Essay On Slavery

Slavery is a prominent part of US history and by the time of the constitutional convention in 1787, slavery was an awful reality and in the first draft of the constitution slavery wasn’t mentioned at all. Slavery was the cause and catalyst of the civil war and they had believed that it would just die out on it’s own, but it didn’t and the issue wasn’t resolved in the writing of the constitution for many reasons including industry, social status, and economy. Slavery and race were discussed at the convention but nothing including the word slavery or race was ever mentioned at all in writing. Instead it would say something like “person held to service or labor”. The Articles of Confederation didn’t mention slavery at all because fugitive slaves and the abolition movement didn’t appear until the 1830’s. Thomas Jefferson the author of the Declaration of Independence was a southerner who owned as many as 223 slaves during his lifetime. Slaves were cheap and the economy was growing. The articles of confederations wasn’t pro-slavery, it just didn’t address it. There hope that it would die out would eventually come to an end when the cotton gin hits the United States. When Eli Whitney invented the Cotton Gin and he himself had hoped that the machine would help end slavery but it did just
Owning slaves provided class and social status for slave owners and it was just a way of living. The more slaves you owned, the high your social status. Slaves represented large portions of the region’s person and corporate wealth. The northern states one by one would start to abolish slavery and the steady flow of immigrants (especially Irish and German) during the potato famine of 1840’s – 1850’s would bring many people who would work for low wages and slowly diminish the need for slavery. After this need for slavery went down, only then do we see during the 13th amendment to the constitution were American slaves were officially