SLAVERY: 

A Peculiar Institution
A PECULIAR INSTITUTION

THE TRANSATLANTIC 
SLAVE TRADE

I. TIMELINE OF SLAVERY IN THE

AMERICAS

1. 15th  CENTURY
 1519 
The Spanish arrive on the shores of S. America and leave with
African slaves to be transported back to Spain.
2. 16TH  CENTURY
 1565  
The Spanish colony of St. Augustine in Florida became the first
permanent European settlement in what would become the US
centuries later; it included an unknown number of African slaves.

II. TIMELINE OF SLAVERY IN THE

AMERICAS
1. 17th  Century
•1619
 - The first record of Africans in English colonial America when men
were brought to the Jamestown Colony who had been taken as
prizes from a Spanish ship. They were treated as indentured
servants, and at least one was recorded as eventually owning land
in the colony.
•1640 
-  John Punch, a black indentured servant, ran away with two white
indentured servants, James, Gregory, and Victor. After the three
were captured, Punch was sentenced to serve Virginia planter Hugh
Gwyn for life. This made John Punch the first legally documented
slave in Virginia (and the US).]
•1654
 - John Castor, a black man who claimed to have completed his term
of indenture, became the first legally recognized slave-for-life in a
civil case in the Virginia colony. The court ruled with his master who
said he had an indefinite servitude for life.
17th Century Cont’d
•1662 
- Virginia law, using the principle
of partus sequitar ventrem, (Latin for "that which is brought forth
follows the womb"), said that children in the colony were born into
their mother's social status; therefore children born to enslaved
mothers were classified as slaves, regardless of their father's race or
status. This was contrary to English common law for English
subjects, which held that children took their father's social status.
•1672
- Royal African Company is founded in England, allowing slaves to
be shipped from Africa to the colonies in North America and the
Caribbean. England entered the slave trade.
•1676
 - Both free and enslaved African Americans fought in Bacon’s
Rebellion along with English colonists.
 

III. TIMELINE OF SLAVERY IN THE

AMERICAS
 1. 18th  Century

•1705
 - The Virginia Slave Codes define as slaves all those servants
brought into the colony who were not Christian in their original
countries, as well as those American Indians sold by other Indians
to colonists.
•1712
 - April 6 – The New York State Revolt of 1712.
•1739 
- September 9 – In the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina slaves gather
at the Stono River to plan an armed march for freedom.
•1770 
- March 5 – Crispus Attucks is killed by British soldiers in the Boston
massacre, a precursor to the American Revolution.
•1773
- Phyllis Wheatley has her book Poems on Various Subjects,
Religious and Moralpublished.
 
2. 18th  Century

•1775 
- April 14 – The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully
Held in Bondage holds four meetings. It was re-formed in 1784
as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and Benjamin Franklin would
later be its president.
•1776–1783
American Revolution: Thousands of enslaved African Americans in
the South escape to British lines, as they were promised freedom to
fight with the British. 
In South Carolina, 25,000 enslaved African Americans, one-quarter
of those held, escape to the British or otherwise leave their
plantations. After the war, many African Americans are evacuated
with the British for England; more than 3,000 Black Loyalists are
transported with other Loyalists to Nova Scotia and New
Brunswick, where they are granted land. Still others go to
Jamaica and the West Indies. An estimated 8–10,000 were
evacuated from the colonies in these years as free people, about 50
percent of those slaves who defected to the British and about 80
percent of those who survived.
Many free blacks in the North fight with the colonists for the
rebellion.
•1777:
 July 8 – The Vermont Republic (a sovereign nation at the time)
abolishes slavery, the first future state to do so. No slaves were held
in Vermont.
•1780
– Pennsylvania becomes the first U.S. state to abolish slavery.
 

INDENTURED SERVANTS

•Indentured servants first arrived in America in the decade following

the settlement of Jamestown by the Virginia Company in 1607.
•The idea of indentured servitude was born of a need for cheap
labor. The earliest settlers soon realized that they had lots of land to
care for, but no one to care for it. With passage to the Colonies
expensive for all but the wealthy, the Virginia Company developed
the system of indentured servitude to attract workers. Indentured
servants became vital to the colonial economy.
•The timing of the Virginia colony was ideal. The Thirty Year's War
had left Europe's economy depressed, and many skilled and unskilled
laborers were without work. A new life in the New World offered a
glimmer of hope; this explains how one-half to two-thirds of the
immigrants who came to the American colonies arrived as indentured
servants.

