Station 1: Medieval European History – An Overview



Station 1: Early Colonial Life for African Americans

Slavery first came America through Virginia. From there, it spread both north and south. By the early 1700s, enslaved Africans were living in every colony. Even Benjamin Franklin owned slaves for a time. But like most people in the New England and Middle Colonies, Franklin found that hiring workers when he needed them cost less than owning slaves.

In the Southern Colonies, however, slavery expanded rapidly. From Virginia to Georgia, slaves helped raise tobacco, rice, indigo, and other cash crops.

The Atlantic Slave Trade

Most of the slaves who were brought to the colonies came from West Africa. Year after year, slave ships filled with cloth, guns, and rum sailed from the colonies to the coast of West Africa. There, these goods were traded for Africans. The ships then returned to the Americas carrying their human cargoes.

For the Africans packed onto slave ships, the ocean crossing—known as the Middle Passage—was a nightmare. Olaudah Equiano was just ten years old when he was put onto a slave ship. He never forgot “the closeness of the place…which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself.” Nor did he forget “the shrieks of the women, and groans of the dying.” The terrified boy refused to eat, hoping “for the last friend, Death, to relieve me.”

Although Equiano survived the voyage, many Africans died of sickness or despair. Even so, the Atlantic slave trade was very profitable. Many colonial merchants built fortunes trading in human beings.

Work Without Hope

The slaves‘ masters in America demanded hard work. Most enslaved Africans were put to work in the fields raising crops. Others worked as nurses, carpenters, blacksmiths, drivers, servants, gardeners, and midwives (people who assist women giving birth). Unlike other colonists, slaves had little hope of making a better life. Their position was fixed at the bottom of colonial society.

Some slaves rebelled by refusing to work or running away, but most adapted to their unhappy condition as best they could. Slowly and painfully, they began to create a new African American way of life.

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Photo Caption

The first slaves were brought to the United States in 1619 to help produce tobacco in the Virginia colony. Above, we see slaves tending tobacco while their owner relaxes, feet up, smoking his pipe.

Station 2: The Constitution and Slavery

The Three-fifths Compromise was enacted in 1787 when delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia accepted a plan determining a state’s representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. It was ironic that it was a liberal northern delegate, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who proposed the Three-Fifths Compromise, as a way to gain southern support for a new framework of government. Southern states had wanted representation apportioned by population; after the Virginia Plan was rejected, the Three-Fifths Compromise seemed to guarantee that the South would be strongly represented in the House of Representatives and would have disproportionate power in electing Presidents.

The issue of how to count slaves split the delegates into two groups. The northerners regarded slaves as property who should receive no representation. Southerners demanded that Blacks be counted with whites. The compromise clearly reflected the strength of the pro-slavery forces at the convention. The “Three-fifths Compromise” allowed a state to count three fifths of each Black person in determining political representation in the House. It was an early American effort to avoid the intersectionality of race, class, nationality and wealth for political control. It was an early American effort to avoid the intersectionality of race, class, nationality and wealth for political control

Rather than halting or slowing the importation of slaves in the south, slavery had been given a new life — a political life. Even when the law stopped the importing of new slaves in 1808, the south continued to increase its overall political status and electoral votes by adding and breeding slaves illegally. The Three-fifths Compromise would not be challenged again until the Dred Scott case in 1856.

Station 3: Jim Crow Origin

White composers from the South, inspired by the music of black slaves, created a type of music known as minstrel songs. The songs honored black music by mimicking it. But at the same time, the performers mocked African Americans by blackening their white faces, wearing shabby clothes, and singing in exaggerated African American dialects. In 1828 Thomas Dartmouth Rice caused a national sensation with his song “Jump Jim Crow”:

Weel about and turn about and do jis so

Ev’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.

The racist phrase “Jim Crow,” which came from Rice‘s black minstrel show character, had a long life. Many years later, laws that discriminated against African Americans would be known as “Jim Crow laws.”

Minstrel shows became the most popular form of entertainment in America. They inspired composer Stephen Foster to write such famous songs as “Old Folks at Home,” “Camptown Races,” and “Oh! Susanna.” Foster earned nationwide fame, proof that a truly American musical tradition had arrived.

Station 4: Fighting Slavery

Some Americans had opposed slavery even in Revolutionary War times. Quakers stopped owning slaves in 1776. By 1792, every state as far south as Virginia had anti-slavery societies.

Once the slave trade ended in 1808, northern shipping communities had no more interest in slaves. Still, northern factory owners liked the cheap cotton that the South provided. Although slavery ended in the North by the early 1800s, many northerners still accepted southern slavery.

