Unit 2 · Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance

Ladinos (Atlantic creoles) ● (core concept) — African Christians with experience in the Atlantic world who sailed with early Spanish expeditions to the Americas as interpreters, sailors, and soldiers.

Juan Garrido ● (core concept) — An African conquistador who participated in the 1513 Spanish expedition to Florida.

Estevanico ● (core concept) — An enslaved African who was a member of the 1528 Narváez expedition to North America.

Transatlantic slave trade volume ● (core concept) — About 12.5 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic over more than 350 years, while only about 388,000, roughly 5 percent, were taken directly to the United States.

Charleston disembarkation ● (core concept) — About 48 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to North America landed at Charleston.

Senegambia ● (core concept) — One of the nine departure regions of the slave trade; about 23.6 percent of the enslaved people taken to North America came from Senegambia.

Angola ● (core concept) — One of the nine departure regions of the slave trade; about 23.8 percent of the enslaved people taken to North America came from Angola.

Three-part journey ● (core concept) — The enslaved journey had three stages: capture in the African interior, the Middle Passage across the Atlantic, and sale at auction in the Americas.

Middle Passage mortality ● (core concept) — About 15 percent of Africans died during the Middle Passage crossing of the Atlantic.

Phillis Wheatley ● (core concept) — The first published African American poet; her poem On Being Brought from Africa to America appeared in 1773.

Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) ● (core concept) — An African-born writer whose 1789 autobiography described his kidnapping and enslavement and became a key text of the antislavery movement.

Shipboard resistance ● (core concept) — Enslaved Africans resisted during the Middle Passage through revolts, hunger strikes, and suicide.

La Amistad ● (core concept) — An 1839 shipboard revolt led by Sengbe Pieh, also called Joseph Cinque, that ended in a U.S. Supreme Court case freeing the captives.

Brookes diagrams ● (core concept) — Plans of the slave ship Brookes showing enslaved people packed below deck, circulated by abolitionists to expose the Middle Passage's cruelty.

Act of 1808 ● (core concept) — The U.S. law that banned the further importation of enslaved people into the country.

Second Middle Passage ● (core concept) — The forced migration of more than one million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South after 1808, over two and a half times the number originally brought directly from Africa to the United States.

Solomon Northup ● (core concept) — A free Black man kidnapped and sold into slavery, whose 1853 memoir Twelve Years a Slave documented the domestic slave trade.

Cotton gin ○ — The invention that made cotton production far more profitable and drove demand for enslaved labor in the Deep South.

Gang system ● (core concept) — A plantation labor system in which enslaved people worked together in groups under constant supervision of a driver, common on cotton plantations.

Task system ● (core concept) — A plantation labor system in which enslaved people were assigned daily tasks and, once finished, could tend their own gardens and culture, common on rice plantations.

Gullah ● (core concept) — The culture and creole language of African Americans in the Sea Islands, preserving strong West African elements.

Rice fanner basket ● (core concept) — A coiled basket used to winnow rice, carrying West African agricultural knowledge to the Americas.

Slave codes ● (core concept) — Laws that defined enslaved people as property and restricted their movement, assembly, and education.

Code Noir ● (core concept) — The 1724 French colonial code governing enslaved people in Louisiana.

South Carolina slave code of 1740 ● (core concept) — The harsh slave code enacted after the Stono Rebellion to prevent further uprisings.

Constitutional avoidance of the words slavery ● (core concept) — The U.S. Constitution avoided using the words slave or slavery until the Thirteenth Amendment abolished the institution.

Dred Scott v. Sandford ● (core concept) — The 1857 Supreme Court decision, written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, ruling that Black people were not U.S. citizens and had no standing to sue.

Partus sequitur ventrem ● (core concept) — A 1662 Virginia law establishing that a child's status followed the mother's condition, making the children of enslaved women enslaved for life.

Elizabeth Key ● (core concept) — An English-African woman who won her freedom in a 1656 Virginia case by arguing her father's free status, before the colony hardened hereditary slavery laws.

Hypodescent (one-drop rule) ● (core concept) — The practice of classifying anyone with any African ancestry as Black, regardless of appearance.

Creole languages ● (core concept) — Languages formed by blending African and European languages, such as Gullah in the Sea Islands.

Spirituals ● (core concept) — African American religious songs expressing sorrow and hope, some carrying double meanings or serving as signals on the Underground Railroad; later divided into sorrow songs and jubilee songs.

