essay on abolition of slavery

Essay on Abolition Of Slavery

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100 Words Essay on Abolition Of Slavery

Introduction.

Slavery is a dark chapter in human history. It was a system where people, known as slaves, were treated as property. They were bought, sold, and forced to work without their consent. The abolition of slavery was a movement to end this cruel practice.

Early Resistance

Slaves always resisted their condition. They would run away, rebel, or even fight for their freedom. This resistance was the first step towards ending slavery. It made people question the morality of owning another human being.

Abolition Movement

In the 18th century, the abolition movement began in earnest. People started speaking out against slavery. They formed groups and campaigned for laws to end slavery. This movement played a crucial role in bringing about the end of slavery.

Key Figures

Many people fought for the end of slavery. People like William Wilberforce, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass played key roles. They risked their lives to help slaves escape and to change public opinion about slavery.

End of Slavery

The abolition movement led to laws that ended slavery. In the United States, the 13th Amendment in 1865 officially abolished slavery. In other parts of the world, similar laws were passed. This marked the end of legal slavery.

The abolition of slavery was a significant achievement in human rights. It showed that people can change unjust systems. Even today, it serves as a reminder that everyone deserves freedom and respect.

250 Words Essay on Abolition Of Slavery

Slavery is a dark part of human history. It was a time when people were bought and sold like objects. They were forced to work without pay. This essay talks about the end of slavery, known as the abolition of slavery.

What is Abolition?

Abolition means to officially end something. In this context, it means the ending of slavery. This was a big step towards human rights.

Why was Slavery Abolished?

Slavery was abolished because it was wrong and unfair. People began to understand that every human being should be free and have rights. They started to fight against slavery.

How was Slavery Abolished?

The abolition of slavery did not happen overnight. It took many years and a lot of effort. People like William Wilberforce in England and Abraham Lincoln in America fought hard to end slavery. They passed laws to stop it.

Impact of Abolition

The end of slavery had a huge impact. It meant freedom for millions of people. It was a big step towards equality and human rights. But, it did not end all problems. Former slaves faced many challenges, like racism and poverty.

The abolition of slavery was a major event in history. It showed that people can fight against injustice and win. It is a reminder that everyone deserves to be free and treated with respect. We must remember this history to ensure that such wrongs are never repeated.

In conclusion, the abolition of slavery was a significant step towards promoting human rights and equality. It serves as a reminder of the power of collective action against injustice.

500 Words Essay on Abolition Of Slavery

Slavery was a cruel practice where people were treated as property. They were bought, sold, and forced to work without pay. Many people fought against it and worked hard to end it. This fight is known as the abolition of slavery.

When and Where Slavery Existed

Slavery existed in many parts of the world, including America, Africa, and Europe, for many centuries. It was most common in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. People were captured from their homes in Africa and taken to other countries to work on farms and in homes.

The Abolition Movement

The abolition movement was a group of people who wanted to end slavery. They believed it was wrong to treat people as property. Many were brave men and women who risked their lives to help enslaved people gain freedom. This group included people like Harriet Tubman, William Lloyd Garrison, and Frederick Douglass.

The Fight Against Slavery in America

In America, the abolition movement gained strength in the 19th century. People began to realize that slavery was wrong and fought to change the laws. The North and South disagreed about this. The North wanted to end slavery, but the South wanted to keep it because their economy depended on it. This disagreement led to the Civil War in 1861.

The End of Slavery

The Civil War ended in 1865, and with it came the end of slavery. President Abraham Lincoln played a big role in this. He signed a law called the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, which declared that all enslaved people in the South were free. After the war, the 13th amendment to the Constitution was added. It made slavery illegal in the entire United States.

The abolition of slavery had a big impact. It meant that millions of people were free and could live their lives as they wanted. But it also led to many challenges. The freed people had to find jobs and homes, and they faced discrimination. Despite these challenges, the end of slavery was a big step towards equality and justice.

The abolition of slavery was a long and hard fight, but it was worth it. It showed that people can stand up against injustice and make a difference. It is an important part of history that reminds us of the value of freedom and equality. Today, we must continue to fight against all forms of discrimination and injustice, just like the abolitionists did.

In conclusion, the abolition of slavery was a significant event that changed the world. It ended a cruel practice and set a path towards equality and justice.

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World History Project - Origins to the Present

Course: world history project - origins to the present > unit 6, read: why was slavery abolished three theories.

READ: Race and Post-Abolition Societies
READ: Rise of Proletariat
BEFORE YOU WATCH: Capitalism and Socialism
WATCH: Capitalism and Socialism
READ: Child Labor
READ: A World Tour of Women's Suffrage
READ: Responses to Industrialization
Transformation of Labor

First read: preview and skimming for gist

Second read: key ideas and understanding content.

According to the article, which countries in the Atlantic abolished the slave trade early? Which countries abolished slavery early? Which countries abolished it late?
How might capitalism have helped end slavery? How did this connect to production and distribution during the Industrial Revolution?
How might changing morality have helped end slavery? How did this connect to the transformations in human communities caused by the Enlightenment and changes in religious and political communities?
How might networks of Africans and descendants of Africans have helped end slavery?
Does the author argue that slavery actually ended when it became illegal? Use evidence from the text to back up your answer.

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

Earlier in this era, you learned about liberal and national political revolutions as well as the Industrial Revolution. In this lesson, you’re learning about networks of reformers who tried to change the world. This article presents you with political, economic, and reform arguments for why slavery ended. Based on what you’ve learned in this era, which argument seems most convincing? Which is the least convincing?

Why Was Slavery Abolished?: Three Theories

Theory 1: free labor and free wages, theory 2: morality, theory 3: the actions of africans in the americas and europe, want to join the conversation.

Introductory Essay: Slavery and the Struggle for Abolition from the Colonial Period to the Civil War

How did the principles of the Declaration of Independence contribute to the quest to end slavery from colonial times to the outbreak of the Civil War?

I can explain how slavery became codifed over time in the United States.
I can explain how Founding principles in the Declaration of Independence strengthened anti-slavery thought and action.
I can explain how territorial expansion intensified the national debate over slavery.
I can explain various ways in which African Americans secured their own liberty from the colonial era to the Civil War.
I can explain how African American leaders worked for the cause of abolition and equality.

Essential Vocabulary

Slavery and the struggle for abolition from the colonial period to the civil war.

The English established their first permanent settler colony in a place they called Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Early seventeenth-century Virginia was abundant in land and scarce in laborers. Initially, the labor need was met mostly by propertyless English men and women who came to the new world as indentured servants hoping to become landowners themselves after their term of service ended. Such servitude was generally the status, too, of Africans in early British America, the first of whom were brought to Virginia by a Dutch vessel in 1619. But within a few decades, indentured servitude in the colonies gave way to lifelong, hereditary slavery, imposed exclusively on black Africans.

Because forced labor (whether indentured servitude or slavery) was a longstanding and common condition, the injustice of slavery troubled relatively few settlers during the colonial period. Southern colonies in particular codified slavery into law. Slavery became hereditary, with men, women, and children bought and sold as property, a condition known as chattel slavery . Opposition to slavery was mainly concentrated among Quakers , who believed in the equality of all men and women and therefore opposed slavery on moral grounds. Quaker opposition to slavery was seen as early as 1688, when a group of Quakers submitted a formal protest against the institution for discussion at a local meeting.

Anti-slavery sentiment strengthened during the era of the Revolution and Founding. Founding principles, based on natural law proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and in several state constitutions, added philosophical force to biblically grounded ideas of human equality and dignity. Those principles informed free and enslaved blacks, including Prince Hall, Elizabeth Freeman, Quock Walker, and Belinda Sutton, who sent anti slavery petitions to state legislatures. Their powerful appeal to natural rights moved legislators and judges to implement the first wave of emancipation in the United States. Immediate emancipation in Massachusetts, gradual emancipation in other northern states, and private manumission in the upper South dealt blows against slavery and freed tens of thousands of people.

Slavery remained deeply entrenched and thousands remained enslaved, however, in states in both the upper and lower South , even as northern leaders believed the practice was on its way to extinction. The result was the set of compromises the Framers inscribed into the U.S. Constitution—lending slavery important protections but also preparing for its eventual abolition. The Constitution did not use the word “slave” or “slavery,” instead referring to those enslaved as “persons.” James Madison, the “father” of the Constitution, thus thought the document implicitly denied the legitimacy of a claim of property in another human being. The Constitution also restricted slavery’s growth by allowing Congress to ban the slave trade after 20 years. Out of those compromises grew extended controversies, however, the most heated and dangerous of which concerned the treatment of fugitive slaves and the status of slavery in federal territories.

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 renewed and enhanced slavery’s profitability and expansion, which intensified both attachment and opposition to it. The first major flare-up occurred in 1819, when a dispute over whether Missouri would be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state generated threats of civil war among members of Congress. The adoption of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 quelled the anger for a time. But the dispute was reignited in the 1830s and continued to inflame the country’s political life through the Civil War.

A cotton gin on display at the Eli Whitney Museum by Tom Murphy VII, 2007.

“U.S. Cotton Production 1790–1834” by Bill of Rights Institute/Flickr, CC BY 4.0

Separating the sticky seeds from cotton fiber was slow, painstaking work. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (gin being southern slang for engine) made the task much simpler, and cotton production in the lower South exploded. Cotton planters and their slaves moved to Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama to start new cotton plantations. Many planters in the Chesapeake region sold their slaves to cotton planters in the lower South. This created a massive interstate slave trade that transferred enslaved persons through auctions and forced marches in chains and that also broke up many slave families.

In 1831, in Virginia, a large-scale slave rebellion led by Nat Turner resulted in the deaths of approximately 60 whites and more than 100 blacks and generated alarm throughout the South. That same decade saw the emergence of a radicalized (and to a degree racially integrated) abolitionist movement, led by Massachusetts activist William Lloyd Garrison, and an equally radicalized pro slavery faction, led by U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

The polarization sharpened in subsequent decades. The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) brought large new western territories under U.S. control and renewed the contention in Congress over the status of slavery in federal territories. The complex 1850 Compromise, which included a new fugitive slave law heavily weighted in favor of slaveholders’ interests, did little to restore calm.

A few years later, Congress reopened the Kansas and Nebraska territories to slavery, thereby undoing the 1820 Missouri Compromise and rendering any further compromises unlikely. The U.S. Supreme Court tried vainly to settle the controversy by issuing, in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the most pro-slavery ruling in its history. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, a rising figure in the newly born Republican Party, declared the United States a “house divided” between slavery and freedom. In late 1859, militant abolitionist John Brown alarmed the South when he attempted to liberate slaves by taking over a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He was promptly captured, tried, and executed and thereupon became a martyr for many northern abolitionists.

Watch this BRI Homework Help video: Dred Scott v. Sandford for more information on the pivotal Dred Scott decision.

Leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, and James Forten all worked for the cause of abolition and equality.

As the debate over slavery continued on the national stage, formerly enslaved and free black men and women spoke out against the evils of slavery. Slave narratives such as those by Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northrup, and Harriet Jacobs humanized the experience of slavery. Their vivid, heartbreaking accounts of their own enslavement strengthened the moral cause of abolition. At the same time, enslaved men and women made the brave and dangerous decision to run away. Some ran on their own, and others used the Underground Railroad, a network of secret “conductors” and “stations” that helped enslaved people escape to the North and, after 1850, to Canada. The most famous of these conductors was Harriet Tubman, who traveled to the South about 12 times to lead approximately 70 men and women to freedom. Free blacks faced their own challenges. Leaders such as Benjamin Banneker, James Forten, David Walker, and Maria Stewart spoke out against racist attitudes and laws that sought to limit their political and civil rights.

This map shows the concentration of slaves in the southern United States as derived from the 1860 U.S. Census. The so-called “Border states”—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and after 1863, West Virginia—allowed slavery but remained loyal to the Union. Credit: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

By 1860, the atmosphere in the United States was combustible. With the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in November of that year, the conflict over slavery came to a head. Since Lincoln and Republicans opposed the expansion of slavery and called it a moral evil, seven slaveholding states declared their secession from the United States. And in April 1861, the war came. The next five years of conflict and bloodshed determined the fate of enslaved men, women, and children, and of the Union itself.

Reading Comprehension Questions

What actions were taken to oppose slavery in the colonial period and Founding era?
Why did the Constitution not use the words “slave” or “slavery”?
The invention of the cotton gin
The Mexican-American War
Dred Scott v. Sandford
The election of Abraham Lincoln as president
How did formerly enslaved and free black men and women fight to end slavery?

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Slavery in America

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 26, 2024 | Original: November 12, 2009

Hundreds of thousands of Africans, both free and enslaved, aided the establishment and survival of colonies in the Americas and the New World. However, many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619 , when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown , Virginia . The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship Sao Jao Bautista.

Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans.

Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.

When Did Slavery Start in America?

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.

After the American Revolution , many colonists—particularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the agricultural economy—began to link the oppression of enslaved Africans to their own oppression by the British, and to call for slavery’s abolition.

Did you know? One of the first martyrs to the cause of American patriotism was Crispus Attucks, a former enslaved man who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770. Some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War.

But after the Revolutionary War , the new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, when it It determined that three out of every five enslaved people were counted when determining a state's total population for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress. The Constitution's drafters also guaranteed the right to repossess any “person held to service or labor” (an obvious euphemism for slavery).

