The history of slavery in the United States (1619-1865) began soon after the English colonists first settled in Virginia and lasted until the passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In the very early decades of the institution, there was indentured servitude, which typically lasted a period of four to seven years for white and black alike; by 1662 the American incarnation of slavery was established by court ruling. By the end of the 17th century slavery was far more common in the Southern colonies than in the North.

From about the 1640s until 1865, people of African descent were legally enslaved within the boundaries of the present United States, mostly by whites, but also by a number of American Indians and free blacks. The vast majority of this slaveholding was in the southern United States; approximately one Southern family in four held slaves prior to war. According to the 1860 U.S. census, fewer than 385,000 individuals (i.e. 1.4% of White Americans in the country, or 4.8% of southern whites) owned one or more slaves.[1][2] 95% of blacks lived in the South, comprising one-third of the population there as opposed to 1% of the population of the North.[3]

The wealth of the U.S. in the first half of the 19th century was greatly enhanced by this exploitation of negro race slaves.[4][5] But with the Northern victory in the Civil War, the slave-labor system was abolished in the south and the large southern cotton plantations became much less profitable. Northern industry, which had expanded rapidly before and during the war, surged even further ahead of the South's agricultural economy. Industrialists came to dominate many aspects of the nation's life, including social and political affairs. The planter aristocracy of the South disappeared. The rapid economic development following the Civil War laid the groundwork for the modern U.S. industrial economy.

Approximately 12 million Black Africans were shipped to the Americas from the 17th to the 19th centuries.[6][7] Of these, 5.4% (645,000) were brought to what is now the United States.[8] The slave population in the U.S. had grown to 4 million by the 1860 Census.

[edit] Colonial America
Main article: Slavery in Colonial America
The first record of African slavery in Colonial America occurred in 1619. A Dutch ship, its name unrecorded by those present, had captured 20 enslaved Africans in a battle with a Spanish ship bound for the Caribbean. The Dutch ship had been damaged first by the battle and then more severely in a great storm during the late summer when it came ashore at Jamestown. Though the colony was in the middle of a period later known as "The Great Migration" (1618-1623), during which its population grew from 450 to 4,000 residents, extremely high mortality rates from disease, malnutrition, and war with Indians kept the population of able-bodied laborers low [1]. The Dutch ship being in severe need of repairs and supplies and the colonists being in need of able-bodied workers, the human cargo was traded for food and services.

In addition to African slaves, poor Europeans were brought over in substantial numbers as indentured servants, particularly in the British Thirteen Colonies.[9] The white citizens of Jamestown, who had themselves arrived from Britain, decided to treat the first Africans in Virginia as indentured servants. As with European indentured servants, the Africans were freed after a stated period and given the use of land and supplies by their former masters, and at least one, Anthony Johnson, eventually became a landowner on the Eastern Shore and a slave-owner himself. The major problem with indentured servants was that in time they would be freed, but were unlikely to become prosperous. The best lands in the tidewater regions were already in the hands of wealthy plantation families by 1650, and the former servants became an underclass. Bacon's Rebellion showed that the poor laborers and farmers could prove a dangerous element to the wealthy landowners. By switching to pure chattel slavery, new white laborers and small farmers were mostly limited to those who could afford to immigrate and support themselves.

The transformation from indentured servitude to racial slavery happened gradually. There are no laws regarding slavery early in Virginia's history. However, by 1640 the Virginia courts had sentenced at least one black servant to slavery. In 1654, a court in Northampton County ruled against one John Casor, declaring him property for life. Since persons with African origins were not English citizens by birth, they were not necessarily covered by English Common Law.

Slaves on a Virginia plantation, c. 1790The Virginia Slave codes of 1705 made clear the status of slaves. During the British colonial period, every colony had slavery. Those in the north were primarily house servants. Early on, slaves in the South worked on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice, and tobacco; cotton became a major crop after the 1790s.[10] In South Carolina in 1720 about 65% of the population consisted of slaves.[11] Slaves were used by rich farmers and plantation owners with commercial export operations. Backwoods subsistence farmers seldom owned slaves.

Some of the British colonies attempted to abolish the international slave trade, fearing that the importation of new Africans would be disruptive. Virginia bills to that effect were vetoed by the British Privy Council; Rhode Island forbade the import of slaves in 1774. All of the states except Georgia had banned or limited the African slave trade by 1786; Georgia did so in 1798 - although some of these laws were later repealed.[12]

[edit] 1776 to 1850

[edit] Second Middle Passage
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As the nation expanded west, so did the cultivation of cotton[13] and the institution of slavery. Historian Peter Kolchin wrote, "By breaking up existing families and forcing slaves to relocate far from everyone and everything they knew" this migration "replicated (if on a reduced level) many of [the] horrors" of the Atlantic slave trade.[14] Historian Ira Berlin called this movement the Second Middle Passage. Characterizing it as the "central event” in the life of a slave between the American Revolution and the Civil War, Berlin wrote that whether they were uprooted themselves or simply lived in fear that they or their families would be involuntarily moved, "the massive deportation traumatized black people, both slave and free."[15]

Although complete statistics are lacking, it is estimated that 1,000,000 slaves moved west between 1790 and 1860. Most of the slaves were moved from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Originally the points of destination were Kentucky and Tennessee, but after 1810 Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas received the most. In the 1830s, almost 300,000 were transported, with Alabama and Mississippi receiving 100,000 each. Every decade between 1810 and 1860 saw at least 100,000 slaves moved from their state of origin. In the final decade before the Civil War, 250,000 were moved. Michael Tadman, in a 1989 book Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South, indicates that 60-70% of interregional migrations were the result of the sale of slaves. In 1820 a child in the Upper South had a 30% chance to be sold South by 1860.[16]

