conclusion for slavery essay

Slavery Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on slavery.

Slavery is a term that signifies the injustice that is being carried out against humans since the 1600s. Whenever this word comes up, usually people picture rich white people ruling over black people. However, that is not the only case to exist. After a profound study, historians found evidence that suggested the presence of slavery in almost every culture. It was not essentially in the form of people working in the fields, but other forms. Slavery generally happens due to the division of levels amongst humans in a society. It still exists in various parts of the world. It may not necessarily be that hard-core, nonetheless, it happens.

Impact of Slavery

Slavery is one of the main causes behind racism in most of the cultures. It did severe damage to the race relations of America where a rift was formed between the whites and blacks.

The impact of Slavery has caused irreparable damage which can be seen to date. Even after the abolishment of slavery in the 1800s in America, racial tensions remained amongst the citizens.

In other words, this made them drift apart from each other instead of coming close. Slavery also gave birth to White supremacy which made people think they are inherently superior just because of their skin color and descendant.

Talking about the other forms of slavery, human trafficking did tremendous damage. It is a social evil which operates even today, ruining hundreds and thousands of innocent lives. Slavery is the sole cause which gave birth to all this.

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The Aftermath

Even though slavery was abolished over 150 years ago, the scars still remain. The enslaved still haven’t forgotten the struggles of their ancestors. It lives on in their hearts which has made them defensive more than usual. They resent the people whose ancestors brought it down on their lineage.

Even today many people of color are a victim of racism in the 21st century. For instance, black people face far more severe punishments than a white man. They are ridiculed for their skin color even today. There is a desperate need to overcome slavery and all its manifestations for the condition and security of all citizens irrespective of race, religion , social, and economic position .

In short, slavery never did any good to any human being, of the majority nor minority. It further divided us as humans and put tags on one another. Times are changing and so are people’s mindsets.

One needs to be socially aware of these evils lurking in our society in different forms. We must come together as one to fight it off. Every citizen has the duty to make the world a safer place for every human being to live in.

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Despite the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, the practice is prevalent in the contemporary world. It is estimated that more people are enslaved today than during the few centuries of the transatlantic slave trade. Modern slavery poses a serious challenge to human rights protection worldwide, and many governments as well as international and regional bodies are working towards preventing and combating it.

This course explored the historical origins and forms of slavery from ancient times to the twenty-first century. It also looked at the international legal instruments regulating the prohibition of slavery: international human rights treaties, ILO conventions, as well as regional human rights instruments.

You should now be able to:

• understand the historical origins of slavery as well as examples of slavery
• understand the international legal framework prohibiting slavery
• understand the concept of modern slavery and its various forms
• analyse the applicable law and apply it to a given example/case study
• think critically about human rights aspects of slavery in a variety of contexts and to articulate an independent view
• critically analyse and evaluate proposals for new legislation addressing modern slavery.

If you are unsure about any of these, go back and reread the relevant section(s) of this course.

The New York Times

Magazine | the 1619 project, the 1619 project.

AUG. 14, 2019

In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.

Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. black americans have fought to make them true., if you want to understand the brutality of american capitalism, you have to start on the plantation., myths about physical racial differences were used to justify slavery — and are still believed by doctors today., america holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others., for centuries, black music has been the sound of artistic freedom. no wonder everybody’s always stealing it., ‘i slide my ring finger from senegal to south carolina & feel the ocean separate a million families.’, what does a traffic jam in atlanta have to do with segregation quite a lot., why doesn’t the united states have universal health care the answer begins with policies enacted after the civil war., slavery gave america a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment. both still define our prison system., the sugar that saturates the american diet has a barbaric history as the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery., a vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining, evictions and exclusion, separates black and white america., a re-education is necessary., most americans still don’t know the full story of slavery. this is the history you didn’t learn in school., ‘we are committing educational malpractice’: why slavery is mistaught — and worse — in american schools., the 1619 project continues, the 1619 podcast.

An audio series from The Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery.

Live at the Smithsonian

Watch highlights of a symposium about how history is defined — and redefined — featuring historians, journalists and policymakers.

Reader Responses

We asked you to share photographs and stories of your enslaved ancestors. The images and stories helped paint a picture of a too-often-erased American history.

We asked you how you learned about slavery in school. You told us about degrading role play, flawed lessons and teachers who played down its horrors.

Race/Related

The 1619 Project was conceived by Nikole Hannah-Jones. In this interview, she talks about the project and the reaction to it.

In the N.B.A., the very term “owner” has come under fire, as players, most of whom are black, assert self-determination.

Behind the Scenes of 1619

Since January, The Times Magazine has been working on an issue to mark the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved people arriving in America.

For teachers

Looking for ways to use this issue in your classroom? You can find curriculums, guides and activities for students developed by the Pulitzer Center at pulitzercenter.org/1619 . And it’s all free!

More on NYTimes.com

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Struggles for Freedom: Essays on Slavery, Colonialism, and Culture in the Caribbean and Central America

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Darién J. Davis; Struggles for Freedom: Essays on Slavery, Colonialism, and Culture in the Caribbean and Central America. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 February 1999; 79 (1): 110–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-79.1.110

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This important collection of essays brings together newly edited materials and previously published work by the author on the English-speaking Caribbean. Bolland, a sociologist, aims to look at the economic, political, and cultural forces that have shaped Caribbean societies from colonial times to the present day. Divided into four sections— “Colonial and Creole Societies,” “Colonization and Slavery,” “From Slavery to Freedom,” and “Class, Culture and Politics”— Struggles for Freedom is diverse in its approach and subject matter. In the introductory essay, “Creolization and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History,” Bolland makes clear that “creolization” constitutes a central dynamic of Caribbean social history, and this assertion reverberates throughout the book.

Bolland begins part 2 by looking at the colonization of Central America and the enslavement of its inhabitants, while demonstrating the economic links that existed between Central America and the Spanish-dominated Caribbean prior to 1550. He focuses on indigenous slavery and offers the generally accepted argument that the impact of African slavery in any particular region was inversely related to the availability of indigenous labor. The chapter on Belize is more specific, as it examines labor practices related to timber extraction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bolland makes clear that Belize’s creole culture evolved from the complex interaction among slaves from different cultural backgrounds, slaves and their masters, and men and women who were not primarily engaged in plantation slavery. The final essay in this second section examines changing European perceptions of Amerindians in Belize, from the early European colonizers of the time of Columbus to the British overlords of the nineteenth century. Bolland surveys the perceptions of colonizers and chroniclers during the initial phase of contact and colonization, although he pays particular attention to the ethnocentric views of the British, a legacy that persists to this day.

In part 3 Bolland questions the notion that social relations changed after the abolition of slavery. He demonstrates that in many cases slaves had opportunities to engage in wage labor while so-called “freed men and women” were often coerced. This same theme is more specifically treated in chapter 6, which examines how after abolition the British ensured continued control over land and labor in the West Indies in general and Belize in particular. This section concludes with an essay on the politics of freedom in the British West Indies. Bolland tackles the complex question of how former slaves gave meaning to their freedom by examining issues of worker autonomy after emancipation. As he shows, the answer to this question varied, and must be interpreted within the complex relationship between “dominance, resistance and accommodation” (p. 187).

In part 4, Bolland analyzes four important West Indian novelists (Victor Stafford Reid, Ralph de Boissiére, John Hearne, and George Lamming). Although his frame of analysis is not as clear as in other chapters, he does offer us a glimpse into the cultural history of the region in the preindependence era of the 1940s and 1950s. As he searches for authentic articulations of “Creole culture,” Bolland offers little in the way of a historical or nationally-specific context for understanding the novelists and their novels. Moreover, the reader is never quite sure why the author has chosen to examine these four novelists. Nonetheless, Bolland makes us understand why he believes it is Lamming who best “makes the concept of an authentic Caribbean nation possible” (p. 256).

The final essay of the book focuses on the role of ethnicity in decolonization and political struggle in two English-speaking Caribbean nations on the mainland: Belize and Guyana. Both countries have remarkably similar histories and thus make for a superb comparison. Bolland forcibly argues that party politics, which many have analyzed through the prism of ethnicity, in fact cuts across ethnic lines. Moreover, in both countries, as in the region as a whole, cultural and ethnic identities are intimately related to class formation, emerging nationalism, and state formation.

This volume is an important contribution to the literature on the English-speaking Caribbean. It is particularly helpful in placing Anglophone communities in a context that extends beyond the island-nations (although comparative material from the major island-nations of Jamaica, Barbados, or Trinidad is minimal). Bolland inevitably faced the challenge of many Caribbean scholars who must balance broad regional trends with in-depth analysis of specific nation-states. In light of this, it is remarkable that one author is able to provide so much depth and breadth to the subject. For the historian, many of the general essays may not be historically specific enough. Others will lament the lack of comparison with the Spanish, French, and Dutch Caribbean. Yet, these essays provide important themes and issues that will allow for cross-cultural comparison. This volume is well organized and conceptualized (although it does not include the index listed in the table of contents) and will be an important reference for years to come.

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The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Introduction.

• 2. New England
• 3. Boston, Massachusetts
• 4. New York, New York
• 5. The Mid-Atlantic
• 6. Virginia
• 7. Richmond, Virginia
• 8. The Carolinas
• 9. Charleston, South Carolina
• 10. The Deep South
• 11. Savannah, Georgia
• 12. New Orleans, Louisiana
• 13. Conclusion
• Download report
• More resources

Cite this report Equal Justice Initiative, "The Transatlantic Slave Trade" (2022).

Text copied.

A National Legacy: Our Collective Memory Of Slavery, War & Race

• Chapter 1 Origins Intro

The European Influence on Africa

The barbarity of the middle passage, slavery in the americas.

