Chattel Goods - The Sad Story of Slavery in the US

Chattel Goods - The Sad Story of Slavery in the US

By: a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures

When Fish and I first moved to Arkansas, we visited the Pea Ridge Civil War Battlefield. Having both been raised in the Western United States, this was our first direct encounter with what is often referred to as the Confederacy. It felt profoundly foreign.

Since then, I’ve learned more through visits to places like Oak Alley Plantation and the Prairie Grove Battlefield. And yet, despite the education, I still don’t get it.

I struggle—deeply—with the idea that one human being could own another. I struggle so much with this belief that it is almost impossible for me to comprehend how people were willing to go to war and die to preserve it. I often return to Oscar Wilde’s observation: “A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”

That struggle led me into a research project on the history of slavery in the United States. What I discovered is that slavery has neither a clean beginning nor a clean end, and it was never solely a Confederate problem.

Slavery begins wherever one person gains sufficient power to dominate another. It likely crossed the Bering Strait with the first peoples of the Americas, or emerged shortly after their arrival. In early America, slavery often resulted from warfare, raids, and conquest. In some cases, parents sold children into servitude to survive famine. Enslaved status was not always hereditary, though it sometimes was.

The dynamics of slavery changed dramatically with European expansion into the New World. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel helps explain how Spanish, English, and French powers overwhelmed Indigenous populations, and how Portuguese, English, and Dutch traders devastated African societies. Their advantage lay in animal husbandry, bringing disease immunity, cavalry, and military dominance.

The first documented act of European enslavement on what is now US territory occurred in 1508, when Juan Ponce de León used forced Native labor in Puerto Rico. By 1513, enslaved Africans were being imported. In 1526, enslaved Africans were brought to what is now South Carolina to support the ill-fated San Miguel de Gualdape colony. Many are believed to have escaped and joined Native tribes.

By 1565, slavery became permanent on the North American continent with the founding of St. Augustine. Ironically, under Spanish rule, slavery in Florida was relatively limited, and Spain even offered freedom to enslaved people who escaped from other colonies.

When the English arrived in 1607, they initially practiced forms of wartime slavery common among Native tribes. Indentured servitude, labor exchanged for passage, blurred into coercion. In 1619, enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia aboard British privateer ships. Because they were baptized Christians, they were legally classified as indentured servants. That fiction collapsed in 1640, when John Punch was sentenced to lifetime servitude, becoming the first African enslaved for life under English colonial law.

Massachusetts legalized slavery in 1641. Virginia formalized it through court rulings, including Johnson v. Parker in 1654, which permanently enslaved John Casor. In 1662, Virginia adopted partus sequitur ventrem, making slavery hereditary through the mother.

By the mid-18th century, slavery existed throughout all colonies. Even those that initially resisted—like Georgia—eventually capitulated due to labor shortages.

French colonies adopted slavery under the Code Noir, which provided limited protections, enforced Christian baptism, and allowed narrow paths to freedom. Spanish colonies maintained similarly complex systems. No region of what became the United States was untouched by enslavement.

Abolitionist movements grew alongside revolutionary sentiment. During the Revolutionary War, both British and American forces promised freedom in exchange for service. Northern states gradually abolished slavery after independence. Massachusetts outlawed it in 1783. The Northwest Ordinance barred it north of the Ohio River.

In contrast, Southern dependence on cotton intensified demand for enslaved labor. Human beings became commodities—“capital”—bred and sold when land was exhausted. Ironically, this expansion sowed the seeds of the Civil War itself.

The Constitution’s Three-Fifths Compromise granted the South disproportionate political power, fueling resentment. When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, Southern states seceded. War followed. The Emancipation Proclamation took effect in 1863, but slavery did not entirely end until years later—1866 in the Cherokee Nation, 1867 in Alaska, 1873 in Puerto Rico, and as late as 1900 in Hawaii.

And still, it didn’t end.

Convict leasing, company towns, debt peonage, and forced labor persisted into the 20th century. In Alaska, coerced labor existed until the Fur Seal Act of 1966. Modern forms of enslavement persist among undocumented agricultural and domestic laborers.

Most devastatingly, human trafficking—particularly sexual exploitation—never stopped. Not after the Civil War. Not after the Mann Act of 1910. Not now.

According to the Global Slavery Index, approximately 400,000 people are enslaved in the United States today. None are believed to be imported, but many are trapped nonetheless.

There are over 600,000 open missing-person cases in the US. While many are explainable, history teaches us that not all are. We know from survivors like Jaycee Dugard and Amanda Berry that disappearance does not mean death.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have made progress; the number of missing Americans has fallen since the 1990s, but the work is far from finished.

Slavery never vanished. It adapted.

And until we confront it honestly and relentlessly, it will remain.

I hope—sincerely—that someday we eliminate it altogether.

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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life

She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.

You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.

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