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First African Slaves Arrive in Virginia
o The colony, the company, and the Nation all wanted to make themselves wealthy through commerce. This desire led to the introduction of African slavery into New Netherland. The fur trade did not prove as lucrative as investors had hoped, and the Company found that colonists tended to abandon agriculture for trade. The company decided that the primary function of New Netherland should be to provide food for its more lucrative plantation colonies in Brazil and the Caribbean. -
First African Slaves Arrive in Virginia
Earlier in the century, the Dutch had seized a portion of northern Brazil from Portugal and introduced a sugar-plantation slave economy, which it transplanted to islands in the Caribbean. By that time they had also entered the transatlantic slave trade. In fact, a Dutch warship dropped off the first 20 Africans at the English colony of Jamestown in 1619 in return for food. With its own plantation colonies needing slave labor, the Netherlands became a major player in the slave trade, transporting -
First African Slaves in America
Africans to the colonies of other nations as well. -
Period: to
Slavery Timespan
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Slavery made illegal in the North, by the Northwest Ordinance.
the upper south (Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware) legislatures passed laws making it easier to emancipate slaves. -
Slavery made illegal in the North, by the Northwest Ordinance.
o The Combination of Revolutionary ideal of freedom and African American activism presented a significant challenge to white Americans, and they met it in part. Every state north of Delaware eliminated slavery either in their constitutions or through gradual emancipation. In Addition, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory (the future stats of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin). In the states of the upper south (Virginia, Maryland, and Delawa -
Eli Whitneys creation of the Cottin Gin increases demand for slavery
o The most significant boost to American commercial agricultural arose from the late eighteenth-century mechanization of the English textile mills and the resulting increased demand for cotton. The colonies had not been an important source of raw cotton, because the only variety that grew well in most of North America was extremely laborious and time-consuming to clean. Spurred by the new English markets, in 1793 Eli Whitney invented a mechanism that reduced the cleaning time of this short-stap -
Eli Whitneys creation of the Cottin Gin increases demand for slavery
cotton from pound a day to 50 pounds a day. Almost at a stroke, Whitney’s gin made cotton viable cash crop for much of the South. -
1800 Gabriel organizes slave Revolt
Gabriel Prosser's rebellion In the spring of 1800, Prosser, a deeply religious man, begins plotting an invasion of Richmond, Virginia and an attack on its armory. By summer he has enlisted more than 1,000 slaves and collected an armory of weapons, organizing the first large-scale slave revolt in the U.S. On the day of the revolt, the bridges leading to Richmond are destroyed in a flood, and Prosser is betrayed. The state militia attacks, and Prosser and 35 of his men are hanged. -
The Missouri Compromise
o The compromise also provided that slavery would be permitted in Arkansas Territory but excluded from the rest of the Louisiana Purchase. The Missouri Compromise was a devastating defeat for the opponents of Slavery. For decades they had struggled to hold back the expansion of slavery and the growing power of the slaveholders in national politics. Disgusted by the increasing belligerence of all, they hoper, by keeping it out of Missouri. But they had failed, and the consequences of their -
The Missouri Compromise
failure were soon apparent. Slavery’s defenders had always used racial politics to try to stop antislavery politics, but their successes were limited in the 1820’s. Impressed by the strength of antislavery sentiment during the Missouri crisis, southerners joined and emerging political coalition that came to be know as the Democratic Party. This coalition started from the premise that slavery would henceforth be excluded from national politics by means of an increasingly effective white racial co -
William Lloyd Garrison
o The most dramatic break came in the person of William Lloyd Garrison, whose commitment to perfectionism led him to found his own abolitionist newspaper. The Liberator, in Boston in 1831. In the first issue Garrison announced his absolute rejection of any compromise with slavery: “I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.” Garrison approach was know as immediatism—by which abolitionists meant not the -
William Lloyd Garrison
immediate abolition of slavery, but the immediate beginning of the process that would lead to slavery’s ultimate abolition. -
Nat Turner Leads biggest Rebellion
o In the summer of 1831 an African American driver and preacher by the name of Nat Turner launched a rebellion in Virginia. The rebellion was put down and Turner and other conspirators were executed, but unlike earlier plots, this revolt had actually taken place. Inspired by a millennialist fervor’, for two days Tuner and his followers had effectively controlled part of southern Virginia, recruiting new allies, executing whites, and freeing slaves. Although the number of active insurrectionists -
Nat Turner Leads Biggest Rebellion
