let 'em take me to de fiel'. Dem wuz good days, chile; mighty good days. I wuz happy den, but since 'mancipation I has jes' had to scuffle an' work an' do de bes' I kin. . when de Yankees come, dey wuz jes' ruineration to de plantation. . . de ol' days wuz bes' of all." (381).

"Missy . . . I'se de proudest nigger in de worl', 'caze I was a slave belonging to Marse Robert Toombs of Georgia; de grandest man dat ever lived, next to Jesus Christ. He was de bes' stump speaker in de State, an' he had mo' frien's dan a graveyard has ghosts. He was sho a kin' man, an' dere warn't no one livin' who loved his wife an' home mo' dan Marse Bob. . . he was near 'bout de greates' man dat eber come outen de South. He were a good business man; he were straight as dey make 'em, an' he sho enjoy playin' a good joke on someone. . . All us slaves on Marse Bob's place was cared for lak de white folks. We had de white folks doctor to treat us when we was sick. We had good clothes, good food an' we was treated fair. Dere warn't no mean peoples on our plantation. . . I 'members Marse Bob's smokehouse mos' of all. It had everthing in it f'um 'possum to deer . . . Atter de S'render, nary a slave lef' Marse Bob. He gib eve'y nigger over twenty-one a mule, some lan' an' a house to start off wid. Yassum, Mistis, I kin read an' write; my pappy learnt me how." (383 - 384).
William "Bill" Henry Towns
With this Slave Narrative, we can see the blatant disparity between the truth and abolitionist falseness. Abolitionist William Wells Brown said Robert Toombs was not one whit better than Simon Legree. Obviously, we should trust the people who knew Robert Toombs well rather than those who never met him.
Stepney Underwood
"Course Mr. Young didn't have to worry 'bout his han's runnin' away, cause he wan't a mean man like some of de slave holders was. He never spoke harsh or whupped 'em, an' he didn't 'low nobody else to do it neither. . . All of Mr. Young's hands liked him 'cause he didn't make 'em sleep on corn shuck mattresses an' he didn't have dey meals cooked in a wash pot. . . Life was kiner happy durin' slavery 'cause we never knowed nothing 'bout any yuther sort of life or freedom. . . When slavery was goin' on it was all right for me 'cause I never had it hard . . . As I said afore, Massa Young an' ol' Mistis was mighty good folks on 'count of dey never whupped any of they han's. Iffen dere was one dat would give trouble dey would git rid of him. De overseers had to be kin' to de hands or elswe he was outten a job. De chillum was mighty nice, too. Ever' time dey went to town or to de sto' dey would bring us younguns some candy or somepin'. . . Speakin' of holidays; de han's celebrated ever' holiday dat deir white folks celebrated. . . Ever' Christmas we'd go to de Big House an' git our present, 'cause ol' Mistis always give us one. . . we was free. I didn't mean that we lef' Mr. Young's 'cause we stayed wid him for de longest atter slavery was over. . . My chillums doin' pretty well in life. Dere's two of my sons what's doctors . . .Three of 'em is been school teachers . . . (385 - 393). [This Slave Narrative was recorded by Levi D. Shelby, Jr., an African-American.]

"My Mammy belonged to the Johnstons and my pappy was owned by the Underwoods . . . dey lived next to each other on two big plantations in Lowndes County. Dey was good peoples - dem Underwoods, I remembers dat dey use to think I was as funny as a little monkey. De massa usta laugh his head off at me, and when dere was parties, de guests would always say: . . . We wants to see Stepney dance." (394).

Simon Walker

"Cun'l Walker call all de slaves up to de Big House, an standin dere on de verandah he told 'em dey wuz now all free niggers - free to go whar dey pleased. But, ef anybody wanted to stay on de plantation to hole up dare hans. Mos' all de hans stayed on de plantation 'tell de Cun'l died, and de fambly sorter broke up. Dat wuz fo' yeahs atter de Surrender." (405-406).

Lucindia Washington

"All dis happen in Sumter County whar I was bawn. Us had a pretty place dere. . . You axe was we punished? Yassuh, we was punished for something: most of all for stealin'. . . When I was ma'ied . . . at de age of thirteen, Alex Washington, my husband an me had a forty-dollar weddin'. My mistis baked me a cake, an' a white schoolmaster named Henry Hindron spoke de ceremony. Me an' dat old husband had twenty-two chillums. . . Yes my chile, I is got religion. I seed Jesus hanging f'um de cross. He give his blood so dat us could live. I knows I is goin' to heaben." (410).

Eliza White

"Massa was a good man, and I did love Ole Mistis. Dey was mighty good to us niggers; fed us out dey own garden. We had checked homespun . . purty calico and dyed osnaburg . . .Massa and Mistis had four chillum. Two of dem, Dave and Quit, was bad fighting kids. I seen Massa make dem strip to dey waist, and whip 'em, den make dem go in and bathe. . . De patterollers was a good thing foh de lazy ones. When daylight come we had to get up . . . Massa didn't have his slaves whipped much; just when dey was lazy and wouldn't work. . . we would have some good frolics . . . big times at de cornshuckin's . . . We had purty beads made wid corn . . . I still 'members de Christmas I got my fust shoes . . . " (411-412).

Callie Williams

" Pappy was a driver . . . mammy say dat she stay at de little nursery cabin and look after all de little babies . . . Der mammies would come in from de field about ten o'clock to nurse 'em . . . all of 'em stayed fat as a butter balls, me among 'em. . . dey had all de vegetables dey needed and dere was always plenty of skimmed milk. . . dey really loved to eat . . . 'possum and fish. Dey'd eat and eat 'till dey'd get sick . . . After it was all over my pappy rented land on Mr. McLemore's place and he and mammy stayed dere till dey died. Dey was buried in de same graveyard dat Mr. McLemore had set aside for his slaves. . . . When any of de slaves wanted to get married . . . jump the broomstick and you is married. De ceremony wasn't much but dey stuck lots closer den and you didn't hear about so many divorces and such as dat." (426 - 428).

Aunt Silvia Witherspoon

"Honey, Massa an' Mistis Witherspoon was quality! Yassmam, dey was quality. Us slaves was treated lak we was somp'n round dat place. Massa didn't 'low no oberseer to tote no strop 'hine his niggers. Besides dat we was fed good an' had good clothes." (429).

About this Collection - Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938

Prison & Slavery - A Surprising Comparison. The ultimate purpose of my writings is not to praise slavery compared to freedom, but to compare two types of slavery: antebellum slavery in the USA versus modern mass incarceration.

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Did any Southern slave owners have good "employee relations" with their slaves?

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Answer (1 of 13): Let us be clear here: while there were undoubtedly slaveholders who were less brutal than some of their contemporaries, the fact remains that the system of slavery was maintained at all times by either coercion or the threat of coercion. It was an institution predicated on viole...

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I wonder where did slavery originate from?

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Where did most African slaves come from? What region in Africa?

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Answer (1 of 5): Once again, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Voyages Database to the rescue. Estimates West-Central Africa (what is now Angola, Dem. Rep of Congo, Rep. of Congo, and Equitorial Guinea) are the source for a huge majority portion of enslaved Africans to the Americas, with 5,694,575 embar...

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I wonder if slaves ever killed themselves.

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I wonder if slave owners named their slaves?

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Answer (1 of 8): During slavery in the United States, most all slaves were given names by their owners. It was up to the slave owner to assign whatever name they wished, and most often consisted of no more than a first name. Look at some of these receipts for the purchase of slaves below: You...

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I wonder why the Europeans took millions of innocent African people from their home villages in the first place.

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During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European traders started to get involved in the Slave Trade. European traders had previously been interested in African nations and kingdoms, such as Ghana and Mali, due to their sophisticated trading networks. Traders then wanted to trade in human beings.

They took enslaved people from western Africa to Europe and the Americas. At first this was on quite a small scale but the Slave Trade grew during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as European countries conquered many of the Caribbean islands and much of North and South America.

Europeans who settled in the Americas were lured by the idea of owning their own land and were reluctant to work for others. Convicts from Britain were sent to work on the plantations but there were never enough so, to satisfy the tremendous demand for labour, planters purchased slaves.

They wanted the enslaved people to work in mines and on tobacco plantations in South America and on sugar plantations in the West Indies. Millions of Africans were enslaved and forced across the Atlantic, to labour in plantations in the Caribbean and America.

Slavery changed when Europeans became involved, as it led to generation after generation of peoples being taken from their homelands and enslaved forever. It led to people being legally defined as chattel slaves.

A chattel slave is an enslaved person who is owned for ever and whose children and children's children are automatically enslaved. Chattel slaves are individuals treated as complete, property to be bought and sold. Chattel slavery was supported and made legal by European governments and monarchs. This type of enslavement was practised in European colonies from the sixteenth century onwards.

Europeans wanted lots of slaves, so people were captured to be made slaves.

Enslaved Africans were transported huge distances to work. They had no chance of returning home.

Children whose parents were enslaved became slaves as well.

How were they enslaved?
The principal methods of enslaving Africans were warfare, raiding and kidnapping, though people were enslaved through judicial processes, debt and, in regions with unstable rainfall levels, drought famine. The degree of violence involved in enslaving people varied between regions and through time. Warfare was a common source of slaves in Senegambia, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast (Bight of Benin) and Angola. Raiding and kidnapping seemed to have predominated in the Bight of Biafra, from where Equiano was exported.

Although some of the enslaved were forced to travel long distances to reach the coast, the costs of moving slaves, including the risk of deaths, meant that the homeland of the majority of enslaved Africans, who were taken away by the British, lay within a few hundred kilometres of the Atlantic coast.

Slave forts were established all along the coast of West Africa, to house captured Africans in holding pens (barracoons) awaiting transport. They were equipped with up to a hundred guns and cannons to defend European interests on the coast, by keeping competitors at bay. There were approximately 80 castles dotted along the slave-trading coast. The forts had the same basic design, with narrow windowless stone dungeons for captured Africans and fine European residences.

The largest of these forts was Elmina, in modern day Ghana. The fort had been fought over by the Portuguese, the Dutch and finally the British. At the height of the trade, Elmina housed 400 company personnel, including the company director, as well as 300 'castle slaves'. The whole commerce surrounding the Slave Trade had created a town outside the castle, of about 1000 Africans.

In other cases, the enslaved Africans were kept on board the ships, until sufficient numbers were captured, waiting perhaps for months in cramped conditions, before setting sail.
The ethnic groups of the enslaved Africans
The British traders covered the West African coast from Senegal in the north to the Congo in the south, occasionally venturing to take slaves from South-East Africa in present day Mozambique.

Some areas or venues on African Atlantic coast were more attractive to traders looking for the supply of enslaved people than others. This attractiveness was dependant on the level of support from the local chieftains rather than geographical barriers or the demography of local populations. Where there was cooperation it was easier to maintain order and efficiency in the process of the trade.

Some African rulers fought against the slave trade. However, other African rulers were willing to supply European traders with the extra enslaved people they wanted. As demand grew, some African traders started to capture other Africans and sell them to the Europeans. The British, French and Portuguese often helped these rulers in wars against their enemies.

African rulers who were willing to supply enslaved Africans became very rich and powerful. They became well armed with guns from Europe. The numbers of wars increased and they became more violent because of the Europian guns and weapons. Many Africans died for every enslaved person who was eventually sold.

The enslaved Africans comprised a mixture of ethnic groups. However after 1660, two thirds of Africans carried away by British ships came from just three regions - the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast and Central Africa. Within the Bight of Biafra just two venues - Old Calabar on the Cross River and Bonny in the Niger Delta - supplied the great majority of slaves entering British ships. Overall, Igbos from the Bight of Biafra constituted probably the largest single ethnic group of enslaved Africans entering the British Slave Trade, followed by Akan from the Gold Coast and Bantu from central Africa.

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The Arrival of European Traders: The Abolition of Slavery Project

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During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European traders started to get involved in the Slave Trade. European traders had previously been interested in African nations and kingdoms, such as Ghana and Mali, due to their sophisticated trading networks. Traders then wanted to trade in human beings.

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I wonder if the first slave owner was black?

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This image claiming that the first slave owner in America was a black man has been going around social media for the last few months. As is mentioned by commenter Ralph459, this is not a picture of Anthony Johnson, but that of former slave and abolitionist from Massachusetts, Lewis Hayden [1] This image says: " The First Slave Owner in America was not only a black man, but he went to court and demanded it "

There has been some argument as to what "America" really means as far as this image, South America was first called the Land of Americus, or America, in the Cosmographiae Introductio, printed on April 25, 1507, and it was later amended to add the name to North America as well, and in 1538, the geographer Gerard Mercator gave the name America to all of the Western Hemisphere on his Mapamundi.

African Slaves had been in the New World since at least 1501 when they were brought to modern day Brazil. But since this image is surely meant to use the 13 British Colonies, and not the United States of America, I will use them. I'm quite sure it wasn't supposed to mean the United States of America, since in 1789 when it officially became a nation (When the Articles of Confederation were superseded by the ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America) there were almost 700,000 slaves here already, and many laws had codified slavery, and some states had already abolished slavery by this point.

Slavery in the Colonies started nearly as soon as the colonies themselves, and information regarding these colonies is difficult to find due to so much being lost over the years and so much not documented to begin with. Slavery was first codified in 1641 in the Colonies. I will only write about slaves and slave laws that took place before 1655, the year mentioned in this image that case of Anthony Johnson vs Robert Parker happened.

Anthony Johnson wasn't the first slave owner in America, legal or otherwise. He wasn't the first in North America, he wasn't the first in the original 13 colonies, he wasn't the first in the US, he wasn't the first made a slave owner by a court of law. He was at best the first known black slave owner in the 13 colonies. Read on for the details.

Virginia

Virginia's first slaves.

Let's start at the beginning. I'm going to base this on the original 13 colonies, even though slaves were owned by other countries in what would later become US States. Jamestown, Virginia was the first colony, established in 1607 [2].

In 1619 John Rolfe (who served as secretary and recorder general of Virginia (1614-1619) and as a member of the governor's Council (1614-1622)) was also responsible for the first mention of Africans in Virginia. In a letter to Sandys in January 1620, Rolfe noted that late in August 1619 the Dutch ship White Lion arrived at Point Comfort, at what is now Fort Monroe, with "20. and odd Negroes" on board.

About the latter end of August, a Dutch man of Warr of the burden of a 160 tunnes arrived at Point-Comfort, the Comandors name Capt Jope, his Pilott for the West Indies one Mr Marmaduke an Englishman. They mett with the Treasurer in the West Indyes, and determined to hold consort shipp hetherward, but in their passage lost one the other. He brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes, which the Governor and Cape Marchant bought for victualls (whereof he was in greate need as he pretended) at the best and easyest rates they could. He hadd a lardge and ample Commyssion from his Excellency to range and to take purchase in the West Indyes.

Four days later, the English ship Treasurer arrived with additional Africans, the lot having been captured from a Portuguese ship carrying slaves en route from Luanda, Angola, to the West Indies. (The Treasurer was partly owned by Samuel Argall and was the same ship on which Argall had transported Rolfe and Pocahontas to England.) Rolfe's letter is the first extant mention of Africans in Virginia, although there may have been others in the colony before then. [3] These Africans were stolen from Portuguese slave ships not merchant ships transporting indentured servants. The Governor at the time was Sir George Yeardley, and the Cape Merchant was Abraham Piersey. In Thomas D Morris's book " Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860 " He says that Governor Yeardley in his will, written in 1627, listed these Africans separately from his indentured servants, and that the 1624 Census listed the blacks with no last names, but white indentured servants with surnames and contract completion dates.
20 slaves sold to colonists, Jamestown, 1619, negros
While there is still some debate as to whether or not these Africans were slaves or indentured servants, the Virginia Library Archives References services tells me:

From the research completed thus far it appears that there is no mention of the existence of a bill of lading from the White Lion that documents the trade at Jamestown of the slaves that had been captured from the Portuguese vessel. Likewise there doesn't appear to be any mention of an existing document that definitively designates the status of this group as a whole as being either indentured servants or slaves at that time. Records from gatherings do not indicate the marital status of the Africans (Mr., Miss, etc.) and, unlike white servants, no year is associated with the names - information vital in determining the end of a servant's term of bondage. Most likely some Africans were slaves and some were servants.

Other Africans began to turn up in Virginia court records. On September 19, 1625, for instance, the General Court ordered Captain Nathaniel Bass to provide clothing for an African man named Brass (or Brase), who had come to Virginia with a Captain Jones and been sold to Captain Bass. The same decision awarded temporary custody of Brass to Lady Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley, the wife of Sir George Yeardley and a resident of Jamestown, who was then ordered to pay forty pounds of good tobacco per month for his labor "so long as he remayneth with her." It was a decision that both distinguished between African servitude and slavery, and put a price on the labor of an African male.

The Library of Virginia
Archives Reference Services
800 E Broad Street
Richmond, VA  23219-8000

Virginia's first legal cases involving slaves.

In 1640 the first case in Virginia to make an indentured servant a slave was that of John Punch.

On July 9, 1640, members of the General Court decided the punishment for three servants-a Dutchman, a Scotsman, and an African-who ran away from their master as a group. The proceedings reveal an example of interracial cooperation among servants at a time when the colony's leaders were starting to create legal differences between Europeans and Africans. John Punch became the first African to be a slave for life by law in Virginia (and all 13 colonies).

Whereas Hugh Gwyn hath by order from this Board Brought back from Maryland three servants formerly run away from the said Gwyn, the court doth therefore order that the said three servants shall receive the punishment of whipping and to have thirty stripes apiece one called Victor, a dutchman, the other a Scotchman called James Gregory, shall first serve out their times with their master according to their Indentures, and one whole year apiece after the time of their service is Expired. By their said Indentures in recompense of his Loss sustained by their absence and after that service to their said master is Expired to serve the colony for three whole years apiece, and that the third being a negro named John Punch shall serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural Life here or elsewhere [4]

In the second case, dated July 22, six white servants and a black man were caught running away, and their punishments varied. While four of the servants received lesser sentences, the other two were ordered whipped and branded on the cheek with the letter R, and several years were added to their indentures. One of these men was also sentenced to work for a year with a leg shackle. "Emanuel the Negro" suffered the same harsh sentence (and was also assigned a leg shackle), but because he presumably was a slave, he did not receive added years. [5][6]

Massachusetts

Massachusetts First Slaves

The exact date slaves first entered Massachusetts is unknown but many sources suggest Samuel Maverick was the first slaveholder in the colony after he arrived in early Boston in 1624 with two slaves. According to the book "Bound for America: The Forced Migration of Africans to the New World," the first slaves imported directly from Africa to Massachusetts arrived in 1634.

A few years later, in December of 1638, a slave ship named Desire brought Boston's first shipment of slaves from Barbados, whom had been exchanged for enslaved Pequot Indians from New England.

Massachusetts First Laws involving slaves.

In 1641, Governor John Winthrop, a slave owner himself, helped write the first law legalizing slavery in North America. In 1641 he helped write the Massachusetts Body of Liberties which was the first legal code established in Massachusetts. Liberty 91 claimed:

91. There shall never be any bond slavery, villeinage, or captivity amongst us unless it be lawful captives taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us. And these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israel concerning such persons cloth morally require. This exempts none from servitude who shall be judged thereto by authority.

