Exploring History
American Slavery
America's System
unique
While the U.S. did not invent slavery, we did have a unique system that set it apart from the rest of the world. While the U.S. received a small fraction of the people who were traded, forced breeding was a uniquely American model, which greatly expanded the number of enslaved people living in the country. Enslaved people were seen and treated as animals, so they could be bred as such. The U.S. was on the periphery of the slave trade, but think about how much it has defined race and life in our nation.
The United States had 52 ports of entry associated with the Middle Passage, or route from Africa to the Americas. Some scholars argue that the U.S. began in 1619, when the first African captives arrived, because of the significance they had in shaping this nation.
Approximately 463,000 Africans were imported to the colonial or independent United States, which is about 4 percent of the Africans who survived the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. However, that number doesn’t take into consideration the 2 million people who died on the journey. The conditions on the ships were terrible, again emphasizing the belief that captives were nothing more than animals. This number also doesn’t take into consideration the number of people who died in raids in Africa, where they captured people in the first place.
America industrialized slavery in scale and made it vastly more profitable and cruel. American slavery had eight distinctive features. Other slaveholding societies shared some of these; none shared all.
1. Slavery was racial.
2. Slaves were chattel- legal fiction (acknowledged as humans but treated as animals, property).
3. Slavery was inheritable.
- Our slave system did not simply subjugate captives in war; it put chains on their children, starting with Virginia statutes passed in 1661–62. Over the next 203 years, successive generations were born into slavery. Six million died without ever tasting freedom.
4. America’s slave population was self-sustaining.
5. American slaves were a large minority.
- Because the elements of racial, chattel, inheritable, and self-sustaining slavery were combined, American slavery did something nearly unique in slave societies: It created a people where none had been before: a people uniquely American and uniquely grounded in slavery, with a culture of their own and an accompanying loss of historical memory of having been many separate peoples in their ancestral lands.
6. Slavery was exceptional.
7. American slavery migrated from 1790s-1850s.
8. American slavery ended ubruptly.
- Immediately emancipated slaves without an intermediary step.
America’s legacy of slavery matters because we are Americans and because enslaved people’s descendants carry a unique communal memory.
Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson is a phenomenal book that explores how America has been shaped by a hidden caste system. She argues that we are all cast into roles by society based on our appearance, and that the whole of American society was slavery at one point. Slavery was not unique in and of itself to the United States; however, the U.S. had a very unique system that completely ruled one category of humanity out of the human race. Humans were converted into currency, machines, and objects to be controlled. Wilkerson argues that Nazi Germany looked to the U.S. for an example of how they desired to racially purify and separate people. There are so many parallels between the U.S. system of slavery and Nazi Germany, yet we never talk about them. How come Nazi’s are condemned, but we glorify America at the same time?
Race is a social construct: a man made invention. Race how we see it is not real- we are 99.9% the same as humans. We “see” people today through learned social meanings and stereotypes based on the invented notion of race (color of skin).
Wilkerson argues that racism and casteism (hierarchy of status) often occur simultaneously in the U.S. We all have an assumed place in society, with either granting or withholding occurring based on that perceived status.
