The Black Experience of the Americas - Final Study guide
1829: A Chronology of Abolition. What happened?
David Walker's Appeal
The Codification of Slavery and Race in 17th Century Virginia
Determining the legal status of blacks in early Virginia remains controversial because laws regulating slavery do not appear in the colony's legal statutes prior to the 1660s—more than forty years after the first African slaves arrived. however, cases prosecuted in Virginia in 1630 and 1640 suggest that Africans may not have received equal justice even before then, while excerpts from laws passed in the 1660s and beyond are clearly discriminatory. The relatively gradual appearance of such laws has led some historians to argue that racial prejudice was crucial to the development of black slavery.
Harriet Tubman
Escaped slavery in 1849. Returned to the South at least 14 times to lead, directly and indirectly, some 130 slaves to freedom.
1827: A Chronology of Abolition. What happened?
Establishment of the first black newspaper. Freedom's Journal.
Country marks
Facial scars indicating particular African origins.
1816: A Chronology of Abolition. What happened? Hint: at age 16 you want to move somewhere else....
Formation of the American Colonization Society and the start of the anti-colonization movement in the free black community.
1826: A Chronology of Abolition. What happened?
Formation of the Massachusetts General Colored Association.
1833: A Chronology of Abolition. What happened? (2)
Garrison's "Declaration of Sentiments" of the society stresses immediate abolition of slavery, end to racial discrimination and "moral suasion" and "non-resistance."
Charlotte Forten
Granddaughter of James Forten After the Civil War began, she applied to Philadelphia's Port Royal Relief Committee to teach newly freed slaves. Traveled to the Seas Islands to teach former slaves. Arrived in 1862. Journal of her experiences were published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864.
Vigilance committees
Groups led by free blacks and their allies in the North to assist fugitive slaves.
1840s - 50s: A Chronology of Abolition. What happened?
Growing militancy in the abolitionist movement to end racial discrimination in the north.
1820s - 30s: A Chronology of Abolition. What happened? (1 of 2)
Impact of the Second Great Awakening leads to the start of social reform movements in the United States especially in the northern states.
Free People of Color of Richmond, Virginia
In 1817, free blacks in Richmond, Virginia, met to discuss the American Colonization Society's plans for sending African Americans back to Africa. Though willing to move away from Virginia, they were not willing to leave North America and petitioned the U.S. Congress to grant them land somewhere on the continent where they could resettle
Henry Highland Garnet
Initiated the National Convention of Colored Men in 1864. an African American abolitionist and orator. An advocate of militant abolitionism, Garnet was a prominent member of the abolition movement that led against moral suasion toward more political action. Renowned for his skills as a public speaker, he urged blacks to take action and claim their own destinies. Garnet was the first black minister to preach to the United States House of Representatives.
Bilboes
Iron hand and leg cuffs used to shackle slaves.
Sojourner Truth
Isabella Baumfree: embodied and spoke powerfully to the intersection of the struggles of blacks, women, and the dispossessed. Influence and Popularity: piercing intelligence, Christian spirituality, speaking ability, and commanding sense of self. Spoke in 1851 for women's rights and equality. Akron, Ohio.
Ladinos
Latinized blacks who were born or raised in Spain, Portugal, or these nations' Atlantic or American colonies and who spoke fluent Spanish or Portuguese.
Black laws
Laws adopted in some Midwestern states requiring all free black residents to supply legal proof of their free status and post a cash bond of up to $1,000 to guarantee their good behavior.
Black codes
Laws regulating the labor and behavior of freedpeople passed by southern states in the immediate aftermath of emancipation. These laws were overturned by the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
William Lloyd Garrison
Led the moral suasion wing of the abolitionist movement, while the wealthy brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan led the political action wing. Together they founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. (1805-1879) American journalist and reformer; he published the famous antislavery newspaper, the Liberator, and helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society, promoting immediate emancipation and racial equality.
Freedom suits
Legal actions by which slaves sought to achieve freedom in British and American courts.
Sarah Grimke
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes 1838; took a leading role in attacking the unjust subordination of women in American life; became a Quaker and leader for women's rights and abolition; Sarah in no way intended to suggest that the condition of free women can be compared to that of slaves in suffering on degradation, but women faced the same limitations as slaves in education and work opportunity.
Isaiah C. Wears
Lincoln's own racism and his keen awareness of the pervasiveness of white racism made him unable to envision a multiracial society. These realities shaped his views on emancipation. Until the Emancipation proclamation of January 1863, his emancipation plans always involved promoting colonization. Meeting with black leaders on August 14, 1862, Lincoln stated, "But for your race among us, there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other. Nevertheless, I repeat, without the institution of slavery, and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence. It is better for us to be separated." 42 the next day, at a meeting of the Statistical Association of the Colored people of Philadelphia, the group's president, Isaiah C. Wears (1822-1900), challenged Lincoln's ideas.
Proclamation for Amnesty and Reconstruction (1863)
Lincoln's proposal for the reorganization and readmission into the Union of the defeated Confederate states.
Abroad marriages
Marriages between slaves who belonged to different owners and lived on different plantations
Maroons
Members of runaway slave communities; also known as cimarrons, from the Spanish cimarrón
1837: A Chronology of Abolition. What happened?
Murder of Elijah Lovejoy by an anti-abolitionist mob.
1832: A Chronology of Abolition. What happened?
New England Anti-Slavery Society organized in the African Baptist Church in the black quarter of the city of Boston.
By the 17th Century, what countries began to dominate the slave trade?
Northern European countries
P.C. Weston
On rice plantations in Georgia and South Carolina, slave laborers worked individually on a set of daily tasks rather than in gangs under the direct supervision of an overseer. But their work was still carefully managed by their owner, as noted in the instructions that the rice planter P.C. Weston issued to his overseer in 1856. The following year, his rules were published in De Bow's Review, a widely circulated magazine dedicated to the "agricultural, commercial, and industrial progress" of the American South.