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton.

By the mid-19th century, America’s westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War . Though the Union victory freed the nation’s four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and beyond.

In the late 18th century, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt.

Around the same time, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin , a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. His device was widely copied, and within a few years, the South transitioned from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region’s dependence on enslaved labor.

Slavery itself was never widespread in the North, though many of the region’s businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Between 1774 and 1804, most of the northern states abolished slavery or started the process to abolish slavery, but the institution of slavery remained vital to the South.

Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years. By 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

Living Conditions of Enslaved People

Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many enslavers owned fewer than 50 enslaved people.

Landowners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement were restricted.

Many enslavers raped women they held in slavery, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their enslavers.

Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families. Most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal.

Slave Rebellions

Rebellions among enslaved people did occur—notably, ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822—but few were successful.

The revolt that most terrified enslavers was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Turner’s group, which eventually numbered around 75 Black men, murdered some 55 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them.

Supporters of slavery pointed to Turner’s rebellion as evidence that Black people were inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them. And fears of similar insurrections led many southern states to further strengthen their slave codes in order to limit the education, movement and assembly of enslaved people.

Abolitionist Movement

In the North, the increased repression of southern Black people only fanned the flames of the growing abolitionist movement .

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by free Black people such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison , founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator , and Harriet Beecher Stowe , who published the bestselling antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin .

While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slaveholding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious “free-labor” argument, which held that slaveholding was regressive, inefficient and made little economic sense.

Free Black people and other antislavery northerners had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad , gained real momentum in the 1830s.

Conductors like Harriet Tubman guided escapees on their journey North, and “ stationmasters ” included such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Secretary of State William H. Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Although estimates vary widely, it may have helped anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 enslaved people reach freedom.

The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North. It also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro-slavery southerners of their northern countrymen’s determination to defeat the institution that sustained them.

Missouri Compromise

America’s explosive growth—and its expansion westward in the first half of the 19th century—would provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion.

In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government’s right to restrict slavery over Missouri’s application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouri’s southern border were to be free soil.

Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was only temporarily able to help quell the forces of sectionalism.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War .

Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out—with considerable bloodshed—in the new state of Kansas.

Outrage in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska Act spelled the downfall of the old Whig Party and the birth of a new, all-northern Republican Party . In 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court (involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his enslaver had taken him into free territory) effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery.

John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry

In 1859, two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery.

John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry , Virginia—in which the abolitionist and 22 men, including five Black men and three of Brown’s sons raided and occupied a federal arsenal—resulted in the deaths of 10 people and Brown’s hanging.

The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South.

The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America ; four more would follow after the Civil War began.

Though Lincoln’s anti-slavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the United States as a nation.

Abolition became a goal only later, due to military necessity, growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the self-emancipation of many people who fled enslavement as Union troops swept through the South.

When Did Slavery End?

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State…in rebellion,…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t officially end all slavery in America—that would happen with the passage of the 13th Amendment after the Civil War’s end in 1865—some 186,000 Black soldiers would join the Union Army, and about 38,000 lost their lives.

The Legacy of Slavery

The 13th Amendment, adopted on December 18, 1865, officially abolished slavery, but freed Black peoples’ status in the post-war South remained precarious, and significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

Previously enslaved men and women received the rights of citizenship and the “equal protection” of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment and the right to vote in the 15th Amendment , but these provisions of the Constitution were often ignored or violated, and it was difficult for Black citizens to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping .

Despite seeing an unprecedented degree of Black participation in American political life, Reconstruction was ultimately frustrating for African Americans, and the rebirth of white supremacy —including the rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—had triumphed in the South by 1877.

Almost a century later, resistance to the lingering racism and discrimination in America that began during the slavery era led to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which achieved the greatest political and social gains for Black Americans since Reconstruction.

America’s First Memorial to its 4,400 Lynching Victims

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Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation and Freedom

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Reconstruction, 1865-1877

Donald Brown, Harvard University, G6, English PhD Candidate

No period in American history has had more wide-reaching implications than Reconstruction. However, white supremacist mythologies about those contentious years from 1865-1877 reigned supreme both inside and outside the academy until the 1960s. Columbia University’s now-infamous Dunning School (1900-1930) epitomizes the dominant narrative regarding Reconstruction for over half of the twentieth century. From their point of view, Reconstruction was a tragic period of American history in which vengeful White Northern radicals took over the South. In order to punish the White Southerners they had just defeated in the Civil War, these Radical Republicans gave ignorant freedmen the right to vote. This resulted in at least 2,000 elected Black officeholders, including two United States senators and 21 representatives. In order to discredit the sweeping changes taking place across the American South, conservative historians argued this period was full of corruption and disorder and proved that Black Americans were not fit to leadership or citizenship.

Thanks to the work of a number of Black and leftist historians—most notably John Roy Lynch, W.E.B. Du Bois, Willie Lee Rose, and Eric Foner—that negative depiction of Reconstruction is being overturned. As Du Bois famously wrote in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), this was a time in which “the slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; and then moved back again toward slavery.” During that short time in the sun, underfunded biracial state governments taxed big planters to pay for education, healthcare, and roads that benefited everyone. There is still much more to be unpacked from this rich period of American history, and Houghton Library contains a wealth of material to further buttress new narratives of that era.

Reconstructing Reconstruction

While some academics, like those of the Dunning School, interpreted Reconstruction as doomed to failure, in the years immediately following the Civil War there were many Americans, Black and White, who saw the radical reforms as being sabotaged from the outset. Writer and civil rights activist Albion W. Tourgée published his best selling novel Bricks Without Straw in 1880. Unlike most White authors at the time, Tourgée centered Black characters in his novel, showing how the recently emancipated were faced with violence and political oppression in spite of their attempts to be equal citizens.

In this period, two of the most iconic amendments were implemented. The Fourteenth Amendment ratified several crucial civil rights clauses. The natural born citizenship clause overturned the 1857 supreme court case, Dred Scott v. Sandford , which stated that descendants of African slaves could not be citizens of the United States. The equal protection clause ensured formerly enslaved persons crucial legal rights and validated the equality provisions contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Even though many of these clauses were cleverly disregarded by numerous states once Reconstruction ended, particularly in the Deep South, the equal protection clause was the basis of the NAACP’s victory in the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed another important civil right: the right to vote. No longer could any state discriminate on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. At Houghton, we have proof of the exhilarating response Black Americans had to the momentous progress they worked so hard to bring about: Nashvillians organized a Fifteenth Amendment Celebration on May 4, 1870. And once again, during the classical period of the Civil Rights Movement, leaders appealed to this amendment to make their case for what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Reign of Kings Alpha and Abadon

Lorenzo D. Blackson's fantastical allegory novel, The Rise and Progress of the Kingdoms of Light & Darkness ; Reign of Kings Alpha and Abadon (1867), is one of the most ambitious creative efforts of Black authors during Reconstruction. A Protestant religious allegory in the lineage of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress , Blackson's novel follows his vision of a holy war between good and evil, showing slavery and racial oppression on the side of evil King Abadon and Protestant abolitionists and freemen on the side of good King Alpha. The combination of fantasy holy war, religious pedagogy, and Reconstruction era optimism provide a unique insight to one contemporary Black perspective on the time.

It is important to emphasize that these radical policy initiatives were set by Black Americans themselves. It was, in fact, from formerly enslaved persons, not those who formerly enslaved them, that the most robust notions of freedom were imagined and enacted. With the help of the nation’s first civil rights president, Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877), and Radical Republicans, such as Benjamin Franklin Wade and Thaddeus Stevens, substantial strides in racial advancement were made in those short twelve years. Houghton Library is home to a wide array of examples of said advancement, such as a letter written in 1855 by Frederick Douglass to Charles Sumner, the nation’s leading abolitionist. In it, he argues that Black Americans, not White abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, founded the antislavery movement. That being said, Douglass was appreciative of allies, such as President Grant, of whom he said: “in him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.” Houghton Library also houses an extraordinary letter dated December 1, 1876 from Sojourner Truth , famous abolitionist and women’s rights activist, who could neither read nor write. She had someone help steady her hand so she could provide a signed letter to a fan, and promised to also send her supporter an autobiography, Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bondswoman of Olden Time, Emancipated by the New York Legislature in the Early Part of the Present Century: with a History of Her Labors and Correspondence.

In this hopeful time, Black Americans, primarily located in the South, were determined to use their demographic power to demand their right to a portion of the wealth and property their labor had created. In states like South Carolina and Mississippi, which were majority Black at the time, and Louisiana , Alabama, and Georgia , with Black Americans consisting of nearly half of the population, the United States elected its first Black U.S. congressmen. Now that Black Southern men had the power to vote, they eagerly elected Black men to represent their best interests. Jefferson Franklin Long (U.S. congressman from Georgia), Joseph Hayne Rainey (U.S. congressman from South Carolina), and Hiram Rhodes Revels (Mississippi U.S. Senator) all took office in the 41st Congress (1869-1871). These elected officials were memorialized in a lithograph by popular firm Currier and Ives. Other federal agencies, such as the Freedmen’s Bureau , also assisted Black Americans build businesses, churches, and schools; own land and cultivate crops; and more generally establish cultural and economic autonomy. As Frederick Douglass wrote in 1870, “at last, at last the black man has a future.”

Currier and Ives group portrait of Black representatives in the 41st and 42nd Congress

Black Americans quickly took full advantage of their newfound freedom in a myriad of ways. Alfred Islay Walden’s story is a particularly remarkable example of this. Born a slave in Randolph County, North Carolina, he only gained freedom after Emancipation. He traveled by foot to Washington, D.C. and made a living selling poems and giving lectures across the Northeast. He also attended school at Howard University on scholarship, graduating in 1876, and used that formal education to establish a mission school and become one of the first Black graduates of New Brunswick Theological Seminary. Walden’s Miscellaneous Poems, Which The Author Desires to Dedicate to The Cause of Education and Humanity (1872) celebrates the “Impeachment of President Johnson,” one of the most racist presidents in American history; “The Election of Mayor Bowen,” a Radical Republican mayor of Washington, D.C. (Sayles Jenks Bowen); and Walden’s own religious convictions, such as in “Jesus my Friend;” among other topics.

Black newspapers quickly emerged during Reconstruction as well, such as the Colored Representative , a Black newspaper based in Lexington, KY in the 1870s. As editor George B. Thomas wrote in an “Extra,” dated May 25, 1871 : “We want all the arts and fashions of the North, East and Western states, for the benefit of the colored people. They cannot know what is going on, unless they read our paper.... Now, we want everything that is a benefit to our colored people. Speeches, debates, and sermons will be published.”

Reconstruction proves that Black people, when not impeded by structural barriers, are enthusiastic civic participants. Houghton houses rich archival material on Black Americans advocating for civil rights in Vicksburg, Mississippi , Little Rock, Arkansas , and Atlanta, Georgia , among other states, in the forms of state Colored Conventions and powerful political speeches . For anyone interested in the long history of the Civil Rights Movement, these holdings are a treasure trove waiting to be mined. Though the moment in the sun was brief, the heat exuded during Reconstruction left a deep impact on progressive Americans and will continue to provide an exemplary political model for generations to come.

The Center for Legislative Archives

Benjamin Franklin's Anti-Slavery Petitions to Congress

During his life, Franklin had many careers including service as a diplomat, a printer, a writer, an inventor, a scientist, a lawmaker, and a postmaster, among others. In his later years he became vocal as an abolitionist and in 1787 began to serve as President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. The Society was originally formed April 14, 1775, in Philadelphia, as The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage; it was reorganized in 1784 and again in 1787, and then incorporated by the state of Pennsylvania in 1789. The Society not only advocated the abolition of slavery, but made efforts to integrate freed slaves into American society.

Franklin did not publicly speak out against slavery until very late in his life. As a young man he owned slaves, and he carried advertisements for the sale of slaves in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. At the same time, however, he published numerous Quaker pamphlets against slavery and condemned the practice of slavery in his private correspondence. It was after the ratification of the United States Constitution that he became an outspoken opponent of slavery. In 1789 he wrote and published several essays supporting the abolition of slavery and his last public act was to send to Congress a petition on behalf of the Society asking for the abolition of slavery and an end to the slave trade. The petition, signed on February 3, 1790, asked the first Congress, then meeting in New York City, to "devise means for removing the Inconsistency from the Character of the American People," and to "promote mercy and justice toward this distressed Race."

The petition was introduced to the House on February 12 and to the Senate on February 15, 1790. It was immediately denounced by pro-slavery congressmen and sparked a heated debate in both the House and the Senate. The Senate took no action on the petition, and the House referred it to a select committee for further consideration. The committee reported on March 5, 1790 claiming that the Constitution restrains Congress from prohibiting the importation or emancipation of slaves until 1808 and then tabled the petition. On April 17, 1790, just two months later, Franklin died in Philadelphia at the age of 84.

Petition from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery to Vice President John Adams signed by Benjamin Franklin (front), February 3, 1790; Records of the U.S. Senate, RG 46.

View in National Archives Catalog

Petition from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery to Vice President John Adams signed by Benjamin Franklin (back), February 3, 1790; Records of the U.S. Senate, RG 46.