INDENTURED SERVANTS CONT’D

•With a long history in England, indentured servitude became, during
most of the seventeenth century, the primary means by which
Virginia planters filled their nearly inexhaustible need for labor. At
first, the Virginia Company of London paid to transport servants
across the Atlantic, but with the institution of the headright system in
1618, the company enticed planters and merchants to incur the cost
with the promise of land. 
•As a result, servants flooded into the colony, where they were
greeted by deadly diseases and often-harsh conditions that killed a
majority of newcomers and left the rest to the mercy of sometimes-
cruel masters. 
•The General Assembly passed laws regulating contract terms, as
well as the behavior and treatment of servants. Besides benefiting
masters with long indentures, these laws limited servant rights while
still allowing servants to present any complaints in court. 
•By the end of the seventeenth century, the number of new servants
in Virginia had dwindled, and the colony's labor needs were largely
met by enslaved Africans.

TERMS OF INDENTURED CONTRACTS

•Servants typically worked four to seven years in exchange for
passage, room, board, lodging and freedom dues. While the life of an
indentured servant was harsh and restrictive, it wasn't slavery. There
were laws that protected some of their rights. But their life was not
an easy one, and the punishments meted out to people who
wronged were harsher than those for non-servants. An indentured
servant's contract could be extended as punishment for breaking a
law, such as running away, or in the case of female servants,
becoming pregnant.
•For those that survived the work and received their freedom
package, many historians argue that they were better off than those
new immigrants who came freely to the country. Their contract may
have included at least 25 acres of land, a year's worth of corn, arms, a
cow and new clothes. Some servants did rise to become part of the
colonial elite, but for the majority of indentured servants that
survived the treacherous journey by sea and the harsh conditions of
life in the New World, satisfaction was a modest life as a freeman in a
burgeoning colonial economy.

BLACK INDENTURED SERVANTS

•In 1619 the first black Africans came to Virginia. With no slave laws
in place, they were initially treated as indentured servants, and given
the same opportunities for freedom dues as whites. However, slave
laws were soon passed – in Massachusetts in 1641 and Virginia in
1661 –and any small freedoms that might have existed for blacks
were taken away.
•As demands for labor grew, so did the cost of indentured servants.
Many landowners also felt threatened by newly freed servants
demand for land. The colonial elite realized the problems of
indentured servitude. Landowners turned to African slaves as a more
profitable and ever-renewable source of labor and the shift from
indentured servants to racial slavery had begun.
 

“ANTONIO” AKA ANTHONY JOHNSON

•Anthony Johnson (b. c. 1600 – d. 1670) was a black Angolan

who achieved freedom in the early 17th-century Colony of
Virginia after serving his term of indenture. He became a property
owner that owned slaves, and was one of the first people in Virginia
to have his right to own a slave legally recognized. Held as an
indentured servant in 1621, he earned his freedom after several
years, and was granted land by the colony.
•He later became a successful tobacco farmer in Maryland. He
attained great wealth after having been an indentured servant and
has been referred to as “'the black patriarch' of the first community
of Negro property owners in America".
 
Chargement…

INDIAN MASSACRE OF 1622

 
•Johnson was sold to a white planter named Bennet as an indentured
servant to work on his Virginia tobacco farm. In the early colonial
years, most Africans in the Thirteen Colonies were held under such
contracts of indentured servitude. With the exception of those
indentured for life, they were released after a contracted period with
many of the indentured receiving land and equipment after their
contracts expired or were bought out.  Most white laborers also
came to the colony as indentured servants.
•Antonio almost lost his life in the Indian massacre of 1622 when
his master's plantation was attacked. The Powhatan,, who were the
Native Americans dominant in the Tidewater of Virginia, were trying
to repulse the colonists from their lands. They attacked the
settlement where Johnson worked on Good Friday and killed 52 of
the 57 men.
 

 
•When Anthony Johnson was released from servitude, he was legally
recognized as a "free Negro." He developed a successful farm. In
1651 he owned 250 acres (100 ha), and the services of five
indentured servants (four white and one black). In 1653, John
Castor, a black indentured servant whose contract Johnson appeared
to have bought in the early 1640s, approached Captain Goldsmith,
claiming his indenture had expired seven years earlier and that he
was being held illegally by Johnson. A neighbor, Robert Parker,
intervened and persuaded Johnson to free Casor.
•Johnson was granted a large plot of farmland after he paid off his
indentured contract by his labor. On 24 July 1651, he acquired 250
acres (100 ha) of land under the headright system by buying the
contracts of five indentured servants, one of whom was his son
Richard Johnson.

