Essay On Slavery In America

If we consider the world today versus how it was when the original civilizations came to be, we would notice that none of the initial inhabitants of most locations are still residing in the province where their people originated. This is initiated by the diasporas around the world that has transpired throughout antiquity. By definition, a diaspora is a distribution of any people from their original homeland. It has occurred all over the globe and alters the lives and cultures of many groups of people. One of the most notorious diasporas that the United States is familiar with, went on from the 1620s to 1865; the African slave trade. Slavery in America commenced when the first African slaves were conveyed to the North American colony of Jamestown,
Virgin, in 1619. The motive for the slaves were to arrange a labor force to help in the construction of profitable crops as tobacco. Slavery was trained throughout the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and African slaves assisted in assembling the economic groundworks of the United States. The American westward expansion and the rising obliteration movement in the North triggered an immense debate over slavery which would tear the nation apart in the Civil War. Though the Union triumph emancipated the nation’s four million slaves, the heritage of slavery continues to effect American history. From the riotous years of Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and to this day, the events during slavery still has an effect on the United States and more specifically, African Americans. Without slavery, the United States would not have been in the position it was in economically, there would be no such thing as White Supremacy, and the act of racism within the African American race would not have existed. If the slaves were not moved from their homeland, Africa, the United States would not be in the position it is in today in both positive and negative aspects. According to European colonial officials, the abundant land they had “discovered” in the Americas was useless without sufficient labor to exploit it. Slavery systems of labor exploitation were preferred, but neither European nor Native American sources proved adequate to the task. Enslaved Africans became the labor force of choice in the Western Hemisphere so much so that they became the overwhelming majority of the colonial populations of the Americas. Of the 6.5 million immigrants who survived the crossing of the Atlantic and settled in the Western Hemisphere between 1492 and 1776, only one million were Europeans. More than half of the enslaved African captives in the Americas were employed on sugar plantations. Sugar developed into the leading slave-produced commodity in the Americas. The most commonly used phrase describing the growth of the American economy in the 1830s and 1840s was “Cotton is King.” One crop, slave-grown cotton, provided over half of all US export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world’s cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry.
Slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured goods that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers. The economic engine of the slave trade helped to fuel America’s prosperity. The profits from the trade in enslaved people flowed to many places. Traders were not the only ones to profit from America’s internal slave trade. Slave owners in the Upper South profited because they received cash for the people they sold. Slave owners in the Lower South profited because the people they purchased were forced to labor in the immensely productive cotton and sugar fields. The merchants who supplied clothing and food to the slave traders profited, as did steamboat, railroad and ship owners who carried enslaved people. Slavery became one of the main reasons why the Civil War was started. Because of the uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the
national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states the Civil War commenced. When Abraham Lincoln won the election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The Civil War caused many economic consequences in America. By 1877, when Reconstruction ended with the withdrawal of the Union Army, native white rule returned in every former Confederate state. Economic recovery in the South was slow. Cotton did not reach its 1859 level of production until 1879. As cotton production increased, however, the price fell. Tobacco followed a similar pattern. The region remained capital poor and grew slowly in population. In 1860 the population of the slaves was 11 million compared to 12 million in 1870, and increase of only about 10 percent compared with a 29 percent increase for the rest of the country. The South failed to attract many immigrants after the War because of limited economic opportunities. Its reliance on staple crop agriculture and slowly growing population did not create demand for expanded infrastructure, one of the factors driving the rapid expansion of the national economy outside the former Confederate states. For at least two generations after the Civil War the South remained predominantly agricultural and largely outside the industrial expansion of the national economy. Today, if one looks at the economies of the North and South, the consequences of the Civil War are still apparent. Southern states have higher rates of poverty, poorer educational outcomes, higher infant mortality rates, and lower life expectancy rates, all of the statistics one would expect when a region has experienced what the South experienced. Without the diaspora of the Africans to America, the United States would have never reached that economical high nor would the Civil War had commenced. Because of slavery and because of the Civil War, the South still suffers from those consequences. Other than the fact that slavery affect America’s economy, it also encouraged the idea of White Supremacy.