Slavery in the United States has been abolished for one hundred sixty-one years, the duration lasting over two hundred forty-six years from the arrival of the first twenty enslaved Africans in Jamestown, Virginia. By the start of the American Civil War, there were roughly four million enslaved people in bondage. Slavery in the U.S. was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. These four million represented approximately thirteen percent of the U.S population at that time.
Slavery has been known to have been taught in U.S. schools as a disconnected, softened historical event rather than a systemic institution. These lessons focus on heroic leaders who rose up from their oppression instead of fighting the oppressors, leading to a dumbed-down version of crucial knowledge that could be obtained from the violence, economic and political context that played a huge part in shaping the lives of African Americans.
Before even landing on American land, enslaved Africans had to endure horrendous treatment. Boarding the ships, African men, women and children were stripped naked and subjected to invasive examinations to determine their value for work. The lower deck of a slave ship was separated by gender, with humans being shackled and crowded together with little to no airflow or even sanitation, creating an oppressive heat below the ship.
Captive Africans suffered from dysentery, malaria, yellow fever and smallpox. In the face of these conditions, some threw themselves overboard or refused to eat. Violence ensued when compliance wasn’t met, including torture, sexual violence or even being thrown overboard.
Beyond whipping to hurt the enslaved, being seen as less than by the majority of White Americans gave the initiative to treat Black Americans as subservient. This excuse gives them ‘right’ for the right to do as they please with no repercussions because there were simply none at that time.
Enslavers often used iron gags, a flat iron that goes into the mouth, keeping the tongue down so nothing could be swallowed, with the only passage of breath being through small holes in a mouth-plate. When an escaped enslaved person was found, they were often put into this confinement as disciplinary action. Other punishments included being whipped with a cat-o’-nine-tails (a multi-tailed whip with barbs) while nailed to a power keg, having ears sawn off, branding and mutilation with hot irons.
Named the “Father of Gynecology”, James Marion Sims, a White doctor in Montgomery, Alabama, between 1845 and 1849, performed excruciating induction experiments without anesthesia on multiple Black women and girls. These life-threatening procedures were only legally required to obtain permission from slave owners. Lucy, an enslaved woman, was nearly killed by blood poisoning. Anarcha, an enslaved teen, was operated on over thirty times without anesthesia before developing a technique that was deemed safe on white patients. This inhumane torture helped Sims create a repair for chronic complications of childbirth, but left these women unable to give birth and with difficulty working after.
Recommended by his wife, Sims operated on a young black boy. The boy was violently ill and near death. Sims located what he later diagnosed as the ‘exciting cause’ of all the symptoms in the child’s head, but was still unable to save the child. This started the plight of procedures on black infants suffering from “trimus nascentium”, a term he coined for what is now known as neonatal tetanus. Sims attempted to treat these cases by using a shoemaker’s awl to pry the skulls of the unfortunate infants back into alignment.
In Florida and Louisiana, it’s said there once was a practice of placing Black children or infants on the edge of swamps and waterways to attract alligators, often with a rope tied around their waist or neck. Hunters would intervene only when the alligator attacked or was close enough, though this practice has a lack of definitive evidence. These accounts are based on postcards and oral histories.
Enslaved women in the U.S. used Gossypium hirsutum (cotton bark) to manage their bodies, prevent pregnancy and induce abortions. These women would chew the root or boil it into a tea to prevent pregnancy. This is something they had to endure under the threat and practice of sexual exploitation. There was no protection from being sexually harassed or raped by masters and overseers.
Widespread abuse occurred when men with authority took advantage of the situation. Even if a woman seemed agreeable to the situation, she had no choice. Enslaved men were often powerless to protect the women they loved in these situations.
Collected by the Federal Writers’ Project, the story of Aunt Sally, enslaved in the Heard family, remarks on the grief of allotments of husbands and wives, or parents and children, that were sold or transferred to different plantations to fulfill inheritance shares, tearing families apart. At one point, breaking off from her story due to emotional distress, it was quoted, “Lord, honey, Ah got such a pain in mah stomach.” The story describes the looming threat of being separated from their families due to these allotments, creating psychological and emotional trauma.
Based on the historical accounts of the enslaved, the treatment of elderly and disabled enslaved people was characterized by brutal neglect. It was common for owners to expel them from plantations without food or shelter. Frederick Douglass describes his own grandmother being left to die alone in a hut after becoming too old for work. If not run out or starved to death, they were sold for an extremely low rate to physicians for medical experiments, or just left to be disposed of in ditches.
The last known U.S. slave ship, The Clotilda, brought the last captive African people to the United States. The illegal voyage occurred in 1860, more than fifty years after the slave trade was outlawed by Congress. Mobile, Alabama, shipbuilder Timothy Meaher allegedly made a bet that he wouldn’t get caught, hiring Captain William Foster to set sail to West Africa. The ship carried one hundred and ten African men, women and children captured from a tribal war in modern-day Nigeria and Benin.
Arriving in Mobile Bay in July 1860, the Clotilda was burned in the Mobile River Delta to hide the evidence of crime, and then slaves were transferred to shore by steamboat. Many of the survivors were unable to go back to Africa after the Civil War and emancipation. Pooling money together to buy land, they founded their own self-sufficient community north of Mobile known as Africatown, where they were able to maintain African identities, language and cultural traditions.
The last survivors of slavery lived well into the 20th century, providing their firsthand accounts. Cudjo Lewis lived until 1935 and was thought to be the last survivor. His story was later documented by Zora Neale Hurston and an anthropologist in Barracoon. Another survivor, Matilda McCrear, lived until 1940, making her the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade in the U.S. The wreckage of the Clotilda was identified in the Mobile River in 2019, along with tangible evidence of descendants in Africatown.
Through the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, antebellum slavery, the Civil War, which resulted in the abolition of slavery, and then the rise of the Jim Crow era, attempting to integrate the formerly enslaved people held its own terrors for Black Americans. The shift to Post-Jim Crow, with the Civil Rights Movement and Voting Rights Act, officially ended the discriminatory laws. In the present day, systematic racism, economic disparities and lingering health effects in the Black community from slavery and other inequalities persist in American society.
These stories and their own personal antecedents are only the tip of the iceberg of testimonies to the trials the African enslaved had to endure. It’s important not to forget the history of America, through the most savage treatment ever endured for multiple decades throughout history. Though there may never be enough to give reparations for these heinous crimes, learning not to repeat this history could be a major step forward in the right direction, united instead of divided.
