Slavery in the United States

Slave sale in Easton, Maryland

The history of slavery in the United States began soon after Europeans first settled in what became the United States. Many slaves were freed during the American Civil War, many by Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation but finally and completely by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

From about the 1640s until 1865, people of African descent were legally enslaved within the boundaries of the present U. S. mostly by whites, but also by a comparatively small number of American Indians and free blacks. The wealth of the U.S. was greatly enhanced by the exploitation of African American slaves.

While estimates of the number of slaves brought to North America vary from a few hundred thousand to a few million, the slave population in the U.S. had grown to 4 million by the 1860 Census. In other countries, the slave population barely reproduced itself. From the later 18th century, and possibly before that even, and until the Civil War, the rate of natural growth of North American slaves was much greater than for the population of any nation in Europe, and was nearly twice as rapid as that of England.

Colonial America

Main article: Slavery in Colonial America

The first record of African slavery in Colonial America occurred in 1619. A Dutch ship, its name unrecorded by those present, had captured 20 enslaved Africans in a battle with a Spanish ship bound for the Caribbean. The Dutch ship had been damaged first by the battle and then more severely in a great storm during the late summer when it came ashore at Jamestown. Though the colony was in the middle of a period later known as "The Great Migration" (1618-1623), during which its population grew from 450 to 4,000 residents, extremely high mortality rates from disease, malnutrition, and war with Indians kept the population of able-bodied laborers low.[1] The Dutch ship being in severe need of repairs and supplies and the colonists being in need of able bodied workers, the human cargo was traded for food and services. The white citizens of Jamestown, who had themselves arrived from Britain, decided to treat the first Africans in Virginia as indentured servants. As with European indentured servants, the Africans were freed after a stated period, given the use of land and supplies by their former masters, and at least one, Anthony Johnson, eventually became a landowner on the Eastern Shore and a slave-owner himself.

The transformation from indentured servitude to racial slavery happened gradually. There are no laws regarding slavery early in Virginia's history. However, by 1640, the Virginia courts had sentenced at least one black servant to slavery. In 1654, a court in Northampton County ruled against one John Casor, declaring him property for life.

The Virginia Slave codes of 1705 made clear the status of slaves. During the British colonial period, every colony had slavery. Those in the north were primarily house servants. Early on, slaves in the South worked on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice, and tobacco; cotton became a major crop after the 1790s. Slaves were used by rich farmers and plantation owners with commercial export operations. Backwoods subsistence farmers seldom owned slaves.

Native Americans

During the 17th century, Indian slavery, the enslavement of Native Americans by European colonists, was common. Many of these Native slaves were exported to off-shore colonies, especially the "sugar islands" of the Caribbean. Historian Alan Gallay estimates that from 1670-1715, British slave traders sold between 24,000 and 51,000 Native Americans from what is now the southern part of the U.S.

After 1800, the Cherokees and some other tribes started buying and using black slaves, a practice they continued after being relocated to Indian Territory in the 1830s. In the American Civil War they sided with the Confederacy; their slaves were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.

By contrast, the Seminoles welcomed into their nation African Americans who had escaped slavery (Black Seminoles).

Decline of slave trade

Some of the British colonies attempted to abolish the international slave trade, fearing that the importation of new Africans would be disruptive. Virginia bills to that effect were vetoed by the British Privy Council; Rhode Island forbade the import of slaves in 1774. All of the states except Georgia had banned or limited the African slave trade by 1786; Georgia did so in 1798 - although some of these laws were later repealed.

