Question

Explain the development of American slavery.  How was it unique in world history? What events and/or historical processes led to its development?  How did it co-exist, and co-develop, with American freedom?

Answer 1

Slavery in America began in 1619 when, in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia, a Dutch ship brought 20 African slaves ashore.

European colonists in North America turned to African slaves throughout the 17th century as a cheaper, more abundant source of labor than indentured servants, mostly bad Europeans.

Although it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians estimate that during the 18th century alone 6 to 7 million black slaves were imported into the New World, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and most abominable men and women.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, black slaves 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.

Following the American Revolution, many colonists— especially in the North, where slavery was comparatively insignificant to the agrarian economy — began to connect the oppression of black slaves to their own British oppression, and to call for the abolition of slavery.

But the new United States after the Revolutionary War. Constitution tacitly recognized the institution of slavery, counting each slave as three-fifths of a individual for taxation and representation purposes in Congress and guaranteeing the right to repossess any "individual held in service or labor"

Slavery itself has never been prevalent in the North, though many entrepreneurs in the region have grown wealthy in slave trade and southern plantations investment. All northern states abolished slavery between 1774 and 1804, but the so-called "special institution" of slavery remained vital to the South.

Even if the U.S. Congress banned African slave trade in 1808, national trade flourished, and the U.S. slave population over the next 50 years almost tripled. It had reached nearly 4 million by 1860, with more than half living in the southern cotton-producing countries.

Slave owners tried to create their slaves totally dependent on them, and slave life was regulated by a scheme of restrictive codes. Usually they were forbidden to learn to read and write, and their conduct and motion were limited.

With slave women, many masters took sexual freedoms and rewarded obedient slave conduct with favors while brutally punished rebellious slaves. A rigid hierarchy among slaves (from privileged house slaves to low-field hands) helped maintain them divided and less likely to organize against their masters.

The Emancipation Proclamation, by freeing some 3 million black slaves in the rebel states, deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and placed heavily on the Union side of global public opinion.

Although the Proclamation of Emancipation did not formally end all slavery in America—that would occur with the enactment of the 13th Amendment after the end of the Civil War in 1865—some 186,000 black troops would join the Union Army, and some 38,000 were killed.