1. Warm Up 09.16.13 Please answer the following question:
What were the conditions like for slaves on ships coming to America?

2. Agenda 09.17.13 Announcements/ Housekeeping
Unit 1 Exam = Monday (9/23)
Review Sheet today
Intro DBQ 1: Tuesday (9/24)
Slavery in Colonial America
Complete notes on American Slavery
SLAVE RESISTANCE
HW: Voices of Freedom (VOF) #21

3. Questions to Consider
According to Zinn, what is the root for racism in America?
Why were Africans considered “better” slaves than Indians in Virginia?
How did 16th century Africa compare to 16th century Europe politically, economically, and militarily?
How did slavery in Africa differ from slavery in Europe and the Americas?
What was the position of the Catholic Church in Portugal vis-à-vis slavery?
In terms of mortality, what was the cost of slavery?
What was the relationship between slavery and the plantation system?
What evidence exists that America’s slaves did not accept their fate easily?
Why did slave owners fear poor whites?

4. Chapter 4 Slavery, Freedom, and the Struggle for Empire to 1763

5. Slavery and Empire Atlantic Trade
Caribbean = main focus for British empire
Aka – The Triangular Trade
British goods  Africa & Colonies  Sugar, Tobacco, etc  Europe  Slaves from Africa  New World
Slavery became connected to race
The greatest contradiction of the eighteenth century was the simultaneous expansion of the British empire, celebrated by Britons for its unique commitment to liberty, and slavery.
The transatlantic slave trade flourished in the 1700s. In this century alone arrived more than half of the 7.7 estimated million Africans transported to the New World between 1492 and The immensely profitable slave trade was a vital part of world commerce. In the 1eughteenth-century British empire, slavery, not wage labor, was the norm. Slave plantations contributed greatly to British economic development, and the first mass consumer goods in international trade, namely sugar, rice, coffee, and tobacco, were produced by slaves and stimulated the growth of the slave trade.
Though the Caribbean continued to be the British empire’s commercial center and the crown’s major revenue producer, slave-grown products from the mainland increased as a share of Atlantic trade. The Atlantic ocean’s triangular trading routes carried British manufactured goods to Africa and the colonies, brought to Europe colonial products including tobacco, indigo, sugar, and rice, and shipped slaves from Africa to the Americas. Most colonial vessels went back and forth from the mainland to the West Indies, however, shipping agricultural and other goods that the islands couldn’t produce in exchange for plantation crops and slaves. Even merchants from New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island participated in and profited from the slave trade. In Britain, the slave trade also stimulated the rise of port cities like Liverpool and Bristol, fostered the growth of banking, shipbuilding, insurance, and helped finance the early industrial revolution.

6. Map 4.1 Atlantic Trading Routes
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company
Map 4.1 Atlantic Trading Routes

7. Slavery and Empire Africa and the Slave Trade
Most African Rulers took part
Awful for West Africa’s society and Economy
The Middle Passage
Quote “a harrowing experience”
Slaves sold in America for 20-30x more than Africa
Crammed
Height between decks = only 18 inches!
Equiano*
Both crew and slaves suffered high casualties
Only 5% destined for N.A.
400,000 – 600,000
By 1770, 1/5 of the 2.3 million in Colonies (Not including Indians) were Africans and their descendants.
In the eighteenth century, slavery in West African societies shifted from being a minor to a central institution. Most African rulers participated in the slave trade, although often in ways most beneficial to them. The slave trade made Africa a major market for European goods, especially textiles and guns. This disrupted relations within and among African societies in ways that encouraged the growth of the slave trade and exacerbated conflict among African societies competing for power, goods, and access to slaves. Of course, the loss of tens of thousands of men and women to the slave trade weakened and distorted West Africa’s economy and society.
The voyage across the Atlantic, known as “the middle passage,” was a harrowing experience for slaves. Since a slave could be sold in America for twenty or thirty times their price in Africa, slave traders crammed slaves as tightly on ships as possible. Given such conditions, including the spread of disease, about one in five slaves died before the ships reached the Americas. Of those who survived, only a small percentage were sold and stayed in the North American colonies, which had a lower death rate than colonies in the West Indies and Brazil, where slave plantation conditions and work were more brutal. The British colonies of North America imported between 400,000 and 600,000 slaves, and by 1770, due to slaves’ natural reproduction, one-fifth of the 2.3 million people in the English colonies (not including Indians) were Africans and their descendants.

