Darkest Hours: Origins of Slavery
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What is the significance of slavery in American history?
The history of American slavery is not buried in the past. It is written into the nation's landscape. It stands in brick and stone, in ports and fields, in the architecture of power itself. Slavery shaped where America built, how it expanded, and who profited. At Monticello and Mount Vernon, enslaved people built and sustained the homes of presidents. In Charleston and New Orleans, auction blocks once stood near busy docks where human lives were bought and sold alongside cotton and sugar. In Washington, D.C., enslaved labor helped construct the White House and the Capitol, enduring symbols of liberty and freedom constructed amid bondage. Follow the geography and the system comes into wider focus.
Tobacco in Virginia, rice in the Carolinas, sugar along the Mississippi, cotton spreading across the Deep South. These landscapes generated immense wealth that flowed north into banks, insurance companies, factories, railroads, universities, institutions, and infrastructure that benefited from slavery even as many denied responsibility for it. Slavery built one America while another claimed distance. The nation divided not only by belief but by geography, between those who depended openly on enslavement and those who profited while looking away. To understand the United States, we must read the land itself. Because slavery was not a side story. It was a national system, embedded in the ground beneath our feet.
It is American History Hit. Welcome. I'm Don Wildman. One of the things we try to do on this series is find a clear path into history that can otherwise feel dense and overwhelming. Not to simplify it, but open it up. This episode is especially important in this regard because our story is so often relegated to the past when it has so much to do with our shared present. We'll discuss today the earlier years of American slavery, where this system came from, how it took shape on this continent, and why decisions made at the beginning of this nation mattered so long afterwards. For this, we're fortunate to have the guidance of historian Justine Hill Edwards, author of a number of award-winning books and publications, including Savings and Trust, The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedmen's Bank, which won the 2025 Frederick Douglass Book Prize.
as well as Unfree Markets, The Slave's Economy, and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina. She is an associate professor at the great and good University of Virginia.
How did the transatlantic slave trade begin?
Professor Hill Edwards, Justine, welcome to the podcast. Honored you could be here. Thank you for inviting me and thank you for having me. You teach what I understand is a very popular class covering the origins of American slavery and right there in Virginia. I'm curious, what are the ideas that most resonate with your students?
Yeah, I mean, I'm teaching this class right now, and it's a lecture course on American slavery, and it's the course that I've taught the most here at UVA. And the ideas that resonate with my students most are really connecting the history of slavery to kind of what they see all around them. We are at Thomas Jefferson's University, and so a lot of what I do is try to connect the the history of the university, the history of the founding of the nation, the history of slavery in Virginia specifically, but the colonies and the country writ large to kind of everything that they see. And so it is such a fascinating place to do this history and to teach it because everything that we talk about and they look at around them in some ways relates interestingly to the history of American slavery.
LESLIE KENDRICK
Knowledge is power. It frees us up and it's actually it ends up having a positive impact, which is such a welcome thing in this world today. Hopefully this episode does the same for listeners. The American system of slavery, the slave economy begins, of course, as a transatlantic practice. Where does it first begin? Who initiates it and why do they conceive of doing it at that time?
Yeah, well, the history of American slavery does not actually start in the colonies that would become the United States of America.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the significance of slavery in American history?
0:03–2:51
2
How did the transatlantic slave trade begin?
2:51–6:06
3
What were the experiences of enslaved people during the Middle Passage?
6:06–9:48
4
How did the plantation system evolve in the Americas?
9:48–13:44
5
What legal frameworks supported slavery in the colonies?
13:44–20:10
6
How did the Revolutionary War impact attitudes towards slavery?
20:10–24:14
7
What role did cotton play in the expansion of slavery?
24:14–27:42
8
How does the legacy of slavery affect modern society?
27:42–49:06