Martin Delaney
One of the few black leaders to take seriously the notion of the mass recolonization in Africa. In 1859 he visited West Africa's Niger Valley seeking a suitable site for relocation.
Lucy Stanton
One of the first black women to receive an undergraduate degree from an American college, graduating in 1850 from Oberlin. She took the "Ladies' Course," a two-year program that led to a diploma but was separate from the four-year "gentlemen's Course." Stanton delivered this speech to the Oberlin Ladies' Literary Society, of which she was the president.
Taino Indians
One of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean.
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
Part of the Compromise of 1850, this law strengthened federal authority over fugitive slaves.
Fictive kin
People regarded as family even though they were not related by blood or marriage.
Wendell Phillips
Phillips was an American orator, abolitionist, and reformer. He also spoke publicly in favor of women's rights, temperance, abolition and elimination of capital punishment. His most famous speech, The Murder of Lovejoy speech protested the murder of Elijah Lovejoy and gained him recognition from the public. Helped found American Anti-Slavery Society. He was a Boston patrician who was of strict principle. He wouldn't eat cane sugar and wouldn't wear cotton because they were both produced by southern slaves.
New Lights
Protestant ministers who, during the Great Awakening, challenged traditional religious practices by delivering emotional sermons that urged listeners to repent and find salvation in Christ.
The Liberator
Published by William Lloyd Garrison. 450 subscribers in the first year, 400 of whom were African American.
The South Carolina Slave Code, 1740
Punishment was another important function of slave law. In the aftermath of the Stono rebellion, the South Carolina legislature strengthened its already severe code of slave punishment by passing the following legislation.
Cash crops
Readily salable crops grown for commercial sale and export, rather than local use.
Historically black colleges and universities
Separate institutions of higher learning for African Americans. Most of them were founded in the post-emancipation era.
Carracks/caravels
Small sailing ships used by the Portuguese to explore Africa and the Atlantic world. Lightweight, fast, and easy to maneuver, they generally had two to four masts
In 1494, the _________ turned to the __________ to supply slaves for their colonies.
Spanish; Portuguese
Thomas Morris Chester
Speaking at the twenty-ninth anniversary of the Philadelphia Library Company of Colored persons on December 9, 1862, the lawyer and educator Thomas Morris Chester (1834-1892) focused on a central theme in the black freedom struggle: the need for self-respect, or race pride. Chester supported colonization, leaving his family in Liberia during the Civil War. In June 1863, when invading Confederates threatened Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he organized a company of African Americans to help defend the city, but Union commanders rejected their service. In 1864, he became a war correspondent for the Philadelphia Press.
1840: A Chronology of Abolition. What happened?
Split in the abolitionist movement over tactics and philosophy and the formation of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.
Ku Klux Klan
Started by Nathan Bedford Forrest; secret organization that used terrorist tactics in an attempt to restore white supremacy in Southern states after the Civil War.
Susie King Taylor
Susie King Taylor (1848-1912) was a Georgia slave who in 1862 ran away with her cousins and uncles to a contraband camp in the Sea Islands. Mature, well-spoken, and literate, she organized a school for contrabands. After she married Edward King, a black noncommissioned officer in the thirty-third U.S. Colored troops, she was attached to the unit as a laundress. She also taught and nursed the soldiers. The following excerpt is from Taylor's memoir, published in 1902, which is the only published account of its kind.
Georgia Trustees and Settlers Disagree over Slavery
The British crown-appointed trustees who founded Georgia banned slavery in 1735 as a matter of public policy. Though not opposed to slavery on principle, they believed that the adoption of slavery in Georgia would compromise the military security of the colony and discourage white settlers from immigrating there. But many of the colonists who settled in Georgia, convinced that they could not prosper without slaves, repeatedly petitioned the trustees to reverse their ban.
George Whitefield
The British minister George Whitefield (1714-1770) was tremendously popular in the American colonies, where his visits helped sustain and expand the religious enthusiasm of the Great Awakening. He spent several months as a parish priest in Savannah, Georgia, where he saw slavery firsthand. Whitefield did not object to the practice of slavery and later owned slaves himself, but on his first visit to the southern colonies, he was appalled to see how poorly the slaves were treated.
Alexander Falconbridge
The British surgeon Alexander Falconbridge (d. 1792) served as a ship's surgeon on four slave trade voyages between 1780 and 1787 before rejecting the slave trade and becoming an abolitionist. He wrote An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa in 1788, after his conversion. It provides an unflinching account of the brutality of the transatlantic trade.
King Alfonso I
The Kongolese king Afonso I (1509-1542) was a Christian convert who welcomed Portuguese trade, culture, and Christianity into his kingdom as a way to enhance Kongo's position as the dominant state in the region. Afonso read Portuguese and employed a Kongolese secretary, João Teixeira. Composed by the king and written by his secretary, this letter illustrates some of the problems the slave trade created for African leaders who forged alliances with slave trading European nations.
Proceedings of the American Equal Rights Association
The May 12, 1869, meeting of the American Equal Rights Association was its last. By this time, tensions between those who prioritized black male suffrage and those who prioritized woman suffrage had torn the association apart. In this excerpt from the meeting's proceedings, we hear from Frederick Douglass and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, two of the most important African American leaders of the day and key advocates for abolition, African American rights, and women's rights. Susan b. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Pauline W. Davis, Julia Ward Howe, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were key white advocates for both abolition and women's rights, and to differing extents, supporters of African American rights.
Slaughterhouse cases (1873)
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling limiting the authority of the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling expanded the scope of state-level citizenship at the expense of U.S. citizenship.