1776 to 1850

Treatment of slaves

Treatment of slaves, primarily African Americans, was both harsh and inhumane. Whether laboring or walking about in public, people living as slaves were regulated by legally authorized violence. On large plantations, slave overseers were authorized to whip and brutalize noncompliant slaves. Slave codes authorized, indemnified or even required the use of violence, and were denounced by abolitionists for their brutality. Both slaves and free blacks were regulated by the Black Codes, and had their movements monitored by slave patrols conscripted from the white population which were allowed to use summary punishment against escapees, sometimes maiming or killing them. In addition to physical abuse and murder, slaves were at constant risk of losing members of their families if their owners decided to trade them for profit, punishment, or to pay debts. A few slaves retaliated by murdering owners and overseers, burning barns, killing horses, or staging work slowdowns.

Because they were the legal property of their owners, it was not unusual for enslaved African American women to be raped by their owners, members of their owner's families, or their owner's friends. Children who resulted from such rapes generally were slaves as well.

Slaves were fed, clothed, housed and provided medical care in the most minimalist manner. It was common to pay small bonuses during the Christmas season and some slave owners permitted their slaves to keep earnings and gambling profits. (One slave, Denmark Vesey, is known to have won a lottery and bought his freedom.) In many households, treatment of slaves varied with the slave's skin color. Darker-skinned slaves worked in the fields, while lighter-skinned house servants had comparatively better clothing, food and housing.

Beginning in the 1750s, there was widespread sentiment during the American Revolution that slavery was a social evil (for the country as a whole and for the whites) and should eventually be abolished. All the Northern states passed emancipation acts between 1780 and 1804; most of these arranged for gradual emancipation and a special status for freedmen, so there were still a dozen "permanent apprentices" in New Jersey in 1860.

The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 declared all men "born free and equal"; the slave Quork Walker sued for his freedom on this basis and won his freedom, thus abolishing slavery in Massachusetts.

Throughout the first half of the 19th century, a movement to end slavery grew in strength throughout the United States. This struggle took place amid strong support for slavery among white Southerners, who profited greatly from the system of enslaved labor. These slave owners began to refer to slavery as the "peculiar institution" in a defensive attempt to differentiate it from other examples of forced labor.

The large, well-funded American Colonization Society had an active program of shipping ex-slaves and free blacks who volunteered back to Africa to the American colony of Liberia.

After 1830, a religious movement led by William Lloyd Garrison declared slavery to be a personal sin and demanded the owners repent immediately and start the process of emancipation. The movement was highly controversial and was a factor in causing the American Civil War.

A very few abolitionists, such as John Brown, favored the use of armed force to foment uprisings among the slaves; others tried to use the legal system.

Peter, a slave from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863. The scars are a result of a whipping by his overseer, who was subsequently discharged. It took two months to recover from the beating.

Influential leaders of the abolition movement (1810-60) included:

• William Lloyd Garrison - Published The Liberator newspaper
• Harriet Beecher Stowe - Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin
• Frederick Douglass - Nation's most powerful anti-slavery speaker, a former slave. Most famous for his book, "Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass.
• Harriet Tubman - Helped 350 slaves escape from the South, became known as a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad.

Slave uprisings that used armed force (1700 - 1859) include:

• New York Revolt of 1712
• The Stono Rebellion (1739) in South Carolina
• New York Slave Insurrection of 1741
• Gabriel's Rebellion (1800) in Virginia
• Louisiana Territory Slave Rebellion, led by Charles Deslandes (1811)
• George Boxley Rebellion (1815) in Virginia
• Denmark Vesey Uprising in South Carolina (1822)
• Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831) in Virginia
• The Amistad Seizure (1839) on a Spanish ship

See also: List of notable opponents of slavery‎

Rising tensions

The economic value of plantation slavery was magnified in 1793 with the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, a device designed to separate cotton fibers from seedpods and the sometimes sticky seeds. The invention revolutionized the cotton-growing industry by increasing the quantity of cotton that could be processed in a day by fifty-fold. The result was explosive growth in the cotton industry and greatly increased demand for slave labor in the South.