• 2. New England Intro
• New England Trafficking
• A Trafficking-Based Economy
• Industries Reliant on Enslaved Labor
• Laws Limiting Freedom
• 3 Boston Intro
• The Port of Boston
• Controlling Enslaved People
• Profiting from Trafficking
• After Abolition
• 4 New York City Intro
• Trading on Wall Street
• Laws Targeting Black People
• An Economy Founded on Slavery
• Post-War Racial Discrimination
• 5 Mid-Atlantic Intro
• A Hub for Human Trafficking
• Work of Enslaved People
• Separating Families
• Controlling Black People
• A Legacy of Racial Bias
• 6 Virginia Intro
• Tobacco Drives Trafficking
• Legislating Hereditary Enslavement
• Laws Controlling Lives
• The Domestic Slave Trade
• 7 Intro Richmond
• A Trafficking Hub
• An Enslavement-Based Economy
• Suppressing Black Resistance
• Center of the Domestic Slave Trade
• 8 Intro Carolinas
• Trafficking for Rice and Indigo
• North Carolina Trafficking
• Resistance to Enslavement
• 9 Intro Charleston
• “Carolina Gold”
• Centrality of African Culture
• Wealth Through Exploitation
• 10 Intro Deep South
• Spanish and French Trafficking
• Enslavement Conditions
• Trafficking Surges in the 18th Century
• Illegal Transatlantic Trafficking
• 11 Intro Savannah
• Trafficking in Savannah
• Urban Enslavement
• “The Weeping Time”
• Legacy of Enslavement
• 12 Intro New Orleans
• A City Built on Trafficking
• Brutal Conditions
• Resistance and Violent Response
• Conclusion TST Intro

Table of Contents

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• Acknowledgments

The enslavement of human beings occupies a painful and tragic space in world history. Denying a person freedom, autonomy, and life represents the worst kind of abuse of human rights.

Many societies tolerated and condoned human slavery for centuries. But in the 15th century, an expanded and terrifying new era of enslavement emerged that has had a profound and devastating impact on human history.

The abduction, abuse, and enslavement of Africans by Europeans for nearly five centuries dramatically altered the global landscape and created a legacy of suffering and bigotry that can still be seen today.

After discovering lands that had been occupied by Indigenous people for centuries, European powers sent ships and armed militia to exploit these new lands for wealth and profit starting in the 1400s. In territories we now call “the Americas,” gold, sugar, tobacco, and extraordinary natural resources were viewed as opportunities to gain power and influence for Portugal, Spain, Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Scandinavian nations.

Europeans first sought to enslave the Indigenous people who occupied these lands to create wealth for foreign powers, resulting in a catastrophic genocide. Disease, famine, and conflict killed millions of Native people within a relatively short period of time.

Determined to extract wealth from these distant lands, European powers sought labor from Africa, launching a tragic era of kidnapping, abduction, and trafficking that resulted in the enslavement of millions of African people.

Between 1501 and 1867, nearly 13 million African people were kidnapped, forced onto European and American ships, and trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean to be enslaved, abused, and forever separated from their homes, families, ancestors, and cultures.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade represents one of the most violent, traumatizing, and horrific eras in world history. Nearly two million people died during the barbaric Middle Passage across the ocean. The African continent was left destabilized and vulnerable to conquest and violence for centuries. The Americas became a place where race and color created a caste system defined by inequality and abuse.

In the “colonies” that became the United States, slavery took on uniquely appalling features. From New England to Texas, Black people were dehumanized and abused while they were enslaved and denied basic freedoms. Legal and political systems were created to codify racial hierarchy and ensure white supremacy. Slavery became permanent and hereditary, defined by race-based ideologies that insisted on racial subordination of Black people for decades after the formal abolition of slavery.

Millions of Black people born in the U.S. were subjected to abuse, violence, and forced labor despite the young nation’s identity as a constitutional democracy founded on the belief that “all men are created equal.” Racialized slavery was ignored, defended, or accommodated by leaders while the new nation gained extraordinary wealth and influence in the global economy based on the forced labor of enslaved Black people.

The economic legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade—including generational wealth and the founding of industries that continue to thrive today—is not well understood.

New England, Boston, New York City, the Mid-Atlantic, Virginia, Richmond, the Carolinas, Charleston, Savannah, the Deep South, and New Orleans were shaped by the trafficking of African people, but few have acknowledged their history of enslavement or its legacy.

This report is a first step in helping people understand the scope and scale of the devastation created by slavery in America and the Transatlantic Slave Trade’s influence on a range of contemporary issues. It seeks to initiate more meaningful and truthful conversations about the history of slavery in America and how we can effectively address its legacy.

At a time when some believe we should avoid any discourse about our history that is uncomfortable, we believe that an honest engagement with our past is essential if we are to create a healthy and just future.

Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director

Maya Angelou

In this Chapter

T he enslavement of people has been a part of human history for centuries. Slavery and human bondage has taken many forms, including enslaving people as prisoners of war or due to their beliefs, 1 See David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford University Press, 2006), 27, 32; Jack Goody, “Slavery in Time and Space,” in Asian and African Systems of Slavery , ed. James L. Watson (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 25-27, 32-35. but the permanent, hereditary enslavement based on race later adopted in the U.S. was rare before the 15th century.

Many attributes of slavery began to change when European settlers intent on colonizing the Americas used violence and military power to compel forced labor from enslaved people. Indigenous people became the first victims of forced labor and enslavement at the hands of Europeans in the Americas. However, millions of Indigenous people died from disease, famine, war, and harsh labor conditions in the decades that followed. 2 Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 42-54.

Committed to extracting profit from their colonies in the Americas, European powers turned to the African continent. To meet their ever-growing need for labor, they initiated a massive global undertaking that relied on abduction, human trafficking, and racializing enslavement at a scale without precedent in human history. Never before had millions of people been kidnapped and trafficked over such a great distance.

The permanent displacement of 12.5 million African people to a foreign land, with no possibility of ever returning, created an enduring legacy and shaped challenges that remain with us today. 3 David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 23.

Europe had no contact with Sub-Saharan Africa before the Portuguese, seeking wealth and gold, sailed down the western coast of Africa and reached the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) in 1471. 4 Junius P. Rodriguez, ed., The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, Volume I  (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 1997), 307-08. Initially focused on obtaining gold, Portugal established trading relationships and built El Mina Fort to protect its interests in the gold trade. 5 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 89.

The convergence of European powers in Sub-Saharan Africa set in motion a devastating process that fused sophisticated labor exploitation, international commerce, mass enslavement, and an elaborate race-based ideology to create the Transatlantic Slave Trade. 6 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 21, 99; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 81-82, 84, 87, 89, 109.

Over the following decades, the Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Danish, and Swedes began to make contact with Sub-Saharan Africa as well. Portugal soon converted El Mina into a prison for holding kidnapped Africans, and European traffickers built castles, barracoons, and forts on the African coast to support the forced enslavement of abducted Africans.

German and Italian merchants and bankers who did not personally traffic kidnapped Africans nonetheless provided essential funding and insurance to develop the Transatlantic Slave Trade and plantation economy. 7 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 87-89 Italian merchants were essential in the effort to extend the sugar plantation system to the Atlantic Islands off the west coast of Africa, like São Tomé, and financial capital from Genoa was instrumental in expanding Portugal’s ability to traffic Africans. 8 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 84-89, 104, 109.

By the 1600s, every major European power had established trading relationships with Sub-Saharan Africa and was participating in the transportation of kidnapped Africans to the Americas in some way. During this time period, several thousand Africans were kidnapped and trafficked to mainland Europe and the Americas, but the volume of human trafficking soon escalated to horrific proportions. 9 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 21, 99; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 81-82, 84, 87, 89, 109.

An engraving of trafficked Africans arriving in Virginia in 1619.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Led again by the Portuguese, European powers began to occupy the Americas in the 1500s. In the 16th and 17th centuries, using land stolen from Indigenous populations in the Americas, Europeans established plantations that relied on enslaved labor to mass produce goods (primarily sugar cane) for trading and sale. 10 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 81, 97. The cultivation of sugar for mass consumption became a driving force in the growing trafficking of human beings from Africa. 11 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 103, 107-09.

Europeans initially relied on Indigenous people to supply this labor. 12 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 95-100. But mass killings and disease decimated Indigenous populations in what historian David Brion Davis called “the greatest known population loss in human history.” 13 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 98.

The Indigenous population in Mexico plummeted by nearly 90% in 75 years. In Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic), the population of Arawak and Taino people fell from between 300,000 and 500,000 in 1492 to fewer than 500 people by 1542, just five decades later. 14 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 98. Without Indigenous workers, plantation owners in the Americas grew desperate for a new source of exploited labor. 15 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 95-102.

Driven by the desire for wealth, these European powers shifted from acquiring gold and other goods in Sub-Saharan Africa to trafficking in human beings. Over the following centuries, Europeans demanded that millions of Africans be trafficked to work on plantations and in other businesses in the Americas. 16 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 99-102.

Slavery had existed in Africa prior to this point, but this new commodification of human beings by European powers was entirely unique and it drastically changed the African concept of enslavement. 17 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 99-102.

Although some African officials and merchants acquired wealth through the export of millions of people, the Transatlantic Slave Trade devastated and de-stabilized societies and economies across Africa. The scale of disruption and violence contributed to long-term conflict and violence on the continent while European powers were able to amass massive financial benefits and global power from this dehumanizing trade. 18 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 100.

The Iberian powers of Spain and Portugal and their colonies in Uruguay and Brazil were responsible for trafficking 99% of the nearly 630,000 kidnapped Africans trafficked from 1501 to 1625. 19 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 23, tbl. 2. Over the next 240 years, England, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the Baltic States, and their colonies joined the Iberians in actively trafficking Africans. Almost 12 million kidnapped Africans were trafficked from 1625 to 1867. 20 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 23, tbl. 2. Ships from Portugal and its colony Brazil alone were responsible for trafficking 5,849,300 kidnapped Africans during this time period. 21 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 23, tbl. 2.

Ships originating in Great Britain were responsible for trafficking more than a quarter of all people taken from Africa from 1501 to 1867. 22 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 23, tbl. 2. From 1726 to 1800, British ships were the leading traffickers of kidnapped Africans, responsible for taking more than two million people from Africa. 23 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 23, tbl. 2.

A painting of kidnapped Africans aboard a trafficking ship.

Dea/G. Dagli Orti/Getty Images

From 1626 to 1867, ships from North America were responsible for trafficking at least 305,000 captured people from Africa. In the two years before the U.S. legally ended the international slave trade in 1808, a quarter of all trafficked Africans were carried in ships that flew the U.S. flag. 24 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 34. Rhode Island’s ports combined to organize voyages responsible for trafficking at least 111,000 kidnapped Africans, making it one of the 15 largest originating ports in the world. 25 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 39.

The horrific conditions of the Middle Passage meant that of more than 12.5 million Africans kidnapped and trafficked through the Transatlantic Slave Trade, only 10.7 million survived the journey. 26 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 19.

