US History 1 Unit 5: History of Slavery in the United States

The Slave Trade

• Original slaves were taken from the western parts of Africa: Ghana, Senegal, Sierra Leone

• Taken from all different parts and traded before getting on the slave ships

• Europeans justified slavery with religion (not Christian, so not civilized) not as formal as Europeans, skin color

• Heavy abrasive metal on the necks of people to dehumanize them, and so they don’t escape, many more slaves than slave gatherers, easier to treat people as less than human if they are not seen as human

Triangle Trade

The Middle Passage

• Voyage that brought slaves from Africa to West Indies and North America

• Enslaved people endured traumatic conditions on slavers’ ships, including cramped quarters, meager rations and physical and sexual assault

• Lasted 12-20 weeks

• Branded for identification

• 20% of the captured died before reaching the New World

  • Disease rampant

    • Blood, sweat, excrement, vomit

    • HOT

    • Many committed suicide

• Millions of people died on this passage and sharks started to follow the ships’ routes

• 350 years 20 million people trafficked

Slave Auctions

• Grab and Go-Auction

  • Received tickets to buy slaves

  • Grab men, women, and children in a pen and traded them in for tickets

• Bidding Auction

  • Slaves sold to bidders who paid the highest price

  • Inspected slaves

  • Young, healthy = high price, close to 1000 dollars, sold next to animals and objects

  • Old, sick = low price

Slave Codes

• Outlines the rights of slaves

• Slave codes varied from state to state

  • Could not do business with a slave without the consent of the owner

  • Slaves could be awarded as prizes in raffles, wagered in gambling, offered as security for loans, and transferred as gifts from one person to another

  • Slaves were not permitted to keep a gun

  • Education of slaves was prohibited

“The peculiar institution”

• “Peculiar” = “one’s own”

  • Something distinctive to or characteristic of a particular palace or people

  • Replaced the word slavery

  • South was set apart from the North and slavery made this more apparent

• South could not economically exist without slavery

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

• Fugitive slave clause: guaranteed to slave owners the right to reclaim enslaved persons who escaped to other states

• 1793, Congress passed a Fugitive Slave Act

• 1850, Congress passed an additional Fugitive Slave Law

  • Permitted slave owners to employ agents to arrest enslaved persons who had escaped from them even if slaves were in free states

• Fugitive slave laws created slave catching industry in US

  • Professional bounty hunters traveled around the country searching for fugitive slave

Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857)

How did a Supreme Court decision inflame passions between North and South?

• Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857)

  • The Supreme Court, which decided that Scott was legally enslaved, ruled that African Americans were property, not citizens of the United States

  • Non-citizens cannot sue in federal court

  • Living in a free state could not make Scott free

• Art and literature

The Emancipation Proclamation

• Executive order (without Congress’s approval) that Abraham Lincoln made

• As of January 1, 1863, slaves in states or sections of states still in rebellion would be free

• Slaves in border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland and Delaware remained slaves

  • Felt would have joined the confederacy, freeing them as war tactic

  • Maryland surrounds the capital and can’t lose it

  • Make war about uniting the country and not slavery 

• Important step in adding the abolition of slavery to the Union’s original wartime objective

  • It was the federal government’s most decisive statement against slavery in the nation’s history

  • Encouraged African Americans to support the Union and authorized them to serve in the Union’s army and navy - though still separate

• President Lincoln was more concerned with preserving the Union than freeing slaves

• Britain and France though not involved in the Civil War were against slavery

• Lincoln was more concerned with preserving the Union and uniting the country than freeing slaves, his quote

Origins of slavery in the U.S.

“Africans In Virginia”

https://classroom.google.com/c/NjIxMjM4MTc2NDkw/a/NjYxODgwNTk5NzI5/details

Slave owners and their view on slavery

• Not all Southerners were slave owners

  • Only ⅓ of white families owned slaves

  • Slave-owners were the wealthiest and most powerful

  • Members of all three white social classes supported a southern social and legal structure based upon white supremacy

• Believed the slaves were better off as their property, believed slavery benefited the slaves

  • Civilizing savages

  • “Blessing for the slave, blessing for the master”

Slave owner is like a father figure and in turn for taking care of them the slave would be loyal, paternalism, have to rely on their master for everything

Life as a Slave

Life as a Slave: In the Field

• 80-90% of enslaved people were called field hands

  • Survived by the work of their hands

• Worked six days a week, doing all the hard labor

  • Clearing land, planting, and weeding

  • During harvest season, enslaved people might work 18-hour days

  • No one exempt from work, children and old still have jobs to do

• Field workers were under the watchful eye of of an overseer, white man whose job was to maximize the owner’s profit by getting the most work possible out the the enslaved laborers

  • Cruel and used harsh, bullying treatment

Life as a Slave: Other Jobs

• Domestic Slaves

  • Cleaned, cooked, served as maids or waiters, raised the master’s children

  • Most likely lighter slaves would be in the house

  • Better idea of what was going on in the outside world, some secretly learned to read

• Highly skilled laborers

  • Bricklayers, carpenters, coopers, or smith

  • Sold out for work by other owners

  • Could keep a portion of their earnings for their work

  • Could be rented out for their service

Slave Culture

Slave Culture

• Religious and cultural traditions played a large part in helping them cope with the harshness of their lives, focused on obeying master in Christianity

