African American History

B

Slave Populations

By 1750 there were nearly 240,000 people of African descent in British North America, fully 20 percent of the population, though they were not evenly distributed. The greatest number of African Americans lived in Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina because large plantations with many slaves were concentrated in the South. Blacks constituted over 60 percent of the population in South Carolina, over 43 percent in Virginia, and over 30 percent in Maryland, but only about 2 percent in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. In the Northern colonies, enslaved people were much more likely to work in households having only one or a few slaves.

Virtually all colonies had a small number of free blacks, but in colonial America, only Maryland had a sizeable free black population. Over the generations of enslavement, at least 95 percent of Africans in the United States lived in slavery. But even as early as the 1600s, some gained their freedom by buying themselves or being bought by relatives. Since slavery was inherited through the status of the mother, some blacks became free if they were born to non-slave mothers. Others gained their freedom from bondage for meritorious acts or long competent labor.

C

Slavery versus Indentured Servitude

Slavery was the most extreme, but not the only form of unfree labor in British North America. Many Europeans and some Africans were held as indentured servants. Neither slaves nor indentured servants were free, but there were important differences. Slavery was involuntary and hereditary. Indentured servants made contracts, often an exchange of labor for passage to America. They served for a limited time, commonly seven years, and generally received 'freedom dues,' often land and clothing, upon finishing their indenture. Although some slaves gained freedom after a limited term, others served for life, and a second generation inherited the slave status of their mothers. Gradually by the 18th century, colonial laws were consolidated into slave codes providing for perpetual, inherited servitude for Africans who were defined as property to be bought and sold.

In their day-to-day lives, slaves and servants shared similar grievances and frequently formed alliances. Advertisements seeking the return of slaves and servants who had run away together filled colonial newspapers. When a slave named Charles escaped in 1740, the Pennsylvania Gazette reported that two white servants, a 'Scotch man' and an Englishman, escaped with him. Sometimes interracial alliances involved violence. During Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, slaves and servants took up arms against Native Americans and the colonial government in Virginia. In 1712 New York officials executed Native Americans and African American slaves for plotting a revolt, and in 1741 four whites were executed and seven banished from colonial New York for participating with slaves in a conspiracy. People in similar circumstances—poor and unfree whites, Native Americans, and blacks-formed alliances throughout the colonial era.

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V

American Revolution

A

Black Participation in the War

After the British defeated the French in the French and Indian War (1754-1763), the British began to change their relationship with their American colonies. They started to increase taxes, demanded that the colonists help pay for British soldiers stationed in the colonies, and controlled the colonial trade opportunities more carefully. Most colonists were outraged, particularly about the new taxes. They felt that Great Britain did not have the right to tax them, since it did not allow them representatives in Parliament.

Colonists, both black and white, worked together to fight what they saw as British injustices. Interracial mobs rioted against the Stamp Act of 1765 and other despised regulations imposed on the colonies throughout the 1760s. American protests targeted British officials and soldiers. In 1770 Crispus Attucks, a fugitive slave of mixed African and Native American descent, led an interracial crowd of sailors and laborers in attacking the British guard at Boston's customs office. They threw snowballs, chunks of ice, and stones; in response, the soldiers fired into the crowd, wounding six and killing Attucks and four others. For rebellious Americans, the Boston Massacre, as this event was named, symbolized Britain's armed determination to deprive them of their rights.

When the American Revolution began in 1775, all but 25,000 of the 500,000 African Americans in British North America were enslaved. Many were inspired by American proclamations of freedom, and both slaves and free blacks stood against the British. The black minutemen at the Battle of Lexington in 1775 were Pompy of Braintree, Prince of Brookline, Cato Wood of Arlington, and Peter Salem, the slave of the Belknaps of Framingham, freed in order that he might serve in the Massachusetts militia. Prince Estabrook, a slave in Lexington, was listed among those wounded in this first battle of the war. African Americans also served in the Battle of Bunker Hill, where former slave Salem Poor received official commendation as 'a brave and gallant soldier.'

At first General George Washington refused to recruit black troops. It was the British who made the first move to enlist blacks. In November 1775 Lord Dunmore, the British colonial governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation that all slaves belonging to rebels would be received into the British forces and freed for their services. Tens of thousands of slaves escaped from Southern plantations, and over a thousand fought for the British. Tye, 'a Negro who [bore] the title of colonel' led one interracial guerrilla band in New Jersey. In the South, such bands, called banditti, burned and looted plantations, stole horses, and liberated slaves, some of whom became British soldiers.

The demands of war eventually changed Washington’s mind, and he began to recruit black soldiers. Before the war was over, more than 5000 African Americans from every state except Georgia and South Carolina served in the Revolutionary army. Slaves, many serving in their owner's place, were promised freedom in return for their service. There were several black regiments like the Rhode Island Regiment and Massachusetts' 'Bucks of America,' but most African Americans served in integrated units, the last integrated American army units until the Korean War in the 1950s.