Eighty percent of the people who embarked for the Americas between 1500 and 1820 were kidnapped Africans, who far outnumbered European immigrants. 27 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , xvii.

Almost two million Africans died during the Middle Passage—nearly one million more than all of the Americans who have died in every war fought since 1775 combined. 28 Department of Veteran’s Affairs, America’s Wars Fact Sheet , May 2021, https://www.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fs_americas_wars.pdf ; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , xvii, 18-19.

Numbers like this can help to quantify the scope of the harm, but they fail to detail the horrific and torturous experience of those who perished and the trauma that 10.7 million Africans who survived the weeks-long journey carried with them.

An exhibit at EJI’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, features more than 200 sculptures by Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo memorializing those who died during the Middle Passage.

Human Pictures

Some enslaved people were taken from the coast of West Africa and sold to European slave traders. For most captives the experience of Transatlantic trafficking began weeks, months, or even years before they ever saw the coast. Driven by the increasing external demand from white enslavers and traders, African kidnappers traveled inland and kidnapped people from their villages and towns. In the 18th century, 70% of Africans trafficked in the Transatlantic Slave Trade were free people who had been “snatched from their homes and communities.” 29 Sowande M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 63. They were most often forced to walk, bound together in a coffle, for dozens or even hundreds of miles until they reached the coast. 30 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 63, 136; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 87.

At the coast, kidnapped Africans were forced into barracoons, slave pens, and dungeons within prison castles to await the ships that would take them across the Atlantic. Kidnapped Africans were forced to board slave trading ships that stayed docked—sometimes for months—until they had loaded enough human cargo to make the passage sufficiently profitable for the enslavers. 31 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 67, 99-101; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , xvii, 160; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 100. Records do not establish an exact death toll, but scholars estimate the mortality rate among those confined in barracoons and on board docked trading ships “equaled that of Europe’s fourteenth-century Black Death,” which claimed at least 40% of Europe’s population. 32 Alice M. Phillips, ed., “The Black Death: The Plague, 1331-1770,”  John Martin Rare Book Room, Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, University of Iowa, 2017, http://hosted.lib.uiowa.edu/histmed/plague/ .

Countless Africans perished before they even began the Middle Passage. 33 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , xvii; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 100.

Ottobah Cugoano was a young child when he was “snatched away from [his] native country, with about eighteen or twenty more boys and girls.” 34 Ottobah Cugoano, “Narrative of the Enslavement of Ottobah Cugoano, a Native of Africa; Published by Himself in the Year 1787,” in The Negro’s Memorial; or, Abolitionists Catechism; by an Abolitionist (London: Hatchard and Co., Piccadilly, and J. and A. Aroh, Conhill, 1825), 120. The kidnappers brandished “pistols and cutlasses” and threatened to kill the children if they did not come with them. 35 Cugoano, “Narrative of Enslavement,” 121. For Ottobah and millions like him, the trauma of familial separation would be inflicted repeatedly in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Ottobah’s “hopes of returning home again were all over” 36 Cugoano, “Narrative of Enslavement,” 122-23. as he was marched to the coast and placed in a prison until a white slave trader’s ship arrived three days later. “[I]t was a most horrible scene,” Ottobah later recounted. 37 Cugoano, “Narrative of Enslavement,” 124.

Ottobah Cugoano

“Narrative of the Enslavement of Ottobah Cugoano,” 124.

African captives were forced to undergo invasive and dehumanizing examinations before they boarded enslavers’ ships. Women, men, and children were stripped naked, prodded, and molested to determine if they were “prime slaves” capable of performing hard labor and having children. 38 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 73-85.

Rob Culpepper

Traders invasively groped the breasts, buttocks, and vaginal areas of women and young girls, allegedly to assess their childbearing ability. 39 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 73-78, 85. Men and boys were similarly molested around the groin, scrotum, and anus. 40 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 85. One white trafficker later testified the process was similar to what he would do to “a horse in this country, if I was about to purchase him.” 41 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 85.

Captives were then assigned a number and loaded onto ships, separated by gender and tightly packed into the holds under conditions that were noxious and extreme. Men were typically “locked spoonways” together, naked and forced to lie in urine, feces, blood, and mucus, with little to no fresh air. 42 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 105; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 92-93. Alexander Falconbridge, a white surgeon who participated in the slave trade, later testified that captives “had not so much room as a man in his coffin, neither in length or breadth, and it was impossible for them to turn or shift with any degree or ease.” 43 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 105.

An illustration of the Brookes, a British ship used to traffic enslaved people.

Library of Congress

Trafficked Africans were forced to lie chained and manacled for weeks during the journey, unable to stretch out or stand except during limited time on deck. The foul conditions were a breeding ground for disease and vermin; some captives suffocated from the lack of air below deck. 44 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 103-08; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 92-93. On some ships, the mortality rate was as high as 33%. 45 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 92-93; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 18-19.

About 15% of kidnapped Africans—nearly two million people—died during the Middle Passage.

African women and girls suffered similarly horrific conditions in the hold—and they were uniquely terrorized by the crew. Forced to be naked and segregated from the men, they lived in constant fear of being raped or assaulted by white sailors, who subjected them to sexual violence and flogged those who resisted. 46 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 138-48; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 90-93.

Sexual assault of African women was so commonplace that Alexander Falconbridge later testified that sailors were “permitted to indulge their passions among them at pleasure.” 47 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 138-44. Young girls were similarly subjected to violence. One surviving account details the experience of “a little girl of eight to ten years” who was repeatedly raped by a ship’s captain over three consecutive nights. 48 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 144.

White sailors engaged in sexual violence without any fear of consequences or accountability. 49 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 138-48; Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 90-93.

Some African women faced a second level of terror—the inability to protect their small children who were brought on board with them or born during the voyage. 50 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 151-54. Many African women were forcibly separated from their infants when they were kidnapped from their homes or when they were sold to white traffickers but some women carried small infants with them. Babies were of little value in the market across the Atlantic, and so abusive sailors used them to manipulate, control, and terrorize their mothers. 51 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 151-54. One account details a sailor who “tore the child from the mother, and threw it into the sea” when the newborn would not stop crying. 52 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 151.

Enslaved women and young girls were systematically subjected to sexual abuse and violence by traffickers and enslavers.

Another account from a white trafficker reports that a woman and her nine-month-old were purchased and placed onboard a ship. The baby “would not eat,” so the captain “flogged him with a cat o’ nine tails” in front of his mother and other captives on the ship. 53 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 152-53. When he noticed that the baby’s feet were swollen, the captain ordered his crew to submerge the baby’s legs in boiling water, causing “the skin and nails [to come] off.” 54 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 153. The baby still would not eat, so the captain flogged him at each meal time for several days before finally “[tying] a log of mango, either eighteen or twenty inches long, and about twelve or thirteen pound weight, to the child by a string round its neck,” beating the baby again, and dropping the baby to the ground, killing him. 55 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 153. His mother—powerless to save her baby—was beaten until she agreed to throw her baby’s body overboard. This act of terror was intentionally committed in view of other captives to strike fear and maintain control. 56 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 153-54.

Cruelty and terrorism were common on trafficking vessels operated by Europeans. Sailors inflicted brutal punishments for even minor offenses as a reminder of their control. 57 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 131-37. One account from a white sailor reported that eight to 10 captives were brought to the top deck one night “for making a little noise in the rooms.” 58 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 136-37. Sailors were then ordered to “tie them up to the booms [horizontal poles extending from the base of the mast], flog them very severely with a wire cat [a whip with multiple tails of wire], and afterwards clap the thumb-screws upon them, and leave them in that situation till morning.” 59 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 136-37. The same sailor said the use of the thumb-screws—a device that crushed fingers via pressure—was so violent and harmful that it resulted in “fevers” and even death on occasion. 60 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 136-37.

For more serious offenses, sailors inflicted even greater violence. One captive woman who was accused of aiding (but not actively participating) in an attempted revolt against the kidnappers, was strung up on the deck by her thumbs in view of the other captives. As a warning to them, she was flogged and knifed to death. 61 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 158.

An illustration published in an 1833 anti-slavery periodical shows traffickers throwing enslaved people overboard.

The threat of being flogged with a cat o’ nine tails [a multi-tailed whip with lashes often tipped with metal or barbs] or placed in the thumb-screws hung over each captive. 62 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 186-87. Consuming more than their meager allotment of food could lead to whipping and torture. 63 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 118-24. Captives were forced onto the deck and made to “dance” for exercise under threat of flogging. As one eyewitness observed, “Even those who had the flux, scurvy, and such edematous swelling in their legs, as made it painful to them to move at all, were compelled to dance by the cat.” 64 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 92-93. Failure to eat one’s rations likewise resulted in abuse, whipping, or torture in the thumb-screws until the kidnapped African agreed to eat. 65 Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea , 118-24, 186-87.

These excruciating conditions lasted for weeks and sometimes for months. A typical voyage took five or six weeks; some took two or three months. 66 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 160. Longer voyages led to higher mortality rates among the kidnapped Africans on board. 67 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 160.

When the ships landed in ports across North and South America, the kidnapped Africans who survived the Middle Passage were subjected to a renewed round of examinations and molestation by enslavers before they were sold again and forced to do hard labor that often resulted in their untimely deaths. 68 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 92-93, 107-17; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 6, 16, 159-61. Around 80% of kidnapped Africans transported across the Middle Passage were forced to work on sugar plantations under incredibly dangerous conditions that led to high mortality rates. 69 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 6.

Olaudah Equiano

Of the enslaved men, women, and children who survived the Middle Passage, approximately 90% arrived in the Caribbean or South America. 82 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , xix. The Portuguese, Spanish, French, British, and Dutch controlled slavery in the Americas, and each followed different political, legal, and cultural practices. 83 Eltis and Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade , 21-23. Due in part to these differences, the evolution of slavery in the Americas varied across the region, as did the social construction of race and racial hierarchy.

There is no value in comparing the relative “harshness” of slavery across the Americas; the brutality and inhumanity of slavery was universal. Moreover, conditions in the South American and Caribbean colonies were horrific—the vast majority of enslaved people in these colonies worked on sugar plantations, which were notoriously harsh environments. Work on these plantations was “life-consuming,” with long hours of gang labor—often beginning at 5 a.m. and working until dusk—and extremely hazardous work conditions. Plantations in Brazil had higher mortality rates and lower life expectancies than plantations in the U.S. 84 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 92-93, 107-119.

