1750s

Throughout the colonial period, the sale of enslaved people without regard for family bonds was both legally sanctioned and commercially routine. Enslaved people had no legal standing to resist sale or separation; marriages between enslaved people held no legal validity; and children of enslaved women were born enslaved regardless of the father's status. Charleston's slave market at Broad Street and East Bay regularly sold husbands from wives and children from mothers. Runaway slave advertisements document the frequency of families sundered by sale: descriptions of enslaved people who had fled mention they were believed to be going to locations where they had a wife or where their children had been sold. Planters sometimes deliberately separated family members to prevent coordinated resistance. The sexual exploitation of enslaved women by enslavers and overseers — which produced enslaved children who were simultaneously the enslaver's biological offspring and his legal property — was endemic and unaddressed by colonial law.

Throughout the colonial period, the sale of enslaved people without regard for family bonds was both legally sanctioned and commercially routine. Enslaved people had no legal standing to resist sale or separation; marriages between enslaved people held no legal validity; and children of enslaved women were born enslaved regardless of the father's status. Charleston's slave market at Broad Street and East Bay regularly sold husbands away from wives and children from mothers, reflecting buyers' preferences and enslavers' financial calculations. Runaway slave advertisements from the period document the frequency of families sundered by sale: descriptions of enslaved people who had fled mention they were 'believed to be going to [named location] where they have a wife' or 'where his children were sold.' Planters sometimes deliberately separated family members to prevent coordinated resistance. The sexual exploitation of enslaved women by enslavers and overseers — which produced enslaved children who were simultaneously the enslaver's biological offspring and his legal property — was endemic, unaddressed by colonial law, and represented a specific form of violence with no legal remedy for its victims.

By 1750, the area at the east end of Broad Street and East Bay Street in Charleston, South Carolina — at and around the Watch House, later the site of the Old Exchange Building (opened 1772) — had become the primary auction site for enslaved people in North America. By a law of 1710, the east end of Broad Street was designated the authorized site for market activity. Enslaved people newly arrived through Sullivan's Island were quarantined, inspected, and then brought to these waterfront wharves and the surrounding streets for public auction. Buyers examined enslaved people's teeth, skin, muscles, and hands; women were stripped and inspected for reproductive capacity. Families were routinely separated — the enslaved person's value was calculated purely as labor or reproductive capital, and buyers' preferences determined who would be sold away from parents, spouses, and children. Charleston was the entry point for approximately 40 percent of all enslaved Africans brought to mainland North America, and the Broad Street market was where the trade in human beings was conducted at its most concentrated.

By 1750, the area at the east end of Broad Street and East Bay Street in Charleston, South Carolina — at and around the Watch House, later the site of the Old Exchange Building (opened 1772) — had become the primary auction site for enslaved people in North America. By a law of 1710, the east end of Broad Street was designated the authorized site for market activity. Enslaved people arriving through Sullivan's Island were quarantined, inspected, and then brought to the waterfront wharves and surrounding streets for public auction. Buyers examined enslaved people's teeth, skin, muscles, and hands; women were stripped and inspected for reproductive capacity. Families were routinely separated by sale. Charleston was the entry point for approximately 40 percent of all enslaved Africans brought to mainland North America.

After years of pressure from planters who envied South Carolina's rice economy, Georgia's Trustees lift the ban on slavery. The enslaved population grew from nearly zero to over 15,000 by the time of the Revolution. The decision transformed Georgia's economy and society along the plantation model and rendered the colony's founding anti-slavery principles a historical footnote.

Through the first half of the eighteenth century, enslaved African people developed sophisticated strategies for maintaining African cultural traditions while adapting to colonial conditions. Forbidden from using drums in most colonies — which authorities correctly understood as communication tools — enslaved people developed substitutes: hand-clapping, foot-stomping, and body-percussion. Ring shout worship — a shuffling circular dance to chanting and handclapping preserving West African religious movement — was practiced in brush arbor gatherings away from white surveillance. Enslaved Muslims maintained prayer in secret. African naming traditions, foodways, medicinal plant knowledge, and craft techniques (basket-weaving from specific West African traditions survives to the present in South Carolina's Gullah-Geechee community) were transmitted across generations. Praise houses and informal gatherings became sites of community formation. Enslavers tried to disrupt African cultural continuity by mixing people from different ethnic groups, but cross-group bonds formed anyway.

