If only “the victims” would take one second to look at their history. There were ALWAYS more BLACK slave owners than white slave owners. There were ALWAYS more WHITE Irish slaves than black slaves. Why? Because they were cheaper.
Abraham Lincoln…A REPUBLICAN freed the Black man from slavery. The KKK was ALWAYS, and still is a Left Wing Democratic organization. The self imposed ridiculous reverse discrimination in this country has gotten out of hand. The sense of entitlement of Black liberals in this nation is born out of pure HUBRIS that they deserve everything for nothing because of suffering that never happened and is not happening from anyone else but themselves. Even the term African American is incorrect. NO RACE is born out of where your ancestors were and where you are now. That is YOUR HERITAGE…NOT YOUR RACE! The correct term is Negro or Black and always will be. Just because something offends you doesn’t give you the right to change it. From the looks of it, the Black Liberals will insist everything in this nation be changed until somebody finally says no.
Here is a quick reference to answer questions on slavery around the world. It’s important to note there are far more white slaves historically than black slaves. Also important to note that while everyone wants to focus SOLELY on the black man being sold into slavery and held by the white man, the majority of slaves SOLD worldwide were by BLACK slave traders! So, who is more at fault? The seller or the buyer who rounded them up against their will for profit?
The slave trade is a world thing and in America it hasn’t existed for over 150 years. However, I will argue that it has been rerouted in a different form as welfare etc.
I just find it funny seeing whole Asian families who came over to this country in the 70s to 90s as refugees with not much more than the clothing on their backs, earn college degrees, become successful professionals, and dominate in business, medicine, science, and engineering, while people born in this fine nation with all the benefits, subsidies, and comfort can’t seem to do much with their lives.
Looking at the large historical picture, this was not true. In fact, taking slavery as a percentage of the total population into account, there have been more white slaves than black throughout history. The first ’slaves’ taken to work plantations in the American colonies, for example, were in fact white. They were called indentured servants, normally seized when they couldn’t pay their debts, but they were slaves none the less. Millions of white slaves were also taken by Islamic countries who raided deep into Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as along the Merranean coasts. We won’t even mention the slaves taken by ancient empires from Rome and earlier. The fact that black slaves became common from the 18th century onwards is largely due to anti-slavery laws passed in Europe protecting Europeans from being enslaved. These laws were enforced by the military, economic and political strength of the western European countries promulgating them. However, for around 150 years, these laws were not extended to protect other parts of the world, including Africa. As the slave trade in Africa was already a massive industry, and had been for thousands of years, white transatlantic slavers cashed in on this by buying slaves from African slave traders. (They seldom captured slaves themselves, though). By the time the USA had ended all slavery, after the civil war, western powers enforced the anti-slavery drive, actually attacking ships suspected of transporting slaves.
With reference to South Africa, most slaves in pre 1800s Cape Colony were not black but of Asian origin, as it was considered dangerous to keep black slaves who might be sympathetic to frontier tribes (not to mention very easy for them to escape back to their tribes). The descendants of these slaves gradually intermingled with whites and blacks to form the South African groups.
So why are American still the only group that blames slavery on today? Why can’t we do as others and get ahead and begin to live? Why can’t we stop being oppressed by our own when we want better for ourselves and others?.
History of slavery
The history of slavery covers slave systems in historical perspective in which one human being is legally the property of another, can be bought or sold, is not allowed to escape and must work for the owner without any choice involved. As Drescher (2009) argues, “The most crucial and frequently utilized aspect of the condition is a communally recognized right by some individuals to possess, buy, sell, discipline, transport, liberate, or otherwise dispose of the bodies and behavior of other individuals.”[1] In the American colonies and other places, an integral element was frequently the assignment of children of a slave mother to the status of slaves – born into slavery.[2] Slavery does not include other forced labor systems: historical forced labor by prisoners, labor camps, or other forms of unfree labor, in which laborers are not considered property.
Slavery can be traced back to the earliest records, such as the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1760 BC), which refers to it as an established institution.[3] Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations, as it is developed as a system of social stratification. Slavery typically also requires a shortage of labor and a surplus of land to be viable.[4] David P. Forsythe wrote: “The fact remained that at the beginning of the nineteenth century an estimated three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will either in some form of slavery or serfdom.”[5] While slavery has existed for thousands of years, the social, economic, and legal position of slaves was vastly different in different systems of slavery in different times and places.[6]
Slavery is no longer legal anywhere in the world,[7] though human trafficking remains an international problem. An estimated 29.8 million persons are living in illegal slavery today.[8]
Evidence of slavery predates written factors, the practice of slavery would have proliferated after the development of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution about 11,000 years ago.[4]
Slavery was known in civilizations as old as Sumer, as well as almost every other ancient civilization, including Ancient Egypt, Ancient China, the Akkadian Empire, Assyria, Ancient India, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Islamic Caliphate, and the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas.[9] Such institutions were a mixture of debt-slavery, punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war, child abandonment, and the birth of slave children to slaves.[10]
Cast of the corpse of a prisoner (as evidenced by the manacles that remain on his ankles) recovered from the ruins of Pompeii, 79 AD
Records of slavery in Ancient Greece go as far back as Mycenaean Greece. The origins are not known, but it appears that slavery became an important part of the economy and society only after the establishment of cities.[11] Slavery was common practice and an integral component of ancient Greece, as it was in other societies of the time, including ancient Israel and early Christian societies.[12][13][14] It is estimated that in Athens, the majority of citizens owned at least one slave. Most ancient writers considered slavery not only natural but necessary, but some isolated debate began to appear, notably in Socratic dialogues. The Stoics produced the first condemnation of slavery recorded in history.[14]
During the 8th and the 7th centuries BC, in the course of the two Messenian Wars the Spartans reduced an entire population to a pseudo-slavery called helotry.[15] According to Herodotus (IX, 28–29), helots were seven times as numerous as Spartans. Following several helot revolts around the year 600 BC, the Spartans restructured their city-state along authoritarian lines, for the leaders decided that only by turning their society into an armed camp could they hope to maintain control over the numerically dominant helot population.[16] In some Ancient Greek city states about 30% of the population consisted of slaves, but paid and slave labor seem to have been equally important.[17]
Rome
Romans inherited the institution of slavery from the Greeks and the Phoenicians.[18] As the Roman Republic expanded outward, it enslaved entire populations, thus ensuring an ample supply of laborers to work in Rome’s farms and households. The people subjected to Roman slavery came from all over Europe and the Merranean. Such oppression by an elite minority eventually led to slave revolts; the Third Servile War led by Spartacus was the most famous and severe. Greeks, Berbers, Germans, Britons, Slavs, Thracians, Gauls (or Celts), Jews, Arabs and many more ethnic groups were enslaved to be used for labor, and also for amusement (e.g. gladiators and sex slaves). If a slave ran away, he was liable to be crucified. By the late Republican era, slavery had become a vital economic pillar in the wealth of Rome.[19] In the Roman Empire, probably over 25% of the empire’s population,[20] and 30 to 40% of the population of Italy[21] was enslaved.
