RBG Nat Turner Instructional Unit

A U.S. Department of Education Grant Program
Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools

Restoring America’s Memory: A Renaissance of Teacher Knowledge
2006-2007 Great Americans Biography Symposia Series

Nat Turner Instructional Unit
Table of Contents

Background
Africans In America – People and Events: Nat Turner’s Rebellion 1831 …………………… 3
Nat Turner Biography …………………………………………………...…………………… 5
Slavery…………………………………………………...……………………………………. 7
Africans in America …………………………………………………...……………………… 17

Literacy Links
Common Features and Patterns in Social Studies Reading ……...…………………………... 27
Unwritten History ………………………………………………….............................................. 29
RAFT Assignment …………………………………………………...………………………….. 32
Making Big Words – continents …………………………………...…………………………… 33
Making Big Words – frightening …………………………………...………………………….. 36
Making Words – millions …………………………………………...………………………….. 39
Making Words – scared …………………………………………….…………………………… 42
Frederick Douglass Cloze Activity …………………………………………………...………… 45

Poetry and Song
On Being Brought from Africa to America ………………………..…………………………… 47
The Slave’s Complaint …………………………………………….…………………………… 48
Death of An Old Carriage Horse ……………………………………………………………….. 49
This Train …………………………………………………...………………………………… 50
Civil War …………………………………………………...…………………………………… 51
The Drinking Gourd …………………………………………………...……………………….. 52
The Ballad of Nat Turner …………………………………………………...…………………... 53
12 Sonnets in Memory of Nat Turner …………………………………………………...………. 54
Ode to Ethiopia (Lyrics in a Lowly Life, 1896) by Paul Laurence Dunbar …………………….. 60
Accountability (Lyrics in a Lowly Life, 1896) by Paul Laurence Dunbar ……………………… 62
Student Poetry …………………………………………………...……………………………… 63

Restoring America’s Memory: 1 Nat Turner Instructional Unit
A Renaissance of Teacher Knowledge Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools

Teaching and Learning Resources
You Were There: A Witness to History Speech ……………………………………………… 65
An Introduction to Slave Narratives: Harriet Jacobs’s Life of a Slave Girl ………………….. 66
Lessons for the Children: Creating a Picture Book About Slavery lesson plan ……………… 69
The Middle Passage According to Olaudah Equiano lesson plan ……………………………. 71
The Underground Railroad lesson plan …………………………………………………......... 73
Applying Question–Answer Relationships to Pictures …………………………………. 74
Teaching With Documents – The Amistad Case …………………………………….............. 82

Resources on CD
Graphics
Jeopardy – blank template and sounds
Lesson Plans – Materials
Primary Sources
Digital History – Frederick Douglass – experience with a Negro breaker
Digital History – Frederick Douglass – Matters fro which a slave may be whipped
Digital History – Frederick Douglass - Assesses the meaning of emancipation
Digital History – Frederick Douglass - Uses a black sailor’s papers to escape
Digital History – William Lloyd Garrison – How It Is with a Slave
Digital History – Primary Source Readings and Questions – Slavery
Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
Narrative – Solomon Northup
Narrative - Harriet Jacobs
Narrative – Omar ibn Said
Nat Turner’s Confession
Singular Escape
The Fugitive Slave Act 1850 full text
The Heroic Slave
Slavery’s Opponents and Defenders
Follow the Drinking Gourd
Frederick Douglass by Paul Dunbar
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Slavery in America Teacher Resources (see online resources for links)
Online Resources
PowerPoint
Underground Railroad Video Power Point and materials
Nat Turner’s rebellion


People & Events
Nat Turner's Rebellion
1831

Nat Turner was born on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, the week before
Gabriel was hanged. While still a young child, Nat was overheard describing events that had happened
before he was born. This, along with his keen intelligence, and other signs marked him in the eyes of his
people as a prophet "intended for some great purpose." A deeply religious man, he "therefore studiously
avoided mixing in society, and wrapped [him]self in mystery, devoting [his] time to fasting and praying."

In 1821, Turner ran away from his overseer, returning after thirty days because of a vision in which the
Spirit had told him to "return to the service of my earthly master." The next year, following the death of his
master, Samuel Turner, Nat was sold to Thomas Moore. Three years later, Nat Turner had another vision.
He saw lights in the sky and prayed to find out what they meant. Then "... while laboring in the field, I
discovered drops of blood on the corn, as though it were dew from heaven, and I communicated it to many,
both white and black, in the neighborhood; and then I found on the leaves in the woods hieroglyphic
characters and numbers, with the forms of men in different attitudes, portrayed in blood, and representing
the figures I had seen before in the heavens."

On May 12, 1828, Turner had his third vision: "I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly
appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the
sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching
when the first should be last and the last should be first... And by signs in the heavens that it would make
known to me when I should commence the great work, and until the first sign appeared I should conceal it
from the knowledge of men; and on the appearance of the sign... I should arise and prepare myself and slay
my enemies with their own weapons."

At the beginning of the year 1830, Turner was moved to the home of Joseph Travis, the new husband of
Thomas Moore's widow. His official owner was Putnum Moore, still a young child. Turner described
Travis as a kind master, against whom he had no complaints.

Then, in February, 1831, there was an eclipse of the sun. Turner took this to be the sign he had been
promised and confided his plan to the four men he trusted the most, Henry, Hark, Nelson, and Sam. They
decided to hold the insurrection on the 4th of July and began planning a strategy. However, they had to
postpone action because Turner became ill.

On August 13, there was an atmospheric disturbance in which the sun appeared bluish-green. This was the
final sign, and a week later, on August 21, Turner and six of his men met in the woods to eat a dinner and
make their plans. At 2:00 that morning, they set out to the Travis household, where they killed the entire
family as they lay sleeping. They continued on, from house to house, killing all of the white people they
encountered. Turner's force eventually consisted of more than 40 slaves, most on horseback.

By about mid-day on August 22, Turner decided to march toward Jerusalem, the closest town. By then
word of the rebellion had gotten out to the whites; confronted by a group of militia, the rebels scattered,
and Turner's force became disorganized. After spending the night near some slave cabins, Turner and his
men attempted to attack another house, but were repulsed. Several of the rebels were captured. The


remaining force then met the state and federal troops in final skirmish, in which one slave was killed and
many escaped, including Turner. In the end, the rebels had stabbed, shot and clubbed at least 55 white
people to death.

Nat Turner hid in several different places near the Travis farm, but on October 30 was discovered and
captured. His "Confession," dictated to physician Thomas R. Gray, was taken while he was imprisoned in
the County Jail. On November 5, Nat Turner was tried in the Southampton County Court and sentenced to
execution. He was hanged, and then skinned, on November 11.

In total, the state executed 55 people, banished many more, and acquitted a few. The state reimbursed the
slaveholders for their slaves. But in the hysterical climate that followed the rebellion, close to 200 black
people, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were murdered by white mobs. In addition,
slaves as far away as North Carolina were accused of having a connection with the insurrection, and were
subsequently tried and executed.

The state legislature of Virginia considered abolishing slavery, but in a close vote decided to retain slavery
and to support a repressive policy against black people, slave and free.


Nat Turner
Nat, remembered today as Nat Turner, (October 2, 1800 – November 11, 1831) was an American slave
whose failed slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, was the most remarkable instance of black
resistance to enslavement in the antebellum southern United States. His methodical slaughter of white
civilians during the uprising made him a controversial figure, but he is still considered by many to be a
heroic figure of black resistance to oppression. Though he became known as "Nat Turner" in the aftermath
of the uprising, his actual given name was simply "Nat".

Early life
Nat was born in Southampton County, Virginia. He was singularly intelligent, picking up the ability to read
at a young age and experimenting with homemade paper and gunpowder. He grew up deeply religious and
was often seen fasting and praying. He frequently received visions which he interpreted as being messages
from God, and which greatly influenced his life; for instance, when Nat was 21 years old he ran away from
his master, but returned a month later after receiving such a vision. He became known among fellow slaves
as "The Prophet".
On February 12, 1831, an annular solar eclipse was seen in Virginia. Nat took this to mean that he should
begin preparing for a rebellion. The rebellion was initially planned for July 4, Independence Day, but was
postponed due to deliberation between him and his followers and illness. On August 13, there was an
atmospheric disturbance, a solar eclipse, in which the sun appeared bluish-green. Nat took this as the final
signal, and a week later, on August 21, the rebellion began.

Rebellion: Nat Turner's slave rebellion
Nat started with a few trusted fellow slaves. The rebels traveled from house to house, freeing slaves and
killing all the white people they found. The insurgency ultimately numbered more than 50 slaves and free
blacks.
Because the slaves did not want to alert anyone to their presence as they carried out their attacks, they
initially used knives, hatchets, axes, and blunt instruments instead of firearms. Nat called on his group to
"kill all whites." The rebellion did not discriminate by age or sex, although Nat later indicated that he
intended to spare women, children, and men who surrendered as it went on. Before Nat and his brigade of
slaves met resistance at the hands of a white militia, 57 white men, women and children had been killed.

