Slavery

Before I delve into the Civil War and the quilts made during that period, I want to investigate the institution of slavery and what provoked it on such a mass scale. Slavery had always been a part of humanity as a way of expanding the gene pool in small civilizations. Tribal cultures around the world raided neighboring tribes to steal livestock, women and children. Though they were initially slaves, they were eventually adopted or married into the tribe after a period of forced labor and indoctrination. The ancient Egyptians practiced slavery and forced labor on a grand scale to build their pyramids. Ancient Persians primarily enslaved women for sex. Ancient Roman aristocrats perceived slaves as property and personal servants for life. As the world became more civilized, slavery died in all but the most primitive parts of the world. At the dawn of the 16th century, it returned and exploded on a scale never before seen in human history.  

Slavery was a European industry headed by Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, France and the Netherlands. It began with the discovery of sugar. Sugar is native to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. It was discovered by Alexander the Great in 325 BCE. Crusaders brought sugar back to Europe in the 12th century. Europeans had become addicted to sugar, but it was expensive trading with India. 

European migrants, under the direction of the Kingdom of Castile, invaded and colonized the Canary Islands during the 15th century, where they converted much of the land to the production of wine and sugar. Along with this, they also captured native Canary Islanders, the Guanches, to use as slaves both on the Islands and across the Christian Mediterranean. Sugarcane was grown on the Canary Islands and refined in Venice before it was sold to European monarchs. Spain wanted to make this process cheaper in order to maximize profits. Slavery strongly correlated with Europe's need for labor, especially for the labor-intensive sugar colonies in the Caribbean operated by England, France, Spain, the Dutch Republic and to a lesser degree, Sweden and Denmark. 

We all know that the New World was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492. He wasn’t the first explorer to land on the continent, but he was the first to capitalize on it. In August 1492 Christopher Columbus stopped in the Canary Islands before sailing in search of the West Indies. He carried cuttings of sugarcane to the Caribbean while the Portuguese took sugar cane to Brazil. The first sugar-cane harvest in Hispaniola took place in 1501. 

The Virgin Islands were originally inhabited by the Arawak, Carib and Cermic people, almost all of whom are thought to have perished during the colonial period due to enslavement, foreign disease, and mass extermination brought about by European colonists. They were replaced by slaves from West Africa to cultivate sugar cane, tobacco and indigo. Much of the South American population was also decimated by pestilence and were replaced by African slaves. Many Africans had a limited natural immunity to yellow fever and malaria; but malnutrition, poor housing, inadequate clothing, and overwork contributed to a high mortality rate. This meant they had to be continually replaced. Thus, the Atlantic slave trade was born.

Sugar became highly popular and by the 19th century, sugar came to be considered a necessity. This evolution of taste and demand for sugar as an essential food ingredient resulted in major economic and social changes. Demand drove, in part, the colonization of tropical islands and areas where labor-intensive sugarcane plantations and sugar manufacturing could be successful. The demand for cheap labor to perform the cultivation and processing increased the demand for slaves from West Africa.

Columbus also discovered extra long staple cotton in South America and brought it back to Spain. It was much better quality than the tree cotton grown in India. English colonists later planted it in the British West Indies where it was tended by slaves from West Africa. By the 1650s, Barbados had become the first British colony to export cotton to England and Europe.

In 1498, Vasco Da Gama discovered a sea route to India. Many indigo plantations were later established by European powers in the tropical climates of South America and the West Indies. Spain imported the dye from its colonies in El Salvador, Haiti, Jamaica and Puerto Rico. 

Colonial Slavery 1508 - 1808

In 1508, Ponce de Leon established the first settlement near present-day San Juan and began enslaving the indigenous Tainos. In 1513, to supplement the dwindling Tainos population, the first enslaved African people were imported to Puerto Rico. Many sugar mills had been constructed in Cuba and Jamaica by the 1520s. The first Africans enslaved within the continental United States arrived via Santo Domingo to the San Miguel de Gualdape colony (most likely located in the Winyah Bay area of present-day South Carolina), founded by Spanish explorer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón in 1526. De Ayllón and many of the colonists died shortly afterwards of an epidemic and the colony was abandoned. The settlers and the enslaved people who had not escaped returned to Santo Domingo.

