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1
K, Chellapandian. "Impact of slavery System in America with Reference to Colson Whitehead’s the Underground Railroad." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 8, no. 2 (2020): 5. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v8i2.10402.
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This article tells you that how the slavery system flourished in America and the impact of slavery system in America. Slavery system in America started when Christopher Columbus discovered America in the year 1492. In 1508 the first colony settlement was established by Ponce de Leon in Samjuan. The first African slaves arrived in South Carolina in 1526. During the 16th and 17th century the city St. Augustine was the Hub of the slave trade. Once Britishers established colonies in America, they started importing slaves from Africa. At one point Mary land and Virginia full of African slaves. After the discovery America Britishers came to know that America is suitable for cotton cultivation so they dawned with an idea that for cultivating cotton in America, Africans are the most eligible persons. On the other hand Britishers believed that Africans know the methods of cultivation and they are efficient labours. So they brought African through the Atlantic slave trade to work in cotton plantation. The amounts of slaves were greatly increased because of rapid expansion of the cotton industry. At the beginning of 17th century Britishers were cultivating only cotton and later on they invented the cotton gin. The invention of the cotton gin demanded more manpower and they started importing more slaves from Africa.At the same time southern part of America continued as slave societies and attempted to extend slavery into the western territories to keep their political share in the nation. During this time the United States became more polarized over the issue of slavery split into slaves and free states. Due to this in Virginia and Maryland a new community of African and American culture developed. As the United States expanded southern states, have to maintain a balance between the number slave and free state to maintain political power in the united states senate.
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Raley, J. "Colonizationism versus Abolitionism in the Antebellum North: The Anti-Slavery Society of Hanover College and Indiana Theological Seminary (1836) versus the Hanover College Officers, Board of Trustees, and Faculty." Midwest Social Sciences Journal 23 (November 1, 2020): 80–118. http://dx.doi.org/10.22543/0796.231.1030.
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In March 1836, nine Hanover College and Indiana Theological Seminary students, almost certainly including Benjamin Franklin Templeton, a former slave enrolled in the seminary, formed an antislavery society. The society’s Preamble and Constitution set forth abolitionist ideals demanding an immediate emancipation of Southern slaves with rights of citizenship and “without expatriation.” Thus they encountered the ire of Hanover’s Presbyterian trustees—colonizationists who believed instead that free blacks and educated slaves, gradually and voluntarily emancipated by their owners, should leave the United States and relocate to Liberia, where they would experience greater opportunity, equality, and justice than was possible here in the United States and simultaneously exercise a civilizing and Christianizing influence on indigenous West Africans. By separating the races on two different continents with an ocean between them, America’s race problem would be solved. The efforts of the colonizationists failed, in part because of a lack of sufficient resources to transport and resettle three million African Americans. Then, too, few Southern slaveholders were willing to emancipate their slaves and finance those former slaves’ voyages, and most free blacks refused to leave the country of their birth. In Liberia, left largely to their own resources, colonists encountered disease, the enmity of local tribes, the threat of slavers, and difficulties in farming that left these former slaves struggling for existence, even if free blacks who engaged in mercantile trade there fared well. In the United States, the trustees’ conviction that American society was racist beyond reform, together with their refusal to confront the system of slavery in the South in hope of preserving the Union and their refusal to allow even discussion of the subject of slavery on the Hanover campus, left their central question unanswered: Would it ever be possible for people of color and whites to reside together in the United States peaceably and equitably? The trustees’ decision exerted another long-term impact as well. Although today the campus is integrated, Hanover College would not admit an African American student until 1948.
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Sillah, Mohammed Bassiru. "Islam in the United States of America." American Journal of Islam and Society 17, no. 1 (2000): 111–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v17i1.2078.
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Although Islam is the youngest of the three Abrahamic religions, it bas succeededin making breakthroughs in all comers of the globe. Today, it is thefastest growing religion in the world. and its presence has become a recognizedfact in rich industrialized nations like the United States. In the book underreview, Professor Sulayman Nyang examines the arrival and development ofIslam in America and asserts that it will stand permanently side-by-side withChristianity and Judaism and that these religions will co-exist peacefully.In the first chapter. the author tells the story of the African Muslim slaves inNorth America. The discovery of the New World by Columbus resulted in thetransplantation of millions of African slaves to work in the plantations of whitesettler farmers. A large number of slaves were captured in West Africa - aregion where Islam had already become firmly rooted. However, the nature of slavery itself (as it was practiced in America) and the separation of the childrenfrom their Muslim parents impeded the take-off process of Islam in America.These were also critical times for the African Muslim slaves, as they were notallowed to practice their religion freely. This lack of religious tolerance forcedmany of the slaves to convert to Christianity, which was the faith of their "masters."The author also mentions the wave of Muslim immigrants that occurredduring the frrst quarter of the twentieth century and involved people from theMiddle East, North Africa, southern and central Asia, and southern and centralEurope. Some of these immigrants returned home after the war, but manydecided to stay in the United States in order to pursue the American Dream.The next turning point for Islam was the Islamic Revolution, which broke outin Iran in 1979 and had a very strong impact in the United States due to thecountry's close alliance with the ousted Shah ...
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Nguyen, Dung Ngoc. "FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES ( FROM BEGINNING TO THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE )." Science and Technology Development Journal 14, no. 1 (2011): 46–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.32508/stdj.v14i1.1895.
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Slavery in the U.S was formed by needs of building and exploiting the British colonies. At the first period, from beginning to the War for Independence of the colonies , the formation of slavery inthere was related with gradual replace of the” Indentured servitude”established by the colonists for the poor european emigrants. By middle of 17th century, the British colonies began to legalize the slavery with “Slave codes” that created a “ Racial slavery”. So, black slaves formally were considered as property and goods for possession and bargain. Their position was the same as the position of the ancient slaves. Increasing amount of the slaves would strongly affect socio- economic situation of the colonies and caused social conflicts inhere. In some first decads of 18th century, most colonies pass the laws banning slave trade activities. The slavery abolition was just enforced within the time of the War for Independence; however, not to get the thorough results.
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Temin, Peter. "The Labor Market of the Early Roman Empire." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34, no. 4 (2004): 513–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/002219504773512525.
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The available evidence on wages and labor contracts supports the existence of a functioning labor market in the early Roman empire, in which workers could change jobs in response to market-driven rewards. Slaves were included in the general labor market because Roman slavery, unlike that in the United States and in Brazil, permitted frequent manumission to citizen status. Slaves' ability to improve their status provided them with incentives to cooperate with their owners and act like free laborers. As a result, the supply and demand for labor were roughly equilibrated by wages and other payments to most workers, both slave and free.
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Okere, Gloria, and La Sheria Nance Bush. "Qualified immunity: unveiling police violence and misconduct in the United States." Forensic Research & Criminology International Journal 11, no. 3 (2023): 105–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.15406/frcij.2023.11.00376.
