What Was The Leading Cause Of Slavery From 1451-1870

Document B is a journal entry from a man named Charles Mackay on his experience in the North. It gives us what blacks should be able to do and what restriction the had. According to Doc B, “We shall not make a black man a slave; we shall not buy or sell him; but we shall not associate with him”. This document tells us what rights black’s should have and what restrictions they could have.

The slave trade in the North American colonies began to grow in the 1600s. The African slave trade sourced their slaves from many different West African villages and countries. The business of slavery was a growing and profitable field, not only for the slavers, but also for the slaveholders. With the decrease of indentured servants, settlers in the English colonies looked for a new source of labor to satisfy their growing labor demands. The next source was Africa. “By the 1690s slaves outnumbered indentured servants four to one” (45). Europeans largely disregarded the ethical dilemma posed by slavery due to the European view of Africans and their culture as uncivilized, foreign, and heathen (44). The largest forced migration in history (44)

Slavery existed heavily in the South by the 1700’s. What started out with indentured servants, quickly but slowly, became slavery in a more brutal and disheartening way. European colonists turned to slavery because for every one indentured servant there were 17 slaves. (Chapter 2, page 46) This made it easier for European colonists to be able to replace slaves rather than waiting for indentured servants. Also, during Bacon’s Rebellion, Europeans quickly learned that servants were dangerous, because they had a right to fight back. Servants expected to be free within seven years in exchange for working the Europeans land. This also created the image that slaves would be easier to control simply because they had nothing to look forward to, once a slave always a slave. Once the Virginia slave law came out, it initially separated blacks and whites by skin color thus beginning the road to the new definition of “race.” In the south, slavery was in higher demand due to the increase of land to grow crops, indigo and tobacco. The more land you had, the more slaves you needed to pick and grow these crops which increased your money value.

From 1619 to 1640 the slaves that were sold in Jamestown earned their freedom by working for the European settlers. These slaves were able to have some of the freedoms and liberties that the new settlers had. These slaves were taken from their homeland and were brought over were smaller in number, but in 1650 as plantations began to develop, the demand for slaves grew. “Many of the slaves taken in the transatlantic trade were from the states on or near the west coast of Africa.” With the demand for slavery increasing the chiefs and traders began raiding small towns and villages taking people at will. Millions of Africans were torn from their families and deported to the America and sold as slaves. (Portcities Bristol)

In the late 1800’s, slavery was a very controversial topic in the United States. There was no peace about it. Slavery caused families to split, and brothers to kill one another. With feelings so strong on this topic, it was extremely difficult to please both sides – the North and the South. This was especially difficult when running for president. Many strategies were tested, but only a few prevailed. Some candidates thought it would be best to let the people decide whether or not their state was pro or anti-slavery. One candidate did not take much of a stand for either side. Presidents Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan all made it to the White House, but did not leave much of a legacy do to their stances on slavery.

In the early to mid-1800s, slavery was starting to become a major issue across the United States. As the northern states began to pass laws that were slowly beginning to give slaves more rights and even free them, the southerners were destroying rights that the slaves had and doing everything in their power to try to counter act the North. Tensions began to get so high that white southerners began to make their own militaries in defense. Finally, Nat Turner, a Christian preacher, made a huge and grewsome move. In 1831, he led slaves through the Virginia countryside and killed sixty white people with no regard of age or sex. Turner had what he thought were good intentions—to lead a group of freed slaves against southern planters in hopes of

American slavery was fueled by the transport of captured Africans across the Atlantic to the Western Hemisphere. The kidnapping was carried out by African slave traders, who then sold captives to European slave traders. The eventual transfer of over 10 million people in this fashion is known as the largest forced migration in history (America: A Narrative History, 101-103).

