Expansion Of Slavery Essay

In 1619, slavery began in America when a Dutch ship brought 20 African slaves to the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America relied on African slaves as a less expensive labor source. Some historians as well as other researchers conducted a theory and came up with the estimate that 6 to 7 million black slaves were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, omitting the African continent of some of its healthiest men and women. From the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia, African slaves had to adjust to working on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast in the 17th and 18th centuries. After the American Revolution, many colonists

In addition to that, Native Americans captured enemy tribes and sold them into slavery. Slavery was a violent tine because plantation masters relied on violence to handle their slaves. In addition to that, the racism and prejudice involved at the time were dehumanizing towards the African slaves. There were other factors that lead to the expansion of slavery such as the cotton gin. The textile industry in England was in a huge demand for American cotton, so in 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. The cotton gin made it easier to make cotton. This made things run smoother in a way because the production of southern crops suffered due to the trouble of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand. Over time, the cotton gin would go from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of strictly cotton. Because of this, the transition strengthened the region’s reliance on slave labor. By 1860, the cotton gin had reached over to nearly 4 million cotton-producing states in the