slavery: Definition, Synonyms from Answers.com

n., pl. -ies.

1. The state of one bound in servitude as the property of a slaveholder or household.
2. 1. The practice of owning slaves.
   2. A mode of production in which slaves constitute the principal work force.
3. The condition of being subject or addicted to a specified influence.
4. A condition of hard work and subjection: wage slavery.

noun

A state of subjugation to an owner or master: bondage, enslavement, helotry, serfdom, servileness, servility, servitude, thrall, thralldom, villeinage, yoke. See over/under.

n

Definition: bondage
Antonyms: emancipation, freedom, liberty

Was the most divisive constitutional issue in pre–Civil War America. The problem stemmed from a federal republic that was in Abraham Lincoln's words, “half slave and half free.” Slavery led to the Supreme Court's most infamous decision—Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)—a case characterized as a “self‐inflicted wound” by Charles Evans Hughes. This case became a political issue in 1858 and 1860, helping to elect Lincoln president in the latter year. But Dred Scott was not the only controversial slavery case to come before the high court. A full understanding of Supreme Court jurisprudence on slavery begins with an examination of the Constitution and its slavery‐related clauses.

Constitutional Structure and Slavery

African Slave Trade and the Supreme Court

Slavery and Interstate Commerce

Slavery and Extraterritoriality: Fugitive Slaves

Slaves in Transit and Slavery in the Territories

Times are not as they were when the former decisions on this subject were made. Since then not only individuals but States have been possessed of a dark and fell spirit in relation to slavery, whose gratification is sought in the pursuit of measures, whose inevitable consequence must be the overthrow and destruction of our government. Under such circumstances it does not behoove the State of Missouri to show the least countenance to any measure which might gratify this spirit. (p. 586)

By this time Scott was technically under the control of John F. A. Sanford, a New Yorker who was the executor of Dr. Emerson's estate. This allowed Scott to sue Sanford in federal court under diversity jurisdiction. In the United States district court, Sanford argued, in a plea in abatement, that Scott could not be a citizen of the United States for diversity purposes because he was a Negro. District Judge Robert W. Wells denied this plea, ruling that if Scott was free, then he was a citizen, for purposes of diversity jurisdiction, and could sue. If he was not free, then of course whether he could sue or not became moot (see Mootness). Wells then held a trial on the merits of the case, and ruled that Scott's status was legitimately determined by the Missouri Supreme Court, and he was in fact a slave. At this point, Scott's attorneys appealed to the United States Supreme Court. By the time the case reached Chief Justice Taney's court, the question of slavery in the territories had become the central political issue of the decade. Taney's decision must be seen in the context of this background.

From 1820 until 1850 the issue of slavery in the territories had been governed by the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery in almost all of the West. However, with the acquisition of new lands in the Mexican War, and the acceptance throughout the South of a “positive good” view of slavery, Southerners were no longer content to see slavery shut out of the western territories. In 1854 Congress repealed the Missouri Compromise, by opening Kansas and Nebraska to slavery in 1854, under a theory of popular sovereignty. Under the theory of popular sovereignty, the settlers of a territory would decide for themselves whether to admit slavery or not. Rather than democratizing the West; popular sovereignty led to a mini–civil war known as “Bleeding Kansas,” in which free state and slave state settlers fought for control of the territorial government. Meanwhile, in the North the newly organized Republican party gained enormous support by campaigning against the spread of slavery into the territories. In the 1856 presidential election this party, which was less than two years old, carried all but five northern states.

Taney's Decision. The avidly proslavery Chief Justice Taney used Dred Scott to decide pressing political issues in favor of the South. Taney's two most controversial points dealt with the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise and the rights of free blacks under the federal Constitution.

By strained logic Taney argued that the territories clause of Article IV of the Constitution only applied to the territories owned by the United States in 1787 and did not apply to territories acquired after that date. This led him to conclude that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. In addition, Taney argued that freeing slaves in the territories constituted a taking of property without due process, which violated the Fifth Amendment. This was the Supreme Court's first use of the concept of substantive due process. Thus, under Taney's theory of the Constitution Dred Scott had not been entitled to freedom, even while he lived in Minnesota. More importantly, Taney's theory meant that all congressional limitation on slavery in federal jurisdictions was unconstitutional. This was a direct assault on Northerners who had been working to make the territories free.

Taney compounded this attack on northern attitudes with a stunning and gratuitous denial of the rights of free blacks in the United States. Although unnecessary for the outcome of the case, Taney examined whether Scott had standing to sue in federal court, even if he were free. Taney asked: “Can a Negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities guaranteed by that instrument to the citizens?” Rigorously applying a jurisprudence of original intent, Taney answered his own question with a resounding no. Taney concluded that even those free blacks living in the North with full state citizenship could never be citizens of the United States. Taney argued that blacks

are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time [1787] considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privilege but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them. (pp. 404–405)

In an analysis that was historically incorrect and shocking to the North, Taney asserted that at the time the Constitution was adopted blacks were universally considered “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his [white people's] benefit” (p. 407). Taney gave examples of colonial laws discriminating against blacks, which were “still in force when the Revolution began” (p. 409), to show that blacks were not citizens in those states. He then cited sources from “the States where slavery had worn out, or measures taken for its speedy abolition,” to prove that from the Revolution onward blacks were degraded and unequal throughout New England (p. 413). He argued that these precedents illustrated “the entire repudiation of the African Race” (p. 415). What Taney ignored, of course, was that at the time of the Revolution free blacks in fact voted in a number of states, including Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, and were clearly constituent members of the society that adopted the Constitution.

Finally, Taney discussed how Scott's status was affected by his residence in Illinois. Here he relied on Strader v. Graham, where the Court had ruled that each state had a right to decide for itself the status of persons under its jurisdiction. Thus, if Scott had sued in Illinois, that state could have freed him. But Scott sued in Missouri, whose supreme court had refused to free Scott based on his residence in Illinois, a ruling binding on Federal courts.

Curtis's Dissent. All nine justices wrote opinions in Dred Scott. Six concurred with Taney, including two northern doughfaces, Robert Grier and Samuel Nelson. Justices John McLean of Ohio and Benjamin R. Curtis of Massachusetts dissented. Curtis refuted Taney at almost every point. Curtis asserted that United States citizenship preceded the Constitution, and that under the Articles of Confederation state citizenship qualified one for national citizenship. Curtis noted that free blacks were citizens of at least five states before 1787 and thus they were also citizens of the United States at the time the Constitution was adopted. In answer to Taney's argument that Congress could not regulate slavery in the territories, Curtis noted that everyone, including Taney, admitted “Congress has some power to institute temporary Governments over the territory” (p. 609). Curtis believed this power came from the territories clause of Article IV, because that was a “reasonable interpretation of the language of the Constitution” (p. 610) and made much greater sense than Taney's unpersuasive attempt to show that the clause only applied to the federal territories existing in 1787. Curtis demonstrated that if Congress has a power, it is a broad power, and not the narrow and constricted one that Taney found. Curtis reasoned that the words “needful regulation” in the territories clause was a grant of such power. Could a “needful regulation” reach slavery? Curtis noted that

while no other clause of the Constitution can be shown, which requires the insertion of an exception respecting slavery, and while the practical construction for a period of upwards of fifty years forbids such an exception, it would, in my opinion violate every sound rule of interpretation to force that exception into the Constitution upon the strength of abstract political reasoning which we are bound to believe the people of the United States thought insufficient to induce them to limit the power of Congress, because what they have said contains no such limitation. (p. 623)

Political Reaction to Dred Scott. Curtis's dissent heartened Northerners like Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, who wrote that Taney's decision was an “atrocious,” “wicked,” “abominable,” “false,” opinion. It was a “collection of false statements and shallow sophistries,” a “detestable hypocrisy” and a “mean and skulking cowardice.” The Chicago Tribune expressed the reaction of many Northerners: “We scarcely know how to express our detestation of its inhuman dicta, or to fathom the wicked consequences which may flow from it.”

The Dred Scott case gave Taney an opportunity to try to settle the issue of slavery, once and for all, in favor of the South. Taney hoped that his magisterial decision would end the controversy over slavery in the territories and in the process destroy the new Republican party, which so threatened slavery. Yet his decision had just the opposite effect, in part because, as historian Don Fehrenbacher has written in his The Dred Scott Case (1978): “Taney's opinion, carefully read, proves to be a work of unmitigated partisanship, polemical in spirit though judicial in its language, and more like an ultimatum than a formula for sectional accommodation. Peace on Taney's terms resembled the peace implicit in a demand for unconditional surrender.” The decision was, as the political scientist Harry Jaffa has written, “nothing less than a summons to the Republicans to disband” (p. 3).

Instead of disbanding, Republicans successfully made Taney and the decision the focus of their 1858 and 1860 campaigns. In his “House Divided” speech (1858), Abraham Lincoln argued that Taney's opinion was part of a proslavery conspiracy to nationalize slavery and a prelude to future proslavery jurisprudence. He warned of “another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits.” He told the voters in Illinois, and by extension the entire North, that “We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their state free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state.” Lincoln feared such a decision because of language in a concurring opinion in Dred Scott by Justice Samuel Nelson, a New York doughface, and because of a slave case that was then making its way through the New York courts.

Justice Nelson noted that “except as restrained by the Federal Constitution” the states had “complete and absolute power over the subject of slavery.” Nelson may have only been referring to the Fugitive Slave Clause's limitation on the states. But Republicans, such as Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio and Abraham Lincoln, saw a darker side to Nelson's opinion, especially because Nelson concluded by observing:

A question has been alluded to … namely: the right of the master with his slave of transit into or through a free State, on business or commercial pursuits, or in the exercise of a federal right, or the discharge of a federal duty, being a citizen of the United States, which is not before us. This question depends upon different considerations and principles from the one in hand, and turns upon the rights and privileges secured to a common citizen of the republic, under the Constitution of the United States. When that question arises, we shall be prepared to decide it. (p. 468)

In the Illinois senate race of 1858 Abraham Lincoln condemned the “wicked consequences” of the Dred Scott decision and expressed the fear that the Supreme Court might soon force slavery on the North through what he called “the next Dred Scott Case.” He noted that “in what cases” the states were restrained was “left an open question.” Lincoln warned the North that the “next Dred Scott Case” would legalize slavery throughout the nation.

Lincoln's fears were far from paranoid. In 1852 the New York Supreme Court ruled that eight slaves were properly liberated when their owner brought them into New York while changing ships for a voyage to New Orleans. After the Dred Scott decision the New York Court of Appeals, that state's highest court, upheld this result in Lemmon v. The People (1860). Had that case gone to the Supreme Court it is likely that Taney and his proslavery colleagues would have ruled that New York did not have the power to free slaves in transit. The election of Lincoln, secession, and the Civil War, mooted that issue.

Summary

From 1790 to 1861 the Supreme Court's slavery jurisprudence reflected American politics. In the end the Court tried to solve the American dilemma over slavery with decisions that entirely protected slavery and thoroughly repudiated the dominant ideology of the North. Such a solution was bound to fail. The solution of the Taney Court was consistent with the makeup of that court. Dominated by southerners and northern Democrats, the Court supported slavery at almost every turn. Slaveowners and the institution of slavery almost always won before the high court. The only exceptions to this general rule involved the African slave trade, Kentucky v. Dennison, which turned on critical political issues, and a few minor cases, which were decided on strictly technical grounds. Blacks seeking freedom could find no sympathy on the nation's highest court until the chief justice from Maryland died and was succeeded by the abolitionist Salmon P. Chase. Less than two years after this change on the Court, slavery itself disappeared, and the Court was left with the difficult task of building a new jurisprudence, based on concepts of freedom and racial equality. Saddled with formidable proslavery precedents, the postwar Court was not as successful in protecting freedom as the prewar Court had been in protecting slavery.

See also Commerce Power; Fugitive Slaves.

Bibliography

• Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Anti‐Slavery and the Judicial Process (1975).
• Paul Finkelman, Prigg v. Pennsylvania and Northern State Courts: Antislavery Use of a Proslavery Decision, Civil War History 25 (1979): 5–35.
• Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (1981).
• Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Constitutional Convention: Making a Covenant with Death, in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, edited by Richard Beeman, etal. (1987), pp. 188–225.
• Harold M. Hyman and William M. Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835–1875 (1982).
• Thomas D. Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780–1861 (1974).
• William M. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760–1848 (1977).
• William M. Wiecek, Slavery and Abolition before the United States Supreme Court, 1820–1860, Journal of American History 65 (1978): 34–59

— Paul Finkelman

The condition in which the life, liberty, and fortune of an individual is held within the absolute power of another. The English word derives from Slav, because Slavs were frequently slaves in the Dark Ages. The first challenges to slaveholding arose in ancient Greece, and Aristotle produces a somewhat embarrassed justification of slavery, arguing that some people are slaves by nature. As has often been remarked, the movement for American independence produced the Declaration of Independence with its claim ‘that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness’. But the Declaration was written by the Virginian slaveholder Thomas Jefferson, who never freed his own slaves. First the slave trade and then slavery was abolished in the British Empire and in America during the nineteenth century through a combination of principled argument, political advantage, and the Union victory in the American Civil War (1861-5). Slavery is still found in a number of countries, notably Myanmar (Burma).

Forced labour for little or no pay under the threat of violence. Slavery has existed on nearly every continent, including Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and throughout most of recorded history. The ancient Greeks and Romans accepted the institution of slavery, as did the Mayas, Incas, Aztecs, and Chinese. Until European involvement in the trade, however, slavery was a private and domestic institution. Beginning in the 16th century, a more public and "racially" based type of slavery was established when Europeans began importing slaves from Africa to the New World (see slave trade). An estimated 11 million people were taken from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade. By the mid-19th century the slave population in the U.S. had risen to more than four million, although slave imports had been banned from 1809. Most of the Africans sent to the United States worked on cotton or rice plantations in the South, their status governed by slave codes. Almost 40 percent of captives transported from Africa to the Americas were taken to Brazil, where harsh conditions required the constant replenishing of slaves. Following the rise of abolitionism, Britain outlawed slavery in its colonies in 1833, and France did the same in 1848. During the American Civil War, slavery was abolished in the Confederacy by the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), which was decreed by Pres. Abraham Lincoln. Brazil was the last to abolish slavery, doing so in 1888. Official policy notwithstanding, slavery continues to exist in many parts of the world. Many contemporary slaves are women and children forced into prostitution or working at hard labour or in sweatshops. Debt bondage is common, affecting millions of people, and slaves are often traded for material goods. See also Dred Scott decision; Fugitive Slave Acts; serfdom; Underground Railroad.

