essay on freedom and slavery

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Defining Freedom

How have the legacies of slavery shaped the struggle for freedom?

The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865, formally abolished slavery throughout the United States. But ending slavery was only a first step toward securing full freedom and citizenship rights for African Americans. The struggle to fulfill the promises of liberty, equality, and justice for all, which began with the nation’s founding and took on new meaning and momentum during the era of Reconstruction, would continue for generations to come.

Clockwise, Top Left:  U.S. Colored Troops march through Charleston, South Carolina, 1865.  Courtesy of National Park Service, Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park, FOSU 12614.  Silent protest parade in New York City against the East St. Louis Massacre, 1917. Library of Congress .  March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963.  Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of James H. Wallace Jr.   Protesters hold pictures of George Floyd as they march in a Juneteenth rally in New York City, 2020.  Getty Images .

… the point of protest isn’t winning—it’s holding fast to the promise of freedom even when fast victory is not promised. Amanda Gorman “Fury and Faith,” 2020

Before The 13th Amendment

Freedom, slavery, and the founding of america: 1770s–1780s.

The desire for freedom by enslaved African Americans manifested itself during the early stages of the nation’s development. Their decisions to run away or to publicly express their disdain for slavery in writing or in the courts illustrated the importance of freedom for them. The language contained in the Constitution further reinforced their belief in their right to liberty and freedom despite the decision by the Constitutional Congress to allow for the continued existence of slavery—a decision which created a paradox for the new nation of espousing liberty but depending economically on enslavement.

In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance. Phillis Wheatley, 1774

Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral , 1773.

Early Freedom Movements: 1830s–1850s

Brethren, the time has come when you must act for yourselves … Think how many tears you have poured out upon the soil which you have cultivated with unrequited toil and enriched with your blood; and then go to your lordly enslavers and tell them plainly, that you are determined to be free … Inform them that all you desire is FREEDOM, and that nothing else will suffice. Henry Highland Garnet “Address to the Slaves of the United States,” delivered before the National Convention of Colored Citizens, Buffalo, New York, 1843

African Americans spoke forcefully and regularly about ending slavery and claiming their rights as citizens. Individuals like David Walker produced powerful essays condemning the institution, appealing for equal rights, and encouraging the enslaved to throw off their enslavement.

David Walker’s Appeal, 1843.

The Black convention movement , which began in 1830, was another important national forum that voiced the demands of its participants for abolition, voting rights, and equal treatment. Gaining the right to vote and fair treatment were issues of national concern. In Ohio and Illinois African Americans protested state Black Laws, which, among other things, prevented them from voting, holding public office, or living in the state without paying a minimum bond of $500 to ensure good behavior. In light of this discriminatory treatment, African Americans sought to expand the focus of the abolition movement so it not only looked to end slavery, but to champion equal treatment of all Americans as well.

Freedom During Slavery

Nat Turner’s Bible, 1830s. Enslaved people seized freedom by any means possible, including rising up against their enslavers. Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher who led a rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, was carrying this Bible when he was arrested. Read More

Tin box made by Joseph Trammell to carry his freedom papers, 1852. During slavery, legally free African Americans were required to register with county courts and secure Certificates of Freedom, also known as freedom papers. Joseph Trammell, a free Black man in Loudon County, Virginia, used this handmade tin to protect and carry his precious documents.

Antislavery pamphlet about the Fugitive Slave Act, 1854. This printing of the Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850 was sponsored by antislavery groups as a protest against the new law that required authorities in free states to assist in capturing people who had escaped from enslavement.

Ambrotype of Elisa Greenwell, a self-emancipated woman, early 1860s. A handwritten note accompanying this photograph identified Greenwell as a resident of Philadelphia who had escaped from her enslaver in Leonardtown, Maryland, in 1859.

Civil War and Emancipation

Our new government is founded … upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, 1861

The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 threatened the survival of slavery in the eyes of many southern state officials and fueled their decision to secede. The Civil War which resulted did eventually evolve into a war to bring slavery to an end. Enslaved African Americans saw this possibility early in the war and flocked to U.S. Army lines where they believed they would gain their freedom. Fort Monroe in Virginia was one of the first places to have enslaved men arrive there in 1861 seeking freedom.

Freedom seekers approach U.S. Army guards near Fort Monroe, May 1861.

The District of Columbia instituted compensated emancipation in 1862. President Lincoln followed this action by issuing a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of that year and the final Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863. The 1863 Proclamation offered freedom to the enslaved in Confederate territory and allowed African Americans to enlist in the U.S. Army for the first time. By the end of the Civil War approximately 179,000 African Americans took up arms and made important contributions to the successful conclusion of the conflict for the Union.

Portrait of a U.S. soldier, ca. 1865.

Carte-de-visite of a group of African Americans gathered around a man with a pocket watch. A sign on the wall reads "1 Jan-Slaves Forever Free." The text in chain links on the sides read "Waiting for the Hour - Watch Meeting Dec 31, 1862."

The13th Amendment and Reconstruction

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Section 1

The constitutional amendment abolishing slavery in the United States was introduced in Congress in December 1863, midway through the Civil War, and finally passed on January 31, 1865. It would be almost another year before the 13th Amendment was declared ratified by the states, on December 18, 1865. By then, the Civil War had ended with the defeat of the Confederacy, and Vice President Andrew Johnson had become president following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

Read more about the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in "Our American Story"

The 13th Amendment was brief and to the point—in less than 50 words, it proclaimed the demise of slavery, an institution which predated the founding of the United States and had been supported, expanded, and enforced in North America by racist legal and social systems for nearly 250 years. While the amendment outlawed the institution of slavery, it also included a clause that allowed slavery and involuntary servitude to be used as punishment for a crime. This language, originally used in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 , protected the state’s right to force prisoners to work, a longstanding practice that would drastically expand in the aftermath of slavery.

Section 2 of the 13th Amendment granted Congress the right to pass legislation to enforce the abolition of slavery. This marked a significant shift in power between the federal government and the states by giving Congress new responsibility for protecting civil rights at the federal level. It laid the foundation for the passage of federal laws designed to protect newly freed African Americans from state laws and practices that deprived them of their civil liberties and attempted to return them to a condition of enslavement.

Abolitionists celebrated the ratification of the 13th Amendment as a moral victory over the inhumanity of slavery and a redeeming of the Constitution’s founding promise of freedom. But many African Americans also greeted the new law with wary skepticism. They recognized the outlawing of slavery as not the end, but only the beginning of what would be needed to secure full freedom and equal rights. The enemy still to be defeated was the systemic racism that had justified and supported slavery in the South and restricted the freedom of all Black people throughout the country.

Carte-de-visite of Frederick Douglass. The reverse side has a laurel wreath in ink in the center. Below the wreath is an inscription that reads “Helen Douglass.”

Testing the 13th Amendment: The Black Codes

… all the State laws imposing disabilities upon colored people on the ground of color, ‘being but a creation of slavery, and passed for its maintenance and perpetuation, are part and parcel of the system and must follow its fate.’   Equal Suffrage: Address from the Colored Citizens of Norfolk, Va., to the People of the United States, June 5, 1865

In order to regain representation in Congress, the former Confederate states agreed to ratify the 13th Amendment and write new state constitutions abolishing slavery. But the southern states also passed new laws, known as Black Codes, that restricted the rights of newly freed people in order to control their labor, maintain the racial status quo, and keep them in conditions as similar to slavery as possible. 

In 1865 and 1866, African Americans held political conventions across the South to protest the Black Codes and demand full civil and political rights, including the right to vote. Congress responded by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Drawing on the authority granted to Congress by the 13th Amendment to enforce the abolition of slavery, this was the first federal civil rights legislation. The Civil Rights Act voided the Black Codes by declaring African Americans to be citizens entitled to the same rights, benefits, and protections under the law as white citizens. While it did not address voting rights, the law defined certain basic rights for all citizens, including the right to make and enforce contracts, give evidence in court, and own property.

Burning a Freedmen’s School-House, Memphis, Tennessee, 1866

Despite the new federal laws, many white Americans continued to resist the idea of Black freedom. President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee and a former enslaver, vetoed the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, but Congress overrode his veto. Less than a month later, violence erupted in Memphis, Tennessee. Mobs of white police and civilians attacked the city’s Black community, burning homes, churches, schools, and businesses. The Memphis Massacre, which lasted from May 1 to May 3, 1866, left 46 African Americans dead and dozens more injured. Soon after the massacre in Memphis, a group of Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, formed the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that used violence and intimidation to oppose Black civil rights and promote white supremacy in the South.

African Americans also continued to confront white resistance and discrimination in northern and western states, where slavery had been outlawed before the Civil War but free Black people were still not treated as equal citizens. During the 1860s, the city of Philadelphia became a focal point for civil rights struggles through the efforts of activists such as Octavius Catto, who led a successful movement to end racial segregation in streetcars and other public accommodations.

Civil rights activists viewed segregation, the denial of voting rights, and other restrictions on Black freedom as vestiges of slavery that should also be abolished under the 13th Amendment.

A prominent voice for African American civil rights, Octavius Catto (1839–1871) founded the Philadelphia chapter of the Equal Rights League of Pennsylvania in 1864. He led protests and helped draft legislation to outlaw segregated streetcars. On Election Day in 1871, Catto was shot and killed by a white man who was later acquitted by an all-white jury.

Restricting the 13th Amendment: U.S. Supreme Court

The Thirteenth Amendment … not only struck down the institution of slavery as previously existing in the United States, but it prevents the imposition of any burdens or disabilities that constitute badges of slavery or servitude. Justice John Marshall Harlan Dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896

During Reconstruction, the push for full freedom continued, supported by additional federal laws that built and expanded on the 13th Amendment of 1865 and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The 14th Amendment , ratified in 1868, and the 15th Amendment , ratified in 1870, further revised the U.S. Constitution to specify rights that could not be denied on account of race or color, including birthright citizenship, equal protection, due process, and voting rights. In 1875, Congress passed another Civil Rights Act that prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels, theaters, and transportation.

These federal laws drew on the 13th Amendment, which granted Congress the power to enforce the abolition of slavery. This included not only the former system of human bondage and forced labor, but the related system of racial oppression that political and legal discourse referred to as the “badges and incidents of slavery.” In this view, any laws that restricted or impinged on Black people’s freedom and citizenship rights were considered aspects of slavery, and thus prohibited by the 13th Amendment.

But by the late 1870s, the federal government had begun to retreat from supporting Reconstruction and defending Black freedom in the South. White supremacists used violence, fraud, intimidation, and other tactics to suppress Black voting and regain control of southern state governments. Once back in power, they passed state laws that established the system of racial segregation and Black disenfranchisement known as Jim Crow.

The Union as it was / The lost cause, worse than slavery, 1874.

Three U.S. Supreme Court rulings ( Civil Rights Cases (1883) ; Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) ; and Hodges v. United States (1906) ) significantly narrowed the definition of freedom granted by the 13th Amendment. These rulings weakened or repealed federal civil rights laws and allowed state Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination to stand. This revised, restricted view of the 13th Amendment—as only outlawing the institution of chattel slavery itself, rather than securing full freedom for Black people—would continue to hamper civil rights efforts until the 1960s.

A hand-painted sign used for segregating transportation terminal seating area.

The Legacies of Slavery

“except as punishment for a crime”: race and incarceration.

The 13th Amendment sanctioned involuntary servitude if convicted of a crime, which created an opening for the advent of convict leasing.  Under the convict leasing system African Americans were arrested for fabricated reasons such as loitering or failing to sign a work contract. Law officials then leased their labor or used them to create roads, build factories, construct railroads, and perform other tasks without compensation. In many ways convict labor became a substitute for enslavement. Indeed In 1871 the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia ruled in Ruffin v. Commonwealth that convicts were “the slave of the state.” This point of view enabled prisons like Angola in Louisiana and Parchman Farm in Mississippi to notoriously exploit prisoners well into the 21st century.

The Convict Lease System and Lynch Law are twin infamies which flourish hand in hand in many of the United States. Ida B. Wells

The reinforcement of the courts caused Ida B. Wells and others to view convict leasing as racially oppressive as lynching in its victimization of African Americans. It is impossible to gauge how many men, women and children fell victim to this system, although some estimates suggest several million people were victimized. Not only were they often unfairly arrested, but they lost their rights as citizens while imprisoned and in many instances even after they were released from imprisonment.

Anyone who has been convicted of a felony in this country becomes a slave of the state, and you lose your human rights and in most cases your citizen rights for a long time, in some cases forever. Albert Woodfox, 2017 Activist and member of the Angola 3, who served 40 years in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary before his false conviction was overturned

Guard tower at Angola Prison, West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana Many prison farms were founded on former slave plantations. One of the largest and longest-lasting of these plantation prisons is the Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola, established in 1880. Among the largest prisons in the United States, Angola for much of its history has been known as one of the harshest and most inhumane. In the 1950s it was deemed the “bloodiest prison in America.”

“The Vestiges of Slavery”: Racial Discrimination and Violence

Our country cannot wait any longer for the full realization of the abolition of all the remaining vestiges of slavery. Thurgood Marshall, 1953

Long after the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery in 1865, civil rights advocates continued to call on the nation to abolish the legacies of slavery that persisted in the form of racial discrimination. In a 1953 speech to the National Urban League, Thurgood Marshall—then Special Counsel to the NAACP—spoke of the need for “concerted action to remove many of the remaining vestiges of slavery.” Marshall was referring to the systemic racism that confined Black people to second-class citizenship, including residential segregation, denial of the right of employment, and the threat of physical violence. As long as these vestiges of slavery remained, the 13th Amendment’s promise of freedom would remain unfulfilled.

In 1968, a year after Thurgood Marshall was appointed as the first Black Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court issued its first major 13th Amendment ruling in over 60 years. In the case of Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company , the Court determined that real estate practices that discriminated against Black property buyers could be outlawed by Congress under the 13th Amendment. This decision marked a return to original Reconstruction-era interpretations of the 13th Amendment, which defined it as a law intended to secure Black freedom by eliminating the “badges and incidents of slavery.”

