People crying for freedom and liberty from tyranny built a nation out of greed and unethical acts. The rapacious desires of a nation to gain wealth and possessions lead to the emotional and psychological trauma of West Africans and African Americans. In spite of being taken from Africa, the sweat and blood of these Africans contributed to the birth of the beautiful nation that would eventually recognize their descendants as equals. The Exploration Age commenced in the fifteenth century when European nations decided to expand their power for technological, demographic, and economic reasons. The results of European expansion lead to new discoveries, international trade of goods and people, migration, and rivalry among European …show more content…
With less indentured servants in America to provide labor, the labor force transitioned from indentured servants to chattel slavery. “Unlike Spain and Portugal, who by the late fifteenth century were already enslaving West Africans in their domestic economies, the English had no prior model of slavery to serve them in the Americas.” Britain did not set out to enslave West Africans; they did not have the means to justify enslavement. The English later turned to the bible to justify participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade;
The official rationale for enslaving Africans was that they were heathens, but slave traders and slave owners sometimes interpreted a passage in the book of Genesis as their justification. Ham, they maintained, committed a sin against his father Noah that condemned his supposedly black descendants to be "servants unto servants."
The English related the color black to sin. They justified slavery because the bible stated that Ham and his descendant’s punishment for sinning was slavery. The southern colonies were made up of large plantations that produced tobacco, cotton or rice. In comparison to northern states, the southern economy was dependent on the free labor African slaves provided. The plantation society was divided into four major groups: the wealthy planters, the smaller planters, the poor whites, and the Africans. Plantation owners often trained some
Throughout the book, The Origins of Slavery, the author, Betty Woods, depicts how religion and race along with social, economic, and political factors were the key factors in determining the exact timing that the colonist’s labor bases of indentured Europeans would change to involuntary West African servitude. These religion and racial differences along with the economic demand for more labor played the key roles in the formation of slavery in the English colonies. When the Europeans first arrived to the Americas in the late sixteenth century, at the colony of Roanoke, the thought of chattel slavery had neither a clear law nor economic practice with the English. However by the end of that following century, the demand for slaves in the
The English colonies in present day America used slavery as a form a cheap labor, but it wasn't until the seventeenth century that the view of slavery became racial based. Slave labor on Chesapeake was thought as beneficial because slaves never became free and their children were born into slavery.“Species in which a distinction is already marked immediately at birth, between those of it members who are intended for being ruled and those who are intended to rule.” Many poor farmers that lived on Chesapeake felt that they were intended to rule because they could get married and have families, property, move and associate with other people, be a jury, vote and hold office. “They could also work and sleep as they pleased.” When the English started expanding and looking for land one of their rationales was that they could put the land to better use by employing European-style agriculture and livestock. Many of the English policies towards the Indians were based on segregation. In order to continue segregation, the English came to develop the notion of “race”: they began to view race as an imperative that justified English rule. “Greeks regarded themselves as well born into their own country but absolutely and in all places.” The English thought of themselves the same way. Aristotle’s views were present in the English justification for supporting that slavery and the taking of lawns justified and therefore it was natural because they were
Before the 1680's, indentured servitude was the primary source of labor in the newly developed colonies. There were
Any knowledgeable man of the bible realizes that it does indeed refer to slavery and the justification of it numerous times. Jacobs writes that the “[plantation owners] seem to satisfy their consciences with the doctrine that God created the Africans to be slaves” (44). She continues by quoting the Bible, stating “What a libel upon the heavenly Father, who ‘made of one blood all nations of men!’” (44). This statement says that all men are equal, although other verses directly contest it.
A common biblical reference that they used was The Ten Commandments, which states that one must never covet someone else’s house, manservant, or maidservant. Due to this ancient context that most Americans lived by at the time, it provided sufficient evidence that slavery was rather “human nature”, or a naturally occurring and cyclical practice in society. In addition to religion, pro-slavery activists and followers argued that bringing the Africans to the United States was a “win-win” situation. Bringing the Africans to the United States was actually a benefit for the Africans because they were being brought to a richer, prouder, and more valuable country. In a way, slavery was a way for the slaves to pay their slaveholders back for bringing them to such a “nicer” location.