At the same time, the northern states banned slavery, though as Alexis De Toqueville pointed out in Democracy in America (1835), the prohibition did not always mean that the slaves were freed. In many cases, it simply encouraged slave owners to move African American slaves to states which still allowed slavery. This resulted in a population movement of black Americans to the South and a hardening of opinions among whites in favor of slavery in the southern states to protect the profits that white slave owners gained from exploiting African American slave labor, and out of fear of African Americans standing up to demand equal and civil rights if they were freed.

Just as demand for slaves was increasing, supply was restricted. The United States Constitution, adopted in 1787, prevented Congress from banning the importation of slaves before 1808. On January 1, 1808, Congress acted to ban further imports. Any new slaves would have to be descendants of ones who were currently in the U.S. However, the internal U.S. slave trade, and the involvement in the international slave trade or the outfitting of ships for that trade by U.S. citizens, were not banned. Though there were certainly violations of this law, slavery in America became more or less self-sustaining; the overland 'slave trade' from Tidewater, Virginia, and the Carolinas to Georgia, Alabama, and Texas continued for another half-century.

Because of the three-fifths compromise in the United States Constitution, slaveholders exerted their power through the Federal Government and the resulting Federal Fugitive slave laws. Refugees from slavery fled the South across the Ohio River and other parts of the Mason-Dixon Line dividing North from South, to the North via the Underground Railroad. The physical presence of African Americans in Cincinnati, Oberlin, and other Northern towns agitated some white Northerners though others helped hide former slaves from their former owners, and others helped them reach freedom in Canada. After 1854, Republicans fumed that the Slave Power, especially the pro-slavery Democratic Party, controlled two or three branches of the Federal government.

Because the Midwestern states decided in the 1820s not to allow slavery and because most Northeastern states became free states through local emancipation, a Northern block of free states solidified into one contiguous geographic area. The dividing line was the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon line (between slave-state Maryland and free-state Pennsylvania).

North and South grew further apart in 1845 with the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention on the premise that the Bible sanctions slavery and that it was acceptable for Christians to own slaves. The Southern Baptist Convention has since renounced this interpretation. This split was triggered by the opposition of northern Baptists to slavery, and in particular, by the 1844 statement of the Home Mission Society declaring that a person could not be a missionary and still keep slaves as property. The Methodist and Presbyterian churches likewise divided north and south, so that by the late 1850s only the Democratic Party was a national institution, and it split in the 1860 election.

Distribution of slaves in 1820

Census Year	# Slaves	# Free blacks	Total black	% free blacks	Total US population	% black of total
1790	697,681	59,527	757,208	7.9%	3,929,214	19%
1800	893,602	108,435	1,002,037	10.8%	5,308,483	19%
1810	1,191,362	186,446	1,377,808	13.5%	7,239,881	19%
1820	1,538,022	233,634	1,771,656	13.2%	9,638,453	18%
1830	2,009,043	319,599	2,328,642	13.7%	12,860,702	18%
1840	2,487,355	386,293	2,873,648	13.4%	17,063,353	17%
1850	3,204,313	434,495	3,638,808	11.9%	23,191,876	16%
1860	3,953,760	488,070	4,441,830	11.0%	31,443,321	14%
1870	0	4,880,009	4,880,009	100%	38,558,371	13%
Source: http://www.census.gov/population/documentation/twps0056/tab01.xls

Nat Turner, anti-literacy laws

In 1831, a bloody slave rebellion took place in Southampton County, Virginia. A slave named Nat Turner who was able to read and write and had "visions", led what became known as Nat Turner's Rebellion or the Southampton Insurrection. On a murderous rampage with the goal of freeing himself and others, Turner and his followers killed men, women and children, but were eventually subdued by the white militia.

Nat Turner and many of his followers were hanged. All across the South, harsh new laws were enacted in the aftermath of the 1831 Turner Rebellion to curtail the already limited rights of African Americans. Typical was the Virginia law against educating slaves, free blacks and children of whites and blacks. These laws were often defied by individuals, among whom was noted future Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.