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Police violence and misconduct have been evident throughout American history. The earliest forms of policing began in the 1700s in the Carolinas with “Slave Patrols”. It was established to terrorize and suppress enslaved Africans and to apprehend and return the runaway slaves to their owners.1 During the 1960s, direct causations of racial tension and riots was also a conjunction with President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Crime” initiative. This section documents the history of police violence and misconduct between the periods of 1960 through the early 2000s. The overlapping theme of qualified immunity highlights a prominent role in issues arising from civil rights and accountability.
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Borucki, Alex. "Trans-imperial History in the Making of the Slave Trade to Venezuela, 1526-1811." Itinerario 36, no. 2 (2012): 29–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0165115312000563.
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The last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of knowledge about the transatlantic slave trade, both through research on specific sections of this traffic and through the consolidation of datasets into a single online resource: Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (hereafter Voyages Database). This collective project has elucidated in great detail the slave trading routes across the Atlantic and the broad African origins of captives, at least from their ports of embarkation. However, this multi-source database tells us little about the slave trading routes within the Americas, as slaves were shipped through various ports of disembarkation, sometimes by crossing imperial borders in the New World. This gap complicates our understanding of the slave trade to Spanish America, which depended on foreign slavers to acquire captives through a rigid system of contracts (asientos and licencias) overseen by the Crown up to 1789. These foreign merchants often shipped captives from their own American territories such as Jamaica, Curaçao, and Brazil. Thus, the slave trade connected the Spanish colonies with interlopers from England, France, the Netherlands, Portugal (within the Spanish domain from 1580 to 1640), and eventually the United States. The importance of the intra-American slave trade is particularly evident in Venezuela: while the Voyages Database shows only 11,500 enslaved Africans arriving in Venezuela directly from Africa, I estimate that 101,000 captives were disembarked there, mostly from other colonies. This article illuminates the volume of this traffic, the slave trading routes, and the origins of slaves arriving in Venezuela by exploring the connections of this Spanish colony with the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French Atlantics. Imperial conflicts and commercial networks shaped the number and sources of slaves arriving in Venezuela. As supplies of captives passed from Portuguese to Dutch, and then to English hands, the colony absorbed captives from different African regions of embarkation.
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Ericson, David F. "The United States Military, State Development, and Slavery in the Early Republic." Studies in American Political Development 31, no. 1 (2017): 130–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0898588x17000049.
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The U.S. military was the principal agent of American state development in the seven decades between 1791 and 1861. It fought wars, removed Native Americans, built internal improvements, expedited frontier settlement, deterred slave revolts, returned fugitive slaves, and protected existing property relations. These activities promoted state development along multiple axes, increasing the administrative capacities, institutional autonomy, political legitimacy, governing authority, and coercive powers of the American state. Unfortunately, the American political development literature has largely ignored the varied ways in which the presence of slavery influenced military deployments and, in turn, state development during the pre–Civil War period.
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Luzardo, Jesús. "Fatal Longings: Nostalgia, Slavery, and Medicine." Critical Philosophy of Race 12, no. 1 (2024): 182–209. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.12.1.0182.
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ABSTRACT This article analyzes the politics of nostalgia’s history as a fatal disease between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, especially as it was applied to slaves in late eighteenth-century Cuba. I trace nostalgia’s medical history beginning with its inauguration in Swiss medicine in 1688, and then describe the contours of its transformation into a military disease primarily affecting white soldiers in France and the United States. Finally, I translate and analyze key elements of Francisco Barrera y Domingo’s work on nostalgia as experienced by slaves in sugar mills in Havana. I show that Barrera uses his analysis of nostalgia and its treatment to describe the slaves’ harrowing conditions and homesickness. Nevertheless, in denying slaves the ability to return home and in failing to propose the abolition of the slave system in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, I argue, Barrera in fact deploys the diagnosis of nostalgia in order to medicalize and pathologize the slaves’ reactions and resistance to their captivity. Thus, despite his sympathy to the slaves, I conclude that for Barrera, nostalgia functions as a tool to better manage the slaves as laborers and as property.
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Turi, Gabriele. "La schiavitů e il predominio dell'Occidente." PASSATO E PRESENTE, no. 87 (October 2012): 155–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.3280/pass2012-087009.
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Robin Blackburn examines the slave system in the two Americas - United States, Brazil and Cuba - which he judges as an essential element of capitalist modernity, capable of contributing to, or even explaining the industrial revolution. Instead, its abolition, according to the author, was due not to economic causes, but to internal or international crises, the struggles for independence, the wars and revolts of the slaves, rather than the humanitarian propaganda of the antislave movement. Often the battle for emancipation - in particular the Haiti revolution that broke out in 1791 - did not yield any immediate gains for the former slaves, but left as its heritage the defense of the universal rights of man.
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Thomas, Brian W. "Power and Community: The Archaeology of Slavery at the Hermitage Plantation." American Antiquity 63, no. 4 (1998): 531–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2694107.
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The social and material lives of African Americans on antebellum plantations in the southern United States were heavily influenced by power relations inherent to the institution of slavery. Although planters exerted immense control over slaves, plantation slavery involved constant negotiation between master and slave. This give-and-take was part of the lived experience of enslaved African Americans, and one way to approach the study of this experience is by adopting a dialectical view of power. I illustrate how such a theoretical approach can be employed by examining the archaeology of slavery at the Hermitage plantation, located near Nashville, Tennessee. By examining material culture from former slave cabins located on different parts of the plantation, I explore how various categories of material culture reflected and participated in planters’ efforts to control slaves, as well as how those efforts were contested.
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Gurza-Lavalle, Gerardo. "Against Slave Power? Slavery and Runaway Slaves in Mexico-United States Relations, 1821–1857." Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 35, no. 2 (2019): 143–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/msem.2019.35.2.143.
