Slavery and the Making of America

As early as the 1620s, there were no laws defining the limitations imposed on slaves in the colonies, but within a hundred years, everything changed. By the early 18th century, the trade of African slaves in America was expanding and many colonies adopted strict "black codes," transforming the social system into one of legal racial oppression.

From the 1740s to the 1830s, slavery continued to support economic development, but the Revolutionary War revealed the contradictions of a nation seeking independence while denying freedom to its black citizens. As the slave population reproduced, American planters became less dependent on the African slave trade and ensuing generations of slaves developed a unique culture of their own.

While the Northern states adopted laws to abolish and phase out slavery, in the southern United States, slavery entered the period of its greatest expansion as cotton became the country’s most valuable crop. The abolitionist movement, led by Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and others, gathered strength in the North, contributing to the widening fissure and imminent break-up of the nation.

The complexities of the Civil War and Reconstruction are chronicled through the experience of South Carolina slave Robert Smalls. The formation of militant groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, threatened the future of racial equality and segregation laws began to appear across the country. Slavery's eradication had not brought an end to black oppression.