Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance

The first Africans in what became the United States arrived in the 1500s with Spanish expeditions. Many were ladinos, Africans who knew Iberian languages and culture and belonged to a generation of Atlantic creoles who worked as go-betweens; Juan Garrido, a free man born in Kongo, joined a 1513 expedition to Florida, and Estevanico, an enslaved man from Morocco, was forced to explore and translate across Texas and the Southwest beginning in 1528.

Over about 350 years, more than 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships bound for the Americas, mainly by Portugal, Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands; only about 5 percent of the survivors (about 388,000 people) came directly to what became the United States, and nearly half of those landed in Charleston, South Carolina. They came from many West and Central African peoples, such as the Wolof, Akan, Igbo and Yoruba, and different mixes of these groups shaped distinct Black communities across the South.

Captives endured three stages: a forced march to the coast and imprisonment in crowded coastal dungeons, the Middle Passage across the Atlantic, where about 15 percent died, and a 'final passage' of quarantine, resale and transport inland. The trade fed war and instability in West Africa and took away people who would have led communities and raised families, and formerly enslaved writers like Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley described these experiences in narratives and poetry.

Captives resisted on slave ships through hunger strikes, jumping overboard and organized revolts, which made the trade costlier and led enslavers to add barricades, nets and guns. In 1839 Sengbe Pieh (Cinqué) led Mende captives in taking over the Amistad, and the Supreme Court later freed them; abolitionists spread diagrams like that of the British ship Brookes to expose the trade's horrors, and modern artists such as Willie Cole reuse slave-ship imagery to honor the people lost.

After the United States banned importing enslaved Africans in 1808, the cotton boom drove a huge domestic slave trade: more than one million enslaved people were forced from the upper South to the lower South, a migration called the Second Middle Passage. Auctions tore families apart, and writers like Solomon Northup, a free New Yorker kidnapped and sold into slavery, described them to disprove enslavers' claims that slavery was gentle.

Enslaved people of all ages did field, household and skilled work in cities and on farms, and some were owned by churches, factories and colleges. On plantations, the gang system (groups working sunup to sundown under an overseer, for crops like cotton and sugar) differed from the task system (individual daily quotas, for rice and indigo), which left room for cultures like Gullah to survive; slavery's profits tied the North and South together and built racial wealth gaps that last today.

Slave codes, from Louisiana's Code Noir to South Carolina's 1740 code, made slavery lifelong, inherited and based on race, and they limited enslaved people's movement, gatherings, literacy and self-defense. The US Constitution protected slavery without naming it, and in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) the Supreme Court ruled that Black Americans, enslaved or free, were not and could never be citizens.

A 1662 Virginia law applied the principle of partus sequitur ventrem ('the offspring follows the womb'), so a child's status followed the mother's: children of enslaved women were enslaved, even when their fathers were free white men, often enslavers who had assaulted their mothers. It shows that race is socially constructed, since laws, not biology, defined racial categories and tied them to freedom or slavery, later through the 'one-drop rule.'

Enslaved African Americans blended African traditions with European and Indigenous influences to create a new culture: quilts, pottery like David Drake's inscribed storage jars, instruments like the banjo, and creole languages like Gullah. Spirituals mixed Christian hymns with African call and response and rhythm; their double meanings could carry hope, protest or plans to escape, and they became the roots of gospel and the blues.

After the 1808 ban, fewer African Americans were born in Africa, and around the same time white leaders formed the American Colonization Society to send free Black people to Africa. In response, many Black writers stressed their American identity and stopped calling themselves 'African,' and over the next two centuries names like 'Colored,' 'Afro-American,' 'Black' and 'African American' were debated and adopted.

Spanish Florida offered freedom to people who escaped slavery in the British colonies and became Catholic, and in 1738 its governor set up Fort Mose near St. Augustine under Francisco Menéndez, the first legally sanctioned free Black town in what's now the United States. Florida's promise helped inspire the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, led by Jemmy and many Catholic Kongolese; South Carolina answered with its harsh 1740 slave code, and British forces later destroyed Fort Mose.

