Untitled Flashcards Set

Unit 2 APAAS–

Freedom,Enslavement and Resistance 

Vocabulary and People

Important Specific Facts from the CED to MEMORIZE 

• Slave codes defined chattel slavery as a race-based, inheritable, lifelong condition and included restrictions against freedom of movement, congregation, possessing weapons, and wearing fine fabrics, among other activities. These regulations manifested in slaveholding societies throughout the Americas, including the Code Noir and Código Negro in French and Spanish colonies.

• Slave Codes developed in response to African Americans’ resistance to slavery, to institutionalized discrimination, and to legalize the status of servitude of African descended people to include non-citizenship in the US

• Dred Scott v. Sandford 1857. Dred Scott’s freedom suit (1857) resulted in the Supreme Court’s decision that African Americans, enslaved and free, were not and could never become citizens of the U.S. 

• Partus Sequitur Ventrem

  • Partus sequitur ventrem, a 17th-century law, defined a child’s legal status based on the status of its mother and held significant consequences for enslaved African Americans

  • Partus codified hereditary racial slavery in the U.S. by ensuring that enslaved African American women’s children would inherit their status as property, which invalidated African Americans’ claims to their children

  • Partus was designed to prohibit the mixed race children of Black women from inheriting the free status of their father (the custom in English common law).Partus gave male enslavers the right to deny responsibility for the children they fathered with enslaved women (most often through assault) and to commodify enslaved women’s reproductive lives.

• In 1656, Elizabeth Key (born of a White father and an enslaved Black mother) became the first Black woman in North America to sue for her freedom and win. Soon after, in 1662, the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was passed by the General Assembly of Virginia and spread throughout the remaining 13 colonies.

• Religious services and churches became sites for community gathering, celebration, mourning, sharing information, and, in the North, political organizing. Religion inspired resistance to slavery in the form of rebellions, such as those led by Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, and the activism of abolitionists like Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, and Henry Highland Garnet.

• In 1738, the governor of Spanish Florida established a fortified settlement under the leadership of Francisco Menéndez, an enslaved Senegambian who fought against the English in the Yamasee War and found refuge in St. Augustine. The settlement, called Fort Mose, was the first sanctioned free Black town in what is now the U.S.

• The emancipation from slavery offered by Spanish Florida to slaves fleeing the British colonies inspired the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina in 1739. Led by Jemmy, an enslaved man from the Angola region, nearly 100 enslaved African Americans set fire to plantations and marched toward sanctuary in Spanish Florida. After the Stono Rebellion, in 1740, the British province of South Carolina passed a restrictive slave code that prohibited African Americans from organizing, drumming, learning to read, or moving abroad, including to other colonial territories. One month later, British colonial forces invaded Florida, eventually seizing and destroying Fort Mose. 

• The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was the only uprising of enslaved people that resulted in overturning a colonial, slaveholding government. It transformed a European colony (Saint-Domingue) into a Black republic free of slavery (Haiti) and created the second independent nation in the Americas, after the U.S. 

  • The Haitian Revolution prompted Napoleon to sell many of the French colonies, including the Louisiana Purchase bought by Thomas Jefferson which more than doubled the size of the US and created a controversy about the expansion of slavery into the new territory. 

  • The Haitian Revolution inspired uprisings in other African diaspora communities, such as the Louisiana Slave Revolt (1811), one of the largest on U.S. soil, and the Malê Uprising of Muslim slaves (1835), one of the largest revolts in Brazil.

• Afro-descendants who escaped slavery to establish free communities were known as maroons. Maroon communities emerged throughout the African diaspora, often in remote and hidden environments beyond the purview of enslavers. Some communities lasted for just a few years, while others continued for a full century. Maroon communities consisted of self emancipated people and those born free in the community. In maroon communities, formerly enslaved people created autonomous spaces where African-based languages and cultural practices blended and flourished, even as maroons faced illness, starvation, and the constant threat of capture. African Americans formed maroon communities in areas such as the Great Dismal Swamp (between Virginia and North Carolina) and within Indigenous communities

• Resistance often took small forms rather than outright rebellion or escape. Enslaved people continually resisted their enslavement by slowing work, breaking tools, stealing food, or attempting to run away.