The Portuguese, in the 16th century, were the first to engage in the Atlantic slave trade. Many Africans were captured by warring tribespeople and sold to Portuguese slave traders. They were transported on coffin ships to South America and the Caribbean. It is worth noting that Kongo adopted Catholicism in the 15th century from Portugal and often took Portuguese names during baptism. However, many Congolese were taken as slaves by the Portuguese. In 1526, they completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil and other European countries soon followed. By 1540, there were 800 cane-sugar mills in Santa Catarina Island and another 2,000 on the north coast of Brazil. 

In 1539, Hernando de Soto transported Canarian Isleños to La Florida. Some Canary Islanders went to Florida with Pedro Menéndez, who founded St. Augustine, the first permanent European settlement in 1565. While in Brazil, Spanish explorers discovered Logwood which became an important dye in Spain. It was so important that they rounded up Africans by the thousands and transported them to South America while they shipped South Americans and later Africans to their colonies in Louisiana and Jamaica. Spain colonized Mexico and Central America for logwood trees that were chopped down and exported to Antwerp that was renowned for its black dye industry. Belize developed as an English logging camp inhabited from the 17-18th centuries. 

Spanish explorers also transplanted prickly pear cactus from South America and Mexico in the Canary Islands. The insects that live on the cactus are crushed to produce Cochineal which is much more fade resistant and less labor intensive than producing Turkey red which it replaced. In 1618 Barbary pirates attacked Lanzarote and La Gomera taking 1000 captives from the Canary Islands to be sold as slaves in North Africa.

Puritan New England, Virginia, Spanish Florida, and the Carolina colonies engaged in large-scale enslavement of Native Americans. In New England, slave raiding accompanied the Pequot War and King Philip's War. Enslaved Indians were in Jamestown. The English slavers in cooperation with the Westo and Occaneechi peoples, conducted slave raids in what is now Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and possibly Alabama. African slaves were the best answer to the labor shortage in the New World because American Indians were more familiar with the environment, and would often successfully escape into the wilderness that African slaves had much more difficulty surviving in.

Only a fraction of the enslaved Africans brought to the New World ended up in British North America, 5-7%. By the end of the 17th century, colonists were importing many Africans and mulattoes from the Caribbean islands to satisfy the demand for labor. There was limited demand for slaves, and trade with America was not profitable, while trade with the West Indies and South America remained lucrative.

Slavery in the early American colonies was an indentured servitude, even for blacks. Indentured servitude is contract labor that ends after a period of 4-7 years. It is not lifetime forced bondage. Indentured servants received room and board, clothes, and training in an occupation. After that they received cash, tools, and land, and became ordinary settlers. English Seperatists who fled to Holland to escape religious persecution were granted passage to America. After working out their contracts for passage money to Virginia and completing their indenture, each was granted 50 acres of land. Other English indentured servants were teenagers whose father sold their labor voluntarily in return for free passage to the colonies. Many indentured servants were Scottish and Irish "traitors to the English crown" who were sent to work on tobacco plantations as punishment for "war crimes." In the 18th century, some Scots left voluntarily to start a new life after the Battle of Culloden. They would later fight in the southern campaigns of the Revolutionary War.

New York

The very name "Wall Street" is born of slavery, with enslaved Africans building a wall in 1663 to protect Dutch settlers from Indian raids. This walkway and wooden fence, made up of pointed logs and running river to river, later was known as Wall Street, the home of world finance. Enslaved and free Africans were largely responsible for the construction of the early city, first by clearing land, then by building a fort, mills, bridges, stone houses, the first city hall, the docks, the city prison, Dutch and English churches, the city hospital and Fraunces Tavern. At the corner of Wall Street and Broadway, they helped erect Trinity Church.

In 1711, the city's Common Council established a Meal Market at Wall and Water streets for hiring slave labor and auctioning enslaved Africans who disembarked in Manhattan after their arduous trans-Atlantic journey. The merchants used these laborers to operate the port and in such trades as ship carpentry and printing. Africans also engaged in heavy transport, construction work, domestic labor, farming and milling. Their efforts were part of the euphemistically titled Triangular Trade: Africans living on what was then called the Gold Coast — with Africans being considered black gold — were bought using New England rum; the Africans were sold in the West Indies to work the fields to create sugar and molasses; and the sugarcane products were taken to New York and New England to be made into rum.

