The image above illustrates European and European American enslavement of Africans and African Americans during the colonial era and national era.[1] It portrays a mid-1800s, middle-aged New Orleans woman with her enslaved girl servant.[2] Child enslavement—by birth, commercial sale, or loan—was a pervasive form of North American child abuse (however inadequate that term to describe slavery). As Frederick Douglass reflected, in addition to American slavery’s violence and deprivation, its very worst feature was life enslavement itself (APAN:I:265; Douglass 2017).

What distinguished European slavery from other forms of enslavement in world history? From where in Africa did slaves come? What role did slavery play in American Founders’ constitutional debates and in their private lives? What obstacles to social, economic, and political freedom did African Americans face in the early United States?

Chapter 5 Learning Objectives

5.1 Racialized Slavery

• Describe the origins of the modern concept of race
• Define Middle Passage

5.2 African Ethnicities

• Define the African Diaspora
• Name the main New World destinations of slaves

5.3 Slavery and the Founders

• Define the one-drop rule
• Define the Constitution’s Three-Fifths Clause
• Explain the Constitution’s distinction between “persons” and “citizens”

5.4 Blacks in the Antebellum United States

• Describe slaveholding by U.S. presidents
• Explain northern restrictions on black civil and political rights
• Describe sexual violence of white men against black women

Chapter 5 Key Terms (in order of appearance in chapter)

Middle Passage: the Atlantic voyage of slave ships from Africa to the New World

one-drop rule: the major North American racial ideology: one “drop” of nonwhite “blood” (ancestry) is theoretically sufficient to make you nonwhite

Three-Fifths Clause: the section of the Constitution (1787) stating that three-fifths of each state’s enslaved population would be included in that state’s population count

Monticello: Thomas Jefferson’s slave plantation in Charlottesville, Virginia

white nationalism: the 1800s claim that America was a country for white people alone

First Emancipation: the gradual abolition of slavery in the northern states

free labor ideology: a northern version of 1800s white nationalism, seeking to prevent economic competition with enslaved southern blacks (e.g., in agriculture) or free northern blacks (e.g., jobs). For example: “Keep Ohio white.”

Black Laws: northern state laws denying that the Bill of Rights applied to African Americans. A version of 1800s white nationalism. Ohio passed its first Black Laws in 1804.

5.1 Racialized Slavery

Slavery is an ancient and widespread human institution, continuing to endure in several forms in the world today (Davis 2006; Patterson 2018). The form discussed here, modern racialized enslavement by Europeans of Africans, existed for about 447 years—from 1441 (first African slave market in Portugal) to 1888 (abolition in Brazil). White slaveholding is one of world history’s greatest tragedies, a significant part of the human story demanding renewed attention in each new generation.

In some ways, modern slavery resembled other slave systems. Christian slaveholding shared origins with Muslim slaveholding in the Middle Ages (APAN:I:74). Modern European slavery began with Portugal’s expeditions along the West African coast in the 1430s and 1440s (ibid). Portugal combined the European medieval practice of enslaving non-Christians with the modern practice of maritime voyaging to participate directly in distant markets: here, the existing slave trade in Islamic and sub-Saharan African societies. Like medieval slaves in Europe, Africans were not Christians. But unlike earlier slaves, Africans’ dark skin color and hair type dramatically differed from European skin and hair. Like modern slavery, the modern concept of race sprang from these first sustained trading encounters of Portugal with West Africa.

By 1492, European, North African, Middle Eastern, and sub-Saharan African societies were all practicing African enslavement. But the ensuing rise of the West—European global colonization (see Chapter 4)—meant that only the European form would be transplanted into the New World, ballooning there to gargantuan proportions. In contrast to small-scale Islamic and African slaveholding, large-scale European plantation agriculture in the Americas would drag 12.5 million Africans across the Atlantic by the latter 1800s. This hellish transport inside suffocating, stinking slave ships became known as the Middle Passage.

Table 5.1. European Slaving, 1501-1875: Years by Nation

Source: https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates. Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Accessed 2/7/21.

