There were almost 700 thousand slaves in the U.S. in 1790, which equated to approximately 18 percent of the total population, or roughly one in six people. By 1860, the final census taken before the American Civil War, there were four million slaves in the South, compared with less than 500,000 free Black Americans in all of the U.S.. Of the 4.4 million Blacks in the U.S. before the war, almost four million of these people were held as slaves; meaning that for all African Americans living in the US in 1860, there was an 89 percent* chance that they lived in slavery. A brief history Trans-Atlantic slavery began in the early 16th century, when the Portuguese and Spanish forcefully brought enslaved Africans to the New World. The British Empire introduced slavery to North America on a large scale, and the economy of the British colonies there depended on slave labor, particularly regarding cotton, sugar, and tobacco output. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century the number of slaves being brought to the Americas increased exponentially, and at the time of American independence it was legal in all thirteen colonies. Although slavery became increasingly prohibited in the north, the number of slaves remained high during this time as they were simply relocated or sold from the north to the south. It is also important to remember that the children of slaves were also viewed as property, and were overwhelmingly born into a life of slavery. Abolition and the American Civil War In the years that followed independence, the Northern States gradually prohibited slavery, it was officially abolished there by 1805, and the importation of slave labor was prohibited nationwide from 1808 (although both still existed in practice after this). Business owners in the Southern States however depended on slave labor in order to meet the demand of their rapidly expanding industries, and the issue of slavery continued to polarize American society in the decades to come. This culminated in the election of President Abraham Lincoln in 1860, who promised to prohibit slavery in the newly acquired territories to the west, leading to the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865. Although the Confederacy (south) took the upper hand in much of the early stages of the war, the strength in numbers of the northern states including many free, Black men, eventually resulted in a victory for the Union (north), and the nationwide abolishment of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Legacy In total, an estimated twelve to thirteen million Africans were transported to the Americas as slaves, and this does not include the high number who did not survive the journey (which was as high as 23 percent in some years). In the 150 years since the abolition of slavery in the US, the African-American community have continuously campaigned for equal rights and opportunities that were not afforded to them along with freedom. The most prominent themes have been the Civil Rights Movement, voter suppression, mass incarceration, and the relationship between the police and the African-American community.

This statistic shows the number of black men and women in the US from 1820 until 1880. Slavery was legal in the Southern States of the US until 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment was added to the US Constitution after the American Civil War. Until that time all of the slaves included in this statistic were registered as living in the South, whereas the majority of the free, black men and women lived in the Northern States. From the data we can see that, while the slave experience was very different for men and women, there was relatively little difference between their numbers in each respective category. While female slaves were more likely to serve in domestic roles, they were also more likely to be working in the lowest and unskilled jobs on plantations, whereas men were given more skilled and physically demanding roles. As slavery was abolished in 1870, all black people from this point were considered free in the census data. It is also worth noticing that in these years the difference in the number of men and women increased, most likely as a result of all the black male soldiers who fell fighting in the American Civil War.

This study uses historical records from 36 archives in the United States to analyze 8,437 enslaved people's sale and/or appraisal prices from 1797 to 1865.

Between 1501 and 1866, it is estimated that over 12.5 million people were forced onto ships in Africa, and transported to the Americas as slaves. Furthermore, it is estimated that only 10.7 million of these slaves disembarked on the other side of the Atlantic, meaning that roughly 1.8 million did not survive the journey. The transatlantic slave trade was a part of the triangular trade route between Europe, Africa and the Americas, during the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Generally speaking, this route saw European merchants bring manufactured products to Africa to trade for slaves, then transport the slaves to the Americas to harvest raw materials, before taking these materials back to Europe where they would then be consumed or used in manufacturing. Slavery was an integral part in funding the expansion of Europe's colonial empires, which shaped the modern and highly globalized world in which we live today.