“We Want White Tenants in Our White Community,” sign posted in Detroit, Michigan, 1942.

Demonstrators demand federal laws to end housing segregation, Chicago, Illinois, 1960.

The Jones ruling followed a series of major federal civil rights laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed in response to the mass movement for Black freedom during the 1950s and 1960s. Just as Reconstruction was regarded as a “second founding” of the United States—an opportunity to remake the nation without slavery, on a new foundation of freedom and equality—many referred to the modern Civil Rights Movement as a “Second Reconstruction,” another chance to take up the unfinished work of the 13th Amendment and fulfill its promise of freedom.

Freedom Quilt, ca. 1975. Jessie Telfair was inspired to make this quilt as an expression and memorialization of her experiences during the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1960s, Telfair was encouraged by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s efforts to register African American voters in Southwest Georgia. Telfair decided to register to vote. When her employers learned of her actions, they fired her from her job as a cafeteria worker at an elementary school in her small community of Parrott, Georgia. The quilt is an affirmation of her personal freedom as well as a statement about the freedoms guaranteed to all American citizens.

Revisiting the 13th Amendment

Abolition … is not a relic of history. It is an ongoing movement to rethink the systems that produce inequity and build a society that values the lives of the most vulnerable. Phillip Atiba Goff, 2021 Co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity

The 13th Amendment is a touchstone in the struggle to abolish slavery and secure full freedom for African Americans, a struggle that extends from the nation’s founding to Reconstruction, through the modern Civil Rights Movement to today. It is also a catalyst for ongoing debate, activism, and legislation about defining and protecting freedom for all Americans. In recent decades, Congress has applied the 13th Amendment to support the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (2000), the first federal law targeting modern-day human trafficking, and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (2009). In 2020, Democratic members of Congress introduced a joint resolution calling for an Abolition Amendment that would nullify the “except as punishment” clause in the 13th Amendment, as part of efforts to address issues of mass incarceration, human rights abuses, and racial disparities in the U.S. prison system.

Along with highlighting the need to address and eliminate the persisting legacies of slavery, the 13th Amendment inspires questions about how to carry forward the legacy of abolition and build new institutions that promote a more just and equitable democracy.

Million Man March, Washington, D.C., 1995.

Think about whether this country truly wants Black people to be free. If it doesn’t, how will we become free anyway? Patrisse Cullors, 2020 Co-founder of Black Lives Matter

Reconstruction changed the nation in fundamental ways. Three new amendments to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, provided equal protection of the law for all citizens, and banned racial discrimination in voting. But the promise of these laws alone would not secure the visions of freedom that African Americans pursued, if the nation was not willing to uphold and enforce them.

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Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation and Freedom

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Civil War, 1861-1865

Jonathan Karp, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, PhD Candidate, American Studies

The story of the Civil War is often told as a triumph of freedom over slavery, using little more than a timeline of battles and a thin pile of legislation as plot points. Among those acts and skirmishes, addresses and battles, the Emancipation Proclamation is key: with a stroke of Abraham Lincoln’s pen, the story goes, slaves were freed and the goodness of the United States was confirmed. This narrative implies a kind of clarity that is not present in the historical record. What did emancipation actually mean? What did freedom mean? How would ideas of citizenship accommodate Black subjects? The everyday impact of these words—the way they might be lived in everyday life—were the subject of intense debates and investigations, which marshalled emerging scientific discourses and a rapidly expanding bureaucratic state. All the while, Black people kept emancipating themselves, showing by their very actions how freedom might be lived.

Self-Emancipation

The Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, abolished slavery in the secessionist Confederate states and the United States, respectively, but it is important to remember that enslaved people were liberating themselves through all manners of fugitivity for as long as slavery has existed in the Americas. Notices from enslavers seeking self-emancipated Black people were common in newspapers throughout the Americas, as seen in this 1854 copy of the Baltimore Sun .

The question of how formerly enslaved people would be regarded by and assimilated into the state as subjects was most obviously worked out through the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was meant to support newly freed people across the South. Two years before the Bureau was established, however, there was the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission. Authorized by the Secretary of War in March 1863, the Inquiry Commission was called in part as a response to the ever-increasing number of refugees—who were still referred to at the time as “contraband”—appearing at Union camps. The three appointed commissioners—Samuel Gridley Howe, James McKaye, and Robert Dale Owen—were charged with investigating the condition and capacity of freedpeople.

Historians are still working to understand the scale of refugees’ movements during the Civil War. Abigail Cooper estimates that by 1865 there were around 600,000 freedpeople in 250 refugee camps. Many of the camps were overseen by the Union, while others were established and run by freedpeople themselves. Conditions in the camps could be brutal. In 1863, the Inquiry Commission heard that 3,000 freedmen had fortified the fort in Nashville for fifteen months without pay. Rations were slim. In spite of these conditions, the camps were also sites where Black people profoundly restructured the South by their very movement and relationships.

Port Royal Experiment

During the Civil War, the U.S. government began an experiment in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Plantation owning enslavers had abandoned their lands, leaving behind over 10,000 formerly enslaved Black people. With the help of abolitionist charities from the North, these Black farmers cultivated cotton for wages in the same places they had formerly been held in bondage. Their work was so successful that it inspired international calls for support, like this letter published in Manchester, England. The short-lived success of this experiment was largely ended at the government's hands, when the lands were returned to White ownership.

The Inquiry Commission, a large portion of whose records are held at Harvard, focused many of their efforts on the camps. It was not clear how, exactly, they should go about their work. The Commission was established before the field of sociology emerged with its institutionalized tools for the supposedly scientific study of populations. A federal body had never before been responsible studying people who were or had been enslaved. The commissioners travelled across the American South and Canada, observing and interviewing freedmen. They sent elaborate surveys to military leaders, clergy, and other White people who interfaced with large numbers of people who had escaped slavery. Through this work, the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission made Black people into subjects of the United States’ scientific gaze. Their records are an invaluable record of life under slavery; they also reinscribed underlying racial logics.

Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom has a collection of 189 objects related to the Commission’s inquiry . The vast majority of them are responses to their survey, written by White people the Commission identified as having special knowledge of freedmen. The view of slavery from this vantage point is limited. Most if not all of the respondents recount conversations with people who were or had been enslaved, but these accounts are all mediated by their authors and the Commissioners. There’s no telling what the quoted enslaved people would or wouldn’t have shared with these people, or why. If some shape of life under slavery emerges from reading these survey responses, it is a necessarily distorted one. The American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission is emblematic of a style of scientific discourse that set its sights on Black people and the cultural meanings of race without concern for the views of Black people. In this field, Whiteness was necessary for expertise.

The surveys are most revealing as records of how these agents of the federal government conceived of the question of freedom—what they called, “one of the gravest social problems ever presented a government.” What kinds of questions did they ask? The forms had forty-two questions. Some asked for geographic and population data. Others asked for information about life before emancipation: did freedmen carry signs of previous abuse (they did) and did their masters have an effect on enslaved peoples’ families (they invariably did)? The vast majority of the questions, however, asked for the respondent’s opinions and general observations of the formerly enslaved refugees. The Commission wanted to know about these peoples’ strength, endurance, intellectual capacity, attachments to place, as well as their religious devotion, their general disposition, work ethic, and ways of domestic life. The list ended with the most important question, which the previous ones had apparently prepared the respondent to answer to the best of their abilities: “In your judgement are the freedmen in your department considered as a whole fit to take their place in society with a fair prospect of self-support and progress or do they need preparatory training and guardianship? If so of what nature and to what extent?”

Slow Stretching Emancipation

The Emancipation Proclamation was widely celebrated by enemies of slavery, though it did not emancipate all enslaved Black peoples. Celebrations were held in Northern cities like Philadelphia and Boston . News of emancipation was slow moving, even in areas that were covered by the proclamation. In areas under Union control, like Port Royal, Black people were informed of their new legal status on January 1st, but in areas under Confederate control the proclamation was often kept secret from enslaved people or entirely ignored. In his memoir, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington described his experience learning of the proclamation:

After the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography, pg. 21

From the questions the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission asked, it is clear that they imagined the freemen’s “fitness” to hinge on their ability to work for wages, own land, and maintain standard familial structures. The surveys asked whether freedmen “seemed disposed to continue their domestic relations or form new ones.” They asked whether, under slavery, enslaved children were taught to respect their parents. Commissioners wished to know if family names were common, and, if so, how they travelled through generations. The question about laboring for wages, which appeared towards the end of the questionnaire, was deeply connected to the question of what should come after slavery. If wages would not be successful in turning freedmen into laborers, a system of apprenticeship might be considered. The commissioners’ fixation on land was a result of the longstanding connection in the United States between citizenship and landowning. It was also a response to fears of Black migration. In all, the surveys show that the question of freedmen’s fitness was one of their assimilation into the intertwined relations of the capitalist wage and the family, as recognized by the state and church.

While the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission went about their work, freedpeople made their lives in ways that both answered the Commission’s questions and exceeded them. Some people found their way to camps to join the war effort; others went in search of family and still others made homes where they were. Washington Spradling, for example, told the Commission in 1863 how freedpeople in Kentucky pooled resources to pay for funerals and buy their relatives out of slavery, all under the oppression of new police powers. Across the South, as the Civil War raged, Black people brought about emancipation. They could not wait for the state’s commissions and reports. However, shades of their experiments in freedom are visible in the reports of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission.

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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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Slavery — Edmund Morgan Slavery And Freedom Analysis

Edmund Morgan Slavery and Freedom Analysis

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Published: Mar 14, 2024

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Background Essay: The Origins of American Slavery

How did enslaved and free Blacks resist the injustice of slavery during the colonial era?

• I can articulate how slavery was at odds with the principle of justice.
• I can explain how enslaved men and women resisted the institution of slavery.
• I can create an argument supported by evidence from primary sources.
• I can succinctly summarize the main ideas of historic texts.

Essential Vocabulary

Written by: The Bill of Rights Institute

American Slavery in the Colonies

Throughout the colonial era, many white colonists in British North America gradually imposed a system of unfree and coerced labor upon Africans in all the colonies. Throughout the colonies, enslavement of Africans became a racial, lifelong, and hereditary condition. The institution was bound up with the larger Atlantic System of trade and slavery yet developed a unique and diverse character in British North America.

Europeans forcibly brought Africans to the New World in the international slave trade. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, European slave ships carried 12.5 million Africans, mostly to the New World. Because of the crowded ships, diseases, and mistreatment, only 10.7 million enslaved Africans landed at their destinations. Almost 2 million souls perished in what a draft of the Declaration of Independence later called an “ execrable commerce.”

Europeans primarily acquired the enslaved Africans from African slave traders along the western coast of the continent by exchanging guns, alcohol, textiles, and a broad range of goods demanded by the African traders. The enslaved were alone, having been separated from their families and embarked on the harrowing journey called the “ Middle Passage ” in chains. They were frightened and confused by their tragic predicament. Some refused to eat or jumped overboard to commit suicide rather than await their fate.

This diagram depicts the layout of a slave ship. (Unknown author – an Abstract of Evidence delivered before a select committee of the House of Commons in 1790 and 1791, reprinted in Phyllis M. Martin and Patrick O’Meara (eds.) (1995). Africa third edition. Indiana University Press and James Currey.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Passage#/media/File:Slave_ship_diagram.png

Most Africans in the international trade were bound for the European colonial possessions in the Caribbean and South America. The sugar plantations there were places where disease, climate, and work conditions produced a horrifying death rate for enslaved Africans. The sugar crop was so valuable that it was cheaper to work slaves to death and import replacements.  About 5 percent of the human cargo in the slave trade landed in British North America.

The African-American experience in the 13 colonies varied widely and is characterized by great complexity. The climate, geography, agriculture, laws, and culture shaped the diverse nature of enslavement.

Enslaved Africans in the British North American colonies did share many things in common, however. Slavery was a racial, lifetime and hereditary condition. White supremacy was rooted in slavery as its victims were almost exclusively Africans. It was a system of unfree and coerced labor that violated the enslaved person’s natural rights of liberty and consent. While the treatment of slaves might vary depending on region or the disposition of the slaveholder, slavery was at its core a violent and brutal system that stripped away human dignity from the enslaved. In all the colonies, slaves were considered legal property. In other words, slavery was a great injustice.

Differing climates and economies led to very different agricultural systems and patterns of enslavement across the colonies. The North had mostly self-sufficient farms. Few had slaves, and those that did, had one or two enslaved persons. While the North had some important pockets of large landowners who held larger numbers of slaves such as the Hudson Valley, its farms were generally incompatible with large slaveholding. Moreover, the nature of wheat and corn crops generally did not support slaveholding the same way that labor-intensive tobacco and rice did. Cities such as New York and Philadelphia also had the largest Black populations.

On the other hand, the Chesapeake (Maryland and Virginia) and low country of the Carolinas had planters and farmers who raised tobacco, rice, and indigo. Small farms only had one or two slaves (and often none), but the majority of the southern enslaved population lived on plantations. Large plantations frequently held more than 20 enslaved people, and some had hundreds. Virginian Robert “King” Carter held more than 1,000 people in bondage. As a result, in the areas where plantations predominated areas of the South (especially South Carolina), enslaved people outnumbered white colonists and sometimes by large percentages. This led to great fear of slave rebellions and measures by whites, including slave patrols and travel restrictions, to prevent them.

Robert “King” Carter was one of the richest men in all of the American colonies. He owned more than 1,000 slaves on his Virginia plantation. Anonymous. Portrait of Robert “King” Carter. Circa 1720. Painting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Carter_I#/media/File:Robert_Carter_I.JPG

The regional differences of slavery led to variations in work patterns for enslaved people. A few Northern enslaved people worked and lived on farms alongside slaveholders and their families. Many worked in urban areas as workers, domestic servants, and sailors and generally had more freedom of movement than on southern plantations.

