Article #2
The Slave Trade and the Era of
Slavery, 1500-1860
The Slave Trade
The slave trade developed as an extension of
mercantilism, the doctrine that prevailed among the rising monarchies of Europe
in the 15th century, whereby each nation-state sought to maximize
its profits via domestic and international trade in competition with other
nations. Since raw materials, finished
goods, and markets could all be powerfully augmented by expanding the national
territory across the globe, imperialism and colonialism became conceptually
associated with mercantilism: Control of
territories overseas increased national access to raw materials, goods, and
markets beyond the confines of the borders for Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands,
France, and Great Britain.
Portugal was for a time in the very late 15th
century the leader in voyages of exploration.
The immediate motivation was direct access to the Spice Islands (today’s
Indonesia). At the time, Arabs operating
across West Asia and Italians plying the Mediterranean Sea and surrounding
areas frequently acted as two layers of middlepersons with which the nations of
Europe had to deal in securing the spices that came mostly via overland routes
to the Mediterranean. Prince Henry the
Navigator of Portugal navigated very little himself, but in 1488 he did send
Bartholomew Dias down the western coast of Africa to the Cape of Good Hope at
the southern tip of the continent; and
in 1498 his court trained and sponsored Vasco da Gama and his the crew aboard
ships that went all the way around the Cape of Good Hope and on to the eastern
coast of India in 1498. Subsequent trips took the Portuguese on through the
seas of Southeast and East Asia, where they exerted a presence in today’s
Indonesia, Malaysia, China, and Japan;
and establishing territorial
control at Macau, to the west of Hong Kong in southern China.
Meanwhile, the monarchical duo Ferdinand and
Isabella of Spain sponsored four voyages of Columbus during 1492-1502. That first voyage of 1492 landed on the
island of Hispaniola, which in today’s world is split between the nations of
Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This
was close enough to the American mainland to be credited for the European
discovery of the Americas. Native
Americans had long since come through the Bering Straits from Asia and expanded
over the territory that today is identified with North America, Central
America, and South America. But For
Europeans this was very big news that Columbus did not find the Spice Islands
that he set out to find via and all-water westerly route--- but did discover what for them (and also
Asians and Africans) was a whole New World.
Having sailed for Spain, other Spaniards soon
came to the Americas after Columbus.
Hernando Cortez conquered the Aztecs in 1521. Francisco Pizarro conquered the Incas in
1536. Vaso Nunez de Balboa looked out
from the Isthmus of Panama to see that another ocean on the west--- the Pacific---- was looming close to the Atlantic that he
could still see behind him to the east.
The Portuguese did establish a colony in
today’s Brazil, but for a while, by the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Portuguese
and Spain divided the previously imperialistically unclaimed world between
them, with Spain presiding over the Western Hemisphere and Portugal roaming
over the Eastern Hemisphere . The
Spaniards swept in with a vengeance to set up colonies in South American,
Central America, islands of the Caribbean, Mexico, today’s Florida and the
American Southwest from Texas to California.
In the Caribbean and South America especially, the Spaniards set up huge
sugar plantations and mines that were enormously productive of silver and gold.
Both the mines and the plantations required
heavy inputs of labor. Great populations
of Native American people had been wiped out with small pox and yellow
fever; those that remained knew the
territory so well that they became adept escape artists when the Spaniards
tried to put them to work on the plantations, whether as indentured servants or
slaves. But on the coast of African, the
Portuguese and then the Spaniards discovered mighty the might nations the
Dahomey, Ashanti, and others who were willing to trade their captives of war,
prisoners, and criminals as slaves in exchange for weapons, metal goods, cloth,
and alcoholic beverages.