For more information on slavery, visit Britannica.com.

The voluntary or involuntary servitude of one person to another. In the ancient world, slavery was commonplace and human society made no effort to change the situation. According to ancient Greek thought (Aristotle), humanity is naturally divided into free men and slaves. Judaism did not abolish slavery, but restricted it and imposed such strict conditions on the ownership of slaves that in many cases slavery became paid labor for a specified period of time. The Bible differentiates between the Hebrew slave and the Canaanite slave. A Hebrew became a slave either because he was sold by a law court (Bet Din) to make good a theft he had committed and was unable to repay, or because he sold himself due to extreme poverty and the inability to support his family. A person sold by a law court can be sold for no more than six years. If at the end of the specified time he does not wish to go free, his ear is pierced with an awl and he then remains a slave until the Jubilee year. The Talmud explains why the man's ear is pierced as follows: "The ear which heard the words at Mount Sinai, 'for the Israelites are slaves unto me,' they are My [i.e., God's] slaves and not slaves to slaves; yet this person nevertheless acquired a master for himself- therefore his ear is pierced." His master may not separate him from his wife and children and must feed them, although they are not subservient to him and their earnings do not belong to him. Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah (Yad, Hilkhot Avadim) enumerates the obligations of the master to his Hebrew slave, whether the person sold himself or was sold by the bet din. First, the sale cannot be a public one. A person who purchases a slave cannot make him do "servile" work, which is defined as unlimited work or work of no value. The owner is forbidden to have the slave perform work of a demeaning nature. The owner is required to supply Jewish slaves, whether male or female, with the same quality of food and drink, clothing and living accommodations as his own, as it states, "for he is happy with you" (Deut. 15:16), which the rabbis interpret as meaning that the master may not eat good-quality bread and serve the slave inferior-quality bread, that the master may not drink old wine and serve the servant new wine, that the master may not sleep on feathers and the slave sleep on straw. The sages said that one who buys a slave for himself is really buying a master for himself. A female Jew can only become a slave if she was sold as such by her father. A father may not sell his daughter as a slave unless he has absolutely no land or movable possessions or even clothing on his back. Even in such cases, the father is forced to redeem his daughter, as soon as he is able to, because of the blemish to the family. A female may only be sold as a slave by her father while she is still a minor and is freed automatically at the onset of puberty unless her master has married her. No female beyond the age of puberty can be a slave. The Torah protects the female slave's honor and commands the master either to marry her or to give her to his son in marriage, and if not, "she shall go free, without payment" (Ex. 21:11), i.e., without having to pay for her liberty. A female slave, unlike a male slave, cannot extend her service by having her ear pierced. The law court is forbidden to sell a Jew as a slave to a non-Jew and one who sells himself to a non-Jew must do everything in his power to redeem himself thereafter. If he cannot arrange for the funds, his relatives must attempt to do so. The law court has the right to force the relatives to redeem him, so that the slave does not become assimilated among non-Jews. If the relatives do not redeem him or cannot afford to redeem him, it is a positive commandment for every Jew to redeem him. The Hebrew slave who is to return to his family after a number of years of servitude must be given a grant by his former owner, in order to enable him to reestablish himself: "When you set him free, do not let him go empty-handed. Furnish him out of the flock, threshing floor, and vat, with which the Lord your God has blessed you. Bear in mind that you were slaves in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you; therefore I enjoin you this commandment today" (Deut. 15:13-15). A Canaanite slave is the property of his master and is bought for all time. He does not go free in the jubilee year. The Bible states, "Such male and female slaves as you may have---it is from the nations round about you that you may acquire male and female slaves ... These shall become your property. You may keep them for a possession for your children after you, for them to inherit for all time. Such you may treat as slaves" (Lev. 25:44-46). However, even the life of the Canaanite slave is not totally under the master's control. If the slave was circumcised, he is considered to be a member of the family and he partakes of the paschal sacrifice together with everyone else. The Bible requires the slave to rest on the Sabbath and to observe the same commandments that a woman must observe. He can be released from his slavery either by being redeemed or by his master's freeing him by means of a document to that effect. If the slave suffers any permanent injury to an organ (e.g., his eye or tooth) by the hand of his master, he is automatically granted the right to his freedom. Killing a Canaanite slave is considered to be murder. It is forbidden to return a runaway slave to his master (Deut. 23:16). Even though the Canaanite slave is formally the property of his owner, "it is pious and wise for a person to act mercifully and not to impose too heavy a burden on his slave and not to mistreat him, and to give him proper food and drink, and not to humiliate him by action or by word, and not to be excessively angry or to shout excessively, but to speak to him calmly and to hear his complaints" (Sh. Ar., Y.D. 267:17). A Canaanite slave who had been freed could become Jewish through immersion (tevilah) and could then marry a Jew. The Christian Church, at an early stage after becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE, forbade Jews to own Christian slaves. The owning of slaves ceased among Jews earlier than among Christians. In the Western Hemisphere, Jews---like other whites---could be found among slave owners and slave traders. The period of the American Civil War found Jewish voices on both sides of the debate. Rabbi Morris J. Raphall of Congregation B'nai Jeshurun in New York strongly defended slavery, citing the biblical precedent. Rabbi David Einhorn of Baltimore spoke out in favor of abolition, calling slavery "the greatest possible crime against God," and had to flee the city during clashes between pro- and anti-slavery forces

An accepted social institution in the ancient world when it did not necessarily mean servitude for life. A distinction was made in Israelite law between Hebrew and alien slaves. The Hebrew slave was not forced to serve for more than six years, but if his wife had been given to him by the master, she and the children born to him had to remain with the master if the slave chose to go free (Ex 21:2-4).There were a number of ways by which a Hebrew could fall into bondage, the most frequent being his inability to pay a debt (Lev 25:39, 47). Selling children was also legal (Ex 21:7; II Kgs 4:1; etc.). If poverty was the reason for servitude the slave had to be treated not as a bondsman but as a hired servant, and was to serve until the year of the jubilee (Lev 25:39-40). But when a girl was sold as a maidservant she had to remain with her owner (Ex 21:7). A thief could be sold to make restitution for the damage he had caused (Ex 22:3). If a Hebrew were sold to a stranger his brethren had to redeem him (Lev 25:47-48), and the same applied to Hebrew prisoners of war (Neh 5:8). The servitude of a Hebrew slave did not bring about any change in his social and personal status: after completing his term he was free to go to his own house. Moreover, it was the duty of his master to furnish him liberally from his own flock, and with grain and wine and “you shall remember that you were a slave in the of , and the Lord your God redeemed you” (Deut 15:14-15). In certain cases where a slave preferred to stay with his master and his wife and children, the servitude did not last longer than the coming jubilee, when he was able to return to his land, which would be released to him (Lev 25:54).Some slaves reached positions of eminence, examples being Eliezer, Abraham’s slave (Gen 24:21), and Joseph (Gen 39:4). In some cases the master’s daughter could be given to a slave (I Chr 2:34-35). A slave was allowed to acquire possessions of his own, including other slaves (II Sam 9:8-9), and to use the income in order to redeem himself (Lev 25:49-51). A master was allowed to strike a slave, but cruelty was punished (Ex 21:20, but see v. 21). According to Deuteronomy (23:15) a fugitive slave was not to be handed back to his owner. The provisions for manumission were different for non-Hebrew slaves, who were mainly prisoners of war or women taken as concubines for their masters or their sons (Gen 34:29; Num 31:9; Deut 21:10-14).After the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites a different kind of servitude emerged. Some Israelite tribes paid tribute, in most cases in the form of forced labor; thus Issachar became “a band of slaves” (Gen 49:14-15). However, the references are generally to slaves of other nations (Deut 20:10-15; Josh 16:10, etc.). This system of servitude developed still further in the time of Solomon, during whose reign the greatly increased building activities called for enormous numbers of laborers, so that all that was left of the non-Israelite population came under bondage (I Kgs 9:21-22); and the male Israelites had to serve three months a year as well (I Kgs 5:13-14). The term “servant of Solomon” for this kind of servitude was still in use at the time of the return from Babylon (Ezra 2:58; Neh 7:57, 60). Associated with these servants were the Nethinim, some kind of public slaves (Ezra 2:58; Neh 7:60; 11:3). Similar were the Gibeonites, who became “woodcutters and water carriers for the house of my God” (Josh 9:23).From Persian to Byzantine times slavery was still legally recognized. The Mishnah and the Talmud refer to all foreign slaves as Canaanite bondsmen. Slaves who were circumcised enjoyed many of the privileges of Jewish society, but they were not allowed to acquire property. Nor could they intermarry with foreign slaves and maidservants. Many Jews were sold into slavery after the destruction of the , but they were quickly freed. A synagogue of Freedmen is referred to in Acts 6:9.Many figures in the NT were either slaves, like Onesimus (Philem vs. 8-16), or were of servile background. The presence of slaves in the world and in the church is generally taken for granted in the NT. The ethical teaching of the early church toward slaves echoes in large measure the growing egalitarianism voiced by the Stoics and gradually reflected in Roman imperial legislation, partly under Christian influence. The NT urges the acceptance of the slave as a brother (Philem v. 16), recognizing that in Christ slave and free are one, as a result of dying and rising with Christ in baptism unto newness of life (I Cor 12:13; Gal 3:28; Col 3:11). Slaves are not to be abused (Eph 6:9), but to be treated with equality and fairness (Col 4:1). Revelation 18:13 decries the inhumanity of the slave trade and I Timothy 1:9-10 classifies slave-kidnapers among the “unholy and profane”.Slaves were so much a part of ancient life (some estimates put them between a fifth and a third of the total population of the Roman Empire) that the NT frequently uses slave imagery. The slave is a stock figure in many parables of Jesus, and figures in three of his sayings: Matthew 6:24; 10:24; Mark 10:43. In the Epistles and Revelation, servile metaphors are used for the status of the sinner (Rom 6:6; Titus 3:3; Gal 4:3, 9; II Pet 2:19), the status of the Christian (Rom 6:18, 22; Eph 6:6), and the role of Christ (Phil 2:6-11; I Pet 2:18-25).

[Richard Burton]

Bibliography

• C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (1980)
• A. Gautier, Les Soeurs de Solitude (1985)
• R. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848 (1988)

[Ge]

A form of social stratification in which some individuals are literally owned by others as their property.

What does it mean to dehumanize a human being? To ponder this question is to approach some definition of slavery, one of the most extreme forms of dehumanization. We know enough about life in the antebellum South to know that slaves resisted dehumanization, that they created a folk culture, a family structure, and a spiritual life that blunted the dehumanizing force of slavery. What was it, then, that made slavery slavery?

The problem of slavery, and not just in the American South, was that it defined slaves as outsiders within the very societies of which they were a part. In America this meant that although the slaves got married and formed families, their families were not legally sanctioned and were therefore liable to be torn apart at the will of the master. Put differently, the slave family had no social standing. From youth to old age, from sunup to sundown, slaves spent the bulk of their waking lives at work, for slavery in America was nothing if not a system of labor exploitation. Yet the slaves had no right whatsoever to claim the fruits of their labor. This was "social death," and to the extent that humans are social beings, slavery was a profoundly dehumanizing experience.

What it means to be socially dead, an outsider, varies depending on how a society defines social life. Over the course of slavery's two and a half centuries of life in what became the United States, Americans developed a very specific understanding of social life. In so doing, they were specifying the definition of slavery in America. They saw membership in society in terms of rights, thereby defining the slaves as rightless.

To be sure, social death did not extinguish the slaves' cultural life. The slaves sometimes accumulated small amounts of property, for example, but they had no right to their property independent of the master's will. They bought and sold merchandise, they hired out their labor, but their contracts had no legal standing. In their sacred songs, their profane folktales, and in their explicit complaints, the slaves articulated their dissatisfaction with slavery. But they had no right to publish, to speak, or to assemble. They had no standing in the public sphere, just as their private lives had no legal protection. Thus the distinction between public and private—a central attribute of American society beginning in the eighteenth century—did not apply to the slaves. In all of these ways American slavery dehumanized its victims by depriving them of social standing, without which we cannot be fully human.

Origins of American Slavery

Slavery was largely incompatible with the organic societies of medieval Europe. After the collapse of ancient slavery human bondage persisted on the margins of medieval Europe, first on the islands of the eastern Mediterranean and later in the coastal areas of southern Europe. But western slavery did not revive until the feudal economies declined, opening up opportunities for European merchants and adventurers who were freed from the constraints that prevailed elsewhere. Over the course of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries Europe's consciousness of itself expanded to the point where no "Europeans" were considered "outsiders," and as such available for enslavement. This was a far cry from conditions in Africa, where a much more local conception of social membership made Africans subject to enslavement by other Africans. Thus, during those same centuries, entrepreneurs—first from Spain and Portugal and later from Holland and England—took to the seas and plugged themselves into Africa's highly developed system of slavery, transforming it into a vast Atlantic slave trade.

Finally, the collapse of an organically unified conception of European society, reflected in the Protestant Reformation's destruction of the "one true church," paved the way for the critical liberal distinction between the public and private spheres of life. Modern slavery flourished in this setting, for the slaveholders ironically required the freedom of civil society to establish the slave societies of the Atlantic world. Thus did the slave societies of the Americas grow up alongside, and as part of, the development of liberal capitalism. This is what distinguished "modern" slavery from its predecessors in antiquity.

The Atlantic Slave Trade

The Atlantic Slave Trade was in some ways an extension of a much older Mediterranean slave trade. Over the course of the late Middle Ages slave-based sugar plantations spread from Turkey to the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, and westward to coastal regions of southern France and Spain before breaking out into the Atlantic and spreading southward to the Azores, Madeira, and São Tomé. To some extent this line of expansion followed the source of slaves, for by the time sugar was being planted on the islands of the Mediterranean, Arab traders were transporting sub-Saharan Africans across the desert to sell them as slave laborers in southern and eastern Europe. Thus as Europe expanded it grew increasingly dependent on the continued willingness of Africans to enslave one another.

