Slavery in the United States

This research examines the phenomenon of slavery in the United States. The research will set forth the historical context in which slavery emerged in the colonial period and then discuss the degree to which slavery can be considered a direct result of white racism versus the degree to which white racism may have helped cause and perpetuate it.

The readiness of the English colonists in the New World to accept the fact of Negro slavery has been well documented. In his account of the migrations from England to America on the part of people who were seeking to practice their religion in a condition of absolute freedom from state interference, Becker includes the fact that the freedom-loving Puritans and religious dissenters appear to have had little trouble about depriving others of their freedom. This appears to have been a uniquely "American" attitude toward personal independence. First in the colonies and later in the United States as such, slavery appears to have operated as a byproduct of physical conditions and economic structures of the New World. There was a culture of servitude in place in the earliest years of migration. Even before 1619, when records in the colony of Virginia note that "a Dutch man of war[re] with 20 negars" arrived, there were white indentured servants, some voluntary immigrants and some indentured because of debt, in all of the colonies. The arrival of African slaves brought a racial component to that culture. By 1702, New York's the scope of cert

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ically does not provide for freeing of slaves who enter free territory -- and which virtually guaranteed future "liberal" interpretation of the Fugitive Slave Law. The lineage of slavery's socially respectable history and its unexamined assumptions -- even after Emancipation -- can be seen in a retrospective review of the phenomenon. Phillips's book on of slavery in the American colonies is presented as purely economic in tone. However, it is laden with references that, taken together, appear to be intended to valorize white European culture and exempt it from responsibility for slavery as a moral difficulty. It equates the successful plantation system with the success of and need for slavery: "If the plantation system were to be perpetuated an entirely different labor supply [aside from indentured servants] must be had." Abolishing the slave trade while maintaining the slave system only confused matters and, says Phillips, actually prolonged the institution. That is because agriculture was booming. The result was "to enhance immensely the preciousness of slaves and to increase in similar degree the financial obstacle to a sweeping abolition." Phillips acknowledges the trauma of slaves' "wrench from Africa," but insists that

Category: History - S