The domestic slave trade between 1820 and 1860 took a toll on many slave families. As the expansion of the cotton kingdom grew the need for money began the trade amongst masters and slave traders. Masters sold men, women, and children. Many families were torn apart some due to punishment.
Indentured Servants and slaves are two unrelated kinds of workers because of the reasons they are working and how long they work. Indentured servants would sign a contract saying they would work for someone if they paid for their trip to America, they were people willing to work. Slaves were African Americans that were forced to work for their owners, they were traded and bought from other people. Also Slaves ended up overpowering the Indentured servants for numerous reasons. Slaves were forced workers which meant that their owners could make them keep working for as long as they wanted them to.
Southern Slaves and Northern Laborers had many different experiences, even though they were both considered workers. Their compensation, working hours, working conditions, and consequences for breaking rules varied. In the end, the life of a Southern Slave was, mainly, harder than the life of a Northern Laborer. First off, Southern Slaves probably had better compensation than Northern Laborers. Although Northern Laborers were given wages by the factory owners for their work, they ultimately had to pay back the factory owners for their provisions.
Sharecropping was a major impact on the African Americans. Different types of sharecropping have been practiced worldwide, but in the rural south, it was typically practiced by former slaves because it was the only opportunity they had. Sharecropping allowed families to rent small land from a landowner who was typically white. They would then give a portion of their crops to the landowner at the end of the year, but would eventually end in debt because they didn’t have enough money for their needs. Africans then had to keep working for the landowner to pay off their debt.
Introduction: At this point in time in history, indentured servitude wasn’t an uncommon act. Many of those who migrated from Europe to the New World couldn’t pay for their passage and were sold to landowners to pay their dues for passage. They were fed, clothed and given shelter. Those who could afford passage to the New World had no money to survive once they arrived.
For merchants to make the highest profit, they needed cheap forms of labor. By exploiting those who were of a lower class, these merchants were able to retain a higher profit and not
Just after Reconstruction, life for African Americans began to go downhill as all of their newly gained rights became suppressed because of the new laws and systems that were put in place. Many African Americans that stayed in the South did so because they wanted to continue working in agriculture, and, therefore, had the end goal of getting their own land, which let them fall into the trap that was sharecropping. Africans Americans would rent small plots of land from a landowner, and pay their debts in the form of a portion of their crops. There was also the vagrancy law, which caused any African American that was not working and had no proof that they had a job to be arrested. This leads to the convict lease system, in which wealthy, usually Caucasian American, people rented out prisoners for labor.
Walker's choice of diction in "The Flowers" not only further developed the mood and tone of the story; it also alluded to the setting as well. To elaborate, in the beginning of "The Flowers", Myop's family's home is described as a "sharecropper cabin," suggesting that the story takes place in the aftermath of the Civil War, as sharecropping was a system of farm tenancy which began common after the Civil War because although African-Americans were freed from slavery, most had no money to support themselves, and were essentially forced to stay on their former masters' plantations, as while they were not enslaved, racial discrimination was rampant, which often limited the options of African-Americans seeking work, particularly those in the South, to jobs concerning manual labor such as farming.
Whites had slaves work their mines and farms, the two most important jobs at the time. Without the slaves, no one was there to take care of their families and maintaining submission was the rule of the land. However, it was arguable that colored people were the main reason that the country was striving. It was so unfair that slaves built this country off of their diligent and humbled work ethic, yet they were still viewed as being far inferior to whites.
Firstly, after Civil War ends, it became called as the Reconstruction. Soldiers were sent by American government to southern states with a purpose to protect the African Americans and their newly won freedom. Even though, they were partially free, most of them couldn’t escape from poverty and in very unpleasant conditions. In the South they cultivated land and could possess some part of growing crops because they worked like sharecroppers, and farmers in the white people’s farm. However, whites continued to discriminate the African Americans.
Looking at the period in which the primary source was written it was a time when “effective emancipation in the cotton South forced a hasty reorganization of the black labor force to secure the harvest.” “Planters…offered money wages or crop shares plus specified rations and garden rights to freedmen for resumption of slave-style work gang employment in the cotton field” The first primary source that are to be examined deals with sharecropping: “Working on Shares” by Henry Blake. This source is a first-hand account of a former slave, Henry Blake about life in the sharecropping system. Once they were freed, they worked on shares and then they rented.
1.How did slavery develop and change in different places and cultures? Slavery began we people started using african americans to do their work. The would be taken from their homes and family to do these chores and had little to no rights. In the US we used them more on plantations to help with farming. 2.How did the Atlantic slave trade work?
They we created a new way to enslave the blacks it was called sharecropping was a way to keep blacks working. The had been given the rite to vote but as quickly as it was given it was taken. They were left to struggle to get by as wage laborers. They had to work for someone else in the factory or on the farm.
Especially in the south, were many plantation owners lost their workforce. They would now either be forced to pay their laborers or sell their farms, neither of which they were partial to. Out of this came sharecropping, where landowners gave laborers a house, and land, in exchange for a share of their crops. However this system had many issues, the laborers were almost always African Americans with no savings to buy tools, which they would need to buy from the landowners, putting them in debt, and making it difficult for them to become independent. Another result of the end of the war was the Depression of 1873, which raised the unemployment rate to 15% and created greater tensions among the working class in the United States.
In the aftermath of the war the Freedman’s bureau was established to assist the freed slaves. Many different programs were put into place in an effort to alleviate the suffering of the prior slaves. This helped both the freed slaves and the farmers. Now, the freed slaves could work the land for wages and the farmers could obtain cheap laborers to do their bidding. While it did much to help freed black men further their pursuit of true freedom, the Bureau was given little power by Congress, and it expired in