slavery then and now essays

The New York Times

Magazine | a brief history of slavery that you didn't learn in school, a brief history of slavery that you didn't learn in school.

By MARY ELLIOTT and JAZMINE HUGHES AUG. 19, 2019

Four hundred years after enslaved Africans were first brought to Virginia, most Americans still don’t know the full story of slavery.

Curated by Mary Elliott All text by Mary Elliott and Jazmine Hughes Aug. 19, 2019

Sometime in 1619, a Portuguese slave ship, the São João Bautista, traveled across the Atlantic Ocean with a hull filled with human cargo: captive Africans from Angola, in southwestern Africa. The men, women and children, most likely from the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo, endured the horrific journey, bound for a life of enslavement in Mexico. Almost half the captives had died by the time the ship was seized by two English pirate ships; the remaining Africans were taken to Point Comfort, a port near Jamestown, the capital of the English colony of Virginia, which the Virginia Company of London had established 12 years earlier. The colonist John Rolfe wrote to Sir Edwin Sandys, of the Virginia Company, that in August 1619, a “Dutch man of war” arrived in the colony and “brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes, which the governor and cape merchant bought for victuals.” The Africans were most likely put to work in the tobacco fields that had recently been established in the area.

[ Read our essay on why American schools can’t teach slavery right .]

Forced labor was not uncommon — Africans and Europeans had been trading goods and people across the Mediterranean for centuries — but enslavement had not been based on race. The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which began as early as the 15th century, introduced a system of slavery that was commercialized, racialized and inherited. Enslaved people were seen not as people at all but as commodities to be bought, sold and exploited. Though people of African descent — free and enslaved — were present in North America as early as the 1500s, the sale of the “20 and odd” African people set the course for what would become slavery in the United States.

Slavery, Power and the Human Cost

1455 - 1775.

In the 15th century, the Roman Catholic Church divided the world in half, granting Portugal a monopoly on trade in West Africa and Spain the right to colonize the New World in its quest for land and gold. Pope Nicholas V buoyed Portuguese efforts and issued the Romanus Pontifex of 1455, which affirmed Portugal’s exclusive rights to territories it claimed along the West African coast and the trade from those areas. It granted the right to invade, plunder and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” Queen Isabella invested in Christopher Columbus’s exploration to increase her wealth and ultimately rejected the enslavement of Native Americans, claiming that they were Spanish subjects. Spain established an asiento, or contract, that authorized the direct shipment of captive Africans for trade as human commodities in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. Eventually other European nation-states — the Netherlands, France, Denmark and England — seeking similar economic and geopolitical power joined in the trade, exchanging goods and people with leaders along the West African coast, who ran self-sustaining societies known for their mineral-rich land and wealth in gold and other trade goods. They competed to secure the asiento and colonize the New World. With these efforts, a new form of slavery came into being. It was endorsed by the European nation-states and based on race, and it resulted in the largest forced migration in the world: Some 12.5 million men, women and children of African descent were forced into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The sale of their bodies and the product of their labor brought the Atlantic world into being, including colonial North America. In the colonies, status began to be defined by race and class, and whether by custom, case law or statute, freedom was limited to maintain the enterprise of slavery and ensure power.

Queen Njinga

In 1624, after her brother’s death, Ana Njinga gained control of the kingdom of Ndongo, in present-day Angola. At the time, the Portuguese were trying to colonize Ndongo and nearby territory in part to acquire more people for its slave trade, and after two years as ruler, Njinga was forced to flee in the face of Portuguese attack. Eventually, however, she conquered a nearby kingdom called Matamba. Njinga continued to fight fiercely against Portuguese forces in the region for many years, and she later provided shelter for runaway slaves. By the time of Njinga’s death in 1663, she had made peace with Portugal, and Matamba traded with it on equal economic footing. In 2002, a statue of Njinga was unveiled in Luanda, the capital of Angola, where she is held up as an emblem of resistance and courage.

Means of Control

“The iron entered into our souls,” lamented a formerly enslaved man named Caesar, as he remembered the shackles he had to wear during his forced passage from his home in Africa to the New World. Used as restraints around the arms and legs, the coarse metal cut into captive Africans’ skin for the many months they spent at sea. Children made up about 26 percent of the captives. Because governments determined by the ton how many people could be fitted onto a slave ship, enslavers considered children especially advantageous: They could fill the boat’s small spaces, allowing more human capital in the cargo hold. Africans were crammed into ships with no knowledge of where they were going or if they would be released. This forced migration is known as the Middle Passage. As Olaudah Equiano, the formerly enslaved author, remembered, “I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me.” Overheating, thirst, starvation and violence were common aboard slave ships, and roughly 15 percent of each ship’s enslaved population died before they ever reached land. Suicide attempts were so common that many captains placed netting around their ships to prevent loss of human cargo and therefore profit; working-class white crew members, too, committed suicide or ran away at port to escape the brutality. Enslaved people did not meekly accept their fate. Approximately one out of 10 slave ships experienced resistance, ranging from individual defiance (like refusing to eat or jumping overboard) to full-blown mutiny.

Cultivating Wealth and Power

The slave trade provided political power, social standing and wealth for the church, European nation-states, New World colonies and individuals. This portrait by John Greenwood connects slavery and privilege through the image of a group of Rhode Island sea captains and merchants drinking at a tavern in the Dutch colony of Surinam, a hub of trade. These men made money by trading the commodities produced by slavery globally — among the North American colonies, the Caribbean and South America — allowing them to secure political positions and determine the fate of the nation. The men depicted here include the future governors Nicholas Cooke and Joseph Wanton; Esek Hopkins, a future commander in chief of the Continental Navy; and Stephen Hopkins, who would eventually become one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

All children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.’

Race Encoded Into Law

The use of enslaved laborers was affirmed — and its continual growth was promoted — through the creation of a Virginia law in 1662 that decreed that the status of the child followed the status of the mother, which meant that enslaved women gave birth to generations of children of African descent who were now seen as commodities. This natural increase allowed the colonies — and then the United States — to become a slave nation. The law also secured wealth for European colonists and generations of their descendants, even as free black people could be legally prohibited from bequeathing their wealth to their children. At the same time, racial and class hierarchies were being coded into law: In the 1640s, John Punch, a black servant, escaped bondage with two white indentured servants. Once caught, his companions received additional years of servitude, while Punch was determined enslaved for life. In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, in which free and enslaved black people aligned themselves with poor white people and yeoman white farmers against the government, more stringent laws were enacted that defined status based on race and class. Black people in America were being enslaved for life, while the protections of whiteness were formalized.

A Deadly Commodity

Before cotton dominated American agriculture, sugar drove the slave trade throughout the Caribbean and Spanish Americas. Sugar cane was a brutal crop that required constant work six days a week, and it maimed, burned and killed those involved in its cultivation. The life span of an enslaved person on a sugar plantation could be as little as seven years. Unfazed, plantation owners worked their enslaved laborers to death and prepared for this high “turnover” by ensuring that new enslaved people arrived on a regular basis to replace the dying. The British poet William Cowper captured this ethos when he wrote, “I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, for how could we do without sugar or rum?” The sweetening of coffee and tea took precedence over human life and set the tone for slavery in the Americas.

Continual Resistance

Enslaved Africans had known freedom before they arrived in America, and they fought to regain it from the moment they were taken from their homes, rebelling on plantation sites and in urban centers. In September 1739, a group of enslaved Africans in the South Carolina colony, led by an enslaved man called Jemmy, gathered outside Charleston, where they killed two storekeepers and seized weapons and ammunition. “Calling out Liberty,” according to Gen. James Oglethorpe, the rebels “marched on with Colours displayed, and two Drums beating” along the Stono River, entreating other members of the enslaved community to join them. Their goal was Spanish Florida, where they were promised freedom if they fought as the first line of defense against British attack. This effort, called the Stono Rebellion, was the largest slave uprising in the mainland British colonies. Between 60 and 100 black people participated in the rebellion; about 40 black people and 20 white people were killed, and other freedom fighters were captured and questioned. White lawmakers in South Carolina, afraid of additional rebellions, put a 10-year moratorium on the importation of enslaved Africans and passed the Negro Act of 1740, which criminalized assembly, education and moving abroad among the enslaved. The Stono Rebellion was only one of many rebellions that occurred over the 246 years of slavery in the United States.

Memory and Place-Making

Enslaved black people came from regions and ethnic groups throughout Africa. Though they came empty-handed, they carried with them memories of loved ones and communities, moral values, intellectual insight, artistic talents and cultural practices, religious beliefs and skills. In their new environment, they relied on these memories to create new practices infused with old ones. In the Low Country region of the Carolinas and Georgia, planters specifically requested skilled enslaved people from a region stretching from Senegal to Liberia, who were familiar with the conditions ideal for growing rice. Charleston quickly became the busiest port for people shipped from West Africa. The coiled or woven baskets used to separate rice grains from husks during harvest were a form of artistry and technology brought from Africa to the colonies. Although the baskets were utilitarian, they also served as a source of artistic pride and a way to stay connected to the culture and memory of the homeland.

The Limits of Freedom

1776 - 1808.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” So begins the Declaration of Independence, the document that eventually led to the creation of the United States. But the words point to the paradox the nation was built on: Even as the colonists fought for freedom from the British, they maintained slavery and avoided the issue in the Constitution. Enslaved people, however, seized any opportunity to secure their freedom. Some fought for it through military service in the Revolutionary War, whether serving for the British or the patriots. Others benefited from gradual emancipation enacted in states like Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. In New York, for example, children born after July 4, 1799, were legally free when they turned 25, if they were women, or 28, if they were men — the law was meant to compensate slaveholders by keeping people enslaved during some of their most productive years.

[ How was slavery taught in your school? We want to hear your story. ]

Yet the demand for a growing enslaved population to cultivate cotton in the Deep South was unyielding. In 1808, Congress implemented the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which terminated the country’s legal involvement in the international slave trade but put new emphasis on the domestic slave trade, which relied on buying and selling enslaved black people already in the country, often separating them from their loved ones. (In addition, the international trade continued illegally.) The ensuing forced migration of over a million African-Americans to the South guaranteed political power to the slaveholding class: The Three-Fifths Clause that the planter elite had secured in the Constitution held that three-fifths of the enslaved population was counted in determining a state’s population and thus its congressional representation. The economic and political power grab reinforced the brutal system of slavery.

A Powerful Letter

After the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson and other politicians — both slaveholding and not — wrote the documents that defined the new nation. In the initial draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson condemned King George III of Britain for engaging in the slave trade and ignoring pleas to end it, and for calling upon the enslaved to rise up and fight on behalf of the British against the colonists. This language was excised from the final document, however, and all references to slavery were removed, in stunning contrast to the document’s opening statement on the equality of men. Jefferson was a lifelong enslaver. He inherited enslaved black people; he fathered enslaved black children; and he relied on enslaved black people for his livelihood and comfort. He openly speculated that black people were inferior to white people and continually advocated for their removal from the country. In 1791, Benjamin Banneker, a free black mathematician, scientist, astronomer and surveyor, argued against this mind-set when he wrote to Jefferson , then secretary of state, urging him to correct his “narrow prejudices” and to “eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions, which so generally prevails with respect to us.” Banneker also condemned Jefferson’s slaveholding in his letter and included a manuscript of his almanac, which would be printed the following year. Jefferson was unconvinced of the intelligence of African-Americans, and in his swift reply only noted that he welcomed “such proofs as you exhibit” of black people with “talents equal to those of the other colors of men.”

She Sued for Her Freedom

In the wake of the Revolutionary War, African-Americans took their cause to statehouses and courthouses, where they vigorously fought for their freedom and the abolition of slavery. Elizabeth Freeman, better known as Mum Bett, an enslaved woman in Massachusetts whose husband died fighting during the Revolutionary War, was one such visionary. The new Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 stated that “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties.” Arguing that slavery violated this sentiment, Bett sued for her freedom and won. After the ruling, Bett changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman to signify her new status. Her precedent-setting case helped to effectively bring an end to slavery in Massachusetts.

‘If one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it.’

God Wouldn’t Want Segregated Sanctuaries

Black people, both free and enslaved, relied on their faith to hold onto their humanity under the most inhumane circumstances. In 1787, the Rev. Richard Allen and other black congregants walked out of services at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest its segregated congregations. Allen, an abolitionist who was born enslaved, had moved to Philadelphia after purchasing his freedom. There he joined St. George’s, where he initially preached to integrated congregations. It quickly became clear that integration went only so far: He was directed to preach a separate service designated for black parishioners. Dismayed that black people were still treated as inferiors in what was meant to be a holy space, Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal denomination and started the Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church. For communities of free people of color, churches like Allen’s were places not only of sanctuary but also of education, organizing and civic engagement, providing resources to navigate a racist society in a slave nation. Allen and his successors connected the community, pursued social justice and helped guide black congregants as they transitioned to freedom. The African Methodist Episcopal Church grew rapidly; today at least 7,000 A.M.E. congregations exist around the world, including Allen’s original church.

The Destructive Impact of the Cotton Gin

The national dialogue surrounding slavery and freedom continued as the demand for enslaved laborers increased. In 1794, Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, which made it possible to clean cotton faster and get products to the market more quickly. Cotton was king, as the saying went, and the country became a global economic force. But the land for cultivating it was eventually exhausted, and the nation would have to expand to keep up with consumer demand. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson struck a deal with Napoleon Bonaparte, the Louisiana Purchase: In exchange for $15 million, the United States gained almost 830,000 square miles of land, doubling the size of the country and expanding America’s empire of slavery and cotton. Soon after this deal, the United States abolished the international slave trade, creating a labor shortage. Under these circumstances, the domestic slave trade increased as an estimated one million enslaved people were sent to the Deep South to work in cotton, sugar and rice fields.

Describing the Depravity of Slavery

“Benevolent men have voluntarily stepped forward to obviate the consequences of this injustice and barbarity,” proclaimed the Rev. Peter Williams Jr. in a historic speech about the end of the nation’s involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “They have striven assiduously to restore our natural rights; to guaranty them from fresh innovations; to furnish us with necessary information; and to stop the source from whence our evils have flowed.” A free black man who founded St. Philip’s African Church in Manhattan, Williams spoke in front of a white and black audience on Jan. 1, 1808 — the day the United States ban on the international slave trade went into effect. The law, of course, did not end slavery, and it was often violated. Williams forced the audience to confront slavery’s ugliness as he continued, “Its baneful footsteps are marked with blood; its infectious breath spreads war and desolation; and its train is composed of the complicated miseries of cruel and unceasing bondage.” His oration further defined a black view of freedom that had been building since the foundation of the country, as when the formerly enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley noted in 1774,“for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.”

A Slave Nation Fights for Freedom

1809 - 1865.

As demand for cotton grew and the nation expanded, slavery became more systemic, codified and regulated — as did the lives of all enslaved people. The sale of enslaved people and the products of their labor secured the nation’s position as a global economic and political powerhouse, but they faced increasingly inhumane conditions. They were hired out to increase their worth, sold to pay off debts and bequeathed to the next generation. Slavery affected everyone, from textile workers, bankers and ship builders in the North; to the elite planter class, working-class slave catchers and slave dealers in the South; to the yeoman farmers and poor white people who could not compete against free labor. Additionally, in the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson implemented his plan for Indian removal, ripping another group of people from their ancestral lands in the name of wealth. As slavery spread across the country, opposition — both moral and economic — gained momentum. Interracial abolition efforts grew in force as enslaved people, free black people and some white citizens fought for the end of slavery and a more inclusive definition of freedom. The nation was in transition, and it came to a head after Abraham Lincoln was elected president; a month later, in December 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union, citing “an increasing hostility on the part of the nonslaveholding states to the institution of slavery” as a cause. Five years later, the Civil War had ended, and 246 years after the “20 and odd Negroes” were sold in Virginia, the 13th Amendment ensured that the country would never again be defined as a slave nation.

