With the exodus of poor whites from the Eastern cities and Southern plantations, the importation of un-free whites to the U.S. was curtailed and redirected to Australia. White children would hereafter be enslaved in Great Britain as coal donkeys and machine operators, who normally suffered occupational death or maiming before age 18. These children were used to literally grease the gears and feed the engines of the factories that would transform the cotton shipped from American slave plantations into clothing and other goods, hence the industry of early mercantile Britain was based on these twin symbiotic atrocities.
In the meantime, the slave masters of America, who had been unsuccessful in their attempts to maintain a class of perpetual white slaves and had to replace them with expensive African imports, now enacted laws in collusion with northern industrialists that made every white man of the United States of America—whether a resident of a slave state or not, a slave owner or not—an involuntary, unpaid, slave catcher. Rather than being motivated by high ideals of universal human rights, most northern whites were against the formation of new slave states in the west, because they saw the Rich Southern Planter Class as their ultimate enemy and his black slaves as the weapon used by the rich white man to deny the free laborer, tradesman and small landowner a living. The slave plantations were the big corporations of their day and free whites opposed black slaves just as the black warriors in Africa opposed the white soldiers that dispossessed them for their distant masters.
Chronology
Entries bearing primarily on African American enslavement are in bold face.
Keep in mind that most of the key African American slave spokesmen of this period were predominantly half-white, as much white as black. Douglas, Roper and Wells were all half white, Mսlattos. The genius of the slave master system of regarding any person with a drop of African blood as black, served to contain such intellects as these to the racial cause and contain their influence from infecting the wider society.
1800: Virginia, Gabriel Prosser’s rebellion.
1803: Georgia, Igbo Landing, African slaves drown themselves.
1805: Virginia. Chatham Manor uprising.
1805: Tripoli, Africa. The United States Navy defeats the Barbary Pirates in a battle to stop the enslavement of American sailors in the Mediterranean.
1807: Congress passed the law prohibiting the importation of slaves into the United States after January 1, 1808.
1807: Great Britain. Parliament abolishes the slave trade throughout the colonies, but does not abolish forced servitude of poor whites, who are forced to work in hazardous mine and factory conditions and to settle Australia.
1807: New York. Solomon Northup was born a free black man.
1808: America. The U.S. Congress prohibits the importation of African slaves into the United States.
1811: New Orleans, German Coast Uprising
1812: America. The United States declares war on Great Britain. Among the numerous reasons for this declaration was the enslavement of American sailors by the British Navy.
1814: Kentucky. William Wells Brown was born to his black slave mother and the cousin of his white master.
1815: Virginia, George Boxley
1815: North Carolina. Moses Roper, mixed race slave, is born, his white slave father’s wife attempting to kill him as he was delivered. Moses appears to be white and is consequently treated with excessive cruelty.
1816: Barbados. Bussa's Rebellion
1817: The American Colonization Society was founded to settle free Negroes in Africa.
1818: Talbot County, Maryland. Frederick Douglas was born to a black slave woman and her white master.
1820: The Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri as a slave state but prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Territory thereafter about 36°30’ north latitude.
1821: The Quaker, Benjamin Lundy, started publishing his antislavery paper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation, the title of which puts the lie to the American myth that only blacks were enslaved in really America.
1821: Indiana. A court began to enforce the ordinance of 1787—finally, after a full generation indentures were struck down by courts.
1822: February 18, Raleigh, North Carolina. Thirteen-year-old Andrew Johnson, whose father Jacob Johnson had recently died, was sold to James J. Selby to serve until age 21. I used the term sold, but the legal term was “bound,” a term that directly stipulates that this person is a slave, an unfree laborer. In the cash-poor society in early America, in the South, until the eve of the Civil War, a widow with no income and children to feed had little choice but to release her children and sign over her parental rights in court. No money would change hands, but James J. Selby was, according to this court document, guaranteed 8 years of free labor. He maintained the right of a father in a society that believed strongly in beating and binding children, and if on purpose or by accident, Andrew would have been killed, Selby would have faced nothing more than a fine. In America during this period, the laws governing servitude were almost identical to the code of Hammurabi in 1700 BC. It is easy to see how the record of white slavery could be blurred as the word apprentice and apprenticeship are used, which in a modern context evokes a free will internship, not bound conditions. This system of indenture was later replaced by jails, reform schools, penitentiaries, and compulsory military service as a way of maintaining control over the lower classes.
1822: Charelston, South Carolina. A slave revolt led by the freed man, Denmark Vesey, is defeated.
1824: Raleigh, North Carolina, Andrew Johnson and another boy escaped and were sought as fugitives. Later after opening a successful tailoring business, he sought to make amends with Selby his former master but was rebuked.
1825: New York. The first women’s labor organization was organized in the garment industry.
1826: Aberdeen, Scotland. Peter Williamson’s memoir was reprinted with a forward denouncing slavery.
1827: May, Greeneville, Tennessee. Andrew Johnson establishes a tailor shop and is married to Eliza McCardle.
1830: York, England. children worked 13 hours a day in woolen mills and were beaten when they fell asleep.
1831: William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator.
1831: The Nat Turner Rebellion occurred in Virginia.
1831: The New England Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Boston.
1831-1832: Emancipation was narrowly defeated in the Virginia constitutional convention.
1831–1832: Jamaica, Baptist War
1832 William Lloyd Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization was published. It marked a turning point of anti-slavery against colonization.
1833: Slavery ended in the British Empire, but not for whites in Britain.