Capture and execution
The rebellion was suppressed within 48 hours, but Nat eluded capture until October 30 when he was
discovered hiding in a cave and then taken to court. After his execution, a lawyer, Thomas Ruffin Gray,
who had access to the jail in which Nat had been held, took it upon himself to publish The Confessions of
Nat Turner, derived partly from research done while Nat was in hiding and partly from conversations with
Nat before his trial. This document is the primary historical document regarding Nat. However, its author's
bias is problematic. It is probable that Gray suppressed some facts and gave undue emphasis to others. It
seems unlikely, for example, that Nat would have said such things as, “we found no more victims to gratify
our thirst for blood.” However, the book does contain other lines which appear genuine, particularly the
passages in which Nat describes his visions and early childhood.
On November 5, 1831, Nat was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.
He was hanged on November 11 in Jerusalem, Virginia, now known as Courtland, Virginia. His body was
then flayed, beheaded and quartered, and various body parts were kept by whites as souvenirs.


Consequences
Prior to the Nat Turner Revolt, there was a fairly substantial abolition movement in the state of Virginia,
largely on account of economic trends that made slavery less profitable in the Old South in the 1820's and
fears of the rising number of blacks in whites, especially in the Tidewater and Piedmont regions. Most of
the movement's members, including acting governor John Floyd, supported resettlement for these reasons.
Considerations of white racial and moral purity also influenced many of these abolitionists.
However, fears of repetitions of the Nat Turner Revolt served to polarize moderates and slave owners
across the South. Municipalities across the region instituted repressive policies against slaves and free
blacks. The freedoms of all black people in Virginia were tightly curtailed, and an official policy was
established that forbade questioning the slave system on the grounds that any discussion might encourage
similar slave revolts. There is evidence of trends in support of such policies and for slavery itself in
Virginia before the revolt. This was probably due in part to the recovering Southern agricultural economy
and the spread of slavery across the continent which made the excess Tidewater slaves a highly marketable
commodity. Nat's actions probably sped up existing trends.
In terms of public response and loss of white lives, no other slave uprising inflicted as severe a blow to the
community of slave owners in the United States. Because of this, Nat is regarded as a hero by many
African Americans and pan-Africanists worldwide.
Nat finally became the focus of popular historical scholarship in the 1940s, when historian Herbert
Aptheker was publishing the first serious scholarly work on instances of slave resistance in the antebellum
South. Aptheker stressed how the rebellion was rooted in the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave
system. He traversed libraries and archives throughout the South, managing to uncover roughly 250 similar
instances, though none of them reached the scale of the Nat Turner Revolt.


Slavery
Introduction
Beginning at least as early as 1502, European slave traders shipped approximately 11 to 16 million
slaves to the Americas, including 500,000 to what is now the United States. By the beginning of the
eighteenth century, slaves could be found in every area colonized by Europeans.
Initially, English colonists relied on indentured white servants, but by the late seventeenth century,
faced with a shortage of servants, they increasingly resorted to enslaved Africans. Three distinctive
systems of slavery emerged in the American colonies. In Maryland and Virginia, slavery was widely used
in raising tobacco and corn and worked under the "gang" system. In the South Carolina and Georgia low
country, slaves raised rice and indigo, worked under the "task" system, and were able to reconstitute
African social patterns and maintain a separate Gullah dialect. In the North, slavery was concentrated on
Long Island and in southern Rhode Island and New Jersey, where most slaves were engaged in farming
and stock raising for the West Indies or were household servants for the urban elite.
The American Revolution had contradictory consequences for slavery. Thousands of slaves freed
themselves by running away. In the South, slavery became more firmly entrenched, and expanded rapidly
into the Old Southwest after the development of the cotton gin. In the North, in contrast, every state freed
slaves by statute, court decision, or enactment of gradual emancipation schemes.
During the decades before the Civil War, slave grown cotton accounted for over half the value of all
United States exports, and provided virtually all the cotton used in the northern textile industry and 70
percent of the cotton used in British mills. The slave South failed to establish commercial, financial, or
manufacturing companies on the same scale as the North.

Background
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington were slaveholders. So, too, were Benjamin
Franklin and the theologian Jonathan Edwards. John Newton, the composer of "Amazing Grace," captained
a slave ship early in his life. Robinson Crusoe, the fictional character in Daniel Defoe's famous novel, was
engaged in the slave trade when he was shipwrecked. Slavery has often been treated as a marginal aspect of
history, confined to courses on southern or African American history. In fact, slavery played a crucial role
in the making of the modern world. Slavery provided the labor force for the Slavery played an
indispensable role in the settlement and development of the New World. Slavery dates to prehistoric times
and could be found in ancient Babylon, classical Greece and Rome, China, India, and Africa as well as in
the New World.

Slavery in Historical Perspective
Slavery in the United States was not unique in treating human beings like animals. The institution of
slavery could be found in societies as diverse as ancient Assyria, Babylonia, China, Egypt, India, Persia,
and Mesopotamia; in classical Greece and Rome; in Africa, the Islamic world and among the New World
Indians. At the time of Christ, there were probably between two and three million slaves in Italy, making
up 35 to 40 percent of the population. England's Domesday book of 1086 indicated that 10 percent of the
population was enslaved. Among some Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest, nearly a quarter of the
population consisted of slaves. In 1644, just before the Dutch ceded Manhattan to the British, 40 percent of
the population consisted of enslaved Africans.
It is notable that the modern word for slaves comes from "Slav." During the Middle Ages, most slaves


in Europe and the Islamic world were people from Slavic Eastern Europe. It was only in the fifteenth
century that slavery became linked with people from sub-Saharan Africa.

The Newness of New World Slavery
Was the slavery that developed in the New World fundamentally different from the kinds of servitude
found in classical antiquity or in other societies? In one respect, New World slavery clearly was not unique.
Slavery everywhere permitted cruelty and abuse. In ancient India, Saxon England, and ancient China, a
master might mistreat or even kill a slave with impunity.
Yet in four fundamental respects New World slavery differed from slavery in classical antiquity and in
Africa, eastern and central Asia, or the Middle East.
1. Slavery in the classical and the early medieval worlds was not based on racial distinctions. Racial
slavery originated during the Middle Ages, when Christians and Muslims increasingly began to recruit
slaves from east, north central, and west Africa. As late as the fifteenth century, slavery did not
automatically mean black slavery. Many slaves came from the Crimea, the Balkans, and the steppes of
western Asia. But after 1453, when the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople, the capital of eastern
Christendom, Christian slave traders drew increasingly upon captive black Muslims, known as Moors, and
upon slaves purchased on the West African coast or transported across the Sahara Desert.
2. The ancient world did not necessarily regard slavery as a permanent condition. In many societies,
including ancient Greece and Rome, manumission of slaves was common, and former slaves carried little
stigma from their previous status.
3. Slaves did not necessarily hold the lowest status in pre-modern societies. In classical Greece, many
educators, scholars, poets, and physicians were in fact slaves.
4. Only in the New World that slavery provided the labor force for a high-pressure profit making capitalist
system of plantation agriculture producing cotton, sugar, coffee, and cocoa for distant markets. Most slaves
in Africa, in the Islamic world, and in the New World prior to European colonization worked as farmers or
household servants, or served as concubines or eunuchs. They were symbols of prestige, luxury, and power
rather than a source of labor.

Slavery in Africa
Slavery existed in Africa before the arrival of Europeans--as did a slave trade that exported a small
number of sub-Saharan Africans to North Africa, the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf. But this system of
slavery differed from the plantation slavery that developed in the New World.
Hereditary slavery, extending over several generations, was rare. Most slaves in Africa were female.
Women were preferred because they bore children and because they performed most field labor. Slavery in
early sub-Saharan Africa took a variety of forms. While most slaves were field workers, some served in
royal courts, where they served as officials, soldiers, servants, and artisans. Under a system known as
"pawnship," youths (usually girls) served as collateral for their family's debts. If their parents or kin
defaulted on these debts, then these young girls were forced to labor to repay these debts. In many
instances, these young women eventually married into their owner's lineage, and their family's debt was
cancelled.
Under a system known as "clientage," slaves owed a share of their crop or their labor to an owner or a
lineage. Yet they owned the bulk of their crop and were allowed to participate in the society's political
activities. These slaves were often treated no differently than other peasant or tenant farmers.

