Introduction

The enslavement of Africans and their American-born descendants has often been characterized as America’s “original sin.” The United States was created on a principle that all people are “created equal,” set out in the Declaration of Independence, while the Constitution was written “to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” But when the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, slavery was legal in every one of the new thirteen states, and in nearly half of them slavery was a central economic and social institution. When the Constitution was written, in 1787, about one out of every five Americans was held in slavery. The contradictions between “equality” and “the Blessings of Liberty” and the existence of slavery underscores the notion of slavery as the nation’s original sin. The legacy of slavery—including the intellectual arguments American leaders made to defend the institution—continues to haunt us, more than 150 years after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States. Between 1861 and 1865 four million African Americans gained their liberty, but only after the bloodiest and most costly war in American history. But even with the end of slavery, the culture of racism, discrimination, and oppression remained. Much of that legacy stemmed from many of the documents found in this collection.

Africans first arrived in the Virginia colony in 1619, where they were sold as indentured servants, serving those who purchased their indentures for a period of time usually ranging from three to five years. At the time there were no slaves in England, where slavery had long disappeared. But slavery existed in parts of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire until the European expansion into the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, the word slave itself derived from the word Slav, because in the early Middle Ages, starting around the year 750, Scandinavian raiders (called both the Norsemen and the Vikings) raided the Slavic communities along the Baltic Sea, capturing people and bringing them to the Mediterranean, where they were sold as slaves. By the year 1,000 or so, the word Slav had evolved into the term slave throughout Europe. By the mid-1400s Black people from sub-Saharan Africa were being sold into southern Europe by North African slave traders. Well before Columbus set sail in 1492, enslaved Africans could be found in Spain and Portugal, on the various islands in the eastern Atlantic, such as the Canaries and the Azores, as well as on some Mediterranean islands. By 1619, when the first Africans arrived in Virginia, Spanish and Portuguese colonists held large numbers of African slaves in their colonies in the Western Hemisphere, in Brazil, Central and South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean.

Most Africans in early Virginia who survived their period of indentured servitude became free people. A few became moderately successful landowners. In the 1660s the Virginia legislature, called the House of Burgesses, began to pass laws recognizing the institution of slavery and encouraging its growth. By the 1680s Virginia was deeply committed to slavery, which could be found in all of the other British colonies in the Americas. By the time of the Revolution slavery was a central aspect of American life. Slavery was legal in every one of the thirteen colonies that declared their independence in 1776. Many of the leaders of the American founding, including George Washington, Patrick Henry, and James Madison, owned hundreds of slaves throughout their lives. In stirring language, the Declaration of Independence declared that all people “are created equal” and entitled to the rights “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Ironically the man who wrote those words, Thomas Jefferson, owned more than 100 enslaved people at the time, and would die fifty years later owning nearly 200 slaves.

The first U.S. census, in 1790, found that almost one in every five Americans was held as a slave. There were about four million slaves in the nation when the Civil War began, constituting about 12.5 percent of the nation’s population, and were worth, in 1860 dollars, more than $2 billion (more than $75 billion in 2024). Except for a few slaves in the western territories and Washington, D.C., all of these enslaved people lived in the fifteen southern states. In 1860, on the eve of the American Civil War, slaves made up 55 percent of Mississippi’s population, 57 percent of South Carolina’s, and more than forty percent of much of the rest of the South. The value of these slaves and the valuable products they produced (including, cotton, rice, sugar, tobacco, iron ore, coal, other raw materials, and some manufactured goods) made the southern slaveowners the richest people in the nation.

While the legacy of slavery remains a blot on American history, there was also a legacy of antislavery and equality that challenged slavery and the morality of treating people as property to be bought and sold, and denying them their liberty or the right to live their lives in happiness. At a formal level that legacy of opposing slavery led the northern states to abolish slavery during and after the Revolution and then to abolish all slavery in the nation during and immediately after the Civil War. This led to three constitutional amendments ending slavery, making all people born in the nation citizens, requiring that laws be equally enforced, and prohibiting discrimination in voting on the basis of race, color, or previous status as a slave. This legacy led to numerous civil rights laws, both in the 1860s and 1870s and in the 1950s and 1960s, and beyond. It led to court decisions striking down law that required segregation and legalized discrimination. However, the legacy of antislavery has yet to overcome many of the cultural and ideological views that supported slavery.