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This work analyses the diplomatic conflicts that slavery and the problem of runaway slaves provoked in relations between Mexico and the United States from 1821 to 1857. Slavery became a source of conflict after the colonization of Texas. Later, after the US-Mexico War, slaves ran away into Mexican territory, and therefore slaveholders and politicians in Texas wanted a treaty of extradition that included a stipulation for the return of fugitives. This article contests recent historiography that considers the South (as a region) and southern politicians as strongly influential in the design of foreign policy, putting into question the actual power not only of the South but also of the United States as a whole. The problem of slavery divided the United States and rendered the pursuit of a proslavery foreign policy increasingly difficult. In addition, the South never acted as a unified bloc; there were considerable differences between the upper South and the lower South. These differences are noticeable in the fact that southerners in Congress never sought with enough energy a treaty of extradition with Mexico. The article also argues that Mexico found the necessary leeway to defend its own interests, even with the stark differential of wealth and resources existing between the two countries. El presente trabajo analiza los conflictos diplomáticos entre México y Estados Unidos que fueron provocados por la esclavitud y el problema de los esclavos fugitivos entre 1821 y 1857. La esclavitud se convirtió en fuente de conflicto tras la colonización de Texas. Más tarde, después de la guerra Mexico-Estados Unidos, algunos esclavos se fugaron al territorio mexicano y por lo tanto dueños y políticos solicitaron un tratado de extradición que incluyera una estipulación para el retorno de los fugitivos. Este artículo disputa la idea de la historiografía reciente que considera al Sur (en cuanto región), así como a los políticos sureños, como grandes influencias en el diseño de la política exterior, y pone en tela de juicio el verdadero poder no sólo del Sur sino de Estados Unidos en su conjunto. El problema de la esclavitud dividió a Estados Unidos y dificultó cada vez más el impulso de una política exterior que favoreciera la esclavitud. Además, el Sur jamás operó como unidad: había diferencias marcadas entre el Alto Sur y el Bajo Sur. Estas diferencias se observan en el hecho de que los sureños en el Congreso jamás se esforzaron en buscar con suficiente energía un tratado de extradición con México. El artículo también sostiene que México halló el margen de maniobra necesario para defender sus propios intereses, pese a los fuertes contrastes de riqueza y recursos entre los dos países.
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Hopkins, Daniel P. "The Danish Ban on the Atlantic Slave Trade and Denmark's African Colonial Ambitions, 1787–1807." Itinerario 25, no. 3-4 (2001): 154–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0165115300015035.
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On 16 March 1792, King Christian VII of Denmark, his own incompetent hand guided by that of the young Crown Prince Frederik (VI), signed decree banning both the importation of slaves into the Danish West Indies (now the United States Virgin Islands) and their export from the Danish establishments on the Guinea Coast, in what is now Ghana. To soften the blow to the planters of the Danish West Indies and to secure the continued production of sugar, the law was not to take effect for ten years. In the meantime, imports of slaves, and of women especially, would actually encouraged by state loans and favourable tariffs, so as, it was hoped, render the slave population capable of reproducing itself naturally thereafter.
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Palley, Howard A. "The White Working Class and the Politics of Race in the United States." Open Political Science 4, no. 1 (2021): 174–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/openps-2021-0016.
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Abstract The Declaration of Independence asserts that “All men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Nevertheless, the United States, at its foundation has been faced with the contradiction of initially supporting chattel slavery --- a form of slavery that treated black slaves from Africa purely as a commercial commodity. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom had some discomfort with slavery, were slaveholders who both utilized slaves as a commodity. Article 1 of our Constitution initially treated black slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning representation in order to increase Southern representation in Congress. So initially the Constitution’s commitment to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” did not include the enslaved black population. This essay contends that the residue of this initial dilemma still affects our politics --- in a significant manner.
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Tyson, Thomas N., and David Oldroyd. "Accounting for slavery during the Enlightenment: Contradictions and interpretations." Accounting History 24, no. 2 (2018): 212–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1032373218759971.
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This article discusses Enlightenment principles and describes how they were manifested in the debates on slavery. It then analyzes the role of accounting during the slave era in the United States and British West Indies. The key areas discussed are property rights, the humanity of slaves, economic incentives, and self-improvement. The article finds that belief in progress through reason, the common denominator of Enlightenment thinking, was not generally evident in the management and accounting practices on plantations and that the utility of accounting to slaveholders was limited. These practices were not geared toward improving productivity. Instead, short-term gains were achieved by driving the slaves harder, or longer term ones by treating slaves more benevolently to extend life spans or acquiring new plantations to expand capacity. The rate of productivity on plantations tended to be governed by established social norms and was not susceptible to change nor was it noticeably impacted by accounting.
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SCHERMERHORN, CALVIN. "Arguing Slavery's Narrative: Southern Regionalists, Ex-slave Autobiographers, and the Contested Literary Representations of the Peculiar Institution, 1824–1849." Journal of American Studies 46, no. 4 (2012): 1009–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002187581100140x.
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AbstractIn the twenty-five years before 1850, southern writers of regional literature and ex-slave autobiographers constructed a narrative of United States slavery that was mutually contradictory and yet mutually influential. That process involved a dynamic hybridization of genres in which authors contested meanings of slavery, arriving at opposing conclusions. They nevertheless focussed on family and the South's distinctive culture. This article explores the dialectic of that argument and contends that white regionalists created a plantation-paternalist romance to which African American ex-slaves responded with depictions of slavery's cruelty and immorality. However, by the 1840s, ex-slaves had domesticated their narratives in part to sell their works in a literary marketplace in which their adversaries’ sentimental fiction sold well. Scholars have not examined white southern literature and ex-slave autobiography in comparative context, and this article shows how both labored to construct a peculiar institution in readers’ imagination. Southern regionalists supplied the elements of a pro-slavery argument and ex-slave autobiographers infused their narratives with abolitionist rhetoric at a time in which stories Americans told about themselves became increasingly important in the national political crisis over slavery extension and fugitive slaves. It was on that discursive ground that the debates of the 1850s were carried forth.
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Lander, Kevin, and Jonathan Pritchett. "When to Care." Social Science History 33, no. 2 (2009): 155–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0145553200010944.
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Prior to the Civil War, many hospitals in the southern United States treated both free and slave patients. In this article we develop a model for the selective medical treatment of slaves. We argue that the pecuniary benefits of hospital care increased with the price of the slave if healthy. Using a rich sample of admission records from New Orleans Touro Hospital, we find a positive correlation between the predicted price of the slave and the probability of hospital admission. We test the robustness of the model by controlling for the length of residence in the city, ownership by traders and doctors, and the type of illness.
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Smith, Kai Alexis. "Popular culture as a tool for critical information literacy and social justice education: Hip hop and Get Out on campus." College & Research Libraries News 79, no. 5 (2018): 234. http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/crln.79.5.234.
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We live in a politically polarizing climate and at a time when there is great economic and social unrest in the United States. Our current moment brings to my mind other periods in our nation’s history. First, the 1857 Dred Scott decision, when the Supreme Court decided that slaves were not U.S. citizens and could not sue for their freedom. So that even if a slave escaped to the North, he or she was still considered the property of the slave owner and must be returned.1 The second is in the 1960s, when the antiwar and civil rights movements occurred.2,3
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Solow, Barbara L., and Mary Turner. "From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves: The Dynamics of Labour Bargaining in the United States." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, no. 1 (1997): 151. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/206210.
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Gonzales, Michael J. "Chinese Plantation Workers and Social Conflict in Peru in the late Nineteenth Century." Journal of Latin American Studies 21, no. 3 (1989): 385–424. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022216x00018496.