Which makes Massachusetts the first colony to legalize and codify slavery.

In 1643 The New England Confederation of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven adopted a fugitive slave law.

John Winthrop, 2nd, 6th, 9th, and 12th Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

New York

First Slaves in New York.

In Leslie M Harris's book, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Historical Studies of Urban America) she says the first slaves in the Colony of New York came in 1626, when 11 African slaves were imported by the Dutch West India Company. In 1635 roads were built by slaves, timber and firewood cut by slaves, and they cut and burned limestone and seashells used in outhouses. In 1636 settlers bought slaves from a ship's captain from Providence Island, in 1642 a French privateer sold and unknown number of slaves, and in 1652 a Dutch privateer captured a Spanish ship and sold 44 of its African slaves to the settlers. By 1655 settlers were hoping to cash in on the slave trade, by buying slaves and reselling them to other settlements, when a Dutch ship Witte Paert brought 300 African Slaves.

"The first blacks to arrive in New Amsterdam were Paul d' Angola, Simon Congo, Anthony Portuguese, John Francisco, and seven other males in 1626. Their names indicate that they may have been slaves on Portuguese or Spanish ships captured at sea. Three women were brought in from Angola in 1628. The Reverend Jonas Michaelius, first minister of the Dutch Reformed Church of New Netherland, gave his opinion of their value as maid‑servants: "the Angola slaves are thievish, lazy and useless trash." These fourteen blacks formed 5.2 percent of the 270‑person population of New Amsterdam in 1628. " [7]

First New York Laws involving slaves.

In 1640, New York passes a law that forbids residents from harboring or feeding runaway slaves.

In 1652, the first law establishing codes for Slaves and Slavery was written in New York, it was called the "Protection for Slaves" law, and were passed to prevent the mistreatment of slaves. Whipping was forbidden unless the owner received permission from authorities. Manumission of slaves was allowed.

New Hampshire

First slaves in New Hampshire

According to Dr. Dinah Mayo-Bobee's Servile Discontents: Slavery and Resistance in Colonial New Hampshire, 1645-1785, African slaves were noted in New Hampshire by 1645. They concentrated in the area around Portsmouth.

The first known black person in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, came from the west coast of Africa in 1645. He was captured one Sunday when slave merchants attacked his village in Guinea, killing about a hundred persons and wounding others. Upon arrival in Boston, the slave was bought by a Mr. Williams "of Piscataqua." When the General Court of the colony learned of the raid and kidnapping, the court ordered the merchants to return the African to his home. Slavery was not the issue of concern, for human bondage was legal in the region. The court was "indignant" that raiders had violated the Sabbath and that they had committed "ye haynos and crying sin of man stealing." [8]

Connecticut

First Slaves in Connecticut

According to Benjamin Trumbull, a Connecticut Historian, who wrote " A complete history of Connecticut, civil and ecclesiastical, from the emigration of its first planters, from England, in the year 1630, to the year 1764 (v.002): and to the close of the Indian wars " the first slave in the state of Connecticut was Louis Berbice, killed at the Dutch Fort 'in Hartford by Gysbert Opdyke in 1639. It is certain that ownership of negroes was common among the leading statemen of our early history. Theophilus Eaton, the first governor of New Haven Colony; JohnTalcott of Hartford; Edward Hopkins, second governor of Connecticut Colony, and founder of the famous Hopkins Grammar Schools, were all owners of slaves. John Pantry of Hartford owned them, and the inventories of the estates of Col. George Fenwick in 1660, and of John Latimer in 1662, show those eminent gentlemen to be in a like category.

Trumbull also said "it is certain that Africans were introduced into the Colonies as early as 1620, and the fact that slavery existed in New Haven Colony in 1644 shows that the custom was rooted in the very earliest history of the state. It must be said in extenuation that the early settlers were but following the practice obtaining in England, their mother country, from the time of Elizabeth, with the difference that the slaves in England were not black, but white; again, that if we were among the first to introduce African slavery, we were among the first to abolish that institution." Which clearly shows that Connecticut slaves were not white at all, but black.

First laws involving slaves in Connecticut

The "Articles of Confederation" of 1643 is probably the first know law to involve "ownership" of people (aka slaves) a provision was made for the distribution among the inhabitants of "persons, as well as lands and goods, taken in the spoils of war." [9]

It was almost by accident that slavery was officially recognized in Connecticut in 1650. The code of laws compiled for the colony in this year was especially harsh on the Indians. It was enacted that certain of them who incurred the displeasure of the colony might be made to serve the person injured or "be shipped out and exchanged for Negroes." [10]

Delaware

First slave in Delaware

According to Alf Aberg's book "The People of New Sweden" In 1639 Anthony, the first known enslaved African arrived in Delaware, the ship, the Fogel Grip, which accompanied Kalmal Nyckel, brings a 25th man from St. Kitts, a slave from Angola known as Anthony Swartz. He served Johan Printz, Governor of New Sweden. [11]

These are the slaves, slave owners, and slave laws passed before 1655, there are surely more, but these are the documented ones. While I am aware that I didn't list all of the 13 colonies, this is because I stopped at 1655, and all other colonies either didn't pass laws until after then, didn't have any documents slaves before then, or weren't established yet.

Anthony Johnson

This brings us to Anthony Johnson, Anthony Johnson first arrived in Virginia in 1621. Referred to as "Antonio a Negro" in early records, Anthony went to work on a tobacco plantation. It's not clear whether he was an indentured servant (a servant contracted to work for a set amount of time) or a slave. [12] 1651, Johnson claimed 250 acres of land along Pungoteague Creek. He claimed the land by virtue of five headrights A headright was a colonial system put in place to help bring laborers to the new Colonies, in exchange for buying the contract for an indentured servant, the colonies would give the purchaser between 1 and 1000 acres each. In the case of Virginia it was given at a rate of 50 acres per indentured servant. So this means that Johnson had bought the contracts for 5 indentured servants, which typically had contracts of either 4 or 7 years. This is how Johnson came to have a servant named John Casor. However, 4 years later, John Casor escaped to a nearby farm owned by Robert Parker and claimed that Johnson had kept him longer than his indenture by "7 or 8 years" which is obviously not true since he had only acquired his contract 4 years prior.

The Civil Suit was against Robert Parker for taking his property, not against John Casor. According to the case transcript form the original archives, John Casor claimed to be an indentured servant, which might have possibly been true if you consider that Virginia gave Johnson a 50 acre headright for him, but Johnson said he was not, and that he was purchased as a slave (probably untrue for above reasons) but there was obviously no proof of indenture since Casor was returned to Johnson. According to the ruling he was not "an indentured servant made a slave as the result of a civil suit" as the court apparently believed he was already a slave. He did not go to court to demand it. The transcript follows [13]:

The deposition of Captain Samuel Goldsmith taken (in open court) 8th of March Sayth, That beinge at the howse of Anthony Johnson Negro (about the beginninge of November last to receive a hogshead of tobacco) a Negro called John Casar came to this Deponent, and told him that hee came into Virginia for seaven or Eight yeares (per Indenture) And that hee had demanded his freedome of his master Anthony Johnson; And further said that Johnson had kept him his servant seaven yeares longer than hee ought, And desired that this deponent would see that hee might have noe wronge, whereupon your Deponent demanded of Anthony Johnson his Indenture, hee answered, hee never sawe any; The said Negro (John Casor) replyed, hee came for a certayne tyme and had an Indenture Anthony Johnson said hee never did see any But that hee had him for his life; Further this deponent saith That mr. Robert Parker and George Parker they knew that the said Negro had an Indenture (in on Mr. Carye hundred on the other side of the Baye) And the said Anthony Johnson did not tell the negro goe free The said John Casor would recover most of his Cowes of him; Then Anthony Johnson (as this deponent did suppose) was in a feare. Upon this his Sonne in lawe, his wife and his 2 sonnes perswaded the said Anthony Johnson to sett the said John Casor free. more saith not

Samuel Goldsmith

This daye Anthony Johnson Negro made his complaint to the Court against mr. Robert Parker and declared that hee deteyneth his servant John Casor negro (under pretence that the said Negro is a free man.) The Court seriously consideringe and maturely weighinge the premisses, doe fynde that the said Mr. Robert Parker most unjustly keepeth the said Negro from Anthony Johnson his master as appeareth by the deposition of Captain Samuel Goldsmith and many probably circumstances. It is therefore the Judgment of the Court and ordered That the said John Casor Negro forthwith returne unto the service of his said master Anthony Johnson, And that mr. Robert Parker make payment of all charge in the suit. also Execution.

Conclusion

While the case of Anthony Johnson and John Casor was not the case of the first slave, first slave owner, or first legal slave owner, it might possible have been the first civil case involving slavery, and at the very least is the first known example in the colonies of a black man owning either indenture servants or slaves. Slaves had been here since 1619, and all slaves had been "legal" slaves (and thus their owners "legal" slave owners) since the first law legalizing slavery passed. The first man to be considered a slave by a court of law was John Punch, and his owner Hugh Gwyn considered the first slave owner by a court of law. However it might be of interest to note that in 1670, when Johnson died, a court in Virginia ruled that, because "he was a Negro and by consequence an alien," the land owned by Johnson (in Virginia) rightfully belonged to the Crown meaning that because he was a negro he did not have the legal right to own property to begin with. [14]

References

[1] http://nbhistoricalsociety.org/Important-Figures/lewis-hayden/
[2] http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/colonial/jb_colonial_jamestwn_1.html
[3] http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Rolfe_John_d_1622
[4] McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, p. 466. http://www.virtualjamestown.org/practise.html
[5] H. R. McIlwane, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia 1622-1632, 1670-1676 (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1924), 466-467. http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/General_Court_Responds_to_Runaway_Servants_and_Slaves_1640
[6] http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Runaway_Slaves_and_Servants_in_Colonial_Virginia#start_entry
[7] http://www.geni.com/people/Simon-Congo/6000000013422175686
[8] http://www.seacoastnh.com/blackhistory/slaves.html
[9] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/art1613.asp
[10] https://archive.org/stream/codeof165000conn/codeof165000conn_djvu.txt
[11] https://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/digital/pahistory/folder_1.html
[12] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p265.html
[13] Northampton County Order Book 1655-1668, fol. 10; via Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975), P. 180-181.
[14] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p265.html

The difference between slaves, and indentured servants.
An indentured servant is by definition "A person under contract to work for another person for a definite period of time, usually without pay but in exchange for free passage to a new country. During the seventeenth century most of the white laborers in Maryland and Virginia came from England as indentured servants." A slave is by definition "the condition in which one person is owned as property by another and is under the owner's control, especially in involuntary servitude. Lifetime hereditary involuntary servitude."
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Was the First Slave Owner in America a Black Man?

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This image claiming that the first slave owner in America was a black man has been going around social media for the last few months.

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I wonder why they stacked so many slaves on top of each other

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I wonder  how long the slaves lasted before they died on passages?

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The Slave Trade - Constitutional Rights Foundation

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Ironically, the first ship carrying slaves across the Atlantic went from west to east. During his second voyage to America, Columbus captured 500 Caribbean Indians to take back to Spain. About 200 Indians died during the Atlantic crossing and were thrown into the sea.

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I wounder what was the most caused death of slaves

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The American slave trade caused 5 million deaths "or more."

By Jon Greenberg on Tuesday, March 18th, 2014 at 1:43 p.m.

Every war is filled with grim statistics, and Andrew Napolitano took a debate with Comedy Central's Jon Stewart down that road when he brought up the Civil War's casualties. President Abraham Lincoln, Napolitano argued, could have undone slavery "without causing the deaths of 785,000 human beings."

"How many deaths of human beings were caused by the American slave trade?" Stewart shot back.

"Unfortunately, a million and a half," Napolitano said.

"Try 5 million or more," Stewart said.

We are fact-checking several claims from the Civil War debate between Napolitano, a libertarian pundit and former judge, and Stewart. Here we are looking at if the American slave trade, the process by which people were acquired and sold into slavery, resulted in the death of 5 million people or more. (Statistics focus on the slave trade, because experts say it's impossible to know the overall death toll caused by slavery in America.)

We asked Comedy Central for Stewart's source and did not hear back. But it seems likely Stewart got his information from another Daily Show guest. Historian Manisha Sinha from the University of Massachusetts was part of a panel in a mock game show called

Asked during the game to estimate the number of deaths, Sinha said 2 million to 5 million might have perished.

So that would put Stewart on the high end of one estimate. But Stewart made an error in his characterization.

Sinha was talking about the Atlantic slave trade, which included slaves bound for South America, the Caribbean as well as North America, while Stewart focused on the American slave trade.

So what's the American share? Starting in the late 1960s, historians began culling hard numbers on the slave trade from shipping manifests and other original documents. The result is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database. It has tabulated an estimated 80 percent of the traffic in human beings and found about 10.7 million people survived the passage from their homeland between 1500 and 1866. Of that, about 390,000 made it to North American soil. This was about 3 percent of the total.

Historian Herbert Klein of Columbia and Stanford universities, who worked on the database, said that the data suggest about 85,000 people destined for North America did not survive the trip across the Atlantic -- far below 5 million.(The same data show deaths caused by the slave trade in all of North and South America at about 1.8 million.)

However, as exact as this information might be, it only goes so far. Much data is missing, either because it was lost or because no records were kept of the illegal shipments of slaves to North America that took place after 1808. That was the year when the United States banned the importation of slaves from Africa.
Our ruling
Plus, as we noted, the database counts only the deaths due to the capture and transport of slaves and says nothing about the people who died in bondage from brutality, disease and deprivation.

When the Civil War began, about 4 million people lived in slavery. According to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, half of all their babies died in the first year of life. That was twice the rate for white babies. Stanford Medical School cites the statistic that in 1850, the life expectancy of slaves was four years less than for whites.

Stewart said the American slave trade caused the deaths of at least 5 million people. Stewart appears to be using an estimate for deaths associated with the slave trade in North and South America. America's portion is much smaller, an expert told us.

We rate Stewart's claim False.

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Jon Stewart: Slave trade caused 5 million deaths

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Every war is filled with grim statistics, and Andrew Napolitano took a debate with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart down that road when he brought up the Civil War’s casualties. President Abraham Lincoln, Napolitano argued, could have undone slavery "without causing the deaths of 785,000 human beings."

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I wonder what kinds of jobs slaves had on the Middle Passage?

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Tragic History of Slavery Through the Middle Passage Slave Trade

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Nowhere in the annals of history has a people experienced such a long and traumatic ordeal as Africans during the Atlantic slave trade.

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I wonder when slavery started and ended.

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Many don't know the answer. We should declare Dec. 6 Liberation Day.

I cringe every year when Black History Month rolls around. Don't get me wrong, I think it's important for all Americans to know something about "the black experience" that played such a big role in shaping the culture and politics of this nation.

But I'm always bothered by what we don't learn about black history during this February observance. Nothing makes me want to holler more than two important things we don't seem to know about slavery. And just what is that? Most Americans I encounter don't know when it started - or ended.

Without this vital historical context, non-blacks lack a foundation for understanding that " peculiar institution." Counting from the arrival of the first slave ship, blacks were enslaved a century longer than they have been free. These are important benchmarks of the journey blacks have made from enslavement to freedom. African Americans who don't know this lack a vital part of what Socrates said is the greatest knowledge a person can have: know thyself.

Sadly, most people don't know that the first slave ship docked in Jamestown, Va., in August 1619, a year before the pilgrims dropped anchor at Plymouth Rock. And most aren't aware that slavery in this country didn't officially end until Dec. 6, 1865, the day the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified.

It didn't end on Jan. 1, 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. That was a Civil War executive order that freed slaves only in parts of the South that were not under control of the Union Army. Slaves in sections of Virginia and Louisiana occupied by the Union Army were left in bondage - and those in the rest of the Confederacy weren't actually freed because Lincoln didn't control those rebellious areas.

And despite the fact that more than half of the states and the District of Columbia have a Juneteenth observance to celebrate the end of slavery, slavery wasn't ended in June 1865. That's when slaves in Galveston, Texas, learned of the Emancipation Proclamation. But by then, that presidential executive order was widely thought to be unenforceable, and the 13th Amendment had been passed by Congress and was sent to the states for approval.

So, the Juneteenth celebration of slavery's demise is something akin to telling a lie, when the truth will do better.

If anything of lasting value comes out of our annual homage to black history, I think it should be this: the designation of Dec. 6 as Liberation Day. It was on that day in 1865 that America's period of black enslavement, which lasted 246 years, officially came to an end.

Now I'm not talking about creating another national holiday - though Liberation Day ought be far more important to our national consciousness than New Year's Day, which just marks the turning of a page in the Gregorian calendar, and Columbus Day, a perpetuation of the myth of European discovery.

No, Liberation Day ought to be rooted in the determination of blacks to get our history right. Instead of people staying home, Liberation Day should cause blacks - and many other Americans -- to turn out for events that will help us to get to "know thyself."

"There are the stories that made America, and there are the stories that America made up," Bernard Kinsey, owner of one of this nation's most informative collections of black artifacts and memorabilia, told me. And he's right.

Making Dec. 6 our Liberation Day holiday would be a great way to ensure that black history is more fact than fiction.
DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism and Communication, writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.
In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the opinion front page or follow us on twitter @USATopinion or Facebook.

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Wickham: Do you know when slavery began and ended?

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Many don't know the answer. We should declare Dec. 6 Liberation Day. I cringe every year when Black History Month rolls around. Don't get me wrong, I think it's important for all Americans to know something about "the black experience" that played such a big role in shaping the culture and politics of this nation.

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I wonder what the biggest slave revolt against the master was

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I wonder how what were the most famous rebellions of slavery?

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The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

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One of the most pernicious allegations made against the African-American people was that our slave ancestors were either exceptionally "docile" or "content and loyal," thus explaining their purported failure to rebel extensively. Some even compare enslaved Americans to their brothers and sisters in Brazil, Cuba, Suriname and Haiti, the last of whom defeated the most powerful army in the world, Napoleon's army, becoming the first slaves in history to successfully strike a blow for their own freedom.

As the historian Herbert Aptheker informs us in American Negro Slave Revolts, no one put this dishonest, nakedly pro-slavery argument more baldly than the Harvard historian James Schouler in 1882, who attributed this spurious conclusion to " 'the innate patience, docility, and child-like simplicity of the negro' " who, he felt, was an " 'imitator and non-moralist,' " learning " 'deceit and libertinism with facility,' " being " 'easily intimidated, incapable of deep plots' "; in short, Negroes were " 'a black servile race, sensuous, stupid, brutish, obedient to the whip, children in imagination.' "

Consider how bizarre this was: It wasn't enough that slaves had been subjugated under a harsh and brutal regime for two and a half centuries; following the collapse of Reconstruction, this school of historians - unapologetically supportive of slavery - kicked the slaves again for not rising up more frequently to kill their oppressive masters. And lest we think that this phenomenon was relegated to 19th- and early 20th-century scholars, as late as 1959, Stanley Elkins drew a picture of the slaves as infantilized "Sambos" in his book Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, reduced to the status of the passive, "perpetual child" by the severely oppressive form of American slavery, and thus unable to rebel. Rarely can I think of a colder, nastier set of claims than these about the lack of courage or "manhood" of the African-American slaves.