A Woman Bequeathed

Rhoda Phillips’s name was officially written down for the first time in 1832, in the record of her sale. She was purchased when she was around 1 year old, along with her mother, Milley, and her sister Martha, for $550. The enslaver Thomas Gleaves eventually acquired Rhoda. He bequeathed her to his family in his will, where she is listed as valued at $200. She remained enslaved by them until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Afterward, Rhoda is believed to have married a man and had eight children with him. When she died, the Gleaves family ran an obituary in The Nashville Banner that showed the family still could not see the inhumanity of slavery. “Aunt Rhody,” the obituary said, “was raised by Mr. Gleaves and has lived with the family all her life. She was one of the old-time darkies that are responsible for the making of so many of their young masters.” In this daguerreotype of Rhoda, she is about 19, and in contrast to the practice at the time, Rhoda appears alone in the frame. Typically, enslaved people were shown holding white children or in the background of a family photo, the emphasis placed on their servitude. Rhoda’s story highlights one of the perversities of slavery: To the Gleaves, Rhoda was a family member even as they owned her.

By Black People, for Black People

On March 16, 1827, the same year that slavery was abolished in New York, Peter Williams Jr. co-founded Freedom’s Journal, the first newspaper owned and operated by African-Americans. A weekly New York paper, it was edited by John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish, who wrote in their first editorial , “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations.” Russwurm and Cornish wanted the paper to strengthen relations among newly freed black people living in the North and counter racist and hostile representations of African-Americans in other papers. At its peak, the paper circulated in 11 states and internationally. Although it folded in 1829, Freedom’s Journal served as inspiration for other black newspapers, and by the start of the Civil War, there were at least two dozen black-owned papers in the country. The renowned abolitionist and scholar Frederick Douglass used his newspapers to call for and to secure social justice.

Generations of Enslavement

On March 7, 1854, Sally and her three daughters, Sylvia, Charlotte and Elizabeth, were sold for $1,200. Sally was able to remain with her children, at least for a short time, but most enslaved women had to endure their children being forcibly taken from them. Their ability to bear children — their “increase” — was one of the reasons they were so highly valued. Laws throughout the country ensured that a child born to an enslaved woman was also the property of the enslaver to do with as he saw fit, whether to make the child work or to sell the child for profit. Many enslaved women were also regularly raped, and there were no laws to protect them; white men could do what they wanted without reproach, including selling the offspring — their offspring — that resulted from these assaults. Many white women also served as enslavers; there was no alliance of sisterhood among slave mistresses and the black mothers and daughters they claimed as property.

‘Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. ... Let your motto be resistance!’

Liberation Theology

In 1831, Nat Turner, along with about 70 enslaved and free black people, led a revolt in Southampton County, Va., that shook the nation. Turner, a preacher who had frequent, powerful visions, planned his uprising for months, putting it into effect following a solar eclipse, which he interpreted as a sign from God. He and his recruits freed enslaved people and killed white men, women and children, sparing only a number of poor white people. They killed nearly 60 people over two days, before being overtaken by the state militia. Turner went into hiding, but he was found and hanged a few months later. It was one of the deadliest revolts during slavery, a powerful act of resistance that left enslavers scared — both for their lives and for the loss of their “property.” The Virginia resident Eleanor Weaver reflected on the events, stating in a letter to family members: “We hope our government will take some steps to put down Negro preaching. It is those large assemblies of Negroes causes the mischief.” More stringent laws went into effect that controlled the lives of black people, free or enslaved, limiting their ability to read, write or move about.

The Slave Patrols

In 1846, Col. Henry W. Adams, of the 168th Regiment, Virginia Militia, started a slave patrol in Pittsylvania County, Va., that would “visit all Negro quarters and other places suspected of entertaining unlawful assemblies of slaves ... as aforesaid, unlawfully assembled, orany others strolling from one plantation to another, without a pass from his or her master or mistress or overseer, and take them before the next justice of the peace, who if he shall see cause, is hereby required to order every such slave ... aforesaid to receive any number of lashes, not exceeding 20 on his or her back.” Slave patrols throughout the nation were created by white people who were fearful of rebellion and were seeking to protect their human property. While overseers were employed on plantation sites as a means of control, slave patrols — which patrolled plantations, streets, woods and public areas — were thought to serve the larger community. While slave patrols tried to enforce laws that limited the movement of the enslaved community, black people still found ways around them.

Growing National Tension

In 1850, Congress passed a new Fugitive Slave Act, which required that all citizens aid in the capturing of fugitive enslaved black people. Lack of compliance was considered breaking the law. The previous act, from 1793, enabled enslavers to pursue runaway enslaved persons, but it was difficult to enforce. The 1850 act — which created a legal obligation for Americans, regardless of their moral views on slavery, to support and enforce the institution — divided the nation and undergirded the path to the Civil War. Black people could not testify on their own behalf, so if a white person incorrectly challenged the status of a free black person, the person was unable to act in his or her own defense and could be enslaved. In 1857, Dred Scott, who was enslaved, went to court to claim his freedom after his enslaver transported him into a free state and territory. The Supreme Court determined his fate when Chief Justice Roger B. Taney stated that no black person, free or enslaved, could petition the court because they were not “citizens within the meaning of the Constitution.” By statute and interpretation of the law, black people in America were dehumanized and commodifiedin order to maintain the economic and political power supported by slavery.

Enlisting in a Moral Fight

It is unclear whether Jacob Johns was enslaved, recently freed or a free man when he enlisted in the Union Army as a sergeant in the 19th United States Colored Troops Infantry, Company B. His unit fought in 11 battles, and 293 of its men were killed or died of disease, including Johns. When the war began in 1861, enslaved African-Americans seized their opportunity for freedom by crossing the Union Army lines in droves. The Confederate states tried to reclaim their human “property” but were denied by the Union, which cleverly declared the formerly enslaved community as contraband of war — captured enemy property. President Abraham Lincoln initially would not let black men join the military, anxious about how the public would receive integrated efforts. But as casualties increased and manpower thinned, Congress passed the Second Confiscation and Militia Act in 1862, allowing Lincoln to “employ as many persons of African descent” as he needed, and thousands enlisted in the United States Colored Troops. Jacobs was one of nearly 180,000 black soldiers who served in the U.S.C.T. during the Civil War, a group that made up nearly one-tenth of all soldiers, fighting for the cause of freedom.

Always on Your Person

A free black man living in Loudoun County, Va., Joseph Trammell created this small metal tin to protect his certificate of freedom — proof that he was not enslaved. During slavery, freedom was tenuous for free black people: It could be challenged at any moment by any white person, and without proof of their status they could be placed into the slave trade. Trammell, under Virginia law, had to register his freedom every few years with the county court. But even for free black people, laws were still in place that limited their liberty — in many areas in the North and the South, they could not own firearms, testify in court or read and write — and in the free state of Ohio, at least two race riots occurred before 1865.

One Family’s Ledger

Slaveholding families kept meticulous records of their business transactions: buying, selling and trading people. A record of the Rouzee family’s taxable property includes five horses, 497 acres of land and 28 enslaved people. Records show the family enterprise including the purchase and sale of African-Americans, investment in provisions to maintain the enslaved community and efforts to capture an enslaved man who ran toward freedom. From one century to the next, the family profited from enslaved people, their wealth passing from generation to generation. As enslaved families were torn apart, white people — from the elite planter class to individuals invested in one enslaved person — were building capital, a legacy that continues today.

‘I shall never forget that memorable night, when in a distant city I waited and watched at a public meeting, with 3,000 others not less anxious than myself, for the word of deliverance which we have heard read today. Nor shall I ever forget the outburst of joy and thanksgiving that rent the air when the lightning brought to us the Emancipation Proclamation.’

Freedom Begins

On Sept. 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, stating that if the Confederacy did not end its rebellion by Jan. 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves” in the states that had seceded would be free. The Confederacy did not comply, and the proclamation went into effect. But the Emancipation Proclamation freed only those enslaved in the rebelling states, approximately 3.5 million people. It did not apply to half a million enslaved people in slaveholding states that weren’t part of the Confederacy — Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Delaware and what would become West Virginia — or to those people in parts of the Confederacy that were already under Northern control. They remained enslaved until Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865. The freedom promised by the proclamation — and the official legal end of slavery — did not occur until the ratification of the 13th Amendment on Dec. 6, 1865. Only then was the tyranny of slavery truly over. Nevertheless, the Emancipation Proclamation was deeply meaningful to the community of formerly enslaved African-Americans and their allies. Annual emancipation celebrations were established, including Juneteenth; across the country, African-American gathering spots were named Emancipation Park; and the words of the proclamation were read aloud as a reminder that African-Americans, enslaved and free, collectively fought for freedom for all and changed an entire nation.

‘The story of the African-American is not only the quintessential American story but it’s really the story that continues to shape who we are today.’

Mary Elliott is curator of American slavery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she co-curated the ‘‘Slavery and Freedom’’ exhibition. Jazmine Hughes is a writer and editor at The New York Times Magazine.

Slavery in America

By: History.com Editors

Published: April 25, 2024

Millions of enslaved Africans contributed to the establishment of colonies in the Americas and continued laboring in various regions of the Americas after their independence, including the United States. Many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619 , when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved Africans ashore in the British colony of Jamestown , Virginia . The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista. Yet, enslaved Africans had been present in regions such as Florida, that are part of present-day United States nearly one century before.

Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than Indigenous populations and indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans.

Existing estimates establish that Europeans and American slave traders transported nearly 12.5 million enslaved Africans to the Americas. Of this number approximately 10.7 million disembarked alive in the Americas. During the 18th century alone, approximately 6.5 million enslaved persons were transported to the Americas. This forced migration deprived the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern Atlantic coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.

Slavery in Plantations and Cities

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia. Starting 1662, the colony of Virginia and then other English colonies established that the legal status of a slave was inherited through the mother. As a result, the children of enslaved women legally became slaves.

Before the rise of the American Revolution , the first debates to abolish slavery emerged. Black and white abolitionists contributed to the enactment of new legislation gradually abolishing slavery in some northern states such as Vermont and Pennsylvania. However, these laws emancipated only the newly born children of enslaved women.

Did you know? One of the first martyrs to the cause of American patriotism was Crispus Attucks, a former enslaved man who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770. Some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War.

But after the end of the American Revolutionary War , slavery was maintained in the new states. The new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, when it determined that three out of every five enslaved people were counted when determining a state's total population for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, European and American slave merchants purchased enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas and forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco, wheat, indigo, rice, sugar, and cotton. Enslaved men and women also performed work in northern cities such as Boston and New York, and in southern cities such as Charleston, Richmond, and Baltimore.

By the mid-19th century, America’s westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War . Though the Union victory freed the nation’s four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and beyond.

In the late 18th century, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop planted and harvested by enslaved people, but whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a U.S.-born schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin , a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. His device was widely copied, and within a few years, the South transitioned from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region’s dependence on enslaved labor.

Slavery was never widespread in the North as it was in the South, but many northern businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Although gradual abolition emancipated newborns since the late 18th century, slavery was only abolished in New York in 1827, and in Connecticut in 1848.

Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years. By 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

Living Conditions of Enslaved People

Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many enslavers owned fewer than 50 enslaved people.

Landowners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement were restricted.

Many enslavers raped women they held in slavery, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their enslavers.

Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families. Most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal.

Slave Rebellions

Enslaved people organized r ebellions as early as the 18th century. In 1739, enslaved people led the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, the largest slave rebellion during the colonial era in North America. Other rebellions followed, including the one led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822. These uprisings were brutally repressed.

The revolt that most terrified enslavers was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Turner’s group, which eventually numbered as many 50 Black men, murdered some 55 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them.

Like with previous rebellions, in the aftermath of the Nat Turner’s Rebellion, slave owners feared similar insurrections and southern states further passed legislation prohibiting the movement and assembly of enslaved people.

Abolitionist Movement

As slavery expanded during the second half of the 18th century, a growing abolitionist movement emerged in the North.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by formerly enslaved people such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison , founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator .

While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slaveholding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious “free-labor” argument, which held that slaveholding was regressive, inefficient and made little economic sense.

Black abolitionists and antislavery northerners led meetings and created newspapers. They also had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad , gained real momentum in the 1830s.

Conductors like Harriet Tubman guided escapees on their journey North, and “ stationmasters ” included such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Secretary of State William H. Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Although no one knows for sure how many men, women, and children escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad, it was in the thousands ( estimates range from 25,000 to 100,000).

The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North. It also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro-slavery southerners of their northern countrymen’s determination to defeat the institution that sustained them.

Missouri Compromise

America’s explosive growth—and its expansion westward in the first half of the 19th century—would provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion.

In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government’s right to restrict slavery over Missouri’s application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouri’s southern border were to be free soil.

Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was only temporarily able to help quell the forces of sectionalism.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War .

Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out—with considerable bloodshed —in the new state of Kansas.

Outrage in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska Act spelled the downfall of the old Whig Party and the birth of a new, all-northern Republican Party . In 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court (involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his enslaver had taken him into free territory) effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery.

John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry

In 1859, two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery.

John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry , Virginia—in which the abolitionist and 22 men, including five Black men and three of Brown’s sons raided and occupied a federal arsenal—resulted in the deaths of 10 people and Brown’s hanging.

The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South.

The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America ; four more would follow after the Civil War began.

Though Lincoln’s anti-slavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the United States as a nation.

Abolition became a goal only later, due to military necessity, growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the self-emancipation of many people who fled enslavement as Union troops swept through the South.

When Did Slavery End?

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State…in rebellion,…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t officially end all slavery in America—that would happen with the passage of the 13th Amendment after the Civil War’s end in 1865—some 186,000 Black soldiers would join the Union Army, and about 38,000 lost their lives.

The Legacy of Slavery

The 13th Amendment, adopted on December 18, 1865, officially abolished slavery, but freed Black peoples’ status in the post-war South remained precarious, and significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

Previously enslaved men and women received the rights of citizenship and the “equal protection” of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment and the right to vote in the 15th Amendment , but these provisions of the Constitution were often ignored or violated, and it was difficult for Black citizens to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping .

Despite seeing an unprecedented degree of Black participation in American political life, Reconstruction was ultimately frustrating for African Americans, and the rebirth of white supremacy —including the rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—had triumphed in the South by 1877.

Almost a century later, resistance to the lingering racism and discrimination in America that began during the slavery era led to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which achieved the greatest political and social gains for Black Americans since Reconstruction.

Ana Lucia Araujo , a historian of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, edited and contributed to this article. Dr. Araujo is currently Professor of History at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples Projects. Her three more recent books are Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History , The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism , and Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery .

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What Is a Legacy of Slavery?

An essay by david blight.

Because slavery is so central to the history of the United States—its origins, economic development, society, culture, politics, and law—it has left in its wake a wide array of legacies that seem ever-present yet ever-changing in our world. Sometimes the question of slavery’s legacy seems out-of-focus, inaccessible, or expressed in fuzzy language. Other times the legacy of slavery and emancipation may confront us when we least expect it. In 1961, in an essay in the New York Times titled “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” James Baldwin observed that when Americans reflect on their history, the “words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up.” Indeed, the living meanings, surviving challenges, and sometimes seemingly intractable problems born of great events or vast human practices and systems from the past are what make history matter. This is why legacies matter. And that is why the Council of Independent Colleges and the Gilder Lehrman Center have launched the Legacies of American Slavery project….

