...Rape During The Antebellum Period The first African slaves arrived in Virginia, North America in 1619. As the plantations of the antebellum south flourished, the African slave trade gained momentum. Between the 16 and 19th centuries, America had an estimated 12 million African slaves (Slavery in the United States, Junius P. Rodriguez ). Enslavement of the African Americans formally commenced in the 1630s and 1640s. By 1740, colonial America had a fully developed slavery system in place, granting slave owners an absolute and tyrannical life-and-death authority over their slaves or 'chattels' and their children (Slavery in the United States, Junius P. Rodriguez ). Stripped of any identity or rights, enslaved black men and women were considered legal non-persons, except in the event of a crime committed. Documents and research on the slave era in the antebellum south are awash with horror stories of the brutal and inhuman treatment of slaves, particularly women (Slavery in the United States, Junius P. Rodriguez). Considered 'properties' by their masters, enslaved black women endured physical and emotional abuse, torture, and sometimes even death. By the 1800s, slavery had percolated down mainly to the antebellum south. While a majority of enslaved men and women were designated as 'field servants' performing duties outside the house, a smaller percentage, particularly women were employed as domestics or 'house servants', mammies and surrogate mothers. In the absence of any security...
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...• Robert Livingston • War of 1812- Military conflict between US and Britain following revolution about unresolved issues: trade restrictions, etc. • Tecumseh- Native American leader of the Shawnee and a large tribal confederacy; opposed US in war of 1812. • John Quincy Adams- sixth president; whig. • Empire of Liberty- theme developed first by Thomas Jefferson to identify America's world responsibility to spread freedom across the globe. Jefferson saw America's mission in terms of setting an example, expansion into the west, and by intervention abroad. • Transportation Revolution- early 1800s, development of steamboats, canals, and railroads. Faster transport of people, products, and knowledge. • National Road- First major improved highway in the United States to be built by the federal government. Connection between the Potomac and Ohio Rivers and a gateway to the West for thousands of settlers. • Communication Revolution- Samuel Morse invented telegraph. • The Market Revolution- improvements in how goods were processed and fabricated as well as by a transformation of how labor was organized to process trade goods for consumption. • Porkopolis- Cincinnati was the country's chief hog packing center, and herds of pigs traveled the streets. • Labor theory of value- The value of a commodity is only related to the labor needed to produce or obtain that commodity and not to other factors of production • Second Party System- 2 party system • Democrats-...
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...Henry Thoreau and Frederick Porcher both felt America was not heading in the right direction. However, they had different reasons for suggesting this. Thoreau thought slavery and those who ignored it were the problem while Porcher thought the conflict between capital and labor was the problem. Thoreau believed that government ignorance was the reason slavery still existed and Porcher believed that capitalism was the cause of the conflict between capital and labor. They each wrote of possible remedies to fix America from heading down a road from which it would never return. Henry Thoreau considered slavery and ignorance what was wrong with the United States. He believed slavery was immoral and the activism of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry...
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...Historical Timeline and Essay Michael Meisenheimer AAGN10AA62 December 11, 2011 Kelly Cantrell Historical Timeline and Essay Timeline 1793 Eli Whitney Invents the Modern Cotton Gin Slavery was becoming less and less profitable in the South prior to 1793. One reason was because cotton was not a profitable crop for farmers because preparing it for sale was so labor intensive. Eli Whitney's cotton gin turned cotton into a profitable crop and raised the demand of slaves in the South to grow it. This coincided with the North becoming a more industrialized region that didn't need to depend on slaves. 1819 Missouri Compromise The Missouri Compromise was brokered by Senator Henry Clay to settle the dispute between the North and the South about if the Western territories would be slave or free. Under the terms of the Compromise, slavery would only be allowed in Missouri and south of the 36th parallel. The need for the Missouri Compromise illustrates how the North and the South were beginning to hold very different views on how allowable slavery was to the nation. Bitter feelings about the compromise persisted in both the North and the South. 1828 The Nullification Crisis The Nullification Crisis grew out of a protective tariff of 1828. The tariff was popular with the Northern states, because it provided protection for American made goods. Southern states traded heavily with Great Britain during this time, and felt it would damage their economies. With the support...
