Antebellum Slavery

In this unit, we learned a lot about slavery in America in the 19th century.  We learned how America's economy became dependent on slavery and how slaves were treated.  There are three essential question about this unit: How did Slavery become economically entrenched in American society by the early 19th century?, How does a system of slavery based on race affect human dignity?, and finally What human characteristics does such a system choose to ignore?

For the first essential question, we answered it by doing an interactive map activity.  We used the following activity, http://mappinghistory.uoregon.edu/english/US/US18-00.html. Here we saw how the discovery of the cotton gin jump started slavery. With this new invention it was now easier and faster to separate the cotton from the seeds. This caused a big increase in slave trade in the south because plantation owners wanted a lot of slaves to produce a lot of cotton. Now that cotton was being grown and manufactured in huge amounts, it became the south's main economy. The south became dependent on cotton for money and to keep the economy running. Even though the north didn't allow slaves, they still were indirectly funding slavery by buying cotton from slave plantations.

Map in interactive activity:

In class we were put into groups and assigned one of three slavery activists to research and read about. They were Frederick Douglass, George Fitzhugh and John Brown. George Fitzhugh had this idea about the free laborers being more enslaved than the negro slaves. He said that slaves had it better off because they had less responsibilities than free laborers. He goes on to explain his ideas in his book, Cannibals All! When free laborers see this, they lose their dignity because Fitzhugh is basically calling them all worse off than slaves. For most of their lives free whites have been told that they're better than slaves, but now Fitzhugh is saying the opposite almost. This leads on to the next point of the human characteristics that are ignored. For one, intelligence is ignored a lot if you're a slave. People think you are dumb and can't think and everyone thinks that they're better than you. Love is also another big characteristic that gets ignored a lot for slaves. For example, in the movie we watched, Prince Among Slaves, Prince has to free his wife and kids himself. He is set free by his owner, but his wife and kids are not. People not only deny people love, but they deny family too. Many slaves' families have been split up again and again, and no one cares about it. Overall, slavery as a whole in 19th century America was morally wrong, even if it was part of the economy, they could have at least treated the slaves better.