2 Britain and the Slave Trade: The Rise of Abolitionism

Published: January 2012
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This chapter examines the transformation of international law from justifying slave trade to ultimately suppressing it. It argues that the key player in the international abolition movement was Great Britain. At first, British merchants were early participants in the slave trade, second only to the Portuguese in terms of volume of slaves shipped. But by the late eighteenth century, attitudes toward the slave trade in Britain began to change. Historians agree that British abolitionism arose out of a combination of factors, including economic changes, Enlightenment philosophy, and religious revival movements. Throughout the Napoleonic Wars, Britain continued the practice of seizing foreign slave ships. In the years following the Napoleonic Wars, Britain triggered a sea change in the status of the slave trade under international law. Time and again, British diplomats would remind other nations that they had agreed by treaty to suppress the slave trade.

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Welcome to Gale International

Debates over slavery and abolition: an interpretative and historiographical essay, orville vernon burton | clemson university.

Slavery is an ugly word, and the vast majority of modern readers would immediately identify it as an ugly concept. Any effort to reintroduce the institution in the United States would no doubt be vigorously resisted by all but a marginal few; most citizens, in fact, would wonder how such a proposal could even be seriously debated, or how support for it could be buttressed by anything other than ignorance or the most unmitigated form of selfishness. People, however, tend to have short memories (which is why they need historians). Slavery had been a commonly accepted fact of life since before written records began and has lingered in some parts of the world until the present time. In the past, individuals were enslaved, some for being captives, debtors, criminals, or the indigent poor. Sometimes whole groups were placed in bondage. In either case, the purpose of the institution was primarily to provide inexpensive labor and, in some societies, to promote group identity among the enslavers by providing a permanently contrasted "other," which allowed the enslaving group to feel superior. Sometimes individual slaves, or even large groups, were freed. Sometimes too, slaves rose up, often spurred by inspirational leaders such as Moses or Spartacus. Some of these efforts at resistance were more successful than others, but the institution continued through the centuries. The very word slave has its roots in the ethnic nomenclature Slav , for Slavs were frequently enslaved by their Holy Roman conquerors. The first African slaves appeared in the English colonies in 1619. Native Americans too were often enslaved in the seventeenth century, frequently being shipped to the West Indies. Europeans introduced a complex slave trade to their new Indian neighbors, often pitting tribe against tribe to obtain captives to sell into slavery. By the eighteenth century, however, slavery as practiced by Europeans almost exclusively victimized Africans by means of the triangular slave trade. Slavery in colonial and early America existed in both the North and the South. For example, slavery was common in New York. Even by the Civil War, there were still a few remaining slaves in New Jersey, which had ended slavery through gradual emancipation but like other northern states had become a free state. Further north, New Hampshire still had eighteen slaves at the war's beginning. Slavery, though, moved from being a national problem to an increasingly sectional difference defining North and South in the United States. Several southeastern Indian tribes, in fact, adopted plantation slavery (far different from the kinship slavery they had traditionally practiced, which involved war captives) and began to identify, even after Indian Removal, with their white southern neighbors where slavery was concerned. Abolitionist organizations arose in the eighteenth century, first in Europe and then in America. Although slavery was common in the British Empire, it existed mostly on colonial plantations; by the 1770s only fifteen thousand Africans were enslaved in England itself, most of them domestic servants. Most English citizens rarely if ever saw the full effects of slavery, and few gave it much thought. This changed in 1772, when the Bostonian Charles Stuart recaptured his slave James Somerset, who had escaped while accompanying his master on a trip to England. Stuart made preparations to send Somerset to the West Indies for resale. Somerset, however, had made friends. He had been baptized during his stay, and his new godparents interceded on his behalf, issuing a writ of habeus corpus, forcing the issue to trial. Lord Mansfield, chief justice of the King's Bench, issued a judgment that ended: "Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged." Lord Mansfield's decision called into question whether, and how, slavery could be enforced in Great Britain; a large segment of the public wrongly concluded that slavery was abolished, but that was not the case. Regardless of legal decisions made in London, slavery continued to flourish in the West Indies. The first British abolitionist organization was set up by Quakers in 1783. This was followed, in 1787, by the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, whose membership included Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp. Clarkson and Sharp tirelessly investigated the slave trade, writing pamphlets and delivering speeches intended to educate the British public about the horrors of slavery. They also heavily promoted the autobiography of the former slave Olaudah Equiano, who joined them on lecture tours. The movement needed a political face, however, and they found it in William Wilberforce, a prominent evangelical member of Parliament. Wilberforce, with the support of powerful political friends such as William Pitt the Younger and Charles Fox, became the most recognized voice in the abolitionist movement for decades. The anti-slavery group, however, continued to face powerful opposition from planters. Their cause was dealt a blow when Britain went to war with France in 1793, creating an atmosphere in which any protests against the status quo were interpreted as unpatriotic. The abolitionists did not relent, and in 1807 the slave trade was banned in Great Britain. In 1833, benefiting from a national mood for reform in general, they achieved an even greater goal: slavery itself was abolished. Wilberforce learned of the passage of the Abolition of Slavery Act on his deathbed. London's Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, formed in 1787, served as an inspiration for the visiting Frenchman Jacques Pierre Brissot, who became acquainted with several members. Upon his return to Paris in 1788 Brissot founded the Society of Friends of the Blacks, hoping the two organizations could work together to end the slave trade. Although many politicians and intellectuals joined Brissot's Society, the planters and merchants who benefited from the trade mounted a well-organized publicity campaign that gained them much public support. Society members were sometimes attacked in the streets for their unpopular views. The successful French Revolution led to the publication, in 1789, of the Declaration of the Rights of Man . The document delineated rights for "all men without exception" and included the statement "men are born and remain free and equal in rights." It did not, however, directly address slavery. The declaration's precepts inspired Julien Raimond to come to France and present his case to the National Assembly. Raimond, a mulatto who had been born free, owned an indigo plantation in Saint-Domingue (later Haiti). Raimond wanted the French government to ease racial restrictions in Saint-Domingue and to allow its wealthy colonial citizens of color to vote. Supported by friends such as Abbé Henri Grégoire, Vincent Ogé (who was also a freeborn black from the colony), and the Society of Friends of the Blacks, Raimond convinced the assembly to enfranchise freeborn blacks. The decision incensed white colonists, and they refused to enforce it; in turn, Ogé led an unsuccessful insurrection in 1791 and was tortured to death. A few months later a much larger slave revolt began, which would ultimately lead to the formation of Haiti, the first black republic. Slavery was abolished in France in 1794 but reinstituted in 1802, mostly in reaction to Haiti and the failed insurrection in Guadeloupe. The French writer Victor Schoelcher began to publish anti-slavery literature in the 1830s, founding his own abolitionist group in 1834. Appointed undersecretary of state for the colonies after the Revolution of 1848, Schoelcher immediately set up a committee to end slavery. On 27 April 1848 the provisional government accepted and passed the committee's decree to abolish slavery in all French territories, freeing 260,000 slaves. The United States' Founding Fathers, while writing about freedom and liberty, were ambivalent enough about the subject of slavery to avoid discussing it directly as much as possible; for example, the words slave or slavery are never mentioned in the Constitution. The American Revolution, a revolution for liberty, inspired an all too brief moment of manumission among some slaveholders, especially in the North, but also in the South. And some slaves took the opportunity of the British offer of manumission to leave the country. By the early nineteenth century even some white southerners were having doubts about how worthwhile the "peculiar institution" really was, and most of its supporters presented it as a distasteful, necessary evil. Then, in 1831, the abolition of slavery became a serious topic of conversation. In Boston, Massachusetts, the Christian pacifist William Lloyd Garrison denounced any and all who excused slavery—people, churches, political parties—and founded the Liberator , an abolitionist newspaper. While circulation was relatively limited, the paper and his speaking engagements brought attention to the issue of slavery. Later that year, in North Hampton, Virginia, a religiously motivated enslaved man, Nat Turner, led Virginia slaves in a bloody revolt. Because Nat Turner's Rebellion occurred seven months after the first publication of the Liberator , many blamed Turner's insurrection on Garrison, linking abolitionism to slave revolt. Abolitionism developed a newfound immediacy in the aftermath of Turner's slave revolt, which cost the lives of sixty whites and of many more African Americans in retaliation. Even some slave owners, fearful for their families' safety, questioned whether slavery was worth the risk. Some opponents of slavery presented the revolt as proof that men, even slaves, could reach a point where they were willing to die for a chance at freedom. The possibility of ending slavery in the Commonwealth was taken up by the Virginia legislature and debated vigorously by both sides. In the process of this debate, with the rest of the country anxiously looking on, a southern economist named Thomas Roderick Dew framed an argument in favor of slavery's retention that would be the backbone of proslavery arguments for decades. This spurred even more vigorous debate, and activity, by slavery's opponents. Dew's approach to slavery was practical, couched in the language of logic. The southern economy would fall apart overnight if slavery were suddenly abolished, and it might never recover. Dew asserted that the slaves might never recover as well. Slavery, in Dew's argument, was a force of "positive good" for both the enslavers and the enslaved. Blacks were too backward to fend for themselves, and it would be cruel to force them to do so; it would be unchristian. Far from being the blight, even perhaps the necessary evil, that generations had considered slavery to be, slavery was now presented as a stabilizing social force for good. Those arguments invigorated some individuals who might before have been embarrassed to promote the institution, even as they benefited from it—individuals such as Thomas Jefferson, who succinctly summed up the problem of slavery: "We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go." Meanwhile, activists and preachers on both sides found a plethora of scriptures to support their respective views. Strong proslavery elements in the North equated abolitionism with the Industrial Revolution, believing that, although slavery definitely needed reform, many of the abolitionists' financial backers were working for their own self-interest, seeking to replace one form of abuse with another (industrialized wage slavery) and thus gain a more compliant workforce. Slavery, long a source of unease and contention, became the focus of a legitimate national discussion in a way that would be unfathomable to most modern Americans. As politicians since Jefferson had understood, the slavery question threatened to fragment the nation into dangerous sectional shards, destroying coalitions, parties, and compromises—dissolving the broad middle ground of moderation and common interest itself. To forestall that danger, Congress instituted a congressional "gag rule" in 1836 to prevent debate over slavery. When abolitionist societies in the North were flooding Congress with petitions detailing the horrors of bondage in lurid terms, South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun helped force through legislation requiring that offending appeals be laid on the table, unread, unrecorded, and not open to discussion. Freedom of speech was thus limited in Congress until 1844, when the gag rule was defeated through the leadership of former President John Quincy Adams, the son of the second president, John Adams. "Old Man Eloquent," by then a Massachusetts representative, was unequivocal in his opposition to slavery and commitment to free speech. He ultimately died working at his desk. Religion played a large role in both proslavery and anti-slavery movements. Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Baptists, while strong in the belief that the Bible condoned slavery, also had important anti-slavery wings. Pope Gregory XVI published an apostolic letter banning Catholic participation in the slave trade, though he did not condemn slavery outright. Taking a position held only by the most daring white Protestants, the New Orleans newspaper Propagateur Catholique declared that "the Negroes are men" regardless of skin color. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church opposed abolition because it feared liberal individualism. Protestant evangelical anti-slavery activists frequently denounced slavery and Catholicism as parallel despotic systems, both opposed to education, free speech, and political liberty. With increasing fervor a minority of reformers began to declare that the worst sin facing America was slavery. Against the laws and customs of community, they posed a higher law of individual conscience and a new vision of social order. Earlier it had been predominantly southerners who led the most active anti-slavery group, the American Colonization Society. Their program encouraged voluntary emancipation and the colonization of freed slaves in Africa. Very few white Americans could envision a racially egalitarian society in which black people were fully citizens of the republic. Free African Americans in the North were active and vocal opponents of colonization because it meant exile from the home they knew. In 1832, the peak year of emigration to Liberia, only about eight hundred left America, most of them enslaved persons freed on condition of emigrating to Africa. Neither Abraham Lincoln nor Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin , were abolitionists; both favored voluntary colonization. African Americans were the strongest advocates for the immediate end of slavery. It was always clear to African Americans that when whites spoke of liberty they limited it to themselves. Not accepting this limitation, virtually all free black community organizations, including schools, churches, fraternal associations, and mutual aid societies, favored abolition. African American contributions to the abolitionist movement itself began in the Northeast with several "African Societies" during the late eighteenth century. During the 1820s organizations such as the Massachusetts General Colored Association were formed to fight southern slavery and northern segregation, and the African American newspaper Freedom's Journal , published in New York in 1827, provided sustained criticisms of slavery. African American abolitionists also preceded white abolitionists in their insistence that moral suasion alone would not effect an end to slavery. In 1829 David Walker, son of a free black mother and enslaved father, published an Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. He advocated uncompromising resistance to slavery, encouraging African Americans to fight "in the glorious and heavenly cause of freedom." When Walker's pamphlet was found in the possession of African Americans in Savannah, the Georgia legislature reacted quickly, enacting the death penalty for circulating publications designed to stir insurrection. Seeing danger coming from troublemaking whites as well as enslaved blacks, they enacted severe penalties for teaching slaves to read or write. Other states followed suit. Forces against abolition were also strong in the North. Abolitionists had to fight against the Constitution, the courts, precedent, expediency, and prejudice. The vast majority of whites blamed abolitionists for stirring up sectional trouble. At best they were scorned and marginalized. At worst they lost their lives. In 1837 an anti-abolitionist mob in Illinois, furious with the Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy and his abolitionist newspaper, the Alton Observer , murdered Lovejoy as he fled the burning building that housed his newspaper. In Boston, William Lloyd Garrison represented the radical end of the white abolitionist spectrum. While he opposed slave uprisings and violent resistance, Garrison thought that African Americans should "share an equality with whites." He excoriated the Constitution as a proslavery document. He advocated dissolution of the Union in order to establish a true democracy without slavery. Garrison, the ascetic nonconformist, was not a popular man and was once forced to parade through Boston with a noose around his neck. Among those falling under the influence of Garrison was Frederick Baily. Enslaved in Baltimore, Baily, carrying forged papers as proof that he was a free black sailor, purchased train tickets to Philadelphia and then to New York, where a free African American sailor directed him to the abolitionist David Ruggles. Ruggles sent Frederick and his new wife, Anna, to live with the family of Nathan Johnson, a free and well-to-do African American. To avoid slave catchers, Baily changed his last name to Douglass. Frederick Douglass became a mighty spokesman for abolition. His personal experiences enabled him to counter proslavery propaganda that slaves were content and had an easy life. Douglass and Garrison came to differ on how best to seek freedom for the enslaved. Douglass disagreed with Garrison that resisting slavery through violence was wrong. The two also disagreed on the Constitution, which Douglass thought could "be wielded in behalf of emancipation." Like other black Americans, Douglass coupled anti-slavery activities with demands for racial equality and justice. In December 1847 Douglass published the first issue of his abolitionist paper the North Star , a four-page weekly out of Rochester, New York. Named after the star pointing the way north to fugitive slaves, the paper printed as its motto, "Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren." Although differences between Garrison and Douglass became bitter and irreconcilable, both men were part of a radical faction that relied on a higher law, or natural law, of individual conscience. Based in Boston, Garrison, Douglass, and their allies—including female anti-slavery activists—pursued moral suasion, which they believed could change hearts radically and so change the world, achieving complete and immediate emancipation, wiping away racism, and advancing the government of God on earth. The Garrisonians held sway across the 1830s. In the 1840s another group, equally religious but more temperate in their hopes for change, came to the fore. Clustered around the New York businessmen and brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, this faction focused on political institutions. Where the Boston contingent worked in hired lecture halls, church basements, and shabby newspaper offices, always in search of donations and petition signatures, the New York crowd took a less pie-in-the-sky approach. The Tappanites were mostly lawyers and merchants, well acquainted with the levers of power and the paying of bills, and as much concerned with channeling and limiting social change as initiating it. Firm believers in private property, they repudiated the idea that reformers should rely on a higher law than the Constitution. To them, civic responsibility in a free society required working within the system. Organizing the political process, with all the mundane labor and pitiful compromises that entailed, the Tappanites worked at the precinct, local, and state levels to elect anti-slavery men. By putting the right men in office, the Tappanites set out to transform the nation and resolve the contradictions the Founding Fathers had institutionalized. Fired by a conviction that the Constitution was fundamentally anti-slavery, Arthur and Lewis Tappan used the judicial process to defend enslaved Africans who in 1839 had mutinied and taken over the ship Amistad from Spanish slavers. The whole idea that the captives might have a right to bring a lawsuit troubled the Spanish minister. Observing the proceedings, Minister Argaiz was incredulous. Why, he wondered, did not the United States government "interpose its authority to put down the irregularity of these proceedings?" The verdict went in favor of the Africans and ultimately was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1841. Lewis Tappan and his associates gave thanks to God that the case established the "liberties of thirty-six fellow-men" as well as the "fundamental principles of law, justice, and human rights." The two factions of the abolitionist movement, one sentimental and working on moral suasion and the other political and working on civic processes, were not complementary. They made war as bitterly with each other as with the forces of slavery itself. A powerful subtext of race and gender conflict undergirded this split. At stake, the Tappanites insisted over and over, was the sustained existence of a republic with white men in charge. Anyone attending a Garrisonian rally could understand what they meant. Black orators such as Douglass, Henry Bibb, and Henry "Box" Brown spoke before the gatherings, telling their tales of victimization and loss, breaking hearts and firing passions. White preachers and would-be preachers, such as Henry Beecher, Theodore Weld, and Henry Channing, agitated their audiences with scandalous stories of whipping and rape. White women themselves seized the podium and spoke out in stentorian tones against bondage. Indeed, to many it seemed that the South Carolinian turned abolitionist Sarah Grimké and the stern Quaker Lucretia Mott behaved like men. Worst of all to these critics was the sight of black women such as Sojourner Truth, speaking out, even shouting, and calling all categories of social order into dispute. To many white men, such performances seemed desperately threatening. Though they jeered Amelia Bloomer's ludicrous attempts at dress reform, and smirked at how Lydia Child and Angelina Grimké henpecked their husbands, the changes in gender relations they saw unfolding before them seemed genuinely sobering. The abolitionists in America were part of a broader world reform movement that crossed continents. Garrison's Liberator was filled with news of reform movements in other parts of the world. Even the anti-slavery, gradualist emancipationist, moderate Abraham Lincoln, speaking against the Kansas–Nebraska Bill on 16 October 1854 in Peoria, Illinois, claimed kin to the world's liberal reform movement:

Fellow countrymen—Americans south, as well as north, shall we make no effort to arrest this? Already the liberal party throughout the world, express the apprehension "that the one retrograde institution in America, is undermining the principles of progress, and fatally violating the noblest political system the world ever saw." This is not the taunt of enemies, but the warning of friends. Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of "moral right," back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of "necessity." Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south—let all Americans—let all lovers of liberty everywhere—join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.

Lincoln understood that the slavery debates in the United States were part of a larger world phenomenon. Blended with the Garrisonians were all kinds of freethinkers who came to America after their efforts for representative governments, unregulated economic life, and greater civil liberties were crushed throughout Europe, especially after the failed European revolutions of 1848. Anarchists, gender revolutionaries, race-mixers, and communitarians came. Their numbers were swelled by stranger creatures too, preaching sexual freedom, abolition of the family, and "Red Republicanism." The New Yorkers wanted no part of this mob, because of both their limitless and diffuse radicalism and their tendency to alienate more moderate potential support. To the Tappans and cronies such as the wealthy Gerrit Smith, the elimination of slavery required hard heads, not soft hearts. To them, mobilizing the political power of western territory that was naturally "free soil" and impelling it toward constitutional reform was a practical task destined to doom bondage and reinvigorate the nation, socially and economically. As for the slaveholders, they had great contempt for the pious, tub-thumping Garrisonians, as well as a ready stock of coiled hemp, but nothing like real fear. When Boston radicals had tried to flood Charleston with anti-slavery pamphlets in the 1830s, South Carolinians used them for a splendid bonfire. When Massachusetts Congressman Samuel Hoar went south in 1844 to survey slavery's evils for himself, vigilante slaveholders waited eagerly for his boat to dock; he declined their grim welcome and hurried home, as they expected. When the abolitionist "Brutus" (actually a turncoat southerner gone north) urged nonslaveholders to rise and slay the master class in 1847, squires employed the opportunity to shore up local support, prying into the details of community life in search of those who might be "soft" on slavery and encouraging their speedy departure. And indeed, southern whites learned to mute their complaints about slavery. Religious opposition to bondage, especially among Quakers and Universalists, was hemmed in and rooted out. In the upper South, moralists were warned to hold their tongues; in Georgia and the Carolinas, they simply pulled up stakes, establishing new anti-slavery bulwarks north of the Ohio River. Men with few prospects or no desire to ascend into the planter class likewise emigrated to the northwest. The most bitter racists too followed their footsteps, unwilling to live in "a Negro country" any longer. By the mid-1830s, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio were becoming hotbeds of religious moralism, free-soil ideology, and Negrophobia. Yet none could deny that anti-slavery sentiment was on the increase. Southern slaveholders correctly viewed the small but growing number of abolitionists as part of an international movement steadily encircling them. Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, England in 1832. By 1838 all slaves within the British Empire, including Canada, had been given a gradual emancipation and were free. Over the course of the early nineteenth century, most of the new nations of the Western Hemisphere also gradually abolished slavery when they gained their independence. As anti-slavery activism grew louder, so did proslavery advocates. Proslavery writers, in addition to seeking sympathy from the North, also needed to convince nonslaveowners, particularly those in the upper South who had a history of animosity and friction with the lower South, and the southern evangelical groups who thought and interpreted the Bible independently. Slaveholders also had to deal with the guilt that lurked in the conscience of many southerners. Although assuredly proslavery, William A. Smith, president of Randolph-Macon College, wrote as late as 1856 that "there are not a few spread throughout our Southern states whose minds are in a state of great embarrassment on this subject" because of religious beliefs and "the great abstract doctrine of Mr. Jefferson on the sinfulness of slavery." However, the abolitionist attack on the "peculiar institution" changed the majority white southern viewpoint that slavery was sinful. Brilliant thinkers denied Jefferson's assertion to the contrary and declared that slavery was a "positive good." Senator John C. Calhoun, who built his fortune on slavery, announced in 1838 that southerners, goaded by anti-slavery agitation, now had a new attitude toward slavery. "This agitation has produced one happy effect at least; it has compelled us to the South to look into the nature and character of this great institution, and to correct many false impressions that even we had entertained in relation to it." Whereas southerners used to think that slavery "was a moral and political evil," he declared they had come to a different realization: "we see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world." In South Carolina first and then elsewhere throughout the South, the obvious note of apology was subtracted from discussion of slavery. Slavery was good, they argued, because it brought Africans into civilization and into Christianity. They argued that slavery was beneficial for America because only in the South had conservative values and the measured accumulation of wealth allowed men of leisure to develop a higher sense of duty toward their inferiors and an understanding of their crucial role in the advance of Western civilization. For proslavery theorists, slavery made possible a white man's democracy. This conversation about slavery continued even after the institution itself had officially died in North America. People continued to talk about slavery, whether it was southern apologists promoting an idyllic vision of their "Lost Cause" or professional and amateur historians who sought meaning in the past but often found reflections of their own time instead. By the early twentieth century, when the Baptist minister and novelist Thomas Dixon's racist vision of The Clansman was captivating American audiences in its newest incarnation as the D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation , academia's perception of slavery had come practically into full conformity with Thomas Roderick Dew's defense of it almost a century before. From the days of James G. Randall and the so-called revisionist school of historians who saw the Civil War as a needless war, one that was more or less bumbled into, influential historians blamed the abolitionists, with some fault to the proslavery theorists who responded, as the major culprits for instigating the war. In the 1960s, with the civil rights movement, a group of younger historians, among them Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Martin Duberman, James M. McPherson, Lawrence Friedman, and Aileen S. Kraditor showed that the abolitionists were essentially altruistic and idealistic, many of them motivated by deeply held religious convictions on the brotherhood of man. David Brion Davis, in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution , 1770–1823 (1975), challenged this view of the abolitionists, linking their influence to the rise of industrialization: "Liberation from slavery did not mean freedom to live as one chose, but rather freedom to become a diligent, sober, dependable worker who gratefully accepted his position in society." The foremost critic of Davis has been Thomas L. Haskell, who agrees with the centrality of capitalism in understanding the abolitionists but has argued that "what links the capitalist market to a new sensibility is not class interest so much as the power of market discipline to inculcate altered perceptions of causation in human affairs." This debate raged primarily in issues of the American Historical Review , collected by Thomas Bender in his edited The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (1992). Historians of abolitionism have debated the relative merits of the different players as well as the different factions of the abolitionist movement. Emphasis on the role of women and gender and the centrality of free African Americans have become central to the study of abolitionism. Scholars have in the last decade begun to investigate the international connections among abolitionists and other reform groups. While historians have disagreed over abolitionism, the most contentious arguments among historians have centered on slavery itself. Nowhere have historians disagreed more, and argued more directly with each other and against each other than over the nature and meaning of slavery for the United States. Beginning with the professional historian Ulrich B. Phillips, who argued in 1908 that plantation slavery had been an economic dead end and was already beginning to fade out by the Civil War, historians can be grouped into schools of interpretation. According to Phillips, rather than being motivated purely by economics, the planters had acted against their own immediate interests in the kind treatment of their slaves, civilizing them and providing needed stability in southern society. He also argued that southerners were driven by a desire to keep their world a "white" world, at least so far as power distribution was concerned. In two influential books, American Negro Slavery (1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929), Phillips expressed his belief, shared by most of his generation, that slavery was a "school house of civilization" for the enslaved people. Phillips paints slave owners as kind and caring, with slavery dominated by an ethos of paternalism. His sympathetic view of slavery resulted as much from his use of the plantation records—that is, the journals and writings of white owners of slaves—as from his own southern white background. Phillips was a good historian, with many useful insights, if one can remove the underlying racist framework. Phillips had graduate students write dissertations on slavery in each of the southern states. From the 1910s into the 1950s and even early 1960s, Phillips' "paternalistic" view of slavery dominated the history profession. The predominant historical view of slavery was not far removed from that presented in popular movies such as Gone with the Wind . Many of Phillips' ideas might seem dated today, but it is worth pointing out that for the rest of the twentieth century it was economics and social structure that served as the underpinnings of the study of slavery, not the political or religious elements that had been considered so important while the institution was "alive." There were dissenting views of slavery. Herbert Aptheker documented hundreds of slave revolts to show that the "happy slave" was a myth. A number of black scholars, including the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and the historian John Hope Franklin, also argued against Phillips' paternalistic view of slavery. But it was not until 1956, when Kenneth M. Stampp asserted that slavery was profitable and that profit was what propelled it, that an alternative historical school of slavery came into existence. He also argued that it had been a matter of truly harsh economics, for slavery was a brutal and cruel practice. In The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South , Stampp systematically rebutted the interpretation of slavery in Phillips' books chapter by chapter. Stampp used not only the planters' manuscript records that Phillips had used but also newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves and some former slaves' accounts of slavery. Stampp, influenced by the emerging civil rights movement, stated an integrationist view that inspired many whites at the time but offended many black intellectuals when he stated, "I have assumed that the slaves were merely ordinary human beings, that innately Negroes are , after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less." But Stampp's description of the brutality of slavery caused people to wonder what were the consequences on the enslaved people of such harsh conditions of life. For a short time a debate raged in the history profession between those who thought that Phillips was correct in his interpretation of a paternalistic slavery and those who supported Stampp's view of a harsh slave regime. In 1959 Stanley Elkins attempted to break up what he believed was a sterile debate by introducing psychological and comparative history into the discussion of American slavery. Elkins soon provided a counter for the second half of Phillips' argument; he wrote about slavery as a psychologically oppressive system, creating the same sort of mental effects on its victims as had the Holocaust. According to Elkins, Stampp was correct, and the viciousness of slavery left former enslaved people so emotionally scarred that they were unable to function in American society, becoming dependents rather than participants. The next generation of scholars was eager to engage Elkins' ideas, specifically his assertion that slaves had no culture of their own because of their harsh treatment. The "community and culture" school announced itself most forcefully in 1972 with the almost simultaneous publication of the African American historian John W. Blassingame's The Slave Community and the sociologist George P. Rawick's From Sundown to Sunup . Both books were based on exhaustive research in primary sources emanating from the slaves themselves—Blassingame in the nineteenth-century autobiographies of escaped slaves, Rawick in the Federal Writers Project interviews with former slaves in the 1930s. Felicitously written and published by a major press, Blassingame's book received the most attention. Indeed, Rawick's book was published as the first volume of a forty-one-volume series of facsimile reprints of the typescripts of those interviews. The "slave community school" produced many works examining the ways in which slave communities had functioned and even found agency. One of the leading examples, Eugene D. Genovese's monumental Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) not only focused on slave community in fresh ways, it also grappled with economic and social questions that could be traced back to Phillips and found valuable insights on black-white relations in Phillips. Genovese argued that there was reciprocity among slaves and masters but that masters lived by a paternalistic cultural ethos and ruled both slaves and other whites through hegemony. Genovese's book was soon followed by Herbert G. Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976), and Lawrence W. Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977), both of which took exception to Genovese's revised paternalism interpretation of slavery. These "community and culture" historians held that despite the power of the master class slaves were able to find space for themselves and create a syncretic African American culture and community rooted in the family, religion, and a folk culture of resistance. The English historian Peter Parish dubbed Blassingame, Genovese, Gutman, and Levine "the New Testament of slavery studies." They showed considerable variation in negotiating a difficult and uncertain course between emphasizing the achievements of the slaves and the environment in which that achievement took place, not to mention assessing the role played by the African heritage in that achievement. Ira Berlin wrote that "the slaves' history—like all human history—was made not only by what was done to them but also by what they did for themselves." In the 1980s community studies such as Charles Joyner's Down By the Riverside (1984) and Orville Vernon Burton's In My Father's House Are Many Mansions (1985) tended to reinforce this general interpretation while filling in details and pointing out exceptions. By the late 1980s, however, complaints were being voiced that the studies of what had come to be called the "culture and community" school romanticized the slave experience. As early as 1971 Joel Williamson had argued that "most of what constituted black culture was a survival response to the world the white man made." In 1983 John B. Boles revisited an earlier theme in Black Southerners , arguing that whites actually asserted considerable control over black religious practices. At the same time, community scholars such as Burton and Joyner added the awareness that place mattered. Where the slaves were, what they grew, and who their masters were influenced a great deal of their lives. It was Peter Kolchin, however, who levelled the most severe criticisms of the community school in his Unfree Labor (1987) and American Slavery (1993, 2003). Arguing partly on the basis of his comparative work with Russian serfdom, Kolchin held that the close proximity in which southern masters and slaves lived dramatically stifled the slave's opportunity for cultural autonomy and self-expression. He even contended in American Slavery that there was no such thing as a "slave community" but only a shared sense of identification with fellow sufferers. There were some chances for slave autonomy, but very, very few. Another line of revision was put forth in William Dusinberre's Them Dark Days (1996). Dusinberre contends that slavery on the South Carolina rice plantations was far harsher than generally assumed. The child mortality rate for those under age fifteen was 28 percent for the general population and 48 percent for slaves in general, but it was 66 percent for rice plantation slaves. These figures continue to underline the importance of place. However, Dusinberre argues, contrary to Kolchin, that there was indeed a form of slave community, albeit one of endurance rather than mere autonomy. A third line of revision came from Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I a Woman? (1985) in which she argues that slavery was qualitatively different for women and that an overreliance on patriarchy as an explanatory factor in the context of the slave community is a mistake. A huge literature has now developed on slavery and gender, which examines issues of space, place, race, and even the concept of the "body." None of the "culture and community" scholars individually romanticized the slave experience. They had all read Stampp and Elkins, and they took slavery's harshness to be already convincingly established. But they were also influenced by what they considered the obvious neglect of black culture and black achievement inherent in any emphasis on slavery's traumatic and pathological effects. Individually they neither portrayed slavery as an easy life nor contended that the cultural achievement of the slaves had been an easy one. It soon became obvious, however, that the impression conveyed by a series of studies may be different from that conveyed by any one of them separately. Much remains unknown or dimly perceived. Perhaps it could be said that slavery was commercial but not capitalist. Or perhaps it would be more nearly accurate to say that slavery was capitalist, but qualitatively different from merchant or industrial capitalism. Certainly by the late antebellum period a vast amount of southern social, intellectual, and political capital was invested in slavery. But just as certainly, American slavery was more than an economic system. Sundown to sunup in the quarters was as important as sunup to sundown in the fields in creating a cohesive African American culture, perhaps more so. Remembered African traditions combined with encountered European traditions in a new American environment to create a new African American culture and a new African American community. A new synthesis may be forthcoming, but its emergence will have to await a patient sifting of the various state and local studies of slavery and perhaps even more research in specific communities. Place matters a great deal to the understanding of slavery, for how the location, crop, and size of the farm or plantation and the proclivities of a specific master intersected with the gender, age, occupation, and attitudes of a specific slave made a material difference to each and every enslaved person. Historians continue to find new ways to look at slavery, and new arguments to propound. Slavery is not a closed question, nor is it dead; to assume so would be as unwise as ignoring a serpent in the shadows and would block our efforts to understand it and curtail its lingering effects. In the eyes of some, the question was ultimately settled on the grisly fields of battle. Although slavery as an institution in the United States did in fact end in the final echoes of the Civil War, arguments for its justification would live on in Lost Cause mythology and beyond. Historians still argue about its causes and effects; it still marks our national psyche. Its chains clink in the shadows, restless whispers echo in the house we have inherited, reminding us that the past, to paraphrase William Faulkner, is never quite as dead as we would wish it to be.

