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After the Revolution some 3,000 former slaves had been transported from New York to Nova Scotia, where they became known as Black Loyalists

Equiano was appointed to an expedition to resettle London's Black Poor in Freetown, a new British colony founded on the west coast of Africa, at present-day Sierra Leone. The blacks from London were joined by more than 1,200 Black Loyalists who chose to leave Nova Scotia.

He was one of the leading members of the Sons of Africa, a small abolitionist group composed of free Africans in London

Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745 – 31 March 1797),[3] known in his lifetime as Gustavus Vassa (/ˈvæsə/),[4] was a prominent African in London, a freed slave who supported the British movement to end the slave trade.

His last master was Robert King, an American Quaker merchant who allowed Equiano to trade on his own account and purchase his freedom in 1766.

Equiano settled in England in 1767 and worked and traveled for another 20 years as a seafarer, merchant, and explorer in the Caribbean, the Arctic, the American colonies, South and Central America, and the United Kingdom.

in 1792 Equiano married an English woman named Susannah Cullen and they had two daughters.

In Virginia, Equiano was bought in 1754 by Michael Pascal,

He was transported with 244 other enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to Barbados in the West Indies.

He and a few other slaves were sent on to the British colony of Virginia.

Pascal took Equiano with him when he returned to England, and had him accompany him as a valet during the Seven Years' War with France. Also trained in seamanship, Equiano was expected to assist the ship's crew in times of battle; his duty was to haul gunpowder to the gun decks. Pascal favoured Equiano and sent him to his sister-in-law in Great Britain, so that the youth could attend school and learn to read and write.

At this time, Equiano converted to Christianity

Pascal sold Equiano to Captain James Doran of the Charming Sally at Gravesend, from where he was transported back to the Caribbean, to Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands. There he was sold to Robert King, an American Quaker merchant from Philadelphia who traded in the Caribbean.[1

King set Equiano to work on his shipping routes and in his stores. In 1765, when Equiano was about 20 years old, King promised that for his purchase price of 40 pounds, the slave could buy his freedom.[14] King taught him to read and write more fluently, guided him along the path of religion, and allowed Equiano to engage in profitable trading for his own account, as well as on his master's behalf

The merchant urged Equiano to stay on as a business partner, but the African found it dangerous and limiting to remain in the British colonies as a freedman. While loading a ship in Georgia, he was almost kidnapped back into slavery.

By about 1767, Equiano had gained his freedom and went to England. He continued to work at sea, travelling sometimes as a deckhand based in England. In 1773 on the British Royal Navy ship Racehorse, he travelled to the Arctic in an expedition to find a northern route to India.[15] On that voyage he worked with Dr. Charles Irving, who had developed a process to distill seawater and later made a fortune from it. Two years later, Irving recruited Vassa for a project on the Mosquito Coast in South America, where he was to use his African background and Igbo language to help select slaves and manage them as labourers on sugar cane plantations. I

Equiano expanded his activities in London, learning the French horn and joining debating societies, including the London Corresponding Society. He continued his travels, visiting Philadelphia and New York in 1785 and 1786, respectively.

n the 1780s he became involved in the abolitionist movement.

Equiano was befriended and supported by abolitionists, many of whom encouraged him to write and publish his life story. He was supported financially in this effort by philanthropic abolitionists and religious benefactors.

As part of settling in Britain, Equiano/Vassa decided to marry and have a family. On 7 April 1792, he married Susannah Cullen, a local girl

The couple settled in the area and had two mixed-race daughters, Anna Maria (1793–1797) and Joanna (1795–1857).

The Plantation Legend

the South was, in reality, a diverse and complex region

large parts of the South were unsuitable for plantation life

Unlike the slave societies of the Caribbean, which produced crops exclusively for export, the South devoted much of its energy to raising food and livestoc

Piedmont, Tidewater, coastal plain, piney woods, Delta, Appalachian Mountains, upcountry, and a fertile black belt--regions that clashed repeatedly over such political questions as debt relief, taxes, apportionment of representation, and internal improvements.

Large slaveholders were extremely rare. In 1860 only 11,000 Southerners, three-quarters of one percent of the white population owned more than 50 slaves; a mere 2,358 owned as many as 100 slaves. However, although large slaveholders were few in number, they owned most of the South’s slaves. Over half of all slaves lived on plantations with 20 or more slaves and a quarter lived on plantations with more than 50 slaves.

These slaveowners were a diverse lot. A few were African American, mulatto, or Native American; one-tenth were women; and more than one in ten worked as artisans, businesspeople, or merchants rather than as farmers or planters. Few led lives of leisure or refinement.

The average slaveowner lived in a log cabin rather than a mansion and was a farmer rather than a planter. The average holding varied between four and six slaves, and most slaveholders possessed no more than five.