Civil Rights cases (1883)
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
George Lawrence
The abolition of the international slave trade on January 1, 1808, was commemorated annually by early-nineteenth-century black northerners. Speakers typically deplored the abuses of the trade and celebrated its abolition, while also discussing the ongoing problems that African Americans still faced. George Lawrence presented the following oration at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in New York City on January 1, 1813. Nothing further is known about Lawrence, who gave no other recorded speeches.
Guanches
The aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands.
What is the first stage of the Slave Trade?
The capture and march to the Atlantic Coast.
Fourteenth Amendment (ratified 1868)
The constitutional amendment that defined U.S. citizenship to include blacks and guarantees citizens due process and equal protection of the laws.
Fifteenth Amendment (ratified 1870)
The constitutional amendment that enfranchised black men.
Thirteenth Amendment (1865)
The constitutional amendment that officially outlawed slavery everywhere in the Union.
Fugitive slave clause
The constitutional clause permitting slave owners of any state to retrieve their fugitive slaves from any other state.
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
The controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that Scott, a slave, was not entitled to sue in the Missouri courts and was not free even though he had been taken into a free territory; that no person of African descent could be a citizen; that slaves were property; and that Congress had no authority to regulate slavery in the territories.
Mary Reynolds
The daughter of a free black father and an enslaved mother, Mary Reynolds grew up on the Kilpatrick family plantation in Black River, Louisiana. Although her father was willing to buy Reynolds's mother and children, their owner refused to sell them, so the family remained enslaved until the Union army took control of Louisiana during the civil War. Reynolds told her story in the mid-1930s to a writer working for the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration. Interviewed in the Dallas county (Texas) convalescent home, she claimed to be over one hundred years old, and although she appeared feeble and frail, her memories of slavery were vivid.
Diaspora
The dispersion of a people from their homeland. Applied to Africans, this term usually describes the mass movement of Africans and their descendants to the Americas during the slave trade.
Confederate States of America
The eleven southern states that seceded from the United States in 1860 and 1861, precipitating the Civil War.
Freedmen's Bureau (1865-1869)
The federal agency created to aid freedpeople in their transition to freedom.
Louisiana Purchase (1803)
The federal government's purchase of Louisiana from France, which doubled the size of the United States and fostered the spread of slavery.
Boston Merchants Samuel Sewall and John Saffin Clash over Slavery
The first antislavery tract published in New England, The Selling of Joseph, condemned both African slavery and the slave trade in North America. Written by Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), who had long been uneasy about slavery, it may have been inspired by the freedom struggles of a slave named Adam, who belonged to John Saffin (1626-1710). Saffin had promised that he would give Adam his freedom after hiring out his labor to a nearby farmer for a term of seven years, but Saffin later reneged, forcing Adam to petition for his freedom and inspiring white Bostonians to circulate a petition on his behalf. Sewall's antislavery tract does not take up Adam's case, but instead contests the legitimacy of slavery as an institution by invoking the biblical tale of Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers. Saffin's reply provides biblical support for slavery, while also attacking the character of Africans as a race.
Belinda
The following account of an African childhood interrupted by enslavement appears in a petition to the Massachusetts legislature written on behalf of an African-born slave known only as Belinda. Captured and enslaved in the 1720s, she spent much of her life as the property of Isaac Royall, a Medford, Massachusetts, resident and British loyalist during the Revolutionary War. Royall fled the colony and died in 1781. Freed after her master's death, Belinda petitioned the new state's new government for an "allowance" from the estate of her former master. Composed when she was over seventy years old, Belinda's petition was signed with an X, indicating that she was illiterate. No record of who wrote the text exists.
Peter Blake
The following ledger is from the ship's log kept by Peter Blake, the captain of the slave ship James. It chronicles the mortality among the ship's African captives on a 1675-1676 voyage from the Gold Coast to Barbados. Such accounts were used to calculate the profits and losses of a voyage. They also provide a record of the horrors of the transatlantic journey.
Colonization
The idea that blacks should be sent back to Africa or moved to another territory outside the United States.
Uplift
The idea that racial progress demands autonomous black efforts; especially seen as the responsibility of the more fortunate of the race to help lift up the less fortunate.
stono rebellion
The most serious slave rebellion in the the colonial period which occurred in 1739 in South Carolina. 100 African Americans rose up, got weapons and killed several whites then tried to escape to S. Florida. The uprising was crushed and the participants executed. The main form of rebellion was running away, though there was no where to go.
Naturalization Act of 1790
The nation's first immigration law, which instituted a two-year residency requirement for immigrants who wished to become U.S. citizens and limited naturalization to free white people.
What is the second stage of the Slave Trade?
The ocean voyage from Africa to the Americas.
U.S. Colored Troops
The official designation for the division of black units that joined the U.S. army beginning in 1863.
Living out
The practice of allowing slaves who were hired out in urban areas to keep part of their wages to pay for their rented lodgings.
Hiring out
The practice of owners contracting out their slaves to work for other employers.
Civil disobedience
The refusal to obey a law that one believes is unjust.
Early National Period
The revolution marked the end of slavery in Haiti and started the formation of the Republic of Haiti. The rebellion against French authority was the most successful slave revolt ever.
Black Reconstruction
The revolutionary political period from 1867 to 1877 when, for the first time ever, black men actively participated in the mainstream politics of the reconstructed southern states and, in turn, transformed the nation's political life.