Celtic Tribes
Celtic tribes of Europe are recorded by various Roman sources as owning slaves. The extent of slavery in prehistorical Europe is not well known, however.[22]
Middle Ages
The chaos of invasion and frequent warfare also resulted in victorious parties taking slaves throughout Europe in the early Middle Ages. St. Patrick, himself captured and sold as a slave, protested against an attack that enslaved newly baptized Christians in his “Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus”. Slavery during the Early Middle Ages had several distinct sources.
The Vikings raided across Europe, but took the most slaves in raids of the British Isles and Eastern Europe. While the Vikings kept some slaves as servants, known as thralls, they sold most captives in the Byzantine or Islamic markets. In the West their target populations were primarily English, Irish, and Scottish, while in the East they were mainly Slavs. The Viking slave trade slowly ended in the 11th century, as the Vikings settled in the European territories they had once raided. They converted serfs to Christianity and merged with the local populace.[23]
Medieval Spain and Portugal were the scene of almost constant warfare between Muslims and Christians. Al-Andalus sent periodic raiding expions to loot the Iberian Christian kingdoms, bringing back booty and slaves. In a raid against Lisbon, Portugal in 1189, for example, the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur took 3,000 female and child captives. In a subsequent attack upon Silves, Portugal in 1191, is governor of Córdoba took 3,000 Christian slaves.[24]
The Byzantine-Ottoman wars and the Ottoman wars in Europe resulted in the taking of large numbers of Christian slaves and using or selling them in the Islamic world too.[25] After the battle of Lepanto approximately 12,000 Christian galley slaves were freed from the Ottoman fleet.[26]
Similarly, Christians sold Muslim slaves captured in war. The Knights of Malta attacked pirates and Muslim shipping, and their base became a centre for slave trading, selling captured North Africans and Turks. Malta remained a slave market until well into the late 18th century. One thousand slaves were required to man the galleys (ships) of the Order.[27][28]
Slavery in Poland was forbidden in the 15th century; in Lithuania, slavery was formally abolished in 1588; they were replaced by the second enserfment. Slavery remained a minor institution in Russia until 1723, when the Peter the Great converted the household slaves into house serfs. Russian agricultural slaves were formally converted into serfs earlier in 1679.[29] The escaped Polish and Russian serfs and kholops formed autonomous communities in the southern steppes, where they became known as Cossacks (meaning ‘outlaws’).[30]
Great Britain and Ireland
Main articles: Slavery in Britain and Ireland and Slavery in the colonial United States
Capture in war, voluntary servitude and debt slavery became common within the British Isles during the Middle Ages. Slaves were routinely bought and sold. Running away was also common and slavery was never a major economic factor in the British Isles during the Middle Ages. Ireland and Denmark were markets for captured Anglo- Saxon and Celtic slaves. Pope Gregory I reputedly made the pun, Non Angli, sed Angeli (”Not Angles, but Angels”), after a response to his query regarding the identity of a group of fair-haired Angles, slave children whom he had observed in the marketplace. After 1100 slavery faded away as uneconomical.[31]
Islamic powers
Ottoman advances resulted in many captive Christians being carried deep into Muslim territory.
The Islamic World was a main factor in slavery. After the Muslim conquests of North Africa and most of the Iberian peninsula, the Islamic world became a huge importer of Saqaliba (Slavic) slaves from central and eastern Europe.[32] Islamic law forbade Muslims to enslave fellow Muslims or so-called People of the Book: Christians, Jews, Sabians and Magians, but an exception was made if they were captured in battle. If they converted to Islam, their master was expected to free them as an act of piety, and if they did not, the master had to teach them.[33] Muslims did not always treat slaves in accordance with Islamic law.[34] The Muslim powers of Iberia both raided for slaves and purchased slaves from European merchants, often the Jewish Radhanites, one of the few groups who could easily move between the Christian and Islamic worlds.[35] Jewish participation in the slave trade was recorded starting in the 5th century.[36] Olivia Remie Constable wrote: “Muslim and Jewish merchants brought slaves into al-Andalus from eastern Europe and Christian Spain, and then re-exported them to other regions of the Islamic world.”[35] The etymology of the word slave comes from this period, as the word sklabos means Slav.[37][38]
In the late Middle Ages, from 1100 to 1500, the European slave trade continued, though with a shift from being centered among the Western Merranean Islamic nations to the Eastern Christian and Muslim states. The city states of Venice and Genoa controlled the Eastern Merranean from the 12th century and the Black Sea from the 13th century. They sold both Slavic and Baltic slaves, as well as Georgians, Turks, and other ethnic groups of the Black Sea and Caucasus, to the Muslim nations of the Middle East.[39] The sale of European slaves by Europeans slowly ended as the Slavic and Baltic ethnic groups Christianized by the Late Middle Ages.[39]
From the 1440s into the 18th century, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were sold into slavery to the Turks. In 1575, the Tatars captured over 35,000 Ukrainians; a 1676 raid took almost 40,000. About 60,000 Ukrainians were captured in 1688; some were ransomed, but most were sold into slavery.[40][41] Some of the Roma people were enslaved over five centuries in Romania until abolition in 1864 (see Slavery in Romania).[42]
Muslims continued to trade in European slaves into the Modern time period.[39] Muslim pirates, primarily Algerians with the support of the Ottoman Empire, raided European coasts and shipping from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and took thousands of captives, whom they sold or enslaved. Many were held for ransom, and European communities raised funds to buy back their citizens. They gradually ended their attacks with the naval decline of the Ottoman Empire in the late 16th and 17th centuries, as well as the European conquest of North Africa throughout the 19th century.[39] The United States conducted raids of North Africa to defeat the Barbary Pirates in its early Federal period.
