Slavery in the United States

[Mr Uncle Leroy]

Ledger of sale of 118 slaves, Charleston, South Carolina, c. 1754

Slavery in the United States for this article refers to the legal institution that existed in the United States of America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Slavery had been practiced in British North America from early colonial days, and was firmly established by the time of the United States' Declaration of Independence in 1776. After this, there was a gradual spread of abolitionism in the North, while the rapid expansion of the cotton industry from 1800 caused the South to identify strongly with slavery, and attempt to extend it into the new Western territories. Thus slavery polarized the nation into slave states and free states along the Mason-Dixon Line, which separated Maryland (slave) and Pennsylvania (free).

Although the international slave trade was prohibited from 1808, internal slave-trading continued apace, and the slave population would eventually peak at four million before abolition.[1][2] Of all 1,515,605 free families in the fifteen slave states in 1860, nearly 400,000 held slaves (roughly one in four, or 25%),[3] amounting to 8% of all American families.[4] By the time of the United States founding, even though some free persons of color were present, the status of slave was largely limited almost entirely to Africans and those of African decent, creating a system and legacy in which race played an influential role.

As the West opened up, the regions believed they needed to keep a balance between the numbers of slave and free states, in order to maintain a balance of power in Congress. The new territories acquired from Britain, France and Mexico were the subject of major political compromises. By 1850, the newly rich cotton-growing South was threatening to secede from the Union, and tensions continued to rise. With church ministers under pressure to preach the relevant policies, the Baptist and Methodist churches split into regional organizations. When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election on a ticket of no new slave states, the South finally broke away to form the Confederacy. This marked the start of the Civil War, which caused a huge disruption of Southern life, with many slaves either escaping or being liberated by the Union armies. The war effectively ended slavery, before the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (December 1865) formally outlawed the institution throughout the United States.

Destination of African Slaves (1519–1867)[1]
DestinationPercentage
Portuguese America38.5%
British America (minus North America)18.4%
Spanish Empire17.5%
French Americas13.6%
British North America6.5%
English Americas3.3%
Dutch West Indies2.0%
Danish West Indies0.3%


Slaves imported to American colonies[6]
DateNumbers
1620–170021,000
1701–1760189,000
1761–177063,000
1771–179056,000
1791–180079,000
1801–1810124,000[7]
1810–186551,000
Total597,000

Slaves processing tobacco in 17th-century Virginia

 

[Mr Uncle Leroy]

In 1735, the Georgia Trustees enacted a law to prohibit slavery in the new colony, which had been established in 1733 to enable the "worthy poor" as well as persecuted European Protestants to have a new start. Slavery was then legal in the other twelve English colonies, and neighboring South Carolina had become particularly dedicated to mass enslavement of an African labor force. The Georgia Trustees wanted to eliminate the risk of slave rebellions and make Georgia better able to defend against attacks from the Spanish to the south, who offered freedom to escaped slaves. James Edward Oglethorpe was the driving force behind the colony, and the only trustee to reside in Georgia. He opposed slavery on moral grounds as well as for pragmatic reasons, and vigorously defended the ban on slavery against fierce opposition from Carolina slave merchants and land speculators.[11][12][13]

The Protestant Scottish highlanders who settled what is now Darien, Georgia added a moral anti-slavery argument, which was rare at the time, in their 1739 "Petition of the Inhabitants of New Inverness".[14] By 1750 Georgia authorized slavery in the state because they had been unable to secure enough indentured servants as laborers, since economic conditions in England began to improve in the first half of the 18th century.

During most of the British colonial period, slavery existed in all the colonies. People enslaved in the North typically worked as house servants, artisans, laborers and craftsmen, with the greater number in cities. The South depended on an agricultural economy, and it had a significantly higher number and proportion of slaves in the population, as its commodity crops were labor intensive.[15] Early on, slaves in the South worked primarily in agriculture, on farms and plantations growingindigo, rice, and tobacco; cotton became a major crop after the 1790s. The invention of the cotton gin enabled the cultivation of short-staple cotton in a wide variety of areas, leading to the development of the Deep South as cotton country. Tobacco was very labor intensive, as was rice cultivation.[16] In South Carolina in 1720, about 65% of the population consisted of slaves.[17] Planters (defined by historians as those who held 20 slaves or more) used slaves to cultivate commodity crops. They also worked in the artisanal trades on large plantations and in many southern cities. Backwoods subsistence farmers, the later wave of settlers in the 18th century who settled along the Appalachian Mountains and backcountry, 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 theBritish Privy Council. Rhode Island forbade the import of slaves in 1774. All of the colonies except Georgia had banned or limited the African slave trade by 1786; Georgia did so in 1798. Some of these laws were later repealed.[18]

