As mentioned by William Harper, “The cultivation of the great staple crop cannot be carried on without slaves.” (Harper, Memoir in Slavery, 1837) In a time of western expansion and the cotton boom, some slave traders were able to accumulate great wealth from the slave-trading business and sought opportunities to acquire higher social status and financial stability. A con of slavery was when slaves were driven mercilessly to plant, cultivate, and harvest the crops for market. A failed crop meant the planter could lose his initial investment in land and slaves and possibly suffer bankruptcy. A successful crop could earn such high returns that the slaves were often worked beyond human endurance. Plantation masters argued callously that it was cheaper to work the slaves to death and then buy new ones than it was to allow them to live long enough and under sufficiently healthy conditions that they could bear children to increase their numbers.
Without it, the work would not have gotten done, or as quickly as it did. As ugly as it is to say, without the forced labor, the United States might not be the United States. The massive production of cotton propelled the United States to becoming a world power. With this crop, the United States was able to breakaway from the Crown: all thanks to slavery. Americans, North and South, both supported slavery.
The South were all for slavery: * Slaves would work on the cotton and tobacco plantations in the south, working the land. * It was their cornerstone for all their business and wealth in the Southern States. * Without slavery, they feared that they would lose all aspects of their income and in-turn lose the ‘power’ that they had. * The creation of the cotton gin increased the demand for slavery as more and more production of cotton was in demand. This in-turn upsetted the North.
When slaves were obtained or purchased, they were to fulfill a purpose. Most were bought to work on farms and plantations in order to grow crops or raw materials to create goods in order to make money. Slaves were laborers who did all the backbreaking labor for their masters so that the masters would live wonderful lives. Nguyen 2 Slavery was a controversial subject upon many people. Some people have strong support for slavery, but many others oppose as well.
Slaves did jobs like looking after animals, others were in the fields working on the crops that were being grown, some slaves worked in the mills working the machines, slaves did any other jobs their owners wanted them to do. There were several reasons for abolishing slavery which will be discussed in this essay, some were humanitarian, some were economic. Examples of different views on why slavery was abolished were for example – one English historian, in 1869 said ‘The crusade of England against slavery may be regarded as one of the most virtuous acts recorded in the history of the nations’. Another example from a West Indian man, writing in 1938 said ‘Those who see in the abolition of slavery the awakening conscience of mankind should spend a few minutes asking themselves why it is that man’s conscience, which has slept peacefully for so many centuries, should awake just at the time when men began to see the unprofitableness of slavery’. One factor why historians believe slavery was abolished was because of the actions of white, middle-class campaigners such as Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce.
Some could say because no other slavery country had been divided on the issue of slavery. The United States was divided on the issue of slavery, the North was anti-slavery because there was little to no need free labor, however the south depended heavily on slave’s free labor to maintain high profits and high levels of production. In early America, slaves were a minor portion of the labor force and later became a vital asset to the economy. The slave population in America had a dramatic increase from the late 1700s to the early 1860s. Expansion of the country, invention of the cotton gin, and greater demand for cotton were all contributing factors to the changes in the slave population in early America.
He also collaborated with Henry Ford, to develop a process to extract rubber from the milk of the goldenrod. He also developed new strains of cotton. The most important being “Carver’s Hybrid,” a cross between short-stalk cotton and tall-stalk cotton. I chose to write about George Washington Carver because he made spectacular advances in soil conservation, and soil fertilization. If it was not for his timely interventions, the southern farmers would have probably been made bankrupt.
Slavery built the U.S.’s economy. As we’ve learned through the readings and all the films and documentaries watched in this class, two of the largest exports out of the U.S. (the South, to be more specific) were cotton and tobacco, which were picked by the slaves. As the demands for cotton and tobacco increased, so did the number of slaves, which unfortunately led to (White Americans) believing to be superior and led to hate and discriminating against a group of people based on their skin color. This led the Civil Rights Movement in 1964, which changed history in America, with some important events that I’ve learned from taking this class. Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, (also known as the Southampton Insurrection), which was a slave rebellion that took place in Southampton county in Virginia in August 1831.
Our nation struggled to establish and economy but after years of becoming economically stronger and industrialized what we stood for would be forgotten. The civil war happened for many reasons; it reestablished what our country stood for and kept the union together. The differences between the north and south would eventually need to be resolved. War did not have to be the answer but if the war did not happen slavery could have gone on for much longer. When our country was established, inhabitants of the southern colonies shared a great deal with the northern colonist.
The different crops and their distinctive patterns of labor organization gave rise to several other important distinctions as well. Tobacco was the first plantation crop in North America. English settlers in the Chesapeake region recognized tobacco's profitable potential in the early seventeenth century. They built their first plantations using the labor of British indentured servants rather than African slaves. But in the late 1600s the market for English servants dried up, and Virginia planters turned instead to slavery.