Slavery in Colonial America

The first Africans to be brought to North America landed in Virginia in 1619. It is unclear whether they were outright slaves or other kinds of unfree laborers, such as indentured servants.
By the 1670s slave codes enacted by individual colonies made slavery a legal, racially-based institution throughout the American Colonies. Until the American Revolution, slavery existed legally in all American colonies, north and south.

It was the monk Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566) who came with the idea of using inhabitants from Africa as slaves instead of Indians. At first, Las Casas was a pioneer for people's rights and fought for the indigenous peoples in America and their rights, since they were originally used for slavery. However, when the indigenous slaves almost died out, he suggested importing slaves from Africa. Las Casas struggled with the slaveholders for the termination of slavery until his death.

Fernand Braudel has said"Such hardships are not to be laid at the door simply of the planters, the mine-owners, the moneylending merchants of the Consulado in Mexico City or elsewhere, the harsh officials of the Spanish crown, the sugar- and tobacco-dealers, the slave-traders, or the grasping captains of trading vessels.... they were essentially middlemen, agents for other people.... In reality the root of the evil lay back across the Atlantic, in Madrid, Seville, Cadiz, Lisbon, Bordeaux, Nantes or Genoa, without question in Bristol, and in later years Liverpool, London and Amsterdam." (Braudel 1984 p 393).

And he quotes Karl Marx: ""The veiled slavery of the wage-workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World."

Following the Revolution, some of the new states began to write constitutions that eliminated slavery, though the new Constitution of the United States protected the rights of slaveholders.

Slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

See also