Essay on Slavery
Slavery in the United States before the American Civil War was a very controversial topic that created divides between many families and friends. The divide ended with the northern territories being against slavery and the southern territories being pro-slavery. Many slaves in the South tried to reach the North, but after plantation owners quickly grew angry that their “property” was running away, the government created the Fugitive Slave Act stating that any slave who ran away must return back to their owners if they are found in the United States. Laws like these restricted slaves tremendously, but slaves were treated much worse than that.
The treatment and experiences of slaves were unbearable, due to the fact that nobody
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This Act made it incredibly hard for slaves to get out of slavery because now they couldn’t just go to the North; now they were forced to go all the way to Canada. Increasing the length that they had to travel was very detrimental to many of the the slaves because they didn’t know how to survive very well in the wilderness. This lead to the creation of the Underground Railroad which was created by Harriet Tubman to help enslaved humans get to free territories where they can do what they wish. It wasn’t very complicated to navigate the underground railroad, but it was very dangerous to navigate. In order to make sure that you were going in the correct direction and going to the correct house, you would have to go up to complete strangers and say “friend of a friend”, which takes a lot of guts because if you were a black person in this time period, everyone else that wasn’t part of the Underground Railroad hated black people. If the person was working with the Underground Railroad, they would repeat “friend of a friend” back to you. Runaway slaves would recognize these people because they would have candles in their windows. Slaves would continue their travels at night because there was a lesser chance of being seen by people chasing them at night, so it was easy to see the candles from a distance. The Underground Railroad was not the only way that people of the North and freed slaves helped those who were enslaved; there were many abolitionists who were trying to fight against slavery for