Pier 17 on the East River was a disembarkation point, as were all other slips and docks along lower Manhattan where the Hudson and East rivers rippled by. Today the pier is known as the South Street Seaport, a popular destination for gift-buying tourists who just happen to be visiting where enslaved Africans first touched land in chains. From 1825 on, the seaport of South Street outdid the combined trade of its two closest competitors in Boston and Philadelphia in volume and value of imports and exports. Long before the Civil War loomed, New York, after London and Paris, had become the third major city of the western world. Its glory was built largely of cotton, the product of backbreaking labor.

From seed to cloth, Northern merchants, shippers and financial institutions in New York controlled nearly every aspect of cotton production and trade. Only large banks in Manhatten or London could extend to plantation owners the credit they needed to buy slaves between planting and selling their crops.

The Buttonwood Agreement, which started what became the New York Stock Exchange, was signed in 1792 under a buttonwood tree in front of 68 Wall Street, about a block away from the slave market at the intersection of Wall and Water streets. The agreement covered transactions and companies involved in the slave trade, including shipping, insurance and cotton. Granted, many white folks did indeed help build America — as they profited from slavery. John Jacob Astor, who was born in Germany in 1763, became America's first multimillionaire, making his fortune in furs, the China trade and cotton transportation, part of the slave trade. Astor, who died at age 84 in 1848, is the namesake of the Waldorf Astoria hotel and neighborhoods in New York City.

Moses Taylor, who helped finance the illegal slave trade, had his offices at 55 South Street, now part of the 111 Wall Street complex. His decades-long banking operations evolved into Citibank. He sat on the boards of firms that became Con Edison, Bethlehem Steel and AT&T. When Taylor died in 1882, at age 76, his estate was worth $40 million to $50 million, or roughly $44 billion in current calculations.

Philip Livingston of Dutchess County, just north of New York City, was probably the New York merchant most involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, endowed Yale University's first professorship using his slave-based wealth. He was also a founder of King's College, which later became Columbia University, and his name is found on homes and estates, some of them now historical sites, in the Hudson Valley and on Livingston Street in Brooklyn Heights.

There were also the three siblings — Henry Lehman and his two brothers, Mayer and Emanuel — who had emigrated from Germany to Alabama and, by 1850, formed Lehman Brothers, a merchandising business that quickly evolved into a cotton-brokerage firm. In 1870 the two surviving brothers moved to New York and helped establish the New York Cotton Exchange, the first commodities-futures trading venture. The company also helped found the Coffee Exchange and the Petroleum Exchange. Their international investment firm died in 2008 as the great recession got under way.

Another of the era's top businessmen, Charles L. Tiffany, got the financing to open a fancy-goods store in 1837 at 259 Broadway from his father, who operated a cotton mill in eastern Connecticut using cotton picked by Southern slave labor. Thus, slave profits were instrumental in launching what became Tiffany & Co., the internationally renowned jeweler, whose current New York City offices are on Fifth Avenue and at 37 Wall Street.

The founders of Brown Bros. Harriman built their bank by lending millions of dollars to Southern planters and arranging for the shipment and sale of slave-grown cotton in New England and Great Britain during the 1800s. When the bank took control of three Louisiana plantations at one point, it also got 346 enslaved Africans. 

And finally, after all that work, whites got to enjoy New York as the city played host to the 100,000 planters and their families who came north for cooler weather during the summer while their slaves worked for abusive overseers. Hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues geared up for their special visitors, offering Southern hospitality up north, as plantation owners rested from ordering about the people who were essential in creating America and its wealth.

Virginia Colony

The first group of 20 or so West Africans imported from the Caribbean arrived at Cape Comfort aboard the James ship in August 1619. They were sold in Jamestown, Virginia to work as indentured servants. 

John Punch was the first documented black slave in America. He was born in present-day Cameroon in West Africa and was an indentured servant of Hugh Gwyn.

 Genealogical research indicates that some time in the 1630s, John Punch married a white woman, likely also an indentured servant. By 1637 he had fathered a son called John Bunch (labelled by genealogists as "John Bunch I"). [The name difference is probably due to a misspelling by a census enumerator or misreading by a genealogist, both of which are quite common.] Punch and his wife are known as the first black and white couple in the colonies who left traceable descendants. The Punch/Bunch descendants were free black people who became successful land-owners in Virginia. Some lines eventually assimilated as white, after generations of marrying white.