Although European chattel slavery resembled other slavery systems, in many ways it was even worse. (“Chattel” means moveable property or assets: e.g., an ox, not a house.) The rising West was fueled by the emergence of a new economic system, modern agricultural capitalism (aka mercantilism). Slavery played a central role in this system, which depended on large-scale, disciplined labor forces to cultivate cash crops (Levine 2005:18). During the 1600s, sugar became the primary Caribbean plantation crop, resulting in massive slave importation (Dunn 2000; Mintz 1986; Ortiz 1973). Additional New World crops included tobacco, coffee, cotton, indigo, and rice. Between the 1400s and 1700s, the vast majority of people—about 86%—arriving in the Americas were enslaved Africans (Levine 2005:19). Sugar in particular required large-scale, controlled, and dangerous labor. Life for slaves in the Caribbean sugar colonies was often extreme. In some colonies, European planters calculated that, by literally working their current slaves to death and purchasing new ones, they would receive more profit than by improving slaves’ labor conditions (APAN:I:265). Slaves were living, breathing tools: investments of human capital joined to non-human capital (e.g., sugar mills, pounds sterling) to generate profit for Europeans.

Accordingly, New World slaves suffered the worst features of both slavery and capitalism: (1) no hope of liberation (womb to tomb, slave status of children); (2) racism (ideology of African natural inferiority); (3) enslaved capitalist workforce (absolute distinction between planter and slave classes); (4) massive scale (12.5 million imports: largest forced migration in history); (5) sheer cruelty (widespread rape, torture, and other extreme physical and psychological abuse). Together, such factors strongly suggest that white slaveholding was the worst example of slavery in world history.

By comparison, medieval and modern African and Islamic slavery, like ancient Mediterranean slavery—though all deeply damaging—inflicted less harm. In African societies, slavery was omnipresent and fundamental to economic activity. However, eventual freedom was often possible for such captives, with their children often being born free rather than enslaved, and their descendants enjoying full social inclusion (Chasteen 2001:44). Similarly, in Greek and Roman antiquity slaves typically had some legal rights, with their legal status as slave being temporary and not inherited by their children (Levine 2005:19). The fundamental difference was that European slavery was racialized: based on the emerging modern (1500s-1800s) notion of race. Rather than on tribal or ethnic degradation or religious difference, European slavery increasingly relied on racial claims of absolute and innate inferiority of a sizable portion of the world’s non-European peoples (Allen 1994).

5.2 African Ethnicities

Africans taken to the Americas and Europe collectively formed the African Diaspora (“die-AS-por-uh”: dispersal of seeds). They represented many ethnic groups with different languages and cultures. In this, they resembled their diverse European captors, who were primarily Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, and Dutch.

Africans came from three overall regions: West Central, West, and East Africa (Chasteen 2001:47-48). Four New World destinations awaited them: the Caribbean, Brazil, the Spanish mainland, and North America. 40% came from West Central Africa (today’s Congo and Angola), 20% from West Africa’s Bight[3] of Benin (Togo, Benin, southwest Nigeria), 13% from West Africa’s Bight of Biafra (Cameroon, Gabon, southeast Nigeria), and 9% from West Africa’s Gold Coast (Ghana). Others originated in other West African regions (Senegal, Gambia, Sierra Leone) and East Africa (Mozambique, Madagascar) (APAN:I:94).

Slave merchants and buyers paid little attention to ethnic distinctions like Akan or Fula, Igbo or Kongo, Yoruba or Hausa, focusing more on individual slaves’ age, health, strength, willingness to obey, childbearing abilities, etc. The result—complex ethnic mixing—hindered enslaved Africans’ ability to understand each other. Nevertheless, concentrations of certain ethnicities did exist in many places, promoting New World survival of aspects of African languages and religions, handed down and transformed across generations (Price 2001). Colonial North American planters created slave labor hierarchies using African ethnic distinctions (APAN:I:266-67). Over time, enslaved populations created new languages—Creoles—merging and transforming existing African and European languages (e.g., Dutch Creole: Price 2001; English Creole: Kincaid 1997, Lovelace 1998; French Creole: Chamoiseau 1999, Condé 1992).

