Slavery in the colonial history of the United States facts for kids
Slavery in the colonial history of the United States, from 1526 to 1776, was a complex system. It grew because European colonies needed many workers, especially for large farms called plantations. These plantations grew crops like sugar in the Caribbean and South America. Countries like Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Dutch Republic ran these plantations.
Ships in the Atlantic slave trade brought people from Africa to the Americas to be enslaved. Native Americans were also enslaved in the North American colonies, but less often. Enslaving Native Americans mostly stopped by the late 1700s. However, it continued in the Southern states until President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Sometimes, people were enslaved as a punishment for crimes.
In the colonies, if an enslaved woman had a child, that child was also born enslaved. This was true no matter who the father was. This rule was called partus sequitur ventrem. By the time of the American Revolution, European powers had made chattel slavery (where enslaved people were treated as property) common for Africans and their descendants across the Americas, including the future United States.
Contents
Native Americans and Slavery
Native Americans enslaved people from their own tribes or other tribes. This usually happened after battles or raids, both before and after Europeans arrived. This continued into the 1800s. Sometimes, Native American families adopted captives, especially young women or children, to replace family members they had lost. Slavery was not always passed down from parents to children.
Enslaved people included those captured in wars, those traded from other tribes, children sold by their parents during hard times, and even people who gambled themselves into servitude.
Spanish explorers visited the Carolinas between 1514 and 1525 and enslaved Native Americans, taking them to Santo Domingo. A Spanish colony started in 1526 in the Carolinas and Georgia. Its rules said Native Americans should be treated well and paid. But it also allowed buying and exporting Native Americans who were already enslaved by other Native Americans. This colony did not last long.
Native Americans were also enslaved by the Spanish in Florida under a system called encomienda. In New England and the Carolinas, Native Americans were captured in wars and given out as slaves.
Some early European explorers and colonists were also captured and enslaved by Native Americans.
Historians like Alan Gallay point out that Native American enslavement of war captives was different from the European slave trade. The European system was a new kind of trade, focused on buying and selling people as property.
For example, in Virginia in the 1670s, Nathaniel Bacon and his men were allowed to enslave Native Americans they captured in war. Laws were later passed that grouped Native Americans with other non-Christian servants (like African slaves) as slaves for life.
Puritan New England, Virginia, Spanish Florida, and the Carolina colonies enslaved many Native Americans. They often used Native American groups to fight wars and capture slaves for them. In New England, slave raids happened during the Pequot War and King Philip's War. In the Carolinas, the slave trade was the largest among the British colonies in North America. It's estimated that between 24,000 and 51,000 Native Americans were exported from South Carolina.
Historian Ulrich Phillips suggests that Africans were seen as better workers for the New World because Native American slaves knew the land well and could escape easily. Africans were also more familiar with growing crops like indigo and rice. These crops often brought disease-carrying mosquitoes, and Africans were less likely to get sick from diseases like malaria than Native Americans.
First Enslaved Africans Arrive
The Carolinas
The first African slaves in what is now the United States arrived on August 9, 1526, in Winyah Bay with a Spanish expedition. Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón brought 600 colonists, including enslaved Africans, to start a colony. This colony later moved to what is now Georgia.
Until the early 1700s, it was hard to get enslaved Africans in the British mainland colonies. Most were sold to the West Indies for the demanding sugar trade. The large sugar farms and high death rates there meant that more and more slaves were always needed.
One of the first big centers for African slavery in the English North American colonies was Charles Town and the Province of Carolina, founded in 1670. This colony was started mainly by sugar farmers from Barbados. They brought many African slaves from that island to start new farms in the Carolinas.
To get enough farm workers, colonists also enslaved Native Americans for a while. The Carolinians changed the Native American slave trade by treating these slaves as goods to be sold, mostly to the West Indies. Historian Alan Gallay estimates that between 1670 and 1715, about 24,000 to 51,000 captive Native Americans were sent from South Carolina to the Caribbean. This was more than the number of Africans brought to the English mainland colonies during the same time.
Georgia
The first African slaves in what is now Georgia arrived in mid-September 1526 with Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón's colony of San Miguel de Gualdape. They rebelled and lived with local Native Americans, causing the colony to fail in less than two months.
Two centuries later, Georgia was the last of the Thirteen Colonies to be founded. It was the furthest south. Georgia's founders did not oppose slavery, but they wanted to use workers from Britain. They were also worried about safety because Spanish Florida was nearby. Spain often offered freedom to enslaved people who escaped from enemy colonies if they joined their militia.
Even with arguments for slavery, it was not allowed until the Spanish were defeated by Georgia colonists in the 1740s. To get workers for rice farms, Georgia's leaders finally allowed African slavery in 1751. Slavery quickly grew. After Georgia became a royal colony, it began importing slaves directly from Africa in the 1760s.
