How was it possible that slavery was so central in a society where individual freedom was so highly valued? This is one of the many paradoxes of ancient Greece . . . or maybe it’s not a paradox but a reflection of the fact that we can only value things based on contrast. Perhaps it was because of the fundamental role of slavery that ancient Greeks came to value individual freedom so much. This list presents 10 interesting facts linked to slavery in ancient Greece.

10 Slave Population

There are no reliable figures available on the slave population in ancient Greece. Some scholars have made educated guesses, but the slave population varied significantly across different regions of Greece.

Modern estimations suggest that in Attica (Athens and its vicinity) from 450 to 320 BC, there were roughly 100,000 slaves. The total population of the region was around 250,000, which would give us a slave-to-free ratio of about 2:5. Other, more general estimates state that between 15 and 40 percent of the ancient Greek population were slaves in various regions at different times.

9 Slave Procurement

A large number of slaves were prisoners of war, usually part of the booty seized by the victorious army. One famous example comes from Philip II of Macedon (Alexander the Great’s father), who sold 20,000 women and children into slavery after the invasion of Scythia in 339 BC. The connection between war booty and slave procurement was so tight that slave traders sometimes joined the armies during their campaigns so they could buy the prisoners immediately after they were captured.

Other streams of slave procurement included piracy, debt, and even barbarian tribes who were willing to exchange their own people for specific goods. Trading posts also acted as big suppliers of slaves for Greece. Many of these were located around the Black Sea, and some cities such as Byzantium and Ephesus also had big slave markets.

8 Slave Occupations

In Athens, making a living by working for others was perceived negatively. State employment was the only form of wage labor free from this prejudice. Since most free citizens avoided wage labor as much as they could, slaves were used to fill the workforce gaps. As a result, saves could perform a wide range of jobs in ancient Greece.

We know of slaves being employed as cooks, craftsmen, maids, miners, nurses, porters, and even in the army as attendants to their masters, baggage carriers, and sometimes as fighters. Some specific public positions were performed by slaves, the most famous example being (surprisingly) the police in Athens, which, at least during part of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, consisted mostly of Scythian slaves.

7 Slave Ownership

Owning slaves was a fairly common practice in ancient Greece. A middle-class family might have had between three and 12 slaves, but those numbers are just estimations by scholars and hard to verify. The number of slaves varied according to time and place.

In his work Ecclesiazusae, Aristophanes equates not owning any slaves to a sign of poverty. The two major owners of slaves in ancient Greece were the state, where slaves were employed as police and various other public functions, and also wealthy businessmen, who supplied slaves for working in the mines.

6 Versatile Lifestyles

There were different types of slaves in ancient Greece, and their living conditions and expectations were strongly linked to their occupations. The most unfortunate were the slaves involved in mining, who were condemned to a miserable life and almost certainly an early death.

However, not all slaves were doomed to suffer cruelty and abuse, and some could expect a more or less decent living. Slaves specialized as craftsmen, for example, could work and live separately from their masters and could engage in commerce and generate income, though a portion of what they earned had to go to their masters’ pockets. Spartan slaves (helots) could enjoy family life. State slaves in the Athenian army who died during combat were even honored with a state funeral, the same as free citizens.

5 Slaves And Craft Production

During Classical times, the booming Athenian craft production industry forced many workshops to evolve into factories. Slave labor was the dominant workforce in many prominent factories, most of which belonged to wealthy politicians.

We have records of two factories owned by Demosthenes that were largely supported by slaves. One of these factories produced swords and had about 30 slaves, while the other used 20 slaves and produced couches. Lysias, the famous writer, owned the largest production center we have on record, a shield factory which had 120 slaves.

4 Slaves And Mining

Mining has always been a highly profitable activity, and ancient Greece was no exception. The profits from mining were as immense as the risks of working in the mines. It’s no wonder that the Athenians employed slaves for a job so dangerous.

Large profits were made not only from the actual mining activity, but also by those who could supply slave labor. We know that the politician and general Nicias (fifth century BC) supplied as many as 1,000 slaves to work in the mines, making 10 talents a year, an income equivalent to 33 percent on his capital.

The fate of slaves working in the mines was precarious. Many of them worked underground in shackles, deprived from sunlight and fresh air. In 413 BC, an Athenian army was captured during a disastrous expedition to Sicily, and all 7,000 Athenian prisoners were forced to work in the quarries of Syracuse. Not one of them survived.

3 Slaves And Freedom

Some slaves could hope to gain their freedom. It was possible mainly for those in a position of saving money, especially those who where involved in wage labor and therefore had some degree of financial autonomy. Slaves who were able to save enough money could buy their freedom by paying their masters an agreed sum. We also know of slaves employed in the army who were granted their freedom as a reward for their service.

At Delphi, many inscriptions displaying the names of slaves who bought their freedom have been found. They illustrate the diverse array of regions from which the slave were procured: Caria, Egypt, Lydia, Phoenicia, Syria, and many other countries appear.

2 Helots

The helots were Greeks reduced to servitude by the Spartans. Their exact origin is unclear, but some accounts claim that they had been the inhabitants of a place called Helos, which was conquered by the Spartans. With every new conquest, the number of helots increased.

