Plantation Life In Hawaii In The 1800s

American Hawaii Hawaii is known for its beautiful beaches, it’s nice year-round weather, and its culture. Thousands of vacationers come to Hawaii each year to get away from the stressful city and relax. But do they know how cruel the Americans were to the natives? Do they know how we corrupted their culture and their religion? Do they know how Hawaii really became a state? Probably not. When most people think of Hawaii, they think of happy Hawaiian babes hula dancing and palm trees swaying in the warm breeze. Hawaii has still held on to many of their traditions although they were invaded by Americans. But you have to go to a museum to see their old way of life. Hawaii is now populated mostly by Americans.

Most plantation workers faced backbreaking work and discrimination because of their Asian heritage, but things were different for the largest group of European immigrants. The Portuguese were the largest group of European immigrants to ever move to Hawaii. They played a major role in developing Hawaii into what it is today. Many Portuguese farmers and families came to Hawaii due to a fungus blight that was plaguing the crops and creating an economic depression for farmers in Portugal. The Portuguese had many push factor that brought them to Hawaii, they were also treated differently from all the other immigrant groups that worked the plantation as well, and they had many cultural impacts on Hawaii that still influence it today.

In the mid 1800 there was a boom in sudar crops. It was hard for the Hawaiians to make sugar alone, so they took immigrants from other countries to help the Hawaiians but there was many struggles to in this years of boom.Plantation life in Hawaii in the 1800 was difficult. Living conditions in Hawaii were severely poor, working conditions were painful, and racism was treated unfairly.

As the oldest island in Hawaii, Kauai has a wealth of history. Over the years, it has gone from ancient battlefields to a modern economy. First inhabited around 200 to 600 AD, the original settlers most likely reached Kauai from the Marquesas Islands nearly 2,000 miles away. Since these early immigrants arrived, an estimated 1,000 of the 1,300 species on Kauai have gone extinct. Centuries later, the Tahitians arrived and took over the island from the shorter Marquesans.

The crops grown on plantations and the slavery system changed significantly between 1800-1860. In the early 1800s, plantation owners grew a variety of crops – cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, hemp, and wheat. Cotton had the potential to be profitable, but there was wasn’t much area where cotton could be grown. However, the invention of the cotton gin changed this - the cotton gin was a machine that made it much easier to separate the seeds from cotton. Plantation owners could now grow lots of cotton; this would make them a lot of money. As a result, slavery became more important because the demand for cotton was high worldwide. By 1860, cotton was the main export of the south. The invention of the cotton gin and high demand for cotton changed

They feared of an uprising occurring among their current and former indentured servants which caused them to prefer slave labor more because they had more control over them. This caused a decrease in indentured servants and an increase in slaves. This is shown in Document, during 1680 and 1684 the switch occurred and from 1684 to 1699 the number of slaves increases tremendously. This shows how dependent the owners were of their plantations and

This shows that the South lacked in the white working force, forcing them to find another source of labor, African slaves. Another source of labor that was quickly dwindling for the plantation owners were indentured servants. In the first couple of waves of settlers that came over to the New World, many came over as indentured servants because it was the only way for them to pay for a trip over to escape the English economy and poverty. But the English economy began to improve and people didn?t need to come over anymore causing even more trouble for the plantation owners to find people to work the fields.

Indentured servants were used in early colonial times as a means of passage to the new world. The cash crops of the early settlers were exhaustingly labor intensive. In fact, U.S. History (2015) indicated that “the growth of tobacco, rice, and indigo and the plantation economy created a tremendous need for labor in Southern English America” (p. 1). The technology did not exist at the time for machinery that clears the ground and works the land as it does today. The work had to be done by hand; from clearing and prepping the fields to harvesting the crops, it was all manual labor for which the new land did not have ample supply of.

