Chapter Four
Slavery and Empire,
1441–1770
Chapter Focus Questions
1. How did the slave system develop?
2. What was the history of the slave trade and the
Middle Passage?
3. How did communities develop among African
Americans in the eighteenth century?
4. What connections existed between the
institutions of slavery and the imperial system of
the eighteenth century?
5. What was the early history of racism in America?
American Communities:
African Slaves Build Their
Own Community in Coastal
Georgia
Building an African American
Community in Coastal Georgia
1.
Georgia plantations were extensions of the South
Carolina rice belt.
a.
b.
2.
3.
4.
Rice was extremely profitable.
With the expansion of rice came the expansion of the
slave trade.
Slaves endured great hardships in their capture,
transport, and arrival in the new world.
Harsh conditions greeted slaves on the plantations.
Some slaves resisted but most remained slaves.
Communities developed based on kinship networks,
culture (music and arts), and a common heritage.
4.1:
The Beginnings of African
Slavery
A. Sugar and Slavery
1.
Europeans were concerned with the moral
implications of enslaving Christians.
Muslims and Africans could be used as slaves because
they were not Christians.
2.
3.
4.
In 1441, the Portuguese opened the trade by
bringing slaves to the sugar plantations on the
island of Madeira.
The expansion of sugar production in the
Caribbean increased the demand for slaves.
Caribbean sugar and slaves were the core of the
European colonial system.
B. West Africans
1. Slaves came from well-established societies and local
communities of West Africa.
a. More than 100 peoples lived along the West African coast.
b. Most important institution was the local community organized
by kinship.
2. Most West African societies were polygamous and
based on sophisticated systems of farming and
metalworking.
3. Extensive trade networks existed.
4. Household slavery was an established institution.
a. Slaves were treated more as family than as possessions.
b. Children were born free.
This image of Mansa Musa (1312–37), the ruler of the Muslim kingdom of Mali in
West Africa, is taken from the Catalan Atlas, a magnificent map presented to the
king of France in 1381 by his cousin, the king of Aragon. In the words of the Catalan
inscription, Musa was “the richest, the most noble lord in all this region on account of
the abundance of gold that is gathered in his land.” He holds what was thought to be
the world’s largest gold nugget. Under Musa’s reign, Timbuktu became a capital of
world renown. SOURCE:Courtesy of Library of Congress.
A black slave deiver supervises a gang of slave men and women preparing the fields
for the planting of sugar care in the West Indies, a colored engraving published in
William Clark’s Ten Views Found in the Island of Antigua (London, 4823) SOURCE:The British Library.
4.2:
The African Slave Trade
A. The African Slave Trade
1. The Demography of the Slave Trade
2. Most slaves were transported to the Caribbean or
South America.
One in twenty were delivered to North America
(600,000)
3. The movement of Africans across the Atlantic
was the largest forced migration in history.
4. Between 10 and 11 million African slaves came
to the New World.
MAP 4.1 The African Slave Trade The enslaved men, women, and children
transported to the Americas came from West Africa, the majority from the lower Niger
River (called the Slave Coast) and the region of the Congo and Angola.
FIGURE 4.1 Estimated Number of Africans Imported to British North America,
1701–75 These official British statistics include only slaves imported legally, and
consequently undercount the total number who arrived on American shores. But
the trend over time is clear. With the exception of the 1750s, when the British
colonies were engulfed by the Seven Years War, the slave trade continued to rise
in importance in the decades before the Revolution. SOURCE:R.C.Simmons,The American Colonies:From Settlement to
Independence (London:Longman,1976),186.
FIGURE 4.2 Africans as a Percentage of Total Population of the British
Colonies, 1650 –1770 Although the proportion of Africans and African Americans
was never as high in the South as in the Caribbean, the ethnic structure of the South
diverged radically from that of the North during the eighteenth century. SOURCE:Robert W.Fogel and
Stanley L.Engerman,Time on the Cross (Boston:Little,Brown,1974),21.
