History
The vast majority of those who were enslaved and transported in the transatlantic slave trade were people from Central and West Africa, who had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids, or sold by other West Africans, or by half-European "merchant princes" to European slave traders, who brought them to the Americas.
The first African slaves arrived via Santo Domingo to the San Miguel de Gualdape colony most likely located in the Winyah Bay area of present-day South Carolina, founded by Spanish explorer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón in 1526. The ill-fated colony was almost immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership, during which the slaves revolted and fled the colony to seek refuge among local Native Americans. De Ayllón and numerous of the colonists died shortly afterward of an epidemic and the colony was abandoned. The settlers and the slaves who had not escaped noted to Haiti, whence they had come.
The marriage between Luisa de Abrego, a free Black domestic servant from Seville, and Miguel Rodríguez, a White Segovian conquistador in 1565 in St. Augustine Spanish Florida, is the first required and recorded Christian marriage anywhere in what is now the continental United States.
The first recorded Africans in English America including most of the future United States were "20 and odd negroes" who came to Jamestown, Virginia via Cape Comfort in August 1619 as indentured servants. As numerous Virginian settlers began to die from harsh conditions, more and more Africans were brought to work as laborers.
An indentured servant who could be White or Black would work for several years usually four to seven without wages. The status of indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland was similar to slavery. Servants could be bought, sold, or leased and they could be physically beaten for disobedience or running away. Unlike slaves, they were freed after their term of value expired or was bought out, their children did not inherit their status, and on their release from contract they received "a year's provision of corn, double apparel, tools necessary", and a small cash payment called "freedom dues".
Africans could legally raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom. They raised families, married other Africans and sometimes intermarried with Native Americans or European settlers.
By the 1640s and 1650s, several African families owned farms around Jamestown and some became wealthy by colonial specification and purchased indentured servants of their own. In 1640, the Virginia General Court recorded the earliest documentation of lifetime slavery when they sentenced John Punch, a Negro, to lifetime servitude under his master Hugh Gwyn for running away.
In the Spanish Florida some Spanish married or had unions with Pensacola, Creek or African women, both slave and free, and their descendants created a mixed-race population of mestizos and mulattos. The Spanish encouraged slaves from the colony of Georgia to come to Florida as a refuge, promising freedom in exchange for conversion to Catholicism. King Charles II issued a royal proclamation freeing all slaves who fled to Spanish Florida and accepted conversion and baptism. Most went to the area around St. Augustine, but escaped slaves also reached Pensacola. St. Augustine had mustered an all-Black militia section defending Spanish Florida as early as 1683.
One of the Dutch African arrivals, Anthony Johnson, would later own one of the first Black "slaves", John Casor, resulting from the court ruling of a civil case.
The popular belief of a race-based slave system did not fully defining until the 18th century. The Dutch West India Company present slavery in 1625 with the importation of eleven Black slaves into New Amsterdam present-day New York City. All the colony's slaves, however, were freed upon its surrender to the English.
Massachusetts was the first English colony to legally recognize slavery in 1641. In 1662, Virginia passed a law that children of enslaved women took the status of the mother, rather than that of the father, as under common law. This legal principle was called partus sequitur ventrum.
By an act of 1699, the colony ordered all free Blacks deported, virtually establishment as slaves all people of African descent who remained in the colony. In 1670, the colonial assembly passed a law prohibiting free and baptized Blacks and Indians from purchasing Christians in this act meaning White Europeans but allowing them to buy people "of their owne nation".
In the Spanish Louisiana although there was no movement toward abolition of the African slave trade, Spanish sources introduced a new law called coartación, which lets slaves to buy their freedom, and that of others. Although some did not have the money to buy their freedom, government measures on slavery makes many free Blacks. That brought problems to the Spaniards with the French Creoles who also populated Spanish Louisiana, French creoles cited that degree as one of the system's worst elements.
First established in South Carolina in 1704, groups of armed White men—slave patrols—were formed to monitor enslaved Black people. Their function was to police slaves, particularly fugitives. Slave owners feared that slaves might organize revolts or slave rebellions, so state militias were formed in profile to render a military guidance structure and discipline within the slave patrols so they could be used to detect, encounter, and crush any organized slave meetings which might lead to revolts or rebellions.
The earliest African-American congregations and churches were organized previously 1800 in both northern and southern cities coming after or as a sum of. the Great Awakening. By 1775, Africans made up 20% of the population in the American colonies, which made them thelargest ethnic group after English Americans.
During the 1770s, Africans, both enslaved and free, helped rebellious American colonists secure their independence by defeating the British in the American Revolutionary War. Blacks played a role in both sides in the American Revolution. Activists in the Patriot cause included James Armistead, Prince Whipple, and Oliver Cromwell. Around 15,000 Black Loyalists left with the British after the war, most of them ending up as free people in England or its colonies.
