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Learn
About Slavery
Beginning at least as early as 1502,
European slave traders shipped approximately 11 to 16 million slaves to
the Americas, including 500,000 to what is now the United States. By the
beginning of the eighteenth century, slaves could be found in every area
colonized by Europeans.
Initially, English colonists relied
on indentured white servants, but by the late seventeenth century, faced
with a shortage of servants, they increasingly resorted to enslaved
Africans. Three distinctive systems of slavery emerged in the American
colonies. In Maryland and Virginia, slavery was widely used in raising
tobacco and corn and worked under the "gang" system. In the South Carolina
and Georgia low country, slaves raised rice and indigo, worked under
the "task" system, and were able to reconstitute African social patterns
and maintain a separate Gullah dialect. In the North, slavery was concentrated
on Long Island and in southern Rhode Island and New Jersey, where most
slaves were engaged in farming and stock raising for the West Indies
or were household servants for the urban elite.
The American Revolution had contradictory consequences for slavery.
Thousands of slaves freed themselves by running away. In the South,
slavery became more firmly entrenched, and expanded rapidly into the
Old Southwest after the development of the cotton gin. In the North,
in contrast, every state freed slaves by statute, court decision, or
enactment of gradual emancipation schemes.
During the decades before the Civil War, slave grown cotton accounted
for over half the value of all United States exports, and provided virtually
all the cotton used in the northern textile industry and 70 percent
of the cotton used in British mills. The slave South failed to establish
commercial, financial, or manufacturing companies on the same scale
as the North.
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and
George Washington were slaveholders. So, too, were Benjamin Franklin
and the theologian Jonathan Edwards. John Newton, the composer of "Amazing
Grace," captained a slave ship early in his life. Robinson Crusoe,
the fictional character in Daniel Defoe's famous novel, was engaged
in the slave trade when he was shipwrecked.
Slavery has often been treated
as a marginal aspect of history, confined to courses on southern
or African American history. In fact, slavery played a crucial
role in the making of the modern world. Slavery provided the
labor force for the Slavery played an indispensable role in the
settlement and development of the New World.
Slavery
dates to prehistoric times and could be found in ancient Babylon,
classical Greece and Rome, China, India, and Africa as well as
in the New World.
To learn more, read a succinct overview of the history of
slavery.
American Slavery As It Is by Theodore Dwight Weld, 1839
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/documents/documents_p2.cfm?doc=81
Read
more documents.
Maps:
Slave
Trade Maps
http://gropius.lib.virginia.edu/Slavery/FMPro?-
DB=SlaveTrade.fp5&-Format=return.html&HiddenCategory=1&-Max=16&-Find
Images:
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Pictorial
Images of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
http://gropius.lib.virginia.edu/SlaveTrade/
An extensive collection of maps, images, and portraits illustrating
the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, as it took place from Africa through
the middle passage and landing in the New World.
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Click
for more images.
Timelines:
Chronology
of Antislavery
Timeline of abolition
Fact sheets and lesson plans:
Fact sheets:
Handout on Slavery
Fact Sheets on Slavery
Time Line on Slavery
Recommended
lesson plan:
Families
in Bondage
http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=280
Fact checks:
Test
your knowledge about the history of slavery by taking our Slavery
Quiz.
Recommended readings:
Essential
books:
- Ira
Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery
in America
- Peter
Kolchin, American Slavery
Click
to access a succinct essay on the best books on the history of slavery.
You may
also click to view a longer
list of recommended books.
Few historical topics have evoked
more heated debate than slavery. Among the central questions that
historians have debated are these:
- Why did slavery come to dominate
the economies of such societies as ancient Greece and Rome, the
southern United States, Brazil, and Britain and France's Caribbean
colonies?
- Why did slavery achieve its greatest
strength in the United States, a society dedicated to freedom and
equality?
- In what ways were slavery and racism
connected?
For more than a century, professional
historians have engaged in heated debates over slavery. They have
argued over whether slavery or racism came first; whether the Constitution
was a pro- or anti-slavery document; and whether slavery was the underlying
cause of the American Civil War. Click below to learn about two heated
historical debates:
For a more complete discussion of
the debates over slavery, read our historiographical essay.
A number of leading scholars have written articles on slavery that
are available online. Refer to our links
to these articles.
 Recommended
film{maybe an s} :
Glory
The heroic story of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment,
the first black regiment to fight in the Civil War.
Learn
more:
Many
influential Hollywood films, from Birth of a Nation and
Gone with the Wind to Glory and Amistad,
have helped shape the way Americans have thought about slavery.
To learn more about inaccuracies in Hollywood's depictions
of slavery.
 Recommended
Web site:
Virginia
Runaways
http://www.uvawise.edu/history/runaways/
A digital database of runaway and captured slave and servant advertisements
from 18th-century Virginia newspapers, this project offers full transcripts
and images of all runaway and captured ads for slaves, servants, and
deserters placed in Virginia newspapers from 1736 to 1790.
To
learn more
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