The Middle Passage As with trade, the slave journey was also broken into three parts; the First Passage was the stage where slaves were captured and transported to African ports, the Middle Passage was the journey across the Atlantic, while the Final Passage was where the slaves were transported to their place of work. The death toll in the First Passage is thought to be the highest of the three stages, as millions were killed or fatally wounded as they were captured, however a lack of written data and historical evidence has made this number difficult to estimate. In contrast, shipping records from the time give a much more accurate picture of the Middle Passage's death toll, and this data suggest that roughly 14.5 percent of slaves did not survive the journey. The reason for this was the harsh and cramped conditions on board; slave ships were designed in such a way that they could fit the maximum number of slaves on board in order to maximize profits. These conditions then facilitated the spread of diseases, such as smallpox and dysentery, while malnutrition and thirst created further problems. Generally, slavers aimed to keep slaves as healthy (therefore; profitable) as possible, although there are countless examples of mistreatment and punishment of slaves by their captors, and several cases where slaves were exterminated by the crew as provisions ran low.

Rise and fall of the transatlantic slave trade

The European arrival in the Americas also saw the introduction of virgin soil epidemics (new diseases being introduced to biologically defenseless populations) which decimated the indigenous populations. The abundance of natural resources, but lack of available labor led to the rise of the transatlantic slave trade. Until the mid-1600s, Portuguese traders had a near-monopoly on this trade, supplying slaves to the newly expanding Spanish and Portuguese empires in South America. As other European powers began to expand their empires in the Caribbean and North America, the slave trade grew dramatically, and during the eighteenth century, the number of slaves being brought to the New World increased from an annual average of thirty thousand in the 1690s to 87 thousand in the 1790s. The transatlantic slave trade reached its peak between the 1750 and 1850, and an average of 74 thousand slaves were brought to the Americas each year between these dates. The largest decline came as the slave trade was disrupted during the American War of Independence (1775-1783), although the trade became weakened as the abolitionist movement gained momentum in Europe and the Americas around the turn of the century. The most significant impacts came as the slave trade was abolished in Britain and the U.S. in 1807 and Brazil in 1831, and Britain then used its position as the global superpower to impose abolition on other nations and used the Royal Navy to enforce these measures. While most nations abolished the slave trade in the early 1800s, it would take decades before the actual practice of slavery would be abolished; today, slavery is illegal in almost every country, however modern slavery in the forms of forced labor, human trafficking and sexual exploitation continues to be prevalent across the globe.

The "Enslaved People in the African American National Biography, 1508-1865" dataset builds on the complete print and online collection of the African American National Biography (AANB), edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. The full collection contains over 6,000 biographical entries of named historical individuals, including 1,304 for subjects born before 1865 and the abolition of slavery in the United States. In making a subset of biographical entries from the multivolume work, the goal was to extract life details from those biographies into an easy-to-view database form that details whether a subject was enslaved for some or all of their lives and to provide the main biographical details of each subject for contextual analysis and comparison. 52 fields covering location data; gender; names, alternate names and suffixes; dates and places of birth and death; and up to 8 occupations were included. We also added 13 unique fields that provide biographical details on each subject: Free born in North America; Free before 13th Amendment; Ever Enslaved; How was freedom attained; Other/uncertain status; African born; Parent information; Runaways and rebels; Education/literacy; Religion; Slave narrative or memoir author; Notes; and Images.

This project entailed recording and coding information from slave narratives gathered as part of the Federal Writers' Project. Between 1936 and 1938, federal authorities organized teams of interviewers in seventeen states who gathered the recollections of over two thousand former slaves. The typescript of these interviews, running to more than ten thousand pages, was deposited in the Library of Congress and has been available on microfiche for many years. Information on the actions, attitudes, beliefs and experiences of slaves was coded from 2,358 slave narratives.