B. Slavers of All Nations
1. All Western European nations participated in the
African slave trade.
2. The slave trade was dominated by the Portuguese in
the sixteenth century, the Dutch in the sugar boom of
the seventeenth century, and the English who entered
the trade in the seventeenth century.
3. New England slavers entered the trade in the
eighteenth century.
4. Arrangements were generally made with local
African headmen and chiefs to conduct raids to
capture potential slaves.
C. Olaudah Equiano
1. In 1756, Olaudah Equiano was eleven years old
and living with his family in Nigeria.
2. He was captured by African slave raiders and
transported to America.
3. Purchased first by a Virginia tobacco planter and
later by an English sea captain, Equiano served
as a slave for ten years before buying his
freedom.
4. He published his autobiography in 1789 as part
of his dedication to the antislavery cause.
D. The Shock of Enslavement
1. Enslavement was an unparalleled shock.
2. African raiders or armies often violently
attacked villages to take captives.
3. The captives were marched in coffles to the
coast, many dying along the way.
4. On the coast, the slaves were kept in barracoons
where they were separated from their families,
branded, and dehumanized.
E. The Middle Passage
1. The Atlantic voyage was called the Middle Passage
because it was the middle portion of the triangle trade.
2. Slaves were crammed into ships and packed into
shelves 6 feet long and 30 inches high.
3. They slept crowded together spoon fashion.
4. There was little or no sanitation and food was poor.
5. Dysentery and disease were prevalent.
6. Slaves resisted by jumping overboard, refusing to eat,
and revolting.
7. One in six slaves died during this voyage.
A slave coffle in an eighteenth-century print. As the demand for slaves increased,
raids extended deeper and deeper into the African interior. Tied together with forked
logs or bark rope, men, women, and children were marched hundreds of miles toward
the coast, where their African captors traded them to Europeans. SOURCE:North Wind Picture Archives.
Slaves below deck on a Spanish slaver, a sketch made when the vessel was
captured by a British warship in the early nineteenth century. Slaves were “stowed
so close, that they were not allowed above a foot and a half for each in breadth,”
wrote one observer. The close quarters and unsanitary conditions created a stench
so bad that Atlantic sailors said you could “smell a slaver five miles down wind.”
SOURCE:The Granger Collection.
F. Arrival in the New World
1.
The sale of human cargo occurred in several ways.
a.
b.
c.
A single buyer may have purchased the whole cargo.
Individual slaves could be auctioned to the highest
bidder.
The “scramble” had the slaves driven into a corral
and the price was fixed.
•
2.
Buyers rushed among the slaves, grabbing the ones
they wanted.
In the sale process, Africans were closely
examined, probed and poked.
Portrait of Olaudah Equiano, by an
unknown English artist, ca. 1780.
Captured in Nigeria in 1756 when
he was eleven years old, Equiano
was transported to America and
was eventually purchased by an
English sea captain. After ten years
as a slave, he succeeded in buying
his own freedom and dedicated
himself to the antislavery cause.
His book, The Interesting Narrative
of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
(1789), was published in numerous
editions, translated into several
languages, and became the
prototype for dozens of other slave
narratives in the nineteenth
century.
SOURCE:Portrait of a Negro Man,Olaudah Equiano ,ca.1780, (previously attributed to
Joshua Reynolds)by English School.Royal Albert Memorial
Museum,Exeter,Devon,UK/Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York.
G. Political and Economic Effects on Africa
1. The slave trade:
a. resulted in the loss of millions of people over
hundreds of years
b. weakened African states who became
dependent on European trade
c. caused long-term stagnation of the West
African economy
d. prepared the way for European conquest of
Africa in the nineteenth century
4.3:
The Development of North
American Slave Societies
A. Slavery in North America
1. Slavery spread throughout the Caribbean
and southern coast of North America.
2. By 1770, Africans and African Americans
numbered 460,000 in British North
America-- comprising over 20% of the
colonial population.
MAP 4.2 Slave Colonies of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries By the
eighteenth century, the system of slavery had created societies with large African
populations throughout the Caribbean and along the southern coast of North
America.
