Slave Ship Slavery

For over 2,000 years, slavery has been conducted in various parts of the world. From year 1500 to year 1900, Europeans stole individuals from West Africa, West Central Africa, and Southeast Africa and shipped them to the different parts of the Atlantic. This process dehumanized them of their identity. Europeans stole husbands, wives, merchants, blacksmiths, farmers, and even children. They removed them from their homelands and gave them new names: slaves. European slaveholders never thought to take ownership of their actions by killing humans with brutality and degradation. Slave trade was considered popular in England and soon after more countries began the process of taking slaves to newly claimed territories. These countries include

Heinrich Heine's poem the Slave ship reveals the inhumane and horrible experiences slaves had to go through while traveling on slave ships. At the beginning of the poem the captain Mynheer van Koek of the ship admires his work, for he obtained six hundred slaves "dirt cheap". More than likely, Koek bought the slaves from African leaders who had no problem in trading their own people. Often times African leaders would do this to punish their people, not knowing the lingering effect it would have on the world. Heine's describes how Koek swapped "brandy", "trinkets", and "beads" for the precious life of a slave. In stanza 7, the captain's moment of bliss has finally come to an end we he realizes that the slaves are dieing in substantial numbers,

“The Horrors of a Slave Ship,” describes in detail, the tragic experiences of Olaudah Equiano as a captive slave. Equiano suffered many sleepless nights; he was flogged and kidnapped multiple times. In the article, the author is trying to give the reader the feeling by giving details of the brutally floggings and desperation as many slaves suffocated to death as they were placed in an overcrowded deck. Overall, the author tries to give readers their point across of the difficulties in being a captive slave.

The human manufacturing process defined by Mustakeem encompasses the warehousing, transport, and delivery of African bodies. Mustakeem establishes a grim and soul snatching tone as the process is deconstructed throughout the first chapter of “Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage”. Trekking the Middle Passage was not simple feat for the actors of the sick movement of people, and it was disgustingly worse for women, children, and the elder Africans. This process was one piece of the evolution of the New World economy emphasized by Mustakeem. “It is not enough to say that Africans were captured, transformed into commodities, shipped out of Africa, sold to interested buyers, and turned into slaves once moved into plantations,” page 7.

Chattel slavery, so named because people are treated as the personal property, chattels, of an owner and are bought and sold as commodities, is the original form of slavery. When taking these chattels across national borders it is referred to as Human Trafficking especially when these slaves provide sexual services.

Slavery was like an addiction that the south could not break. Although it provided economic benefits to both the north and the south, the addiction or “curse” bound the people to the downfalls of slavery as well. Slavery created an oligarchy of which a small aristocracy of slave-owners would dominate political, economic, and social affairs of both blacks and whites. The institutions negative impact on the South, and even the entire nation would eventually lead to a great tragedy: the civil war.

Everyone has their own understanding of what slavery is, but there are misconceptions about the history of “slavery”. Not many people understand how the slave trade initially began. Originally Africa had “slaves” but they were servants or serfs, sometimes these people could be part of the master’s family. They could own land, rise to positions of power, and even purchase their freedom. This changed when white captains came to Africa and offered weapons, rum, and manufactured goods for people. African kings and merchants gave away the criminals, debtors, and prisoner from rival tribes. The demand for cheap labor was increasing, this resulted in the forced migration of over ten million slaves. The Atlantic Slave Trade occurred from 1500 to 1880 CE. This large-scale event changed the economy and histories of many places. The Atlantic Slave Trade held a great amount of significance in the development of America. Africans shaped America by building a solid foundation for the country.

The two majors drivers that led to the transatlantic slave trade was the European desire for the agricultural products of the Americas and the need for laborers to work the land in the Americas. All participants, besides for the slaves, benefited from the trading.

From the moment of capture, African men, women and children endured a relentless chain of pain and abuse. Life onboard the slave ships became a constant battle for survival, as the gruesome conditions below the deck presented formidable physical health problems. Burnside describes the African slaves descent into hell:

A valid point Howard Zinn wrote in A People's History of the United States was that African Americans were "ensnared" into American slavery for many reasons, those of which include desperate settlers, the helplessness of Africans outside their home country, the greed of colonists, the control against rebellion, and the consequences of black and white collaboration. I believe he makes a very valid point, for all his reasons have historical evidence to back them up.

When Americans today consider the term “slavery,” they recall a dark time in their nation's past, when an entire race of people were subjugated solely for the color of their skin, a travesty of civil rights that progressive thinking has striven to heal, insofar as paving the way to the election of an African-American president. Slavery is an antiquated practice from a draconian past, and it has no relevance in this modern, enlightened age. What Americans fail to comprehend is that slavery is not only alive and well, but thriving, and fueling the global economy at the expense of human lives. The International Labour Organization (ILO), a United Nations agency dedicated to protecting the human rights of laborers world-wide, estimates that

The process of Emancipation in the United States dismantled what was known as Chattel slavery, but didn’t initially prohibit the actions taken to work around this. African Americans were still struggling with a system of oppression that sought to keep them in other forms slavery. The south at this time was still known as a “landed aristocracy,” meaning that those who owned land held majority of the wealth. The idea was to redistribute confiscated lands to African Americans to grant them economic independence, since their labor was the foundation of all the generated profits. The Sherman Field Orders would grant this for the African American population, only to later be dismantled by state legislation. Generally, the Black community wanted

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the South was dominated by an elite group of White men who made their profits off the labor of Black slaves. Only 12% of southern white slaveholders owned twenty or more slaves, the amount used to distinguish between a planter and a farmer. Planters owned more than half of all the slaves and produced three-quarters of the South’s cotton, making these men very wealthy and allowing them to establish the social, political, and economic tone of the antebellum South.

In The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker, the introduction starts out with the description of being in the bottom of the canoe. The owba coo coo was one of the worst punishments a slave could receive. There was much fear of the ship and with it came an odor of death. In the introduction Rediker gives the reader an insight of a woman before she boards the slave ship. Through this story the reader gets an emotional insight of the terror that came along with the ship. When the slaves boarded the ship it could be compared to them transitioning into hell. W.E.B Dubois refers to the Middle Passage as the “most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history.” Many of the slaves died on the

Slavery has been in the United States early as 1619. Slaves were brought to America for one thing and one thing only, money. Tobacco took a great amount of work to harvest, but with the slaves help it all got completed. Slaves cost at least three more times than a regular servant for the reason that slavery was their life, it was their job. Regular servants finished their ‘slavery’ time in about 4 years. Slavery really got across the whole country as time passed, and in 1670 the crop, tobacco, took over the nation. In fact, slavery didn’t really come into play in the laws until the 1660s. In the early 1680s Virginia wanted to alter what a slave was, earlier defined by the House of Burgess. The Europeans saw African Americans as human