Learn About Slavery

Beginning at least as early as 1502, European slave traders shipped approximately 11 to 16

million slaves to the Americas, including 500,000 to what is now the United States. By the
beginning of the eighteenth century, slaves could be found in every area colonized by
Europeans. Initially, English colonists relied on indentured white servants, but by the late
seventeenth century, faced with a shortage of servants, they increasingly resorted to enslaved
Africans.
Three distinctive systems of slavery emerged in the American colonies. In Maryland and
Virginia, slavery was widely used in raising tobacco and corn and worked under the "gang"
system. In the South Carolina and Georgia low country, slaves raised rice and indigo, worked
under the "task" system, and were able to reconstitute African social patterns and maintain a
separate Gullah dialect. In the North, slavery was concentrated on Long Island and in southern
Rhode Island and New Jersey, where most slaves were engaged in farming and stock raising
for the West Indies or were household servants for the urban elite.
The American Revolution had contradictory consequences for slavery. Thousands of slaves
freed themselves by running away. In the South, slavery became more firmly entrenched, and
expanded rapidly into the Old Southwest after the development of the cotton gin. In the North, in
contrast, every state freed slaves by statute, court decision, or enactment of gradual
emancipation schemes.
During the decades before the Civil War, slave grown cotton accounted for over half the value of
all United States exports, and provided virtually all the cotton used in the northern textile
industry and 70 percent of the cotton used in British mills. The slave
South failed to establish commercial, financial, or manufacturing
companies on the same scale as the North.

Slavery dates to prehistoric times and could be found in ancient Babylon, classical Greece and
Rome, China, India, and Africa as well as in the New World. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison,
and George Washington were slaveholders. So, too, were Benjamin Franklin and the theologian
Jonathan Edwards. John Newton, the composer of "Amazing Grace," captained a slave ship
early in his life. Robinson Crusoe, the fictional character in Daniel Defoe's famous novel, was
engaged in the slave trade when he was shipwrecked.
Slavery has often been treated as a marginal aspect of history, confined to courses on southern
or African American history. In fact, slavery played a crucial role in the making of the modern
world. Slavery provided the labor force for the Slavery played an indispensable role in the
settlement and development of the New World.
In the decades before the Civil War, a third of the South's population labored as slaves.
Enslaved African Americans performed all kinds of work, but slavery mainly meant backbreaking
field work. Deprivation and physical hardship were the hallmark of life under slavery. Slave sales
frequently broke up slave families. Nevertheless, enslaved African Americans were able-through their families, religion, and cultural traditions--to sustain an autonomous culture and

community beyond the direct control of their masters. In addition, slaves

resisted slavery through insurrection and a variety of indirect protests
against slavery.
American Slavery As It Is
Digital History ID 284

Date:1839
Document:
I. Food
We begin with the food of the slaves, because if they are ill treated in this respect we may be
sure that they will be ill treated in other respects, and generally in a greater degree. For a man
habitually to stint his dependents in their food, is the extreme of meanness and cruelty, and the
greatest evidence he can give of utter indifference to their comfort....
Hon. Robert Turnbull, a slaveholder of Charleston, South Carolina: "The subsistence of the
slaves consists, from March until August, of corn ground into grits, or meal, made into what is
called hominy, or baked into corn bread. The other six months they are fed upon the sweet
potato. Meat, when given, is only by way of indulgence or favor...."
The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, May 30, 1788: "A single peck of corn a week, or
the like measure of rice, is the ordinary quantity of provision for a hard-working slave; to which a
small quantity of meat is occasionally, though rarely, added...."
"The common allowance of food in the penitentiaries, is equivalent to one pound of meat, one
pound of bread, and one pound of vegetables per day. It varies a little from this in some of them,
but it is generally equivalent to it." First Report of the American Prison Discipline Society....
II. Labor.
Philemon Bliss, Esq., a lawyer of Elyria, Ohio, who lived in Florida in 1834 and 1835. "During
the cotton-picking season they usually labor in the field during the whole of the daylight, and
then spend a good part of the night in ginning and baling. The labor required is very frequently
excessive, and speedily impairs the constitution."
Mr. Cornelius Johnson, of Farmington, Ohio, who lived in Mississippi a part of 1837 and 1838.
"It is the common rule for the slaves to be kept at work fifteen hours of the day, and in the time
of picking cotton a certain number of pounds is required of each. If this amount is not brought in
at night, the slave is whipped, and the number of pounds lacking is added to the next day's
job.....
III. Clothing.
Wm. Ladd, Esq. of Minot, Maine, recently a slaveholder in Florida. "They were allowed two suits
of clothes a year, viz. one pair of trowsers with a shirt...for summer, and for winters, one pair of
trowsers, and a jacket of Negro cloth, with a beige shirt and a pair of shoes. Some allowed hats,
and some did not; and they were generally, I believe, allowed one blanket in two years.
Garments of similar materials were allowed the women."
Mr. Lemuel Sapington, of Lancaster, Pa., a native of Maryland, and formerly a slaveholder.
"Their clothing is often made by themselves after night, though sometimes assisted by the old
women, who are no longer able to do out-door work; consequently it is harsh and

uncomfortable. And I have very frequently seen those who had not attained the age of twelve
years go naked."
IV. Dwellings.
Mr. George W. Westgate, member of the Congregational Church in Quincy, Illinois, who has
spent a number of years in slave states. "On old plantations, the Negro quarters are of frame
and clapboards, seldom affording a comfortable shelter from wind or rain; their size varies from
8 to 10, to 10 by 12, feet, and six or eight feet high; sometimes there is a hole cut for a window,
but I never saw a sash, or glass in any. In the new country, and in the woods, the quarters are
generally built of logs, of similar dimensions."
Mr. Cornelius Johnson, a member of the Christian Church in Farmington, Ohio. Mr. J. lived in
Mississippi in 1837-8. "Their houses were commonly built of logs, sometimes they were framed,
often they had no floor, some of them have two apartments, commonly but one; each of these
apartments contains a family. Sometimes these families consisted of a man and his wife and
children, while in other instances persons of both sexes, were thrown together without any
regard to family relationship."
Source: Gilder Lehrman Institute
Additional information: Theodore Dwight Weld, ed., American Slavery As It Is, 35-36, 40-41, 43
Copyright 2014 Digital History
Antislavery
Introduction
Digital History ID 4568

