Colonial America
Main article: Slavery in the colonial United States
In the early years of the Chesapeake Bay settlements, it was difficult to attract and retain laborers, and there was a high mortality rate.[3] Most laborers came from Britain as indentured servants, who signed contracts of indenture to pay with work for their passage, their upkeep and training, usually on a farm, as the colonies were highly agricultural. These indentured servants were young people who intended to become permanent residents. Some masters treated them as well or as poorly as family members. In some cases, convicted criminals were transported to the colonies as indentured servants, rather than being imprisoned. Many Scots-Irish, Irish and Germans came in the 18th century. The indentured servants were not slaves. The planters found that the major problem with indentured servants was that many left after several years, just when they had become skilled and the most valuable workers. In addition, an improving economy in England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries meant that fewer workers chose to go to the colonies. Historians estimate that more than half of all white immigrants to the English colonies of North America during the 17th and 18th centuries came as indentured servants. The number of indentured servants among immigrants was particularly high in the South.[3]
| Destination | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Portuguese America | 38.5% |
| British America (minus North America) | 18.4% |
| Spanish Empire | 17.5% |
| French Americas | 13.6% |
| British North America | 6.5% |
| English Americas | 3.3% |
| Dutch West Indies | 2.0% |
| Danish West Indies | 0.3% |
The first 19 or so Africans arrived ashore near the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, brought by Dutch traders who had seized them from a captured Spanish slave ship. The Spanish usually baptized slaves in Africa before embarking them. As English law considered baptized Christians exempt from slavery, these Africans were treated as indentured servants who joined about 1,000 English indentured servants already in the colony. They were freed after a prescribed period and given the use of land and supplies by their former masters. The historian Ira Berlin noted that what he called the "charter generation" was sometimes made up of mixed-race men who were indentured servants, and whose ancestry was African and Iberian. They were descendants of African women and Portuguese and Spanish men who worked in African ports as traders or facilitators in the slave trade. For example, like Anthony Johnson, who arrived in 1621 as an indentured servant, some Africans achieved freedom and became property owners. The transformation of the status of Africans from indentured servitude to slavery—whereby they could never leave—happened gradually. There were no laws regarding slavery early in Virginia's history. But, in 1640, a Virginia court sentenced John Punch to slavery after he attempted to flee his service.[4] The two whites with whom he fled were only sentenced to an additional year of their indenture, and three years service to the colony.[5] This marked the first legal sanctioning of slavery in the English colonies and was one of the first legal distinctions made between Europeans and Africans.[4][6]
| Date | Numbers |
|---|---|
| 1620–1700 | 21,000 |
| 1701–1760 | 189,000 |
| 1761–1770 | 63,000 |
| 1771–1790 | 56,000 |
| 1791–1800 | 79,000 |
| 1801–1810 | 124,000[8] |
| 1810–1865 | 51,000 |
| Total | 597,000 |
In 1654, John Casor, a black indentured servant, was the first man to be declared a slave in a civil case. He had claimed to an officer that his owner, free black colonist Anthony Johnson, had held him past his indenture term. A neighbor, Robert Parker told Johnson that if he did not release Casor, Parker would testify in court to this fact; which under local laws, may have resulted in Johnson losing some of his headrightlands. Under duress, Johnson freed Casor, who entered into a seven years' indenture with Parker. Feeling cheated, Johnson sued Parker to repossess Casor. A Northampton County court ruled for Johnson, declaring that Parker illegally was detaining Casor from his rightful master who legally held him "for the duration of his life".[9]
Since persons with African origins were not English subjects by birth, they were considered foreigners and generally outside English common law. Elizabeth Key Grinstead, a mixed-racewoman, successfully gained her freedom and that of her son in the Virginia courts in 1656 by making her case as the daughter of the free Englishman Thomas Key. She was also a baptized Christian. Her attorney and her son's father was also an English subject, which may have helped her case.[10]
Shortly after the Elizabeth Key trial and similar challenges, in 1662 Virginia passed a law adopting the principle of partus sequitur ventrum (called partus, for short), stating that any children of an enslaved mother would take her status and be born into slavery, regardless if the father were a freeborn Englishman. This was a reversal of common law practice, which ruled that children of English subjects took the status of the father. The change institutionalized the power relationships between slaveowners and slave women, freed the white men from the legal responsibility to acknowledge or financially support their mixed-race children, and somewhat confined the open scandal of mixed-race children and miscegenation to within the slave quarters.
The Virginia Slave codes of 1705 further defined as slaves those people imported from nations that were not Christian, as well as Native Americans who were sold to colonists by other Native Americans or captured by Europeans during village raids.[11] This established the basis for the legal enslavement of any non-Christian foreigner.
In 1735, the Georgia Trustees enacted a law to prohibit slavery in the new colony, which had been established in 1733 to enable the "worthy poor" as well as persecuted European Protestants to have a new start. Slavery was then legal in the other twelve English colonies, and neighboring South Carolina had become particularly dedicated to mass enslavement of an African labor force. The Georgia Trustees wanted to eliminate the risk of slave rebellions and make Georgia better able to defend against attacks from the Spanish to the south, who offered freedom to escaped slaves. James Edward Oglethorpe was the driving force behind the colony, and the only trustee to reside in Georgia. He opposed slavery on moral grounds as well as for pragmatic reasons, and vigorously defended the ban on slavery against fierce opposition from Carolina slave merchants and land speculators.[12][13][14]
The Protestant Scottish highlanders who settled what is now Darien, Georgia added a moral anti-slavery argument, which was rare at the time, in their 1739 "Petition of the Inhabitants of New Inverness".[15] By 1750 Georgia authorized slavery in the state because they had been unable to secure enough indentured servants as laborers, since economic conditions in England began to improve in the first half of the 18th century.
