slavery

slavery,

historicially, an institution based on a relationship of dominance and submission, whereby one person owns another and can exact from that person labor or other services. Slavery has been found among many groups of low material culture, as in the Malay Peninsula and among some Native Americans; it also has occurred in more highly developed societies, such as the southern United States. Since the 20th cent., the term slavery has been more broadly understood as including forced labor generally.

History

Although it is commonly held that slavery was rare among primitive pastoral peoples and that it appeared in full form only with the development of an agricultural economy, there are numerous instances that contradict this belief. Domestic slavery and sometimes concubine slavery appeared among the nomadic Arabs, among Native Americans primarily devoted to hunting, and among the seafaring Vikings. Some ascribe the beginnings of slavery to war and the consequent subjection of one group by another. Slavery as a result of debt, however, existed in very early times, and some African peoples have had the custom of putting up wives and children as hostages for an obligation; if the obligation was unfulfilled, the hostages became permanent slaves.

Slavery in the Ancient World

The institution of slavery extends back beyond recorded history. References to it appear in the ancient Babylonian code of Hammurabi. Its form and nature varied greatly in ancient society. It seems to have been common in the Tigris-Euphrates civilizations and in ancient Persia. It may not have been common in ancient Egypt until the New Kingdom or later, and the belief that slaves built the pyramids is probably incorrect. The institution was familiar to the ancient Hebrews, according to passages in the Bible.

Slavery was an established institution in the Greece of Homer's time, and a large portion of the population of the Greek city-states in later days were of the servile class. There were domestic slaves, agricultural slaves, and artisans and workers. In Greece, although not quite as commonly as in Asia Minor, there were also public slaves, for example, those belonging to the temples. In general it is thought that slaves in the Greek city-states were relatively well treated, and there were laws protecting them against excessive cruelty or abuse. However, the slaves were regarded as property and had no rights in courts of law. Slaves could obtain their freedom by buying it, by being granted it in the owner's will, or as a reward for outstanding service.

Slavery in early Roman history seems to have been of the same type as in Greece, but by the 1st cent. B.C., as the Roman Empire continued to expand, a form of agricultural slavery called estate slavery was introduced on a wide scale; in this form agriculture was pursued by large numbers of slaves in an impersonal relationship with the landowner, who had practically absolute power over them. The increasing wealth of Rome led to an expansion in domestic slaves, and the servile class grew to great numbers. They were employed in the theater, in gladiatorial combats, and, to some extent, in prostitution. Most of the slaves were foreign, and some were highly educated and were employed as instructors. Having a large retinue of slaves became one of the prime marks of luxury, and exotic, especially Asian, slaves were in great demand. As the number of conquered provinces grew, so did the slave supply. Consequently, manumission (emancipation from slavery) was common, and freedmen became a significant factor in the Roman social system. The slave had almost no legal status, although custom mitigated against extreme brutality; the slave could testify against his or her master only in a very limited number of serious crimes (adultery, incest, and, later, lese majesty). As the Roman expansion abated, conditions of slavery improved somewhat.

Slavery after the Fall of the Roman Empire

The introduction of Christianity toward the end of the Roman Empire had no effect on the abolition of slavery, since the church at that time did not oppose the institution. However, a change in economic life set in and resulted in the gradual disappearance of the agricultural slaves, who became, for all practical purposes, one with the coloni (tenant farmers who were technically free but were in fact bound to the land by debts). This process helped prepare the way for an economy in which the agricultural slave became the serf.

The semifreedom of serfdom was the dominant theme in the Middle Ages, although domestic slavery (and, to some extent, other forms) did not disappear. The church began to encourage manumission, while ignoring the fact that many slaves were attached to church officials and church property. Sale into slavery continued to be an extreme punishment for serious crimes.

Slavery flourished in the Byzantine Empire, and the pirates of the Mediterranean continued their custom of enslaving the victims of their raids. Islam, like Christianity, accepted slavery, and it became a standard institution in Muslim lands, where most slaves were African in origin. In Islamic life, keeping slaves was largely a sign of wealth, with slaves used as soldiers, concubines, cooks, and entertainers and to perform a variety of other functions. Another form of Muslim slavery was in the eunucheunuch
[Gr.,=keeper of the couch], castrated human male, particularly a chamberlain of a harem in Asia. The custom of employing eunuchs as servants in wealthy or royal households is very ancient; it reached its epitome at the court of Constantinople under the Byzantine emperors,
..... Click the link for more information. guardians of the harems; eunuchs had been widely known in Greek, Roman, and especially Byzantine times, but it was among the Muslims and in East Asia that they were to survive longest. In Muslim countries, slavery and freedom had a much more fluid boundary than in the West, with some slaves and former slaves reaching positions of great power and prestige.

In Western Europe slavery largely disappeared by the later Middle Ages, although it still remained in such manifestations as the use of slaves on galleys. In Russia slavery persisted longer than in Western Europe, and indeed the serfs were pushed into the classification of slavery by Peter the Great.

Modern Slavery

A revolution in the institution of slavery came in the 15th and 16th cent. The explorations of the African coast by Portuguese navigators resulted in the exploitation of the African as a slave, and for nearly five centuries the predations of slave raiders along the coasts of Africa were to be a lucrative and important business conducted with appalling brutality. The British, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese all engaged in the African slave trade. Although Africans were, as early as 1440, brought back to Portugal, and although subsequent importations were large enough to change distinctly the ethnography of that country, it was not in Europe that African slavery was to be most profitable and widespread, but in the Americas, where European exploitation began at the end of the 15th cent.

The first people to be enslaved by the Spanish and Portuguese in the West Indies and Latin America were the Native Americans, but, because the majority of Native American slaves either revolted or escaped, other forms of forced labor, akin to serfdom, were introduced (see repartimientorepartimiento
, in Spanish colonial practice, usually, the distribution of indigenous people for forced labor. In a broader sense it referred to any official distribution of goods, property, services, and the like.
..... Click the link for more information. and encomiendaencomienda
[Span. encomendar=to entrust], system of tributory labor established in Spanish America. Developed as a means of securing an adequate and cheap labor supply, the encomienda was first used over the conquered Moors of Spain.
..... Click the link for more information. ). The resistance of the Native Americans to slavery only increased the demand for Africans to replace them. Africans proved to be profitable laborers in the Caribbean islands and the lowlands of the South American mainland. In the colder highlands Native American slavery or quasislavery continued; long after the introduction of the first Africans the Paulistas (inhabitants of the city and state of São Paulo, Brazil) continued their slave raids against the Native Americans of the Brazilian hinterlands. But African slavery gradually became dominant.

The first Africans arrived in the British settlements on the Atlantic coast when they were traded or sold for supplies by a Dutch ship at Jamestown, Va., in 1619. They may have been indentured servants, but by the 1640s lifetime servitude existed in Virginia, and slavery was acknowledged in the laws of Massachusetts. The raising of staple crops—coffee, tobacco, sugar, rice, and, much later, cotton—and the rise of the plantation economy made the importation of slaves from Africa particularly valuable in the Southern colonies of North America. The slave trade moved in a triangle; setting out from British ports, ships would transport various goods to the western coast of Africa, where they would be exchanged for slaves. The slaves were then brought to the West Indies or to the colonies of North or South America, where they were traded for agricultural staples for the return voyage back to England. Later, New England ports were included in this last leg. The number of slaves in the colonies increased until in some (notably French Saint-Domingue, the modern HaitiHaiti
, Fr. Haïti , officially Republic of Haiti, republic (2015 est. pop. 10,711,000), 10,700 sq mi (27,713 sq km), West Indies, on the western third of the island of Hispaniola.
..... Click the link for more information. ) they constituted a majority of the population. In America by the date of the Declaration of Independence (1776) about one fifth of the population was enslaved.

The Antislavery Movement

The growth of humanitarian feeling during the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th cent., the spread of the ideas of Jean Jacques RousseauRousseau, Jean Jacques
, 1712–78, Swiss-French philosopher, author, political theorist, and composer. Life and Works

Rousseau was born at Geneva, the son of a Calvinist watchmaker.
..... Click the link for more information. and others, and the increase of democratic sentiment led to a growing attack on the slave trade. The French Revolution had a great effect not only in the spread of agitation for human rights but more directly in the uprisings in Saint-Domingue and the establishment of Haitian independence. The movement for the abolition of slavery progressed slowly in the United States during the 18th and the first half of the 19th cent. Each of the Northern states gradually abolished the practice, but the prohibition of foreign slave trade promised in the Constitution (ratified in 1789) was not realized until 1808.