Slave traders were responsible for the majority of the slaves that moved west. Only a minority moved with their families and existing master. Slave traders had little interest in purchasing or transporting intact slave families, although in the interest of creating a "self-reproducing labor force" equal numbers of men and women were transported. Berlin wrote, "The internal slave trade became the largest enterprise in the South outside the plantation itself, and probably the most advanced in its employment of modern transportation, finance, and publicity." The slave trade industry developed its own unique language with terms such as "prime hands, bucks, breeding wenches, and fancy girls" coming into common use.[17] The expansion of the interstate slave trade contributed to the "economic revival of once depressed seaboard states" as demand accelerated the value of the slaves that were subject to sale.[18]

Some traders moved their "chattels" by sea, with Norfolk to New Orleans being the most common route, but most slaves were forced to walk. Regular migration routes were established and were served by a network of slave pens, yards, and warehouses needed as temporary housing for the slaves. As the trek advanced, some slaves were sold and new ones purchased. Berlin concluded, "In all, the slave trade, with its hubs and regional centers, its spurs and circuits, reached into every cranny of southern society. Few southerners, black or white, were untouched."[19]

The death rate for the slaves on these marches was nowhere near that experienced by captives in the days of the Atlantic slave trade, but they were still higher than the normal death rate. Berlin summarizes the experience:

… the Second Middle Passage was extraordinarily lonely, debilitating, and dispiriting. Capturing the mournful character of one southward marching coffle, an observer characterized it as "a procession of men, women, and children resembling that of a funeral." Indeed, with men and women dying on the march or being sold and resold, slaves became not merely commodified but cut off from nearly every human attachment….

Murder and mayhem made the Second Middle Passage almost as dangerous for traders as it was for slaves, which was why the men were chained tightly and guarded closely. … The coffles that marched slaves southward – like the slave ships that carried their ancestors westward – became mobile fortresses, and under such circumstances, flight was more common than revolt. Slaves found it easier – and far less perilous – to slip into the night and follow the North Star to the fabled land of freedom than to confront their heavily armed overlords.[20]

Once the trip was ended, slaves faced a life on the frontier significantly different from their experiences back east. Clearing trees and starting crops on virgin fields was harsh and backbreaking work. A combination of inadequate nutrition, bad water, and exhaustion from both the journey and the work weakened the newly arrived slaves and produced casualties. The preferred locations of the new plantations in river bottoms with mosquitoes and other environmental challenges threatened the survival of slaves, who had acquired only limited immunities in their previous homes. The death rate was such that, in the first few years of hewing a plantation out of the wilderness, some planters preferred whenever possible to use rented slaves rather than their own.[21]

The harsh conditions on the frontier increased slave resistance and led to much more reliance on violence by the masters and overseers. Many of the slaves were new to cotton fields and unaccustomed to the "sunrise-to-sunset gang labor" required by their new life. Slaves were driven much harder than when they were involved in growing tobacco or wheat back east. Slaves also had less time and opportunity to boost the quality of their lifestyle by raising their own livestock or tending vegetable gardens, for either their own consumption or trade, as they could back home.[22]

In Louisiana it was sugar, rather than cotton, that was the main crop. Between 1810 and 1830 the number of slaves increased from under 10,000 to over 42,000. New Orleans became nationally important as a slave port, and by the 1840s had the largest slave market in the country. Dealing with sugar cane was even more physically demanding that growing cotton, and the preference was for young males who represented two-thirds of the slave purchases. The largely young, unmarried male slave force made the reliance on violence by the masters “especially savage.”[23]

[edit] Treatment of slaves
Historian Kenneth M. Stampp describes the role of coercion in slavery, “Without the power to punish, which the state conferred upon the master, bondage could not have existed. By comparison, all other techniques of control were of secondary importance.” Stampp further notes that while rewards sometimes led slaves to perform adequately, most agreed with an Arkansas slaveholder, who wrote:

Now, I speak what I know, when I say it is like ‘casting pearls before swine' to try to persuade a negro to work. He must be made to work, and should always be given to understand that if he fails to perform his duty he will be punished for it.[24]

According to both the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Brion Davis and the Marxist historian Eugene Genovese, treatment of slaves was both harsh and inhumane. Whether laboring or walking about in public, people living as slaves were regulated by legally authorized violence. Davis makes the point that, while some aspects of slavery took on a "welfare capitalist" look,:

Yet we must never forget that these same "welfare capitalist" plantations in the Deep South were essentially ruled by terror. Even the most kindly and humane masters knew that only the threat of violence could force gangs of field hands to work from dawn to dusk "with the discipline," as one contemporary observer put it, "of a regular trained army." Frequent public floggings reminded every slave of the penalty for inefficient labor, disorderly conduct, or refusal to accept the authority of a superior.[25]

On large plantations, slave overseers were authorized to whip and brutalize non-compliant slaves. Slave codes authorized, indemnified or even required the use of violence, and were denounced by abolitionists for their brutality. Both slaves and free blacks were regulated by the Black Codes, and had their movements monitored by slave patrols conscripted from the white population which were allowed to use summary punishment against escapees, sometimes maiming or killing them. In addition to physical abuse and murder, slaves were at constant risk of losing members of their families if their owners decided to trade them for profit, punishment, or to pay debts. A few slaves retaliated by murdering owners and overseers, burning barns, killing horses, or staging work slowdowns. [26] Stampp, without contesting Genovese's assertions concerning the violence and sexual exploitation faced by slaves, does question the appropriateness of a Marxian approach in analyzing the master-slave relationship.[27]

Genovese claims that because the slaves were the legal property of their owners, it was not unusual for enslaved black women to be raped by their owners, members of their owner's families, or their owner's friends. Children who resulted from such rapes were slaves as well, as they took the status of their mothers, unless freed by the slaveholder. Nell Irwin Painter and other historians have also documented that Southern history went "across the color line". Contemporary accounts by Mary Chesnut and Fanny Kemble, both married in the planter class, as well as accounts by former slaves gathered under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), all attested to the abuse of women slaves by white men of the owning and overseer class.