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As the world capitalist system developed during the nineteenth century non-slave labour became a commodity that circulated around the globe and contributed to capital accumulation in metropolitan centres. The best examples are the emigration of millions of Asian indentured servants and European labourers to areas of European colonisation. Asians replaced emancipated African slaves on plantations in the Caribbean and South America, supplemented a declining slave population in Cuba, built railways in California, worked in mines in South Africa, laboured on sugarcane plantations in Mauritius and Fiji, and served on plantations in southeast Asia. Italian immigrants also replaced African slaves on coffee estates in Brazil, worked with Spaniards in the seasonal wheat harvest in Argentina, and, along with other Europeans, entered the growing labour market in the United States. From the perspective of capital, these workers were a cheap alternative to local wage labour and, as foreigners without the rights of citizens, they could be subjected to harsher methods of social control.1
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Bailey, Ronald. "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry in New England." Social Science History 14, no. 3 (1990): 373–414. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s014555320002085x.
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The significance of the slave trade and slavery-related commerce—what I will call the slave(ry) trade—in contributing to the development of colonial America and the United States has been a persistent theme in the work of Afro-American scholars. Two scholars in particular should be cited in this regard. W. E. B. DuBois (1896: 27) pointed out that slave labor was not widely utilized because the climate and geography of New England precluded the extensive development of agriculture: “The significance of New England in the African slave-trade does not therefore lie in the fact that she early discountenanced the system of slavery and stopped importation; but rather in the fact that her citizens, being the traders of the New World, early took part in the carrying slave trade and furnished slaves to the other colonies.” DuBois’s account of the role of Massachusetts and of Rhode Island, which later became “the clearing house for the slave trade of other colonies,” was similar to what was popularized as the “triangular trade” thesis.
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Simeonov, Simeon Andonov. "“Insurgentes, Self-Styled Patriots”." Journal of Global Slavery 5, no. 3 (2020): 291–321. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2405836x-00503004.
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Abstract This article argues that Iberian consulates in the United States identified the emergence of a “privateering archipelago,” a new revolutionary interimperial legal/economic regime stretching from Rhode Island to the greater Caribbean in the post-Napoleonic decade. Spanish consuls’ successful navigation of the privateering archipelago enabled them to expand the power of Cuban slavers into the southern U.S. Spanish consuls’ confrontation with privateers became a driving force in the revival of the slave trade after its international condemnation at the Congress of Vienna (1815). Even though there were many ways in which Spanish consulates used the entanglement between privateering and slaving to strengthen the colonial hold on slavery, it was by means of whitening passports that they sought to institutionalize their power in the privateering archipelago. Intended to disenfranchise free gente de color and to re-commodify African slaves, the policy of whitening passports ended up marginalizing mariners and alienating them from consuls.
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Sullivan, Michael. "Protecting Minorities from De Facto Statelessness: Birthright Citizenship in the United States." Statelessness & Citizenship Review 4, no. 1 (2022): 66–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.35715/scr4001114.
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Birthright citizenship is the subject of intense political debate in the United States because of its connection to the debate over unauthorised immigration and the inclusion of national minorities. Similar debates have taken place in other common law countries, leading to the restriction of jus soli birthright citizenship in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. The Supreme Court of the United States and United States Department of State’s interpretation of the Citizenship Clause in § 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment ensures that all ‘persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States’, including the children of unauthorised immigrants. This article argues that the rule of jus soli birthright citizenship in the United States is rooted in an older understanding of the birthright of native-born British subjects, and later, American citizens, to enjoy the birthright of protections and an ever-expanding set of rights based on where they were born, regardless of the status of their parents. Stated in a way that included the children of slaves and immigrants as citizens based on their birthplace alone, jus soli birthright citizenship in the United States remains a powerful tool of inclusion for marginalised minority groups.
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Miller, Melinda C. "Land and Racial Wealth Inequality." American Economic Review 101, no. 3 (2011): 371–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.101.3.371.
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Could racial wealth inequality have been reduced if freed slaves had been granted land following the Civil War? This paper exploits a plausibly exogenous variation in policies of the Cherokee Nation and southern United States to identify the impact of free land on the size of the racial wealth gap. Using data on land, livestock, and home ownership, I find evidence that former slaves who had access to free land were absolutely wealthier and experienced lower levels of racial wealth inequality in 1880 than former slaves who did not. Furthermore, their children continued to experience these advantages in 1900.
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Chen, Cheryl Rhan-Hsin, and Gary Simon. "Actuarial Issues in Insurance on Slaves in the United States South." Journal of African American History 89, no. 4 (2004): 348–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4134059.
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Bemis, Michael F. "Sources: World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States." Reference & User Services Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2011): 83. http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/rusq.51n1.83.
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LeClercq, Desirée. "Nestlé United States, Inc. v. Doe. 141 S. Ct. 1931." American Journal of International Law 115, no. 4 (2021): 694–700. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ajil.2021.55.
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On June 17, 2021, the United States Supreme Court reversed and remanded a suit filed against Nestlé USA and Cargill under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) for lack of jurisdiction. This case has already garnered attention over the nature of the dispute (child slaves in Africa), the Supreme Court's treatment of jurisdiction under the ATS, and the finding shared by five of the nine Supreme Court justices that domestic corporations can potentially be sued under the ATS. This analysis focuses on the child slavery and global supply chain aspects of the decision.
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Ostdiek, Bennett, and John Fabian Witt. "The Czar and the Slaves: Two Puzzles in the History of International Arbitration." American Journal of International Law 113, no. 3 (2019): 535–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ajil.2019.23.
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AbstractIn 1822, the Russian czar resolved a dispute over compensation for slaves fleeing to British lines during the War of 1812. American observers have long asserted that this canonical decision favored the United States. But new debate has recently arisen among historians. Uncovering evidence from diplomatic archives, this Article concludes that the czar did indeed side with the United States. Moreover, the case demonstrates how nineteenth-century American statesmen pressed international law into service in support of slavery.
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Kelly, Brian. "Slave Self-Activity and the Bourgeois Revolution in the United States: Jubilee and the Boundaries of Black Freedom." Historical Materialism 27, no. 3 (2019): 31–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-00001817.
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Abstract For more than a generation, historical interpretations of emancipation in the United States have acknowledged that the slaves played a central role in driving that process forward. This is a critically important advance, and one worth defending. But it is also a perspective whose influence seems increasingly precarious. This article explores the complex relationship between the slaves’ ‘revolution from below’ and the bourgeois revolution directed from above, in part through an appraisal of W.E.B. Du Bois’s argument about the ‘slaves’ general strike’ and the wider revolutionary upheaval encompassing civil war and reconstruction. Grounded in a close familiarity with sources and interpretive trends, the article offers a detailed reading of shifting perspectives in current historiography, a comprehensive review of left engagement with Du Bois’s work, and an extended ‘critical and sympathetic’ appraisal of his major work from within the framework of the Marxist tradition.