In Great Britain

British humanitarians who had incorporated the abolition of slavery into their conception of Christianity labored successfully to outlaw (1807) the British slave trade. These same men, especially William WilberforceWilberforce, William,
1759–1833, British politician and humanitarian. He was elected to Parliament in 1780 and during the campaign formed a lifelong friendship with William Pitt, whose measures he generally supported in the House of Commons.
..... Click the link for more information. , Thomas ClarksonClarkson, Thomas,
1760–1846, English abolitionist. He devoted most of his life to agitation against slavery, and the voluminous information that he gathered on the slave trade helped to influence Parliament.
..... Click the link for more information. , Zachary Macaulay, and Lord Brougham (Henry Peter BroughamBrougham, Henry Peter, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux
, 1778–1868, British statesman, b. Edinburgh. As a young lawyer in Scotland he helped to found (1802) the Edinburgh Review
..... Click the link for more information. ), continued to work for the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, which was finally effected with the Abolition Act of 1833. However, according to some writers, the British, in abolishing slavery, were primarily motivated by economic, not humanitarian, interests. These critics argued that, while the institution produced great wealth under the mercantilist system, it became unprofitable with the rise of industrial capitalism, which displaced mercantilism early in the 19th cent. At any rate, the abolition legislation of 1833 was followed by the gradual abolition of slavery in all lands under British control, principally by the device of invalidating the legality of slavery and removing its legal safeguards, usually by recompensing the owners.

In the United States

Although there were slaves in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in the early 17th cent. and, after it became the English colony of New York, slaves were sold there from 1711–62, slavery proved unprofitable in the Northern states and by the early 19th cent. slavery in the north had disappeared. Its abolition had been hastened by the work of the Quakers, who, as in Great Britain, had become staunchly opposed to the institution. In the South, however, where African slaves arrived in the tens of thousands from the late 17th through the early 18th cent., slavery came to be an integral part of the plantation system (especially after the introduction of the cotton gin in 1793). The U.S. Constitution implicitly permitted slavery, but enslaved people were defined as persons, not as property. From the late 18th cent. to the eve of the Civil War, more than a million slaves were moved from the Eastern Seaboard to the Deep South, where many labored in the sugar and cotton fields and where, as pressures for profits increased, treatment of slaves was particularly brutal. The vast internal slave trade, which often tore slave families apart, was the South's second largest enterprise; only the plantation system itself surpassed it in size.

In the Northern United States, humanitarian principles led to the appearance of the abolitionistsabolitionists,
in U.S. history, particularly in the three decades before the Civil War, members of the movement that agitated for the compulsory emancipation of the slaves.
..... Click the link for more information. . They knew little of the actual conditions in the South and were fighting not for economic reform but for idealistic principles. The abolitionists in general tended to regard slavery as an unmitigated evil. The small Northern farmer also feared slavery as a system of cheap labor against which it was difficult to compete.

The South, eager to conserve the status quo, developed a bellicose defense of the system, which was hardened by such factors as the slave uprising led by Nat TurnerTurner, Nat,
1800–1831, American slave, leader of the Southampton Insurrection (1831), b. Southampton co., Va. Deeply religious from childhood, Turner was a natural preacher and possessed some influence among local slaves.
..... Click the link for more information. , the troubles over fugitive slaves, and the very active propaganda against the South. The question, involving the very existence of Southern society as then organized, was the dominant one in U.S. history from 1830 to 1860. The political expression of the struggle was largely an attempt on the part of the South to maintain legislative guarantees of the system against the efforts of the abolitionists.

The chief question concerned the right of extension of slavery in the Western territories. This first became important in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise. Many leading statesmen of the time sought an answer: Henry ClayClay, Henry,
1777–1852, American statesman, b. Hanover co., Va. Early Career

His father died when he was four years old, and Clay's formal schooling was limited to three years.
..... Click the link for more information. , the great compromiser; Daniel WebsterWebster, Daniel,
1782–1852, American statesman, lawyer, and orator, b. Salisbury (now in Franklin), N.H. Early Career

He graduated (1801) from Dartmouth College, studied law, and, after an interval as a schoolmaster, was admitted (1805) to the bar.
..... Click the link for more information. ; John C. CalhounCalhoun, John Caldwell
, 1782–1850, American statesman and political philosopher, b. near Abbeville, S.C., grad. Yale, 1804. He was an intellectual giant of political life in his day. Early Career

Calhoun studied law under Tapping Reeve at Litchfield, Conn.
..... Click the link for more information. ; Stephen A. DouglasDouglas, Stephen Arnold,
1813–61, American statesman, b. Brandon, Vt. Senatorial Career

He was admitted to the bar at Jacksonville, Ill., in 1834. After holding various state and local offices he became a U.S.
..... Click the link for more information. , who proposed popular sovereigntypopular sovereignty,
in U.S. history, doctrine under which the status of slavery in the territories was to be determined by the settlers themselves. Although the doctrine won wide support as a means of avoiding sectional conflict over the slavery issue, its meaning remained
..... Click the link for more information. as means to decide the free or slave status of territories; and the uncompromising antislavery men, such as Charles SumnerSumner, Charles,
1811–74, U.S. senator from Massachusetts (1851–74), b. Boston. He attended (1831–33) and was later a lecturer at Harvard law school, was admitted (1834) to the bar, and practiced in Boston. He spent the years 1837 to 1840 in Europe.
..... Click the link for more information. and William H. SewardSeward, William Henry,
1801–72, American statesman, b. Florida, Orange co., N.Y. Early Career

A graduate (1820) of Union College, he was admitted to the bar in 1822 and established himself as a lawyer in Auburn, N.Y., which he made his lifelong home.
..... Click the link for more information. . The great compromises—the Missouri CompromiseMissouri Compromise,
1820–21, measures passed by the U.S. Congress to end the first of a series of crises concerning the extension of slavery.

By 1818, Missouri Territory had gained sufficient population to warrant its admission into the Union as a state.
..... Click the link for more information. , the Compromise of 1850Compromise of 1850.
The annexation of Texas to the United States and the gain of new territory by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the close of the Mexican War (1848) aggravated the hostility between North and South concerning the question of the extension of slavery into the
..... Click the link for more information. , and the Kansas-Nebraska ActKansas-Nebraska Act,
bill that became law on May 30, 1854, by which the U.S. Congress established the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. By 1854 the organization of the vast Platte and Kansas river countries W of Iowa and Missouri was overdue.
..... Click the link for more information. —were ultimately ineffective.

Sectional opposition, which involved even broader questions than slavery, including the constitutional issue of states' rightsstates' rights,
in U.S. history, doctrine based on the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
..... Click the link for more information. , grew more passionate as the two sections became more and more hostile. The Ostend ManifestoOstend Manifesto,
document drawn up in Oct., 1854, at Ostend, Belgium, by James Buchanan, American minister to Great Britain, John Y. Mason, minister to France, and Pierre Soulé, minister to Spain. William L.
..... Click the link for more information. and the proposed annexation of Cuba, the fugitive slave lawsfugitive slave laws,
in U.S. history, the federal acts of 1793 and 1850 providing for the return between states of escaped black slaves. Similar laws existing in both North and South in colonial days applied also to white indentured servants and to Native American slaves.
..... Click the link for more information. , the operations of the Underground RailroadUnderground Railroad,
in U.S. history, loosely organized system for helping fugitive slaves escape to Canada or to areas of safety in free states. It was run by local groups of Northern abolitionists, both white and free blacks.
..... Click the link for more information. , the furor caused by the Dred Scott CaseDred Scott Case,
argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1856–57. It involved the then bitterly contested issue of the status of slavery in the federal territories. In 1834, Dred Scott, a black slave, personal servant to Dr. John Emerson, a U.S.
..... Click the link for more information. , the Wilmot ProvisoWilmot Proviso,
1846, amendment to a bill put before the U.S. House of Representatives during the Mexican War; it provided an appropriation of $2 million to enable President Polk to negotiate a territorial settlement with Mexico.
..... Click the link for more information. —all heightened the tension. Sporadic armed conflict erupted in Kansas and in the Harpers Ferry raid of John BrownBrown, John,
1800–1859, American abolitionist, b. Torrington, Conn. He spent his boyhood in Ohio. Before he became prominent in the 1850s, his life had been a succession of business failures in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York.
..... Click the link for more information. . The struggle became more clearly defined as the Republican party was formed with a definite antislavery platform.