However, the Nobel economist Robert Fogel controversially describes the belief that slave-breeding and sexual exploitation destroyed the black family as a myth. The family was the basic unit of social organization under slavery; it was to the economic interest of planters to encourage the stability of slave families, and most of them did so. Most slave sales were either of whole families or of individuals who were at an age when it would have been normal for them to have left the family.[28]

According to Genovese, slaves were fed, clothed, housed and provided medical care in the most minimal manner. It was common to pay small bonuses during the Christmas season, and some slave owners permitted their slaves to keep earnings and gambling profits. (One slave, Denmark Vesey, is known to have won a lottery and bought his freedom.) In many households, treatment of slaves varied with the slave's skin color. Darker-skinned slaves worked in the fields, while lighter-skinned house servants had comparatively better clothing, food and housing.[29]

As in President Thomas Jefferson's famous household, it wasn't just an abstract issue of skin color. Sometimes planters used light-skinned slaves as house servants because they were relatives. Several of Jefferson's household slaves were children of his father-in-law and an enslaved woman, who were brought to the marriage by Jefferson's wife. Sally Hemings, the young enslaved woman with whom Thomas Jefferson had a sexual relationship and children after his wife died, was half-sister to his wife.

However, Fogel argues that the material conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers. They were not good by modern standards, but this fact emphasizes the hard lot of all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the 19th century. Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90 percent of the income he produced.[28]

In a survey, 58 percent of historians and 42 percent of economists disagreed with the proposition that the material condition of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers.[28]

Slaves were considered legal non-persons except if they committed crimes. An Alabama court asserted that slaves "are rational beings, they are capable of committing crimes; and in reference to acts which are crimes, are regarded as persons. Because they are slaves, they are incapable of performing civil acts, and, in reference to all such, they are things, not persons.[30]

[edit] Misdemeanor of women
During the early 1600s African women as well as men were brought into the United States for slavery. While working on plantations and farms, women and men had equal labor-intensive work. However, much of the hard labor was taken care of by men or by women who were past the child-bearing stage. Some of the labor-intensive jobs given to women were: cooking for the Master's household as well as the slaves themselves, sewing, midwifery, pruning fields, and many other labor-intensive occupations.

In 1837, an Antislavery Convention of American Women met in New York City with both black and white women participating. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had first met at the convention and realized the need for a separate women's rights movement. At the London gathering Stanton also met other women delegates such as Emily Winslow, Abby Southwick, Elizabeth Neal, Mary Grew, Abby Kimber, as well as many other women. However, During the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society, which Stanton and Winslow attended, the hosts refused to seat the women delegates. This resulted in a convention of their own to form a "society to advocate the rights of women" (Sklar). Eight years later at Seneca Falls, New York, Stanton and Winslow launched the women's rights movement, becoming one of the most diverse and social forces in American life. Furthermore, the fact that the movement came at the end of the Civil War and just before World War I was a definite surprise.[31]

[edit] Abolitionist movement
Beginning in the 1750s, there was widespread sentiment during the American Revolution that slavery was a social evil (for the country as a whole and for the whites) and should eventually be abolished. All the Northern states passed emancipation acts between 1780 and 1804; most of these arranged for gradual emancipation and a special status for freedmen, so there were still a dozen "permanent apprentices" in New Jersey in 1860.[32]

The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 declared all men "born free and equal"; the slave Quork Walker sued for his freedom on this basis and won his freedom, thus abolishing slavery in Massachusetts.

Throughout the first half of the 19th century, a movement to end slavery grew in strength throughout the United States. This struggle took place amid strong support for slavery among white Southerners, who profited greatly from the system of enslaved labor. These slave owners began to refer to slavery as the "peculiar institution" in a defensive attempt to differentiate it from other examples of forced labor.

The large, well-funded American Colonization Society had an active program of shipping ex-slaves and free blacks who volunteered back to Africa to the American colony of Liberia.

After 1830, a religious movement led by William Lloyd Garrison declared slavery to be a personal sin and demanded the owners repent immediately and start the process of emancipation. The movement was highly controversial and was a factor in causing the American Civil War.

A very few abolitionists, such as John Brown, favored the use of armed force to foment uprisings among the slaves; others tried to use the legal system.

