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Slavery existed in the United States from its founding in 1776 until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on December 5, 1865, under which it was abolished nationally. The last known survivors who were born into legalized slavery or enslaved prior to the passage of the amendment are listed below. The list also contains the last known survivors in various states which abolished legal slavery prior to 1865. Some birth dates are difficult to verify due to lack of birth documentation of many enslaved individuals.
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Name | Image | Birth | Death | Notes and References |
---|---|---|---|---|
Peter Mills | October 26, 1861 | September 22, 1972 | Born in Prince George's County, Maryland, and died after a pedestrian accident in Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh County, Pennsylvania. [1] | |
Sylvester Magee | (May 29, 1841) | October 15, 1971 | Unverified and purportedly died at 130 years old in Columbia, Marion County, Mississippi. [2] [3] | |
William Casby | January 19, 1857 [4] | August 17, 1970 [5] | Photographed on March 24, 1963, by Richard Avedon in Algiers, New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana, with multiple generations of his family. [6] [7] [8] | |
Mary Hardway Walker | 1848 | 1969 | Purportedly lived to at least 120 years old; she had a child who died in his 90s, according to the family Bible on Ancestry.com. She moved from Union Springs, Bullock County, Alabama to Chattanooga, Hamilton County, Tennessee, where a newspaper article was published about her learning to read in 1966 at age 116. [9] | |
Anna J. Cooper | ![]() | August 10, 1858 | February 27, 1964 | Anna Cooper was a notable academic and activist who was born enslaved in Raleigh, Wake County, North Carolina. [10] [11] |
Josephus | pre-1865 | after August 28, 1963 | Listed in a bulletin for Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington as supposedly the last surviving American enslaved person. [12] | |
Jeff Doby | February 6, 1858 | March 26, 1963 | Believed to be the oldest living person in South Carolina at the time of 1961 and one of the last living formerly enslaved slaved persons in South Carolina. Jeff was born in Camden, Kershaw County, and died at the age of 105 in 1963. He was featured in the local newspaper after his 103rd birthday and photographed. Two of his sons would also live to be nearly 100 years old. [13] | |
Fountain Hughes | May 10, 1848 | 1957 | Former enslaved person freed in 1865 after the American Civil War. Descendant of Betty Hemings, slave matriarch at Thomas Jefferson's plantation Monticello. Hughes was interviewed in June 1949 about his life by the Library of Congress as part of the Federal Writers' Project of oral histories of formerly enslaved persons. The recorded interview is available online through the Library of Congress and the World Digital Library. | |
Alfred "Teen" Blackburn | April 26, 1842 | March 8, 1951 | One of the last surviving American enslaved persons who remembered slavery, and one of the last Confederate pensioners; resided in North Carolina. [14] | |
Eliza Moore | 1843 | January 21, 1948 | One of the last verified surviving American enslaved persons; resided in North Carolina. [15] | |
William Andrew Johnson | 1859 | 1943 | Last surviving slave of a U.S. President (Andrew Johnson); visited Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the White House in 1937. [16] [17] | |
Adeline Dade | 1853 | December, 1941 | Possibly one of the last living former slaves in New York. [18] | |
Harriet Wilson Whitely | March 15, 1855 | April 26, 1941 | The last living former slave in Fairmont, Fairmont County, West Virginia. [19] | |
Matilda McCrear | 1857 | January 1940 | The last known survivor of the Clotilda in 1859–1860, the last trans-Atlantic slave ship to arrive in America from Africa. [20] | |
Redoshi | ![]() | 1848 | 1937 | The next to last known survivor of the Clotilda , the last slave ship to arrive in America. [21] |
Delia Garlic | ![]() | 1837 | 1937 at the earliest | Born in Virginia; was purportedly 100 years old during an interview with Margaret Fowler in the late 1930s. [22] [23] Date of death is unclear. |
Cudjoe Lewis | ![]() | 1841 | July 17, 1935 | One of the last survivors of the Clotilda , the last slave ship to arrive in America. [24] |
Perry Lockwood | ca. 1844 | 1929 | Allegedly one of the last living former slaves in lower Delaware; died aged 87 [25] | |
Reuben Freeman | c. 1835 | c. 1915 | One of the last slaves in Somerset County, New Jersey; lived in Somerville; was enslaved to William Annin of Liberty Corner [26] Likely other later survivors because final slaves were not emancipated until 1865 in New Jersey. | |
David Hendrickson | 1799 | 1900 | Allegedly the last living former slave sold "on the block" in New Jersey. [27] Likely other later survivors because final slaves were not emancipated until 1865 in New Jersey. | |