In the victory of the Republican presidential candidate, Abraham LincolnLincoln, Abraham
, 1809–65, 16th President of the United States (1861–65). Early Life

Born on Feb. 12, 1809, in a log cabin in backwoods Hardin co., Ky. (now Larue co.), he grew up on newly broken pioneer farms of the frontier.
..... Click the link for more information. (1860), the South saw a threat to Southern institutions, and the Southern states in an effort to secure those institutions resorted to secessionsecession,
in political science, formal withdrawal from an association by a group discontented with the actions or decisions of that association. The term is generally used to refer to withdrawal from a political entity; such withdrawal usually occurs when a territory or state
..... Click the link for more information. and formed the ConfederacyConfederacy,
name commonly given to the Confederate States of America
(1861–65), the government established by the Southern states of the United States after their secession from the Union.
..... Click the link for more information. . The Civil WarCivil War,
in U.S. history, conflict (1861–65) between the Northern states (the Union) and the Southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy.
..... Click the link for more information. followed, and the victory of the North brought an end to slavery in the United States. Lincoln's Emancipation ProclamationEmancipation Proclamation,
in U.S. history, the executive order abolishing slavery in the Confederate States of America. Desire for Such a Proclamation

In the early part of the Civil War, President Lincoln refrained from issuing an edict freeing the slaves despite
..... Click the link for more information. (issued in 1863, it declared all slaves in the Southern secessionist states free) was followed by other legislation, especially the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The end of the Civil War did not result in the integration of the former slaves into American life. Although there were gains toward this under ReconstructionReconstruction,
1865–77, in U.S. history, the period of readjustment following the Civil War. At the end of the Civil War, the defeated South was a ruined land. The physical destruction wrought by the invading Union forces was enormous, and the old social and economic
..... Click the link for more information. , these were subsequently reversed by the Jim Crow lawsJim Crow laws,
in U.S. history, statutes enacted by Southern states and municipalities, beginning in the 1880s, that legalized segregation between blacks and whites. The name is believed to be derived from a character in a popular minstrel song.
..... Click the link for more information. . Generally easily identified by the color of their skin, African Americans were subjected to segregation and other forms of discrimination practiced by most white Americans and legislated in many jurisdictions. This situation did not begin to be ameliorated until the civil-rights struggles of the 20th cent. (see civil rightscivil rights,
rights that a nation's inhabitants enjoy by law. The term is broader than "political rights," which refer only to rights devolving from the franchise and are held usually only by a citizen, and unlike "natural rights," civil rights have a legal as well as a
..... Click the link for more information. ; integrationintegration,
in U.S. history, the goal of an organized movement to break down the barriers of discrimination and segregation separating African Americans from the rest of American society.
..... Click the link for more information. ).

In the late 20th cent. the idea of compensating American blacks for their enslavement through some form of reparations won widespread support from African-American organizations and greater notice, although little support, from the broader society. The reparations movement was spurred in part by payments to HolocaustHolocaust
, name given to the period of persecution and extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany. Romani (Gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, and others were also victims of the Holocaust.
..... Click the link for more information. victims, to Japanese Americans interned during World War II, and to some Native American tribes. Unlike these groups, however, reparations for slavery would be paid to individuals who are descendants by several generations of the victims, instead of to the victims or to a tribal people. Supporters of reparations, however, argue that contemporary African Americans continue to suffer from the vestiges of slavery and the discrimination that followed emancipation.

In Other Countries

In other countries emancipation of slaves was also a serious problem, but never to such an extent as in the United States, chiefly perhaps because the question of race prejudice was nowhere else so important. As the South American nations gained independence, they broadened their democratic principles to include absolute prohibition of slavery (Chile in 1823, Central America in 1824, Mexico in 1829, and Bolivia in 1831) or gradual emanicpation (Argentina in 1813, Colombia in 1814, and Venezuela in 1821). In BrazilBrazil
, Port. Brasil, officially Federative Republic of Brazil, republic (2015 est. pop. 205,962,000), 3,286,470 sq mi (8,511,965 sq km), E South America. By far the largest of the Latin American countries, Brazil occupies nearly half the continent of South America,
..... Click the link for more information. the opposition of the planters to abolishing slavery was strong, and it was only after a series of rather ineffective measures that the slaves were emancipated in 1888. Opposition to that action helped to launch the revolution of 1889.

In later years the slave trade was conducted on the east coast of Africa, the market being in Muslim lands. Most antislavery efforts during the 19th cent. were directed against slave trading. Great Britain had passed antislave-trade laws in 1807 and 1811; the British attempted to enlist other nations in an effort to stop the slave trade, and several treaties for such a purpose were signed in the 1840s. However, the first important international agreement was not reached until the Berlin Conference in 1885, which bound the more important Muslim potentates to act against the slave traffic. This was supplemented by the even more significant Brussels Act of 1890, to which 18 states were signatory.

The emperor of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) was unable to prevent traffic from that land to Arabia, and a brisk trade went on over the Red Sea. International scandals occurred from time to time with regard to forced labor; three notable ones concerned the Congo, LiberiaLiberia
[New Lat.,=place of freedom], officially Republic of Liberia, republic (2015 est. pop. 4,500,000), 43,000 sq mi (111,370 sq km), W Africa. Liberia fronts on the Atlantic Ocean for some 350 mi (560 km) on the southwest and is bordered on the northwest by Sierra Leone, on
..... Click the link for more information. , and the Putumayo region of Peru in the 1930s (Native American servitude). The League of Nations adopted the resolutions of the International Slavery Convention of 1926, which was considered an advance over the Brussels Act of 1890; its main weakness was in not providing a permanent commission to oversee the total abolition of slavery. Slavery continued to exist in parts of Asia, the Middle East, and, despite increasingly successful efforts to abolish it, in various parts of Africa.

The United Nations has continued the efforts of the League of Nations to achieve worldwide abolition of slavery. The Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, contained a provision prohibiting slavery or trading in slaves. The Security Council in 1954 condemned systems of forced labor, particularly those employed as a means of political coercion. In 1956 a UN conference of plenipotentiaries adopted a convention on the abolition of slavery; an important aspect of the convention was the inclusion of other institutions similar to slavery as practices to be abolished. However, a report prepared for the United Nations in 1966 charged that slavery still existed in parts of Africa and Asia.

Although efforts to end involuntary servitude continued throughout the last half of the 20th cent., by the beginning of the 21st cent. forms of slavery, forced, or bonded labor still persisted in a number of countries, e.g., Mauritania, Niger, and Sudan in Africa, Myanmar, Pakistan, Thailand, and parts of the Persian Gulf region in Asia, and the Amazon region of Brazil. More isolated instances have been occasionally revealed elsewhere, e.g., involving Asian immigrants in the United States and sub-Saharan African migrants in parts of Libya. In many cases of forced labor, workers have been deceptively recruited in their home countries and then deprived of their passports and forced to work under altered contractual terms once they have arrived in a foreign country.

