The Roots of American Slavery:

A bibliographical Essay

The cancer of slavery spread through America long before 1776. Slaveholders had so effectively protected the institution that many leaders of the American Revolution regarded its elimination as impossible. The development of lifetime bondage during the nearly 90 years between the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865 merely extended an evolutionary process that had begun almost 160 years before 1776.

There are many recent books from which one can learn how slavery became so integral a part of early American society during the country's gestation. John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., take the sweeping view in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (7th ed., New York, 1994), as does Peter Kolchin in American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York, 1993). Their bibliographies will help those who wish to read specialized studies. In the first volume of The History of Black Americans (vol. 1- , Westport, Conn.,. 1975- ), Philip S. Foner interprets the colonial period from the Marxist point of view. The comparative approach prevails in Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America (3rd ed., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1992) and in George M. Fredrickson's difficult but eminent White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American & South African History (New York, 1981). Betty Wood, The Origins Of American Slavery: Freedom And Bondage In The English Colonies (New York, 1997), Donald R. Wright's African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1990) and African Americans in the Early Republic, 1789-1831 (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1993) are good texts on the earlier periods of slavery in the colonies and the United States. Two of the best anthologies of primary documents on slavery, Michael Mullin's American Negro Slavery: A Documentary History (New York, 1976) and Willie Lee Rose's Documentary History of Slavery in North America (New York, 1976), are particularly rich in sources from early America.

With the exception of a minority of Native Americans, all North American slaves were Africans or of African descent. The practices of the slave trade, which made massive involuntary migration possible, receive comprehensive attention in Daniel Mannix's and Malcolm Cowley's standard work, Black Cargoes (New York, 1962), while James Pope-Hennessey passionately explores the moral issues in Sins of the Fathers: A Study of the Atlantic Slave Traders (New York, 1968). Although later authors have raised his figures, Philip D. Curtin's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wisc., 1969) gives a strong impression of the staggering number of people involved. New research receives its due in Herbert S. Klein's The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, N.J., 1978), Madeleine Burnside, Spirits Of The Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade In The Seventeenth Century (New York, 1997), Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), and in Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge, La., 1981). Walter Minchinton's Virginia Slave Trade Statistics, 1678-1775 (Richmond, Va., 1985) reveals a higher number of importations than previously known, while most of the available evidence on Virginia and other New World importation of Africans is abstracted by Elizabeth Donnan in Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (4 vols., Washington, D.C., 1930-1935).

If most of the first North American slaves came from Africa, where did slavery itself originate? The Old Testament of the Bible contains one answer, but more modern interpretations, such as David B. Davis's Pulitzer Prize winner, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), will also guide you. The English were quite ready to enslave black Africans by the early 1600s, Winthrop Jordan tells us. His White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968) - available in condensed and simplified format as The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (New York, 1974) - surveys voluminous evidence that the thinking of most European-Americans was from the beginning uniformly based on the principle of white supremacy. Studies of the establishment of slavery in specific colonies, such as Peter H. Wood's Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), Joseph Boskin's Into Slavery: Racial Decisions in the Virginia Colony (Philadelphia, 1976), Betty Wood's Slavery in Georgia, 1739-1775 (Athens, Ga., 1984), and the dated but still useful analysis of The Negro in Colonial New England (New York, 1942), by Lorenzo J. Greene, show the growth of the institution to have been an evolutionary, and not a dramatically rapid, process. T. H. Breen's and Stephen Innes's "Myne Own Ground": Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (New York, 1980) takes the same stance. Richard S. Dunn's "Masters, Servants, and Slaves in the Colonial Chesapeake and the Caribbean," a brief, straightforward, and comparative lecture on the beginnings of North American slavery, appears in Early Maryland in a Wider World (Detroit, 1982), 242-67.