The helots were occupied as farmers, house servants, and any other activity that would distract the Spartan citizens from their military duties. There was constant tension between the helots and the Spartans. They were treated in humiliating ways and constantly intimidated. They had to wear a cap made of dog skin and a leather tunic. It was agreed that the helots should be beaten an agreed number of strokes every year, regardless of any transgression they might have committed, so they would not forget that they were slaves.

Sparta had a secret police (the Crypteia), responsible for keeping the Helots in check. Plutarch (Life of Lycurgus 28) wrote that the Crypteia would kill any helot found in the countryside during the night. During the day, they would kill any helot who looked strong and fit.

1 Rational Justifications

While we might have objections to the practice of slavery, ancient Greek society did not seem to share our concerns against human exploitation. Slavery was not only accepted as a normal institution, but there were also a number of justifications for it.

Aristotle wrote that some people were simply born to be slaves, while others were born to rule the slaves, a doctrine known as “natural slavery” (Politics 1, 1253b15–55b40). Slavery, Aristotle said, was a good thing for slaves, for without masters, slaves would not know how to live their lives. He also saw slaves as “animate tools”—pieces of property to be used, with no rights other than those granted by their masters.

+ Further Reading

Ancient Greece, the source of western learning and history. And the source of many lists:

10 Bizarre Sex Facts From The Ancient World
10 Things You Didn’t Know About Greek Mythology
10 Myths And Untold Facts About Ancient Greece And Rome
10 Common Misconceptions About the Ancient Greeks

The involvement of whites in ending slavery is one fact that has always been left out of the history of slavery. Yet, without them, it is probable that slavery would not have ended—at least, not at the time it did. The whites who opposed slavery were called abolitionists and included people like Charles Darwin, who might have even proposed the theory of evolution just to prove slavery wrong.

10 Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin joined the antislavery movement toward the end of his life even though he had owned slaves when he was younger and ran advertisements for the sale of slaves in his Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper. To be fair, though, he also ran antislavery advertisements sponsored by the Quakers in the same newspaper.

In 1787, he became the president of The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, which was formed as The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage in April 1775. The society was not only against the abolition of slavery but also wanted the integration of the freed slaves as US citizens.^[1]

One of Benjamin Franklin’s last acts was the signing of an antislavery bill on behalf of his society on February 3, 1790. The bill was sent to Congress, where it caused a heated face-off when it was read in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

At the end, the Senate neither approved nor rejected the bill while the House of Representatives appointed a committee to investigate its feasibility. On March 5, the committee concluded that Congress was not empowered to ban the importation of slaves or free slaves before 1808. Benjamin Franklin died a month later on April 17, 1790.

9 Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin, the famed father of evolution, was against slavery even though he never publicly voiced his views. We know of his antislavery stance from a series of letters containing antislavery remarks which he had written to family, friends, and associates.

It has even been suggested that he might have researched and proposed the theory of evolution to counter the belief at that time that blacks and whites were descendants of different ancestors. However, Darwin faced one problem before he could propose the theory of evolution. If the problem were not addressed, he feared that the theory would appear to support slavery instead of refuting it.^[2]

The complication was that slavery also existed in nature—at least among Formica sanguinea slave-maker ants, which always took Formica fusca ants as slaves. Darwin smartly clarified that the Formica sanguinea slave-maker ants had evolved to be dependent on their Formica fusca slaves and would die off within a year without them. Clearly, whites had not evolved to that extent.

8 William Fox

William Fox was a British abolitionist who attempted to end the slave trade by organizing a mass boycott of goods produced with slave labor. In 1791, he authored a pamphlet in which he persuaded British citizens to end slavery by boycotting sugar produced with slave labor. His major argument: A family could free a slave if they stopped consuming sugar for 21 months, and 38,000 families would end slavery completely if they participated in the sugar boycott.

About 70,000 copies of the pamphlet sold out in four months. One year later, 400,000 Britons started a boycott against sugar produced with slave labor. Some Britons stopped taking sugar entirely while others only purchased sugar made with free labor in the East Indies.

The boycott was so successful that sugar sales dropped by one-third and sugar imports from India, which is in the East Indies, increased by 1,000 percent. However, it did not end slavery.^[3]

7 John Jay

John Jay is another Founding Father who was against slavery. In 1785, he established an antislavery society called “The New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves and the Protection of such of them as had been or wanted to be Liberated.” The members included Alexander Hamilton, another Founding Father. But the society was controversial because most members were slave owners themselves.

Hamilton attempted to end this by proposing a rule that required all members to free their slaves if they wanted to belong to the group. But his proposal was quickly thwarted by the slave-owning members.

The society limited its activities to New York. There, it protested the kidnapping of slaves and free blacks, provided legal aid to slaves and free blacks, and opened a school for blacks.^[4]

6 William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce, a member of Parliament, was crucial to abolishing slavery in Britain. He believed that he had been ordained by God to end slavery in Britain. So he joined the abolitionist movement in 1786 at the behest of abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson, who encouraged him to promote antislavery bills in Parliament.

When Wilberforce proposed his first antislavery bill in 1789, he chided other members of Parliament for allowing slavery to continue under their watch. They voted against ending slavery, but that did not deter Wilberforce. He tried again the following year. Again, the members of Parliament rejected his bill.