Bibliography

See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (1896, repr. 1970); A. H. Abel, The Slaveholding Indians (3 vol., 1915–25; repr. 1970); R. H. Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire (1928, repr. 1968); U. B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929, repr. 1963); W. L. Westermann, Upon Slavery in Ptolemaic Egypt (1929); W. L. Mathieson, British Slavery and Its Abolition, 1823–1838 (1926, repr. 1967), Great Britain and the Slave Trade, 1839–1865 (1929, repr. 1967), and British Slave Emancipation, 1838–1849 (1932, repr. 1967); E. Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (4 vol., 1930–35; repr. 1965); G. MacMann, Slavery through the Ages (1938); R. Coupland, The Exploitation of East Africa, 1856–1890: The Slave Trade and the Scramble (1939, repr. 1968); I. E. Edwards, Towards Emancipation: A Study in South African Slavery (1942); E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944, repr. 1964); Fisk Univ., Social Science Institute, Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Account of Negro Ex-Slaves (1945, repr. 1970); G. Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (tr. 1946; 2d ed. 1956, repr. 1963); I. Mendelsohn, Slavery in the Ancient Near East (1949); K. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956); C. W. W. Greenidge, Slavery (1958); M. I. Finley, ed., Slavery in Classical Antiquity (1960, repr. 1968); S. O'Callaghan, The Slave Trade Today (1962); D. P. Mannix, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865 (with M. Cowley, 1962); J. Williamson, After Slavery (1965); D. B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975), and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2014); A. Zilversmidt, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (1967); S. M. Elkins, Slavery (2d ed. 1968); A. Weinstein, ed., American Negro Slavery: A Modern Reader (1968); L. Foner and E. D. Genovese, ed., Slavery in the New World (1969); D. L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (1970); R. S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (1970); J. Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle (1971); A. J. Lane, ed., The Debate over Slavery (1971); R. W. Winks, Slavery: A Comparative Perspective (1972); R. Fogel and S. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974); E. D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974); W. L. Rose, A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (1976); J. A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade (1981); S. Stuckey, Slave Culture (1987); E. Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (1988); C. B. Dew, Bond of Iron (1994); H. Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870 (1997); P. D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint (1998); K. Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999); J. H. Franklin and L. Schweninger, Runaway Slaves (1999); R. L. Paquette and L. A. Ferleger, ed., Slavery, Secession, and Southern History (2000); R. Segal, Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (2001); I. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (1998) and Generations of Captivity (2003); A. Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (2005); S. Deyle, Carry Me Back (2005); E. Fox-Genovese and E. D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class (2005); S. Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (2006); D. A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008); Y. Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World (2009); S. Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (2009); G. W. Van Cleve, A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (2010); D. Eltis and D. Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010); H. Zinn, The Other Civil War: Slavery and Struggle in Civil War America (2011); J. Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012); W. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013); E. E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014); R. S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (2014); G. Grandin, The Empire of Necessity (2014); S. Wilentz, No Property in Man (2018).

slavery

institutionalized domination over persons who have no property or birth rights, who are often treated as the property of another, and who are subject to control in all aspects of their lives, with no enforceable limits. Such a system, in which the slave is dominated by a slave master, is often referred to as chattel slavery, which may be distinguished from other forms of unfreedom and unfree labour such as SERFDOM and debt bondage (see DEBT PEONAGE).

In the most comprehensive comparative study of slavery, O. Patterson (1982) argues that there are three universal features. First, a slave master has virtually unlimited rights of violence or threat of violence over a slave; secondly, a slave experiences ‘natal alienation’ being genealogically isolated and denied all rights of birth; thirdly, a slave has no honour. Unlike other definitions of slavery Patterson shows that in many societies masters had little interest in what slaves produced. For example, in kin-based societies in Africa, slaves were acquired as a means of increasing the number of dependants, and hence the prestige, of the master with little resulting economic difference between the master and slave. So the experience of Ancient Greece and Rome and the antebellum Southern states of North America from the 17th to the 19th century, where enslavement was primarily for labour purposes, cannot be incorporated in a general definition of slavery.

Patterson further questions the usual definition of slaves as being the property of the masters. He argues that, viewed comparatively, the concept of property in connection with slavery is socially variable with the legal recognition of absolute property common in Europe but not universal, emerging only with Roman law. This concept of absolute property may have emerged from the institution of slavery rather than the other way round. Patterson points out that other categories of dependants may be defined as the property of others, so that this in itself may not distinguish slaves: rather the distinctive feature is that slaves are denied rights of property (except for the peculium whereby the master invested partial and temporary rights of possession (see USUFRUCT) in the slave, but with ownership rights still vested in the master). Thus, in defining slavery Patterson omits the concept of ownership and on the level of personal relations defines it as ‘the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonoured persons’.

Near-universal correlates of slavery have been the sexual abuse of female slaves by their masters, the high frequency of concubinage and sometimes marriage between master and slave, and the rarity of enslavement of members of the master's own ETHNIC GROUP (with Russia in the 17th- and 18th-centuries being one of the few examples of such a practice).

Since slavery has existed in many known societies from the very beginning of human history, there have been many variations in the practice and institutions. Some societies such as Ancient Greece and Rome (see ANCIENT SOCIETY), the US, Brazil and many parts of the Caribbean from the late 17th century to the mid-19th, may be termed slave-holding societies, in as much as the ruling classes derived most of their wealth by extracting ECONOMIC SURPLUS from slaves, even though, as in Ancient Greece and Rome, this may not have been the most prevalent form of labour (de Ste. Croix, 1981). Other variations are in the means of enslavement, of which capture in warfare and kidnapping have historically been the most important, accounting for the majority of slaves in the Atlantic slave trade between the 17th and 19th centuries. Other means have included penal enslavement, the main source of slaves in Imperial China, and birth, with many variations between societies in how slave status was inherited, e.g. Roman practice was for slave status to derive from the mother, but under the Near Eastern and Islamic rule the higher status of the parents was decisive, meaning that children of mixed (slave and free) parentage usually became free. The means of acquiring slaves has also varied, internal or external trade being among the most common (Patterson even argues that slavery may have been involved with the origins of trade) and dowry and bride payments.

A final main variation concerns manumission practices, the freeing of slaves. The best-known slavery system in the modern world, that of the southern USA, is unusual in that manumission rates were amongst the lowest known. In many systems, slaves often became free on the death of their master, through marriage or concubinage with the master, especially in Islamic societies, by adoption, or through political manumission, e.g. by the state in recognition of acts of bravery in warfare. On freedom, however, the slave often remained in a dependent relationship with the ex-master, although, again, the US South was exceptional in granting such low status to freed slaves.

No known slave masters have succeeded in totally controlling all slaves or in having them accept totally their dishonoured status (compare DIALECTIC OF CONTROL). Thus slave rebellion has been a constant feature throughout history, although the lack of any ready basis for unity among slaves means that the only documented successful overthrow of a slavery system by rebellion was in San Domingo in the French Caribbean 1791-1803 (see James, 1980). As with all systems of domination, the sole use of violence as a means of control is self-destructive, so that various other incentives have figured, primarily the possibility of freedom, but also the right to acquire possessions which may be used to buy freedom. The extent to which slave systems subordinate psychologically, by the creation of a 'slave mentality’ (e.g. ‘Uncle Tomism’), has been challenged recently (see Weinstein and Gatell, 1979; Genovese, 1971).

Debate also exists as to whether slave systems are inherently inefficient compared with non-slave systems (e.g. involve more costs of social control, social subsistence and labour reproduction, and involve less flexibility in use of capital). Associated with this is the question of whether their elimination has been brought about primarily by economic or political considerations. The suggestion is that slave systems only become established where other forms of labour are in short supply and/or where a ready source of slave labour exists.

Slavery

the earliest and most overt form of exploitation, in which the slave, together with the instruments of production, is the property of his master, the slaveholder. In the most extreme forms of slavery, the slave had absolutely no rights. Devoid of any economic incentive to work, he labored only under direct physical compulsion. Sometimes the status of slaves was also emphasized by such visible symbols as a brand, collar, or special clothing. Appearing at the time of the dissolution of the primitive communal system, slavery was the basis of the slave-holding system. Slaves were members of foreign tribes taken prisoner in time of war or captured in military operations designed specifically for that purpose (raids, piracy), as well as members of the same tribe who had been enslaved for not paying their debts or for committing crimes. The number of slaves also grew through a natural increase in the existing slave population and through the slave trade.

The earliest form of slavery was patriarchal slavery, in which the slaves were considered members without rights of the family that owned them. They usually lived under the same roof as their master but performed heavier tasks than the other members of the family. The patriarchal form of slavery is closely related to the existence of a natural economy. This form of slavery existed to a certain extent among all nations during their transition to class societies. It predominated in the societies of the ancient East, as well as in the Greek states and Rome, until rapid economic development changed slavery in these states into the form that it assumed in antiquity. For Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., and for the late Roman Republic, patriarchal slavery was already a thing of the past. “Classical” slavery had become firmly established in conjunction with a market economy and the maximum expropriation of the slave as an individual—the loss of all his rights and his transformation into a “talking tool.”

