Under the Fugitive Slaves Acts (1793 and 1850), gangs, known as ‘black-birders’ received generous rewards for extraditing suspected fugitive slaves to their ‘owners’ in the South... Read More
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The underground railroad is a figurative term used to refer to the escape route of African-American runaway slaves to the free North, Canada, Mexico and overseas between 1790 and 1865. The network of... Read More
In 1860, the slave population was distributed throughout the Deep South, and included the adjoining areas of East Texas, West Tennessee and North Florida. Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky and Virginia... Read More
Between 1800–60, the slave population grew from 800,000 to nearly 4,000,000; in 1860 almost one-third of southern families owned slaves. Of these, nearly 50 per cent had fewer than five slaves,... Read More
Until the 1830s, the dominant purpose of European colonization in Africa was the slave trade. From 1808–34, the abolition movement progressively eliminated the European slave trade with North... Read More
In 1732 a group of English ‘worthy poor’ settlers led by English philanthropist and member of Parliament James Oglethorpe, landed at Savannah and began establishing a chartered colony named... Read More
The pattern and incidence of slavery varied widely across the Caribbean. The British and French colonies, with economies dominated by the highly labour-intensive plantation cultivation of sugar, were... Read More
W.E.B Dubois wrote of the post-Reconstruction South, ‘the slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back toward slavery’. The ‘Redeemer’ Democrats enforced their monopoly... Read More
A former slave and educated Roman Catholic, Toussaint L’Ouverture (the ‘Black Napoleon’) led the Haitian Revolution in 1791. L’Ouverture, inspired by the French Revolution and its rhetoric of... Read More
In 1852, British chancellor of the exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli, described the colonies as a ‘millstone around our necks’. The abolition of slavery in the West Indies and costly anti-slavery... Read More