Living in a poorhouse in the 1800’s was considered normal because poor families couldn’t support themselves. “They are believed to have slept six people to one bed,” (Document 6) which is very disturbing because there aren’t any showers back then or even hospitals. It is a huge negative because of how horrible pollution and illnesses were commonly spread easily and killed off more people. Furthermore children were affected during this time because they had to stay at home in dangerous living situations with no protection. Luckily, this is a positive affect because child labor laws were passed. A huge defect is while they sat home, they weren’t being educated. Another main key point in this writing is children not being able to have an education. Instead of going to school and learning children were forced to work laboriously for a long amount of time. “From six in the morning till seven at night,” (Document 7). I acknowledge the suffering the children had to go through because they didn’t have a regular childhood. They were brought up in the world believing that working just to get by is normal

Transitioning from slavery to free-labor created new issues to arise between African Americans and white Southerners. It was believed that if no longer slaves, African Americans still must work. Henry Adams, an African American observing planters, wrote that, “white men would drive colored women out in the fields to work…and would tell colored men that their wives and children could not live on their places unless they worked in the fields.”10 In the same line of thinking, M. C. Fulton requests that freedwomen be required to work, stating that it is impossible for one man to provide for his family while his wife is in “idleness,” without stealing.11 What Adams observed and what Fulton complained about shows two different reasons for pushing freedwomen to work, in a way that, presumably, was different than what was expected of white women. The free-labor system caused disputes in what qualified as “work.” White employers claimed that, “the labor of the employee belongs to him for the whole year, that he must labor for him six days during the week and do all kinds of work required of him wether directly connected with the crop.”12 Freedmen, however, claimed that they had “no other work to do but to cultivate and gather the crop.”13 White employers did not seem to view African American laborers as employees, rather they saw them as slaves with contracts, able to submit complaints about their employment

In the antebellum America, slavery expanded because of planation needs and Westward expansion. In the 19th century, owning a cotton plantation was the number one thing, economically, to do. With the spread of the cotton market, planters “forged a distinctive culture around the institution of slavery”. Slavery increased even more because of the rise of cotton plantations. Plantations were big, and owners needed a good amount of workers to keep it running. Owners could either pay workers, or buy slaves and have them work for nothing. The owners would still usually clothe and feed the slaves, but some did not. In the end, owning slaves was more economically beneficial. On top of the cotton market, sugar also bursted onto the scene. Henry Bibb

Many men and woman were desperately needed to work on the land. The slave’s owners where white bond servants paying their passage across the ocean from Europe through indentured labor, eased but did not solve any of their problems. Slaves were mainly economical on large farms where they labored intensive cash crops, including tobacco, cotton, rice, sugar, and many other farming products that were able to be traded and exported. By the end of the American Revolution, slavery was finally proven unprofitable in the North, so it started dying out. In the South the institution was becoming less and less useful to farmers as tobacco prices fluctuated and began to drop rapidly. That’s is when the cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney, which “created the growth of southern slavery again and was the central place of cotton in the world economy” (class notes). The cotton replaced the tobacco leading to the South’s main cash crop and slavery became profitable again. That made the international slave trade rise. Although, majority of the Southerners did not own any slaves at all. But, by 1860 the South’s abnormality institution was impossible to separate from the regions economy.

The state of Hawaii, also known collectively as the Hawaiian Islands, has a long history regarding its development. From migration, to the development of producing goods as a way of bartering, to an eventual governed society, the modernization of Hawaii has an illustrious history. The people who impacted this and were part of creating a globalized look at Hawaii played a part into modernization the state. This paper will illustrate the modernization of this land and its westernization throughout the years.

The task system portrayed the Lowcountry rice slavery as more kinder and gentler than plantation labor elsewhere but that is not true. The conditions of disease, labor exertion, and brutality on rice plantations was the down fall in the task system labor force. The conditions were so heinous that the Lowcountry did not experience a natural increase of enslaved populations due to the birth rate of the enslaved being too low. The enslaved children that made it to birth and childhood experienced an especially high mortality rate also due to the conditions they had to live in. Writers at the time remarked that there was no harder, or more unsanitary, work possible; “negroes, anckle and even mid-leg deep in water which floats an ouzy mud, and exposed all the while to a burning sun which makes the very air they breathe hotter than the human blood; these poor wretches are then in a furness of stinking putrid effluvia: a more horrible employment can hardly be imagined.” (“South Carolina and the African Slave Trade”). Lowcountry rice fields have been described as charnel houses for African-American slaves. Malaria and enteric diseases killed off the low country slaves at rates which are

Preindustrial labor, or “old” labor, was not easy. Days were long and pay was never sufficient enough for