Mongols[]
The Mongol invasions and conquests in the 13th century also resulted in taking numerous captives into slavery.[43] The Mongols enslaved skilled individuals, women and children and marched them to Karakorum or Sarai, whence they were sold throughout Eurasia. Many of these slaves were shipped to the slave market in Novgorod.[44][45][46]
The ransoming of Christian slaves held in Turkish hands, 17th century
Slave commerce during the Late Middle Ages was mainly in the hands of Venetian and Genoese merchants and cartels, who were involved in the slave trade with the Golden Horde. In 1382 the Golden Horde under Khan Tokhtamysh sacked Moscow, burning the city and carrying off thousands of inhabitants as slaves. Between 1414 and 1423, some 10,000 eastern European slaves were sold in Venice.[47] Genoese merchants organized the slave trade from the Crimea to Mamluk Egypt. For years, the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan routinely made raids on Russian principalities for slaves and to plunder towns. Russian chronicles record about 40 raids of Kazan Khans on the Russian territories in the first half of the 16th century.[48]
In 1441, Haci I Giray declared independence from the Golden Horde and established the Crimean Khanate. For a long time, until the early 18th century, the khanate maintained an extensive slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. In a process called the “harvesting of the steppe”, they enslaved many Slavic peasants. About 30 major Tatar raids were recorded into Muscovite territories between 1558 and 1596.[49]
Moscow was repeatedly a target. In 1521, the combined forces of Crimean Khan Mehmed Giray and his Kazan allies attacked the city and captured thousands of slaves.[50] In 1571, the Crimean Tatars attacked and sacked Moscow, burning everything but the Kremlin and taking thousands of captives as slaves.[51] In Crimea, about 75% of the population consisted of slaves.[52]
The Vikings and Scandinavia
Main articles: Thrall and Volga trade route
In the Viking era beginning circa 793, the Norse raiders often captured and enslaved militarily weaker peoples they encountered. The Nordic countries called their slaves thralls (Old Norse: Þræll).[23] The thralls were mostly from Western Europe, among them many Franks, Anglo-Saxons, and Celts. Many Irish slaves were used in expions for the colonization of Iceland.[53] The Norse also took German, Baltic, Slavic and Latin slaves. The slave trade was one of the pillars of Norse commerce during the 6th through 11th centuries. The Persian traveller Ibn Rustah described how Swedish Vikings, the Varangians or Rus, terrorized and enslaved the Slavs taken in their raids along the Volga River. The thrall system was finally abolished in the mid-14th century in Scandinavia.[54]
Modern Era[]
Merranean powers frequently sentenced convicted criminals to row in the war-galleys of the state (initially only in time of war).[55] After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and Camisard rebellion, the French Crown filled its galleys with French Huguenots, Protestants condemned for resisting the state.[56] Galley-slaves lived and worked in such harsh conditions that many did not survive their terms of sentence, even if they survived shipwreck and slaughter or torture at the hands of enemies or of pirates.[57] Naval forces often turned ‘infidel’ prisoners-of-war into galley-slaves. Several well-known historical figures served time as galley slaves after being captured by the enemy—the Ottoman corsair and admiral Turgut Reis and the Knights Hospitaller Grand Master Jean Parisot de la Valette among them.[58]
Denmark-Norway was the first European country to ban the slave trade. This happened with a decree issued by the king in 1792, to become fully effective by 1803. Slavery as an institution was not banned until 1848. At this time Iceland was a part of Denmark-Norway but slave trading had been abolished in Iceland in 1117 and had never been reestablished.[59]
Slavery in the French Republic was abolished on 4 February 1794, including in its colonies. The lengthy Haitian Revolution by its slaves and free people of color established Haiti as a free republic in 1804 ruled by blacks, the first of its kind.[60] At the time of the revolution, Haiti was known as Saint-Domingue and was a colony of France.[61] Napoleon Bonaparte gave up on Haiti in 1803, but re-established slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1804, at the request of planters of the Caribbean colonies. Slavery was permanently abolished in the French empire during the French Revolution of 1848.
Portugal
The 15th-century Portuguese exploration of the African coast is commonly regarded as the harbinger of European colonialism. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, granting Afonso V of Portugal the right to reduce any “Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers” to herary slavery which legitimized slave trade under Catholic beliefs of that time. This approval of slavery was reaffirmed and extended in his Romanus Pontifex bull of 1455. These papal bulls came to serve as a justification for the subsequent era of slave trade and European colonialism. Although for a short period as in 1462, Pius II declared slavery to be “a great crime”.[62] The followers of the church of England and Protestants did not use the papal bull as a justification. The position of the church was to condemn the slavery of Christians, but slavery was regarded as an old established and necessary institution which supplied Europe with the necessary workforce. In the 16th century, African slaves had replaced almost all other ethnicities and religious enslaved groups in Europe.[63] Within the Portuguese territory of Brazil, and even beyond its original borders, the enslavement of native Americans was carried out by the Bandeirantes.