Ring shout ● (core concept) — A counterclockwise circle dance with singing and percussion-like movement that preserved African ritual forms.

David Drake ● (core concept) — An enslaved South Carolina potter who inscribed his large storage jars with verse, such as one dated 1858.

Wallace Willis ● (core concept) — A formerly enslaved Black person in Choctaw territory in Mississippi who was displaced to Oklahoma Territory during the Trail of Tears; he composed and documented the spiritual Steal Away.

Fodet ○ — A Senegambian musical form identified as one of the roots of the blues.

Colored Conventions ● (core concept) — State and national conventions of free Black people beginning in the 1830s to organize around freedom, rights, and education.

American Colonization Society ● (core concept) — An organization that promoted the emigration of free Black people to Africa, opposed by most African Americans.

Jesse Jackson and the term African American ● (core concept) — In 1988, Jesse Jackson promoted the ethnonym African American to replace Black as the preferred term for descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States.

Fort Mose ● (core concept) — Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, founded in 1738 near St. Augustine, Florida, under Francisco Menéndez; the first legally sanctioned free Black town in the present-day United States.

St. Augustine ● (core concept) — The Spanish settlement founded in 1565 in Florida that offered asylum to enslaved people who converted to Catholicism.

Stono Rebellion ● (core concept) — The 1739 uprising in South Carolina led by Jemmy, involving Kongo participants who were Portuguese-speaking Catholics.

Haitian Revolution ● (core concept) — The 1791 to 1804 revolution that produced the only successful slave uprising to overturn a colonial enslaving government, creating the second independent nation in the Americas.

Toussaint L'Ouverture ○ — The leader of the Haitian Revolution, later the subject of Jacob Lawrence's painting series.

1805 Haitian Constitution, Article 14 ● (core concept) — The provision of Haiti's first constitution declaring all Haitian citizens Black.

Haitian reparations to France ● (core concept) — The indemnity Haiti paid to France for roughly 122 years as the price of its independence.

Louisiana Slave Revolt of 1811 ● (core concept) — The uprising led by Charles Deslondes along Louisiana's German Coast, the largest slave revolt in U.S. history.

Malê Uprising ● (core concept) — The 1835 revolt in Bahia, Brazil, led by Muslim Africans, reflecting the spread of resistance across the diaspora.

Daily resistance ● (core concept) — Everyday acts of opposition to enslavement, including work slowdowns, tool breaking, theft, and running away.

German Coast Uprising ● (core concept) — The 1811 Louisiana revolt led by Charles Deslondes, involving up to 500 enslaved people.

Creole revolt ● (core concept) — The 1841 shipboard revolt led by Madison Washington that freed about 130 enslaved people, who reached the Bahamas.

Nat Turner ● (core concept) — The leader of the 1831 rebellion in Virginia, one of the most famous slave revolts in the United States.

Denmark Vesey ● (core concept) — A free Black carpenter in Charleston who planned a large slave revolt in 1822.

Henry Highland Garnet ● (core concept) — A Black abolitionist who urged enslaved people to resist and rise up against slavery.

1526 revolt ● (core concept) — The earliest known revolt by enslaved Africans in present-day U.S. territory.

Free Black population in 1860 ● (core concept) — By 1860, free Black people made up about 12 percent of the Black population in the United States.

Mutual-aid societies ● (core concept) — Organizations formed by free Black people in cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans to provide burial, sick, and financial support.

Maria W. Stewart ● (core concept) — The first Black woman to publish a political manifesto and give a public address, linking racial and gender oppression in early American feminism.

Maroon communities ● (core concept) — Communities of people who escaped enslavement and built autonomous settlements in remote areas.

Palenques ● (core concept) — Fortified settlements of escaped enslaved people in Spanish America.

Quilombos ● (core concept) — Communities of escaped enslaved people in Brazil; the term comes from the Kimbundu word kilombo, meaning war camp.

Quilombo dos Palmares ● (core concept) — The large Brazilian maroon community that resisted Portuguese attacks for nearly a hundred years.

Great Dismal Swamp ● (core concept) — The swamp on the Virginia-North Carolina border that sheltered maroon communities in the United States.

Bayano ● (core concept) — A sixteenth-century African leader of maroon resistance in Panama.

Queen Nanny ● (core concept) — An eighteenth-century leader of the Jamaican Maroons who resisted British forces.

Maroon wars versus slave revolts ● (core concept) — Maroon wars were long conflicts between colonial powers and established maroon communities, distinct from uprisings by people still enslaved on plantations.