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Nyang, Sulayman S. "EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION." American Journal of Islam and Society 25, no. 1 (2008): 142–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v25i1.1505.
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The arrival of Islam in the United States ofAmerica has been dated backto the coming of slaves fromAfrica. During this unfortunate trade in humancargo from the African mainland, many Muslim men and women came tothese shores. Some of these men and women were more visible than others;some were more literate in Arabic than the others; and some were betterremembered by their generations than the others. Despite these multiple differencesbetween the Muslim slaves and their brethren from various parts oftheAfrican continent, the fact still remains that their Islam and their self-confidencedid not save them from the oppressive chains of slave masters. Thereligion of Islam survived only during the lifetime of individual believerswho tried desperately to maintain their Islamic way of life. Among theMuslims who came in ante bellum times intoAmerica one can include YorroMahmud (erroneously anglicized as Yarrow Mamout), Ayub Ibn SulaymanDiallo (known to Anglo-Saxons as Job ben Solomon), Abdul Rahman(known as Abdul Rahahman in the Western sources) and countless otherswhose Islamic ritual practices were prevented from surfacing in public.1Besides these Muslim slaves of ante bellumAmerica, there were otherswho came to these shores without the handicap of slavery. They came fromSouthern Europe, the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent. TheseMuslimswere immigrants to America at the end of the Nineteenth Century andthe beginning of the Twentieth Century. Motivated by the desire to come toa land of opportunity and strike it rich, many of these men and women laterfound out that the United States ofAmerica was destined to be their permanenthomeland. In the search for identity and cultural security in their newenvironment, these Muslim immigrants began to consolidate their culturalresources by building mosques and organizing national and local groups forthe purpose of social welfare and solidarity. These developments among theMuslims contributed to the emergence of various cultural and religious ...
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Pereira, Thales Augusto Zamberlan. "Poor Man's Crop? Slavery in Brazilian Cotton Regions (1800-1850)." Estudos Econômicos (São Paulo) 48, no. 4 (2018): 623–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0101-41614843tzp.
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Abstract Much of the literature about cotton production in Brazil during the nineteenth century considers cotton as a "poor man's crop" - cultivated by small farmers who did not employ a large slave labor force. However, information provided in population maps from the period between 1800 and 1840 shows that slaves represented half the population in Maranhão, the most important cotton exporter in Brazil until the 1840s. This represented a higher share than in any region in northeast Brazil and was comparable to the slave population shares recorded in the United States' cotton South. This paper shows that, during the cotton boom years (1790-1820), not only was the cotton exported from northeast Brazil to Britain and continental Europe cultivated on large plantations, but also, slave prices were higher in Maranhão than in other Brazilian provinces.
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Anderson, Kevin B. "Marx’s intertwining of race and class during the Civil War in the United States." Journal of Classical Sociology 17, no. 1 (2017): 28–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468795x17691387.
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Marx wrote extensively on race and class in the American Civil War. These writings, developed during the time he founded the First International and was completing Capital, argue that capitalism was grounded in slavery and that racism attenuated class-consciousness among workers from dominant racial groups. At the same time, the Civil War unleashed new forms of democratic and revolutionary consciousness and action, in which Black slaves seeking freedom, Black and White northern soldiers, British workers, and abolitionist and socialist intellectuals expressed solidarity with each other across racial and national lines. The Civil War had revolutionary implications, not only in terms of bodily and political freedom for four million human beings but also in terms of large-scale economic changes that uprooted a centuries-old agrarian system and that posed – in the end unsuccessfully – the question of radical land reform on behalf of the former slaves. These Marx writings, which have been discussed only sporadically over the past century, are especially timely today.
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Ingersoll, Thomas N. "Slave Codes and Judicial Practice in New Orleans, 1718–1807." Law and History Review 13, no. 1 (1995): 23–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/743955.
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Slave law in early Louisiana is of great interest because it was shaped by three major European legal traditions under the rule of France (1699 to 1769), Spain (1769 to 1803), and the United States (after 1803). In this article, the types and origins of slave laws in early Louisiana and their application in the slave society of New Orleans is examined. Several different imperial, local, and mixed codes were ordained in the colony to govern relations between masters and slaves, and these laws reveal either the political strategies of imperial policymakers or the social tactics of slaveowners, but very little about actual slave treatment. The administration of justice in New Orleans was mostly determined by the planters: local needs and ideals prevailed when they conflicted with those represented by the crown's laws, and the courts rarely interfered with the authority of indivdual slaveowners over their chattels.
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Fe, Marina. "Los fantasmas de Beloved." Anuario de Letras Modernas 14 (July 31, 2009): 125–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.22201/ffyl.01860526p.2008.14.679.
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Tony Morrison’s novel is inspired in the real story of a fugitive slave, Margaret Garner, and can be considered a ghost story belonging to the African American oral tradition as well as a slave narrative. In it, Morrison wants to break the silence around the dreadful events that took place in the lives of millions of black slaves in The United States of America. Her characters must learn to "speak the unspeakable" in order to exorcise the demons of slavery through "rememory", the painful remembrance of the past that haunts not only the black community but the whole history of this nation. Morrison’s intention may well be to write a "literary archaology", recovering the past in an original narrative mode that gives a voice to those that had been silenced for centuries.
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Baibakova, Larisa Vilorovna. "Peculiarities of perception by former slaves of their social status in the era of slavery (based on the collection of their memoirs in the Library of US Congress)." Исторический журнал: научные исследования, no. 4 (April 2020): 131–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.7256/2454-0609.2020.4.33626.
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Slavery has always been condemned across the world; however in the end of the XX century, such canonical concept was rectified based on the extensive examination by American scholars of compilation of narratives of the former slaves collected in 1930s in the United States. At that time, 2,300 former slaves from 17 states were interviewed about their life in the era of slavery. Later, these interviews were placed in open access on the website of the Library of US Congress, reconstructing a contradictory picture of everyday life of African-Americans in the conditions of plantation economy: some reminiscences convey almost a nostalgic feeling of the past, while others criticizes it severely. The author in his attempt explain the historical accuracy of the results of mass interviewing of African-Americans, tries to make sense why 70 years later, the eyewitnesses of the same event have polar viewpoints. Forming the new comparative-historical approaches towards examination of collective consciousness under the influence of anthropologization of historical knowledge, the interview materials allow reconstructing the period, demonstrating the value system of the entire population group, unlike biography that structures the chain of events in chronological order. Analysis of the archive “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938” has not been previously conducted within the Russian historiography, just briefly mentioned as one of the documentary aspects of the institution of slavery. The contained material is important for scientific comprehension of the bygone era of slavery, reflected in the collective memory of long-suffering African-American sub-ethnos. The problem of slavery in the United States, which synthesizes heritage of the past with practices of everyday life in various manifestations, seems optimal from the perspective of historiographical interest.