When the Spanish and the Portuguese first encountered West Africans the Europeans were too weak to establish plantations on the African mainland. But by establishing slavery on the island off the African coast—Madiera, the Azores, and São Tomé—the Europeans created the network of connections with Africans that later allowed them to expand their operations into a vast transatlantic slave trade. Thwarted on the African mainland the Europeans turned westward, leaping across the Atlantic to establish sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. Over the course of several hundred years, European and colonial slavers purchased approximately thirteen million slaves from their African captors. Perhaps eleven million of those Africans survived the Atlantic crossing to be put to work on the farms and plantations of the New World.

Slavery and the slave trade grew as the economy of western Europe expanded and developed. It peaked in the eighteenth century, when a "consumer revolution" centered in England and North America created unprecedented demand for the commodities produced by slaves, especially sugar. Indeed, the history of slavery in the Americas can be written in terms of the rise and fall of a series of sugar economies, first in Brazil, and then on a succession of Caribbean islands beginning with Jamaica and ending, in the nineteenth century, with Cuba. By the time the British got around the establishing permanent settlements on the North American mainland, the Atlantic slave trade that fed the booming sugar plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean was fully operational. If the English colonists in Virginia, Maryland, and elsewhere chose to develop slave economies of their own, the means to do so were readily at hand.

From "societies with Slaves" to "slave Societies"

In 1776 slavery was legal in every one of the thirteen colonies that declared its independence from Great Britain. Most of the leading ministers in Puritan Massachusetts had been slave owners. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century a significant percentage of the population of New York City was enslaved, and in 1712 several dozen of that city's slaves openly rebelled. By then there were substantial numbers of slaves in Newport, Rhode Island, which was rapidly becoming a center for the North American slave trade. To the south, African slaves first arrived in the Chesapeake region of Virginia and Maryland in 1619. Slaves appeared in the Carolinas a generation or two later. The ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth century America was not unusual, however: slaves had been present in human societies throughout history, and colonial America was no exception.

What made the colonies—and ultimately the American South—exceptional was the fact that the Chesapeake and lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia became full-scale slave societies rather than merely societies with slaves. Slave societies are rare things in human history, and so its emergence in North America is one of the most important historical developments of the eighteenth century. Slave society, not slavery, is what distinguished the northern colonies from the southern colonies and explains why slavery was abolished in the northern states but persisted in the South. Thus the emergence of slave society, rather than the emergence of slavery itself, is the first major turning point in the history of American slavery.

In the Chesapeake slave society developed fairly slowly. For most of the seventeenth century African slaves in Maryland and Virginia numbered in the hundreds. When English settlers first discovered the profitable potential of large-scale tobacco production, their first source of labor was indentured servants, most of them from Great Britain. Thus, tobacco planting was an established business when, in the late seventeenth century, the English economy improved and the supply of indentured servants dried up. It was only then that Chesapeake planters turned to African slaves in large numbers. Between 1680 and 1720 the Chesapeake was transformed from a society with slaves to a slave society. In those same years, a slave society based on rice planting was constructed in the Carolina lowcountry.

By 1750 the economy and society of both the Chesapeake and the lowcountry were based on slavery. But the two regions differed in significant ways. Tobacco plantations were relatively small; they could be run efficiently with twenty or thirty slaves. Rice plantations were most efficient with fifty slaves or more, whereas the sugar plantations of the Caribbean—and later Louisiana—required so much initial capital that they were most efficient when they had a hundred slaves or more. Because tobacco required some care to cultivate, slaves were organized in gangs that were directly supervised either by the master, an overseer, or a slave driver. Rice planting, by contrast, demanded certain skills but it did not require direct supervision. So in the Carolina lowcountry, slave labor was organized under a "task" system, with individual slaves assigned a certain task every day and left largely on their own to complete it.

Because of these distinctions, slave life in the eighteenth-century lowcountry differed in important ways from slave life in the Chesapeake. Large rice plantations made it easier for slaves to form families of their own. On the other hand, high death rates in the lowcountry destabilized the families that did form. Smaller farms meant that tobacco slaves were much more likely to marry "away" from their home plantations, with all the disruptions and difficulties that such marriages inevitably entailed. On the other hand, Chesapeake slave families were less disrupted by disease and death than were the slave families of the Carolina lowcountry.

Because sugar cane was such a labor-intensive crop, sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean were death traps for slaves; they required constant infusions of new laborers imported from Africa. But sugar could not grow in Virginia or Carolina; and the relative health of slaves working the crops grown there made a family life among slaves possible. As a result, the slave population of the North American colonies developed the ability to reproduce itself naturally over the course of the eighteenth century. In the tobacco regions the slaves achieved a fairly robust rate of population growth, whereas the rice slaves did little more than reproduce their numbers. As a result, the expansion of the rice economy required substantial imports of African slaves throughout the eighteenth century, whereas in the Chesapeake the slave population was largely native-born after 1750. The high density of blacks, combined with sustained African immigration, created a distinctive culture in the coastal lowcountry, a culture marked by its own "gullah" dialect and the persistence of significant African traditions. In Virginia and Maryland, by contrast, a largely native-born population and smaller plantations led to an English-speaking slave community that was more assimilated to the culture of the English settlers.

Although the rice plantations grew more technologically sophisticated, and therefore more productive, over the course of the eighteenth century, the rice culture itself was largely restricted to the lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia. The tobacco culture of the Chesapeake proved more adaptable. In the upper South, planters shifted readily to wheat production when the tobacco economy faltered. But more important, the tobacco pattern spread at the end of the century into the inland regions of the lower South, where it facilitated the expansion of short-staple Cotton. Thus the form slave society took in the colonial Chesapeake—relatively small plantations, a gang labor system, relatively high birth rates, and a native-born slave population—became the model upon which the cotton economy of the nineteenth century depended. Before that happened, however, the American Revolution had dramatically altered the history of slavery in the United States.

Slavery and the American Revolution

The American Revolution had a profound but ambiguous effect on the history of slavery in the United States. It established the terms of a ferocious debate, without precedent in history, over the morality of slavery itself. It resulted in the creation of the first sizable communities of free blacks in the United States. It made slavery into a sectional institution by abolishing or restricting it in the North while protecting it in the South. And by defining a "citizen" of the new nation as the bearer of certain basic rights, it definitively established the status of American slaves as rightless.

As soon as the conflict between the colonies and Great Britain erupted, the English began to encourage southern slaves to rebel against their masters. Thousands of slaves took advantage of the British offer, thereby transforming the war for independence into a civil war in the southern colonies. As a result, southern slaveholders came to associate their struggle for freedom from Great Britain with the struggle to preserve slavery. The slaves, meanwhile, began to define freedom as the acquisition of rights.

Some of the revolutionary changes had important social consequences. For example, the revolutionary commitment to fundamental human equality inspired the abolition of slavery in every northern state between 1776 and 1804. In the upper South the same ideology, combined with the relative weakness of the slave economy, prompted a wave of Manumissions (formal emancipations) in Virginia and Maryland. Northern abolition and southern manumissions together produced the first major communities of free blacks in the United States.

There were important legal changes as well. Slave codes across the South were revised to reflect the liberal humanist injunction against cruelty: some of the most barbaric punishments of slaves were eliminated and the wanton murder of a slave was made illegal for the first time. The new Constitution gave Congress the power to ban, by a simple majority vote, the entire nation from participating in the Atlantic slave trade after 1808. In addition the first U.S. Congress reenacted a Northwest Ordinance, first passed by the Continental Congress, substantially restricting the western expansion of slavery in the northern states. All of these developments reflected the sudden and dramatic emergence of an antislavery sentiment that was new to the world.

But the Revolution did not abolish slavery everywhere, and in important ways it reinforced the slave societies of the South even as it eliminated the last societies with slaves in the North. Humanizing the slave codes made slavery less barbaric, for example, but also more tolerable. More important, the new Constitution recognized and protected slavery without ever actually using the word "slave." It included a fugitive slave clause and two "three-fifths" clauses that gave the southern states a discount on their tax liabilities and enhanced representation in the House of Representatives. Finally, the same liberal ideology that provided so many Americans with a novel argument against slavery became the basis for an equally novel proslavery argument. The rights of property in slaves, the claim that slaves were happy, that they were not treated with cruelty, that they were less productive than free laborers: all of these sentiments drew on the same principles of politics and political economy that inspired the Revolution. They became the mainstays of a developing proslavery ideology.

The Westward Expansion of the Slave Economy

Beginning in the 1790s, a previously moribund slavery came roaring back to life. In 1793 Eli Whitney invented a machine that made the cultivation of short-staple cotton profitable. Almost immediately the cotton economy began a relentless expansion that continued for more than half a century and eventually provided the catalyst for the Civil War.

The Cotton boom commenced with the migration of slaveholders from the upper South down the Piedmont plateau into South Carolina and Georgia. By 1800 slave-holders were spilling across the Appalachians planting tobacco in Kentucky and Tennessee and cotton in Georgia and Alabama. The population of Alabama and Mississippi, 40,000 in 1810, leaped to 200,000 in 1820 and kept growing until it reached over 1.6 million by 1860. By then cotton and slavery had crossed the Mississippi River into Louisiana, parts of Missouri, and Texas. In those same years slave plantations in Kentucky and Tennessee expanded their production of tobacco and to a lesser extent, hemp. And in southern Louisiana the rise of the cotton kingdom was paralleled by the rise in huge, heavily capitalized sugar plantations.

But rice, tobacco, and sugar could not match the dynamism and scope of short-staple cotton. Indeed, cotton quickly established itself as the nation's leading export, in both tons and dollars. Although its growth was erratic—slowing in the 1820s and again in the early 1840s—it never stopped. And far from stagnating, the cotton economy was never more vibrant than it was in the 1850s. Thus on the eve of the Civil War many white Southerners were persuaded that "Cotton is King" and could never be dethroned.

The consequences of slavery's expansion were not confined to economic history, however. For both free and enslaved Southerners, the cotton boom had powerful effects on social and cultural life. Among the slaveholders, the cotton boom bred an aggressively expansionist ethos that influenced everything from family life to national politics. Wives and mothers complained about the men who were prepared to pull up stakes and move westward in search of new opportunities. Sons were urged to leave their towns and families to start up new plantations further west. And slaveholding presidents, including Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk, carried these expansionist convictions with them to Washington, D.C., provoking wars and international confrontations all for the sake of facilitating slavery's expansion. But it was the slaves whose lives, families, and communities were most profoundly disrupted by the rise of the cotton kingdom.

The Deterioration of Slave Life

In the second half of the eighteenth century the lives of most slaves improved. Infant mortality rates among slaves declined; the average height of adult slaves rose, indicating an adequate level of nutrition. With that the slaves reached a healthy rate of natural population growth, the ratio of men to women evened out, and it was possible for most slaves to form families of their own. In addition, the American Revolution had inspired many masters in the upper South to free their slaves, and for the vast majority who remained in bondage the laws of slavery became somewhat less severe. After 1800, however, this progress came to a halt, and in some ways reversed itself.

In the nineteenth century the conditions of slave life deteriorated. Beginning in the 1790s the state legislatures made it harder and harder for masters to manumit (free) their slaves, further choking the already narrow chances the slaves had of gaining their freedom. After 1830 most southern states passed laws making it a crime to teach a slave to read, adding legally enforced illiteracy to the attributes of enslavement. The health of the slaves declined as well. The number of low-birth-weight infants increased, and the average height of the slaves fell—both of them indications of deteriorating levels of nutrition. With the rise of the sugar plantations of Louisiana, a new and particularly ferocious form of slavery established a foothold in the Old South. Sugar plantations had a well-deserved reputation for almost literally working the slaves to death. They averaged a stunning population decline of about 14 percent each decade. But sugar planting was so profitable that it could survive and prosper anyway, thanks to an internal slave trade that provided Louisiana planters with a steady supply of replacement laborers.

The growth of the internal slave trade in the antebellum South made the systematic destruction of African American families a defining element of the slave system. In colonial times, when new slaves were imported through the Atlantic slave trade, the internal trade was small. But with the expansion of the cotton economy after 1790 and the closing of the Atlantic trade in 1808, a robust market in slaves developed. At first Virginia and Maryland but later South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee exported their slaves to the newer slave states further west and south. Eventually even Alabama and Mississippi became net exporters of slaves. Between 1790 and 1860 nearly a million slaves were exported from one part of the South to another, making it one of the largest forced migrations in human history. Between one third and one half of these slaves did not migrate with their masters but were sold through the interstate slave trade.

Slaveholders protested that they sold family members apart from one another only when absolutely necessary. But "necessity" was a flexible concept in the Old South. When the cotton economy was booming and slave prices were high, for example, it became more "necessary" to sell slaves. Furthermore, the ages of the slaves put up for sale suggest that husbands were regularly sold away from wives and children were regularly sold away from parents. The paradox was appalling: cotton cultivation was healthy enough to sustain a natural growth of the slave population through the creation of slave families, but the expansion of the cotton economy broke up those families by the tens of thousands. The forced sale of a close relative became a nearly universal experience for the slaves of the Old South.

The Plantation Regime

Since the late eighteenth century, Americans both North and South accepted that slave labor was less efficient than free labor. Even the slave owners agreed that a slave lacked the incentives to diligent labor that motivated the free worker. Slaves could not be promoted for hard work or fired for poor work. They did not get raises. Harder work did not bring more food, better clothing, a finer home. The slaves could not accumulate savings hoping to buy farms of their own; they could not work with the aim of winning their ultimate freedom; nor could they work to insure that their children's lives would be easier than theirs. Lacking the normal incentives of free labor, the slaves were universally dismissed as lackluster and inefficient workers.

And yet the slave economy grew at impressive, even spectacular rates in the nineteenth century. The returns on investment in slave plantations were comparable to the returns on businesses in the North. Despite the ups and downs of the market for slave-produced commodities, slavery was by and large a profitable system in the Old South. This was no accident. The slaveholders organized their farms and plantations to be as productive as possible. They constructed a managerial hierarchy to oversee the daily labor of the slaves. They employed the latest techniques in crop rotation and manuring. They planted corn and raised livestock that complemented the cash crops, thus keeping the slaves both busy and adequately nourished.

