The Legacy of Slavery

The Legacy of Slavery: The Cause and the Impact In 1865 the thirteenth amendment was signed into the constitution eradicating the institution of slavery and therefore granting rights and freedom to black slaves in the United States of America. Since the Great Emancipation and the signing of the amendment, racial tensions have continued to plague the nation. The legacy of slavery to this day continues to affect the attitudes and feelings that both whites and blacks feel towards the treatment of African Americans. In order to understand why race continues to be an issue in America one must first look to the past and discover where the problem began. The purpose of this paper is to examine the history of slavery and the profound legacy it has left on America by using the slaver era, the Jim Crow era, and today to understand why this legacy lives on. It is important to note that African enslavement in its most early stages was not a result of the ideology of a superior race; slavery in the mid-fifteen hundreds was purely an enterprise driven by profit. This cruel enterprise was fueled due to the European demand for sugar and tobacco that was cultivated in the New World (Heuman 64-66). Native Americans were also victims of slavery but due to their lack of resistance towards Old World diseases many died in the fields making them an invaluable “tool” for Europeans (Heuman 67). Free labor ensured European plantation owners a hundred percent profit margin while African free laborers provided the owners with workers that were strong and could resist European diseases (Heuman 64-66). It was when slavery became a problem of morality that race started to become an immense factor in everyday thinking. It was in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century that the issue of race would emerge and change the path of history. The issue of the morality of slavery arose in the seventeenth century when English lawyers began to question the vitality of enslavement under English