Classical slavery flourished for a relatively short time since the very nature of slave labor caused its inevitable downfall and transformation: the slaves’ hatred of their work and the oppression could only lead to the economic inefficiency of slavery and necessarily required at least a basic modification of the forms of servile dependence. Historical factors, such as the reduction in the supply of slaves and the constant slave rebellions, reinforced the economic factors in impelling slaveholders to find new forms of exploitation. The necessity of providing the direct producers with an incentive to work and thereby increasing the efficiency of their exploitation was becoming quite apparent. Many slaves were then bound to the land and gradually merged with the coloni (colonatus system). This development, which had economic causes, resulted in the de facto disappearance of any differences between coloni and slaves.

Slavery played a considerable, but not a leading, role in the economy of the “barbarian” states that emerged on the territory of the Roman Empire in the early Middle Ages, particularly in the Ostrogoth state in Italy and the Visigoth state in Spain. In these states, many of the slaves worked the land and paid quitrent to a lord, thus gradually merging with the impoverished members of peasant communes to create a group of enserfed peasants. By the 13th century, slavery had almost completely disappeared from most of Western Europe, although an extensive slave trade still flourished down to the 16th century in such Mediterranean cities as Venice and Genoa, which imported slaves from Turkey and sold them in North Africa.

In Byzantium slavery disappeared at a much slower rate than in Western Europe. It was still economically significant in the tenth and 11th centuries, but by the late 11th and 12th centuries the merger of slaves with the dependent peasantry was practically completed in Byzantium as well. Slavery existed in the Germanic and Slavic tribes chiefly in its patriarchal form; among the Slavs, only the Dalmations traded in slaves. In ancient Rus’ slavery still existed between the ninth and 12th centuries within the framework of a developing feudal society. The slaves (kholopy) gradually joined the ranks of the dependent peasantry, most of them becoming household serfs. However, the situation of certain groups of serfs, particularly those working in mines, differed very little from that of slaves. Slavery continued to exist down to the sixth century in the ancient kingdoms of Transcaucasia and Middle Asia; vestiges of slavery could still be observed there during the Middle Ages.

In the largest Oriental states, notably China and India, slavery existed in its patriarchal form until the onset of capitalist relations, and sometimes it did not disappear even when the latter became established. The main source of slavery in this part of the world in the Middle Ages was indebtedness. In China, impoverished peasants frequently sold members of their own families into slavery, and throughout the entire medieval period criminals or members of their families became slaves of the state. Slavery was also relatively widespread in the Muslim countries of the Near East. Because Islam forbade the enslavement of Muslims, the main source of slavery in Muslim countries was prisoners captured in the course of wars against the “infidels” and the purchase of slaves in the markets of Europe, Asia, and Africa. In the Muslim countries, slaves were used for heavy labor, such as mining (Zinji), in the armies of Muslim rulers (Ghulams, Mamelukes), and in households and personal service (including harems).

The spread of slavery throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas beginning in the 16th century is linked to the process known as the primitive accumulation of capital and to the colonial subjugation of the countries in these areas. Slavery was most extensive and assumed the greatest economic importance in the colonies on the American continent owing to the specific development of the colonies in the Americas: the lack of manpower and the presence of uninhabited land that could be used for large-scale plantation agriculture. The opposition of the Indians, their extermination, and the formal prohibitions on enslaving Indians imposed by the rulers of Spain and Portugal prompted Spanish, Portuguese, and, later, North American planters to import Negro slaves from Africa. The slave trade reached its peak between the 17th and 19th centuries, and the total number of Negroes imported to the Americas probably exceeded 10 million.

In the late 18th century Negro slaves constituted the majority of the population in areas dominated by large plantations in the South of the USA, the West Indies, Brazil, and Guyana. Negroes were brutally treated on the plantations, where their status was that of draft animals. Only the slaves serving in the households of the plantation owners found themselves in a slightly better position. Unions between slaveholders and Negro concubines gave rise to a large mulatto population in several countries. The industrial revolution, which stimulated a sharp increase in the demand for cotton and other industrial crops, gave fresh impetus to the development of plantation slavery in the USA at the end of the 18th and first decade of the 19th century.

As capitalism developed, it became increasingly evident that slave labor had a low productivity and hampered the further evolution of productive forces. Under those circumstances the abolition of slavery began in response to the increasing opposition of slaves and to the growth of a large-scale antislavery social movement, exemplified by abolitionism in the USA. The French Revolution proclaimed the abolition of slavery, but this goal was achieved in reality in the French colonies only in the 1840’s. Slavery was legally abolished in Great Britain in 1807, but in fact continued to exist in the British colonies until 1833. Portugal proclaimed the abolition of slavery in the 1850’s, and in the 1860’s slavery was abolished in most states on the American continent. The abolition of slavery in the USA occurred as a result of the Civil War (1861–65) between the North and the slaveholding South. Forms of forced labor that differed little from slavery continued to exist after the latter had officially been abolished. They included peonage in Latin America and the system of contract laborers in Oceania. The institution of slavery persisted for a long time in a number of colonies and dependencies. It was particularly widespread in Portugal’s African colonies as part of the plantation economy and as a household institution. As late as the 1950’s slavery existed among the Arabs of central and southern Arabia and in such African countries as Ethiopia and Nigeria.

The struggle to eradicate slavery through international law began in the 19th century, but most international documents condemning slavery remained purely formal. What may be regarded as the first international antislavery convention was signed in Geneva in 1926 under the auspices of the League of Nations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN in 1948, prohibited slavery and slave trade in all its forms (art. 4). A conference of 59 nations that convened in Geneva in 1956 for the purpose of combating slavery adopted a supplementary convention on the eradication of slavery, the slave trade, and institutions and customs similar to slavery, such as forced labor.

REFERENCES

Marx, K. Kapital, vol. 3. In K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 25, part 2.
Engels, F. Proiskhozhdenie sem’i, chastnoi sobstvennosti i gosudarstva. Ibid., vol. 21.
Utchenko, S. L., and E. M. Shtaerman, “O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii rabstva.” Vestnik drevnei istorii, no. 4, 1960.
Wallon, H. Istoriia rabstva v antichnom mire, vols. 1–2. Moscow, 1941. (Translated from French.)
Nieboer, H. Y. Rabstvo, kak sistema khoziaistva: Etnologicheskoe issledovanie, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1907. (Translated from English.)
Averkieva, Iu. P. Rabstvo u indeitsev Severnoi Ameriki. Moscow-Leningrad, 1941.
OON: Doklad spetsial’nogo komiteta po voprosu o rabstve (Vtoraia sessiia) [No place, 1951.]
Pasherstnik, A. E., and I. D. Levin. Prinuditel’nyi trud i rabstvo v stranakh kapitala. Moscow, 1952.
Foster, W. Negritianskii narod v istorii Ameriki. Moscow, 1955. (Translated from English.)
Ingram, J. K. A History of Slavery and Serfdom. London, 1895.
Greenidge, G. W. Slavery. London, 1958.
Nevinson, H. W. A Modern Slavery. Essex, 1963.
Martin, G. Histoire de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises. Paris, 1948.
Tannenbaum, F. Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas. New York, 1947.
Dumond, D. L. A Bibliography on Antislavery in America. Ann Arbor, 1961.

V. I. KOZLOV

slavery

[′slav·ə·rē] (invertebrate zoology) An interspecific association among ants in which members of one species bring pupae of another species to their nest, which, when adult, become slave workers in the colony.

slavery

the state or condition of being a slave; a civil relationship whereby one person has absolute power over another and controls his life, liberty, and fortune

Slavery

Related to Slavery: History of slavery

Slavery

A civil relationship in which one person has absolute power over the life, fortune, and liberty of another.

History

At some point in history, slavery has plagued nearly every part of the world. From ancient Greece to the modern Americas, innumerable governments have sanctioned the complete control of certain persons for the benefit of other persons, usually under the guise of social, mercantile, and technological progress.