Blacks developed their own cultures in North and South. Despite different cultures and languages brought from Africa and regional differences within the colonies, a strong sense of community developed especially in areas where they had greater autonomy. Slave quarters on large plantations and urban communities of free blacks were notable for the development of Black culture through resistance, preservation of traditions, and expression. The free and enslaved Black communities kept in conversation with each other to transmit news and to hide runaways.

Different systems of work developed on Southern plantations. One was a “gang system ” of labor in which planters or their overseers drove groups of enslaved people, closely watched their work, and applied physical coercion to compel them to work faster. They also worked in the homes, laundries, kitchens, and stables on larger plantations.

On the massive rice plantations of the Carolinas, enslaved people were often assigned tasks and allowed to stop working when they reached their goals. The “ task system ” could foster cooperation and provide incentives to complete their work quicker. Plantation slaves completed other tasks including cooking, cleaning, laundry, childcare, and worked as skilled artisans.

The treatment and experience of enslaved people was rooted in a brutal system but could vary widely. Many slaveholders were violent and cruel, liberally applying severe beatings that were at times limited by law or shunned by society. Others were guided by their Christian beliefs or humanitarian impulses and treated their slaves more paternalistically . Domestic work was often easier but under much closer scrutiny than fieldhands who at times enjoyed more autonomy and community with other enslaved people. Slaveholders in New England were more likely to teach slaves to read or encourage religious worship, but enslaved people were commonly restricted from learning to read, especially in the South.

Enslaved people did not passively accept their condition. They found a variety of ways to resist in order to preserve their humanity and autonomy. Some of the common daily forms of resistance included slowing down their pace of work, breaking a tool, or pretending to be sick. Some stole food and drink to supplement their inadequate diets or simply to enjoy it as an act of rebellion. Young male slaves were especially likely to run away for a few days and hide out locally to protest work or mistreatment. Enslaved people secretly learned to read and that allowed them to forge passes to escape to freedom. They sang spirituals out of religious conviction, but also in part to express their hatred of the system and their hope for freedom.

Slaves developed their own culture as a way to bond together in their hardships and show defiance to their owners. This image depicts slaves on a plantation dancing and playing music. Anonymous. The Old Plantation. Circa. 1790. Painting. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Slave_dance_to_banjo,_1780s.jpg

The enslavement of Africans in British colonies in North America developed differently in individual colonies and among regions. But, the common thread running throughout the experience of slavery was injustice. Blacks were denied their humanity and natural rights as they could not keep the fruits of their labor, lived under a brutal system of coercion, and could not live their lives freely. However, a few white colonists questioned the institution before the Revolutionary War.

Comprehension and Analysis Questions

• How did slavery violate an enslaved person’s natural rights?
• How did slavery vary across the 13 British colonies in North America?
• How did Blacks resist their enslavement?

Related Content

Introductory Essay: The Declaration of Independence and the Promise of Liberty and Equality for All: Founding Principles and the Problem of Slavery

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Origins of the Slave Trade

Why did Africa and Europe engage in the slave trade?

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Slavery in America

By: History.com Editors

Published: April 25, 2024

Millions of enslaved Africans contributed to the establishment of colonies in the Americas and continued laboring in various regions of the Americas after their independence, including the United States. Many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619 , when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved Africans ashore in the British colony of Jamestown , Virginia . The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista. Yet, enslaved Africans had been present in regions such as Florida, that are part of present-day United States nearly one century before.

Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than Indigenous populations and indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans.

Existing estimates establish that Europeans and American slave traders transported nearly 12.5 million enslaved Africans to the Americas. Of this number approximately 10.7 million disembarked alive in the Americas. During the 18th century alone, approximately 6.5 million enslaved persons were transported to the Americas. This forced migration deprived the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern Atlantic coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.

Slavery in Plantations and Cities

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia. Starting 1662, the colony of Virginia and then other English colonies established that the legal status of a slave was inherited through the mother. As a result, the children of enslaved women legally became slaves.

Before the rise of the American Revolution , the first debates to abolish slavery emerged. Black and white abolitionists contributed to the enactment of new legislation gradually abolishing slavery in some northern states such as Vermont and Pennsylvania. However, these laws emancipated only the newly born children of enslaved women.

Did you know? One of the first martyrs to the cause of American patriotism was Crispus Attucks, a former enslaved man who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770. Some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War.

But after the end of the American Revolutionary War , slavery was maintained in the new states. The new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, when it determined that three out of every five enslaved people were counted when determining a state's total population for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, European and American slave merchants purchased enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas and forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco, wheat, indigo, rice, sugar, and cotton. Enslaved men and women also performed work in northern cities such as Boston and New York, and in southern cities such as Charleston, Richmond, and Baltimore.

By the mid-19th century, America’s westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War . Though the Union victory freed the nation’s four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and beyond.

In the late 18th century, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop planted and harvested by enslaved people, but whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a U.S.-born  schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin , a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. His device was widely copied, and within a few years, the South transitioned from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region’s dependence on enslaved labor.

Slavery was never widespread in the North as it was in the South, but many northern businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Although gradual abolition emancipated newborns since the late 18th century, slavery was only abolished in New York in 1827, and in Connecticut in 1848.

Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years. By 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

Living Conditions of Enslaved People

Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many enslavers owned fewer than 50 enslaved people.

Landowners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement were restricted.

Many enslavers raped women they held in slavery, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their enslavers.

Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families. Most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal.

Slave Rebellions

Enslaved people organized r ebellions as early as the 18th century. In 1739, enslaved people led the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, the largest slave rebellion during the colonial era in North America.  Other rebellions followed, including the one led by  Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822. These uprisings were brutally repressed.

The revolt that most terrified enslavers was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Turner’s group, which eventually numbered as many 50 Black men, murdered some 55 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them.

Like with previous rebellions, in the aftermath of the Nat Turner’s Rebellion, slave owners feared similar insurrections and southern states further passed legislation prohibiting the movement and assembly of enslaved people.

Abolitionist Movement

As slavery expanded during the second half of the 18th century,  a growing abolitionist movement emerged in the North.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by formerly enslaved people  such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison , founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator .

While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slaveholding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious “free-labor” argument, which held that slaveholding was regressive, inefficient and made little economic sense.

Black abolitionists  and antislavery northerners led meetings and created newspapers. They also had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad , gained real momentum in the 1830s.

Conductors like Harriet Tubman guided escapees on their journey North, and “ stationmasters ” included such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Secretary of State William H. Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Although no one knows for sure how many men, women, and children escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad, it was in the thousands ( estimates range from 25,000 to 100,000).  

The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North. It also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro-slavery southerners of their northern countrymen’s determination to defeat the institution that sustained them.

Missouri Compromise

America’s explosive growth—and its expansion westward in the first half of the 19th century—would provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion.

In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government’s right to restrict slavery over Missouri’s application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouri’s southern border were to be free soil.

Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was only temporarily able to help quell the forces of sectionalism.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War .

Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out—with considerable bloodshed —in the new state of Kansas.

Outrage in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska Act spelled the downfall of the old Whig Party and the birth of a new, all-northern Republican Party . In 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court (involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his enslaver had taken him into free territory) effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery.

John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry

In 1859, two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery.

John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry , Virginia—in which the abolitionist and 22 men, including five Black men and three of Brown’s sons raided and occupied a federal arsenal—resulted in the deaths of 10 people and Brown’s hanging.

The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South.

The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America ; four more would follow after the Civil War began.

Though Lincoln’s anti-slavery 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.

Abolition became a goal only later, due to military necessity, growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the self-emancipation of many people who fled enslavement as Union troops swept through the South.

When Did Slavery End?

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State…in rebellion,…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t officially end all slavery in America—that would happen with the passage of the 13th Amendment after the Civil War’s end in 1865—some 186,000 Black soldiers would join the Union Army, and about 38,000 lost their lives.

The Legacy of Slavery

The 13th Amendment, adopted on December 18, 1865, officially abolished slavery, but freed Black peoples’ status in the post-war South remained precarious, and significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

Previously enslaved men and women received the rights of citizenship and the “equal protection” of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment and the right to vote in the 15th Amendment , but these provisions of the Constitution were often ignored or violated, and it was difficult for Black citizens to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping .

Despite seeing an unprecedented degree of Black participation in American political life, Reconstruction was ultimately frustrating for African Americans, and the rebirth of white supremacy —including the rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—had triumphed in the South by 1877.

Almost a century later, resistance to the lingering racism and discrimination in America that began during the slavery era led to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which achieved the greatest political and social gains for Black Americans since Reconstruction.

Ana Lucia Araujo , a historian of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, edited and contributed to this article. Dr. Araujo is currently Professor of History at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples Projects. Her three more recent books are Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History , The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism , and Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery .

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271 Slavery Topics and Essay Examples

✨ tips for an essay, research paper or speech about slavery, 🏆 best slavery titles for essay, 🥇 most interesting slave trade essay topics, ⭐ good titles for slavery essays, 💡 slavery writing prompts, 🔎 simple & easy slavery titles, ✍️ slavery essay topics for college, ❓ research questions about slavery.

Writing an essay on slavery may be challenging as the topic brings up negative emotions to many people.

This issue is related to differences between social positions and their negative effects. In addition, slavery reveals racial disparities in society and damages race relations in many cultures.

Good slavery essays discuss the aspects and problems that are important and relevant today. Choose slavery essay topics that raise significant problems that remain acute in modern society. Slavery essay titles and topics may include:

• The problem of human trafficking in today’s world
• Why is it hard to stop child trafficking in today’s world?
• The aspects of plantation life for slaves
• The development of American slavery
• Was slavery inevitable?
• Differences and similarities between slavery in the US and serfdom in Russia
• The ineffectiveness of peaceful means against slavery
• Destructive aspects of slavery
• The link between slavery and racism
• The differences between the impact of slavery on women and men of color

Once you select the issue you want to discuss, you can start working on your paper. Here are some tips and secrets for creating a powerful essay:

• Remember that appropriate essay titles are important to get the readers’ interest. Do not make the title too long but state the main point of your essay.
• Start with developing a structure for your essay. Remember that your paper should be organized clearly. You may want to make separate paragraphs or sections for the most important topics.
• Include an introductory paragraph, in which you can briefly discuss the problem and outline what information the paper will present.
• Remember to include a concluding paragraph too, in which you will state the main points of your work. Add recommendations, if necessary.
• Do preliminary research even if you feel that you know much about the topic already. You can find useful information in historical books, peer-reviewed journals, and trusted online sources. Note: Ask your professor about the types of sources you are allowed to use.
• Do not rely on outside sources solely. Your essay should incorporate your knowledge and reflections on slavery and existing evidence. Try to add comments to the citations you use.
• Remember that a truly powerful essay should be engaging and easy-to-understand. You can tell your readers about different examples of slavery to make sure that they understand what the issue is about. Keep the readers interested by asking them questions and allowing them to reflect on the problem.
• Your slavery essay prompts should be clearly stated in the paper. Do not make the audience guess what the main point of the essay is.
• Although the content is important, you should also make sure that you use correct grammar and sentence structures. Grammatical mistakes may make your paper look unprofessional or unreliable.
• If you are writing an argumentative essay, do not forget to include refutation and discuss opposing views on the issue.
• Check out slavery essay examples online to see how you can structure your paper and organize the information. In addition, this step can help you to avoid possible mistakes and analyze the relevance of the issue you want to discuss.

Do not forget to check our free samples and get the best ideas for your essay!

