Slavery in the U.S.
Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of human chattel enslavement of Africans and people of African descent. Slavery had been practiced in British America from early colonial days, and was legal in all Thirteen Colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It lasted in some states until its abolition through the American Civil War (1861–1865). As an economic system, slavery was largely replaced by sharecropping.
By the time of the American Revolution (1775–1783), the status of slave had been institutionalized as a racial caste associated with African ancestry. When the United States Constitution was ratified (1789), a relatively small number of ”free people of color” were among the voting citizens, which consisted only of male property owners.
During and immediately following the Revolutionary War, abolitionist laws were passed in most Northern states and a movement developed to abolish slavery. Most of these states had a higher proportion of free labor than in the South and economies based on different industries. They abolished slavery by the end of the 18th century, some with gradual systems that kept adults as slaves for two decades. However, the rapid expansion of the cotton industry in the Deep South after the invention of the cotton gin greatly increased demand for slave labor, and the Southern states continued as slave societies. Those states attempted to extend slavery into the new Western territories to keep their share of political power in the nation; Southern leaders also wanted to annex Cuba to be used as a slave territory.
The United States became polarized over the issue of slavery, represented by the slave and free states, in effect divided by the Mason–Dixon line which delineated (free) Pennsylvania from (slave) Maryland and Delaware.
Congress, during the Jefferson administration, prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans, which became effective in 1808, although smuggling (illegal importing) via Spanish Florida was not unusual.
Domestic slave trading, however, continued at a rapid pace, driven by labor demands from the development of cotton plantations in the Deep South. More than one million slaves were sold from the Upper South, which had a surplus of labor, and taken to the Deep South in a forced migration, splitting up many families. New communities of African-American culture were developed in the Deep South, and the total slave population in the South eventually reached 4 million before liberation.
As the West was developed for settlement, the Southern state governments wanted to keep a balance between the number of slave and free states to maintain a political 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.
Many white Southern Christians, including church ministers, attempted to justify their support for slavery as modified by Christian paternalism. The largest denominations—the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches, split over the slavery issue into regional organizations of the North and South. When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election on a platform of halting the expansion of slavery, seven states broke away to form the Confederacy. The first six states to secede held the greatest number of slaves in the South. Shortly after, the Civil War began when Confederate forces attacked the US Army’s Fort Sumter. Four additional slave states then seceded.
Due to Union measures such as the Confiscation Acts and Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the war effectively ended slavery, even before ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 formally ended the legal institution throughout the United States.
“A Necessary Evil”
In the 19th century, proponents of slavery often defended the institution as a “necessary evil.” White people of that time feared that emancipation of enslaved Black people would have more harmful social and economic consequences than the continuation of slavery. In 1820, Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, 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.”
The French writer and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, in his influential Democracy in America (1835), expressed opposition to slavery while observing its effects on American society. He felt that a multiracial society without slavery was untenable, as he believed that racism and prejudice against Blacks increased as they were granted more rights, which is what had happened in the northern states. He believed that the attitudes of white Southerners, and the concentration of the Black population in the South, were bringing the white and Black populations to a state of equilibrium, and were a danger to both races. Because of the racial differences between master and slave, he believed that the latter could not be emancipated.
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.”
“A Positive Good”
However, as the abolitionist movement’s agitation increased and the area developed for plantations expanded, apologies for slavery became more faint in the South. Leaders then described slavery as 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.”
Other Southern writers, like James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh, presented several arguments to defend the act of slavery in the South. Hammond, like Calhoun, believed that slavery was needed to build the rest of society. In a speech to the Senate on March 4, 1858, Hammond developed his “Mudsill Theory,” defending his view on slavery stating, “Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill.” Hammond believed that in every class one group must accomplish all the menial duties, because without them the leaders in society could not progress. He argued that the hired laborers of the North were slaves too: “The difference… is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment,” while those in the North had to search for employment.
