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400 years of slavery

400 years since slavery: a timeline of

American history

In 1619, a ship with 20 captives landed at

Point Comfort in Virginia, ushering in the era
of American slavery
by Khushbu Shah and Juweek Adolphe

A group of African American slaves at the Cassina Point plantation of James Hopkinson on Edisto Island, South
Carolina. Photograph: Marian S Carson Collection/Library of Congress

Fri 16 Aug 2019 07.00 BST

Many Americans’ introduction to US history is the arrival of 102 passengers

on the Mayflower in 1620. But a year earlier, 20 enslaved Africans were
brought to the British colonies against their will.

As John Rolfe noted in a letter in

400 years of slavery
This is part of a week-long series to mark the
400th anniversary of the first African
Americans who arrived as captives on a ship
in 1619, ushering in the era of American
slavery. This series will look at the history and
legacy of American slavery.
Do idyllic southern plantations
really tell the story of slavery?
Point Comfort: where slavery in
America began 400 years ago
How we think about the term
’enslaved’ matters
More from this series
even if that history has been framed around anyone but Africans and African
1619, “20 and odd negroes” were
brought by a Dutch ship to the
nascent British colonies, arriving at
what is now Fort Hampton, then
Point Comfort, in Virginia. Though
enslaved Africans had been part of
Portuguese, Spanish, French and
British history across the Americas
since the 16th century, the captives
who landed in Virginia were
probably the first slaves to arrive into
what would become the United
States 150 years later.
Four hundred years on, the captives’
arrival has informed nearly every
major moment in American history,
even if that history has been framed around anyone but Africans and African
Americans.

“Historians, elected political figures [and] community leaders would prefer

to sort of imagine the United States as a kind of mythic, Anglo-Saxon
Christian place,” says Michael Guasco, an early American history professor at
Davidson College.

In 1992, Toni Morrison told the Guardian: “In this country, American means
white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”

Early settlers
An engraving shows the arrival of a Dutch slave ship with a group of African slaves for sale at
Jamestown, Virginia, 1619. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

1619
After the first captives were forced on to Virginia’s shores by a Dutchman in
1619, the majority of the country remained white and relied mainly on the
labor of Native American slaves and white European indentured servants. It
was not until the end of the 17th century that the transatlantic slave trade
made its impact on the American colonies.

Number of african slaves brought to British North America and the US

300,000

250,000

200,000

150,000

100,000

50,000
0
1620-1700 1701-1760 1761-1810

Guardian Graphic | Source: American Abolitionists

1661
The first anti-miscegenation statute – prohibiting marriage between races –
was written into law in Maryland in 1661, shortly after enslaved people were
brought to the colonies. By the 1960s, 21 states, most of them in the south,

still had those laws in place. Alabama was the last state to repeal the ban on
interracial marriage, in 2000.
A Boston advertisement for a cargo of about 250 ‘fine healthy negroes’, recently arrived from
Africa on the slave ship Bante Island. Circa 1700. Photograph: MPI/Getty Images

American revolution

1776
The Declaration of Independence, which embraced in its first lines “that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain
unalienable rights”, did not extend that right to slaves, Africans or African
Americans, with the final version scrapping a reference to the denunciation
of slavery. Thomas Jefferson, a slaveowner himself, penned those lines
rejecting slavery; he removed the reference after receiving criticism from a
number of delegates who enslaved black people. This could represent “the
fabric of the American political economy” ever since, some historians have
said.
Slavery flourished initially in the tobacco fields of Virginia, Maryland and
North Carolina. In the tobacco-producing areas of those states, slaves
constituted more than 50% of the population by 1776. Slavery then spread to
the rice plantations further south. In South Carolina, African Americans
remained a majority into the 20th century, according to census data.

1790 US Census
At the time of the first US Census, non-white slaves accounted for a sizable
portion of the population of southern states

State Crops Total Percentage of population that were

population slaves

Virginia Tobacco 747,610 39.1%

North Tobacco, cotton 395,005 25.5%

Carolina

Maryland Tobacco 319,728 32.2%

South Rice, indigo, 249,073 43.0%

Carolina cotton

Georgia Rice, indigo, 82,548 35.5%

cotton

Guardian graphic | Source: Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877 and IPUMS NHGIS,
University of Minnesota, www.nhgis.org

1860
The British-operated slave trade across the Atlantic was one of the biggest
businesses of the 18th century. Approximately 600,000 of 10 million African
businesses of the 18th century. Approximately 600,000 of 10 million African
slaves made their way into the American colonies before the slave trade – not
slavery – was banned by Congress in 1808. By 1860, though, the US recorded
nearly 4 million enslaved black people – 13% of the population – in the
country as the American-born population grew.

>100k
>100k slaves
slaves 100-200k
100-200k 200-300k
200-300k 300-400k
300-400k 400k+
400k+

Md.
Md. DE
DE
Mo.
Mo. Va.
Va.
KY
KY

Tenn.
Tenn. NC
NC
Ark.
Ark.
SC
SC
Miss.
Miss. Ala.
Ala. Ga.
Ga.
Tex. La.
La.
Tex.

Fla.
Fla.
Guardian graphic | Source: 1860 census

Eight of the first 12 US presidents were slave owners. Proponents of slavery

supported the efforts of groups like the American Colonization Society, who
“sent back” tens of thousands of free black people – most of them American-
born – to Liberia in the 19th century to prevent disruption caused by free
descendants of slaves.

