A Different Perspective: Slavery and It's Affect on the African-American Way of Life in America

By Charles E. Shaw

It is understood that the first recorded history of slavery had its beginning in the United States in 1619, when approximately twenty Africans were brought by a Dutch soldier and sold to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia as indentured servants. The transformation from indentured servitude to racial slavery happened gradually. It wasnt until 1661 that a reference to slavery entered in Virginia law, directed at Caucasian servants who ran away with a black servant. It wouldnt be until the Slave Codes of 1705 that the status of African-Americans as slaves would be sealed. This would last for another 160 years, until after the end of the American Civil War with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865. However, it must be noted that the first imported Africans were brought as indentured servants not slaves. They were required, as white indentured servants to serve nine years. Many were brought to the British North American colonies, specifically Jamestown, Virginia in 1620.

It is most interesting to make note of the fact that slavery was subsequently legalized in the following states:

1641 Massachusetts becomes the first colony to legalize slavery.
1650 Connecticut legalizes slavery.
1661 Virginia officially recognizes slavery by statute.
1662 A Virginia statute declares that children born would have the same status as their mother.
1663 Maryland legalizes slavery.
1664 Slavery is legalized in New York and New Jersey.

The shift from indentured servants to African slaves was prompted by a dwindling class of former servants who had worked through the terms of their indentures and thus became competitors to their former masters. These newly freed servants were rarely able to support themselves comfortably, and the tobacco industry was increasingly dominated by large planters. This caused domestic unrest culminating in Bacons Rebellion. Eventually, chattel slavery became the norm in regions dominated by plantations that were owned by Englishmen who lived in Great Britain, where the British courts had made a series of contradictory rulings on the legality of slavery, which encouraged several thousand slaves to flee the newly-independent United States as refugees along with the retreating British in 1783.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 21, 2007
• ISBN: 9781465317681

Charles E. Shaw

I am not a historian. I am simply an American citizen who grew up in Brooklyn, New York after my birth in the state of Virginia. My family, African-Americans from the south, decided to leave a life of farming and despair to move to New York to start anew, with nine children; three girls, six boys, and mother and father, who firmly believed that they could make a better life for all their family members. As the exception to the rule, I finished high school along with my brothers and sisters, and went on to college where I earned degrees in business and in law. This enabled me to become an officer and manager in the banking industry, where I served over twenty eight years. In addition I served a number of years as a businessman, served in state government, and served in the regular Army of the U.S. I have written other books on business and banking that were published by and for the banking community as training and management material. I am currently working on a series of business books which will be introduced to members of the business community as a source of training for new small business owners and entrepreneurs.

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A DIFFERENT

PERSPECTIVE

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Slavery and It’s Affect on The

African-American Way of Life In America

Charles E. Shaw

Copyright © 2007 by Charles E. Shaw.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

DEDICATION

FOREWARD

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

GLOSSARY

DEDICATION

It is customary for a writer to

dedicate his/her work to someone who has been instrumental and helpful in the preparation of the subject matter, or to that special something or someone that has inspired the writer to undertake such an exhausting, delicate, and challenging task of this kind. While the acknowledgement of individuals and the contributions they make are important to a writer and to his/her work. In this particular case, it would be more important and appropriate to dedicate this book and its message to the many descendant African-Americans who find it necessary to deal with many ancestral issues that may prove to be not only provocative, but compelling, distracting, distressing, destructive, and psychologically debilitating to their state of mind and well being. Therefore, this book is dedicated to them and to the many immigrant Americans of color that are not of African descent, but whose cultural differences would make them just as susceptible and vulnerable to many of the same adverse conditions as those that the African-Americans had to endure as descendants of African slaves. I would like further, to dedicate this book and its message to my father and my mother, Santee and Hagar Shaw who are very dear to my heart, and who while working very hard to raise and to nurture nine children under very difficult and trying circumstances, never lost hope in their development and resolve to make America a more harmonious and a better place for their children and the average African-American, and Linda Johnson, a dear friend who perseveres in her commitment and resolve to openly demonstrate to the world her unyielding and unwavering qualities as a mother and as an African-American woman. This book is dedicated with the hope that White-America will wake up to the realization that the average African-American and other people of color are just as capable, passionate, and sophisticated as it is when competing for many of the same things in life when given the opportunity to do so.