The system that developed was lucrative for
both African and European traders and devastating to the people traded and
their families. Europeans typically
established what they called “factories” at coastal edge in West Africa or on
nearby islands. There they would set up
large cages for the imprisonment of the human chattel for which they traded
with the agents of the Dahomey, Ashanti, and others. When enough slaves accumulated to fill a ship
at an economically viable level, the human cargo was hustled aboard the ships
and carried across the Atlantic Ocean through what was termed the Middle
Passage to America. The international
commercial exchange was known as the Triangular Trade, whereby slaves were
taken to work the sugar plantations and mines of South America, and the
tobacco, rice, and cotton plantations of in the Old South of colonial North
America; the agricultural goods of the
Americas were carried on to Europe for processing; and goods from those European factories were
then carried on to Africa, at which point the triangular process began again.
The trip across the Atlantic generally took
four to five weeks. There were three or
more levels to the ships, just three feet or so apart, with slaves packed in
horizontal position, scrunched into spots
five and one-half feet long and about sixteen
inches wide. There the slaves remained
chained together, ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist as they lay in an
accumulating filth of urine and excrement.
Once a week or so, the slaves were taken on deck to get a rinsing from
pails of water, sometimes with requests from the crew to dance or skip or move
in some frivolous fashion as the cleaning was taking place.
So horrid were ship conditions that about one
in seven (approximately 15%) slaves died on the Middle Passage. But this was part of the calculation. The slave haul was so valuable in the
aggregate that a few lives lost did not matter in crude terms of profit and
loss. Outlays for food and provisions on
the ships were no more than necessary for the majority of the slaves to
survive, with a few dead bodies carried on into port considered a rationally
sustainable loss.
Slaves taken for work on the plantations and
mines of South America were sold in such numbers that the purchaser just gave
the hordes disembarking from the slave ships a quick look and packed them off
to the plantation. Slaves sold in places
such as Charleston and New Orleans in the Old South were given more fastidious
examination, in similar fashion to that of a horse trade. Teeth and gums were examined to determine
age. Backs were examined for any sign of
scars from cracking whips that might indicate a rebellious spirit. A woman’s facial wrinkles and the condition
of her legs and abdomen were assessed for child-bearing potential. Prices for slaves ranged over time and
place; in Louisiana, the price of a field
hand went up from about $500 in the early 19th century to
approximately $1,500 at the advent of the Civil War.
The slave trade was big business. The imperial and eventually the industrial
might of European empires depended on the goods that resulted from unpaid
labor. Slave ship owners and speculators
regularly realized three-fold returns on their investments. Returns could be even greater when the goods
for which slaves were in exceptionally high demand. But the vagaries of weather and health could
also wipe out an investment and bring economic ruin to a ship owner who had bet
too heavily on the returns of single ship.
On balance, though, the slave trade was hugely profitable and a huge
factor in the economic growth of the nascent capitalist economies of Europe,
especially those of Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.
In the course of the late 17th
century and the 18th century, Great Britain defeated Dutch and
French rivals in wars and secured agreements that gave that nation preeminence
in the slave trade. Wealth gained from
the slave trade played a vital role in the growth and maintenance of the
British Empire. Two-thirds of the
African slaves sold by British traders went to non-British purchasers; one-third went to fellow Britons. Through the 17th century, ship
owners from London still played an important role, but in the course of the 18th
century the cities of Bristol and Liverpool came to overshadow London as
locations for ship owners and investors.
By 1795, Liverpool dominated five-eighths of the British slave trade and
three-sevenths of the entire European slave trade.
African Americans in The American
Revolution and the Founding to the United States
When war broke out between the British
imperial powerhouse and the upstart American colonists in 1775, people of
African provenance, whether free blacks or those of slave status shrewdly
calculated their interests. A given
African American might well ask at least these two questions.
Should I fight with the British, believing
promises that doing so will bring freedom from plantation masters in the
American South?
Or should I fight with the Americans and trust
that a war for the cause of liberty will result in my own?
In all, approximately 5,000 African Americans,
mostly free blacks, fought on the side of the Americans. Another 1,000 people of African descent who
had been in slave status gained their freedom by fighting with the British
army. African Americans served as combat
troops with both armies. They
also conducted missions of espionage and
performed a variety of practical tasks:
clearing roads, cooking meals, hauling equipment, repairing bridges, and
driving wagons transporting officers, troops, weaponry, and supplies.