1850s to the Civil War

California Indian slavery

Slavery of Indians was organized in colonial and Mexican California through Franciscan missions, theoretically entitled to ten years of Native labor, but in practice maintaining them in perpetual servitude, until their charge was revoked in the mid-1830s. Following the 1847-1848 invasion by U.S. troops, Native Californians were enslaved in the new state from statehood in 1850 to 1867. Slavery required the posting of a bond by the slave holder and enslavement occurred through raids and a four-month servitude imposed as a punishment for Indian "vagrancy".

Bleeding Kansas

After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act,1854, the border wars broke out in Kansas Territory, where the question of whether it would be admitted to the Union as a slave or free state was left to the inhabitants. The abolitionist John Brown was active in the rebellion and killing in "Bleeding Kansas" as were many white Southerners. At the same time, fears that the Slave Power was seizing full control of the national government swept anti-slavery Republicans into office.

Dred Scott

Dred Scott was a 62-year-old slave who sued for his freedom on the ground that he had lived in a territory where slavery was forbidden. The territory was the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase, from which slavery was excluded under the terms of the Missouri Compromise. In a sweeping decision that set the United States on course for Civil War, the Supreme Court denied Scott his freedom. The court ruled that Dred Scott was not a citizen who had a right to sue in the Federal courts, and that Congress had no constitutional power to pass the Missouri Compromise.

The 1857 Dred Scott decision decided 6-3, held that a slave did not become free when taken into a free state; Congress could not bar slavery from a territory, and blacks could not be citizens. This decision, seen as unjust by many Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln was also seen as proof that the Slave Power had seized control of the Supreme Court. The decision, written by 79-year-old Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney barred slaves and their descendants from citizenship. The decision enraged abolitionists and encouraged slave owners.

1860 presidential election

The divisions became fully exposed with the 1860 presidential election. The electorate split four ways. One party (the Southern Democrats) endorsed slavery. One (the Republicans) denounced it. One (the Northern Democrats) said democracy required the people themselves to decide on slavery locally. The fourth (Constitutional Union Party) said the survival of the Union was at stake and everything else should be compromised.

Lincoln, the Republican, won with a plurality of popular votes and a majority of electoral votes. Lincoln however, did not appear on the ballots of ten southern states: thus his election necessarily split the nation along sectional lines. Many slave owners in the South feared that the real intent of the Republicans was the abolition of slavery in states where it already existed, and that the sudden emancipation of 4 million slaves would be problematic for the slave owners and for the economy that drew its greatest profits from the labor of people who were not paid.

They also argued that banning slavery in new states would upset what they saw as a delicate balance of free states and slave states. They feared that ending this balance could lead to the domination of the industrial North with its preference for high tariffs on imported goods. The combination of these factors led the South to secede from the Union and thus began the American Civil War. Northern leaders like Lincoln had viewed the slavery interests as a threat politically, and with secession, they viewed the prospect of a new southern nation, the Confederate States of America, with control over the Mississippi River and the West, as politically and militarily unacceptable.

War and emancipation

The consequent American Civil War, beginning in 1861, led to the end of chattel slavery in America. Not long after the war broke out, through a legal maneuver credited to Union General Benjamin F. Butler, a lawyer by profession, slaves who came into Union "possession" were considered "contraband of war" and therefore, he ruled that they were not subject to return to Confederate owners as they had been before the War. Soon word spread, and many slaves sought refuge in Union territory, desiring to be declared "contraband." Many of the "contrabands" joined the Union Army as workers or troops, forming entire regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT). Others went to refugee camps such as the Grand Contraband Camp near Fort Monroe or fled to northern cities. General Butler's interpretation was reinforced when the U.S. Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1861, which declared that any property used by the Confederate military, including slaves, could be confiscated by Union forces.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, was a powerful move that promised freedom for slaves in the Confederacy as soon as the Union armies reached them. The proclamation made the abolition of slavery an official war goal that was implemented as the Union took territory from the Confederacy. According to the Census of 1860, this policy would free nearly four million slaves, or over 12% of the total population of the United States.