B. Slavery Comes to North America
1. Between about 1675 and 1700 the Chesapeake went from
being a society with slaves to a slave society.
a. There was a decline in immigration of English servants.
b. European immigrants had better opportunities in other
colonies.
c. The Royal English African Company began shipping directly
to the region and the labor shortage was filled with slaves.
2. Expansion of slavery prompted Virginia to develop a
comprehensive slave code.
3. More Africans were imported into North America
between 1700 and 1710 than in the entire previous
century.
Africans herded from a slave ship to a corral where they were to be sold by the cruel
method known as "the scramble," buyers rushing in and grabbing their pick. This
image was featured in an antislavery narrative published in 1796. Source: The Granger Collection, New York.
C. The Tobacco Colonies
1. Slave societies arose in areas where a commodity was
produced that commanded an international market.
2. Tobacco was the most important commodity produced
in eighteenth century North America, accounting for
25 % of the value of all colonial exports.
3. Slavery allowed the expansion of tobacco production
since it was labor-intensive.
4. Using slave labor, tobacco was grown on large
plantations and small farms.
5. The slave population in this region grew largely by
natural increase.
D. The Lower South
1. South Carolina was a slave society from its
founding.
2. The most valuable part of the early economy was the
Indian slave trade.
3. Rice and indigo were the two major crops.
4. In South Carolina, large plantations employing many
slaves dominated.
5. Georgia prohibited slavery until South Carolina
planters began to settle on the coast with their slaves.
6. By 1770, about 80 % of the coastal population of
South Carolina and Georgia was African American.
Residence and Slave Quarters of Mulberry Plantation, by Thomas Coram, ca. 1770.
The slave quarters are on the left in this painting of a rice plantation near Charleston,
South Carolina. The steep roofs of the slave cabins, an African architectural feature
introduced in America by slave builders, kept living quarters cool by allowing the heat
to rise and dissipate in the rafters. SOURCE:Thomas Coram,Residence and Slave Quarters of Mulberry Plantation ca.1770.Oil on paper,10 •17.6 cm. Gibbes
E. Slavery in the Spanish
Colonies
1.
Though the papacy denounced slavery it was a basic part of
the Spanish colonial labor system.
2. The character of Spanish slavery varied by region.
a. In Cuba, on sugar plantations, slavery was brutal.
b. In Florida, slavery resembled household slavery common in
Mediterranean and African communities.
c. In New Mexico, Indian slaves were used in mines, as house
servants, and as fieldworkers.
3. Spain declared Florida a haven for runaway slaves from the
British colonies and offered land to those who would help
defend the colony.
F. French Louisiana
1. Natchez Rebellion 1629
a. The Natchez Indians and the slaves of Louisiana joined
together in an armed uprising killing ten percent of the
colonial population.
b. Authorities crushed the rebellion but diversified economy
and French Louisiana became a society with slaves.
2. French settlers used slave labor but slaves made up
only about one-third of the population.
3. Louisiana did not become an important North
American slave society until the end of the
eighteenth century.
G. Slavery in the North
1.
2.
Slavery was a labor system in some northern
commercial farming areas but only made up ten
percent of the rural population in these regions.
In port cities, slavery was common.
By 1750, the slave and free African populations made up
15 to 20 % of the residents of Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia.
3.
4.
Elsewhere in the countryside, slavery was
relatively uncommon.
Antislavery sentiment first arose among the
Quakers of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
The London Coffee House, near the docks of Philadelphia, was the center of the
city’s business and political life in the mid-eighteenth century. Sea captains and
Merchants congregated here to do business, and as this contemporary print
illustrates (in the detail on the far right), it was the site of many slave auctions.
Slavery was a vital part of the economy of northern cities. SOURCE:The Library Company of Philadelphia.
4.4:
African to African
American
A. The Daily Lives of Slaves
1. The North American country-born, or “Creole”, slave
population was rapidly growing.
2. Africans formed the majority of the labor force that made
the plantations profitable and thus built the South.