Punch was judicially punished with a life of servitude for escaping to Maryland in 1640. The Punch case was significant because it established the disparity between his sentence as a negro and that of the two European indentured servants who escaped with him (Victor, a Dutchman and James Gregory, a Scotsman). When they were captured, all three were sentenced to 30 lashes each. Public flogging was a common punishment meted out to both whites and blacks. There is a historic Whipping Tree in front of the courthouse in Seminole, Oklahoma, so the practice wasn't isolated to the Deep South or only associated with slavery.

Victor and James were sentenced to an additional four years of servitude. However, John Punch, the African, was sentenced to servitude for the rest of his life. The difference in penalties makes this one of the first cases to show a racial distinction between black and white indentured servants. It is the first documented case in Virginia of an African sentenced to a lifetime of servitude.

Anthony Johnson was a black Angolan who was one of the original group of 20. He was born a Catholic in the Kingdom of Kongo (present-day Angola) in 1600. He was captured by enemy tribesmen and sold to Arab slave traders. He was then sold to a merchant working for the Virginia Company. In Jamestown, he was sold as an indentured servant to a white planter named Bennet to work on his tobacco farm. He completed his term of indenture in 1623 and was granted his freedom. He only worked for 4 years and 5 months. After acquiring his freedom, Johnson purchased the contracts of five indentured servants (4 white and one black). Johnson purchased John Casor, a black endentured servant in the 1640s.

By 1651, he had increased his holdings to 250 acres of land and later established a tobacco farm in Maryland. He attained great wealth and became the patriarch of a community of the first Negro property owners in America. He also became the first black property owner to own black slaves after a case precedent was set in the Punch case. In 1653, Casor approached Captain Goldsmith and claimed that his servitude had ended seven years earlier and that he was being held illegally by Johnson. Robert Parker, a white planter, offered Casor work and signed a contract with him.

In 1654, Johnson sued Parker in the Northampton Court for the return of Casor. In 1655, the court ruled that Johnson could hold Casor indefinitely. The court gave judicial sanction for a black man to own a slave of his own race, thus setting a legal precedent for permanent slavery. This was the first instance of a judicial determination in the Thirteen Colonies holding that a person who had committed no crime could be held in servitude for life. Johnson became the first slave owner and Casor, the first black chattel slave. By 1830, there were 3,775 black slaveholders of mixed race in the South who owned a combined 12,760 black slaves. 80% of those black slaveholders were in Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland.

In 1662 the Virginia Colony passed a law that children in the colony were born with the status of their mother. This meant that the children of slave women were born into slavery, even if their fathers were free, English and white. This was a reversal of English common law, which held that the children of English subjects took the social status of their father. Africans were considered foreigners and thus were not English subjects. Under this law, children born of a free white mother and Negro father were born free. 

In 1670 the colonial assembly of Virginia passed a law prohibiting free and baptized negroes and Indians from purchasing Christians (meaning English or European whites) but allowing them to buy people of their own race.

In 1691, the law was amended; so that mixed-race children had to serve as indentured servants for a period of 30 years while the mother would be fined fifteen pounds sterling. If the mother failed to pay the fine within a month of birth, she was indentured herself for five years. This was the beginning of generational slavery.

In 1699 Virginia passed a law deporting all free blacks to Sierra Leone, virtually defining as slaves all people of African descent who remained in the colony. But many new free colored families continued to be formed during the colonial years by the close relationships among the working class. At this time, there were only about 300 people of African origin living in the Virginia Colony, about 1% of an estimated population of 30,000. In this early period, free blacks enjoyed "relative equality" with the white community. About 20% of the free black Virginians owned their own homes. 

In September 1705 a man referred to by researchers as John Bunch III (a great grandson of John Punch) petitioned the General Court of Virginia for permission to publish banns for his marriage to Sarah Slayden, a white woman. Their minister had refused to publish the banns. There had been a ban on marriages between Negroes and whites, but Bunch posed a challenge, as he was the son of a white woman, with only a degree of African ancestry. At the time, mulatto meant a person of half Negro and half white ancestry, but he was 7/8ths white and 1/8th black. He appealed the denial to the General Court of Virginia. The Court's decision is unknown, but in October 1705 the General Court of Virginia issued a statute expanding the use of the term "mulatto." The court said a mulatto was someone who was a "child, grandchild, or great-grandchild of a black or Native American."

