As with most of the customs of the colonial period, American slave trade had its roots in Europe. What began in the mid 1500s as a small trading business between an English navigator and The Spanish, limited to the West Indies, grew to a global empire by the beginning of the 18th century. Contrary to popular belief, the slave trade of America began in South and Central America. The monarchs of England gained control of extraction and supply to Spanish colonies.
It wasn’t until 1619 when Dutch slave traders brought African slaves to the English-American colonies. There was instant conflict amongst the colonies. Some were adamantly opposed to owning another person, some were confused about the right to hold another Christian as a slave, and others were unsure whether offspring of a free person and slave should be free or not. At this time, Indians were also being imported from the West Indies. Under legislation, any non-Christian servants transported by shipping were to remain slaves for the rest of their lives. Also, any children born of a slave were to remain slaves their entire lives.
Slavery may have not grown to the magnitude it reached in the late 1700s had English rule not made it impossible to prohibit it. In 1761, the Virginia colony attempted to reduce slave traffic with laws including tariffs. The King replied with an order that no colony could impose laws outlawing or taxing the trading of slaves. This was one of the very first thoughts of revolution from England. The original Declaration of Independence addressed the issue of slave trade and its negativity on the colonies in the opening paragraph.
Slavery slipped into the lives of those who opposed it by coy religious intentions. The Georgia settlement had been struggling to remain slave free. However, they saw the growth of their Carolina neighbors, and attributed their success with their slave holdings. One of the ways slavery was introduced was through missionary work with “heathen Africans.” Christian leaders of Georgia, Carolina and Virginia proclaimed that slave owners who introduced and encourage the Christian faith to their slaves would be blessed.
More laws from parliament in 1750 imposed slavery on the colonies. The ships were coming whether they wanted them to or not. This was a tactic employed by England to subdue the colonist from revolt or revolution from the crown.
When it came time to formally design a new government, leaders were torn on the topic of slavery and the trade. Even though settlers were predominantly against slavery, those who owned slaves became dependent on them. What’s more is that many of those who owned slaves, and those who had made a business out of slave trade, were the wealthiest in the new nation. They held the power. So, when the Constitution was being drafted, provisions were made to allow slavery to continue in states that already allowed it, but no regulations on other states were made. Some states outright illegalized the trading and commerce of slavery. Only slaves born within the state, or held at that time, were permitted to be kept as slaves.
This could have limited slavery, and possibly even cause it to end on its own. However, state legislations began popping up under the guise of imposing limitations on slave trade. Taxes, from $5 to $10 per sold person were being collected by the state government. Now, not only the wealthy plantation owners and professional slave traders, but also the government had begun to reap the financial benefits of slave trade. The conflicts leading to the abolition movements, Civil War, and equal suffrage riots; the racial and social divide that has been widening ever since; and the unequal caste system of the United States rests on the way the new government approach slavery laws in the first decade of the New Nation’s development.
