History of Slavery in The United States - Colonial America

Colonial America

About 600,000 slaves were imported into the U.S., or 5% of the 12 million slaves brought across from Africa to the Americas. The great majority of African slaves went to sugar colonies in the Caribbean and to Brazil, where life expectancy was short and the numbers had to be continually replenished. Life expectancy was much higher in the U.S. (because of generally better food, less disease, lighter work loads, and better medical care) so the numbers grew rapidly by excesses of births over deaths, reaching 4 million by the 1860 Census. From 1770 until 1860, the rate of natural growth of North American slaves was much greater than for the population of any nation in Europe, and was nearly twice as rapid as that of England.

The first 19 or so blacks arrived ashore near Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, brought by Dutch traders who had seized them from a captured Spanish slave ship. The Spanish usually baptized slaves in Africa before embarking them and English law considered baptized Christians exempt from slavery, so these Blacks joined about 1,000 English indentured servants already in the colony. Some achieved freedom, owned land, and one later owned the American Colonies' first true slave.

In the early years of the Chesapeake Bay colony, most laborers came from Britain as "indentured servants." To gain passage to the colonies, they signed contracts of indenture to pay with work for their passage, their upkeep and training, usually on a farm, as the colonies were highly agricultural. The servants were young people who intended to become permanent residents. Some masters treated them as well or as poorly as family members. They were not slaves. In some cases, convicted criminals were transported to the colonies as indentured servants, rather than being imprisoned. Many Scots-Irish, Irish and Germans came in the eighteenth century.

Historians estimate that more than half of all white immigrants to the English colonies of North America during the 17th and 18th centuries came as indentured servants. The number of indentured servants among immigrants was particularly high in the South. The early colonists of Virginia treated the first Africans in the colony as indentured servants. They were freed after a stated period and given the use of land and supplies by their former masters. The historian Ira Berlin noted that what he called the charter generation was sometimes made up of mixed-race men who were indentured servants, and whose ancestry was African and Iberian. They were descendants of Portuguese and Spanish men who worked in African ports as traders or facilitators in the slave trade, and their African consorts.

The Chesapeake Bay Colony had difficulty attracting sufficient laborers; in addition, there was a high mortality rate in the early years. The wealthier planters found that the major problem with indentured servants was that they left after several years, just when they had become skilled and the most valuable workers. In addition, an improving economy in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century meant that fewer workers chose to go to the colonies. The transformation of the status of Africans from indentured servitude to slavery—whereby they could never leave—happened gradually. There were no laws regarding slavery early in Virginia's history. But, by 1640, the Virginia courts had sentenced at least one black servant, John Punch, to slavery.

In 1654, John Casor, a black indentured servant, became the first legally recognized slave in Colonial America. He claimed to someone named Robert Parker that his owner, free black colonist Anthony Johnson, had held him past his term. Parker told Johnson that if he did not release Casor, Parker would testify in court to this fact; under local laws, this might cause the forfeiture of some of Johnson's land. Under duress, Johnson freed Casor, who entered into seven years' servitude with Parker. Johnson, who felt he had been cheated, sued Parker to repossess Casor. A Northampton County court ruled for Johnson, declaring that Parker illegally was detaining Casor from his rightful master who legally held him "for the duration of his life". Since persons with African origins were not English subjects by birth, they were considered foreigners and generally outside English Common Law. Elizabeth Key Grinstead, a mixed-race woman, successfully gained her freedom and that of her son in the Virginia courts in 1656 by making her case as the daughter of the free Englishman Thomas Key. She was also a baptized Christian. Her attorney and her son's father was also an English subject, which may have helped her case.

Shortly after the Elizabeth Key trial and similar challenges, in 1662 Virginia passed a law adopting the principle of partus sequitur ventrum (called partus, for short), stating that any children of an enslaved mother would take her status and be born into slavery, regardless if the father were a freeborn Englishman. This institutionalized the power relationships, freed the white men from the legal responsibility to acknowledge or financially support their children, and somewhat confined the open scandal of mixed-race children and miscegenation to within the slave quarters.

The Virginia Slave codes of 1705 further defined as slaves those people imported from nations that were not Christian, as well as Native Americans who were sold to colonists by other Native Americans. This established the basis for the legal enslavement of any non-Christian foreigner.

In 1735, the trustees of the colony of Georgia, set up to enable worthy laborers to have a new start, passed a law to prohibit slavery, which was then legal in the other twelve English colonies. They wanted to eliminate the risk of slave rebellions and make Georgia better able to defend against attacks from the Spanish to the south. The law supported Georgia's original charter—to turn some of England's poor into hardworking small farmers.

The Protestant Scottish highlanders who settled what is now Darien, Georgia added a moral anti-slavery argument, which was rare at the time, in their 1739 "Petition of the Inhabitants of New Inverness".

By 1750 Georgia authorized slavery in the state because they had been unable to secure enough indentured servants as laborers, since economic conditions in England began to improve in the first half of the eighteenth century. During most of the British colonial period, slavery existed in all the colonies. People enslaved in the North typically worked as house servants, artisans, laborers and craftsmen, with the greater number in cities. The South depended on an agricultural economy, and it had a significantly higher number and proportion of slaves in the population, as its commodity crops were labor intensive. Early on, slaves in the South worked primarily in agriculture, on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice, and tobacco; cotton became a major crop after the 1790s. The invention of the cotton gin enabled the cultivation of short-staple cotton in a wide variety of areas, leading to the development of the Deep South as cotton country. Tobacco was very labor intensive, as was rice cultivation. In South Carolina in 1720, about 65% of the population consisted of slaves. Planters (defined by historians as those who held 20 slaves or more) used slaves to cultivate commodity crops. Backwoods subsistence farmers, the later wave of settlers in the 18th century who settled along the Appalachian Mountains and backcountry, seldom owned slaves.

Some of the British colonies attempted to abolish the international slave trade, fearing that the importation of new Africans would be disruptive. Virginia bills to that effect were vetoed by the British Privy Council. Rhode Island forbade the import of slaves in 1774. All of the colonies except Georgia had banned or limited the African slave trade by 1786; Georgia did so in 1798. Some of these laws were later repealed.