Through the first half of the eighteenth century, enslaved African people in the colonies developed sophisticated strategies for maintaining African cultural traditions while adapting to colonial conditions. Forbidden by law in most colonies from using drums — which colonial authorities correctly understood as communication tools — enslaved people developed substitutes: hand-clapping, foot-stomping, and the body-percussion practice of patting juba. Ring shout worship — a shuffling circular dance to chanting and handclapping that preserved West African religious movement — was practiced in brush arbor gatherings away from white surveillance. Enslaved Muslims maintained prayer practice in secret. African naming traditions, foodways, medicinal plant knowledge, and craft techniques (basket-weaving from specific West African traditions survives to the present day in South Carolina's Gullah-Geechee community) were transmitted across generations. Praise houses and informal gatherings became sites of community formation and information-sharing. Enslavers tried to disrupt African cultural continuity by mixing people from different ethnic groups to prevent communication, but cross-group bonds formed anyway.

Historical analysis of European shipping records documents that the years 1751-1775 were the peak era of slave ship revolts, with approximately one in ten slave ships experiencing an uprising during the Middle Passage. At least 45 documented revolts on British and American ships are recorded, with additional revolts aboard French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish vessels. Many revolts occurred within sight of African shores during the eight months ships typically spent gathering captives along the West African coast — a period during which captives could see land, had not yet experienced the full horrors ahead, and could form social bonds and plan. The mean number of Africans killed during suppressions was approximately 25, or about 10 percent of those aboard. Ship captains responded with increasingly brutal preventive measures: leg irons, neck collars, separate confinement of men and women, regular inspections for tools or loose shackles. The sheer frequency of revolts testifies to the unbroken will to resist among people facing the Middle Passage.

Historical analysis of European shipping records documents that the years 1751-1775 were the peak era of slave ship revolts, with approximately one in ten slave ships experiencing an uprising during the Middle Passage. At least 45 documented revolts on British and American ships are recorded, with additional revolts aboard French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish vessels. Many revolts occurred within sight of African shores during the eight months ships typically spent gathering captives along the West African coast — a period during which captives could see land and form social bonds to plan. The mean number of Africans killed during suppressions was approximately 25, or about 10 percent of those aboard. Ship captains responded with increasingly brutal preventive measures: leg irons, neck collars, separate confinement of men and women, regular inspections for tools or loose shackles.

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting ruled that Quakers who bought or sold enslaved people would be disowned from the meeting. Influenced by John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, this was the first formal religious body in America to make slaveholding a disciplinary offense. By 1776 the Meeting required members to free all enslaved people or face expulsion — a model for later abolitionist organizing.

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting ruled that Quakers who bought or sold enslaved people would be disowned. Influenced by John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, this was the first formal religious body in America to make slaveholding a disciplinary offense. By 1776 the Meeting required members to free all enslaved people or face expulsion.

In 1753, North Carolina became the third English colony after South Carolina (1704) and Virginia (1727) to legislate a formal, colony-wide slave patrol system. North Carolina's patrol law required county militias to organize patrols empowered to stop any enslaved person off their enslaver's property without written authorization, to enter enslaved people's dwellings without a warrant, to break up any assembly of enslaved people, and to inflict summary corporal punishment. The spread of patrol legislation from colony to colony in the first half of the eighteenth century reflected the standardization of racial terror as state policy across the American South — each colony building on the previous, creating a model that would persist through the Civil War and whose institutional DNA shaped American policing well into the twentieth century.

Free and enslaved Black men served in colonial militias throughout the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Massachusetts, Virginia, and Connecticut all recorded Black soldiers in muster rolls. Some enslaved men were promised freedom for service; most received neither land grants nor the rights extended to white veterans. Their participation sharpened contradictions between colonial rhetoric of liberty and the practice of slavery.

Under pressure from planters, Georgia reverses its ban and opens the colony to slavery.