America declared all men are created equal, then wrote slavery into its Constitution. This episode traces the full arc of American slavery from its origins in 1619 through the Constitutional compromises, the abolitionist movement, and the Civil War that finally forced a resolution. It's essential viewing for anyone trying to understand how the nation's founding ideals and its gravest moral failure coexisted for nearly two centuries.

Key Takeaways

• Of the estimated 12 million Africans shipped to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade, fewer than 400,000, less than 4%, arrived in what became the United States.

• The 1662 Virginia law making a child's status follow the mother's transformed slavery from a condition into a hereditary institution, locking families into bondage across generations.

• Vermont, not yet a state, was the first modern government to abolish slavery outright in 1777.

• The Underground Railroad is estimated to have freed around 100,000 enslaved people between the 1830s and 1860s.

• Lincoln's Gettysburg Address framed the Union cause explicitly as proof that the proposition that all men are created equal could be made real, recasting the war as a second founding.

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FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: What percentage of enslaved Africans from the transatlantic trade ended up in the United States?

Fewer than 4% of the estimated 12 million Africans transported across the Atlantic in the slave trade arrived in what became the United States, approximately 388,000 people. The vast majority of enslaved Africans were taken to Brazil and the Caribbean, where mortality rates on sugar plantations were significantly higher than in North America.

Q2: How did Virginia's 1662 law change the nature of slavery in America?

The 1662 Virginia law established that a child born in the colony would inherit the status of its mother, not its father. This made slavery hereditary. Before this law, the legal status of children born to enslaved mothers and free fathers was ambiguous. Afterward, enslavers could increase their labor force simply through the natural births of enslaved women, and freedom could not be inherited through a white father.

Q3: Why didn't the Constitution simply abolish slavery in 1787?

Southern states, particularly South Carolina and Georgia, made clear they would not join the Union if the Constitution threatened slavery. Northern delegates, prioritizing national unity and a functional federal government, accepted a series of compromises protecting the slave trade until 1808, counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for representation, and requiring the return of escaped enslaved people across state lines.

Q4: How many people did the Underground Railroad free?

Historians estimate that the Underground Railroad freed approximately 100,000 enslaved people between the 1830s and 1860s, operating through a network of abolitionists, free Black families, church communities, and sympathetic households across both the North and the South. The number is significant, though it represents a fraction of the nearly 4 million people still enslaved at the start of the Civil War.

Q5: When did Lincoln decide to make emancipation a goal of the Civil War?

Lincoln's position evolved over the course of the war. At the outset, he insisted the fight was to preserve the Union, not to end slavery, partly to keep border states loyal. As Union armies advanced into the South and soldiers witnessed slavery's brutality firsthand, public opinion shifted. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, freeing enslaved people in Confederate states, and by Gettysburg that November he had framed the entire Union cause as a struggle to prove the proposition that all men are created equal.

Born Under a Terrible Paradox

The Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal and endowed with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. At the same time, American slavery, which preceded the Declaration by nearly two centuries, had not only grown by 1776, it soon found protection in the Constitution. America was born under a terrible paradox between American slavery and American freedom. The eventual end of slavery would bring a new birth of freedom. Before then, however, the American paradox would give way to civil war. Slavery stretches back five millennia to Mesopotamia, the first civilization, and has been entrenched in every major civilization that followed. North Africans traded in black slaves several centuries before their European counterparts.

The vast majority of slaves that came to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade were caught and sold within Africa by black Africans. Of the 12 million African slaves shipped to the Americas via the transatlantic trade, about 10.7 million survived the brutal conditions suffered on the slave ships. Of those millions, 388,000, or just under 4%, arrived in what became the United States. The first African slaves likely to arrive in America were brought to St. Augustine, Florida, a Spanish settlement founded in 1565. The first documented sale of African slaves to English settlers was in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. The first major legislative attempt to manage slavery in the territories is the subject of our episode on the Missouri Compromise.

The Legal Architecture of American Slavery

At the time, colonial slave laws were not yet clearly established. In 1640, the black African John Punch escaped from his Virginia master along with two white indentured servants. All three were caught. Each man was whipped for escaping. The white servants received extended indentures. Punch, however, was sentenced to servitude for life. He was the first black African made a permanent slave by law in America. In 1662, a Virginia law determined that a child's status followed the mother, thereby making slavery hereditary. In 1667, the same state determined that baptism, which had been one route to freedom, would no longer be a factor in freeing someone from slavery.

In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon led a rebellion against Governor William Berkeley of Virginia. Among the 200 men who joined Bacon, there were poor whites, free blacks, and black slaves. After the rebellion was crushed, Virginia's ruling class expanded lifetime slavery for Africans and their descendants. Poor whites, on the other hand, were granted easier access to land, the right to bear arms, and elevated legal status above black people. By 1776, the number of black slaves in America had grown to nearly 600,000. Southerners were not alone in owning slaves: on the eve of the American Revolution, out of an estimated population of 23,000 in New York City, there were approximately 3,000 black slaves. The slavery question turned bloody on the frontier, as we cover in our episode on Bleeding Kansas.

The Founders and the Constitution's Compromises

The American founders were deeply divided over slavery. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, they struck a compromise. Without ever mentioning the term slave, the Constitution protected the slave trade until 1808, counted a slave as only three-fifths of a person, and mandated that fugitive slaves be returned across state lines. The act prohibiting importation of slaves was passed in 1807. It was signed into law on March 2nd, 1807 by President Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, and took effect on January 1st, 1808, the earliest possible date the Constitution permitted.

There were early attempts to make American freedom prevail over American slavery. Driven largely by Quaker Christians, America was host to the first convocation for abolition in 1775. In 1777, the Independent Republic of Vermont, not yet a state, became the first modern polity to abolish slavery, more than 30 years before the end of the slave trade in Britain. In 1780, Pennsylvania set abolition into gradual motion. In 1783, Massachusetts was the first American state to abolish slavery altogether. By 1804, every northern state had either abolished slavery or set into motion gradual abolition. Operating mainly between the 1830s and 1860s, the Underground Railroad freed an estimated 100,000 slaves through a network of people, houses, and routes.

Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom

When the Civil War broke out, the North was primarily motivated to end secession and restore the Union. The newly elected Lincoln was concerned to do so in a way that maintained loyalty to the Union in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, all border states. But motivation changed. As the Civil War progressed and as Union soldiers advanced into Confederate territory and saw the cruelty and scope of southern slavery for the first time, they reported back to families and sweethearts. This helped shift public opinion in the North. Union generals were increasingly convinced that in order to break the South, they had to break the institution of slavery.

And Lincoln, who had always been opposed to slavery, moved increasingly toward emancipation as a moral necessity. In his 1863 Gettysburg Address, the president called for the North to prove the proposition that all men are created equal. Before the graves of the fallen, Lincoln called forth a new birth of freedom, at once the emancipation of America's black slaves and the renewal of the American Republic. In the end, if America was born under the terrible paradox between slavery and freedom, she would finally become the only country in the history of the world to fight a civil war to end slavery for the cause of freedom. The war that finally forced the question to a resolution opened with the events we cover in our episode on the First Battle of Bull Run.