Why slavery happened

Most of us only learned partial truths about slavery in the United States. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, many in the North and South wanted to put an end to continuing tensions. The Lost Cause is a distorted version of Civil War history.

In the decades after the war, a number of Southern historians began to write that slaveholders were noble and had the right to secede from the Union when the North wished to interfere with their way of life.

Due to efforts by a group of Southern socialites known as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Lost Cause ideology influenced history textbooks as well as books for children and adults. Union generals like Ulysses S. Even an accurate historical curriculum emphasizes progress, triumph, and optimism for the country as a whole, without taking into account how slavery continues to affect black Americans and influence present-day domestic policy from urban planning to health care.

It does not emphasize that 12 of the first 18 presidents were enslavers, that enslaved Africans from particular cultures were prized for their skills from rice cultivation to metallurgy, and that enslaved people used every tool at their disposal to resist bondage and seek freedom. From slavery to Jim Crow to civil rights to the first black president, the black American story is forced into the story of the unassailable American dream — even when the truth is more complicated.

Given what we learn about slavery, when we learn it, and how, it is clear that everyone still has much more to learn. Teaching Tolerance and Teaching for Change are two organizations that have been wrestling with how we introduce this topic to our young. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the greatest myths about slavery is that it ended.

In fact, it evolved into its modern form: mass incarceration. The United States has the highest prison population in the world. More than 2. African Americans make up roughly 13 percent of the general population. But black men, women, and youth have outsize representation in the criminal justice system, where they make up 34 percent of the 6.

Their labor is used to produce goods and services for businesses that profit from prison labor. For those of us who study the early history of mass incarceration in America, these statistics are not surprising.

From the late s through the s, over 90 percent of the prison and jail populations of the South were black. Thousands of incarcerated men, women, and children were hired out by the state to private factories and farms for a fee.

They earned nothing for their toil. Today, labor exploitation, the denial of human dignity and the right to citizenship, family separation, and violent punishment define our criminal justice system in ways that mirror slavery. Hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people work. It is also an opportunity to critique its legacies. Correction: An earlier version misstated the range of presidents who were enslavers.

It was 12 of the first 18 presidents, not 12 of the first 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. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad , gained real momentum in the s. Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Although estimates vary widely, it may have helped anywhere from 40, to , enslaved people reach freedom.

Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was able to help quell the forces of sectionalism only temporarily. In , another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War. Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out—with considerable bloodshed—in the new state of Kansas.

In , the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his master had taken him into free territory effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery. In , two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery.

The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists, but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South. The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Almost no enslaved African Americans lived in the Mississippi territory when it became a US territory in around But by , the cotton regions have around 2 million enslaved people living in them.

The most important development in this shift, the making of this massive cotton-producing engine, is the internal slave trade.

And they are retrained by force. In most cases, they seem to have gone through a very disorienting time in which they are forced to pick cotton and also do all the other operations of a slave labor camp. But picking cotton is especially important because it is the bottleneck of production.

Staying with that last point about the threat of violent punishment, you write about how, as the desire to increase cotton profits grows, enslavers focus on how to wring more and more profit from the labor of the enslaved. And that increased productivity, you note, is largely a response to the threat and actual use of torture and violence.

Can you talk about the ways that violence gets used as a means of forcing increasingly productive labor? The first form of violence is the violence of the domestic slave trade itself, where people are chained, and forced to march hundreds of miles or are shipped around the cape of Florida.

But after that, the violence is really in two forms. And once enslaved people are pretty much fixed in one place and are forced to go out into the cotton fields daily for work, what you see is during the day itself there is an increased level of supervision by whites.

In the South Carolina islands, and in a different way in the Chesapeake, enslaved Africans and African Americans often worked outside immediate white supervision, and often outside direct measurement of their labor output. So we see that people are forced to work from dawn to dusk, often with direct white supervision, and those who stop working are yelled at to continue to work.

At the end of the day, that output is weighed and recorded. Quotas for daily cotton picking and minimums that you have to make, or else you will be whipped, clearly increase over time. But you have a qualitatively different kind of labor which produces a quantifiable result — an increase of percent in the average amount of cotton picked per day from to One of the things you often highlight is the importance of centering the voices of enslaved men and women in the story of American slavery.

At a time where the country is having more and more discussions about slavery and its impact on the present, why do you see centering the voices and lived experiences of the enslaved men and women as an important aspect of discussing this history?

First, those voices are truly the wellspring of a tradition of interpretation. So on one hand, this is a tradition of people who make a very obvious point which seems clearly true to me. But on the other hand, this is a tradition that has been all too often ignored or downplayed or critiqued. Frederick Douglass gets told after he escapes from slavery that he needs to be charismatic, not intellectual. But I think centering those kinds of voices is crucial, and the interpretations that come from those voices, as a historian, that is the job.

And this depends on having white voices telling the story. As a white historian, the best thing I can do to disturb that is to bring nonwhite voices to the forefront in how I tell the story. Not just because these voices are correct, but because telling the story in this way helps — to a small extent — to do the work of helping a white reader be able to confront the history of their own identity formation, the history of their own wealth.

I wrote the book over a long period of time, and when I started, people were writing different things and in some cases asking different questions about slavery.

But there were a number of folks who had started to ask the questions that mine were inspired by, and were pushing the conversation toward — the works of Du Bois, Angela Davis, and the Caribbean tradition of study. But what I am happy to see is that because of the work of activists involved in the Movement for Black Lives, and activists in the different reparations movements, some of the questions and critiques that a few of us historians tried to amplify are being amplified far more broadly and effectively by these forces in society.

And that backlash plays a role in burying these types of questions. And the debt is so great that whites have little claim to say that something is too much to pay. They have no standing to argue that the wealth distribution should remain where it is today.

So I am worried that the violence of our time may suppress any movement toward a better resolution of the arguments implied by calls for reparations. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.

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