Use Of African Slave Labor example essay topic

Agriculture was the most important economic activity in America from the founding of Virginia in 1607 to about 1890. Although farming declined rapidly in relative economic importance in the twentieth century, U.S. agriculture continued to be the most efficient and productive in the world. Its success rested on abundant fertile soil, a moderate climate, the ease of private land ownership, growing markets for farm produce at home and abroad, and the application of science and technology to farm operations. The first settlers, finding that European agriculture could not easily be transferred to the new environment, adopted the Indian practices of raising corn, squash, tobacco, and other crops. From the beginning corn, grown in all the colonies, was the leading food crop.

Tobacco, which was exported to earn foreign exchange, was raised mostly in Virginia and Maryland. In New England, farmers on small acreages raised corn, oats, and rye, vegetables and fruits, and livestock, especially cattle and sheep. In the central colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey wheat was the major crop. Farmers there were also heavy producers of livestock and animal products, as well as fruit and vegetables. Most farmers in early America were largely self-sufficient, producing enough for their family needs, but also some surplus for sale. Agriculture from Maryland, and southward, was more specialized and commercialized than in the North.

Corn was the main grain and food crop, but tobacco, rice, and indigo were the principal export crops. The plantation system was developed in connection with the production of tobacco and rice, with black slaves providing much of the labor by the late seventeenth century. Cotton was grown for home use in the late eighteenth century, but because it was difficult to extract the seeds it did not become an important commercial crop until after the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793. Farmers then used crude hand tools made of wood, sometimes with iron parts. Plows too might have an iron facing on the cutting edge.

Planting, weeding, and harvesting were done by hand labor. Significant changes in farming began to occur at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, tens of thousands of farmers surged westward to settle on the rich lands of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. [1] There a grain-livestock empire gradually took shape that was unequaled anywhere in the world. In the South farmers and planters pushed into Alabama and Mississippi and as far west as Texas, establishing a vast cotton kingdom and back country of mainly self-sufficient farmers. Agricultural expansion was encouraged by removal of Indians from choice farmlands, liberal public land policies, development of canal and rail transportation, demand for food and fiber in the growing towns and cities, increasing exports, and especially improved farm machinery.

One of the greatest advances made in agriculture before the Civil War was the shift from human to animal power and the use of new labor-saving machines. Besides the cotton gin, innovations such as iron and steel plows, reapers, threshing machines, grain drills, corn and cotton planters, and iron harrows and cultivators became common. These implements were drawn by oxen and horses. In 1800, it took fifty-six man-hours to grow (Fite 27).

Meanwhile, agricultural reformers advised farmers to rotate their crops, conserve the soil, use fertilizers, adopt new crops, improve livestock breeds, and use the latest machinery. Although a few farmers practiced soil conservation by rotating crops or growing legumes, they just simply plowed up new lands when the fertility of their fields declined. Of the three main components of production-land, labor, and capital-land was the cheapest, so it made economic sense in the short run to exploit the soil to the fullest (Fite 28). Farmers continued to supply many of their own needs, but increasingly they were selling their produce, much of it abroad, and buying manufactured goods. Cotton was highly important because they earned foreign exchange for investment in American manufacturing and transportation. Moreover, agriculture supplied the raw materials for some of the nation's leading manufactures such as textiles and food products.

In brief, agriculture was a powerful engine behind American economic development in the first half of the nineteenth century (Schelbecker 194). Elise Boulding argued that women initiated the Agricultural Revolution. According to Boulding, [2] the Agricultural Revolution occurred in two stages, horticulture and agricultural proper. Boulding defines horticulture as farming carried out by hand tools that produce enough food for subsistence only. She defines agricultural proper as farming that produces surpluses of food by using plows and other machinery. The result of what women did throughout these two stages of the Agricultural Revolution was crucial because it led to the establishment of settlements and changed the roles of people and their relationships with each other.

Boulding indicates that everything women did throughout this time period had an impact on the future. Through cause and effect, Boulding shows how women discovered the value of a simple grain of einkorn and how that triggered a series of events that changed the world forever. According to the article, women had discovered the value of einkorn as long ago as the year 20,000 B.C. The women of the nomadic herds of this time would gather these grains of einkorn while at their various campsites. Due to the construction of the einkorn seed, it was easily able to plant itself. When the women would gather and bring in the plant, grains would drop and the following year when the nomadic herds would return to their campsite, there would be a stand of grain waiting for them. The women caught on to this and began making a point to scatter extra grain so that there would be einkorn waiting for them when they returned to camp.

This was the beginning of planting. Eventually the amount of einkorn that grew would last the nomadic herds for the year, and there would be no need for them to leave. This was the establishment of settlements. Boulding explains that the earliest settlements used horticulture farming; a style she argues was completely dominated by women. Boulding explains that the women knew where the best places to grow grain were and how to mark the fields (31).