The documents in these volumes teach us how slavery evolved in the seventeenth century, grew in the eighteenth century, and remained a central social, economic, and cultural institution from the Revolution until the end of the Civil War.

Slavery in World History

Slavery has existed in virtually every society throughout human history. As the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has written: “There is nothing notably peculiar about the institution of slavery. It has existed from before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized.” Patterson found slavery in every “region on earth” and concluded that “probably there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders” (Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). Indeed, it is likely that most people in the world have ancestors who were both slaves and slaveowners.

While the day-to-day practice of slavery varied from place to place, as did treatment of people held as slaves, systems of slavery incorporated most or all of the following attributes. Most of these were also found in American slavery.

1. People are held as slaves for life and are legally considered to be property. Thus, they are owned by others and can be sold, traded, rented, used as collateral for loans, seized for debts or the failure to pay taxes, given away (often as wedding presents), bequeathed and inherited, and exchanged for other slaves or things of value. This was the state of affairs in all the American colonies before the Revolution, and in the fifteen slave states that existed in 1860.

2. The status of “slave” is inheritable, usually through the mother; Romans considered this rule—that the child follows the status of the mother—“as being of the law of nations.” As the second document in this set shows, the American colonies adopted this rule in the 1660s, abandoning the English common law rule that a child followed the status of the father.

3. Formal legal structures, or customs that have the virtual force of law, regulate the return of slaves who escape the immediate control of their owners; in this process the government authorized the use of private force and violence to recover fugitive slaves, but the government may also choose to use its own forces to recover fugitives. In addition, the government may punish people who protect or harbor fugitives and allow private lawsuits by aggrieved slaveowners against those who aided their runaway slaves. All slave societies limited the mobility of slaves. Every slave state in the South had laws allowing for the arrest of any Black suspected of being a runaway slave, and the U.S. government passed two fugitive slave laws, one in 1793 and the other in 1850, to help southern slaveowners seize runaway slaves in the free states of the North and West and bring them back to slavery in the South.

4. Slaves have limited (or no) legal rights or protections; they can generally neither sue nor be sued; when prosecuted for crimes, they have very few rights or protections; those “rights” they have are usually created to either protect the master’s property interest in the slave or to preserve the integrity of the legal system itself and not to protect the personal or individual rights of the slaves. Every southern state had laws, and sometimes special courts, to prosecute slaves and free Black people for crimes. No southern Blacks could have a jury of their “peers,” because no Black person, slave or free, could be a juror.

5. Slaves may be punished by slaveowners (or their agents) with minimal or no interference from the government. The “symbol” of the slaveowner was a whip, while a symbol of enslavement was the chain. American slaveowners could punish slaves for any reason or no reason at all, and it was illegal for slaves to resist punishment or fight back. Throughout world history governments also maintained the right to punish slaves for crimes or violations of rules formally enacted by the state. Such laws could be found throughout all the American colonies before the Revolution and everywhere in the American South before the Civil War. In ancient Rome owners could kill slaves without any legal constraints, and strangers who did so were only subject to penalties for destroying someone else’s property. The American slave states prohibited murdering slaves but did not consider it murder if a slave died from what the courts thought was “reasonable” punishment. It was also not a crime to kill a slave who was trying to escape bondage. The American slave states banned owners from implementing some kinds of truly barbaric punishments, like chopping off limbs, or castration, or other forms mutilation. But the facts of the case of State v. Mann and Souther v. Commonwealth, and the picture of the former slave “Gordon” in these volumes, illustrates the truly barbaric nature of American slavery, because owners could mistreat their slaves as they wished.