Simon Legree and Uncle Tom: A scene from Uncle Tom's Cabin, history's most famous abolitionist novel.

The Arizona Organic Act abolished slavery on February 24, 1863, in the newly formed Arizona Territory. Tennessee and all of the border states (except Kentucky) abolished slavery by early 1865. Some slaves were freed by the operation of the Emancipation Proclamation as Union armies marched across the South. Emancipation as a reality came to the remaining southern slaves after the surrender of all Confederate troops in spring 1865. There still were over 250,000 slaves in Texas. They were freed as soon as word arrived of the collapse of the Confederacy, with the decisive day being June 19, 1865. Juneteenth it is celebrated in Texas, Oklahoma, and some other areas and commemorates the date when the news finally reached the last slaves at Galveston, Texas.

Legally, the last 40,000 or so slaves were freed in Kentucky by the final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865.

Reconstruction to present

During Reconstruction, it was a serious question whether slavery had been permanently abolished or whether some form of semi-slavery would appear after the Union armies left.

Sharecropping

An 1867 federal law prohibited a descendant form of slavery known as sharecropping or debt bondage, which still existed in the New Mexico Territory as a legacy of Spanish imperial rule. Between 1903 and 1944, the Supreme Court ruled on several cases involving debt bondage of black Americans, declaring these arrangements unconstitutional. In actual practice, however, sharecropping arrangements often resulted in peonage for both black and white farmers in the South.

Educational issues

The anti-literacy laws after 1832 undoubtedly contributed greatly to the widespread illiteracy facing the freedmen and other African Americans after the American Civil War and Emancipation 35 years later. After Emancipation, the unfairness of such laws helped draw attention to the problem of illiteracy as one of the great challenges confronting these people as they sought to join the free enterprise system and support themselves during Reconstruction and thereafter.

Consequently, many religious organizations, former Union Army officers and soldiers, and wealthy philanthropists were inspired to create and fund educational efforts specifically for the betterment of African Americans in the South. They helped create normal schools to generate teachers, such as those which eventually became Hampton University and Tuskegee University. Stimulated by the work of educators such as Dr. Booker T. Washington, by the first third of the 20th century, over 5,000 local schools had been built for blacks in the South with using private matching funds provided by individuals such as Henry H. Rogers, Andrew Carnegie, and most notably, Julius Rosenwald, each of whom had arisen from modest roots to become wealthy.

Apologies

On 2007-02-24 the Virginia General Assembly passed House Joint Resolution Number 728 acknowledging "with profound regret the involuntary servitude of Africans and the exploitation of Native Americans, and call for reconciliation among all Virginians." With the passing of this resolution, Virginia becomes the first of the 50 United States to acknowledge through the state's governing body their state's negative involvement in slavery. The passing of this resolution came on the heels of the 400th anniversary celebration of the city of Jamestown, Virginia, which was one of the first slave ports of the American colonies.

Free Blacks and Slavery

Some slaveholders were black or had some black ancestry. In 1830 there were 3,775 such slaveholders in the South with 80% of them located in Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. Half of these lived in cities rather than the countryside with most in the two cities of New Orleans and Charleston. Only a few were “substantial planters”, and, of those that were, most were of mixed race. Historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger wrote:

“A large majority of profit-oriented free black slaveholders resided in the Lower South. For the most part, they were persons of mixed racial origin, often women who cohabited or were mistresses of white men, or mulatto men … . Provided land and slaves by whites, they owned farms and plantations, worked their hands in the rice, cotton, and sugar fields, and like their white contemporaries were troubled with runaways.”

Historian Ira Berlin wrote:

In slave societies, nearly everyone – free and slave – aspired to enter the slaveholding class, and upon occasion some former slaves rose into slaveholders’ ranks. Their acceptance was grudging, as they carried the stigma of bondage in their lineage and, in the case of American slavery, color in their skin.

