1. To discuss the African origins of slavery in the British colonies.
2. To examine the process by which slavery became a political institution in the "New World."
3. To discuss the characteristics of slavery as it developed in the American colonies.

Goal #1: To discuss the African origins of slavery in the British colonies

All too often, studies of American slavery fail to examine the life which the Africans were forced to leave behind. Therefore, we will begin our analysis of slavery by asking two questions:

• From where did the slaves originate?
• What type of culture and lifestyle did the African leave behind when he or she was forced into slavery?

From where did the slaves originate? As the above map of "Negroland" indicates, slaves were kidnapped mainly from western Africa, or what many have called The Slave Coast - the coastal areas of present-day Togo, Benin (formerly Dahomey) and western Nigeria. In the pre-colonial time this was one of the most densely populated parts of the African continent. It became one of the most important export centers for the Atlantic slave trade from the early 16th century to the 19th century.

As the map below indicates, between 1650-1860, as many of 15 million Africans were kidnapped and forced into slavery. While the vast majority were transported to South and Central America and the West Indies, about a half million came to North America. You can see that most slaves were kidnapped from southwest Africa, where they lived largely in tropical rainforests, or areas that had no geographical similarities to where they were transported in North America.

What kind of culture and lifestyle did the Africans leave behind after being forced into slavery?

• On the coast and interior of West Africa, about 100 million people lived in hundred of individual tribal nations.
• Most nations were feudal societies based upon agriculture. African farmers were skilled and some were familiar with iron tools.
• While slavery existed within African nations, it initially was comprised of prisoners of war - not on profit or racism.
• Individual tribes shared communal lands and there was little understanding of private property. Communal lands were cultivated for communal needs - not for profit.
• Large urban centers existed - especially in the northern parts of Africa - and these had well established businesses and trade routes.
• As this map indicates, sub-Saharan Africa was rich with vast and powerful empires long before the Europeans arrived. One of the biggest empires, Ethiopia, was actually and perhaps uniquely successful in resisting European imperialism.) The Songhai Empire, at its peak in the 14th century, was a global center of culture and learning, based in the still-famous mosques of Timbuktu. The map spans two thousands years from 500 B.C. to 1500 A.D., so these empires were not concurrent; some existed centuries apart.
• African nations had stable and well-defined concepts of law and order, although rivalry existed among nations.
• Muslims comprised 10-15% of all slaves brought to the "New World."
  • By the time Europeans began trading in African slaves, Islam as a religion and culture was well established in West Africa. After it was initially brought to the region by Arab merchants, Africans began to spread it throughout the northern part of the continent. It gained a particularly strong foothold in the Gold Coast, Senegal, and Dahomey, what is now the Congo and Angola.
  • Islamic scholars taught men as well as women, boys and girls, and peasants to read and write, so the literacy rate was much higher than in Europe. Thus, it is likely that many Muslims sold as slaves were literate. We know this because they left behind their Korans, letters, and journals.
  • Muslims who were sent to America faced a harsh Christian world entirely hostile to their faith. Practicing a religion other than Christianity in the colonies was forbidden, so it was difficult for a slave to maintain his or her Islamic faith in captivity. It was especially difficult to uphold the five Pillars of Islam. Evidence does exist, however, that slaves in North America, and especially in South America, tried to upheld the first four pillars.
  • This struggle has been documented by Alex Haley in Roots and we are clearly able to witness the difficulty with which Kunta Kinte tries to keep the Islamic faith alive in his family. It is especially difficult as he marries a woman who was born in America, who never experienced freedom, and is a Christian. This is one of the greatest barriers to maintaining the Muslim faith.

As we begin our analysis of slavery in America, it is important to emphasize that we know a great deal about the evolution of African slavery in American society because slaves were property and as such, records were kept on everything that was owned.

• And what is the single identifying social, political, and economic indicator of success in all the colonies? Property.
• Thus, property in slaves was highly documented from the time slaves were captured and through their transportation to America. Documentation continued from their sale and through their entire lives on the plantations where they lived.

• 1400s   The Portuguese began enslaving West Africans
• 1502    The slave trade to "New World" officially began when slaves were introduced to the Caribbean with permission from Spain.
• 1540     About 10,000 African slaves were exported annually into the West Indies.
• 1619     Slavery arrived in North America when the first Africans - 20 men from West Africa - involuntarily arrived in Jamestown on a Dutch frigate. About one million African slaves  had already arrived in South America.
• 1637    The first American slave ship sailed for Africa in search of slaves.
• 1660s  The black population of the Caribbean islands outnumbered the white population.
• 1661     Virginia became the first colony to legalize slavery. Within 42 years after the involuntary arrival of Africans in North America, slavery had become an American institution - an established and accepted, as well as legal, practice in society.
• 1672     Charles II chartered the Royal African Company; between 1672 and 1731, the RAC dominated the world slave market.
• 1800     Between 10-15 million Africans had forcibly arrived in the Americas - about one-third of the original number who had been kidnapped from their homes.  Of these, about 6% - or about 650,000 - actually came to North America.
• 1807     The British Parliament oulawed slavery - although in practice, slavery had been nonexistent in Britain for 200 years.
• 1808     The U.S. abolished slave trading, but the system of slavery remained legal.
• 1810    The 1.1 million slaves in the US constituted almost twice the total number of Africans imported from Africa during the preceding two centuries.
• 1860     The almost 4 million slaves in the US constituted six times the number of slaves the nation had imported.
• 1865     The U.S. abolished slavery after passing the Thirteenth Amendment.
  