Unlike their neighbors, abolitionists wanted to end slavery. But they did not always agree about how to do it. Radicals tried to inspire slaves to rise up in revolt. Others wanted to find a peaceful way to end slavery immediately. Moderates wanted to give slaveholders time to develop farming methods that didn‘t rely on slave labor.

From the early days, both blacks and whites worked in the abolition movement, sometimes together, sometimes separately. Black activists often maintained their independence. One African American journalist wrote, “As long as we let them think and act for us…they will outwardly treat us as men, while in their hearts they still hold us as slaves.”

In 1831, a deeply religious white man, William Lloyd Garrison, started a fiery abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator. Braving the disapproval of many northerners, Garrison demanded the immediate freeing of all slaves. “I will be as harsh as truth,” he wrote. “I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.” Angry pro-slavery groups destroyed Garrison‘s printing press and burned his house.

Station 5: Women Get Involved

Many women were inspired by the religious reform movement to become involved in the fight against slavery. Like other abolitionists, they sometimes faced violence. When a young woman named Angelina Grimke spoke against slavery, an antiabolition mob threw stones. When she kept speaking, they burned the building.

Angelina and her sister Sarah had been raised in a South Carolina slaveholding family. After traveling North and becoming Quakers, they saw slavery in a new way. The two sisters began speaking out about the poverty and pain of slavery. At first they spoke only to other women, but soon they were speaking to large groups of men and women throughout the North. The Grimkes led the way for other women to speak in public.

Some abolitionists, like Sojourner Truth, were former slaves. Truth had always been strongly spiritual and had preached throughout the North at religious meetings and on street corners. But when she met Douglass and Garrison, their enthusiasm inspired her to speak out about slavery. An outstanding speaker, Truth argued that God would end slavery peacefully.

Abolitionists were a minority, even in the North. But their efforts, and the violence directed against them, helped change northerners’ attitudes toward slavery. In addition, the anti-slavery fight helped pave the way for the next great reform movement, the struggle for women‘s rights.

Station 6: Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was born in a slave cabin, in February, 1818 in Easton, Maryland, and he was separated from his mother when only a few weeks old to be raised by his grandparents. At about the age of six, his grandmother took him to the plantation of his master and left him there. Douglass never recovered from the betrayal of the abandonment. When he was about eight he was sent to Baltimore to live as a houseboy with Hugh and Sophia Auld, relatives of his master. It was shortly after his arrival that his new mistress taught him the alphabet. When her husband forbade her to continue her instruction, because it was unlawful to teach slaves how to read, Frederick took it upon himself to learn. He made the neighborhood boys his teachers, by giving away his food in exchange for lessons in reading and writing. At about the age of twelve or thirteen Douglass purchased a copy of The Columbian Orator, a popular schoolbook of the time, which helped him to gain an understanding and appreciation of the power of the spoken and the written word, as two of the most effective means by which to bring about permanent, positive change.

At approximately the age of fifteen, Douglass became a field hand. During this time he had an encounter with the slavebreaker Edward Covey. Their fight ended in a draw, but the victory was Douglass', as his challenge to the slavebreaker restored his sense of self-worth. After an aborted escape attempt when he was about eighteen, he was sent back to Baltimore to live with the Auld family, and in early September, 1838, at the age of twenty, Douglass succeeded in escaping from slavery by impersonating a sailor.

He went first to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he and his new wife Anna Murray began to raise a family. Whenever he could he attended abolitionist meetings, and, in October, 1841, after attending an anti-slavery convention on Nantucket Island, Douglass became a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and a colleague of William Lloyd Garrison. This work led him into public speaking and writing. He published his own newspaper, The North Star, participated in the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, in 1848, and wrote three autobiographies. He was internationally recognized as an uncompromising abolitionist, indefatigable worker for justice and equal opportunity, and an unyielding defender of women's rights. He became a trusted advisor to Abraham Lincoln, United States Marshal for the District of Columbia, Recorder of Deeds for Washington, D.C., and Minister-General to the Republic of Haiti. Frederick Douglass died late in the afternoon or early evening, of Tuesday, 20 February 1895, at his home in Anacostia, Washington, DC.

Frederick Douglass sought to embody three keys for success in life:

• Believe in yourself.

• Take advantage of every opportunity.

• Use the power of spoken and written language to effect positive change for yourself and society.

Station 7: Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth, legal name Isabella Van Wagener, (born c. 1797, Ulster county, N.Y., U.S.—died Nov. 26, 1883, Battle Creek, Mich.), African American evangelist and reformer who applied her religious fervor to the abolitionist and women’s rights movements.