  • Bonded the slaves for support

• Slave culture combined a variety of cultures

  • Kept the West African heritage alive

Consisted of

• Storytelling

  • Involve animals that represented the slave and the master, 

  • Brer rabbit, used animals instead of slave and master, rabbit is slave, and predator is master like bear, comes from African stories, in the end the rabbit always outsmarts the predator (master)

• Music and singing

  • Able to sing their way through

• Created new languages

  • Mixture of languages

  • Gullah is a new language created South Carolina and people still speak it today there, many words come from African languages

• Religious Dance

  • Consisted of hand-clapping, stepping (west African traditions) kept these going

• Styles of food

  • American barbeque, slaves were given worst cuts of meat and pork, given molasses and certain spices, make little food they got taste better, more barbeque in south

Slave Religion

Most slaves converted to Christianity

• Masters used Christianity to preach obedience, manipulated slaves and religion

• Slaves used Christianity to focus on the coming life of freedom

• Spiritual and emotional release from a difficult life

  • Made life tolerable knowing heaven is next

• Slave spirituals: religious songs expressing the want of freedom

  • Also contained secret messages on how to escape to the North

Slave Resistance and Rebellion (what did rebellions have in common?)

Slave Resistance

Less extreme

• Faked illnesses

• Broke tools

• Worked slow

• Poisoned masters

More extreme

• Education - knowledge is power

• Purchase freedom

• Run away

• Organized rebellion and insurrection - slaves tried to get weapons, slaves outnumbered free whites in south, southerners lived in constant fear of this and this is why the slave codes are so strict

• Natives often helped runaway slaves

• What were the risks and if failed it was death, terrible punishment, or new slave codes passed to limit slaves further

In common the slave rebellions were largely unsuccessful and ended up with slaves being executed/killed

Slave Resistance and Rebellion:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cG02UemMVlp0mJQIsS1xYmj01yTMAUSsvdp1xmBIUW0/edit

The Abolitionist movement, its members, and its goals

What was Abolition?

• The movement to end slavery

• Called for an end to slavery with immediate emancipation of all enslaved people

  • Did not believe that the enslaved people’s owners should be reimbursed for the loss of their “property” - did not sit well with Southerners

• Abolitionists saw slavery as wrong on many different levels

  • Went against the rights for all men set forth in the Declaration of Independence

  • Sinful for man to act as God above other people, which is how they saw the master’s treatment of enslaved people, only master is God

  • Slavery encouraged immoral behavior in owners of enslaved people, rape murder, physical abuse

  • Destroyed the institutions of marriage and family because enslaved children, wives, and husbands were bought and sold  as separate properties

  • Connection to Douglass and how the most religious master’s were the most cruel

Prominent Abolitionists

• William Lloyd Garrison

  • Radical white abolitionist

  • Founded New England anti-slavery society; American anti-slavery society

  • Newspaper, “The Liberator”

  • Based out of Boston

  • Meets Frederick Douglass and Lloyd writes the introduction for his book and urges his to speak

• David Walker

  • Free black

  • Advised slaves to fight for freedom instead of waiting to be freed

    • “Those who don’t fight should be kept in slavery”

• Frederick Douglass

  • Hired by Garrison to be a public speaker about life as slave

  • Newspaper “The North Star”

• Sojourner Truth

  • Former slave outspoken advocate for abolition and women’s rights

  • Wrote a narrative

• Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke

  • Lectured and wrote articles about putting an end to slavery

  • First women’s rights activis

The significance of the Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad

• Secret network of people, places, and routes, in the North that led slaves to freedom

• Methods:

  • Stowaway on boats and trains, hiding places

  • Traveled by foot at night

  • Henry Brown shipped himself to Philadelphia in a box

  • Ellen Smith Craft dressed up as a sickly white man (she looked white), she took her husband with her and pretended he pretended to be her slave

• Those who escaped:

  • Mostly were young, single men

  • Escaped from Upper South

  • Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland

  • Difficult to escape from the Deep South

• Station, safe house, and certain lanterns meant a safe house

• Conductors, like Harriet Tubman led people to slavery

• Stationmasters were the people at the stations

Important workers on the Underground Railroad

• Free blacks, escaped slaves, white abolitionists

• Harriet Tubman went back 19 times to the South and guided people to freedom, she knew many routes, union army would later higher he as a spy, first women military officer

• William Still with house is Philadelphia, one of few people who wrote things down, he wanted to record the history, he eventually published a book about the underground railroad

• Levi Coffin a Quaker probably helped over 3,000 people through his house

• Abolitionists called the fugitive slave act the Kidnapping Act

The impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

• Written by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  • “The little lady who made the big war” -Lincoln

• 1,000,000 copies sold by 1853 (one year)

• Exposed horrors of slavery to the masses, Stowe lived in Ohio

  • Based on accounts from slave narratives and what Stowe witnessed firsthand

• Moral Issue: slavery was evil, even with the nicest slave owners

  • Written in response to passage of Fugitive Slave Act

• Added to sectionalism of the North/South, straining relationship further

  • South outraged

  • Responded with own literature that portrayed happy lives of slaves

• Modern Criticism: Stereotyped characters, Uncle Tom is described as submissive and considered a derogatory term for a black men today

• Translated into 37 different languages at the time

• People sent her dismembered parts of their slaves, only fueled her to write more

The Slave Narrative and its role in abolitionism and understanding slavery

• Not until December 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment is slavery declared completely, officially, over, and forever outlawed

• It would be another century until African Americans received true freedom and equality with the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement