short essay about slavery

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.

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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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Slavery in America

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 26, 2024 | Original: November 12, 2009

Hundreds of thousands of Africans, both free and enslaved, aided the establishment and survival of colonies in the Americas and the New World. However, many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619 , when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown , Virginia . The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship Sao Jao Bautista.

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

Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.

When Did Slavery Start in America?

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.

After the American Revolution , many colonists—particularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the agricultural economy—began to link the oppression of enslaved Africans to their own oppression by the British, and to call for slavery’s abolition.

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 Revolutionary War , the new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, when it 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. The Constitution's drafters also guaranteed the right to repossess any “person held to service or labor” (an obvious euphemism for slavery).

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton.

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, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt.

Around the same time, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a young Yankee 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 itself was never widespread in the North, though many of the region’s businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Between 1774 and 1804, most of the northern states abolished slavery or started the process to abolish slavery, but the institution of slavery remained vital to the South.

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

Rebellions among enslaved people did occur—notably, ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822—but few were successful.

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 around 75 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.

Supporters of slavery pointed to Turner’s rebellion as evidence that Black people were inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them. And fears of similar insurrections led many southern states to further strengthen their slave codes in order to limit the education, movement and assembly of enslaved people.

Abolitionist Movement

In the North, the increased repression of southern Black people only fanned the flames of the growing abolitionist movement .

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by free Black people such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison , founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator , and Harriet Beecher Stowe , who published the bestselling antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin .

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.

Free Black people and other antislavery northerners 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 estimates vary widely, it may have helped anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 enslaved people reach freedom.

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.

America’s First Memorial to its 4,400 Lynching Victims

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — African American — The history of slavery in America

The History of Slavery in America

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Published: Dec 5, 2018

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Introductory Essay: Slavery and the Struggle for Abolition from the Colonial Period to the Civil War

How did the principles of the Declaration of Independence contribute to the quest to end slavery from colonial times to the outbreak of the Civil War?

I can explain how slavery became codifed over time in the United States.
I can explain how Founding principles in the Declaration of Independence strengthened anti-slavery thought and action.
I can explain how territorial expansion intensified the national debate over slavery.
I can explain various ways in which African Americans secured their own liberty from the colonial era to the Civil War.
I can explain how African American leaders worked for the cause of abolition and equality.

Essential Vocabulary

Slavery and the struggle for abolition from the colonial period to the civil war.

The English established their first permanent settler colony in a place they called Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Early seventeenth-century Virginia was abundant in land and scarce in laborers. Initially, the labor need was met mostly by propertyless English men and women who came to the new world as indentured servants hoping to become landowners themselves after their term of service ended. Such servitude was generally the status, too, of Africans in early British America, the first of whom were brought to Virginia by a Dutch vessel in 1619. But within a few decades, indentured servitude in the colonies gave way to lifelong, hereditary slavery, imposed exclusively on black Africans.

Because forced labor (whether indentured servitude or slavery) was a longstanding and common condition, the injustice of slavery troubled relatively few settlers during the colonial period. Southern colonies in particular codified slavery into law. Slavery became hereditary, with men, women, and children bought and sold as property, a condition known as chattel slavery . Opposition to slavery was mainly concentrated among Quakers , who believed in the equality of all men and women and therefore opposed slavery on moral grounds. Quaker opposition to slavery was seen as early as 1688, when a group of Quakers submitted a formal protest against the institution for discussion at a local meeting.

Anti-slavery sentiment strengthened during the era of the Revolution and Founding. Founding principles, based on natural law proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and in several state constitutions, added philosophical force to biblically grounded ideas of human equality and dignity. Those principles informed free and enslaved blacks, including Prince Hall, Elizabeth Freeman, Quock Walker, and Belinda Sutton, who sent anti slavery petitions to state legislatures. Their powerful appeal to natural rights moved legislators and judges to implement the first wave of emancipation in the United States. Immediate emancipation in Massachusetts, gradual emancipation in other northern states, and private manumission in the upper South dealt blows against slavery and freed tens of thousands of people.

Slavery remained deeply entrenched and thousands remained enslaved, however, in states in both the upper and lower South , even as northern leaders believed the practice was on its way to extinction. The result was the set of compromises the Framers inscribed into the U.S. Constitution—lending slavery important protections but also preparing for its eventual abolition. The Constitution did not use the word “slave” or “slavery,” instead referring to those enslaved as “persons.” James Madison, the “father” of the Constitution, thus thought the document implicitly denied the legitimacy of a claim of property in another human being. The Constitution also restricted slavery’s growth by allowing Congress to ban the slave trade after 20 years. Out of those compromises grew extended controversies, however, the most heated and dangerous of which concerned the treatment of fugitive slaves and the status of slavery in federal territories.

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 renewed and enhanced slavery’s profitability and expansion, which intensified both attachment and opposition to it. The first major flare-up occurred in 1819, when a dispute over whether Missouri would be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state generated threats of civil war among members of Congress. The adoption of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 quelled the anger for a time. But the dispute was reignited in the 1830s and continued to inflame the country’s political life through the Civil War.

A cotton gin on display at the Eli Whitney Museum by Tom Murphy VII, 2007.

“U.S. Cotton Production 1790–1834” by Bill of Rights Institute/Flickr, CC BY 4.0

Separating the sticky seeds from cotton fiber was slow, painstaking work. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (gin being southern slang for engine) made the task much simpler, and cotton production in the lower South exploded. Cotton planters and their slaves moved to Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama to start new cotton plantations. Many planters in the Chesapeake region sold their slaves to cotton planters in the lower South. This created a massive interstate slave trade that transferred enslaved persons through auctions and forced marches in chains and that also broke up many slave families.

In 1831, in Virginia, a large-scale slave rebellion led by Nat Turner resulted in the deaths of approximately 60 whites and more than 100 blacks and generated alarm throughout the South. That same decade saw the emergence of a radicalized (and to a degree racially integrated) abolitionist movement, led by Massachusetts activist William Lloyd Garrison, and an equally radicalized pro slavery faction, led by U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

The polarization sharpened in subsequent decades. The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) brought large new western territories under U.S. control and renewed the contention in Congress over the status of slavery in federal territories. The complex 1850 Compromise, which included a new fugitive slave law heavily weighted in favor of slaveholders’ interests, did little to restore calm.

A few years later, Congress reopened the Kansas and Nebraska territories to slavery, thereby undoing the 1820 Missouri Compromise and rendering any further compromises unlikely. The U.S. Supreme Court tried vainly to settle the controversy by issuing, in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the most pro-slavery ruling in its history. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, a rising figure in the newly born Republican Party, declared the United States a “house divided” between slavery and freedom. In late 1859, militant abolitionist John Brown alarmed the South when he attempted to liberate slaves by taking over a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He was promptly captured, tried, and executed and thereupon became a martyr for many northern abolitionists.

Watch this BRI Homework Help video: Dred Scott v. Sandford for more information on the pivotal Dred Scott decision.

Leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, and James Forten all worked for the cause of abolition and equality.

As the debate over slavery continued on the national stage, formerly enslaved and free black men and women spoke out against the evils of slavery. Slave narratives such as those by Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northrup, and Harriet Jacobs humanized the experience of slavery. Their vivid, heartbreaking accounts of their own enslavement strengthened the moral cause of abolition. At the same time, enslaved men and women made the brave and dangerous decision to run away. Some ran on their own, and others used the Underground Railroad, a network of secret “conductors” and “stations” that helped enslaved people escape to the North and, after 1850, to Canada. The most famous of these conductors was Harriet Tubman, who traveled to the South about 12 times to lead approximately 70 men and women to freedom. Free blacks faced their own challenges. Leaders such as Benjamin Banneker, James Forten, David Walker, and Maria Stewart spoke out against racist attitudes and laws that sought to limit their political and civil rights.

This map shows the concentration of slaves in the southern United States as derived from the 1860 U.S. Census. The so-called “Border states”—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and after 1863, West Virginia—allowed slavery but remained loyal to the Union. Credit: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

By 1860, the atmosphere in the United States was combustible. With the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in November of that year, the conflict over slavery came to a head. Since Lincoln and Republicans opposed the expansion of slavery and called it a moral evil, seven slaveholding states declared their secession from the United States. And in April 1861, the war came. The next five years of conflict and bloodshed determined the fate of enslaved men, women, and children, and of the Union itself.

