322US P. Marquis. Transcript of class by Eric Foner (selection)
UNIT 2. SLAVERY IN THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
2.1. “AMERICAN” SLAVERY FROM COLUMBUS TO 1808
Transcript of class given by Eric Foner (Columbia University). Selected passages.
* denotes that the document is visible on my website
2.1.1. WHAT IS SLAVERY?
… So what is slavery anyway? The word slavery is used and abused in many, many
ways and times. Inequality is not slavery. Exploitation is not slavery. And I believe we
should be fairly precise. The American revolutionaries before the -- before independence
claimed that British taxation, taxation without representation was reducing them to
slavery. Obviously this was a metaphor. They weren't really being reduced to slavery
because slavery is kind of all purpose metaphor for oppression, inequality. I've heard
people say on TV maybe that's not the best place to find this stop and frisk is sort of like
slavery, you know? No. It is isn't. It may not be a good thing but it is not like slavery
believe me. Orlando Patterson, the sociologist at Harvard, wrote a book years ago about
slavery in which he identified like 200 different systems of slavery in world history. And
there were different in enormous ways but what did they have in common? They had in
common what he called social death. Social death or another way of putting it the
reduction of a person to property. The reduction of a person to property. That is they
could be bought and sold. They essentially have no rights. Social death they are not part
of the society they are living in. That doesn't mean they're not unequal. Being part of the
society doesn't mean that you are treated equally and every society people are treated
unequally but slavery is a specific form of that where people are reduced to chattel
property. Now sad to say, slavery has existed as far back as you go in human history, you
can find slavery. That's a sad commentary on our species. And it exists today in various
places. …
The main point is that from the very beginning of European discovery and exploration
and settlement and conquest of the New World, slavery was here. Columbus brought back
a few Native Americans, Indians, from the Caribbean on his first voyage, 1492. He came
here and he brought a few Indians back with him to be slaves in Spain. And by 1502, 10
years later, Africans were being transported to Hispaniola where the Dominican Republic
and Haiti, that island. The first place the Spanish setup a colonial settlement in the New
World but even more deeply as Davis shows, without slavery the development of the
New World would have been impossible. Modern capitalism, the money that went into
the Industrial Revolution. The settlement of the Western hemisphere. All those things
depended on slavery in the large measure. The slave trade was a gigantic part of world
commerce in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. To show you the centrality of slavery from
1500 to about let's say 1820, it's estimated about 12 and a half million people crossed the
Atlantic from East to West, 12 and a half million people over 3 centuries. Of those 12 and
a half million people about 10 million were slaves. Two and a half million were
Europeans. So the number of slaves brought over vastly outnumbered the -- sort of free
migrants.
2.1.2. NEW WORLD SLAVERY
note: Western Hemisphere = North and South America
… in the western hemisphere and I'm talking about the United States, the Caribbean, the
West Indies and particularly Brazil, the great center of slavery in South America, slavery
differed in two fundamental ways from what had existed before; one, it was racial
slavery, right? There was a difference of appearance between the owner and the slave,
which came to be described as race; that is to say, it came to be described as something
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322US P. Marquis. Transcript of class by Eric Foner (selection)
inherent in the person. Skin color [inaudible] skin colors around, I mean what's the big
deal, but skin color came to be associated with the idea of race as an inherent quality,
which doomed some people to perpetual slavery. …
Secondly, slavery in the western hemisphere was plantation slavery, not household
slavery. There was all sorts of slavery and there was plenty of household slavery and
slaves did all sorts of work but the center of gravity of slavery was the slave plantation.
The slave plantation is a large scale, agricultural operation using large numbers of unfree
laborers to produce a staple crop for the world market, whether it's sugar, tobacco, cotton
later on, therefore what? What implications flow from that? First of all, there is a sharp
separation between the owner and the slaves. There is this constant immersion in the
world marketplace, which wasn't the case for slavery before this. It means that the
number of slaves outnumbers the free people; when you put large numbers of people
together on an agricultural enterprise with a few free people and maybe dozens or
hundreds of slaves, that means that the sort of policing system or the danger or the, you
know, the need to discipline that population is far, far greater than when the slave is just a
sort of one person or two working in a household. And so it's a -- you need a regimented,
disciplined labor force with all sorts of police restrictions on them to make sure they don't
conspire and rebel or run away or something like that.