So, did African-American slaves rebel? Of course they did. As early as 1934, our old friend Joel A. Rogers identified 33 slave revolts, including Nat Turner's, in his 100 Amazing Facts. And nine years later, the historian Herbert Aptheker published his pioneering study, American Negro Slave Revolts, to set the record straight. Aptheker defined a slave revolt as an action involving 10 or more slaves, with "freedom as the apparent aim [and] contemporary references labeling the event as an uprising, plot, insurrection, or the equivalent of these." In all, Aptheker says, he "has found records of approximately two hundred and fifty revolts and conspiracies in the history of American Negro slavery." Other scholars have found as many as 313.

Let's consider the five greatest slave rebellions in the United States, about which Donald Yacovone and I write in the forthcoming companion book to my new PBS series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

1. Stono Rebellion, 1739. The Stono Rebellion was the largest slave revolt ever staged in the 13 colonies. On Sunday, Sept. 9, 1739, a day free of labor, about 20 slaves under the leadership of a man named Jemmy provided whites with a painful lesson on the African desire for liberty. Many members of the group were seasoned soldiers, either from the Yamasee War or from their experience in their homes in Angola, where they were captured and sold, and had been trained in the use of weapons.

They gathered at the Stono River and raided a warehouse-like store, Hutchenson's, executing the white owners and placing their victims' heads on the store's front steps for all to see. They moved on to other houses in the area, killing the occupants and burning the structures, marching through the colony toward St. Augustine, Fla., where under Spanish law, they would be free.

As the march proceeded, not all slaves joined the insurrection; in fact, some hung back and actually helped hide their masters. But many were drawn to it, and the insurrectionists soon numbered about 100. They paraded down King's Highway, according to sources, carrying banners and shouting, "Liberty!" - lukango in their native Kikongo, a word that would have expressed the English ideals embodied in liberty and, perhaps, salvation.

The slaves fought off the English for more than a week before the colonists rallied and killed most of the rebels, although some very likely reached Fort Mose. Even after Colonial forces crushed the Stono uprising, outbreaks occurred, including the very next year, when South Carolina executed at least 50 additional rebel slaves.

2. The New York City Conspiracy of 1741. With about 1,700 blacks living in a city of some 7,000 whites appearing determined to grind every person of African descent under their heel, some form of revenge seemed inevitable. In early 1741, Fort George in New York burned to the ground. Fires erupted elsewhere in the city - four in one day - and in New Jersey and on Long Island. Several white people claimed they had heard slaves bragging about setting the fires and threatening worse. They concluded that a revolt had been planned by secret black societies and gangs, inspired by a conspiracy of priests and their Catholic minions - white, black, brown, free and slave.

Certainly there were coherent ethnic groups who might have led a resistance, among them the Papa, from the Slave Coast near Whydah (Ouidah) in Benin; the Igbo, from the area around the Niger River; and the Malagasy, from Madagascar. Another identifiable and suspect group was known among the conspirators as the " Cuba People," "negroes and mulattoes" captured in the early spring of 1740 in Cuba. They had probably been brought to New York from Havana, the greatest port of the Spanish West Indies and home to a free black population. Having been "free men in their own country," they rightly felt unjustly enslaved in New York.

A 16-year-old Irish indentured servant, under arrest for theft, claimed knowledge of a plot by the city's slaves - in league with a few whites - to kill white men, seize white women and incinerate the city. In the investigation that followed, 30 black men, two white men and two white women were executed. Seventy people of African descent were exiled to far-flung places like Newfoundland, Madeira, Saint-Domingue (which at independence from the French in 1804 was renamed Haiti) and Curaçao. Before the end of the summer of 1741, 17 blacks would be hanged and 13 more sent to the stake, becoming ghastly illuminations of white fears ignited by the institution of slavery they so zealously defended.

3. Gabriel's Conspiracy, 1800. Born prophetically in 1776 on the Prosser plantation, just six miles north of Richmond, Va., and home (to use the term loosely) to 53 slaves, a slave named Gabriel would hatch a plot, with freedom as its goal, that was emblematic of the era in which he lived.

A skilled blacksmith who stood more than six feet tall and dressed in fine clothes when he was away from the forge, Gabriel cut an imposing figure. But what distinguished him more than his physical bearing was his ability to read and write: Only 5 percent of Southern slaves were literate.

Other slaves looked up to men like Gabriel, and Gabriel himself found inspiration in the French and Saint-Domingue revolutions of 1789. He imbibed the political fervor of the era and concluded, albeit erroneously, that Jeffersonian democratic ideology encompassed the interests of black slaves and white workingmen alike, who, united, could oppose the oppressive Federalist merchant class.

Spurred on by two liberty-minded French soldiers he met in a tavern, Gabriel began to formulate a plan, enlisting his brother Solomon and another servant on the Prosser plantation in his fight for freedom. Word quickly spread to Richmond, other nearby towns and plantations and well beyond to Petersburg and Norfolk, via free and enslaved blacks who worked the waterways. Gabriel took a tremendous risk in letting so many black people learn of his plans: It was necessary as a means of attracting supporters, but it also exposed him to the possibility of betrayal.

Regardless, Gabriel persevered, aiming to rally at least 1,000 slaves to his banner of "Death or Liberty," an inversion of the famed cry of the slaveholding revolutionary Patrick Henry. With incredible daring - and naïveté - Gabriel determined to march to Richmond, take the armory and hold Gov. James Monroe hostage until the merchant class bent to the rebels' demands of equal rights for all. He planned his uprising for August 30 and publicized it well.

But on that day, one of the worst thunderstorms in recent memory pummeled Virginia, washing away roads and making travel all but impossible. Undeterred, Gabriel believed that only a small band was necessary to carry out the plan. But many of his followers lost faith, and he was betrayed by a slave named Pharoah, who feared retribution if the plot failed.

The rebellion was barely under way when the state captured Gabriel and several co-conspirators. Twenty-five African Americans, worth about $9,000 or so - money that cash-strapped Virginia surely thought it could ill afford - were hanged together before Gabriel went to the gallows and was executed, alone.

4. German Coast Uprising, 1811. If the Haitian Revolution between 1791 and 1804 - spearheaded by Touissant Louverture and fought and won by black slaves under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines - struck fear in the hearts of slave owners everywhere, it struck a loud and electrifying chord with African slaves in America.

In 1811, about 40 miles north of New Orleans, Charles Deslondes, a mulatto slave driver on the Andry sugar plantation in the German Coast area of Louisiana, took volatile inspiration from that victory seven years prior in Haiti. He would go on to lead what the young historian Daniel Rasmussen calls the largest and most sophisticated slave revolt in U.S. history in his book American Uprising. (The Stono Rebellion had been the largest slave revolt on these shores to this point, but that occurred in the colonies, before America won its independence from Great Britain.) After communicating his intentions to slaves on the Andry plantation and in nearby areas, on the rainy evening of Jan. 8, Deslondes and about 25 slaves rose up and attacked the plantation's owner and family. They hacked to death one of the owner's sons, but carelessly allowed the master to escape.

That was a tactical mistake to be sure, but Deslondes and his men had wisely chosen the well-outfitted Andry plantation - a warehouse for the local militia - as the place to begin their revolt. They ransacked the stores and seized uniforms, guns and ammunition. As they moved toward New Orleans, intending to capture the city, dozens more men and women joined the cause, singing Creole protest songs while pillaging plantations and murdering whites. Some estimated that the force ultimately swelled to 300, but it's unlikely that Deslondes' army exceeded 124.

The South Carolina congressman, slave master and Indian fighter Wade Hampton was assigned the task of suppressing the insurrection. With a combined force of about 30 regular U.S. Army soldiers and militia, it would take Hampton two days to stop the rebels. They fought a pitched battle that ended only when the slaves ran out of ammunition, about 20 miles from New Orleans. In the slaughter that followed, the slaves' lack of military experience was evident: The whites suffered no casualties, but when the slaves surrendered, about 20 insurgents lay dead, another 50 became prisoners and the remainder fled into the swamps.

By the end of the month, whites had rounded up another 50 insurgents. In short order, about 100 survivors were summarily executed, their heads severed and placed along the road to New Orleans. As one planter noted, they looked " like crows sitting on long poles."

5. Nat Turner's Rebellion, 1831. Born on Oct. 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Va., the week before Gabriel was hanged, Nat Turner impressed family and friends with an unusual sense of purpose, even as a child. Driven by prophetic visions and joined by a host of followers - but with no clear goals - on August 22, 1831, Turner and about 70 armed slaves and free blacks set off to slaughter the white neighbors who enslaved them.

In the early hours of the morning, they bludgeoned Turner's master and his master's wife and children with axes. By the end of the next day, the rebels had attacked about 15 homes and killed between 55 and 60 whites as they moved toward the religiously named county seat of Jerusalem, Va. Other slaves who had planned to join the rebellion suddenly turned against it after white militia began to attack Turner's men, undoubtedly concluding that he was bound to fail. Most of the rebels were captured quickly, but Turner eluded authorities for more than a month.

On Sunday, Oct. 30, a local white man stumbled upon Turner's hideout and seized him. A special Virginia court tried him on Nov. 5 and sentenced him to hang six days later. A barbaric scene followed his execution. Enraged whites took his body, skinned it, distributed parts as souvenirs and rendered his remains into grease. His head was removed and for a time sat in the biology department of Wooster College in Ohio. (In fact, it is likely that pieces of his body - including his skull and a purse made from his skin - have been preserved and are hidden in storage somewhere.)

Of his fellow rebels, 21 went to the gallows, and another 16 were sold away from the region. As the state reacted with harsher laws controlling black people, many free blacks fled Virginia for good. Turner remains a legendary figure, remembered for the bloody path he forged in his personal war against slavery, and for the grisly and garish way he was treated in death.

The heroism and sacrifices of these slave insurrectionists would be a prelude to the noble performance of some 200,000 black men who served so very courageously in the Civil War, the war that finally put an end to the evil institution that in 1860 chained some 3.9 million human beings to perpetual bondage.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.

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The Five Greatest Slave Rebellions in the United States | African American History Blog | The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

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One of the most pernicious allegations made against the African-American people was that our slave ancestors were either exceptionally "docile" or "content and loyal," thus explaining their purported failure to rebel extensively.

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I wonder who was the first slave owner?

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Anthony Johnson ( b. c. 1600 - d. 1670) was a black Angolan who achieved freedom in the early 17th-century Colony of Virginia after serving his term of indenture. He became a property owner that owned slaves, and was one of the first people in Virginia to have his right to own a slave legally recognized.

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I wonder if only black people were slaves?

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I wonder why black people were treated so badly?

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I wonder how many slaves died each month?

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The European slavetrade was the largest and most deadly in history.

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I wonder how slaves used the bathroom during the passage to america.

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The Middle Passage | The Atlantic crossing | From Africa to America | Slavery Routes | Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery | PortCities Bristol

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The Middle Passage was the crossing from Africa to the Americas, which the ships made carrying their 'cargo' of slaves. It was so-called because it was the middle section of the trade route taken by many of the ships. The first section (the 'Outward Passage' ) was from Europe to Africa.

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I wonder what they would do if a slave killed another slave.

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I wonder if the food the slaves ate was good.

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www.enotes.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.

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I wonder why they stacked so many slaves on top of each other?

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I wonder how it felt being chained so long and not having any clothes on.

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I wonder how many people survived the trip.

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This Haunting Animation Maps the Journeys of 15,790 Slave Ships in Two Minutes

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By the conclusion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade at the end of the 19th century, Europeans had enslaved and transported more than 12.5 million Africans.

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I wonder what would've happened if a slave slept on the underground railroad

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Notes from the Underground Railroad

Passengers on this "railroad" never forgot their life-or-death journey from bondage.

Arnold Gragston struggled against the current of the Ohio River and his own terror the first night he helped a slave escape to freedom. With a frightened young girl as his passenger, he rowed his boat toward a lighted house on the north side of the river. Gragston, a slave himself in Kentucky, understood all too well the risks he was running. "I didn't have no idea of ever gettin' mixed up in any sort of business like that until one special night," he remembered years later. "I hadn't even thought about rowing across the river myself."

Slaves had been making their way north to freedom since the late 18th century. But as the division between slave and free states hardened in the first half of the 19th century, abolitionists and their sympathizers developed a more methodical approach to assisting runaways. By the early 1840s, this network of safe houses, escape routes and "conductors" became known as the "Underground Railroad." Consequently, a cottage industry of bounty hunters chasing escaped slaves sprang to life as lines of the railroad operated across the North-from the big cities of the East to the little farming towns of the Midwest. Above all else, the system depended on the courage and resourcefulness of African Americans who knew better than anyone the pain of slavery and the dangers involved in trying to escape.

In a 1937 interview with the Federal Writers' Project, Gragston recalled that his introduction to the Underground Railroad had occurred only a day before his hazardous trek, when he was visiting a nearby house. The elderly woman who lived there approached him with an extraordinary request: "She had a real pretty girl there who wanted to go across the river, and would I take her?"

The dangers, as Gragston well knew, were great. His master, a local Know-Nothing politician named Jack Tabb, alternated between benevolence and brutality in the treatment of his slaves. Gragston remembered that Tabb designated one slave to teach others how to read, write and do basic math. "But sometimes when he would send for us and [if] we would be a long time comin', he would ask us where we had been. If we told him we had been learnin' to read, he would near beat the daylights out of us-after getting somebody to teach us."

Gragston suspected such arbitrary displays of cruelty were meant to impress his master's white neighbors and considered Tabb "a pretty good man. He used to beat us, sure; but not nearly so much as others did, some of his own kin people, even."

Tabb seemed especially fond of Gragston and "let me go all about," but Gragston realized what would happen if he were caught helping a slave escape to freedom-Tabb would probably shoot him or whip him with a rawhide strap. "But then I saw the girl, and she was such a pretty little thing, brown-skinned and kinda rosy, and lookin' as scared as I was feelin'," he said. Her plaintive countenance won out, and "it wasn't long before I was listenin' to the old woman tell me when to take her and where to leave her on the other side."

While agreeing to make the perilous journey, Gragston insisted on delaying until the next night. The following day, images of what Tabb might do wrestled in Gragston's mind with the memory of the sad-looking fugitive. But when the time came, Gragston resolved to proceed. "Me and Mr. Tabb lost, and as soon as [dusk] settled that night, I was at the old lady's house.

"I don't know how I ever rowed the boat across the river," Gragston remembered. "The current was strong and I was trembling. I couldn't see a thing there in the dark, but I felt that girl's eyes."

Gragston was certain the effort would end badly. He assumed his destination would be like his home in Kentucky, filled "with slaves and masters, overseers and rawhides." Even so, he continued to row toward the "tall light" the old woman had told him to look for. "I don't know whether it seemed like a long time or a short time," he recalled. "I know it was a long time, rowing there in the cold and worryin'." When he reached the other side, two men suddenly appeared and grabbed Gragston's passenger-and his sense of dread escalated into horror. "I started tremblin' all over again, and prayin'," he said. "Then one of the men took my arm and I just felt down inside of me that the Lord had got ready for me." To Gragston's astonishment and relief, however, the man simply asked Gragston if he was hungry. "If he hadn't been holding me, I think I would have fell backward into the river."

Gragston had arrived at the Underground Railroad station in Brown County, Ohio, operated by abolitionist John Rankin. A Presbyterian minister, Rankin published an anti-slavery tract in 1826 and later founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. Rankin and his neighbors in Ripley provided shelter and safety for slaves fleeing bondage. Over the years, they helped thousands of slaves find their way to freedom-and Gragston, by his own estimate, assisted "way more than a hundred" and possibly as many as 300.

He eventually made three to four river crossings a month, sometimes "with two or three people, sometimes a whole boatload." Gragston remembered the journeys more vividly than the men and women he took to freedom. "What did my passengers look like? I can't tell you any more about it than you can, and you weren't there," he told his interviewer. "After that first girl-no, I never did see her again-I never saw my passengers." Gragston said he would meet runaways in the moonless night or in a darkened house. "The only way I knew who they were was to ask them, 'what you say?' And they would answer, ' Menare.'" Gragston believed the word came from the Bible but was unsure of its origin or meaning. Nevertheless, it served its purpose. "I only know that it was the password I used, and all of them that I took over told it to me before I took them."

The dangers increased as Gragston continued his work. After returning to Kentucky one night from a river crossing with 12 fugitives, he realized he had been discovered. The time had come for Gragston and his wife to make the journey themsleves. "It looked like we had to go almost to China to get across that river," he remembered. "But finally, I pulled up by the lighthouse, and went on to my freedom-just a few months before all of the slaves got theirs."

The work of the Underground Railroad involved a network of white abolitionists, dedicated slaves like Gragston and free African Americans such as William Still of Philadelphia. The youngest of 18 children, Still was born in 1821, moved to Philadelphia in the mid-1840s and went to work for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society as a mail clerk and janitor. He rose to prominence in the city's burgeoning abolitionist movement and served as chairman of the General Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia. Still was closely involved in the planning, coordinating and communicating required to keep the Underground Railroad active in the mid-Atlantic region. He became one of the most prominent African Americans involved in the long campaign to shelter and protect runaways.

In The Underground Rail Road, a remarkable book published in 1872, Still recounted the stories of escaped slaves whose experiences were characterized by courage, resourcefulness, pain at forced partings from family members and, above all, a desperate longing for freedom. For Still, aiding runaway slaves-and helping to keep families intact-was a deeply personal calling. Decades earlier, his parents had escaped slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore. William's father, Levin, managed to buy his freedom after declaring as a young man that "I will die before I submit to the yoke."

William's mother, Sydney, remained in bondage, but she fled with her four children to Greenwich, N.J., only to be seized by slave-hunters. Sydney and her family were returned to Maryland, but she escaped a second time to New Jersey. She changed her name to Charity to avoid detection and rejoined her husband, but their reunion was tarnished by the knowledge that she was forced to leave two boys behind. Her angry former owner promptly sold them to an Alabama slaveholder. William Still would eventually be united with one of his enslaved brothers, Peter, who escaped to freedom in the North-a miraculous event that after the war inspired William to compile his history, hoping it would promote similar reunions.

The work of the Underground Railroad became the focal point of pro- and anti-slavery agitation after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Part of that year's grand legislative compromise aimed at halting the slide toward civil war, the law required federal marshals to capture escaped slaves in Northern free states and denied jury trials to anyone imprisoned under the act. Abolitionists and supporters of slavery-each for their own reasons-tended to exaggerate the extent of the railroad's operations, historian James McPherson observes, but there was no denying its effectiveness. As the decade progressed, the Fugitive Slave Act gave the work of the Underground Railroad new urgency.

