Civil War Dbq Essay

During the years that led up to the Civil War, the economic system between the North and the South were completely incompatible. The South’s economy was based on agriculture, whereas, the North was depended on manufacturing. The difference between the economic systems significantly created a conflict between the North and the South such as Anti-slavery, pro-slavery, and political demand. The plantation system in the South had rapidly grown, especially with the invention of the cotton gin. The South significantly raised the value of slaves, because slaves were more profitable to work on plantations. Slaveholders usually used slaves as a machines, by sending them to work on cotton, tobacco, and corn fields (Sass 74). Even though the agriculture

This made the price of slave extremely expensive, an average of a healthy men slave cost one thousand and eight hundred dollars which equivalent to forty-five thousand dollars in current money. This made slave-owners that did not grow much cotton to sell off their slaves and caused slaves to be separated from their family. (Berkin 255). As a matter of fact, slave owners not only caused dehumanization of the slaves, but mostly treated their slaves violently. Josiah Henson, in document six of “Agriculture Development and Slavery in the South”, describes the violence that had happened to his parents and other slaves. Henson claimed that he saw his dad was once beaten by his owner, another slave got his head thrust against the post, and his right ear fastened to it with a tack and it has been said that what they get if the slaves strikes a white man, this shows the violence that occurred during the slavery of white men have toward the slave. Consequently, in the eighth document of “Agriculture Development and Slavery in the South”, Harriet Jacobs was a former slave, describing the risk to the female slaves. She claimed that slaves are a property of their master and their master could do anything to them (Hoffman 371). As a result, slaves started to run away from their masters and refused to work, according to document four in the “Agriculture Development and

He considered laborers earning insufficient wages “wage slaves”, because the laborers worked so hard and barely sufficient for their existence (Hoffman 333). Moreover, he claimed that if the slave has never been free man, we think, as general rule, his sufferings are less than those of the free laborer at wages. As can be seen above, these two document shows the definition of “Wage Slavery”, because people work so hard that they don’t have enough time for social interaction but still didn’t own enough money to support their life and family. Moreover, in the seventh document, George Templeton wrote his diary about the European immigrants, he claimed that there were Irish men and women were dragged out and lay on the ground where they had been working twelve feet below the street level. This document illustrates how European immigrants are moving to the North for the jobs, and they were extremely facing the danger during the work and also didn’t make lots of money either. Not to mention, most immigrants usually faced an extremely discrimination from the facts that they believe in different god, dressed differently and spoke different language. Furthermore, most children that work in the factory does not have opportunity to be educated just like slaves. For instance, Harriet Hanson Robinson a worker in a factory that has been mention above, quite school to work