Teacher Background Information Sheet

Concepts for “Pursuing Equality”:

 Economics, supply and demand, production, distribution of goods, markets, cultures, slaves, cultural beliefs, food, dress, folktales, Civil War, African American heritage

What is the 12th United States Colored Heavy Artillery?

The 12th Artillery unit is comprised of Kentucky’s only African-American Civil War re-enacting unit and some of its members are descendants of Civil War soldiers.  The mission of the group is to serve as the outreach arm for the Camp Nelson Heritage Foundation by educating the general public on the impact of African-American soldiers from Kentucky, honoring the approximately 200,000 Africans Americans who served in the military during the Civil War.

An Historical Perspective

African Americans migrated from Africa as early as the 1600s.  The history of slavery in the United States (1619-1865) began soon after the English colonists first settled in Virginia and lasted until the passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Before the widespread establishment of chattel slavery, much labor was organized under a system of bonded labor known as indentured servitude. This typically lasted a period of four to seven years for white and black alike, and it was a means of using labor to pay the costs of transporting people to the colonies. By 1662 court rulings established the racial basis of the American incarnation of slavery to apply chiefly to Africans and people of African descent, and occasionally to Native Americans.   In part because of the Southern colonies' devotion of resources to tobacco culture, which was labor intensive, by the end of the 17th century they had a higher number and proportion of slaves than in the North, but slavery was widespread in northern agricultural areas.

From about the 1640s until 1865, people of African descent were legally enslaved within the boundaries of the present United States. They were held overwhelmingly by whites, but also by some Native Americans and free black people. The majority of slaveholding was in the southern United States. According to the 1860 U.S. census, nearly 4 million slaves were held in a total population of just over 12 million in the 15 states in which slavery was still legal. Of all 1,515,605 families in the 15 slave states, 393,967 held slaves (roughly one in four), amounting to 8% of all American families.  Most households, however, had only a few slaves. The concentration of slaves were held by planters, defined by historians as those who held 20 or more slaves.  The planters achieved wealth and social and political power. Ninety-five percent of black people lived in the South, comprising one-third of the population there, as opposed to 1% of the population of the North.

The wealth of the U.S. in the first half of the 19th century was greatly enhanced by the exploitation of labor of enslaved African Americans. But with the Union victory in the Civil War, the slave-labor system was abolished in the South. The large southern cotton plantations became much less profitable. Northern industry, which had expanded rapidly before and during the war, surged even further ahead of the South's agricultural economy. Industrialists from northeastern states came to dominate many aspects of the nation's life, including social and some aspects of political affairs. The planter class of the South lost power temporarily. The rapid economic development following the Civil War laid the groundwork for the modern U.S. industrial economy.

Approximately 12 million black Africans were shipped to the Americas from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Of these, 5.4% (645,000) were brought to what is now the United States. The slave population in the U.S. had grown to 4 million by the 1860 Census.

Taken from internet source: Wikipedia:, January 16, 2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_the_United_States