James Habersham and William Piercy
The seminarian David Margate was born in Africa and educated at Trevecca College in South Wales. The Countess of Huntingdon, who founded the college, sent Margate to minister to the slaves at Bethesda, an orphanage in Savannah, Georgia. Bethesda was originally established by George Whitefield, who bequeathed it to the Countess in his will. After Whitefield's death in 1770, the Countess took over Bethesda and staffed it with students and clergy from Trevecca. Margate did not stay at Bethesda long because he soon became convinced that God wished him to deliver his people from slavery. Warned by sympathetic whites to avoid discussing slavery, Margate nonetheless publicly condemned the institution and had to flee Georgia to avoid being arrested for inciting a slave revolt. Margate left no written record of his stay, but the story of his trip and the sense of alarm that his ideas provoked are captured in a series of letters about Margate written by concerned whites. James Habersham, a friend of Whitefield's, and William Piercy, an English curate whom the Countess of Huntingdon had appointed to serve as Bethesda's president, wrote the following letters in the spring of 1775.
Code Noir
The slave code used in France's New World colonies.
James Barbot Jr.
The son and nephew of slave traders, James Barbot Jr. worked aboard slave ships for much of his life and recorded his experiences in several published works. Employed on the Don Carlos as the supercargo (officer) in charge of the slaves' purchase and sale, Barbot wrote the following description of how best to manage the captives on board. Despite the precautions described here, an onboard rebellion took place on the ship's first day at sea. At least twenty-eight captives were "lost"— either killed in battle or through suicide by drowning.
Madison Hemings
The son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Madison Hemings (1805-1877) grew up on Jefferson's Monticello estate. When Jefferson died in 1826, he freed Madison and his brother Eston in his will. The brothers were allowed to stay in Virginia as a result of a petition to the legislature that Jefferson submitted before his death, and they remained there until their mother died in 1835. The Hemings children were descended from slave owners on their mother's side as well. Sally Hemings was fathered by John Wayles, Jefferson's father-in-law—which made her Jefferson's wife Martha's half-sister and made Wayles her children's paternal grandfather. In 1873, Madison Hemings shared his family history with S. F. Wetmore, a reporter for Ohio's Pike County Republican.
Triangle trade
The trade system that propelled the transatlantic slave trade, in which European merchants exchanged manufactured goods for enslaved Africans, whom they shipped to the Americas to exchange for New World commodities, which they then shipped back to European markets.
What is the third stage of the Slave Trade?
The transfer from the initial American point of disembarkation to the workplace.
Sojourner Truth
Though entitled to freedom at age twenty-one under New York's gradual emancipation law, Isabella Baumfree's son Peter ended up in Alabama after her former owner, John Dumont, sold the boy to his brother, who shipped him out of state. He might well have remained enslaved there all his life but for his mother's battle to free him. Isabella Baumfree (1797-1883) changed her name to Sojourner truth in 1843. Nearly seventy years old when she spoke at the second meeting of the American equal Rights Association in New York City in May 1867. She had begun life as a slave in New York and become one of the most famous African Americans of the nineteenth century. An abolitionist and a supporter of women's rights, Truth electrified audiences with her candor and forthright manner of expression.
Conjure
Traditional African folk magic in which men and women called conjurers draw on the powers of the spirit world to influence human affairs.
Force Acts (1870, 1871)
Two laws providing federal protection of blacks' civil rights in the face of white terroristic activities.
What three major areas in Africa supplied the bulk of the slave sent to the United States?
Upper Guinea (Senegambia to Sierra Leone), Lower Guinea (the Gold Coast to the Bight of Benin), and Kongo-Angola (West Central Africa).
Vilet Lester
Vilet Lester wrote or dictated the following letter to her former mistress, Patsey Patterson, in the summer of 1857. Little information is available about Lester's life, but the letter suggests that the Patterson family had sold Lester away from her North Carolina home several years earlier. Lester lists the series of owners she has lived with since she "was constrained" to leave North Carolina and expresses how much she misses her family and her former owner. She is also anxious to locate her daughter, whom her new owner has agreed to purchase.
William Still
Was an African-American abolitionist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, conductor on the Underground Railroad, writer, historian and civil rights activist. He was chairman of the Vigilance Committee of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. He directly aided fugitive slaves and kept records of their lives, to help families reunite after slavery was abolished. After the American Civil War, he wrote an account of the underground system and the experiences of many refugee slaves, entitled The Underground Railroad Records, published in 1872. Assisted Octavius Catto and helped to succeed in getting a desegregation law passed in 1867.
John Mercer Langston
Was an American abolitionist, attorney, educator, and political activist. Together with his older brothers Gideon and Charles, he became active in the Abolitionist movement. He helped runaway slaves to escape to the North along the Ohio part of the Underground Railroad. In 1858 he and Charles partnered in leading the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society.
Indentured servants
White laborers who came to the English North American colonies under contract to work for a specified amount of time, usually four to seven years.
1831: A Chronology of Abolition. What happened?
William Lloyd Garrison starts publishing The Liberator and changes his position on colonization and gradual emancipation.
Thomas Pinckney [Achates]
Writing under the pen name Achates, Thomas Pinckney (1750-1828), a seventy-two-year-old Revolutionary War hero and former South Carolina congressman, published a pamphlet on the Denmark Vesey conspiracy shortly after it was suppressed. In this selection, he analyzes the causes of the planned rebellion and offers suggestions on how future slave unrest might be prevented.
When did the Slave Trade climax?
in the 1780s
Maria Stewart
leader of the Philadelphia female anti-slavery society, a biracial abolitionist organization. Mostly made of quaker women but also good amount of black women. she publicly addressed the black men about acting against slavery. She had lost hostility coming from the black community because of that.
Freedom's Journal
o Freedom's Journal was the first African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States. Founded by Rev. Peter Williams, Jr. and other free black men in New York City, it was published weekly starting with the 16 March 1827 issue. Freedom's Journal was superseded in 1829 by The Rights of All, published between 1829 and 1830 by Samuel Cornish, the former senior editor of the Journal.
