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Lower Mississippi Valley French Revolution

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At the beginning of the colonial period in America, there was a great need for workers that could help make a profit for the foreign companies who invested in colonies in the Americas. While these workers originally came from several backgrounds and countries, it soon became clear that African slavery dominated all forms of forced labor. Nowhere was this clearer than in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Starting off as a French colony the Lower Mississippi Valley’s primary work force was from European workers and Native American enslaved people. However, as the manipulation of African slavery in the French colony of Saint Domingue, today known as Haiti, began to turn a huge profit. The French government incentivized the use of African slavery to …show more content…

Survivors of these raids would be mostly women and child, and as many would perish from disease the French settlers desired to increase slave labor in other ways. In time, French settlers seeing both the economic success of Haiti and the abundance of slave importations from Africa turned to African slavery to increase the number of enslaved workers in the French colony (Clark-Pujara 2/6/18). As the colony increased in size and the number of enslaved Africans, both grew and became the primary work force the Lower Mississippi Valley turned into a slave society. Finally, the introduction of the Code Noir, a decree passed by French King Louis XIV to the French colonial empire, established African raced based slavery as the norm throughout all French colonies. Fundamentally, the introduction and use of African slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley resulted from the desire for a large enslaved work force and the already established African slave societies and laws found in other French

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Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market by historian Walter Johnson focuses specifically on New Orleans during the 1800s. Even more specifically, Johnson drills down to the showrooms were people were treated like objects to be bought and sold. He examines the ins and outs of the slave trade through the activities that took place in these showrooms. The thesis of this nonfiction book is that slavery was caused and supported in large part by mercantilism in that people were commoditized in the same way tobacco, sugar, and cotton were, for example. Unfortunately, the 1808 ban of international slave trade did not diminish this trend, but rather forced it to morph into a domestic slave trade, which led to worse conditions for enslaved persons as cotton became a more powerful market.

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838 Words | 4 Pages

In George Reid Andrew’s journal entry entitled “Black Workers in the Export Years: Latin America,” Andrews poses the challenging question, “What were the impacts of the export years on racial dynamics and “racial orders” in Latin America?” Andrew replies with a complex answer: why owning land, racializing labor migrations, and unionizing ethnics groups produced a vast amount of racial conflict and provided space for negotiation in the workforce of multiracial Latin American regions. Andrews starts his claim stating the crucial relevance of owning an efficient amount of land to grow crops during the time period of the late 1800’s in Latin America. Andrews confesses, “Rural workers who hold sufficient amount land to feed themselves and their

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675 Words | 3 Pages

Document A is a painting of Landing Negroes at Jamestown from Dutch Man-of-War, 1619. The New World’s need for labor was fulfilled with indentured servants, brought from Europe, and African slaves, brought by the millions to the Americas. The painting shows the ship and the order of these landings. Document A gives the audience the ability to see the way that slavery came to be in and impacted the Americas. Document C gives statistics on the amount of people forced to migrate and work in the Americas.

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940 Words | 4 Pages

Saint Domingue was one of the richest colonies of the Americas during the late eighteenth century. Its extravagance resulted from their large production of highly demanded coffee, cotton, and sugar, which heavily depended on strict slave regime. Slaves, many whom were African born, made up the vast majority of the population and suffered poor working and living conditions. The anger of slaves caused the Haitian Revolution, which would lead to Haiti freeing itself from its oppressor and becoming an independent republic in the Caribbean. The Haitian Revolution created a profound effect not only the former French colony, but also acted as a leader for reformation around the world.

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1388 Words | 6 Pages

The use of slaves has always been present in the world since the beginning of civilization, although the use and treatment of those slaves has differed widely through time and geographic location. Different geographies call for different types of work ranging from labor-intensive sugar cultivation and production in the tropics to household help in less agriculturally intensive areas. In addition to time and space, the mindsets and beliefs of the people in those areas affect how the slaves will be treated and how “human” those slaves will be perceived to be. In the Early Modern Era, the two main locations where slaves were used most extensively were the European dominated Americas and the Muslim Empires. The American slavery system and the

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In this article “African Dimensions Of The Stono Rebellion”, John Thornton a professor of history and African American studies, who wrote about the African slaves in the Americas, and specifically the servants in South Carolina during the early eighteenth century. In his writing, the author describes the personality of Africans and their desire to escape from slavery, going through obstacles on their path to freedom. John Thornton is primarily an Africanist, with a specialty in the history of West Central Africa before 1800. His work has also carried him into the study of the African Diaspora, and from there to the history of the Atlantic Basin as a whole, also in the period before the early nineteenth century. Thornton also serves as a consultant