Florida
An African slave named Estevanico arrived in Tampa Bay, Florida, in April 1528 with the Narváez expedition. He traveled north with them.
African slaves arrived again in Florida in 1539 with Hernando de Soto and in 1565 when St. Augustine, Florida was founded. When St. Augustine was founded, there were already enslaved Native Americans there.
The Spanish settlement was small, and they had relatively few slaves. The Spanish promised freedom to enslaved people who escaped from the English colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. If these enslaved people became Catholic and agreed to serve in the Spanish army, they could become Spanish citizens. By 1730, a Black settlement called Fort Mose grew near St. Augustine. It was later made stronger with defenses. The men from Fort Mose helped defend St. Augustine against the British. Fort Mose is known as the only free Black town in the southern United States that a European government supported.
In 1763, Great Britain took over Florida from Spain. Spain moved its citizens, including the people of Fort Mose, to Cuba. As Britain developed Florida for plantation farming, the number of enslaved people grew. In twenty years, the percentage of enslaved people in the population rose from 18% to almost 65% by 1783.
Texas and the Southwest
An African slave named Estevanico reached Galveston island in November 1528. He was with the remaining members of the Narváez expedition from Florida. They were captured by Native Americans and held until 1535.
Spanish Texas had few African slaves, but many Native Americans were enslaved. Starting in 1803, Spain freed enslaved people who escaped from the Louisiana territory, which the United States had recently bought. More African slaves were brought to Texas by American settlers.
Virginia and Chesapeake Bay
The first Africans recorded in Virginia arrived in late August 1619. The ship The White Lion docked at Old Point Comfort with about 20 Africans. They had been captured from the area of present-day Angola and taken from a Portuguese slave ship. The Jamestown colony traded supplies for these Africans. Some of these individuals may have been treated like indentured servants at first, as slave laws were not passed until later (1641 in Massachusetts and 1661 in Virginia). However, from the beginning, most were treated as slaves, with "African" or "negro" becoming the same as "slave." Virginia passed laws about runaway slaves in 1672.
Some early Africans in the colony gained freedom by finishing a work contract or by becoming Christian. At least one, Anthony Johnson, later owned slaves or indentured servants himself. Historians say this shows that racial attitudes were more flexible in early 17th-century Virginia than they would become later. A 1625 count showed 23 Africans in Virginia. By 1690, there were 950. During this time, the legal differences between white indentured servants and "Negros" grew. Africans and people of African descent became lifelong and inherited chattel slaves.
New England
In 1677, a book called The Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians described how Native American prisoners of war were enslaved and sent to the Caribbean after Metacom's War. Captured Native American enemies, including women and children, were also sold into slavery for profit and sent to the West Indies.
African and Native American slaves were a smaller part of the New England economy. This economy was based on small farms and trades, not large plantations. Most enslaved people were house servants, but some worked on farms. The Puritans made slavery legal in 1641. The Massachusetts Bay royal colony passed the Massachusetts Body of Liberties. This law allowed slavery in three cases: if people were captured in war, if they sold themselves into slavery, or if they were sentenced to slavery by the government. The law used the word "strangers" for people bought and sold as slaves, meaning they were not native English subjects. Colonists began to use this term for Native Americans and Africans.
In 1714, the New Hampshire Assembly passed "An Act To Prevent Disorders In The Night." This law said that "No Indian, Negro, or Molatto is to be from Home after 9 o'clock." This was an early example of rules that would later become "sundown towns."
New York and New Jersey
The Dutch West India Company brought slavery to New Amsterdam (now New York City) in 1625. They brought eleven enslaved Black people to work as farmers, fur traders, and builders. The Dutch colony grew across the North River (Hudson River) to Bergen (in today's New Jersey). Later, settlers also privately owned slaves. Even though they were enslaved, Africans had some basic rights. Families were usually kept together. They could join the Dutch Reformed Church, marry, and have their children baptized. Enslaved people could speak in court, sign legal papers, and sue white people. Some could work extra hours and earn the same wages as white workers. When the English took over the colony in the 1660s, the company freed all its slaves. This created an early group of free Negros in the area.
The English continued to import more slaves. Enslaved Africans did many different jobs, both skilled and unskilled. Most worked in the growing port city and nearby farming areas. In 1703, more than 42% of New York City's homes had slaves. This was a higher percentage than in Boston and Philadelphia, and second only to Charleston in the South.
Midwest, Mississippi River, and Louisiana
The French made slavery legal in their colonies in New France, near the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. They also used slave labor on their Caribbean islands like Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue. After the port of New Orleans was founded in 1718, French colonists brought more African slaves to the Illinois Country to work on farms or in mines. By the mid-1700s, enslaved people made up about one-third of the small population in that rural area.