Peter, a slave from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863. The scars are a result of a whipping by his overseer, who was subsequently discharged. It took two months to recover from the beating.Influential leaders of the abolition movement (1810-60) included:

William Lloyd Garrison - published The Liberator newspaper
Harriet Beecher Stowe - author of Uncle Tom's Cabin
Frederick Douglass - nation's most powerful anti-slavery speaker, a former slave. Most famous for his book Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass.
Harriet Tubman - helped 350 slaves escape from the South, became known as a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad.
Slave uprisings that used armed force (1700 - 1859) include:

New York Revolt of 1712
The Stono Rebellion (1739) in South Carolina
New York Slave Insurrection of 1741
Gabriel's Rebellion (1800) in Virginia
Louisiana Territory Slave Rebellion, led by Charles Deslandes (1811)
George Boxley Rebellion (1815) in Virginia
Denmark Vesey Uprising in South Carolina (1822)
Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831) in Virginia
The Amistad Seizure (1839) on a Spanish ship
See also: List of notable opponents of slavery‎

[edit] Rising tensions
The economic value of plantation slavery was magnified in 1793 with the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, a device designed to separate cotton fibers from seedpods and the sometimes sticky seeds. The invention revolutionized the cotton-growing industry by increasing the quantity of cotton that could be processed in a day by fiftyfold. The result was explosive growth in the cotton industry and greatly increased demand for slave labor in the South.[33]

At the same time, the northern states banned slavery, though as Alexis de Toqueville pointed out in Democracy in America (1835), the prohibition did not always mean that the slaves were freed. Toqueville noted that as Northern states provided for gradual emancipation, they generally outlawed the sale of slaves within the state. This meant that the only way to sell slaves before they were freed was to move them South. Toqueville does not provide any documentation that such transfers actually occurred to any great extent.[34] In fact, the emancipation of slaves in the North led to the growth in the population of northern free blacks from several hundred in the 1770s to nearly 50,000 by 1810.[35]

Just as demand for slaves was increasing, supply was restricted. The United States Constitution, adopted in 1787, prevented Congress from banning the importation of slaves until 1808. On January 1, 1808, Congress acted to ban further imports. Any new slaves would have to be descendants of ones who were currently in the U.S. However, the internal U.S. slave trade, and the involvement in the international slave trade or the outfitting of ships for that trade by U.S. citizens, were not banned. Though there were certainly violations of this law, slavery in America became more or less self-sustaining.

With changes to agriculture in the Virginia and Carolina Tidewater, planters had excess slave labor. They began to sell enslaved African Americans to traders who took them to markets for the expanding plantations in the Deep South: Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. This internal slave trade and forced migration of enslaved African Americans continued for another half-century. The scale of the internal slave trade contributed to the wealth of the Deep South. In 1840 New Orleans, which had the largest slave market and important shipping, was the third largest city in the country and the wealthiest.

Because of the three-fifths compromise in the U.S. Constitution, slaveholders exerted their power through the Federal Government and the resulting Federal fugitive slave laws. Refugees from slavery fled the South across the Ohio River and other parts of the Mason-Dixon Line dividing North from South, to the North via the Underground Railroad. The physical presence of African Americans in Cincinnati, Oberlin, and other Northern towns agitated some white Northerners, though others helped hide former slaves from their former owners, and others helped them reach freedom in Canada. After 1854, Republicans fumed that the Slave Power, especially the pro-slavery Democratic Party, controlled two or three branches of the Federal government.

Because the Midwestern states decided in the 1820s not to allow slavery, and because most Northeastern states became free states through local emancipation, a Northern block of free states solidified into one contiguous geographic area. The dividing line was the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon line (between slave-state Maryland and free-state Pennsylvania).

North and South grew further apart in 1845 with the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention on the premise that the Bible sanctions slavery and that it was acceptable for Christians to own slaves. The Southern Baptist Convention has since renounced this interpretation. This split was triggered by the opposition of northern Baptists to slavery, and in particular, by the 1844 statement of the Home Mission Society declaring that a person could not be a missionary and still keep slaves as property. The Methodist and Presbyterian churches likewise divided north and south, so that by the late 1850s only the Democratic Party was a national institution, and it split in the 1860 election.

[edit] Nat Turner, anti-literacy laws
In 1831, a bloody slave rebellion took place in Southampton County, Virginia. A slave named Nat Turner who was able to read and write and had "visions", led what became known as Nat Turner's Rebellion or the Southampton Insurrection. On a murderous rampage with the goal of freeing himself and others, Turner and his followers killed men, women and children, but were eventually subdued by the white militia.

Nat Turner and many of his followers were hanged. All across the South, harsh new laws were enacted in the aftermath of the 1831 Turner Rebellion to curtail the already limited rights of African Americans. Typical was the Virginia law against educating slaves, free blacks and children of whites and blacks. These laws were often defied by individuals, among whom was noted future Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.

[edit] 1850s to the Civil War

[edit] Bleeding Kansas
After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854, the border wars broke out in Kansas Territory, where the question of whether it would be admitted to the Union as a slave or free state was left to the inhabitants. The abolitionist John Brown was active in the rebellion and killing in "Bleeding Kansas" as were many white Southerners. At the same time, fears that the Slave Power was seizing full control of the national government swept anti-slavery Republicans into office.

[edit] Dred Scott
Dred Scott was a 62-year-old slave who sued for his freedom on the ground that he had lived in a territory where slavery was forbidden. The territory was the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase, from which slavery was excluded under the terms of the Missouri Compromise. In a sweeping decision that set the United States on course for Civil War, the Supreme Court denied Scott his freedom. The court ruled that Dred Scott was not a citizen who had a right to sue in the Federal courts, and that Congress had no constitutional power to pass the Missouri Compromise.

The 1857 Dred Scott decision, decided 6-3, held that a slave did not become free when taken into a free state; Congress could not bar slavery from a territory, and blacks could not be citizens. This decision, seen as unjust by many Republicans including Abraham Lincoln, was also seen as proof that the Slave Power had seized control of the Supreme Court. The decision, written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, barred slaves and their descendants from citizenship. The decision enraged abolitionists and encouraged slave owners.[36]

[edit] 1860 presidential election
The divisions became fully exposed with the 1860 presidential election. The electorate split four ways. One party (the Southern Democrats) endorsed slavery. One (the Republicans) denounced it. One (the Northern Democrats) said democracy required the people themselves to decide on slavery locally. The fourth (Constitutional Union Party) said the survival of the Union was at stake, and everything else should be compromised.