George Fitzhugh used assumptions about white superiority to justify slavery, writing that, “the Negro is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child.” In The Universal Law of Slavery, Fitzhugh argues that slavery provides everything necessary for life and that the slave is unable to survive in a free world because he is lazy, and cannot compete with the intelligent European white race. He states that “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and in some sense, the freest people in the world.” Without the South, “He (slave) would become an insu
fferable burden to society” and “Society has the right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery.”
Agitation against Slavery
Throughout the first half of the 19th century, abolitionism, a movement to end slavery, grew in strength; most abolitionist societies and supporters were in the North. They worked to raise awareness about the evils of slavery, and to build support for abolition.
This struggle took place amid strong support for slavery among white Southerners, who profited greatly from the system of enslaved labor. But slavery was entwined with the national economy; for instance, the banking, shipping and manufacturing industries of New York City all had strong economic interests in slavery, as did similar industries in other major port cities in the North. The northern textile mills in New York and New England processed Southern cotton and manufactured clothes to outfit slaves. By 1822 half of New York City’s exports were related to cotton.
Slaveholders began to refer to slavery as the “peculiar institution” to differentiate it from other examples of forced labor. They justified it as less cruel than the free labor of the North.
Henry Clay (1777–1852), one of three founders of the American Colonization Society, intended to relocate free Blacks from the US to Africa, founding Liberia.
The principal organized bodies to advocate abolition and anti-slavery reforms in the north were the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and the New York Manumission Society. Before the 1830s the antislavery groups called for gradual emancipation. By the late 1820s, under the impulse of religious evangelicals, the sense emerged that owning slaves was a sin and the owner had to immediately free himself from this grave sin by emancipation.
Colonization Movement
In the early part of the 19th century, other organizations were founded to take action on the future of Black people in America. Some advocated removing free Black people from the United States to places where they would enjoy greater freedom; some endorsed colonization in Africa, while others advocated emigration.
During the 1820s and 1830s, the American Colonization Society (ACS) was the primary organization to implement the “return” of Black Americans to Africa. The ACS was made up mostly of Quakers and slaveholders, who found uneasy common ground in support of “repatriation.” But, by this time, most Blacks in America were native-born and did not want to emigrate; rather, they wanted full rights in the United States, where their people had lived, died, labored and suffered for generations.
In 1822 the ACS established the colony of Liberia in West Africa. The ACS assisted thousands of free Black people to emigrate there from the United States. Many white people considered this preferable to emancipation in the United States. Henry Clay, one of the founders and a prominent slaveholder politician from Kentucky, said that Blacks, facing unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, could never amalgamate with white people.
After 1830, abolitionist and minister, William Lloyd Garrison promoted emancipation, characterizing slaveholding as a personal sin. He demanded that slave-owners repent and start the process of emancipation. His position increased defensiveness on the part of some southerners, who noted the long history of slavery among many cultures. A few abolitionists, such as John Brown, favored the use of armed force to foment uprisings among the slaves, as he did at Harper’s Ferry. Most abolitionists tried to raise public support to change laws and to challenge slave laws. Abolitionists were active on the lecture circuit in the North, and often featured escaped former enslaved Black people in their presentations. The eloquent Frederick Douglass became an important abolitionist leader after escaping from slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was an international bestseller and aroused popular sentiment against slavery. It also provoked the publication of numerous anti-Tom novels by Southerners in the years before the American Civil War.
After Great Britain and the United States outlawed the international slave trade in 1807, British slave trade suppression activities began in 1808 through diplomatic efforts and formation of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron. From 1819, they were assisted by forces from the United States Navy. With the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, the relationship with Britain was formalized, and the two countries jointly ran the Blockade of Africa with their navies.
Treatment of Slaves in the United States
The treatment of enslaved Black people in the United States varied widely depending on conditions, times and places. The power relationships of slavery corrupted many whites who had authority over slaves, with children showing their own cruelty. Masters and overseers resorted to physical punishments to impose their wills. Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding and imprisonment. Punishment was most often meted out in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was carried out to re-assert the dominance of the master or overseer over the slave. Treatment was usually harsher on large plantations, which were often managed by overseers and owned by absentee slaveholders, conditions permitting abuses.
