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Slaves had always played an important role in the United States’ economy throughout its history. The United States was excelling in the production of cotton starting the 1800s. By 1815 cotton was already the nation’s most valuable export and by 1840 worth more than all other U.S. exports combined. Slaves provided the necessary labor to keep the industry going. To harvest the utmost crops, plantation owners developed two labor systems, the task system and the gang system. The task system was most popular on small-scale plantations. “Slaves were given a prescribed amount of labor to complete each day. Plowing or hoeing task, for example, involved plowing or hoeing so much ground per day.” The gang system was widely used on larger plantation …show more content…
“It was their challenge to the system of slavery, their actions in defying slaveholders by fleeing to the North and Canada, that prompted fugitive slave laws in the first place.” Congress passed the Compromise of 1850 act in order to ease the tension between northern and southern states. The act promises to grant the Fugitive Slave Act, to the pro-slavery state, while accepting California to the Union as a free state and “the abolition of the slave trade in the nation’s capital.” The Fugitive Slave Act “denied fugitive slaves a right to a jury trial and required northern citizens to assist in their recovery” which angered the anti-slavery group in the North. However, this act did not ease tension between the states, but further damage the relationships between them. This act prompted southern states to leave the Union on 1852. The expansion into the western territories played a large part in the conflict because the conflict first arose when deciding whether or not these new territories should become free states or slavery …show more content…
During the Progressive Era, tens of thousands of African Americans migrated from the South to the Northeast and Midwest in search of a better life. In the South, the Ku Klux Klan, a group that believed in white supremacy, started the practice of lynching. African Americans were lynched for simply being black. The Southern states also passed a series of laws called Jim Crow Laws. These laws prevented African Americans to vote by requiring poll tax, and literacy tests. Segregation was another big factor and drove African Americans to leave the South. From school, to restaurant, to public transportations, every place was segregated in the South. There were little to no job opportunity in the South for African Americans. “Escaped from the degrading heritage of slavery in the South,” African Americans were willing to work despite little wage in the North. Because of the ongoing WWI during that time period, factories lacked cheap labor from
Jim Crow Laws, enforced in 1877 in the south, were still being imposed during the 1930s and throughout. These laws created segregation between the two races and created a barrier for the Blacks. For example, even though African Americans were allowed to vote, southern states created a literary test exclusively for them that was quite difficult to pass, since most Blacks were uneducated. However, if they passed the reading test, they were threatened with death. Also, they had to pay a special tax to vote, which many African Americans could not afford.
Originally thought of as a benefit to slaveholders, the act ended up hurting the Southern cause for slavery. The act not only allowed escaped slaves to be hunted in the North, but also required federal marshals to assist slave catchers. In spite of the fact that each section received and experienced many benefits, I think that the north seemed to gain the most from the Compromise of 1850. The equilibrium of the Senate was at the present time with the free states, in spite of the fact that California often voted with the south in regards to many issues in the 1850s. The major success for the purpose of the south was the Fugitive Slave Law. In the final analysis, the north refused to impose it. “Massachusetts even called for its nullification, stealing an argument from John C. Calhoun. Northerners claimed the law was unfair. The flagrant violation of the Fugitive Slave Law sets the scene for the tempest that emerged later in the decade.” Yet at this point in time, Americans anticipated that the fragile peace would succeed. In conclusion, the North got more advantages because California was admitted as a free state, minimizing the Southern on voting power in Congress. This is the reason why Northerns perceived that they should make a pro-Southern signal by accepting the new Fugitive Slave Act. It horribly rebounded them, evoking and arousing sympathy for oppressed
The population of African Americans from 1865 to 1900 had limited social freedom. Social limitations are limitations that relate “…to society and the way people interact with each other,” as defined by the lesson. One example of a social limitation African Americans experienced at the time is the white supremacy terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan or the KKK. The KKK started as a social club formed by former confederate soldiers, which rapidly became a domestic terrorist organization. The KKK members were white supremacists who’s objective was to ward off African Americans from using their new political power. In an attempts to achieve their objective, Klansmen would burn African American schools, scare and threaten voters, destroy the homes of African Americans and also the homes of whites who supported African American rights. The greatest terror the KKK imposed was that of lynching. Lynching may be defined via the lesson as, “…public hanging for an alleged offense without benefit of trial.” As one can imagine these tactics struck fear into African Americans and the KKK was achiev...
One item in the Compromise of 1850 was the provision for a stronger Fugitive Slave Law. This new law made it a federal crime to not return a runaway slave to the south. The law also established that any suspected runaway slave was to be tried by a single judge, not by a jury. Also, these judges were compensated by a system that provided them with more money for deciding that the slave was guilty than innocent. This law obviously encouraged people not to harbor runaway slaves, and when they were caught, it provided the judge an incentive to have them returned to the south.
The new territories and the discussion of whether they would be admitted to the Union free or slave-holding stirred up animosity. The Compromise of 1850 which offered stricter fugitive slave laws, admitted California as a free state, allowed slavery in Washington D.C., and allowed new territories to choose whether they wanted to be slave-holding or free was supposed to help ease tension between the North and South. Yet Southern states wanted more new territories to be slave-holders so the institution of it would continue to grow. They believed slavery was a way of life and as Larrabee said in his senate speech, “You cannot break apart this organization and this system that has intertwined itself into every social and political fiber of that great people who inhabit one-half of the Union.” (“There is a Conflict of Races”).
