1. Sarah and Angelina Grimke grew up in South Carolina on a slave plantation, and as they got older rejected the southern lifestyle and moved up north to advocate for the abolitionist movement and women’s rights. 2. The Nullification Crisis occurred in 1828 after The Tariff of Abominations put a tariff on imported goods; South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union. The tariff benefited the north but hurt the south.
They then escaped to England where they sued for their freedom, and finally made their way back to Old Calabar. The account of these two princes comes from many different sources coupled together by Sparks. Letters written by Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin John, brothers native of Old Calabar, are principal sources for the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century. These letters provide insight to the transatlantic slave trade centered on the lives of two individuals. In Sparks’s writing, the Robin Johns’ story allows us "to translate those statistics (of the slave trade) into people" (5).
He was a very influential person in the abolition of slaves. Just as Frederic Douglass did, he wrote an autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, that discusses the time spent in slavery, how served on vessels and how gained his independence by his own. In his youth he was kidnapped along with his little sister and they were separate from each other. Equiano changed hands a few times before being shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. In Equiano’s narrative he describes how cruel was the treatment of slaves.
At the start of the eighteenth century Britain’s colonies relied heavily on the slave trade for their economic development. The slave trade was a result of labor shortage in the colonies, itself in turn created by the desire of European colonists to exploit new world land, resources and cash crops for capital profits. Prior to Africans being transported to the Americas to be used for slave labor and forced to work on the plantations, indentured servants were used to work on these plantations. Indentured servants were men who came mainly from Europe to work in fields and on plantations in North America and across the Caribbean. A lot of these Indentured servants were convicts which had to work in the colonies as a form of punishment, but they were free to go after 4-7 years of working.
There, he worked briefly on a plantation before being sold to a British officer and commencing an active naval career during the Seven Years’ War and after. Purchasing his freedom after eleven years of slavery, he continued his maritime career and became a keen proponent of Methodism. A fairly prominent African in English society, he became heavily involved in the campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, and published The Interesting Narrative largely to promote this cause. Although born in Africa, Olaudah Equiano was clearly a product of the European Enlightenment. The Interesting Narrative reveals this influence through the book’s radical arguments in favor of individual equality and its opposition to slavery as a cruel and inhumane practice contrary to enlightened society.
Slavery: “The Peculiar Institution” Slaves were brought to the colonies first as indentured servants then slave traders started capturing slaves from Africa and bring them to the Caribbean. The colonist found slave labor cheap compared to indentured slaves who eventually ended their service. Slavery began in the United States about the 1630’s. During this time the colonial courts and legislatures made Africans property and enslaved to their masters for a life time. The legislature also ruled that slave status would be inherited by their children.
(McKay, Chap 21, pg 570) In order to get a good perspective on what being a slave was like, we will look into a narrative written by Olaudah Equiano. Equiano was a native of Iboland who was captured at the age of eleven. He describes how some villagers would wait until the adults would go out in the plantations to work to abduct their younger children. Once Equiano was sold to the Europeans he says that they were treated horribly beaten and cramped on a very small boat. The reason that the slaves were treated badly could have been due to the fact that the Europeans had to pay a high price for them or just due to a lack of space.
While the Haitian Revolution and Latin American Wars for Independence were different in the act of slave revolts and leadership of the revolutions, they were similar because both revolutions concluded in the abolition of slavery, and founding of a new state. Slave revolts were a major contributor in the Haitian Revolution whereas the Latin American Wars of Independence had citizens freeing the slaves. The rebellion of slaves that began the Haitian Revolution commenced in April of 1791. In 1810 enlightened thinking spurred the desire for economic reform to spread throughout Latin America. Citizens fought for the basic human rights for the slaves.
Gordon S. Barker in his book, In Fugitive Slaves and the Unfinished American Revolution: Eight Cases, 1848-1856 he contributes to the stories on American Revolution particularly in an effort to re-image and re-periodize the ‘grand American narrative’ of the U.S revolution by George Bancroft. The book is focused on the other side of the revolution i.e. the Black’s struggle for the war against slavery. For the common American man, the revolution and thus the war ended quite before when compared with the Revolution waged by the African slaves. The African Americans, united in their quest for creating ‘a perfect union’ which at its very earliest ended when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified.
The plantation system was then developed, whereby natives of the Caribbean and eventually various groups of people were forced to work on these plantations as slaves. The Europeans controlled and owned the resources of society and the factors of production as well as wealth and political power. The subject class became alienated and rarely challenged slave owners, in the fear of physical abuse or death. As a result the Europeans were perceived as superior to African slaves and Indian and Chinese indentured laborers. According to George Beckford a Jamaican sociologist Caribbean society is still sculpted along the lines of the plantation long after its emancipation.