Domestic Slave Trade
This term describes the mass forced relocation of over 1 million African Americans from the Upper South to the Lower South.
What is the Second Middle Passage?
Enslaved workers in this system labored in gangs under an overseer from sunrise to sunset.
What is the gang system?
This French colonial code regulated enslaved people’s lives, defining them as property under strict controls.
What is the Code Noir?
This term refers to self-emancipated Black communities in Brazil, akin to palenques in Spanish America.
What are quilombos?
By 1860, this percentage of the African American population in the U.S. was free.
What is 12 percent?
After 1808, the enslaved population in the U.S. grew primarily through this natural process rather than importation.
What is childbirth?
Under this system—used for rice and indigo—enslaved people worked independently to meet a daily quota.
What is the task system?
South Carolina’s 1740 statute, passed after the Stono Rebellion, barred enslaved people from gathering, reading, or drumming.
What is the 1740 South Carolina slave code?
The largest quilombo in Brazil, lasting nearly a century, was known by this name.
What is Quilombo dos Palmares?
These member-funded groups supported Black schools, businesses, and independent churches in Northern cities.
What are mutual-aid societies?
These Upper South states—such as Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri—were major sources of enslaved people sold southward.
What are the Upper South?
Enslaved people created these in English, with syncopated rhythms, to help pace group work in the fields.
What are work songs?
This principle, later codified by the “one-drop rule,” classified anyone with any African ancestry as Black and subject to enslavement.
What is hypodescent?
This vast swamp between Virginia and North Carolina sheltered maroon communities in the United States.
What is the Great Dismal Swamp?
In the 1830s, this activist became the first Black woman to publish a political manifesto and deliver a public address.
Who was Maria W. Stewart?
This Lower South region—comprising SC, GA, FL, AL, MS, LA, and TX—was dominated by the slave-cotton system.
What is the Lower South?
This creole language emerged in the Carolina lowcountry among task-system rice cultivators.
What is Gullah?
Before the Fifteenth Amendment, these two states were the only ones to allow Black men to vote.
What are Wisconsin and Iowa?
In sixteenth-century Panama, this maroon leader fought Spanish forces to defend his community’s autonomy.
Who was Bayano?
These institutions doubled as community centers: places of worship, celebration, mourning, and political organizing for free Black people.
What are Black churches?
Over this many times more people were displaced in the domestic trade than arrived in the U.S. directly from Africa.
What is two-and-a-half times?
Even cities that did not host slave markets benefited economically from this institution foundational to the American economy.
What is slavery?
Ratified in 1870, this amendment prohibited denying the vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
What is the Fifteenth Amendment?
In eighteenth-century Jamaica, this National Hero led maroons in wars against the English, later becoming a symbol of resistance.
Who was Queen Nanny?
Black women’s advocacy highlighted the intersections of these three factors—anticipating debates still central to Black politics today.
What are race, gender, and class?