Preview

What Is The Role Of Slavery In The 19th Century

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
524 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
What Is The Role Of Slavery In The 19th Century
In the 19th Century slaves in the South were treated as property, worked to almost the brink of death, and mentally and physically abused by their masters. The life of a slave on large plantations was daily physical labor from sun up to sun down, six days a week. Cultivation of cotton was done year round, there wasn’t an off season. Not all slaves were crop workers, some dug ditches, built houses, worked as house servants, or any other form of labor their owner saw fit. At times slaves were outsourced to other plantations to work, some made enough money to purchase their freedom. Planters often thought of slaves as children requiring constant care and supervision. Slaves were a form of capital, they were the tools of production for a booming economy. …show more content…
Many slaves married and had children and they didn’t want their family unit to be broken up. One-third of the slaves being sold in the South were court-ordered sheriff’s actions to payback the planters debts. Then the slaves began to organize and resist slavery. In 1811 hundreds of slave in Louisiana marched through New Orleans, with guns, waving flags, and beating drums. It took 300 soldiers of the U.S. Army to stop their actions. Nat Turner led a bloody rebellion, in which 60 whites were killed in Virginia in 1831. Some also escaped their bondage with the help of the Underground Railroad. An informal network of sympathetic free blacks who helped fugitives from the South escape to the North. Approximately 130,000 slaves used the Underground Railroad for their freedom. The married slaves were less likely to run away from families, so they sabotaged farm equipment, worked slowly and inefficiently, but one of the extreme actions of their discontentment was to poison the entire plantation owners’

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    What was slavery? Slavery, another way it was called was the " Peculiar Institutions" was an everyday life routine in The South. Slavery was people of bottom class with no money, besides that people of upper class would own them they would purchase them and make them work in their cotton business. Slaves would not get paid because they were working they would just work because they were forced to not because they wanted too and would get treated very cruelly like they were a piece of garbage worth nothing. Slaves didn't do anything wrong to deserve like their being treated and owned.…

    • 651 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    During the time of the civil war slave life on plantations varied in many ways and some people would define slavery as a cold-hearted event that occurred in history. Plantation life was harsh and it dictated the way African Americans lived life. Slaves weren’t considered humans during the slavery time period because none were treated as if one was. The slaves had to adjust as time went on because it was no longer about them it was about their work on the fields and their overseer. Although slavery was only thought to be the owning of slaves it was not, Sojourner Truth, Soloman Northup, and Harriet Tubman tell their life stories.…

    • 1806 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Slaves were free and able to own and/or rent their own property but wasn’t able to transform as individual contributors and owners to produce and establish a solid foundation for their families. Slaves didn’t have an efficient transformation that included the proper education education, resources, and available opportunities that would have solidified them becoming profitable.…

    • 449 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Enslaved African Americans resisted slavery in a variety of active and passive ways. "Day-to-day resistance" was the most common form of opposition to slavery. Breaking tools, feigning illness, staging slowdowns, and committing acts of sabotage—were all forms of resistance and expression of slaves' alienation from their masters. Running away was another form of resistance. Most slaves ran away relatively short distances and were not trying to permanently escape from slavery. I have chosen to talk about five different instances when slaves rebelled or revolted. The five revolts I chose to discuss throughout my paper are Denmark. Vesey ‘s Slave Revolt of 1822, the New Orleans Louisiana Revolt of January 1811, the New York City Slave Rebellion…

    • 1236 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Slaves were a proponent to profit and an efficient farm for the owners. Therefore, it was most beneficial to try and cure sick slaves, which was often done by their…

    • 524 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Resistance to slavery began almost as soon as slavery itself did. This should not be surprising when considering that slaves were treated more as property than as human beings. In the United States, resistance to slavery took up multiple forms. These included large-scale rebellions and smaller, quieter acts of resistance. The “day to day resistance,” to slavery was the most common form of resistance. This type of resistance included playing dumb, not following orders, breaking tools, and faking illness among many other examples. On the opposite end of resistance were large-scale open rebellions. The most famous of these was the Nat Turner rebellion. On August 22, 1831, Nat Turner and roughly seventy armed slaves and free blacks went on a revenge…

    • 1887 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Beginning in the 1600s, African slaves were shipped to America in order to contribute their labor to the production of lucrative commodities. Originally, slave labor was utilized on tobacco plantations; however, the depletion of this land, the invention of the cotton gin, and the mechanization of the textile industry led to a demand for cotton. In the south, slaves were exploited on these cotton fields, as they were a cheap and plentiful worksource. Plantation owners completely relied on slave labor and felt that it was essential to their economic success. As this shift to the cotton plantations occurred in the South, a very different change was occurring in the North.…

