Slavery in the US

Slavery in the United States

• Europeans enslaved millions of Africans and sent them to work in their colonies.

• European diseases wiped out much of the Native American population, causing colonists to look for a new labor force.

• Slaves in the Americas created distinct cultures.

Slavery in the United States

• Europeans were immune, or had a natural resistance, to diseases common in Europe like measles, smallpox, and typhus.

• Native Americans had no resistance to these diseases, and millions died in the years after the Europeans arrived.

• With a shortage of Native American workers, Spanish and Portuguese plantation owners had to find other sources of cheap labor.

• Slaves from West Africa were brought to America and the African slave trade flourished.

Slavery in the United States

• In 1510 Spanish government legalized the sale of slaves in the colonies.

• Most slaves came from the interior of Africa.

• One out of every six slaves died along the Middle Passage, the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to reach the Americas, because of horrible living conditions.

• Slave trade led to the African Diaspora, as enslaved Africans were sent all across the world.

• Colonial leaders worked to regulate slave treatment and behavior, but treatment of enslaved Africans varied.

Slavery in the United States

• Slaves in the Americas came from diverse backgrounds, but shared many customs and viewpoints.

• They built upon what they had in common to create a new African American culture.

• Family

  • Vital part of slave culture

  • Provided a refuge, a place not fully under the slaveholders’ control

  • Faced many challenges, including being broken apart

Slavery in the United States

• Christianity blended with traditional African elements

• Gave sense of self-worth and hope

• Spirituals were a common form of religious expression.

• Used songs and folktales to tell their stories of hope, sorrow, agony, and joy

• Art and Dance

  • Form of expression

  • Dances were important social events in slave communities.

  • Heavily influenced by African traditions.

Slavery in the United States

• Slaves worked at a variety of jobs on plantations.

• Life under slavery was difficult and dehumanizing.

• Slave culture centered around family, community, and religion.

• Slave uprisings led to stricter slave codes in many states.

Slavery in the United States

• Working in the Field

  • Most field hands worked on the same task at the same time.

  • Slaves worked from sunup to sundown.

  • Men, women, and children older than about 10 did the same tasks.

• Working in the Planter’s Home

  • Slaves worked as butlers, cooks, or nurses in the planters’ homes.

  • These positions had better food, clothing, and shelter but required more hours of work.

Slavery in the United States

• Working at Skilled Jobs

  • Larger plantations sometimes allowed slaves to learn skilled trades.

  • Skilled persons were sometimes permitted to sell their services to other people to earn money.

  • Some skilled slaves were able to buy their freedom.

Slavery in the United States

• Slaveholders viewed slaves as property that they could buy and sell to make a profit.

• Most common method of sale was the auction.

• Buyers might choose to buy one enslaved person but not that person’s family members.

• Traders sometimes kidnapped free African Americas and sold them into slavery.

• Living Conditions

  • Dirt-floor cabins with few furnishings and often, leaky roofs

  • Rough clothing

  • Small food rations

Slavery in the United States

• Punishments could be very severe, including whipping, locking people in stocks, or making them wear iron and chains while working.

• Many states passed slave code to control slaves’ actions

• Slaves feared separate from family more than punishment.

• Enslaved parents passed down heritage through oral histories and folktales.

• Enslaved persons daily rebelled in small ways by

  • working slower

  • running away for days or trying to escape permanently

  • sabotaging equipment

Slavery in the United States

• Violent slave revolts were rare.

• Enslaved persons involved in rebellions could be executed.

• Most violent revolt was Nat Turner’s Rebellion, which occurred in 1831 in Virginia.

  • Nat Turner led a group of slaves who tried to kill all of the slaveholders in their county.

  • They killed about 60 people in the community.

  • More than 100 innocent slaves who were not in Turner’s group were killed.

  • Turner was executed.

  • The state passed stricter slave codes.

Slavery in the United States

• Some Americans opposed slavery before the country was even founded.

• Americans took more organized action supporting abolition, or the complete end to slavery, in the 1830s.

• Abolitionists came from different backgrounds and opposed slavery for various reasons.

• Some believed African Americans should have the same rights as white Americans, while others were opposed to full equality.

• Some wanted to send freed African Americans to Africa to start new colonies.

  • Liberia was founded on the west coast of Africa in 1822.

  • 12,000 African Americans eventually settled in Liberia.

Slavery in the United States

• William Lloyd Garrison published an abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, and helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society.

• Angelina and Sarah Grimké, two white southern women, were activists who wrote antislavery works, including American Slavery As It Is.

• Frederick Douglass escaped slavery and became one of the most important African American leaders of the 1800s.

• Sojourner Truth, another former slave, traveled around the country preaching the truth about slavery and women’s rights. Other African Americans also wrote narratives about their experiences as slaves in order to expose slavery’s cruelties.

Slavery in the United States

• By the 1830s a loosely organized group had begun helping slaves escape from the South.

• Abolitionists created the Underground Railroad– a network of people who arranged transportation and hiding places for fugitives, or escaped slaves.

• Fugitives would travel along routes leading them to northern states or to Canada.

  • They could not be certain of freedom in the free states.

  • U.S. law still considered them property. 

• Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave, led her family and more than 300 slaves to freedom.

Slavery in the United States

• Many white northerners agreed with the South and supported slavery, thinking that ending slavery would take jobs from white workers.

• Congress forbade its members from discussing antislavery petitions.

• Many white southerners saw slavery as vital to the South’s economy and culture.

Slavery in the United States

• Additional land gained after Mexican-American War caused bitter slavery dispute.

• Missouri Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30’.

• During the war, Representative David Wilmot offered the Wilmot Proviso, which would not permit slavery in the new territories.

• Wilmot Proviso was not passed, but it revealed growing sectionalism, or favoring of one region over the entire country.

• During the 1848 presidential campaign, antislavery northerners formed the Free-Soil Party, which supported the Wilmot Proviso.

Slavery in the United States

• California applied to enter the Union. Southerners did not want California to be a free state because it would upset the balance of slave and free states.

• Senator Henry Clay offered Compromise of 1850.

  • California would enter the Union as a free state.

  • The rest of the Mexican Cession would be federal land. The slavery question would be decided by popular sovereignty.

  • Texas would give up land east of the upper Rio Grande. In return, the federal government would pay Texas’s debt from when it was an independent republic.

Slavery in the United States

• Made it a crime to help runaway slaves and allowed officials to arrest runaway slaves in free areas 

• Slaveholders could take suspected fugitives to U.S. commissioners, who decided their fate. Commissioners received more money for returning them to slaveholders.

• Accused fugitives could not testify on their own behalf.

• Enforcement of act immediate

• Thousands of northern African Americans fled to Canada in fear.

• Anthony Burns was fugitive returned to slavery with federal help in 1854.

Slavery in the United States

• Northern abolitionists used stories of fugitive slaves to gain sympathy for their cause.

• Fiction also informed people about the evils of slavery.

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe was an influential antislavery novel published in 1852.

  • More than 2 million copies sold within a decade.

  • Still widely read as source about harsh realities of slavery.