Slavery In The 1800's

In the 1800’s, more land was conquered in North America by the United States which led to plantation growth in the South. This led to the demand of more people to work on the expanded fields from the South, so they utilized the triangular trade system to benefit themselves. However, slavery was a foreign and unacceptable practice to the North since they were more industrialized. This incited a political development called abolitionism in the North which impacted the subjugated African Americans to move toward the North for more opportunity. In order to maintain their way of living, the Southerners mistakenly declared that the slave proprietors have given their slaves bliss, better work conditions, and more flexibility than the free African …show more content…
Nonetheless, the South had a tendency to overlook people who looked different. Even though slaveholders claimed that, “the negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world,” the enslaved African Americans did not have any rights. The right to go anywhere in the country, make decisions, and gain knowledge were all fundamental rights that were offered to everyone but the Southern states removed these rights from the African Americans. For example, one of the Alabama Slavery laws stated, “no slave may travel beyond his master’s home without a pass or some letter that proves the slave is traveling with the permission of a master, employer, or overseer. If a slave is caught without such a pass, the owner or overseer can whip the slave ten lashes on the back.” What the Southern states did not understand was that slaves were not inanimate puppets that needed to be controlled by their owner; they were intelligent human beings who needed at least small liberty to do things for themselves. A former slave, Fountain Hughes, recalled back to his years of slavery and said, “they all had uh, what you call, I might call it now, a jail centers, was just the same as we was in jail. Now I couldn’t go from here across the street, or I couldn’t go through nobody’s house without I have a not, or something from my master.” The lack of freedom was just like being captive in jail, however, with no crime and a punishment for the innocent. Women had additional limitations as a slave. They had no say in their marriage because the owners only wanted to increase the population of the workers on the plantation. Rose, a female slave born in Texas, firmly stated, “Her owner forced her to live with