Slavery in America, from 1619 to 1865
The first recorded enslaved Africans arrive in English Virginia in 1619; by 1860 nearly four million people are held in bondage in the United States.
- Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America — Ira Berlin, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1998)
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database — SlaveVoyages Consortium
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
- The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story — Nikole Hannah-Jones (ed.), One World (2021)
In late August 1619 an English privateer, the White Lion, landed “20 and odd Negroes” at Point Comfort in Virginia. They had been seized from a Portuguese slave ship carrying captives from Angola. They were not the first Africans in North America (Spanish Florida had enslaved and free Africans decades earlier), but they are the first recorded in the English colonies that became the United States.
- Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America — Ira Berlin, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1998)
- The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story — Nikole Hannah-Jones (ed.), One World (2021)
How slavery took hold
At first the status of Africans in Virginia was not fixed; some, like Anthony Johnson, became free landowners. Over the seventeenth century, as tobacco planters turned from indentured English servants to enslaved Africans, colonial laws hardened. Virginia ruled in 1662 that a child’s status followed the mother’s, making slavery hereditary, and later laws tied it explicitly to race. Ira Berlin calls this the shift from “societies with slaves” to “slave societies”.
- Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America — Ira Berlin, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1998)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
Of the roughly 12.5 million Africans forced onto ships in the transatlantic slave trade, only about 400,000 (around 3%) were landed in mainland North America; most went to the Caribbean and Brazil. But in the United States the enslaved population grew by natural increase, so that by the 1860 census there were nearly four million enslaved people, about one in eight Americans.
- Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database — SlaveVoyages Consortium
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
A slave republic of liberty
Slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies in 1776. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal”, yet its author, Thomas Jefferson, enslaved hundreds of people, and the Constitution of 1787 protected slavery without naming it: it counted an enslaved person as three-fifths of a person for representation, allowed the slave trade until 1808, and required the return of people who escaped.
- The Radicalism of the American Revolution — Gordon S. Wood, Alfred A. Knopf (1992)
- The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family — Annette Gordon-Reed, W. W. Norton (2008)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and the opening of the Deep South made slavery more profitable than ever. Cotton grown by enslaved people was the country’s leading export before the Civil War, and around a million people were sold or forced from the upper South to the cotton states in a vast internal slave trade that broke up families.
- Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America — Ira Berlin, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1998)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
Resistance
Enslaved people resisted in countless ways: running away, slowing work, keeping families and faith alive, and occasionally revolting, as in Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia in 1831. Black churches, spirituals and folk traditions born in slavery became foundations of African American culture. Free Black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and white allies, built a movement that made slavery the central question of national politics.
- Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom — David W. Blight, Simon & Schuster (2018)
- Give Me Liberty! An American History — Eric Foner, W. W. Norton (2004)
Slavery ended only through the bloodiest war in American history and the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865. But the racial order it created outlived it, through segregation, lynching and discrimination, and Americans still argue about how much of the present it explains.
- Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 — Eric Foner, Harper & Row (1988)
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era — James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press (1988)
Slavery is not a side-story but central to the American founding and economy. The New York Times' 1619 Project (2019) argued for placing 1619 and Black Americans' struggle at the centre of the national story, since Black Americans did much to make the country's democratic ideals real.
- The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story — Nikole Hannah-Jones (ed.), One World (2021)
Slavery was central, but the Revolution's ideals also became the weapon used against it. Historians including Gordon Wood and James McPherson challenged some claims, notably that protecting slavery was a primary reason for the Revolution; the Times later softened that line. Many conservatives see the project as teaching Americans to despise their country.
- Letter from five historians on The 1619 Project, with the editor's response — Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz and Gordon S. Wood; Jake Silverstein, The New York Times Magazine (2019)
- The Radicalism of the American Revolution — Gordon S. Wood, Alfred A. Knopf (1992)
Why it matters today
Slavery and the racial hierarchy built to justify it are the deepest wound in American life. Gaps in wealth, housing and policing, arguments over monuments and school curricula, and the very question of what the founding meant all run back to it. How to teach it is itself one of the sharpest fault lines in American politics.