Factors specific to each European power and its colonies distinguished the experiences of enslaved men and women across the Americas. In the North American colonies and later the U.S., white people were in the majority everywhere except in South Carolina and Mississippi. 85 Kathryn MacKay, “Statistics on Slavery,” Weber State University, accessed September 2, 2022, https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm . But in South America and the Caribbean, nonwhite people regularly exceeded 80% of the population. 86 Steven Mintz, “Historical Context: American Slavery in Comparative Perspective,” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, accessed September 6, 2022, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teaching-resource/historical-context-american-slavery-comparative-perspective ; Robert J. Cottrol, The Long Lingering Shadow: Law, Liberalism, and Cultures of Racial Hierarchy and Identity in the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 39.

In the months leading up to the 1794 revolution in Haiti, white Europeans made up just 5% of the population and there were as many free people of color as there were Europeans. 87 Franklin W. Knight, “The Haitian Revolution,” American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (February 2000): 108. Iberian control in South America was challenged by the growing number of enslaved people, who often demanded their freedom in exchange for fighting Indigenous people who resisted European colonizers. 88 Cottrol, Long Lingering Shadow , 34. In these colonies, the threat of rebellion against the minority white population was critical in shaping society.

In contrast, the exceptionally large white majority in North America meant that rebellions by enslaved people, while far more common than most people realize today, did not represent as great a threat to white rule. 89 Cottrol, Long Lingering Shadow , 60, 86. As a result, while the fear of rebellions profoundly shaped the legal and cultural landscape of North America, 90 See, e.g. , Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 14, 18-21, 33 (discussing the impact of the Deslondes rebellion in Louisiana). British colonists rarely were forced to make legal or political concessions to enslaved people.

Geographic and demographic variations also distinguished how race and racial hierarchy developed in North America. For example, during the first century of Portuguese colonization in Brazil, there were very few Portuguese or white women, 91 D. Wendy Greene, “Determining the (In)Determinable: Race in Brazil and the United States,” 14 Mich. J. Race & L. 143, 150 (2009). which meant that despite anti-miscegenation laws passed in Portugal, there were high rates of interracial sex between white men and women of African descent in Brazil. 92 Greene, “Determining the (In)Determinable,” 150. By 1822, more than 70% of Brazil’s population “consisted of blacks or mulattoes, slaves, liberto, and free” people of color. 93 Greene, “Determining the (In)Determinable,” 151.

Today, Brazil is home to the largest population of African descendants outside the African continent. 94 Greene, “Determining the (In)Determinable,” 150.

In most South American and Caribbean colonies, large populations of free people of color emerged and “elaborate human taxonomies” based on race and caste were developed. 95 Herbert S. Klein and Ben Vinson III, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean , 2d. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 200-12. A different racial hierarchy evolved in North America, where free people of color represented a very small fraction of the population. 96 Aaron O’Neill, “Black and Slave Population of the United States from 1790 to 1880,” Statista , June 21, 2022, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010169/black-and-slave-population-us-1790-1880/ . There, a single, rigid color line separated two racial groups: Black and white. 97 Klein and Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America , 195.

Finally, the legal codes that governed enslaved peoples’ lives—laws on manumission, the status of enslaved people as humans or property, marriage and family formation, and racial classification—varied by region and the colony. 98 Klein and Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America , 207-14. These laws demonstrate the complex racial hierarchies in the region.

Throughout the region, racial discrimination was codified in laws that barred free Black people from “hold[ing] political office, practic[ing] prestigious professions (public notary, lawyer, surgeon, pharmacist, smelter) or enjoy[ing] equal social status with whites.” 99 Ann Twinam, Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 52. But in 1795, the Spanish Crown made it possible to purchase whiteness—people of color with mixed ancestry could “apply and pay for a decree” that converted their legal status to white. 100 Ann Twinam, “Purchasing Whiteness: Race and Status in Colonial Latin America,” Not Even Past , September 1, 2015, https://notevenpast.org/purchasing-whiteness-race-and-status-in-colonial-latin-america/ . These laws sparked “vigorous and serious debate concerning the civil rights of those of mixed descent” in some countries. The 1812 constitution of the Spanish Empire further expanded opportunities for mixed-race citizens, including desegregating universities a century and a half before the U.S. 101 Twinam, “Race and Status.”

Evan Milligan

In French colonies, the “Code Noir” passed by Louis XIV in 1685 shaped an entirely different landscape. The code mandated execution for an enslaved person who struck their enslaver, 102 Article XXXIII, “The Code Noir (The Black Code),” LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY: EXPLORING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION , accessed October 17, 2022, https://revolution.chnm.org/d/335 . but it also granted free people of color the same rights as any “persons born free,” 103 Articles LVIII and LIX, “The Code Noir.” prohibited enslaved parents from being sold separately from their children, 104 Article XLVII, “The Code Noir.” deemed free the child of a free woman and an enslaved man of color, 105 Article XIII, “The Code Noir.” and fined an enslaver who had a child with an enslaved woman unless he married and freed the woman and her child. 106 Article IX, “The Code Noir.”

Critically, under the Code Noir, free people of color dramatically increased their numbers. In Louisiana, which spent decades under French control, there were 18,647 free Black people by 1860—almost 3,000 more than in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi combined. 107 Laura Foner, “The Free People of Color in Louisiana and St. Domingue: A Comparative Portrait of Two Three-Caste Slave Societies,” Journal of Social History 3, no. 4 (Summer 1970): 407 n.1 (citing U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Negro Population in the United States, 1790-1915” (Washington, 1918), 57).

The British and their descendants in North America made race the central aspect of laws governing slavery and the lives of enslaved and free Black Americans. 108 Klein and Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America , 203 (“Especially following the Haitian Revolution, British, French, Dutch, and North American legislation became ever more hostile to freedmen.”).  A stark “black-white binary” reflected and reinforced the centrality of race in all areas of American life. 109 Klein and Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America , 201.

As a result, while the particular experience of slavery depended on region and time period, enslavement in the U.S. became a rigid, racialized caste system that inexorably tied enslavement to race.

The system of enslavement that emerged in North America was legitimated by an elaborate set of laws enforced through terror and violence and used to justify and codify the permanent, hereditary, and unending slavery of Black people for generations.

From the first arrival of kidnapped Africans in the English colonies that would become the United States, the institution of enslavement was foundational to the economy of every major city on the Eastern Seaboard. The history of these regions cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the role enslavement played in creating their economies, laws, and political and cultural institutions and the innumerable ways this legacy shapes these communities today.

The Role of the Christian Church

The British Library

Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano , is a firsthand account of the Transatlantic Slave Trade that provides a critical perspective into the horrors of trafficking.

Olaudah was 11 years old when he and his sister were kidnapped from their home in the Eboe region of the Kingdom of Benin (likely, modern-day Nigeria) while their parents worked in the field. 70 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African,  vol. I (London, 1789) 4-5, 48-49. Separated from his sister, he was trafficked over many months through various households before eventually being taken to the ocean and forced to board a docked slave ship. 71 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 49-71.

Overwhelmed with terror, Olaudah was placed below decks, where he was knocked back by the crying of his fellow captives and “the loathsomeness of the stench,” which made it impossible to eat anything. When he refused food from the slave traders, they violently flogged him. 72 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 73-74. Olaudah witnessed repeated “brutal cruelty” from the slave traders, including hourly whippings for anyone who refused to eat. 73 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 73-75.

When the slave ship set sail for Barbados, Olaudah spent weeks below decks.

The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.

This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable. 74 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 78-80.

Olaudah details an incident when, having caught fish for themselves, the white traffickers threw the extra fish they did not eat overboard, rather than give it to the kidnapped Africans. 75 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 80-81.

He witnessed at least three kidnapped Africans attempt suicide by trying to jump off the ship and drown in the ocean rather than be subjected to a life of enslavement. One of the three men was caught and whipped “unmercifully.” 76 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 81-82.

After weeks at sea, the ship arrived in Barbados, where Olaudah and the other captives were taken to a “merchant’s yard, where we were all pent up together like so many sheep in a fold, without regard to sex or age.” 77 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 83-85. He was held there a few days before seeing buyers “rush” into the yard and grab the enslaved people they wanted to purchase, tearing apart families and loved ones who had survived the Middle Passage together. 78 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 86-87. Olaudah wrote:

I remember in the vessel in which I was brought over, in the men’s apartment, there were several brothers, who, in the sale, were sold in different lots; and it was very moving on this occasion to see and hear their cries at parting. O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you?

Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends to toil for your luxury and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your avarice? Are the dearest friends and relations, now rendered more dear by their separation from their kindred, still to be parted from each other, and thus prevented from cheering the gloom of slavery with the small comfort of being together and mingling their sufferings and sorrows? Why are parents to lose their children, brothers their sisters, or husbands their wives? Surely this is a new refinement in cruelty, which, while it has no advantage to atone for it, thus aggravates distress, and adds fresh horrors even to the wretchedness of slavery. 79 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 86-88.

Along with other kidnapped Africans from the same ship, Olaudah was not sold in Barbados. They were held on the island for several days, and then transported to Virginia, where they were sold into slavery. 80 Equiano, Interesting Narrative , 90-94.

Years later, in 1766, while enslaved by Robert King, a Quaker living in Montserrat, Olaudah Equiano purchased his freedom for 40 British pounds. He eventually moved to London and joined the abolitionist movement. 81 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, vol. II (Cambridge University Press, Reprint Edition, 2013), 11-19.

Back to the report

Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Starting in the 15th century, when European powers initiated contact and commercial activity with Sub-Saharan Africa, and continuing throughout the following centuries, organized religion played a leading role in developing, supporting, and legislating the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Rooted in a belief that their duty to spread Christianity justified their actions, religious organizations did not only embrace human trafficking and the enslavement of millions of Africans—they actively participated.

The Roman Catholic Church was critical to the efforts of global expansion by Portugal, Spain, and France and the creation of massive commercial enterprises built on the suffering and death of enslaved people. 110 Cottrol, Long Lingering Shadow , 55-57. In 1452 and 1455, Pope Nicholas V formally supported Spain and Portugal’s mass kidnapping and enslavement of Africans because it would help to Christianize enslaved people. 111 Carl Wise and David Wheat, “Pope Nicolas V and the Portuguese Slave Trade,” in African Laborers for a New Empire: Iberia, Slavery, and the Atlantic World , Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, updated 2016, https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/african_laborers_for_a_new_emp/pope_nicolas_v_and_the_portugu#! .