What then is a legacy? A historical legacy can be an idea or an eternally recurring question at the root of a dream—for example, “Why is human equality so hard to achieve?” A legacy can be emotional, manifesting itself in habits of thought, assumptions, behaviors, and lasting psychological patterns of struggle, action, or expectation. A legacy can be political, emerging in voting tendencies and recurring public policy issues. A legacy can be economic, evolving in patterns of growth and access or lack of access to material goods, services, human capital. A legacy can exist in law, in court decisions, in government policies that change when challenged or revert to older practices in times of reaction. Legacies can be laid down and commemorated in stone, in bronze, in musical traditions, in all manner of artistic forms. Legacies can be embodied in a very literal sense, as patterns of health and disease that can be traced to past experience through medical research. A legacy might be as local as a family story passed from generation to generation, or as big as a national origin narrative. Legacies can be institutional, growing as part of organizations that exist to educate, advocate, preserve, protest, or advance a set of ideas….

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The Long-lasting Impact of Slavery on Society

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Slavery Then and Now: Interrogating the Past to Understand the Present

Sara forsdyke.

As America reckons more fully with the legacy of slavery, and the world confronts the horrors of ongoing systems of oppression of peoples such as the Uyghurs in China and the Rohingya in Myanmar, what can we learn from the history of slavery in ancient Greece? This book argues that an understanding of ancient Greek slavery is important for two reasons.

The first reason is to give the hundreds of thousands of enslaved individuals who lived in ancient Greece their historical due by documenting their lives. This means uncovering not just how they labored and suffered but also – to the extent possible – their thoughts and aspirations, and especially the ingenuity with which they exploited the contradictions in the system of slavery to reclaim rights, human dignity and sometimes even freedom itself. It also means examining the full range of experiences of enslaved persons, from the young boy toiling in a blacksmithing shop under the lash of a whip, to the publicly-owned slaves who performed vital civic functions and lived independently. Among the various lives examined in this book are the many women who performed domestic chores in the households of their enslavers and the entrepreneurial women who wove textiles for market, some of whom accumulated enough personal property to purchase their freedom.

More unusual, yet still illustrative of the diversity of experience of the enslaved, is the case of an enslaved individual named Drimakos, who established a colony of runaway slaves on the island of Chios and negotiated a treaty that allowed those who were egregiously abused a place of refuge. Similarly, some enslaved individuals sought refuge in religious shrines and were transferred by temple authorities to less harsh enslavers, or even freed by being designated “slaves of the god.” Furthermore, there is evidence that some enslaved individuals engaged in clever ruses by which they leveraged the laws to their advantage. For example, despite being denied legal rights, some slaves exploited the law that required offending slaves to be handed over to their victims as compensation for harm. By conspiring with a third party and then staging an act of damage or wounding, enslaved individuals engineered their transfer to individuals with whom they had arranged better living conditions. We only know of such legal dodges because the laws had to be augmented by provisions to counter such acts of resistance. Even laws concerning citizenship sometimes reveal that some enslaved individuals tried to pass as free citizens, a tactic that was facilitated by the lack of obvious physical markers of difference such as skin color.

The second reason for exploring the slavery in ancient Greece is to contribute to the understanding of the full diversity of systems of slavery in world history. For example, in contrast to slavery in the American South, slavery in ancient Greece was not based primarily on racial distinctions. Rather, both Greek and non-Greek individuals were enslaved following defeat in warfare, capture in raids or birth to an enslaved mother. In common with other slave systems, however, enslavers in ancient Greece projected imagined distinctions onto the enslaved, such as “a body suitable for manual labor” or a “slavish nature.” In some intellectual circles (e.g., Aristotle), these invented characteristics became associated with persons of non-Greek ethnicity, yet the Greeks continued to enslave other Greeks throughout their history. Moreover, these degrading distinctions were applied despite the Greeks’ reliance on enslaved individuals for work requiring literacy and numeracy, such as civic administration and banking.

The intellectual acrobatics of ancient Greek ideologies of slavery, therefore, provide a particularly vivid demonstration of the arbitrariness and artificiality of constructions of difference between human beings. The study of ancient Greek slavery is a stark reminder of how societies can construct systems of discrimination that are widely accepted in their own time but patently self-serving and inhumane when viewed from afar. While slavery itself has largely been abolished in the modern world, slave-like conditions remain for groups such as the Uyghurs in China, and there is continual need to interrogate the ideas and institutions that undergird modern discriminatory systems. A view from ancient Greece can help us recognize and correct historical and ongoing injustices.

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About The Author

Sara Forsdyke is Josiah Ober Collegiate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Michigan. She has published widely on ancient democracy, slavery and the law...

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Modern Slavery

Introduction

Slavery, long banned and universally condemned, persists in many corners of the world, victimizing tens of millions of people.

Slavery disproportionally affects women and girls while also victimizing men and boys of all backgrounds, and no country in the world is immune. Consumers buy slave-made goods and services for which victims toil in mines, farms, factories, or private homes. Ending slavery takes political will, moral courage, and the collaboration of governments, businesses, and consumers.

Discussion and Essay Questions

Discussion questions.

What is slavery and what drives it? Is there a global consensus on the definition of slavery?
Are there places in the world where slavery is more prevalent? What are the drivers of higher prevalence in different parts of the world?
Is poverty a root cause of slavery? If so, would eliminating poverty eliminate slavery?
Are slavery and human trafficking the same thing? Can they be used interchangeably?
How does slavery impact women and children specifically?
How many slaves are in the world today and where are they?
Why is it difficult to eradicate slavery?
What does “state-sponsored slavery” mean? How can governments be pushed to end “state-sponsored slavery”?
How are people enslaved because they owe a debt to someone else?
Does law enforcement do enough to eradicate slavery?
Why is forced marriage considered a form of slavery?
Whose responsibility is it to end slavery? What are some common tactics and strategies used to combat slavery?

Essay Questions

The Walk Free Foundation and the International Labor Organization released a new estimate of modern day slavery in the world in 2017. Of the 40 million people living in slavery they found in the previous year, millions are said to be victims of forced marriage. What is forced marriage and why is it considered slavery? Should forced marriage be considered on par with sexual exploitation found in sex trafficking, or forced or child labor?
Many goods that we consume today could be made by slaves. These goods can be found in common products and components that are sourced from countries around the world. This means that many of us are inadvertently supporting exploitative labor practices. What role can consumers play to ensure that we don’t support factories and production facilities that exploit workers? What can businesses do to support fair and ethical supply chains? Are consumers and businesses doing enough?
Western definitions of slavery conflict with local and customary practices in some countries. For example, child marriage and even some forms of child labor are acceptable in some parts of the world, but considered human rights violations according to international standards. Is it fair to impose Western or international human rights norms on countries that conflict with their local customs and supersede local culture?
There is some evidence that labor trafficking is more prevalent throughout the world than sex trafficking, however, law enforcement arrests and prosecutes more offenders for sex trafficking than labor trafficking. Why is this the case? Why does sex trafficking get more attention than labor trafficking by law enforcement?
The U.S. government uses various foreign policy instruments to pressure other governments to uphold certain human rights standards. For example, the Trafficking in Persons Report issued annually by the U.S. State Department grades countries for their individual efforts to eradicate trafficking and slavery in their jurisdictions. Does this type of government-to-government advocacy and pressure have an effect? Is it important to integrate slavery concerns into U.S. foreign policy and for the U.S. government to hold other governments accountable?

Supplementary Materials

ILO/Walk Free Global Estimate

Taking time to reflect on how deeply slavery has shaped our society

Oscar Dubón, UC Berkeley's vice chancellor for equity & inclusion, wrote the campus community in honor of Black History Month

February 7, 2020

Oscar Dubón, UC Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity & inclusion, sent the following message to the campus community on Friday:

This year’s Black History Month is much more than 29 days devoted to recognizing Black Americans’ history, culture, and contributions to the United States. It is part of a broader reflection and commemoration of one of the darkest events in our United States history – the 400th anniversary of the inhumane and involuntary arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the British colonies. Around the country – and here on campus through the 400 Years campus initiative – we are taking time to reflect on how deeply slavery has shaped all aspects of our society and led to injustices that continue to affect Black people throughout the U.S. today.

While many assume Black Americans now have equal rights, that is not the lived experiences of many Black Americans as they go about their daily lives encountering unequal access to services, racial profiling, and microaggressions. Racism – whether explicit or implicit – remains common, and racist actions occur throughout our country, in our state, and on our campus. When these incidents occur at Berkeley, they reinforce the experience among members of our Black community that they are not respected or valued.

As a campus, we have work to do to transform our institution into a place where everyone experiences a true sense of belonging. For over 50 years, Black student activists have led the fight for equal rights and protection for all, and today, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff continue that work.

While many deep challenges remain for which we must be held accountable, there is also a lot to celebrate.”

– Oscar Dubón

While many deep challenges remain for which we must be held accountable, there is also a lot to celebrate. We wish to share some highlights of our Black campus community and lift the multiple contributions of Black Americans that have made and are making lasting contributions toward change at the university. As expressed at the Othering & Belonging Institute Symposia focused on reflections on the 400th year of enslaved Africans, it is important to not only consider the harm that has come to African Americans but also their courage, resilience, and triumph in the face of incredible adversity.

We pay homage to two of the first nine Black students at UC Berkeley. Ida Louise Jackson started the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority chapter, the first Black sorority on the Berkeley campus and in the Western United States. She experienced discrimination at the hands of then-Chancellor Barrows who would not include her sorority photo in the Blue & Gold magazine. Despite this, in 1925, she became California’s first Black teacher and ended her career in education as principal of McClymonds High School in the Oakland Unified School District.

We celebrate Lionel Wilson, an Oakland native, who entered Berkeley in 1932 as an economics major. Like Ida, he experienced racism and discrimination; when completing his graduate program course, he was told by his professor that he would not be placed in job opportunities that were offered to his fellow white students. Despite this, Lionel graduated from Berkeley in 1938, received his law degree and became Alameda County’s first Black judge and Oakland’s first Black mayor elected for three consecutive terms.

Today, we celebrate the second cohort of twelve talented African American Initiative (AAI) Scholarship recipients whom we welcomed to campus this past fall. These new scholars joined the inaugural group of 26 AAI scholars. Through a $2 million donation provided this year from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund , we are implementing plans that will make our campus a more attractive and welcoming place for Black students. The gift is aimed at providing scholarships, building community, and improving Black students’ campus experience through programming and services offered through the Fannie Lou Hamer Black Resource Center, the African American Student Development Office, and a host of community and campus partners.

Oscar Dubón, vice chancellor for equity and inclusion, speaks to the campus community during an event. (UC Berkeley photo by Megan Lee)

We celebrate the leadership of the Black Staff & Faculty Organization, who with the Coalition of Ethnic Staff Organizations , has partnered with Chancellor Christ and new senior administrator, Eugene Whitlock, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Human Resources/Chief People & Culture Officer, to bring forth recommendations that will improve the work environment for all. Such as the acknowledgment and modified policy that endorses release time as a part of the workday to support and move forward campus initiatives of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

We celebrate Black staff in the dining halls and the Golden Bear Café, administrative assistants, student advisors, coaches, staff members—both in student-facing and non-student-facing roles–who play key roles in encouraging, advocating, and ensuring that all of our students are welcomed and supported.

We celebrate David Blackwell, the first Black tenured professor at UC Berkeley. Blackwell Hall, located on the corner of Bancroft Way & Dana Street is named in the honor of this great scholar and change maker. In 1978, Barbara Christian was the first African American woman granted tenure and the same year she was elected chair of the Department of African American Studies. We celebrate the history and the legacy of the many Black faculty members who have come after Dr. Blackwell and Dr. Christian—like Professor Linda M. Burton who began her term as dean of Berkeley Social Welfare in September 2019. They continue the legacy of generating new knowledge, teaching the next generation of leaders, and guiding the university toward a better future.

We celebrate the work and contributions of the U.C. Berkeley Black alumni associations, which continue to partner with and hold the campus accountable for making needed changes to transform the Black experience on campus. We celebrate prominent alumni Warren Widener, a 1967 Berkeley Law graduate and director of the Berkeley branch of the NAACP who tackled issues of discrimination and advocated for minorities as the City of Berkeley’s first Black mayor, and Barbara Lee, a 1975 graduate who is the first Black woman from Northern California to be elected to state Senate, and the first woman to be elected to serve California’s 13th (formerly 9th) district.

We celebrate what is believed to be the largest private collection of African American quilts that was left to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) by the late collector and art scholar Eli Leon. The first quilt exhibit highlighting Bay Area native Rosie Lee Tompkins’ work will be on exhibit at BAMPFA from February 19 – July 19, 2020.

We celebrate the campus commitment to changing the landscape of UC Berkeley by reimagining ways to signal belonging and uplifting the multiple contributions that the Black community has made to the university despite the limits.

Black History Month should not be the only time of year that we celebrate the lives and accomplishments of Black Americans. There are several meaningful ways to pay homage to the sacrifices and contributions of Black Americans. Here are a few ways to put words into action:

Be proactive and educate yourself about the struggles and achievements of Black Americans;
Visit local and national museums like the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee or the National African American Museum in Washington, D.C;
Combat and speak out against all forms of injustice and racism;
Participate in community events that educate, celebrate, and advance Black causes;
Acknowledge the horrific nature of slavery and its lasting impacts to the Black community;
Reflect on your own benefits and privileges on the backs of Black Americans

We encourage you to deepen your knowledge and be inspired to action through events hosted this month by campus organizations including the African American Student Development , the Department of African American Studies , the Othering & Belonging Institute , Black Staff & Faculty Organization , the Black Recruitment & Retention Center , the Black Student Union , and other Black organizations .

Slavery in the USA and Its Impact on Americans Essay

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Introduction

Impact on the modern society, works cited.

Slavery in the United States of America is a highly important topic to discuss even at the present moment. Although this regime and level of racial discrimination have been left in the past, people must still learn the history of American slaves who were owned by white citizens. Not only does this let one learn more about the country in which they reside, but it also shows its citizens how freedom was gained for all inhabitants. The following paper will present a discussion of slavery in the USA and an explanation of the tremendous impact it made on the lives of all Americans. It will also include a description of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and coverage of various Civil War events.

As mentioned in the introductory section, slavery existed in a period when the United States of America was not an attractive country for immigrants from Africa. Once a black person was noticed in towns or cities, he or she could be caught and sold to slaveholders, regardless of their free status (Berlin 26). Although these people could have families and jobs, their freedoms were disregarded by other citizens due to their skin color, which was the main basis for discrimination. It is a well-known fact that nowadays those with racist beliefs are disapproved of in the US. However, when the famous American Revolution was going on, people with black skin were treated as representatives of a lower racial caste (Thirty-Ninth Congress of the USA). It is necessary to mention that individuals of Arabic, Hispanic, or other non-white ethnic backgrounds were not enslaved and were regarded as free people of color (Berlin 54).

