The Color Purple

Slavery involves a lot of factors as to why it exists, it exists because mankind is greedy and is out for money and if that means that you have to put others down then that will happen. Different opinions on this matter exist and whether they are right or wrong is not in my hands. The difference in education, fear and economy between the North and South will be involved in the topic. However the resistance to the anti-slavery campaign, led by Lincoln, is one that was not because of an ideological opposition but rather an economic ploy. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “America has a free government where every man has a right to be equal with every other man”, but that was not the case before the Civil War. The resistance of the South to Lincoln’s

This difference is about how many slaves they have in the North compared to the South. Alice Walker has written a book called The Color Purple, that is set in 1920s Georgia, that makes this very clear even though is not set in the same time period as the civil war. The protagonist Celie has a sister, Nettie, that lives in the North. Nettie has been writing letters to Celie about how colored people are treated and their way of living. Nettie said that she got examined by a colored doctor, page 136, which means that the doctor was free. It also meant he was educated and had the freedom to study which was something the slaves in the South did not have, that freedom was stripped from them when they arrived in the states that allowed slavery. The North with its early abolishment of slavery shows progress and continuity while the South is still backwards and is struggling to bloom. The blooming process was forcefully stopped because they were too focused on slavery, that focus killed any momentum they had. If the South had chosen not to focus on slavery but on normal manual labor and/or industrialization they would have been able to improve their economy. In contrast to the factory, the plantation was a central feature of Southern life. Would they have lost their 3.9 million slaves in the 1860s there would be an economic disaster that would have changed everything, because they had no back-up plan. All of the sources link back to it being an economic ploy rather than an ideological opposition. If the numbers lied it would have been totally different but numbers do not lie as they always state