Slavery in American History
An Essay on Slavery

by William Kincaid

This essay has been presented here to illuminate the issue of slavery. It has been drawn from historical sources in as objective a manner as possible. My main purpose is to present historical facts, and my conclusions based on facts, which may contradict some of the distortions which are perpetrated in elementary and high school history texts and classes. History should be told as it happened, and not altered to make America look great, make Pilgrims look admirable, make Indians look like primitive nomads, etc. Truth is much better for kids than the falsehoods they will have to "unlearn" later in life.

 The Pilgrim Colonists and the Jamestown colonists started arriving in 1620 and bought their first African slaves in 1621. The Colonists met the Indian tribes and established a fairly cooperative relationship at first. The Indians were farmers, and had developed the land into tillable farm plots. Few of the Colonists were farmers, and there was a lack of agricultural knowledge among them. The Indians helped the Colonists survive by giving them Indian foods, and by teaching them the art of farming.

In Jamestown, the Colonists were too busy hunting for gold to prepare for the winter, which as transplanted urban Englanders, they had not entirely anticipated. The Jamestown Colonists spent their time digging up Native American graves and other pursuits while the Pilgrims, who showed up a little later in a different area, were a little more industrious. The Jamestown Colony was a failure and many people did not survive the winter. The Pilgrims were much more successful. They arrived interested in agriculture which was the key to their greater success. They also found ready made farms and homes, even crops in the cultivated fields, waiting for them.

Due to the vast numbers of Native Americans wiped out by disease (an event which the Pilgrims called a fortunate act of Providence), tribal farmlands were left unclaimed. The Colonists took these Indian farms over and applied their newly learned skills. Many aspects of the tribal system, such as the truly Democratic government and the use of eagle symbolism, were observed and copied by the Colonists.

 After their numbers began to grow exponentially, the Colonists also began to look for ways to expel the Indians from the colonized territories to get the rest of the properties. The Colonists were also looking for ways to make the profits for which they were responsible under their English charters. The tradition of forced servitude was many thousands of years old, and the English Colonists had brought indentured servants with them, which were for all intents and purposes a type of slave.

Some of the Colonists tried making the Native Americans into indentured slaves through various means, as the supply of white indentured servants was limited and the Natives were readily available. The Native Americans could be tricked out of ownership of their lands; could be hired for agricultural labor and then fined for various infractions, leading to indentured servitude to repay the debt; or merely taken and held by force.

Once the Native Americans lost their lands and became dependent on the Colonial economic system, they had no choice but to work. The Indians who were unwilling slaves merely had to run away to return to their families, which was a drawback for the Colonists.

The Pilgrims had been purchasing African slaves from the Dutch and Portugese traders. The closeness of Indian settlements became a threat to the Colonists because the Africans learned they could escape to nearby Indian lands. African slaves who escaped to Indian lands were welcomed and honored, and some became chiefs of the tribes. Intermarriage was highly thought of as it produced bi-cultural offspring which were highly regarded in the Indian cultures.

The fact that the Indian tribes welcomed the escaped slaves must have been yet another Indian-related annoyance to the white colonists. Was it possibly a factor in the degeneration of the once cooperative relationship between Indians and whites? If a buffer of wilderness could be created by pushing the tribes away from the Colonies, then the African slaves would have no easy escape. The expensive losses of African slaves to Indian lands would thus be reduced.

A clever trade system developed which allowed the Colonists to get rid of many Indians, acquire tracts of newly "abandoned" cleared farmland, and bring in many more African slaves through barter. The Puritans found that they could capture the Native Americans and trade them for African slaves when Spanish slave traders periodically visited the East Coast. The Colonists shipped many thousands of Native American slaves out of the country. The Spanish slave traders, who dubbed their trading spot "Labrador" as it was their source of cheap labor, would take the Native Americans to Haiti and other Spanish colonies to work mines, etc. This system quickly brought many Africans to the Colonies. Why is it that in depictions of the First Thanksgiving, we never see African slaves at the table?

The agrarian system needed labor, which the African and Indian slaves unwillingly provided. They resisted in every conceivable way, but their masters had the upper hand. Eventually, the Southern States, where African slaves powered a cruelly efficient machine of commerce, were somewhat unique in that slavery was not only profitable, but also an integral part of the booming cotton economy.