Among many other European slave markets, Genoa, and Venice were some well-known markets, their importance and demand growing after the great plague of the 14th century which decimated much of the European work force.[64] The maritime town of Lagos, Portugal, was the first slave market created in Portugal for the sale of imported African slaves – the Mercado de Escravos, opened in 1444.[65][66] In 1441, the first slaves were brought to Portugal from northern Mauritania.[66] Prince Henry the Navigator, major sponsor of the Portuguese African expions, as of any other merchandise, taxed one fifth of the selling price of the slaves imported to Portugal.[66] By the year 1552 African slaves made up 10 percent of the population of Lisbon.[67][68] In the second half of the 16th century, the Crown gave up the monopoly on slave trade and the focus of European trade in African slaves shifted from import to Europe to slave transports directly to tropical colonies in the Americas – in the case of Portugal, especially Brazil.[66] In the 15th century, one third of the slaves were resold to the African market in exchange of gold.[63]
As Portugal increased its presence along China’s coast, they began trading in slaves. Many Chinese slaves were sold to Portugal.[69][70] Since the 16th century, Chinese slaves existed in Portugal, most of them were Chinese children and a large number were shipped to the Indies.[71] Chinese prisoners were sent to Portugal, where they were sold as slaves, they were prized and regarded better than moorish and black slaves.[72] The first known visit of a Chinese person to Europe dates to 1540, when a Chinese scholar, enslaved during one of several Portuguese raids somewhere on the southern China coast, was brought to Portugal. Purchased by João de Barros, he worked with the Portuguese historian on translating Chinese texts into Portuguese.[73] Dona Maria de Vilhena, a Portuguese noble woman from Évora, Portugal, owned a Chinese male slave in 1562.[74][75][76] In the 16th century, a small number of Chinese slaves, around 29–34 people were in southern Portugal, where they were used in agricultural labor.[77] Chinese boys were captured in China, and through Macau were brought to Portugal and sold as slaves in Lisbon. Some were then sold in Brazil, a Portuguese colony.[78][79][80] Due to hostility from the Chinese regarding the trafficking in Chinese slaves, in 1595 a law was passed by Portugal banning the selling and buying of Chinese slaves.[81] On 19 February 1624, the King of Portugal forbade the enslavement of Chinese of either sex.[82][83]
Spain
Emperor Charles V captured Tunis in 1535, liberating 20,000 Christian slaves
The Spaniards were the first Europeans to use African slaves in the New World on islands such as Cuba and Hispaniola, where the native population starved themselves rather than work for the Spanish. Although the natives were used as forced labor (the Spanish employed the pre-Columbian draft system called the mita),[84] the spread of disease caused a shortage of labor, and so the Spanish colonists gradually became involved in the Atlantic slave trade. The first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola in 1501;[85] by 1517, the natives had been “virtually annihilated” by the settlers.[86] The problem of the justness of Indian slavery was a key issue for the Spanish Crown. It was Charles V who gave a definite answer to this complicated and delicate matter. To that end, on November 25, 1542, the Emperor abolished slavery by decreed in his Leyes Nuevas New Laws. This bill was based on the arguments given by the best Spanish theologists and jurists who were unanimous in the condemnation of such slavery as unjust; they declared it illegitimate and outlawed it from America–not just the slavery of Spaniards over Indians, but also the type of slavery practiced among the Indians themselves[87] Thus, Spain became the first country to abolish slavery.
Netherlands
Although slavery was illegal inside the Netherlands it flourished in the Dutch Empire, and helped support the economy.[88] By 1650 the Dutch had the pre-eminent slave trade in Europe.[89] They were overtaken by Britain around 1700.[citation needed] As of 1778, it was estimated that the Dutch were shipping approximately 6,000 Africans for enslavement in the Dutch West Indies.[90] The Dutch shipped about 550,000 African slaves across the Atlantic, about 75,000 of whom died on board before reaching their destinations. From 1596 to 1829, the Dutch traders sold 250,000 slaves in the Dutch Guianas, 142,000 in the Dutch Caribbean islands, and 28,000 in Dutch Brazil.[91] In addition, tens of thousands of slaves, mostly from India and some from Africa, were carried to the Dutch East Indies.[92]
Barbary Corsair
From the 16th to 19th century, Barbary Corsairs raided the coasts of Europe and attacked lone ships at sea. From 1609 to 1616, England lost 466 merchant ships to Barbary pirates. 160 English ships were captured by Algerians between 1677 and 1680.[93] Many of the captured sailors were made into slaves and held for ransom. The corsairs were no strangers to the South West of England where raids were known in a number of coastal communities. In 1627 Barbary Pirates under command of the Dutch renegade Jan Janszoon operating from the Moroccan port of Salé occupied the island of Lundy.[94] During this time there were reports of captured slaves being sent to Algiers.[95][96]
Ireland, despite its northern position, was not immune from attacks by the corsairs. In June 1631 Murat Reis, with pirates from Algiers and armed troops of the Ottoman Empire, stormed ashore at the little harbor village of Baltimore, County Cork. They captured almost all the villagers and took them away to a life of slavery in North Africa.[97] The prisoners were destined for a variety of fates—some lived out their days chained to the oars as galley slaves, while others would spend long years in the scented seclusion of the harem or within the walls of the sultan’s palace. Only two of them ever saw Ireland again.
Robert Davis estimates that the number of Christians from Europe being sold into slavery on the Barbary coast between 1530 and 1780 may have been as high as 1 or 1.25 million.[39][93]
British slave trade[]
Britain played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade, especially after 1600. Slavery was a legal institution in all of the 13 American colonies and Canada (acquired by Britain in 1763). The profits of the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to 5% of the British economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution.[98] The Somersett’s case in 1772 was generally taken at the time to have decided that the condition of slavery did not exist under English law in England. In 1785, English poet William Cowper wrote: “We have no slaves at home – Then why abroad? Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs receive our air, that moment they are free. They touch our country, and their shackles fall. That’s noble, and bespeaks a nation proud. And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then, And let it circulate through every vein.”[99] In 1807, following many years of lobbying by the abolitionist movement, lead primarily by William Wilberforce, the British Parliament voted to make the slave trade illegal anywhere in the Empire with the Slave Trade Act 1807. Thereafter Britain took a prominent role in combating the trade, and slavery itself was abolished in the British Empire with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard.[100] Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade, for example against “the usurping King of Lagos”, deposed in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers.[101] In 1839, the world’s oldest international human rights organization, Anti-Slavery International, was formed in Britain by Joseph Sturge, which worked to outlaw slavery in other countries.[102]
In 1811, Arthur William Hodge was the first slave owner executed for the murder of a slave in the British West Indies.[103] He was not, however, as some have claimed, the first white person to have been lawfully executed for the killing of a slave.[104][105]
Modern Europe
During World War II (The Holocaust), the Germans used slave labor from across occupied Europe to support their war effort, and numbering perhaps 6 million people.[106][107][108]
The Soviet Union had about 14 million people working in Gulags during its existence.[109] This camp system was also used to colonize Siberia.
Africa
Two slightly differing Okpoho manillas as used to purchase slaves
In most African societies, there was very little difference between the free peasants and the feudal vassal peasants. Vassals of the Songhay Muslim Empire were used primarily in agriculture; they paid tribute to their masters in crop and service but they were slightly restricted in custom and convenience. These people were more an occupational caste, as their bondage was relative. In the Kanem Bornu Empire, vassals were three classes beneath the nobles. Marriage between captor and captive was far from rare, blurring the anticipated roles.[110]
French historian Fernand Braudel noted that slavery was endemic in Africa and part of the structure of everyday life. “Slavery came in different disguises in different societies: there were court slaves, slaves incorporated into princely armies, domestic and household slaves, slaves working on the land, in industry, as couriers and intermediaries, even as traders” (Braudel 1984 p. 435). During the 16th century, Europe began to outpace the Arab world in the export traffic, with its slave traffic from Africa to the Americas. The Dutch imported slaves from Asia into their colony in South Africa. In 1807 Britain, which held extensive, although mainly coastal colonial territories on the African continent (including southern Africa), made the international slave trade illegal, as did the United States in 1808. The end of the slave trade and the decline of slavery was imposed upon Africa by outside powers.
