History Of Slavery

The governor, John Winthrop, declared the philosophy of the rulers: "... in all times some must be rich, some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjection."

Some Americans in New England entered the business, and in 1637 the first American slave ship, the Desire, sailed from Marblehead. Its holds were partitioned into racks, 2 feet by 6 feet, with leg irons and bars.

"all persons except Negroes" were to get arms and ammunition—probably to fight off Indians.

Took place when the authorities told a group of troublesome shipwrights they could not "worke a stroke of worke more."

Negro woman servant who begot a child by Robert Sweat, a white man. The court ruled "that the said negro woman shall be whipt at the whipping post and the said Sweat shall tomorrow in the forenoon do public penance for his offense at James citychurch..."

A master was convicted of raping two women servants. He also was known to beat his own wife and children; he had whipped and chained another servant until he died. The master was berated by the court, but specifically cleared on the rape charge, despite overwhelming evidence.

Statutes for controlling rebellious slaves were passed.

The Fundamental Constitutions were written by John Locke, his constitution set up a feudal-type aristocracy, in which eight barons would own 40 percent of the colony's land, and only a baron could be governor.

A law was passed in Virginia that "in case any English servant shall run away in company of any Negroes" he would have to give special service for extra years to the master of the runaway Negro.

Virginia colony faced a rebellion of white frontiersmen, joined by slaves and servants, a rebellion so threatening that the governor had to flee the burning capital of Jamestown.

"You may be pleased to know that the very principle and best of the land; the best for soile; the best for situation; as laying in ye center and midle of the town: and as to quantity, nere half, belongs unto eight or nine proprietors. ..."

"very civil and good-natured people, easy to be dealt with, condescending to what Europeans require of them in a civil way, and very ready to return double the presents we make them."

In Virginia the colony's Northern Neck, a plot was discovered in which slaves planned to kill all the whites in the area and escape during a mass funeral.

With enormous landed estates, where the barons controlled completely the lives of their tenants, many of the grievances of the poor were mixed up in the farmers' revolt of Jacob Leisler and his group.

The House of Commons received "a petition of divers merchants, masters of ships, planters and others, trading to foreign plantations... setting forth, that the plantations cannot be maintained without a considerable number of white servants, as well to keep the blacks in subjection, as to bear arms in case of invasion."

Virginia provided for the banishment of any "white man or woman being free who shall intermarry with a negro, mulatoo, or Indian man or woman bond or free."

The law requiring plantation owners to have at least one white servant for every six male adult Negroes.

By this time in Virginia, there were 6,000 slaves, one-twelfth of the population.

Law was passed requiring masters to provide white servants whose indenture time was up with ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings, and a gun, while women servants were to get 15 bushels of corn and forty shillings. Also, the newly freed servants were to get 50 acres of land.

Dismemberment was provided for in the Virginia Code of 1705.

Still, rebellions took place—not many, but enough to create constant fear among white planters. The first large-scale revolt in the North American colonies took place in New York in 1712.

And there was some contact between blacks and Indians, when Africans and Indians joined in an insurrection. But this was quickly suppressed.

They attacked Belchers ships, broke into his warehouses looking for corn, and shot the lieutenant governor when he tried to interfere.

With fear of slave rebellion growing, white servants were allowed in Virginia to join the militia as substitutes for white freemen

A report to the English government said that in South Carolina "black slaves have lately attempted and were very near succeeding in a new revolution ... and therefore, it may be necessary ... to propose some new law for encouraging the entertainment of more white servants in the future. The militia of this province does not consist of above 2000 men."

Maryland passed a law in 1723 providing for cutting off the ears of blacks who struck whites, and that for certain serious crimes, slaves should be hanged and the body quartered and exposed.

In the colonial papers of England, a 1729 report from the lieutenant governor of Virginia to the British Board of Trade tells how "a number of Negroes, about fifteen... formed a design to withdraw from their Master and to fix themselves in the fastnesses of the neighboring Mountains.

Demand began to grow for institutions to contain the "many Beggarly people daily suffered to wander about the Streets.

All the cities built poorhouses, not just for old people, widows, crippled, and orphans, but for unemployed, war veterans, new immigrants.

Mullin found newspaper advertisements between 1736 and 1801 for 1,138 men runaways, and 141 women.

William Byrd, a wealthy Virginia slaveowner, wrote in 1736:
We have already at least 10,000 men of these descendants of Ham, fit to bear arms, and these numbers increase every day, as well by birth as by importation.

"It has always been the policy of this government to create an aversion in them [Indians] to Negroes."

At Stono, South Carolina, in 1739, about twenty slaves rebelled, killed two warehouse guards, stole guns and gunpowder, and headed south, killing people in their way, and burning buildings.

In those European countries, where the idea of private property was becoming powerful, theft was punished brutally. But in the Congo, communal life persisted, the idea of private property was a strange one, and thefts were punished with fines or various degrees of servitude.

Due to high prices for wheat.

It was at sea sixteen weeks, and when it arrived in Boston, forty-six of its 106 passengers were dead of starvation, six of them eaten by the survivors.

Seven slaves were put to death for murdering their master.

The New Yorker Cadwallader Golden, in his Address to the Freeholders, attacked the wealthy as tax dodgers unconcerned with the welfare of others (although he himself was wealthy) and spoke for the honesty and dependability of "the midling rank of mankind" in whom citizens could best trust "our liberty & Property."

In Maryland, where slaves were about one-third of the population in 1750

25,000 whites faced 40,000 black slaves, with 60,000 Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians in the area.

The government was worried about black revolt, and during the Cherokee war, a motion to equip five hundred slaves to fight the Indians lost in the Carolina assembly by a single vote.

Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found.

By 1763, there were 170,000 slaves, about half the population

The South Carolina legislature prohibited Charleston masters from employing Negroes or other slaves as mechanics or in handicraft trades.

1795 Liverpool had more than a hundred ships carrying slaves and accounted for half of all the European slave trade.

10 to 15 million blacks had been transported as slaves to the Americas, representing perhaps one-third of those originally seized in Africa. It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings to death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern Western civilization, at the hands of slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and America, the countries deemed the most advanced in the world.