Slavery was much more widespread in lower colonial Louisiana. There, the French developed sugar cane plantations along the Mississippi River. Slavery continued under both French (1699–1763, and 1800–1803) and Spanish (1763–1800) rule. The first people enslaved by the French were Native Americans, but they could easily escape into the countryside they knew well. Starting in the early 1700s, the French brought Africans to work in the colony. Many colonists and Africans died, so new workers had to be brought in regularly.
In 1724, Louis XIV of France's Code Noir was put into effect in colonial Louisiana. This law controlled the slave trade and slavery in the French colonies. Because of this, Louisiana and the Mobile, Alabama areas developed different patterns of slavery compared to the British colonies.
The Code Noir gave some rights to enslaved people, like the right to marry. While it allowed harsh physical punishment under certain conditions, it forbade owners from torturing slaves, separating married couples, or separating young children from their mothers. It also required owners to teach slaves the Catholic faith.
The Code Noir banned marriages between different races. However, relationships between white men and African or African-American women happened from the earliest years in La Louisiane. In New Orleans society, a formal system called plaçage developed. These relationships often involved contracts that sometimes gave freedom to the woman and her children (if she was still enslaved). They also sometimes provided education for the mixed-race children and property settlements. Free people of color became a middle social group between whites and enslaved Black people. Many worked as skilled craftspeople, and some gained education and property.
In the English colonies, slavery gradually became a system based on race. It included all people of African descent, even those of mixed race. From 1662, Virginia decided a child's social status based on the mother's status. So, children born to enslaved mothers were considered slaves, no matter who their father was. Children born to free mothers were free. This was different from English law, where a child's status usually followed the father's. This rule removed any responsibility from white fathers for their children born to enslaved women.
Slave Rebellions
Slave rebellions in the colonies before 1776 (or 1801 for Louisiana) include:
- San Miguel de Gualdape (1526)
- Gloucester County, Virginia Revolt (1663)
- New York Slave Revolt of 1712
- Samba Rebellion (1731)
- Stono Rebellion (1739)
- New York Slave Insurrection of 1741
- 1791 Mina conspiracy
- Pointe Coupée conspiracy (1794)
16th and 17th Centuries
While the British knew about Spanish and Portuguese slave trading, they did not use slave labor in the Americas until the 1600s.
In 1607, England started its first permanent colony in North America at Jamestown. Tobacco became the main crop there. Growing tobacco needed many workers. British plantation owners in North America and the Caribbean needed a workforce for their cash crop farms. At first, they used indentured servants from Britain. Later, they switched to Native American and West African slave labor. During this time, the English also started colonies in Barbados (1624) and Jamaica (1655). These Caribbean colonies became rich by growing sugar cane, which was in high demand in Europe. They were also early centers of the slave trade for the growing English colonial empire.
At first, indentured servants were used for labor. These servants worked for up to seven years in exchange for their trip to Jamestown, food, housing, clothes, and job training. After their service, they received money, clothes, tools, or land and became regular settlers. However, colonists found indentured servants too expensive. Many died, so new workers were always needed. Also, as England's economy improved, fewer people wanted to become indentured servants in the harsh colonies.
Slavery Grows in the 17th Century
Laws about slavery became stricter in the second half of the 1600s. The future for Africans and their descendants became much harder. By 1640, Virginia courts had sentenced at least one Black servant, John Punch, to slavery for life. In 1656, Elizabeth Key won a lawsuit for her freedom. She argued that her father was a free Englishman, she was Christian, and he had set up a limited work contract for her.
After her case, in 1662, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law. This law, called partus, said that any child born in the colony would have the same status as its mother, whether enslaved or free. This changed an old English law where a child's status followed the father's. It meant white fathers had no responsibility for their children born to enslaved women.
In the late 1600s, the British economy improved, and fewer British indentured servants came to the colonies. Also, Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 made plantation owners worry about many poor white men (former indentured servants) who had no land. Rich Virginia and Maryland planters started buying slaves instead of indentured servants in the 1660s and 1670s. Poorer planters followed around 1700. Slaves cost more than servants, so at first, only the wealthy could afford them.
The first British colonists in Carolina brought African slavery to the colony in 1670, the year it was founded. Charleston eventually became the busiest slave port in North America. Slavery spread from the South Carolina Lowcountry to Georgia, then across the Deep South. Enslaved people outnumbered free white people in South Carolina from the early 1700s until the Civil War. A strict political system developed to prevent slave rebellions and justify white slave ownership. In the North, slaves usually lived in towns, not on plantations. They worked as craftspeople, sailors, and house servants.
In 1672, King Charles II restarted the Royal African Company. This company had a monopoly on the African slave trade for England. Then, in 1698, the English parliament opened the trade to all English subjects. The slave trade to the mid-Atlantic colonies grew a lot in the 1680s. By 1710, the African population in Virginia had grown to 23,100 (42% of the total). Maryland had 8,000 Africans (23% of the total). In the early 1700s, England became the world's leading slave trader, passing Spain and Portugal.
