Updated Tuesday, July 26, 2005  

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The Black Days of Slavery In the United States

Most Americans, black and white, would rather not discuss slavery. As with many subjects denial is the position most prefer. Whites because of guilt and responsibility, but blacks for reasons deep seeded in some twisted belief that to be enslaved in somehow makes you a lesser being. U.S. slavery, over centuries, produced another problem; Negroes. The Negro, in many ways, is akin to the Jew before Israel, or Palestinians today. The Negro is a people with no homeland. There is no Negroland. The land of the Negroes birth, the United States of America, has a track record, dating back centuries, of oppressing people of color; blacks, browns, yellows, and reds. But the Chinese still have their China, the Mexican-American can always return to Mexico as the Irishman is welcomed in Ireland, but where do Negroes go?

Slavery is in the past and has no impact on life today is often the argument presented, but today's racism is rooted in slavery, and until the day that fact is recognized there will never be an end to racial unrest in the United States of America.

The Portuguese, Dutch, and British controlled most of the Atlantic slave trade. Most Africans taken to North America came from the various cultures of western and west central Africa. The territories that are now Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria were the origins of most slaves brought to North America, although significant numbers also came from the areas that are now Senegal, Gambia, and Angola. These areas were home to diverse linguistic, ethnic, and religious groups. Most of the people enslaved were farmers and/or raised livestock. Their agricultural and pastoral skills made them valuable laborers in the Americas.

Hell was an American plantation There is no such thing as a "good master".

Estimates range but most agree that ten million Africans were transported from Africa into forced bondage between 1502 to 1860; although only six percent were traded in North America.

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Why Africans?

There were efforts made to enslave native Americans, but there are inherent difficulties in enslaving a people in their own land. The natives knew the territory, and could easily escape.

Betty Wood, in her book, The Origins of American Slavery (Hill and Wang, 1997), lays blame at the feet of the Christian Church, but there were other reasons more easily substantiated.

Africans at least since the late 1400s visited the Americas as scouts, interpreters, navigators, and military men. Long before the slave trade there is evidence of Africans having explored the regions of South America, and the many coastal islands.

African workers had extensive experience in cultivating rice, cotton, and sugar, all crops grown in West and North Africa. Africans were also skilled at iron working, music and musical instruments, the decorative arts, and architecture.

Portuguese traders brought the first African slaves for agricultural labor for the Caribbean plantations in 1502.The slave trade flourished for well over three hundred years, and during those centuries millions of Negroes were born into human bondage with no associations with previous freedoms. What history demonstrates, however, is that one does not have to be born free to desire to be free. 

The vast majority of Africans brought to the 13 British colonies worked as agricultural laborers; many were brought to the colonies specifically for their experience in rice growing, cattle herding, or river navigation. For example, South Carolina planters drew upon the knowledge of slaves from Senegambia in West Africa to begin cultivating rice, their first major export crop. In the South, slaves grew tobacco in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, and rice and indigo in South Carolina and Georgia. In the North, slaves also worked on farms.

African Americans, slave and free, also worked in a wide variety of occupations. They were household workers, sailors, preachers, accountants, music teachers, medical assistants, blacksmiths, bricklayers, and carpenters, doing virtually any work American society required.

Despite possessing the valuable skills that could not be mastered without intelligence it served the purposes of whites to label the African/Negro/Colored folks as some form of sub-human in order to justify what can not be justified. This same logic is applied today when unarmed black men are shot repeatedly by cowardly punk police,  and there, one might consider, in a very direct link between slavery and life in contemporary U.S.A.

Slavery did not always work out to the benefit of the masters of the plantation. Jemmy was a South Carolina slave in 1739. Men who purchased men did not inquire into their background. Jemmy, not really his true name, was just another slave that wasn't just another slave. Jemmy had been captured in war, and sold into slavery. He was a field colonel in his tribal army.

Jemmy communicated with other slaves using drums as effectively as the Internet today. The slaves danced to mask the true meaning of the rhythms that continued well into the night. Secretly Jemmy met with other slaves and laid out his plan. One day he led some forty slaves into Charles Town where they captured the armory stores and armed themselves, and others that were drawn to them by pounding drums, blaring bugles, and waving flags on extremely long poles. Throughout the day slaves gathered while the citizens of Charles Town ran for their lives. Some were killed, but Jemmy's objective was not murder, but freedom.

The militia was called out to give chase only to find that no one was running. When they approached the gathering of slaves they were attacked from all sides and suffered great loses as they fell back, and then retreated. As the drums continued Jemmy led his followers away from Charles Town. A second unit of militia overtook them but faired no better than their predecessors.

Jemmy continued his march to freedom into Florida Territory, then owned by Spain. There were repeated attacks by South Carolina and Georgia militia units, but none prevailed. There was established in Florida Territory a community of former slaves that were befriended and assisted by natives.

The efforts of the slave owners to retrieve their property did no cease, but every armed group sent into the territory were either badly mauled, or never heard from again.

However, by 1750 there were nearly 240,000 people of African descent in British North America, fully 20 percent of the population, though they were not evenly distributed. The greatest number of African Americans lived in Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina because large plantations with many slaves were concentrated in the South. Blacks constituted over 60 percent of the population in South Carolina, over 43 percent in Virginia, and over 30 percent in Maryland, but only about 2 percent in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. In the Northern colonies, enslaved people were much more likely to work in households having only one or a few slaves.

Slavery, although wicked in its concept, did not always destroy the spirit of the enslaved. One example would be Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797). Born in present day Nigeria, Olaudah was kidnapped and sold into slavery while still a child. During his initial journey across the ocean he learned several languages from those captured in other regions of Africa; the first indication of his intellectual capabilities. It should not be surprising that Olaudah eventually purchased his own freedom, converted to Christianity, and wrote a book, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789). His work is considered a  firsthand perspective of life as a slave in a land heralded for its freedoms.

