Slavery

Slavery

The Terrible Transformation- Worldwide and local factors in the establishment of Legal slavery in the North America in the mid-eighteenth century

Since the beginning of colonization, in 1619, when the first slaves arrived in Jamestown, the issues of slavery and the struggle for black liberation marked the history of the United States and often divided the nation. The capitalist character of establishing a slave south, analogous to the northern states, was to some extent a contradiction internal to the system. A slave economy tends to inhibit the economic development of a capitalist society, as pointed out by Max Weber in his book The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Moreover, the return of profits back into production, present in the industrialized north, did not occur in the same way in the southern states, which had a marked tendency to heavy consumption. Thus, north and south differ in the extent to which the first has a qualitative economic progress (return of profits to production), and south, in turn, to drive their profits in land and slaves, has a quantitative economic progress, leading into account the low productivity of labour, slave labour. This is due to the mentality of the slave owner southern slaves who invested in it gave prestige and economic and social security in a society dominated by the planters. The resulting leaps in production northerner owners Southerners led to a sharp dispute with the owners the north. If it accepts the capitalist condition for the southern states, as well as the northern states, has then a capitalist society that prevented the development of the very capitalism, a fact that historically tends to riots, wars and revolutions, especially considering that south had problems producing products for domestic consumption. It is possible to infer here that slavery engendered economic stagnation in the southern states, which in turn came into conflict with the north becoming more productive, thereby generating the American Civil War.

The relationship between white slave owners and white non-owners was also a factor that probably generated hegemony disputes in a country possessed of a clear dividing line between the industrialized north and abolitionist, and the southern states of the United States - landowners, aristocrats and slave because the use of hand-slave labour prevented the use of white and discouraged the immigration of Europeans to southern aristocratic.

Although the slave trade to be banned in 1815, smuggling continued until the year 1860, while in the north grew the campaign for abolition. The Missouri Compromise, 1820, authorizes slavery just below the 36th parallel. In late 1860, the state of South Carolina had already declared out of the Union, a fact that led to the formation of the Confederate States of America. A few months after the election of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), a Republican opposed to slavery, confederacy, and imprint separatist already clustered 11 states.

Local and worldwide factors

Despite the appalling conditions African slaves persevered, it is vital to underscore that when European forces started cutting up the New World between them, African slaves were not ...