Slavery in America Test | U.S. History

Answer: western Africa

Most slaves came in the 1600s and 1700s, from west Africa, where they were prisoners of war or otherwise prisoners or already slaves, and were sold to white slave traders to be taken to the New World. The image shows slaves in Africa being marched to the coast to be taken to their new life here.

They are being held together with makeshift wooden poles and neck yokes, while in America, when it came time to march them, they would probably be taken in iron collars with chains. Life was not much better, until they were sold to a final home, and then it might become better or worse, but more settled.

Answer: the middle passage

The middle passage was so named because shippers arranged the three-part "triangle trade," a way of sailing from Europe to Africa to the New World. Each leg of the trip contained profitable produce: commercial goods from Europe to be sold in Africa, slaves from Africa to be sold in the New World, and raw materials from the New World to be sold in Europe.

The image shows how slaves were tucked on board a ship like other cargo, to make the most profitable trip. There were various methods, some better or worse, all attempting to make the most profit for the shipper.

Estimates of the total number of people who died on the voyages out of Africa, whether to North America, the Caribbean or South America, range from two million to four million. Portugese shippers dominated the trade at first, but soon, shippers from a variety of countries took part.

Slaves sent just to North America were only a part of the total numbers sent from Africa to the New World. It is difficult to find words for the passage. Even the best trips were full of human suffering. The worst trips brought tales of murder, suicide and other horrors.

Answer: property

The laws also applied to any children born to a female slave, because they would be slaves for life also.

Enslaved people were the property of their owner. They could be bought, sold, mortgaged, or left to heirs in a will. They could not legally be married to each other, because the owner's rights superceded the usual rights of a husband to stay with his wife, make decisions about their children, and similar things.

One difference was that an owner could kill an ox or burn down a house, but he couldn't deliberately kill a slave. If he "accidentally" killed a slave while whipping him or her, that didn't matter, depending on certain states' laws.

The owner could set rules for his slaves, and take care of petty crime that occurred on his property, punishing his/her enslaved people as he/she saw fit. A slave could not testify in court against a white person.

Free blacks could be sold into slavery for comitting major crimes like murder, or minor crimes like not being able to pay jail fees, depending on state laws. A white person would only be given a fine or jail term.

It is difficult for humans today to believe there was such a category in the past--human, but not quite human. Property, yet still recognized as someone whom you could love as well as hate, and who understood right from wrong, yet were not human enough to be free like others. It's difficult to conceive of.

Answer: yes, an owner could whip a slave without any justification

Yes, an owner had complete control over his (or rarely her) slaves and could decide on any punishment. If he chose not to do the whipping himself, he could hire an overseer or use any other person. Constables were available for whipping, as part of their list of services like serving a warrant. There were limits, according to different state laws, on what was considered cruelty, but the punishment needed to be witnessed by a white person, since no black could testify, so if it was done out of sight of neighbors or other whites, an owner could do anything.

In practice, slaves were punished more on large plantations worked on the gang system, where each person was expected to keep up a certain production and could be whipped for falling short. On smaller plantations, whipping usually only occurred for crimes chosen by the owner, petty theft, running away, that kind of thing.

Slaves owned no property (generally speaking) so they couldn't be fined, and imprisoning them made no sense since they were already slaves. Whipping was one of the few punishments left; branding was another, less common option.

Answer: no, they had no choice to whom they would be sold or if they would be sold

Like a mortgaged home, enslaved people had no choice whether they would be sold if they were mortgaged and foreclosed, or if their owner died. They were at the mercy of the courts and of the lifespan of the owner. No matter how kind he (or she) was and how much he promised he would never separate them or sell them to a cruel master, he lost all control when he either died or had economic problems.

Answer: cotton

A practical machine cotton picker wasn't developed until the 20th Century, so slaves were needed to do the hand work of picking. The cotton gin, invented in the early 19th Century, sped up the separating of seeds, so cotton-growing became a profitable but high-pressure year-round job. Other crops that needed hand labor were sugar cane, rice and, in Kentucky and Missouri, hemp.

Northern crops such as wheat or hay were less dependent on hand labor, so slavery flourished in the south, but withered away in the north. John C. Calhoun made a famous speech in 1837, declaring that slavery was a positive good, that actually benefited the black race, and southern whites followed his lead. From then on, slavery was not just a way to get crops picked, but a way of life, a peculiar institution which the south needed and, a few decades later, which it was willing to fight for.

