Howard Zinn History

History, “Bacon’s Rebellion helped to catalyze the creation of a system of racial slavery in the Chesapeake colonies” (79). The demand for higher benefits displeased many business owners which influenced them to seek other lower risk laborers. After the Bacon’s Rebellion, plantation owners and merchants feared of another costly dispute among their indentured servants. The practice of chattel slavery offered as a more promising prospect for preventing future rebellion. The underlying pattern of the conspiracy was to select people who were illiterate and destitute to work in the foreign land of the Atlantic World.

With the rise of white supremacist groups and the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) the persecution of black Americans increased as their freedom was seen as a threat to white Americans. When ex-slaves would try to flee plantations and set up their own farms, they would be lynched or murdered. In 1867, a former slave owner in Tennessee said that they continued to whip, maim and kill black Americans as if slavery still existed. The amendments and acts did not make the perception of black Americans change, by law they were regarded as equal individuals who deserved equal treatment everywhere, but in society they were still regarded as inferior and animalistic, and laws and legislation in southern states were set up to continue that ideology. The ‘Plessy vs. Ferguson’ Supreme Court case approved the ‘separate but equal’ legal segregation.

In this century, slavery came into play, it was very sad because it separated families, slaves lived under poor conditions, they also had rules like the Black Codes which were laws passed by Southern states that had the intent and the effect of restricting African Americans freedom, and of compelling them to work in a labor economy. In 16-3 “Jacob Brown wishes to find his sister and friends, from whom he was sold about eight years ago.” Many of these people wanted to have liberty; they tried to reunite their families because of the separation of slavery. In addition, black people won their freedom by establishing 13, 14, and 15 amendments that signify freedom, citizenship, and vote. In the movie, “Gone with the Wind”, it shows how slaves suffered during this ages, how they were treated being ruled by their superiors.

Through these descriptions, atrocity of plantation overseer and impact of harsh punishment on slaves are obvious. In document 3, the picture shows that in this bloody trade, slaves are just like materials and goods, they are not treated as people, they are more likely treated like machines and jetton. The opinion stated in document 5 by John Woolman that: “…we contradict and are against this traffic of men’s bodies.” He supposed that if slavery happens on them, “…if men should rob or steal us away, and sell us from slaves to strange countries, separating husbands from their wives and children.” He listed lots of evidences to indicate that the slavery is cruel and it should be discarded.

Their goal was to end the racial discrimination and segregation amongst. They believed that slavery was a sin and that it was every American’s obligation to help free them back to Africa. Not many people agreed though. Both Northerners and Southerners did not support he ways of goals of the abolitionist. They thought that it threatened the racial social order and created economic instability.

Survivors of these raids would be mostly women and child, and as many would perish from disease the French settlers desired to increase slave labor in other ways. In time, French settlers seeing both the economic success of Haiti and the abundance of slave importations from Africa turned to African slavery to increase the number of enslaved workers in the French colony (Clark-Pujara 2/6/18). As the colony increased in size and the number of enslaved Africans, both grew and became the primary work force the Lower Mississippi Valley turned into a slave society. Finally, the introduction of the Code Noir, a decree passed by French King Louis XIV to the French colonial empire, established African raced based slavery as the norm throughout all French colonies. Fundamentally, the introduction and use of African slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley resulted from the desire for a large enslaved work force and the already established African slave societies and laws found in other French

After being separated from his mother at a young age, Frederick Douglass fights back against slavery and human rights. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, the author, Frederick Douglass, uses powerful rhetoric to disprove the Pragmatic and the Scientific pro-slavery arguments of Pre-Civil War America. The Pragmatic Argument is about how many people believe that if all black slaves were to be freed, then this would result in convulsions which would then lead to extermination of the one or other race. Many people also believed that black slavery was necessary for American history.

Killing or lynching of unwanted slaves, mistreatment, torture, segregation, cultural uprooting, disorientation and dislocation were some of the “natural” faith of the slaves. Slaves who survived the inhuman treatments, face their daily lives with “indelible stain” of slavery, indignity, segregated and marginalized and cultural alienation. All these put together, one is faced with a psychological load of permanent lack of identity, consciousness of color and indeed nostalgia for the lost homeland, from where they have been uprooted. Up till today, many former slaves in different parts of the world still bear the blunt scars of slavery, which is difficult - if not impossible - to

“The Hardships of a Slave” The autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave depicted the life of a slave during the 1800’s. Not only did it explain the life of Frederick Douglass, but also, the life of his family and friends around him. It showed the true severe and harsh treatment of African Americans during this time. Around this time, being an African American meant you were treated as less than human, property, an animal.

Sugar was a major crop grown mainly on the eastern Atlantic regions. The Portuguese were the first people who had an outlasting effect on the Atlantic Slave Trade. Portuguese were using native slaves in Brazil, but the native slaves were dying in large masses. The Portuguese started to buy African slaves. African slaves had a longer life expectancy when compared to the native slaves.

Words like “opportunity”, “equality”, and “liberty” are thrown around a lot. But have we reached the point where these concepts are attainable? Well, in some respects, we have! However, in others, we still have a long way to go. Take the word “opportunity”, for example.