Atlantic Creole is a term used to describe the charter generation of indentured servants brought to America before 1660. These servants had roots in Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. They were of mixed race primarily descended from European fathers and African mothers. Some of these mixed-race "Atlantic Creoles" are today called "Latino", if they are descended from Portuguese or Spanish fathers. In the Chesapeake Bay Colony, many of the Atlantic Creoles intermarried with their English neighbors, adopted English surnames, became property owners and farmers, and owned slaves in turn. The families became well-established, with numerous free descendants by the time of the American Revolution.

Through continued intermarriage with white families in Virginia, Bunch ancestors probably were identified as white as early as 1720. Members of this line migrated into Tennessee and Kansas. The Bunch surname also became associated with a group of racially mixed families known as Melungeon in Tennessee. Another line migrated into North Carolina where they were classified in some records as mulatto.

In the early nineteenth century, racially mixed people of less than one-eighth African or Native American ancestry (equivalent to one great-grandparent) were considered legally white. Many racially mixed people lived as white in frontier areas, where they were treated in accordance with their community and fulfillment of citizen obligations.

The Five Civilized Tribes owned black slaves after 1800 and brought 15,000 slaves with them into Indian Territory during the Great Removal in 1837. This made the eastern half of Oklahoma a Southern slave-owning and cotton-growing territory. Nine Civil War battles were fought by Native tribes in northeastern Oklahoma. Confederate allied tribes were pushed south of present-day I-40 and east of I-35. 

In 1816, a group of wealthy European-Americans, some of whom were abolitionists and others who were racial segregationists, founded the American Colonization Society with the express desire of returning African Americans who were in the United States to West Africa. In 1820, they sent their first ship to Liberia, and within a decade around two thousand African Americans had been settled in the west African country. Such re-settlement continued throughout the 19th century, following the deterioration of race relations in the southern states after Reconstruction in 1877.

As a side note, the Masonic 18th Landmark for making a man a Mason states that "a man must be born of a free mother." The Virginia Colony was the birthplace of Freemasonry in America. Fast forward 200 years and it was a few individual Masons who established the KKK that acted as the militant arm of the Democrat Party during the Jim Crow era.

In 1924, Virginia adopted the "one drop rule" under its Racial Integrity Act which defined as black anyone with any known black ancestry, no matter how limited.

Atlantic Slave Trade Ends

In 1625, Barbary pirates from North Africa began to seize North American colonists. Roughly 700 Anglo Americans were held captive in North Africa as slaves between 1785 and 1815. Some captives used their experiences to criticize slavery in the United States. The Barbary situation led directly to the creation of the United States Navy in 1794. While the United States managed to secure peace treaties, it was obliged to pay tribute for protection from attack. Payments in ransom and tribute to the Barbary States amounted to 20% of United States government annual expenditures in 1800. The First Barbary War in 1801 and the Second Barbary War in 1815, led to more favorable peace terms ending the payment of tribute.

In 1747, Andreas Sigismund Marggraf of Germany announced the discovery of sugar in beets and devised a method using alcohol to extract it. Sugar was a luxury in Europe until it became more widely available due to the rise of beet sugar in Prussia, and later in France under Napoleon. Sugar cane plantations would no longer be necessary.

Slavery ended in French Haiti after the Haitian Revolution in 1791. The revolt resulted in a global cotton shortage. Europe would need a new source of cotton. Denmark was the first country to ban the African trade through legislation in 1792, which took effect in 1803. The United States Congress passed the Slave Trade Act in 1794, which prohibited the building or outfitting of ships in the U.S. for use in the slave trade. In 1805 the British Order-in-Council had restricted the importation of slaves into colonies that had been captured from France and the Netherlands. Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, imposing stiff fines for any slave found aboard a British ship, though it continued internally in the Caribbean until the 1820s. In 1807 Congress outlawed the importation of slaves which took effect on January 1, 1808. In 1810 an Anglo-Portuguese treaty was signed whereby Portugal agreed to restrict its trade into its colonies. In the 1813 Anglo-Swedish treaty, Sweden outlawed its slave trade. In the Treaty of Paris, France agreed to abolish its slave trade within five years. In the 1814, Anglo-Netherlands treaty, the Dutch outlawed their slave trade. The last country to ban the Atlantic slave trade was Brazil in 1831. However, a vibrant illegal trade continued to ship large numbers of enslaved people to Brazil and also to Cuba until the 1860s, when British enforcement and further diplomacy finally ended the Atlantic slave trade. In 1870 Portugal ended the last trade route with the Americas. In Brazil, slavery was not ended until 1888, making it the last country in the Americas to end involuntary servitude.

