SLAVERY

Slavery

Slavery

Historically, slaves have been produced in three primary ways: debt default, capture, and breeding. Only the latter two, however, are significant to American slavery. Of all three sources for slaves, raising them may have been responsible for the greatest number overall, but has rarely proved sufficient to perpetuate the institution. Such slaves were almost always the offspring of slave parents, although there have been instances of nonslave parents so destitute that they sold their own children, as well as instances of raising orphans and foundlings for slavery (Johnson, 2008). Breeding did not figure prominently in ancient or medieval slavery, and among New World economies, only in North America was the slave population reproducing itself by the mid-18th century. Virtually everywhere else, the persistence of human bondage depended on continued importation of captured slaves (Brinkley, 2009).

Servile rebellions faced severe free rider problems, and the only successful slave insurrection was in Haiti, ending in 1804. A more frequent and efficacious form of slave resistance was running away. As a result, slavery has never thrived unless some combination of geographical, political, or cultural barriers curtailed flight—barriers like the U.S. Constitution's fugitive slave clause. The freeing of slaves by their owners, in contrast, has been common (Johnson, 2008). These manumissions would often take the form of skilled slaves buying their own liberty in mutually beneficial transactions. Only in the British Caribbean and the southern United States did governments deprive masters of the right to free individual slaves, a policy that rendered American slavery significantly worse for the slaves.

Slavery always required an array of legal, political, and military safeguards, yet it endured well into the 19th century. Although no one enjoyed being a slave, only a few thinkers—primarily early classical liberals—had challenged the institution's legitimacy or necessity before Quakers organized the world's first antislavery society in ...