Unit 2: Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance

Atlantic World

The connected system linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas that expanded after the late 1400s through exploration, colonization, trade, and war.

Racialized chattel slavery

A system in the Americas that treated enslaved people as legally owned property (chattel) and increasingly tied enslavement to African ancestry/Blackness, creating a lasting racial hierarchy.

Chattel slavery

A form of slavery in which human beings are legally defined as movable property that can be bought, sold, and inherited.

Racial formation (race-making)

The process by which laws, policies, and ideologies construct and harden racial categories and link them to rights, status, and vulnerability.

Ladinos

Early Africans in the Americas (often in the early 1500s) who were familiar with Iberian languages and culture; among the first Africans in territories that later became the United States.

Atlantic Creoles

Africans or people of African descent in the early Atlantic world who often navigated multiple languages and cultures and sometimes served as intermediaries before racialized chattel slavery fully dominated.

Juan Garrido

A free African-born conquistador from the Kingdom of Kongo; the first known African to travel to North America (1513) and served in Spanish conquests.

Estevanico (Esteban)

An enslaved African healer from Morocco forced to serve as an explorer/translator (1528) in what is now Texas; later killed amid Indigenous resistance to Spanish colonialism.

Plantation economy

A labor system centered on large-scale production of cash crops for export, demanding intense, controllable labor and generating huge profits for elites.

Cash crops

Market-oriented crops grown for profit—especially sugar, and later tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton—driving demand for coerced labor in the Americas.

Hereditary slavery

A legal arrangement in which slavery is permanent for life and passed to children, increasing planters’ long-term control over labor and wealth.

Indentured servitude

A labor system in which workers (often Europeans) labored for a fixed term in exchange for passage, food, or wages; distinct from lifetime, inheritable slavery.

Partus sequitur ventrem

A legal principle (spread in the 1600s) stating that a child’s status follows the mother, making slavery hereditary and tying reproduction directly to slaveholders’ property claims.

Caribbean plantation societies

Colonial societies (especially sugar islands like Barbados and Saint-Domingue) marked by extreme labor demands and high mortality, requiring constant importation of enslaved Africans.

British North American slavery

Slavery as it developed in mainland British colonies (e.g., Chesapeake and later the Deep South), including plantation zones and also many non-plantation settings.

Transatlantic slave trade

The forced transport of millions of Africans to the Americas over more than 350 years (over 12.5 million people), organized around coerced human trafficking for plantation profit.

Middle Passage

The ocean crossing of the slave trade (often around three months), characterized by severe violence, disease, malnutrition, and death; about 15% of captives perished during the voyage.

Seasoning

A coercive period after arrival in the Americas when enslavers tried to force adaptation to new labor regimes and break resistance, often involving resale and further movement.

Slave-trading departure zones

Major coastal regions in Africa from which captives were taken; the course highlights nine modern regions (e.g., Senegambia, Angola, Mozambique) to emphasize diversity of origins.

Senegambia

A major African departure region for the slave trade; along with Angola, it provided over half of the captives brought to mainland North America.

Angola

A major West Central African departure region in the slave trade and a principal origin area for captives taken to mainland North America.

African diasporic identities

New identities and communities formed under forced migration and mixing, combining multiple languages, religions, and cultural practices rather than a single “African culture.”

Firearms trade

The exchange of guns for captives and other goods that intensified warfare and raiding in parts of West Africa, destabilizing societies and increasing enslavement.

Shipboard resistance

Acts of defiance during the slave trade—such as hunger strikes, jumping overboard, or revolts—that raised costs and risks for slavers and challenged captivity.

Slave-ship diagrams

Political images (often circulated by abolitionists) showing packed ship holds; they could expose brutal conditions while also omitting details (e.g., often depicting fewer people than were actually onboard).

Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinqué)

A captive from Sierra Leone who led the 1839 revolt on the slave ship involved in the Amistad case, becoming a major symbol in antislavery activism.

Amistad case (1839)

A legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that the Mende captives had been illegally held and granted them freedom, strengthening public antislavery sentiment.

Domestic slave trade

The internal U.S. buying and selling of enslaved people, a central mechanism that expanded slavery and intensified family separation and forced migration.

Second Middle Passage

A term for the mass forced migrations of enslaved people within the United States—especially from the Upper South to the Deep South during the cotton boom.

Cotton boom

The rapid expansion of cotton production that increased demand for enslaved labor and fueled the growth of the domestic slave trade across the Deep South.

Slave auctions

Public markets where enslaved people were inspected, sold, and often violently disciplined as spectacle, making racial power and commodification visible.

Commodification

The process of reducing enslaved people to saleable property, treating human lives as items of commerce and profit.

Gang system

A labor system organizing enslaved workers into supervised groups for all-day work (common with cotton, sugar, tobacco), maximizing surveillance and control.

Task system

A labor system (often in Lowcountry rice/indigo regions) assigning specific tasks; completion could sometimes allow limited personal time, though still within coercion and unfreedom.

Gullah Creole

A Creole language associated with the Carolina Lowcountry, maintained in part through community formation and, in some contexts, labor patterns like the task system.

Fictive kin

Family-like bonds beyond biological ties that enslaved people formed to support childcare, survival, and community under the threat of sale and separation.

Syncretism

The blending and transformation of religious and cultural traditions under new conditions, producing new practices shaped by memory, necessity, and community.

Spirituals

Religious songs (including sorrow and jubilee songs) expressing hardship and hope; they built solidarity and could carry layered or coded meanings under surveillance.

Slave codes

Colonial and state laws defining slavery as lifelong and inheritable while restricting movement, assembly, education, and legal rights, enforcing white supremacy.

Code Noir

A French legal regime governing slavery in French colonies, illustrating that Atlantic slavery had varying legal structures across empires.

South Carolina’s 1740 slave code

A harsh code written after the Stono Rebellion that increased repression by restricting gathering, movement, literacy, drumming, and other activities and imposing severe punishments.

Stono Rebellion (1739)

A South Carolina uprising in which about 100 enslaved people burned plantations and marched toward Spanish Florida; it triggered harsher repression, including the 1740 slave code.

Maroon communities

Settlements of self-emancipated (escaped) enslaved people that could persist for years or decades, often in hard-to-reach geography and sometimes alongside Indigenous communities.

Fort Mose

A fortified refuge established in 1738 in Spanish Florida near St. Augustine; remembered as the first free Black town in what is now the United States.

Haitian Revolution (1791–1804)

The most successful large-scale slave revolt in the Atlantic world, ending slavery in Saint-Domingue and creating Haiti as an independent Black nation with global political impact.

Abolitionism

Movements to end slavery, using strategies ranging from moral persuasion to political action and direct aid to fugitives; African American leadership and print culture were central.

Slave narratives

First-person accounts by formerly enslaved people used as historical evidence, literary works, and political texts to expose slavery’s violence and argue for abolition and Black humanity.

Fugitive Slave Act (1850)

A federal law that strengthened the capture and return of alleged fugitive enslaved people, encouraged kidnapping, penalized assistance, and heightened risks for free Black communities.

Emancipation Proclamation

Lincoln’s wartime order effective January 1, 1863, declaring freedom for enslaved people in areas in rebellion; it reshaped the war’s meaning but depended on Union military enforcement.

Juneteenth

A commemoration of emancipation in Texas marked by the 1865 reading of General Order No. 3 in Galveston; remembered as freedom reaching the last state where enforcement arrived late (made a U.S. federal holiday in 2021).