A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their masters.
Many masters raped enslaved women, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished.
They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement were restricted. Landowners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. Most lived on large plantations or small farms many masters owned fewer than 50 enslaved people. History of SlaveryĮnslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Though the Union victory freed the nation’s four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and beyond.Īn escaped enslaved man named Peter showing his scarred back at a medical examination in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863. By the mid-19th century, America’s westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton.
Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, counting each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress and guaranteeing the right to repossess any “person held to service or labor” (an obvious euphemism for slavery). Some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War.īut after the Revolutionary War, the new U.S. After the American Revolution, many colonists-particularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the agricultural economy-began to link the oppression of enslaved Africans to their own oppression by the British, and to call for slavery’s abolition.ĭid you know? One of the first martyrs to the cause of American patriotism was Crispus Attucks, a former enslaved man who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770.
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