    • 1849 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Eleven years later in the August of 1831, a slave named Nate Turner influenced a rebellion, which spread throughout southern Virginia. Turner, leading a small army of seventy people killed about sixty white people. After two days of the merciless killings, a militia subdued the insurgence. The Virginia lawmakers reacted by removing what few civil rights slaves and free blacks had.…

    • 659 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Nat turners plan was to steal horses, be armed with weapons, free the slaves, and kill white people. This rebellion resulted in the death of fifty one white people. Nat Turner has had the biggest revolt led by any slave in the South of the United States. Nat turner was convicted and killed two months after hiding. In this revolt hundreds of African Americans were murdered by mobs and militias. Due to this revolt, the law restricting education to all African Americans had been passed and due to the fact that many white people are scared of African Americans revolting, white ministers must be present at all worship…

    • 532 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    That there were white abolitionists added to the credibility of the movement because, although slavery was already outlawed in the Northern states, whites were still perceived as more educated than African Americans. The supporters of the abolitionist’s movement were diverse, but nobody did more for the movement than former slaves. Harriet Tubman was a slave for 15 years of her life before she escaped and joined the Underground Railroad. “The Underground Railroad was a network of people, many African American, offering shelter and aid to escaped slaves ().” Harriet personally “escorted 300 slaves to freedom ()” through the Underground Railroad.…

    • 1005 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    When analyzing the daily life and general treatment of slaves during the antebellum period, it is important to remember that first and foremost, slaves were property. Although oppressed and overworked, a common misconception is that slaves were severely abused or by slaveholders. While there were certainly many unspeakable human rights violations and beatings were commonplace, laws actually protected slaves from abandonment and execution. To understand why the constant beating and rape of slaves is a myth, consider the position of slaveholders from a strictly economic perspective. Slaves were essentially expensive pieces of farm equipment that their owners wanted to extract maximum productivity from in order to maximize the amount of revenue generated over the life of the slave.…

    • 967 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The chains of slavery during the 1800’s was a time in which forced human lifelong labor was at its peak of cruelty and popularity among the south. Slaves had to endure a hard life in which their whole lives were controlled by those who owned them. Their only hope, was to escape to the north and hopefully not be caught by the people that hunted them to bring them back to their masters. Family life for slaves did not really exist. For one it was common custom for slave mothers to part with their children before they were one year old as they would be sold and then placed under the care of an old woman who could not work in the fields (p.18).…

    • 1754 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Nat Turner Slave Rebellion

    • 1933 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Turner, a slave preacher, relied upon visions he had received from God to establish his plans. Turner described visions of “…white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle and the sun was darkened…” (Turner 214). As a result of this vision and others, Turner believed he had been specially chosen by God to lead the slaves in a rebellion. In fact, he claimed that the Spirit told him that “…Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent…” (Turner 215). Turner spread these messages among the other slaves and “…they believed and said my wisdom came from God” (Turner 213). These visions from Turner led to another example of religiously inspired resistance. During his rebellion, he and his about eighty followers marched from farm to farm and killed all the whites (Foner 428). Turner’s Rebellion resulted in the introduction of new slave codes. For example, new laws in Virginia “…prohibited blacks, free or slave, from acting as preachers…” (Foner 429). This new slave law displays the fear this rebellion caused whites by prohibiting one of their common origins. While Turner’s Rebellion did lead to his and seventeen others’ death, it created internal stirrings throughout the South in the conversation about slaveholding, impacting society in…

    • 1933 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Slave labor lasted until the end of the American Civil War. Cotton was dependent on slavery and slavery was dependent on cotton. In the 1830s and 1840s cotton was called" Cotton King" because cotton was a big thing in the American economy. Which is why the plantation economy of the slavery states in the Deep South led to the creation of “The Second Middle Passage.” Which is why cotton being now the most important fiber producing plant. That's why cotton plays a role in the feed and oil industries with its seed. That's why if I lived in the 1800s I would build a factory with many machines, like a sewing machine and spinning jenny etc. And I would let the people work for me instead of forcing them to work…

    • 725 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    a) There was severe limitation on free time for the enslaved as free time was equated to loss of production time on the estate. As a result, a structure of economic dependence was created whereby enslaved Africans relied on the planter for their food, shelter and clothing.…

    • 661 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays