Racism and the Enslavement of African Americans
Did Racism cause enslavement of African Americans? To answer this question you have to determine what a slave is? And what Racism is? By my views and believes, slavery is any type of duty somebody does for you. You own them so they work for you otherwise they will get punished. Now Racism is a negative attitude towards another race. After these to words are cleared up you come to a conclusion that racism in the 17th century caused enslavement of African Americans. To believe this you have to look at the history left for us to read. The court papers, and journals of people back in the 17th century.
The first blacks arrived at Jamestown in 1619, they were from Africa and there were 20 of them, (C. Degler pg 64) there were probably Africans in the Virginia colony before that famous ship in 1619. What the Africans are seeing is a wilderness, forested plains, teeming waters, empty land. They have come to a place that is undeveloped in the way that Europeans envision that development. So what do the English men do, they put to work the Africans immediately. The Africans were sent to cut the trees to pick up the stones. To move the boundaries to level land, put crops in, fish, hunt, to do all the necessary labors that settlement and society demand. This was the slave's life, and if they did not cooperate than they were punish.
Now reading different history facts I found that these 20 African Americans were from indentured servitude (servants contracted to work for a set amount of time) ( C Degler pg 67) to racial slavery did not happen overnight. There are no laws regarding slavery early in US history. By 1640, the Jamestown courts had sentenced at least one black servant...
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...f Africans, and since little information flowed back across the Atlantic, mistreatment and abuse in America did not alter the flow of enslaved persons from Africa. So the slavery movement went on.
It was not until 1661 that a reference to slavery entered into Jamestown law, (C Degler pg 72) a transformation had begun, but it would not be until the Slave Codes of 1705 that the status of African Americans would be sealed as slaves. Slowly the number of blacks grew in Jamestown. In 1625 there were only 23. In 1650 there were about three hundred. By 1700, more than a thousand Africans were being brought into the colony every year. These numbers would increase dramatically in the years to come. As slavery became more popular the more the Africans there were. This status of slavery was only brought to be, because of the racism the English men brought upon the Africans.
Though African slaves who were labeled as indentured had a chance at freedom and to eventually have their own land, they were not treated nearly as well as the white slaves. It is confirmed just by the records that have been seen from early Jamestown. In the records the white indentured slaves are not only listed by full name but they have ages, arrival dates, and the ship that they arrived on. Whereas the African slaves are only listed by “negro man” or “negro woman.” Very few of the africans had arrival dates or their ship listed because they were not considered
Winthrop D. Jordan author of White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812, expresses two main arguments in explaining why Slavery became an institution. He also focuses attention on the initial discovery of Africans by English. How theories on why Africans had darker complexions and on the peculiarly savage behavior they exhibited. Through out the first two chapters Jordan supports his opinions, with both facts and assumptions. Jordan goes to great length in explaining how the English and early colonialist over centuries stripped the humanity from a people in order to enslave them and justify their actions in doing so. His focus is heavily on attitudes and how those positions worked to create the slave society established in this country.
They preferred African slaves to European or Native American slaves because they "could be held for unlimited terms, and there was no means by which word of harsh or arbitrary treatment could reach their homelands" (Wood, 43). The ability of the Englishmen to hold slaves for an unlimited amount of time and to use any methods of punishment gave them all the power. The indentured servant only worked to fulfill the previous contract as part of the headright system. Colonists "complained of the 'servants that dayley become free"(41). Since the servants had varying terms of service, it made it difficult to keep enough workers. Native Americans were cheap and did not have to be imported, but knew the land better than the Englishmen and could easily escape. There was also a language barrier and they died relatively quick, which made them not worth the investment. This shows some insight into how the African population started to become
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slavery was cruelty at its best. Slavery is described as long work days, a lack of respect for a human being, and the inability for a man or a woman to have gainful employment. The slaves were victimized the most for obvious reasons. Next on the list would be the families of both the slave and slave owners. At the bottom of the list would be the slave owners. Slavery does in fact victimize slaves, slave owner and their families by repeating the same cycle every generation.
Slavery was a practice throughout the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and through slavery, African-American slaves helped build the economic foundation of which America stands upon today, but this development only occurred with the sacrifice of the blood, sweat, and tears from the slaves that had been pushed into exhaustion by the slave masters. A narrative noting a lifetime of this history was the book The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African written by Olaudah Equiano. Equiano was a prominent African involved in the British movement for the abolition of the slave trade. He was captured and enslaved as a child in his home town of Essaka in what is now known as south eastern Nigeria, later he was shipped to the West Indies, he then moved to England, and eventually purchased his freedom (Equiano). Olaudah Equiano, with many other millions of slaves, faced many hardships and was treated with inconceivable injustices by white slave masters and because of the severity of these cruel and barbarous occurrences, history will never forget these events.
Black lives in America have been devalued from the moment the first shipment of black slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619. They were seen as nothing more than an lucrative animal to help aid in the production of various crops, such as tobacco, rice, and cotton. The Europeans were careful in the breaking of the black slaves, as they did not want a repeat of the Native American enslavement. European settlers found it difficult to enslave natives as they had a better understanding of the land and would often escape from the plantation. The African slaves however were stripped of everything they had ever known and were hauled to a new distant world.
