In 1619, african slavery was introduced to the southern colonies, and in the caribbean, because:

Conversations about slavery in the United States frequently center on the South and the Civil War. Yet the roots of slavery in the New World go much deeper than that—back to the original British colonies, including the northernmost in New England. Although New England would later become known for its abolitionist leaders and its role in helping formerly enslaved Southern blacks and those escaping slavery, the colonies had a history of using enslaved and indentured labor to create and build their economies.

The Origins of American SlaveryThe concept of slavery was hardly a new one when England’s colonists reached North American shores, as it had been practiced in Europe for more than a century before the colonies. So the arrival of Africans in Virginia in 1619 was not the start of a new phenomenon, but the beginning of human trafficking between Africa and North America based on the social norms of Europe.

While slavery grew exponentially in the South with large-scale plantations and agricultural operations, slavery in New England was different. Most of those enslaved in the North did not live in large communities, as they did in the mid-Atlantic colonies and the South. Those Southern economies depended upon people enslaved at plantations to provide labor and keep the massive tobacco and rice farms running. But without the same rise in plantations in New England, it was more typical to have one or two enslaved people attached to a household, business, or small farm.

In New England, it was common for individual enslaved people to learn specialized skills and crafts due to the area’s more varied economy. Ministers, doctors, tradesmen, and merchants also used enslaved labor to work alongside them and run their households. As in the South, enslaved men were frequently forced into heavy or farm labor. Enslaved women were frequently forced to work as household servants, whereas in the South women often performed agricultural work.

New England’s Forced Laborers: the Enslaved, Indentured Servants, and Native Americans

Part of the reason slavery evolved differently in New England than in the middle and southern colonies was the culture of indentured servitude. As a carryover from English practice, indentured servants were the original standard for forced labor in New England and middle colonies like Pennsylvania and Delaware. These indentured servants were people voluntarily working off debts, usually signing a contract to perform slave-level labor for four to seven years. Historians estimate that more than half of the original population of the American colonies was brought over as indentured servants.New England colonies were also slower to start accepting African slavery in general—possibly because there were local alternatives to enslaved Africans. Early in New England’s history, a different kind of human trafficking emerged: enslaving and shipping local Native Americans to the West Indies. This kind of slavery was limited compared to the number of enslaved Africans and indentured servants that eventually came to New England, but exporting and enslaving these native people was an undeniable part of early New England human trafficking.

Enslaved Africans quickly replaced indentured servants on plantations in Virginia, Maryland, and other Southern colonies, but in New England, imported enslaved people were initially given the same status as indentured servants. This changed in 1641, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed laws for enslaved people differentiating enslaved labor from the indentured servants’ contract labor, which took away the enslaved’s rights.

Still, the New England colonies began to show differences in their approaches to slavery, even as slavery became more common in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island in the 18th century. The colonial government in Rhode Island—which had the largest enslaved population by the 1700s—tried, though ultimately failed, to enforce laws that gave the enslaved the same rights as indentured servants and set enslaved individuals free after 10 years of service. Although human trafficking continued to flourish throughout the 1700s, these first moves to break up human trafficking foreshadowed what was to come in the New England colonies.

Becoming the “Free North”

The use of slavery throughout the colonies (particularly the southern ones) continued to grow throughout the 18th century, but as the colonies moved closer to revolution against England, there was a growing trend of questioning slavery and its practices in New England. The number of people freed from bondage in New England grew, as the enslaved who fought in the Revolutionary War (on both sides) were offered freedom.

Religious societies like the Quakers (who believed that slavery was sinful and amoral) began the first stirrings of anti-slavery movements in New England. These early movements would later form the backbone of the 19th century abolitionist movements that would spread throughout the United States.

