African American Women In The 1800s

During the 1800s women had no rights whatsoever, specifically African American women. Abigail Waterhouse, was a 30-year-old African American woman who was a slave living in Virginia with her husband and two children. Abigail was in an accident which put her into a coma, she awoke 30 years later to a completely new world. A world where event such as the civil war, market revolution and world wars had happened. All these changes were unfamiliar to her, she embraced some of the changes but not many of them as she still felt like she was still in an era where none of these changes had happened, as if time had never passed. One of the events that Abigail was unable to witness was the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution began

With the invention of the steamboat many families had the option of migration, specifically from the east to the west, by the Erie Canal. The completion of the Erie Canal set off a scramble among other states to match New York’s success. Several borrowed so much money to finance elaborate programs of canal construction that they went bankrupt during the economic depression that began in 1837. By then, however, more than 3,000 miles of canals had been built, creating a network linking the Atlantic states with the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys and drastically reducing the cost of transportation. The Market Revolution led to the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; While the North became an industrial and manufacturing powerhouse, the South became a cotton kingdom, founded on slavery. White settlers from Virginia and the Carolinas, began to force original Native Americans further west and they moved in and established plantations in the now freed regions. The South was filled with the production of cotton, and it was controlled by plantation agriculture. As the cotton-based economy rose so did slavery, as slaves were needed to work on the plantations.

Before her slumber the riots for equal rights had started to begin. The civil war began in 1861 and lasted till 1865, that is how long the battle took yet it took many years till the war completely changed and affected everyone's lives. The Civil War if often called the first modern war in America, as it is the first war that mass armies confronted each other on the battlefield with deadly weapons created during the industrial revolution. The death toll in the civil war exceeds the total number of Americans who died in all the nations other wars. The first engagement that occurred was the first Battle of Bull Run that took place in Northern Virginia and ended with the union army retreating. The second Battle of Bull Run was won by Robert E. Lee a confederate soldier which ultimately led him to go to battle in the North. At the Battle of Antietam, in Maryland, McClellan and the Army of the Potomac repelled Lee’s advance. In a single day of fighting,