Perhaps no one embodied the hunger for freedom more completely than John Henry Hill. A father and "young man of steady habits," the 6-foot, 25-year-old carpenter was, in Still's words, "an ardent lover of Liberty" who dramatically demonstrated his passion on January 1, 1853. After recovering from the shock of being told by his owner that he was to be sold at auction in Richmond, Hill arrived at the site of the public sale, where he mounted a desperate struggle to escape. Employing fists, feet and a knife, he turned away four or five would-be captors and bolted from the auction house. He hid from his baffled pursuers in the kitchen of a nearby merchant until he decided he wanted to go to Petersburg, Va., where his free wife and two children lived.

He stayed in Petersburg as long as he dared, leaving only when informed of a plot to capture him. Hill returned to his kitchen hideout in Richmond before learning that Still's Vigilance Committee had arranged-at the considerable cost of $125-for him to have a private room on a steamship leaving Norfolk for Philadelphia. Four days after departing Richmond on foot, he arrived in Norfolk and boarded ship-more than nine months after escaping from the auction. "My Conductor was very much Excited," Hill later wrote, "but I felt as Composed as I do at this moment, for I had started...that morning for Liberty or for Death providing myself with a Brace of Pistels."

On October 4, Hill wrote Still to inform him that he had arrived safely in Toronto and found work. But other matters preoccupied him. "Mr. Still, I have been looking and looking for my friends for several days, but have not seen nor heard of them. I hope and trust in the Lord Almighty that all things are well with them. My dear sir I could feel so much better sattisfied if I could hear from my wife."

But the Christmas season of 1853 brought good news. "It affords me a good deel of Pleasure to say that my wife and the Children have arrived safe in this City," Hill wrote on December 29. Although she lost all her money in transit-$35-the family reunion proved deeply moving. "We saw each other once again after so long, an Abstance, you may know what sort of metting it was, joyful times of corst."

During the next six years, Hill frequently wrote Still, reflecting on his experiences in Canada, the situation in the United States-and sometimes passing on sad family news. On September 14, 1854, Hill wrote of the death of his young son, Louis Henry, and his wife's heartache at the boy's passing. In another letter, Hill fretted about the fate of his uncle, Hezekiah, who went into hiding after his escape and ultimately fled to freedom after 13 months. Hill's letters are replete with concern for escaped slaves and the volunteer "captains" of the Underground Railroad who risked imprisonment or death to assist runaways. Still acknowledged Hill's spelling lapses but praised his correspondence as exemplifying the "strong love and attachment" freed slaves felt for relatives still in bondage.

Despite enormous difficulties, some families managed to escape to freedom intact.

Ann Maria Jackson, trapped in slavery in Delaware, made up her mind to flee north with her seven children when she learned alarming news of her owner's plans. "This Fall he said he was going to take four of my oldest children and two other servants to Vicksburg," she confided to Still. "I just happened to hear of this news in time. My master was wanting to keep me in the dark about taking them, for fear that something might happen."

Those fears were well-founded. Upon learning of his planned departure for Mississippi, quick-thinking Jackson gathered her children and headed for Pennsylvania. The presence of slave-hunting spies along the state line complicated the family's escape, but on November 21 a volunteer reported to Still that Jackson and her children, ranging in age from 3 to 16, were spotted across the state line in Chester County. From Pennsylvania, the family continued north into Canada. The 40 or so years Jackson had spent in slavery were at an end.

"I am happy to inform you that Mrs. Jackson and her interesting family of seven children arrived safe and in good health and spirits at my house in St. Catharines, on Saturday evening last," Hiram Wilson wrote to Still from Canada on November 30. "With sincere pleasure I provided for them comfortable quarters till this morning, when they left for Toronto."

Caroline Hammond's family faced different challenges. Born in 1844, Hammond lived on the Anne Arundel County, Md., plantation of Thomas Davidson. Hammond's mother was a house slave and her father, George Berry, "a free colored man of Annapolis."

Davidson, she remembered, entertained on a lavish scale, and her mother was in charge of the meals. "Mrs. Davidson's dishes were considered the finest, and to receive an invitation from the Davidsons meant that you would enjoy Maryland's finest terrapin and chicken besides the best wine and champagne on the market." Thomas Davidson, Hammond recalled, treated his slaves "with every consideration he could, with the exception of freeing them."

Mrs. Davidson, however, was a different story. She "was hard on all the slaves, whenever she had the opportunity, driving them at full speed when working, giving different food of a coarser grade and not much of it." Her hostility would soon evolve into something more sinister.

Hammond's father had arranged with Thomas Davidson to buy his family's freedom for $700 over the course of three years. Working as a carpenter, Berry made periodic partial payments to Thomas Davidson and was within $40 of completing the transaction when the slaveowner died in a hunting accident. Mrs. Davidson assumed control of the farm and the slaves, Hammond remembered-and refused to complete the transaction Berry had arranged with her late husband. As a result, "mother and I were to remain in slavery."

The resourceful Berry, however, was undeterred. Hammond recalled that her father bribed the Anne Arundel sheriff for permits allowing him to travel to Baltimore with his wife and child. "On arriving in Baltimore, mother, father and I went to a white family on Ross Street-now Druid Hill Avenue, where we were sheltered by the occupants, who were ardent supporters of the Underground Railroad."

The family's escape had not gone unnoticed. Hammond remembered that $50 rewards were offered for their capture-one by Mrs. Davidson and one by the Anne Arundel sheriff, perhaps to protect himself from criticism for the role he played in aiding their escape in the first place. To flee Maryland, Hammond and her family clambered into "a large covered wagon" operated by a Mr. Coleman, who delivered merchandise to the towns between Baltimore and Hanover, Pa.

"Mother and father and I were concealed in a large wagon drawn by six horses," Hammond recalled. "On our way to Pennsylvania we never alighted on the ground in any community or close to any settlement, fearful of being apprehended by people who were always looking for rewards."

Once they were in Pennsylvania, life for Caroline and her family got much easier. Her mother and father settled in Scranton, worked for the same household and earned $27.50 a month. Hammond attended school at a Quaker mission.

When the war ended, her family returned to Baltimore. Hammond completed the seventh grade and, just like her mother, became a cook.

As she recounted her experiences as a slave in a 1938 interview with the Federal Writers' Project, Hammond looked back on a life of 94 years with justified pride and satisfaction.

"I can see well, have an excellent appetite, but my grandchildren will let me eat only certain things that they say the doctor ordered that I should eat. On Christmas Day 49 children and grandchildren and some great-grandchildren gave me a Christmas dinner and $100 for Christmas," she declared. "I am happy with all the comforts of a poor person not dependent on anyone else for tomorrow."

Not surprisingly, freedom produced the same bliss and relief for a number of Underground Railroad passengers.

Hill's correspondence with Still is suffused with the escaped slave's profound joy in his new life. Even as he mourned the loss of his son, Hill reflected on his contentment. "It is true that I have to work very hard for comfort," he acknowledged in a letter to Still in 1854, but freedom more than compensated for his grief and hardship.

"I am Happy, Happy."

Robert B. Mitchell is the author of Skirmisher: The Life, Times and Political Career of James B. Weaver.

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Passengers on this "railroad" never forgot their life-or-death journey from bondage. Arnold Gragston struggled against the current of the Ohio River and his own terror the first night he helped a slave escape to freedom. With a frightened young girl as his passenger, he rowed his boat toward a lighted house on the north side of the river.

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I wonder why the south wanted slavery?

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The south wanted slavery mainly because they wanted to be able to have workers but not have to pay them. This way the South could make more money to either buy more slaves, more land, and be able to pay their taxes. This is mainly why the Civil War started. The North didn't like how the South didn't have to pay workers and the North did. The South also depended on slavery to keep the growth of their farms, and plantations good. With out slavery the South would have been much worse.

The South, needed slavery. The North didn't and were more against slavery than the South. The North worked in mills, factories, they owned and operated. The South grew cotton and tobacco. They needed people who would work in the fields for little or no money at all.

The south even used their slaves for the army. They didn't let their best slaves go to war but they let their more uncontrollable slaves go. When the south realized they needed more men in their army they turned to slaves and had them work in factories so whites in the factories could fight. But soon they needed more men again and this time they had slaves go into the army. Most slaves were even offered freedom if they fought in the war.

Slaves, once the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, stopped working as much as they used too. They slowed down and realized that they would be freed soon. Slaves once the War was coming nearer to the end slaves would run away up to the North and join the Army. Some never fought but if they did they were fierce fighters.

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Why did the South want slavery? - Slavery during the Civil War

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The south wanted slavery mainly because they wanted to be able to have workers but not have to pay them. This way the South could make more money to either buy more slaves, more land, and be able to pay their taxes. This is mainly why the Civil War started.

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I wonder if any slaves were able to escape...

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Underground Railroad - Runaway Slaves method of escape

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personal ingenuity enabled people to survive and, in some cases, escape to freedom.

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I wonder if a slave ever killed there master

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Find out about seven groups of slaves who risked everything for a chance at freedom.

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I wonder how did the Revolutionary War affect slavery?

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How did the Revolutionary War affect slavery? Could slavery have been ended at this time? | eNotes

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Get an answer for 'How did the Revolutionary War affect slavery? Could slavery have been ended at this time?' and find homework help for other Slavery, American Revolution questions at eNotes

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I wonder how did slaves get their names

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Answer (1 of 8): During slavery in the United States, most all slaves were given names by their owners. It was up to the slave owner to assign whatever name they wished, and most often consisted of no more than a first name. Look at some of these receipts for the purchase of slaves below: You...

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I wonder what kind of diseases were spreading through the ship when slaves were abroad...

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I wonder if any slaves spoke up for themselves.

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Period 2
I wonder what year did slavery even begin.

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Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

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.

When Did Slavery Start?

Hundreds of thousands of Africans, both free and enslaved, aided the establishment and survival of colonies in the Americas and the New World. However, many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship Sao Jao Bautista.

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

Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.
READ MORE: The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s. It Just Surfaced
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, counting each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress and guaranteeing the right to repossess any "person held to service or labor" (an obvious euphemism for slavery).

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 would transition from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region's dependence on enslaved labor.
READ MORE: 40 Years a Slave: The Extraordinary Tale of an African Prince Stolen from His Kingdom
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.
READ MORE: The Shocking Photo of 'Whipped Peter' That Made Slavery's Brutality Impossible to Deny
History of Slavery

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.
READ MORE: Enslaved Couples Faced Wrenching Separations, or Even Choosing Family Over Freedom
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.
READ MORE: How the Underground Railroad Worked
Missouri Compromise
WATCH: 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 able to help quell the forces of sectionalism only temporarily.

Kansas-Nebraska Act
WATCH: 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.
READ MORE: How Many US Presidents Owned Enslaved Workers?
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.
READ MORE: What Is Juneteenth?
The Legacy of Slavery
WATCH: The Civil War and Its Legacy
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.
PHOTOS: See America's First Memorial to its 4,400 Lynching Victims

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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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I wonder who discovered Africa.

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European exploration of Africa - Wikipedia

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The geography of North Africa has been reasonably well known among Europeans since classical antiquity in Greco-Roman geography. Northwest Africa (the Maghreb) was known as either Libya or Africa, while Egypt was considered part of Asia.

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I wonder why the slave owners physically and sexually abuse the women slaves ?

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I wonder how many slave families were separated?

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Who authorized explorers to enslave Africans

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7. Slave Trade, Exploration, American Beginnings: 1492-1690, Primary Resources in U.S. History and Literature, Toolbox Library, National Humanities Center

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Primary resources--historical documents, literary texts, and works of art--thematically organized with notes and discussion questions.

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i wonder if they were any other races other than black people as slaves

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I wonder if some african americans got away from being captured in their village.

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This article discusses systems, history, and effects of slavery within Africa. See Arab slave trade, Atlantic slave trade, Maafa, and Slavery in contemporary Africa for other discussions.

Slavery has historically been widespread in Africa, and still continues today in some countries.

Systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of Africa, as they were in much of the ancient world. In many African societies where slavery was prevalent, the enslaved people were not treated as chattel slaves and were given certain rights in a system similar to indentured servitude elsewhere in the world.[citation needed ] When the Arab slave trade and Atlantic slave trade began, many of the local slave systems began supplying captives for slave markets outside Africa.

Slavery in historical Africa was practiced in many different forms: Debt slavery, enslavement of war captives, military slavery, slavery for prostitution and criminal slavery were all practiced in various parts of Africa. Slavery for domestic and court purposes was widespread throughout Africa. Plantation slavery also occurred primarily on the eastern coast of Africa and in parts of West Africa. The importance of domestic plantation slavery increased during the 19th century due to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Many African states dependent on the international slave trade reoriented their economies towards legitimate commerce worked by slave labor.

Multiple forms of slavery and servitude have existed throughout African history and were shaped by indigenous practices of slavery as well as the Roman institution of slavery[citation needed ] (and the later Christian views on slavery), the Islamic institutions of slavery via the Arab slave trade, and eventually the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery was a part of the economic structure of African societies for many centuries, although the extent varied. Ibn Battuta, who visited the ancient kingdom of Mali in the mid-14th century, recounts that the local inhabitants vied with each other in the number of slaves and servants they had, and was himself given a slave boy as a "hospitality gift." In sub-Saharan Africa, the slave relationships were often complex, with rights and freedoms given to individuals held in slavery and restrictions on sale and treatment by their masters. Many communities had hierarchies between different types of slaves: for example, differentiating between those who had been born into slavery and those who had been captured through war.

Travels in the Interior of Africa, Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior of Africa v. II, Chapter XXII - War and Slavery.

The forms of slavery in Africa were closely related to kinship structures. In many African communities, where land could not be owned, enslavement of individuals was used as a means to increase the influence a person had and expand connections. This made slaves a permanent part of a master's lineage and the children of slaves could become closely connected with the larger family ties. Children of slaves born into families could be integrated into the master's kinship group and rise to prominent positions within society, even to the level of chief in some instances. However, stigma often remained attached and there could be strict separations between slave members of a kinship group and those related to the master.

Chattel slavery is a specific servitude relationship where the slave is treated as the property of the owner. As such, the owner is free to sell, trade, or treat the slave as he would other pieces of property and the children of the slave often are retained as the property of the master. There is evidence of long histories of chattel slavery in the Nile river valley and Northern Africa, but evidence is incomplete about the extent and practices of chattel slavery throughout much of the rest of the continent prior to written records by Arab or European traders. .

Many slave relationships in Africa revolved around domestic slavery, where slaves would work primarily in the house of the master but retain some freedoms. Domestic slaves could be considered part of the master's household and would not be sold to others without extreme cause. The slaves could own the profits from their labour (whether in land or in products), and could marry and pass the land on to their children in many cases.

Military slavery involved the acquisition and training of conscripted military units which would retain the identity of military slaves even after their service. Slave soldier groups would be run by a Patron, who could be the head of a government or an independent warlord, and who would send his troops out for money and his own political interests.

This was most significant in the Nile valley (primarily in Sudan and Uganda), with slave military units organized by various Islamic authorities, and with the war chiefs of Western Africa. The military units in Sudan were formed in the 1800s through large-scale military raiding in the area which is currently the countries of Sudan and South Sudan.

Moreover, a considerable number of the men born between 1800 and 1849 in West African regions (today Ghana and Burkina Faso) and abducted as slaves to serve in the army in Dutch Indonesia. Interestingly, soldiers were on average 3 cm taller than other West African population. Furthermore, data showed, that West Africans were shorter than North Europeans but of almost equal height to South Europeans. This was mainly related to the quality of the nutrition and healthcare.

Human sacrifice was common in West African states up to and during the 19th century. Although archaeological evidence is not clear on the issue prior to European contact, in those societies that practiced human sacrifice, slaves became the most prominent victims.

The Annual customs of Dahomey was the most notorious example of human sacrifice of slaves, where 500 prisoners would be sacrificed. Sacrifices were carried out all along the West African coast and further inland. Sacrifices were common in the Benin Empire, in what is now Ghana, and in the small independent states in what is now southern Nigeria. In the Ashanti Region, human sacrifice was often combined with capital punishment.

Many nations such as the Ashanti of present-day Ghana and the Yoruba of present-day Nigeria were involved in slave-trading. Groups such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands, waging war on African states to capture people for export as slaves. Historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood have provided an estimate, that of the Africans captured and then sold to Europeans around 90% of those who were shipped in the Atlantic slave trade. Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard Chair of African and African American Studies, has stated that "without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred."

The entire Bubi ethnic group descends from escaped intertribal slaves owned by various ancient West-central African ethnic groups.[citation needed ]

Like most other regions of the world, slavery and forced labor existed in many kingdoms and societies of Africa for hundreds of years. According to Ugo Kwokeji, early European reports of slavery throughout Africa in the 1600s are unreliable because they often conflated various forms of servitude as equal to chattel slavery.

The best evidence of slave practices in Africa come from the major kingdoms, particularly along the coast, and there is little evidence of widespread slavery practices in stateless societies. Slave trading was mostly secondary to other trade relationships; however, there is evidence of a trans-Saharan slave trade route from Roman times which persisted in the area after the fall of the Roman empire. However, kinship structures and rights provided to slaves (except those captured in war) appears to have limited the scope of slave trading before the start of the Arab slave trade and the Atlantic slave trade.

Chattel slavery had been legal and widespread throughout North Africa when the region was controlled by the Roman Empire (145 BC - ca. 430 AD and by the Eastern Romans from 533 to 695). A slave trade bringing Saharans through the desert to North Africa, which existed in Roman times, continued and documentary evidence in the Nile Valley shows it to have been regulated there by treaty. Chattel slavery persisted after the fall of the Roman empire in the largely Christian communities of the region. After the Islamic expansion into most of the region because of the trade expansion across the Sahara, the practices continued and eventually, the assimilative form of slavery spread to major societies on the southern end of the Sahara (such as Mali, Songhai, and Ghana). The medieval slave trade in Europe was mainly to the East and South: the Christian Byzantine Empire and the Muslim World were the destinations, Central and Eastern Europe an important source of slaves. Slavery in medieval Europe was so widespread that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly prohibited it-or at least the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands was prohibited at, for example, the Council of Koblenz in 922, the Council of London in 1102, and the Council of Armagh in 1171. Because of religious constraints, the slave trade was carried out in parts of Europe by Iberian Jews (known as Radhanites) who were able to transfer slaves from pagan Central Europe through Christian Western Europe to Muslim countries in Al-Andalus and Africa.

"There are no records of how many men, women and children were enslaved, but it is possible to calculate roughly the number of fresh captives that would have been needed to keep populations steady and replace those slaves who died, escaped, were ransomed, or converted to Islam. On this basis, it is thought that around 8,500 new slaves were needed annually to replenish numbers - about 850,000 captives over the century from 1580 to 1680. By extension, for the 250 years between 1530 and 1780, the figure could easily have been as high as 1,250,000."

Davis' numbers have been disputed by other historians, such as David Earle, who cautions that the true picture of European slaves is clouded by the fact the corsairs also seized non-Christian whites from eastern Europe and black people from west Africa.

In addition, the number of slaves traded was hyperactive, with exaggerated estimates relying on peak years to calculate averages for entire centuries, or millennia. Hence, there were wide fluctuations year-to-year, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, given slave imports, and also given the fact that, prior to the 1840s, there are no consistent records. Middle East expert, John Wright, cautions that modern estimates are based on back-calculations from human observation.