In 1548, Pope Paul III used his “apostolic authority” to declare the slave trade legal in the eyes of the church, which empowered the religious monarchies in European nations to continue to engage in Transatlantic trafficking. 112 Pius Onyemechi Adiele, The Popes, The Catholic Church, and The Transatlantic Enslavement of Black Africans 1418-1839 (Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2017), 383-84. The “popes and their friends” accepted “gifts” of enslaved Black people shipped from Africa to Rome. 113 Davis, Inhuman Bondage , 79.

Through Transatlantic trafficking, the church systematically extended its influence. European enslavers baptized millions of enslaved people whose labor they used to amass vast wealth. 114 Arnold Bauer, The Church in the Economy of Spanish America: Censos and Depositos in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983), 707.

The Jesuits, a religious order of the Catholic Church, justified slavery as a path to evangelization, but this did not insulate the people they enslaved from the exploitation, brutality, and dehumanization that was central to the system of chattel slavery. Like other enslavers, the Jesuits forced enslaved people to work on “Jesuit sugar plantations, cattle ranches, tobacco farms and vineyards, urban colegios, and as domestic servants.” 115 Adam Rothman, “The Jesuits and Slavery,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 8 (December 15, 2020).

During the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, several groups of European Christians formally broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. 116 Adiele, Catholic Church, and Transatlantic Enslavement , 16. These new Protestant churches also supported Transatlantic trafficking and believed the slave trade was wholly compatible with Christianity.

Like the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England not only promulgated an ideological apparatus to support race-based slavery, but it also was directly involved in trafficking and enslavement. The Church of England owned and operated Codrington, a profitable sugar plantation in Barbados where over 275 enslaved men, women, and children labored in hot, grueling conditions to plant, harvest, and produce sugar, which required a worker to stand over a boiling cauldron for more than 12 hours at a time. 117 Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 61-68. Early death was expected and devastating injuries commonplace. Visitors to Codrington noted that hatchets were kept nearby and used to sever the limbs of enslaved people whose fingers got caught in the mill. 118 Hochschild, Bury the Chains , 63-64. Those who tried to flee were whipped, branded, and forced to wear iron collars, but records show there were numerous escape attempts. 119 Hochschild, Bury the Chains , 65.

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Slavery Essay

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Topic: Slavery in America

Slavery used to be an important resource in America, and the first workers were imported to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. There the African slaves were used to aid in the tobacco and cotton productions. There were many different opinions on this subject, but slavery was here to stay, at least for the next couple of centuries. Around the 1860s, the bloody Civil war broke out and Abraham Lincoln, as the president, ratified a law which would eventually free the nations four million slaves. Five years later, the North won the Civil war, the slaves were freed and slavery was abolished. Even though black people were free at last, life would not be easy for them.

Slavery had always had its critics in America, so as the slave trade grew, so did the opposition. The slave labor enabled the colonies to become so profitable, that in 1660 England’s King Charles the second established the royal African company to transport humans from Africa to America. When England finally outlawed its slave trade in 1807, America relied on its own internal slave trade. By 1860, millions of slaves were still moved and sold in the colonies, but no new slaves were imported into the US after 1808. In 1820, the Missouri compromise banned slavery in all new western states, this concluded mostly the southern colonies. The country began to divide around the 18th century over the North and South issue.

When Abraham Lincoln was elected for president in 1860, he convinced many southerners that slavery would never be permitted to expand into new territories acquired by the US. He also declared the emancipation declaration during the war, in 1863. Though Lincoln’s antislavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery but to preserve the United States as a nation. Eventually, the confederate surrendered in 1865 and the Northside won. The 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery, but freed blacks’ status in the post-war South remained problematic.

Opinions were based on your beliefs and how the world around you evolved. In the North, people were against slavery, but in the South, they thought something else. In the South, people were taught to think that slavery was a natural concept. The defenders of slavery meant that they could not end servitude, considering that slave labor was the foundation of their economy. They also meant that freeing the slaves would lead to anarchy and chaos, and that slavery had existed throughout history and was a common state of mankind. The Northside didn’t rely on slave work as much as the Southside did. The Northside did not like slavery and meant that it was heartless. Other groups (religious groups), thought that it was gruesome and inhuman, while others were busy thinking about their beliefs.

The life of an African-American, after the Civil war, was a world transformed. There were no more of the brutal beatings and the sexual assaults, the selling and forcible relocation of family members, the denial of education, legal marriage, homeownership and so on. Congress enforced laws that promoted civil rights and political rights for African-Americans. The three most important laws the Congress passed was the Amendments. There was the thirteenth amendment which ended slavery, the fourteenth amendment which gave African-Americans the rights of American citizenship, and the fifteenth amendment which gave black men the right to vote. Life after the years of slavery would also prove to be difficult. The South established laws known as the black codes, which meant that they had no right to own land, there were own laws for punishments, they had no rights to carry weapons, no rights to vote and it was illegal not to have work. Most of the African-American, though free, lived in severe poverty.

Slavery began in America when the first slaves were brought to Virginia in 1619. The slaves would aid in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton. Slavery was of central importance to the South side’s economy. The differences between the South and the North would provoke a big debate, that would tear the nation apart in the gruesome Civil war. Slavery ended after the North won the civil war in 1865 after Abraham Lincoln ratified the thirteenth amendment law. There were many opinions, especially in the South. The southerners meant that slavery had always been around and that it was natural. The Northside meant that it was not right, while other religious groups thought it was horrific. After the Civil war, problems would still appear for the freed slaves. Despite that the beatings, the sexual assaults, and the selling were long gone, life would not be easy for the African-Americans. The South made new laws, known as the black code. It indicated that «negroes» were not allowed to do certain things such as own land, or even carry weapons. Although it was a new law and a new era, it would not change peoples hearts.

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Handout F: Slavery Essay

For nearly 250 years, the existence of slavery deprived African Americans of independent lives and individual liberty. It also compromised the republican dreams of white Americans, who otherwise achieved unprecedented success in the creation of political institutions and social relationships based on citizens’ equal rights and ever-expanding opportunity. Thomas Jefferson, who in 1787 described slavery as an “abomination” and predicted that it “must have an end,” had faith that “there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it.” He later avowed that “there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach in any practicable way.” Although Jefferson made several proposals to curb slavery’s growth or reduce its political or economic influence, a workable plan to eradicate slavery eluded him. Others also failed to end slavery until finally, after the loss of more than 600,000 American lives in the Civil War, the United States abolished it through the 1865 ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

American slavery and American freedom took root at the same place and at the same time. In 1619-the same year that colonial Virginia’s House of Burgesses convened in Jamestown and became the New World’s first representative assembly-about 20 enslaved Africans arrived at Jamestown and were sold by Dutch slave traders. The number of slaves in Virginia remained small for several decades, however, until the first dominant labor system-indentured servitude-fell out of favor after 1670. Until then indentured servants, typically young and landless white Englishmen and Englishwomen in search of opportunity, arrived by the thousands. In exchange for passage to Virginia, they agreed to labor in planters’ tobacco fields for terms usually ranging from four to seven years. Planters normally agreed to give them, after their indentures expired, land on which they could establish their own tobacco farms. In the first few decades of settlement, as demand for the crop boomed, such arrangements usually worked in the planters’ favor. Life expectancy in Virginia was short and few servants outlasted their terms of indenture. By the mid-1600s, however, as the survival rate of indentured servants increased, more earned their freedom and began to compete with their former masters. The supply of tobacco rose more quickly than demand and, as prices decreased, tensions between planters and former servants grew.

These tensions exploded in 1676, when Nathaniel Bacon led a group composed primarily of former indentured servants in a rebellion against Virginia’s government. The rebels, upset by the reluctance of Governor William Berkeley and the gentry-dominated House of Burgesses to aid their efforts to expand onto American Indians’ lands, lashed out at both the Indians and the government. After several months the rebellion dissipated, but so, at about the same time, did the practice of voluntary servitude.

In its place developed a system of race-based slavery. With both black and white Virginians living longer, it made better economic sense to own slaves, who would never gain their freedom and compete with masters, than to rent the labor of indentured servants, who would. A few early slaves had gained their freedom, established plantations, acquired servants, and enjoyed liberties shared by white freemen, but beginning in the 1660s Virginia’s legislature passed laws banning interracial marriage; it also stripped African Americans of the rights to own property and carry guns, and it curtailed their freedom of movement. In 1650 only about 300 blacks worked Virginia’s tobacco fields, yet by 1680 there were 3,000 and, by the start of the eighteenth century, nearly 10,000.

Slavery surged not only in Virginia but also in Pennsylvania, where people abducted from Africa and their descendants harvested wheat and oats, and in South Carolina, where by the 1730s rice planters had imported slaves in such quantity that they accounted for two-thirds of the population. The sugar-based economies of Britain’s Caribbean colonies required so much labor that, on some islands, enslaved individuals outnumbered freemen by more than ten to one. Even in the New England colonies, where staplecrop agriculture never took root, the presence of slaves was common and considered unremarkable by most.

Historian Edmund S. Morgan has suggested that the prevalence of slavery in these colonies may have, paradoxically, heightened the sensitivity of white Americans to attacks against their own freedom. Thus, during the crisis preceding the War for Independence Americans frequently cast unpopular British legislation-which taxed them without the consent of their assemblies, curtailed the expansion of their settlements, deprived them of the right to jury trials, and placed them under the watchful eyes of red-coated soldiers ­as evidence of an imperial conspiracy to “enslave” them. American patriots who spoke in such terms did not imagine that they would be forced to toil in tobacco fields; instead, they feared that British officials would deny to them some of the same individual and civil rights that they had denied to enslaved African Americans. George Mason, collaborating with George Washington, warned in the Fairfax Resolves of 1774 that the British Parliament pursued a “regular, systematic plan” to “fix the shackles of slavery upon us.”

As American revolutionaries reflected on the injustice of British usurpations of their freedom and began to universalize the individual rights that they had previously tied to their status as Englishmen, they grew increasingly conscious of the inherent injustice of African-American slavery. Many remained skeptical that blacks possessed the same intellectual capabilities as whites, but few refused to count Africans as members of the human family or possessors of individual rights. When Jefferson affirmed in the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal,” he did not mean all white men. In fact, he attempted to turn the Declaration into a platform from which Americans would denounce the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This he blamed on Britain and its king who, Jefferson wrote, “has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s [sic] most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.” The king was wrong, he asserted, “to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold.” Delegates to the Continental Congress from South Carolina and Georgia, however, vehemently opposed the inclusion of these lines in the Declaration of Independence. Representatives of other states agreed to delete them. Thus began, at the moment of America’s birth, the practice of prioritizing American unity over black Americans’ liberty.