Wilberforce got his third chance at ending slavery in 1807 as the Anglo-French War of 1793 caused some distraction. This time, he did not call for the abolition of slavery but for the banning of slave trading between British and French merchants. Parliament passed the act, causing the slave trade to plummet by 75 percent.^[5]

Thereafter, Wilberforce began campaigning for the freedom of slaves held in Africa and the British colonies. His wishes came true on July 26, 1833, when Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act that outlawed slavery in most of its colonies. Wilberforce died three days after that act was passed.

5 George Fox

George Fox is the founder of the Quakers, a Christianity movement that also calls itself the “Society of Friends.” Quakers believe that all humans are equal, so no human can own another human. Fox launched an antislavery campaign in 1657 when he wrote a letter that condemned slavery to slave-owning Quakers.

The Quakers became more vocal in condemning slavery in the 1750s when they banned members from owning slaves and encouraged non-Quakers to free their slaves. In 1783, the Quakers sent an antislavery bill to the British Parliament, which refused to take action because Quakers were not Anglicans.

To gain more support, the Quakers formed an abolitionist group that consisted of nine Quakers and three Anglicans. The group was called “The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” They were tasked with raising awareness about slavery and lobbying for a law to end it.^[6]

4 Elizabeth Heyrick

Elizabeth Heyrick was an English abolitionist from Leicester, England. She authored several pamphlets condemning slavery and, together with Susannah Watts, formed the “Birmingham Ladies Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves.”

Her society heavily financed the abolitionist movement of William Wilberforce, even though it was always sidelined by the men. Unlike Wilberforce, who initially called only for an end to the slave trade, Heyrick called for an end to slavery itself. She even threatened to withdraw financial support from Wilberforce if he did not change his ideology.^[7]

She campaigned against the trading of sugar made with slave labor in her Leicester hometown. There, she compared the people who purchased sugar with “receivers of stolen goods” because the plantation owners were thieves. She also openly criticized other abolitionists for not taking swift and decisive actions against slavery and for always depending on Parliament to end slavery.

3 Anne Knight

Anne Knight was another Quaker who called for the abolition of slavery. In addition, she fought for women’s rights, including the right to vote. In fact, she switched from primarily condemning slavery to fighting for women’s rights and inspired the formation of the first suffrage group, the Sheffield Female Reform Association, in 1851.

In the 1830s, she organized antislavery meetings, distributed antislavery pamphlets, and sent antislavery bills to Parliament. In 1840, she attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. It was this event that made her switch from actively condemning slavery to fighting for women’s rights after she observed that female abolitionists from the United States were not given seats.^[8]

2 William Lloyd Garrison

William Lloyd Garrison founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833.^[9] The society had over 200,000 members in 1840 and was the primary antislavery movement in the United States. The freed slave Frederick Douglass was a prominent member of and speaker for the society and he would later go on to be the first African American to receive a vote for president of the United States at the 1888 Republican National Convention.

The society’s tactics included sending antislavery bills to Congress and publishing antislavery journals and pamphlets that sometimes included propaganda. This made it a lot of enemies among proslavery supporters, who often raided the society’s meetings to attack members.

Garrison opposed the society’s involvement in politics, but some members thought otherwise. The pro-politics members broke away in 1839 to form the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which metamorphosed into the Liberty Party in 1840.

1 John Woolman

John Woolman was another Quaker abolitionist who was so committed to ending slavery that he dumped his tailoring business to focus on it. In 1746, he began traveling around the United States to visit slave owners and encourage them to free their slaves.

During his travels, he refused to sleep in buildings that had slaves, if at all possible. The few times he did, he always paid even if they did not accept payments. He also avoided purchasing goods made with slave labor. This was why his clothes were always free of dyes because most dyes were made with slave labor.

During a visit to England in 1772, he refused to travel from London to York by coach because the coachmen worked the horseboys and horses too hard. Instead, he trekked all the way, preaching as he went, until he completed the 645-kilometer (400 mi) journey in six weeks. He came down with smallpox soon after reaching York and died on October 7, 1772.^[10]

Oliver Taylor is a freelance writer and bathroom musician. You can reach him at [email protected].

Slavery in America didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation. It lived on—even after the Civil War had ended and the 13th Amendment had been put into place.

The Civil War brought the Confederate States back into the Union, but the people who lived in the South weren’t through fighting. They were determined to keep things exactly as they were during the heyday of slavery.

They made state laws that let them keep black people in essential servitude. As a result, slavery in America lived on for a lot longer than most people realize.

10 Slavery Was Used As A Legal Punishment

The 13th Amendment didn’t make all forms of slavery illegal. It kept one exception. Slavery, it ruled, was still permitted “as a punishment for crime.”

All the Southern states had to do was find a reason to arrest their former slaves, and they could legally throw them right back on the plantation. So, Southern politicians set up a series of laws called the “Black Codes” that let them arrest black people for almost anything.

In Mississippi, a black person could be arrested for anything from using obscene language to selling cotton after sunset. If he was as much as caught using a bad word, he could be charged, leased out as a slave laborer, and put to work in chain gangs and work camps on farms, mines, and quarries.

It happened a lot. By 1898, 73 percent of Alabama’s revenue came from leasing out convicts as slaves.^[1]

The enslaved convicts were treated terribly. They were beaten so brutally and viciously that, in one year, one of every four enslaved convicts died while working. Work camps kept secret, unmarked graves where they would bury men they’d beaten to death to hide the evidence. By the end, those graves held the mutilated bodies of at least 9,000 men.

