To understand the Underground Railroad, you first need to learn about slavery. Slavery is deeply rooted in human history—it began with the first civilizations. Slavery in North America affected millions of people, including a man named Josiah Henson and his family.
Josiah Henson was three years old when his father came home with his ear cut off. Born in Maryland in 1789, Josiah was a slave like his parents. An overseer had hurt Josiah’s mother, so his father attacked the man. The overseer tied Josiah’s father to a post, whipped him 100 times, and then sliced his ear off. Josiah could hear his father’s screams from a mile off.
As final punishment, the slave was sold. After that, Josiah never saw his father again.
ESSENTIAL QUESTION?
How did the U.S. Constitution enable Southern states to maintain the institution of slavery?
civilization: a community of people that is advanced in art, science, and government.
overseer: a person who supervises workers.
predictable: to know what will happen next.
Triangular Trade: a transatlantic trade network in which slaves and manufactured goods were exchanged between Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the American colonies.
status: the position or rank of one group in society compared to another group.
race: a group of people that shares distinct physical qualities, such as skin color.
This event scarred Josiah. He vowed to be the perfect slave so his owner would never have an excuse to hurt him the way his father had been hurt. However, the institution of slavery did not play by predictable rules. While Josiah was everything his owner wanted—strong, obedient, and loyal—it was not enough. We’ll learn more about the journey of Josiah and his family in the following chapters.
THE TRIANGULAR TRADE
The slavery that shaped the life of Josiah Henson and millions of other American slaves began with a trade network. This network was known as the Triangular Trade.
Slavery of a Different Sort
Slavery existed in Africa long before the first European set foot on the continent. African slavery was different from the system that developed in the United States. African slaves had the right to marry and own property. After working for a certain number of years, African slaves were set free. Slave status was not passed down from parents to their children and was not linked to skin color. In contrast, American slaves had no rights at all. Slavery was based on race, and if a child’s mother was a slave, then that child was born a slave.
colony: an area that is controlled by or belongs to another country.
coffle: a line of slaves fastened together.
Middle Passage: the forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.
contagion: the spreading of a disease.
transatlantic slave trade: the buying and selling of enslaved Africans to buyers in Europe and the Americas that lasted from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries.
In this trade network, captured Africans and other goods were exchanged between Africa, Europe, the West Indies, and the American colonies. The system began in 1442, when Portuguese explorers returned from Africa with a cargo hold full of gold dust and 10 African slaves.
Once Portugal began to trade slaves, other European countries quickly joined in. Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain all bought African people to grow their sugar, cotton, coffee, and tobacco. Traders captured African men, women, and children from their villages and chained them together in long lines called coffles. The captives were marched to forts on the west coast of Africa and held in damp, dark dungeons for weeks or months until European merchants purchased them in exchange for rum, cloth, or guns.
The next phase of the captives’ nightmare was called the “Middle Passage.” On this leg of the Triangular Trade, captured Africans were transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the islands of the West Indies, where they were sold at auction. The voyage usually lasted two months.
Captives were confined below deck in a space the size of a coffin. Adults were crammed into bunks 16 inches wide, 32 inches high, and 5 feet, 11 inches long. Chains linked people together by the neck, leg, or arm. They could not easily reach the pots placed at the ends of the bunks to use as toilets, so they had to lie in their own waste for hours. Once a day, the crew brought the captives up on deck so the cargo hold could be rinsed out.
In conditions such as this, it is not surprising that disease jumped from person to person. Ship captains often ordered sick captives thrown overboard to try to stop the contagion, but smallpox and yellow fever killed many Africans.
During the course of the transatlantic slave trade, between 1 and 2 million people died on the Middle Passage.
SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAN COLONIES
In the late summer of 1619, a Dutch ship appeared in the Chesapeake Bay on the coast of Virginia. Settlers of Jamestown, the first British colony in North America, watched as the ship dropped anchor in their harbor. The ship’s cargo was empty, except for 20 Africans that the Dutch crew had recently captured from a Spanish ship. The captain traded the captives for food and supplies.
indentured servant: a person bound by contract to work a certain number of years without pay.
plantation: a large farm where one kind of crop is grown for export.
racism: negative opinions or treatment of people based on race.
inherited trait: a characteristic passed down from parent to child.
monitor: to watch or keep track of something or someone.
distinct: clearly different.