CITATION: Burton, Orville Vernon: "Debates Over Slavery and Abolition: An Interpretative and Historiographical Essay." Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive. Cengage Learning, 2009

Any views and opinions expressed in these essays are those of the author in question, and any views or opinions from the original source material are those of the publication in question. Gale, part of Cengage Group, provides facsimile reproductions of original sources and do not endorse or dispute the content contained in them. Author affiliation and information within them are correct as of the original publication date.

271 Slavery Topics and Essay Examples

✨ tips for an essay, research paper or speech about slavery, 🏆 best slavery titles for essay, 🥇 most interesting slave trade essay topics, ⭐ good titles for slavery essays, 💡 slavery writing prompts, 🔎 simple & easy slavery titles, ✍️ slavery essay topics for college, ❓ research questions about slavery.

Writing an essay on slavery may be challenging as the topic brings up negative emotions to many people.

This issue is related to differences between social positions and their negative effects. In addition, slavery reveals racial disparities in society and damages race relations in many cultures.

Good slavery essays discuss the aspects and problems that are important and relevant today. Choose slavery essay topics that raise significant problems that remain acute in modern society. Slavery essay titles and topics may include:

The problem of human trafficking in today’s world
Why is it hard to stop child trafficking in today’s world?
The aspects of plantation life for slaves
The development of American slavery
Was slavery inevitable?
Differences and similarities between slavery in the US and serfdom in Russia
The ineffectiveness of peaceful means against slavery
Destructive aspects of slavery
The link between slavery and racism
The differences between the impact of slavery on women and men of color

Once you select the issue you want to discuss, you can start working on your paper. Here are some tips and secrets for creating a powerful essay:

Remember that appropriate essay titles are important to get the readers’ interest. Do not make the title too long but state the main point of your essay.
Start with developing a structure for your essay. Remember that your paper should be organized clearly. You may want to make separate paragraphs or sections for the most important topics.
Include an introductory paragraph, in which you can briefly discuss the problem and outline what information the paper will present.
Remember to include a concluding paragraph too, in which you will state the main points of your work. Add recommendations, if necessary.
Do preliminary research even if you feel that you know much about the topic already. You can find useful information in historical books, peer-reviewed journals, and trusted online sources. Note: Ask your professor about the types of sources you are allowed to use.
Do not rely on outside sources solely. Your essay should incorporate your knowledge and reflections on slavery and existing evidence. Try to add comments to the citations you use.
Remember that a truly powerful essay should be engaging and easy-to-understand. You can tell your readers about different examples of slavery to make sure that they understand what the issue is about. Keep the readers interested by asking them questions and allowing them to reflect on the problem.
Your slavery essay prompts should be clearly stated in the paper. Do not make the audience guess what the main point of the essay is.
Although the content is important, you should also make sure that you use correct grammar and sentence structures. Grammatical mistakes may make your paper look unprofessional or unreliable.
If you are writing an argumentative essay, do not forget to include refutation and discuss opposing views on the issue.
Check out slavery essay examples online to see how you can structure your paper and organize the information. In addition, this step can help you to avoid possible mistakes and analyze the relevance of the issue you want to discuss.

Do not forget to check our free samples and get the best ideas for your essay!