Lincoln, the Republican, won with a plurality of popular votes and a majority of electoral votes. Lincoln, however, did not appear on the ballots of ten southern states: thus his election necessarily split the nation along sectional lines. Many slave owners in the South feared that the real intent of the Republicans was the abolition of slavery in states where it already existed, and that the sudden emancipation of 4 million slaves would be problematic for the slave owners and for the economy that drew its greatest profits from the labor of people who were not paid.

They also argued that banning slavery in new states would upset what they saw as a delicate balance of free states and slave states. They feared that ending this balance could lead to the domination of the industrial North with its preference for high tariffs on imported goods. The combination of these factors led the South to secede from the Union, and thus began the American Civil War. Northern leaders like Lincoln had viewed the slavery interests as a threat politically, and with secession, they viewed the prospect of a new southern nation, the Confederate States of America, with control over the Mississippi River and the West, as politically and militarily unacceptable.

[edit] War and emancipation
The consequent American Civil War, beginning in 1861, led to the end of chattel slavery in America. Not long after the war broke out, through a legal maneuver credited to Union General Benjamin F. Butler, a lawyer by profession, slaves who came into Union "possession" were considered "contraband of war" and therefore, he ruled that they were not subject to return to Confederate owners as they had been before the war. Soon word spread, and many slaves sought refuge in Union territory, desiring to be declared "contraband." Many of the "contrabands" joined the Union Army as workers or troops, forming entire regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT). Others went to refugee camps such as the Grand Contraband Camp near Fort Monroe or fled to northern cities. General Butler's interpretation was reinforced when Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1861, which declared that any property used by the Confederate military, including slaves, could be confiscated by Union forces.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 was a powerful move that promised freedom for slaves in the Confederacy as soon as the Union armies reached them, and authorized the enlistment of African Americans in the Union Army. However, the Emancipation proclaimation did not free slaves in the Union-allied slave-holding states that bordered the Confederacy. Since the Confederate States did not recognize the authority of President Lincoln, and the proclamation did not apply in the border states, at first the proclamation freed only a few slaves that had escaped behind Union lines. Still, the proclamation made the abolition of slavery an official war goal that was implemented as the Union took territory from the Confederacy. According to the Census of 1860, this policy would free nearly four million slaves, or over 12% of the total population of the United States.

Simon Legree and Uncle Tom: A scene from Uncle Tom's Cabin, history's most famous abolitionist novelThe Arizona Organic Act abolished slavery on February 24, 1863 in the newly formed Arizona Territory. Tennessee and all of the border states (except Kentucky) abolished slavery by early 1865. Some slaves were freed by the operation of the Emancipation Proclamation as Union armies marched across the South. Emancipation as a reality came to the remaining southern slaves after the surrender of all Confederate troops in spring 1865. There still were over 250,000 slaves in Texas. They were freed as soon as word arrived of the collapse of the Confederacy, with the decisive day being June 19, 1865. Juneteenth is celebrated in Texas, Oklahoma and some other areas and commemorates the date when the news finally reached the last slaves at Galveston, Texas.

Legally, the last 40,000 or so slaves were freed in Kentucky[37] by the final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865.

[edit] Reconstruction to present
During Reconstruction, it was a serious question whether slavery had been permanently abolished or whether some form of semi-slavery would appear after the Union armies left.

[edit] Sharecropping
An 1867 federal law prohibited a descendant form of slavery known as sharecropping or debt bondage, which still existed in the New Mexico Territory as a legacy of Spanish imperial rule. Between 1903 and 1944, the Supreme Court ruled on several cases involving debt bondage of black Americans, declaring these arrangements unconstitutional. In actual practice, however, sharecropping arrangements often resulted in peonage for both black and white farmers in the South.

[edit] Educational issues
The anti-literacy laws after 1832 undoubtedly contributed greatly to the widespread illiteracy facing the freedmen and other African Americans after the Civil War and Emancipation 35 years later. After Emancipation, the unfairness of such laws helped draw attention to the problem of illiteracy as one of the great challenges confronting these people as they sought to join the free enterprise system and support themselves during Reconstruction and thereafter.

Consequently, many religious organizations, former Union Army officers and soldiers, and wealthy philanthropists were inspired to create and fund educational efforts specifically for the betterment of African Americans in the South. They helped create normal schools to generate teachers, such as those which eventually became Hampton University and Tuskegee University. Stimulated by the work of educators such as Dr. Booker T. Washington, by the first third of the 20th century, over 5,000 local schools had been built for blacks in the South with using private matching funds provided by individuals such as Henry H. Rogers, Andrew Carnegie, and most notably, Julius Rosenwald, each of whom had arisen from modest roots to become wealthy.

[edit] Apologies
On February 24, 2007 the Virginia General Assembly passed House Joint Resolution Number 728 acknowledging "with profound regret the involuntary servitude of Africans and the exploitation of Native Americans, and call for reconciliation among all Virginians."[38] With the passing of this resolution, Virginia becomes the first of the 50 United States to acknowledge through the state's governing body their state's negative involvement in slavery. The passing of this resolution came on the heels of the 400th anniversary celebration of the city of Jamestown, Virginia, which was one of the first slave ports of the American colonies.