Pragmatism confronted principle not only on the floor of Congress but also on the plantations of many prominent revolutionaries. When Jefferson penned his stirring defense of individual liberty, he owned 200 enslaved individuals. Washington, the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and future first president, was one of the largest slaveholders in Virginia. James Madison-who, like Jefferson and Washington, considered himself an opponent of slavery- was also a slaveholder. So was Mason, whose Virginia Declaration of Rights stands as one of the revolutionary era’s most resounding statements on behalf of human freedom. Had these revolutionaries attempted to free their slaves, they would have courted financial ruin. Alongside their landholdings, slaves constituted the principal asset against which they borrowed. The existence of slavery, moreover, precluded a free market of agricultural labor; they could never afford to pay free people-who could always move west to obtain their own farms, anyway-to till their fields.

Perhaps the most powerful objection to emancipation, however, emerged from the same set of principles that compelled the American revolutionaries to question the justice of slavery. Although Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and Mason considered human bondage a clear violation of individual rights, they trembled when they considered the ways in which emancipation might thwart their republican experiments. Not unlike many non-slaveholders, they considered especially fragile the society that they had helped to create. In the absence of aristocratic selfishness and force, revolutionary American governments relied on virh1e and voluntarism. Virtue they understood as a manly trait; the word, in fact, derives from the Latin noun vir, which means “man.” They considered men to be independent and self-sufficient, made free and responsible by habits borne of necessity. Virtuous citizens made good citizens, the Founders thought. The use of political power for the purpose of exploitation promised the virtuous little and possessed the potential to cost them much. Voluntarism was virtue unleashed: the civic-minded, selfless desire to ask little of one’s community but, because of one’s sense of permanence within it, to give much to it. The Founders, conscious of the degree to which involuntary servitude had rendered slaves dependent and given them cause to resent white society, questioned their qualifications for citizenship. It was dangerous to continue to enslave them, but perilous to emancipate them. Jefferson compared it to holding a wolf by the ears.

These conundrums seemed to preclude an easy fix. Too aware of the injustice of slavery to expect much forgiveness from slaves, in the first decades of the nineteenth century a number of Founders embarked on impractical schemes to purchase the freedom of slaves and “repatriate” them from America to Africa. In the interim, debate about the continued importation of slaves from Africa stirred delegates to the Constitutional Convention. South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney vehemently opposed prohibitions on the slave trade, arguing that the matter was best decided by individual states. The delegates compromised, agreeing that the Constitution would prohibit for twenty years any restrictions on the arrival of newly enslaved Africans. As president, Jefferson availed himself of the opportunity afforded by the Constitution when he prohibited the continued importation of Africans into America in 1808. Yet he had already failed in a 1784 attempt to halt the spread of slavery into the U.S. government’s western territory, which stretched from the Great Lakes south toward the Gulf of Mexico (the compromise Northwest Ordinance of 1787 drew the line at the Ohio River), and in his efforts to institute in Virginia a plan for gradual emancipation (similar to those that passed in Northern states, except that it provided for the education and subsequent deportation of freed African Americans). Of all the Founders, Benjamin Franklin probably took the most unequivocal public stand against involuntary servitude when, in 1790, he signed a strongly worded antislavery petition submitted to Congress by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. This, too, accomplished little. The revolutionary spirit of the postwar decade, combined with the desire of many Upper South plantation owners to shift from labor-intensive tobacco to wheat, created opportunities to reduce the prevalence of slavery in America-especially in the North. Those opportunities not seized upon-especially in the South-would not soon return.

Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793 widened the regional divide. By rendering more efficient the processing of cotton fiber-which in the first half of the nineteenth century possessed a greater value than all other United States exports combined-Whitney’s machine triggered a resurgence of Southern slavery. Meanwhile, the wealth that cotton exports brought to America fueled a booming Northern industrial economy that relied on free labor and created a well­-educated middle class of urban professionals and social activists. These individuals kept alive the Founders’ desire to rid America of slavery, but they also provoked the development of Southern proslavery thought. At best, Southerners of the revolutionary generation had viewed slavery as a necessary evil; by the 1830s, however, slaveholders began to describe it as a positive good. African Americans were civilized Christians, they argued, but their African ancestors were not. In addition, the argument continued, slaves benefited from the paternalistic care of masters who, unlike the Northern employers of “wage slaves,” cared for their subordinates from the cradle to the grave. This new view combined with an older critique of calls for emancipation: since slaves were the property of their masters, any attempt to force their release would be a violation of masters’ property rights.

Regional positions grew more intractable as the North and South vied for control of the West. Proposals to admit into statehood Missouri, Texas, California, Kansas, and Nebraska resulted in controversy as Northerners and Southerners sparred to maintain parity in the Senate. The 1860 election to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, a Republican who opposed the inclusion of additional slave states, sparked secession and the Civil War.

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” Jefferson had prophetically remarked, for “his justice cannot sleep for ever.” Americans paid dearly for the sin of slavery. Efforts by members of the Founding generation failed to identify moderate means to abolish the practice, and hundreds of thousands died because millions had been deprived of the ability to truly live.

Robert M.S. McDonald, Ph.D. United States Military Academy

Suggestions for Further Reading:

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, reprint, 1992.

Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.

Miller, John Chester. The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, reprint, 1991.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery – American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975.

Tise, Larry E. Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

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Slavery Argumentative

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Introduction, historical context, justifications for slavery, critiques of slavery, the legacy of slavery, addressing the legacy.

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In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction.

By Zadie Smith

A philosophy without a politics is common enough. Aesthetes, ethicists, novelists—all may be easily critiqued and found wanting on this basis. But there is also the danger of a politics without a philosophy. A politics unmoored, unprincipled, which holds as its most fundamental commitment its own perpetuation. A Realpolitik that believes itself too subtle—or too pragmatic—to deal with such ethical platitudes as thou shalt not kill. Or: rape is a crime, everywhere and always. But sometimes ethical philosophy reënters the arena, as is happening right now on college campuses all over America. I understand the ethics underpinning the protests to be based on two widely recognized principles:

There is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.

If the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on the weak, then there is a duty to stop the gears by any means necessary.

The first principle sometimes takes the “weak” to mean “whoever has the least power,” and sometimes “whoever suffers most,” but most often a combination of both. The second principle, meanwhile, may be used to defend revolutionary violence, although this interpretation has just as often been repudiated by pacifistic radicals, among whom two of the most famous are, of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr . In the pacifist’s interpretation, the body that we must place between the gears is not that of our enemy but our own. In doing this, we may pay the ultimate price with our actual bodies, in the non-metaphorical sense. More usually, the risk is to our livelihoods, our reputations, our futures. Before these most recent campus protests began, we had an example of this kind of action in the climate movement. For several years now, many people have been protesting the economic and political machinery that perpetuates climate change, by blocking roads, throwing paint, interrupting plays, and committing many other arrestable offenses that can appear ridiculous to skeptics (or, at the very least, performative), but which in truth represent a level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us.

I experienced this not long ago while participating in an XR climate rally in London. When it came to the point in the proceedings where I was asked by my fellow-protesters whether I’d be willing to commit an arrestable offense—one that would likely lead to a conviction and thus make travelling to the United States difficult or even impossible—I’m ashamed to say that I declined that offer. Turns out, I could not give up my relationship with New York City for the future of the planet. I’d just about managed to stop buying plastic bottles (except when very thirsty) and was trying to fly less. But never to see New York again? What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)! Falling at the first hurdle! Anyone who finds themselves rolling their eyes at any young person willing to put their own future into jeopardy for an ethical principle should ask themselves where the limits of their own commitments lie—also whether they’ve bought a plastic bottle or booked a flight recently. A humbling inquiry.

It is difficult to look at the recent Columbia University protests in particular without being reminded of the campus protests of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, some of which happened on the very same lawns. At that time, a cynical political class was forced to observe the spectacle of its own privileged youth standing in solidarity with the weakest historical actors of the moment, a group that included, but was not restricted to, African Americans and the Vietnamese. By placing such people within their ethical zone of interest, young Americans risked both their own academic and personal futures and—in the infamous case of Kent State—their lives. I imagine that the students at Columbia—and protesters on other campuses—fully intend this echo, and, in their unequivocal demand for both a ceasefire and financial divestment from this terrible war, to a certain extent they have achieved it.

But, when I open newspapers and see students dismissing the idea that some of their fellow-students feel, at this particular moment, unsafe on campus, or arguing that such a feeling is simply not worth attending to, given the magnitude of what is occurring in Gaza, I find such sentiments cynical and unworthy of this movement. For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas— it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone. If the concept of safety is foundational to these students’ ethical philosophy (as I take it to be), and, if the protests are committed to reinserting ethical principles into a cynical and corrupt politics, it is not right to divest from these same ethics at the very moment they come into conflict with other imperatives. The point of a foundational ethics is that it is not contingent but foundational. That is precisely its challenge to a corrupt politics.

Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands. (Those brave students who—in supporting the ethical necessity of a ceasefire—find themselves at painful odds with family, friends, faith, or community have already made this calculation.) This flexibility can also have the positive long-term political effect of allowing us to comprehend that, although our duty to the weakest is permanent, the role of “the weakest” is not an existential matter independent of time and space but, rather, a contingent situation, continually subject to change. By contrast, there is a dangerous rigidity to be found in the idea that concern for the dreadful situation of the hostages is somehow in opposition to, or incompatible with, the demand for a ceasefire. Surely a ceasefire—as well as being an ethical necessity—is also in the immediate absolute interest of the hostages, a fact that cannot be erased by tearing their posters off walls.

Part of the significance of a student protest is the ways in which it gives young people the opportunity to insist upon an ethical principle while still being, comparatively speaking, a more rational force than the supposed adults in the room, against whose crazed magical thinking they have been forced to define themselves. The equality of all human life was never a self-evident truth in racially segregated America. There was no way to “win” in Vietnam. Hamas will not be “eliminated.” The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity. The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides, but it’s impossible not to notice that the sort of people who take at face value phrases like “surgical strikes” and “controlled military operation” sometimes need to look at and/or think about dead children specifically in order to refocus their minds on reality.

