Slavery
North America Themes
Term 1 Week 8
Lecture outline
 The Atlantic slave trade
 The internal slave trade
 Slave work
 Free time, culture and the slave community
 Punishment
 Resistance and rebellions
The Atlantic Slave Trade
Involvement of Africans in the Slave
Trade
Cape
Coast
Castle
1973
1727
Plan of a Slave Ship
Selling
Slaves
Henry Laurens describing a sale
in Charleston in 1755: ‘there has
been two slave ships in one day
the number about 250 & never
was such pulling & hawling for
Negroes before. Had there been
1,000 they would not have
supplied the demand of the
purchasers which appear'd. A
few through this sold so high as
£300 per head. They were
slaves from the Windward
Coast.’
Slavery spreads West
1790
1830
1860
Slave Crops (1860)
Cotton
Rice
Tobacco
Domestic Slavery
The Slave
Community
The Slave Family
Encouraged by masters, leads to children, status of marriage, issues of fertility,
how to protect children, loss of innocence.
Fictive kinship
Gender and the ‘double-burden’
Slave Religion
African religious remnants
(magic, ancestor worship,
style of worship
Gradual adoption of Xnty
(SPG, Methodists, Baptists)
Preference for Old Testament
Imp of spirituality to slaves
Slave Leisure Time
The Informal Economy
Ubiquity
Master’s right of life or death
Purpose of punishment
Punishment
Role of legal process
Resistance
 Diff between passive and Active resistance
 Can take many forms, slow work, feigned illness, tool breaking, theft
 Violent resistance, arson, poisoning – severe consequences

Two slaves executed for murder of master “Sam was burnt and Ephraim hung, and
his head severed from his body and publickly exposed….the burning of malefactors
is a punishment resorted to only when absolute necessity demands a signal
example….it was a scene which transfixed in breathless horror almost every one
who witnessed it. As the flames approached him, the piercing shrieks of the
unfortunate victim struck upon the heart with a fearful, painful vibration – but when
the devouring element seized upon his body, all was hushed – yet the cry of agony
still thrilled in the ear, and an involuntary and sympathetic shudder ran through the
crowd. We hope that this awful dispensation of justice may be attended with such
salutary effects as forever to preclude the necessity of its repetition” Augusta
Chronicle Feb 1, 1820
Running Away
Most commonly young men
Most returned or captured
Some made lived in swamps
or woods “maroons”
Small number made it to
freedom in North or Canada
Harriet Jacobs
Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897),
escaped in 1835
Frederick Douglass
 Born a slave c1818 in
Maryland
 Escaped 1838
 Abolitionist
 Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass
(1845)
Slave Rebellions
 New York (1721, 1741)
 Stono Rebellion (SC,
1739)
 Gabriel Prosser
Conspiracy (VA, 1800)
 Louisiana (1811)
 Denmark Vesey
Conspiracy (SC, 1822)
 Nat Turner Rebellion
(Virginia, 1831)
Key Questions to Consider:
 Was African enslavement due to racism or economics?
 How, when, and why did Africans become ‘African Americans’?
 To what extent can we talk about a generalised or universal ‘slave
experience’?
 To what extent were slaves able to form a ‘slave community’?
 Did slave women face a ‘double burden’?
 To what extent and in what ways were slaves able to resist their
enslavement?
 Why were there so few slave rebellions in the United States?
Next week: white society in the antebellum South, the reasons the
South seceded from the Union in 1861, and the Civil War