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These vitally important records serve as a detailed log of the American South’s history during its tumultuous transition away from slavery and into the era of segregation. In doing so, they foreshadow and provide crucial context for African Americans’ struggles for freedom in the century ahead.
- Slavery in Plantations and Cities
- Cotton Gin
- Living Conditions of Enslaved People
- Slave Rebellions
- Abolitionist Movement
- Missouri Compromise
- Kansas-Nebraska Act
- John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry
- Civil War
- When Did Slavery End?
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 mo...
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 ...
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...
Enslaved people organized rebellions 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 Veseyin Charleston in 1822. These uprising...
As slavery expanded during the second half of the 18th century, a growing abolitionist movementemerged 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...
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 compro...
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 ou...
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 Brow...
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 Warbegan. Though Lincoln’s anti-slavery views were well established, the central Uni...
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 Proclamationdeprived th...
Jul 17, 2023 · While the first roots of these disparities among Black families trace back to the era of slavery, we found that state institutions after the end of slavery drove their persistence—regimes called Jim Crow. Upon gaining freedom from slavery, Black families were eager to pursue formal education.
Oct 9, 2014 · Instead of being at the center of the national economy — as were 20-year-olds in slave traders’ value scale — those who are young and black have become a distortion of the “extra man”: They are...
- Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Oct 14, 2009 · Black history in the United States is a rich and varied chronicle of slavery and liberty, oppression and progress, segregation and achievement.
- 4 min
Aug 19, 2019 · 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...
African Americans in the Antebellum United States. OpenStaxCollege. [latexpage] Learning Objectives. By the end of this section, you will be able to: Discuss the similarities and differences in the lives of slaves and free blacks. Describe the independent culture and customs that slaves developed.
