This s engraving depicts an enslaved woman and young girl being auctioned as property. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work as indentured servants and labor in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton. Hundreds of thousands of Africans, both free and enslaved, aided the establishment and survival of colonies in the Americas and the New World. However, many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be , when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown , Virginia.
Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans. Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.
It Just Surfaced. In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia. But after the Revolutionary War , the new U.
In the late 18th century, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt. Around the same time, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.
But in , a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin , a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. Between and , all of the northern states abolished slavery, but the institution of slavery remained absolutely vital to the South. Though the U. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in , the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years.
Other scholars, including Linda Heywood and John Thornton of Boston University, insist that the Africans from the White Lion and the Treasurer were enslaved by the English as they had originally been by the Portuguese slave traders before they were taken by pirates. Some of the early Africans, like Anthony and Mary Johnson, who arrived in and , respectively, amassed hundreds of acres of land and owned slaves themselves. Some won their freedom in court; others, like John Punch, were sentenced to permanent servitude for daring to run away.
By , any ambiguity about the status of blacks — free, indentured, enslaved — was clarified by a series of so-called racial integrity laws that institutionalized white supremacy. Facebook Twitter Email. The history of Black History Month. Slavery flourished initially in the tobacco fields of Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina.
Slavery then spread to the rice plantations further south. In South Carolina, African Americans remained a majority into the 20th century, according to census data. The British-operated slave trade across the Atlantic was one of the biggest businesses of the 18th century. Approximately , of 10 million African slaves made their way into the American colonies before the slave trade — not slavery — was banned by Congress in Eight of the first 12 US presidents were slave owners.
According to Abraham Lincoln, the civil war was fought to keep America whole, and not for the abolition of slavery — at least initially. Lincoln took on the fight for the freedom of slaves, some historians have suggested, because he was worried the British would support the south in its self-declared self-determination and recognize the south as a separate entity. But eventually, under the 14th amendment, African American men were granted the right to vote.
Slavery is everywhere. But Kentucky has many other beginnings of its own. History is full of beginnings and the present can be one too. Holden received a doctoral degree in African American and women's and gender history from Rutgers University. Her research focuses on African American women and slavery in the antebellum South. The University of Kentucky is increasingly the first choice for students, faculty and staff to pursue their passions and their professional goals.
Accolades and honors are great. But they are more important for what they represent: the idea that creating a community of belonging and commitment to excellence is how we honor our mission to be not simply the University of Kentucky, but the University for Kentucky.
Skip to main content. People Map. Share this page:. August 20, By Lindsey Piercy Today we reflect on a grim chapter in our nation's history — the beginning of a year story filled with tragedy, inequality, resilience and survival.
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