Theodore Weld
• A preacher and abolitionist who collect slave stories (with his wife, Angelina Grimke) in American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses • Weld was devoted to the abolitionism movement. He advised the breakaway anti-slavery Whigs in Congress and his anonymous tract "American Slavery as It Is" (1839) was the inspiration for Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
• An abolitionist from Massachusetts and commander of the First Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers. • Received a Union flag for his unit, which was composed of former slaves.
Lydia Maria Child
• This white woman wrote popular and highly successful historical novels. In 1831, she attended a public meeting where she heard William Lloyd Garrison give a speech against slavery. She was moved and in 1833, her book, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, was published. The book was powerful and caused many notable whites to join the anti-slavery movement, including Charles Sumner. Her traditional audience and the sales of her books dropped dramatically and she started a weekly newspaper instead, the Anti-Slavery Standard. She, along with Lucretia Mott and Maria Chapman, were elected to the executive committee of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1839. While she continue to fight for racial equality, she broadened her views to include the rights of women and Native Americans.
William Lloyd Garrison
(1805-1879) American journalist and reformer; he published the famous antislavery newspaper, the Liberator, and helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society, promoting immediate emancipation and racial equality. Led the moral suasion wing of the abolitionist movement, while the wealthy brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan led the political action wing. Together they founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833.
William Wells Brown
(1815-1884). Playwright and novelist who wrote The Escape, or Leap to Freedom. He was born into slavery near Lexington, KY and during his 20 years as a slave belonged to 3 different owners. He escapes to Canada when his owner takes him to Cincinnati. In 1843, he became an abolitionist leader. He took his middle name from a Quaker who helped him escape to Canada. He first settled in Cleveland and then worked on the steamships on Lake Eerie. He worked the Underground Railroad and helped many slaves escape to freedom in Canada. Wrote his own slave narrative. The Fugitive Slave Act stranded him in Britain in 1850. He was the first African American Playwright to be born into slavery.
Frederick Douglass
(1817-1895) American abolitionist and writer, he escaped slavery and became a leading African American spokesman and writer. He published his biography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and founded the abolitionist newspaper, the North Star.
What fraction of those imported to North America came from Kongo-Angola regions?
1/4
What fraction of those imported to North America came from the Bight of Biafra region?
1/4
What fraction of those imported to North America came from the Senegambian region?
1/6
African Slave Trade: Dates
1450 - 1867
Between ______(year) and ______(year), Europeans transported a minimum of __________ people in some _____________ slaving expeditions (equivalent to _____ ships a year.)
1492; 1867; 10 million; 27,000; 170
Between ______(year) and ______(year), there was a _____% mortality rate.
1492; 1867; 50
In what year was the Dutch West Indies Trading Company formed?
1621
In what year was the British Royal African Company formed?
1672
Important U.S. Colonial Period and Early Republic Slave Revolts
1676: Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia (led by Nathaniel Bacon but has mixed race participation) 1712: New York City 1739: Stono Rebellion in South Carolina 1741: New York City 1800: Gabriel's Conspiracy in Virginia
Expansion of the Cotton Kingdom
1790-1820: Early National period 1820-1860: Antebellum era 1790s: Admission of Kentucky and Tennessee as slave states into the Union After 1800: Admission of Mississippi and Alabama as slave states into the Union 1803 Louisiana purchase 1811 Acquisition of Florida 1845 Annexation of Texas 1750-1850: Industrial Revolution in Britain begins with the expansion of the Textile industry 1793 Invention of the Cotton Gin 1790 3,000 bales of cotton produced in the south 1860 4 million bales of cotton produced in the south 1790 650,000 slaves in the United States 1830 2 million slaves in the United States 1860 4 million slaves in the United States 1790-1860: Over 1 million slaves sold in the domestic slave trade from the upper south to the lower south Cotton was the single largest item of export from the United States throughout this period and its value outweighed the value of all other items of export from the United States 1810: African Americans constituted 20% of the population of the United States and 90% of the black population was enslaved in the southern states 1820: Missouri Crisis
Robert Purvis
1810-1898. Successful African American businessman who helped start the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Often considered to have started the Underground Railroad.
A Chronology of Abolition
1816: Formation of the American Colonization Society and the start of the anti-colonization movement in the free black community 1826: Formation of the Massachusetts General Colored Association 1827: Establishment of the first black newspaper. Freedom's Journal 1829: David Walker's Appeal 1820s—30s: Impact of the Second Great Awakening leads to the start of social reform movements in the United States especially in the northern states Colonization and gradual emancipation movements in the upper south and north 1831: William Lloyd Garrison starts publishing The Liberator and changes his position on colonization and gradual emancipation 1832: New England Anti-Slavery Society organized in the African Baptist Church in the black quarter of the city of Boston 1833: American Anti-Slavery Society organized in Philadelphia included three African Americans, Robert Purvis, James Barbadoes and James McCrummill Garrison's "Declaration of Sentiments" of the society stresses immediate abolition of slavery, end to racial discrimination and "moral suasion" and "non-resistance" 1830s: Anti-black and anti-abolition mobs in the north result in race riots and physical harassment of abolitionists 1837: Murder of Elijah Lovejoy by an anti-abolitionist mob 1840: Split in the abolitionist movement over tactics and philosophy and the formation of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society 1840s-50s: Growing militancy in the abolitionist movement and movement to end racial discrimination in the north
Important U.S. Antebellum Slave Revolts
1822: Denmark Vesey's conspiracy in South Carolina 1831: Nat Turner's rebellion in Virginia 1841: Creole slave revolt led by Madison Washington
James Forten
1836: Founded the Christian-inspired American Moral Reform Society. 1766-1842. A free African American patriot who worked on an American warship during the Revolution. Later became a successful businessman who helped organize abolitionists. Funded prominent anti-slavery newspaper "The Liberator."
Before the trade picked up (1700), ___________ Africans had already been shipped to the Americas.