The nature of the slave societies differed greatly across the continent. There were large plantations worked by slaves in Egypt, the Sudan and Zanzibar, but this was not a typical use of slaves in Africa as a whole. In most African slave societies, slaves were protected and incorporated into the slave-owning family.[citation needed]
13th-century Africa – Map of the main trade routes and states, kingdoms and empires
In Senegambia, between 1300 and 1900, close to one-third of the population was enslaved. In early Islamic states of the western Sudan, including Ghana (750–1076), Mali (1235–1645), Segou (1712–1861), and Songhai (1275–1591), about a third of the population were slaves. In Sierra Leone in the 19th century about half of the population consisted of slaves. In the 19th century at least half the population was enslaved among the Duala of the Cameroon, the Igbo and other peoples of the lower Niger, the Kongo, and the Kasanje kingdom and Chokwe of Angola. Among the Ashanti and Yoruba a third of the population consisted of slaves. The population of the Kanem was about a third-slave. It was perhaps 40% in Bornu (1396–1893). Between 1750 and 1900 from one- to two-thirds of the entire population of the Fulani jihad states consisted of slaves. The population of the Sokoto caliphate formed by Hausas in the northern Nigeria and Cameroon was half-slave in the 19th century. It is estimated that up to 90% of the population of Arab-Swahili Zanzibar was enslaved. Roughly half the population of Madagascar was enslaved.
The Anti-Slavery Society estimated that there were 2,000,000 slaves in the early 1930s Ethiopia, out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million.[118] Slavery continued in Ethiopia until the brief Second Italo-Abyssinian War in October 1935, when it was abolished by order of the Italian occupying forces.[119] In response to pressure by Western Allies of World War II Ethiopia officially abolished slavery and serfdom after regaining its independence in 1942. On 26 August 1942 Haile Selassie issued a proclamation outlawing slavery.[120][121]
When British rule was first imposed on the Sokoto Caliphate and the surrounding areas in northern Nigeria at the turn of the 20th century, approximately 2 million to 2.5 million people there were slaves.[122] Slavery in northern Nigeria was finally outlawed in 1936.[123]
Elikia M’bokolo, April 1998, Le Monde diplomatique. Quote: “The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth).” He continues: “Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean”[124]
Sub-Saharan Africa[]
Arab slave traders and their captives along the Ruvuma river (in today’s Tanzania and Mozambique), 19th-century engraving.
David Livingstone wrote of the slave trades:
“To overdraw its evils is a simple impossibility…. We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path. [Onlookers] said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer. We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead…. We came upon a man dead from starvation…. The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be broken heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves.”
Livingstone estimated that 80,000 Africans died each year before ever reaching the slave markets of Zanzibar.[125][126][127][128] Zanzibar was once East Africa’s main slave-trading port, and under Omani Arabs in the 19th century as many as 50,000 slaves were passing through the city each year.[129]
Prior to the 16th century, the bulk of slaves exported from Africa were shipped from East Africa to the Arabian peninsula. Zanzibar became a leading port in this trade. Arab slave traders differed from European ones in that they would often conduct raiding expions themselves, sometimes penetrating deep into the continent. They also differed in that their market greatly preferred the purchase of female slaves over male ones.
The increased presence of European rivals along the East coast led Arab traders to concentrate on the overland slave caravan routes across the Sahara from the Sahel to North Africa. The German explorer Gustav Nachtigal reported seeing slave caravans departing from Kukawa in Bornu bound for Tripoli and Egypt in 1870. The slave trade represented the major source of revenue for the state of Bornu as late as 1898. The eastern regions of the Central African Republic have never recovered demographically from the impact of 19th-century raids from the Sudan and still have a population density of less than 1 person/km².[130] During the 1870s, European initiatives against the slave trade caused an economic crisis in northern Sudan, precipitating the rise of Mahdist forces. Mahdi’s victory created an Islamic state, one that quickly reinstituted slavery.
The Middle Passage, the crossing of the Atlantic to the Americas, endured by slaves laid out in rows in the holds of ships, was only one element of the well-known triangular trade engaged in by Portuguese, Dutch, French and British. Ships having landed slaves in Caribbean ports would take on sugar, indigo, raw cotton, and later coffee, and make for Liverpool, Nantes, Lisbon or Amsterdam. Ships leaving European ports for West Africa would carry printed cotton textiles, some originally from India, copper utensils and bangles, pewter plates and pots, iron bars more valued than gold, hats, trinkets, gunpowder and firearms and alcohol. Tropical shipworms were eliminated in the cold Atlantic waters, and at each unloading, a profit was made.
The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of slaves were captured on raiding expions into the interior of West Africa. These expions were typically carried out by African states, such as the Oyo empire (Yoruba), Kong Empire, Kingdom of Benin, Imamate of Futa Jallon, Imamate of Futa Toro, Kingdom of Koya, Kingdom of Khasso, Kingdom of Kaabu, Fante Confederacy, Ashanti Confederacy, Aro Confederacy and the kingdom of Dahomey.[133][134] Europeans rarely entered the interior of Africa, due to fear of disease and moreover fierce African resistance. The slaves were brought to coastal outposts where they were traded for goods. The people captured on these expions were shipped by European traders to the colonies of the New World. As a result of the War of the Spanish Succession, the United Kingdom obtained the monopoly (asiento de negros) of transporting captive Africans to Spanish America. It is estimated that over the centuries, twelve to twenty million people were shipped as slaves from Africa by European traders, of whom some 15 percent died during the terrible voyage, many during the arduous journey through the Middle Passage. The great majority were shipped to the Americas, but some also went to Europe and Southern Africa.