The majority of slaves transferred from Africa were forced to work on the cotton plantations of businessmen from the CSA (Confederative States of America). They also worked at farms, mills, and other places that required cheap human labor. As mentioned previously in the paper, black people were not paid for their hard work. In addition, their living conditions were inappropriate – they had no access to clean water for hygienic purposes, no beds, no private rooms, and so on (Berlin 27). It would be accurate to state that many black people could not bear living in such conditions. Their lives were short, with a majority of them dying because of fatigue and exhaustion (Berlin 32). Some of those who were enslaved might be treated better than others if their owner saw that a particular person worked hard and brought much profit to his or her slaveholder. The majority of people deprived of their rights had to work in fields under the burning sun for more than twelve hours every day. They were not allowed to have any days off or vacations.

The situation with slavery became critical, with white people disregarding the rights of individuals from Africa, and the government of the USA became seriously concerned with the idea of emancipation (Thirty-Ninth Congress of the USA). It appeared that almost all businesses situated in the territories of the CSA back then were powered by slaves. However, Afro-Americans’ civil rights were respected in the Northern part of the country when Abraham Lincoln was in rule. The president wanted to make all people in his country free and equal (Thirty-Ninth Congress of the USA). After he was elected in 1860, the politician started considering the emancipation of slaves (Lincoln). Nevertheless, his colleagues told him that giving freedom to the approximately four million black people from the Southern states of the country would have an adverse impact on its economy and the well-being of white citizens in the CSA.

Abraham Lincoln asked governors of several states in the South to support his emancipation strategy (Lincoln). All seven territories (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas) refused to free their slaves and become part of the Northern States. Although many governors refused to support Lincoln’s strategy, they had to stand against his army forces in the Civil War that started later. The main purpose of the multiple battles between the Union and the Confederates was to make all people in the country free and equal.

When the war was almost over, President Lincoln issued and signed the Emancipation Proclamation on the first day of 1863, ordering “That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free,” (Lincoln). Almost three million former slaves were freed. In response to this, some slave-owners took their workers and moved to the South or other territories outside of the country as they believed that their economic system would be destroyed according to the new laws of the United States of America (Berlin 71). Indeed, black people were fully freed even in the Southern states once the Civil War was over.

Unfortunately, the American economy was not as stable and prosperous as it has become in the present. Therefore, many black people preferred to stay and work for their previous masters after the war ended in 1865, as they could not find any other jobs (Berlin 63). Indeed, the Reconstruction Era was a hard time for all people who inhabited the former CSA. However, nowadays, American citizens cannot even think about going back to this regime of discrimination based on race. However, the thirteenth amendment that was issued at the end of the Civil War stated that every citizen of the USA could not be enslaved unless he or she was punished for breaking the law (General Records of the United States Government). It appears that this kind of racism is now both illegal and immoral. Although many other adverse political and economic situations happened in the USA after Emancipation, this event presents a border between the country’s past and the future (Lincoln).

Since the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, citizens of the United States of America have never faced slavery again (Lincoln). Nevertheless, this part of the country’s history made a tremendous impact on all people who live here because racism is considered to be immoral and remains a taboo topic. Discussions of these phenomena are inappropriate in the society of African Americans as well. There is no other country in the world that considers the topics of both racism and slavery as limited as they have become America. People are allowed to talk about slavery and discrimination against black individuals only at schools during history classes. Otherwise, it is considered to be offensive to people of color.

Slavery in the USA was one of the toughest periods in the country’s history. Slaves did not have appropriate living conditions, food, water, or other benefits of contemporary civilization. Thankfully, Abraham Lincoln signed and issued the Emancipation Proclamation that made all black people in the USA free since 1863. This event may be regarded as a critical moment in American history that promoted citizens’ rights and dignities. Nowadays, regular citizens are discouraged from mentioning racism and slavery in public places and cannot discriminate against people of color. Inhabitants of the USA must learn the history of slavery to understand how their nation became one of the greatest liberty symbols in the world.

Berlin, Ira. The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States . Harvard University Press, 2015.

General Records of the United States Government. “ Proposed Thirteenth Amendment Regarding the Abolition of Slavery .” DocsTeach . 1861. Web.

Lincoln, Abraham. “ Emancipation Proclamation .” DocsTeach . 1863. Web.

Thirty-Ninth Congress of the USA. “ Civil Rights Act of 1866 .” DocsTeach . 1866. Web.

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Atlantic slavery and the slave trade: history and historiography.

Daniel B. Domingues da Silva Daniel B. Domingues da Silva History Department, Rice University
and Philip Misevich Philip Misevich Department of History, St. John’s University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.371
Published online: 20 November 2018

Over the past six decades, the historiography of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade has shown remarkable growth and sophistication. Historians have marshalled a vast array of sources and offered rich and compelling explanations for these two great tragedies in human history. The survey of this vibrant scholarly tradition throws light on major theoretical and interpretive shifts over time and indicates potential new pathways for future research. While early scholarly efforts have assessed plantation slavery in particular on the antebellum United States South, new voices—those of Western women inspired by the feminist movement and non-Western men and women who began entering academia in larger numbers over the second half of the 20th century—revolutionized views of slavery across time and space. The introduction of new methodological approaches to the field, particularly through dialogue between scholars who engage in quantitative analysis and those who privilege social history sources that are more revealing of lived experiences, has conditioned the types of questions and arguments about slavery and the slave trade that the field has generated. Finally, digital approaches had a significant impact on the field, opening new possibilities to assess and share data from around the world and helping foster an increasingly global conversation about the causes, consequences, and integration of slave systems. No synthesis will ever cover all the details of these thriving subjects of study and, judging from the passionate debates that continue to unfold, interest in the history of slavery and the slave trade is unlikely to fade.

slave trade
historiography

From the 16th to the mid- 19th century , approximately 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forcibly embarked on slave ships, of whom only 10.7 million survived the notorious Middle Passage. 1 Captives were transported in vessels that flew the colors of several nations, mainly Portugal, Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Ships departed from ports located in these countries or their overseas possessions, loaded slaves at one or more points along the coast of Africa, and then transported them to one or more ports in the Americas. They sailed along established trade routes shaped by political forces, commercial partnerships, and environmental factors, such as the winds and sea currents. The triangular system is no doubt the most famous route but in fact nearly half of all slaves were embarked on vessels that traveled directly between the Americas and Africa. 2 Africans forced beneath the decks of slave vessels were captured in the continent’s interior through several means. Warfare was, perhaps, the commonest, yielding large numbers of captives for sale at a time. Other methods of enslavement included judicial proceedings, pawning, and kidnappings. 3 Depending on the routes captives traveled and the ways they were captured, Africans could sometimes find themselves in the holds of ships with people who belonged to their same cultures, were from their same villages, or were even close relatives. 4 None of this, however, attenuated the sufferings and appalling conditions under which they sailed. Slaves at sea were subjected to constant confinement, brutal violence, malnutrition, diseases, sexual violence, and many other abuses. 5

Upon arrival in the Americas, Africans often found themselves in equally hostile environments. Slavery in the mining industry and on cash crop plantations, especially those that produced sugar and rice, significantly reduced Africans’ life expectancies and required owners to replenish their labor force through the slave trade. 6 By contrast, slave systems centered on less intensive crops and the services industry, particularly in cities, ports, and towns, often offered enslaved Africans better chances of survival and even the possibility of achieving freedom through manumission by purchase, gift, or inheritance. 7 These apparent advantages did not necessarily mean that life was any less harsh. Neither did the prospect of freedom significantly change slaves’ material lives. Few individuals managed to obtain manumission and those who did encountered many other barriers that prevented them from fully enjoying their lives as free citizens. 8 In spite of those barriers, slaves challenged their status and conditions in many ways, ranging from “quiet” forms of resistance—slowdowns, breaking tools, and feigning illness at work—to bolder initiatives such as running away, plotting conspiracies, and launching rebellions. 9 Although slavery provided little room for autonomy, Africans strove to maintain or replicate aspects of their cultures in the Americas. Whenever possible, they married people with their same backgrounds, named their children in their own languages, cooked foods using techniques, styles, and ingredients similar to those found in their motherlands, composed songs in the beats of their homelands, and worshipped ancestral spirits, deities, and gods in the same fashion as their forbears. 10 At the same time, slave culture was subject to constant change, a process that over the long run enabled enslaved people to better navigate the dangerous world that slavery created. 11

This overview may seem rather free of controversy, but it is in fact the result of years of debates, some still raging, and research conducted by generations of historians of slavery and the slave trade. Perhaps no other historical fields have been so productive and transformative over such a short period of time. Since the 1950s, scholars have developed and refined new methods, created new theoretical models, brought previously untapped sources to light, and posed new questions that shine bright new light on the experiences of enslaved people and their owners as well as the social, political, economic, and cultural worlds that they created in the diaspora. Although debates about Atlantic slavery and the slave trade go back to the era of abolition, historians began grappling in earnest with these issues in the aftermath of World War II. Early scholarship focused on the United States and tended to articulate views of slavery that reflected elite sources and perspectives. 12 Inspired by the US civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and wider global decolonization campaigns, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the rise of approaches to the study of slavery rooted in new social history, which aimed to understand slaves as central historical actors rather than mere victims of exploitation. 13 Around the same time, a group of scholars trained in statistical analysis sparked passionate debates about the extent to which quantitative assessments of slavery and slave trading effectively represented slaves’ lived experiences. 14 To more vividly capture those experiences, some historians turned to new or underutilized tools, particularly biographies, family histories, and microhistories, which provided windows into local historical dynamics. 15 The significance of the penetrating questions that these fruitful debates raised has been amplified in recent decades in response to the growing influence of transnational and Atlantic approaches to slavery. Atlantic frameworks have required the gathering and analysis of new data on slavery and the slave trade around the world, encouraging scholars from previously underrepresented regions to challenge Anglo-American dominance in the field. Finally, the digital turn in the 21st century has provided new models for developing historical projects on slavery and the slave trade and helped democratize access to once inaccessible sources. 16 This article draws on this rich history of scholarship on slavery and the slave trade to illustrate major theoretical and interpretive shifts over time and raise questions about the future prospects for this dynamic field of study.

Models of Slavery and Resistance

While each country in the Americas has its own national historiography on slavery, from a 21st-century perspective, it is hard to overestimate the role that US-based scholars played in shaping the agenda of slavery studies. Analyses of American plantation records began around the turn of the 20th century . Early debates emerged in particular over the conditions of slavery in the American South and views of the relationship between slaves and owners. Setting the foundation for these debates in the early- 20th century , Ulrich Bonnell Phillips offered an extraordinarily romanticized vision of life on the plantation. 17 Steeped in open racism, his work compared slave plantations to benevolent schools that over time “civilized” enslaved peoples. Conditioned by the kinds of revisionist interpretations of Southern slavery that emerged in the era following Reconstruction, Phillips saw American slavery as a benign institution that persisted despite its economic inefficiency. His work trivialized the violence inherent in slave systems, a view some Americans were eager to accept and, given his standing among subsequent generations of slavery scholars, one that prevailed in the profession for half of a century.

Early challenges to this view had little immediate impact within academic circles. That primarily black intellectuals, working in or speaking to white-dominated academies, offered many of the most sophisticated objections helps explain the persistence of Phillips’ influence. In the face of looming institutional racism, several scholars offered bold and fresh interpretations that uprooted basic ideas about the slave system. Over his illustrious career, W. E. B. Du Bois highlighted the powerful structural impediments that restricted black lives and brought attention to the dynamic ways that African Americans confronted systematic exploitation. Eric Williams, a noted Trinidadian historian, took aim at the history of abolition, arguing that self-interest—rather than humanitarian concerns—led to the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. Melville Herskovitz, a prominent white American anthropologist, turned his attention to the connections between African and African American culture. 18 Though many of these works were marginalized at the time they were produced, this scholarship is rightfully credited with, among other things, shining light on the relationship between African and African American history. Turning their attention to Africa, scholars discovered a variety of cultural practices that, they argued, shaped the black experience under slavery and in its aftermath. Even those scholars who challenged or rejected this Africa-centered approach pushed enslaved people to the center of their analyses, representing a radical departure from previous studies. 19

Similarly, works focused on the history of slavery and the slave trade in other regions of the Americas, especially those colonized by France, Spain, and Portugal, were often overlooked. The economies of many of these regions had historically depended on slave labor. The size of the captive populations of some of them rivaled that of the United States. Moreover, they had been involved in the slave trade for much longer and far more extensively than any other region of what became the United States. Researchers in Brazil, Cuba, and other countries often noticed these points. 20 Some of them, like the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, received training in the United States and produced significant research. However, because they published mainly in Portuguese and Spanish, and translations were hard to come by, their work had little initial impact on Anglo-American scholarship. The few scholars who did realize the importance of this work used it to draw comparisons between the Anglophone and non-Anglophone worlds of slavery, highlighting differences in their patterns of colonization and emphasizing the distinctive roles that Catholicism and colonial legal regimes played in shaping slave systems across parts of the Americas. A greater incidence of miscegenation and slaves’ relative accessibility to freedom through manumission led some scholars to argue that slavery in the non-Anglophone New World was milder than in antebellum America or the British colonies. 21

In the United States, the dominant narratives of American slavery continued to emphasize the absolute authority of slave owners. Even critics of Phillips, who emerged in larger numbers in the 1950s and vigorously challenged his conclusions, thought little of slaves’ abilities to effect meaningful change on plantations. Yet they did offer new interpretations of American slavery, as the metaphors scholars used in this decade to characterize the system attest. Far from Phillips’ training school, Kenneth Stampp argued that plantation slavery more appropriately resembled a prison in which enslaved people became completely dependent on their owners. 22 Going even further, Stanley M. Elkins compared American slavery to a concentration camp. 23 The experience of slavery was so traumatic that it stripped enslaved people of their identities and rendered them almost completely helpless. American slavery, in Elkins’ view, turned African Americans into infantilized “Sambos” whose minds and wills came to mirror those of their owners. While such studies drew much needed attention to the violence of plantation slavery, they all but closed the door on questions about slave agency and cultural production. Emphasizing slave autonomy ran the risk of minimizing the brutality of slave owners, and for those scholars trying to overturn Phillips’s vision of American slavery, that brutality was what defined the plantation enterprise.

It took the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s to move slavery studies in a significantly new direction. Driven by their hard-fought battles for political rights at home, African Americans and others whom the civil rights movement inspired added critical new voices and perspectives that required a rethinking of the American past. Scholars who emerged during this period largely rejected the overwhelming authority of the planter class and instead turned their attention to the activities of enslaved people. Slaves, they found, created spaces for themselves and exercised their autonomy on plantations in myriad ways. While they recognized the violence of the slave system, historians of this generation were more interested in assessing the development of black society and identifying resistance to plantation slavery. Far from the brainwashed prisoners of their owners, enslaved people were recast as producers of dynamic and enduring cultures. One key to this transformation was a more careful analysis of what occurred within slave quarters, where new research uncovered the existence of relatively stable—at least under the circumstances—family life. Another emphasized religion as a tool that slaves used to improve their conditions and forge new identities in the diaspora. The immediate post-civil rights period also saw scholars renew their interest in Africa, breathing new life into older debates about the origins and survival of cultural practices in the Americas. 24

What much of the scholarship in this period shared was the idea that no matter how vicious the system, planter power was always incomplete. Recognizing that reality, slaves and their owners established a set of ground rules that granted slaves a degree of autonomy in an attempt to minimize resistance. Beyond mere brutality, slavery thus rested on unwritten but widely understood slave “rights”—Sundays off from plantation labor, the cultivation of private garden plots, participation in an independent slave economy—that both sides negotiated and frequently challenged. This view was central to Eugene Genovese’s magisterial book, Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made , which employed the concept of paternalism to help make sense of 19th-century Southern slavery. 25 Paternalist ideology provided owners with a theoretical justification for slavery’s continuation in the face of widespread criticism from Northern abolitionists. Unlike in the urban North, Southerners claimed, where free African Americans faced deplorable conditions and had little social support, slave owners claimed to take better care of their “black and white” families. Slaves also embraced paternalism, though toward a different end: doing so enabled them to use the idea of the “benevolent planter” to their own advantage and make claims for incremental improvements in slaves’ lives. Slavery, Genovese argued, was thus based on the mutual interdependence of owners and slaves.