The Impact of the Slave Trade on West and Central Africa
The trans-Atlantic trade profoundly changed the nature and scale of slavery in Africa itself. The
development of the Atlantic slave trade led to the enslavement of far greater numbers of Africans and to
more intense exploitation of slave labor in Africa.
While the trade probably did not reduce the overall population, it did skew the sex ratio. In Angola,
there were just 40 to 50 men per 100 women. As a result of the slave trade, there were fewer adult men to


hunt, fish, rear livestock, and clear fields. The slave trade also generated violence, spread disease, and
resulted in massive imports of European goods, undermining local industries.

Enslavement
Many Americans mistakenly believe that most slaves were captured by Europeans who landed on the
African coast and captured or ambushed people. It is important to understand that Europeans were
incapable, on their own, of kidnapping 20 million Africans.
Most slaves sold to Europeans had not been slaves in Africa. They were free people who were captured
in war or were victims of banditry or were enslaved as punishment for certain crimes or as repayment for a
debt. In most cases, rulers or merchants were not selling their own subjects, but people they regarded as
alien.
Apologists for the African slave trade long argued that European traders purchased Africans who had
already been enslaved and who otherwise would have been put to death. Thus, apologists claimed, the
slave trade actually saved lives. This is a serious distortion of the facts. Some independent slave merchants
did stage raids on unprotected African villages and kidnap and enslave Africans. Professional slave traders,
however, set up bases along the West African coast where they purchased slaves from Africans in
exchange for firearms and other goods. Before the end of the seventeenth century, England, France,
Denmark, Holland, and Portugal had all established slave trading posts on the West African coast.
The massive European demand for slaves and the introduction of firearms radically transformed West
African society. A growing number of Africans were enslaved for petty debts or minor criminal or
religious offenses or following unprovoked raids on unprotected villages. An increasing number of
religious wars broke out with the goal of capturing slaves. European weapons made it easier to capture
slaves.
Some African societies like Benin in southern Nigeria refused to sell slaves. Others, like Dahomey,
appear to have specialized in enslavement. Drought, famine, or periods of violent conflict might lead a
ruler or a merchant to sell slaves. In addition, many rulers sold slaves in order to acquire the trade goods--
textiles, alcohol, and other rare imports--that were necessary to secure the loyalty of their subjects.
After capture, the captives were bound together at the neck and marched barefoot hundreds of miles to
the Atlantic coast. African captives typically suffered death rates of 20 percent or more while being
marched overland. Observers reported seeing hundreds of skeletons along the slave caravan routes. At the
coast, the captives were held in pens (known as barracoons) guarded by dogs. Our best guess is that
another 15 to 30 percent of Africans died during capture, the march from the interior, or the wait for slave
ships along the coast.

The Middle Passage
Between 10 and 16 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic between 1500 and
1900. But this figure grossly understates the actual number of Africans enslaved, killed, or displaced as a
result of the slave trade. At least 2 million Africans--10 to 15 percent--died during the infamous "Middle
Passage" across the Atlantic. Another 15 to 30 percent died during the march to or confinement along the
coast. Altogether, then, for every 100 slaves who reached the New World, another 40 had died in Africa or
during the Middle Passage.
On shipboard, slaves were chained together and crammed into spaces sometimes less than five feet
high. Conditions within the slave ships were unspeakably awful. Inside the hold, slaves had only half the
space provided for indentured servants or convicts. Urine, vomit, mucous, and horrific odors filled the
hold.
The Middle Passage usually took more than seven weeks. Men and women were separated, with men
usually placed toward the bow and women toward the stern. The men were chained together and forced to
lie shoulder to shoulder. During the voyage, the enslaved Africans were usually fed only once or twice a
day and brought on deck for limited times.


The death rate on these slave ships was very high, reaching 25 percent in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries and remaining around ten percent in the nineteenth century as a result of malnutrition
and such diseases as dysentery, measles, scurvy, and smallpox. The most serious danger was dehydration
due to inadequate water rations. Diarrhea was widespread and many Africans arrived in the New World
covered with sores or suffering fevers.
Many Africans resisted enslavement. On shipboard, many slaves mutinied, attempted suicide, jumped
overboard, or refused to eat. Our best estimate is that there was a revolt on one in every ten voyages across
the Atlantic.
The level of slave exports grew from about 36,000 a year in the early eighteenth century to almost
80,000 a year during the 1780s. By 1750, slavers usually contained at least 400 slaves, with some carrying
more than 700. During the peak years of the slave trade, between 1740 and 1810, Africa supplied 60,000
captives a year outnumbering Europeans migrating to the New World.

The Origins of New World Slavery
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, black slaves could be found in every New World area
colonized by Europeans, from Nova Scotia to Buenos Aires. While the concentrations of slave labor were
greatest in England's southern colonies, the Caribbean, and Latin America, where slaves were employed in
mines or on sugar, rice, tobacco, and cotton plantations, slaves were also put to work in northern seaports
and on commercial farms. In 1690, one out of every nine families in Boston owned a slave.
It was not inevitable that Europeans in the New World would rely on African slaves to raise crops,
clear forests, and mine precious metals. In every New World colony, Europeans experimented with Indian
slavery, convict labor, and white indentured servants.
Why did every European power eventually turn to African labor? Europeans imported African slaves
partly for demographic reasons. As a result of epidemic diseases, which reduced the native population by
50 to 90 percent, the labor supply was insufficient to meet demand. Africans were experienced in intensive
agriculture and raising livestock and knew how to raise crops like rice that Europeans were unfamiliar
with.
Initially, English colonists relied on indentured white servants rather than on black slaves. Over half
of all white immigrants to the English colonies during the seventeenth century consisted of convicts or
indentured servants.
As late as 1640, there were probably only 150 blacks in Virginia (the colony with the highest black
population), and in 1650, 300. But by 1680, the number had risen to 3,000 and by 1704, to 10,000. Faced
by a shortage of white indentured servants and fearful of servant revolt, English settlers increasingly
resorted to enslaved Africans. Between 1700 and 1775, more than 350,000 Africans slaves entered the
American colonies.

Slavery in Colonial North America
The first generation of Africans in the New World tended to be remarkably cosmopolitan. Few of the
first generation came directly from Africa. Instead, they arrived from the West Indies and other areas of
European settlement. These "Atlantic Creoles" were often multilingual and had Spanish or Portuguese
names. Sometimes they had mixtures of African and non-African ancestry. They experienced a period of
relative racial tolerance and flexibility that lasted until the 1660s. A surprising number of Africans were
allowed to own land or even purchase their freedom.
Beginning in the late 1660s, colonists in the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia imposed
new laws that deprived blacks, free and slaves, of many rights and privileges. At the same time, they began
to import thousands of slaves directly from Africa.
During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, three distinctive systems of slavery emerged in
the American colonies. In the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, slavery was widely used in
agriculture--in raising tobacco and corn and other grains--and in non-agricultural employment--in
shipbuilding, ironworking, and other early industries.



In the South Carolina and Georgia Low Country, slaves raised rice and indigo and were able to
reconstitute African social patterns and maintain a separate Gullah dialect. Each day, slaves were required
to achieve a precise work objective, a labor system known as the task system. This allowed them to leave
the fields early in the afternoon to tend their own gardens and raise their own livestock. Slaves often passed
their property down for generations.
In the North, slavery was concentrated in productive agriculture on Long Island and in southern
Rhode Island and New Jersey. Most slaves were engaged in farming and stock raising for the West Indies
or as household servants for the urban elite.

Slavery’s Evolution
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, most slaves were born in Africa, few were Christian, and
very slaves were engaged in raising cotton. By the start of the American Revolution, slavery had changed
dramatically. As a result of a demographic revolution, a majority of slaves had been born in the New
World and were capable of sustaining their population by natural reproduction. Meanwhile, Second, a
"plantation revolution" not only increased the size of plantations, but also made them more productive and
efficient economic units. Planters expanded their operations and imposed more supervision on their slaves.
A third revolution was religious. During the colonial period, many planters resisted the idea of
converting slaves to Christianity out of a fear that baptism would change a slave's legal status. By the early
nineteenth century, slaveholders increasingly adopted the view that Christianity would make slaves more
submissive, orderly, and conscientious. Slaves themselves found in Christianity a faith that could give them
hope in an oppressive world. In general, slaves did not join their masters' churches. Most became Baptists
or Methodists.
A fourth revolution altered the areas in which slaves lived and worked. Between 1790 and 1860, 835,000
slaves were moved from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and
Texas. We know that slaves were frequently sold apart from their families or separated from family
members when they were moved to the Old Southwest.
Finally, there was a revolution in values and sensibility. For the first time in history, religious and
secular groups denounced slavery as sinful and as a violation of natural rights. During the 1760s, the first
movements in history began to denounce slavery.