2.2 million
Of the 80,000 Africans that were shipped every year during the climax of the Slave Trade, what fraction were shipped in the 18th and 19th centuries?
4/5
When the trade climaxed, how many Africans were shipped a year?
80,000
About ____% of the captives were sent to the brutal tropical sugar growing regions of Brazil and the Caribbean. ____% to Brazil, and ____% to North America.
95; 40; 5-6
Somerset case (1772)
A British legal case that freed an American slave named James Somerset and inspired other slaves to sue for their freedom.
Second Great Awakening
A Christian revival movement that took place during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Alfred M. Green
A Philadelphia schoolteacher, gave this speech to an assembly of black men in Philadelphia on April 20, 1861, just a few days after Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers to put down the insurrection. Green urges an enthusiastic response, pointing to the patriotism of black men who fought in previous wars, despite "past grievances."
American Missionary Association
A Protestant missionary organization resulting from the merger of black and white missionary societies in 1846 to promote abolition and black education.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
A best-selling novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe that portrayed the horrors of slavery, boosted the abolitionist cause, and angered the proslavery South.
Compromise of 1850
A compromise aimed at reducing sectional tensions by admitting California as a free state; permitting the question of slavery to be settled by popular sovereignty in New Mexico and the Utah Territories; abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia; resolving the Texas debt issue; and enacting a new fugitive slave law.
Three-Fifths Compromise
A compromise between the northern and southern states, reached during the Constitutional Convention, establishing that three-fifths of each state's slave population would be counted in determining federal taxes and representation in the House of Representatives.
First Confiscation Act (1861)
A congressional act authorizing the confiscation of Confederate property, including slaves employed in the rebellion, who were then considered free.
Second Confiscation Act (1862)
A congressional act declaring freedom for all slaves employed in the rebellion and for refugee slaves able to make it to Union-controlled territory.
Wade-Davis Bill (1864)
A congressional proposal for the reorganization and readmission into the Union of the defeated Confederate states. Lincoln refused to sign the bill.
Asiento
A contract or trade agreement created by the Spanish crown.
Wilmot Proviso (1846)
A controversial congressional proposal that sought to prohibit slavery in the new territories gained as a result of the Mexican- American War. Although it did not pass the Senate, it sparked angry debate between the North and South.
Gullah
A creole language composed of a blend of West African languages and English.
Black Nationalism
A diffuse ideology founded on the idea that black people constituted a nation within a nation. It fostered black pride and encouraged black people to control the economy of their communities.
Lord Dunmore's Proclamation (1775)
A document issued by Virginia's royal governor, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, in November 1775, offering freedom to "rebel" colonists' slaves who joined his forces.
Habeas corpus
A feature of English common law that protects prisoners from being detained without trial. Translated literally, the Latin phrase means "you should have the body."
Lying out
A form of resistance in which slaves hid near their home plantations, often to escape undesirable work assignments or abusive treatment by their owners.
Elmina Castle
A fortress in present-day Ghana, built by the Portuguese as a trading post in 1482 and used as a major slave trading center by the Dutch from 1637 to 1814.
Sarah Mapps Douglass
A founding member of the Female Literary Society of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Female Anti- Slavery Society. A well-regarded lecturer and political essayist, she also established a high school for black girls and taught at the Institute for Colored Youth. Her life and activism reflected her deep commitment to Quakerism. In the speech excerpted here, which she gave at one of the first meetings of the Female Literary Society, she describes the awakening of her compassion for enslaved blacks.
Coffle
A group of animals, prisoners, or slaves chained together in a line.
Thomas Cole and Other Free Blacks
A group of freemen of color appealed to the South Carolina Senate to repeal some of the provisions against free blacks contained in the former colony's slave codes. Passed in the aftermath of the Stono rebellion, the 1740 Negro Act denied free blacks the right to trial by jury and prohibited them from testifying under oath. It also permitted slaves, who could testify under oath, to present informal testimony against free blacks. These authors called their document a "memorial," which at the time meant a written statement of facts or a petition presented to a legislative body.
Encomienda
A labor system used by the Spanish in their colonization of the Americas. Under this system, the crown granted colonists control over a specified number of Native Americans from whom they could extract labor.
Creole
A language that originated as a combination of other languages; the term creole can also refer to people who are racially or culturally mixed.
Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)
A law that allowed the residents of Kansas and Nebraska Territories to decide whether slavery should be allowed.
Abolitionist movement
A loose coalition of organizations with black and white members that worked in various ways to end slavery immediately.
Elizabeth Jennings
A member of the Ladies Literary Society of New York, founded in 1834 by the city's elite black women to promote self- improvement through reading, discussion, and community activities. Jennings gave the speech excerpted here at the society's third annual meeting, which was also attended by a number of supportive men. Jennings's topic, the importance of black women improving their minds, was a consistent theme among elite black women.
Quaker
A member of the Religious Society of Friends, a pacifist Protestant sect known for its commitment to social justice.
Special Field Order 15 (1865)
A military order by Union general William T. Sherman distributing confiscated and abandoned Confederate land to freedmen.
Great Awakening
A multidenominational series of evangelical revivals that took place in North America between the 1730s and the 1780s.
Underground Railroad
A network of antislavery activists who helped fugitive slaves escape to the North and Canada.
Convict lease
A penal system in which convict labor is hired out to landowners or businesses to generate income for the state.
Mulatto
A person with mixed white and African ancestry.
Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (1862)
A presidential proclamation giving the Confederacy one hundred days to cease the rebellion. If it did not, all its slaves would be freed.
Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
A presidential proclamation, issued by Abraham Lincoln, freeing all slaves under Confederate control and authorizing the use of black troops in the Civil War.
Moral suasion
A primary strategy in the abolitionist movement that relied on vigorous appeals to the nation's moral and Christian conscience.