Any free farmer could have done as much, but the slaveholders had advantages that counteracted the weaknesses of their labor system. They put otherwise "unproductive" slaves to work. Slave children went to work at an earlier age than free children, for example. And elderly slaves too old for fieldwork were put in charge of minding very small children and preparing the meals for all the slaves. These and other economies of scale turned a labor system that was in theory unproductive and inefficient into what was, in practice, one of the great economic successes of the nineteenth century.

On a well managed plantation the slaves were kept busy year round, fixing tools and repairing buildings during the winter season, tending to the corn when the cotton was taken care of, slaughtering the hogs after the last of the cotton was ginned. Since most slaves lived on units with twenty or more slaves, most were introduced to some form of systematic management. Slave "drivers" acted as foremen to oversee the gangs in the fields. On larger plantations overseers were hired to manage day to day operations. The larger the plantation the more common it was for particular slaves to specialize in various forms of skilled labor. The "well managed plantation," the slaveholders agreed, took into consideration not simply the amount of cotton produced, but the overall productivity of the farm's operations.

Yet the fact remained that the slaves lacked the incentive to care very much or work very hard to maximize the master's profits. As a result, much of the management of slaves was aimed at forcing them to do what they did not really care about. This was the underlying tension of the master-slave relationship. It was the reason almost all masters resorted to physical punishment. In the final analysis, the efficiency of southern slavery, and the resentment of the slaves, was driven by the whip.

Slave Culture

Slaves responded to the hardships and disruptions of their lives through the medium of a distinctive culture whose roots were in part African and in part American but whose basic outlines were shaped by the experience of slavery itself.

Slave culture developed in several distinct stages. Over the course of the eighteenth century, as the slave population stabilized and the majority of slaves became native-born, a variety of African dialects gave way to English as the language through which most American slaves communicated with one another. A native-born slave population in turn depended on the existence of slave families.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a growing number of slaves converted to evangelical Christianity and by 1860 Protestantism was the dominant religion of enslaved African Americans.

Despite the fact that most slaves eventually spoke English and practiced Christianity, elements of West African culture persisted. In some parts of the South, such as lowcountry South Carolina and southern Louisiana, the African influence could be strong. The mystical practices of voodoo common among Louisiana slaves, for example, were only one example of African cultural practices that survived in the Old South. More generally, slaves continued to put their faith in the conjurers and potions that were a part of the mystical life of West Africans. Other African cultural traces could be found in the slaves' funeral practices, their marriage ceremonies, and in the way they treated the sick and the dying. Slave music evinced a rhythmic complexity more common to West Africa than to western Europe. And slave dancing, which masters commonly dismissed as mere wild gyrations, were more often a legacy of African traditions such as the "ring shout."

Even the fact that the slaves spoke English, formed families, and practiced Christianity did not mean that they had simply absorbed the culture of their masters. In important ways the slaves used their language to construct a folk culture of rituals, music, and storytelling that reflected the continuing influence of African traditions and that remained very much the culture of slaves rather than masters. The slaves reckoned kinship more broadly and more flexibly than did their masters, providing some measure of emotional protection from the disruptions of family life. Nor was slave Christianity a mere carbon copy of the religion of the masters. Slaves did not distinguish the sacred from the profane as sharply as their owners did; they empathized more with the Moses of the Old Testament, who led his people out of bondage, than with the New Testament Epistles of St. Paul, which exhorted slaves to obey their masters.

For the masters, however, slave culture was as important for what it lacked as for what it contained. Try as they might, the slaveholders could not overcome the structural constraints of a labor system that gave the slaves no reason to respond to the bourgeois injunctions to diligence, thrift, and sobriety. Slave culture was distinguished less by the persistence of African traditions than by its distance from the culture of the masters.

The Culture of the Masters

Years ago, a pioneering historian of the Old South wrote that slavery was "less a business than a life; it made fewer fortunes than it made men." Maybe so. But slavery made more than its share of fortunes: in 1860 almost all of the richest counties in America were located in the South. And the men who made those fortunes did not do so by lolling about on their verandas, sipping mint juleps and reading the Old South's version of the daily racing form.

The slaveholders were a hard-nosed and aggressive lot. Those who inherited their plantations added to their wealth by buying second and third plantations. Sometimes they pulled up stakes, moved west, and built more plantations. Slaveholders who started with a handful of slaves often used their professional careers to subsidize their accumulation of more land and more slaves. It was the rare planter whose wealth did not entail careful management of his farm, constant supervision of his slaves, and a keen eye for a chance to expand his operations or move on.

Because successful slave ownership was hard work, the planters liked to think that they had arrived at their exalted social standing not by the advantages of privileged upbringings but through their steady adherence to the bourgeois virtues of thrift, diligence, and sobriety. No doubt a few generations of wealth smoothed out the rough edges on many a planter family, and the temptation to fancy themselves aristocrats of a sort could become irresistible. But the demands of the slave economy and the plantation regime could not be ignored: to lose sight of the bottom line was to risk financial and social ruin.

Faced with rising antislavery criticism from the North, the slaveholders looked to their experience and filtered it through the prevailing political culture to produce a provocative series of proslavery arguments. If cruelty was immoral, the slaveholders insisted that the slaves were well treated and that brutality was frowned upon. If happiness rested upon a decent standard of living, the slaves were so well treated that they were among the happiest people on earth. Only as slaves did Africans, who would otherwise languish in heathenism, have access to the word of God. Although slave labor was in principle less efficient than free labor, southern slavery put an otherwise unproductive race of people to work in an otherwise unproductive climate, thereby creating wealth and civilization where it could not otherwise have existed. In a culture that sentimentalized the family, the slaveholders increasingly insisted that the families of slaves were protected against all unnecessary disruption. Thus by the standards of liberal society—the immorality of cruelty, the universal right to happiness, freedom to worship, the sanctity of the family, the productivity of labor, and the progress of civilization—southern slave society measured up.

Or so the slaveholders claimed. Northerners—enough of them, anyway—thought differently. As the relentless expansion of the slave states pushed against the equally relentless expansion of the free states, the two regions sharpened their arguments as well as their weapons. When the war came North, with more guns and more machines and more free men to put in uniform, suppressed the slaveholders' rebellion and put down slavery to boot. Thus did American slave society, wealthier and more powerful than ever, come to its violent and irreversible end.

Bibliography

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Slavery in one form or another has been a central feature of East Slavic and Russian history from at least the very beginning almost to the present day. Its presence and its offshoots have lent a particular coloration to Russian civilization that can be found in few other places.

One common social science definition of slavery is that the slave is an outsider; namely, that he or she is of a different race, religion, caste, or tribe than that of his or her owner. In cases where that was not true, slaveholders resorted to fiction, which made the slave (usually an infant abandoned by its parents) appear to be an outsider. Or a slave might be a lawbreaker who by his crime had placed himself outside of society: one who, in Orlando Patterson's phrase, was "socially dead." This could include debtors, who were regarded as thieves because they could not or would not repay borrowed money or goods, or criminals who could not pay fines.

Russia included such outsiders as slaves, but (along with Korea) also enslaved its own people. This was unusual and made Russian slavery distinctive. Because of its atypical nature, some people have questioned whether Russian rabstvo and especially kholopstvo were in fact "really slavery." However, a thoughtful examination indicates that all such individuals in fact were slaves. All varieties of slaves were treated equally under the law.

From the dawn of Russian history, as everywhere else on Earth at the time, slaves were typically products of warfare - East Slavic tribes fighting with each other or with neighboring Turkic, Iranian, Finnic, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish, Germanic, and other peoples. Such victims were true outsiders who could be either enslaved in Rus itself or taken abroad into the international slave trade. Slaves were mentioned in every Russian law code. As the earliest such code, the Russkaia pravda, grew in size from its earliest redaction compiled in about 1016 to its full size, the so-called Expanded Pravda a special section on slavery was added. It enumerated some of the avenues into slavery, such as sale of prior slaves, self-sale, becoming a steward, and marriage of a free person to a slave. An indentured laborer could be sold into slavery as recompense for crimes. As in all slave systems, the owner was responsible for a slave's offenses, much as an owner is responsible for his dog. The heyday of medieval Russian slavery followed the collapse of political unity after 1132, and each of the dozen or so independent principalities waged civil war against each other as well as the steppe nomads and neighboring sedentary peoples to the west. As always - until probably the 1880s - Russia was a labor-short country, so those desiring extra hands often enslaved them. Much of twelfth-century farming was done by slaves living in barracks.

The Mongol invasion and conquest made the situation worse. The Mongols enslaved skilled individuals and dispatched them to Karakorum, Sarai, and other corners of the earth. The dozen or so principalities of Rus in 1237 fragmented into fifty, perhaps even one hundred - each enslaving the labor of other principalities. Many of these slaves were shipped to Novgorod, whose famous slave market was at the busy intersection of Slave and High Streets, where professional readers and writers set up their business composing and reading for customers the famous birch-bark letters. Slaves from Novgorod were shipped into the Baltic, to England, to other Atlantic countries, and into the Islamic lands of the Mediterranean.

While the unification of the East Slavic lands by Moscow put an end to the capture of other East Slavs into slavery, Russia was still short of labor, and the appetite for slaves did not decline. In Kievan Rus the Orthodox Church had provided charity, but this diminished with the rise of Moscow. In order for the impoverished to survive, the practice began to develop of those in need selling themselves into what was described as "full slavery." This was a form of perpetual, lifelong slavery in which offspring were described as hereditary slaves. Most societies could not withstand the tension inherent in enslaving their own people, but this did not seem to bother the Russians. From the outset Russian society had consisted not only of East Slavs, but also the ruling Varangian/Viking element, conquered indigenous Iranians, Finns, and Balts, plus any Turkic, Mongol, or other people who wanted to live in Rus. There were no barriers to intermarriage among these peoples, and the sole distinction came to be (perhaps after 1350, or even the 1650s) those who allegedly were Orthodox Christians and those who were not. Thus the insider-outsider dichotomy was weakly developed, and this perhaps permitted Russians to enslave their own people.

In the sixteenth century full slavery came to be replaced by what is best translated as limited service contract slavery (kabalnoye kholopstvo), known elsewhere (in Parthia) as antichresis. It worked as follows: A person in need or who did not desire to control his own life found a person who would buy him. (Two-thirds of the cases involved primarily young males, the other third females.) They agreed on a price; the slave took the money from his buyer and agreed to work for him for a year in lieu of paying the interest on the money. If he did not repay the loan (or a third person - presumably another buyer - did not repay it for him), he defaulted and became a full slave. By the 1590s there were many such slaves. Serfdom was in full development, and the slave had the advantage that he had to pay no taxes, whereas the serf did. Slavery was becoming so popular that the powerful government unilaterally changed the terms of limited service contract slavery: The limitation was changed from the one year of the loan to the life of the person giving the loan. There was a dual expropriation here: The person taking the loan (i.e., selling himself) could no longer pay it off, and the person granting the loan (i.e., buying the slave) could not pass the slave to his heirs. This became the premier form of slavery until the demise of the institution in the 1720s. Two changes were introduced: in the 1620s a maximum price of two rubles, and in the 1630s an increase of the maximum to three rubles. This meant that some would-be slaves could find no buyer because their price was too high, whereas others were forced to sell themselves for less than their "market price" would have been without the price controls. Regardless, slavery introduced a form of dependency such that those who were manumitted almost always resold themselves upon the death of the owner, often to the deceased owner's heirs. About 10 percent of the entire population were slaves.

Russia was the sole country in the world with a central office (the Slavery Chancellery) in the capital controlling the institution of slavery. All slaves had to be registered. In the 1590s a reregistration of all slaves was required, in which about half of all slaves were limited service contract slaves and the others were of half a dozen other varieties. There were military captives, subject to return home upon the signing of a peace treaty with the enemy belligerent. There were debt slaves, who had defaulted on a loan which could be "worked off" at the rate of 5 rubles per year by an adult male, 2.50 rubles per year by an adult female, and 2 rubles per year by a child over ten. There were indentured slaves, who agreed to work for a term in exchange for cash, training, and often a promise that the owner would marry them off before the end of the term. Those who married slaves were themselves enslaved, as were those who worked for someone else for over three months. There were hereditary slaves, those born to slaves and their offspring. The very complex practices of the Slavery Chancellery were codified into chapter 20 (119 articles) of the Law Code of 1649.

Slavery had a profound impact on the institution of serfdom which borrowed norms from slavery. Farming slaves were converted into taxpaying serfs in 1679. Household slaves (the vast majority of all slaves) were converted into house serfs by the poll tax in 1721. After 1721 serfdom increasingly took on the appearance of slavery until 1861.

Bibliography

Hellie, Richard. (1982). Slavery in Russia, 1450 - 1725. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Hellie, Richard, ed. and tr. (1988). The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649. Irvine, CA: Charles Schlacks.

Patterson, Orlando. (1982). Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

—RICHARD HELLIE

This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

A civil relationship in which one person has absolute power over the life, fortune, and liberty of another.

History

At some point in history, slavery has plagued nearly every part of the world. From ancient Greece to the modern Americas, innumerable governments have sanctioned the complete control of certain persons for the benefit of other persons, usually under the guise of social, mercantile, and technological progress.

The United States' legacy of slavery began in the early seventeenth century. However, the stage for U.S. slavery was set as early as the fourteenth century, when the rich nations of Spain and Portugal began to capture Africans for enslavement in Europe. When Spain, Portugal, and other European countries conquered and laid claim to the New World of the Caribbean and West Indies in the late sixteenth century, they brought along the practice of slavery. Eventually, slavery expanded to the north, to colonial America.

The first Africans in colonial America were brought to Jamestown by a Dutch ship in 1619. These twenty Africans were indentured servants, which meant that they were to work for a certain period of time in exchange for transportation and room and board. They were assigned land after their service and were considered free Negroes. Nonetheless, their settlement was involuntary.

The status of Africans in colonial America underwent a rapid evolution after 1619. One early judicial decision signaled the change in European attitudes toward Africans. In 1640, three Virginia servants — two Europeans and one African — escaped from their masters. Upon recapture, a Virginia court ordered the European servants to serve their master for one more year, and the African servant to serve his master, or his master's assigns, for the rest of his life.

As early as 1641, colonial Massachusetts recognized slavery as a legal institution, announcing in its Body of Liberties that "[t]here shall never be any bond slaverie . . . unless it be lawful Captives taken in just warres, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us." Twenty years later, just two generations after the arrival of the first Africans in colonial America, the first statute recognizing African slavery was passed in Virginia.