8. An architect’s plan for a slave ship
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company
An architect’s plan for a slave ship

9. Map 4.2 The Slave Trade in The Atlantic World, 1460–1770
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company
Map 4.2 The Slave Trade in The Atlantic World, 1460–1770

10. Slavery and Empire Freedom and Slavery in the Chesapeake
Three distinct slave systems in Colonies:
Tobacco based plantation (Chesapeake)
Rice based plantation (SC & Georgia)
Non-plantation (NE and Middle Colonies)
Tobacco = oldest of three
System of freedom
Race = social division
VA Law*
Free = white
By the mid-eighteenth century, there were three distinct slave systems in British North America: tobacco-based plantation slavery in the Chesapeake, rice-based plantation slavery in South Carolina and Georgia, and non-plantation slavery in New England and the Middle Colonies.
The tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake, where nearly half of the region’s population in 1770 were slaves, was the largest and oldest of the three. Extending deep inland, slavery in Virginia existed on large plantations and many small farms. Slavery had created the Chesapeake elite, a landed gentry who dominated the region’s society and politics in conjunction with merchants in the tobacco trade and lawyers defending the interests of slaveholders. Slavery transformed Chesapeake society into an elaborate hierarchy of degrees of freedom: large planters at the top, lesser planters and landowning yeomen below them, and at the bottom a large population of indentured servants, tenant farmers, convicts, and slaves.
Though planters made more laws enhancing the power of masters over their slave property, violence, such as whipping, was at the center of the institution and its perpetuation. As slavery became entrenched, race became a more significant line of social division. Whites more and more saw free blacks as dangerous and unwanted and restricted the rights given earlier to free blacks, such as gun ownership and the vote (for free, landowning black men). Because Virginia by law required freed slaves to leave the colony, free blacks remained a very small part of the population.

11. Slavery and Empire Indian Slavery in Early Carolina The Rice Kingdom
Creeks
Eventually rebelled, colonists turned elsewhere
The Rice Kingdom
SC first colony to have black majority!
Africans taught colonists how to grow!
“Task System”
The rice plantation system of slavery that developed in South Carolina and Georgia first relied on Indian slaves, some of whom the colony exported, along with deerskins and furs. Some tribes, like the Creeks, first participated in the Indian slave trade, starting wars with other tribes just to secure captives for the trade. But the Creeks and other Indian tribes, fearing enslavement and other English abuses, rebelled, and this encouraged Carolina colonists to turn elsewhere for their labor force.
Rice cultivation in the low country of South Carolina prompted the importation of African slaves there, and led to a growing racial divide between whites and blacks. South Carolina was the first colony to have a black majority. By the 1730s, when North Carolina became its own colony, two-thirds of its population was black. Indigo, a crop used for blue dye, also became a staple crop there in the 1740s, and was cultivated on slave plantations. Africans, familiar with the crop at home, actually taught the colonists how to grow rice. As opposed to the Chesapeake, where slaves worked constantly in gangs, slaves on the rice plantations worked in the “task” system, assigned daily jobs which, once completed, gave them time for leisure or crops of their own.

12. Slavery and Empire The Georgia Experiment James Oglethorpe
“worthy poor”
Did not last (1751)
Slavery in the North
Small farms
Slavery not central
Worked in shops, docks, and personal servants.
Legal rights
Banned physical punishment
Bring law suits to court
Marriages recognized
New York & Phila had significant amount of slaves; however, employers shifted to wage labor in years before the revolution.
Rice cultivation also developed in Georgia, founded in 1733 by philanthropists led by James Oglethorpe, a wealthy reformer who favored the abolition of slavery. Oglethorpe wanted to create a colony in which the “worthy poor” of England could find economic opportunity; the British government wanted the colony as a defensive barrier against the Spanish and their Indian allies in Florida. Although the colony initially banned liquor and slaves, many of its settlers wanted both, and by the 1740s, colonists were appealing for the English liberty of self-government in order to have slaves. In 1751, Georgia’s proprietors surrendered the colony to the crown, which repealed the ban on slavery and liquor. Georgia quickly came to resemble South Carolina, with large rice plantations supporting a wealthy planter class that dominated the colony.
Compared to the plantation areas, New England and the middle colonies were mostly areas of small farms were slavery was not central. Slaves were only a small percentage of the population, and even wealthy families rarely owned more than one slave. Slaves worked as farm labor, in artisan shops, on the docks, and as personal servants. Slaves in the North, however, sometimes had more legal rights than their southern counterparts; in New England, slaves could not be severely physically punished, slaves could bring suits in court, and slave marriages were recognized. A significant number of slaves were present in New York and Philadelphia, although many employers of slave labor turned to wage labor in the years before the American Revolution.

13. Table 4.1 Slave population as percentage of total population
of original thirteen colonies, 1770
Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © W.W. Norton & Company