The U.S. legacy of slavery began in the early seventeenth century. However, the stage for U.S. slavery was set as early as the fourteenth century, when the rich nations of Spain and Portugal began to capture Africans for enslavement in Europe. When Spain, Portugal, and other European countries conquered and laid claim to the New World of the Caribbean and West Indies in the late sixteenth century, they brought along the practice of slavery. Eventually, slavery expanded to the north, to colonial America.

The first Africans in colonial America were brought to Jamestown by a Dutch ship in 1619. These 20 Africans were indentured servants, which meant that they were to work for a certain period of time in exchange for transportation and room and board. They were assigned land after their service and were considered free Negroes. Nonetheless, their settlement was involuntary.

The status of Africans in colonial America underwent a rapid evolution after 1619. One early judicial decision signaled the change in European attitudes toward Africans. In 1640, three Virginia servants—two Europeans and one African—escaped from their masters. Upon recapture, a Virginia court ordered the Euro pean servants to serve their master for one more year and the African servant to serve his master, or his master's assigns, for the rest of his life.

Amistad: Mutiny on a Slave Ship

African slaves occasionally revolted against their masters, and the result was usually severe punishment for the slaves. The mutiny of fifty-four slaves on the Spanish ship Amistad in 1839 proved an exception, however, as the U.S. Supreme Court granted the slaves their freedom and allowed them to return to Africa.

The fifty-four Africans were kidnapped in West Africa, near modern-day Sierra Leone, and illegally sold into the Spanish slave trade. They were transported to Cuba, fraudulently classified as native Cuban slaves, and sold to two Spaniards. The slaves were then loaded on the schooner Amistad, which set sail for Haiti.

Three days into the journey, the slaves mutinied. Led by Sengbe Pieh, known to the Spanish crew as Cinque, the slaves unshackled themselves, killed the captain and the cook, and forced all but two of the crew to leave the ship. The Africans demanded to be returned to their homeland, but the crew tricked them and sailed toward the United States. In August 1839 the ship was towed into Montauk Point, Long Island, in New York.

Cinque and the others were charged with murder and Piracy. A group of abolitionists formed the Amistad Committee, which organized a legal defense that sought the slaves' freedom. U.S. President Martin Van Buren, pressed by Spain to return the slaves without trial, hoped the court would find the slaves guilty and order them returned to Cuba. The federal circuit court dismissed the murder and piracy charges because the acts had occurred outside the jurisdiction of the United States. It referred the case to the federal district court for trial to determine if the slaves must be returned to Cuba.

At the trial the slaves argued that there was no legal basis for returning them to Cuba because the importation of slaves from Africa was illegal under Spanish law. The district court agreed, ruling that the Africans were free and should be transported home. Van Buren ordered an immediate appeal to the Supreme Court.

Former president John Quincy Adams represented the slaves before the Supreme Court, making an impassioned argument for their freedom. The Court, in United States v. Libellants of Schooner Amistad, 40 U.S. 518 (15 Pet. 518), 10 L. Ed. 826, affirmed the district court and agreed that the Africans were free persons. By the end of 1841, thirty-five of the Amistad survivors had sailed for Sierra Leone; the rest remained in the United States.

Reparations

The U. S. government enacted the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery, but it has never formally apologized to African Americans for their enslavement nor offered financial reparations to compensate them for their peonage. Since the end of the U.S. Civil War there have been occasional calls by African Americans for reparations, but political and legal efforts have always failed. However, in the 1990s a new movement for slavery reparations began to coalesce, led by a group of scholars and lawyers. This group has been encouraged by the payment of reparations to Jewish Holocaust victims by German corporations that employed slave labor and by the U.S. government's payment of $60,000 to every Japanese American person held in detention camps during World War II. Nevertheless, the slavery reparations issue arouses strong emotions in those opposed to the idea. In addition, legal doctrines make the prospect of court victories unlikely.

The idea of reparations is rooted in the field order issued by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman as he conquered several Southern states during the last months of the Civil War. Sherman's order authorized the distribution of 40 acres of Southern land to each freed slave and the loan of a government mule to work the land. The promise of "40 acres and a mule" proved illusory, however, as Congress failed to ratify such a program. In short order Southern whites reclaimed their land and Southern blacks became sharecroppers, renting out land in return for a meager financial return.

A reparations lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department was dismissed in 1915, but in the 1920s marcus garvey made reparations part of his Black Nationalist program. In the 1950s and 1960s Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, preached black separatism and called on the government to give blacks land as reparations for slavery. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s reparations were ignored, with leaders focusing on political and civil equality. However, by the late 1960s a new, more radical form of Black nationalism started to emphasize the need for economic justice. In 1969 James Forman issued a "Black Manifesto" that demanded $500 million as reparations "due us as people who have been exploited and degraded, brutalized, killed, and persecuted." Again, reparations were ignored and the issue appeared dead. It was resurrected, however, in 1989 when Representative John Conyers (D-Mich.) introduced a resolution that sought to establish a commission that would study reparations for African Americans. The resolution went nowhere, but Conyers has continued to introduce it every year, to no avail.

The modern debate over reparations began in earnest with the publication of Randall M. Robinson's bestseller, The Debt: What America Owes Blacks. Robinson argued that the value of slave labor over the course of 246 years of American slavery easily reached into the trillions of dollars. He noted that slaves picked and processed cotton, which fueled commerce and industry throughout the United States. Robinson called on the government to establish independent community trust funds that would distribute money into the community to fund black-owned businesses and to fund education and training programs. He disavowed the direct payment of reparations to individuals. Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree and other lawyers and scholars joined Robinson to form the Reparations Coordinating Committee. The committee has explored suing the U.S. government, and in 2002 it filed suit against several U.S. corporations that allegedly profited from slavery during the nineteenth century. A 2001 California law has aided the group's efforts, for it requires all insurance companies doing business in California to report on any policies issued to slave-holders prior to 1865. A number of prominent companies revealed in their 2002 filings that they had issued slave insurance and thereby profited from slavery.

The debate over reparations has divided along racial lines. A 2002 opinion poll found that 80 percent of African Americans endorsed a formal apology for slavery from the U.S. government and 67 percent were in favor of monetary reparations. This contrasted sharply with white respondents; 30 percent of whites supported an apology while only 4 percent thought that monetary compensation was appropriate. Opposition to reparations falls into three main arguments. First, opponents note that all former slaves are dead and that living descendants do not deserve payments for their ancestors' losses. This is quite different from the U.S. government's payments to living Japanese Americans for their detention during World War II. A second objection is more practical: who would get the money and how much would each person receive? Critics point out that some African Americans were not slaves before the Civil War and that other blacks immigrated to the United States since the Abolition of slavery. It would be exceedingly difficult to sort out the descendants of slaves. A third objection centers on making current white Americans liable for the sins of the past. Critics note that millions of people entered the United States from Europe, Asia, and South American between 1865 and today. These individuals, as well as the descendants of non-slaveholding Americans, should not be forced to pay their tax dollars to compensate for a reprehensible system they had nothing to do with. In addition, some African-American scholars have voiced concerns about the symbolic consequences of seeking reparations. They contend that this cause reinforces the role of blacks as victims and looks to the past rather than the future.

Proponents of reparations respond by arguing that financial compensation will not go to individuals, thus eliminating the practical difficulties of identifying claimants. They also contend that slavery, along with the 100 years of repression and discrimination following the Civil War, have directly injured African Americans living today. They point out that the U.S. government is an ongoing organization that is responsible for its actions, whether or not individuals were present at the time of the actions in question. Finally, they believe that while the money is important, the demand for restitution will encourage the healing of old wounds.

Most commentators believe that reparations will not be achieved through the legal system, due to many substantive and procedural doctrines. In Cato v. United States, 70 F.3d 1103 (9th Cir. 1995), a federal appeals court dismissed a lawsuit that sought reparations and an apology from the U.S. government. The court found that it had no jurisdiction to consider the case. First, private citizens cannot sue the federal government under the doctrine of Sovereign Immunity. Second, the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the suit because they could not show they were personally injured by slavery. The court made clear that generalized class-based grievances cannot be heard in a court of law. The court concluded that the plaintiffs should press their claims with Congress. Based on this ruling, many commentators have expressed skepticism that the 2002 lawsuit against several corporations would succeed. The companies will also be able to demonstrate that prior to the Civil War slavery was legal.