Slavery had been written into the Constitution at a time when three of its signers were the three largest slaveholders in the US (one of them George Washington!). The population of New York City was more than one-third African slaves in 1790! Although he made many rhetorical comments about the dubious morality of slavery, Thomas Jefferson was speaking like one of today's politicians talking about term limits. Jefferson owned over 180 slaves at the time of the Revolution, and continued to increase his slave holdings until his death. At the time of his demise in the early 1800's he owned well over 200 slaves. During his life and at death (in his will) he freed a total of only six of his many slaves, all of them blood relatives. His famous home Monticello was built with income provided by the work of these slaves.

Benjamin Franklin owned slaves for 30 years and even sold them at his Philadelphia store, but is remembered as an abolitionist today. In 1733, Franklin advertised one of his female slaves for sale in his newspaper... "A Likely Wench about fiteen Years Old, has had the Smallpox, been in the Country above a year and talks English. Inquire of Printer Hereof." His views on slavery changed during his life, and later in life he founded the first schools for blacks and became an advocate of abolition.

William Penn, often thought of as an abolitionist because he was a Quaker, also owned slaves. He remarked that slaves made the best servants as they had "permanence" and could not quit their employment.

Puritan minister Cotton Mather also owned slaves, showing that even the most prominent Puritans could acceptably be slaveholders. The Puritans came here for "religious freedom", so they say in school history classes. The Puritans kept slaves, and practicing any religion other than theirs was punished by death. Why do grade schools and high schools whitewash this? If school history classes don't teach about the Puritans' blatant disregard for other people's physical freedom (which is surely as important as the privilege to openly practice a religion) then school kids are getting a distorted an inaccurate impression of the "morality" of the Puritans.

The heroic story of the Alamo stirs the American sense of pride in our independence, courage, and determination to stand for values even when against an overpowering foe. The sacrifice of the American occupants of the Alamo in the face of certain death is far braver than the option of surrender. The various tellings of the story help in the mythmaking process that began shortly after the US press told the story as breaking news. However, the real story behind the myth is far more believable and logical. The heroes of the Alamo didn't die for self-determination.

They died fighting to preserve their way of life, which was threatened by Mexican taxation, government corruption, and most unacceptable to the slave-holding Texans, a growing abolitionist trend in the Mexican government. The rebellion in Texas and the Mexican-American War a decade later have been given the hero making treatment for so long, and have become so endeared in the hearts of U.S. citizens, particularly Texans, that the circumstances have become well obscured over the years. Heroes are supposed to be larger than life, without flaws, and should be seen in "black and white" so they sharply contrast with normal mortals.

If the timeline is examined it is easy to see that slavery was indeed an important issue in the Texas War of rebellion (1835-36) and the later Mexican-American War (1846-48). Of course, in the early 1830's, with recent abolitions of slavery in some Northern states and other countries, and a slavery debate over new states admitted to the Union, it seems like the slavery controversy was a factor in practically everything that happened at that time.

There have been movies, primary and secondary textbooks, and works of non-academic fiction and non-fiction that have worked to glorify Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, the Last Stand at the Alamo, etc. The phrase "Remember the Alamo" reminds us of John Wayne in the famous movie. But how much do we want to remember, and how accurately do we want to remember it? The issue of slavery clouds the issue in a moral sense, which is anathema to hero making.

In books which favor the heroic version of history, the Texans' quest for unrestricted slavery is sometimes mentioned but virtually buried among vague "rights" for which the Texans were said to have fought, obscuring the importance of an issue which today would cast much doubt on the morality of the fight. Indeed, mentioning slavery along with other motivations for the Texas independence movement seems a little like heresy.

Slavery is something that we in the 21st Century have little sympathy for. However, ask a 19th Century slaveholder to give up his slaves, which allowed profitability in labor intensive enterprises like cotton farming, and for whom the slaveowner had paid up to $1000 per slave, and you might find yourself looking into the barrel of a gun. This is what happened in Texas, but the story has been sanitized to form the basis of a heroic legend that has become accepted as history.

The story began in the 1820's when Mexico encouraged settlement of Texas by ambitious American planters in order to add a share of potentially huge cotton profits to Mexican tax revenues and, likely, to aid in control of indigenous people. The settlers were Southerners, familiar with cotton agriculture and the administration of the numbers of slaves necessary to accomplish cotton's brutal labor demands.

The settlers brought their slaves with them, so from the beginning that there was approximately one slave for every 5 Texans. The Texans enjoyed years of freedom to develop their property and become established in Texas. Their investment produced a potentially large tax revenue source for Mexico as well. Allowing the Texans to continue to keep slaves to work the fields and pick the cotton kept the relationship going.