Now why bring people from Africa, 3,000 miles in order to do this? There was a lot of
people already here when the Europeans came; Native Americans all over the place,
right? There were millions of them, no one knows exactly how many. Not that many in
the area that had become the United States but maybe a couple of million or so and
certainly in Latin America but it's -- excuse me -- it's very hard to enslave people on their
own turf, so to speak, on their own territory. That is a recipe for constant warfare, right?
Constant warfare if you're trying to enslave the people living or nearby, also they know
the territory; they know the terrain, they can run away very easily. They have allies
around. Now there were efforts to enslave Native Americans and in some places, they
worked for a while and a slave trade in Native Americans developed in the early Colonial
Period, South Carolina was sending Native Americans as slaves down to the Caribbean at
some points. But also, Native Americans lacked resistance to the diseases that came along
with Europeans and they died out in enormous numbers, one of the greatest population
catastrophe in world history was the decimation of the Native American population. I'm
talking about the whole hemisphere, not just what becomes the U.S., and so Africans,
unfortunately for them, had a greater history of contact with Europeans and greater
resistance to many of the diseases that flourished in the tropical world. So by the 16th
Century, as one historian writes, the color of slaves changed from white to black; …
The great height of it is the 18th century, where massive numbers of slaves are brought to
Brazil, the Caribbean and a small number, really only a small number to British North
America and then the slave trade continues well into the 19th Century to particularly
Brazil and Cuba are picking up slaves then. And I'm not really going to go into the middle
passage but probably many of you have seen this famous image of the slave ship
Brookes* and the way people were crammed in, you know, this just shows you how
slaves were as commerce, as commodities, were crammed into the hold of the ship. Every
spare inch was filled with a man or a woman or a child because the profit in bringing
African people across the ocean to the New World was so great that even though many
people died on the slave trade, it still was more profitable to cram them in than to actually
try to create a more healthy living situation. …
2.3. SLAVERY IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE
… Let's hone in on the area that will become the United States which is where our main
concern is here. By the time of the settlement of the British colonies, you know the
British colonies of the East Coast of the -- of North America, Virginia, and then the other
ones. Plantation slavery had already entrenched itself. We're talking -- you know Virginia
1607, slavery is already a thriving institution by then in the Caribbean and parts of
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322US P. Marquis. Transcript of class by Eric Foner (selection)
Spanish America. Why? What was -- slavery then was based on sugar. Sugar was the
great slave crop of the Caribbean and Brazil. The first mass marketed commodity in
history. Before the sugar plantation international trade was basically in luxury goods. I
mean what was Columbus looking for anyway when he went to -- stumbled on the New
World? Right? He was trying to get over -- he thought he was heading for China, India,
the Islands. What was he looking for? Spices, right? Hey, spices, silks, what's -- that's a
long way to go for a little oregano, you know? [Laughter] But you know spices were part
of -- were a luxury item. You could sell them for an enormous amount of money if you
could get them back to Europe but sugar is different. Sugar is a mass marketed thing and
it became the greatest commodity in history up to that point and the profits of growing
and selling sugar were immense. You know you can -- as I don't know as Henry Ford
figured out and many other people, you can make a lot more money selling a lot of
something for a low price than selling a few things for a high price. And sugar is so -- and
sugar requires slaves. You could not get free people to work on the very, very arduous
labor conditions on these sugar plantations but at the same time, the other great
commodity of trade was slaves themselves. The slave trade itself. So basically
international trade or at least Atlantic trade in the 17th and 18th centuries is basically
either slaves or the product of slave labor. That's what is being transported back and forth
across the Atlantic. And the slave trade, control of the slave trade becomes a major
diplomatic prize in the contest for power of European empires. It becomes the cause of
wars between Great Britain, the Dutch, and Spain. …
2.1.4. SLAVERY IN COLONIAL VIRGINIA
Now, in -- historians have debated a lot the how, why, and when exactly slavery
developed in the British colonies of North America, particularly Virginia. Why Virginia?