1833: April 14: England, Birmingham Journal:
“That night a chariot passed her,
While on the ground she lay;
The daughters of her master
An evening visit to pay –
Their tender hearts were sighing
As wrongs to negroes were told
While the white slave was dying
Who gained their father’s gold.”
-Anonymous
1833: The American Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Philadelphia.
1834; Prudence Crandall’s school for Negro girls in Canterbury, Connecticut was closed by vandalism and mob destruction.
1834: Florida. After attempting escape 16 times and changing hands with 17 slave masters, mixed-race slave Moses Roper finally makes his escape and flees to England, where he writes his autobiography, marries and lectures about his horrific life.
1834: Ohio. Mixed-race slave, William Wells Brown escaped from slavery and moved to Boston where he became a prolific writer.
1834: Dorset, England. Farm workers tried to unionize and were shipped into slavery in Australia.
1835: The near lynching of Garrison occurred in Boston.
1836: England. Historian William Cobbett described English working conditions as worse than American plantation slavery.
1836: The office of James G. Birney’s Philanthropist was sacked in Cincinnati.
1836: Massachusetts passed the first law limiting child labor in the United States. This form of child labor was slavery as bound children were made to serve until they reached age 21 for boys and 18 for girls. Enslavement of children in U.S. cities would continue until 1923.
1837: Elijah Lovejoy’s press was destroyed, and Lovejoy was killed in Alton, Illinois.
1838: After being betrayed by black slaves when attempting to escape from a Talbot County Plantation, Frederick finally receives the assistance of poor whites [who he declined to name to protect them] from Fells Point, Baltimore, and makes his escape from there.
1838: Pennsylvania. Hall, built for meetings of reform groups, was burned during the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in Philadelphia.
1839: Liverpool, England. Herman Melville, an American sailor, describes the English poor in horrific terms.
1839: Amistad, ship rebellion
1840: Frances Trollope describes industrial child slavery in England.
1840: America. The Liberty Party was organized and nominated James Birney for president.
1840: London, England. The World Anti-Slavery Convention was held in London. Women from the American Delegation were denied seats on the floor.
1840: England. Robert Owen writes “The working classes of Great Britain are in worse condition than any slaves in any country…”
1841: January 3: England. Eight-year-old miner, William Smith, dies on the job.
1841: Solomon Northup was kidnapped and sold into slavery.
1841: The Amistad case, involving the importation of illegal slave into the Americas, was tried in Federal Courts.
1841: Creole case, ship rebellion
1842: Slave Revolt in the Cherokee Nation, who put a stop to that back-talking right away.
1843: England, four-year-old children enslaved in the “coal pits.”
1845: Frederick Douglas published An American Slave, his bestselling autobiography.
1846: Author William Dodd in the book “The Factory System Illustrated” 10,000 were maimed and killed by equipment in English factories in 1846 alone.
1847: Liberia became the first black republic in Africa founded by expatriated African Americans.
1848: United States victory in the Mexican War.
1850: The Fugitive Slave Law was passed as part of the Compromise of 1850.
1850: President Zachary Taylor, owner of over 100 slaves, opposed the extension of slavery to newly open territories, bringing the country to the brink of civil war.
1851: Herman Melville describes a black slave boy held and cruelly treated in New England, in the novel Moby Dick, in which he also describes a free black church congregation.
1851: September 11, Christiana, Pennsylvania. A fight against slave catchers by free and runaway blacks results in the trial for treason of a white man who did not assist the slave catchers.
1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
1853: Solomon Northup was rescued through the actions of numerous white friends, from the savage working conditions of a Red River plantation, where he claims to have seen white slaves toiling.
1854: The fugitive slave, Anthony Burns was returned from Boston to Virginia.
1855: Alabama River, Frederic Law Olmsted reports that hired Irish hands were given riskier jobs than the black slaves as the saves were too valuable to risk and a dead Irishman drew no wages.
1857: Dread Scott Decision.
1857: Streetsville, Ontario. While touring as speaker for the abolition of slavery, Solomon Northup appears to have been kidnapped while drunk. There is no known date or place of death and a court case against his kidnaps was dropped due to Solomon’s disappearance.
1858: Abraham Lincoln condemned slavery in his “House Divided” speech.
1859: Virginia, John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry to form and support a slave revolt.
1861: Iowa, Congressman claims that the Confederacy “exalts and spreads Africans at the expense of the white race.”
1861: Confederacy, any slave holder owning 20 or more slaves was exempt from fighting the war.
1861: Andrew Johnson, now a member of the Senate, is the only southern senator not to leave the federal government and join The Confederacy.
1861: The Civil War began.
1862: Andrew Johnson is elected Vice President to Abraham Lincoln.
1863: Winston County, Alabama. A citizen refuses to fight for The Confederacy, says, “all tha want is to git you to fight for their infernal negroes, and after you do their fightin’, you may kiss their hind parts for o’ tha care.”
1863: The Emancipation Proclamation was issued.
1863: Somewhere, Solomon Northup is thought to have been slain by his kidnappers.
1865: April 15. With the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson becomes President of the United States.
1865: The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified.
1868: March 5. President Andrew Johnson is tried by the U.S. Senate and avoids impeachment by one vote.
1868: The Fourteenth Amendment made former U.S. slaves citizens.
1868: Christmas Day. Andrew Johnson pardons southerners who had taken part in the Civil War.
1874: Andrew Johnson is elected Senator of Tennessee.
1923: New York State. Contracts holding orphans and poor children to terms of forced labor were banned.
