Glossary of American slavery

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Broadside advertising bucks, wenches and a "picaninny" in Kentucky, 1855 Great Sale of Slaves 1855.jpg
Broadside advertising bucks, wenches and a "picaninny" in Kentucky, 1855
Broadside advertising "acclimated" slaves separately from other people for sale, in New Orleans in 1858 Broadside for 1858 Sale of Slaves in New Orleans.jpg
Broadside advertising "acclimated" slaves separately from other people for sale, in New Orleans in 1858

This is a glossary of American slavery, terminology specific to the cultural, economic, and political history of slavery in the United States

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slavery in the colonial history of the United States</span>

The institution of slavery in the European colonies in North America, which eventually became part of the United States of America, developed due to a combination of factors. Primarily, the labor demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies 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 targets of enslavement by Europeans during the era.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slavery in the United States</span>

The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slave codes</span> Subset of laws regarding chattel slavery and enslaved people

The slave codes were laws relating to slavery and enslaved people, specifically regarding the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slave trade in the United States</span>

The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the mercantile trade of enslaved people within the United States. It was most significant after 1808, when the importation of slaves from Africa was prohibited by federal law. Historians estimate that upwards of one million slaves were forcibly relocated from the Upper South, places like Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri, to the territories and then-new states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of slavery in Georgia</span>

Slavery in Georgia is known to have been practiced by European colonists. During the colonial era, the practice of slavery in Georgia soon became surpassed by industrial-scale plantation slavery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Igbo people in the Atlantic slave trade</span>

The Igbo of Igboland became one of the principal ethnic groups to be enslaved during the Atlantic slave trade. An estimated 14.6% of all enslaved people were taken from the Bight of Biafra, a bay of the Atlantic Ocean that extends from the Nun outlet of the Niger River (Nigeria) to Limbe (Cameroon) to Cape Lopez (Gabon) between 1650 and 1900. The Bight’s major slave trading ports were located in Bonny and Calabar.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of slavery in Virginia</span>

Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Plantation complexes in the Southern United States</span>

Plantation complexes were common on agricultural plantations in the Southern United States from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Until the abolition of slavery, such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Treatment of slaves in the United States</span>

The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of slavery in Louisiana</span> Regional history of slavery in the USA

Following Robert Cavelier de La Salle establishing the French claim to the territory and the introduction of the name Louisiana, the first settlements in the southernmost portion of Louisiana were developed at present-day Biloxi (1699), Mobile (1702), Natchitoches (1714), and New Orleans (1718). Slavery was then established by European colonists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slave marriages in the United States</span> Generally not legal before the American Civil War

Slave marriages in the United States were typically illegal before the American Civil War abolished slavery in the US. Enslaved African Americans were legally considered chattel, and they were denied civil and political rights until the United States abolished slavery with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Both state and federal laws denied, or rarely defined, rights for enslaved people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Coffle</span> Forced-march caravan of chained enslaved people or animals

A coffle, sometimes called a platoon or a drove, was a group of enslaved people chained together and marched from one place to another by owners or slave traders. These troupes, sometimes called shipping lots before they were moved, ranged in size from a fewer than a dozen to 200 or more enslaved people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bibliography of the slave trade in the United States</span>

This is a bibliography of works regarding the internal or domestic slave trade in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slave markets and slave jails in the United States</span>

Slave markets and slave jails in the United States were places used for the slave trade in the United States from the founding in 1776 until the total abolition of slavery in 1865. Slave pens, also known as slave jails, were used to temporarily hold enslaved people until they were sold, or to hold fugitive slaves, and sometimes even to "board" slaves while traveling. Slave markets were any place where sellers and buyers gathered to make deals. Some of these buildings had dedicated slave jails, others were negro marts to showcase the slaves offered for sale, and still others were general auction or market houses where a wide variety of business was conducted, of which "negro trading" was just one part. The term slave depot was commonly used in New Orleans in the 1850s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theophilus Freeman</span> 19th-century American slave trader

Theophilus Freeman was a 19th-century American slave trader of Virginia, Louisiana and Mississippi. He was known in his own time as wealthy and problematic. Freeman's business practices were described in two antebellum American slave narratives—that of John Brown and that of Solomon Northup—and he appears as a character in both filmed dramatizations of Northup's Twelve Years a Slave.

John Hagan was a well-known American interstate slave trader who operated slave jails in both Charleston and New Orleans, as well as maintaining strong business and personal ties to the Richmond slave markets. He partnered with his brothers Hugh Hagan and Alexander Hagan, as well as with his maternal uncles, Hugh McDonald and Alexander McDonald. John Hagan was also a cotton factor, meaning he ran a cotton brokerage and de facto private bank and business office for cotton plantation owners.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slave mortgage</span> Financial instrument

A slave mortgage was a financial instrument used by financiers wherein money was lent on the basis of the value of enslaved people. There are records of slave mortgages in the United States and in South Africa. According to scholar Bonnie Martin, "the time lag between the recording of mortgages and foreclosures, when added to the dispersed nature of the mortgage recording process, made this financial engine relatively invisible, allowing potentially large economic and human consequences to remain unrecognized." As historian Calvin Schermerhorn put it, slave mortgages "drew equity out of [slave] bodies to reinvest in [sugar] refinement technology and more enslaved workers". Settlers fleeing a slave mortgage crisis was one of the precipitating factors of the American colonization of the Republic of Texas in the 1830s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seth Woodroof</span> American slave trader (~1805–1875)

Seth Woodroof was a slave trader based in Lynchburg in central Virginia, United States. He was an interstate trader who ran what the Lynchburg Museum called the "most active and infamous" slave pen in the city. He is believed to have been actively trading from approximately 1830 until the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861. Woodroof sat on the Lynchburg city council from 1858 to 1865.

