Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: 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. We actually have to go across to Atlantic Africa, to regions like modern day Ghana, Nigeria, Angola. to really understand the origins of American slavery and really the origins, the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade.
And we're talking about not in 1619, but we're talking about really in the 1440s with Portuguese explorers really making these kind of first economic and political contacts with Atlantic African nations in the 1440s.
Why the Portuguese? I always wondered that. What was their culture that they began this practice?
Sure. Well, they began to develop fairly sophisticated naval technologies in terms of understanding wind, understanding water. how to build and construct ships.
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Chapter 3: What were the experiences of enslaved people during the Middle Passage?
But that was not at all the case. We are talking about diplomatic relationships and connections between Atlantic African rulers and European traders and merchants. And so we're talking about unilateral political relationships that were developed. We're not talking about pillage and domination, especially in the first generations of contact and trade and political negotiations.
Yeah, I asked that intentionally naive question to say, you know, there's a lot of thinking that goes into this. I mean, the understanding of how these colonies, future colonies are going to be developed and the agriculture that will be propagated there is going to require labor. And that has always fascinated me. And I've not done enough study to understand that.
the chain reaction of thinking that goes on with those European powers that say, hmm, we want to make a lot of money here. How are we going to do that if we have to, you know, take laborers over there and pay them? That's not going to work. So I've always tried to sort of reverse engineer this and understand where that came from. But it's very complicated.
And we're not, of course, talking only about the Portuguese. We're talking about the English and the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, all of those European economic powers who are now, you know, freed from their shores by the age of discovery. And suddenly they can sail all around this world as they're finding out.
And there is land and weather that's going to make things back in Europe, you know, prosper. Jamaica, Barbados, Brazil are a bigger part of this overhaul story than Americans usually realize, right?
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. If we are looking at... the Atlantic world, as historians and scholars call it. This kind of the clashing and colliding of empires, of labor, of explorers, of merchants, of diplomats, of politicians, of
And they are traveling back and forth from regions of Europe to, again, Atlantic Africa, to South America, Brazil in particular, to the Caribbean, the West Indies, to mainland North America. That is what we are talking about. And then if we are talking really about in terms of numbers, sheer numbers, we are really talking about Brazil with the Dutch and then the Portuguese.
We're talking about places like Barbados, which was at one point the crown jewel of the British Empire in this period of time, and we are talking about later on Jamaica. For the French, really, we are talking about Saint-Domingue, modern-day Haiti that comes later in the 18th century. But in terms of sheer numbers, the British colonies that would become the U.S.
actually received a small percentage, about 5% of the total population of enslaved Africans that were sold throughout the Atlantic world.
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Chapter 4: How did the plantation system evolve in the Americas?
And they were looking to both expand their political power, but expand their economic power as well in tandem. Those two things went hand in hand. And so they were seeing their investments in the expansion of plantations as an expansion of their kind of colonial holdings. And slavery was part and parcel of that colonial project. And so, again, we see the Dutch in Brazil.
We see the Portuguese in Brazil as well. We see all of these kind of colonial enterprises crop up around the production and exportation of crops. But there were specific crops that were kind of honed on early on. Sugar. becomes a massively important product that really fuels economic activity and travel and trade throughout the Atlantic world.
And so in many ways, sugar and slavery go hand in hand. One would not have burgeoned and grew without the other.
This being an American history show, we will not spend as much time as I wish we could on the African story at that point. I desperately want to tell that story. But what brings that free labor across the ocean, tragically, is what's called the Middle Passage.
The forced transportation of enslaved people from Western and South Central African coast, often working through intermediaries, these slave factors or traders, they were called, of course, worked for companies. And they placed these folks captive onto these slave ships under the most horrific and lethal conditions. We should describe this experience.
How long were they held before they were put to sea?
Sure. Well, first, I mean, I do want to kind of reframe this. I tend to not call slave labor free labor because I think that that terminology could be a bit fraught and a bit confusing. You're right.
I'm being glib when I say that. I agree with you. Sure. I mean that to put the onus on those who are using these people for their own good. Of course, free labor becomes another term later on.