probably never exceeded 70, 57 whites died in the uprising, mire than in any previous slave rebellion. Southern whites took their revenge in a month long reign of vigilante terror, but the insurrection had left its mar. Southern whites lived in a state of constant fear, convinced that northern and southern slaves were in league against them. In an 1832 convention South Carolina radicals voted 136 to 26 to nullify the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 in the state. -
Wilmot Proviso
o A Democrat congressman from Pennsylvania attached to an appropriations bull an amendment banning slavery from all the territories acquired in the war with Mexico. The aim of the Famous Wilmot Proviso was to preserve western lands for white settlement. Initially, Northern Whigs and Democrats joined in support of the proviso, whereas their southern counterparts opposed it. Reintroduced in the next session of Congress, However, the proviso went down to defeat. Nevertheless, it paralyzed congress -
WIlmot Proviso
for several years in the late 1840’s, when conditions in the West demanded federal legislation. -
Harriet Tubman
o Born a slave in Maryland, Harriet Tubman escaped to freedom, and later led more than 300 other slaves to the North and to Canada to their freedom, too. The best-known conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman was acquainted with many of the social reformers and abolitionists of her time, and she spoke against slavery and for women's rights. -
Harriet Beecher Stowes "Uncle Tom's Cabin"
o The astonishing success of Stowe’s novel was a measure of northern anxiety. In vivid prose, Stowe drew a sentimental portrait of a slave mother and her infant child as they fled from a master who had contracted to sell them apart. Few readers missed the point. Anyone who helped Elizabeth save her child violated the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 -
Kansas-Nebreska Act
, the final version of Douglas’s bill repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The debate over the bill was ferocious, but in the end the Kansas-Nebraska Act became a law. -
Kansas Nebraska Act
o Southerners suspicious of attempts to regulate slavery in the territories demanded that the Missouri Compromise be repealed. Douglas withdrew the bill and reintroduced it in 1854 with a new twist. He spilt Nebraska Territory into two, Kansas to the West of the Slave State of Missouri and Nebraska to the north of Kansas. Both were organized on the principal of sovereignty, and Kansas was expected to become a slave state and Nebraska a free state. To win southern congressional support, the -
The Dred Scott Decision
o In 1833, when John Emerson an army surgeon from Missouri, was assigned to Fort Armstrong, Illinois and took a slave named Dred Scott with him. Emerson spent two years there and then two years in at Fort Snelling in Wisconsin Territory. Slavery was illegal in Illinois and Wisconsin Territory. Back in Missouri Scott sued his owners, claiming that several years of residence on free soil, which me him legally free. After losing in 1854, Scott appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. He also lost that -
The Dred Scott Decision
it was a unanimous vote against Scott. People were really upraised with the fact that Chief Justice Robert Taney, but with what he said, “Scott was not a citizen because he was black” -
John Brown
o In the fall of 1858 the mysterious John Brown had sought out to invade Virginia. Fredrick Douglas advised him to give it up. Yet Brown rented a farm in Maryland near the town of Harpers Ferry in Western Virginia, where a small federal arsenal was located. He apparently planned to capture the arsenal and distribute the guns to local slaved, he was trying to make a rebellion. On the eve of October 16, 1859 Brown and 18 followers walked across the Potomac River with a wagonload of guns and seized -
John Brown
the armory. He told them to travel throughout the country to hand out weapons to other slaves. But the slaves were not the ones that rose, the military did. As the military charged into the house where Brown and his followers were, 2 of Browns men died and he was injured. He was then hung on December 2, but for being a rebel you think he would be looked at as a bad person, but that was only the south that thought that, the north looked at him as a Hero. -
The Emancipation Proclimation
o It was a proclamation that would free all slaves in the North it would also bring the slaves from the South up to the North. This would make it so they could have more soldiers for their army since none of them had a place to really go, this was also an advantage against the South. The slaves in the South had to fight, tend to the injured, and working on the farms still. Even though many slaves were trying to flee in the North they weren’t actually free until the proclamation did pass. -
The Emancipation Proclimation
In the end there were over 186,000 blacks that had joined the North, and 134,111 of those slaves were from the South. -
13th Amendmant
o After the Emancipation Proclamation only half a million slaves have been freed from it, but there were many more slaves still not freed. So after Lincoln being re-elected, he and the republicans scrambled to get it through congress before the war ended and support for emancipation finally evaporated. Congress finally [assed the amendment and sent it to the states in January of 1865. It was not ratified until December, but in the intervening months most of the slaves were in fact emancipated. -
13th Amendment
When Lee surrendered many slaves and slaveholders spontaneously concluded that slavery itself was finished and began making new arrangements. Not to long after the amendment had passed Lincoln was murdered by a Southern actor named John Wilkes Booth.
