...Atlantic Chattel Slavery Through the progression of slavery, we see a gradual but dramatic change the way people viewed slaves. Many factors aided the deterioration of treatment towards slaves from a people to property mindset. Whether it was the beginning of the African Slave Trade, the economic driven cash crops, British laws passed to control slaves or the development of British Low Country each factor belittled the human aspect of a slave. To understand how one gets labeled as “cattle” we must understand where it came from. We first look at the beginning treatment of slaves to gather a comparison on how it differed from Atlantic Chattel Slavery. Slaves in the early east Africa were generally war captives of conquering dynasties. Islamic religion helped to maintain the humanity of these war captives. They were accepted as a member of the family (nation) but the lowest ranking one. Islamic members who owned slaves had obligations to educate and convert them to Islam. They also made it illegal to sell children from their parent which in turn was a cultural device to bring outside people into the society. After two generations of slavery these families were accepted into the society. Slaves during this time would also live to the same standards as their owners. This means a slave owned by a wealthy person would have a better lifestyle (clothes, food, etc.) than a poorer one. Slavery was still not a positive experience but when we compare to the lifestyle of Caribbean/America...
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...Rape During The Antebellum Period The first African slaves arrived in Virginia, North America in 1619. As the plantations of the antebellum south flourished, the African slave trade gained momentum. Between the 16 and 19th centuries, America had an estimated 12 million African slaves (Slavery in the United States, Junius P. Rodriguez ). Enslavement of the African Americans formally commenced in the 1630s and 1640s. By 1740, colonial America had a fully developed slavery system in place, granting slave owners an absolute and tyrannical life-and-death authority over their slaves or 'chattels' and their children (Slavery in the United States, Junius P. Rodriguez ). Stripped of any identity or rights, enslaved black men and women were considered legal non-persons, except in the event of a crime committed. Documents and research on the slave era in the antebellum south are awash with horror stories of the brutal and inhuman treatment of slaves, particularly women (Slavery in the United States, Junius P. Rodriguez). Considered 'properties' by their masters, enslaved black women endured physical and emotional abuse, torture, and sometimes even death. By the 1800s, slavery had percolated down mainly to the antebellum south. While a majority of enslaved men and women were designated as 'field servants' performing duties outside the house, a smaller percentage, particularly women were employed as domestics or 'house servants', mammies and surrogate mothers. In the absence of any security...
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...The topic of slavery has caused a striking conversation for decades. Often when people think about slavery they only think about slavery in America before the Civil War. Slave trade began in the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese began exploring the coast of West Africa. Slavery then continued out to the rest of South America, the Middle East, and Europe. Soon more people became a part of the Atlantic Slave trade. Some Africans would be sent to Europe, because they were conditioned to work in a tropical environment, and the Europeans wanted workers who could work in any environment. During the high mid century serfdom was introduced in Europe. Much like slavery, serfdom linked peasants to a plot of land owned by their lord. Though they...
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...going on since the beginning of time. Prejudice and discrimination started years ago with slavery. Chattel, Child, Debt bondage, and Servile marriages are four types of slavery. Chattel slavery is when one person actually owns another person. Child slavery is when poor families actually send their children out into the streets to beg and steal to survive. Debt bondage slavery is when employers pay their workers such low wages that it is not enough to survive. And last servile marriages is where families will marry off their women against their wills for the pleasure and satisfaction of the man. (Macionis, 2010) When someone mentions prejudice and discrimination one tends to think whites verses blacks. Prejudice and discrimination can be towards another person because of their race, sex, color, or even religious belief. Some slavery families do not know anything else but slavery and they actually found a type of comfort with it. Because of previous generations participating in these traditions has become a family law or tradition. Many traditions have become a norm for families in slavery and are still important, especially in the South. This explains why southerners have had and still have a hard time changing their prejudice and discrimination views. Southerners worshiped their past, it became their present, and it has colored their vision of the future. By showing how the south passed on prejudice towards blacks and other minorities as a tradition after the civil war...
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...slaves fulfilled the demand for labor in the South by the British Colonists since they had an agriculturally based economy. They grew cotton on vast tracks of land that was very labor intensive for planting and picking. What were the major differences between African slaves and indentured servants the early colonies? We see that there was little difference between the slave and the indentured servant. Indentured servants came from England. They had no chance at owning land in England and were very poor. The only way they could get to the colonies was to come as indentured servants. They passage was paid for and they worked for a "master" for a specified amount of time then they were freed. In fact, black slaves and indentured servants were treated virtually the same and worked in the fields together. But after 1680, the mainland colonists depended more on the slave trade because there was less indentured servants. More land was freed...