In the mid-1600s, Virginia colonists began to take note of the phenomenal agricultural production occurring in the Caribbean and West Indies. The extreme labor demands and savage punishments of European colonists there had depleted the population of productive Amerindian slaves, but those same colonists were continuing to prosper. By purchasing masses of able-bodied pubescent and adult Africans, the colonists avoided waiting for a slave population to increase by native birth, and in the scramble for quick, easy, and substantial profits in the New World, this gave them an edge. Virginia colonists, eager to achieve the same prosperity, endeavored to sanction African slavery.

In 1661, Virginia colonists enacted a law that legitimized African slavery and provided that the status of an African child would be determined by the status of its mother. If the mother of a child was a slave, then her child was doomed to slavery. In the following years, colonial Virginia passed more laws that severely restricted the rights of African slaves and expanded the rights of owners of African slaves. Each of the original colonies eventually followed Virginia's lead by enacting similar laws that promoted or recognized the enslavement of Africans.

Most of the first African slaves were captured in Africa by the Dutch or by fellow Africans. They were then manacled and delivered in crowded, brutal conditions across the Atlantic Ocean by the Dutch West India Company, an organization formed in Holland for the sole purpose of trafficking in slaves. English companies such as the East India Company and the Royal African Company also contributed to the seventeenth-century American slave trade. Although untold numbers of Africans died en route, the profitable slave trade so increased the African slave population in America that by the late 1600s, European colonists were already beginning to anticipate insurrections and slave revolts. By 1750, populations of displaced Africans would range from an estimated 550 in New Hampshire to over 101,000 in Virginia.

From the beginning, African slaves resisted their servitude by running away, fighting back, poisoning food, and plotting revolts. The first Europeans to openly denounce slavery and work for its abolition were Quakers, or members of the Society of Friends, who were concentrated in Pennsylvania. As early as 1688, the Quakers publicly declared that slavery was at odds with Christianity. Along with other European abolitionists, they actively worked to help African slaves escape their owners.

The legal treatment of African slaves varied slightly from colony to colony according to the area's economic structure. Northern colonies such as Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island relied on the export of various local commodities such as fish, liquor, and dairy products, so their involvement with African slavery was in large part limited to slave trading. Nonetheless, the New England colonies sanctioned the use of slave labor, and they enacted codes that prevented African slaves from exercising such basic rights as freedom of association and movement. Though generally regarded as less harsh than those of such southern colonies as Virginia and the Carolinas, the New England slave codes nevertheless legalized the enslavement of Africans.

The middle colonies — New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey — also had codes that promoted the slave industry and deprived African slaves of most basic rights. Laws were often tailored especially for African slaves. In New York, for example, any slave found forty miles north of Albany was presumed to be escaping to Canada and could be executed upon the oath of two witnesses. In New York City, slaves could not appear on the street after dark without a lighted lantern. From 1700 to 1740, growth of the African slave population in New York outdistanced growth of the European population and gave the city the largest slave population in the region. Many of the slaves here provided domestic service to wealthy families. Except in New York, slavery in the middle colonies was not widespread, because the commercial economies and small-scale agriculture practiced by the Germans, Swedes, and Danes in this region did not require it. Further, many settlers in the rural areas of the middle colonies were morally opposed to slavery. Neither of these conditions prevailed in the southern colonies.

Georgia was originally established as a slavery-free English colony in 1733, but the prohibition against slavery was repealed in 1750 after repeated entreaties from European settlers. The economies of colonial Virginia, Maryland, and North and South Carolina centered on large-scale agricultural production. The vast majority of the South's colonial agrarians profited at first from the sale of tobacco, rice, and indigo. These products were planted, cultivated, and harvested exclusively by African slaves on vast farms known as plantations. Plantation production relied on manual labor and required tremendous numbers of workers to be successful, and thus the southern colonies found their needs met by the widespread enslavement of Africans.

Because of the importance of slavery to the plantation-based economies, slave codes in the southern colonies were made quite elaborate. For example, South Carolina prevented slave owners from working their slaves for more than fifteen hours a day in spring and summer, and more than fourteen hours a day in fall and winter. Slave owners were also warned against undue cruelty to slaves. At the same time, Europeans were not allowed to teach African slaves to read or write; freedom of movement was severely restricted for slaves; liquor could not be sold to slaves; and whippings, mutilations, and other forms of punishment for slaves were explicitly authorized by law.

The laws regarding slaves reflected the terrorism and paternalism of slavery. A slave had a nebulous right to self-defense, but a slave owner was allowed to restrain and punish a slave with impunity. A slave owner could not beat a slave publicly, but a slave could not avoid punishment for a crime committed at an owner's command. A free Negro could not voluntarily submit to slavery for a price, and Europeans were not allowed to subject a free African to slavery by treating one as a slave for any length of time. However, every African was presumed to be a slave until she or he could prove otherwise. This presumption was abolished in the northern states shortly after the United States won its independence from England, but it remained unchanged in the southern states until the end of the Civil War.

Not all Africans were slaves. Some free Africans had bought their freedom, some were the descendants of Jamestown's first free African servants, some had escaped their owner, and some had been freed, or manumitted, by their owner. A slave owner could not free a slave if doing so left the slave unable to pay his or her debts. Some statutes allowed a slave owner to free only slaves who could work and support themselves, and other statutes required a slave owner to provide continuing financial support to freed slaves.

In some areas in the South, manumission of a slave was illegal, but the law did not prevent a slave owner from sending or taking slaves to another state to set them free. In states where manumission was legal, an owner could free a slave by executing a deed declaring the slave's liberty. Generally, the deed had to be filed in a county clerk's office or authorized or proved in court. Some states allowed for the manumission of slaves in the slave owner's will. A gift of land to a slave by a slave owner was often held to be a manumission of the slave, since only a free individual could own land. A manumitted slave was entitled to work for wages and to own land and personal property through acquisition or inheritance.

After the United States won the War of Independence, Vermont, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey all passed legislation that gradually abolished slavery. These northern states, inspired mostly by the revolutionary, liberal philosophies of the period, began advocating expanding notions of freedom that were being rejected in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

In May 1787, delegations from each of the thirteen colonies began to meet in Philadelphia to devise a federal constitution. The Constitutional Convention was to begin on May 14, but few representatives had arrived by then, and it was postponed. On May 25, seven states were represented, and the convention began. Delegates from the various colonies continued to arrive through June, with the last ones coming from New Hampshire on July 22, four days before the convention was adjourned. Slavery was just one topic on a very long agenda.

The abolition of the United States' enslavement of Africans was not seriously entertained at the convention. Virginia's George Mason and many delegates from the northern states argued against any recognition of slavery in the Constitution, but the overriding concern at the convention was to unify the states under a system of government that left substantial control of social and political questions to the individual states. It seemed clear to the majority of the representatives that a country founded on individual freedoms could not participate in slave trading, but it was equally clear that if the widespread enslavement of Africans by the southern states were prohibited by the new federal government, there would be no United States.

North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia insisted that a state's right to import slaves be left untouched. Delegates from other states argued for the abolition of slavery, and still other delegates wanted no hint of the practice included in the Constitution. A committee comprising one delegate from each state was dispatched to settle the issue. The committee returned with a constitutional clause, couched in the negative, that made slave trade vulnerable to prohibition after the year 1800. The strange set of bedfellows produced by this issue — New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia were against the clause — illustrated the variety of considerations at play.

After further debate and modification by the entire convention, the Slave Trade Clause was inserted into Section 9 of Article I: "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight." Attached to this language was another clause that allowed for the imposition of a tax or duty on such importation, not to exceed $10 for "each Person" (read, "each Slave").

The one other opaque reference to slavery in the Constitution was the so-called Three-fifths Compromise. In Article I, Section 2, the Framers wrote that the population of a state, for purposes of determining taxation and representation in the House of Representatives, would be measured by counting the "Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons." This language struggled mightily to avoid the mention of African slavery, but was understood as allowing the southern states to count each slave as three-fifths of a person in a government census.

This method of population measurement, three-fifths, was actually developed by Congress in 1783, during debate over state representation in the federal government. The northern states opposed the inclusion of African slaves in the determination of population, because the southern states contained thousands of African slaves who played no part in the political process. The southern states argued that a state's African slave population reflected its true power and wealth, which should in turn be reflected in its federal representation. The northern states eventually compromised with the southern states to allow five African slaves to equal three free men for purposes of population determinations and federal representation.

At the Constitutional Convention, standing alone, the three-fifths proviso did not immediately satisfy the majority of states. Opposition to the measure was not organized: no single cause unified the dissatisfied states, and no split occurred between slave states and free states. Opposition also was not based on the morality of counting slaves as less than full citizens: very little wrangling took place over this concern, and an amendment to count slaves as whole persons was rejected by a vote of 8-2. Eventually, the three-fifths ratio was adopted for the Constitution, but only after direct taxation of the states was also tied to state population. Thus, the only compromise regarding the recognition of African slaves grew from struggles over money and political power, not a concern over morality. A showdown between the slave states and the free states over African slavery never occurred. Although the United States was to cease the purchase and sale of slaves, the practice of slavery in the southern states survived the Constitutional Convention.

While all this politicking was taking place, the land in the southern states was fast becoming infertile. Farmers and plantation owners realized they needed to diversify their crops to save the soil. Shortly after the Constitution was ratified in 1789, the southern states sought the development of a cotton gin in order to convert agricultural production from rice, tobacco, and indigo to cotton. The cotton gin, which mechanically extracted cotton seeds, was eventually designed by Eli Whitney and Phineas Miller in 1792. The production of cotton did not require large start-up funds, and with the cotton gin for seed removal, African slaves had more time for cultivation. This all added up to large profits for southern plantation owners. With the help of New England slave traders, they imported African slaves by the tens of thousands in the years following the Constitutional Convention. Nevertheless, in March 1807, Congress passed a law prohibiting the importation of African slaves. Effective January 1, 1808, in fulfillment of the suggestion contained in Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution, the U.S. slave trade officially ended. But a state's right to sanction slavery did not.

In the early 1800s, the United States was expanding, and the question of slavery began to consume the country. In 1819, leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives proposed a bill that would allow the Missouri Territory to enter the Union as a slave state. Although northern legislators outnumbered southern legislators at the time, House Speaker Henry Clay, of Kentucky, arranged an accord between enough congress members to pass a version of the bill that admitted Missouri as a slave state. In exchange for legal slavery in Missouri, the southern legislators agreed to limit the northern boundaries of slavery to the same latitude as the southern boundary of Missouri. Thus were the terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which became a watershed in the United States' experience with slavery.

In its constitution, Missouri declared it would not allow slaves to be emancipated without their owner's consent. Furthermore, free African Americans were not allowed to enter the state. Antislavery congress members objected to the latter clause on the ground that it violated the federal Constitution's mandate that "the Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States" (art. IV, § 2). African Americans had, after all, gained citizenship in the northern states.

Again Clay maneuvered votes in Congress. Missouri agreed not to discriminate against citizens from other states, but did so in a resolution that was abstract and unclear and left unsettled the question of precisely who was a citizen of the several states. In 1821, Missouri's constitution was approved, and Missouri was officially a slave state.

Once Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine was admitted as a free state; the Senate had refused to accept Maine until the House altered its position on Missouri. As a result, in 1821, the Union consisted of twelve free states, twelve slaves states, and a deepening divide between the two.

European settlements pressed westward. After the United States acquired the Southwest by force in the Mexican War, it again faced the question of slavery. In 1850, Congress altered the geographic limits on slavery established by the Missouri Compromise. California was admitted as a free state, but the Utah and New Mexico Territories were opened to slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 further eroded the dictates of the Missouri Compromise by admitting slavery in those territories.

One particular case brought by a slave came to a head in the 1850s and caught the attention of the Republican presidential candidate for the 1860 election, former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 15 L. Ed. 691 (1857), Dred Scott sued the widow of his deceased owner in Missouri state court, asking for his freedom. The dispute began in 1834 and ended with an 1857 Supreme Court decision confirming Scott's slave status. The decision galvanized abolitionists in the north and Lincoln railed against the decision in his campaign for the presidency. The decision also strengthened the resolve of pro-slavery forces in the South. As the struggle for power between slavers and emancipators intensified, the geographic lines proscribing slavery, drawn and redrawn, were fast becoming battle lines.

In 1860, Republican Abraham Lincoln won the presidency on an anti-slavery platform, and like-minded Republicans gained a majority in Congress. In February 1861, with the abolition of slavery imminent, South Carolina seceded from the Union, and Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee soon followed suit. Before Lincoln's inauguration in March, the Confederacy was in place. On April 12, the Confederates attacked South Carolina's Fort Sumter, and the United States' internal war over the issue of slavery had begun.

Many early American colonists had believed they were justified in enslaving Africans because Africans were not Christians. After the American Revolution, as the country became polarized over the issue of slavery, slavery supporters in the South worked to clear the southern states of anti-slavery leaders and their forces. One abolitionist, for example, was beaten, tarred and feathered, set afire, doused in water, and whipped. As late as the 1820s, more than one hundred abolitionist groups operated in the slave states, but by the 1840s, virtually none were left. Slavers in the southern states also began to cultivate more ambitious rationales for African slavery. Slavery supporters cited essays written by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle that declared that slavery was the natural order of things.

Aristotle had claimed that slaves were slaves because they had allowed themselves to become enslaved. This was just and right, his theory continued, because if those with strong bodies (Africans, to U.S. slavers) performed the labor, those with upright bodies (European colonists and their descendants) would have the time and energy for technological and economic advancement. U.S. slavery enthusiasts expanded on the theories of Aristotle and other philosophers to explain that it was the Africans' lot in life to be slaves because it was inherent in their nature to be servile and hardworking. Other southern slavers forwent any philosophies of slavery and simply enjoyed the luxuries realized through the enslavement of Africans.

Throughout the Civil War, President Lincoln and the U.S. Congress were busy passing federal legislation on the subject of slavery. On August 6, 1861, Congress passed the Confiscation Act, which allowed the United States to lay claim to any property used in insurrection against it. Under this act, slaves who served in the Confederate army were to be set free upon capture by Union forces. In June 1862, Lincoln signed a bill passed by Congress that abolished slavery in all territories owned by the federal government. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that all slaves in the United States were free persons and that they were to remain free persons.

