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Triangular Slave Trade Research Paper

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The Atlantic Slave Trade
For my research paper, I chose the topic of the Atlantic Slave Trade, how it affected American plantations, and what work was like before slavery in places like factories. This is an important part of the shaping of how America is seen today. The United States is one of the most advanced nations of the modern world, and one of the reasons it is that way is because of slave transporting and labor. The Atlantic Slave Trade, the first leg of the triangular trade occurring from the opening of the 15th century to the beginning of the 19th century, was the beginning of an expansionist age revolving around slavery, which was very different compared to the customs of American factories and plantations before slavery, which …show more content…

Stage 1 was when slave ships from Britain left ports like London, Liverpool and Bristol for West Africa carrying goods such as cloth, guns, ironware and drink that had been made in Britain. (The Abolition Project) Stage 2 occurred when African dealers kidnapped people from villages up to hundreds of miles inland. One of these people was Quobna Ottabah Cugoano who described how the slavers attacked with pistols and threatened to kill those who did not obey. They marched the captives to the coast where they would be traded for goods. The prisoners would be forced to march long distances, as Major Galan describes, with their hands tied behind their backs and their necks connected by wooden yokes. (The Abolition Project) Stage 3, the last stage, was when the money made from the sale of enslaved Africans, goods such as sugar, coffee and tobacco were bought and carried back to Britain for sale. The ships were loaded with produce from the plantations for the voyage home. (The Abolition …show more content…

In the South, it seemed like the complete opposite. They wanted and depended greatly upon slavery in many ways. Their very economic success came from slavery. In the years following the American Revolution, slavery, which had never been so prevalent or economically important in the North as in the South, became the South's "peculiar institution." Between 1774 and 1804, all the northern states took the side attempting to abolish slavery. In some states freedom was immediate, but more often, for example in New York and New Jersey, it was gradual. Slaves who were born after passage of the state's emancipation act were released when they reached a specific age. But despite widespread questioning of its morality and an explosion of private manumissions in the Upper South during the revolutionary era, bondage actually expanded in the southern states. The spread of cotton production following the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 abruptly increased the demand for slave labor and made possible the rise of a vast new slave empire as southerners moved west. At the outbreak of the Revolution, the United States contained about half a million slaves, North and South. However, on the eve of the Civil War, the country held almost 4 million slaves, confined entirely to the South.

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