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Slavery in the colonial history of the United States

Slavery in the colonial history of the United States refers to the institution of slavery that existed in the European colonies in North America which eventually became part of the United States of America. Slavery developed due to a combination of factors, primarily the labour demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies, which had resulted in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery existed in every European colony in the Americas during the early modern period, and both Africans and indigenous peoples were targets of enslavement by European colonists during the era.

This article is about slavery in the Colonial era. For slavery after the United States were formed, see Slavery in the United States.

As Spanish, French, Dutch, and British gradually established colonies in North America from the 16th century onwards, they began to enslave indigenous people, using them as forced labour to help develop colonial economies. As indigenous peoples suffered massive population losses due to imported diseases, Europeans quickly turned to importing slaves from Africa, primarily to work on slave plantations that produced cash crops. The enslavement of indigenous people in North America was later replaced during the 18th century by the enslavement of black African people. Concurrent with the development of slavery, racist ideology was developed among Europeans in Europe and European colonists, the rights of free people of color in European colonies were curtailed, slaves were legally defined as chattel property, and the condition of slavery as hereditary.


The Thirteen Colonies of northern British America, were for much or all of the period less dependent on slavery than the Caribbean colonies, or those of New Spain, or Brazil, and slavery did not develop significantly until later in the colonial era. Nonetheless, slavery was legal in every colony prior to the American Revolutionary War, and was most prominent in the Southern Colonies (as well as, the southern Mississippi River and Florida colonies of France, Spain, and Britain), which by then developed large slave-based plantation systems. Slavery in Europe's North America colonies which did not have warm climates and ideal conditions for plantations to exist primarily took the form of domestic labour or doing other forms of unpaid work alongside non-enslaved counterparts. The American Revolution led to the first abolition laws in the Americas, although the institution of chattel slavery would continue to exist and expand across the Southern United States until finally being abolished at the time of the American Civil War in 1865.[2][3][4]

(1526)

San Miguel de Gualdape

Gloucester County, Virginia Revolt (1663)

[80]

New York Slave Revolt of 1712

(1731)

Samba Rebellion

(1739)

Stono Rebellion

New York Slave Insurrection of 1741

1791 Mina conspiracy

(1794)

Pointe Coupée conspiracy

Colonial slave rebellions before 1776, or before 1801 for Louisiana, include:

Ethridge, Robbie Franklyn (2010). From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.  978-0807834350.

ISBN

Wood, Betty. The Origins of American Slavery. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997.  978-0809016082.

ISBN

Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. 50th Anniversary edition. New York: International Publishers, 1993.  0717806057

ISBN

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1998.

Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974.

Genovese, Eugene D.

Gutman, Herbert G. . New York: Pantheon, 1976.

The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925

Huggins, Nathan. Black Odyssey: The African-American Ordeal in Slavery. New York: Pantheon, 1990.

Jewett, Clayton E. and John O. Allen; Slavery in the South: A State-By-State History. (Greenwood Press, 2004)

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

McManus, Edgar J. A History of Negro Slavery in New York, Syracuse University Press, 1966

American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975.

Morgan, Edmund S.

Olwell, Robert. Masters, Slaves, & Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (1998).

Polgar, Paul J.; Lerner, Marc H.; Cromwell, Jesse, eds. (2023). Beyond 1619: The Atlantic Origins of American Slavery. University of Pennsylvania Press.  978-1-5128-2501-5.

ISBN

. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Resendez, Andres

Schwalm, Leslie A. A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Silkenat, David. Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Snyder, Terri L. The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Trenchard, David (2008). . In Hamowy, Ronald (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; Cato Institute. pp. 469–470. ISBN 978-1412965804.

"Slavery in America"

White, Deborah Gray. Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. (Norton, 1985) .

excerpt

Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery. 4th edition, 1975.

Wood, Betty. Slavery in Colonial America, 1619–1776 (2005)

excerpt

Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974).

Immigrant Servants Database

collaboration by UNESCO, Colonial Williamsburg and others

Slavery and the slave trade