Table 5.2. Enslaved Africans’ Destinations and Origins

Source: Adapted from APAN:I:95

Table 5.2 shows that most of the 12.5 million Africans went to the Caribbean or Brazil. During slavery, the Caribbean alone received eleven times as many as North America (4,143,600 vs. 378,000). Major Caribbean slave colonies included Barbados, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo (today’s Dominican Republic and Haiti), Jamaica, and Cuba (see Figure 4.1). Thus, although significant, North America was a periphery, not at the center, of the main zones of slave importation (Chasteen 2001:17). By the mid-1700s, the economic value of Britain’s sugar islands (especially Jamaica and Barbados) dwarfed that of its North American possessions, which after 1763 included lower Canada. In the American Revolution (1775-1783), Britain was at least as concerned to safeguard these immensely valuable Caribbean colonies (which it succeeded in doing) as it was to retain control of the thirteen mainland colonies (which it lost).

5.3 Slavery and the Founders

As in the Caribbean, white slaveholding played a key part in colonial and early republican America (Johnson 1999). To understand this role, below we survey racial-ethnic diversity in colonial times, examine the Constitution’s handling of slavery, and discuss slaveholding by the Founders.

British North America featured more racial-ethnic diversity than almost anywhere else in the world in the 1700s. Ruled by Britain, it comprised a wide variety of European, African, and Native American ethnicities (APAN:I:98-99). Northwestern Europeans came from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and France.

The first enslaved Africans had disembarked in Virginia in 1619. After 1650, increasing use of enslaved African labor, especially in southern agriculture but also in northern towns, added a significant African, non-Christian minority to the American population (APAN:I:86). Throughout the eighteenth century most new arrivals, North and South, were black slaves (ibid:97). By 1775, about 20% of the labor force in Philadelphia was enslaved; about one of every seven residents of New York City was black (ibid:100). Overall, 20 percent of the new nation’s population was black, mostly West African, and virtually all enslaved (ibid:86, 103). Laws and customs categorized biracial people of African and European ancestry as black. This “white or black,” either-or racial classification system is called the one-drop rule, with one “drop” of nonwhite “blood” (ancestry) theoretically sufficient to make you nonwhite.

Given slavery’s ubiquity in the new United States—New England, mid-Atlantic, and especially South—it loomed large at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. A major issue of debate was how to apportion federal Congressional representation. Southern states with many slaves wanted them counted in their population, whereas the other states wanted counts to exclude slaves. Slavery was thus a major foundation of the new nation, with three-fifths of a state’s slaves counting toward state population (APAN:I:183-84). Getting the Three-Fifths Clause into the Constitution (ratified 1787-1790) was a political victory for southern slaveholders. More Africans were enslaved in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia than in the mid-Atlantic or New England; the clause gave these states disproportionate political power. Notice also the clause’s ambiguity regarding the humanity of African Americans. Legally, they were portable property: living capital like oxen. Oxen weren’t included in southern population counts. But, to advance southern political interests, 60% of slave property in a state would be included in its (human) population. The clause represents a tacit admission of black humanity.

Similar ambiguity existed between “persons” (or “men”) and “citizens,” a key distinction in the Constitution (1787) and Declaration of Independence (1776). Whereas “persons” included all people residing in the United States (e.g., white women, nonwhites, children), only “citizens” were full members of the nation, exercising key rights such as voting and the rights listed in the Bill of Rights (APAN:I:199). Implicit in the “persons-citizens” distinction was the white, male, commonsense view of the Founders. They saw the new nation as a free (white) man’s republic—similar to the ancient Roman Republic as described by Livy (an ancient historian read by all eighteenth-century gentlemen as schoolboys). The founding documents enshrined white, male privilege or social advantage. The citizenry comprised the free (white) men (especially property-owners). This conception was radically egalitarian for the eighteenth century, but nevertheless excluded from citizenship women (free or unfree) and unfree (black) men. In American law, these were not “citizens,” but “persons” (though Africans were also “property”).

Such ambiguities amounted to a fundamental contradiction, one that would lead decades later to the women’s rights movement (starting in 1840s) and to Civil War over slavery. The nation in the early 1800s was among the world’s freest, while simultaneously being the largest slaveholding country at that time (Levine 2005:4). A nation dedicated to the individual freedom of “citizens” denied that very freedom to nonwhite, nonmale “persons.”