The degree of intimacy between slaves and owners that paternalism implied spoke to another question that occupied scholars writing in the 1960s and 1970s: given the violence of the slave system, why had so few large-scale slave rebellions occurred? For Phillips and those whom he influenced, the benevolent nature of Southern slavery provided a sufficient explanation. But undeniable evidence of the violence of slavery required making sense of patterns—or the seeming lack—of slave resistance. Unlike on some Caribbean islands, where slaves far outnumbered free people and environmental and geographic factors tended to concentrate the location of plantations, conditions in the United States were less conducive to widespread rebellion. Yet slaves never passively accepted their captivity. The literature on resistance during this period deemphasized violent forms of rebellion, which occurred infrequently, and reoriented scholarship toward the variety of ways that enslaved people challenged the domination of slave owners over them. Having adjusted their lenses, historians found evidence of slave resistance seemingly everywhere. Enslaved people slowed the paces at which they worked, feigned illnesses, broke tools, and injured or let escape animals on plantations. Such “day-to-day” resistance did little to overturn slavery but it gave some control to captives over their work regimes. In some cases, slaves acted even more boldly, committing arson or poisoning those men and women responsible for upholding the system of bondage. Resistance also took the form of running away, a strategy that long preceded the famous Underground Railroad in North America and posed unique problems in territories with unsettled frontiers, unfriendly environmental terrain, and diverse indigenous populations into which fleeing captives could integrate. 26

This shift in scholarship toward slave agency and resistance was anchored in the creative use of sources that had previously been unknown or underappreciated. Although they had long recognized the shortcomings of Phillips’s reliance on records from a limited number of large plantations, historians struggled to find better options, particularly those that shed light on the experiences and perspectives of enslaved people. Slave biographies provided one alternative. In the 1970s, John Blassingame gathered an exhaustive collection of runaway slave accounts to examine the life experiences of American slaves. 27 Whether such biographies spoke to the majority of slaves or represented a few exceptional black men became the subject of considerable disagreement. Scholars who were less trusting of biographies turned to the large collection of interviews that the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration conducted with former slaves. 28 Though far more numerous and representative of “typical” slave experiences, the WPA interviews had their own problems. Would former slaves have been comfortable speaking freely to primarily white interviewers about their lives in bondage? The question remains open. Equally pressing was the concern over the amount of time that had passed between the end of slavery and the period when the interviews were conducted. Indeed, some two-thirds of interviewees were octogenarians when federal employees recorded their stories. Despite such shortcomings, these sources and the new interpretations of slavery that they supported pushed scholarship in exciting new directions. Slaves could no longer be dismissed as passive victims of the plantation system. The new sources and approaches humanized them and reoriented scholarship toward the communities that slaves made.

Across the Atlantic, scholars of Africa began to grapple in earnest with questions about slavery, too. Early contributions to debates over the role of the institution in Africa and its impact on African societies came from historians and anthropologists. One strand of disagreement emerged over whether slavery existed there at all prior to the arrival of Europeans. This raised more fundamental questions about how to define slavery. The influential introduction to Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff’s edited volume, Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives , took pains to distinguish African slavery from its American counterparts. It rooted slavery not in racial difference or the growth of plantation agriculture but rather in the context of Africa’s kin-based social organization. According to the coauthors, the institution’s primary function in Africa was to incorporate outsiders into new societies. 29 So distinctive was this form of captivity that Miers and Kopytoff famously deployed scare quotes each time they used the word “slavery” in order to underscore its uniqueness.

Given their emphasis on incorporation, the process by which enslaved people over time became accepted insiders in the societies into which they were forcibly introduced, and their limited treatment of the economically productive roles that slaves played, Miers and Kopytoff came in for swift criticism on several fronts. Neo-Marxists were particularly dissatisfied. Claude Meillassoux, the prominent French scholar, responded with an alternative vision of slavery in Africa that highlighted the violence that was at the core of enslavement. 30 That violence made slavery the very antithesis of kinship, which to many scholars invalidated Miers and Kopytoff’s interpretation. Meillassoux and others also pointed to the dynamic economic roles that slaves played in Africa. 31 Studies in various local settings—in the Sokoto Caliphate, the Western Sudan, and elsewhere—made clear that slavery was a central part of how African societies organized productive labor. 32 This reality led some scholars to articulate distinct slave, or African, modes of production that, they argued, better illuminated the role of slavery in the continent. 33

In addition to these deep theoretical differences, one factor that contributed to the debates was the lack of historical sources that spoke to the changing nature of slavery in Africa. Documentary evidence describing slave societies is heavily concentrated in the 19th century , the period when Europe’s presence in Africa became more widespread and when colonialism and abolitionism colored Western views of Africans and their social institutions. To overcome source limitations, academics cast their nets widely, drawing on methodological innovations from anthropology and comparative linguistics, among other disciplines. 34 Participant observation, through which Africanists immersed themselves in the communities they studied in order to understand local languages and cultures, proved particularly valuable. 35 Yet the enthusiasm for this approach, which for many offered a more authentic path to access African cultures and voices, led some scholars to ignore or paper over its limitations. 36 To what extent, for example, did oral sources or observations of social structures in the 20th century reveal historical realities from previous eras? Other historians projected back in time insights from the more numerous written sources from the 19th century , using them to consider slavery in earlier periods. 37 Those who uncritically accepted evidence from such sources—whether non-written or written—came away with a timeless view of the African past, including as it related to slavery. 38 It would take another decade, during which the field witnessed revolutionary changes to the collection and analysis of data, until scholars began to widely accept the fact that, as in the Americas, slavery differed across time and space.

The Cliometric Debates

Around the same time that some scholars in the Americas were pushing enslaved people to the center of slavery narratives, a separate group of academics trained in economics began steering the focus of studies of slavery and the slave trade in a different direction. While research on planter power and slave resistance allowed historians to infer broad patterns of transformation from a limited collection of local records, this new group of scholars turned this approach upside down. They proposed to assess the underlying forces that shaped slavery and the slave trade to better contextualize the individual experiences of enslaved people. This big-picture approach was rooted in the quantification of large amounts of data available in archival sources spread across multiple locations and led ultimately to the development of “cliometrics,” a radically new methodology in the field. Two works were particularly important to the establishment of this approach: Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census and Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery . 39

Philip Curtin’s “census” provided the first quantitative assessment of the size, evolution, and distribution of the transatlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries . Previous estimates of the magnitude of the transatlantic trade claimed that it involved somewhere between fifteen and twenty million enslaved Africans—or in some cases many times that amount. 40 However, upon careful examination, Curtin found that such estimates were “nothing but a vast inertia, as historians have copied over and over again the flimsy results of unsubstantial guesswork.” 41 He thus set out to provide a new figure based on a close reading of secondary works that themselves had been based on extensive archival research. To assist in this endeavor, Curtin enlisted a technology that had only recently become available to researchers: the mainframe computer. He collected data on the number of slaves that ships of every nation involved in the traffic had embarked and disembarked, recorded these data on punch cards, and used the computer to organize the information into time series that allowed him to make projections for the periods and branches of the traffic for which data were scarce or altogether unavailable. Curtin’s findings posed profound challenges to the most basic assumptions about the transatlantic traffic. They revealed that the number of Africans forcibly transported to the Americas was substantially lower than what historians had previously assumed. Curtin also demonstrated that while the British were the most active slave traders during the second half of the 18th century , when the trade had reached its height, the Portuguese (and, after independence, Brazilians as well) carried far more enslaved people during the entire period of the transatlantic trade. 42 Furthermore, while the United States boasted the largest slave population by the mid- 19th century , it was a comparatively minor destination for vessels engaged in the trade: the region received less than 5 percent of all captive Africans transported across the Atlantic. 43

Curtin’s assessment of the slave trade inspired researchers to flock to local archives and compile new statistical data on the number and carrying capacity of slaving vessels departing or entering particular ports or regions around the Atlantic basin. Building on Curtin’s solid foundation, these scholars produced dozens of studies on the volume of various branches of the transatlantic trade. Virtually every port that dispatched slaving vessels to Africa or at which enslaved Africans were disembarked in the Americas received scholarly attention. What emerged from this work was an increasingly clear picture of the volume and structure of the Atlantic slave trade at local, regional, and national levels, though the South Atlantic slave trade remained comparatively understudied. 44 Historians of Africa also joined in these discussions, providing tentative assessments of slave exports from regions along the coast of West and West Central Africa. 45 The deepening pool of data that such research generated enabled scholars to use quantitative methods to consider other aspects of the transatlantic trade. How did mortality rates differ on slave vessels from one national carrier to another? 46 Which ports dispatched larger or smaller vessels and what implications did vessel size have for participation in the slave trade? 47 Which types of European commodities were most highly sought after in exchange for African captives? 48 As these questions imply, scholars had for the first time approached the slave trade as its own distinctive topic for research, which had revolutionary consequences for the future of the field.

Time on the Cross had an effect on slavery scholarship that was similar to—indeed, perhaps even greater than—that of Curtin’s, especially among scholars focused on the antebellum US South. Inspired by studies that challenged the view of plantation slavery as unprofitable, Fogel and Engerman, with the help of a team of researchers, set out to quantify nearly every aspect of that institution in the US South, from slaves’ average daily food consumption to the amount of cotton produced in the US South during the antebellum era. 49 Consistent with the cliometricians’ approach, Fogel and Engerman listed ten findings that “contradicted many of the most important propositions in the traditional portrayal of the slave system.” 50 Their most important—and controversial—conclusions were that slavery was a rational system of labor exploitation maintained by planters to maximize their own economic interests; that it was growing on the eve of the Civil War; and that owners were optimistic rather than pessimistic about the future of the slave system during the decade that preceded the war. 51 Further, the authors noted that slave labor was productive. “On average,” the cliometricians argued, a slave was “harder-working and more efficient than his white counterpart.” 52

While cliometrics made important contributions to the study of slavery and the slave trade, the quantitative approach came in for swift and passionate criticism. Curtin’s significantly lower estimates for the number of enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic were met with skepticism; some respondents even charged that his figures trivialized the horrors of the trade. 53 Although praised for its revolutionary interpretation, which earned Fogel the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993 , Fogel and Engerman’s study of the economics of American slavery was almost immediately cast aside as deeply flawed and unworthy of serious scholarly attention. Critics pointed not only to carelessness in the authors’ data collection techniques but also to their mathematical errors, abusive assumptions, and insufficient contextualization of data. 54 Fogel and Engerman, for example, characterized lynching as a “disciplinary tool.” After counting the number of whippings slaves received at one plantation, they concluded that masters there rarely used the punishment. They failed to note, however, the powerful effect that such abuse had on slaves and free people who merely watched or heard the horrible spectacle. 55 More generally, and apart from these specific problems, critics offered a theoretical objection to the quantitative approach, which, they argued, conceived of history as an objective science, with strong persuasive appeal, but which silenced the voices of the individuals victimized by the history of slavery and the slave trade.

Nevertheless, the methodology found followers among historians studying the history of slavery in other parts of the Atlantic. B. W. Higman’s massive two-volume work, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 , remains an unparalleled quantitative analysis of slave communities on the islands under British control. 56 Robert Louis Stein’s The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century also makes substantial use of cliometrics and remains a valuable reference for students of slavery in Martinique and Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti). 57 But outside of the United States, nowhere was cliometrics more popular than Brazil, where scholars of slavery, including Pedro Carvalho de Mello, Herbert Klein, Francisco Vidal Luna, Robert Slenes, and others, applied it to examine many of the same issues that their North American counterparts did: rates of profitability, demographic growth, and economic expansion of slave systems. 58 Africanists also found value in the methodology and employed it as their sources allowed. Patrick Manning, for instance, used demographic modeling to examine the impact of the slave trade on African societies. 59 Philip Curtin compiled quantitative archival sources to analyze the evolution of the economy of Senegambia in the era of the slave trade. 60 Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson traced the circulation of cowries, the shell money of the slave trade, noting that “of all the goods from overseas exchanged for slaves, the shell money touched individuals most widely and often in their day-to-day activities.” 61

In many ways, the gap between quantitative and social and cultural approaches to slavery and the slave trade that opened in the 1970s has continued to divide the field. Concerned that cliometrics sucked the dynamism out of interpretations of the slave community and reduced captives to figures on a spreadsheet, some scholars responded by deploying a variety of new tools to reclaim the humanity and individuality of enslaved actors. Microhistory, an approach that early modern Europeanists developed to recover peasant and other everyday people’s stories, offered one such opportunity. 62 Biography provided another. By reducing its scale of observation and focusing on individuals, families, households, or other small-scale units of analysis, such research underscored the messiness of lived experiences and the creative and often unexpected ways that slaves fashioned worlds for themselves. 63 But such approaches raised a separate set of questions: do biographical accounts reveal typical experiences? In an era when few slaves were literate and even fewer committed their stories to paper, any captives whose accounts survived—in full or in fragments, published or unpublished—were by definition exceptional. Moreover, given the clear overarching framework that decades of quantitative work on the slave trade had developed, one would be hard-pressed to ignore completely the cliometric turn. As two quantitatively minded scholars noted, “it is difficult to assess the significance or representativity of personal narratives or collective biographies, however detailed, without an understanding of the overall movements of slaves of which these individuals’ lives were a part.” 64 While an emphasis on what might be described as the quantitative “big picture” is not by nature antagonistic toward social and cultural historians’ concerns with enslaved people’s lived experiences, the two approaches offer different visions of slavery’s past and often feel as if they sit on opposite ends of the analytical spectrum.

Women, Gender, and Slavery

In the roughly two and a half decades that followed the major interpretive shifts that Kenneth Stampp and Stanley Elkins introduced into scholarship on slavery, the field remained an almost exclusively male one. With rare exceptions, men continued to dominate the profession during this period; their work rarely probed with any degree of sophistication the experiences of women in plantation societies. While second-wave feminism inspired women to enter graduate programs in history in larger numbers beginning in the 1960s, it took time for published work on women’s history, at least as it related to slavery, to appear in earnest. Revealingly, it was not until 1985 that the Library of Congress created a unique catalog heading for “women slaves.” Yet in the three decades since then, women’s (and later gendered) histories of slavery have been published at an ever-increasing pace. Scholars in the 21st century would struggle to take seriously books written about slavery that fail to show an appreciation for the distinctive experiences of men and women in captivity or more generally across plantation societies.