Thus, African Americans in search of freedom from slavery served on both sides during the Revolution. As a result of the Revolution, the population of free blacks in the United States increased-from about 25,000 in 1776 to nearly 60,000 when the first federal census was conducted in 1790.

B

The Ideals of the Revolution

Slavery was important to American patriots. It was the opposite of liberty and served as a benchmark against which they measured their own freedom. They continually warned that they would not be denied their rights, saying they must not be the 'slaves' of England. The ideals of the Revolution emphasized the incompatibility of slavery in a free land, and slaves petitioned for their freedom using the words of the Declaration of Independence.

African Americans hoped that men who wrote such lofty words as “all men are created equal” would realize the immorality of continuing to enslave their fellow countrymen. 'We expect great things,' one group wrote, 'from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow men to enslave them.'

However, the American Revolution and the American colonies’ fight against British oppression did not bring slavery to an end. The words slave and slavery did not appear in the Constitution written in 1787, but the framers of the Constitution struck a compromise allowing the slave trade to continue until 1808. Slavery remained important to the economy of the new nation, and after the Revolution, it became more concentrated in the South.

VI

The Concentration of Slavery in the South

In the North the rhetoric of the Revolution proved a powerful argument against slavery. Starting with Vermont in 1777, one Northern state after another either abolished slavery outright or passed gradual emancipation laws that freed slave children as they reached adulthood. Although abolition faced stiff opposition in areas of New York, Rhode Island, and New Jersey, where slavery was most economically significant, by the mid-1820s virtually all the slaves in the United States were in the Southern states. These states were becoming more dependent on slave labor as cotton became an important plantation crop.

In 1793 the invention of the cotton gin, a simple device that revolutionized the processing of raw cotton, dramatically increased the profitability of cotton cultivation. More slave labor was dedicated to cotton production; slave prices increased, and the value of cotton rose sharply. In addition, slavery spread southward and westward into the vast area acquired from France through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. By 1815 cotton was America's most valuable export, and the economic and political power of cotton-growing states, often called the 'Cotton Kingdom,' grew correspondingly.

The need for slave labor, and thus the price of slaves, was much higher in states in the lower South, such as Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, than in the states of the upper South, including Virginia and Maryland. The result was a thriving domestic slave trade that devastated many slave households. Teenage boys and young adult men were especially desirable laborers for the new areas, and slave families in the upper South lost sons, brothers, and young fathers to the cotton plantations of the lower South. At the time of the Revolution, most slaves were held along the southeastern seaboard, but by 1860 the greatest concentrations of slaves were in the lower South.

The lives of slaves were greatly influenced by where they lived and worked. In Southern cities, slaves provided household services, labored for small businessmen and merchants, and sometimes worked as municipal garbage workers or firefighters. Both in cities and on plantations, skilled slaves did the carpentry, built and sometimes designed the buildings, crafted ornate furnishings, prepared elaborate meals, supplied music for planters' formal balls and parties, and provided services ranging from veterinary care to folk medicine for both whites and blacks. Plantations employed small numbers of slaves as household servants and some as skilled workers. Most slaves, however, worked in the fields. Plantation life, especially in the lower South, was hard and dangerous, but because of the larger numbers of slaves, it offered greater opportunities for establishing slave families and communities.

As the South expanded westward and as tobacco and rice cultivation gave way to cotton, the way slaves worked changed. In the 18th and 19th centuries slaves working on plantations in the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia often labored under the task system. Typically, a slave was given a task each day and worked until that task was completed. Once the daily task was finished, the rest of the day was the slave’s own. The work was extraordinarily hard, but the worker exercised some control over the pace of work and the length of the workday.

On large 19th-century cotton plantations, slaves usually worked in groups called gangs headed by slave drivers. The driver, who was generally a slave selected for intelligence and leadership ability, directly supervised the field laborers. Gangs worked the crop rows, plowing, planting, cultivating, or picking, depending on the season. Unlike those under the task system, these slaves had little control over their work schedule beyond the rhythm of the work songs that regulated the pace of their work.

The vast majority of white Southerners could afford no slaves and struggled for basic self-sufficiency, but many slaveholding planters were rich and politically powerful. By the 1850s there were more millionaires in the plantations from Natchez, Mississippi, to New Orleans, Louisiana, than in all other areas of the nation combined. By 1860 the 12 richest counties in the nation were all located in the South. The Southern economy depended on slavery, and by 1860 the U.S. economy depended on the Southern cotton that accounted for almost 60 percent of the value of all the nation's exports.

VII

Free Black Population

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