Figure 5.1. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (left)[5] and George Washington’s Mount Vernon (right)[6] were colonial Virginia plantations—places of bondage—running for generations on the enslaved labor of women, men, and children. Monticello appears on the U.S. nickel.

How the Founders handled slavery in the Constitution reflected its role in their private (social and economic) lives. Many of these men owned enslaved people (Table 5.3 below). However, though pro-slavery feelings would harden in the 1800s, the later 1700s was a time of relative uncertainty about slavery’s future and occasional support for gradual abolition (Levine 2005:5-6). For example, Jefferson—though refraining from freeing his almost two hundred slaves—felt much personal anguish about the paradox of a republic founded on liberty yet based on slave labor. Franklin and Jay went farther, with Jay regularly manumitting his slaves as they aged (though holding other slaves), and Franklin liberating all his slaves in 1781. Likewise, Washington grew conflicted about slavery, altering his will so that, after his death, his slaves would be freed following his wife’s death (Klinkner & Smith 1999:21). Other Founders like Samuel Adams and John Adams had long opposed slavery.[7] Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton founded (1784) the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, as well as (1785) the New York Manumission Society (Levine 2005:148).

Table 5.3. Slaveholding and Founders

Nevertheless, despite some Founders’ misgivings, it’s important to remember the big picture: Jay and Franklin, like many other Founders, owned Africans for considerable periods of their lives. The experience of mastership shaped in fundamental ways their ideas and actions on the relationship between race (whiteness) and nation (see Chapter 7). “Washington freed his slaves only after he and his wife had died. The Washingtons lived their entire lives served by enslaved African American people, including Martha Washington’s half-black sister, the product of her father’s rape of a woman he enslaved” (Moore 2008:53).

All U.S. Founders were white creoles[8] with no significant black or indigenous ancestry, a situation contrasting with Latin America’s leadership during independence (1810-1825). To take but two examples, José María Morelos in Mexico’s War of Independence (1810-1821) and Antonio Maceo in Cuba’s (1868-1898) Wars of Independence were renowned leaders of color (Ferrer 1999; Velázquez 2010). Such leaders, both at the time and in future generations, served crucial political purposes for nonwhites seeking to resist white supremacy. Nonwhite Mexicans and Cubans could point to the heroic roles played by people who looked like themselves in their country’s struggle for independence (Fuente 2001). In stark contrast, the total absence of major leaders of color in the American Revolution constrained African Americans and Native Americans at the time and later in their attempts to challenge white nationalism: the claim that America was a republic for white people alone.

5.4 Blacks in the Antebellum United States

African Americans, both enslaved and free, endured great oppression in the antebellum U.S. (“Ante-bellum”: before the Civil War.) Three themes shed light on this history: (1) slaveholding by U.S. presidents, (2) northern abolition and ongoing black exclusion, and (3) sexual violence of white men against enslaved black women.

(1) Slaveholding and presidents. Not only did early U.S. political leadership include no members of color, but several antebellum presidents (like Founders) owned people of color. Until John Quincy Adams took office in 1825, all presidents had been Virginia slaveholding planters, except slavery opponent John Adams. Zachary Taylor, the Mexican War general who died in office in 1850, was the last slaveholding president. By contrast, Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829; Britain did the same in almost all its colonies during the 1830s.

Table 5.4. Slaveholding and Presidents, to 1863 Emancipation

Table 5.4 shows that seven (44%) of the sixteen presidents up to Emancipation were slaveholders. Twelve (57%) of these twenty-one presidential terms (not including Lincoln’s second) featured a slaveholder president. Put differently, across the 75-year period from 1789-1863, a slaveholder was president in 46 (61%) of those years. For over three-fifths (61%) of the nation’s existence from constitutional ratification to the Civil War, the highest office in the land was held by a slaveowner. These facts provide important background on the oppression of African Americans in antebellum America (Berlin 2003; Deyle 2005).

(2) Northern abolition, denial of citizenship rights, white terrorism. In 1775, almost one in five (about 700,000) Americans was black (APAN:I:200). Over 95% of this group was enslaved (ibid:103). Slavery, though mostly located on southern plantations, was also common in the mid-Atlantic and New England. How did northern abolition come about?