History identifies with many of the tangible as well as the intangible things that have occurred over many decades to help set African-Americans free, but nothing to help free them from the internal anguish and struggle reflected by a mind-set that has been conditioned and affected by the many hardships and circumstances of a daunting legacy of the past that now centers on consuming and influencing their every-day behavior and that which is recognized as the uncertainty and despair that may be found in many of their eyes and everyday lives.

FOREWARD

What we are considering and

discussing in the framework of this book are those things we value most as a people and as human beings – human dignity and freedom. This book chronicles and provides a fresh and uncompromised look into the history of the country and that which surrounds the legacy of slavery and its adverse affect on the lives of the average African-American and his/her family today. While at times this material may seem difficult to comprehend, it will become clear and less complicated as the information it imparts is digested and understood for what it says about slavery and how it continues to adversely affect and to influence the behavior, the plight, and the environment of the average African-American. Even though this book discusses many of the issues that are raised and defined in its contents, it still manage to show the average African-American to be unacquainted with and unprepared to accept the fact that what happened during slavery may now be responsible for the change in his/her psyche and his/her unusual and unpredictable behavior. This book identifies in many ways with the inexplicable behavior of many African-Americans that may be identified by an overlapping extension of complex behavior that links him/her to intersecting lines of that which represents the embodiment of an entangled and an entrapped life in an unforgiving Web of Slavery, and how the underlying trappings have continued to manifest themselves by clinging to the hearts and minds of us all as a people, and silently revealing those things that influence our behavior and lifestyle most as distant descendants of African slaves.

As an African-American, I am obligated by the turbulent nature of an American heritage and that of my personal experiences as a member of America’s diverse society to discuss as best I can, how I feel, and what I believe about what has been truly happening to us as surviving descendants of African slaves for over three centuries in this country. There are many unanswered questions and complex issues we must consider, must confront, and must address when discussing our plight and future as African-Americans in this country. Many of the unanswered questions do not come without controversy and the pain staking thoughts, tasks, and issues that surround us and continue to surface, haunt us, and adversely affect us each and every day in very sensitive, very real, and very relevant areas of:

. Economics and Servitude

. Education and Wealth

. Politics and Power

. Wealth and Control

. Post Civil War and Segregation

. Environmental Conditioning and Cognitive Behavior

. Legacy and Heritage

. Crossbreeding and Separation

. Pride and Prejudice

. Equality and Discrimination

In addition, there are issues that tend to perpetuate the adverse conditions that were once introduced centuries ago by the early White-European/Americans because of their misguided belief in the creation, development, and the maintenance of a permanent inferior social class of people in the West African and the descending African-American. These issues, while they may reflect and bring back to life age-old problems, they are just as relevant and provocative today as they were in the past, and even though they may now be inter-linked and/or made interchangeable depending upon how they are presented and applied in connection with identifying with the principal reasons or causes of particular problems and concerns of the African-American. Need less to say, many recognized African-American problems originated from the dehumanizing effect that slavery has had on us and our African ancestors who were classified and treated with disrespect and brutality as assets and as the personal property of the White-European/American slave owners in the predominantly southern regions of the United States.

