Figure 1.--This boy was photographed in the 1850s. We know nothing about the boy, but he looks to be from the small black middle class in the North.

The 1850s was the last decade of slavery in America. Most black children lived as slaves in the South and were crudely dressed. There are very few images available of slave children, just as there are few painted portraits. The small number of images is due to the cost and the low estem in which slave children generally often wore clothes discaded by their owners. We have very limited information on how slave children were dressed. On large plantations slave children might wear simplest garments fashioned by their parents from rough fabric. Small numbers of blacks lived in the north and dressed like other children of similar economic levels.

Slavery

The European countries which conquered native American civilizations in the 16th century enslaved millions in Brazil and South America to work in mines and the tremendously profitable sugar plantations. The conditions were so brutal and European disesases so virlulent that native American populations were descimated. The Spanish and Portuguese turned to Africans. Millions of Africans were transported across the Atlantic and sold into slavery in the Americas. Slavery in earlier epochs had no racial connotations. With the growth of the African slave trade, slavery in the Western mind became associated with race as with the collapse of Native American populations, it was Africans who were enslaved in huge numbers. European Christian who would not have tolerated the enslavement of other Europeans found little objection to enslaving black Africans.

Created: September 30, 2002
Last updated: September 30, 2002