Aside from social benefits, geographical aspects made slavery seem more appealing. Average food crops were not compatible with the southern soil, so southern farmers turned to rice, cotton, and tobacco. Cotton and tobacco were the South’s most important and profitable crops (green). Tobacco became the main source of revenue for the southern colonists (yellow). It requires eleven months of intense labor on the plantations (pink). This gave plantation owners another reason to dislike indentured servitude; they
In American history, every event and person plays a part in the future. For example, rich plantation owners helped America advance their economy. However, that would not have been at all possible without the help of their slaves. The time and institution of slavery is a time of historical remembrance. It played a primary role during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The treatment, labor conditions, and personal stories of these slaves’ treatment and labor conditions are all widely discussed around the world to this day.
Since the creation of the constitution in 1776, a new country emerged from the old world, a new America. With innovative ideas that were shocking the planet with its democracy, they ushered the values of freedom and rights that every man shall have. But even though did looks terrific, it did not apply to everyone. Black people were excepted from it because they were “pieces of human”, in other words, they were objects. And it was constitutionally right. Treating blacks as slaves was something permissible. Based on the thoughts of the Bible, Leviticus 44-46 “‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them, you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46
Although they chose the African Negro race, race isn’t the cause for it. It’s all about money, power, and the ability to work. African Negros had very little knowledge about anything around this time, and the master saw this as an opportunity to profit off of them. Some people actually thought that no other race could get the job done like African Negros can. People such as the Governor George McDuffie of South Carolina believed that ‘African can change his skin,’ it will be useless to try by any human power, to make free those whom God has doomed to be slaves…’ Slaves were treated in a very horrific way, it seems as if they got beaten more than they deserved. The scars that were left after each whipping are scars that will never heal and that’s something that they just had to deal with. Why? They were property to others, so whatever the master says, goes. Simple. Do your job, or get
Many English immigrants came to America to seek religious freedom and some to improve their economic conditions. The concept of how slavery, thought by many colonists to be an economic necessity, was shaped and came to be rationalized and justified through Christian religious beliefs, is very interesting.
Slavery was present in almost ever home even religious houses, thus showing others that slavery is okay and treating people like property is normal. Although not all religious people had slaves, the ones that did made all the other religious people look like hypocrites. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A racial pretext for slavery was never treated as necessary because of the preexisting hierarchical system in Ancient Roman and Greek civilizations. Racist dogma began to flourish among the plantation owners, who gained largely from slavery. After bringing in African slaves in mass quantities to produce cash crops, the plantation owners were driven to establish the foundations and ideologies that would ingrain African enslavement. Planters attempted quite a few justifications, such as Noah’s curse on Ham from the Bible. They contend that Negros were descended from Ham and therefore born into servitude. However, by the time slavery was abolished they favorited the notion that Negros were a different and lesser species. The establishment of plantation based economies with systemized slave codes fortifying racial slavery and mostly African labor forces in the early New World colonies was to some measure a domino effect of the economic and demographic shifts that sugar constructed in the
The lengths that Europeans went to just justify their bigoted ideas is astounding. Originally, it was: Noah cursed Ham. Nothing else; nothing about Ham’s descendant being black. The European modification that the descendants of Ham were “cursed by being black” goes back to the dichotomy of [the definitions] of “black” and “white”. Sanders calls these modifications “fanciful rabbinical expansions of the Genesis
The Holy Bible speaks of slavery as a direct result of sin and is really against God’s intention. In the book of Genesis 9:25-27 from the Bible is where the first mentioning of slavery begins when Noah curses his grandson, Canaan, and his descendants to slavery because of Ham, his father, saw Noah when he was drunk and naked in the tent. The Bible also tells us that God told Abraham that his people would be strangers in a land that did not belong
An evil origin ignited an immoral flame that spread throughout this beautiful, unpredictable world. Now putting aside my established point of view, Eric Williams proposed that slavery was an economic situation. There are multiple reasons why the enslavement of people as economic by the following: a shortage of labor in the New World, African slaves are cheaper than of other races, and African slaves physical endurance is vastly superior to of white and Indian slaves. In other words, the expansion of the Americas caused a need for labor, which reinforced slavery and then caused racism.