This book is the focus of an uncompromised look, review, and analysis of the different issues we must now face and identify with as African-Americans and how these issues are continuing to surface today, and to plague us like a man made disease that may be used to influence the behavior of descendants of African slaves of a distant and not too distant past and present. Its focus centers on the unimaginable revolutionary and evolutionary journeys we have had as a people, whose misfortunes and problems have been chronicled in the many forced and misguided deeds of the White-European/Americans who had at one time in our history dehumanized and claimed ownership of the African people that were wrongfully taken from their homes in West Africa and brought to America. This fact is upheld, substantiated, and supported by the historic facts and events that took place during and after America’s beginning development in the middle of the 17th century, which continued throughout the 18th and mid 19th centuries in the southern and in some northeastern states and regions of the developing United States. The White-European/Americans’ past misguided beliefs and behavior encouraged, influenced, and perpetuated issues and events that would follow that would require that behavior modifications would have to be made to the past practices of injustice and discrimination against us as surviving descendants of African slaves during the late 19th, the 20th, and early years of the 21st centuries. During the periods in question, and when slavery was first introduced and maintained, trade and commerce dominated to greatly influence the behavior of White southern slave owners whose principal focus and goal it was to build wealth and power based on subjugation and the strong backs of the enslaved African laborers. This uncompromising look, review, and analysis chronicles many of the events and conditions under which our African ancestors were forced to live and to endure as slaves of White-European/Americans, even while being subjected to some of the most demoralizing, dehumanizing, and humiliating conditions this country has ever witnessed and knowingly participated in. This book addresses the unpredictable nature and enduring consequence of slavery on the human condition and the psyche of those affected most after centuries of ancestral and inherited environmental conditioning and the past physical and mental torture that ensued to affect us, and our post treatment and way of life as descendant African-Americans in this country.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

To Begin with, an African-

American in the context of this book’s treatise is identified and defined as a person of West African descent and whose ancestral place of birth reflects an aboriginal connection to Africa, and who was taken by force and transported to America and the Americas as chattel and personal property of the White-European/American slave owners as slave laborers.

. Slavery and the Nullification of a Person’s or a

People’s Human Rights:

While no one has the right to take away another person’s freedom or human rights, that person’s freedom and human rights may be placed in jeopardy and/or forfeited anytime that person capitulates to the dictates of someone who may be prepared and who may also be in a position of authority to coerce that person to give up those rights as a free person. This would be true in those cases in which free individuals or families have been taken by force from their homes and native country and forcibly removed and transported by ship to America as slave laborers by their captors who basically stripped them of their freedom, and fundamental rights and liberties as human beings. When these acts are committed against humanity, and I say humanity, they are carried out without government sanction, because to do so would be against the basic principles of an honorable government and civilized democratic society unless it was carried out in direct violation of the existing laws or may be repugnant to that which may otherwise be considered to be morally wrong. It is often said that specific rules of law are applied in a civilized society, and that a person’s rights are protected by these rules of law and that the protection that the rules would normally provide may be waived or forfeited by the governing body in the society only when a person or a group of persons violates the established rules of law that that society establishes and uses to govern and to control the proper, improper, legal or illegal behavior of all members of that society. Naturally, certain conditions and circumstances will usually have to exist and to dictate how a person or group of people are required to behave, to react, and to respond to another person or group’s demands based on what may be there in written or unwritten common laws in support of those claims and demands. However, in cases that may otherwise involve the abduction of men, women, and children from their native country for purposes of enslaving them for personal use and gain, such actions may be considered and declared illegal and repugnant to the dictates of humanity and morality and to a truly free and democratic system of government. Nevertheless, when slavery was first introduced to America, the country did not have in the strictest sense a truly open, autonomous, and enlightened democratic system of government, because much of the country was still undergoing change from one system to another, settlement, development, and colonization by different White European immigrants and related governments that entered the country to make it their home and/or colony.

