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Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of human chattel slavery that existed in the United States of America in the 18th and 19th centuries after it gained independence and before the end of the American Civil War. Slavery had been practiced in British North America from early colonial days, and was recognized in all the Thirteen Colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. By the time of the American Revolution (1775-1783), the status of slave had already become a caste associated with African ancestry, contributing to a system and legacy in which race played an influential role. At the time the United States Constitution was ratified (1789), a relatively small number of free people of color were among its voting citizens. During and immediately following the Revolutionary War, abolitionist laws and sentiment began in the Northern states; in addition, as most of these states had a higher proportion of free labor, they abolished slavery by the end of the 18th century, some with gradual systems that did not free the last slave until into the 1800s. But the rapid expansion of the cotton industry in the Deep South after the invention of the cotton gin led to the Southern states to depend on slavery as integral to their economy. They attempted to extend it as an institution into the new Western territories, believing that slavery had to expand, or it would die; they dreamed of annexing Cuba as a slave, plantation-based territory. The United States was polarized over the issue of slavery, represented by the slave and free states divided by the Mason–Dixon line, which separated free Pennsylvania from slave Maryland and Delaware. The importation of slaves was nationally prohibited in 1808, although illegal importation—smuggling—was not unusual. Domestic slave trading, however, continued at a rapid pace, driven by demand from the growth of cotton plantations in the Deep South. More than one million slaves were sold from the Upper South, which had a surplus of labor, and taken to the Deep South in a forced migration, splitting up many families. New communities of African-American culture were developed in the Deep South, and the total slave population in the South eventually reached 4 million before liberation.〔Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and David Eltis, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, Harvard University. Based on "records for 27,233 voyages that set out to obtain slaves for the Americas". 〕〔(Introduction – Social Aspects of the Civil War ), National Park Service.〕 As the West was developed for settlement, the Southern states wanted to keep a balance between the number of slave and free states, in order to maintain a political balance of power in Congress. The new territories acquired from Britain, France, and Mexico were the subject of major political compromises. By 1850, the newly rich cotton-growing South was threatening to secede from the Union, and tensions continued to rise. With Southern church ministers having adapted to support of slavery, modified by Christian paternalism, the largest denominations, the Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches split over slavery into regional organizations of the North and South. When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election on a platform of no new slave states, the South finally broke away to form the Confederacy; the first six states to secede held the greatest number of slaves. This marked the start of the Civil War, which caused a huge disruption of the slave economy, with many slaves either escaping or being liberated by the Union armies. Due to Union measures such as the Confiscation Acts and Emancipation Proclamation, the war effectively ended slavery, even before the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 formally outlawed the institution throughout the United States. ==Colonial America== (詳細はChesapeake Bay settlements, colonial officials found it difficult to attract and retain laborers under the harsh frontier conditions, and there was a high mortality rate.〔 Most laborers came from Britain as indentured servants, who signed contracts of indenture to pay with work for their passage, their upkeep and training, usually on a farm, as the colonies were based in agriculture. These indentured servants were young people who intended to become permanent residents. Some masters treated them as well or as poorly as family members. In some cases, convicted criminals were transported to the colonies as indentured servants, rather than being imprisoned. The indentured servants were not slaves. The planters found that the major problem with indentured servants was that many left after several years, just when they had become skilled and the most valuable workers. In addition, an improving economy in England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries meant that fewer workers chose to go to the colonies. Historians estimate that more than half of all white immigrants to the English colonies of North America during the 17th and 18th centuries came as indentured servants. The number of indentured servants among immigrants was particularly high in the South. Many Germans, Scots-Irish, and Irish came to the colonies in the 18th century, settling in the backcountry of Pennsylvania and further south.〔(Richard Hofstadter, "White Servitude" ), n.d., Montgomery College. Retrieved January 11, 2012.