William Wells Brown, who escaped to freedom, reported that on one plantation, enslaved 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 subject to a flesh-rending lash from a bullwhip for each pound they were short. The whipping post stood next to the cotton scales. A New York man who attended a slave auction in the mid-19th century reported that at least three-quarters of the male slaves he saw at sale had scars on their backs from whipping. By contrast, small slave-owning families sometimes had a more humane environment but that was not a given.
There were 1,161 slaves executed in the U.S. between the 1790s and 1850s. Quick executions of innocent slaves as well as suspects typically followed any attempted slave rebellions, as white militias overreacted with widespread killings that expressed their fears of rebellions, or suspected rebellions.
Although most slaves had lives that were very restricted in terms of their movements and agency, exceptions existed to virtually every generalization; for instance, there were also slaves who were allowed to rent out their labor and enslaved doctors and root-workers who treated upper-class white patients.
Many enslaved Blacks possessed medical skills needed to tend to each other, and used folk remedies brought from Africa. They also developed new remedies based on American plants and herbs.
Because of the power relationships at work, enslaved Black women in the United States were at high risk for rape and sexual abuse. Many Black men suffered rape and sexual abuse as well.
Many enslaved Black people fought back against sexual attacks, and some died resisting. Others carried psychological and physical scars from the attacks.
Southern culture strongly policed against sexual relations between white women and black men on the purported grounds of racial purity but, by the late 18th century, the many mixed-race slaves and slave children showed that white men had often taken advantage of enslaved Black women. Wealthy planter widowers, such as John Wayles and his son-in-law Thomas Jefferson, took enslaved Black 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. As a result of centuries of slavery and such relationships, DNA studies have shown that the vast majority of Black people born in America also have historic European ancestry, generally through paternal lines.
Slave Rebellions
There were few phases of antebellum Southern life and history that were not in some way influenced by the fear of, or the actual outbreak of, “militant concerted slave action.”
Historians in the 20th century identified 250 to 311 slave uprisings in U.
S. and colonial history. These include:
New York Slave Revolt Of 1712 (1712)
Stono Rebellion (1739)
New York Conspiracy Of 1741 (1741)
Gabriel’s Conspiracy (1800)
Igbo Landing Slave Escape (1803)
Chatham Manor Rebellion (1805)
1811 German Coast Uprising, (1811)
George Boxley Rebellion (1815)
Denmark Vesey’s Conspiracy (1822)
Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion (1831)
Black Seminole Slave Rebellion (1835–1838)
Amistad Seizure (1839)
Creole Case (1841)
1842 Slave Revolt In The Cherokee Nation
Canada
The British colonies of Canada were a battleground for the British and American governments during the War of 1812. The treaties following the war sealed a low-level animosity between the Canadian colonies and the new nation of the United States, slowing the migration between the countries and increasing the American expansion to the west. In 1867 the British North American Act took the Province of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia and formed the Dominion of Canada, the first and largest self-governing colony of the British Empire. The majority of Canada was a vast, forested, unexplored wilderness. The great cattle herds of Alberta, the metropolis of Montreal, and the growing wilderness town of Vancouver, were all linked in 1886 with the completion of the transcontinental railway by Canadian Pacific Railway. The opening of rail service, and the grand hotels built along the route, sped up the expansion of the Canadian west.
While the expansion brought more people to the towns and cities along the rail line, it still left great swaths of the country unexplored. Stories of Wendigo, the embodiment of winter, isolation, and cannibalism spread throughout the end of the 1800s. Some claim that Wendigo wander the wildernesses of Canada, preying on hunters, trappers, and explorers of the arctic regions. Others claim that the spirit creatures have been encountered in towns like Vancouver and the newly incorporated city of Winnipeg. Whether the tales of the Wendigo and related stories of Sasquatch are true or just the myths and stories of the local Indians are unknown. Nobody who has gone hunting for either creature has come back with one. Of course, a few expeditions have never come back…
Steamfunkateers Page 21