Slavery in To Kill a Mockingbird Novel The introduction of Tom by the author is a plot device to represent the plight of the slaves in the state.
Sethe’s Slavery in “Beloved” by Toni Morrison In spite of the fact that the events depicted in Beloved take place after the end of the American Civil War, Sethe, as the main character of the novel and a former slave, continues to […]
Analysis of Themes of Slavery in Literature The paper will be concentrated on the analysis of the works ‘The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano’ by Olaudah Equiano, ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass’ by Frederick Douglass, and ‘Incidents […]
Chapters 4-6 of ”From Slavery to Freedom” by Franklin & Higginbotham At the same time, the portion of American-born slaves was on the increase and contributed to the multiracial nature of the population.
Slavery in the Roman Empire The elite were the rich people, and majority of the population that comprised of the common farmers, artisans, and merchants known as the plebeians occupied the low status.
How “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” Addresses Slavery The insensitivity in this mistreatment and dehumanization of Black people is pervasive to the extent that Jim considers himself “property” and was proud to be worth a fortune if anyone was to sell him. To […]
John Brown and His Beliefs About Slavery John Brown was a martyr, his last effort to end slavery when he raided Harper’s Ferry helped to shape the nation and change the history of slavery in America.
“American Slavery, 1619-1817” by Peter Kolchin The concluding chapter details of the demise of slavery on the onset of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The period of American Revolution was a “watershed “in transforming the vision that portrayed slavery was justifiable […]
Impact of Revolution on Slavery and Women Freed slaves and other opponents of the slave trade in the north agitated for release and freedom of slaves in the south.
Du Bois’ “The Soul of Black Folk” and T. Washington’s “Up From Slavery” Du Bois in the work “The Soul of Black Folk” asks the question, why black people are considered to be different, why they are treated differently as they are the same members of the society, […]
Economic Impact of Slavery Growth in Southern Colonies 1 The need to occupy southern colonies came as a result of the successes that were recorded in the north, especially after the establishment of cash crop farming. The setting up of the plantations in […]
Metaphoric Theme of Slavery in “Indiana” by George Sand In her novel about love and marriage, Sand raises a variety of central themes of that time society, including the line of slavery both from the protagonist’s perspective and the French colonial slavery.
Freedom in Antebellum America: Civil War and Abolishment of Slavery The American Civil War, which led to the abolishment of slavery, was one of the most important events in the history of the United States.
Globalization and Slavery: Multidisciplinary View Globalization is an exciting concept and maybe one of the greatest achievements of the modern world. A case of the multidisciplinary nature of slavery is also evident in Pakistan, where slavery thrives on religious grounds.
Impacts of Slavery and Slave Trade in Africa Slavery existed in the African continent in form of indentured servitude in the previous years, but Atlantic slave trade changed the system, as people were captured by force through raids before being sold to other […]
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and Slavery It is said that “the book is a very inadequate representation of slavery; and it is so, necessarily, for this reason, – that slavery, in some of its workings, is too dreadful for the purposes […]
Betty Wood: The Origins of American Slavery Economic analyses and participation of the slave labor force in economic development are used to analyze the impact and role of slave labor in the development of the American economy.
Slavery and Identity: “The Known World” by Edward Jones Moses is used to this kind of life and described by one of the other characters as “world-stupid,” meaning he does not know how to live in the outside world. He has a strong connection […]
“Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America” by Morgan Kenneth Slavery has for a very long time attracted the attention of many history scholars.”Morgan Kenneth, in his book Slavery and the British Empire gives a deep in site of how the British came to embrace […]
The Theme of Slavery in Aristotle’s “Politics” He notes that the fundamental part of an association is the household that is comprised of three different kinds of relationships: master to slave, husband to wife, and parents to their children.
Gender Politics: Military Sexual Slavery In this essay, it will be shown that military power and sexual slavery are interconnected, how the human rights of women are violated by the military, and how gender is related to a war crime.
The “Slavery by Another Name” Documentary The documentary highlights how the laws and policies of that time enabled the exploitation of Black people and how the legacy of slavery continued to shape the racial dynamics of the country.
Human Trafficking: Slavery Issues These are the words to describe the experiences of victims of human trafficking. One of the best places to intercept human trafficking into the US is at the border.
The Slavery Experience: Erra Adams Erra Adams indicates that he was the oldest of the children and his task was to plow the land. The formerly enslaved person noted that the death of the master was a real grief for […]
Abraham Lincoln: The End of Slavery Lincoln actively challenged the expansion of slavery because he believed the United States would stay true to the Declaration of Independence. It is worth considering the fact that Lincoln was not the only advocate for […]
Recreation of Slavery in “Sweat” Book by Hurston Perhaps the best-portrayed theme and the most controversial one is the recreation of slavery on the part of Afro-Americans who have just been freed of it.
California’s Issues With Slavery However, the report and the book indicate this point and emphasize that the concept of free land was made in favor of white people but not in the interests of African Americans.
Sexual Slavery and Human Smuggling They were the only people in the house, and it appeared that her parents were not home. The social worker’s job in Tiffani’s life is to look into her past, from her childhood through her […]
Were the Black Codes Another Form of Slavery? Slavery in the United States has been a part of the nation’s history for hundreds of years, and yet it did not end abruptly.
How Slavery Makes Sense From Various Perspectives Given that there is a historical precedent for the “peculiar institution,” it would be erroneous to dismiss slavery as something that is new. Thus, the institution of slavery is found even in the Bible, and […]
Slavery in The Fires of Jubilee by Stephen Oates Apart from the story being arranged in chapters, the layout and approach suggest that the author has described the area of events narrated and then given the narration.
Modern Slavery in Global Value Chains: Case Study The main reason for accusations of forced labor is that most of the factories Nike owns are in Vietnam, and they provide the lowest possible wages.
Differences of Slavery: Oklahoma Writers’ Project vs. The Textbook Today, many sources discuss the characteristics of slavery, its causes, and the outcomes and describe the conditions under which the Civil War began. In the accounts and the textbook, different opportunities for slaves are given […]
Autobiography & Slavery Life of Frederick Douglass This essay discusses the slavery life of Frederick Douglass as written in his autobiography, and it highlights how he resisted slavery, the nature of his rebellion, and the view he together with Brinkley had about […]
The American Civil War: Pro- & Anti-Slavery Forces The pro-slavery forces argued that slavery was the right thing to do, promoting abolitionists and the anti-slavery forces as terrible villains because they wanted to abolish slavery.
Slavery: Historical Background and Modern Perspective Despite the seemingly short period of contract slavery, people did not have the right to marry without the owner’s permission while the contract term was in effect.
Irish Immigrants and Abolition of Slavery in the US The selected historical events are Irish immigration to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s and the movement for slavery abolition, which existed in the country at the same time.
Irish Immigration to America and the Slavery Despite the fact that the Irish encountered a great number of obstacles, the immigration of Irish people to the United States was advantageous not only to the immigrants but also to the United States.
Irish Immigrants and the Abolition of Slavery Irish people, though not as deprived of rights as the enslaved Africans, also endured much suffering and fought slavery to the best of their ability.
North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States: 1790 – 1860 The book North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States: 1790 1860 by Leon Litwack is an illustration of how African Americans were treated in the northern states just before the start of The […]
Modern Slavery and Its Emergence The author turns to the examples of three European countries and, through the analysis, reveals the piece of the effects of the slave trade and the modernization of its forms.
Moral Aspect of Slavery from a Northern and Southern Perspective Pro-slavery, non-expansionist, and abolitionist perspectives on the moral foundations of slavery identify both differences between the North and south of the US and the gradual evolution of the nation’s view of African people.
Thomas Jefferson on Slavery and Declaration of Independence Additionally, with the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson set the foundation for the abolition of slavery in the future. Thus, the claim that Jefferson’s participation in slavery invalidates his writing of the Declaration of Independence is […]
Europeans’ Interest in Sugar and Slavery Hence, in the Atlantic world, it was also a significant factor, contributing not only to the well-being of the affected populations in Europe but also to the growth of slavery in the region.
Self-Reflection on John Adams: Slavery and Race This could demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of the freedom of speech limitations that are considered in modern America. Therefore, I would like to know the perspectives of different political parties on the events of […]
Slavery and Indentured Servitude Slavery practices were perceived to extend in Boston, which is believed to be the first place where someone tried to force enslaved people to have children to earn money. To summarize, the practice of slavery […]
Indentured Servitude and Slavery The slave population in the North progressively fell throughout the 1760s and 1770s with slaves in Philadelphia reducing to approximately 700 in 1775.
Critical Response: The Origin of Negro Slavery Considering that individuals of all races were involved in slavery in the New World, racism emerged as a consequence of forced labor and was not originally connected to the targeted discrimination of African Americans.
Chesapeake Colonies and Development of Slavery The given trend was similar to the Middle and Chesapeake colonies, proving specific attitudes to slavery peculiar to people of that period.
American Slavery Arise and Abolition In this regard, the new slaves were not truly emancipated, as they were still dependent on a source of resources for subsistence.
Analysis of Slavery in United States The main points highlighted in the lecture are focused on the socio-economic differences between the two systems, the actual life of slaves, and methods of blacks’ rebellion.
Review of Slavery Topic in “Never Caught” Thus, the former’s relationship to this institution was guided by humanity towards the slaves and the development of legal methods of improving their lives that did not exist in the latter case.
Prohibiting Slavery in the United States In other words, the original ideas incorporated the considerations of sexual immorality due to the abuse of the affected persons and the practice of breeding people for sale. The contributions to the discussion were also […]
Slavery Experience by Abdul Rahman ibn Ibrahim Sori Abdul Rahman continued talking about his family and status, but his royal priorities were not enough to confirm his identity and return to his family.
Discussion of Slavery in Focus For this reason, the audience that reads about cases of slavery in some of the third-world countries has the feeling of encountering the past something that, in readers’ understanding, is already a history.
New Slavery in “Disposable People” by Kevin Bales The immense increase of the population after World War II and the influence of development and globalization of the world’s economy on traditional families in developing countries have led to the increment in the gap […]
Analysis of Documents on Greek Slavery The passages will be examined and evaluated better understand the social and cultural history of the period and learn more about the social order in Ancient Greece. It can be asserted that the issue of […]
Discussion of Justification of Slavery As a result, such perceptions gave rise to the argument that the latter people are inferior to Europeans and, thus, should be in a position of servitude.
The Industrial Revolution, Slavery, and Free Labor The purpose of this paper is to describe the Industrial Revolution and the new forms of economic activity it created, including mass production and mass consumption, as well as discuss its connection to slavery.
Expansion of Freedom and Slavery in British America The settlement in the city of New Plymouth was founded by the second, and it laid the foundation for the colonies of New England.
Should the U.S. Government Pay Reparations for Slavery Coates tries to get the attention of his audience by explaining to them the importance of understanding the benefits of the impact the slaves faced during the regime of white supremacy.
Antebellum Slavery’s Role in Shaping the History and Legacy of American Society The novel tells the story of two different times, the 1970s and 1815s, and shows other conditions of the heroes’ existence due to gender and racial characteristics.
View on the Slavery in the State of Mississippi According to Mississippi’s “Declaration of Causes,” slavery is “the greatest material interest of the world” and “these products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions”.
Alexander Stephens on Slavery and Confederate Constitution The speaker remarks that the persistent lack of consensus over the subordination and slavery of the “Negro” between the South and North was the immediate reason why the Confederates decided to secede and establish their […]
Origins of Modern Racism and Ancient Slavery The diversity of African kingdoms and the empires were engaged in the slave trade for hundreds of years prior to the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade. The working and living condition of slaves were […]
Isaac Burt: Modern-Day Slavery in the US Therefore, the author begins with the critical review of data on the notion of human trafficking, including sex and labor trafficking forms, which often use immigrants and women as vulnerable populations.
How Violent Was the Slavery? Ask African American Women The book significantly impacted American literature due to the writer’s roots and the problems of slavery addressed in a detailed manner.
The Role of Slavery for the American Society: Lesson Plan Understand how the development of slavery could influence the social and economic life of the Southern states and the role of the plantation system in the process.
Colonialism and the End of Internal Slavery The Atlantic slave trade was considered among the main pillars of the economy in the western region between the 16th and 19th centuries.
The History of American Revolution and Slavery At the same time, the elites became wary of indentured servants’ claim to the land. The American colonies were dissatisfied with the Royal Proclamation of 1763 it limited their ability to invade new territories and […]
The Expansion of Slavery: Review Their purpose was to track and catch runaway slaves and return them to their masters. The work of slaves was primarily agricultural.
Abolitionist Movement: Attitudes to Slavery Reflected in the Media One of the reasons confirming the inadmissibility of slavery and the unfairness of the attitude towards this phenomenon is the unjustification of torture and violence.
Slavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson As a result, relatively same practices of social death were applied to indigenous American people, which proves Patterson’s point of view that this attitude was characteristic not only for the African slave trade.
Antebellum Culture and Slavery: A Period of History in the South of the United States The antebellum era, also known as the antebellum south, is a period of history in the south of the United States before the American Civil War in the late 18th century.
Slavery and Society Destruction Seduced by the possibility of quick enrichment, the users of slave labor of both the past and the present, betrayed their humanity due to power and money.
Trans-Atlantic Chattel Slavery and the Rise of the Modern Capitalist World System The reading provides an extensive background of the historical rise and fall of the African nations. The reading gives a detailed account of the Civil War and the color line within its context.
Modern Slavery: Definition and Types Modern slavery is a predatory practice that is being utilized by businesses and organizations, some seemingly legitimate, worldwide through the exploitative and forced labour of victims and needs to be addressed at the policy and […]
Human Trafficking as a Global Crime Industry: Labor, Slavery, Sexual Slavery, Prostitution, and Organ Harvesting As members of the society, every individual has to be aware of this glaring issue, and do their part in preventing human trafficking. This project will present an in-depth analysis of various aspects and perspectives […]
Slavery in “Disposable People” Book by Kevin Bales The key point of his book is that the phenomenon of slavery is impossible to be eradicated. He has studied the current economic and political situations of the countries presented in his book that help […]
Late Slavery and Emancipation in the Greater Caribbean The epoch of slavery defined the darkest history in the evolution of the civilization of humanity; the results of slavery continue permeating the psychology of very “far” descendants of the slaves themselves.
Transatlantic Slave Trade and Colonial Chesapeake Slavery Most of the West African slaves worked across the Chesapeake plantation. This paper will explore the various conditions and adaptations that the African slaves acquired while working in the Chesapeake plantation.
Slavery and Secession in Georgia The representatives of the State of Georgia were worried because of the constant assaults concerning the institution of slavery, which have created the risk of danger to the State.
Slavery of African in America: Reasons and Purposes Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, the African slaves were shipped to Europe and Eastern Atlantics, but later the colonies started demanding workers and the trade shifted to the Americas.
Slavery in Charleston, South Carolina Prior to the Year 1865 Charleston is a city in South Carolina and one of the largest cities in the United States. It speaks about the life and origin of the slaves and also highlights some of their experiences; their […]
Verisimilitude of Equiano’s Narrative and Understanding of Slavery The main argument in the answer to Lovejoy was that the records could clarify the author’s true age, which is the key to the dismissal of the idea that Equiano is a native African.
The Case for Reparations: Slavery and Segregation Consequences in the US Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his essay The Case for Reparations, examines the consequences of slavery and segregation in the United States and argues the importance of reparations for black Americans, both in a financial and moral […]
Critique of Colin Thies’ “Commercial Slavery” The goal of the article was to evaluate the economic and political situation of the African slave trade and avoid other aspects according to which people were considered as oppressed and enslaved.
Fredrick Douglas Characters. Impact of Slavery The institution of slavery drove and shaped the enslaved people to respond and behave in different ways in that Fredrick Bailey was forced to flee away from slavery and later changed his name to Fredrick […]
Litwack’s Arguments on the Aftermath of Slavery This paper seeks to delve into a technical theme addressed by Leon on what kind of freedom was adopted by the ex-slaves prior to the passage of the 13th U.S.constitutional amendment of 1865 that saw […]
Slavery, Civil War, and Abolitionist Movement in 1850-1865 They knew they were free only they had to show the colonists that they were aware of that.[1] The slaves were determined and in the unfreed state they still were in rebellion and protested all […]
Slavery History in North America in the Middle 1830s I was born in a small village in Georgia, in the middle 1830s, a time when the United States was going through a lot of slave trade activities, and to many, the trade was accommodated […]