9 Many Freed Slaves Worked On The Same Farms For The Same Wages

When the 13th Amendment was passed, a judge in Alabama declared that he and his Southern brethren were going to keep black slave labor alive in the South. “There is really no difference,” he said, “whether we hold them as absolute slaves or obtain their labor by some other method.”

He was right. Their new jobs as free people weren’t much different from their jobs as slaves. The newly freed slaves may have dreamed of better lives and new occupations, but a better life wasn’t easy to find. They had no money, no education, and no experience doing anything other than slaving away on a white man’s plantation.

Many ended up signing labor contracts with their former masters and were put back to work on the same farms. There, white landowners kept slave-condition gang labor alive with whites overseeing black workers.

Pay wasn’t much better than it was during slavery. In fact, it was often worse. The earliest records of black wages weren’t taken until 1910, nearly 50 years after emancipation. Even then, the average black man made no more than one-third the salary of the average white man.^[2]

8 Sharecropping Made Slaves Through Debt

Emancipated slaves had been promised 40 acres of land and a mule, but the government quickly backed out of the deal. It was an unfeasible amount of land to take from the white people who owned it, and most refused to sell their land to black people anyway. So they came up with something else—sharecropping.

White landlords would offer to give black families about 20 acres of land on which to grow cotton. In exchange, the whites expected about half of the black families’ crops. The landlords would even be able to dictate what the blacks grew, which often meant they’d be stuck growing tobacco or cotton.

With fields full of cotton, the slaves couldn’t grow their own food. So they had to buy it. But with half of their incomes going to white landlords, they were often bringing home less than slaves. They’d have to borrow money for food from the landlords, too—keeping the blacks in a perpetual cycle of debt and servitude.^[3]

7 Unemployed Black People Were Forced To Work Without Pay

If you turned down the slave-labor jobs you were being offered, they’d just make you work. If a black person in Virginia was caught without a job, he could be charged with vagrancy. He’d be forced to spend the next three months working for pay that, even at the time, was described as “slaves wages [that were] utterly inadequate to the support of themselves.”

Trying to escape just made things worse. If a vagrant working slave wages tried to run, he would be tied up with a ball and chain and forced to keep working—except that now he wouldn’t get paid a penny.^[4]

Vagrancy was called “slavery in all but its name.” But it was often much worse than what the blacks had gone through in slavery days. More than that, it forced black people to either accept the slave-like conditions that came with sharecropping and gang labor or to work without pay.

6 Fake Apprenticeships

Another way to keep legal slaves was to call them your apprentices. Plantation owners would lure their former slaves back by promising to teach them everything the plantation owners knew and get the freedmen ready to succeed on their own. However, the plantation owners just put the freedmen right back in their old slave jobs.

The former slaves would now be under contracts forcing them to work for their old masters, and the freed slaves could get in legal trouble for breaking these contracts. If they got real jobs, even the people who hired them could be sued by the slave owners for “enticing” their apprentices away.^[5]

One woman named Elizabeth Turner went through this. She was tricked into going right back to the same slave labor she’d done before emancipation. Turner managed to get out with the help of an abolitionist lawyer who took her case for free. But most weren’t so lucky. Most former slaves were illiterate and uneducated and didn’t know any way to get out of the contracts that threw them right back into slavery.

5 Confederados Took Their Slaves To Brazil

Brazil lured Confederate slave owners after the Civil War. Slavery was still legal there, and it was in wider swing than it ever had been in the US. About five million slaves had been sent across the Atlantic to Brazil—more than 10 times the number that had been sent to the US.

For many Confederates, that was a selling point. Between 10,000 and 20,000 people moved from the US to Brazil under the promise that they would be allowed to keep their slaves. Some dragged their newly emancipated slaves with them to a land where the freedmen could be forced back into servitude. Meanwhile, other Confederates picked up new slaves in Brazil at discounted prices.

Even today, there are little communities in Brazil that still revere their American slave-owning ancestors, called “Confederados” by the community that took them in.^[6] Now 150 years later, the descendants of slavers still wave Confederate flags and speak with a Georgia twang.

4 Black Workers Were Locked Up And Beaten

Systems of slavery through debt like sharecropping were officially made illegal in 1867, but they carried on for about another 100 years. Sometimes, though, it wasn’t just the debt keeping people imprisoned.

Some African Americans were lured to jobs and then actually locked up and kept from leaving. For example, one group of workers in Florida went to work in a sugarcane field and soon found themselves locked up in a filthy shack. Their new employers would beat the former slaves to get them to work and threatened to kill them if they tried to leave.^[7]

In other places across the US, black workers were shackled to beds or beaten with cat-o’-nine-tails to keep them working for nothing more than a few scraps. The men lured in were usually illiterate, and so they were completely incapable of fighting for their freedom in court.

This wasn’t the norm, however, and even white Southerners were disgusted when they found out it was happening. Little was done to stop it, though, until the 1940s. It took concentrated Axis propaganda campaigns to shame the US into genuinely and effectively stamping out these camps.

3 Blacks Couldn’t Testify Against Whites

In Kentucky, black people didn’t have the legal right to testify against white people in court. That was more than just a civil injustice. It allowed white people to effectively do whatever they wanted to their black neighbors.

A white person could walk into a black person’s house, take everything, and get away with it. And sometimes, that was exactly what happened.