... Julius Lester, To Be a Slave, 1968: pg. 76

1. The roots of institutionalized slavery were economic.  Initially, it was the economic need for slaves that led to the institutionalization of slavery - not the social need to enslave the inferior.
   • By mid-1600s, the southern colonists realized that to make their crops marketable and profitable, they needed a regular supply of laborers who could be profitably obtained in large quantities.
   • Enslavement gradually was seen as the perfect solution to their economic problems. Africans could satisfy their need for a cheap, reliable, profitable, and regular labor source.
   • Because of the southern reliance on single crop economy - which was possible because of the weather, climate, and geography - slavery spread quickly in the south. This map demonstrates the geographical dimensions of slavery according to the second U.S. census.

   

   • Slave trading was also a major component of North American colonial economics. The goal became to cram as many slaves as possible into as small a space as possible to make the largest profits as possible.
   • Once they landed in North America, slaves were auctioned off at corporate headquarters up and down the east coast. The slave auction was one of the first of many of the inhumane events that the kidnapped Africans were subjected to upon arrival. You can see this in this episode from Roots.
2. The system of slavery was legitimized through four rationales: racial, economic, legal, and religious.
   • The racial rationale originated from the feelings of racism the colonists brought to the English colonies - blacks were considered racially and culturally inferior to the white race.  If they were enslaved, the rationale continued, blacks would be culturally and spiritually uplifted through the humanizing influences of Western society and Christianity
   • The economic rationale was based upon four beliefs that favored black slaves above slaves of any other race or ethnicity:
     • Blacks, because of their color, could be easily apprehended;
     • Blacks could be purchased outright, thus guaranteeing a stable, permanent and inexhaustible supply of labor; 
     • Blacks originating in a foreign land could be immediately subjected to more rigid discipline that would guarantee the plantation’s long-term labor stability; and
     • Black slaves were relatively cheap - the initial outlay was large, but it was a long-term, life-time  investment that required few economic outlays throughout a slave’s life.
   • The legal rationale was created to legally define the status and and treatment of slaves.  Slaves were legally restricted to the black race and defined as property, not humans.  Thus, the slave’s racial and property status ensured that he or she would have no legal rights.  The rationale was enforced by the legal standard of treatment enacted in colonial slave codes  that bound slaves to obey their masters and respect all whites.  These codes ensured that
     • No slave could leave the plantation without written permission of  master.
     • Slaves found guilty of conspiracy, murder or rape would be hanged and their masters compensated by the colony.
     • Slaves who robbed a house or store would receive 60 lashes and be placed in the pillory where his ears were severed from his head.
     • Slaves would be whipped, maimed, or branded for petty offenses.
   • The religious rationale was created to convince whites and blacks alike that God sanctioned slavery.  Slaves were told in their churches that God wished them to be obedient to their masters and to do otherwise was sinful. For instance, Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl recalls the following text of a Sunday sermon given to the slaves in Edenton, North Carolina:

"Hearken, ye servants!  Give strict heed unto my words.  You are rebellious sinners.  Your hearts are filled with all manner of evil. 'Tis the devil who tempts you.  God is angry with you, and will surely punish you, if you don’t forsake your wicked ways.  Instead of serving your masters faithfully, which is pleasing in the sight of your heavenly Master, you are idle, and shirk your work.  God sees you.  You tell lies.  God hears you.  Instead of being engaged in worshipping him, you are hidden away somewhere, feasting on your master’s substance; tossing coffee-grounds with some wicked fortuneteller, or cutting cards with another old hag.  Your masters may not find you out, but God sees you, and will punish you.  O, the depravity of your hearts!  When your master's work is done, are you quietly together, thinking of the goodness of God to such sinful creatures?  No, you are quarrelling, and tying up little bags of roots to bury under the door-steps to poison each other with.*  God sees you.  You men steal away to every grog shop to sell your master’s corn, that you may buy rum to drink.  God sees you.  You sneak into the back streets, or among the bushes, to pitch coppers.  Although your masters may not find you out, God sees you; and he will punish you.  You must forsake your sinful ways, and be faithful servants.  Obey your old master and your young master - your old mistress and your young mistress.  If you disobey your earthly master, you offend your heavenly Master.  You must obey God’s commandments.  When you go from here, don’t stop at the corners of the streets to talk, but go directly home, and let your master and mistress see that you have come.”