Did slaves accept the system created by their masters? The evidence that many, perhaps most, did not has been increasing in recent years. Some years ago, Herbert Aptheker argued that there were numerous American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1943; 5th ed., New York, 1983). These episodes, however, never were so widespread and dangerous to slaveowners as rebellions in the West Indies or Latin America. Instead, it seems that the running away or escaping analyzed by Gerald W. Mullin in Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in 18th Century Virginia (New York, 1972) was the most prevalent kind of defiance. Transcriptions of over 7,800 advertisements for runaways are now available in Lathan A. Windley, ed., Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790 (4 vols., Westport, Conn., 1983). In addition, Philip J. Schwarz's Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 (Baton Rouge, 1988) attempts to show that the trials of thousands of slaves for such crimes as arson, poisoning, or stealing often reveal other forms of slaves' opposition to the power of their owners. Helen T. Catterall's monumental Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro (5 vols., Washington, D.C., 1929) contains voluminous references to both civil and criminal court cases concerning slavery. Thomas J. Davis, Rumor of Revolt: the "Great Negro Plot" in Colonial New York (New York, 1985) and Douglas Egerton, Gabriel?s Rebellion: the Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993) cover two significant slave conspiracies to rebel.

There were whites who at least tried to alleviate the sufferings of slaves, if not to abolish slavery altogether, before 1776. These people dominate the first two volumes of David B. Davis's definitive study of the intellectual history of trans-Atlantic abolitionism. The first volume has already been cited; the second is The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution: 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976). The American Revolution, Davis explains, confronted Patriots with an agonizing dilemma. They mostly kept their slaves, but as they helped to form a new nation based on the rhetoric of freedom, they lost much of the certainty they once had about the morality of slavery. In Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991), Sylvia R. Frey explores the impact of British military strategy and tactics on slavery in the South. Jordan's White Over Black, Duncan J. MacLeod's Slavery, Race, and the American Revolution (New York, 1975), Gary B. Nash's Race and Revolution (Madison, Wisc., 1990), Benjamin Quarles's The Negro in the American Revolution (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), Staughton Lynd's Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution (Indianapolis, 1967), Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville, Va., 1983), and Donald Robinson's Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820 (New York, 1971) also cover this extremely important period, indicating how the tragic erosion of the New Republic's libertarian ideology blocked the early abolition of human bondage in the United States.

Slavery was the experiences of many slaves as much as it was a system. Unfortunately, "The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the `African'" - readily available in Arna Bontemps's Great Slave Narratives (Boston, 1969) - and Venture Smith's "Narrative" (Early Negro Writing, 1760-1837, Dorothy Porter, ed. [Boston, 1971], 558-68) stand almost alone as eighteenth-century slave autobiographies. Few novels deal with slaves before 1776. Virginians fortunately have many means of learning the history of slavery in a familiar, local setting. Besides the Boskin, Breen and Innes, Egerton, Morgan, and Mullin titles previously cited, such books as Thad W. Tate, Jr., The Negro in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg (Charlottesville, Va., 1972) and Robert McColley, Slavery in Jeffersonian Virginia (2nd ed., Urbana, Ill., 1974) deal intensively with the colony and young state that had more slaves than any other in North America. Peter H. Wood discusses the literature on seventeenth and eighteenth-century slavery in "'I Did the Best I Could for My Day': The Study of Early Black History During the Second Reconstruction, 1960 to 1976," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., XXXV (April 1978), 185-225; Peter J. Parish succinctly summarizes recent scholarship on slavery in his Slavery: History and Historians (New York, 1989); and Ira Berlin brilliantly synthesizes many studies in "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America," American Historical Review, LXXXV (February 1980), 44-78, an article that concentrates on changes and varieties in North American slavery just as Allan Kulikoff's "Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater Maryland and Virginia, 1700 to 1790," (William and Mary Quarterly, XXXV [April 1978], 226-59) focuses on the Old Dominion and Maryland. Kulikoff's article is a prelude to his challenging synthesis in Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986).

Hundreds of other books and articles have been published on this subject, as indicated by the staggering number of titles in John David Smith's Black Slavery in the Americas: An Interdisciplinary Bibliography, 1865-1980 (2 vols., Westport, Conn., 1982), by the titles that appear in the annual bibliography in Slavery and Abolition, by the many articles in Paul Finkelman, ed., Articles on American Slavery (18 vols., New York, 1988), by the numerous primary sources in Paul Finkelman, ed., Slavery, Race and the American Legal System, 1700-1872 (16 vols., New York, 1988), by the many entries in forthcoming encyclopedias of slavery, and by the large array of articles in the updated Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery (Westport, Conn., 1996), but if you read a selection of the titles listed here, you will be unable to avoid the conclusion that North American slavery took root long before the invention of the cotton gin in the early 1790s.