Anti Slavery Movement In The United States

US History Exam Fall
#2

In America’s history, it is stained with the history of slavery. At the time, slavery was thought to be ok and just, but it isn’t. Having another human being as a piece of property and treating the like oxen. They would be severely punished if they tried to escape from their owners. They would be whipped, bound to a pole, starved, or even hung. There were people that thought that it wasn’t okay to have someone as property and treat them like that. Humans are supposed to be rulers of themselves and be independent. It is human nature to run away from someone who basically kidnapped you from your home and put you to work. Over the period of slavery more and more people began to disagree with slavery. Thus came the anti-slavery movement. This caused the whole nation to become divided into two parts. The North and The South completely divided on their beliefs. The North was against slavery, and the South was for slavery. This pushed the North and South to always be arguing about if slavery should be allowed everywhere. With the North being free many slaves would run away to the
north and disappear. Slaves were quite expensive, so when they did escape the owners had to make sure that they couldn’t do it again. This continued to push them apart and the two sides were not unified anymore. This brought them to the Civil War.
In the earlier years of the 1800s the Abolitionist movement was created.
They created a movement to end slavery. This spread across the Atlantic Ocean a also affected the Western Europeans and in the end brought an end to slavery and slave trade. There were many important American abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, William Wells Brown. William Lloyd Garrison was a journalist, a suffragist, and a social reformer. He wrote in his books explaining about how cruel the slaves were being treated. This angered many slave owners and pulled the south and the north apart further. The slaves had a few jobs to do around the plantations, such as Planters, or Field Hands. Planter and field hands worked the land and were out in the fields from sunrise to sunset. Then once they came back, they would come back to rotting wooden shacks and them having to sleep on the
floor.
The south wanted the north to become all slave states too so their slaves couldn’t run away to the north. If the north wasn’t free the Civil War would never have happened occurred. The south tried to stop all attempts for slave outbreaks or runaways. One very famous African American Slave Rebel is Nat Turner. Nat Turner was a preacher that held spirituals in churches and he planned outbreaks. This was a perfect scheme for planning things for the other slaves because none of the owners came to the churches. So they held the perfect places to stash weapons, and hold meetings to revolt. But, once the slaves started to revolt religious meeting weren’t allowed.
The reason that the Civil War occurred was because of the split between the states about their thoughts on slavery. The only way that this war could have been avoided was if both sides were either pro-slavery or all anti-slavery. If all people were treated equally then there wouldn’t be any such thing as slavery, and there could have just been paid workers that earned their money through working at the plantations. The beliefs of the south ripped apart the country and started the Civil War.