ipl-logo

Slavery In Early America Essay

639 Words3 Pages

Slavery
“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally”, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was a big advocate of anti-slavery in early America. The issue of slavery throughout the span of early America is very significant. In early America and other countries, slavery was defined as an institution. If slaves were defiant they could be beaten, mutilated, branded and sometimes castrated; and this was all legal. Just this statement makes me sick and makes it an important topic to discuss. I believe that slavery is an important study of early America because of its effect on cotton production, causing the secession of many states, and also brought Lincoln to create the emancipation proclamation during the Civil War, just to name a few.
In early America, cotton was the most important export. The exporting of cotton bales increased from 1815 to 1859 by about four million (American Yawp, chapter 8). Northern textiles had rapid growth which led to an increase in the business of slavery because they picked the cotton. Cotton growers needed more slaves to keep up to the demands of the textile companies. Slave-labor was the key to the …show more content…

Secession occurred when states withdrew from the Union because of the drive toward the abolition of slavery. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina was the first state to secede. Mississippi was the second state to secede stating why they should disaffiliate from the federal union, “There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin” (Mississippi Secession, 1861). Secession at first was peaceful but then led to arguments and controversies triggering the first shots at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. It came down to war being the variable to eradicate legal slavery in the United

Show More
Related
131 Words | 1 Pages

The use of the cotton gin had a major impact on slavery by expanding the use and population of slaves. “This machine revolutionized the process of separating cotton from its seed, making it dramatically faster and less expensive to turn picked cotton into usable cotton for textiles” the author said. Harvesting the cotton fields was intense work and the more cotton that was being produced lead to more fields causing more slaves to be needed to work those fields. All the large cotton plantations that the south maintained, by 1850 the slave population increased tremendously. “Southern wealth had become reliant on this one crop and thus was completely dependent on slave-labor.”

Read More
490 Words | 2 Pages

The North had a far better economy than the south, with about twice as many soldiers, factories benefited the North’s economy rather than the South, increasing tensions between the two regions. Southerners relied on their plantations and slaves to work on them, so the fact that the Northerners wanted to take away their slaves just pushed the South to the edge. By 1860 the North had over twice the amount of railroads as the South; despite the fact that the South had a larger population due to slaves (Doc A). The mass amounts of railroads in the North upheld the large amounts of deliveries between factories. While the North was mostly industrial and the South was more agricultural.

Read More
484 Words | 2 Pages

Evelyn Castillo Mr. Lopez APUSH Per. 3 Slavery was an essential component to the economy and labor force in the United States that slowly grew into a major conflict that was the main source of tension between the states. They were first brought into the New World around the time of its settling. Slaves were treated inhumanely by Americans and enslaving them was seen as normal.

Read More
248 Words | 1 Pages

How important was slavery to the economy of the South? Discuss its effects on agriculture, industry, politics, society and any other relevant aspects of the South. 1. Agriculturally and economically, white Southerners increased the effective use of slave labor thanks to Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. The cotton gin processed picked cotton faster than human hands and doubled the volume of cotton they grew. As Britain and France’s interest for textiles they traded around the world increased, American investors saw this as an opportunity for the fertile lands of central Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

Read More
517 Words | 3 Pages

Slavery was also increasing because you never had to pay the slaves that you owned and the plantations required a lot of labor, so slaves were a lot cheaper than the indentured servants. The profits from tobacco and rice led planters to import enslaved Africans, which made the economy depend on slavery. Although slavery was a morally

Read More
1183 Words | 5 Pages

When the Northern Region of America was colonized by the Europeans, there was much idle and fertile land which ha d to be put into good use. However, there was shortage of cheap labor. Thus, cheap men and women were required to work on the plantations. Enslaving white slaves was not the solution because the whites were deemed unfit and lazy to deliver better outcomes like the strong African men. This led to the wake of slave-trade where explorers would import slaves from Africa and sell them in America.

Read More
1116 Words | 5 Pages

In the 1800s the need for cotton rapidly increased as the textile industry was on the rise in the North and even in Europe. As the need for cotton increased, the need for labor increased as well. “American cotton production soared from 156,000 bales in 1800 to more than 4,000,000 bales in 1860.”(Dattel, 2006) Southerners believed that slavery was the answer to all of their problems. The South

Read More
1271 Words | 6 Pages

One of the biggest creation in the 19th century was cotton and the Cotton Gin. Cotton played a huge factor in slavery, and the way they used it. Cotton helped grow the south’s economy and many of the slave owners depended on it. Before cotton, the go to source in the south was rice and tobacco. People didn’t really think much of cotton.

Read More
766 Words | 4 Pages

No matter your stance at the time, one thing became clear: socially, politically and economically, slavery was the fabric of American success and gave birth to the Old South as we know it today. At the center of the entire institution of slavery, and central to its defense, was the economic domination it provided a young country in international markets. In the early 19th century, cotton was a popular commodity and overtook sugar as the main crop produced by slave labor. The production of cotton became the nation’s top priority; America supplied ¾ of the cotton supply to the entire world.

Read More
613 Words | 3 Pages

The Constitution was known as the supreme law of the land, a legal document that establishes the laws of the government. In the constitution it states that all men are created equal; however, slavery was an opposing ideal to it. Slavery in the United States was a forbidding reality. Slavery was not mentioned in the constitution because of these three factors: the Three-fifths Clause, the Slave Trade Clause, and the Fugitive Slave Clause.

Read More
1135 Words | 5 Pages

More cotton led to the need of more slaves. Slavery had become so essential that the slaves outnumbered the whites in certain parts of the South. (Tucker,

Read More
704 Words | 3 Pages

Have you ever wondered how life was for the slaves in the South? Slaves in the South suffered through many consequences. For example, they suffered through many whippings with cow skin if they didn't obey their master, they also got separated from their family mostly the fathers, so, they can be sold to a very mean slave owner. Even if they were living a miserable life on the farms, they had their own culture and they managed to even get married in the farmland or where they worked. Not only did the slaves live on the farm.

Read More
376 Words | 2 Pages

The African-American race will never be fully relieved from the emotional pain that was instilled in them over hundreds of years of oppression and inequity. Slavery was a horrendous institution that was full of equally horrendous acts committed against African-American slaves on a daily basis. These acts are the basis of the psychological scar on African Americans. When a race or group of people is forced to endure suffering on the level which slaves experienced during slavery, the memory is not so easily forgotten. It sticks with them, leaving them, and their ancestors, with the burden of this mistreatment.

Read More
637 Words | 3 Pages

Slavery began long before the colonization of North America. This was an issue in ancient Egypt, as well as other times and places throughout history. In discussing the evolution of African slavery from its origins, the resistance and abolitionist efforts through the start of the Civil War, it is found to have resulted in many conflicts within our nation. In 1619, the first Africans in America arrived in Jamestown on a Dutch ship.

Read More
441 Words | 2 Pages

Over the years from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, slaves were not only transported to just the United States, but to all around the world. They were sold and traded to many different countries which meant that their cultures went with them. As they would grow and multiply in an area, they would repopulate in others. Forced labor migrations contributed to globalization because when slaves of different ethnicities were shipped to other parts of the world, they took their culture and history with them. When the term “Slave trade” is used, it has a negative meaning and usually a negative context behind it, but by seeing what the slave trade actually did for not only America, but for the world, the meaning behind it can be viewed from another angle.

Read More

More about Slavery In Early America Essay

Related Topics

Open Document