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

Open Document