Actions leading toward emancipation often came from blacks themselves, rather than whites. Unlike in 1863—emancipation by federal proclamation affecting all states and territories—northern abolition was a piecemeal process (state by state) starting early in U.S. history during the Revolution (Klinkner & Smith 1999:20). Moreover, whereas some states banned slavery all at once (e.g., Vermont in 1777, Massachusetts in 1783), others adopted gradual emancipation (e.g., Pennsylvania in 1780, New Jersey in 1804). This process is called the first emancipation (APAN:I:200). Emancipation created a growing free black population in the North, increasingly sectionalizing slavery as a southern institution. Nevertheless, the process was haphazard: for example, even in the 1830s many blacks remained enslaved in New Jersey and New York (ibid:295).

Northern abolition represented a significant achievement, but freedom often came with no meaningful civil or political rights. Widespread white nationalist assumptions meant that the very idea of “free black” or “black American” seemed paradoxical to many whites, with the most sympathetic often advocating mass black deportation to Africa. Between 1815 and 1860, antiblack racism thoroughly shaped the life experience of African Americans in the North (APAN:I:295). An important distinction was between law and custom. The bare fact of legal emancipation only provided negative freedom: you were no longer someone’s property. Customs of racist attitudes (as well as laws) blocked most blacks from positive freedoms: the realistic ability to vote and exercise the Bill of Rights, to move about freely, to advance in American society, to hold political office, to expect civil and criminal legal protection, etc. Racism—both in law and custom—replaced slavery with an ambiguous limbo status that was not slavery but not freedom as experienced even by poor whites.

At best, northern laws and customs treated blacks indifferently. However, in the expanding northwest (Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin) many whites embraced a more aggressive version of white nationalism, based on free labor ideology. Free (white) northern workers competed with enslaved (black) southern workers, and with free black workers. Northern segregation promoted cross-class white economic interests, with state laws benefiting whites at the expense of blacks. Such northern laws were early versions of racial segregation, systematized in the South after Reconstruction (1865-1877) into Jim Crow apartheid. Inspired by free labor ideology, state laws restricting black citizenship increasingly dominated the North in the antebellum decades. For example, blacks in antebellum New York were dissuaded from voting by a $250 tax not paid by white voters. After 1803, the new northwestern states—seeking to shield white workers from perceived black competition—passed Black Laws outlawing blacks from voting or entering the state (Marx 1997:42).

Northern Black Laws embodied a version of white nationalism, by denying that the Bill of Rights applied to African Americans. Ohio, which became a state in 1803, passed such laws almost immediately thereafter (Klinkner & Smith 1999:37). “[A]s early as 1804, Ohio legislators had implemented black laws…requir[ing] black people to prove that they were not slaves and to find at least two people who would guarantee a surety of five hundred dollars for the African Americans’ good behavior. The laws also limited African Americans’ rights to marry whites and to gun-ownership…”[9] In the 1840s, many Midwesterners and other northerners supported new legislation to curtail citizenship rights of African Americans in their states. At this time, all but five northern states prevented blacks from voting on an equal basis with whites (Levine 2005:177).

Northern apartheid did not stop at legal restrictions, but also included numerous extralegal acts of white terrorism against blacks (APAN:I:296). As noted, whites resented the economic (jobs) competition of enslaved and free blacks. Such resentments frequently burst out in antiblack violence: “The Cincinnati Riots…occurred in…April and July 1836 by a mob of whites against black residents. These were part of a pattern of violence at that time. A severe riot had occurred in 1829, led by ethnic Irish, and another riot against blacks broke out in 1841.”[10]

One version of free labor ideology was abolitionist, seeking to extend free labor to slaves and end competition with cheap slave labor. Likewise, frontier regions frequently opposed the extension of slavery westward. Both forms displayed white racism by seeking to restrict the physical movements and economic activities of both enslaved and free blacks (Klinkner & Smith 1999:41). Free labor ideology frequently attacked blacks regardless of free or slave status, seeking to (for example) “keep Kansas white.” In sum, white opposition to slavery often arose from intense antiblack reasoning and feeling (APAN:I:359; Berwanger 1967; Levine 2005:251). White supremacist laws and customs in western states and territories harmed not only blacks but also East Asians and Mexicans (see Chapter 6).

