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Slavery Series: An Introduction

© Michael J. Swogger

There was perhaps no system of labor more fundamental to the development of the United States than slavery. Forced labor was ubiquitous in the earliest days of Jamestown, in the establishment of the New England colonies, in the low-lying fertile regions Carolina. Bondspeople came from the streets of English towns and the impoverished and conquered Irish homeland. They were American Indians, German commoners, English criminals sentenced to years of hard labor, Africans taken from the Ivory Coast. Many worked alongside free laborers and entrepreneurs while others were confined to each other's company in seas of tobacco and rice.

Slavery was first and foremost an economic institution. It was a means by which profits were gained, livelihood was created. The sources of this forced labor in America comprising people from many walks of life, countries of origins, races, and creeds illustrates the degree of lengths to which those engaged in enterprise were willing to travel to gain wealth. But as the drive behind the economics of forced labor would change little throughout the first two hundred years of American history, the system would become more complex and multifarious as people of fewer backgrounds grew subject to enslavement. By the American Revolution it was one group who would be identified almost solely as the course of slave labor in America: blacks.

The following series of articles deals with the complex system of labor that was slavery in America. It is an examination of how slavery evolved from its earliest days resembling indentured servitude through the American Revolution and the fully matured slavery of the Antebellum Period. The first piece focuses on forced labor in the early colonies and how it transformed into an economic system by which blacks were relegated to pariah status with all others born into a higher social caste. The second concerns colonial slavery and its inner workings through the American Revolution and the early republic, with the rise of abolition and the beginnings of slavery becoming a Southern-dominated phenomenon. The third article details antebellum slavery and its array of functions as a system of economics and as a means social and political control. The final piece deals specifically with slaver resistance and the institution's demise after the Civil War.

A number of excellent sources are the backbone of this series. Gary Nash's Red, White, and Black and Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom are two excellent resources on the settling of the North American continent and how slavery shaped early American life. Additionally, A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki provides a solid survey of both early and antebellum slavery. And, of course, one cannot reasonably discuss any aspect of African American history without first consulting John Hope Franklin's and Alfred A. Moss, Jr.'s From Slavery to Freedom. Finally, two works are indispensable when examining the many aspects of slavery in America. Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution and Peter Kolchin's American Slavery are both tremendous books this author simply cannot do without. Other sources are utilized as well and are cited accordingly throughout the series. Full bibliographic information to all specific sources referenced here is provided below.