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Introduction In Ronald Takaki’s book, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Takaki argues that despite the first slave codes emerged in the 1660’s, de facto slavery had already existed and provides evidence to support this claim. While he provides a range of data, these facts can be categorized in three groups: racial, economic, and historical. These groups served as precursors to what eventually led to slavery codes to be enacted and the beginning of one of the darkest chapters in American History. Racial

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928 Words | 4 Pages

In the Americas, the main exports were silver and cash crops, both of which required work that was terribly tedious and exhausting. This led to the overwhelming predominance of slavery in the Americas, since the Europeans were not willing to carry out the hard work themselves. When the Europeans found they lacked a workforce, the sought slaves elsewhere. While the people who were called slaves changed, the institution never did. The same mistreatment, torture, and horrible conditions were evident in American slavery until it was abolished centuries later.

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The end of the fifteenth century is attributed as the time period in which Christopher Colombus “discovered” the Americas. Although he was allegedly the first European to have reached these unknown lands at the time, many sought to reach the new world, for a variety of reasons. Most of those people could be divided in two: the settlers and the conquerors. In North America, there were more of the former, people looking for a new home where they could rebuild their families and lives. In Meso-America, however, the goal was to exploit the lands in order to produce and extract new goods which they could trade.

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814 Words | 4 Pages

In the 1700-1800’s, the use of African American slaves for backbreaking, unpaid work was at its prime. Despite the terrible conditions that slaves were forced to deal with, slave owners managed to convince themselves and others that it was not the abhorrent work it was thought to be. However, in the mid-1800’s, Northern and southern Americans were becoming more aware of the trauma that slaves were facing in the South. Soon, an abolitionist group began in protest, but still people doubted and questioned it.

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The impact of slavery on the Old South is a difficult measure to establish because slavery was the Old South. While the popular adage was “Cotton is King,” it was simply a microcosm of the delusion of the day. Truly, slavery was king. Slavery was the growing tension of the time, political catalyst and ironically crux of American power. To the masses, slavery was a social defining stance; the “peculiar institution” to some and a defining moral line to others, American life was changed depending on what view you took of slavery.

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358 Words | 2 Pages

As France was facing the beginning of the revolution, on the night of August 21, 1791, a well-organized slave revolt conducted by a voodoo priest named Dutty Boukman, broke out in the north of Saint-Domingue; where largest plantations were located. Black slaves massacred their masters and set fire to the sugar and coffee plantations. Although the revolts did extensive damage, the Whites kept control of the colony’s major cities. The issue with this revolt was not the total abolition of slavery, but a negation of the freedom of the slaves and their families. Also, they negotiated for a new system in which the week was divided into six days, 3 of these days would be work for their master and three days for themselves.

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858 Words | 4 Pages

While Caribbean slavery and Russian serfdom are similar in regard to economics costs, they differ in the cultural details and agricultural productions. Both Caribbean slavery and Russian serfdom provided very cheap labor and economically benefited their mother government; however, the two methods came about in different ways. When the Spanish and Portuguese first began colonizing the Caribbean and South America, they stumbled upon a rich supply of native. They soon coerced the natives into working on sugar and tobacco plantations as slaves—the conditions were horrendous and life was short and brutal.

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123 Words | 1 Pages

Saint-Domingue achieved its status as the Atlantic’s richest colony because slave traders and plantation owners purchased and imported people from west and west-central Africa and forced them to work as slaves on sugar and coffee plantations. The colony produced other goods such as indigo, cacao, and mahogany, but coffee and sugar were the real moneymakers. Prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue fostered a life-crushing labor system but at the same time provided unique opportunities for the development of an economically and socially rich class of gens de couleurs. Free people of color also lived in other American colonies, but their political and social strength and number made the situation in Saint-Domingue unique.3 The overwhelming majority of

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382 Words | 2 Pages

Race and class outlined the major reasons for the revolution that occurred in Haiti. One of the first causes was when the French National Assembly issued the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (in 1789), proclaiming, “men are born and remain free and equal in rights” (Popkin). This caused massive debate and uprisings in Saint Domingue, because the majority of population was not free or did not posses equal rights, therefore, the uprising “forced [the French] to consider whether their principles applied to the 800,000 slaves in France’s overseas colonies” (Popkin). Because the white planation owners had a difficult time controlling their slaves during this point they would treat them even worse and ignore this Declaration from France.

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