Slavery In The United States Essays - Slavery In The United States

Slavery in the United States In the history of the United States nothing has brought more shame to the face of America than the cold, premeditated method of keeping black people in captivity. People from England who migrated to America used many different methods to enslave black people and passed them down through the children. These methods were quite effective, so effective that these slaves were kept in captivity for over two hundred years in this country. It was the rain of terror that kept black people in fear of their lives for so long. The invention of the gun back in the fifth-teenth century was the main reason that these people were able to go to another continent and enslave so many people. These people from Africa were mistreated very badly right from the start both mentally and physically. They were packed very tightly on ships for months at a time chained to each other with no place to go to the bathroom, little water to drink, and hardly anything to eat. As the population constantly increased in the colonies during the 1600s, so did the demand for slavery especially in the southern colonies where the big plantations were. These plantations were very lucrative since the owners had free manual labor and they could keep all the profit from the crops for themselves. They also had to justify what they were doing to themselves so what they did was tell themselves that these slaves were barbaric and not smart enough to be civilized. These slave owners also owned huge houses in the middle of their plantations and thought of themselves as noblemen. In acuality, it was the slaves who were living nobly while the Europeans were living barbaricly. The Europeans who owned slaves also thought that the slaves were not smart enough because they could not speak English and they did not have a written language. This was proven not to be true either because the second generation of slaves learned the English language with no trouble at all. Once the sl aves started having children, the demand for slaves dropped while the market for selling slaves and their children went up. This was another way they kept slaves in slavery. If a person was born to a slave, he or she was automatically born into a life of slavery. The owners would also keep their slaves ignorant. They would not teach them how to read or write. If they could read, they would have been shocked to find that these colonists believed that every man is born with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They also would have known that these colonists left the last country that they were in for this same reason. Their ignorance to this fact is not what kept them in slavery for so though. What kept them obedient was the fact that they knew they would be made an example of if they tried to escape. Second of all, they had no where to escape to. It was not like they had a friends house to hide out in. They knew if they rebelled or acted up, they would be either beaten very badly with whips, punished by starving in the basement, or just shot. I am sure they all wanted to rebel, but they saw what happened to the ones who did rebel so most of them decided not to. As time went on, slaves were getting smarter and were learning how to read and write. They started learn that not all black people in the country were enslaved. By word of mouth or by reading, they started to learn that slavery did not exist up north. Then they started to learn that not every white person was out to get them if they knew that they were planning to escape. This was a very dangerous plan though. Some white people would actua lly help some slaves escape. This was called the Underground Railroad. Underground because it was kept a big secret from everyone because nobody could trust anybody back then because you would never know who would snitch and who wouldnt. The railroad part was a string of houses of white