The North American royal colonies not only imported Africans but also captured Native Americans and forced them into slavery. Many Native Americans were shipped as slaves to the Caribbean. Many enslaved people from the British colonies escaped by going south to the Spanish colony of Florida. There, they were given freedom if they promised loyalty to the King of Spain and became Catholic. In 1739, Fort Mose was built by African-American freedmen. It became a northern defense post for St. Augustine. Fort Mose became a safe place for escaped slaves from the English colonies to the north. It is seen as an early part of the Underground Railroad.
Chattel slavery developed in British North America before all the laws supporting it were in place. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, harsh new slave codes limited the rights of African slaves and made it harder for them to gain freedom. The first full slave code in British North America was South Carolina's (1696). It was based on the colonial Barbados slave code of 1661. It was updated often throughout the 1700s.
A 1691 Virginia law stopped slave owners from freeing slaves unless they paid for the freed people to leave Virginia. Virginia made interracial marriage a crime in 1691. Later laws took away free Black people's rights to vote, hold office, and carry weapons. Virginia's House of Burgesses set up the main legal rules for slavery in 1705.
Atlantic Slave Trade to North America
Of all the enslaved Africans brought to the New World, only about 5–7% ended up in British North America. Most enslaved people transported across the Atlantic Ocean were sent to the Caribbean sugar colonies, Brazil, or Spanish America. In the Americas, especially the Caribbean, tropical diseases caused many deaths. This meant many new enslaved people were always needed. Many Africans had some natural protection against yellow fever and malaria. However, poor food, bad housing, not enough clothes, and too much work led to high death rates.
In British North America, the enslaved population grew quickly because of births. This was not the case in the Caribbean colonies. Not enough food and poor health were possible reasons. Of the few babies born to enslaved people in the Caribbean, only about 1/4 survived the terrible conditions on sugar plantations.
Not only major European powers like France, England, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands were involved in the slave trade. Other countries, like Sweden and Denmark, also took part, but on a much smaller scale.
Indentured Servitude
Some historians suggest that indentured servitude provided a model for slavery in the 17th-century colonies. Indentured servants were usually teenagers in England whose fathers sold their labor for a set time (usually four to seven years). In return, they received free travel to the colonies, food, housing, clothes, and job training. After their service, they received money, clothes, tools, or land and became regular settlers.
The Quaker Petition Against Slavery
In 1688, four German Quakers in Germantown, a town near Philadelphia, wrote a petition against the use of slaves. They presented it to their local Quaker Meeting. The Meeting agreed with the idea but could not decide what to do. The petition was passed up to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, where it was also not acted upon. It was then put away and forgotten for 150 years.
This Quaker petition was the first public American document to protest slavery. It was also one of the first public statements about universal human rights. Even though the petition was forgotten for a time, the idea that everyone has equal rights was often discussed in Philadelphia Quaker society throughout the 1700s.
18th Century
During the Great Awakening in the late 1700s, Methodist and Baptist preachers traveled in the South. They tried to convince plantation owners to free their slaves, saying that everyone was equal in God's eyes. They also welcomed enslaved people as members and preachers in new churches. The first Black churches (all Baptist) in what became the United States were founded by enslaved and free Black people. These were in Aiken County, South Carolina, in 1773; Petersburg, Virginia, in 1774; and Savannah, Georgia, in 1778, before the end of the Revolutionary War.
Slavery was officially recognized as a serious wrong in 1776 by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. This group had been against slavery since the 1750s.
Beginning of the Anti-Slavery Movement
African and African-American slaves showed their opposition to slavery through armed uprisings like the Stono Rebellion (1739) in South Carolina. More often, they resisted by working slowly, breaking tools, and running away, either for short times or permanently. Until the time of the American Revolution, almost no white American colonists spoke out against slavery. Even the Quakers generally accepted slaveholding until the mid-1700s, though they later became strong opponents of slavery during the Revolutionary era. During the Great Awakening, Baptist and Methodist preachers in the South first urged owners to free their slaves. In the 1800s, they more often urged better treatment of slaves.
Later Events
After the American Revolution, the northern states all ended slavery. New Jersey was the last to do so in 1804. Some of these states passed the first laws to end slavery in the entire New World. In states with gradual abolition laws, children born to enslaved mothers had to work for a long time into adulthood.
By 1808, all states (except South Carolina) had banned the international buying or selling of slaves. In 1807, Congress also banned the international slave trade. However, the trade of enslaved people within the South continued. This brought great wealth to the South, especially to New Orleans.
On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This freed slaves in areas that were rebelling during the American Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and forced labor, was approved in December 1865.
|
