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Slavery in the colonial history of the United States refers to the institution of slavery as it existed in the European colonies which eventually became part of the United States. In these colonies, slavery developed due to a combination of factors, primarily the labour demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies, which had resulted in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery existed in every European colony in the Americas during the early modern period, and both Africans and indigenous peoples were victims of enslavement by European colonizers during the era.
The American Colonization Society (ACS), initially the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America until 1837, was an American organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to encourage and support the migration of freeborn blacks and emancipated slaves to the continent of Africa. It was modeled on an earlier British colonization in Africa, which had sought to resettle London's "black poor".
An African American is a citizen or resident of the United States who has origins in any of the black populations of Africa. African American-related topics include:
In the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, free people of color were primarily people of mixed African, European, and Native American descent who were not enslaved. However, the term also applied to people born free who were primarily of black African descent with little mixture. They were a distinct group of free people of color in the French colonies, including Louisiana and in settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. In these territories and major cities, particularly New Orleans, and those cities held by the Spanish, a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed. These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry. Racial classifications were numerous in Latin America.
The Black Codes, sometimes called the Black Laws, were laws which governed the conduct of African Americans. In 1832, James Kent wrote that "in most of the United States, there is a distinction in respect to political privileges, between free white persons and free colored persons of African blood; and in no part of the country do the latter, in point of fact, participate equally with the whites, in the exercise of civil and political rights." Although Black Codes existed before the Civil War and although many Northern states had them, the Southern U.S. states codified such laws in everyday practice. The best known of these laws were passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866, after the Civil War, in order to restrict African Americans' freedom, and in order to compel them to work for either low or no wages.
In the British colonies in North America and in the United States before the abolition of slavery in 1865, free Negro or free Black described the legal status of African Americans who were not enslaved. The term was applied both to formerly enslaved people (freedmen) and to those who had been born free, whether of African or mixed descent.
Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs, II was an American Presbyterian minister who served as Secretary of State and Superintendent of Public Instruction of Florida, and, along with U.S. Congressman Josiah Thomas Walls, was among the most powerful black officeholders in the state during Reconstruction. An African American who served during the Reconstruction era, he was the first black Florida Secretary of State, holding the office over a century prior to the state's second black Secretary of State, Jesse McCrary, who served for five months in 1979.
Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley, born Anta Madjiguène Ndiaye, also known as Anta Majigeen Njaay or Anna Madgigine Jai, was a West African from present-day Senegal, who was enslaved and sold in Cuba, probably via the slave pens on Gorée Island. In Cuba she was purchased, as wife, by plantation owner and slave trader Zephaniah Kingsley. After his death, she became a planter and slave owner in her own right, as a free Black woman in early 19th-century Florida.
Partus sequitur ventrem was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that children of slave mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels), as well as the common law of personal property.
Kingsley Plantation is the site of a former estate on Fort George Island, in Duval County, Florida, that was named for its developer and most famous owner, Zephaniah Kingsley, who spent 25 years there. It is located at the northern tip of Fort George Island at Fort George Inlet, and is part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve managed by the U.S. National Park Service. Kingsley's house is the oldest plantation house still standing in Florida, and the solidly-built village of slave cabins is one of the best preserved in the United States. It is also "the oldest surviving antebellum Spanish Colonial plantation in the United States."
The Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, played a major role in the abolition movement against slavery in both the United Kingdom and in the United States. Quakers were among the first white people to denounce slavery in the American colonies and Europe, and the Society of Friends became the first organization to take a collective stand against both slavery and the slave trade, later spearheading the international and ecumenical campaigns against slavery.
Proslavery is support for slavery. It is sometimes found in the thought of ancient philosophers, religious texts, and in British writings and in American writings especially before the American Civil War but also later through the 20th century. Arguments in favor of slavery include deference to the Bible and thus to God, some people being natural slaves in need of supervision, slaves often being better off than the poorest non-slaves, practical social benefit for the society as a whole, and slavery being a time-proven practice by multiple great civilizations.
Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. was a plantation owner, born in England, who moved as a child with his family to South Carolina, and became a planter, slave trader, and merchant. He built four plantations in the Spanish colony of Florida near what is now Jacksonville, Florida. He served on the Florida Territorial Council after Florida was acquired by the United States in 1821. Kingsley Plantation, which he owned and where he lived for 25 years, has been preserved as part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, run by the United States National Park Service. Finding his large and complicated family progressively more insecure in Florida, he moved them to a vanished plantation, Mayorasgo de Koka, in what was then Haiti but soon became part of the Dominican Republic.
