African Slavery Effects On Early America

When the Americas were first being settled, the Europeans started farming to get a stable economy going. They decided that they couldn’t work the fields themselves, because they were too rich to be doing anything for themselves, so the early settlers started piggybacking off of other people’s hard work. Slaves started to make up more of our population than the actual Europeans did. They were all brought over from Africa and they were thought of as property; not people. During the Atlantic World, African slavery had many causes and effects on early American society. There are many different reasons why slavery started. When the Americas were first being developed, they had a need for workers. They tried using indentured servants, which were people who came from Europe and

Racism, discrimination because of skin color, was practically invented during this time. People before didn’t care about other’s skin colors until they were made to think that lighter skin means superior when in fact the only difference is the amount of melanin in our bodies. When the Portuguese went to Africa, they didn’t care that they had a darker skin tone than them because they were taught to think that light automatically equals better. With the amount of slaves being taken, most, if not all, families got torn apart and were never reunited. Many cultures lost their fittest members to European traders and plantation owners. A horrifying amount of Africans died, whether they died on the Middle Passage to disease and famine, or died because they were overworked after they survived the Middle Passage. The plantation owners could afford to work their slaves to death because they were expendable and if you worked them for a little more than 2 years, a profit would be made. Because of this, many slave owners rarely bothered to give the slaves more than the minimum amount of things to keep them alive for about 2