With the help of their children, the women would gather fruit and nuts and bring in the grain at harvest time. In these horticultural settlements, the roles of children changed in that they now had family responsibilities in the fields. The family relationship strengthened with the increase of agricultural productivity. As a result, husband, wife, and child began to live in the same dwellings, creating the family unit.

Before, the husband did not even live in the same dwelling as the wife, so this greatly increased the interaction of husband and wife, creating new family patterns seen in society today. Because most of these horticultural villages were matrilocal, women also held the positions of power. The senior woman of a family along with her children was the property-holding unit. In the fertile areas, horticulture progressed into agricultural proper, allowing many new and different roles for the women of the Agricultural Revolution. Women were no longer the main field workers because they alone were unable to produce the necessary surplus needed to feed the growing towns and cities.

Men, along with animal drawn plows, became the primary farmers, producing a great surplus of crops. Since women were no longer working in the fields, they began spending time making tools and containers to help the facing and storing of surplus grains. Without the nomadic limitations of being able to own only what one could carry, women were able to expand and improve their tools and storage containers. They used larger and heavier grinding stones which produced better grain. They also grind ed fine stone for storage bowls and made rough baskets. Through the process of making these new containers, the women unknowingly invented the first form of pottery.

Although the women spent less time in the fields, they kept extremely busy because there was much work that had to be done due to the surplus of food produced by the agricultural proper method of farming. Elise Boulding makes it clear that throughout the two stages of the Agricultural Revolution, horticulture and agriculture proper, women were very important (35). From the gathering of a simple grain of einkorn to agricultural proper farming that produced surplus to feed the cities, women had important roles throughout it all. The results of their actions led to crucial changes in the world's way of life that can still be seen today. The use of African slave labor assumed different roles depending on the natural and economic conditions that varied between colonial regions. Slavery was a social institution defined by law and custom as the most absolute involuntary form of human servitude.

[3] The definitive characteristics of slaves are as follows: their labor or services were obtained through force; their physical beings were regarded as the property of another person, their owner; and they were entirely subject to their owner's will. Since the earliest times, slaves have been legally defined as chattel. Therefore, they could be bought, sold, traded, given as a gift, or pledged for a debt by their owner, usually without any recourse to personal or legal objection or restraint. With the development of the plantation system in the southern colonies in the latter half of the 17th century, the number of Africans imported as agricultural slave laborers increased significantly.

Generally, slaves were used as domestics and in trade in the northern colonies; in the Middle Atlantic colonies, they were used more in agriculture; and in the southern colonies, where plantation agriculture was the primary occupation, most slaves were used to work the plantations. All the colonies in their early stages shared a common dependence upon the exploitation of subject people to achieve a measure of prosperity. The purpose of this paper is to explore the emergence and growth of slavery in North America. Specifically, working conditions and status of slaves evolved in various colonies from their arrival in 1619, through the American Revolution, to the new republic.

As slavery evolved differently in the thirteen colonies, the colonial areas will focus on are the Chesapeake region, the north, the Carolina's and Georgia, followed by Louisiana. In 1619 a ship arrived in Jamestown, and sold twenty "Negroes" it had brought over from Africa as part of its cargo. Bound labor was common in all the colonies because of the intense labor shortage. Many settlers earned their passage to the New World, and that of their families, by indenturing themselves for a term of years, usually seven, after which they would be free. Some of the early Africans were treated as indentured servants, because there are records of free blacks in the Chesapeake area in the 1650's. During this period, however, the white colonists determined that blacks would be slaves for the term of their lives, and their children would be slaves as well.

Initially, they were treated as indentured servants and freed after a term of service. Many black servants, however, began to lose the same rights afforded to their white counterparts. Tobacco was the Chesapeake's regional crop. Tobacco was a profitable crop, but its profits did not come close to those of the sugarcane. Tobacco, like sugar required a large amount of labor. As a result, ample numbers of immigrants traveled to the Chesapeake eager to work.

Virginia, for example, experienced a drastic growth in slave population as enslaved Africans replaced indentured servants. By the 1700's, court decisions made it nearly impossible for blacks to be viewed as anything other than property and the institution of slavery took root in the new colonies. As economic conditions in European countries improved during the late seventeenth century, white indentured servitude gradually disappeared from the colonial landscape (Phillips 195). As a result, planters, who needed dependable labor, gradually began to restrict the activities of African servants. Throughout the next 20 years, much evidence pointed towards the fact that many blacks were being treated as slaves and their children were being inherited like property. During the middle years of the seventeenth century elite tobacco planters increasingly assumed the right to do as they pleased with their African workers.

That assumption was legally sanctioned in 1669. Thus, almost exactly a century after the first colonists had set foot in Jamestown; the House of Burgesses codified and systematized Virginia's laws of slavery. These laws would be modified and added to over the next century and a half, but the essential legal framework within which the institution of slavery would subsequently operate had been put in place. It had taken the English in Virginia the best part of one hundred years to finalize their construction of a legal status quite unknown in the Common Law of England, to declare unequivocally that Africans were a form of property; that they were, and henceforth would remain, "strangers" and "outsiders" who would be required to live out their lives according to an entirely different set of laws from those that governed people of European birth and ancestry. [4] By 1710, a racially based system of chattel slavery was firmly fixed.