“Slave Statistics” consists of 7,289 records derived from lists of enslaved individuals in Anne Arundel and Montgomery counties as of November 1, 1864, the date when the Constitution of 1864, which abolished slavery in the state of Maryland, took effect. Maryland remained in the Union during the Civil War, despite the divided loyalties of her people. Because Maryland was a Union state, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not free Maryland slaves. Many enslaved people, however, had taken advantage of the war's confusion to leave their enslavers earlier, some by joining the Union Army. Hoping that the federal government would repay the state's loyalty and compensate its citizens for the chattels lost, the General Assembly ordered that a listing be made of all slaveholders and their slaves as of November 1, 1864. The federal government never compensated the owners, but these records, called “Slave Statistics,” are the only evidence available of enslaved people and owners at the time of state emancipation. The Maryland State Archives retains the Slave Statistics reports for 1867-1869 for eight Maryland counties; the dataset includes information from two of the eight counties, Anne Arundel and Montgomery. The dataset includes all information on the original lists, including names of enslavers; county and district of residence; names of enslaved individuals and their physical condition, term of servitude, and Union Army service, including regiment; record date; and compensation (if applicable).

The purpose of this data collection was to provide data on the height of slaves and indentured servants in the colonial and antebellum periods of United States history. Data were taken from newspaper advertisements describing the runaways. Variables include the state in which the advertisement was published, the year of the advertisement, the first and last names of the runaway slave or indentured servant, and his or her race, sex, age, height, place of birth, legal status (whether he or she was a convict or in jail at time of advertisement), profession, and knowledge of the English language.

Analysis unit

Persons, households, and dwellings

UNITS IDENTIFIED: - Dwellings: yes - Vacant Units: no - Households: yes - Individuals: yes - Group quarters: yes

UNIT DESCRIPTIONS: - Dwellings: A separate inhabited tenement, containing one or more families under one roof. Where several tenements are in one block, with walls either of brick or wood to divide them, having separate entrances, they are each to be numbered as separate houses; but where not so divided, they are to be numbered as one house. - Households: One person living separately in a house, or a part of a house, and providing for him or herself, or several persons living together in a house, or in part of a house, upon one common means of support, and separately from others in similar circumstances - Group quarters: Yes

Universe

All persons living in the United States including temporarily absent residents and sailors at sea, no matter how long they may have been absent, if they were believed to be still alive. "Indians not taxed", which refers to Native Americans living on reservations or under tribal rule. Native Americans who had renounced tribal rule and "exercise the rights of citizens" were to be enumerated.

Kind of data

Population and Housing Census [hh/popcen]

Sampling procedure

MICRODATA SOURCE: Department of the Interior

SAMPLE SIZE (person records): 273596.

SAMPLE DESIGN: 1-in-100 national random sample of the free population. African-American slaves are not included in this dataset. Individual-level data on the 1860 slave population is available at the

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face [f2f]

Research instrument

The census operation involved six forms. Form 1 was used to enumerate free persons and collected information on individual characteristics. Form 2 was used to enumerate slaves. Other forms were used to record information about agriculture and industry.

A “runaway slave record,” or as it is officially titled, “Runaway and Escaped Slaves Records, 1794, 1806-1863,” include accounts, correspondence, receipts, and reports concerning expenses incurred by localities related to the capture of enslaved people attempting to escape bondage to pursue freedom. The collection also includes records with information related to enslaved people from multiple localities who escaped to United States military forces during the Civil War. While many independent businesses bought and sold human beings, local and state governments such as the state of Virginia also participated in and profited from human trafficking. Localities were reimbursed for the expenses of confining, feeding, and selling of self-emancipated people, and likewise, the state established procedures to compensate enslavers for their financial loss when enslaved people ran away or were imprisoned or executed. If a person was captured and their enslaver could not be identified, they became the property of the state and were sold. The proceeds from these sales went to the state treasury, and often, records of those sales can be found in the Public Claims records from the Auditor of Public Accounts. The net proceeds were deposited into the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Literary Fund for the public education of poor white children.

The data in this collection is drawn directly from the historical documents and may contain language that is now deemed offensive.

This study presents data pertaining to slave sales and appraisals that took place from 1775 to 1865 in eight states of the southern United States: Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, and Mississippi. The data were obtained from probate records on deposit in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Genealogical Society Library, Salt Lake City, Utah. Variables document the sale locations and the appraised and sale values of the slaves, as well as the slaves' age, sex, occupational skills, and condition of health. A related study is SLAVE HIRES, 1775-1865 (ICPSR 7422), also prepared by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman.

