eginning at least as early as 1502, European slave traders
shipped approximately 11 to 16 million slaves to the Americas,
including 500,000 to what is now the United States. By
the beginning of the eighteenth century, slaves could
be found in every area colonized by Europeans.
Initially, English colonists relied on indentured white
servants, but by the late seventeenth century, faced with
a shortage of servants, they increasingly resorted to
enslaved Africans. Three distinctive systems of slavery
emerged in the American colonies. In Maryland and Virginia,
slavery was widely used in raising tobacco and corn and
worked under the "gang" system. In the South
Carolina and Georgia low country, slaves raised rice and
indigo, worked under the "task" system, and
were able to reconstitute African social patterns and
maintain a separate Gullah dialect. In the North, slavery
was concentrated on Long Island and in southern Rhode
Island and New Jersey, where most slaves were engaged
in farming and stock raising for the West Indies or were
household servants for the urban elite.
The American Revolution had contradictory consequences
for slavery. Thousands of slaves freed themselves by running
away. In the South, slavery became more firmly entrenched,
and expanded rapidly into the Old Southwest after the
development of the cotton gin. In the North, in contrast,
every state freed slaves by statute, court decision, or
enactment of gradual emancipation schemes.
During the decades before the Civil War, slave grown cotton
accounted for over half the value of all United States
exports, and provided virtually all the cotton used in
the northern textile industry and 70 percent of the cotton
used in British mills. The slave South failed to establish
commercial, financial, or manufacturing companies on the
same scale as the North.
Background
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington
were slaveholders. So, too, were Benjamin Franklin and
the theologian Jonathan Edwards. John Newton, the composer
of "Amazing Grace," captained a slave ship early
in his life. Robinson Crusoe, the fictional character
in Daniel Defoe's famous novel, was engaged in the slave
trade when he was shipwrecked. Slavery has often been treated
as a marginal aspect of history, confined to courses on
southern or African American history. In fact, slavery
played a crucial role in the making of the modern world.
Slavery provided the labor force for the Slavery played
an indispensable role in the settlement and development
of the New World. Slavery dates to prehistoric times and
could be found in ancient Babylon, classical Greece and
Rome, China, India, and Africa as well as in the New World.
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