Political action
A primary strategy in the abolitionist movement that relied on working through political channels to force changes in the law and political practices.
Contraband
A refugee slave seeking protection behind Union lines. This designation recognized slaves' status as human property and paved the way for their emancipation.
Ring shout
A religious ritual developed by slaves in the West Indies and North America that involved forming a circle and shuffling counterclockwise while singing and praying.
Bobalition
A rendition of the word abolition, based on what whites heard as a mispronunciation by blacks. It was used on broadsides and in newspapers to mock free black celebrations of abolition.
Gag rule
A series of congressional resolutions passed by the House of Representatives between 1836 and 1840 that tabled, without discussion, petitions regarding slavery; the gag rule was instituted to silence dissent over slavery. It was repealed in 1844.
Black convention movement
A series of national, regional, and local conventions, starting in 1830, where black leaders addressed the concerns of free and enslaved blacks.
Personal liberty laws
A series of state laws in the North aimed at preventing the return of fugitive slaves to the South.
Driver
A slave assigned to oversee the work of other slaves.
Stono rebellion (1739)
A slave rebellion that took place near South Carolina's Stono River in 1739. It was led by slaves who hoped to find freedom in Spanish Florida. The rebels killed about twenty whites before they were captured and subdued.
Truant
A slave who ran away for a limited period of time to visit loved ones; attend religious meetings or other social events; or escape punishment, abusive treatment, or undesirable work assignments.
North Star
A star, also known as Polaris, that always points north and was used by escaped slaves to navigate their way to freedom.
Half-freedom
A status allotted primarily to Dutch-owned slaves who helped defend New Netherland against Indian attacks. Half-freedom liberated adult slaves but not their children.
Chattel slavery
A system by which slaves were considered portable property and denied all rights or legal authority over themselves or their children.
Task system
A system of slave labor in which enslaved workers were assigned daily tasks and permitted to work unsupervised as long as they completed their tasks.
Bozales
A term used by the Spanish for recently imported African captives.
Invisible church
A term used to describe groups of African American slaves who met in secret for Christian worship.
Sarah G. Stanley
A twenty-year- old black schoolteacher, represented the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society of Delaware, Ohio, at an Ohio convention of black men gathered to petition the state legislature to permit black men to vote. Unable to address the all-male convention directly because she was a woman, Stanley arranged for one of the male delegates to read her statement, excerpted here, which thrilled the convention. She expressed black women's support for the black male vote in the strongest possible terms, but the appeal to the Ohio legislature failed. During and after the Civil War, Stanley would go on to become a teacher of freedpeople.
Sarah H. Bradford
After the Civil War, supporters and friends of Harriet Tubman (c. 1820-1913) encouraged her to record her extraordinary life story for both posterity and financial support. Sarah H. Bradford (1818-1912), an admirer and friend, wrote the account authorized by Tubman and based on interviews with Tubman herself, anecdotes, documents, letters, and newspaper articles. Tubman—slave and fugitive; conductor on the underground railroad; Union scout, spy, cook, and nurse; lecturer for woman suffrage; and caretaker and benefactor of indigent African Americans all her life—was a heroine in her own time and remains an iconic figure in the black freedom struggle. Bradford's account, however, has been criticized as exaggerated. As you read the following excerpt, try to detect the real person behind Bradford's rhetoric and her transcription of Tubman's speech.
Theodore Parker
Also transcendentalist and a theologian and radical reformer who attacked slavery from the pulpit.
1833: A Chronology of Abolition. What happened? (1)
American Anti-Slavery Society organized in Philadelphia included three African Americans, Robert Purvis, James Barbadoes, and James McCrummill.
Angelina Grimke
American political activist, abolitionist, women's rights advocate, and supporter of the women's suffrage movement. A letter she sent to William Lloyd Garrison was published in his newspaper (The Liberator) and a speech she gave to abolitionist in Philadelphia brought her fame.
Lucy Stone
American women suffragist who was well-known for being an accomplished antislavery speaker that also supported the women's rights movement. She was the first woman to receive a college degree and the first to keep her maiden name.
Amistad case
An 1839 slave insurrection aboard the Amistad, a Spanish ship, in international waters near Cuba. The case became a widely publicized abolitionist cause and ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which freed the rebels in 1841.
Creole insurrection
An 1841 slave insurrection aboard the Creole, a ship carrying 135 slaves from Hampton Roads, Virginia, to New Orleans, Louisiana.
Civil Rights Act of 1866
An act defining U.S. citizenship and protecting the civil rights of freedpeople.
Reconstruction Act of 1867 (first)
An act dividing the South into military districts and requiring the former Confederate states to write new constitutions at conventions with delegates elected by universal male suffrage.
Northwest Ordinance (1787)
An act of the Second Continental Congress organizing the region known as the Old Northwest, which included U.S. territories north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. Slavery was banned in these territories.
Civil Rights Act of 1875
An act requiring equal treatment regardless of race in public accommodations and on public conveyances.
Indian Removal Act (1830)
An act signed into law by President Andrew Jackson forcing Indians living east of the Mississippi River to relocate to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma).
Missouri Compromise (1820)
An agreement balancing the admission of Missouri as a slave state with the admission of Maine as a free state and prohibiting slavery north of latitude 36°30′ in any state except Missouri.
Crop lien
An agricultural system in which a farmer borrows against his anticipated crop for the seed and supplies he needs and settles his debt after the crop is harvested.
Sharecropping
An agricultural system that emerged during Reconstruction in which a landowner contracts with a farmer to work a parcel of land in return for a share of the crop.
Negro Election Day
An annual New England celebration in which black communities elected their own kings and governors in elaborate ceremonies that included royal processions, political parades, and inaugural parties.
Popular sovereignty
An approach to resolving the question of whether to allow slavery in new states by letting residents of the territories decide.