From the beginning, African Americans were
involved in famous events leading up to and through the American
Revolution. Crispus Attucks was among
those killed in the Boston Massacre of 5 March 1770. Lemuel Haynes was among the Minutemen who
gathered to defend the Concord Bridge in Concord, Masschusetts, on the day
(April 1775) of the “shot heard round the world.” Peter Salem also fought at Concord, and he
was a mainstay in the battles of Bunker Hill (1775), Saratoga (1777), and Stony
Point (1779); he is credited with some
for fatally wounding British Major General John Pitcairn at Bunker Hill, and he
appears in a painting by John Trumbull, an artist who captured many key moments
in the American revolution on canvass.
Primas Black and Epheram Blackman of Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys
participated in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga. Other male African American soldiers whose
names gained a place in historical records for having fought in the American
Revolution against the British are Pomp Blackman, Samuel Craft, Prince
Estabrook, Caesar Ferrit, John Ferrit (Caesar’s son), Barzillai Lew, and Cuff
Whittemore. African American women were
among those who fought on the American side:
The memoirs of African American poet Lucy Terry Prince (1730-1821) tell
how black women disguised as men fought the British in various battles waged
over the full course of the conflict.
Up until the end of the colonial period, white
colonists prevented African Americans from serving as soldiers. Whites feared that giving blacks guns would
encourage black-on-white violence and even full-scale revolution. Some whites perpetuated the myth that blacks
were inferior and incapable of acquiring the skills of the soldier. But when war came, many of the colonies,
especially those of the North, gave permission to African Americans to wield
guns against the British. Apparently the
fear of African Americans bearing arms returned in the aftermath of the
American Revolution: In 1792, Congress
passed a law restricting military service to free white men.
Upon the founding of the new nation, and after
the first attempt at a general statement of constitutional principles in the
Articles of Confederation (1781) failed to provide for an effective central
government, James Madison took responsibility for writing the United States
Constitution of the United States that went into effect in 1789. Many of the founders, even those who were
slaveholders, realized that there was an abiding ironic cruelty in the
maintenance of slavery as an institution in a nation whose constitution
reflected the ideals of the Enlightenment or Age of Reason. They knew that as a matter of principle,
liberty and justice for humanity should include all of those who are
human. But slavery was a contentious
issue that could have torn the young nation apart in a
sectional fight involving those whose
livelihoods depended on slave labor and those who were not invested in, or
morally objected to, the institution of slavery.
So Madison finessed the language a bit,
avoiding the term, “slave,” but at three points in the United States
Constitution, identifying issues of law that most definitely pertained
specifically to African Americans. In
Article I, Section 2 reference is made to “other persons” who were to be counted
as “three-fifths” of a full human being in each state for purposes of
determining level of representation in the House of Representatives of the
United States Congress. And in Article
I, Section 9, Madison writes that “the importation of certain persons” could
cease as of 1808 and empower the United States Congress to place a tax on such
persons brought into the United States thereafter; reference was clearly to the slave
trade. And in Article IV, Madison writes
that anyone escaping from bondage should be returned to the party who owned their
labor.
Thus it was that the world’s greatest document
of national governance, embodying the general principles of the Enlightenment
and embracing the phraseology of John Locke in guaranteeing “life, liberty, and
property” (5th and 14th Amendments) to citizens, did
little to protect life for African Americans, implicitly denied them liberty,
and not only failed to guarantee them right to property but rather considered
them property guaranteed for ownership by others.
Slavery on the Plantations of the American
South
Slavery existed throughout the American
colonies during the 16th and 17thcenturies, and through
most of the 18th century in the run-up to the Revolutionary War
against the British. In the North, slave
owning tended to be on a small scale, with slaves to work as personal and
household servants, on loading docks, in workshops and then in small
factories; only a few worked on the
small farms of New England, upper New York, Jew Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In the aftermath of the American Revolution,
the northern states one after another terminated slavery, so that during the
more than half-century that ensued before the Civil War, there developed great
economic and social distinctions between the North and the South.