6. Owners have unlimited rights to sexual activity with their slaves, and slaves have no right to resist the sexual advances of their owners. Slaves have no rights or very limited rights to appeal the actions of their masters to formal legal institutions. As the Supreme Court of North Carolina said in State v. Mann: “The slave, to remain a slave, must be made sensible that there is no appeal from his master; that his power is in no instance usurped; but is conferred by the laws of man at least, if not by the law of God.”

7. Slaves have only a limited voice in legal proceedings and are not allowed to give testimony against their owners or (usually) other free people. In the American South before 1865, no Blacks could ever testify for or against a white person. Where the testimony of slaves was permitted, whether in the ancient world or the American South, courts generally did not give it the same weight as if coming from a free person.

8. Slavery is a lifelong and inheritable status; however, where the laws allowed it, owners were able to make slaves into free persons through a formal legal process, called manumission. That said, in many places (including the southern states) these freed persons were not given full legal rights and could be re-enslaved for violating some laws. Almost every slave system (and all the southern states) retained the right to limit, reverse, or completely forbid manumission. Some southern states prohibited the manumission of slaves, even if the owners wanted to do so.

9. The ownership of slaves in every slave society was supported, usually explicitly, by laws, regulations, administrative activities, courts, and legislatures, including provisions for special courts and special punishments for slaves, provisions for the capture and return of fugitive slaves, and provisions and rules for regulating the sale of slaves. Every year southern states passed new laws to regulate slaves and slavery.

Most societies preferred to enslave foreigners. For example, ancient Greece considered non-Greeks to be barbarians who were fit for slavery. But, in almost all slave societies, local residents and neighbors were also enslaved. There were Greek slaves in Athens and Italian slaves in Rome. Similarly, there were Chinese slaves in China, Russian slaves in Russia, and Muslim slaves in Islamic societies. Europeans enslaved their fellow countrymen (as well as people from other parts of Europe) throughout the ancient world and well into the modern period. Slavery was found all over Africa, and most slaves were from other communities, linguistic groups, or cultures. But local people might end up as slaves as punishment for crimes or because they had no way to pay their debts except by selling children, spouses, or even themselves into slavery. Slavery was deeply imbedded in the culture of the Aztec and Inca and among many Native American societies north of Mexico. Most slaves among Native Americans were captured enemies, but as elsewhere in the world, some were from the local community.

Slavery in North America

But in the British colonies, the United States, and the rest of the Western Hemisphere, slavery was different. Initially, especially in the Spanish colonies, Europeans enslaved Native Americans. When Columbus returned to Spain from his first voyage to the Caribbean, he returned with captured enslaves Carib Indians. However, by the mid-1600s slavery was generally limited to people of African ancestry. In this “new world,” Europeans were never held as slaves. However, children of African and African American female sales fathered by white men were held as slaves throughout the Western Hemisphere. For the first time in human history, slavery became racialized. By the 1700s the British settlers of North America only enslaved Black people. This led to an ideology of race that dominated the United States. The excerpts in these volumes from Thomas Jefferson and Dr. Samuel Cartwright illustrate how highly educated Americans invented racial arguments that justified slavery.

Today these statements shock most Americans, but some of these arguments still circulate in popular cultures, and among people who are uncomfortable living in a multiracial society. As the excerpts from Rev. Thornton Stringfellow show, southern ministers used the Bible to support slavery. Almost all churches in the South supported and defended slavery. Many congregations actually owned slaves, as did many southern clergymen. Almost all southern Christian denominations believed slaves should be baptized, made to attend church, and even have their marriages solemnized by clergymen. Of course, all southern clergymen fully understood that while a slave couple could be married in a church, no southern state law recognized the legality of a slave marriage, and throughout the slave states, slave families were destroyed by the sale of one partner but not the other, or the sale of children away from their parents. The destruction of slave families was one of the great horrors of the system.

American courts, the U.S. Constitution, and many political leaders also supported slavery. Southern politicians defended slavery on legal, constitutional, and economic grounds as well as with racist arguments, such as those in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and Alexander Stephens’s “Cornerstone Speech,” which he gave on the eve of the Civil War. At the time he made this speech, Stephens was vice president of the Confederate States of America. Many northern leaders protected slavery because it was politically convenient or because they did not care what happened to Black people, as long white southerners were happy. Others saw the bargain with slavery as essential to preserving the Union and important for the northern economy.

