Slavery in the United States

Painting of George Washington and enslaved Africans on his estate.

Brief Historical Context

Slavery in the United States took form in the institution of human chattel slavery, which it inherited from its colonial predecessors. The practice was prevalent from independence in 1776 until the end of the civil war in 1865. Primarily employed in the South, enslaved Afro-Americans were the backbone of the plantation economy in the US. Throughout this period, enslaved African Americans were collectively reduced to commodities which could be bought and sold for the benefit of White slave owners and had the same legal rights as farm animals. After the abolition of chattel slavery in the aftermath of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, many of chattel slavery's socio-economic relationships endured through the developments of the Jim Crow economy and sharecropping.

Prior to the formation of the United States the region had already developed and institutionalized a strict racial caste network built on White racial supremacy over African people. After the independence of the thirteen colonies, abolitionist legislation was gradually implemented in northern states where dependence on slave labor was minimal. As abolitionist movements arose in the aftermath of the American Revolution, supporters of slavery were granted concessions through the three-fifths compromise; a constitutional clause which made southern political power disproportionate in the US House of Representatives and Electoral College by counting Africans in America 3/5ths a person on the US Census. Despite the Jefferson administration's ban on the importation of slaves, it's enforcement was sporadic and ineffective and smuggling was common practice.

Contrary to a commonly held belief of the time that the peculiar institution would die down, the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney and the subsequent mechanization of the seed separation process led to the dramatic rise in the cotton productivity and demand for slaves. As a result of this new growing labor demand, enslaved Africans were often sold and transported from the Upper South to Deep South plantations. Coinciding with US territorial expansion, planter elites made efforts to expand slavery into new territories, resulting in the formation of the Republican Party in 1854. Tensions between the north and south continued as the Republicans gradually obtained political power in northern states and pushed for limiting slavery's expansion while the Democratic Party and its Southern Aristocracy supporters saw the Republicans as a threat to chattel slavery. In the midst of developing tensions between the two camps, religious denominations split over the issue of slavery into regional organizations of the North and South.

The elevation of Abraham Lincoln into the Presidency in 1860 on the platform of halting the expansion of slavery was the catalyst for the development of the Confederate States of America, starting with the succession of South Carolina which broke off from the Union before Lincoln's confirmation. At the inception of the Confederacy, 1/3rd of its inhabitants were enslaved Africans and the states of Mississippi and South Carolina held a solid Afro-American majority. In response to the siege of Fort Sumter by South Carolina militias, the Lincoln Administration called for a seventy-five thousand man militia to suppress the Confederate States. Wartime developments like the Emancipation Proclamation effectively ended chattel slavery in most of the south. Chattel slavery would persist in Kentucky until December 1965 as a result of the ratification of the 13th amendment.

White Settler Colonialism's Justifications for Slavery and White Supremacy

''Logical'' Justification

Yeoman farmers, who typically did not own slave labor, made up the majority of whites in southern society. They generally believed in and sided with the institution of slavery but also occasionally challenged the goals of the planter elite; especially on the western frontier of the U.S where they advocated for the gradual abolition of slavery. In efforts to justify the existence of the peculiar institution, southern aristocrats often sponsored white supremacist campaigns in both media and academia. With the three-fifths compromise, giving elite whites political power in congress, white elite planters also consolidated power, by making loans to those in need, hiring poor whites for work, as well as using resources to transport crops of yeoman farmers to the market. Even if some yeoman farmers didn't participate in the institution of slavery, they had major incentives not to end it because white settler colonial elites had made white society dependent upon themselves. White settler-colonialism, and its justification for the institution for slavery, was a political and economic move, to coerce, and influence those in slavery, and those who didn't contribute to slavery as much as actual slave owners, to disprove the evils, and horrors of slavery and to justify its evil to end it. The white settler elite created the idea of white supremacy to uphold white society together under elitist control. The idea that all whites were equal and superior towards black African slaves, was not in question due to the lower, and poor white farmers, who either did or did not support the idea of white supremacy, not having any benefits to opposing the idea of it, since the elite white farmers did in fact keep the yeoman poor farmers alive, and sustainable. Two justifying phrases include those that explain slavery, as a ''necessary evil'' or a ''positive good''. John C. Calhoun noted that:

''I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good - positive good... There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other. Broad and general as is this assertion, it is fully borne out by history... I fearlessly assert that the existing relation between the two races in the South, against which these blind fanatics are waging war, forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions.''

Explaining the ''inherent'', and ''moral'', as well as, ''necessary'', domination of the white race over the black, race bound southern society together. The planter elite and forged a unbreakable tie with the lower white classes and established a stronghold on southern culture.