the eugene genovese slavery essay

 the eugene genovese slavery essay

The Impact of Slavery in American History

1. Introduction

This essay will be broken up into two specific examples with two parts each. The first is on the work of W.E.B Du Bois and an excerpt from Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder. I will compare a piece of Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America with a study of the specific effects on a specific university. The second example will be pulled from scholarly research on the lasting impact of slavery on the economies of the South and urban areas today. In each example, I will detail the direct effects of the specific instance in slavery and then show how it translates into damages still relevant today. Each example will be used to show the broad range of the influence of slavery and the systematic way it still lasts.

This section will review the impact of slavery on American society and detail its potential lasting influence. The long-term dynamic effects from the past have integrated into today and still yield damages that may seem irreversible. True struggles emanated from slavery; the civil rights movement is merely a reflection of the battle it took to free the captives from their oppressive fates. Militant actions of civil defiance are sometimes necessary to progress, but never to the extent of insurrection. The recent events of Hurricane Katrina are proof that the impoverished state of African Americans, often times a direct result of slavery, still leaves them at the bottom of America’s social and economic ladder. Furthermore, a large portion of Europe’s position in today’s global economy is due to slavery in the Americas. Finally, the resilience of racial tension in America proves that the country has yet to remedy the damages caused by the slavery era. All these modern dilemmas bear a striking semblance to the past, and thus it is necessary to connect the two in order to understand the full implications of slavery on American society. Throughout the essay, I will be pulling out specific examples in history in order to solidify the connection between the lasting effects and the influence they had from slavery.

2. Origins of Slavery in America

The immediate reason that the English began importing more and more African slaves, in place of indentured servants, were because of the advantages that were now clear to them. The Africans were available through the international slave trade, they had already been exposed to European diseases so they were more resistant and had no allies to aid them in escaping, their skin color made it easier to enforce the legal distinction of slavery, and finally because of the House of Burgess’ ruling that gave lifetime servitude to Black slaves and freed servants. This sealed the fate of Africans and African Americans in the New World for a life of involuntary servitude.

At first, the English, as well as other Europeans, brought over African slaves to provide labor in their New World territories because they were cheap and disposable. Native American slaves were easier to obtain, and it was much more difficult for them to escape; meanwhile, there were high mortality rates for new slaves. Where it wasn’t the Europeans hunting down the natives to enslave them, they would often make treaties with local chieftains and then leave it to them to provide slaves to do the labor. These factors combined with a growing market for permanent human labor in the new emerging economy of the 17th and 18th century America to create a system of race-based perpetual slavery.

3. The Economic and Social Consequences of Slavery

The economic effects of this are clear. The North was developing a more diverse and complex economy while the South remained a one-crop economy with low levels of development. The North sought to pass protective tariffs to bolster its economic development, while the South, which had little manufacturing, relied on free trade. This was a major issue of contention between the North and South and was a contributing factor in the start of the Civil War. The Civil War was devastating to the South, and it can be argued that it never fully recovered. This is reflected by the fact that some of the poorest states in the US are those that were slave states. The effects of the economic disparity between the North and South can still be seen. Up until the recent financial crisis, the average income in the South was lower than that of the North, and there is still a tangible difference in wealth between the two. This can all be directly linked to the economic consequences of slavery.

The economic disparities that arose from slavery had enduring effects that lasted long after the institution of slavery was abolished. These disparities had serious implications for the American nation to come. Initially, the reliance on slaves for the cultivation of staple crops such as sugar, tobacco, rice, and cotton meant that plantations were concentrated in the South. This led to a dramatic decrease in the population of the South compared to the North, as well as a large urban-rural population gap. The effects of these population trends can still be seen in the modern United States. The South is still less urbanized than the North, and the population disparity between black and white Americans can also be linked to the patterns of plantation slavery, as black Americans tend to be concentrated in the South.

4. The Abolitionist Movement and the Road to Emancipation

In 1816, a group of white Virginians formed the American Colonization Society (ACS). They were supported by moderates who feared the growing population of free blacks (mostly due to the northern emancipation measures) and by a number of slaveholders who believed that bondage was no longer a profitable system. The ACS secured support for a slave emancipated named Richard Bland Lee and acquired a charter from the state of Virginia. With some funding from the federal government, the organization settled on the West African coast, a colony that would become Liberia. In 1821, the society sent its first group of freed slaves across the Atlantic to start a new home. Though the recolonization movement was a failure, these efforts to create a society in Liberia help set the precedent for what emancipation would resemble in post-Civil War America.

In the very late 18th century, political figures such as Thomas Jefferson held the general view that blacks were not capable of living as equals to whites. Jefferson argued that due to the memory of the brutal treatment suffered under slavery, blacks would always have resentment towards their previous masters were they to be set free. Jefferson continues to say that it is best for both races if they were separated. This notion of separation between the blacks and whites is a prevalent notion to the advocates of the African recolonization movement. The idea of recolonization was to send blacks back to Africa, for they were viewed as a separate community that could not live a full life with the restraints of segregation.

The abolitionist movement and the road to emancipation took several decades to unfold, and they were anything but a seamless journey to freedom. Emancipation was the process of bringing an end to slavery. This passage on the elimination of slavery will explore the break between antebellum and the success of the Civil War in regards to the outlook on blacks, to the actual political measures taken to create a slaveless America.

5. Legacy of Slavery and its Relevance Today

The many legacies of American slavery are the continuing backdrop of race relations and economic inequality. Today’s widespread and deep racial disparities in income, unemployment, and incarceration are the result of a long history of adverse social, economic, and political conditions. One example is the racial discrepancy in education, which Brown v. Board of Education reported that separate schools for black and white students “are inherently unequal” and the racial educational gap continues to be very wide. The average white and Asian American high school graduates still complete more years of education than the average African American and Latino students have had little or no measurable impact on the racial achievement gap. Another instance of racial disparity is that of the economic gap between whites and blacks. A report to the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights stated that “one-third of America’s poor are black.” A third of African Americans and Latinos belong to the lowest income quintile, compared with only 15 percent of whites. This low income status has highly impacted health care. 33% of African Americans and 30% of Latinos are very concerned about their ability to afford health care, compared to 17% of whites. This concern is justifiable given that 33% of African Americans and 35% of Latinos, compared to 21% of white non-Hispanics, are uninsured. Slavery provided an economic underclass and severely restricted opportunities for the upward social mobility of African Americans in the South. Although African Americans have made gains in education, and since then the income gap between blacks and whites has somewhat shrunk, the truth remains that African Americans still remain at the bottom of the economic status ladder.