Free blacks were perceived “as a continual symbolic threat to slaveholders, challenging the idea that ‘black’ and ‘slave’ were synonymous.” Free blacks were seen as potential allies of fugitive slaves and “slaveholders bore witness to their fear and loathing of free blacks in no uncertain terms. For free blacks, who had only a precarious hold on freedom, “slave ownership was not simply an economic convenience but indispensable evidence of the free blacks” determination to break with their slave past and their silent acceptance of – if not approval – of slavery.”

Historian James Oakes notes that, “The evidence is overwhelming that the vast majority of black slaveholders were free men who purchased members of their families or who acted out of benevolence.” In the early part of the 19th Century southern states made it increasingly difficult for any slaveholders to free slaves, so often the purchasers of family members were left with no choice but to maintain, on paper, the master-slave relationship. In the 1850s “there were increasing efforts to restrict the right to hold bondsmen on the grounds that slaves should be kept ‘as far as possible under the control of white men only.”

See also

• Fugitive slave laws
• Sharecropping
• Hush harbor
• Frances Anne Kemble
• Partus
• Slave rebellion

Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Albert, Octavia V. Rogers. The House of Bondage Or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves. Oxford University Press, 1991. Primary sources with commentary. ISBN 0-19-506784-3
  • The House of Bondage, or, Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves, Original and Life-Like complete text of original 1890 edition, along with cover & title page images, at website of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Berlin, Ira, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowlands, eds. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 5 vol Cambridge University Press, 1982. very large collection of primary sources regarding the end of slavery
• Blassingame, John W., ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies.Louisiana State University Press, 1977.
• A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) (Project Gutenberg: [2]), (Audio book at FreeAudio.org [3])
• "The Heroic Slave." Autographs for Freedom. Ed. Julia Griffiths Boston: Jewett and Company, 1853. 174-239. Available at the Documenting the American South website[4].
• Frederick Douglass My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) (Project Gutenberg: [5])
• Frederick Douglass Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892)
• Frederick Douglass Collected Articles Of Frederick Douglass, A Slave (Project Gutenberg)
• Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies by Frederick Douglass, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Editor. (Omnibus of all three) ISBN 0-940450-79-8
• Rawick, George P., ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography . 19 vols. Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972. Collection of WPA interviews made in 1930s with ex-slaves

Historical studies

• Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves. (2003) ISBN 0-674-01061-2.
• Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Harvard University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-674-81092-9
• Berlin, Ira and Ronald Hoffman, eds. Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution University Press of Virginia, 1983. essays by scholars
• David Brion Davis. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006)
• Elkins, Stanley. Slavery : A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. University of Chicago Press, 1976. ISBN 0-226-20477-4
• Fehrenbacher, Don E. Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective Oxford University Press, 1981
• Fogel, Robert W. Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery W.W. Norton, 1989. Econometric approach
• Franklin, John Hope and Schweninger. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. (1999) ISBN 0-19-508449-7.
• Gallay, Alan. The Indian Slave Trade (2002).
• Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made Pantheon Books, 1974.
• Genovese, Eugene D. The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (1967)
• Genovese, Eugene D. and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (1983)
• Hahn, Steven. "The Greatest Slave Rebellion in Modern History: Southern Slaves in the American Civil War." Southern Spaces (2004)
• Higginbotham, A. Leon, Jr. In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period. Oxford University Press, 1978. ISBN 0-19-502745-0
• Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877 Hill and Wang, 1993. Survey
• Mason, Matthew. Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic. (2006) ISBN 13:978-0-8078-3049-9.
• Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia W.W. Norton, 1975.
• Morris, Thomas D. Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860 University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
• Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. (1982) ISBN 0-393-31705-6.
• Scarborough, William K. The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South (1984)
• Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956) Survey
• Tadman, Michael. Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Reference

• Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007.
• Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. Encyclopedia of Emancipation and Abolition in the Transatlantic World. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007.

