Unfortunately for many blacks who became slaves, they were traded as merchandise for goods. Even though Chattel Slavery was a system that was first initiated in Europe, it later did become legal in the United States. The legalization of Chattel slavery in the United States happened due to the fact that a trader who brought slaves into America. He kept bringing slaves into America as servants to him and other, this marking the beginning of legal Chattel slavery in the United States. It came to the point that black slaves were part of the Civil War.
The first major group of European dealers in West Africa was the Portuguese, followed by the British and the French.”African sellers often kidnapped slaves and brought them to markets on the coast. At these markets, European and American purchasers traded materials such as cloth, iron, guns, alcohol, and decorative items that were helpful to the merchants in turn for purchasing slaves. Most frequently, slave sellers were found to be men, and they used their expanded wealth to improve their prestige. They used this to their advantage to contact themselves, through marriage, to other wealthy families in their kingdom. The Africans who were enslaved were generally prisoners of war or captives from slave raids.
Tituba is in her forties. Parris brought her with him from Bardados, where he spent some years as a merchant” (17). The Commercial slavery was the logical extension both of the need to acquire a cheap labor force for burgeoning planter economies, and of the desire to construct Europe’s cultures as ‘civilized’ in contrast to the native, the cannibal and the savage (Ashcroft et al., 1998). The slavery system not only consumed the black physically but also destroyed them spiritually. In The Crucible, Tituba, a black woman and slave, is suffering from loss of ambitious to return home under slavery.
Set in the 1840s before the Civil War, the novel takes place in the South, where slavery was supported and needed for the tobacco and cotton industries. During this time, a language barrier existed between the slaves and their owners. This is depicted in the novel by having the slaves talk in a different and strange way. By using slavery as a theme of his book, Twain appears to be criticizing slavery and the segregation that followed it. Slaves in those years were oppressed by their owners and suffered greatly, and this was viewed as a normal every day thing.
Slave narratives provide eloquent arguments against the inhumane practice of slavery and serve as crucial documentations of America’s reprehensible history. Frederick Douglass, a famous black abolitionist, fearlessly published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass seven years after his escape from bondage. Douglass powerfully details the physical hardships of a male slave and the evils that occurred within slave plantations. Similarly, Harriet Jacobs–once free–published her narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs tackles the emotional tribulations inflicted upon herself and other women of color by their white masters.
Beloved Beloved represents the awful history behind slavery, and exposes the damaging effects it had on the individuals that witnessed it. The novel, set in the Post-Civil War in Ohio is that of a sad victory story. “124” the powerful place in which the ex-slaves express extreme emotions of what happened in the past. Kristin Boudreau states that “when Toni Morrison’s Beloved opens with a house “full of baby’s venom, it announces the prominent pain in the lives of these ex-slaves” (Boudreau, 447). African Americans had to regroup and put their slavery demons at bay, experiencing their own personal traumas.
Born around 1745, Equiano lived a relatively noble childhood in his village of Essaka until local raiders captured him and sold him, beginning his lifelong struggle against slavery. (Edwards 44) As his expeditions and experiences with his masters began to amass, his anti-slavery rhetoric developed as well. By the 1780’s, Equiano “had become deeply involved in the politics of the black people, championing their cause” by forging relationships with white abolitionists such as Granville Sharp and by advocating for the publicizing of atrocities inflicted on slaves (Mtubani 90). Equiano, because of his unfortunate upheaval into the throes of slavery as a child, quickly became much more than a historical individual; he became a pivotal champion for the rights of his people as freemen and as
Hence, we are expected to perform various duties on the sugar plantation. My fellow slave counterpart were categorized as Chattel slave whom were expected to perform labor and sexual favors, serfdom slaves who weren’t allowed to leave without consent or permission from our masters, those who performed labor as a result of fear that both they and their families would be beaten, field and House slaves or “domesticated slaves” who worked in the planters’ houses and enjoyed better living conditions than that of the other classes of slaves. House slaves performed duties in houses belonging to their house masters whereby they received greater benefits and privileges such as food, clothing, education, cooking, formulation of close bonds between both slave and master as they as they were entrusted with a certain level of information which lead to the betrayal of other slaves for special privileges. Honychurch, L. (1980), argued that those of us who are Artisans were the middle class slaves and as such, worked in the “mills and boiling houses” as “ladlers” of syrup, carpenters and toolmakers”. He also stated that to be educated slave often lead inferior slaves to “fight for freedom”.
Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl discusses how slavery dehumanizes and breaks down an individual to no worth. Douglass’ and Jacobs’ accounts are similar because they lecture against slavery with the work and obstacles they went through. Jacobs says, “For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood. The influences of slavery had the same effect on me that they had on other young girls; they had made me prematurely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the world.” (827) Jacobs explains that slavery has attempted to take a toll on her life with its physical, emotional, and mental abuse. Women in slavery were mistreated sexually as well, and in this case, Jacobs faced sexual oppression at a young age.
At the beginning of the colonial period in America, there was a great need for workers that could help make a profit for the foreign companies who invested in colonies in the Americas. While these workers originally came from several backgrounds and countries, it soon became clear that African slavery dominated all forms of forced labor. Nowhere was this clearer than in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Starting off as a French colony the Lower Mississippi Valley’s primary work force was from European workers and Native American enslaved people. However, as the manipulation of African slavery in the French colony of Saint Domingue, today known as Haiti, began to turn a huge profit.