African-Americans

« African-Americans Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton.

By the mid-19th century, America’s westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War.

Though the Union victory freed the nation’s four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and beyond. Hundreds of thousands of Africans, both free and enslaved, aided the establishment and survival of colonies in the Americas and the New World.

However, many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia.

Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans.

Some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women. 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.

After the American Revolution, many colonists—particularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the agricultural economy—began to link the oppression of enslaved Africans to their own oppression by the British, and to call for slavery’s abolition. But after the Revolutionary War, the new U.S.

Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, counting each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress and guaranteeing the right to repossess any “person held to service or labor” (an obvious euphemism for slavery). The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president.

Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America; four more would follow after the Civil War began. Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years.

The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered voluntarily for eventual compensation or debt repayment, or it may be imposed as a judicial punishment.

Historically, it has been used to pay for apprenticeships, typically when an apprentice agreed to work for free for a master tradesman to learn a trade (similar to a modern internship but for a fixed length of time, usually seven years or less).

Later it was also used as a way for a person to pay the cost of transportation to colonies in the Americas.

Like any loan, an indenture could be sold; most employers had to depend on middlemen to recruit and transport the workers, so indentures (indentured workers) were commonly bought and sold when they arrived at their destinations.

Like prices of slaves, their price went up or down depending on supply and demand.

When the indenture (loan) was paid off, the worker was free.

Sometimes they might be given a plot of land.

Indentured workers could usually marry, move about locally as long as the work got done, read whatever they wanted, and take classes. The Missouri Compromise was United States federal legislation that balanced desires of northern states to prevent expansion of slavery in the country with those of southern states to expand it.

It admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state and declared a policy of prohibiting slavery in the remaining Louisiana Purchase lands north of the 36°30′ parallel.

The 16th United States Congress passed the legislation in 1820, and President James Monroe signed it a few days later. The Mason–Dixon line, is a demarcation line separating four U.S.

states, forming part of the borders of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia (part of Virginia until 1863).

It was surveyed between 1763 and 1767 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon as part of the resolution of a border dispute involving Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware in colonial America.

The dispute had its origins almost a century earlier in the somewhat confusing proprietary grants by King Charles I to Lord Baltimore (Maryland) and by King Charles II to William Penn (Pennsylvania and Delaware).

The largest, east-west portion of the Mason–Dixon line along the southern Pennsylvania border later became known, informally, as the boundary between the Southern slave states and Northern free states.

This usage came to prominence during the debate around the Missouri Compromise of 1820, when drawing boundaries between slave and free territory was an issue, and resurfaced during the American Civil War, with border states also coming into play.

The Confederate States of America claimed the Virginia portion of the line as part of its northern border, although it never exercised meaningful control that far north – especially after West Virginia separated from Virginia and joined the Union as a separate state in 1863.

It is still used today in the figurative sense of a line that separates the Northeast and South culturally, politically, and socially. Dixie, Dixieland or Dixie's Land, is a nickname for all or part of the Southern United States.

Most definitions include the U.S.

states below the Mason–Dixon line that seceded and comprised the Confederate States of America, almost always including the Deep South Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) was an American abolitionist and social activist.

Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 slaves using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.

During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army.

In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage. The Underground Railroad was a network of clandestine routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early- to mid-19th century.

It was used by enslaved African Americans primarily to escape into free states and Canada Lord Garrison Frederick Douglass (1817 or 1818–1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman.

After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings.

Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens.

Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave. It was in response to this disbelief that Douglass wrote his first autobiography, and later two others, describing his experiences as a slave.

His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave became a bestseller and was influential in promoting the cause of abolition.

Following the Civil War, Douglass was an active campaigner for the rights of freed slaves.

Douglass also actively supported women's suffrage, and he held several public offices.

Without his permission, Douglass became the first African American nominated for vice president of the United States, as the running mate of Victoria Woodhull on the Equal Rights Party ticket. Triangular trade is trade between three ports or regions.

Triangular trade usually evolves when a region has export commodities that are not required in the region from which its major imports come.

It has been used to offset trade imbalances between different regions.

The Atlantic slave trade used a system of three-way trans-Atlantic exchanges which operated between Europe, Africa and the Americas from the 16th to 19th centuries.

A classic example is the colonial molasses trade, which involved the circuitous trading of slaves, sugar (often in liquid form, as molasses), and rum between West Africa, the West Indies and the northern colonies of British North America in the 17th and 18th centuries.

In this circuit, the sea lane west from Africa to the West Indies (and later, also to Brazil) was known as the Middle Passage; its cargo consisted of abducted or recently purchased African slaves. The Middle Passage was the stage of the Atlantic slave trade in which millions of enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas as part of the triangular slave trade.

Ships departed Europe for African markets with manufactured goods (first side of the triangle), which were then traded for slaves with rulers of African states and other African slave traders.

Slave ships (also known as Guineamen) transported the slaves across the Atlantic (second side of the triangle). Dred Scott v.

Sandford (1857), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that held that the United States Constitution was not meant to include American citizenship for people of black African descent, regardless of whether they were.... »