3. As agricultural peoples, Africans were used to rural
routines and most slaves worked in the fields.
4. Slaves were supplied rude clothes and hand-me-downs
from the master's family.
5. On small plantations and farms, Africans may have
worked along side their masters.
6. Large plantations provided the population necessary for
the development of an African American culture.
B. Families and Communities
1. In the development of African American
community and culture, the family was the most
important institution.
2. Slave codes did not legalize slave marriages and
families were often separated by sale or bequest.
3. Slaves created family structures developing
marriage customs, naming practices, and a
system of kinship.
4. Fictive kinship was used by slaves to humanize
the world of slavery.
Bett, also known as Elizabeth
Freeman, was born into slavery in a
Massachusetts household about
1742. As a young woman she was
subjected to the violent abuse of her
mistress, who struck her with a hot
shovel, leaving an indelible scar.
Fleeing her owner Mum Bett enlisted
the aid of antislavery lawyer Thomas
Sedgwick, who helped win her
freedom in 1772. This miniature was
painted by Sedgwick's daughter
Susan in 1811.
SOURCE:Courtesy of Massachusetts Historical Society.
C. African American Culture
1. The formative period of African American community
development was the eighteenth century.
2. The resiliency of slaves was shown in the development of
a spiritually sustaining African American culture drawing
upon dance, music, religion, and oral tradition.
3. Until the Great Awakening, large numbers of African
Americans were not converted to Christianity.
4. Death and burial were important religious practices.
5. Music and dance formed the foundations of African
American culture.
6. The invention of an African American language facilitated
communication between American-born and African
slaves.
This eighteenth-century painting depicts a celebration in the slave quarters on a South
Carolina plantation. One planter’s description of a slave dance seems to fit this scene: the
men leading the women in “a slow shuffling gait, edging along by some unseen exertion of
the feet, from one side to the other—sometimes courtesying down and remaining in that
posture while the edging motion from one side to the other continued.” The women, he
wrote, “always carried a handkerchief held at arm’s length, which was waved in a graceful
motion to and fro as she moved.”
SOURCE:Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center,Williamsburg,Virginia.
C. The Africanization of the South
1. Acculturation occurred in two directions-English influenced Africans and Africans
influenced English.
2. Africanization was evident in:
a. cooking: barbecue, fried chicken, black-eyed peas,
and collard greens
b. material culture: basket weaving, wood carving, and
architecture
c. language: yam, banjo, tote, buddy
d. music and dance: banjo
Buddy Qua of St. Vincent. African
names for weekdays, such as “Qua”
or “Quow” (Tuesday), were common
among the slaves of the Caribbean
and the Lower South. This sketch
comes from an eighteenth-century
series showing slaves going about
their daily tasks.
SOURCE:National Library of Jamaica.
D. Violence and Resistance
1.
2.
The slave system was based on force and violence.
Africans resisted in the following ways:
a.
b.
c.
d.
3.
Refusing to cooperate and malingering
Mistreating tools and animals
Running away
Revolt
There was always fear of uprisings but slaves in
North America rarely revolted.
a.
b.
Conditions for a successful revolt were not present.
Slaves had also developed culture and communities and
did not want to risk losing these things.
Fugitive slaves flee through the swamps in Thomas Moran’s The Slave Hunt (1862).
Many slaves ran away from their masters, and colonial newspapers included notices
urging readers to be on the lookout for them. Some fled in groups or collected
together in isolated communities called “maroon” colonies, located in inaccessible
swamps and woods.
SOURCE:Thomas Moran,The Slave Hunt,1862,oil on canvas,86.4 •111.8 cm.Gift of Laura A.Clubb,The Philbrook Museum of Art,Tulsa,Oklahoma.
4.5:
Slavery and Empire
A. Slavery the Mainspring
1. The slave trade was the foundation of the
British economy.
a. Created a large colonial market for exports
that stimulated manufacturing
b. Generated huge profits that served as a source
of investments
c. Supplied raw cotton to fuel British
industrialization
Eighteenth-century ships being
unloaded of their colonial cargoes on
London’s Old Custom House Quay.