Slavery in Brazil ● (core concept) — Brazil received about half of the roughly ten million Africans who survived the Middle Passage, working in sugar, gold, coffee, and cattle economies.

Capoeira ● (core concept) — The Afro-Brazilian martial art developed by enslaved Africans, disguised as dance.

Congada ● (core concept) — An Afro-Brazilian performance tradition blending African and Catholic elements in festival processions.

Brazilian abolition of 1888 ● (core concept) — Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888, when about four million people were already free and about one and a half million were freed.

Black Seminoles ● (core concept) — Africans and African Americans who allied with the Seminole people in Florida, resisting enslavement and removal.

Second Seminole War ● (core concept) — The 1835 to 1842 war in Florida in which Black Seminoles fought alongside Seminoles against U.S. removal.

Five large Indigenous nations and slavery ● (core concept) — Five large southeastern Indigenous nations enslaved Black people, adopting slave codes and patrols; the resulting forced removals hardened Black-Indigenous racial lines.

Emigrationists ● (core concept) — African Americans, spurred in part by the Dred Scott decision of 1857, who advocated leaving the United States for Latin America, the Caribbean, or West Africa.

Paul Cuffee ● (core concept) — A Black shipowner who in 1815 transported 39 African Americans to Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Martin R. Delany ● (core concept) — A Black nationalist who called for a nation within a nation and became the first Black field officer in the U.S. Army.

Antiemigrationists ● (core concept) — African Americans who opposed leaving the country and asserted birthright citizenship in the United States.

David Walker ● (core concept) — The author of the 1829 Appeal, which rebutted Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and urged enslaved people to resist.

Moral suasion ● (core concept) — The antislavery strategy of persuading enslavers and the public through moral argument; radical thinkers like Walker went beyond it toward calls for resistance.

Early Black religious nationalism ● (core concept) — The current of Black political thought, exemplified by figures like David Walker and Julia Williams Garnet, that fused Christian faith with calls for Black self-determination.

Underground Railroad ● (core concept) — The network of secret routes and safe houses by which about 30,000 enslaved people reached freedom.

Fugitive Slave Acts ● (core concept) — The 1793 and 1850 federal laws requiring the return of people who escaped enslavement.

Harriet Tubman ● (core concept) — The formerly enslaved conductor who made 19 return trips to free about 80 people, used spirituals as signals, served as a Union spy and nurse, and led the Combahee River raid, the first time an American woman led a major military operation.

Photography and racial stereotypes ● (core concept) — African Americans used photography to counter racist caricatures, presenting themselves with dignity on their own terms.

Sojourner Truth ● (core concept) — The abolitionist and women's rights advocate who sold cartes-de-visite portraits of herself to fund her activism.

Frederick Douglass ● (core concept) — The formerly enslaved abolitionist who was the most photographed man of the nineteenth century.

Gendered resistance to slavery ● (core concept) — Enslaved women's resistance took distinct forms, including fighting back against sexual assault, using abortifacient plants, infanticide, and fleeing with children, since laws against rape did not protect them.

Harriet Jacobs ● (core concept) — The author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), whose narrative centered domestic life and sexual violence under slavery.

Mary Prince ● (core concept) — The author of an 1831 narrative documenting enslavement in the Caribbean.

Black Civil War military service ● (core concept) — About 200,000 Black men served the Union, including 50,000 free Northerners and 150,000 formerly enslaved people; Black women served as cooks, nurses, laundresses, and spies.

Half pay for Black soldiers ● (core concept) — Black Union soldiers received half the pay of white soldiers until Congress corrected the policy.

Paul Laurence Dunbar ● (core concept) — The poet whose 1895 poem The Colored Soldiers honored Black Civil War troops.

Emancipation Proclamation ● (core concept) — The 1863 presidential order declaring freedom for enslaved people in the rebellious states.

Thirteenth Amendment ● (core concept) — The 1865 constitutional amendment that freed four million enslaved people, with an exception clause for punishment of a crime.

Juneteenth ● (core concept) — June 19, 1865, when General Order No. 3, issued by Major General Gordon Granger in Galveston, Texas, proclaimed absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property; it became a federal holiday in 2021.

1866 treaties ● (core concept) — The treaties that freed about 10,000 people enslaved by Indigenous nations after the Civil War.

New York Freedom Day ● (core concept) — July 5, 1827, the day slavery ended in New York State, commemorated by Black New Yorkers.