Well, first, it was the first one. But more important, Virginia seems to exemplify the, you
know, contradiction between slavery and freedom in our history. Virginia is the home of
Thomas Jefferson and Mad -- the Declaration of Independence. It's the home of Madison,
the father of the Constitution. It's one of the pivots of the American Revolution. How
come -- how did slavery develop there at the same time? I mean, let's take the year 1619.
Okay. What happened in 1619? The installation of the House of Burgesses in Virginia, a
representative assembly, more or less. I mean, only rich guys could vote for it, but it's still
a -- maybe the seedbed of American democracy. Who knows. But also 1619, 20 black
people were delivered into Virginia from a Dutch ship. The first black presence in the
colonies that will become the United -- I'm not talking about the southwest where there
were blacks down there earlier. The Spanish were there. I'm talking to eastern North
America that will become the United States in 1776. …
But little by little, slavery becomes entrenched in Virginia in the 1600s. And why? Well,
a whole series of reasons. …,
in 1680 Pennsylvania opens up and William Penn says, I don't want this slavery stuff.
Although there was some. We're going to have free farmers here. I'm going to -- the way
to make money, I have all this land, is to rent or sell the land to free farmers. That's what I
want. So if you're a guy in England and you got a chance to go to Virginia to work on a
tobacco plantation or to Pennsylvania where you can get some free land, what are you
going to do? Whites stopped coming to Virginia as other opportunities open up, and that
further encourages the importation of slaves.
And finally, in 17 -- in 1676, they have this little unpleasantness called Bacon's Rebellion
where a whole lot of former indentured servants who are now free but very poor rise up
and kick out the governor and set up -- they take over Virginia. And even -- the next year,
the British send a fleet and kick them all out. But, you know, this shows that this -- that
the class of former indentured servants can be a very volatile group; maybe it's better to
have people who are working their whole lives and can never become free, right?
And also, early Virginia was a sort of death trap. People died in enormous numbers early
on; and therefore, it didn't make any sense to -- you know, slave is more expensive than
an indentured servant because you have their labor for the whole life -- their whole life,
but if they're only going to live a few years, what's the point of buying someone's labor
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322US P. Marquis. Transcript of class by Eric Foner (selection)
for their whole life. So in the early days, an indentured servant made a lot more rational
sense. But as the life expectancy increases, it becomes more desirable, from the point of
view of planters, to bring in more and more slaves.
So by 16 -- by 1700, Virginia is now -- the number of slaves is growing very rapidly, the
plantation system has entrenched itself in Virginia. Here it is to tobacco they are going,
not sugar like further south, but tobacco which is also enormously popular. In fact, what
did Colonial America contribute to the world, actually? Sugar, which rots your teeth; and
tobacco, which kills you off in other ways. So that was our contribution to world
civilization at that time. So by the middle -- we are telescoping a lot of history here -- by
the middle of the 1700s, Virginia's a slave society. Half the population is slave and they
work on everything. I'm talking about plant -- you name it, that's what the slaves were
doing. I don't care -- working on the docks, were building roads, crafts, personal servants.