A black woman named Nancy Talbot was sitting in her home when a white man broke in, grabbed everything he could carry, and left. Talbot tried pressing charges against the thief, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind—including that of the judge—that the thief was guilty.^[8]

But Talbot was legally forbidden from testifying. Without her testimony, the judge couldn’t convict the white criminal.

Black people had the right to earn their own money now, but they didn’t have any recourse to keep it. A white person could take anything the black person had earned right out his pocket, and there was essentially nothing that the blacks could do about it.

2 White People Could Get Away With Massacres

Even if the 13th Amendment made it illegal on paper to beat a slave, laws like Kentucky’s made it perfectly possible to massacre a whole black family and get away with it. Which is exactly what John Blyew and George Kennard did.

In 1868, Blyew and Kennard broke into the home of the black-skinned Foster family with an axe. The two intruders murdered the father, mother, and grandmother and seriously wounded two of the children.^[9]

The eldest child, 16-year-old Richard, hid under his father’s dead body until the killers left. Then he crawled to a neighbor’s house for help. He’d been hit by their axe, though, and his wounds were so bad that he died two days later.

The only survivors were the youngest children: eight-year-old Laura, who had hidden and survived, and six-year-old Amelia, who had been hacked in the head but miraculously lived. Still, Amelia went the rest of her life with a massive, disfiguring scar across her face—and without her parents.

Blyew and Kennard were arrested. But under Kentucky law, the survivors weren’t allowed to testify. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that Kennard and Blyew couldn’t be convicted because the witnesses were black.

Eventually, the law was changed and Blyew and Kennard were sent to prison. But they didn’t stay there long. Both men were pardoned by the governor and set free.

1 Mississippi Didn’t Ratify The 13th Amendment Until 1995

When the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was passed in 1865, 27 of America’s then-36 states ratified it. As the years passed, the other states gave up their stance of protesting emancipation and threw their support behind the right of a black person to live free.

For some states, though, it took a long time. Kentucky didn’t ratify the 13th Amendment until 1976, and Mississippi waited until 1995 before officially accepting that slavery was against the Constitution.

Even after voting to end slavery in 1995, though, Mississippi still didn’t go through with it. The politicians who voted for the resolution didn’t report it to the Federal Register, so it didn’t actually take effect until 2013.

It wasn’t until activists realized that Mississippi was still registered as protesting the end of slavery that they actually put the order through. Officially, Mississippi’s government was against ending slavery until just four years ago.^[10]

We talk about slavery almost as if it was something that only happened in the United States. Slavery is treated as a distinctly American legacy and American shame—but that couldn’t possibly be farther from the truth.

Nearly every country in the world participated in the slave trade, and a lot of them took in far more slaves than the United States. Of the 12.5 million African slaves sent to the New World, only 388,000—or about three percent—of them ended up in the US.^[1]

We’ve all heard about Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and the Emancipation Proclamation, but that wasn’t the end of slavery around the world. Slaves were still battling for their freedom, and, outside their own countries, their stories have been almost completely ignored.

10 Britain Spent Most Of Its Budget Paying Off Slaveowners

When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, their biggest concern was the slaveowners. A growing abolitionist movement in the empire had pushed them to do the humane thing and let their slaves go free, but they were still terrified about how all their slaveowners would react—so they paid them off.

The British government spent £20 million reimbursing slavers for the “loss of their slaves.” That was a huge amount of money—it was 40 percent of their treasury’s annual income, and the country had to go £15 million in debt to pay for it.^[2] They didn’t finish paying off that debt until 2015, meaning that, in a sense, British taxes were going toward paying off slaveowners for 182 years.

The slaves didn’t see a penny of that £20 million. They weren’t given any resources or land to compensate them for working without pay or any guidance on how to make a better life for themselves. And so, when slavery ended, most ended up staying on the same plantations they’d been at their whole lives, working for wages so low that life wasn’t much better than before.

9 Canada Abolished Slavery To Save A Single Woman

The end of slavery in the British Empire didn’t change much in Canada. They’d already abolished slavery 40 years earlier, in 1793, all as a part of one man’s efforts to save a single woman named Chloe Cooley.

Chloe Cooley was an African slave whose owner intended to sell her in the US. While a crowd of people watched, he tied her up, threw her into a boat, and sailed her across Lake Erie. Cooley did everything she could to resist, screaming for her life and trying to escape, but it was all to no avail.

Two men in the crowd, though, reported what they’d seen to Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe, and he made it his personal goal to save Cooley. He tried to bring her owner to court, but the case was thrown out.^[3] She was the owner’s property, and, by law, he could do anything he wanted to her.

So Simcoe changed the law. He campaigned to get slavery abolished in Canada and pulled it off in record time. Less than four months after Cooley was sold, slavery was illegal.

Simcoe, though, never managed to save Cooley. The new law only banned the purchase of new slaves—slaveowners were still allowed to keep the ones they had. No one knows for sure what happened to Cooley, but there’s every reason to believe she died in the United States, working on a plantation slave gang.

8 Brazil Kept Slavery Alive Longer Than Any Country In The Americas

We don’t often talk about the Brazilian slave trade, but it was bigger than any other in North or South America. As we’ve said, only three percent of the African slaves went to the United States—but 32 percent (four million) of them went to Brazil.

