Emancipation

The American slavery regime ultimately collapsed as a result of a bitter, four-year civil war. By the war's end, some four million bondspersons were officially liberated from a life of chattel slavery in the American south. Though President Abraham Lincoln and the Union government had taken steps to strategically emancipate thousands of slaves in the rebellious Confederate states via the Emancipation Proclamation, real freedom came only once the practice of slavery was abolished by constitutional amendment in 1865. Thus, it was the Thirteenth Amendment that proclaimed that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall [Page 773]have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The amendment also gave Congress the power to “enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” That emancipation ultimately came as a direct result of the Civil War should not elide the long history of activism and the numerous clarion calls for freedom by blacks from the earliest days of American nationhood.

Beginning in the mid-17th century, America's small black enslaved population sometimes made successful grasps at freedom even as slavery and indentured servitude became entrenched features of life in the Americas. In the Virginia colony, a small cargo of Africans had arrived in 1619 to supplement the growing population of English tobacco farmers. Within a short time, the Chesapeake Bay colonies produced most of the world's tobacco and so monetary wealth in the colonies and in the metropole became inexorably tied to a planter's wealth in slaves. Meanwhile, in the north, Massachusetts became the first English colony to recognize the institution of slavery in 1641, followed by Connecticut (in 1650), and Virginia (in 1661). Two years later, Virginia further ordered slavery a perpetual status passed from mother to child. Simply, a child born to an enslaved mother would also be enslaved. That slavery was now codified along racial and gendered lines now meant even fewer avenues to freedom by generations of blacks.

As the tobacco plantation economy thrived throughout the Chesapeake, a man's, and exclusively a white man's, success and indeed his very own freedom was connected to the prevalence of slavery around him. At bottom, slavery and freedom were symbiotic factors in shaping the American character for nearly two centuries, yet over time, the push toward freedom grew stronger and more resolute.

By the early to mid-18th century, slavery had taken hold as the primary mode of labor in the young but thriving British American colonies. Spurred by the booming transatlantic slave trade, the plantation complex had arrived from the Caribbean islands and many eager American planters, especially in South Carolina and Georgia, now boasted large landholdings with an equally impressive number of slaves. Broadsides advertising the sale of slaves and the arrival of slave ships at various southern port cities colored the developing landscape and littered the pages of a nascent American press. At the dawn of the 18th century, slavery had fully arrived, leaving its imprint on America's economics, politics, and social relations.

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