Slavery-From Beginning to End

In the fifteenth century, Europeans began to import slaves from the African continent. The discovery of America increased the demand for cheap labor and there­fore increased the slave trade. During the next 400 years, slave traders kidnapped about 15 million Africans and sold them into slavery. When the American Civil War began in 1860, there were about 4.5 million blacks in the United States, most of them slaves.

The vast majority of slaves lived in the South, where they worked in cotton, tobacco, and sugar-cane fields. Most were deprived of a formal education, although a few were taught to read and write. Their African religious practices were discouraged, and they were forced to convert to Christianity.

The slaves suffered greatly, both physically and emotionally. They worked long hours in the fields. They lived in crowded, primitive houses. Some were abused by cruel mas­ters. Often, slave owners separated black families by selling a slave's husband, wife, or child. Uncle Tom's Cabin, a famous novel about southern slavery, emphasized all these evils. The book aroused so much antislavery feeling in the North that Abraham Lincoln said to its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war."

The "great war" that Lincoln was talking about was, of course, the American Civil War, also called (primarily in the South) the War between the States. Slavery was the underlying cause of this war. The agricultural South depended on slave labor to work the fields of its large plantations. The industrialized North had no use for slave labor, and slavery was against the law there. Northerners considered slavery a great evil, and, in fact, some white Northerners helped blacks escape to one of the free states. By the mid-nineteenth century, the nation was divided between slave states and free states. Whenever a new state wanted to enter the Union, the question of whether it would be slave or free was raised. Finally, the South decided to leave the Union and become a separate country-the Confederate States of America. President Lincoln would not allow this. In order to keep the U.S. united, Lincoln led his nation into a civil war. The war ended in 1865 with the North victorious, the country reunited. and slavery abolished.

In 1863, 2 years before the war ended, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the Confederate states. Shortly after the war ended in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution freed all slaves. A few years later, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments gave the former slaves full civil rights. including giving African­American men the right to vote.

Check your comprehension.

Why were there slaves in the South but not in the North?

Дата добавления: 2015-08-27