The southern economy generated enormous wealth and was critical to the economic growth of the entire United States. Well over half of the richest 1 percent of Americans in 1860 lived in the South. Even more important, southern agriculture helped finance early 19th century American economic growth. Before the Civil War, the South grew 60 percent of the world’s cotton, provided over half of all U.S. export earnings, and furnished 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Cotton exports paid for a substantial share of the capital and technology that laid the basis for America’s industrial revolution.

the early 1790s, slavery appeared to be a dying institution. Slave imports into the New World were declining and slave prices were falling because the crops grown by slaves--tobacco, rice, and indigo--did not generate enough income to pay for their upkeep.

short-term loan contracts provided by bankers (asientos)

[18]

Initially, since Portugal had unimpeded rights in West Africa via its 1494 treaty it dominated the European slave trade of Africans.

the Spanish fiscal authorities gave individual asientos to merchants, primarily from Portugal, to bring slaves to the Americas.

Following the establishment of the Portuguese colony of Angola in 1575,

Angolan interests came to dominate the trade,

he period of the Iberian Union.

those holding asientos for the Brazilian slave trade often also trading slaves in Spanish America.

Till 1622 half of the slaves were destined for Mexico.

The other half of this story is Africa. The very basis of the ease of the conquistadors’ take-over of the New World — the indigenous peoples’ vulnerability to European diseases — also made them useless as a labour force and so Africans had to be shipped in instead as slaves.

For the next three centuries, the exploitation of Africa made that of the New World possible.

the Triangular Trade that ensured the maturation of capitalism and underpinned the elaboration of Enlightenment high culture — the shipping of slaves from Africa to harvest such staples of European life as sugar, cotton and tobacco in the New World. It built the investment infrastructure of capitalism.

Ultimately, the Portuguese proved more adept at the ‘great game’ of imperialism than the Spanish — the 1493 Treaty of Tordesillas gave them the best slave ports in equatorial Africa and Brazilian plantations which proved so extensive and productive that they supplied even north America with tobacco

it was the Spanish that came first, and it was they that set the pattern.

but a key

was the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Azores, Madeiras, and Canary Islands during the 15th century.

Alfred Crosby argued in his 1986 history, Ecological Imperialism:[2]

[T]he Iberian conquest of the Azores, Madeiras and Canaries [w]as a pilot program for the reshaping of European colonies in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Oceania. In all these places, the newcomers would conquer the human populations and Europeanize entire ecosystems. They dared this because they had seen from the Iberian experience in the Canaries that European crops and herds would thrive in all but the most hostile, unfamiliar environments, and that the fiercest indigenes could be beaten despite their superior numbers and home-ground advantage. As a result, tens of millions of natives around the world would die.

Capitol Men

Dray's

It does not really offer an assessment of Reconstruction's successes and failings

Twelve years earlier, Smalls had piloted the Planter, on which he worked as a slave crewman, out of Charleston harbor and delivered it to the Union navy, a deed that made him a national hero. In 1864, while the ship was undergoing repairs in Philadelphia, a conductor evicted Smalls from a streetcar when he refused to give up his seat to a white passenger. Ninety years before a similar incident involving Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Smalls's ordeal inspired a movement of black and white reformers to persuade the Pennsylvania legislature to ban discrimination in public transportation.

Stephens offered a long argument based on states' rights as to why the bill was unconstitutional.

The subject of their exchange was a civil rights bill banning racial discrimination in places of public accommodation.

Elliott launched into a learned and impassioned address explaining why the recently enacted Fourteenth Amendment justified the measure (which was signed into law by President Grant the following year), then reminded Congress of an infamous speech Stephens had delivered on the eve of the Civil War: "It is scarcely twelve years since that gentleman shocked the civilized world by announcing the birth of a government which rested on human slavery as its cornerstone." Elliott already had proved that he refused to be intimidated by whites: in 1869 he whipped a white man in the streets of Columbia for writing inappropriate notes to his wife. A black man assaulting a white man in defense of his wife's good name was not a common occurrence in nineteenth-century South Carolina.

Congressmen Dray profiles came from diverse origins and differed in their approach to public policies. Some had been free before the Civil War, others enslaved

Some favored government action to distribute land to former slaves; others insisted that in a market society the only way to acquire land was to purchase it. Some ran for office as representatives of their race, others as exemplars of the ideal that, with the end of slavery and the advent of legal equality, race no longer mattered. Reconstruction's black Congressmen did not see themselves simply as spokesmen for the black community

was one of the more conservative black leaders; yet in the Senate he spoke out for more humane treatment of Native Americans and opposed legislation banning immigration from China

sixteen black members of Congress

had enjoyed opportunities and advantages unknown to most African-Americans

had been born free in North Carolina

was the slave son of his owner and was educated by the same tutor who taught his white half-siblings.

