Darkest Hours: Origins of Slavery

American History Hit

History Hit

America, History

4.3 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2026

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Origins of Slavery in America, from its early colonial history to its expansion after the Revolutionary war, is the darkest chapter of American history. In this episode, we'll explore how European colonists first brought enslaved Africans to the Americas, how legal frameworks were devised to uphold the practice and what they were forced to endure on the plantations.

Today we welcome Justene Hill Edwards, Historian and Professor at University of Virginia, as our guest on today’s episode. Justene is the author of Savings and Trust: the Rise & Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank, which was the Winner of the 2025 Frederick Douglass Book Prize.

Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.

Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.

All music from Epidemic Sounds.

American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The history of American slavery is not buried in the past. It is written into the nation's landscape.
0:10.4	It stands in brick and stone, in ports and fields, in the architecture of power itself. Slavery
0:18.2	shaped where America built, how it expanded, and who profited it.
0:23.4	At Monticello and Mount Vernon, enslaved people built and sustained the homes of presidents.
0:29.5	In Charleston and New Orleans, auction blocks once stood near busy docks where
0:34.1	human lives were bought and sold alongside cotton and sugar. In Washington, D.C.,
0:39.8	enslaved labor helped construct the White House and the Capitol, enduring symbols of liberty
0:44.8	and freedom constructed amid bondage. Follow the geography and the system comes into wider focus.
0:52.2	Tobacco in Virginia, rice in the Carolinas, sugar along the Mississippi, cotton spreading
0:58.1	across the deep south.
1:00.2	These landscapes generated immense wealth that flowed north into banks, insurance companies,
1:06.5	factories, railroads, universities, institutions, and infrastructure that benefited from slavery
1:13.2	even as many denied responsibility for it. Slavery built one America while another claimed
1:20.1	distance. The nation divided not only by belief, but by geography, between those who depended
1:26.2	openly on enslavement and those who profited while looking away.
1:30.2	To understand the United States, we must read the land itself, because slavery was not a side story.
1:36.9	It was a national system embedded in the ground beneath our feet.
1:51.0	Music ground beneath our feet. It is American History Hit. Welcome. I'm Don Wildman. One of the things we try to do on
1:56.1	this series is find a clear path into history that can otherwise feel dense and overwhelming. Not to simplify it,
2:03.1	but open it up. This episode is especially important in this regard because our story is so often
2:09.1	relegated to the past when it has so much to do with our shared present. We'll discuss today
2:15.2	the earlier years of American slavery, where this system came from, how it took shape on this continent, and why decisions made at the beginning of this nation mattered so long afterwards.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Hit, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of History Hit and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.