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Who Do You Think You Are? Season Two
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Times of Slavery
Emmitt Smith found out that not only were his ancestors slaves, but that his fifth-great grandfather was most likely a slave-owner, and responsible for the birth of Mariah, his fourth-great grandmother. Stories like these were not uncommon during this time, incredible as they seem today. Here are some other less-known facts about the era of slavery, a time when people were treated as property.
Did you know?
- The first large-scale enslavement of the African people by Western Europeans began in the 1440s when Portugal set upon the populations of West Africa, in a bid to supply cheap labor to cash-crop plantations of the Caribbean and the Americas.
- The trans-Atlantic slave trade was the primary source for the dispersal of Africans into the Western Hemisphere. Between 1526-1867, sub-Saharan Africa lost over twelve and a half million people to the slave trade. About one in eight died aboard ships during the journeys to the New World.
- The first Africans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. By 1755 all 13 colonies recognized chattel slavery, where children of slaves were also bonded to a life of servitude.
- Slaves were punished for such things as reading, disobedience, or practicing religion. Punishments included lynching, being placed in shackles, and public whippings.
- During Christmas time or "vacation" for slaves, some masters deliberately got their slaves drunk so they would be too stuporous to escape. Owners lectured their slaves that, if they were free men, they would spend all their days drunk and be unable to support themselves.
- Nat Turner led the Southampton Insurrection in August of 1831, a slave rebellion that took place in Virginia and killed more than 50 white people. Retribution came quickly, with many slaves slaughtered. Virginia went on to pass legislation making it illegal for slaves to read or write.
- Henry Brown, who was born into slavery in 1815, went to extremes to be free when his wife and children were sold to a North Carolina owner without him. With the help of a friend and white store owner, Brown placed himself inside a shipping box and arranged to have himself mailed to Philadelphia. When opened, Harry "Box" Brown was found alive and well and went on to be a celebrity and outspoken abolitionist.
- In 1800, prime field hands were sold from $400-600 and in 1850 the price went up to $1,300-1,500. By 1860 (a year before the Civil War), Southerners owned close to $4 billion worth of slaves.
- Slaves generally had no surnames; upon being freed, some took on the last names of their former owners.
- The Underground Railroad is thought to have gotten its name when an owner chased his escaped slave through Kentucky to the Ohio River. When the slave suddenly "disappeared," the owner remarked that it was as if his slave had "gone off on some underground road."
- The Fugitive Slave Act, stipulating that a runaway slave could be returned to his rightful "owner" if caught, led many escaped slaves to seek refuge in Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. According to one estimate, 100,000 slaves escaped from the South from 1810-1850.
- The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, finally made slavery illegal throughout the Union. It was the first of the five Reconstruction Amendments that followed the Civil War.
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