Life Under Slavery
Slaves suffered extremely high mortality. Half of all slave infants died during their first year of life,
twice the rate of white babies. And while the death rate declined for those who survived their first year, it
remained twice the white rate through age 14. As a result of this high infant and childhood death rate, the
average life expectancy of a slave at birth was just 21 or 22 years, compared to 40 to 43 years for
antebellum whites. Compared to whites, relatively few slaves lived into old age.
A major contributor to the high infant and child death rate was chronic undernourishment. Slave
owners showed surprisingly little concern for slave mothers' health or diet during pregnancy, providing
pregnant women with no extra rations and employing them in intensive fieldwork even in the last week
before they gave birth. Not surprisingly, slave mothers suffered high rates of spontaneous abortions,
stillbirths, and deaths shortly after birth. Half of all slave infants weighed less than 5.5 pounds at birth, or
what we would today consider to be severely underweight.
Infants and children were badly malnourished. Most infants were weaned early, within three or four
months of birth, and then fed gruel or porridge made of cornmeal. Around the age of three, they began to
eat vegetables soups, potatoes, molasses, grits, hominy, and cornbread. This diet lacked protein, thiamine,
niacin, calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D, and as a result, slave children often suffered from night
blindness, abdominal swellings, swollen muscles, bowed legs, skin lesions, and convulsions.

Slave Resistance and Revolts
Enslaved African Americans resisted slavery in a variety of active and passive ways. "Day-to-day
resistance" was the most common form of opposition to slavery. Breaking tools, feigning illness, staging


slowdowns, and committing acts of arson and sabotage--all were forms of resistance and expression of
slaves' alienation from their masters.
Running away was another form of resistance. Most slaves ran away relatively short distances and
were not trying to permanently escape from slavery. Instead, they were temporarily withholding their labor
as a form of economic bargaining and negotiation. Slavery involved a constant process of negotiation as
slaves bargained over the pace of work, the amount of free time they would enjoy, monetary rewards,
access to garden plots, and the freedom to practice burials, marriages, and religious ceremonies free from
white oversight.
Some fugitives did try to permanently escape slavery. While the idea of escaping slavery quickly
brings to mind the Underground Railroad to the free states, in fact more than half of these runaways headed
southward or to cities or to natural refuges like swamps. Often, runaways were relatively privileged slaves
who had served as river boatmen or coachmen and were familiar with the outside world.
Especially in the colonial period, fugitive slaves tried to form runaway communities known as
"maroon colonies." Located in swamps, mountains, or frontier regions, some of these communities resisted
capture for several decades.
During the early eighteenth century there were slave uprisings in Long Island in 1708 and in New
York City in 1712. Slaves in South Carolina staged several insurrections, culminating in the Stono
Rebellion in 1739, when they seized arms, killed whites, and burned houses. In 1740 and 1741,
conspiracies were uncovered in Charleston and New York. During the late eighteenth century, slave revolts
erupted in Guadeloupe, Grenada, Jamaica, Surinam, San Domingue (Haiti), Venezuela, and the Windward
Island and many fugitive slaves, known as maroons, fled to remote regions and carried on guerrilla warfare
(during the 1820s, a fugitive slave named Bob Ferebee led a band in fugitive slaves in guerrilla warfare in
Virginia). During the early nineteenth century, major conspiracies or revolts against slavery took place in
Richmond, Virginia, in 1800; in Louisiana in 1811; in Barbados in 1816; in Charleston, South Carolina, in
1822; in Demerara in 1823; and in Jamaica and in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831.
Slave revolts were most likely when slaves outnumbered whites, when masters were absent, during
periods of economic distress, and when there was a split within the ruling elite. They were also most
common when large numbers of native-born Africans had been brought into an area at one time.
The main result of slave insurrections was the mass executions of blacks. After a slave conspiracy
was uncovered in New York City in 1740, 18 slaves were hanged and 13 were burned alive. After
Denmark Vesey's conspiracy was uncovered, the authorities in Charleston hanged 37 blacks. Following
Nat Turner's insurrection, the local militia killed about 100 blacks and 20 more slaves, including Turner,
were later executed. In the South, the preconditions for successful rebellion did not exist, and tended to
bring increased suffering and repression to the slave community.
Violent rebellion was rarer and smaller in scale in the American South than in Brazil or the
Caribbean, reflecting the relatively small proportion of blacks in the southern population, the low
proportion of recent migrants from Africa, and the relatively small size of southern plantations. Compared
to the Caribbean, prospects for successful sustained rebellions in the American South were bleak. In
Jamaica, slaves outnumbered whites by ten or eleven to one; in the South, a much larger white population
was committed to suppressing rebellion. In general, Africans were more likely than New Worldborn slaves
to participate in outright revolts. Not only did many Africans have combat experience prior to enslavement,
but they also had fewer family and communities ties that might inhibit violent insurrection.

The Economics of Slavery
Like other slave societies, the South did not produce urban centers on a scale equal with those in the
North. Virginia's largest city, Richmond, had a population of just 15,274 in 1850. That same year,
Wilmington, North Carolina's largest city, had just 7,264 inhabitants. Southern cities were small because
they failed to develop diversified economies. Unlike the cities of the North, southern cities rarely became
centers of commerce, finance, or processing and manufacturing and Southern ports rarely engaged in
international trade.



By northern standards, the South's transportation network was primitive. Traveling the 1,460 miles
from Baltimore to New Orleans in 1850 meant riding five different railroads, two stagecoaches, and two
steamboats. Its educational system also lagged far behind the North's. In 1850, 20 percent of adult white
southerners could not read or write, compared to a national figure of 8 percent.
Nevertheless, there is no reason to think that slavery was doomed for economic reasons. Slavery was
adaptable to a variety of occupations, ranging from agriculture and mining to factory work. During the
decades before the Civil War, slave grown cotton accounted for over half the value of all United States
exports, and provided virtually all the cotton used in the northern textile industry and 70 percent of the
cotton used in British mills.
Nevertheless, the South's political leaders had good reason for concern. Within the South, slave
ownership was becoming concentrated into a smaller number of hands. The proportion of southern families
owning slaves declined from 36 percent in 1830 to 25 percent in 1860. At the same time, slavery was
sharply declining in the upper South. Between 1830 and 1860, the proportion of slaves in Missouri's
population fell from 18 to 10 percent; in Kentucky, from 24 to 19 percent; in Maryland, from 23 to 13
percent. By the middle of the nineteenth century, slavery was becoming an exception in the New World,
confined to Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rice, a number of small Dutch colonies, and the American South. But the
most important threat to slavery came from abolitionists, who denounced slavery as immoral.

Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery

Slave Trade
The level of slave exports grew from about 36,000 a year during the early 18th century to almost 80,000 a
year during the 1780s.
The Angolan region of west-central Africa made up slightly more than half of all Africans sent to the
Americas and a quarter of imports to British North America.
Approximately 11,863,000 Africans were shipped across the Atlantic, with a death rate during the Middle
Passage reducing this number by 10-20 percent.
As a result between 9.6 and 10.8 million Africans arrived in the Americas.
About 500,000 Africans were imported into what is now the U.S. between 1619 and 1807--or about 6
percent of all Africans forcibly imported into the Americas. About 70 percent arrived directly from Africa.
Well over 90 percent of African slaves were imported into the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6
percent of imports went directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the U.S. had a quarter of blacks in
the New World.
The majority of African slaves were brought to British North America between 1720 and 1780. (Average
date of arrival for whites is 1890)
Comparisons
American plantations were dwarfed by those in the West Indies. About a quarter of U.S. slaves lived on
farms with 15 or fewer slaves. In 1850, just 125 plantations had over 250 slaves.
In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana and Brazil, the slave death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that
they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. Rates of natural decrease ran as
high as 5 percent a year. While the death rate of U.S. slaves was about the same as that of Jamaican slaves,
the fertility rate was more than 80 percent higher.
U.S. slaves were further removed from Africa than those in the Caribbean. In the 19th century, the majority
of slaves in the British Caribbean and Brazil were born in Africa. In contrast, by 1850, most U.S. slaves
were third-, fourth-, or fifth generation Americans.