But the great number -- the largest number are these plantation labors growing and
dealing with tobacco. …
2.1.5. 18TH CENTURY SLAVERY
… The great era of the slave trade to what becomes the United States, is about 1730 to
1770; that's when -- you're talking about maybe 400,000 slaves were brought in to the
American colonies, that's a heck of a lot of people but remember, there were 10 million
brought across the ocean so the 400,000 is a very, very small percentage of the total slave
trade. 1770, now there was some illegal -- some importation later, some illegal, some
legal but basically by 1860, the vast majority of the black population in this country are
two generations at least, removed from Africa. They are African- Americans, that's what
they are; they're people born in America, whose ancestry is African and their culture is a
merger of African and American culture. We will see that down the road but anyway, as I
say, by this point, the slave laws, what they call the slave codes are in place and they
don't really change very much all through the 19th century. At the base of the law of
slavery is that the slave is property; that's number one, completely under the will of the
master and more generally of the white community at large. Slaves cannot testify in court,
in a case involving a white person, they cannot move, go anywhere without a pass from a
white person. Increasingly, they cannot be taught to read and write. Their marriages are -have no legal standing, they're not recognized in law, they can get married but it has no
legal basis. The master can punish them in virtually any way he wants with only minimal,
minimal oversight by the law. Any white person can apprehend any black person if they
have a suspicion about them and as property, slaves can be bought, sold, rented, willed,
sued for in court, et cetera. …
Now as I said, all the original 13 colonies had slavery in one form or another, many more
in the south than in the north but in the north, there were slaves in New England, very
few. New York was the center of slavery. New York City, in 1750, about one seventh,
15% of the population of this city was slaves. Slaves worked in -- on the docks, they
worked for craftsmen, they worked -- many of them worked in the homes of well to do
people as servants of one kind or another. Many, many slaves worked on farms in the
surrounding countryside, which included at that time, believe it or not, Brooklyn.
Brooklyn was a farming county, Kings County, and probably a majority of the farms in
Brooklyn at that time, used at least one slave as labor. So slavery was around, but as I
say, it wasn't the foundation of the economic order here. But overall, as I say, by the 18th
Century slavery and the slave trade are key aspects of the Atlantic world and the money
flows back into England and enriches the crown, the government, it enriches British
merchants, particularly in Liverpool, Bristol, the ports on the western side of Great
Britain. Much of that money will go into the early industrial revolution, the money that
flows into the early factory system is coming out of the profits made from slave labor and
the slave trade.
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322US P. Marquis. Transcript of class by Eric Foner (selection)
2.1.6. SLAVERY AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
(optional – general interest) Now the American Revolution creates a crisis for slavery in
what now is the United States because of the -- well, for two reasons, one is just the
ideological contradiction between liberty and slavery. Our nation is founded by a
revolution dedicated, rhetorically at least, to liberty, right? That's -- Jefferson said we are
creating an empire of liberty; empire of liberty seems like an oxymoron, a contradiction
of terms. How can an empire be an empire of liberty? But that's the point. This will be
different. European empire are empires of oppression, the American empire will be an
empire of liberty for everybody and -- or Tom Paine in Common Sense, the United States
is the asylum for mankind, anybody in the world seeking to escape oppressive
government, oppressive conditions can find a homeland in the United States. That's why
Paine says the American Revolution is not just one little place throwing off another, it is a
world historical event. It creates a nation dedicated to liberty and yet of course, half a
million slaves are in the colonies in 1776.
This is one of my favorites, this is a runaway slave ad* that Thomas Jefferson put in a
Virginia newspaper, okay, 1769. Sandy run away from the subscriber a Mulatto slave
called Sandy. The Southern Press was full of -- and by the way, the New York Press too - was full of notices like notices like this; runaway slave ads, which are very useful for
historians in that they give physical descriptions of the slaves, their skills, any identifying
marks, scars, language abilities, anything that can help you identify this person but here is
Thomas Jefferson, the father of American liberty, seeking to get back Sandy, who ran
away from Jefferson. And indeed, Sandy was recaptured and then sold, even though
Jefferson didn't like to buy and sell slaves, he did sell Sandy, who had run away. …
Davis talks about this, but -- the contradiction between liberty and slavery does make a
difference, very slowly but still it happens; in the Revolutionary Era, the northern states
slowly move toward abolishing slavery, takes a while. Pennsylvania, 1780, wow, that's
cool; New York waits till 1799; New Jersey waits till 1804; and these are what they call
gradual emancipation laws. They don't just -- they don't actually free anybody. They
provide for the freedom of children henceforth born. The child of a slave will become
free after serving a quote, unquote, apprenticeship of 25 years or something so the death
of slavery in the north is drawn out, over a long -- in New York, it's not till 1827 that
slavery is finally gone. Nonetheless, for the first time now, there is a line across the
country between slave states and free states; that line didn't exist previously. …
