Slavery and the Underground Railroad
Exploring slavery and the network that lead them to freedomSlavery in America
The meaning of democracy was put to the test by slavery, which was ingrained in American society. Half of all U.S. exports were produced by slaves’ labor, which also provided a significant amount of the financial capital and raw materials required to kickstart industrialization. Enslaved persons were valued at an estimated $2.7 billion in 1860 when they were bought and sold as property.
In a conflict with a Spanish ship in 1619, a Dutch ship called the White Lion took 20 slaves from Africa. For battle-related repairs, they landed at Jamestown, Virginia. The enslaved Africans were traded by the Dutch to the Colonials as indentured laborers in exchange for food and supplies. Slavery had come to the Americas.
The Growth of Slavery
In contrast to indentured servants, who were mostly impoverished Europeans, European immigrants in North America turned to enslaved Africans throughout the 17th century as a more affordable and plentiful labor source. Some historians have calculated that 6 to 7 million enslaved individuals were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, despite the fact that exact numbers are impossible to provide.
Enslaved Africans primarily labored on the southern coast’s tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations in the 17th and 18th centuries, from the Chesapeake Bay provinces of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia. Many Americans began to connect the tyranny of enslaved Africans to their own enslavement by the British after the American Revolution, especially in the North where slavery was largely unimportant to the agricultural economy.
The Cotton Gin
The South had an economic crisis in the late 18th century as a result of the virtually complete exhaustion of the land used for tobacco cultivation, which cast doubt on the future expansion of slavery in America. American cotton, a southern commodity whose output was constrained by the challenge of manually extracting the seeds from raw cotton fibers, had a significant increase in demand about the same time as the mechanization of the textile industry in England.
However, a young Yankee teacher by the name of Eli Whitney created the cotton gin in 1793. It was a straightforward mechanical device that effectively removed the seeds. His idea was widely imitated, and in a short period of time, the South switched from the large-scale production of tobacco to cotton, which increased the area’s reliance on enslaved labor. Though many of the region’s businesses became wealthy from the slave trade and investments in southern plantations, slavery itself was never widely practiced in the North. Between 1774 and 1804, the majority of the northern states abolished slavery or began the process of doing so, but the South continued to depend on the institution.
Civil War
The following year, when Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln was elected as president, the South would finally collapse. Seven southern states seceded to form the Confederate States of America within three months; four more did so after the Civil War started.
Despite the fact that Lincoln’s anti-slavery sentiments were publicly known, the primary goal of the Union war at the outset was to maintain the United States as a country. Due to military necessity, rising anti-slavery sentiment in the North, and the self-emancipation of many people who left slavery as Union troops advanced across the South, abolition did not become a goal until much later.
Lincoln first announced the emancipation of slaves on September 22, 1862, and on January 1, 1863, he officially declared that “slaves within any State, or defined part of a State…in rebellion,…shall then, thenceforward, and permanently free”. The Emancipation Proclamation stripped the Confederacy of the majority of its labor force by liberating around 3 million slaves in the rebel states, which substantially influenced public opinion around the world in favor of the Union. Although the 13th Amendment’s ratification after the Civil War’s conclusion in 1865 would officially put an end to slavery in America, the Emancipation Proclamation nevertheless resulted in around 186,000 Black troops joining the Union Army and about 38,000 of them dying in combat.
The Legacy of Slavery
Although slavery was officially ended on December 18, 1865, the status of freed Black people in the South after the war remained fragile, and enormous difficulties were ahead throughout the Reconstruction era. The 14th Amendment granted previously enslaved men and women the right to citizenship, “equal protection” under the Constitution, and the right to vote; however, these provisions of the Constitution were frequently disregarded or broken, and it was challenging for Black citizens to participate in the post-war economy due to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements like sharecropping.
Reconstruction was ultimately discouraging for African Americans despite the unprecedented level of Black involvement in American politics. By 1877, white supremacy—including the establishment of racial groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—had won in the South. The civil rights movement of the 1960s, which saw the largest political and social advancements for Black Americans since Reconstruction, was sparked by resistance to the persistent racism and discrimination that persisted in America after the end of slavery almost a century earlier.
Ammunition
Slave Rebellions
Enslaved individuals did attempt to rebel, most unsuccessfully led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822. The Nat Turner-led uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831 was the one that worried enslavers the most. Turner’s group, which eventually numbered about 75 Black men, murdered about 55 white people in just two days before being routed by state militia troops and local white residents’ armed resistance. Turner’s rebellion was cited by proponents of slavery as proof that Black people were barbarians who needed an institution like slavery to discipline them, and out of fear of similar uprisings, many southern states strengthened their slave laws to restrict the education, movement, and gathering of enslaved people.
Missouri Compromise
America’s rapid development and westward expansion in the first half of the 19th century would provide the struggle over slavery in America and its potential expansion or limitation a bigger stage. Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and all western territories north of Missouri’s southern border were to be free soil in 1820 after a contentious discussion about the federal government’s ability to restrict slavery over Missouri’s application for statehood. Even though the Missouri Compromise was intended to establish a balance between slave and free states, it was only momentarily successful in stifling the forces of sectionalism.
Kansas-Nebraska Act
In order to settle the issue of slavery in the areas conquered during the Mexican-American War, another flimsy agreement was made in 1850. However, four years later, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which affirmed popular sovereignty over legislative decree and opened all new territories to slavery, sparked a bloody conflict in the newly created state of Kansas between pro- and anti-slavery groups. The Kansas-Nebraska Act caused outrage in the North, which contributed to the demise of the old Whig Party and the emergence of a new, entirely northern Republican Party. The Missouri Compromise was effectively invalidated in 1857 when the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott case, which involved an enslaved man who fought for his freedom on the grounds that his master had taken him into a free area, that all territories were accessible to slavery.
Slavery
In the antebellum South, nearly one-third of the population was comprised of slaves. Many owners of slaves lived on enormous plantations or on modest farms. Through a system of stringent laws, landowners aimed to make their captives totally reliant on them. Their conduct and movement were largely restricted, and they were typically forbidden from learning to read and write.
Many slave owners sexually assaulted their slaves, rewarding submissive conduct with benefits while punishing disobedient slaves harshly. In order to keep the captives divided and less inclined to band together against their masters, there was a rigorous hierarchy among them, ranging from privileged house employees and skilled artisans to unskilled field hands. Many enslaved men and women did marry and have children. The majority of owners of enslaved people encouraged this behavior, but they did not typically hesitate to split up families by sale or removal.
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Vocabulary
Emancipation Proclamation — issued by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863, this document declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”
Fugitive Slave Act — passed in 1850, the act required that slaves be returned to their owners, even if they were in a free state. The act also made the federal government responsible for finding, returning, and trying escaped slaves.
Master — a term used by slaves to address their owners
North Star — used by slaves to find their way north and to freedom
Patrollers — men who searched for escaped slaves
Quilt — blanket made from squares of fabric that are sewn together; sometimes used to pass information to runaways
Slave catcher — a person who made money by finding escaped slaves, capturing them, and returning them to their owners
Spirituals — religious songs sung by the slaves to lift their spirits and relay coded information
Stationmasters — people along the Underground Railroad who allowed runaway slaves to hide in their homes