BACON’S REBELLION

•Jamestown like England adopted a class system, there were the elite
planters and the indentured and former indentured servants.  The
elites were seeded the best lands on the coast, while when the
indentured contracts were fulfilled the former indentured servants
were given land in the interior surrounded by Native American tribes
whose lands they the former indentured servants were now living on.
•The elites had developed relations with some of the tribes and were
trading for rich furs and relied on maintaining those relationships,
despite the impact on the Colonists now living in the interior.

BACON’S REBELLION

•This quite complicated story started in Virginia in 1674, when a

group of farming settlers (former indentured servants)
demanded that natives roaming around the settlement be sent away
or killed. They claimed that the natives disturbed the peace and
productivity of their farming lands. Due to this, small conflicts
occurred between the two parties.
•It escalated when Doeg Indians stole pigs from Thomas Mathews,
who failed to pay them for traded goods. The settlers then responded
to this by killing several of the Doeg, who in turn killed Robert Hen,
Mathews’ herdsman.
•Militia captains took action and killed a group of Indians; however,
instead of the Doeg, they killed some from the peaceful tribe
of Susquehannock. Of course, the Susquehannocks took revenge, and
long series of attacks were conducted both by settlers
and Susquehannocks. The conflict reached its peak when John
Washington brought troops from Maryland to Virginia and killed
the Susquehannock’s chiefs and tribesmen.

DECLARATION OF 
THE PEOPLE OF VIRGINIA

•To avoid further conflicts, William Berkeley, the governor of

Virginia, passed a law that allowed the natives to stay in the colonial
lands. This enraged a planter named Nathaniel Bacon, who gathered
some settlers and planned against Berkeley.
•8 Colonists were killed shortly after in Henrico County, which further
enraged Nathaniel Bacon. Bacon and his fellow colonists issued a
“Declaration of the People of Virginia,” which became the public
document that made their rebellion “official.” They accused Berkeley
of irresponsibility and the failure to perform his duty as the governor
of Virginia.
 

REBELLION ESCALATES

•They started by attacking the native tribe of Pamunkey, who were

allies of the British. Afterwards, they stormed Jamestown and burned
the land, all in September of 1676. Berkeley was forced to retreat and
refuse fighting against this rebellion.
•Everything could have gone well, but Bacon died due to
dysentery. John Ingram took over, but he was not able to keep the
rebel forces intact. This became a chance for Berkeley to defeat them
at Chesapeake Bay, eventually reclaiming his position when he
returned to the burnt remains of Jamestown.
 

BACON’S REBELLION HIGHLIGHTS 

A NEED FOR A NEW UNDERCLASS
•Bacon’s rebellion caused a stir among the British, who allowed
Berkeley to stay on as a governor. Under his rule, he took the rebels’
property and had 23 men hanged. However, after a thorough
investigation, he was sent back to England and was replaced.
•Bacon’s Rebellion highlighted the growing problems with the
indentured and former indentured servants, including their
insufficient numbers to meet the unending demand for new labor. 
•One important finding in this rebellion was the possibility that a
group of people could unite under a single cause and overthrow
small regimes, something that the British became wary of. Thus,
Bacon’s Rebellion can be seen as a catalyst to the solution for this
problem in the enslavement of Africans.  African slaves provided a
permanent underclass.

TIMELINE OF SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS

17TH CENTURY
•1619 - The first record of Africans in English colonial America when
men were brought to the  Jamestown Colony of Virginia who had
been taken as prizes from a Spanish ship. They were treated as
indentured servants, and at least one was recorded as eventually
owning land in the colony.
•1640 -John Punch, a black indentured servant, ran away with two
white indentured servants, James, Gregory, and Victor. After the
three were captured, Punch was sentenced to serve Virginia planter
Hugh Gwyn for life. This made John Punch the first legally
documented slave in Virginia (and the US).
•1654 - John Castor, a black man who claimed to have completed his
term of indenture with former indentured servant Anthony
Johnson, became the first legally recognized slave-for-life in a civil
case in the Virginia colony. The court ruled with his master who said
he had an indefinite servitude for life.
17TH CENTURY CONT’D
•1662 - Virginia law, using the principle of partus  sequitur  ventrem,
said that children in the colony were born into their mother's social
status; therefore children born to enslaved mothers were classified
as slaves, regardless of their father's race or status. This was contrary
to English common law for English subjects, which held that children
took their father's social status.
•1672 – Royal Afican Company is founded in England, allowing slaves
to be shipped from Africa to the colonies in North America and the
Caribbean. England entered the slave trade.
•1676 - Both free and enslaved African Americans fought in Bacon’s
Rebellion along with English colonists.