In the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue overthrew colonial rule and founded Haiti, a free Black republic and the second independent nation in the Americas. No other revolt by enslaved people ever did that. Haiti's victory pushed France to sell Louisiana to the United States, frightened enslavers across the Americas and inspired Black rebels and thinkers for generations, even as France forced Haiti to pay crushing reparations in exchange for recognition.

Enslaved people resisted every day by slowing work, breaking tools or running away, and churches became hubs for sharing news and organizing. Larger revolts included the 1811 German Coast Uprising in Louisiana, led by Charles Deslondes and the largest in US history, Denmark Vesey's planned revolt in Charleston (1822), Nat Turner's rebellion in Virginia (1831), and Madison Washington's 1841 takeover of the ship Creole, which freed about 130 people in the Bahamas.

By 1860 about 12 percent of Black Americans were free, and in cities like Philadelphia and New York they built mutual-aid societies, schools, churches and newspapers. Black women argued that freedom had to include them too, linking abolition with women's rights. In the early 1830s Maria W. Stewart became one of the first American women of any race to give public speeches on politics, and she is often called the first Black woman to publish a political manifesto.

Maroons were people who escaped slavery and built their own hidden communities, from the Great Dismal Swamp between Virginia and North Carolina to palenques in Spanish America and quilombos in Brazil, where Palmares lasted nearly 100 years. Some maroon groups fought wars against colonial governments to protect their freedom, while others signed treaties that required them to help put down slave revolts.

Brazil received more enslaved Africans than anywhere else, about half of the roughly 10 million who survived the Middle Passage, and African traditions such as capoeira and the congada survive there. Because manumission was more common, most Afro-Brazilians were already free when Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery in 1888, while in the United States the enslaved population kept growing through births, to about 4 million.

Some freedom seekers found refuge with the Seminoles in Florida, were welcomed as kin and fought beside them in the Second Seminole War (1835–1842). But the five large Indigenous nations of the Southeast also enslaved Black people, adopted slave codes and took enslaved people with them on the Trail of Tears, which hardened racial lines and pushed Black and mixed-race members out of their communities.

Facing slavery and racism, some Black abolitionists, like Paul Cuffee and Martin R. Delany, supported emigration to Africa, the Caribbean or Latin America and embraced Black nationalism, the idea of Black unity, pride and self-determination. Others, like Frederick Douglass, rejected emigration and claimed their birthright as American citizens, pointing out the hypocrisy of a nation that celebrated freedom while enslaving millions.

Some Black abolitionists rejected moral suasion, the strategy of persuading white Americans that slavery was wrong, and called for radical resistance instead. David Walker's Appeal (1829), smuggled into the South, urged enslaved people to fight for their freedom, with violence if they had to, and Henry Highland Garnet's 1843 address to enslaved people called on them to rise up.

The Underground Railroad was a secret network of Black and white abolitionists who helped freedom seekers reach free states, Canada and Mexico; an estimated 30,000 people escaped this way, even though the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 let enslavers recapture them in the North. Harriet Tubman escaped slavery, went back again and again to guide dozens of people to freedom, and later served the Union Army as a spy and nurse and led the Combahee River raid.

Nineteenth-century Black leaders used the new technology of photography to present themselves as dignified citizens and fight racist caricatures: Frederick Douglass was the most photographed man of his century, and Sojourner Truth sold portrait cards to fund her activism. Today artists like Bisa Butler, whose quilted portrait of Harriet Tubman is a required source, build on these images to honor these leaders' courage.

The law gave enslaved women no protection from sexual violence, and they resisted in many ways, including fighting back and escaping with their children. Narratives by formerly enslaved women, such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and The History of Mary Prince, focused on family, vulnerability and abuse, while men's narratives tended to stress independence, and women's accounts fueled both abolition and early feminism.

About 200,000 Black men served in the Union Army and Navy during the Civil War, most of them formerly enslaved, even though they received lower pay at first and faced enslavement or death if captured; Black women worked as nurses, cooks, laundresses and spies. Many saw their service as proof of their citizenship, while Black communities in the North faced violence like the 1863 New York City draft riots.

The Emancipation Proclamation (1863) freed enslaved people only in Confederate states still at war; slavery ended nationwide with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, except as punishment for a crime, and in Indian Territory through treaties in 1866. Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when General Order No. 3 told enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, that they were free; it is one of many Black Freedom Days and became a federal holiday in 2021.