Intro to Nat Turner

for something bigger. Some people might say that Turner was crazy when he says that he could hear voices and could see visions, and these would help him to lead this great rebellion.

In the 1860 United States Census it shows that 55% or 436,631 of people in Mississippi were slaves by the year 1860, meaning that the majority of people in one state alone were enslaved. This shows how one state alone had took advantage of the gin leading to the heavy increase in the need for slaves to pick and produce cotton. Although some of these slaves were used for other jobs besides agriculture, the vast majority were used for the cotton industry.

Gray was filling in the empty spots he did so in his own words, and

During the 1800 – 1860 period the US experienced a considerable expansion not only of states, but also of people under slavery from half a million to roughly four million. Interestingly, from 1800 to 1860 slavery shifted from northern states to mostly south ones.

They did no more work than the other people in the village did. Their clothing, housing, food and mannerisms were the same as the people who owned them. European influence started to affect slavery in Africa and it was now becoming an enterprise rather than a legal system for punishment. Traders would come to Africa selling goods to these people, who did not have access to these goods before, in exchange for slaves. These traders would bribe chiefs of tribes to go out and capture neighboring villagers in exchange for goods, encouraging the kidnapping and enslavement of fellow Africans. "When a trader wants slaves, he applies to a chief for them, and tempts him with his wares." This was all a part of the European Triangular Trade. Goods were brought to Africa in order to trade with the Africans. Slaves were then shipped to the Americas to produce more goods to be sent to Europe in order start the whole trade cycle again.

” For many, the economic structure of slavery still held strong and it established status in British America. Slavery had begun in the later half of the 17th century and in many ways, it had made Atlantic commerce and overseas settlement possible. Thousands of Africans had been shipped overseas to work in the fields of staple crops. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, high concentrations of slaves remained in the southern colonies where they continued to labour on cotton and tobacco plantations. Of the thirteen colonies, Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas held the highest concentrations of slaves. In 1775, it is estimated that of the 2.5 million people living in the thirteen colonies, 500,000 were blacks. The vast majority of these blacks were slaves, with many labouring for their masters under harsh conditions. Although their experiences were difficult, blacks rarely revolted or staged rebellions against their masters. This has often been associated with the plantation system, and the role it played in severing blacks’ ties to one another. As highlighted by historian Silvia Frey, “The North American plantation organization, with the dominating presence of the master, inhibited the development of the tribal cohesiveness that characterized the islands’ plantation organization and produced widespread violence against whites by black guerrilla bands.” However, despite the absence of any significant

The Atlantic Slave Trade lasted between 1450 and 1750 and drastically impacted the lives of both European and African people. During this time, the Europeans, such as the British, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch, traveled to Africa in search of labor workers. In total, over twelve million slaves were taken, mainly because they workers to make money, but it also had to do with their race, religion – as they were not Christian – and to civilize them because the Europeans did not believe that they were humans. Due to these European beliefs, the Europeans saw themselves as the most powerful group and viewed slave trade as a business. The Africans, on the other hand, had a harder time transitioning into slavery. Many of them were taken from their homes and forced to accept a new life working as a slave. These events did not come without many sacrifices from the African people. One of the major reasons the slave trade was so expansive is due to the low life expectancy of the slaves after their capture. While the Europeans believed that they were helping the African culture, as well as themselves, the African society as a whole suffered the most.

Nat Turner was an African American slave who was born in Southampton County, Virginia on October 2, 1800. He started working on southern plantations 1831. When he was younger, everyone thought of him as being very smart. They saw that he was smart when he was about 3 or 4 years old. While young Nat Turner was playing with some of his friends, his mother heard him tell the children about something that had happened to him when he was born. She later had asked him about what he told the children. She asked him details about the incident, and it confirmed that he knew about this past event. From that time on, other slaves believed that in addition to his unique view, his physical markings were a sign that he would be a prophet.

In 1850, the quality of African American people’s lives depended largely on whether they lived in the Northern or Southern states. States in the North had all ended slavery by then, so black people who lived in those states lived free. But, in the South, slavery was common. Most slaves worked on large farms called plantations, growing the South’s primary crop - cotton. In the 1850s, the South was producing 4 million bales of cotton a year, the vast majority of which was produced using slave labor. All of this cotton brought wealth to the South. In fact, if the South was treated as its own nation in 1850, it would have been the 4th richest nation in the world. The economy depended on cotton, and therefore slaves.

The African Slave Trade was a massive system of Europeans taking African Americans and selling them into slavery. The African Slave Trade began in the 15th century. This slave trade put Africa in a weird relationship with Europe that cause the depopulation of Africa, but it increased the wealth of Europe.

In 1850, it was normal for a slave to work on a large plantation with around ten to fifteen other slaves. The

Otherwise, slavery was the important effect to promote causes of the Civil War. Approximately, in one Southern family has four held slaves to war. According to the 1860 in the United Stated, about 385,000 individuals owned one or more slaves. About of black people lived in the South, including one third of the population there as protested to 1% of the population of the

Long before their contact with whites, Africans were a strongly religious, and deeply spiritual people. During the early history of slavery, the African American spirituality was often seen by whites as a pagan faith. These rituals and dogmas were seen by whites as Voodoo, Hoodoo, Witchcraft, and superstitions. They often commented on these "pagan practices," and fetishes, and were threatened by them. As a result, great effort was put on eradicating these practices, and many were lost within a generation.# Although tremendous efforts was placed on eradicating the “superstitious” religious beliefs of the African slaves, they were not immediately introduced to the religion of white slave masters, Christianity. Many planters resisted the idea of converting slaves to Christianity out of a fear that baptism would change a slave's legal status. The black population was generally untouched by Christianity until the religious revivals of the 1730s and 1740s. The Bible was manipulated to support the institution of slavery and its inhumane practices. Christianity was used to suppress and conform slaves. Slaveholders, priests, and those tied to the Church undermined the beliefs of the millions of African-Americans converts.# White Christianity was used to justify the enslavement of blacks. By the early nineteenth century, slaveholders had adopted the view that Christianity would make slaves more submissive and orderly.

Slave Societies in this chapter includes people with similar characteristics who lived together in a well or less organized community. Slave societies in eighteenth -century were common in North America in New England, the Mid-Atlantic and the Lower Mississippi Valley. The black slavery experience was not unique, that is not the same in these areas, was influenced by local conditions, nation of the colonizers, composition of men and women, statistical characteristics of a population, such as age and income, places where black people came from, nature of the slave market in the Atlantic World or methods of production of economic activities. The majority of slaves who came from Africa were more

When Europeans arrived along the West African coast, slavery already existed on the continent, however slavery in Africa and the brutal form of slavery that would develop in the Americas were completely different. African slavery was more like European serfdom. For example, in the Ashanti Kingdom of West Africa, slaves could marry, own property and even own slaves. And slavery ended after a certain number of years of servitude. Most importantly, African slavery was never passed from one generation to another, and it lacked the racist element that whites were masters and blacks were slaves.