The Texans, after all, were producing large amounts of valuable cotton on the otherwise desolate northern Mexican lands, which enabled them to pay taxes to the cash starved Mexican government. Also, it helped secure the land against Indian claims. However, events outside the control of Texans threatened this mutually prosperous relationship.

Mexico had a politically active abolitionist movement and a populace with deep religious feelings. In September of 1829 slavery was prohibited in Mexico. Because the politically connected Texans were outraged, one month later, the law was changed to allow slavery only in Texas. A few months later in early 1830, Mexico altered its policy under a new government that was less interested in catering to Texas.

Mexico passed a law that prohibited further American settlement, and banned importation of additional slaves into Texas. The Mexican abolition movement, following the pattern seen around the world, had apparently pressured for more restrictions.

This was a strict proviso, but for the Texans it was survivable, as they already had thousands of slaves within Mexico. The law must have created difficulties for the Texans and been a great source of irritation to them as they worked to develop their slave labor based agricultural economy.

There were other grievances by this time, such as the amount of taxes the Texans were required to pay, but none struck home so much as the "bread and butter" issue of slavery. Without it, the Texans could not make a profit and ultimately would be out of business.

As the American population of Texas grew increasingly disgruntled with the various restrictions imposed by Mexico, an independence movement developed led by Stephen Austin. He presented a petition for independence to the Mexican government in 1833, and was then arrested and jailed until 1835.

In 1835, there were about 20,000 Texans and 4000 slaves in Texas. In December of 1835 the newly crowned dictator General Antonio Santa Anna amended the slavery laws to ban slavery in Texas.

The settlers and their newly freed leader Austin quickly announced that they would secede from Mexico. To the great dismay of the Texans, however, in December of 1835 President Santa Ana extended the slavery ban to Texas to appease Mexican abolitionists. The Texans immediately rebelled and declared that they were seceded from Mexico, and declared the Republic of Texas.

One of their first actions was to ban free blacks from the Republic. Not content with the possibility of withdrawing from Texas, the Texans enlisted the help of citizens of the United States in order to preserve slavery and the huge tracts of cotton growing land. This resulted in the famous siege and battle at the Alamo, a Catholic mission taken over by the Texans.

There is some irony in the usurping of a church property by the Texans to support their commercial enterprises, and as the Mexicans had wanted them to adopt Catholicism as well as end slavery. Newspapers told the story of the Alamo in a way which played on the sympathies of Americans.

It became an epic, heroic tale of stoic determination on the part of Davy Crockett and others, a classic, hopeless fight to the death. The Mexican Army smashed a small but important group of Texans at the Alamo. Santa Anna permitted a woman, her child, and a slave to escape death to spread the word to other Texans of the consequences of rebellion.

One month after the Alamo, in March of 1836, Texas adopted a constitution which included a provision declaring slavery was legal in Texas. In April, Texans rallied under Sam Houston and "Remember the Alamo". They defeated the Mexicans, declared the Republic of Texas, ratified the Texas Constitution and requested U.S. statehood as a slave state.

The Mexican American War was fought about 10 years after the Alamo, and added a buffer territory between the slave states and slave-free Mexico, where many Africans had escaped to freedom. Fought by the U.S. Army against the Mexicans, the men who fought in this war later fought on both sides of the Civil War. Many of the people who fought for Texas after the Alamo were Southern volunteers. The greatest number came from Tennessee, which is why the state of Tennessee is now called "The Volunteer State".

The commanding Union general and later president Ulysses S Grant wrote, "The occupation, separation, and annexation [of Texas] were, from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union." Grant told his countrymen, "Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times."

The Republic of Texas, as they called it, was saved by the efforts of the volunteers and the US Army, and later admitted to the Union as a state. This is an example of an economic system that could probably not exist without slavery.

Texas was later admitted as a slave state and Texans fought against the Union in the Civil War. After the Civil War, the morality of the banished practice of slavery became more doubtful to Americans than it was prior to the great conflict. The debate over whether or not slavery could be acceptable legally and under God ended, and the 13th and 14th amendments formally freed all slaves and made them citizens. It then became something to sweep under the rug of our recollections in some cases. Thus, we "remember the Alamo", but not the reality behind it.

