Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. It Just Surfaced. In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia. But after the Revolutionary War , the new U.
In the late 18th century, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt. Around the same time, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand. But in , a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin , a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds.
Between and , all of the northern states abolished slavery, but the institution of slavery remained absolutely vital to the South. Though the U. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in , the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years.
By it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South. An escaped enslaved man named Peter showing his scarred back at a medical examination in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population.
Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many masters owned fewer than 50 enslaved people. Land owners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement was restricted. Many masters raped enslaved women, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished.
A strict hierarchy among the enslaved from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their masters. Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families; most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal.
Rebellions among enslaved people did occur—notably ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in —but few were successful.
In the North, the increased repression of southern Black people only fanned the flames of the growing abolitionist movement. Free Black people and other antislavery northerners had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the s. Most infants of enslaved mothers were weaned within three or four months. Even in the eighteenth century, the earliest weaning age advised by doctors was eight months.
After weaning, slave infants were fed a starch-based diet, consisting of foods such as gruel, which lacked sufficient nutrients for health and growth. Slaves suffered a variety of miserable and often fatal maladies due to the Atlantic Slave Trade, and to inhumane living and working conditions.
Common symptoms among enslaved populations included: blindness; abdominal swelling; bowed legs; skin lesions; and convulsions. Common conditions among enslaved populations included: beriberi caused by a deficiency of thiamine ; pellagra caused by a niacin deficiency ; tetany caused by deficiencies of calcium, magnesium, and Vitamin D ; rickets also caused by a deficiency of Vitamin D ; and kwashiorkor caused by severe protein deficiency.
Diarrhea, dysentery, whooping cough, and respiratory diseases as well as worms pushed the infant and early childhood death rate of slaves to twice that experienced by white infants and children. The domestic slave trade in the US distributed the African American population throughout the South in a migration that greatly surpassed in volume the Atlantic Slave Trade to North America. Though Congress outlawed the African slave trade in , domestic slave trade flourished, and the slave population in the US nearly tripled over the next 50 years.
The domestic trade continued into the s and displaced approximately 1. Some destinations, particularly the Louisiana sugar plantations, had especially grim reputations. But it was the destruction of family that made the domestic slave trade so terrifying.
Prices of slaves varied widely over time, due to factors including supply, and changes in prices of commodities such as cotton. Even considering the relative expense of owning and keeping a slave, slavery was profitable. Although young adult men had the highest expected levels of output, young adult women had value over and above their ability to work in the fields; they were able to have children who by law were also slaves of the owner of the mother.
Therefore, the average price of female slaves was higher than their male counterparts up to puberty age. Slaveholding became more concentrated over time, particularly as slavery was abolished in the northern states. The fraction of households owning slaves fell from 36 percent in to 25 percent in
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