Christian Slaves
In Algiers during the time of the Regency of Algiers in North Africa in the 19th century, Christians and Europeans were captured and forced into slavery. This eventually led to the Bombardment of Algiers in 1816.[135]
African participation in the slave trade
Some African states played a role in the slave trade. They would sell their captives or prisoners of war to European buyers.[136] Selling captives or prisoners was common practice among Africans and Arabs during that era. However, as the Atlantic slave trade increased its demand, local systems which primarily serviced indentured servitude became corrupted and started to supply the European slave traders, changing social dynamics. It also ultimately undermined local economies and political stability as villages’ vital labor forces were shipped overseas as slave raids and civil wars became commonplace. Crimes which were previously punishable by some other punishment became punishable by enslavement.[137]
The prisoners and captives that were sold were usually from neighboring or enemy ethnic groups.[138] These captive slaves were not considered as part of the ethnic group or ‘tribe’ and kings did not have a particular loyalty to them. At times, kings and chiefs would sell criminals into slavery so that they could no longer commit crimes in that area. Most other slaves were obtained from kidnappings, or through raids that occurred at gunpoint working together with Europeans.[136] Some African kings refused to sell any of their captives or criminals. King Jaja of Opobo, a former slave himself, completely refused to do business with slavers.[138] Ashanti King Agyeman Prempeh (Ashanti king, b. 1872) also sacrificed his own freedom so that his people would not face collective slavery.[138]
The inspection and sale of a slave
Before the arrival of the Portuguese, slavery had already existed in Kingdom of Kongo. Despite its establishment within his kingdom, Afonso I of Kongo believed that the slave trade should be subject to Kongo law. When he suspected the Portuguese of receiving illegally enslaved persons to sell, he wrote letters to the King João III of Portugal in 1526 imploring him to put a stop to the practice.[139]
The kings of Dahomey sold their war captives into transatlantic slavery, who otherwise would have been killed in a ceremony known as the Annual Customs. As one of West Africa’s principal slave states, Dahomey became extremely unpopular with neighbouring peoples.[140][141][142] Like the Bambara Empire to the east, the Khasso kingdoms depended heavily on the slave trade for their economy. A family’s status was indicated by the number of slaves it owned, leading to wars for the sole purpose of taking more captives. This trade led the Khasso into increasing contact with the European settlements of Africa’s west coast, particularly the French.[143] Benin grew increasingly rich during the 16th and 17th centuries on the slave trade with Europe; slaves from enemy states of the interior were sold, and carried to the Americas in Dutch and Portuguese ships. The Bight of Benin’s shore soon came to be known as the “Slave Coast”.[144]
In the 1840s, King Gezo of Dahomey said:[145][146]
“The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery…”
200th anniversary of the British act of parliament abolishing slave trading, commemorated on a British two pound coin.
In 1807, the UK Parliament passed the Bill that abolished the trading of slaves. The King of Bonny (now in Nigeria) was horrified at the conclusion of the practice:[147]
“We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself.”
Some historians conclude that the total loss in persons removed, those who died on the arduous march to coastal slave marts and those killed in slave raids, far exceeded the 65–75 million inhabitants remaining in Sub-Saharan Africa at the trade’s end.[citation needed] Others believe that slavers had a vested interest in capturing rather than killing, and in keeping their captives alive; and that this coupled with the disproportionate removal of males and the introduction of new crops from the Americas (cassava, maize) would have limited general population decline to particular regions of western Africa around 1760–1810, and in Mozambique and neighbouring areas half a century later. There has also been speculation that within Africa, females were most often captured as brides, with their male protectors being a “bycatch” who would have been killed if there had not been an export market for them.
Scottish explorer Mungo Park encountered a group of slaves when traveling through Mandinka country:
They were all very inquisitive, but they viewed me at first with looks of horror, and repeatedly asked if my countrymen were cannibals. They were very desirous to know what became of the slaves after they had crossed the salt water. I told them that they were employed in cultivation the land; but they would not believe me … A deeply-rooted idea that the whites purchase negroes for the purpose of devouring them, or of selling them to others that they may be devoured hereafter, naturally makes the slaves contemplate a journey towards the coast with great terror, insomuch that the slatees are forced to keep them constantly in irons, and watch them very closely, to prevent their escape.[148]
During the period from late 19th century and early 20th century, demand for the labor-intensive harvesting of rubber drove frontier expansion and forced labor. The personal monarchy of Belgian King Leopold II in the Congo Free State saw mass killings and slavery to extract rubber.[149]
Modern times
Slavery in modern Africa
The trading of children has been reported in modern Nigeria and Benin. In parts of Ghana, a family may be punished for an offense by having to turn over a virgin female to serve as a sex slave within the offended family. In this instance, the woman does not gain the title or status of “wife”. In parts of Ghana, Togo, and Benin, shrine slavery persists, despite being illegal in Ghana since 1998. In this system of ritual servitude, sometimes called trokosi (in Ghana) or voodoosi in Togo and Benin, young virgin girls are given as slaves to traditional shrines and are used sexually by the priests in addition to providing free labor for the shrine.
It is estimated that as many as 200,000 black south Sudanese children and women (mostly from the Dinka tribe sold by the Sudanese Arabs of the north) have been taken into slavery in Sudan during the Second Sudanese Civil War.[150][151] In Mauritania it is estimated that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are currently enslaved, many of them used as bonded labor.[152] Slavery in Mauritania was criminalized in August 2007.[153]
Evidence emerged in the late 1990s of systematic slavery in cacao plantations in West Africa; see the chocolate and slavery article.[146]
The Americas
Among indigenous peoples[]
In Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica the most common forms of slavery were those of prisoners-of-war and debtors. People unable to pay back a debt could be sentenced to work as a slave to the person owed until the debt was worked off. Warfare was important to the Maya society, because raids on surrounding areas provided the victims required for human sacrifice, as well as slaves for the construction of temples.[154] Most victims of human sacrifice were prisoners of war or slaves.[155] According to Aztec writings, as many as 84,000 people were sacrificed at a temple inauguration in 1487.[156] Slavery was not usually herary; children of slaves were born free. In the Inca Empire, workers were subject to a mita in lieu of taxes which they paid by working for the government. Each ayllu, or extended family, would decide which family member to send to do the work. It is unclear if this labor draft or corvée counts as slavery. The Spanish adopted this system, particularly for their silver mines in Bolivia.[157]
Other slave-owning societies and tribes of the New World were, for example, the Tehuelche of Patagonia, the Comanche of Texas, the Caribs of Dominica, the Tupinambá of Brazil, the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, that lived along the coast from what is now Alaska to California, the Pawnee and Klamath.[158] Many of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, such as the Haida and Tlingit, were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave-traders, raiding as far as California. Slavery was herary, the slaves being prisoners of war. Among some Pacific Northwest tribes about a quarter of the population were slaves.[159][160] One slave narrative was composed by an Englishman, John R. Jewitt, who had been taken alive when his ship was captured in 1802; his memoir provides a detailed look at life as a slave, and asserts that a large number were held.