Not all Americans accepted or supported slavery. Not surprisingly, African Americans held in slavery, fugitive slaves, and free Blacks vigorously opposed slavery, organized to fight it, and described its horrors. The stories of slave life in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave taught northerners just how evil slavery was. Many of the documents in this volume show how some political leaders, religious activists, and abolitionists (who were mostly in the North) spent vast amounts of time, energy, and money to fight slavery. Southerners who despised slavery, most famously the father of Abrham Lincoln, moved North. While Rev. Thornton read the Bible to support slavery, the Quaker activist John Woolman (who lived in New Jersey and Pennsylvania) preached against slavery and wrote books denouncing slavery before the Revolution. Many northern ministers published sermons, set up schools for the children of former slaves, and helped fugitive slaves escape. Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an active abolitionist in Boston, became the commander of the first Black Civil War regiment, which was organized in South Carolina. In 1861, Rabbi David Einhorn had to flee Baltimore, in the slave state of Maryland, when he published a sermon declaring that the Old Testament and Jewish law did not support slavery.

Slavery was embedded in U.S. legal culture. In these volumes we see laws creating and supporting slavery starting in the 1660s and continuing into the 1850s. We have Supreme Court decisions supporting and protecting slavery. But we also see laws, state constitutions, and court decisions ending slavery in the North.

The documents in this collection show the varied ways American supported and opposed slavery. They remind us of the horrors of the system, of the intellectual and moral strength of those who struggled against it, the bravery of many slaves and free Blacks who took great risks to escape slavery, and in the case of Harriet Tubman, to help other people escape as well.

American slavery ended in the most destructive war in American history. Most Confederate soldiers were not slaveowners; they served their new country because of patriotism or because they were drafted. But, as Alexander Stephens’s “Cornerstone Speech,” the Confederate Constitution, and the South Carolina Declaration of the Causes of Secession show, the South left the Union to protect slavery. This set the stage for Abraham Lincoln to gradually move against slavery with policies, such as enlisting Black troops, to bring an end to the system.

Who ended slavery? There is no single answer. In the first two years of the Civil War, at least 100,000 southern slaves ran to the U.S. Army to become free, and by the end of the war more than 200,000 Black men, most of whom were slaves when the war began, would serve in the Army and Navy to help destroy slavery. Meanwhile, many thousands of Black women and men worked as civilian employees of the Army. Lincoln provided leadership by authorizing the use of Black troops and then issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that a victory of the U.S. Army would be a victory for liberty. Military commanders, most importantly Ulysses S. Grant, refused to consider peace without the abolition of slavery. In the end slavery was ended by the people of the North, the massive number of southern slaves who fought or served in other ways, and the political leaders who had been fighting slavery since the 1830s, and who in the 1860s passed many laws and three constitutional amendments to end slavery and secure freedom for 4 million people.

In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison, a young printer, started the Liberator, the nation’s first newspaper dedicated to the immediate end to slavery. His first editorial is published in this series. He started the American Anti-Slavery Society and spent three decades fighting slavery, in what seemed like a foolish enterprise that would never be successful. On December 29, 1865, Garrison published the last issue of the Liberator, because the Thirteenth Amendment had been ratified and slavery was ended. His last editorial is also reprinted here. Garrison’s life, as well as that of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, and many others who opposed slavery, remind us that supporting and protecting human liberty and freedom requires dedication and hard work. Even after slavery was formally ended, many opponents of slavery continued to fight for racial equality and justice. They knew there was so much more work to do, including the writing and ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which are in this collection. Beyond that, Americans still have to understand slavery, come to terms with the damage it caused to millions of people who were treated as property, and to make sense of it in our own times. We hope this collection will be a step in that direction.

Paul Finkelman

Robert F. Boden Professor of Law

Marquette University Law School