Several forces worked against the production of studies on enslaved women. If sources detailing slaves’ lives are in general sparse, evidence on women slaves is particularly spotty. Deborah Gray White’s pioneering work, Aren’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South , the first book-length study of enslaved women, triumphantly pieced together fragments of information from Federal Writers’ Project interviews with scattered plantation records to breathe life into the historiography of black women. It revealed the powerful structures that served to constrain enslaved women’s lives in the 19th century United States. As White famously concluded: “Black in a white society, slave in a free society, women in a society ruled by men, female slaves had the least formal power and were perhaps the most vulnerable group of Antebellum Americans.” 65 Yet publishers and academic peers did not immediately take seriously work focused on women slaves. White noted, for example, how colleagues in her department warned her that she would be unlikely to earn tenure writing about such a topic. This environment was hardly the type of nurturing one required for sustained research. 66

Though it was an uphill struggle, an influential group of scholars gradually developed a framework for understanding slavery’s realities for women. Early work focused on the foundational tasks of recovering female voices and using them to challenge standard narratives of the plantation system. It made clear the complex and multifaceted roles of women captives—as mothers, wives, fieldworkers, and domestics—and in the process reshaped scholarly understanding of the dynamics of the plantation enterprise. Social relations within plantation households commanded particular attention. Some scholars emphasized bonds between black and white women whose lives, they argued, were conditioned by a shared and oppressive patriarchal culture. Catherine Clinton, for example, characterized white mistresses as “trapped” within plantation society. “Cotton was King, white men ruled, and both white women and slaves served the same master,” she argued. 67 While she sympathized with the plight of plantation mistresses, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, another leading figure of American women’s history, offered a contrary view of gendered relations within Southern households, one that highlighted division. Far from sharing common interests with enslaved women, mistresses clearly benefitted from slavery’s continuation. Their status as white and elite took priority over the bonds of womanhood. 68

The first sustained studies of women’s resistance to slavery also appeared in the 1980s. The historiographical pivot toward day-to-day resistance, which more effectively revealed the sophisticated ways that enslaved Africans and their descendants challenged their captivity, also opened a window of opportunity to view women as disruptors of the slave system in their own right. No longer dismissed as, at most, timid supporters of male-led revolts, women were in this period redefined as “natural rebels” who exploited white perceptions of female docility for their own benefit. Enslaved women, for example, were not generally chained onboard slave vessels, which gave them greater opportunities to organize revolts. Those few women who worked in privileged positions within plantation households took on responsibilities that gave them unique access to white families and exposed them to white vulnerabilities. Cooks could theoretically poison their owners, a threat that seemed all too real given the world of violence that underpinned the plantation. And while the coercive realities of slavery rooted every sexual relationship between white men and black women in violence, some scholars pointed to the possibility that women slaves who endured such abuse saw marginal improvements in their material circumstances or the prospects for their children. 69

Within a decade of the publication of Deborah White’s book, scholarship began to shift away from analyses of women and toward investigations of the worlds that men and women made together under slavery. Scholars of Africa brought valuable insights into this issue, drawing on decades of careful research into local constructions of gender and, in particular, the gendered division of labor within Africa. Women, Africanists illustrated, performed many of the most important tasks in agricultural regimes across the continent. 70 Some historians argued that it was their physical rather than biological roles that led slave owners in Africa to prefer and retain female captives, challenging earlier rigid emphases on women’s childbearing capacities. 71 These polarized debates eventually gave way to local and more nuanced analyses that revealed the complex range of contributions that enslaved women made to African societies: Women had children that increased the sizes of households; they cultivated and marketed crops that fed and enriched kingdoms and other less centralized societies; they served as bodyguards to local elites; and they even bought, retained, and traded their own captives. 72 If slavery in Africa was widespread, it was precisely because women had such wide-ranging productive and reproductive value.

These insights had wider implications for the study of the slave trade and the Atlantic World. African conceptions of gender conditioned the supply to Europeans of men and women captives along the coast, illustrating the close relationship between gender issues and economic concerns. 73 Gendered identities that emerged in Africa were adapted and transformed in the Americas depending on demographic, economic, or cultural concerns. 74 Whereas in low-density slave systems, African women and their descendants might follow work regimes that resembled those of their homelands, the gendered division of labor in large slave societies often more closely reflected European attitudes toward women and work. 75 Grappling with such complex realities required historians to dig into local records across a staggering variety of geographic settings. It was in that context that scholars began to broaden their horizons and embrace an increasingly Atlantic orientation—a trend that mirrored broader changes in studies on slavery and the slave trade in the 1990s. 76

The Atlanticization of Slavery Studies

It may seem redundant to identify a shift toward the Atlanticization of slavery studies. Enslaved Africans, after all, were brought to the Americas from across the Atlantic. How, then, could these studies be anything but Atlantic? The reality is that historians have generally looked at the institution through rather parochial eyes, as something limited by regional, national, or cultural boundaries. There were several early and noteworthy exceptions to this trend. Indeed, calls for studies to look at the societies surrounding the ocean as an integral unit of analysis date as far back as the late 1910s. Several scholars took up that call, the most notable perhaps being Fernand Braudel in his 1949 masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II . 77 However, in an increasingly polarized world, the idea faced significant resistance and obstacles. Following World War II, Atlanticization could be easily read as a stand-in for imperialism or westernization. It was only toward the end of the Cold War that historians were able to move past these ideological barriers and understand the value of looking at the Atlantic as “the scene of a vast interaction rather than merely the transfer of Europeans onto American shores,” an interaction that was the result of “a sudden and harsh encounter between two old worlds that transformed both and integrated them into a single New World.” 78

This realization deeply shaped subsequent studies of the history of slavery and the slave trade, some of them reviving earlier debates about cultural continuity and change in the African diaspora. One of the most successful examples to focus on the influence of Africans in shaping slavery on both sides of the ocean is John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World . In it, Thornton argues that slavery was the only form of “private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law.” 79 Consequently, African political and economic elites had significant leverage over the institution, giving them some control over the transatlantic traffic. Thornton’s argument offered a new logic for African participation in the slave trade while also providing a new interpretation of African culture in Africa and the Americas. Although enslaved Africans came from several different regions and societies, Thornton stresses the similarities between their cultures and languages. Based on research on the traffic’s organization, he notes that slave ships rarely purchased captives in more than one port and that they normally sailed along very specific routes. 80 Such an organization favored the transmission of some of the cultural practices enslaved Africans brought with them to the Americas. Nevertheless, Thornton points out, “slaves were not militant cultural nationalists who sought to preserve everything African but rather showed great flexibility in adapting and changing their culture.” 81 His approach thus emphasized the systematic linkages that the transatlantic slave trade forged while leaving space for creolization within slave communities.

Another important contribution that emphasized cultural transformation was Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America . 82 Looking to identify the first generations of blacks who chartered their descendants’ fate in mainland North America, Berlin located them among a group he called “Atlantic creoles,” people who traced their beginnings to the earliest encounters between Europeans and Africans on the west coast of Africa, but who ultimately emerged from the world that Europe, Africa, and the Americas collectively created. Cosmopolitan by experience or circumstance, familiar with the commerce of the Atlantic, and fluent in its languages and cultures, these individuals laid down the foundations for black life in the New World. 83 They arrived not as Africans desperate to replicate their culture, or flexible to adapt, but rather as profoundly changed individuals. Although they permeated most of the colonial societies of the Americas, Berlin claims that in mainland North America at least they were soon swept away by subsequent generations born under the expansion of large-scale commodity production, which ended the porous slave system of the early years of European and African settlement. 84

Although these were important contributions, the Atlanticization of slavery studies opened many more avenues to understand the experiences of Africans and their descendants during the years of bondage. It allowed for comparisons between Africans’ trajectories with those of other players in the formation of the Atlantic world. Paul Gilroy’s well-known Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness is in a way a precursor, expressing “a desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity.” 85 Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan’s edited volume, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal , views a handful of European nations—Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and the Netherlands—as creating this new world centered around the Atlantic, but it also places Africans as well as the indigenous populations of the Americas in comparative perspective. 86 One immediate problem with this approach is that it conflates several hundreds of groups, nations, or peoples into a single category, “Africans,” a term that gained traction only as the slave trade expanded and, consequently, recognized by just a fraction of the people it intended to describe.

A more adequate approach, favored by the Atlantic framework of analysis, would focus on specific African regions or peoples. Here historians have made some progress, mainly in the form of edited volumes. Linda M. Heywood’s edited book, Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora , looks at how Kikongo and Mbundu speakers, often times grouped under designations such as Angola, Benguela, or Congo in places in the Americas as distant from one another as Havana, Montevideo, New Orleans, Recife, and Port au Prince, culturally shaped the African diaspora. 87 Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz’s volume attempts a similar approach, centered on the societies of precolonial Ghana, mainly the Asante and Fante. 88 Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs’s book, by contrast, focuses on a single African people, the Yoruba. 89 Not only were they a sizable group forced into the Atlantic, but they also left an indelible mark in several regions of the Americas. Interestingly, the Yoruba started calling themselves as such, that is, through their language name, only years after the transatlantic slave trade had ended, probably as a result of religious encounters leading up to the colonization of Nigeria. 90 During the period of the slave trade, the Yoruba lived divided into a number of states like Oyo, Egba, Egbado, Ijebu, and Ijesa, located in Southwest Nigeria, and were called outside the region by different terms, such as Nagô in Bahia, Lucumí in Cuba, and Aku in Sierra Leone. 91

Not only did the Atlantic approach contribute to the development of new historical frameworks and perspectives, it also encouraged historians to use traditional sources and methods in more creative and interesting ways. In Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation , Rebecca J. Scott and Jean Hébrard trace the paper trail that members of the Tinchant family left behind to reconstruct over multiple generations the saga of an African woman and her family from slavery to freedom. 92 In addition to tracing individuals and families, historians have also paid greater attention to cultural practices embedded in traditions of agriculture, healing, and warfare, which were disseminated around the Atlantic during the period of the slave trade. Judith A. Carney, for example, looked at the African origins of rice cultivation in the Americas, connecting particular rice growing regions in Upper Guinea to their counterparts in places like South Carolina in the United States and Maranhão in Bazil; James H. Sweet examined the intellectual history of the Atlantic world by following the uses and appropriations of African healing practices from Dahomey to Bahia and Portugal; and Manuel Barcia explored the similarities and differences between warfare techniques employed by West African captives, especially from Oyo, in Bahia, and Cuba. 93 Although urban history has a long tradition among historians, most studies have focused on cities and ports in Europe and the Americas. 94 Historians, including Robin Law, Kristin Mann, Mariana Cândido, and Randy Sparks, however, are redressing that imbalance with studies focused on African ports—Ouidah, Lagos, Benguela, and Anomabu—that emerged or expanded during the slave trade era. 95

Finally, although removed from the Atlantic, the very effort of looking at slavery and the slave trade from a broader perspective has influenced studies on these issues in other parts of the world or even within a global framework. Research on the intra-American slave trade has gained a renewed interest with publications like Greg O’Malley’s Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 . 96 The same could be said of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean with works like Richard Allen’s European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 . 97 One central debate that has recently been revived concerns the relationship between capitalism and slavery. 98 Inspired by Eric Williams’s path-breaking work and, more recently, by Dale Tomich’s concept of “second slavery,” which highlights the creation of new zones of slavery in the United States and other parts of the continent during the 19th century , historians, including Sven Beckert, Edward Baptist, and Seth Rockman, are now enthusiastically assessing the connections between the expansion of slavery in that period and the formation of global financial markets and industrial economies in Europe and North America. 99 Clearly, the scholarly potential occasioned by the Atlanticization of slavery studies is still unfolding and should not be underestimated.

Into the Digital Era

The digital revolution sparked a radical change across the historical profession that has had particularly important ramifications for the study of slavery and the slave trade. Despite the major theoretical, methodological, and interpretive differences that divided scholars throughout the 20th century , the means of scholarly communication and dissemination of research during that period remained virtually unchanged: books, journal articles, and very occasionally interviews, opinion pieces, and documentary films enabled scholars to explain their work to each other and, to a much lesser extent, a wider public. The emergence of the internet and its rapid infiltration of academic and everyday life has disrupted this landscape, opening new and once inconceivable opportunities to engage in open-ended inquiry unencumbered by publication deadlines, and to share the fruits of that labor with anyone who has access to the web. The digital turn has also inspired scholars to offer creative visual interpretations of the history of both slavery and the slave trade. Perhaps most importantly, the web has provided a site for the presentation and preservation of digitized archival sources that would previously have been accessible to only those people with the means to visit the repositories that hold them. While the consequences of the digital turn are being actively discussed and debated, it is clear that digital history is here to stay.

Digital projects focusing on slavery and the slave trade emerged in the 1990s and tended to be somewhat rudimentary in both their aims and scope, reflecting the limited capacity of the internet itself and, perhaps more appropriately, scholars’ limited comfort using it. These projects had as their main purpose the collection and presentation of primary sources—scanning and loading onto a web page images of captives, owners, slave ships, and forts that teachers or students had collected for pedagogical purposes. Among the first large-scale initiatives to bring together these scattered materials was Jerome Handler and Michael A. Tuite’s website, The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas . 100 Created first as a portal to search through images that Handler had used in lectures, this website grew exponentially over time. From the roughly 200 images organized into ten categories with which the site first launched, it now provides access to 1,280 images arranged under eighteen topical headings. Other digital projects focused on the presentation of scanned archival documents. Libraries and historical societies used the web to advertise their holdings and entice interested viewers to further examine their collections. Many of these sites were free of charge, democratizing access to rare scholarly records—at least for those individuals who had access to the internet.

As the technology associated with digitization has improved, a number of organizations have dedicated vast resources to scaling up digital projects. Though its focus goes well beyond slavery and the slave trade, Google Books has been among the most prominent players in the field. 101 Beginning in the early 2000s, Google quietly began scanning published volumes held in major academic libraries. By 2015 , Google estimated that it had scanned 25 million books—nearly one-fifth of the total number of unique titles ever published. Though copyright laws limit full access to the collection, Google Books is nevertheless unparalleled in its scope and offers unrivaled access to published sources on slavery from the pre-copyright era. Other companies have taken more targeted approaches. The Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice portal, for example, offers access to original archival materials focused primarily, though not exclusively, on the Atlantic World that covers the period between 1490 and 2007 . The project enables users to interface with scans of primary sources and use keyword searches to find relevant materials. 102

As this implies, digitization initiatives have not been limited to the Western world, even if, at times controversially, Western institutions have funded the majority of them. Indeed, one of the enduring consequences of the Atlanticization of slavery scholarship has been the growing dialogue it helped generate between scholars living in or working on areas outside of the Anglo-American world. The British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme is one example: it has supported the digitization of entire archival collections in repositories situated in developing countries, where resources for preservation are extremely limited. 103 Local archivists have become valuable collaborators; young students with interests in digital preservation have gained important training and exposure to scanning methods and technologies. Since the early 2000s, major digital initiatives have been launched or completed in places as wide-ranging as Brazil, Cameroon, Cuba, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Saint Helena, with important implications for slavery scholarship. 104 One such example is the Slave Societies Digital Archive , directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbuilt University, which preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and people of African descent. 105 Since 2007 or so, a truly global conversation about slavery and its long-term effects has been nurtured by more widespread access to relevant archival sources.

The growing sophistication of the internet and its users has transformed digital projects on slavery and the slave trade. Websites now go well beyond mere presentations of scanned primary sources. They tend to emphasize interactivity, encouraging site visitors to search through and manipulate data to generate new research insights. Some projects employ “crowdsourcing,” partnering with the public or soliciting data or assistance from site visitors to further a project’s reach. African Origins , for instance, provides to the public some 91,000 records of captives rescued from slave ships in the 19th century , including their indigenous African names. 106 Historians, with the help of other researchers, particularly those people familiar with African languages, have been identifying to which languages these names belong and thereby tracing the inland, linguistic origins of thousands of slaves forced into the Atlantic during the 19th century . 107 This has helped expand insights into slavery and the slave trade well beyond the limited confines of the ivory tower. Moreover, the internet has the added benefit of providing a space for individuals who are passionate about history but whose careers limit their abilities to publish books and articles to share their knowledge with a large pool of readers.