Demography
Slavery in the U.S. was distinctive in the near-balance of the sexes and the ability of the slave population to
increase its numbers by natural reproduction.
Unlike any other slave society, the U.S. had a high and sustained natural increase in the slave population
for a more than a century and a half.
In 1860, 89 percent of the nation's African Americans were slaves; blacks formed 13 percent of the
country's population and 33 percent of the South's population.
In 1860, less than 10 percent of the slave population was over 50 and only 3.5 percent was over 60.
The average age of first birth for slave women was around 20. Child spacing averaged about 2 years.
The average number of children born to a slave woman was 9.2--twice as many in the West Indies.
Most slaves lived in nuclear households consisting of two parents and children: 64 percent nuclear; 21
percent single parents; 15 percent non-family.
Mother-headed families were 50 percent more frequent on plantations with 15 or fewer slaves than on large
ones. Smaller units also had a disproportionately large share of families in which the father and mother
lived on different plantations for most of the week.
Average number of persons per household was 6.
Average age of women at birth of their first child was about 21.
Few slaves lived into old age. Between 1830 and 1860, only 10 percent of slaves in North America were
over 50 years old.
Children
Most infants were weaned within three or four months
There were few instances in which slave women were released from field work for extended periods during
slavery. Even during the last week before childbirth, pregnant women on average picked three-quarters or
more of the amount normal for women.
Half of all slave babies died in the first year of life--twice the rate for white babies.
The average birth weight of slave infants was less than 5.5 pounds.
Slave children were tiny; their average height did not reach three feet until they were 4; they were 5.5
inches shorter than modern children and comparable to children in Bangladesh and the slums of Lagos.
At 17, slave men were shorter than 96 percent of men today and slave women shorter than 80 percent of
contemporary women.
Slaves did not reach their full stature--67 inches for men and 62.5 inches for women--until their mid-20s.
Children entered the labor force as early as 3 or 4. Some were taken into the master's house to be servants
while others were assigned to special children's gangs called "trash gangs," which swept yards, cleared
drying cornstalks from fields, chopped cotton, carried water to field hands, weeded, picked cotton, fed
work animals, and drove cows to pasture.
By age 7, over 40 percent of the boys and half the girls had entered the work force. At about 11, boys
began to transfer to adult field jobs.
Labor
At the beginning of the 18th century, it was common for small groups of slaves to live and work by
themselves on properties remote from their masters' homes.



Sugar field workers in Jamaica worked about 4,000 hours a year--three times that of a modern factory
worker. Cotton workers toiled about 3,000 hours a year.
he median size of slaveholdings ranged from approximately 25 slaves in the tobacco regions of Maryland,
Virginia, and North Carolina, to 30-50 slaves in upland cotton regions. Plantations in the Sea Islands of
South Carolina and Georgia and the sugar parishes of Louisiana averaged 60-80 slaves. In small areas of
Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, slaves lived on 125-175 person units.
In 1790, 44 percent of enslaved Africans lived on units of 20 or more slaves. In 1860, the figure was 53
percent (and approximately a third lived on units with 50 or more slaves).
Half of all masters owned five or fewer slaves. While most small slaveholders were farmers, a
disproportionate share were artisans, shopkeepers, and public officials.
Prices of slaves varied widely over time. During the 18th century, slave prices generally rose. Though they
fell somewhat before the start of the revolution, by the early 1790s, even before the onset of cotton
expansion, prices had returned to earlier levels. Prices rose to a high of about $1,250 during the cotton
boom of the late 1830s, fell to below half that level in the 1840s, and rose to about $1,450 in the late 1850.
Males were valued 10-20 percent more than females; at age ten, children's prices were about half that of a
prime male field hand.
By 1850, about 64 percent of slaves lived on cotton plantations; 12 percent raised tobacco, 5 percent sugar,
4 percent rice.
Among slaves 16-20, about 83 percent of the males and 89 percent of the females were field hands. The
remainder were managers, artisans, or domestic servants.
Growing cotton required about 38 percent of the labor time of slaves; growing corn and caring for livestock
31 percent; and 31 percent improving land, constructing fences and buildings, raising other crops, and
manufacturing products such as clothes.
Slaves constructed more than 9,500 miles of railroad track by 1860, a third of the nation's total and more
than the mileage of Britain, France, and Germany.
About 2/3s of slaves were in the labor force, twice the proportion among free persons. Nearly a third of
slave laborers were children and an eighth were elderly or crippled.

Disease
Slaves suffered a variety of maladies--such as blindness, abdominal swelling, bowed legs, skin lesions, and
convulsions--that may have been caused by beriberi (caused by a deficiency of thiamine), pellagra (caused
by a niacin deficiency), tetany (caused by deficiencies of calcium, magnesium, and Vitamin D), rickets
(also caused by a deficiency of Vitamin D), and kwashiorkor (caused by severe protein deficiency).
Diarrhea, dysentery, whooping cough, and respiratory diseases as well as worms pushed the infant and
early childhood death rate of slaves to twice that experienced by white infants and children.

Domestic Slave Trade
Between 1790 and 1860, 835,000 slaves were moved from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas to
Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
Between 16 and 60 percent of slaves were shipped west by traders.

Profitability
Slaveholding became more concentrated over time. The fraction of households owning slaves fell from 36
percent in 1830 to 25 percent in 1860.



The distribution of wealth in the South was much more unequal than that of the North.
Nearly 2 of 3 males with estates of $100,000 or more lived in the South in 1860.
If the North and South are treated as separate nations, the South was the fourth most prosperous nation in
the world in 1860. Italy did not achieve the southern level of per capita income until the eve of World War
II.
During the Civil War, 140,500 freed slaves and 38,500 free blacks served in the Union Army.



Africans in America
Introduction
The years 1450-1750 brought enormous changes to the North American continent. The native Americans,
or Indians, as the Europeans came to call them, first encountered European explorers, and before long, saw
their world transformed and largely destroyed by European settlers. And European explorers not only
ventured to the lands and natural wealth of the Americas; they also traveled to Africa, where they began a
trans-Atlantic slave trade that would bring millions of Africans to the Americas as well. This slave trade
would over time lead to a new social and economic system: one where the color of one's skin could
determine whether he or she might live as a free citizen or be enslaved for life.

Map: The British Colonies
By the early 1600s, England was eager to gain a colonial foothold on the North American continent. The
first enduring settlement was founded at Jamestown in Virginia in 1607. Colonies in Massachusetts and
elsewhere up and down the eastern seaboard were settled as the century progressed. The English settlers
had occasionally friendly relations with the native "Indians" of these lands, but for the most part, the
interaction between the two turned hostile. Labor to clear the forests, tend the plantations and farms, and
work in the developing seafaring industry became a crucial concern.
From 1619 on, not long after the first settlement, the need for colonial labor was bolstered by the
importation of African captives. At first, like their poor
English counterparts, the Africans were treated as
indentured servants, who would be freed of their
obligations to their owners after serving for several years.
However, over the course of the century, a new race-based
slavery system developed, and by the dawn of the new
century, the majority of Africans and African Americans
were slaves for life.
Control over the captive population became a significant
issue for whites as rebellion and fear of rebellion spread.

Map Information
Virginia: British
1619: A Dutch ship brings the first permanent African
settlers to Jamestown. Africans soon are put to work on
Colonies
tobacco plantations.
1663: A Virginia court decides that a child born to a slave
mother is also a slave.
1705: The General Assembly declares imported servants
who were not Christians in their native lands slaves, and
all negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves property.
Massachusetts:
1641: Massachusetts becomes the first colony to recognize slavery as a legal institution.
The Middle Passage:
1680: The Royal African company transports 5000 African captives annually. By the 18th century, 45,000
Africans are transported annually on British ships.
South Carolina:
1700s: Almost half of the slaves coming to North America arrive in Charleston. Many stay in South
Carolina to work on rice plantations.
1739: The Stono rebellion breaks out around Charleston; over 20 whites are killed by Jemmy and his band.



New York:
1741: Fires break out in New York City, which has the second-largest urban population of blacks.
Numerous blacks are accused and executed in a witch-hunt atmosphere.
Georgia:
1750: Georgia is the last of the British North American colonies to legalize slavery.

Europeans Come to Western Africa

Concerning the trade on this Coast, we notified your Highness that nowadays the natives no longer occupy
themselves with the search for gold, but rather make war on each other in order to furnish slaves. . . The
Gold Coast has changed into a complete Slave Coast.

- William De La Palma
Director, Dutch West India Co.
September 5, 1705

The history of the European seaborne slave trade with Africa goes back 50 years prior to Columbus' initial
voyage to the Americas. It began with the Portuguese, who went to West Africa in search of gold. The first
Europeans to come to Africa's West Coast to trade were funded by Prince Henry, the famous Portuguese
patron, who hoped to bring riches to Portugal. The purpose of the exploration: to expand European
geographic knowledge, to find the source of prized African gold, and to locate a possible sea route to
valuable Asian spices.

Many years had passed between the arrival of
Europeans to Africa and 1795, the time this
image was engraved. The Portuguese, who had
explored much of the coast of western Africa
under the sponsorship of Prince Henry, landed
along the shores of the Senegal River 350 years
earlier.
Image Credit: Musée national des Arts d'Afrique

In 1441, for the first time, Portuguese sailors obtained gold dust from traders on the western coast of
Africa. The following year, Portuguese explorers returned from Africa with more gold dust and another
cargo: ten Africans.

