slavery essay hook

slavery essay hook

The Abolition of Slavery: A Call for Justice and Equality

1. Introduction

After several unsuccessful attempts to end slavery in the US, the 13th amendment of the US Constitution was passed in 1865. At the time, the obvious justification for the abolition of slavery was the new belief in equality and human rights. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution set a standard of human rights that had never been respected in the US with regards to blacks, and in time this led to slavery becoming an increasing paradox to the country’s supposed beliefs in freedom. This amendment also came at a time when the US had become a feared entity by the southern states trying to secede. The slave states were aware that ending slavery was the key to weakening the southern rebellion and in time this proved true. With the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Lincoln effectively weakened the rebellion mechanism in the south by liberating the slaves in the Confederacy. This also made possible the recruitment of blacks in the union army, which was a key to victory in the Civil War.

The abolition of slavery has been considered one of the greatest achievements of American history. It was also one of the most complex and convoluted changes in our nation’s history. The reasons for ending slavery were varied and often debated among blacks and whites in the years as the US Civil War raged on. National support for the eventual abolition came in the form of the 13th amendment, which was passed in 1865. Although it was a great accomplishment that took much effort, the question is whether or not the reasons for the abolition of slavery still hold true today.

2. Historical Background

This transition was not the result of bought of the divine inspiration or saintly self-denial on the part of the British Public and Political establishment. Rather, it was achieved through the intense political struggle and conflicts between anti-slavery and pro-slavery, a complex change in balance in opportunities that in a state this is changed to Parliament legislation and the myriads of interaction between to the queen classes between the rulers and the ruled to the right called History. “But the dreams of the British abolitionist that were converted slaves heard that set Britain a trading point at an end up national dishonor. The abolition of the slave Trade Act in 1807 is the result that a small minority in one age group and all races can change the world”.

The first slave-trading expedition resulting in the importation of Africans to the Americas was organized by the Spanish and carried out by the Portuguese. The round trip from Europe to Africa to the Americas and back to Europe, the infamous triangular trade, took about seven to eight months. This was the beginning of the exploitation of Africans for slave labor. The abolition movement is a fight for human rights. But even though it was a long ago consequence and was not a simulation for the current movement to boycott the Iraq war, the movement’s organization and strategies had a close simulation to our current movements. The abolition of the slave trade and slavery by the British in 1807-8 and the campaign that led to those acts was one of the supreme epics in world history. Its effects transformed the globe and provide a prime example of profound social and systemic change. The abolition of the slave trade, the abolition of slavery, and the slave compensation act are badged with the broad aim to provide a decent level of proof and to develop the understanding of a small cluster of related events that lead British society from engagement in slave owning in the 17th and 18th centuries and upon the greatest system of exploitation in recorded history to a leadership position the idea that people of all races.

3. Devastating Impact of Slavery

The first major area in which Europeans began to emerge from the many competing cultures of the world was in the fifteenth century at the time of the first intensive trading contacts were established between Europe, Africa, and the Eastern Hemisphere’s other major culture centers, i.e. China, India, the Islamic World and Africa. It is during this phase when the development of a distinctive African capitalism began. The Europeans had already established a well-developed capitalist system long before this contact with Africa. This means that the African trading system and its internal and international trading and market arrangements were drastically altered to conform to an incipient European domination of the African trading system, which had reached its final stages and dimensions of transformation in the epoch of colonialism that first manifested itself in the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884-1885. This means that the contemporary arguments and debates in the African world regarding the viability and utility of capitalism came as a result of a prolonged and violent confrontation between European capitalist and African Socialist forms of production. The nature, forms, and intensity of African resistance to both slavery and colonial rule and that of colonial produced phenomenal changes in African Societies aimed at building Socialism as an alternative to Capitalism and restoring the continuity of the historical development of African societies. In dealing with the impact of Slavery and racism in the debate between Capitalism and Socialism in modern Africa we need only to study some aspects of the historical influence and evolution of the two systems since the European conquest. After all it was many African socialists who helped to obtain independence from colonizer starting with Nkrumah who has always been an advocate against racism and slavery and that is why he assisted in the pan-African movement to create a just and free society for all Africans and peoples of African descent around the world. This is a direct challenge to global racism in the call for equality.

4. The Fight for Freedom

Word of the Emancipation procThe 13th amendment signified the close of a long and brutal war between two different societies, and it signified the estspuque et no return to the life they once lived. The South had lost, and this time the Northerners would ensure that it was the enslaved and previously enslaved blacks who would not be subject to the servitude of another. Blacks in the south now knew that they would be able to achieve real occupational opportunities and social status not necessitated by a testing of racial superiority and inferiority. Although it was regarded as a rushed job, blacks were now able to partake in political activity and gain representation. Truly a victory, this had signaled the beginning of the end in a long fight for freedom.

After the abolition of the slave trade, numerous slaves gained their freedom only to find it was not what they expected. A lot of ex-slaves were famished and jobless. This was a far cry from the life they had hoped to live. The slave proprietors, blinded from their loss of free labor force, made an attempt to imitate the order of slavery. Numerous blacks who were now free were unwilling to sit and allow this to come about. Deprived of the prospect of alteration through legitimate political channels, poorer whites and blacks in the south resorted to whatever means were available to alter their intolerable circumstances. Many of these individuals decided that participating in activities such as theft were too hazardous. Since these groups were now unable to use slavery as a means of social and economic organization, it was clear that they would now enslave free blacks to justify their want for a republic analogous to the one that had descended when slavery was at its peak. Whitehallians found this an agreeable choice because this offered the suggestion that a black person was not capable of functioning in a society on his own and would be in need of monitoring from a different race. This would ensure that they held a dominant status in a biracial republic. Fearing racial competition, devastating pogroms that were designed to maintain the caste system and establish white supremacy erupted in several sites across the south. The eruption of the civil war had saved the blacks from any possibility of extermination that could have been witnessed in a small-scale version of the Holocaust. It was at this point in time that blacks saw they would be able to take the initial steps towards true freedom and equality.

5. The Legacy of Abolition

The size and duration of this struggle, its impact upon prevailing institutions, ideologies, and social relations, and its interaction with economic, political, and military events were crucial in determining the pace and depth of internal social change which it precipitated. By the 1830s, the abolitionist movement in the Atlantic World had, in effect, divided the Euro-American peoples between abolitionists and abolitionist societies, and those able to identify and explore the consequences of social change and to exert principled political, economic, and juridical resistance against it. Shaped by a distinctive historical consciousness of a coming age of freedom and equality, abolitionists saw their own age as the crux of transition from a hierarchical and inegalitarian past to their own egalitarian and individualistic future. As a radical ideology that articulated moral principles against the prevailing interests of ruling classes, abolitionism was internally and internationally divisive in the social tensions which it created and the responses which it provoked from defenders of the existing social and racial hierarchy. From the vantage point of the coming immediate or long-term abolition of slavery within the Anglophone world, only an Anglo-American War which destroyed and displaced the political power of the Southern slaveholding social and political elites, and an extended process of economic and social modernization in which new socioeconomic and social criteria substantially displaced the pre-modern, can be seen as having been a successful precondition of abolition. But from a global or pan-historical viewpoint, the abolition of slavery can be seen as the first and in some ways greatest human rights campaign of them all. In the first instance, on a global basis, with the lack of any viable modernization path in Africa, relative to the continuing efflorescence of pre-modern and modern absolutist or colonial forms of state or private warlordship in the new world and with large-scale coerced and servile labor forces still to be found in various parts of the world right down to the present day, the refusal simply to hold slaves was a significant and unprecedented act of moral and economic modernization.