During most of the British colonial period, slavery existed in all the colonies. People enslaved in the North typically worked as house servants, artisans, laborers and craftsmen, with the greater number in cities. The South depended on an agricultural economy, and it had a significantly higher number and proportion of slaves in the population, as its commodity crops were labor intensive.[16] Early on, enslaved people in the Southworked primarily in agriculture, on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice, and tobacco; cotton became a major crop after the 1790s. The invention of the cotton gin enabled the cultivation of short-staple cotton in a wide variety of areas, leading to the development of the Deep South as cotton country. Tobacco was very labor intensive, as was rice cultivation.[17] In South Carolina in 1720, about 65% of the population consisted of enslaved people.[18] Planters (defined by historians as those who held 20 enslaved people or more) used enslaved workers to cultivate commodity crops. They also worked in the artisanal trades on large plantations and in many southern cities. Backwoods subsistence farmers, the later wave of settlers in the 18th century who settled along the Appalachian Mountains and backcountry, seldom held enslaved people.
Some of the British colonies attempted to abolish the international slave trade, fearing that the importation of new Africans would be disruptive. Virginia bills to that effect were vetoed by the British Privy Council. Rhode Island forbade the import of enslaved people in 1774. All of the colonies except Georgia had banned or limited the African slave trade by 1786; Georgia did so in 1798. Some of these laws were later repealed.[19]
A total of about 600,000 enslaved people were imported into the Thirteen Colonies and the U.S, constituting 5% of the twelve million enslaved people brought from Africa to the Americas. The great majority of enslaved Africans were transported to sugar colonies in the Caribbean and to Brazil. As life expectancy was short, their numbers had to be continually replenished. Life expectancy was much higher in the U.S. and the enslaved population also reproduced; enslaved peoples' numbers grew rapidly, reaching 4 million by the 1860 Census. From 1770 until 1860, the rate of natural growth of North American enslaved people was much greater than for the population of any nation in Europe, and was nearly twice as rapid as that of England.[20]
Revolutionary era
Enslaved people inside Britain
| Origins and Percentages of Africans imported into British North America and Louisiana (1700–1820)[21][22] | Amount % |
|---|---|
| West-central Africa (Kongo, N. Mbundu, S. Mbundu) | 26.1 |
| Bight of Biafra (Igbo, Tikar, Ibibio, Bamileke, Bubi) | 24.4 |
| Sierra Leone (Mende, Temne) | 15.8 |
| Senegambia (Mandinka, Fula, Wolof) | 14.5 |
| Gold Coast (Akan, Fon) | 13.1 |
| Windward Coast (Mandé, Kru) | 5.2 |
| Bight of Benin (Yoruba, Ewe, Fon, Allada and Mahi) | 4.3 |
| Southeast Africa (Macua, Malagasy) | 1.8 |
Slavery in Great Britain had never been authorized by statute. In 1772 it was made unenforceable at common law by a decision of Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, but this decision did not govern the Atlantic slave trade, where Britain had become the largest trader,[23] nor apply in the colonies, where the overwhelming majority of British slaves lived. A number of cases for emancipation were presented to the British courts. Numerous runaways hoped to reach Britain where they hoped to be free. The slaves' belief that King George III was for them and against their masters rose as tensions increased before the American Revolution; some colonial slaveholders feared that rebelling against the Crown might trigger a British-inspired slave revolt.
Lord Dunmore's proclamation
In early 1775 Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, wrote to Lord Dartmouth of his intent to free slaves in case of rebellion.[24] On November 7, 1775, Lord Dunmore issued Lord Dunmore's Proclamation which declared martial law[25] and promised freedom for any slaves of American patriots who would leave their masters and join the royal forces. Slaves owned by Loyalist masters, however, were unaffected by Dunmore's Proclamation. Of slaves owned by Rebel masters, approximately 1500 did so; most died of disease before they could do any fighting. Only 300 made it to freedom in Britain.[26]
Revolutionary War and freedom
Many Northern states moved towards emancipation during the Revolutionary Era. The 1777 Constitution of the Vermont Republic banned slavery, freeing males over the age of 21 and women over the age of 18. Pennsylvania in 1780 passed An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, which declared all children born after the act to be free, and Massachusetts, via the Quock Walker Case of 1783, immediately ended slavery in the state. In response to the British offer of freedom for slaves owned by rebel masters, tens of thousands of slaves who were owned by Rebel masters tried to enlist in the British army when it controlled an area. For instance, in South Carolina, nearly 25,000 slaves (30% of the total enslaved population) fled, migrated or died during the disruption of the war. Throughout the South, losses of slaves were high, with many due to escapes.[27] Slaves escaped throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic, joining the British who had occupied New York. In the closing months of the war, the British evacuated 20,000 freedmen from major coastal cities, transporting more than 3,000 for resettlement in Nova Scotia, with others taken to the Caribbean islands, and some to England. Along with these freedmen, the British also transported the slaves of Loyalists. For example, over 5,000 enslaved Africans owned by Loyalists were transported in 1782 from Savannah to Jamaica and St. Augustine. Similarly, over half of the Blacks evacuated out of Charleston to the West Indies and Florida by the British in 1782 were slaves owned by White Loyalists.
In the 18th century, Britain had become the world's largest slave trader. During the revolutionary era, all its rebellious colonies banned or suspended the international slave trade. This was done for a variety of economic, political, and moral reasons depending on the colony. The trade was later reopened in South Carolina and Georgia.[28]
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