In the early as the 15 century, England passed from raising sheep and producing wool, an agricultural activity, to manufacturing cloth. This signaled the beginning of capitalist production. It is in capitalist production that we can locate the basic cause of the slave trade. The slave ship sailed from the home country with a cargo of manufactured goods. These were exchanged at a profit on the coast of Africa for Negroes, who were traded on the plantations, at another profit, in exchange for a cargo of colonial produce to be taken back to the home country.
The nature and effect of the enslavement of people of African descent in the United States constitutes the excuse amongst the white society to feel superior. At the age of thirty, Northup was kidnapped into slavery despite his status as a freeman. Northup’s kidnappers persuaded him to accompany them to Washington, D.C. They promised him quick and easy employment, instant pay, and an
Puerto Rico, an island in the Caribbean, off the coast of the United States was discovered in 1493 by Christopher Columbus and his entourage, who claimed the small island for Spain. Unlike any other nation in the Western hemisphere that was involved in the slave trade, Puerto Rico initially began with the African freemen who came with the Spanish conquistadors. Originally populated by about sixty thousand Taino Indigenous people, benign diseases and attempted sucides soon decreased the population. As a result, African peoples were forced into slavery to help build fortifications, work the fields, and carryout slave owner’s domestic work thus entering Puerto Rico in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. However, the enslaved African peoples didn’t just contribute to the development of this new island; their traditions are what inspired the culture that Puerto Rico is built upon today.
But in the late 1600s the market for English servants dried up, and Virginia planters turned instead to slavery. By 1720 a full-scale plantation system was in place throughout the Chesapeake, grounded on the labor of slaves and oriented toward the production of tobacco. By the standards of Brazilian and Caribbean sugar plantations, however, Chesapeake tobacco plantations were modest in size. They reached their peak efficiency with perhaps twenty or thirty slaves, whereas sugar plantations were most efficient when they had at least fifty slaves. The rice plantations of lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia more closely approximated the sugar plantations.
Both South Carolina and the Chesapeake were affected by these Barbadians ways of slave holding. In the Chesapeake, newly arrived African slaves often were put to work on the outskirts of the plantation, which were called quarters. They were sometimes moved closer towards the middle of the plantation once they learned some English and the routines of growing tobacco in America. Tobacco originated in the Americas, but was also grown in some parts of Africa, so Chesapeake planters often used their laborers' expertise for growing their crops. The majority of these laborers were men.
The earliest Africans were seen in the same light as indentured servants from Europe. According to Hine D., Hine W., & Harrold S. (2014), they (Africans) interacted culturally and physically with the white indentured servants and with American Indians. This cordiality, however, did not last. By the latter half of the 17th century, obvious differences existed in the treatment of black and white servants. Slave codes were soon approved – in Massachusetts in 1641 and Virginia in 1661 –and any minor liberties that might have existed for African American were taken away (Feature Indentured Servants In The U.S , n.p.).
First off the first slaves came from Africa in 1619 which was brought to Virginia. Slavery was system in America that made it legal for whites to buy and own blacks and use them for labor. Slavery was a state to state thing there were many slave owners and famous slave owners were the Framers also known as the founding fathers. Something interesting about the founding fathers were they were hypocrites because most of them were against slavery when they owned slaves, for example George Washington had many slaves but he was against slavery. Another thing to know is that that in the south slaves were considered as three fifths of a person.
America was not the only country of course that practiced slavery; there were many countries that had practiced slavery before. Pinckney states that “If slavery be wrong, it is justified by the example of all the world” (D’Souza, pg. 466). The problem that comes to mind with this is that in those other countries there was no word for freedom, while America was founded as a so called free country. It’s important to understand that slavery wasn’t because of racism but because the pursuit of profit.
Harriet Tubman made it her mission and risked her life often to aid enslaved African Americans. There are limitless factors that led up to Harriet Tubman’s heroic events. Three hundred thousand African slaves were brought on the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean to America between 1619 and 1780. The number of slaves imported to the colonies was relatively small at first, and then grew as the population in the new country ballooned. In the end, there were roughly 10 million Africans shipped as cargo to the United States.
Response to Slavery and The Making of America The first episode of Slavery and the Making of America discussed the beginnings of African enslavement in America and how it slowly became a “downward spiral.” In the beginning, the Dutch West India company was very dependant on the labor of their slaves, so the slaves did have room to negotiate for things like better wages and were treated much better and had more rights than we would typically imagine slaves back then to have. Many of the first eleven slave men that came to “Dutch New Amsterdam” were Christian, had mixed European and African ansestry, were Christian, literate, and spoke many different languages. It was surprising to me how such educated and literate people could have been enslaved and made to work from dawn to dusk like that. I feel that since there were so few slaves at that time, the company was always very afraid that they would loose all the fruits that came from these slave's hard labor so they had to make sure the slaves were content and had to let them negotiate. The hard work of these slaves made the early infrastructure of America.