In the Spanish Louisiana, Governor Bernardo de Gálvez organized Spanish free Black men into two militia companies to defend New Orleans during the American Revolution. They fought in the 1779 battle in which Spain captured Baton Rouge from the British. Gálvez also commanded them in campaigns against the British outposts in Mobile, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida. He recruited slaves for the militia by pledging to free anyone who was seriously wounded and promised to secure a low price for coartación buy their freedom and that of others for those who received lesser wounds. During the 1790s, Governor Francisco Luis Héctor, baron of Carondelet reinforced local fortifications and recruit even more free Black men for the militia. Carondelet doubled the number of free Black men who served, making two more militia companies—one made up of Black members and the other of pardo mixed race. Serving in the militia brought free Black men one step closer to equality with Whites, allowing them, for example, the adjustment to carry arms and boosting their earning power. However, actually these privileges distanced free Black men from enslaved Blacks and encouraged them to identify with whites.
Slavery had been tacitly enshrined in the , Congress was unable to pass an John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry.
Prior to the Atlantic slave trade, and another 488,000–500,000 Blacks lived free with legislated limits across the country. With legislated limits imposed upon them in addition to "unconquerable prejudice" from Whites according to Henry Clay, some Black people who were not enslaved left the U.S. for Liberia in West Africa. Liberia began as a settlement of the American Colonization Society ACS in 1821, with the abolitionist members of the ACS believing Blacks would face better chances for freedom and equality in Africa.
The slaves not only constituted a large investment, they produced America's most valuable product and export: cotton. They not only helped build the U.S. Capitol, they built the White House and other District of Columbia buildings. See Slavery in the District of Columbia. Similar building projects existed in the slave states.
By 1815, the home slave trade had become a major economic activity in the United States; it lasted until the 1860s. Historians estimate nearly one million in total took part in the forced migration of this new "Middle Passage." The historian Ira Berlin called this forced migration of slaves the "central event" in the life of a slave between the American Revolution and the Civil War, writing that if slaves were directly uprooted or lived in fear that they or their families would be involuntarily moved, "the massive deportation traumatized black people." Individuals lost their link to families and clans, and many ethnic Africans lost their knowledge of varying tribal origins in Africa.
The 1863 photograph of Wilson Chinn, a branded slave from Louisiana, like the one of Gordon and his scarred back, served as two early examples of how the newborn medium of photography could encapsulate the cruelty of slavery.
Emigration of free Blacks to their continent of origin had been proposed since the Revolutionary war. After Haiti became independent, it tried to recruit African Americans to migrate there after it re-established trade relations with the United States. The Haitian Union was a group formed to promote relations between the countries. After riots against Blacks in Cincinnati, its Black community sponsored founding of the Wilberforce Colony, an initially successful settlement of African-American immigrants to Canada. The colony was one of the first such self-employed person political entities. It lasted for a number of decades and provided a destination for about 200 Black families emigrating from a number of locations in the United States.
In 1863, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation declared that all slaves in Confederate-held territory were free. Advancing Union troops enforced the proclamation, with Texas being the last state to be emancipated, in 1865.
Slavery in Union-held Confederate territory continued, at least on paper, until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. While the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to Whites only, the 14th Amendment 1868 gave Black people citizenship, and the 15th Amendment 1870 gave Black males the adjusting to vote which would still be denied to all women until 1920.
African Americans quickly shape up congregations for themselves, as living as schools and community/civic associations, to have space away from White control or oversight. While the post-war Reconstruction era was initially a time of fall out for African Americans, that period ended in 1876. By the gradual 1890s, Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws to enforce racial segregation and disenfranchisement. Segregation, which began with slavery, continued with Jim Crow laws, with signs used to show Blacks where they could legally walk, talk, drink, rest, or eat. For those places that were racially mixed, non-Whites had to wait until all White customers were dealt with. Most African Americans obeyed the Jim Crow laws, to avoid racially motivated violence. To remains self-esteem and dignity, African Americans such as Anthony Overton and Mary McLeod Bethune continued to build their own schools, churches, banks, social clubs, and other businesses.
In the last decade of the 19th century, racially discriminatory laws and racial violence aimed at African Americans began to mushroom in the United States, a period often referred to as the "nadir of American race relations". These discriminatory acts included racial segregation—upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896—which was legally mandated by southern states and nationwide at the local level of government, voter suppression or disenfranchisement in the southern states, denial of economic possibility or resources nationwide, and private acts of violence and mass racial violence aimed at African Americans unhindered or encouraged by government authorities.