6 MYTHS ABOUT Slavery.

• Author: Bubar, Joe

Four hundred years after enslaved Africans were first brought to Virginia, many people still don't fully understand American slavery. Here's what we often get wrong.

In 1619, a ship docked in Virginia--changing the course of history. On board were some 20 people who'd been captured in southwestern Africa and forced to make the perilous journey across the Atlantic to Jamestown, where they were sold and likely put to work in tobacco fields. They were the first enslaved Africans brought to the English Colonies that would become the United States.

Captive Africans had already been living in the Americas, transported mainly by the Portuguese and Spanish. But many historians point to the ship's arrival 400 years ago as one of the most consequential moments in history. By the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the early 1800s, about 12.5 million men, women, and children, would be taken from their homes in Africa, shackled in chains, and herded onto ships bound for the New World*

The trans-Atlantic slave trade gave birth to a new form of slavery--one that was based on race, was for life, and was passed down from parent to child. This brutal system of forced labor would propel the colonial economy and fuel the growth of the U.S. into the wealthiest nation in the world.

Yet, despite its impact, many myths about slavery persist. Here are six commonly held misconceptions--and the truth about what really happened.

* About 2 million enslaved people died during the voyage from Africa to the Americas.

MYTH: Enslaved People Rarely Fought Back

TRUTH: In August 1831, a group of about 70 enslaved and free black people, led by an enslaved preacher named Nat Himer, revolted in Southampton, Virginia, killing more than 55 white people. Local militia put down the uprising and imprisoned and killed most of the rebels. In the days following the revolt, white mobs murdered an additional 200 enslaved people, many of whom had nothing to do with it.

Nat Turner's rebellion was just one of many that took place during American slavery. But because the penalty for seeking freedom--either by running away or by rebelling--was often death, most enslaved people resisted in subtler ways. They secretly learned to read and write though education was illegal for them; they sabotaged equipment to slow the unrelenting pace of labor that was expected; they amassed extra food and clothes because they were given barely enough to survive; and they formed families--despite laws that denied them the legal right to marry.

"Enslaved people always resisted," says Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a history professor at Ohio State University, "in ways that are both seen and unseen."

MYTH: Not All Enslaved People Were Treated Badly

TRUTH: While some slaveholders later maintained that they treated the people they enslaved "like family," and treatment did vary from place to place, all enslaved people suffered from violence, whether physical or psychological or both.

Enslaved people were often whipped mercilessly, branded, and shackled. Even those who didn't face this cruelty still encountered other forms of abuse, whether it was rape, having their family members taken from them and sold like livestock, being forced to do backbreaking labor for no pay, or being denied the right to move freely, assemble in groups, and learn to read and write. Historians say all slaveholders ultimately ruled using some methods of violence.

"This is a violent system of controlling people from life to death," says Jeffries. "The only way that it was possible for the institution of slavery to exist, because people were constantly resisting, was through violence--and the threat of violence."

Perhaps nothing is more telling about the brutality of slavery than the fact that so many enslaved people attempted to run away. An estimated 100,000 enslaved people escaped to freedom via the Underground Railroad between 1810 and 1850. Countless more tried but were caught and beaten--or killed.

MYTH: Slavery Existed Only in the South

TRUTH: Though we often think of slavery as a "Southern thing," it existed in all 13 Colonies at some point before the Revolutionary War. Enslaved people in the North were forced to toil on farms and in homes, help build the early cities of Boston and New York, work the docks, and do skilled labor, such as blacksmithing and shoemaking.

However, slavery in the North was never as widespread as it was in the South, which became increasingly reliant on cotton plantations. At the time of the American Revolution, fewer than 10 percent of the half-million enslaved people in the 13 Colonies lived north of the Mason-Dixon line.

By 1804, all Northern states voted to abolish slavery. But Northern whites continued to profit from slavery in the South. New England textile factories obtained their cotton from Southern plantations, banks in New York supplied loans to plantation owners, and Northern insurance companies sold them insurance policies on the people they enslaved. As a result, many white Northerners opposed abolitionism, and during the Civil War, thousands of them dodged the draft or abandoned the ranks of the Union Army.

"Slavery built the New World, as much in the North as in the South," says Anne Farrow, co-author of Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery.

MYTH: The Civil War Wasn't About Slavery

TRUTH: Just a month after Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede, clearly stating its reason in its declaration of secession: "the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery."

Slavery had been outlawed in the North, but nearly 4 million people were held in bondage in the South and in border states. The Southern states' economies relied on slave labor, and many white Southerners feared that the election of Lincoln, who was morally opposed to slavery, would bring about its end.

Other Southern states soon followed South Carolina's lead in breaking from the Union, also citing slavery as their reason. "The people of the slave holding States are bound together," Louisiana's declaration stated, "by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery."

After the...