Forty years after that first human cargo traveled to Portugal, Portuguese sailors gained permission from a
local African leader to build a trading outpost and storehouse on Africa's Guinea coast. It was near a region
that had been mined for gold for many years and was called Elmina, which means "the mine" in
Portuguese. Although originally built for trade in gold and ivory and other resources, Elmina was the first
of many trading posts built by Europeans along Africa's western coast that would also come to export
slaves.

The well-armed fort provided a secure harbor for Portuguese (and later Dutch and English) ships. Africans
were either captured in warring raids or kidnapped and taken to the port by African slave traders. There
they were exchanged for iron, guns, gunpowder, mirrors, knives, cloth, and beads brought by boat from
Europe.

When Europeans arrived along the West African coast, slavery already existed on the continent. However,
in his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson points out that slavery in Africa and the brutal form
of slavery that would develop in the Americas were vastly different. African slavery was more akin to


European serfdom --the condition of most Europeans in the 15th century. In the Ashanti Kingdom of West
Africa, for example, slaves could marry, own property and even own slaves. And slavery ended after a
certain number of years of servitude. Most importantly, African slavery was never passed from one
generation to another, and it lacked the racist notion that whites were masters and blacks were slaves.

New World Exploration and English Ambition

For the English in the New World there are really three labor options. One is to transport people from
England to the New World. Another is to employ or exploit the indigenous labor... And the third is to bring
people from Africa.
- Peter Wood, historian

At the end of the 16th century, Spain and Portugal dominated the South American continent and parts of
the Caribbean. They had also gotten a foothold in Central America and the southern portions of North
America, in Florida and the Southwest. England, with colonizing ambitions of its own, was eager to
establish a foothold on the North American coast.

Urging their countrymen to join in the race for the colonization of the New World were two men, an uncle
and his nephew, each named Richard Hakluyt. In a number of popular pamphlets they made the argument
for colonization: England stood to gain glory, profit, and adventure. The younger sons of English nobility,
lacking property at home, would have new lands to lord over. Merchants would have exotic products to
bring home and new markets in which to sell their goods. The clergy could convert "savages" to
Christianity. The landless poor, who burdened English towns and cities in increasing numbers, would have
opportunity to rise up from their poverty.

English colonial ambition and the exhortations of the Hakluyts set the stage for England's first lasting
settlement in the New World: Jamestown. The colony on Chesapeake Bay was first and foremost a
business enterprise. It was funded by investors in the Virginia Company of London, who recruited the men
who would settle Jamestown. The investors wanted what all investors dream of: a quick return of profit.
The settlers were told to settle on an inland river that might lead to the Pacific and the riches of Asia.
Failing that, investors hoped settlers would send home profitable goods, such as minerals, wooden masts,
dyes, plant medicines, glass, and tar.

Captain John Smith, one of the leaders of the Jamestown venture, later wrote that the force behind
the settlement "was nothing but present profit."

In 1607, 105 colonists landed in Jamestown, and by 1609, 500 settlers had come. However, English
ambition was at first dashed by ignorance and an unforgiving land. Famine struck during the winter of
1609-1610. The settlers had arrived in the midst of a severe regional drought, and they had been too
arrogant to till the soil. They could have received help from native Americans, but they considered the
indigenous people to be savages and, eventually, enemies. The settlers ate their cattle, hogs, poultry, and
finally their horses. And then they starved. Some cases of cannibalism were recorded. By the spring of
1610, only 60 were left alive. Nearly nine of every ten colonists had died. The dream of fortune had turned
into a deadly nightmare.

Not willing to give up and absorb heavy financial losses, the Virginia Company of London sent more
colonists from England. In the next few years, they experimented with various types of tobacco, and by
1617, found success with a variety of seed from Trinidad. Only three years later, a staggering 55,000
pounds of tobacco reached English markets. Jamestown had found a way to survive: by growing and
selling tobacco.



But all these new tobacco fields required many hands and hard labor. At first, the men needed in the fields
came from the working classes of England. While the world of colonial America was controlled by the
wealthy Englishmen, most immigrants were poor men under 25 years of age. At first, the supply of willing
conscripts matched the demand. The population of England had swelled from under three million in 1500
to more than five million by the mid-1600s. The homeless and the unemployed turned their hopes to the
New World. Throughout the 17th century, between half and two-thirds of all white immigrants to the
American colonies came as indentured servants.

In exchange for passage to Virginia or other colonies, these poor English people traded 4-7 years of their
labor. They were fed, sheltered and clothed in exchange for their work. After their time was up, these
indentured servants received their so-called "freedom dues." This often amounted to a bushel of corn for
planting, a new suit of clothes and 100 acres of land. Now these men (and small numbers of women too)
were free to labor for a living on their own.

The turn-over in indentured servants was rapid,
Howard Pyle so aspiring planters considered two other
illustrated many options for solving the need for plantation
historical and labor. One was to hire or exploit the native
adventure stories for Americans. But such workers were susceptible
periodicals, including to new diseases and often proved unreliable, as
Harper's Weekly. In they could always choose to leave work behind
1917, he created this and return to their people. There was also a
depiction of the 1619 second option. In 1619, a Dutch ship that had
arrival of Virginia's pirated the cargo of a Spanish vessel -- captive
first blacks. Africans --anchored at Jamestown in the mouth
of the James River. The ship needed supplies,
so the Dutch sailors traded the Africans for food. The colonists purchased
the Africans, baptized them, and gave them Christian names.

At least some of these Africans, like their white counterparts, were
purchased according to the usual terms for all indentured servants. They and other Africans who were
transported to America at this time would become free after their years of service.

The English who had settled in Jamestown and, over the rest of the 17th century, in the other British North
American colonies soon reached a turning point. Would they continue to hire Europeans and Africans as
indentured servants? Or would they rely on Africans as enslaved workers for life, the model that had
developed in the Caribbean? The colonists had a choice to make. They could use laborers who were free or
who would one day become free. Or they could force people to work their fields for them indefinitely,
without any hope of freedom for themselves or their children. To this day, we carry the scars of the
decision they made: gradually, over several generations, they chose slavery.

By the start of the 16th century, almost 200,000 Africans had been transported to Europe and islands in the
Atlantic. But after the voyages of Columbus, slave traders found another market for slaves: New World
plantations. In Spanish Caribbean islands and Portuguese Brazil by the mid 1500s, colonists had turned to
the quick and highly profitable cultivation of sugar, a crop that required constant attention and exhausting
labor. They tried to recruit native Americans, but many died from diseases brought by Europeans, such as
smallpox, diphtheria, and tuberculosis. And the Indians who survived wanted no part of the work, often
fleeing to the countryside they knew so well. European colonists found an answer to their pressing labor
shortage by importing enslaved workers from Africa.



By 1619, more than a century and a half after the Portuguese first traded slaves on the African coast,
European ships had brought a million Africans to colonies and plantations in the Americas and force them
to labor as slaves. Trade through the West African forts continued for nearly three hundred years. The
Europeans made more than 54,000 voyages to trade in human beings and sent at least ten to twelve million
Africans to the Americas.

From Indentured Servitude to Racial Slavery

We sometimes imagine that such oppressive laws were put quickly into full force by greedy landowners.
But that's not the way slavery was established in colonial America. It happened gradually -- one person at a
time, one law at a time, even one colony at a time. All servants imported and brought into the Country. . .
who were not Christians in their native Country. . . shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto
and Indian slaves within this dominion. . . shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resists his master. . .
correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction. . . the master shall be free of all
punishment. . . as if such accident never happened.
- Virginia General Assembly declaration, 1705

One of the places we have the clearest views of that "terrible transformation" is the colony of Virginia. In
the early years of the colony, many Africans and poor whites -- most of the laborers came from the English
working class -- stood on the same ground. Black and white women worked side-by-side in the fields.
Black and white men who broke their servant contract were equally punished.

All were indentured servants. During their time as servants, they were fed and housed. Afterwards, they
would be given what were known as "freedom dues," which usually included a piece of land and supplies,
including a gun. Black-skinned or white-skinned, they became free.
Historically, the English only enslaved non-Christians, and not, in particular, Africans. And the status of
slave (Europeans had African slaves prior to the colonization of the Americas) was not one that was life-
long. A slave could become free by converting to Christianity. The first Virginia colonists did not even
think of themselves as "white" or use that word to describe themselves. They saw themselves as Christians
or Englishmen, or in terms of their social class. They were nobility, gentry, artisans, or servants.

One of the few recorded histories of an African in America that we can glean from early court records is
that of "Antonio the negro," as he was named in the 1625 Virginia census. He was brought to the colony in
1621. At this time, English and Colonial law did not define racial slavery; the census calls him not a slave
but a "servant." Later, Antonio changed his name to Anthony Johnson, married an African American
servant named Mary, and they had four children. Mary and Anthony also became free, and he soon owned
land and cattle and even indentured servants of his own. By 1650, Anthony was still one of only 400
Africans in the colony among nearly 19,000 settlers. In Johnson's own county, at least 20 African men and
women were free, and 13 owned their own homes.

