What are the economic advantages and disadvantages of slavery

World History

SEEK PAPER

BJ Kim
9cc

Question: What are the advantages and disadvantages of Atlantic slave trade?q 10 to 16 million Africans were victims of Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. This is the same amount of people living in Portugal and Ecuador. Many people had their rights deprived by the Atlantic Slave trade and this happened only about 200 years ago. The victims of African slave trade, were maltreated as products in new world (Americas) and most of them were not able to get back to their home. Even though the Atlantic slave trade somewhat had positive parts especially in Europe, it had much more negative outcomes on Africa like violation of human rights of the slaves, and weakened the African nations. (Might be better…show more content…
Their human rights were destroyed from the first step of Atlantic Slave trade. According to “Thoughts ad Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery add Commerce of the Human Species,” written by Ottobah, A native of Africa, mentions “I was first kidnapped and betrayed by some of my own complexion” which shows African slaves were not going for their own will and destroyed human rights. Later in 16th century, most of African countries that were enforced to export slaves and kingdoms established special law in order to export more slaves. Law states that if one can’t sell slave, that guy is sold as slaves. Therefore, African people betrayed others, which led huge chaos and huge amount of African were (change to being) sold as slaves, which lead to complete chaos (and that resulted in complete chaos). Their human rights were also being destroying when they were transported to new land from their home land by Middle Passage. Middle Passage is journey of slave ship across the Atlantic which the Africans were in the ship for 8 to 10 weeks to their arrival and Africans were exposed to very poor environment. First of all, African slaves were confined to be with ship’s cargo

Many Northern Americans by the 1840s had finally realized that slavery was cruel and evil, While most of the Southerners thought it was good. The slaves had many advantages and disadvantages, although most people would argue that everything about being a slave is unacceptable. Some advantages of being a slave would be being provided by having clothes and food, being part of the family and lastly because they were needed to help so the whites depended on the with outside labor. Although being a slave has some advantages it also comes with disadvantages. Some disadvantages would be that the slaves are holding us back, slavery is evil because they are being mistreated and lastly because we celebrate a holiday that is a sham to them. Back in the 1800s the Southerners thought it was a good idea and not cruel to own slaves, they promoted slavery. The documents A-C show how southerners used their slaves and how they were treating them. Document A says “from this excess of labor, this actual want, and these distressing cares, our slaves are…show more content…
Although the blacks had some good things coming out of slavery they also had some bad things as well. As I said before, the whites from the South didn’t see slavery as a bad thing, the opposite, they saw it as a way of helping the slaves survive by providing them with things. The North thought that it was cruel because they believed that every person should be treated equal. We care about slavery because to look back at what people went trought is a tragedy, I can’t imagine the nightmare people went through. I believe slavery led to the Civil War because of all the debate going on. The Northern and Southern areas of the United States expanded along different lines. The South stayed a mainly countryside economy while the North became more industrialized. Different social cultures and political beliefs developed, which led to disagreeing about

If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

The philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mail-bag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay.” There appears to be a large element of truth in Emerson’s observation.

The South, like other slave societies, did not develop urban centers for commerce, finance, and industry on a scale equal to those found in the North. Virginia’s largest city, Richmond, had a population of just 15,274 in 1850. That same year, Wilmington, North Carolina’s largest city, had only 7,264 inhabitants, while Natchez and Vicksburg, the two largest cities in Mississippi, had fewer than 3,000 white inhabitants.

Southern cities were small because they failed to develop diversified economies. Unlike the cities of the North, southern cities rarely became processing or finishing centers and southern ports rarely engaged in international trade. Their primary functions were to market and transport cotton or other agricultural crops, supply local planters and farmers with such necessities as agricultural implements, and produce the small number of manufactured goods, such as cotton gins, needed by farmers.

An overemphasis on slave-based agriculture led Southerners to neglect industry and transportation improvements. As a result, manufacturing and transportation lagged far behind in comparison to the North. In 1860 the North had approximately 1.3 million industrial workers, whereas the South had 110,000, and northern factories manufactured nine-tenths of the industrial goods produced in the United States.

The South’s transportation network was primitive by northern standards. Traveling the 1,460 overland miles from Baltimore to New Orleans in 1850 meant riding five different railroads, two stagecoaches, and two steamboats. Most southern railroads served primarily to transport cotton to southern ports, where the crop could be shipped on northern vessels to northern or British factories for processing.

Because of high rates of personal debt, Southern states kept taxation and government spending at much lower levels than did the states in the North. As a result, Southerners lagged far behind Northerners in their support for public education. Illiteracy was widespread. In 1850, 20 percent of all southern white adults could not read or write, while the illiteracy rate in New England was less than half of 1 percent.

Because large slaveholders owned most of the region’s slaves, wealth was more stratified than in the North. In the Deep South, the middle class held a relatively small proportion of the region’s property, while wealthy planters owned a very significant portion of the productive lands and slave labor. In 1850, 17 percent of the farming population held two-thirds of all acres in the rich cotton-growing regions of the South.

There are indications that during the last decade before the Civil War slave ownership became increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. As soil erosion and exhaustion diminished the availability of cotton land, scarcity and heavy demand forced the price of land and slaves to rise beyond the reach of most, and in newer cotton-growing regions, yeomen farmers were pushed off the land as planters expanded their holdings. In Louisiana, for example, nearly half of all rural white families owned no land. During the 1850s, the percentage of the total white population owning slaves declined significantly. By 1860, the proportion of whites holding slaves had fallen from about one-third to one-fourth. As slave and land ownership grew more concentrated, a growing number of whites were forced by economic pressure to leave the land and move to urban centers.

What are the economic disadvantages of slavery?

How did the economy benefit from slavery?

What are disadvantages of slavery?