FREE BLACKS IN THE SOUTH

•In general, as the population of color became larger and more

threatening to the white ruling class, governments put increasing
restrictions on manumissions and curtailed the rights of free blacks.
•Many free blacks were born free. Others acquired freedom by way
of manumission (which could itself occur for a variety of reasons),
purchasing their freedom, winning lawsuits for their freedom or
escaping.
•By the nineteenth century, families of free blacks who had been free
for generations flourished. In the United States, some free blacks
achieved a measures of both wealth and societal participation,
owning property, paying taxes, publishing newspapers and, in some
Northern states, voting.

FREE BLACKS

•Free blacks had restrictions on both their civil and political rights in
most states. Property rights were sometimes respected, but also
curtailed in some places.
•Free blacks were often hired by the government as rural police, to
hunt down runaway slaves and keep order among the slave
population.
•By 1776, approximately eight percent of African Americans were
free. By 1810, four percent of blacks in the South (10 percent in the
Upper South), and 75 percent of blacks in the North were free. On
the eve of the Civil War, free blacks comprised about 10 percent of
the population.
•When the end of slavery came, the distinction between former
slaves and those who had always been “free blacks” persisted in
some societies.
 
 

RACIAL DIVIDE
 

MAINTAINING WHITE DOMINANCE

•In 1850, a publication provided guidance to slave owners on how to

produce the “ideal slave”:
•Maintain strict discipline and “unconditional submission”;
•Create a sense of personal inferiority, so slaves “know their place”;
•Instill fear in the minds of slaves;
•Teach the servants to take interest in the master’s enterprise; and
•Ensure that the slave is uneducated, helpless, and dependent by
depriving them of access to education and recreation.
 

SLAVE CODES
•Slave Codes: Slave codes were laws in each U.S. state established
to legitimize the institution of slavery, regulate the relationship
between slave and owner and give slave owners absolute power over
their slaves.
•Slaves codes were state laws established to regulate the
relationship between slave and owner as well as to. 
•In practice, these codes placed harsh restrictions on slaves’ already
limited freedoms and gave slave owners absolute power over their
slaves.
 

SAMPLE SLAVE CODES

•South Carolina established its slave code in 1712, with the following
provisions:
•Slaves were forbidden to leave the owner’s property unless they
obtained permission or were accompanied by a white person.
•Any slave attempting to run away and leave the colony received the
death penalty.
•Any slave who evaded capture for 20 days or more was to be
publicly whipped for the first offense; to be branded with the letter
“R” on the right cheek for the second offense; to lose one ear if
absent for 30 days for the third offense; and to be castrated for the
fourth offense.
•Owners refusing to abide by the slave code were fined and forfeited
ownership of their slaves.
•Slave homes were searched every two weeks for weapons or stolen
goods. Punishment for violations included loss of ears, branding,
nose-slitting, and death.
•No slave was allowed to work for pay; plant corn, peas, or rice; keep
hogs, cattle, or horses; own or operate a boat; or buy, sell, or wear
clothes finer than “Negro cloth.”

FREE BLACKS FLOURISH 

IN THE 19TH CENTURY
•In general, as the population of color became larger and more
threatening to the white ruling class, governments put increasing
restrictions on manumissions and curtailed the rights of free blacks.
•Many free blacks were born free. Others acquired freedom by way
of manumission (which could itself occur for a variety of reasons),
purchasing their freedom, winning lawsuits for their freedom or
escaping.
•By the nineteenth century, families of free blacks who had been free
for generations flourished. In the United States, some free blacks
achieved a measures of both wealth and societal participation,
owning property, paying taxes, publishing newspapers and, in some
Northern states, voting.
 

RESTRICTIONS ON FREE BLACKS

•Free blacks had restrictions on both their civil and political rights in
most states. Property rights were sometimes respected, but also
curtailed in some places.
•Free blacks were often hired by the government as rural police, to
hunt down runaway slaves and keep order among the slave
population.
•By 1776, approximately eight percent of African Americans were
free. By 1810, four percent of blacks in the South (10 percent in the
Upper South), and 75 percent of blacks in the North were free. On
the eve of the Civil War, free blacks comprised about 10 percent of
the population.
•When the end of slavery came, the distinction between former
slaves and those who had always been “free blacks” persisted in
some societies.