Few digital initiatives have done more for slavery scholarship than Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database . The Voyages site is the product of decades of collaborative research into the transatlantic slave trade. Building on Curtin’s Census , it now provides access to information on nearly 36,000 unique slave voyages that operated between the 1510s and 1867 . The site is made possible by the basic reality that, given the vast amount of money they laid out, owners and operators of slave vessels carefully documented many aspects of slaving excursions. Some of the details captured in written records lend themselves to coding and quantification: the names of captains and owners; the places to which slave ships went; the numbers of enslaved people loaded onto and forced off of slave ships; the ratios of males to females and adults to children among captives; and the prices paid for enslaved people. The vast amount of data to which the site provides free access has enabled scholars focused on virtually any aspect of the slave trade or slavery to benefit from and contribute to the Voyages project. Among its most important features is the site’s capacity to expand or revise its records based on contributions from users who uncover new or contradictory evidence. 108

Based in part on the Voyages model—or, in some cases, as a critical response to it—since the 2000s, historical research has witnessed the creation and expansion of important digital projects about enslaved Africans and their descendants. Slave Biographies: Atlantic Database Network , a project spearheaded by Gwendolyn M. Hall and Walter Hawthorne from Michigan State University, offers an open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. 109 Liberated Africans , developed by Henry Lovejoy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, brings together information about the lives of some 250,000 Africans rescued from slave ships between 1807 and 1896 . 110 Final Passages , a project under development by Greg O’Malley and Alex Borucki at the University of California system, plans to provide a database of the intra-American slave trade to be deployed on the same platform as Slave Voyages . 111 And what to say of Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade , winner of a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation? The project seeks to bring such digital resources together by focusing on individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in slave trading at any time between the beginning and the end of the transatlantic slave trade. 112 It is no doubt the epitome in amassing and interconnecting historical data. Conversations about long-term institutional support for these sites and the data on which they are based—a central and underappreciated aspect of digital history—have also begun to take place in earnest. That they are happening at all is indicative of the revolutionary impact that the digital turn has had on the profession.

All in all, it is no easy task to synthesize decades of research on the history of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. Although relatively new in comparison to more established fields of Western history, it has grown quickly, amassing a significant body of literature that incorporates some of the most sophisticated methodologies available. Historians have proven so adaptable in their approaches and uses of sources that it is nearly impossible to indicate the direction in which the field is moving. Moreover, in the wake of movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, public interest has turned again to the complex and thorny issue of reparations. Consequently, historians have had an unprecedented opportunity to engage with the public on this question and related ones concerning how societies represent and memorialize the history of slavery. In 2013 , Laurent Dubois noticed in an opinion piece in The New York Times that calls for reparations for slavery and the slave trade in the Caribbean offered an important opportunity to face the multiple ways in which the past continues to shape the present. 113 In the following year, Ta-Nehisi Coates published a cover article in The Atlantic making a powerful case for reparations in the United States. According to him, “until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.” 114 A leading advocate for public memorializing of slavery, Ana Lúcia Araújo, has recently published a book dedicated exclusively to the issue of reparations for slavery and the slave trade. 115 While the most recent iteration of this debate draws on fresh materials and perspectives, Araújo notes that “since the eighteenth century, enslaved and freed individuals started conceptualizing the idea of reparations in correspondence, pamphlets, public speeches, slave narratives, and judicial claims, written in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.” 116 That such issues continue to spark passionate debates and scholarship provides a strong indication of the enduring relevance of slavery’s past to the shaping of the present.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Alex Borucki, David Eltis, Greg O’Malley, and Nicholas Radburn for their comments on earlier versions of this article. All interpretations and conclusions reached here are, of course, the authors’ responsibility.

Slavery Then and Now: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Modern Day Human Trafficking: What Can We Learn From Our Past?

This resource delves into the enduring consequences of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, drawing parallels between historical slavery and modern human trafficking. It emphasizes the need for a comprehensive understanding of the past to address contemporary issues and advocates for empathy, activism, and various strategies to combat present-day slavery.

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Collection Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938

Slave narratives from slavery to the great depression, slave narratives during slavery and after.

The Slave Narrative Collection represents the culmination of a literary tradition that extends back to the eighteenth century, when the earliest American slave narratives began to appear. The greatest vogue of this genre occurred during the three decades of sectional controversy that preceded the Civil War. The avowed intention of the antebellum narrative was to challenge the roseate portrait of slavery painted by its apologists. The proslavery justification of the "peculiar institution" alleged that it was a benevolent system and that the position of the slave was more secure than that of the Northern wage earner. The slave, according to George Fitzhugh, one of the most vigorous of the proslavery propagandists, "was happy as a human can be." 3

But the stereotype of the "contented slave" was contradicted by the many fugitive slaves who sought refuge from bondage in the North and in Canada. Their often sensational revelations of the realities of slave life provided a persuasive challenge to Southern justifications of slavery. During the antebellum period thousands of autobiographical and biographical accounts of slave experiences were published and generally promoted and distributed by abolitionist propagandists. These narratives enjoyed immense popularity, were eagerly sought for publication by abolitionist journals, and proved financially successful. While it is difficult to weigh their precise influence on the antislavery crusade, there is little doubt that they effectively countered the propaganda of proslavery apologists.

The vogue for the slave narrative waned after the Civil War. The typical antebellum narrative had served as an exposé of the horrors of the "peculiar institution," but the Civil War settled the issue of slavery and destroyed the narrative's raison d'être . The sensational narrative of prewar vintage lingered on, but its publication after the war failed to elicit the same sympathy and enthusiasm. A nation weary of war and intent upon reconciliation expressed little desire to be reminded of the realities of life before the war. Most of the narratives that did appear in the half-century following Reconstruction--their number meager when compared to the plethora of antebellum narratives--reflected a radically different conception of slave life. Now the narratives were employed almost exclusively as a nostalgic and sentimental reaffirmation of the "plantation legend" popularized by Southern local colorists. While local-color treatment of the oral tradition of the ex-slave helped to sustain an interest in African-American folklore during the early years of the twentieth century, this alone proved insufficient to arouse a more general interest in recording ex-slaves' accounts of life under slavery. As the ranks of former slaves dwindled, so did the possibility of preserving the "inside view" of slavery that their testimonies provided.

The Twentieth Century Revival

The late 1920s and 1930s witnessed a revival of interest in slave narratives. During this period several independent projects to secure ex-slave testimonies were undertaken. What most clearly distinguished these from earlier efforts was their sociological character. The single-minded moralism that had pervaded earlier narratives diminished substantially. The typical supplanted the dramatic as the primary focus of inquiry; detailed questionnaires were designed to obtain a catalogue of information on the daily round of slave life. The primary goal in each instance was simply to get aged African Americans to discuss the range of their experiences and impressions of life under the slave regime. The Federal Writers' Project study that produced the Slave Narrative Collection was the most ambitious and comprehensive of several such efforts.

The reasons for the resurgence of interest in slave narratives are both numerous and complex. With the number of surviving ex-slaves rapidly diminishing by the 1930s, the time was imminent when their testimonies could no longer be obtained. This fact was often cited as a motivation by those compiling the narratives. However, while it goes far toward explaining the sense of urgency that inspired the several narrative-gathering efforts, it is insufficient to account for the heightened awareness of the narratives' value at this particular time. The underlying sources of this interest must be sought elsewhere.

Slave Narratives and the New Debate about Slavery

Just as the antebellum slave narratives had gained prominence in reaction to the Southern defense of slavery, so interest in the latter-day slave narrative was stimulated by the dominant attitudes toward the slave regime that prevailed in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Seldom before or since has racism been so pervasive and so academically respectable in the United States. The assumption of the innate and inherited inferiority of non-Anglo-Saxon racial and ethnic groups permeated and dominated white intellectual and popular thought. Social, scientific, and historical thought both mirrored and reinforced this racism.

By far the most profound influence upon the historical study of slavery during this period was the writings of Ulrich B. Phillips, whose monumental American Negro Slavery established him as the leading authority on the subject. 4 American Negro Slavery was so comprehensive, its scholarship so exacting, and its racial assumptions so closely attuned to those then prevailing, that it "succeeded in neutralizing almost every assumption of the anti-slavery tradition." 5 The portrait of slavery that emerged from this work bore a striking resemblance to that espoused by proslavery apologists before the Civil War. It minimized the severity of American slavery, extolled its civilizing and Christianizing functions, and reasserted the notion that the slave was submissive rather than defiant. The overall effect was a verification of the "plantation myth" and a confirmation of what Stanley M. Elkins has termed the "Sambo" image of the slave.

Against this background, the revival of interest in the slave narrative reflected a post-World War I revitalization of African-American culture that was instituted and promoted in large measure by blacks themselves. Most dramatically manifested in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, this revitalization was marked by a concerted quest for a "usable" past, one that would impart a sense of self-respect, dignity, and identity to African Americans. One result was the serious study of black history, spearheaded by the unremitting efforts and inspiration of W. E. B. DuBois and of Carter G. Woodson, the energetic founder, editor, and moving spirit behind the Journal of Negro History . The emergence of an increasing number of black scholars signaled the demise of black acquiescence to the prevailing white interpretations of the African-American past.

The authority of Phillips's interpretation therefore did more than rekindle interest in the subject of slavery. Although accepted as authoritative in most academic circles, his sympathetic view was indignantly contested by the new generation of black scholars who, as the slaves' blood and spiritual descendants, could not approach slavery in the spirit of erudition alone. Just as Phillips's Southern background and heritage had exerted a profound and pervasive influence upon his view of slavery, so the portrait espoused by African Americans was derived from a tradition perpetuated and enriched by the accounts of those who had experienced life under the slave regime. When Phillips spurned the use of ex-slave reminiscences as historical data, he rejected the validity of the very source upon which many of the basic assumptions of African-American scholars were ultimately founded.

Phillips's aversion to using slave narratives as appropriate sources of historical data also precluded the study of slavery written from the standpoint of the slave, since the sources he employed were inadequate to answer the question "What was it like to be a slave?" The recognition that only individuals who had lived under the slave regime could adequately answer this question contributed substantially to the surge of interest in obtaining the testimonies of former slaves.

Slave Narratives and the Waning Authority of Racism

The discovery of African-American culture during the 1920s and 1930s engaged the attention of a growing number of whites as well as blacks. White writers found in African-American life and culture a fresh source of artistic materials, and serious treatment of black culture was a distinguishing feature of the Southern literary renaissance that flourished in the 1920s. Interest in black art and entertainment was reflected in the acceptance of jazz by white musicians and its popularity among white audiences. Fascination with black folklore, which extended back to the nineteenth century, increased significantly during the twenties and was enlivened by innovations such as the unique brand of folk sociology pioneered by Howard W. Odum at the University of North Carolina.

This burgeoning interest in African-American culture was enhanced immeasurably by the rapidly expanding disciplines of anthropology and sociology. While social-scientific thought was not immune to the popular racial preconceptions of the day, the authority of such doctrines was weakened by the impact of intellectual currents from within the social sciences themselves. The concept of culture, more than any other single idea, contributed to the erosion of respectable racism. Although explicitly accepted only in avant-garde circles during the twenties, the culture concept had been an implicit and sometimes contradictory component of the working assumptions of many social scientists even at the zenith of the vogue of racist thought. Facilitated by the decline of racialist explanations and by an increased sophistication in methodological techniques, social-scientific attention to race and African-American culture steadily increased throughout the twenties and thirties. The convergence of these several currents fostered a climate receptive to efforts to obtain personal testimonies concerning antebellum slave life, and it was from within this cultural milieu that interest in the collection of ex-slave narratives arose.

Collections That Led the Way

The earliest of the endeavors to secure interviews with ex-slaves was initiated in 1929 under private auspices when separate and independent projects began simultaneously at Fisk University, Southern University, and Prairie View State College. The projects at Southern and at Prairie View were directed by John B. Cade, a historian whose interest in using the accounts of ex-slaves was initially aroused by the controversy over the nature of the slave regime and, in particular, by Ulrich B. Phillips's contention that slaves had been contented with their lot. Cade later summarized the materials collected under his direction at Southern in the article "Out of the Mouths of Ex-Slaves," and its success stimulated him to undertake a similar effort at Prairie View during the mid-1930s. 6

The Fisk collection of slave narratives evolved as an unanticipated consequence of research directed by Charles S. Johnson, who had established the Social Science Institute at Fisk in 1928. One of Johnson's earliest projects, an extensive community study of the African-American neighborhoods adjacent to Fisk in Nashville, foreshadowed the influence his research training at the University of Chicago's renowned Department of Sociology was to exert on the Fisk collection of slave narratives. In that study, Johnson's research design relied heavily on personal interviews, and Ophelia Settle of the Institute's research staff interviewed a large number of former slaves. Johnson quickly recognized the value of preserving such firsthand accounts of slave life and urged that a concerted effort be made to obtain them. In addition to those in Nashville, interviews were conducted in rural Tennessee and Kentucky and later as an integral component of Johnson's study of Macon County, Alabama, which formed the substance of his analysis of the plantation as a social institution. 7 These interviews proved so satisfactory that Johnson planned to publish a volume based on an analysis of the one hundred documents Settle had obtained. Although the plan was never realized, the Institute's Unwritten History of Slavery reproduced approximately one-third of the narratives. 8

George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (Richmond, Va., 1854), 246. [ Return to text ]
Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery, A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York, 1918; reprint Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1996). [ Return to text ]
Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959), 11. [ Return to text ]
John B. Cade, "Out of the Mouths of Ex-Slaves," Journal of Negro History , XX (July 1935). [ Return to text ]
Charles S. Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation (Chicago, 1934); see also E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago, 1939). [ Return to text ]
The Fisk University interviews were originally published in mimeographed form: Ophelia Settle Egypt, J. Masuoka, and Charles S. Johnson, Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Accounts of Negro Ex-Slaves (Nashville, 1945). A second volume, Fisk University Social Science Institute, God Struck Me Dead: Religion Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Ex-Slaves (Nashville, 1945), was also part of this project and was published at the same time. Both documents have been reprinted as volumes 18 and 19, respectively, of George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn., 1972-79). God Struck Me Dead has also been reprinted by Clifton H. Johnson, ed. (Philadelphia, 1969). [ Return to text ]

James W. Loewen (1942-2021)

We mourn the loss of our friend and colleague and remain committed to the work he began.

Essay 2: How to Teach Slavery

Recognizing that inaccurate history often subtly promotes continuing white supremacy, the National Education Association (NEA) commissioned these articles and has posted some of them in slightly different form at its website . I thank Harry Lawson and others at NEA for the commission, for editorial suggestions, and for other assistance.

