During the slave trade, African chiefs aided the Europeans in capturing slaves from their own people in exchange for goods such as metal tools, fine textiles, and guns. This created a defined hierarchy and conflicts within clans. Hundreds of years later, Africans today are segregated because of their ethnicity. Arrogances of racism, discrimination, and prejudice were strengthened towards Africans today (Rezek 105). The millions of African slaves who were taken to modern day South and North America were cut off from their African roots and eventually their culture was diluted and replaced by foreign beliefs.
It is a representation of how they managed to turn something so horrible into something of invaluable measure. Afro-Caribbean culture in the 17th and 18th century was a manifestation of the mix of social oppression with a free, unchained spirit. Many slaves who came from Africa came with “country marks” on their bodies, which were essentially marks on their skin to identify which tribe they belonged too. This practice subsisted for some time but started to diminish in the mid 1800s. Furthermore, during slavery, slave masters deliberately forbade schooling for slaves in fear that if they were too educated, they would rebel.
.Atlantic Slave Trade: Supported Opinion Paper Slavery has been evident from very the early stages of life, from the ancient times, to today in which illegal manners still take place. However, during the 16th to the 19th century, millions of Africans were captured, beaten, tortured and killed due to the major demand in the need for labour while Europeans decided to settle into the new world. The captains of the transporting ships have a major role in supporting the slavery business, while proving their fault and immense guilt throughout the many accounts and statements made by witnesses and slaves themselves. Their ethical stance, economic conditions and social forces play a role into the push for slaves and their gruesome transportation
In “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, Douglass narrates in detail the oppressions he went through as a slave before winning his freedom. In the narrative, Douglass gives a picture about the humiliation, brutality, and pain that slaves go through. We can evidently see that Douglass does not want to describe only his life, but he uses his personal experiences and life story as a tool to rise against slavery. He uses his personal life story to argue against common myths that were used to justify the act of slavery. Douglass invalidated common justification for slavery like religion, economic argument and color with his life story through his experiences torture, separation, and illiteracy, and he urged for the end of slavery.
The most common way to undermine the institution of slavery was for a slave to run away. “Slaves had diverse reasons for running away, such as brutal punishments, separation from family, and fears of being sold” (Campbell). Slaves were forced to live in hostile environments where they were treated cruelly. They had to work long hours in exchange for little pay. Slave families were often broken up.
One of the events in the history of the anti-slavery fight in the United States that caused the highest number of fatalities was The Nat Turner Rebellion. It was a highly important event that has changed the course of American history and the slavery abolishment. The United States became an entirely other place than it would have been without the rebellion. Thus, there is no wonder that even literature covers this period and these events. The book The Fires of Jubilee written by Stephen B. Oates depicts the atmosphere of trouble and chaos resulting from Nat Turner's rebellion and tells a story of a man who was born as a slave to gain freedom.
Picture the early days of the cotton industry: The Africans, being forced to migrate from their land, the sudden work that falls upon their shoulders, and to deal with the heartache of the separate from their families; beside this they carried Africans into slavery, in order to pick in a cotton field. In the process of building a great economy in America, most people lost the human side of them, or forget that people with dark skin are also human with hearts, not a machine! Ralph Waldo Emerson, express his opinion by saying: “Money often costs too much.”[1] During the seventieth century the money charged the Africans their lives. Owners of farms did not stop by making Negros picking crops, however they crossed the line and started trading them as a material. The public called it by “the slave trade”.
This all started with the slave trade during the 16th century to the 19th century where the British would go and take Africans into the Americas and sold them to white Americans. They would be put to work in plantations and other places with little to no money and would have to live and work under harsh conditions. These people would be stripped from their homes and lives in African in order to be put to work as slaves in America. Slavery was the act of naming a person as property, as well as owning and selling someone as property. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, slavery was used in order to build our economy in our nation.
However, it is clear the U.S. and all the countries of the Americas are built upon the massacre of millions of natives, many who had wished the Europeans no harm. Overall, this factor of the Age of Exploration negative and it changed American history in a most negative way, resetting it to the point when the Europeans first came. Finally, the biggest and most horrifying outcome of the Age of Exploration was the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Slaves were taken from Africa to be used somewhere else in the Americas. Europeans would sometimes use bribing to get rival tribes to betray each other and hand over each other’s enemy.
It is merely the motivation that has changed over time, as compared to the commencement of the same. As analysed by Marcus Rediker in his magnum opus, ‘The Slave Ship’; Africans would enslave people for different reasons contrary to the modern stereotype, profit. He highlights how war was a major source of slaves in West Africa, and had gone on much before the arrival of the Europeans. The memoirs of an Italian born French slave trader, Captain Theodore Canot, can testify to this claim. According to his writings, there were five principles for the enslavement of Africans by other Africans.