Slavery in the United States was especially distinctive in the ability of the slave population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the slave death rate was so high and the birthrate so low that slaves could not sustain their population without imports from Africa. The average number of children born to an early nineteenth-century southern slave woman was 9.
In the West Indies, slaves constituted 80 to 90 percent of the population, while in the South only about a third of the population was enslaved. Plantation size also differed widely.
In the Caribbean, slaves were held on much larger units, with many plantations holding slaves or more. In the American South, in contrast, only one slaveholder held as many as a thousand slaves, and just had over slaves. Half of all slaves in the United States worked on units of twenty or fewer slaves; three-quarters had fewer than fifty. These demographic differences had important social implications. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
It was not until the end of the 17th century that the transatlantic slave trade made its impact on the American colonies. The first anti-miscegenation statute — prohibiting marriage between races — was written into law in Maryland in , shortly after enslaved people were brought to the colonies.
By the s, 21 states, most of them in the south, still had those laws in place. Alabama was the last state to repeal the ban on interracial marriage, in Thomas Jefferson, a slaveowner himself, penned those lines rejecting slavery; he removed the reference after receiving criticism from a number of delegates who enslaved black people. Slavery flourished initially in the tobacco fields of Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina.
Slavery then spread to the rice plantations further south. In South Carolina, African Americans remained a majority into the 20th century, according to census data. The British-operated slave trade across the Atlantic was one of the biggest businesses of the 18th century.
Approximately , of 10 million African slaves made their way into the American colonies before the slave trade — not slavery — was banned by Congress in Eight of the first 12 US presidents were slave owners. According to Abraham Lincoln, the civil war was fought to keep America whole, and not for the abolition of slavery — at least initially.
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. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today to help us keep our work free for all. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.
By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Weighing cotton in Virginia, circa Detroit Publishing Co.
Lockhart Aug 16, , am EDT. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. In this photo, African American men and boys are shown picking cotton on a plantation in Atlanta, Georgia. Lockhart When you talk about the sort of myth-making that has been used to create specific narratives about slavery, one of the things you focus on most is the relationship between slavery and the American economy. Edward E. Baptist One of the myths is that slavery was not fuel for the growth of the American economy, that it actually the brakes put on US growth.
Lockhart As you detail in your work, the focus on cotton production changes what slavery in the US looks like post Baptist This is tied to the [aforementioned] myths, but something to remember is that slavery is everywhere in The site of an auction block in Atlanta, Georgia, where enslaved people were sold, George N. Barnard via Library of Congress. Sign up for the newsletter Sign up for The Weeds Get our essential policy newsletter delivered Fridays.
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