Slavery stayed legal in Brazil for longer than any other country in the Americas, too. It was so strong that, after the US Civil War, Confederate slaveowners who were unwilling to give up owning people moved to Brazil to keep the slave trade alive.

In the end, though, the British Empire pressured them into giving them up. It wasn’t until Brazilians fought alongside their African slaves in the Paraguayan War that they started to see them as human beings.^[4]

In the end, the slaveowners came around to abolition before the government did. They started freeing their own slaves before the state forced them to do it. When slavery was finally abolished in 1888, most of the slaves had already been set free.

7 A Slave Revolt In Haiti Actually Worked

In Haiti, the slaves won their freedom by force. It was the oldest slave colony in America. There had been slaves there since Columbus first landed in 1492, and by 1789, there were nearly 500,000 slaves, outnumbering the white population by more than ten to one.^[5]

When the Haitian slaves heard about the French Revolution, it sparked an idea. From their point of view, it sounded like the white slaves of France had killed their masters and taken possession of the land. They wanted to throw a revolution of their own.

Haitian slaves started wearing red, white, and blue ribbons as tributes to the French Revolution and as a subtle sign that they were getting ready to launch one of their own. And, in October 1790, it started. At first, it was just 350 slaves fighting for their freedom in Saint Dominique, but it soon evolved into a full-on rebellion across the entire country.

It took 14 years for them to win their freedom. The French Army was called in, and the ragtag, revolting slaves had to take on one of the greatest military forces in the world. In the end, though, the French Army was wreaked with disease. They gave up, went home, and let the slave rebellion win.

The very concepts of skin color were abolished. Under the constitution, no matter the color of one’s skin, all Haitians were to “be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks.”

6 The First Black President Of Mexico Abolished Slavery

It probably won’t come as much as a surprise that slavery in Mexico didn’t last much longer after its first black president.

His name was Vicente Ramon Guerrero Saldana (often shortened to Vicente Guerrero), and he was the son of an African Mexican and a Mestizo. To his Mexican comrades, though, his mixed heritage just made him black—in fact, his nickname was “El Negro.”

Guerrero entered office on April 1, 1829, and got rid of slavery before the year was over.^[6] Slavery in Mexico officially ended on September 16, 1829—much to the chagrin of the Americans living there.

Texas, at the time, was full of American slaveholders who weren’t too happy about Guerrero’s new law. The end of slavery in Mexico would eventually lead to Texas declaring independence and would even get Guerrero killed. A revolt rose up against him nearly immediately. Guerrero was dead before two years had passed.

But his law survived. Even though Guerrero died, slavery never came back to Mexico.

5 Britain Forced Zanzibar To Abolish Slavery In Under An Hour

In the late 19th century, Zanzibar was the center of the global slave trade. Thousands of slaves passed through their slave market each year, and the British wanted to put an end to it.^[7]

They tried to do it peacefully. They tried to put economic pressure on Zanzibar to get them to stop the slave trade, but all Zanzibar would give them were a few platitudes and empty gestures. The slave trade was vital to their economy, and they weren’t going to give it up unless someone made them.

So, in 1896, a British fleet set itself up outside of the Sultan’s palace and just bombarded it senseless with everything they had. After 38 to 45 minutes of destruction, the Sultan surrendered, and slavery in Zanzibar came to an end.

It was the shortest war in history. Over 500 people died on the Zanzibar side. On the British side, only one person was wounded. The rest didn’t even stub a toe.

4 It Took Two Wars To End The Barbary White Slave Trade

Africans weren’t the only people being kidnapped and sold into slavery. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire.

The Barbary pirates would raid the coasts of Europe and capture anyone they could get their hands on. Then they would drag them off to Algiers, where they would be sold as slaves.

The Ottoman Empire refused to stop until the United States and Europe forced them. The US had to go to war with the Barbary states twice (in 1801 and 1815) before they left them alone, while the British, Dutch, and French fought with Algiers off and on for nearly 100 years before the Ottoman Empire, in 1890, finally signed an agreement to stop taking white slaves.^[8]

3 Cuba Ignored Spain’s Orders To Abolish Slavery For 75 Years

Officially, slavery was abolished in every Spanish colony in 1811, but Cuba didn’t exactly listen. The slave trade was too profitable there to stop. They deliberately ignored the Spanish order and kept on selling slaves for another 75 years.

It created problems. In 1812, when the slaves in Cuba realized they weren’t going free, a man named Jose Aponte led them in a revolt to try to get them the freedom they’d been denied.^[9] Even in the face of open revolt, though, Cuba kept the slave trade going. They killed Aponte and put his head on display to let every slave know what would happen to them if they questioned the Cuban slave trade.

The slaves didn’t get their freedom until after Cuba and Spain went to war. Cuba went to war with Spain in 1868 but had lost by 1878, and Spain rode the high of their victory to finally actually force Cuba to let their slaves go. Even then, though, the process was so gradual that the shackles didn’t come off until 1886, a whole lifetime after they’d been promised their freedom.

2 Australian Slave Traders Drowned Slaves Rather Than Give Them Freedom

Technically, Australia was a nation of slaves to begin with. The convicts who first populated Australia were sent to work as unpaid slaves on a chain gang, and they were treated so horribly that one of the British officers who went to Australia said, “The slave traffic is merciful compared with what I have seen.”