The Major Developments in Slavery During 1800-1877 Several states in the South, in 1877 beginning with Georgia, took gain of this by issuing a succession of laws and a tax was put on voting.
Slavery in America: Causes and Effects Slavery in America was a period in which people were caught and taken to do manual work in America from various parts of the world as a result of colonization.
Slavery as an Institution in America This paper will look at the factors that enhanced the expansion of slavery as an institution in America during this period and further highlight the views held by the southern on slavery about its social […]
Concept of Slavery Rousseau’s Analysis Rights and slavery are presented by the thinker as two contrary notions; Rousseau strived to provide the analysis of rights in their moral, spiritual sense; the involvement into dependence from the rulers means the involvement […]
The Literature From Slavery to Freedom Its main theme is slavery but it also exhibits other themes like the fight by Afro-Americans for freedom, the search for the identity of black Americans and the appreciation of the uniqueness of African American […]
Slavery in New Orleans and Charleston This paper is going to establish this claim by making a comparison of the lives of the slaves who lived in the urban areas such as the New Orleans and Charleston with those slaves that […]
How Slavery Has Affected the Lives and Families of the African Americans? This paper will focus on how slavery in the earlier years has affected the lives and families of the African Americans in the year 2009.
Slavery as One of the Biggest Mistakes And the last important thing which caused forming the institution of slavery for such a long period in the judgment of Winthrop D.
Colonial Economy of America: Poverty, Slavery and Rich Plantations This topic deals with life in the colonial economy of America and the approach of white people towards black people. Mainly through natural production, the people became wealthy and they led a typical way of […]
African Slavery and European Plantation Systems: 1525-1700 However, with the discovery of sugar production at the end of the 15th Century to the Atlantic Islands and the opening up of the New World in the European conquests, the Portuguese discovered new ways […]
“Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades” by Patrick Manning The author’s approach of examining the slavery issue from the lens of economic history and the involvement of normal Africans living in Africa is then examined.
Slavery and Democracy in 19th Century America In the 19th century when white folks are busy building a nation and taking part in the more significant aspects of creating a new future for their children, Negro slaves were still doing a backbreaking […]
Abraham Lincoln`s Role in the Abolishment of Slavery in America In this speech, Lincoln emphasized the need for the law governing slavery to prevail and pointed out the importance of the independence of individual states in administering laws that governed slavery without the interference of […]
Cotton, Slavery, and Old South The early nineteenth century was a time that was as significant for the south as it was for the north. If the south was to be divided into the upper south and the lower south, […]
Slavery in Latin America and North America In the French and British Caribbean colonies, slaves were also imported in great numbers and majority of the inhabitants were slaves.
“American Slavery an American Freedom” by Edmund S. Morgan The book witnesses the close alliance between the establishment of freedom rights in Virginia and the rise of slavery movement which is considered to be the greatest contradiction in American history.
Lincoln and African Americans’ Role in the Abolition of Slavery This paper seeks to compare and contrast the role of Abraham Lincoln and the African Americans in bringing slavery to an end in the US.
Western Expansion and Its Influence on Social Reforms and Slavery The western expansion refers to the process whereby the Americans moved away from their original 13 colonies in the 1800s, towards the west which was encouraged by explorers like Lewis and Clarke.
How Important Was Slave Resistance as a Cause of Abolition of Slavery? This was particularly evident throughout the history of slaves in the Americas, and across the historical geography of slavery, from the time the slaves were seized from Africa through to the life they were subjected […]
“Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington Each morning it was the duty of the overseer to assign the daily work for the slaves and, when the task was completed, to inspect the fields to see that the work had been done […]
U.S. in the Fight Against a Modern Form of Slavery Since the United States of America is the most powerful nation in the world it must spearhead the drive to eradicate this new form of slavery within the U.S.and even outside its borders.
The Profitability of Slavery for the Slave Master What is missing from this story is the fact that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, North American colonies had to buy African slaves on a world market at prices which reflected the high profitability […]
Slavery in the United States There was a sharp increase in the number of slaves during the 18th century, and by the mid of the century, 200,000 of them were working in the American colonies.
Sociology, Race & Law. Cuban Form of Slavery Today Castro was benefiting alone from the sweat of many Cubans who worked abroad and in Cuba thinking that they could better their livelihood.
African American Women’s Gender Relations and Experience Under Slavery When the New England Confederation was formed in 1643 to promote matters of common concern for the New England Colonies, one provision of the compact was for the rendition of bondservants.
How African Men and Women Experienced Slavery? The book Ar’ not I a Woman, the author portrays that life of a woman in plantation was more difficult that life of a man because of different duties and responsibilities assigned to a woman-slave.
Abraham Lincoln and Free Slavery Moreover, he made reference to the fact that the union was older than the constitution and referred to the spirit of the Articles of the Constitution 1774 and Articles of Confederation of 1788.
Origins, Operations, and Effects of Black Slavery in US However, the impact that the enslavement of the vast numbers of Africans brought to America was phenomenal. This was a major effect of the slave trade.
“Slavery Isn’t the Issue” by Juan Williams Review The author claims that the reparation argument is flawed as affirmative action has ensured that a record number of black Americans move up the economic and social ladder.
Protest Against Slavery in ”Pudd’nhead Wilson” by Mark Twain Pudd’nhead Wilson is the ironic tale of a man who is born a slave but brought up as the heir to wealthy estate, thanks to a switch made while the babies were still in the […]
African Americans Struggle Against Slavery The following paragraphs will explain in detail the two articles on slavery and the African American’s struggle to break away from the heavy and long bonds of slavery. The website tells me that Dredd Scott […]
Slavery in the World The first independent state in the western hemisphere, the United States of America, was formed as a result of the revolutionary war of North American colonies of England for Independence in 1775-1783.
Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Rome The revolt of slaves under the direction of Spartacus 73-71 BC is considered the most significant event of the period of crisis of the Roman republican regime in the first century DC and is estimated […]
Issue of Slavery in “The Known World” by E. P. Jones The slaves were remained in the custody of the white masters received the same treatment as that of bondage slaves. The book is a beautiful representation of pre-war life in Virginia and how the widespread […]
Olaudah Equiano as a Fighter Against Slavery Equiano’s Narrative demonstrates a conscious effort to ascribe spiritual enlightenment to the political arena and hence ascertain the importance of the relationship between spiritual intervention, the amysterious ways of Providence’ and parliamentary decisions concerning the […]
Lincoln as a Fighter Against Slavery It is while a leader of the party he made her first moves to fight slavery in the Illinois house where he argued that slavery was a social evil and ought to be dealt away […]
Slavery in Early America Review However, the local population was dwindling with the influx of disease and abuse and this, combined with Spain abolishing the enslavement of natives in the Americas in the mid-1500s, necessitated a need to acquire Africans […]
Slavery Without the Civil War: Hypothesis The demand for slaves and the positive effect of this in the slaveholders’ profitability as well as the fact that both slaveholders and the slaves need one another to survive saw to it that the […]
Slavery: Central Paradox of American History Since the rise of United States as a nation, historians have long thought of the emergence of slavery and freedom in our society as a great contradiction. As the central paradox, slavery needed to emerge […]
Brief History of Slavery in the United States In his article regarding the true sentiments of the slaves, Genovese suggests the reasons why the slaves were perceived as lazy was as the result of their more natural, rural lifestyle.”The setting remained rural, and […]
Virginia After the Boom: Slavery and “The Losers” New labor force that came to Virginia “threatened the independence of the small freeman and worsened the lot of the servant”.
Antebellum Slavery in Mark Twain’s World Twain’s depiction of Jim and his relationship with Huck was somewhat flawed in order to obey the needs of the story, and also by Twains’ interest in slave autobiographies and also in blackface minstrelsy.
Slavery in New York City: Impact and Significance Blacks’ significance in the development of the city’s most critical systems, such as labor, race, and class divisions, makes it possible to conclude that the influence of slavery in New York was substantial. The effect […]
Slavery In The United Stated Society In the above discussion, there is a short story of slavery in the USA. By abolishing slavery in the USA is the sign of democracy and human dignity.
Black American Authors on Slavery Analysis The work is centered on the same theme that the Narrative the author tells the reader of her experiences as a slave and the way she managed to escape from it.
Slavery Still Exists in American Prisons An examination of the history of the penal system as it existed in the State of Texas proves to be the best illustration of the comparisons between the penal system and the system of slavery.
Ghana: The Consequences of Colonial Rule and Slavery One of the reasons for this dependency is that the country had been the foothold for the slave trade for about four centuries.
“Slavery and the Making of America” Documentary According to the film Slavery and the Making of America, slavery had a profound effect on the historical development of American colonies into one country.
Harriet Jacobs’s Account of Slavery Atrocities She wrote that she wanted the women living in the North to understand the conditions in which slaves lived in the Souths, and the sufferings that enslaved women had to undergo.
Anti Slavery and Abolitionism Both gradual emancipation and conditional emancipation were not allowed, but free blacks from the North and evangelicals revealed their opposition in the form of the movement that required the development of social reform.
Sexual Slavery in “The Apology” Film by Hsiung The documentary being discussed focuses on the experiences of three women, the survivors of military sexual slavery in China, South Korea, and the Republic of the Philippines.
Slavery Resistance from Historical Perspective The lack of rights and power to struggle resulted in the emergence of particular forms of resistance that preconditioned the radical shifts in peoples mentalities and the creation of the tolerant society we can observe […]
Slavery Abolition and Newfound Freedom in the US One of the biggest achievements of Reconstruction was the acquisition of the right to vote by Black People. Still, Black Americans were no longer forced to tolerate inhumane living conditions, the lack of self-autonomy, and […]
Slavery Elements in Mississippi Black Code These are the limitation of the freedom of marriage, the limitation of the freedom of work, and the limitation of the freedom of weapon.
History: Slavery in Southern States The strategy of pacification was especially prevalent during that time because wealthy slaveowners wanted to keep possible protests under control and prevent the rest of the white population from supporting the abolition of slavery in […]
Slavery in “Abolition Speech” by William Wilberforce The following article is devoted to the description of the problem of slavery and the slave trade in Africa. The author also underlines the incompetency of the committee, which is in charge of the question […]
Slavery History: Letters Analysis The letters analyzed in this paper give a piece of the picture that was observed during the 1600s and the 1700s when slaves from different parts of the world had to serve their masters under […]
Social Psychology of Modern Slavery The social psychology of modern slavery holds the opinion that slavery still exists today, contrary to the belief of many people that slavery does not exist in the modern world.
Slavery: History and Influence The slaves were meant to provide labor for the masters and generate wealth. During the day, they would sneak to breastfeed the newborns.
Reformer and Slavery: William Lloyd Garrison The newspaper was published until the end of the civil war and the abolition of slavery by the enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment.
Slavery Role in the American Literature Stowe has claimed that the anti slavery groups questioned the morality of the white Christians who were at the fore front in the oppression of the Black people.
Slavery as a Cause of the American Civil War On the other hand, one is to keep in mind that many historians are of the opinion that the reasons for the war are not so easy to explain.
Thomas Jefferson on Civil Rights, Slavery, Racism When I authored the declaration of independence of the United States of America, I was having a democratic perspective of the American people on my mind.
Slavery, American Civil War, and Reconstruction Indian removal from the Southeast in the late 19th century was as a result of the rapid expansion of the United States into the south.
Slavery in the Ancient World and the US Appearance age and attitude of the slaves acted as the determinants to the wage that they were to be paid for their services.
Slavery in “Flight to Canada” Novel by Ishmael Reed In his novel Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed blurs the boundaries between the prose and poetry as well as the past and the present to express his satirical criticism of the legacy of slavery even […]
Slavery and the Southern Society’s Development The fact that quite a huge number of white people moved to the “Deep South” where cotton planting was among the most lucrative forms of income-generating activities, just goes to show that the whites relied […]
Paternalistic Ethos During American Slavery Era The slave owner gains directly from the welfare of the slaves and the slaves gained directly from offering their services to the slave owner.
The Book About Slavery by Hinton Rowan Helper He claimed further that those who supported abolitionism and freedom were the friends of the south while slaveholders and slave-breeders were the real enemies of the south.
Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox
Slavery in the USA and Its Impact on Americans
Voices From the Epoch of Slavery
“Slavery by Another Name” Documentary
Cultural Consequences of the US Slavery: 1620-1870
The American Anti-Slavery Society
Modern Slavery in Thailand and Mauritania
Frederick Douglass as an Anti-Slavery Activist
George Whitfield’s Views on Slavery in the US
Internal Colonization and Slavery in British Empire
Slavery in “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
Slavery in “A Brief History of the Caribbean”
Slavery in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Slavery Phenomenon and Its Causes in the USA
Women Trafficking and Slavery: Trends and Solutions
Human Trafficking and Modern-day Slavery
Slavery Arguments and American Civil War
Ethical Problems With Non-Human Slavery and Abuse
Racism in USA: Virginia Laws on Slavery
Sojourner Truth: Slavery Abolitionist and Women’s Suffrage
Slavery in Islamic Civilisation
Religious Studies of the Slavery Problem
Slavery and the Abolition of Slave Trade
Slavery and the Civil War Relationship
Abraham Lincoln Against Slavery
Blacks Role in Abolishing Slavery
The Poetry on the Topic of Slavery
John Brown and Thomas Cobb Role in Ending Slavery
Slavery in the Southern Colonies
Christianity, Slavery and Colonialism Paradox
Slavery and the Civil War
Literary Works’ Views on Slavery in the United States
Analysis of Slavery in American History in “Beloved“ by Tony Morrison
History of Abolishing Slavery
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
Sex Slavery in India
The Period of Slavery in the “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs
Slavery in America: “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
Abolition of Slavery in Brazil
Slavery Effects on Enslaved People and Slave Owners
The Problem of Slavery in Africa
Racial Slavery in America
“Not For Sale: End Human Trafficking and Slavery”: Campaign Critique
Colonial Portuguese Brazil: Sugar and Slavery
Aristotle on Human Nature, State, and Slavery
Reform-Women’s Rights and Slavery
Human Trafficking in the United States: A Modern Day Slavery
Oronooko by Aphra Behn and the Why there is no Justification for Slavery
Rise and Fall of Slavery
History of Slavery Constitution in US
Propaganda in Pro-slavery Arguments and Douglass’s Narrative
Testament Against Slavery: ”Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
Comparing and Contrasting three Versions of Slavery
How Did the French Revolution Impacted the Issue of Slavery and the History of Santo Domingo?
Why slavery is wrong
The Evolution of American Slavery
Slavery and Racism: Black Brazilians v. Black Americans
History of the African-Americans Religion During the Time of Slavery
The Emergence of a Law of Slavery in Mississippi
The Effects of Slavery on the American Society
The Ideas of Freedom and Slavery in Relation to the American Revolution
Up from Slavery, Down to the Ground: Sailing Amistad. A
Slavery in the British Colonies: Chesapeake and New England
Slavery and the Old South
African American Culture: A History of Slavery
Slavery and the Underground Railroad
Slavery Illuminates Societal Moral Decay
The Southern Argument for Slavery
Did Morality or Economics Dominate the Debates Over Slavery in the 1850s?
Masters and Slaves: ”Up From Slavery” by Washington Booker
No Reparations for Blacks for the Injustice of Slavery
Slavery: The Stronghold of the Brazil Economy
Slavery, Racism, and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Slavery, the Civil War & Reconstruction
Slavery in American History
The Slavery in America
Beloved by Toni Morrison: History of Slavery and Racial Segregation in America
African Americans: The Legacy of Slavery in the U.S.
Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During WWII and US Occupation in Japan
A New Dawn: The Abolishment of Slavery in the USA
How Slavery Applies to Africans Within the Islamic World?
Where Did Slavery Start First in the World?
How Did Slaves Respond to Slavery?
How the Germans Influenced Modern Day Slavery?
How Did Slavery Change From the Arrival of the First Enslaved People in the 1600s to the Abolition of Slavery in the 1860s?
How Did Slavery Encourage Both Economic Backwardness and Westward Expansion?
Why Did Colonial Virginians Replace Servitude With Slavery?
Did Slavery Create More Benefits or Problems for the Nation?
What Was Slavery Like and How Is It Today?
When and How Did Slavery Begin?
What Were the Positive and Negative Effects of Slavery on the Americas?
Is There a Difference Between Human Trafficking and Slavery?
How Did Slavery Shape Modern Society and the Colonial Nations?
How Did Economic, Geographic, and Social Factors Encourage the Growth of Slavery?
How Did Colonization Along the Atlantic Contribute to Slavery?
What Degree Did Slavery Play in the Civil War?
Modern Day Slavery: What Drives Human Trafficking?
How Did Slavery Start in Africa?
How Did Slavery Affect the Spirit of the Enslaved and the Enslavers?
What Did the Haitian Revolution Do to End Racial Slavery?
How Were African Americans Treated During the Slavery Period?
What Created Slavery?
How Important Was Slavery Before 1850? Was It a Marginal Institution, Peripheral to the Development of American Society?
How Did African American Slavery Help Shape America?
When Did Slavery Start in America?
How Can the World Allow Slavery to Continue Today?
What Were the Differences Between Indentured Servitude and Slavery?
In What Industries Is Slavery Most Prevalent?
How Was Slavery Abolished?
Did the Atlantic Plantation Complex Create Slavery?
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How German Atheists Made America Great Again