The first attempt to appropriate the reparations for Mexico was stymied by the attachment to the bill of the "Wilmot Proviso" prohibiting slavery in any lands acquired from Mexico.   The Wilmot
Proviso became a rallying point for some abolitionists (the Free Soil Party) in the  next presidential election.  The unintended effect of the Free Soil Party's participation was to split the votes for the "free" candidates and thus give a majority to Zachary Taylor, the slaveowning hero general of the Mexican-American War.   Texas was later admitted as a slave state and Texans fought against the Union in the Civil War. 

 By the middle 1800's, the ancient practice of owning slaves was becoming less prevalent around the world, but in the American South, slavery was booming. Not that most of the South depended on it, as it didn't. The barefooted country boys who died in the War between the States were not slaveowners and very few thought they were fighting to keep people in chains. Many of the Confederate soldiers had been convinced that Northern politicians and business interests were trying to control Southern states through legislation. At a time when few in the South had ever been more than 15 or 20 miles from their birthplace, the idea of people from other States trying to control the Federal process frightened the general population in the South.

Four of the "Union" states (Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware) were slave states. A fifth Union slave state, West Virginia, was admitted into the Union in 1863 with the proviso that slavery be phased out by the early 1880's. This shows that ending slavery was not initially the major item on the agenda for the North that it later became towards the end of the War.

The "peculiar institution" was opposed mainly by the Quakers until a few media events (ie; the great abolitionist John Brown at Harper's Ferry, "Uncle Tom's Cabin", and some well-publicized slave rebellions) served to generate public interest and eventually a little sympathy. Note that very few Northern states allowed free blacks to vote, and some even banned blacks from living within their borders during this period!

I point this out because over the years we have come to look at the Civil War as a fight to free slaves. For nearly everybody involved, it was not at the start. The perennially diplomatic Abraham Lincoln stated in a speech made at the start of the War Between The States that he offically did not care whether slavery existed or not, rather that the Union was preserved. (He included a statement that his personal feelings were that all people should be free. This part of the statement is often left out of quotes from this speech.)   Lincoln privately disliked slavery, but had not had much actual experience with all of the aspects of slavery and its costs to the people involved.  Therefore, the conviction that he had by the end of the War that slavery must be ended was not yet formed at the beginning.  He would have agreed to allow it to continue or end, whatever would have preserved the Union.  The indifference of the sentiment reflected the views of the vast majority of Americans, North and South.

The small percentage of Southerners who controlled the bulk of the wealth in the South were the politically influential slaveholders. The wealthy slaveholders dominated Southern politics and media. In an attempt to grab power and build security for the slavery system, the slaveowners "PAC" managed a lobbying campaign to inflame Southern tempers over supposed political and economic domination by Northern States.

Southern newspapers ran incendiary headlines and stories, and "firebrand" politicans made speeches across the South about how the North was trying to dominate the Southern states. Slavery was not really a household topic of concern. Evidence of the overall lack of concern over slavery in both North and South at the start of the War was seen in the public reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation, which caused enlistments in the North to drop off to nearly nothing, and thus the first draft was created.

Farmers in states such as Illinois and Ohio were generally somewhat opposed to setting thousands of slaves loose, to possibly move to their all-white communities. Illinois, as an example, had an "exclusion law" which prohibited freed slaves from moving to Illinois. This law proved to be quite popular, and although some pro-abolition Illinois congressmen put the exclusion law up for review during the Civil War, it was reaffirmed by a wide margin, even getting some votes from other pro-abolition delegates. This showed the Northern attitudes towards freeing the slaves were not what we today might imagine them to be from our perspective.

Originally, Northerners were enthusiastic about fighting to put the rebellious South in its place, and volunteered in large numbers to fight. The somewhat misleadingly named Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which "freed" slaves in the rebel states but left them in chains in four pro-Union border states and in Union controlled portions of three other states, changed attitudes in both North and South. When it began to look as if the Union troops were fighting to free slaves rather than quell rebellion, many Northerners decided they would rather not fight. A headline in a Pennsylvania newspaper read "We'll fight for Uncle Sam, but not for Uncle Sambo". The first Federal draft was enacted as a response to the massive dropoff in enlistments after the Emancipation Proclamation was passed.

A similar effect was seen in the South when Southerners suddenly realized the honor of their state was not the only issue. Many Southerners had gotten involved just to show the ladies of their hometowns that they were noble defenders of the homelands, and when the issue turned to defending the "property rights" of a small handful of slaveholders whom were largely resented by Southern farmboys, predictably enthusisam waned. Again, enlistments dropped off followed by implementation of a draft.