Reading Comprehension Questions

What actions were taken to oppose slavery in the colonial period and Founding era?
Why did the Constitution not use the words “slave” or “slavery”?
The invention of the cotton gin
The Mexican-American War
Dred Scott v. Sandford
The election of Abraham Lincoln as president
How did formerly enslaved and free black men and women fight to end slavery?

American Social History Project · Center for Media and Learning

Background Essay on Slave Communities and Resistance

This short essay explains how historians came to focus not just on what slavery did to enslaved people, but what enslaved people did for themselves within the limits set by this brutal institution.

In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, just under four million African American enslaved people lived and labored in the South. Most worked in agriculture, creating immense wealth for world markets by cultivating and harvesting cotton, tobacco, sugar and rice. Â Planters in the South and merchants in the North and Europe became rich buying and selling goods produced by enslaved African labor in America. In the antebellum South, the system influenced almost every aspect of southern behavior and interaction among blacks, among whites, and between the two races. Â

While northern colonies and states also had slavery, it was never as central to the economy and development of the North, nor as rooted and widespread as it was in the South. Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1780, and over the next several decades other northern states did the same. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the question of slavery increasingly divided North and South. By the 1850s, increasing resistance to the system by enslaved people in the South and abolitionists in the North was changing the course of nineteenth-century American history and would eventually result in the Civil War. Â

Slavery, a central topic in U.S. history, has undergone a thorough re-examination over the last three decades. As historian Herbert Gutman noted, previous generations of historians first asked "What did slavery do for the slave?" and later, acknowledging the system's brutality, "What did slavery do to the slaves?" But when historians began to ask, "What did slaves do for themselves?," our current understanding of slavery emerged. Based on the reinterpretation of old sources and the study of new sources like slave narratives, historians now suggest that within the harsh and brutal confines of slavery, African Americans were resistant and resourceful. In the slave quarters, through family, community and religion, enslaved women, men, and children struggled for a measure of independence and dignity.

In This Collection

Primary documents.

A Plantation Burial
Former Slaves Remember Resistance
"The Slave Mother"
Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, 1861
Ex-Slaves Recall Sunday Meetings
"Five Generations on Smith's Planation, Beaufort, South Carolina"
Colonial Virginia Laws on Slavery and Servitude (1639-1705)
"Go Down, Moses"
A Plantation Mistress Decries a "Monstrous System"
A Former Slave Recalls Slave Quarters and Moments of Leisure
Selling Sweet Potatoes in Charleston
Runaway Slave Advertisement from Antebellum Virginia
Table of Naming Practices among the Bennehan-Cameron Plantation Slaves, Orange County, North Carolina, 1778â€“1842

Secondary Documents

Teaching activities.

Slavery: Acts of Resistance
Gender, Sex, and Slavery
Making Sense of Evidence: The African Burial Ground

Additional Resources

White into Black: Seeing Race, Slavery, and Anti-Slavery in Antebellum America
Doing as They Can: Slave Life in the American South Viewer's Guide
"Slavery and Community"

Historical Era

Antebellum America (1816-1860)

Slavery and Abolition

Martin Luther King Speaks Out Against Injustice

Black "Exodusters" Explain their Reasons for Leaving the South

A Black New Yorker Describes Life in a CCC Camp

Background Essay on Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine

Background Information on the Events at Wounded Knee

Background Essay on the New York City Draft Riots

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The New York Times

Magazine | ‘it was very humiliating’: readers share how they were taught about slavery.

‘It Was Very Humiliating’: Readers Share How They Were Taught About Slavery

Compiled by NICOLE PHILLIP SEPT. 27, 2019

We asked you how you learned about slavery in school. You told us about degrading role play, flawed lessons and teachers who played down its horrors.

Compiled by Nicole Phillip SEPT. 27, 2019

A Florida instructor told a reader to pretend to be enslaved and use her nervousness as part of the character. In Illinois, a reader participated in a debate on slavery in which the pro-slavery side won. And a fourth-grade class in Virginia was given an assignment that referred to enslaved people as “African workers.”