〕 The first 19 or so Africans to reach the English colonies arrived in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, brought by Dutch traders who had seized them from a captured Spanish slave ship. The Spanish usually baptized slaves in Africa before embarking them. As English law then considered baptized Christians exempt from slavery, these Africans were treated as indentured servants, and they joined about 1,000 English indentured servants already in the colony. The Africans were freed after a prescribed period and given the use of land and supplies by their former masters. The historian Ira Berlin noted that what he called the "charter generation" in the colonies was sometimes made up of mixed-race men who were indentured servants, and whose ancestry was African and Iberian. They were descendants of African women and Portuguese and Spanish men who worked in African ports as traders or facilitators in the slave trade. For example, Anthony Johnson arrived in Virginia in 1621 as an indentured servant; he became a free person of color and became a property owner, even owning slaves. The transformation of the status of Africans from indentured servitude to slavery – which they could not leave or escape – happened gradually. There were no laws regarding slavery early in Virginia's history. But, in 1640, a Virginia court sentenced John Punch to slavery after he attempted to flee his service. The two whites with whom he fled were only sentenced to an additional year of their indenture, and three years' service to the colony. This marked the first legal sanctioning of slavery in the English colonies and was one of the first legal distinctions made between Europeans and Africans.〔 In 1654, John Casor, a black indentured servant, was the first man to be declared a slave in a civil case. He had claimed to an officer that Johnson, his owner, had held him past his indenture term. A neighbor, Robert Parker told Johnson that if he did not release Casor, Parker would testify in court to this fact; which under local laws, may have resulted in Johnson losing some of his headright lands. Under duress, Johnson freed Casor, who entered into a seven years' indenture with Parker. Feeling cheated, Johnson sued Parker to repossess Casor. A Northampton County court ruled for Johnson, declaring that Parker illegally was detaining Casor from his rightful master who legally held him "for the duration of his life".〔William J. Wood. "The Illegal Beginning of American Negro Slavery," ''American Bar Association Journal,'' January 1970.〕 During the colonial period, the status of slaves was also affected by interpretations related to the status of foreigners. England had no system of naturalizing immigrants to its island or its colonies. Since persons of African origins were not English subjects by birth, they were among those peoples considered foreigners and generally outside English common law. In 1656 Virginia, Elizabeth Key Grinstead, a mixed-race woman, successfully gained her freedom and that of her son by making her case as the daughter of the free Englishman Thomas Key. She was also a baptized Christian. Her attorney was an English subject, which may have helped her case. (He was also the father of her mixed-race son, and the couple married after Key was freed.)〔(Taunya Lovell Banks, "Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key's Freedom Suit – Subjecthood and Racialized Identity in Seventeenth Century Colonial Virginia" ), Digital Commons Law, University of Maryland Law School. Retrieved April 21, 2009.〕 Shortly after the Elizabeth Key trial and similar challenges, in 1662 the royal colony approved a law adopting the principle of ''partus sequitur ventrum'' (called ''partus'', for short), stating that any children of an enslaved mother would take her status and be considered born into slavery, regardless if the father were a freeborn Englishman or Christian. This was a reversal of common law practice, which ruled that children of English subjects took the status of the father. The change institutionalized the power relationships between slaveowners and slave women, freed the white men from the legal responsibility to acknowledge or financially support their mixed-race children, and somewhat confined the open scandal of mixed-race children and miscegenation to within the slave quarters. The Virginia Slave codes of 1705 further defined as slaves those people imported from nations that were not Christian. Native Americans who were sold to colonists by other Native Americans(from rival tribes), or captured by Europeans during village raids, were also defined as slaves. This codified the earlier principle of non-Christian foreigner enslavement. Implemented in colonial Louisiana in 1724, Louis XIV of France's ''Code Noir'' regulated the slave trade and the institution of slavery in the French colonies. It gave Louisiana a very different pattern of slavery compared to the rest of the United States.〔Martin H. Steinberg, "Disorders of Hemoglobin: Genetics, Pathophysiology, and Clinical Management", pp. 725–726 ()〕 As written, the ''Code Noir'' gave unparalleled rights to slaves, including the right to marry. Although it authorized and codified cruel corporal punishment against slaves under certain conditions, it forbade slave owners to torture them or to separate married couples (or to separate young children from their mothers). It also required the owners to instruct slaves in the Catholic faith, implying that Africans were human beings endowed with a soul, an idea that had not been acknowledged until then.〔Rodney Stark, "For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-hunts, and the End of Slavery", p.322 () Note that the hardcover edition has a typographical error stating "31.2 percent"; it is corrected to 13.2 in the paperback edition. The 13.2% value is confirmed with 1830 census data.〕〔(Samantha Cook,Sarah Hull, "The Rough Guide to the USA" )〕〔(Terry L. Jones, "The Louisiana Journey", p. 115 )〕 Together with a more permeable historic French system related to the status of ''gens de couleur libres'' (free people of color), often born to white fathers and their mixed-race concubines, a far higher percentage of African Americans in Louisiana were free as of the 1830 census (13.2% in Louisiana compared to 0.8% in Mississippi, whose population was dominated by white Anglo-Americans. Most of this "third class" of free people of color, between the French and mass of slaves, lived in New Orleans.)〔 The Louisiana free people of color were often literate, had gained educations, and a significant number owning businesses, properties, and even slaves.〔〔 The ''Code Noir'' forbade interracial marriages. But interracial relationships were formed and their mixed-race descendants became an intermediate social caste between the whites and the mass of slaves. In the English colonies the mulattoes and the blacks were considered equal and discriminated against equally.