Nonetheless, as African-Americans and people with an African ancestry, we must protest how we came to this country, and at the same time not to forget that the America we know and love was born principally out of slavery, even though the majority of its settlers were White emigrants who volunteered to come here to colonize the country with mixed and unresolved feelings and theories about how it should be accomplished. It is important to know and to understand that it was the White Europeans who believed that they were first to set foot upon the land of this country as Europeans, and who are responsible for orchestrating and carrying out illegal abductions, imprisonments, and the importation of otherwise free men, women, and children captives from West Africa to do their bidding without compensation as chattel and as their personal property. When a person or group of people are inappropriately and illegally abducted, identifying an act that is clearly repugnant to the dictates of a lawfully constituted society and is deemed to take away the rights and chances of refusal of an act that compels the performance of an individual or group service for someone else without compensation, the person or persons doing the abducting may well be said to be acting outside of the existing laws, and to be undemocratic, oppressive, and illegally when he places himself in a position of unrecognized and unsanctioned authority to nullify another person’s human rights and to treat him/her as chattel. The word chattel, which is taken from and is defined in the old English Dictionary, originated in Europe where it is commonly used to describe something that may be bartered, bought and/or sold for personal use by individuals, who, according to law, may do as they please with designated property that is in their personal possession and under their control. When the meaning of the word chattel is inappropriately applied to human beings and more specifically to abducted men, women, and children from West Africa, the act of abduction and the reclassification of a people as chattel are meant to dehumanize and to nullify the effect that is given to that which may otherwise be applied to classify a people as human beings. Thus, allowing the illegal abductors to justify their actions and to hide behind their misguided actions, transgression, and mistreatment of the abductees as personal property owners. This is what helped to shield them from the law and gave them as White-European/Americans justification and the unsanctioned wherewithal to open the door to what may otherwise be described as Pandora’s box in order to expose the persons being illegally abducted, enslaved, and subjected to many unspeakable horrors that would be carried out against them and their descendant families. What is most important and interesting to us, are the many moral principles and legitimate things to live by that are brought in to this country each day by otherwise sincere immigrants from their native countries: culture, history, heritage, language, customs, and beliefs, and most of all to be free to exercise these rights. In many respects, these moral issues and principles have helped to develop this country, and without them this country would be hollow and without a foundation upon which to frame and to base the development of a republic, a constitution, and a democratic system of government to the extent that it has. Much of what this country is about and stands for, is represented by that which is taken from native cultures and countries from around the world of immigrants who bring, modify, adapt, and who adopt them as an extension of their own culture in the new world. A good example of this is found and identified in the framing of the Constitution of the United States, which is based in principle upon that which is recognized to have been taken in part by the framers from, modified and modeled for the most part after that of the Magna Carter that frames English common law. The point is made that the enslavement of West Africans has done a great deal of harm and disservice to America, because that which the slaves had to offer at one time has since been lost to them and to this country because of the prohibitions imposed upon them and the underlying difficulties they were compelled to face and to endure. However, it is believed that what they had to offer at one time in history could have helped to enrich this country even more than that which has been experienced historically and at the present time by their descendants. The illicit extraction of millions of West African people from their homeland and native country has upset the balance and is responsible for causing the interruption of evolutionary development in that region of the world, because it is conceivable that those who were wrongfully taken away from their natural setting and cultural development were robbed of their future and that which could have otherwise been had it not been for the wrongful act of slavery and servitude that has been perpetrated and carried out against an innocent people. Now, the world as we know it will never know what could have been. In fact, the abducted West African men, women, and children were not accorded rights as chattel under unsanctioned laws even though such rights were inherent in them as free human beings that were forced into slavery by wealthy White immigrants under circumstances that were repugnant to the dictates of a truly fledgling democratic system of government. Accordingly, the enslaved West Africans were compelled to give up their human rights and freedoms, native customs, heritage, native language, history, name and identity, and culture when coerced to enter the country under the strictest and restricting controls and conditions of the White-European/Americans during this period in America’s history.