To send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment? They are putting their own bodies into the machine. They deserve our support and praise. As to which postwar political arrangement any of these students may favor, and on what basis they favor it—that is all an argument for the day after a ceasefire. One state, two states, river to the sea—in my view, their views have no real weight in this particular moment, or very little weight next to the significance of their collective action, which (if I understand it correctly) is focussed on stopping the flow of money that is funding bloody murder, and calling for a ceasefire, the political euphemism that we use to mark the end of bloody murder. After a ceasefire, the criminal events of the past seven months should be tried and judged, and the infinitely difficult business of creating just, humane, and habitable political structures in the region must begin anew. Right now: ceasefire. And, as we make this demand, we might remind ourselves that a ceasefire is not, primarily, a political demand. Primarily, it is an ethical one.

But it is in the nature of the political that we cannot even attend to such ethical imperatives unless we first know the political position of whoever is speaking. (“Where do you stand on Israel/Palestine?”) In these constructed narratives, there are always a series of shibboleths, that is, phrases that can’t be said, or, conversely, phrases that must be said. Once these words or phrases have been spoken ( river to the sea, existential threat, right to defend, one state, two states, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, terrorist ) and one’s positionality established, then and only then will the ethics of the question be attended to (or absolutely ignored). The objection may be raised at this point that I am behaving like a novelist, expressing a philosophy without a politics, or making some rarefied point about language and rhetoric while people commit bloody murder. This would normally be my own view, but, in the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.

It is in fact perhaps the most acute example in the world of the use of words to justify bloody murder, to flatten and erase unbelievably labyrinthine histories, and to deliver the atavistic pleasure of violent simplicity to the many people who seem to believe that merely by saying something they make it so. It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it. It is perhaps because we know these simplifications to be impossible that we insist upon them so passionately. They are shibboleths; they describe a people, by defining them against other people—but the people being described are ourselves. The person who says “We must eliminate Hamas” says this not necessarily because she thinks this is a possible outcome on this earth but because this sentence is the shibboleth that marks her membership in the community that says that. The person who uses the word “Zionist” as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920—that person does not so much bring definitive clarity to the entangled history of Jews and Palestinians as they successfully and soothingly draw a line to mark their own zone of interest and where it ends. And while we all talk, carefully curating our shibboleths, presenting them to others and waiting for them to reveal themselves as with us or against us—while we do all that, bloody murder.

And now here we are, almost at the end of this little stream of words. We’ve arrived at the point at which I must state clearly “where I stand on the issue,” that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own, personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein—by my stating of a position—you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or the other, putting me over there with those who lisp or those who don’t, with the Ephraimites, or with the people of Gilead. Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words—where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do. Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead. ♦

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By Susan B. Glasser

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

By Jay Caspian Kang

By David Remnick

Joseph Epstein, conservative provocateur, tells his life story in full

In two new books, the longtime essayist and culture warrior shows off his wry observations about himself and the world

Humorous, common-sensical, temperamentally conservative, Joseph Epstein may be the best familiar — that is casual, personal — essayist of the last half-century. Not, as he might point out, that there’s a lot of competition. Though occasionally a scourge of modern society’s errancies, Epstein sees himself as essentially a serious reader and “a hedonist of the intellect.” His writing is playful and bookish, the reflections of a wry observer alternately amused and appalled by the world’s never-ending carnival.

Now 87, Epstein has just published his autobiography, “ Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially if You’ve Had a Lucky Life ,” in tandem with “ Familiarity Breeds Content: New and Selected Essays .” This pair of books brings the Epstein oeuvre up to around 30 volumes of sophisticated literary entertainment. While there are some short-story collections (“The Goldin Boys,” “Fabulous Small Jews”), all the other books focus on writers, observations on American life, and topics as various as ambition, envy, snobbery, friendship, charm and gossip. For the record, let me add that I own 14 volumes of Epstein’s views and reviews and would like to own them all.

Little wonder, then, that Epstein’s idea of a good time is an afternoon spent hunched over Herodotus’s “Histories,” Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian” or almost anything by Henry James, with an occasional break to enjoy the latest issue of one of the magazines he subscribes to. In his younger days, there were as many as 25, and most of them probably featured Epstein’s literary journalism at one time or another. In the case of Commentary, he has been contributing pieces for more than 60 years.

As Epstein tells it, no one would have predicted this sort of intellectual life for a kid from Chicago whose main interests while growing up were sports, hanging out, smoking Lucky Strikes and sex. A lackadaisical C student, Myron Joseph Epstein placed 169th in a high school graduating class of 213. Still, he did go on to college — the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — because that’s what was expected of a son from an upper-middle-class Jewish family. But Urbana-Champaign wasn’t a good fit for a jokester and slacker: As he points out, the president of his college fraternity “had all the playfulness of a member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.” No matter. Caught peddling stolen copies of an upcoming accounting exam for $5 a pop, Epstein was summarily expelled.

Fortunately, our lad had already applied for a transfer to the University of Chicago, to which he was admitted the next fall. Given his record, this shows a surprising laxity of standards by that distinguished institution, but for Epstein the move was life-changing. In short order, he underwent a spiritual conversion from good ol’ boy to European intellectual in the making. In the years to come, he would count the novelist Saul Bellow and the sociologist Edward Shils among his close friends, edit the American Scholar, and teach at Northwestern University. His students, he recalls, were “good at school, a skill without any necessary carry-over, like being good at pole-vaulting or playing the harmonica.”

Note the edge to that remark. While “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life” is nostalgia-laden, there’s a hard nut at its center. Epstein feels utter contempt for our nation’s “radical change from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one.” As he explains: “Our parents’ culture and that which came long before them was about the formation of character; the therapeutic culture was about achieving happiness. The former was about courage and honor, the latter about self-esteem and freedom from stress.” This view of America’s current ethos may come across as curmudgeonly and reductionist, but many readers — whatever their political and cultural leanings — would agree with it. Still, such comments have sometimes made their author the focus of nearly histrionic vilification.

Throughout his autobiography, this lifelong Chicagoan seems able to remember the full names of everyone he’s ever met, which suggests Epstein started keeping a journal at an early age. He forthrightly despises several older writers rather similar to himself, calling Clifton Fadiman, author of “The Lifetime Reading Plan,” pretentious, then quite cruelly comparing Mortimer J. Adler, general editor of the “Great Books of the Western World” series, with Sir William Haley, one of those deft, widely read English journalists who make all Americans feel provincial. To Epstein, “no two men were more unalike; Sir William, modest, suave, intellectually sophisticated; Mortimer vain, coarse, intellectually crude.” In effect, Fadiman and Adler are both presented as cultural snake-oil salesmen. Of course, both authors were popularizers and adept at marketing their work, but helping to enrich the intellectual lives of ordinary people doesn’t strike me as an ignoble purpose.

In his own work, Epstein regularly employs humor, bits of slang or wordplay, and brief anecdotes to keep his readers smiling. For instance, in a chapter about an editorial stint at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Epstein relates this story about a colleague named Martin Self:

“During those days, when anti-Vietnam War protests were rife, a young woman in the office wearing a protester’s black armband, asked Martin if he were going to that afternoon’s protest march. ‘No, Naomi,’ he said, ‘afternoons such as this I generally spend at the graveside of George Santayana.’”

Learned wit, no doubt, but everything — syntax, diction, the choice of the philosopher Santayana for reverence — is just perfect.

But Epstein can be earthier, too. Another colleague “was a skirt-chaser extraordinaire," a man "you would not feel safe leaving alone with your great-grandmother.” And of himself, he declares: “I don’t for a moment wish to give the impression that I live unrelievedly on the highbrow level of culture. I live there with a great deal of relief.”

In his many essays, including the sampling in “Familiarity Breeds Content,” Epstein is also markedly “quotacious,” often citing passages from his wide reading to add authority to an argument or simply to share his pleasure in a well-turned observation. Oddly enough, such borrowed finery is largely absent from “Never Say You’ve Had a Happy Life.” One partial exception might be the unpronounceable adjective “immitigable,” which appears all too often. It means unable to be mitigated or softened, and Epstein almost certainly stole it from his friend Shils, who was fond of the word.

Despite his autobiography’s jaunty title, Epstein has seen his share of trouble. As a young man working for an anti-poverty program in Little Rock, he married a waitress after she became pregnant with his child. When they separated a decade later, he found himself with four sons to care for — two from her previous marriage, two from theirs. Burt, the youngest, lost an eye in an accident while a toddler, couldn’t keep a job, fathered a child out of wedlock and eventually died of an opioid overdose at 28. Initially hesitant, Epstein came to adore Burt’s daughter, Annabelle, as did his second wife, Barbara, whom he married when they were both just past 40.

Some pages of “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life” will be familiar to inveterate readers of Epstein’s literary journalism, all of which carries a strong first-person vibe. Not surprisingly, however, the recycled anecdotage feels less sharp or witty the second time around. But overall, this look back over a long life is consistently entertaining, certainly more page-turner than page-stopper. To enjoy Epstein at his very best, though, you should seek out his earlier essay collections such as “The Middle of My Tether,” “Partial Payments” and “A Line Out for a Walk.” Whether he writes about napping or name-dropping or a neglected writer such as Somerset Maugham, his real subject is always, at heart, the wonder and strangeness of human nature.

Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life

Especially if You’ve Had a Lucky Life

By Joseph Epstein

Free Press. 304 pp. $29.99

Familiarity Breeds Content

New and Selected Essays

Simon & Schuster. 464 pp. $20.99

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Slavery and the Civil War Essay

Theme essays. diversity, extra credit option. reconstruction, works cited.

During the period of 1820-1860, the life of white and black people in the South depended on developing the Institute of slavery which shaped not only social but also economic life of the region. The Institute of slavery was primarily for the Southern states, and this feature helped to distinguish the South from the other regions of the USA.

Slavery played the key role in shaping the economic and social life of the South because it influenced the trade and economic relations in the region as well as the social and class structure representing slave owners, white farmers without slaves, and slaves as the main labor force in the region.

The development of the South during the period of 1820-1860 was based on growing cotton intensively. To guarantee the enormous exports of cotton, it was necessary to rely on slaves as the main cheap or almost free workforce. The farmers of the South grew different crops, but the economic success was associated with the farms of those planters who lived in the regions with fertile soil and focused on growing cotton basing on slavery.

