The Revolution of Slavery in the New World

Introduction

African American slaves had started being transported to the New World in 1492, it was not until 1619 that Africans arrived at Jamestown, and then the 1680’s when a racial-based system was created. In 1619, slavery among Americans would be begin and they would be accustomed to treating the Africans inhumanely, but by 1776 freedom petitions were presented by African slaves to New England courts and legislatives; because the language of liberty had echoed throughout slave communities, thus becoming a revolutionary rallying cry to challenge the white Americans for their freedom. Overall, the fight for freedom for slaves was a long brutal process, containing important events that tied in and led up to 1776, where the discussion of the abolition of slavery will finally begin.

Origins of Slavery In America: Slave Trade

Although the Atlantic slave trade would be later be considered a crime against humanity, during the seventeenth and eighteenth century it was considered a regular business conducted by merchants and african traders; american planters would be bargain for innocent people's lives for profit. The trade was known as the Atlantic Slave Trade, which was the shipment of African slaves to the Caribbean where there would be shipping ports for the slaves to be brought to the American colonies. Since the first mass of consumer goods in international trade were produced by slaves, such as sugar, rice, tobacco, and coffee, the Atlantic Slave Trade made Africa the major key because the demand for products called for the demand of more slaves, and in return the African rulers would receive guns and textiles. But the for the slaves the journey to the new World, also known as the middle passage was anything but ideal. One in five would die during the voyage, and less than five percent of them even made it to the New World; but by 1700 the numbers grew enormously, and by 1750 one-fifth of the population of 2.3 million Americans were African slaves.As the slaves begun to contribute to America’s economic development, the European empires in the New World battled control of this trade, which resulted in the Dutch signing the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, in defeat from England. The Europeans and free colonists had the idea that their freedom meant the power and right to enslave others, which caused them growth and prosperity in their merging society. But there were others who did not believe in the idea of slavery, and they were the quakers. In 1688 the German quakers issued a protest for rights of blacks and against the injustice of having them as slaves. Yet it did not stop the other colonists from their belief that owning slaves was their right, so as the colonies began to expand westwardly, slavery did as well.

Slavery between the North and South

Though both the North and South contained slaves, the treatment of the slaves was vastly different between the two areas. Since slavery became a huge success on colonies economy, the colonists would have huge plantains where the slaves would work. The planters would make law books, where the masters would have power over their human property and restricting the blacks access to freedom, by having violence at the heart of the slave system. An example of this system was the slavery that transformed Chesapeake. The Chesapeake society became a hierarchy of the degrees in freedom, a the top would be the large planters, second was the lesser planters, than the tenant farmers and servants, and lastly the slaves. By the 1740s there were many slaves in the SOuth because rice and indigo were being grown and since the slaves knew how to make the rice, slavery began to grow in Georgia as well. Georgia had fifteen-thousand slaves on their rice plantations by 1770, and in 1751 when there was the chance to ban slavery Georgia repealed it. With race being the line in social divide, there were less than four percent of free blacks in 1750, since whites believed that free blacks were dangerous and undesirable and that the words free and white only correlated with each other. Unlike the South, the North was less central towards plantation regions in New England and the middle colonies. Slaves in these areas were considered no threat to the white majority, meaning that they were able to work as farm hands, in artisans shops, loading and unloading ships, and personal servants. The punishments for slaves in the North also differed from the South, as in severe physical punishment was not allowed. Where in the South slaves weren’t even considered human, by 1770 slave marriages were recognized by law and in New England not only were slaves allowed to own property but could also testify against the white colonists. Since the South was harsher than the North, many slaves would try to run away from the South and to the North, and if unable to obtain their freedom they started fighting back, and the slaves began to resist being treated like property.

The Resistance of Slavery

The slaves that were originally brought to the New World all were from different cultures and different backgrounds, but over time they all became accustomed to being African-American. The one common thread among all these cultures was the experience of slavery and the desire of freedom. In the seventeenth century the African Americans would only desire freedom, but it was the eighteenth century when they really began fighting for it. The Blacks would risk their lives for their freedom and the South would have advertisements for runaways slaves; they normally fled to Charleston, Savannah, or even Florida. The first slave uprising was in 1712 New York City, the slaves set fire to the outskirts and killed nine white men, which resulted in eighteen blacks being executed. Then in 1731, there was the rebellion in Louisiana which was able to temporarily