(3) Sexual violence. Sexual abuse, predation, and rape by white men of nonwhite women under their power has formed a central thread in the entire modern history of the Western hemisphere (Allende 1982; Feinstein 2018; Stannard 1992). Such violence greatly contributed to the growth of mestizo populations in most colonies, starting in the 1500s. Likewise in the U.S.: enslaved African American women were always at risk of sexual abuse and rape by local white men (APAN:I:268). We’ve seen that, in Maryland, Frederick Douglass’ enslaved mother was victimized in this way, probably by her owner (Chapter 2). The decades-long relationship of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) with Sally Hemings (c.1773-1835) provides another example.

Jefferson’s wife, Martha Jefferson (née Wayles) died in 1782, and he never remarried. A few years later, Jefferson began a long-term sexual relationship with his teenage slave Sally, thirty years his junior, with whom he had at minimum six children of mixed race:

“In 1787, Sally, aged 14, accompanied [Jefferson’s daughter] Polly to London and then to Paris, where the widowed Jefferson, aged 44 at the time, was serving as the United States Minister to France. Hemings spent two years there. Most historians believe Jefferson and Hemings’ sexual relationship began while they were in France or soon after their return to Monticello. The exact nature of this relationship remains unclear – the Monticello exhibition on Hemings used the phrase “rape?” to indicate this lack of certainty, and to acknowledge the power imbalance inherent in the relationship between a wealthy, white, male envoy and a 14-year-old, black, female slave. For a female slave to refuse a master’s sexual advances was illegal.”[11]

Sexual violence marked not only Sally Hemings’ life, but also her mother’s. Sally’s father was John Wayles (1715-1773), Martha’s (Jefferson’s wife’s) father, making them half-sisters. Wayles (Jefferson’s white father-in-law) had fathered Sally with his (Wayles’) black slave Betty Hemings (c. 1735-1807), twenty years his junior.[12] Jefferson, who owned his and Sally’s four surviving children, later freed them. He never freed Sally herself, which would have increased public awareness of their relationship (APAN:I:244).

As in Latin America, biracial children were common in the U.S. On the eve of the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of African Americans were “mulattos”: people with significant black and white ancestry, comprising about 12.5% of all African Americans (APAN:I:268). The one-drop rule made such people legally “Negro”; laws passed by slaveholders ensured that biracial children of female slaves would also be slaves. White masters thus not only had an economic incentive toward promoting births among their slaves, but also fathering slave children themselves (Levine 2005:106; Moore 2008:34). By 1860, out of 4 million slaves, 50% of this population were children (15 years old or younger). As Thomas Jefferson had noted decades earlier, “A [slave] child raised every two years…is of more profit than the crop of the best [enslaved] laboring man” (quoted in APAN:I:265). Indeed, buying slaves not primarily for field or house labor, but mainly for sex, was common in places such as New Orleans (ibid:268).

White sexual violence represented a major form of oppression suffered by African Americans for centuries. White slaveholding is one of history’s greatest tragedies, and child abuse by life enslavement of one’s own children surely one of its worst features.

Chapter 5 Summary

Chapter 5 examined white slaveholding. Section 5.1 introduced European racialized slavery of Africans, distinguishing among forms of slavery and explaining why the European form was worst.

Section 5.2 defined the African Diaspora as the dispersal of 12.5 million Africans to New World slavery. It distinguished among the African origin regions, and described four main New World destinations of slaves. It showed that North America was a periphery of the core regions of slave importation: the Caribbean and Brazil.

Section 5.3 introduced slavery in colonial and early republican America. It defined the one-drop rule as an ideology about white and nonwhite being mutual exclusive. It presented the Constitution’s Three-Fifths clause. And it explained the Constitution’s distinction between “persons” and “citizens.”

Section 5.4 discussed challenges African Americans faced in the antebellum United States. It examined slaveholding by presidents, northern abolition and ongoing restrictions on black civil and political rights, and sexual violence of white men against enslaved black women.