Slavery an Examination on American

Slavery

AN EXAMINATION on AMERICAN SLAVERY

The history of slavery in the United States is a very long and complicated tale, one filled with much violence, murder and mayhem. Beginning roughly in the early 1700's, white Southerners began to bring, if not kidnap, native peoples from many regions of the world to work on their plantations. Most of these kidnapped individuals were from Africa and were brought to America on sailing ships overflowing with disease, hunger and death. In fact, many of those aboard these ships did not survive the long voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to such cities as Boston in the North, Savannah in the state of Georgia and Charleston in the state of South Carolina, long considered as the heart of the Deep South.

In what historians refer to as the antebellum South (pre Civil War), the southern economy was almost wholly based on agriculture with much of it aimed for the markets of Great Britain and Europe. In Virginia, South Carolina and Kentucky, black slaves who possessed no rights and extremely limited personal freedoms, planted and harvested great quantities of tobacco, sugar and rice, but it was cotton which set the stage for an immense increase in the need for slaves in the Deep South, especially before the Civil War. These slaves were forced to work without no pay and for very long hours, usually from dawn until dusk unless it was a full moon when they worked well past midnight. The slaves were also housed in utter poverty and were always under the watchful eye of the white plantation owner or "master."

Before the Civil War, slaves were seen as less than second-class citizens and were not allowed to hold any type of job outside of the plantation and could not vote nor participate in any kind of political activity. In the eyes of their slave "Masters," blacks were nothing more than property, bought and sold at markets like cattle or sheep. For American slaves before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, the three old cornerstones of the Old South, being white supremacy, conservation religious beliefs and the agrarian/agricultural way of life almost wholly determined the structure of slave life, even after being freed by President Lincoln's emancipation act and the collapse of the Old South at the end of the Civil War in 1865. Between the early 1800's and up until a period in history known as Reconstruction, the economic and political realities for black American slaves were completely dependent upon the whims and desires of their white slave masters who controlled every aspect of their lives, such as where they lived, slept, what they ate, what they could wear and even what type of religion they could practice.

During the antebellum period, the separation of the races, being white from black, was one of the most powerful institutions in the Deep South; in fact, it was so important that segregation remained in place long after emancipation and the end of the Civil War and up until the middle decades of the 20th century when segregation was made illegal by an act of the U.S. Supreme Court. As to religion, slaves were allowed to worship in segregated sections of white churches, but with the advent of Reconstruction around 1867, freed slaves left the white churches and formed their own Baptist and Methodist congregations.

The governments which were set up by the North during the Reconstruction period often mandated that segregation remain in place which affected the ability of freed slaves to attend and seek assistance in many local and state-level social institutions, such as colleges, hospitals and welfare facilities. For example, in the state of Georgia, there was no existing system for the care of disenfranchised former slaves and those who suffered from diseases and many physical ailments until the early 1880's. Also during this time, former slaves were forced to live in very inadequate housing, especially in southern cities like Atlanta, Richmond and Charleston. Before the Civil War, black American slaves had it even worse, for they usually lived in squalor in ramshackle houses behind the magnificent mansions of the white slave masters.