Some Congressmen had enjoyed unique privileges as slaves.

wner allowed him to learn to read and write and to run a hotel and livery stable in Selma

Others, however, had experienced slavery in all its brutality.

Jeremiah Haralson

None of these men fit the old stereotype of Reconstruction officials as ignorant, incompetent and corrupt.

All were literate, most were seasoned political organizers by the time of their election and nearly all were honest.

ne who does fit the image of venality wa

of Louisiana, whose career combined staunch advocacy of civil rights with a sharp eye for opportunities to line his pockets

Pinchback grew up and attended school in Cincinnati. In the 1850s he worked as a cabin boy on an Ohio River steamboat. He fell in with a group of riverboat gamblers and learned their trade. He turned up in New Orleans in 1862 and expertly navigated the byzantine world of Louisiana's Reconstruction politics. Pinchback was undoubtedly corrupt (he accumulated a small fortune while in office) but also an accomplished politician.

Reconstruction ended in 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes abandoned the idea of federal intervention to protect the rights of black citizens in the South, essentially leaving their fate in the hands of local whites.

black political power, while substantially diminished, did not vanish until around 1900, when the Southern states disenfranchised black voters. Six more African-Americans served in Congress before the end of the nineteenth century. Some of their Reconstruction predecessors remained active in politics

of Planter fame, served as customs collector at Beaufort until 1913, when he was removed as part of a purge of blacks from the federal bureaucracy by Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern-born president since Reconstruction.

Pinchback and Bruce moved to Washington, where they became leaders of the city's black elite and arbiters of federal patronage appointments for African-Americans. Bruce worked tirelessly but unsuccessfully to persuade Congress to reimburse blacks who had deposited money in the Freedman's Savings Bank, which failed during the Panic of 1873. Like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in our own time, the bank was a private corporation chartered by Congress that enjoyed the implicit but not statutory backing of the federal government. Its counterparts today are being bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars, as they have been deemed too big to fail. The Freedman's Savings Bank was too black to rescue.

The last black Congressman of the post-Reconstruction era wa

of North Carolina, whose term ended in 1901. From then until 1929, when

took his seat representing Chicago, Congress remained lily-white. Not until 1972, with

election in Georgia and

in Texas, did black representation resume from states that had experienced Reconstruction. Today the Congressional Black Caucus numbers forty-two members, seventeen of them from the states of the old Confederacy.

One such episode involves

who in 1874 was elected to Congress from Beaufort County, South Carolina.

Equally riveting is the 1874 confrontation between

he former vice president of the Confederacy, then representing Georgia in the House of Representatives, and another black South Carolinian,

Robert Brown Elliott (1842-1884) was an African American member of the United States House of Representatives from South Carolina. Robert Brown Elliott's early life is a mystery. Although he claimed to have been born in Liverpool, England to West Indian immigrants, and to have graduated from Eton College, biographers have been unable to corroborate these facts. He moved to South Carolina in 1867 and established a law practice. Elliott helped organize the local Republican Party and served in the state constitutional convention. In 1868 he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives. The next year he was appointed assistant adjutant-general; he was the first African American commanding general of the South Carolina National Guard. As part of his job, he helped form a state militia to fight the Ku Klux Klan. Elliott was elected as a Republican to the Forty-second and Forty-third United States Congress. He "delivered a celebrated speech" in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.[1] He resigned on November 1, 1874, to fight political corruption in South Carolina. He served again in the South Carolina House of Representatives, where he was elected as Speaker of the House. He ran unsuccessfully for South Carolina Attorney General in 1876. Reconstruction ended that year and he was forced out of office.[] He set up a private law practice in New Orleans.

It would, however, be rash hence to infer, that immediate and unconditional emancipation works better than the gradual and conditioned abolition of slavery.

In studying these precedents it must be re- membered that the slaves in our Southern States are at least ten times as numerous as the slaves in either the British or the French colonies.

t is pretty well understood that President Lincoln agrees with Senator Doolittle in advo- cating colonization of the blacks

Those who have read “Sewell's Or- deal of Free Labor in the British West Indies,” will understand this prejudice. In Jamaica and Barbados the mulattoes are steadily gaining pow- er and influence, and the end can not be mis- taken. The white race must eventually go to the wall. To avoid this result, Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Doolittle, Mr. Blair, and those who agree with them, propose to colonize the negroes of our Southern States—to send them to Hayti, or Cen- tral America, or somewhere else.

To be effectual this remedy must be thorough. The entire four millions must be exported.

unsuccessfully invaded Mexico.

invasions of Nicaragua.

Knights of the Golden Circle, developed plans to create an independent slave empire stretching from Maryland and Texas to northern South America and the West Indies.