This data collection was designed to compare the heights of southern whites with those of slaves and northern white males between 1863 and 1866. Information provided includes month, day, and year of amnesty, county and state, age, color of skin, eyes, and hair, occupation, last name, first name, oath administrators, feet component in height, inch component in height, and height in inches.

In Africa, where domestic slavery was the predominant form of slavery, female slaves were usually favored as they were perceived as being more easily-controlled and less likely to rebel. In the Americas, however, where productive slavery was more prevalent, male slaves were preferred due to the physical intensity of the labor and the perception that they were more likely to survive seasoning or acclimatization to the new environment (in reality, male slaves in the New World had a much higher mortality rate than female slaves).

It is often quoted that slavers aimed to capture two male slaves for every female slave, yet most sources suggest that this target was rarely met. The averages shown here suggest that the gender ratio among slaves was around 179 males for every 100 females, although the difference varied by region, national carrier and century; for example, a much higher share of male slaves was transported to Cuba in the 19th century, than those transported to British Caribbean colonies in the 18th century. Because of these variations, and the lack of gender ratio from several of the earliest and busiest routes (namely Portuguese voyages to Brazil, which was the most common destination for slaves during the transatlantic slave trade), historians are often reluctant to make overall estimates for the gender ratio during the transatlantic slave trade. Nonetheless, a ratio of 170 to 180 males per 100 females is the most common consensus given among modern historians.

According to records regarding the White House (i.e. census data and purchase or rental contracts), at least 201 slaves were known to have been hired from their owner to help build the White House and Capitol Building between 1792 and 1800. The source details that many slaves involved in this feat were undocumented, therefore the number of slaves who actually took part was likely much higher. Similarly, records also show that there were a number of slaves recorded as living or working on the White House grounds until 1850, during the tenure of ten of the first twelve U.S. presidents. It is important to note, however, that these figures apply only to the slaves who moved with the president to the White House (or were hired from their respective owner), and this data is not reflective of the number of slaves owned by U.S. presidents throughout their lifetimes.

Of these first twelve presidents, John Adams and William Henry Harrison were the only to not have slaves living with them in the White House, although Harrison was an advocate of slavery and was a slave owner during his lifetime. Adams' son, John Quincy Adams, also held a strong anti-slavery stance throughout his political career, however, when John Quincy's sister-in-law and brother-in-law died in 1813 and 1815 respectively, their four children went to stay in the White House and brought with them a small number of slaves.

This study presents 1860 data on population and farm production in 5,228 farms located in 405 major cotton-producing counties in the South. The data was compiled from the agriculture, slave, and population schedules of the 1860 United States manuscript Census. For each farm, variables describing farm land, machinery, crops, and livestock are included, as well as production figures for specific crops and types of livestock on the farm. The population variables tabulate the free and slave residents of each farm by sex, race, and age in five- or ten-year categories.

This record is an unpublished report about the history of Native Americans, slaves and freedmen in the Pee Dee. It is a historical report but intended for use as educational material. The goal of this publication is to help teachers better present the unique and diverse history of the Pee Dee region to their students. We have incorporated three basic "themes' of Pee Dee history - - Native American, African American Slave and Plantation Life, and Postbellum Tenancy. In each we have tried to not only provide teachers with the background to integrate Pee Dee regional material into their classroom studies of South Carolina history, but also to begin implementing a integrated curricula which incorporates math and science. We have tried to encourage the use of higher learning skills - - while still providing plenty of latitude so all students could benefit from the materials. An integrated curricula, while relatively new to many programs, is very simple. It recognizes that our current method of teaching isolates both the student and the teacher from the broad pattern of interdisciplinary understanding. Integrated curricula allow the student to better understand how diverse concepts come together to promote a fuller understanding of the world and essential concepts. By integrating cultural heritage with components of math and science, this program provides a more exciting, and more worldly, view of South Carolina. It promotes a greater interest in both history and other disciplines. It also allows students and teachers to better understand the dynamic relationship between history, agricultural endeavors, and economic factors. It encourages students to understand, not simply to memorize and parrot. This integrated curricula is developed to increase critical thinking and maximize the participation of the student in the learning process. Coupled with a field trip to the archaeological site, students will have the opportunity to not only better understand the history of their region, but also to see that history being uncovered and explored through archaeology. This combination provides students and teachers with a rare opportunity. This booklet is organized to allow teachers to quickly identify the information essential for curriculum development -- maximizing the educational potential of the program. Included is information on the goals and objectives of this program, additional background information to provide teachers with the cultural heritage and history content necessary to teach the lessons, three individual teacher lesson plans, student worksheets, and extension activities. While designed for use primarily in Grade 8, to correlate with the instruction of South Carolina History, these materials have wide applicability. With relatively little modification they can be used in Grades 3-12. Teachers should also be aware that not only does Chicora Foundation offer additional programs and in-class room talks, but the Pee Dee Heritage Center, at Coker College, offers other unique teaching opportunities, including a "Tobacco History Curriculum" which traces the history of tobacco from Native American use to the early twentieth century. The Pee Dee Heritage Center can be reached at 803/383-8000 and Chicora's address and telephone number are listed on the title sheet of this publication.