 

[Mr Uncle Leroy]

Northern abolition
During and after the American Revolutionary War, between 1777 and 1804, anti-slavery laws or constitutions were passed in every state north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon Line. By 1810, 75 percent of all African Americans in the North were free. By 1840, virtually all African Americans in the North were free.[30] Vermont's 1777 constitution made no allowance for slavery. In Massachusetts, slavery was successfully challenged in court in 1783 in a freedom suit by Quock Walker as being in contradiction to the state's new constitution of 1780 providing for equality of men. Freed slaves were subject to racial segregation in the North, and it took decades for some states to extend the franchise to them.[31]

Most northern states passed legislation for gradual abolition. As a result of this gradualist approach, New York did not free its last slaves until 1829, Rhode Island had five slaves still listed in the 1840 census, Pennsylvania's last slaves were freed in 1847, Connecticut did not completely abolish slavery until 1848, and slavery was not completely lifted in New Hampshire and New Jersey until the nationwide emancipation in 1865.[32]

The principal organized bodies to advocate these reforms in the north were the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and the New York Manumission Society. The emancipation of slaves in the North led to the growth in the population of northern free blacks, from several hundreds in the 1770s to nearly 50,000 by 1810.[33]

Through the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 under the Congress of the Confederation, slavery was prohibited in the territories northwest of the Ohio River (Existing slaves in the Territory were not freed for years, although they could no longer be sold). That was a compromise, as Thomas Jefferson's original proposal in 1784 to end slavery in all the territories lost in Congress by one vote. The territories south of the Ohio River (and Missouri) had authorized slavery.[34] Yankees and Northerners predominated in the westward movement into the Midwestern territory after the American Revolution; as the states were organized, they voted to prohibit slavery in their constitutions when they achieved statehood: Ohio in 1803, Indiana in 1816, and Illinois in 1818. What developed into a Northern block of free states united into one contiguous geographic area that generally shared an anti-slavery culture. The exceptions were areas along the Ohio River settled by Southerners, for instance, the southern portions of states such as Indiana, Ohio and Illinois, leading those areas generally to share in Southern culture and positions.

Post-revolution Southern manumissions
Although Virginia, Maryland and Delaware were slave states, their legislatures made manumission easier following the Revolution. Quaker and Methodist ministers particularly urged slaveholders to free their slaves. The number and proportion of freed slaves in these states rose dramatically until 1810. More than half of the number of free blacks in the United States were concentrated in the Upper South. The proportion of free blacks among the black population in the Upper South rose from less than one percent in 1792 to more than 10 percent by 1810.[28] In Delaware, nearly 75 percent of blacks were free by 1810.[35]

In the US as a whole, by 1810 the number of free blacks reached 186,446, or 13.5 percent of all blacks.[30] After that period, few were freed, as the development of cotton plantations featuring short-staple cotton in the Deep South drove up the internal demand for slaves in the domestic slave trade.[36]

Internal slave trade and forced migration


Movement of slaves between 1790 and 1860
The growing demand for cotton led many plantation owners further west in search of suitable land. In addition, invention of the cotton gin in 1793 enabled more economic processing of short-staple cotton, which could readily be grown in the uplands. The invention revolutionized the cotton industry by increasing fifty-fold the quantity of cotton that could be processed in a day. The mechanization could efficiently handle short-staple cotton, which could be grown in more places than the long-staple cotton of the Low Country. Results were the explosive growth of cotton cultivation throughout theDeep South and greatly increased demand for slave labor to support it.[37] Manumissions decreased dramatically in the South.[38] At the end of theWar of 1812, fewer than 300,000 bales of cotton were produced nationally. By 1820 the amount of cotton produced had increased to 600,000 bales, and by 1850 it had reached 4,000,000.

By 1815, the internal slave trade had become a major economic activity in the United States; it lasted until the 1860s.[39] Between 1830 and 1840 nearly 250,000 slaves were taken across state lines.[39] In the 1850s over 193,000 were transported, and historians estimate nearly one million in total took part in the forced migration of this new Middle Passage. By 1860 the slave population in the United States had reached 4 million.[39] As the internal slave trade became a dominant feature of American slavery, individuals lost their connection to families and clans. Added to the earlier settlers' previous glossing over of origins and combining slaves from different tribes, many ethnic Africans lost all knowledge of varying tribal origins in Africa, as most had families who had been in the United States for many generations.[39]

This boom in agricultural economies in the Deep South resulted in a large westward and southward forced migration of slaves. Historians have estimated that one million slaves were moved westward and southward between 1790 and 1860. Most of the slaves originated in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, where changes in agriculture decreased demand for slaves. Before 1810, primary destinations were Kentucky and Tennessee, but after 1810 Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas received the most slaves.[40] Kentucky and Tennessee became exporting states.

