Slavery

Introduction

Slavery was already a social and economic institution known since antiquity more remote. It had evolved from one form domain postwar situations semi-economic domain indulge them, until the stranglehold of one man by another under pre-capitalist society of the Middle Ages. More than known, we can say that institution at the time of the great discoveries and the initiation of European expansion in the world. America is precisely that which gives new shape and meaning to this ancient form of domination of man by man (Altman, 14).

The discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492 and the subsequent conquest of this continent at the hands of Spanish and Portuguese repercussions from the sixteenth century in another region of planet, somewhat removed from the events of conquest comes to Africa. Although the two continents separated by the Atlantic Ocean, with historical, social and economic completely different from the XVI century there is a rapprochement between America and Africa. The cause of this approach is that the conquest of America, with all the wealth natural development prospects offered their conquerors, required for complementation labor necessary for the appropriation of such wealth, and advantages in obtaining economic exploitation of such vast areas (King, 20).

Discussion

The Civil War was the bloodiest in American history, involving the death of more than 500,000 Americans, black and white, North and South. Near its end, Lincoln sought to redefine the origins and purposes of the war in his Gettysburg Address, saying that the war had given rise to a "new birth of freedom." But while supporting the abolition of slavery, even at the war's end Lincoln could not bring himself to support—indeed, he opposed—full equality and freedom for the slaves or their descendants.

In return for allowing California to enter the Union as a free state, northern congressmen agreed to pass a tough Fugitive Slave Act that provided for six months imprisonment and a $1,000 fine for anyone found guilty of helping a slave to escape, and required northern law officials to assist in the recapture of runaways. Prior to the law's passage, the recapture of escaped slaves was up to masters and bounty hunters. The new law created tremendous resentment, especially since eight years earlier; the Supreme Court had ruled that state officials did not have to assist in the return of fugitive slaves. The 1850 law required that captured runaways be taken before a federal court or commissioner; it also denied fugitives a jury, and refused to admit fugitives' testimony, though the masters' claims of ownership were accepted as evidence )Legal and Political Chronology of American Slavery, 51). The law aroused strong antislavery sentiment in the North and abolitionists defied it vigorously. 

In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act demolished the Missouri Compromise by establishing the principle of "squatter sovereignty"—the presence or absence of slavery within a new state, that is, was to be determined by the inhabitants of that state. Challenging the right of Congress to forbid slavery—or as they put it, to tell a man what to do with his own property—southern politicians argued that such a determination belonged to ...