Answer: yes

People who were interviewed in the 20th century about being enslaved in their youth, as part of the WPA interviews, sometimes recalled it positively, though people have noted they were more positive about it to white interviewers than black ones. And there was a time after the Civil War, when whites built a myth of the loyal, happy slave, in the era when the drawing beside this question was done for the Uncle Remus stories, showing slaves gathering happily at a cabin at the end of day.

But some enslaved people did find a decent life, though it often depended on the luck of being born where their master let them hire their own time to work a business, or their master needed house servants where they had access to better food, better clothes and a better house. It may have required loyalty in the hopes that loyalty would be repaid, with no guarantee. Much depended on luck, as it does in any life, and obviously no enslaved person reached the equal of wealth or prominence that any free person did, while they were enslaved--if one uses that as a measure of happiness. I add "while they were enslaved," because men and women like Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman enjoyed prominence and success, but not while they were enslaved.

Answer: loosely organized routes of people who helped slaves escape north

Myths have arisen endlessly about the underground railroad. It never actually ran underground--the idea was that slaves could disappear AS IF they were spirited away underground, but they never were. Yet somehow every small town with a tunnel is worshipped as a sign that the underground railroad ran there. Then there's the newer myth, that quilts were used to signal to slaves. Or anything that could have a false bottom was a false bottom used for carrying slaves.

The problem was that an actual underground railroad did exist, with myths from the very beginning. Southerners in the antebellum swore that abolitionists were coming into the deep south to spirit away their slaves, when most of the action was along the fringes of slave territory. White families really did hide blacks who were fleeing from slavery and ushered them on, usually under cover of darkness, to the next nearest safe house. Quakers in Pennsylvannia, escaped slaves in Cincinnati or New York, preachers or just helpful white people in upstate New York or Massachusetts, were ready to help enslaved people who wanted to get free. The work became more dangerous when the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, but it continued.

There were also different ways of escaping slavery. The man in the drawing is supposedly headed for the maroon camp hidden in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina -- a slave colony set up by slaves themselves free from their masters, where they could retreat for a while, for years, or for a lifetime. Such enclaves existed where the land allowed.

Answer: it freed slaves wherever their owners were in rebellion

Lincoln had little power to confiscate law-abiding citizens' property. People had already accused him of overstepping his bounds by canceling the writ of habeas corpus and other things. So he took only the property of people who broke the law, after giving them until January to obey the law. In September of 1862, he issued a warning emancipation proclamation to announce his plans.

When the Emancipation Proclamation came into effect in January 1863, slaves of law-abiding masters remained enslaved -- though in practice, if they escaped to the army, the army was very unlikely to return them. The key sentence in the proclamation was: "all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free..." but it didn't include slaves whose masters were not in rebellion, such as Kentuckians and others.

The cartoon shows a slave being told by a US soldier to "Stand up a man!" now that he has arrived in a union army camp, with the implication being that he no longer needs to bow to anyone under the US flag. The drawing, made in 1863, was one of a set exploring slavery under the emancipation proclamation. Question #4 also shows a card from the set, perhaps showing the same typical slave enduring a whipping under slavery. The card series ends rather sadly, with the slave joining the union army and dying in battle. Question #6, the drawing of slaves picking cotton, is also part of the set.

Answer: yes and no, in some ways it improved, but in other ways, they were still the victim of racism

You may have suspected the answer would be uncertain. In some ways, merely being free of slavery improved slaves' lives, but they were still the victim of racial intimidation, such as the Ku Klux Klan. They had difficulty receiving pay or, on the other hand, changing jobs under a bad boss if they were signed up to a contract. They still lacked social equality, in both north and south, though worse in the south. Migration to the north didn't begin until a while after the war.

In summary, it's difficult to say how each individual reacted to such a major event that affected millions. Some saw improvement, some didn't. Further complicating the question, different groups wanted to write history in ways to make it seem as if some groups were benefitting or being harmed by the change. For example, some talked of the KKK as a noble organization protecting vulnerable southern women. (Seriously. Reading old history books is hard.)

Freedom was the first step on the way to equality for everyone, a good thing that wasn't achieved instantly in 1865 or even 1964.