In time, the white slaves of Australia were replaced with Aboriginal slaves, who were forced to work on sugar plantations. They were all supposed to be freed in 1833, when the British Empire abolished slavery, but the Australians ignored it. They relabeled their slaves “indentured servants” and kept using them for the better part of a century.

It took until 1901—68 years after slavery had been abolished—before the British Empire finally forced Australia to set their slaves free. Some of the slave traders, though, were so determined not to do it that they threw their slaves overboard, letting them drown rather than giving them their freedom.^[10]

1 Mauritania Still Has Slavery

Not every country has abolished slavery. In Mauritania, it is estimated that 43,000 people are still living in slavery.^[11]

The lighter-skinned Berber people of Mauritania are the slaveowners, while the darker-skinned people called the “Black Moors” are the slaves. The Berbers have full control over the Black Moors’ lives, including the right to give their slaves away. In fact, it’s considered a tradition there to give a slave as a wedding gift.

Technically, slavery was legally abolished in Mauritania in 1981, but the slave trade still lives on to this day. The government started to crack down more after a 2012 report by the United Nations put them in the international spotlight, but according to the Global Slavery Index, it was little more than a show to appease the UN. They arrested their first slaveowner immediately around when the UN report came out and very publicly sentenced him to six months in jail—but they stopped pursuing cases when the world stopped paying attention.

To this day, Mauritania remains one of the last great strongholds of slavery in the world.

History books often fail to sync the living with the tragedy of slavery. On the other hand, artifacts can instantly bridge that gap. When we’re faced with a wrecked slave ship, graves, and personal artifacts, a history lesson becomes reality.

Unique photos, autobiographies, and workplaces also invite an intimate look into what it was like to be enslaved. Slavery artifacts have a weird side, too—like the Bible designed to make workers more obedient and the reverse engineering of an escaped slave’s DNA.

10 Mystery Foundations And Box

Virginia’s College of William & Mary is centuries old. In 2011, an excavation was launched south of the college’s iconic Christopher Wren Building. Historic documents recorded nothing in that area. However, after shoveling through a shallow amount of dirt, the team unearthed mysterious foundations.

The brick layer once supported a building 4.9 meters (16 ft) wide and over 6 meters (20 ft) long. A relatively small size for a building today, this one dated to the colonial era when it was considered large.

The structure was likely the living quarters or workplace of the 18th-century enslaved staff. If not lodgings, the building could have been a laundry room or kitchen. Additionally, near the foundations was a box buried for unknown reasons. Made of slate, it measured 15 by 10 centimeters (6 by 4 in) and was empty, save for deteriorated grains that could have been anything.^[1]

9 The Last Slave Ship

The Clotilda was the last slave ship of the United States. Her human cargo was not even legal. By the time the vessel sneaked into Alabama waters, the importation of slaves was banned.

Timothy Meaher was a plantation owner who did not care for humanitarian laws. He made a $100,000 bet that he could bring a boatload of African slaves into the country without being detected.

In 1860, Meaher employed William Foster to sail over to the Kingdom of Dahomey (modern-day Benin) and kidnap 110 people. Meaher and Foster succeeded and burned the Clotilda to destroy the evidence. Historians have looked for the vessel ever since. In 2018, the strongest candidate was tracked down by a journalist. The shipwreck was near Mobile, Alabama, which was already a thumbs-up.

When the Dahomey captives were freed five years after their capture, they built their own town north of Mobile. Structural clues also placed the vessel’s age in the mid-1800s. (Clotilda‘s construction year was 1855.) Additionally, the 38-meter-long (124 ft) ship showed fire damage, but more research is needed to confirm its identity.^[2]

8 A Crucified Slave (Maybe)

In 2007, archaeologists excavated at Gavello, a site outside Venice, Italy. They found a skeleton buried in an unusual way. At the time of his death around 2,000 years ago, Romans buried their dead in tombs and with grave goods. This man was plonked into the ground with neither.

When researchers examined his feet, they found one ankle was missing. The other had unhealed fractures, suggesting the injury occurred right before death. The nature of the wounds strongly suggested that a metal spike had been forced into the foot. One possibility was that his heels had been nailed to a cross.^[3]

Ancient Romans reserved crucifixion mostly for slaves as well as some criminals and those who threatened the status quo (Jesus). Even though the Romans crucified people for centuries, the Gavello grave is only the second time that evidence of the practice turned up in the archaeological record.

The skeleton belonged to a man in his thirties. His small body suggested that he was an undernourished slave. The unceremonious burial also matched the disdain shown for those who were executed.

7 Heming’s Kitchen

Former US president Thomas Jefferson loved French cooking. At the time, French meals needed a certain stove that was exceptionally rare in the United States. In 2017, a kitchen with the right stew stoves was found. Discovered at Monticello (Jefferson’s plantation in Virginia), the room was undoubtedly the realm of James Hemings.

Born into slavery, Hemings was taken to France with Jefferson when the latter served as the US minister to France (1784–89). The 19-year-old Hemings trained as a French chef and, upon his return, introduced macaroni and cheese, meringues, and creme brulee into American culture.

The first thing archaeologists found was the kitchen’s original brick floor in a cellar. As the work continued, the ruins extended to a partial fireplace and the four stew stoves, which would have stood waist-high during Heming’s time. Sadly, only their foundations were left. Even so, the find marked a rare time when a workplace was linked to an enslaved person whose name was known.^[4]

6 The Sierra Leone Smoker

Around 200 years ago, a slave smoked a pipe at Maryland’s Belvoir plantation. The pipe was one of four among other artifacts that remained at the site until archaeologists unearthed them in 2015.