Between 1807 and 1860, the Royal Navy's Squadron seized approximately 1,600 ships involved in the slave trade and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard these vessels. Several hundred slaves a year were transported by the navy to the British colony of Sierra Leone, where they were made to serve as "apprentices" in the colonial economy until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

I think what provoked the end of the African slave trade aside from the Haitian Revolution and the Barbary Wars was the fact that the naturalized black population had grown and developed a resistance to disease as the result of breeding with indigenous populations and slave women being raped by white plantation owners. Transporting and selling Africans was no longer necessary.

Slavery in the South

Up until the rolling cotton gin was invented in 1840, the average plantation only had about 20-50 slaves who would've been treated like family. Slaves in the South were housed, clothed, fed and medically treated when necessary. They were well cared for. Contrary to popular belief, they were also paid for extra work or entertainment. How else could they purchase their freedom? We also think slaves were forced to eat pig offal, but I need to remind readers that nose to tail cuisine is a standard practice worldwide even today. Haggis, the national dish of Scotland is a sheep heart and lungs cooked inside the sheep's stomach. Southern Haggis encorporated pig offal. Poor whites in the South ate the same food that slaves ate because neither one had a choice. I’ll venture to say that slaves ate better and had a better survival rate than poor whites who didn’t have a wealthy plantation owner to care for them. Black pudding or blood sausage and sweatbreads are still common fare in England. Chitlins (fried pig intestine) are still a Southern American delicacy. Only in modern America do we consume only the choicest cuts of meat and throw out the entire rest of the animal.

It's easy for us to look at the past through a modern lens and criticize slavery in the South as being cruel. In many ways, it was cruel. However, I think our perception has been altered by Hollywood films and race baiters. Recent discoveries have uncovered the truth and has made us realize that we've been spoonfed a bunch of lies. In 1838, Jesuits in Maryland sold 272 slaves to plantations in Louisiana to benefit Georgetown University, which owes its existence to this transaction. So, churches and universities owned slaves as well. Slavery was not exclusive to cash crop industries. We don't see this in the movies.

Even though Congress had abolished the Atlantic slave trade, it was allowed to continue internally. The last recorded slave ship to land on U.S. soil was the Clotilde, which in 1859 illegally smuggled a number of Africans into the town of Mobile, Alabama. The last survivor of the voyage was Cudjoe Lewis who died in 1935. Residents of Gee's Bend, Alabama known for its unique African quilts are descended from these African slaves who lived on the Pettway Plantation.

We always want to blame the Southern states for slavery as though the North didn't play a role in it. However, it was New York banks and insurance companies that funded slavery in the South. White plantation owners got caught up in a brutal system they would come to regret within only two generations. That’s right! The height of slavery in the South only lasted from 1830-1865, 35 years. 

The financial rules we have today were established by banks and insurance companies during slavery and haven't changed. The banks loaned money to Southern planters who mortgaged their plantations to buy slaves. Therefore, the slaves and the plantations were legally the property of the banks. The Nine-Tenths Possession Rule means that the lien holder owns 90% of the property until the loan is paid and the planter holds a 10% interest. The bank also purchased life insurance policies on its slaves to protect its investment against loss or damage. This means that Southern planters were in debt up to their eyeballs. They couldn't sell their slaves because you can't sell mortgaged property. If a planter defaulted on a loan payment, the bank had the right of repossession and would have re-sold the slaves to satisfy the debt. I believe this is what happened when most slave families were separated during the first 20 years of this period. JP Morgan Chase Bank is on record as having accepted 13,000 slaves as collateral and owned 1,250 slaves that had been repossessed. Eighteen other companies owned slaves. The most well known among them are: Lloyd's of London, Fleet Boston, RJ Reynolds Tobacco, Brown & Williamson, CSX Corporation and Lehman Brothers.

If a mortgaged slave ran away, died before the debt was paid or was injured beyond his/her ability to work, the bank had the right to sue for loss or damages which would've been necessary to file an insurance claim. An insurance company would only reimburse a bank for any sum not awarded by a judge. Why then, would a planter beat a mortgaged slave to near death or kill one? He wouldn't because he couldn't afford to. Slaves were only punished by flogging if they ran away and were caught. The concept is no different than punishing children for the same reason, even if the punishment was far more severe for slaves than it would be in modern times. I should also add that flogging was done with a cat-o-nine tails, not with a bullwhip as is portrayed in films. Regardless, I'm sure the lashing still hurt like hell. Banks also hired slave catchers to retrieve runaway slaves. Many free blacks in the North were abducted and transported to the South where they were forced into slavery.