Such observations, across the late 1500s and early 1600s observers, estimate that around 35,000 European Christian slaves held throughout this period on the Barbary Coast, across Tripoli, Tunis, but mostly in Algiers. The majority were sailors (particularly those who were English), taken with their ships, but others were fishermen and coastal villagers. However, most of these captives were people from lands close to Africa, particularly Spain and Italy.

In 1544, Hayreddin Barbarossa captured Ischia, taking 4,000 prisoners in the process, and deported to slavery some 9,000 inhabitants of Lipari, almost the entire population. In 1551, Dragut enslaved the entire population of the Maltese island Gozo, between 5,000 and 6,000, sending them to Libya. When pirates sacked Vieste in southern Italy in 1554 they took an estimated 7,000 slaves. In 1555, Turgut Reis sailed to Corsica and ransacked Bastia, taking 6000 prisoners. In 1558 Barbary corsairs captured the town of Ciutadella, destroyed it, slaughtered the inhabitants and carried off 3,000 survivors to Istanbul as slaves. In 1563 Turgut Reis landed at the shores of the province of Granada, Spain, and captured the coastal settlements in the area like Almuñécar, along with 4,000 prisoners. Barbary pirates frequently attacked the Balearic islands, resulting in many coastal watchtowers and fortified churches being erected. The threat was so severe that Formentera became uninhabited.

Early modern sources are full of descriptions of the sufferings of Christian galley slaves of the Barbary corsairs:

Those who have not seen a galley at sea, especially in chasing or being chased, cannot well conceive the shock such a spectacle must give to a heart capable of the least tincture of commiseration. To behold ranks and files of half-naked, half-starved, half-tanned meagre wretches, chained to a plank, from whence they remove not for months together (commonly half a year), urged on, even beyond human strength, with cruel and repeated blows on their bare flesh...

As late as 1798, the islet near Sardinia was attacked by the Tunisians and over 900 inhabitants were taken away as slaves.

Sahrawi-Moorish society in Northwest Africa was traditionally (and still is, to some extent) stratified into several tribal castes, with the Hassane warrior tribes ruling and extracting tribute - horma - from the subservient Berber-descended znaga tribes. Below them ranked servile groups known as Haratin, a black population.

Enslaved Sub-Saharan Africans were also transported across North Africa into Arabia to do agricultural work because of their resistance to malaria that plagued the Arabia and North Africa at the time of early enslavement. Sub-Saharan Africans were able to endure the malaria infested lands they were transported to, which is why North Africans were not transported despite their close proximity to Arabia and its surrounding lands.

In the Horn of Africa, the Christian kings of the Ethiopian Empire often exported pagan Nilotic slaves from their western borderlands, or from newly conquered or reconquered lowland territories. The Somali and Afar Muslim sultanates, such as the medieval Adal Sultanate, through their ports also traded Zanj ( Bantu) slaves that were captured from the hinterland.

Slavery, as practiced in Ethiopia, was essentially domestic and was geared more towards women, this was the trend for most of Africa as well. Women were transported across the Sahara, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean trade more than men. Enslaved people thus served in the houses of their masters or mistresses, and were not employed to any significant extent for productive purpose. The enslaved were thus regarded as second-class members of their owners' family. The first attempt to abolish slavery in Ethiopia was made by Emperor Tewodros II (r. 1855-68), although the slave trade was not abolished legally until 1923 with Ethiopia's ascension to the League of Nations. Anti-Slavery Society estimated there were 2 million slaves in the early 1930s out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million. Slavery continued in Ethiopia until the Italian invasion in October 1935, when the institution was abolished by order of the Italian occupying forces. In response to pressure by Western Allies of World War II, Ethiopia officially abolished slavery and involuntary servitude after having regained its independence in 1942. On 26 August 1942, Haile Selassie issued a proclamation outlawing slavery.

In Somali territories, slaves were purchased in the slave market exclusively to do work on plantation grounds. In terms of legal considerations, the customs regarding the treatment of Bantu slaves were established by the decree of Sultans and local administrative legates. Additionally Freedom for these plantation slaves was also often acquired through eventual emancipation, escape, and ransom.

Oral tradition recounts slavery existing in the Kingdom of Kongo from the time of its formation with Lukeni lua Nimi enslaving the Mwene Kabunga whom he conquered to establish the kingdom. Early Portuguese writings show that the Kingdom did have slavery before contact, but that they were primarily war captives from the Kingdom of Ndongo.

Slavery was common along the Upper Congo River, and in the second half of the 18th century the region became a major source of slaves for the Atlantic Slave Trade, when high slave prices on the coast made long-distance slave trading profitable. When the Atlantic trade came to an end, the prices of slaves dropped dramatically, and the regional slave trade grew, dominated by Bobangi traders. The Bobangi also purchased a large number of slaves with profits from selling ivory, who they used to populate their villages. A distinction was made between two different types of slaves in this region; slaves who had been sold by their kin group, typically as a result of undesirable behavior such as adultery, were unlikely to attempt to flee. In addition to those considered socially undesirable, the sale of children was also common in times of famine. Slaves who were captured, however, were likely to attempt to escape and had to be moved hundreds of kilometers from their homes as a safeguard against this.

The slave trade had a profound impact on this region of Central Africa, completely reshaping various aspects of society. For instance, the slave trade helped to create a robust regional trade network for the foodstuffs and crafted goods of small producers along the river. As the transport of only a few slaves in a canoe was sufficient to cover the cost of a trip and still make a profit, traders could fill any unused space on their canoes with other goods and transport them long distances without a significant markup on price. While the large profits from the Congo River slave trade only went to a small number of traders, this aspect of the trade provided some benefit to local producers and consumers.

Various forms of slavery were practiced in diverse ways in different communities of West Africa prior to European trade. Even though slavery did exist, it was not nearly as prevalent within most West African societies that were not Islamic before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The prerequisites for slave societies to exist weren't present in West Africa prior to the Atlantic slave trade considering the small market sizes and the lack of a division of labor. Most West African societies were formed in Kinship units which would make slavery a rather marginal part of the production process within them. Slaves within Kinship based societies would've had almost the same roles that free members had. Martin Klein has said that before the Atlantic trade, slaves in Western Sudan "made up a small part of the population, lived within the household, worked alongside free members of the household, and participated in a network of face-to-face links."With the development of the trans- Saharan slave trade and the economies of gold in the western Sahel, a number of the major states became organized around the slave trade, including the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire, and Songhai Empire. However, other communities in West Africa largely resisted the slave trade. The Jola refused to participate in the slave trade up into the end of the seventeenth century and didn't use slave labor within their own communities until the nineteenth century. The Kru and Baga also fought against the slave trade. The Mossi Kingdoms tried to take over key sites in the trans-Saharan trade and, when these efforts failed, the Mossi became defenders against slave raiding by the powerful states of the western Sahel. The Mossi would eventually enter the slave trade in the 1800s with the Atlantic slave trade being the main market.

Senegal was a catalyst for slave trade, and from the Homann Heirs map figure shown, shows a starting point for migration and a firm port of trade. The culture of the Gold Coast was based largely on the power that individuals held rather than the land cultivated by a family. Western Africa, and specifically places like Senegal were able to arrive at the development of slavery through analyzing the aristocratic advantages of slavery and what would best suit the region. This sort of governing that used "political tool" of discerning the different labors and methods of assimilative slavery. The domestic and agricultural labor became more evidently primary in Western Africa due to slaves being regarded as these "political tools" of access and status. Slaves often had more wives than their owners, and this boosted the class of their owners. It is valuable to recognize that slaves were not all being used for the same purpose. European colonizing countries were participating in the trade to suit the economic needs of their countries. The parallel of "Moorish" traders found in the desert compared to the Portuguese traders that were not as established pointed out the differences in uses of slaves at this point, and where they were headed in the trade.

Historian Walter Rodney identified no slavery or significant domestic servitude in early European accounts on the Upper Guinea region and I. A. Akinjogbin contends that European accounts reveal that the slave trade was not a major activity along the coast controlled by the Yoruba people and Aja people before Europeans arrived. In a paper read to the Ethnological Society of London in 1866, the viceroy of Lokoja Mr T. Valentine Robins, who in 1864 accompanied an expedition up the River Niger aboard HMS Investigator, described slavery in the region:

Upon slavery Mr Robins remarked that it was not what people in England thought it to be. It means, as continually found in this part of Africa, belonging to a family group-there is no compulsory labour, the owner and the slave work together, eat the like food, wear the like clothing and sleep in the same huts. Some slaves have more wives than their masters. It gives protection to the slaves and everything necessary for their subsistence- food and clothing. A free man is worse off than a slave; he cannot claim his food from anyone.

With the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, demand for slavery in West Africa increased and a number of states became centered on the slave trade and domestic slavery increased dramatically. Hugh Clapperton in 1824 believed that half the population of Kano were enslaved people.

When British rule was first imposed on the Sokoto Caliphate and the surrounding areas in northern Nigeria at the turn of the 20th century, approximately 2 million to 2.5 million people there were enslaved. Slavery in northern Nigeria was finally outlawed in 1936.

With sea trade from the eastern African Great Lakes region to Persia, China, and India during the first millennium AD, slaves are mentioned as a commodity of secondary importance to gold and ivory. When mentioned, the slave trade appears to be of a small-scale and mostly involve slave raiding of women and children along the islands of Kilwa Kisiwani, Madagascar and Pemba. In places such as Uganda, the experience for women in slavery was different than that of customary slavery practices at the time. The roles assumed were based off gender and position within the society. First one must make the distinction in Ugandan slavery of peasants and slaves. Researchers Shane Doyle and Henri Médard assert the distinction with the following:

"Peasants were rewarded for valour in battle by the present of slaves by the lord or chief for whom they had fought. They could be given slaves by relatives who had been promoted to the rank of chiefs, and they could inherit slaves from their fathers. There were the abanyage (those pillaged or stolen in war) as well as the abagule (those bought). All these came under the category of abenvumu or true slaves, that is to say people not free in any sense. In a superior position were the young Ganda given by their maternal uncles into slavery (or pawnship), usually in lieu of debts... Besides such slaves both chiefs and king were served by sons of well to do men who wanted to please them and attract favour for themselves or their children.These were the abasige and formed a big addition to a noble household....All these different classes of dependents in a household were classed as Medard & Doyle abaddu(male servants) or abazana(female servants) whether they were slave or free-born.(175)"

In the Great Lakes region of Africa (around present-day Uganda), linguistic evidence shows the existence of slavery through war capture, trade, and pawning going back hundreds of years; however, these forms, particularly pawning, appear to have increased significantly in the 18th and 19th centuries. These slaves were considered to be more trustworthy than those from the Gold Coast. They were regarded with more prestige because of the training they responded to.

The language for slaves in the Great Lakes region varied. This region of water made it easy for capture of slaves and transport. Captive, refugee, slave, peasant were all used in order to describe those in the trade. The distinction was made by where and for what purpose they would be utilized for. Methods like pillage, plunder, and capture were all semantics common in this region to depict the trade.

Historians Campbell and Alpers argue that there were a host of different categories of labor in Southeast Africa and that the distinction between slave and free individuals was not particularly relevant in most societies. However, with increasing international trade in the 18th and 19th century, Southeast Africa began to be involved significantly in the Atlantic slave trade; for example, with the king of Kilwa island signing a treaty with a French merchant in 1776 for the delivery of 1,000 slaves per year.

At about the same time, merchants from Oman, India, and Southeast Africa began establishing plantations along the coasts and on the islands, To provide workers on these plantations, slave raiding and slave holding became increasingly important in the region and slave traders (most notably Tippu Tip) became prominent in the political environment of the region. The Southeast African trade reached its height in the early decades of the 1800s with up to 30,000 slaves sold per year. However, slavery never became a significant part of the domestic economies except in Sultanate of Zanzibar where plantations and agricultural slavery were maintained. Author and historian Timothy Insoll wrote: "Figures record the exporting of 718,000 slaves from the Swahili coast during the 19th century, and the retention of 769,000 on the coast." At various times, between 65 and 90 percent of Zanzibar was enslaved. Along the Kenya coast, 90 percent of the population was enslaved, while half of Madagscar's population was enslaved.

Slave relationships in Africa have been transformed through three large-scale processes: the Arab slave trade, the Atlantic slave trade, and the slave emancipation policies and movements in the 19th and 20th century. Each of these processes significantly changed the forms, level, and economics of slavery in Africa.

Slave practices in Africa were used during different periods to justify specific forms of European engagement with the peoples of Africa. Eighteenth century writers in Europe claimed that slavery in Africa was quite brutal in order to justify the Atlantic slave trade. Later writers used similar arguments to justify intervention and eventual colonization by European powers to end slavery in Africa.

Africans knew of the harsh slavery that awaited slaves in the New World. Many elite Africans visited Europe on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. One example of this occurred when Antonio Manuel, Kongo's ambassador to the Vatican, went to Europe in 1604, stopping first in Bahia, Brazil, where he arranged to free a countryman who had been wrongfully enslaved. African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe, and thousands of former slaves eventually returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The Arab slave trade, established in the eighth and ninth centuries AD, began with small-scale movement of people largely from the eastern Great Lakes region and the Sahel. Islamic law allowed slavery but prohibited slavery involving other pre-existing Muslims; as a result, the main target for slavery were the people who lived in the frontier areas of Islam in Africa. The trade of slaves across the Sahara and across the Indian Ocean also has a long history beginning with the control of sea routes by Afro-Arab traders in the ninth century. It is estimated that, at that time, a few thousand enslaved people were taken each year from the Red Sea and Indian Ocean coast. They were sold throughout the Middle East. This trade accelerated as superior ships led to more trade and greater demand for labour on plantations in the region. Eventually, tens of thousands per year were being taken. On the Swahili Coast, the Afro-Arab slavers captured Bantu peoples from the interior and brought them to the littoral. There, the slaves gradually assimilated in the rural areas, particularly on the Unguja and Pemba islands.

This changed the slave relationships by creating new forms of employment by slaves (as eunuchs to guard harems and in military units) and creating conditions for freedom (namely conversion-although it would only free a slave's children). Although the level of the trade remained relatively small, the size of total slaves traded grew to a large number over the multiple centuries of its existence. Because of its small and gradual nature, the impact on slavery practices in communities that did not convert to Islam was relatively small. However, in the 1800s, the slave trade from Africa to the Islamic countries picked up significantly. When the European slave trade ended around the 1850s, the slave trade to the east picked up significantly only to be ended with European colonization of Africa around 1900. Between 1500 and 1900, up to 17 million Africans slaves were transported by Muslim traders to the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa.

In 1814, Swiss explorer Johann Burckhardt wrote of his travels in Egypt and Nubia, where he saw the practice of slave trading: "I frequently witnessed scenes of the most shameless indecency, which the traders, who were the principal actors, only laughed at. I may venture to state, that very few female slaves who have passed their tenth year, reach Egypt or Arabia in a state of virginity."

David Livingstone while talking about the slave trade in East Africa in his journals:

Livingstone wrote about a group of slaves forced to march by Arab slave traders in the African Great Lakes region when he was travelling there in 1866:

19th June 1866 - We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead, the people of the country explained that she had bene unable to keep up with the other slaves in a gang, and her master had determined that she should not become anyone's property if she recovered.
26th June 1866 - ...We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path: a group of mon stood about a hundred yards off on one side, and another of the women on the other side, looking on; they said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer.
27th June 1866 - To-day we came upon a man dead from starvation, as he was very thin. One of our men wandered and found many slaves with slave-sticks on, abandoned by their masters from want of food; they were too weak to be able to speak or say where they had come from; some were quite young.

Zanzibar was once East Africa's main slave-trading port, and under Omani Arabs in the 19th century as many as 50,000 slaves were passing through the city each year.

The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade took place across the Atlantic Ocean from the 15th through to the 19th centuries. According to Patrick Manning, the Atlantic slave trade was significant in transforming Africans from a minority of the global population of slaves in 1600 into the overwhelming majority by 1800 and by 1850 the number of African slaves within Africa exceeded those in the Americas.

The slave trade was transformed from a marginal aspect of the economies into the largest sector in a relatively short span. In addition, agricultural plantations increased significantly and became a key aspect in many societies. Economic urban centers that served as the root of main trade routes shifted towards the West coast. At the same time, many African communities relocated far away from slave trade routes, often protecting themselves from the Atlantic slave trade but hindering economic and technological development at the same time.

In many African societies traditional lineage slavery became more like chattel slavery due to an increased work demand. This resulted in a general decrease in quality of life, working conditions, and status of slaves in West African societies. Assimilative slavery was increasingly replaced with chattel slavery. Assimilitave slavery in Africa often allowed eventual freedom and also significant cultural, social, and/or economic influence. Slaves were often treated as part of the their owner's family, rather than simply property.

The distribution of gender among enslaved peoples under traditional lineage slavery saw women as more desirable slaves due demands for domestic labor and for reproductive reasons. Male slaves were used for more physical agricultural labor, but as more enslaved men were taken to the West Coast and across the Atlantic to the New World, female slaves were increasingly used for physical and agricultural labour and Polygyny also increased. Chattel slavery in America was highly demanding because of the physical nature of plantation work and this was the most common destination for male slaves in the New World.

It has been argued that a decrease in able-bodied people as a result of the Atlantic Slave Trade limited many societies ability to cultivate land and develop. Many scholars argue that the transatlantic slave trade, left Africa underdeveloped, demographically unbalanced, and vulnerable to future European colonization.

The first Europeans to arrive on the coast of Guinea were the Portuguese; the first European to actually buy enslaved Africans in the region of Guinea was Antão Gonçalves, a Portuguese explorer in 1441 AD. Originally interested in trading mainly for gold and spices, they set up colonies on the uninhabited islands of São Tomé. In the 16th century the Portuguese settlers found that these volcanic islands were ideal for growing sugar. Sugar growing is a labour-intensive undertaking and Portuguese settlers were difficult to attract due to the heat, lack of infrastructure, and hard life. To cultivate the sugar the Portuguese turned to large numbers of enslaved Africans. Elmina Castle on the Gold Coast, originally built by African labour for the Portuguese in 1482 to control the gold trade, became an important depot for slaves that were to be transported to the New World.

The Spanish were the first Europeans to use enslaved Africans in America on islands such as Cuba and Hispaniola, where the alarming death rate in the native population had spurred the first royal laws protecting the native population ( Laws of Burgos, 1512-13). The first enslaved Africans arrived in Hispaniola in 1501 soon after the Papal Bull of 1493 gave almost all of the New World to Spain.

In Igboland, for example, the Aro oracle (the Igbo religious authority) began condemning more people to slavery due to small infractions that previously probably wouldn't have been punishable by slavery, thus increasing the number of enslaved men available for purchase.

