Why were slaves captured

How did the captives deal with their fate, especially the permanent loss of freedom? What aspects of their capture did they emphasize to their children and grandchildren, as evidenced in the WPA narratives?

How did captured Africans respond to each other on the transatlantic journey and after their sale in America? How did native Africans relate to African Americans, including their own children and grandchildren? Compare the accounts in the published narratives Equiano, Brinch, and Diallo with those recounted by former slaves interviewed in the s.

What do the accounts share? How do they differ? How did capture by Europeans and by Africans differ? One of the earliest first-hand accounts of the African slave trade comes from a seamen named Gomes Eannes de Azurara, who witnessed a Portuguese raid on an African village. He said that some captives "drowned themselves in the water; others thought to escape by hiding under their huts; others shoved their children among the seaweed.

They were free people who were captured in war or were victims of banditry or were enslaved as punishment for certain crimes. In Angola, kidnapping and condemnation for debt were very important. In most cases, rulers or merchants were not selling their own subjects, but people they regarded as alien. We must remember that Africans did not think of themselves as Africans, but as members of separate nations. Apologists for the African slave trade long argued that European traders did not enslave anyone: they simply purchased Africans who had already been enslaved and who otherwise would have been put to death.

Thus, apologists claimed, the slave trade actually saved lives. Such claims represent a gross distortion of the facts. Some independent slave merchants did in fact stage raids on unprotected African villages and kidnap and enslave Africans. She remained enslaved by them until the Emancipation Proclamation in Afterward, Rhoda is believed to have married a man and had eight children with him.

When she died, the Gleaves family ran an obituary in The Nashville Banner that showed the family still could not see the inhumanity of slavery. Gleaves and has lived with the family all her life.

She was one of the old-time darkies that are responsible for the making of so many of their young masters. Typically, enslaved people were shown holding white children or in the background of a family photo, the emphasis placed on their servitude. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations. At its peak, the paper circulated in 11 states and internationally.

The renowned abolitionist and scholar Frederick Douglass used his newspapers to call for and to secure social justice. Sally was able to remain with her children, at least for a short time, but most enslaved women had to endure their children being forcibly taken from them.

Laws throughout the country ensured that a child born to an enslaved woman was also the property of the enslaver to do with as he saw fit, whether to make the child work or to sell the child for profit. Many enslaved women were also regularly raped, and there were no laws to protect them; white men could do what they wanted without reproach, including selling the offspring — their offspring — that resulted from these assaults.

Many white women also served as enslavers; there was no alliance of sisterhood among slave mistresses and the black mothers and daughters they claimed as property. Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. Let your motto be resistance! In , Nat Turner, along with about 70 enslaved and free black people, led a revolt in Southampton County, Va. Turner, a preacher who had frequent, powerful visions, planned his uprising for months, putting it into effect following a solar eclipse, which he interpreted as a sign from God.

He and his recruits freed enslaved people and killed white men, women and children, sparing only a number of poor white people. They killed nearly 60 people over two days, before being overtaken by the state militia. Turner went into hiding, but he was found and hanged a few months later. It is those large assemblies of Negroes causes the mischief. In , Col. Henry W. While overseers were employed on plantation sites as a means of control, slave patrols — which patrolled plantations, streets, woods and public areas — were thought to serve the larger community.

While slave patrols tried to enforce laws that limited the movement of the enslaved community, black people still found ways around them. In , Congress passed a new Fugitive Slave Act, which required that all citizens aid in the capturing of fugitive enslaved black people.

Lack of compliance was considered breaking the law. The previous act, from , enabled enslavers to pursue runaway enslaved persons, but it was difficult to enforce. The act — which created a legal obligation for Americans, regardless of their moral views on slavery, to support and enforce the institution — divided the nation and undergirded the path to the Civil War.

Black people could not testify on their own behalf, so if a white person incorrectly challenged the status of a free black person, the person was unable to act in his or her own defense and could be enslaved. In , Dred Scott, who was enslaved, went to court to claim his freedom after his enslaver transported him into a free state and territory. His unit fought in 11 battles, and of its men were killed or died of disease, including Johns.

When the war began in , enslaved African-Americans seized their opportunity for freedom by crossing the Union Army lines in droves. President Abraham Lincoln initially would not let black men join the military, anxious about how the public would receive integrated efforts. Jacobs was one of nearly , black soldiers who served in the U.

A free black man living in Loudoun County, Va. During slavery, freedom was tenuous for free black people: It could be challenged at any moment by any white person, and without proof of their status they could be placed into the slave trade.

Trammell, under Virginia law, had to register his freedom every few years with the county court. But even for free black people, laws were still in place that limited their liberty — in many areas in the North and the South, they could not own firearms, testify in court or read and write — and in the free state of Ohio, at least two race riots occurred before Slaveholding families kept meticulous records of their business transactions: buying, selling and trading people.

Records show the family enterprise including the purchase and sale of African-Americans, investment in provisions to maintain the enslaved community and efforts to capture an enslaved man who ran toward freedom.

The first leg of the voyage carried a cargo that often included iron, cloth, brandy, firearms, and gunpowder. Upon landing on Africa's "slave coast," the cargo was exchanged for Africans. Fully loaded with its human cargo, the ship set sail for the Americas, where the slaves were exchanged for sugar, tobacco, or some other product. The final leg brought the ship back to Europe. The African slave boarding the ship had no idea what lay ahead.

Africans who had made the Middle Passage to the plantations of the New World did not return to their homeland to tell what happened to those people who suddenly disappeared. Sometimes the captured Africans were told by the white men on the ships that they were to work in the fields. But this was difficult to believe, since, from the African's experience, tending crops took so little time and didn't require many hands.