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...1 Defending the Defenseless During the American Revolution, slavery was in the process of being abolished in Europe and in the Northern states of America. Even though parts of the world were willing to free slaves, the Southern states found ways to defend slavery. In Paul Finkelman’s book Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South, Finkelman provides the writings of many white leaders from the South who believed that slavery was essential to America’s society. The white leaders who spoke about proslavery included a broad range of defenses to justify themselves because they wanted Americans to believe that slavery had a lasting impact economically, religiously, legally, and racially. One of the defenders in Finkelman’s book was Thomas R.R. Cobb. He justified slavery by arguing the effects of abolition in the United States. Cobb said, “The emancipated negroes do not enjoy full and equal civil and political rights in any State in the union, except the State of Vermont” (Finkelman, 79). He was convinced that those who became free of slavery did not live a better life. He believed that any African American slave who is free is not capable of living successfully and “His moral condition compares unfavorably with that of the slave of the South” (Finkleman, 79). This argument states that African Americans who are enslaved are in better hands with the slave owners and therefore they should remain as slaves. Cobb’s defense was justifiable because he...
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...Essay The essay gives you the opportunity to go in-depth into an issue in American culture. Your three possible topics are: (1) relations between blacks and whites; (2) the status of women; and (3) relations between the U.S. and the rest of the world. You pick one of these topics and, using only our textbook, write 1800-2000 words on how you have seen that topic throughout the course, from the beginnings to the present. How has it changed? What were the big events or people involved in it? What analysis can you bring to the topic, in order to assess it critically? The essay is to be critical and not just a summary of sections in which your topic is mentioned in the textbook. The essay should be double-spaced, with one-inch margins, and a 12-point font. Frequent citations (probably one or two per paragraph) to the textbook are essential for each point you find from the textbook. Use Turabian or MLA for your citation format and be exact in your citations, including page numbers for each one. No title page or works cited page are needed. In the beginning of the African American history, there were many obstacles and struggles that the colored people had to face. They were being mistreated, sometimes even less than a white man’s dog. It all began in 1619, the first African slaves were brought to Virginia. Once a person becomes a slave, they were slaves for life and so were the next generation. The majority of the slaves worked in rice or tobacco plantations in dangerous...
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...Bibliographic Essay on African American History Introduction In the essay “On the Evolution of Scholarship in Afro- American History” the eminent historian John Hope Franklin declared “Every generation has the opportunity to write its own history, and indeed it is obliged to do so.”1 The social and political revolutions of 1960s have made fulfilling such a responsibility less daunting than ever. Invaluable references, including Darlene Clark Hine, ed. Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Evelyn Brooks Higgingbotham, ed., Harvard Guide to African American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Arvarh E. Strickland and Robert E. Weems, Jr., eds., The African American Experience: An Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001); and Randall M. Miller and John David Smith, eds., Dictionary of Afro- American Slavery (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1988), provide informative narratives along with expansive bibliographies. General texts covering major historical events with attention to chronology include John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000), considered a classic; along with Joe William Trotter, Jr., The African American 1  Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001); and, Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, The...
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...Colleen Anderson The Civil War HIST 415 Essay One Why did the South Secede? At the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775 all of the colonies allowed slavery. Between Independence and 1820, all states in the North had either banned slavery and were choosing to base their economies on free labor instead. The Free states remained agricultural, but went through a process of industrialization, creating a diversified economy as they invested in cities, factories, and new forms of transportation. The South invested more in agriculture and was extremely reliant on slave labor for its cotton production. The economic, political and cultural life was shaped by a need to maintain slavery. The South was wealthy and its wealth was invested in land and slaves. (McPherson 77) They were worth a lot more than the land which they worked. The South had a society and an economy that revolved around the institution of slavery, and it was being threatened. Abolition was causing the South to bleed money by slaves escaping and the slaves were not being returned to their owners. In my opinion the John Brown raid was a strong factor that pushed the south to secede. Around the time of the Mexican War, both the Northerners and Southerners were concerned over whether or not the new territories should be free of slavery or not. This promoted the development of free soil, in which people mostly Northerners opposed the expansion of slavery into Western territories. The southerners opposed this new group...
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...Analysis of “The Impending Crisis of the South” In an article entitled “The Impending Crisis of the South” Hinton Rowan Helper argued that by over focusing on slavery the slave failed to nourish its other economic facets and had become over reliant on the northern economy. Helper decried that the south had “no foreign trade,” and that southerners contributed nothing to “literature, polite arts, and inventions of the age.” He believed that the slavery was not only ruining the economics of the south, but also its culture, and the minds of its very people. Helper also declared that the talented intelligent southerner would have no reason to stay in the south and this bothered him very dearly; later in the essay Helper mentioned that non slave holding whites in the south are among the most illiterate people in the world. Helper felt that slavery was bringing economic and cultural destruction to his home land. In addition to slavery making the south subservient to the north, Helper also argued that southerners outside the slavery system were severely disadvantaged. He claimed that poor southern whites were “regarded with less esteem than Negroes” and were “infinitely worse off” than even their slave counterparts. Helper was arguing that over focusing on slavery caused the government to neglect those not exploiting slave labor to get by. Not only did this lead to poverty for many poor white folk but it also gave tremendous power to a select few slave holders who became disproportionally...
