The history of slavery in the USA

Historians normally date the start of slavery in the North American colonies to 1619. That year, a Dutch ship carrying African slaves docked at Point Comfort, which served as Jamestown's checkpoint for ships wanting to trade with the colonists. The crew of the Dutch ship was starving, and as John Rolfe noted in a letter to the Virginia Company's treasurer Edwin Sandys, the Dutch traded 20 African slaves for food and supplies. In fact, African slaves may have been present in England's North American colonies earlier than 1619, but Rolfe's letter is the earliest hard evidence of the presence of slaves.

The English settlers who established the Jamestown colony in 1607 did not bring with them any slaves. As they struggled to make a foothold in the new world, however, they began to rely on the help of indentured servants. These were white English who contracted to work under specific conditions for a set number of years in exchange for their passage to America. As labor shortages and the costs of indentured servants increased, the English turned increasingly to slavery, eventually transporting tens of thousands of Africans to the New World each year. The economies of the colonies soon depended on slave labor.

In 1641, Massachusetts became the first colony to legally recognize slavery. Other states, such as Virginia, followed.

The first generation of Africans in the New World tended to be remarkably cosmopolitan. Few of the first generation came directly from Africa. Instead, they arrived from the West Indies and other areas of European settlement. These "Atlantic Creoles" were often multilingual and had Spanish or Portuguese names. They experienced a period of relative racial tolerance and flexibility that lasted until the 1660s. A surprising number of Africans were allowed to own land or even purchase their freedom. But in 1662, Virginia decided all children born in the colony to a slave mother would be enslaved. Slavery was not only a life-long condition; now it could be passed, from generation to generation.

English suppliers responded to the increasing demand for slaves. In 1672, England officially got into the slave trade as the King of England chartered the Royal African Company, encouraging it to expand the British slave trade. In 1698, the English Parliament ruled that any British subject could trade in slaves.

The massive European demand for slaves and the introduction of firearms radically transformed West African society. A growing number of Africans were enslaved for petty debts or minor criminal or religious offenses or following unprovoked raids on unprotected villages. An increasing number of religious wars broke out with the goal of capturing slaves. European weapons made it easier to capture slaves. Some African societies like Benin in southern Nigeria refused to sell slaves. Others, like Dahomey, appear to have specialized in enslavement.

After capture, the captives were bound together at the neck and marched barefoot hundreds of miles to the Atlantic coast. African captives typically suffered death rates of 20 % or more while being marched overland. For every 100 slaves who reached the New World, another 40 had died in Africa or during the Middle Passage.

The “Middle Passage” was the journey of slave trading ships from the west coast of Africa where the slaves were obtained, across the Atlantic, where they were sold. The Middle Passage usually took more than seven weeks. During the voyage, the enslaved Africans were usually fed only once or twice a day and brought on deck for limited times. The death rate on these slave ships was very high, reaching 25% in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and remaining around 10% in the nineteenth century as a result of malnutrition and such diseases as dysentery, measles, scurvy, and smallpox.

In the 17th and 18th centuries three distinctive systems of slavery emerged in the American colonies. In Maryland and Virginia, slavery was widely used in raising tobacco and corn and worked under the "gang" system. In the South Carolina and Georgia low country, slaves raised rice and indigo, worked under the "task" system, and were able to reconstitute African social patterns and maintain a separate Gullah dialect. In the North, slavery was concentrated on Long Island and in southern Rhode Island and New Jersey, where most slaves were engaged in farming and stock raising for the West Indies or were household servants for the urban elite. .

Slavery became a highly profitable system for white plantation owners in the colonial South. As rice boomed, land owners found the need to import more African slaves to clear the swamps where the rice was grown and to cultivate the crop. By 1710, scarcely 15 years after rice came to Carolina, Africans began to out-number Europeans in South Carolina, and slaves began to rebel overtly and violently, as well as covertly. The European settlers, fearing the increasing numbers of blacks, passed law restricting the rights of Africans to meet, travel, earn money, and read.

Georgia, the last free colony, legalized slavery in 1750. That meant slavery was now legal in each of the thirteen British colonies that would soon become the United States.

In 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. The invention of the cotton gin caused a revolution in the production of cotton in the southern United States, and had an enormous impact on the institution of slavery in this country. After the invention of the cotton gin growing and cultivating cotton became a lucrative and less labor-intensive cash crop. This, in turn, led to an increase in the number of slaves and slaveholders, and to the growth of a cotton-based agricultural economy in the South.

The slaves did not always merely accept their fate. Enslaved African Americans resisted slavery in a variety of active and passive ways. "Day-to-day resistance" was the most common form of opposition to slavery. Breaking tools, feigning illness, staging slowdowns, and committing acts of arson and sabotage--all were forms of resistance and expression of slaves' alienation from their masters.

Running away was another form of resistance. Most slaves ran away relatively short distances and were not trying to permanently escape from slavery. Fugitive slaves tried to form runaway communities known as "maroon colonies." Located in swamps, mountains, or frontier regions, some of these communities resisted capture for several decades.

