Slavery in the USA

Hey, yesterday I went to a farm were slaves have lived earlier. It was kinda weird, but i learned a lot and it was really exiting. I went to an old cotton farm were it earlier had been working around 20 slaves... Those slaves lived under very bad conditions. I think it is so mean, but I don’t know what it was like to live in this time. Want to learn something about slavery? Read this!

Some of the cases for the slavery was that they needed people to work on the farms and plantations in the US. Reasons why they used African slaves was partly because they were less sick than for example Indians. The first slaves who came to America, came with a Dutch ship in 1619 to Jamestown in Virginia and it was 20 of them. They were going to work on a tobacco farm. In the beginning, slaves could after 7 years of hard work get their own land and be free. In the 17th and 18th centuries, black slaves worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast.

When it comes to the life on the plantations, the owners treated the slaves differently. Some treated them nice and other treated them bad… Some of them was raped, and others were whipped. If a slave tried to escape, some owners even cut of their limbs. The slaves lived under very bad conditions and it was not much space in the houses they lived in.

Slaves were treated like animals and were sold on actions. Families were ripped apart as they were sold to different plantations. And the man would never see his wife again. However, on the plantations they could fall in love with another man and then after they had been together for a while, possibly the man could be sold to another plantation. A slave had the value of a 3/5 white person.

It was many ways making people slaves; the most common were kidnapping and plundering, but also prisoners of war was sold as slaves. It also happened that people was “given away” or used as a medium of exchange.

It is assumed that 10 to 12 million slaves were exported from Africa to many parts of the world during the period 1451 to 1870. I think that is way too many, but as said earlier, I didn’t live at that time and don’t know what it was like… I’m happy this isn’t what the world is like today. I hope it will never get like this again. Now I want to get of my computer and out in the city again, I’m still in NYC, but leaving in a couple of days, so I want to see as much of the city as possible. Have a GOOD DAY!

Nora

Sources:

http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/slavery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_colonial_United_States