Mayorasgo de Koka was a 35,000-acre (140 km2) tract of land in what was at its inception in Haiti, but since 1844 is in the Dominican Republic. After renting it in 1837, Zephaniah Kingsley purchased it in 1838. As whites were barred from land ownership in Haiti it was titled in the name of Zephaniah's eldest son, the mixed-"race" George Kingsley. It is currently located in the province of Puerto Plata, on the north coast of the Dominican Republic.
In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws were passed by most states to prohibit interracial marriage, and in some cases also prohibit interracial sexual relations. Some such laws predate the establishment of the United States, some dating to the later 17th or early 18th century, a century or more after the complete racialization of slavery. Nine states never enacted such laws; 25 states had repealed their laws by 1967, when the United States Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that such laws were unconstitutional in the remaining 16 states. The term miscegenation was first used in 1863, during the American Civil War, by journalists to discredit the abolitionist movement by stirring up debate over the prospect of interracial marriage after the abolition of slavery.
Slavery in Florida is more central to Florida's history than it is to almost any other state. Florida's purchase by the United States from Spain in 1819 was primarily a measure to strengthen the system of slavery on Southern plantations, by denying potential runaways the formerly safe haven of Florida.
The Chesapeake rebellion of 1730 was the largest slave rebellion of the colonial period in North America. Believing that Virginian planters had disregarded a royal edict from King George II which freed slaves, two hundred slaves gathered in Princess Anne County, Virginia, in October, electing captains and demanding that Governor Gooch honor the royal edict. White planters stopped these meetings, arresting some slaves and forcing others to flee. Although hundreds of slaves fled to the Great Dismal Swamp, they were immediately hunted down by the authorities and their Pasquotank allies.
The Battle of Cap-Français took place from 20 to 22 June 1793 during the Haitian Revolution. It was originally a conflict between commissioners sent by the French Republican government, who were supported by rebellious slaves and free people of color, against the colony's elite and white royalist slave owners, who sparked an uprising against the commissioners in the city, led to a military conflict between whites and coloreds within the city, to eventually lead to an attack by slaves throughout the city.
Slavery as a positive good was the prevailing view of Southern U.S. politicians and intellectuals just before the American Civil War, as opposed to seeing it as a crime against humanity or a necessary evil. They defended the legal enslavement of people for their labor as a benevolent, paternalistic institution with social and economic benefits, an important bulwark of civilization, and a divine institution similar or superior to the free labor in the North.
African Americans have made considerable contributions to the history and development of Jacksonville, Florida. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population make up of African American in Jacksonville Florida is 30.7%.
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Genovese, Eugene D. (2000). "Foreword". In Stowell, Daniel W. (ed.). Balancing Evils Judiciously : The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley. University Press of Florida. ISBN 978-0813017334.
- ↑ Sanders, John L. (2000). "Our Constitutions: A Historical Perspective". State Library of North Carolina. Archived from the original on 2008-04-18.
- ↑ Allman, T. D. (2013). Finding Florida. The True History of the Sunshine State. Atlantic Monthly Press. ISBN 9780802120762.
- ↑ Brown, Canter (January 1995). "Race Relations in Territorial Florida, 1821-1845". The Florida Historical Quarterly . 73 (3): 287–307. JSTOR 30150451.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Kingsley, Zephaniah (1829). Treatise on the Patriarchal or Co-operative System of Society as it Exists in some Governments and Colonies in America, and in the United States, under the Name of Slavery, with its Necessity and Advantages (2nd ed.).
- 1 2 Fleszar, Mark J. (2009). The Atlantic Mind: Zephaniah Kingsley, Slavery, and the Politics of Race in the Atlantic World (M.A. thesis). Georgia State University. Archived from the original on 2018-10-05. Retrieved 2018-10-05.
- ↑ Fleszar, Mark J. (December 2012). "'My Laborers in Haiti Are Not Slaves': Proslavery Fictions and a Black Colonization Experiment on the Northern Coast, 1835–1846". Journal of the Civil War Era . 2 (4): 478–510, at p. 478. doi:10.1353/cwe.2012.0084. JSTOR 26070274. S2CID 161344657.