The Problem 3fulfill. To meet spiraling demand and to keep labor costs low, these modern
entrepreneurs developed a novel kind of slavery whose distinguishing char-
acteristics were its racist underpinnings, inexhaustible supply, and hereditary
basis. All that mattered was the satisfaction of customers at the lowest pos-
sible price and the highest possible profit, not the shocking exploitation
of labor. The slave trade itself, which packed Africans in ships like canned
sardines, was immensely lucrative, with 100 per cent profits not unknown.
Much of the wealth flowed back to mercantile houses, banks, shipping com-
panies, and factories in England – the greatest of the slave-traders – helping
to underwrite the Industrial Revolution. The African kingdoms of Oyo,
Dahomey, and Asante also enriched themselves in the slave industry by sell-
ing off rival tribes in exchange for glass beads, firearms, cloth, rum, tobacco,
and cowrie shells.
When life expectancy in the New World increased in the mid-seventeenth
century, buying slaves made more economic sense. African slaves possessed
clear advantages over Indians and European indentured servants, including
larger supply, resistance to deadly disease, greater farm productivity, and
ready identification as slaves. Because labor in the New World was the scarcest
yet most indispensable commodity, hereditary enslavement was required,
lest slaves convert to Christianity and gain their freedom. The surest way to
keep Africans in bondage was to change the law so that the children of
slave women (including those fathered by white masters) would be slaves,
producing a lucrative cycle. With enslavement came an ideology of racial
oppression. Now Africans were inferior because they were slaves and slaves
because they were inferior.
The English stripped African slaves of virtually all rights under English
common law. Slaves were defined as chattel and were forbidden to speak
their native tongue, practice their religion, or name their children. Their very
identity as human beings was crushed. They could not move about freely,
earn wages, marry whites, carry firearms, resist punishment, testify in court,
or congregate in small groups. Teaching slaves to read and write was a crime,
lest literacy arouse rebelliousness. In short, slaves were to be nothing more
than servile beasts of burden. Free blacks represented a different kind of threat,
and they were barred from voting and taxed at higher rates and imprisoned
for longer terms than whites. Virginia ordered them to leave the colony
within six months and Maryland prohibited their arrival altogether.
During the revolutionary period, American slavery represented a plain
conflict between the promise and practice of liberty for all. While the
colonists excoriated the British for enslaving them politically, the colonists
enslaved Africans physically. During and shortly after the war for independ-
ence, northern states, which had few blacks and had little need of them,
emancipated their slaves while southern states did not. Thomas Jefferson, theTHEC_A02.qxd 3/26/08 6:12 PM Page 3