Ironically, persons owning 20 slaves or more were exempted from the Southern draft, and yet the slavery issue, the sparkplug which started the War Machine, was their doing! Also exempted were persons who could pay $300 to the government or persons who could afford to hire a substitute. This meant that the vast majority of soldiers in the South were the poorer dirt farmers who largely resented slaveowners and slaves as unfair competitors. They could never dream of having enough cash to own a slave if they had even wanted to.

Apathy for the plight of the slaves was a common American trait. We need to realize this so that when we look at the Civil War, we are not looking at it from a well intentioned, but mistakenly moralistic, 1990's point of view.

Robert E. Lee freed his slaves in 1862. I would like to learn more about his motives for doing this. In 1862, the South was doing very well in the War. Things were looking up for the Confederacy, so it would not be too optimistic to think they might actually win. Apparently clinging to slavery throughout the conflict was not his intention. Were there philosophical reasons, or was it due to the difficulties inherent in running a plantation within sight of the Union's capitol?

The Union army "freed" slaves and then gave them a shovel to dig trenches, a bucket to tote water, or an axe to cut wood. Any attempt to leave would be treated the same as if a soldier deserted, but they were still living like slaves. In occupied Southern states, freed slaves were forced to sign one year contracts to work captured plantations, often run by the same cruel overseers. These overseers had signed loyalty oaths, thus allowing them to continue their tyrannical work, but for new Union owners.

The former slaves needed a pass to leave the plantation, just like when they were slaves. A free black man caught by patrollers without a pass or with an expired pass would be beaten and taken back to the plantation with the approval of the new Northern owners, same as when the Southerners ran the plantations. It would probably have been better if the freed slaves had been allowed to fight... at least they would have some hope of getting off the plantations. However, this was unspeakable in the North until late in the War. Many Northerners were terrified of the idea of arming freed slaves. You would have thought they would have made great soldiers against their former oppressors!

 Later, when black Union troops were organized, they were paid $7 a month, while a white soldier in the same uniform received $13 a month.

One ironic note is that the first armed "Negro" units in the War were Southern! They never really had a chance to fight, but slaves provided much hard labor for unwilling (and possibly some willing) support for the Confederate troops.

By 1863, the North and South were fighting solely over slavery. Many parts of the South had refused to secede from the Union, and President Davis had concluded in 1862 that "states rights", if applied to the South, would only undermine the Confederacy by allowing Southern States to secede from the Confederacy!

Union troops entering Southern towns were sometimes met by welcoming supporters (sometimes slaves) who helped them find the Confederate soldiers. General Sherman's army grew ever larger as he crossed the South, picking up volunteers along the way. So many people, including 18,000 former slaves, wanted to join him that he had to start turning them away!

The Civil War is an excellent example of a whole country being dragged into what many thought was a clash over honor and territorial autonomy, but which was solely sparked and promoted by a small PAC of slaveholders and their allies. It evolved into the death rattle of the old agrarian/slaveholding lifestyle of the 13 Colonies which had made the Colonies a profitable enterprise for Britain, made it economically worthwhile for Britain to subsidize the Colonies when enduring hard times and therefore allowed the very survival of the Colonies during their infancy.

Eventually, the tide turned against slavery and the old agrarian system had become too controversial to continue much longer. It should have been handled politically but once the fighting started and people began getting involved for many reasons wholly unrelated to slavery, there was no stopping it.

Back before the Civil War, when the State was the highest level of government most people ever dealt with, and the Federal government was seldom heard of, conflicts between States over who dominated whom could lead to a fight over honor, state pride, etc. We have now learned to look at the country differently, and no longer feel indignant when individual states, if ever, clash over an issue of representation in government. It is no surprise that we have come to think that slavery was the start of the War.... it is an issue we can understand. However, the population as a whole just did not care enough about it back then to start a war over that single issue. It had to first be properly packaged. This is how the War started, with testosterone and a great many unfounded and well-founded fears of "outsiders", rousing patriotic songs, marshal parades past pretty ladies, pretty uniforms, and grandstanding politicians thrown in to make it nationally popular. The issues became focused on slavery as the War lingered on. Toward the conclusion, everyone knew that slavery was the single most important issue that had propelled the Nation into this tragic conflict. The War ended with the near total destruction of the South and its economic system with it. Later, some months after the death of Lincoln, the Thirteenth Amendment legally freed the remaining slaves in the Northern states (after all, they were already freed by the Emancipation Proclamation in the South).

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