However, many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be , when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown , Virginia. Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans.
Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women. It Just Surfaced. In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.
But after the Revolutionary War , the new U. In the late 18th century, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt. Around the same time, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.
But in , a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin , a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. Between and , all of the northern states abolished slavery, but the institution of slavery remained absolutely vital to the South. Though the U. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in , the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years.
By it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South. An escaped enslaved man named Peter showing his scarred back at a medical examination in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population.
Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many masters owned fewer than 50 enslaved people. Land owners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes.
They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement was restricted. Many masters raped enslaved women, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. 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.
Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families; most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal. Rebellions among enslaved people did occur—notably ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in —but few were successful.
In the North, the increased repression of southern Black people only fanned the flames of the growing abolitionist movement. Free Black people and other antislavery northerners had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad , gained real momentum in the s.
Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Although estimates vary widely, it may have helped anywhere from 40, to , enslaved people reach freedom. Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was able to help quell the forces of sectionalism only temporarily.
In , another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War.
Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out—with considerable bloodshed—in the new state of Kansas.
In , the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his master had taken him into free territory effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery.
In , two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery. The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists, but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South. But eventually, under the 14th amendment, African American men were granted the right to vote. Also, African Americans were extended birthright citizenship: that extends to descendants of freed black slaves and immigrants to present day.
The recession of the late 19th century hit the US. Knight riders went out in the dark, burning the homes of African Americans who bought their own land. They rode up to Washington to demand change as southern white Democrats rolled back many of the albeit limited freedoms from Reconstruction just a couple of decades before.
The Jim Crow era of segregation forbade African Americans from drinking from the same water fountains, eating at the same restaurants or attending the same schools as white Americans — all lasting until, and sometimes well past, the s. As African Americans were shut out of jobs and opportunities during Jim Crow, and as more jobs became available in the north and midwest, more than 2 million southern African Americans migrated after the first world war.
In the lead-up to the end of Jim Crow and the civil rights era, the fight continued. For example: only in did the US military desegregate, by executive order. In , in the Brown v Board of Education ruling, the supreme court ruled that segregation was unconstitutional and schools would have to integrate.
Civil rights leaders led anti-segregation marches across the country in the s. Bussing African American children to white schools in white neighborhoods was deemed constitutional.
The Voting Rights Act of attempted to correct this, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting and placing restrictions on a number of southern states if they tried to change voting rights laws. Those restrictions were recently overturned in a supreme court ruling. Since the publication, in , of The Case for Reparations, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the subject of how to settle the financial debts of years of slavery has risen up the political agenda. Those arguing for a financial settlement to descendants of slaves say it is designed to address the racial inequality that still lingers in the US.
The Democratic presidential hopeful Cory Booker has introduced a Senate bill on reparations and has been supported by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Meanwhile, voter suppression, another legacy of slavery and its aftermath, is also becoming a more visible issue. Aggressive attempts by mostly ex-Confederate states to limit the vote for poorer communities of color has become more pronounced since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in It also used census data available online at census.
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