In August 1619 (researchers most often talk about August 20), a ship with two dozen black slaves arrived in the harbor of the first English settlement in the territory of the modern USA - the town of Jamestown in Virginia. Privateers (private individuals who, with permission from the authorities, used ships to capture enemy merchant ships) handed over prisoners to the inhabitants of the colony in exchange for supplies. From this date, the British-American transatlantic slave trade is usually counted.
Black slaves
On the African continent, south of the Sahara, slavery existed before the arrival of Europeans. However, according to historians, it was significantly different from slavery in the usual sense of the inhabitants of Europe or the Middle East. A person could temporarily become a slave due to debt or become dependent on the ruler, but was not considered a thing.
But after Europeans began sailing along the African coast in the 15th century, the content of slavery changed. The Portuguese began to capture the locals to turn them into goods, or negotiated with the leaders of the warlike peoples to redeem their captives.
At first, black slaves in Europe were for the most part turned into domestic servants. However, with the development of the New World, the Portuguese and Spanish colonialists created a need for labor on plantations and mines. The Indians fiercely resisted their compulsion to hard routine work, and already in 1513 the Spaniards first brought slaves from Africa to Puerto Rico. In the second half of the XVI century, black slaves appeared in the Spanish colonies in Florida.
The beginning of the British slave trade
In the colonization of the New World, the British initially lagged behind Portugal, Spain and France. British attempts to gain a foothold in America at the end of the 16th century were unsuccessful. The population of the first colony on Roanoke Island was forced to evacuate due to hostility from the Indians, and the second disappeared without a trace, giving rise to a lot of mystical rumors.
In 1607, the British managed to build the first permanent settlement in North America - Fort James, which was later renamed Jamestown and became the center of the Virginia colony. Since 1612, the British began to grow tobacco on its territory.
In 1619, English privateers intercepted a Portuguese ship carrying slaves from Angola off the coast of Mexico. About 20 people went to the crew of the ship "White Lion". In August, the ship arrived in Jamestown, where the captain exchanged prisoners for provisions.
- A commemorative sign indicating the delivery of the first slaves to Jamestown
- © Jimmy Emerson, DVM / Flickr
Initially, no slavery legislation existed in the North American colonies. Legal relations arising from the possession of slaves were regulated by the courts or by mutual agreement of the colonists. It was only in 1641 in Massachusetts that an act was passed permitting the purchase of slaves outside the colony, the slavery of prisoners of war, criminals and those who themselves would agree to it. Over time, similar laws appeared in other colonies.
In 1672, London introduced a state monopoly on the trade of black slaves. At the end of the XVII century, the English parliament allowed private individuals to sell slaves, and at the beginning of the next century, Britain became one of the countries most actively engaged in the slave trade. The share of slaves in the population of some colonies exceeded 40%.
In 1703, 42% of New York families held slaves. In the northern colonies, black slaves were more often used as domestic servants or workers, in the southern ones they were forced to work on plantations, growing indigo, tobacco and rice.
British merchants bought slaves on the African coast, loaded them onto specially equipped ships and brought them for sale to the New World. From illnesses, due to lack of proper nutrition and inhuman conditions of detention, many of them died on the way. However, profits from the trade in "live goods" covered any costs.
America and slavery
Experts note that the war for US independence 1775 - 1783 years. fundamentally did not change the situation of black slaves in North America.
“The Constitution, which in itself was quite democratic, did not say anything about slavery,” said Yuri Rogulev, director of the Roosevelt US Studies Foundation at Moscow State University, in an interview with RT.
According to him, the legislation of the United States regarded slaves as movable property and protected the rights of slave owners.
In 1807, US authorities prohibited the purchase of slaves from Africa, and in 1820 they equated the transatlantic slave trade with piracy. However, the illegal supply of African slaves to the southern American states continued until the second half of the 19th century.
According to the calculations of historians, in the XVII - XIX centuries, about 600 thousand black slaves were brought to the North American colonies and to the territory of the United States. As their children also became slaves, by 1860 the total number of slaves of African descent in the United States reached approximately 4 million people. Of the 1.5 million white families living in the southern states, about 400 thousand had slaves.
“Slavery from the point of view of American planters was economically feasible. His goal was to get benefits, ”publicist Armen Gasparyan explained in a conversation with RT.
At the same time, a number of historians believe that slavery was an integral part of the formation of American capitalism.
The planters achieved economic efficiency of slaveholding in cruel ways, in particular, by physical punishment. Many slaves walked with scars on their backs - they were beaten for every “fault”, for example, for an insufficient amount of cotton collected.
- A slave with signs of punishment on the back. Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 1863
- © Mathew Brady / Wikipedia
A separate aspect of slavery in the United States was the sexual exploitation of slaves. The planters turned them into concubines and subjected them to violence - this was not limited by law. Some slave owners even opened brothels. Moreover, the children of black slaves from white men were also considered slaves. Slave girls, whose only grandmother or great-grandmother was an African, were highly valued by slaveholders. Their fates are described in a number of famous literary works, in particular, in the novel “Quarteron” by Thomas Mine Reed.
In the 18th-19th centuries, about 300 uprisings of black slaves took place in the USA, but all of them were brutally crushed.
abolition of slavery
At the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries, all the northern states of the USA either abolished slavery completely or adopted plans for its phased elimination. In the southern states, slavery, on the contrary, was actively developing. Following the ban on the import of slaves from abroad, the domestic slave trade market flourished. Moreover, entrepreneurs from the northern states have invested in the slave trade and plantation economy of the south.
Black slaves massively fled from the southern states to the north to gain freedom. In 1850, their situation was greatly complicated due to the adoption by the US Congress of a law that allowed detaining runaway slaves in territories where slavery was abolished. However, in the United States, the abolitionist movement was gaining popularity, speaking under the slogan "All people are born equal" and demanding the complete abolition of slavery.
Between north and south, socio-economic contradictions gradually increased. The north advocated protectionism, and the south favored free trade. The southern states strove for maximum sovereignty and opposed the creation of new states inhabited by northerners in the west.
In 1854, the Republican Party of the United States was created, expressing the interests of northerners. Its representative, Abraham Lincoln, became president in six years. The southern states began to leave the USA en masse, and in 1861, a civil war broke out between north and south. Fortune was for some time on the side of the southerners, but over time their strength was exhausted and they were defeated.
In 1865, the 13th Constitutional Amendment prohibiting slavery entered into force in the United States. However, segregation legislation was soon adopted in part of the country, which deprived the black population of a number of civil rights. African Americans could not attend the same schools, restaurants, cafes, hospitals as the whites. Separate were even the toilets and places in public transport. Segregation restrictions were lifted only in the 60s of the twentieth century.
- Black man near the waiting room for the "colored" population
- © Library of Congress
“Today in the USA they do not like to once again recall the era of slavery and oppression. It’s easier to pretend that all this wasn’t, ”said Gasparyan.
In turn, Rogulev emphasized that the period of slavery was a “significant era in the history of the United States,” the consequences of which are still being felt.
“First there was slavery, then segregation. Racial inequality reigned in the United States for most of the history of the state. Today, he is no longer at the legislative level, but the consequences have not disappeared. Dark-skinned people in the United States are on average poorer than whites, receive less quality education, among them are more unemployed, their quality of life is lower, ”concluded Rogulev.