State and local studies

• Fields, Barbara J. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century Yale University Press, 1985.
• Clayton E. Jewett and John O. Allen; Slavery in the South: A State-By-State History Greenwood Press, 2004
• Kulikoff, Alan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
• Minges, Patrick N.; Slavery in the Cherokee Nation: The Keetoowah Society and the Defining of a People, 1855-1867 2003 deals with Indian slave owners.
• Mohr, Clarence L. On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia University of Georgia Press, 1986.
• Mooney, Chase C. Slavery in Tennessee Indiana University Press, 1957.
• Olwell, Robert. Masters, Slaves, & Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 Cornell University Press, 1998.
• Reidy, Joseph P. From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South, Central Georgia, 1800-1880 University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
• Ripley, C. Peter. Slaves and Freemen in Civil War Louisiana Louisiana State University Press, 1976.
• Rivers, Larry Eugene. Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation University Press of Florida, 2000.
• Sellers, James Benson; Slavery in Alabama University of Alabama Press, 1950
• Sydnor, Charles S. Slavery in Mississippi. 1933
• Takagi, Midori. Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond, Virginia, 1782-1865 University Press of Virginia, 1999.
• Taylor, Joe Gray. Negro Slavery in Louisiana. Louisiana Historical Society, 1963.
• Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion W.W. Norton & Company, 1974.

Historiography

• John B. Boles and Evelyn T. Nolen, eds., Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (1987).
• Richard H. King, "Marxism and the Slave South", American Quarterly 29 (1977), 117-31. focus on Genovese
• Peter Kolchin, "American Historians and Antebellum Southern Slavery, 1959-1984", in William J. Cooper, Michael F. Holt, and John McCardell , eds., A Master's Due: Essays in Honor of David Herbert Donald (1985), 87-111
• James M. McPherson et al., Blacks in America: Bibliographical Essays (1971).
• Peter J. Parish; Slavery: History and Historians Westview Press. 1989
• Tulloch, Hugh. The Debate on the American Civil War Era (1999) ch 2-4

Further reading

Oral histories of ex-slaves

• Before Freedom When I Just Can Remember: Twenty-seven Oral Histories of Former South Carolina Slaves, Belinda Hurmence, John F. Blair, Publisher, 1989, trade paperback 125 pages, ISBN 0-89587-069-X
• Before Freedom: Forty-Eight Oral Histories of Former North & South Carolina Slaves, Belinda Hurmence, Mentor Books, 1990, mass market paperback, ISBN 0-451-62781-4
• God Struck Me Dead, Voices of Ex-Slaves, Clifton H. Johnson ISBN 0-8298-0945-7

Historical fiction

• Edward P. Jones. The Known World New York: Amistad, 2003. ISBN 0-06-055755-9, 2003 winner of the National Book Critic Circle for fiction and 2004 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

External links

• "John Brown's body and blood" by Ari Kelman: a review in the TLS, February 14th, 2007.
• Slavery and the Making of America - PBS - WNET, New York (4-Part Series)
• Timeline of Slavery in America
• Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
• Images of slavery drawn by Thomas Nast (has background music)
• History of Slavery in America a historical overview
• Teaching resources about Slavery and Abolition on blackhistory4schools.com
• Slavery in the United States from EH.NET by Jenny B. Wahl of Carleton College
• Map of 1820 showing free and slave territories.
• Classics on American Slavery collection of old documents available on-line through Dinsmore Documentation
• Slavery: A Dehumanizing Institution by Nell Irvin Painter, historian and author of Creating Black Americans
• New Georgia Encyclopedia (Slavery in Antebellum Georgia)
• WWW-VL: Online Books on Slavery in America
• University of North Carolina Press on finding freedom and liberty in BNA-Canada
• Account of an African Prince Sold into Slavery - Islamica Magazine