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Esposito, Elena. "The Side Effects of Immunity: Malaria and African Slavery in the United States." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 14, no. 3 (2022): 290–328. http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/app.20190372.
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This paper documents the role of malaria in the diffusion of African slavery in the United States. The novel empirical evidence reveals that the introduction of malaria triggered a demand for malaria-resistant labor, which led to a massive expansion of African enslaved workers in the more malaria-infested areas. Further results document that among African slaves, more malaria-resistant individuals—i.e., those born in the most malaria-ridden regions of Africa—commanded significantly higher prices. (JEL I12, J23, J47, N31, N37, N91)
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Lovejoy, Paul E. "Jihad and the Era of the Second Slavery." Journal of Global Slavery 1, no. 1 (2016): 28–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2405836x-00101003.
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The concept “second slavery” as applied to the resurgence of slavery as a factor of production in the Americas in the nineteenth century emphasizes radical changes in the economies of the Atlantic world. The expansion of slavery in the southern United States, Cuba and Brazil occurred in the context of the emergence of an independent Haiti, where slavery had once been dominant but was now abolished, and where the British shifted from being the most important nation in the slave trade to the champions of its abolition, ultimately emancipating the slaves in their colonial empire. The comparable expansion in slavery that occurred in Islamic West Africa as a result of jihad in the same era must be placed in the context of other developments in the Atlantic world. Unlike second slavery in the Americas, developments in the jihad states resulted in economic autonomy, not the growth of the global economy.
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Wise, William. "The Finances of Slave Life Insurance: Did Life Insurers Act Appropriately from a Financial Perspective?" Ad Americam 20 (December 31, 2019): 45–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.12797/adamericam.20.2019.20.04.
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An important part of having slaves as a labor force is insuring their lives and their income. This paper explores whether antebellum life insurance companies insuring slaves did so appropriately and/or responsibly from a financial perspective. Determining whether antebellum life insurance companies did so is essential, as life insurance is a major segment of the economy of most countries and hence it is vital that life insurers perform well and are viable for the benefit of other industries and national economies, including with respect to the antebellum United States. This is the first study to investigate several critical financial elements, including premiums, expenses and mortality, of antebellum life insurance companies regarding feasibility. One characteristic of the results is that if firms employed a suitable expense assumption then the premium did not have a high enough mortality assumption and vice-versa. Additionally, most premium increases used regarding hazardous occupations, sum insured limits and location failed to adequately account for the associated increased mortality. The overall result is that, from a financial perspective, antebellum life insurers had trouble accounting for slave life insurance appropriately and/or responsibly.
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Cox, Marcus S. "A Regiment of Slaves: The 4th United States Colored Infantry, 1863-1866 (review)." Journal of Military History 67, no. 3 (2003): 947–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jmh.2003.0212.
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MORGAN, KENNETH. "George Washington and the Problem of Slavery." Journal of American Studies 34, no. 2 (2000): 279–301. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875899006398.
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Slavery was not the most important issue for which George Washington is remembered; nor were his views on the institution as revealing as those of some of his fellow Founding Fathers. But Washington was a slaveowner for all of his adult life and he lived in Virginia, which was dominated by tobacco plantations based on slave labour. Slavery was central to the socio-economic life of the Old Dominion: after 1750 40 per cent of the North American slave population lived there and the first United States census of 1790 showed 300,000 slaves in Virginia. The tobacco they produced was the most valuable staple crop grown in North America. At his home Mount Vernon, situated on the upper Potomac river overlooking the Maryland shore, Washington created an estate, based on the latest agricultural practice, that was also a set of plantation farms centred around the work of enslaved Africans. Slavery, then, was clearly a persistent part of Washington's life and career. Because of this and his pre-eminent position in American public life, Washington's use of slave labour and his views on an important paradox of American history in the revolutionary era – the coexistence of slavery and liberty – deserve close attention. One man's dilemma in dealing with the morality of his own slaveholding was mirrored in the broader context of what the United States could or would do about the problem of slavery.
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Parodi, Ella. "A critical investigation of Y7 students’ perceptions of Roman slavery as evidenced in the stories of the Cambridge Latin Course." Journal of Classics Teaching 21, no. 42 (2020): 43–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s2058631020000483.
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In an article, ‘The Slaves were Happy’: High School Latin and the Horrors of Classical Studies, Erik Robinson, a Latin teacher from a public high school in Texas, criticises how, in his experience, Classics teaching tends to avoid in-depth discussions on issues such as the brutality of war, the treatment of women and the experience of slaves (Robinson, 2017). However, texts such as the article ‘Teaching Sensitive Topics in the Secondary Classics Classroom’ (Hunt, 2016), and the book ‘From abortion to pederasty: addressing difficult topics in the Classics classroom’ (Sorkin Rabinowitz & McHardy, 2014) strongly advocate for teachers to address these difficult and sensitive topics. They argue that the historical distance between us and Greco-Roman culture and history can allow students to engage and participate in discussions that may otherwise be difficult and can provide a valuable opportunity to address uncomfortable topics in the classroom. Thus, Robinson's assertion that Classics teaching avoids these sensitive topics may not be so definitive. Regardless, Robinson claims that honest confrontations in the classroom with the ‘legacy of horror and abuse’ from the ancient world can be significantly complicated by many introductory textbooks used in Latin classes, such as the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC), one of the most widely used high school Latin textbooks in use in both America and the United Kingdom (Robinson, 2017). In particular, Robinson views the presentation of slavery within the CLC as ‘rather jocular and trivialising’ which can then hinder a reader's perspective on the realities of the violent and abusive nature of the Roman slave trade (Robinson, 2017). As far as he was concerned, the problem lay with the characterisation of the CLC's slave characters Grumio and Clemens, who, he argued, were presented there as happy beings and seemingly unfazed by their positions as slaves. There was never any hint in the book that Grumio or Clemens were unhappy with their lives or their positions as slaves, even though, as the CLC itself states in its English background section on Roman slavery, Roman law ‘did not regard slaves as human beings, but as things that could be bought or sold, treated well or badly, according to the whim of their master’ (CLC I, 1998, p. 78). One might argue, therefore, that there seems to be a disconnect between the English language information we learn about the brutality of the Roman slave trade provided in the background section of Stage 6, and what we can infer about Roman slavery from the Latin language stories involving our two ‘happy’ slaves.
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Martínez, Samuel. "The Racialised Non-Being of Non-Citizens." Statelessness & Citizenship Review 5, no. 1 (2023): 20–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.35715/scr5001.113.
