Slavery In The Book Who Built America

The number one factor that contributed to the development of slavery in North America is simple, the need for labor! There was this mentality in Europe that because America (north and south) was underdeveloped, that European countries were automatically superior. Although a fairly valid statement, natives had their own way of organizing and surviving. With well over several hundred languages already established, their own means of cultivating in correlation with climate, and trade agreements with other nearby tribes according to Christopher Clark in Who Built America. Someone had to build America, someone had to get their elbows dirty and it is beneath conquistadors to do any work themselves. New land meant power and wealth from trading, mining and farming. Columbus fathered this idea of natives providing forced labor for their “new masters” and how could the natives decline with all the European’s fancy weapons pointed at them. Thus began the invasion and expansion of settlements from the Spanish, Dutch and French. In the United States there is a day to celebrate …show more content…
No but it is inevitable in certain parts of the Country unfortunately. African Americans spent centuries in poverty because of slavery and even faced death because of the greed and selfish desire of settlers. In the Book Who Built America the story of Anthony Johnson was shared, how after thirty years he earned his freedom and owned land in Virginia. He became a land owner and one of the first Africans to own a slave. “Their experience exemplified a growing racial rigidity that would see the emergence of racially based slavery as a distinctive labor system…” (Clark, 2008, p. 38). Africans buying African slaves only meant officially owning a slave was normative. The norm by the seventeenth century like it is the norm to have an Apple product in the twenty first