Slavery had arrived in America and soon spread to other colonies.
Not all people of color were considered slaves. Poor whites, blacks, and Native Americans also worked as indentured servants. These servants were bound by a contract to work for a certain number of years without pay. They received a place to live and food to eat, called room and board, and some training. After working out their contract, indentured servants were freed.
That freedom was a problem for rich, white plantation owners. Indentured servants were not a reliable class of workers because they eventually became free and moved on to other jobs. Plantation owners wanted a class of workers they could keep. They found a solution through racism.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the colonies had passed laws that said whites could work as indentured servants, but blacks were considered slaves for life. Bondage was linked to a permanent physical characteristic—skin color. To guarantee a steady supply of slaves, the colonies also declared that any children of an enslaved woman were also slaves. Slavery, like skin color, was now an inherited trait. After these laws were passed, slavery became embedded in American society.
DID YOU KNOW?
Follow the journey of four captured Africans as they are kidnapped and forced on board a slave ship in 1780. What challenges do these captives face? How are their experiences similar and how are they different?
Liverpool slave stories 
Slavery was legal in the Northern colonies, but not common. White people in the Northern colonies lived on small family farms. Slaves were expensive to buy and keep, and Northerners had no reason to own such costly property.
However, the Northern economy was part of the web of American slavery. New England workers built the ships that sailed to Africa to purchase slaves. Rum made in Northern distilleries was traded to African merchants in exchange for slaves.
Most enslaved people lived in the Southern colonies. Tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton all grew in this warm climate, and these crops required a large labor force. On huge plantations, an overseer often monitored slaves in the field. At the end of the day, these workers returned to cabins, where they lived together. Living in groups allowed enslaved people to develop their own distinct culture and maintain traditions from Africa.
Slave huts (Library of Congress)
delegate: a person sent to a meeting as a representative of a larger group of people or a specific area of the country.
ideal: a standard or belief that people strive to achieve.
LIBERTY FOR SOME, NOT ALL
As colonists of Great Britain, Americans had to follow trade laws created by political leaders in London. Many Americans believed these regulations unfairly restricted their freedom. They felt like slaves, and they were sick of it. The colonists began to resist.
Tensions between colonists and Great Britain grew and reached a breaking point in 1776. American leaders who gathered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, decided the time had come to separate from the British Empire and form their own country. Virginian Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. He wrote “… all men are created equal …” and all people had certain rights that no one, not even the government, could take away. These rights included “… life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This document formed the foundation for the future government of the United States of America.
Some white Americans, including Jefferson himself, realized the colonists were demanding rights for themselves that they refused to give to others. While colonists demanded their own freedom from Britain, they continued to enslave African Americans. In his first draft of the Declaration, Jefferson wrote that slavery was against the “most sacred rights of life and liberty.” However, delegates from South Carolina and Georgia demanded this clause be removed.
DID YOU KNOW?
The São José Paquete de Africa was a Portuguese slave ship that sank off the coast of South Africa in 1794. It was recovered in the 1980s. You can see some of the artifacts that were recovered from the ship at this website.
National Museum slave shipwreck found
Slave traders spent the summer months traveling around the South, buying slaves. Men, women, and children were housed in slave pens until they were sold at auction. Before the sale, the slaves were groomed. Gray hairs were plucked out or dyed to disguise slaves’ ages. Slaves were fattened up on meat and butter. On the day of the auction, auctioneers ordered the captives to dance and jump about. Buyers felt each slave’s muscles and looked at the slave’s teeth so they could check the quality of the person they were purchasing.
A slave pen where slaves where kept before auction (Library of Congress)
The final version of the Declaration of Independence says nothing against the slave trade. Why do you think those states were concerned with that line?
The Revolutionary War between the American colonies and the British Empire had erupted in 1775. There were some African Americans who joined the colonists because they believed they had a better chance of freedom in a new nation founded on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.