• Slavery in To Kill a Mockingbird Novel The introduction of Tom by the author is a plot device to represent the plight of the slaves in the state.
• Sethe’s Slavery in “Beloved” by Toni Morrison In spite of the fact that the events depicted in Beloved take place after the end of the American Civil War, Sethe, as the main character of the novel and a former slave, continues to […]
• Analysis of Themes of Slavery in Literature The paper will be concentrated on the analysis of the works ‘The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano’ by Olaudah Equiano, ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass’ by Frederick Douglass, and ‘Incidents […]
• Metaphoric Theme of Slavery in “Indiana” by George Sand In her novel about love and marriage, Sand raises a variety of central themes of that time society, including the line of slavery both from the protagonist’s perspective and the French colonial slavery.
• Slavery in the Roman Empire The elite were the rich people, and majority of the population that comprised of the common farmers, artisans, and merchants known as the plebeians occupied the low status.
• How “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” Addresses Slavery The insensitivity in this mistreatment and dehumanization of Black people is pervasive to the extent that Jim considers himself “property” and was proud to be worth a fortune if anyone was to sell him. To […]
• Freedom in Antebellum America: Civil War and Abolishment of Slavery The American Civil War, which led to the abolishment of slavery, was one of the most important events in the history of the United States.
• John Brown and His Beliefs About Slavery John Brown was a martyr, his last effort to end slavery when he raided Harper’s Ferry helped to shape the nation and change the history of slavery in America.
• Impact of Revolution on Slavery and Women Freed slaves and other opponents of the slave trade in the north agitated for release and freedom of slaves in the south.
• Did Morality or Economics Dominate the Debates Over Slavery in the 1850s? Labour and economy remained intertwined in that; the former was a factor that determined the state of the latter. Scholars single out economical differences between the two states as the cause of the slavery in […]
• Chapters 4-6 of ”From Slavery to Freedom” by Franklin & Higginbotham At the same time, the portion of American-born slaves was on the increase and contributed to the multiracial nature of the population.
• “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and Slavery It is said that “the book is a very inadequate representation of slavery; and it is so, necessarily, for this reason, – that slavery, in some of its workings, is too dreadful for the purposes […]
• Masters and Slaves: ”Up From Slavery” by Washington Booker Instead of criticizing the opposition between the black and the white, Booker emphasizes the interpersonal relationships between the masters and their slaves, emphasizing the devotion of the latter to the white population.
• Protest Against Slavery in ”Pudd’nhead Wilson” by Mark Twain Pudd’nhead Wilson is the ironic tale of a man who is born a slave but brought up as the heir to wealthy estate, thanks to a switch made while the babies were still in the […]
• Economic Impact of Slavery Growth in Southern Colonies 1 The need to occupy southern colonies came as a result of the successes that were recorded in the north, especially after the establishment of cash crop farming. The setting up of the plantations in […]
• Slavery and Identity: “The Known World” by Edward Jones Moses is used to this kind of life and described by one of the other characters as “world-stupid,” meaning he does not know how to live in the outside world. He has a strong connection […]
• The Evolution of American Slavery Overall, it is possible for us to advance a thesis that the origins of black slavery should be sought in the economic development of American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and especially the […]
• Concept of Slavery Rousseau’s Analysis Rights and slavery are presented by the thinker as two contrary notions; Rousseau strived to provide the analysis of rights in their moral, spiritual sense; the involvement into dependence from the rulers means the involvement […]
• “American Slavery, 1619-1817” by Peter Kolchin The concluding chapter details of the demise of slavery on the onset of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The period of American Revolution was a “watershed “in transforming the vision that portrayed slavery was justifiable […]
• “Slavery and the Making of America” Documentary According to the film Slavery and the Making of America, slavery had a profound effect on the historical development of American colonies into one country.
• The “Slavery by Another Name” Documentary The documentary highlights how the laws and policies of that time enabled the exploitation of Black people and how the legacy of slavery continued to shape the racial dynamics of the country.
• Human Trafficking: Slavery Issues These are the words to describe the experiences of victims of human trafficking. One of the best places to intercept human trafficking into the US is at the border.
• The Slavery Experience: Erra Adams Erra Adams indicates that he was the oldest of the children and his task was to plow the land. The formerly enslaved person noted that the death of the master was a real grief for […]
• Abraham Lincoln: The End of Slavery Lincoln actively challenged the expansion of slavery because he believed the United States would stay true to the Declaration of Independence. It is worth considering the fact that Lincoln was not the only advocate for […]
• Recreation of Slavery in “Sweat” Book by Hurston Perhaps the best-portrayed theme and the most controversial one is the recreation of slavery on the part of Afro-Americans who have just been freed of it.
• California’s Issues With Slavery However, the report and the book indicate this point and emphasize that the concept of free land was made in favor of white people but not in the interests of African Americans.
• Sexual Slavery and Human Smuggling They were the only people in the house, and it appeared that her parents were not home. The social worker’s job in Tiffani’s life is to look into her past, from her childhood through her […]
• Were the Black Codes Another Form of Slavery? Slavery in the United States has been a part of the nation’s history for hundreds of years, and yet it did not end abruptly.
• How Slavery Makes Sense From Various Perspectives Given that there is a historical precedent for the “peculiar institution,” it would be erroneous to dismiss slavery as something that is new. Thus, the institution of slavery is found even in the Bible, and […]
• Slavery in The Fires of Jubilee by Stephen Oates Apart from the story being arranged in chapters, the layout and approach suggest that the author has described the area of events narrated and then given the narration.
• Modern Slavery in Global Value Chains: Case Study The main reason for accusations of forced labor is that most of the factories Nike owns are in Vietnam, and they provide the lowest possible wages.
• Differences of Slavery: Oklahoma Writers’ Project vs. The Textbook Today, many sources discuss the characteristics of slavery, its causes, and the outcomes and describe the conditions under which the Civil War began. In the accounts and the textbook, different opportunities for slaves are given […]
• Autobiography & Slavery Life of Frederick Douglass This essay discusses the slavery life of Frederick Douglass as written in his autobiography, and it highlights how he resisted slavery, the nature of his rebellion, and the view he together with Brinkley had about […]
• The American Civil War: Pro- & Anti-Slavery Forces The pro-slavery forces argued that slavery was the right thing to do, promoting abolitionists and the anti-slavery forces as terrible villains because they wanted to abolish slavery.
• Slavery: Historical Background and Modern Perspective Despite the seemingly short period of contract slavery, people did not have the right to marry without the owner’s permission while the contract term was in effect.
• Irish Immigrants and Abolition of Slavery in the US The selected historical events are Irish immigration to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s and the movement for slavery abolition, which existed in the country at the same time.
• Irish Immigration to America and the Slavery Despite the fact that the Irish encountered a great number of obstacles, the immigration of Irish people to the United States was advantageous not only to the immigrants but also to the United States.
• Irish Immigrants and the Abolition of Slavery Irish people, though not as deprived of rights as the enslaved Africans, also endured much suffering and fought slavery to the best of their ability.
• North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States: 1790 – 1860 The book North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States: 1790 1860 by Leon Litwack is an illustration of how African Americans were treated in the northern states just before the start of The […]
• Modern Slavery and Its Emergence The author turns to the examples of three European countries and, through the analysis, reveals the piece of the effects of the slave trade and the modernization of its forms.
• Moral Aspect of Slavery from a Northern and Southern Perspective Pro-slavery, non-expansionist, and abolitionist perspectives on the moral foundations of slavery identify both differences between the North and south of the US and the gradual evolution of the nation’s view of African people.
• Thomas Jefferson on Slavery and Declaration of Independence Additionally, with the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson set the foundation for the abolition of slavery in the future. Thus, the claim that Jefferson’s participation in slavery invalidates his writing of the Declaration of Independence is […]
• Europeans’ Interest in Sugar and Slavery Hence, in the Atlantic world, it was also a significant factor, contributing not only to the well-being of the affected populations in Europe but also to the growth of slavery in the region.
• Self-Reflection on John Adams: Slavery and Race This could demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of the freedom of speech limitations that are considered in modern America. Therefore, I would like to know the perspectives of different political parties on the events of […]
• Slavery and Indentured Servitude Slavery practices were perceived to extend in Boston, which is believed to be the first place where someone tried to force enslaved people to have children to earn money. To summarize, the practice of slavery […]
• Indentured Servitude and Slavery The slave population in the North progressively fell throughout the 1760s and 1770s with slaves in Philadelphia reducing to approximately 700 in 1775.
• Critical Response: The Origin of Negro Slavery Considering that individuals of all races were involved in slavery in the New World, racism emerged as a consequence of forced labor and was not originally connected to the targeted discrimination of African Americans.
• Chesapeake Colonies and Development of Slavery The given trend was similar to the Middle and Chesapeake colonies, proving specific attitudes to slavery peculiar to people of that period.
• American Slavery Arise and Abolition In this regard, the new slaves were not truly emancipated, as they were still dependent on a source of resources for subsistence.
• Analysis of Slavery in United States The main points highlighted in the lecture are focused on the socio-economic differences between the two systems, the actual life of slaves, and methods of blacks’ rebellion.
• Review of Slavery Topic in “Never Caught” Thus, the former’s relationship to this institution was guided by humanity towards the slaves and the development of legal methods of improving their lives that did not exist in the latter case.
• Prohibiting Slavery in the United States In other words, the original ideas incorporated the considerations of sexual immorality due to the abuse of the affected persons and the practice of breeding people for sale. The contributions to the discussion were also […]
• Slavery Experience by Abdul Rahman ibn Ibrahim Sori Abdul Rahman continued talking about his family and status, but his royal priorities were not enough to confirm his identity and return to his family.
• Discussion of Slavery in Focus For this reason, the audience that reads about cases of slavery in some of the third-world countries has the feeling of encountering the past something that, in readers’ understanding, is already a history.
• New Slavery in “Disposable People” by Kevin Bales The immense increase of the population after World War II and the influence of development and globalization of the world’s economy on traditional families in developing countries have led to the increment in the gap […]
• Analysis of Documents on Greek Slavery The passages will be examined and evaluated better understand the social and cultural history of the period and learn more about the social order in Ancient Greece. It can be asserted that the issue of […]
• Discussion of Justification of Slavery As a result, such perceptions gave rise to the argument that the latter people are inferior to Europeans and, thus, should be in a position of servitude.
• The Industrial Revolution, Slavery, and Free Labor The purpose of this paper is to describe the Industrial Revolution and the new forms of economic activity it created, including mass production and mass consumption, as well as discuss its connection to slavery.
• Expansion of Freedom and Slavery in British America The settlement in the city of New Plymouth was founded by the second, and it laid the foundation for the colonies of New England.
• Should the U.S. Government Pay Reparations for Slavery Coates tries to get the attention of his audience by explaining to them the importance of understanding the benefits of the impact the slaves faced during the regime of white supremacy.
• Antebellum Slavery’s Role in Shaping the History and Legacy of American Society The novel tells the story of two different times, the 1970s and 1815s, and shows other conditions of the heroes’ existence due to gender and racial characteristics.
• View on the Slavery in the State of Mississippi According to Mississippi’s “Declaration of Causes,” slavery is “the greatest material interest of the world” and “these products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions”.
• Alexander Stephens on Slavery and Confederate Constitution The speaker remarks that the persistent lack of consensus over the subordination and slavery of the “Negro” between the South and North was the immediate reason why the Confederates decided to secede and establish their […]
• Origins of Modern Racism and Ancient Slavery The diversity of African kingdoms and the empires were engaged in the slave trade for hundreds of years prior to the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade. The working and living condition of slaves were […]
• Isaac Burt: Modern-Day Slavery in the US Therefore, the author begins with the critical review of data on the notion of human trafficking, including sex and labor trafficking forms, which often use immigrants and women as vulnerable populations.
• How Violent Was the Slavery? Ask African American Women The book significantly impacted American literature due to the writer’s roots and the problems of slavery addressed in a detailed manner.
• The Role of Slavery for the American Society: Lesson Plan Understand how the development of slavery could influence the social and economic life of the Southern states and the role of the plantation system in the process.
• Colonialism and the End of Internal Slavery The Atlantic slave trade was considered among the main pillars of the economy in the western region between the 16th and 19th centuries.
• The History of American Revolution and Slavery At the same time, the elites became wary of indentured servants’ claim to the land. The American colonies were dissatisfied with the Royal Proclamation of 1763 it limited their ability to invade new territories and […]
• The Expansion of Slavery: Review Their purpose was to track and catch runaway slaves and return them to their masters. The work of slaves was primarily agricultural.
• Abolitionist Movement: Attitudes to Slavery Reflected in the Media One of the reasons confirming the inadmissibility of slavery and the unfairness of the attitude towards this phenomenon is the unjustification of torture and violence.
• Slavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson As a result, relatively same practices of social death were applied to indigenous American people, which proves Patterson’s point of view that this attitude was characteristic not only for the African slave trade.
• Antebellum Culture and Slavery: A Period of History in the South of the United States The antebellum era, also known as the antebellum south, is a period of history in the south of the United States before the American Civil War in the late 18th century.
• Slavery and Society Destruction Seduced by the possibility of quick enrichment, the users of slave labor of both the past and the present, betrayed their humanity due to power and money.
• Trans-Atlantic Chattel Slavery and the Rise of the Modern Capitalist World System The reading provides an extensive background of the historical rise and fall of the African nations. The reading gives a detailed account of the Civil War and the color line within its context.
• Modern Slavery: Definition and Types Modern slavery is a predatory practice that is being utilized by businesses and organizations, some seemingly legitimate, worldwide through the exploitative and forced labour of victims and needs to be addressed at the policy and […]
• Human Trafficking as a Global Crime Industry: Labor, Slavery, Sexual Slavery, Prostitution, and Organ Harvesting As members of the society, every individual has to be aware of this glaring issue, and do their part in preventing human trafficking. This project will present an in-depth analysis of various aspects and perspectives […]
• Slavery in “Disposable People” Book by Kevin Bales The key point of his book is that the phenomenon of slavery is impossible to be eradicated. He has studied the current economic and political situations of the countries presented in his book that help […]
• Late Slavery and Emancipation in the Greater Caribbean The epoch of slavery defined the darkest history in the evolution of the civilization of humanity; the results of slavery continue permeating the psychology of very “far” descendants of the slaves themselves.
• Transatlantic Slave Trade and Colonial Chesapeake Slavery Most of the West African slaves worked across the Chesapeake plantation. This paper will explore the various conditions and adaptations that the African slaves acquired while working in the Chesapeake plantation.
• Slavery and Secession in Georgia The representatives of the State of Georgia were worried because of the constant assaults concerning the institution of slavery, which have created the risk of danger to the State.
• Slavery of African in America: Reasons and Purposes Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, the African slaves were shipped to Europe and Eastern Atlantics, but later the colonies started demanding workers and the trade shifted to the Americas.
• Slavery in Charleston, South Carolina Prior to the Year 1865 Charleston is a city in South Carolina and one of the largest cities in the United States. It speaks about the life and origin of the slaves and also highlights some of their experiences; their […]
• Verisimilitude of Equiano’s Narrative and Understanding of Slavery The main argument in the answer to Lovejoy was that the records could clarify the author’s true age, which is the key to the dismissal of the idea that Equiano is a native African.
• The Case for Reparations: Slavery and Segregation Consequences in the US Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his essay The Case for Reparations, examines the consequences of slavery and segregation in the United States and argues the importance of reparations for black Americans, both in a financial and moral […]
• Critique of Colin Thies’ “Commercial Slavery” The goal of the article was to evaluate the economic and political situation of the African slave trade and avoid other aspects according to which people were considered as oppressed and enslaved.
• Fredrick Douglas Characters. Impact of Slavery The institution of slavery drove and shaped the enslaved people to respond and behave in different ways in that Fredrick Bailey was forced to flee away from slavery and later changed his name to Fredrick […]
• Litwack’s Arguments on the Aftermath of Slavery This paper seeks to delve into a technical theme addressed by Leon on what kind of freedom was adopted by the ex-slaves prior to the passage of the 13th U.S.constitutional amendment of 1865 that saw […]
• Slavery, Civil War, and Abolitionist Movement in 1850-1865 They knew they were free only they had to show the colonists that they were aware of that.[1] The slaves were determined and in the unfreed state they still were in rebellion and protested all […]
• Slavery History in North America in the Middle 1830s I was born in a small village in Georgia, in the middle 1830s, a time when the United States was going through a lot of slave trade activities, and to many, the trade was accommodated […]
• The Major Developments in Slavery During 1800-1877 Several states in the South, in 1877 beginning with Georgia, took gain of this by issuing a succession of laws and a tax was put on voting.
• Slavery in America: Causes and Effects Slavery in America was a period in which people were caught and taken to do manual work in America from various parts of the world as a result of colonization.