New England governments began to step in as well, outlawing active human trafficking in the Connecticut and Rhode Island colonies. However, few colonial leaders wanted a full repeal of slavery at the time. It was not until the last decades of the 18th century that the former New England colonies began the long process of outlawing slavery via emancipation statutes. These were "gradual emancipation" laws, however, designed to phase out the institution over many years. Though the enslaved populations dwindled over time after these laws were passed, enslaved people were still legally held for decades in some northern states. Despite passage of these gradual emancipation laws in 1784, Rhode Island and Connecticut didn't free their last enslaved people until the 1840s.

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The best-known slave societies were those of the circum-Caribbean world. Slave imports to the islands of the Caribbean began in the early 16th century. Initially the islands often were settled as well by numerous indentured labourers and other Europeans, but following the triumph after 1645 of the sugar revolution (initially undertaken because superior Virginia tobacco had left the Barbadian planters with nothing to sell) and after the nature of the disease climate became known to Europeans, they came to be inhabited almost exclusively by imported African slaves. In time the estate owners moved to England, and the sugar plantations were managed by sometimes unstable and unsavoury Europeans who, with the aid of Black overseers and drivers, controlled masses of slaves. About two-thirds of all slaves shipped across the Atlantic ended up in sugar colonies. By 1680 in Barbados the average plantation had about 60 slaves, and in Jamaica in 1832 about 150. The sugar plantations were among the contemporary world’s largest and most profitable enterprises, paying about 10 percent on invested capital and on some occasions, such as in Barbados in the 1650s, as much as 40 to 50 percent. The proportions of slaves on the islands ranged from more than a third in Cuba, which went into the sugar and gang labour business on a large scale only after the local planters had gained control in 1789, to 90 percent and more on Jamaica in 1730, Antigua in 1775, and Grenada up to 1834.

slavery

Enslaved people cutting sugarcane on the Caribbean island of Antigua, aquatint from Ten Views of the Island of Antigua by William Clark, 1832.

The British Library (Public Domain)

Slaves were of varying importance in Mesoamerica and on the South American continent. Initially slaves were imported because of a labour shortage, aggravated by the high death rate of the indigenous population after the introduction of European diseases in the early 16th century. They were brought in at first to mine gold, and they were shifted to silver mining or simply let go when gold was exhausted in the mid-16th century. In Brazil, where sugar had been tried even before its planting in the Caribbean, the coffee bush was imported from Arabia or Ethiopia via Indonesia, and it had an impact similar to that of sugar in the Caribbean. Around 1800 about half the population of Brazil consisted of slaves, but that percentage declined to about 33 percent in 1850 and to 15 percent after the shutting off of imports around 1850 combined with free immigration to raise the proportion of Europeans. In some parts of Brazil, such as Pernambuco, some two-thirds of the population consisted of Africans and their offspring.

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The final circum-Caribbean slave society was what became the southern United States. Slaves first were brought to Virginia in 1619. Subsequently, Africans were transshipped to North America from the Caribbean in increasing numbers. Initially, however, the English relied for their dependent labour primarily on indentured servants from the mother country. But in the two decades of the 1660s and 1670s the laws of slave ownership were clarified (for example, Africans who converted to Christianity did no longer have to be manumitted), and the price of servants may have increased because of rising wage rates in prospering England; soon thereafter African slaves replaced English indentured labourers. Tobacco initially was the profitable crop that occupied most slaves in the Chesapeake. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 changed the situation, and thereafter cotton culture created a huge demand for slaves, especially after the opening of the New South (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas). By 1850 nearly two-thirds of the plantation slaves were engaged in the production of cotton. Cotton could be grown profitably on smaller plots than could sugar, with the result that in 1860 the average cotton plantation had only about 35 slaves, not all of whom produced cotton. During the reign of “King Cotton,” about 40 percent of the Southern population consisted of Black slaves; the percentage of slaves rose as high as 64 percent in South Carolina in 1720 and 55 percent in Mississippi in 1810 and 1860. More than 36 percent of all the New World slaves in 1825 were in the southern United States. Like Rome and the Sokoto caliphate, the South was totally transformed by the presence of slavery. Slavery generated profits comparable to those from other investments and was only ended as a consequence of the War Between the States.