Search results
Slavery in the colonial history of the United States refers to the institution of slavery as it existed in the European colonies which eventually became part of the United States. Slavery developed due to a combination of factors, primarily the labour demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies, which had resulted in the Atlantic ...
- When Did Slavery Start in America?
- 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. After the American Revolution, many colonists—particularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the agricultural economy—b...
In the late 18th century, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt. Around the same time, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop whose production was limited by the di...
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...
Rebellions among enslaved people did occur—notably, ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Veseyin Charleston in 1822—but few were successful. The revolt that most terrified enslavers was that led by Nat Turnerin Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Turner’s group, which eventually numbered around 75 Black men, murd...
In the North, the increased repression of southern Black people only fanned the flames of the growing abolitionist movement. From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by free Black people such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the radical newspape...
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 Actopened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out...
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...
Apr 22, 2021 · Slavery in Colonial America, defined as white English settlers enslaving Africans, began in 1640 in the Jamestown Colony of Virginia but had already been embraced as policy prior to that date with the enslavement and deportation of Native Americans. Although the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, chattel slavery was not ...
- Joshua J. Mark
Thousands of formerly enslaved men, women, and children left the new United States with the British in 1783, looking towards new lives of freedom in Nova Scotia and other British colonies. Enslaved men also served in patriot forces, sometimes by choice, but sometimes as substitutes for their owners who preferred not to fight.
Aug 19, 2019 · The sale of their bodies and the product of their labor brought the Atlantic world into being, including colonial North America. In the colonies, status began to be defined by race and class, and ...
Aug 14, 2019 · The arrival of the first captives to the Jamestown Colony, in 1619, is often seen as the beginning of slavery in America—but enslaved Africans arrived in North America as early as the 1500s....
Slavery is central to the history of colonial North America. For more than two centuries, European Americans treated enslaved men, women, and children as objects that could be bought and sold . [i] Harvard’s digitized collections can help scholars understand how the institution of slavery suffused every aspect of the colonial world.