• Slavery as an Institution in America This paper will look at the factors that enhanced the expansion of slavery as an institution in America during this period and further highlight the views held by the southern on slavery about its social […]
• The Literature From Slavery to Freedom Its main theme is slavery but it also exhibits other themes like the fight by Afro-Americans for freedom, the search for the identity of black Americans and the appreciation of the uniqueness of African American […]
• Slavery in New Orleans and Charleston This paper is going to establish this claim by making a comparison of the lives of the slaves who lived in the urban areas such as the New Orleans and Charleston with those slaves that […]
• How Slavery Has Affected the Lives and Families of the African Americans? This paper will focus on how slavery in the earlier years has affected the lives and families of the African Americans in the year 2009.
• Du Bois’ “The Soul of Black Folk” and T. Washington’s “Up From Slavery” Du Bois in the work “The Soul of Black Folk” asks the question, why black people are considered to be different, why they are treated differently as they are the same members of the society, […]
• Slavery as One of the Biggest Mistakes And the last important thing which caused forming the institution of slavery for such a long period in the judgment of Winthrop D.
• Colonial Economy of America: Poverty, Slavery and Rich Plantations This topic deals with life in the colonial economy of America and the approach of white people towards black people. Mainly through natural production, the people became wealthy and they led a typical way of […]
• African Slavery and European Plantation Systems: 1525-1700 However, with the discovery of sugar production at the end of the 15th Century to the Atlantic Islands and the opening up of the New World in the European conquests, the Portuguese discovered new ways […]
• The Theme of Slavery in Aristotle’s “Politics” He notes that the fundamental part of an association is the household that is comprised of three different kinds of relationships: master to slave, husband to wife, and parents to their children.
• “Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades” by Patrick Manning The author’s approach of examining the slavery issue from the lens of economic history and the involvement of normal Africans living in Africa is then examined.
• Slavery and Democracy in 19th Century America In the 19th century when white folks are busy building a nation and taking part in the more significant aspects of creating a new future for their children, Negro slaves were still doing a backbreaking […]
• Abraham Lincoln`s Role in the Abolishment of Slavery in America In this speech, Lincoln emphasized the need for the law governing slavery to prevail and pointed out the importance of the independence of individual states in administering laws that governed slavery without the interference of […]
• Cotton, Slavery, and Old South The early nineteenth century was a time that was as significant for the south as it was for the north. If the south was to be divided into the upper south and the lower south, […]
• Slavery in Latin America and North America In the French and British Caribbean colonies, slaves were also imported in great numbers and majority of the inhabitants were slaves.
• Betty Wood: The Origins of American Slavery Economic analyses and participation of the slave labor force in economic development are used to analyze the impact and role of slave labor in the development of the American economy.
• “American Slavery an American Freedom” by Edmund S. Morgan The book witnesses the close alliance between the establishment of freedom rights in Virginia and the rise of slavery movement which is considered to be the greatest contradiction in American history.
• Lincoln and African Americans’ Role in the Abolition of Slavery This paper seeks to compare and contrast the role of Abraham Lincoln and the African Americans in bringing slavery to an end in the US.
• Western Expansion and Its Influence on Social Reforms and Slavery The western expansion refers to the process whereby the Americans moved away from their original 13 colonies in the 1800s, towards the west which was encouraged by explorers like Lewis and Clarke.
• How Important Was Slave Resistance as a Cause of Abolition of Slavery? This was particularly evident throughout the history of slaves in the Americas, and across the historical geography of slavery, from the time the slaves were seized from Africa through to the life they were subjected […]
• “Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington Each morning it was the duty of the overseer to assign the daily work for the slaves and, when the task was completed, to inspect the fields to see that the work had been done […]
• U.S. in the Fight Against a Modern Form of Slavery Since the United States of America is the most powerful nation in the world it must spearhead the drive to eradicate this new form of slavery within the U.S.and even outside its borders.
• The Profitability of Slavery for the Slave Master What is missing from this story is the fact that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, North American colonies had to buy African slaves on a world market at prices which reflected the high profitability […]
• Slavery in the United States There was a sharp increase in the number of slaves during the 18th century, and by the mid of the century, 200,000 of them were working in the American colonies.
• Sociology, Race & Law. Cuban Form of Slavery Today Castro was benefiting alone from the sweat of many Cubans who worked abroad and in Cuba thinking that they could better their livelihood.
• African American Women’s Gender Relations and Experience Under Slavery When the New England Confederation was formed in 1643 to promote matters of common concern for the New England Colonies, one provision of the compact was for the rendition of bondservants.
• How African Men and Women Experienced Slavery? The book Ar’ not I a Woman, the author portrays that life of a woman in plantation was more difficult that life of a man because of different duties and responsibilities assigned to a woman-slave.
• Abraham Lincoln and Free Slavery Moreover, he made reference to the fact that the union was older than the constitution and referred to the spirit of the Articles of the Constitution 1774 and Articles of Confederation of 1788.
• Origins, Operations, and Effects of Black Slavery in US However, the impact that the enslavement of the vast numbers of Africans brought to America was phenomenal. This was a major effect of the slave trade.
• “Slavery Isn’t the Issue” by Juan Williams Review The author claims that the reparation argument is flawed as affirmative action has ensured that a record number of black Americans move up the economic and social ladder.
• Gender Politics: Military Sexual Slavery In this essay, it will be shown that military power and sexual slavery are interconnected, how the human rights of women are violated by the military, and how gender is related to a war crime.
• African Americans Struggle Against Slavery The following paragraphs will explain in detail the two articles on slavery and the African American’s struggle to break away from the heavy and long bonds of slavery. The website tells me that Dredd Scott […]
• Slavery in the World The first independent state in the western hemisphere, the United States of America, was formed as a result of the revolutionary war of North American colonies of England for Independence in 1775-1783.
• Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Rome The revolt of slaves under the direction of Spartacus 73-71 BC is considered the most significant event of the period of crisis of the Roman republican regime in the first century DC and is estimated […]
• Issue of Slavery in “The Known World” by E. P. Jones The slaves were remained in the custody of the white masters received the same treatment as that of bondage slaves. The book is a beautiful representation of pre-war life in Virginia and how the widespread […]
• Olaudah Equiano as a Fighter Against Slavery Equiano’s Narrative demonstrates a conscious effort to ascribe spiritual enlightenment to the political arena and hence ascertain the importance of the relationship between spiritual intervention, the amysterious ways of Providence’ and parliamentary decisions concerning the […]
• Lincoln as a Fighter Against Slavery It is while a leader of the party he made her first moves to fight slavery in the Illinois house where he argued that slavery was a social evil and ought to be dealt away […]
• Slavery in Early America Review However, the local population was dwindling with the influx of disease and abuse and this, combined with Spain abolishing the enslavement of natives in the Americas in the mid-1500s, necessitated a need to acquire Africans […]
• Slavery Without the Civil War: Hypothesis The demand for slaves and the positive effect of this in the slaveholders’ profitability as well as the fact that both slaveholders and the slaves need one another to survive saw to it that the […]
• Slavery: Central Paradox of American History Since the rise of United States as a nation, historians have long thought of the emergence of slavery and freedom in our society as a great contradiction. As the central paradox, slavery needed to emerge […]
• Brief History of Slavery in the United States In his article regarding the true sentiments of the slaves, Genovese suggests the reasons why the slaves were perceived as lazy was as the result of their more natural, rural lifestyle.”The setting remained rural, and […]
• Virginia After the Boom: Slavery and “The Losers” New labor force that came to Virginia “threatened the independence of the small freeman and worsened the lot of the servant”.
• Antebellum Slavery in Mark Twain’s World Twain’s depiction of Jim and his relationship with Huck was somewhat flawed in order to obey the needs of the story, and also by Twains’ interest in slave autobiographies and also in blackface minstrelsy.
• Slavery in New York City: Impact and Significance Blacks’ significance in the development of the city’s most critical systems, such as labor, race, and class divisions, makes it possible to conclude that the influence of slavery in New York was substantial. The effect […]
• Slavery In The United Stated Society In the above discussion, there is a short story of slavery in the USA. By abolishing slavery in the USA is the sign of democracy and human dignity.
• Black American Authors on Slavery Analysis The work is centered on the same theme that the Narrative the author tells the reader of her experiences as a slave and the way she managed to escape from it.
• Slavery Still Exists in American Prisons An examination of the history of the penal system as it existed in the State of Texas proves to be the best illustration of the comparisons between the penal system and the system of slavery.
• Ghana: The Consequences of Colonial Rule and Slavery One of the reasons for this dependency is that the country had been the foothold for the slave trade for about four centuries.
• Harriet Jacobs’s Account of Slavery Atrocities She wrote that she wanted the women living in the North to understand the conditions in which slaves lived in the Souths, and the sufferings that enslaved women had to undergo.
• Anti Slavery and Abolitionism Both gradual emancipation and conditional emancipation were not allowed, but free blacks from the North and evangelicals revealed their opposition in the form of the movement that required the development of social reform.
• Sexual Slavery in “The Apology” Film by Hsiung The documentary being discussed focuses on the experiences of three women, the survivors of military sexual slavery in China, South Korea, and the Republic of the Philippines.
• Slavery Resistance from Historical Perspective The lack of rights and power to struggle resulted in the emergence of particular forms of resistance that preconditioned the radical shifts in peoples mentalities and the creation of the tolerant society we can observe […]
• Slavery Abolition and Newfound Freedom in the US One of the biggest achievements of Reconstruction was the acquisition of the right to vote by Black People. Still, Black Americans were no longer forced to tolerate inhumane living conditions, the lack of self-autonomy, and […]
• Slavery Elements in Mississippi Black Code These are the limitation of the freedom of marriage, the limitation of the freedom of work, and the limitation of the freedom of weapon.
• History: Slavery in Southern States The strategy of pacification was especially prevalent during that time because wealthy slaveowners wanted to keep possible protests under control and prevent the rest of the white population from supporting the abolition of slavery in […]
• Slavery in “Abolition Speech” by William Wilberforce The following article is devoted to the description of the problem of slavery and the slave trade in Africa. The author also underlines the incompetency of the committee, which is in charge of the question […]
• Slavery History: Letters Analysis The letters analyzed in this paper give a piece of the picture that was observed during the 1600s and the 1700s when slaves from different parts of the world had to serve their masters under […]
• Social Psychology of Modern Slavery The social psychology of modern slavery holds the opinion that slavery still exists today, contrary to the belief of many people that slavery does not exist in the modern world.
• Slavery: History and Influence The slaves were meant to provide labor for the masters and generate wealth. During the day, they would sneak to breastfeed the newborns.
• Reformer and Slavery: William Lloyd Garrison The newspaper was published until the end of the civil war and the abolition of slavery by the enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment.
• Slavery Role in the American Literature Stowe has claimed that the anti slavery groups questioned the morality of the white Christians who were at the fore front in the oppression of the Black people.
• Slavery as a Cause of the American Civil War On the other hand, one is to keep in mind that many historians are of the opinion that the reasons for the war are not so easy to explain.
• Thomas Jefferson on Civil Rights, Slavery, Racism When I authored the declaration of independence of the United States of America, I was having a democratic perspective of the American people on my mind.
• Slavery, American Civil War, and Reconstruction Indian removal from the Southeast in the late 19th century was as a result of the rapid expansion of the United States into the south.
• Slavery in the Ancient World and the US Appearance age and attitude of the slaves acted as the determinants to the wage that they were to be paid for their services.
• Slavery in “Flight to Canada” Novel by Ishmael Reed In his novel Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed blurs the boundaries between the prose and poetry as well as the past and the present to express his satirical criticism of the legacy of slavery even […]
• Slavery and the Southern Society’s Development The fact that quite a huge number of white people moved to the “Deep South” where cotton planting was among the most lucrative forms of income-generating activities, just goes to show that the whites relied […]
• Paternalistic Ethos During American Slavery Era The slave owner gains directly from the welfare of the slaves and the slaves gained directly from offering their services to the slave owner.
• The Book About Slavery by Hinton Rowan Helper He claimed further that those who supported abolitionism and freedom were the friends of the south while slaveholders and slave-breeders were the real enemies of the south.
• Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox
• Slavery in the USA and Its Impact on Americans
• Voices From the Epoch of Slavery
• “Slavery by Another Name” Documentary
• Cultural Consequences of the US Slavery: 1620-1870
• The American Anti-Slavery Society
• Modern Slavery in Thailand and Mauritania
• Frederick Douglass as an Anti-Slavery Activist
• George Whitfield’s Views on Slavery in the US
• Internal Colonization and Slavery in British Empire
• Globalization and Slavery: Multidisciplinary View
• Slavery in “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
• Slavery in “A Brief History of the Caribbean”
• Slavery in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
• Slavery Phenomenon and Its Causes in the USA
• Women Trafficking and Slavery: Trends and Solutions
• Human Trafficking and Modern-day Slavery
• Slavery Arguments and American Civil War
• Ethical Problems With Non-Human Slavery and Abuse
• Racism in USA: Virginia Laws on Slavery
• Sojourner Truth: Slavery Abolitionist and Women’s Suffrage
• Slavery in Islamic Civilisation
• Religious Studies of the Slavery Problem
• Slavery and the Abolition of Slave Trade
• Slavery and the Civil War Relationship
• Abraham Lincoln Against Slavery
• Blacks Role in Abolishing Slavery
• The Poetry on the Topic of Slavery
• John Brown and Thomas Cobb Role in Ending Slavery
• Impacts of Slavery and Slave Trade in Africa
• Slavery in the Southern Colonies
• Christianity, Slavery and Colonialism Paradox
• Slavery and the Civil War
• Literary Works’ Views on Slavery in the United States
• Analysis of Slavery in American History in “Beloved“ by Tony Morrison
• History of Abolishing Slavery
• The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
• Sex Slavery in India
• The Period of Slavery in the “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs
• Slavery in America: “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
• Abolition of Slavery in Brazil
• Slavery Effects on Enslaved People and Slave Owners
• The Problem of Slavery in Africa
• Racial Slavery in America
• “Not For Sale: End Human Trafficking and Slavery”: Campaign Critique
• Colonial Portuguese Brazil: Sugar and Slavery
• Aristotle on Human Nature, State, and Slavery
• Reform-Women’s Rights and Slavery
• Human Trafficking in the United States: A Modern Day Slavery
• Oronooko by Aphra Behn and the Why there is no Justification for Slavery
• Rise and Fall of Slavery
• History of Slavery Constitution in US
• Propaganda in Pro-slavery Arguments and Douglass’s Narrative
• Testament Against Slavery: ”Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
• Comparing and Contrasting three Versions of Slavery
• How Did the French Revolution Impacted the Issue of Slavery and the History of Santo Domingo?
• Why slavery is wrong
• Slavery and Racism: Black Brazilians v. Black Americans
• History of the African-Americans Religion During the Time of Slavery
• The Emergence of a Law of Slavery in Mississippi
• The Effects of Slavery on the American Society
• The Ideas of Freedom and Slavery in Relation to the American Revolution
• Up from Slavery, Down to the Ground: Sailing Amistad. A
• Slavery in the British Colonies: Chesapeake and New England
• Slavery and the Old South
• African American Culture: A History of Slavery
• Slavery and the Underground Railroad
• Slavery Illuminates Societal Moral Decay
• The Southern Argument for Slavery
• No Reparations for Blacks for the Injustice of Slavery
• Slavery: The Stronghold of the Brazil Economy
• Slavery, Racism, and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
• Slavery, the Civil War & Reconstruction
• Slavery in American History
• The Slavery in America
• Beloved by Toni Morrison: History of Slavery and Racial Segregation in America
• “Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America” by Morgan Kenneth
• African Americans: The Legacy of Slavery in the U.S.
• Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During WWII and US Occupation in Japan
• A New Dawn: The Abolishment of Slavery in the USA
• How Slavery Applies to Africans Within the Islamic World?
• Where Did Slavery Start First in the World?
• How Did Slaves Respond to Slavery?
• How the Germans Influenced Modern Day Slavery?
• How Did Slavery Change From the Arrival of the First Enslaved People in the 1600s to the Abolition of Slavery in the 1860s?
• How Did Slavery Encourage Both Economic Backwardness and Westward Expansion?
• Why Did Colonial Virginians Replace Servitude With Slavery?
• Did Slavery Create More Benefits or Problems for the Nation?
• What Was Slavery Like and How Is It Today?
• When and How Did Slavery Begin?
• What Were the Positive and Negative Effects of Slavery on the Americas?
• Is There a Difference Between Human Trafficking and Slavery?
• How Did Slavery Shape Modern Society and the Colonial Nations?
• How Did Economic, Geographic, and Social Factors Encourage the Growth of Slavery?
• How Did Colonization Along the Atlantic Contribute to Slavery?
• What Degree Did Slavery Play in the Civil War?
• Modern Day Slavery: What Drives Human Trafficking?
• How Did Slavery Start in Africa?
• How Did Slavery Affect the Spirit of the Enslaved and the Enslavers?
• What Did the Haitian Revolution Do to End Racial Slavery?
• How Were African Americans Treated During the Slavery Period?
• What Created Slavery?
• How Important Was Slavery Before 1850? Was It a Marginal Institution, Peripheral to the Development of American Society?
• How Did African American Slavery Help Shape America?
• When Did Slavery Start in America?
• How Can the World Allow Slavery to Continue Today?
• What Were the Differences Between Indentured Servitude and Slavery?
• In What Industries Is Slavery Most Prevalent?
• How Was Slavery Abolished?
• Did the Atlantic Plantation Complex Create Slavery?
• African American History Essay Ideas
• Frederick Douglass Essay Ideas
• Colonialism Essay Ideas
• Fascism Questions
• Human Rights Essay Ideas
• Freedom Topics
• Global Issues Essay Topics
• US History Topics
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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» Explore the newly discovered papers here