This area had been transformed from a slaveholding society into a slave society. As a result of the Constitutional Compromise of 1787, the importation of slaves ended by 1808. Despite the fact that the newly ratified Constitution treated slaves as property, not all states supported the institution of slavery. 'Free states,' which did not support slavery, bordered the northern portions of the Bay region, while 'slave states' encompassed the southern portions of the Chesapeake. 'Border states' which allowed slavery but were allied with the free states, further highlighted the political differences within the Chesapeake Bay region.

As a result of these ideological differences, the region became a focal point for the national controversy surrounding slavery. Enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1793, the Fugitive Slave Law further complicated the divisions between free, slave, and border states. The law permitted the capture and return of escaped slaves who had taken residence in the Northern Free States. As a result, this new law left the Chesapeake Bay region in the unique position of spanning free, border, and slave states. This specific combination of geography and politics would make the Bay region the center of great turmoil throughout the next century. Slavery in the North While slavery was primarily a southern institution, fifteen percent of slaves lived in the North.

When English merchants became involved in the slave trade, Quakers-particularly George Fox were horrified at seeing the mistreatment of the slaves. He suggested that owners treat slaves better and at the same time, release them after a certain number of years. In 1688 the Quakers made their first public statement against the slave trade. Throughout the first half of the 18th century Quakers, both in England and in the colonies condemned slavery. They campaigned against it, and slowly changed people's minds and convinced them that slavery was inhumane. For nearly two hundred years, however, the North maintained a slave regime more varied and complex than that the "peculiar institution of the South".

Unlike the South, which used slaves primarily for agricultural labor, the North trained and diversified its slave force to meet the needs of a more complex economy. From the seventeenth century onward, Africans could be found in virtually every field of Northern economic life. Many of the Africans worked in the cities. They were used by many wealthy members of that society for jobs around the house and also for skilled labor. The Africans who managed to achieve this position were often working as 'ship builders, lumber mill operators, iron forgers, rope makers, carpenters and printer's assistants'.

They also worked as tailors, shoemakers, coopers, blacksmiths, bakers, weavers and goldsmiths. In technical skill and versatility they spanned the whole range of free labor. The work, ideas, and industry of slavery helped to shape some of the biggest cities in the world, at the time. The amount of money brought in by the slave trade, the completion of menial tasks, and the hard work of skilled laborers all contributed to the formation of the urban areas in the Northern colonies. Though slavery was important to the development of the Northern cities, it was not essential to their continued success. After many of the areas had established themselves as successful urban centers, the amount of slaves began to decrease.

These Northern colonies would be the first to outlaw slavery and stop their reliance on slave labor. For most of the seventeenth century, black slaves in the north had an equivocal legal status somewhere between indentured servitude and absolute bondage. Frequently, they were referred to as servants rather that as slaves and in some cases freedom was granted after a limited period of service. What most clearly separated them from white servants was that the latter had contracts defining the terms of their bondage. A slave had only those rights allowed by his master or granted by the law. The distinction meant that in everyday practice, there were no limits on how far a master might go in exploiting black labor.

As a result, if it was not for the Native American, women, and African slave the American agricultural society would not have developed in the way it has today. All three has its important role of agriculture in early America. 1] George C. Fite, American Farmers, the New Minority (1981). 27 [2] Kevin Reilly, Women and the Origins of Patriarchy Gathering, Agricultural, and Urban Societies, 20,000-3000 BCE; Elise Boulding, Women and the Agricultural Revolution. Pgs 23-46 [3] web history. html. This site explains the hardships of the slaves while being departed from their home land.

[4] web This site describes what it was like as a slave in the south. Baltimore City Community College History 101 The Role of Agriculture in Early America, 1790-1824 (1870) A History Semester Project to Professor Solomon Iyobosa Omo-Osage II Department of Social and Behavior ScienceBYTawonda S. Maxwell 29 November 2004 Thesis Statement: In early America, agriculture was a significant part of society and America's early development. 1) Introduction: This paper will explain how America's agriculture was developed and what roles were played to establish settlement. 2) Literature Overview: The resources use to complete the assign were Kevin Reilly, Women and the Origins of Patriarchy: Gathering, Agricultural, and Urban Societies; Elise Boulding, Women and the Agricultural Revolution, Gilbert C. Fite, American Farmers, The New Minority, John T Schelbecker, Whereby We Thrive: A History Of American Farming, Sandra Johnson, and a unknown web source. They describe in their own way how the American agriculture was established.

3) The Role of Agriculture in Early America, 1790-1824.

Bibliography

Boulding, Elise, 2004.
Women and the Agricultural Revolution. New York. Fite, Gilbert C, 1981.
American Farmers, The New Minority. University of South Carolina. Johnson, Sandra, 2004.
web history. html / Schlebecker, John T, 1975.