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xvii Introduction Jamie J. Wilson The fifty events discussed in this two-­volume collection are classified into ten dis- tinct periods. Slavery in North Amer­i­ca and the American Republic, 1502–1888 The first West Africans to arrive in the English-­speaking North American colonies entered into a constantly shifting and developing system of forced ­ labor. Initially, West Africans ­were not held as slaves instead, they ­ were indentured servants. It was only as the plantation economy grew throughout the mid to late seventeenth ­ century that their indentured servitude transformed into racial slavery as more laws ­ were enacted throughout the American colonies to restrict the rights of West Afri- cans and their American-­born descendants. The Antebellum Era, 1830–1860 The antebellum period is bookmarked by two violent assaults against the institu- tion of slavery. Bound by a higher morality, the African American preacher Nat Turner attempted to end slavery with a violent rebellion against white slaveown- ers in ­Virginia. The era ended with yet another violent attack against the slave regime with John Brown’s raid. That Turner’s rebellion was led by an African American, and Brown’s raid was orchestrated by a white man, hints at a growing but imbalanced antislavery movement from 1830 to 1860. Black antislavery advocates now had white allies. Many of ­these white allies held common anti- black attitudes, but to the growing black-­white alliance, slavery was increasingly seen as antithetical to the founding documents of the nation and to the moral code of the day.