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The abolition of slavery represents one of the greatest moral achievements in history. As late as
1750, slavery was legal from Canada to the tip of Argentina. Each of the 13 American colonies
permitted slavery, and before the Revolution, only one colony--Georgia--had sought to prohibit
the institution. The governments of Britain, France, Denmark, Holland, Portugal, and Spain all
openly participated in the slave trade, and no church had discouraged its members from owning
or trading in slaves.
Yet within half a century, protests against slavery had become widespread. By 1804, every state
north of Maryland and Delaware had either freed its slaves or adopted gradual emancipation
schemes. In 1807, both the United States and Britain outlawed the Atlantic slave trade.
When Congress prohibited the trans-Atlantic slave trade, there were grounds for believing that
slavery was a declining institution. In 1784, the Continental Congress fell one vote short of
passing a bill that would have excluded slavery forever from the trans-Appalachian West. In
1787, Congress did bar slavery from the Old Northwest, the region north of the Ohio River and
east of the Mississippi. During the 1780s and 1790s, the number of slaves freed by their
masters rose dramatically in the Upper South. At the present rate of progress, one religious
leader predicted in 1791, within fifty years it will "be as shameful for a man to hold a Negro
slave, as to be guilty of common robbery or theft." But when William Lloyd Garrison called for an
immediate end to slavery in 1831, the grounds for optimism had evaporated. Despite the end of
the Atlantic slave trade, the slave population in the United States had grown to 1.5 million in
1820 and over two million a decade later. The cotton kingdom had expanded into Mississippi,
Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. In the North, free blacks faced increasingly
harsh discrimination.
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American Slavery in Comparative Perspective
Digital History ID 3044

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Of the 10 to 16 million Africans who survived the voyage to the New World, over one-third
landed in Brazil and between 60 and 70 percent ended up in Brazil or the sugar colonies of the
Caribbean. Only 6 percent arrived in what is now the United States. Yet by 1860, approximately
two thirds of all New World slaves lived in the American South.
For a long time it was widely assumed that southern slavery was harsher and crueler than
slavery in Latin America, where the Catholic church insisted that slaves had a right to marry, to
seek relief from a cruel master, and to purchase their freedom. Spanish and Portuguese
colonists were thought to be less tainted by racial prejudice than North Americans and Latin
American slavery was believed to be less subject to the pressures of a competitive capitalist
economy.
In practice, neither the Church nor the courts offered much protection to Latin American slaves.
Access to freedom was greater in Latin America, but in many cases masters freed sick, elderly,
crippled, or simply unneeded slaves in order to relieve themselves of financial responsibilities.
Death rates among slaves in the Caribbean were one third higher than in the South, and suicide
appears to have been much more common. Unlike slaves in the South, West Indian slaves were
expected to produce their own food in their "free time," and care for the elderly and the infirm.
The largest difference between slavery in the South and in Latin America was demographic. The
slave population in Brazil and the West Indies had a lower proportion of female slaves, a much
lower birth rate, and a higher proportion of recent arrivals from Africa. In striking contrast,
southern slaves had an equal sex ratio, a high birthrate, and a predominantly American-born
population.
Slavery in the United States especially distinctive in the ability of the slave population to
increase its numbers by natural reproduction. In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana and Brazil, the
slave death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that slaves could not sustain their
population without imports from Africa. The average number of children born to an early 19th
century southern slave woman was 9.2--twice as many as in the West Indies.
In the West Indies, slaves constituted 80 to 90 percent of the population, while in the South only
about a third of the population was slaves. Plantation size also differed widely. In the Caribbean,
slaves were held on much larger units, with many plantations holding 150 slaves or more. In the
American South, in contrast, only one slaveowner held as many as a thousand slaves, and just
125 had over 250 slaves. Half of all slaves in the United States worked on units of twenty or
fewer slaves; three quarters had fewer than fifty.
These demographic differences had important social implications. In the American South, slave
owners lived on their plantations and slaves dealt with their owners regularly. Most planters
placed plantation management, supply purchasing, and supervision in the hands of black
drivers and foremen, and at least two thirds of all slaves worked under the supervision of black
drivers. Absentee ownership was far more common in the West Indies, where planters relied
heavily on paid managers and relied on a distinct class of free blacks and mulattos to serve as
intermediaries with the slave population.
Another important difference between Latin America and the United States involved conceptions
of race. In Spanish and Portuguese America, an intricate system of racial classification
emerged. Compared with the British and French, the Spanish and Portuguese were much more
tolerant of racial mixing, an attitude encouraged by a shortage of European women, and
recognized a wide range of racial gradations, including black, mestizo, quadroon, and octoroon.
The American South, in contrast, adopted a two category system of racial categorization in
which any person with a black mother was automatically considered to be black.