African Homelands

Enslaved Africans represented many different peoples, each with distinct cultures, religions, and languages. Most originated from the coast or the interior of West Africa, between present-day Senegal and Angola. Other enslaved peoples originally came from Madagascar and Tanzania in East Africa.

The Triangle Trade

The demands of European consumers for New World crops and goods helped fuel the slave trade. Following a triangular route between Africa, the Caribbean and North America, and Europe, slave traders from Holland, Portugal, France, and England delivered Africans in exchange for products such as rum, sugar, and tobacco that European consumers wanted. Eventually the trading route also distributed Virginia tobacco, New England rum, and indigo and rice crops from South Carolina and Georgia.

Glossary

Abolitionist: an individual who held strong antislavery views

African Diaspora: the dispersal of Africans in the New World

Bondsperson: a person held in servitude as human property to another

Coffle: a group of enslaved individuals transported together for sale

Conductor: one who helped escaping persons move from station to station on the Railroad.

Enslave: to force another into bondage

Manumit: to free

Maroons: runaways who escaped

Middle Passage: the name Africans gave to the trip across the Atlantic Ocean to New World enslavement

Underground Railroad: A movement in the United States from the early 19th century on to help bondspersons escape from slavery and reach freedom

Families on the Auction Block A strong family and community life helped sustain African Americans in slavery. People often chose their own partners, lived under the same roof, raised children together, and protected each other. Brutal treatment at the hands of slaveholders, however, threatened family life. Enslaved women experienced sexual exploitation at the hands of slaveholders and overseers. Bondspeople lived with the constant fear of being sold away from their loved ones, with no choice of reunion. historians estimate that most bondspeople were sold at least once in their lives. No event was more traumatic in the lives of enslaved individuals than the forcible separation from their families. People sometimes fled when they heard of an impending sale. "He would make us hold up our heads, walk briskly back and forth, while customers would fell up our hands and arms and bodies, turn us about, ask what we could do, make us open our mouths and show our teeth...Sometimes a man or woman...was taken...stripped, and inspected more minutely." Solomon Northup, 1853

Selling South To meet the growing demands of sugar and cotton, slaveholders developed an active domestic slave trade to move surplus workers to the Deep South. New Orleans, Louisiana, became the largest slave mart, followed by Richmond, Virginia; Natchez, Mississippi; and Charleston, South Carolina. Between 1820 and 1860 more than 60 percent of the Upper South's enslaved population was "sold South." Covering 25 to 30 miles a day on foot, men, women, and children marched south in large groups called coffles. Former bondsman Charles Ball remembered that slave traders bound the women together with rope. They fastened together the men first with chains around their necks and then handcuffed them in pairs. The traders removed the restraints when the coffle neared the market.

Free Blacks Free African Americans totaled six percent of the South's population in 1860. Free blacks often lived in cities such as Charleston, South Carolina; Natchez, Mississippi; New Orleans, Louisiana; Washington, D.C.; or Baltimore, Maryland, where they found better opportunities for employment and autonomy from whites. Despite the limitations imposed by the racist society that surrounded them, these free African Americans established their own churches, schools, and charitable organizations.

Types of Labor By 1860 some 4 million enslaved African Americans lived throughout the South. Whether on a small farm or a large plantation, most enslaved people were agricultural laborers. They toiled literally from sunrise to sunset in the fields or other odd jobs, such as refining sugar. Some bondspeople held specialized jobs as artisans, skilled laborers, or factory workers. A smaller number worked as cooks, butlers, or maids.

"You may think hard of us for running away from slavery...To be compelled to stand by and see you whip and slash my wife without mercy, when I could afford her no protection, not even by offering myself to suffer the lash in her place...This kind of treatment was what drove me from home and family, to seek a better home for them." --Henry Bibb, Windsor, Ontario, to his former owner, 1844

King Cotton During the 17th and 18th century enslaved African Americans in the Upper South mostly raised tobacco. In coastal South Carolina and Georgia, they harvested indigo for dye and grew rice, using agricultural expertise brought with them from Africa. By the 1800s rice, sugar, and cotton became the South's leading cash crops. The patenting of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 made it possible for workers to gin - separate the seeds from the fiber - some 600 to 700 pounds daily, or ten times more cotton than permitted by hand. The Industrial Revolution, centered in Great Britain, quadrupled the demand for cotton, which soon became America's leading export. Planters' acute need for more cotton workers helped expand southern slavery. By the Civil War the South exported more than a million tons of cotton annually to textile manufactories in Great Britain and the North. Short-staple, or upland cotton, dominated the market. An area still called the Black Belt, which stretched across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, grew some 80 percent of the nation's crop. Simultaneously cotton expanded into the new states of Arkansas and Texas. In parts of the Black Belt enslaved African Americans made up more than three-fourths of the total population.