Slaves in the American South most notably
worked on large plantations given at first to tobacco (especially in the
Virginia and the Carolinas), rice throughout the humid lower South from Florida
to Louisiana), and sugarcane (especially in Florida and Louisiana). But they also work on small farms, some with
just a few slaves, others with about twenty.
Then there were huge plantations of hundreds and even thousands of acres
where slaves worked on large-scale agricultural operations that brought owners
enormous wealth. The largest of the
plantations had the look of towns and even small cities, featuring a coterie of
slave laborers who wove cloth, sewed clothes, made shoes, constructed furniture
and buildings, shoed horses, sawed lumber, forged iron implements, and milled
flour.
Most slaves, though, were field hands who did
backbreaking, intellectually empty work day after day, from sun up to sun down,
at least six days a week. With the
invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in 1793, the separation of seeds from the
main fiber became much easier and cost-effective, motivating planters planters
to give at first more and then most acreage to cotton plants.
Slaves laboring in the nasty work of cotton
picking were typically expected to fill sacks of 250 pounds of cotton a day or
face a whipping. The most adept pickers
of cotton might raise their productivity to 400 pounds--- although many with that capability refrained
from doing so in order to promote rising expectations on the part of the
plantation owner, overseer, and slave driver.
Even at nightfall the work of the slave went
on. Slaves still chopped wood, mended
tools, and fed the cows, pigs and chickens.
By the time they could even return to their quarters, many slaves had
little time to do much else than to fall into bed and get a good enough night’s
sleep to begin another round of work the next day.
Children of slaves automatically assumed the
status of their parents. At the age of
five or six, slave children might do minor tasks in the “Big House” of the
master and family, or they might help in the fields, fetching water, picking up
stones and other clutter, or collect and dispose of garbage. At about ten years old, both female and male
slave children began to do regular field work, very often meaning picking
cotton.
Slave quarters were typically one or two room
shacks holding as many as twelve residents.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, the dwellings
were generally roofed with thatch, then in the 1th century log cabins were
common. The cabins were hot in summer and
cold in winter, particularly overnight in the latter case, since the slave
generally was issued little more than a thin cotton blanket to use as she or he
slept on a mattress made of straw.
Slaves generally made their own simple wooden furniture and adapted
gourds for use as bowls and jugs;
sometimes the master would provide forks and spoons, but frequently
slaves had to fashion these for themselves, as well.
Status distinctions among slaves followed an
order that began at the Big House with those slaves who worked as butlers,
servers, cooks, sewers of clothes, tailors, nannies, carriage drivers, and
gardeners. Out in the fields, working
generally under a white overseer, was an often African American slave driver.
Slave drivers wielded a high level of authority, but the elevated rank
of position came awkwardly, because success depended on exploitation of fellow
African Americans; the slave driver had
to be careful about acquiring a reputation for unnecessary cruelty, because he
still had to dwell among and command the cooperation of other slaves, who could
make life uncomfortable for him if he was judged to wield his power with little
regard for their welfare.
Slaves who lived and worked in the Big House
ate better than did field slaves. They often
ate some of what the kitchen claves cooked for the family of the master. Field slaves, though, made do with a diet in
which flour, cornmeal, and lard provided much of the caloric value. Milk was plentiful on the farm, and beans
served as a good source of protein.
Slaves were ingenious about finding good things from nature’s bounty to
supplement the meals put together from rations put together by the slave
owner. They hunted all manner of wild
game and gathered a wide variety of edible plants, fruit, and nuts from the
fields and forests in and near the farm.
Inventively using herbs and animal fats, slaves turned the wild game and
plants of their immediate environment into masterpieces of the culinary art.
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