Two things that can be linked to the roots of slavery are the Mediterranean region and sugar. It wasn’t until the time of the Crusades that Europeans even knew about sugars existence, they had previously depended on fruits and honey to amplify the taste in their dull diets. Europeans learned about sugarcane and the labor intensive processes for making consumable sugar from the Arabs. Armed with tremendous amounts of capital investment, technology, and a disciplined work force, Europeans started building sugar plantations around the Mediterranean and several islands off the West African coast. Hardships and hazards of the work as well as limitations fastened to serf labor, and the overall lack of wage workers altogether, pointed to slavery as a foundation for labor on the sugar plantation. So why Africans? Through a process of elimination we can deduce why they were chosen as the primary source for slave labor instead of the plentiful and readily available native Indians (who were already in the Americas); poor whites and indentured servants.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was organized on a three point circuit of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It was the largest forced migration of people globally; between 20 and 30 million people with souls, lives, and families were transported from Africa to the Americas. This dim period of human history took place during the 16th and 19th centuries. The premise of this trade was to recruit Africans to work on European plantations anywhere from the eastern parts of North America in plantations all way down to the West Coast of South America working in mines. This undertaking of domineering over other human beings were due to the pseudo ideas that Africans had the ability and power to work tirelessly on farms with power. It was thought that Native Americans were not energetic enough to undertake farm labor. Although don’t get it wrong, Europeans did not introduce the idea of slavery. Slavery has existed since the dawn of time through all cultures, prisoners of war, anti-socials, people in debt, and many others were enslaved. To think though that the Europeans sailed over to Africa and just took natives from their homes would

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 Transatlantic slave trade was a horrific event where between 1526 to 1867 over twelve million slaves were captured and were sent from their native homes in Africa to the Americas. The African slaves that were captured over those centuries were shipped in bulk (between 30,000 a year in the late seventeenth century and 85,000 one hundred years later). Approximately, six percent of the African slaves were taken to North America in the eighteenth century and the majority of enslaved Africans were sent South America and parts of what is now Central America. In the Southern states of America, a single slave owner owned and housed about a thousand slaves. The slave population in the United States grew and this mainly due to the high fertility rate. However, due to the living environment many of the enslaved infants had a high mortality rate did not make it past their first year of life. This was the result of the children being fed food that lacked the nutrients they needed and they were breastfed too early. Due to the unhealthy environment, slaves contracted many terrible illnesses and diseases (i.e. blindness, skin lesions, Vitamin D deficiency, Diarrhea, whooping cough, etc.) that they usually succumbed to without a way to get proper treatment for them. In the mid-nineteenth century, the population of enslaved Blacks tripled from the beginning of the nineteenth

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.

Africa has been a breeding ground for slavery since before recorded history. Several slave owning societies existed within Africa throughout it’s history. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, “18 million Africans were delivered into the Islamic trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades between 650 and 1905.” In the North American slave trade Africa sent about 7-10 million slaves to North America. The North American Slave trade grew the population of Africa, and in particular African slavery to meet the demand of Western slave

We must ask ourselves what led to this dreadful institution? Why was it Africans that were enslaved? Slavery was not anything new. In fact human slavery had excited for thousands of years, but the most recent form of slavery by the masses has been that of the Africans. Unlike popular belief, Africans were not the first group of people to be enslaved in the New World. When the conquistadors arrived in the New World, they had brutally destroyed the native population through mass killing and spread of diseases. The Spanish had also used the Indians as slaves to work on mines. Poor whites were also subjects to a form of slavery

Slavery was thought to be a solution to the British Colonial Empire due to Europeans’ history in enslaving people for centuries. Additionally, the Bible also played an influential role since slavery was approved in it. This all led to slavery first transpiring in the New World when African immigrants were brought as captives to the colonies (Jamestown being the first) to work on tobacco plantations. In fact, Virginia was the first British colony that legally authorized the practice of slavery, in 1661. However, this was linked to the development of the Atlantic Slave Trade, or the Triangular Trade, when the most valuable trades involved enslaved people and products of slave labor. The lion's share of hijacked Africans weren't at that point slaves in Africa. They were free individuals who were seized to give the work that the European forces required to maintain colonies in the Americas. Transoceanic slave exchange included the transportation between 10 million and 12 million subjugated Africans over the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. It was the second of three phases of the triangular exchange. Many also Africans brought with them their languages, art, music, and other imperative components of their culture. At this point in time, there was a large growth in enslaved Africans. Slavery