The Effect of the Industrial Revolution on Slavery

They settled on acquiring African slaves due to a number of reasons; The African slaves were more stronger and immune to a number of diseases in Europe and America, the Africans had no friends and family in America hence it was not easy for them to form alliances or to escape, they provided a permanent and a cheap source of labor, and most of them had worked on farms before in their native lands. In addition, there were also white slaves for cheap labor. Slave trade grew gradually when it began in 1600's. As the demand for labor in the colonies increased, a number of plantation owners resorted to slave labor. These plantation owners used s... ... middle of paper ... ...ution of slavery in America began with the European colonialists who established their colonies in various parts of America.

During the period of time between 1789 and 1840, there were a lot of major changes occurring on the issue of slavery such as the impact it had towards the economy and the status of slaves in general. There were two types of African Americans slaves during the era, either doing hard cheap labor in a plantation usually owned by a white and being enslaved, or free. Undoubtedly, the enslaved African Americans worked vigorously receiving minimal pay, while on the other hand, the free ones had quite a different lifestyle. The free ones had more freedom, money, land/power, are healthier, younger and some even own plantations. In addition, in 1820 the Missouri compromise took into effect, which made it so states North of the 36°30′ parallel would be free and South would be slave and helped give way to new laws regarding the issue of slavery.

As the market for sugar began to increase, so did the number of Africans transported across the Atlantic to North America. This means of transportation is noted in history as the African Slave Trade. According to scholars, 76 percent of the 11 million Africans that unwillingly partook in the African Slave Trade arrived in North America between 1701-1810 (Out of Many, 83). The sugar boom that took place in the middle of the 17th century may have had a great impact on those numbers. The different forms of slavery in the North American colonies greatly depended on the economy of that colony and the type of commodity that it was capable of producing.

Planters worked their slaves in inhuman ways, from dawn to dusk, bringing in the cane before it rotted in the fields. Planters could not make similar demands on typical workers of the time. Most of the workers were feudal serfs who were legally bound to work on the land owned by their landlords. The Dutch and English entered into slave activity during the 1600s somewhat later than the Portuguese and the Spanish. By the 1600s the European demand for New World products such as sugar, tobacco, coffee, and other crops created the high demand for slave labor to meet the demands of the labor-intensive agricultural activities.

The development of early colonial America used slaves for labor because labor was scarce. Slaves played a growing role in creating the necessary labor force needed to provide economic development of the New World. While Spanish and Portuguese slavery existed, the British found it more profitable using Africans to work on plantations in agriculture and farming. They worked in fields producing bulk crops such as tobacco, sugar, cocoa, cotton, and coffee. By the latter half of the 17th century, the demand for agricultural slaves increased to keep up with market demands.

The profitability of slavery ultimately rested on the enormous demand for cotton outside the South. This made slaves the most valuable commodity at the time and most of the profits from slave labor and sales went into purchasing more land and slaves. At the heart of Anglo-American trade lay the highly profitable commerce in cash crops, from tobacco in the Chesapeake colonies to rice and indigo in South Carolina, wheat from the middle colonies to cotton in the South; an extensive textile industry in the North, Insurance companies that insured slaves as property, to many wall street firms that got their start as middle men in the cotton trade, I think it would be logical to conclude that the foundation of American economy lay in the back breaking toil and sweat of Slave labor.

It started as a means of using people as a trade for items such as Tobacco, Sugar and Cotton. It helped the farmers gain more money. The work was hard and there was not enough labor so the white settlers created the slave trade. The slave trade was where the white settlers of Virginia picked up people from Africa to be slaves in America. They took Men, women, and children from their homes to come and be servants or be farmers.

The greater workforce was slaves, and the invention of the cotton gin led to greatly expanding the amount of slavery in the South. The more slaves brought in to cultivate the cotton the more involucrate the Southern planters had become with agriculture, this strong attachment and dependency for cotton led to the South’s poor establishment of Industry. The total value of textiles from the South for example, made about 4.5 million dollars in the 1860’s, that may sound impressive but it is r... ... middle of paper ... .... The slave trade tried to further expand legally by advocating for their rights to buy slaves in Cuba, or Brazil or even Africa; this was discussed in southern commercial conventions, and was specifically brought up by William L. Yancey of Alabama. The cotton was growing bountiful and the planters needed slaves to harvest it, thus the need for slaves pushed the slave trade and increased the amount of slaves in the South tremendously during the first half of the 1800’s.

Virginia was not the only colony in need of help on the plantations. Rice plantations in the Carolinas became a cash crop in the early 1690's. However, slaves were not first to work on the rice plantations; white indentured servants were. The servants did not last long because of the malaria carrying mosquitoes that infested the swamps, and African Americans were soon enlisted as slaves to work the plantation . The plantation owners saw two advantages to having African American slaves as opposed to the white servants.

It spread rapidly throughout America and especially in the South. During these times it gave another reason to keep the slavery at its all time high. Many wealthy planters started a ‘business’ by having their slaves work the cotton plantations, which this was one of a few ways slavery was still in full effect. Not only were there wealthy planters, at this time even if you were a small slave-holder you were still making money. While all of this had been put into the works, Americans had approximately 410,000 slaves move from the upper south to the ‘cotton states’.