That notwithstanding, the things that mean so much to us as a people of African descent, our enslaved West African ancestors lost their freedom of movement, lost their native languages, lost their native customs, lost their native culture, lost their native heritage, and lost their native religious beliefs, to say the least. This entire ordeal became very problematic, difficult, and very perplexing to the people of African extraction who could not fully comprehend nor understand what it truly meant to the White-European/American immigrants who willfully left their native country and homeland to consciously enter a strange land of perceived freedom and opportunity in America. Since the West Africans and descendant African-Americans alike could not have possibly known the feelings of the White-European/American emigrants unless they were placed in their shoes at the time, it is believed that had they been placed in their shoes that they would have otherwise experienced and witnessed feelings of exhilaration, excitement, and celebration. These are the feelings the people of African extraction could not hope to experience or project because of their circumstance and closeness to the problem – being a slave. Otherwise, it is believed that the feelings they would have experienced and expressed as White immigrants, could not have been replicated by the feelings of West African slaves or people of African extraction, simply because their experiences were entirely involuntary and brought about by circumstances that involved despair, coercion, and brutality. However, this feeling of hopelessness may be seen in the eyes of the average African-American today, who has in spite of the seemingly impenetrable barriers placed in front of him/her, continue to persevere and to prevail in an otherwise antagonistic environment that obviously and continuously stacked the odds against them. As African-Americans we know that a deceptive and confusing history and legacy in America does not offer or provide answers to many questions that would otherwise be available to give us the means to learn more about our ancestors, our heritage, our native customs, our ancestral religious beliefs, or our native languages. However, today’s immigrants enter the country with many of the same expressed feelings of excitement, exhilaration, and celebration as those identified and echoed in the past by their ancestors – freedom and democracy. This is done with the knowledge that these feelings are being put forth without the fear of alarming the natural born citizens of the United States. Nevertheless, in understanding the basic differences between that which defines an expatriate of another country and that which defines someone who is forced to come to America, it is important to know that voluntary immigration is carried out by a person’s own free will, while the latter is achieved by oppression and coercive methods. I say this because immigrants know that they can enter this country with the knowledge that they do so of their own free will and for reasons that allow them to gain their freedom and the right to choose and to practice their native customs, culture, religious beliefs, heritage, and their native languages unimpeded.

Obviously, new immigrants knew before coming to America that the laws that provide freedom of religion and that of speech are there to protect them and to enable them to establish, to replicate, and to practice their cultural beliefs and customs without question, denial, or reprisal by the American democratic system of government. Unfortunately, the American people of African extraction can not and do not share in the elusive luxury of knowing where their ancestors came from in Africa, and as a direct consequence, their customs, their heritage, their native languages, their religious beliefs, and their cultures may be lost to them, America, and history for all time, except that they know that their origin is Africa. While this issue may be taken lightly by those not directly affected by the events of the past, they should, nevertheless, be seriously considered when one looks back at the consequences and plight of the African-American as a people of African extraction. The many losses that the African slaves have sustained and endured throughout history were not in and of themselves represented only physical losses, these losses also included fundamental rights that White-America took away from them when they forbade and prevented the ancestors of the people of African extraction to practice their native customs, etc. Unrealized at the time, these devastating losses to generations of African-Americans were brought about and into focus when we considered and examined the underlying horrific and traumatic nature of the things that were deliberately perpetrated and carried out against our African ancestors who were brought to this country under duress to perform slave labor.

It is clear that what happened to the African slaves during the period involving slavery was designed to wipe out their identity as a people and to nullify their humanity and to take away their fundamental rights by redefining their existence as personal property and later as commodities without a heart or soul as human beings. Having to learn this from the past is quite disconcerting and distressing to us as a people of African ancestry, and whose future well being may well depend and rest upon our ability to re-create and to re-build an image of self-respect for ourselves and our families in America in the future. Granted, what happened in the past cannot be changed, but with the help of each other, we can at least re-build our lives and future as a people with self-respect and integrity in the eyes of the free world, and most of all, have more self-respect amongst ourselves as African-Americans.

. Slavery and its Development in the Southern State of America:

It is understood that the first recorded history of slavery had its beginning in the United States in 1619, when approximately twenty Africans were brought by a Dutch soldier and sold to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia as indentured servants. The transformation from indentured servitude to racial slavery happened gradually. It wasn’t until 1661 that a reference to slavery entered in Virginia law, directed at Caucasian servants who ran away with a black servant. It wouldn’t be until the Slave Codes of 1705 that the status of African-Americans as slaves would be sealed. This would last for another 160 years, until after the end of the American Civil War with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865. However, it must be noted that the first imported Africans were brought as indentured servants not slaves. They were required, as white indentured servants to serve nine years. Many were brought to the British North American colonies, specifically Jamestown, Virginia in 1620.

It is most important to make note of the fact that slavery was subsequently legalized in the following states:

. 1641 – Massachusetts becomes the first colony to legalize

slavery.

. 1650 – Connecticut legalizes slavery.

. 1661 – Virginia officially recognizes slavery by statute.

. 1662 – A Virginia statute declares that children born would have

the same status as their mother.

. 1663 – Maryland legalizes slavery.

. 1664 – Slavery is legalized in New York and New Jersey.

The shift from indentured servants to African slaves was prompted by a dwindling class of former servants who had worked through the terms of their indentures and thus became competitors to their former masters. These newly freed servants were rarely able to support themselves comfortably, and the tobacco industry was increasingly dominated by large planters. This caused domestic unrest culminating in Bacon’s Rebellion. Eventually, chattel slavery became the norm in regions dominated by plantations that were owned by Englishmen who lived in Great Britain, where the British courts had made a series of contradictory rulings on the legality of slavery, which encouraged several thousand slaves to flee the newly-independent United States as refugees along with the retreating British in 1783.

It is believed that when slavery was first introduced to America, it was tested with the inclusion and use of many members of the American Indian population and that of the indentured servants that were brought in from Europe and chiefly Great Britain, to settle debt obligations. During this period in European and American history, indentured servants were compelled to work-off outstanding debt obligations as common laborers for the person(s) to whom they were owed or be imprisoned for nonpayment in what was then described as a debtor’s prison.

Nevertheless, the ethnicity of slave laborers was later changed from American Indian and indentured servants and substituted by many White-Europeans with the introduction of the West African because of the much darker skin complexion and the clear distinction that could be made between those that were White and those that were dark skinned and more distinctive. The psychology behind the selection process and substitution of dark skinned Africans in lieu of White indentured servants is quite clear. The substitution is believed to have been based on the notion that a social system could be created and maintained by White-European/Americans that could hold dark skinned slaves permanently apart or separated from White-Europeans as an inferior social class of people which could and would be coerced to capitulate to the dictates of a subservient role and environment.

When slavery was introduced to America, it was never about a personal dislike for people of color, and was therefore not considered something of a personal nature even when it had been established and developed as an environment of vassalage and a source of wealth and power to White-European/Americans. It simply provided White-European/Americans with the means, the ability and the wherewithal to exploit the African for economic, political, and social reasons. This simply gave them the wherewithal to create conditions that would be available to create a framework to develop what they believed would ultimately lead to the development of an inferior social class of people. Once the framework and the underlying components had been considered and established for developing an inferior social class of people, it was hard not to believe that this perceived lower social class of people could be manipulated to succumb to White-European/Americans’ bidding and all that they require without payment or compensation for their labor as chattel. The treatment of another human being or people as a chattel enabled White-America to dehumanize the despicable act of servitude and to base all of its future decisions and actions on the dehumanizing effect that was given to the act of slavery. At the time of its introduction, slavery was not new to the world, because such an ill-conceived and now, ill-fated concept and belief dated back in time long before this country and its subsequent, continuing, revolutionary, and evolutionary development as a nation.