In 1640, the year Johnson purchased his first property, three servants fled a Virginia plantation. Caught and
returned to their owner, two had their servitude extended four years. However, the third, a black man
named John Punch, was sentenced to "serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life."
He was made a slave.

Traditionally, Englishmen believed they had a right to enslave a non-Christian or a captive taken in a just
war. Africans and Indians might fit one or both of these definitions. But what if they learned English and
converted to the Protestant church? Should they be released from bondage and given "freedom dues?"



What if, on the other hand, status were determined not by (changeable ) religious faith but by
(unchangeable) skin color?

This disorder that the indentured servant system had created made racial slavery to southern slaveholders
much more attractive, because what were black slaves now? Well, they were a permanent dependent labor
force, who could be defined as a people set apart. They were racially set apart. They were outsiders. They
were strangers and in many ways throughout the world, slavery has taken root, especially where people are
considered outsiders and can be put in a permanent status of slavery.
- David Blight, historian

Also, the indentured servants, especially once freed, began to pose a threat to the property-owning elite.
The colonial establishment had placed restrictions on available lands, creating unrest among newly freed
indentured servants. In 1676, working class men burned down Jamestown, making indentured servitude
look even less attractive to Virginia leaders. Also, servants moved on, forcing a need for costly
replacements; slaves, especially ones you could identify by skin color, could not move on and become free
competitors.

In 1641, Massachusetts became the first colony to legally recognize slavery. Other states, such as Virginia,
followed. In 1662, Virginia decided all children born in the colony to a slave mother would be enslaved.
Slavery was not only a life-long condition; now it could be passed, like skin color, from generation to
generation.

In 1665, Anthony Johnson moved to Maryland and leased a 300-acre plantation, where he died five years
later. But back in Virginia that same year, a jury decided the land Johnson left behind could be seized by
the government because he was a "negroe and by consequence an alien." In 1705 Virginia declared that
"All servants imported and brought in this County... who were not Christians in their Native Country...
shall be slaves. A Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves ... shall be held to be real estate."

English suppliers responded to the increasing demand for slaves. In 1672, England officially got into the
slave trade as the King of England chartered the Royal African Company, encouraging it to expand the
British slave trade. In 1698, the English Parliament ruled that any British subject could trade in slaves.
Over the first 50 years of the 18th century, the number of Africans brought to British colonies on British
ships rose from 5,000 to 45,000 a year. England had passed Portugal and Spain as the number one
trafficker of slaves in the world.

The African Slave Trade and the Middle Passage.

Who are we looking for, who are we looking for?
It's Equiano we're looking for.
Has he gone to the stream? Let him come back.
Has he gone to the farm? Let him return.
It's Equiano we're looking for.
- Kwa chant about the disappearance of an African boy, Equiano

This African chant mourns the loss of Olaudah Equiano, an 11-year-old boy and son of an African tribal
leader who was kidnapped in 1755 from his home in what is now Nigeria. He was one of the 10 to 12
million Africans who were sold into slavery from the 15th through the 19th Centuries..
"I believe there are few events in my life that have not happened to many," wrote Equiano in his
Autobiography. The "many" he refers to are the Africans taken as free people and then forced into slavery
in South America, the Caribbean and North America.



Along the west coast of Africa, from the Cameroons in the south to Senegal in the north, Europeans built
some sixty forts that served as trading posts. European sailors seeking riches brought rum, cloth, guns, and
other goods to these posts and traded them for human beings. This human cargo was transported across the
Atlantic Ocean and sold to New World slave owners, who bought slaves to work their crops.

European traders such as Nicolas Owen waited at these forts for slaves; African traders transported slaves
from the interior of Africa. Equiano and others found themselves sold and traded more than once, often in
slave markets. African merchants, the poor, royalty -- anyone -- could be abducted in the raids and wars
that were undertaken by Africans to secure slaves that they could trade. The slave trade devastated African
life. Culture and traditions were torn asunder, as families, especially young men, were abducted. Guns
were introduced and slave raids and even wars increased.

In 1888, Harpers requested that Henry M. Stanley's Through a Dark
Continent be adapted for young readers. On Stanley's
recommendation, Thomas Wallace Knox was selected to write the
book, which would be entitled, The Boy Travellers on the Congo. The
illustrations used in Knox's book came from several volumes on
African travels, including the book it was based on.
Slave Caravans on the Road accompanies text describing Arab
involvement with the slave trade and the town of Mombasa, a port
on Africa's east coast. The book tells how Arabs made war with
natives and enslaved captives, as well as inciting war between
various tribes in order to purchase, as slaves, the prisoners of those
After kidnapping potential slaves,
merchants forced them to walk in slave caravans to the European coastal forts, sometimes as far as 1,000
miles. Shackled and underfed, only half the people survived these death marches. Those too sick or weary
to keep up were often killed or left to die. Those who reached the coastal forts were put into underground
dungeons where they would stay -- sometimes for as long as a year -- until they were boarded on ships.

Just as horrifying as these death marches was the Middle Passage, as it was called -- the transport of slaves
across the Atlantic. On the first leg of their trip, slave traders delivered goods from European ports to West
African ones. On the "middle" leg, ship captains such as John Newton (who later became a foe of slavery),
loaded their then-empty holds with slaves and transported them to the Americas and the Caribbean. A
typical Atlantic crossing took 60-90 days but some lasted up to four months Upon arrival, captains sold the
slaves and purchased raw materials to be brought back to Europe on the last leg of the trip. Roughly 54,000
voyages were made by Europeans to buy and sell slaves.

Africans were often treated like cattle during the crossing. On the slave ships, people were stuffed between
decks in spaces too low for standing. The heat was often unbearable, and the air nearly unbreathable.
Women were often used sexually. Men were often chained in pairs, shackled wrist to wrist or ankle to
ankle. People were crowded together, usually forced to lie on their backs with their heads between the legs
of others. This meant they often had to lie in each other's feces, urine, and, in the case of dysentery, even
blood. In such cramped quarters, diseases such as smallpox and yellow fever spread like wildfire. The
diseased were sometimes thrown overboard to prevent wholesale epidemics. Because a small crew had to
control so many, cruel measures such as iron muzzles and whippings were used to control slaves.



The importation of slaves had been prohibited in the United States since
[1808], and yet, the trade continued illegally on a smaller scale for many years
-- even up to the outbreak of the Civil War.

Published in the June 2, 1860 issue of Harper's Weekly, The Slave Deck of the
Bark "Wildfire" illustrated how Africans travelled on the upper deck of the
ship. On board the ship were 510 captives, recently acquired from an area of
Africa near the Congo River. The author of the article reported seeing, upon
boarding the ship, "about four hundred and fifty native Africans, in a state of
entire nudity, in a sitting or squatting posture, the most of them having their
k l t d t f ti l f th i h d d "

Over the centuries, between one and two million persons died in the crossing. This meant that the living
were often chained to the dead until ship surgeons such as Alexander Falconbridge had the corpses thrown
overboard.

While ships were still close to shore, insurrections of desperate slaves sometimes broke out. Many went
mad in these barbaric conditions; others chose to jump to their watery deaths rather than endure. Equiano
wrote of his passage: "Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much happier than myself."

The Growth of Slavery in North America

Is not the slave trade entirely at war with the heart of man? And surely that which is begun by breaking
down the barriers of virtue, involves in its continuance destruction to every principle, and buries all
sentiments in ruin! When you make men slaves, you... compel them to live with you in a state of war.
- Olaudah Equiano, former slave

Slavery became a highly profitable system for white plantation owners in the colonial South. In South
Carolina, successful slave owners, such as the Middleton family from Barbados, established a system of
full-blown, Caribbean-style slavery. The Middletons settled on land near Charleston, Carolina's main port
and slave-trading capital. They took advantage of the fact that at the end of the 17th century, some of the
earliest African arrivals had shown English settlers how rice could be grown in the swampy coastal
environment. With cheap and permanent workers available in the form of slaves, plantation owners
realized this strange new crop could make them rich.

As rice boomed, land owners found the need to import more African slaves to clear the swamps where the
rice was grown and to cultivate the crop. Many of the Africans knew how to grow and cultivate the crop,
which was alien to Europeans. By 1710, scarcely 15 years after rice came to Carolina, Africans began to
out-number Europeans in South Carolina.

Slavery was rapidly becoming an entrenched institution in American society, but it took brutal force to
imposed this sort of mass exploitation upon once-free people. As Equiano wrote, white and black lived
together "in a state of war." The more harshly whites enforced racial enslavement, the more they came to
fear black uprisings. As they became more fearful, they responded by further tightening the screws of
oppression.