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Proponents of barring the children of undocumented immigrants from birthright citizenship allege that the United States (‘US’) Constitution’s 14th Amendment was intended to give full citizenship to former slaves and their progeny, and not to benefit the children of foreign-born people. A real-world example that illustrates the dangers of so restricting birthright citizenship is the Dominican Republic, where legal measures have already excluded the children of out-of-status immigrants (who are mostly of Haitian ancestry) from eligibility for birthright citizenship. The effect of this has not been ethnically cleansing Haitian descendants from the Dominican Republic so much as confining them within the country as a stateless underclass of people. The Dominican case therefore shows that US opponents of birthright citizenship for the children of out-of-status non-citizens must answer to the danger that their proposal would create a legally approved hereditary underclass on US soil, more than a century after the abolition of chattel slavery.
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Cresswell, Tim. "Black Moves." Transfers 6, no. 1 (2016): 12–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/trans.2016.060103.
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Th is article explores the mutual constitution of blackness and mobility in the context of the United States. Using insights gained from the interdisciplinary field of mobility studies, it argues that mobilities have played a key role in the defi nition of blackness (particularly black masculinity) at the same time as blackness has been mapped onto particular forms of mobility. The article is constructed through a series of suggestive vignettes moving backward through time that illustrate continuities in the way forms of movement, narratives of mobility, and mobile practices have intersected with representations of African-American male bodies. Examples include end-zone celebrations in American. football, stop and frisk procedures in New York City, the medical pathologization of runaway slaves, and the Middle Passage of the slave trade.
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Tosko, Mike. "Book Review: Abolition and Antislavery: A Historical Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic." Reference & User Services Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2016): 248. http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/rusq.55n3.248.
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This encyclopedia covers the rise and proliferation of abolitionist movements in the United States and the subsequent consequences of the emancipation of the former slaves. While outside international influences on American slavery existed—particularly Great Britain—the focus here is on both the Northern and Southern United States. Of course, banishing slavery did not lead to immediate social equality, and in fact many abolitionists did not ever desire this type of equality. This work also traces the subsequent controversial issues that emerged following abolition, such as new forms of labor exploitation, the right to own land and to vote, and the use of violence and intimidation to keep African Americans in inferior social and economic positions.
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Kramer, Paul A. "EMBEDDING CAPITAL: POLITICAL-ECONOMIC HISTORY, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE WORLD." Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15, no. 3 (2016): 331–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1537781416000189.
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One of the chief promises of the emerging history of capitalism is its capacity to problematize and historicize relationships between economic inequality and capital's social, political, and ecological domain. At their best, the new works creatively integrate multiple historiographic approaches. Scholars are bringing the insights of social and cultural history to business history's traditional actors and topics, providing thick descriptions of the complex social worlds of firms, investors, and bankers, while resisting rationalist, functionalist, and economistic analyses. They are also proceeding from the assumption that capitalism is not reducible to the people that historians have typically designated as capitalists. As they've shown, the fact that slaves, women, sharecroppers, clerks, and industrial laborers were, to different degrees, denied power in the building of American capitalism did not mean that they were absent from its web, or that their actions did not decisively shape its particular contours.
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Nelzy, Sandy. "The Impact of Ngos in Saint-Louis De Gonzague Camp, Haiti." Practicing Anthropology 35, no. 3 (2013): 20–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.17730/praa.35.3.u7762531040l528v.
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A long time ago, Haiti was known as beautiful, rich in minerals, and a beacon of freedom, where slaves gained their independence. But now, Haiti is known as "the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere." Born and raised in Haiti, I came to the United States for the first time in 1998, and for five years I kept traveling back and forth until my father decided I would be a United States resident in 2003. I have always wanted to help my country, and I knew that living in the United States would be a great step forward. So when I found out about the ethnographic research organized by Dr. Schuller after the earthquake in Haiti, I knew instantly that I was interested in going. I knew that it would be a great opportunity for me to develop skills that would help resolve Haiti's problems in one way or another. I tried preparing myself emotionally to face the difficulties and the heartaches with which I would deal.
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Datta, Y. "How America Became an Economic Powerhouse on the Backs of African-American Slaves and Native Americans." Journal of Economics and Public Finance 7, no. 5 (2021): p121. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/jepf.v7n5p121.
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The objective of this paper is to make the case that the United States became an economic super-power in the nineteenth century on the backs of African-American slaves and Native Americans.It was in 1619, when Jamestown colonists bought 20-30 slaves from English pirates. The paper starts with ‘The 1619 Project’ whose objective is to place the consequences of slavery--and the contributions of black Americans--at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a nation.Slavery was common in all thirteen colonies, and at-least twelve Presidents owned slaves. The enslaved people were not recognized as human beings, but as property: once a slave always a slave.The U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1788, never mentions slavery, yet slavery is at the very heart of the constitution. The U.S. government used the Declaration of Independence as a license to commit genocide on the Native Americans, and to seize their land.Racist ideas have persisted throughout American history, based on the myth that blacks are intellectually inferior compared to whites. However, in a 2012 article in the Scientific American, the authors reported that 85.5% of genetic variation is within the so-called races, not between them. So, the consensus among Western researchers today is that human races do not represent a scientific theory, but are sociocultural constructs.After end of the Civil War, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery in America, and the 15th Amendment protected the voting rights of African Americans.However, in the Confederate South, Jim Crow laws legalized racial segregation between 1870-1968. In 1965, thanks to the Civil Rights movement, the Voting Rights Act was passed to overcome barriers created by Jim Crow laws to the legal rights of African Americans under the 15th Amendment.British and American innovations in cotton technology sparked the Industrial Revolution during the latter part of the eighteenth century. The British cotton manufacturing exploded in the 1780s. Eighty years later in 1860, Manchester, England stood at the center of a world-spanning empire—the empire of cotton. There were three pillars of the Industrial Revolution. One was the centuries-earlier conquest by Europeans of a colossal expanse of lands in the New World. It was the control of huge territories in America, that made monoculture farming of cotton possible. Second was that the Europeans drastically—and unilaterally--altered the global competitive landscape of cotton. They did it by using their military might, and the willingness to use it—often violently--to their advantage.The third—and the most important--was slavery: without which there would be no Industrial Revolution. America was tremendously suited for cotton production. The climate and soil of a large part of American South met the conditions under which the cotton plant thrived. More importantly, the plantation owners in America commanded unlimited supplies of the three crucial ingredients that went into the production of cotton: labor, land, and credit. And this was topped by their unbelievable political power.In 1793 Eli Whitney’s revolutionary cotton gin increased ginning productivity fifty times, and thus removed the bottleneck of removing seeds from cotton. Because of relying on monoculture farming, the problem the cotton planters were facing was soil exhaustion. So, they wanted the U.S. government to acquire more land. Surprisingly, in 1803 America was able to strike an unbelievable