Northern industries were just as responsible for the welfare of slaves as the planter. Textile mills and haberdasheries provided slaves with clothing and shoes. This charity took some of the strain off of the planters. During the winter months when plantations were stagnant, slaves were transported to the North where they built the underground railway system connecting factories and states. Those underground subways still exist, though they've been upgraded. Have you ever wondered why slaves wanted to run to New York or why the route they took was called the Underground Railroad? Well, now you know.

When you live in an agrarian society and your entire livelihood is dependent upon crop production, all sorts of things can go wrong. Drought, torrential rains and flooding, unpredictable freezes, soil condition and disease, crop failure and pestilence are among the many concerns of farmers even today. Boll weevils could decimate a cotton field and leave a planter in financial ruin. I'm sure this happened more times than history has shown us. They didn't just attack cotton either. They also attacked tobacco, corn, tomatoes, peaches, okra and cowpeas--almost the entire Southern food supply!

Its arrival near Brownsville, Texas was first documented in 1892, but I'm sure it was already in the South. The boll weevil migrated from Mexico to the U.S. and spread rapidly throughout the Cotton Belt. By the 1920s, the South was all but destroyed. It had cost America's cotton producers more than $15 billion - from yield losses and costs to control the insect. There's a Boll Weevil Eradication Act in Oklahoma and an organization dedicated to the extermination of boll weevils. They're that much of a threat to the cotton industry and during the 1800s, nothing could be done about them. I can only imagine the stress and starvation that resulted from a boll weevil infestation, and it was no one's fault. But, the banks still demanded their money. No Hollywood film has ever depicted this reality. Hollywood has only one narrative to portray in films about the South or slavery in general. 

The only alternative to the bank’s death grip was for planters to breed their own slaves. Any slave born on the plantation was owned by the planter. A financially strained planter could sell privately owned slaves to alleviate some of his debt. He could also farm them out to other planters or send them to New York to build the underground railway system. He could do whatever he wanted with his own slaves and this is where the cruelty comes into play. As for slave girls and women being raped by their masters, I will only say that poor white women were beaten and raped by white men just as they are today. In Oklahoma, we didn't have a law against child molestation until 1945 (after the Depression when it was common for parents to prostitute their female children to older men). Our first rape law was passed in 1975 and our age of consent law was passed in 1980. So, there ya go. Rape and child molestation weren't considered crimes back then. It was only a crime if a black man touched a white woman. "Fancy" was a code word that indicated a slave girl or young woman was suitable for, or trained for sexual use. It spilled over to include white girls as well and was the inspiration for a Reba McEntire song. 

The lighter the woman's skin, the more desirable and valuable she was. The terms, "high yellow" and "high cotton" referred to these light skinned women. Special markets for the fancy girl trade existed in New Orleans and Lexington, Kentucky. Those considered educated and refined, were purchased by the wealthiest clients to become personal sexual companions. Half breeds were called mulattoes; quarter Africans were quadroons; and, 1/8 Africans called octoroons were very sought after for their light complexion. This practice was especially common in Haiti where both Frenchmen and mixed slaves enjoyed a practice called Plaçage where a man could socially have a slave for a mistress, but not legally marry her. This practice was continued in Louisiana when plantation owners and their slaves immigrated there after the Revolt.

It's a myth that slaves weren't allowed to read and write. Several abolitionist planters defied the norm especially concerning their own mixed race children. In 1835, Oberlin College in Wellington, Ohio became the first white college to admit both blacks and women. It was also part of the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves running to Canada. In 1856, Sarah Jane Woodson Early was among the first African American women to graduate from college and the first African American woman to be a college instructor. She was hired in 1858 by the Wilberforce College, also in Ohio to teach English and Latin. Wilberforce was founded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the first college to be owned and operated by African Americans. She left Wilberforce to teach at an African American girls’ school in North Carolina in 1868. Many wealthy planters in the South sent their mixed race children to Wilberforce. Two hundred mixed race plantation students were enrolled there by 1861. I bet you'll never see this in a Hollywood film! 