Slave revolts were most likely when slaves outnumbered whites, when masters were absent, during periods of economic distress, and when there was a split within the ruling elite. They were also most common when large numbers of native-born Africans had been brought into an area at one time.

After the American Revolution (1775-83), many colonists (particularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the economy) began to link the oppression of black slaves to their own oppression by the British, and to call for slavery's abolition

All throughout the early part of the 1800s, many people in the north more and more opposed slavery. The desire to abolish slavery became known as the abolition movement which became stronger and stronger, especially in New York, Massachusetts and New England. In the 1830s to the 1860s, a movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength in the northern United States, led by free blacks 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" (1852).

Free blacks and other antislavery northerners had begun helping fugitive slaves 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 and although estimates vary widely, it may have helped anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 slaves 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.

When the former colonies met to draft a new Constitution in 1787, they clashed over the issue of slavery. Congress outlawed further importation of African and Caribbean slaves in 1808, but the interstate slave trade continued to flourish as slaves from the Mid-Atlantic states were sold into the deep south to work the cotton fields. In an effort to maintain the balance of free and slave states, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 banned slavery north of the southern boundary of Missouri.

In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act essentially repealed the Missouri Compromise, opening up the slavery issue to popular vote. The result of this was widespread efforts to affect the vote by fraud and/or violence. After this, there was little chance that anything short of war would stop the institution of slavery. The abolitionist John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 aroused sectional tensions even further: Executed for his crimes, Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists and a vile murderer in the South.

Slavery in the United States was essentially ended by the Civil War - a vast and destructive war with far-reaching consequences between the U.S. government (supported by the non-slave holding northern and western states) and a confederacy of rebellious southern states (which fought to preserve slavery).

In the midst of the war, in 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the Confederate States (though not those in the Union). At war's end, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution finally abolished slavery in the United States.

During the Reconstruction period (1865-77) former slaves received the rights of citizenship and the "equal protection" of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment (1868) and the right to vote in the 15th (1870). Reconstruction's end saw an anti-Black backlash and the rise of organized terror by the enemies of African Americans. In 1865, the Ku Klux Klan (a violent, anti-Black organization) was formed to force Blacks to give up their new rights (e.g. voting) and live in a state of fear, oppression and submission. The Klan worked with corrupt public officials and for decades was very successful in certain places in reversing Black post slavery gains.

After reconstruction and even for decades after World War I African Americans experienced a period of great discrimination and hardship. During this time southern states passed laws that prohibited Blacks from voting and instituted segregation in all areas of life.

Between 1900 and 1920 many African Americans moved from the south to northern cities, a population movement called "The Great Migration". Not only did they move to the north, they moved especially to the cities.

Several hundred thousand Blacks served in the World War I (1914-1917). After coming home from the war, they were bitterly disappointed to find out that despite having fought and died for the country they were still subject to the racism and discrimination they faced before they left. The World War II led to a demand for integration in the military forces and finally in July, 1948 President Truman issued an executive order officially integrating the military services. The war also produced benefits like the G.I. Bill which helped pay for soldiers (including Blacks) to go to college and other benefits helped ex-soldiers buy homes. After the war the pace of integration and Black progress quickened.

The civil rights period (1954 to the 1970s) started as a movement for integration and became a total liberation and identity movement. Using non-violent techniques, Martin Luther King, its most important leader, led the civil rights movement in the south and though later martyred, he became the major figure in the struggle for equality all over the world. In the 1960s the US Congress passed the voting and civil rights acts and other legislation which insured Black civil rights. Assumptions of inferiority were challenged and for the first time in American history it became illegal (at least publicly) to discriminate against Blacks.

Since the Civil Rights Movement, African-Americans have improved their social-economic standing significantly and in recent decades the African-American middle class has grown rapidly. The problem with discrimination still has a very strong effect on lives of black Americans in the society. Many black people face problems like chronic poverty, marital stress, out-of-wedlock births, health problems, low educational attainment, and high crime rates. In various interviews on the internet, black Americans still say that racial discrimination is a problem in the American society.

The story of African Americans has involved much difficulty and struggle but yet much overcoming, endurance and accomplishment. Africans and their descendents have helped to build America in many ways: work, culture, inventions, military service, social reforms, politics, art, music, sports and cooking are a few examples. Their many contributions - though never adequately recognized or given credit - made America successful, rich and powerful.

I. Answer the following questions:

1. What year is considered to be the starting point in the history of slavery in the USA?

2. Why did the English turn to slavery?

3. What was the first colony to legalize slavery?

4. What happened in 1662?

5. What happened to Africans after they were captured?

6. What was the “Middle Passage”?

7. What systems of slavery existed in the American colonies?

8. Who invented the cotton gin? When was it? How did the cotton gin affect the

institution of slavery?

9. How did slaves resist slavery?

10. Why was slavery more important in the South than in the North?