• Inspired by the Haitian Revolution, Charles Deslondes led up to 500 enslaved people in the largest slave revolt on U.S. soil, known as the German Coast Uprising, or the Louisiana Revolt of 1811. Deslondes organized support across local plantations and maroon communities (including self-emancipated people from Haiti) and led them on a march toward New Orleans. The revolt was violently suppressed.

• In 1841, Madison Washington, an enslaved cook, led a mutiny aboard the slave brig, Creole, which transported enslaved people from Virginia to New Orleans. Washington seized the ship and sailed it to the Bahamas, knowing that the British had ended slavery in the West Indian colonies in 1833. As a result, nearly 130 African Americans gained their freedom in the Bahamas.

• More enslaved Africans disembarked in Brazil than anywhere else in the Americas. Approximately half of the 10 million Africans who survived the Middle Passage landed in Brazil, where they were forced to labor in various enterprises such as sugar plantations, gold mines, coffee plantations, cattle ranching, and production of food and textiles for domestic consumption.

• Some African Americans were enslaved by Indigenous people in the five large nations (Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole). When Indigenous enslavers were forcibly removed from their lands by the federal government during the Trail of Tears, they brought the Black people they had enslaved. The five large Indigenous American nations (Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole) adopted slave codes, created slave patrols, and assisted in the recapture of enslaved Black people who fled for freedom.

• Emigrationists promoted moving away from the U.S. as the best strategy for African Americans to prosper freely, and evaluated locations in Central and South America, the West Indies, and West Africa. Due to their large populations of people of color, shared histories, and a promising climate, Central and South America were considered the most favorable areas for emigration.African American supporters of emigration and colonization observed the spread of abolition in Latin America and the Caribbean from 1820 to 1860 and advocated building new communities outside the United States. The continuation of slavery and racial discrimination against free Black people in the U.S. raised doubts about peacefully achieving racial equality in the states. 

• Anti-emigrationists saw abolition as a means to achieve the liberation, representation, and full integration of African Americans in American society. They viewed slavery and racial discrimination as inconsistent with America’s founding charters and believed abolition and racial equality would reflect the nation’s ideals. They saw themselves as having “birthright citizenship.”

• Advocates of radical resistance embraced overthrowing slavery through direct action, including revolts and, if necessary, violence to address the daily urgency of living and dying under slavery.  

• The term Underground Railroad refers to a covert network of Black and White abolitionists who provided transportation, shelter, and other resources to help enslaved people fleeing the South resettle in free territories in the U.S. North, Canada, and Mexico in the 19th century. An estimated 30,000 African Americans reached freedom through the Underground Railroad in this period. Due to the high number of African Americans who fled enslavement, Congress enacted the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, authorizing local governments to legally kidnap and return escaped refugees to their enslavers.

• Harriet Tubman is one of the most well-known conductors of the Underground Railroad. After fleeing enslavement, Tubman returned to the South at least 19 times, leading about 80 enslaved African Americans to freedom. She sang spirituals to alert enslaved people of plans to leave.

• In the 19th century, African American leaders embraced photography, a new technology, to counter stereotypes about Black people by portraying themselves as citizens worthy of dignity, respect, and equal rights. 

• Slave narratives described firsthand accounts of suffering under slavery, methods of escape, and acquiring literacy, with an emphasis on the humanity of enslaved people to advance the political cause of abolition. Narratives by formerly enslaved African American women convey their distinct experiences of constant vulnerability to sexual violence and exploitation.

• The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, a wartime order, declared freedom for enslaved people held in the 11 Confederate states still at war against the Union. After the Civil War, legal enslavement of African Americans continued in the border states and did not end until the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865

• Juneteenth marks the end of slavery in the last state of rebellion—Texas. It commemorates June 19, 1865, the day that enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, were informed that they were free by Major-General Gordon Granger’s reading of General Order No. 3. This order was the first document to mention racial equality through “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.” 

EK Chart: the MAIN and BIG ideas of Unit 2