Port Royal Experiment
An attempt by government officials and civilian volunteers to assist Sea Island slaves, who had been abandoned by their owners, in their transition to freedom.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
An educator, journalist, and reformer who was deeply committed to both black and women's rights. In the 1850s, she was also a proponent of emigration to Canada. Following the split of the AeRA, she sided with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan b. Anthony in founding the National Woman Suffrage Association. At the time she gave this speech, Cary was teaching in Washington, D.C. The speech captures the substance of remarks she made before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives in support of a petition on behalf of enfranchising women in Washington, D.C. In 1883, Cary received her law degree from Howard University.
National Equal Rights League
An organization established by black leaders in 1864 to promote emancipation, legal equality, and black male suffrage.
Union League
An organization founded in 1862 to promote the Republican Party. During Reconstruction, the league recruited freedpeople into the party and advanced their political education.
Mutual aid society
An organization or voluntary association in which members agreed to assist one another in securing benefits such as insurance.
Southern strategy
An unsuccessful British military plan, adopted in late 1778, that was designed to defeat the patriots by recapturing the American South.
John Brown's raid (1859)
An unsuccessful attempt by the white abolitionist John Brown to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and incite a slave insurrection.
New York City draft riots (1863)
Anti-Black riots sparked by white working-class opposition to the Union's military draft.
1830: A Chronology of Abolition. What happened?
Anti-black and anti-abolition mobs in the north result in race riots and physical harassment of abolitionists.
Henry Highland Garnet (document)
At the time he delivered this speech, Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882) had been involved in abolitionist activities for more than ten years. He had studied theology at Oneida Institute, where he sharpened his intellectual and rhetorical skills. As a pastor, he mastered public speaking. In 1843, he was one of seventy delegates from twelve states who attended the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York. There he gave a controversial speech that called on slaves to revolt. Notice a crucial rhetorical technique: he addressed his speech to slaves, although of course no slaves were present.
Barracoons
Barracks or sheds where some slaves were confined before boarding the slave ships.
David Walker
Black abolitionist who called for the immediate emancipation of slaves; wrote the "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World."- called for a bloody end to white supremacy; believed that the only way to end slavery was for slaves to physically revolt.
Exodusters
Black migrants who left the South to settle on federal land in Kansas.
Buffalo soldiers
Black soldiers who served in U.S. army units in the West.
Lemuel Haynes
Born in Connecticut, he was abandoned by his white mother and African father. He grew up in Massachusetts, where he was bound out as an indentured servant at the age of six months. He joined the Granville minutemen and fought with patriot forces until 1776, when he caught typhus and had to return home. That year, he wrote the following unpublished and recently discovered manuscript. Expands on the Declaration of Independence by calling for an anti-slavery revolution. He was self-educated and became ordained as a Congregationalist minister.
Phillis Wheatly
Born in Gambia, she was only seven or eight years old when she was sold into slavery. Her masters encouraged her to learn how to read and write and were so impressed by her intelligence that they permitted her to devote her time largely to her education and to develop a gift for poetry. She wrote and published her first poems as a teenager, attracting attention and controversy as an early black author who spoke on behalf of a people whom many whites saw as illiterate by nature.
David George
Born in Virginia to African parents, David George was a slave who escaped from his master several times before evacuation with the British when they shipped out of Charleston. His account of his years as a fugitive slave describes his slow conversion to Christianity. A friend of the black Baptist minister George Liele, George became a minister after he resettled in Nova Scotia and later established a black Baptist church in Sierra Leone.
Olaudah Equiano
Born in what is today southeast Nigeria, Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797) was the youngest son of an Igbo village leader in the kingdom of Benin. Kid- napped into slavery at age eleven, he was resold several times by African masters during his six-month journey to the African coast, where he was sold to a slave trader who carried him to the West Indies and into slavery in Virginia. Written after Equiano purchased his own freedom and became active in the British antislavery movement, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano has long been considered the best African account of enslavement, the Middle Passage, and eighteenth- century life in an African village—although one scholar has recently suggested that Equiano's description of his African past is fictional.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Born to free blacks in the North. Aided slaves to safety on the Underground Railroad. Wrote: "Eliza Harris, Ethiopia, Bury Me in a Free Land, Iola Leroy."
Frederick Douglass (document)
By the time Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) gave this speech, on July 5, 1852, he was as seasoned a speaker as henry highland garnet, and more well known. This may be Douglass's most famous speech. He delivered it to the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, New York, which had invited him to address an Independence Day celebration in Corinthian hall. Some five hundred to six hundred people each paid 12½ cents to hear the renowned abolitionist. As with many community celebrations at the time, this one began with a prayer and a reading of the Declaration of Independence. Douglass made the most of the occasion to drive home his message. The audience, the local press reported, reacted with much applause.
Charles Remond
Charles Lenox Remond was an American orator, activist and abolitionist based in Massachusetts. He lectured against slavery across the Northeast, and in the British Isles on an 1840 tour with William Lloyd Garrison.
An Act for Regulating of Slaves in New Jersey, 1713 - 1714
Colonial statutes regulated the status of individual slaves and the workings of the slave system as a whole. New Jersey legislators enacted the following law to prohibit the colony's citizens from engaging in any kind of commercial transaction with slaves without first securing the permission of the slave's owner. It also prohibited citizens from sheltering slaves who might be fugitives or from freeing their own slaves without pledging "security" funds to the colony should the former slaves ever require public support.
Loyalists
Colonists who remained loyal to Britain during the American Revolution.
1820s - 30s: A Chronology of Abolition. What happened? (2 of 2)
Colonization and gradual emancipation movements in the upper south and north.
Tight packing
Crowding the human cargo carried on slave ships to maximize profits. By contrast, "loose packing" involved carrying fewer slaves in better conditions in an effort to keep mortality rates low.