Brazil
Slavery was a mainstay of the Brazilian colonial economy, especially in mining and sugar cane production.[161] Brazil obtained 38% of all African slaves traded, and more than 3 million slaves were sent to this one country. Starting around 1550, the Portuguese began to trade African slaves to work the sugar plantations, once the native Tupi people deteriorated. Although Portuguese Prime Minister Marquês de Pombal abolished slavery in mainland Portugal on 12 February 1761, slavery continued in her overseas colonies. Slavery was practiced among all classes. Slaves were owned by upper and middle classes, by the poor, and even by other slaves.[162]
From São Paulo, the Bandeirantes, adventurers mostly of mixed Portuguese and native ancestry, penetrated steadily westward in their search for Indian slaves. Along the Amazon river and its major tributaries, repeated slaving raids and punitive attacks left their mark. One French traveler in the 1740s described hundreds of miles of river banks with no sign of human life and once-thriving villages that were devastated and empty. In some areas of the Amazon Basin, and particularly among the Guarani of southern Brazil and Paraguay, the Jesuits had organized their Jesuit Reductions along military lines to fight the slavers. In the mid-to-late 19th century, many Amerindians were enslaved to work on rubber plantations.[163][164][165]
Resistance and abolition[]
Escaped slaves formed Maroon communities which played an important role in the histories of Brazil and other countries such as Suriname, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica. In Brazil, the Maroon villages were called palenques or quilombos. Maroons survived by growing vegetables and hunting. They also raided plantations. At these attacks, the maroons would burn crops, steal livestock and tools, kill slavemasters, and invite other slaves to join their communities.
Jean-Baptiste Debret, a French painter who was active in Brazil in the first decades of the 19th century, started out with painting portraits of members of the Brazilian Imperial family, but soon became concerned with the slavery of both blacks and indigenous inhabitants. His paintings on the subject (two appear on this page) helped bring attention to the subject in both Europe and Brazil itself.
The Clapham Sect, a group of evangelical reformers, campaigned during much of the 19th century for the United Kingdom to use its influence and power to stop the traffic of slaves to Brazil. Besides moral qualms, the low cost of slave-produced Brazilian sugar meant that British colonies in the West Indies were unable to match the market prices of Brazilian sugar, and each Briton was consuming 16 pounds (7 kg) of sugar a year by the 19th century. This combination led to intensive pressure from the British government for Brazil to end this practice, which it did by steps over several decades.
First, foreign slave trade was banned in 1850. Then, in 1871, the sons of the slaves were freed. In 1885, slaves aged over 60 years were freed. The Paraguayan War contributed to ending slavery, since many slaves enlisted in exchange for freedom. In Colonial Brazil, slavery was more a social than a racial condition. In fact, some of the greatest figures of the time, like the writer Machado de Assis and the engineer André Rebouças had black ancestry.
Brazil’s 1877–78 Grande Seca (Great Drought) in the cotton-growing northeast led to major turmoil, starvation, poverty and internal migration. As wealthy plantation holders rushed to sell their slaves south, popular resistance and resentment grew, inspiring numerous emancipation societies. They succeeded in banning slavery altogether in the province of Ceará by 1884.[166] Slavery was legally ended nationwide on 13 May by the Lei Áurea (”Golden Law”) of 1888. In fact, it was an institution in decadence at these times, as since the 1880s the country had begun to use European immigrant labor instead. Brazil was the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery.
Other South American countries[]
During the period from late 19th century and early 20th century, demand for the labor-intensive harvesting of rubber drove frontier expansion and slavery in Latin America and elsewhere. Indigenous people were enslaved as part of the rubber boom in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil.[167] In Central America, rubber tappers participated in the enslavement of the indigenous Guatuso-Maleku people for domestic service.[168]
British and French Caribbean[]
Slavery was commonly used in the parts of the Caribbean controlled by France and the British Empire. The Lesser Antilles islands of Barbados, St. Kitts, Antigua, Martinique and Guadeloupe, which were the first important slave societies of the Caribbean, began the widespread use of African slaves by the end of the 17th century, as their economies converted from sugar production.[169]
By the middle of the 18th century, British Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue had become the largest slave societies of the region, and the Caribbean was rivaling Brazil as a destination for enslaved Africans. Due to overwork and tropical diseases, the death rates for Caribbean slaves were greater than birth rates. The conditions led to increasing numbers of slave revolts, escaped slaves forming Maroon communities and fighting guerrilla wars against the plantation owners.[citation needed] By 1778, the French were importing approximately 13,000 Africans for enslavement yearly to the French West Indies.[90]
To regularise slavery, in 1685 Louis XIV had enacted the code noir, which accorded certain human rights to slaves and responsibilities to the master, who was obliged to feed, clothe and provide for the general well-being of his slaves. Free blacks owned one-third of the plantation property and one-quarter of the slaves in Saint Domingue (later Haiti).[170] Slavery in the French Republic was abolished on 4 February 1794. When it became clear that Napoleon intended to re-establish slavery in Haiti, Dessalines and Pétion switched sides, in October 1802. On 1 January 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the new leader under the dictatorial 1801 constitution, declared Haiti a free republic.[60] Thus Haiti became the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States, and the only successful slave rebellion in world history.[171]
Whitehall in England announced in 1833 that slaves in its territories would be totally freed by 1840. In the meantime, the government told slaves they had to remain on their plantations and would have the status of “apprentices” for the next six years.
In Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, on 1 August 1834, an unarmed group of mainly elderly Negroes being addressed by the Governor at Government House about the new laws, began chanting: “Pas de six ans. Point de six ans” (”Not six years. No six years”), drowning out the voice of the Governor. Peaceful protests continued until a resolution to abolish apprenticeship was passed and de facto freedom was achieved. Full emancipation for all was legally granted ahead of schedule on 1 August 1838, making Trinidad the first British colony with slaves to completely abolish slavery.[172]
After Great Britain abolished slavery, it began to pressure other nations to do the same. France, too, abolished slavery. By then Saint-Domingue had already won its independence and formed the independent Republic of Haiti. French-controlled islands were then limited to a few smaller islands in the Lesser Antilles.