〔〔 When control of Louisiana shifted to the United States after the Louisiana Purchase, the contrast with the "Protestant" South was evident, as their English norms prevailed and interracial relationships were officially discouraged. The ''Americanization'' of Louisiana gradually resulted in the same binary system about race, with free people of color losing some status and even certain rights as they became characterized as officially "black".〔 In 1735, the Georgia Trustees enacted a law to prohibit slavery in the new colony, which had been established in 1733 to enable the "worthy poor" as well as persecuted European Protestants to have a new start. Slavery was then legal in the other twelve English colonies. Neighboring South Carolina had an economy based on the use of enslaved labor. The Georgia Trustees wanted to eliminate the risk of slave rebellions and make Georgia better able to defend against attacks from the Spanish to the south, who offered freedom to escaped slaves. James Edward Oglethorpe was the driving force behind the colony, and the only trustee to reside in Georgia. He opposed slavery on moral grounds as well as for pragmatic reasons, and vigorously defended the ban on slavery against fierce opposition from Carolina slave merchants and land speculators.〔Wilson, Thomas D., ''The Oglethorpe Plan: Enlightenment Design in Savannah and Beyond'', Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012, chapter 3〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】 accessdate = October 4, 2009 )〕 The Protestant Scottish highlanders who settled what is now Darien, Georgia added a moral anti-slavery argument, which became increasingly rare in the South, in their 1739 "Petition of the Inhabitants of New Inverness".〔"It is shocking to human Nature, that any Race of Mankind and their Posterity should be sentanc'd to perpetual Slavery; nor in Justice can we think otherwise of it, that they are thrown amongst us to be our Scourge one Day or other for our Sins: And as Freedom must be as dear to them as it is to us, what a Scene of Horror must it bring about! And the longer it is unexecuted, the bloody Scene must be the greater." – Inhabitants of New Inverness, s:Petition against the Introduction of Slavery 〕 By 1750 Georgia authorized slavery in the state because they had been unable to secure enough indentured servants as laborers; as economic conditions in England began to improve in the first half of the 18th century, workers had no reason to leave, especially to face the risks in the colonies. During most of the British colonial period, slavery existed in all the colonies. People enslaved in the North typically worked as house servants, artisans, laborers and craftsmen, with the greater number in cities. In 1703, more than 42 percent of New York City households held slaves, the second-highest proportion of any city in the colonies after Charleston, South Carolina.〔("Slavery in New York" ), ''The Nation'', 7 November 2005〕 But slaves were also used as agricultural workers in farm communities, including in areas of New York and Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey. The South developed an agricultural economy dependent on commodity crops. Its planters rapidly acquired a significantly higher number and proportion of slaves in the population overall, as its commodity crops were labor-intensive.〔("The First Black Americans" ), Hashaw, Tim; ''US News and World Report'', 1/21/07〕 Early on, enslaved people in the South worked primarily in agriculture, on farms and plantations growing indigo, rice, and tobacco; cotton became a major crop after the 1790s. The invention of the cotton gin enabled the cultivation of short-staple cotton in a wide variety of areas, leading in the 19th century to the development of large areas of the Deep South as cotton country. Tobacco was very labor-intensive, as was rice cultivation.〔("Slavery in America" ), ''Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Black History''. Retrieved October 24, 2007.〕 In South Carolina in 1720, about 65% of the population consisted of enslaved people.〔Trinkley, M. ("Growth of South Carolina's Slave Population" ), ''South Carolina Information Highway''. Retrieved October 24, 2007.〕 Planters (defined by historians in the Upper South as those who held 20 enslaved people or more) used enslaved workers to cultivate commodity crops. They also worked in the artisanal trades on large plantations and in many southern port cities. Backwoods subsistence farmers, the later wave of settlers in the 18th century who settled along the Appalachian Mountains and backcountry, seldom held enslaved people. Some of the British colonies attempted to abolish the international slave trade, fearing that the importation of new Africans would be disruptive. Virginia bills to that effect were vetoed by the British Privy Council. Rhode Island forbade the import of enslaved people in 1774. All of the colonies except Georgia had banned or limited the African slave trade by 1786; Georgia did so in 1798. Some of these laws were later repealed.〔Morison and Commager: ''Growth of the American Republic'', pp. 212–220.〕 Less than 350,000 enslaved people were imported into the Thirteen Colonies and the U.S, constituting less than 5% of the twelve million enslaved people brought from Africa to the Americas. The great majority of enslaved Africans were transported to sugar colonies in the Caribbean and to Brazil. As life expectancy was short, their numbers had to be continually replenished. Life expectancy was much higher in the U.S. and the enslaved population also reproduced; enslaved peoples' numbers grew rapidly, reaching by the 1860 Census. From 1770 until 1860, the rate of natural growth of North American enslaved people was much greater than for the population of any nation in Europe, and was nearly twice as rapid as that of England.〔Michael Tadman, "The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas," ''The American Historical Review,'' December 2000, 105:5 (online )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Slavery in the United States」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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