1: The Colonial Era (De Facto Slavery)

1. Go to the Smithsonian Institution's slideshow about the history of slavery. Use the right hand arrow to click through Introduction overview. Feel free to move on to other sections of that site, but we will be talking this week only about the period from 1619-1789.


2) Take a look at the Wikipedia entry about Slavery in America. Here's how it begins:

Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of chattel slavery that existed in the United States of America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Slavery had been practiced in British North America from early colonial days, and was recognized in the Thirteen Colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. When the United States was founded, even though some free persons of color were present, the status of slave was largely coincident with being of African descent, creating a system and legacy in which race played an influential role. After the Revolutionary War, abolitionist laws and sentiment gradually spread in the Northern states, while the rapid expansion of the cotton industry from 1800 led to the Southern states strongly identifying with slavery, and attempting to extend it into the new Western territories. The United States was polarized by slavery into slave and free states along the Mason-Dixon Line, which separated Maryland (slave) and Pennsylvania (free).

Although the international slave trade was prohibited from 1808, internal slave-trading continued, and the slave population would eventually peak at four million before abolition.



CHECK OUT this Brief History of Slavery