Brutal Challenges to the System

Most African Americans resisted enslavement. They used techniques such as work slowdowns, sabotage, sickness, self-mutilation, or the destruction of property. Whenever possible, individuals attempted to liberate themselves by running away. Some runaways - called maroons - created free communities, such as those that existed in Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp or in the Florida Everglades among the Seminole Indians. Beginning in the 17th century, African Americans repeatedly banded together in attempts to overthrow the institution of slavery. Large-scale uprisings include Gabriel's Rebellion, which occurred near Richmond Virginia in 1800. The revolt's leader, Gabriel Prosser, reportedly drew inspiration from the Haitian Revolution. The best-known rebellion occurred in 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia. Led by enslaved preacher Nat Turner, some 70 followers destroyed property and murdered more than 50 white men, women and children within a 24-hour period. Following Turner's rebellion many Virginia slaveholders reported insubordinate behavior by their slaves. In retaliation vigilantes murdered innocent blacks. The uprising succeeded in terrorizing white southerners, and as a direct result, southern lawmakers enacted stricter regulations designed to tightly control the activities of enslaved and free African Americans.

 

 Many enslaved African Americans freed themselves from bondage whenever possible. Most runaways were young men; enslaved women generally stayed behind with their children. Courageous Americans who opposed slavery helped enslaved individuals reach freedom in the North, Mexico, Caribbean, and the Indian territories. Beginning in the early 19th century, a movement called the Underground Railroad (a few sites are pictured above) helped enslaved people flee the South. Operating without formal organization,participants in the Underground Railroad included both white and black abolitionists, enslaved African Americans, American Indians, and members of such religious groups as the Quakers, Methodists, and the Baptists.

Methods of Escape Slaves passed information about methods of escape by word-of-mouth, in stories, and through songs. No actual trains existed on the Underground Railroad, but guides were called conductors and the hiding places that they used, depots or stations. Runaways escaped to the North along a loosely connected series of routes that stretched through the southern border states. Guided north by the stars and sometimes singing traditional songs like "Follow the Drinking Gourd," most runaways traveled at night on foot and took advantage of the natural protections offered by swamps, bayous, forests, and waterways. Others who escaped from the South traveled into the western territories, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Some runaways took refuge in cities such as Baltimore and New Orleans and blended into the free black population.

Click here for full size version of map.

Levi Coffin

Quaker Levi Coffin was known as the "President" and his home as the "Grand Central Station" of the Underground Railroad. Coffin and his wife Catherine aided thousands of runaways during their lifelong work in the antislavery movement in Newport (Fountain City), Indiana, and Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1844, while visiting Canada, Coffin was reunited with many people he helped escape.

Josiah Henson

With his children and wife, Josiah Henson liberated himself from slavery in Cincinnati in the 1820s. As a Methodist preacher, Henson lectured widely on slavery's evils, and published his autobiography in 1849. Henson's book reportedly served as the major source for Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin . Active in the Underground Railroad, Henson helped more than 100 individuals escape to freedom. In 1841, Henson, together with other abolitionists, purchased land in Dresden, Ontario, and created a vocational school called the British American Institute for Fugitive Slaves.

David Ruggles

African American abolitionist David Ruggles became involved in the Underground Railroad because of his association with William Still, an important conductor based in Philadelphia. Reportedly he helped more than 600 people, including Fredrick Douglass, reach their freedom. as secretary of the New York Vigilance Committee, Ruggles worked to protect African Americans' rights then under assault by the Fugitive Slave Act.

John and Jean Rankin

For 40 years, 1825-65, John and Jean Rankin and their neighbors in Ripley, Ohio fed, clothed, and sheltered thousands of people escaping to freedom. John Rankin, a Presbyterian minister, organized antislavery groups on a local and state level. The Rankin home, sitting above the Ohio River, was known as Liberty Hill.

 

Adjusting to Freedom

Once free, former slaves remade their lives. Many worked hard to raise money to purchase family members still in slavery or to help further their escape. While savoring new experiences, they discovered the extent to which bigotry prevailed in northern society. Obstacles existed for them to find work and to secure satisfactory housing. Few, however, longed for their old lives. "Through the mercy of God," one former slave relished, "he can hold up his hands and pronounce the sentence, 'I am a Freeman!'" During the Civil War many African Americans joined the Federal forces to fight for slavery's destruction.