 

[Mr Uncle Leroy]

Treatment
Main article: Treatment of slaves in the United States


Gordon, a whipped Mississippi slave, photo taken at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863; the guilty overseer was fired.[53]
The treatment of slaves in the United States varied widely depending on conditions, times and places. Treatment was generally characterized by brutality, degradation, and inhumanity. Whippings, executions, and rapes were commonplace.[citation needed] According to Adalberto Aguirre, there were 1,161 slaves executed in the U.S. between the 1790s and 1850s.[54] Exceptions existed to virtually every generalization; for instance, there were slaves who employed white workers, slave doctors who treated upper-class white patients, and slaves who rented out their labor.[55] After 1820, in response to the inability to import new slaves from Africa, some slaveholders improved the living conditions of their slaves, to influence them not to attempt escape.[56]

The colonies and states generally denied slaves the opportunity to learn to read or write, to protect against their forming aspirations that could lead to escape or rebellion.[57] Some slaves learned from planters' children, or from free laborers, while working alongside them.

Medical care for slaves, which was limited in terms of medical knowledge available to anyone, was generally provided by other slaves or by slaveholders' family members. Many slaves possessed medical skills needed to tend to each other, and used many folk remedies brought from Africa. They also developed new remedies based on American plants and herbs.[58]

Some states prohibited religious gatherings of slaves, particularly following incidents such as Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831. Planters feared that group meetings would facilitate communication and may lead to rebellion.[59]

According to Andrew Fede, "...a master could be held criminally liable only if the slave he killed was completely submissive and under the master's absolute control."[60] For example, in 1791 the North Carolina legislature defined the willful killing of a slave as criminal murder, unless done in resisting or under moderate correction.[61]

Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, and imprisonment. Punishment was most often meted in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was carried out simply to re-assert the dominance of the master or overseer over the slave.[62]Treatment was usually harsher on large plantations, which were often managed by overseers and owned by absentee slaveholders; in contrast with small slave-owning families, where the closer relationship between the owners and slaves sometimes resulted in a more humane environment.[63] William Wells Brown, who escaped and became a fugitive slave, reported that on one plantation, slave-men were required to pick 80 pounds-per-day of cotton, while women were required to pick 70 pounds; if any slave failed in his or her quota, they were given lashes of the whip for each pound they were short. The whipping post stood right next to the cotton scales.[64]

Historian Lawrence M. Friedman wrote: "Ten Southern codes made it a crime to mistreat a slave. ... Under the Louisiana Civil Code of 1825 (art. 192), if a master was “convicted of cruel treatment,” the judge could order the sale of the mistreated slave, presumably to a better master."[65]

Because of the power relationships of the institution, slave women in the United States were at high risk for rape and sexual abuse.[66][67] Many slaves fought back against sexual attacks, and some died resisting. Others carried psychological and physical scars from the attacks.[68] Sexual abuse of slaves was partially rooted in a patriarchal Southern culture which treated black women as property or chattel.[67] Southern culture strongly policed against sexual relations between white women and black men on the purported grounds of racial purity but, before the late 18th century, the many mixed-race slaves and slave children showed that white men had often taken advantage of slave women.[67] Wealthy planter widowers, notably such as John Wayles and his son-in-law Thomas Jefferson, took slave women as concubines; each had six children with his partner: Elizabeth Hemings and her daughter Sally Hemings (the half-sister of Jefferson's late wife), respectively. Both Mary Chesnut and Fanny Kemble, wives of planters, wrote about this issue in the antebellum South in the decades before the Civil War. Sometimes planters used mixed-race slaves as house servants or favored artisans because they were their children or other relatives.[69]

 

[Mr Uncle Leroy]

Slave codes
Main article: Slave codes
To help regulate the relationship between slave and owner, including legal support for keeping the slave as property, slave codes were established. Slave codes were laws established to demonstrate legal sanctions over the black population.

While each state had its own slave code, many concepts were shared throughout the slave states.[71] According to the slave codes, teaching a slave to read or write was illegal, although it often took place as children taught each other.

Even though slave codes had many common features, each state had specific codes or variations that suited the laws in that region. For example in Alabama, slaves were not allowed to leave from the premises of the owner without written consent, nor were slaves allowed to trade goods among themselves. In Virginia, slaves were not permitted to drink in public within one mile of his master or during public gatherings. In Ohio, an emancipated slave was prohibited from returning to the state in which he or she had been enslaved. Slaves were not permitted to carry firearms in any of the slave states.

The code for the District of Columbia defined a slave as "a human being, who is by law deprived of his or her liberty for life, and is the property of another."[72]