Topic 2: Slavery, Race, Law, and Nation (1503-1865)

Flashcards covering key historical figures, legal cases, geographic data, and concepts regarding the history of African exploration, the transatlantic slave trade, legal foundations of race-based slavery, and African American cultural development.

What were Ladinos in the context of early European exploration of the Americas?

Free and enslaved Africans familiar with Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese) culture and language who accompanied Europeans on their earliest explorations.

Who was Estevanico, and what was his role in North American exploration?

An enslaved African healer from Morocco who was forced to work as an explorer and translator in Texas and the southwestern United States starting in 1528.

How does chattel slavery differ from traditional domestic slavery?

In chattel slavery, enslaved people and their descendants are legally classified as personal property rather than human beings, and their status is permanent and generational.

Approximately what percentage of enslaved Africans brought across the Atlantic arrived directly in what became the United States?

Approximately 5% (about 388,000 people).

Which two African regions accounted for nearly half of all enslaved captives brought directly to mainland North America?

Senegambia and Angola, which each comprised about a quarter of the total captives brought to mainland North America.

What was Elmina Castle?

A coastal dungeon slave-trading post built in 1482 by Portuguese traders, recognized as likely the first European slave-trading post in sub-Saharan Africa.

What 1662 Virginia statute established the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem?

Act XII, which decreed that all children born in the colony would inherit either bond or free status strictly according to the condition of the mother.

What was the significance of the 1640 Virginia Governor's Council ruling on John Punch?

When John Punch fled with two white indentured servants, the white runaways were given four additional years of servitude while Punch was sentenced to life-long servitude, marking the earliest known legal record of life-long, race-based slavery in the English colonies.

How did labor discipline and oversight differ between the gang system and the task system?

In the gang system, enslaved laborers worked in groups under an overseer's constant supervision from sunup to sundown; in the task system, enslaved individuals worked with less direct oversight until completing a daily assignment quota.

Which traditional African-inspired instrument, shown in this 1859 photograph, was crafted by enslaved African Americans using gourds?

A gourd banjo.

Which settlement depicted below, founded in Spanish Florida in 1738, became the first sanctioned free Black town in what is now the United States?

Fort Mose.

Who was the leader of the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina?

Jemmy, an enslaved Portuguese-speaking Catholic man originally from the Angola region.

What was the Dunmore Proclamation of 1775?

A decree issued by the Royal Governor of Virginia promising freedom to any enslaved person owned by Patriot rebels who escaped and volunteered to fight for the British.

What was the "Second Middle Passage"?

The domestic slave trade in the 19th-century United States that forcibly relocated over one million African Americans from the upper South to the lower South during the cotton boom.

What was the Supreme Court's ruling regarding Black citizenship in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857)?

The court ruled that Dred Scott remained enslaved because freeing him would unlawfully deprive his owner of property, and declared that Black people were not citizens of the United States and had no standing to sue in federal court.