The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of people were bought or captured from West Africa and taken to the Americas.[citation needed ] The increase of demand for slaves due to the expansion of European colonial powers to the New World made the slave trade much more lucrative to the West African powers, leading to the establishment of a number of actual West African empires thriving on slave trade. These included the Oyo empire ( Yoruba), Kong Empire, Imamate of Futa Jallon, Imamate of Futa Toro, Kingdom of Koya, Kingdom of Khasso, Kingdom of Kaabu, Fante Confederacy, Ashanti Confederacy, and the kingdom of Dahomey. These kingdoms relied on a militaristic culture of constant warfare to generate the great numbers of human captives required for trade with the Europeans. It is documented in the Slave Trade Debates of England in the early 19th century: "All the old writers concur in stating not only that wars are entered into for the sole purpose of making slaves, but that they are fomented by Europeans, with a view to that object." The gradual abolition of slavery in European colonial empires during the 19th century again led to the decline and collapse of these African empires. When European powers began to stop the Atlantic slave trade, this caused a further change in that large holders of slaves in Africa began to exploit enslaved people on plantations and other agricultural products.

The final major transformation of slave relationships came with the inconsistent emancipation efforts starting in the mid-19th century. As European authorities began to take over large parts of inland Africa starting in the 1870s, the colonial policies were often confusing on the issue. For example, even when slavery was deemed illegal, colonial authorities would return escaped slaves to their masters. Slavery persisted in some countries under colonial rule and in some instances it was not until independence that slavery practices were significantly transformed. Anti-colonial struggles in Africa often brought slaves and former slaves together with masters and former masters to fight for independence; however, this cooperation was short-lived and following independence political parties would often form based upon the stratifications of slaves and masters. In some parts of Africa, slavery and slavery-like practices continue to this day, particularly the illegal trafficking of women and children. The problem has proven to be difficult for governments and civil society to eliminate.

Efforts by Europeans against slavery and the slave trade began in the late 18th century and had a large impact on slavery in Africa. Portugal was the first country in the continent to abolish slavery in metropolitan Portugal and Portuguese India by a bill issued on 12 February 1761, but this did not affect their colonies of Brazil and Portuguese Africa. France abolished slavery in 1794. However, slavery was again allowed by Napoleon in 1802 and not abolished for good until 1848. In 1803, Denmark-Norway became the first country from Europe to implement a ban on the slave trade. Slavery itself was not banned until 1848. Britain followed in 1807 with the passage of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act by Parliament. This law allowed stiff fines, increasing with the number of slaves transported, for captains of slave ships. Britain followed this with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 which freed all slaves in the British Empire. British pressure on other countries resulted in them agreeing to end the slave trade from Africa. For example, the 1820 U.S. Law on Slave Trade made slave trading piracy, punishable by death. In addition, the Ottoman Empire abolished slave trade from Africa in 1847 under British pressure.

By 1850, the year that the last major Atlantic slave trade participant (Brazil) passed the Eusébio de Queirós Law banning the slave trade, the slave trades had been significantly slowed and in general only illegal trade went on. Brazil continued the practice of slavery and was a major source for illegal trade until about 1870 and the abolition of slavery became permanent in 1888 when Princess Isabel of Brazil and Minister Rodrigo Silva (son-in-law of senator Eusebio de Queiroz) banned the practice. The British took an active approach to stopping the illegal Atlantic slave trade during this period. The West Africa Squadron was credited with capturing 1,600 slave ships between 1808 and 1860, and freeing 150,000 Africans who were aboard these ships. Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade, for example against 'the usurping King of Lagos ', deposed in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers.

According to Patrick Manning, internal slavery was most important to Africa in the second half of the 19th century stating "if there is any time when one can speak of African societies being organized around a slave mode production, [1850-1900] was it". The abolition of the Atlantic slave trade resulted in the economies of African states dependent on the trade being reorganized towards domestic plantation slavery and legitimate commerce worked by slave labor. Slavery before this period was generally domestic.

The continuing anti-slavery movement in Europe became an excuse and a casus belli for the European conquest and colonization of much of the African continent. It was the central theme of the Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference 1889-90. In the late 19th century, the Scramble for Africa saw the continent rapidly divided between Imperialistic European powers, and an early but secondary focus of all colonial regimes was the suppression of slavery and the slave trade. Seymour Drescher argues that European interests in abolition were primarily motivated by economic and imperial goals.

Following conquest and abolition by the French, over a million slaves in French West Africa fled from their masters to earlier homes between 1906 and 1911. In Madagascar over 500,000 slaves were freed following French abolition in 1896. In response to this pressure, Ethiopia officially abolished slavery in 1932, Sokoto Caliphate abolished slavery in 1900, and the rest of the Sahel in 1911. Colonial nations were mostly successful in this aim, though slavery is still very active in Africa even though it has gradually moved to a wage economy. Independent nations attempting to westernize or impress Europe sometimes cultivated an image of slavery suppression, even as they, in the case of Egypt, hired European soldiers like Samuel White Baker's expedition up the Nile. Slavery has never been eradicated in Africa, and it commonly appears in African states, such as Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, and Sudan, in places where law and order have collapsed.

Although outlawed in all countries today, slavery is practiced in secret in many parts of the world. There are an estimated 30 million victims of slavery worldwide. In Mauritania alone, up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are enslaved, many of them used as bonded labour. Slavery in Mauritania was finally criminalized in August 2007. During the Second Sudanese Civil War people were taken into slavery; estimates of abductions range from 14,000 to 200,000. In Niger, where the practice of slavery was outlawed in 2003, a study found that almost 8% of the population are still slaves.

Slavery and the slave trades had a significant impact on the size of the population and the gender distribution throughout much of Africa. The precise impact of these demographic shifts has been an issue of significant debate. The Atlantic slave trade took 70,000 people, primarily from the west coast of Africa, per year at its peak in the mid-1700s. The Arab slave trade involved the capture of peoples from the continental interior, who were then shipped overseas through ports on the Red Sea and elsewhere. It peaked at 10,000 people bartered per year in the 1600s. According to Patrick Manning, there was a consistent population decrease in large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa as a result of these slave trades. This population decline throughout West Africa from 1650 until 1850 was exacerbated by the preference of slave traders for male slaves. It is important to note that this preference only existed in the transatlantic slave trade. More female slaves than male were traded across the continent of Africa. In eastern Africa, the slave trade was multi-directional and changed over time. To meet the demand for menial labor, Zanj slaves captured from the southern interior were sold through ports on the northern seaboard in cumulatively large numbers over the centuries to customers in the Nile Valley, Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf, India, Far East and the Indian Ocean islands.

Extent of slavery

The extent of slavery within Africa and the trade in slaves to other regions is not known precisely. Although the Atlantic slave trade has been best studied, estimates range from 8 million people to 20 million. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database estimates that the Atlantic slave trade took around 12.8 million people between 1450 and 1900. The slave trade across the Sahara and Red Sea from the Sahara, the Horn of Africa, and East Africa, has been estimated at 6.2 million people between 600 and 1600. Although the rate decreased from East Africa in the 1700s, it increased in the 1800s and is estimated at 1.65 million for that century.

Estimates by Patrick Manning are that about 12 million slaves entered the Atlantic trade between the 16th and 19th century, but about 1.5 million died on board ship. About 10.5 million slaves arrived in the Americas. Besides the slaves who died on the Middle Passage, more Africans likely died during the slave raids in Africa and forced marches to ports. Manning estimates that 4 million died inside Africa after capture, and many more died young. Manning's estimate covers the 12 million who were originally destined for the Atlantic, as well as the 6 million destined for Asian slave markets and the 8 million destined for African markets.

Debate about demographic effect

The demographic effects of the slave trade are some of the most controversial and debated issues. Walter Rodney argued that the export of so many people had been a demographic disaster and had left Africa permanently disadvantaged when compared to other parts of the world, and that this largely explains that continent's continued poverty. He presents numbers that show that Africa's population stagnated during this period, while that of Europe and Asia grew dramatically. According to Rodney all other areas of the economy were disrupted by the slave trade as the top merchants abandoned traditional industries to pursue slaving and the lower levels of the population were disrupted by the slaving itself.

Others have challenged this view. J. D. Fage compared the number effect on the continent as a whole. David Eltis has compared the numbers to the rate of emigration from Europe during this period. In the 19th century alone over 50 million people left Europe for the Americas, a far higher rate than were ever taken from Africa.

Others in turn challenged that view. Joseph E. Inikori argues the history of the region shows that the effects were still quite deleterious. He argues that the African economic model of the period was very different from the European, and could not sustain such population losses. Population reductions in certain areas also led to widespread problems. Inikori also notes that after the suppression of the slave trade Africa's population almost immediately began to rapidly increase, even prior to the introduction of modern medicines.

There is a longstanding debate amongst analysts and scholars about the destructive impacts of the slave trades. It is often claimed that the slave trade undermined local economies and political stability as villages' vital labour forces were shipped overseas as slave raids and civil wars became commonplace. With the rise of a large commercial slave trade, driven by European needs, enslaving your enemy became less a consequence of war, and more and more a reason to go to war.[citation needed ] The slave trade, it is claimed, impeded the formation of larger ethnic groups, causing ethnic factionalism and weakening the formation for stable political structures in many places. It also is claimed to have reduced the mental health and social development of African people.

In contrast to these arguments, J. D. Fage asserts that slavery did not have a wholly disastrous effect on the societies of Africa. Slaves were an expensive commodity, and traders received a great deal in exchange for each enslaved person. At the peak of the slave trade hundreds of thousands of muskets, vast quantities of cloth, gunpowder, and metals were being shipped to Guinea. Most of this money was spent on British-made firearms (of very poor quality) and industrial-grade alcohol. Trade with Europe at the peak of the slave trade-which also included significant exports of gold and ivory-was some 3.5 million pounds Sterling per year. By contrast, the trade of the United Kingdom, the economic superpower of the time, was about 14 million pounds per year over this same period of the late 18th century. As Patrick Manning has pointed out, the vast majority of items traded for slaves were common rather than luxury goods. Textiles, iron ore, currency, and salt were some of the most important commodities imported as a result of the slave trade, and these goods were spread within the entire society raising the general standard of living.

Although debated, it is known that the Atlantic Slave trade devastated the African Economy. In 19th century Yoruba Land, economic activity was described to be at its lowest ever while life and property were being taken daily, and normal living was in jeopardy because of the fear of being kidnapped.(Onwumah, Imhonopi, Adetunde,2019)

Effects on Europe's economy

Karl Marx in his economic history of capitalism, [Das Kapital], claimed that "...the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins [that is, the slave trade], signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production." He argued that the slave trade was part of what he termed the "primitive accumulation" of European capital, the non-capitalist accumulation of wealth that preceded and created the financial conditions for Britain's industrialisation and the advent of the capitalist mode of production.

Eric Williams has written about the contribution of Africans on the basis of profits from the slave trade and slavery, arguing that the employment of those profits were used to help finance Britain's industrialisation. He argues that the enslavement of Africans was an essential element to the Industrial Revolution, and that European wealth was, in part, a result of slavery, but that by the time of its abolition it had lost its profitability and it was in Britain's economic interest to ban it. Joseph Inikori has written that the British slave trade was more profitable than the critics of Williams believe. Other researchers and historians have strongly contested what has come to be referred to as the "Williams thesis" in academia: David Richardson has concluded that the profits from the slave trade amounted to less than 1% of domestic investment in Britain, and economic historian Stanley Engerman finds that even without subtracting the associated costs of the slave trade (e.g., shipping costs, slave mortality, mortality of whites in Africa, defense costs) or reinvestment of profits back into the slave trade, the total profits from the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to less than 5% of the British economy during any year of the Industrial Revolution. Historian Richard Pares, in an article written before Williams' book, dismisses the influence of wealth generated from the West Indian plantations upon the financing of the Industrial Revolution, stating that whatever substantial flow of investment from West Indian profits into industry there was occurred after emancipation, not before. Findlay and O'Rourke noted that the figures presented by O'Brien (1982) to back his claim that "the periphery was peripheral" suggest the opposite, with profits from the periphery 1784-1786 being £5.66 million when there was £10.30 million total gross investment in the British economy and similar proportions for 1824-1826. They note that dismissing the profits of the enslavement of human beings from significance because it was a "small share of national income", could be used to argue that there was no industrial revolution, since modern industry provided only a small share of national income and that it is a mistake to assume that small size is the same as small significance. Findlay and O'Rourke also note that the share of American export commodities produced by enslaved human beings, rose from 54% between 1501 and 1550 to 82.5% between 1761-1780.

Seymour Drescher and Robert Anstey argue the slave trade remained profitable until the end, because of innovations in agriculture, and that moralistic reform, not economic incentive, was primarily responsible for abolition.

A similar debate has taken place about other European nations. The French slave trade, it is argued, was more profitable than alternative domestic investments, and probably encouraged capital accumulation before the Industrial Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.

Maulana Karenga states the effects of the Atlantic slave trade in African captives: "[T]he morally monstrous destruction of human possibility involved redefining African humanity to the world, poisoning past, present and future relations with others who only know us through this stereotyping and thus damaging the truly human relations among people of today". He says that it constituted the destruction of culture, language, religion and human possibility.

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This article discusses systems, history, and effects of slavery within Africa. See Arab slave trade, Atlantic slave trade, Maafa, and Slavery in contemporary Africa for other discussions. Slavery has historically been widespread in Africa, and still continues today in some countries.

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I wonder if the adult slaves tried to protect the children in slavery

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How Slavery Affected African American Families, Freedom’s Story, TeacherServe®, National Humanities Center

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How Slavery Affected African American Families

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i wonder how many slaves escaped slavery?

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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. It developed as a convergence of several different clandestine efforts. 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 in a less-secretive fashion.

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.
READ MORE: 6 Strategies Harriet Tubman and Others Used to Escape Along the Underground Railroad
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.
READ MORE: The Little-Known Underground Railroad That Ran South to Mexico
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

Library of Congress

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

iStock / Getty Images Plus

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.
READ MORE: After the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman Led a Brazen Civil War Raid
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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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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I wonder why it was a certain type of race they needed as slaves?

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By the 17th century, America's slave economy had eliminated the obstacle of morality.

Courtesy of the British Museum

Excerpted from Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America by Peter H. Wood. Published by Oxford University Press.

This article supplements Episode 1 of The History of American Slavery, our inaugural Slate Academy. Please join Slate's Jamelle Bouie and Rebecca Onion for a different kind of summer school. To learn more and to enroll, visit Slate.com/academy.

Courtesy of the British Museum, London

During the second half of the 17 th century, a terrible transformation, the enslavement of people solely on the basis of race, occurred in the lives of African Americans living in North America. These newcomers still numbered only a few thousand, but the bitter reversals they experienced-first subtle, then drastic-would shape the lives of all those who followed them, generation after generation.

Like most huge changes, the imposition of hereditary race slavery was gradual, taking hold by degrees over many decades. It proceeded slowly, in much the same way that winter follows fall. On any given day, in any given place, people can argue about local weather conditions. "Is it getting colder?" "Will it warm up again this week?" The shift may come early in some places, later in others. But eventually, it occurs all across the land. By January, people shiver and think back to September, agreeing that "it is definitely colder now." In 1700, a 70-year-old African American could look back half a century to 1650 and shiver, knowing that conditions had definitely changed for the worse.

Some people had experienced the first cold winds of enslavement well before 1650; others would escape the chilling blast well after 1700. The timing and nature of the change varied considerably from colony to colony, and even from family to family. Gradually, the terrible transformation took on a momentum of its own, numbing and burdening everything in its path, like a disastrous winter storm. Unlike the changing seasons, however, the encroachment of racial slavery in the colonies of North America was certainly not a natural process. It was highly unnatural-the work of powerful competitive governments and many thousands of human beings spread out across the Atlantic world. Nor was it inevitable that people's legal status would come to depend upon their racial background and that the condition of slavery would be passed down from parent to child. Numerous factors combined to bring about this disastrous shift-human forces swirled together during the decades after 1650, to create an enormously destructive storm.

By 1650, hereditary enslavement based upon color, not upon religion, was a bitter reality in the older Catholic colonies of the New World. In the Caribbean and Latin America, for well over a century, Spanish and Portuguese colonizers had enslaved "infidels": first Indians and then Africans. At first, they relied for justification upon the Mediterranean tradition that persons of a different religion, or persons captured in war, could be enslaved for life. But hidden in this idea of slavery was the notion that persons who converted to Christianity should receive their freedom. Wealthy planters in the tropics, afraid that their cheap labor would be taken away from them because of this loophole, changed the reasoning behind their exploitation. Even persons who could prove that they were not captured in war and that they accepted the Catholic faith still could not change their appearance, any more than a leopard can change its spots. So by making color the key factor behind enslavement, dark-skinned people brought from Africa to work in silver mines and on sugar plantations could be exploited for life. Indeed, the servitude could be made hereditary, so enslaved people's children automatically inherited the same unfree status.

But this cruel and self-perpetuating system had not yet taken firm hold in North America. The same anti-Catholic propaganda that had led Sir Francis Drake to liberate Negro slaves in Central America in the 1580s still prompted many colonists to believe that it was the Protestant mission to convert non-Europeans rather than enslave them.

Apart from such moral concerns, there were simple matters of cost and practicality. Workers subject to longer terms and coming from further away would require a larger initial investment. Consider a 1648 document from York County, Virginia, showing the market values for persons working for James Stone (estimated in terms of pounds of tobacco):

Francis Bomley for 6 yeares 1500
John Thackstone for 3 yeares 1300
Susan Davis for 3 yeares 1000
Emaniell a Negro man 2000
Roger Stone 3 yeares 1300
Mingo a Negro man 2000

Among all six, Susan had the lowest value. She may have been less strong in the tobacco field, and as a woman she ran a greater risk of early death because of the dangers of childbirth. Hence John and Roger, the other English servants with three-year terms, commanded a higher value. Francis, whose term was twice as long, was not worth twice as much. Life expectancy was short for everyone in early Virginia, so he might not live to complete his term. The two black workers, Emaniell and Mingo, clearly had longer terms, perhaps even for life, and they also had the highest value. If they each lived for another 20 years, they represented a bargain for Mr. Stone, but if they died young, perhaps even before they had fully learned the language, their value as workers proved far less. From Stone's point of view they represented a risky and expensive investment at best.

By 1650, however, conditions were already beginning to change. For one thing, both the Dutch and the English had started using enslaved Africans to produce sugar in the Caribbean and the tropics. English experiments at Barbados and Providence Island showed that Protestant investors could easily overcome their moral scruples. Large profits could be made if foreign rivals could be held in check. After agreeing to peace with Spain and giving up control of Northeast Brazil at midcentury, Dutch slave traders were actively looking for new markets. In England, after Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, he rewarded supporters by creating the Royal African Co. to enter aggressively into the slave trade. The English king also chartered a new colony in Carolina. He hoped it would be close enough to the Spanish in Florida and the Caribbean to challenge them in economic and military terms. Many of the first English settlers in Carolina after 1670 came from Barbados. They brought enslaved Africans with them. They also brought the beginnings of a legal code and a social system that accepted race slavery.

While new colonies with a greater acceptance of race slavery were being founded, the older colonies continued to grow. Early in the 17 th century no tiny North American port could absorb several hundred workers arriving at one time on a large ship. Most Africans-such as those reaching Jamestown in 1619-arrived several dozen at a time aboard small boats and privateers from the Caribbean. Like Emaniell and Mingo on the farm of James Stone, they tended to mix with other unfree workers on small plantations. All of these servants, no matter what their origin, could hope to obtain their own land and the personal independence that goes with private property. In 1645, in Northampton County on Virginia's Eastern Shore, Captain Philip Taylor, after complaining that "Anthony the negro" did not work hard enough for him, agreed to set aside part of the cornfield where they worked as Anthony's plot. "I am very glad of it," the black man told a local clerk, "now I know myne owne ground and I will worke when I please and play when I please."