2.1.7. DISCUSSION: Was there really a North-South border?
… So yes, I think Hahn and, you know, you can go back to Fehrenbacher The
Slaveholding Republic, which is an argument that the national government in this long
period before the war is fundamentally pursuing the interests of slave owners with a few
exceptions. But basically that's what they're doing. So yes, the Mason-Dixon Line is not a
hard and fast barrier or boundary between slavery and lack of slavery. The people who
experience this the most are fugitive slaves. You can run away from the South, but you
can't run away from slavery if you're in New York. You know, I'm writing a little book
about this now so it's been on my mind. There was a jurist in New York in one of these
cases in the 1830s who said, "Well, you know, as long as the fugitive slave law or clause
is in the Constitution, slavery exists in New York." New York has abolished slavery and
yet slavery still exists in New York because the laws of the southern states carry into New
York through the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution and after 1850 through a very
draconian federal law. So I guess you'd say well, -- Malcolm X said this a long, long -you know, much more recently. The boundaries between North and South is the Canadian
border, you know? On the other hand, I think there is a problem with homogenizing
North and South, you know? Yes, racism was deeply embedded in the North; yes, the
North was complicitous in slavery all the way through. And yet, African-Americans and
others had -- or anybody -- had more leeway in the northern states. Abolitionists had
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322US P. Marquis. Transcript of class by Eric Foner (selection)
more leeway. There was more space to challenge the slave system than existed below the
Mason-Dixon Line. So I think you don't want to just create a homogenized America
where slavery is equally powerful and equally present North, South, East, and West.
2.1.8. SLAVERY AND THE 1787 US CONSTITUTION
The Constitution embeds slavery or slavery is embedded in the Constitution, even though
the word "slave" or "slavery" is not in the Constitution until the 13th Amendment -which is ratified after the Civil War -- which abolishes slavery irrevocably. That is the
first time the word "slavery" appears in the Constitution. The founders were -- I don't
know, they just didn't want to put the word "slavery" in. So they used circumlocutions,
"persons held to labor," this kind of thing. But everyone knew what they were talking
about. Here just we will talk about this as we go along because the Constitution's relation
to slavery is a key point of debate by the 1850s. But just a couple of things to bear in
mind.
One, the Three-Fifths Clause -- people have heard all about this, the Three-Fifths Clause - this does not say a black person is three-fifths of a man or something like that. This is
about allocating representatives in Congress, right? In the House of Representatives, the
number of representatives each state has is determined by the population. But what
population? How do you count that slave population? Now, here the South basically said,
"These are people. We got to count them." And the North said, "No, no, no. They're
property. You don't count other forms of property you don't count land, you don't count
domestic animals." I don't know, the slaves are property. So in the end they compromised
on this three-fifths representation in the House is based on the free population and threefifths of other persons. Other persons. Who are these other persons? If you were a man or
a woman from Mars and you landed here and you looked and said, "Well, how can there
be the people and then other persons?" These are the slaves. By the way, there are three
populations talked about in the Constitution: There are the free population; the other
persons; and then there are Native Americans, who are also not part of the body politic.
They are considered members of their own sovereignties. They're dealt with by treaty, not
by the law of the nation. All right. The so Three-Fifths Clause.
Secondly, a clause prohibiting Congress from abolishing the slave trade from Africa for
20 years. It doesn't say you have to abolish it in twenty years, but laws cannot be -against it's the importations of persons, that kind of thing. Why -- now at this point
already, the slave trade from Africa, it has been ended during the revolution because they
cut off all trade with England. And it's already being condemned as a crime against
humanity in Enlightened thought. Why give it 20 more years? Again, it's our old friend
South Carolina and Georgia because they had lost so many slaves to the British when
Savannah, Charleston when the British left that they said, "We need some more slaves."
They said, "We got to keep bringing slaves in for the next twenty years," and the rest the
colonies said, "All right, all right." And so South Carolina brings in up to 1808. Twenty
years later, Congress does abolish the slave trade, the importation of slaves. There is
illegal trading after that, but not that much. But up to that point, South Carolina brings in
almost 100,000 new Africans. So there's a kind of re-Africanization of black culture in
South Carolina in -- right after the American Revolution. So the Slave Trade Clause.