[edit] Arguments used to justify slavery
In the 19th century, proponents of slavery often defended the institution as a "necessary evil". It was feared that emancipation would have more harmful social and economic consequences than the continuation of slavery. In 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter that with slavery:

We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.[39]

Robert E. Lee wrote in 1856:

There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence.[40]

[edit] Slavery as "a positive good"
However, as the abolition agitation increased and the planting system expanded, apologies for slavery became fainter and fainter in the South. Then apologies were superseded by claims that slavery was a beneficial scheme of labor control. John C. Calhoun, in a famous speech in the Senate in 1837, declared that slavery was "instead of an evil, a good—a positive good." Calhoun supported his view with the following reasoning: in every civilized society one portion of the community must live on the labor of another; learning, science, and the arts are built upon leisure; the African slave, kindly treated by his master and mistress and looked after in his old age, is better off than the free laborers of Europe; and under the slave system conflicts between capital and labor are avoided. The advantages of slavery in this respect, he concluded, "will become more and more manifest, if left undisturbed by interference from without, as the country advances in wealth and numbers."[41]

[edit] Native Americans

[edit] Enslavement of Native Americans
During the 17th century, Indian slavery, the enslavement of Native Americans by European colonists, was common. Many of these Native slaves were exported to off-shore colonies, especially the "sugar islands" of the Caribbean. Historian Alan Gallay estimates that from 1670-1715, British slave traders sold between 24,000 and 51,000 Native Americans from what is now the southern part of the U.S.[42]

Slavery of Native Americans was organized in colonial and Mexican California through Franciscan missions, theoretically entitled to ten years of Native labor, but in practice maintaining them in perpetual servitude, until their charge was revoked in the mid-1830s. Following the 1847-1848 invasion by U.S. troops, Native Californians were enslaved in the new state from statehood in 1850 to 1867.[43] Slavery required the posting of a bond by the slave holder and enslavement occurred through raids and a four-month servitude imposed as a punishment for Indian "vagrancy".[44]

[edit] Slavery among Native Americans
The Haida and Tlingit Indians who lived along the Southeast Alaska's coast were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave-traders, raiding as far as California. Slavery was hereditary, the slaves being prisoners of war. Among some Pacific Northwest tribes, about a quarter of the population were slaves.[45][46] Other slave-owning tribes of North America were, for example, Comanche of Texas, Creek of Georgia, the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, that lived along the coast from what is now Alaska to California, the Pawnee, and Klamath.[10]

After 1800, the Cherokees and some other tribes started buying and using black slaves, a practice they continued after being relocated to Indian Territory in the 1830s.[47]

The nature of slavery in Cherokee society often mirrored that of white slave-owning society. The law barred intermarriage of Cherokees and blacks, whether slave or free. Blacks who aided slaves were punished with one hundred lashes on the back. In Cherokee society, blacks were barred from holding office, bearing arms, and owning property, and it was illegal to teach blacks to read and write.[48][49]

By contrast, the Seminoles welcomed into their nation African Americans who had escaped slavery (Black Seminoles).

[edit] Free Blacks and slavery
Some slaveholders were black or had some black ancestry. In 1830 there were 3,775 such slaveholders in the South with 80% of them located in Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. Half of these lived in cities rather than the countryside with most in the two cities of New Orleans and Charleston. Only a few were “substantial planters”, and, of those that were, most were of mixed race.[50] Historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger wrote:

A large majority of profit-oriented free black slaveholders resided in the Lower South. For the most part, they were persons of mixed racial origin, often women who cohabited or were mistresses of white men, or mulatto men … . Provided land and slaves by whites, they owned farms and plantations, worked their hands in the rice, cotton, and sugar fields, and like their white contemporaries were troubled with runaways.[51]

Historian Ira Berlin wrote:

In slave societies, nearly everyone – free and slave – aspired to enter the slaveholding class, and upon occasion some former slaves rose into slaveholders’ ranks. Their acceptance was grudging, as they carried the stigma of bondage in their lineage and, in the case of American slavery, color in their skin.[52]

Free blacks were perceived “as a continual symbolic threat to slaveholders, challenging the idea that ‘black’ and ‘slave’ were synonymous.” Free blacks were seen as potential allies of fugitive slaves and “slaveholders bore witness to their fear and loathing of free blacks in no uncertain terms.[53] For free blacks, who had only a precarious hold on freedom, “slave ownership was not simply an economic convenience but indispensable evidence of the free blacks” determination to break with their slave past and their silent acceptance of – if not approval – of slavery.”[54]

Historian James Oakes notes that, “The evidence is overwhelming that the vast majority of black slaveholders were free men who purchased members of their families or who acted out of benevolence.”[55] In the early part of the 19th century, southern states made it increasingly difficult for any slaveholders to free slaves, so often the purchasers of family members were left with no choice but to maintain, on paper, the master-slave relationship. In the 1850s “there were increasing efforts to restrict the right to hold bondsmen on the grounds that slaves should be kept ‘as far as possible under the control of white men only.”[56]

[edit] Historiography of American slavery
Historian Peter Kolchin, writing in 1993, noted that until recently historians of slavery concentrated more on the behavior of slaveholders than to slaves. Part of this is simply the fact that most slaveholders were literate and able to leave behind a written record of their perspective, while most slaves were illiterate and unable to create a written record. There were differences among scholars on whether slavery should be considered a benign or a “harshly exploitive” institution.[57] Kolchin describes the state of historiography in the early 1900s as follows:

During the first half of the twentieth century, a major component of this approach was often simply racism, manifest in the belief that blacks were, at best, imitative of whites. Thus Ulrich B. Phillips, the era's most celebrated and influential expert on slavery, combined a sophisticated portrait of the white planters' life and behavior with crude passing generalizations about the life and behavior of their black slaves.[58]