The pipe was made of clay, a fortuitous choice for researchers. Clay is porous and can retain bodily fluids such as saliva from a smoker. DNA tests soon identified that the person who enjoyed tobacco in this case was a woman.

Experts did a deeper analysis and found that she shared strong genetic links to modern-day Sierra Leone—more specifically, to the Mende people of West Africa. Indeed, old records revealed that a slavery route once existed between Sierra Leone and Annapolis, where the Belvoir plantation was situated.^[5]

The smoker was either abducted from West Africa or born in America to parents taken from Sierra Leone. The pipe proved that artifacts could identify slave quarters, which often cannot be separated from small housing for white families. The item is also part of an initiative to use artifacts’ DNA remnants to return to descendants their ancestral heritage, which was erased the moment their ancestors landed in America.

5 A Young Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman escaped slavery and then risked her life to free hundreds through the Underground Railroad. All of Tubman’s photos showed an older lady, stooped and fragile. When researchers recently uncovered an unknown portrait of a young Harriet, they were stunned. Not only did it depict her in earlier years, but her famous grit shone through.

The picture was taken in her forties around 1868 or 1869, with Tubman’s gaze as the most striking feature. It burned with a tangible mix of strength and suffering. For the first time, scholars could see why people called her “Moses,” for leading her people to safety, and “General Tubman,” after she helped to free over 700 African-Americans in a Union raid.

The image came from an album that once belonged to abolitionist Emily Howland, who was Tubman’s friend. All 49 portraits were of men and women, black and white, who fought for the freedom and education of enslaved individuals. The album contained another gem—the only known image of John Willis Menard, the first African-American elected to the US Congress.^[6]

4 Unique Slave Narrative

Omar Ibn Said was a wealthy young Muslim in the 19th century. Living in West Africa, he dedicated himself to being an Islamic scholar. One day, he was plucked from his routine and transported halfway across the world. Said was sold into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina.

His first owner was cruel, and after an escape attempt, Said was imprisoned in North Carolina. Contrary to popular belief, slaves were not uniformly illiterate. Said carved Arabic script on the only surface available—the cell’s walls. It was also his autobiography, which ensured his personal story would survive.

The Owen family purchased Said, and he lived with them until he died. He experienced a relatively good life, during which he produced the 15 pages that described his abduction and enslavement.

Today, the document is invaluable as a rare story sourced directly from the victim. (As it was penned in Arabic, his owners could not edit it.) It remains the only known Arabic slave narrative created in the United States. In 2019, the Library of Congress digitized Said’s pages to bring them to a wider audience.^[7]

3 George Washington’s Teeth

One of the wackiest myths surrounding George Washington is that he wore wooden dentures. However, Washington never chewed his corn with timber teeth. By the time he was president, he had already lost most of his own teeth and had several sets of dentures—some sporting other people’s pearly whites. Evidence seems to suggest that they came from slaves.

In 1784, he recorded the purchase of human teeth for his own private use—“By Cash pd Negroes for 9 Teeth on Acct of Dr. Lemoire.” The latter was a dentist who treated Washington and also paid premium prices for people to part with their front teeth.

Slaves could also sell their teeth but for much less. While it is impossible to know if the nine snappers became dentures, they were almost certainly pulled from Washington’s slaves. It is believed that the two men struck a deal to use Washington’s own slaves to drive the price down.^[8]

2 Hans Jonatan’s Genome

In 1784, Hans Jonatan was born in the Caribbean. His family was enslaved on a sugar plantation in St. Croix, which was a colony of Denmark. When Hans was old enough, he was shipped to Denmark and ordered to fight for the Danish navy. At one point, he was told to go back to the colony, but the 18-year-old made a bid for freedom.

In 1802, he fled to Iceland and became the first person with African heritage to reach the region. In recent years, scientists performed the first study using DNA from descendants and genealogical records to partially recreate the genome of an ancestor whose body was not available.

They analyzed 182 of his descendants and reverse engineered their genes until they completed 38 percent of the genome on his mother’s side. It showed that she was originally from Cameroon, Nigeria, or Benin. After comparing the genes to world databases, they also revealed when things changed drastically for the family. Hans’s mother or her parents were captured in West Africa between 1760 and 1790.^[9]

1 Rare Slave Bible

When slaves in the Caribbean opened their first Bible, it was not a regular edition. What British missionaries brought in the 19th century was a version so snipped that it shocked modern people.

In 2019, one of the last three remaining slave Bibles went on display in Washington, DC. Visitors were so stunned by the abridged book that officials soon made it the centerpiece of the exhibition.

Roman Catholics can page through 73 books, the Protestant edition holds 66, and 78 books knit together the Eastern Orthodox translation. The Caribbean version was pruned to 14 books.^[10]

The missionaries wanted to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity. However, they first had to get permission from the sugar plantation owners who did not want their workers reading about rebellions and uprisings. For this reason, related passages were removed.

In this version, the enslaved Israelites never left Egypt. Lines that condemn slave owners are gone. Even though “their” Bible praised obedience to a master, the Caribbean’s enslaved people constantly rebelled and finally gained freedom in 1834.