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...Hellen Wang Abraham Lincoln Essay In 1858, Abraham Lincoln said that "A house divided against itself cannot stand. ”In 1860, after Lincoln won the presidential election, Southern states began to secede from the United States. Tension between the North and South continued, as both regions had different views on slavery. During the eve of the Civil War, the Union and the Confederacy both had relative strengths. The North was fueled by an immigration boom, and a manufacturing economy with lots of new technologies like machines being used in agricultural, which whereas the South relied on the cash crop cotton to make profit, and were dependent on diplomatic and military assistance from England and France in return for cotton. By 1860, 90 percent...
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...FINAL PROJECT: HISTORICAL TIMELINE AND ESSAY Final Project: Historical Timeline and Essay Jennifer Mullins Axia College of the University of Phoenix Historical Timeline and Essay: The Civil War The first shots were fired on April 12, 1861 from Fort Sumter, South Carolina beginning a four-year battle that would end on April 9, 1865, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered in Appomattox, Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, ending what became known as the American Civil War (Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, and Stoff, 2006). In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, America went into two different economical directions: the North became industrial the South agricultural. Although it is believed the underlying cause behind the Civil War was due to the abolition of slavery (slaves were considered a major asset in the southern states), the following timeline shows there were many other factors involved as well. From the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the firing of the first shots at Fort Sumter, America’s journey for equality and unity was a hard one, leaving in its wake destruction, discord, and civil unrest. ____________________________________________________________ ____________ 1776: Declaration of Independence • Was written by Thomas Jefferson • Was signed on July 4th, severing all ties to Britain 1787: Northwest Ordinance • Was passed on July 13th establishing the intent to expand into the West adding...
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...North and South as America drew closer to civil war. The people were beginning to take sides and the public opinion was being swayed by authors and journalists. Two certain literary works of the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Hinton R. Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South, persuaded the people in the middle ground to join the North’s noble cause of defending freedom. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s more emotional story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the most effective novel on the American public opinion. Stowe’s work was emotional and vivid. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was widely distributed throughout the world and it energized anti-slavery forces. Helper took a more logical path in criticizing slavery and his book was mostly used by Republican candidates as campaign literature against Southern Democrats. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin used emotional and stirring words and images into her reader’s minds compared to Helper’s use of graphs and charts to get his point across. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin imagery is popularly used and at the time when literacy was uncommon. Images helped readers understand more. Helper uses graphs and charts, which most likely...
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...Paper 1 Essay After four years of bloodshed and many deaths, it was finally worth it. On December 6th, 1865, slavery had ended. The 13th amendment, which was ratified by Congress, had abolished slavery in the U.S. Many steps were taken in order to achieve this goal, such as the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Abraham Lincoln worked hard to ban slavery and managed to do it. Abraham Lincoln deserves all the amount of credit for abolishing slavery. In 1861, the Civil War had started to abolish slavery. Lincoln saw that the North and the South were fighting and did not want that. He wanted to save the Union, but if he abolished slavery in one step, it would be much more...
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...In their, James H. Dormon and Robert R. Jones refute many different misconceptions that they believe other people have about slave life and culture. One of the people that they believe to have misconceive some parts of slave’s lives and culture is Stanley Elkins. The materials found within the book African American Voices, edited by Steven Mintz, confute many of the views found in both essays written by Elkins and Dormon and Jones. While Dormon and Jones and Elkins considered the institution to be a “closed” system, Dormon and Jones did not see it to be as “closed” as Elkins did. Elkins believed that the system in North American slavery was “closed”, meaning that a mass majority of slaves were restricted from having contact with the free...
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...Chattel slavery in the antebellum South was a brutal and dehumanizing institution that was deeply intertwined with pervasive violence against enslaved individuals. This essay will delve into the multifaceted relationship between slavery and violence, drawing upon insights from three scholarly sources: "Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas" by Sally E. Hadden, "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery" by Eric Foner, and "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism" by Edward E. Baptist. Through their analyses, we will explore the different forms of violence, their targets, and the underlying goals within the context of chattel slavery. Hadden's examination of slave patrols sheds light on how violence was institutionalized to maintain the slave system in the antebellum South. Slave patrols, organized groups tasked with enforcing slave codes, utilized physical force and intimidation tactics to assert control over enslaved individuals. The primary aim of these patrols was to uphold the economic and social order of the slave society by quelling any resistance or defiance among the enslaved population. By using violence as a tool of control, slave patrols perpetuated the dominance of white...
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