Historians James Oliver Horton and Louise Horton described Phillips' mindset, methodology and influence:

His portrayal of blacks as passive, inferior people, whose African origins made them uncivilized, seemed to provide historical evidence for the theories of racial inferiority that supported racial segregation. Drawing evidence exclusively from plantation records, letters, southern newspapers, and other sources reflecting the slaveholder's point of view, Phillips depicted slave masters who provided for the welfare of their slaves and contended that true affection existed between master and slave.[59]

This racist attitude concerning slaves carried over into the historiography of the Dunning School of reconstruction history which also dominated in the early 20th century. Writing in 2005, historian Eric Foner states:

Their account of the era rested, as one member of the Dunning school put it, on the assumption of “negro incapacity.” Finding it impossible to believe that blacks could ever be independent actors on the stage of history, with their own aspirations and motivations, Dunning et. Al. portrayed African Americans either as “children”, ignorant dupes manipulated by unscrupulous whites, or as savages, their primal passions unleashed by the end of slavery.[60]

Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, reaching a plateau in the 1950s, the historiography moved away from the “overt” racism of the Phillips era. However historians still emphasized the slave as an object – whereas Phillips presented the slave as the object of benign attention by the masters, historians such as Kenneth Stampp changed the emphasis to the mistreatment and abuse of the slave.[61]

In the culmination of the slave purely as victim, Historian Stanley M. Elkins in his 1959 work “Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life” compared United States slavery to the brutality of the Nazi concentration camps that totally destroyed the will of the slave, creating an “emasculated, docile Sambo” who identified totally with the master. Elkins' thesis immediately was challenged by historians, and gradually it became recognized that in addition to the effects of the master-slave relationship, slaves did not live in a “totally closed environment but rather in one that permitted the emergence of enormous variety and allowed slaves to pursue important relationships with persons other than their master, including those to be found in their families, churches and communities.” Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman in the 1970s, through their work “Time on the Cross”, presented the final attempt to salvage a version of the Sambo theory, picturing slaves as having internalized the Protestant work ethic of their masters.[62] In picturing a more benign picture of slavery, they also argue in their 1974 book that the material conditions under which the slaves lived and worked compared favorably to those of free workers in the agriculture and industry of the time.

In the 1970s and 1980s historians made use of archaeological records, black folklore, and statistical data to describe a much more detailed and nuanced picture of slave life. Relying also on autobiographies of ex-slaves and former slave interviews conducted in the 1930s by the Federal Writers' Project, historians were able to describe slavery as the slaves experienced it. Far from being strictly a victim or the happy slave that plantation owners had created, slaves were seen as being both resilient and autonomous in many of their activities. Despite the efforts at autonomy and their efforts to make a life within slavery, current historians recognize the precariousness of the slave's situation. Slave children quickly learned that they were subject to the direction of both their parents and their owners. They saw their parents disciplined just as they came to realize that they also could be physically or verbally abused by their owners. Historians writing during this era include John Blasingame (“Slave Community”), Eugene Genovese (“Roll, Jordon, Roll”), Leslie Howard Owens (“This Species of Property”), and Herbert Gutman (“The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom”).[63]

