Slavery

The practice of enslaving Africans dates to the fifteenth century. The Portuguese began the practice during exploration of the West African coast. Acquiring slaves from other Africans, the Portuguese took them back to Europe to be employed as servants or laborers.

Labor in the New World

Exploration opened up the New World to European countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Soon colonies were being established. Economic interest in trade created a demand for cheap labor.

New World colonists tried various solutions to the labor shortage. Efforts to enslave Native Americans failed. Native Americans lacked immunity to European diseases. Their ability to organize and rebel against slavery made such efforts impractical.

When England's lower class experienced food and work shortages, many immigrated to the new colonies as indentured servants. They agreed to work for seven years to pay the price of their passage. This system worked for a time, though it had many problems, including that of runaway servants. When the English economy improved at the end of the seventeenth century, fewer people were willing to agree to the arrangement.

African slavery in America

The first African laborers arrived in the American colonies as early as 1619. About twenty Africans were brought to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia . Historians are uncertain of the social status of these men. It is possible they were indentured servants rather than slaves. Their arrival, however, marked the beginning of African servitude in America.

Unlike runaway indentured Europeans who passed themselves off as free, Africans were easily identifiable in the New World. Cutoff from their communities back home, Africans were unable to organize to

defend themselves. Bolstered by the racist notion that the white race was superior to Africans, legislation and court decisions between 1620 and 1670 made African slavery legal in all of the colonies.

By 1700 African slaves were approximately 10 percent of the population throughout British North America. The expansion of colonial agriculture during the eighteenth century intensified the demand for labor. Tobacco , coffee, sugar, and rice were the colonies' chief exports, and all required a strong and dependable workforce. To fill this demand more than five million slaves were forced into slavery in the New World through the eighteenth century.

Antislavery movements began to appear in the late seventeenth century. Pennsylvania Quakers issued a formal denunciation of slavery in 1687. Known as the “Germantown Statement,” it established a model for others who would publicly denounce slavery using pamphlets during the eighteenth century. Abolitionist (antislavery) societies began to form toward the end of that century. The horrors of slavery were publicized through sermons, newspaper articles, pamphlets, and other antislavery literature.

Slave culture

During the antebellum era in the South, slaves developed a highly distinctive culture of their own. By the nineteenth century most American slaves had been born in the United States and had few direct ties to the African countries from which their ancestors were kidnapped. Slave culture was thus shaped within the American plantation system, but African influences were apparent in virtually every aspect of antebellum slave culture, including religion, music, folktales, and social institutions.

Even working fifteen hours a day, slaves still managed to find opportunities for socializing amongst themselves. Field hands in gangs, for example, talked, sang, and courted among themselves. From sundown to sunup, they were left to themselves. Weekend parties and Sunday celebrations, as well as Christmas festivities, provided a sense of community ties. So did some group work activities, such as corn shuckings, in which slaves were able to combine work with play, singing as they shucked the corn and concluding the day with music and dance. African American culture grew especially in those areas of life where masters rarely intruded.

Many slaves practiced the Christian religion, but they also retained remnants of the African religions of their ancestors. Though it was illegal for black preachers to conduct religious services for black people without a white minister present, slaves held their own religious meetings in secret. They prayed together in a blend of African tradition and Christian concepts. Their prayers often broke into song and dance, intermixed with preaching, shouting, and storytelling in a rhythmic call-and response pattern. The person expressing a spiritual experience would call out words and melody, and the rest of the group would answer in a repeated refrain. While many of the words of these songs, called spirituals, came from the Bible, the call-and-response pattern had its roots in Africa. Many slaves found comfort in the Christian idea that their rewards for a hard life would come in the afterlife. Still southern whites correctly feared African American slave religion because it encouraged slaves to think about their human condition and measure the injustices they faced. Some of the biggest slave rebellions were planned by black preachers.

Revolution and slavery

The American Revolution (1775–83) had the potential to end American slavery completely. The fight for natural rights and independence contradicted the colonists' enslavement of African people. This philosophic environment affected the nature of the debate between proslavery colonists and the growing numbers of abolitionists.

While slavery existed in the northern states, the economy there did not depend on it for strength and stability. A constant stream of immigrants fed the need for labor in the North. This economic reality, combined with the growing acceptance that slavery was immoral, led the northern states to change policies. Between 1777 and 1786 all of the northern states provided for either immediate or gradual emancipation of slaves.

Emancipation in the North was a threat to those in the South. Their agricultural economy benefited from the cheap, controlled labor of slavery. To defend the practice, southern thinkers crafted arguments based on race, economic necessity, history, and religion. Proslavery arguments asserted that the institution was a “positive good” that benefited both the slave and the master.

Slavery was an important topic when North and South gathered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1787 to write the Constitution of the United States. Southern states would not approve a constitution that did not protect the institution of slavery. In the end the U.S. Constitution made it illegal for Congress to outlaw the importation of slaves before 1808. It required free states to return escaped slaves to their owners. Finally it counted each slave as three-fifths of a person for calculating a state's population, which determines the number of congress people a state gets in the House of Representatives.

King cotton

In 1793 Eli Whitney (1765–1825) invented the cotton gin . While cotton was a financially attractive crop to grow, it had been labor intensive and difficult to harvest. The cotton gin solved those problems, making cotton farming more profitable. Sprawling plantations of cotton arose, and production continued to rise until it represented 57 percent of all U.S. exports in 1860.

As cotton farming increased throughout the South, so did the need for cheap labor. Even though the importation of slaves was illegal in the United States after 1808, estimates say that at least three hundred thousand African slaves were smuggled into the country. A strong slave trade developed between the states, and many from the northern areas of the nation were sold to southern plantations.

A national debate

As the number of slaves increased in the South, fear of revolts provoked southern legislation restricting the rights of blacks, both free and enslaved. Southern states looked to the federal government to support their policies and to protect their slave “property” throughout all of the states. Southern states also sought to expand slavery into new territories as the country grew westward in the nineteenth century.

Economic and philosophic differences between the North and the South caused passionate debates on these issues. Congress passed compromise legislation and the U.S. Supreme Court decided cases to try to balance the rights of the northern and southern states.

The human rights of slaves got no protection in this national political dance. In one of its most famous decisions, the Supreme Court decided that a slave was property instead of a citizen. Southern slavers celebrated the result. Abolitionists condemned it. Drawing language from the Declaration of Independence , the abolitionists argued that slavery could not exist in a truly free society founded on the natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Emancipation

The differences between northern and southern states erupted in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln (1809 –1865; served 1861–65) as president. Fears arose in the South that Lincoln's administration would abolish slavery throughout the nation. In early 1861 before Lincoln took office, several southern states announced they were leaving the Union . They formed the Confederate States of America , which fought a civil war against the United States from 1861 to 1865.

Halfway through the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation . Although it was an important step in the path to freedom for African Americans, it was also a military tactic. Lincoln used it to declare freedom for slaves in the rebelling states but not for slaves in border states that remained with the Union, such as Delaware and Maryland .

In January 1865 Congress proposed a constitutional amendment to outlaw slavery forever in the whole country. Northern victory in the American Civil War cleared the political path for adoption of the amendment. By December the amendment had been approved by twenty-seven of the thirty-six states, officially making it the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. All of the states that existed at the time eventually ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, Mississippi most recently, in 1995.