Cross-references

Civil Rights Movement; Emancipation Proclamation; Reconstruction.

The laws regarding slaves reflected the Terrorism and paternalism of slavery. A slave had a nebulous right to Self-Defense, but a slave owner was allowed to restrain and punish a slave with impunity. A slave owner could not beat a slave publicly, but a slave could not avoid punishment for a crime committed at an owner's command. A free Negro could not voluntarily submit to slavery for a price, and Europeans were not allowed to subject a free African to slavery by treating one as a slave for any length of time. Every African was presumed to be a slave, however, until she or he could prove otherwise. This presumption was abolished in the northern states shortly after the United States won its independence from England, but it remained unchanged in the southern states until the end of the U.S. Civil War.

Not all Africans were slaves. Some free Africans had bought their freedom, some were the descendants of Jamestown's first free African servants, some had escaped their owner, and some had been freed, or manumitted, by their owner. A slave owner could not free a slave if doing so left the slave unable to pay his or her debts. Some statutes allowed a slave owner to free only slaves who could work and support themselves, and other statutes required a slave owner to provide continuing financial support to freed slaves.

In some areas in the South, manumission of a slave was illegal, but the law did not prevent a slave owner from sending or taking slaves to another state to set them free. In states where manumission was legal, an owner could free a slave by executing a deed declaring the slave's liberty. Generally, the deed had to be filed in a county clerk's office or authorized or proved in court. Some states allowed for the manumission of slaves in the slave owner's will. A gift of land to a slave by a slave owner was often held to be a manumission of the slave, since only a free individual could own land. A manumitted slave was entitled to work for wages and to own land and Personal Property through acquisition or inheritance.

After the United States won the War of Independence, Vermont, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey all passed legislation that gradually abolished slavery. These northern states, inspired mostly by the revolutionary, liberal philosophies of the period, began advocating expanding notions of freedom that were being rejected in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

In May 1787, delegations from each of the 13 colonies began to meet in Philadelphia to devise a federal constitution. The Constitutional Convention was to begin on May 14, but few representatives had arrived by then, and it was postponed. On May 25, seven states were represented, and the convention began. Delegates from the various colonies continued to arrive through June, with the last ones coming from New Hampshire on July 22, four days before the convention was adjourned. Slavery was just one topic on a very long agenda.

The abolition of the U.S. enslavement of Africans was not seriously entertained at the convention. Virginia's George Mason and many delegates from the northern states argued against any recognition of slavery in the Constitution, but the overriding concern at the convention was to unify the states under a system of government that left substantial control of social and political questions to the individual states. It seemed clear to the majority of the representatives that a country founded on individual freedoms could not participate in slave trading, but it was equally clear that if the widespread enslavement of Africans by the southern states were prohibited by the new federal government, there would be no United States.

North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia insisted that a state's right to import slaves be left untouched. Delegates from other states argued for the abolition of slavery, and still other delegates wanted no hint of the practice included in the Constitution. A committee comprising one delegate from each state was dispatched to settle the issue. The committee returned with a constitutional clause, couched in the negative, that made slave trade vulnerable to prohibition after the year 1800. The strange set of bedfellows produced by this issue—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia were against the clause—illustrated the variety of considerations at play.

After further debate and modification by the entire convention, the Slave Trade Clause was inserted into Section 9 of Article I: "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight." Attached to this language was another clause that allowed for the imposition of a tax or duty on such importation, not to exceed $10 for "each Person" (read, "each Slave").

The one other opaque reference to slavery in the Constitution was the so-called Three-fifths Compromise. In Article I, Section 2, the Framers wrote that the population of a state, for purposes of determining taxation and representation in the House of Representatives, would be measured by counting the "Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons." This language struggled mightily to avoid the mention of African slavery but was understood as allowing the southern states to count each slave as three-fifths of a person in a government census.

This method of population measurement, three-fifths, was actually developed by Congress in 1783, during debate over state representation in the federal government. The northern states opposed the inclusion of African slaves in the determination of population because the southern states contained thousands of African slaves who played no part in the political process. The southern states argued that a state's African slave population reflected its true power and wealth, which should in turn be reflected in its federal representation. The northern states eventually compromised with the southern states to allow five African slaves to equal three free men for purposes of population determinations and federal representation.

At the Constitutional Convention, standing alone, the three-fifths proviso did not immediately satisfy the majority of states. Opposition to the measure was not organized: no single cause unified the dissatisfied states, and no split occurred between slave states and free states. Opposition also was not based on the morality of counting slaves as less than full citizens: very little wrangling took place over this concern, and an amendment to count slaves as whole persons was rejected by a vote of 8–2. Eventually, the three-fifths ratio was adopted for the Constitution, but only after direct taxation of the states was also tied to state population. Thus, the only compromise regarding the recognition of African slaves grew from struggles over money and political power, not a concern over morality. A showdown between the slave states and the free states over African slavery never occurred. Although the United States was to cease the purchase and sale of slaves, the practice of slavery in the southern states survived the Constitutional Convention.

While all this politicking was taking place, the land in the southern states was fast becoming infertile. Farmers and plantation owners realized they needed to diversify their crops to save the soil. Shortly after the Constitution was ratified in 1789, the southern states sought the development of a cotton gin in order to convert agricultural production from rice, tobacco, and indigo to cotton. The cotton gin, which mechanically extracted cotton seeds, was eventually designed by Eli Whitney and Phineas Miller in 1792. The production of cotton did not require large start-up funds, and with the cotton gin for seed removal, African slaves had more time for cultivation. These changes all added up to large profits for southern plantation owners. With the help of New England slave traders, the plantation owners imported African slaves by the tens of thousands in the years following the Constitutional Convention. Nevertheless, in March 1807, Congress passed a law prohibiting the importation of African slaves. Effective January 1, 1808, in fulfillment of the suggestion contained in Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution, the U.S. slave trade officially ended. But a state's right to sanction slavery did not.

In the early 1800s, the United States was expanding, and the question of slavery began to consume the country. In 1819, leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives proposed a bill that would allow the Missouri Territory to enter the Union as a slave state. Although northern legislators outnumbered southern legislators at the time, House Speaker Henry Clay, of Kentucky, arranged an accord between enough congressional members to pass a version of the bill that admitted Missouri as a slave state. In exchange for legal slavery in Missouri, the southern legislators agreed to limit the northern boundaries of slavery to the same latitude as the southern boundary of Missouri. Thus were the terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which became a watershed in the U.S. experience with slavery.

In its constitution, Missouri declared it would not allow slaves to be emancipated without their owner's consent. Furthermore, free African Americans were not allowed to enter the state. Antislavery congress members objected to the latter clause on the ground that it violated the federal Constitution's mandate that "the Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States" (art. IV, § 2). African Americans had, after all, gained citizenship in the northern states.

Again Clay maneuvered votes in Congress. Missouri agreed not to discriminate against citizens from other states, but did so in a resolution that was abstract and unclear and left unsettled the question of precisely who was a citizen of the several states. In 1821, Missouri's constitution was approved, and Missouri was officially a slave state.

Once Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine was admitted as a free state; the Senate had refused to accept Maine until the House altered its position on Missouri. As a result, in 1821, the Union consisted of 12 free states, 12 slaves states, and a deepening divide between the two.

European settlements pressed westward. After the United States acquired the Southwest by force in the Mexican War, it again faced the question of slavery. In 1850, Congress altered the geographic limits on slavery established by the Missouri Compromise. California was admitted as a free state, but the Utah and New Mexico Territories were opened to slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 further eroded the dictates of the Missouri Compromise by admitting slavery in those territories.One particular case brought by a slave came to a head in the 1850s and caught the attention of the Republican presidential candidate for the 1860 election, former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln. In dred scott v. sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 15 L. Ed. 691 (1857), Dred Scott sued the widow of his deceased owner in Missouri state court, asking for his freedom. The dispute began in 1834 and ended with an 1857 Supreme Court decision confirming Scott's slave status. The decision galvanized abolitionists in the north, and Lincoln railed against the decision in his campaign for the presidency. The decision also strengthened the resolve of pro-slavery forces in the South. As the struggle for power between slavers and emancipators intensified, the geographic lines proscribing slavery, drawn and redrawn, were fast becoming battle lines.

