- [Narrator] This is a chart showing estimated population
around the year 1750 in the British colonies in the New World. I've arranged this more or
less from north to south and you can see that as
you go farther south, the percentage of the population that was enslaved and African
grew greater and greater, but one thing to note here is that not any one of these colonies had zero enslaved people at all, even New Hampshire, the farthest north with the smallest percentage
of enslaved Africans had some enslaved people there before the American Revolution. We frequently have the misconception that slavery only happened in the south. In fact, all British colonies
had some amount of slavery and all British colonies
had some involvement in the institution of slavery, whether that was bankrolling
it as a financier, growing food that was intended
for the slave colonies in the West Indies that
didn't want to spare even an acre of land to grow something other than sugar, or
shipping enslaved Africans by either owning or captaining the boats of the middle passage. In fact, one of the largest ports where slaves entered the
North American colonies and were sold at auction was
at Newport, Rhode Island. But despite this, the largest
share of enslaved people were in the southern colonies, which focused on plantation agriculture. So, Maryland, Virginia,
and then even farther south into the British colonies
in the Caribbean. In some of these southernmost colonies, you can see that enslaved Africans outnumbered white people by sometimes quite a considerable amount. As the enslaved population
in the colonies grew, colonial governments began
passing more and more restrictions on the
lives of enslaved people and began codifying who
was or was not a slave. For example, if a white
man and an enslaved woman had a child together,
would that child be free like her father or
enslaved like her mother? What about the opposite case? In Virginia in 1662, the
government passed a law specifying that the
children of enslaved women would follow the condition
of their mothers. Other laws prevented
interracial relationships and defined enslaved
Africans as chattel slaves, which means personal property, and as the personal
property of slave owners, enslaved people had
little to no legal rights. So, over the course of the 1600s, slavery became stricter and more exclusively defined by race. The experience of being
enslaved was unimaginably physically and emotionally taxing. Since enslaved people
had no legal protections, owners could maim or
even kill enslaved people with little to no repercussion. For women, life in slavery also meant the constant threat and frequent reality of rape at the hands of slave owners. Religion, dance, music, and family helped enslaved people deal with the harsh realities of everyday life and enslaved people also developed both covert means of resisting slavery, like, for example, breaking tools, which made it more difficult to work, or overt means of resisting slavery, particularly in slave uprisings. One of these, the Stono Rebellion in 1739 in South Carolina resulted in the deaths of about 42 whites and about 44 blacks. The South Carolina government
responded to the rebellion by making slave codes even harsher. I wanna finish by just
reiterating how central the institution of slavery was to not just some, but all
of the English colonies. In the 19th century, Americans
would refer to slavery as the peculiar institution,
meaning not so much that it was strange,
but that it was specific to the south part of the United States. But slavery really wasn't
specific to the south part, it was the bedrock of
the colonial economy, not just in the south,
but in all the industries that contributed to slavery
in the north as well, those who financed, fed, shipped, and even bought the products
made by enslaved people created the economic prosperity of the North American colonies.