CHAPTER 4 Slavery, Freedom, and the Struggle for Empire to 1763
This chapter concerns the simultaneous growth of slavery and freedom in British North America up to the immediate aftermath of the
Seven Years’ War. It opens with an account of Olaudah Equiano, who experienced both freedom and slavery. Following treatment of
how slavery functioned as the engine of the Atlantic world’s economy, the chapter considers the different slave systems of the Chesa-
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: Olaudah Equiano
II. Slavery and Empire
A. Atlantic Trade
1. A series of triangular trade routes crisscrossed the Atlantic.
3. Slavery became connected with the color black and liberty with the color white.
B. Africa and the Slave Trade
2. The slave trade was concentrated in western Africa, greatly disrupting that region’s society and economy.
C. The Middle Passage
2. Slaves were crammed aboard ships for maximum profit.
4. Less than 5 percent of African slaves went to what became the United States, but the slave population there increased
steadily through natural reproduction.
D. Chesapeake Slavery
1. Three distinct slave systems were entrenched in Britain’s mainland colonies:
2. Chesapeake slavery was based on tobacco.
3. After 1680, labor switched from indentured servitude to slavery.
4. Slavery transformed Chesapeake society into an elaborate hierarchy of degrees of freedom:
a. Large planters
E. Freedom and Slavery in the Chesapeake
2. Race became more important as a line of social division; free blacks lost rights as “free” and “white” became virtually
identical.
F. Indian Slavery in Early Carolina
G. The Rice Kingdom
1. South Carolinian and Georgian slavery rested on rice.
3. Under the task system, individual slaves did daily jobs, the completion of which allowed time for leisure or cultivation of their
own crops.
H. The Georgia Experiment
1. Georgia was established by a group of philanthropists led by James Oglethorpe in 1733.
3. In 1751, Georgia became a royal colony.
I. Slavery in the North
2. Given that slaves were few and posed little threat to the white majority, laws were less harsh than in the South.
3. Slaves did represent a sizable percentage of urban laborers, particularly in New York and Philadelphia.
III. Slave Cultures and Slave Resistance
A. Becoming African-American
2. For most of the eighteenth century, most American slaves were African by birth.
B. African Religion in Colonial America
2. West African religions were of a great variety but shared a belief in spiritual forces in nature.
3. When slaves adopted Christian religious practices, many melded this new religion with their traditional beliefs.
C. African-American Cultures
1. In the Chesapeake, slaves learned English, participated in the Great Awakening, and were exposed to white culture.
2. In South Carolina and Georgia, two very different black societies emerged:
a. Communities on rice plantations retained significant African cultural elements (e.g., housing styles, child naming
3. In the northern colonies a distinctive African-American culture developed more slowly, and African-Americans enjoyed
more access to the mainstream of life.
D. Resistance to Slavery
2. The first eighteenth-century slave uprising occurred in New York City in 1712.
3. Uprisings also occurred in French Louisiana and on various Caribbean islands.
E. The Crisis of 1739–1741
IV. An Empire of Freedom
A. British Patriotism
2. Most Britons shared a common law, a common language, a common devotion to Protestantism, and a common enemy in
France.
3. Britons believed that wealth, religion, and freedom went together.
B. The British Constitution
1. Central to this sense of British identity was the concept of liberty.
3. Britons believed that no man was above the law, not even the king.
4. Britons saw other European nations, especially Catholic ones, as being “enslaved.”
C. The Language of Liberty
D. Republican Liberty
2. Republicanism held virtue—meaning a willingness to subordinate self-interest to the public good—to be crucial in public
life.
3. Republicanism in Britain was associated with the Country Party, which criticized the established political order.
E. Liberal Freedom
2. Lockean ideas included individual rights, the consent of the governed, and the right of rebellion against unjust or
oppressive government.
V. The Public Sphere
A. The Right to Vote
2. Suffrage was much more common in the colonies than in Britain.
3. Colonial politics was hardly democratic in a modern sense.
a. Suffrage was almost universally limited to males.
B. Political Cultures
2. Property qualifications for officeholding were far higher than for voting.
4. In New England, most town leaders were the biggest property holders.
C. Colonial Government
2. The colonial elected assemblies used their control of finance to exercise great influence over governors and other
appointed officials.
D. The Rise of the Assemblies
1. Elected assemblies became more assertive in colonial politics during the eighteenth century.
3. Battles took place between assemblies and governors over land policy.
4. Leaders of the assemblies found, in the writings of the English Country Party, a theory that made sense of their own
experience.
E. Politics in Public
1. The American gentry were very active in the discussion of politics, particularly through clubs.
F. The Colonial Press
1. Widespread literacy and the proliferation of newspapers encouraged political discourse.
2. Bookstores, circulating libraries, and weekly newspapers all contributed to the dissemination of information.
G. Freedom of Expression and Its Limits
1. Freedom of speech was a relatively new idea.
3. After 1695, the government could not censor print material, and colonial newspapers defended freedom of the press as a
central component of liberty.
4. Elected assemblies, not governors, discouraged freedom of the press.
H. The Trial of Zenger
1. Newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger went on trial in 1735 for seditious libel for his criticism of New York’s governor.
a. He was found not guilty.
I. The American Enlightenment
2. One inspiration for the Enlightenment was a reaction against the bloody religious wars that wracked Europe in the
seventeenth century.
3. Belief in Deism (the notion that because God set up natural laws to govern the universe, following the act of creation, God
did not intervene in the world) embodied the spirit of the American Enlightenment.
VI. The Great Awakening
A. Religious Revivals
2. Islam and Judaism in Asia and Europe, respectively, saw a rise in fundamentalism.
3. The Great Awakening was led by flamboyant preachers like Jonathan Edwards, whose Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God stressed the need for humans to seek divine grace.