New Zealand[]
Before the arrival of European settlers each Maori tribe (iwi)considered itself a separate entity equivalent to a nation. During the inter tribal Musket Wars 1807 to 1843 large numbers of slaves were captured by northern tribes who had acquired muskets. About 20,000 Maori died in the wars which were concentrated in the North Island. An unknown number of slaves were captured. Northern tribes used slaves (called mokai) to grow large areas of potatoes for trade with visiting ships. Chiefs started an extensive sex trade in the Bay of Islands in the 1830s using mainly slave girls. By 1835 about 70-80 ships per year called into the port. One French captain described the impossibility of getting rid of the girls who swarmed over his ship out numbering his crew of 70 by 3 to 1. All payments to the girls were stolen by the chief.[173] By 1833 Christianity had become established in the north and large numbers of slaves were freed. However two Taranaki tribes, Ngati Tama and Ngati Mutunga, displaced by the wars carried out a carefully planned invasion of the Chatham Islands, 800 km west of Christchurch, in 1835. About 10% of the Polynesian Morori natives who had migrated to the islands about 1500 were killed with many women being tortured to death. The remaining population were enslaved for the purpose of growing food, especially potatoes. The Moriori were treated in an inhumane and degrading manner for many years. Their culture was banned and they were forbidden to marry.[174] Some Maori took Moriori partners. The state of enslavement of Moriori lasted until the 1860s although it had been banned by British law since 1809 and discouraged by CMS missionaries in North New Zealand from the late 1820s. In 1870 Ngati Mutunga one of the invading tribes, argued before the Native land Court in New Zealand that their gross mistreatment of the Moriori was standard Maori practice or tikanga.[175]
North America[]
Main articles: Slavery in Canada, Slavery in the colonial United States, Slavery in the United States, History of slavery in Kentucky, History of slavery in Missouri, History of slavery in Pennsylvania, Atlantic slave trade, Slavery among the indigenous people of the Americas, and Slavery among the Cherokee
Early events[]
The first slaves used by Europeans in what later became United States territory were among Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón’s colonization attempt of North Carolina in 1526. The attempt was a failure, lasting only one year; the slaves revolted and fled into the wilderness to live among the Cofitachiqui people.[176]
The first historically significant slave in what would become the United States was Estevanico, a Moroccan slave and member of the Narváez expion in 1528 and acted as a guide on Fray Marcos de Niza’s expion to find the Seven Cities of Gold in 1539.
In 1619 twenty Africans were brought by a Dutch soldier and sold to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia as indentured servants. It is possible that Africans were brought to Virginia prior to this, both because neither John Rolfe our source on the 1619 shipment nor any contemporary of his ever says that this was the first contingent of Africans to come to Virginia and because the 1625 Virginia census lists one black as coming on a ship that appears to only have landed people in Virginia prior to 1619.[177] The transformation from indentured servitude to racial slavery happened gradually. It was not until 1661 that a reference to slavery entered into Virginia law, directed at Caucasian servants who ran away with a black servant. It was not until the Slave Codes of 1705 that the status of African Americans as slaves would be sealed. This status would last for another 160 years, until after the end of the American Civil War with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865.
Only a fraction of the enslaved Africans brought to the New World ended up in British North America—perhaps 5%. The vast majority of slaves shipped across the Atlantic were sent to the Caribbean sugar colonies, Brazil, or Spanish America.
By the 1680s with the consolidation of England’s Royal African Company, enslaved Africans were imported to English colonies in larger numbers, and the practice continued to be protected by the English Crown. Colonists began purchasing slaves in larger numbers.
Slavery in American colonial law[]
1642: Massachusetts becomes the first colony to legalize slavery.
1650: Connecticut legalizes slavery.
1661: Virginia officially recognizes slavery by statute.
1662: A Virginia statute declares that children born would have the same status as their mother.
1663: Maryland legalizes slavery.
1664: Slavery is legalized in New York and New Jersey.[178]
The shift from indentured servants to African slaves was prompted by a dwindling class of former servants who had worked through the terms of their indentures and thus became competitors to their former masters. These newly freed servants were rarely able to support themselves comfortably, and the tobacco industry was increasingly dominated by large planters. This caused domestic unrest culminating in Bacon’s Rebellion. Eventually, chattel slavery became the norm in regions dominated by plantations.
Many slaves in British North America were owned by plantation owners who lived in Britain. The British courts had made a series of contradictory rulings on the legality of slavery[179] which encouraged several thousand slaves to flee the newly independent United States as refugees along with the retreating British in 1783. The British courts having ruled in 1772 that such slaves could not be forcibly returned to North America, the British government resettled them as free men in Sierra Leone.
Several slave rebellions took place during the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Republic of Vermont banned slavery in its constitution of 1777 and continued the ban when it entered the United States in 1791.[180] Through the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 under the Congress of the Confederation, slavery was prohibited in the territories north west of the Ohio River. By 1804, abolitionists succeeded in passing legislation that would eventually (in conjunction with the 13th amendment) emancipate the slaves in every state north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon Line. However, emancipation in the free states was so gradual that both New York and Pennsylvania listed slaves in their 1840 census returns, and a small number of black slaves were held in New Jersey in 1860.[181] The importation or export of slaves was banned on 1 January 1808;[182] but not the internal slave trade.
Despite the actions of abolitionists, free blacks were subject to racial segregation in the Northern states.[183] Slavery was legal in most of Canada until 1833, but after that it offered a haven for hundreds of runaway slaves. Refugees from slavery fled the South across the Ohio River to the North via the Underground Railroad. Midwestern state governments asserted States Rights arguments to refuse federal jurisdiction over fugitives. Some juries exercised their right of jury nullification and refused to convict those indicted under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, armed conflict broke out in Kansas Territory, where the question of whether it would be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state had been left to the inhabitants.
The radical abolitionist John Brown was active in the mayhem and killing in “Bleeding Kansas.” The true turning point in public opinion is better fixed at the Lecompton Constitution fraud. Pro-slavery elements in Kansas had arrived first from Missouri and quickly organized a territorial government that excluded abolitionists. Through the machinery of the territory and violence, the pro-slavery faction attempted to force an unpop