A painting of freed slaves, once belonging to the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, arriving at
a ‘federal camp’ in Chickasaw Bayou, Tennessee. Photograph: Corbis via Getty Images
Civil war

1865
According to Abraham Lincoln, the civil war was fought to keep America
whole, and not for the abolition of slavery – at least initially. Southern states
said they wanted to secede to protect states’ rights, but they were really

fighting to keep people enslaved. Lincoln took on the fight for the freedom of
slaves, some historians have suggested, because he was worried the British
would support the south in its self-declared self-determination and
recognize the south as a separate entity. If he had made the war about ending
slavery, it would have looked bad for the south’s fight and the British
supporting its cause. Lincoln’s death was probably the first casualty of “a
long civil rights movement that is not yet over”, the historian Peter Kolchin
has suggested.
The first edition of Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation which declared that slaves in rebel areas
would be ‘henceforth and forever free’. Photograph: MPI/Getty Images

1868
Some experts have argued that Reconstruction laid the foundation for “the
organization of new segregated institutions, white supremacist ideologies,
legal rationalizations, extra-legal violence and everyday racial terror” –
further widening the racial divide among blacks and whites. Others have
pointed out that the end of the war left black Americans free but their status
“undetermined”, with the passing of “codes” to prevent black people from
being truly free.

But eventually, under the 14th amendment, African American men were
granted the right to vote. Also, African Americans were extended birthright
citizenship: that extends to descendants of freed black slaves and
immigrants to present day.

1898
The recession of the late 19th century hit the US. Knight riders went out in
the dark, burning the homes of African Americans who bought their own
land. They rode up to Washington to demand change as southern white
Democrats rolled back many of the albeit limited freedoms from
Reconstruction just a couple of decades before.

Jim Crow era

The Jim Crow era of segregation forbade African Americans from drinking
from the same water fountains, eating at the same restaurants or attending
the same schools as white Americans – all lasting until, and sometimes well
past, the 1960s.

1926
As African Americans were shut out of jobs and opportunities during Jim
Crow, and as more jobs became available in the north and midwest, more
than 2 million southern African Americans migrated after the first world war.
Still, even hundreds of miles away from southern segregation, these
migrating Americans were met by “sundown towns”, where black people
were not welcome after sunset, and by restrictions on where they could live
in cities.

Oregon’s constitution, for example, only removed its exclusionary clause,

prohibiting black people to enter the state, in 1926.
A man drinking at a ‘colored’ water cooler at a bus terminal in Oklahoma City in July 1939.
Photograph: Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration/Universal via Getty
1954
In the lead-up to the end of Jim Crow and the civil rights era, the fight
continued. For example: only in 1948 did the US military desegregate, by
executive order. In 1954, in the Brown v Board of Education ruling, the
supreme court ruled that segregation was unconstitutional and schools
would have to integrate. Civil rights leaders led anti-segregation marches
across the country in the 1960s. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed

the Civil Rights Act into law. Bussing African American children to white
schools in white neighborhoods was deemed constitutional.
African Americans vote for the first time since 1890 in the 1946 Georgia Democratic primary.
Photograph: Bettmann Archive/Getty

1965
“Slavery was gone but Jim Crow was alive. Almost all southern African
Americans were shut out of the ballot box and the political power it could
yield,” wrote Edward E Baptist in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and
the Making of American Capitalism. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 attempted
to correct this, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting and placing
restrictions on a number of southern states if they tried to change voting
rights laws. Those restrictions were recently overturned in a 2013 supreme
court ruling.

Modern day
Since the publication, in 2014, of The Case for Reparations, by Ta-Nehisi
Coates, the subject of how to settle the financial debts of 250 years of slavery
has risen up the political agenda. Those arguing for a financial settlement to
descendants of slaves say it is designed to address the racial inequality that
still lingers in the US.

A Pew study in 2017 showed that the median wealth of white households was
$171,000 – 10 times that of black households ($17,100). The Democratic

presidential hopeful Cory Booker has introduced a Senate bill on reparations

and has been supported by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Meanwhile, voter suppression, another legacy of slavery and its aftermath, is

also becoming a more visible issue. Aggressive attempts by mostly ex-
Confederate states to limit the vote for poorer communities of color has
become more pronounced since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

As Carole Anderson, academic and the author of One Person, No Vote wrote
in the Guardian last week, about the 33 million Americans who have been
purged from the voter rolls since 2014: “Not surprisingly, these massive
removals are concentrated in precincts that tend to have higher minority
populations and vote Democratic.”
A crowd marches from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial during the March on
Washington in 1963. Photograph: Bettmann Archive/Getty
 This article drew on a number of books about the American history of
slavery, including The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making
of American Capitalism by Edward E Baptist; American Slavery, 1619-1877
by Peter Kolchin; and Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle
for Democracy by Nikil Pal Singh. It also used census data available online
at census.gov.

This article was amended on 24 June 2021. A Pew study in 2017 showed
that the median wealth of white households was $171,000, rather than the
median income as an earlier version said. It was further amended on 25
February 2022 to add the 1860 enslaved population in Delaware and to
reflect the correct Virginia borders in that year.

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