In April 1865, the Confederate army surrendered to the Union forces. This touched off a flurry of constitutional amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, was ratified by Congress on December 6, 1865. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified July 9, 1868, was designed to, in part, establish former slaves as full citizens and ensure that no African American would be deprived of any of the privileges and immunities that come with citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment also deleted the offensive three-fifths ratio from the measurement of populations in Section 2 of Article I, and declared that any debts relating to the loss or emancipation of slaves were illegal and void. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified February 3, 1870, gave male African Americans and male former slaves the right to vote.

African slavery in the United States has continued to haunt the country long after its abolition. In the North, segregation of African Americans from the European populations has been a reality, if not sanctioned by law. Beginning in the 1880s, many southern states enacted Black Codes, or Jim Crow laws, which restricted the freedom of movement and expression of African Americans and enforced their segregation from the rest of society.

Contemporary Slavery

Notions of slavery in the United States have expanded to include any situation in which one person controls the life, liberty, and fortune of another person. All forms of slavery are now widely recognized as inherently immoral and thoroughly evil. Slavery still occurs in various forms, but when it does, accused offenders are aggressively prosecuted. Federal statutes punish by fine or imprisonment the enticement of persons into slavery (18 U.S.C.A. § 1583), and the holding to or selling of persons into involuntary servitude (§ 1584). In addition, whosoever builds a ship for slave carriage, serves on a ship carrying slaves, or owns a slave-carrying ship will be fined or imprisoned under 18 U.S.C.A. §§ 1582, 1586, and 1587, respectively.

The statute 18 U.S.C.A. § 1581 prohibits peonage, which is involuntary servitude for the payment of a debt. Labor camps are perhaps the most common violators of the law against peonage. The operators of some labor camps keep victims for work in fields through impoverished conditions, threats, acts of violence, and alcohol consumption. Offenders often provide rudimentary shelter to migrant workers and demand work in return, which can constitute involuntary servitude. An individual can also be convicted of sale into involuntary servitude for delivering victims under false pretenses to such labor camps.

See: Celia, a Slave; Civil Rights; Civil Rights Acts; Constitution of the United States; Dred Scott v. Sandford; Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; Indenture; Ku Klux Klan; Ku Klux Klan Act; Prigg v. Pennsylvania; Republican Party; States' Rights.

IN BRIEF: A system allowing the ownership of people by others. Also: Drudgery.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried upon him personally. — Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865).

See more famous quotes about Slavery

Part of a series on
Slavery
Early history
Aztec slavery · History of slavery Kholop Slavery in ancient Greece Slavery in ancient Rome Slavery in antiquity Slavery in medieval Europe Slavery in the Spanish New World colonies Thrall
Religion
Christianity and slavery · Islam and slavery Judaism and slavery · The Bible and slavery
By country or region
African slave trade · Atlantic slave trade Arab slave trade · Coastwise slave trade History of slavery in Iran · Slavery in Angola Slavery in Brazil · Slavery in Canada Slavery in India · Slavery in Japan Slavery in Libya · Slavery in Mauritania Slavery in Romania · Slavery in Sudan Slavery in the British Virgin Islands Slavery in the United States Swedish slave trade
Contemporary slavery
Debt bondage · Forced prostitution Sexual slavery · Slavery in modern Africa Wage slavery · Unfree labour
Opposition and resistance
Abolition of slavery timeline Compensated emancipation First Servile War List of notable opponents of slavery‎ Slave rebellion · Slave narrative

Slavery is the systematic exploitation of labour. As a social-economic system, slavery is a legal or informal institution under which a person (called "a slave") is compelled to work for another (sometimes called "the master" or "slave owner").^[1] Evidence of slavery predates written records, and has existed to varying extents, forms and periods in almost all cultures and continents.^[2] Slaves are held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase, or birth, and are deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive compensation (such as wages) in return for their labour. As such, slavery is one form of unfree labor. Today, slavery is formally outlawed in nearly all countries, but the phenomenon continues to exist in various forms around the world. ^[3][4]

Today freedom from slavery is an internationally recognised human right. Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.^[5]

Contents

• 1 Etymology
• 2 Definitions
  • 2.1 Other uses of the term
• 3 Economics
• 4 History of slavery and the slave trade
• 5 Abolitionist movements
• 6 Apologies
  • 6.1 Reparations
• 7 Religion and slavery
• 8 Contemporary slavery
  • 8.1 Current situation
  • 8.2 Human trafficking
• 9 See also
• 10 References
• 11 Bibliography
  • 11.1 Uncited sources
  • 11.2 USA
  • 11.3 Slavery in the modern era
• 12 External links

Etymology

Prior to the 10th century, words other than "slave" were used for all kinds of unfree labourers. For instance, the old Latin word servus was used for both serfs and chattel slaves.

The word slave, in Modern English, originates from the Middle English sclave which first appeares around 1290. The spelling was based on Old French esclave, from the Medieval Latin sclavus and ultimately from the Byzantine Greek sklabos (from sklabenoi) meaning "Slavic people" which appears around 580AD. Sklavos approximates the Slavs' own name for themselves, the Slověnci. The spelling of English slave, closer to its original Slavic form, first appears in English in 1538.^[6][7][8] The term originally referred to various peoples from Eastern and Central Europe, as many Slavic and other people from these areas were captured and sold as slaves by the Vikings, and later a Holy Roman Emperor, Otto I (912–973), and his successors.

Thralldom is an archaic synonym for slavery, and thrall a synonym for slave. This comes from Old English þræl (also rendered thrǣl), from Old Norse þræll (thræll). ^[9][10]

Definitions

In its narrowest sense, the word "slave" refers to people who are treated as the property of another person, household, company, corporation or government. This is referred to as chattel slavery.^[13] Slaves are held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase, or birth, and are deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive compensation (such as wages) in return for their labour.^{[citation needed]} The 1926 Slavery Convention described slavery as "...the status and/or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised..." Slaves cannot leave an owner, an employer or a territory without explicit permission (they must have a passport to leave), and they will be returned if they escape. Therefore a system of slavery—as opposed to the isolated instances found in any society—requires official, legal recognition of ownership, or widespread tacit arrangements with local authorities, by masters who have some influence because of their social and/or economic status and their lives.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) defines forced labour as "all work or service which is extracted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily", albeit with certain exceptions of: military service, convicted criminals, emergencies and minor community services.^[14]

The current usage of the word serfdom is not usually synonymous with slavery, because medieval serfs were considered to have rights, as human beings, whereas slaves were considered “things”—property.^[15]

Other uses of the term

The word slavery is often used as a pejorative to describe any activity one finds unpleasant or distasteful. On the one hand, this means the word slavery is applied in situations where it does not technically fit the definition. On the other hand, it also means that it is often not applied in situations that do fit the definition, but where the speaker feels that everyone has a duty to perform the action. Examples of the latter might include jury duty or military conscription, where a person is compelled to perform a job and is paid much less than one would have sought for a similar job in a free market.^{[citation needed]}

• The International Labour Organization says that child labour usually amounts to forced labour.^{[citation needed]}
• Many anarchists, socialists, and communists have condemned "wage slavery" or "economic slavery", where workers are forced to choose between selling their labour to a boss and facing starvation, poverty or a lack of prosperity. This is related to the notion of economic coercion.^{[citation needed]}
• Some libertarians and anarcho-capitalists view government taxation as a form of slavery.^[16]
• Some feel that military drafts and other forms of coerced government labour constitute slavery.^{[17][18][19][20]} Gladiators, for example, were often slaves, with Spartacus being a famous example.
• Some proponents of animal rights apply the term slavery to the condition of some or all human-owned animals, arguing that their status is no different from that of human slaves.^[21]
• Some feel that child support orders amount to slavery .^{[22][23][24][25]} (Labour is compelled in typical court orders, and loss of employment often results in jail time for nonsupport.)

Economics

Economists have attempted to model during which circumstances slavery (and milder variants such as serfdom) appear and disappear. One observation is that slavery becomes more desirable for land owners when land is abundant but labour is not, so paid workers can demand high wages. If labour is abundant but land is scarce, then it becomes more costly for the land owners to have guards for the slaves than to employ paid workers who can only demand low wages due to the competition. Thus first slavery and then serfdom gradually decreased in Europe as the population grew. It was reintroduced in the Americas and in Russia (serfdom) as large new land areas with few people become available.^{[citation needed]}

Another observation is slavery is more common when the labour done is relatively simple and thus easy to supervise, such as large scale growing of a single crop. It is much more difficult and costly to check that slaves are doing their best and with good quality when they are doing complex tasks. Thus, slavery tends to decrease with technological advancements requiring more skilled people, even as they are able to demand high wages.^[26]

It has also been argued that slavery tends to retard technological advancement, since the focus is on increasing the number of slaves rather than improving the efficiency of labour. Because of this, theoretical knowledge and learning in Greece—and later in Rome—was largely separated from physical labour and manufacturing.^[27] Some Russian scholars have argued that the Soviet Union's technological development was hindered by Stalin's use of slave labour.^{[citation needed]}

History of slavery and the slave trade

Slave market in early medieval Eastern Europe. Painting by Sergei Ivanov

Slavery traces back to the earliest records, such as the Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1760 BC), which refers to it as an established institution.^[28] Slavery in ancient cultures was known to occur in civilizations as old as Sumer, and it was found in every civilization, including Ancient Egypt, the Akkadian Empire, Assyria, Ancient Greece, Ancient Persia,^[29] Rome and parts of its empire, and the Islamic Caliphate. Such institutions were a mixture of debt-slavery, punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war, child abandonment, and the birth of slave children to slaves.^[30] Records of slavery in Ancient Greece go as far back as Mycenaean Greece. It is often said that the Greeks as well as philosophers such as Aristotle accepted the theory of natural slavery i.e. that some men are slaves by nature.^[31][32]

As the Roman Republic expanded outward, entire populations were enslaved, thus creating an ample supply. The people subjected to Roman slavery came from all over Europe and the Mediterranean. Greeks, Berbers, Germans, Britons, Thracians, Gauls (or Celts), Jews, Arabs, and many more were slaves used not only for labour, but also for amusement (e.g. gladiators and sex slaves). This oppression by an elite minority eventually led to slave revolts (see Roman Servile Wars); the Third Servile War led by Spartacus was the most famous and severe. By the late Republican era, slavery had become a vital economic pillar in the wealth of Rome.^[33]

The early medieval slave trade was mainly to the East: the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim world were the destinations, pagan Central and Eastern Europe, along with the Caucasus and Tartary, were important sources. Viking, Arab, Greek and Jewish merchants (known as Radhanites) were all involved in the slave trade during the Early Middle Ages.^[34][35][36]

Medieval Spain and Portugal were the scene of almost constant warfare between Muslims and Christians. Periodic raiding expeditions were sent from Al-Andalus to ravage the Iberian Christian kingdoms, bringing back booty and slaves. In raid against Lisbon, Portugal in 1189, for example, the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur took 3,000 female and child captives, while his governor of Córdoba, in a subsequent attack upon Silves, Portugal in 1191, took 3,000 Christian slaves.^[37]

Slavery in early medieval Europe was so common that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly prohibited it—or at least the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands was prohibited at, for example, the Council of Koblenz in 922, the Council of London (1102), and the Council of Armagh (1171).^[38] However, the moral aspect was not considered binding by church representatives in regards to the enslavement of Africans. The 15th century Portuguese exploration of the African coast is commonly regarded as the harbinger of European colonialism.

In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, granting Afonso V of Portugal the right to reduce any "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers" to hereditary slavery which legitimized slave trade under catholic beliefs of that time. This approval of slavery was reaffirmed and extended in his Romanus Pontifex bull of 1455. These papal bulls came to serve as a justification for the subsequent era of slave trade and European colonialism.^[39]

The Byzantine-Ottoman wars and the Ottoman wars in Europe brought large numbers of Christian slaves into the Islamic world too.^[40] After the battle of Lepanto approximately 12,000 Christian galley slaves were freed from the Ottoman Turks.^[41] Christians were also selling Muslim slaves captured in war. The Knights of Malta attacked pirates and Muslim shipping, and their base became a centre for slave trading, selling captured North Africans and Turks.

The maritime town of Lagos, Portugal, was the first slave market created in Portugal for the sale of imported African slaves - the Mercado de Escravos, opened in 1444.^[42][43] In 1441, the first slaves were brought to Portugal from northern Mauritania.^[43] By the year 1552 black African slaves made up 10 percent of the population of Lisbon.^[44][45] In the second half of the 16th century, the Crown gave up the monopoly on slave trade and the focus of European trade in African slaves shifted from import to Europe to slave transports directly to tropical colonies in the Americas - in the case of Portugal, especially Brazil.^[43] In the 15th century one third of the slaves were resold to the African market in exchange of gold.^[46] Spain had to fight against relatively powerful civilizations of the New World. However, the Spanish conquest of the indigenous peoples in the Americas was also facilitated by the spread of diseases (e.g. smallpox) due to lack of biological immunity.^[47] (although the natives retaliated by spreading diseases like syphilis among the Europeans.) Natives were used as forced labour (the Spanish employed the pre-Columbian draft system called the mita),^[48] but the diseases caused a labour shortage and so the Spanish colonists were gradually involved in the Atlantic slave trade. The first Europeans to use African slaves in the New World were the Spaniards who labourers on islands such as Cuba and Hispaniola, where the alarming decline in the native population had spurred the first royal laws protecting the native population (Laws of Burgos, 1512-1513). The first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola in 1501.^[49] England played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade. The "slave triangle" was pioneered by Francis Drake and his associates. Slavery was a legal institution in all of the 13 American colonies, and the profits of the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to 5% of the British economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution.^[50]

Historians say the Arab slave trade lasted more than millennium.^[51] Ibn Battuta tells us several times that he was given or purchased slaves.^[52] Some historians estimate that between 11 and 18 million black African slaves crossed the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara Desert from 650 AD to 1900 AD,^[53][54][55] or more than the 9.4 to 12 million Africans brought to the Americas.^[56] According to Robert Davis between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa and Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries.^[57]

Abolitionist movements

Main article: Abolitionism

Three Abyssinian slaves in chains. Anti-Slavery Society estimated there were 2 million slaves in Ethiopia in the early 1930s, out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million.^[58]

Photographed in 1863 – Slave endured harsh treatment. The scars are a result of a whipping by his overseer, who was subsequently removed by the master.