Louise Tritton | ca. 1780 | 1891 | One of the last living former slaves in Connecticut, and oldest person in New Haven, New Haven County. [28] | |
Adjua D'Wolf | 1794 | 1868 | Possibly the last surviving slave in Rhode Island. Adjua was brought from Africa to Bristol, Bristol County, Rhode Island, in 1803 and enslaved to the D'Wolf family, a family of slave traders, [29] after new enslavement was made illegal in Rhode Island. [30] and her death in 1868 was noted in several newspapers around the country, including in the South. [31] James Howland (1758-1859) was also one of Rhode Island's last legal former slaves, and was enslaved until 1842 [32] [33] D'Wolf and Howland are likely not the last slaves, due to RI's gradual emancipation with several legally slaves still listed in the 1840 census, and likely enslaved until the 1843 RI Constitution banned all slavery. | |
Hannah Kelley | ca. 1760 | January 15, 1864 | Died at 103 years old in Cross Creek, Cross Creek Township, Washington County, Pennsylvania, as possibly the last living former slave in Pennsylvania, formerly owned by John Gardner of Jefferson [ disambiguation needed ], Jefferson County. [34] | |
Margaret Pint | 1778 | 1857 | Purportedly the last living former slave in New York; she was born into slavery in Westchester County. [35] Likely not the last living former slave, because final emancipation in New York did not occur until July 5, 1827. | |
Venus Rowe | ca. 1754 | 1844 | Purportedly one of the last living former slaves in Massachusetts, resided in Burlington, Middlesex County. [36] | |
Name | Image | Birth | Death | Notes and References |
---|---|---|---|---|
Charlie Smith | 1842 (claimed) or 1874 or 1879 | October 5, 1979 | Allegedly born in Liberia or United States of America, claimed to be the last Civil War veteran and slave, among other false claims. Discredited and died in Florida in 1979. [37] | |
Mary Duckworth | 1861 (claimed), likely between 1874 and 1880 | April 20, 1983 | Allegedly born into slavery, but discredited due to census and social security records reporting other later birth dates. [38] [39] | |
The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of various enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The majority of those who were enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from Central and West Africa that had been sold by other West Africans to Western European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids; Europeans gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Except for the Portuguese, European slave traders generally did not participate in the raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade. The South Atlantic and Caribbean economies were particularly dependent on labour for the production of sugarcane and other commodities. This was viewed as crucial by those Western European states which, in the late 17th and 18th centuries, were vying with one another to create overseas empires.
Mariaville is a town in Hancock County, Maine, United States. The population was 513 at the 2010 census.
Slavery in the colonial history of the United States, from 1526 to 1776, developed from complex factors, and researchers have proposed several theories to explain the development of the institution of slavery and of the slave trade. Slavery strongly correlated with the European colonies' demand for labor, especially for the labor-intensive plantation economies of the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and South America, operated by Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and the Dutch Republic.
Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, that existed in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From early colonial days, it was practiced in Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies which formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property and could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until 1865. As an economic system, slavery was largely replaced by sharecropping and convict leasing.
The Fugitive Slave Act or Fugitive Slave Law was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern interests in slavery and Northern Free-Soilers.
Triangular trade or triangle trade is trade between three ports or regions. Triangular trade usually evolves when a region has export commodities that are not required in the region from which its major imports come. It thus provides a method for rectifying trade imbalances between the above regions.
In the United States before 1865, a slave state was a state in which slavery and the slave trade were legal, while a free state was one in which they were not. Between 1812 and 1850, it was considered by the slave states to be politically imperative that the number of free states not exceed the number of slave states, so new states were admitted in slave–free pairs. There were, nonetheless, some slaves in most free states up to the 1840 census, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 specifically stated that a slave did not become free by entering a free state.