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...Slavery Before America History 221 American Military University Slavery Before America This paper will focus on slavery before America and the differences in detail while under each rule. When most people think of slavery they fast forward to Slavery in the Americas because for most there is not a lot known about slavery before America. When in actuality slavery was very much present before the union of the states; and in this paper I intend to show the different slave systems and how they play a part in what we as Americans know to be slavery. According to (Scaruffi, n.d.) The Dutch were the first, apparently, to import black slaves into North America, but black slaves had already been employed all over the world, including South and Central America. For example Britain’s earliest known involvement in the western slave trade dates back over two thousand years ago. The British following the lead of the Portuguese in enslaving Africans actually began to get a strong hold on the slave trade and thus became known as the primary facilitator of slaves. With Britain now the primary facilitator of slaves, Special ships were built to accommodate the lucrative business. Under the rule of the British plantation and mine owners bought the Africans and more died in the process called 'seasoning'. In the British colonies the slaves were treated as non-human: they were 'chattels', to be worked to death as it was cheaper to purchase another slave than to...
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...Leo Sandon TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT Once in the mid-1980s, after I had lectured on the 1965 Selma campaign and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, a young honors student came to me at the conclusion of class. She was incredulous. "Let me get this straight," she said. "Are you saying that African-Americans in the South were denied the right to vote?" When I answered that was the case, she exclaimed, "That is incredible. I never knew that." Her ignorance of our racial policies before 1965 was not all that unusual among my students. Otherwise decently informed undergraduates often were only vaguely aware, if not totally unaware, of this important part of our national story. So when I taught about black and white patterns in American history and religion,...
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...During America’s early development, slavery was the central issue fueling the conflict between state and federal rights, which caused the Civil War. The institution of slavery in the United States resulted in profound effects upon our nation socially, economically, and politically. These changes have had a lasting impact that can still be seen in American society today. The article Origins of the Southern Labor System describes that the American form of slavery was not molded after European concepts of servitude. The article even points out that the word “slave” had no meaning in English law. However, as farmers found large-scale cultivation more profitable, there was a need for the cheapest and most exploitable labor supply. As this system developed, slaveholders out of fear of revolt “were forced to conclude that the slave was wholly unfree, wholly lacking in personality, and wholly a chattel,” (Handlin p.99). At this point black slaves were dehumanized and degraded through the use of masks, whips, separation, and fear. Powerful white plantation owners dominated the south politically and justified their actions through state law. As this continued, the low skilled majority of white southerners could not compete with the free labor system. This labor system led to the fight over westward expansion, southern dependence on northern goods, and the social rift of the north and south. Consequently, our nation was faced with the tragedy of the Civil War, in which Dubois states “poor...
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...THESIS In the monograph, New England Bound, the main thesis is that, despite the myths modern Americans have heard about slavery, American slavery is no longer defined by the nineteenth century Southern colonies; slavery was just as important in the New England colonies’ building and economic prosperity. The history of slavery is much more complicated than what modern Americans have learned in school as enslaved people were a part of Northern industry far before “King Cotton” emerged in the South. Slaves in the New England colonies were not strictly defined by race; there were Indian slaves and African slaves laboring alongside English colonists in the beginnings of America. Warren challenges the traditional claim that institutionalized slavery was southern colony-centric by giving ample evidence that slavery was used before the southern colonies were even a thought. The very survival of Jamestown depended on the presence of slave societies in the West Indies. Furthermore, Warren proves that slavery was essential to the colonists’ survival...
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...were nonsense: There were important kingdoms and great civilisations in Africa at the same time as people in Britain were living in primitive iron-age huts. Moreover from Egypt came ideas about geometry, arithmetics and astronomy. The proofs of their skills are for example the pyramids which are also one of the seven wonders of the world. Different words have been used to describe black Americans. For a long time they were referred to as negroes and often the word ‘nigger’ was used to insult them. Many whites called them ‘coloured people’. Since the 1960’s the term ‘black’ has become normal, although some people prefer the term ‘Afro-American’ as a reminder of their original roots in Africa. THE BEGINNING OF SLAVERY IN THE US The history of blacks in North America began in 1619, when a Dutch ship brought the first Negro slaves to Virginia. The first imported Africans were brought as indentured servants, not slaves. They were required, as white indentured servants were, to serve seven years. Black people were forcibly taken from their native land. They never saw their families or their native land again. In their new surroundings they had to work for their ‘master’ and many of them were treated cruelly because they had no rights as slaves. Millions...
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...resulted in exploitation of the available resources and transformation of the America into agriculture industry. The abundance resources of land were used by the colonists to make plantations. Seeing the potential benefits from the planting of commercial crops, most English laborers came to the New World as indentured servants. However, the labor sources of the indentured servant were later shifted to the slave, especially the African slave. These African slaves were victims of the particularly brutal slavery institution that was established during the English colonial era. As they played an important role in developing the English colonies, their...