However, most blacks sided with the British. The British Army encouraged slaves to escape and join their army, promising them freedom when the war ended. Although the British only wanted men of fighting age, an estimated 100,000 slaves, males and females of all ages, fled to British lines.
emancipate: to legally free someone.
constitution: the basic principles and laws of a nation.
amendment: a correction, addition, or change to the U.S. Constitution.
congregation: the people who regularly attend a church.
The colonists won the war in 1783. The new nation of the United States of America had to create the structure of the government and legal system. Immediately, the founding fathers began to debate what role slavery would play in the new country.
POLITICAL COMPROMISES
Four years later, through the hot summer of 1787, political leaders debated what form the new government would take. Some Northern states had already passed laws that either abolished slavery or gradually emancipated slaves. However, only 40,000 slaves lived in the North. More than 650,000 lived in Southern states, and this population of slaves made up 60 percent of the South’s wealth. Southerners had no intention of freeing their slaves. Like it or not, America was stuck with what some called the “peculiar institution.”
The debate over slavery was fierce and the convention called to write the U.S. Constitution almost collapsed, but the leaders finally compromised. Southerners got some of what they wanted. Slavery remained legal and protected. Although slaves could not vote, each slave counted as three-fifths of a person when determining how many representatives a state had in the U.S. House of Representatives. This gave Southern states more voting power in the House. They also passed a fugitive slave law that permitted owners to pursue and recapture slaves who had run away to free states.
Supporters of slavery got the better deal, though Northern states did not walk away empty-handed. No new slaves could be imported from other countries after 1808, and slavery was banned in territories north of the Ohio River.
Although the word “slavery” never appeared in early drafts of or amendments to the Constitution, the Constitution was clear— the United States was a slave nation.
FREE NORTH AND SLAVE SOUTH
In the years following the Revolution, many people thought slavery would die a natural death. Some slaveholders wanted to create a nation based on the principle that all men were created equal, so they freed their slaves. Additionally, religious leaders in Quaker, Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations preached that slaves were their brothers and sisters before God and should be free.
Between 1790 and 1810, hundreds of owners freed their slaves. Pennsylvania’s slave population shrank from 8,887 to 4,177. In Delaware, the number of free blacks skyrocketed from 30 percent of the state’s black population to 75 percent. Thomas Jefferson believed “The spirit of the master is abating … preparing for a total emancipation.”
A technological breakthrough changed everything, though. A man named Eli Whitney (1765–1825) invented a cotton cleaning machine in 1793 called a cotton gin. By hand, it took a slave an entire day to clean one pound of cotton. The cotton gin used a roller with metal teeth to scrape seeds off the cotton, and could do the work of dozens of slaves. Suddenly, American cotton exports grew from nearly zero in 1790 to 6 million pounds by 1796.
with a vengeance: to an excessive or surprising degree.
skimp: to give someone a very small amount of something.
Farmers planted thousands of acres of cotton. The Deep South became a cotton kingdom. Human labor was needed to till and harvest the cotton and the decline of slavery quickly reversed. Soon, slavery spread to new territories south of the Ohio River. In 1790, 650,000 enslaved people lived in the South. By 1800, that number jumped 900,000. By 1820, there were 1.8 million slaves and by 1850, there were 3.2 million slaves. Slavery peaked at 4 million in 1860.
Rather than dying a slow death, the institution of slavery had been reborn with a vengeance.
LIFE AS A SLAVE
Not only did slaves have to work for free, they also had to behave a certain way. A slave had to lower his eyes in the presence of a white person and step off the path as a white person passed. Slaves were expected to be cheerful at all times. Owners thought that crabbiness and sadness might be signs that the slave was thinking about escape.
Slave vs. Free
Take a look at this timeline of how the nation became geographically divided by slavery. Look at the years each state was admitted into the country and whether it was a free or slave state. What does this timeline suggest about how politicians were trying to balance the demands of people who supported slavery with those who opposed slavery?
Learner coming of civil war
Often, owners disciplined slaves for no good reason. A woman named Fannie Moore was a slave on a Virginia plantation. She recalled the cruelty of the mother of her owner. The woman thought slaves were “… just like animals, not like other folks. She whip me, many time with a cow hide, till I was black and blue.”
