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The prohibition on the importation of slaves into the United States after 1808 limited the supply of slaves in the United States. This came at a time when the invention of the cotton gin enabled the expansion of cultivation in the uplands of short-staple cotton, leading to clearing lands cultivating cotton through large areas of the Deep South, especially the Black Belt .
Early scholarship focused on the United States and tended to articulate views of slavery that reflected elite sources and perspectives. 12 Inspired by the US civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and wider global decolonization campaigns, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the rise of approaches to the study of slavery rooted in new social history, which aimed to understand slaves as central ...
- Slavery in Plantations and Cities
- Cotton Gin
- Living Conditions of Enslaved People
- Slave Rebellions
- Abolitionist Movement
- Missouri Compromise
- Kansas-Nebraska Act
- John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry
- Civil War
- When Did Slavery End?
In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia. Starting 1662, the colony of Virginia and then other English colonies established that the legal status of a slave was inherited through the mo...
In the late 18th century, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop planted and harvested by enslaved people, but whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand. But in 1793, a U.S.-born schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented ...
Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many enslavers owned fewer than 50 enslaved people. Landowners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to...
Enslaved people organized rebellions as early as the 18th century. In 1739, enslaved people led the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, the largest slave rebellion during the colonial era in North America. Other rebellions followed, including the one led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Veseyin Charleston in 1822. These uprising...
As slavery expanded during the second half of the 18th century, a growing abolitionist movementemerged in the North. From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by formerly enslaved people such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the radical newspaper...
America’s explosive growth—and its expansion westward in the first half of the 19th century—would provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion. In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government’s right to restrict slavery over Missouri’s application for statehood ended in a compro...
In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War. Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it ou...
In 1859, two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery. John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia—in which the abolitionist and 22 men, including five Black men and three of Brown’s sons raided and occupied a federal arsenal—resulted in the deaths of 10 people and Brow...
The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America; four more would follow after the Civil Warbegan. Though Lincoln’s anti-slavery views were well established, the central Uni...
On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State…in rebellion,…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamationdeprived th...
Sep 13, 2017 · The overstated significance of 1619—still a common fixture in American history curriculum—begins with the questions most of us reflexively ask when we consider the first documented arrival of ...
- Michael Guasco
Jun 19, 2017 · Myth Four: Slavery was a long time ago. Truth: African-Americans have been free in this country for less time than they were enslaved. Do the math: Blacks have been free for 152 years, which means ...
- Daina Ramey Berry
Apr 1, 2003 · To write slavery's history, new sources had to be found. Two young historians led the way, and their pioneering work opened the door to an understanding of slave life in the colonial era. In 1972, Gerald W. Mullin's Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia suggested what might be done by the application of historical imagination and some deep digging in colonial ...
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Aug 19, 2019 · Artwork by Deb Bishop. A Brief History of Slavery That You Didn't Learn in School. Four hundred years after enslaved Africans were first brought to Virginia, most Americans still don’t know the ...
