Introduction to Slavery
Slavery, a system under which an individual is held as the property of another to be used or disposed of at the will of the owner, or master. Slavery has existed throughout most of human history and is still practiced in some parts of the world. It originated in prehistoric times, when it was found to be more profitable to enslave than to slaughter captives of war. The term “slave" dates from the Middle Ages, when it came into common usage in Europe because of the large numbers of Slavs who had been forced into servitude.
Warfare was the original source of slave labor. When slavery proved economically advantageous, it was extended to include debtors and criminals. To insure a continuous and plentiful supply of slaves, a slave trade was established, with people being seized and sold into slavery. Children born of slaves were also enslaved.
The status of slaves and their treatment varied greatly in different times and places. In some societies, slaves were considered merely chattels, pieces of property. They had no rights; their lives and labors belonged to their owners. In other social systems, slaves were recognized as human beings. Thus they received certain protections under the law, and manumission (release from slavery) was sometimes possible.
Slaves were utilized in agriculture, industry, commerce, domestic service, and the armed forces. The conditions of their labor ranged from the highly privileged position held by the well-educated teacher slaves of Rome to the miserable existence of those who worked in the mines.
Throughout history various legal, social, economic, and philosophical arguments—typically involving prejudices of race, color, nationality, or religion—were made to justify slavery. The view that enslavement was an inherent moral evil was not forcefully propounded until an antislavery movement began to develop late in the 18th century.
Slavery In the Ancient World
Ancient peoples of many different civilizations practiced some form of slavery, and in many areas—such as Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Greece, Rome, India, and China—it was an established institution. The Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plato regarded mastery over the weak by the strong as natural and inevitable. Slaves made up a significant part of the population of Athens in the fourth century B.C. and were an integral element of social and economic life. The military society of Sparta could not have existed without its slave laborers, the helots.
Ancient Rome during the period of the Republic began,the practice of using large slave gangs to work huge plantations. Such work, however, was not the lot of most Roman slaves. Some toiled alongside their farmer masters. Others worked as minor city officials, private tutors, servants, factory laborers, and gladiators. Slaves performed nearly all the duties at the courts of the Roman emperors. By the reign of the emperor Trajan (98–117 A. D.), one out of three persons in Rome was a slave. Roman law precisely defined the status of a slave and was the basis for later slave codes.
Slavery In the Middle Ages
Toward the end of the Roman Empire, slavery began to decline as slave labor became increasingly scarce and expensive. Although disrupted by the barbarian invasions of the early Middle Ages, slavery continued to exist in western Europe and in the Byzantine Empire. The Christian Church did not oppose the institution of slavery, considering it a part of the divine order of the world. However, the Church asserted the equality of both master and slave before God and sought to mitigate some of the evils of servitude.
As early as the sixth century A. D., slavery in Europe began to be replaced by serfdom, a system that proved better suited to the emerging feudal agricultural economy. Serfs were in a state between slave and free, bound to the soil (that is, they could not leave the land of their own free will) and more or less subject to the will of their lord. However, the religious wars between Christians and Muslims helped to keep slavery alive, as each side enslaved prisoners of the opposing religion. In the late Middle Ages, warfare against the Turks and a demand for domestic servants revitalized slavery for a time in some parts of Europe. The Mediterranean slave trade reached its peak in the 14th and 15th centuries.
American Slavery
Slavery in the Americas began shortly after the first European settlers arrived in the New World. In some areas Native American slave labor was used at first, but soon the Europeans began to import slaves from Africa. Several European nations became engaged in a profitable slave trade in Africans. An especially barbarous aspect of the slave trade was the passage from Africa to America on overcrowded, poorly supplied vessels and the consequent disease and death. From the early 16th century to the mid-19th century, about 15 million Africans were transported to the New World.
In North AmericaThe first Africans were brought to what is now the United States in 1619. They were not slaves but indentured servants. However, it was not long before Africans were being brought in as slaves. Slavery existed in both the North and the South during the colonial period. However, it was the introduction of large-scale cotton farming in the South after the Revolutionary War that made slavery profitable.
Only a minority of Southern whites, less than one-fourth, held slaves, and most of them owned only one or two. Large-plantation owners were the exception, although as a class they dominated social, economic, and political life in the pre-Civil War South. Not all slaveholders were white; some Indians had black slaves, and even some free blacks held slaves. At the time of the Civil War, there were about four million slaves—approximately one-third of the population of the slaveholding states.
Slavery varied from place to place. Not all slaves labored on plantations; some worked as domestic servants, skilled artisans, and factory hands. For the vast majority, however, bondage meant submission and degradation. It was a physically and psychologically brutalizing experience. In general, blacks' existence as human beings was given no recognition. They had little or no protection under the law and little hope of emancipation. There were few slave revolts, but many thousands of slaves fled the South.
A complicated set of laws grew up to safeguard the property interests of slaveholders. Slavery gradually became a highly emotional political issue in the North-South struggle for power that was taking place in the national government. The importation of slaves after 1808 was forbidden by the U.S. Congress. Abolitionist agitation began early in the 19th century. However, it was the defeat of the South in the Civil War that resulted in the abolition of slavery by the 13th Amendment in 1865. Although the blacks were freed, the racism accompanying slavery persisted.
In South America and the West IndiesIndigenous people were enslaved in South America in the early period of European colonization. Gradually, Africans replaced them. Millions of blacks were transported as slaves to the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English colonies, especially to the West Indies and Brazil. The first were brought in 1502, to the island of Hispaniola.
Most blacks labored on plantations in tropical areas. Slave codes provided that the slave was not the absolute property of the owner, but the slave's treatment was not markedly better than that of the slave in the Southern United States. However, manumission generally was easier and was encouraged by some governments. Hispaniola was the first to abolish slavery in the Western Hemisphere, in 1793; Brazil was the last, in 1888.
Modern Slavery
By the end of the 19th century slavery had been abolished in the British Empire, Europe, and the Americas. It has continued to exist legally in parts of Asia and Africa and illegally in other areas of the world. Various organizations, such as the Anti-Slavery Society for the Protection of Human Rights, headquartered in London, and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, have sought its elimination. It is estimated that several million humans still exist under varying conditions of slavery, including chattel slavery, serfdom, and debt bondage.