The Freedom Papers

About the newly discovered slave papers.

In 2007, a supervisor in the office of Allegheny County Recorder of Deeds Valerie McDonald Roberts came upon an 1816 ledger with the word “Negro” written on it. The book yielded 18th and 19th century accounts of legal transactions in Pittsburgh from the years 1792 to 1857 of slaves, freed Black people, never enslaved Blacks, and indentures.

The papers include accounts of transactions involving human property: slaves freed by their owners; slaves who paid for their own freedom; records of human sales in Pennsylvania and other states; requests for Freedom Papers and Certificates of Freedom; the indentures of Black girls and boys; and spousal and parental purchases to free their children.

McDonald Roberts turned the papers over to the Senator John Heinz History Center because of their historic significance.

» Explore the newly discovered papers

Self-Evident Truths? The Declaration of Independence

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

These oft-quoted words from the Declaration of Independence seem to be so clear and unequivocal that Thomas Jefferson, the primary author, called the unalienable rights a self-evident truth. But Jefferson, who owned more than 200 slaves himself, equivocated on the issue in theory and in practice.

While he theoretically abhorred the institution, he believed Blacks were inferior, and worried about the ability of freed slaves to survive their freedom in a nation not completely ready, or willing, to grant them that unalienable right. As part of the political give-and-take that led to the 13 separate American colonies uniting in rebellion, an entire section of the grievances against King George III in Jefferson’s classic declaration was excised at the insistence of representatives of the Southern colonies:

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He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of a CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.

So the issue of slavery was sacrificed for political expediency in the effort to unite the colonies against the repression of King George, and the issue of slavery would be put off at least another 11 years, until the newly formed nation created its constitution.

The Constitution and Slavery

Although the United States was founded on the principle of liberty for all, the institution of slavery was well entrenched in the country when the delegates gathered in Philadelphia to write the U.S. Constitution at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Every state except Massachusetts and the districts of Vermont and Maine counted slaves. In framing the Constitution, the founding fathers debated the slavery issue and struggled with the wording of the original document, which makes no mention of the word slave or slavery.

Although not explicitly stated, references to slavery occur in three areas of the Constitution. They are Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3; Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1; and Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3.

While not directly referencing slavery, Article 5 allows no amendment prior to 1808, the date designated in Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1, to end the institution.

The first article, the Legislative Branch, alludes to the institution of slavery in specifying the number of representatives permitted for each state. Large states wanted representation to be based on population while small states wanted each state to have the same number of representatives. This became a major point of discussion and was not resolved for two months. The decision was a compromise: The House of Representatives would be based on population and the Senate would have two members from each state. The Southern states wanted to count the slaves because it would increase their political power, but the Northern states disagreed. Again, the delegates compromised as spelled out in the Enumeration Clause—Section 2, Clause 3. Slaves were referred to as “other persons” and would be counted as three-fifths of a person.

The second reference in the first article—Section 9, Clause 1—relies on another euphemism, describing the slave trade as the “importation of such persons.” While many states had outlawed slavery, several states that allowed it threatened to leave the Convention if the slave trade were banned. Another compromise came into play. Congress would have the power to ban the importation, but not until January 1, 1808. Also outlined in this clause, a tax or duty not exceeding $10 for each person was to be imposed on such importation. To further underscore the existence of slavery until 1808, the authors state in Article 5 of the Constitution that there can be no amendment to Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1, which meant that the 1808 power to outlaw slavery could not be changed even by amendment to the Constitution itself.

The delegation addressed another issue. Southern states wanted escaped slaves to be returned. They didn’t have this guarantee under the Articles of Confederation. However Congress, operating under the Articles of Confederation, had passed the Northwest Ordinance, which banned slavery in the Northwest Territory and promised that slaves who escaped to the territories would be returned to their owners.

Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution adopts a similar clause, but again there is no mention of the actual word slave. The clause, known as the Fugitive Slave Clause, states that a “person held to service or labour” in one state who has escaped to another state is to be returned to the state from which the person fled. This was the result of a compromise with the New England states that received concessions on shipping and trade in exchange for the clause.

Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition of Slavery

The disintegration of slavery in Pennsylvania began with isolated individual acts of manumission. An “indisputable” case, and the first known example of record in the Commonwealth, occurred in 1701, when Lydia Wade of Chester County, Pa., by testament declared, “My will is that my negroes John and Jane his wife shall be set free one month after my decease.”

Pennsylvania’s formal abolition of slavery began in 1780 with the enactment of the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery. The language of the law denounced the institution of slavery and acknowledged that slavery “not only deprived [Negro and mulatto slaves] of the common blessings that they were by nature entitled to, but has cast them into the deepest afflictions, by an unnatural separation and sale of husband and wife from each other and from their children. …”

By the 1770s, it was clear that Pennsylvania and Virginia had conflicting claims upon the western lands, encompassing Pittsburgh.

In 1773, Pennsylvania designated the land west of the Alleghenies, including Pittsburgh, as Westmoreland County. In 1776, Virginia created what it called the District of West Augusta, which encompassed three counties: Monongalia, Ohio, and Yohogania, which also included Pittsburgh.

Many residents of the area were stymied. Those who favored Virginia tended to register their deeds and record their marriages and births with Virginia. Others registered transactions with Pennsylvania. Some even registered with both.

In 1779, the Mason-Dixon Line was extended to what is now the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania, and the land that had been West Augusta became Allegheny, Beaver, Fayette, Greene, and Washington counties in Pennsylvania.

Pittsburgh fell 50 miles north of the line and was determined to be in Westmoreland County, Pa.

This decision had important implications for slavery in the region. As the two states were approving the border deal in 1780, Pennsylvania was enacting its Gradual Abolition of Slavery Act. In contrast, slavery in Virginia continued to flourish until 1863.

Ending the Slave Trade

An Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves into any Port or Place Within the Jurisdiction of the United States (Enacted 1807; took effect January 1, 1808)

Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution prevented Congress from prohibiting the importation of slaves into the United States before 1808. Acting with dispatch, Congress passed and on March 2, 1807, President Thomas Jefferson signed into law legislation stipulating that, effective January 1, 1808, “it shall not be lawful to import or bring into the United States or the territories thereof from any foreign kingdom, place, or country, any negro, mulatto, or person of colour with intent to hold, sell, or dispose of such negro, mulatto, or person of colour, as a slave, or to be held to servitude or labour.”

Although the law had its weaknesses and was laxly enforced, it nevertheless resulted in a sharp reduction in the number of slaves brought into the United States.

In the single decade of 1790-1800, for instance, it is reported that more than 79,000 Africans were transported to North America; from 1810 through the 1860s, that number was estimated to be approximately 50,000.

The U.S. domestic slave trade boomed in the wake of the 1808 law, reportedly resulting in close to a million slaves being sold across state borders, mainly from the upper South to the deep South, where “King Cotton” created a massive demand for slave labor. And this number of course does not include intrastate slave transactions. The domestic U.S. slave trade broke up thousands of families, as husbands often were sold separately from wives and children separately from parents. The sight of slave auctions and sales in the South outraged sensitive souls and was a major factor promoting antislavery sentiment in the North.

The sharp reduction of slave imports to the United States drove up the price of slaves, which led to an improvement in the way they were treated so that they could survive and reproduce. In countries like Brazil and Cuba, on the other hand, the continuing importation of slaves kept prices so low that slaveholders were tempted to work slaves to death and simply replace them with fresh shiploads from Africa. Life, alas, was much shorter and brutish for slaves in the West Indies and Brazil than in the United States, where, as we know, conditions were brutal enough. However, the downside in the United States was that this shortage encouraged a form of slave breeding in which slaveholders forced slave women to reproduce.

Allegheny County Registry of the Children of Slaves

Children in Pennsylvania born to slave parents after March 1, 1780, were to be considered indentured servants rather than slaves. To help ensure this, the Act of Gradual Abolition required that slaveholders register their slaves in the county courthouse. To get around this law, some Pennsylvania slaveholders sent pregnant slave women to the South to give birth. In 1788, the Legislature prohibited such practices and, to help with enforcement, mandated that slaveholders go to the county courthouse to register the children of slaves born after March 1, 1780.

The registry of children of slaves in Allegheny County came into the possession of Thomas Waite Sr. of Bellevue and was made available to Edwin N. Schenkel, principal of Bellevue High School. In 1931, Schenkel, inspired by his professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, Russell Jennings Ferguson, copied these records, which ultimately were deposited at the Western Pennsylvania Historical Society.

Between 1789 and 1813, some 65 Allegheny County owners of slaves registered a total of 185 children. Those registering included doctors, lawyers, innkeepers, farmers, merchants, and widows and included such prominent names as John and Presley Neville, Conrad Winebiddle, Jacob Beltzhoover, and Abraham Kirkpatrick.

© 2009 University Library System , University of Pittsburgh

The Meaning of ‘War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.’ These three short sentences are a central part of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): a book which is probably the best-known dystopian novel ever written.

It’s also one of the books most people lie about having read, perhaps because they feel they already know the overarching plot points and key ideas within the novel, so well-known are they even to non-readers.

But what precisely does ‘War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength’ mean in the context of Nineteen Eighty-Four ?

George Orwell (1903-50), born Eric Arthur Blair, was one of the most remarkable writers of the first half of the twentieth century. His essays are among the best in the English language, not least because of their clear-headedness, married with a clarity of expression. Indeed, Orwell even wrote an essay about the need for political language to be clear and direct; we need his advice now more than ever.

As well as writing numerous essays and short journalistic pieces, he also wrote a number of novels. Two of these, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four , remain popular and widely studied in schools and universities.

Orwell’s last novel before his untimely death from tuberculosis was Nineteen Eighty-Four , completed in 1948 and published a year later. The novel is a classic example of dystopian fiction, and depicts a near future in which Britain has become a one-party state, in which thinking the wrong thoughts can be a crime (see ‘thoughtcrime’) and land you in trouble with the ‘thought police’. The dictator who rules over this totalitarian state is known as Big Brother.

The protagonist is Winston Smith, who works for the Ministry of Truth (a body partly inspired by Orwell’s time spent working at the BBC ) where old historical records are altered, to remove any embarrassing facts that don’t fit with the party line.