Then another -- this is another fugitive slave ad from much later than Jefferson. So
runaway slave, here's the reward. The Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution, which
basically says -- again, it doesn't use the word, "slave" but "persons held to labor in one
state escaping to another shall be returned." Shall be returned. Now, that's rather
ambiguous. It doesn't say who is responsible for returning them. This becomes a major
point the political debate, as we will see. Is it the states? Is it the federal government? Is it
the owner himself who just goes and grabs the guy and brings him back? Some people
did that. But the Fugitive Slave Clause is a tremendously important piece of the
Constitution. Why? Because this creates what we call extra-territoriality -- extraterritoriality for slave law. In other words, New York can abolish slavery, but it cannot
extricate itself from the responsibility to help enforce slavery in Virginia, let us say. Any
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322US P. Marquis. Transcript of class by Eric Foner (selection)
person who enters the state of New York is presumed to be free except for, of course, a
fugitive slave. Even though the law of New York after 1827 does not recognize the
condition of slavery, you cannot be a slave in New York; nonetheless they have to
recognize the legitimacy of Virginia's slave laws and enforce those laws by apprehending
and returning fugitive slaves. …
2.1.9. Additional topic #1: Why was the racist ideology given a big boost by the
enlightenment ideas of the American Revolution?
Now, the irony here -- and here I'm drawing on work by our colleague Professor Barbara
Fields and others -- is that the contradiction between a revolution for liberty and the
existence of slavery actually greatly strengthens racism in the United States. If you
believe, as Jefferson says, that all men are created equal and all men are entitled to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, how can you justify the existence of slavery? Well,
it is because the slaves are inherently incapable of exercising those natural rights. How do
we know? We know because they are members of an inferior race. I'm not saying that
everyone was treated the same before this. Of course not. But in the colonial era -- excuse
me -- although there was difference and certainly prejudice, there was no ideological
construction of racism. That is the idea that the most important characteristic of a person
is their race. That is that the world is divided into groups of people called "races."
Whether there's three of them -- you know, Caucasian, Africa, and Mongolian as they
used to say -- or a hundred of them like the Dillingham Commission on Immigration
published a list in 1911 and 1913. Whatever it is, the way to understand the world is by
the different races of mankind, and each race has inherent qualities built in which they
can never outgrow. And the quality -- and Jefferson explains this again in Notes on the
State of Virginia, here's the problem with blacks. They lack rationality, they lack self -they've got some nice qualities, he said. They're kind of happy-go-lucky, musical, that
kind of thing. But they lack the qualities that will enable them to actually live in freedom.
Therefore, making them slaves does not violate the principle of equality anymore of
depriving children of their rights violates the principle of equality. …
2.1.10. Additional discussion #2: the changing criterion for the right to vote (1790s1830s)
In 1790 -- in 1790 when the Constitution is going into effect, almost all the states allowed
free black men to vote if they could meet the property qualification, which most couldn't.
But there was no racial bar. And that included North Carolina; it included Tennessee,
which comes in a little after this and all the northern states. Women could not vote
anywhere except New Jersey, by the way, give them credit. Christie -- New Jersey. New
Jersey allowed women to vote from 1776 to 1804, or five, or six. Something like that. But
they had to meet the property qualification, too. And since women couldn't own property,
that was a problem. But widows basically could in their own name. Widows could vote.
But anyway, class is the main line of division of voting, along with gender. But as the
19th century goes on, the class distinction falls away. By the 1820s and '30s, property
qualifications for voting are gone. Any adult male -- white -- can vote. But increasingly,
states take away the right to vote from free blacks. So Pennsylvania takes it away,
Connecticut takes it away, New York takes it away. And all the states that enter the
Union -- starting with Ohio in 1803, with the one exception of Maine -- in their
Constitutions limit voting to white men. So to follow, race replaces class as the line the
division among men who can vote.
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