Calvin Schermerhorn is an American historian who specializes in the study of slavery, capitalism, and African-American inequality. Educated at Saint Mary's College of Maryland, Harvard Divinity School and University of Virginia, he teaches at Arizona State University.

References

  1. ↑ Olivarius, Kathryn (2022). Necropolis: disease, power, and capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN   978-0-674-24105-3.
  2. ↑ Jewett, Clayton E.; Allen, John O. (2004). Slavery in the South: a state-by-state history. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. p. 165. ISBN   978-0-313-32019-4.
  3. 1 2 Smithers, Gregory D. (2012-11-01). Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History. University Press of Florida. ISBN   978-0-8130-5915-0.
  4. ↑ "Slave Ship Manifests filed at New Orleans, 1807-1860". National Archives. 2016-08-15. Retrieved 2023-09-05.
  5. ↑ "Martha Washington | Martha Washington: A Life". marthawashington.us. Retrieved 2024-06-28.
  6. ↑ González, Felipe; Marshall, Guillermo; Naidu, Suresh (June 2017). "Start-up Nation? Slave Wealth and Entrepreneurship in Civil War Maryland" (PDF). The Journal of Economic History. 77 (2): 373–405. doi:10.1017/S0022050717000493. ISSN   0022-0507.
  7. ↑ "Bill of sale for a girl named Clary purchased by Robert Jardine for 50 pounds". National Museum of African American History and Culture. Retrieved 2024-06-28.
  8. ↑ Gates, Henry Louis Jr. (2012-08-01). Black in Latin America. NYU Press. p. 229. ISBN   978-0-8147-3818-4.
  9. ↑ "griffe" . Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press.(Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
  10. ↑ Gutman, Herbert G. (1975). Fogel, Robert William; Engerman, Stanley L. (eds.). "Enslaved Afro-Americans and the "Protestant Work Ethic"" . The Journal of Negro History. 60 (1): 77. doi:10.2307/2716796. ISSN   0022-2992. JSTOR   2716796. S2CID   150340537.
  11. 1 2 Schermerhorn, Calvin (2015). The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. pp. 36 (likely), 38–39 (tavern). doi:10.12987/9780300213898. ISBN   978-0-300-19200-1. JSTOR   j.ctt1bh4d2w. LCCN   2014036403. OCLC   890614581.
  12. ↑ Marrs, A.W. (2009). Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., doi:10.1353/book.3447. Page 61
  13. ↑ Troutman, Phillip Davis (August 2000). Slave Trade and Sentiment in Antebellum Virginia (Thesis). University of Virginia. doi: 10.18130/v36d22 . pages=84–86
  14. ↑ Johnson, Walter (2013). River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 159. ISBN   9780674074880. LCCN   2012030065. OCLC   827947225. OL   26179618M.
  15. 1 2 "Number Thirty: Visit to a Rice Plantation continued by Yeoman [Frederick Law Olmstead][sic]". The New York Times. 1853-07-21. p. 2. Retrieved 2023-09-08.
  16. ↑ "If These Pages Could Talk: Touro Infirmary's First Admission Book". TriPod: New Orleans at 300. Retrieved 2023-09-21.
  17. ↑ Dickman, Michael (2015). Honor, Control, and Powerlessness: Plantation Whipping in the Antebellum South (Thesis). Boston College. hdl:2345/bc-ir:104219.
  18. ↑ Weld, Theodore (1839). "Floggings". American Slavery As It Is . New York: American Anti-Slavery Society. p. 63. Retrieved 2023-07-28– via utc.iath.virginia.edu.
  19. ↑ Wilson-Fall, Wendy (2015-10-21). Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic. Ohio University Press. ISBN   978-0-8214-4546-4.
  20. ↑ Wolfe, Brendan. "Indentured Servants in Colonial Virginia". Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved 2023-08-31.
  21. ↑ "About the Project | Slave Stampedes on the Southern Borderlands" . Retrieved 2023-08-31.
  22. ↑ U.S. House District of Columbia Subcommittee on Government Operations and Metropolitan Affairs (1983). Rhodes Tavern (preservation and Restoration): Hearing and Markup Before the Subcommittee on Government Operations and Metropolitan Affairs of the Committee on the District of Columbia, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, Second Session, on H. Res. 532 ... November 30 and December 16, 1982. U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 806.
  23. ↑ Fiske, David A.., Brown, Clifford Waters., Seligman, Rachel. Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave. United States: Praeger, 2013. Pages 182–183
  24. ↑ Johnson, Walter (2013). River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 86. ISBN   9780674074880. LCCN   2012030065. OCLC   827947225. OL   26179618M.
  25. ↑ "The Last of His Kind: Talk with an Old Slave-Seller Who Lags Superfluous on the Stage". St. Louis Globe-Democrat. 1884-05-24. p. 12. Retrieved 2023-09-11– via Newspapers.com.
  26. ↑ "Patty Cannon". Dorchester History. Retrieved 2023-10-29.
  27. ↑ Stroud, George McDowell (2005). Stroud's Slave Laws: A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several States of the United States of America. Black Classic Press. ISBN   978-1-58073-007-5.
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