Yeah. But the transition of slave traders kind of taking a person and taking a person and making them into a commodity, into a slave is such an important part of this conversation in that in many ways, slavery, kind of the violence of slavery and the violence of the slave trade was kind of the catalyst that kind of turned a person into a commodity, into a slave.
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Chapter 5: What legal frameworks supported slavery in the colonies?
The transatlantic voyage was incredibly physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually traumatic for the enslaved. And so in many ways, it was that trauma of being warehoused and imprisoned, being shipped across the Atlantic that in enslavers and slave traders mind kind of transition them from being a person on the Atlantic African side to being a slave on the New World side.
Yes, it was a dehumanization, a conscious dehumanization of these individuals. The voyage would take up to two months.
At times more. It would be a lesser amount of time from places like Angola to Brazil. It could be from places on the Gold Coast to Jamaica or Barbados, four or five months. And then getting up to the English colonies of mainland North America, that could add an additional month or two. And so we are talking about months-long process. Yeah.
And by middle passage, we're talking about a triangle, basically, that there is a... This is the second leg, right, of what essentially is this whole economic diagram. How so?
Well, historians call this the triangular trade. And this is a trade of goods from Atlantic Africa to perhaps regions of South America or the Caribbean, up to regions of mainland North America, and then perhaps to Western Europe. And so... This is a triangular trade of goods and commodities from slaves to gold to guns to gunpowder to sugar to the byproducts of sugar.
We're talking about rum was incredibly popular. And so this triangular trade really defined Atlantic commerce in this period of time.
Where is a good part to place the story of American slavery in this in this paradigm?
Historians will often say 1619 is this pivotal moment in terms of examining this history for the colonies that would become the United States. 1619 was the first recorded instance in August of that year. of enslaved Africans being purchased or traded in Virginia. And so this is within the kind of British colonial context.
And so we have about 20 enslaved Africans being traded in Virginia at this period of time. And interestingly enough, if you read the historical record, it It's kind of not this dramatic event as it's written. John Rolfe is kind of talking about politics and everything, and then he says that, yes, 20 and odd enslaved Africans are kind of brought here. And so...
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Chapter 6: How did the Revolutionary War impact attitudes towards slavery?
And in South Carolina and in the Lowcountry, the enslaved really didn't work side by side with whites for an overseer or an enslaver. They were really working independently on their own. And so what this meant is that some historians might say that they had more, quote unquote, autonomy over freedom, for lack of a better word. I tend to not use that word.
But it meant that all of these other aspects of slave life could develop and evolve. This is what I talk about in my first book, Free Market. And so there was a robust and a vibrant slaves economy that developed in tandem with the task system. And so it meant that travelers who would go to Charleston, for example, would be surprised that the enslaved would be in marketplaces selling goods.
They'd have to haggle with enslaved women to buy goods. And so this became part and parcel of life in the Lowcountry, and it evolved around rice production. If we go north to Virginia, the enslaved worked by what was called gang labor. They would work In groups, side by side, often guided by an overseer. And that was the kind of day in, day out experience of slave life in places like Virginia.
And at the same time, of course, we can't forget that this was happening up north as well in a whole different kind of way, not on the industrial level, I suppose, but more on a family farm kind of basis. Is that fair to say?
Yeah, I mean, it kind of gets back to this idea that slavery evolved in a variety of ways based on time and place. And so slavery in Charleston in, let's say, 1720 was not the same as the experience of an enslaved person in Massachusetts, for example, in the same period of time. There weren't really plantations in New England. There were kind of smaller slave holdings.
And so the entire slave population was actually a bit smaller. And the enslaved were kind of clustered in cities. And so we have slaves in Boston, in Newport, as opposed to kind of outside of those specific regions.
One needs to build the enslavement story in America. You can't just accept it, wrote certainly from the movies. You can't take that sort of naive view of this. And I'm sure this is what you're teaching in your class, that there was a very progressive systemic process.
path that this took over these periods of time that built with the size of the agriculture that was being cultivated, the industry that was being built. And so this enslavement happens very systemically and it creates a marketplace, which is where it gets so ugly and so vile, really. So we'll take a short break.
And when we come back, we'll talk about the legal development surrounding slavery in this period. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.
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Chapter 7: What role did cotton play in the expansion of slavery?
