Slavery And The Slave Trade

In the 15th century, the Portuguese started to explore the coast of Africa. The Portuguese began to transport African slaves to Portugal and Spain, thus initiating the popularity of buying and selling slaves. In the 16th century, Europeans began to trade African slaves across the Atlantic Ocean. Slavery was not a new concept to Africa. Many African leaders prior to popularized slave trade had traded other Africans to the Arabs as slaves. Most people that were sold into slavery were forced into it because they had committed a crime. However, many were sold into slavery because they were captured in raids. Europeans did not intentionally search for slaves, but if they came across Africans that could be captured, they took them. Africans brought slaves to the coast in efforts to trade goods for cheap labor.

Slavery in America started in 1619 when settlers brought over African Americans to Jamestown, Virginia. The slaves came to Jamestown to work on the tobacco plantations. The slaves were also sent to other colonies such as South Carolina to work on the cotton plantations. Slaves were people who worked for no pay. This caused the land owners to make more profit from their plantations because they didn’t have to pay their workers. Southern slave owners, specifically in South Carolina, relied on slavery as a major part of their economy.

Virgina has differences and similarities when it comes to slave narratives. To explain further, this is why the details and experiences that these ex-slaves gave in describing the institution of slavery and the practice of slavery are tremendously important because Virginia became a royal colony, the first in English history. However, the English kings were occupied with affairs at home, the Virginia house of burgesses was able to continue its functions and won formal recognition in the late 1630s. Thus, representative government under royal domain was assured. By 1641, when Sir William Berkeley became governor, the colony was well established and extended on both sides of the James up to its falls.

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.

Slavery became an established activity in America by 1600’s. The slaves were mostly to provide free and cheap labor. Apart from America, slavery was practiced in other parts of the world throughout history, and in fact it can be traced back to the time of the ancient civilization. With industrial revolution especially with the rise of sugar plantations, the slaves were used to grow sugar in the periods from 1100. This intensified between 1400 and 1500 when Portugal and Spain ventured into sugar growing in the eastern Atlantic regions. The growth of the plantations required labor, hence African slaves were bought from Africa, to provide labor.

Slavery of the Black man in America was the cruelest ever known to man. Europeans transported slaves from Africa as early as 1505. The African Slaves were first exploited on an island named Hispaniola, in the Caribbean by the Europeans to do labor work, before they were sent to the Americas. The women usually worked the interior cooking and cleaning while the men were sent out into the plantation fields to farm. These Africans were stripped of their homes, cultures, and languages. Slaves were treated like animals.

Freedom is what our ancestors fought for and because of them we are here today. Struggle and pain are just a few things that our ancestors experienced. However, I learned that this nightmare ended in 1865 after the 13th Amendment was passed. It gave them freedom. These were some of the phrases that will come to my mind when discussing slavery with other individuals. Throughout the years I have been a victim of my own ignorance for believing that Slavery undoubtedly ended in 1865. I can honestly admit that I was wrong.

Slaves; people who are the property of and wholly subject to another. Why did it begin in the first place? It was not until December 6th of 1865 when congress finally ratified a law to abolish slavery. However, words of the law still had not spread and it would take around a year for the slave owners to finally set the slaves free. The process of freeing the slaves was full of misery, pain, and constant insults by the majority of the white population. However, despite discouragement from the whites, the black people (with the support of some whites) pulled through and achieved the main goal of being independent. That event took a while to occur, the real question is how did blacks and whites resist slavery until it was finally abolished. How did the slaves counter the abuse and harassment of the slave owners? I hypothesized that the blacks were able to withstand the punishment and slowly undermine slavery due to their intelligence. And at the end of slavery, both races would be intellectually equal.

Slaves were first imported into the United States back in 1502 by a merchant named; Juan de Córdoba. The South was very interested in bringing in more slaves so that they could use them to grow various kinds of crops such as ; tobacco, sugar, and cotton, in their huge plantations, which were owned by farmers. Thus, the south favored slavery as it brought them economic benefits. Even though slaves were very beneficial to their masters, they still were treated very badly. Men would get beaten, burned, whipped, and even hanged. Women would get raped and sexually abused by their slaveholders.

Capturing native African people and using them as slaves was not a new idea. It had already been going on in Portugal for some 350 years , where Africans worked day in and day out in fields. Slavery was decreasing in Europe, but it still existed. The “New World,” which would eventually become the United States, was not expansive enough at first to need slave labor, but this soon changed. The colonies grew in size as more people traveled there and established trading posts and towns. The Dutch West India Company, a huge trading company located in what would become Manhattan, sold eleven enslaved Africans to Virginia, and the slaves, all male, arrived in 1626. They were forced to work in harsh conditions from sunup to sundown and were a driving force in building the infrastructure of the town.

In the 1500s to 1900s, Africans were taken from Africa and brought across the Atlantic Ocean where they were traded and sold for labor in the New World, which included the Caribbean Islands, and North and South America. Around the 1600s, the Europeans captured and bought slaves, which began the Atlantic Slave trade and the forced migration of about 24 million people from Africa.

Slavery was accepted and recognized all around the world. During the sixteenth to nineteenth century, many european colonies engaged in the slave trade and the Atlantic slave trade. Roughly twelve million African slaves were transported across the Atlantic from the early sixteenth century to the 1860’s. Britain became the largest slave provider, 3.1 million slaves were transported, but only 2.7 survived. The government of Great Britain banned slave ships from engaging in the slave trade because they believed it was not morally correct or morally right to have slaves. Walvin argues that the British played a major and involuntary role in bringing an end to the slave trade. He also believes if the British were not the initiators for the slave

The Atlantic slave trade began in the sixteenth century and was abolished in the British Empire in the early nineteenth century. During four centuries American and Europeans nations obtained enslaved people from African slave-traders (although some were captured by Europeans slave traders).

Prior to Columbus’ journey to the Americas, sugarcane had been linked to slavery. Originating in India, sugarcane was brought to Europe and quickly started to rapidly gain traction. Slaves were imported from Africa to produce sugar. So, when sugarcane was brought to the Americas in the early 1500s, nothing good came with it. The Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch started sugar mills in Hispaniola, Brazil, and the Caribbean, and their first choice of slaves, the natives, quickly died off from the diseases that the Europeans brought; so, Africans were shipped in to work the mills. Thus, starting the Atlantic slave trade. The endless loop of the two slave trade triangles could not be stopped. The slaves were brought to the Americas, and in the first triangle, the sugar was sent to Europe, where goods were sent to Africa to trade for more slaves. In the second, the molasses created by the sugar production was sent to the British colonies where it was distilled into rum, and the rum was shipped to Africa to be traded for more slaves. Sugar trade eventually settled down by the end of the 18th century, and sugar became an everyday item in Europe. Sugar was a much better sweetener than fruit and honey for the European’s tea, coffee, and cocoa and the Europeans were hooked. Because sugar was a demanded commodity, rum became the most profitable manufactured item in New England, and so, the Sugar and Molasses Act of 1773 and the Sugar Act of 1764 were enacted. The colonists did

Foner said that the American government and slavery are linked with the long history (Foner, 48). The history of slavery and slave trade started as from 1619 when African slaves were being taken to the colony Jamestown in North America. The major reason why people participated in the slave trade was to boost the economy of the United States because the slaves provided free labor to the industries, plantations, and firms. Slave trade also became the culture of the United States especially during the 17th and the 18th century in South America and North America.