Early on, we are introduced to the ‘War is Peace’ slogan, along with the accompanying slogans ‘Freedom is Slavery’ and ‘Ignorance is Strength’:

The Ministry of Truth – Minitrue, in Newspeak – was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

  WAR IS PEACE

  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

And again, later, Winston recalls these slogans from the Ministry of Truth, before finding them inscribed in other places, too:

Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:

He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother.

This quotation, presenting three sets of axiomatic statements which are fundamentally contradictory, exemplifies the ways in which the totalitarian society in Orwell’s novel alters the meanings of words in order to manipulate people’s understanding of the world around them.

How can war be its opposite, peace? How can freedom be enslaving, when the two things stand in stark opposition to each other? And how can ignorance be lauded as a strength? It is from such topsy-turvy statements that the dystopian world of Orwell’s novel was created.

But ‘War is Peace’ is explained in more detail in the ‘book within a book’ that features in Nineteen Eighty-Four . This (fictional) book is titled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism and its author is Emmanuel Goldstein, a rival of Big Brother who supposedly runs the Brotherhood, a resistance movement. Chapter III of Goldstein’s book, which Winston reads, is titled ‘War is Peace’, and explains the origins of the Party’s slogan:

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. […] But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

War, then, against some imagined enemy helps to mobilise society and keep its hierarchical structures in place. People become unified in a wartime situation and when on a wartime footing. Goldstein goes on:

The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries.

Goldstein then continues, explaining how the terms  war  and  peace  become interchangeable in the new political landscape:

For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This – although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense – is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.

Through being united by a common hatred of ‘the enemy’, then, the people of Oceania in Orwell’s novel remain focused on their shared purpose, which is to win the war. But war in the old sense has become meaningless, has ceased to exist: it is merely a device by which the fabric of society is kept going, the way ‘peace’ is maintained.

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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.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

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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New Alabama sculpture park, Black history museums are changing the way history is told

M ONTGOMERY, Ala. ‒ From a wooden bench at the edge of the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, visitors can see the Alabama River where enslaved Africans were transported and sold into a life of forced labor.

From the wide windows on the second floor of the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, visitors can look across the Cooper River toward Africa , where people from the continent were kidnapped to be auctioned off.

The sculpture park opens Wednesday. The international museum opened last summe r. Both were built on sites considered sacred and important to telling the history of African Americans, to telling the history of America.

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“We have to build these places where we can tell the story, save the story, steward the story,’’ said Tonya Matthews, president and CEO of the International African American Museum . “But one of the challenges has been the curation of the story. Who is picking the stories? Who is telling the stories? What stories do we believe should have grand institutions? Arguably, the African American story has not been in the category that was thought to need a grand institution.’’

The museum and monument park are among a growing number of sites across the country opening in the past decade to preserve and celebrate Black History and the Black experience in America. Some are multimillion-dollar museums , while others are housed in small interpretive centers.

In Mississippi, there is the Civil Rights Museum in Jackson and the B.B. King Museum in the blues legend's hometown of Indianola. In Alabama, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice tells the story of the nation’s troubling history of lynching, and in Washington, D.C., the National Museum of African American History and Culture , showcases the journey of Black people across the United States.

Black museums have long been “cultural anchors’’ in their communities, but it has been only in recent years that more have raised enough money and garnered enough support to open, museum leaders said. The institutions matter even more today as lawmakers in some states push to restrict the teaching of Black history and ban some books that tell this history, experts said.

“History matters in profoundly important ways,’’ said Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and now secretary of the Smithsonian. “And it's partly museums' job to articulate that and to provide an opportunity to use history to define reality and give hope.”

New sculpture park tells history of slavery in the US

On a recent afternoon, the Alabama River rose so high the boat that would have ferried visitors from downtown Montgomery to the new Freedom Memorial Sculpture Park wasn’t in service. The voyage is intended to introduce visitors to the site along the waterway enslaved people traveled.

The park, which opens March 27, sits on a 17-acre site between the river and the railroad tracks enslaved people were forced to lay.

Nearly all the works in the park were created by African American, African and Indigenous artists. Some are part of the permanent collection; others are on loan. Each tells a story.

Acknowledging Indigenous people who lived on the land long before Europeans arrived, there are sculptures honoring their culture, their presence, their resilience. A bronze sculpture created by Allan Houser pictures a man hunting buffalo. Steps away stands Cliff Fragua's “Three Sisters,’’ made of Utah alabaster.

Further along the path, a map tracing the Transatlantic Slave Trade shows nearly 3 million people were trafficked from Luanda, Angola, from 1501 to 1867.

Wooden pillars report dates and counties where enslaved people were brought. From 1619 to 1774, 3,996 were taken to Hampton, Virginia .

Visitors walk along a trail made with resin to make it feel more like earth. They can read ''slave laws'' that banned enslaved people from traveling off plantations without written permission. Punishments included floggings, sometimes death.

The narrative of William Wells Brown tells the story of his escape from slavery. (He went on to lecture against slavery and write what is considered the first novel by an African American.)

There is “Last Seen,’’ panels featuring ads posted by people searching for wives, mothers, husbands. Many spent their last nickels and dimes looking for loved ones, said Bryan Stevenson, who created the park and founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization pushing to end mass incarceration.

“That just reinforces how much for enslaved people the most important thing about slavery was the ability to love someone , to find your children, your siblings, your parents,’’ Stevenson told USA TODAY in an interview ahead of the park's opening. “That was powerful.”

Near the end of the path, visitors look toward the sky at the National Monument to Freedom, a 43-foot-high, 155-foot-wide steel structure that bears 122,000 ''unique'' surnames adopted by Black people in the 1870 Census. It was the first count where enslaved Black people were listed by name.

Plans for the wall went from 20 feet high to 30 feet to 43 feet. ‘‘The history of our people deserves to be on something big,’’ Stevenson said.

Part of the inscription Stevenson wrote for the wall reads: “The country you built must honor you. We acknowledge the tragedy of your enslavement. We commit to advancing freedom in your name.’’

Black museums are about storytelling

Museums bring in lifelong learners, while artifacts help humanize history, Bunch said . They teach visitors about slavery , for instance , through the tale of a family or a plantation.

“They're all about storytelling, making you care about the people whose histories you explore,’’ Bunch said.

Since the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016, people have been more interested in visiting their local museums and creating new ones, said Vedet Coleman-Robinson, executive director of the Association of African American Museums.

The museum had 1.6 million visitors last year.

Today, there are about 300 African American - focused museums, including virtual ones. More are scheduled to open soon, including the National Urban League’s Civil Rights Museum in Harlem, the Go-Go Museum in Washington, D.C, The Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx, and the National Juneteenth Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

“Now is the time for people to really get familiar with our museums and our history,’’ Coleman-Robinson said. “We’re past due.”

The early Black museums opened decades ago because the history of African Americans wasn’t included in mainstream institutions, Coleman-Robinson said. “Our museums have really been voices for their communities.’’

Charleston highlights local Black history

It’s not lost on visitors to the International African American Museum at what was once the busiest slave port in Northeast America, where hundreds of thousands of Africans were brought to Gadsden’s Wharf to be sold into generations of slavery.

The idea for the museum began about 20 years ago, and plans changed and expanded over the decades. 

“It became clear that Charleston didn't just need to tell its own story ‒ that we were the linchpin in the much larger story of that beginning period of slavery in America,’’ Matthews said.

More than 100,000 people have visited since the museum opened last summer.

In addition to its focus on slavery, museum visitors explore the history of Africa and the African diaspora. They also learn about the region's rich arts and culture.

“The circle got even wider, and folks decided that … this period of slavery is neither the beginning nor the end of the African American journey,’’ Matthews said.

On one recent afternoon, Suzanne Johnson sat on a bench inside the Praise House exhibit at the museum. She hummed along as she watched a video of people singing and celebrating the rich Gullah Geechee culture. She watched it again, then again.

The stop at the museum last month was a must for Johnson and her daughter, Cameron Mine, who were visiting from Miami. They spent hours in the museum seeing exhibits like the slave tags Black people had to wear. There was #758 porter, #672 servant. There was a black wall listing names forced on enslaved Africans and another with names they came with like Cando, Tooguah and Sannar.

The Praise House particularly stirred emotions for Johnson , whose grandmother has roots in South Carolina.

“If they take our stories from us, we cease to exist,” said Johnson, 51. “The beauty of this museum is it weaves our stories together.’’

Johnson believes museums are necessary especially now to counter restrictions like in her home state of Florida, where the College Board's Advanced Placement African American Studies course was banned . “They’re trying to stifle our story,’’ she said.

Johnson was excited to see that next to the Praise House, construction for new exhibits had begun. “I intend to grow with the museum,’’ she said.

'Igniting a cultural renaissance'

Museums help expand public education about African American history, said Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and senior vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation , the nonprofit that established the fund.

“We're at a moment of igniting both cultural reckoning around the gaps in the American story and the need to more equitably interpret American history,’’ Leggs said. “We’re also igniting a cultural renaissance.”

Matthews, of the International African American Museum, said there is finally a recognition that the African American story doesn’t just fit in an art gallery and that it should be included in every museum focused on American history.

“There is also room to have entire spaces dedicated to the story so we can get into the nuances, so we can talk about it from different perspectives,’’ Matthews said.

Heaven Campbell and Karissa Pelichet stopped at the painting of a family in the international museum, discussing the pain of learning the father had been lynched.

The sophomores from North Carolina A&T State University were recently in Charleston to visit the museum and learn more about the city’s Black history. They had also booked a Black Heritage walking tour for that afternoon.

“We love Black History and how it shows how far we’ve come,’’ said Pelichet, 20.

The roommates had visited other museums in the past, including The King Center in Atlanta and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “It ties everything together,” Pelichet said of the visits.

Campbell, who has taken several African American study classes, said it’s on people to explore their heritage.  

“We can’t depend on the public school system to teach our history,’’ said Campbell, 20, adding that visiting museums is only part of learning about Black history. “It should be a stepping stone, but not our only stepping stone.”

Black history restrictions spur more interest

The push to teach more Black history comes as dozens of states, including Florida, Texas and Oklahoma, have adopted or proposed measures that critics say omit crucial parts of Black history . Some have also banned books, many of them by Black authors that focus on race.

The restrictions have spurred more people to educate themselves , museum leaders said.

‘’The more we try to clamp down on some things, frankly, the more people are talking about it and then they start to seek out places to find this story,’’ Matthews said. “Many will look for specifically authentic places.’’

That’s often a Black museum, experts said.

“The broader public understands that museums and historic sites are supplemental places of knowledge and education and are critically important at this moment in our history,’’ Leggs said.

Bunch said there will always be interest in Black museums regardless of political pushback.

“You want to make sure that those museums are strong so when the pendulum swings and more and more people are coming to the subject, they have good museums to explore.’’

To learn more: Black churches in Florida buck DeSantis: 'Our churches will teach our own history.'

The Freedom Monument Sculpture Park is the latest of three EJI history projects in Montgomery. More than 2 million people have visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum since they opened in 2018.

Stevenson called the response ‘’affirming’’ and ‘’encouraging.’’

“That has helped me believe that what we're doing can have an impact and has power, and we should keep trying to do it,’’ he said.

The reaction to their first two sites led the EJI to create the sculpture park with its focus on slavery. “I really hope that we begin to understand that the institution of slavery created harms that have a legacy and that we need to understand those harms,’’ Stevenson said.

'An investment well worth making'

Not all new Black museums are mega structures. Some focus on one person or moment in history. Some don’t have a building at all. The Sankofa Mobile Museum recently visited schools in Prince George’s County, Maryland, teaching local Black history.

An old storefront in Sumner, Mississippi, houses the Emmett Till Interpretive Center and features exhibits about the 14-year old Black teenager who was murdered by white men in Mississippi in 1955. Emmett’s death was a catalyst in the Civil Rights Movement.

Other new opportunities: Several Black museums have opened in recent years with more coming soon. Here's a list.

The center opened in 2016. Last summer, President Joe Biden signed a proclamation establishing the Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument at three historic sites in Mississippi and Illinois, where Emmett was from.

“It really is going to be a place more of reflection so people can think about (what happened),’’ said Daphne Chamberlain, a civil rights historian in Mississippi who is working with the center. "It's always important that we remember, and if we don't remember, what we're also doing is subscribing to all of these attacks on Black history.’’

African American historic sites have long been underfunded and undervalued, experts say.

The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund has received more than 6,000 requests totaling $700 million in the past six years, including some from museums and historic sites.

Leggs said there aren’t enough funders for such preservation projects. “This is critically important, but this funding is often short-term gap investing,’’ he said.

More local communities should support Black museums, Leggs said, particularly since many are “cultural anchors.’’

The price tag for the International African American Museum grew to $100 million. It received money from private and public entities, including the state, county and city.

“Ask and you shall receive, but ask many, many times,’’ Matthews said.

Museum officials made the case that the new institution would fit with the region's brand of promoting its history. Matthews says that “is what began to make folks more and more comfortable.''

It has been only in more recent years that there has been the capability to build some Black museums, Stevenson said. He doesn’t believe the Equal Justice Initiative could have done it 10 years ago.

“We didn't have the ability to create institutions with autonomy like the institutions that we've created, but now we do,’’ Stevenson said. “We have resources. We have capacity. We just have to make sure we have vision.’’

EJI doesn’t take government funding. Visitors pay $5 for admission to the sites to keep it affordable.

The cost for the sculpture park, where construction is still underway, is expected to climb to about $20 million.

“What we did on the other two sites has made me believe it's an investment well worth making,’’ said Stevenson, adding that the response has been overwhelming. “When I hear some of the things I hear, when the students come through and people come through, there’s no limit to what I would spend to try to create that kind of consciousness.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New Alabama sculpture park, Black history museums are changing the way history is told

Market Harmony: the Symphony of Economic Freedom

This essay about the dynamics of a free market economy explores its principles, challenges, and impact on society. It highlights how the free market operates based on supply and demand, promoting innovation and individual autonomy. While acknowledging its benefits, the essay also addresses concerns such as income inequality and market failures. It emphasizes the importance of striking a balance between market freedom and responsible governance to ensure equitable outcomes and sustainable progress. Ultimately, the essay underscores the enduring significance of the free market in driving economic growth and social empowerment, urging for its preservation and evolution in an ever-changing world.

