With the Democratic presidential campaign heading into more
debates and the release of information on the 1619 Project at the New York
Times, the issue of slavery and reparations is bound to come up so I thought I
would report on the history of slavery in America in order to make certain our
many candidates have the truth.
In this article I will trace the roots and history of
slavery in the U.S. including those responsible for the slave trade in North
America.
Long before Columbus ever discovered the Americas slavery
was a vital component of society and culture throughout the known
world. In historical Africa slavery was practiced in many different
forms.
There was indentured servitude, Debt slavery, enslavement of captives, military slavery, slavery for prostitution criminal slavery. African slaves were shipped throughout the world well before America was even discovered.
In truth, there were over sixty million slaves taken from Africa. Of that number, ten to twelve million were sold to slave traders for shipment to the Americas. Over one million died in captivity in Africa or during the ten-week ship journey to the New World.
Slightly less than ten million made it to the Americas from the first Portuguese shipment of the Atlantic African Slaves between 1503 and 1519, and the end of slavery in America in 1865.
No slaves were sold to the North American colonies until 1619. Of the ten million arriving in the Americas over the years, the North American colonies of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and the Dutch received a total of 388,000 slaves, twenty-six percent children, as definitely established in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
The same five European empires were in vicious competition to colonize both the Americas and Africa, so led by the Portuguese they established and owned the African Slave Trade in partnership with the African kingdoms. With the discovery of the Americas in 1492 the Trans-Atlantic African Slave Trade evolved rapidly with shipments to Central and South America where Spain and Portugal had colonies.
By the time North America was first being settled in 1608 the five European empires began diverting some African slaves to North America to service their new colonies. When the citizens of the thirteen British colonies in North America revolted and defeated the mighty British empire, then adopted a new Constitution in 1789, the new Republic signaled that the African Slave Trade must end.
In 1808 both the US and Britain banned African slave trade. Individual states banned slavery leading up to the American Civil War in 1860. By that time America had grown from thirteen states to thirty-three states, and eleven seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy.
Though President Abraham Lincoln ended slavery with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, it was not until the defeat of the Confederates in 1865 and notification given in the state of Texas, that slavery officially came to an end.
During the period of 1619 when slaves first arrived in North America until the end of slavery and freeing of all slaves in 1865, there were about five million slaves in North America, of which 388,000 came from Africa. Half of the slaves were men, one third were children, and one eighth were elderly or crippled.
The vast majority of the growth in the number of slaves in North America was primarily natural increase, in which the population of slaves grew an average of 28.7 percent a year from 1790 until 1860.
In the U.S., on average, a slave mother gave birth to between nine and ten children, more than twice the birth rate of the West Indies in Central America. Throughout most of the New World the European practice of children born to slaves became slaves.
Driven by a huge demand for sugar, cotton and tobacco in Europe, the Southern states became plantation states. After the US banned African slaves in 1808 the demand for workers on the plantations became so severe that over a million slaves were moved from Northern states to the Southern plantation states.
When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 there were thirty-three American states. Eleven seceded from the Union and started their own nation, the Confederacy. At the time there were about 3.9 million slaves in the US, both the North and the South. During the Civil War over 500,000 Southern slaves were freed by the Union troops, and all the slaves in America were freed by 1865.
In 1860, the population of the entire Republic was 31.5 million, including 3.9 million Black slaves. Most were located in fifteen Southern states, of which eleven did secede from the Union.
Ironically, more than seventy-five percent of the Southern population did not own slaves in 1860.
Summary
African slave trade began almost 200 years before America was discovered.
From 1519 until 1860 ninety-seven percent of the African slaves brought to America and sold went to Central and South America, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, just three percent went to North America.
The African Slave Trade was established by the European empires of Portugal, Britain, France, Spain and the Dutch.
African Trans-Atlantic slave trade was a European undertaking to supply manpower for development of the European colonies in America.
When Americans revolted and defeated the British empire and adopted the US Constitution in 1789, the young nation was surrounded by the British, French and Spanish colonies still in America.
In 1808 the new Republic banned the African Slave Trade to the US.
It took further wars with Britain, 1812, Mexico in 1846-48, and Spain in 1898 to finally free the US from the stranglehold of the remaining European colonies surrounding the Republic.
By 1865 the Confederacy was defeated and the Southern states were reunified into the United States.
From the birth of the nation in 1789 until the 1865 defeat of the Confederacy and freeing of all slaves was a total of seventy-six years.
In other words, it took 400 years to build the system of slavery in the United States and within seventy-six years after becoming a Republic, slavery was abolished and all slaves freed.
Now, there is still much work left to do to bring about the racial equality guaranteed by our Constitution. Bias and discrimination are among the most difficult of all deadly sins to overcome.
Yet we still faced the power of evil in our history of imposed slavery and were able to stop it, then destroy it, for all time. At great cost America resisted the dark forces of slavery, the greatest abomination of sin against the Creator, our God. Of that we should be proud.
