Slave Trade Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

break ones back muckle - Essay ExampleThe slave-exporting states such as Virginia engaged in adversarial relationships with slave-importing states in their roles of seller and buyer. Moreover, as the slaves went further south, the lower South states deduced that the upper South was beginning to change its perspective on slavery. This difference fire a deep debate over the reopening of the African slave trade. (Deyle, 2004)The areas of the blockheaded South saw that novel imports would allow Virginia to remain a loyal slave state. However, Virginia did not want newly-arrived slaves to diminish the value of its quick human property. Perceiving that slavery was under attack and fearing the loss of Virginia to the free states, the lower South decided to seced. The Deep South forced Virginia into secession. At that time, Virginia had no desire to deprive itself of the revenues from the domestic slave trade. Southern cotton supported the textile mills of England and the American No rth. Market forces dominated the growth and traffic of slave trade. Slave traders were demanding entrepreneurs who were fully absorbed in a highly competitive business (Deyle, 2005). Slave traders acted as conduits of merchandise values into the South, who then paved the way to consumerism and speculation and enhanced modern business practices to the other regions. Slaveholders denied that they sell slaves willingly and insulated themselves from complicity in the human traffic. (Deyle, 2004). The slave trade has myriad dimensions. Southern farmers, planters, and speculators carried their human chattel with them whenever they fail from Alabama to Virginia. Moreover, many slaveholders wanted to increase their enslaved workforces. The experience of being sold to slave traders and to a landowner was the most soul-rending experience most African Americans endured, aside from bodily punishments. An ex-slave Ben had recounted to interviewer Mary White Ovington in 1910 that all fall, th e slaves would be sold in the same way that cattle was sold.Slaveholders would transfer them from one place to some other as if they were mules or horses. Families would be split without consideration for husbands, wives and children. Those who had been sold to new masters never knew what to demand and they never had an inkling of what type of new master they would encounter in their new plantation. (Jewett and Allen, 2004). When Samuel Townsend, a slave owner from Virginia, needed more than slaves, he bought them from traders in Richmond. This movement of slaves from the Upper South to the Gulf states presented possibilities for paying speculations. Thousands of slaves born in Virginia showed up in Alabama during from 1820s to 1840s. Groups of slaves moved from Virginia and the Carolinas each fall. Montgomery was Alabamas largest slave sale site. Blacks being transported but encumbered by foot irons and chains were a pitiful skunk on the roads. After railroads had been built in Montgomery with the Upper South slave markets, particularly during the 1850s, more traders and speculators used the railroads to move their human cargo (Jewett and Allen, 2004). Uncle Toms Cabin converted the North to the cause of the slave. The book brought plateful to the heart of the North, and of the world, that the slave was a man. The book was instrumental in conveying the fact that the slave is united to mankind by human love and aspiration and anguish but devoid of the rights of man. (Merriam, 1970). Uncle Toms