Taken together, two new books tell the century-long story of the revolutionary ideals that transformed the United States, and the counterrevolutionaries who fought them.

A triptych of black-and-white photographs, from left to right, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx.

By S. C. Gwynne

S.C. Gwynne is the author of “Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War.”

AN EMANCIPATION OF THE MIND: Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America, by Matthew Stewart

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SECOND AMERICAN REPUBLIC: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, by Manisha Sinha

What was the Civil War about? In a word, slavery.

What actually caused the war, however, is a vastly more difficult idea. Try this explanation on for size: The driving force in American politics in the decades after the American Revolution was the rise of an arrogant, ruthless, parasitic oligarchy in the South, built on a foundation of Christian religion and a vision of permanent, God-ordained economic inequality.

Though much of the South was poor, this new aristocracy was vastly rich. Two-thirds of all estates in the United States worth more than $100,000 were in the hands of Southern white men. Their goal in seceding was to undo the basic ideals of the American republic and keep their wealth.

These counterrevolutionaries — for that is what they were — insisted that men were by divine design unequal , both racially and economically. To fight this notion and crush what amounted to an existential threat to democracy, the antislavery movement needed ideas as much as, ultimately, guns.

That’s the narrative that frames Matthew Stewart’s engaging and often surprising new book, “An Emancipation of the Mind. ” The title refers to the rise of new ways of thinking in the antislavery movement, what Stewart calls “the philosophical origins of America’s second revolution.”

The most significant ideas that Stewart traces are religious. From 1770 to 1860, religion in America underwent a massive shift. The number of churches exploded, North and South. Soon, most of these churches, using clear and manifold endorsements of slavery from the Bible (“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ”), were promoting and actively defending the slave republic.

As the antislavery crowd soon learned, it was impossible to spin “slavery is sin” arguments against biblical literalism. Ending slavery, Stewart says, “was hardly part of God’s plan.” This wasn’t just a Southern opinion: Three out of five clerics who published pro-slavery books and articles were educated at Northern divinity schools. Two decades before the outbreak of war, abolitionism was still a skulking pariah, a despised minority in the North as well as the South.

The abolitionists clearly needed help. Enter the Germans, specifically the freethinking Germans whose radical republican philosophy underpinned the failed European revolutions of 1848. “Freidenkers’’ like the theologian David Friedrich Strauss and the philosopher and anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach formulated ideas of the laws of nature and “nature’s God” that were at odds with the tenets of Christianity.

A large group of German intellectuals, fresh from the battles of 1848, arrived on American shores, joined the abolitionist movement and radicalized it. As he did in his 2014 book “Nature’s God,” which traced the way that the heretical philosophies of Spinoza and Lucretius influenced American founders like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, Stewart here argues convincingly that these philosophers found willing listeners in the persons of Abraham Lincoln, who kept Strauss and Feuerbach on his shelf; Frederick Douglass, who saw American Christianity as “the bulwark of slavery”; and the abolitionist firebrand Theodore Parker, whose lectures reached as many as 100,000 people a year in the 1850s.

Wasn’t much of this simply revolutionary atheism? Yes, it was, and it’s a bit of a shock to find out how close Lincoln and Douglass were to these ideas, though they paid lip service to more conventional Christian beliefs when translating them for the public.

The other big idea here — also with help from the Germans, especially Karl Marx (a great admirer of Lincoln, who, Stewart argues, liked him too) — has to do with the economics of slavery. “At the root of the ills of the slave system,” writes Stewart, “lies the extreme economic inequality that it inevitably produces — not just between races but among the white population.”

Between 1852 and 1862, Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote 487 articles for The New York Daily Tribune; Lincoln likely read them . They explained the war as “nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labor.”

After the war came Reconstruction. How do you deconstruct Reconstruction? Very, very carefully. It’s one of the toughest, most maddeningly complicated tasks in the writing of American history. That’s because Reconstruction — the word we use to denote the failed post-Civil War attempt to build a more inclusive country — unfolded in different ways in different states, on different timetables and with a wildly proliferating cast of players.

In her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic,” the historian Manisha Sinha not only has taken on this vast subject, but has greatly expanded its definition, both temporally and spatially. Her Reconstruction embraces the Progressive Era, women’s suffrage, the final wars against Native Americans, immigration and even U.S. imperialism in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries. She covers these difficult issues with remarkable skill and clarity.

In Sinha’s telling, the achievements of Reconstruction — we are in the latter 1860s and early 1870s here — are truly amazing. The federal decision to use the Army against recalcitrant ex-Confederates to secure rights for Black people resulted, she writes, in “a brief, shining historical moment when abolition democracy triumphed in much of the South and across the rest of the nation,” which “meant the inauguration of a progressive, interracial democracy.”

These years saw the passage of constitutional amendments that guaranteed citizenship, equal protection under the law and the vote for Black men. They also saw the rise of a powerful Freedmen’s Bureau, Black voting on a massive scale and the election of thousands of Black representatives to national, state and local office. More than 600 Black politicians were elected in the South to state legislatures alone.

Black Americans and freedpeople, Sinha reminds us, were themselves behind much of this change, a process she calls “grass-roots reconstruction.” As she laid out in her 2016 book “ The Slave’s Cause ,” and shows more briefly here, they documented atrocities and pushed to have them exposed, filed petitions, swore out affidavits at the risk of their lives and formed political organizations and lobbies.

But the Second American Republic would soon come crashing down, the victim of another violent counterrevolution whose principal weapons were racial terror and political assassination. In its place rose a New South, where class distinctions were shored up, where the government was by and for white men and where the belief that Black people were inferior to white people was firmly in place. Instead of economic freedom, Americans got debt peonage, stolen wages, criminalized self-employment and a convict leasing system. The great flowering of education during Reconstruction was trampled too as terrorists burned down more than 600 Black schools.

Sinha tells these stories well. She also pushes out beyond the conventionally defined subjects of Reconstruction. In her account, the ascendancy of Jim Crow and the conquest of the West, among other forms of repression, are profoundly connected, and not only because the government failed to protect Black liberty as well as Indigenous land rights and sovereignty. The Army that was raised to fight Southern counterrevolutionaries was redeployed in the West to subjugate Indians. The literacy requirements used to disenfranchise Black Americans in the South also proved effective in targeting immigrants and working-class people in the North.

Still, the ideals of the Second Republic did not completely wither on the vine. Sinha convincingly advances her vision of Reconstruction all the way forward to 1920, when the 19th Amendment granted women’s suffrage. That landmark event was inspired by the marquee equal rights amendments of the Reconstruction era, which, Sinha writes, “bequeathed a legacy of political activism and progressive constitutionalism” on the movement, a breath of air that gave America new life.

AN EMANCIPATION OF THE MIND : Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America | By Matthew Stewart | Norton | 374 pp. | $32.50

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SECOND AMERICAN REPUBLIC : Reconstruction, 1860-1920 | By Manisha Sinha | Liveright | 562 pp. | $39.99

How Did Harriet Tubman Contribute To The Abolition Of Slavery

Can you grade my Informational essay about the Abolishment of Slavery: What events caused the Abolishment of slavery? Slavery in the United States was a very common thing which many accepted, however for slavery to end many events had to happen. Harriet Tubman played a role in ending slavery and she was a leader for the slaves and helped other slaves gain freedom. The end of the triangular trade was also a big factor in ending slavery. The factors which abolished slavery in the United States were the end of the triangular trade, Harriet Tubman's leadership and the Civil war. The triangular trade was a 3 part trade between Americans and the Europeans. First the Europeans would travel to West Africa. When they reached there, they would trade guns and clothes for men, women and children, Second the Europeans would sell the slaves to the Americans, Third the Americans would force the slaves to work labor jobs such as picking cotton and after that the Americans would travel to Europe and sell the goods the slaves harvested to Europeans. According to the article “The Transatlantic Slave Trade” the boat rides between nations were very harsh and were very unbarable, all the slaves were chained and put into a small room and many were also scared. A slave …show more content…

The Civil War was a war between the North and South sides of America. At this time Abraham Lincoln was elected president, the south saw him as a man who would end slavery; however, Lincoln did not see himself this way. Lincoln had 2 goals, which were to end slavery and to keep the country together. Tubman quotes “God won't let Master Lincoln beat the south”,”till he does the right thing” the right thing was to abolish slavery. Eventually, slaves were allowed to join the army and be armed, even though Lincoln didn’t trust them, Tubman was enthusiastic. On one assault, Tubman was able to free at least 750 slaves, which gave more power to abolish

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Tubman quotes "God won't let Master Lincoln beat the south","till he does the right thing" the right thing was to abolish slavery. Eventually, slaves were allowed to join the army and be armed, even though Lincoln didn't trust them, Tubman was enthusiastic. On one assault, Tubman was able to free at least 750 slaves, which gave more ...