Unit 2 Exam - HUSH

Colonial Slavery

• 1. Historical Context

  • Beginning in 1440, the Portuguese forcibly transported Africans to the Americas for labor via the Middle Passage

  • Approximately 12 million Africans were transported in this matter, with 15% dying at sea

  • At the start of the British colonies, indentured servants “voluntarily” became the labor force

    • under a contract with a landowner, working for 4-7 years in exchange for passage to the Americas, room, and board

  • However, the number of enslaved Africans steadily increased over the course of the 17th and 18th century

• 2. The Institution of Slavery

  • By the 1660s, Virginia enacted slave codes

    • Kept Africans and their children in permanent bondage, thus creating a race-based definition of slavery

    • Mostly in the South, the plantation system had the greatest demand for labor

    • by 1750 ½ of Virginia’s population and 2/3 of South Carolina’s population were enslaved

African Americans in the Early Republic

• 1. Historical context

  • By the 19th century, slavery had been a part of the nation for 2 centuries

  • Cotton became more profitable with the mention of the Cotton Gin by Eli Whitney. The increased speed of operating the unusable cotton fibers from their seeds

  • The rise of “King Cotton” created a rise in the importation of slaves before it was outlawed in 1808

• 2. Anti-slavery Effects

  • In 1831 Nat Turner organized about 70 slaves who killed Turner’s master, wife, and children with axes. They then went from plantation to plantation in Virginia, murdering about 75 whites in total in Nat Turner’s Rebellion

  • This shook Southerners, who responded by increasing slave patrols and tightening their repressive slave codes

• 3. Conditions

  • Generally, life on the fields meant working sun up to sun down 6 days a week. Plantation slaves lived in small dirt shacks with a dirt floor

States and Slavery (1844-1877)

• 1. Manifest Destiny

  • The US added large territories through victory in the Mexican-American War, raising questions about slavery in the newly acquired lands

  • The number of free and slaves was equal in 1849: 15 each

• 2. California

  • A powering of settlers came into California because of the Gold Rush

  • By 1849, California wanted to join the US as a “free” state. This raised fear in the Southerns, as the number of free and slave states would not be balanced

  • Compromise of 1850

    • Ca added as a free state

    • No slave trade in DC

    • New land from Mexico without restrictions on slavery

    • Fugitive slave laws

• 3. Abolishment Movement

  • A. Underground Railroad

    • approx. 100,000 enslaved black Americans escaped to freedom, many with the help of white and free black abolitionists

    • Groups organized secret routes known as the “underground railroads”

    • Harriet Tubman was most famous “conductors” for helping free over 70 people

    • It was hard to escape, especially after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act that empowered “slave patrols” in the North and in the South

Reconstruction

• 1. Context

  • After the Civil War the Nation needed to rebuild

  • major issues:

    • North and South reunited?

    • System of labor replacing slavery?

    • States of former slaves?

  • 1865: the 13th Amendment banned slavery in the US

• A. Freedmen’s Bureau

  • Government created Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865 to help former slaves into American Society as freedmen

    • provided food, clothing, education, and job training to freed slaves

  • In 1872, Congress abruptly abandoned the program, refusing to renew

• 2. Black Codes

  • Black Codes which were legal methods of keeping freed slaves in positions of servitude

    • servitude = forced labor

  • Local officials arrested unemployed blacks, fine them for vagrancy (homelessness), and hired them out to private employers to satisfy the fines

• A. Sharecropping

  • A system where the landlord albums a tenant to use the land in exchange for a slave of the crop

  • modified slavery

    • gave a large portion to owners, no tools, loans from owners, cycle of debt

  • through this system black sharecroppers fell further and further into debt to landowners

• B. Violence

  • violence and intimidation spread

  • Southerners established a number of secret terrorist societies in this era, including the Ku Klux Klan

  • One of the goal at the first was to drive blacks out of politics

  • 400 hangings of African Americans occurred better 1868 and 1871