History of slavery in South Carolina
Slavery in South Carolina was widespread even relative to other slave states, and the region had a black majority throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.[1][2] On the verge of the American Civil War, "45.8 percent of white families in the state owned slaves."[1] Under South Carolina law, slaves were "deemed, sold, taken, reputed and adjudged in law, to be chattels, personal in the hands of their owners and possessors, and their executors, administrators, and assigns, TO ALL INTENTS, CONSTRUCTIONS AND PURPOSES WHATSOEVER...A slave is not generally regarded as legally capable of being within the peace of the State. He is not a citizen, and is not in that character entitled to her protection."[3]
Charleston was a major hub of both the transatlantic and interstate slave trades. The South Carolina General Assembly reopened the port of Charleston to the transatlantic slave trade between 1803 and 1807, during which time some 50,000 enslaved Africans were imported to the state; this trade was finally cut off by the 1808 federal law Prohibiting Importation of Slaves.[4] Historian Frederic Bancroft found that there were no fewer than 50 slave traders, called "brokers" in Charlestonian parlance, working in the city in 1859–60.[5]
Gallery
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1860 US census, South Carolina, number of slaves per owner -
Illustration from Frederick Law Olmstead's A journey in the seaboard slave states - with remarks on their economy (1856) -
African Americans outside a building preparing cotton for the cotton gin, possibly at Smith's plantation, Port Royal -
Plantation slave chapel worship, South Carolina, 1863
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See also
- South Carolina slave codes
- Port Royal Experiment
- Old Slave Mart
- List of plantations in South Carolina
- Antebellum South Carolina
- History of slavery in the United States by state
References
- ^ a b "Slavery". South Carolina Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2023-08-07.
- ^ "African Passages, Lowcountry Adaptations". Lowcountry Digital Library at the College of Charleston. 2013. Retrieved 2023-08-08.
- ^ Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1853). A key to Uncle Tom's cabin: presenting the original facts and documents upon which the story is founded. Boston: J. P. Jewett & Co. pp. 164, 284. LCCN 02004230. OCLC 317690900. OL 21879838M.
- ^ "Reconfiguring the Old South: Solving the Problem of Slavery, 1787–1838 by Lacy Ford (Teaching the Journal of American History)". archive.oah.org. Retrieved 2023-09-02.
- ^ Bancroft, Frederic (2023) [1931, 1996]. "Chapter VIII: The Height of the Slave Trade in Charleston". Slave Trading in the Old South (Original publisher: J. H. Fürst Co., Baltimore). Southern Classics Series. Introduction by Michael Tadman (Reprint ed.). Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. p. 175. ISBN 978-1-64336-427-8. LCCN 95020493. OCLC 1153619151.
Further reading
- Ashton, Susanna, ed. (2012). I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives. University of South Carolina Press.
- Hill Edwards, Justene (2021). Unfree Markets: The Slaves' Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina. Columbia studies in the history of U.S. capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-54926-4. LCCN 2020038705.
- Hudson, Larry E. (2010). To Have and to Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press.
- Sinha, Manisha (2003). The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina. University of North Carolina Press.
- Wood, Peter (2012). Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. Knopf Doubleday.
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