Slavery has existed, in one form or another, through the whole of recorded human history — as have, in various periods, movements to free large or distinct groups of slaves. According to the Biblical Book of Exodus, Moses led Israelite slaves out of ancient Egypt — possibly the first written account of a movement to free slaves. Later Jewish laws (known as Halacha) prevented slaves from being sold out of the Land of Israel, and allowed a slave to move to Israel if he so desired. The Cyrus Cylinder, inscribed about 539 BC by the order of Cyrus the Great of Persia, abolished slavery and allowed Jews and other nationalities who had been enslaved under Babylonian rule to return to their native lands. Abolitionism should be distinguished from efforts to help a particular group of slaves, or to restrict one practice, such as the slave trade.

There were celebrations in 2007 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Abolition of the slave trade in the United Kingdom through the work of the British Anti-Slavery Society. William Wilberforce received much of the credit although the groundwork was an anti-slavery essay by Thomas Clarkson. Wilberforce was also urged by his close friend, Prime Minister William Pitt, to make the issue his own. After the abolition act was passed these campaigners switched to encouraging other countries to follow suit, notably France and the British colonies.

Between 1808 and 1860, the British West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard.^[59] Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade, for example against "the usurping King of Lagos", deposed in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers.^[60]

Abolitionist pressure in the United States produced a series of small steps forward. After January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited,^[61] but not the internal slave trade, nor involvement in the international slave trade externally. Legal slavery persisted; and those slaves already in the U.S. would not be legally emancipated for another 60 years. The American Civil War, beginning in 1861, led to the end of chattel slavery in the United States.

On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 4 states:

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Apologies

On May 21, 2001, the National Assembly of France passed the Taubira law, recognizing slavery as a crime against humanity. At the same time the British, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese delegations declined to give an apology for the slave trade and limited to give a "regret." This is probably due to the legal implications of such a statement. It is worth to mention that it is uncertain whether the apology of these four nations are for "slave trade" or "slavery".^{[citation needed]} Apologies on behalf of African nations, for their role in trading their countrymen into slavery, also remain an open issue since slavery was practiced in Africa even before the first Europeans arrived and the Atlantic slave trade was performed with a high degree of involvement of several African societies. The black slave market was supplied by well-established slave trade networks controlled by local African societies and individuals.^[62] Indeed, as already mentioned in this article, slavery persists in several areas of West Africa until the present day.

"There is adequate evidence citing case after case of African control of segments of the trade. Several African nations such as the Ashanti of Ghana and the Yoruba of Nigeria had economies depended solely on the trade. African peoples such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as middlemen or roving bands warring with other African nations to capture Africans for Europeans."^[63]

Several historians have made important contributions to the global understanding of the African side of the Atlantic slave trade. By arguing that African merchants determined the assemblage of trade goods accepted in exchange for slaves, many historians argue for African agency and ultimately a shared responsibility for the slave trade.^[64]

The issue of an apology is linked to reparations for slavery and is still being pursued by a number of entities across the world. For example, the Jamaican Reparations Movement approved its declaration and action Plan.

In September, 2006, it was reported^[65] that the UK Government may issue a "statement of regret" over slavery, an act that was followed through by a "public statement of sorrow" from Tony Blair on November 27, 2006.^[66]

On February 25, 2007 the state of Virginia resolved to 'profoundly regret' and apologize for its role in the institution of slavery. Unique and the first of its kind in the U.S., the apology was unanimously passed in both Houses as Virginia approached the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, where the first slaves were imported into North America in 1619.^[67]

On August 24, 2007, Mayor Ken Livingstone of London, United Kingdom apologized publicly for Britain's role in colonial slave trade. "You can look across there to see the institutions that still have the benefit of the wealth they created from slavery," he said pointing towards the financial district. He claimed that London was still tainted by the horrors of slavery. Jesse Jackson praised Mayor Livingstone, and added that reparations should be made. Neither mentioned the role of the original Arab and Muslim captors of African slaves^[68].

Reparations

Sporadically there have been movements to achieve reparations for those formerly held as slaves, or sometimes their descendants. Claims for reparations for being held in slavery are handled as a civil law matter in almost every country. This is often decried as a serious problem, since former slaves' relative lack of money means they often have limited access to a potentially expensive and futile legal process. Mandatory systems of fines and reparations paid to an as yet undetermined group of claimants from fines, paid by unspecified parties, and collected by authorities have been proposed by advocates to alleviate this "civil court problem". Since in almost all cases there are no living ex-slaves or living ex-slave owners these movements have gained little traction. In nearly all cases the judicial system has ruled that the statute of limitations on these possible claims has long since expired.

Nonetheless, from time to time misinformation is circulated (often through e-mail) to United States residents describing a $5000 "slavery tax credit", supposedly passed into law under President Bill Clinton's administration during the 1990s, but never announced to the public. No such credit exists, and persons attempting to promote or take advantage of the alleged credit are subject to prosecution. (See Slavery reparations scam for further information.) A similar scam involves a "tax credit" available to Native Americans.

Religion and slavery

Some argue that the Bible condones slavery in Ancient Israelite society by failing to condemn the widespread existing practice present in other cultures.^[69] It also explicitly states that under certain circumstances, slavery is morally acceptable.^[70][71] There are also scholars who argue that Islam condones slavery,^{[citation needed]} although the institution of slavery has largely been outlawed in the Muslim world.^{[citation needed]}

Contemporary slavery

Since 1945, debate about the link between economic growth and different relational forms (most notably unfree social relations of production in Third World agriculture) occupied many contributing to discussions in the development decade (the 1960s). This continued to be the case in the mode of production debate (mainly about agrarian transition in India) that spilled over into the 1970s, important aspects of which continue into the present (see the monograph by Brass, 1999, and the 600 page volume edited by Brass and van der Linden, 1997). Central to these discussions was the link between capitalist development and modern forms of unfree labour (peonage, debt bondage, indenture, chattel slavery). Within the domain of political economy it is a debate that has a very long historical lineage, and - accurately presented - never actually went away. Unlike advocacy groups, for which the number of the currently unfree is paramount, those political economists who participated in the earlier debates sought to establish who, precisely, was (or was not) to be included under the rubric of a worker whose subordination constituted a modern form of unfreedom. This element of definition was regarded as an epistemologically necessary precondition to any calculations of how many were to be categorized as relationally unfree.

Three types of slavery exist in contemporary society: wage slaves, contract slaves, and slaves in the traditional sense:

• Wage slavery occurs when a person is employed at a wage level which does not allow the worker an opportunity to leave their employer. Socialists and anarchists, however, use the term more broadly to refer to a situation in which a person must sell his or her labour power, submitting to the authority of an employer in order to prosper or merely to subsist; creating a hierarchical social condition in which a person chooses a job but only within a coerced set of choices (e.g. work for a boss or starve) which usually excludes democratic worker's control of the workplace and the economy as a whole and unconditional access to a fair share of the basic necessities of life.

• Contract slavery occurs when people are tricked or compelled into signing contracts requiring them to work under conditions that amount to slavery.

• Slavery in the traditional sense still exists, though it now operates underground. Actual slavery still operates using much the same methods as in the past, with people (often women and children) being abducted or lured by work offers, transported to another country where they are "sold" - with the men and male children sold for labour, while the women and girls are sometimes destined for domestic work or to work in prostitution, primarily in Asia and the West.

A combination of wage and contract slavery is found in Sarawak mining towns among Indonesian Dayak immigrants. They are required to buy the tools they need to work with. However, as they often do not have the required money, they need to buy them on a loan. Then they discover that local food is so expensive that all their wages are spent on that, so they can't pay off the loan and are forced by law to keep working for no gain.

Though slavery was officially abolished in China in 1910,^[72] the practice continues unofficially in some regions.^[73][74]

Slavery also exists in other countries across the world. Groups such as the American Anti-Slavery Group, Anti-Slavery International, Free the Slaves, the Anti-Slavery Society, and the Norwegian Anti-Slavery Society continue to campaign to rid the world of slavery.

One example of the contemporary fight against slavery worldwide, is against that which is especially pervasive in agriculture, apparel and the sex industry.^{[citation needed]}

Current situation

Although outlawed in nearly all countries, forms of slavery still exist in some parts of the world. ^[77][78] According to a broad definition of slavery used by Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves (FTS), an advocacy group linked with Anti-Slavery International, there were 27 million people (although some put the number as high as 200 million) who worked in virtual slavery in 2007, spread all over the world.^[79] According to FTS, these slaves represent the largest number of people that has ever been in slavery at any point in world history and the smallest percentage of the total human population that has ever been enslaved at once.

FTS claims that present-day slaves have been sold for US$40, in Mali, for young adult male labourers, or as much as US$1,000 in Thailand for HIV-free, young females, suitable for work in brothels. The lower limit represents the lowest price that there has ever been for a slave: the price of a comparable male slave in 1850 in the United States would have been about US$25,800 in present-day terms^[80] (US$1,000 in 1850). That difference, even allowing for differences in purchasing power, is significant.^{[citation needed]} As a result of the lower price, the economic advantages of present-day slavery are clear.^{[clarification needed]}

Enslavement is also taking place in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.^[81] The Middle East Quarterly reports that slavery is still endemic in Sudan.^[82] In June and July 2007, 570 people who had been enslaved by brick manufacturers in Shanxi and Henan were freed by the Chinese government.^[83] Among those rescued were 69 children.^[84] In response, the Chinese government assembled a force of 35,000 police to check northern Chinese brick kilns for slaves, sent dozens of kiln supervisors to prison, punished 95 officials in Shanxi province for dereliction of duty, and sentenced one kiln foreman to death for killing an enslaved worker.^[83]

In Mauritania alone, it is estimated that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are enslaved, many of them used as bonded labour.^[85][86] Slavery in Mauritania was criminalized in August 2007.^[87] In Niger, slavery is also a current phenomenon. A Nigerian study has found that more than 800,000 people are enslaved, almost 8% of the population.^[88][89][90] Pygmies, the people of Central Africa's rain forest,^[91] live in servitude to the Bantus.^[92] Some tribal sheiks in Iraq still keep blacks, called Abd, which means servant or slave in Arabic, as slaves.^[93] Child slavery has commonly been used in the production of cash crops and mining. According to the U.S. Department of State, more than 109,000 children were working on cocoa farms alone in Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) in 'the worst forms of child labor' in 2002.^[94]

In November 2006, the International Labour Organization announced it will be seeking "to prosecute members of the ruling Myanmar junta for crimes against humanity" over the continuous forced labour of its citizens by the military at the International Court of Justice.^[95][96] According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), an estimated 800,000 people are subject to forced labour in Myanmar.^[97][98]

The Ecowas Court of Justice is hearing the case of Hadijatou Mani in late 2008, where Ms. Mani hopes to compel the government of Niger to end slavery in its jurisdiction. Cases brought by her in local courts have failed so far.^[99]

Human trafficking

Main article: Human trafficking

Trafficking in human beings (also called human trafficking) is sometimes referred to as a form of slavery. The opponents of the practice point out that victims are tricked, lured by false promises, or forced into a "debt slavery" situation by the use against them of coercion, deception, fraud, intimidation, isolation, threat and use of physical force, debt bondage or even force-feeding with drugs of abuse to control their victims.^[100]

Whilst the majority of victims are women, and sometimes children, who are forced into prostitution (in which case the practice is called sex trafficking), victims also include men, women and children who are forced into manual labour.^[101]

Due to the illegal nature of human trafficking, its exact extent is unknown. A US Government report published in 2005, estimates that 600,000-800,000 people worldwide are trafficked across borders each year. This figure does not include those who are trafficked internally.^[102]

See also

Various

List of known slaves Bandeirantes Blackbirding Classism Coolies Corporate colonialism Debt bondage Fazendas

Freeborn Indentured servant Involuntary servitude Master-slave dialectic Sambo's Grave Serfdom Sexual slavery Slavery at common law

Slave ship Subculture Trafficking in human beings Underclass Unfree labour Wage slavery William Lynch Speech Workhouse

Slavery by region

Slavery in Brazil Slavery in Canada Slavery in Japan Slavery in Mauritania Slavery in Sudan Arab slave trade Aztec slavery Barbary pirate Slavery in Bermuda Slavery in Nazi Germany

Forced labor in Germany during World War II Slavery in Soviet Union Slavery in modern Africa African slave trade Atlantic slave trade Slavery in Asia Coastwise slave trade Kholops (semi-slaves in Russia) Swedish slave trade

Slavery in the United States Origins of the American Civil War North Carolina v. Mann George Washington#Washington and slavery Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream United States National Slavery Museum Thralls (slaves of the vikings)

Slavery by religion and era

Christianity and slavery History of slavery Islam and slavery

Judaism and slavery Slavery in ancient Greece Slavery in ancient Rome

Slavery in antiquity Slavery in medieval Europe The Bible and slavery

Opposition and resistance

Abolition of slavery timeline Compensated emancipation First Servile War

International Year List of notable opponents of slavery Slave rebellion

Slave narrative

Films

Stanley Kubrick, Spartacus, 1960 Sergio Giral, Cimarron, 1967 Marlon Brando, Burn!, 1969 Sergio Giral, El Otro Francisco (The Other Francisco), 1975 Tomas Gutierrez Alea, La Ultima Cena (The Last Supper), 1976 Alex Haley, Roots, 1977 mini-series based on Haley's book

Carlos Diegues, Quilombo, 1984 Gene Hackman, Mississippi Burning, 1988 Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust, 1991 Haile Gerima, Sankofa, 1993 Charles Burnett, Nightjohn, 1996 Steven Spielberg, Amistad, 1997