Owners wanted to get the most amount of work out of their slaves for the least amount of cost. They skimped on slaves’ food, clothing, and shelter. Fannie’s master lived in a large, beautiful house while Fannie lived in a one-room cabin with a dirt floor. A slave cooked delicious multi-course meals for Fannie’s owner. When it was time for Fannie’s supper, her grandmother poured milk over a pot of cornbread, put several wooden spoons into the pot, and set it in the middle of the floor. The enslaved children dove at the pot, all eating at once.
Gordon was a slave who escaped from Louisiana in 1863 and joined the Union Army. Photographs of his scarred back were used as a tool to convince people how bad slavery was.
Gordon was a slave who escaped from Louisiana in 1863 and joined the Union Army. Photographs of his scarred back were used as a tool to convince people how bad slavery was.
Adult slaves were given one thin blanket and one or two sets of clothing each year. However, children too young to work in the fields were not given any blankets and received only one linen shirt. When this wore out, the child went naked.
Former slave Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) recalled how, “in hottest summer and coldest winter, I was kept almost naked—no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a coarse tow linen shirt, reaching only to my knees.” To stay warm at night, Douglass crawled inside a discarded sack.
infusion: to introduce a new quality or custom into something.
consent: approval or agreement.
rebel: to resist authority.
defiance: bold disobedience.
Cultural Infusion
The cultural traditions that enslaved people inherited from their African ancestors infused American culture in many ways. Here are a few things in modern society that come from slave culture:
›Folktales—Brer Rabbit and Chicken Little
›Foods—black-eyed peas, kidney beans, yams, peanuts, and watermelon
›Expressions—bozo, funk, and zombie
›Musical styles—spirituals, jazz, and blues
›Instruments—banjo, fiddle, bells, and hand-clapping music or hambone
›Dance moves—jig, shuffle, and backstep
Enslaved children as young as two were assigned physical tasks, such as hauling water and wood, picking up trash, and chasing birds out of the garden. Most children began field work between the ages of eight and twelve.
Although they were not physically behind bars, slaves were in a jail of sorts. They could not travel off their owner’s property without a pass. Slaves were forbidden from gathering in groups. They could not buy or sell goods, carry a weapon, or ride a horse without their owner’s consent. Enslaved couples could not legally marry. Slave children were not allowed to attend school or learn to read and write. Worst of all, an owner could sell off any family member at any time for any reason.
The brutality of daily life was unendurable for many enslaved people. Resistance was dangerous, but slaves fought back anyway. In the next chapter, you will examine how slaves rebelled against their captivity in many ways. Their defiance sparked some whites to come to the slaves’ defense and other whites to hurt them even more.
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Now it’s time to consider and discuss the Essential Question: How did the U.S. Constitution enable Southern states to maintain the institution of slavery?
GRAPHING THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
Historians used different types of data to make sense of the past. Stories of individual slave experiences provide a close-up view of life as an enslaved person, but a wide lens is also needed to understand the extent of global slavery. Statistical graphs can help historians interpret large numbers.
Look at this bar graph and use it to answer the questions below.
*What does this data tell you about slavery and how it changed during centuries?
*What factors might have caused more Africans to be transported during one century over another?
*What questions about slavery does this graph help answer and what questions does it not address?
*What math problems can you write and solve from the data on this chart?
EXPLORE MORE: One problem with statistics is that they are impersonal. How can you take this data about millions of Africans and put a human face on these victims of slavery?
The simple cornmeal pancake has long roots in America. It was George Washington’s favorite breakfast. The dish gets its name from a flat pan called a hoe griddle. Enslaved people did not have this type of griddle. Instead, they baked their corn cakes on garden hoes in fires near the fields where they worked. Try your hand at cooking this staple of a slave’s diet.
Find a recipe for hoe cake in American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, published in 1798, at this website. |
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Amelia Simmons hoe cakes |
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Do an online search for modern recipes for hoe cake. How do they differ from the historic recipe?
Choose one recipe to prepare and taste test.
*What does it taste like? Is it filling?
*Why might this food appeal to slaves who have to work all day?
EXPLORE MORE: Some recipes for hoe cake call for yeast. What function does yeast serve in bread recipes? Would enslaved people have used yeast? Why or why not?