1. ^ Grooms, R.M."Dixie's censored subject - Black slaveholders", The Barnes Review via americancivilwar.com, 1997. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
2. ^ Olsen, O.H. " Historians and the extent of slave ownership in the Southern United States.", Civil War History via southernhistory.net, December 2004. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
3. ^ James McPherson, Drawn with the Sword, page 15
4. ^ Horton and Horton pg. 7. The Hortons write, "The slave trade and the products created by slaves' labor, particularly cotton, provided the basis for America's wealth as a nation, underwriting the country's industrial revolution and enabling it to project its power into the rest of the world."
5. ^ "Was slavery the engine of economic growth?", Digital History. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
6. ^ Ronald Segal, The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside Africa (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), ISBN 0-374-11396-3, page 4. "It is now estimated that 11,863,000 slaves were shipped across the Atlantic. [Note in original: Paul E. Lovejoy, "The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the Literature," in Journal of African History 30 (1989), p. 368.] ... It is widely conceded that further revisions are more likely to be upward than downward."
7. ^ Quick guide: The slave trade, BBC, March 15, 2007. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
8. ^ Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and David Eltis, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, Harvard University. Based on "records for 27,233 voyages that set out to obtain slaves for the Americas". Stephen Behrendt, "Transatlantic Slave Trade", Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), ISBN 0-465-00071-1.
9. ^ "The curse of Cromwell", A Short History of Northern Ireland, BBC. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
10. ^ ^{a b} "Slavery in America", Encyclopedia Britannica's Guide to Black History. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
11. ^ Trinkley, M. "Growth of South Carolina's Slave Population", South Carolina Information Highway. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
12. ^ Morison and Commager: Growth of the American Republic, pp. 212-220.
13. ^ Kolchin pg. 96. As early as 1834, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana grew half the nation's cotton, and by 1859, along with Georgia, they grew 78%. By 1859 cotton growth in the Carolinas had fallen to just 10% of the national total. Berlin pg. 166. At the end of the War of 1812 there were less than 300,000 bales of cotton produced nationally. By 1820 this was up to 600,000 and by 1850 the number had reached to 4,000,000 bales.
14. ^ Kolchin pg. 96
15. ^ Berlin pg. 161-162
16. ^ Berlin pg. 168-169. Kolchin pg. 96. Kolchin notes that Fogel and Engerman maintained that 84% of slaves moved with their families but "most other scholars assign far greater weight … to slave sales." Ransome (pg. 582) notes that Fogel and Engermann based their conclusions on the study of some counties in Maryland in the 1830s and attempt to extrapolate that as reflective of the entire South over the entire period.
17. ^ Berlin pg 166-169
18. ^ Kolchin pg. 98
19. ^ Berlin pg. 168-171
20. ^ Berlin pg. 172-173
21. ^ Berlin pg. 174
22. ^ Berlin pg. 175-177
23. ^ Berlin pg. 179-180
24. ^ Stampp, The Peculiar Institution pg. 171
25. ^ Davis pg. 196
26. ^ Genovese (1967)
27. ^ Stampp, Kenneth M. "Interpreting the Slaveholders' World: a Review." Stampp writes, "Genovese writes with verve, and certainly he is never dull. But, in my opinion,his attempt to demonstrate the superiority of the Marxian interpretation of history must be adjudged a failure. Some may explain this by arguing that the book's point of view is not in fact very Marxian. My own explanation is that the antebellum South, with its essentially racial defense of slavery, and with its emphasis on caste rather than class, is just about as unpromising a place for the application of a Marxian interpretation of history as one can imagine."
28. ^ ^{a b c} Weiss, T. "Review of Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, "Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery", Economic History News Services - Book Reviews, November 16, 2001. Book review. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
29. ^ Genovese (1967)
30. ^ Catterall, Helen T., Ed. 1926. Judicial Cases Concerning Slavery and the Negro. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institute, p. 247
31. ^ Sklar, Kathryn. "Women who speak for an Entire Nation". American British Women Compared at the World Anti-slavery Convention, London 1840. The pacific Historical Review, Vol. 59, Wo. 4, Nov. 1990. Pp. 453-499.
32. ^ Richard S. Newman, Transformation of American abolitionism : fighting slavery in the early Republic chapter 1
33. ^ The People's Chronology, 1994 by James Trager
34. ^ de Toqueville pg. 367.
35. ^ Berlin, "Generations of Captivity" pg. 104
36. ^ Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)
37. ^ E. Merton Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (1926) pp 268-70.
38. ^ O'Dell, Larry. "Virginia Apologizes for Role in Slavery", The Washington Post, 2007-02-25. 
39. ^ Jefferson, Thomas. "Like a fire bell in the night" Letter to John Holmes, April 22, 1820. Library of Congress. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
40. ^ Lee, R.E. "Robert E. Lee's opinion regarding slavery", letter to president Franklin Pierce, December 27, 1856. civilwarhome.com. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
41. ^ Beard C.A. and M.R. Beard. 1921. History of the United States. No copyright in the United States, p. 316.
42. ^ Gallay, Alan. (2002) The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670-171. Yale University Press: New York. ISBN 0-300-10193-7.
43. ^ Castillo, E.D. 1998. "Short Overview of California Indian History", California Native American Heritage Commission, 1998. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
44. ^ Beasley, Delilah L. (1918). "Slavery in California," The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 3, No. 1. (Jan.), pp. 33-44.
45. ^ Digital "African American Voices", Digital History. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
46. ^ "Haida Warfare", civilization.ca. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
47. ^ A history of the descendants of the slaves of Cherokee can be found at Sturm, Circe. Blood Politics, Racial Classification, and Cherokee National Identity: The Trials and Tribulations of the Cherokee Freedmen. American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 1/2. (Winter - Spring, 1998), pp. 230-258. In 1835, 7.4% of Cherokee families held slaves. In comparison, nearly one third of white families living in Confederate states owned slaves in 1860. Further analysis of the 1835 Federal Cherokee Census can be found in Mcloughlin, WG. "The Cherokees in Transition: a Statistical Analysis of the Federal Cherokee Census of 1835". Journal of American History, Vol. 64, 3, 1977, p. 678. A discussion on the total number of Slave holding families can be found in Olsen, Otto H. Historians and the extent of slave ownership in the Southern United States. Civil War History, Dec. 2004 (Accessed here June 8, 2007)
48. ^ Duncan, J.W. 1928. "Interesting ante-bellum laws of the Cherokee, now Oklahoma history". Chronicles of Oklahoma 6(2):178-180. Retrieved July 13, 2007.
49. ^ Davis, J. B. 1933. "Slavery in the Cherokee nation". Chronicles of Oklahoma 11(4):1056-1072. Retrieved July 13, 2007.
50. ^ Stampp p. 194. Oakes p.47-48.
51. ^ Franklin and Schweninger pg. 201
52. ^ Berlin, "Generations of Captivity" pg. 9
53. ^ Mason pg. 19-20
54. ^ Berlin, "Generations of Captivity" pg. 138
55. ^ Oakes pg. 47-48
56. ^ Oakes pg. 47-49
57. ^ Kolchin pg. 134
58. ^ Kolchin pg. 134
59. ^ Horton and Horton pg. 9. David and Temin (page 740) add, "The considerable scholarship of Phillips and his followers was devoted to rehabilitating the progressive image of white supremacist society in the antebellum South; it provided a generally sympathetic and sometimes blatantly apologetic portrayal of slaveholders as a paternalistic breed of men."
60. ^ Foner pg. xxii
61. ^ Kolchin pg. 135. David and Temin pg. 741. The latter wrote, “. The vantage point correspondingly shifted from that of the master to that of his slave. The reversal culminated in Kenneth M. Stampp's ‘The Peculiar Institution’ (1956), which rejected both the characterization of blacks as a biologically and culturally inferior, childlike people, and the depiction of the white planters as paternal Cavaliers coping with a vexing social problem that was not of their own making.”
62. ^ Kolchin pg. 136
63. ^ Kolchin pg. 137-143. Horton and Horton pg. 9