In the 1930s, students at Prairie View State Normal & Industrial College, under the direction of the college’s registrar and Arts and Sciences director, John Brother Cade, participated in a project to interview 229 formerly enslaved individuals from 17 states in the United States, as well as Indian Territory and Canada. Nearly early 70 years since the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, many of these individuals experienced the tail end of slavery as an institution in America, and this project aimed to capture their voices, experiences, and the hardships that they faced in the early years of their lives. Students sought out information regarding food, clothing, housing facilities, quality of life, epistemology, family, and treatment, to capture the perspective of formerly enslaved individuals and the institution of slavery. This dataset, whose fields were extracted from the documents in this archival collection housed at Southern University, compiles key pieces of information these ex-slaves shared with Prairie View students.

Throughout the history of the transatlantic slave trade, approximately 5.7 million of the 12.5 million African slaves who embarked on slave ships did so in ports along the region of West Central Africa and St. Helena; of these 5.7 million, almost 3.9 million were destined for Brazil. This region was also the most common point of origin for slaves destined for the Spanish and Dutch Americas, and French colonies in the Caribbean. The majority of slaves destined for British colonies in the Caribbean were taken from ports along the Bight of Biafra or the Gold Coast, while the regions of Senegambia and nearby Atlantic islands was the most common for slaves destined for mainland North America. This data refers only to the number of slaves who embarked on ships in Africa, and not the number who disembarked; it is estimated that approximately 14.5 percent of slaves who embarked on ships destined for the Americas died during the Middle Passage.

The Dutch-speaking Runaway Slaves dataset includes information 483 Dutch-speaking slaves and three black indentured servants who were reported fleeing their condition of bondage in the American colonies and early United States. The data comes primarily from newspaper advertisements digitized and made available through newspapers.com and ReadEx’s Early American Newspaper Database. This current database is the first to gather and organize data specifically concerning runaway slaves who spoke Dutch. The compilation of this data was primarily intended research on the language and economics of slavery in Dutch New York. The database includes 486 rows of entries, with eleven columns of data about Dutch-speaking runaway slaves. These eleven columns of data are as follows: Year, Name, Age, Sex, Language, Speaks, Owner, County, State, City, and Source.

From 1501 until 1866, it is estimated that the transatlantic slave trade saw more than 12.5 million African people forcefully put on slave ships and transported to the Americas. Of these 12.5 million, only 10.7 million disembarked on the other side of the Atlantic, meaning that approximately 1.8 million (14.5 percent) did not survive the journey, known as the Middle Passage. Throughout most of the the sixteenth century, the mortality rate was around thirty percent, it then fell below twenty percent in the late seventeenth century, and below fifteen percent in the late eighteenth century. There was a slight increase in the mid-1800s, before the transatlantic slave trade effectively ended in the 1860s. The overall average mortality rate is lower than the rate in most decades, due to the larger numbers of captives transported in the late 1700s; a significant number of these voyages were between Africa and Brazil, which was generally the shortest of the major routes.