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Slavery In America

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From the inception of the Colonies, the United States’ economy has depended heavily on cash crops grown in the South. In order to attain the most desirable output level, landowners needed huge slave populations to pick crops and keep achieving a profit. In a capitalist economy such as ours, everything comes down to profit. Profit drove owners to constantly strive to produce the most output for the cheapest expense. A wise businessman would have been stupid to overlook any opportunity for cost cutting, and slave labor was a huge subtraction from labor expense. Businessmen built the institution of slavery in the Americas with profit being the main goal every step of the way; from negotiations with African slavers, to keeping track of and …show more content…

In these deals with African traders, merchants had goods such as guns, textiles, and other commodities unknown to Africa while Africans had slaves. Stephanie Smallwood bluntly explains these transactions: “Captive people come aboard: Like precious metal, they had been bartered: they had been offered as commodities by African traders who would not, or could not, use gold to buy European goods.” With the nature of these transactions, a dangerous precedent was set; one that would haunt African-Americans for generations to come. From this point on, these soon to be slaves were no longer considered people or even human property. In the merchant’s perspective, they had not just traded objects for people with lives and consciousness; rather, they had simply offloaded cargo in exchange for much more valuable cargo. This economic attitude can be seen most clearly in the accounting of the voyages like the 1677 ledger from the Sarah Bonadventure. The humans they had just bought were officially reduced to tallies on their ledgers, the very same as crates of metal or gunpowder would have been. Before they even left Africa, captive slaves had found their way into America’s economy as numbers instead of …show more content…

The next step of the business transaction was to deliver the human cargo to the customer. Merchants handled this the only way they knew how, with extreme efficiency and exercising cost-cutting practices to their full extent. In order for a voyage to be successful in the eyes of the financer, all potential for profit must be captured. This meant that the maximum number of units must be traded and brought to market. Merchants on the ship, who were paid on a unit by unit basis, understood that they must pack onto the ship as many units as could fit. Equiano gives us insight to his first-hand experience when he describes the cargo deck as, “so crowded that each [captive] had scarcely room to turn himself… it almost suffocated us.” For example, a ship called the Barbados Merchant captained by Joseph Bingham was instructed to take on 350 slaves but the company had also said, “or 50 more if you can take them.” The ship ended up being further modified to take on 450. The instructions from the company have a pretty clear message: take however many you can fit. The traveling condition of the captives was never even brought into question. After all, they were simply thought of as cargo, and cargo doesn’t need room to

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