Anthony and Mary Johnson had also gained their own property in Northampton County before 1650. He had arrived in Virginia in 1621, aboard the James and was cited on early lists as "Antonio a Negro." He was put to work on the tobacco plantation of Edward Bennett, with more than 50 other people. All except five were killed the following March, when local Indians struck back against the foreigners who were invading their land. Antonio was one of the lucky survivors. He became increasingly English in his ways, eventually gaining his freedom and moving to the Eastern Shore, where he was known as Anthony Johnson. Along the way, he married "Mary a Negro Woman," who had arrived in 1622 aboard the Margrett and John, and they raised at least four children, gaining respect for their "hard labor and known service," according to the court records of Northampton County.

By the 1650s, Anthony and Mary Johnson owned a farm of 250 acres, and their married sons, John and Richard, farmed adjoining tracts of 450 and 100 acres respectively. In the 1660s, the whole Johnson clan pulled up stakes and moved north into Maryland, where the aging Anthony leased a 300-acre farm called "Tonies Vineyard" until his death. His widow Mary, in her will of 1672, distributed a cow to each of her grandsons, including John Jr., the son of John and Susanna Johnson. Five years later, when John Jr. purchased a 44-acre farm for himself, he named the homestead Angola, which suggests that his grandparents had been born in Africa and had kept alive stories of their homeland within the family. But within 30 years, John Jr. had died without an heir, and the entire Johnson family had disappeared from the colonial records. If we knew their fate, it might tell us more about the terrible transformation that was going on around them.

Gradually, it was becoming harder to obtain English labor in the mainland colonies. Civil war and a great plague reduced England's population, and the Great Fire of London created fresh demands for workers at home. Stiff penalties were imposed on sea captains who grabbed young people in England and sold them in the colonies as indentured servants. (This common practice was given a new name: "kidnapping.") English servants already at work in the colonies demanded shorter indentures, better working conditions, and suitable farmland when their contracts expired. Officials feared they would lose future English recruits to rival colonies if bad publicity filtered back to Europe, so they could not ignore this pressure, even when it undermined colonial profits.

Nor could colonial planters turn instead to Indian labor. Native Americans captured in frontier wars continued to be enslaved, but each act of aggression by European colonists made future diplomacy with neighboring Indians more difficult. Native American captives could easily escape into the familiar wilderness and return to their original tribe. Besides, their numbers were limited. African Americans, in contrast, were thousands of miles from their homeland, and their availability increased as the scope of the Atlantic slave trade expanded. More European countries competed to transport and exploit African labor; more West African leaders proved willing to engage in profitable trade with them; more New World planters had the money to purchase new workers from across the ocean. It seemed as though every decade the ships became larger, the contacts more regular, the departures more frequent, the routes more familiar, the sales more efficient.

As the size and efficiency of this brutal traffic increased, so did its rewards for European investors. Their ruthless competition pushed up the volume of transatlantic trade from Africa and drove down the relative cost of individual Africans in the New World at a time when the price of labor from Europe was rising. As their profits increased, slave merchants and their captains continued to look for fresh markets. North America, on the fringe of this expanding and infamous Atlantic system, represented a likely target. As the small mainland colonies grew and their trade with one another and with England increased, their capacity to purchase large numbers of new laborers from overseas expanded. By the end of the century, Africans were arriving aboard large ships directly from Africa as well as on smaller boats from the West Indies. In 1698, the monopoly held by England's Royal African Co. on this transatlantic business came to an end, and independent traders from England and the colonies stepped up their voyages, intending to capture a share of the profits.

All these large and gradual changes would still not have brought about the terrible transformation to race slavery, had it not been for several other crucial factors. One ingredient was the mounting fear among colonial leaders regarding signs of discontent and cooperation among poor and unfree colonists of all sorts. Europeans and Africans worked together, intermarried, ran away together, and shared common resentments toward the well-to-do. Both groups were involved in a series of bitter strikes and servant uprisings among tobacco pickers in Virginia, culminating in an open rebellion in 1676. Greatly outnumbered by these armed workers, authorities were quick to sense the need to divide their labor force in order to control it. Stressing cultural and ethnic divisions would be one way to do that.

Lifetime servitude could be enforced only by removing the prospect that a person might gain freedom through Christian conversion. One approach was to outlaw this traditional route to freedom. As early as 1664, a Maryland statute specified that Christian baptism could have no effect upon the legal status of a slave. A more sweeping solution, however, involved removing religion altogether as a factor in determining servitude.

Therefore, another fundamental key to the terrible transformation was the shift from changeable spiritual faith to unchangeable physical appearance as a measure of status. Increasingly, the dominant English came to view Africans not as "heathen people" but as "black people." They began, for the first time, to describe themselves not as Christians but as whites. And they gradually wrote this shift into their colonial laws. Within a generation, the English definition of who could be made a slave had shifted from someone who was not a Christian to someone who was not European in appearance. Indeed, the transition for self-interested Englishmen went further. It was a small but momentous step from saying that black persons could be enslaved to saying that Negroes should be enslaved. One Christian minister was dismayed by this rapid change to slavery based on race: "These two words, Negro and Slave" wrote the Rev. Morgan Godwyn in 1680, are "by custom grown Homogeneous and Convertible"-that is, interchangeable.

As if this momentous shift were not enough, it was accompanied by another. Those who wrote the colonial laws not only moved to make slavery racial; they also made it hereditary. Under English common law, a child inherited the legal status of the father. As Virginia officials put it in 1655: "By the Comon Law the Child of a Woman slave begot by a freeman ought to bee free."

But within seven years that option had been removed. Faced with cases of "whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or Free," the Virginia Assembly in 1662 decided in favor of the master demanding service rather than the child claiming freedom. In this special circumstance, the Assembly ignored all English precedents that children inherited the name and status of their father. Instead, the men in the colonial legislature declared that all such children "borne in this country shal be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother." In Virginia, and soon elsewhere, the children of slave mothers would be slaves forever.

Now the terrible transformation was almost complete, with the colony of Virginia leading the way. An additional legal sleight of hand by the land-hungry Virginia gentry helped speed the process. For several generations, as an incentive toward immigration, newcomers had received title to a parcel of land, called a "headright," for every family member or European servant they brought to the struggling colony.

By expanding this system to include Africans, self-interested planter-magistrates, who were rich enough to make the initial investment in enslaved workers, managed to obtain free land, as well as valuable labor, every time they purchased an African worker.

In the decades before 1700, therefore, the number of African arrivals began to increase, and the situation of African Americans became increasingly precarious and bleak. Sarah Driggus, an African American woman who had been born free during the middle of the 17 th century, protested to a Maryland court in 1688 that she was now being regarded as a slave. Many others of her generation were feeling similar pressures and filing similar protests. But fewer and fewer of them were being heard. The long winter of racial enslavement was closing in over the English colonies of North America.

Reprinted from Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America by Peter H. Wood with permission from Oxford University Press. © 1996, 2003 by Peter H. Wood.

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The Reason America Adopted Race-Based Slavery

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By the 17th century, America's slave economy had eliminated the obstacle of morality. Excerpted from Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America by Peter H. Wood. Published by Oxford University Press. This article supplements Episode 1 of The History of American Slavery, our inaugural Slate Academy.

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I wonder if any free black people owned slaves.

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Editor's note: For those who are wondering about the retro title of this black history series, please take a moment to learn about historian Joel A. Rogers, author of the 1934 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof, to whom these "amazing facts" are an homage.

(The Root) - 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro No. 21: Did black people own slaves? If so, why?

One of the most vexing questions in African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves owned slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect, is yes, of course; some free black people in this country bought and sold other black people, and did so at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the Civil War. For me, the really fascinating questions about black slave-owning are how many black "masters" were involved, how many slaves did they own and why did they own slaves?

The answers to these questions are complex, and historians have been arguing for some time over whether free blacks purchased family members as slaves in order to protect them - motivated, on the one hand, by benevolence and philanthropy, as historian Carter G. Woodson put it, or whether, on the other hand, they purchased other black people "as an act of exploitation," primarily to exploit their free labor for profit, just as white slave owners did. The evidence shows that, unfortunately, both things are true. The great African-American historian, John Hope Franklin, states this clearly: "The majority of Negro owners of slaves had some personal interest in their property." But, he admits, "There were instances, however, in which free Negroes had a real economic interest in the institution of slavery and held slaves in order to improve their economic status."

In a fascinating essay reviewing this controversy, R. Halliburton shows that free black people have owned slaves "in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery," at least since Anthony Johnson and his wife Mary went to court in Virginia in 1654 to obtain the services of their indentured servant, a black man, John Castor, for life.

And for a time, free black people could even "own" the services of white indentured servants in Virginia as well. Free blacks owned slaves in Boston by 1724 and in Connecticut by 1783; by 1790, 48 black people in Maryland owned 143 slaves. One particularly notorious black Maryland farmer named Nat Butler "regularly purchased and sold Negroes for the Southern trade," Halliburton wrote.

Perhaps the most insidious or desperate attempt to defend the right of black people to own slaves was the statement made on the eve of the Civil War by a group of free people of color in New Orleans, offering their services to the Confederacy, in part because they were fearful for their own enslavement: "The free colored population [native] of Louisiana ... own slaves, and they are dearly attached to their native land ... and they are ready to shed their blood for her defense. They have no sympathy for abolitionism; no love for the North, but they have plenty for Louisiana ... They will fight for her in 1861 as they fought [to defend New Orleans from the British] in 1814-1815."

These guys were, to put it bluntly, opportunists par excellence: As Noah Andre Trudeau and James G. Hollandsworth Jr. explain, once the war broke out, some of these same black men formed 14 companies of a militia composed of 440 men and were organized by the governor in May 1861 into "the Native Guards, Louisiana," swearing to fight to defend the Confederacy. Although given no combat role, the Guards - reaching a peak of 1,000 volunteers - became the first Civil War unit to appoint black officers.

When New Orleans fell in late April 1862 to the Union, about 10 percent of these men, not missing a beat, now formed the Native Guard/Corps d'Afrique to defend the Union. Joel A. Rogers noted this phenomenon in his 100 Amazing Facts: "The Negro slave-holders, like the white ones, fought to keep their chattels in the Civil War." Rogers also notes that some black men, including those in New Orleans at the outbreak of the War, "fought to perpetuate slavery."
How Many Slaves Did Blacks Own?
So what do the actual numbers of black slave owners and their slaves tell us? In 1830, the year most carefully studied by Carter G. Woodson, about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black population was free. Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves, out of a total of 2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so the numbers of slaves owned by black people over all was quite small by comparison with the number owned by white people. In his essay, " ' The Known World' of Free Black Slaveholders," Thomas J. Pressly, using Woodson's statistics, calculated that 54 (or about 1 percent) of these black slave owners in 1830 owned between 20 and 84 slaves; 172 (about 4 percent) owned between 10 to 19 slaves; and 3,550 (about 94 percent) each owned between 1 and 9 slaves. Crucially, 42 percent owned just one slave.

Pressly also shows that the percentage of free black slave owners as the total number of free black heads of families was quite high in several states, namely 43 percent in South Carolina, 40 percent in Louisiana, 26 percent in Mississippi, 25 percent in Alabama and 20 percent in Georgia. So why did these free black people own these slaves?

It is reasonable to assume that the 42 percent of the free black slave owners who owned just one slave probably owned a family member to protect that person, as did many of the other black slave owners who owned only slightly larger numbers of slaves. As Woodson put it in 1924's Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830, "The census records show that the majority of the Negro owners of slaves were such from the point of view of philanthropy. In many instances the husband purchased the wife or vice versa ... Slaves of Negroes were in some cases the children of a free father who had purchased his wife. If he did not thereafter emancipate the mother, as so many such husbands failed to do, his own children were born his slaves and were thus reported to the numerators."

Moreover, Woodson explains, "Benevolent Negroes often purchased slaves to make their lot easier by granting them their freedom for a nominal sum, or by permitting them to work it out on liberal terms." In other words, these black slave-owners, the clear majority, cleverly used the system of slavery to protect their loved ones. That's the good news.

But not all did, and that is the bad news. Halliburton concludes, after examining the evidence, that "it would be a serious mistake to automatically assume that free blacks owned their spouse or children only for benevolent purposes." Woodson himself notes that a "small number of slaves, however, does not always signify benevolence on the part of the owner." And John Hope Franklin notes that in North Carolina, "Without doubt, there were those who possessed slaves for the purpose of advancing their [own] well-being ... these Negro slaveholders were more interested in making their farms or carpenter-shops 'pay' than they were in treating their slaves humanely." For these black slaveholders, he concludes, "there was some effort to conform to the pattern established by the dominant slaveholding group within the State in the effort to elevate themselves to a position of respect and privilege." In other words, most black slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but far too many turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit.
Who Were These Black Slave Owners?
If we were compiling a "Rogues Gallery of Black History," the following free black slaveholders would be in it:

John Carruthers Stanly - born a slave in Craven County, N.C., the son of an Igbo mother and her master, John Wright Stanly - became an extraordinarily successful barber and speculator in real estate in New Bern. As Loren Schweninger points out in Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915, by the early 1820s, Stanly owned three plantations and 163 slaves, and even hired three white overseers to manage his property! He fathered six children with a slave woman named Kitty, and he eventually freed them. Stanly lost his estate when a loan for $14,962 he had co-signed with his white half brother, John, came due. After his brother's stroke, the loan was Stanly's sole responsibility, and he was unable to pay it.

William Ellison's fascinating story is told by Michael Johnson and James L. Roark in their book, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South. At his death on the eve of the Civil War, Ellison was wealthier than nine out of 10 white people in South Carolina. He was born in 1790 as a slave on a plantation in the Fairfield District of the state, far up country from Charleston. In 1816, at the age of 26, he bought his own freedom, and soon bought his wife and their child. In 1822, he opened his own cotton gin, and soon became quite wealthy. By his death in 1860, he owned 900 acres of land and 63 slaves. Not one of his slaves was allowed to purchase his or her own freedom.

Louisiana, as we have seen, was its own bizarre world of color, class, caste and slavery. By 1830, in Louisiana, several black people there owned a large number of slaves, including the following: In Pointe Coupee Parish alone, Sophie Delhonde owned 38 slaves; Lefroix Decuire owned 59 slaves; Antoine Decuire owned 70 slaves; Leandre Severin owned 60 slaves; and Victor Duperon owned 10. In St. John the Baptist Parish, Victoire Deslondes owned 52 slaves; in Plaquemine Brule, Martin Donatto owned 75 slaves; in Bayou Teche, Jean B. Muillion owned 52 slaves; Martin Lenormand in St. Martin Parish owned 44 slaves; Verret Polen in West Baton Rouge Parish owned 69 slaves; Francis Jerod in Washita Parish owned 33 slaves; and Cecee McCarty in the Upper Suburbs of New Orleans owned 32 slaves. Incredibly, the 13 members of the Metoyer family in Natchitoches Parish - including Nicolas Augustin Metoyer, pictured - collectively owned 215 slaves.

Antoine Dubuclet and his wife Claire Pollard owned more than 70 slaves in Iberville Parish when they married. According to Thomas Clarkin, by 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, they owned 100 slaves, worth $94,700. During Reconstruction, he became the state's first black treasurer, serving between 1868 and 1878.

Andrew Durnford was a sugar planter and a physician who owned the St. Rosalie plantation, 33 miles south of New Orleans. In the late 1820s, David O. Whitten tells us, he paid $7,000 for seven male slaves, five females and two children. He traveled all the way to Virginia in the 1830s and purchased 24 more. Eventually, he would own 77 slaves. When a fellow Creole slave owner liberated 85 of his slaves and shipped them off to Liberia, Durnford commented that he couldn't do that, because "self interest is too strongly rooted in the bosom of all that breathes the American atmosphere."

It would be a mistake to think that large black slaveholders were only men. In 1830, in Louisiana, the aforementioned Madame Antoine Dublucet owned 44 slaves, and Madame Ciprien Ricard owned 35 slaves, Louise Divivier owned 17 slaves, Genevieve Rigobert owned 16 slaves and Rose Lanoix and Caroline Miller both owned 13 slaves, while over in Georgia, Betsey Perry owned 25 slaves. According to Johnson and Roark, the wealthiest black person in Charleston, S.C., in 1860 was Maria Weston, who owned 14 slaves and property valued at more than $40,000, at a time when the average white man earned about $100 a year. (The city's largest black slaveholders, though, were Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry, both of whom owned 84 slaves.)

In Savannah, Ga., between 1823 and 1828, according to Betty Wood's Gender, Race, and Rank in a Revolutionary Age, Hannah Leion owned nine slaves, while the largest slaveholder in 1860 was Ciprien Ricard, who had a sugarcane plantation in Louisiana and owned 152 slaves with her son, Pierre - many more that the 35 she owned in 1830. According to economic historian Stanley Engerman, "In Charleston, South Carolina about 42 percent of free blacks owned slaves in 1850, and about 64 percent of these slaveholders were women." Greed, in other words, was gender-blind.
Why They Owned Slaves
These men and women, from William Stanly to Madame Ciprien Ricard, were among the largest free Negro slaveholders, and their motivations were neither benevolent nor philanthropic. One would be hard-pressed to account for their ownership of such large numbers of slaves except as avaricious, rapacious, acquisitive and predatory.

But lest we romanticize all of those small black slave owners who ostensibly purchased family members only for humanitarian reasons, even in these cases the evidence can be problematic. Halliburton, citing examples from an essay in the North American Review by Calvin Wilson in 1905, presents some hair-raising challenges to the idea that black people who owned their own family members always treated them well:

A free black in Trimble County, Kentucky, " ... sold his own son and daughter South, one for $1,000, the other for $1,200." ... A Maryland father sold his slave children in order to purchase his wife. A Columbus, Georgia, black woman - Dilsey Pope - owned her husband. "He offended her in some way and she sold him ... " Fanny Canady of Louisville, Kentucky, owned her husband Jim - a drunken cobbler - whom she threatened to "sell down the river." At New Bern, North Carolina, a free black wife and son purchased their slave husband-father. When the newly bought father criticized his son, the son sold him to a slave trader. The son boasted afterward that "the old man had gone to the corn fields about New Orleans where they might learn him some manners."

Carter Woodson, too, tells us that some of the husbands who purchased their spouses "were not anxious to liberate their wives immediately. They considered it advisable to put them on probation for a few years, and if they did not find them satisfactory they would sell their wives as other slave holders disposed of Negroes." He then relates the example of a black man, a shoemaker in Charleston, S.C., who purchased his wife for $700. But "on finding her hard to please, he sold her a few months thereafter for $750, gaining $50 by the transaction."

Most of us will find the news that some black people bought and sold other black people for profit quite distressing, as well we should. But given the long history of class divisions in the black community, which Martin R. Delany as early as the 1850s described as "a nation within a nation," and given the role of African elites in the long history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, perhaps we should not be surprised that we can find examples throughout black history of just about every sort of human behavior, from the most noble to the most heinous, that we find in any other people's history.