Inspired by Nikita Stewart’s essay for The 1619 Project on why slavery is taught so poorly in American schools, we asked readers to tell us about their own experiences learning this history. We received hundreds of responses depicting off-base and factually inconsistent lessons, as well as a few thoughtful approaches.

Below is a selection, condensed and edited for clarity.

The ‘Good’ Aspects of Slavery

Many readers remembered lessons that emphasized the “pleasant” aspects of slavery, an attempt to play down its horrors that some rejected even as children.

In the fifth grade, my textbook said that many enslaved people were “sad” that slavery ended, because their enslavers took care of them and gave them food and clothing. I took the book home, and my parents made me go back to school and tell my teacher to change the book and teach us the truth — my parents said “justice demanded it.” — Kian Glenn, 32, went to school in Eden Prairie, Minn.

In my 10th grade American history class, we were given an assignment to write the “pros” and cons of slavery. Many of us questioned what, if any, “pro” would there be, but the assignment stood. — Deirdre Sheridan, 24, went to school in Scotch Plains, N.J.

We were taught that removing people from Africa and bringing them to America “saved” them from idolatry and damnation. We were also taught that slavery was a “kindly” institution and that enslavers “loved” their enslaved people and took good care of them. — Karen Seay, 72, went to school in Inman, S.C.

In grade nine or 10, we took Alabama History. The teacher told us that “slavery wasn’t that bad.” Then the teacher asked, “Would you treat something badly that you had paid good money for?” — Reginald Grayson, 53, went to school in Huntsville, Ala.

Inaccuracies About the Cause of the Civil War

Even though historians have concluded that slavery was central to the Civil War, many readers told us that their teachers told them otherwise.

In seventh grade, my teacher announced that “the Civil War had absolutely nothing to do with slavery!” while standing in the middle of the classroom and sweeping her arm in the air dramatically. — Angela Aguero, 59, went to school in Chelsea, Mass.

In eighth grade, we debunked the “myth” that slavery caused the Civil War. Instead, we learned, the Southern states felt as though their rights were being encroached on by the Northern states, and thus “states’ rights” actually led to the breaking up of the Union. — Daniel Tran, 20, went to school in Windham, N.H.

My high school history teacher was a strict economic determinist — all wars are fought for economic reasons, whether or not those reasons were actual or merely perceived was moot to him. To him, slavery was not a cause of the war, except to the extent that it threatened the economic interests of landed Southerners. — John Beauregard , 79, went to school in Windsor, Conn.

Poorly Constructed Demonstrations

Readers told us about lessons that missed the mark by providing little context for what students should be learning — or, worse, that seemed to minimize the evils of slavery.

In the fifth or sixth grade, several students were designated as judges. The rest of the class was divided into two groups — one pro-slavery and the other against — and asked to give arguments in front of the judges about whether slavery should be outlawed.

I was on the antislavery side, so I got up and talked to the class about families being torn apart and babies ripped out of mothers’ arms. I remember this activity so clearly because I thought we had the easier argument and we should have won by default.

I was shocked when the judges voted against us. — Jane Zhi , 33, went to school in Hoffman Estates, Ill.

In the eighth grade, my teacher turned off the lights, gathered the desks in the middle of the room and made all the students sit in the fetal position under them. She then played a music track with crashing waves and spooky thunderbolts. She told us that this is what the Middle Passage was like for enslaved persons.

At the time, I thought the activity was dumb, boring and pointless.

The lesson was so superficial that it was probably a mockery of real horrors and hardship. Also, it probably wasn’t an appropriate way to communicate the material to us, and the emulation of the pain could have been triggering for some. — Mark Anliker, 25, went to school in Zionsville, Ind.

One day, I was looking at a work sheet my little sister brought home from school from the fourth grade. Two questions in particular caught my eye. One was “In what region did the African workers primarily settle?”

And another was “Why did the Virginia colony need African slave labor?” I couldn’t believe the work sheet referred to enslaved people as “African workers,” as though it was voluntary. I also couldn’t believe it said Virginia needed slave labor. — Hannah Lang , 23, Leesburg, Va.

In the fifth grade, I was one of three black girls in the class, and all three of us were assigned to be “slaves” during a presentation. I told my teacher that I was too nervous to give the presentation, and he told me to add that into the role playing.

