How did slavery affect gender roles for African Americans Essay

How did slavery affect gender roles for African Americans - Essay Example The history of slavery is almost as old as humanity having being practised for centuries in Asia, Africa, Europe and even Americas before European settlement. North America was a late entrant in the human trade as Spanish and Portuguese slavers are approximated to have transported over a million African slaves to South America prior to those in North America (Drescher and Engerman, 1998). Slavery in America can be traced to the first European settlements in the seventeenth century (1619) in Virginia when the Dutch sold the first African slaves (19) to the English colonialist settlers. The number of slaves ballooned with as the importance of cotton and later tobacco trade intensified (Engerman et al, 2003). The original settlers did not regard their slaves as destined for lifelong servitude until the 1660s when Maryland in 1664 declared that all slaves and their children would in future be deemed permanent ‘servants’. This conventional theorem has been disputed by McColley (1988, Pg.280), who asserts that these ‘captives’ were common slaves held against their will and only termed servants by historians due to the lack of records then as the word slave was only introduced from the mid nineteenth century. The decline of slave trade in Europe has though being attributed to the equivalent slavery rise in the New Lands in the Americas (BBC, 2007). The Ante-Bellum South comprised of the southern American states that were still practising slavery before the American Civil War. The ante-bellum south were the plantation owners who relied on slave labour to operate their expansive farms. The main ‘Black Belt’ segment was made of the cotton growing states of Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas; the tobacco producing states of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and Kentucky; hemp

Slavery in america contritubuted greatly to the economin growth which Research Paper

Slavery in america contritubuted greatly to the economin growth which america prosper - Research Paper Example According to Garvin Wright, slavery was seen in the economic sense as a system of production6. Hence many people never saw anything wrong with using other human beings for cheap, or in most cases, free labor. Slavery became the sole production system that was most economically efficient especially in the South. The practice was able to produce enormous amounts of wealth for many people. Just before the start of the Civil War, the South, which was more slave-dependent than the North, had a much higher per capita level than Italy or Spain, two of the countries that were considered economic super powers then. The South’s use of slaves to enhance prosperity was greatly reinforced by political and social structures which supported the use of free or cheap slave labor2. Below is an analysis of different areas of the American economy where slavery was used as a major boost to productivity and profitability. The United States had huge tracts of highly productive lands in the South, but there was one problem: lack of labor. Therefore, with the coming of slavery in the continent, plantation owners could produce whatever they wanted using the labor provided by the slaves. One of the crops that greatly improved the economy of the US during the slave era was cotton. Many white Americans owned huge tracts of land where they grew cotton, especially in the South. Due to lack of mechanization, the farmers depended on human labor on their farms. With slave trade, the farmers did not have to worry about paid wages for their workers; they made them work for free. Although the Africans themselves did not gain anything from all their efforts, the rest of America did enjoy the fruit of this unappreciated labor7. Cotton was a major export and it used to earn the country a lot of money. The slaves made it possible for the farmers to produce large amounts of