Long-Term Effects Of Slavery

Superior Essays
1. Describe and explain how slavery affected the economic, social, and political development of the South during the first half of the nineteenth century. Why did Slavery become the essential difference between the North and the South? What are the long-term effects of slavery?
Answer
Black people were brought to America from Africa during 17th, 18th, and 19th century. They were forcibly transported to Atlantic in slave ships and sold to work on sugar and cotton farms in the southern states. Due to the demand increase for cotton in Europe in the first half of the 19th century, it resulted in the primary growth of cotton industry in Southern states. However, the demand for cotton in Europe increased the demand for slave labor that can be blamed
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Northerners and Southerners expressed entirely different views of the American Promise and the place of slavery within it. These differences crystallized into political form when David Wilmot proposed banning slavery in any territory won in the Mexican-American War. When Wilmot proposed and submitted his amendment, he did not foresee that the debate he unleashed would end up in Civil war just fifteen years later. A lot of controversies spurred up, and congress attempted to address these issues with the Compromise of 1850, but the fugitive Slave Act and the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin hardened northern sentiments against slavery an confirmed southern suspicions of northern ill will. Americans could no longer continue its journey as a nation half slave and half free. Northerners and Southerners were always interpreting any incident or piece of legislation as an attempt by one side to gain moral and political advantage at the others expense. The northerners viewed the Dredd Scott decision, the Lecompton Constitution, and the southern reaction to John Brown’s raid as evidence of a Slave Power conspiracy to deny white northerners their constitutional rights, while the southerners interpreted the northern reaction to these same events as evidence of conspiracy to rob them of security and equality within the Union. For more that seventy years, statesmen had found compromises that accepted slavery and preserved the Union. As each section grew increasingly committed to its labor system and the promise it offered, Americans realized that accommodations had its limits. In 1859, John Brown’s militant antislavery pushed white southerners to the edge. In 1860, Lincoln’s election convinced whites in the Lower South that Slavery and the society that they had built on it was at risk in the Union, and they seceded. Also the bloody violence that erupted in

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