Most of the goods imported into
England from the American colonies
were produced by slave labor.
SOURCE:Samuel Scott,Old Custom House Quay Collection.By courtesy of the Board of
Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
MAP 4.3 Triangular Trade Across the Atlantic The pattern of commerce among
Europe, Africa, and the Americas became known as the “Triangular Trade.” Sailors
called the voyage of slave ships from Africa to America the “Middle Passage”
because it formed the crucial middle section of this trading triangle.
FIGURE 4.3 Value of Colonial
Exports by Region, Annual
Average, 1768–72 With tobacco, rice,
grain, and indigo, the Chesapeake
and Lower South accounted for nearly
two-thirds of colonial exports in the
late eighteenth century. The Middle
Colonies, however, were also
becoming major exporters of grain.
SOURCE:James F.Shepherd and Gary M.Walton,Shipping,Maritime Trade and the Economic
Development of Colonial America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1972),211 –27.
B. The Politics of Mercantilism
1. Mercantilism
a. Colonies existed to benefit the mother country
b. The economy should be controlled by the state
c. The economy was a "zero-sum" game where profits
for one country meant losses for another.
2. Competition between states was to hoard the
fixed amount of wealth that existed in the world.
C. Wars for Empire
1. The English, French, and Spanish struggled for
control over North America and the Caribbean
in a series of wars that had their European
counterparts.
2. Wars in the southern region of the colonies
focused on slavery.
3. Wars in the northern region were generally
focused on the control of the Indian trade.
D. British Colonial Regulation
1. European nations created state trading monopolies to
manage the commerce of its empires.
2. The Navigation Acts passed between 1651 and 1696
created the legal and institutional structure of
Britain's colonial system.
3. The Wool, Hat, and Iron acts reduced colonial
competition with British manufacturing interests.
4. Great Britain did not allow colonial tariffs, banking,
or local coinage.
5. The increase in colonial trade led Britain to pursue a
policy of "salutory neglect."
E. The Colonial Economy
1. The colonial economy grew rapidly.
2. The New England shipbuilding was stimulated by
trade.
3. Benefits for northern port cities
a. Participation in the slave trade to the South and West Indies
b. Trading foodstuffs for sugar in foreign colonies
4. Between the 1730s and 1770s, the commercial
economies of the North and South were becoming
integrated.
The New England artist John Greenwood painted this amusing view of New England
sea captains in Surinam in 1757. By the early eighteenth century, New England
merchant traders like these had become important participants in the traffic in slaves
and sugar to and from the West Indies. Northern ports thus became important pivots
in the expanding commercial network linking slave plantations with Atlantic markets.
SOURCE:John Greenwood,Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam, 1757.Oil on bed ticking,95.9 •191.2 cm.The Saint Louis Art Museum,Museum Purchase.
4.6:
Slavery and Freedom
A. The Social Structure of the Slave Colonies
1. Slavery produced a highly stratified class society.
a. Elite planters held more than half of the land and
sixty percent of the wealth.
b. Small planters and farmers made up half of the
adult white male population.
•
Many kept one to four slaves.
c. Throughout the plantation region, landless men
constituted about forty percent of the population.
•
Work included renting land, tenant farming, hiring
out as overseers, or becoming indentured servants.
B. White Skin Privilege
1.
2.
3.
Skin color determined status.
Legal and other racial distinctions were constant reminders
of the freedom of white colonists and the debasement of all
African Americans, free or slave.
Relationships between free whites and enslaved blacks
produced a mixed-ancestry group known as mulattoes.
Majority of mulattoes were slaves.
4.
Racism created contempt between African Americans and
colonists.
Thomas Jefferson placed this advertisement in the Virginia Gazette on September 14,
1769. Americans need to seriously consider the historical relationship between the
prosperity and freedom of white people and the oppression and exploitation of
Africans and African Americans. SOURCE:Virginia Historical Society.