Emancipation Day is observed in many former European colonies in the Caribbean and areas of the United States on various dates to commemorate the emancipation of slaves of African descent.
Slavery in New Jersey began in the early 17th century, when Dutch colonists trafficked African slaves for labor to develop their colony of New Netherland. After England took control of the colony in 1664, its colonists continued the importation of slaves from Africa. They also imported "seasoned" slaves from their colonies in the West Indies and enslaved Native Americans from the Carolinas.
Africatown, also known as AfricaTown USA and Plateau, is a historic community located three miles (5 km) north of downtown Mobile, Alabama. It was formed by a group of 32 West Africans, who in 1860 were included in the last known illegal shipment of slaves to the United States. The Atlantic slave trade had been banned since 1808, but 110 slaves held by the Kingdom of Dahomey were smuggled into Mobile on the Clotilda, which was burned and scuttled to try to conceal its illicit cargo. More than 30 of these people, believed to be ethnic Yoruba, Ewe, and Fon, founded and created their own community in what became Africatown. They retained their West African customs and language into the 1950s, while their children and some elders also learned English. Cudjo Kazoola Lewis, a founder of Africatown, lived until 1935 and was long thought to be the last survivor of the slaves from the Clotilda.
Slavery among Native Americans in the United States includes slavery by and slavery of Native Americans roughly within what is currently the United States of America.
An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, passed by the Fifth Pennsylvania General Assembly on 1 March 1780, prescribed an end for slavery in Pennsylvania. It was the first act abolishing slavery in the course of human history to be adopted by a democracy. The Act prohibited further importation of slaves into the state, required Pennsylvania slaveholders to annually register their slaves, and established that all children born in Pennsylvania were free persons regardless of the condition or race of their parents. Those enslaved in Pennsylvania before the 1780 law came into effect remained enslaved for life. Pennsylvania's "gradual abolition"—rather than Massachusetts's 1783 "instant abolition"—became a model for freeing slaves in other Northern states.
Sylvester Magee purported to be the last living former American slave. He received much publicity and was accepted for treatment by the Mississippi Veterans Hospital as a veteran of the American Civil War. If this claim were true, Magee would not only have been the last surviving American Civil War veteran, but the oldest person to have ever lived.
Redoshi was a Beninese woman taken to the U.S. state of Alabama as a girl in 1860. Until a later surviving claimant, Matilda McCrear, was announced in 2020, she was considered to have been the last surviving victim of the transatlantic slave trade. Taken captive in warfare at age 12 from the Slave Coast of West Africa, she was sold to Americans and transported by ship to the United States, in violation of U.S. law. She was sold again and enslaved on the upcountry plantation of the Washington Smith family in Dallas County, Alabama, where her owner renamed her Sally Smith.
Matilda McCrear was a Yoruba-American woman who was the last known living survivor in the United States of the transatlantic slave trade and the ship Clotilda. She was captured and brought to Mobile, Mobile County, Alabama, at the age of two with her mother and older sister.
Gradual emancipation was a legal mechanism used by some states to abolish slavery over a period of time, such as An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery of 1780 in Pennsylvania.
The Negro Farmer: Extension Work for Better Farming and Better Living is a 1938 educational film made by the United States Department of Agriculture with assistance from the Tuskegee Institute. It features music, entitled "Negro Melodies", from the Tuskegee Institute Choir directed by African American composer William L. Dawson (composer). Through commentary from a white male narrator using racial innuendo inferring African American inferiority in farming practices, the film is a condescending, "paternalistic portrait of black rural life", intended to "halt a mass migration to the urban north by black people".
The United States of America historically allowed the enslavement of human beings, most of them Africans and African Americans who were transported from Africa during the Atlantic slave trade and whose freedom was taken as a result. The institution of slavery began in the United States in the 16th century under British colonization of the Americas, and was ended with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
Captain Tomba was an African ruler who was sold into slavery during the 18th century.