Between 1777 and 1804, all the states north of Maryland abolished slavery. Many northern slaves used the words of the revolution to petition prominent politicians to consider the hypocrisy of slavery in a land birthed on the equality of all men. What has to be considered is that northern blacks could, or certainly in greater numbers, read and write. Southern slaves who labored in plantation fields were ignorant to all except hard work.

Henry Bibb was another slave that put pen to paper and told the story of life as a slave. Henry Bibb was born a slave in Kentucky in 1815. He recounts his sufferings, escapes, recaptures, and unsuccessful attempts to free his family. Bibb lectured for the Liberty party in Ohio and Michigan during the 1840s and fled to Canada after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, as did thousands of other fugitives living in the North. His narrative includes many illustrations, including the depiction of the celebration of the Sabbath among the slaves and a slave sale.

Antislavery forces organized vigilance committees to protect fugitive slaves from the increased danger, and many were rescued from slavecatchers. For example, abolitionists spirited William and Ellen Craft out of Boston and sent them to England; a group of blacks burst into a Boston hearing room, freed Shadrach Minkins (known in Boston as Fred Wilkins) and carried him to Canada; a crowd in Syracuse overwhelmed jail guards and freed Jerry McHenry. There were also many unsuccessful rescue attempts, such as the cases of Thomas Sims in 1851 and Anthony Burns in 1854, both of whom were returned to slavery after reaching Boston. Such events generated public sympathy for the antislavery cause. Resistance to the federal law in Boston was so strong that 2000 soldiers were required to escort Anthony Burns to the ship that returned him to Virginia.

The law of the land sent you back into slavery.

The Fugitive Slave Act was the "law of the land" and as wrong as two left feet, but not the only example of American hypocrisy when it comes to the treatment of blacks, and other minorities, but the greatest hatred is reserved for those black Americans whose roots go back even further than the Mayflower. As the 21st Century approaches black Americans continue to battle similar injustices when law supports social prejudices.

Black anger and pessimism increased in 1857 when the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott case. Scott, a slave, had sued for freedom based on his having lived with his master for two years in the free territory of present-day Minnesota. In a major victory for slaveholders, the Court not only refused Scott’s petition for freedom but declared that blacks were not American citizens. Further, it decided that Congress could not bar slavery from the Western territories. These court rulings brought a heavy blow to the abolitionist movement because it placed those in support of freedom on the wrong side of the law, and subject to arrests and fines.

The shame belongs to the United States of America, and make no mistake about it, the wrongs of over three hundred years of slavery can not be corrected in the thirty-five years that have passed since the 1964 legislation that allegedly placed bigotry on the wrong side of the law. But the political conservatives insist that all the wrongs of slavery have been corrected and that racial prejudices have been removed from American life. Yeah, right !

During the early years of the 19th century, Americans generally ignored the issue of slavery. The North, for all practical purposes, abolished the institution during the American Revolution, and the South kept it, but slavery did not enter into the political debates of the early republic. That changed in 1819 when Missouri sought to enter the union as a slave state. The North was hesitant about the new state, because it wanted to preserve the balance in the Senate between slave and free states. The problem was solved by the admission of Maine as a free state. In the Missouri Compromise, Congress also agreed to establish a line in the lands acquired by the Louisiana Purchase, allowing slavery to the south of the line, but not to the north. Seemingly the issue had been settled, but a perceptive American, Thomas Jefferson, sensed trouble ahead: "This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it the knell of the union."

Within a few years an abolitionist movement had grown up in the North, and in the South, where once the wisest men had criticized slavery, there was a new determination to maintain and perpetuate the institution. In his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison published a strident declaration that the slavery issue could not be ignored: "Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present."

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was published in 1852. This portrait of a sympathetic, Bible-reading black slave owned by a drunken thug electrified readers in the North. It became the most popular book in the United States and raised the consciousness of many Americans that slavery was morally wrong. In the 1860 presidential election many of them voted for Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the recently formed Republican party.

Lawyer, entrepreneur, politician, and statesman, Lincoln was a creature of his time, he was equivocal about whether black Americans were the equal of whites. Moreover, in the war that soon followed his election, his first goal was to preserve the Union rather than to free the slaves. But in his moral outrage at the idea of slavery, he did not equivocate. In an address to an Indiana regiment shortly before his death, Lincoln remarked: "I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly those who desire it for others. Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."

With Lincoln's election, the Southern states seceded from the Union, and in 1861 the American Civil War began. Young men on both sides thought they were fighting for God's cause. Southerner Charles Colcock Jones, Jr., remarked: "Heaven forbid" that Yankees should "ever attempt to set foot upon this land of sunshine, of high-souled honor, and of liberty." Yankee William Wheeler wrote: "I do not suppose that I am very well fitted for a soldier, but still I have a good deal of fight in me, and think that I shall never see a holier cause to fight for."

During the second year of the war, Lincoln decided that the time was ripe to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, beginning the process of freeing the slaves. He also approved the formation of black regiments within the Union army, including the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth, which fought valiantly in an unsuccessful attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina in 1863. The South refused to recognize the legitimacy of black troops, and in several instances black captives were executed along with their white officers. In retaliation, Lincoln refused to discuss further prisoner exchanges unless the Confederacy changed its policy on blacks.

On New Year's Eve many African American churches hold prayer and worship services from the late evening until midnight when they welcome the new year with praise, thanksgiving, prayer, and confession. These services are called watch night meetings. December 31, 1862, was a very special evening for the African American community, because it was the night before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, freeing all the slaves in the Confederate states.

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