"If you're a white authority, you're constantly trying to figure how tightly you want to impose the lid with
respect to people running away. How fierce should the punishments be? Should it be a whipping? Should it
be the loss of a finger or a hand or a foot? Should it be wearing shackles perpetually?"
- Peter Wood, historian

Carolina authorities developed laws to keep the African American population under control. Whipping,
branding, dismembering, castrating, or killing a slave were legal under many circumstances. Freedom of
movement, to assemble at a funeral, to earn money, even to learn to read and write, became outlawed.
This disturbing image was created for a book entitled, Narrative of a Five-Years'
Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. The author, Englishman John
Gabriel Stedman, was hired by the Dutch to help quell slave uprisings in their
South American colony. In his "narrative" he describes the plants and animals
he encountered, as well as how he and fellow soldiers tortured runaway slaves
who had been recaptured.
A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows is based on a crude sketch by
Stedman, engraved by the famous English poet and artist, William Blake. Its
graphic depiction of a slave in Surinam hanging by a single rib illustrates the
general lack of compassion whites had when dealing with enslaved Africans
throughout the world.
Image Credit: James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota This disturbing
image was created for a book entitled, Narrative of a Five-Years' Expedition
against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. The author, Englishman John Gabriel
Stedman, was hired by the Dutch to help quell slave uprisings in their South
A i l I hi " ti " h d ib th l t d i l h

At times the cruelty seemed almost casual. A Virginia slaveowner's journal entry for April 17, 1709 reads:
"Anaka was whipped yesterday for stealing the rum and filling the bottle up with water. I said my prayers
and I danced my dance. Eugene was whipped again for pissing in bed and Jenny for concealing it."

On the 9th of September last at Night a great Number of Negroes Arose in Rebellion, broke open a Store
where they got arms, killed twenty one White Persons, and were marching the next morning in a Daring
manner out of the Province, killing all they met and burning several Houses as they passed along the Road.
- Wm Bull

White fears of the people they kept enslaved were entirely justified. On September 9, 1739, an African man
named Jemmy, thought to be of Angolan origin, led a march from Stono near Charleston toward Florida
and what he believed would be freedom on Spanish soil. Other slaves joined Jemmy and their numbers
grew to nearly 100. Jemmy and his companions killed dozens of whites on their way, in what became
known as the Stono Rebellion. White colonists caught up with the rebels and executed those whom they
managed to capture. The severed heads of the rebels were left on mile posts on the side of the road as a
warning to others.

White fear of blacks was also rampant in New York City, which had a density of slaves nearing that of
Charleston. In 1741, fires were ignited all over New York, including one at the governor's mansion. In
witch-hunt fashion, 160 blacks and at least a dozen working class whites were accused of conspiring
against the City of New York. Thirty-one Africans were killed; 13 were burned at the stake. Four whites
were hung.

A few white men, although in the minority, balked at the cruelty toward African slaves. Francis Le Jau, an
Anglican minister who oversaw a church built on land donated by the Middletons, spoke against the cruelty



of Carolina slavery. Samuel Sewall, a Boston judge, wrote a pamphlet called The Selling of Joseph,
criticizing slavery.

Georgia, the last free colony, legalized slavery in 1750. That meant slavery was now legal in each of the
thirteen British colonies that would soon become the United States. But the conflict between those who
supported racial enslavement and those who believed in freedom was only just beginning. In the
tumultuous generation of the American Revolution, protests against "enslavement" by Britain and demands
for American "liberty " would become common in the rebellious colonies, and many African Americans,
both slave and free, had high hopes that the rhetoric of Independence would apply to them. These hopes,
however, would eventually be dashed, and it would take a bloody civil war three generations later to finally
bring an end to the enslavement of black Americans.

Teacher’s Guide at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/narrative.html



Common Features and Patterns in Social Studies Reading

Everyday Reading
What kinds of reading do you do every day? Probably more than you think. For example, when you
are waiting for dinner, you might look over the newspaper headlines or television listings. You may
read e-mail and surf the Internet. You go to school and do homework. This all requires plenty of
reading.

Social Studies Reading
When you are reading for a social studies class, you may not be reading just for pleasure. You are
gathering information. What kinds of social studies reading does your teacher assign? How can you
get the most benefit out of each kind?

Social studies reading falls into two basic groups: primary sources and secondary sources. Primary
sources include firsthand information: eyewitness accounts, true stories someone tells about his or
her own life, speeches, laws, and other official documents. Secondary sources are everything else.
They are other people's versions of something that has happened.

Primary sources
letters court records
diaries oral (spoken) histories
speeches government records autobiographies

Secondary sources
textbooks biographies
news reports histories
magazine or journal articles

Both groups are important in social studies. Textbooks and other secondary sources give you
the big picture about an era or a special theme in history. Diary accounts and other primary
sources give you real-life details, feelings, and viewpoints about historical events and times.
For most social studies students, though, reading assignments tend to be secondary sources-
textbooks and other histories.

Features and Patterns to Look For
Here are some of the most common features to watch for when you read social studies assignments:

Common Features

Graphics Special Text
•maps •bulleted/ numbered lists
•charts •boxed or shaded text
•graphs •special chapter introductions with key topics
•time lines •special chapter endings with summaries
•photos •questions to think about
•drawings •highlighted material

Each of these features needs your attention as you read. They give you important information that is


not found in the regular text.
Here are some of the most common patterns in social studies readings.
These are ways of organizing information to be aware of as you read.

Common Patterns

• Chronological order
• Main idea and details
• Cause and effect
• Compare and contrast

Learn how to recognize these features and patterns. Then you can use the best reading strategy for
each one. This will help you master your social studies material. It will also help you organize and
express your thoughts better when you write. In the following lessons, you will look at many of these
common features and patterns in more detail.



Unwritten History
The integration of history and archaeology has led to the study of people who have often been
denied a voice in traditional history because of race, class, or gender. The historical archaeologist
challenges traditional interpretations of the past and questions written sources of history. The
historical archaeologist goes directly to the people for evidence of the people's history. The following
two examples show historical archaeology at work.
While digging a site for an office tower in lower Manhattan, New York City, workers unearthed
the bones of some 400 bodies buried in an 18th-century cemetery for African slaves. The information
held in this cemetery provided data about the health of enslaved Africans prior to the American
Revolution. Half of the 400 skeletons belonged to children under the age of 12. Nearly half of those
were infants. Of the children who survived infancy, half showed signs of illness and malnutrition.
Evidence of cultural continuity from Africa to the New World was found in a heart-shaped design of
tacks hammered into one coffin lid. The design is thought to be a ritual symbol of the Akan people of
Ghana and Ivory Coast.
The second example is found in the excavations at Southern plantations by Charles H. Fairbanks
in the 1960s. Fairbanks's research pieced together information from the enslaved people. By
excavating slave cabins, he found that Africans ate a variety of wild local plants, hunted game with
guns, trapped and ate raccoons and opossums, caught mullet and catfish in tidal streams, and cooked
in their homes. And like the evidence of the New York coffin design, Fairbanks's evidence also
showed that African culture and identity-expressed in the people's pottery, food, and architecture-had
been preserved in the New World.

Main Idea 1 Answer Score
Mark the main idea M 15
Mark the statement that is too broad B 5
Mark the statement that is too narrow N 5

Score 15 points for each correct answer.

a. Historical archaeologists study cemeteries and plantations.
b. Historical archaeologists study the nonwritten evidence of people lives.
c. Historical archaeology is a field of study.

Check the correct answer for 2-6
Subject Matter 2 This passage mostly focuses on
a. why historical archaeology is important.
b. what historical archaeology can show about poor or enslaved people.
c. how historical archaeology is changing today.
d. comparing classical archaeology and historical archaeology



Supporting Details 3 The Manhattan cemetery yielded information about the
a. health of African slaves.
b. diet of African slaves
c. clothing of African slaves
d. literacy rate of African slaves.

Conclusion 4 Fairbanks's excavations show that slaves on Southern plantations

a. often went hungry.

b. were excellent cooks.
c. had a fair amount of leisure time
d. had a varied diet.

Clarifying Devices 5 The term historical archaeology is explained through
a. a dictionary definition.
b. a question-and-answer format.
c. definition and examples.
d. comparison and contrast

Vocabulary in Context 6 In this passage, interpretations means
a. questions.
b. evaluations
c. translations.
d. summaries

Add your scores for questions 1-6. Enter the total here.



Unwritten History Answer Key

1 a N
b M
c B
2 a
b √
c
d
3 a √
b
c
d
4 a
b
c
d √
5 a
b
c √
d
6 a
b √
c
d


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