Slavery

Slavery has appeared in many forms throughout its long history. Slaves have served in capacities as diverse as concubines, warriors, servants, craftsmen, tutors, and victims of ritual sacrifice. In the New World (the Americas), however, slavery emerged as a system of forced labor designed to facilitate the production of staple crops. Depending on location, these crops included sugar, tobacco, coffee, and cotton; in the southern United States, by far the most important staples were tobacco and cotton. A stark racial component distinguished this modern Western slavery from the slavery that existed in many other times and places: the vast majority of slaves consisted of Africans and their descendants, whereas the vast majority of masters consisted of Europeans and their descendants.

Slavery has played a central role in the history of the United States. It existed in all the English mainland colonies and came to dominate productive relations from Maryland south. Most of the Founding Fathers were large-scale slaveholders, as were eight of the first 12 presidents of the United States (see Race and the American Presidency).
Debate over slavery increasingly dominated American politics, leading eventually to the nation's only civil war, which in turn finally brought slavery to an end.After emancipation, overcoming slavery's legacy remained a crucial issue in American history, from Reconstruction following the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement a century later. There was nothing inevitable about the use of black slaves. Although Dutch traders brought 20 Africans to Jamestown, Virginia, as early as 1619, throughout most of the 17th century the number of Africans in the English mainland colonies grew very slowly. During those years colonists experimented with two other sources of unfree labor: Native American slaves and European indentured servants.

Although some Native American slaves existed in every colony, the number was limited. Indian men balked at performing agricultural labor, which they regarded as women's work, and colonists complained that they were "haughty" and made poor slaves. Even more important, the settlers found it more convenient to sell Native Americans captured in war to planters in the Caribbean than to turn them into slaves on their own terrain, where escape was relatively easy and violent resistance a constant threat. Ultimately, the policy of killing Indians or driving them away from white settlements proved incompatible with their widespread employment as slaves.Far more important as a form of labor than Indian slavery was white indentured servitude. Most indentured servants consisted of poor Europeans who, desiring to escape harsh conditions and take advantage of fabled opportunities in America, traded three to seven years of their labor in exchange for the transatlantic passage. At first predominantly English but later increasingly Irish, Welsh, and German, servants consisted primarily (although not exclusively) of young males. Once in the colonies, they were essentially temporary slaves; most served as agricultural workers although some, especially in the North, were taught skilled trades. During the 17th century, they performed most of heavy labor in the Southern colonies and also provided the bulk of immigrants to those colonies.

For a variety of reasons, foremost among them improved conditions in England, the number of persons willing to sell themselves into indentured servitude declined sharply toward the end of the 17th century. Since the labor needs of the rapidly growing colonies were increasing, this decline in servant migration produced a labor crisis. To meet the need, landowners turned to African slaves, who from the 1680s began to supplant the labor of indentured servants; in Virginia, for example, blacks (the great majority of whom were slaves) increased from about 7 percent of the population in 1680 to more than 40 percent by the middle of the 18th century. During the first two-thirds of the 17th century Holland and Portugal had dominated the African slave trade and the number of Africans available to English colonists was limited. During the late 17th and 18th centuries, by contrast, naval superiority gave England a dominant position in the slave trade, and English traders (some of whom lived in English America) transported millions of Africans across the Atlantic.The transatlantic slave trade produced one of the largest forced migrations in history. From the early 16th century to the mid-19th century, between 10 and 11 million Africans were torn from their homes, herded onto ships where they were sometimes so tightly packed that they could barely move, and deposited in a strange new land. (Since others died in transit, Africa's loss of population was greater still.) By far the largest importers of slaves were Brazil and the Caribbean sugar colonies; together, they received well over three-quarters of all Africans brought to the New World. About 6 percent of the total (600,000 to 650,000 persons) came to the area of the present United States.