To understand our country, Americans have to understand the role slavery has played. Understandably, the topic can make teachers nervous. But teachers who leave it out, cover it hastily, or soften its harshness inadvertently minimize its importance. This makes history white, not right. Most textbooks now show the horror of slavery and its impact on black America. However, they remain largely silent about its impact on white America, North or South. Slavery’s twin legacies to the present are the social and economic inferiority it conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it impregnated within white minds and inside our culture. Both still haunt our society. Unlike slavery, racism is not over yet. Textbooks have trouble treating honestly any problem that has not already been solved. The key insight students need is: racism arose in part as the rationale for slavery. (It also rationalized the taking of the land from indigenous peoples.) Montesquieu, the French social philosopher who had a deep influence on American democracy, summed up the role of racism ironically: “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [slaves] to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christian.” Here Montesquieu is presaging Leon Festinger’s idea of cognitive dissonance — that people mold their ideas to rationalize their actions. People are not born racist. Little babies have no idea that people come divided into different races. Indeed, biologically, there is only one race – the human race. History divided us up into races. Slavery had existed long before racism, of course. Europeans enslaved each other, Africans each other, Native Americans each other. Previous slaveries hardly treated enslaved persons justly, but slaves sometimes did get traded back to their home people. Or they might eventually marry someone from the host society, thus escaping bondage. Around 1450, however, Europeans put together cannons, ships that could sail against the wind, and other social and physical inventions and proceeded down the coast of Africa with a newfound military superiority. The racial slavery that resulted offered almost no way out. Moreover, one’s children and their children were also enslaved forever. Such blatant injustice required stronger justification — hence racism. By the 1850s, most whites considered blacks so inferior that slavery was appropriate for them. This view of African Americans was not just Southern and did not just go away in 1865, when slavery was outlawed. The very essence of what we have inherited from slavery is the idea that it is appropriate, even “natural,” for whites to be on top, blacks on the bottom. The struggle over slavery and white supremacy is the dominant single theme in American history. Most antebellum mansions, North and South, were built by slaves or from profits derived from the slave and cotton trades. Black-white relations became the central issue in the Civil War, which killed as many Americans as all our other wars combined. The political and social contest between blacks and white supremacists was the main issue of Reconstruction. The Nadir of race relations (1890-1940) then led to the ongoing struggle for civil rights. It is critical that students today understand all this. Unfortunately, I have yet to read a textbook that connects history to racism. Uninformed notions may rush in to fill the resulting analytic vacuum. White students may conclude that all societies have always been racist, perhaps by nature, so racism is all right. Black students may conclude that all whites have always been racist, perhaps by nature, so to be anti-white is all right. History is the antidote to these fallacies, beginning with an accurate portrayal of the relationship between slavery then and racism now.

Es sential Reading

Loewen, “Methods for Teaching Slavery to High School Students and College Undergraduates in the United States,” in Bethany Jay and Cynthia Lyerly, eds., Understanding and Teaching American Slavery (Madison: U of WI Press, 2016), 9-30, tells the four key problems enslaved persons faced and also suggests a metaconversation to hold with students to start a discussion of slavery.

All essays in the Correct(ed) series: Introducing the Series Essay 2: How to Teach Slavery Essay 3: How to Teach Secession Essay 4: Teaching about the Confederacy and Race Relations Essay 5: Confederate Public History Essay 6: Reconstruction Essay 7: Getting History Right Can Decrease Racism Toward Mexican Americans Essay 8: Problematic Words about Native Americans Essay 9: How and When Did the First People Get Here? Essay 10: The Pantheon of Explorers Essay 11: Columbus Day Essay 12: How Thanksgiving Helps Keep Us Ethnocentric Essay 13: American Indians as Mascots Essay 14: How to Teach the Nadir of Race Relations Essay 15: Teaching the Civil Rights Movement Essay 16: Getting Students Thinking about the Future

Poems & Poets

Slavery -- Then and Now

BY John S. O'Connor

Let's say you don't take the North Pole worskshop to be a metaphor for the sweat-shop oppression of slighted people everywhere. Fine, have it your way.

Just before the holidays my students and I were reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and considering examples of modern-day slavery. Here's a link to a radio broadcast on the topic from NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5510902. (Just in time for gift giving, I know. Let the party begin!)

I am always struck by the brilliance of Douglass' writing, but nowhere more so than in his breath-taking paragraph about his grandmother. After quoting from "the slave poet," Whittier, Douglass outdoes the former with a paragraph of extra-ordinary beauty and pathos regarding his grandmother's expulsion from the "safety" of the plantation:

The hearth is desolate. The children, the unconscious children, who once sang and danced in her presence, are gone. She gropes her way, in the darkness of age, for a drink of water. Instead of the voices of her children, she hears by day the moans of the dove, and by night the screams of the hideous owl. All is gloom. The grave is at the door. And now, when weighed down by the pains and aches of old age, when the head inclines to the feet, when the beginning and ending of human existence meet, and helpless infancy and painful old age combine together -- at this time, this most needful time, the time of exercise of that tenderness and affection which children only can exercise towards a declining parent -- my poor old grandmother, the devoted mother of 12 children, is left all alone, in yonder little hut, before a few dim embers. She stands - she sits - she staggers - she falls - she groans - she dies - and there are none of her children or grandchildren present, to wipe from her wrinkled brow the cold sweat of death or to place beneath the sod her fallen remains. Will not a righteous God visit for these things?

We also examined Robert Pinsky's poem "Shirt" and then I asked students to discover the orgins of something they were wearing. Here are a couple of examples;

Spirited Shirt by MollyH.

Soft, full of school-spirit, a kelly green shirt Bought in the bookstore For a student assembly On a busy day in May

Worn on Spirit Days Or before a big game Or on a random rainy morning When no other outfit comes to mind

The tag, rather inconspicuously Reads “made in Colombia”. Sí, a country on the colorful maps Of my Spanish textbook

But whose hands handled and crafted my spirited shirt?

496,900 pesos per month $250 American Dollars 50% of that goes to her food She sows on the machine

she lives in fear of joining a union 37 Colombian unionists were murdered in 2007 she doesn’t want to be next she has no choice

The U.S.-Colombia Trade agreement mandates “acceptable conditions of work with respect to minimum wages, hours of work, and occupational safety and health.”

But to her It’s just ink on a paper On a congressman’s desk Insignificant As the kelly green fabric I wore on Spirit Day

Size Large Soft Lavender by Maeli G

Size Large soft lavender, Folded neatly atop a pile of Polyester and cotton blend, Blended, muted colors translated into Muted screams As the mother awakes To find her child, Slumbering in soft lavender sheets From which she will not, Cannot, rise. She was three years old: Three for one third Of the slumbering babies. One third never to light Five candles Without being hungry.

The sleeves, their ridges Choking the wrist -- They’re the style and the time. Choking the wrists Of the orphaned boy who turned To the maras, The gangs and the guns, And was caught in the raid. There were twelve years wasted In a cold prison cell For his little pouch of marijuana, His wealth, His only chance. His only family. Through the stone walls, he heard The maras make their war On the obedient, Suspected in darker, warmer nights Than those in hell. He’s sitting on a cot In hell’s spare room, now, with A wish for brotherhood, Wasting twelve years For the raid and the pouch And the sleeve.

The ribs around the neck, Around her neck, Where the border police held her for a time After they pulled her from her sanctuary, The back of a white van. She had hidden there, Under the blankets, Bathed in a polyester blend of Soft lavender. She had dreamed of thirty thousand Failures before her. A population exporting Los Angeles crime culture and Bringing it home, To that orphaned boy’s only family And the guns and the fists And the only money to be found Anywhere. Where a silence comes Only when babies cease to cry, When the fog falls Over dark allies where The police wait for orphans to make mistakes. To make seven hundred And twenty-one mistakes, One for each arrest. Twenty kilograms, two kilograms, Three tons, seven tons, Four million pills, And the man with the tan face And the black mustache Begs for legalization. The mother of the babe In the lavender sheets Works away at her station, Pricked fingers but no sleep For lonely beauties, Hungry bellies, Churning out yards of lavender. Lying in the dust.

I was cold, and I picked up A sweatshirt at the Walgreens On the corner. It cost me ten dollars For size Large soft lavender.

John S. O'Connor's poems have appeared in places such as Poetry East and RHINO . He has written two books...

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Slavery: Then and Now

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: History

When we think about slavery many things come to our mind. There are many different ways one can describe slavery. If you were to look it up in a dictionary it would say that a slave is “one who is owned and forced into service by another,” this was the definition given in the Webster’s Dictionary. But then again if you were to look it up in the Oxford Dictionary the definition given here is of one who is an “obsessive devotee.” On the whole slavery can have different meanings to different people. The meaning of slavery has a different meaning today than it did years ago. As Alex Haley wrote, slavery was difficult to explain years ago because it was going on at the time. Today when someone says the word slavery more than half of the people would think of plantations and people being forced to work the land and being mistreated. But what do you say to a little child who comes up to you and asks you want slavery is? In today’s society we can take the word slavery and put it to the modern days. Would one say that slavery only existed years ago when plantation owners would buy people to force them to do hard labor and mistreat them, or would one mention about the slavery that goes on in today’s society? What about the people who are forced to do hard labor like many years ago?

Many people do not realize it but indeed we do have modern-day slavery. What is today’s modern day slavery? There are several things that can be put into today’s slavery. This is one problem that is often over looked in today’s society. It may not have as much impact as it did years ago, but if we stop and think about it, this problem is still as harsh and crude as it was years ago. I would think that up to some extent the problem has grown now because it is in fact often overlooked.

The Essay on Slavery Slaves People Equiano

Oppression and cruelty; just two of the many words used to describe slavery. However no word or words can be used to truly illustrate the hardships and tough times that the slaves went through. In the time of slavery, innocent people were taken from their homes and separated from their families to be sold as workers to people around the world. They did not just work, similar to modern times, they ...

For example in Sudan, as a result of an Islamic vs. Christian civil war, women and children that are mostly black and Christian are captured in raids. They are later sold as chattel slaves in “modern day slave markets”. Now the question that I have is, “ Does a human life have a price?” Well according to these people it does, and the price that they decided to put on a human life has been as low as fifteen dollars. Slaves who attempt to run away are castrated or branded like animals. Have we learned nothing from our history? It is said that history repeats itself and thus we should learned from it. Obviously some people have not and are repeating the same harsh mistakes that we have supply worked so hard to fix.

Another example of modern-day slavery occurs in Brazil. In Brazil, poverty-stricken young men are promised good work by harvesting crops. Impressed by the opportunity to better their lives they agree to for the work. Instead of going to work they are trucked hundreds of miles to isolated jungles and forced at gunpoint to clear rainforest. I don’t know about you, but harvesting and clearing up the rainforest are totally different things.

In Haiti men are also trucked but these men are trucked across the island of Hispaniola to the Dominican Republic and forced to cut sugar cane. The men in Haiti do not have it as bad though; sure they get paid for working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. How much? Well their wages, if they could be called that, is below the cost of food. Some people would say that they are getting paid for their work so they are not really considered slaves, but according to the Webster’s Dictionary they are because these men remain captives for many years, some even for life.

The Essay on Slavery Slaves Would Work

Slavery in the south in the late eighteen hundreds, was not only beneficial to the plantation owners and farmers, but to the economy itself. In 1850 the south contributed greatly to the Industrial Revolution, with Great Britain producing an abundance of textiles, cotton was in heavy demand. The economy required large amounts of cotton to be produced, and slave labor was a necessity. The status of ...

Modern-day slavery does not discriminate. In Pakistan and India hundreds of thousands of little children, some as young as seven, work in slavery to make beautiful oriental carpets. Where do the parents come in? Well the parents are tricked into allowing their children to be taken from their home, they are promised that their children will be well taken cared of and that they will learn a trade. What parent would not want this for his child, especially when they can’t offer anything better to them.

Now according to the Oxford Dictionary, there is still another form of slavery. In some way we can still call it modern-day slavery. If we think back at the definition of “obsessive devotee” what comes to mind? Some people could be said to be a slave to their work. But would that qualify as slavery as it is described? The answer pretty much depends on who you are. In some instances you can say “ Yes you can be a slave to work, and it be considered slavery.” Someone can be so into his or her work that they sleep, think, and walk work. These are the people who often place work first and then their family. Another common term for this is workaholic. Occasionally this is caused because when they were young they lacked things that they wanted. This caused them to grow up thinking that they must be rich and successful in order to get and give the things that they did not have when they were young. Often a person who is a slave to their work think that weekends and holidays is a fine time to work. They tend to put too much emphases on their work that they forget about the needs of their family, this need is not financial need, but the need of love and personal warmth.

Many people think that slavery is a thing of the past. However, incidents have shown that it is not. If we were supposed to have learned anything from our history, some people have missed it. Nobody has the right to own somebody else; people are human and thus carry a soul. This is something that is priceless. And to those who enslave themselves to work, fashion, or otherwise should stop and think how good they have it. It is not by choice that some people are taken from their homes and made to work what is called a “twenty-four seven”. People who are enslaved to work do have a choice, and if they were as smart as they like to think they are, they should spend more time at home.

The Essay on Heroes Of Society People Children Things

Heroes of society Heroes are important in life we " ve always had them and always will. They " re our role models, we attempt to be resembling them. Society looks up to these heroes for many reasons, it could be that they " re cool or have style, because they could fly or have supernatural powers, because of the way they make a person feel, the confidence they have, or even because a majority ...

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Twelve Years a Slave (1853), the brief review questioned Baptist's emphasis on the role of slavery in the making of American capitalism and reminded the readers of the magazine of much more traditional things, like "Yankee ingenuity," the Protestant work ethic, and the readily available land of the sprawling republic. Surely, the reviewer suggested, these things - and not slavery - explained ...
Slavery -- Then and Now
After quoting from "the slave poet," Whittier, Douglass outdoes the former with a paragraph of extra-ordinary beauty and pathos regarding his grandmother's expulsion from the "safety" of the plantation: The hearth is desolate. The children, the unconscious children, who once sang and danced in her presence, are gone.
The Then and Now Meaning of Slavery
Slavery: Then and Now When we think about slavery many things come to our mind. There are many different ways one can describe slavery. If you were to look it up in a dictionary it would say that a slave is one who is owned and forced into service by another, this was the definition given i...
Slavery: Then and Now, Sample of Essays
The meaning of slavery has a different meaning today than it did years ago. As Alex Haley wrote, slavery was difficult to explain years ago because it was going on at the time. Today when someone says the word slavery more than half of the people would think of plantations and people being forced to work the land and being mistreated.

The New York Times

Slavery, Power and the Human Cost

Queen Njinga

Means of Control

Cultivating Wealth and Power

Race Encoded Into Law

A Deadly Commodity

Continual Resistance

Memory and Place-Making

The Limits of Freedom

A Powerful Letter

She Sued for Her Freedom

God Wouldn’t Want Segregated Sanctuaries

The Destructive Impact of the Cotton Gin

Describing the Depravity of Slavery

A Slave Nation Fights for Freedom

A Woman Bequeathed

By Black People, for Black People

Generations of Enslavement

Liberation Theology

The Slave Patrols

Growing National Tension

Enlisting in a Moral Fight

Always on Your Person

One Family’s Ledger

Freedom Begins

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Slavery in America

Slavery in Plantations and Cities

Living Conditions of Enslaved People

Slave Rebellions

Abolitionist Movement

Missouri Compromise

Kansas-Nebraska Act

John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry

When Did Slavery End?

The Legacy of Slavery

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What Is a Legacy of Slavery?

The Long-lasting Impact of Slavery on Society

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Slavery Then and Now: Interrogating the Past to Understand the Present

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Modern Slavery

Introduction

Discussion and Essay Questions

Essay Questions

Supplementary Materials

Taking time to reflect on how deeply slavery has shaped our society

Slavery in the USA and Its Impact on Americans Essay

Introduction

Article contents

Models of Slavery and Resistance

The Cliometric Debates

Women, Gender, and Slavery

The Atlanticization of Slavery Studies

Into the Digital Era

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

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James W. Loewen (1942-2021)