While slavery was peculiar within a democratic republic, it was an integral and seldom questioned part of the 18th-century British empire. Examining the complex culture of the South Carolina law country from the end of the Stono Rebellion through the American Revolution, historian Robert Olwell analyzes the structures and internal dynamics of a world in which both masters and slaves were also imperial subjects.
This book condemns slavery, by appealed to whites' rational self-interest, rather than any altruism towards blacks. Helper claimed that slavery hurt the Southern economy by preventing economic development and industrialization, and that it was the main reason why the South had progressed so much less than the North since the late 18th century.
The story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George’s County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation’s capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. A Question of Freedom asks us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.
Slavery was in many ways the fundamental institution in colonial Cuba, whose economy was based on the export of sugar from the slave-worked plantations. This volume presents a quantitative study of Cuban slavery from the late eighteenth century until 1880, the year slavery was formally abolished on the island. The core of this study is an examination of the yearly movement of slave prices and changes in the demographic characteristics of the slave market. Based on data from the notarial protocol records of the Archivo Nacional de Cuba, this book establishes precise price trends for slaves by age, sex, nationality, and occupation, and considers a number of other variables including the prices of coartados (slaves who had begun the process of buying their freedom) and the patterns of emancipation. Incorporating over 30,000 slave transactions from three separate locations in Cuba - Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos - this work comprises the largest extant database on any slave market in the Americas.
John Hope Franklin has devoted his professional life to the study of African Americans. Originally published in 1943 by UNC Press, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860 was his first book on the subject. As Franklin shows, freed slaves in the antebellum South did not enjoy the full rights of citizenship. Even in North Carolina, reputedly more liberal than most southern states, discriminatory laws became so harsh that many voluntarily returned to slavery.