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...on throughout the book is one which touches many of us deeply, slavery. As a person who has studied both law and religion and who is now embarking on a study of moral theology & ethics, I was highly interested in reading what John T. Noonan a distinguished scholar -author and member of the U.S. Court of Appeals- had to say in such an arena. Having heard him lecture, I was interested to see how his viewpoint translated into this type of arena. I was not disappointed. Throughout our course we not only discussed how this work dealt with such a topic, but we also discussed our own viewpoints on this very topic. Within the following paper I will discuss the issue of slavery, in the form of a synthetic paper, and how not only how it has evolved, but also the various positions the church has had concerning such an issue. As a backdrop, I will also use what Noonan outlined in his book as well. Therefore, this paper will be in the form of a review of Noonan thoughts (which will utilize various points from my prior presentation on this topic)/synthetic paper on the issue of slavery within the Catholic Church. John T. Noonan builds A Church That Can and Cannot Change on the fact that the deposit of faith cannot change. In the early chapters Noonan identifies three areas where change in moral principles has definitely occurred in the course of the history of the Catholic Church. These principles are slavery, usury and religious liberty. He also points to a fourth...
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...Ian Cohen Tuesday, October 2, 2012 Book Analysis 1 Much of African-American history in America over the past four centuries is a recollection of stories from the years when African-Americans were utilized as slaves on the plantations of affluent, white farmers. In the book, Celia, A Slave written by Melton A. McLaurin, Celia’s fate in many ways did in fact seem predetermined. As an enslaved woman who killed her white master in the nineteenth-century US South, I agree with the statement that it was very unlikely for Celia to ever escape with her life. The story accounts of Celia’s life bound together in a vivid way to relay the circumstances surrounding a female slave’s cruel life and the ways that she took matters into her own hands. “Slavery was an institution fundamental to the existence of Southern society, a permanent part of the Southern way of life,” (McLaurin, 18). Hence, the fact that in many ways, Celia’s fate was decided on the day that Robert Newsom claimed her, as the options that she once had would no longer be available. In 1855, slavery was a major source of sectionalism in the United States. It was in this chaotic setting that Celia was put on trial for murdering her master, Robert Newsom, who had been consistently raping her for five years. Throughout Celia’s trial the two main views on slavery were seen: some saw them as people and others just saw them as property. “Her experience suggests…that slaves were powerless to protect there most basic humanity...
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...historical articles; Fredrick Douglass “What to the slave is the fourth of July” and David Walker’s “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World”. The essay will attempt to discuss the very famous speech Fredrick Douglas made in 1952 as well as David’s Walker’s appeal while comparing and contrasting both the appeal and the speech. Afterward, a summary will be given and a conclusion will be drawn. As we look throughout history, one would argue that we couldn’t find a more appalling and unjust act as that of slavery. Slavery played a major role of not only history but of an innumerable amount of American people. In David Walker’s appeal and Fredrick Douglass what to the slave is the fourth of July, men and women of African American descent struggle with the reality of slavery and the cruel results and affect it had on people like themselves. Fredrick Douglas was one of the most influential African Americans of his day, in spite of his inauspicious beginning, he was born into slavery on a plantation in Maryland where he was called Fredrick Augustus Washington Bailey. Douglas always suspected that his father was his mother’s white owner, Captain Aaron Anthony. He spent his early childhood in privation on the plantation then he was sent to work as a house slave for the auld family in Baltimore. There, he came in contact with printed literature and quickly realized the relationship between literacy and personal freedom. With help from Mrs. Auld, Douglas learned how to read and write...
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...the cruelty and the barbarity of slavery The Narrative life of Frederick Douglass and his speech, “The Meaning of the Fourth of July to a Negro.” He emphasizes this by using education as the key to the path of freedom. Knowledge has liberated those who have been oppressed by slavery. Nelson Mandela, a famous civil rights activist and the first South African president, once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon, which you can use to change the world.” (Mandela, 1993). Both were subjugated by societies filled with abusive racism. Douglass used education as a weapon to guide him to his independence. Through knowledge, Douglass ascended to be as educated as a white man. By insisting on his credibility, appealing to his readers’ emotions, and making logical arguments against his oppressor, Douglass communicates that literacy is a tool used to overcome the oppression of slavery. This is significant because literacy broadened the perspective of slaves, which enabled them to prevail against inhumane conditions. As a former slave, Douglass emphasizes reliability by talking about his experience as a slave to show how slaveholders would prevent them from knowledge. He realized his life had been molded into an abrupt distorted lie created by the most wicked of men by stating, “My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man...
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