However, when we think of slavery, it must be in the context of that which is shown in John Rolfe’s recorded journals of the first shipment of West Africans to Virginia in 1619, in which he listed them as Negars. Needless to say, after the introduction of the West African to slavery in America, and long before other ethnic slurs, epithets, and characterizations like Negroes, Colored People, Black Men, Black-Americans, African-Americans, or the word Niger, a Spanish word, were ever introduced or applied to describe members of the black race. Slavery and the slave-trade was alive and well, and operating quite energetically, pervasively, and successfully in the southern states of America; notably, in Virginia, West Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Louisiana, Florida, Maryland, Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Delaware, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri. It should be noted that the extent of slavery was not limited to the south alone, because in certain regions of the north, it had made its way, its mark, and its impressions as well, but to a lesser extent, and in particular, New York.

During this period in the history and development of America, millions of West African people and their families were taken by force from their homes and homeland in Africa and transported via slave ships to America as assets and the personal property of White slave-owners and slave-traders. The treatment the West Africans received while being held in captivity as slaves was considered to be appropriate by the slave traders’ and slave owners’ standards for that which had been labeled and classified as their chattel and personal property. Being classified as an asset enabled the slave-owners to treat the West African men, women, and children captives as commodities which could be bartered, bought and/or sold to the highest bidder during auction ceremonies that were held in southern areas of America that were considered legal havens for slave-traders. Naturally, the only legal havens were those located in the southern states of America before and during the Civil War.

At this particular point in time in America’s history and development, slavery was chronicled as one of the most disgraceful and detestable acts perpetrated and practiced against humanity mankind has ever conceived, contrived, and devised, but to this day represents one of the most important events in America’s history. It represents a period in history in which basic ideologies were not shared by those living in the different northern or southern states of America. In fact, White southerners believed that they should have the right and freedom to do what they believed to be appropriate to support the south and its economy.

However, it was rather ironic that the southern states would want their own freedom and yet advocate and support the capture and removal of free foreign citizens and their families from their homes and homeland to serve them in a servile way on their plantations and farms that were being built and managed. The fact that the southern states believed this was clear evidence of how hypocritical White people of the southern states were in their beliefs, because the two beliefs and philosophies clearly contradicted and repelled each other. It also meant that they wanted to have their cake and to eat it too without any consequence of a backlash from natural evolutionary and revolutionary changes that would take place in the human condition to change public opinion and society’s future beliefs in the moral treatment of others.

For the most part, slavery represented an infectious philosophic view, belief, and a misguided way of life that would be shared deeply by White-American southerners in the southern states of America. So much so, that the southern states were determined to use this philosophy as a way and means to build and to maintain an economic base that would not only be capable of supporting the southern regions of the country, but that of other regions in the north as well. The wealth that was created by slavery allowed many White-American southerners to become rich and powerful to the extent that they started to believe that they could do well as separatists and not become a part of the developing and evolving union that was beginning to emerge throughout the country. In fact, many of the northern states had become rather dependent upon the production of certain crops that would be produced in the southern states to supply them with what they needed, but were not capable of producing on their own without great difficulty. The crops of the south included the production of cotton, tobacco, corn, sugar, and rice. However, between the years 1619 and 1865, over ten million Africans and their descendants had been enslaved, with an overwhelming number being transported to the Americas to work as personal property and unpaid laborers on tobacco farms, cotton farms and sugar plantations. The derivative remnants of slavery have since been carried forward into the 20th and 21st centuries as something that is less than slavery, but clearly representing a modified and compromising version of servitude.

Therefore, it can safely be said that the development of slavery in the southern states of America was based in principle upon trade and commerce and the competitive spirit it created between the different states and their people in the south and that of the north. Later in its development, slavery would be responsible for producing tobacco crops that would be grown, harvested, and sold for enormous profits to Europeans, and mainly to Great Britain, who would eventually purchase and import over 100 million pounds of the tobacco crop annually from the State of Virginia alone. As this clearly demonstrates, the growth in economic wealth, political power, and the prosperity that would follow trade and commerce in this country would continue to motivate those responsible for the propagation and further development of slavery in the southern states of America.

. A