Slavery Fight For Freedom
Slavery Fight for Freedom
During the course of the slave trade millions of Africans became involuntary immigrants to the New World. Some African captives resisted enslavement by fleeing from slave forts on the coast of West African. Others mutinied on board slave trading vessels, or cast themselves into the ocean, rather facing death than enslavement. In the New World there were those who ran away from their owners, ran away among the Indians, formed maroon societies, revolted, feigned sickness, or participated in work slow downs. Some sought and succeeded in gaining liberty through various legal means such as "good service" to their masters, self-purchase, or military service. Still others seemingly acquiesced and learned to survive in servitude.
The European, American, and African slave traders engaged in the large amounts of trade in humans. The politicians and businessmen who supported them, did not intend to put into motion a chain of events that would motivate the captives and their descendants to fight for full citizenship in the United States of America. But they did. When Thomas Jefferson penned the words, "All men are created equal," he could not possibly have envisioned how literally his own slaves and others would take his words. African Americans repeatedly questioned how their owners could consider themselves "noble" in their own fight for independence from England while at the same time believing that it was wrong for slaves to do the same.
The first slaves came to the Western Hemisphere in the early 1500s. Twenty African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Series of complex colonial laws began to reform the status of Africans and their connection to slavery. The United States outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, but the domestic slave trade and illegal importation continued for several decades.
Captured Africans were sold at auction as "chattel," like inanimate property or animals. Many...
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