In 1863 to 1877 Reconstruction brought an end to slavery, it paved the way for the former slaves to become citizens. The African Americans wanted complete freedom. However, that right became a setback and were seen as second class citizens. Before the end of the Reconstruction, a legislation was passed called the Jim Crow law. The law enforced the segregation of people of African descent. The legislation was a system to ensure the exclusion of racial groups in the Southern States. For example, separate transportation law, school division, different waiting rooms both at the bus terminals and hospitals, separate accommodations, marriage law and voting rights. The Jim Crow law was supposed to help in racial segregation in the South. Instead,
The Great Migration was the movement in which 6 million African Americans from the South traveled to the North for more work opportunities. The South treated them harshly in terms of segregation and work opportunities. After World War I, segregation policies known as Jim Crow Laws were enforced in the South and forced the blacks to contribute to the sharecropping system. In the meantime, the North was lacking a great number of industrial workers due to the shortage of European immigrants after the Great War. Thus, many of the black southerners left and moved to the North.
The author goes on to describe antebellum slavery. During this time he describes slavery as a massive expansion. He expresses this knowledge through numbers of slaves and overwhelming facts. At this time cotton boosted the economy of all the slave states, cotton producing or not. Cotton created an intense demand for slave labor and therefore slave prices rose to an all time high. Slave trading was very traumatic for the slaves, being separated from the only thing they knew. Some lived on plantations under a watchful eye and others worked right beside their owners. Slaves on large plantations usually worked in gangs, and there were better positions to work then others. Some gangs were separated into groups of lighter work, consisting of men and woman. Other gangs weren't so lucky and were assigned to hard labor.
Although abolition of slavery in the South coincided with the conclusion of the Civil War, a century of institutionalized racism was widespread in the former Confederacy. This institutionalized racism came in the form of the Jim Crow laws. It was a social norm to look at African Americans as inferior or even harmful to the White population. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan roamed around "defending" the white population from the African Americans. This defense came in the form of public executions (lynching) or intimidation.
"The 1850's was a time of attempted compromise when compromise was no longer possible." This quote best describes this time period, because Americans were trying to compromise their views to prevent a large conflict, but there were many events which made a compromise impossible. The Fugitive Slave Act was part of the Compromise Act of 1850. This act required that authorities in the North had to assist southern slave catchers to retrieve and return slaves to their owners. Southerners favored this act because they saw no slavery in the territories to the west, by the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act it would help preserve slavery in the south.
The Compromise of 1850 marked the initial rise of Black loss of rights in this period. Previously, it was possible for Northerners to ferry slaves to their freedom. However, “Included in the compromise were funds budgeted specifically for catching fugitive slaves and prosecuting anyone lending assistance in the effort'; (Kevin Holloway, The Fugitive Slave Act and the Compromise of 1850). With specific funds that were directed in catching fugitive slaves, white bounty hunters could freely raid the North and search for fugitive slaves. These brutal hunters could now abduct any Black person left alone. Many Blacks that were never in bondage were kidnapped and taken to the South to be slaves. This legislation limited the rights of African Americans and enabled the white populous to oppress African Americans.
Toward the end of the Progressive Era American social inequality had stripped African Americans of their rights on a local and national level. In the 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessey vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court sided with a Louisiana state law declaring segregation constitutional as long as facilities remain separate but equal. Segregation increased as legal discriminatory laws became enacted by each state but segregated facilities for whites were far superior to those provided for blacks; especially prevalent in the South were discriminatory laws known as Jim Crow laws which surged after the ruling. Such laws allowed for segregation in places such as restaurants, hospitals, parks, recreational areas, bathrooms, schools, transportation, housing, hotels, etc. Measures were taken to disenfranchise African Americans by using intimidation, violence, putting poll taxes, and literacy tests. This nearly eliminated the black vote and its political interests as 90% of the nine million blacks in America lived in the South and 1/3 were illiterate as shown in Ray Stannard Baker’s Following the Color Line (Bailey 667). For example, in Louisiana 130,334 black voters registered in 1896 but that number drastically decreased to a mere 1,342 in 1904—a 99 percent decline (Newman ). Other laws prevented black...
The laws known as “Jim Crow” were laws presented to basically establish racial apartheid in the United States. These laws were more than in effect for “for three centuries of a century beginning in the 1800s” according to a Jim Crow Law article on PBS. Many try to say these laws didn’t have that big of an effect on African American lives but in affected almost everything in their daily life from segregation of things: such as schools, parks, restrooms, libraries, bus seatings, and also restaurants. The government got away with this because of the legal theory “separate but equal” but none of the blacks establishments were to the same standards of the whites. Signs that read “Whites Only” and “Colored” were seen at places all arounds cities.
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...
Many Africans were forced to work in the sharecropping system. The Klu Klux Klan has greatly impacted the Africans. During the 1920s there were only two main jobs Africans could choose from, sharecropper and farmers. This made life hard for African Americans because of the lack of available jobs for the colored. They were evicted from the south so they moved to the North. “After t...