I mean, I'm imagining these companies are... It's horrible to say these, but purveying these commodities as they see them. You know, this is the property that they're that they're using. And so how was this codified into laws and and break down in these different colonies?
Well, understanding the laws of slavery is really fundamental to understanding how slavery evolves and expands here. And so if we think about kind of the popular narrative of American slavery, I think is focused on the South in places like South Carolina and Georgia.
But if we're to understand the kind of legal foundations of slavery, especially in colonial America, we actually have to go first to Massachusetts. And Massachusetts was actually the first colony to legally recognize slavery. And that happened in 1641, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties.
And it is a law that essentially says, and I'll get the actual language wrong, but slavery is essentially legal if slaves are sold to colonists in just wars. And so what it kind of means is that this idea that colonists were recognizing the presence of enslaved Africans, even enslaved Native Americans, but they were kind of taking a backseat to being active participants in the slave trade.
Like slavery is fine if we're fighting wars or if slaves are sold to us we are not going out and pursuing slaves which was not true but it is in 1641 again in massachusetts not in a place like south carolina or virginia that slavery is is recognized within its laws Now, this shifts to 1662 in Virginia.
We often think about slavery being inheritable, this idea that an enslaved child's status is based on the status of the father. Well, this shifts from fairly early on in American history, again, in 1662 in Virginia, there is an important law that essentially says that the status of the child follows the status not of the father, but of the mother.
And so if a child's mother was enslaved, then that child would be enslaved. And if a child's father was not enslaved or free, then that child would be free. And so what this means is that this makes slavery an inheritable status. And increasingly, this recognizes the racialized status of the enslaved. And so it means then, too, that slavery and the status of the enslaved is
is kind of made into an economic unit. Slaves are made into a commodity. And so it is really early on, again, in this process that we have these laws, both in Massachusetts and Virginia, that fundamentally structure how slavery evolves.
People who want to minimize this historically in American story often compare, oh, there were slaves in Rome and all that sort of thing. And The difference is that this is a racialized slavery. This is a very specifically racialized slavery, legally, as you're saying.
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Chapter 8: How does the legacy of slavery affect modern society?
This is, again, not only an American phenomenon. This was done through the Spanish colonies as well. And this was codified all over the place in different – it really breaks down to absurd fractions is what ends up happening where someone has a quarter of this or an eighth of this. And it's really amazing how specific and legal it tries to be.
Again, also to distinguish it from indentured labor, which was a whole other kind of thing that someone could move through and – essentially an apprentice kind of thing. But this is very specifically and hatefully. So a system about people who look a certain way and therefore we project upon them a status. Exactly. Yeah. It's really important to distinguish that.
Yeah, I mean, it is. I mean, this is a period of time. And the question often comes up, well, there's Roman slavery, there was slavery in the ancient world. Most civilizations had forms of slavery or kind of bonded labor. But the kind of American or if we can call it Atlantic story has two main features that are really important. One, the racialized aspect of slavery.
Slave status becomes affiliated with black skin or dark skin. And two, the inheritability of slave status. In other civilizations, an enslaved person could buy themselves out of slavery, could marry out of slavery, or could convert to a different religion to not be enslaved. And those three factors were very early on eliminated within the Atlantic world. And that is why this is so important.
Well, and, you know, as generations go on, soon we have African-Americans, you know, we have whole generations who are born and raised here and then many others after that.
It happens fairly soon because Americans, I mean, because human beings procreate that we have an entire population who has, you know, only been living as an enslaved population as their fathers and forefathers were before them. It's incredible. But when do we become aware of that identity among Americans? Sure.
Well, this really happens in the late 17th and early 18th centuries as we have increasing populations of enslaved Africans as the status of slave becomes wholly affiliated with kind of black skin. And so it is in this period, especially by the early 18th century, when we get this idea, this identity of kind of African-Americans being affiliated and associated with enslaved status.
It happens fairly early.
There's a merging that goes on with West African traditions. It's fascinating, especially when you go to New Orleans and talk about it there. The West African religions marrying up with Christianity and all the music and religious practices. It's amazing how this culture... Despite the oppression and cruelty still sort of flowers underneath of that and then rises up later on for sure.
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