ABUSE OF FEMALE SLAVES

•Sexual abuse of slaves was partially rooted in a patriarchal Southern
culture that perceived all women, whether black or white, as chattel,
or property.
•Rape was also used to increase the slave population as a part of the
practice of slave breeding, particularly after the 1808 federal ban on
the importation of slaves.
•Beginning in 1662, Southern colonies adopted into law the principle
of partussequitur ventrem, by which children of slave women took
the status of their mother, regardless of the father’s identity.
•“Fancy maids” were sold at auction into concubinage or
prostitution, which was termed the “fancy trade.”
 

BENJAMIN BANNEKER

•Benjamin Banneker designed and built the first clock in the British

American colonies. 
•He also created a series of almanacs. 
•He corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and wrote that "blacks
were intellectually equal to whites". 
•Banneker worked with Pierre L’Enfant to survey and design a street
and urban plan for Washington D.C.
 
Chargement…

BENJAMIN BANNEKER

PHYLLIS WHEATLEY

•In 1773, sometime between July and October, Wheatley was

emancipated by the Wheatley family shortly after her book, Poems
on Subjects Religious and Moral, was published in London. Susanna
Wheatley died in the spring of 1774. John Wheatley's death followed
in 1778. Shortly after, Phillis Wheatley met and married John Peters,
a free black grocer. They struggled with poor living conditions and the
deaths of two babies.[18]
•In 1779, Wheatley submitted a proposal for a second volume of
poems, but was unable to publish it because of her financial
circumstances, the loss of patrons after her emancipation (often
publication of books was based on gaining subscriptions for
guaranteed sales beforehand), and the Revolutionary War. However,
some of her poems that were to be published in that volume were
later published in pamphlets and newspapers.[19]
•Her husband John Peters was improvident, and imprisoned for debt
in 1784, leaving an impoverished Wheatley with a sickly infant son.
She went to work as a scullery maid at a boarding house to support
them, a kind of domestic labor that she had not been accustomed to,
even before becoming a free person. Wheatley died on December 5,
1784, at the age of 31.[20]

EUGENICS
 

EUGENICS
•Eugenics is the science of improving the human species by
selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. 
•It aims to reduce human suffering by “breeding out” disease,
disabilities and so-called undesirable characteristics from the human
population. 
•Early supporters of eugenics believed people inherited mental
illness, criminal tendencies and even poverty, and that these
conditions could be bred out of the gene pool.
 

EUGENICS IN AMERICA
•In the late 19th century, Galton—whose cousin was Charles Darwin
—hoped to better humankind through the propagation of the British
elite. His plan never really took hold in his own country, but in
America it was more widely embraced.
•Eugenics made its first official appearance in American history
through marriage laws. In 1896, Connecticut made it illegal for
people with epilepsy or who were “feeble-minded” to marry. In 1903,
the American Breeder’s Association was created to study eugenics.
 

EUGENICS FINANCED BY AMERICAS ELITE

•John Harvey Kellogg, of Kellogg cereal fame, organized the Race

Betterment Foundation in 1911 and established a “pedigree registry.”
The foundation hosted national conferences on eugenics in 1914,
1915 and 1928.
•As the concept of eugenics took hold, prominent citizens, scientists
and socialists championed the cause and established the Eugenics
Record Office. The office tracked families and their genetic traits,
claiming most people considered unfit were immigrants, minorities
or poor.
•The Eugenics Record Office also maintained there was clear
evidence that supposed negative family traits were caused by bad
genes, not racism, economics or the social views of the time.

FORCED STERILIZATIONS

•Eugenics in America took a dark turn in the early 20th century, led
by California. From 1909 to 1979, around 20,000 sterilizations
occurred in California state mental institutions under the guise of
protecting society from the offspring of people with mental illness.
•Many sterilizations were forced and performed on minorities.
Thirty-three states would eventually allow involuntary sterilization in
whomever lawmakers deemed unworthy to procreate.

NATIVE AMERICAN STERILIZATIONS

•According to a 1976 Government Accountability Office investigation,

between 25 and 50 percent of Native Americans were sterilized
between 1970 and 1976. It’s thought some sterilizations happened
without consent during other surgical procedures such as an
appendectomy.
•In some cases, health care for living children was denied unless their
mothers agreed to sterilization.

U.S. SUPREME COURT 

RULES ON FORCED STERILIZATIONS

•Many sterilizations were forced and performed on minorities.

Thirty-three states would eventually allow involuntary sterilization in
whomever lawmakers deemed unworthy to procreate.
•In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilization of the
handicapped does not violate the U.S. Constitution. In the words of
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes, “…three generations
of imbeciles are enough.” In 1942, the ruling was overturned, but not
before thousands of people underwent the procedure.