SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES

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Introduction

Slavery was a fundamental social and economic institution during America's formative centuries and remains an underlying factor in the country's social, economic, and cultural history. That American slavery was based on race—only persons of African descent were enslaved—means that the institution was all-important in setting the course of American race relations. One cannot understand America—American culture in general and African American culture in particular—in its present form without understanding how slavery influenced American life before 1865 and then cast a long shadow over all American people in the 135 years since its abolition.[1]

The Atlantic Context

Slavery did not begin with the seventeenth-century American colonists but goes back to antiquity. The legal status of chattel slavery (men and women as someone's property) dates to before 2000 bc; in Mesopotamia. Trading of slaves, and warfare associated with capturing prisoners to be used as slaves, existed within most slave societies. When Europeans developed sugar plantations in the eastern Mediterranean in the thirteenth century, planters there bought humans from wherever they were available—Slavic Russia (hence the term slave), the Levant, or black Africa; when sugar production expanded to islands off Africa's Atlantic coast in the fifteenth century, slaves came from nearby African societies; and when plantation agriculture caught on in the New World late in the sixteenth century, European planters continued to seek bonded laborers who would work best for the most reasonable price. For reasons including immunities to a variety of diseases and difficulties in capturing and holding local peoples, those native to the Americas did not fit this bill. But Africans did. By the seventeenth century, a transatlantic slave trade was supplying Africans to plantations in Brazil and the West Indies. Men and women of African descent were the primary agricultural laborers of a vast and growing, staple-producing, Atlantic economic system. It was in this context that English adventurers settled along the James River in Virginia in 1607, looking for ways to turn a profit. [2] It is not surprising that they tried agriculture—at first growing tobacco rather than sugar—nor that English settlers purchased slaves from Africa just a dozen years following their arrival. Others along the Atlantic side of the New World were doing the same thing.

Slavery's Origins on the British North American Mainland

Slavery began at different times and for different reasons in the various regions of the British North American mainland. Around the Chesapeake Bay, in Virginia and Maryland, tobacco planters worked European laborers beside bonded Africans through the difficult first half of the seventeenth century. Some of the earliest Africans (men and women already familiar with European ways through ties in Africa to a greater Atlantic culture) found means in the British Chesapeake region to gain their freedom, acquire land, and start down the same path toward opportunity that most servants sought. But for the Africans, the path closed off quickly. As colonial demands for labor heightened and European sources of workers tailed off late in the seventeenth century, planters bought more and ...