Isabella was the daughter of slaves and spent her childhood as an abused chattel of several masters. Her first language was Dutch. Between 1810 and 1827 she bore at least five children to a fellow slave named Thomas. Just before New York state abolished slavery in 1827, she found refuge with Isaac Van Wagener, who set her free. With the help of Quaker friends, she waged a court battle in which she recovered her small son, who had been sold illegally into slavery in the South. About 1829 she went to New York City with her two youngest children, supporting herself through domestic employment.

Since childhood Isabella had had visions and heard voices, which she attributed to God. In New York City she became associated with Elijah Pierson, a zealous missionary. Working and preaching in the streets, she joined his Retrenchment Society and eventually his household.

In 1843 she left New York City and took the name Sojourner Truth, which she used from then on. Obeying a supernatural call to “travel up and down the land,” she sang, preached, and debated at camp meetings, in churches, and on village streets, exhorting her listeners to accept the biblical message of God’s goodness and the brotherhood of man. In the same year, she was introduced to abolitionism at a utopian community in Northampton, Massachusetts, and thereafter spoke in behalf of the movement throughout the state. In 1850 she traveled throughout the Midwest, where her reputation for personal magnetism preceded her and drew heavy crowds. She supported herself by selling copies of her book, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which she had dictated to Olive Gilbert.

Encountering the women’s rights movement in the early 1850s, and encouraged by other women leaders, notably Lucretia Mott, she continued to appear before suffrage gatherings for the rest of her life.

In the 1850s Sojourner Truth settled in Battle Creek, Michigan. At the beginning of the American Civil War, she gathered supplies for black volunteer regiments and in 1864 went to Washington, D.C., where she helped integrate streetcars and was received at the White House by President Abraham Lincoln. The same year, she accepted an appointment with the National Freedmen’s Relief Association counseling former slaves, particularly in matters of resettlement. As late as the 1870s she encouraged the migration of freedmen to Kansas and Missouri. In 1875 she retired to her home in Battle Creek, where she remained until her death.

Station 8: Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman, née Araminta Ross, (born c. 1820, Dorchester county, Maryland, U.S.—died March 10, 1913, Auburn, New York), American bondwoman who escaped from slavery in the South to become a leading abolitionist before the American Civil War. She led hundreds of bondmen to freedom in the North along the route of the Underground Railroad—an elaborate secret network of safe houses organized for that purpose.

Born a slave, Araminta Ross later adopted her mother’s first name, Harriet. From early childhood she worked variously as a maid, a nurse, a field hand, a cook, and a woodcutter. About 1844 she married John Tubman, a free black.

In 1849, on the strength of rumors that she was about to be sold, Tubman fled to Philadelphia, leaving behind her husband, parents, and siblings. In December 1850 she made her way to Baltimore, Maryland, whence she led her sister and two children to freedom. That journey was the first of some 19 increasingly dangerous forays into Maryland in which, over the next decade, she conducted upward of 300 fugitive slaves along the Underground Railroad to Canada. By her extraordinary courage, ingenuity, persistence, and iron discipline, which she enforced upon her charges, Tubman became the railroad’s most famous conductor and was known as the “Moses of her people.” It has been said that she never lost a fugitive she was leading to freedom.

Rewards offered by slaveholders for Tubman’s capture eventually totaled $40,000. Abolitionists, however, celebrated her courage. John Brown, who consulted her about his own plans to organize an antislavery raid of a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia), referred to her as “General” Tubman. About 1858 she bought a small farm near Auburn, New York, where she placed her aged parents (she had brought them out of Maryland in June 1857) and herself lived thereafter. From 1862 to 1865 she served as a scout, as well as nurse and laundress, for Union forces in South Carolina. For the Second Carolina Volunteers, under the command of Col. James Montgomery, Tubman spied on Confederate territory. When she returned with information about the locations of warehouses and ammunition, Montgomery’s troops were able to make carefully planned attacks. For her wartime service Tubman was paid so little that she had to support herself by selling homemade baked goods.

After the Civil War Tubman settled in Auburn and began taking in orphans and the elderly, a practice that eventuated in the Harriet Tubman Home for Indigent Aged Negroes. The home later attracted the support of former abolitionist comrades and of the citizens of Auburn, and it continued in existence for some years after her death. In the late 1860s and again in the late 1890s she applied for a federal pension for her Civil War services. Some 30 years after her service, a private bill providing for $20 monthly was passed by Congress.

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