How it works

In the grand orchestration of economic systems, the free market economy emerges as a symphony of unparalleled dynamism and innovation. Defined by the interplay of supply and demand, this economic paradigm is a testament to the ingenuity of human interaction and the pursuit of individual aspirations. Within this vibrant marketplace, prices serve as the conductor, orchestrating the movements of countless actors in a harmonious dance of exchange and progress.

At its heart, the free market economy champions the principles of autonomy and self-determination.

Unlike the rigid confines of centrally planned systems, where the heavy hand of government dictates economic outcomes, the free market empowers individuals and businesses to chart their own course. Armed with the freedom to innovate, entrepreneurs harness their creativity to meet the ever-evolving needs and desires of consumers. This spirit of enterprise fuels a perpetual cycle of competition and improvement, driving advancements in technology, efficiency, and quality.

Yet, amidst the symphony of market forces, a delicate balance must be struck. While the absence of excessive regulation fosters innovation and flexibility, it also invites the risk of exploitation and inequality. Without safeguards in place, monopolistic tendencies may emerge, stifling competition and curtailing consumer choice. Moreover, the pursuit of profit, while a powerful incentive for progress, can sometimes lead to ethical compromises and disregard for societal welfare.

In navigating these complexities, proponents of the free market recognize the need for a nuanced approach. Rather than advocating for unchecked laissez-faire policies, they advocate for a blend of market freedom and responsible governance. Antitrust measures, for instance, serve as a bulwark against monopolistic practices, ensuring a level playing field for businesses of all sizes. Similarly, environmental regulations help safeguard our planet’s finite resources, mitigating the negative externalities that arise from unchecked exploitation.

Moreover, the free market economy is not merely an engine of economic growth, but a catalyst for social progress and empowerment. By democratizing access to opportunity, it enables individuals from all walks of life to pursue their dreams and improve their standard of living. Through the mechanism of voluntary exchange, it fosters mutual understanding and cooperation among diverse communities, transcending cultural and geographical boundaries.

In contemplating the essence of the free market economy, one is reminded of its profound resilience and adaptability. Across centuries and continents, it has weathered storms of adversity and upheaval, emerging stronger and more vibrant with each trial. Its enduring appeal lies not in its perfection, but in its capacity for renewal and evolution. As we stand on the precipice of a new era of economic transformation, let us heed the lessons of the past and embrace the boundless potential of the free market to shape a brighter future for generations to come.

In conclusion, the free market economy stands as a beacon of human ingenuity and progress, embodying the timeless virtues of autonomy, innovation, and cooperation. While not without its challenges and complexities, it remains a testament to the power of individual freedom and voluntary exchange to unleash the full potential of human endeavor. As we navigate the ever-changing currents of global commerce, let us strive to preserve and nurture the principles that lie at the heart of this remarkable economic paradigm, ensuring a legacy of prosperity and opportunity for generations to come.

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A Furious, Forgotten Slave Narrative Resurfaces After Nearly 170 Years

John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged.

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By Jennifer Schuessler

One day in 1855, a man walked into a newspaper office in Sydney, Australia, with an odd request.

The man, later described as a “man of color” with “bright, intelligent eyes” and an American accent, was looking for a copy of the United States Constitution.

The text was procured, along with a recent book on the history of the United States. Two weeks later, the man returned with a nearly 20,000-word text of his own, bearing a blunt title: “The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots.”

The first half offered an account of the author’s birth into slavery in North Carolina around 1815, his escape from his master, his years on a whaling ship and then his departure from “the land of the free” for the shores of Australia, where he went to work in the gold fields.

The second half was a long, blistering condemnation of the country he had left behind, in particular its revered founding document.

“That devil in sheepskin called the Constitution of the United States,” Jacobs wrote, is “the great chain that binds the north and south together, a union to rob and plunder the sons of Africa, a union cemented with human blood, and blackened with the guilt of 68 years.”

The newspaper published the narrative anonymously, in two installments, attributing it only to “A Fugitive Slave.” How it was received is unknown.

The man’s words then sat, unread and forgotten, until a few years ago, when an American literary scholar came across them while digging around one night in an online newspaper database.

Now, it is being published for the first time in 169 years by the University of Chicago Press, under its unflinching original title, with the author’s name — John Swanson Jacobs — emblazoned on the cover.

The rediscovery of a long-forgotten slave narrative would be notable enough. But this one, scholars who have seen it say, is unique for its global perspective and its uncensored fury, from a man living far outside the trans-Atlantic network of white abolitionists who often limited what the formerly enslaved could write about their experiences.

And it comes with an uncanny twist: Jacobs was the brother of Harriet Jacobs, whose 1861 autobiography, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” the earliest known account of the experience of American slavery by a woman, is now seen as a cornerstone of the 19th-century literary canon.

Today, John Jacobs is remembered mostly as a footnote to his sister’s story. But Jonathan D.S. Schroeder, the scholar who rediscovered the narrative said he hopes the book will restore Jacobs to history, placing him in the tradition of Black radicalism from David Walker’s incendiary “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World” from 1829 to the Black Lives Matter movement today.

The narrative is a “spectacular performance of autobiographical freedom.” Schroeder argues. And it raises a deeper question: How would other formerly enslaved people — including Jacobs’s more famous sister — have told their stories if they had been truly able to write freely?

A Homegrown American Genre

Slave narratives have been called the United States’ only homegrown literary genre, if also a complicated one. Well into the 20th century, they were dogged by questions about their authenticity, and the degree to which they had been shaped, or even fabricated, by white editors.

But today, the roughly 200 known to survive are prized both as direct testimony of enslavement and as the seedbed of a literary tradition that stretches from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead (whose novel “The Underground Railroad’ was partly inspired by Harriet Jacobs’s book ).

Schroeder came upon John Jacobs’s 1855 narrative by an odd back door. Back in 2017, he was fresh out of graduate school in English, and trying to turn his Ph.D. dissertation about the history of nostalgia into a book.

Today, we may think of nostalgia, a term coined in the 1680s by a Swiss physician, as a pleasantly wistful state. But it originated as a medical diagnosis , which was often applied to despondent prisoners, soldiers and others seen as “irrationally” homesick, including enslaved people .

One night, after a day of working on a job application, Schroeder was digging around on the internet, trying to blow off “stress anxiety.” He had been reading the 2004 biography of Harriet Jacobs by Jean Fagan Yellin and was fascinated by the fact that both her brother and her son, Joseph, had gone to Australia — “physically pretty much the farthest away from America you could get,” as Schroeder put it.

Joseph died in Melbourne, apparently by suicide, around 1860. Had the cause of death been listed as “nostalgia,” Schroeder wondered? Looking for more information, he started plugging various spellings (and misspellings) of both men’s names into Trove , a database of digitized Australian newspapers.

Almost immediately, two articles popped up, published on subsequent days in April 1855, with the same striking title: “The United States Government by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery.”

“It felt like getting hit by a bolt of lightning,” Schroeder said. But he also didn’t want to get too excited. “I know how often these things turn out to not be what they appear to be.”

The narrative begins with the anonymous author’s birth in Edenton, N.C., where Harriet Jacobs was born. As he read the first installment, Schroeder noticed many other details that lined up with those in Harriet Jacobs’s as-yet unpublished book.

Then, two-thirds of the way through, there was a description of a letter the author had left for his enslaver in 1839, shortly before escaping from their hotel in New York City and fleeing by ship.

“Sir, I have left you not to return,” he wrote. The letter was signed, “No longer yours, John S. Jacob.”

The editors had left a letter off the surname. But this was clearly Jacobs.

“Then, I allowed myself to be hit with the full force of it,” Schroeder said.

The next day, Schroeder contacted Caleb Smith, an English professor at Yale, to ask for advice. Smith, who in 2013 drew headlines for authenticating the earliest known memoir by an imprisoned Black American , from the 1850s, called Jacobs’s narrative an “exciting” find.

“We are accustomed to thinking about slavery in terms of silenced voices, lost stories, lives that left only cryptic traces in the archives,” Smith said in an email. “But the voice here is loud and clear in its rage.”

Manisha Sinha, a leading historian of abolition at the University of Connecticut, called it “a major discovery” and “a wow,” which adds to our understanding of the evolution of Black antislavery activism.

Historians have known John Jacobs as a barely documented player in radical abolitionist circles of the 1840s, who sometimes lectured alongside Frederick Douglass, his neighbor in Rochester, N.Y.

In 1851, Douglass broke with the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, rejecting his view of the Constitution as an irredeemable “covenant with death.” But unlike Douglass, Sinha said, “Jacobs doesn’t give up on his radical indictment of the United States.”

Scattered in the Archives

Schroeder, now 43 and teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design, was initially uncertain what to do with the discovery. A literary agent recommended he research a full biography to publish alongside the text. So Schroeder transformed himself from an interpretive literary scholar into an old-fashioned archive hound.

Today, many scholars of slavery emphasize the silences and biases of the archive. “It’s important to know that the records you are looking at weren’t set up to preserve the life of the person you are writing about, and often quite the opposite,” Schroeder said.

Most scholars had assumed that Yellin, who spent three decades researching Harriet Jacobs, had tracked down most of what could be found about the Jacobs family. (Yellin died in 2023 .) But Schroeder found many previously unnoticed records, including a forgotten oil portrait from 1848 that he believes depicts John.

In Boston, he uncovered court documents describing Jacobs’s great-grandparents’ attempt to escape slavery in the 1790s. In London, he found ship logs that allowed him to trace Jacobs’s wanderings after he left Australia for London in 1856.

From his base in London, Jacobs spent the next 15 years working on ships carrying sugar from the Caribbean, oranges from the Black Sea, cotton from Egypt. He also helped finish the trans-Atlantic telegraph line and, in 1869, sailed to Bangkok on a gunboat delivered as a present for the new king of Siam.

Jacobs, Schroeder writes, “lived a life that was even more incredible than his narrative.” But his traces, he said, were “scattered to the wind.”

In 1860, as Harriet’s book was about to appear, John decided to republish his own narrative. Before a voyage to Brazil, he entrusted the text to a London magazine called Leisure Hour.

The editors chopped it nearly in half , excising most of its political arguments and turning it into a more conventional tale of suffering and escape. And gone was the original title, with its blast at the 600,000 American “despots” who owned fellow human beings.

“They cut out the radical contract that Jacobs asks the reader to submit to,” Schroeder said, “which is to pay attention not to enslaved people in pain, but to the people and laws that create the pain.”

Brother and Sister

John Jacobs died in 1873, a few months after returning to the United States. Today, few of the literary pilgrims who go to Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., to visit Harriet’s grave are likely to pause over the small marker set into the grass nearby, labeled simply “Brother.”

But Schroeder hopes his research will prompt a rethinking of the siblings’ interconnected stories.

Harriet’s book, which includes harrowing descriptions of sexual abuse, borrowed conventions from the sentimental novel, to better appeal to the target audience of antislavery Northern white women. John’s narrative, Schroeder writes, is “unsentimental to its core.” But were their stories originally intended to be so different?

Both siblings, Schroeder writes, began thinking about their books in the period when they lived together in Rochester, in the late 1840s, and possibly “intended for their stories to be read together.” And in the late 1850s, Schroeder writes, John seemed to encourage Harriet, who visited London, to publish her book there.

In her biography, Yellin describes how Harriet spent three years trying to get her book published, which meant getting the imprimatur of white benefactors. Twice, she asked Harriet Beecher Stowe for an endorsement, and was rebuffed. When “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” was finally published in 1861, in Boston, the white editor revised it heavily, and cut a closing tribute to the radical abolitionist John Brown.

At the end of her book, Harriet describes John’s departure for California. What would her finished book would have been like, Schroeder wonders, if she had joined him — and then, like him, continued even farther?

“There were invisible constraints on formerly enslaved authors who remained in the United States,” Schroeder said. Without the two versions of John Jacobs’s narrative, “we wouldn’t see that as clearly.”

Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. More about Jennifer Schuessler

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Dover middle school students nominate their heroes, tell them why in their own words

Dover Area Middle School students invited their heroes to school on May 22 to hear, in their own words, why they were chosen. Parents, teachers, coaches and soldiers were among those chosen by students.

Students wrote the essays ahead of time and then invited their heroes to the assembly where students sat at long tables with their heroes to hear why they were chosen.

"My hero is Miguel Rosado, his friends and family call him Mikey. He is my dad," Mikalyn Rosado read to her father, "He changed his life for me and that is why he is my hero..."

Rosado, wearing an XPO logistics company work shirt and cap, said he was a little bit choked up by the nomination, unaware that his daughter had named him her hero before he had arrived to meet her at school.

Several essays were chosen to read in front of the whole room.

Brody Wise took to the podium to read his nomination of his father Andrew Wise, "Have you ever heard of a hero without a cape? Well I have one… He might have some mental scars from serving, but there isn’t anything in the world that I would be grateful for more than him," citing his service to the Marine Corps. “He put his life on the line to give us the freedom of walking the earth.” 

Andrew Wise served with the Marines between 2000-2004 during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Brody goes on to tell the audience how his father has “influenced my life to make me a clean and trustworthy person and make me stronger so when it comes time for me to face.”

Andrew Wise gave his son a strong hug after his reading.

Justin Rowand, a Dover middle school football coach, wore two name tags that said “Justin” because he was nominated by two different students. He sat at the end of the table with his head slightly tilted to the ceiling as he listened to what the two boys were saying on either side of him

More photos: Dover log house through the years in photos.

“He was a good impact on me and he helped me so much and made me into the young man I was today…,” Josh Alexander said, sitting to the right.

“He is a mentor to me and helps me every single day whether it comes to being better in life or being better in football,” Broden Greener said to his left.