The good news, scholars agree, is that by 1860 the number of free blacks owning slaves had markedly decreased from 1830. In fact, Loren Schweninger concludes that by the eve of the Civil War, "the phenomenon of free blacks owning slaves had nearly disappeared" in the Upper South, even if it had not in places such as Louisiana in the Lower South. Nevertheless, it is a very sad aspect of African-American history that slavery sometimes could be a colorblind affair, and that the evil business of owning another human being could manifest itself in both males and females, and in black as well as white.
As always, you can find more "Amazing Facts About the Negro" on The Root, and check back each week as we count to 100. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root. Follow him on Twitter.

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Editor's note: For those who are wondering about the retro title of this black history series, please take a moment to learn about historian Joel A. Rogers, author of the 1934 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof, to whom these "amazing facts" are an homage.

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I wonder how slavery caused the civil war...

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True Causes of the Civil War

Irreconcilable Differences
Simmering animosities between North and South signaled an American apocalypse

Any man who takes it upon himself to explain the causes of the Civil War deserves whatever grief comes his way, regardless of his good intentions. Having acknowledged that, let me also say I have long believed there is no more concise or stirring accounting for the war than the sentiments propounded by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in "The Second Coming," some lines of which are included in this essay. Yeats wrote his short poem immediately following the catastrophe of World War I, but his thesis of a great, cataclysmic event is universal and timeless.

It is probably safe to say that the original impetus of the Civil War was set in motion when a Dutch trader offloaded a cargo of African slaves at Jamestown, Va., in 1619. It took nearly 250 eventful years longer for it to boil into a war, but that Dutchman's boatload was at the bottom of it-a fact that needs to be fixed in the reader's mind from the start.

Of course there were other things, too. For instance, by the eve of the Civil War the sectional argument had become so far advanced that a significant number of Southerners were convinced that Yankees, like Negroes, constituted an entirely different race of people from themselves.

It is unclear who first put forth this curious interpretation of American history, but just as the great schism burst upon the scene it was subscribed to by no lesser Confederate luminaries than president Jefferson Davis himself and Admiral Raphael Semmes, of CSS Alabama fame, who asserted that the North was populated by descendants of the cold Puritan Roundheads of Oliver Cromwell-who had overthrown and executed the king of England in 1649-while others of the class were forced to flee to Holland, where they also caused trouble, before finally settling at Plymouth Rock, Mass.

Southerners on the other hand, or so the theory went, were the hereditary offspring of Cromwell's enemies, the "gay cavaliers" of King Charles II and his glorious Restoration, who had imbued the South with their easygoing, chivalrous and honest ways. Whereas, according to Semmes, the people of the North had evolved accordingly into "gloomy, saturnine, and fanatical" people who "seemed to repel all the more kindly and generous impulses" (omitting-possibly in a momentary lapse of memory-that the original settlers of other Southern states, such as Georgia, had been prison convicts or, in the case of Louisiana, deportees, and that Semmes' own wife was a Yankee from Ohio).

How beliefs such as this came to pass in the years between 1619 and 1860 reveals the astonishing capacity of human nature to confound traditional a posteriori deduction in an effort to justify what had become by then largely unjustifiable. But there is blame enough for all to go around.

From that first miserable boatload of Africans in Jamestown, slavery spread to all the settlements, and, after the Revolutionary War, was established by laws in the states. But by the turn of the 19th century, slavery was confined to the South, where the economy was almost exclusively agricultural. For a time it appeared the practice was on its way to extinction. Virginia's Thomas Jefferson probably summed up the attitude of the day when he defined the South's "peculiar institution" as a necessary evil, which he and many others believed, or at least hoped, would wither away of its own accord since it was basically wasteful and unproductive.

Then along came Eli Whitney with his cotton gin, suddenly making it feasible to grow short-staple cotton that was fit for the great textile mills of England and France. This in turn, 40 years later, prompted South Carolina's prominent senator John C. Calhoun to declare that slavery-far from being merely a "necessary evil"-was actually a "positive good," because, among other things, in the years since the gin's invention, the South had become fabulously rich, with cotton constituting some 80 percent of all U.S. exports.

But beneath this great wealth and prosperity, America seethed. Whenever you have two people-or peoples-joined in politics but doing diametrically opposing things, it is almost inevitable that at some point tensions and jealousies will break out. In the industrial North, there was a low, festering resentment that eight of the first 11 U.S. presidents were Southerners-and most of them Virginians at that. For their part, the agrarian Southerners harbored lingering umbrage over the internal improvements policy propagated by the national government, which sought to expand and develop roads, harbors, canals, etc., but which the Southerners felt was disproportionately weighted toward Northern interests. These were the first pangs of sectional dissension.

Then there was the matter of the Tariff of Abominations, which became abominable for all concerned.

This inflammatory piece of legislation, passed with the aid of Northern politicians, imposed a tax or duty on imported goods that caused practically everything purchased in the South to rise nearly half-again in price. This was because the South had become used to shipping its cotton to England and France and in return receiving boatloads of inexpensive European goods, including clothing made from its own cotton. However, as years went by, the North, particularly New England, had developed cotton mills of its own-as well as leather and harness manufactories, iron and steel mills, arms and munitions factories, potteries, furniture makers, silversmiths and so forth. And with the new tariff putting foreign goods out of financial reach, Southerners were forced to buy these products from the North at what they considered exorbitant costs.

Smart money might have concluded it would be wise for the South to build its own cotton mills and its own manufactories, but its people were too attached to growing cotton. A visitor in the 1830s described the relentless cycle of the planters' misallocation of spare capital: "To sell cotton to buy Negroes-to make more cotton to buy more Negroes-'ad infinitum.'"

Such was the Southern mindset, but the tariff nearly kicked off the war 30 years early because, as the furor rose, South Carolina's Calhoun, who was then running for vice president of the United States, declared that states-his own state in particular-were under no obligation to obey the federal tariff law, or to collect it from ships entering its harbors. Later, South Carolina legislators acted on this assertion and defied the federal government to overrule them, lest the state secede. This set off the Nullification Crisis, which held in theory (or wishful thinking) that a state could nullify or ignore any federal law it held was not in its best interests. The crisis was defused only when President Andrew Jackson sent warships into Charleston Harbor-but it also marked the first time a Southern state had threatened to secede from the Union.

The incident also set the stage for the states' rights dispute, pitting state laws against the notion of federal sovereignty-an argument which became ongoing into the next century, and the next. "States' rights" also became a Southern watchword for Northern (or "Yankee") intrusion on the Southern lifestyle. States' rights political parties sprang up over the South; one particular example of just how volatile the issue had become was embodied in the decision in 1831 of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Gist (ironically from Union, S.C.) to name their firstborn son "States Rights Gist," a name he bore proudly until November 30, 1864, when, as a Confederate brigadier general, he was shot and killed leading his men at the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee.

Though the tariff question remained an open sore from its inception in 1828 right up to the Civil War, many modern historians have dismissed the impact it had on the growing rift between the two sections of the country. But any careful reading of newspapers, magazines or correspondence of the era indicates that here is where the feud began to fester into hatred. Some Southern historians in the past have argued this was the root cause of the Civil War. It wasn't, but it was a critical ingredient in the suspicion and mistrust Southerners were beginning to feel about their Northern brethren, and by extension about the Union itself. Not only did the tariff issue raise for the first time the frightening specter of Southern secession, but it also seemed to have marked a mazy kind of dividing line in which the South vaguely started thinking of itself as a separate entity-perhaps even a separate country. Thus the cat, or at least the cat's paw, was out of the bag.

All the resenting and seething naturally continued to spill over into politics. The North, with immigrants pouring in, vastly outnumbered the South in population and thus controlled the House of Representatives. But the U.S. Senate, by a sort of gentleman's agreement laced with the usual bribes and threats, had remained 50-50, meaning that whenever a territory was admitted as a free state, the South got to add a corresponding slave state-and vice versa. That is until 1820, when Missouri applied for statehood and anti-slavery forces insisted it must be free. Ultimately, this resulted in Congress passing the Missouri Compromise, which decreed that Missouri could come in as a slave state (and Maine as a free state) but any other state created north of Missouri's southern border would have to be free. That held the thing together for longer than it deserved.

In plain acknowledgement that slavery was an offensive practice, Congress in 1808 banned the importation of African slaves. Nevertheless there were millions of slaves living in the South, and their population continued growing. Beginning in the late 18th century, a small group of people in New England concluded that slavery was a social evil, and began to agitate for its abolition-hence, of course, the term "abolitionist."

Over the years this group became stronger and by the 1820s had turned into a full-fledged movement, preaching abolition from pulpits and podiums throughout the North, publishing pamphlets and newspapers, and generally stirring up sentiments both fair and foul in the halls of Congress and elsewhere. At first the abolitionists concluded that the best solution was to send the slaves back to Africa, and they actually acquired land in what is now Liberia, returning a small colony of ex-bondsmen across the ocean.

By the 1840s, the abolitionists had decided that slavery was not simply a social evil, but a "moral wrong," and began to agitate on that basis.

This did not sit well with the churchgoing Southerners, who were now subjected to being called unpleasant and scandalous names by Northerners they did not even know. This provoked, among other things, religious schisms, which in the mid-1840s caused the American Methodist and Baptist churches to split into Northern and Southern denominations. Somehow the Presbyterians hung together, but it was a strain, while the Episcopal church remained a Southern stronghold and firebrand bastion among the wealthy and planter classes. Catholics also maintained their solidarity, prompting cynics to suggest it was only because they owed their allegiance to the pope of Rome rather than to any state, country or ideal.

Abolitionist literature began showing up in the Southern mails, causing Southerners to charge the abolitionists with attempting to foment a slave rebellion, the mere notion of which remained high on most Southerners' anxiety lists. Murderous slave revolts had occurred in Haiti, Jamaica and Louisiana and more recently resulted in the killing of nearly 60 whites during the Nat Turner slave uprising in Virginia in 1831.

During the Mexican War the United States acquired enormous territories in the West, and what by then abolitionists called the "slave power" was pressing to colonize these lands. That prompted an obscure congressman from Pennsylvania to submit an amendment to a Mexican War funding bill in 1846 that would have prevented slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico-which became known, after its author, as the Wilmot Proviso. Even though it failed to pass into law, the very act of presenting the measure became a cause célèbre among Southerners who viewed it as further evidence that Northerners were not only out to destroy their "peculiar institution," but their political power as well.

In 1850, to the consternation of Southerners, California was admitted into the Union as a free state-mainly because the Gold Rush miners did not want to find themselves in competition with slave labor. But for the first time it threw the balance of power in the Senate to the Northern states.

By then national politics had become almost entirely sectional, a dangerous business, pitting North against South-and vice versa-in practically all matters, however remote. To assuage Southern fury at the admission of free California, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made Northerners personally responsible for the return of runaway slaves. Contrary to its intentions, the act actually galvanized Northern sentiments against slavery because it seemed to demand direct assent to, and personal complicity with, the practice of human bondage.

During the decade of the 1850s, crisis seemed to pile upon crisis as levels of anger turned to rage, and rage turned to violence. One of the most polarizing episodes between North and South occurred upon the 1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which depicted the slave's life as a relentless nightmare of sorrow and cruelty. Northern passions were inflamed while furious Southerners dismissed the story en masse as an outrageously skewed and unfair portrayal. (After the conflict began it was said that Lincoln, upon meeting Mrs. Stowe, remarked, "So you are the little lady who started this great war?")

In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act, sponsored by frequent presidential candidate Stephen A. Douglas, overturned the Missouri Compromise and permitted settlers in the Kansas Territory to choose for themselves whether they wanted a free or slave state. Outraged Northern abolitionists, horrified at the notion of slavery spreading by popular sovereignty, began raising funds to send anti-slave settlers to Kansas.

Equally outraged Southerners sent their own settlers, and a brutish group known as Border Ruffians from slaveholding Missouri went into Kansas to make trouble for the abolitionists. Into this unfortunate mix came an abolitionist fanatic named John Brown riding with his sons and gang. And as the murders and massacres began to pile up, newspapers throughout the land carried headlines of "Bleeding Kansas."

In the halls of Congress, the slavery issue had prompted feuds, insults, duels and finally a divisive gag rule that forbade even discussion or debate on petitions about the issue of slavery. But during the Kansas controversy a confrontation between a senator and a congressman stood out as particularly shocking. In 1856, Charles Sumner, a 45-year-old Massachusetts senator and abolitionist, conducted a three-hour rant in the Senate chamber against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, focusing in particular on 59-year-old South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, whom he mocked and compared to a pimp, "having taken as his mistress the harlot, Slavery." Two days later Congressman Preston Brooks, a nephew of the demeaned South Carolinian, appeared beside Sumner's desk in the Senate and caned him nearly to death with a gold-headed gutta-percha walking stick.

By then, every respectable-sized city, North and South, had a half-dozen newspapers and even small towns had at least one or more; and the revolutionary new telegraph brought the latest news overnight or sooner. Throughout the North, the caning incident triggered profound indignation that was transformed into support for a new anti-slavery political party. In the election of 1856, the new Republican Party ran explorer John C. Frémont, the famed "Pathfinder," for president, and even though he lost, the party had become a force to be reckoned with.

In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its infamous Dred Scott decision, which elated Southerners and enraged Northerners. The court ruled, in essence, that a slave was not a citizen, or even a person, and that slaves were "so far inferior that they [have] no rights which the white man [is] bound to respect." Southerners were relieved that they could now move their slaves in and out of free territories and states without losing them, while in the North the ruling merely drove more people into the anti-slavery camp.

Then in 1859, John Brown, of Bleeding Kansas notoriety, staged a murderous raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., hoping to inspire a general slave uprising. The raid was thwarted by U.S. troops, and Brown was tried for treason
and hanged; but when it came out that he was being financed by Northern abolitionists, Southern anger was profuse and furious-especially after the Northern press elevated Brown to the status of hero and martyr. It simply reinforced the Southern conviction that Northerners were out to destroy their way of life.

As the crucial election of 1860 approached, there arose talk of Southern secession by a group of "fire-eaters"- influential orators who insisted Northern "fanatics" intended to free slaves "by law if possible, by force if necessary." Hectoring abolitionist newspapers and Northern orators (known as Black, or Radical Republicans) provided ample fodder for that conclusion.

The 1850s drew to a close in near social convulsion and the established political parties began to break apart-always a dangerous sign. The Whigs simply vanished into other parties; the Democrats split into Northern and Southern contingents, each with its own slate of candidates. A Constitutional Union party also appeared, looking for votes from moderates in the Border States. As a practical matter, all of this assured a victory for the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, who was widely, if wrongly, viewed in the South as a rabid abolitionist. With the addition of Minnesota (1858) and Oregon (1859) as free states, the Southerners' greatest fears were about to be realized-complete control of the federal government by free-state, anti-slavery politicians.

With the vote split four ways, Lincoln and the Republicans swept into power in November 1860, gaining a majority of the Electoral College, but only a 40 percent plurality of the popular vote. It didn't matter to the South. In short order, always pugnacious South Carolina voted to secede from the Union, followed by six other Deep South states that were invested heavily in cotton.

Much of the Southern apprehension and ire that Lincoln would free the slaves was misplaced. No matter how distasteful he found the practice of slavery, the overarching philosophy that drove Lincoln was a hard pragmatism that did not include the forcible abolition of slavery by the federal government-for the simple reason that he could not envision any political way of accomplishing it. But Lincoln, like a considerable number of Northern people, was decidedly against allowing slavery to spread into new territories and states. By denying slaveholders the right to extend their boundaries, Lincoln would in effect also be weakening their power in Washington, and over time this would almost inevitably have resulted in the abolition of slavery, as sooner or later the land would have worn out.

But that wasn't bad enough for the Southern press, which whipped up the populace to such a pitch of fury that Lincoln became as reviled as John Brown himself. These influential journals, from Richmond to Charleston and myriad points in between, painted a sensational picture of Lincoln in words and cartoons as an arch-abolitionist-a kind of antichrist who would turn the slaves loose to rape, murder and pillage. For the most part, Southerners ate it up. If there is a case to be made on what caused the Civil War, the Southern press and its editors would be among the first in the dock. It goes a long way in explaining why only one in three Confederate soldiers were slaveholders, or came from slaveholding families. It wasn't their slaves they were defending, it was their homes against the specter of slaves-gone-wild.

Interestingly, many if not most of the wealthiest Southerners were opposed to secession for the simple reason that they had the most to lose if it came to war and the war went badly. But in the end they, like practically everyone else, were swept along on the tide of anti-Washington, anti-abolition, anti-Northern and anti-Lincoln rhetoric.

To a lesser extent, the Northern press must accept its share of blame for antagonizing Southerners by damning and lampooning them as brutal lash-wielding torturers and heartless family separators. With all this back and forth carrying on for at least the decade preceding war, by the time hostilities broke out, few either in the North or the South had much use for the other, and minds were set. One elderly Tennessean later expressed it this way: "I wish there was a river of fire a mile wide between the North and the South, that would burn with unquenchable fury forevermore, and that it could never be passable to the endless ages of eternity by any living creature."

The immediate cause of Southern secession, therefore, was a fear that Lincoln and the Republican Congress would have abolished the institution of slavery-which would have ruined fortunes, wrecked the Southern economy and left the South to contend with millions of freed blacks. The long-term cause was a feeling by most Southerners that the interests of the two sections of the country had drifted apart, and were no longer mutual or worthwhile.

The proximate cause of the war, however, was Lincoln's determination not to allow the South to go peacefully out of the Union, which would have severely weakened, if not destroyed, the United States.

There is the possibility that war might have been avoided, and a solution worked out, had there not been so much mistrust on the part of the South. Unfortunately, some of the mistrust was well earned in a bombastic fog of hatred, recrimination and outrageous statements and accusations on both sides. Put another way, it was well known that Lincoln was anti-slavery, but both during his campaign for office and after his election, he insisted it was never his intention to disturb slavery where it already existed. The South simply did not believe him.

The Lincoln administration was able to quell secession movements in several Border States-Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and what would become West Virginia-by a combination of politics and force, including suspension of the Bill of Rights. But when Lincoln ordered all states to contribute men for an army to suppress the rebellion South Carolina started by firing on Fort Sumter, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina also joined the Confederacy rather than make war on their fellow Southerners.

"Because of incompatibility of temper," a Southern woman was prompted to lament, "we have hated each other so. If we could only separate, a ' separation a l'agreable,' as the French say it, and not have a horrid fight for divorce."

Things had come a long way during the nearly 250 years since the Dutchman delivered his cargo of African slaves to the wharf at Jamestown, but in 1860 almost everyone agreed that a war wouldn't last long. Most thought it would be over by summertime.

Article originally published in the September 2010 issue of America's Civil War.

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The Events That Caused The American Civil War Causes Of The Civil War Summary States' Rights The Missouri Compromise The Dred Scott Decision The Abolitionist Movement Abolitionist John Brown John Brown's Raid On Harpers Ferry Slavery In America Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin Secessionism Abraham Lincoln's Election Civil War Causes [...]