*  The minister is preaching against the established African American cultural practices of using coffee for divination, cards for conjuring, and making balls filled with roots for both divination and conjuring.  This was part of the Kongo civilization which was kept alive and well by many slaves in America. 

3. Slavery was not just a regional problem in the south; rather, it was a national problem that shaped the lives of all colonial residents, northerners and southerners, rich and poor, black and white alike. Furthermore, most of the slave traders landed their ships in the New England and Middle Colonies, as well as auctioned them off in both regions - as can be seen in the poster below, advertising the arrival of slaves to be auctioned in the 1780s.

• Most Northern slaves usually worked in small groups as farmhands, servants, craftsmen, and general laborers. What was different about slavery in the north, was that slaves did not live in concentrated surroundings like the plantations of the south nor was the northern economy dependent upon slavery.
• In NY in 1790, about one in five white households in New York City owned slaves; three-quarters of these households contained only one or two slaves each. In the few large landholding plantations in NY, the populations rarely exceeded 20 slaves. At no time in colonial NY did the entire slave population exceed 20% of the total.
• However, especially in the north where more free blacks lived, as well as a significant number of white servants and some slaves - the fear of a combined class uprising of white and black laborers was very real.

4. Slavery affected all of the colonies by nurturing the growth of several major social divisions that affected all of colonial America. These divisions, explained below, provide a clear message that American society was divided -  racially between the white, black, and red peoples of North America;  socially between the more privileged and less privileged of white and black society; and economically between rich and poor. There were at least four social divisions:

• Between the small percentage of wealthy plantation owners who owned the vast majority of the slaves, and the large percentage of Southern whites who owned very little land and few, if any, slaves.
  • By 1860, only 2.7% of southern slave holders owned more than 50 slaves and only 0.1% owned 200 or more.  These 2.8% of whites owned one quarter of all the slaves in the South.
  • Another quarter of all slaves lived on plantations with between 1-9 slaves, and half on plantations with between 10-49 slaves.
• Among black slaves accorded hierarchical positions at the plantations.
• Between all whites and all blacks.
• Among the discontented classes of Americans - white and black alike.  As Zinn reminds us in People's History of the United States , “Only one fear was greater than the fear of black rebellion in the new American colonies.  That was the fear that discontented whites would join black slaves to overthrow the existing order.”  (p. 37). 
  • In Ronald Takaki’s analysis of slavery in America, he finds white and black laborers in Virginia “occupied a common social space - a terrain of racial liminality that had not yet developed rigid caste lines.  White and black, they shared a condition of class exploitation and abuse: they were all unfree laborers.”  (A Different Mirror, Takaki, 55.) 
  • In Virginia, by the early 1660s, a discontented class existed of white and black indentured servants, slaves, and landless freemen - what the planter elite called “a giddy multitude.” 
  • Thus, the Virginia legislature -  followed by others - took  measures to deal with such fear, especially the legislative proclaimation that white men were superior to black; and offered white lower class members benefits previously denied to them which made them economically superior to lower class whites.  Dividing and conquering.

5. Slaves resisted slavery, both by means of active plots and rebellions, abolition support, enlisting with the North during the Civil War, as well as passive resistance to the day-to-day toil of slavery. Slaves in the Americas rebelled against their masters from the very beginning of the institution. As early as the summer of 1526, 500 Spaniards and 100 black slaves founded a town near the mouth of the Pee Dee River in what is now South Carolina. By November, the slaves rebelled, killed some of their masters, and escaped to join the local Indians. The 150 Spaniards who survived fled to Haiti without any slaves. Thus, the first non-Native settlers in the United States were blacks - blacks who rebelled against slavery from the very first. Following are the types of resistance regularly witnessed in North America.

