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. Involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime is still legal in the United States.
George Fitzhugh was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based social theories in the antebellum era. He argued that the negro was "but a grown up child" needing the economic and social protections of slavery. Fitzhugh decried capitalism as practiced by the Northern United States and Great Britain as spawning "a war of the rich with the poor, and the poor with one another", rendering free blacks "far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition." Slavery, he contended, ensured that blacks would be economically secure and morally civilized. Some historians consider Fitzhugh's worldview to be proto-fascist in its rejection of liberal values, defense of slavery, and perspectives toward race.
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.
St. Andrew's Hall was a public building in Charleston, South Carolina, on Broad Street. The hall served as headquarters for the St. Andrew's Society of Charleston, South Carolina. It was also an important part of the social life of upper-class Charlestonians. It was used for balls, banquets, concerts, and meetings of organizations like the South Carolina Jockey Club and the St. Cecilia Society. The hall could also be used for lodging, and both President James Monroe and General Marquis de Lafayette stayed there.
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 states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.
Hibernian Hall is a historic meeting hall and social venue at 105 Meeting Street in Charleston, South Carolina, United States. Built in 1840, it is Charleston's only architectural work by Thomas Ustick Walter, and a fine example of Greek Revival architecture. The wrought iron gates were made by Christopher Werner, a German-American master ironworker in Charleston.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Manisha Sinha is an Indian-born American historian, and the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016), which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. and, most recently The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (2024).
The planter class, also referred to as the planter aristocracy, was a racial and socioeconomic caste which emerged in the Americas during European colonization in the early modern period. Members of the caste, most of whom were settlers of European descent, consisted of individuals who owned or were financially connected to plantations, large-scale farms devoted to the production of cash crops in high demand across Euro-American markets. These plantations were operated by the forced labor of slaves and indentured servants and typically existed in subtropical, tropical, and somewhat more temperate climates, where the soil was fertile enough to handle the intensity of plantation agriculture. Cash crops produced on plantations owned by the planter class included tobacco, sugarcane, cotton, indigo, coffee, tea, cocoa, sisal, oil seeds, oil palms, hemp, rubber trees, and fruits. In North America, the planter class formed part of the American gentry.
James Henry Ladson was an American politician, wealthy plantation owner from Charles Town and officer of the American Revolution. He served as the Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina from 1792 to 1794, and was a member of the South Carolina state Senate from 1800 to 1804.
James Henry Ladson (1795–1868) was an American planter and businessman from Charleston, South Carolina. He was the owner of James H. Ladson & Co., a major Charleston firm that was active in the rice and cotton business, and owned over 200 slaves. He was also the Danish Consul in South Carolina, a director of the State Bank and held numerous other business, church and civic offices. James H. Ladson was a strong proponent of slavery and especially the use of religion to maintain discipline among the slaves. He and other members of the Charleston planter and merchant elite played a key role in launching the American Civil War. Among Ladson's descendants is Ursula von der Leyen, who briefly lived under the alias Rose Ladson.
Sarah Reeve Ladson (1790-1866) was an American socialite, arts patron, and style icon. Born into a prominent Charleston family, she was an influential member of the South Carolinian planter class. She was regarded as one of the most fashionable American women of her time and was the subject of various portraits and sculptures.
The President of Stony Brook University serves as the university's Chief Executive Officer. Stony Brook's President, in addition to his or her duties to the university's many academic programs, also oversees the Stony Brook University Hospital with its five health science programs and 120 community-based service centers. The President additionally plays an integral role in the economic development of Long Island, New York through Stony Brook's capacity as co-manager of the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
What will be required is a new attitude toward public higher education, a new state of mind, a new desire to put some real meaning into the motto inscribed in the seal of the State University of New York which says “Let each become all he is capable of being."
William Caleb McDaniel is an American historian. His book Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for History. He is also an Associate professor of History at Rice University.
This is a bibliography of works regarding the internal or domestic slave trade in the United States.
Elihu Creswell was an "extensive negro trader" of antebellum Louisiana, United States. Raised in an elite family in the South Carolina Upcountry, Creswell eventually moved to New Orleans, where he specialized in "acclimated" slaves, meaning people who had spent most of their lives enslaved in the Mississippi River basin so they were more likely to have acquired immunity to the region's endemic contagious diseases. This gave him a market niche distinct from many of his competitors, who typically imported slaves from Chesapeake region of the Upper South, or from border states as far as west as Missouri. Unique among slave traders, Creswell's will provided for the manumission of his slaves and moreover provided for their transportation to "the free United States of America." His mother, the other major beneficiary of his will, contested this provision. The legal documentation of the case and the "succession of Elihu Creswell" is a valuable primary source on the slave trade in New Orleans and the history of slavery in Louisiana. A judge ultimately rejected Sarah Hunter Creswell's petition and in 1853 when the steamer Cherokee departed New Orleans, among the passengers aboard were 51 free people of color bound for New York.
A red flag was a traditional signal used by slave traders of the United States to indicate that a slave auction was imminent.
The Richmond, Virginia slave market was the largest slave market in the Upper South region of the United States in the 1840s and 1850s. An estimated 3,000 to 9,000 slaves were sold out of Virginia annually between 1820 and 1860, many of them through Richmond. Richmond's slave traders clustered their jails and auction rooms on Wall Street, a narrow alley in a section of the city called Shockhoe Bottom, the valley created by Shockoe Creek, which bisected the city. Traders also used the offices and meeting rooms at the Exchange Hotel, St. Charles Hotel, City Hotel and Odd Fellows' Hall. A visitor of 1852 reported, "There are four [slave depots], and all in the same street, not more than two blocks from the Exchange Hotel, where we are staying. These slave depots are in one of the most frequented streets of the place, and the sales are conducted in the building, on the first floor; and within view of the passers-by. There are small screens, behind which the men of mature years are taken for inspection; but the men and the boys are publicly examined in the open store, before an audience of full one hundred." He reported that only three of 20 men so exhibited had "clean backs" unmarked by whip scarring.
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.