Thus, the prosperity of this or that white farmer and planter depended on using slaves in his farm or plantation. Slaves working for planters took the lowest social positions as well as free slaves living in cities whose economic situation was also problematic. The white population of the South was divided into slave owners and yeoman farmers who had no slaves.

Thus, having no opportunities to use the advantages of slavery, yeoman farmers relied on their families’ powers, and they were poorer in comparison with planters (Picture 1). However, not all the planters were equally successful in their economic situation. Many planters owned only a few slaves, and they also had to work at their plantations or perform definite duties.

Slaves were also different in their status because of the functions performed. From this point, the social stratification was necessary not only for dividing the Southern population into black slaves and white owners but also to demonstrate the differences within these two main classes (Davidson et al.).

As a result, different social classes had various cultures. It is important to note that slaves were more common features in spite of their status in families, and they were united regarding the culture which was reflected in their religion, vision, and songs. The difference in the social status of the white population was more obvious, and the single common feature was the prejudice and discrimination against slaves.

Picture 1. Yeoman Farmer’s House

The Civil War became the real challenge for the USA because it changed all the structures and institutions of the country reforming the aspects of the political, economic, and social life. Furthermore, the Civil War brought significant losses and sufferings for both the representatives of the Northern and Southern armies.

It is important to note that the situation of the Union in the war was more advantageous in comparison with the position of the Confederacy during the prolonged period of the war actions.

As a result, the South suffered from more significant economic and social changes as well as from extreme losses in the war in comparison with the North’s costs. Thus, the main impact of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery which changed the economic and social structures of the South and contributed to shifting the focus on the role of federal government.

The Civil War resulted in abolishing slavery and preserving the political unity of the country. Nevertheless, these positive outcomes were achieved at the expense of significant losses in the number of population and in promoting more sufferings for ordinary people. A lot of the Confederacy’s soldiers died at the battlefields, suffering from extreme wounds and the lack of food because of the problems with weapon and food provision.

During the war, the Union focused on abolishing slaves who were proclaimed free. Thus, former slaves from the Southern states were inclined to find jobs in the North or join the Union army.

As a result, the army of the Confederacy also began to suffer from the lack of forces (Davidson et al.). Moreover, the situation was problematic off the battlefield because all the issues of food provision and work at plantations and farms challenged women living in the Southern states.

The forces of the Union army were more balanced, and their losses were less significant than in the Southern states. Furthermore, the end of the war did not change the structure of the social life in the North significantly. The impact of the war was more important for the Southerners who had to build their economic and social life without references to slavery.

The next important change was the alternations in the social role of women. Many women had to work at farms in the South and to perform as nurses in the North (Picture 2). The vision of the women’s role in the society was changed in a way.

However, in spite of the fact that the population of the South had to rebuild the social structure and adapt to the new social and economic realities, the whole economic situation was changed for better with references to intensifying the international trade. Furthermore, the abolishment of slavery was oriented to the social and democratic progress in the country.

Picture 2. “Our Women and the War”. Harper’s Weekly, 1862

Diversity is one of the main characteristic features of the American nation from the early periods of its formation. The American nation cannot be discussed as a stable one because the formation of the nation depends on the active migration processes intensifying the general diversity. As a result, the American nation is characterized by the richness of cultures, values, and lifestyles.

This richness is also typical for the early period of the American history when the country’s population was diverse in relation to ethnicity, cultures, religion, and social status. From this point, diversity directly shaped the American nation because the country’s population never was identical.

The Americans respected diversity if the question was associated with the problem of first migrations and the Americans’ difference from the English population. To win independence, it was necessary to admit the difference from the English people, but diversity was also the trigger for conflicts between the Americans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen as well as Indian tribes.

The ethic diversity was not respected by the first Americans. The further importations of slaves to America worsened the situation, and ethnic diversity increased, involving cultural and social diversity.

Diversity was respected only with references to the negative consequences of slave importation. Thus, the Southerners focused on using black slaves for development of their plantations (Davidson et al.). From this point, white planers concentrated on the difference of blacks and used it for discrimination.

Furthermore, slavery also provoked the cultural and lifestyle diversity between the South and the North of the country which resulted in the Civil War because of impossibility to share different values typical for the Southerners and Northerners. Moreover, the diversity in lifestyles of the Southerners was deeper because it depended on the fact of having or not slaves.

Great religious diversity was also typical for the nation. White population followed different branches of Christianity relating to their roots, and black people developed their own religious movements contributing to diversifying the religious life of the Americans (Davidson et al.).

Thus, the aspects of diversity are reflected in each sphere of the first Americans’ life with references to differences in ethnicities, followed religions, cultures, values, lifestyles, and social patterns. This diversity also provoked a lot of conflicts in the history of the nation.

The role of women in the American society changed depending on the most important political and social changes. The periods of reforms and transformations also promoted the changes in the social positions of women. The most notable changes are typical for the period of the Jacksonian era and for the Civil War period.

The changes in the role of women are closely connected with the development of women’s movements during the 1850s and with the focus on women’s powers off the battlefield during the Civil War period.

During the Jacksonian era, women began to play significant roles in the religious and social life of the country. Having rather limited rights, women could realize their potentials only in relation to families and church work. That is why, many women paid much attention to their church duties and responsibilities.

Later, the church work was expanded, and women began to organize special religious groups in order to contribute to reforming definite aspects of the Church’s progress. Women also were the main members of the prayer meetings, and much attention was drawn to the charity activities and assistance to hospitals (Davidson et al.).

Women also played the significant role in the development of revivalism as the characteristic feature of the period. Moreover, the active church work and the focus on forming organizations was the first step to the progress of the women’s rights movements.

It is important to note that the participation of women in the social life was rather limited during a long period of time that is why membership and belonging to different church organizations as well as development of women’s rights movements contributed to increasing the role of women within the society. Proclaiming the necessity of abolishment, socially active women also concentrated on the idea of suffrage which was achieved later.

The period of the 1850s is closely connected with the growth of the women’s rights movements because it was the period of stating to the democratic rights and freedoms within the society (Davidson et al.). The next important event is the Civil War. The war influenced the position of the Southern white and black women significantly, revealing their powers and ability to overcome a lot of challenges.

The end of the Civil War provided women with the opportunity to achieve all the proclaimed ideals of the women’s rights movements along with changing the position of male and female slaves in the American society.

The development of the American nation is based on pursuing certain ideals and following definite values. The main values which are greatly important for the Americans are associated with the notions which had the significant meaning during the periods of migration and creating the independent state. The two main values are opportunity and equality.

These values are also fixed in the Constitution of the country in order to emphasize their extreme meaning for the whole nation.

Opportunity and equality are the values which are shaped with references to the economic and social ideals because all the Americans are equal, and each American should have the opportunity to achieve the individual goal. Nevertheless, in spite of the proclaimed ideals, the above-mentioned values were discussed during a long period of time only with references to the white population of the country.

The other values typical for the Americans are also based not on the religious, moral or cultural ideals but on the social aspects. During the Jacksonian era, the Americans focused on such values as the democratic society. Following the ideals of rights and freedoms, the American population intended to realize them completely within the developed democratic society (Davidson et al.).

Moreover, these ideals were correlated with such values as equality and opportunity. It is necessary to pay attention to the fact that for many Americans the notions of democratic society, opportunity, and equality were directly connected with the economic growth. That is why, during long periods of time Americans concentrated on achieving freedoms along with pursuing the economic prosperity.

Thus, it is possible to determine such key values which regulate the social attitudes and inclinations of the Americans as equality and opportunity, freedoms and rights. In spite of the fact the USA was the country with the determined role of religion in the society, moral and religious aspects were not proclaimed as the basic values of the nation because of the prolonged focus of the Americans on their independence and prosperity.

From this point, opportunity, equality, freedoms, and rights are discussed as more significant values for the developed nation than the religious principles. The creation of the state independent from the influence of the British Empire resulted in determining the associated values and ideals which were pursued by the Americans during prolonged periods of the nation’s development.

The period of Reconstruction was oriented to adapting African Americans to the realities of the free social life and to rebuilding the economic structure of the South. The end of the Civil War guaranteed the abolishment of slavery, but the question of black people’s equality to the whites was rather controversial.

That is why, the period of Reconstruction was rather complex and had two opposite outcomes for the African Americans’ further life in the society and for the general economic progress of the states. Reconstruction was successful in providing such opportunities for African Americans as education and a choice to live in any region or to select the employer.

However, Reconstruction can also be discussed as a failure because the issues of racism were not overcome during the period, and the era of slavery was changed with the era of strict social segregation leading to significant discrimination of black people.

The positive changes in the life of African Americans after the Civil War were connected with receiving more opportunities for the social progress. Thus, many public schools were opened for the black population in order to increase the level of literacy (Picture 3). Furthermore, the impossibility to support the Southerners’ plantations without the free work of slaves led to changing the economic focus.

Thus, industrialization of the region could contribute to creating more workplaces for African Americans (Davidson et al.). Moreover, the racial and social equality should also be supported with references to providing more political rights for African Americans.

Reconstruction was the period of observing many black politicians at the American political arena. The question of blacks’ suffrage became one of the most discussed issues. From this point, during the period of Reconstruction African Americans did first steps on the path of equality.

Nevertheless, Reconstruction was also a great failure. The South remained unchanged in relation to the social relations between the whites and blacks. After the Civil War, segregation was intensified. The economic and social pressure as well as discrimination against the blacks was based on the developed concept of racism (Davidson et al.).

The Southerners preserved the prejudiced attitude toward the blacks, and prejudice and discrimination became the main challenge for African Americans in all the spheres of the life.

In spite of definite successes of Reconstruction, African Americans suffered from the results of segregation and discrimination, and they were prevented from changing their economic and social status.

Picture 3. Public Schools

Davidson, James, Brian DeLay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark Lytle, and Michael Stoff. US: A Narrative History . USA: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Print.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Slavery and the Civil War." December 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/.

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• American Reconstruction Period
• American History: Reconstruction, 1865 -1877
• The Los Angeles Zoot-Suit Riots and Its Effects
• History of American Foreign Policy
• Literary Works' Views on Slavery in the United States
• The Main Persons in Native American History
• "From Migrant to Acadian: A North American Border People, 1604–1755" by Naomi Griffiths

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