In 1860, Republican Abraham Lincoln won the presidency on an anti-slavery platform, and like-minded Republicans gained a majority in Congress. In February 1861, with the abolition of slavery imminent, South Carolina seceded from the Union, and Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee soon followed suit. Before Lincoln's inauguration in March, the Confederacy was in place. On April 12, the Confederates attacked South Carolina's Fort Sumter, and the U.S. internal war over the issue of slavery had begun.

Many early American colonists had believed they were justified in enslaving Africans because Africans were not Christians. After the American Revolution, as the country became polarized over the issue of slavery, slavery supporters in the South worked to clear the southern states of anti-slavery leaders and their forces. One abolitionist, for example, was beaten, tarred and feathered, set afire, doused in water, and whipped. As late as the 1820s, more than one hundred abolitionist groups operated in the slave states, but by the 1840s, virtually none was left. Slavers in the southern states also began to cultivate more ambitious rationales for African slavery. Slavery supporters cited essays written by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle that declared that slavery was the natural order of things.

Aristotle had claimed that slaves were slaves because they had allowed themselves to become enslaved. This was just and right, his theory continued, because if those with strong bodies (Africans, to U.S. slavers) performed the labor, those with upright bodies (European colonists and their descendants) would have the time and energy for technological and economic advancement. U.S. slavery enthusiasts expanded on the theories of Aristotle and other philosophers to explain that it was the Africans' lot in life to be slaves because it was inherent in their nature to be servile and hardworking. Other southern slavers forwent any philosophy of slavery and simply enjoyed the luxuries realized through the enslavement of Africans.

Throughout the Civil War, President Lincoln and the U.S. Congress were busy passing federal legislation on the subject of slavery. On August 6, 1861, Congress passed the Confiscation Act, which allowed the United States to lay claim to any property used in insurrection against it. Under this act, slaves who served in the Confederate army were to be set free upon capture by Union forces. In June 1862, Lincoln signed a bill passed by Congress that abolished slavery in all territories owned by the federal government. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that all slaves in the United States were free persons and that they were to remain free persons.

In April 1865, the Confederate army surrendered to the Union forces. This event touched off a flurry of constitutional amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, was ratified by Congress on December 6, 1865. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified July 9, 1868, was designed to, in part, establish former slaves as full citizens and ensure that no African American would be deprived of any of the privileges and immunities that come with citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment also deleted the offensive three-fifths ratio from the measurement of populations in Section 2 of Article I, and declared that debts relating to the loss or emancipation of slaves were illegal and void. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified February 3, 1870, gave male African Americans and male former slaves the right to vote.

African slavery in the United States continued to haunt the country long after its abolition. In the North, Segregation of African Americans from the European populations was a reality, if not sanctioned by law. Beginning in the 1880s, many southern states enacted Black Codes, or Jim Crow Laws, which restricted the freedom of movement and expression of African Americans and enforced their segregation from the rest of society.

Contemporary Issues Surrounding Slavery

Notions of slavery in the United States have expanded to include any situation in which one person controls the life, liberty, and fortune of another person. All forms of slavery are now widely recognized as inherently immoral and thoroughly evil. Slavery still occurs in various forms, but when it does, accused offenders are aggressively prosecuted. Federal statutes punish by fine or imprisonment the enticement of per sons into slavery (18 U.S.C.A. § 1583), and the holding to or selling of persons into Involuntary Servitude (§ 1584). In addition, whoso ever builds a ship for slave carriage, serves on a ship carrying slaves, or owns a slave-carrying ship will be fined or imprisoned under 18 U.S.C.A. §§ 1582, 1586, and 1587, respectively.

The statute 18 U.S.C.A. § 1581 prohibits peonage, which is involuntary servitude for the payment of a debt. Labor camps are perhaps the most common violators of the law against peon age. The operators of some labor camps keep victims for work in fields through impoverished conditions, threats, acts of violence, and alcohol consumption. Offenders often provide rudi mentary shelter to migrant workers and demand work in return, which can constitute involun tary servitude. An individual can also be con victed of sale into involuntary servitude for delivering victims under False Pretenses to such labor camps.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, much of the debate surrounding slavery related to movements urging the U.S. government to pay reparations to descendants of slaves. Supporters of this movement suggest that cash payments made to these descendants is justified to compensate the victims of slavery for years of hardship, harm, and indignities. Local governments in such cities as Dallas, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland have urged Congress to consider this form of payment. Opponents of reparations note that the costs of reparations, if given to the extent that some supporters urge, would cost the federal government trillions of dollars. More over, many critics question how these cash payments would be made and how recipients would be identified for receiving them.

Cross-references

Celia, a Slave; Civil Rights; Civil Rights Acts; Constitution of the United States; Douglass, Frederick; Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; Indenture; Ku Klux Klan; Ku Klux Klan Act; Prigg v. Pennsylvania; Republican Party; States' Rights; Taney, Roger Brooke. See also primary documents in "Slavery" section of Appendix.

Slavery

Missouri Compromise">Missouri Compromise
Wilmot Proviso">Wilmot Proviso
Compromise of 1850">Compromise of 1850
Kansas-Nebraska Act">Kansas-Nebraska Act
Dred Scott v. Sandford">Dred Scott v. Sandford
"a house divided" speech">"a house divided" speech
Emancipation Proclamation">Emancipation Proclamation

Slavery was introduced to the American colonies in the 1620s. By 1700 the slave population, located primarily in the southern colonies, had grown dramatically. After independence, the United States debated whether slavery should be allowed to continue. Though the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banned slavery in the western territories, the Framers of the U.S. Constitution did not outlaw it. For the most part the Constitution ignored the issue, but the Three-fifths Compromise permitted southern states to count each slave as three-fifths of a white person for legislative Apportionment.

The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, which revolutionized cotton processing and vastly increased the profitability of cotton growing, and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 forced the United States to consider whether slavery should be confined to the Southern states or extended to the new states carved out of the territory west of the Mississippi River. Legislative compromises succeeded in holding the Union together until mid-century. The Dred Scott case (dred scott v. sandford, 60 U.S. [19 How.] 393, 15 L. Ed. 691 [1857]), however, destroyed the legal basis for compromise by holding that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories.

Abolitionist opposition to slavery increased after Dred Scott. Abraham Lincoln's hostility to slavery, expressed in his "House Divided" speech, frightened the Southern states. His election as president in 1860 led to the secession of the Southern states and the U.S. Civil War. Though Lincoln saw the preservation of the Union as his main goal, he recognized that slavery had to be ended. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, decreed the freedom of slaves in Southern territories, but it took the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, to abolish slavery in the United States.

SLAVERY. The state or condition of a slave.
2. Slavery exists in most of the southern states. In Pennsylvania, by the act of March, 1780, for the gradual abolition of slavery, it has been almost entirely removed in Massachusetts it was held, soon after the Revolution, that slavery had been abolished by their constitution; 4 Mass. 128; in Connecticut, slavery has been totally extinguished by legislative provisions; Reeve's Dom. Bel. 340; the states north of Delaware, Maryland and the river Ohio, may be considered as free States, where slavery is not tolerated. Vide Stroud on Slavery; 2 Kent, Com. 201; Rutherf. Inst. 238.

slavery

slav·er·y

slavery

slav•er•y

Slavery

slavery

slavery

slave

slavery

slavery,

History

Slavery in the Ancient World

Slavery after the Fall of the Roman Empire

Modern Slavery

The Antislavery Movement

In Great Britain

In the United States

In Other Countries

Bibliography

slavery

Slavery

REFERENCES

slavery

slavery

Slavery

Slavery

History

Amistad: Mutiny on a Slave Ship

Further readings

Reparations

Further readings

Cross-references

Contemporary Issues Surrounding Slavery

Further readings

Cross-references

Slavery

Slavery

Slavery

slavery

Synonyms for slavery

noun enslavement

Synonyms

Antonyms

Synonyms for slavery

noun a state of subjugation to an owner or master

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Synonyms for slavery

noun the state of being under the control of another person

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Related Words

noun the practice of owning slaves

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noun work done under harsh conditions for little or no pay

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