A Discussion on Slavery in America
Slavery Everyone knows a little about slavery, but do they know that Indians were slavers as well as Africans? Slavery had a huge impact on the world for many reasons. What if the people in America at this time had found another way or something other than slavery? Also what would have happened if slavery never existed? I feel that America would not have survived without slavery. Without slavery the world would not have been the way it is today, it would be a lot different.
The three reasons I feel that America would have not have survived without slavery are because of the following: the early settlers had no idea how to harvest enough foods, that there would not have been enough manpower to win the Revolutionary War, and lastly the culture that we have today would not be the same and as unique without slavery. Settlers came to the New World because they wanted to get out of Europe. People also thought that the New World was going to be this great and wonderful place because of all the booster literature. Booster literature was pamphlets or posters about the New World, but they told lies and made the place look a lot better than it really was.
The people that came were mostly serfs and lower class people who had to sell everything they owned just to pay for the boat trip to the New World. However some people still did not have enough money to get there, so they went to the New World as indentured servants. Indentured servants were pretty much slaves because they worked on someone land for a couple of years in till they worked enough to pay for there voyage to the New World. The southern states needed these slaves because the southern states had more farms and plantations than the North did. Not everyone could afford slaves; slaves were really expensive.
They were expensive to buy because they had to be feed and taken care of. Some Indians were taken as slaves because they were captured from their tribe. These Indians were used for harvesting food among other things. These Indians were great farmers because they had been doing it their entire life. Without the Indians and other slaves the setters in no way possible could have harvest enough food for everyone.
The settlers put the slaves into the fields to do all of the work. Think about it this way, in today world it takes a two-hundred-thousand dollar machine to do what the slaves had to do. In the South there were 3,953,760 slaves in 1860 (Funk & Wagnalls). The Caribbean and Brazilian sugar plantations required a consistently high supply of labor for centuries (Funk & Wagnalls). Europeans needed more laborers than they could recruit from among their own metropolitan masses (Funk & Wagnalls).
This proves that the setters could not survive without slavery. How did America become America? Well America had to fight a war to brake away from Great Britain. By 1921 the British Empire held sway over a population of about 470-570 million people, which was roughly a quarter of the world’s population (Wikipedia). This war was the Revolutionary War or some people call it America’s war for independence, and without the help from the slaves America might have lost this war.
America was a small little nothing compared to Great Britain. The people in America had no way of beating the most powerful country in the world at this time. How was the America going to be able to defect this country? The army of the Americas or the rebels was and were the number slaves fighting in this war. If the slaves were not apart of the North and more importantly apart of the South they army would have only been..smaller. Great Britain tried to get slaves to come for their side because they knew that having slaves on their side would help. Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia, issued an emancipation proclamation in November 1775, promising freedom to runaway slaves who fought for the British (Wikipedia).
