End of Slavery

It started around the 1800s; slavery was viewed as being wrong.  The people who worked to abolish slavery were called abolitionists. There were several disagreement on slavery. In 1861, the civil war broke out , the North won and slavery became illegal in 1865. This was done of course thanks to President Abraham Lincoln which created the statement that freed slaves called the Emancipation Proclamation. The U.S constitution was changed, and the 13^th Amendment declared that slavery would always be illegal in the United States. Even though the slave owners didn’t agree with slavery being abolished the North were able to make it illegal. Slave owners depended on slave work for money.  Although many Northerners wanted the South to change, they were going to enforce it.  So that’s when the two side decided to fight which settled this issue permanently. During the war President Abraham Lincoln took the time to risk telling the South what to do and he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. Emancipation means freedom and Proclamation is a statement made by a ruler like the president. It freed slaves in the South, the looks in their faces must have been full of joy and happiness. They were no longer anyone’s property.. they were FREE at last! 

A Difficult Escape

Escaping wasn’t easy. Slave owners observed every move, every motion slaves made. Slaves had a way of getting their freedom, which was using the Underground Railroad. This wasn’t an actual railroad and it did not travel underground.  It was a secret pathway and safe houses slaves used to escape from the South, where slavery was legal, to the north, where they could be free. However slaves knew they were risking their lives, and running away was a crime. A slave who ran away once would receive a terrible beating, punishment by their slave owners. They did this to remind other slaves to not attempt to leave the South. The second or third time a slave would be punished with death. The South was full of security, it was watched by police and slave catchers. They wanted to make sure their slaves weren’t trying to escape; they had to secure the area, and look out for any slaves. A slave that had no idea of where he was going, or didn’t have the right place to hide were usually caught within a day or two of running away from their plantations. It was difficult to escape, and the consequences they will have to face if caught by one of the slave catchers were terrible.


http://www.misterteacher.com/american%20slavery/introduction.html

Why Africans !?

The first slave owners were not Europeans but several native American tribes including the Klamath, Pawnee, Yurok, Creek, Mandan and Comance all of them had small numbers of slaves. However white European Americans were the ones to create the institution of slavery that we are all familiar with.  People from northern states profited from the slave trade by shipping the African American to the Americas as slaves. This is were it all started and the history of slavery basically began. By 1860, there were about four million slaves in the country. We ask ourselves why Africans out of all people. Well Europeans began enslaving Africans in the 1400’s.  African slaves and European indentured servants lived similar lives however the servants were able to get their freedom. African Americans were forced into a life of servitude. Slaves began loosing their rights once they became property. Laws gave masters power over many slaves, which included the right to kill and mistreat them. White slave owners began to think that they were superior than the blacks. This increased the gap between slaves and freedom. The American Civil War was fought, over slavery. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation which freed all the slaves. The North won in 1865, and it brought an end of slavery in the United States. 

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schooladventures/slavery/world.html

Mistreatment of Woman

Women during slavery had to take care of their children and had to face punishment. They also lived with the threat of being sexually abused or raped by their owners. Among the entire punishments woman faced during slavery, whippings were the most common. The wips were made of plaited cow skin. 

Woman would run away trying to protest whippings or also to escape from being mistreated.  Their job wasn’t different from the men. They both did equally difficult work; woman worked in the fields with the men. However pregnant women and nursing mothers were given lighter work called “trash gang”, which consisted of pregnant, nursing and elderly women.  Woman that will confront their masters were punished severely if not by death their hand would be amputated. They were hung from trees and burnt with fire as they swing them.  A form of domestic punishment women faced was to have the domestics kneel with their bare knees on pebbles and work.  They lived their lives threatened to being rape, the mistreatment from the planters were sick mentality and showed immense hatred towards the blacks. The females slave misery continued for a long time, with no hopes of ever ending.

http://scholar.library.miami.edu/slaves/womens_resistance/individual_essays/harmony.html

There were laws in slavery?

Well, yea slaves had to follow laws that their masters created. Slavery throughout the South had to lived under a set of laws called the Slave Codes. The basic idea of the Slave Codes was to basically let slaves know that they were considered property, not people. Slaves were not allow to go against the whites, make contracts, leave the plantation without permission or hit a white person even if it was for self defense, buy and sell things, gather with their people and visit the homes of slave owners or free blacks. They had no social life and weren’t given no type of freedom it was nothing but work, work and more hard work.. Not like today, back in the day there was no such thing as murder in slavery, or rape of a woman, it was just considered trespassing.

            The laws became even tighter if there were rumors of slave revolt.  Patrols were set up to protect the Slave codes. It searched for anything that can lead to insurrection. If insurrection occurs or not, whites will form committees that will torture and kill the blacks. The blacks had to follow the slave codes and most of them did to prevent any type of mistreatment.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2956.html : Includes information about Slave codes

Problems that slaves had to face..

Slaves weren’t living how we are living now, and many of us don’t really appreciate what we have, if we compared our lives to theirs maybe we can actually see the difference. They lived in crude quarters that would leave them vulnerable to bad weather and disease. They had a small amount of clothing and  had to work as domestics in order to get some clothing from their masters. Heat and humidity caused a lot of health problems for several slave workers. Their health was worst than their owners and it was mostly because of inadequate nutrition, and hard labor leading to diseases. They had no medical support and illnesses weren’t treated the right way. 

             In rice plantations, slaves had to stand in water causing malaria. Because of this children began dying. Not only did they have to deal with hard work , diseases and illness but they had to live under thee threat of sale. Slaves were sold as if they were a piece of clothing, or animals. They were sold as a form of punishment, Families were separated and were scattered in different places. However even families were to find each other, they still had to live with the taught that at any time their owners can decide to sale them. Live was just not easy for these slaves…

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2956.html: How they lived that cause illnesses and diseases 

Role of Slavery in America..

During the decades before the civil war started, the cotton that slaves used accounted for half the value of all United States exports, and it provide all the cotton used in the northern textile industry and about 70 percent of the cotton was also used in British Mills.  However the slave south failed to establish commercial and financial or manufacturing companies.

Learning about slavery I was able to find out that there were some famous slaveholders,

Some famous slaveholders that you might have heard have are Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington as well as Benjamin Frankly and Jonathan Edwards.  Slavery is basically treated as an important aspect of history, including the African American history. Even though slavery wasn’t such a good historical event that occurred in the United States it did play an important role for our nation. It played a crucial role in the making of the modern world, in other words it helped in the settlement and development of the New World. Also, in the history of the United Stated, it existed in all English mainland colonies. The debate over slavery dominated the American politics and it lead to an important event of our American history the Civil War. The war that helped achieve the independence of certain countries.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/slavery/index.cfm : Digital History/ Learning About Slavery and Its Background.