The first arrivals of Africans in America were treated similarly to the indentured servants in Europe. Black servants were treated differently from the white servants and by 1740 the slavery system in colonial America was fully developed.
The African American identity derived its source, after slaves were “lumped together as “Africans” against the backdrop of multivalent Western oppression.” African slaves endured poverty and brutal labor in the New World. By the end of the seventeenth century, colonies established racial slavery laws, identifying subjugation on Africans and its descendants by race. Despite the effort of owners trying to purchase slaves from various destinations to avoid insurrection, people from diverse cultures bonded and created lifelong lasting friendships and families, which formed a psychological stronghold against segregation, discrimination, and dehumanization. However, the slaves lost touch with their African kin, “a distance made wider by the passage of some seven
Since the beginning of slavery in the America, Africans have been deemed inferior to the whites whom exploited the Atlantic slave trade. Africans were exported and shipped in droves to the Americas for the sole purpose of enriching the lives of other races with slave labor. These Africans were sold like livestock and forced into a life of servitude once they became the “property” of others. As the United States expanded westward, the desire to cultivate new land increased the need for more slaves. The treatment of slaves was dependent upon the region because different crops required differing needs for cultivation. Slaves in the Cotton South, concluded traveler Frederick Law Olmsted, worked “much harder and more unremittingly” than those in the tobacco regions.1 Since the birth of America and throughout its expansion, African Americans have been fighting an uphill battle to achieve freedom and some semblance of equality. While African Americans were confronted with their inferior status during the domestic slave trade, when performing their tasks, and even after they were set free, they still made great strides in their quest for equality during the nineteenth century.
In addition, slavery also grew as a commodity for colonists in the seventeenth century. The practice of slavery by Europeans in North America began around 1619 when the first Africans were shipped over seas to the Chesapeake Bay area. Initially, Africans that were brought to America were considered indentured servants, not slaves. The typical ruling was that they would not serve longer than seven years before being be released and integrated into the colony. This coincided with the Biblical command of the Old Testament that stated, "If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything.” However, it was not long until this ruling changed and African and Indians became expected to serve for
Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland were settled in the early 17th century. It was a difficult live for the first colonist; they had limited labor and were constantly raided by Native Americans. Colonist tried to use the Native Americans as a source of slavery. Most of the colonist’s farms were by forest areas so Native Americans would just leave in to the woods. Colonists were afraid of pressuring them from the fear of getting ambushed by gangs of Native Americans. Another reason Native Americans men made bad slaves was because the women in the tribes did the agricultural work in the Native American villages.
...ter researching and reading the stories of the famous African slaves free safely, does not provide comfort for my soul of the African slaves that died before 1865. The African slaves may have died by natural causes or by the hands of the slaves’ owners. However, the stories of Nate Turner, the Black Seminoles, Dred Scott, Polly Berry, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and many other famous and not so famous African slaves gave me a since of pride that I am a descendant of an African slave male and female. Moreover, my African American racial heritage did not sit back and wait for Abraham Lincoln to approve outlaw slavery, but the African slaves knew throughout the entire time from 1619 to 1865 that no white man or woman should be allowed to own another man or woman, no matter where the person is originated from or who that person is born from.
Some of the earliest records of slavery date back to 1760 BC; Within such societies, slavery worked in a system of social stratification (Slavery in the United States, 2011), meaning inequality among different groups of people in a population (Sajjadi, 2008). After the establishment of Jamestown in 1607 as the first permanent English Chesapeake colony in the New World that was agriculturally-based; Tobacco became the colonies chief crop, requiring time consuming and intensive labor (Slavery in colonial America, 2011). Due to the headlight system established in Maryland in 1640, tobacco farmers looked for laborers primarily in England, as each farmer could obtain workers as well as land from importing English laborers. The farmers could then use such profits to purchase the passage of more laborers, thus gaining more land. Indentured servants, mostly male laborers and a few women immigrated to Colonial America and contracted to work from four to seven years in exchange for their passage (Norton, 41). Once services ended after the allotted amount of time, th...
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, brings to light many of the social injustices that colored men, women, and children all were forced to endure throughout the nineteenth century under Southern slavery laws. Douglass's life-story is presented in a way that creates a compelling argument against the justification of slavery. His argument is reinforced though a variety of anecdotes, many of which detailed strikingly bloody, horrific scenes and inhumane cruelty on the part of the slaveholders. Yet, while Douglas’s narrative describes in vivid detail his experiences of life as a slave, what Douglass intends for his readers to grasp after reading his narrative is something much more profound. Aside from all the physical burdens of slavery that he faced on a daily basis, it was the psychological effects that caused him the greatest amount of detriment during his twenty-year enslavement. In the same regard, Douglass is able to profess that it was not only the slaves who incurred the damaging effects of slavery, but also the slaveholders. Slavery, in essence, is a destructive force that collectively corrupts the minds of slaveholders and weakens slaves’ intellects.
The journey to freedom for African Americans all started in 1619 when the first twenty African slaves were brought to Jamestown to serve a land not familiar with, in order to please wealthy white settlers. For the next 150 years, Africans were uprooted from their homeland and shipped across the Atlantic ocean to the United States to be sold as if they were property in America. The majority of these slaves were imported between 1741 and 1810. By 1790 blacks made up over 19% of the U.S. population.