• Plots, rebellions, and riots.  Historian Richard Maxwell Brown found from 1663-1866, 45 significant actual or aborted slave revolts, plots, or uprisings.
  • Winthrop Jordan’s (1993) study of diaries, census data, and plantation records from Adams County, Mississippi at the beginning of the Civil War uncovered a slave conspiracy to organize a large-scale revolt.  After the plot was uncovered, slaves were hanged and another 40 arrested and beaten.
  • Herbert Aptheker chronicled about 250 incidents where at least 10 slaves joined in a revolt or a conspiracy. 
• Individual resistance.  Paul Blassingame (1972:107) argued that resistance was not limited to planned or aborted uprisings.  Indeed, “hundreds of slaves...ran away from their masters, assaulted, robbed, poisoned and murdered whites, burned their master’s dwellings,” and “hundreds more fought whites in self defense.”  Zinn argues that individual resistance began in Africa, and was also common in the Spanish Caribbean colonies prior to English colonization.
• Guerrilla war.  Brown and others provided evidence of "Maroon bands" of runaway slaves who conducted “a guerrilla war against their erstwhile white masters.” Herbert Aptheker found that between 1672 and 1864,  at least 50 maroon communities existed in the United States, primarily in the forested, mountainous, and swampy regions of South Carolina, Northern Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. 
• Abolition efforts.  Ripley, et. al. (1993) wrote 5 volumes that include documents selected from thousands of newspaper and manuscript collections from the United States, Great Britain, and Canada that illustrate the efforts of black persons - both free and slaves - to abolish slavery and fight racism.  
• Enlistment in the Civil War.  Berlin, et. al. (1993) documented the enlistment and military service of almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors, most of whom were former slaves.

6. Despite the physical and emotional brutality of slavery, many slaves retained their African ways, some of their African and Muslim traditions and family names, and their human dignity. As Historian Gary Nash has written:

"Though slaves were kept in bondage, slaves were far from passive.  They were not stripped of their identities; they were rarely emotionally attached to their masters; they seldom forgot their African culture.  Instead, they were locked into a dynamic relationship with their owners in which, despite the grotesquely uneven distribution of power, they demonstrated extraordinary ingenuity in setting limits on the master’s ability to coerce them.  However brutal the power held over them, slaves were actively and continuously involved in carving out psychological “space” for themselves.  Survival was their immediate goal, but freedom was their ultimate hope...Slaveowners could not obliterate slave family life without threatening the efficient and profitable management of the plantation.  Often they encouraged slaves to live together and take up the role of parents, for masters found that slaves were more dutiful and productive when tied to spouses and offspring.  If not concerned about the morality of their slaves, they were interested in maximizing the output of labor and minimizing insubordination.  Also, slaves themselves refused to give up the right to family association.  Though strictly confined within “the peculiar institution,” they still managed to forge affective ties.  Overcoming formidable obstacles, slaves fashioned intimate bonds between man and woman, parent and child." (Nash, 1979)

7. Slavery not only oppressed whites and enslaved blacks, it also endangered the rights and liberties of American citizens.

• By 1790, slaves comprised 35% of the entire southern population. By 1800, the institution of slavery completely dominated Southern life. White masters socialized young black children to become slaves and, at the same time, socialized white boys and girls to become masters and mistresses. The psychological effects were enormous.
• One of the primary psychological influences of slavery, then, was fear - fear within the black population of their master, as well as fear within white society of an enlarged, enslaved, and unempowered black population. Eaton’s (1940) analysis of primary documents found that slaveholders had a "pathological fear of their slaves," were haunted by images of "the black terror," and lived in melodramatic and phobic fear of "imagined insurrectionists."
• Frances A. Kemble, the wife of a Georgia planter, wrote that slaves were "a threatening source of constant insecurity" and that "every southern woman lived in terror of her slaves." A Louisiana slaveholder wrote of tense times "when there was not a single planter who had a calm night's rest" and when every master went to bed with a gun at his side.(As quoted in Takaki, p. 114)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/US_Slave_Free_1789-1861.gif

Conclusions
“The Enslaved - The Origins of Slavery”

1. It was an economic need that led to the institutionalization and legalization of slavery, not the social need to enslave the inferior.
2. Enough good will and shared experiences existed between white and black servants in colonial America to make masters fearful of a united resistance.
3. By the end of the 1600s, colonial society was racially divided between the white, black, and red peoples of North America and socially divided between the privileged and less privileged of white and black society.  In some cases, such divisions were the result of a divide and conquer mentality deliberately designed by white, Protestant elites to maintain their economic, social, and political empowerment.
4. Slavery was not just a regional problem confined to the southern colonies.  Rather, slavery was first a colonial problem and then a national problem  that shaped the lives of all residents, northerners and southerners,  black and white alike.
   • Its economic and political effect were greater upon southern whites and blacks because slavery was directly tied to the economy, which was not the case in the north.
   • Its social effects, directed by the racial justification for enslavement, were equally as influenced throughout all the colonies.
5. The vast majority of slaves were discontented with their lives under slavery.  However, despite the cruelties of the system, many slaves were able to retain a great deal of their African identity and culture as well as preserve their basic human rights. Slave families showed a “stubborn resistance” to the pressures of family and cultural disintegration.
6. While actual slave revolts were rare, the fear of such rebellion was constant among white slave owners.  Ironically, the institution of slavery also enslaved the white owners.
7. Resistance was a regular byproduct of the institution of slavery - running away, not working too hard, collective strikes, and rebellion.  Slaves were not contented with their situation and most, when given an opportunity, resisted in any way they could.

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