Jonathan Demme, Beloved, 1998 Kevin Willmott, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, 2004 (mockumentary/political drama) Owen 'Alik Shahadah, 500 Years Later, 2005 Michael Apted, Amazing Grace, 2006 Marco Kreuzpainter, Trade, 2007

v • d • e Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
General principles Article 1: Freedom, Egalitarianism, Dignity and Brotherhood Article 2: Universality of rights
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Article 1 and 2: Right to freedom from discrimination · Article 3: Right to life, liberty and security of person · Article 4: Freedom from slavery · Article 5: Freedom from torture and cruel and unusual punishment · Article 6: Right to personhood · Article 7: Equality before the law · Article 8: Right to effective remedy from the law · Article 9: Freedom from arbitrary arrest, detention and exile · Article 10: Right to a fair trial · Article 11.1: Presumption of innocence · Article 11.2: Prohibition of retrospective law · Article 12: Right to privacy · Article 13: Freedom of movement · Article 14: Right of asylum · Article 15: Right to a nationality · Article 16: Right to marriage and family life · Article 17: Right to property · Article 18: Freedom of thought, conscience and religion · Article 19: Freedom of opinion and expression · Article 20.1: Freedom of assembly · Article 20.2: Freedom of association · Article 21.1: Right to participation in government · Article 21.2: Right of equal access to public office · Article 21.3: Right to universal suffrage
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Article 1 and 2: Right to freedom from discrimination · Article 22: Right to social security · Article 23.1: Right to work · Article 23.2: Right to equal pay for equal work · Article 23.3: Right to just remuneration · Article 23.4: Right to join a trade union · Article 24: Right to rest and leisure · Article 25.1: Right to an adequate standard of living · Article 25.2: Right to special care and assistance for mothers and children · Article 26.1: Right to education · Article 26.2: Human rights education · Article 26.3: Right to choice of education · Article 27.1: Right to participate in culture · Article 27.2: Right to intellectual property
Context, limitations and duties Article 28: Social order · Article 29.1: Social responsibility  · Article 29.2: Limitations of human rights · Article 29.3: The supremacy of the purposes and principles of the United Nations Article 30: Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
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References

1. ^ "Mesopotamia: The Code of Hammurabi". "e.g. Prologue, "the shepherd of the oppressed and of the slaves". Code of Laws #7, "If any one buy from the son or the slave of another man"."
2. ^ Historical survey > Slave-owning societies, Encyclopædia Britannica
3. ^ UN Chronicle | Slavery in the Twenty-First Century
4. ^ BBC Millions 'forced into slavery'
5. ^ "The law against slavery". Religion & Ethics - Ethical issues. British Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved on 2008-10-05.
6. ^ http://www.answers.com/slave&r=67
7. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica Online - Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary - Slave
8. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica Online - Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary - Slav
9. ^ http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=thrall
10. ^ http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=thrall
11. ^ Gulag, Encyclopaedia Britannica
12. ^ The Gulag Collection: Paintings of Nikolai Getman
13. ^ The Abolition Project: Glossary
14. ^ International Labour Organization definition
15. ^ Regine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths trans. Anne English Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), pp. 86-87
16. ^ E.g., Machan, Tibor R. (13 April 2000). "Tax Slavery". Ludwig von Mises Institute. Retrieved on October 9, 2006.
17. ^ See the Slavery section in the Conscription article for more.
18. ^ The Military Draft and Slavery and Conscription Is Slavery both by Ron Paul
19. ^ An Idea Not Worth Drafting: Conscription is Slavery by Peter Krembs
20. ^ [http://www.davidkopel.com/NRO/2001/Nationalized-Slavery.htm Nationalized Slavery A policy Italy should dump] by Dave Kopel refers to both the military and national service requirements of Italy as slavery
21. ^ Spiegel, Marjorie. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, New York: Mirror Books, 1996.
22. ^ Modern Day Slavery by Becky Kiely and Tonya Klar
23. ^ Men, Divorce and Suicide: Another View
24. ^ SLAVERY AND CHILD SUPPORT by Adrian Banks
25. ^ Jailing for child support violates Slavery statutes
26. ^ Slavery and other property rights
27. ^ Technology
28. ^ "Mesopotamia: The Code of Hammurabi". "e.g. Prologue, "the shepherd of the oppressed and of the slaves". Code of Laws #7, "If any one buy from the son or the slave of another man"."
29. ^ Introduction of Slavery
30. ^ Demography, Geography and the Sources of Roman Slaves, by W. V. Harris: The Journal of Roman Studies, 1999
31. ^ Ben Kiernan "Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur", Yale University Press, 2007, ISBN 0300100981, 9780300100983, Pages 65-68
32. ^ Léonie J. Archer (1988). "Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour: And Other Forms of Unfree Labour." History Workshop Centre for Social History (Oxford, England), Published by Routledge,ISBN 0415002036, 9780415002035, Page 28
33. ^ Slavery in Ancient Rome
34. ^ Slave trade -- Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
35. ^ JewishEncyclopedia.com - slave-trade
36. ^ Slavery Encyclopedia of Ukraine
37. ^ Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain: The Order of Merced on the Christian-Islamic Frontier
38. ^ Slavery, serfdom, and indenture through the Middle Ages
39. ^ Allard, Paul (1912). "Slavery and Christianity". Catholic Encyclopedia XIV. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved on 2006-02-04.
40. ^ Ottoman Dhimmitude
41. ^ Famous Battles in History The Turks and Christians at Lepanto
42. ^ Goodman, Joan E. (2001). A Long and Uncertain Journey: The 27,000 Mile Voyage of Vasco Da Gama. Mikaya Press, ISBN 096504937X.
43. ^ ^{a b c} de Oliveira Marques, António Henrique R. (1972). History of Portugal. Columbia University Press, ISBN 0231031599, p. 158-160, 362-370.
44. ^ Thomas Foster Earle, K. J. P. Lowe "Black Africans in Renaissance Europe" p.157 Google
45. ^ David Northrup, "Africa's Discovery of Europe" p.8 (Google)
46. ^ Klein, Herbert. The Atlantic Slave Trade.
47. ^ David A. Koplow Smallpox The Fight to Eradicate a Global Scourge
48. ^ U.S. Library of Congress
49. ^ HEALTH IN SLAVERY
50. ^ Was slavery the engine of economic growth?
51. ^ Islam and Slavery
52. ^ Insights into the concept of Slavery
53. ^ Welcome to Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Black History
54. ^ Focus on the slave trade
55. ^ The Unknown Slavery: In the Muslim world, that is — and it's not over
56. ^ Historical survey > Slave-owning societies
57. ^ Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800 / Robert Davis (2004) ISBN 1403945519
58. ^ Twentieth Century Solutions of the Abolition of Slavery
59. ^ Sailing against slavery. By Jo Loosemore BBC
60. ^ The West African Squadron and slave trade
61. ^ Foner, Eric. "Forgotten step towards freedom," New York Times. December 30, 2007.
62. ^ Adu Boahen, Topics In West African History p. 110
63. ^ Afrikan Involvement In Atlantic Slave Trade, By Kwaku Person-Lynn, Ph.D
64. ^ João C. Curto. Álcool e Escravos: O Comércio Luso-Brasileiro do Álcool em Mpinda, Luanda e Benguela durante o Tráfico Atlântico de Escravos (c. 1480-1830) e o Seu Impacto nas Sociedades da África Central Ocidental. Translated by Márcia Lameirinhas. Tempos e Espaços Africanos Series, vol. 3. Lisbon: Editora Vulgata, 2002. ISBN 978-972-8427-24-5
65. ^ What the papers say, BBC News, 2006-09-22
66. ^ Blair 'sorrow' over slave trade, BBC News, 2006-11-27
67. ^ BBC News, 2007-02-25
68. ^ Livingstone breaks down in tears at slave trade memorial
69. ^ Does the Bible condone slavery
70. ^ Leviticus 25:44-46
71. ^ Exodus 21:7-11
72. ^ Commemoration of the Abolition of Slavery Project
73. ^ "Chinese Police Find Child Slaves." [1]
74. ^ "Convictions in China slave trial"[2]
75. ^ War and Genocide in Sudan
76. ^ The Lost Children of Sudan
77. ^ UN Chronicle | Slavery in the Twenty-First Century
78. ^ BBC Millions 'forced into slavery'
79. ^ Kevin Bales, Disposable People
80. ^ US CPI inflation data obtained from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis - Consumer Price Index (Estimate).
81. ^ "Does Slavery Still Exist?". Anti-Slavery Society. Retrieved on 2008-01-04.
82. ^ "My Career Redeeming Slaves", MEQ (December 1999). Retrieved on 31 July 2008.
83. ^ ^{a b} "Convictions in China slave trial", BBC (July 17, 2007). Retrieved on 4 January 2008.
84. ^ Zhe, Zhu (June 15, 2007). "More than 460 rescued from brick kiln slavery", China Daily. Retrieved on 4 January 2008.
85. ^ Mauritania made slavery illegal last month
86. ^ The Abolition season on BBC World Service
87. ^ Mauritanian MPs pass slavery law
88. ^ The Shackles of Slavery in Niger
89. ^ Born to be a slave in Niger
90. ^ BBC World Service | Slavery Today
91. ^ As the World Intrudes, Pygmies Feel Endangered, New York Times
92. ^ Congo's Pygmies live as slaves, newsobserver.com
93. ^ IRAQ: Black Iraqis hoping for a Barack Obama win, Los Angeles Times
94. ^ U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, 2005 Human Rights Report on Côte d'Ivoire
95. ^ "ILO seeks to charge Myanmar junta with atrocities", Reuters (2006-11-16). Retrieved on 17 November 2006.
96. ^ ILO asks Myanmar to declare forced labour banned
97. ^ ILO cracks the whip at Yangon
98. ^ Critics: Myanmar biofuel drive uses forced labor
99. ^ BBC report on Mani case
100. ^ Trafficking FAQs – Amnesty International USA
101. ^ US State Department Trafficking report
102. ^ US State Department Trafficking report

Bibliography

• Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, vol. III: The Perspective of the World (1984, originally published in French, 1979.)
• Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1999)
• Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1988)
• Finkelman, Paul. Encyclopedia of Slavery (1999)
• Lal, K. S. Muslim Slave System in Medieval India (1994) [3] ISBN 81-85689-67-9
• Gordon, M. Slavery in the Arab World (1989)
• Jacqueline Dembar Greene, Slavery in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, (2001), ISBN 0531165388
• Nieboer, H. J. Slavery as an Industrial System (1910)
• Postma, Johannes. The Atlantic Slave Trade, (2003)
• Rodriguez, Junius P., ed., The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery (1997)
• Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia (2007)
• Shell, Robert Carl-Heinz Children Of Bondage: A Social History Of The Slave Society At The Cape Of Good Hope, 1652-1813 (1994)
• William Linn Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity (1955), ISBN 0871690403

Uncited sources

• The Slavery Reader, ed. by Rigas Doganis, Gad Heuman, James Walvin, Routledge 2003
• Mintz, S. Slavery Facts and Myths

USA

• Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1999), most important recent survey
• Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II Doubleday (March 23, 2008), ISBN 0385-50625-2 ISBN 978-0385-50625-0
• Boles, John. Black Southerners: 1619-1869 (1983) brief survey
• Engerman, Stanley L. Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor (1999)
• Genovese Eugene D. Roll, Jordan Roll (1974), classic study
  • Richard H. King, "Marxism and the Slave South", American Quarterly 29 (1977), 117-31, a critique of Genovese
• Escott, Paul D. "Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom" Journal of Southern History, Vol. 67, 2001
• Parish, Peter J. Slavery: History and Historians (1989)
• Phillips, Ulrich B. American Negro Slavery:A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (1918; paperback reprint 1966), southern white perspective
• Phillips, Ulrich B. Life and Labor in the Old South (1929)
• Sellers, James B. Slavery in Alabama (1950).
• Sydnor, Charles S. Slavery in Mississippi (1933
• Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956), a rebuttal of U B Philipps
• Vorenberg, Michael . Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (2001)
• Weinstein, Allen , Frank O. Gatell, and Lewis Sarasohn, eds., American Negro Slavery: A Modern Reader, third ed. (1978)
• Mintz, S. Digital History Slavery, Facts & Myths [4]

Slavery in the modern era

• Jesse Sage and Liora Kasten, Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 ISBN 9781403974938
• Tom Brass, Marcel van der Linden, and Jan Lucassen, Free and Unfree Labour. Amsterdam: International Institute for Social History, 1993
• Tom Brass, Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour: Case Studies and Debates, London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999. 400 pages.
• Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden, eds., Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues, Bern: Peter Lang AG, 1997. 600 pages. A volume containing contributions by all the most important writers on modern forms of unfree labour.
• Kevin Bales, Disposable People. New Slavery in the Global Economy, Revised Edition, University of California Press 2004, ISBN 0-520-24384-6
• Kevin Bales (ed.), Understanding Global Slavery Today. A Reader, University of California Press 2005, ISBN 0-520-24507-5freak
• Kevin Bales, Ending Slavery: How We Free Today's Slaves, University of California Press 2007, ISBN 978-0-520-25470-1.
• Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis, Slave: My True Story, ISBN 1-58648-212-2. Mende is a Nuba, captured at 12 years old. She was granted political asylum by the British government in 2003.
• Gary Craig, Aline Gaus, Mick Wilkinson, Klara Skrivankova and Aidan McQuade: Contemporary slavery in the UK: Overview and key issues, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 26 Feb 2007, ISBN 978 1 85935 57
• Somaly Mam Foundation

External links

Historical

• Comité de Liaison et d'Application des Sources Historiques (archives & history of slavery in Saint-Barthélemy)
• Slavery Resource Guide, from the Library of Congress
• Parliament & The British Slave Trade 1600 - 1807
• Digital History - Slavery Fact Sheets
• The West African Squadron and slave trade
• British documents on slave holding and the slave trade, 1788-1793 (DjVu) and layered PDFPDF (a searchable facsimile at the University of Georgia Libraries)
• Slavery - PBS

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This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - slaveri, trældom

Nederlands (Dutch)
slavernij

Français (French)
n. - esclavage, (fig) asservissement

Deutsch (German)
n. - Sklaverei, Sklavenarbeit

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - δουλεία, σκλαβιά, δουλοκτημοσύνη, χαμαλίκι

Italiano (Italian)
schiavitù

Português (Portuguese)
n. - escravidão (f), escravatura (f), submissão total, trabalho sem descanso

Русский (Russian)
рабство, тяжелый подневольный труд

Español (Spanish)
n. - esclavitud

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - slaveri, träldom, slavgöra

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
奴隶的身份, 奴隶制度, 奴隶状态

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 奴隸的身份, 奴隸制度, 奴隸狀態

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 노예 상태, 힘든 일, 굴종

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 奴隷の身分, 奴隷制度, 骨の折れる仕事

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) أمتلاك ألرقيق, عبوديه, أستعباد‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮עבדות, עבודה מפרכת‬

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