Several African American women published poetry, biographies and novels during the second half of the 19th century. Harriet Jacobs (1813 - 1897) was a slave who escaped to New York in 1835 and published her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl under the pseudonym Linda Brent in 1861. Today, it is regarded as the most in-depth slave narrative written by a black woman in America. Elizabeth Keckley (1818 - 1907) was a biracial child of an enslaved mother and her owner. She worked as a seamstress while enslaved in Missouri and saved $1,200 to purchase her freedom in 1855. She published her memoir Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House in 1868. Sarah Jane Woodson Early published a biography of her husband and how he rose from slavery in The Life and Labors of Rev. Jordan W. Early. Other African American women of note are Hallie Quinn Brown, Anna Julia Cooper and Fannie Jackson Coppin.

Civil War Enslavement by the Union Army

The future of former slaves remained sealed in the cotton fields. Blacks were denied economic and physical mobility by federal government policy, by the racial animosity of Northern whites, and by the enduring need for cotton labor in the South. The federal government was forced to confront the question of what to do with slave refugees of the war and those who had escaped behind Union lines. In 1863 Union Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas in the Mississippi Valley devised a solution, a form of containment policy, whereby freed slaves would remain in the South. They would be used in the military service, or placed on the abandoned cotton plantations to till the ground. Former slaves were to be contracted to work on the abandoned plantations – many around Vicksburg. Labor guidelines, such as $10 a month pay and a 10-hour day, were posted. If a laborer missed two hours of work a day, he lost one-half of his day’s pay. The former slaves were not allowed to leave the plantation without a pass. The white Northern lessees of the plantations were generally driven by money. As many as two-thirds of the labor force was thought to have been defrauded of their wages in 1864.

Reconstruction

After the war ended in 1865, the future of cotton land remained under white southern control. Northern Republican businessmen were firmly opposed to confiscation of lands from southern plantation owners and actively supported the resumption of cotton production by means of large plantations under the management of landowners.

The economic importance of cotton had not diminished after the war. In fact, the federal government and northern capitalists were well aware that restoration of cotton production was critical to the financial recovery of the nation. Cotton exports were needed to help reduce the huge federal debt and to stabilize monetary affairs in order to fund economic development, particularly railroads.

America regained its sought-after position as the world’s leading producer of cotton. By 1870, sharecroppers, small farmers, and plantation owners in the American south had produced more cotton than they had in 1860, and by 1880, they exported more cotton. For 134 years, from 1803 to 1937, America was the world’s leading cotton exporter.

African Colonization

The North was backed by money from England that funded the Union Army during the Civil War with the exception that slavery would be abolished if they won. If they lost, the money had to be repaid. We all know what happened in 1865. The South lost and slavery in the United States was abolished.

What I find so interesting is that England didn’t really care about the abolition of slavery. They wanted to weaken the United States economy and take out their competition. The United States had become a rival in terms of natural resources. It was becoming a powerful nation and it had just lost the bulk of its labor force during the war and as a result of abolition. 

In as little as eleven years after the Civil War, England was in a battle with Spain, France, Belgium and Italy over controlling interests in Africa—a continent rich in copper, tin, gold, diamonds, rubber, cotton, cocoa, tea, palm oil and ivory. This is when the worst atrocities were committed against Africans, and it happened in their own country. The Belgian King Leopold II discovered rubber trees in the Congo. The natural rubber was tapped and then, exported to Europe for refinement. 

King Leopold ordered the amputation of the hands and feet of men, women and children if they didn’t work fast enough. This was in addition to brutal beatings. Failure to meet their rubber collection quotas resulted in death. From 1876-1914, it is estimated that 15 million Congolese died from a combination of brutality, smallpox, swine flu and dysentery. The only event in history that could compare to it would be the Holocaust. 

The first international protest occurred in 1890 when George Washington Williams, an African American Civil War soldier, Baptist minister, lawyer, politician and journalist, wrote a letter to the United States Secretary of State, in which he described conditions in the Congo as "crimes against humanity", thus coining the phrase, which would later become key language in international law.

In 1901, an epidemic of Sleeping Sickness killed over 250,000 natives in Uganda and half the population of the Congo. The most severe beating would not awaken a person who had been bitten by the tse-tse fly, a relative of the horse fly that only occurs in the region. An arsenic based drug was developed in 1910, but it caused blindness. This period of English and African history was the inspiration for the 1912-1966 series of Tarzan books and a 2016 movie, The Legend of Tarzan. 

In closing, African slavery was practiced from 1508-1914 and only 35 of those 406 years occurred in the American South. Let that sink in!