deal with the French--the Louisiana Purchase--which doubled the territory of the United States. In 1819 America acquired Florida from Spain, and in 1845 annexed Texas from Mexico.Between 1803 and 1838, under President Andrew Jackson, America fought a multi-front war against the Native Americans in the Deep South, and expropriated vast tracts of their land, that culminated in the ethnic cleansing of the Deep South.With an unlimited supply of land—and slave labor--even soil exhaustion did not slow down the cotton barons; they just moved further west and farther south. New cotton fields now sprang up in the sediment-rich lands along the banks of Mississippi. So swift was this move westward that, by the end of the 1830s, Mississippi was producing more cotton than any other southern state. By 1860, there were more millionaires per capita in Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in America.The New Orleans slave market was the largest in America--where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold.The entry of the United States in the cotton market quickly began to reshape the global cotton market. By 1802 America was the single-most supplier of cotton to Britain.For eighty years--from the 1780s to 1865--almost a million people were herded down the road from the upper South to the lower South and the West, to toil on cotton plantations. The thirty-odd men walked in coffles, the double line hurrying in lock-step. Each hauled twenty pounds of iron, chains that draped from neck-to-neck, and wrist-to-wrist, binding them all together. They walked for miles, days, and weeks, and many covered over 700 miles.The plantation owners devised a cruel system of controlling their slaves that the enslaved called “the pushing system.” This system constantly increased the number of acres each slave was expected to cultivate. In 1805 each “hand” could tend to five acres of a cotton field. Fifty years later that target had been doubled to ten acres.Overseers closely monitored enslaved workers. Each slave was assigned a daily quota of number of pounds of cotton to pick. If the worker failed to meet it, he received as many lashes on his back as the deficit. However, if he overshot his quota, the master might “reward” him by raising his quota the next day.One of the most brutal weapons the planters used against the slaves, was the whip: ten feet of plaited cowhide. When facing the specter of an overseer’s whip, slaves were so terrified that they could not speak in sentences. They danced, trembled, babbled, and lost control of their bodies.When seeking a loan, the planters used slaves as a collateral. With extraordinarily high returns from their businesses, the planters began to expand their loan portfolio: sometimes using the same slave worker as collateral for multiple mortgages. The American South produced too much cotton. However, consumer demand could not keep up with the excessive supply, that then led to a precipitous fall in prices, which, in turn, set off the Panic of 1837. And that touched off a major depression.The slaveholders were using advanced management and accounting practices long before the techniques that are still in use today.The manufacture of sugar from sugarcane began in Louisiana Territory in 1795. In sugar mills, children, alongside with adults, toiled like factory workers with assembly-like precision and discipline under the constant threat of boiling hot kettles, open furnaces, and grinding rollers. To attain the highest efficiency, sugar factories worked day and night where there is no distinction as to the days of the week. Fatigue might mean losing an arm to the grinding rollers, or being flayed for not being able to keep up. Resistance was often met with sadistic cruelty.The expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence, drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the course of a single life time, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations, to a continental cotton empire. As a result, the United States became a modern, industrial, and capitalistic economy. This is the period in which America rose from being a minor European trading partner, to becoming the world’s leading economy. Finally, we hope that we have successfully been able to make the argument that America became an economic powerhouse in the nineteenth century not only on the backs of African-American slaves, but also on the genocide of Native Americans, and their stolen lands.
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Gable, Eric. "What heritage does and does not do to identity: some answers from an ethnographic perspective." Horizontes Antropológicos 11, no. 23 (2005): 51–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s0104-71832005000100004.
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This paper explores how caretakers of slave-era heritage sites objectify and enact what Robert Bellah and his co-authors call "communities of memory" in a racially polarized United States and how the public interpret their efforts at creating what amounts to official history. It highlights the often-vexed encounter between those who are in charge of conveying public representations of slavery and race in the antebellum era in the United States and vernacular responses to such representations. It looks at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, which recently has made great efforts to make slaves prominent figures in the landscapes it reconstructs in on-site maps, tours, and literature. Of particular interest are the various ways that vernacular skepticism and cynicism about public portrayals continues to generate controversy at Monticello, and particularly at how the topic of erasure and invisibility remain enduring themes in the popular imagination of what public history is all about when such history focuses on slavery and race. By interrogating public skepticism about official portrayals of the past, the paper moves towards a performative approach to studying what heritage does to identity production rather than a representational approach. Among the identities that are produced at Monticello (and by extension other antebellum sites) are racial and oppositional identities.
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Gemme, Paola. "Domesticating Foreign Struggles: American Narratives of Italian Revolutions and the Debate on Slavery in the Antebellum Era." Prospects 27 (October 2002): 77–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0361233300001149.
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Reporting on the Roman revolution of 1848 as the foreign correspondent of theNew-York Daily Tribune, Margaret Fuller observed that Americans used the same arguments against the political emancipation of Italy that they employed against the social emancipation of blacks in the United States. “Americans in Italy,” she wrote, “talk about the corrupt and degenerate state of Italy as they do about that of our slaves at home.” “They come ready trained,” she explained, “to that mode of reasoning which affirms that, because men are degraded by bad institutions, they are not fit for better.” This essay builds upon Fuller's comment. It examines American accounts of the Italians' mid-19th-century struggle to free their country from its colonial bond to the Austrian empire and substitute local absolutist monarchies with more enlightened forms of government, and demonstrates that the discourse on revolutionary Italy became the site of a reenactment on foreign grounds of the domestic controversy over slavery. The discussion on whether Italians could become republican subjects was liable to become a mediated debate over emancipation and the future of the African bondsmen in the American republic because of the alleged similarities, both historical and “racial,” between the populations of Italy and blacks in antebellum America. Like the slaves in the United States, Italians had been subjected to brutal despotism for centuries, which, within the 19th-century environmental conception of political virtue, was believed to have negatively affected their aptitude for freedom. Like the black slaves, moreover, Italians were placed by racist ideology outside the pale of the dominant Anglo-Saxon racial category, a political as well as a “biological” class marked by the exclusive capacity for self-government.
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Welch, Kimberly. "William Johnson's Hypothesis: A Free Black Man and the Problem of Legal Knowledge in the Antebellum United States South." Law and History Review 37, no. 1 (2019): 89–124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0738248018000640.
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This essay uses the diary of free black barber and Natchez, Mississippi, businessman William T. Johnson as a means to explore the extent to which one black man in the antebellum U.S. South knew the law; how he came to know it; and what role he saw it play in his life and community. In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to black Americans' engagement with the legal system in the pre-Civil War U.S. South and have undermined the notion that black people were legal outsiders. In particular, they have shown that African Americans in the slave South were legal actors in their own right and were legally savvy. Yet what does it mean when scholars say that free blacks and slaves knew how to use the law? This essay uses Johnson's diary to demystify the phrase “to know the law” and shows that we speak of “knowing the law,” we speak of a remarkably complex and uneven phenomenon, one best mapped on a case-to-case basis. Understanding what it meant “to know the law” sometimes requires examining an individual's personal theory or hypothesis of what law does for them.