B. The Preaching of Whitefield
2. The Great Awakening enlarged the boundaries of liberty as Old Lights (traditionalists) and New Lights (revivalists)
defended their right to worship.
a. New Light churches criticized colonial taxes used to support an established church.
b. They also defended religious freedom as a natural right.
C. The Awakening’s Impact
1. The Great Awakening inspired criticism of many aspects of colonial society.
3. Especially in the Chesapeake area, slaves became Christian.
4. The Great Awakening expanded the circulation of printed material in the colonies.
VII. Imperial Rivalries
A. Spanish North America
2. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Spain tried to reinvigorate its empire north of the Rio Grande.
a. Spain wanted stable relations with nomadic groups—Comanche and Apache.
3. Despite establishing religious missions and presidios, the Spanish population in Spain’s North American empire remained
relatively small and sparse.
B. The Spanish in California
1. Russian immigrants established forts in Alaska and later moved southward into California, creating a clash of empires.
2. Junípero Serra founded the first mission in San Diego in 1769.
a. Heavy death toll of Native Americans existed due to forced labor and disease.
C. The French Empire
1. France was Britain’s biggest rival in Europe and North America.
3. Much smaller in population, the French tended to view North America as a place of cruel exile for criminals and social
outcasts.
VIII. Battle for the Continent
A. The Middle Ground
1. Indians were constantly being pushed from their homes into a “middle ground” between European empires and Indian
sovereignty.
3. The area was known more by rumor than observation, and contemporary maps bore little resemblance to the actual
geography.
B. The Seven Years’ War
1. In the first half of the eighteenth century, wars against Spain and France set the stage for England becoming the
dominant power in Europe.
3. The war went against the British until 1757, when William Pitt became British secretary of state and enacted policies that
turned the tide of battle.
4. In 1759, the British gained control of pivotal Forts Duquesne, Ticonderoga, and Louisbourg and the key St. Lawrence River
settlement of Quebec.
C. A World Transformed
2. Pitt declared that peace would be as hard to make as war, and the war indeed put future financial strains on all the
participants.
D. New Indian Identities
1. The Seven Years’ War helped lay the foundation for the emergence of a distinct Native American identity.
3. With the removal of the French, the balance–of-power diplomacy that had enabled groups like the Iroquois to maintain a
significant degree of autonomy was eliminated.
5. In 1763, Indians launched a revolt against British rule.
7. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature)
a. Pontiac’s Speeches (1762 and 1763).
E. The Proclamation Line
1. To avoid further Indian conflicts, London issued the Proclamation of 1763, which banned white settlement west of the
Appalachian Mountains.
2. The Proclamation enraged settlers and land speculators hoping to take advantage of the expulsion of the French.
F. Pennsylvania and the Indians
1. The war deepened the hostility of western Pennsylvanian farmers toward Indians and witnessed numerous indiscriminate
assaults on Indian communities.
3. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature)
a. Scarouyady’s speech to the Pennsylvania Provincial Council (1756).
G. Colonial Identities
1. The colonists emerged from the Seven Years’ War with a heightened sense of collective identity.
2. The war also strengthened the colonists’ pride in being members of the British empire.
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• One early American contemporary stated that there was a widespread “dangerous spirit of liberty” among the New World’s
slaves. Explore that idea by considering slave culture and forms of resistance.
• How vital was slavery to the Atlantic economy in the eighteenth century? Provide specific evidence to support your response.
• How was slavery different in the British northern, Chesapeake, and Lower South colonies by 1770?
• Discuss republicanism and liberalism. What are the similarities and differences between the two concepts?
• Explain why property was important as a qualifier for voting in British America. How did such a policy exclude able voters?
Were liberty and property ownership linked? Why or why not?
• How did the Great Awakening inspire ordinary citizens to assert their right to independent judgment? Did the movement ex-
pand freedoms? Why or why not?
• How did Indians cope with the increasing settlement of whites during the eighteenth century and the subsequent removal of the
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
Africans in America
Africans in America is a four-part PBS video about America’s history of slavery. Part 1 is “The Terrible Transformation, 1450–1750.”
Slavery and the Making of America
Roots (Warner Bros. miniseries, 12 hours, 1997)
Directed by Marvin J. Chomsky in the late 1970s, this multipart visual docudrama series is perhaps the best re-creation of slavery on film.
Father Serra in California
French and Indian War
Great Awakening
Pontiac’s Rebellion
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Aldridge, A. Owen. “Natural Religion and Deism in America before Ethan Allen and Thomas Paine.” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 4 (1997):
835–838.
Anderson, Fred. A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985.
Breen, T. H., and Stephen Innes. “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1980.
1997.
Sobel, Mechal. The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1987.
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
1. Documentary Film Analysis
a. Show an episode from the 1970s documentary Roots, particularly the second and third episodes when Kunta Kinte adjusts to tobacco planta-
tion life in Virginia during the late 1760s. Next, show Part 1 of the documentary series Slavery and the Making of America that focuses in
b. Sample questions to ask the students include: Why did slavery arise in the Chesapeake? How was slave life in the tobacco colonies different from the
experiences of African-Americans in the rice colonies of the Carolinas and Georgia? How did African-Americans resist slavery? What were the
limitations to black resistance across the thirteen colonies?
2. Classroom Debate: Indians and Spaniards in California
Divide the class into two groups: California Indians and Spanish missionaries. Create the conditions for a classroom discussion/debate based on ques-
tions such as: Why did Spain missionize the Indians? What impact did the missions have on California Indians? How did California Indians respond to
the mission system? Allow the two groups time to prepare answers to the questions, perhaps as an initial take-home assignment discussed in groups the