- [Narrator] This is a chart
showing estimated population around the year 1750
in the British colonies in the New World.
I've arranged this more or less from north to south
and you can see that as you go farther south,
the percentage of the population
that was enslaved and African grew greater and greater,
but one thing to note here is that
not any one of these colonies
had zero enslaved people at all,
even New Hampshire, the farthest north
with the smallest percentage of enslaved Africans
had some enslaved people there
before the American Revolution.
We frequently have the misconception
that slavery only happened in the south.
In fact, all British colonies had some amount of slavery
and all British colonies had some involvement
in the institution of slavery,
whether that was bankrolling it as a financier,
growing food that was intended for the slave colonies
in the West Indies that didn't want to spare
even an acre of land to grow something
other than sugar, or shipping enslaved Africans
by either owning or captaining the boats
of the middle passage.
In fact, one of the largest ports
where slaves entered the North American colonies
and were sold at auction was at Newport, Rhode Island.
But despite this, the largest share of enslaved people
were in the southern colonies,
which focused on plantation agriculture.
So, Maryland, Virginia, and then even farther south
into the British colonies in the Caribbean.
In some of these southernmost colonies,
you can see that enslaved Africans
outnumbered white people by sometimes
quite a considerable amount.
As the enslaved population in the colonies grew,
colonial governments began passing more and more
restrictions on the lives of enslaved people
and began codifying who was or was not a slave.
For example, if a white man and an enslaved woman
had a child together, would that child be free
like her father or enslaved like her mother?
What about the opposite case?
In Virginia in 1662, the government passed a law
specifying that the children of enslaved women
would follow the condition of their mothers.
Other laws prevented interracial relationships
and defined enslaved Africans as chattel slaves,
which means personal property,
and as the personal property of slave owners,
enslaved people had little to no legal rights.
So, over the course of the 1600s,
slavery became stricter
and more exclusively defined by race.
The experience of being enslaved was unimaginably
physically and emotionally taxing.
Since enslaved people had no legal protections,
owners could maim or even kill enslaved people
with little to no repercussion.
For women, life in slavery also meant
the constant threat and frequent reality
of rape at the hands of slave owners.
Religion, dance, music, and family
helped enslaved people deal with
the harsh realities of everyday life
and enslaved people also developed
both covert means of resisting slavery,
like, for example, breaking tools,
which made it more difficult to work,
or overt means of resisting slavery,
particularly in slave uprisings.
One of these, the Stono Rebellion in 1739
in South Carolina resulted in the deaths
of about 42 whites and about 44 blacks.
The South Carolina government responded to the rebellion
by making slave codes even harsher.
I wanna finish by just reiterating how central
the institution of slavery was
to not just some, but all of the English colonies.
In the 19th century, Americans would refer to slavery
as the peculiar institution, meaning not so much
that it was strange, but that it was specific
to the south part of the United States.
But slavery really wasn't specific to the south part,
it was the bedrock of the colonial economy,
not just in the south, but in all the industries
that contributed to slavery in the north as well,
those who financed, fed, shipped,
and even bought the products made by enslaved people
created the economic prosperity
of the North American colonies.