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.).
Well, let us look deeper at the history of the African slavery. Arab Slave Trade Before the Arabs arrived, the Africans had enslaved their own people. When African farmers needed more laborers, they bought slaves, that way they increased production, at a reduced cost. The Arab slave trade, from the 9th the 19th century, was said to involve about 14 million blacks from the time of Muslim conquest. Slaves were often sold and transported to distant lands as it was common that when slaves were kept close to their homes, they
“The Songhay emperors, for example, often employed slaves as administrators and soldiers, since the rulers distrusted free nobles, whom they considered excessively ambitious and undependable” (Bentley, and Ziegler ). The way that the law and society perceived slaves in Africa is another way in which African slavery differed from other parts of the world. There was no concept of private
Slave abolitionists in both the North and the South organised what was called the Underground Railroad. This was not really a railroad, for it had no trains, tracks, or passengers, in the ordinary sense of the words. It was called the Underground Railroad because it was conducted in secrecy and because railway terms were used in reference to the manner of the system. This was a secret organisation of black and white people who took escaping slaves from one “safe house” or “station” to another, all the way to freedom in the North. The northern states had already abolished slavery, whereas millions of slaves continued to be enslaved in the South.
Jim Crow: A Clever Ruse with Cruel Intent by Nunya Buisness English 151 Professor Weezy 21 April 2013 Racial inequality and segregation was not a new manifestation. Before the Civil War, when slavery had established the status of most blacks, there was no apparent need for statutory measures segregating the races. The initial postwar governments passed a few segregation laws and some restrictive Black Codes, but these did not continue to exist past Reconstruction. What replaced them, however, was not racial integration but an informal code of exclusion and discrimination. (Litwack 8) The Jim Crow system gave Southern whites a legal way to reclaim all-encompassing control over the lives of blacks after the Civil War and Reconstruction.
It was in 1661 in Virginia that the first slave law was passed. All people of a darker skin color were considered in a state of servitude and subservient to those of a lighter shin color. Not all people of African descendants were slaves, there were about a million African Americans who were labeled “free men”. Those who did not have the label of “free men” were slaves to wealthy people of European descent, and had to do whatever their “masters” or “owners” told them to do. By this time American society had created not only a new social group, which was “African American”, but also a new sociological issue, which was called slavery.
The Bill of Rights (1791) sets out the freedoms that all American citizens should enjoy. This however did not mean every person living in the USA. There was a long history of slavery in America. Slavery was the foundation of the civil war between the South (slave states) and the North (free states) of America. President Lincoln, led the northern states, declared freedom for all slaves in his 1862 Emancipation Proclamation.
According to Madison’s notes it’s because “the delegates thought it wrong to admit in the constitution the idea that there could be property in men (Spalding, pg. 463). Washington a slave holder was even against slavery, he wrote “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery” (Spalding, pg. 461). America was not the only country of course that practiced slavery; there were many countries that had practiced slavery before.
Unfortunately because of the struggle to survive the African people adopted slave trade and started capturing and trading their people for European goods. Portugal’s started slavery in the fourteenth century with West Africa. The West Europeans developed a trading system in the sixteenth century but it was not successful as expected because the slaves tried to escape the hardship of labor. Later slavery expanded leading to the” Triangle Trade.” This was where ships left Europe went to Africa and then Americas. The Middle Massage was called “The Middle Passage,” because it was the second and longest part of a three part triangle trade that started from Africa and ended in North and South America, and the Caribbean.
How important was the role of anti- slavery campaigners in the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833? AS Essay - Rohan Shah 9C - Wilsons School The trade triangle was vital to the continuation of slavery till 1833. Ships from British ports, like Bristol and Manchester, and other European Countries would sail down from Britain, carrying textiles, metal goods and guns to West Africa. There slave dealers, mainly tribe chiefs, would capture people from other tribes or POW’s they had captured, and swap them for the goods. From here, British ships would carry them to the Caribbean on ships (known as the Middle Passage) where they would be sold and forced to work on plantations.