He said if my voice shakes or cracks, I can say I sound like that because “massa will beat me or sell me if he knewed I was talkin’ to y’alls.” It was very humiliating, and I felt horrible afterward. — Mary Watts, 29, went to school in Orlando, Fla.

A Missing Education

Some told us that lessons on slavery were rushed, severely lacking or missing entirely.

I didn’t learn about slavery until high school. It was a short paragraph within a chapter about the Civil War in our history textbook. Although I already knew about slavery, it took me literal years to understand the scope, long-term ramifications and all-encompassing reach of slavery — and I’m still learning today. — Margaret Brown e, 33, went to school in North Kingstown, R.I.

I was one of the few African-American students at my high school in Southern Virginia. While taking Advanced Placement U.S. History, I noted that our book only had about one and a half pages on slavery, which included the half-page diagram of a slave ship. — Brian M. Williams, 39, went to school in Botetourte County, Va.

There was minimal discussion about slavery at my school, but in our Texas history class, a teacher joked, “If the South won, you would be our slaves.” I was one of four black students and we looked at one another in shock. The teacher became angry and said it was “just a joke.” — Gina Kennedy, 46, went to school in Dallas

I don’t remember being taught anything other than the main facts: when it started, what crops benefited and other significant historical events. My Advanced Placement U.S. History teacher zoomed through it all. — Poppy Purcell, 44, went to school in Redondo Beach, Calif.

Well-Handled Lessons

Not all readers felt that their education was lacking. Some told us they received memorable and robust lessons on slavery that encouraged them to think deeply about the atrocities faced by enslaved people and also about how that history is reflected in modern society.

In seventh grade, my history teacher had us compare the district textbook with “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn. A moment that stands out the most was when we discussed the semantic difference between the phrases “they were given freedom” and “they took their freedom.”

The conclusion of the lesson was that “to take” implies that one is retrieving what has been stolen and is a phrase of power, whereas “to give” implies that freedom is not an inherent trait but rather a state to be bestowed by a benefactor. Once I saw this language, I couldn’t unsee it. — Kri sten N ., 41, went to school in Santa Rosa, Calif.

I had an excellent, but unorthodox, U.S. History teacher. During one discussion, he said this: Enslavers loved enslaved people “like they loved their dogs.”

During that time, I think it was common for people to believe the adage: Enslavers “loved their slaves.”

I believe a student brought this up in discussion. Mr. Hall’s comment told us that “love” might mean something very different than appreciation. This realization was profound to me.

I came to see that it could be love of property, love of economic advantage, love of defining and “being superior,” love of degrading people. — Suzanne Zintel , 76, went to school in Ridgewood, N.J .

I always thought the way I was taught about slavery was standard, which is why I’m always surprised to see headlines saying that most Americans don’t know the full story of slavery.

We learned about how different countries addressed slavery and eventually outlawed it. We learned about the participation of slaves and freed men in the Civil War and in the numerous revolts that occurred before.

Our textbooks were supplemented by field trips to plantations that showed slave quarters, and we watched movies to help understand the subject. We also read the writings of Frederick Douglass and learned about other enslaved people who sued for their freedom.

I went to a Catholic school that was open and intent on teaching us the failures of the Catholic Church throughout history, including slavery. — Gabriela W., 27, went to school in Irving, Tex.

American Slavery: A Very Short Introduction

Associate professor of history

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American Slavery: A Very Short Introduction traces the development of American slavery, from the Portuguese capture of Africans in the 1400s until its abolition following the Civil War, and explores its effects on the American colonies and the United States of America. It examines legislation that differentiated American Indians and Africans from Europeans as the ideology of white supremacy flourished. These laws reflected the contradiction of America's moral and philosophical ideology that valorized freedom on one hand and justified the enslavement of a population deemed inferior on another. The tense and often violent relationships between the enslaved and the enslavers are explored, as well as those between abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates.

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Blog article

Slavery, rooted in America’s early history

External resources

In the OUP print catalogue
America's Joan of Arc (2006) on Oxford Scholarship Online
Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (1995) on Oxford Scholarship Online
Slavery and Sin (2011) on Oxford Scholarship Online
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COMMENTS

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